Chains of Redemption (3 page)

Therein lay the real problem. Jessica Kirk had run out of places to hide, and she couldn't afford another enemy. So here she stood in water up to her ankles, in a mine where the air stank of sulfur and urine, picking at a wall with an archaic tool being very careful not to outwork the others for fear of being found out, and making just enough to barely eke out a living on a planet named after a human who had died shortly after he discovered it.

The lucky fuck! He didn't live long enough to grow to hate this floating sewer of a planet.

Jessica on the other hand had, and every day her conviction grew to find some way off Pete. And every day saw another perfectly good plan completely scrapped because it lacked one key element: plausibility.

What she actually needed was to be someone, damn near
anyone
else.

She carried her full bucket up out of the mineshaft and to the payment station. Her ore was weighed, poured into a waiting wheelbarrow, and she was given a fist full of chads that could be used at the Argy-run store to buy things for ten times what they were worth. She buried the chads deep in her pocket with the others from the day and started on the long walk home. There were some things they needed at home, but she just didn't feel like ending the day by getting screwed over by the government store. If she had, she just might have had to kill someone.

It was easy to hide on Pete. People didn't really look at each other; it was just too much to see your own despair etched onto another person's face. They were all Argy and all empathic. It was enough to feel the hopelessness all around you without seeing it, too.

Home wasn't much to look at. Like most of the huts on Pete, it was built up on wooden stilts about eight feet off the ground. The walls and roof were made of woven plant fronds, the roof then covered with pitch. Plastic guttering collected the daily rainwater off the roof and it ran into a fifty-gallon barrel placed in the eves of the hut. This was where they got all their running water.

There was a small porch on the front of their hut, which was seen as rather a luxury, as were the small bank of solar panels which were lashed to the roof and used to power one light and a ceiling fan in the one room dwelling. There was a ramp that led up to the porch, and by the time she had climbed it she was completely drained of hope. She flopped into one of the woven reed chairs that sat on the porch and looked out over the village.

The whole place smelled of human shit. No small wonder, since the toilets were raised areas in the corner of each dwelling. You basically raised the lid, shit in the corner, and the turds fell eight feet into a composting bin of straw. Once every three weeks the slop man came around with his wagon, cleaned out the bins and took the contents to the fields. Then he came back and brought fresh straw. If it rained hard enough to cause a flood—which it did at least once a month and was the reason for the dwellings being on stilts in the first place—the whole place became a giant cesspool. Fortunately for them the Argy government was kind enough to spray the place with something—most possibly lethal if you were exposed over a period of years—that killed ninety percent of the bugs. Of course, the ten percent that didn't die were pissed off and caused as much damage as was possible.

"Did you get any cheese?" Right asked as he hobbled out onto the porch.

They had gone to a very expensive geneticist to have Right's hair, eye and skin color genetically altered so that he could pass as an Argy. It had cost Jessica most of the money she'd managed to smuggle off Earth and had been a huge risk. It hardly seemed worth all the trouble now. Right hadn't been on Pete for two weeks when one of the local nasties drilled a hole in his leg and laid its eggs. The insect in question laid several hundred eggs. The larvae hatched in six weeks time, and then the real fun began, because they started eating their host. If you tried to remove or kill them they secreted a poison so lethal that the host died instantly. Then, of course, they could continue to eat the host's carcass. The larvae stayed in that stage for five years.

The eggs had been laid in Right's right leg. You could actually see the things moving around just under the skin. The doctors told them that if he ate plenty of protein the larvae would most likely stay in the leg area, and that in five years they would make a single hole in his skin and all crawl out where they could then easily be killed. In the meantime the larvae moved around in him, eating his flesh and making him miserable.

He just wasn't very good company anymore. She really didn't know why she continued to let him live. Far from enhancing her life, he detracted from it. All he did was take and take; he gave back nothing, as he had in fact nothing to give. He was sick. Jessica guessed she felt responsible for him, knowing that it was only because of her that he was forced to live on Pete in the first place.

She didn't understand him at all. If she were a mere mortal forced to live in this gods-forsaken place with bugs eating her flesh and nothing to do but sit around in a shack all day smelling the neighbors' shit and waiting for cheese, she wouldn't want to live. Yet every time she offered to end his suffering he acted like she was some sort of psycho.

"I have to have cheese, Jess," Right whined, hobbling over to a chair and sitting down. "If I don't get enough protein . . ."

"We still have a couple of eggs left, Right. I'll get you some cheese tomorrow."

"That's what you said yesterday, Jess . . ."

"I
said
 . . ." Jessica glared at him, "that I would get it tomorrow."

"OK," Right said, sighing complacently. "How was work?"

She turned her head slowly to glare at him, a look of utter disgust on her face.

"Sorry," Right said. "It's just . . . what else is there to talk about?"

He had a point. The only other topic of interest was the bugs in his leg, and she had ordered him to quit talking about them two years ago.

She sighed. "I filled six buckets with ore, and I have enough chads to buy your cheese. My feet were wet all day, and I'm almost tired."

"Are you not feeling yourself, Jess?" Right asked carefully.

"No! I
am
feeling myself. I'm feeling
just
like myself. That's the freaking problem!"

Mickey stood on an elevated platform on the mainland looking out at the sea of brown faces.

"There are thousands of them," he said in an awed whisper.

"One hundred and thirty thousand," John Henry supplied.

Mickey looked up at him and grimaced. "What in hell's name are we going to do with a hundred and thirty thousand aliens that think you're a god?"

