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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."

 

 

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