Chains of Redemption

by Selina Rosen

  By the time David was Baldor's age he had known the bite of slavery, brutal work, hunger, and grief. There had been no playtime for him. He had succeeded in giving his children a better life than he had.

  So far.

  "Some of my people are worried," Taleed said. "Many of them still can't quite let go of the old ways. They are afraid that our world will be populated with more of you than there are of us. They still believe we may be punished for not following the breeding programs of The Ancestor. First we absorbed all of the Reliance personnel from the space station, and now we are absorbing all these children, over a thousand of them already. Some of the older ones, the ones who worry that we have abandoned the gods, are becoming hostile towards your people. They are worried about the mixing."

  "Taleed, you know the history of your world, of your people. We are the same people except for the fact that your race gets half your DNA from the Argys. You have already been mixed. You were purposely mixed. If your people were to mix with us they would become less mixed, not more so."

  "I know that, but as much as we have tried . . . some of my people still don't understand. There will be trouble with them; it might even escalate to fighting in the streets. Fighting between us—like in the old days—and I would just like to know why . . . The real reason why she is sending them here?" Taleed asked.

  The Argy blood was the problem, because though it had been homogenized, the Fourers still had empathy far above that of a normal Reliance-born human. Taleed could feel, or at the very least had a nagging sense, that David wasn't telling him everything he knew. Still, he didn't have to be the one to tell Taleed.

  "For the last ten years in every combat situation, RJ has chosen our people alone to fight with her," Janad said. "The answer is obvious. RJ is going to live forever. She is going to fight the Reliance till they are gone. Not just here, not just on Earth, but everywhere. She's going to need troops. Troops that she trusts. Where is she going to get them? She's going to make them. She's sending the war orphans here, so that they will grow up in our gravity, so that they will grow up learning our skills, our way of hunting and fighting, a way that she has grown to admire and trust. She sends them here so that when the time comes and she needs them, she will have a new army."

  Stratton normally didn't even bother to address anything that didn't deal directly with the moon-based space station or the planetary defense system they'd built. She was in charge of the military, and most days it seemed that was really all she cared about. In fact, every day she reminded David more and more of RJ. The difference being, there seemed to be no sense in her single-mindedness, since they hadn't been attacked since they had evacuated the space station and destroyed it. Of course according to what Bradley had told David, that battle had been bloody, hundreds of people had died, and she'd felt personally responsible.

  Stratton had been in command, and David knew what it was like to be in command when people were dying all around you. You couldn't help but feel responsible, and people dealt with guilt in different ways. Maybe Stratton was just trying to make sure that they were so well prepared that such a bloodbath would never again occur on her watch.

  Whatever her normal motivation was, Stratton wasn't silent on this issue, and she was obviously upset. "What's the difference between what she's doing and the Reliance raising children to be Elites?"

  "We aren't going to force them into war if they don't want to go. We aren't raising them in barracks. They are being put with willing families, and the families are raising them as their own," David said quickly.

  "Then they'll be pulled away from those families and shipped wherever RJ needs them to fight in a war they won't understand any more than the Fourers she's fighting with now understood what the Reliance was doing to them," Stratton said.

  "Then maybe we should make sure they do understand," Taleed said quietly. Still everyone heard him.

  "What!" Stratton exclaimed. "You can't be thinking of helping her in this craziness. These are children we're talking about."

  "They won't always be children," Taleed said. "Yes, we are making our land more fertile. David has taught us much about farming and getting the most out of our land. The New Alliance has helped us with supplies, and we are now using birth control to hold our own population at a sustainable number, but still . . . Children grow, they will eat more. Why let them tax the land when they could serve our world and the New Alliance as RJ's army? You are forgetting that on our world we trained our children from the time they could walk to fight battles against their own kind for no other reason than to further the dreams of a long dead madman. I say we train these children in the ways of battle as we have always trained our own young. We tell them always what their purpose is . . ."

  "Many of them will remember the deaths of their parents. That they had another life and it was stolen from them. They will want to fight." Even if he hadn't seen her or recognized her voice David would have known it was Janad simply because she was the only person he knew who interrupted the king without so much as an "excuse me." And one of only a handful of people who could get away with it.

  "Exactly," Taleed said. "They will want to fight the people who took their families, and forced them from their world. And as long as our people know they aren't going to stay, why should they object?" He looked at Stratton for her approval. "An army has to come from somewhere, why not from here? Why not these children with no families to grieve for them if they are killed?"

  "Do either of you hear how callous you sound? I'm not convinced this is what's best for them, for anybody. You're making decisions for them. Molding them for a life they may not want. Is this our brave new world? One in which we emulate the practices of the very Reliance we say we hate?" Stratton didn't look like she was going to back down any time soon.

