Chapter 115: Order

  Megaera's silver wings spread until they enfolded the entirety of the throne room. Nestled in their embrace, Chloe could not think of the chamber as the office of a failed president. It was the seat of the Astroykos emperors. Hers.

  Finally, she opened her mind to the flow of knowledge and power. Chloe couldn't afford to hold back anymore; the erinyes never had.

  She knew she had to stop what was happening. It was her duty. It always had been. This was why she, why the Empress, existed.

  Errard Zelph believed the emperors were chains on humanity, and in his way he was right. Chains to bind the destructive impulses, the irreconcilable differences, the chaos that a galaxy's worth of human beings could generate. Without those chains, mankind could never unite on such a scale.

  Chloe had always believed it was all too big for her – the politics, the plots, the people too numerous and interconnected and incomprehensible.

  But it wasn't.

  When she gave herself over to her power, she finally understood that it was too big for everyone but her.

  Zelph's misunderstanding made sense to Chloe, too. She saw the last century of the Astroykos Empire unfurl before her. Human space torn apart by a civil war three generations of emperors refused to wield their power to stop.

  Chloe's ancestors had not lived up to their responsibilities.

  It fell to her to set things right.

  Etemenos hung suspended around her. She took its measure, her clairvoyance and prescience blended into a picture of the world-city in eternal now, physically impossible but for the chains of psions binding it to her and the universe. Where did one end and the other begin? Did one end and the other begin, or was that just a trick of her former, human perception?

  Effortlessly, she stretched her hand across hundreds of kilometers and halted the suicide run of a dying Federal cruiser. The vast ship didn't even strain against her invisible guiding hand. Grim determination froze on the face of its captain. A flick of Chloe's thoughts closed the gash seeping radiation into the ship's hull.

  With a thought she was beside her mother and Milissa. She felt the afterimage of their terror and tasted her mother's determination to be brave, and she would have wept if it hadn't been so easy to pull the pieces of Etemenos's core together and set the victims of the explosion on the newly-melded floor, unharmed.

  Thinking of the explosion made her thoughts fly to the shell that had caused it, and the hundreds of thousands of other shells, each bigger than a mecha, hurtling between the fleets. These she simply annihilated, separating their bonds at the molecular level and dispersing their energy as waste heat across the entire universe.

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  It was all so easy. So simple.

  All she had to do was accept who – what – she was.

  The seven miniature suns of Etemenos and all the force of its momentum strained against her. Time tried to march on.

  She refused to allow it.

  She would fix it all.

  No more hurting.

  Yet even as she did, a tiny voice – was it her own, so small and weak there at the heart of her she could scarcely imagine it connected to the vastness of her being? – whispered caution. She couldn't fix everything.

  Not because it was too big.

  Because it was too small.

  The seven miniature suns of Etemenos boiled with fusion fire in every atom. She had but to concentrate to perceive them in their totality, but to stop each individual atomic reaction? And every molecule in the world-city and its people, straining to continue the stately, flawlessly engineered dance they'd been twirling for centuries? She could stop the rings and spheres in their tracks, but every piece of them, down to particles so small they were only half-extant until her limitless perception forced them to become real, strained against her under its own momentum and in its own way.

  She felt her confidence falter.

  Her grasp on time began to slip.

  She was aboard the Pacific Resolution but there was no peace. In a hundredth of a heartbeat she had allowed time to pass. One of the com officers was frozen in the beginning of a scream as he tried to wrench his hand from the console it had melded to. Her father was pinned by a pair of marines, but none of them had realized that they were not just pinned –

  Chloe panicked.

  Desperately, she forced herself to focus on the molecular chains binding her father to the armor of his captors. Thank the Principle he hadn't yet had time to feel the maddening, incomparable, incomprehensible pain. She could still fix this. Molecule by molecule she separated them, lifting them into the air because she didn't want the distraction of the ground, wishing for vacuum.

  But she wasn't watching elsewhere.

  A hearbeat.

  She was with her mother and Milissa, performing the same operation to extract them from the walls of Etemenos, faster, more practiced – but she wasn't watching elsewhere.

  The universe rebelled against her meddling. By blind momentum it crashed molecule into molecule, moment into moment.

  Zelph had not been wrong. The emperors, who watched civil war tear apart their realm while they sat on Etemenos too afraid to use their full power, had not been wrong.

  Chloe was the one who was wrong.

  So, so wrong, and there was nothing she could do but flit here, now there, a million places at once but it was not enough because there were infinite “there”s and her consciousness, if not her power, could not be all things at all times. She didn't dare stop. She couldn't succeed.

  She didn't even know how to stop.

  Everyone she loved was going to die. Her parents. Her friends. Even her enemies, who were all right in their own ways, in at least equal measure to the ways they were wrong.

  Even Rudy? The one person she could not sense. The one person she could neither save nor damn. But she could destroy everything around him and didn't know how to stop herself.

  Her heart cried out for him but he was the one person who couldn't answer.

  So she believed –

  – until she saw Megaera's silver sheen flow away from red hands, and electric blue eyes met hers.