John Henry smiled down at the President of New Freedom. "I've thought of a couple of uses for their more attractive women folk." The brown make-up he had been wearing for weeks was smeared and looked as ridiculous as the handless man's statement sounded. Mickey would have probably laughed if there were anything to laugh about.

It had taken them the better part of three weeks to get the aliens all here. He had come to the conclusion that splitting them up and shipping them all around New Freedom would have been far too problematic. It would be much easier to deal with them if they were all in one spot, and he had decided that Alsterase, or what used to be Alsterase, was as good a place as any.

Or so Mickey had thought. Now, looking out at this mass of humanity that was waiting anxiously for answers that he didn't really have, he wasn't so sure. Food and clean water supplies were running low, and they couldn't seem to build latrines fast enough.

A hundred and thirty thousand aliens, most of whom didn't understand or speak their language. Aliens with different customs and beliefs than their own, who were going to need food and shelter and clothes to name just a few of the problems, and where was he supposed to get those things? Yank them out of his ass?

His attempts to reach David on Beta 4 had been futile, because of that stupid magnetic pulse thing, he supposed. But attempts the last couple of days to reach RJ hadn't been any better. He thought maybe Marge was losing her touch, or maybe RJ's ship's communications system was damaged. He had contacted the people on the space station, but they had their hands full just repairing the damage to the station and preparing for the Reliance attack they were sure was going to come at any minute.

The ideal solution would be to send them all back to their homeworld, so of course that wasn't actually a conceivable option.

"Do we have some sort of interpreter?" Mickey asked John.

John nodded. "Hey, Gerald! Come on up here, man!" John yelled.

Gerald was a mountain of a man with a head so bald it shone in the sunlight, and a huge smile that put Mickey instantly at ease.

"Yes, my king," he said bowing to John Henry. Mickey gave John Henry a dirty look. "Hey, I didn't ask for this job, remember?"

Mickey nodded. He looked up at Gerald. "My name is Mickey. I am the President, that's like king of this place, New Freedom. Do you understand?"

Gerald smiled again and nodded. "I understand everything, except why you talk so slowly."

Mickey felt like an idiot now, because the guy spoke better Reliance than he did. Or at least better than Mickey had a few years ago.

"Speak into this thing," Mickey pointed at a mike. "Tell the people that John Henry's just a guy like any other guy . . . without any hands," Mickey explained. "We dressed him up like your king-god or whatever so that we could free you from the Reliance. So that you would follow us before they could use you against us. We can't send you back to your home planet, because we don't have the resources." Mickey was feeling less and less good about what he was saying. Gerald was looking at him like he wasn't quite sure of Mickey's sanity, and if he had this huge guy repeat this shit, there was a very good chance he was going to have a hundred and thirty thousand alien super-warriors stomping him into chunky midget stew. Gerald drew a breath and turned to the mike, and Mickey started pulling frantically on Gerald's pants leg. "No . . . don't say any of that. Wait."

Mickey started pacing back and forth, trying to think. He had to have answers, real answers, if he was going to avoid a full-scale riot and bring these people into the fold. He couldn't tell them he'd tricked them, that he couldn't send them home and he had no real answers for them. They'd go berserk; they'd kill everything in sight. He needed perfect words and diplomacy. He needed RJ's brain and David's mouth.

He had left Diana on Alsterase Island because he knew this was potentially a very dangerous situation, but now he wished she were there to give him some well-needed moral support.

He had brought thousands of hungry aliens to a dead city where there was no shelter and very little food, and . . . It was a dead city now, but it was the place that had once given them all hope. It was nothing now but a clean stretch of land. He took a deep breath, and suddenly he had the answer.

"All right, tell them this," Mickey said, and Gerald nodded and moved back to the mike. "Our new friends . . ." He waited for Gerald to repeat his words and get the attention of the restless crowd. "You have, as we all have, witnessed and been the target of the Reliance's great evil . . ." Again he waited for the interpreter to repeat his words. "We do not have the resources to send you home." Gerald looked at him to make sure he wanted that repeated, and Mickey nodded. "However, we will give you this land, and you will make a new home here with our help . . ." Gerald repeated his words almost as he spoke them, having found a rhythm. "This was once our great city. Once it was our home, but the Reliance came and destroyed it. Now we will rebuild it, bigger, better than it was before. They pulled you from your homes, dragged you through the stars and brought you here to fight in a war that wasn't yours. Forever now will our destinies be as one, even as our enemy is one. This place will thrive again as it once did. They took you from your home, but you will build a new home here. They destroyed Alsterase, but it shall be built again. It shall rise from the ashes and scream into the Reliance's face,
We shall overcome!
"

Gerald waited for Mickey to say more.

Mickey wiped the sweat from his brow. "Ah, that was it."

When Gerald repeated this to the people, they started to cheer.

"Wow! That was some speech," John Henry said.

"I was thinking, what would David say, and how would he say it?"

"Well, it was great." John Henry patted Mickey on the back so hard he almost knocked him over.

"Yeah, now all I have to do is figure out how I'm going to make it happen."

Two days later Mickey was completely exhausted. They were shipping food, livestock, seed, fishing boats, farming and building supplies from all over New Freedom. It wasn't as easy as one might think to figure out where the surplus was and how to get it from point A to point B with the least effort, even with Marge's help.

"Did you find any nails?" Mickey asked in a sleepy voice.

"Yes," the supercomputer droned in its mock female voice, making Mickey miss Topaz and his other friends even more. "They should arrive by truck tomorrow."