by Selina Rosen
She stopped at the top of the ramp and looked out over the crowd. Most of these were her people, the people who had fought with her for all these many, long, battle-torn years. They had chosen to stay on their home planet, and many that were going home with her would only be going back to Earth to pick up their families and come home. Beta 4 was home, and now that the planet was something more than a barely habitable world and they were approaching middle and even old age in some cases, they all wanted to be home.
Like Gerald.
Her people had been replaced by the war orphans as had always been the plan, but while they fought like Fourers, and were as strong as Fourers, they weren't the people she was used to. There were so many faces she was going to be missing.
Like Gerald's.
She couldn't remember ever being lower. She was about to go ahead and board the shuttle when she heard David call out, "Wait!"
She stopped. She had wondered where he was, and had decided that he simply couldn't bear to say good-bye. But here he came, his oldest child in tow. The crowd parted to let them through. By the time they reached the top of the ramp the old man was out of breath. The boy all but hid behind his father, which wasn't easy because he was as tall as his farther, and probably a good twenty pounds heavier.
"RJ," David hugged her, and she could feel his heart pounding, hear his ragged breathing. "I'm glad we caught you . . . Baldor." He stopped to catch his breath. "He wants to go with you."
Jessica looked around David at the young man skeptically. He was excited, but in that way that could have meant anything from adulation to terror.
"He wants to go to Earth with me, or you want him to go to Earth with me?" Jessica asked suspiciously.
"I . . . I want to go," Baldor said. He was a handsome man, with a skin color somewhere between his mother and father's, and jet-black hair that was nearly as straight as hers. His eyes were as dark and brooding as his father's. Take some Beta 4 blood, mix it with some Reliance born and bred humans, and you were likely to get a whole cascade of different colors and types of people. "I want to serve with you." He repositioned the large duffel bag he was carrying.
"I appreciate it, kid, but I think you ought to know that I'm mostly going to be laying around in my cell licking my wounds and sulking. I'm not going to be going to any front soon, and I'm not going to be much fun to be around," Jessica explained.
"He's not a child, RJ, he doesn't need to be entertained. He'll be on a new world. If that doesn't hold his interest, I don't know what will," David said.
"All right." She didn't have enough fight left in her to even argue.
So Baldor went with them, and she was glad he was with them after they started the flight home. She wasn't in the mood for Dax's enthusiasm, and it was nice for him to have someone his own age to talk to. It allowed her to go to her quarters, shut the door, and just be alone with her pain.
She knew she'd done the right thing, but that didn't make her loss any easier to take. She felt like someone had removed a piece of her soul. She wanted to hold him again. Wanted to feel his love for her from across the room. The bed; she looked at it and her chest felt suddenly empty. They'd shared that bed on the way to Beta 4. They'd made love in it. It just looked huge now, huge and empty. As empty as she felt. She lay down on the bed and moved to his side of it. She took in a deep breath and held it. It still smelled like him. She took off all her clothes and crawled under the covers, moving to his side of the bed. She closed her eyes and just breathed in his scent, trying to pretend he was still there with her. She hadn't slept since they had arrived on Beta 4, and pure exhaustion combined with the temporary comfort of being in his place helped her to drift into a solid but nightmare-filled sleep.
Dax answered every question he had, and like anyone who has just learned the answers themselves, his answers were delivered in detail and with enthusiasm.
Baldor had felt a moment of pain when they'd hit the jumpgate and Beta 4 had disappeared from view. He had made his decision at the last minute and had to rush his goodbyes with his mother, friends and other family members. His mother had tried to be brave, as she always was, but he had seen the tears gleaming in her eyes and had almost changed his mind. He stood at one of the viewports looking out at the blur of stars that was hyperspace.
He didn't understand it, any of it. How the ship flew, what hyperspace was or how it got there. He felt a slight flush and a little nausea, which could have been caused by any number of things. Anything from the flight itself to the shot they'd given him to keep him from getting the space sickness his father had explained in such graphic details. It might have even been caused by the thought of missing his family and friends. He was leaving everything familiar behind and going off on a grand adventure. He was excited and apprehensive at the same time.
He walked away from the port and started in the direction he smelled food coming from. He thought maybe getting something in his stomach might calm his nerves and nausea.
In the mess hall he got a tray, filled it with food, and then looked around for a place to sit. He saw Dax sitting at a table alone with a tray of uneaten food in front of him, so he walked over and sat across from him.
Baldor could tell Dax was in deep thought, so he didn't try to talk to him. Just sat down and started eating.
After several minutes Dax said in a faraway tone, "We all have a very narrow view of what normal is."
"Huh?" Baldor said, not really understanding what that had to do with anything, or why Dax chose to share this information with him now.
