Chapter 77: Knowledge and Power

Objectively, Rudy knew he shouldn't be shouting. Way to calm a panicked person down, right? And he didn't remember turning his comlink off. He and Chloe had tried to keep Milissa from feeling the brunt of whatever had happened on the battlecruiser, and he'd blown that all to hell. Besides, he saw no reason it would help.

Objectively.

“Chloe,” he screamed, and tore at the silver that still clung stubbornly to her shaking body. He wrenched her from it and fell backwards onto it, sank a little ways, then felt it burn and twist away from him. “Get off her, you monster! Leave her alone! Chloe, wake up!”

The erinyes obeyed. It shrank from them in a wave, more like nanopaste than a mecha's hard body, more like something alive and frightened than either.

Chloe did not.

He couldn't tell if she was really asleep. She was definitely dreaming, though, and her dreams couldn't be any kind of pleasant.

He cradled her in his arms and lifted her face to his. Tears streaked the transparent mask over her closed eyes, and her mouth worked like she was trying to speak but had no breath.

“Chloe,” he whispered, “wake up. Please, Clo. Please come back. See? I'm being polite. Don't you want to see me be polite? Doesn't happen every day, right? Don't you? Chloe, please, Principle, babe – Chloe, wake up!”

Her eyes snapped open and he regretted the plea.

They were wild, unfocused, flashing across his face without really seeing him. Whatever she was seeing wasn't Rudy, and it obviously terrified her.

She beat against his chest and writhed in his arms. He held her tighter, afraid she'd hurt herself.

She hurt him instead, kneeing him in the groin hard enough he doubled over even after his flight suit's armor spread the impact.

Chloe wriggled from his grasp in the second it took him to catch his breath.

She stumbled backwards across the floor, her elbows and feet and hands scrabbling for purchase.

Rudy followed.

“Stay away from me,” she shouted. “Don't touch me!”

At least she was talking.

“Chloe,” he said. He forced his voice to stay calm. “Chloe, listen to me.”

“No!” She rolled over and buried her face in her arms. Her shoulders heaved with a great sob and she slumped onto the deck.

The erinyes stirred just beyond her. Aside from the hole in its elegant 'chest,' it still looked like a mecha, but at the edges of the ring of bare deck, its surface bubbled and twitched, stretching silver pseudopods toward Chloe and then flinching away.

That monster, Rudy thought. It did this to her. It must have done it to everybody on the battlecruiser.

And it was afraid of him.

For the moment, at least, Rudy was too mad for the feeling to be mutual. So help me Principle, he thought, I'll kill every last drop of you, you silver son of a bitch!

He took a step toward it. The silver recoiled.

“I told you,” he said, “to leave her alone.”

The erinyes's surface roiled in what he took for challenge.

Bring it on! He clenched a fist and threw it forward. The erinyes-free sphere went with it, stretching into an egg-shaped bubble. He couldn't exactly hit the thing – but from the way it shuddered as he tried, this was better, anyway.

“Stop,” Chloe whispered.

Rudy hesitated. Was she talking to him? Did she know what he was doing? Hell, did she even know he was there?

Or was she talking to whatever it was he couldn't see?

The erinyes didn't seem to be able to hurt him or her, at least for the moment. He had to chance it.

He turned back to Chloe and knelt by her side. She was still shaking, but at least she didn't flinch away when he wrapped her in his arms.

“It's okay, Clo,” he whispered. “I'll stop. You're just fine.”

She didn't respond.

“It's me,” he said. “It's Rudy. Rudolf Kaine Algreil, remember? About a week ago, you told me – well, okay, you implied, but it was a strong implication – you loved me. So wake up and look me in the eye and say it again. I sure do want to hear you say it.”

Slowly, Chloe looked up again.

Her face was still streaked with tears and tensed with fear. But her eyes were lucid.

She stopped shaking.

She took a deep breath.

She said, “Thank you, Rudy. And I do. I love you so much.”

He smiled down at her.

“But,” she finished, “you need to let go of me.”

So much for smiling.

He let her go. The way she said it, he was at least willing to hear her out. “Is this one of those things we can't explain, Clo?”

“No.” She looked to the erinyes, still bubbling in a circle around them. “You can't touch me because you're destroying my powers.”

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“I'm what?”

“You don't just have a barrier, Rudy,” Chloe said. “Look at what you're doing to Megaera. Coming close to you melts it. What do you think it's doing to my power? Why do you think the first time I touched your mind here, I could do it, and now you're as dead as empty space to me and Milissa and Stephan?”

“I'm not feeling real sorry for the erinyes. It tried to eat you. As for your powers –”

“The erinyes tried to help me,” Chloe said. “I just... wasn't ready for how much.”

Rudy wasn't sure he believed her. Maybe she thought what that monster did was helping, but he doubted it. “What did you see in there, Chloe?”

“I'm... not sure.” Then: “The past.”

“The battlecruiser's past?” Suddenly, he could understand the way she'd been thrashing around like she expected him to tear her apart.

“And my mother's,” Chloe said quietly.

Rudy winced. He knew she didn't mean Ellie Hughes.

“You saw what attacked this wreck? What did... whatever happened?”

“It wasn't an attack,” Chloe said. “It was a mutiny.”

“On an Imperial Guard ship?” That was something even the classified files Rudy had access to didn't say boo about. Was Chloe wrong? Was Rudy's security clearance less extensive than he thought?

