Chains of Redemption (41 page)

"Where is she?" Jessica asked.

"Her ship has just docked on Justice Station, and she has been greeted."

"Visual," Jessica ordered. In seconds she was looking at a picture of her sister flanked by the robot—did he look older?—and some obviously alien boy. RJ didn't look happy. She looked for and found the camera, and then she stared into it. For a moment Jessica was sure she was looking right at her.

"So RJ's back. She found some near Earth normal world to hang out on until she got enough fuel to get back. I think I'm more surprised that it took her so long than that she was able to do it at all. So what now?"

She'd never really gotten around to making a plan. The obvious answer was to take Pete, break and run for it, but that really wasn't her style.

There was really only one answer.

She met her son in the mess hall for breakfast as she always did when they were home. She carefully kept her emotions in check. "Things are pretty quiet these days. Why don't you go to Beta 4 and spend some time with Baldor?"

His head snapped up, and he was obviously excited at the prospect. "By myself?"

Jessica laughed. "I think you're old enough to take a trip by yourself, don't you?"

"Yes, when can I leave?"

"There's no battle looming on the horizon, and you're not a child anymore. You could go whenever you wanted. Baldor was pretty upset by his mother's death, and it might be nice for him to have an old friend around. Someone once said that no matter how old you are, when your parents are both dead, you're an orphan. That's got to be tough, especially when you grew up with two such loving parents. Why not leave today?"

"So soon?" and now he was a little suspicious.

"Why not? There's nothing really happening here, just a bunch of boring deskwork. Shoveling funds here and moving product there."

"You could come with me, you know he'd love to see you . . ."

"I can't. Someone has to help Dax do all that boring fund-shoveling and product-pushing."

"All right, I'll go pack." He kissed her cheek, then took off at a run. He was looking forward to this time apart from her, which was normal. He was a grown man; he shouldn't be spending all his time with his mother. He wasn't a boy anymore, and it was high time he struck out on his own, had a little independence.

It hurt that he didn't need her anymore, but she supposed that was good, since she might not be around forever after all. Still it, was a sharp pain in her soul to know that she had done such a good job raising him that she had made herself unnecessary.

She knew there was no way RJ could get there in less than a week, but she still breathed easier when Pete's ship left Moonbase Station.

As soon as his ship had been given the all clear she ordered an evacuation of the fort on Alsterase Island, leaving only enough personnel to run the computer complex.

"RJ, what the hell's going on?" Dax demanded after loading his wife and children safely into a helicopter. "Are we under attack?"

"Not yet," Jessica answered.

"We can't leave the fort. We can't leave Marge. The entire New Alliance is run from here. Everything depends on the computer."

"We downloaded all of Marge's files onto crystals and had the crystals sent to Sever Station two years ago . . ."

"The new Sever Station computer complex won't be finished for ten years. What would you like us to do in the meantime?"

"I'll try to keep the fight outside," Jessica said thoughtfully. Then added, almost to herself, "We never should have had all our guns in this armory. We should have had a secondary supercomputer built long ago. Still, if I can keep the fight outside . . ."

"Fight? What fight are you talking about, RJ?" Dax demanded, apparently tired of being left out of the loop.

Jessica looked at him. He wasn't the baby she had nurtured through the flu, the boy she had played with, or even the young man she had helped to mold into a leader. He was a forty-two year old man with children of his own and responsibilities far greater than most beings. She sighed, no sense candy coating it.

"All right, Dax, the fast track. I'm not RJ. You've never known RJ. She disappeared from our space before you were a twinkle in your father's eye. I hated my life, I wanted to make a change, and so I took over hers. No harm no foul. Well, now, RJ's back in our space, and she'll come here, for me.

"I suppose I could make a run for it. Hide from her, but then we'll just be chasing each other for eternity. I could at the very least leave Alsterase Island, which would remove Marge from harm's way. But it would make me more vulnerable, put me out in the open, and that's no way to prepare for battle. This is the most fortified complex in the entire New Alliance. This is where she'll expect me to be. This is where it has to happen. She knows I'm not going to run, because she wouldn't run. I'm not going to just gift-wrap my ass and hand it to her. If she wants me, she's going to have to come in here and get me."

Dax was silent, just seeming to let his mind digest all that she had said. Then he looked up at her. "I'm not leaving."

"What!"

"I said I'm not leaving. I am President of New Freedom of Earth. I have a responsibility to this world, this space, to you . . . you're my best friend. I don't care—how could I care—about who you were before I was even born. As far as I'm concerned you're RJ, and this other woman is the imposter. I'm going to stay here, with you, and help you fight her."

"Dax . . . what can you do? She's me and I'm her. She's a GSH, and for the record, on the one other occasion we stood toe to toe, she stomped my ass in no uncertain terms."

"I . . . I can help run the weapons console. Maybe I could talk to her."

Jessica laughed, not at him, but at what he said. "I don't think RJ is coming across the vastness of both charted and uncharted space to do any 'talking'. RJ is a creature of action, not words. Even more than I am."

"All my life you have protected me. When you went into battle I stayed on this island and hid. Now someone is coming here for you, and I'm not going to run from here to hide somewhere else. I won't run to safety while I leave you and the computer that runs our entire empire in jeopardy. I would lose all credibility as a leader."

"No one would know, Dax," Jessica said in a pleading tone. "I'd rather have you out of harm's way."

