Chương 81: Final Offer

Fleet Station Chel, Vidako System Imperium Stellarum May 16, 2848 Cassie kept one hand on the railing as she floated next to the computer station in hangar five. For all the time she'd spent on space stations and ships over the course of her life, the experience of being in zero-g without being strapped down to a seat was actually relatively uncommon.

A benefit, perhaps, to the fact that while Lady Ren was perfectly capable of standing on her own two feet, the Kestrels and Leviathan which made up Fleet Station Chel's patrol vehicles could hardly be stored under any other conditions.

"How's everything look?" Cassie asked.

"The neural lace connection is fine," Natalie Ramírez said.

"But we knew that already. Fuel lines are clear, ammo is loaded and batteries have a full charge. I think we're good to go." She looked away from the flat screen to Chief Jastrow. Dimitri Jastrow stood behind the younger techs, dressed in a simple coverall with a belt from which hung a variety of small tools and sensors, each attached by a carabiner or strapped into a pocket. There were dark stains on his fingers—oil or grease, Cassie wasn't quite sure.

"So long as Doctor Seung gives her approval, we're clear on the mechanical end." Nara Seung had tucked her feet around the base of the railing to keep herself in place, only a meter or two away from Cassie. The screen of her tablet wasn't quite angled in such a way that Cassie could make it out, so she pushed herself along the rail until she was behind the older woman and looking over her shoulders. Lit up on the screen was Arc's cognitive and physical assessment, and Cassie took it in with a single glance.

Cognitive and Physical Assessment: Arcturus Sandhurst Age: 18 Rank: Cadet 4th Class Cardiac Health 51st percentile Cognitive Processing Speed 99. 9th percentile* Hand Eye Coordination 66th percentile Reflexes 50th percentile Spatial Intelligence 92nd percentile Strength 49th percentile G-Force Tolerance (Head to Toe) 5. 1 Genetic Modifications: NA Qualifications: T-3 Tyro"His cognitive processing speed's still ticking up, more than six months after the neural lace was installed," Seung observed.

If she had noticed that Cassie was behind her, she didn't give any sign.

"I would have expected to see that number stabilize by now. Gains in cardiac health, hand-eye coordination, and strength are all consistent with the growth curve of similar first-year cadets. His g-force tolerance is slightly higher, but that's the result of the centrifuge training."

"Five point one g's," Cassie pointed out.

"I believe your condition was that he had to reach five." At that, the doctor did turn her head.

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that he shared that with you. Yes, Cadet Sabran-Solaris, your boyfriend has met my minimum threshold to participate in this... reckless waste of a duel. I don't suppose you'd care to talk him out of it?"

"At this point?" Cassie shook her head.

"I think everything's gone too far for anyone to back down." Seung scowled.

"I'll monitor his vitals from here, but so far as I'm concerned, Chief Jastrow, he's cleared to go out." Cassie pushed off the railing and threw her body in the direction of the desk where Natalie Ramírez sat. Once there, she stabbed the flatscreen and opened up a comm link with the mech.

"Seung and Jastrow say that you're cleared for a test run, Arc. Head on over to the airlock. And don't bang my mech up." She threw a glance at Lady Ren's head, where the majority of the mech's sensors were placed, and grinned to let Arc know that she was just teasing him.

"Alright," Arc's voice came back, slightly flattened by the small speakers attached to the computer station.

"Disconnecting couplings. Heading for the airlock now." The padded armatures which held the mech in place loosened with a hiss, then moved away, folding up and tucking themselves into spaces left in the hangar walls. As Cassie, Seung, and the tech crew watched, Arc stepped the mech forward toward the airlock. There was a whole launching system set up for Kestrels, which had neither feet, nor articulated hands—but of course, the system wasn't designed to handle a customized Janissary.

It was a testament, Cassie thought, to just how much Arc's piloting had improved that he nudged the fifty-five ton war machine into the open airlock without so much as a bump.

"Sealing airlock," Natalie said, tapping at the touchscreen of the workstation. The enormous doors shut and sealed, blocking their sight of the mech.

"Pumping out atmosphere. No sense in wasting it, after all." Cassie glanced down, her eyes finding the indicator which displayed the air pressure inside the airlock as it ticked down steadily toward zero. At this point, Lady Ren and her pilot would be dependent on its tank of liquid oxygen and converter, enough for roughly two standard imperial days.

"Opening external airlock doors," Natalie said. Her eyes flicked over to Chief Jastrow, he gave a very small nod, and then Natalie keyed the command into the flatscreen. Cassie doubted that anyone who wasn't right next to her would have noticed.

"Leaving the airlock now," Arc's voice came back over the comms.

"Pulling up the station's external optics," Natalie announced. She must have activated a holo-projector, because an image flickered to life above her workstation, large enough for everyone in the hangar to watch. In the projection from the sensor feed, a white and gold armored mech floated away from the airlock, descending in a gentle arc toward the ground below.

