Chains of Redemption
by
Selina Rosen

Table of Contents

Book Three of the Chains Trilogy

Chains of Redemption
Selina Rosen

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Chains of Redemption: Copyright ©2004 Selina Rosen.

A Baen Ebook
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com

Cover art by Charles Keegan

ISBN 10: 1-5922-2000-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-5922-2000-7

First ebook, March 2008

Electronic version by WebWrights
www.webwrights.com

Chapter One

RJ had been prepared for instant retaliation. It was the reason she had immediately left Beta 4 space and headed once again for the Argy home world of Deakard. She had hoped that the speed of their departure coupled with their destination would throw the Reliance off. It had apparently worked at first. They'd traveled in hyperspace for two weeks without detecting any other ships. They'd made initial contact with the Argy and they seemed anxious to meet with them and discuss some sort of alliance.

It looked like they were going to make it to Deakard this time without a hitch.

Of course one of the problems with riding the hyperspacial spaceways was that there were just so many directions you could go. Apparently the Reliance had kept searching till they'd figured out which way RJ and her crew had gone, and then they'd sent ships in pursuit.

"Someone up there does not want us to get to Deakard," Topaz said with a nervous laugh as he looked over RJ's shoulder at the screens, which clearly showed that they had three fully loaded cruisers and one carrier closing on them fast. "Maybe they aren't after us. Maybe they don't even see us. After all, we are headed for Deakard, maybe they're just out here looking for Argy ships."

"Yeah . . . and maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt!" Levits screamed from where he sat at the ship's controls.

"It's immaterial either way," RJ said. "Even if they weren't actually looking for us, they've found us now, and you can bet your sweet ass they aren't going to just turn around and go home or scoot around us."

"You think I have a sweet ass?" Topaz asked with a smile.

"Oh, don't even start your crazy assed shit now, old man!" Levits hissed.

"Can we go any faster? Can we outrun them?" Topaz asked.

"How freaking stupid do you think I am?" Levits yelled back. "I jacked the speed up to maximum the minute the ship warned us about the bastards. This is it. We're in a freaking troop carrier; they're in fully loaded cruisers. We might be able to lose the carrier, but not those cruisers. We can't outrun them, and we sure as hell can't outgun them. We're screwed!"

RJ ran her hands down her face and flopped into her seat with a sigh. "We've got hundreds of uniforms and enough food to literally feed a battalion, but no real speed and minimal weapons."

"Well, I think you'd better come up with something a little more productive than slinging bad clothing and K-rations at them. What do we do, RJ?" Levits asked. "Come on, we're going to be in range in less than four clicks."

"You're the freaking pilot!" RJ bellowed. "What do you think we should do?"

"Don't make me say it," Levits said. "It's dangerous, and completely insane."

"As dangerous as three fully loaded cruisers and a carrier loaded with fighters?" RJ asked. "You said it yourself, we can't outrun them, and we sure as hell can't outgun them in a firefight, even with me in control of the weapons."

"You have a point." Levits started making the necessary corrections to their navigational system, and the ship immediately started sounding the warning siren, although it was hard to say whether it was doing this because they were now in range of the closest cruiser's weapons or because of what Levits was doing. "Damn! We're in range!"

"Then so are they." RJ moved to the weapons console and sat down as they took a hit that rocked the whole ship. "Damn! That was a Mega Cannon 5000. You better get us out of here quick, Levits. Our shields won't hold."

Topaz laughed and said in an accent neither of them had ever heard before, "The shields won't hold, Captain, she's gonna blow!"

They ignored him, because after all, he was completely insane.

RJ locked on target and fired, gratified to see the cruiser she had targeted lurch under impact. Of course their shields were stronger, and she wasn't likely to even pierce their hull before they totally obliterated their ship. For generations scientists had argued that you couldn't have a battle in Hyperspace; in that moment RJ wished they had been right. Simple fact was—in all things—when push came to shove you couldn't really know what was or was not possible until someone had tried it. Battles had been fought in hyperspace as long as RJ could remember.

They took another hit. "Dammit, Levits! Sometime this week!" RJ ordered.

"Quit screaming at me, I'm going as fast as I can. Screaming at me isn't helping. Freaking bitch." He mumbled the last part as he worked the console in front of him. "You don't understand. The ship's computer has been expressly programmed not to do what we're trying to make her do."

Topaz saw Poley sit down in his chair and put his belt on, a testament to the peril that they were obviously all in. Topaz quickly ran to a seat and belted himself in, too. "Just where the hell are we going?"

"Out of hyperspace into real space," Poley answered.

"Don't you need a gate for that—a destination, some knowledge of where you are in relation to where you'll be?"

"Yes, that would be nice," RJ said.

"I think I'd rather take our chances with the Reliance if we happen to be voting now." As Topaz spoke, the ship took another hit—this one worse than the first two. "On second thought . . . Levits, get us the hell out of here!"

"Hold onto your seats," Levits said, strapping himself in. He looked over at RJ."RJ?"

"Yes!" she said turning to face him, her face a mask of barely disguised rage.

"I love you," he said.

"I love you, too," she answered.

"Oh my God! We're all going to die!" Topaz screamed, grabbing the arms of his chair in a death grip.

The ship's engines whined, the lights dimmed, then they were seemingly spit into real space, and all was still.

Topaz ran his hands over his body, checking his package twice just to be sure. He looked up at Poley and smiled. "I'm alive! I'm alive!"

"Oh joy," Levits said sarcastically. He looked at RJ and smiled. She smiled back.

"What's to stop them from following us?" Topaz asked.

"They can jump out of the hyperspace stream, but they wouldn't likely wind up in this part of space," Poley answered.

Topaz unbuckled himself and stood up, rubbing his hands on his pants and walking to the viewport as the blast door was opening. "So . . . where are we?"

"We could be damn near anywhere. See, when you're in hyperspace you basically aren't anywhere till you get to a jumpgate. What happens when you jump from nowhere to somewhere with no destination? You could wind up anywhere," RJ said as she unbuckled herself, stood up and walked towards the navigational console, stopping along the way just long enough to kiss the top of Levits' head. "Or we could be nowhere," she said, sitting at the navigational console.

"Say what?" Topaz asked.

"Exactly," RJ said, and started working the console in front of her.

Levits was watching her. He didn't like the look on her face. "What's wrong, where are we? Deep in Reliance territory? Close to a base? What?"

RJ looked out the viewscreen and frowned. She rubbed her hand down her face.

"What?" Topaz and Levits both demanded.

She sighed as she read the screen in front of her. "No data, location unknown."

"What!" they demanded.

"It would appear that we have flown into uncharted space. The ship's computer has no idea where we are, and neither do I."

"Cool!" Topaz said rubbing his hands together in anticipation. "We are boldly going where no man has gone before."

"Cool! Cool!" Levits damn near gave himself whiplash trying to jump out of his seat without unbuckling. He undid the buckle and jumped to his feet, although the motion had lost all its impact by then. "Don't you know what this means, old man? We aren't going to Argy! In a few more months we won't be going anywhere because we'll be out of fuel. The scoops will only give us so much energy—not enough to sustain a ship this large without additional fuel, and since we are in uncharted space I don't know where we might find any! Uncharted, as in without charts. And I don't see any big flashing signs that say 'Fun, Food and Fuel, Humans Welcome,' do you? If we don't find a planet with a breathable atmosphere and edible food, or run into a radiation storm, our ship will run out of fuel, we'll run out of food, we'll run out of air, and we'll all, even you old man, die in the vacuum of space!!!"

"I won't die," Poley assured them.

"That's very comforting, thank you Poley!" Levits screamed. "The robot will survive. How nice."

"No, because I would miss all of you," he said.

"We'll find a planet. That's all. We'll keep searching till the ship finds something familiar," RJ said. "We might not be all that far from charted space. It could just be that we're looking at it from an angle that the ship's computer doesn't recognize."

"Not that far! RJ, we're talking about light years. The best this ship can do without a jumpgate, out of hyperspace, is warp one. At that speed even if the fuel and food would last we would all likely be dust before we reached a habitable destination." He saw Poley start to speak and pointed a finger at him. "All right, I'd be dust before we found anything close to an Earth-type planet. Do you have any idea what the odds are?" Before Poley could pop off with a mathematical answer, Levits glared at him. "Don't you dare spit out a number, Tin Pants," he said shaking his finger at him. "First our food supply's going to run out, and then our fuel supply's going to be exhausted. Won't that be fun, old man?"

"You're always so negative, Levits. It's not healthy. You're starting to get frown lines," Topaz said.

Frown lines or not, Levits was right, there was little reason for optimism. RJ got up from the navigational console. "Poley, come over here and chart this section of space. Find us a suitable planet. See if you can find our space, you know, where we belong."

Poley nodded, unbuckled himself, got up and walked to the console. "Do you want to know the number?" he whispered in her ear.

"Not really, Poley, but thank you," RJ said with a smile.

Poley nodded and sat down at the console. His fingers flew across the keys too fast for the human eye to actually see.

"We got away from the Reliance, Levits," RJ said, addressing the worried look on his face. "At the very worst, we have bought ourselves a little more time. Let's not waste that."

He nodded, forcing a smile. She took his hand and they left the bridge together.

Topaz watched them go and then flopped in the pilot's chair.

"Poley, try to find us a planet with female humanoids with compatible genitalia, would ya?" Topaz ordered.

"Now that makes the odds even worse," Poley said with a smile.

"Poley, was that a joke?" Topaz asked.

"Yes, but it is also the truth. The likelihood of finding an Earth-type planet is bad enough. When you add the probability of humanoid life forms, it comes out as . . ."

"No number, Poley, please." Topaz sighed. A few minutes later they heard RJ's cry of ecstasy as it echoed down the corridors to the bridge. "Damn, what's it been, like five minutes? Why couldn't I have ever met a girl like that?"

"Because you didn't hang out in the right bars?"

"Two jokes in one day, Poley!" Topaz said, more than a little surprised. "Is that some sort of record?"

"I have noticed that you all tend to make jokes when you are nervous. This situation has made me nervous, so I am trying to relieve the tension by bringing a little levity to our conversation."

"It doesn't really work if you tell us that's why you're doing it. In fact, I can't think of many things more frightening than a situation that makes a robot nervous." Topaz frowned, then RJ made another ship shaking sound, and the extreme urgency of their predicament was temporarily lost on Topaz. "Could you at the very least find us a planet with pretty animals?" He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and moved to close the bridge door.

The Reliance Admiral looked at the screen. "Where the hell did she go?"

"She jumped hyperspace, sir."

"Can she do that and live?" he asked.

The lieutenant shrugged. "I don't think we know, sir."

"What the hell is that?" the Admiral screamed, seeing dozens of blips covering the screen.

"It's an Argy battle fleet coming in fast."

"They must have detected the weapons fire," he said thinking out loud. "Full retreat. Remain at all battle stations and prepare for attack," the Admiral ordered.

Turning the ships around to make a retreat had turned out to be a big mistake. There hadn't been time to put enough distance between them and the Argy battle fleet, and they had wound up "facing" them with the afts of their ships, which were never as well armed or armored. In the battle that ensued they lost all but the carrier he was on, and they had basically continued to move even when the other ships had stood their ground and fought. It was protocol. The cruisers fought the battle, the carrier stayed at a safe distance, and its fighters unloaded and went in for the kill.

It didn't matter; the Admiral knew it would be his head if he reported what had really happened. That they'd lost all three battle cruisers and their crews, fourteen fighters and their pilots, and had failed to take out the rebel leader and her crew would be considered inexcusable.

"All right, boys, listen up," he said addressing the personnel on the bridge. "The only ones who know what actually happened out here are you and me. Now RJ and her people are gone, one way or the other, and we did that, but you know the brass." No one thought it was a good idea to point out that he was the brass. "They're only going to see that we let her get away, and that an Argy battle fleet kicked our asses and took out three of our ships. So . . . this is what actually happened today . . ."

Chapter Two

Jessica Kirk had lost track of time. She'd done it on purpose, which she knew meant that she knew exactly how much time had passed, but she was at least pretending not to. She sat on a rock in the mine and watched the others work, not because she was physically tired, but just because she was fed up.

Of all the places she might have found to hide out, she had to end up on Pete.

Pete was a mineral rich agricultural planet deep within Argy held territory. A human named Pete originally discovered the planet, but the Argys had killed the human colonists and claimed the world as their own. After ten years of war it had become theirs by right of conquest. They had put their own colonists on the planet, and now had a nice thriving community of work drones.

Maybe the Reliance had realized just what a shit hole Pete actually was and had lost on purpose, though Jessica personally doubted it. For all that it was a horrible place for beings of any kind to live, it created a lot of product. When you peeled away all the other layers, that's what it always came down to with both the Argy and the Reliance hierarchy—product. Product equaled profits, and profits equaled power.

Pete had proved to have too bad a climate for "important" Argys to live there, so they sent the "unimportant" people to colonize it. They promised them free housing and some land of their own, a chance to better their lives. Idiots had flocked to the planet looking for some freedom, only to find that they had traded one sort of slavery for another, and in most cases if they were on Pete they had actually traded down.

Jessica had learned long ago that in most cases the term "colonists" was just a nice way of saying "slave laborers" and/or "cannon fodder".

These people worked all day either in mines or tending crops or livestock. Anything they needed that had to be manufactured, like cooking utensils, farm implements, picks, shovels, and medicine, they could only buy from the Argy government store. If they needed medical attention they had to go to an Argy hospital. The government always seemed to be able to work it so that no matter how much product the people brought them, they never made quite enough money to pay off their debt, so that there was no way for them to actually better their lot in life. They could never quit working; they couldn't even afford to slow down.

The planet was hot and humid with rain falling for at least an hour around the middle of every day. Crops grew and flourished as long as you grew them on raised ground that drained. The other things that did really well were disease, deadly venomous insects, reptiles, and poison fungus of every shape and size.

On most days just breathing was like trying to pull oxygen from water. The humidity was so high that gills would have come in handy.

Everyone was hot all the time. The whole planet seemed to reek of body odor, raw sewage, and rotting plant life.

Ventilation fans and the extreme depth of the mines made them the coolest places to work. Unfortunately the noise of those fans and the pumps, which had to constantly pull water out of the mines to keep them from flooding, was enough to drive you completely crazy.

No place on the planet, not one single place that Jessica had found, would be comfortable to either humans or Argy. Hell, Jessica could barely tolerate it. Yet the Reliance and Argy had fought over this piss hole for years. Thousands on both sides had died before the Argy claimed victory and the Reliance let them have it.

In Jessica's opinion it showed the full extent of their greed.

It was safe to say that Jessica hated Pete. That she in fact hated everything about the stinking planet. But beggars couldn't be choosers, and as wretched as the place was it was one of the few places in the universe that Jessica Kirk could live. She wasn't safe anywhere in the Reliance. Since RJ had seen fit to inundate the airwaves with pictures of herself, and since she and Jessica were clones from the same batch of GSH's, everyone in the Reliance now knew exactly what Jessica was. She hadn't helped her position any by killing a Reliance bigshot and several dozen other people in a Reliance Sector Capital on Earth. The Reliance had plastered her picture up right alongside RJ's with the same description and order, "Dangerous rogue GSH, approach only with deadly force."

Jessica had ordered the burning of the rebels' stronghold, Alsterase, so she wasn't too terribly loved by the rebels in the New Alliance, either.

Worst of all, she had ordered RJ and her lover killed, and while the GSH she had sent to do the job hadn't succeeded in killing RJ, he had killed her lover. So there was a very good chance that the relentless bitch was never going to rest till she had Jessica's head on a pike. And Jessica had no doubt that RJ could do it; after all, RJ had bested her in every battle except Alsterase, and even then she'd come back, blown up Capitol, and taken one of Jessica's eyes.

Everyone knew what she was, and that she should never have been. Everyone knew what she had done and considered her crimes to be unforgivable.

There was no human quarter to which she could turn for help, and no hope of redemption.

For all of these reasons hiding in Reliance space had been completely out of the question.

If she had tried to get on Deakard or any of the Argy Alliance's prime planets she would have undergone a complete body scan which would have shown that not only was her DNA not on file anywhere, but also that she was half human, and genetically engineered at that. They would have drawn the obvious conclusion that she was a Reliance military officer. They wouldn't have let her live if they could help it.

The only logical place for her was on one of the Argy dredge planets. The places so hungry for "colonists" that they didn't question where you came from or how you got there, much less run a scan on you. Profiles cost money, and you just didn't spend money to profile cattle.

It was pretty clear-cut really. No one in their right mind would want to be someplace like Pete. No one with any real options would go there. Therefore just the fact that you wanted to be there meant that you were too stupid to be suspect.

"You, One-eye!" the Argy taskmaster named Shlerb yelled. "Get up and get back to work."

His name matched his physique. She had sworn long ago that someday she was going to kill the fat ugly bastard.

Jessica took in a deep breath of stale, water-rich air, stood up, picked up her pick and bucket, and headed back into the mine. There was high tech equipment that could pull fifty times what pick and shovel crews could pull out of here, but at this time in the game, both to the humans and the Argy, people were a renewable resource. High tech equipment was worth more than people, and if a cave collapsed and killed twenty men they were not nearly as upset as if one of the water pumps or a fan broke. They would sometimes charge repair costs to the workers by cutting their pay until the repair was paid for.

Once in the mine, Jessica took slow steady swings at the wall. She could work ten times as fast as the fastest person here. She could strike that pick in exactly the right spot and with enough force and accuracy to take out a whole section of wall, but if she did that they would know what she was.

In fact, it seemed to her that she had spent most of her rather long life hiding what she really was. Had spent most of her life being like the people who came in and took all their product in return for shoddy merchandise, making sure that they couldn't do anything more than exist. She'd been like Shlerb back there . . . No, worse, because she'd never had to get dirty to benefit from the fruit of other people's labors.

She was learning firsthand what she had inflicted on those under her authority. She had sat in judgment over her fellow man. Made decisions with the flick of her hand that had changed thousands of lives forever. In the blink of an eye, with no thought of the callousness of her actions, she had ordered "clean-up" expeditions. Whole villages of unarmed work units had been killed, every man, woman and child, young and old, for no other reason than they cost the Reliance more in supplies than they produced in product. She did it because it was her job; that was the way things were done. She didn't make the rules, but she'd loved them.

She'd treated people with less regard than farm animals. The Reliance trained an Elite to believe that they were better than even other soldiers. Certainly she had never even considered that mere work units were capable of serious thought, much less feelings.

The Reliance picked who could breed and who couldn't by what the projected weather for the next twenty years in any given area was, and if they happened to be wrong and crops, forests, or animals died, then the area was considered "unproductive," and people were killed for no other reason than some weather forecasting program had screwed up.

Jessica had signed such orders. They made up a lie about spies being harbored in a village, and armed troops marched into villages full of unarmed work units and killed everything that moved.

It had all been very cut and dried. People were supposed to earn their keep, and if they couldn't, well, then some of them had to go. Tough problem—simple solution.

She supposed that it was poetic justice that she who had without pity dominated and mistreated those under her was now forced to live under the same sort of tyrannical rule that she had once dished out and lavished in. However, Jessica didn't think herself stupid, and she felt that after more than three years of this shit she had truly learned her lesson.

She took in another deep breath and started picking away at the wall.

Gee, if I work really, really hard I may be able to buy a piece of cheese. Or I could just get tired of all this shit and start my own little rebellion right here on Pete. The problem with that, of course, was that the Argy equivalent of a GSH was a hairless, sexless, almost featureless creature who looked like the freak that human GSH's were called. There was only one on Pete, no doubt because any more would have been overkill, but she didn't want to go toe to toe with him. After all, he was twice her size, and RJ had all but killed her. If Jessica did anything that would show the Argy what she was, they would not listen to her and follow her in battle to topple their oppressors. No, they would most probably attack her and continue to attack her until the GSH arrived and finished her off. And if by some miracle she managed to beat the resident GSH, and escape from Pete, where would she go?

Therein lay the real problem. Jessica Kirk had run out of places to hide, and she couldn't afford another enemy. So here she stood in water up to her ankles, in a mine where the air stank of sulfur and urine, picking at a wall with an archaic tool being very careful not to outwork the others for fear of being found out, and making just enough to barely eke out a living on a planet named after a human who had died shortly after he discovered it.

The lucky fuck! He didn't live long enough to grow to hate this floating sewer of a planet.

Jessica on the other hand had, and every day her conviction grew to find some way off Pete. And every day saw another perfectly good plan completely scrapped because it lacked one key element: plausibility.

What she actually needed was to be someone, damn near anyone else.

She carried her full bucket up out of the mineshaft and to the payment station. Her ore was weighed, poured into a waiting wheelbarrow, and she was given a fist full of chads that could be used at the Argy-run store to buy things for ten times what they were worth. She buried the chads deep in her pocket with the others from the day and started on the long walk home. There were some things they needed at home, but she just didn't feel like ending the day by getting screwed over by the government store. If she had, she just might have had to kill someone.

It was easy to hide on Pete. People didn't really look at each other; it was just too much to see your own despair etched onto another person's face. They were all Argy and all empathic. It was enough to feel the hopelessness all around you without seeing it, too.

Home wasn't much to look at. Like most of the huts on Pete, it was built up on wooden stilts about eight feet off the ground. The walls and roof were made of woven plant fronds, the roof then covered with pitch. Plastic guttering collected the daily rainwater off the roof and it ran into a fifty-gallon barrel placed in the eves of the hut. This was where they got all their running water.

There was a small porch on the front of their hut, which was seen as rather a luxury, as were the small bank of solar panels which were lashed to the roof and used to power one light and a ceiling fan in the one room dwelling. There was a ramp that led up to the porch, and by the time she had climbed it she was completely drained of hope. She flopped into one of the woven reed chairs that sat on the porch and looked out over the village.

The whole place smelled of human shit. No small wonder, since the toilets were raised areas in the corner of each dwelling. You basically raised the lid, shit in the corner, and the turds fell eight feet into a composting bin of straw. Once every three weeks the slop man came around with his wagon, cleaned out the bins and took the contents to the fields. Then he came back and brought fresh straw. If it rained hard enough to cause a flood—which it did at least once a month and was the reason for the dwellings being on stilts in the first place—the whole place became a giant cesspool. Fortunately for them the Argy government was kind enough to spray the place with something—most possibly lethal if you were exposed over a period of years—that killed ninety percent of the bugs. Of course, the ten percent that didn't die were pissed off and caused as much damage as was possible.

"Did you get any cheese?" Right asked as he hobbled out onto the porch.

They had gone to a very expensive geneticist to have Right's hair, eye and skin color genetically altered so that he could pass as an Argy. It had cost Jessica most of the money she'd managed to smuggle off Earth and had been a huge risk. It hardly seemed worth all the trouble now. Right hadn't been on Pete for two weeks when one of the local nasties drilled a hole in his leg and laid its eggs. The insect in question laid several hundred eggs. The larvae hatched in six weeks time, and then the real fun began, because they started eating their host. If you tried to remove or kill them they secreted a poison so lethal that the host died instantly. Then, of course, they could continue to eat the host's carcass. The larvae stayed in that stage for five years.

The eggs had been laid in Right's right leg. You could actually see the things moving around just under the skin. The doctors told them that if he ate plenty of protein the larvae would most likely stay in the leg area, and that in five years they would make a single hole in his skin and all crawl out where they could then easily be killed. In the meantime the larvae moved around in him, eating his flesh and making him miserable.

He just wasn't very good company anymore. She really didn't know why she continued to let him live. Far from enhancing her life, he detracted from it. All he did was take and take; he gave back nothing, as he had in fact nothing to give. He was sick. Jessica guessed she felt responsible for him, knowing that it was only because of her that he was forced to live on Pete in the first place.

She didn't understand him at all. If she were a mere mortal forced to live in this gods-forsaken place with bugs eating her flesh and nothing to do but sit around in a shack all day smelling the neighbors' shit and waiting for cheese, she wouldn't want to live. Yet every time she offered to end his suffering he acted like she was some sort of psycho.

"I have to have cheese, Jess," Right whined, hobbling over to a chair and sitting down. "If I don't get enough protein . . ."

"We still have a couple of eggs left, Right. I'll get you some cheese tomorrow."

"That's what you said yesterday, Jess . . ."

"I said . . ." Jessica glared at him, "that I would get it tomorrow."

"OK," Right said, sighing complacently. "How was work?"

She turned her head slowly to glare at him, a look of utter disgust on her face.

"Sorry," Right said. "It's just . . . what else is there to talk about?"

He had a point. The only other topic of interest was the bugs in his leg, and she had ordered him to quit talking about them two years ago.

She sighed. "I filled six buckets with ore, and I have enough chads to buy your cheese. My feet were wet all day, and I'm almost tired."

"Are you not feeling yourself, Jess?" Right asked carefully.

"No! I am feeling myself. I'm feeling just like myself. That's the freaking problem!"

Chapter Three

Mickey stood on an elevated platform on the mainland looking out at the sea of brown faces.

"There are thousands of them," he said in an awed whisper.

"One hundred and thirty thousand," John Henry supplied.

Mickey looked up at him and grimaced. "What in hell's name are we going to do with a hundred and thirty thousand aliens that think you're a god?"

John Henry smiled down at the President of New Freedom. "I've thought of a couple of uses for their more attractive women folk." The brown make-up he had been wearing for weeks was smeared and looked as ridiculous as the handless man's statement sounded. Mickey would have probably laughed if there were anything to laugh about.

It had taken them the better part of three weeks to get the aliens all here. He had come to the conclusion that splitting them up and shipping them all around New Freedom would have been far too problematic. It would be much easier to deal with them if they were all in one spot, and he had decided that Alsterase, or what used to be Alsterase, was as good a place as any.

Or so Mickey had thought. Now, looking out at this mass of humanity that was waiting anxiously for answers that he didn't really have, he wasn't so sure. Food and clean water supplies were running low, and they couldn't seem to build latrines fast enough.

A hundred and thirty thousand aliens, most of whom didn't understand or speak their language. Aliens with different customs and beliefs than their own, who were going to need food and shelter and clothes to name just a few of the problems, and where was he supposed to get those things? Yank them out of his ass?

His attempts to reach David on Beta 4 had been futile, because of that stupid magnetic pulse thing, he supposed. But attempts the last couple of days to reach RJ hadn't been any better. He thought maybe Marge was losing her touch, or maybe RJ's ship's communications system was damaged. He had contacted the people on the space station, but they had their hands full just repairing the damage to the station and preparing for the Reliance attack they were sure was going to come at any minute.

The ideal solution would be to send them all back to their homeworld, so of course that wasn't actually a conceivable option.

"Do we have some sort of interpreter?" Mickey asked John.

John nodded. "Hey, Gerald! Come on up here, man!" John yelled.

Gerald was a mountain of a man with a head so bald it shone in the sunlight, and a huge smile that put Mickey instantly at ease.

"Yes, my king," he said bowing to John Henry. Mickey gave John Henry a dirty look. "Hey, I didn't ask for this job, remember?"

Mickey nodded. He looked up at Gerald. "My name is Mickey. I am the President, that's like king of this place, New Freedom. Do you understand?"

Gerald smiled again and nodded. "I understand everything, except why you talk so slowly."

Mickey felt like an idiot now, because the guy spoke better Reliance than he did. Or at least better than Mickey had a few years ago.

"Speak into this thing," Mickey pointed at a mike. "Tell the people that John Henry's just a guy like any other guy . . . without any hands," Mickey explained. "We dressed him up like your king-god or whatever so that we could free you from the Reliance. So that you would follow us before they could use you against us. We can't send you back to your home planet, because we don't have the resources." Mickey was feeling less and less good about what he was saying. Gerald was looking at him like he wasn't quite sure of Mickey's sanity, and if he had this huge guy repeat this shit, there was a very good chance he was going to have a hundred and thirty thousand alien super-warriors stomping him into chunky midget stew. Gerald drew a breath and turned to the mike, and Mickey started pulling frantically on Gerald's pants leg. "No . . . don't say any of that. Wait."

Mickey started pacing back and forth, trying to think. He had to have answers, real answers, if he was going to avoid a full-scale riot and bring these people into the fold. He couldn't tell them he'd tricked them, that he couldn't send them home and he had no real answers for them. They'd go berserk; they'd kill everything in sight. He needed perfect words and diplomacy. He needed RJ's brain and David's mouth.

He had left Diana on Alsterase Island because he knew this was potentially a very dangerous situation, but now he wished she were there to give him some well-needed moral support.

He had brought thousands of hungry aliens to a dead city where there was no shelter and very little food, and . . . It was a dead city now, but it was the place that had once given them all hope. It was nothing now but a clean stretch of land. He took a deep breath, and suddenly he had the answer.

"All right, tell them this," Mickey said, and Gerald nodded and moved back to the mike. "Our new friends . . ." He waited for Gerald to repeat his words and get the attention of the restless crowd. "You have, as we all have, witnessed and been the target of the Reliance's great evil . . ." Again he waited for the interpreter to repeat his words. "We do not have the resources to send you home." Gerald looked at him to make sure he wanted that repeated, and Mickey nodded. "However, we will give you this land, and you will make a new home here with our help . . ." Gerald repeated his words almost as he spoke them, having found a rhythm. "This was once our great city. Once it was our home, but the Reliance came and destroyed it. Now we will rebuild it, bigger, better than it was before. They pulled you from your homes, dragged you through the stars and brought you here to fight in a war that wasn't yours. Forever now will our destinies be as one, even as our enemy is one. This place will thrive again as it once did. They took you from your home, but you will build a new home here. They destroyed Alsterase, but it shall be built again. It shall rise from the ashes and scream into the Reliance's face, We shall overcome!"

Gerald waited for Mickey to say more.

Mickey wiped the sweat from his brow. "Ah, that was it."

When Gerald repeated this to the people, they started to cheer.

"Wow! That was some speech," John Henry said.

"I was thinking, what would David say, and how would he say it?"

"Well, it was great." John Henry patted Mickey on the back so hard he almost knocked him over.

"Yeah, now all I have to do is figure out how I'm going to make it happen."

Two days later Mickey was completely exhausted. They were shipping food, livestock, seed, fishing boats, farming and building supplies from all over New Freedom. It wasn't as easy as one might think to figure out where the surplus was and how to get it from point A to point B with the least effort, even with Marge's help.

"Did you find any nails?" Mickey asked in a sleepy voice.

"Yes," the supercomputer droned in its mock female voice, making Mickey miss Topaz and his other friends even more. "They should arrive by truck tomorrow."

"Great, then I'm going to bed. I can deal with the rest of this shit in the morning." Mickey got up and started to his room. He had hardly seen Diana in days. He just wanted to go to bed, curl up around her and go to sleep. He was almost out of the room when Marge announced.

"Mickey, David Grant is hailing us."

"Well, don't just sit there, patch him through." Mickey was suddenly wide awake. He launched himself back into his chair and stared expectantly up at the viewscreen. He didn't even really see David before he started speaking, "David, I've been trying to get in touch with you for days. Things here are a gigantic mess, and . . ." He noticed then that David wasn't saying anything. "What . . . What's wrong?"

David started crying then, and the words he said were hardly intelligible. "RJ . . . she's gone."

"She left you there, I know." They had already talked about it, but David seemed a lot more upset now, maybe it had just sunk in. "She will probably come back to get you when she leaves Deakard."

David sniffed hard and wiped his nose on his sleeve. In the background Mickey could just make out a female voice obviously trying to sooth him. "You don't understand, Mickey. They're gone, they're all gone." He started crying hard again then. "I can't do this." He stood up and walked away from the screen, and a Beta 4 woman took the chair. She seemed to be only a little more in control of herself than David had been.

"Mickey, my name is Janad. I'm sorry to meet you under such circumstances, and sorry," her voice broke and then she contained herself, "to have to tell you . . . We just got a message from the station. They intercepted a coded transmission. A Reliance task force was sent after RJ's ship, and they are saying that they destroyed it. That there were no survivors."

"Marge, she should have known, surely she would have intercepted . . . So it can't be true." Except that I ordered Marge to shut down all unnecessary functions and focus only on our immediate problem. "Marge, find RJ's ship, contact RJ's ship," Mickey ordered.

"I told you, I cannot find the ship," Marge said.

"What do you mean?" Mickey asked, slamming his fist down on the console in frustration. "What do you mean you can't find the ship?"

"It doesn't exist."

"No!" Mickey screamed, his own tears starting to fall like rain. "This can't be happening. They can't be dead."

"Intercepting an encoded message from Reliance battle carrier, Rotania," Marge droned.

"Well decode it, you stupid computer!" Mickey screamed.

There was only a few seconds pause, but it might as well have been a million years.

"Rotania log. Our ships the Boxton, Hepler, Delmark, and the carrier Rotania found the rebel leader RJ's stolen ship and followed it at a distance beyond her detection equipment in hyperspace to a point where she was too far from any gate to make a successful jump. We then closed in and opened fire. She put up a fight and the Boxton took minor damage as did the Delmark, but I'm pleased to say that in the end we were victorious and the ship was hit in its reactor which caused a chain reaction which vaporized the ship. No one could have survived the explosion, and no escape pods or ships were lunched prior to the explosion. Shortly after we dispatched the rebels' ship a fully loaded Argy battle fleet attacked us . . ." It went on to make an exact list of all their damages.

Mickey hadn't heard anything past "she put up a fight." He knew what was coming after that, and didn't need to hear it yet again. They were gone. They were all gone. Topaz, Levits, Poley and RJ.

He and David were now the only members of the original inner circle left. The battle was left to them to fight alone, and now they could never retreat.

RJ looked at Poley across the bridge. "How long?" she asked.

Poley shrugged. "Two months, three if we cut all life support in the ship, keep the solar sails fully opened and the scoops fully pulling. If we don't go to warp one."

It was a death sentence, and she was doubly glad that she'd decided to talk to her brother about it when both Topaz and Levits were asleep.

Firing the armaments had depleted their fuel cells, and they weren't picking up enough radiation with the scoops to make a real difference.

"What if we jettison everything? Every chair, every pot, every pan?" RJ asked.

"You'd waste more energy opening and closing the airlocks and re-pressurizing than you'd save losing the weight," Poley informed.

RJ nodded. She had thought as much.

"Of course there is all that radioactive gold," Poley said.

"What!"

"The safe full of radioactive gold," Poley said with a shrug.

RJ jumped out of her chair, ran over, and hugged and kissed the robot. Then she started pacing back and forth.

"I must be just completely freaking losing it! Here we are wondering where we're going to get fuel for our fusion reactor, and we've got one thousand five hundred and sixty three pounds of radioactive gold," RJ said in disbelief. "If we used it for fuel, how long would it last?"

"With the gravity fields and the life supports shut down, fifteen years, maybe more. It depends on the efficiency of the solar sails and the scoops, how much radiation we can collect along the way. Without knowing exactly what we may encounter I can't efficiently determine an exact length of time," Poley said.

"Fifteen years could be more than enough time to get us to an Earth-type planet if one exists, maybe even back into our own space." She started pacing back and forth. "Topaz, Levits and I would have to go into cryogenic sleep. You'd have to run the ship, make all the decisions."

"I would be lonely," Poley said.

A few years ago such a statement would have given her cause to pause. She might even have laughed. Now she knew his statement to be fact. The robot had developed emotions, and having emotions, he now had a need to be around other people. However, there was no alternative.

"I'm sorry, Poley, but it's the only option." She must have sounded as troubled as she felt.

"What's wrong?" Poley asked. "We've found a solution to our problem."

RJ stopped pacing, looked at him and said sadly. "It's not really a very good solution, is it, Poley? There is still no guarantee of our survival, and if we do survive . . . We'll be going to sleep now, knowing that we've abandoned our cause. That the world, in fact the galaxy we know has been left behind, and that we may never wake up again. If we do wake up it will most likely be on a world we don't know. A world with no other humans, most probably with no other intelligent life forms at all. There may or may not be food that we can eat. Just because we can breathe the air doesn't mean that it will be a habitable planet. It's the only solution, and it's better than dying without trying, but it's certainly no reason to celebrate."

Topaz thought it was a brilliant idea, and was all hot to experience cryogenic sleep, but then he didn't know what Levits knew about what he liked to call "the sleep of death".

"Do you dream? Are you aware of time, your surroundings?" Topaz asked excitedly when RJ and Poley had told he and Levits of their plan.

"You're not aware of anything," Levits spat in his direction. "It's just like being dead, and since we may die without ever being brought back, it may very well be our death. I don't want to give up any time that I have left. I'd rather draw my last breath knowing that I'm dying than give up any time I might have by basically killing myself."

"I have charted several blue planets, there is a good chance that one or all of them are habitable," Poley said. "I believe I might have even found a familiar solar system, it's hard to tell because it's fifteen light years away and I'm looking at the back of it, if it is, but it just might be Ursala Prime. I figure if we go in that direction . . ."

Levits cut him off. "Now even the robot is guessing." He looked at RJ. "Do you really believe there is a chance that we will be revived? That he'll find us a habitable planet?"

"The odds are good," RJ said. "Even if he could just find us one with a power source we could keep the ship running, live out our lives in it . . ."

"You mean my life, don't you?" Levits said. The rest of them all had the capability of out-lasting the ship. He wondered who had more to lose with death, the man who was going to live forty years or the man who was going to live forever. RJ was incapable of forgetting, so she was purposely choosing to ignore the whole food problem. Since the food was packed in airtight, non-corroding military containers it could be stored forever, and there had been enough food onboard to literally feed an army for several months. But even if they carefully rationed it, there couldn't be more than twenty years worth of food in the ship.

There were no good choices, just like there hadn't been a choice when he'd flown the ship out of hyperspace and put them here. There was impending death and a small hope then, and there was impending death and a small hope now. Was it better to live two months and die, or was it better to take a chance and go under now? Then he realized there might be a compromise.

"You said the ship can only continue to fly as long as we might need it to if we shut down the life support systems and the gravity field. But we don't have to do it today. Let's live for two more weeks." He looked at RJ. "Let's live the next two weeks like they're the last two weeks of our lives, and then let's put this plan into action. Two weeks won't make a real difference."

"You're right," RJ said. She walked over and embraced him, and then she was talking only to him. "If I only have two weeks left to live, I'm glad I'll be spending them with you. If we wake up on a brave new world and we find we have a lifetime together, I will gladly spend that with you as well."

"That's the sweetest thing I've ever heard," Topaz said, wiping a tear from his eye.

RJ shot him a dirty look and led Levits out the door.

Topaz immediately stood up and started for the door himself. "Where are you going?" Poley asked curiously.

"To see if one of the Reliance screws who used to run this freaking ship left a blow-up doll lying around. And you better hope I find one, because you're starting to look pretty good to me, Tin Pants." He winked at Poley as he walked out the door.

Poley turned back to the instrument panel and started wondering how he'd spend his time when he didn't have all of them to take care of.

Chapter Four

Jessica Kirk sat on the porch of her stilted bungalow in hell and wondered just what she was going to do with the news she'd heard today.

A ship had landed to be loaded, which happened at least twice a week, so there was nothing unusual about that. Nor was it an uncommon occurrence for Jessica to work close enough to the guards to hear what they were saying. There were no viewscreens, no radio or newspapers on Pete. There was nothing of interest or importance happening on Pete, and the only way you could find out what was going on elsewhere in the galaxy was by eavesdropping on the Argy military drones that came and went on those ships.

With Jessica's superior hearing she didn't even have to get close enough to look suspicious.

Most days the news was nothing more exciting than they—the Argy—were losing on one front or they were winning on some other. News of what was going on in the Reliance was rare to completely nonexistent.

Until today. RJ had gotten so huge that it seemed that her demise had became news on both sides. Strategically it made a certain amount of sense. The Argy were fighting a war with the Reliance. RJ was a problem for the Reliance, and therefore her death was going to mean they were going to have to work a little harder.

Also there were rumors that RJ had been on her way to the planet Deakard to try and strike a deal with the Argy government, which would benefit both the Argys and the New Alliance. The Argy had believed she could help them, because her forces had just recently taken complete control of a Reliance-held planet.

There was obviously some discrepancy between the Argy account of how RJ had died and the Reliance account. That was curious all by itself, but what she found most intriguing was just how hard the Argy seemed to be taking RJ's death. Perhaps it was because she gave them a much-needed edge against their enemy. Maybe it was as simple as the fact that she was one of them—or at least half one of them—and they felt a camaraderie because, though she had been raised by the Reliance, she had still attacked them. Perhaps they thought her actions had been controlled by some trace of race memory.

RJ was dead. RJ the indestructible, who had confounded her at every turn, was dead, and the Argy were mourning. The New Alliance, RJ's friends, no one would ever be quite the same.

Jessica was the same blood, for all intents and purposes she was the same person, and did even one soul care that she was stuck on this gods forsaken planet walking in shit and shoveling rock all day?

No! Even Right only cared because he was stuck here with her, not because he had any real affection for her. He might have once, but she'd taken care of that.

She wondered if they could be wrong. After all, RJ was supposed to be dead once before and she'd risen from the grave to bite Jessica and the whole Reliance on their metaphorical asses.

She was my nemesis, but she was also my sister. I feel a strange sense of loss. A universe without RJ. What a strange place.

She wished there was some way that she could be sure. Some way to find out just exactly what had happened—whether RJ'd been alone or if her loyal band of fools had been with her. Morbid curiosity she supposed, still she really did want to know just exactly what had happened.

In the distance she could just make out the ship. She smiled; it was almost too easy.

The next morning she once again took a job loading ore into wheelbarrows to be hauled into the ship. She wheeled her load in, dumped it, and the rest was as easy as getting around the brain-dead guards without being seen or felt. Everyone, including the GSH, was supervising the loading of the ship, and no one was watching the data rooms.

The file was easy to find when you knew what you were looking for, and there it was. RJ had been heading to Deakard for a summit with the high Argy council concerning an alliance of sorts between the Argy and The New Alliance.

My enemy's enemy is my friend, Jessica thought.

A Reliance battle fleet had apparently been looking for RJ because she had just kicked the Reliance's ass on Beta 4 and taken their space station. They had found her en route to Deakard and attacked. They had opened fire and the ship, according to the Reliance accounts, had been vaporized, but the Argy told a different story. They said RJ's ship had run out of the hyperspacial stream, which didn't necessarily mean that she was dead.

But she was for all intents and purposes gone.

An Argy patrol arrived shortly after the firefight as the Reliance battle fleet was retreating and the Argy patrol attacked them, taking out three of their ships.

Damn, sounds like the Reliance is just getting its ass kicked everywhere.

The Argy verified their account of what had happened to RJ and her ship by stressing the fact that they could find no wreckage from the style and type of ship that she'd been in. They accused the Reliance of enhancing the account for their own benefit so that they wouldn't look like the total losers that they were. Knowing the Reliance the way she did, it wasn't very hard for Jessica to believe that this was true.

Jessica quickly put herself in RJ's position.

I'm in hyperspace going towards Deakard. I'm not near any jumpgates, in fact I'm days away from them and I see enemy ships coming in fast. I'm in a troop carrier so I have no speed, and only very limited armaments, so what do I do? Jessica smiled broadly. I jump hyperspace. I break the barrier and go into real space, so . . .

She checked to see if there was any ship of that size that had suddenly appeared somewhere and found nothing. Which didn't mean anything except that RJ probably wasn't dead, but she might very well be too far away to cause any trouble.

Time would tell, and if there was one thing Jessica had, it was time.

She heard someone coming and got up. She slid against the wall next to the door, and then she snuck out as they walked in. In minutes she was wheeling her wheelbarrow back out of the ship's cargo bay, and if anyone had noticed she was gone longer than she should have been they didn't say so.

That night when she finished work she stopped by the company store and spent all her chits on a big chunk of cheese.

As she walked in the door of the shack that night she was actually whistling happily, if completely out of tune. She threw the cheese at Right who was sitting at the table.

"What got into you?" Right asked with a smile.

"Today wasn't quite as crappy as most," Jessica answered.

Jessica couldn't sleep that night. Not that she really needed to sleep every day, just that since she had been on Pete she'd gotten in the habit of sleeping eight to ten hours a day just because it helped to pass the time. Sleep had become a way to escape from reality. Even on the occasions when she woke from a nightmare she found that moment when she became aware of being awake, and then of where she was, to be the most difficult time of the day.

Tonight a little glimmer of light was shining dimly on the horizon. There was hope, a chance for an escape from this hell. She had knowledge, and as she had learned long ago and had put in deep storage in the years since her undoing, knowledge was power.

What to do with the knowledge she had? That was, indeed, the question.

RJ might be dead, though Jessica personally doubted it, but she might be. If she had landed somewhere in charted space she would have more than likely been located by now. If she were even close there would have been some sort of communication. Someone would have caught her on a detection device somewhere and no doubt everyone was looking for her. The Argy, the Reliance, the New Alliance. If any of them had found or made contact with her, none of them had made record of it, and that was highly unlikely.

Of course, in all likelihood none of them were even looking. After all, none of them really knew RJ. None of them understood how she thought and how she reacted quite the way Jessica did, and therein lay her chance at freedom from this world. Her chance at redemption.

She walked out onto the porch and looked around her. The swamp gas was rising, making a green luminous haze over the stilted village of slaves. She needed more information, lots more. She needed to be able to watch for the signs that would mean RJ had returned to their space, because if it was possible, RJ would be back, and if she came back none of Jessica's plans would work, so she couldn't afford the luxury of getting her hopes up.

Except that it had been so long since she'd had any real emotions at all that it felt good to hope, and plan, and dream.

She had to get her hands on a computer, and not just any computer but one that she could modify to do exactly what she needed it to do. Unfortunately this meant taking something that was going to be missed, and that would mean house-to-house searches and questioning, so she had to have a damn good hiding place.

She smiled as it came to her in a flash. How to get it, where to hide it, and how to modify it to do what she needed it to do. She was back on her game in a way that she hadn't been in a very long time, maybe ever.

The next day when she was loading ore she once again brought in a load and used it as an opportunity to access the rest of the ship. It was easy. The GSH had been positioned outside the ship and the guards and foremen didn't really see the Argy slaves as individuals. To them they all looked the same. They supposedly watched them to make sure they didn't do things like steal from the ship or try to stow away. That they kept working, and didn't slack off. But the truth was they didn't really watch them at all. They didn't actually see them at all. The guards and foremen were like shepherds. They watched the sheep, but unless one turned purple or started flipping somersaults they weren't likely to notice one any more than the others.

Then of course there was the other thing. The slaves never broke the rules because they were sure they were being watched, and the punishment for breaking the rules was harsh. They knew this because every once in a while a foreman or a guard claimed a worker had committed a grievous crime against the empire. The colonist in question would then be judged, found guilty, and beaten nearly to death, often without even knowing what they were supposed to have done. After such public admonishment they would all be on their best behavior for quite awhile.

Jessica knew if she was careful that she could move through the ship unseen and unmolested. She could, after all, move with great speed, stealth and precision. Her vision—even with one eye—was so sharp that she could see even the slightest movement. Her hearing was so superb that she was neither worried about accidentally running into a guard nor of one sneaking up on her. Her reflexes were lighting fast, her body actually moving in many cases before she was aware of her brain telling it to do so. The only thing she really had to worry about was the ship's detection equipment. She had noticed that there were no cameras in the halls or offices. However, she was sure that something as expensive and therefore as important as a computer would be rigged to sound an alarm if anyone tampered with it. She would have to disconnect this alarm. The problem was that she wasn't going to have a lot of time to figure it out, and Argy technology was different from Reliance technology; not a lot, but enough. Her knowledge of it was very limited, and she wasn't going to have days or even hours to figure out all the ways it was different and how their anti-tampering devices might work.

She found the computer and power supply she wanted and dove under the console. She looked at the tangle of fiber optics and cringed. Like trying to pull the legs off a spider without actually killing it.

Everything she needed would fit easily into the ore bucket she'd brought with her. She looked at the tangle of cables, trying to decide which one was the alarm. She couldn't figure it out; maybe there was no alarm. Maybe they weren't worried about theft. Perhaps because of their empathic powers the Argy didn't worry about such things, thinking that it would be easy to root out a thief because he would have guilt and fear radiating from him.

Of course Jessica wasn't worried about that. She didn't feel guilty about stealing the equipment, and she wasn't really afraid of anything. She was also very good at emitting one emotion while actually feeling another.

About the time she was ready to just start yanking cables she found the security link. Now she had to disconnect it in such a way that the link still thought it was hooked up. It turned out to be easier than she had anticipated. All she had to do was sever the cable instead of unscrewing it.

It seemed like it had taken hours, but in mere minutes Jessica had disconnected both the computer and the power supply. She dumped the ore out of the bottom of her bucket, slipped the equipment into a heavy plastic sack and stuffed it back into the bucket. Then she covered it back up with the ore and carefully headed back towards the cargo bay. She stood in the hallway and waited for a moment when neither guard nor slave was in the quickly filling hold, then she snuck out and was dumping the ore off the top of her bucket just as a guard and two workers came in. She loaded her bucket into her wheelbarrow and then wiped her brow as if she'd worked up a sweat. She took a deep breath as if trying to cool off, then she took off her shirt—not unusual for either sex on Pete—slung it over the bucket and headed back out for another load.

Of course she didn't actually go get another load. Instead she told the foreman she was feeling ill, turned in her wheelbarrow for the day, grabbed her bucket and headed home.

Once there she made sure no one, including Right, was looking and she dumped the contents of the bucket into the composting shit and shoved it down with a stick. She smiled. No one would look there. By the time the shit wagon came around they would have stopped their investigation and she would have retrieved her prize from the shit.

She didn't trust Right not to cave, so she had no intention of telling him, and since she didn't want to have to explain to him why she was home so early in the day she picked up her bucket and headed for the mines. No one there would know she had gone home "sick," and if someone moved over from the job loading the ship and noticed her she'd simply explain that she felt better and that with her sick husband she couldn't afford to miss even a half day's work. She'd try to sneak in without anyone even noticing and then talk to as many people as possible because there was a very good chance that people would just assume that she'd been there all day.

The day went quickly and she felt something she hadn't felt in so long it took her several minutes to realize what it was. She was happy.

"What you so happy about, One-eye?"

She looked at the foreman and snarled; she didn't like being on a planet where everyone was empathic. It had been a lot more fun when she was the only one who knew what other people were feeling. She slammed her shields up and he smiled.

"Well?" he asked in a teasing tone.

"None of your business," she grated out. Oh how she hated having to give him even this much pleasantness. The time had been when she had given the orders, when she would have had him killed for his insolence, when she would have just grabbed him and snapped his neck if the mood struck her. Now she was forced to kiss his ass and she hated it.

His time was coming.

"I could have you beaten," he said.

And I could stick my hand up your ass, grab your backbone, pull it out in one piece, and use your empty carcass for a hand puppet, she thought. "If you must know I was able to buy a large piece of cheese for my sick husband, and because of the strength it gave him we were able to make love for the first time in a very long time."

Just saying it made her cringe inside. She hadn't let Right touch her since he'd gotten the worms. It was just too gross.

The foreman laughed. "Your husband has the worms."

"Yes."

He looked at her lustfully then. "Tell you what, sugar, next time you need it you come on over to ole Shlerb's house and I'll give it to you. Give it to you real good. Unless you're just into the feel of all those little worms wiggling in his skin, up against yours. Who knows? Come to think of it that might be fun." He walked away laughing.

Laugh while you still can, fatso, Jessica thought.

That was their real job. To make sure no happiness could flourish here. He had felt her happiness and had immediately tried to crush it. They always did that. She'd watched them do it to dozens of other people and it really hadn't dawned on her just what they were doing until they were doing it to her just now. She realized that she'd learned a lot of things this way.

As long as the bad stuff isn't happening to you, you really don't have any compassion for the people it is happening to. As long as life was giving her everything that she could realistically get from it, it never dawned on her to consider what might be happening to others, what she might be doing to them.

That was the big difference between her and RJ. RJ hadn't needed to be the one living in filth without hope to feel others' pain. She had willingly left comfort and security to fight a battle that wasn't even hers. Because RJ was capable of feeling other people's pain, not because she was an empath, but because she was a human being and their suffering was her suffering. She understood their complaints without even hearing them. She took on the Reliance because she knew what they were doing to the people was wrong. No other reason.

Not for glory, not for wealth, not for power, just because she didn't like how they treated people.

Jessica hadn't seen that evil until they had turned it on her. It wasn't important till the problem became her problem. Until the Reliance's completely corrupt and unjust system had decided to come after her because she had done the best she could do to please them and had failed due to circumstances beyond her control. The same reason she had personally signed the orders to have entire villages eradicated, because they had failed to earn their keep due to circumstances beyond their control.

She thought she'd found enlightenment, but what had she really learned? Nothing. Because she hadn't realized till that sleaze-bag had stolen her own happiness what they were doing to everybody else.

They wanted to totally obliterate any joy, any hope these people might find. Because as long as you lived your life in total despair you began to believe that you didn't deserve and certainly shouldn't expect anything better. You did your day's work, spent all your money at the government store, went home with your meager supplies and didn't make waves because while you were sure that nothing could get any better, you knew for a fact that it could get a hell of a lot worse.

She still had so much to learn about everything.

"Hey, One-eye, is that as fast as you can work?" the foreman chided.

Like he's picking on me because I'm the only one who looks any different to him. RJ always beat me because she was better than me; she was better than me because she noticed everything, and she noticed everything because she actually cared. She actually wanted to fix things. Not just for herself, but for everybody. She was driven to take down the Reliance. She knew it wasn't going to be easy, so she made plans. And how did she come to make those plans? How did she launch one successful campaign after another? Because she looked at everything from every different angle. Not just what was obviously important, but all the little things, the details. She analyzed everything.

Jessica looked at the foreman with a slitted eye, watching him without him noticing. What did she really know about him? He had helped to make her life a living tormentuous hell for three years and what did she really know about him? She'd never even thought about him before. He was like the bugs, the heat, the humidity and the stench. He was here, she was here, and she had to be here, so she had to tolerate him.

Now she studied him, going over all those past conversations, which her totally retentive memory could call up at will, and started to put together a picture of who this guy really was.

First, he was the enemy. Second, he was a bully who enjoyed the power he wielded in his position as foreman. Third, he had been stationed on Pete, so he had either done something unforgivably wrong in the eyes of his superiors, or he wasn't smart enough to be important enough to move up in the ranks high enough so that he couldn't be given a shit assignment. Putting together every conversation she had with him, Jessica was thinking it was probably the latter. If that was the case, what did that say? That four, he was slow-witted and probably not very ambitious.

Five, he was lusty, and because of his looks and foul odor probably only got sex when he took it—which she imagined he did every chance he got, without giving his victims a second thought. So six, he wasn't deserving of any compassion or consideration, since he had hurt others just because he could.

Seven, he would be easy to use to get what she needed when the time came. Because an enemy as stupid, unambitious, and instinct-motivated as Shlerb could easily be turned into an unwitting ally, and then disposed of when he was no longer necessary.

Chapter Five

Mickey walked the wall of the old prison and looked out at the mainland, which was no longer barren and empty. There were now thousands of people mixed with the goats there.

Just a few short months ago they had discussed what should be done concerning the ever-growing goat population grazing, actually overgrazing, what had once been Alsterase. Now that was no problem. The Beta 4 humanoids were eating the goats as fast as they could hunt them down.

Trucks arrived daily with food and building supplies. From the island he could see the new construction now dotting the mainland. He swore that if he concentrated when the wind blew just right he could hear the hammers and saws as the city took shape.

The Beta 4 humanoids were hardworking and strong. What was more, they seemed to absorb information like a sponge. They only had to be shown something once to be able to copy the action.

They seemed to be truly happy with their new home. He never heard one of them say they wished to return to their homeworld. When Mickey had expressed that he found this curious, Gerald had explained to him that their home world was barely habitable.

After the initial panic of setting the process in motion, the relocation of the aliens and the rebuilding of Alsterase was more or less running itself. Which was a good thing because Mickey just couldn't deal with any of it right now.

He was barely able to carry out the functions necessary for his own survival, much less function as leader of a new nation. Fortunately, his close aides had stepped in to take over during this time. The supercomputer helped to make the temporary transfer of power unnoticeable.

Everyone seemed to be sure that at any minute he would step up and take over again.

Mickey wasn't quite as sure.

He was completely consumed with his grief, and he was really having a hard time remembering what they were all fighting for at all. First Whitey and Sandra and everyone else who had died in the raid on Alsterase, and now RJ, Levits, Poley and Topaz were lost forever to the all-consuming void of space. All dead.

