by Aer-ki Jyr
But not all of them. The most active of them all was not right, so said her own unit, and as Paul finished up his own part in the cleanup and was getting ready to leave with his fleet to head elsewhere he had a few hours to spare, so he headed across the planet until he found where Ginsi was still in the field. When he got to her she was high in the sky, floating above an area that was seeing a few remaining V’kit’no’sat still active as teams of mechs hunted them down.
He’d expected her to be on the ground, but it looked like she was keeping an eye out from above and ready to swoop down and help with any problems…though Paul could tell that wasn’t true, at least not in full as he got closer, flying up in his blue/orange Goku armor until he floated side by side with her purple/white Frieza armor that was barely intact, with him seeing several breaches that revealed smooth skin beneath.
“Hello, Paul,” she said amicably. “You have no idea how glad we are that you showed up.”
“We’re about to pull out, but we’re leaving some ships behind just in case. How are you doing?”
“Alive. A lot of our people aren’t.”
“Have you checked the other invasions?”
“A little. We’re getting hammered everywhere, aren’t we?”
“We’re pushing back now thanks to the Paladin, and some of The Nexus races came to help.”
“I saw that.”
“Did you see how fast the V’kit’no’sat were conquering other planets?”
“Not really.”
“Voran would have been completely destroyed by now. You held them back far better than any other world.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
“Damage done, I know,” Paul said, understanding that part. “But the part you saved is significant. They hit you hard here and you defied them in a way that’s never been done before.”
“Olivia taking a Mach’nel was bigger.”
“Sneak attack and significant. This was grinding fighting and you were a big reason why the planet held out. I heard your kill count was over 18,000.”
“I have no idea,” she said, still looking at the ground as she talked from behind her helmet.
“This was probably the toughest battle you’ve ever fought, but not by much. You’ve had to grind your way through losing efforts with far less help than you had here. Something else is bothering you beyond the losses. What is it?”
Ginsi was quiet for a moment, then finally looked at Paul. “He broke my legs.”
“Who?”
“The Oso’lon we killed. My unit, I mean. Just a bunch of Humans and no mech or aerial support. I got a tag on him then dove into the breach when he took the bait. Got my fingers in his body and fought him inside his head enough for the rest of my team to take him down.”
“Is that why your armor looks so bad?”
“Different set. That one got trashed more than this.”
“How did your legs get broke?”
“My Rentar slipped. Not on my torso or my head, thankfully, but his mind was so powerful that the coverage on my legs dipped for just a moment. He responded so fast and with such force my legs felt like twigs. He didn’t even damage my armor, just reached inside and snapped both of them. I don’t know how I held my focus after that, against his mental pressure, the pain, and the fire from his neck turret. Somehow I did long enough for my unit to do enough damage, but I should have been dead.”
“Bad, but that’s not the first time you’ve been wounded.”
“I pushed it too far, Paul. I shouldn’t have survived that.”
“And Morgan shouldn’t have survived that Nestafar gravity trap long before you were born…but she did. Even if she doesn’t remember how she summoned the strength to do it, and so did you.”
“I think I tried to do too much, and now I’m worried that I’m going to be hesitant. That’s not me, Paul,” she said, retracting her helmet so he could see her face, with him doing the same.
“Give it enough time and you’ll recalibrate. Right now you’re still rattled. You haven’t gotten a good sleep in yet, have you?”
“Bits and pieces,” she said, a tear streaking down the left side of her face.
“That’s not what’s gut punching you,” Paul guessed. “What else happened?”
Ginsi sighed, then retracted the armor over her left hand. It looked tiny, betraying the strength in it, and she reached it out towards him meekly.
“Tell me what I could have done differently,” she said, now fully crying.
Paul retracted his own armor, his hand no bigger than hers, and wrapped his fingers gently through Ginsi’s, making the flesh contact required for him to bypass the Ikrid block and let him look around in her mind.
She pointed him to where he needed to go, then let him feel through her memories of the Oso’lon takedown. Ginsi watched him, her powerful mind holding back her natural reaction to push him out, while giving him a few pointers here and there. She could have sent him the memories telepathically, but she needed an answer and that required Paul be able to look where he wanted and see things that she might have missed…but the underlying problem became obvious as events played out at super speed thanks to his Sav.
She’d been mentally linked to the Oso’lon when it died, her interfering with its mind just enough to make it fight sloppily. It had fought back against her, with Ginsi losing but holding on long enough to do her job. She could feel some of its thoughts, and since both her and the Oso’lon also had Sav their mental battle had encompassed what felt like hours despite it being only a few minutes.
Ginsi had felt what the Oso’lon was thinking, including its death. It went from confident to surprised to panicked as it became apparent that it was going to die. It was unpleasant to feel, but Paul now saw what was bothering Ginsi. This Oso’lon hadn’t been a monster. It had been given a mission that it felt was essential to the stability of the galaxy, and more importantly for this planetary invasion. The V’kit’no’sat were stalled and losing so many troops that something had to change, so this Oso’lon and a few others had tried something rash and nearly pulled it off.