Ten or twenty meters beneath the mech stretched the gray rock and sand of Chel's surface; in the background, the black of space was broken only by scattered stars, with the single exception of one of Vidako's two suns, half-visible just on the horizon. A lunar sunrise, Cassie thought to herself. Or would it be a different term, on a moon named Chel?

"This should be far enough away to light off the thrusters," Arc said, once he'd touched down. Chief Jastrow leaned forward.

"Gentle to start with," he cautioned.

"No one's fired those thrusters in space since the factory put them in. You can kick it up a notch once we're certain everything's working right."

"Affirmative," Arc said. Cassie watched as the variable thrust nozzles swiveled, and then lit up in brightness, as the first drops of fuel from the mech's tanks ignited. The force of it sent Lady Ren on a gentle curve away from the hangar, skimming out across the surface of the moon, and Cassie couldn't help but smile.

There was a little bit of sadness, and a little bit of fear, mixed in with what she was feeling, because she'd looked forward to piloting her own mech for so long—and because no matter what else she was thinking, Cassie couldn't escape the knowledge, in the back of her mind, that Arc was going to be fighting for his life soon. But beyond both of those things, it was just a beautiful sight.

It was everything she loved about mechs—this technological miracle that put an artificial body around a human mind and let them fly together through the void. She was happy for the man she loved that he was able to experience it. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. Behind the workstation, the human-sized airlock which led out into the corridor hissed open, and Monica Yarborough pushed herself through.

The intelligence agent showed not the slightest discomfort at operating in zero-g, having traded out the skirt of her suits for slacks so well-fitted they must have been tailored. She floated over to Cassie, stopped herself with a hand on the railing, and leaned in close.

"Cadet Radecki is asking for a meeting with you," Yarborough whispered.

"As predicted."

"He came to you?" Cassie asked. Yarborough shook her head.

"No, he went to Commandant Marlowe. Unless something's gone wrong, he shouldn't know that I'm here—or at least, not who I am. Do you remember what you need to do?" Cassie nodded, though she couldn't help but feel a spike of resentment that Radecki had to pull her away now, during Arc's first low-g flight.

"Lyra records the entire conversation," she said.

"Whatever he offers, I refuse. Am I still using a dead-drop, with you here?"

"No need," Yarborough said.

"That plan was from before I needed to stay around to deal with your boyfriend's disciplinary hearing. Once you've got a recording, and the meeting's over, I'll take a copy along with the footage of the duel itself with me when I leave. I've got a courier ship waiting at Pinnacle Station; no one else will get word of what happens here back to Terra before I do."

"There's one other thing you should know," the older woman warned.

"Radecki's arranged to have a reporter named Rebecca Cuevas up here, along with a small camera crew. She's the same one he's given interviews to in the past."

"Wonderful," Cassie grumbled.

"Let's go." She pushed herself away from the rail toward the airlock and saw that Yarborough followed after giving her just enough room that they wouldn't end up colliding. On the other side of the airlock, Jessica waited, having taken up the task of preventing anyone who wasn't part of their team from entering the hangar. Cassie felt a moment's disorientation at the return of gravity, when she stepped from one grav-field to another, and left behind the zero-g in which the mech had been stored.

"Where are we meeting him?" Cassie asked.

"They wanted you to come to his squad's rooms in the pilots' quarters," Jessica said. Cassie could tell exactly what her bodyguard thought about that from her expressive roll of the eyes.

"I presume you said no to that." Cassie managed not to laugh.

"We've had a conference room cleared out, instead," Yarborough explained.

"Commandant Marlowe is waiting for you there. This way." She took a right at the next intersection, and Cassie followed, with Jessica trailing behind.

"I'll go in first," the imperial guard said.

"Do a sweep and then come out and get you." Cassie nodded and kept her eyes straight ahead. It hadn't taken long for every soldier at Fleet Station Chel to know exactly who she was, particularly with how the upcoming duel had been making the rounds of the planetary net—which included not only Pinnacle Station, but Chel, as well. Oh, there was about a three second lag time - Two point five-four seconds, exactly, Lyra provided, helpfully.

- but that was only noticeable if you were trying to talk to someone else over a live video-feed. Data packets moved plenty quick enough to load a pre-recorded news feed, send messages, or load a storefront. Most of the personnel stationed on Chel treated Cassie just like any other cadet, but the moment she stepped out of her temporary quarters, or out of the hangar, into someplace more public, she felt eyes on her.

At the intersection ahead, a conversation died as they approached and then resumed in hushed tones once they had moved on. Cassie would have bet money that the precise topic had changed, with her appearance. When the three women reached the conference room, Cassie recognized most of the people standing in the hall outside the door.

There was an Alu'kan and a Torean who'd worked with Radecki to delay her and ambush Arc, at the beginning of the whole mess, and both were there, looking annoyed at being forced to cool their heels outside the room. Jessica immediately moved forward, opened the door, and stepped into the conference room, pulling a scanner out of her back pocket before moving out of Cassie's line of sight. Cassie leaned up against the wall to wait, and Monica Yarborough took a post at her side.

