Chapter 109: Victor’s Boon

  “Chloe.”

  She turned at the sound of her name, soft against the backdrop of crashing thoughts and presidential censure, loud enough she could hear it across a galaxy. She took a step, legs tensed to spring across the office, Animus Hunters be damned, and let the speaker fold her into his arms and tell her it would be all right. She'd believe, even though she knew he'd be wrong.

  But she couldn't do that.

  Deflated, she finished her turn and looked up a familiar crimson flight suit to shining electric blue eyes. “Rudy,” she said.

  He stepped forward, but he must have understood her hesitation. She couldn't give up her power. Not yet.

  Since she'd gotten it caught on camera, she probably never could.

  Maybe Rudy understood that, too, because he contented himself with an uncharacteristically quiet, “You okay?”

  “I screwed up, Rudy,” Chloe said.

  “Bad?”

  “Worse.” A beat. “Did you...?”

  “It's complicated.”

  “You lost?” She was surprised, after everything that had happened, to realize that she still felt a little disappointed.

  “I said it's complicated.” He snorted. “Yeah.”

  Which meant the Etemenos Cup's Champion had to be the man who appeared in the doorway behind Rudy. Marcel Avalon bowed as he entered the presidential offices. “Madame President,” he said. “Miss Hughes.”

  The Animus Hunters apparently didn't rate a mention.

  Chloe wondered if she should correct Avalon, at least where Zelph was concerned. She could feel the hostility between them, each holding the other in contempt, seeing the other as anathema, the worst part of the system they both served. Yet the Grand Admiral was closer to the man whose fall he'd helped engineer than Avalon could have guessed. They parted company only where honor was concerned. Zelph was willing to sacrifice even that on the altar of duty.

  Zelph's was not her story to tell. Nor did she feel any desire to defend the honor he'd chosen to throw away.

  All she wanted to do was run to Rudy, and that was the last thing she could do.

  Unless, of course, she was prepared to give up.

  She hoped the thought was one Zelph had planted in her brain. She knew better.

  If she were to tell Rudy what had happened, explain that the crime her dad would be condemned for was too new for the Victor's Boon to wipe away, throw herself on the Senate's mercy and her dad to the wolves...

  President Rhetta Ferrill was legalistic enough it might even work.

  Her dad would tell her to do it. He'd already tried to convince her to sacrifice him once. She could get everything she wanted, with just one exception, if she just got his perfectly sensible advice through her thick skull.

  But she couldn't.

  “I see, Marcel,” Ferrill said, “that you've won the Etemenos Cup once again.”

  The ex-admiral bowed his head. His hand clasped over his heart, over a stripe of bright blue that lent color to his golden flight suit. “Yes, Ma'am.”

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  “Once again, you have my congratulations.”

  “And I thank you for them, Ma'am,” Avalon said. “But – forgive me. It is not congratulations I have come to ask of you.”

  “You are referring to the Victor's Boon.” Ferrill's voice sounded shakier than Chloe had ever heard it, either in person or in a recording. The president's hands were balled tight over her desk. “Marcel, I... I must remind you to follow the old adage. Be careful what you wish for.”

  “I understand.”

  No, Chloe thought, you don't. President Ferrill doesn't want to tell you outright to ask something for yourself, but she's not gonna let me go and there's nothing you can do for me and my dad.

  Chloe started to speak, but Avalon cut her off.

  “I did not interrupt an emergency session of the Federal Senate merely to ask some small favor in exchange for whatever good I have done the people,” he said. Chloe found herself staring at him, almost as mesmerized by his voice as when they first met. Even Rudy, even Zelph, looked to Avalon.

  “I came here with all speed,” the ex-admiral said, “in the hopes I might do a greater service in victory than I did in the winning of it.”

  “The situation has changed, Marcel,” Ferrill said, but her voice was curiously subdued. Chloe realized with a start that even the woman who had risen to the highest position in human space wasn't immune to the power of her greatest champion's voice.

  “Let it change.” Avalon strode forward and stood beside Chloe. Imperial or no, she felt like she was disappearing into his shadow and was glad of the chance to. “What I have come to ask, and to do, does not require a 'situation' to make it right. It simply is.”

  No one answered.

  “Madame President,” Avalon said, “I know you have done something that you believed to be wrong, because you believed it best for the peace and equality of the galaxy.”

  “Marcel –”

  “I trust your judgment. If you believed it such, surely, so it was. But a wrong thing done for the best principles is no less wrong, and the best end born of wrong practice cannot long last.” Avalon faced Ferrill. His amber eyes barely narrowed as he spoke, his lantern jaw did not tighten – but Chloe, standing beside him, could feel a kind of tension she'd hardly known in her life roiling beneath his calm facade. “Please give me the chance to make practice as well as principle right – the situation be damned.”

  Ferrill rose unsteadily. She reached out and lay a shaking hand over the fist clenched to Avalon's chest. Her lips trembled for a moment, then broke into a small, sad smile.

  Her other hand lowered to the surface of her desk. It rippled with symbols Chloe couldn't make out.

  Ferrill met Avalon's eyes. Chloe couldn't see those amber orbs, but she could sense the plea he could not bring himself to speak.

  “Divine Auric Drake. You are ever the people's greatest shield. Yours is the lance that defends their justice, and the flame that fires their hearts to it. You remind them of what they ought to be, and show them that they can be.” Her smile broke free and her voice just broke. She whispered, so quietly Chloe could barely hear her, “They and I both.”

  Avalon bowed his head.

  “Divine Auric Drake,” the president said, “Champion of the Etemenos Cup, hero, Admiral, now and ever of the Federal Navy. Ask your victor's boon, and the Senate will see it done.”

  Avalon stared, stunned, maybe, that she'd called him 'admiral.'

  Chloe suspected they would have all called him 'emperor' if he'd asked them to. In his own way, he was more powerful than the emperors of the Astroykos Dynasty. Thank the Principle he used his power as little, and as well, as the best of them.

  “Madame President,” Avalon said, “members of the Federal Senate.

  “I ask you to pardon Jack and Chloe Hughes, free spacers and citizens of the Federated Stars, of all crimes of which they stand accused. I vouch for their standing as good citizens, and swear such missteps as they have made weigh as heavy on us as on them. It is we who have failed them, not they us, and I ask you to redress the failure.”

  The Senate erupted. Chloe realized that when Ferrill had touched her desk, she'd triggered the sound to and from the presidential office.

  Which meant it hadn't been on before.

  When she fought Zelph –

  When she learned why Ferrill and Zelph had pursued her family –

  No one outside the chamber knew. Only the Animus Hunters, the president, and Chloe herself would ever have to.

  She didn't have to lose after all.

  If her dad heard –

  The images of the senate boxes faded into the background and one holographic screen drowned out the rest. The first sound to emerge from it was applause.

  Slow, deliberate, sarcastic applause.

  Chloe looked up at the screen. So did Rudy, Avalon, Ferrill, Zelph, the Animus Hunters, even the senators whose images she could barely make out in their minimized projections.

  “Very nice speech, Admiral,” Otto Abeir Algreil said, “but it's a little late.”