She stiffened in her chair and started punching new numbers into Tracking's extrapolations, and her face paled.
***
Ben Belkassem stood silent, chewing the inside of his lip raw, and smelled the tension about him. The dispatch boat's velocity was down to seventy-two percent of light-speed, but Alicia's more powerful drive had Megaira down to barely.88 C despite her far shorter deceleration period.
No one spoke, and he wondered if Keita suspected what he did. Probably. Did Tannis? He glanced at the major's white, strained features and looked away. She might not admit it to herself, but she must be beginning to.
He returned his gaze to the plot. Thank God he'd left Megaira the O Branch codes. At least they could talk to each other without Defense Command-and Treadwell-listening in.
***
"What the-?" Lieutenant Anders twitched in surprise and looked up at his supervisor. "Sir, Bogey Two's just made a second turnover! She's stopped decelerating and started accelerating again."
Emotionless computers considered the changed data, and Anders gasped.
"Oh my God-she's on a collision course for Orbit One!"
***
Tannis groaned as Megaira turned end-for-end and aligned her Fasset drive on the point in space Orbit One would reach in forty-two minutes and sixteen seconds. It turned the drive into a shield against the heavier fire of the inner fortress ring-and at the moment she reached Orbit One, the alpha-synth would have regained virtually all the velocity she'd lost. Alicia would be moving at.985 C when she rammed.
***
Fifty-seven minutes after it had been sent, Keita's desperate message converged with Megaira's receivers.
Alicia looked up incuriously as a com screen blinked to life. She recognized the face, but the person who had known and respected-even loved-that man was dead, and the powerful voice meant less than the brutal vibration lashing Megaira's over-stressed hull.
"Alley, I know what you're doing," the voice said, "but you don't have to. We have independent confirmation, Alley; we know who you're after, and I swear we'll get him. You've done enough-now you have to break off." Sir Arthur Keita's eyes pled with her from the screen and his voice was raw with pain yet soft. "Please, Alley. Break off. You don't have to kill nine thousand people. Don't turn yourself into the very thing you hate."
Alley? It was Megaira's pleading mental voice. Alley, they know about Treadwell. You don't have to-
"It doesn't matter! They knew about Watts and let the bastard live! You think someone like Treadwell won't have something to trade them for his life?!"
But Uncle Arthur's given you his word! Please, Alley! Don't make me help you kill yourself!
Alicia only snarled in response. She turned her eyes from the screen where Keita's face still begged her to relent. She closed her ears to his voice, and deep at her very core, where even she could no longer hear it, a lost soul sobbed in torment. She locked her attention on Orbit One, ignoring the SLAMs still flashing towards her. All that mattered was that distant sphere of battle steel. Her smoking bloodlust craved the destruction to come-and the last, dying fragment of the person she once had been embraced it as her only escape from what she had become.
***
"She's not breaking off," Tannis whispered, and Keita nodded. Ten minutes had passed since Alicia must have received their message, and Megaira held her course unflinchingly. He glanced at the plot. The dispatch boat had crossed Soisson's orbit eleven minutes ago, and the range to Megaira had fallen to thirty light-minutes. The handful of warships in the system were converging on the alpha-synth, but none of them could reach her in time.
He closed his eyes, then turned to the dispatch boat's commander.
"I need two volunteers. One in the engine room and one on the helm. Put the rest of your people into your shuttle and get out of here."
The lieutenant looked up in confusion, but Ben Belkassem understood.
"I'm a pretty fair helmsman, Sir Arthur," he said.
"What-?"
Tannis broke off, eyes widening, and stared mutely at Keita. The brigadier gazed back, sad eyes unflinching, and she bit her lip.
"Go with them, Tannis," he said gently.
"No. Let me talk to her! I can stop her-I know I can!"
"There's no time... and there's only one shuttle. If you don't leave now, you can't leave at all."
"I know," she said, and he started to make it an order, then sighed.
***
"Admiral, that dispatch boat's shuttle just separated."
Admiral Horth tore herself away from the intensifying fire ripping ineffectually towards the alpha-synth and checked her plot as the shuttle arced away from the dispatch boat's base course. It was fourteen light-minutes from Soissons, still streaking for the far side of nowhere at sixty-five percent of light-speed, and no shuttle could kill that kind of velocity. Which meant its crew must be counting on someone else's picking them up... and must have a very urgent reason for abandoning ship.
The dispatch boat's vector curved very slightly, and Horth swallowed in sudden understanding. Its course had been roughly convergent with the alpha-synth's from the start; now the match was perfect, and the dispatch boat was no longer decelerating.
***
A blue dot swelled ahead of Megaira on Alicia's mental plot, far larger and more powerful than any SLAM. Her nostrils flared and she bared her teeth as hate boiled within her. She knew what it had to be-and that, unlike a SLAM, it possessed onboard seeking capability.
She hunched down in her command chair, eyes bloodshot and wild, but her course never deviated. She would reach Treadwell or die trying, and dying would be a triumph in itself.
