Chains of Destruction Read online

  Chains of Destruction

  by

  Selina Rosen

  Table of Contents

  Book Two of the Chains Trilogy

  Chains of Destruction

  Selina Rosen

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Chains of Destruction: Copyright ©2002 Selina Rosen. First Edition: June 2002 Meisha Merlin books

  A Baen Ebook

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  Cover art by Charles Keegan

  ISBN 10: 1-8920-6569-X

  ISBN 13: 978-1-8920-6569-8

  First ebook, March 2008

  Electronic version by WebWrights

  www.webwrights.com

  Prologue

  Jago stared at his two subordinates with utter contempt. They were beaten, battered and dripping filth all over his throne room. If he had been angry when he summoned them, he was furious upon seeing them. Especially Kirk. She stood there with an infuriating air of arrogance on her face, as if she had done nothing wrong and dared him to say otherwise.

  "You incompetent idiots!" Jago screamed, his blubber shaking in rage. "You utter fools! How could you let this happen?"

  "We thought . . . We thought she was dead. We thought the rebellion had been utterly obliterated. We couldn't have foreseen this. How could we have prepared for something no one could have seen coming?" Governor General Right tried to explain their actions, or lack thereof. He had spent a lifetime cultivating the fine art of appeasing those above him in rank, and considered himself quite good at it. Good enough in fact to talk his way out of even this most recent disaster. He had one problem, however, and Jago was looking right at her.

  "What about you, Kirk? Enlighten me. This was your zone; ultimately you're responsible for what has happened there. What do you have to say for yourself? Anything? Anything at all!"

  Jessica had been staring at a spot on the floor with the eye she had left after her encounter with RJ. She was focusing intently on a place where the dried blood had flaked off her hand and formed a small pile at her feet. Slowly she looked up at Jago with more contempt than even he could muster. She smiled, not at all a pleasant sight, and much to Right's dismay she began to speak.

  "You giant, ugly, malignant toad! You asked us to accomplish the impossible, and we tried. We all tried. We bent and broke laws; we did everything in our power. We went above and beyond. Do you truly believe I would have let my guard down for even a minute if I hadn't been sure she was dead? If I had known RJ was alive I couldn't have slept; I couldn't have eaten. RJ, self righteous and indignant, confounded us for years; an angry RJ will totally annihilate us.

  "Look at me! Do I look like I didn't try? You can't beat RJ! It can't be done!" Jessica's eye grew large and wild looking. "She's like cockroaches. You think that you've killed her, but she just comes back mutated and does bigger and badder things. Hell, she robbed the bank at Satis and blew up Capital after she was supposed to be dead."

  Jago started to speak, but Jessica fixed him with a cold stare that seemed to literally suck all the air out of him. "No! You shut up. Just shut the hell up! I know what you plan to do to us. You'll do what you always do to cover up your own incompetence; you'll have us executed. Well, kill me if you want. Kill me because I have failed. I only cared about one thing, and I can't do it! She's always going to win." Jessica started to laugh hysterically, and the guards moved closer to her. She stopped laughing abruptly and fixed Jago with a stare.

  "On second thought, I'm not ready to die." Suddenly she leapt through the air landing with her feet planted on Jago's lap. Without stopping she knelt down, grabbed his head in a headlock and gave it a cruel twist. She jumped back to the floor as a gurgling sound left Jago's lips. The guards watched in horror as he fell from his chair face first onto the floor. His fat hadn't quite stopped rippling when Jessica put a hand to her mouth in mock horror. "Oops!"

  While the two rattled guards were trying to figure out what had just happened and how, Jessica leapt at one delivering a killing kick to the bridge of his nose. Grabbing his weapon she turned and fired on the second guard as she ducked away from the laser bolt he had just fired at her. Then she ran over and grabbed his weapon as well. As she stood to her full height she turned to look at Right.

  "Are you coming?" she asked.

  Right looked from her to the fallen body of Sector Leader Jago. "My god, Jessy . . . What the hell have you done?"

  "I killed him. They were going to kill us anyway, Right. They can only kill me once, and I'm damned if I'm going to make it easy for them. The only question you should be asking yourself now is do you stand a better chance with me, or without me?"

  She offered him one of the lasers, and he took it nodding. "I'm with you."

  The two guards that had been stationed outside the chamber door chose that moment to rush in and die, but they had already sounded the general alarm.

  As Kirk and Right ran through the halls of the palace Right realized that this was what Jessica Kirk had been created for. She was a GSH, a genetically superior humanoid, created for battle. Putting her behind a desk had been a waste. She sensed would-be ambushes before they appeared and killed trained soldiers before they could fire a single shot. Perhaps if Jessica had been physically leading her troops instead of just giving orders she might have beaten RJ.

