Chapter 75: Stop

Silver slid away from Chloe's eyes.

Overhead, broad beige panels emitted gentle light over green-carpeted hallways and broad, rounded halls set with planters.

The light played across a dark-haired angel's lips as they creased in a frown. Her voice was almost inaudibly soft against the battlecruiser's background hum, but high and clear like a distant bell. She whispered, “What's going on?”

The man beside her could not have looked more ordinary in comparison: almost painfully so in a dull-liveried flight suit with only the green-and-white Imperial crest on one shoulder to lend color to its brown and gray. His voice, too, was drab, but tight with urgency that seemed incongruous, almost impossible, in the angel's presence. “There's no time, Karissa,” he said, and reached for her arm.

Chloe noticed for the first time that the “angel” wasn't, not unless angels could get very pregnant.

She realized, as she floated, disembodied, in the battlecruiser's hallway, that she looked upon her Imperial mother, the last Empress, Karissa Astroykos.

Chloe tried to orient herself, but it was impossible. It took all of her willpower to hold on to the memory of how she'd gotten here. How and when. She felt like she could slip into this seeming now and lose her way, or her self.

She was either seeing something within the erinyes, or it had triggered something in her powers to allow her to see this. Save for the displacement in time she knew had to be occurring, it was the same as when she'd watched her father and the Animus Hunter on Etemenos. It was the hunches she'd always had, made clear at last.

Or at least clearer. Either the strangeness of the scene or Chloe's vantage point lent it a dreamlike quality.

Karissa, one hand automatically, unconsciously resting over the curve of her belly, reached the other out to the – what? Imperial guardsman?

“Errard,” she said, “make the time.”

He frowned back at her and Chloe saw, thirty years removed, the Animus Hunter he would become.

She had no idea what that meant, though, or even if she was seeing the truth. Errard wasn't, after all, an uncommon name.

“We've stopped,” he said, and the more Chloe heard his voice the more she felt certain it was the same man. “I don't know why and I cannot raise the captain.”

“I'm sure I can,” Karissa said.

“Don't!”

Unless her telepathy was so effortless as to be imperceptible to her future-daughter's remote viewing, Karissa didn't.

Errard took her outstretched hand and gently lowered it. “There may be things you should not have to see.”

“Oh.” Karissa lowered her eyes.

Couldn't he see, Chloe wondered. Karissa already knew Errard was going to betray her. Chloe knew it, and she'd just arrived. He was too agitated. She, too resigned.

Maybe he knew and just didn't want to admit it to himself.

“We have to get to the mecha bay,” he said. “Come. Quickly!”

She followed in silence, only shaking her head after he'd turned.

Chloe wanted to reach through the ages and grab her by the shoulders and scream, don't! Whatever you're doing now, turn around – or keep going if you did turn around, because Principle knows – and I know – how this ends.

Awfully.

With the beautiful halls of the Imperial battlecruiser stained red. With Karissa dead. With Errard fighting and killing her husband the Emperor.

Badly, except for Chloe being given into the arms of Jack and Ellie Hughes.

But that made no sense, Chloe thought. She'd been five or six when her parents found her. The scene playing out before her with a young Imperial Guardsman and a pregnant Empress had to have taken place half a decade before the battlecruiser reached its awful end. Was it even the same ship? Were they even the people she thought they were?

The erinyes was old – ancient. She didn't know where it came from, what it was, what it wanted. She didn't dare guess why it had sent her consciousness here or given her a glimpse of what had been. She had only intuition to tell her anything she saw had ever been real.

Intuition sufficed.

Karissa allowed Errard to pull her forward as urgently as her condition allowed. The carpet beneath them, artfully disguised nanopaste, sped them on their way. Chloe drifted after them, unable to stop herself even if she'd wanted to.

If I had a lick of sense, she thought, I would want to. I know what they're going to see, or have done to them, or do.

But not who'd done what.

Not why.

Not, though she hoped never to need this final bit of knowledge, how.

Chloe had wished for knowledge and power to save her parents, to repay some small measure of her debt to Rudy.

The erinyes – Megaera – offered to grant her wish.