Or had something gone down all those years ago Algreil Aerospace didn't have any inkling of?

“Zelph was there,” Chloe said. “He – I think he used to be my mother's friend, and maybe the captain of her guards. But he was in on the mutiny. He said it was for her own good. She didn't believe –”

“Stephan took on Zelph almost even up,” Rudy said. “No way could he...”

He met Chloe's eyes and, if not understood, at least got the idea.

An Animus Hunter couldn't do what had been done to the battlecruiser. But an Imperial, in the fullness of her powers, with an erinyes? If a greater power existed in the galaxy, Rudy had never heard of it.

Chloe caught his expression and nodded. “Principle knows she didn't mean to hurt anybody. She did, though. The last thing I saw was her saying – stop. And it did.”

“It?”

“Everything,” Chloe said. “The ship. The people. Principle, Rudy, the stars.”

“That's –” He shook his head. “No way. It had to be an illusion.”

“Like the people half-fused to the decks? Or each other?”

Rudy couldn't help but shudder. At least it gave him an argument, though. “It didn't happen everywhere, Clo. Whatever it looked to you like she did, it was just this ship.”

Or it was worst at this ship.

Rudy knew he could check incidents of unexplained medical conditions around the time the battlecruiser disappeared. He also knew he didn't have the stomach to.

Chloe lowered her eyes. “Maybe.”

“Then –”

“I didn't see what went wrong,” Chloe said, “but I know what my mother wanted to do:

“She tried to take the whole ship out of phase,” she continued. “She wanted to take me someplace, some space, where I could be born safely. Megaera would be my cocoon and her midwife and the battlecruiser would sail on, outside any kind of space and time you or I would understand. Then, when it was safe, she wanted to call her husband, the Emperor, to come get us.

“And it almost worked.”

Almost.

Chloe slumped. Rudy could see the sobs wracking her flight-suited form. He wanted to make them go away.

When he started to drift forward, she looked up and shook her head.

“You want to talk about it?”

“I want to forget it.” Chloe gulped down another breath. “It seems like I should. She never wanted me to know what happened, so until my parents found me five years later, I never knew anything at all.”

“Can you forget?”

“I wish.” Chloe climbed unsteadily to her feet. Instinctively, Rudy reached out to steady her, but she slid away easily in zero-gee. “It's not something you can just put out of your mind.”

“So what do we do now?”

“I take the erinyes,” Chloe said. “And we go to Etemenos. Like we planned.”

“What? No. That thing may have been trying to help, but it didn't. It hurt you. No way I'm letting you go back to it!”

“It's not your decision,” Chloe said. She drifted backwards toward the edge of the empty space he'd created.

“Chloe, you don't have to do this.”

She shook her head. “I need its power to rescue my parents, Rudy.”

“No you don't.” Rudy jetted to his feet and after her. “You don't need any power. You've got mine.”

Chloe lowered her eyes. “You'll protect me? Protect them?”

“Of course!”

“Like my mother did?”

Rudy didn't answer. It sounded like a rhetorical question.

“Someone gave literally everything of herself to protect me,” Chloe said. “It's so much, too much. No one else can ever have to do that again.”

“We all need help sometimes, Chloe. Hell, even I need it.” The joke sounded flat even to Rudy's ears. He couldn't imagine how it sounded to hers.

“Thanks, Rudy,” she said. “And you're right. I'll probably need your help before this is over, and Principle knows your company is about the only reason I'm anything like sane.

“But I won't let you protect me anymore.”

Before he could try to stop her, before he could even respond, she stepped outside his sphere and into the silver mass of the erinyes.

She was engulfed immediately.

Rudy wanted to run after her and drive the erinyes back with all the might he seemed to possess. He knew he could. The erinyes was apparently made of psions. Just coming close to him destroyed it.

But...

It wasn't his decision.

Yet.

He wasn't going to let the erinyes hurt Chloe, whatever she might say. If she didn't come out, and fast, he would protect her, and she'd either learn to deal with it or she'd leave.

At least she'd be able to leave. Better that than the alternative.

Rudy fixed his gaze on his suit's chronometer. It ticked down the milliseconds, mockingly slow.

Come on, Clo, he thought. Prove me wrong.

I'll even, he added, say please.

He figured Chloe couldn't hear his thoughts, but she might as well have. The erinyes's rippling shape compressed. It twisted like a wet towel, but it kept twisting and folding long after any fabric would have reached its limits.

In what seemed like hours but took only seconds according to his chronometer, the erinyes was gone.

Chloe stood in its place, her white flight suit gone. A sheath of shining silver covered her body, not mecha but armor.

She turned, moving with what seemed like unnatural grace to Rudy – but maybe it was just her being so smooth in zero-gee – and the erinyes folded itself away from her face. Her flight suit's mask was gone, too; that they were in vacuum seemed to bother her not at all.

She spoke.

She frowned.

The mask rippled back over her head.

“Rudy,” she said, using the comlink again. “The erinyes's systems are all psychic, so we can't talk that way.”

“Are you okay, Chloe?”

“I've been better,” she admitted. “But – yeah. I'm okay. This truly is what we came here for, Rudy: knowledge and power. So much. It's unbelievable.”

Rudy rolled his eyes. “You know I don't care about that crap, right?”

“I know. But until we rescue my parents, I do.”