For what? Freedom. It hardly seemed worth it. What good was freedom without the people you loved to enjoy it with you?

He remembered the long endless weeks that RJ herself had walked this very wall, looking at the same strip of land, and he now realized most probably asking herself the same questions he was now asking. What did it—any of it—matter? Life was short, fleeting, and what real difference could anyone, dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people make? In the end everyone died, even the best, the strongest, even those specifically built and fashioned not to do so succumbed to the nothingness of death.

Some people believed in an afterlife. A place where people hung out with some sort of god or gods, and relished in the rewards that had eluded them in life. If they were horrible people they went to a place where they were tortured 24/7 and paid for the sins they had committed in life.

Mickey believed in neither place. Neither made sense to him. If they were going to live forever, then they must have always been, and if they had always been, then where had they been before? And why didn't he remember it? Why would a benevolent god waste so much energy punishing people for all eternity? Besides, if you were always being punished, wouldn't it eventually become old hat? On the four hundred and eighty second time they shoved a red hot poker up your ass, didn't you just shrug and say, "You know, it just isn't that bad anymore." Pain was caused from the body's desire not to die. Once you knew you were going to live forever even pain must eventually lose its edge.

The Reliance had—according to Topaz—used and then tried to eradicate such belief systems, but had never truly succeeded, because the more ignorant the people were the easier it was for them to believe in such utter crap. The worse their lot in life was, the more they desperately wanted to believe that there would be something better for them and worse for their oppressors in some afterlife.

People suffered—he guessed they always had—from the delusion that somehow life was fair. Since it obviously wasn't, they had made up something so that they could pretend that it was. I ain't got shit now, and my life sucks, but by god when I die . . .

It would be nice to be that ignorant. Comforting to think that there was some reward in a world after you died, but Mickey couldn't make himself believe that his friends were anywhere but floating as particles in space.

Mickey wanted desperately for things to be fair, but knew they weren't. He knew now that this was what had been bothering RJ as she walked this wall. She had known that they were all gone. Truly and forever gone. Not someplace waiting for her to get there.

Mickey remembered wishing that RJ would just snap out of it, become herself again. Quit brooding and just come back to the land of the living.

He imagined that was what Diana and the others were wishing he would do now.

He realized only now that it wasn't really something you could control. Grief wasn't just losing the people you cared about. It was having a little piece of yourself ripped away from you. It was waking up in the morning feeling like a piece of you was missing, that was lost forever. Your soul was torn apart. You felt shredded and barely alive, and yet everyone was demanding that you put yourself back together and get back to work.

For your own good.

A lot depended on him. Part of him knew that he owed it to his dead comrades to keep their dream alive, but a larger and louder part screamed, This is what killed them! Do you really want to keep it alive and watch it kill still more people you love, maybe even Diana? Do you want to die for this cause?

Diana walked out then. She didn't talk to him, just sat on a piece of wall and watched. He wanted to talk to her, to at least acknowledge that he knew that she was there, but found that even trying to find words was impossible. It was then that he realized that he was crying, sobbing in fact. He wondered how long he had been doing so, and tried to stop. He looked up at Diana and saw that there were tears in her eyes, too.

"I . . . I'm sorry," he said.

She got up, walked over to him, knelt down and hugged him. He hugged her back, probably holding her too tightly but if she cared she didn't say so.

"I love you, Mickey."

He cried harder. "I love you, too. I just . . . I can't take this."

"I know . . . It's been hard for everyone, but I know it's much worse for you."

"RJ . . ." His voice broke and he swallowed hard before continuing. "She was the first person who ever gave a damn about me. She risked her life for me, saved me; she made me the man I am today. Hell, I could hardly talk."

"I know."

"They were the only family I've ever known. Now they're all gone."

"I want to say something. Something wonderful and profound that will make all your pain go away, because I can't stand to see you hurting. But what could I . . . what could anyone say? What could we do? Nothing," Diana said in a soft voice. A voice filled with pain and with love.

And suddenly his pain just wasn't as sharp.

She didn't realize that she had just said those very words that she was so sure she didn't have. He couldn't even have repeated what she had said that had started to fill the empty spot in him. Maybe it was just the sudden realization that everyone wasn't gone. He was here and Diana was here, and they had to fight the Reliance. They couldn't give in now, because in the Reliance neither he nor Diana was considered worthy of food, water or even air. He was a midget, not even three feet tall. Diana had a deformed foot, and that was all the reason the Reliance needed to kill them.

That's what they were fighting. That was why you risked your life and the lives of those you cared about, because by giving in to the Reliance you weren't saving yourself or anyone else. You were just condemning them to a different kind of death. One where they didn't die fighting, they died because they didn't fight. They died because they didn't fit the Reliance's needs so they hunted them down, lined them up and shot them.

He'd rather die fighting, and so had they. That was the choice they had all, every one of them, made.

He pushed gently away from Diana, dried the tears from her face with his fist, and then dried his own tears. He took a deep breath and looked into her eyes.

"You are amazing."

Diana looked more than a little confused, "Me? But, what . . ."

He put a finger over her lips. "Shush." He moved his finger and kissed her lips gently. "Don't say anything else. I remembered something RJ said. She said I had to live a normal life for all of them. That's more true now than ever." He took her hand, and she stood up and followed him to their room.

Poley didn't lose track of time. He wished he could because it would have made life easier. As it was he was fully aware of the one week, two days, three hours and forty-seven minutes that had passed since he'd sealed the others into their cryogenic sleeping chambers.

It had only taken him a few hours to secure everything on the ship so that it wouldn't be floating around free when he turned the artificial gravity off. Now he wished he had taken his time, stretched the duty out. Of course he couldn't do that because the artificial gravity took more energy than the life support; more energy, in fact, than everything except the actual propulsion of the ship.

So now it was off and he was wearing gravity boots, which was all he really needed to walk around the ship without bumping off walls, ceilings and floors. Weightlessness didn't affect him like it did a human. He was, of course, incapable of losing muscle mass since he didn't have muscles. Bouncing around in zero-gee did, however, screw with his internal gyros, making it hard to control his movements and the direction in which he was trying to go. While he wasn't as easily broken as a flesh and blood being, he could still take damage, and certainly his body bouncing into things could break them. Poley couldn't afford to damage anything, and he sure didn't want to hurt himself. He had to take care of everything, maintain himself and the ship regularly, and make sure he stopped to recharge when necessary, because they were all counting on him. He was in charge.

He was lonely.

Poley walked to the bridge to check the data boards again, though he knew the chances that they were any closer to an Earth-type planet since he had looked five minutes ago were forty six million four hundred nine thousand to one.

He sighed, something that seemed to help the humans deal with stress, but didn't see why it worked for them.

He wondered if what he was feeling actually was stress.

He missed his sister, he missed having her ask him questions, listen to his answers, and then make decisions that seemed in many cases to go directly against the data he had given her. He guessed the emotion he felt because she trusted him to take over the ship and to make all the decisions himself was pride. Further, Poley calculated that the anxious feeling he got when he thought he might let them down was caused by a fear of failure.

And he was sure that all the reasons he kept calculating for why he should wake them up added up to only one thing—he was lonely.

And bored.

He started drumming his fingers on the console, listening to the rhythm of the drumming. He did this for three hours, fourteen minutes and twenty-three seconds.

What else did he have to do? Not too much went wrong with a ship when most of the systems were turned off. Once every two or three months he'd have to transport some more of the radioactive gold to the fusion reactor, but even after using all the precautionary measures and equipment it wouldn't take him more than a couple of hours.

He found himself wishing it took longer to recharge, because it was the same for him as the humans sleep cycle. A time when he wasn't really thinking, just shut down, recharging till his internal alarm told him he'd had enough.

He had interacted with them every day for an average of ten hours a day, for eight years, six months, eleven days, six hours and thirty-two minutes. Before that he'd always been with Stewart. Now he had nothing but the running of the ship and the search for their home space and/or an inhabitable planet to occupy his vast mind and his time. The real problem being that there was no action he could take to make a habitable planet jump onto their scanners, and the ship more or less ran itself.

Boredom.

He was sure Topaz would have made some joke about a robot being bored, Levits would have laughed and when Poley looked hurt—and he had learned very quickly how to do that, and just what it could get him—and RJ would tell them to lay off.

These random thoughts made him miss them all the more.

He needed to find something to do, anything to occupy the hours he would otherwise spend trying to figure out good excuses to wake the others up.

On Earth he had carved things, and RJ always praised his carvings. He searched the ship for twenty-four hours but found nothing he could carve up that might not be of use to them when they landed on a planet—if only he hadn't carved it up that is. His practicality didn't allow him to even consider doing damage to something they might actually need later.

He leaned against the wall with a deep sigh. He still didn't feel any better. Nothing. He had nothing to do but run the ship and check the scanners for suitable planets, which took maybe one hour of a twenty-four hour day.

He'd go crazy. He was sure they'd all have some joke about that. He wondered what a robot's mental breakdown would be like and envisioned frayed fiber optics and charred circuits. This made him smile for a minute, then he frowned. It wasn't really funny. He needed something to do, some task to carry out. After all, that was his function. But there was nothing.

Then he saw the long, bare white walls of the hall. He knew it was just paint over a metal surface. He smiled his best mechanical smile, dug his carving knife from his pocket and started to scrape it along the walls. It left a silver line in the otherwise white walls, but it couldn't actually be considered damage since it didn't weaken the ship. He had found his canvas, and this time he wouldn't make a geometric shape. He missed his sister most, so he would etch a picture of her into the wall. He smiled again. She would be humming; she liked to hum, even though she wasn't terribly good at it.

Chapter Six

Right watched in disgust as Jessica shoved the shit covered, stinking sack into their shower.

"Jessica, what on Pete are you playing at?" he demanded for the fifth time, though he was sure he knew. Only two short days ago the searches and interrogations had stopped. After having beaten half the population and totally intimidated the other half the Argy had finally admitted defeat and were punishing the entire population of the village by docking the amount paid for buckets of ore until the debt of the stolen computer was paid off. Or until the Argy government felt they had all been duly punished for the theft.

Jessica ignored him and continued cleaning the bag.

"Jessica, if that is what I think it is . . . if you're caught with it . . . if we're caught with it."

"We aren't going to be. They've stopped looking for it. We're all paying for it . . ."

"Some people have died, Jess."

"So . . . people die for lesser causes every day. Don't pretend to care. How many lives did you destroy as Governor General Right? Did you even care? No, you didn't give one good damn, and those were your people. Don't try to force me into some hypocritical moral dilemma, Right. We both know that your only real motivation for doing so is that you've figured out that I am no longer blind to the suffering of others and you hope to sway me to bury this thing before someone finds out I have it and tortures you to death. The damage to the populace has been done, some have died, and many have suffered and will continue to suffer. If I bury this now it will have all been for nothing. I knew of the possible consequences when I stole it and deduced that in fact the end did justify the means, as with this I can start to put things right. So shut the fuck up, stay out of my way, and out of my business."

Right watched as Jessica carefully unwrapped the items in question. Even clean the sack smelled awful, and so for that matter did the shower. Right threw the sack into the trash and then scrubbed the shower out. Even expelling this small amount of energy made him weak. Less money for ore meant less money for protein, and less protein meant the worms would move on up his body. She didn't care. She didn't care about all the others who had suffered for her theft, and she sure as hell didn't care about him.

He walked across the small room and sat down, exhausted. He watched as Jessica went to work tinkering with the electronic equipment like a child with a new toy.

"What are you going to do with it?" he asked.

"Find out what I need to know," she answered vaguely, and shut up and leave me alone was implied.

That was it; whatever her plan was he wasn't to be part of it. She had hidden the fact that she had the equipment in the first place, and now she wasn't going to tell him why she had it. She was leaving him out of the loop, because she didn't trust him to be able to mask his feelings under questioning. Though part of him knew he was safer if he didn't know, it still hurt that she didn't trust him after all this time.

Right had become accustomed to constant pain these last few horrible years as the worms made a meal of his leg. He could feel every move they made as they squirmed their way around his body. It was an indescribable pain, and one he had to deal with alone.

He wasn't allowed to converse with, or even have light contact with, the Argy they shared the planet with, because Jessica felt his Argy wasn't good enough to pass for a local, and his emotions were too easily read. So he had no external outlet. Jessica's answer to his pain was to offer to put him out of his misery on a regular basis. She said she'd changed, and she had. He'd watched, in fact he'd had a front row seat as Jessica Kirk had slowly gone completely and totally insane. There were moments of clarity, but there were no truly sane moments with her any more.

She believed that she had developed a conscience that she didn't formerly have. Truly believed that she had gained enlightenment. Life on Pete had been her personal hell. A way of clearing away the demons of the evil she had committed in the name of the Reliance.

Right certainly felt as if he'd paid, and paid, and paid.

Jessica hadn't been through the crap he'd been through. Her perfect body hadn't been invaded by parasites. But she was still sure she'd done enough time in hell. She'd been punished, and now she wanted . . . what, exactly?

Where could they go? Where besides this hateful planet could they hide? They had come here in the first place because they'd been completely out of options.

He knew then why Jessica had stolen the equipment. Jessica was going to start looking for options.

Jessica had all but given up on the pile of electronic crap. At one point she was sure that she would never to be able to boost it enough to get the range she needed, much less hack into Reliance communications. About the time she was ready to throw it back into the shit from whence it had come, she found that one missing piece that had eluded her. Within hours she had managed to hack into just the right Reliance data port.

She smiled triumphantly. The idiots hadn't even bothered to change the codes since she'd defected. Of course, they didn't actually expect people to be able to store streams of code in their heads.

RJ was still missing and the Reliance was still claiming to have killed her and her entire crew. No mention was made of her jump out of hyperspace. She found no data to indicate that any ship had entered Reliance or Argy space from 'the frontier.' Certainly there was no data to indicate that RJ's ship had surfaced anywhere in charted space. No unauthorized landings, no audio contact, nothing. For all intents and purposes RJ was gone.

The New Alliance had apparently absorbed a bunch of Beta 4 humanoids that the Reliance had tried to build into an army to fight the New Alliance. The delightful irony of the news almost made Jessica laugh. The New Alliance had also absorbed the entire planet of Beta 4 and its orbiting satellite Pam Station into their growing empire.

David Grant had apparently stayed on Beta 4, no doubt to act as an ambassador for the New Alliance on the newly acquired planet.

Pam Station had been the last place that RJ had been 'alive'. As such, Jessica badly needed to hack into the system there. It turned out to be harder to breach this system than it had been to get into the Reliance military mainframe because of some New Alliance system code named MARGE—Jessica was still trying to figure out what the letters stood for—which kept putting up blocks. It wasn't until she tried a completely different approach—actually with the help of Argy technology—that she was able to get through at all. When she did, she finally had the information she most needed.

Jessica had expected RJ to be accompanied by Poley, but she'd known very little about the man named Levits and even less about the man they called Topaz. Kirsty, the spy who had infiltrated the new Alliance and handed Alsterase to Jessica on a silver platter, had known very little about them, because RJ had never actually trusted the girl.

Jessica took awhile to digest that thought.

If RJ had given in to her instincts and killed Kirsty on sight, things would have played out in a totally different way. The variables boggled even Kirk's mind. It was, of course, all immaterial. Grant had bought the girl's act, had bargained for her life, and from that point on all their fates were sealed for better or worse.

But RJ hadn't trusted Kirsty, so she'd hidden things from her. Kept her away from the "Inner Circle" as much as possible, and therefore limited her contact with Levits and the mysterious Topaz. She'd been able to pull up Levits' service record, which was one of the reasons Jessica was surprised to learn that he'd gone with RJ into space. She hadn't been able to pull up any record on anyone named Topaz fitting his description in any Reliance system. As far as the Reliance was concerned he didn't exist, which wasn't at all surprising for a resident of Alsterase.

Even Jessica couldn't have guessed at the truth. As she read the log of one Lieutenant Stratton, she learned not only why Levits had put aside his fear to follow RJ, but also just why Topaz had no record. She wasn't sure that she believed all that she read concerning him, but it was obvious that Lieutenant Stratton did. Jessica found Stratton's telling of her brief but mutually beneficial meeting with RJ and her people enlightening on several counts.

When she was done reading it, Jessica knew everything she needed to know about Levits and Topaz, and in fact everything she needed to know for the next stage of her plan.

They were all the Reliance coins Jessica had left. She sat in the middle of the floor bending them over the links of the chain she had found in the mines. Right was watching her with a carefully curious expression on his face. Finally when he could stand it no longer he asked, "Jessica . . . What in hell's name are you doing now?"

She looked up at him, pulling a look of doom over her face. "It's the chain I built in my life, link by link, and yard by yard I made it. See how cumbersome and heavy . . ."

"What on earth are you going on about?"

"Illiterate swine," Jessica mumbled and went on working on her task. "Millions of books spanning thousands of generations of humankind at your fingertips, and did you bother to read any of them? No."

"I shouldn't have to remind you, but I don't read as quickly as you do." He sighed. "Surely I would have killed to have even a small portion of such reading material these last long years stuck in this pit with nothing to do but watch my flesh crawl and my worms grow. You have been barely communicative, and now . . . Even now when you are obviously working on something. Some plan. Even now you refuse to talk to me, to tell me what exactly it is that you're doing. It's been years since you've let me touch you, even when I have the strength, and now you're getting ready to do . . . something, and I'm not part of that plan, am I?"

"Of course you're part of the plan, Right. A very important part of the plan," Jessica said with a smile. "I've just been a little preoccupied . . ."

"Why are you building her chain, Jessica?" he asked in that special voice one used to talk to very small children and crazy people, especially when they were doing something particularly disturbing.

"Because she doesn't need it anymore, but they still need her." Jessica finished bending the last coin around a link of chain. She held it up. "Isn't it pretty?"

"Jess . . . That just doesn't make any sense," Right said sadly, no doubt sure that this time she'd gone irretrievably around the bend.

"Sure it does, baby, it just doesn't make any sense to you. But it will. It's all about redemption. Don't you see? It's all about making what's wrong, right, Right. Fixing what I helped to break." She put the chain down, got up off the floor and walked over to him. She took his hand, and he looked up at her, a little chill of excitement going through him that she felt and drank in. "You've been a very good companion to me, Right, a true friend. How do you feel?"

"Ah . . . as well as can be expected . . . Why do you ask?"

She smiled at him in that special way, and he didn't have to ask again. He just followed limpingly as she pulled him toward the bed.

Jessica sighed, rose from the bed and picked her clothes up off the floor as she turned to look down on Right. He looked peaceful, as if asleep. Or at least he did after she bent down and closed his eyes.

She didn't feel any guilt about killing him. He had been miserable here, and she couldn't have taken him with her even if she had wanted to. He had died happy, in the way that no few sickly Argy men had died, so no one was likely to ask any questions. They were having sex, she had an orgasm, and she accidentally killed him. Of course the truth was that she just didn't even try to control herself knowing that the end result—being all that she was—would mean that he died.

His death closed one chapter in her life and opened a whole new one.

After a few seconds of preparation, she was ready for the next task at hand. Carefully, she took down the plastic shower curtain and spread it on the floor in the middle of the room. Then she picked up Right's nude body, carried him over and laid him on top of it. Using the sharp knife she had laid to hand, she cut his guts open. Then she removed his stomach, intestines and a few other odds and ends, shoved all the stolen computer parts inside him and then carefully covered them with his organs. Some of the stuff had to be thrown away to make room, so she just chucked it down the waste hole knowing no one would notice it among the other shit. Quickly but carefully she sewed the wound shut, cleaned him from head to toe, and then duct taped his whole midsection—just to be on the safe side. Careful not to re-open the incision, she then moved him back to the bed and dressed him in his favorite shirt, leaving him unclothed from the waist down. Finally she picked up the shower curtain, cleaned it in the shower and hung it back up.

She made herself cry, which wasn't too hard to do seeing as no matter how big a pain in the ass he had been he had still been the only friend she'd had. She had to work at feeling guilty, which wasn't very hard, either, considering all that she had done as a Reliance officer.

Then she ran out onto her porch screaming into the night, "My husband is dead! My gods! I have killed my poor sick husband!"

A group of villagers soon gathered to comfort her. Knowing well what had happened and how, no one further questioned her. Since everyone knew he had the worms, several of the men watched as she put on his pants and stuffed him into one of the bio-waste bags they had brought for that purpose. Then they helpfully gathered up Right's bagged carcass and carried it off towards the incinerator as Jessica followed in a herd of consoling women. One told her how she had killed her aged husband the same way only last spring. It happened sometimes, no one ever blamed anyone, she shouldn't blame herself, and he probably welcomed death anyway having the worms in him and all.

He was loaded into the incinerator, it was set on high, and in mere moments Right, his worms, and the computer components he hid were history. Nothing but dust.

She returned home to "mourn" on her own. When the others were clear of her abode she sat down and smiled. She wondered when would be a proper time to start the next phase of her plan. How long would she be expected to mourn for Right? She wanted off this filthy planet, but she couldn't afford to screw up, not now.

She expected that taking into account the severity of Right's illness and how tiresome life with him obviously was that she wouldn't be expected to mourn more than a couple of weeks.

For two weeks she moped around just shooting out vibes of grief and general guilt. It wasn't hard; there were many things in her life that had made her unhappy. Stewart's rejection of her seemed to be her favorite unpleasant memory. There were a multitude of things she felt very real guilt for, and all stemmed from being stupid enough to buy into the Reliance's propaganda. Which she could blame on her father because he hadn't trained her to think for herself the way he had RJ. He had in fact killed himself rather than choose her over her sister, which made her very unhappy, which fed her guilt, etcetera.

Finally, she figured she had displayed all the grief necessary. After all, life was short, and life on Pete was shorter. A general "shit happens" type attitude seemed to prevail where all horrors were concerned on Pete. It was time for her to move forward to the next stage of her plan.

He was watching her. She had noticed when she had finally opened her eye that he always watched her, and she could feel his lust. No doubt her flawless body more than made up for the eye she was missing.

"Sorry to hear about your husband, One-eye," he said as he approached her close to the middle of the day. It was obvious that he wasn't in the slightest bit sorry.

"Thanks," Jessica said in an absent tone.

He laughed then. "I hear you bed killed him."

That's what the Argy called it, bed killing. She supposed it was nicer than saying "fucked to death."

She just nodded.

"He was sickly and weak. You couldn't kill a healthy man," he said.

Jessica looked up at him and gave him her very sexiest smile. "Now I wouldn't want to bet on that."

The pig was now fully aroused. She didn't have to use her empathic powers to know it, he was pointing at her—and not with a finger. "I'd take that bet," he said.

She purposely looked down at her feet and tried to feel coy, though she wasn't really sure what that was. "It's been a very long time since I've had a healthy man."

"Take me to your place after work and I'll show you the best night of your life."

She knew that was a boast he wouldn't be able to make good on.

He was a filthy pig who wanted her to do disgusting things and who liked to get violent during sex, but if he noticed she didn't bruise or bleed he didn't say anything. He didn't seem to mind when he busted his knuckles on her stomach. She was good at pretending, and he was too stupid to figure out the implications.

He got her so-called "cushy" jobs, as she pretended to enjoy a good beating and screwed his brains out. He was easy to play because he was just so damn stupid, and so sure that he was playing her.

Jessica knew just exactly how to give a man exactly what he most desired. It was how she had controlled every man she'd ever slept with. It wasn't a week before she had this indecent slob jumping through hoops.

He moved to slap her hard across the face and she grabbed his arm and easily twisted it behind his back. She forced him face down onto the bed.

"What the . . ."

"You know this is what you really want, Shlerb," she whispered in his ear. "To have someone who dominates you."

He laughed, "And you think you can do it." He tried to get away and found that he couldn't. "All right, Jesut"—that was the Argy name she'd given herself when she arrived on Pete—"this isn't funny anymore."

"Oh, isn't it?" She slammed the palm of her free hand into the small of his back hard enough to hurt, but not do damage and he struggled. "I'm having a hell of a good time."

He struggled again, and she leaned more on the arm again, making it hurt, but not pulling it off, or even out of the socket as she could do without even breaking a sweat. Beneath her he quit struggling. "Don't . . . Don't hurt me," he pleaded, and she knew immediately what he really wanted. She slapped his ass with her free hand hard enough to leave a print and could see that his tiny little dick was pointing into the bed. "You think you're such a big, bad brute, but you aren't. You're just a nasty, dirty little boy who needs to be punished. Don't you think you deserve to be punished, Shlerb?"

"Yes," he said in a small voice. "Yes, I do."

And so she did.

Shlerb was now her trained dog. He would have done anything for her, and so she asked him for just exactly what she wanted.

He lay in blissful pain in the middle of her bed.

"Shlerb, I want you to get me inside the very next ship that lands."

"I . . . I can't do that. I could lose my job."

"They could give you a worse detail than Pete?" Jessica said, dismissing his fear.

"Probably," he said, obviously not knowing. "Hey, let's play some more," he winked at her. "I've been really bad, I should be spanked."

"There will be no more playing till you get me on that ship. I want a real bath and a real meal. I want to see something different, something clean. If you can't even do that for me, then what do I need you for? You told me you had connections."

"All right," he sighed. "I'll see what I can do."

Jessica got up and wrapped the chain around herself. Today was the day. Today was the day she got off this gods forsaken planet.

Security had doubled on the ships, which was why she needed Shlerb's help. Ever since she had stolen the computer and power unit the Argys had made sure that particular route onto the ship was always well guarded, and there just weren't any other ways onto the ships without clearance.

Shlerb had clearance.

Jessica could wait till security got lax again, which would happen eventually, but she was suddenly tired of waiting. She was sick to death of screwing Shlerb, and as little company as Right had been, she found that she missed him. She wasn't quite sure why. Perhaps it was simply that she'd gotten used to having him around. Maybe it was because he had known her as well as anyone ever had, and no one else here even knew what she was or why she was here.

As a foreman Shlerb had certain rights, and the ship's crew knew him. If he was smart it would be easy for him to get her on board. Of course he wasn't smart, he was a freaking, perverted moron, but now he'd take her orders, do what she told him, and Jessica was more than smart enough for the both of them.

Shlerb came around the corner of the mineshaft out of breath and red in the face. He was sending guilt in a great huge wave, so Jessica smacked him good and hard in the ribs. He collapsed against the wall, gasping for the wind she'd forced from his lungs.

"Dammit, Jesut, why did you do that?"

"Because you were telegraphing guilt, you idiot," Jessica answered in an angry hiss. "Don't you know how to use a shield?"

"Sorry," he said.

"Don't be sorry, just stop being stupid. Did you get them?"

He pulled the bag from inside his shirt, and she smiled as she jerked it out of his hands. She checked to make sure he'd gotten everything and then she started to undress.

"I was very nearly caught," he objected.

"No doubt because you were sending guilt out in a huge radiating wave," she mumbled under her breath.

"Ah . . . What's that chain for?"

"To make you ask stupid questions. You just don't worry about my chain. Did anyone see you?"

"I don't think so . . . It's not going to work, Jesut," he said as he watched her slip the uniform on over the chain. "No one's going to believe that someone with one eye . . ."

"You used to delight in pointing that out to me. I thought we'd gotten past that," Jessica said with a snarl.

"I was just going to say . . . You couldn't keep a top military position with one eye," he said.

"Which is why I needed this." She took off her patch and shoved it down in her pocket, then she tied a piece of gauze over her eye.

"That isn't going to fool anyone," Shlerb said, shaking his head.

For answer she grabbed his hand, cut his finger with a knife and stuck the bleeding end of it on the gauze, which soaked the blood up. He tried to swing a fist into her head with his free hand, but she grabbed his fist and held it. He got excited, and she wanted to kill him right then and there, but she still needed him.

"You're going to take me in. If anyone asks, I was walking through the mines doing a spot check and something blew. Luckily you were there, and . . ." He was grinning like an idiot. She sighed. "Keep your mouth shut; I'll do all the talking."

Everything had worked just as she planned. She was rushed to the infirmary with no real questions being asked. Blood did something to the psychology of every race she had ever encountered. No matter what color that blood happened to be, when people saw blood running out of themselves or someone else they always freaked out. Even seasoned medical personnel couldn't help but get excited.

The body was like a full fuel tank. Everyone knew it only held just so much fuel and when that fuel ran out the motor sputtered and died. If the blood happened to be coming from an eye, that caused an instant panic. She knew all about the horror of losing an eye, and the reaction it caused.

She clung to Shlerb as if he were her lifeline, and as the doctor slid in the door ahead of them she broke the vial she held tightly in her right hand. Before even the nurse could enter the alarm sounded and the doors started to close. The nurse jumped the rest of the way through as all the doors to the room quickly slammed shut.

"Contamination!" the alarm sounded loudly. "Contamination. Examination room Gester Fontacks sealed."

"What have you two been exposed to?" the doctor said with agitation, but his emotions showed fear.

"Nothing that I know of," Shlerb said with real worry as he helped Jessica to sit on the table.

Jessica lay down feigning pain and looked for the surveillance camera she knew would be present. Security cameras might be considered unnecessary for most of the ship, but she had been sure they would monitor the treatment rooms for any number of reasons. Not the least of which was the scenario she was even now playing out. The camera was a problem, but it was also a much-needed prop in her plan.

The "bug" hadn't been hard to get. Half the "colonists" were sick with some crap most of the time. She'd picked up the discarded snotty tissue of one who looked especially ill and had stuck the nasty mess into a small vial, figuring that if the contamination sensors in this infirmary were anywhere near as sensitive as the ones in Reliance ships, even something as relatively harmless as a common cold would be enough to successfully shut them off from the rest of the ship. When a treatment room was shut down because of contamination no one was likely to want to try to break in.

The camera, however, was a problem, because with a contamination scare it was a sure bet that someone would be carefully watching the monitor and listening.

She couldn't just destroy the monitor, because she was going to need it later. She needed it to appear, to anyone who might be watching, as if there were simply a glitch in the system. She waited for Shlerb to make his move, but of course he just stood there like the big idiot that he was as the nurse and doctor started to don protective gear. She glared at him, he looked puzzled, and then the big idiot grinned and nodded wildly as he reached into his pocket, pulled out the device and showed it to her.

Jessica gritted her teeth and hoped she was the only one who noticed the idiot boy's display.

He moved slowly—and it might be added, obviously—towards the camera. When he was under it, out of view, he reached up and stuck the apparatus on the camera. Almost immediately a red light on the side of the scanner started to blink, no doubt signaling that the camera wasn't working. A few seconds later it started to make an irritating little pinging noise. Jessica smiled in satisfaction. There had been no way to actually test her invention, so till now she couldn't be sure whether it would work or not.

"Damn, now what's wrong with that thing?" the doctor asked. "Control, can you see us at all?"

There was no answer.

"Can you hear us?" he asked, though it seemed like a really stupid question to Jessica. There was still no answer. The doctor walked reluctantly over to Jessica to check out her wound. "Herster," he said to the nurse over his shoulder, "see if you can't fix that camera."

"Screw the camera," Jessica said, sitting bolt upright on the examining table before the doctor even had a chance to start to examine her. "You fix my eye."

"You don't understand, Lieutenant. Unless they can see us, unless we can report on what you're carrying, they can't let us out of this room. That means we can't go to a surgical unit if we need to. We can't leave this room till the tests are run and I can assure my commanding officer that I'm not unleashing any form of deadly contaminant onto this ship. Now the computer is currently running a diagnostic on the germ, and when it has determined what it is and how best to disinfect . . ."

"No," Jessica said with a smile as she reached out and easily picked the man up off the floor by his collar. "You don't understand. I don't give a shit about any of that."

"Jesut!" Shlerb protested. "You didn't say you were going to do any of this crazy shit. You said you wanted a decent shower and a good meal."

"You shut up, you sniveling, wretched moron," Jessica hissed and suddenly all her power was back. She was in control. Once again she was the force to be reckoned with. She put the doctor down and ripped the gauze off her eye. She walked over to the sink and washed her face, then she turned to look at the three people she shared the room with, but she only addressed the doctor. "You're going to put an eye back in my head, because everyone's going to know exactly who I am if I go back there without an eye. You do exactly what I tell you to do and no one's going to get hurt." She laughed then and walked up to Shlerb. "Except you, you filthy, putrid, maggot festering in a two day old turd. You, I'm going to kill."

"But Jesut, I . . . I love you. I helped you."

"You treated me like total shit until I gave you something you wanted, and now you're about to give me something I want. It's a shame for the irony to be wasted on someone as stupid as you, but I'm going to take one of your eyes so I won't be One-eye anymore." She grabbed his head in her hands and spun it with enough torque to break his neck, then lay him gently on the floor as the nurse and doctor screamed. She turned to look at them, her one eye gleaming with maniacal intent, as Shlerb's body jerked around on the floor like a fish thrown on dry land.

"I could do this myself. It wouldn't be easy, but I could," Jessica said. "So I suggest you shut up and help me before I make you just as dead as old Shlerb here."

"What . . . What do you want me to do?" the doctor asked as he comforted the nurse, though from what she was reading the nurse wasn't as scared as the doctor was.

"You're a doctor. I don't think it should take a genius to figure it out. I want you to take an eye out of this moron and put it into me."

"It . . . it isn't that simple, you need to cross-match and . . ."

"I've already done that. It was just good luck that the guy with the closest match for me was the guy who tormented me for three years. It's Karma really," Jessica said a lilt to her voice that hadn't been there since the day she'd lost her eye. The Argys didn't have a word for Karma, so she knew they hadn't understood her and she didn't care. She was in control. She was the boss.

"It can't be a close match, it has to be perfect. This is an emergency room, we would need an operating room, and . . ."

"And I can't believe you haven't figured out what the hell I am. I'm a genetically superior humanoid. I have my kit right here." She pulled the black wallet from her pocket. "Don't blow smoke up my ass. You can do the surgery here as easily as in an operating room. Look, I'll even do the hard part for you." She pulled the knife from her pouch and leaned beside Shlerb's body.

She carefully harvested the eye and put it into the sterile bowl the nurse brought her without being asked. The nurse wasn't stupid. She no doubt believed Jessica's claim to be just exactly what she said she was.

Jessica took the bowl with the eye in it from the nurse and looked from it to Shlerb's body. "Gee, Shlerb, every time I'm looking at another guy's cock with this eye I'll be thinking of you." She laughed. "Let's get this show on the road shall we? I've only got another four or five thousand years to live. Time's a-wasting."

Doctor Sedro was a nervous wreck. If it had been his specialty, and it wasn't, doing this sort of transplant operation would be nerve-wracking under the best of circumstances. Doing it on a fully awake and fully functional GSH with no actual experience and under these circumstances was unthinkable, but he knew he didn't have any choice. He couldn't afford to make even the slightest mistake. There was no doubt that she would kill both him and Herster if they didn't do exactly as they were told. Of course, he wasn't exactly sure that she wouldn't kill them anyway.

He had no idea where she'd come from, why she'd been built, or how she had wound up on Pete. He was sure that she was completely insane, psychotic. That was dangerous in a normal Argy, but in someone so obviously genetically enhanced . . . it could be cataclysmic. Who made her? Why did they make her? More important, what is her ultimate plan and what is she going to do to us?

The eye socket was like nothing he had ever seen. The eyelid was still there, even the eyelashes, and when she opened the lid, it was as if the eye socket had just healed. He wondered just exactly how she thought he could fix this.

She seemed to read his mind, making him wonder if she might not also be telepathic.

"It's easy. Make a small incision in the back with the laser and find the optic nerve. Then scrape the socket to expose the tissue. Connect the optic nerve to the eyeball and we're ready to go . . . Oh, and you've only got a few seconds before my tissue starts to heal, so make it quick."

She wasn't lying, either. He had to keep cutting just to keep the opening from healing until he got done. At one point he thought seriously about using the laser scalpel to kill her, but before he could do more than just think it he found her hand around the wrist in which he was holding the aforementioned scalpel. She looked at him and smiled a smile that was anything but pleasant.

"Don't even think it, dick boy," she hissed. "Like I said. I could do this myself if I absolutely had to. Unless you did more damage than I believe you could do with that sucker, all you'd really do is piss me off."

He did the surgery, and then stepped back to see her reaction. He knew he'd successfully restored sight on that side of her body when she started to laugh.

She stopped suddenly and sat straight up. She looked at him coldly then. "So . . . Now all that remains for me to do is to get off this rock, and you can help me do that, too."

"How so?" he asked cautiously.

She picked the dead man up off the floor and stuck him on the examining table, his empty eye socket purposely turned away from the camera. She found some clean gauze and wrapped it back around her own head before she started talking, "This man died of some unknown virus. Something so bad that he didn't show any symptoms at all till ten minutes before he died. The diagnostic program has failed to identify the virus."

"The planet would be quarantined," the doctor thought out loud. "No ships could land till the virus could be identified and a cure found. The ship would have to recall everyone who'd been in contact with it since it landed, and we'd be forced to go to Vero station to go through testing and decontamination," he finished, showing his understanding of at least part of her plan. "But why would you want to go there? It's just a medical station, one that deals with the most highly contagious diseases in the galaxy at that. No one in their right mind willingly goes to Vero Station." She just smiled, and he suddenly knew. "You can't get sick."

"And because no one would willingly go there, no one will ever guess that anyone would hijack a ship to go there," she said.

"They won't let you leave the station till the whole ship has been decontaminated and we've all gone through quarantine," he said, thinking he'd found the glitch in her plan.

She laughed out loud at him and just shook her head. "I'm not one of those idiot bad guys that find it necessary to tell some unimportant idiot do-gooder my entire plan. All you need to know is that you'd better make damn sure that they believe you when I fix that freaking camera. All you need to worry about is that you and Herster there do the performances of your life, because if you fail . . . I'll kill you and every other Argy on this ship, and I'll do what I want to do anyway. I'm trying to turn over a new leaf, you know, not just kill the innocent and declare them collateral damage, but if you make me . . . Well, I don't have to get vulgar, do I?"

He shook his head no. He had no doubt that she could and would do exactly what she said if they forced her hand. She was . . . Well, the gods only knew what she was, and she was crazy enough to do almost anything if it meant that in the end she had what she wanted. He wondered if she was even sure of what that was.

Chapter Seven

Mickey looked at the city that had all but sprung up overnight.

The Beta 4 humanoids, or "Fourers" as they had taken to calling them, had not only rebuilt the city, but they had rebuilt the docks.

When Mickey had sent some of his people who had once made a living fishing the oceans around Alsterase to teach the Fourers to fish, they had at first been more than a little reluctant. Even though they were running out of food options, as they were running out of goats.

The Fourers had been afraid of the ocean. Afraid to the point that they wouldn't walk into it, much less consider getting into a boat that was going to float on top of it.

"Why are they so afraid of the water?" Mickey had asked Gerald when the Fourers flatly refused to be coaxed onto the boats.

"Not water," Gerald explained, "they are afraid of the ocean. In fact, when you first put them here they thought you meant to kill them. It was only when they realized that you lived in the middle of it that they began to understand that the ocean wasn't going to swallow them whole. The oceans of our world are places of death. They are, in fact, places so violent that most of us had never even seen one till we came here. There are constant storms, hurricanes, winds so strong they change the land daily, and you will sometimes find strange fish four hundred miles from the shore lying in the middle of what is usually a desert."

Mickey nodded. "Tell them that this ocean is not like that. In fact this ocean is named . . ." It took him a minute to remember the old name that Topaz had told him, and then he wasn't sure he got it right. "The Pacifist. It's called that because it is a mostly peaceful ocean. They only have to watch out for the undertows, and the fishermen will show them how to do that. Tell them I promise that if they learn the proper way to do things on the ocean, it's safe."

Gerald told them everything Mickey said and they seemed to believe him. They boarded the boats, each with their own interpreter.

Now after just a year, not only were they fishing and feeding themselves but they were shipping fish inland as well. They had taken all that they knew about hunting and used it to fish.

For a while everything had been going so smoothly that Mickey had all but forgotten RJ's warning about the Reliance. She had said that it was only a matter of time till they tried to take back what they had lost.

He had naïvely thought that when they had foiled their plot by turning the Fourers against the very Reliance it had been sent here to serve, they had succeeded in proving that any attempt at aggression would meet such failure. He should have known better.

The real problem was that RJ hadn't lived to make it to Deakard. She hadn't enlisted the help of the Argy in their fight against the Reliance, and with the Argy-Reliance war being in a temporary lull the Reliance had more than enough manpower to send troops and weapons to Earth. Mickey knew RJ would have seen the offensive strike coming and would have made plans to avert it. Mickey hadn't been aware they were in trouble till the Reliance had pounded the small town of Redenoak, just over the border in the Northeast quarter of New Freedom.

It was a return to the old days of Reliance brutality. They had bombarded the town and killed every living thing. The military base and new hospital they had just built had been pounded completely level, and then the Reliance troops had retreated. By the time the reinforcements arrived there was nothing to do but bulldoze up the piles of debris and bodies and set the whole thing on fire. Before the flames could die down the Reliance hit again, and though they were ready this time, it was all the New Alliance could do to hold its ground.

They couldn't go on long like this. They hadn't even repaired all the damage created by the war. People were just starting to get their lives back, learning how to live in a free society. How to work together for common goals without fighting like children. The liberated work units of New Freedom were just beginning to taste the fruits of their victory. Their bellies were just beginning to know what it was like to be full. They had just gotten decent healthcare. There were schools, factories, hospitals and opportunities. They were just learning what it was like to have hope. Hope that the future had something wonderful to offer.

War was going to tear down everything they had built up.

And then everything that RJ, and Levits, Poley and Topaz had lived and died for would truly be lost.

There was only one choice and that was to keep fighting. But while they were fighting, factories and schools didn't get built, and inevitably some of what had been built would be lost.

Worst of all, men and women would die. People who had just begun to learn the joys of freedom would die to protect it.

Hope would be lost, the people would be easily filled with a more familiar emotion—despair, and then everything would fall apart.

And for what? So that the Reliance could keep power over everything. For what reason? Why did they have to have it all? Why did they have to have any of it? They were a nameless and faceless entity, a corporation whose sole purpose seemed to be to enslave humankind and make it miserable.

Earth wasn't the only place there was a problem with newborn Reliance aggression. David had contacted him just two days ago. The Reliance had attacked Pam Station. The station crew had been forced to make a decision and make it quickly. So, after doing as much damage as possible to the attacking Reliance fleet, the crew of the station had evacuated to the planet's surface, rigging the station with explosives and blowing it up as the last of the crew landed on Beta 4. Pam Station's explosive demise had taken out what remained of the Reliance fleet, but it could hardly be called a victory.

It was a huge loss to all of them. The New Alliance had been using the ships they had confiscated with the station and had used the space station to smuggle goods to and from Beta 4. Without the space station, and with the strong gravitational pull of the planet to contend with, this trade route was dead. This would hurt the New Alliance both on Earth and on Beta 4. The jumpgate was still intact, but it looked like that might actually be more a problem than a solution, as it allowed Reliance ships to come and go from their space at will.

It seemed that without her presence they were swiftly losing all that RJ had gained for them.

Mickey wondered if the Reliance would now attack Beta 4 as they were attacking Earth. If they did, how could the Fourers and the few New Alliance troops stationed there hope to stand against the might of the Reliance with a fistful of ships they didn't have enough fuel for, and mostly primitive weapons?

"Well?" Stratton asked David expectantly.

David shrugged and shook his head as he paced in front of Taleed's throne. He didn't know what she expected of him; after all, she was the one with all the military experience. "I don't know. Maybe."

"Maybe he says," the young king bellowed, throwing his mechanical hands around, making broad circles above his head, and showing his obvious state of panic. "Maybe! We can't run the kingdom on maybes. Yes or no?"

"I'm not a freaking fortune teller!" David yelled back. "I don't know whether we should destroy the jumpgate or not. If we do we cut off the Reliance's route here, at least until they can construct a new one, but we also cut off our route to Earth. I don't have any information that you don't have. I have no way of knowing whether the Reliance will attack the planet's surface or not. Why do you expect me to know any more than you do?" he demanded of Taleed, and then without giving him time to answer David turned on Bradley and Stratton. "And you two! If any of us could second-guess what the Reliance might do next, I would think it would be you. After all, you were in the Reliance military, I never was. RJ made the plans, she did the strategy, all I ever did was talk, and follow. The one time I decided to lead a group of men into battle all but a handful were killed for their trouble.

"We were all more or less sure they wouldn't attack the station because it was so well armored and armed that it would cost them too much to take it. But we all watched as you blasted one ship after another from the sky and they just kept coming. They didn't really seem to give a damn."

"We forgot just how little human life means to the Reliance," Bradley said. He turned from looking out the huge cracked window that adorned the throne room to face the others. "They didn't use big expensive ships. They brought in a carrier, parked it out of our weapon range, and then just kept launching one assault after another. Jak-10s are what they call "throwaway" ships. Nothing but flying death traps really. Like wrapping yourself in aluminum foil and lighting your ass on fire. But they can carry a big-assed missile, and they come at you by the dozens. Trying to drop them before they get to you is like trying to wade through water without getting wet."

Janad walked into the throne room looking as hugely and uncomfortably pregnant as she was. She smiled at David as she took the closest seat she could find. "How we lost the station is immaterial. Find out why we lost the station, and you'll know why they suddenly decided it was worth it to lose so many ships, no matter how inexpensive they were, and so many men. Even when life is cheap, it's not free. If we knew why they attacked the station now, we'd know whether or not they mean to attack the planet's surface."

"She's right," Taleed said, apparently understanding her logic even when David and the other Earthers didn't. Taleed saw the puzzled looks on their faces and explained slowly, so that they might understand. "RJ said they wouldn't attack because it wasn't worth losing many ships for a space station in bad repair, in service to a planet which would no longer trade with the Reliance. We must have seemed like, as she said, more trouble than we were worth. So . . . Why are we now suddenly worth the trouble? If it's a trouble caused by the station but not by the planet, the planet may not be a target at all." He fell silent, obviously trying to answer his own question.

"They might have found out about the trade going on between us and Earth. Since they attacked New Freedom, our supplying the bastards with anything might have been a threat to them," David suggested. "In which case they might destroy the jumpgate themselves."

Stratton took in a deep breath and let it out so quickly that everyone heard her. They all turned to look at her expectantly. "They see us as a potential military base, a potential army. Weapons could be built and stored here. Fleets of ships could be anchored on the moons. We became a target because they see us as a potential threat."

"As they well should," Taleed said in a strongly testosterone-filled voice.

David smiled, but mostly ignored the young king. "So they took out the station—or at least got us to take it out ourselves—successfully keeping us from sending troops to Earth, or to keep the New Alliance from sending ships and weapons here. Either way, now that the supply line has been shut down the planet, if not the jumpgate, should be safe."

"But we can't bet on it," Stratton said. "What if their motive is nothing more complicated than they aren't busy fighting the Argy right now so they might as well tackle the New Alliance while they have the extra time, ships and manpower? It's just the kind of stupid shit they would do. In any case, I don't think it would do for us to drop our guard."

"But what's our guard?" Janad asked. "We need more weapons, better weapons, if we have to fight the Reliance here. Where are we going to get them if we destroy the jumpgate?"

"She's right. Spears, arrows and rock hammers aren't going to stop a full-fledged Reliance assault fleet," Bradley said.

"I was thinking about that ship in the mountain," Janad said.

"Ship in the mountain?" Bradley asked.

"Yes, of course!" David said excitedly. He walked over and kissed Janad on the top of her head. "The Argy ship. It had that horrible weapon we used on the GSHs. Who knows what else it might have?"

"And we've got the few skiffs and small ships we brought from the station, and some hand-held laser rifles and blasters as well," Stratton said.

"But no power packs," Bradley reminded them. "The only ships we have that are large enough to do the flight between here and Earth had to land on the surface, and there isn't enough fuel if we used all the fuel cells from all the ships for even one to lift off this planet. These ships were all forced into battle, and firing the guns uses up the fuel cells fast. Hell, all but one of them wouldn't be flight worthy without major repairs."

"But they could send supplies to us through the jumpgate. Meet us on one of our moons. We have plenty of power to run the skiffs," Stratton said excitedly.

"We were using our ships, remember, and they're all here stranded here with us. They'd have to steal a ship first, and it sounds like they have their own problems," Bradley reminded.

"Still, if we close the jumpgate we shut down any hope of aid from that sector," Stratton said. "If the Reliance is hell-bent on using it to bring ships here to attack us, blowing the gate will only slow them down. You know as well as I do that they could construct a new and better fortified gate in two weeks—tops."

Bradley nodded in silent agreement.

"You and your maintenance crew can build anything. Isn't that what you're always bragging about?" David said. "We have geothermal power running out our asses."

"And don't think that doesn't smart," Janad said.

David ignored her. "We could fix up that old Argy ship. All you have to do is find a way to convert geothermal power into something we can use to power the ships and the weapons."

"All right. Not that it's going to be as easy as you're making it sound, but let's say it's possible and we can do that. I still don't understand what you expect me to do with some old ship, maybe not in much better shape than this one. One that's grown into the side of a mountain no less," Bradley said.

"This one fired its gun when we most needed it to," Taleed reminded.

"That's right," David said. "Let's say we could take some of the stuff you brought with you . . ."

"'Stuff' being a technical term," Bradley said with a smile, though it was obvious that he was starting to get as excited about the possibilities as David.

David mostly ignored the ribbing and went on. "The ship is already up a mountain. Let's say we could turn it into an early warning station of sorts. I'm sure it's got equipment that could be made to tell us when and if ships are coming in. It could be made to sound some sort of an alarm to warn us. Why couldn't we take what it's got, add some other stuff and maybe make a powerful laser cannon? One that could knock an invasion fleet from the sky."

Bradley laughed, "And while we're at it, why not just put a giant force field over the entire planet?"

"You know what I mean, Bradley, do the best with what we have," David said.

"That is what we in maintenance are best at, but you have to realize that such a project could take months, maybe even years," Bradley said.

"Then we tackle the simple stuff first," David said. "Shifting the power units to the least damaged ships. We dig barracks and build fortifications . . ."

"And we will train all our people, even as our people have always been trained for war." Taleed stood up from his throne. "We will train our bodies and hope they will not be forced to do battle. We will dig barracks and make fortifications and hope we don't have to dwell in them. We will build weapons and hope we don't have to use them. We will prepare in every way that we can prepare, and we will wait and hope."

David stood by the open window soaking in the cool night breeze and looking up at the small blue moon that was almost blotted out by the much larger white moon it shared the night sky with. Sometimes it was still hard to believe that he wasn't on Earth.

Sometimes it was hard to believe that he was the same farm work unit who'd been sent to a prison work camp for trying to get people to revolt against the Reliance. It seemed like one day he was digging potatoes under the Reliance foreman's watchful eye, and the next he was here on this alien world, and everything in the middle was just a blur. Those days in between had been fast and furious, not like his life before, or even like his life now. Life in those days had been life on the edge, where any wrong move, any glitch in judgment had meant life or death for someone.

His life on Beta 4 had been calm, a time of quiet reflection. Learning to deal with the demons of his past, with his loss, and learning how to move forward. He had forgotten the horror of the Reliance because till a few days ago they had seemed like only a distant bad memory, but now they were back, and . . .

RJ had said they would be. That they'd come to reclaim all that the New Alliance had taken. She'd headed for Argy to try and stop that, but . . . he swallowed a lump in his throat.

My God, it still hurts so much when I think about her. My breath hurts my throat. For so long she was the air I breathed. It's like my lungs don't want to function without her. And yet even with this loss, he looked over his shoulder at the woman who lay in his bed, I have never been happier. It doesn't seem to go together, this great sadness with this great joy. It's like I'm empty and I'm full at the same time. But now it could all change. I've been in war before. I've been in war with my friends and comrades, but never with my wife and my child.

"David, why don't you come to bed?" Janad pleaded. "There is nothing. Nothing at all that can be done that we aren't doing. If they are coming, they will come whether you are watching for them or not."

"I wasn't watching for them." He walked away from the window, over to the bed and climbed in. He reached over the top of her and turned off the light. "I was just thinking." He curled around her back and wrapped his arms around her.

"What were you thinking about, or need I ask?"

"RJ would know what to do, Janad," David said sadly.

"Maybe you know what to do. Maybe Taleed does. Everyone just acts, David. They do the best they can. She wasn't always right. No one's always right. If she was always right, if she had always known what to do, they'd be alive right now."

"I thought . . ." David's voice died in his throat.

"What?" Janad coxed.

"I thought our child would be born in a different world than I was. That he'd be free, and now . . ."

"And now his future is uncertain. Everyone's future is uncertain at their birth, David. He may very well grow up in a free world. If you had grown up in a free world, where would you be now? You don't know, but you do know this, you never would have met me. You wouldn't be here on this world now, and you never would have known RJ. She's gone now, but if you had been born in a free world you never would have met her in the first place. Knowing her, meeting her was the defining moment in your life, as meeting you was the defining moment in mine."

Chapter Eight

When the ship docked at Vero station, Jessica knew she was home free. As was to be expected, she, the doctor and the nurse were treated as the highly contagious individuals they had pretended to be. They were attended to by men in HAZMAT suits and moved into large plastic bubbles which they were ordered to zip themselves into. The bubbles were then filled with air and they were told to walk to the highest-level quarantine area.

Jessica had a moment of amusement when she remembered one of her underlings back at Capitol having a similar device for his hamster to exercise in. She could remember seeing the little ball with the creature inside rolling around the halls. At the time she had wondered why he would bother to have something so useless that took care and feeding. Now she knew. The animal had been something he could lavish affection on that the Reliance hadn't picked for him. Something that it couldn't control. For him, watching the antics of the hamster had been watching something that was free, even if it was living in a cage.

She wondered how stupid she must look rolling down the hall in her ball, "getting her exercise." She smiled. Maybe some greater being somewhere was enjoying watching her now as she had secretly enjoyed watching the hamster in the ball. She had twice ordered the young officer to put his pet away when she had been caught looking, because she felt silly. Now she wished she had taken the time to tell him how much she had enjoyed watching the creature's antics.

Simple things, simple kindnesses, made the difference between being on the outside and being on the inside. When you were nice to people, they were nice to you, not because they had to be but because they wanted to be.

She supposed it would have absolutely killed their father to teach all of his children this simple lesson.

Jessica hadn't had much practice being nice.

She was reminded of that when they were all told that they could take off the bubble in the quarantine room, and the nurse glared at her. No doubt because Jessica had caused her this ultimate humiliation for a healthcare worker.

She'd like to be able to tell her that she'd make it up to her later, but why add insult to injury by lying? So Jessica just looked at the woman and shrugged helplessly.

The real problem was her newfound rule, not to kill people unless they deserved it or were better off dead. She could have just taken the ship at any time in flight, but to do that she would have had to kill most everyone on board. Her newly acquired conscience told her that would be wrong.

Besides, killing an entire ship full of Argys wouldn't have helped her get where she ultimately wanted to go.

So she waited till her two prisoners were sound asleep and then she very carefully dismantled the alarm on the door. She wasn't too worried about other detecting devices in the station since she wasn't actually contaminated, but the alarm on the door was geared to go off as soon as the airlock was broken. Once she had successfully disconnected the alarm she opened the door, closed it behind her, and took off at a brisk pace down the hall.

By the time the doctor and nurse woke up and had time to tell their story, she'd be long gone.

If everything went as planned.

She easily found a computer that was only too happy to give her the station layout. Her first stop was the laundry, where they carefully sterilized every item of clothing that came to the station. She grabbed a general's uniform and traded out.

In this uniform, she could go damn near anywhere without being questioned. Not that at this hour of the night there were many people around to question her. She went down to the dock and right into the computer room. The two techs there stood up.

"At ease," she said. They gave her a funny look, so she guessed she'd used the wrong Argy words, but they sat down anyway without any suspicion.

She accessed the computer and found what she needed. A ship that had already been decontaminated, that was currently empty awaiting its quarantined crew. It was a smaller ship, and one that she should be able to pilot on her own. It also probably wouldn't be missed for awhile, since its captain and crew were scheduled to be in quarantine for the next three weeks.

"I'll be taking the Yaberly out. I've been released from quarantine and my admiral has just ordered me back to base."

"What of a crew?" one of the techs asked curiously.

Jessica didn't miss a beat, just laughed. "You boys think I can't handle my own ship? My crew are all still in quarantine, and you know how it is—when the admiral calls, you listen."

