Chains of Redemption (40 page)

Baldor wasn't really too surprised when it was Pete's words which decided him. He walked up and put his hand on Baldor's shoulder. "Go, be with your mother. Your father is dead, she needs you, and you need her. It's just a battle, like so many others we've fought."

Baldor nodded; the boy was right. But he looked at RJ half hoping she'd insist that she needed him. She didn't even turn to face him. He sighed.

"I'm coming home, Mom," he said, and watched the relief wash over his mother's tired features. He wondered momentarily what she thought he was going to do. How she thought he could help. Maybe she just needed to be with him the way he now felt that he needed to be with her and Sandra. Needed to be home, on the world he'd been born on, with his people.

Baldor was packing his bag when she walked into his room.

"I'm really sorry to hear about your dad," she said.

"Really?" he spat back angrily. "It didn't seem that way to me."

"I'm sorry for your loss," she said defensively.

"What about you? He was your friend once. You started all of this together. When Mickey," his voice caught in his throat and he swallowed hard. "When Mickey died, you cried like a baby, you fell completely apart."

"Actually I cried up till he was dead, and then I stopped," she said quietly.

"Why?"

"Because once he was dead there was no chance that he was going to suddenly get better, hop up and become Mickey again." She shrugged. "Because once someone's dead they just aren't there anymore."

"Do you have no tears at all for my father?" Baldor cried. "He loved you, RJ, he loved you."

"He didn't know me!" Jessica shouted back, and just for a second it looked like she was going to tell him something more enlightening than what she wound up saying. "I've spent much more time with you than I did with him. That was literally your lifetime ago. He and I grew apart."

"As you and I will grow apart," Baldor said accusingly. "As you'll distance yourself from everyone and everything except Pete. I loved you, RJ, not as my father did, as a friend, but as a man loves a woman. I stopped on the day that I realized that you were never going to love me back. That I was more like a pet than a person to you. You cared for me, but you could live without me, and when I'm gone you'll only remember me because you can't forget, not because I meant one damn thing to you." He was hurt, and his pain allowed him to say things he'd never been able to say to her before, and he supposed because he was in pain she let him. "I still care for you, more than I want to. More than I ought to considering you treat me with little or no concern. I could have been what he was to you, your beloved Gerald. You and I might have shared a love as potent and as rich, but you wouldn't allow it. If you would have but asked it I would have deserted my mother, my family in their time of grief and flown across the galaxy with you to fight yet another campaign. But what would you do for me? What if anything do I mean to you?"

"I cared enough about you not to fall in love with you," she said sadly. "Go back to your planet, find a woman who will love you the way you deserve to be loved." She walked over and kissed him on the check. "Think of me fondly from time to time, but never look back."

She turned and walked out of the room.

Baldor watched her walk away and a cold chill went up his spine. He knew he was never going to see her again. His thought was solidified when Pete, Dax and a dozen others showed up at the dock to see him off, but RJ was nowhere in sight.

Pete was tearing up, no doubt because Baldor had been as close to a father as the boy had ever had. He held Baldor longer than he should have when he embraced him, and a whole lot tighter.

Baldor looked hopefully around the dock, hating himself for doing it, then furthered his shame by asking Pete, who still hadn't let him go, "Where's RJ?"

The boy leaned into his ear then and whispered something so astonishing Baldor almost fainted. Pete let go of him then and took a step back saying, "That's why she didn't cry when he died."

Baldor nodded. He knew it was a secret, and the fact that the boy would tell him something about his beloved mother that she obviously didn't want told let Baldor know just how much Pete cared for him. "I won't tell," he whispered, stepping closer to Pete for a moment. At least he had left a lasting mark on someone. "You take care of yourself, kid."

Pete nodded, tears falling on his cheeks. "You take care of yourself. After all I'm a GSH, not much can happen to me. I'll come see you on Beta 4."

So even Pete knew Baldor wasn't coming back again.

Baldor boarded the boat and headed for the mainland and the transmat station. In a few hours he'd be boarding a ship headed for home. He watched as the island got smaller and the faces of his friends blurred till they were unrecognizable. Alsterase Island, it and the supercomputer it contained, had always been so important to their war effort. He wondered what would become of it when peace broke out everywhere.

He wondered what would happen to the platinum blond war goddess who had led them, whoever she might really be. What happened to someone who had lived for battle when there were no more battles to be fought?

He wondered what was going to happen to him. He had also lived for the battle, and for her. Without her, without a battle to fight, did he even know who he was? He was going home to be with his family and his old friends, but he'd hardly visited in the last twenty years, and when he had been there just three weeks ago . . .

How can he be dead? I was just there, I just saw him. He was old and frail, but . . . He's dead; accept it. What am I ever going to do with the information Pete just gave me? I know why he told me, so I'd understand why she wasn't upset. But now there are a billion other things I just don't understand. She is the devil from all the stories my father told me when I was a child. Yet even at her worst that wasn't the woman I fought beside, not the woman that I knew
.

This thought brought him a surprising glimmer of hope for his own future. If she could change that much, then who was to say he couldn't settle down quite happily to a normal life on his home planet? Maybe raise a couple of kids, grow some crops, and . . .

What the hell was he thinking! He'd die of boredom. He was going home to grow old and die, just as his father had done. He sat down in the boat and cried for the rest of the ride to the mainland. The people in the boat with him pretended not to notice, and no doubt thought he was crying for his father.

