Chains of Redemption (31 page)

Jessica heard his words echoing in her head.
He needs RJ's forgiveness, and I can give it to him because I'm not her and he didn't do anything to me, except help me to commit my biggest sin. So . . . you didn't part well. RJ left you here because she blamed you for the attack on Alsterase, but you were just an unwitting pawn. I was the great instigator. I was the one who found the weak link in her chain . . . And what must it be like to live with the knowledge that you were the weak link, that you were your best friend's undoing? That you'd caused the death of your friends, the destruction of your capital? If I was RJ and you had been directly responsible for causing the death of the man I loved . . . If Gerald had been well and you'd been directly responsible for causing his death, no matter what the reason was, I never would have forgiven you, and she wouldn't have, either. But I know something that she didn't know then and probably hasn't learned yet, if she's even still alive. I know what it's like to live with what you've done every day of your life. I know what it's like to live with the stain of guilt on your soul. To strive every day to pay for the sins of your past and always find yourself wanting. RJ wouldn't forgive you, just like she will never forgive me, but she's not here, and I can let you off the hook. I can give you that which seems to forever elude me
.

She turned slowly around to face him. "There is nothing particularly selfish in wanting to be forgiven," Jessica said carefully. "It wasn't your fault. Kirk was smart, quite possibly the most intelligent person I've ever known . . . Except for me, of course. She set a trap and we all fell into it. I wrote her off too quickly, didn't give her enough credit. What happened to Alsterase was more my fault than it was yours. She was after me. She had to destroy me because she felt she was the only one who could. I was a challenge for her, perhaps the only challenge in her life. I should have known what she was capable of, after all she's me and I'm her." He was quiet, and she decided she might have been pushing it with that last sentence, so she said quickly, "What's selfish is to hold a grudge, to withhold forgiveness. I'm sorry, David."

The old man hugged her neck and started to cry. She hugged him back though he was a virtual stranger to her, and cried just because right then everything made her cry.

Jessica and Dax were preparing to board the shuttlecraft that would take her to her ship on the Beta 4 moonbase. There was a great mass of humanity there to see her off, and it had taken almost an hour to say good-bye to everyone.

She stopped at the top of the ramp and looked out over the crowd. Most of these were her people, the people who had fought with her for all these many, long, battle-torn years. They had chosen to stay on their home planet, and many that were going home with her would only be going back to Earth to pick up their families and come home. Beta 4 was home, and now that the planet was something more than a barely habitable world and they were approaching middle and even old age in some cases, they all wanted to be home.

Like Gerald.

Her people had been replaced by the war orphans as had always been the plan, but while they fought like Fourers, and were as strong as Fourers, they weren't the people she was used to. There were so many faces she was going to be missing.

Like Gerald's.

She couldn't remember ever being lower. She was about to go ahead and board the shuttle when she heard David call out, "Wait!"

She stopped. She had wondered where he was, and had decided that he simply couldn't bear to say good-bye. But here he came, his oldest child in tow. The crowd parted to let them through. By the time they reached the top of the ramp the old man was out of breath. The boy all but hid behind his father, which wasn't easy because he was as tall as his farther, and probably a good twenty pounds heavier.

"RJ," David hugged her, and she could feel his heart pounding, hear his ragged breathing. "I'm glad we caught you . . . Baldor." He stopped to catch his breath. "He wants to go with you."

Jessica looked around David at the young man skeptically. He was excited, but in that way that could have meant anything from adulation to terror.

"He wants to go to Earth with me, or you want him to go to Earth with me?" Jessica asked suspiciously.

"I . . . I want to go," Baldor said. He was a handsome man, with a skin color somewhere between his mother and father's, and jet-black hair that was nearly as straight as hers. His eyes were as dark and brooding as his father's. Take some Beta 4 blood, mix it with some Reliance born and bred humans, and you were likely to get a whole cascade of different colors and types of people. "I want to serve with you." He repositioned the large duffel bag he was carrying.

"I appreciate it, kid, but I think you ought to know that I'm mostly going to be laying around in my cell licking my wounds and sulking. I'm not going to be going to any front soon, and I'm not going to be much fun to be around," Jessica explained.

"He's not a child, RJ, he doesn't need to be entertained. He'll be on a new world. If that doesn't hold his interest, I don't know what will," David said.

"All right." She didn't have enough fight left in her to even argue.

So Baldor went with them, and she was glad he was with them after they started the flight home. She wasn't in the mood for Dax's enthusiasm, and it was nice for him to have someone his own age to talk to. It allowed her to go to her quarters, shut the door, and just be alone with her pain.

She knew she'd done the right thing, but that didn't make her loss any easier to take. She felt like someone had removed a piece of her soul. She wanted to hold him again. Wanted to feel his love for her from across the room. The bed; she looked at it and her chest felt suddenly empty. They'd shared that bed on the way to Beta 4. They'd made love in it. It just looked huge now, huge and empty. As empty as she felt. She lay down on the bed and moved to his side of it. She took in a deep breath and held it. It still smelled like him. She took off all her clothes and crawled under the covers, moving to his side of the bed. She closed her eyes and just breathed in his scent, trying to pretend he was still there with her. She hadn't slept since they had arrived on Beta 4, and pure exhaustion combined with the temporary comfort of being in his place helped her to drift into a solid but nightmare-filled sleep.

Dax answered every question he had, and like anyone who has just learned the answers themselves, his answers were delivered in detail and with enthusiasm.