Of course they did, that's why they didn't argue with the "general" further. They didn't dare argue with the uniform. It was a military thing, and if Jessica understood nothing else she understood the military mind. You didn't salute or take orders from the person; you saluted and took orders from the little insignia attached to their uniforms. Her uniform said she was a general, so therefore they treated her like a general, which meant they didn't question her or try to detain her in any way.

The planet Deakard loomed before her, big and dark with red channels all over it. It was ugly and alien-looking to her, though it had been her biological mother's planet of origin. She wondered momentarily if their mother had even known that she had twelve children. She wondered briefly just how many of those twelve were still alive . . . if RJ still was. She shoved it out of her mind as something that, like so many other things, just didn't matter because there were no real answers, only more questions.

She focused on the Moonbase Station where she would dock before heading to the surface of the planet.

She wondered what sort of reception she should expect.

They had been able to push the Reliance back past their border, and there had been no further assault on Beta 4, but that was only because the Argy made their move in a big way against Stashes. It seemed they were ready to put all that they had into shoving the Reliance presence off this most mineral-rich, but most inhospitable planet in the system. The Reliance was just as determined that they would not be forced off the planet.

They were both greedy mismanagers, and both desperately needed the minerals of Stashes.

All-out war between the Argy and the Reliance meant a time of peace for the New Alliance, but now they all knew that they couldn't count on it to last. RJ had been right. They were going to have to utterly and completely destroy the Reliance.

But how? Mickey asked himself as he stared out over the new Alsterase. How did they fight an empire hundreds of years old that had a never-ending stream of manpower and weapons behind them? The New Alliance was out-manned and out-gunned. Mickey wasn't being negative; it was just a simple fact.

He paced the wall looking out at the healthy, happy city by the bay, and wondered how he was going to ensure that it stayed that way. That it didn't return to ash once again.

RJ would have known.

He didn't have to ask why she was so much on his mind today. David had contacted him just last night to tell him that his son had been born. He had named him Baldor in honor of RJ and her fallen lover, Whitey Baldor.

"I was going to name him RJ," David had said, tears running down his face. "But then I thought, how will I explain that I named him after a woman and that his name means Reject, Jerking? I couldn't name him Whitey . . . Well, for the obvious reasons. So we named him Baldor. It's a good name. Don't you think it's a good name?"

He was looking for approval, so Mickey gave it to him. "I think it's a perfect name, David. Congratulations." He realized only then that he was crying, too. Neither of them talked about why they were crying. It wasn't necessary. They both knew. You wanted to share the big life-cycle events with your friends, and their friends were mostly dead.

He hadn't told David about his own child. He didn't want to tell anyone because he was afraid it would jinx the pregnancy. After all, he and Diana had been trying to conceive for many years, and it had taken them this long to succeed.

He had wondered about the sanity behind having a child. Bringing it into this uncertain world. The truth was that he very much wanted a child of his own with Diana, and she very much wanted a child with him. They wanted to create something that was uniquely theirs and that had overpowered any fears they might have had. They wanted a child they could share and love, the way no one had ever loved them.

Until RJ.

"My god, Mickey!" He turned to face Diana who ran towards him white as a sheet, and he ran to meet her.

"What's wrong . . . is it the baby?" he asked anxiously.

"No it's just . . . I'm seeing things."

And then Mickey saw it, too. RJ walked out onto the wall, her chain wrapped around her waist, her shoulder length platinum blond hair blowing in the breeze, her arm jerking around like a fish on a dock.

"Oh, honey! I'm home," she called, waving, and Mickey passed out cold.

"How . . . I don't understand. You're supposed to be dead," Mickey said from where she'd laid him on the couch. He was still too overwrought to fully comprehend. To know whether what he was seeing was real, a hallucination, or if he would wake from a dream at any moment.

"Gee, it's good to see you, too." She laughed.

"The others?" Mickey asked.

Her face seemed to drop then, and she looked at the floor. "Dead. Topaz . . . a piece of shrapnel hit him and sliced him in two."

"Like the rat," Mickey said sadly.

She gave him an odd look. "Huh?"

"The rat in Topaz's experiment," Mickey said.

"Oh, yeah." She paused then, her features looking suddenly dark. "Levits and Poley were blown right out of the ship. Poley smacked the front of a Reliance ship." She shrugged. "I was hurt, I guess. I don't remember exactly what happened. Next thing I remember I was waking up in a prison cell on a Reliance ship, my arms and legs shackled with titanium steel."

"How'd you escape?" Mickey asked.

"I didn't for the first few days. I just didn't give a damn what happened to me. It just seemed like too much even for me to be expected to live through. I'd lost so many people I cared about. Two of the men I loved."

"Two?" Mickey asked curiously.

"Yes, Levits, you know he and I . . ."

"No, I didn't," Mickey said.

"Well, we were and then . . . he was dead. It happened so quick. We were all there and then . . . they were all dead, and I just sat there in that cell. Waiting for them to kill me, or something even worse. I figure they were only keeping me alive because they wanted to run some experiments on me. So I'm sitting there waiting to die, and just generally feeling sorry for myself and suddenly I realize I'm letting the bastards win. I had a quest and they were stopping me from my quest. I was going to Deakard to make an alliance, and they stopped me. Suddenly I knew I couldn't let them win, not without a fight. I found a weak link and worked it till I had a hand free. Once I had a hand free it was easy to break the other chains. The short version is, I broke out of the cell and made a run for the landing bay. I found a ship and got away, and, no, it wasn't as easy as I made it sound."

"But . . . how did you get your chain back then?"

She looked sad again. "Take a good look. This isn't the same chain; it's a new one. I tried to make it look like the old one, but it's really not the same. Nothing's the same." She started to cry, and he moved to pat her shoulder.

It took several minutes for her to control herself, and then she continued her story. She had taken the hijacked ship to Deakard, and after jumping through a barrage of questions and near torture she had convinced them that she was in fact RJ and not some Reliance spy trying to trick them.

"It was difficult but not impossible. The Argy have been at a near stalemate with the Reliance over Stashes. They needed a solution to their problems and people see what they most want to see."

"So . . . you convinced them to carry out an all-out assault against Stashes."

"Yes, and I promised them that we would attack the Reliance on our Southern and Northern Borders . . ."

"What!" Mickey understood that they had to go after the Reliance, but, "We don't have the manpower to do that! We'll spread ourselves too thin."

"We'll have more than enough manpower—it's the old divide and conquer thing. If we do a full out attack here, they'll be spread too thin. They can't fight us full out here and fight the Argys full out there. At some point they'll have to choose. Do they care more about holding Earth, or do they care more about taking Stashes? Is it worse to lose to us, or worse to lose to the alien menace? Come after us and they might risk the kind of mutiny they witnessed on Pam Station. If Reliance troops have the decision of firing on humans or firing on aliens, they are going to pick the aliens every single time."

Mickey nodded his head. Good, sound reasoning as always, but he was the president, and these were his people she wanted to use for cannon fodder. "A lot of people will die."

"Not as many as you think. Remember when we pretended to lose, but we were actually winning? It confounded the shit out of Kirk. There's no reason it won't work again now, and we'll take minimum casualties."

Mickey nodded his head thoughtfully, and said, "People see what they want to see."

"Precisely."

David couldn't believe what he was seeing on the vid screen before him. He ran his hands down his face again just trying to be sure that he was awake.

Mickey stood to the side of where she sat. The little man was smiling broadly, and his smile seemed to add credence to what David's eyes were seeing.

"RJ, how? I thought . . . How?"

"It's a long story and too sad to tell. Short version. I lived, they didn't. I finished my mission and the Argys are at least temporarily our allies."

David nodded then said excitedly, "I want you to meet someone."

Janad brought his infant son and placed him in David's arms. "This is my son."

RJ smiled. "Congratulations."

"I named him Baldor."

For a second there was no sign of recognition on her face at all. Maybe there was a glitch in transmission. He tried again. "I named him Baldor."

"It's a good name," she said, nodding. "Thank you."

"I wanted to honor you, to honor him."

She just nodded; maybe she was too choked with emotion to really comment. That would be like RJ.

"It's good to see you, RJ," Janad said.

"You, too. So . . . I hate to turn things to business so quickly, but I hear you've lost the station . . ."

David was more than happy to fill her in on all the problems they had encountered, and their ideas for fixing them. He was ecstatic to sit and listen as she once again fed them a plan that would secure their world while making life near-impossible for the Reliance—and all only in a matter of minutes.

Everything was back to normal, and David felt like he could really breathe for the first time since RJ had left him on Beta 4.

The plan was as simple as it was dangerous. Jessica had carefully chosen only the best warriors of the Fourers to accompany her. The first wave of shock troops would attack in force at a Reliance military base just over the border of South New Freedom. Four hours later shock troops would descend on a prison just over the border of North New Freedom. RJ had used prisoners for military units before. It had been a good, sound plan, and Jessica meant to copy it.

While this was happening she and her troops would move into position and wait for just the right moment.

She had taken Gerald with her for more than the reason that he spoke better Reliance than the others. She had taken him because the "little man" didn't totally trust her. She could feel confusion, and sometimes outright suspicion, coming from Mickey in waves whenever she screwed up—knowing something she shouldn't or more often, not knowing something that she was supposed to. When everyone knew you had total recall, only a fool would buy the idea that you had forgotten something—especially something of importance.

And Mickey was no man's fool. Intelligent, resourceful and compassionate, RJ had done well when she'd chosen him to lead New Freedom. It reminded her of just how much she had to learn if she was going to become RJ, because Jessica Kirk never would have chosen this deformed little human to run a cafeteria, much less a new nation.

This was the main reason she'd taken Gerald with her; she needed to know more about Mickey. Gerald had become Mickey's right hand man, so he knew Mickey and everything that Mickey knew very well, but he didn't know RJ or what RJ knew at all. So Jessica could question him, lure him into conversations where he'd tell her just what she needed to know, and all without him becoming suspicious.

She started her covert interrogation in the truck on the way to their first stop. She was driving the truck, because one of the things she had learned already was that RJ always drove. Jessica would have been happy to kick back and let someone else do the driving, but apparently the only time RJ let someone else drive was when she planned on taking some action that she couldn't do while driving.

As she drove along the bumpy half-dirt, half-asphalt road she wondered why RJ would want to drive. What was it about this simple act that she found appealing? She saw a bump in the road ahead and drove around it, and suddenly she had the answer. RJ was even more of a control freak than she was. She wanted to know exactly where the vehicle was going and to control its every movement. No surprises.

"So . . . What's been going on since I left?" Jessica asked Gerald, who was riding in the cab with her. The others were in the back of the truck, well hidden.

It wasn't hard to get Gerald talking, and it was easy to see why he and Mickey had become such fast friends. The man was genuinely warm and easy with a smile. When he laughed it was genuine, and when he was serious he was very serious. In short, he was very sincere and loyal. A leader of men needed someone who would always tell him the truth whether it was what he wanted to hear or not, and he needed someone whose integrity was never in question.

Gerald was all of these things. He would never have willingly betrayed Mickey, but he had no reason to mistrust her. He believed her to be RJ, and therefore beyond reproach, so he was easy to bait.

"That Marge is some computer," got Jessica everything Gerald knew about the computer. "Topaz was a certifiable genius but completely insane," inspired him to tell every story Mickey had told him about the old man, and she pretended like she'd heard it all before.

By the time they reached their first destination he had told her enough details that she felt that if she were very careful she could keep from stepping in any real holes, and maybe finally win Mickey over totally.

It was dark when she brought the truck to a stop. She parked just off the road, and she and Gerald ran to the back and opened the doors. They had used a refrigeration unit and set it on high, which kept the warriors comfortable , and the truck would draw no unwanted attention.. Nothing terribly intimidating about a truckload of refrigerated food.

They quickly unloaded, and all two hundred forty Fourers immediately headed for the brush and disappeared. When they got back Jessica looked at the relieved-looking group of men and women and smiled. They weren't dressed in the traditional Loincloth and vest that most of the warriors wore. They were dressed instead in black fatigues. Gone were the spears, bows and arrows. She had given them all laser sidearms and equipped them with short swords for close-in fighting. She'd also trained them to use both.

"All right, do you understand our mission?"

Gerald repeated her words in their language just in case some of them didn't understand the Reliance tongue she spoke, though she had noticed that most of them were now speaking it as well as most farm units.

"Oui," they said in unison, then, "yes."

They were a people bred and trained for war. They were more than ready for this; they were looking forward to it. This was why she had decided to take the Fourers. No one fought quite as well as those who actually wanted to do it. There was no fear in them, only anticipation.

"Let's move out, three deep, keep close," she ordered, and she and Gerald started walking through the scattered brush towards the sounds of battle that she knew only she could hear. They had traveled some thirty minutes before the others could hear them as well. Ten minutes after that they could see the laser blasts, flame, and smoke. "Pick up the pace." She jogged, remembering not to leave them behind. As long as she kept a good, even pace and didn't run to her full capacity they could easily keep up with her. This was another reason for using the Fourers. Earth's gravitational pull was considerably less than what their bodies were used to, so the Fourers were much stronger than any human.

They came to the fence, and as she had expected with all of the fighting going on at the front gates and central complex, no one was paying particular attention to the perimeter. Stupid, but predictable. She took hold of the fence and ripped a huge hole in it, impressing all hell out of the Fourers who weren't quite sure that she wasn't some sort of god anyway. Of course Jessica, for her part, wasn't rushing to tell them any different.

They made their way across the complex toward where she knew the transmat station was, the Fourers just seeming to blend into whatever was around them. She heard a troop of men running in their direction and motioned for her troop to get against the barracks they had been moving beside. When she turned to see if they had complied, she almost couldn't see them at all. She smiled happily; finally she was working with people who knew how to take orders. People with a semblance of a brain, some very real instinct, and an inbred talent for killing.

When she had been working with the Reliance she had been working constantly with incompetent imbeciles. No wonder RJ had jumped ship so easily. The reasons to be on this side just kept adding up. It was so nice not to be working with idiots.

The Reliance troop seemed to prove her point as they ran right past the Fourers without so much as a second glance. It wasn't till they had completely passed them that an Argy hybrid in the back ranks suddenly turned, having no doubt felt more than seen them. He screamed a warning, but before the troop of about fifty soldiers could even turn, all two hundred fifty of the Fourers had taken a target, aimed and fired. When the blaster fire stopped only seconds later, not one member of the Reliance troop was left standing.

"I love these guys," Jessica said in whispered excitement. She motioned for them to run towards the transmat station and they followed her. Another Reliance troop, having heard the blaster fire, rounded the corner of a barracks building just as the station came into view. They met with the same fate as the first troop, and Jessica didn't even get to fire her weapon.

Jessica set the transmat controls and they all got in. By the time the Reliance realized their real objective, they had already materialized aboard Moonbase Station. They left the transmat port at a run.

"Squads one and two go left. Squads three and four go right. Squads five, six, and seven come with me."

She unwrapped the chain from around her waist on the run. As she slung the chain towards its intended victim and felt it connect, saw the man slapped against the wall quite dead, she became RJ. Here was yet another piece to the puzzle. Another answer to the question of why she and her sibling, her clone, were so different. Jessica had been built for this, but she had never actually done it. She had no memories of any youth. She had been given growth hormone until in months she had emerged from the tank as she was. She'd been fed large amounts of information for three months and then thrown out into the world, on her own, for all intents and purposes an adult-sized infant with no real experience.

Stewart had given her the recorded past of being raised Elite, and transferred from one unit to another. It just so happened that the unit he had her "transferred to" was stationed on Earth. Jessica had been intelligent and driven. She was drawn to the power of position, and so she worked for and attained political positions. Before anyone had a chance to notice that she didn't age she had herself transferred, always into a better position, and changed all the dates on her personnel files as she went. There had never been any problem until RJ had come into the picture, and she'd never actually been in a real war until now.

RJ had been raised by Stewart. She'd gone into the service at the bottom and worked her way up to Elite—only she would know why. RJ had served on a dozen planets in a hundred different campaigns. She'd led soldiers, not from an office, but in the field, long before she took on the New Alliance's cause.

Today Jessica felt like she knew her sister better than she knew herself. There was a rush of adrenalin she got in battle that she'd never had before. A thrill from knowing you were going to win. You couldn't lose, because you had soldiers behind you that you had trained and that you could trust to follow you into hell and back again if you but shouted the order.

The chain and laser became like parts of her well-manufactured body, the chain popping heads as the laser mowed down the remaining opposition. She didn't have to think; she just acted. Her body seemed to know exactly what to do. The laser was aimed and fired without real thought. The chain moved as if of its own accord.

It was a rush—like nothing she'd ever encountered in her life.

RJ had always won because she fought for a cause she believed in. She had always beaten Jessica Kirk because she had the love and loyalty of soldiers who were willing to follow wherever she led and lay down their lives, if need be, for the cause. The cause was freedom, and after having been a slave on Pete for well over three years she now knew just how sweet and important freedom was.

In less than six hours they had killed every last Reliance soldier and taken complete control of Moonbase Station.

The Fourers cheered as Jessica made contact with Marge.

"The battles on the surface have also been successful," the fake feminine voice droned in her ear.

"Very good," Jessica said feeling completely satisfied with herself. She wrapped the chain, now covered in blood, back around her waist. "Send the pilots and the crews up."

"Yes, RJ," Marge droned.

The computer didn't have a clue. It saw and heard RJ. It was much easier to fool the computer than it was Mickey.

She licked her lips and tasted blood. It was only then that she realized she was covered in it from head to toe. "Better than sex with Zark," Jessica mumbled of the blood bath all around her.

"What's that, RJ?" Gerald asked.

Jessica smiled. "Happy with the victory is all. We take many casualties?"

"We haven't done a head count yet, but it looks like we lost very few warriors. Very few serious injuries at all, I think. Mickey is right, you are indeed the greatest of generals."

Jessica felt pride, real pride. This was actual accomplishment, not like sliding your hands over the computer keys and ordering things done hundreds, even thousands of miles away. She smiled and patted Gerald on the back a little too hard. "Ah, sorry." She looked around at all the Fourers, and after only a second to contemplate what RJ would say shouted out, "You guys! Now you guys kick some major ass! I have never before seen or heard of warriors like you. Man! This is all just such a rush!" She wasn't sure if it was exactly the kind of thing that RJ might say or not, but it was what she felt.

"What should we do with the bodies?" Gerald asked.

"Sling them into an airlock and let them float in the vastness of space. I'll just bet there isn't anything quite as distressing to a Reliance battle fleet than hundreds of dead Reliance soldiers floating around pinging off the sides of their ships."

Of course cleanup wasn't really necessary. By the time the battle fleet got there, they'd be long gone. The pilots and crews who would come up after the Fourers had cleared the place would load every ounce of cargo they could find onto every ship docked here and plot a course for Beta 4. The reason was two-fold. First and foremost, they were getting much-needed supplies and weapons to Beta 4. Second, any ship they had was a ship the Reliance didn't have. This would both help and impress their Argy allies.

The two biggest ships would land on a moon orbiting Beta 4 and lock into the surface, making a haphazard but operational space station. A few ships would be kept tethered to the station. The rest would land on Beta 4 with much-needed supplies and arms, and be used as well-armed bases across the surface of the planet.

Marge had been monitoring the traffic on Moonbase Station, looking for a full contingent of ships to be there fully loaded with weapons and other materials necessary to sustain the colony on Beta 4, but awaiting departure to Reliance colonies. When this coincided with every Reliance fleet being too far away to amass an attack of any size against the ships en route to Beta 4, they had made their move.

The operation had been smooth and flawless. Jessica wasn't really surprised, but she was really excited and incredibly impressed by her own brilliance.

This is why RJ was always so cocky. Once you pulled something like this off a couple of hundred times, you just began to feel that anyone who was challenging you was obviously not aware of just how badly they were going to get their ass kicked.

Eventually Beta 4 was going to be very important to her plans, so it had to be sufficiently fortified. Today they had taken a huge step in that direction.

Chapter Nine

Poley scratched at the wall, putting the finishing touches on his most recent masterpiece—a picture of his father. He held the small vacuum in his left hand to catch the scrapings so that they wouldn't float around and get into the ship's equipment.

He had realized over the years that he had literally billions of images in his memory banks, but he found that he most enjoyed etching people, so he did.

He suddenly heard a light buzzing that rose to a crescendo, and he found himself pocketing his knife, slinging the vacuum aside and running for the flight deck. He flopped unceremoniously into the pilot's chair and started to read the information screaming across the screen. He had set it at a speed no human could have read.

He made a happy noise. The computer had found an Earth-type planet. He calculated that it would take them approximately five years, fifty-nine days, sixteen hours and forty-five minutes to get there. He was so excited that he started to go wake the others up and tell them, then could find no logical reason for doing so. He sighed, noting once again that it didn't really make him feel better.

They had assembled in Taleed's throne room as they did every week to discuss the state of their planet. Together they made the rules that governed this society. David had tried his best not to be a part of this group, but finally had to admit that in spite of the mistakes of his past, or maybe because of them, they needed him on this council.

"I just want to know why she keeps sending them here," Taleed insisted. One of Taleed's mechanical hands had stuck in an odd position, and he made a face as he tried to fix it with his other. He wasn't having any success, so Haldeed, smiling, ran up and fixed it for him. Taleed smiled broadly at the mute man. "Thank you, Haldeed." Haldeed just nodded and went to sit to the king's side, as always completely attentive to him. "David?" Taleed prompted.

David had hoped that during the adjustment Taleed would have forgotten his question. No such luck. David didn't know why he found it necessary to defend RJ or her actions after all these years. Especially when he was sure he knew, and that her reason was far from compassionate. "With the fertilizers they've sent, the new farming equipment, and the constant stream of supplies she sends . . . There's more than enough food." Not that farming on Beta 4 wasn't a constant uphill battle—it seemed that nothing really palatable grew well there.

"I didn't say there wasn't enough food, and certainly we have seen a long and profitable time of peace, while the Earth has seen much war. I just know that RJ never does anything without more than one reason, and I wanted to know why she sends all the war orphans here. The fact that it's safe and we have plenty of food isn't her only reason. I dare say it isn't even her main reason." Taleed was calm; his manner was far from confrontational. He really did just want to know. He was curious. David also knew that Taleed's manner could change completely if he didn't get a satisfactory answer to his question.

David and Taleed had become good friends; in many ways he had replaced RJ in David's life. Yet David knew that if he had to make a choice between what RJ wanted and what Taleed wanted, he was going to choose RJ every time. He wasn't sure whether RJ would want Taleed and the others to know or not, but if she did she no doubt would have told them herself. Since she hadn't told David anything he didn't feel particularly guilty not telling Taleed what he thought, even if it meant Taleed was going to throw one of his now infamous royal fits.

David shrugged. "I don't know."

"You're full of shit!" Taleed said very unmajestically. "I think you know exactly what she's up to."

David looked to where Baldor, now ten, and his six year old sister Sandra were playing with the king's three year old. Taleed had married and given the planet the male heir to the throne—Taheed the second, who the kids all called Two—as was expected of him. Only a handful of people knew where Taleed's true heart lay, and they kept silent. David didn't really understand, but he had learned the hard way just what happened when you tried to tell your friends who they should or shouldn't love. The queen, for her part, was happy not to be part of an uncared-for harem as had been the old tradition. She enjoyed a comfortable life in the palace, and if rumor was true, the attention of several of the palace guards. No one seemed to be hurt by the arrangement and everyone seemed happy, so who was he to push the limitations he'd learned under a Reliance enslaved population onto these people who had grown up in a different world with a different culture?

David watched the children play and smiled, for the moment forgetting about the meeting at hand, or that he was supposed to be part of it.

By the time David was Baldor's age he had known the bite of slavery, brutal work, hunger, and grief. There had been no playtime for him. He had succeeded in giving his children a better life than he had.

So far.

"Some of my people are worried," Taleed said. "Many of them still can't quite let go of the old ways. They are afraid that our world will be populated with more of you than there are of us. They still believe we may be punished for not following the breeding programs of The Ancestor. First we absorbed all of the Reliance personnel from the space station, and now we are absorbing all these children, over a thousand of them already. Some of the older ones, the ones who worry that we have abandoned the gods, are becoming hostile towards your people. They are worried about the mixing."

"Taleed, you know the history of your world, of your people. We are the same people except for the fact that your race gets half your DNA from the Argys. You have already been mixed. You were purposely mixed. If your people were to mix with us they would become less mixed, not more so."

"I know that, but as much as we have tried . . . some of my people still don't understand. There will be trouble with them; it might even escalate to fighting in the streets. Fighting between us—like in the old days—and I would just like to know why . . . The real reason why she is sending them here?" Taleed asked.

The Argy blood was the problem, because though it had been homogenized, the Fourers still had empathy far above that of a normal Reliance-born human. Taleed could feel, or at the very least had a nagging sense, that David wasn't telling him everything he knew. Still, he didn't have to be the one to tell Taleed.

"For the last ten years in every combat situation, RJ has chosen our people alone to fight with her," Janad said. "The answer is obvious. RJ is going to live forever. She is going to fight the Reliance till they are gone. Not just here, not just on Earth, but everywhere. She's going to need troops. Troops that she trusts. Where is she going to get them? She's going to make them. She's sending the war orphans here, so that they will grow up in our gravity, so that they will grow up learning our skills, our way of hunting and fighting, a way that she has grown to admire and trust. She sends them here so that when the time comes and she needs them, she will have a new army."

Stratton normally didn't even bother to address anything that didn't deal directly with the moon-based space station or the planetary defense system they'd built. She was in charge of the military, and most days it seemed that was really all she cared about. In fact, every day she reminded David more and more of RJ. The difference being, there seemed to be no sense in her single-mindedness, since they hadn't been attacked since they had evacuated the space station and destroyed it. Of course according to what Bradley had told David, that battle had been bloody, hundreds of people had died, and she'd felt personally responsible.

Stratton had been in command, and David knew what it was like to be in command when people were dying all around you. You couldn't help but feel responsible, and people dealt with guilt in different ways. Maybe Stratton was just trying to make sure that they were so well prepared that such a bloodbath would never again occur on her watch.

Whatever her normal motivation was, Stratton wasn't silent on this issue, and she was obviously upset. "What's the difference between what she's doing and the Reliance raising children to be Elites?"

"We aren't going to force them into war if they don't want to go. We aren't raising them in barracks. They are being put with willing families, and the families are raising them as their own," David said quickly.

"Then they'll be pulled away from those families and shipped wherever RJ needs them to fight in a war they won't understand any more than the Fourers she's fighting with now understood what the Reliance was doing to them," Stratton said.

"Then maybe we should make sure they do understand," Taleed said quietly. Still everyone heard him.

"What!" Stratton exclaimed. "You can't be thinking of helping her in this craziness. These are children we're talking about."

"They won't always be children," Taleed said. "Yes, we are making our land more fertile. David has taught us much about farming and getting the most out of our land. The New Alliance has helped us with supplies, and we are now using birth control to hold our own population at a sustainable number, but still . . . Children grow, they will eat more. Why let them tax the land when they could serve our world and the New Alliance as RJ's army? You are forgetting that on our world we trained our children from the time they could walk to fight battles against their own kind for no other reason than to further the dreams of a long dead madman. I say we train these children in the ways of battle as we have always trained our own young. We tell them always what their purpose is . . ."

"Many of them will remember the deaths of their parents. That they had another life and it was stolen from them. They will want to fight." Even if he hadn't seen her or recognized her voice David would have known it was Janad simply because she was the only person he knew who interrupted the king without so much as an "excuse me." And one of only a handful of people who could get away with it.

"Exactly," Taleed said. "They will want to fight the people who took their families, and forced them from their world. And as long as our people know they aren't going to stay, why should they object?" He looked at Stratton for her approval. "An army has to come from somewhere, why not from here? Why not these children with no families to grieve for them if they are killed?"

"Do either of you hear how callous you sound? I'm not convinced this is what's best for them, for anybody. You're making decisions for them. Molding them for a life they may not want. Is this our brave new world? One in which we emulate the practices of the very Reliance we say we hate?" Stratton didn't look like she was going to back down any time soon.

Taleed looked at David for help. David took a deep breath. He had been trained for this. This was, in fact, a life he had chosen for himself, which he had long ago decided he didn't want. There was, however, no turning back. He was the speechmaker. He knew how to sway people with his words. How to make even the impossible sound plausible and the detestable like a good idea. It was his gift, and it had been his and RJ's great undoing. Maybe it could help her now. "Our children have grown up in a world none of us knew as children, and yet we have carefully taught them about all manner of fighting and of war. We have carefully explained to them what it's like to be a slave. To have no rights. What they must watch for, the signs. All the things they must guard against if we are to keep tyrants from taking over our world. We teach children of the harshness of reality in the hopes they never have to see it, live through it, but knowing that in all probability they will. Peace rarely lasts. We have peace here only because the Reliance is too busy with the New Alliance on Earth and the Argy to come after us. The more we improve this planet, the more we terraform it, shape it to make a better world for ourselves and our children, the more inevitable that the Reliance will come and take it away from us. We are only living in this time of peace now because others are dying someplace else.

"The ethics we teach our children today; loyalty, honor, bravery. The true horror of our lives, the real despicable truth is that they will only learn the true value of these things if they are forced into battle. Only in desperation are we truly tested. We are teaching our own children the rules of war. Training them for battle, knowing it's probably inevitable. What makes these orphaned children any better than our own? If RJ needs troops and she comes here to get them . . . Well, having trained our children as we have, to believe that freedom is worth fighting for, that another's freedom is just as important as their own . . . how many, if any, of our own children will choose to stay behind if she calls for troops?"

Stratton nodded, though it was hard to tell whether she actually understood and approved or was just resigned. It didn't matter. Either way she would now go along with their plans. And in the end, who really knew what was right? Only time would tell whether the decision they had made here today was the right one. After all, none of them would actually be affected by this decision. No, they had made this decision for others. Children, children who would be trained into an army to serve under a crazy, genetically engineered humanoid who had so much hate in her soul, so much pain, that she was never going to rest until the Reliance was completely eradicated. She didn't care about the cost.

And today he had helped her. Today he had put all other reason out of his mind and he had helped her cause with the gift of speech he had been born with and that Topaz had later nurtured with hours of careful study and tutoring. He had led them in the direction he was sure she wanted them to go, for no other reason than she was RJ. He owed her everything, and he had helped to make her what she was today—single-minded and crazy.

And she was. He hadn't actually seen her since she'd come back from the dead. She was far too busy to come to Beta 4, and he seriously didn't care if he ever got on a spaceship again, as sick as he had been the first and last time. Besides, he couldn't leave here, he had a family, responsibilities here that he'd never had anywhere else. So he hadn't actually had physical contact with RJ since her return. But even over the monitor he could tell she had changed. He supposed he couldn't really expect her not to have. She'd been through hell and back more than once, and somewhere along the way something had snapped. Snapped? Hell, it had blown up.

It didn't matter. She was still RJ. She still knew how to run a campaign, and she was still in charge. She still knew what she was doing.

He hoped.

The rest of the meeting followed a more or less normal path for this small group of people who had the job of making decisions that affected an entire planet, and today, David figured, the future of the universe itself.

Jessica returned to the fort after yet another successful campaign as her loyal troops stayed on the mainland partying in the streets of Alsterase.

Mickey's son ran to greet her at the dock. The black-headed, three-foot tall eleven-year-old hit her with such force that had she been a normal woman he would have bowled her over. She picked him up and swung him around effortlessly before she set him down and messed his hair with her fist.

He laughed and hugged her again. "What did you bring me, RJ?"

Jessica laughed. "What makes you think I brought you anything?"

"Because you always do."

She put her hand on his shoulder and started walking with him towards the old prison. She reached into her left hand pocket with her free hand and pretended to be looking for something. Finally she pulled out a small glass ball about three inches in diameter and handed it to him. He grinned wildly and started jumping around so much she had to release him. He ran around in front of her, forcing her to stop in her stride or plow over the top of him. "It's the biggest marble I've ever seen."

Jessica grinned now, almost as excited as the boy. "Ah, but it's not just a marble, Dax." She positioned it in his hand so that the red dot pointed up. "Hold it very tightly and watch."

The boy watched in amazement as a dragon seemed to materialize in the air in front of him and over the "marble". "It's a hologram," he said in awe.

"Yes. Now move your hand back and forth like this." She showed him with her own hand.

As Dax moved his hand, a man with a sword appeared and started to fight with the snarling dragon. When he stopped moving his hand the man stood alone. "I have to show my mom and dad." He motioned for her to lean down and he kissed her on the check. "Thanks, RJ," he practically sang, and then he was gone. She smiled after him. He wasn't going to get much bigger, that was what the doctor said. He had apparently inherited the gene from his father, a fact that seemed to bother Mickey much more than it bothered the boy.

Gerald walked up beside her, carting his duffel bag. "That boy . . . so much energy," he laughed. "If I didn't know better, I'd think he was yours."

"He is mine," Jessica said softly. "He's my heart." She fought the tears that wanted to fall.

"He loves you, too."

"I know he does." Jessica laughed then and slapped Gerald almost too hard on the back. "Too much time away from home has made me very sentimental." That and an exceptionally high body count. The battle for Zone 3-B and permanent control of Moonbase Station had been the longest and bloodiest yet. She'd lost a good third of her own personal unit. Men and woman she had fought beside for ten years were dead. Smiles she had gotten used to seeing were gone forever, people she had trusted and who had trusted her, people she had let down.

Comrades, friends.

"No one blames you, RJ," Gerald said as if reading her mind.

"But they should," Jessica said with a sigh. "I got careless, cocky. I thought we could win easily."

"We did win, RJ . . ."

"But not easily." Jessica sighed and started moving back towards the fort, and now a tear did fall. It fell from the eye she had stolen from the Argy foreman she had killed all those years ago, and she quickly wiped it away. She wasn't RJ. She was an abomination of genetically engineered flesh and bone with a dead man's eye.

"No one can know everything, RJ," Gerald said as he followed her. "None who died would have wanted to be anywhere else in that hour. They died doing a great deed. Another zone is free. We have permanent control of the Moon base. The Reliance has been completely eradicated from Earth. Many die and leave no such legacy."

It was one of the reasons she preferred fighting with the Fourers. They were true warriors. Like her, they were built for war and conquest. They weren't afraid of dying, and would rather die in battle than in a hospital bed. Today she damned their loyalty and fearlessness in battle. Damned her own pride. Jessica nodded silently, not really knowing how to explain to Gerald that she didn't feel any better knowing that given the chance, even knowing they would die, they still would have followed her into battle.

Mickey looked across the table at her. "Do you think they'll come back?"

Jessica shook her head no. "They evacuated all the Reliance big shots to one of Trinidad's moons. We don't know which one, but I'm guessing Seritompia. They've all but lost the battle for Stashes. Argy forces are even now moving towards Urta, and if the Reliance wants to hold Stashes and secure Urta they will have to move all their forces there. They can't afford to take another pounding from us right now. Not over a world they consider as unproductive as Earth.

"We have taught the work units to fight back and destroyed most of their bases and cities. In short, there is nothing left here that in their opinion is worth fighting for. Not when they know there is a good chance they can't win."

"Then, why . . . Why did they fight so hard up till now?" Gerald asked.

"To keep from losing face. They just lost their home planet to a bunch of heretics. In their war with the Argy they have always touted themselves as being the strongest force in the universe. Now they've lost their home planet to a bunch of work units. There has been no such rebel uprising amongst the Argy. The Argy will take Stashes, and then they'll go after Urta. Therein lies the real problem."

"Huh?" Mickey asked, feeling lost.

"Well, we split the Reliance forces between Earth and Stashes, and it allowed us to take Earth while the Argy took Stashes. They haven't yet, but they will. The Reliance couldn't beat either one of us as long as they were fighting both of us. But when I met with the Argy on Deakard and we discussed forming an alliance, it was just to help us take Earth and them to take Stashes. The Argy obviously don't plan to adhere to our original agreement. Once they have successfully taken Stashes, they will move against other Reliance-held planets. They will try to take over the colony planets, and that was never part of the deal, because I want the colony planets. I don't want to see the Reliance replaced on the outer worlds by the Argy, who are just as bad, if not worse, when it comes to enslaving their people."

"Why don't the Argy . . . why don't they rebel against their leadership if it's as bad as you say it is?" Mickey asked.

"You are frustrated, confused and hungry. From this I can deduce that you don't really understand what we are talking about, that you wish you'd never brought the subject up, and that if we could now just eat the rest of our meal in relative silence you would be very happy," Jessica spat back quickly. "In a race where everyone knows how everyone else feels and where you become a suspect if you continuously shield your feelings, it's rather hard to construct, let alone carry out, any kind of rebellion. Then there are the telepaths, all of whom work for the government and make a living randomly reading the thoughts of people in and around strategic areas. This is why we don't want them to take over the colony planets."

"Is there any way they can be stopped? Can the Reliance stop them?"

"I don't know if the Reliance can stop them. The Argy have gained a lot of momentum, while the Reliance has lost two massive campaigns. Morale has got to be at an all-time low, and many of them must be questioning why they are fighting for a regime that they are now starting to question. The Argy can be stopped; the question is what's the best way to stop them? What's the best way to stop them and still get rid of the Reliance? Just as the Reliance couldn't fight on two fronts, neither can we. We have to decide what's going to best serve the New Alliance."

"What are you thinking?" Mickey asked.

"That I'd also like to drop the subject and finish dinner," Jessica said with a smile.

Mickey smiled back and nodded.

Jessica walked along the wall. When she had first done it, it had just been because she had learned it was something RJ had done. Apparently RJ had walked along this wall and looked out at the bareness of the mainland. Now of course there was a thriving city there again, but when RJ had walked this wall . . . nothing but ruins. Ruins that Jessica had created in that previous life.

And now she knew. Now she knew exactly what RJ had felt looking out at what had once been. Why she had come after Jessica with such a vengeance.

It was all about caring. Actually caring more about someone else than you did about yourself. The minute she had become RJ she had learned what it meant to truly care about someone, because for the first time she had felt the very real caring that others had for her. Mickey loved her. So did Diana and a dozen others.

Guilt hung over Jessica like a filthy shroud.

When people truly cared for you, loved you, it was only a matter of time till you loved them back, unless you were dead. Jessica was crazy, but not dead. Of course Mickey and Diana and the others didn't actually love Jessica. They loved RJ. They actually hated Jessica. So this love was stolen. It belonged to RJ, but Jessica had stolen it, just as she had stolen her sister's life.

RJ had paced this wall and looked out at the mainland, thinking about all she had lost. Now Jessica paced this wall and looked out on the mainland, thinking about all that she had lost.

When Dax had been born his mother had held him first, then Mickey had taken him, and then the tiny infant, still covered with slime, had been placed into Jessica's arms—and she had immediately fallen in love. It had been the purest joy she had ever felt. The strongest emotion.

For the first few months of his life Jessica had spent most of her time on the front. Every time she came back it was obvious that Dax didn't remember her, but she didn't care. Just holding him made her feel better about everything.

Then when Dax was six months old he became very ill. The doctor said it was the flu. Dax cried almost constantly, and after two days with no sleep, and having the flu themselves, both Mickey and Diana were exhausted. Of course Jessica didn't actually need much sleep, couldn't get sick, and she had endless amounts of energy. She practically ordered Mickey and Diana to bed and she took over care of the sick baby.

She walked Dax for hours on end. Bathed him, fed him, gave him his medicine, and basically willed him to get well. By the third night he was feeling better, and as she was walking him he lay his head on her shoulder, looked right at her and sighed. Then she felt it. He loved her. He didn't think she was RJ. Hell, he didn't know RJ. He actually loved her.

Having that pure, unconditional love, feeling it, had changed her.

She looked at the city. Her people were over there right now, enjoying themselves, reveling in their victory, drinking to lost comrades. None of them were blaming her. But it was her fault. She had miscalculated the number of men she would need for the assault. She had told them to bear right when they should have borne left. Gerald was right. She couldn't know everything.

Not even RJ knows everything. Alsterase is proof of that. The fact that I'm here in her place now and she's gods-only-know-where is proof of that. But does it really matter? I caused the deaths of my troops, my friends, just as surely as I caused the destruction of Alsterase. Can I ever truly gain redemption when everything I do just brings more death? I was crazy once, I know that now, but am I still just as crazy and I just don't understand it? I was completely insane before, but I didn't think I was. Maybe I'm still crazy and I still don't know it.

"Hey, RJ!" Dax's yell and the sound of his footsteps broke her concentration. He ran up to her out of breath, the ball in his hand. "Sit down," he ordered. He always wanted her to sit down or kneel because otherwise he wasn't sure he had her full attention; she was too tall. "Wait till you see this." He placed his hand on the bottom of the ball and held it there for several seconds; it was actually heat-activated. The dragon came up and he made him bow, and then the man came up and he made him bow, then he made them fight. Then they bowed to each other and he had them shake hands and walk away. "See? One of them doesn't always win. Sometimes it ends in a draw."

"You are very wise," Jessica said.

"Sometimes you can also make the dragon spurt blood from his mouth."

"Or maybe not," Jessica laughed. She sat down on a section of wall. "So . . . are you too big to sit on my lap?"

Dax made a face. "Not too big, but too old. I'm almost twelve you know, RJ."

"Your father used to ride around on my shoulder when he was a full grown man. I think you can sit in my lap. Come on, humor an old woman." She patted her leg. Dax looked around to make sure no one was looking, then he walked over and let her set him in her lap. He lay his head against her shoulder, and sighed, and Jessica knew that he didn't really mind sitting in her lap at all.

He laughed. "You aren't old."

"You know that I am, Dax." She kissed the top of his head and held him tight. "I'm older than your mom, and much older than your dad. Today I actually feel the years."

"Well, you don't look it," he said.

"You know, kid, I'd probably be flattered if I hadn't been built in a bottle and poured onto the Earth."

He laughed.

"You think that's funny, huh?" she asked with a smile, and he nodded.

"Tell me about the battle, RJ. Tell me what happened." It wasn't an unusual request, he always wanted to hear about the battle and she always told him.

And she did tell him, but this time it was different. This time she told him everything, even how her friends had died. This time she didn't glorify it. She told him how Mantel had looked at her and smiled at the moment he knew the blast was going to strike him. How Armonda had screamed out and then fallen dead without even a moment to contemplate her death. She explained the empty feeling in her soul when Justin had died in her arms just moments after the last shot in the battle had been fired. Then she cried, and he comforted her.

Chapter Ten

RJ stepped from the cryogenic chamber and started to scrape the blue-green sludge from her face and body. She had been slowly revitalized so that she wasn't cold, and the apparatus had sucked the cryogenic liquid from her airways and lungs so she wasn't having any trouble breathing. She knew that her vision would clear shortly, that she was going to be all right. But she felt as if she had awakened from one, long, horrible nightmare, one that she couldn't remember but that had left her feeling raw, exposed and filthy. The slime didn't help.

"Come, RJ, I'll lead you to the shower." Poley took her arm and started to guide her through the hallways of the ship, which was good because she still couldn't see. As she started to walk she realized just how incredibly disoriented she was.

She tried to speak and found that she actually had to think about it to make it happen. "The . . . the others?"

"Fine, but I'll need your help to revive them. I thought it best we get you up first."

RJ nodded silently. He was right. If she was having this much trouble it would be much worse for Levits and even Topaz.

Poley helped her into the bathroom and over to one of the showerheads. The water smelled stale, but that was to be expected, it hadn't been used in . . . "How long?" she asked as the warm water started to beat down on her.

"Twelve years, three months, two weeks, three days, fourteen hours, three minutes, and forty two seconds. I'm so happy to have you out walking around." He hugged her, getting wet in the process.

"It's good to be out," RJ said. Her vision was coming back to her, and so were her other senses. The strength was returning to her legs. "Where are we, Poley?"

"A nice small Earth-class planet . . . actually it's a moon, but that's really splitting hairs, isn't it? There are plants and animal life and water and air with the correct mixture of oxygen to hydrocarbons . . . All right, there is a little too much oxygen, but nothing you shouldn't be able to adapt to."

He was talking very fast. She thought at first it was some malfunction, but then as he hugged her yet again she realized that the robot was just excited. She smiled and turned the water off. She looked at Poley. He was, as always, clean and well dressed, but there was something different about his face, something she couldn't quite put a finger on because it didn't make any sense. He looked as if he had aged.

He smiled broadly. "I added some wrinkles," he said proudly.

"Why?" RJ asked with a laugh.

"I really like your laugh," Poley said ignoring her question.

"Poley . . . why did you give yourself wrinkles?"

"I felt older. I wanted to look older. I missed you, I was very bored and very lonely, aren't those the sort of things that they say ages people?"

"Well, yes, but . . ."

"I felt aged, so I wanted to look aged." He led her towards a bench in the room. He pointed down at the sleeveless black coveralls and the section of chain. "I put your clothes out for you."

"Thanks, Poley." She slipped into the coveralls and then wrapped her chain around her waist, gently fingering the links. It felt like it had been twelve years. In cryo-sleep you weren't supposed to be aware of anything, much less the passage of time, but she was different from a normal human. Maybe, just maybe, she did feel the passage of time. She felt like she did. "Come on, let's go wake the others."

Poley nodded eagerly and led her into the hall. She stopped flat and just stared. All the walls, every inch of ceiling, every inch of floor, had been etched with photo-perfect life-sized precision with pictures of herself, Levits, Topaz, David, Stewart . . . in fact, most probably anyone Poley had ever had direct contact with.

"My god!" she breathed.

"Do you like them?" Poley asked excitedly.

"Like them, Poley? They are amazing! How much . . ."

"Most of the ship. I filled over seventeen thirty-two gallon plastic garbage bags with the paint chips made from the etchings."

"Twelve years," RJ said in a distant voice. Seeing what Poley had accomplished in that time, all that he had done, brought home the reality of the loss of time. She realized that she really hadn't felt the passage of time at all. Not twelve years worth.

"I told you I was bored," Poley said. "Come on, I want to show Topaz and Levits."

RJ nodded and followed him. Twelve years, and where were they now? What sort of world awaited them outside the ship? What of their own world? What was happening at home, on Beta 4? She might never know. If this planet could sustain life, their life, that didn't mean they would find a suitable fuel supply for their ship. She could be stuck on this planet for the rest of her rather long life.

The Reliance might have taken back all they had won on Earth and on Beta 4. Or perhaps the New Alliance had succeeded in driving the Reliance from Earth. There was no way of knowing.

Twelve years.

Twelve years! It seemed so surreal. All the time that had passed since the moment she had crashed into David Grant in the woods till the moment they'd dodged the Reliance fleet by driving their ship out of hyperspace and into an uncharted galaxy had come to just over eight years. What had happened in the twelve years they'd been asleep?

"RJ?" Poley prompted, and RJ realized only then that she had stopped moving, and was just staring at a picture of Mickey riding on Whitey's shoulder.

She couldn't seem to walk away. She had known Whitey for such a short period of time, yet he had changed her forever. In twelve years what might they have accomplished, what joys might they have shared, and what of Mickey? He had been alive when she left, but there was no guarantee that he still was. Twelve years on a planet that might very well be at war, without her help, without Topaz or Levits or Poley. She had left him alone to face an unknown future and had taken all the people who could help him.

Her plan had completely and utterly failed. She hadn't made it to Deakard. That being the case, what chance did Mickey and the New Alliance have of holding onto New Freedom?

"Do you . . . do you know where we are in relation to real space?" RJ asked, reaching out to trace the lines of Whitey's picture with her finger.

"This is real space, RJ."

"You know what I mean, Tin Pants, have you seen any constellations that look like our space, our galaxy?"

"Yes, but it would take us another five years to reach it and two years after that to reach the nearest jumpgate. We don't have enough fuel."

"Well, ain't that a kick in the pants. Let's keep that knowledge between you and me, all right?"

"Why?" Poley asked.

She sighed, "Because it's better to lose a race by three yards than by two inches."

"I don't understand."

RJ sighed again. "If we find a suitable power source then we'll tell them how close we are. Till then we'll just say we don't know."

"But that's a lie."

RJ laughed. "Yes, it is. But it's a good lie. I'll teach you about that later." She frowned suddenly, let her hand fall away from the picture and just stared at it for a minute.

"Does my picture make you sad, RJ?" Poley asked.

RJ looked at him and smiled. "No Poley, your picture does not make me sad. Missing them makes me sad."

"It's very hard to miss people," he said.

"Yes it is."

Topaz awoke with a start, spit the last of the blue green slime from his mouth and croaked out in an unused voice, "Bitchin'!" After he took a moment to try to find his whole voice he said, "I can't see shit, is that normal?"

His speech centers were actually coming back faster than hers had, which RJ found annoying for some reason she couldn't quite put her finger on. "It usually lasts four to six hours. Mine only lasted about fifteen minutes. I have no idea how long yours will last. Poley will take you down to the showers while I wake Levits up."

"So, Tin Pants, did you miss us?" she heard Topaz ask as they walked away.

"You have no idea," she mumbled as she worked the controls that would bring Levits back from the sleep of death.

That was what it was, too. Like being dead for twelve years and then waking up and . . . Where the hell were they? For a second she debated whether it was kinder to just let Levits sleep, and then she selfishly decided she wanted him to be with her.

The process of reviving took about thirty minutes. Levits was slowly warmed to 98.6 then the gel was sucked out of the tube he was in and then out of his airways. When this was done the electrodes attached to his chest were activated and his body was shocked back to life.

When Levits' heart started beating normally, his blood pressure stabilized and his breathing became normal, RJ opened the tube and carefully removed the tubes that ran down his nose into his lungs. Then she removed the electrodes from his chest. She took a wet towel and wiped the goo from Levits' face, and his eyes opened.

"You're all right, Levits," RJ assured him.

He tried to speak but nothing came out. He tried again.

On his third try he stammered out, "God I hate this shit."

"I know," RJ said gently. She ran her finger over his still slightly blue lips. It was taking a while for circulation to return. It was normal, because unlike her and Topaz, Levits was normal.

He had wanted to stay on Earth. He had wanted her to stay on Earth with him. Now they were . . . wherever the hell they were, because she had wanted to be anywhere but Earth. Twelve years had passed while they slept in blue-green slimy shit, and they were probably never going home.

"I'm sorry," RJ said gently.

"Why . . . sorry?"

"Because if I had done what you wanted to do you'd be safe on Earth enjoying the free country we helped create."

"No, we'd be fighting an army of Beta 4 humanoids trained to kill us. Besides, as mushy and un-me as this is going to sound, I'd rather be anywhere with you than on Earth without you."

"Remember that when you find out where we aren't and just how long we've been asleep."

Levits' vision had taken six hours to return, and after eight his legs still didn't want to hold him, so RJ helped him to the bridge where Topaz and Poley were waiting.

"I know this is going to sound stupid because we've been asleep for . . . how long again?" Levits asked, as RJ helped him to set in the pilot's chair.

"Twelve years," the other three said at once.

"Anyway, I'm tired. I've been sleeping for twelve years and I feel like I could take a nap."

"Actually, me too, believe it or not," RJ said.

Levits looked at Poley through squinted eyes. "So, etch and sketch boy, you want to tell me why I'm screaming in every single picture you've done of me?"

Poley shrugged. "It's how I best remembered you."

Levits mumbled something under his breath.

"So let's have a look at our new home." RJ pressed a button and the blast doors opened. They found themselves looking at the badly overgrown ruins of what must have once been a very large high tech city. Some small, primate-looking, fur-bearing creatures were hanging in vines looking at the ship and apparently screeching, though they couldn't hear them. RJ engaged the audio equipment and they heard the animal's cry, which she thought sounded more like bird song than monkey chatter. As if on cue, a bird of some type flew toward the port, and RJ actually ducked.

"That can't be good," Topaz said.

"It's just a freaking bird," Levits said in disbelief.

"He's talking about the ruins," RJ said. "Where are the beings that built this city? Where did they go? What happened to them?"

"I monitored this planet for years. As I got closer there were signs of life. I saw the cities, but there are no signs that civilization still exists. No sign of motor vehicles, planes or even radio waves. No satellites, nothing to imply that beings this advanced still live here. No signs of anything mechanical. No power plants. From the patterns I saw from space I suspect a meteor shower wiped out the intelligent life form. In fact, I would go so far as to say there was a mass extinction," Poley said.

"If the buildings made it, at least in part, through the holocaust, what makes you think the humanoid population didn't?" Levits asked.

"Why do you naturally assume they were humanoid?" Topaz asked, an aggravated tone to his voice.

RJ ignored him and answered Levits' question. "Buildings don't care about climate or air quality. If the population survived, then why are there no signs of the civilization they obviously once lived in? Unless they've devolved into something more primitive, or mutated."

Levits nodded.

"I found nothing toxic to humans in my examination of the air. Below Earth normal radiation levels," Poley said.

"Nothing we know is toxic to us," Levits corrected.

"He's right," Topaz said. "This is an alien world. Our equipment can't have knowledge of compounds that have never been encountered by humans. We don't know what substances or chemicals we might find here . . . Hey! I wonder if my brush is here?" He wandered across the bridge and out the door.

"Freaking beautiful!" Levits yelled.

"See what I mean?" Poley said to RJ.

RJ smiled a crocked smile and nodded. "Poley, go after Topaz and make sure he doesn't leave the ship."

Poley left chiming as he went after Topaz. "Your brush couldn't be here, Topaz. You have never been here before. Your thought is illogical."

"So?" Levits asked.

RJ shrugged. "This is a big planet, a moon actually, but not much smaller in size than Earth. The air seems good; the gravitational pull is close to Earth normal. The animal life we can see certainly doesn't look dangerous . . ."

"But?" Levits prompted.

"As you suggested, just because this city is in ruins doesn't mean that every intelligent being on the planet is dead."

"Just their civilization. If they had survived surely they would have made an attempt to rebuild what they lost. You heard what Tin Pants said. No signs of intelligent life," Levits reminded.

"That's not what he said, he said he detected no radio waves, no working motor vehicles, no satellites. Technology does not necessarily equal intelligence, and the lack of technology does not necessarily rule out the presence of intelligent life. Don't forget the Beta 4 humanoids, they were so ignorant of technology that they thought thermo generators where gods, but they were by no means stupid."

"Alright they may be smart, but if they don't have technology . . ."

"Maybe they have found some energy source so different from our traditional sources that our equipment can't detect it, any more than it can give us any information about compounds it doesn't understand. Of course that's mostly just wishful thinking on my part."

"Wishful thinking?" Levits asked in confusion.

"If there isn't any intelligent population, then there is no energy source. There will be no one to help us, and we'll never get off this planet," RJ said.

"In which case we might as well walk out on the surface without any protective gear, because I for one don't plan to spend my life cooped up in this tin can."

"The rest of us could leave the ship without protective gear, but you should wear it just in case. The ship will be able to filter the air and . . ."

"For how long?" Levits demanded. "Twelve years in space, even with most systems shut down, solar cells at maximum, and using the gold in the fusion reactor, how much stored fuel do you think we actually have left? A year's worth, two, three, ten? And what about food rations? We've got six months worth at the most . . ."

"Actually closer to twenty years."

Levits was momentarily taken aback, but only momentarily. "Yeah, but it all tastes like crap, and I plan on living longer than twenty years. Eventually we're going to have to find food here, and there's no guarantee that even after the computer analyzes and says it's safe that there won't be something in it that will kill us. I'm sick to death of being the weak link in your chain, RJ. No, I don't have superhuman abilities like the rest of you, but I'm not exactly a sniveling, pants-shitting infant, either. I'd rather die if I'm going to die, and get it over with. I don't want to sit any longer with death hanging over my head. We just spent twelve years sleeping in goo waiting for this. Waiting to find a planet that might sustain us. This is it; it's our only shot. We will most probably be stuck here for the rest of our lives, the rest of my life at the very least. So as soon as we've had some time to rest, eat and have sex, not necessarily in that order, I want to leave the ship without a suit and check out this planet of ours."

Well rested and sated on all levels, RJ opened the airlock. The air was heavy in oxygen content and for a minute she saw Levits waver.

"You all right?" she asked.

"Give me a second to adjust," Levits said with a smile. "I'm not really used to good air."

"My god it smells wonderful here," Topaz said, starting down the gangplank.

"Nothing toxic. I believe that smell is flowers," Poley announced.

"I didn't say it smelled toxic you tin idiot," Topaz hissed in Poley's direction.

