by Selina Rosen
"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, e
very 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.
