Chains of Redemption (25 page)

"Get back and wait," RJ ordered Poley, and he joined her some fifty feet away from where the Ocupods struggled. Two of them actually managed to get into the water. RJ watched as the domes opened and the Ocupods swam away. She smiled, and waited for the others to lie still on the beach. "You wait here. I'll call if I need you."

Poley nodded.

RJ walked to the beach. One by one she dragged the Ocupods into the water. When the last of them had escaped into the ocean she pulled the machines from the water. Once they were out of the water Poley helped her drag them above the high tide line.

"Why?" Poley asked, as they finished dragging the last one to a safe distance from the water's edge. "I have calculated over and over, and can think of no reason to let those creatures live."

"They have a communal intelligence," RJ explained.

"I fail to see the significance of that."

"By destroying their machines but saving them we showed compassion. That it's not them we hate, but their power over us, i.e. their transport machines. It tells them that we won't come after them in their world. That we are willing to share the planet with them. Them in their place and us in ours.

"But . . . How does that serve our cause?"

RJ laughed and patted his back. "Sometimes it's nice just not to be perceived as an asshole."

"What are you going to do now, RJ?" Poley asked as they walked along the path of destruction the Ocupods had made through the jungle when they had embarked on this, their last campaign.

RJ looked at the damage around them and thought about all the Ocupod debris around the ship. "Well, the first thing we have to do is clean up the mess."

"You know what I mean, RJ," Poley said. "You were built for battle. With nothing to fight, what will you do? I was built to serve Stewart, and after that I was programmed to serve you, and when you were in cryogenic sleep—even though I was still fulfilling my purpose—I felt incomplete. What are you going to do?"

"You found a hobby, perhaps I, too, will find a hobby."

"I don't think you will find one that will allow you to fulfill your full function."

"Please stop it," Gerald begged, grabbing both of Jessica's arms. She slung him aside like a toy and kept slamming on the keyboard, pulling up one file after another, reading it and then moving on.

"No! No! It's got to be here. It's got to be here somewhere."

Gerald picked himself up off the floor and dusted himself off. She hadn't hurt him and she certainly could have. He wasn't mad at her, he was worried. She was completely and totally obsessed. Crazier than he'd ever seen her, and he'd seen her plenty crazy. "RJ . . . it's been three weeks. You've done nothing day or night but pore over these files. You haven't slept, you've hardly eaten. This is insane"

"What's insane is thinking that the bastard found the key to eternal life and that he then deleted it. That he would destroy it. No, it's here. Somewhere in all this idiotic prattling on and on about nothingness and . . . Oh, my gods!" She quickly flipped back and reread the page of text she had just so quickly dismissed.

"Did you find it?" Gerald asked, half afraid of the answer.

"No . . . But something very interesting. The brilliant but completely insane madman who built all of this and found the formula for eternal life was Stewart's father. That would make him my paternal grandfather." She was thoughtful for a moment. "I wonder if she knows, or knew, depending completely on her living or dead status."

"If who knew what?" Gerald asked, thinking that with the knowledge she'd just imparted to him, that it must be true what they said about insanity being hereditary.

"Her. You know. Me," Jessica said.

Gerald just shook his head, thinking at this point it was better to say nothing at all. She had taken Diana's death hard. For the first month she had stayed close to Mickey and Dax. She seemed to be handling it pretty well, mostly just helping them to cope. Then, just as it was obvious that Mickey and Dax were learning to live with their loss, RJ had gone completely and totally insane. Again.

One night she'd sat up bolt straight in bed, and announced she had the answer.

After this revelation all plans to infiltrate the Reliance had been placed on hold while she tore the old prison apart, finding anything that remotely resembled a crystal or an ancient disk. She then sat down to engage in the daunting—even for RJ—task of going through each and every file in the supercomputer's massive memory bank looking for what was, in essence, the formula for immortality.

Gerald didn't believe that such a thing existed. It was well known that Topaz had been insane. There was no formula at all. He had probably been a GSH, just like RJ was.

Gerald watched as she devoured one screen of text after another in rapid succession and knew that even she couldn't keep up this pace.

She had been teetering on the edge of sanity ever since he knew her, but this was shoving her over that edge. He wasn't sure exactly why, whether it was just Diana's death or the idea that she couldn't do anything about it. She'd lost so many people, you'd have thought she would have gotten used to it by now, but she obviously hadn't. She was determined to find something to keep them all alive forever.

"Stop, at least for awhile. Get something to eat, sleep for awhile," Gerald pleaded. "Please, RJ."

She spun in her chair, turning to look at him, her face a mask of rage. "Don't call me that! Never call me that!"

"It's your name," Gerald said in confusion. "Can't you see that this isn't helping? This isn't helping Dax or Mickey, and it certainly isn't helping you. You can't go on like this. It's making you crazy."

"I'm not crazy. He found the key to eternal life, and I'm going to find it. There is no way he would have destroyed the formula. It has to be here somewhere."

"He was insane, RJ . . ."

"Don't call me that!" she screamed.

"It's your name!" he insisted, now every bit as mad as she was. "I can't take this anymore. Get your crazy ass up out of that chair, go get something to eat and go to bed. If the information is in this computer it's been here for hundreds of years. It can wait till in the morning."

"Don't you tell me what to do!" she yelled back, getting to her feet and taking a menacing step forward.

"Why the hell not? You're my woman, I love you, and I'm not going to stand here one more day and watch you go one ounce crazier while I have a breath left in my body. If you want to continue this crazy shit, you're going to have to kick my ass."