"For the record, I'm not really made of tin," Poley corrected, sounding ever so slightly put out.

Topaz ignored him and stepped off the gangplank.

"Don't wander off," RJ warned.

She watched as the primate-looking animals swung quickly through the trees away from them. "Did you see that?" she asked no one in particular.

"What?" Topaz asked, returning reluctantly to the group still at the top of the gangplank.

"How the little monkey things ran from us," RJ said.

"So?" Topaz shrugged and moved away from them again.

"Why would they run from us unless they had seen something like us before? Unless they have been hunted by something like us," Poley said.

"Oh, I don't know, RJ, maybe because we're twenty times their size and look nothing like anything they've seen before." Topaz stepped on the planet again and this time they followed him. Poley had landed the ship in a large flat area in the middle of the ruined city where the plant growth wasn't as dense. Topaz got down on the ground and brushed the leaves away with his hand and under it found a hard concrete-like surface. "RJ, what do you make of this?"

She looked at the spot of ground and then around at the circle they had landed in. It wasn't that big, in fact not much bigger than their ship. Poley had no doubt used the landing program on the ship to find the best possible spot. On a planet that was mostly ocean and jungle, this would have been it. "It might have been a parking lot."

"Oh yes, of course," Topaz said in a superior tone. "Because of course anything intelligent, any advanced civilization must be humanoid. I suppose you have also deduced that they must have two arms, two legs, two eyes, and hair on their head and around their privates, which of course are exactly like ours as well." He started walking while continuing his tirade. RJ looked at Levits and smiled. He rolled his eyes and took her hand as they walked.

Topaz ranted on. "I used to watch all those stupid science-fiction movies and read all those stupid science-fiction books and I used to wonder why no one was ever bright enough to figure out that not all intelligent life would be humanoid. I used to wonder why every alien they found on Star Trek was always bipedal and exactly like us, except for bigger brains, ridges on their foreheads or pointed ears."

"Perhaps because they were visionary. After all the Argy are humanoid, so much like us that we can interbreed. In fact, to date all intelligent life we've found has had basically a similar body design to ours," RJ said. "Besides this planet has those little primate type creatures we've already seen, and they naturally would have evolved into something humanoid."

Poley continued where his sister had stopped. "It's logical to assume that any Earth-type planet would evolve in a similar fashion to our own. That being the case, the flora, fauna and intelligent species would be very similar. It's a good design, the whole two arms, two legs, two eyes thing. I mean what would be done with, say, a third leg? Tentacles certainly wouldn't be as versatile as hands . . ."

"I expect such narrow-mindedness from something so unimaginative," Topaz snapped at the robot. Not paying any attention to where he was going, he tripped over something knee high and fell. He landed on his ass. He jumped up and turned to investigate the offending obstacle that had been hidden from view by plant life. "Well, shit," he said as he looked at what was obviously an ancient commode.

They explored deep into the heart of the ruined city where some of the structures were still twenty stories tall and looked like they had been sheared off at the top. Age, weather and plants were ripping the buildings apart, and RJ had suggested early on that they steer clear of the taller buildings to keep from being crushed by falling debris, which littered the streets and had to be climbed over.

"Are we looking for anything in particular?" Levits asked after they had been walking for several hours.

"Just looking," RJ answered. "Why, do you feel bad? Do we need to go back to the ship?"

"I feel fine," Levits snapped. He was not about to tell them that he felt nauseous and was tired. No doubt from doing this much exercise so soon after a twelve-year hibernation. He was going to have to learn to keep up with the superhumans and the robot or he was going to find himself constantly left behind. Much to his amazement he found himself wishing that David was here, so he wouldn't be the only normal human around.

RJ stopped abruptly and threw her arms out. They all knew what that meant, so they stopped and listened.

"Poley what is that?" she asked.

"I hear breathing. A larger animal, and more than one of them."

RJ nodded. "We are being watched."

"By what?" Levits whispered back.

"How the hell would I know? But I can tell you this. Whatever they are they have emotions, because I felt them before I heard them," RJ said. "They are curious about us, and afraid."

"So something has survived?" Topaz whispered.

"Yes." She turned around and started back the way they had come.

"What are we doing?" Topaz asked, still talking in a whisper.

"Going back to the ship," RJ said. "Stop whispering. They won't be able to understand us, and if we start whispering they're going to know something's wrong."

"Is something wrong?" Levits asked.

"Well they were stalking us, tracking us. They are no doubt hunters, and we don't know what weapons they have. Could be anything from stone axes to sophisticated weapons left over from this crumbled civilization. Don't forget the thing we found in the ancient Argy ship that damn near killed you all."

Levits doubled his pace and had soon passed RJ.

Two weeks later, though they'd set up monitoring equipment and had gone on several expeditions, they were no closer to putting a face on the beings they shared the planet with.

"Well they certainly aren't stupid," RJ said, as she watched the screen go dead; yet another monitor had been taken out. "They know we're trying to see them, and they know what the cameras do."

"Why don't you force a confrontation?" Topaz asked. He was growing more impatient by the day. He wanted to meet the creatures they shared the planet with, because as he kept saying . . . "They are so different from us that they find our form hideous and repulsive." He wanted very much to have his theory proven true. "You could catch one, RJ."

"If these creatures lack technology, and I'm sort of guessing they do, then they aren't going to be able to help us get fuel to get our craft off this planet even if we don't piss them off. As such we will be stuck here. Since we're going to be stuck here with them, and I'm guessing there are a hell of a lot more of them than there are of us, I don't think forcing a confrontation is a very good idea."

"So far they have allowed us to leave the ship and run our tests for edible food without even attempting to attack us. This means one of two things. Either they are as curious about us as we are about them, or they are sizing us up making sure there aren't any more of us in this big-assed contraption before they attack."

"Well that's a comforting thought," Levits said from where he and Poley were running tests on some plant samples they had brought back to the ship on their last expedition.

"Any data yet on exactly what catastrophe caused the collapse of this society?" RJ asked Poley.

"Nothing concrete, but I'm still ninety-five percent sure it's meteor destruction. Little else would have done so much damage. This was a very advanced civilization. In many ways more advanced than our own," Poley said, not bothering to look up from what he was doing.

"Why do you say that, Tin Pants?" Topaz asked.

"Well every single plant we have tested has not only been edible but has also been filled with nutritional value and highly digestible . . ."

"Don't taste too bad, either," Levits said walking away from the lab bench and dropping into a nearby chair.

"The chances of this being natural selection are highly unlikely . . ."

"I'm so proud, did you notice he didn't spit out numbers?" Topaz asked.

"I don't see why you should be proud," Poley said, sounding almost angry. "You didn't build me with the ability to learn and to deduce that it annoyed people when I gave them the exact numbers contained in a probability factor."

"Please finish what you were saying, Poley," RJ pleaded.

"These plants have been genetically engineered in such a way that they have reproduced themselves identically from the time they were created. They have in many generations killed off all other forms of plant life on the planet. They have done so without either cross-pollinating with the native plants or each other. Each plant is still what it was originally created to be. Humans have never been able to do that with their gene tampering. We were never able to create a genetically engineered plant whose seeds came up true."

RJ nodded. "I've also noticed that the plants seem to have an uncanny ability to adapt to their surroundings. I've seen the same variety of plant doing just as well in full sun as full shade. There are plants growing inside buildings whose roofs still don't leak, so the ground inside is dry. Yet the plants are doing just as well there as they are doing out on the surface where it rains three and four times a week."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Topaz asked.

"Nothing, I guess," RJ shrugged. "I just thought it was interesting."

"A civilization as advanced as Poley says this one was might have had space travel. There might be pieces of that technology available on this world. These survivors might not even know what it is, but we will if we find it. We still may be able to get off this planet and back home," Levits said excitedly.

"I hate to be a nay-sayer, but not every race finds it necessary to explore space. If they had space flight the logical thing would have been to evacuate the planet when they saw the comet approaching. Since there is still intelligent life here, I assume they didn't do so, which implies they probably didn't have that ability. However if they had space flight and they did evacuate the planet then they certainly wouldn't have left anything that was capable of flight here," RJ said.

"Actually I think you quite like being a nay-sayer. The truth is we aren't going to find out anything until we make contact," Topaz said haughtily.

"You know, Dumbass," Levits said, making it sound like Topaz's name, as had been his habit the last few days that Topaz had been driving them all as crazy as he was. "It might not be so easy to make contact with this multi-tentacled, three butted, one eyed lizard, with a horn growing out of his dick."

"I realize that some of us are happy as long as we're getting three square meals and two good screwings a day, but speaking solely from the experience of someone who hasn't had a really good fucking in something close to thirteen years, some of us are interested in something more than three square meals a day. We want to explore this planet to see . . ."

"If a multi-tentacled, three-butted, one-eyed lizard woman would screw you?" RJ suggested.

"Well, yes," Topaz said incredulously.

They all laughed—even the robot. Then RJ walked over to Topaz and patted his cheek. "A little patience, Topaz. Making contact with these creatures, whatever they might look like, isn't going to be as easy as making contact with the Beta 4 humanoids. Some of them spoke our language, and you actually spoke theirs. They, as it turned out, were at least part human. There is going to be no spoken language between these creatures and us, and there will be no shared DNA. They are completely alien to us, and we to them. We don't want a violent first contact. We have to convince them that we mean them no harm, but are capable of harming them if our hand is forced. We need the upper hand, but we don't want to scare them. We certainly don't want them to attack us."

"You aren't afraid of them, are you?" Levits asked in disbelief.

RJ shook her head. "No, there aren't many things I actually fear. However, consider this. They know what we look like, but we have no idea what they look like, and what if they were able to do the same thing with people that they did to plants?"

"Then they'd all be edible and highly nutritious!" Topaz exclaimed, and then went off—no doubt to look for something he hadn't lost yet.

Levits shook his head and smiled in spite of himself.

RJ sighed deeply. "They'd all be GSH's. I may not be stronger than they are." She suddenly snapped her fingers and looked in the direction Topaz had just gone. "I just now figured it out. His brain fizzes out when it's reached the saturation point. When what he's just realized is too much for him."

"Well, duh," Poley said hollowly from where he stood carving on a piece of wood he had taken from the surface.

"You know, I think I liked you better when you were more like a robot and less like us," RJ teased.

"Really?" Poley inquired, looking suddenly hurt.

"No, not really." She walked over and kissed his cheek. "Come on, I just had an idea."

RJ and Poley left the ship carrying full packs, closing and securing the hatch behind them. They walked away from the ship towards the heart of the city.

"What now?" Poley asked.

"We wait for them to get close. Take your pack off and put it down."

Poley nodded, and RJ followed suit. Then she stretched and rubbed at her lower back.

"Act like your back hurts."

Poley copied her actions almost too closely. "We'll act like they got too heavy and we decided to go on without them and come back for them later." As she talked she made hand gestures, which suggested what she was saying. "Act like you don't think it's such a good idea."

"But it was the plan."

"Poley, just . . . act like Levits does when I tell him to do something he doesn't want to do."

Poley started throwing his arms around in dramatic sweeps and screaming. "That's the stupidest freaking thing I've ever heard. Are you freaking out of your tiny little genetically superior brain? You crazy bitch, you can't leave your pack here for any idiot, tentacled, slime-eating alien to come and pilfer and . . ."

"Alright, that's enough!" RJ yelled back. "You've done very well but now it's time for you to walk after me and pout. I know you know how to pout because you do it all the time." RJ started walking.

"Because everyone treats me like a machine," Poley said, as he followed her with a pout.

"We do not," RJ said with a laugh.

"Sometimes you do."

"Well, sometimes you act like it."

"Do not," he mumbled, more or less proving his point.

They walked on through the ruins for another hour just checking things out. "Look here," RJ said, kneeling down and pointing to a plant limb that was growing at a right angle against the ground.

"We most probably stepped on it when we walked this way three days ago," Poley said, leaning down to look at the plant with interest. "It has already healed."

"Better than healed, it's starting to put out a new branch at the break, see?" She pointed. "It's compensating for the damage, even though the plant has healed."

"They are very hardy."

RJ nodded, looking thoughtful but saying nothing more as she took off walking again. They walked for another thirty minutes. going much further into the city than they had ever been before.

"Hey look," Poley called out as he rolled a rock the size of a hay bale aside and pointed to the skeleton he'd just found underneath it.

RJ scampered over the rocks and looked at it. She nodded. "So much for Topaz's theory."

"Bipedal, two armed," Poley supplied.

RJ nodded and crawled over the rubble to kneel beside the skeleton and get a closer look. There only seemed to be four digits on the hand, one of which was an opposable thumb, but there were six finger joints. The chest cavity was larger than that of a human, showing that the race had most probably developed at a time when the atmosphere wasn't quite as oxygen rich. Of course it was hard to tell exactly how large it might have been because it had been crushed by the rock, and she was going strictly on the size and amount of the crushed fragments. The skull was definitely different. There was a thick bone plate on the forehead and a flap of bone covered both cheeks. She picked one of these up, guessing that it had been connected by tissue and cartilage. There were similar bones around where the throat would have been. The stomach area also had been covered in similar bone plates.

Internal armor. The sort of thing a genetic engineer might do, and she was almost afraid to pick up one of the leg bones for her next test. But it easily crumbled to dust in her hand. "Not GSH's," RJ said.

"What about the armor?"

"Like the plates on some lizard's back. They evolved that way."

"How can you be so sure, RJ?" Poley asked.

"I would have thought you'd figure that out on your own. If you're going to go to all the trouble to create a GSH with armor plates, why wouldn't you make them as strong as steel?"

"Some might consider that overkill, or perhaps they simply weren't able to accomplish it," Poley suggested, then changing the subject. "They aren't following us anymore."

"I know. Come on, let's go find them." RJ touched a button on her wrist com, and it started beeping. "Yep, our gear's on the move, and you know it isn't doing that on its own. Let's move."

RJ was impressed. Had it not been for their sophisticated locating equipment she never would have been able to follow the trail they left. They left things so undisturbed in their wake that it was as if they walked just above the ground.

The earpiece she had in place helped her hear what they were saying, not that she could actually understand them, but given just a little time she would. Their language was sophisticated, stern sounding with hard edges. There was nothing guttural about it. Each word was spoken with perfect diction—more proof that they had been at one time a sophisticated civilization.

They soon reached their encampment. RJ and Poley stopped on the outskirts of the camp, squatted down out of sight, and watched the natives with calculated interest.

As she had thought they would, they were going through the bags. For this reason she had sewn the transmitters into the linings and put into the bags what she wanted them to know about herself and her crew. Some fruits she'd found on their planet to show them that they ate, canteens full of water to show their need for rehydration. A jacket to indicate that they needed protection against the elements, a knife to show that they had weapons and could defend themselves. Pictures RJ had Poley etch into two small pieces of the ship's ceiling tiles of the male and female of the human species nude—though RJ was pretty sure that the fact that Poley had used his own form for the male of the species was going to cause instant feelings of inadequacy in the local male population if they had similar genitalia, and RJ had a feeling they did.

Their village was several miles away from the ruins, but not so far that they wouldn't have noticed a huge spaceship landing. They were obviously interested in RJ and her crew or they wouldn't have shadowed them since their arrival. So she was helping them learn about her as she was in turn learning about them.

Their village was constructed of native materials mixed with materials that had been taken from the lost civilization. Nothing looked very sturdy or substantial. What had obviously once been some sort of vehicle was now the roof of a building made of trees and stacked stones. The whole place had a sort of "half" essence to it. Half the old, half the new, with that which was new looking like what should have been old. This was a post-apocalyptic society. Something catastrophic had happened to this world and this was what had risen from the ashes. This was what had survived.

But why build way out here? Why not reconstruct the city, when much of it was obviously salvageable? Why had they seemingly lost all knowledge of technology?

It smacked of plague, logical since disease often followed a natural disaster—any disaster, actually. Water systems got polluted, sewer systems didn't work, and normal healthcare and hygiene were often impossible. Disease ran rampant. If you were afraid an area was contaminated you certainly wouldn't want to live there.

Of course if that was the case you wouldn't hunt there either, and they obviously did.

RJ agreed with Poley's meteor theory. It explained all the massive damage, and how a skeleton got under a piece of fallen building. Of course it could have happened much later. He might not have been killed during the initial disaster; he could have died hundreds of years later. He might have been hunting in the ruins, been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had a piece of building fall on top of him.

No, that didn't work because his chest had been huge, indicating a need to filter large amounts of air to get the oxygen he needed. As she was looking at these people she could see that they had much smaller chest cavities. They had already evolved, they had grown up in the planet's now oxygen-rich atmosphere. That hadn't happened over night.

So many questions. Why were they living out here? Why had they abandoned the cities? Where had all their technology gone?

The only way she was going to get any solid answers was to learn their language. RJ listened intently to the words they spoke and defined the words by what they were taking from their packs, what they were looking at, and how they were relating to one another. Their emotions were easily read—excitement, fear, and hope.

It was this last one that puzzled her. Why hope? What did they think she and the others might offer them? Did they realize that their world had once had so much more? Did they understand that the technology of the spaceship meant that RJ and the others might be able to tell them how to achieve it? That they might be able to bring the planet back to what it had once been?

They looked almost human. They had hair of several different colors on their heads, and, RJ guessed with a smile, thinking how pissed off Topaz would be, around their privates. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth. Their foreheads were slightly pronounced, and if you knew to look for them you could see where the bone plates dwelt under their skin, but for the most part you could have dropped them on a Reliance colony planet and no one would have known the difference. Sort of blew all shit out of Topaz's little rant about them all having their collective heads up their asses concerning alien life forms. Of course any disappointment he was likely to feel was probably going to be washed away when he saw that not only did their females seem to be compatible, but they were also attractive.

In fact, they were a very attractive people. She smiled when she realized their skin was almost the same color as hers, that golden tanned look that wasn't really a tan at all. They were big and small and every size in between. They were young and old, weak and strong. More like humans than the Argy, in fact. Which meant they probably had no paranormal abilities. They were different because their emotions and thoughts were hidden from each other, and therefore their difference was in how they attracted a mate, made friends, and developed personal connections. Beings with telepathic and empathic powers almost always wound up looking more or less the same, because their needs, wants, and desires, the things that made them different, were obvious.

"Now what?" Poley asked in a whisper.

"We wait, watch and learn."

Poley nodded. He knew what she meant, because he was doing the same thing. Learning parts of their language by watching what words were associated with what objects and actions. Since neither of them was capable of forgetting, they would quickly learn the language.

The dim "night" began to fall, and some of the other natives started building up a big fire in a central pit. It wasn't really necessary for light, though, because reflected light from the planet's surface hit the moon at nightfall and almost always kept at least this side of the moon from falling into complete darkness. The only exception was when the planet eclipsed the sun, which happened about once every seventy-eight hours and lasted for about four hours.

The natives put the packs and their contents aside after very neatly repacking them, and started to prepare what she assumed was the evening meal. Big pots were hung over the fire and everyone, young and old, male and female started to chop up the native plant life and a couple of small animals and put equal measures into each pot. In a few minutes the contents of the pots were boiling and RJ's mouth started to water. It was the best food she'd smelled since they'd roasted water snails over a fire on Beta 4.

The vessels they used to cook and to eat from had obviously been gleaned from the dead civilization from which they had come. She wondered just how far this attachment to the past went, how much knowledge had been handed down. Did they know they were the same people whose dead cities they hunted in, or did they believe they were a different race? Did they know those cities had been built by their ancestors or did they believe they had been built by gods?

That they had lost the ability to create many of the things they used was obvious. They had spears and slingshot-like contraptions, and they had what appeared to be very old projectile firing type weapons, but she had to wonder if they actually still worked or were just for show.

Their dress was simple. Robes and pants made of cloth, no doubt made of plant fiber. More than likely one of these plants had been engineered for the sole purpose of making clothing. The cloth was in shades of green and brown. She thought at first it was its natural color, and then realized with a smile that it was camouflage. Their common everyday dress, from the youngest to the oldest, was camouflage. They were hunters, hunters with minimalist weapons, so they had to be stealthy, unseen. They were accustomed to hiding in plain sight. This is why they hadn't seen them. They were a careful people, but why?

Their demeanor seemed to imply that they were also hunted, yet RJ had seen no such predator, the ship's computers had detected no such animal. No doubt there were others who had survived, other little pockets of civilization that had made it through the holocaust. Maybe they had become tribal and fought over hunting and foraging land.

It seemed altogether absurd, considering that everything on the planet seemed to be edible and the planet was nothing but jungle. These beings did not look underfed.

But beings did weird, illogical things. They made up some stupid religion, then you had to believe what they said or you had to go. According to Topaz and all that she'd read, this was what had caused most of the wars on pre-Reliance Earth.

Ultimately, the Reliance had used religious wars to take over control of the world. They used religion to bring the world to its knees, and then they abolished it—since it was obviously so detrimental—and made the Reliance the people's god.

And the whole "my gods are better than your gods" hadn't just caused numerous wars on Earth, but had caused them with a dozen other races on as many planets that she could think of. People wanted answers to things that couldn't really be answered, and so they made up things they could believe in that answered their questions. Since people seemed to be incapable of just agreeing to disagree, they always wound up fighting over something that none of them could prove. Few worlds had managed to avoid this.

There were other things people fought over as well: food, sports teams, borderlines, and freedom.

Whatever the cause, RJ was now sure that these people were at war with someone. This was no doubt the reason for their hope. They were hoping that RJ and her crew would have weapons with which they could defeat their enemy. They were hoping for some sort of alliance.

She frowned. How could she choose sides? She'd fought before without reason or purpose but simply because she was ordered to do so. She didn't want to do that again. How did she know these guys weren't the bad guys? She didn't want to fight over food on a planet covered with food, or over whose god was better.

Suddenly she heard an electronic sound off in the distance. She took out her earpiece to be sure it wasn't just feedback. "Poley . . ."

"I hear it."

"I thought you said there were no active machines on this planet."

"There weren't. I monitored the planet for twenty-seven months and found nothing."

RJ put her earpiece back in, and started to com Levits to see if he had detected anything, but she didn't have to—he was yelling in her ear.

"RJ do you read? Get the fuck out of there. Dammit are you listening?"

"Yes, and you can stop screaming, any time now," RJ said. "What the hell is that? I can hear something coming this way though it's still distant."

"I don't know what the hell it is, but there are three of them, they are huge, they are moving very fast, and they seemed to just walk up out of the ocean."

"Well that would explain why we didn't detect them. The water must have blocked the mechanical activity." Poley said.

"Shoddy-assed Reliance equipment, next time lets steal something better," RJ said with a smile.

"The computer image I'm getting makes them look like . . . Well, like huge spiders. Now get your ass back to the ship this minute." Levits ordered.

"Ah, alright," RJ said, not moving a muscle.

"Oh dammit! You aren't coming back, are you?"

"And you're surprised because I normally do everything you say? I want to see what it is," RJ replied.

"I was afraid you were going to fucking say that," Levits said. Then he was gone, and she could hear the locals again. They were obviously shouting warnings and probably obscenities at each other. Then they were throwing their food aside, and running and arming themselves with the projectile weapons, so RJ assumed they did actually still work. She doubted their hearing was as good as hers, so they hadn't heard them coming, they had felt them. She had noticed a slight trembling of the ground, and these beings seemed to have a heightened sense of touch. No doubt another reason they were able to move with such stealth.

"RJ," Poley said calmly at her side. "I think we should go. There are three of them, they are large, and they have some sort of plasma type weapon."

"You aren't afraid are you, Tin Pants?"

"Well I am less than thrilled at the prospect of you and me taking on three very large, armed robots."

"Robots?"

"Well, they move like robots," Poley explained.

RJ looked at him, eyebrows raised.

"I'm hardly a simple robot," he said, proving it by the fact that he had been able to read her body language.

RJ smiled, then nodded silently. After a few moments of screaming and what looked a whole lot like drawing straws, most of the natives had fled. Only a few holding the projectile weapons stayed. They were staying so that the others could make their getaway. Theirs was obviously a suicide mission, and she could tell by their body language that there was a very good chance that they were all going to take off running when whatever was coming got there.

"Come on," RJ said to Poley and she got up. He followed her right into the middle of the natives' camp. The ten natives left there turned and looked at them, startled and obviously wanting to run and hide from the strangers. Since they were here to die anyway, there was only a second when they thought about running from RJ and Poley. Then their duty to protect their people from the beasts that were rushing towards them won over fear of the strangers. However, they did aim their weapons at them.

RJ held her hands up quickly and Poley followed suit. She carefully used the words she had already learned and sign language to tell them what she interpreted as, "We want to help you kill the enemy." She must have gotten it right because the one she assumed was the leader looked at her and spit out a word she took to mean "OK", and the weapons turned away from her and Poley.

They were getting closer now. The noise rose in tempo, and the ground shook more. Then the trees parted, and there stood three twenty-foot tall six-legged metal "spiders." Each was topped with a glass dome and inside RJ could just make out three one-eyed alien creatures obviously controlling the machines.

"Well, this ought to make Topaz's day. He's going to get his monster and get compatible females, too," RJ mumbled.

The natives opened fire on the glass domes with the projectile weapons, and RJ knew instantly this must be their weak spot. Then the cowardly little bastards ran into the jungle, leaving her and Poley to fight the monsters themselves.

So they had either just stayed there to slow the things down, or they had decided to leave RJ and Poley to fight their suicide mission.

Blaster fire erupted from the machines, taking out one of the natives who hadn't been fast enough. RJ grabbed her blaster with one hand and whipped her chain off her waist with the other. She slung the end of her chain towards one of the legs of the closest metal-clad monster just as it lifted off the ground. She snagged it the first try and yanked with all her force. The monster faltered, almost falling. RJ leapt on top of the globe as blaster fire struck the ground where she had been standing only a moment before.

She crashed down on the clear dome with her fist but nothing happened, except a resounding ringing sound that was louder than even the blaster fire. She kept tension on the chain, keeping the leg up and throwing the machine off its normal gait. She could feel the terror of the creature inside the machine. He wasn't used to being in danger, he was at the top of the food chain. Around her she could see that the natives had come back, and while they weren't getting in close they were firing their weapons at the beasts. The projectiles were doing little more than bouncing off the clear domes, and annoying the hell out of her. In fact, one of them ricocheted into her arm, and she almost lost her grip on the chain.

She could see Poley running in a zigzag pattern at a high rate of speed, in and out of the legs of the metal-clad monsters, confounding their fire and movement. He stopped at a point under one, looked up and fired his laser. Sparks and red liquid rained down on Poley for his trouble, but the monster immediately started to lurch around spastically. He had targeted the machine's hydraulic system. Damn! She wished she'd thought of that. Still, she couldn't let her metal brother get the better of her. She shot the dome with her laser, holding a steady stream on it till it cracked. Then she smacked it again with her fist, full force. This time the dome busted and she found herself sitting on the slimy head of the alien inside—which she now knew had been covered by seawater. Exposed to air, the creature immediately started to die and his machine, which was apparently attached to him, started to lurch around wildly. RJ found herself flying through the air. She landed on her ass on the ground, her chain falling in a neat pile in her lap. She looked up to see the remaining fully mobile machine bearing down on her, its gun aimed right at her head. She rolled and it missed.

She was in the process of jumping to her feet when the entire machine blew up, covering her in a sludge of monster guts, seawater and hydraulic fluid. She wasn't vain enough to believe that it had gotten so scared it simply blew itself up rather than face her. She turned around to see one of the ship's skiffs hovering in the air above them.

"You're welcome," Levits said in her earpiece.

"I would have killed it," RJ said insistently, as she rose to her feet, dusting herself off.

"Would it absolutely kill you to say thank you, RJ?"

"It might, why risk it?" RJ answered with a grin. She wiped the goo off her face with her hand. It had the same consistency as the cryo-chamber goo, and a nose hair-singeing stench.

"You want me to blow that one?" Levits asked of the damaged one that was still lurching around.

"No, I'd like to see if we can catch one of these slimy things alive and check it out." The machine fell over as if on cue, and the natives grabbed clubs, ran in, and beat on the globe till it burst and the creature inside died. "Or not."

"Hah!" Topaz screamed into her ear through his mouthpiece. "See? I was right! Slimy tentacled ocean-dwelling aliens."

"What about the others?" RJ asked, wanting to slap him for the temporary ringing in her ear.

"I was still right."

"If you say so. Levits, return to the ship."

"Are you sure? That could just be the first wave."

"They were the test," RJ said. "Now they know we can kill them, they'll have to process the data before they send more troops."

"You're thinking like a human, RJ, and those things aren't even humanoid, which of course proves that I was right, I'd like to remind you," Topaz said.

"In my experience all beings which wage wars do it in a similar fashion. All creatures that hunt, hunt in a similar fashion. If I'm wrong you can always come back and save me again, all the while singing out choruses of how right you were. I don't plan to stay here anyway. We'll meet you back at the ship."

"Okay," Levits said, and RJ watched as the ship flew away.

One of the natives walked up to her and yelled a bunch of stuff she couldn't understand. However she could feel that he was thankful, excited, and again there was the overriding emotional swell of hope. They had easily defeated these people's enemies, and so they had hope that they might finally overcome their oppressors.

The rest of the tribe rushed into the village and started hastily packing things. Here was the answer to why they hadn't chosen to rebuild in the city, why their village looked so temporary. They were nomadic. Not because they were following the feeding areas, but because they were always in hiding from their enemies.

RJ smiled. This wasn't so different from home after all.

She grabbed the one she assumed by his posture—and the fact that he seemed to be barking orders at the others—was their leader. He instinctively swung and struck her. She let him go and he jumped away, swinging his hand in the air.

"Sorry," she said, and assumed from his emotions and his posture that he returned the apology. "You," she indicated with a sweep of her hand him and all his people. "Follow." She walked away, then stopped, pointed in the direction she wanted to go and then at herself. "Me."

He nodded and hollered something to his people. They all stopped in their tracks and looked from him to her and back again. He spit something back, pointing at the creatures in the suits they had just killed. They all made a gesture with their right hand, placing it in front of them with palms up, which she assumed meant, all right if you say so.

"Poley!" she yelled and he ran over. "Take samples from the creatures, and make notes and images of the interior and exterior of the machines."

"RJ . . . You have photographic memory . . ."

"They aren't for me, they're for Topaz and Levits; and get our packs and all our gear. The less the enemy knows about us the better."

He nodded and went about the task. She would have liked to have taken one of the machines back to the ship, but was afraid that not even she and Poley would be able to drag one fast enough to avoid any aftershock guard the creatures might send. What she had told Levits and Topaz was true, but depending on what equipment the creatures might have, they might be able to assess damage and make plans much faster than, say, a Reliance crew.

The leader walked up beside her and indicated that his people were ready to follow. RJ held her hand out, palm upward, and took off walking. The others followed. Poley collected his samples and their gear and followed the last native.

There were a hundred and three of the natives in all. Since the ship had been a troop carrier there was plenty of room in the cargo bay for the natives' things, and plenty of room in the ship's quarters to house them.

They seemed impressed but not particularly in awe of any of the technology on the ship, so RJ assumed that they did, in fact, know their heritage. No doubt they had been forced to live the way they were because of the creatures.

Of course the million-dollar question was, where did the creatures come from? It was a sure bet this city hadn't been built by or for them.

She was learning the native's language quickly, because of what she was, but not quickly enough to suit her. So she grabbed the leader and took him to a viewscreen. She turned it on and he was excited but not shocked, thus confirming what she already believed to be true. They didn't have technology, but they knew what it was.

She programmed it for a picture of a man. "Man, human, him," she said pointing at the image.

The man nodded that he understood, and then gave her ten words for the male of their species.

One of the natives, a male, walked up to them and spit out some words. The leader nodded then looked at RJ. When he saw she was watching, he touched his mouth and then his belly.

RJ held her hand palm up and turned to Poley. "Poley, take some of the natives out of the ship with you and allow them to get food. Then take them to the kitchen and show them how to use the cooking appliances."

Poley nodded.

"RJ . . . Are you sure it's such a good idea to have these natives running amok on our ship?" Levits asked. "We know nothing about them."

"Like for instance RJ, how do we know who the bad guy really is?" Topaz asked in a harsh whisper.

"Are you agreeing with me?" Levits asked in mock surprise.

"Yes, go write it in your little calendar and put a gold star by it." Topaz turned away from him and glared at RJ. "How do you know that these people aren't the bad guys, and the guys in the suits aren't the good guys?"

"I don't really give a shit," RJ said, annoyed that they were taking time away from her language lesson. Until she learned their language she wasn't going to be able to learn everything she needed to know about this planet, these people, and their slimy ocean dwelling enemy.

"Are you serious?" Topaz asked in disbelief. "These people might have been the aggressors in this altercation. This attack might have been in retaliation."

"True, but those things are slimy and icky," RJ said in a coldly logical way.

"Speaking of which," Levits made a face, "were you planning on washing that shit off soon? You smell like six months of stale butt cheese."

"What does six months of stale butt cheese smell like?" RJ laughed.

"I'm guessing it smells the way you smell right now."

Topaz was outraged. "I . . . I can't believe you, either of you. Would you listen to what you said? You're going to condemn an entire race because it's ugly, different. Don't you even care how they feel, why they attacked?"

"No, I really don't. Now if you would both leave me alone so I could pick this man's language from his brain, then I could get a bath and find out whether or not we're aiding and abetting the bad guys a lot sooner."

"If nothing else, leaving you alone will get me further from the stench. If you need me, I'll be locked on the bridge in case the natives turn hostile," Levits said with a smile and walked off. Topaz just stood there with his arms crossed giving RJ a stern look.

"Isn't there something you've lost that you should go look for?" RJ asked with a crooked grin.

Topaz left apparently in a huff, mumbling, "Is there any real distinction between stale butt cheese and fresh butt cheese?" When he was no doubt half way down the hall he yelled out, "Don't think you've heard the end of this, RJ!"

She didn't really know whether he was talking about the whole alien thing or butt cheese, and she didn't really care; both were equally irrelevant to her at the moment.

Chapter Eleven

It hadn't been a decision she had come to easily. Jessica had gone to the Argy first, offering them continued support on their front if they would stop their forward push against the Reliance. Which she guessed showed the extent of her hate and distrust of the Reliance, because she'd known the Argy were going to laugh in her face—which they did. Jessica decided right then and there that she'd make them damn sorry that they had.

As far as the Argy were concerned they had the forward momentum and they saw no reason to back off while they were winning. They told Jessica as much and even insinuated that when they'd beaten down the Reliance they'd be coming after the New Alliance. They might as well have just come right out and said it, because Jessica never had any doubt that they would.

The Reliance had asked for a personal meeting with her and a New Alliance delegation, stating that it would be detrimental to have a meeting over monitors as any signal might be picked up by the Argy.

This made sense to Jessica but smelled of a trap, so she picked the where—a space station in orbit around Seritompia—the when and the how. Her "delegation," much to the agitation of the Reliance delegation, consisted of Gerald, four other Fourers, and a fully loaded battle fleet, which came in slightly after her ship had docked at the space station.

The Reliance officials had threatened to call off the meeting, or worse yet call up their own battle fleet. In the huge, very loud argument that ensued between Jessica and the Reliance liaison, Jessica explained that she wasn't about to come into a pit full of vipers without some snake charmers. After several more minutes of screaming, the Reliance lackeys admitted they had no real recourse, and the summit meeting was called into session.

Not that the Reliance seemed to understand the real situation in the slightest. They mostly wanted to flex some political muscle and watch her cave in to all their demands under the guise of "saving humanity from the alien menace."

She wasn't into playing their game. She was far removed from her days as a desktop general. She was a battle general now, the kind that fought with her fists instead of her keyboard, and she found that she no longer had any patience at all for their vast store of bureaucratic bullshit.

"You wouldn't have called a temporary truce or asked for this summit if you truly thought you could defeat or even contain the Argy without us." Jessica all but spat on the Reliance Governor who sat across the huge conference table from her. His statement to the effect that if the New Alliance would surrender to them they could reunite the Reliance and defeat the Argy had been exactly what she expected of them, but still not what she wanted to hear.

"I had forgotten how completely arrogant and equally stupid is the Reliance indoctrinated brain. We will not ever go backwards. We will go forward. The Reliance will either become the New Alliance, or there will be no alliance between my people and yours. Your society is no better than what the Argys offer if they should win. They enslave the people; you enslave the people. There is no advantage for us in choosing you over them. We already have an agreement with them. Our proposal would bring hope back to the people of the Reliance. It would give freedom to all human kind. It would give the soldiers something worth fighting for."

The governor got to his feet. His added height didn't intimidate Jessica in the least, and she proved it by keeping her seat and looking disinterested as he started to bellow, even going so far as to yawn and pretend to be looking at her fingernails. "Your proposal is preposterous! How dare you assume that you know what is right for the whole of the Reliance? The Reliance has been in control for hundreds of years . . ."

"And humankind has been shackled for all that time," Jessica reminded. "The Reliance jerked freewill from the people and made the human race slaves to a handful of bureaucrats at the top . . . You people, actually. So is it any wonder that you would rather risk the total absorption of our race by the Argy than share your power and freedom with the masses? It's a lose, lose proposition for you. Either way people like you become extinct—just one more work unit trying to make its way in the great scheme of the cosmos. I imagine the thought that you might have to climb out of your lofty towers and come down here with the rest of us terrifies you."

"There must be freedom for all, the Elite and the work unit alike. All must profit from the society or it is flawed," Gerald added from where he sat on Jessica's right.

"And are there truly no problems on the two planets you currently hold?" the governor asked in a smug voice.

When she thought back on it later, she determined that that had been the moment she lost all pretense of patience with him and the whole lot. "Show me one of the many propaganda disks you've made showing how rough we in the New Alliance held territories have it, and I'll shove it up your ass," Jessica hissed out, and now she stood to her full height—which put her about four inches above the governor, so that she was looking down at him, which in her estimation was exactly as things should be. "The only problems we have are caused by the things the Reliance did, or are still doing. Morale in the Reliance, both among the work units and the military, is at an all-time low because everyone is fed up. In spite of the crap you keep feeding them about us, they still see us as a viable alternative to the way you're making them live, so what does that say about the Reliance? It's a relic, and its time—the time it never should have had in the first place—is over. Who knows what has made this generation different from past ones, but the people as a whole are finally past believing that their lives are as good as they could be, that they are better off than they should expect. They are finally looking around them and seeing that some people live in golden towers and eat caviar while others live in dung heaps and eat garbage. This generation wants more than a subsistence life and mates that have been picked for them by a computer. They want to be able to choose their own destinies."

"If history has told us nothing else, it has told us that such systems of government are doomed to failure," one of the council members said.

"Give the masses free will and you guarantee anarchy," another added. "The Earth's history is filled with such governments, all of which were doomed to failure."

"They were doomed to failure because the rich and powerful used them for their own gain." Her voice rose in pitch as she continued. "What I have learned from history is that the rich are inherently evil, and that evil people will willingly sell their governments, their families, and their people out completely to stay in power, to stay rich, and become richer. The governments deteriorated because it became impossible for an honest, hard-working man to run for political office. They deteriorated because the people who cared only for making themselves and their friends even richer bought their way into public office. They created the Reliance. The New Alliance has made laws that will keep that from happening because you people don't give a damn about anyone but yourselves, your comfort, your authority, your stuff, and having more stuff than the guy you're sitting next to in this room today."

The governor looked at her and smiled a smug, arrogant smile, one that said that he somehow thought he was winning the argument; he obviously thought that something she had just said would be her undoing. And that was finally the point at which, having already lost all patience with them, she decided they just weren't worth messing with. She jumped up on the table and kicked the governor in his smug smile. His face collapsed on the toe of her boot, and he wasn't smiling anymore. She kicked his body, oozing gray matter and blood, off her foot and watched with glee as the falling body flipped his chair over backwards and fell to sprawl with a thud on the floor.

No one in the chamber had any weapons, but Jessica had been allowed to keep her chain mostly because she had refused to take it off, and no one had thought it was a good idea to push the issue. Besides, the Reliance goons simply didn't recognize it as a weapon. She pulled the chain off her body even as Gerald and the other Fourers jumped free of their chairs. Gerald jumped up on the table beside her as the others went to guard the exits, having picked up their chairs to use as weapons.

Jessica almost laughed; they must look ridiculous to the twenty high-ranking Reliance officers sitting around the table. Six aliens fighting for the rights of a race that none of them looked like they had even spawned from. There they stood, alone against the masses, and though no one in the room was armed there were armed guards just outside the door. She glanced at Gerald, fully expecting to see an I can't believe you did that look on his face, but he just smiled at her and the only readable emotion coming from him was excitement. He was ready to fight; apparently he had been just as tired of all the talking as she had been.

The doors opened and the armed guards ran in, two from each door. The chairs in the Fourers hands slammed into the guards' bodies and they went sprawling. As each guard went down, there was a Fourer taking his weapons, and very soon there were fully armed Fourers guarding each door.

Before those assembled had a chance to even make a run for the exits, Jessica stomped her foot hard on the table, spraying everyone in the room with gray matter and successfully getting their attention.

"All right . . . here's the deal. I'm going to talk, and you're going to listen . . ."

"More troops," one of the Fourers announced.

"Stand down, let them in." A dozen armed guards poured into the room, too stupid to realize they now had the enemy at their back. They could have just killed them all and made a run for it, but that wasn't the plan.

Jessica looked not at any of the governors or senators, but at the guards. "Get the fuck out of here! Don't you idiots get it yet?" She pulled up her shirt and pointed to a piece of tape over her heart. "If my heart stops beating for even a second, my armada opens fire and this entire station gets turned into space dust."

After no more than a moment's hesitation, the guards left quickly and the doors closed behind them.

"Now, where was I?" Jessica seemed to think for a minute, then she nodded. "I'm going to talk, and you're going to listen. You've all had a chance to read our proposal . . ."

"You can't seriously believe that we will ever willingly hand over control of the entire Reliance to . . ." The chain smacked the senator from Sheows in the head, and he fell to the floor dead.

"I said!" she yelled, "that I'm going to talk, and that you're going to listen."

And so they did.

The proposal was simple. The Reliance would change its name, its policies, and its leadership. It would dissolve, and the New Alliance would stand in its place. Not too surprisingly, the Reliance was not quick to accept the proposal.

Jessica, Gerald, and the New Alliance armada had left the space station knowing that their "proposal" would be the fodder for all manners of jokes around the water coolers of Reliance offices the empire over. Some would consider it a wasted effort. It would probably never make it into the history records. Only Jessica and her team knew the true significance of the meeting.

The Reliance would no doubt go over the disks of the transcript of that meeting a dozen times, and no one would ever realize that anything of any significance had happened, because the equipment wouldn't have picked it up except as background noise.

But Jessica had heard it, loud and clear. One of the governors had whispered to one of the others that they would have a lot of explaining to do when they got to Raha.

" . . . so?" Gerald said with a shrug when she told him.

Jessica sighed impatiently. "He said they'd have some explaining to do when they got to Ra—ha." She said it more slowly this time so that he might understand the significance.

He gave her a helpless look and shrugged, "I still don't understand. It seems to me that the entire trip was a huge waste of our time and energy. They only listened to you because they were afraid not to, and they didn't argue with you for the same reason. They have no intention of taking our proposal seriously. We should have just killed them all and blown up the station . . ."

"All right, dumbass." Jessica's sigh this time showed that she had lost all patience with him, which made him smile. She smiled back in spite of herself and said, "I don't suppose that I should expect you to be able to read my mind."

"Especially since your brain was created to run like a computer," he reminded.

"Fair enough. All right, he said they'd have some explaining to do when they got to Raha. The council of the twelve has been in hiding. Now we know they have moved them from Seritompia to Raha, because who else could they need to "explain" things to?"

Gerald shrugged. He wasn't afraid of her; it was one of the things she liked about him. "So what, RJ? Raha is a whole planet . . ."

"It's a moon," she corrected.

"It's one of Trinidad's moons, and the smallest of Trinidad's moons is bigger than Earth."

"I planted a tracer on the idiots' ship. That should narrow it down a bit."

"All right, let's say we're able to find them. Then what? They won't listen to us any better than those assholes did."

"We aren't going to talk to them, you idiot!" Jessica jumped to her feet and started pacing back and forth. "We're going to assassinate them. That's how the Reliance came to power, through a series of assassinations. It seems only fitting that they lose power the same way. We do to them exactly what they did to Earth's last governments. We're just going to do a better job than they did." She stopped pacing and looked at him. "We kill all their key people and secretly replace them with our own people. We take over the same way they did, by subverting them internally."

Gerald nodded and smiled. "It's a superb plan."

"Thank you," she said. Any anger she'd had for him being washed away as she looked at him. She smiled, walked over to him, sat in his lap, and wrapped her arms around his neck. If he was startled in the slightest it didn't show in his expression. "I'm very bored, Gerald," she said with a pout.

He wrapped his arms around her. "There's nothing much to do when you're in space."

"You'd noticed that, too." Jessica kissed him, and he kissed her right back. She looked at him and for a moment considered what she was doing. She'd wanted him for a long time, but had purposely avoided physical contact because she cared for him. She also knew, because she had felt it, that he cared for her. She started to push gently away from him, but he pulled her closer.

"What are you afraid of?" he asked in a whisper.

She started to give him some flip answer, but found the truth spilling from her mouth. "I want you."

"And I want you."

"You don't understand, Gerald," she said in a voice that sounded suddenly foreign to her. "I actually want you, not just sex. I want to be with you because I like you, I care for you, and I like that you care for me. It could get very complicated."

"Life is filled with complications. To be enjoyed life has to be truly lived, chances taken, and obstacles overcome. I have desired you for a very long time, and I have cared about you longer than that."

"Then why didn't you . . . Why didn't you say something, make a pass, anything?"

"Why should I have to? I know you're an empath, I know you know how I feel, so surely if you wanted something with me you would make the first move. You know, like you are right now," he said with a laugh. She liked his laugh, and she loved his smile. She kissed him again, and he kissed her back, this time a long, hot, passion-filled kiss, and any logical thought she might have had left her brain.

"Is it true what they say about bald men?" she asked with a sly smile.

"They don't call me Gerald 'le Baton' for nothing."

Jessica had known that because of their hybrid status and generations of selective breeding the Fourers were genetically superior and stronger than humans, but she had never guessed just how much so.

Gerald hadn't had Zark's stamina, of course, but he'd made up for it in technique that the GSH had been sadly lacking. Jessica couldn't remember ever feeling quite so at peace, quite so calm. She'd never before felt so very "in the moment." It was as if nothing else mattered, not the past, not the future.

Her back was pressed against his stomach, his head was resting on hers, and he whispered in her ear, "I love you, RJ."

Suddenly the moment was shattered and the peace fled her mind as the past flooded in and seemed to twist like a knife in her heart. He was her man, her lover, not RJ's. He didn't even know RJ.

She wasn't RJ.

She untangled herself from him and jumped from bed. She grabbed her coveralls off the floor where they'd been discarded and pulled them on, suddenly hating the vulnerable feeling she had been reveling in only moments before. She needed to be dressed, and she needed to be dressed right then. She actually tore her coveralls in the process, but she didn't care.

"What's wrong, RJ?" Gerald asked, sitting up in bed.

"That!" Jessica screamed. "That's what's wrong. Quit calling me that. That's not me. That's not my name!"

She sat down on the end of the bed, put her head in her hands, and for some reason she couldn't understand, she started to cry.

Gerald moved onto his knees behind her and put his arms around her. He rested his chin on her head. "I'm sorry."

"It's not you," Jessica cried. "I love you. It's me. I'm what's wrong. I'm always wrong."

"You're perfect to me," he whispered.

"You don't know what I am, who I am," she said accusingly.

"Yes I do," he whispered. "I know just what and who you are, and I love you."

Jessica sniffled and dried her eyes with her hands. He did know her. After all, it was just a name. It didn't matter, did it? If you called a tomato an orange it was still a tomato. People didn't look at it and say, "Oh, look! An orange!" They saw a tomato. She had told them all she was RJ, but she was still Jessica Kirk. They were still seeing Jessica Kirk. She was doing good, changing the galaxy. Doing the work RJ had started, true, but she was doing it all because it had become her crusade, too. She was still herself, even if they all thought she was RJ. Even if she was doing what RJ would have done.

RJ's friends had become her friends, her allies Jessica's allies. Gerald didn't love RJ; he didn't even know her. He loved her, Jessica. So he'd called her RJ. It didn't matter because that's who he thought he loved. He didn't know her real name and she couldn't tell him because she needed his love, and if he knew what she had been, he might not love her at all.

No one in the New Alliance could ever love Jessica Kirk. She was the Bogey Man in the tales they told their children—the horrible beast who had destroyed their "Capitol" and almost killed their leader.

That was the real pain. That was what really hurt. For a minute that past, her past, had been gone as if it had never been, and then he had spoken her name and it was back with a vengeance. No matter how hard she tried, she never seemed to be able to get away from what she had done. But for one bright shining moment she hadn't been anyone but a woman in love with a man.

"Are you all right?" Gerald asked.

Jessica nodded silently. She pushed gently away from him, stood up and took the coveralls off again. She moved to lie on the bed and looked up at him where he still knelt, patiently waiting for her to decide what she wanted.

"Make me forget again."

They had been gone for three months, and Jessica fully expected a grand reception, but not even Dax showed up to greet her at the docks. It was only then that she realized how tight-lipped everyone had seemed when they'd arrived in Alsterase, how sad they had felt.

She instantly knew something was wrong, terribly wrong. Something so bad they had decided not to tell her while she'd been out.

She took off at a run that even Gerald couldn't keep up with.

"RJ, what's wrong?" he called after her.

She didn't answer, just burst through the doors of the old prison, and kept going. There was the usual hustle and bustle she had come to expect from the base, but there was a somberness, a silence that was totally uncommon for the place. The wave of grief coming from them all was so strong that she felt like her brain was on fire. She quickly raised her shields.

"What the hell has happened!" she demanded in a roar, as she came to a dead stop in the middle of the room.

Her answer was more silence. They just stared at her, some of them started to cry, others being unable to hold her gaze turned away.

Dax came running into the room. He ran to her, and she knelt down to be at the right height to embrace him when he fell sobbing into her arms. Even through her shields she could feel his deep grief, but she was so happy to see him safe that she immediately calmed. "What has happened?" she asked softly.

Dax just cried louder and buried his face in her shoulder. She looked at a man standing near them and demanded with her stare that he answer her question.

"Diana is dead," he said solemnly.

"No!" Jessica felt the word pulled from her lips. It couldn't be true, it just couldn't be. Diana wasn't old, she wasn't sick. There was no battle here. Diana was her friend, and she was Dax's mother. She couldn't be dead. It was a lie. Except . . . she had never seen Dax like this. She got to her feet carrying the thirteen-year-old child with her, holding him close, rocking him as if he were a baby. Her own tears started rolling down her face. "Where's Mickey?" she asked.

"On the wall," the man answered.

Jessica nodded, and still carrying the boy she headed for the wall. She walked out the door that was opened for her and saw Mickey standing just staring at the city across the bay. She walked quietly up to his back, though she was sure he could hear the boy's crying. She didn't know what to say, so she just stood there for a long time trying to comfort Dax and staring at Mickey's back, waiting for words that weren't coming because her own grief was so new.

When RJ had killed Jack it had been like this, totally unexpected. At the time losing Jack had been the hardest thing she'd ever had to deal with. Later she had realized that he hadn't really been as important to her as she had thought he was. She had believed at the time that she had truly and deeply loved him. In all the years since then, she'd realized that at that time she'd had no idea what real love even was. Now she did, and this loss burned in her soul. She could see Diana's gentle smile, hear her warm laughter, feel the love she generated whenever she looked at her husband, her son, her friend. The idea that she was never going to see, hear or feel her friend again was more than she could stand, and she could only imagine what it must be like for Mickey and Dax.

And yet part of her—a part she instantly hated—was counting her loss the way she would in a battle, by who was more important to her. Dax was alive, which was most important. Mickey was all right, which was her second concern. Diana being dead was horrible, but of the three the most bearable loss in the army of her heart.

Mickey didn't even turn to face them. Maybe he was just so consumed with his own grief that he couldn't stand to deal with anyone else's. Or maybe he just didn't want them to see his grief. Maybe he needed to keep it to himself.

"How?" Jessica wasn't even sure she had vocalized the word until Mickey started to answer her slowly without turning around.

"She went swimming." His voice caught in his throat and he cleared it. "She got caught in the undertow. By the time they got her out it was too late." He started crying then. "She was just swimming. She loved to swim, and she knew what she was doing. I don't know how she could have screwed up so badly." He turned then and hugged her legs, which might have been comical under different circumstances.

"It's not right," Jessica cried. "It can't be. She can't just be dead. We'll clone her, that's what we'll do, make a new her. We'll bring her back to us."

Dax and Mickey were just looking at her then like she'd gone mad, and she instantly knew why. Mickey released her, and she sank down to sit on the wall, drawing Dax closer to her. Mickey sat beside her and patted her back, and she realized that she was now crying louder than either of them.

"That was crazy. I know that was wrong, I'm sorry." Jessica couldn't seem to be able to help herself, sometimes crazy things just spewed forth from her mouth. "It wouldn't be her. It would just be something horrible that would look like her, but wouldn't actually be her. It wouldn't be the same. It could never be the same. It would be worse."

It would be like me. It would look the same, but it wouldn't have Diana's memories, her loves and hates. It would be a horrible reminder of just what they had all lost. Every time I saw it I'd want to kill it for pretending to be my friend. You can't just replace people. But I did. I replaced RJ, and none of them are the wiser, so the contempt isn't there, but if they knew I was an imposter . . . But they don't know and they never will. I'm not RJ, so what? I love them as much, maybe even more than she would have. I'm here for them and she's not. I'm here to help them through this. They need me, I'm here, she's not and neither is Diana. They left, but I never will.

She bent and kissed the top of Dax's head, and then leaned over and kissed the top of Mickey's as well. "We'll get through this together. We'll survive this, too."

Mickey nodded silently.

Gerald walked out onto the wall then and stood silently by the door. She saw the glint of tears in his eyes. He just stood there for her, for them, letting them all know that he was there and that he cared, but not infringing on their grief. Jessica loved him all the more in that moment and made a pact that she wasn't going to be bereaved of him, of any of them, not if she could help it.

Chapter Twelve

It was a planet distant from their own and populated with beings different from themselves who had basically made most of the same mistakes that humankind had, and a few more that humanity hadn't even dreamed of.

It didn't take RJ long to learn their language and only a little longer before she was reading over their written texts. The written records had been well maintained and were how the humanoids of this planet had kept and remembered their past so completely.

Just as she had suspected, the Abornie, as they called themselves, had once been a huge and thriving civilization, highly technologically advanced. But as Earth had done, they'd allowed strange religious practices to influence better judgment and logic. They had badly overpopulated their planet, to the point that famine was imminent. They had polluted their world to a truly unbearable, hardly believable level. Farmland and forests had continued to be gobbled up for housing till there was very little room to grow crops, and pollution had dangerously depleted their oxygen supply.

Whereas humans had sought to leave the planet and pushed their research in that direction to cure their overpopulation and pollution problems, the Abornie had turned to genetics. They began by creating highly nutritious plant life that could thrive in poor, almost nonexistent, and often toxically polluted soil. They had turned to the oceans that they had already badly polluted to find the raw materials they needed to continue to build and maintain their cities, vehicles, and in short to keep their way of life going.

Like humans, it had never dawned on them to just simply stop breeding like flies and conserve their resources instead of going full out to deplete one source and then go find another. Taking care of the planet, learning to waste less and recycle more, had never even occurred to them as an option. Humans had trashed Earth out till they were teetering on the edge of extinction; the threat of that and war with the alien menace had helped the Reliance to come to power. The Reliance had cured those problems, but the cost had been the enslavement of the human race, mind, body and soul, and the conquering and plundering of numerous other worlds.

Rather than change their ways, the Abornie, like humans, had just found another way to continue doing just what they always had. They found another resource to exploit.

However, raping the oceans hadn't been as easy as they had expected it to be. Farming and mining the ocean had turned out to be dangerous and less than cost effective. So they again turned to genetic engineering for answers. There had been a large octopus-type creature that dwelt in the planet's oceans. It was slow and not terribly dexterous, but not unintelligent. Geneticists spliced the creature's DNA with that of their own and a half a dozen other creatures and soon had a semi-intelligent underwater work force. They called these creatures Ocupods. The Abornie had created the suits the creatures wore of a strong uncorrodable metal alloy they called Zspun. The creatures were trained to carry out the simple, mostly mindless tasks of digging up ore from the oceans' depths and carrying it in buckets up out of the water. They were trained to bring crustaceans and shrimp from the oceans' depths. The Abornie basically used them as slave labor.

