Epilogue

  Chloe sank deeper into Rudy's embrace.

  They snuggled on a folded-down bunk. Her bunk – theirs – on the Mother Goose.

  Home.

  The familiar sound of the engine humming just at the edge of human hearing. The coziness of close composite walls covered with familiar screens. A closeness to the air, a quiet tension. Groundlings she'd met called it the electricity in the air a calm before the storm, but Chloe had known and loved the feeling all her life.

  Or maybe it was just because the company was good.

  She leaned back and reached up to cup his cheek.

  Rudy smiled down at her. Chloe had seen plenty of his smiles – his famous cocky grin when he'd pulled off some crazy scheme, his tired smile when he hardly had anything left and he had to give more, everything between. This one was something new, so small and subtle it just tugged at the corners of his lips, but it went all the way deep in his electric blue eyes.

  She'd never, she realized, seen him content before.

  She supposed he, too, was home.

  Chloe could have demanded any vessel in the Federal or Oligarchical fleets. She'd asked for the one ship she wanted, the only one she ever wanted, and the only crew she'd ever want to fly it.

  The Mother Goose left Etemenos unmolested. No one wanted her to stay. Safer, by far, to get her far away from the old seat of her ancestors. Otherwise she might have decided to stretch out that shining silver hand of hers and claim it.

  “They,” Feds and oligarchs alike, had no idea how little she wanted that.

  Nor, thankfully, how little she would have been able to accomplish if she had.

  All Chloe Hughes wanted was with her on the Mother Goose. The ship itself, which she'd missed more than she could have imagined. Its mecha, simple, squat and comfortable and nothing at all like the lost erinyes. Her friend Milissa, who they would return to her home soon enough.

  Her parents. They manned the bridge now, but every centimeter of the Mother Goose reminded her of them. She could close her eyes and remember their reunion. Her dad's bear hug, so tight she felt like she would suffocate, and gladly. Her mom's happy tears when the embrace finally ended. None of them spoke. None of them had to.

  And Rudy.

  Her father had married them. It was the spacer way. The ceremony, such as it was, had been over in a few minutes, so fast Chloe had hardly registered they'd gone by.

  Chloe wanted to lose herself in Rudy's embrace again, but the speakers surrounding her room's main screen insisted on intruding. She wanted to shut them off, but she didn't have the right to.

  Etemenos had survived. The war was, if not over, at least postponed. Less than a hundred thousand people had died. By galactic standards, the altercation barely rose to the level of a disaster.

  Chloe knew better.

  She'd seen those “less than a hundred thousand.” She'd felt them die. Even if she could have forced herself to forget them, she didn't have the right to.

  Onscreen, a reporter stood outside the closed core of Etemenos. Repair mecha swarmed in the background, spraying new nanomachines onto hastily-erected temporary lattices. “Repairs continue here at Etemenos's core,” the reporter said, waving a hand at the machines behind him. Chloe wondered if he was really standing on a platform outside the core or if the news company was splicing together two sets of footage. “That hasn't stopped the Federal Senate from launching into another emergency session at the heart of the world city. Our sources indicate that President Rhetta Ferrill's administration faces a crisis of confidence in light of the Shadow Empress Incident.”

  Chloe winced.

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  That was the name both sides had given her: the Shadow Empress. Why not? She'd refused the throne of her ancestors, but she'd commanded a cease-fire as surely as if she sat it. She'd threatened to kill any of the faction leaders who refused to postpone hostilities. Then she'd disappeared.

  To them, it had to seem like she intended to rule from the shadows. She terrified them. If she hadn't been the one up there handing down proclamations, she'd have scared herself.

  Heck, she did scare herself.

  Fortunately, they didn't know that.

  Just as they didn't know how empty her threats had been. An Imperial's power could have destroyed them all, if not with the precision she’d claimed to have.

  The only power Chloe had left ended when she stepped aboard the Mother Goose.

