Chapter 102: Limitless

  Chloe gave neither President Ferrill nor the Animus Hunters a chance to parse her words.

  With a thought, the dark-armored hands grasping her spasmed away. With another, their owners crashed into the walls of the president's office. With a third, seven of the remaining eight Animus Hunters flew backwards to crumple beside the first pair.

  Chloe hadn't expected it to be so easy. Effortless. She could suddenly understand why people coveted the Imperials' power, her power – and why people feared it. Just that taste was as easy as breathing and as wonderful as a sunny summer day, and she could have poured on a thousand times as much.

  And, Principle willing, she would be rid of it very soon.

  President Ferrill watched her, eyebrow raised, neither moving nor speaking and seemingly unconcerned. “I thought, Grand Admiral, you had the young lady Limited.”

  “I did,” Errard Zelph said. “I injected her myself.”

  Chloe turned to face the Grand Admiral, foremost of the Animus Hunters. He was more than a head taller than her. With his bland, bureaucratic face curled into a scowl above his weird organic armor, he looked like an enfleshed demon.

  Slowly, casually, Chloe held her hand up to her neck.

  A line of silver liquid seeped from her pores. It seemed to fold back into her skin, unsheathing a few drops of yellow fluid that dried to an itchy crust almost instantly on contact with the air – the nanomechanical limiters the Animus Hunters had tried to inject her with. Her erinyes had had other ideas.

  Zelph's scowl quirked up into a parody of a smile. “Very clever.”

  Chloe cocked her head and her eyebrow and reached out to flick him away as she had his subordinates.

  Somewhere between her and the Animus Hunter, the telekinetic wave bent, doubled over, and nearly hurled her into the wall.

  Chloe's calm smile froze on her face.

  Apparently, it wasn't going to be as easy as it had seemed for a moment.

  President Ferrill sighed. “You are making a mistake, Miss Hughes. If you stand down now, you may still –”

  The president's mouth kept moving, but no sound reached Chloe's ears. She stopped, frowned at Zelph, spoke again – silently.

  Chloe pressed against the air around her. Her probe bounced back, and when she pushed, she felt a double layer of psion shells separating the air, a molecule-thin bubble of vacuum, impermeable to sound.

  It was subtle, it was clever, and it was perfectly, artfully, invisibly done. Even with as little understanding as she had, Chloe had to admire the technique.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  She looked back to Zelph and realized for the first time how much of his power he must have been hiding behind that facade of light-bending psions. He played the thug, but he was something much worse.

  “This is no longer President Ferrill's concern,” the Animus Hunter said.

  “I know why you're doing this,” Chloe said.

  “Oh?”

  “Megaera showed me what happened on the battlecruiser,” she said. “I know you loved my – Empress Karissa. You turned against the imperial system because she had to marry the Emperor, and against him when she actually did love him.”

  Zelph waited, unmoving. Chloe might have been able to read his mind if she forced it, but she couldn't get anything from his face.

  Not, she thought, that she needed to.

  “You're still trying to make up for what happened to her,” Chloe continued. “You have to either prove to yourself you were right, or atone for being wrong. To either finish what you started, or make me finish you for the way you betrayed her.”

  Zelph closed his eyes, nodded again. “Very good, Miss Hughes. You observed, interpreted, and derived logical conclusions from what you saw. Yours is a neat analysis of the situation, and the psychology you describe an entirely reasonable explanation for my actions.”

  “You don't have to do this,” Chloe said. “You –”

  It is also, Zelph thought, entirely wrong.

  She flinched from his presence in her mind.

  Your mistake, he continued, effortlessly slipping through the telepathic shields she tried to raise, was in assigning to me a psychology with which you were familiar. A Spacer's rooted in family and crew bonding, or a noble's rooted in house and bloodline, or the all-consuming puppy love you share with Rudolf Algreil.

  Chloe was vaguely aware she'd sunk to her knees. Alien feelings surged through her brain, confusing, repulsive.

  I did love Karissa, Zelph thought. But unlike the people of your experience, that love was not central to my character. It was a motive, but a minor one.

  Chloe tried to shout, I don't believe you!

  But she did.

  The thoughts pouring into her proved it.

  I was a revolutionary, Zelph thought, long before Karissa was lost to me. I have come to believe Theophilos competed for her affections fairly and made her happier than I would have. He would have been welcome to her.

  But he was not welcome to dominate humanity.

  I don't understand, Chloe thought.

  I am an idealist, Miss Hughes, daughter of the imperial line whose name you – rightly – reject. I believe in a precept greater than people.

  I betrayed Karissa's trust because humanity mattered more to me than any one human – even her. She swore all her life she did not want the mantle of empress, but when I tried to take it from her, to free her from its burden, she fought. She risked your life, lost her own and killed thousands by trying to use the very power she claimed to hate.

  She didn't want that –

  She failed, Miss Hughes. As you will.

  I fought Theophilos because he would have sooner given up his life than either his title or the unearned vengeance he swore against the House of Commons. I led the first Animus Hunters at the Battle of Etemenos, not to kill a rival for love, but to destroy an impediment to freedom. Even then I would have taken his surrender, but he would not give it.

  He died for his hubris, Miss Hughes.

  Zelph met Chloe's eyes. He held her shaking gaze as easily as if his gauntleted hand clasped her by the chin.

  He thought:

  As you will.