RJ had just finished reading this to Topaz when he exclaimed, "See? The Abornie are the bad guys. I always wondered why in all those horrid movies it was always the slimy ugly guys that got the bad rap. Why couldn't something cute and fluffy be evil? Some of the most beautiful women I have ever known have been the biggest bitches, yourself included. Nothing personal. How come we never saw, say, evil Ewoks? No, it's always the slimy tentacled guy who is evil to his gooey core. Now finally here's the proof, the cute guys are evil. Ha!"

"So I guess you'd like to trade Oxania, the Abornie girl we all know you've been boinking, for a slimy tentacled lover," RJ said with a laugh.

Topaz made a face.

"That's why the slimy, ugly guy is always the bad guy, Topaz," RJ said as she continued to read, being able to talk and read at the same time, which annoyed all hell out of anyone she happened to be talking to. "We can't relate to the Ocupods. We don't understand their needs or their desires, any more than they can understand ours. There is no common ground on which we can stand to try to understand the others' needs, no basis on which to negotiate. Their needs and what makes them happy aren't even close to the same as ours."

RJ read on. The Abornie had used electric impulses to drive their newly created slaves, to train and communicate with them. For a hundred years the creatures had carried out these simple tasks even as the Abornie continued to pollute and overuse their planet. Then something unforeseen had happened. They had detected a huge meteor heading their way. Since they had put no effort or cash into it, there were no spaceships that could do anything more than carry satellites up into orbit around their planet/moon, which they called Frionia.

There was hope that the larger planet they orbited would drag the meteor off its course, but not much. Early calculations put Frionia between the planet Humongous and the meteor when it came into their space. There were a few government installations that had been built for just such a disaster across their world, but they had been constructed to hold only a few thousand of the chosen of their race. The government had avoided panic in the streets and a struggle for room in the bunkers by covering up their findings and leaving the general public uninformed while the "chosen" moved to the safety of the bunkers.

The meteor had broken up in their atmosphere, sending thousands of huge segments of the rock plummeting into the surface of the moon. It was as if the entire surface of Frionia had been sprayed with high impact missiles. The worst damage had been concentrated on one side of the planet, which had been far from a good thing. The planet had tilted on its axis, which had in turn triggered massive tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, continental shifts and earthquakes. The volcanoes had spewed noxious gases and clouds of ash, which mixed with the dust particles caused by the meteor's impact. Any living thing on the surface that hadn't been killed in the initial chaos had died in the years of darkness that followed.

Only those in the few bunkers that had survived intact had lived to propagate.

And the Ocupods. The oceans had been barely damaged in the meteor shower. The subsequent darkness, the drop in ocean temperatures, the continental shifts, earthquakes and volcanoes erupting hadn't affected the Ocupods much. They had been designed to see and work in the ocean's depths, in the darkness, and the cold. Even eruptions and quakes occurred in the ocean with much greater frequency that on the landmasses, so they were able to cope. In the years that followed the destruction wrought by the meteor the Ocupods thrived. And there was something the Abornie scientists hadn't taken into account when they created these underwater slaves; the original animal had a communal intelligence.

The Ocupods started to make their own civilization under the ocean's surface, not that any of the Abornie had actually seen it. After the attacks began, some of the Abornie speculated that without the work that the Abornie kept them busy with, the Ocupods had become motivated to create a culture of their own.

When the dust cleared and sun could actually touch the planet's surface again, the ice finally melted. The genetically engineered plants came out of their deep slumber and once again started growing to cover the surface of the planet. Life on the surface once again became possible, and the remnants of the Abornie people came up out of their bunkers and started to rebuild. They reintroduced to the planet's surface the animals they had kept alive with them underground, and they immediately started to thrive.

The Ocupods somehow detected machinery on the surface, no doubt because the Abornie DNA had given them a heightened sense of touch, and being as big as they were they could feel vibrations, maybe even feel sonic wavelengths. They put on the suits the Abornie had made for them and went to the surface to check it out. They saw the activity, and no doubt having some race memory, or maybe even a language of their own, deduced that the Abornie would once again overpopulate the surface, pollute the ocean the Ocupods lived in, and force them to work.

So they attacked.

And they had continued to attack every time the Abornie tried to use any sort of technology ever since that time. Any machine they came across they tore apart. They had deduced, of course, that as long as there was no such technology, the Abornie couldn't invade their world and enslave them. As long as they could force the Abornie to live a primitive existence they would never be a threat.

"Well?" Topaz asked, seeing the look on her face.

"The Ocupods, as much as it pains me to say it, are only trying to protect themselves from falling under Abornie rule again. They're simpleminded creatures and most probably don't even know why they continue to stop the Abornie every time they start any sort of machine. It's probably become an instinct for them. They detect any sort of high tech activity and they attack out of fear," RJ said thoughtfully.

"So why attack the village?"

"Because our transmitter was in the pack."

"All right, better question," Levits said as he walked into the room. "Why didn't they, and why haven't they attacked the ship? The Abornie have been here for two weeks, and nothing."

RJ looked thoughtful, she shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe they can't figure out what we are, and whether we're an enemy or not. Maybe they're just flat afraid, and maybe they're smarter than we think and they're checking us out even as we speak, preparing to make an attack. Look at it this way; these are most probably not the only Abornie on the planet. No doubt there are pockets of Abornie all across the surface of this rather large moon. The same would be true of the Ocupods. They could all be coming here in the water, forming such a large group that they can't help but win. That's what I'd be doing if I had thousands of followers and a communal intelligence. The chicken shit equipment on this ship doesn't seem to be able to monitor underwater activity, so they could be grouping underwater and we'd have no way of knowing."

"I'll take what's hidden behind door number two, Marty," Topaz said. "I like door number two." He got up and took off for no apparent reason. Levits sat in the chair Topaz had vacated.

"If they don't like technology . . . Well, on this world, on most worlds actually, you don't get much more high-tech than an interstellar space ship," Levits said. "So if I were the slimy, tentacled bastards, I'd want to take this fucker out."

RJ nodded. "But they'd want to make sure that we couldn't retaliate, because they know we can kill them easily. Since they have a communal brain they'd all know exactly what we did and how." She fell silent again, looking thoughtful.

"All right, what are you thinking?"

"I'm wondering if they have missiles."

"Do they have missiles?" RJ asked the leader, Taral, in his own language.

"Yes," he answered.

"Well?" both Topaz and Levits demanded. Neither of them had even come close to mastering the most rudimentary words of the Abornie language. In fact, Topaz had gone so far as to say that when they spoke it sounded like gargling snot to him.

"He said yes," RJ informed them. She started to ask him another question, but Topaz jumped out of his seat and yelled, "Beautiful! Fucking beautiful!"

"Is he going to hurt me?" Taral asked, holding up his hands as if to shield himself from Topaz.

"No, he's just crazy," RJ explained. Then she turned to Topaz and said in the Reliance tongue. "Sit down and shut up, or leave. You aren't helping."

Topaz grumbled something that not even RJ could make out, then flopped back into his chair.

RJ smiled, momentarily amused because the sound Topaz had made sounded a whole lot like gargling snot. She sobered and looked at Taral again. "How big are their missiles?"

"What?" He obviously didn't understand her question.

"How much damage do they do?"

"You saw," he said, and made a loud noise and spread his hands to imitate the blasting apart of an object.

"That's not a missile," RJ said shaking her head. "That was just a plasma cannon." Well, she'd thought she knew their language pretty well until she was trying to explain something they might not even have words for.

"Well?" Topaz and Levits asked again.

"He thinks the plasma cannon is a missile," RJ said.

"Then they don't have missiles," Levits said in a relieved tone.

"No one said that." She flipped on the monitor on the wall and ran her fingers over the keyboard. A picture of a missile appeared, and then it flew through the air and blew up a mock ship. It was a training film. She turned to Taral. "Do they have something like that?"

Taral's eyes were large. "No," he said. "Nothing like that, but with something like that we could kill them."

RJ sighed, relieved but still troubled.

"What?" Levits and Topaz demanded.

"The Ocupods don't have missiles." She was speaking in the Reliance tongue. "This bloodthirsty bastard wants us to get him some missiles to blow them up."

"We don't have any missiles, just some lasers and the plasma cannons on the ship and on the skiff, and probably not nearly enough power to run them for long enough to fight a huge battalion of those horrid metal spider things," Levits said.

"I'm sure we could find the power, and build better weapons, given time. That's hardly the problem." RJ was upset, and she didn't try to hide it.

"What would the real problem be then, RJ? Those really creepy things could be grouping in the thousands to attack us even now. You said so yourself." Levits remained a bit confused by RJ's demeanor.

"Those really creepy things are the only thing that has kept the Abornie from going right back to destroying this planet. In all the books that I've read since I've been here, their books in their words, nowhere did they show any remorse over what they had done to their world. Nowhere did they take responsibility for what the Ocupods have become. It's as if they totally fail to realize that their actions and the actions of their ancestors are directly related to their lot in life today.

"I'm afraid that if we take away their only enemy they will go right back to doing what caused the problems of their world in the first place. It's the first real moral dilemma I've come across in battle since the day I decided I wasn't going to kill unarmed civilians and turned on the Reliance."

"We have to live here, RJ," Levits reminded. "Those things, they don't think or feel the way that we do, you said so yourself." He seemed to be hell-bent on reminding her of everything she'd said as if she had somehow forgotten, which RJ found more than a little annoying. "The Abornie . . . they're like us. They deserve to have something better than a minimal life, living in the jungles like primitives. Being hunted down and killed anytime they try to better their lives. The Ocupods are evil. You only have to look at them to know that." Levits shot Topaz a heated look, no doubt blaming him for RJ's dilemma.

"The Abornie created that evil, maybe they deserve to live under its rule," RJ said.

"I can't even believe you're suggesting that. You, who fought for human freedom. You, who put freedom above all else." Levits stood up and started pacing. "Do I even have to remind you that if we don't find compatible energy of some kind that we have no chance of leaving this planet? And then there's the added problem of finding our own space. The fate of these people—and let's call them people because that's what they are to us—is the same as ours. Whatever happens to them is ultimately going to happen to us. True, the slimy tentacled creeps haven't attacked the ship yet, but eventually you know that they will. Even if they don't, what happens the first time we try to do something on the surface? Go looking for an energy source . . . if we find one, what are they going to do then?"

"If they attack the ship, what are the chances that they'd be able to get in? The solar cells seem to be running at full efficiency here. Our power cells are charged . . . at least enough to run our weapons. If we fired in short, well-targeted bursts we could probably hold back a massive attack," RJ said. "I'm sure our shields would hold."

"I can't believe that there's something to fight and you don't want to fight it!" Levits turned on Topaz and trumpeted accusingly, "This is all your fault, old man, you put this crap into her head."

Topaz laughed. "Oh yes, because of course I've always had such sway with her."

"Why is everyone yelling?" Taral asked, holding his hands over his ears.

"What did he say?" Levits and Topaz asked RJ.

"He said if you spent as much time learning his language as you did bitching at me and each other maybe you wouldn't have to ask so many stupid questions," RJ said with a crooked grin.

"We don't all have genetically superior brains," Levits said hotly.

"Or even sufficient ones," Topaz said, looking at Levits with meaning.

"That's it. I'm kicking your ass, old man," Levits jumped up and punched Topaz, who fell out of his chair and got up swinging. Soon the two men were rolling around on the floor.

"What's wrong?" Taral asked, getting out of his chair and moving away from the fight and towards the door.

"Two men of the same race can't get along, and yet I think I can make some sort of truce between two different species," RJ said in his language as she rose from her chair and physically pulled the two men apart. She held them each at arm's length. "That's enough!" she yelled at them.

They grumbled, but each went back to his chair.

RJ glared at Levits. "This isn't our world, what right do we have to meddle here? Maybe the Abornie deserve the life they have . . ."

"And maybe the work units deserved the life they had under the Reliance. I don't really see what the difference is between this and that," Levits said, wiping some blood from his lip.

"As much as it pains me to say this, he's right, RJ. Like it or not, this is our world now. The Abornie made mistakes, similar to the ones humans made. They created a monster to help them out of a problem, and now the monster controls them. Perhaps we can free the Abornie and keep them from falling into the same traps as their ancestors. We could tell them what they did wrong, how to advance without destroying their planet. Maybe we really can keep history from repeating itself."

"You were the one who kept saying that maybe the Ocupods weren't the bad guys, that maybe these people were, and you were right. Don't you get it? They don't understand that what they did was wrong. They want to return to a time when they overran the planet like rats. When they polluted the water and the air, and abused every other lifeform on this world. They didn't learn from their mistakes, and if we remove the problem their carelessness caused then they'll never learn . . ."

"RJ, these Abornie never lived in that world. They didn't sin against the planet. They didn't create those things in the ocean. They didn't pollute their world. Maybe they have no remorse because they didn't do anything wrong. You want to punish them for mistakes made by people who died hundreds of years ago," Levits said, in an unusually (for him) calm voice. "The only thing that Taral here and the others are guilty of is trying to make a little better life for themselves. Just trying to live. Maybe it didn't start out that way, but those things are now the aggressors, and I think your first instincts were right. They're slimy and icky and they need to be destroyed." He took a breath before continuing. "The Abornie built these genetically engineered freaks to serve them, and now they are causing problems. It's time for them to go."

Topaz leaned forward, buried his face in his hands and mumbled, "And he was doing so well right up till then."

Levits still wasn't aware that he'd said anything wrong. He really thought the old man was just having one of his insane moments till he heard a low, throaty growl emanating from the throat of his beloved. He gave her a curious look and then quickly went over what he had just said. He swallowed hard and must have looked as horrified as he felt, because RJ quit growling, glared at him with eyes that were almost glowing with rage, and then she got up and stomped out of the room. He got up and ran after her.

"Now, RJ . . . you know I didn't mean it that way . . ."

Topaz ran his hands down his face and raised his head to look at the confused native he shared the room with. "You see, the real problem is that no one is ever really happy with things the way they are, so they start trying to make them better." The native said some snot gargling thing, and Topaz continued as if they understood one another. "That's right, Taral, exactly, it's all about wanting what you don't have. Food, shelter, sex, it ought to be enough, but invariably it's not. People start out wanting simple things like better food and better sex, and wind up making multileveled attachment dildos that sing and roll and vibrate, and buildings that touch the clouds, and hand-held hair dryers, because of course your hair will never dry otherwise." Taral said something else. "Call me crazy all you like, but you know it's true. You could get along just fine with these creatures if you would just stop wanting so much. And RJ and the Ocupods wouldn't be here at all if people would have been happy with creatures the way they had evolved, and hadn't decided to play God."

RJ wasn't talking to Levits, as much because she had more important things on her mind as the fact that he could be so clumsily insensitive and she wanted to punish him.

Not that she wasn't enjoying making him feel at least as badly as he'd made her feel. It seemed to bother him no end that she walked out of any room he walked into, and when she told him she didn't want to talk about it she could feel the waves of frustration coming off of him like heat. He kept saying he was sorry, and she would say, "It's all right. Forget about it." But her tone was very dismissive, and his head would all but explode. She'd let him roast in his own juices until she wanted to have sex, and then she'd suddenly forgive him, knowing damn good and well that he'd say something just as insensitive in another day or two.

Human nature, humanoid nature, you couldn't get away from it. Sentient beings did thoughtless things.

"The suits are the problem," RJ said to Poley as she walked away from the viewing port she'd been standing at. "Take away the suits and the Ocupods can't attack the Abornie, or us for that matter. Take away the suit and they become just another genetically engineered freak on this planet, swimming happily in the ocean until the Abornie totally overrun the planet and decide to enslave them again. Vicious cycle."

"Do you think they have the ability to make new suits?" Poley asked.

"I don't know, but I don't see how. To make metal you have to smelt ore and it's damn hard to keep a decent fire going under the water. If they were doing it on the surface surely the ship would have detected the activity. They at least have the technology to repair them though, or after all these hundreds of years they would be dysfunctional. I wish we could have brought one back to the ship."

"That would have been most useful."

"If they aren't capable of making the suits, then how many could they have? No matter how well you maintain something, there are certain things that go wrong that can't be fixed. Over several hundred years how many would have had to be parted out to keep the others going?" RJ turned to look back out the viewport again. Frionia was a beautiful world. Reclaimed by plant life, the air was clean and rich. The planet was covered with crystal clear rivers and streams. "Poley."

"Yes, RJ."

"If we get rid of the Ocupods, or at least stop them from attacking the Abornie, how long before that stream is running in sewage and toxic waste?"

He walked up behind her and looked at the stream in question. "There's no way of knowing, perhaps never."

"What, no long stream of numbers, Tin Pants?"

"Where people are involved you can make no accurate numeric predictions. Perhaps knowing the mistakes of their forefathers they will curb their destructive natures, and . . ."

"You've been talking to Topaz," RJ said with a laugh.

"That doesn't make me wrong," Poley said.

"No it doesn't." RJ turned and kissed his check. "Thanks, Poley."

Poley smiled, pleased with her praise. "Are you really angry with Levits?"

"I'm more angry at what he said than I am at him," RJ explained.

"He doesn't think of you that way. That's why he said it, RJ, because he doesn't think of you as a GSH, just like you don't think of me as a robot."

She had noticed before that it distressed him when any of them fought, but he'd never actually tried to intervene before.

"I love you, Tin Pants." She patted his shoulder and moved around him towards the door. She turned in the door and looked at his back; he was still looking out the window at the jungle. He was a machine, but he was so much more to her. He had been given an artificial intelligence, and he had as far as she was concerned become sentient. But to the Ocupods he'd just be another machine. He was a machine, but he was her brother, and those things would take him completely apart if given half a chance.

Dilemma over.

As she had calculated, the Ocupods appeared one day in full force, but she had prepared carefully for the day and they were as ready as they could be.

In the weeks it had taken the Ocupods to put an army of this size together RJ had worked up a defensive strike plan that would very quickly turn defender into aggressor.

She had armed as many of the Abornie as she could with the Reliance weapons on the ship, then she'd taught them to use the laser sidearms.

With Levits ready at the weapons console and watching the scanners carefully for any activity, RJ, Poley and Topaz had taken teams of the Abornie out onto the surface to make traps and primitive weapons with which to supplement the ship's weapons. The ship's power supply needed to last throughout the duration of the battle, and the only way to make sure of that was to use its weapons as little as possible.

RJ had been sure they were fully prepared for an attack, but now . . . There were just so damn many of them. RJ looked at the scanner as hundreds of spider shaped images started crawling across it. She ran her hands down her face.

"Well?" Levits asked.

"Fire at the ones on the front line when they come into range . . . No, wait." RJ looked thoughtful for a minute and mumbled the word cannon fodder and then started calculating again. She smiled when she was done. "Wait till the ones in the middle come into range."

"RJ . . . By the time that happens the ones in the front will be on top of us."

"No, because we're going to go out to fight them. Don't you see, Levits?" She was excited now. She was going to do battle. She wasn't afraid; this was where everything she was came into play. Only in battle was her full potential ever put to the test. "Cannon fodder. These things have probably employed every viable suit they have. I'm sure they can't make the suits themselves, and they've been parting them out for hundreds of years. Some of those suits, maybe most, are in varying states of decay, and if I'm right the worst of those will be in the front lines. Cannon fodder. The damaged ones will be easier for us to take out. We take out the strong ones in the middle and the back, and maybe we won't run out of power before we run out of big metal spiders."

Levits nodded. "I hope you're right. Be careful!" he yelled at her departing back, though he knew it wasn't very likely. Still, when your girlfriend was a GSH with a legendary talent for battle, you didn't really worry too much about her. Mostly you just felt bad for her opponents.

Unless they were slimy tentacled guys, and then you just didn't care.

The children stayed on board as RJ led every other Abornie on the ship out into the jungle to face their mortal enemy. They were afraid, but they were also fed up. They were tired of losing and tired of running. They had been kept down because they'd had no way to fight their enemy, and now they did. Most of them were excited, ready to have it over. On this day, maybe only on this day, they became one people. All thoughts of self were for a split second put behind them. RJ had been half afraid that when it came down to the wire they'd run into the jungle to hide and leave her and her crew to face the Ocupod army on their own. But today they were fighting for the freedom of their race, for the chance of a better life. They believed they were going to win. They believed their new "friends" were going to lead them to a new age, an age of comfort and security. RJ only hoped they didn't lead them into a time of overpopulation, pollution and constant war.

RJ called her troops to battle stations as the Ocupods fired their first barrage of plasma blasts on the ship. Most of the blasts fell short, and the others bounced off the ship's defense shield. She and Poley ran into the fray as Topaz took his troop to arm the traps that had been mostly designed by him. Of course his first trap didn't have to be armed at all, as became evident when the first row of Ocupods fell into the limb-covered pit.

As RJ had expected, the machines in the front were in the worst shape, so half of the ones that fell in the pit broke—sometimes immediately killing the slimy alien inside. As the other half tried to climb out, the first line of Abornie fired their lasers at the glass domes of their tentacled oppressors, and as they cracked, a second wave of Abornie ran in with wooden clubs and smashed the domes.

With their front line basically destroyed and making an obstacle between the ship and the rest of their troop, the Ocupods slowed, seeming to take a collective minute to think. While they were doing this Topaz unleashed his second trap. He gave the order, and the Abornie cut through the ropes holding back the mountains of logs on both the left and right sides of the Ocupods.

The logs rolled from their devices, bowling an entire row of the Ocupods down and crushing about a third of them. Most of the machines in the front lines were in worse repair than even she had calculated; many were barely operational. The Abornie pressed forward and once again attacked the fallen Ocupods. RJ and Poley ran into the fray, RJ taking the left flank while Poley took the right. They targeted healthy looking machines, ran beneath them and shot out their hydraulic systems. The machines then lurched around hampering the movements of the fully operational units behind them.

All the while RJ could hear and see the ship's laser and plasma cannons picking off the Ocupods on the back line. Beside her one of the creatures stuck a tentacle all the way through the chest of an Abornie. The Ocupod fired at her and she rolled away from the blast and came up underneath him where she then fired on his hydraulic system. As he was lurching around, he hit RJ with the dead Abornie still stuck on his tentacle and sent her flying through the air. She landed on top of another Ocupod and hung on. She targeted the glass dome with her laser until it cracked and then smacked the glass. As the machine started to lurch in the creature's death spasms she jumped from the top of it to the top of another and did the same thing. She continued to do this till none of them were close enough to jump onto, and then she jumped to the ground and continued her assault from below, again targeting the hydraulic systems.

By dusk only a dozen of the creatures were still standing, and they were beating a hasty retreat.

"Levits, hold fire," she ordered and the cannons stopped. "Finish these off," RJ ordered the exhausted Abornie, and pointing at the still lurching Ocupods. "Poley, you with me."

He nodded and ran after her. "RJ . . . why are we chasing them? Why not let Levits finish them off?"

"Because they have a communal intelligence," she answered. "Come on . . . we have to beat them to the water."

"Water . . . RJ, I can't go in the water," Poley reminded.

"You won't have to. We have to stop them getting back in." She increased her speed.

"RJ . . . I can't keep up," Poley said.

"It's all right, Poley you can take the rear."

He wasn't sure he knew what that meant, but his sister was gone, so he just moved towards the ocean as fast as he could and hoped she was telling him the truth about her plan not including him going into the water.

RJ pulled out all the stops. It had been a long time since she'd run as fast or jumped as high as she could. It felt good to be pushing herself to the max. She easily got around the Ocupods without them being the wiser and moved between them and the ocean. When they saw her they turned to retreat into the jungle, but Poley was blocking their way. One of them fired upon her, and she once again ran under them, easily knocking out their hydraulic systems, and Poley did the same. In minutes all twelve units were lurching around on the beach.

"Get back and wait," RJ ordered Poley, and he joined her some fifty feet away from where the Ocupods struggled. Two of them actually managed to get into the water. RJ watched as the domes opened and the Ocupods swam away. She smiled, and waited for the others to lie still on the beach. "You wait here. I'll call if I need you."

Poley nodded.

RJ walked to the beach. One by one she dragged the Ocupods into the water. When the last of them had escaped into the ocean she pulled the machines from the water. Once they were out of the water Poley helped her drag them above the high tide line.

"Why?" Poley asked, as they finished dragging the last one to a safe distance from the water's edge. "I have calculated over and over, and can think of no reason to let those creatures live."

"They have a communal intelligence," RJ explained.

"I fail to see the significance of that."

"By destroying their machines but saving them we showed compassion. That it's not them we hate, but their power over us, i.e. their transport machines. It tells them that we won't come after them in their world. That we are willing to share the planet with them. Them in their place and us in ours.

"But . . . How does that serve our cause?"

RJ laughed and patted his back. "Sometimes it's nice just not to be perceived as an asshole."

"What are you going to do now, RJ?" Poley asked as they walked along the path of destruction the Ocupods had made through the jungle when they had embarked on this, their last campaign.

RJ looked at the damage around them and thought about all the Ocupod debris around the ship. "Well, the first thing we have to do is clean up the mess."

"You know what I mean, RJ," Poley said. "You were built for battle. With nothing to fight, what will you do? I was built to serve Stewart, and after that I was programmed to serve you, and when you were in cryogenic sleep—even though I was still fulfilling my purpose—I felt incomplete. What are you going to do?"

"You found a hobby, perhaps I, too, will find a hobby."

"I don't think you will find one that will allow you to fulfill your full function."

Chapter Thirteen

"Please stop it," Gerald begged, grabbing both of Jessica's arms. She slung him aside like a toy and kept slamming on the keyboard, pulling up one file after another, reading it and then moving on.

"No! No! It's got to be here. It's got to be here somewhere."

Gerald picked himself up off the floor and dusted himself off. She hadn't hurt him and she certainly could have. He wasn't mad at her, he was worried. She was completely and totally obsessed. Crazier than he'd ever seen her, and he'd seen her plenty crazy. "RJ . . . it's been three weeks. You've done nothing day or night but pore over these files. You haven't slept, you've hardly eaten. This is insane"

"What's insane is thinking that the bastard found the key to eternal life and that he then deleted it. That he would destroy it. No, it's here. Somewhere in all this idiotic prattling on and on about nothingness and . . . Oh, my gods!" She quickly flipped back and reread the page of text she had just so quickly dismissed.

"Did you find it?" Gerald asked, half afraid of the answer.

"No . . . But something very interesting. The brilliant but completely insane madman who built all of this and found the formula for eternal life was Stewart's father. That would make him my paternal grandfather." She was thoughtful for a moment. "I wonder if she knows, or knew, depending completely on her living or dead status."

"If who knew what?" Gerald asked, thinking that with the knowledge she'd just imparted to him, that it must be true what they said about insanity being hereditary.

"Her. You know. Me," Jessica said.

Gerald just shook his head, thinking at this point it was better to say nothing at all. She had taken Diana's death hard. For the first month she had stayed close to Mickey and Dax. She seemed to be handling it pretty well, mostly just helping them to cope. Then, just as it was obvious that Mickey and Dax were learning to live with their loss, RJ had gone completely and totally insane. Again.

One night she'd sat up bolt straight in bed, and announced she had the answer.

After this revelation all plans to infiltrate the Reliance had been placed on hold while she tore the old prison apart, finding anything that remotely resembled a crystal or an ancient disk. She then sat down to engage in the daunting—even for RJ—task of going through each and every file in the supercomputer's massive memory bank looking for what was, in essence, the formula for immortality.

Gerald didn't believe that such a thing existed. It was well known that Topaz had been insane. There was no formula at all. He had probably been a GSH, just like RJ was.

Gerald watched as she devoured one screen of text after another in rapid succession and knew that even she couldn't keep up this pace.

She had been teetering on the edge of sanity ever since he knew her, but this was shoving her over that edge. He wasn't sure exactly why, whether it was just Diana's death or the idea that she couldn't do anything about it. She'd lost so many people, you'd have thought she would have gotten used to it by now, but she obviously hadn't. She was determined to find something to keep them all alive forever.

"Stop, at least for awhile. Get something to eat, sleep for awhile," Gerald pleaded. "Please, RJ."

She spun in her chair, turning to look at him, her face a mask of rage. "Don't call me that! Never call me that!"

"It's your name," Gerald said in confusion. "Can't you see that this isn't helping? This isn't helping Dax or Mickey, and it certainly isn't helping you. You can't go on like this. It's making you crazy."

"I'm not crazy. He found the key to eternal life, and I'm going to find it. There is no way he would have destroyed the formula. It has to be here somewhere."

"He was insane, RJ . . ."

"Don't call me that!" she screamed.

"It's your name!" he insisted, now every bit as mad as she was. "I can't take this anymore. Get your crazy ass up out of that chair, go get something to eat and go to bed. If the information is in this computer it's been here for hundreds of years. It can wait till in the morning."

"Don't you tell me what to do!" she yelled back, getting to her feet and taking a menacing step forward.

"Why the hell not? You're my woman, I love you, and I'm not going to stand here one more day and watch you go one ounce crazier while I have a breath left in my body. If you want to continue this crazy shit, you're going to have to kick my ass."

For a second he got the impression that she was about to rip him in two, which he knew she was capable of. Then she just ran to him, threw her arms around his neck and started to cry. "Can't you see? I can't lose you, Gerald. I can't lose you, or Mickey, or Dax. I can't."

He picked her up and kissed her forehead, then started carrying her towards their quarters. "Everything dies, and then all that matters is how well it lived," he said gently, trying to comfort her.

"Not me, Gerald, I don't die. Everyone around me, but not me, and I'll be alone. Don't you see, Gerald? I'll be all alone."

"No you won't. There will always be new people for you to love, to love you."

"It's not the same. Don't you see it's not the same? You can't replace people like you do shoes. And I can't stand it; I know I can't. I'll go all the way crazy, and then I'll never get back."

When Jessica woke up in the morning and went over what she'd been doing, and more importantly what she'd been saying, she admitted—at least to herself—that she had gone over the edge. Gerald had been right. Some food, some sleep, and a lot of sex; in short, a little normalcy had put things back in perspective.

She rolled over and hugged Gerald, loving the feel of him. Sleeping with him was like sleeping with a huge, stuffed bear. He made her feel safe, though in reality what could happen to her? He wasn't afraid of her, and she liked that. Every other man she'd ever slept with, including Zark, had feared her. Gerald didn't. She could kill him in a heartbeat and he knew it, yet he had no fear of her. He trusted her absolutely, and so she trusted him.

"Did you sleep?" he asked rolling in her arms to face her.

"Yes." She kissed his lips. "Very well. Very well, indeed."

"Do you feel better?" he asked carefully.

She laughed. "Yes, I feel better, but no, I'm not going to quit looking for the cure to death."

Gerald sighed. "Could you at least pretend to be sane while you're doing it?"

"Yes." She kissed him again, then started rubbing her body against his seductively. "If you'll remind me every once in awhile."

Mickey and Gerald sat at a table in the cafeteria, each with a cup of coffee. With Diana's death and RJ's obsessive, crazed attempts to find Topaz's formula, they hadn't had a chance to really talk in months.

"How are you?" Gerald asked.

"All right, as long as I don't think about her. Everyone keeps telling me that eventually I'll be able to think of her without feeling the pain," Mickey shrugged. "I try to keep busy. Dax seems to be doing well. Of course, I don't know that it's at all healthy for him to have joined RJ in her mad quest for Topaz's formula, but . . . Well, it keeps him busy, and I know being busy helps me. He's with RJ, and he does love her."

"And she loves him." Gerald sighed. "She had plans, big plans, good plans. How to deal with the Reliance. Now . . . I've talked to her till I'm blue in the face, but she won't listen. She's hell bent on making us live forever."

"Without even bothering to ask us if it's what we want or not," Mickey said. "She's afraid of being alone. I think it's the only thing she actually fears."

"I know, she's told me as much. I understand, but would you . . . would you want to be immortal?" Gerald asked carefully.

"Right now . . . no. I don't care what people say, I don't really believe that losing Diana is a pain that's ever going to go away, and I wouldn't want to live an eternity without her. What if those religious 'hoo-ha's' are right and there is some sort of life after this one, and I could go there and be with her again, be with Whitey, and Sandra, Topaz and Levits?"

"It's a nice thought," Gerald said.

"What about you, Gerald? Would you want to live forever?"

"On my world we believed in a lot of strange things as you know, but the one thing that still makes sense to me is that souls get recycled. When you die, you become someone else, get to live a new life, maybe on a new world, have a new adventure. I think I'd like that, but . . . I don't want her to have to be alone. I'm afraid that if she were alone then she really would go insane."

Mickey nodded. "You know, of course, that she's not going to find what she's looking for."

"I don't believe it exists. How could she find what doesn't exist?"

"It doesn't exist anymore. It did exist once. Topaz created something that changed him. But see, he didn't actually know how he did it. It was a mistake. Something happened, something that he didn't count on, something outside the experiment, and he could never duplicate the serum. RJ's apparently forgotten that."

"But . . . RJ can't forget."

"Exactly."

Jessica read the screen for the one-thousandth time. It had taken her six months to go over all the data on file. This was the last page of text concerning Topaz. She had looked at everything. Everything he had written or spoken into the computer, everything that had so much as a mention of his name. Everything related to him or the formula that she could milk from the data banks, crystals and old disks. There was nothing. The bastard had reported everything from his old bowling score to his bowel movements. But there was nothing. Not one single file concerning the experiment that had made him immortal.

She slammed her fist through the monitor.

"Monitor six has been damaged; droid twelve, please move to room three, assess damage and report," Marge droned.

"What's wrong?" Dax asked as she got up and started to pace.

"It's not here. The bastard didn't make a single entry concerning the actual serum, what it contained, how it was made. There's nothing. I've checked this whole damn fort. I've turned it upside down and inside out. I've read every freaking file. Nothing. Not a fucking word!" She hit the old block wall with her fist, and it cracked.

"Structural damage to East wall in room three. Droid fifteen, please assess damage and repair. RJ, please stop striking things," the computer droned.

"It doesn't matter, RJ," Dax said.

"I let you down," Jessica said. "How can you say it doesn't matter?"

"You didn't let me down," Dax said with a comforting smile. "I was only helping you so that I could spend time with you. I never believed that anyone could take a potion and become immortal. I don't want to live forever."

"So you were patronizing me? Like I'm some crazy person? I'm not crazy!" Jessica stormed from the room, stomped across the prison and out onto the wall. Dax started to follow her, but Gerald put out a hand and stopped him at the door.

"She didn't find it, did she?" he asked the boy.

Dax shook his head. "No, and she's very upset. She yelled at me." The boy was near tears, no doubt because she'd never even so much as raised her voice to him before. "I didn't mean to make her mad."

"You didn't make her mad, Dax. She isn't mad at you."

"But she yelled at me," he sniffled, and now a tear ran down his cheek.

"But she isn't mad at you. She's mad because she wanted something and she can't have it, and that's the way RJ is."

"Should I say I'm sorry?" Dax asked.

"No, you didn't do anything wrong. I'll go see if I can talk to her. You go on and play."

The boy nodded and left reluctantly.

Gerald took a deep cleansing breath, then opened the door and walked out onto the wall.

She was standing with one foot on the wall looking out at the mainland. He walked right up to her back, and she said, just loud enough that he could hear it, "If you don't blow the old city up, there's no place to put the new one."

He put his arms around her stomach and lay his head on her shoulder. "I'm sorry," he said.

"I'm the one who's sorry. It's normal. The old die and make room for the young. People die and it makes room for new people. I'm what's wrong, only me. Even a normal GSH has an expiration date, a day when they're going to die, but not me. Unless something amazingly cataclysmic happens, I'm going to live forever, and now I care. More than care, I love people." She leaned her head back so that her cheek rested against his. "How do I show that love? . . . By trying to make you as abnormal as me. Trying to find a potion that never should have been. Then Dax told me what I should have known all along—he doesn't want to live forever. No one does. Maybe that's why he destroyed the formula, maybe he wasn't as crazy as everyone thought. Maybe he knew that people shouldn't live forever. That it's not a blessing but a curse. To live when everyone around you is dying. And most people . . . most people aren't worth the skin they're wearing, they are callous, uncaring, lazy, and hateful. If given power they use it to enslave those they put beneath them. They blow up cities and kill lovers, mothers, fathers, brothers and friends. Why would you want to give something like that eternal life? Why, Stewart?" She jerked her head upright and pulled away from Gerald suddenly. "Why did you make us like this, Stewart? Why!" She jumped off the wall onto the rubble below, and then she ran and jumped into the ocean. She started swimming away from the island, away from Alsterase out to sea.

A complete one-eighty. One minute she was making perfect sense, seeming to accept things the way they were, the next she was doing some crazy shit. It wasn't the first time he'd seen her mood change so completely, so quickly. Gerald sighed, turned and ran across the wall and through the door.

"What's wrong?" Mickey asked.

"It's nothing. I've got it." Gerald ran out of the prison and straight for the dock. He wasn't about to tell Mickey—whose wife had just a few short months ago died while swimming—that his best friend was now trying to drown herself by swimming out so far that she couldn't get back, and Gerald was sure that was just what she was doing.

He jumped in a boat and took off for where he figured he'd find RJ. For one awful minute he was sure that he wasn't going to find her, and then he saw her swimming hard against the current. It took the boat awhile to catch up with her even with the motor on high.

"RJ, get in the boat!" Gerald ordered, yelling over the roar of the motor.

"Leave me alone. I'm old. I've lived a full life, and I want to die. I deserve to die. You don't know the horrible things I've done, and I can't forget. I've tried and I can't." She swam faster, and he had to speed up to catch her.

"Get in the boat!"

"No!"

This went on for over three hours before she finally started to give out. She slowed to a crawl, then finally faltered and went under. He stopped the boat quickly, reached over the side and grabbed her arm just before it went out of sight. Then he dragged her back into the boat, and she lay in a wet pile on the deck, shivering. "Why wouldn't you let me die?" she sobbed angrily.

"The same reason you wanted to keep me alive. I'm selfish, and I don't want to live without you. The big difference being that there is no reason that I should have to. You're not going to die, deal with it." He sat down on the deck next to her and wrapped one of her wet hands in his. "Besides, we're almost out of gas, I have no idea where we are, and without you I'll never find the shore."

Jessica laughed in spite of herself, then she hugged him tightly. "I'm crazy, you know that."

"Yes, but I still love you. I'm good for forty more years or a hundred-thousand miles, whichever comes first," he said, mimicking something he'd heard on one of the old videos the computer played for their enjoyment.

She laughed again. "How am I ever going to live without you?"

"Why don't you try living with me, and worry about that when I'm gone? Worry about the things you can do something about, like kicking the Reliance's ass, and don't worry about the things you can't do anything about. Maybe that's why you're here, and why you're the way you are, RJ. It's going to take more than one lifetime to take the Reliance down and secure us against the Argy. Who else could do that? No one but you."

She nodded. That was it; she was paying for her crimes by taking out the entity that had given her the power to commit them. Perhaps therein lay her redemption.

Chapter Fourteen

RJ grabbed Topaz by the collar and pulled him off the ramp of the skiff. "What in hell's name do you think you're doing?"

He jerked away from her with an effort that cost him the collar of his jumpsuit. "I'm bringing the people of this world together."

"I ordered you to leave the people of this world alone," RJ said angrily. "We have done enough."

"Yeah, well you aren't the boss of me," Topaz said, sticking out his tongue.

RJ grabbed his arm and pulled him further away from the group of Abornie, who were walking out of the skiff looking wide-eyed and frightened. "Listen to me, you crazy old shit, you pull another stunt like this, and . . ."

"And you'll what?" Topaz demanded. "Rip my arms off and beat me to death with them? If we're going to keep the Abornie from making the same mistakes as they did before, we need to bring them all together, form a government, and make a civilization."

"Leave them alone. This isn't some game in which the Abornie are chess pieces and you get to play God."

"I'm not playing with them . . . That's always your answer, isn't it, RJ? You think you prefer anarchy, complete self-rule, but you saw for yourself back in New Freedom what happens without rules. Anarchy never works because eventually someone figures out that no one's in control, and he gathers similar people to him and you wind up with a world being governed by bullies . . ."

"As opposed to being ruled by you," RJ interrupted.

"Well . . . I think I'd do as good a job as any."

"Let me tell you what I think. I think you have good intentions, but that you're crazier than a latrine rat. I think that if we let you carry out your plans you'll set yourself up as a godking, not unlike the crazy, handless, black Frenchman of Beta 4 fame. Except of course you're never going to die, so they're going to be stuck worshipping you and following your rules forever. And as crazy as we all know that you are, how can you be so damn sure you know what's best for them?"

"Listen, RJ. There are only pitiful handfuls of the Abornie across this planet. You heard Poley; he calculated a little more than fifteen thousand at best. Scattered across the planet they'll never thrive, but bring them together, and . . ."

"You can have wonderful overpopulation, disease, and pollution right at our doorstep. Overnight, no waiting. What a great idea, why wait for the pestilence, why not get right to it?" RJ yelled. "I don't want that. I want to be left alone to try to find a power supply which will be compatible with my ship so that someday we can get off this planet, hopefully without inflicting our will on these people any more than we already have. Leave them where they are, scattered across the surface of the planet, and it could take them decades, maybe even millennia to destroy their world. Move them together in one place and you tax the food supply and speed up the process of destruction."

"And I say it's our duty to make sure these people don't fall into the same traps their ancestors fell into. That they don't make the same mistakes that humans made when they let the Reliance break their will. In order to do that we have to have them all in the same place. We could shape a new world, make it our own. Create a Walden, a perfect world."

"See? You're already talking crazy. Nothing can ever be perfect when sentient beings are involved. They are inherently flawed. They desire, and desire causes jealousy, and jealousy causes hate, and hate causes fear, and fear leads to war. No matter what you try to do, you will not stop them from making mistakes. Give them better dwellings, modern medicine, in short make their lives easier, and they will multiply, and when they multiply they will need more, and the more they need the less there will be to share, and the less each person has the more they will envy what everyone else has . . ."

"So your answer is not to try. To just sit back and let them do whatever they're going to do on their own. Knowing everything we know about what goes wrong in a society and why? You, in your rational, logical—God, you sound more like Poley every day—opinion, think we should just go about our business and let them fend for themselves."

RJ looked around her. In the six months since they had utterly vanquished the squadrons of Ocupods that had attacked them no more had appeared, not by sight and not by the scanners. If they still had the capability to come on land, at least for the time being they weren't making any attempt to do so. The Abornie, with their help, had constructed furnaces to melt down the metal from the Ocupod suits and had forged new tools, even built a bulldozer of sorts with Poley's help. They were clearing the overgrown streets of the ruined city and rebuilding the structures. They were killing plants to make room—not for people, but for the things the people wanted.

"We have already pushed them ahead by thousands of years," she said in an almost inaudible whisper, then continuing in a normal voice said, "Look how far they have come in a few short months. What they have accomplished. None of this would have been possible if we hadn't landed on their planet. We have already changed the entire future of this world. I think we've done enough damage."

"Damage!" Topaz screamed. "I think you're the one who's crazy. These people were living like animals, afraid to even try to build a forge for fear of incurring the wrath of the Ocupods. Now they're rebuilding their world, their culture."

"When the first man on Earth who decided there was something beyond himself and the world around him called that thing God and started to pray to it, I wonder if he knew how much trouble he was causing? Do you think he knew that people would fight and die because they couldn't agree on how to worship God or even what God was? I wonder if he knew that someday what he started would be used as a tool to enslave the entire human race. After all, it must have seemed like a fairly harmless thing, to believe in a god and to pray to it. Yet Earth's history is a bloody tapestry of religious persecution of one group towards another, often leading to full-out war, death and utter destruction. Look what one crazy man with a plan did to Beta 4. And now you expect me to stand by and let you do basically the same thing here. These people don't need our involvement, they need our neglect. They don't need a God, and they sure as hell don't need you as that God."

"You know what?" Topaz said, shaking his finger in her face, which seemed to only slightly annoy her. "You have become completely cynical and bitter."

"Oh? Ya don't say," RJ said with a crooked smile.

"We could build Utopia here, RJ. Why even try to get the ship running? Why even try to get back to Earth? We could make this world a perfect place. We could stay here."

"We don't belong here. Every day we stay here, everything we do, interferes with this planet's natural course."

"Then where do we belong, RJ?" Topaz took a deep breath. "Back on Earth? You're not even a full human. You're an Argy hybrid, a GSH. I'm a close to six hundred year old man. Poley's a robot with AI capabilities that not even you and I can fully fathom. The only one who belongs on Earth is Levits, and you and I both know that realistically he won't live long enough to make it back there, unless we find this mythical all-purpose power supply of yours tomorrow. If we could ever even find Reliance space, find Earth, by the time we get there everything will be different and everyone we know will be dead. So why even try?"

It was a good question, which was probably why she got so mad. "Because it's home."

"A home you couldn't wait to get away from. Need I remind you that we wouldn't be here at all if you hadn't decided that you just had to go to Deakard?"

She wanted to rip his head off and sling it into the brush, so instead she just yelled in his face. "Don't bring any more of them here! Leave things alone!" She stomped off into the jungle.

Topaz smiled smugly and started over to talk to his new friends, not that he actually spoke their language enough to carry on a full-fledged conversation, but he at least spoke it well enough that he'd talked them into coming back here with him.

He found himself intercepted by Poley before he could reach his destination. "You haven't won the argument, Topaz. These people . . ."

"Just stop! Both of you, passing judgment and preaching. Pretending like you know everything. Of course I won the argument, because she is utterly wrong, and I am completely right, and she knows it." Behind Poley Topaz saw the old group of Abornie attack the new group. "What the hell?"

"As I was about to say before you so rudely interrupted me, these people don't like each other. When you left and RJ figured out what you were doing, she talked to the Abornie elders and found out that the Abornie are tribal."

"Well . . . I suppose it would have killed her to just tell me that."

"Actually, I rather think she decided you'd find out for yourself," Poley said.

Topaz waded into the fray, trying to stop the fighting, shouting words he wasn't quite sure of the meaning of, and seemed to do nothing but intensify the fighting. He found himself thrown at the robot's feet for his troubles. He looked up at Poley. "Aren't you going to help me?"

"You aren't the boss of me," Poley said haughtily and stomped off in the direction his sister had gone.

"Are you mocking me, you tight-assed walking tin can?" Topaz trailed off, realizing there were more important things at hand, and ran back into the boiling mass of Abornie, but nothing he said or did seemed to be doing more than getting his own ass kicked.

Poley caught up with her in the jungle. "RJ, they've started fighting," he reported calmly.

She nodded. "I know, I heard them."

"What are you going to do about it?" Poley asked.

RJ shrugged. "The more I try to do nothing, the more I interfere," she mumbled.

"What are you going to do?" Poley asked again.

"What should I do?" RJ asked.

Poley was more than a little taken aback, and it took his circuits awhile to comprehend what she had asked. "You're asking me?" he asked, still not sure.

RJ laughed and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. "Yes, Tin Pants, I'm asking you. Do the math. If we continue to interfere, what do you calculate will happen?"

"I've told you before. There's no way of knowing, too many as yet undefined variables. There's no way to make a calculated determination."

"Exactly," RJ said. "And without knowing what chain reaction our interference might cause, isn't it better if we do as little as possible?"

"Probably, but RJ . . . We've already interfered on a grand scale. By destroying the native's common enemy it's only a matter of time till they hunt each other down and kill each other if that's what they've got in their mind to do, and apparently it is. The ones currently here with us now have better weapons and machines. They're redeveloping technology and reclaiming their heritage. Maybe Topaz is right, and at this point all we can do is continue to interfere."

"That isn't exactly what I wanted to hear."

"I'm sorry," Poley shrugged.

RJ sighed. "I'm tired of being responsible for everything, you know. What if everything I do, everything I have ever done here, and on Earth, everywhere is just ultimately going to make everything everywhere worse?"

"What if everything you do will make it better?" Poley asked back.

"But you can never know, can you? Every step I take, every breath, has the chance to change everything. Pull here, and something gets pushed there, and everything is different, and how do you know whether it's better or not?"

"Maybe you just have to do what you think is right in the moment."

"Don't you see? That's how all the mistakes happen, by people living in the moment without thinking things out, by not asking themselves, what is this going to do in twenty years, in fifty, in a hundred?" RJ reached down and picked up an uprooted plant and stared at it. "I'm tired of being responsible."

"But someone has to do it," Poley said with a shrug.

She nodded silently, walked over and planted the plant just off the walking trail. Then she turned and started back for the ship. The forty natives Topaz had brought with him were being beaten to death by the Abornie colony they had originally found.

RJ shouted at the crowd in their language. "Enough! Stop this now!" Most of them ceased their fighting immediately, and RJ easily waded into the group and broke the rest of the fights up. "You idiots are the same people. Why are you fighting?" Everyone started screaming at once. "Enough!" There was silence, and RJ walked over and helped Topaz up from where he'd mostly been laying on the ground getting stepped on by the combatants. "You," she pointed at Taral, "and you," she pointed at the female whom she assumed by her demeanor and dress was the leader of the other tribe. "Come with me. The rest of you, if there is any more fighting I will come back and kill you all. Do you understand?" They all held their hands out to her, palms up. "Good."

She sat with them at the table in the Captain's quarters, and wished that she could be somewhere, almost anywhere else.

"What's your name?" she asked the female.

"Uvar," she said. "These people, they are our sworn enemies from the beginning of time . . ."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," RJ droned back. "So, let's cut to the chase. Why are you people fighting?" She was sure they didn't fully understand her, even though she was using their language, because of her use of Reliance euphemisms, but she knew they got the gist of what she was saying.

"They stole our children," Uvar said.

"Your children joined our people willingly, and then you attacked our village and . . ."

"Hold." RJ held up her hand, though she knew it probably didn't have the same meaning here. "When did they steal your children? And when did they attack your village?"

"In the time when we came from the caves to once again embrace the land," Uvar said.

"After much fighting our tribes called a truce. They would stay in their place, and we would stay in ours, and today they broke that truce," Taral growled.

"We had no idea where the strange alien would take us," Uvar spat back. "That he would deliver us into the hands of our enemies. All we could make out clearly from his bad speaking was that he and his kind had killed the Ocupods, and that he was going to take us to a place where there was a 'great comfy chair'."

"Why would our savior bring hope to you, the attackers of our people?"

"Why would anyone help you baby stealers?"

"Shut up!" RJ brought her fist down into the table for emphasis. "Gods! Why must all humanoids be so freaking stupid? Listen to me, you crawling bugs beneath my feet." She took a deep breath and let it out. "Centuries ago, your tribe," she pointed at Taral, "was short one sex. In other words you lacked enough breeding pairs to carry on your line, and so they went to her tribe and stole some children of that sex to complete your breeding pairs. Your ancestors," she pointed at Uvar, "were understandably pissed off and attacked their village." She sighed deeply and said in her own language, more to herself than anyone else, "Why can't people ever just talk?" She turned back to the two natives at the table.

"You have to ask why the two groups of your people didn't just merge into one. Why did they separate into two groups in the first place? And the answer is clear. They came from two different bunkers and no doubt fell into the same patterns of class-ism they had fallen into before the Apocalypse." She mocked them, "You came from that bunker, it's not as good as our bunker, we're smarter and therefore we can't let our breeding pairs be contaminated by your breeding pairs." She wasn't a talker, never had been. She was an ass kicker. It would have been so much easier to just kick their asses and tell them how things were going to be, but now she supposed was the time for diplomacy, or at least as close as she could get. "Here's a big freaking clue for ya. I don't give a shit about any of that. Get over it. All of that crap happened hundreds of years ago.

"Let me tell you what I have learned about your people in the relatively short time I have been here. Your ancestors were completely self-centered and selfish. They destroyed this planet. They played god with all the plants and animals here, and created the creatures that became your ultimate enemies, rather than curb their destructive ways. Your ancestors, your direct bloodline, were the worst of the lot, because you are the direct descendants of the people who went underground to save themselves while the rest of their civilization perished on the surface.

"You are the descendants of the people who came out of the bunkers. You know your history through books, and yet you choose to fight with one another over something that happened hundreds of years ago. Something that never should have been fought over in the first place. You have learned nothing from your ancestral past. You would make the same mistakes they made, maybe more quickly." She shook her head and mumbled in her own language, "Most people aren't worth the skin they walk around in."

She ran both her hands down her face, then glared at them, her face a mask of rage, and said in their language, though what she said must have done nothing but confuse them further, "So Topaz is right, and the only hope for this world is if we take control and steer it in a healthy direction."

"You will not take control of my people," Uvar said.

"Or mine," Taral swore.

RJ laughed and stood up. Screw diplomacy; you couldn't reason with fools. "Who do you think your people will follow if I walk from this ship with," she pointed at Uvar, "your head in one hand, and yours," she pointed at Taral, "in the other? If you want to act like animals, I'll treat you like animals. I'll kill you and everyone who opposes me until I've killed every single Abornie on this planet or I'm in power, whichever comes first. I don't want to be the bitch goddess of your world, but I can do it if I have to. And believe me, you don't want to make me do anything I don't want to do."

For a minute it looked like they wanted to argue with her, and then they both lifted their right hands, palm up, a submissive look on their faces. She could feel the fear radiating from them.

Maybe that's all I'm good for, scaring people, RJ thought. Well . . . whatever works. You can't talk sense to people who won't hear it, if I've learned nothing else in my long life I've learned that action speaks louder than words. At least I've found my hobby.

Chapter Fifteen

Jessica sat in what had once been Topaz's office in the room where the inner circle had once met, and waited for the muttering to cease. When it did, she stared across the table at the team of scientists she had assembled from all corners of New Alliance held territory.

They were the best, the most auspicious group of geneticists ever assembled. All these men and women had once worked for the Reliance. All of them had now defected to their side; still there was something in them that couldn't quite let go of the old trainings. There were some things you just didn't consider doing, and what she was asking them to do was one of these.

"I know what you're all thinking. It's against regulations. Well, guess what, people, we . . . none of us . . . belong to the Reliance anymore, and their regulations don't affect us."

"But," her name was Dorana, and she was by far the most uncomfortable with the proposed project, "these things you're asking us to build. We would program them for loyalty to the New Alliance, but not program their emotions. They would basically have free will."

"Within the boundaries of serving the New Alliance, yes."

"And no expiration date?" Dr. Pagel said. He was not quite as uncomfortable about the project as Dorana, but he was running a close second.

"That's right," Jessica said coolly.

"All right, I understand the importance of the cloning. I even understand the reason for having people in leadership positions that are loyal to us and who can't be killed. It would seem to insure that the New Alliance would hold for eternity, however . . . Even if we program them with loyalty to the causes and beliefs of the New Alliance, if you also give them a full range of emotions, in time they could break that training. They could, in fact, force their will on the whole of the New Alliance. You'd have for all intents and purposes a small army of GSH's running our government . . ."

Jessica interrupted him with a cough, Pagel looked at her and then turned red in the face. "I ah . . . I wasn't talking about . . ."

"I'm sure you weren't. But I'm rather the exception that proves my point. I was raised Elite, I was given no loyalty programming at all and a full range of emotions, and on the day that I realized the Reliance was evil I rose up against them. You build these things and program them with loyalty to us. We'll teach them to fight and to lead in the way we want them to lead. The rest will be up to them."

"What's our time frame?" Dorana asked, and now the emotion radiating from her was resolve. She still wasn't sure it was such a good idea, but she was going to go along because her Reliance programming was still very much in effect, and you went along with whatever the officer wanted you to do, and this GSH was already in charge.

"The necessary cells and data have been collected and a laboratory with all you will need to complete the project has been set up here on the basement level. Accommodations have also been made for you here. I would like to have the finished product ready to ship out in two years or less."

Dorana nodded; it was a tight but not unreasonable time frame.

"Are you sure you want to introduce Argy DNA?" Pagel asked. "Do we want leaders that can read people's emotions?"

Again Jessica fixed him with a stare, and again he turned red in the face. "I, ah, didn't . . ."