  Maybe, but Right somehow doubted it. RJ and Jessica were made from the same genetic stuff, but RJ was superior even to Jessica. And RJ's troops were motivated by something the Reliance couldn't hope to understand much less duplicate.

  It was rather late in the game to think about any of that now – way too late. In a split second Jessica had turned them into the enemies of not just the rebellion but of the very Reliance they had spent their lives serving.

  The Reliance was the single strongest power in the universe. He'd been taught this since birth. He didn't even know why they were running. Where the hell they were going? Was there any place in the universe remote enough that one of their enemies couldn't root them out? What sort of life could they possibly have? What sort of an existence could they hope to eke out when every hand was turned against them? He'd probably be better off dead, yet he didn't lower his weapon, and he never stopped fighting. There was something in him stronger than logic; something that wanted to live.

  The helicopter port was adequately manned and guarded for a normal attack, but this was no normal attack. This was an attack by a crazed mad woman with the strength and armor of a small tank. In seconds the way to the copter had been cleared, and Right found himself being dragged along behind her. She practically slung him in the copter before getting in herself and punching the ignition. They took off under a hail of laser fire, and Jessica started laughing. In seconds they were out of range of even the laser cannons, and she just kept laughing. For one horrible moment Right was sure she was never going to stop.

  "We've lost everything, Jessica, everything! We have nowhere to go and no one to turn to. We are fugitives with no real options. What's so damn funny about that?"

  "I just realized something. Something so awful I don't even want to think it, but I can't help myself." She quit laughing. "It came to me when I was looking at fat, pompous, worthless Jago – just before I killed him – and I knew what people mean when they say My blood ran cold, because it did. Suddenly I knew something so true and so horrible that I was consumed by it for a moment." She started laughing again. In fact she laughed harder than she had before.

  "What! What do you know, Jessica?" Right demanded losing his
patience.

  "We were on the wrong side," Jessica said turning to look at him with no sign of laughter in her voice or in her features. "You, me, Jack. All on the wrong side. Worse still, I know this only now when I have made an enemy of the only person in the universe who is likely to be able to kill me, and I went after her not because she killed the man I loved. I never really loved Jack. I went after her with such a vengeance because she broke something I wasn't done playing with yet, and because she was better than I was. We're free, Right. Don't you get it? For the first time in our lives we have no one but ourselves to answer to."

  "We probably won't live a week," Right mumbled.

  "So? We'll live one week free. A whole week with no one to answer to and no orders to follow, and it will be the most wonderful week of our lives. This is it. This is what RJ and her goons were fighting for." Much to his dismay she started laughing again. "We were on the wrong side, Right. We were on the wrong side all the time."

  Right cringed at the manic sound of her laughter as it echoed around the tiny cockpit. He took a deep breath and released it slowly, fighting panic. There was no doubt that she was now completely mad, so Right took no comfort in the knowledge that she was probably right.

  Chapter 1

  When Governor General Right and Senator Jessica Kirk assassinated Sector Leader Jago they left Zone 2-A completely without leadership. The Reliance quickly filled the empty positions with officers who were even more incompetent. Officers who didn't know or understand the Zone, and personnel who had no idea how the rebels worked.

  Taking immediate advantage of this total lack of competent leadership, RJ led her troops in one successful attack after another. Like dominos Reliance installations inside Zone 2-A fell before them. Within months the Reliance pulled out of zone 2-A altogether.

  The Reliance never called it a defeat. Officially they simply decided that Zone 2-A had become an unprofitable venture, a liability. That it would cost more to make the zone functional for the Reliance than it was worth.

  They offered the New Alliance a treaty that neither side ever signed. There was never a summit; the two sides never met. Instead there was a silent agreement. The Reliance would stay out of Zone 2-A as long as the New Alliance didn't attack Reliance installations outside the Zone. It was an agreement neither group trusted the other side to keep, so there was at best a guarded truce with both sides just waiting for the other to step even one foot over the border.

  To make sure the work units outside the zone understood that the Reliance had actually won, the Reliance imposed harsh economic sanctions against the Zone. When it was obvious that the Zone didn't need them to survive, the Reliance built a huge studio housing a fake Zone 2-A and broadcast daily reports about how badly the free state was faring. According to the Reliance, people in Zone 2-A were starving, and disease was rampant.

  The Reliance turned a liability into an asset. The unrest that had started to erupt throughout the work units around the world came to an abrupt halt when they believed they would pay for their freedom with starvation and disease. They put down their weapons and went back to work when they saw the horrible "realities" of freedom.

  Of course the Reliance reports were far from the truth. Life had never been any better in the land the New Alliance called New Freedom. There was plenty of food, plenty of clean water, and the people were free to do as they wanted.

  In fact that seemed to be their only real problem.

