“Vitals are weak,” one of the doctors reported.
Cha’Rolette covered her mouth with her hands, aghast. What have I done?
Cha’Rolette ran out into the corridor, colliding with the last person in the universe she wanted to see.
There you are, E’Duwag said, his guards steadying him and her.
Cha’Rolette’s face became harsh. Leave me alone. I have nothing to say to you.
Oh but I have much to say to you, he said proudly.
Cha’Rolette clenched her fists and narrowed her voice to him alone. After all you’ve done to me? Fine, you wanna talk, let’s talk. Let’s start with you selling nano-mimetic gel to the Bertulf. Don’t even bother denying it. I know you were the source somehow.
E’Duwag straightened his tie. Since you insist, I won’t deny it.
Cha’Rolette wiped her face on her sleeve. And selling a fleet of drone warships to them? What were you thinking? You could have brought the whole family down. If that plague had gotten out, everyone could have died!
No, not everyone. Just our enemies. The condition of the sale was that Ssykes bloodlines would be excluded. We would have been immune.
And you believed them? You are an idiot!
E’Duwag grabbed her shoulders. She stiffened up fearfully at his touch.
I’ve killed people for saying less to me than you just did.
For a moment, Cha’Rolette’s eyes were frightened, but she remembered everything this man had done to her, and she forced her way past it.
Don’t touch me! she said, smacking his hands away. Don’t ever lay a finger on me again, do you hear me?
Is that any way to talk to your father?
You are not my father! Maybe you were once, but not anymore. You mean nothing to me. I do not care what you think, I do not care what you say! I want nothing from you! Now get out of here and leave me alone. I don’t need your love.
She turned and flew away.
E’Duwag smiled. Which is why you now have it.
Cha’Rolette spun around. What?
E’Duwag smiled at her, esteem in his eyes. You are ready to take over the family. Come with me. Everything is prepared. The entire family is gathered. Tonight, I step down and you will replace me as head of Ssykes Industries. Every branch family member will swear fealty to you and you alone with an unbreakable oath.
* * *
Daan Nathers’ hair was almost completely white now. While the world was frozen around him, he stood in the bubble of accelerated time with what once had been Lyssandra Bal, whipping her cruelly.
“Do you know what I’ve lost?” he screamed, flicking the metallic whip. It hit her back, releasing dark energies. Her body trembled in pain, but she made no sound.
Steam shot out angrily from the holes in his skull. “This is how I get it back!”
He whipped her again, blood trickling from the wounds.
“Tell me what I want to know. I’ll be the man who destroyed Ragnarok.”
He whipped her again, tearing away pieces of flesh.
“I’ll be the hero.”
He whipped her again, splattering indigo blood all over his face.
Nathers was tired. He steadied himself by resting his palms on his knees.
“I will break you, you know. I swear it.”
Lyssandra Bal made no response.
A wicked smile crossed his lips. “He’s in the hospital, you know? Your beloved ArchTyrant.”
Her cloudy eye flickered ever so slightly.
“They say he’s going to pull through, but he won’t.”
Nathers scooted up close and whispered into her ear. “I’m going to pay him a visit tonight, and he’s going to have a little accident. What do you think of that?”
He raised up the neural whip for another blow, but she caught his wrist, quick as lightning.
“I think you have made a grave mistake,” she said, looking up at him with her wrinkled face. “I cannot leave here without an order from my master, but if his life is in danger, I can act on my own to keep him safe.”
Nathers reached for his sidearm, but it was too late. She spun him around, putting him in an arm lock. Before he knew what was happening, his own pistol was shoved into his mouth.
“I have a question for you, Daan,” she said cruelly. “Where have you stored my weapons?”
* * *
Gerald opened his eyes. He had never been so disappointed to find himself alive as he was in that moment. His heart ached. In his mind, all he could see was Cha’Rolette in tears as he rejected her marriage proposal.
“It’s for the best,” he reminded himself, still trying to make himself believe it. “She will hate me, but she will be safe from me, and will live a long and healthy life. His heart nearly broke when he remembered that four more such rejections would have to be made before all the girls were free of him. When he imagined their faces as hurt as Cha’Rolette’s had been, his heart withered inside of him.
“I really am the villain, after all.”
Daan Nathers walked up and flashed his identification. As Gerald looked on in confusion, the guards and nurses were cleared away. Even Kalia eventually relented and walked out into the hallway, until Nathers and Gerald were alone.
The door was sealed and locked, then the blast doors behind them. Nathers came up and stood over Gerald, looking at him strangely.
“You need something?” Gerald asked.
Nathers tapped something on his belt, and his body melted away, revealing an aged Lyssandra Ball.
Gerald’s eyes went wide. “You. What do you want?”
She knelt reverentially. “May I speak with you, master?”
Gerald looked around, not quite sure what to say. He saw the call button controls on the wall, but he doubted his injured body would be able to reach it before she stopped him.
“I suppose.”
She sat down wearily. “If I were cruel, and had the powers of creation to wield, do you know what I would do?”