"It's all right. I understand your concern, but why wouldn't we want a leader who can feel his constituents' pain? It's hard to ignore people's feelings when you actually feel them. This plan will work. We will be able to take over the Reliance with a minimum of bloodshed, and then, being once more one people, we can push the Argy back into their place and work for a lasting peace between our races."

They all nodded, some of them now actually excited about the project.

She dismissed them and they filed out of the room, leaving her alone with Gerald, Mickey and Dax. It had taken them eight years to collect the necessary samples, and in that time Dax had become a man. He'd topped out at only four feet tall, but since he'd grown up in a much different world than his father had, he didn't have the insecurities about his height that his father did. For one thing, he'd always had Jessica as his protector. No one teased a child who had a huge bronze god to protect him.

Jessica realized the others were all silent. They'd been working towards this for eight years, but now that it was upon them, they still had doubts.

"What?" she asked them.

"Some of their concerns," Mickey started, "they aren't exactly things I've never thought of. That we haven't discussed."

"Maybe we should reconsider the project," Gerald added, and Jessica knew then that he and Mickey and maybe even Dax had already talked about this.

Jessica took a deep breath and let it out. "It's a little late for that. Stashes has been taken by the Argy. The Reliance, thanks mostly to our work, is collapsing in on itself. That's what we want, but if we don't move and move quickly it's going to be too late. We have to take over the Reliance before they have run out of firepower. We have to take over while there are still enough troops and viable ships to crush an Argy advance into our territory. We have to win while we can immediately make the New Alliance a force to be reckoned with. We can't do that unless we take complete control of the Reliance when it still has a fully functioning battle fleet, and since it will still have that fully functioning battle fleet the only way to successfully do this is to take over from the inside out."

Mickey nodded. "All right, I understand all that. But RJ . . . you're talking about making GSH's and then putting them into positions of power."

She gave him the same look she had given Dr. Pagel when he'd said the same thing.

"You can intimidate them, RJ, but not me. You know damn good and well what I'm talking about. You are basically reproducing yourself, and while I love you with all my heart and soul, you, my friend, often don't act in the best interest of yourself, much less the New Alliance."

"True, but to be a good leader a person must experience both success and failure. You have to occasionally lose in order to win. I didn't say this GSH government would be perfect. I just said it's the best we can do to make sure that the New Alliance can survive past your lifetimes. Give the people an eternal government, set up the way we want it, and what could possibly go wrong?"

Gerald covered his ears with his hands and screamed out, "You have cursed us all!"

They all laughed.

"Seriously," Jessica started, "these GSH's will look like the ambassadors, senators, governors and other high government officials they will replace. The assassinations will take place quietly; the genetically superior clones will be set into place. They will immediately start making policy that favors the New Alliance until the Reliance is no more. By the time anyone realizes what we've done—if they ever do—it will be way too late to stop us. If you have a better plan to take over the Reliance, ensure the future of the New Alliance, and crush the Argys before they can start gobbling up Reliance space, let's hear it."

They didn't of course.

Mickey started to lever himself out of his chair with an effort, and Dax went to help him. Mickey was now sixty, and physical injuries experienced in battle, emotional trauma and stress made him feel even older most days. It was raining outside, and that seemed to affect his arthritis. He needed a knee replacement, but he kept putting it off. The way he was moving, it didn't look like he was going to be able to put it off much longer. He laughed at himself. "You might ought to have them make a replacement for me while you're at it, RJ."

"There will be no way to replace you, my friend," Jessica said sadly. It was hard to watch her loved ones age. The fact that Dax was a grown man now ate on her soul, not because he wasn't her baby anymore, although she admitted she missed the days when he would crawl up in her lap and talk to her. His age tormented her because having now reached full maturity he was starting to die, and though most days she tried not to think about losing any of them, least of all Dax, it was hard to put it out of her mind completely.

"Don't get maudlin, RJ, I'm not dead yet. However, I could use some help, Gerald?" Gerald got up and helped Mickey walk from the room and back to his own office.

Dax just hung out; he wanted to say something, but he was afraid to. She could feel it when he started babbling. "My dad said sometime when you go into space, I can go with you. He said he always wanted to go, but he couldn't because of all his responsibilities here. When do you think you'll go again? Is the transmat scary? I hear it's scary. Can you really see the whole planet from the moon, and . . ."

Jessica walked over laughing and hugged him. "What's bothering you?"

"Am I that obvious?" he said with a sigh, resting his head against her stomach.

"Yes, at least to me. In fact, I think even if I wasn't half Argy I'd know when there was something bothering you. So what is it?"

He pushed gently away from her and went to sit in a chair. She sat down, too, because she could tell that he was very serious and upset. He seemed to be mulling it over and then just spit it out, "Gerald is sick."

"What?" Jessica asked in shock.

"He doesn't want you to know. I'm not supposed to know, but I overheard him and Dad talking."

"You were eavesdropping again," Jessica said in a scolding tone. Where his father had used his size to pick pockets, Dax used his to spy on people. He wasn't any sort of pervert, he was mostly just nosey. Most probably he hadn't outgrown his childhood desire to be some sort of undercover detective. "What's he got, the flu?"

"No, maybe I shouldn't tell, but I don't see how I can not tell you. I feel like I'm lying to my mother." Dax had a tear in his eye, but he didn't cry.

Jessica suddenly realized that they weren't talking about any simple virus. "What's wrong with him, Dax. Can it be fixed?"

"It's some disease the Fourers get," Dax explained. "It can't be cured. They were calling it Le Mort de Corps."

Jessica took in a deep breath and it came out in a sob. "Las Tarak." Her breath almost left her on the words.

"What?" Dax asked in a quiet voice.

"That's the problem with hybrids," Jessica explained. "You can get all the good traits of both races, but you can also get all the bad traits. Mort de Corps is Las Tarak. It's an Argy disease that attacks the central nervous system. It starts slowly, loss of feeling in the extremities that comes and goes, then temporary loss of the use of an arm or a leg, till the body doesn't work at all. Eventually they even lose the ability to speak, only the brain is still alive. They can live like that for years."

"Do the Argy have a cure?" Dax asked hopefully.

Jessica shook her head no, her voice had left her.

"He didn't want you to know because he didn't want you to treat him differently, but I thought maybe you should know because then you could treat him differently. If I'd known my mother was going to die when she did, I would have made sure I told her that I loved her, I would have treated her nicer and minded the first time I was told to do things."

Jessica sucked her tears down inside herself. "Do you know how advanced the disease is?"

"It's just beginning. He told Dad he had about three years before he'd lose the use of his arms and legs," Dax said.

"Then we'll make the next three years count," Jessica said nodding. A tear escaped the eye that wasn't hers, and it reminded her of all the things she'd done to get here to this moment. "I'll pretend that I don't know, and hope that he doesn't change his mind about telling me."

"Are you mad I told you?" Dax asked. "Was it the wrong thing to do?" He was young, still trying to decide what was right and what was wrong.

"No, I'm not mad at you. I'm so glad you told me. I just don't want Gerald to know that I know, because it isn't what he wants," Jessica said.

Dax nodded. He still had something on his mind, but she could tell he wasn't going to give it up, and if it was more bad news she didn't want to hear it.

"Do what?" David asked the insane image on the screen before him.

"Launch an assault against Trinidad," Jessica ordered again.

"What on earth for?" Taleed demanded. "If we do that, they're sure to retaliate."

"And while they're busy fighting you in space and attacking your planet we can put our people into position and no one will even notice. The leaders will be called together to challenge this new threat. The battle will last five days total and do very little damage, if any. Me and my people will be docking at the space station in two days time and shuttling to the surface to prepare our troops there and take up strategic positions across the surface of the planet."

"The war orphans," David said almost under his breath. This was what she had sent them here for. To fight an assault on Beta 4 itself.

"Any casualties here are unacceptable!" Stratton exclaimed. "There is no need to put this planet or these people at risk."

"After all that the New Alliance has done for Beta 4, I think it's time for you people to either put up or shut up." No one had to ask what she meant by that. She smiled as if to cushion her words and continued in a calmer tone. "On a planet of warriors I think if you put it to a vote you'll find the majority of them would be more than happy to stomp a little Reliance ass. We have given you the ships to carry out the assault. We have armed your planet and protected it all these long years. While you have experienced peace and prosperity, we have fought battle after battle that served us all. It's payback time, don't you think?"

"She's right," Taleed said. "Order the assault on Trinidad. RJ will be here to defend us long before our fleet reaches Trinidad, and it will take them days after that to retaliate here."

"Our people were born and trained as warriors from our birth," Janad explained to Stratton. "We don't fear death, we long for a good fight. We have known this day would come, and now . . . RJ is right, if given a vote on this matter our people would fight for the right to die for the cause."

Coming from the fifty-year-old mother of his two grown children, it temporarily brought a smile to David's face. However he only half heard what was being said around him as he stared at the vision of RJ on the screen.

"We will send the fleet out at once," Taleed said, "and we happily await your return to our world."

RJ nodded. "As I look forward to my return. I'd say I wish it were under happier circumstances, but these are the happiest of circumstances. When this battle ends, so does the Reliance's reign of terror. A new age shall be born and rise from its ashes." She closed the transmission.

"David?" Janad asked of the expression on his face, his silence.

"She's coming," he said, "here."

Jessica turned away from the screen, and she smiled at Dax, who hadn't stopped babbling since they had left Earth. Things she took completely for granted thrilled him, and it was fun to view the experience through his eyes.

Gerald looked up at her and smiled. She pretended not to have seen him fall into the chair when one of his legs locked up. It wouldn't be long now till he was completely immobilized. She tried to live in the moment and not think about it, or what life was going to be like without him. She had to think about the battle at hand, and how she was going to handle David Grant, who thought he knew her intimately and who she had only ever talked to over the viewscreen. He would no doubt expect . . . What, exactly? RJ had left him there, why? Jessica didn't really know. She didn't know how they had parted, what was said, or what wasn't. She'd have to be very careful, or he'd figure her out. She'd avoid contact with him altogether, but that wasn't really an option since he worked with the king and the council on Beta 4. Besides, avoiding him would be the most suspicious thing she could do.

Gerald was trying to stand and couldn't do it. She purposely didn't look, but Dax was staring, near tears, and obviously wanting to go and help his "uncle." Jessica grabbed the boy's arm. "Come on, I'll show you the weapons bay." She pulled him quickly away from the commander's office and in the direction of the armory. "Dax . . ."

"I know, I'm sorry," he said. "It's just so hard."

Jessica nodded. "It's hard for me, too, but he can't know I know, not now."

"Can I ask you something?"

"I know what you're going to ask, and no, you can't ask."

Jessica marched into Taleed's throne room as if she owned the place, dressed much to David's amusement in traditional Fourer garb—a leather loincloth and vest. Well, it was almost traditional garb; she was still wearing those damned Elite boots, and her chain was wrapped over her right shoulder and around her waist, her blaster hanging in the coiled strands of chain.

She hadn't changed a bit, not one tiny bit. David imagined what his own lined face framed in gray hair must look like to her. On her right hand a big bald Fourer strode in with the confidence of a warrior, and on her left was a young man of such short stature that David knew he had to be Mickey's son. David ran to her, embraced her, and she hugged him back. Janad and Taleed both took turns hugging the returning champion as David's children and the young prince stood in the background, obviously in awe of the white-haired beauty who was the hero of every story their parents had ever told them.

The fact that she was every bit as charismatic as she had ever been must have made them feel as if they were in the presence of a god.

David hugged her again. "RJ, I can't tell you how good it is to see you."

"And you." Though her hug and her tone of voice felt less than enthusiastic.

"Baldor, Sandra come here," David said excitedly. The children appeared, almost hiding behind his back. "RJ, these are my children."

"Pleasure to meet you. David, this is my mate, Gerald, and I'm sure you've guessed that this is Diana and Mickey's son, Dax."

"My son, Taheed the second," Taleed introduced his fifteen year old son, who seemed more than happy to keep Sandra between himself and RJ.

"I'd love to visit, but we'll have time for that later. Chairs?"

David was a little taken aback. RJ could stand for hours without even getting tired. Still, when the chairs arrived she was the first to sit down, so maybe even though she didn't look it she was feeling her age. When Gerald sat down beside her she took his hand and looked at him, and even David could see that she loved him. It was obvious from the way he looked at her that he loved her, too. Some of the guilt David still had concerning Whitey was washed away when he saw this. She had found someone else.

Dax first sat down next to RJ, and then as the boring adult meeting rambled on, he had drifted off with the other young people to sneak into the palace gardens. RJ had glanced up as he left, making sure exactly where he was going and what he was doing, and David realized with no small amount of surprise that she considered him to be her child. She was mothering him.

Which became even more obvious when she insisted that Taleed, his family and retinue spend the entirety of the battle in Sûreté Station, which was what they had named the bunker they had made from the old Argy ship—and that Dax was to go with them. When the meeting was over they moved to the banquet hall, also known as the old ship's mess hall, and sat down to the feast Taleed had ordered prepared in their honor.

David had sat beside RJ at the table and started rattling, telling her all about his life on Beta 4, his kids and Janad. RJ had in turn told him about how Mickey was doing and all about Dax, and her mate, Gerald, but about herself she said very little.

When she finished eating she said she was tired, and after telling Dax to go directly to his quarters when he had finished dinner, she excused herself and she and Gerald left the dining hall and followed one of the palace servants to their assigned room.

David was curious and more than a little disappointed.

"What?" Janad asked at his shoulder.

"RJ . . . She doesn't get tired."

"Her man has Le Mort de Corps," Janad said. "I saw it earlier, when we got ready to go to dinner, his legs wouldn't work so that he could stand. That's why RJ started talking again, to wait till his legs would work again."

David well knew the effects of the disease. "He's dying, then."

"Yes, and very close to losing the use of his legs at the very least," Janad said sadly.

David ran his hands down his face. "She can't catch a break, first Whitey, then Levits, and now this guy. She's not aging, and neither is anyone she touches, because anyone who touches her dies."

"Maybe that's better," Janad said.

"What!" David exclaimed.

"What must it be like to sit and watch someone you love shrivel and die of old age, while you're still," she shrugged, "feeling and looking like you're twenty-five?"

Chapter Sixteen

RJ weeded her garden, pulling out the plants she didn't want and putting them in a bucket to be cleaned and eaten. It was hard to keep the plants in any sort of check. She had built a gazebo and a large fishpond that was fed by a small stream she had made by digging out and diverting a spring. Raised beds and pathways made from debris from the old city stretched out in every direction.

The huge garden was her little hobby. The one she'd taken up after deciding to let Topaz and Levits handle the running of the Abornie's lives, and after she'd grown tired of working on the ship. Topaz and Levits had collected all the Abornie into three ruined city areas spaced far enough apart to make sure there was enough food, but close enough together that they could all be governed easily. For the most part RJ ignored them all and let them do as they pleased. She only stuck her two cents worth in when it was absolutely necessary.

She had thought she would find peace and tranquility immensely boring, but you could fill your time just as easily with projects as you could with warfare. She found that she liked building things and encouraging things to grow—although mostly she seemed to spend her time trying to keep them from growing where she didn't want them—almost as much as she liked blowing things up. It wasn't as challenging as warfare, but it was rewarding in a different way.

She was about to deadhead a bunch of flowers when Topaz stomped into her garden, shattering her peace.

"What the hell are you playing at?" he yelled.

"Huh?" she asked as she pulled a wilted flower from its stalk.

"It took me months to figure it out, but I just realized why you lost interest in working on the ship and became so damned interested in gardening, and it isn't because you couldn't find a suitable power source."

RJ grabbed him, quickly dragged him to her and clamped a hand over his mouth. "Keep your voice down, old man." He nodded and she let him go.

"Uvar just told me that you and Poley found a more than suitable energy source in the core of an old power plant. That you installed it in the ship instead of handing it over to be used by the Abornie . . ."

"I told you that's a rumor."

"Can the crap, RJ, I've been down to the reactor room and I've seen it, whatever the hell it is."

"The energy source is very unstable. I'd never willingly put it in their hands . . . If it's so important to them, let them make their own expedition and find another one. They have access to the same books that I read, and they could find another power plant easily enough. You could lead them if it's that important to you, but they'll get the one we installed in the ship over my dead body."

"That isn't the point, RJ. The point is that the ship is fully operational and fully fueled. In fact, the way I understand it, that power source in tandem with the ship's scoops should be almost infinitely renewable. We could lift off today . . ."

"And go where, old man? We don't even know where we are in relationship to our space."

"And now you're lying again," Topaz said in a hissed whisper. "Poley is a lot of things, but a good liar isn't one of them. I know that you and he have known where we were all along. More because of what he wouldn't say than because of what he would. Now what the hell is going on? What are you playing at, RJ? For years you've done nothing but complain about getting off this planet and back to our own. Now I'm sure you have the means, and you're just staying here playing with plants."

"I like it here. You said it yourself, why should we leave?"

"I said it, but you never agreed. In fact, you gave dozens of reasons why we shouldn't be here at all, so why are we still here?"

RJ sighed. "Levits is seventy-seven years old, Topaz, and at least sixty-five of those years he's actually used. He's a sixty-five year old man who I ripped away from peace and prosperity on his own planet. He wanted to stay, I didn't, and he came with me because he loves me.

"Just like you, he's happy here, Topaz. He goes fishing and plays with the Abornie children; hell, half of them call him uncle. He was a man who should have had his own children and grandchildren, and he couldn't have any of that, again because of me. Unlike you and me he is living on borrowed time. Yeah, I could shove him into cryogenic sleep again, and we could spend years in space and get back to . . . What? We don't know what has happened, much less what will have happened by the time we get back. I could fly him back into hell again. I could jerk him away from a life he loves, to take him—a sixty-five year old man—back into a war zone to start all over again. And he'd go with me, Topaz. He'd leave everything he cares about and go with me because even after all these years he still loves me. So we're staying here, right here, until he's had a chance to live out his life. Then we'll go. Time doesn't matter to us. He'd do anything for me, and this is the least I can do for him."

"Why don't you tell him? It might be nice for him to realize just how much you care for him," Topaz said quietly.

"Because if he knew I could leave and wouldn't because of him, he wouldn't be able to enjoy staying. If he thinks we can't leave, then he can be happy."

"What about you, RJ, are you happy?" Topaz asked.

RJ shrugged. "As much as I can be. The indigenous people suck, but I like the plants."

Two short weeks later she was working in her garden again when she smelled something familiar on the wind and stiffened.

"What is it?" Poley asked from where he'd been helping her in the garden. But she was gone, running in the direction of the smell, and he ran after her without waiting for her to answer just in case she might need him.

She looked at the Ocupod roasting over the fire. Judging by the size, it was obviously a youngster. She glared at the Abornie stuffing their faces with its cooked flesh.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" She rubbed her hands down her face. Then she ran and grabbed the spit off the fire and slung it in all their faces. "This was a sentient being. The equivalent of a child. It thinks, just like you and I. You don't eat an intelligent being. Gods, just when I think we've taught you idiots something about civilization, some touch of ethics, you do something like this."

"He killed it," half of them said, pointing to one man in the group. As usual, quick to point the blame away from themselves.

"We eat fish," he said with a shrug.

"Fish can't repair machines or build things. They don't make decisions or fight wars. They don't think. Just because you can kill something doesn't mean you should. Why don't you eat each other?"

"And she doesn't mean in a pleasant sexual way," Topaz added helpfully, as he walked up to see what was causing all the commotion.

RJ glared at all of them. "You will not hunt these creatures or kill them. In all these long years since the battle they have showed no aggression towards you. How dare you hunt them for food?" She stomped off, back in the direction of her garden, and Poley followed. She started to work again and tried to forget the image in her head.

"That was a very bad thing," Poley said, kneeling down to work beside her.

"Yes, and how come we know that, but those morons didn't?" RJ hissed.

"I don't know."

"I heard what happened." RJ looked up and Levits was standing there. "Is it really that big a deal?"

"You tell me," she said angrily. "Would you like to be killed and stuck on a stick over a fire for barbarians to eat? Better than that, would you like an Ocupod to eat one of those little Abornie brats you're so fond of?"

"Not really," Levits said. "It was a mistake, they just weren't thinking."

"What you're calling a mistake, I call murder. Even when I was a Reliance goon I knew the difference between killing a trained and armed soldier and an unarmed civilian. That's why I jumped sides, remember? I never had any doubt in that war. But with these people . . . I often wonder if I didn't destroy the wrong army."

"The Abornie are basically good people, RJ. They just need guidance," Levits said. "You should really get to know them. You've separated yourself from them, haven't tried to make friends with them."

He wasn't wrong; she hadn't even tried to create relationships with them. She couldn't afford to. In order to "guide" them she needed to intimidate them. Someone had to be the heavy, and it certainly wasn't going to be Topaz—who liked to be their benevolent god—or baby-kissing Levits. She ignored what he had said and instead said, "You know if I had admitted defeat and retreated back to my own ground, and then my enemy came into my territory, I'd be pissed. But if they then started murdering my people, I'd attack."

"What do you mean?" Levits asked.

"I have a feeling you're going to find out very soon."

The next day five Abornie went out in a boat, and three hours later the boat came back empty. Poley and RJ went down to examine the boat as a bunch of Abornie looked on.

"Well?" RJ asked the robot.

"Ocupod DNA. You're thinking retaliation?" Poley answered.

"Yes." Without another word she walked into the jungle, shoved a small tree over, topped it, then dragged it out into the water till she was waist deep. She speared the pole into the sand under the water and made sure it was secure. She then walked back up on the beach and looked at the crowd.

"For hundreds of years you couldn't even go near the ocean, much less fish in it, but we destroyed the Ocupod's capability of fighting us on land and so we started to venture out to sea to fish. That was fine. There was nothing wrong with that. They let us do it. Don't you understand that? They let us fish their ocean. They didn't have to. They can't come up here, but that," she pointed out at the endless ocean behind her, "is still their domain, and they will always be supreme there. You killed one of them, and now they have retaliated. They will not let us fish the oceans unmolested until the murderer is brought to justice." She waded into the crowd. The Abornie in question saw her coming, realized what she was doing, and took off running. She caught him easily, and in spite of his squirming she easily carried him down to the pole standing in the water. She lashed him to the pole with her chain, and the whole of the Abornie assembled there started to protest.

"RJ . . . what in hell's name are you doing?" Levits asked as he ran up on the scene.

"Justice," RJ said.

"It looks more like a ritual sacrifice to me," Levits said angrily.

"You call it a sacrifice, I call it an execution."

The voices of the Abornie raised in pitch against her, and she just glared at them. "Five people have already died for what one man did, so how can you condemn my actions and not his? Because many of you ate the results of his actions? Why? Because it tasted so good? Nothing that smells so foul could taste anything but horrid. Because there is so little food? This planet is nothing but food."

"In which case, we don't have to fish," Levits said. "Let's just stop fishing."

"Why should all be punished because of the sins of one man? Those creatures have a common intelligence. They share information. They know who the murderer is, and maybe if we give them the murderer they will let the rest of us fish."

"Then you'd better unchain him and put me out there," Levits said, walking right up to her. "Because I didn't kill it, but I'm the one who caught it. I'm thinking those ignorant bastards aren't going to be able to tell the difference."

"You . . . Why?"

"It was an accident," Levits said. "Apparently it and I were after the same fish. I picked it up in my net. Foro," he pointed to the guy tied to the pole, "All he saw was the enemy of his people, no matter how small, and he killed it before I could toss it back in. After it was dead . . . Does it really matter whether they ate it or not? Things just aren't as black and white as you'd like them to be, RJ. If he deserves to die, then so do I, and I don't think his death is going to do us any good."

RJ couldn't remember ever being quite so mad at anyone in her life except maybe Jessica Kirk. She stomped out into the water and unwrapped the chain, freeing the man. Then she stomped back through the surf and for a second actually considered tying Levits to the pole. If it weren't for the fact that he had once saved her life at great risk to his own, not even the fact that she loved him would have stopped her from carting his ass out there and lashing him to the pole to appease the Ocupods.

"I wash my hands of the lot of you. That includes you Levits!" She threw her hands up and walked back towards the ship.

The people cheered Levits.

"Shut up!" Topaz ordered. "There is nothing to celebrate here." He shook his head, in that moment almost feeling his age. "What you did was inexcusable. RJ tried to restore justice to our world, but there is no way to attain justice in this matter. That is never a cause for rejoicing. Go about your business."

They didn't budge, as they were always slow to get moving.

"Go now!" Topaz screamed. The Abornie left quickly, all going in different directions.

Levits slapped Topaz on the shoulder laughing. "Dude, lighten up."

Topaz turned to glare at Levits, a look of black rage on his face. "How dare you humiliate her like that!"

"What?" Levits asked in disbelief.

"You have totally and completely ruined her credibility with those people, and for what? To save a murderer's life?"

"Ah, come on, man! Foro's a good man, he just made a mistake . . ."

"Don't you get it? RJ is right about them. They act without thinking, and so do you." Topaz turned his back on him and walked back towards the ship.

In the weeks that followed, Topaz and Poley created a sonic wave transmitter that produced a sound that kept the Ocupods away without actually hurting them. But the rift between RJ and the Abornie people wasn't so easily fixed. From that moment on they didn't even try to hide their disdain for her, or she her contempt for them.

Chapter Seventeen

As Jessica had calculated, the Reliance forces hit the Capital of Beta 4 with everything they had. Jessica had spent the last seven days training her new troops, building barricades and evacuating not only Taleed, his advisors and their families, but also the entire civilian population of the capital. By the time the Reliance attacked they were basically attacking a fully armed military base with Beta 4 trained soldiers led by their fanatical, genetically superior leader.

The battle wouldn't last long.

Jessica preferred to fight on the ground instead of commanding a ship. Her troop would face the Reliance ground troops. She moved herself, and therefore Gerald, into the front line.

There was a moment when she knew she should have ordered them to pull back, but instead she moved forward. When Gerald took a hit in his chest she ordered the others to fall back, grabbed his body and dragged him into cover. He was dying, she knew it and he knew it. He looked at her and smiled. "You knew. You knew all along, didn't you?"

"Yes." She nodded her head, her tears falling onto his face.

"And . . . You did all this for me?"

"Yes." She didn't even try to control her sobbing. At that moment if a blast had hit her in the head and killed her she would have died happy. "Because I love you."

"I love you, too, RJ."

She held him tightly as the life left his body, probably tight enough to snap a couple of his ribs. "That's not my name!" She forced herself to let go of him, jumped to her feet, and screamed again, "That's not my name!" Then she pulled the chain off her waist and ran into the fight. A laser blast clipped her one, two, three, times. She didn't care; it didn't hurt. It couldn't compete with the pain in her heart. Her chain smacked into the side of a man's head, smashing his helmet into his brain, and while she was trying to free her chain from his skull she slung her foot into the gut of another man and knocked him some twenty feet. "All must die!" she yelled.

She jumped and kicked, chained and blasted everything remotely Reliance in sight, and just kept going till the Reliance turned tail to run. Then she ran after them and ordered her ships to take them out even as they tried to retreat.

"Hunt them down to the last soldier. All must die," she swore again as she watched her troops descend on the retreating bodies of the beaten Reliance army.

When it was all over it had been forty-eight hours of fighting. She was bloody and burnt, her clothes having taken so many hits that they were barely hanging on her body, but she wasn't tired. She went back to Gerald's body, picked him up like a baby and started carrying him back to the royal palace. She went to the throne room of the antique ship where a crew had been manning the old ship's brand new guns, sat down on the throne with Gerald in her lap, leaned over his body, and just cried.

"In the old days when a warrior would near the final stages of Le Mort de Corps he would ask to fight in the front lines so that he could die in battle," Janad was explaining to David as they stood at the funeral, waiting for the body to be shoved into the crematorium. "No warrior wants to live flat on their back unable to move, but still being fully aware of the fact that they're crapping themselves and have to be cared for like a tiny infant. No one wants to die like that, but it's that much worse for someone who has lived a very physical life." She lowered her voice still more. "Someone with such a very physical mate."

He'd seen RJ looking this distraught only once before. She clung to Mickey's son, and he comforted her as much as she could be comforted. David had tried to get close to her a couple of times to try and help, to say something, but she'd seemed to intentionally avoid him. Maybe he just reminded her of that other loss.

David walked out into the palace gardens to clear his head, as he often did. It was hard to believe it was all over. The battle had ended abruptly when the Reliance Council of Twelve had ordered the troops to pull out of Beta 4. He knew what that meant; the clones had taken control of the Reliance government. It was a downhill fight from now on, until of course they had to come up against the Argy. It was a huge victory, and yet he just felt numb.

The battle he and RJ had started so long ago when he'd run into her in the forest was for all intents and purposes over, and while he had aged, RJ was exactly the same. What was that like, to live through all the hell and come out on the other side unchanged? But she wasn't unchanged, just the package was. Her insides had been puréed, and he doubted that any of them could actually comprehend what went on in her head. He remembered that long ago she had told him she remembered everything that ever happened to her in detail. It must be like living in a constant nightmare.

He didn't really know her anymore, and that hurt a lot.

As if thinking about her had made her appear, he turned a corner and there she stood, looking up at the pale blue moon. He walked up to her back and asked a stupid question, "You all right, RJ?"

She shrugged. "I've never really been all right, have I? He was sick."

"I know, Janad explained."

She laughed then, though you could hear the tears in her voice when she spoke, "Did she explain that I would have gladly taken care of his every need and kept him alive in any state just to have him near me for even a few more years? Did she tell you how hard it was to put his desires ahead of mine? He died on his planet in battle. That was what he wanted, but it's not what I wanted. Do you know the last time I put someone else's needs over my own?"

"I've seen you do it lots of times . . ."

"NO! Not me. I never have. This was it; this was the first time ever. I ought to feel good about it. I want to, but I just feel lost and angry and alone. I'm completely self-absorbed and selfish."

"You lost someone you loved, RJ, and it isn't the first time," he said. "The last time I hurt like you're hurting now it was because I thought you were dead. If you want to hear the epitome of selfish I'll give it to you. Right now you're standing here grieving, and this planet has just been bombarded by the Reliance. Many of our people are dead, and more will die before it's really over, yet part of me is so incredibly happy because I'm seeing you again. Because even if it is absolutely the worst circumstances possible, you and I are here together and we're talking, and I had convinced myself that I was going to die without ever seeing you again. I need your forgiveness. I need to hear you say that you forgive me before I die. Now that's selfish."

Jessica heard his words echoing in her head. He needs RJ's forgiveness, and I can give it to him because I'm not her and he didn't do anything to me, except help me to commit my biggest sin. So . . . you didn't part well. RJ left you here because she blamed you for the attack on Alsterase, but you were just an unwitting pawn. I was the great instigator. I was the one who found the weak link in her chain . . . And what must it be like to live with the knowledge that you were the weak link, that you were your best friend's undoing? That you'd caused the death of your friends, the destruction of your capital? If I was RJ and you had been directly responsible for causing the death of the man I loved . . . If Gerald had been well and you'd been directly responsible for causing his death, no matter what the reason was, I never would have forgiven you, and she wouldn't have, either. But I know something that she didn't know then and probably hasn't learned yet, if she's even still alive. I know what it's like to live with what you've done every day of your life. I know what it's like to live with the stain of guilt on your soul. To strive every day to pay for the sins of your past and always find yourself wanting. RJ wouldn't forgive you, just like she will never forgive me, but she's not here, and I can let you off the hook. I can give you that which seems to forever elude me.

She turned slowly around to face him. "There is nothing particularly selfish in wanting to be forgiven," Jessica said carefully. "It wasn't your fault. Kirk was smart, quite possibly the most intelligent person I've ever known . . . Except for me, of course. She set a trap and we all fell into it. I wrote her off too quickly, didn't give her enough credit. What happened to Alsterase was more my fault than it was yours. She was after me. She had to destroy me because she felt she was the only one who could. I was a challenge for her, perhaps the only challenge in her life. I should have known what she was capable of, after all she's me and I'm her." He was quiet, and she decided she might have been pushing it with that last sentence, so she said quickly, "What's selfish is to hold a grudge, to withhold forgiveness. I'm sorry, David."

The old man hugged her neck and started to cry. She hugged him back though he was a virtual stranger to her, and cried just because right then everything made her cry.

Jessica and Dax were preparing to board the shuttlecraft that would take her to her ship on the Beta 4 moonbase. There was a great mass of humanity there to see her off, and it had taken almost an hour to say good-bye to everyone.

She stopped at the top of the ramp and looked out over the crowd. Most of these were her people, the people who had fought with her for all these many, long, battle-torn years. They had chosen to stay on their home planet, and many that were going home with her would only be going back to Earth to pick up their families and come home. Beta 4 was home, and now that the planet was something more than a barely habitable world and they were approaching middle and even old age in some cases, they all wanted to be home.

Like Gerald.

Her people had been replaced by the war orphans as had always been the plan, but while they fought like Fourers, and were as strong as Fourers, they weren't the people she was used to. There were so many faces she was going to be missing.

Like Gerald's.

She couldn't remember ever being lower. She was about to go ahead and board the shuttle when she heard David call out, "Wait!"

She stopped. She had wondered where he was, and had decided that he simply couldn't bear to say good-bye. But here he came, his oldest child in tow. The crowd parted to let them through. By the time they reached the top of the ramp the old man was out of breath. The boy all but hid behind his father, which wasn't easy because he was as tall as his farther, and probably a good twenty pounds heavier.

"RJ," David hugged her, and she could feel his heart pounding, hear his ragged breathing. "I'm glad we caught you . . . Baldor." He stopped to catch his breath. "He wants to go with you."

Jessica looked around David at the young man skeptically. He was excited, but in that way that could have meant anything from adulation to terror.

"He wants to go to Earth with me, or you want him to go to Earth with me?" Jessica asked suspiciously.

"I . . . I want to go," Baldor said. He was a handsome man, with a skin color somewhere between his mother and father's, and jet-black hair that was nearly as straight as hers. His eyes were as dark and brooding as his father's. Take some Beta 4 blood, mix it with some Reliance born and bred humans, and you were likely to get a whole cascade of different colors and types of people. "I want to serve with you." He repositioned the large duffel bag he was carrying.

"I appreciate it, kid, but I think you ought to know that I'm mostly going to be laying around in my cell licking my wounds and sulking. I'm not going to be going to any front soon, and I'm not going to be much fun to be around," Jessica explained.

"He's not a child, RJ, he doesn't need to be entertained. He'll be on a new world. If that doesn't hold his interest, I don't know what will," David said.

"All right." She didn't have enough fight left in her to even argue.

So Baldor went with them, and she was glad he was with them after they started the flight home. She wasn't in the mood for Dax's enthusiasm, and it was nice for him to have someone his own age to talk to. It allowed her to go to her quarters, shut the door, and just be alone with her pain.

She knew she'd done the right thing, but that didn't make her loss any easier to take. She felt like someone had removed a piece of her soul. She wanted to hold him again. Wanted to feel his love for her from across the room. The bed; she looked at it and her chest felt suddenly empty. They'd shared that bed on the way to Beta 4. They'd made love in it. It just looked huge now, huge and empty. As empty as she felt. She lay down on the bed and moved to his side of it. She took in a deep breath and held it. It still smelled like him. She took off all her clothes and crawled under the covers, moving to his side of the bed. She closed her eyes and just breathed in his scent, trying to pretend he was still there with her. She hadn't slept since they had arrived on Beta 4, and pure exhaustion combined with the temporary comfort of being in his place helped her to drift into a solid but nightmare-filled sleep.

Dax answered every question he had, and like anyone who has just learned the answers themselves, his answers were delivered in detail and with enthusiasm.

Baldor had felt a moment of pain when they'd hit the jumpgate and Beta 4 had disappeared from view. He had made his decision at the last minute and had to rush his goodbyes with his mother, friends and other family members. His mother had tried to be brave, as she always was, but he had seen the tears gleaming in her eyes and had almost changed his mind. He stood at one of the viewports looking out at the blur of stars that was hyperspace.

He didn't understand it, any of it. How the ship flew, what hyperspace was or how it got there. He felt a slight flush and a little nausea, which could have been caused by any number of things. Anything from the flight itself to the shot they'd given him to keep him from getting the space sickness his father had explained in such graphic details. It might have even been caused by the thought of missing his family and friends. He was leaving everything familiar behind and going off on a grand adventure. He was excited and apprehensive at the same time.

He walked away from the port and started in the direction he smelled food coming from. He thought maybe getting something in his stomach might calm his nerves and nausea.

In the mess hall he got a tray, filled it with food, and then looked around for a place to sit. He saw Dax sitting at a table alone with a tray of uneaten food in front of him, so he walked over and sat across from him.

Baldor could tell Dax was in deep thought, so he didn't try to talk to him. Just sat down and started eating.

After several minutes Dax said in a faraway tone, "We all have a very narrow view of what normal is."

"Huh?" Baldor said, not really understanding what that had to do with anything, or why Dax chose to share this information with him now.

"Well, until I came on this trip with RJ I'd never really been off Alsterase Island. I'd only ever even been to the mainland about a dozen times. I went to school on the island with the other kids who lived there. I thought my life was normal, but . . . Well, when I saw how you and your people reacted to RJ, when we went to the old ship—the palace, not the bunker," he clarified, "well it suddenly dawned on me that nothing about me or my life has been normal. My father is the president of the New Alliance, and a midget. My 'aunt' is RJ, the GSH who started the New Alliance with your father. My Uncle was an alien from another planet. Most of the people I grew up with weren't human or at least they weren't full Earthborn humans. You grew up on a world at peace. You were trained for warfare, but you've never seen it. I grew up on a world at war. RJ and Gerald and half the population of Alsterase would ship out and go off on campaign. They'd be gone for months at a time and return victorious, and there were always people who went out with them who didn't come back. Yet till now, none of those people were ever people I was close to.

"My life wasn't affected. I never really knew the horror of what was happening. I know Gerald was dying, and I know this is how he wanted to die, in battle. But he's still dead." Dax sniffled but didn't cry. "People have fought, and people have died in the thousands so that you and I could reach this age and never know what it's like to be slaves, to fear for our lives. I lost my mother when I was thirteen, but she wasn't killed by the Reliance . . ."

"Like my father's family was," Baldor interjected. "His mother and sister were allowed to die of diseases the Reliance knew how to cure, and his father was taken away and died in a prison work camp. My father escaped from such a camp just before he found RJ, and he said it was where they sent people to die, that they worked them to death."

"We had a childhood, which is something that our parents never had," Dax said. "Everything that we take for granted is something they all bled for."

"Many of the people I went to school with and trained with were the war orphans who were sent from Earth. They talked of the horrors of their lives in the Reliance. Many of them had nightmares. Our father never seemed to talk of anything but the horrors of his life in the Reliance, of his days fighting with RJ and the inner circle. Still, I didn't really understand till I heard the bombs bursting on the surface of our planet, saw the devastation . . . I wanted to leave the bunker to go and fight, but my parents wouldn't let me. They who had both fought in many glorious battles made me stay there in the bunker like a cowardly child, afraid of the dark."

Dax nodded. "I felt the same way. Though I know I wouldn't be much good in a fight, I'm sure there was something I could have done. My father, he used to go with them everywhere. He used his size to get in places they couldn't . . ."

"He was a very good pickpocket," Baldor said with a smile. "I've heard many stories about your father's talents. He is a great leader."

"I've mostly played till now," Dax admitted. "They make me sit in on meetings, and I know it's because they want me to learn to be like my dad. I sit in the meetings and I hardly listen. I'm bored to tears, and I can't wait to get out of there. See, I just never understood why anything they were doing was all that important. It wasn't action, not real fighting. I wanted to do the sort of things they used to do. I could see no reason for the hours and hours of talking. Why they couldn't just make up their mind to do something, and then do it?

"Until now, I lived on that island and no matter what they said had happened, everything for me was exactly the same. Nothing changed, except fewer people came back than left, and even that never registered. I knew they were grooming me to take my father's place. To learn from him how to be a leader, and yet I never paid any attention. I never realized just how important all that sitting around and talking was, because I never really saw the end results."

"What happened on your world in days was just a part of a plan that was years in the making and that spanned a galaxy. This had to be put here and that there. They went and got this, so they could do that, so that this would be ready when something else happened. It seems to you that it happened in less than a week, but the truth is that battle was being fought for years. Gerald's dead, and even that was part of the plan.

"My mother died, and it was so unreal. You think when you lose someone else that you love that it's going to be different, that you're going to be ready. I mean, I knew he was dying even before RJ did, and I knew she brought him so that he could die . . ."

"She did him a great honor, he died well," Baldor said.

"But he's still dead. My family keeps getting smaller and smaller," Dax said sadly. "The only one I can really count on is RJ. She's been with me my whole life. If I fell she picked me up and dusted me off. If I cried she held me till I stopped. She took care of me when I was sick and when I was grieving for my mother. She's always known just what to do or say to make me feel better. Now she's hurting and I don't have any idea what to do or say."

"She has lost mates before," Baldor said, he was trying to be helpful.

"Do you think that makes it easier or something?" Dax all but screamed at him. "I just told you it's always the same. People you love are dead, and you just don't know what to do about it, how to feel or how to act. Whether to do the things you love to do and try to pretend like they're still there or maybe that they never were, or whether you should just lock down, sit in the dark and cry. Sometimes you do all of it." He took a deep breath and calmed down. "The point is that what I thought was normal isn't. The world, the universe, isn't what I thought it was. I just realized that I don't know anything that I thought I knew, and that everything I know is worthless." Baldor was conspicuously silent. "What?" Dax asked.

"Well . . . I was just wondering if you were going to eat that?" Baldor asked of the neglected tray of food.

Dax pushed the tray towards him and said in a disgusted tone, "Knock yourself out."

For the first few weeks Baldor had been more than entertained just exploring the planet of his father's birth, and the city his father and RJ had started the New Alliance in. Or at least the city built on the ruins of that city. The ocean was of particular interest to him, and he enjoyed hours just running from the waves and staring out at the never-ending body of water.

Alsterase was an excellent city for him to have come to. Since most the population was Fourers, as the Earthers called them, he was able to delight in all the pleasures of this new world without actually feeling like a foreigner.

Dax's father had even accompanied him on a trip to the mainland and introduced him to his favorite place. He explained that it was—as close as he could remember—a reproduction of the old bar that had stood in the same place before the Reliance's invasion of Alsterase. It was called The Golden Arches. A huge, bilious yellow, double plastic arch loomed over the roof of the place with a sign under it that said "Billions Served." Baldor had asked what the symbol and the sign meant, but the little man had shrugged. "Damned if I know. Topaz knew but wouldn't say, he said it would ruin the mystery of the place for us."

Baldor was confused. "Why recreate something that you didn't know the meaning of in the first place?"

"Because it was so important to the feeling of the place. The Golden Arches." He'd gotten a faraway look then. "It's where it all began. I had so many good memories of the place, I just wanted to try to recreate it as closely as possible. I wanted to recreate the feeling I used to get when we were all here together. We were all so young then, and everything seemed possible. I just wanted to feel that way again."

"And did you?" Baldor had asked.

Mickey had smiled. "Almost." The old man looked tired then. "Topaz used to say you can never go home. I always just thought it was one of the crazy things he said that made no sense because he'd come from a different time. Then I had this bar built exactly the way I remembered it. When it was all done I walked in with RJ, expecting to feel the same way I had before. It was the same bar in the same place, but everything was different. See, the way I had felt had very little to do with the place and everything to do with us. All of us together. Whitey, Sandra, Topaz, Levits, and Poley. I met my wife here, and now . . . they're all dead. Your father's on a different planet, and RJ . . . well, RJ is so different now than she was then. Topaz was right. You can never go home."

Baldor thought on that a moment. "Then why is this your favorite place now, if it was such a disappointment?"

"Because sometimes second best is really the best you can do. People see what they want to see." He took a long drink of the beer he held in his hand and then pushed Baldor's beer closer to him. "Better drink that before it gets hot."

Baldor had known that this meant he didn't want to talk about it anymore.

Baldor had soon seen why his father and his friends had liked the bar so much, and he'd spent a lot of time there, getting drunk and chasing women, thus carrying on his father's legacy. He was having a good time, but he hadn't left his mother and father, his sister and his friends to come to Earth to party. He'd come to carry on another of his father's legacies—to fight at RJ's side against the Reliance. To make his mark on the New Alliance, and therefore the universe, as his father had done.

On the island and in Alsterase he'd heard talk of conflict erupting here and there between the New Alliance forces and the Reliance. Pockets of resistance against New Alliance control. He waited for RJ to pick a front and take him with her into battle, but she spent all day, every day, either walking back and forth on "The Wall," or watching one old movie after another as if trying to numb her brain. Dax told him that he was worried about her.

"My father says she's done this before, and she did some really weird shit when mom died, but I've never seen her like this. I try to talk to her, and she just acts like she doesn't hear me at all. She doesn't eat and she doesn't drink, and I know she doesn't have to eat as much or as often as we do, but I know she has to eat sometime or even she isn't going to make it. She sleeps twelve hours a day, and I know she doesn't need much sleep at all."

"Maybe she's so tired because she isn't eating or drinking like she should be," Baldor suggested.

"Maybe, I just know something's got to give. My dad says to leave her alone, that she needs to grieve in her own way, but I think he's forgetting that she doesn't grieve in very healthy ways."

"Maybe I could talk to her," Baldor had suggested.

"It couldn't hurt," Dax said, but he didn't look very hopeful.

Deciding he was never going to do anything more important than drinking and getting laid if RJ didn't snap out of her depression, Baldor steeled himself and went looking for her. He'd found her on the wall just staring at the mainland.

"RJ . . . I was thinking you might feel better if we went to one of the fronts and fought a battle." His father had been the great word man, and as Baldor stumbled over the moronic words that seemed to come from his mouth without any thought whatsoever, he wondered why that gene seemed to have hopped right over his head and slammed into a big rock. "I . . . I mean. They say keeping busy helps."

Her complete silence and the fact she didn't even turn to face him wasn't making it very easy to talk to her.

"All my life my father has told me great stories of your bravery. There is no battle that you can't fight, and no fight that you can't win . . ." and he had absolutely nothing to follow that up with. "So, ah, maybe if you were fighting you'd feel better."

Gods, why don't I just shut up. Everything I say is stupider than the thing I said before. Killing people will make her feel better about losing her husband? How freaking stupid is that. The woman has lost three mates. Every one of them has died in battle. A battle is probably the last thing on her mind. More death isn't going to magically heal her broken heart.

"I'm sorry, RJ, I'm being very selfish. The truth is I don't really care about your pain. I just want to go fight because that's what I want." Gods, did I really say that out loud? What do I have, a death wish? "I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I am being selfish, but it's not like I don't care about your pain. I do, I just meant that I wasn't actually thinking about the way you felt, and I'm very sorry to have bothered you." Baldor turned and ran across the wall and back through the door.

Dax looked at him. "Well?"

"I suck!" Baldor said in an astonished whisper. "I have never felt so utterly and completely stupid in my entire life."

Dax smiled. "Don't be so hard on yourself. It's hard to talk to someone when they don't even seem to know you're there."

Just then Mickey showed up carrying something in his arms. "Get the door for me," he ordered, and Baldor and Dax nearly tripped over each other opening the door.

"What have you got, Dad?" Dax asked.

Mickey turned to look at the young men. "You can come with me, but only if you promise to be quiet."

Intrigued, both Baldor and Dax nodded silently and followed Mickey through the door.

Mickey walked up to RJ's back. "RJ . . . I have something for you."

To Baldor's surprise, she turned around, and the look on her face startled him. She looked lost, her cheeks were drawn in, and her skin was an unhealthy, almost green hue. Mickey held the bundle in his arms up to her.

"That won't help, Mickey," she said sadly. "It will just die, and then I'll be alone again."

"No, it won't die, RJ. Because he's truly yours. Your DNA, yours and Gerald's," Mickey said. "He's the child the two of you would have had, if you could have had children."

Her face immediately changed, her features transformed. She reached down and took the bundle from Mickey's arms, uncovered the newborn's face, smiled and held him to her. She kissed his cheek and then knelt down and kissed Mickey's. "Thank you," she whispered. "It's a little cold out here, I think I better take my son inside." She walked past them all into the building.

Dax was the first to find his voice. "Dad . . . How? Why?"

"How is easy. She and Gerald left DNA everywhere, and we have a group of the best genetic engineers in the universe in our employ. Why should be obvious. She's my friend, my best friend. Except for you and your mother I have never loved anyone more. I knew he was dying, we all did, and I knew she was going to take it hard. She needs someone to love who will love her, who can't die, or she's going to go crazy, and what the New Alliance never needs is a crazy GSH at the helm. She needs him, and more importantly, she deserves him."

"How did you know having a baby GSH would help her?" Baldor asked.

"Because when mom died RJ tried to find Topaz's formula. She wanted to make all of us immortal," Dax answered. "Gerald said the only thing she truly feared was being alone."

Baldor pretended to understand, but he really didn't. How could a test-tube-built, vat baby replace her man? How could a tiny baby of any kind return RJ to the warlord the New Alliance needed to finish the war? It just made no sense at all to him, till three weeks later, the baby strapped on her back, RJ announced that they were going to the planet Sheows to fight a pocket of Reliance resistance there.

The baby sat next to RJ in a special seat during take-off.

They were all silent till they had made it through the jumpgate, then the baby started crying. As soon as the ship had leveled out, RJ got up and took the child out of the seat. She talked baby talk to him, which made Baldor think that perhaps she had lost her edge as a warlord.

"Have you named him yet?" Baldor asked, because when last he had heard a week ago, she still hadn't chosen a name for him.

She nodded and said over the baby's head as she rocked him back and forth, "I have decided to call him Pete."

"Pete . . . what does it mean?" Baldor asked.

RJ shrugged. "Nothing I guess."

"Then why did you name him that?"

"Why did your father name you Baldor? Because it meant something to him. Well, Pete means something to me."

"What?"

"It was where my redemption began, and Pete is another beginning for me."

Baldor pretended to understand, but he had no idea what she was talking about.

When they landed on Sheows, RJ strapped Pete on her back and carried him with her into battle.

Now Baldor knew that it had been a tradition amongst his people to carry their infants into battle, and he knew that RJ had adopted many of his people's ways. In fact, most of the time she acted more like a Fourer than he did, but he was still shocked to see RJ fighting with one hand and pushing a bottle into the infant's face with the other.

He didn't care what his people's heritage was, it just seemed wrong to carry a tiny baby into a battle, even if he was a GSH. By the end of the first day of fighting poor Pete had picked up his first battle wound. He was scared, but not really hurt, and RJ comforted him as the wound closed in—by Baldor's watch—under two minutes.

Baldor had also suffered his first wound that day when a laser blast clipped his right arm. It had landed him in the ship's infirmary.

The day's fighting had been brutal, but they had managed to shove their opponents back by several miles and put them into a poor strategic position, so that now the ship's cannons were finishing them off. Jessica cradled her son close to her. He smiled, his earlier mishap completely forgotten, and she kissed the top of his head.

Jessica had enjoyed ripping the heart from the chest of the man who had dared to nick her son.

Someone rang her doorbell, and she frowned at the interruption. "What is it?" she growled as she moved to open the door.

The doctor stopped, fidgeting with a medscan unit in his hand. "Yes?" she asked impatiently when he just stood there.

"It's Baldor, RJ, he's . . ."

"Is he all right?" she asked quickly, all animosity suddenly gone. "I didn't think he was hit that badly."

"He's going to be fine, but . . ." He handed her the unit.

She shifted the baby so that she could take it. She read the information on the screen, then stared at the doctor. "This can't be."

"But it is," he said. "His cells are even regenerating faster than a normal Fourer's, faster than any hybrid on file. He's carrying your DNA. Genetically altered DNA."

Jessica handed her son to the doctor. "Watch Pete," she ordered. The doctor nodded and took the baby. RJ took the medscan unit and headed for the infirmary. When she demanded to know where Baldor was a nurse told her, and she marched to his room and burst through the door.

Baldor awoke from a drug-induced sleep to see RJ standing at the end of his bed.

"What the hell are you?" she demanded.

"Excuse me?" Baldor said. He was in quite a bit of pain, his brain was foggy from the painkiller they'd given him, and he half thought he was still asleep and dreaming. But as his thoughts cleared he realized she was really there.

"You heard me." She slung the unit at him. He picked it up off his belly and looked at it, it was some sort of chart, numbers and things that made no sense to him at all. He shrugged. He had no idea what she was talking about.

"I'm sorry, maybe it's the drugs, but this just looks like a bunch of gibberish to me."

"Are you going to lay there and tell me that you don't have any idea how you got her DNA? Because it sure as hell isn't mine. She was different from me. Did Stewart make her so she could have children? That's it, isn't it? You're her kid, aren't you? Hers and David's, and he knows I'm not her, and he's sent you here to spy on me, or . . ." She trailed off then. "Only you're a Fourer. Maybe she had an affair with a Fourer, but no, she wasn't there long enough. And you're not old enough. Then how?"

"I have no idea what you're even talking about. Are you all right, RJ?"

She took in a deep breath and let it out. She glared at him as if trying to pull the truth from his eyes. She picked up the medscan and looked at the data again. She looked at him again, and then he realized what she was really doing. She was reading his emotions to see if he was lying to her, but he didn't even know what he was supposed to be lying about.

"There isn't enough of it to be maternally or paternally given. It seems to have come from Grant's DNA, to be a sliver of his genetic material, but how? How did it get there?" she mumbled.

"How did what get where?" Baldor asked in confusion.

"How did my DNA wind up in your body?" she demanded.

Baldor laughed. "Oh that, it's from the blood transfusion."

"What?" she asked.

"Remember when Dad was wounded and he thought he was going to die? He should have died, but you took a syringe of your blood and put it in him and it saved him. The doctor said it changed his chromosomes a little, so Sandra and I heal a little bit faster than other people, and we're hardly ever sick. It's not really that big a deal, is it?" he said.

RJ looked as if she had been kicked in the gut. "No, I suppose not. Get to feeling better." She left, Baldor fell back to sleep, and he all but forgot the incident at once.

Jessica practically ran back to her room, where she took Pete from the doctor and practically threw the medscan at him.

"Well?" he asked, and she damned his curiosity. She explained the incident as Baldor had told it to her.

"Yes, well that would explain it," he said, then added with arched eyebrows. "You forgot the incident?"

He would never know just how close he had come to getting his head snapped off his body in that minute. She turned on him and hissed, "You know how much information is in my brain? How many years of data are stored up there? Even with total recall, do you really expect me to be able to call up even the most obscure incident in mere moments?"

"I'm sorry, General." He bowed and quickly left her presence, so maybe he did know how close he'd come to death.

As the door closed Jessica held her son close to her. Pete fussed a little, no doubt upset because he could feel that she was.

"It's all right, Pete. It's all right. She's far away from us, and she hasn't reproduced. It was just a fluke." But for a minute, just one insane moment, she had been sure that RJ had given birth to her own child. That Stewart had given her yet another thing that he hadn't given Jessica, and all the old resentment for her sibling had felt new.

She looked at her son, Gerald's son. She wished Gerald could have known his son, and that Pete could have known his father. Had she been a normal woman it would have been possible. Of course, if she were a normal woman she would have most probably been dead before she had a chance to meet him.

Gerald would never know his son, but Pete would know his father because she would make sure that he did.

Chapter Eighteen

Most of the Abornie approached her with fear, lightly shielded animosity, and only when it was an absolute necessity. They were afraid of her, and they just flat and simple didn't like her. Which was probably just as well, because RJ had decided that she loathed them.

The Abornie loved Topaz and Levits, using any excuse to be near them, and avoided her—and therefore Poley—like the plague.

But then Topaz and Levits did nothing but praise and encourage them, while RJ gladly told them they were all worthless screw-ups, not worth the air they breathed.

RJ worked on her newest project and thought with a wry smile that it was rather like children with a strict parent and a lenient one.

The more lenient parent gives unconditional love and never demands anything from the child, praises the child on every small accomplishment, doctors their wounds without questioning how they got them, and rationalizes their shortcomings. The strict parent shows their love by trying to mold the child into a responsible and complete person, by setting necessary boundaries and demanding a certain amount of responsibility from the child for their own actions. The strict parent tells the child the unhappy truths the child doesn't want to hear, orders them to complete tasks they don't want to do, and punishes them when they screw up.

This was the role RJ had unwittingly taken on, the big difference being that she really didn't even care about the Abornie. Her only reason for getting involved with them at all was that she liked the planet, and didn't want them to screw it up again.