Glad her formlessness spared her from having to decide, Chloe followed the pair down the halls of the battlecruiser.

She knew, without knowing how she knew, they were close, now, to the mecha bay where more than a decade in the future Jack and Ellie Hughes would find Megaera with Karissa and Chloe inside. Where, more than a decade after that, Chloe and Rudy had found the erinyes again.

Where I really am, Chloe reminded herself. It would be so easy to forget.

The hallways in this past looked so peaceful. Apparently, the battlecruiser was the Empress's personal vessel. Shadowy duplicates of Karissa flickered through the halls overseeing the draping and care of the plants that gave the ship free, limitless oxygen and warm beauty. Watering them herself, when her attendants failed to stop her, accepting their gentle admonishments with a gentler smile. The halls were lovely under her care, extensions of a self that must have been lovely within as without. The half-seen images made Chloe wish desperately to see more.

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Through Megaera, she realized, she might be able to.

Errard stopped abruptly. Karissa flitted to a stop behind him, her grace belying her advanced pregnancy.

“Gunfire,” she said.

Chloe couldn't hear it, but Errard nodded. She wondered if her ears just weren't sharp enough or if her remote viewing limited the radius of her hearing somehow. Assuming what she experienced now was even the same thing as what she’d stumbled into achieving a few days before.

Karissa turned her back to the sound. Her silver-flight-suited shoulders slumped. “It’s time for you to explain, Errard.”

“There must be some sort of attack,” he said. “A mutiny, even.”

“Even that?” Karissa gazed down the hallway, staring straight at where Chloe's perception came from, and for a minute Chloe's heart leaped with the hope she could actually make a difference.

But the Empress stared through her like she wasn't even there.

Which, of course, she wasn't.

“Karissa...” Errard tensed, trying to look at Karissa without taking his eyes off the source of the fire.

“Why, Errard?”

“I don't –”

“Do not lie to me. It is beneath us both. Of course it is mutiny. You are a mutineer yourself.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Errard said. “You know I'd never do anything to hurt you or your daughter.”

“Or Theo?” The Emperor Theophilos XIX, no doubt. Even though Chloe knew, intellectually, this woman was the Empress and Chloe herself supposedly their daughter, it sounded weird to hear the Emperor of human space called by a diminutive.

Errard didn't answer for a moment. His hand hovered poised over her shoulder, shaking, answering for him. At last he said, “I'd rather it not come to that.”

“I did tell you, dear friend, it would come to that, and this, and all such tragedies.”

“Prophecies,” Errard Zelph said. He packed such contempt into the word Chloe at last recognized his Animus Hunter's voice.

“I am of the line of St. Sophia, whose dreams were the dreams of empire. You truly cannot believe I see the future?”

If you saw the future, Chloe wondered, how could you possibly have followed the path you did?

“I have my moments of prescience, too, Karissa,” Errard said. “Hints of might-be and ought-to, nothing more. You cannot rely on them.”

“You are not as I am.”

He withdrew his hand. Chloe wondered if she could sense the pain he didn't bother to keep from his face. When his lip curled and his eyes darkened, he looked so much more like the man she knew he grew to be.

Karissa said, “If it were not for my Chloe, I would not object. Death is frightening, parting sad, but both bearable. You should not have threatened her.”

“You're imagining this, Karissa,” Errard said, but he couldn't keep the strain out of his voice. Karissa already knew, Chloe knew she knew – Principle, she'd said so. Errard didn't believe she was so weak-minded he could convince her, did he? “I'm not threatening anyone.”

“Mutiny has a way of proving unkind to one side or both,” Karissa said. She turned to face him, whirling a train of dark curls behind her. “One need not be a prophet to see how it might spin awry.”

“I'm doing this for you, Karissa,” Errard said. He gripped her shoulders, tightly enough Chloe winced along with her birth mother. “For Chloe – even for Theo. None of you want the future this country forces you to have. You've said it often enough.”

“It is not the future you want to erase, Errard, but the past. The thing you cannot change, and I must not.”

“You're wrong,” Errard said. “I will not be so kind as to say Theo deserves you, but I know he makes you as happy as you can be within this role. This is a chance, an excuse, to cast away the role entirely.”