  Taleed looked at David for help. David took a deep breath. He had been trained for this. This was, in fact, a life he had chosen for himself, which he had long ago decided he didn't want. There was, however, no turning back. He was the speechmaker. He knew how to sway people with his words. How to make even the impossible sound plausible and the detestable like a good idea. It was his gift, and it had been his and RJ's great undoing. Maybe it could help her now. "Our children have grown up in a world none of us knew as children, and yet we have carefully taught them about all manner of fighting and of war. We have carefully explained to them what it's like to be a slave. To have no rights. What they must watch for, the signs. All the things they must guard against if we are to keep tyrants from taking over our world. We teach children of the harshness of reality in the hopes they never have to see it, live through it, but knowing that in all probability they will. Peace rarely lasts. We have peace here only because the Reliance is too busy with the New Alliance on Earth and the Argy to come after us. The more we improve this planet, the more we terraform it, shape it to make a better world for ourselves and our children, the more inevitable that the Reliance will come and take it away from us. We are only living in this time of peace now because others are dying someplace else.

  "The ethics we teach our children today; loyalty, honor, bravery. The true horror of our lives, the real despicable truth is that they will only learn the true value of these things if they are forced into battle. Only in desperation are we truly tested. We are teaching our own children the rules of war. Training them for battle, knowing it's probably inevitable. What makes these orphaned children any better than our own? If RJ needs troops and she comes here to get them . . . Well, having trained our children as we have, to believe that freedom is worth fighting for, that another's freedom is just as important as their own . . . how many, if any, of our own children will choose to stay behind if she calls for troops?"

  Stratton nodded, though it was hard to tell whether she actually understood and approved or was just resigned. It didn't matter. Either way she would now go along with their plans. And in the end, who really knew what was right? Only time would tell whether the decision they had made here toda
y was the right one. After all, none of them would actually be affected by this decision. No, they had made this decision for others. Children, children who would be trained into an army to serve under a crazy, genetically engineered humanoid who had so much hate in her soul, so much pain, that she was never going to rest until the Reliance was completely eradicated. She didn't care about the cost.

  And today he had helped her. Today he had put all other reason out of his mind and he had helped her cause with the gift of speech he had been born with and that Topaz had later nurtured with hours of careful study and tutoring. He had led them in the direction he was sure she wanted them to go, for no other reason than she was RJ. He owed her everything, and he had helped to make her what she was today—single-minded and crazy.

  And she was. He hadn't actually seen her since she'd come back from the dead. She was far too busy to come to Beta 4, and he seriously didn't care if he ever got on a spaceship again, as sick as he had been the first and last time. Besides, he couldn't leave here, he had a family, responsibilities here that he'd never had anywhere else. So he hadn't actually had physical contact with RJ since her return. But even over the monitor he could tell she had changed. He supposed he couldn't really expect her not to have. She'd been through hell and back more than once, and somewhere along the way something had snapped. Snapped? Hell, it had blown up.

  It didn't matter. She was still RJ. She still knew how to run a campaign, and she was still in charge. She still knew what she was doing.

  He hoped.

  The rest of the meeting followed a more or less normal path for this small group of people who had the job of making decisions that affected an entire planet, and today, David figured, the future of the universe itself.

  Jessica returned to the fort after yet another successful campaign as her loyal troops stayed on the mainland partying in the streets of Alsterase.

  Mickey's son ran to greet her at the dock. The black-headed, three-foot tall eleven-year-old hit her with such force that had she been a normal woman he would have bowled her over. She picked him up and swung him around effortlessly before she set him down and messed his hair with her fist.

  He laughed and hugged her again. "What did you bring me, RJ?"

  Jessica laughed. "What makes you think I brought you anything?"

  "Because you always do."

  She put her hand on his shoulder and started walking with him towards the old prison. She reached into her left hand pocket with her free hand and pretended to be looking for something. Finally she pulled out a small glass ball about three inches in diameter and handed it to him. He grinned wildly and started jumping around so much she had to release him. He ran around in front of her, forcing her to stop in her stride or plow over the top of him. "It's the biggest marble I've ever seen."

  Jessica grinned now, almost as excited as the boy. "Ah, but it's not just a marble, Dax." She positioned it in his hand so that the red dot pointed up. "Hold it very tightly and watch."

  The boy watched in amazement as a dragon seemed to materialize in the air in front of him and over the "marble". "It's a hologram," he said in awe.

  "Yes. Now move your hand back and forth like this." She showed him with her own hand.

  As Dax moved his hand, a man with a sword appeared and started to fight with the snarling dragon. When he stopped moving his hand the man stood alone. "I have to show my mom and dad." He motioned for her to lean down and he kissed her on the check. "Thanks, RJ," he practically sang, and then he was gone. She smiled after him. He wasn't going to get much bigger, that was what the doctor said. He had apparently inherited the gene from his father, a fact that seemed to bother Mickey much more than it bothered the boy.

