by T J Mott
“So?” He studied her intense green eyes, seeing traces of defiance and even hatred in them, and something in his mind clicked into place. “Are you just lashing out in anger and harassing them?”
She frowned. “Do you know how many Ailonian slaves die each day?” she retorted. “It’s time to do the same to the Avennians!”
“Whoa, hang on a minute here!” he said, getting a bad feeling for where this was going. “Do you even know who operates this freighter?” He gestured towards the front of the ship, as if pointing out the crew which was not present. A crew made of regular people. This was clearly a civilian freighter.
She shook her head. “Avennians!” she said angrily, her voice loud but not quite a shout.
He tilted his head back, looked up at the ceiling, and groaned loudly as the Cadrian Casino memories flooded back into his mind. Memories of innocent people he’d hurt, collateral damage from some of his contracts and missions. “No,” he said. “We can’t do this.”
“What do you mean!?”
“You’re lashing out in unfocused anger! This operation won’t help your cause!”
She stepped up to him and jabbed her index finger into his chest. “I’m in charge of this operation, Mr. Messier!”
“And how many operations like this have you led?” he snapped back.
She stuck her nose up. “This is the first one. But there will be more.”
He shook his head and rubbed his forehead. “No. Not yet.” He stepped back and looked at their small crew. “Listen. I’ve seen how the ARF operates on this planet. You guys are mostly ignored by the Avennians. If you start striking out like this, you’ll lose that advantage very quickly. And without a good plan in place, you’ll be throwing away everything.”
“They won’t even know it’s us!” Ria protested. “The ship will disappear in hyperspace! How could they possibly trace it to us?”
“How does destroying this ship help to free Ailon?” Okay. Time to use my so-called command voice. He raised his voice, intentionally projecting the sound of confidence that made his men follow his orders even when they doubted his sanity because he claimed to be from Earth. “Listen. We’re canceling this now. Take those chemicals back out, load them back into the truck, and we’re all going back to the camp as if this never happened. Understood?”
Chet, Jason, and Harve looked from him and then to Ria, clearly not sure who to follow. Ria’s normally-pale face was almost as red as her hair. “Ms. Parri? What do we do?” asked Chet.
“This is not the way to fight back,” Thad continued, focusing on Ria. “Earlier, you said you wanted my help. This is me helping you.”
“This has been in the plans for weeks now! We can’t just cancel it at the last second!” Her face was still flushed, and Thad wondered if he’d burned up all the goodwill she’d just shown him. If she pulls away from me in anger, that would make things far easier. It won’t be hard to put my feelings for her away if she’s not trying so hard to pull them back out.
“This isn’t right. You have to call this off. Trust me on this.”
She glared at him, her nostrils flaring in anger, but he could see the indecision and uncertainty in her eyes. She didn’t know what she was doing, and she knew that, but she was prideful and used to being in charge.
After five seconds, her expression softened a bit as she relented. “Okay,” she said, her eyes smouldering. “But you better be right about this.”
***
The group spent the drive back to the camp in total silence, their mood as chilly as the cold Ailonian night. Thaddeus sat in the same seat in the middle row, but this time Ria was up front by the driver, her arms folded across her chest, brooding.
Once they returned to the camp, she angrily—but quietly—demanded that he wait for her in the mess while she checked on Rin, her six-year-old son. So Thaddeus was waiting in the corner of the mess, where the crew had set up a faux living room. He sat on one of the two lightweight couches which faced each other with a plastic coffee table between them, waiting alone, wondering what kind of outburst he was about to receive and if his short stint in the ARF was already over.
Still, he felt relieved that he’d succeeded in getting the operation canceled, preserving the ARF’s status for the time being and saving a crew of Avennian civilians from dying in hyperspace.
She entered the mess a half hour later, still looking quite upset. She walked towards him, came to a stop at the end of the coffee table, and defiantly folded her arms across her chest. She didn’t sit and didn’t say anything, and glared indignantly at Thad. He decided to cut straight to the point. “How many operations like that are planned?”
She didn’t answer the question. “I can’t believe you embarrassed me in front of my men like that,” she said, her voice low and dripping with barely-restrained anger.
He sighed and stood. “I’m sorry, but it had to be done. I can’t condone a mission like that.”
“It’s not your place to condone anything!” she snapped. “I’m in charge here! We’ve been waiting for years to strike back, and we’re finally in a position to start!” Closing her eyes, she sighed in frustration. “I knew I shouldn’t have involved you. You’re an outsider, and you haven’t been here long enough to understand.”
“Ria, please, just sit down and listen.” She remained standing and glared down at him. “Look, you trusted me enough to cancel the mission. Just trust me now. Hear me out.”
“I’m not sure if I should have trusted you.” He made a pained expression and waved his hand at the couch across from him, and she finally sat down. He returned to his seat.
“That mission wasn’t a strike against the Avennian government which has enslaved this world.” He held up a hand to stifle her response. “That was a civilian freighter. Not operated by the people who hold Ailon in slavery, but by uninvolved civilians.”
“They aren’t uninvolved if they’re helping Avennia!” she retorted.
