The Mechaneer

Chapter 45: The Project

Marcel Avalon wore the white and dark green dress uniform of his station, emblazoned with the symbols of his battlegroup, the Federal Navy's Second Fleet, the Reformer, and the Divine Auric Drake. Ceremonial sidearm and sword adorned his waist, held in place by a gold brocade belt. In profile, he looked like a recruiting poster come to life.

Except that he was still seated in his medical chair.

Except that when he turned to Ellie, one side of his face was the pale pink of newly fabricated skin.

Except that he looked nearly as miserable as she felt.

"So," she said, "you're really going."

"I have my duty," he said. "You know that."

"Your duty. And how do you expect to achieve that? Your leg won't heal for a month at least. Maybe never, if you damage it while it's regenerating. You're still taking Limiters to keep the pain of your internal organs being rearranged from driving you mad." Ellie shook her head. "You can't even walk, much less pilot."

"I would think you'd be thankful," Avalon said. "If I am at less than my full capability, I am less likely to defeat your husband."

"You wouldn't beat Jack anyway." Ellie wished she could believe that. She'd seen Avalon fight a mechaneer-aristocrat to a standstill. How could any ordinary man hope to stand against him?

Of course, she reminded herself, Jack was hardly ordinary.

Just not a mechaneer-aristocrat. Not a psychic errant.

And not a match for the Divine Auric Drake.

Avalon asked, "You really believe that, Ellie?"

"No," she said, hating herself more for admitting it than for feeling it in the first place. "You'd probably demolish him."

"I don't want to fight him," Avalon said.

"Then why are you?" Ellie cried. She rushed across the spartan Etemenos apartment and fell to her knees beside the medical chair. "Why do you have to do this, damn you?"

"Because it's my duty."

"And you'd die for that. Kill for that. Kill a man you know isn't guilty of anything more than protecting his family, the man I love. And you can sit there with a straight face and try to sound kind to me?" Her hands closed around his, shaking. She felt like she was going to cry, or laugh, or maybe throw up.

All of the above sounded about right.

"I have my orders," he said. "If your husband had not sided with Otto Algreil's rebels –"

"If you people hadn't forced him to, you mean?" Ellie looked up at him. It would be so easy to take comfort in his troubled expression, his kind words.

No.

She refused to be comforted!

Avalon was going to take his Second Fleet to Algreil Prime, and he was going to kill Jack, die trying or both.

Ellie's grip on Avalon's hand tightened. She hoped, and wondered if she should hope, that she wasn't hurting him. It was his left, only just recovered. "If what the president said is true –"

"It is," Avalon said automatically.

"– then this is all a big misunderstanding. Jack and I fearing you'd hurt Chloe. The attack on the Algreil arcology. Jack fighting for his old boss. His old boss fighting at all!"

"It was not a misunderstanding on the part of Otto Abeir Algreil," Avalon said. "If that man did not plan on this exact result, it is only to the extent that he lost the engagement on Wellach."

"I could give a damn about Otto Algreil," Ellie snarled. "Principle! That man deserves the worst you could give."

"In this, we are agreed."

"But Jack doesn't. I swear he doesn't. He's always been loyal to the Senate, always believed in this government. Even when it did wrong, he believed it would make things right." Ellie gazed up into Avalon's mesmerizing amber eyes. "Admiral, Marcel, please, let me come with the Reformer. Let me talk to him!"

"I…" Avalon sighed. "I can't, Ellie. I'm sorry."

"Why?"

"Because you are only free at all thanks to President Ferrill and I vouching for you. You are guilty of sedition in a time of war, Ellie, though neither of us knew at the time war had come. I can't believe you wouldn't do more if you believed the stakes were the lives of my men or the life of your husband. I won't put you in a position to make that decision, for your sake or my men's."

Ellie hung her head.

Free? On a world-city where she knew no one and nothing, where the hallways formed and vanished from a nanomachine sea, where likely every person she'd met save Marcel Avalon and perhaps Rhetta Ferrill saw her as property?

Yet she couldn't deny his accusation. She would destroy the Reformer and every man aboard, and herself with it, if she thought it would save Jack's life.

"Why aren't you afraid I'll kill you now, then?" Ellie asked. Avalon was somewhat recovered, but not so much that she couldn't have taken his life if she'd wanted to. She could probably yank the sidearm from his own belt and shoot him with it.

Except that she couldn't do that.

Avalon knew she could kill him. He knew she probably should. Yet he had let her take care of him, unwatched, unguarded, unaided, for three weeks. She'd taken the best care she could, too. Principle alone knew why, but she could only bear the thought of Avalon dying when she weighed his death against Jack or Chloe's.

"Well?" she demanded. "Why aren't you afraid?"

"If you killed me," he said, "it would be to protect your family. It would be insufficient, but it would not be wrong. Since it would be my life against theirs, I would not hold it against you. Harming my men is another matter entirely."

"How can you say that and still go out and fight Jack?"

"I have my orders."