  Gerald walked up beside her, carting his duffel bag. "That boy . . . so much energy," he laughed. "If I didn't know better, I'd think he was yours."

  "He is mine," Jessica said softly. "He's my heart." She fought the tears that wanted to fall.

  "He loves you, too."

  "I know he does." Jessica laughed then and slapped Gerald almost too hard on the back. "Too much time away from home has made me very sentimental." That and an exceptionally high body count. The battle for Zone 3-B and permanent control of Moonbase Station had been the longest and bloodiest yet. She'd lost a good third of her own personal unit. Men and woman she had fought beside for ten years were dead. Smiles she had gotten used to seeing were gone forever, people she had trusted and who had trusted her, people she had let down.

  Comrades, friends.

  "No one blames you, RJ," Gerald said as if reading her mind.

  "But they should," Jessica said with a sigh. "I got careless, cocky. I thought we could win easily."

  "We did win, RJ . . ."

  "But not easily." Jessica sighed and started moving back towards the fort, and now a tear did fall. It fell from the eye she had stolen from the Argy foreman she had killed all those years ago, and she quickly wiped it away. She wasn't RJ. She was an abomination of genetically engineered flesh and bone with a dead man's eye.

  "No one can know everything, RJ," Gerald said as he followed her. "None who died would have wanted to be anywhere else in that hour. They died doing a great deed. Another zone is free. We have permanent control of the Moon base. The Reliance has been completely eradicated from Earth. Many die and leave no such legacy."

  It was one of the reasons she preferred fighting with the Fourers. They were true warriors. Like her, they were built for war and conquest. They weren't afraid of dying, and would rather die in battle than in a hospital bed. Today she damned their loyalty and fearlessness in battle. Damned her own pride. Jessica nodded silently, not really knowing how to explain to Gerald that she didn't feel any better knowing that given the chance, even knowing they would die, they still would have followed her into battle.

  Mickey looked across the table at her. "Do you think they'll come back?"

  Jessica shook her head no. "They evacuated all the Reliance big shots to one of Trinidad's moons. We don't know which one, but I'm guessing Seritompia. They've all but lost the battle for Stashes. Argy forces are even now moving towards Urta, and if the Reliance wants to hold Stashes and secure Urta they will have to move all their forces there. They can't afford to take another pounding from us right now. Not over a world they consider as unproductive as Earth.

  "We have taught the work units to fight back and destroyed most of their bases and cities. In short, there is nothing left here that in their opinion is worth fighting for. Not when they know there is a good chance they can't win."

  "Then, why . . . Why did they fight so hard up till now?" Gerald asked.

  "To keep from losing face. They just lost their home planet to a bunch of heretics. In their war with the Argy they have always touted themselves as being the strongest force in the universe. Now they've lost their home planet to a bunch of work units. There has been no such rebel uprising amongst the Argy. The Argy will take Stashes, and then they'll go after Urta. Therein lies the real problem."

  "Huh?" Mickey asked, feeling lost.

  "Well, we split the Reliance forces between Earth and Stashes, and it allowed us to take Earth while the Argy took Stashes. They haven't yet, but they will. The Reliance couldn't beat either one of us as long as they were fighting both of us. But when I met with the Argy on Deakard and we discussed forming an alliance, it was just to help us take Earth and them to take Stashes. The Argy obviously don't plan to adhere to our original agreement. Once they have successfully taken Stashes, they will move against other Reliance-held planets. They will try to take over the colony planets, and that was never part of the deal, because I want the colony planets. I don't want to see the Reliance replaced on the outer worlds by the Argy, who are just as bad, if not worse, when it comes to enslaving their people."

  "Why don't the Argy . . . why don't they rebel against their leadership if it's as bad as you say it is?" Mickey asked.

  "You are frustrated, confused and hungry. From this I can deduce that y
ou don't really understand what we are talking about, that you wish you'd never brought the subject up, and that if we could now just eat the rest of our meal in relative silence you would be very happy," Jessica spat back quickly. "In a race where everyone knows how everyone else feels and where you become a suspect if you continuously shield your feelings, it's rather hard to construct, let alone carry out, any kind of rebellion. Then there are the telepaths, all of whom work for the government and make a living randomly reading the thoughts of people in and around strategic areas. This is why we don't want them to take over the colony planets."

  "Is there any way they can be stopped? Can the Reliance stop them?"

  "I don't know if the Reliance can stop them. The Argy have gained a lot of momentum, while the Reliance has lost two massive campaigns. Morale has got to be at an all-time low, and many of them must be questioning why they are fighting for a regime that they are now starting to question. The Argy can be stopped; the question is what's the best way to stop them? What's the best way to stop them and still get rid of the Reliance? Just as the Reliance couldn't fight on two fronts, neither can we. We have to decide what's going to best serve the New Alliance."