"Well, until I came on this trip with RJ I'd never really been off Alsterase Island. I'd only ever even been to the mainland about a dozen times. I went to school on the island with the other kids who lived there. I thought my life was normal, but . . . Well, when I saw how you and your people reacted to RJ, when we went to the old ship—the palace, not the bunker," he clarified, "well it suddenly dawned on me that nothing about me or my life has been normal. My father is the president of the New Alliance, and a midget. My 'aunt' is RJ, the GSH who started the New Alliance with your father. My Uncle was an alien from another planet. Most of the people I grew up with weren't human or at least they weren't full Earthborn humans. You grew up on a world at peace. You were trained for warfare, but you've never seen it. I grew up on a world at war. RJ and Gerald and half the population of Alsterase would ship out and go off on campaign. They'd be gone for months at a time and return victorious, and there were always people who went out with them who didn't come back. Yet till now, none of those people were ever people I was close to.
"My life wasn't affected. I never really knew the horror of what was happening. I know Gerald was dying, and I know this is how he wanted to die, in battle. But he's still dead." Dax sniffled but didn't cry. "People have fought, and people have died in the thousands so that you and I could reach this age and never know what it's like to be slaves, to fear for our lives. I lost my mother when I was thirteen, but she wasn't killed by the Reliance . . ."
"Like my father's family was," Baldor interjected. "His mother and sister were allowed to die of diseases the Reliance knew how to cure, and his father was taken away and died in a prison work camp. My father escaped from such a camp just before he found RJ, and he said it was where they sent people to die, that they worked them to death."
"We had a childhood, which is something that our parents never had," Dax said. "Everything that we take for granted is something they all bled for."
"Many of the people I went to school with and trained with were the war orphans who were sent from Earth. They talked of the horrors of their lives in the Reliance. Many of them had nightmares. Our father never seemed to talk of anything but the horrors of his life in the Reliance, of his days fighting with RJ and the inner circle. Still, I didn't really understand till I heard the bombs bursting on the surface of our planet, saw the devastation . . . I wanted to leave the bunker to go and fight, but my parents wouldn't let me. They who had both fought in many gloriou
s battles made me stay there in the bunker like a cowardly child, afraid of the dark."
Dax nodded. "I felt the same way. Though I know I wouldn't be much good in a fight, I'm sure there was something I could have done. My father, he used to go with them everywhere. He used his size to get in places they couldn't . . ."
"He was a very good pickpocket," Baldor said with a smile. "I've heard many stories about your father's talents. He is a great leader."
"I've mostly played till now," Dax admitted. "They make me sit in on meetings, and I know it's because they want me to learn to be like my dad. I sit in the meetings and I hardly listen. I'm bored to tears, and I can't wait to get out of there. See, I just never understood why anything they were doing was all that important. It wasn't action, not real fighting. I wanted to do the sort of things they used to do. I could see no reason for the hours and hours of talking. Why they couldn't just make up their mind to do something, and then do it?
"Until now, I lived on that island and no matter what they said had happened, everything for me was exactly the same. Nothing changed, except fewer people came back than left, and even that never registered. I knew they were grooming me to take my father's place. To learn from him how to be a leader, and yet I never paid any attention. I never realized just how important all that sitting around and talking was, because I never really saw the end results."
"What happened on your world in days was just a part of a plan that was years in the making and that spanned a galaxy. This had to be put here and that there. They went and got this, so they could do that, so that this would be ready when something else happened. It seems to you that it happened in less than a week, but the truth is that battle was being fought for years. Gerald's dead, and even that was part of the plan.
"My mother died, and it was so unreal. You think when you lose someone else that you love that it's going to be different, that you're going to be ready. I mean, I knew he was dying even before RJ did, and I knew she brought him so that he could die . . ."
"She did him a great honor, he died well," Baldor said.
"But he's still dead. My family keeps getting smaller and smaller," Dax said sadly. "The only one I can really count on is RJ. She's been with me my whole life. If I fell she picked me up and dusted me off. If I cried she held me till I stopped. She took care of me when I was sick and when I was grieving for my mother. She's always known just what to do or say to make me feel better. Now she's hurting and I don't have any idea what to do or say."
"She has lost mates before," Baldor said, he was trying to be helpful.
"Do you think that makes it easier or something?" Dax all but screamed at him. "I just told you it's always the same. People you love are dead, and you just don't know what to do about it, how to feel or how to act. Whether to do the things you love to do and try to pretend like they're still there or maybe that they never were, or whether you should just lock down, sit in the dark and cry. Sometimes you do all of it." He took a deep breath and calmed down. "The point is that what I thought was normal isn't. The world, the universe, isn't what I thought it was. I just realized that I don't know anything that I thought I knew, and that everything I know is worthless." Baldor was conspicuously silent. "What?" Dax asked.
"Well . . . I was just wondering if you were going to eat that?" Baldor asked of the neglected tray of food.
Dax pushed the tray towards him and said in a disgusted tone, "Knock yourself out."
