The Mechaneer

Chapter 2: Desperate Times

Ellie held Chloe as they watched Zelph’s departure. Neither they nor Jack spoke, and their flight suits muffled the evacuating atmosphere and the stirring of the Animus Hunter’s huge mecha, so his words hung in the air. Uncontested.

Ellie wanted to challenge them.

She couldn’t.

She remembered how she and Jack had found Chloe. How she’d picked up the gravitic signature of a Civil War era battlecruiser far from the battlefields of the conflict. How they’d approached the hulk, a metal pyramid as ominous as any tomb. How, against all reason, a distress signal had emerged from one of its cratered and cavernous mecha bays.

She remembered the mecha they found inside, huge and silver, unnaturally smooth, far more terrible than the Animus Hunter machine that must have been a crude copy or inversion of it.

She remembered the two figures curled within its cockpit. One had been Chloe, a tiny angel, delivered sleeping into Ellie’s arms. The other, the woman who must have been her mother, with her almost divinely beautiful face and her last smile, who lived just long enough to extract a promise to protect Chloe.

But Ellie refused to remember Chloe’s mother’s death, or what was left of the body beneath that beautiful face, or anything else she’d seen on that battlecruiser.

Like the Valuable Confiscated Livestock camp she’d been interred in before Jack rescued her, the battlecruiser had shaped Ellie into the person she was now. She refused to allow the past’s horrors any other hold on her. Life was too good to let memory taint it.

She couldn’t deny, though, that Animus Hunter Zelph was right. Chloe had grown up a Hughes but she had been born something else, and her birth mother proved that a psychic could do herself at least as much harm as anyone else.

So Ellie said nothing while Zelph’s mecha shrank from sight, the bay doors closed at last, and air rushed back in. She might have stayed silent, trying not to think about the past, if Chloe hadn’t almost collapsed in her arms.

In an instant, Jack was beside them. His arms wrapped around them both, holding them close, propping them up.

“That was damn fine work, ladies,” he said. His flight suit peeled back and Ellie willed hers to do the same. “It’s not every day you stand up to an Animus Hunter, eh?”

Chloe shrank deeper into her parents’ arms. Her suit’s hood peeled away and her short hair, dyed the same blonde as Ellie’s, splayed out at all angles.

“You were so brave when he got in your face, Clo,” Jack said. He grinned, but Ellie could hear the almost hysterical relief in his voice. She hoped she noticed only because of felid senses, but knew Chloe would, too. “No need to be scared now that he’s gone. It’s gonna be okay.”

“No,” Chloe said. Her voice was muffled against Ellie’s shoulder, but Ellie could feel her body shaking.

Ellie kissed the top of her head. She hadn’t been able to for years when Chloe stood up straight. “Chloe...”

“It’s not going to be okay.” Chloe looked up. Her eyes wavered with tears, like space at the edge of a compression tunnel.

Abruptly, she tugged free of her parents’ embrace. She stood with her back to them, facing the bay doors Zelph’s mecha had knelt in front of.

“Of course it will, honey,” Ellie said.

“How?” Chloe’s voice sounded very small.

“Because we’ll keep you safe.” Ellie touched her daughter’s arm.

“You can’t,” Chloe said.

“Don’t count us out just yet,” Jack said.

Ellie felt her daughter’s muscles tense.

Chloe drew in a deep breath. Her hand settled over Ellie’s, and she turned to offer a shaky smile. “You’re right.”

Her voice shook. She smelled of cold sweat and her hands trembled, but her smile grew stronger and she met Ellie’s eyes and Jack’s in turn.

Ellie’s ears flattened. She already knew what Chloe was about to say:

“I have to leave the Mother Goose.”

Jack stepped forward. “What!”

“You’ve both done so much for me,” Chloe said. “If I stay, sooner or later, that Animus Hunter or someone like him is going to find me. When he does, you’ll try to stop him. When you fail, you’ll get hurt. I won’t let you get hurt. Not because of me.”

“Who said anything about failing?” Jack asked.

“An Animus Hunter, Dad! You can’t handle someone like that. What’re you going to do, climb in Gosling One and use the welding torch on his mecha?” Chloe shook her head. She ended looking plaintively at Ellie.

Ellie wanted to assure her Jack would do exactly that, and that he’d win.

She knew only one of those was true, the same as her daughter.

“There’s always running away, Clo,” Jack said. “We’ve kept you safe this long. Just ‘cause some hot shot Animus Hunter's sniffing around in the right star system doesn’t mean we don’t have what it takes.”

“You kept me safe while the Federal Senate consolidated its power over what used to be the Empire. It’s just like salvage, Dad. The further we get from the war, the fewer cracks for people like us to slip through.” Chloe took Ellie’s hand in one of hers and reached the other out to Jack. After a moment’s hesitation, he took it.

“If you try to hide,” Chloe said, “you won’t be able to take jobs in the big star systems. We’ve got enough problems just surviving, getting fuel, paying off the Goose. If you won’t take jobs because you’re worried about me getting caught, you could lose everything.”

What would everything mean? Their mecha. Their ship. Their Spacer way of life, the only truly happy one Ellie had known. For her, it might mean her freedom. She’d married Jack under the transitional laws between the Empire and the Federated Stars, but she didn’t doubt that a debt collector would regard her as her husband’s property, not his partner. And the law? She refused to remember the VCL camp; that she had to refuse told her everything about the law’s view of her.

She would not tell Chloe that, though.

“If you think,” Ellie said, “this ship is more important than you to your father and I –”

“Of course not!” Chloe’s shoulders slumped. “Maybe I’m not a good enough person to care about just anybody. It’s because you care, because you’ve done so much for me, that I can’t let you get hurt.”

There was an alternative, Ellie knew. A place they could be safe, at least from Animus Hunters. The Astroykos Emperor died and the mechaneer-aristocracy lost their planetary seats to the Federated Stars, but there were other planets. Distant estate-worlds on the Periphery, where, at least according to rumor, they held court over the few followers they had left.

Jack wouldn’t want to go there. In truth, Ellie didn’t, either. If the nobles she remembered from childhood recognized Chloe as one of their own, they wouldn’t let her stay with her adoptive parents, any more than an Animus Hunter would.

If it came down to them or Zelph, though, Ellie had to believe in the nobles. Jack would need persuading. Maybe arguing. Later, when Chloe was calmer or when she wasn’t listening, Ellie and Jack could have that argument.

For now, they needed to keep Chloe on the Mother Goose. Keep her safe.

Ellie forced a smile easily. She had to consciously mimic baseline human expressions to begin with. The perk of her ears and the unwrinkling of her nose, those took effort. She made it, and was rewarded with a brief smile from her daughter.

“We’ve still got a few tricks up our sleeves, Chloe,” Ellie said.

“And I’ve got a hunch,” Chloe said, so quietly even Ellie had to cock her ear to hear.

Jack either heard, too, or knew what Chloe had intended to say. He gripped her shoulders and turned her to face him. “I don’t care if you’ve got a signed, sealed and certified prophecy from St. Sophie Astroykos herself, you’re not leaving this ship. That goes double for when you’re in trouble.”

Chloe opened her mouth, but didn’t speak.

“You’re gonna stay right here,” Jack said, “and your mom and I are gonna take care of you, and nobody’s gonna get hurt except whoever thinks they can come around and take you away. You got that, Chloe?”

She said, “Yes, Dad.”