***
Sir Arthur Keita glanced at the chronometer. Ben Belkassem had the helm. The dispatch boat's skipper had taken over Engineering, and Tannis manned the communications console. No one else was aboard, and they had eight-point-nine minutes-under seven, given relativity's dictates-to live. It seemed unfair, somehow, to be robbed of those few, precious seconds by Einstein's ancient equations, but he pushed the thought aside.
"Talk to her, Tannis," he said softly.
***
"Alley-it's Tannis, Alley."
Alicia's eyes jerked back to the com, and her wrath faltered. A strange sound hung in the air, and she realized it was herself, the unbroken, animal snarl of her rage. She sucked in breath, frowning in slow, painful confusion as she peered at the screen. Tannis? What was Tannis doing here?
"I'm on the dispatch boat ahead of you, Alley," Tannis said, and Alicia's heart spasmed. Tears gleamed on Tannis's face and hung in her soft voice, and a tattered fragment of the old Alicia writhed under them. "Uncle Arthur's with me, Sarge-and Ben Belkassem. We... can't let you do this."
Alicia tried to speak, tried to scream at Tannis to get out of her path, to let her by to rend and destroy, to run for her own life, but nothing came out, and Tannis went on speaking as the hurtling vessels raced together at a closing speed one and a half times that of light.
"Please, Alley," Tannis begged. "We know the truth. Uncle Arthur knows. We've brought the warrants with us. We'll get him, Alley-I swear we will. Don't do this. Don't make us kill you."
Agony stabbed Alicia. She wanted to tell Tannis it was all right, that she had to be killed. Death didn't twist her with anguish and startle tears back into her glaring eyes at last. It was Tannis's voice, Tannis's sorrow, and knowing the only way that unarmed dispatch boat could kill her.
"Please," she whispered to the bulkheads. "Oh, please, Tannis. Not you, too."
But her transmitter was dead; only Megaira and Tisiphone heard her anguish, and Tannis drew a deep breath on her com screen.
"All right, Alley," she whispered. "At least it won't be a stranger."
Alicia DeVries staggered up out of her command chair and pounded the com with her bare fists. Shattered plastic slashed her hands bloody, and her animal shriek of loss drowned even the howl of Megaira's tortured drive. She ripped the unit fr
om the console and hurled it to the deck, but she couldn't kill the memory, couldn't stop it, couldn't stop knowing who she was about to kill, and hatred and loss and grief were an agony not even death could quench.
***
"She's not going to break off," Keita whispered through bloodless lips, and Tannis sobbed silently in agreement.
Ben Belkassem only nodded and adjusted his course slightly.
***
The being called Tisiphone had no eyes. She had never wept, for she had never known sorrow, or compassion, or love. Those things were alien to her, no part of the thing she had been created to be.
Until now.
She felt Megaira's frantic grief beyond the barrier she held between Alicia's madness and the AI, felt it like a pale, anemic shadow of Alicia's agony. The agony she had created. The torment she had inflicted upon an innocent. Only the tiniest shadow of Alicia DeVries survived, and the fault was hers. She had reduced the greatest warrior she had ever known to a hate-maddened animal who could be stopped only by death, and-far, far worse than that-Alicia knew what had happened. Somewhere deep inside, she stared in horror at the thing she had become and begged to die.
Tisiphone looked upon the work of her hands and recoiled in horror of her own. She'd been corrupted, she realized. She'd broken Alicia DeVries, shattered her concepts of justice and mercy, of compassion and honor, and even as she stripped them from her victim, they had infected her. She'd seen herself in Alicia from the outset; now she had perfected the Fury in Alicia, but she had become something else, and what she saw appalled her.
She fought against the paralysis of her own self-disgust. Alicia's bottomless hate and hunger hissed and crackled before her, and she feared them. She, who had never known fear, knew terror as she confronted her equal. It would be so easy to hold her hand, to wait out the last fleeting minutes and let death separate her from that seething well of power, for Alicia DeVries was a Fury, fit to destroy even an immortal.
But Tisiphone had learned too much, changed too fundamentally. It was her fault, she'd told Alicia, and hers the price to pay.
She paused for one blazing second, drawing in her power, and attacked.
***
Alicia DeVries howled and lurched to her feet, pounding her head with clenched, bloody fists. She staggered, writhing in her agony, and rebounded from the uncaring battle steel of a bulkhead. She went back to her knees, beating her face against the padded deck sole in a blind, demented frenzy, and chaos raged behind her eyes.
The blood-red ferocity of her madness shuddered as Tisiphone drove into it, and thunderbolts of raw, unfocused power flayed the Fury with spikes of agony she had never been meant to know. Fury opposed Fury, clawing and gouging, and there was no mercy in Alicia. She lashed out, frantic to kill, to destroy, to avenge all her loss and torment and betrayal and suffering even if she must drown a universe in blood, and Tisiphone screamed in soundless pain under the avalanche of hate.
She could not reply in kind-she would not! She had said she was more skilled to wound than heal, and it was true, but this time she would heal or perish herself. She refused to strike back. She absorbed the killing blows without riposte, and drove a tortured sliver of her being towards the wound in Alicia's mind-the bleeding hole to Hell that filled Alicia with madness.
