Chapter 73: Entombed

The Errant Magpie emerged from its compression tunnel into the darkness of deep space. Stars twinkled in the distance and a sun, at least four weeks’ journey away in normal space, cast a faint but still discernible glow on the transport's prow.

And on the dark bulk of the pyramidal ship looming above them.

Rudy's eyes narrowed as he saw it again. He leaned over and whispered, “You sure you're ready for this, Chloe?”

“No,” she said. “But I'm sure we don't have any other choice.”

Apart from forgetting this crazy plan, of course. Rudy couldn't exactly blame Chloe for her determination, but sometimes he sure wished she didn't have it.

Like when her determination took them back to the battlecruiser hulk.

He tried to tell himself the dead ship couldn't hurt him. Even if there were some kind of psychic ghosts aboard, he was the safest person in the world to deal with them.

As evidenced by the telekinetic beating his mecha took when he fought Stephan.

As evidenced by the memories of his last visit.

Besides, even if he wasn't in danger, Chloe might be. Even Milissa, who neither he nor Chloe planned on allowing within a kilometer of that huge dark shape, might be. Hell, with her empathy...

Rudy remembered what he'd felt when he went aboard the battlecruiser, and he was as mundane as they came. Literally. Maybe it was just disturbing. Maybe it caused some physical change in the atmosphere or temperature. Maybe his powers hadn't activated yet.

Yeah. And maybe it was just strong enough to get through whatever his shield or anti-psion field or whatever it was.

“Are you sure you don't want me to come along?” Milissa called. “It's not like I can do much with the Magpie if someone chases us down.”

“You can warn us, Milissa,” Chloe said. “That could be the most important thing.”

“Yeah, but... it's creepy here. I'd rather not stay on the ship alone.”

You don't know the half of it, Rudy thought.

Chloe effortlessly slid the ship's velocity and course to match the battlecruiser's, locked them in, and rose. Rudy looked over his shoulder as she sprinted to Milissa's console and leaned over to pat her hand. “The Magpie's safe,” she said. “But if you're not here to watch our backs, Rudy and I won't be.”

“I know, Highn... Chloe.” Chloe's quest to get the Kyrillos girl to use her name rather than her title seemed to be paying off.

Slowly.

Chloe smiled down at Milissa. “Thanks, Mili. You're a pal.”

Milissa beamed.

Rudy turned back to the main screen to hide his grin. Chloe was probably the younger of the two, but nobody would ever think she filled the little sister role. She could be pretty smooth with it, too. Rudy doubted he could have persuaded Milissa to stay as easily.

Of course, Chloe had the advantage that Milissa, whether she admitted it or not, considered Chloe's word law. Hell, the only reason she wouldn’t admit it was because Chloe had passed an edict barring her from doing so.

Rudy's grin faded when he looked at the battlecruiser.

It's just a machine, he told himself. It's a hell of a lot less dangerous than Stephan Kyrillos, and you kicked his ass.

Just a machine the size of a small city, packed with bizarrely butchered men who died from causes unknown, possibly in connection with an attack from forces unknown, whose motives were, of course, unknown.

Nothing to be afraid of.

Chloe had to control her fear better. Rudy could tell by how tightly wound she seemed whenever they were alone. She didn't want Milissa to know how afraid she felt, didn't want to be that afraid when Milissa could pick up on it.

Rudy didn't have to worry about the Kyrillos girl's empathy picking up his fear, though. As long as she and Chloe weren't looking his way, he could indulge it to his heart's content.

Not exactly his idea of a lucky break.

“Let's get going, Clo,” Rudy called. “No reason to waste time here.”

“Right.” She returned to her chair and settled in, unlocking the controls without so much as a flick of her wrist. He had to admire the way her slender fingertips played lightly across the panel. She'd learned the controls in the days it took them to leave New Kyrillopolis's sun behind. Now she manipulated them like an ace.

The Errant Magpie soared in a tight spiral around the battlecruiser hulk, putting a little over a kilometer between it and them. Rudy manned the transport's sensor suite, which, like most of its systems, was way too high-end to be legal on a civilian vessel.