It was something just like Ginsi or Paul would have done, not something to murder civilians but an objective to open up this planet to the purging orbital bombardment similar to what Star Force had to do during the lizard war. Star Force had offered them surrender and they didn’t take it…which was a huge difference to the V’kit’no’sat who decreed all the rogue Zen’zat must die regardless…but they’d had to kill so many lizards that it had gotten to Paul several times, especially when he had to do it personally rather than from orbit.
There were many parallels between the two, but Star Force had been in the right and the V’kit’no’sat were definitely in the wrong…except this Oso’lon didn’t think so. For whatever reason he saw the Terraxis abominations as a threat. An unregulated mess that couldn’t be accommodated, knowing that no Zen’zat would wish to be turned back into a Ter’nat, and that if Star Force was offered a surrender they would refuse on that reason alone. Not to mention that some things like Sav couldn’t be reversed. Those that had it would have to be killed, otherwise the balance within the galaxy would be wrecked.
To this Oso’lon balance was insanely important, for without it the V’kit’no’sat would tear themselves apart as they almost had during Mak’to’ran’s rise to rule. Mak’to’ran had restored the balance that had been slowly eroding over the millennia, saving the V’kit’no’sat and the galaxy, for without the V’kit’no’sat to hold balance everything would devolve into chaos.
Star Force, despite its success, was deemed as unsustainable and a threat to the V’kit’no’sat. No race was allowed to exist outside the V’kit’no’sat, yet these Zen’zat were and they were not following the rules. Their psionics were not earned, and they possessed technology that Zen’zat were never meant to field unless in the service of another race.
The underlying reason that Zen’zat were not allowed to reproduce was not a feeble one, and the t
hreat of disruptions if it did happen was not something the V’kit’no’sat took lightly. This Oso’lon felt that the mere existence of these abominations was chaos incarnate and had to be eliminated similar to the way Star Force had to eliminate the lizards. He thought he was doing the right thing and was fighting hard to accomplish it, and when he was dying Ginsi had felt his despair. He’d been doing everything he was supposed to do, but the chaos was winning.
He felt like a victim, not a murderer, and had died fighting bravely with no malice towards Star Force above and beyond the fact that they were killing him. To the Oso’lon they were no different than the mindless horde of the lizards…only lizards given technology they hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve, and that were far too dangerous with it to be allowed to live.
The Oso’lon thought he was protecting the galaxy, and Ginsi could feel beyond his reasoning that he was a good person…and she’d killed him.
“Evil fights evil,” she said as Paul continued to look through her mind. “Evil fights good. Good fights evil…but good doesn’t fight good. What could I have done differently? I’ve been over this in my mind so many times and I can’t find a flaw. I can’t find a mistake I made. Please tell me what I did wrong.”
Paul took a long moment to gather his thoughts, going through this in his mind many times before he squeezed her hand tighter and looked her in the eye.
“They invaded us. We didn’t invade them. They chose this fight, and forced you to defend the planet. You didn’t have a choice but to fight back and you didn’t have the stun weapons necessary to disable the Oso’lon…and even if you did troops would have to be devoted to guarding it and keeping it down. If you kept him alive it meant Star Force personnel elsewhere would die.”
“But he wasn’t an enemy. He should have been an ally. I should have rescued him.”
“You didn’t have the power to without leaving someone else in jeopardy.”
“It doesn’t feel right, Paul.”
“It’s not right, but he forced it upon you. It takes one to fight, but two to make peace. He wasn’t interested in peace.”
“He was attacking a building, not us when we ambushed him.”
“And without that building his buddies would have killed a lot more people, along with him. You didn’t kill him in a moment of atrocity, so it feels worse, but…”
“He was a good person, Paul. I can’t get past that. I should have done something different.”
“Could you have captured him?”
“Not without letting him take the turret first…but it’s just a building. We can build another in a week.”
“They forced this fight on us,” Paul reiterated. “If we invaded their territory there would be lots of tactics that we would not use because some of the people on the receiving end might not deserve it, but every V’kit’no’sat here came to kill us.”
“He didn’t deserve it,” Ginsi said, and Paul knew she was firm on that…and he couldn’t rightly disagree.
“So what, you let yourself die so he could live?”
“Of course not, but when he broke my legs it was like I wasn’t a person to him. I was just a gnat he should have been able to swat away but couldn’t. He didn’t see me as a good person, just a force of nature that had to be destroyed and that doing so he was doing the right thing.”
“But he wasn’t doing the right thing, and he didn’t stop when he sensed your mind.”
“He didn’t have a choice! We were killing him.”
“And vice versa.”
“We kill people for doing that, Paul.”