  * * *

  "I said," RJ repeated through tightly clenched teeth. "I abstain. As in I'm not voting."

  "Why not?" Mickey asked. "We are all in agreement. If we do not set up a system of government soon, New Freedom will fall without the help of the Reliance. In the beginning the people ran around like they were crazy engaging in every form of debauchery and pleasure. Just when we were all sure that they would kill each other they got tired of playing, and now they just sit all day waiting to be told what to do. They are so used to being ordered around they don't know how to act. They need some guidance, some rules and a purpose."

  "He's right, RJ," Topaz started. "These people don't know what to do with their freedom. The zone is in ruins; institutions must be rebuilt. We need schools and hospitals, and we need people to be trained as doctors, nurses, and teachers. Even you must agree that we need a military of some kind to protect what we have won, or we have no chance of keeping it."

  "I know all that, but I don't have to like it. You don't need my vote for it to pass, and I don't want to vote on this." She stood up. "In fact, I don't want to vote on anything. I'm not cut out for any of this rule-making crap! You guys do it, and call me when we have a war to fight."

  She walked out. Both Levits and David started to follow her. When they came up even with each other they stopped and glared at one another, each challenging the other's right to go after RJ.

  It was a power struggle that Topaz was tired of and not in the mood to deal with.

  "We don't have time for any chest pounding gentlemen. We have decisions to make," Topaz said. "RJ has made hers, and we all know that no amount of coaxing is going to get her to change her mind."

  Both men nodded and sat down.

  The meeting went on for hours. In the end they decided that since general voting was impossible to implement in a largely illiterate, mostly non-technological society, the inner circle would choose six people from each community to govern. Mickey was made President of New Freedom. He would solve problems that couldn't be solved at a community level with the help of the rest of the members of the inner circle and the super computer Marge.

  Their first priority was civil defense. All citizens over the age of sixteen would be enlisted and armed. Once a week they would meet in the town squares across the country and drill to make sure that they were always combat ready. The six governors of each community would double as drill sergeants.

  Each citizen would be required to give three days a month to community service in an effort to rebuild necessary military installations and power plants destroyed in the war. They would also build hospitals and schools. The first order of business would be to repair the viewing screens in each town. Then the viewing screens could be used to warn people of bad weather and other troubles and teach them necessary skills. Everything from reading to surgical techniques could be taught this way.

  "I'll go tell RJ," David said as the meeting ended.

  "I'll tell her," Levits hissed. "Why don't you go do what you're best at, turning good things into shit."

  Topaz cleared his throat. "I'll tell RJ." For whatever reason they didn't argue with him.

  Topaz took a deep breath and let it out. He thought he knew where to find her. He walked out of the ancient prison and out onto the wall that surrounded the old exercise yard. As expected RJ was standing at the very end looking out across the water at the site that had once been a great city.

  Topaz often thought of RJ as a ghost that haunted this place. Right now as she stood staring at something he knew was gone, her expression unreadable and her white hair blowing in the slight breeze, she looked the part.

  He walked up to her, and without waiting for her to acknowledge his presence he told her all that had been decided in the meeting.

  "It sounds feasible," RJ said in a noncommittal tone.

  "You want to tell me what's wrong?" Topaz asked, gently putting a hand on her shoulder.

  "Everything is futile." She sighed. "I have just realized that in civilization there is no true freedom, only degrees of enslavement. That eventually, try as you might to set it up so that it can't happen, governments take away most, if not all, rights. It is a natural progression over which the masses have very little control because you have taken control away from them for their own good. Anarchy doesn't work, therefore you have to build a government. People run a government. People in power become aware of their power, and if they don't it's a sure bet that the ones who take over from them will.

  "People have different likes and dislikes an
d different things that annoy them. They start out with obvious rules about not killing one another or stealing from each other, but before you know what has happened there will be rules about how fast people can drive, who they can drive with, what they can wear, eat, drink, watch. Who they can have sex with, who can reproduce and who can't . . . It's all just a matter of time. Governments start out doing just what's right, but "right" is subjective, and humanoids are easily swayed. Eventually, the New Alliance will turn into the Reliance, for no other reason than that each new group that comes to power would be annoyed by different things.

  "Most type E planets develop many different races through natural selection, and those races develop even more diverse cultures, religions and governments. But sooner or later the more plentiful or more progressive races take over the planet. One by one they kill off the less powerful races until the planet is one race, one government. It happened on Argy, it happened here, and because of the Reliance and the Argy it is currently happening at an accelerated rate on dozens of worlds. They are killing off entire races and cultures, just as we killed off the different races and cultures on our own planet. We can slow them down, but we won't stop them because eventually our own people – the government that we are starting today – will finish the Reliance cause. They will, that is, if the Argy's don't win. In the end not even the entire universe is big enough for more than one race.