Baldor had felt a moment of pain when they'd hit the jumpgate and Beta 4 had disappeared from view. He had made his decision at the last minute and had to rush his goodbyes with his mother, friends and other family members. His mother had tried to be brave, as she always was, but he had seen the tears gleaming in her eyes and had almost changed his mind. He stood at one of the viewports looking out at the blur of stars that was hyperspace.

He didn't understand it, any of it. How the ship flew, what hyperspace was or how it got there. He felt a slight flush and a little nausea, which could have been caused by any number of things. Anything from the flight itself to the shot they'd given him to keep him from getting the space sickness his father had explained in such graphic details. It might have even been caused by the thought of missing his family and friends. He was leaving everything familiar behind and going off on a grand adventure. He was excited and apprehensive at the same time.

He walked away from the port and started in the direction he smelled food coming from. He thought maybe getting something in his stomach might calm his nerves and nausea.

In the mess hall he got a tray, filled it with food, and then looked around for a place to sit. He saw Dax sitting at a table alone with a tray of uneaten food in front of him, so he walked over and sat across from him.

Baldor could tell Dax was in deep thought, so he didn't try to talk to him. Just sat down and started eating.

After several minutes Dax said in a faraway tone, "We all have a very narrow view of what normal is."

"Huh?" Baldor said, not really understanding what that had to do with anything, or why Dax chose to share this information with him now.

"Well, until I came on this trip with RJ I'd never really been off Alsterase Island. I'd only ever even been to the mainland about a dozen times. I went to school on the island with the other kids who lived there. I thought my life was normal, but . . . Well, when I saw how you and your people reacted to RJ, when we went to the old ship—the palace, not the bunker," he clarified, "well it suddenly dawned on me that nothing about me or my life has been normal. My father is the president of the New Alliance, and a midget. My 'aunt' is RJ, the GSH who started the New Alliance with your father. My Uncle was an alien from another planet. Most of the people I grew up with weren't human or at least they weren't full Earthborn humans. You grew up on a world at peace. You were trained for warfare, but you've never seen it. I grew up on a world at war. RJ and Gerald and half the population of Alsterase would ship out and go off on campaign. They'd be gone for months at a time and return victorious, and there were always people who went out with them who didn't come back. Yet till now, none of those people were ever people I was close to.

"My life wasn't affected. I never really knew the horror of what was happening. I know Gerald was dying, and I know this is how he wanted to die, in battle. But he's still dead." Dax sniffled but didn't cry. "People have fought, and people have died in the thousands so that you and I could reach this age and never know what it's like to be slaves, to fear for our lives. I lost my mother when I was thirteen, but she wasn't killed by the Reliance . . ."

"Like my father's family was," Baldor interjected. "His mother and sister were allowed to die of diseases the Reliance knew how to cure, and his father was taken away and died in a prison work camp. My father escaped from such a camp just before he found RJ, and he said it was where they sent people to die, that they worked them to death."

"We had a childhood, which is something that our parents never had," Dax said. "Everything that we take for granted is something they all bled for."

"Many of the people I went to school with and trained with were the war orphans who were sent from Earth. They talked of the horrors of their lives in the Reliance. Many of them had nightmares. Our father never seemed to talk of anything but the horrors of his life in the Reliance, of his days fighting with RJ and the inner circle. Still, I didn't really understand till I heard the bombs bursting on the surface of our planet, saw the devastation . . . I wanted to leave the bunker to go and fight, but my parents wouldn't let me. They who had both fought in many glorious battles made me stay there in the bunker like a cowardly child, afraid of the dark."

Dax nodded. "I felt the same way. Though I know I wouldn't be much good in a fight, I'm sure there was something I could have done. My father, he used to go with them everywhere. He used his size to get in places they couldn't . . ."

"He was a very good pickpocket," Baldor said with a smile. "I've heard many stories about your father's talents. He is a great leader."

"I've mostly played till now," Dax admitted. "They make me sit in on meetings, and I know it's because they want me to learn to be like my dad. I sit in the meetings and I hardly listen. I'm bored to tears, and I can't wait to get out of there. See, I just never understood why anything they were doing was all that important. It wasn't action, not real fighting. I wanted to do the sort of things they used to do. I could see no reason for the hours and hours of talking. Why they couldn't just make up their mind to do something, and then do it?

"Until now, I lived on that island and no matter what they said had happened, everything for me was exactly the same. Nothing changed, except fewer people came back than left, and even that never registered. I knew they were grooming me to take my father's place. To learn from him how to be a leader, and yet I never paid any attention. I never realized just how important all that sitting around and talking was, because I never really saw the end results."

"What happened on your world in days was just a part of a plan that was years in the making and that spanned a galaxy. This had to be put here and that there. They went and got this, so they could do that, so that this would be ready when something else happened. It seems to you that it happened in less than a week, but the truth is that battle was being fought for years. Gerald's dead, and even that was part of the plan.

"My mother died, and it was so unreal. You think when you lose someone else that you love that it's going to be different, that you're going to be ready. I mean, I knew he was dying even before RJ did, and I knew she brought him so that he could die . . ."

"She did him a great honor, he died well," Baldor said.

"But he's still dead. My family keeps getting smaller and smaller," Dax said sadly. "The only one I can really count on is RJ. She's been with me my whole life. If I fell she picked me up and dusted me off. If I cried she held me till I stopped. She took care of me when I was sick and when I was grieving for my mother. She's always known just what to do or say to make me feel better. Now she's hurting and I don't have any idea what to do or say."

"She has lost mates before," Baldor said, he was trying to be helpful.