Her naive attitude was frustrating, but at the same time he realized that even six months ago he probably would not have balked at her choice of target. “That ship was crewed by regular people just trying to survive. They’re not the right targets. Don’t attack civilians, even if they seem to be on the wrong side, because then you’d just be terrorists. You need to go after the government and the Avennian Army, the people who actually enforce the slavery here. Anything else is just noise that hurts the wrong people, does nothing to help Ailon, and will eventually bring Avennia’s wrath down on the ARF once they learn who’s responsible. And the ARF isn’t ready for that. You guys have the run of the planet! Don’t throw that away until you’re ready!”
Ria looked unconvinced but she didn’t say anything.
Sighing, he pursed his lips and leaned forward in the couch as he mentally filtered out some details from his own story. He couldn’t fully reveal himself, but maybe he could say just enough to get his point across. “I wasn’t a shuttle mechanic. You were right about that. But I wasn’t exactly a soldier, either. I was a mercenary. I took on contracts as part of a little army-for-hire, and we did other people’s dirty work for them. And then I came to realize, in a very painful way, that there was lots of collateral damage during my career. Too many innocent people have died.” He looked down at his left hand and flexed his new fingers, hearing a faint metallic clink as they tapped one another, and rubbed at his forearm lightly with the palm of his real hand. The sensations he felt from the arm were still so alien and he wondered how long it would take before the strangeness would feel normal to him.
He grimaced. “I have too much innocent blood on my conscience already,” he said, and inside his mind he was once again chained up in the Cadrian Casino and facing accusation after accusation from his enemies. As he spoke, he heard the guilt and sorrow in his own voice, and wished he could somehow go back and make things right. “I won’t add to it by targeting civilians here. And that’s why I called the mission off.”
Ria still looked an
gry, but her eyes softened considerably. “I had no idea. I thought you got hurt defending your home from invaders. Like the war between Ailon and Avennia.”
“I didn’t tell you,” he said. “I didn’t want to. I came here to get away from fighting. I thought volunteering for a relief group would be good for me. I thought I’d be quietly helping people who are suffering, instead of fighting.” He laughed, almost beneath his breath, and then shook his head incredulously. “I didn’t know I’d find myself in the middle of a new insurrection.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking upon him with sympathy and now with no trace of anger in her voice. “Chad, the few we have left, those who survived the war, don’t really know how to fight. But I think you do.”
He stayed silent for a long moment, considering those words and anticipating what she was about to ask of him. Why are you here, Marcell? If you wanted to free Ailon, you’d have brought a fleet or two and the entire brigade of Marines. But you came alone.
I needed to get away.
But why Ailon? You could have gone anywhere in the galaxy. But for some reason you came here.
I wanted to see the damage I caused. Firsthand.
And then what? Leave Ailon enslaved and go back home to Headquarters? Could you live with that?
The old me could.
The old you is gone. You changed.
I don’t want to change. It hurts.
It hurts because you were a cold-hearted bastard who would run over anyone to get what you wanted, and you’ll always have that in your past.
I just wanted to go home! To Earth!
Yes, and look what that desire made you do. Look at Ailon. There are half a million slaves in this star system because you wanted to gift the Ailon Rebels’ weapons to Earth.
What’s done is done. I can’t bring back Ria’s husband, or Chet’s family, or Jason’s parents. I can’t make things right here, no matter how hard I try.
No, you can’t make things right. But you could make things better.
“Can you help us?”
There was nothing for him at Ailon. Nothing to bring him closer to Earth, nothing to expand his hidden caches of technology and weapons, nothing to increase his wealth or strengthen his fleets, nothing that would expand his intelligence networks.
Nothing that would absolve him of his guilt. Even if he helped Ailon, he’d always live with the memories of the horrors he’d seen. He would never forget the sight of slaves being shot in the back while trying to run to freedom, or the slaves returning from the lunar mines who were barely clinging to life after being forced to work in a low-gravity environment with poorly-maintained life support systems. He’d always see the pain in the eyes of those he worked with at Clinic 12, knowing that they had lost loved ones and had their lives and hearts permanently changed, and it was his fault.
I can’t make things right, but I can make things better.
Getting involved was the right thing to do. It wasn’t right for Thaddeus, and it certainly wasn’t right for his Organization. But it was right for Ailon.
That was a distinction he could never have made in that long timespan between being abducted from Earth and being tortured at the Cadrian Casino.
“Chad, are you okay?”
He sighed and looked down for a long moment, and then nodded subtly. “Yes, I’ll help,” he said softly. He looked up and saw how she held her mouth in worry, and then locked his eyes on to Ria’s sharp green irises. You can never restore what she’s lost, but you can give her a better future.
“This resistance…how many people are involved? How many know about it? Is it just this clinic, or is it all of the ARF?”
She shrugged uneasily. The uncertain look on her face told him she didn’t quite trust him yet. “It’s part of the ARF, at the top levels, but I don’t know numbers. The Rebel Council gave me this assignment. I do know it was the first attack and that others will follow soon.”