Now Gerald was really confused. “I give up, what?”
“I would create a race of people. I’d give them free will, then place them in bodies designed to do nothing but eat and breed. I’d make them mortal, give them a laughably short life span, then make them just intelligent enough that they’d live in fear of their own death every day of their short little lives. Does that sound cruel to you?”
“It sounds like you just designed humans.”
She smiled with her wrinkled lips. “Then you understand now.”
She gathered back her faded thinning hair into a pony tail.
“I come from a world called Mystrinto. Don’t bother looking it up, there are no files anymore. It’s nothing more than a lifeless ball of dust. In fact, my memories of it are probably the only evidence that a people ever existed there at all.”
She began segmenting the pony tail with her knobby hands. “I was raised on a small farm, with my parents and my three sisters. I didn’t know it back then, but my people were part of an ethnic minority called the Kei’ish. We composed less than a percent of the population, but when the droughts came, we were blamed for the trouble. When we would go to market to sell milk, the townsfolk called us names, threw rotten fruit at us. I could never understand why they hated us so much, so one day we just stopped going to town, and for a while that seemed like enough. I was just a little girl, so once I couldn’t see it, I forgot it was there.”
Lyssandra’s clouded eyes became distant. “Then one night the soldiers came. I woke up to find my mother crying over my father’s dead body. My sisters and I were pulled out of our beds and thrown into a cart. We never saw our mother again. We were paraded around the town as each one of the soldiers took a turn beating us.”
“They beat us until we couldn’t open our eyes anymore. Then they threw us on a pyre, planning to burn us alive. There was a loose plank on the platform, and I managed to wriggle underneath when the flames reached me. When I emerged the next morning, there were no Kei’ish l
eft in my town, except for me. I made it to the road and I just started running. I ran and ran until I was so hungry I cried.”
There was something strangely familiar about this story. “What happened to you?” Gerald asked.
“I got lucky. The same thing was happening in every town. There were survivors. A handful here, a handful there. We found each other, but the soldiers still hunted us. That’s when we started to fight back. We laid traps for them in the forests, dug pits in the hills, waited for them in the caves. One by one, we took those cursed soldiers out, and every one we took out was another rifle in our hands.”
She looked down at her scarred hands.
“But still they came. They burned the forest to smoke us out, they collapsed the entrances to the caves, they laid siege to the hills. We fought them every day, sometimes from morning to night. It was endless.”
She clenched her fists. “I was a teenager by then. It was my decision, I won’t blame anyone else. I made the decision to take the fight to their lands. We started burning their fields. It was easy with the drought. We poisoned their wells with Kurra root and animal corpses; we set their houses on fire during the night. One by one, we took out their towns, and I watched people plead to me with their eyes like I had pleaded with mine, but I was past feeling. I was drunk with rage, and we showed them no mercy.
“It got harder and harder to find them. We searched everywhere. Occasionally we found a little group of them and we’d cut them down like weeds. There were only a handful of us left by then, and we never saw any more soldiers.
“With the winter cold came the sickness. We were starving, weak. We all got sick. Somehow I pulled through. I buried the last of my people, and then I kept looking for more soldiers to kill, but I never found them. One day I reached the ocean, and I realized that there weren’t anymore. They were gone, and I was alone.”
Gerald looked at her sympathetically. “So what happened?”
“You found me. Or rather, your previous incarnation found me. A trader by the name of Hee’hidzin happened to set down on my world for repairs. I must have seemed crazy to him. Filthy and half-starved to death. But he didn’t hurt me, he fed me. You came down from the sky like a heavenly being. You took me with you. You showed me the wonders of the galaxy, but my heart would not heal. I had known nothing but hate for so long, there was no room left inside me for anything else. I spoke to the leaders of the Alliance, I spoke to the senators. Everywhere we went, the message was the same. They had known what was happening on my world, but since it was a purely internal affair on a primitive world, they had decided not to get involved.”
She spat on the floor. “And then I talked to their priests, and do you know what they told me? They told me that even if they had intervened, the soldiers who burned my sisters would not have been punished, because they were following orders. They said that I was a murderer, but the soldiers were not. I spoke to a hundred different religious sects, and they all parroted the same poisonous words. That I would be punished in my next life for what I had done, but the soldiers would not.”
Gerald felt sorry for her. “Why are you telling me this?”
She turned to him. “Because, I want you to know that I understand you. Out of everyone in this galaxy, I alone know what you truly feel.”
“And what is that?”
“That life is cruel, and a universe that would punish one kind of cruelty but not another is doubly cruel. Yes, I am a monster for what I have done, but by the heavens SO WERE THEY! If I am a devil for fighting for my life, but those soldiers are angels for burning my sisters, then the fault lies not with me, but with the judge that would make such a ridiculous judgment! The universe is broken. Its laws are cruel; they don’t make any sense. Why create life in the first place if it exists only to be cruel. You know this, don’t you?”
He looked down, his heart heavy. “Yes, I do.”
She leaned in close. “What if I told you that you and I found a way to change the rules? To throw the judge off of his throne?”