  Rudy whispered, “Hey.”

  She looked back to his smiling face.

  “Don't let those bastards get to you,” he said. “You did good.”

  “Maybe.” Good for the Feds? Sure. She hadn't wanted to settle the fight in favor of either side, but only one still had the invincible shields of the World City. Of course, only one had Otto Algreil, and from what Chloe had seen, Rudy's brother was a balancing factor in his own right.

  She wondered if she ought to hope so.

  “It won't come to another war,” Rudy said.

  “Because they're afraid of me.”

  He shook his head. “Because they were looking for a way out. Maybe not Ferrill and Zelph, but Otto sure was. You gave him one. Maybe more importantly, you gave the senate one. No way the people will vote in anybody who wants to pick this fight all over again when it came so close to wrecking Etemenos.”

  “You're just trying to make me feel better,” Chloe said.

  He cocked his head. “Is it working?”

  Yes.

  Not because he was right, though she could at least hope he was.

  Because he was him.

  Because he was here, on this ship, in her arms.

  She leaned up to kiss him.

  His lips stayed closed.

  “What?”

  “First,” he said, pulling away, “you've got to tell me how you pulled it off.”

  “My last big bluff?”

  He nodded.

  Chloe held her hand up. Her gray flight suit slid down the length of her fingers.

  “But you didn't have a flight suit other than the erinyes,” Rudy said.

  “Sure I did,” Chloe said. “Etemenos.”

  He blinked.

  “My ancestors,” Chloe said, “had it built from the same stuff as our flight suits. When I saw –” Everything, she thought, but she couldn't parse it all even now, and didn't want to. “– how it worked, I started to realize why they built it that way.”

  Etemenos's structure responded to her will like a flight suit. A backup system in case the emperors' powers failed? If so, it had at least been enough power to save the world-city's people.

  It wasn't enough power to rule like her ancestors had.

  Rudy whistled softly. “Trust your machines, eh?”

  “We'll make a spacer of you yet,” Chloe said. This time, when she leaned forward to kiss him, he didn't dodge.

  Across the room, the news droned on, threatening to pull her out of the moment. She could turn it off. Rudy would, soon enough.

  She wondered how her ancestors had managed to shut it out.

  They could sense the whole galaxy. With a thought, they could see any planet in human space. With another, appear there in the minds of their subjects or as an illusion of solid psions. Maybe the galaxy hadn't been too big for them – but then, maybe it had. They hadn't held it in the end. Even now, she didn't know if her Imperial father died fighting for his crown or sacrificed himself to join his wife.

  She knew the galaxy was too big for Chloe Hughes. For Chloe Algreil, even!

  If she hadn't stopped the fighting, it would have consumed Etemenos. Whoever won, billions would have died. She'd saved...

  What had she saved?

  What had she changed?

  Onscreeen, the reporter spoke of plans to reinforce the Federal Second Fleet in preparation for a possible strike against the “Oligarchical rebels.” “Recently reinstated Grand Admiral Marcel Avalon opposes the measure,” the reporter said. “He assured us, however, that he would be ready to carry out his orders.”

  The screen cut to the admiral, resplendent in his new dress uniform. “I advise against the pursuit of war. We have seen far too clearly how costly it may be. Nonetheless, if it is the will of the people, all the Federal Navy stands ready to ensure it is carried out in the swiftest and most merciful manner possible.”

  Chloe willed the screen away.

  Rudy claimed war wouldn't be “the will of the people.” Admiral Avalon would work to keep it from becoming so. Surely she could place her trust in them. They were, after all, the greatest mechaneers of the age.

  And yet –

  “Everything we did, Rudy,” she whispered. “Everything everyone did, the people who died and got hurt and got scared? For all of that, is the world really any different?”

  Rudy kissed her.

  She molded herself to his kiss and his body and slid back into his embrace.

  When their lips parted, his eyes met hers and he breathed, “Mine is.”