Chains of Redemption (22 page)

That was the real pain. That was what really hurt. For a minute that past, her past, had been gone as if it had never been, and then he had spoken
her
name and it was back with a vengeance. No matter how hard she tried, she never seemed to be able to get away from what she had done. But for one bright shining moment she hadn't been anyone but a woman in love with a man.

"Are you all right?" Gerald asked.

Jessica nodded silently. She pushed gently away from him, stood up and took the coveralls off again. She moved to lie on the bed and looked up at him where he still knelt, patiently waiting for her to decide what she wanted.

"Make me forget again."

They had been gone for three months, and Jessica fully expected a grand reception, but not even Dax showed up to greet her at the docks. It was only then that she realized how tight-lipped everyone had seemed when they'd arrived in Alsterase, how sad they had felt.

She instantly knew something was wrong, terribly wrong. Something so bad they had decided not to tell her while she'd been out.

She took off at a run that even Gerald couldn't keep up with.

"RJ, what's wrong?" he called after her.

She didn't answer, just burst through the doors of the old prison, and kept going. There was the usual hustle and bustle she had come to expect from the base, but there was a somberness, a silence that was totally uncommon for the place. The wave of grief coming from them all was so strong that she felt like her brain was on fire. She quickly raised her shields.

"What the hell has happened!" she demanded in a roar, as she came to a dead stop in the middle of the room.

Her answer was more silence. They just stared at her, some of them started to cry, others being unable to hold her gaze turned away.

Dax came running into the room. He ran to her, and she knelt down to be at the right height to embrace him when he fell sobbing into her arms. Even through her shields she could feel his deep grief, but she was so happy to see him safe that she immediately calmed. "What has happened?" she asked softly.

Dax just cried louder and buried his face in her shoulder. She looked at a man standing near them and demanded with her stare that he answer her question.

"Diana is dead," he said solemnly.

"No!" Jessica felt the word pulled from her lips. It couldn't be true, it just couldn't be. Diana wasn't old, she wasn't sick. There was no battle here. Diana was her friend, and she was Dax's mother. She couldn't be dead. It was a lie. Except . . . she had never seen Dax like this. She got to her feet carrying the thirteen-year-old child with her, holding him close, rocking him as if he were a baby. Her own tears started rolling down her face. "Where's Mickey?" she asked.

"On the wall," the man answered.

Jessica nodded, and still carrying the boy she headed for the wall. She walked out the door that was opened for her and saw Mickey standing just staring at the city across the bay. She walked quietly up to his back, though she was sure he could hear the boy's crying. She didn't know what to say, so she just stood there for a long time trying to comfort Dax and staring at Mickey's back, waiting for words that weren't coming because her own grief was so new.

When RJ had killed Jack it had been like this, totally unexpected. At the time losing Jack had been the hardest thing she'd ever had to deal with. Later she had realized that he hadn't really been as important to her as she had thought he was. She had believed at the time that she had truly and deeply loved him. In all the years since then, she'd realized that at that time she'd had no idea what real love even was. Now she did, and this loss burned in her soul. She could see Diana's gentle smile, hear her warm laughter, feel the love she generated whenever she looked at her husband, her son, her friend. The idea that she was never going to see, hear or feel her friend again was more than she could stand, and she could only imagine what it must be like for Mickey and Dax.

And yet part of her—a part she instantly hated—was counting her loss the way she would in a battle, by who was more important to her. Dax was alive, which was most important. Mickey was all right, which was her second concern. Diana being dead was horrible, but of the three the most bearable loss in the army of her heart.

Mickey didn't even turn to face them. Maybe he was just so consumed with his own grief that he couldn't stand to deal with anyone else's. Or maybe he just didn't want them to see his grief. Maybe he needed to keep it to himself.

"How?" Jessica wasn't even sure she had vocalized the word until Mickey started to answer her slowly without turning around.

"She went swimming." His voice caught in his throat and he cleared it. "She got caught in the undertow. By the time they got her out it was too late." He started crying then. "She was just
swimming
. She loved to swim, and she knew what she was doing. I don't know how she could have screwed up so badly." He turned then and hugged her legs, which might have been comical under different circumstances.

"It's not right," Jessica cried. "It can't be. She can't just be dead. We'll clone her, that's what we'll do, make a new her. We'll bring her back to us."

Dax and Mickey were just looking at her then like she'd gone mad, and she instantly knew why. Mickey released her, and she sank down to sit on the wall, drawing Dax closer to her. Mickey sat beside her and patted her back, and she realized that she was now crying louder than either of them.

"That was crazy. I know that was wrong, I'm sorry." Jessica couldn't seem to be able to help herself, sometimes crazy things just spewed forth from her mouth. "It wouldn't be her. It would just be something horrible that would look like her, but wouldn't actually be her. It wouldn't be the same. It could never be the same. It would be worse."

It would be like me. It would look the same, but it wouldn't have Diana's memories, her loves and hates. It would be a horrible reminder of just what they had all lost. Every time I saw it I'd want to kill it for pretending to be my friend. You can't just replace people. But I did. I replaced RJ, and none of them are the wiser, so the contempt isn't there, but if they knew I was an imposter . . . But they don't know and they never will. I'm not RJ, so what? I love them as much, maybe even more than she would have. I'm here for them and she's not. I'm here to help them through this. They need me, I'm here, she's not and neither is Diana. They left, but I never will
.