Although she had begun to believe that the planet's genetically engineered plant life wouldn't allow it to be destroyed. The plants were resilient, there was no doubt about that. You could cut a tree down, even pull it up, and within a week there would be a sapling in the spot. Give it six months and it was a full-sized tree again.

She had done extensive experiments, just tinkering around to see exactly how resilient the plant life was. She moved them into the ship into artificial light. At first they went through a little shock, and for about a week it looked like they weren't going to do as well as they did with real sunlight. Then they adapted, and you couldn't tell any difference between them and the plants growing outside.

On the planet's surface it rained an average of three times a week, so she tried removing them from water. After about a week they started to wilt. At the end of two they started to look really bad. But at the end of three weeks, the plants actually started to perk up again. What she found after running several years of experiments was that the plants could adapt to damn near anything and thrive.

They could resist temperatures as high as a hundred and fifty degrees, and as low as twelve degrees and still flourish. Above or below that range they went dormant, but the minute you lowered or raised the temperature they came right back again.

If forced, they could go as long as three months without water; after that they would again enter a dormant stage. But the minute water hit them they grew again. They would come back even after two years without water, but after that, some never recovered. They had an uncanny ability to adapt to almost anything you threw their way, so it would be hard, but not impossible, for the Abornie to trash out Frionia again.

RJ would let Topaz and Levits indulge the Abornie just so long, and then she would step in and do what was necessary to keep them from wiping themselves and the planet out, try to teach them some real values.

Of course since Topaz, and especially Levits, made it very clear that they just felt she was being over careful and mean, the Abornie mostly snuck around behind her back and did as they damn well pleased.

Just like a kid with a strict parent and a lenient one.

Over the years she had mostly given up. Maybe it showed a flaw in her personality that she couldn't even make herself care what happened to them. The one positive thing contact with the Abornie had done for RJ was to make her appreciate the human race a whole lot more.

The Abornie had a life expectancy of two hundred and fifty Earth years. For the first two hundred and twenty-five years they were usually completely ambulatory. They had all their health and all their senses, and it was only after two hundred and twenty-five years that their health started to fade at all.

Humans, even in the Reliance where medicine was highly advanced, only had an average life expectancy of a hundred years, and the last twenty of that was usually spent just trying to stay alive. Humans had short lives; they spent most of their short lives just trying to figure out what it was all about. About the time they finally figured it out it was way too late to enjoy it. If the Reliance had ever let you enjoy anything at all.

If humans had been given the life expectancy of an Abornie, there was no telling how they might have advanced and grown as a people. It is quite possible that the wisdom that humans would have gained from such long lives would have made it impossible for the Reliance or anything like it to have ever taken over.

But the Abornie wasted this gift. The only lesson they ever seemed to learn was that having more, and doing less to have more, was what it was all about. Even the equal sharing of chores she had noticed when she first observed them—that she had thought at the time showed how advanced they were—had turned out not to be an overriding air of fairness at all. Instead, it was a direct result of their absolute childishness, and she didn't mean in the good sense. If one Abornie sat down for whatever reason, they all sat down, because why should one Abornie do anything if even one other Abornie is not doing anything? If they hadn't gotten over this, they no doubt would have starved out. The Abornie picked leaders based solely on popularity and argued about everything. Getting them to actually work together was like pulling teeth. The only thing any of them seemed to have the smallest bit of talent for was spending copious amounts of time trying to figure out the easiest way to do something. For this reason, anything they were doing always took five times as long as if they had just done it in the first place.

They were the proof that breeding would tell, that environment could only effectively combat breeding if you changed someone's environment completely. Their ancestors had been a bunch of egg-headed scientists who had probably never shed a drop of sweat in their lives. To add insult to injury, these were people so selfish that they valued their own lives above that of their fellow beings.

To find out exactly what caliber of people had gone into the bunkers you only had to ask yourself a few simple questions. Would you want to live on a dead world? Do you think you deserve to live more than your family, your friends, your neighbors, or even the guy who runs the corner market? Could you really stand being alive knowing that by taking a place in the bunker you had ensured someone else's demise? How vain do you have to be to think you deserve to be the future of a race's gene pool?

RJ had read everything she could find on the planet to read in the years she had been here, and the utter and complete selfishness of the Abornie's ancestors was abhorrent. It seemed that there had actually been room for hundreds of thousands more people in the bunkers, and enough supplies to sustain them. But the scientists, doctors and politicians had decided that they had no idea how long the "winter" would last, and that they were better off keeping their numbers to a bare minimum to ensure their own personal survival. Some of the occupants of the bunkers had actually decided to go to the bunkers while leaving their entire family on the surface to die. They had written what she was sure they thought were heart-rending accounts of how they'd been forced to go below and leave their loved ones to die. How hard the decision had been for them. RJ wasn't buying any of it. Their family, friends, homes, pets, everything would be destroyed, they knew it, and they chose to save their own asses.

The Abornie were the descendants of people who thought it showed great courage that they were willing to go below and leave everyone else to die to save their race. They'd had ice water for blood.

Even their on-going feud with the Ocupods had been their own damn fault. They had realized early on—because though they were selfish and self-centered, they were also incredibly intelligent—that the Ocupods attacked them only when they tried to use any kind of machinery, electricity, or basically any form of technology. But they just kept trying anyway, until the Ocupods eventually ran them out of the ruins where they had been living and into the jungles. Even then they kept trying, even though it had caused the death of many of their people, because they just wanted to have it all. They knew that technology existed, and they were willing to sacrifice lives—as long as it wasn't theirs, and no one ever thinks it's going to be them—just to have simpler lives.

Because they were just that incredibly lazy.

How much easier did they actually need it? The planet was always a balmy sixty to eighty degrees, they had lots of clean water, and food was everywhere. They could have just hung out and survived, but that wasn't good enough.

Assholes! The Abornie were, plain and simple, the largest group of assholes she'd ever encountered. She could find absolutely nothing redeemable about them as a whole.

Topaz and Levits kept treating them like hapless natives who had been forced into a horrible existence by cowardly, genetically engineered freaks. They guided them and were patient with their squabbling and bickering to an almost disgusting degree.

All RJ saw when she looked at them at all were worthless hunks of humanoids walking around hell-bent on having whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it, with no thought at all to the future, or each other, or the planet.

She didn't mince words when she bothered to talk to them at all. She told them just how she felt about them. Whenever she saw or heard them doing something she considered to be the next step to riding a rail into hell, she spared no feelings and no words telling them how stupid and short-sighted they were.

So, for the most part, the Abornie avoided her like a plague.

Except for Alan. From the time he'd been a tiny toddler, Alan had done everything in his power to be close to her and Poley. It was as if he'd figured out, almost fresh from the womb, that the Abornie were all assholes, and wanted to be as far away from them as possible. That place just turned out to be anyplace that Poley and RJ were. The fact that the child had hung around them all day, every day, from early in the morning till late in the evening, sometimes even spending the night on the ship from the time he was about three, and they didn't even know who his parents were, more or less told the whole story about Abornie parenting skills.

As a race they were lousy parents, no doubt because they lacked the capacity to care for anything as much as they cared for themselves. Of course, these lousy parenting skills had kept their numbers low and might just ensure the future of the planet.

Alan was highly intelligent and very good humored. He liked to play practical jokes on them, though most of them failed from the beginning because he couldn't quit smiling. She'd even caught him trying to mask his emotions from her, and doing it quite successfully, but he was still smiling, so his tricks just didn't quite work. Sometimes she pretended to fall for one of his gags just to humor him, but he always knew that she was.

By the time Alan was fourteen he had all but quit returning home. He had now been living with them almost constantly for ten years, and she still didn't know who his parents were. It was only at this point that RJ realized that one of the reasons he was so different from the others was that he had basically been raised by them, and not the Abornie. He had developed all the same facial expressions and speech patterns that they had. He even used their slang, and was practically bilingual, knowing at least as much Reliance as Levits had forgotten.

Alan moved forward to hold the piece of metal she was trying to weld into place, as always seeming to know what needed to be done without being told . . . Thus proving that he was nothing like the rest of his race. They would happily stand and watch you struggle with something and never offer to lift a finger to help. If you gave up and finally asked for their help, they would immediately start to argue over who was closer.

Again, like hateful children.

While Levits and Topaz had encouraged her in her gardening hobby, neither of them seemed to approve of her newest hobby, the reconstruction of two of the Ocupod "vehicles" so that she and Poley could get inside and operate them. It was a major undertaking, and they had to cannibalize one of the skiffs to accomplish the desired outcome. It would be well worth the effort and the lost skiff when they were through, though, and they were having a good time doing it. Six months ago when Levits had first seen what they were building in the hold area of the ship they all still lived in, he had been more than shocked. He'd been pissed off.

"Do you really hate them so much that you would bring their worst nightmare back to life?" he had said in outrage.

RJ hadn't missed a beat. "Oh, I hate them a lot, but this has nothing to do with them. I need something to do, and I've found something to keep me busy for awhile." She'd shrugged. "Scaring all hell out of your pets is only a happy little extra."

"They aren't animals, RJ . . ."

"We've had this argument before, and I have already said, way too many times to be happy to repeat it, that animals are more deserving of our nurturing and respect." She hadn't even bothered to look up at him from where she was working on the machine in question. She hadn't been able to really look at him lately. He was like some joke gone horribly wrong, a withered, bent caricature of the man who had been her friend, and whom she had once loved.

She had realized when she couldn't quite forgive him for the incident with the slaughtered Ocupod that she didn't feel the same way about him that she had Whitey, that it wasn't the same kind of love. When the years started to slam into him hard and heavy, when his body became a graph of the ravages of time and his constant complaining was no longer cute, she realized the honeymoon was over. Her desire for him had ended way before his had for her, and she had been greatly relieved on the day that he was no longer able to perform.

He had completely aligned himself to people who hated her, constantly choosing them over her until it had eroded most of what she had felt for him. However, there was still enough there to keep her on this world.

It wasn't a real problem. Time was as always on her side, he had meant so much to her once, and he did still love her. For his sake she had promised to keep her project confined to the ship, and he had seemed to be appeased.

"How long till you leave now?" Alan asked her. She didn't know why Poley had told the boy that the ship was fully operational, fueled, and ready to launch, and that they knew the way home, but he had. Alan hadn't told anyone else, which really showed how much he had aligned himself with them.

She thought of Levit's condition. "Not long now," she said.

The boy nodded sadly, no doubt because he'd be left in the land of the flaming assholes. She was very tempted to take him with them, but what sort of life would that be for him? He was better off with the idiots than being slung across the universe with the GSH, the robot, and the crazy old man. He had someplace where he belonged, even if his people were all morons. If he went with them, he'd be as out of place as they were here, and everywhere else.

"Don't worry, Alan, you will find new friends," Poley said, reading the boy's body language—a feat which never ceased to amaze RJ, given what Poley was.

"No I won't." The boy let go of the piece he'd been holding and stomped off, which wasn't really very helpful at all.

"You upset him," Poley said accusingly.

"Me? I didn't do anything." RJ said.

"I'm going to go check on him," Poley said, and left her there to work on her project alone.

"Great." RJ sighed as she tried to do what she'd been doing with his help by herself. It wasn't really working. "I really do think I preferred Poley when I gave orders and he followed them, no questions asked," she mumbled. She gave up trying to do the work herself, and walked over to get a cup of water off the workbench where she'd left it. She took a long swallow, then crawled up on the workbench to await Poley's return.

Her mind unwittingly turned to Levits and his condition. He was now eighty-seven years old and sick, sick with something very human. Cancer, Topaz said, and something far beyond their ability to cure. He was wasting away slowly. His friends from the village came in a steady stream, bringing him different foods they said were cures, not knowing they didn't work with his physiology. They visited with him and took turns bathing and dressing him. These people who had so much trouble doing anything for anyone but themselves were bending over backwards for him, which showed how much they actually cared for him.

And what had he actually done for them? He'd played with their children. Told them stories about Earth. Fished with them. Taught them how to build vehicles and helped govern them.

She'd been the one who won the war for them, thereby making all these things possible. Her they hated. They hated her because she was different, because she was stronger than they were, and because she expected them to act responsibly.

Levits was no threat, his rotting carcass proved that. She might at any minute rise up in her anger and smite them. She didn't age, and they all knew what she was capable of. If they had been smart, they would have been kissing her ass. After all, Levits was dying, and then the only one they'd have to protect them from her wrath would be Topaz. They didn't know she was leaving as soon as Levits died, and she preferred it that way. Let them all squirm.

Simple-minded, selfish, chicken shits, and he prefers them to me. He loves me, even now when he's laying there dying, and knows I can't really stand to be near him. But he thinks they are somehow worthier than me. Whitey understood me, and I thought Levits did, too. He did, till they turned him against me. Till he started to become more like one of them than one of us. They stole him from me, and that's the real reason I hate them so much.

RJ wasn't at all sure she was happy to have discovered this about herself. It seemed petty, and she didn't consider herself to be petty.

She had to make herself check on Levits every day, and every day she hoped that it would be the day when he'd have the pride and dignity to ask her to do what needed to be done. But he seemed to be happy to live in any state. Topaz had used a pain blocker so that Levits felt basically nothing. His food had to be puréed and fed to him through a straw. He shit and pissed himself on a regular basis. He could barely breathe, and was only coherent about six hours a day, but even in those rare moments he didn't ask for what she would have demanded in his position.

She didn't know if this made him incredibly brave or incredibly weak, she only knew that she'd be glad when it was over. When it would finally all be over and she could leave this beautiful, amazing world inhabited by the worst form of parasites.

RJ finally realized that quite a bit of time had passed and neither Poley nor Alan had returned, so she decided she'd better go check on them. They had gone towards the interior rooms, so she headed that way. She had barely entered the hallway when she heard a horrible screaming coming from Poley's room. The door was closed, so she kicked it open and jumped through, blaster in hand. She stopped, for the moment frozen by shock.

"Ah . . . I'm, ah . . ." She started laughing nervously, holstered her blaster, picked up the door and backed out, propping it in the doorway as she went. "Sorry, really sorry, boys."

She kept laughing as she walked away shaking her head. The universe had just become an even stranger place than it had been a few short minutes ago.

"So," RJ looked up at Poley as he walked into the hold, "where's Alan?"

Poley looked puzzled. "He said he was embarrassed that you saw what we were doing. He went to the garden to get something for dinner." He shrugged.

"Poley do you . . . Well, do you enjoy doing that with Alan?"

"He seems to enjoy it very much, and I find that gives me a certain excitement. He says I'm the best at it, but of course I would be, because I'm perfect."

"So you keep saying," RJ said and added under her breath, "to think all these years I thought the boy had a crush on me."

"No, Alan doesn't find females sexually pleasing," Poley said, having of course heard her.

"Well, obviously not," RJ laughed. "Poley, does Alan understand what you are?"

"I believe so. He says I'm gentle, handsome, gallant and very wise, and I am all of those things."

"You're also a robot, Poley."

"And you're a GSH. You weren't supposed to be able to have sex, but you can. I, on the other hand, was programmed to be fully sexually functional." He had an almost defensive tone in his voice.

She decided to let it drop. They'd be leaving soon, and then what would it matter if the boy had a warm memory of an encounter with something that wasn't actually flesh and blood?

She went to Levit's room as she did every day. They hadn't shared a room since he'd become impotent. He had contended that it was just too hard for him. She had thought if it was hard it wouldn't have been a real problem, and had hidden her joy at being able to distance herself from him without it having been her decision.

Today his breathing seemed even more labored than usual. She ignored the now ever-present smell of shit and disinfectant that seemed to permeate the room.

He was just lying there, wheezing and gasping and making horrible bowel sounds that he couldn't control. For a second she saw him in her mind's eyes, a happy memory of him young and beautiful and full of life, reminding her of why she had cared for him so much.

But the present slapped her in the face, even as the tears ran down her checks.

This was how it was supposed to be. How awful. She could learn from her mistakes and experiences and live to use the knowledge. If she ever died it would be in the middle of some horrible blast, it would be quick and clean. Yet this fragile, almost dead creature had once saved her life. He'd fought at her side, would have given his short life for her. He'd loved her, and he'd loved these stupid-assed Abornies that she had no use for.

Now his body was eaten up with disease and very little of humanity remained, and yet still he clung to life.

"RJ?" he croaked out. She moved up where he could see her and forced herself to take his hand.

"I'm here, Levits."

He almost laughed, then coughed.

"Maybe you shouldn't try to talk," she suggested.

"Why, because I might die?" he smiled. "You don't understand, do you?" he asked.

"Understand what?"

"Why I care for them so much."

"No, I really don't. You were never one to suffer fools until we came here. You were basically selfish and self-centered, yet you opened your heart to them, and they didn't deserve a second thought from you."

"You never gave them a chance, RJ. They are flawed, just like humans are flawed, but they aren't the hopeless parasites you make them out to be. Quit separating yourself from them, become part of the community. They can be warm, loving, gracious."

"If you give away your life in service to them," RJ said, and didn't even try to keep the resentment from her voice.

"I didn't give away my life in service to them, RJ. They became my life, my reason to live."

She realized what he was doing. He was saying good-bye. So she didn't tell him that he had wasted his life. Instead she asked in a low tone. "What's your reason for living now?"

He laughed again and then coughed again. He shook his head. "Could you hand me that glass of water?" She let go of his hand, grabbed the water and held it to his lips, knowing he couldn't actually hold the glass himself anymore. He shook his head, indicating that he'd had enough, and she took the glass away and set it down. "To answer your question, my one true love, I'm afraid of dying. Scared to death of it, actually."

"Then why are you choosing to make it last?" she asked in a low sad voice.

"Because I love life, even this life. Every minute of it is precious."

RJ just didn't see it that way. Perhaps his brain is just so far gone that he can't think clearly.

"Do you remember the day we first made love? It was in the ship after David had pelted us with shit."

She nodded silently, thinking it was no wonder he was thinking of that, smell being such a strong trigger for memories. "Of course we did shower first," she clarified with a smile.

"I'm laying here thinking about that. About that and sticking your heart back in your chest and getting you out of Alsterase, because that was truly my finest hour. I'm thinking about all of the people I've known, Sandra and Whitey, and Mickey and even that idiot David Grant. I'm thinking about all the Abornie children I've played with over the years, and mostly I'm thinking about you. I'm thinking how all those people, everyone I've ever met, how each encounter changed my life, and I'm hoping that when I'm gone people are going to think about me and think about how I changed their lives."

"I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you," RJ said quietly.

Levits frowned. "Ah, but I don't always get the feeling that you're glad that you're alive."

RJ laughed. "I'm not always, but I'll always remember you."

"Yes, but then you don't have much choice, do you?"

"I'd remember you anyway."

He was silent, struggling for the moment just to breathe. When he spoke again his voice came in gasps. "So, have you lost the last vestiges of respect you had for me?"

"No," she lied.

"But you won't miss me when I'm gone."

"I already miss you, because the man I knew is already gone. That's why I don't understand, Levits," RJ said sadly. "I've had to watch you die in stages over the years, and I understand that that's just the way it is for normal humans. I understand that just because your eyesight dims doesn't mean you want to die. Just because your legs hurt and don't want to work and you move more slowly . . . But this, I will never understand why anyone would want to hold on in this state. How many times can you play over memories of things you can never do again, people who are gone, places you'll never see again, and . . ."

"I am tired of it, RJ. Finally. Tired of fighting it," he said quietly. "It won't be long now. I can feel it. Please, RJ, take me out to your garden and let me die in that beautiful place, not in here in all this sterility, with the stink. Let me die looking at you. Listening to you talking about the old days."

She cradled him in her arms and carried him out to the garden. A group of Abornie tried to stop her at the door, but she easily shoved through them.

"Stop for a minute," Levits said in gasps. She did, and he said to the oldest Abornie man there, a man who Levits had been close to for years, "My friend, please, I wish to die outside and alone with my love."

The man nodded and started to cry like a baby. If she'd been the one on her way to die, they'd no doubt have created a dance of joy to do in celebration.

She set him down on a bench in the garden and sat down beside him. Without waiting, she started talking. "Remember when we first met?"

"Yes, I was all out of luck then, just like I'm out of time now."

She held his hand and kept talking to him till he interrupted her asking, "Why?"

"Huh?"

"Why did you stay?"

"Stay where?"

"I know, RJ. He told me."

She didn't have to ask which he. Topaz was never very good at keeping secrets. Unless of course they were his.

"I couldn't leave you here, and I couldn't take you with me," she said simply.

"Thank you," he said. He slumped against her then, silent. His breath came in three quick, shuddering breaths that moved his whole body, and then all was quiet.

The Abornie buried their dead as the humans did when there was no crematorium close by. Except that they had a strange habit of stuffing the dead person's mouth with food and taping it shut. No doubt some ritual left over from a long forgotten religion, because none of them seemed to know why it was done, just that it was proper.

She didn't go to see him put in the ground. She saw no reason to do so. She was walking through her garden one last time. With Levits gone she saw no reason to linger even one more day on the planet's surface. She'd already said good-bye to Alan, the only Abornie she gave one damn about, and as soon as Topaz got back, they would lift off. Poley was even now preparing the ship for takeoff. RJ sighed and leaned against a tree, listening to the small stream she had diverted to run through her garden. She would miss this, but of course she was taking as much of it as she could with her.

"It's beautiful here," Topaz said, walking up behind her.

"Yes it is."

"It was a wonderful service, quite colorful. Many people said very nice things about him."

"Uh huh," RJ said noncommittally.

"When I was a kid, way before I found the secret to ultimate rejuvenation and promptly lost it, there was this character called Superman. Ran around in tights and a cape doing good deeds. Saving the innocent from evil with his super powers. He could jump tall buildings with a single bound, he had x-ray vision, and he could fly and shoot laser beams out of his eyes . . ."

"That's ridiculous . . ."

"Shut up and listen for a minute. He wasn't real, he was a made-up character," Topaz said impatiently. "He could do all this really cool shit, and when I was a kid it was a big deal to watch him on TV or read the comic book, because no one had superhuman abilities. I, of course, lived to see the creation of people with super powers." He saw the incredulous look on her face, growled and said quickly, "Except for flying and shooting laser beams from their eyes. Anyway, once there were real super humans, once I was one myself, the shows and books lost all appeal to me. I had loved that character because he was so righteous, so perfect. When they created the first GSH's I realized how naïve I had been. Nothing could contain Superman, but the Reliance had easily harnessed the GSH's. I stopped believing in super heroes.

"Then you came along, and I believed again. You were better than any comic book hero I could have conjured up, because you weren't perfect, and you weren't perfect because you were real."

She turned around and smiled at him. "Where is this going, old man? It's time to go."

Topaz took a deep breath and let it out. "I'm not going with you."

She had felt doubt coming from him for weeks, but couldn't figure out to what it applied. She wished she could have said she'd seen this coming, but she just hadn't. "What the hell!"

"I want to stay here," he said.

"What on earth for?"

"I like it here, RJ. I have friends here, respect, purpose."

"Screw that. I know you, old man. You just want to continue to play god."

Topaz shrugged, seeming not to be concerned by her accusation or her anger in the slightest. "So what if I do? I'll make a good and decent god."

"By doing what? Continuing what you and Levits have started? Teaching them how to make bigger and better machines so that they can clear-cut, slash and burn the land? I know, you can help them get one of the old power plants working so that they can get in a fight over whose turn it is to drench the reactor core and blow the planet up? Or just make life so simple for them that they breed like flies and kill every other thing on the planet till they ultimately wind up killing even themselves off in a big cluster-fuck of stupidity?"

"You know, RJ, you have this doom-filled attitude about every civilization. Remember that you had similar qualms about the New Alliance before we left Earth. I know what you're worried about. That we'll start out very well meaning, and before you know it there will be pollution and war and people calling on the phone to sell you aluminum siding and life insurance, and you'll be like, 'No thank you, I'm not interested,' but they just won't ever stop talking, till you feel like your head is going to explode and you just rip the damn thing right out of the wall, and . . ."

"I have no clue what any of that last part even is or what it means. You are completely nuts, and yet you think you can actually help this planet full of rejects who are hell-bent on destruction. Get a woman to take with you. Get two if you need to, but get your crazy ass on the ship, we're going."

"No . . . I'm not going . . . Oh, I suppose you could make me go, but if you do I promise to make your life an absolute living tormentuous hell. Besides, Superman would never force someone to do something against his wishes."

"I'm not freaking Superman! I'm not any sort of man. Why? Why would you do this?" RJ pulled at her hair. "Why would you choose them over me? They're going to die, you know. They aren't like Poley and me. They're going to get old and die."

"That's what makes them so damned interesting. Just when I get bored with them they'll die and new ones will be born. That's what I learned from being here, don't you see? You are right, of course, because you always are. These people are stupid, and yes, they would destroy this world. I want to see if I can keep them from doing that. I want to see if I can make a difference. It's all about me, don't you see? Me, me, me. I'm not choosing them over you, I could never love anyone or anything the way that I love you, except of course me." He walked over and took her into his arms. She hugged him, and he could feel her tears wet on his shoulder as they soaked through his thin shirt. "I'm choosing to stay here instead of going with you because this world needs me and you don't."

"Yes I do, Topaz." She cried loudly then; no doubt these were in part tears she hadn't cried for Levits.

He let go and stepped away to look at her. She dried her eyes and held his gaze, and said again, "I do need you, Topaz, you're the only one who knows me, understands me."

He laughed then, his own tears spilling onto his checks. "But I'm a nut job, remember? Crazier than a shithouse rat."

"But you know me."

"And you know yourself. You have Poley. You have each other. You long for adventure. Gardening was nice and you enjoy it, but it's not enough for you. A simple, quiet life could never be enough for you, because it isn't what you were built for. You're Superman, kid. I've lived my great adventures and enjoyed them all, and now I want to live this adventure here with these people. It's not like it's forever. Eventually we'll meet again. Here or on some faraway world. What's a couple of hundred years to either of us?"

She hugged him again, this time so hard it was uncomfortable. "I'm going to miss you, old man."

"I'll miss you too, brat."

She let him go, turned and marched towards the ship. He watched her back as she walked away, and then ran to catch up. "RJ, wait a minute."

She stopped and turned, the look on her face saying that she hoped he was changing his mind. Her face clouded again when she felt that he hadn't.

"I have to tell you something." He looked nervously at his feet, then losing his nerve looked up and blurted out, "I am your father, Luke."

RJ laughed and hugged him again. She whispered in his ear, "I'll always remember you just like this, old man . . . Crazy."

He nodded, suddenly very sober. "Super heroes . . . they always wound up alone, RJ. They always wound up alone because in reality the writers realized that people so different would always be on the outside. You and I, we have corporeal lives, we feel and are felt, our actions have consequences, and yet we're never really quite part of it, are we?"

RJ closed the bay doors as she walked in and headed for the bridge. She took her seat beside Poley silently.

"Where is Topaz?" Poley asked.

"He has decided to stay," RJ said.

Poley's eyebrows arched. "And you let him do that?"

"I could have made him leave, kicking and screaming the whole way I suppose, but he promised to make our lives a living, tormentuous hell if I did."

"That would suck," Poley said. "We're ready to lift off on your word."

RJ thought about it for only a split second. "OK, let's go," she ordered.

The ship's thrusters fired, and in mere minutes they had lifted off the surface of the moon/planet they'd called home. When they had landed there had been four of them, and now there were only two. It sort of sucked the joy out of the moment for her.

Being in space again, in flight, almost made her feel like she was already home, though from their calculations they were at least five years away from their own space. Maybe it was all the different emotions going through her head, accompanied by the myriad of noises the ship made on takeoff, but she hadn't heard him come in, and when he spoke she almost came out of her seat, belt or not.

"Wow, this is great!"

"What in hell's name are you doing here!" RJ screamed, spinning in her seat to look at the boy where he stood clinging to the doorway for dear life.

For answer he just smiled and looked lovingly at Poley, and that's when she knew. Alan wasn't a stowaway, he was a passenger. She glared at her metal brother. So this was why he'd been so hot to lift off.

Poley smiled at her and shrugged. "He wanted to come."

"And I didn't want him to come. I told you, Poley, I told you all the reasons why."

"But none of those were really very good reasons, RJ."

How had this happened? When had Poley started making decisions that went against hers? Was he supposed to be able to do that? She didn't think that he could. It was rather like having a toy that you thought would do one thing, and finding out that it didn't do that at all, but something completely different that wasn't nearly as cool. Still, she had to admit that in a strange way she was glad to see the boy.

"You better strap yourself in," she said with a sigh.

"I had strapped him in, in the crew's quarters," Poley said, obviously wanting RJ to know that he hadn't been at all negligent with the lad's safety, "and I've treated him for the space sickness, formulating the medicine for his specific race."

"Freaking beautiful," RJ said, as she unstrapped herself and went to get the Abornie, who was bouncing all over the bridge trying to make it to a chair. She helped him sit in one, and then strapped him in before returning to her own seat. She glared at her brother. "So, knowing I would disapprove, you stuck him in crew's quarters where I wouldn't hear or feel him till we were off the planet and I wasn't likely to make you take him back."

"Well, I'm not stupid, am I?" Poley said defensively.

"No, you aren't stupid," RJ said, thinking of the absolute irony of her being without a mate and the robot bringing his along. It was going to be a long flight. She hadn't planned to go into cryogenic sleep. The fuel core they had taken from the planet meant they had very little fear of ever running low on fuel again. She had decided that years in space would give her time to meditate and reflect. Now she wondered whether that was such a good idea, even for her.

As soon as they cleared the planet's gravitational pull all turbulence ended and the ship smoothed out. RJ breathed deeply, unbuckled her belt, and got out of her seat. She looked at Alan, then at her brother. "Should we put him in a cryogenic chamber?"

"Not unless he becomes unstable. He will keep us company," Poley said quickly, his mechanical origin being more apparent in the quality of his voice when he was annoyed or panicked. He didn't want the man to be put into cryogenic sleep. The robot was attached to him, the way he had always been attached to RJ, maybe even more.

RJ felt as if the whole universe had abandoned her. She nodded silently and left the bridge. She went to check on her plants. They were fine, nothing spilled or knocked over in takeoff. She was half disappointed—it would have been nice to have something to do. She left the "green house" and started towards her quarters. Suddenly she drew up short, stopping to stare at a picture of Topaz etched onto the wall. Gone, they were all gone now, except Poley.

RJ wound up walking up and down the hallways and into the different rooms of the ship, just looking at all of Poley's artwork. When she had first come out of cryo-sleep and seen it, she had been overwhelmed by Poley's "hobby." Then, like anything else, as she saw it every day it had just blended into the background, something she took for granted. Now she took time to really look at them again. Her father, Whitey, Sandra, Topaz, David, Mickey . . . Levits, she smiled, always screaming.

Alone. She had been alone for most of the first part of her life. Surrounded by other soldiers, but separated from them, she had to be careful they didn't find out that she was a GSH, but it hadn't been very hard to keep most of them at bay because part of her nature was obvious. She was obviously an Argy hybrid, and humans didn't want to be around someone who could read their emotions. It made them feel raw and exposed, so usually they kept their distance.

Of course occasionally one of the men would let his sexual curiosity beat down his better judgment, and he'd try to make time with her. It wasn't usually very hard to get them to back off, and if they didn't she promptly beat them to a pulp.

A picture of herself caught and held her attention. She was standing on top of a transport truck, her chain in hand, her face a picture of passionate rage as she flung her favorite weapon out at some unseen foe from some past battle. She started to just walk past and then stopped dead in her tracks. She turned slowly around and went back to look at the picture.

Where did she go? RJ thought. Look at me. I used to have such passion, such purpose. How long have I just been going through the motions? One day after another. I remember every word I've ever read, or heard, everything I've ever seen. But when did I change? When did I stop being that woman? I don't know, I . . . I can't put a time on it or even link it to an event. Did it happen slowly over the course of the years or all at once? Did everyone else notice and they just didn't say anything? Everyone else is gone, maybe they took little pieces of me with them when they went and left this thing that I am now.

Suddenly she found herself running all over the ship looking just at the pictures of herself. Pictures of her smiling and radiantly happy. Crying, and obviously tattered and left in ruins by her grief, but that hadn't done it, either. Looking at the pictures she saw not who she was, but only who she had been. Not one of these pictures was who she was now.

Yet she hadn't aged, she hadn't changed, she was physically the same.

But her soul, her mind, knew that she was approaching her second century.

Knowledge, horrible, terrible knowledge had stolen away the spark of humanity she had worked so hard to acquire. There were beautiful things, wonderful things, everywhere she had ever been, but they were always dwarfed when compared with the harsh truths of life. The really good times, the happy times had been short. The agony, despair and loneliness had stretched out for year upon year, till the only happiness in her life was memories.

People you loved and put your trust in would betray, forget and abandon you just when you least expected it. They would use you as long as it served them and then forget you and toss you aside till they needed you again.

They would die. Some quickly and without warning, ripping your heart from your chest and leaving you in agony. Some died slowly in stages until their death was nothing but a huge relief. Some killed themselves to keep a secret. But they all died.

And when they were gone what had it really mattered that they had ever lived? Levits hoped to be remembered, and he would be, by her. But to the selfish Abornie that he had put so much store in, his memory would fade quickly. His face would only occasionally flash through their thoughts till eventually they wouldn't even remember his name. They would, in fact, remember her longer, because they had hated her, and people tended to remember their enemies long after they had forgotten their friends.

And somewhere along the line, in her mind, everyone had become an enemy. She had vilified the Abornie because she didn't trust them, and she didn't trust them, she realized only now, because she didn't want to. It was easier to just not trust in people, because they would always let you down in some way, shape, or form. Keep them at a distance and then they couldn't hurt you.

"No good deed goes unpunished," Topaz had been known to say. She had stayed on Abornie for Levits' sake, and Topaz had wound up staying, too. She had to wonder if they'd left twenty years ago if Topaz would have stayed. But worse than losing Topaz was what she'd lost of herself. The entire experience had done nothing but drain her spirit dry.

She hadn't realized it till now, but that was why she'd become so involved with the gardening, because it was the only thing that ever seemed to give anything back. She put out effort, and it gave back beauty and tranquility. It asked nothing of her that she couldn't easily give.

Everything else she had ever put her effort into had left her emotionally bankrupt. She had given huge amounts of herself to any number of people, a multitude of causes, and what had she received for all her trouble? What had been the big payoff for her?

She'd sacrificed her own happiness for others more than once, and though a million theologians, poets and scholars would try to tell you otherwise, there simply was no reward. You gave everything you had, and people gave back only what they felt like giving, with little or no thought to your needs. Eventually you wound up like she had, with nothing left to give anyone, not even yourself.

She suddenly felt like a puppet whose strings had been dropped; she went with the feeling and dropped to the floor in a pile. And what are you doing now, freak? Going back to what? To finish what you started. For what reason? What purpose? Will it make you feel better? Will it make you happy? Do you even remember how to be happy? Do you really believe anyone will care?

She had landed in a sitting position, but found that even that wasn't giving her the "worthless puddle of goo" sensation she suddenly wanted to imitate, so she lay all the way down and stared up at the ceiling, where Poley had carved a picture of Stewart.

How appropriate.

Was he to blame for having created her? Was this horrible empty feeling something that happened to everyone, or was it something that only happened to her because of what she was?

She wasn't immortal, but she was damn close. She didn't fear death, at times she would have welcomed it, but maybe that was because somewhere deep down inside her she knew that unless she was willing to actually work at the whole dying thing it wasn't really an option. She had only ever come close to dying twice; once Whitey had saved her, and once Levits had. Now they were both dead, and she was not only still alive, but physically she was as healthy now as she had ever been.

Almost dying had made her vulnerable for a moment, made her almost human. When she hadn't died, when she had in fact made a full recovery—as good as new—it had left her feeling . . . What?

She thought about it a good long moment and had her answer. It had made her feel separated from the others. More different than ever. She was a GSH, and GSH's had been created for one thing and for one thing only, to serve humans. RJ wasn't like other GSH's, of course, because she hadn't been programmed. Because all her emotions were fully, painfully intact, and she had no expiration date. Yet with all this free will what had she done?

All the things I did, everything I've ever done, so little of it was actually just for me. Why? I enjoyed fighting, admittedly, even fighting for the Reliance. It made me feel important, alive. I enjoyed all the planning and strategizing that went into our attacks on the Reliance, but all that changed when Alsterase was attacked. I changed then, but even then I wasn't the useless shell I am now. Something made me worse.

Suddenly she knew the exact moment when the little piece of her spirit that had remained had departed. It was the damned Ocupod incident.

When that happened, I knew. And once I knew there was no going back. I was no different in the minds of any of them that day than the Ocupods. We had all been created, and therefore our feelings didn't matter. It would have been so easy for Levits to just let me kill the bastard to make a point. But no, he chose the Abornie over me. He chose to make me look like a moron rather than let the Ocupods have the killer. Because he never understood that the Ocupods had as much right to thrive as the Abornie did. I knew then that I was still just a freak in the eyes of the masses, and that was when I reached the shit saturation point. I just couldn't take the crap anymore. Everyone seemed more interested in everyone else's needs, in their feelings than mine. Because I'm bulletproof they treat me like I can't be hurt, and the only one who ever really understood that I could be was Whitey.

I just shut down. I didn't even know I'd done it, but I just shut myself off from everyone else. I was tired of being used when I was handy and forgotten when I was no longer necessary or entertaining. Tired of playing second fiddle, as Topaz would say. I was sick to death of everyone else's needs being more important than mine. So I just moved myself to a place where they couldn't hurt me, and now . . . I'm barely even alive. That's why Topaz decided to stay. Why Poley's found a new friend, because I wasn't really there for them anymore.

She started to blame herself for the way she felt, but it wasn't all her fault. How much could one person, even her, be expected to put up with, before something inside them said enough?

Still she hated the way she felt, or rather the way she didn't feel.

She started to get up several times and found that she simply didn't have the will to do it. At one point Poley walked up to her. "RJ, are you having a malfunction?" he asked, standing at her feet and looking down at her.

"Yes," she hissed.

"Do you need medical attention?"

"No!" she snapped.

"Would you like me to help you up?"

"No . . . I just want to lie here. Why don't you go play with your new friend and leave me be?"

"Are you mad at me because of Alan?"

"I'm not capable of working up mad. In fact, I can't even seem to work up an 'I don't give a shit'."

"You are depressed," Poley said, nodding his understanding, "because of Levits and Topaz."

"And about a billion other things," she said.

"I could give you a shot . . ."

"To make me believe that I'm happy? No thanks."

"Alan is making dinner, would you like to eat?" Poley asked. No doubt this was why he'd come looking for her in the first place.

"No, I'll just lay here staring at Father, wondering why he ever bothered to make me."

"He made you because he needed you."

"What do you mean?"

"You and your siblings were his key to eternal life."

"Freaking beautiful."

"RJ, staring at father will not help your depression," Poley said matter-of-factly.

"Well what would . . . short of drugging me up?" RJ asked flippantly.

"Perhaps if you went to work with your plants," Poley suggested.

He was trying to be helpful, so maybe he hadn't totally replaced her in his personality chips. Problem was she didn't want to be helped. "I don't want to work with my plants."

"What's wrong exactly?" Poley asked.

"Everything, Poley. Think about it. I'm ancient, so I should have it all figured out by now and I don't. I'm not even close. I don't know how to feel anymore. I've forgotten what it's like to be truly alive. You're just learning, and I'm forgetting." She rolled over and lay her face on the cool steel floor. "Sometimes it's not that life is bad, it's just that it isn't good. Do you know what I mean?"

"Not really."

"It's like nothing's really wrong but it isn't right either."

"That doesn't make any sense RJ . . . Perhaps you should go into the cryogenic chamber. I could wake you up when we reach our space."

"And I can be in this same great mood, five years older and covered in goo, no thanks," RJ said to the floor. "I've got to figure out what's missing and how to get it back before we get home, or what's the point of going home at all?"

"I've promised Alan that he can see Marge."

RJ banged her head on the floor.

"That won't help, either," Poley said.

"Maybe not, but it feels so good when I quit."

Chapter Nineteen

The campaign wasn't finished, yet Jessica found herself leaving the battle with a minimal crew and heading back to Earth.

"He'll be all right, Mom," Pete said, as he sat down beside her on the bed in Jessica's quarters.

Jessica shook her head. "No . . . no Pete, he won't be. He's an old man and he's sick. He's going to die. I just . . . I need to see him one more time." She cried, and he put his arm around her shoulders to comfort her. Pete had grown up in battle, he knew all about death. She saw no reason to whitewash it for him now. Besides, she couldn't be strong for him, she needed him to be strong for her. "I just need to see him. To talk to him before he dies."

Pete nodded silently, and she realized he was crying, too. Mickey had ordered him made, but all that mattered to Pete right now was that Mickey had always been in his life, and now he wasn't going to be. At twelve there were a lot of things about himself that Pete didn't know. Jessica knew the time to tell him was rapidly approaching, but she'd put it off this long, so she could put it off a little while longer.

Dax met their boat at the docks, where they embraced and had a good cry. Finally Jessica pulled away from him and dried her eyes.

"Can I see him now? Is he lucid?"

"Yes and yes. He's actually asking to see you every time he wakes up," Dax answered. "His brain's as sharp as it ever was, it's his body . . . It's just giving out on him."

She and Pete followed Dax to Mickey's room, but at the door Jessica stopped.

"I . . . I'd like to see him alone."

Dax nodded. "Come on, Pete, we'll go get something to eat."

Pete looked reluctantly at his mother, and she forced a smile. "You must be upset, someone has said 'food,' and you aren't gone already." She put her hand against his cheek and then bent down and kissed his forehead. "Go on."

He nodded and followed Dax. Jessica took a deep breath and entered the room. She walked right up to Mickey's bedside and dismissed the nurse in attendance with a nod of her head. Jessica sat down in the chair that had been placed there for visitors and took Mickey's hand. To say he didn't look like himself would have been a horrible understatement. He was almost skeletal, and his color was all but non-existent.

"You're here. Thank God, I don't think I could have held on much longer," he said, his voice showing just how weak he was.

"So, just what's wrong with you?" she asked bluntly, but with obvious concern.

He smiled, and he suddenly looked like Mickey again. "It would be easier for me to explain what isn't wrong with me."

Jessica laughed, the tears falling from her eyes and splashing on their joined hands. "I don't know what I'm going to do without you."

"You'll do fine," he said.

"I'll miss you . . . There's something I have to tell you." Her sobbing made her almost incoherent, so she took a deep breath and tried to get herself under control. "Something I should have told you a long time ago . . ."

"I know already," he interrupted.

"No, you couldn't, I'm . . ."

"Jessica Kirk. Yes, I know," Mickey said with a smile.

"But . . . how?"

"Right from the beginning I had my doubts. Remember one of the first things you ever told me was that 'people see what they want to see'? Well, I wanted to see RJ, and right away I started to ask myself what the chances were that RJ could have actually survived the attack that killed even Poley and Topaz, then escaped from the Reliance to return here. It seemed too good to be true. Then there were the little things." He coughed a little, and then continued. "RJ couldn't forget things, yet there were obvious gaps in your memory. Mostly they were small things, so I rationalized them away, told myself you'd had some sort of breakdown. I mean, you were obviously crazy. Sorry, no offense."

"None taken."

"Somewhere deep down, I think I knew all along that you weren't RJ, but I was never a hundred percent sure until Diana died and you started looking for Topaz's formula. You see, Topaz used the serum he'd created, but he was never actually able to duplicate it . . ."

"Something happened. Something outside the bounds of his experiment," Jessica said with a sigh. "That's why the formula wasn't on file anywhere, because he didn't know how he had made it. After he'd lived a few hundred years and learned being eternal wasn't all it was cracked up to be, he just deleted everything he'd ever had on it to make sure no one else could even try."

"Probably. The point is that I hadn't forgotten that fact, and if I hadn't what were the odds that RJ had? It's not the sort of thing RJ, or anyone for that matter, would have forgotten. Unless you just didn't know in the first place. When you spent months and tore the place apart looking for the formula I knew then, for a fact, that you weren't RJ."

"But . . . I could have been one of the others from the batch. Stewart made twelve of us. My chip was dysfunctional, so some of the other's locating chips might have malfunctioned as well. After all, I have both eyes." Jessica felt more than a little cheated, she had wanted to confess, and she wasn't at all sure that she liked the idea that a mere mortal had figured out her clever act.

"The eye was the other thing. See RJ had your eye put into a resin cube, and she carried it in her pocket. If she had lost it she would have been highly pissed off, but you never once mentioned it. And no, I knew you couldn't have been one of the others. Ever since I've known you, you've sat and stared at Alsterase with the same haunted look in your eyes that she had. That's how I knew who you were, and that you'd never hurt either us or the New Alliance again. You had obviously come here looking for some sort of deliverance. Now why would you need to do that unless you were Kirk?" He smiled, a smile that went all the way to his eyes. "Besides, the eyes aren't exactly the same color, are they?"

"They're damn close," Jessica said smiling back.

"Close—as Topaz would say—only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."

"Why didn't you tell everyone, Mickey? Why didn't you order me away?"

"Like I said, at first I just willed myself to believe that you were RJ. I needed to believe that I hadn't lost her, too. By the time I knew for sure . . . You were already my friend, a friend, in many ways more important to me than she was. She left me here to go off on an adventure, and I don't think she ever planned to actually return. But you . . . You always came back. Look where you are right now. You should be across the galaxy fighting one of the final battles in this long campaign, but instead you're here. For no other reason than you knew that I needed you here. You have put my needs, our friendship, above the needs of even the New Alliance."

"But I destroyed Alsterase, I had your friends killed . . ."

"You were a puppet of the state. Like RJ, you broke away. You and she aren't so different. Who knows what horrors RJ committed when she was a Reliance goon? You couldn't have done it at all if it hadn't been for David, and he was supposed to be on our side. If I could forgive him, and I did before anyone else, why couldn't I forgive you?"

"I can't forgive myself."

"I know. Maybe you shouldn't, maybe it's only remembering our sins that keeps us from committing them over and over again."

Jessica nodded; she had begun to believe this herself. "You know . . . She, RJ, she may not actually be dead." Jessica told him what she thought had happened to the ship.

"If anyone could make it back, it would be her. You'd better be ready."

Jessica nodded silently. "I'm sorry, Mickey. Sorry for all the lies. Sorry for all the pain my actions caused you and everyone else."

"I let it go a long time ago. Let me tell you something I probably shouldn't. I think you did what RJ couldn't have done. She would have continued to pound the Reliance, and we would have fought many successful campaigns, but I don't think we ever would have won. You see, RJ was all about the fight, all about battle strategy, but she didn't have your training in government. You implemented political answers to problems that never would have occurred to her, or any of the rest of us for that matter.

"The talents that allowed you to successfully attack and destroy Alsterase were the same talents you used to take the Reliance down. Sort of a kick in the Reliance's pants when you think about it. They taught you how to play dirty politics, and you wound up turning their own tactics on them. RJ never would have done that, because she didn't have the training for it."

"I don't know, she used some pretty dirty tricks herself," Jessica said, not knowing whether to feel insulted or complimented.

"But she didn't know how Reliance hierarchy worked, not the way you did. Don't you see? It was fate. The closer I get to dying, the more I wonder whether I had any control over what I did at all. What put me . . . what puts any of us, in that one position we need to be in to change the universe? All any of us ever are is just a small part of everything else. If I hadn't picked the wrong man's pocket, if I had run further into town instead of down to the docks, I never would have met RJ at all, and I would have died at twenty. I wouldn't have been part of all this, and who's to say that if I had never been part of this that any of it would have happened?"

"It's too easy to say that we're like puppets on a string with little or no control over our own actions. It doesn't give you the credit you deserve for all you've done, nor does it hold me accountable for my crimes. I don't believe it for a second. I know what I did and why I did it. I committed great acts of terror against humankind. Me, my own self, I won't put it on fate, anyone, or anything else."

"At least cut yourself a little slack," Mickey said with a quiet smile.

"I have, or I couldn't have gone on."

"Just know that I don't bear you a grudge." His hand on hers tightened. "In my eyes you have more than earned redemption."

There was that word again. It meant a lot that he loved her even knowing who she was and what she had done. Jessica wished it were as easy as having him say all was forgiven. Talking, especially about all these deep things, was making him tired, so she changed the subject and did all the talking as he listened.

The same total recall that had made it obvious to him that she wasn't RJ now worked to tell stories in detail of happier times. Times they'd spent together with Diana and Gerald and a dozen other friends, most of whom were now dead. She told him stories about Dax when he was a child and about Pete. Times they shared together, only the happy ones, until Mickey had fallen asleep. His hand became limp in hers, but she could still feel his pulse pounding.

She disengaged her hand from his and walked out of the room. The nurse was standing outside the door attentively, and for a second she wondered if he had been listening, but if he had been, he would have been afraid now and he wasn't. So she told him to go back in and keep an eye on Mickey, and she went off in search of her son and Dax. She found Pete sitting alone in the mess hall staring silently at a wall, obviously in deep thought. He rose when he saw her, walked over to meet her in the middle of the room and embraced her; she held him tight for quite awhile.

"So, where's Dax?"

"He had to go. Something to do with some shipments being misdirected or some other presidential shit."

Jessica nodded with a smile. Raise a child with soldiers, and you couldn't expect him not to have a vocabulary like one.

"Come on." She took his hand and started leading him across the compound till they walked out the door and out onto the wall. It was night and the city lights shone on the shore.

"It's beautiful," Pete said.

"Yes."

"What's wrong, I mean besides Mickey? I can tell there's something else bothering you."

And of course he could, because he was an empath, just like her. He was her son in every way, shape and form. He felt the guilt and insecurity beyond her grief.

Jessica took a deep breath and let it out. "It's time I told you who you are."

"I know what I am, mother. I know that I'm a GSH, that I was created from yours and my father's DNA. I know exactly what I am." His voice was filled with panic, as if he feared she was about to tell him that everything he had ever known to be a truth was about to be undone with a stream of words he didn't want to hear.

"I didn't say what you are I said who, and you can't know who you are because I am your mother, and you don't know who I am."

If Pete had been bothered at all about her revelation it didn't show. In fact, the only strong emotion coming from him had been relief, no doubt because his image of himself and where he'd come from hadn't been altered. He didn't seem to understand at all why her confession was supposed to be such a big deal, and Jessica got a strange feeling that, like Mickey, he'd known all along. She half wished that either Mickey or Pete had started screaming about what a horrible bitch she was. It was as if they just didn't understand the true demon that she had been when she hadn't been RJ. But she'd now been RJ almost as long as she had been Jessica Kirk. So maybe Jessica was dead, and only RJ remained.

That was too easy. She knew what she'd done, and she knew why she'd done it, and they didn't. Maybe if they did they wouldn't be so quick to forgive and forget. She'd had no righteous reasons. She hadn't done it from a sense of duty to the Reliance. She had just wanted to beat her sister. It was simple sibling rivalry. The fact that hundreds, thousands of people had died in their little squabble hadn't really bothered either of them. But RJ had been on the right side. Jessica realized only now that it was this knowledge that had driven her completely mad. That when it was all done and said, not only had RJ beaten her at every turn, but she'd also been fighting the righteous battle, while Jessica had been working for the evil empire.

So on top of everything else, she'd been wrong, and that had been more than even her brain could bear.

Meltdown.

It all seemed so long ago now, and it was. Mickey's dying proved that. He had been a young man in his mid twenties when she'd first met him, and now he had died of old age.

They buried him on the island next to Diana. Many people spoke until their words were just garbled sound, meaning nothing. Jessica hadn't spoken, just stood there with Pete and Dax wondering why her tears were no longer flowing.

Mickey had hung on for two weeks after she returned home and then, feeling that even his mind was slipping, he had asked for a lethal injection, a quick death. For those two weeks there was not a single day that she hadn't cried so loudly that her body shook. But from yesterday morning when she had awakened to the news that he had chosen to die in the night, till now, no tears. She was sad, but she was no longer beside herself with grief.

Lonely, she guessed that was what she felt most. Her friend was dead, she was never going to see him again, and she guessed it mostly made her feel lonely. He had been in bad health, and she knew he didn't want to live like that. He'd been able to get around with little or no help right up till the last few weeks of his life, and she understood and guessed she was a little relieved that he had chosen to die before he went through any more pain, or lost anymore of himself. It seemed a proper death for such a noble leader.

She'd miss him.

She walked down to the dock and just stood staring out over the surface of the ocean. She remembered the day she'd jumped in and tried to swim herself to death, and Gerald had come after her. He'd saved her. At the time she'd wondered why, and when he'd died she'd actually hated him for it. Now, well, she hated to think of all she would have left undone, and what she would have missed. She never would have had Pete. Wouldn't have lived to watch Dax grow into the confident leader he had become. To see the Reliance fall.

She was sorry her friend was dead, but she was glad that she was here, alive and fully functional.

It was good to be alive. She took in a deep breath, and felt weird when she realized she actually felt happy.

Who knows, if I live long enough I just might yet deserve Mickey's forgiveness.

She sat down and dangled her feet over the side of the dock. The breeze in her face was brisk but felt good, and the air off the ocean smelled clean.

Pete walked up beside her and sat down. He put his arm around her, and she put her arm around him.

"You're feeling better," he announced.

"Yes," she said simply.

"Me, too. It's not normal, is it?"

"What?"

"To get over a death so soon?" Pete asked, sounding suddenly uncomfortable with the subject he'd chosen to talk about.

Jessica shrugged. "Who's to say what's normal? We loved Mickey; we'll always remember him. But he was an old man in a lot of pain. He lived a good life, a full life, and he died the way he wanted to. He loved many people, and he was loved by everyone that knew him. I don't think anyone truly disliked him. He's left a son and two grandchildren. He lives on through them. He lives on through us."

Pete nodded. "And we'll always have each other, so we'll never be alone."

"Right son, we'll never be alone."

Chapter Twenty

RJ hummed tunelessly as she worked with her plants. The plants seemed to be adapting even to the ship's artificial gravity. At first it had been pretty touch and go, and she had been afraid that she had at last found something her beloved plants couldn't adapt to, but then they had come back like champs.

Not that it really mattered.

The plants were once again beginning to thrive. The longer they were in space the fewer problems the plants would have, till eventually they would be fully adapted even to this most completely foreign environment.

They were truly amazing.

"This one doesn't look so good," Alan said from where he was helping her with the plants. RJ walked across the bunk hall she had converted to a green house to check on the plant. He was right, it didn't look very healthy. Fortunately it was a species she had brought many of.

"Cut it off and we'll eat it tonight," RJ said. Alan cut the plant off at ground level; the plant's roots would stay in the ground dormant for a while as if sulking, and then it would spring up again.

They did this every day, checked the greenhouse and cut off the sickly plants, thus making room for healthier ones. She kept her tree starts in a refrigerator to keep them dormant till she could plant them. They just grew too fast to be contained on the ship.

They had constructed and installed "grow lights" on the ceiling and under the top bunks. They had removed the mattresses from the bunk beds that lined the long, narrow room, made the bunks into planters and filled them with soil and nutrients from the surface of the planet. They covered the surface of the dirt with a fibered mesh made of basically the same fabric the Abornie's clothes were made from and secured the edges. Then they cut small holes in the fabric and planted the plants. The holes would tear larger as the plants grew, but the fabric would still ensure that dirt wouldn't be slopped all over the room and plants disturbed if there was in-flight turbulence or on takeoff.

When the plants had all been small they had watered the beds manually. Now the beds were hooked up to the water recycling mechanism of the ship, and they found that running water through the plants in the middle of the recycling process not only made the plants grow better but also helped to recycle the water faster.

RJ had spent most of the first three months they'd been in space moving from one spot to another in the ship, lying on the floor and concentrating on the picture—whoever it might be—above her, meditating at length on the meaning of life, in particular her own life. On the last day of the third month she had suddenly realized that she was no closer to finding answers than she had been when she had first started her quest, and then enlightenment had flooded into her brain like a cascading waterfall of ice, complete with the chunks.

Nothing mattered.

There actually were no answers.

She couldn't figure any of it out because it wasn't supposed to make any sense. It just was.

The answer was that there was no answer. It was so incredibly simple.

You had to work hard at not trying to figure it out, to just exist, and try to enjoy at least part of the existing. You couldn't actually expect to enjoy much more than a small piece of existing, because mostly being a living, breathing, existing being meant that shit rained on your head more often than not, and you had to take the good when you could and try to whitewash the bad parts so that they didn't seem so bad.

