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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.

 

 

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