If Rudy and Chloe hadn't wanted to shield Milissa from what the battlecruiser contained, they would have steered the ship directly into the mecha bays. Maybe it was patronizing, but they had both seen how she reacted to things like the bandersnatch attack and Stephan's anger. They'd agreed it was neither fair nor safe to expose her to the kind of crawling, gut-chewing horror they'd faced the last time they came to this ship. Horror, Rudy reminded himself, that had gotten through mental shields the Black Rook hadn't come close to scratching.

Shields that hadn't been active yet.

He hoped.

Instead of docking, they scanned the mecha bays on every wavelength Rudy could find on the sensor console. It took longer and it wasn't as precise. If they didn't find Chloe's mother's mecha, her 'erinyes,' then they'd have to search the ship with the mecha in the Magpie's bay.

Rudy did his best to hide the chill he felt at their backup plan.

One of the panels before him displayed the interior of a mecha bay. Between the various systems the Magpie had, from visual light to X-rays to graviton sensors, he got a pretty clear picture of what lay inside.

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Imperial Guard mecha, the gussied-up versions of the one he'd flown against Stephan. Impressive, but irrelevant. Nothing bigger, at least that he could see. Nothing that set off any of the sensors as weird.

Chloe glanced at him.

He shook his head.

She nodded and kept the Magpie circling.

Thankfully, the battlecruiser didn't have as many mecha bays as a modern ship its size. It was obviously meant for more than just transporting military machines around to kill other vessels of its weight class. The oligarchs, the nobs and even the Feds would have hesitated to dedicate a destroyer to toting around a dignitary like the empress, much less a ship this big. But then, the emperors had built an entire planet-sized city in the middle of deep space. Frugality didn't seem to have been their strong suit.

Neither, Rudy thought, did survival. Maybe they hadn't sent a big enough ship.

Maybe it wouldn't have mattered.

None of the mecha had launched, at least as far as he could tell. That creeped him out more than anything. Well, maybe not more than the corpses seemingly melded with each other and with the walls of the battlecruiser.

Anyway, it creeped him out plenty.

What could have hit this immense vessel so hard and fast it never got its mecha into the fight?

He remembered how the men aboard had died. Whatever had done that could do... pretty much whatever the hell it wanted, Rudy figured, and more power to it as long as it did it somewhere far away.

The next galaxy sounded good to him.

He was so busy tying himself into knots over the battlecruiser, he almost didn't notice when the Errant Magpie's sensors spat out an anomalous reading.

“I think we've got something,” he called.

The ship's thrusters reversed and pushed it to a halt. “Let me see,” Chloe said.

“We could put it up on the main screen,” Milissa suggested.

“No!” Chloe and Rudy shouted it at the same time. They exchanged embarrassed glances.

“It was just a suggestion,” Milissa said quietly, but she didn't push it.

Chloe joined Rudy at his station, peering down at the image of one of the battlecruiser's mecha bays. The imperial line mecha were present here as well, row upon row of them.

So was something else.

It lay on its back, unlike the rest of the mecha which stood in their bays, and while the angle made it hard for the Magpie's instruments to get a fix on it, it seemed bigger than the machines surrounding it.

Chloe sucked in a breath.

Rudy glanced up at her. “This it?”

She nodded.

“Then let's go get it,” Rudy said. He tried to sound more confident than he felt. Chloe might not be able to read his mind, but she knew him well enough to know he took a lot to scare.

The last time he'd come to the battlecruiser, he'd gotten scared. He'd gotten freaking terrified, and he'd panicked. That just did not happen. Period. Not in tournaments, not in street fights, not even in his first real life-or-death battle against another mechaneer.

Chloe had brought him back to himself, and he'd never been able to express how much he owed her for that.

Regardless, she nodded again and strode to the bridge doors. Rudy rose and followed. He caught up with her at the doors, where she paused to say, “Hold the fort, Mili. We'll be right back.”

“Good luck,” Milissa said. She waved to them and made no move to look back to the battlecruiser. Smarter than she let on, that one.

Rudy and Chloe, on the other hand, were going back into the ship.

Not so smart.

Rudy kept his thoughts to himself as he and Chloe descended to the mecha bay.

