Good place to pause, going into a weekend. There’s a bit more, but I’m not sure if it will be in Part 5 or the Epilogue. I’ll have to see where it best fits.

You have to admire the subtlety of what is being done to Allie. The Great Powers of the Polar Alliance cannot trust one another with the full ramifications of the discoveries she made, so it became a matter of “it’s your problem now! Good luck!”

Enjoy my content? Buy me a beer!

“We are now aware of at least two of these devices,” Aurelia began.  “How many more?  No one knows.  How to they work?  Aqua tells us nothing and the classified parts of Alicia’s story are vague.  Unless we want more sacrificial victims of our experiments – and I am sorry for your nation’s loss of Mikhail Zhukov, Tsarina – then we’re reduced to poking the one we have with a stick and tossing lab rats at it.”

“’We’re’ reduced, Empress?” Reina said with tone of warning.  “It is not in your possession.”

“Nor is it in yours.  Yet,” Aurelia easily agreed.  “But in some weeks, it likely shall be in someone’s.  My heart goes out to the families of the men ordered to pick it up.”

“Possession,” she carried on after a pause, “is known as nine-tenths of the law.  Who will be leading the work to mine into the cavern?”

“My kid sister, as you well know, Aurelia,” Anastasia said, looking mulish.  “And Midwife or not, she is a member of the Russian Imperial House, we Romanovs.”

“Who were reinstalled by me,” Reina cut.  “Do not forget that, Tsarina.”

“How could I as you remind us so frequently?  And didn’t you say you had work to do?”

“Once I possess the device, it seems I may have all the time in worlds without end.”

“Once you…!” the Tsarina spat.

“We’ve gone from interplanetary war to another Russian civil war,” Robert Hartmann laughed at the two.  His wife, Nadia, looks appalled at that comment!  “I think we all know the way out of this, but are too caught up in the moment to look about and see it.”

“You would be surprised what thought I, my family, my tribe, have given this matter, Crown Prince,” Reina replied, instantly in total control of herself. 

Seeing the Tsarina next to her weave a little, Alicia reached out to steady her.  She is rather old for a human, I wonder…

Don’t wonder, know, Reina said to her mind.  I suspect your clever grandfather, from his caustic words, know where all of this is going.  Aurelia certainly does.  And, it is she who must act next.  What?  Did you think I was only speaking through that screen?  You have much to learn, former Hero.  Saying all that to say this:  I just made Annie older about the way forward.

Did you really just call her Annie, Reina?

For a moment, Alicia stood in the snow, maybe thirty cm deep, blowing a bit and stretching off to bright horizon.

“I like it here.  It is empty,” Reina said for next to her.

Allie looked over.  And down.  She is pretty short.  “Not wearing clothes?” The demi was already shivering in what she understood to be some kind of construct.

“I am not using a sensory plug-in,” she replied, looking up with a hot look in her reddish eyes.  “You are better than this.  Turn your receptors off.”

Not really good at that sort of thing, Alicia scrunched her eyes shut until the shivering stopped and the cold went away.

“Better.  You must learn, quickly, and be older in such things.  Your first life is gone,” the short Machine announced.

“What does that mean?  And why did you call me former hero?”

“You are about to find out.”

Still holding and steadying the Tsarina, she found herself back in the great hall.

“Empress Aurelia Hartmann?” Reina asked with some formality.  “Are you prepared to act?”

“As of this moment, per my order, you Alicia Alvarez are emancipated from the Hartmann family of the imperium,” also formal.  I’m…what?  “You found a new line and thus may choose whatever surname you so desire, if you do so desire.”

“I…” the fifteen-year-old was overwhelmed by panic.  She looked to her grandfather.  “What…?”

“It,” the Tsarina said, pushing Alicia’s hands off with a tiny shake of her wizened head, “is the unanimous decision of Houses Romanov, Hartmann, Habsburg, and Yamato, that you, Alicia, are now the reigning Queen of Mars.”

She placed both of her hands onto Allie’s head.  “Autokrator Áris.  By the Grace of God, that world is yours.”

“And all of the problems with it,” she barely whispered.  “I am so sorry for you.”

“I’m…a queen?  Just like that?” Alicia knew she was talking too loud, high, and fast.  She watched her grandfather and his wife take a knee, heads down.

“Come, my royal sister,” Aurie laughed through the screen, “say something historic!”

“I’m…scared.”

“Good,” Reina smirked.  “That is a start.  Keep the peace, Queen Alicia.”