Chains of Redemption (2 page)

Topaz watched them go and then flopped in the pilot's chair.

"Poley, try to find us a planet with female humanoids with compatible genitalia, would ya?" Topaz ordered.

"Now that makes the odds even worse," Poley said with a smile.

"Poley, was that a joke?" Topaz asked.

"Yes, but it is also the truth. The likelihood of finding an Earth-type planet is bad enough. When you add the probability of humanoid life forms, it comes out as . . ."

"No number, Poley, please." Topaz sighed. A few minutes later they heard RJ's cry of ecstasy as it echoed down the corridors to the bridge. "Damn, what's it been, like five minutes? Why couldn't I have ever met a girl like that?"

"Because you didn't hang out in the right bars?"

"Two jokes in one day, Poley!" Topaz said, more than a little surprised. "Is that some sort of record?"

"I have noticed that you all tend to make jokes when you are nervous. This situation has made me nervous, so I am trying to relieve the tension by bringing a little levity to our conversation."

"It doesn't really work if you tell us that's why you're doing it. In fact, I can't think of many things more frightening than a situation that makes a robot nervous." Topaz frowned, then RJ made another ship shaking sound, and the extreme urgency of their predicament was temporarily lost on Topaz. "Could you at the very least find us a planet with pretty animals?" He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and moved to close the bridge door.

The Reliance Admiral looked at the screen. "Where the hell did she go?"

"She jumped hyperspace, sir."

"Can she do that and live?" he asked.

The lieutenant shrugged. "I don't think we know, sir."

"What the hell is that?" the Admiral screamed, seeing dozens of blips covering the screen.

"It's an Argy battle fleet coming in fast."

"They must have detected the weapons fire," he said thinking out loud. "Full retreat. Remain at all battle stations and prepare for attack," the Admiral ordered.

Turning the ships around to make a retreat had turned out to be a big mistake. There hadn't been time to put enough distance between them and the Argy battle fleet, and they had wound up "facing" them with the afts of their ships, which were never as well armed or armored. In the battle that ensued they lost all but the carrier he was on, and they had basically continued to move even when the other ships had stood their ground and fought. It was protocol. The cruisers fought the battle, the carrier stayed at a safe distance, and its fighters unloaded and went in for the kill.

It didn't matter; the Admiral knew it would be his head if he reported what had really happened. That they'd lost all three battle cruisers and their crews, fourteen fighters and their pilots, and had failed to take out the rebel leader and her crew would be considered inexcusable.

"All right, boys, listen up," he said addressing the personnel on the bridge. "The only ones who know what actually happened out here are you and me. Now RJ and her people are gone, one way or the other, and we did that, but you know the brass." No one thought it was a good idea to point out that he was the brass. "They're only going to see that we let her get away, and that an Argy battle fleet kicked our asses and took out three of our ships. So . . . this is what actually happened today . . ."

Jessica Kirk had lost track of time. She'd done it on purpose, which she knew meant that she knew exactly how much time had passed, but she was at least pretending not to. She sat on a rock in the mine and watched the others work, not because she was physically tired, but just because she was fed up.

Of all the places she might have found to hide out, she had to end up on Pete.

Pete was a mineral rich agricultural planet deep within Argy held territory. A human named Pete originally discovered the planet, but the Argys had killed the human colonists and claimed the world as their own. After ten years of war it had become theirs by right of conquest. They had put their own colonists on the planet, and now had a nice thriving community of work drones.

Maybe the Reliance had realized just what a shit hole Pete actually was and had lost on purpose, though Jessica personally doubted it. For all that it was a horrible place for beings of any kind to live, it created a lot of product. When you peeled away all the other layers, that's what it always came down to with both the Argy and the Reliance hierarchy—product. Product equaled profits, and profits equaled power.

Pete had proved to have too bad a climate for "important" Argys to live there, so they sent the "unimportant" people to colonize it. They promised them free housing and some land of their own, a chance to better their lives. Idiots had flocked to the planet looking for some freedom, only to find that they had traded one sort of slavery for another, and in most cases if they were on Pete they had actually traded down.

Jessica had learned long ago that in most cases the term "colonists" was just a nice way of saying "slave laborers" and/or "cannon fodder".

These people worked all day either in mines or tending crops or livestock. Anything they needed that had to be manufactured, like cooking utensils, farm implements, picks, shovels, and medicine, they could only buy from the Argy government store. If they needed medical attention they had to go to an Argy hospital. The government always seemed to be able to work it so that no matter how much product the people brought them, they never made quite enough money to pay off their debt, so that there was no way for them to actually better their lot in life. They could never quit working; they couldn't even afford to slow down.

The planet was hot and humid with rain falling for at least an hour around the middle of every day. Crops grew and flourished as long as you grew them on raised ground that drained. The other things that did really well were disease, deadly venomous insects, reptiles, and poison fungus of every shape and size.

On most days just breathing was like trying to pull oxygen from water. The humidity was so high that gills would have come in handy.

Everyone was hot all the time. The whole planet seemed to reek of body odor, raw sewage, and rotting plant life.

Ventilation fans and the extreme depth of the mines made them the coolest places to work. Unfortunately the noise of those fans and the pumps, which had to constantly pull water out of the mines to keep them from flooding, was enough to drive you completely crazy.

No place on the planet, not one single place that Jessica had found, would be comfortable to either humans or Argy. Hell, Jessica could barely tolerate it. Yet the Reliance and Argy had fought over this piss hole for years. Thousands on both sides had died before the Argy claimed victory and the Reliance let them have it.

In Jessica's opinion it showed the full extent of their greed.

