by Selina Rosen
She looked at the Ocupod roasting over the fire. Judging by the size, it was obviously a youngster. She glared at the Abornie stuffing their faces with its cooked flesh.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" She rubbed her hands down her face. Then she ran and grabbed the spit off the fire and slung it in all their faces. "This was a sentient being. The equivalent of a child. It thinks, just like you and I. You don't eat an intelligent being. Gods, just when I think we've taught you idiots something about civilization, some touch of ethics, you do something like this."
"He killed it," half of them said, pointing to one man in the group. As usual, quick to point the blame away from themselves.
"We eat fish," he said with a shrug.
"Fish can't repair machines or build things. They don't make decisions or fight wars. They don't think. Just because you can kill something doesn't mean you should. Why don't you eat each other?"
"And she doesn't mean in a pleasant sexual way," Topaz added helpfully, as he walked up to see what was causing all the commotion.
RJ glared at all of them. "You will not hunt these creatures or kill them. In all these long years since the battle they have showed no aggression towards you. How dare you hunt them for food?" She stomped off, back in the direction of her garden, and Poley followed. She started to work again and tried to forget the image in her head.
"That was a very bad thing," Poley said, kneeling down to work beside her.
"Yes, and how come we know that, but those morons didn't?" RJ hissed.
"I don't know."
"I heard what happened." RJ looked up and Levits was standing there. "Is it really that big a deal?"
"You tell me," she said angrily. "Would you like to be killed and stuck on a stick over a fire for barbarians to eat? Better than that, would you like an Ocupod to eat one of those little Abornie brats you're so fond of?"
"Not really," Levits said. "It was a mistake, they just weren't thinking."
"What you're calling a mistake, I call murder. Even when I was a Reliance goon I knew the difference between killing a trained and armed soldier and an unarmed civilian. That's why I jumped sides, remember? I never had any doubt in that war. But with these people . . . I often wonder if I didn't destroy the wrong army."
"The Abornie are basically good people, RJ. They just need guidance," Levits said. "You should really get to know them. You've separated yourself from them, haven't tried to make friends with them."
He wasn't wrong; she hadn't even tried to create relationships with them. She couldn't afford to. In order to "guide" them she needed to intimidate them. Someone had to be the heavy, and it certainly wasn't going to be Topaz—who liked to be their benevolent god—or baby-kissing Levits. She ignored what he had said and instead said, "You know if I had admitted defeat and retreated back to my own ground, and then my enemy came into my territory, I'd be pissed. But if they then started murdering my people, I'd attack."
"What do you mean?" Levits asked.
"I have a feeling you're going to find out very soon."
The next day five Abornie went out in a boat, and three hours later the boat came back empty. Poley and RJ went down to examine the boat as a bunch of Abornie looked on.
"Well?" RJ asked the robot.
"Ocupod DNA. You're thinking retaliation?" Poley answered.
"Yes." Without another word she walked into the jungle, shoved a small tree over, topped it, then dragged it out into the water till she was waist deep. She speared the pole into the sand under the water and made sure it was secure. She then walked back up on the beach and looked at the crowd.
"For hundreds of years you couldn't even go near the ocean, much less fish in it, but we destroyed the Ocupod's capability of fighting us on land and so we started to venture out to sea to fish. That was fine. There was nothing wrong with that. They let us do it. Don't you understand that? They let us fish their ocean. They didn't have to. They can't come up here, but that," she pointed out at the endless ocean behind her, "is still their domain, and they will always be supreme there. You killed one of them, and now they have retaliated. They will not let us fish the oceans unmolested until the murderer is brought to justice." She waded into the crowd. The Abornie in question saw her coming, realized what she was doing, and took off running. She caught him easily, and in spite of his squirming she easily carried him down to the pole standing in the water. She lashed him to the pole with her chain, and the whole of the Abornie assembled there started to protest.
"RJ . . . what in hell's name are you doing?" Levits asked as he ran up on the scene.
"Justice," RJ said.
"It looks more like a ritual sacrifice to me," Levits said angrily.
"You call it a sacrifice, I call it an execution."
The voices of the Abornie raised in pitch against her, and she just glared at them. "Five people have already died for what one man did, so how can you condemn my actions and not his? Because many of you ate the results of his actions? Why? Because it tasted so good? Nothing that smells so foul could taste anything but horrid. Because there is so little food? This planet is nothing but food."
"In which case, we don't have to fish," Levits said. "Let's just stop fishing."
"Why should all be punished because of the sins of one man? Those creatures have a common intelligence. They share information. They know who the murderer is, and maybe if we give them the murderer they will let the rest of us fish."
"Then you'd better unchain him and put me out there," Levits said, walking right up to her. "Because I didn't kill it, but I'm the one who caught it. I'm thinking those ignorant bastards aren't going to be able to tell the difference."
"You . . . Why?"
"It was an accident," Levits said. "Apparently it and I were after the same fish. I picked it up in my net. Foro," he pointed to the guy tied to the pole, "All he saw was the enemy of his people, no matter how small, and he killed it before I could toss it back in. After it was dead . . . Does it really matter whether they ate it or not? Things just aren't as black and white as you'd like them to be, RJ. If he deserves to die, then so do I, and I don't think his death is going to do us any good."
RJ couldn't remember ever being quite so mad at anyone in her life except maybe Jessica Kirk. She stomped out into the water and unwrapped the chain, freeing the man. Then she stomped back through the surf and for a second actually considered tying Levits to the pole. If it weren't for the fact that he had once saved her life at great risk to his own, not even the fact that she loved him would have stopped her from carting his ass out there and lashing him to the pole to appease the Ocupods.
"I wash my hands of the lot of you. That includes you Levits!" She threw her hands up and walked back towards the ship.
The people cheered Levits.
"Shut up!" Topaz ordered. "There is nothing to celebrate here." He shook his head, in that moment almost feeling his age. "What you did was inexcusable. RJ tried to restore justice to our world, but there is no way to attain justice in this matter. That is never a cause for rejoicing. Go about your business."
They didn't budge, as they were always slow to get moving.
"Go now!" Topaz screamed. The Abornie left quickly, all going in different directions.
Levits slapped Topaz on the shoulder laughing. "Dude, lighten up."
Topaz turned to glare at Levits, a look of black rage on his face. "How dare you humiliate her like that!"
"What?" Levits asked in disbelief.
"You have totally and completely ruined her credibility with those people, and for what? To save a murderer's life?"
"Ah, come on, man! Foro's a good man, he just made a mistake . . ."
"Don't you get it? RJ is right about them. They act without thinking, and so do you." Topaz turned his back on him and walked back towards the ship.
In the weeks that followed, Topaz and Poley created a sonic wave transmitter that produced a sound that kept the Ocupods away without actually hurting them. But the rift
between RJ and the Abornie people wasn't so easily fixed. From that moment on they didn't even try to hide their disdain for her, or she her contempt for them.
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 s
et 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.