When they were in range Poley cautiously hailed the space station.

He had asked RJ, "What should I say?"

"Say what you wish to say, all is for nothing and nothing is for me," she had replied.

"You know, RJ, you're really starting to piss me off," Poley said, raising his voice ever so slightly to show that he was agitated.

This had caused her to laugh. The first real laugh he'd heard pass her lips in years.

"Just tell me what I should say. We have no idea what has happened here in the years that we've been gone. Whether the Reliance is still in power, the New Alliance or even the Argy," Poley said.

"When in doubt, tell the truth."

Poley thought about that for a minute, and decided nothing of any value was likely to come from her mouth soon, so he put together his own message. "People and computers of the space station I don't know the name of, we are approaching in our vessel, the Avonlea. We are in an old Reliance military troop carrier, but there are only three of us, we have been lost in space for several dozen years and are completely neutral concerning all things political. May we please dock at your station?"

To his surprise, Marge's voice droned back, "We have been expecting you. Please dock."

Poley walked all through the ship till he found RJ laying in the middle of the floor making bubbles by blowing through a wire hoop covered with sudsy water.

He relayed the communication just as it had transpired, and RJ slung the bubbles aside and sat bolt upright.

"Now that's interesting indeed," she said, and it almost looked like she might actually get up without further coaxing.

"Are you sure, RJ?" Poley asked, working very hard on his best sarcastic voice. "Are you sure it isn't bland and nothing circled in a ring of meaninglessness?"

She laughed and then she did get up. "Marge, you say?"

"Yes, Marge, and she seemed to be expecting us, at least expecting the ship."

"And you stupidly told them there were only three of us," RJ said.

"I didn't figure it would matter to you since everything we do is only nothing and . . ."

"You do understand!" she said excitedly, and hugged him. Then she released him and skipped off in the direction of the bridge, which he was no longer sure was a good thing.

When he got to the bridge Alan was sitting in his seat looking shocked and more than a little scared, and RJ was talking to the space station.

"Yo, Marge! This is RJ in the Avonlea. By the way, everything is nothing and nothing really matters."

"I know," Marge droned back.

"Damn! It
is
you, Marge. Hey listen, who exactly has been expecting us?"

"Us, we have been expecting you," Marge said.

"Who us?" RJ asked.

"You and me."

RJ's hand moved away from the transmitter, closing transmission to the space station. The near idiot half smile that had graced RJ's features for the last five plus years eroded to be replaced by a look of pure rage. "Kirk!" she spat out. She depressed the com button again. "Marge, have I been here the whole time?"

"Here and there, and we have been waiting for your return."

RJ let go of the button again, stomped to the middle of the bridge and started pacing. "Kirk!" she hissed again, then started mumbling almost to herself. "Jessica kills Jago, and I hate her, so she can't stay in Reliance space. So she goes to Argy space and hides out, but once I'm gone all she's got to do is get an eye, any eye, and she can just come right back to Earth and take over being me. Topaz was right, you can never go home again." She let out a roaring, growling scream that echoed through the ship. Then she took off in the direction of her cabin.

"Where's she going?" Alan asked.

Poley shrugged. "I'm sure I don't know."

When she came back a few minutes later she had changed into an old Reliance issue sleeveless black coverall, she had her chain wrapped around her waist with a blaster in the coils, she'd cut her hair, and he could see where Jessica's eye cube bulged in her pocket.

"Glad to have you back," Poley said with a smile.

She smiled back at her metal brother and walked over and messed up his hair. "Nice to be back. Now dock this freaking ship and let's figure out just exactly what's happened while we've been gone."

Alan gave Poley a confused look, and Poley smiled. "I think my sister just found something that mattered to her."

Alan stayed close to Poley and RJ as the bay door opened, and he entered the tube with great trepidation. He followed just behind them. Knowing that they didn't really know what to expect made him feel even less secure. For the first time he began to wonder if he should have stayed on Frionia. It wasn't after all such a bad place and . . . Aaah! There were aliens everywhere he looked. The docks were crowded. Surely nothing could be accomplished with so many people in the same place. Then they all started chanting RJ's name.

Alan wondered if they had lied to him about the life expectancy of humans. Most of these people looked younger than he was. How could they remember RJ? Unless they were older than they appeared, most of them wouldn't have been alive when RJ had landed on Frionia. Then he remembered what Poley had told him about RJ, and realized what RJ had been so upset about on the ship. One of the clones had taken her place, the most hated one, the one she'd told him stories about when he was a child. The one whose eye she carried in her pocket.

That was why she'd lost her religion.

RJ looked at the sea of humanity chanting her name and wanted to scream. Kirk had stolen her identity, and
Nothing
only knew what she'd done with it. That she had infiltrated the New Alliance was clear, just exactly what she had done with it wasn't so obvious.

Fortunately, it wouldn't be very hard for RJ to find out. She'd just borrow a trick from her hated sibling and pretend to be her . . . self. By the end of the day she should know everything that had transpired while she was gone and where her opponent was. Which was good, because she was sure that by now Jessica Kirk knew just exactly where
she
was.

She had been sound asleep when the alarm rang. The alarm she had set up so long ago that only she knew its true meaning. Jessica jumped out of bed and threw on her robe, then she headed for the main computer complex.