She wondered if she and Jessica had worked this out in advance—the intelligence analyst did a fairly convincing impression of another bodyguard, at a casual glance.

"I don't see what's so special about you," the Torean girl spoke up, after a moment.

"Other than who your parents happen to be." Cassie blinked.

"Excuse me, who are you?" The girl's feathered crest ruffled in a display that Cassie knew meant she was angry. Living with Vee for two entire semesters had made her intimately familiar with Torean body language.

"Kitree Red Crest, Cadet Second Class," she shot back.

"First class, practically, now that exams are over. Which means I out-rank you."

"You do," Cassie agreed. Perhaps you should act like it, she kept to herself. Thankfully, they didn't need to wait long for Jessica to send her the 'all clear' message through their respective AIs. At that point, she ducked into the conference room, leaving Monica Yarborough outside. Fletcher Radecki stood next to the table, in the conference room, with Commandant Marlowe, while Jessica had taken up a place just inside and to one side of the door.

Save for the imperial guard, who remained still, everyone else in the room turned to watch Cassie enter.

"Thank you for coming, Cadet," Marlowe said.

"Cadet Radecki has indicated that he is prepared to discuss a potential alternative to proceeding with this duel."

"Interesting that Arc isn't in the room, then," Cassie said, finding herself a seat at the table. It was a deliberate power play: in the civilian world, they'd both be required to wait for her to be seated, while as a cadet, she should theoretically have waited for Marlowe. After all, she and Jessica were the lowest ranking people in the room. But Radecki wasn't here to negotiate with a cadet: he was here to make demands of a princess imperial.

"Cadet Sandhurst isn't in a position to agree to all of my terms," Radecki said.

"Nor am I prepared to discuss the details of this compromise with anyone but Princess Cascada." Marlowe narrowed her eyes.

"This duel will not proceed except under my supervision," she stated.

"You can say whatever you have to say with me here in the room."

"It's alright," Cassie broke in.

"I was expecting this. The cadet has a proposal from his father, the senator, I'm certain. I'm willing to hear them out. But my bodyguard remains in the room."

"Fine," Radecki agreed. Commandant Marlowe stood for a moment, straight as a steel bar, and then nodded. Without another word, she stepped out of the room. This is it, Cassie told Lyra. Begin recording from here. Confirmed, the AI told her. There will be two copies—Aegis is recording as well, at Jessica's command. It was the first time, Cassie realized, that she'd ever heard the name of her bodyguard's AI.

"So," she said.

"You have an offer to make. Let's hear it." Radecki took the chair opposite Cassie by the back, pulled it out, and then settled himself into place. Then, he leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, as if trying to take up as much space with his body as he possibly could.

"I am prepared to put aside this duel under the following conditions," he said.

"First, that on behalf of your parents and the imperial family as a whole, you agree to throw support behind Amélie Lipień for the seat which will open on the appropriations committee when Senator Gilchrist retires. Second, that Cadet Sandhurst makes a public apology to me. Third, that you break off your inappropriate relationship with him. He's beneath you, and beneath the imperial family, as I believe this entire chain of events demonstrates quite aptly.

Finally, you will record a commitment of support to a candidate of my father's choice, in advance of the next imperial election. A copy of this recording will be kept by my family, to be released when we find it appropriate." Cassie blinked.

"A candidate of your choosing. That's not just guaranteeing my support—it's effectively blocking me from standing for election myself."

"Those are my father's conditions," Radecki said.

"But since it isn't him here, and it's just you and I, I'll give you an alternative. Put the farm boy aside and marry me, and not only will we forget about the recording, but you'll have my family's support, with all of our wealth and connections, when you put yourself forward as a candidate for empress." Is he going behind his own father's back? Lyra asked. Is this an example of a double-cross? You and Iceni have been watching too many holodramas, Cassie thought back. But yes, I suppose it is.

I'm sure he'd just love to be consort to an empress.

"That's quite the offer," Cassie said.

"There are a few problems with it, of course." Radecki spread his hands wide.

"I'm open to negotiation on particulars, so long as the broad strokes are agreeable."

"I could begin with the fact that I've never had any desire to be empress after my father dies," Cassie said.

"And that it's always been my intention to support my brother when the time comes. I could also point out that we're not in the business of buying and selling committee seats. But what I really can't get over is what world you live in where you're delusional enough to think that I would ever, for even an instant, consider marrying a snake like you." Fletcher Radecki drew back and scowled.

"I'm trying to be kind to you," he began, but Cassie didn't let him get going.

"No, you're trying to put yourself as close to the throne as you can get," she interrupted.

"And you don't care about anyone you might hurt in the process. You don't even care about the damage all your scheming might do to the imperium, while we're at war. You disgust me." Cassie pushed her chair back and stood up, so that she could look down on him.

"I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Arc's a better man than you'll ever be. I can't wait to watch him wipe the floor with you." She turned her back on Radecki and left the room, with Jessica and Monica Yarborough falling in behind her. Now that Cassie had the recording, there was no more use in talking. Everything is up to Arc, now.