Chains of Redemption

by Selina Rosen

  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.