She had tinkered with the machine he’d taken into battle against Stephan, but it had been more to pass the time than from any hope of bringing it back to working order, much less combat spec. They’d need a full repair bay to attempt that.

Without that mecha, Rudy and Chloe had to lean on a pair of the Civil War relics the Kyrillos men-at-arms had piloted. He would have rather shared a cockpit, but they might need two mecha if something went wrong and he didn't want to have to rely on Milissa to bail them out.

The gravity was off in the bay, so Rudy kicked his way up to one of the mecha and climbed into its open cockpit. Chloe already had hers shut by the time he reached the rim. Not for the first time, he had to admire the way she swam through zero gee like she'd been born to it.

“We're good to go, Milissa,” Rudy said, as much to test the communications suite and to give the Kyrillos girl a way to feel useful as because he or Chloe needed someone to open the mecha bay doors. They could trigger them remotely from their mecha.

The air vacuumed from the chamber, then the doors slid apart and open space sucked out whatever wisps remained.

Open space, except for the battlecruiser below.

Rudy switched to a private channel between the mecha. “Okay, Clo, what's the plan?”

“You should stay here.” Her face appeared on his left. She didn't seem to be looking at the camera mounted over the front of her cockpit, because her eyes didn't meet his.

“Not gonna happen,” Rudy said.

“I know you won't,” she said, “but you should.”

“We've been through this before.” Whether 'this' was Chloe saying she should go to the battlecruiser alone or the battlecruiser itself, Rudy's statement applied.

Chloe nodded absently.

“So,” Rudy said again, “what's the plan?”

“I take back my mother's mecha,” Chloe said. Her current machine stepped from its moorings and burned toward the open doors of the mecha bay.

Rudy's followed. After the fluid grace of the aristocratic mecha, adjusting to the man-at-arms model made him feel like he was piloting through molasses. Fortunately, Chloe's pace was deliberate. He caught up to her halfway between the transport and the looming cavern that was the battlecruiser's mecha bay.

“That's a good goal,” Rudy said. “Or at least a not-crazy one. Do you know how?”

“My parents dragged it out of here without incident.”

“And Stephan said it would 'smote the flaming sword what drew it' or some shit like that,” Rudy said. “Some shit, I might add, that Marcel apparently believed, because it's still here.”

“It's waiting for me,” Chloe said.

Rudy looked at her image more closely. At first, he'd thought she was looking intently at one of her instruments, but now he saw that her gaze seemed unfocused, distant.

Rudy frowned. “I really hope you mean that metaphorically, Clo.”

She didn't answer. She glided down to the bay, careless grace belying the mecha she piloted.

Rudy thought about trying to restrain her. This whole thing felt rotten to him. He didn't feel unnaturally terrified like he had last time; naturally was a different story. “Chloe, stop. Talk to me. What's waiting for you?”

“The erinyes,” Chloe said. “Megaera.”

“It's got a name?”

No answer.

“You know its name?” Oh, crap. Rudy's thrusters flared and he hit the deck hard enough to drop his mecha into a crouch. He straightened up and took off after Chloe. “Chloe, don't touch it!”

The sight of the erinyes almost brought him up short. It was, by far, the most magnificent mecha he'd ever seen: eighteen meters tall – or long, since it lay on its back – and made entirely of a silvery, almost liquid-looking substance he'd never seen before, it sprouted a pair of elegant wings and a delicate, extremely organic looking figure that could have been Chloe's writ colossal. It glowed, and he didn't see any source for the lighting.

Chloe's man-at-arms mecha knelt before it like a primitive idol before the goddess it was meant to represent.

Rudy didn't much like the idea of Chloe kneeling to that thing. He rushed forward, grabbed Chloe's machine by the shoulders and turned it to him, trying to shake some sense into her.

His mouth went dry.

Chloe's cockpit was open.

He shot a glance at his communications window – blank –, then looked down at the erinyes.

A tiny figure in a white flight suit knelt on its silvery chest, her head bowed.

“Chloe!” Rudy reached for her. He could pluck her gently from the erinyes and they could figure out what the hell was going on.

At least he could have, if she hadn't chosen that moment to fall forward and sink through the silvery metal.