For a second he got the impression that she was about to rip him in two, which he knew she was capable of. Then she just ran to him, threw her arms around his neck and started to cry. "Can't you see? I can't lose you, Gerald. I can't lose you, or Mickey, or Dax. I
can't
."

He picked her up and kissed her forehead, then started carrying her towards their quarters. "Everything dies, and then all that matters is how well it lived," he said gently, trying to comfort her.

"Not me, Gerald, I don't die. Everyone around me, but not me, and I'll be alone. Don't you see, Gerald? I'll be all alone."

"No you won't. There will always be new people for you to love, to love you."

"It's not the same. Don't you see it's not the same? You can't replace people like you do shoes. And I can't stand it; I know I can't. I'll go all the way crazy, and then I'll never get back."

When Jessica woke up in the morning and went over what she'd been doing, and more importantly what she'd been saying, she admitted—at least to herself—that she had gone over the edge. Gerald had been right. Some food, some sleep, and a lot of sex; in short, a little normalcy had put things back in perspective.

She rolled over and hugged Gerald, loving the feel of him. Sleeping with him was like sleeping with a huge, stuffed bear. He made her feel safe, though in reality what could happen to her? He wasn't afraid of her, and she liked that. Every other man she'd ever slept with, including Zark, had feared her. Gerald didn't. She could kill him in a heartbeat and he knew it, yet he had no fear of her. He trusted her absolutely, and so she trusted him.

"Did you sleep?" he asked rolling in her arms to face her.

"Yes." She kissed his lips. "Very well. Very well, indeed."

"Do you feel better?" he asked carefully.

She laughed. "Yes, I feel better, but no, I'm not going to quit looking for the cure to death."

Gerald sighed. "Could you at least pretend to be sane while you're doing it?"

"Yes." She kissed him again, then started rubbing her body against his seductively. "If you'll remind me every once in awhile."

Mickey and Gerald sat at a table in the cafeteria, each with a cup of coffee. With Diana's death and RJ's obsessive, crazed attempts to find Topaz's formula, they hadn't had a chance to really talk in months.

"How are you?" Gerald asked.

"All right, as long as I don't think about her. Everyone keeps telling me that eventually I'll be able to think of her without feeling the pain," Mickey shrugged. "I try to keep busy. Dax seems to be doing well. Of course, I don't know that it's at all healthy for him to have joined RJ in her mad quest for Topaz's formula, but . . . Well, it keeps him busy, and I know being busy helps me. He's with RJ, and he does love her."

"And she loves him." Gerald sighed. "She had plans, big plans, good plans. How to deal with the Reliance. Now . . . I've talked to her till I'm blue in the face, but she won't listen. She's hell bent on making us live forever."

"Without even bothering to ask us if it's what we want or not," Mickey said. "She's afraid of being alone. I think it's the only thing she actually fears."

"I know, she's told me as much. I understand, but would you . . . would you want to be immortal?" Gerald asked carefully.

"Right now . . . no. I don't care what people say, I don't really believe that losing Diana is a pain that's ever going to go away, and I wouldn't want to live an eternity without her. What if those religious 'hoo-ha's' are right and there is some sort of life after this one, and I could go there and be with her again, be with Whitey, and Sandra, Topaz and Levits?"

"It's a nice thought," Gerald said.

"What about you, Gerald? Would you want to live forever?"

"On my world we believed in a lot of strange things as you know, but the one thing that still makes sense to me is that souls get recycled. When you die, you become someone else, get to live a new life, maybe on a new world, have a new adventure. I think I'd like that, but . . . I don't want her to have to be alone. I'm afraid that if she were alone then she really would go insane."

Mickey nodded. "You know, of course, that she's not going to find what she's looking for."

"I don't believe it exists. How could she find what doesn't exist?"

"It doesn't exist anymore. It did exist once. Topaz created something that changed him. But see, he didn't actually know how he did it. It was a mistake. Something happened, something that he didn't count on, something outside the experiment, and he could never duplicate the serum. RJ's apparently forgotten that."

"But . . . RJ can't forget."

"Exactly."

Jessica read the screen for the one-thousandth time. It had taken her six months to go over all the data on file. This was the last page of text concerning Topaz. She had looked at everything. Everything he had written or spoken into the computer, everything that had so much as a mention of his name. Everything related to him or the formula that she could milk from the data banks, crystals and old disks. There was nothing. The bastard had reported everything from his old bowling score to his bowel movements. But there was nothing. Not one single file concerning the experiment that had made him immortal.

She slammed her fist through the monitor.

"Monitor six has been damaged; droid twelve, please move to room three, assess damage and report," Marge droned.

"What's wrong?" Dax asked as she got up and started to pace.

"It's not here. The bastard didn't make a single entry concerning the actual serum, what it contained, how it was made. There's nothing. I've checked this whole damn fort. I've turned it upside down and inside out. I've read every freaking file. Nothing. Not a fucking word!" She hit the old block wall with her fist, and it cracked.

"Structural damage to East wall in room three. Droid fifteen, please assess damage and repair. RJ, please stop striking things," the computer droned.

"It doesn't matter, RJ," Dax said.

"I let you down," Jessica said. "How can you say it doesn't matter?"

"You didn't let me down," Dax said with a comforting smile. "I was only helping you so that I could spend time with you. I never believed that anyone could take a potion and become immortal. I don't want to live forever."