Because you couldn't stop bad things from happening.

Which was why nothing really mattered.

If you actually thought that it did, it was just an illusion, an illusion that kept you going so that you could live out the next totally meaningless day, off into oblivion.

So, being enlightened with the knowledge of the absolute lack of meaning to any of it, she had then risen from the floor. She'd gone directly to her quarters, removed Kirk's eye in its cube from her pocket and the chain from her body and stuck them in a drawer. Then she had gone to take care of her plants. It was none too soon, either, because although Poley and Alan had tried, they really neither one had the talent with plant life that she did. They hadn't known what to do when the plants started to go through shock, and though still alive they had looked sad indeed.

Of course, that didn't really matter, either. Except that she had to pretend like it did because otherwise she wasn't fulfilling her place in the complete farce that was existence.

In these last five plus years she had tried to bring enlightenment to Alan and Poley, but they mostly screwed, carved on huge chunks of wood they had dragged into the hold for that purpose, and looked at her like she was crazy. Apparently the simplicity of it all was more than they could comprehend even when she explained it very slowly and with interpretive dance.

She had let her hair grow down to her ass and kept it braided in one long braid. When Poley asked why, she had tried to explain. "I'm letting my hair grow as a sign of my new understanding of myself and the nothingness I bring to the universe, the unnecessariness of me. The absolute meaninglessness of life, the cosmos, of everything."

"And your hair represents that how?" Poley asked with all the patience of a man talking to a retarded child.

"Because it's growing. I didn't tell it to, and yet it just does, even though it's totally unnecessary for it to do so. I don't need it to protect my head from attack or the elements, but it still keeps growing. Don't you see? It's the embodiment of the truth of nothingness."

He didn't, and he said so, and then once again suggested the cryogenic chamber. He did that a lot. It was all because he was a robot and therefore incapable of comprehending the concepts she tried to teach him. Alan didn't understand because the blood never stayed in his brain long enough for him to comprehend complicated concepts, like that they could never really know anything, and that nothing really mattered.

They seemed to think that she was spending too much time contemplating nothing, that perhaps the lack of activity was making her something less than sane. But wasn't that the way it always was with visionaries? They thought of crap, and other people told them all the reasons why what they thought was inconceivable.

Alan went to the kitchen with her to help prepare the evening meal. Which would be what it always was, some ancient packet of food from the ship's stores and some chopped up plant life. He missed fish and meat. The stuff in the packets was supposed to be different stuff, but to his pallet it all tasted mostly the same.

Of course as RJ would remind him—if he dared to say anything about it—the tastelessness of it should remind them of the fact that it didn't really matter.

She truly thought he and Poley didn't understand what she was trying to say, and seemed totally unaware that the things she said were both completely insane and downright trite. Poley said she was working through her issues, whatever the hell that meant. It seemed to Alan that she was mostly walking around the ship doing maintenance work, playing with her plants, and talking to herself way more than could possibly be healthy. He didn't know what was wrong with her, and—unlike Poley—he didn't pretend to, but he did know that there was something wrong.

And she wasn't getting any better.

She would lay down in the middle of the floor anywhere, go to sleep and sleep for two days, then get up and run back and forth, up and down the corridors for a week at a time, barely stopping long enough to eat and take care of her plants. Then she'd sleep again.

She'd go to the ship's workout hall and exercise for three days straight, then not look in the room for a month. There was no pattern or rhythm to what she did. She was living according to her new philosophy that, "nothing really matters, so I don't give a shit."

Alan missed his friend, especially since she was the only one besides Poley to talk to, and Poley could be, well . . . a little mechanical. Alan had run out of programs to review. He had learned to speak the Reliance language in its entirety now, which was good, because the minute the ship had lifted off it had been as if both Poley and RJ had forgotten how to speak his native tongue at all.

He knew way more about weapons and spaceships than he wanted to know. In fact, the more he knew about space flight, the more he wondered why they didn't just blow up or smack into a sun or planet, or why an asteroid or meteor didn't smack into them.

In short he was still enjoying being with Poley, but the whole "flying aimlessly through space" thing was starting to lose its appeal. He wanted to be somewhere instead of feeling as if he were always between places.

Halfway through cooking dinner Poley walked into the kitchen. Happy to see him, Alan walked over to him and kissed his cheek. Poley patted his back, and Alan felt the same warm feeling he always felt. At least Poley was the same. He couldn't have stood it if Poley had changed, too. Unless of course he could maybe be a little more demonstrative.

"RJ, we have entered our own space."

"That's nice," she said without looking up from what she was doing.

Poley sighed. "Do you still want me to chart a course for Derma station? The ship has detected a jumpgate closer. Would you rather I redirected to that one?"

"Whatever." She shrugged. "One place or no place is just as good as any other."

"Fine then," Poley sounded almost snippy. He had told Alan that he was getting tired of RJ's attitude, too. That he was ready for her to snap out of it. "Aren't you even a little excited about a new jumpgate and station much closer? It wasn't there when we left. Aren't you even a little excited about the prospect of exploring this place and maybe finding out what has happened to the New Alliance in our long absence? Whether that station is inhabited by the Argy or the Reliance or New Alliance personnel?"

She shrugged again. "It doesn't matter, it won't make any real difference."

Alan looked at Poley, and Poley nodded and rolled his eyes.

"I know you both think I'm crazy, but if you would just learn to embrace the truth you'd find the absolute peace I have found by just not caring so damn much about anything."

"I'm very excited," Alan told Poley.

"Thanks, Alan," Poley said, glaring at his sister. "You could at least pretend to care, RJ."

"I do. In fact, I get exhausted from all the pretending."

Poley sat on the bridge, and Alan sat in the chair opposite him and listened with excitement as Poley explained how close they were to the jumpgate and therefore the end of their voyage.

"We will dock at the station in three days time," Poley said.

"That soon? You didn't tell RJ we were that close." Alan was now even more excited.

"If I had breath I wouldn't waste it on my sister right now. We'd just have to hear some more crap about how three days or a hundred is just as meaningless as forty months, or some such prattling nonsense."

Alan laughed at Poley's joke. "Maybe she'll do better when we get her around other people like her."

"There aren't any other people like her. Well, just one, and I guarantee that running into her wouldn't help RJ. I think that's part of the problem. What she is, I mean. I think there's too much data and she's trying to compress her files. I can simply download files of no importance to some deep memory crystal, and if I later find that the information is completely unimportant, I can delete it. She doesn't have such a system. She has no way to remove things from her memory banks, and I think her brain is too full of knowledge that doesn't compute."

"But she just sounds . . . crazy," Alan said.

"I know. I think going crazy may be how she goes about dumping files," Poley said. He sighed deeply and frowned. "I keep trying, but it still doesn't help."

"What?" Alan asked in confusion.

"Nothing," Poley was obviously thinking. "Calculating" as he sometimes called it.

"What's wrong?" Alan asked.

"Just trying to figure out what's going to happen if the station is filled with hostiles. How is RJ going to handle it? Is she going to go in swinging and blasting, or is she going to try to convert them to her new religion?"

Chapter Twenty-one

Baldor watched his mother's face on the screen, but didn't actually hear her words.

"Baldor, are you all right?" Dax asked at his shoulder.

"He can't be dead. I just saw him not three weeks ago, and he was fine," Baldor said to the picture of his mother, ignoring Dax. It was, after all, a stupid question. How could he be all right? "My father can't be dead, Mother, he can't."

"I'm sorry, son," Janad said, and her grief made him see her real age for the first time ever. When had his mother gotten so old?

While he'd fought dozens of battles on at least as many worlds at RJ's side, his sister had grown up, his childhood friend Two had taken his father's place on the throne of Beta 4, his mother had grown old, and his own father had died.

Where the hell had the time gone? Hell, he was now nearly forty himself, not that he actually looked it. The doctors told him that his genetically altered DNA was causing him to age more slowly. In fact, they couldn't be sure just how long he might live, but they projected that he might well remain physically young and healthy till he was a hundred and fifty. His father had lived a full life, but he hadn't lived any hundred and fifty years. Baldor wasn't prepared for him to be gone, and he had just seen him. To Baldor that made it all the more surreal. He had just seen him and he'd been fine, so how could he be dead now? He realized that his insisting that his father couldn't be dead because he'd just seen him wasn't any less stupid than Dax's, "Are you all right?" question.

"It was quick and unexpected," Janad said. "Your father's heart had been a problem for years, you know that. I guess it finally just gave out."

"Quick and unexpected beats slow and painful any day," RJ said in a voice that sounded more like she was talking to herself than anyone else. She sat a few feet away at another console. She actually appeared to be working; if she was affected at all by his father's death she wasn't showing it.

"Yes, I suppose so," his mother said, though even across space and on the monitor he could tell that RJ's demeanor troubled her, too.

"Do you want me to come home, Mother?" Baldor asked.

"That's not necessary," she said, though her tone of voice spoke more clearly than she did.

"We can ship you out to Beta 4 tomorrow," RJ said, and he realized then that she had actually been checking data on ships arriving and departing from the moon base.

"How long can I take?" Baldor asked.

"Take as long as you need," RJ said.

"But we're leaving for Trinidad in twelve days," Baldor protested.

RJ smiled at him then. "We can fight a small skirmish without you."

The "small skirmish" she was referring to was going to involve the last of the hardcore Reliance, three hundred thousand strong, which had vowed to fight to the death rather than surrender to the New Alliance.

This was what they had been doing for the better part of twenty years now. The Reliance as a power had been overthrown, but those still loyal to the Reliance, being mostly military and armed to the teeth, had retreated to different areas and dug in. New Alliance troops attacked one stronghold after another, and none of them had even really given the New Alliance cause to pause, but it had taken years to totally eradicate the Reliance.

While they had worked long and hard to rid the New Alliance of the scourge of the Reliance, the New Alliance's "dignitaries" went to work on the Argy. It had taken ten years, but eventually a truce was called between the New Alliance held territory and the Argy. The aliens had been willing to give up their campaign against Urta in exchange for complete control of the planet of most contention—Stashes. The New Alliance for their part promised not to try to take claim of any Argy held planet, including Stashes.

These last remaining Reliance idiots who had dug in on Trinidad were really the only obstacle between the New Alliance and real and lasting peace and prosperity. The promise of a new age. This could very well be the last battle he would ever have a chance to fight.

And what else did he really know? What else did he have?

He looked from his mother's face to the back of RJ's head. His mother said it wasn't necessary for him to be there, but he knew what she really meant. Don't come if you don't give a damn about me and your sister. She didn't need him, but she wanted him.

When RJ told him she didn't need him, she meant it, and he knew that it was true. That hurt more than a little. They had been friends, closer than friends, they had been comrades at arms and at times even lovers. Though for as long as he could remember the only person that RJ had really loved was Pete.

Pete had been in battle literally all of his life. You would have expected him to be a serious, brooding young man considering all he'd seen. He wasn't, though. He was a happy, carefree man with a penchant for practical jokes, an almost constant smile, and a way with the ladies. Pete was strange, if beautiful to look at. His dark hair hung in short, loose ringlets around his head. His six foot five inch frame was thin but well muscled. His skin was darker even than Baldor's own, and his eyes, well his eyes were damn near as blue as his mother's, and like his mother he always wore the traditional Fourer garb.

Baldor wasn't really too surprised when it was Pete's words which decided him. He walked up and put his hand on Baldor's shoulder. "Go, be with your mother. Your father is dead, she needs you, and you need her. It's just a battle, like so many others we've fought."

Baldor nodded; the boy was right. But he looked at RJ half hoping she'd insist that she needed him. She didn't even turn to face him. He sighed.

"I'm coming home, Mom," he said, and watched the relief wash over his mother's tired features. He wondered momentarily what she thought he was going to do. How she thought he could help. Maybe she just needed to be with him the way he now felt that he needed to be with her and Sandra. Needed to be home, on the world he'd been born on, with his people.

Baldor was packing his bag when she walked into his room.

"I'm really sorry to hear about your dad," she said.

"Really?" he spat back angrily. "It didn't seem that way to me."

"I'm sorry for your loss," she said defensively.

"What about you? He was your friend once. You started all of this together. When Mickey," his voice caught in his throat and he swallowed hard. "When Mickey died, you cried like a baby, you fell completely apart."

"Actually I cried up till he was dead, and then I stopped," she said quietly.

"Why?"

"Because once he was dead there was no chance that he was going to suddenly get better, hop up and become Mickey again." She shrugged. "Because once someone's dead they just aren't there anymore."

"Do you have no tears at all for my father?" Baldor cried. "He loved you, RJ, he loved you."

"He didn't know me!" Jessica shouted back, and just for a second it looked like she was going to tell him something more enlightening than what she wound up saying. "I've spent much more time with you than I did with him. That was literally your lifetime ago. He and I grew apart."

"As you and I will grow apart," Baldor said accusingly. "As you'll distance yourself from everyone and everything except Pete. I loved you, RJ, not as my father did, as a friend, but as a man loves a woman. I stopped on the day that I realized that you were never going to love me back. That I was more like a pet than a person to you. You cared for me, but you could live without me, and when I'm gone you'll only remember me because you can't forget, not because I meant one damn thing to you." He was hurt, and his pain allowed him to say things he'd never been able to say to her before, and he supposed because he was in pain she let him. "I still care for you, more than I want to. More than I ought to considering you treat me with little or no concern. I could have been what he was to you, your beloved Gerald. You and I might have shared a love as potent and as rich, but you wouldn't allow it. If you would have but asked it I would have deserted my mother, my family in their time of grief and flown across the galaxy with you to fight yet another campaign. But what would you do for me? What if anything do I mean to you?"

"I cared enough about you not to fall in love with you," she said sadly. "Go back to your planet, find a woman who will love you the way you deserve to be loved." She walked over and kissed him on the check. "Think of me fondly from time to time, but never look back."

She turned and walked out of the room.

Baldor watched her walk away and a cold chill went up his spine. He knew he was never going to see her again. His thought was solidified when Pete, Dax and a dozen others showed up at the dock to see him off, but RJ was nowhere in sight.

Pete was tearing up, no doubt because Baldor had been as close to a father as the boy had ever had. He held Baldor longer than he should have when he embraced him, and a whole lot tighter.

Baldor looked hopefully around the dock, hating himself for doing it, then furthered his shame by asking Pete, who still hadn't let him go, "Where's RJ?"

The boy leaned into his ear then and whispered something so astonishing Baldor almost fainted. Pete let go of him then and took a step back saying, "That's why she didn't cry when he died."

Baldor nodded. He knew it was a secret, and the fact that the boy would tell him something about his beloved mother that she obviously didn't want told let Baldor know just how much Pete cared for him. "I won't tell," he whispered, stepping closer to Pete for a moment. At least he had left a lasting mark on someone. "You take care of yourself, kid."

Pete nodded, tears falling on his cheeks. "You take care of yourself. After all I'm a GSH, not much can happen to me. I'll come see you on Beta 4."

So even Pete knew Baldor wasn't coming back again.

Baldor boarded the boat and headed for the mainland and the transmat station. In a few hours he'd be boarding a ship headed for home. He watched as the island got smaller and the faces of his friends blurred till they were unrecognizable. Alsterase Island, it and the supercomputer it contained, had always been so important to their war effort. He wondered what would become of it when peace broke out everywhere.

He wondered what would happen to the platinum blond war goddess who had led them, whoever she might really be. What happened to someone who had lived for battle when there were no more battles to be fought?

He wondered what was going to happen to him. He had also lived for the battle, and for her. Without her, without a battle to fight, did he even know who he was? He was going home to be with his family and his old friends, but he'd hardly visited in the last twenty years, and when he had been there just three weeks ago . . .

How can he be dead? I was just there, I just saw him. He was old and frail, but . . . He's dead; accept it. What am I ever going to do with the information Pete just gave me? I know why he told me, so I'd understand why she wasn't upset. But now there are a billion other things I just don't understand. She is the devil from all the stories my father told me when I was a child. Yet even at her worst that wasn't the woman I fought beside, not the woman that I knew.

This thought brought him a surprising glimmer of hope for his own future. If she could change that much, then who was to say he couldn't settle down quite happily to a normal life on his home planet? Maybe raise a couple of kids, grow some crops, and . . .

What the hell was he thinking! He'd die of boredom. He was going home to grow old and die, just as his father had done. He sat down in the boat and cried for the rest of the ride to the mainland. The people in the boat with him pretended not to notice, and no doubt thought he was crying for his father.

Chapter Twenty-two

When they were in range Poley cautiously hailed the space station.

He had asked RJ, "What should I say?"

"Say what you wish to say, all is for nothing and nothing is for me," she had replied.

"You know, RJ, you're really starting to piss me off," Poley said, raising his voice ever so slightly to show that he was agitated.

This had caused her to laugh. The first real laugh he'd heard pass her lips in years.

"Just tell me what I should say. We have no idea what has happened here in the years that we've been gone. Whether the Reliance is still in power, the New Alliance or even the Argy," Poley said.

"When in doubt, tell the truth."

Poley thought about that for a minute, and decided nothing of any value was likely to come from her mouth soon, so he put together his own message. "People and computers of the space station I don't know the name of, we are approaching in our vessel, the Avonlea. We are in an old Reliance military troop carrier, but there are only three of us, we have been lost in space for several dozen years and are completely neutral concerning all things political. May we please dock at your station?"

To his surprise, Marge's voice droned back, "We have been expecting you. Please dock."

Poley walked all through the ship till he found RJ laying in the middle of the floor making bubbles by blowing through a wire hoop covered with sudsy water.

He relayed the communication just as it had transpired, and RJ slung the bubbles aside and sat bolt upright.

"Now that's interesting indeed," she said, and it almost looked like she might actually get up without further coaxing.

"Are you sure, RJ?" Poley asked, working very hard on his best sarcastic voice. "Are you sure it isn't bland and nothing circled in a ring of meaninglessness?"

She laughed and then she did get up. "Marge, you say?"

"Yes, Marge, and she seemed to be expecting us, at least expecting the ship."

"And you stupidly told them there were only three of us," RJ said.

"I didn't figure it would matter to you since everything we do is only nothing and . . ."

"You do understand!" she said excitedly, and hugged him. Then she released him and skipped off in the direction of the bridge, which he was no longer sure was a good thing.

When he got to the bridge Alan was sitting in his seat looking shocked and more than a little scared, and RJ was talking to the space station.

"Yo, Marge! This is RJ in the Avonlea. By the way, everything is nothing and nothing really matters."

"I know," Marge droned back.

"Damn! It is you, Marge. Hey listen, who exactly has been expecting us?"

"Us, we have been expecting you," Marge said.

"Who us?" RJ asked.

"You and me."

RJ's hand moved away from the transmitter, closing transmission to the space station. The near idiot half smile that had graced RJ's features for the last five plus years eroded to be replaced by a look of pure rage. "Kirk!" she spat out. She depressed the com button again. "Marge, have I been here the whole time?"

"Here and there, and we have been waiting for your return."

RJ let go of the button again, stomped to the middle of the bridge and started pacing. "Kirk!" she hissed again, then started mumbling almost to herself. "Jessica kills Jago, and I hate her, so she can't stay in Reliance space. So she goes to Argy space and hides out, but once I'm gone all she's got to do is get an eye, any eye, and she can just come right back to Earth and take over being me. Topaz was right, you can never go home again." She let out a roaring, growling scream that echoed through the ship. Then she took off in the direction of her cabin.

"Where's she going?" Alan asked.

Poley shrugged. "I'm sure I don't know."

When she came back a few minutes later she had changed into an old Reliance issue sleeveless black coverall, she had her chain wrapped around her waist with a blaster in the coils, she'd cut her hair, and he could see where Jessica's eye cube bulged in her pocket.

"Glad to have you back," Poley said with a smile.

She smiled back at her metal brother and walked over and messed up his hair. "Nice to be back. Now dock this freaking ship and let's figure out just exactly what's happened while we've been gone."

Alan gave Poley a confused look, and Poley smiled. "I think my sister just found something that mattered to her."

Alan stayed close to Poley and RJ as the bay door opened, and he entered the tube with great trepidation. He followed just behind them. Knowing that they didn't really know what to expect made him feel even less secure. For the first time he began to wonder if he should have stayed on Frionia. It wasn't after all such a bad place and . . . Aaah! There were aliens everywhere he looked. The docks were crowded. Surely nothing could be accomplished with so many people in the same place. Then they all started chanting RJ's name.

Alan wondered if they had lied to him about the life expectancy of humans. Most of these people looked younger than he was. How could they remember RJ? Unless they were older than they appeared, most of them wouldn't have been alive when RJ had landed on Frionia. Then he remembered what Poley had told him about RJ, and realized what RJ had been so upset about on the ship. One of the clones had taken her place, the most hated one, the one she'd told him stories about when he was a child. The one whose eye she carried in her pocket.

That was why she'd lost her religion.

RJ looked at the sea of humanity chanting her name and wanted to scream. Kirk had stolen her identity, and Nothing only knew what she'd done with it. That she had infiltrated the New Alliance was clear, just exactly what she had done with it wasn't so obvious.

Fortunately, it wouldn't be very hard for RJ to find out. She'd just borrow a trick from her hated sibling and pretend to be her . . . self. By the end of the day she should know everything that had transpired while she was gone and where her opponent was. Which was good, because she was sure that by now Jessica Kirk knew just exactly where she was.

She had been sound asleep when the alarm rang. The alarm she had set up so long ago that only she knew its true meaning. Jessica jumped out of bed and threw on her robe, then she headed for the main computer complex.

"Where is she?" Jessica asked.

"Her ship has just docked on Justice Station, and she has been greeted."

"Visual," Jessica ordered. In seconds she was looking at a picture of her sister flanked by the robot—did he look older?—and some obviously alien boy. RJ didn't look happy. She looked for and found the camera, and then she stared into it. For a moment Jessica was sure she was looking right at her.

"So RJ's back. She found some near Earth normal world to hang out on until she got enough fuel to get back. I think I'm more surprised that it took her so long than that she was able to do it at all. So what now?"

She'd never really gotten around to making a plan. The obvious answer was to take Pete, break and run for it, but that really wasn't her style.

There was really only one answer.

She met her son in the mess hall for breakfast as she always did when they were home. She carefully kept her emotions in check. "Things are pretty quiet these days. Why don't you go to Beta 4 and spend some time with Baldor?"

His head snapped up, and he was obviously excited at the prospect. "By myself?"

Jessica laughed. "I think you're old enough to take a trip by yourself, don't you?"

"Yes, when can I leave?"

"There's no battle looming on the horizon, and you're not a child anymore. You could go whenever you wanted. Baldor was pretty upset by his mother's death, and it might be nice for him to have an old friend around. Someone once said that no matter how old you are, when your parents are both dead, you're an orphan. That's got to be tough, especially when you grew up with two such loving parents. Why not leave today?"

"So soon?" and now he was a little suspicious.

"Why not? There's nothing really happening here, just a bunch of boring deskwork. Shoveling funds here and moving product there."

"You could come with me, you know he'd love to see you . . ."

"I can't. Someone has to help Dax do all that boring fund-shoveling and product-pushing."

"All right, I'll go pack." He kissed her cheek, then took off at a run. He was looking forward to this time apart from her, which was normal. He was a grown man; he shouldn't be spending all his time with his mother. He wasn't a boy anymore, and it was high time he struck out on his own, had a little independence.

It hurt that he didn't need her anymore, but she supposed that was good, since she might not be around forever after all. Still it, was a sharp pain in her soul to know that she had done such a good job raising him that she had made herself unnecessary.

She knew there was no way RJ could get there in less than a week, but she still breathed easier when Pete's ship left Moonbase Station.

As soon as his ship had been given the all clear she ordered an evacuation of the fort on Alsterase Island, leaving only enough personnel to run the computer complex.

"RJ, what the hell's going on?" Dax demanded after loading his wife and children safely into a helicopter. "Are we under attack?"

"Not yet," Jessica answered.

"We can't leave the fort. We can't leave Marge. The entire New Alliance is run from here. Everything depends on the computer."

"We downloaded all of Marge's files onto crystals and had the crystals sent to Sever Station two years ago . . ."

"The new Sever Station computer complex won't be finished for ten years. What would you like us to do in the meantime?"

"I'll try to keep the fight outside," Jessica said thoughtfully. Then added, almost to herself, "We never should have had all our guns in this armory. We should have had a secondary supercomputer built long ago. Still, if I can keep the fight outside . . ."

"Fight? What fight are you talking about, RJ?" Dax demanded, apparently tired of being left out of the loop.

Jessica looked at him. He wasn't the baby she had nurtured through the flu, the boy she had played with, or even the young man she had helped to mold into a leader. He was a forty-two year old man with children of his own and responsibilities far greater than most beings. She sighed, no sense candy coating it.

"All right, Dax, the fast track. I'm not RJ. You've never known RJ. She disappeared from our space before you were a twinkle in your father's eye. I hated my life, I wanted to make a change, and so I took over hers. No harm no foul. Well, now, RJ's back in our space, and she'll come here, for me.

"I suppose I could make a run for it. Hide from her, but then we'll just be chasing each other for eternity. I could at the very least leave Alsterase Island, which would remove Marge from harm's way. But it would make me more vulnerable, put me out in the open, and that's no way to prepare for battle. This is the most fortified complex in the entire New Alliance. This is where she'll expect me to be. This is where it has to happen. She knows I'm not going to run, because she wouldn't run. I'm not going to just gift-wrap my ass and hand it to her. If she wants me, she's going to have to come in here and get me."

Dax was silent, just seeming to let his mind digest all that she had said. Then he looked up at her. "I'm not leaving."

"What!"

"I said I'm not leaving. I am President of New Freedom of Earth. I have a responsibility to this world, this space, to you . . . you're my best friend. I don't care—how could I care—about who you were before I was even born. As far as I'm concerned you're RJ, and this other woman is the imposter. I'm going to stay here, with you, and help you fight her."

"Dax . . . what can you do? She's me and I'm her. She's a GSH, and for the record, on the one other occasion we stood toe to toe, she stomped my ass in no uncertain terms."

"I . . . I can help run the weapons console. Maybe I could talk to her."

Jessica laughed, not at him, but at what he said. "I don't think RJ is coming across the vastness of both charted and uncharted space to do any 'talking'. RJ is a creature of action, not words. Even more than I am."

"All my life you have protected me. When you went into battle I stayed on this island and hid. Now someone is coming here for you, and I'm not going to run from here to hide somewhere else. I won't run to safety while I leave you and the computer that runs our entire empire in jeopardy. I would lose all credibility as a leader."

"No one would know, Dax," Jessica said in a pleading tone. "I'd rather have you out of harm's way."

"I would know. I'm not a child anymore, and I don't need your protection." Suddenly his voice eroded in anger. "Why did you wait till now to tell me? I have told you everything, every humiliating, stupid, or just plain wrong thing that I've ever done. I thought there were no secrets between us. You could have told me."

"Dax, do you know what you're saying? You got caught masturbating by a girl you had a crush on. You fell off the dock, showing off for your friends and broke your arm. The worst thing you ever did was throw a grenade in a toilet." She pounded her fist into her chest three times hard, as tears streamed down her face. "I blew up a city, and not just any city, but Alsterase. I had a GSH built specifically to kill my own sister. How could I ever just tell you that? I'm sick to death of everyone making excuses for me and forgiving me without a moment's hesitation. What I did is inexcusable, and no one seems to be even really pissed off. Well, now finally someone's coming who understands what I did, and she is pissed. Whatever happens, there is finally going to be some closure."

Dax closed the space between them and wrapped his arms around her waist, resting his head on her stomach. "Nothing could change the way I feel about you. No one blames you, because we all know you, the person you have become. It's not fair. It seems like we just crushed the last of the Reliance resistance. This was supposed to be a time of peace, and now what? What's going to happen? What do you honestly think is going to happen?"

Jessica took a deep breath and expelled it. "RJ will come, I don't know exactly when or how, but it will be soon, and it will be spectacular. She's coming to kill me. I'll try to talk her out of it, it won't work, and we'll fight till one of us is dead."

"Then what?"

"Well, that rather depends on who winds up dead, doesn't it?"

Chapter Twenty-three

"Beer is cool," Alan drooled from where he half-stood, half-lay against the bar.

"I think you should stop drinking now," Poley suggested sternly.

"I never want to stop drinking," Alan laughed.

"If you continue to drink, you will continue to lose motor function until you fall onto the floor, and then you will in all likelihood vomit a disgusting combination of the pretzels you've swallowed without really chewing, beer and stomach bile."

Alan wrinkled his nose up and looked at Poley with slightly blurred vision. "Really?"

"Yes, really," Poley answered. "I think perhaps you should drink some water now."

"Oh, all right," Alan said, thinking that Poley could be a horrible killjoy at times. RJ was in the corner of the bar playing some game with bottle caps. She was laughing and seemed to be having a good time, and Alan said as much to Poley as he pushed a glass of water into Alan's hand.

"She's gathering information," Poley explained glancing over his shoulder at his sister.

"I think she's just having a good time," Alan argued.

"That would be nice."

She was winning at bottle caps, but then the only one who'd ever beaten her at the archaic barroom game was Poley. As she played, she pumped the patrons of the bar for information that they gladly gave her.

It took only a little effort to get them to tell her everything she needed to know without actually asking direct questions. After all, they all believed she knew. Many of these men and women had fought in campaigns against the Reliance, and they were more than happy to tell battle story after gory battle story—she just filled in the gaps.

By the time she had won thirty-two successive games of bottle caps, and before Alan had quite sobered up from his first experience with fermented grain, she knew more than she needed to. She gathered up Poley and Alan and headed back to the Avonlea.

By all accounts Jessica Kirk had defeated the Reliance. This made RJ's return completely unnecessary and therefore very anti-climactic. This being the case, a more rational being would have programmed the ship for a different destination. RJ wasn't feeling very rational. There was no place for her here now, and for that and so many other things, Kirk was going to pay.

RJ had been more or less sure the moment she smelled the full strength whiskey in her glass, and saw the sign over the bar that offered prostitutes of every sex and type at reasonable prices, that the Reliance had been totally and completely beaten. Everything she had learned after that just confirmed what she already knew.

While she'd been stuck on Frionia experiencing the living death of just existing, Kirk had been living RJ's, life with her friends, on her planet, carrying out her crusade. Worse yet, RJ got the impression that Kirk had actually managed to achieve a quicker, less painful, more complete exchange of power than she would have pulled off in the same time frame, and that did nothing but feed her growing need for revenge.

If you were going to take over my life and my quest, the least you could have done was to fail miserably at it, RJ thought as she sat at the pilot's console of the ship.

"RJ, are you sure you don't want me to do that?" Poley asked as he buckled Alan—who was still drunk—into his seat.

"I think it's high time I take back control of my destiny, Tin Pants. Don't you?" She started powering up the ship.

"I think we should wait till Alan is sober before we take off, and I think I should pilot the ship since you've never actually done it before."

"Alan's about to learn a valuable lesson in temperance, and just because I've never done something doesn't mean I don't know how or that I shouldn't," RJ informed him.

He nodded and handed a bag to Alan.

"What's this for?" Alan asked with a giggle.

"You'll figure it out," Poley said. He took his seat and strapped himself in.

Alan watched as RJ lined the ship up with the jumpgate and thought how pretty and light it was. Then the ship lurched forward at a high rate of speed, and it felt like they were slingshot through an ass hole backwards.

Alan felt like he was going to puke and remembered the bag. He brought it up to his lips and felt the beer and half eaten pretzels forced out of his stomach, through his throat, and into the bag. The pretzels scratched his throat as they came up, and he was sure he was going to die.

The ship seemed to stabilize till it felt more like what he was used to, but he just kept throwing up into the bag until he feared it was going to get overfull and burst.

He heard belts being unclicked, and then Poley was at his side, unbuckling him and holding the bag for him. Poley patted his back in a comforting way.

RJ was laughing, and he knew she was laughing at him. "You going to be all right, sport?"

Alan had finished throwing up, he hoped. He pushed the bag, which now disgusted him, away from him and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "I'm going to kill you," he hissed.

RJ laughed even louder. "Yeah, he's gonna be fine." She left the bridge.

Alan looked at Poley. "I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault. Come on, let's go get you cleaned up." Poley helped him get up and took him to the showers.

The water felt good running over his body, and he started to feel like he just might live. He knew Poley had gone to dispose of his bag-o-vomit. He let the water run into and out of his mouth for a good five minutes, and still couldn't get the horrid taste out. He finally gave up and turned off the water. Poley handed him a towel.

"She knew I would get sick, didn't she?" Alan asked.

"Yes."

"Why . . ."

"Did she take off anyway?"

Alan nodded.

"Because she's on a mission. She won't stop till she accomplishes what she's got it in her mind to do."

"And what does she want to do?"

"Kill our sister."

Two weeks later they popped out of hyperspace and the moon base started talking to her, telling her where, when, and how to tether her ship.

She just smiled and hurled her ship towards the surface of the planet.

"RJ . . . what are you doing now?" Poley asked calmly.

"What does it look like I'm doing?" RJ asked.

"Fixing to ram Earth with the Avonlea," Poley said with all the excitement he could muster.

"Oh . . . maybe I should slow down then. Thrusters?"

"That would be recommended," Poley answered.

"I'm just so excited. You know, about being home, seeing the old stomping grounds, ripping the metal heart out of the chest of a close family member."

She saw Alan look at Poley in panic, and heard Poley answer, "She doesn't mean me."

"Chill, Alan," RJ laughed. "You're just along for the ride. You guys can go do a little sight-seeing while I take care of business."

"RJ . . . J-6 has only done what you started. She has brought the New Alliance to power, gotten rid of the Reliance. Maybe she has changed, and . . ."

"I'm still going to kill her. Don't try to reason with me, Poley. Remember that she's the one that had that thing built. You remember, the thing that killed Whitey and Sandra, ripped my heart out of my chest and left me for dead, and cut your head off? She's the one who had Alsterase hit with cluster bombs." RJ's voice shook as she continued. "I don't care what she has done. I only care what she did. Kirk is all about power, having it, keeping it, using it. She changed sides only because she couldn't stay in the Reliance after she'd killed Jago. Don't you see? She's all about being Queen of everything, and she has used my life to do it. She's in charge of it all now. Don't you get it? She's taken over everything by pretending to be me."

"But the people seem happy. They're free, isn't that what you wanted?" Poley asked.

"How long before she starts demanding things? Before we find out that those GSH's she's put in power are programmed to carry out her bidding, and only her bidding? Don't you see, if I don't kill her, where the hell am I going to go?"

Poley was silent, and she knew this was because—knowing her—he now knew that there was no sense in arguing with her, that her mind had been made up.

And it was.

The ship had landed on the surface of the planet with a lurch that made Alan feel like his ass should be about where his shoulders were. In spite of that, he smiled. They were finally on solid ground. He unbuckled himself when he saw both Poley and RJ do it.

"She knows you're here, and where you landed. She has Marge," Poley informed his sister.

"So . . . What's your point?" RJ asked.

"RJ," his voice dragged, then sounded almost mechanical. "She will have the upper hand."

RJ slung a dismissive hand in the air and left the room. Poley followed her, so Alan did, too.

"You may not kill her, RJ. She may kill you," Poley said.

"I had thought of that," RJ said, never stopping her forward movement.

"I don't want you to die. I need you," Poley explained.

RJ stopped then, turned around and hugged her brother, and kissed him on the cheek. She looked at Alan. "You'll take care of him, won't you?" She let go of Poley, hugged Alan, and then started walking again. They followed.

Alan suddenly found a huge lump in his throat. "Why do this, RJ? We could go somewhere, anywhere else, together," Alan begged. He didn't really understand why she found it necessary to be here, or to kill her sister. He really thought they'd all land on some new world and live happily ever after. "We can just go somewhere else. Poley says there are lots of nice worlds . . ."

She didn't stop or turn to face them, she just screamed, "I can't go anywhere or do anything until I take care of my past!" She threw her hands up in a dramatic fashion. "Don't you get it? She took my life. I have to get it back."

"You don't even know for certain that she's there," Poley said.

"Oh, yes. Yes I do. Because if I was her, that's where I'd be. And, yes, I know that this is a very small advantage, because she will also know what I'm doing right now," RJ said. She walked into the loading bay, walked around the metal Ocupod suit and smiled. "However, I think I've got at least one really good surprise for her."

"The ship has landed twenty miles from here," Marge said.

"Yes," Jessica said simply.

"RJ . . . I mean, Jessica, why not send a squadron of planes and some ground troops to take her out?" Dax asked.

"Because she'd only kill them, and they wouldn't be able to stop her. At least Poley is with her. Her ship will be prepared to lay down covering fire if she needs it," Jessica answered. "Too many people have already died in our struggle. I think maybe we should keep our fight between the two of us and keep the body count down."

She looked at the monitor in front of her and saw it reflected on the GPS even as Marge chimed, "A mechanical device has left her ship, I detect weapons and a force field."

"See what I mean?" Jessica said to Dax. He just stared at her in stunned silence. "Marge, can you get me a visual?"

In seconds Jessica was looking at a blurry picture of the little toy her sister had brought with her.

"What the hell is that?" Dax asked.

"A big, ugly killing machine." Jessica took in a deep breath and let it out. "A can I'm going to have to open. What sorts of weapons does she have?" Jessica asked the computer.

"Plasma cannons, two forward and two aft lasers. That's all that I can detect at this time."

"Marge, does the machine have a communications unit? Can you make contact?"

"A connection has been opened."

"RJ, do we really have to play this out?" Jessica asked.

There was a laugh, and she saw Dax cringe, no doubt because it sounded just like her.

"Now that's a fucking riot coming from you," RJ's voice came back. "You, the woman who epitomizes 'playing it out'."

"Well, you've got me there," Jessica said with a calm she didn't really feel. "I don't suppose it will help to explain to you that I know I was wrong. That I'm sorry and I've changed."

"Let's see," RJ's voice came back, there was a pause and then, "No! You see I've changed too, but not for the better, and all because of you. I couldn't stay here. I had to leave because I couldn't stand looking at what you had destroyed anymore."

"I'm not going to let you just march in and kill me."

"I wouldn't want you to, that wouldn't be any fun."

The transmission ended. Jessica could hear the click as the connection was severed.

"Marge, reconnect with her craft."

"I am working at connecting . . . She's gone."

Marge didn't have to explain what she meant. The image had left the screen as the machine went into the water. "Damn! It's a submersible," Jessica breathed. "Find it, find the damn thing!"

A blinking light appeared on the screen, but that was the best visual they could get. A few seconds later even that was gone.

"She's scrambling our signal," Marge informed.

"I can see that. Keep trying to make an audio connection to her craft."

"I have no information on the location of the craft . . ."

"I know that, Marge, but she has to come up sometime. Be looking for her, and try to make an audio connection as soon as she surfaces."

"Understood."

Jessica moved to the weapons console. She wondered how dexterous the machine was. She guessed that it could climb over and around or go through almost anything. All right, if that's the case, where is she most likely to surface?

It was a good question. RJ knew the area and the fort, but she would also know that in the decades that she'd been gone much would have changed. She wouldn't expect everything to be in exactly the same place that it was when she had left. So I'm not one damn bit closer to knowing where she might surface. I have no idea how fast that contraption moves, especially under water, or how much oxygen she actually has. Is it capable of making its own oxygen, or does she have a limited amount on board with her? If that's the case she'll surface quickly. If not, she might stay under days, even weeks . . . No, she's ready for this to come to an end, and she doesn't care how it ends as long as it does.

This being the case, she wasn't too surprised when the strange vehicle surfaced only a few minutes later, not far from the docks. A little more surprising was that it immediately fired on the fort and did damage.

"Damage to sector seven, second floor," Marge droned.

"That's a really strong plasma cannon," Jessica said almost to herself. She took careful aim and fired on the metal spider. It lurched but didn't fall or even seem to take any real damage, and it seemed to simply dance around the lasers firing from the perimeter defense grid.

"I've made contact," Marge announced.

RJ circled the island at a distance before deciding to take the path of least resistance and surface right next to the dock. She immediately fired her plasma cannon at the second story, mostly to test what Kirk would do next.

Not too surprisingly she found herself fired on, and while she had easily stepped around and over the laser security grid, she couldn't continue to do that and successfully dodge incoming fire. It rocked the vehicle, but didn't break through her force field.

Poor Ocupod bastard, if he'd had forcefield technology she might not be wearing his skin right now.

RJ fired on the fort again.

Then Jessica was talking over her comlink. "RJ, you are going to damage the computer with your attack. The entire system depends on Marge . . ."

"And you figured I wouldn't risk damaging the computer and shutting down the New Alliance, so you decided to hole up here, but there's one thing you didn't consider. I don't give a good damn about this New Alliance. I don't know any of these people, and I don't care about them. Why should I? None of them give a good damn about me." She fired her plasma cannon again, and this time she knocked out the laser defense grid. It seemed that some things had stayed the same. She moved quickly and then stuck a metal tentacle through the front doors and ripped them off. Then, just for good measure, she stuck another one through a section of concrete wall. "I'll tear this thing down a brick at a time if I have to."

Jessica fired a full blast of plasma bolts into the vehicle and it stumbled backwards and fell, only to get right up again. Jessica took her hands off the console and jumped to her feet.

"All right, RJ."

"What the hell are you doing?" Dax asked, jumping into the seat of the weapons console. He started to fire.

"No." Jessica grabbed his hand. "All right, RJ, let's keep this between you and me."

"I thought we were," RJ's voice chimed back.

"I've got people here with me, and the computer. Eventually we will break through the force field on your machine, but in the meantime the fort will take much damage, and what's the point? Surely you and I could put our toys aside. We could meet and settle this the way it should be settled."

"Where would we meet?"

"I think you know where," Jessica answered.

"How do I know that you or your people won't fire on me as soon as I leave my vehicle?"

"Where's the trust?" Jessica asked with a crooked grin. "See you in ten."

RJ cradled the grenade launcher in her arms and jumped from her perch in the Ocupod carrier. When it didn't rain fire upon her head she slung the cumbersome weapon down and took off at a dead run. She jumped onto the wall, and as if on cue Jessica Kirk walked out the door onto the wall to face her.

The irony of the fact that she was dressed in a Reliance issue uniform while her sibling was dressed like a Beta 4 humanoid didn't for one minute elude her.

"Where'd you get the eye?" RJ asked, as she pulled the cube from her pocket. "I know where I got mine."

"Guy named Shlerb, you would have hated him," Jessica said. She jerked the chain off her waist with a single tug, hit RJ's hand and sent the eye flying. "So . . . I'm ready to have this over with, what about you?"

For answer RJ pulled the chain from her body and slung it into the side of Jessica's head in one movement. Jessica seemed to roll with the action as if expecting it. Then she jumped and her boot landed in RJ's face, sending her onto her back. RJ rolled quickly and jumped to her feet. She slung the chain out, it snagged Jessica's leg, and RJ pulled her to the ground. She quickly jumped astride Jessica and slammed a fist into her head hard. Jessica rolled her whole body till she was on her stomach, and then leapt up in a motion that sent RJ flying.

RJ landed on her feet and slapped her chain out at Jessica at the same time as Jessica was slinging hers towards RJ. The two chains tangled, and RJ slung Jessica on the end of the chains into a wall. The wall crumbled and debris rained down. From where she lay in the rubble, Jessica pulled on her chain, and the two chains broke free of each other, but the backlash slung RJ into the rubble so fast that she found herself sprawled facedown in the debris. Jessica picked up a huge chunk of rubble and slammed it into RJ's head as she was working at standing up. Feeling she had the upper hand, and not wanting to lose it, Jessica abandoned her chain and dove on RJ, driving her to the ground.

But RJ easily rolled out from under Jessica, jumped to her feet and slammed her Elite boot heel into the back of Jessica's neck so hard it made a snapping sound. She then jumped on Jessica's back and carefully wrapped her chain around her opponent's throat. She started to apply pressure even as Jessica squirmed.

"Ah, Jess, this is just way too easy after all these years. That's the real difference between them and us, you know. They can't hold a grudge for a hundred years. Memories fade for them till they're like a sun-bleached picture you can barely see the image in. But not us, we remember everything that ever happened to us, everything we did, just as crisp and clear as if it happened only a minute ago. After all the years of pain, there should be some slower way for me to kill you. Something more inventive and painful. But you know what, kid? You've gotten damn good, and I'm just not sure that given another chance you might not wind up killing me."

Choking sounds came from Jessica's throat as she continued thrashing around under RJ's weight, trying to get a hand around the chain.

"Yep, this is sure a letdown . . ."

Suddenly RJ felt something cold against the back of her head, and then a small but authority-filled voice ordered, "Let her go." Without releasing the pressure she held on Jessica's throat, and indifferent to the barrel of the weapon held against her head, she turned to face the man and for a second did a double-take.

"Mickey?"

"No, his son, Dax. President of the New Alliance. Now let her go," he ordered, as if he really thought that she would.

"Shooting me with that laser will only piss me off, sonny boy," RJ said. "You know that. I'll take your gun away, and then I'll kill you."

"And while you're doing it, she'll get away." He was shaking, obviously scared to death, but he wasn't about to back down. "Now let her go."

He was willing to die to save Kirk. When had been the last time anyone had been willing to die for her? When they had even chosen her side in an argument?

Her hand on the loops of the chain slackened, and her eyes were drawn to the eye in the cube sitting on the ground, staring up at her. She turned her head slightly, and over the bay in the distance she could see the lights of Alsterase starting to sparkle in the pre-night sky. She slowly released the chain in her hand, got up and walked back to sit on a section of the wall, feeling something like a blow-up toy with all the air let out. She sat there and just stared at the large city. Alsterase, the city by the bay, the city that rocks, the city that never stops, Topaz had said of it. And there it was. Again. Looking the way it had before David had betrayed her, and everything had gone wrong.

Dax ran to Jessica's side and quickly removed the chain from her throat. She was coughing, trying to catch her breath and get to her feet at the same time, but her arms and legs weren't working right.

RJ took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and then she got up and walked towards Kirk. Dax moved between them, pointing his gun.

"I broke her neck, I was just going to put it back," RJ explained.

Dax nodded and reluctantly moved out of her way, though he kept his weapon on her. RJ leaned down and struck Jessica's neck hard, there was another cracking sound, and then she helped Jessica to her feet.

Jessica looked at RJ. "Why?" she croaked.

"I would have felt bad kicking Mickey's boy's ass. Besides," RJ walked over and picked up the eye. She brought it over and handed it to Jessica, who took it reluctantly.

"The woman who destroyed my life only had one eye the last time I saw her. And that," she pointed at Alsterase, "wasn't here when I left, but his father was. And now he's dead, isn't he?"

Dax nodded silently and lowered the weapon in his hand.

"It's way too late to kill my enemy. Besides, why should I release you from the hell of living?" RJ picked up her chain and moved to sit on the wall, again staring at the city. "While I was gone you took out the Reliance." She started caressing the links of chain. "So now what?"

Jessica didn't have to ask; she knew what her sister meant. Without even each other to fight, there was really no need for either of them in New Alliance space. She moved to sit on the wall next to her, though not too close. There was no sense pushing her luck.

"Well, I thought—if you didn't kill me of course—that I might go off to Pete and kick a little Argy butt, see if I can't topple their government," Jessica said thoughtfully. "I could send for Pete after I got a stronghold there."

"You could send for a planet?" RJ asked, thinking maybe the chunk of building Jessica had smashed into her head was taking its toll.

"No, Pete, my son . . ."

"Your son!" RJ shrieked.

"Yes. Mickey had him made for me from my and my late lover's DNA. Pete's a GSH."

"You must be so proud," RJ said with a laugh.

"Actually, I am. So . . . what about you? What are you going to do?"

"That's a good question. I've been in limbo so long, I'm not sure what I want, or that I belong anywhere. The first thing I've felt passionately about in years was killing you, and you ruined that for me." RJ shrugged. "Maybe I'll just hang here for awhile, get to know Dax, see just how the world's changed. Let Poley and his boyfriend do a little sightseeing."

It was Jessica's turn to be shocked. "Poley, the robot, has a boyfriend?"

"Yes, who would ah thunk it? Poley, a homosexual," RJ said.

"Yeah, that's the issue." Jessica laughed, then added on a more serious note. "You could join me in my quest against the Argy," Jessica said, realizing how insane it sounded seeing as they were sitting in the rubble that had been created when they had been trying to kill each other just a few minutes ago. Her neck still hurt.

RJ shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe I will after awhile. Still need to get over the whole hating your guts thing." She reached into her coveralls pocket, pulled out her kit, flipped it open and removed a pill from the tube inside. "Pronuses?"

"Yeah, thanks," Jessica said, taking the pill RJ handed her.

RJ took one herself and then replaced the pouch in her pocket. "Did you go crazy?" she asked curiously.

"Oh, yeah, more than once," Jessica said. "You?"

"Oh, yeah. Father wasn't always there, either. Maybe it's hereditary."

"Stewart was odd, but he wasn't crazy. I'm thinking we got it from Topaz."

"Topaz?"

"Yes, didn't he ever tell you? He was Stewart's father. He is our grandfather."

RJ shook her head and laughed. "So that's what the crazy old shit was trying to tell me."

They both seemed to realize at the same time that Dax was just standing, staring at them.

"What?" they asked in unison.

He nervously looked at his feet. "Well, I know you're clones and all, but . . . Well, you don't look that much alike to me."

They looked at each other and started to laugh.

Chapter Twenty-four

Baldor looked up at the sun and then spit in the dust. Digging and planting, planting and digging. Farming was no life for a warrior. He began to understand why his ancestors had listened to the priests when they told them there was to be a time of war. It broke the absolute, total monotony of living a normal day-to-day life on a third class planet like Beta 4.

His people had been hunters and gatherers for the most part, farming and raising livestock just to help subsidize what the meager land had to offer. When there wasn't enough food, the priests would just insist that God had told them to fight, and so they'd hold a war until enough people had died that there was plenty of food for everyone else.

Baldor didn't see why that was so evil, especially now when his days were filled with digging and planting, and planting and digging, and plants grew but they really didn't flourish, even with fertilizers and irrigation and a dozen other things commerce had brought to Beta 4.

His sister had taken a mate, and they were raising children. She daily pleaded with him to do the same thing, but he knew that was no life for him. He stayed and helped them with their farm and bit his tongue instead of telling them just how absolutely dull and colorless their life was. That he'd rather die in a fiery pit in hell than copy their lifestyle and make it his own.

He didn't really know what he was going to do or how. His mother's death had left him feeling empty and alone, but he didn't think taking up with the first willing female and having the state's suggested two kids was the answer.

No normal woman was ever going to be able to take her place in his heart.

He remembered what Mickey had told him as he looked up at the relentless sun. "You can never go home," he muttered under his breath.

It had been good to see Pete, spend some time with his old friend, and catch up on what was going on back on Earth with RJ and Dax and his other friends. But Pete had returned to Earth too soon, and now he just missed his friends and his mother all the more.

He bent over, stuck yet another plant in the ground and pretended like it was a land mine. They were on Urta fighting a ground war, just cleaning up a few straggling Argy who hadn't quite gotten the idea that it was time for them to go home. They were placing the mines to secure their perimeter. Suddenly he was surrounded; he raised his shovel like a blaster and started making blaster-firing sounds. When he swung around to check his rear flank he almost slapped his chuckling sister upside the head with his shovel. He lowered it to the ground, feeling the blood rushing to his face.

"Hey, commando! Let the cabbage live. There's word from headquarters," Sandra said with a laugh.

"Huh?" Baldor asked.

"Two wants to see you at the palace," Sandra said.

Baldor sighed. There was only one thing in this universe more boring than farming, and that was going to the palace, pretending to be interested and that you actually understood what the hell they were talking about. He certainly didn't see why they needed him there. Baldor was supposed to be in charge of defense, but the whole, "we must have a strong defense," thing was kind of a non-issue since there was no fighting in the whole system, much less on the planet. Which was of course why he, the head of defense for Beta 4, was planting cabbages.

Still, there was always hope that some minor battle had sprung up somewhere that might need his attention. Maybe some Fourers fighting with some Earth-born settlers.

"Did he say why?" Baldor asked hopefully.

"No, just that he needed to see you," Sandra said, being her usual completely unhelpful self.

Baldor sighed, threw down his shovel and started for the house, mumbling. Two had probably gotten his father's fake hands bronzed or some equally absurd thing. He was like a small child, always wanting you to see everything that he'd done and praise him for it.

His sister moved up beside him and put her arm around him. "Baldor, you have got to find some joy in your life. You can't just go on living like this, feeling nothing," Sandra said in a concerned voice.

"Don't you understand, Sandra? Everything is pointless; nothing really matters. You help win a battle, and when there's peace . . . You're obsolete and no one needs you. So what have you really done? Nothing."

She sighed, no doubt because she was tired of hearing it, and mostly wanted to hear him say that he'd fallen in love with some ordinary woman and was ready to sit back and hoe the cabbage while she spit out those kids.

Hell, he couldn't stand Sandra's kids; he sure as hell didn't want any of his own.

He took a bath and dressed, then got in his solar powered vehicle with the mind-boggling top end speed of twenty-five miles per hour, and thought it was a good thing they were only ten miles from the Capital. If it had been any further the bronzed hands would have tarnished before he made it to the palace. He flipped some tunes on in the computer and took off. He sang along tunelessly with the music as he drove. For the moment at least, he was just enjoying the fact that he wasn't planting cabbages, and that there might actually be something wrong.

He had a momentary flutter of excitement when he saw the skiff parked outside the palace. Then he sighed. No sense getting excited, it's most likely a shipment of cloth or some really exciting new fertilizer. If there really is some god living in the generator, please strike me dead right now if Two just wants to share some new agricultural product with me.

He got out of his car and entered the palace without fanfare. He walked right to Taheed's throne room and stopped dead.

"RJ?"

"Hi," she said.

He ran across the room and hugged her as tightly as he could, so glad to see her that he couldn't contain himself. She didn't hug him back, just looked at Taheed and said, "He certainly is a friendly cuss."

RJ looked uncomfortably at the man who held her like she might get away at any minute.

The king coughed, looking embarrassed and said, "He thinks he knows you. Ah, Baldor . . ."

"Baldor?" RJ asked. She looked at the young man and saw her old friend's eyes looking back at her. She smiled. "You're David and Janad's son. He named you after Whitey."

Baldor released her then, stepping back to arm's length. "My gods! You're not her, you're really . . . Well, you."

"You knew?" Taheed asked.

"Yeah, Pete told me." Baldor looked long and hard at her face, no doubt trying to see if she was exactly the same.

Love, that's what she had felt in his embrace. He had loved Kirk. It had felt good to feel love again, even if it hadn't actually been for her.

He looked around her at where Poley and Alan stood and he smiled. "That must be Poley, but this can't be Levits, he would have to be . . ."

"He's dead, and he was human. Alan isn't either." She smiled. "You look so much like your father."

Baldor laughed. "I'm a little darker."

After they'd eaten dinner with the king, Poley and Alan had retired to their quarters and RJ had walked out to the palace gardens. They were even more beautiful than they were when she'd last been there. Of course there'd been all the shooting, bombs, and death then. When she introduced her plants to this world, it would finally really bloom.

She both heard and felt him, so she wasn't too surprised when he started talking.

"So . . . Why did you come here?" Baldor asked from where he'd walked up behind her. "I mean besides to bring us these miracle plants of yours?"

"Truthfully?" she asked turning to face him.

"Yes."

"Because this world was the last place where I was ever truly happy. The last place where I seemed to know just exactly what my role in the universe was."

"Kirk . . . did you . . . is she?" It was obvious what he was trying to ask, by the fact that he was afraid to fully ask the question. He didn't want to hear the answer if it was the wrong one.

She sighed. "We fought, I won, and no I didn't kill her. I realized that taking her life away wasn't going to bring mine back. Kirk's halfway to a planet in the Argy quadrant by now, ready to whip a little Argy ass. She seems to know just exactly what she wants to do with her life. If you ask me, I think she just finds peace as boring as I do. I won't lie to you, I really, really wanted to kill her. But when it came right down to it, I just couldn't do it."

Baldor laughed. "She inspires those feelings in people. So, what do these plants of yours do that's so amazing?"

RJ smiled broadly. "Well, they adapt. It's harder than you think."

THE END

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Chains of Redemption

Table of Contents

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four