For the first few weeks Baldor had been more than entertained just exploring the planet of his father's birth, and the city his father and RJ had started the New Alliance in. Or at least the city built on the ruins of that city. The ocean was of particular interest to him, and he enjoyed hours just running from the waves and staring out at the never-ending body of water.
Alsterase was an excellent city for him to have come to. Since most the population was Fourers, as the Earthers called them, he was able to delight in all the pleasures of this new world without actually feeling like a foreigner.
Dax's father had even accompanied him on a trip to the mainland and introduced him to his favorite place. He explained that it was—as close as he could remember—a reproduction of the old bar that had stood in the same place before the Reliance's invasion of Alsterase. It was called The Golden Arches. A huge, bilious yellow, double plastic arch loomed over the roof of the place with a sign under it that said "Billions Served." Baldor had asked what the symbol and the sign meant, but the little man had shrugged. "Damned if I know. Topaz knew but wouldn't say, he said it would ruin the mystery of the place for us."
Baldor was confused. "Why recreate something that you didn't know the meaning of in the first place?"
"Because it was so important to the feeling of the place. The Golden Arches." He'd gotten a faraway look then. "It's where it all began. I had so many good memories of the place, I just wanted to try to recreate it as closely as possible. I wanted to recreate the feeling I used to get when we were all here together. We were all so young then, and everything seemed possible. I just wanted to feel that way again."
"And did you?" Baldor had asked.
Mickey had smiled. "Almost." The old man looked tired then. "Topaz used to say you can never go home. I always just thought it was one of the crazy things he said that made no sense because he'd come from a different time. Then I had this bar built exactly the way I remembered it. When it was all done I walked in with RJ, expecting to feel the same way I had before. It was the same bar in the same place, but everything was different. See, the way I had felt had very little to do with the place and everything to do with us. All of us together. Whitey, Sandra, Topaz, Levits, and Poley. I met my wife here, and now . . . they're all dead. Your father's on a different planet, and RJ . . . well, RJ is so different now than she was then. Topaz was right. You can never go home."
Baldor thought on that a moment. "Then why is this your favorite place now, if it was such a disappointment?"
"Because sometimes second best is really the best you can do. People see what they want to see." He took a long drink of the beer he held in his hand and then pushed Baldor's beer closer to him. "Better drink that before it gets hot."
Baldor had known that this meant he didn't want to talk about it anymore.
Baldor had soon seen why his father and his friends had liked the bar so much, and he'd spent a lot of time there, getting drunk and chasing women, thus carrying on his father's legacy. He was having a good time, but he hadn't left his mother and father, his sister and his friends to come to Earth to party. He'd come to carry on another of his father's legacies—to fight at RJ's side against the Reliance. To make his mark on the New Alliance, and therefore the universe, as his father had done.
On the island and in Alsterase he'd heard talk of conflict erupting here and there between the New Alliance forces and the Reliance. Pockets of resistance against New Alliance control. He waited for RJ to pick a front and take him with her into battle, but she spent all day, every day, either walking back and forth on "The Wall," or watching one old movie after another as if trying to numb her brain. Dax told him that he was worried about her.
"My father says she's done this before, and she did some really weird shit when mom died, but I've never seen her like this. I try to talk to her, and she just acts like she doesn't hear me at all. She doesn't eat and she doesn't drink, and I know she doesn't have to eat as much or as often as we do, but I know she has to eat sometime or even she isn't going to make it. She sleeps twelve hours a day, and I know she doesn't need much sleep at all."
"Maybe she's so tired because she isn't eating or drinking like she should be," Baldor suggested.
"Maybe, I just know something's got to give. My dad says to leave her alone, that she needs to grieve in her own way, but I think he's forgetting that she doesn't grieve in very healthy ways."
"Maybe I could talk to her," Baldor had suggested.
"It couldn't hurt," Dax said, but he didn't look very hopeful.
; Deciding he was never going to do anything more important than drinking and getting laid if RJ didn't snap out of her depression, Baldor steeled himself and went looking for her. He'd found her on the wall just staring at the mainland.
"RJ . . . I was thinking you might feel better if we went to one of the fronts and fought a battle." His father had been the great word man, and as Baldor stumbled over the moronic words that seemed to come from his mouth without any thought whatsoever, he wondered why that gene seemed to have hopped right over his head and slammed into a big rock. "I . . . I mean. They say keeping busy helps."
Her complete silence and the fact she didn't even turn to face him wasn't making it very easy to talk to her.
"All my life my father has told me great stories of your bravery. There is no battle that you can't fight, and no fight that you can't win . . ." and he had absolutely nothing to follow that up with. "So, ah, maybe if you were fighting you'd feel better."
Gods, why don't I just shut up. Everything I say is stupider than the thing I said before. Killing people will make her feel better about losing her husband? How freaking stupid is that. The woman has lost three mates. Every one of them has died in battle. A battle is probably the last thing on her mind. More death isn't going to magically heal her broken heart.