"Damn your orders!" Ellie sprang to her feet. She stalked away from him, fists balled so tight her nails dug into her palms. "That's a coward's excuse. You know what's right and you refuse to do it; what's wrong, and you refuse to stop it."

"You know my opinion on this matter," Avalon said. "I cannot afford to have any other. President Ferrill is the duly elected leader of the Federal Senate. Hers is the will of the people, and I am their hand."

"You trust her that much?"

"Of course!" If there was one thing that could crack Avalon's shell, it was President Ferrill.

Ellie had to try. If it wasn't the only thing she could do for Jack, it was the only thing she could bring herself to. She forced the tension to ease from her body, the tightness from her voice.

She turned back to Avalon. "Why do you trust her so much? Just because she got elected president?"

"I obey because she is the president," Avalon said. "I trust her because she is the closest thing to a mother I have."

Ellie fumbled for an answer. "I hadn't realized... she was that much older than you."

"I'm younger than I look," Avalon said. "And the president looks well for her age."

You look too young to be an admiral, Ellie thought. If you're younger than that...

She didn't doubt Avalon's competence, but if what he said was true, how could he speak with a straight face about 'equality' when he could only owe his position to nepotism?

She said, "I don't understand."

"I don't either, to be honest," he admitted. "I'm a military man, not a scientist. Suffice to say that I am not exactly, or not entirely, human."

Ellie's eyes widened. "You're a hybrid?"

"Or something like one, yes," Avalon said. "I was 'born' in a research facility during the waning years of the Civil War. My creators were part of the Reinforced AnthropoMorphic Soldier Enhancement System, or RAMSES, Project, one of many such programs that sought to match the mental powers of the aristocracy to better oppose their social power."

"Marcel," Ellie whispered, "I think you shouldn't be telling me this."

"You're right," he said. "Everything you're hearing is classified so top secret, I doubt a hundred people outside the senate know it. None of my crew. As far as I know, none of my immediate superiors."

"Then why tell me?"

"Because I want you to understand, Ellie." Marcel's medical chair hovered closer to her. He reached out and clasped her hand. "Unless you do not want to know."

I don't, Ellie thought. Oh, Principle, I don't. I don't want to think about this, about –

She said, "Please, tell me."

"As far as I know, I was six months old during the Battle of Etemenos. At that point, my physical maturation was closer to twelve years."

Ellie felt her mouth going dry. Six months before Etemenos.

It couldn't be true.

She asked, "How?"

"Hormone, nanomachine and nutrient treatments," Avalon said. "As I said, I am no scientist. The specifics of the project are beyond me. I don't even know where my genetic code comes from, save that it includes hybrid and aristocratic strains. I know only that my early months were comprised of training via subliminal briefing. My... creators hoped I would be ready to take the field as early as calendar age three."

Ellie wanted to look away, but his gaze held hers as powerfully as a gravitic field. She said, "That's horrible."

"They were horrible times," he said.

"You can't excuse doing something like that!"

He smiled ruefully. "If the directors of the RAMSES Project hadn't accelerated my growth, trained me, in that manner, I wouldn't even be alive. I find it difficult to condemn them for that.

"Not," he added, "that I find it difficult to condemn them."

Ellie cocked her head. Up until now, she'd assumed Avalon couldn't see the horror of what he described.

"The Battle of Etemenos killed the Emperor, then believed to be the only surviving Imperial. It broke the power of the aristocracy and crippled the Oligarchical military." Avalon's smile turned bitter, nearly to a snarl. "Under the circumstances, breeding supersoldiers was deemed unnecessary. Dangerous. And, of course, political unacceptable."

"What happened?"

"My creators attempted to shut down the project," Avalon said. "They were not entirely successful."

"Merciful Principle," Ellie whispered.

"Perhaps. Enhanced or no, I was physically only twelve years old when I killed a dozen of the project's security guards, took their weapons, and fought my way into the research station's residential quarters before I was captured. The Principle's intervention is not out of the question."

Wordlessly, Ellie wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him close. She felt tears rolling down her cheeks.

If Avalon noticed her, he gave no sign. "Still, I would have died there if not for President Ferrill. She was not the president then, of course, only the junior senator from Raypoint and assistant to then-President Casimir. She learned of the plan to disband the RAMSES Project and erase all trace of it, including the test subjects. She convinced President Casimir to investigate the Defense Research Committee and threatened to expose their plan to a vote in the full senate if they did not rescind it. We were only hybrids, nonpersons, but it would have been politically uncomfortable for the committee's members."

Ellie shuddered.

"Why not agree, though? They had given the order already and already it had been carried out." Avalon's body shook with what might have been a sob or a bitter laugh. "But for their succeeding too well in my case.

"They would have killed me despite the rescinded order," he continued, "as I was obviously a 'life form hostile to galactic security.' But President Ferrill would not allow it. Before I ever even met her, she was willing to pull every string, cash in every favor, to save me. She risked her career, her freedom, perhaps her life.

"And in the end," he concluded, "she saved mine."