She bent and kissed the top of Dax's head, and then leaned over and kissed the top of Mickey's as well. "We'll get through this together. We'll survive this, too."

Mickey nodded silently.

Gerald walked out onto the wall then and stood silently by the door. She saw the glint of tears in his eyes. He just stood there for her, for them, letting them all know that he was there and that he cared, but not infringing on their grief. Jessica loved him all the more in that moment and made a pact that she wasn't going to be bereaved of him, of any of them, not if she could help it.

It was a planet distant from their own and populated with beings different from themselves who had basically made most of the same mistakes that humankind had, and a few more that humanity hadn't even dreamed of.

It didn't take RJ long to learn their language and only a little longer before she was reading over their written texts. The written records had been well maintained and were how the humanoids of this planet had kept and remembered their past so completely.

Just as she had suspected, the Abornie, as they called themselves, had once been a huge and thriving civilization, highly technologically advanced. But as Earth had done, they'd allowed strange religious practices to influence better judgment and logic. They had badly overpopulated their planet, to the point that famine was imminent. They had polluted their world to a truly unbearable, hardly believable level. Farmland and forests had continued to be gobbled up for housing till there was very little room to grow crops, and pollution had dangerously depleted their oxygen supply.

Whereas humans had sought to leave the planet and pushed their research in that direction to cure their overpopulation and pollution problems, the Abornie had turned to genetics. They began by creating highly nutritious plant life that could thrive in poor, almost nonexistent, and often toxically polluted soil. They had turned to the oceans that they had already badly polluted to find the raw materials they needed to continue to build and maintain their cities, vehicles, and in short to keep their way of life going.

Like humans, it had never dawned on them to just simply stop breeding like flies and conserve their resources instead of going full out to deplete one source and then go find another. Taking care of the planet, learning to waste less and recycle more, had never even occurred to them as an option. Humans had trashed Earth out till they were teetering on the edge of extinction; the threat of that and war with the alien menace had helped the Reliance to come to power. The Reliance had cured those problems, but the cost had been the enslavement of the human race, mind, body and soul, and the conquering and plundering of numerous other worlds.

Rather than change their ways, the Abornie, like humans, had just found another way to continue doing just what they always had. They found another resource to exploit.

However, raping the oceans hadn't been as easy as they had expected it to be. Farming and mining the ocean had turned out to be dangerous and less than cost effective. So they again turned to genetic engineering for answers. There had been a large octopus-type creature that dwelt in the planet's oceans. It was slow and not terribly dexterous, but not unintelligent. Geneticists spliced the creature's DNA with that of their own and a half a dozen other creatures and soon had a semi-intelligent underwater work force. They called these creatures Ocupods. The Abornie had created the suits the creatures wore of a strong uncorrodable metal alloy they called Zspun. The creatures were trained to carry out the simple, mostly mindless tasks of digging up ore from the oceans' depths and carrying it in buckets up out of the water. They were trained to bring crustaceans and shrimp from the oceans' depths. The Abornie basically used them as slave labor.

RJ had just finished reading this to Topaz when he exclaimed, "See? The Abornie
are
the bad guys. I always wondered why in all those horrid movies it was always the slimy ugly guys that got the bad rap. Why couldn't something cute and fluffy be evil? Some of the most beautiful women I have ever known have been the biggest bitches, yourself included. Nothing personal. How come we never saw, say, evil Ewoks? No, it's always the slimy tentacled guy who is evil to his gooey core. Now finally here's the proof, the cute guys are evil. Ha!"

"So I guess you'd like to trade Oxania, the Abornie girl we all know you've been boinking, for a slimy tentacled lover," RJ said with a laugh.

Topaz made a face.

"That's why the slimy, ugly guy is always the bad guy, Topaz," RJ said as she continued to read, being able to talk and read at the same time, which annoyed all hell out of anyone she happened to be talking to. "We can't relate to the Ocupods. We don't understand their needs or their desires, any more than they can understand ours. There is no common ground on which we can stand to try to understand the others' needs, no basis on which to negotiate. Their needs and what makes them happy aren't even close to the same as ours."

RJ read on. The Abornie had used electric impulses to drive their newly created slaves, to train and communicate with them. For a hundred years the creatures had carried out these simple tasks even as the Abornie continued to pollute and overuse their planet. Then something unforeseen had happened. They had detected a huge meteor heading their way. Since they had put no effort or cash into it, there were no spaceships that could do anything more than carry satellites up into orbit around their planet/moon, which they called Frionia.

There was hope that the larger planet they orbited would drag the meteor off its course, but not much. Early calculations put Frionia between the planet Humongous and the meteor when it came into their space. There were a few government installations that had been built for just such a disaster across their world, but they had been constructed to hold only a few thousand of the chosen of their race. The government had avoided panic in the streets and a struggle for room in the bunkers by covering up their findings and leaving the general public uninformed while the "chosen" moved to the safety of the bunkers.

The meteor had broken up in their atmosphere, sending thousands of huge segments of the rock plummeting into the surface of the moon. It was as if the entire surface of Frionia had been sprayed with high impact missiles. The worst damage had been concentrated on one side of the planet, which had been far from a good thing. The planet had tilted on its axis, which had in turn triggered massive tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, continental shifts and earthquakes. The volcanoes had spewed noxious gases and clouds of ash, which mixed with the dust particles caused by the meteor's impact. Any living thing on the surface that hadn't been killed in the initial chaos had died in the years of darkness that followed.