"I would know. I'm not a child anymore, and I don't need your protection." Suddenly his voice eroded in anger. "Why did you wait till now to tell me? I have told you everything, every humiliating, stupid, or just plain wrong thing that I've ever done. I thought there were no secrets between us. You could have told me."

"Dax, do you know what you're saying? You got caught masturbating by a girl you had a crush on. You fell off the dock, showing off for your friends and broke your arm. The worst thing you ever did was throw a grenade in a toilet." She pounded her fist into her chest three times hard, as tears streamed down her face. "I blew up a city, and not just any city, but Alsterase. I had a GSH built specifically to kill my own sister. How could I ever just tell you that? I'm sick to death of everyone making excuses for me and forgiving me without a moment's hesitation. What I did is inexcusable, and no one seems to be even really pissed off. Well, now finally someone's coming who understands what I did, and she
is
pissed. Whatever happens, there is finally going to be some closure."

Dax closed the space between them and wrapped his arms around her waist, resting his head on her stomach. "Nothing could change the way I feel about you. No one blames you, because we all know you, the person you have become. It's not fair. It seems like we just crushed the last of the Reliance resistance. This was supposed to be a time of peace, and now what? What's going to happen? What do you honestly think is going to happen?"

Jessica took a deep breath and expelled it. "RJ will come, I don't know exactly when or how, but it will be soon, and it will be spectacular. She's coming to kill me. I'll try to talk her out of it, it won't work, and we'll fight till one of us is dead."

"Then what?"

"Well, that rather depends on who winds up dead, doesn't it?"

"Beer is cool," Alan drooled from where he half-stood, half-lay against the bar.

"I think you should stop drinking now," Poley suggested sternly.

"I never want to stop drinking," Alan laughed.

"If you continue to drink, you will continue to lose motor function until you fall onto the floor, and then you will in all likelihood vomit a disgusting combination of the pretzels you've swallowed without really chewing, beer and stomach bile."

Alan wrinkled his nose up and looked at Poley with slightly blurred vision. "Really?"

"Yes, really," Poley answered. "I think perhaps you should drink some water now."

"Oh, all right," Alan said, thinking that Poley could be a horrible killjoy at times. RJ was in the corner of the bar playing some game with bottle caps. She was laughing and seemed to be having a good time, and Alan said as much to Poley as he pushed a glass of water into Alan's hand.

"She's gathering information," Poley explained glancing over his shoulder at his sister.

"I think she's just having a good time," Alan argued.

"That would be nice."

She was winning at bottle caps, but then the only one who'd ever beaten her at the archaic barroom game was Poley. As she played, she pumped the patrons of the bar for information that they gladly gave her.

It took only a little effort to get them to tell her everything she needed to know without actually asking direct questions. After all, they all believed she knew. Many of these men and women had fought in campaigns against the Reliance, and they were more than happy to tell battle story after gory battle story—she just filled in the gaps.

By the time she had won thirty-two successive games of bottle caps, and before Alan had quite sobered up from his first experience with fermented grain, she knew more than she needed to. She gathered up Poley and Alan and headed back to the Avonlea.

By all accounts Jessica Kirk had defeated the Reliance. This made RJ's return completely unnecessary and therefore very anti-climactic. This being the case, a more rational being would have programmed the ship for a different destination. RJ wasn't feeling very rational. There was no place for her here now, and for that and so many other things, Kirk was going to pay.

RJ had been more or less sure the moment she smelled the full strength whiskey in her glass, and saw the sign over the bar that offered prostitutes of every sex and type at reasonable prices, that the Reliance had been totally and completely beaten. Everything she had learned after that just confirmed what she already knew.

While she'd been stuck on Frionia experiencing the living death of just existing, Kirk had been living RJ's, life with her friends, on her planet, carrying out her crusade. Worse yet, RJ got the impression that Kirk had actually managed to achieve a quicker, less painful, more complete exchange of power than she would have pulled off in the same time frame, and that did nothing but feed her growing need for revenge.

If you were going to take over my life and my quest, the least you could have done was to fail miserably at it
, RJ thought as she sat at the pilot's console of the ship.

"RJ, are you sure you don't want me to do that?" Poley asked as he buckled Alan—who was still drunk—into his seat.

"I think it's high time I take back control of my destiny, Tin Pants. Don't you?" She started powering up the ship.

"I think we should wait till Alan is sober before we take off, and I think I should pilot the ship since you've never actually done it before."

"Alan's about to learn a valuable lesson in temperance, and just because I've never done something doesn't mean I don't know how or that I shouldn't," RJ informed him.

He nodded and handed a bag to Alan.

"What's this for?" Alan asked with a giggle.

"You'll figure it out," Poley said. He took his seat and strapped himself in.

Alan watched as RJ lined the ship up with the jumpgate and thought how pretty and light it was. Then the ship lurched forward at a high rate of speed, and it felt like they were slingshot through an ass hole backwards.

Alan felt like he was going to puke and remembered the bag. He brought it up to his lips and felt the beer and half eaten pretzels forced out of his stomach, through his throat, and into the bag. The pretzels scratched his throat as they came up, and he was sure he was going to die.

The ship seemed to stabilize till it felt more like what he was used to, but he just kept throwing up into the bag until he feared it was going to get overfull and burst.

He heard belts being unclicked, and then Poley was at his side, unbuckling him and holding the bag for him. Poley patted his back in a comforting way.