Shocked, he looked up at her.
She stood up and extended her aged hand. “Come. You and me. Let’s finish together what we started together. Let’s fix this broken universe, so that other people won’t have to suffer like you and I have suffered.”
Chapter Forty-One
The first step in creating a monster is to teach moral relativism. One you have it fixed in their heads that each person chooses for themselves what is right and what is wrong, their hearts become as moldable as clay, their minds as soft as putty. Give me a people who believe in moral relativism, and within a decade I’ll have them committing genocide on their neighbors and thanking me for the privilege.
-Attributed to Ary Ilcno, Fourth General of Ragnarok, Y17.08-K9274pp
Gerald looked on through the viewport of the shuttle as the stars galloped by. Calling it a shuttle was something of an exaggeration. It was basically an oversized egg the size of a small room. One might wonder how all of the devices an interstellar craft requires could be crammed into such a small package while still leaving room for two people. The answer is simple. It can’t. It was built for one.
Gerald shifted his weight a little to relieve the cramping in his calves. His damaged nerves were acting up again. His back felt like it was on fire, and his broken shoulder and legs had never really healed properly. His chest felt tight for a second, and he had to curl over in order to keep from passing out.
“Are you all right, Master?” Lyssandra asked, surprisingly unaffected by the cramped conditions, given her advanced age.
“It’s nothing,” Gerald said, waving his hand. “Just feeling the effects of those bites Trahzi took out of me.”
Lyssandra’s eyes narrowed at the mention. “It was my fault they betrayed you, Master. If only I had finished the Ooinaru Juu-san sooner, they could not have turned on us.”
Gerald fought to catch his breath. “You know, I really would prefer you not call me that.”
“Why not? That is what you are.”
“That doesn’t mean I want to be. Despite the stereotype, not all human men want a slave girl, you know?”
Lyssandra looked down sadly at her withered body. “I’m afraid I’d be too old to offer you such comforts anymore.”
Gerald looked at her with compassion. “Look, I know we have been enemies up until recently. But I want you to know I am sorry about what happened to you.”
Her cloudy eyes became soft. “Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For looking at me the way you used to. You have no idea how much it means to me, Master.”
Gerald smiled at her. It was funny how quickly he had become comfortable with her presence. At first, he had assumed it was because they shared a common fate. They were both damned, after all. The rest of the universe had declared them its enemy. Here before him was the one person whom he could trust to never judge him, never to look at him with contempt, because her crimes matched his own.
Now he realized it was more than that. There was a connection, a natural bond that he could not define, or ignore. Something that transcended time and lifespans.
“Could you do me a favor?” he asked.
“Anything, Master.”
“Just call me Gerald from now on. I’m really not interested in having a slave. If I am to be a fugitive and a war criminal, and it seems the Alliance will forever consider me such, I would much rather have a companion by my side, an equal.”
Lyssandra began to cry.
Gerald became concerned. “I’m sorry, I...”
She placed her hand on his cheek. “No, it’s all right. I’m crying because I am so happy.”
Gerald furrowed his brow. “Is it really so amazing? It seems like common sense to me. I have to wonder what you have been through, that such a small gesture would mean so much to you.”
She wiped the tears from her face. “Like I told you, you have my unconditional love. You don’t have to show me kindness, or
respect, or affection. You may mistreat me for the rest of our lives and I will still love you. The fact that you have already showed me so much kindness, fills my old heart with more joy than you can ever know. And even if you never do so again, I want you to know that I will be forever grateful.”
Gerald shook his head in disbelief. “Lyssandra, what has happened to you, that you would say such a thing? That you would be willing to tolerate such an existence?”
She looked at him with complete adoration. “Like I said, I love you, my ArchTyrant. I am yours to do with as you will.”
“You make love seem like such a terrible curse,” he said aloud. He then recalled how many times he had said similar things to others, and his guilt shut him up.
Gerald took her old wrinkled fingers in his hand. “I can’t promise you that I will never hurt you. A younger me would have made such a promise, but I have stopped believing in that dream. What I can promise, is that I will try to hurt you as little as possible.”
She looked at him oddly. “You really are different this time, aren’t you?”
She shook her head, as if trying to clear away an old image. “I mean, you are still you, don’t get me wrong. But you are very different as well.”
“I’m a different person now. I’ve had different experiences.”
“That’s the thing. People aren’t supposed to change from life to life. They are pretty much the same from one lifetime to the next. The elites are reborn as elites, the poor are reborn as the poor, and the thieves are reborn as lawyers. You are so completely different, it makes me wonder if we were closer than I thought to achieving our goal last time.”
A shadow fell over them. The small craft passed through some kind of clear membrane, and suddenly there appeared before them a massive craft, several hundred times larger than the greatest warships. It hung in space like a giant black hairy spider.
Gerald could not help but gasp.
“Welcome home, Gerald,” Lyssandra said, looking on it happily.
“What is it?” Gerald asked. He had seen clips and pictures from the historical records, but none of them managed to capture the awe of its presence.
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