It was safe to say that Jessica hated Pete. That she in fact hated everything about the stinking planet. But beggars couldn't be choosers, and as wretched as the place was it was one of the few places in the universe that Jessica Kirk could live. She wasn't safe anywhere in the Reliance. Since RJ had seen fit to inundate the airwaves with pictures of herself, and since she and Jessica were clones from the same batch of GSH's, everyone in the Reliance now knew exactly what Jessica was. She hadn't helped her position any by killing a Reliance bigshot and several dozen other people in a Reliance Sector Capital on Earth. The Reliance had plastered her picture up right alongside RJ's with the same description and order, "Dangerous rogue GSH, approach only with deadly force."

Jessica had ordered the burning of the rebels' stronghold, Alsterase, so she wasn't too terribly loved by the rebels in the New Alliance, either.

Worst of all, she had ordered RJ and her lover killed, and while the GSH she had sent to do the job hadn't succeeded in killing RJ, he had killed her lover. So there was a very good chance that the relentless bitch was never going to rest till she had Jessica's head on a pike. And Jessica had no doubt that RJ could do it; after all, RJ had bested her in every battle except Alsterase, and even then she'd come back, blown up Capitol, and taken one of Jessica's eyes.

Everyone knew what she was, and that she should never have been. Everyone knew what she had done and considered her crimes to be unforgivable.

There was no human quarter to which she could turn for help, and no hope of redemption.

For all of these reasons hiding in Reliance space had been completely out of the question.

If she had tried to get on Deakard or any of the Argy Alliance's prime planets she would have undergone a complete body scan which would have shown that not only was her DNA not on file anywhere, but also that she was half human, and genetically engineered at that. They would have drawn the obvious conclusion that she was a Reliance military officer. They wouldn't have let her live if they could help it.

The only logical place for her was on one of the Argy dredge planets. The places so hungry for "colonists" that they didn't question where you came from or how you got there, much less run a scan on you. Profiles cost money, and you just didn't spend money to profile cattle.

It was pretty clear-cut really. No one in their right mind would want to be someplace like Pete. No one with any real options would go there. Therefore just the fact that you wanted to be there meant that you were too stupid to be suspect.

"You, One-eye!" the Argy taskmaster named Shlerb yelled. "Get up and get back to work."

His name matched his physique. She had sworn long ago that someday she was going to kill the fat ugly bastard.

Jessica took in a deep breath of stale, water-rich air, stood up, picked up her pick and bucket, and headed back into the mine. There was high tech equipment that could pull fifty times what pick and shovel crews could pull out of here, but at this time in the game, both to the humans and the Argy, people were a renewable resource. High tech equipment was worth more than people, and if a cave collapsed and killed twenty men they were not nearly as upset as if one of the water pumps or a fan broke. They would sometimes charge repair costs to the workers by cutting their pay until the repair was paid for.

Once in the mine, Jessica took slow steady swings at the wall. She could work ten times as fast as the fastest person here. She could strike that pick in exactly the right spot and with enough force and accuracy to take out a whole section of wall, but if she did that they would know what she was.

In fact, it seemed to her that she had spent most of her rather long life hiding what she really was. Had spent most of her life being like the people who came in and took all their product in return for shoddy merchandise, making sure that they couldn't do anything more than exist. She'd been like Shlerb back there . . . No, worse, because she'd never had to get dirty to benefit from the fruit of other people's labors.

She was learning firsthand what she had inflicted on those under her authority. She had sat in judgment over her fellow man. Made decisions with the flick of her hand that had changed thousands of lives forever. In the blink of an eye, with no thought of the callousness of her actions, she had ordered "clean-up" expeditions. Whole villages of unarmed work units had been killed, every man, woman and child, young and old, for no other reason than they cost the Reliance more in supplies than they produced in product. She did it because it was her job; that was the way things were done. She didn't make the rules, but she'd loved them.

She'd treated people with less regard than farm animals. The Reliance trained an Elite to believe that they were better than even other soldiers. Certainly she had never even considered that mere work units were capable of serious thought, much less feelings.

The Reliance picked who could breed and who couldn't by what the projected weather for the next twenty years in any given area was, and if they happened to be wrong and crops, forests, or animals died, then the area was considered "unproductive," and people were killed for no other reason than some weather forecasting program had screwed up.

Jessica had signed such orders. They made up a lie about spies being harbored in a village, and armed troops marched into villages full of unarmed work units and killed everything that moved.

It had all been very cut and dried. People were supposed to earn their keep, and if they couldn't, well, then some of them had to go. Tough problem—simple solution.

She supposed that it was poetic justice that she who had without pity dominated and mistreated those under her was now forced to live under the same sort of tyrannical rule that she had once dished out and lavished in. However, Jessica didn't think herself stupid, and she felt that after more than three years of this shit she had truly learned her lesson.

She took in another deep breath and started picking away at the wall.

Gee, if I work really, really hard I may be able to buy a piece of cheese. Or I could just get tired of all this shit and start my own little rebellion right here on Pete.
The problem with that, of course, was that the Argy equivalent of a GSH was a hairless, sexless, almost featureless creature who looked like the freak that human GSH's were called. There was only one on Pete, no doubt because any more would have been overkill, but she didn't want to go toe to toe with him. After all, he was twice her size, and RJ had all but killed her. If Jessica did anything that would show the Argy what she was, they would not listen to her and follow her in battle to topple their oppressors. No, they would most probably attack her and continue to attack her until the GSH arrived and finished her off. And if by some miracle she managed to beat the resident GSH, and escape from Pete, where would she go?