Thaddeus stood up and stepped away from the couches. He approached a nearby window and looked out into the darkness with his hands behind his back. “Are your men fairly representative of the ARF workers? Inexperienced, in terms of combat or covert operations?”
“Yes, most units are pretty similar to this one.” She paused. “Chad, we provide food and medical care. We aren’t soldiers, even if some in our ranks think we are. But we do want our freedom.”
He shook his head. If the next missions were as random and unfocused as the one he’d just blocked, then they had no real strategy to free Ailon. They were far too inexperienced to start a war, and their actions would only make things worse—for themselves, and for the enslaved population they hoped to free.
He turned to face her again. She looked uncertain and afraid, not looking at him, instead staring straight ahead at the empty couch in front of her. “Ria, how much pull do you have with your leadership?”
“A bit. My husband was well-respected during the war.”
“I need you to get them to call off all planned attacks,” he said. “Your resistance isn’t ready to reveal itself. You need more time. Much more time.”
“What do I tell them? They won’t call off anything unless I can give them a very good reason.”
Thad nodded. “Then tell them to at least delay things until I can meet them, until they hear what I have to say.”
She slowly turned her head to until she faced him directly, and her worried green eyes flicked up to meet his. “What will you do?”
He wrapped his right hand around his left wrist and massaged the metal joint with his thumb, again distinctly aware of the strange sensations he felt from the artificial limb’s sensors. “I can train them. I can organize them. I can teach how to fight, how to hide, how to gather intelligence. I can teach how to pick valuable, strategic targets, and to minimize collateral damage.”
His eyes narrowed, and part of him still couldn’t believe he was getting involved. “I can teach them how to win a war.”
Chapter 13
“How did you actually lose your hand?” Ria asked. “It looks recent. What war, where?”
Thaddeus frowned and looked down at the floor uneasily. He was suddenly aware of a new change within him: he didn’t want to lie to Ria. But he had to. I can’t tell her the truth. I’m wanted on Ailon. The rebels even sent representatives to Cadria Minor! He shuddered as those painful memories flooded back into his consciousness. I know I can help here, but not if they execute me first. “I really don’t want to talk about it,” he answered.
The silence dragged out between them. Ria’s expression changed from neutral curiosity to sorrow. “Chad, I’m sorry,” she said, her tone soft and caring. Stepping closer to him, she took his hand in hers, and the look in her eyes told him she really meant it. “I know you’re hiding a lot of pain. I’m sorry I keep bringing it up.”
He smirked slightly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m just a shuttle mechanic from Arica.”
“Right,” she replied, this time her voice heavy with sarcasm. She raised an eyebrow and her eyes seemed to twinkle as she smiled.
They were standing together in a hallway, in a building on the Ailon Relief Foundation’s main campus in Orent. It was the middle of the night and they were waiting to be brought into a meeting with the Rebel Council. A few days after aborting their freighter sabotage mission, they had driven back to the capital together, leaving behind the rest of their crew and equipment near Zhale. To Thad’s surprise, the journey had been relaxing. The two of them actually got along quite well and they’d spent the trip making small talk and laughing. For a while, they’d had the chance to act like regular people. And Thaddeus realized, feeling both sadness and remorse at the revelation, that he hadn’t taken the time to act like a regular person since his Earth days.
Yet at times, the drive had also been frightening. Ria had continually pried at him, trying to get him to open up about his past and satisfy her curiosity, although he’d managed to remain vague and dodge
all the big questions about who he was.
He was still silently admiring her brilliant green eyes when a voice interrupted them. “Mrs. Parri? The Council is ready to receive you and your guest.”
She gave his hands a brief squeeze and then stepped back from him, still smiling. “Ready?” she asked.
He nodded soberly, and then followed her and the other ARF worker—a young man barely out of his teen years—into a neighboring room. It was a small room, perhaps a classroom of some kind in a previous life. At the moment it had folding tables set up in a semicircle, focused around a smaller table like some kind of panel of inquiry. Six men and two women sat behind the tables, facing inward, and Thad suppressed a shudder as the angry-looking man in the center of the formation motioned him and Ria to sit at the middle. He’d seen this arrangement before. It was really close to a variation of the Cadrian Casino auction room from his nightmares.
“I’ll get right to the point,” the angry-looking man said without introduction as the two of them took their seats. He was older, not quite elderly yet, with deep lines on his face that suggested he’d worn a scowl for most of his life. “You shut down the first operation in our new resistance against Avennia,” he spat out accusingly at Thaddeus. “And you,” he said even more sharply while stabbing a finger in Ria’s direction, “let him stop you. I picked you, Mrs. Parri, to lead the first operation because of your husband’s history with the Rebels. Now I see trusting you was a mistake.”
A muted huff came from the woman who sat three seats to the man’s left. She was middle-aged, with light brown hair streaked through with gray and an aura of prissy self-importance around her. Stacks of papers sat in neat piles on the table in front of her. She even wore a set of eyeglasses, something Thaddeus had only seen a few times, and only in backwater sectors of the galaxy with a low development index. She looked like she had something to say, but lacked the confidence to speak up.
The man shot her an annoyed glance before returning his attention to Ria. “Well? Explain yourself!” he barked.
