by Selina Rosen
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 technolog
y; 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.