“By holding me hostage against my husband's abdication?”

“I'm giving you, all of you, a chance at a normal life. Isn't that what you want?”

“It is not what I will have,” Karissa said.

Chloe understood the conversation ended with those words. So, despite his jaw working around another protest, did Errard.

At least she thought so, until he turned and started to stalk down the hall.

“Errard,” Karissa called, “dear friend, it isn't too late –”

“I'm afraid it is.”

An explosion ripped through the bulkhead Chloe observed 'from.' For a moment, her view clouded. When she could see again, Karissa and Errard each floated at the center of a sphere of telekinetic energy. Fire licked harmlessly at their barriers, spurting and spiraling toward the vacuum of an open, unshielded mecha bay. Dead and dying plants curled after it. The entire hallway had blown out, partly collapsing into the bay. Below, men in Imperial Navy and Imperial Guard uniforms, some armored, most not, fired hopelessly into ranks neither side seemed sure existed, heedless of the pair floating overhead.

If I had been careless, Karissa thought, Chloe would have been hurt by that blast. A blast created by the mutineers, the rebels, with whom my oldest, dearest friend now aligns himself.

They go too far, Errard thought.

And you thought you could control this. The contempt in Karissa's mind astonished Chloe. The Empress seemed so soft, it was hard to remember she had the power as well as the face of a goddess. Too, it seemed she had the will. You are a poorer kidnapper than you have become a friend.

You and Chloe weren't hurt, Errard thought, but how long can that last? You must see reason and come with me!

Karissa looked down at the men below. One of the navy men had unlimbered an anti-mecha battery. That was what had blown out the corridor. It had done worse to a cluster of Imperial Guard mechaneers who had been rushing toward their machines. Their corpses followed flame and the Empress's planter boxes toward the void. Two guardsmen stormed the battery as another shell rolled into its mechanism. A blast of killing force slammed into the gunner and hurled him back amidst a rapidly vaporizing cloud of blood.

Chloe realized she still didn't know which side wanted to protect Karissa and which side wanted to kidnap her.

Reasonable, thought Karissa. She started to laugh at Errard and ended up choking out a sob.

Kari –! Errard's hand stretched out.

Chloe felt the new, but somehow familiar presence forming around Karissa. She'd expected the young Empress to have to seek out her erinyes, but the mecha came to her. It seemed to come from her, its silvery form spreading beautiful, terrible wings from nothing at all.

Chloe shouldn't have been able to see, but she could.

Oh, Principle, she could.

Karissa, Errard thought frantically, stop, you aren't trained for this! You don't know how to use that kind of power!

Pray I learn quickly, old friend, Karissa thought.

You could hurt Chloe!

Karissa hesitated.

Chloe wasn't sure whether to be happy or not, because she wasn't sure if she was watching the events leading up to the battlecruiser's doom or a chain that hadn't, but maybe should have, happened. Already, the killing below looked like the first stages of the ruin she and Rudy had picked their way through, but it wasn't even close to complete.

Maybe this Karissa had a chance, or at least a few years with her daughter.

Deep down, though, Chloe knew better.

She had a sick feeling she knew what came next.

The erinyes's emergence silenced the combatants below, at least for the moment. They hadn't even noticed when the Empress they wanted to either protect or capture nearly died from their misplaced fire. The unfurling of her mecha got their attention just fine, though.

They looked up, mouths wide with awe, as Megaera descended among them.

Errard, discarded, forgotten, drifted toward the airlock. Chloe didn't know how to parse his expression. He probably didn't know himself. There was anger, and terror, and sorrow. Jealousy, adoration – and in him, too, awe.

None of them had seen an erinyes before, Chloe realized.

Somehow, incongruously, Chloe could see both the Imperial mecha's silver form and Karissa within it. The Empress looked nearly as awed – and terrified – as any of her subjects, but her jaw was set in a line harder than it seemed designed for and her eyes blazed with what had to be Imperial fire.

If Chloe hadn't known what had to happen, she'd have been on pins and needles to see it. As it was, all she wanted to do was look away.

Stop, Karissa thought.

The universe obeyed.