She touched it, only for an instant, and staggered as she was hurled away. Bits and pieces of her own being were ripped from her, added to the holocaust reaching to consume her, and she clawed her way back into its teeth. Somewhere behind it she heard the sobbing of a little girl-a mortal girl alone and terrified in hellspawned darkness-and groped blindly for her hand.
***
Tannis Cateau sat silent at the com station, face bloodless. Sir Arthur Keita stood beside her, one arm around her shoulders, and a display at Ben Belkassem's elbow raced downward, counting off the moments left to live.
Ninety seconds. Eighty. Seventy-five. Seventy. Sixty-five. Sixty. Fifty-five. Fifty -
And then the oncoming Fasset drive swung aside, clawing away from its deathride with frantic power, and Ben Belkassem wrenched his own course to the side while Sir Arthur Keita leapt for the com and began bellowing orders for Vice Admiral Horth to cease fire.
Epilogue
The elevator door opened, and Ferhat Ben Belkassem stepped onto the flight deck of the refurbished starship Megaira. Alicia DeVries unfolded herself from the command chair, immaculate as of yore in midnight-blue and silver. Her hair was its natural color once more, spilling over her shoulders in a tide of sunrise, and Ben Belkassem decided it went even better with the uniform than her black hair had.
He held out his hand.
"Ferhat."
She took his hand in both of hers, squeezing firmly, and he marveled again at the way her smile got inside a person. The fanaticism and hatred were gone, yet they'd left their mark. There was a new depth in her cool, emerald eyes, a softness. Not a weakness, but a new strength, perhaps. The strength of someone who understands how utterly any human, however remarkable, can be reduced.
"Alicia." He looked around with a smile of his own. "How was the shakedown cruise?"
"Why not ask someone who knows?" a voice said from a speaker, and his smile turned into a grin. "As a matter of fact," Megaira continued, "it went even better than the original builders' trials." The speaker sniffed. "I told them we could increase the drive mass."
"Must have been a shock for the yard to have the ship talking back."
"It was good for them," Megaira insisted.
"Probably." His eye fell on the chair still sitting beside Alicia's, and he settled into it with a little sigh. "Never thought I'd sit here again," he said softly, rubbing the armrests gently.
"You almost didn't get to," Alicia agreed. She could talk about it now with only the faintest twinge. She remembered every horrifying moment, yet the memories held no terror. They were only memories-and warnings.
"How's Tisiphone?" Ben Belkassem asked after a moment, and Alicia smiled wryly, stroking her temple unconsciously.
"Still here-though I'm not too sure Tannis and Uncle Arthur really believe in her even now."
"Ha! They believe. The Emperor doesn't hand out citations-not even secret ones-to figments of the imagination. They may not agree on what she is, but they know she's there." He cocked his head and eyed her curiously. "Speaking of whom, I sort of had the impression she'd be... Well, moving on once the job was over."
So did I, a voice said wryly in Alicia's mind.
Should I tell him?
You may as well, Little One. I would prefer not to keep secrets from him-nor am I any too sure we could if we tried!
"I'm afraid she can't 'move on,' " Alicia said to Ben Belkassem. The inspector raised his eyebrows, and she sighed. "Something happened there at the last. I don't understand it-I'm not even sure Tisiphone does, really-but we both came so close to, well-"
She paused and cleared her throat, and Ben Belkassem nodded.
"She stopped me somehow," Alicia continued softly. "There was a... a hole inside me. I'm not sure I can explain it, but-"
I believe I can, Little One. With your permission?
Alicia blinked in surprise, then nodded and sat back to listen to her own voice.
"At first, I did not understand what Alicia had done, Inspector," the Fury said through Alicia's mouth, and to his credit, he didn't even flinch. "I had sealed a portion of her mind-a mistake which almost destroyed her, for she is not a person to submit to transgressions tamely."
Ben Belkassem nodded, watching with fascination as Alicia turned pink.
"She attacked the barrier I had built and breached it, and in the process she accomplished still more. I was made three in one, Inspector. There were... connections between my selves, but I lost them when I lost my sisters. Or so I thought, for in truth, they exist still. One set I extended without even realizing to Megaira, and so we were able to accomplish much, yet I was in control of that linkage, however little I recognized it.
; "But I was not prepared when Alicia forced open the other. Sir Arthur, as you know, once speculated that I was some manner of secondary personality, created when Alicia awakened inherent psionic capabilities of her own. He was wrong, but not entirely. She did possess such talents, latent and undeveloped but powerful, and I did not recognize them. I ought to have. There were... signs of them before ever Alicia and I actually meant. But despite that, I did not anticipate the reality of which she proved capable. I am inclined, as you may have observed, to arrogance. I do not apologize. It is my nature, yet because of my arrogance, I had always scorned human minds.
"That," Alicia heard "her" voice turn wry, "is no longer the case. Alicia has cured me. My presence awoke that capability to reach in through the unused link I had forgotten, and through it she tapped my basic structure. Even the best of human minds-even Alicia's-is not equal to that. I have learned much from Alicia, yet I remain what I am, and it drove her mad."
David Weber - In Fury Born (ARC) Page 91