“Ah…” he said, getting a glimpse of what else was bothering her. “And when he broke your legs, you saw yourself on the reverse side.”
“I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to. I was committed and I had to see it through. If it had been just me I might have tried to run, but my unit was right there around his feet and if I didn’t keep messing with his mind…”
“So you blinded yourself to get through the moment.”
“I didn’t know what to do so I held course…and I’m wondering if he wasn’t doing the same thing.”
“You can’t control others, so let’s focus on you. You want to know what mistake you made that led you to kill a good person?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“I need to know, like it or not.”
“You’re not omniscient. You can only play the circumstances that are presented to you. In the moment you were so overtaxed you couldn’t do anything else, so you held course as he was in your head trying to mess with you. You put yourself in a compromised position based on the assumption that he was the enemy that needed to be stopped and the only way to stop him was to kill him. Then you get hit with a revelation you didn’t expect and were ill prepared to deal with because you had gone all in to make the kill. You couldn’t find a solution then and you can’t find one now, so you stayed the course and you’re worried that such willful blindness is a problem.”
“Am I wrong?”
“Not when it’s necessary.”
“Define ‘necessary.’”
“When people will die if you hesitate. If you can’t find another way, you continue with what you were doing.”
“Even if it’s wrong?”
“No, but what options did you have?”
“None. But that doesn’t make it right. He was one of the good guys.”
“Deluded into doing something wrong. We have to make sure we are not deluded, that’s our responsibility, but against an opponent this strong we don’t have the luxury of helping them survive their delusions when they push us to the breaking point. We have to fight to survive first, then help others.”
“We killed him. We didn’t give him a chance to run away.”
“Would he?”
“Yes, he would have.”
“And then what? Would he have left the planet or continued to fight after repairing his armor?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if having access to my mind would have affected him the same way.”
“Then there’s your problem. You don’t know if he would continue to be a threat or not. If he would have had a change of heart you should have let him go. If he wasn’t going to, then killing him before he could kill more of us was the right call. There’s no way for you to know.”
“I feel like I should have at least given him the chance. I feel like the monster now.”
“If they were weaker we could err on the side of caution…”
“But their strength demands we don’t take chances or we get ourselves killed, I know…I know.”
“Still doesn’t feel right, does it?” he said, letting go of her hand.
“I feel duped into becoming the enemy and I don’t know how to deal with this. I can’t just ignore it.”
“Can’t ignore it and can’t solve it, so you’re stuck in a cycling rut.”
“You been there?”
“Yeah, and it’s not pretty.”
“How did you get out of it?”
“Time and some good counsel.”
“Like you’re doing now?”
“Trying to. But you killed a good person. That’s never going to feel right and you can’t undo it. But unless you identify the mistake you can’t call a Mulligan and shake it off, so you keep endlessly looking for a mistake that isn’t there.”
“If there is no mistake then how did it happen?”
“The mistake was his, and it put you in a situation that never should have existed. He attacked good people.”
“And they killed him. We have to find a way to spare the good ones, Paul. I don’t know how, but we have to. If there’s one of them, there have got to be others.”
“We are not taking prisoners to mentally check, because we are not going to kill prisoners when they turn out to be baddies.”
“I know, but we have to do something.”
Paul put a hand on her shoulder, skin against armo
r, and nodded slowly. “Alright, alright. I’ve had a few more centuries than you to work through this, and I’ve developed a few tricks to work around the darkside trap you got ensnared in.”
“Such as?”
“There’s some V’kit’no’sat ship salvage up there we can use. Whatever resistance is still left on the planet we’ll capture rather than kill, then after interrogation we’ll put them on the salvage and tow it to Sol if we have to. We’re not keeping prisoners, but we can send them back.”
“To fight us again later?”
“We’re now dominant in this system, so we have the option of mercy, even if they don’t deserve it. We’ve done it before, and sent a message with them. Hopefully the V’kit’no’sat don’t think it’s a trap and kill them on the spot…but at least they’ll have a chance this way.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. And to make sure no one gets killed trying to capture them, you’re getting another set of armor and go with me to personally handle this.”
“I don’t have another set. This is my last one.”
“Then don’t punch as hard. You won’t need to anyway if we’re using stun weapons.”
“Point,” she conceded. “Thank you.”
“You didn’t screw up as far as I can see, but when we do we have to get ourselves back in the right and shake off what happened. We don’t forget nor condone. We learn and move on until such a time that we find a Tardis and can actually do something about the past,” he said, sending out a mental order through the battlemap to stop eradication missions and switch to reconnaissance until properly equipped capture teams could be assembled. It would be harder, but they had time and the Excalibur didn’t have to be the first ship out in the system exit convoy that he was not going to delay. Plus he wanted to take Ginsi with him once this planet was secure and put her to use in the next place they ended up at, which at this point looked to be the Davmes System.
