Chains of Redemption Read online

  The Reliance officials had threatened to call off the meeting, or worse yet call up their own battle fleet. In the huge, very loud argument that ensued between Jessica and the Reliance liaison, Jessica explained that she wasn't about to come into a pit full of vipers without some snake charmers. After several more minutes of screaming, the Reliance lackeys admitted they had no real recourse, and the summit meeting was called into session.

  Not that the Reliance seemed to understand the real situation in the slightest. They mostly wanted to flex some political muscle and watch her cave in to all their demands under the guise of "saving humanity from the alien menace."

  She wasn't into playing their game. She was far removed from her days as a desktop general. She was a battle general now, the kind that fought with her fists instead of her keyboard, and she found that she no longer had any patience at all for their vast store of bureaucratic bullshit.

  "You wouldn't have called a temporary truce or asked for this summit if you truly thought you could defeat or even contain the Argy without us." Jessica all but spat on the Reliance Governor who sat across the huge conference table from her. His statement to the effect that if the New Alliance would surrender to them they could reunite the Reliance and defeat the Argy had been exactly what she expected of them, but still not what she wanted to hear.

  "I had forgotten how completely arrogant and equally stupid is the Reliance indoctrinated brain. We will not ever go backwards. We will go forward. The Reliance will either become the New Alliance, or there will be no alliance between my people and yours. Your society is no better than what the Argys offer if they should win. They enslave the people; you enslave the people. There is no advantage for us in choosing you over them. We already have an agreement with them. Our proposal would bring hope back to the people of the Reliance. It would give freedom to all human kind. It would give the soldiers something worth fighting for."

  The governor got to his feet. His added height didn't intimidate Jessica in the least, and she proved it by keeping her seat and looking disinterested as he started to bellow, even going so far as to yawn and pretend to be looking at her fingernails. "Your proposal is preposterous! How dare you assume that you know what is right for the whole of the Reliance? The Reliance has been in control for hundreds of years . . ."

  "And humankind has been shackled for all that time," Jessica reminded. "The Reliance jerked freewill from the people and made the human race slaves to a handful of bureaucrats at the top . . . You people, actually. So is it any wonder that you would rather risk the total absorption of our race by the Argy than share your power and freedom with the masses? It's a lose, lose proposition for you. Either way people like you become extinct—just one more work unit trying to make its way in the great scheme of the cosmos. I imagine the thought that you might have to climb out of your lofty towers and come down here with the rest of us terrifies you."

  "There must be freedom for all, the Elite and the work unit alike. All must profit from the society or it is flawed," Gerald added from where he sat on Jessica's right.

  "And are there truly no problems on the two planets you currently hold?" the governor asked in a smug voice.

  When she thought back on it later, she determined that that had been the moment she lost all pretense of patience with him and the whole lot. "Show me one of the many propaganda disks you've made showing how rough we in the New Alliance held territories have it, and I'll shove it up your ass," Jessica hissed out, and now she stood to her full height—which put her about four inches above the governor, so that she was looking down at him, which in her estimation was exactly as things should be. "The only problems we have are caused by the things the Reliance did, or are still doing. Morale in the Reliance, both among the work units and the military, is at an all-time low because everyone is fed up. In spite of the crap you keep feeding them about us, they still see us as a viable alternative to the way you're making them live, so what does that say about the Reliance? It's a relic, and its time—the time it never should have had in the first place—is over. Who knows what has made this generation different from past ones, but the people as a whole are finally past believing that their lives are as good as they could be, that they are better off than they should expect. They are finally looking around them and seeing that some people live in golden towers and eat caviar while others live in dung heaps and eat garbage. This generation wants more than a subsistence life and mates that have been picked for them by a computer. They want to be able to choose their own destinies."

  "If history has told us nothing else, it has told us that such systems of government are doomed to failure," one of the council members said.

  "Give the masses free will and you guarantee anarchy," another added. "The Earth's history is filled with such governments, all of which were doomed to failure."

  "They were doomed to failure because the rich and powerful used them for their own gain." Her voice rose in pitch as she continued. "What I have learned from history is that the rich are inherently evil, and that evil people will willingly sell their governments, their families, and their people out completely to stay in power, to stay rich, and become richer. The governments deteriorated because it became impossible for an honest, hard-working man to run for political office. They deteriorated because the people who cared only for making themselves and their friends even richer bought their way into public office. They created the Reliance. The New Alliance has made laws that will keep that from happening because you people don't give a damn about anyone but yourselves, your comfort, your authority, your stuff, and having more stuff than the guy you're sitting next to in this room today."

  The governor looked at her and smiled a smug, arrogant smile, one that said that he somehow thought he was winning the argument; he obviously thought that something she had just said would be her undoing. And that was finally the point at which, having already lost all patience with them, she decided they just weren't worth messing with. She jumped up on the table and kicked the governor in his smug smile. His face collapsed on the toe of her boot, and he wasn't smiling anymore. She kicked his body, oozing gray matter and blood, off her foot and watched with glee as the falling body flipped his chair over backwards and fell to sprawl with a thud on the floor.

  No one in the chamber had any weapons, but Jessica had been allowed to keep her chain mostly because she had refused to take it off, and no one had thought it was a good idea to push the issue. Besides, the Reliance goons simply didn't recognize it as a weapon. She pulled the chain off her body even as Gerald and the other Fourers jumped free of their chairs. Gerald jumped up on the table beside her as the others went to guard the exits, having picked up their chairs to use as weapons.

  Jessica almost laughed; they must look ridiculous to the twenty high-ranking Reliance officers sitting around the table. Six aliens fighting for the rights of a race that none of them looked like they had even spawned from. There they stood, alone against the masses, and though no one in the room was armed there were armed guards just outside the door. She glanced at Gerald, fully expecting to see an I can't believe you did that look on his face, but he just smiled at her and the only readable emotion coming from him was excitement. He was ready to fight; apparently he had been just as tired of all the talking as she had been.

  The doors opened and the armed guards ran in, two from each door. The chairs in the Fourers hands slammed into the guards' bodies and they went sprawling. As each guard went down, there was a Fourer taking his weapons, and very soon there were fully armed Fourers guarding each door.

  Before those assembled had a chance to even make a run for the exits, Jessica stomped her foot hard on the table, spraying everyone in the room with gray matter and successfully getting their attention.

  "All right . . . here's the deal. I'm going to talk, and you're going to listen . . ."

  "More troops," one of the Fourers announced.

  "Stand down, let them in." A dozen armed guards poured into the room,
too stupid to realize they now had the enemy at their back. They could have just killed them all and made a run for it, but that wasn't the plan.

  Jessica looked not at any of the governors or senators, but at the guards. "Get the fuck out of here! Don't you idiots get it yet?" She pulled up her shirt and pointed to a piece of tape over her heart. "If my heart stops beating for even a second, my armada opens fire and this entire station gets turned into space dust."

  After no more than a moment's hesitation, the guards left quickly and the doors closed behind them.

  "Now, where was I?" Jessica seemed to think for a minute, then she nodded. "I'm going to talk, and you're going to listen. You've all had a chance to read our proposal . . ."

  "You can't seriously believe that we will ever willingly hand over control of the entire Reliance to . . ." The chain smacked the senator from Sheows in the head, and he fell to the floor dead.

  "I said!" she yelled, "that I'm going to talk, and that you're going to listen."

  And so they did.

  The proposal was simple. The Reliance would change its name, its policies, and its leadership. It would dissolve, and the New Alliance would stand in its place. Not too surprisingly, the Reliance was not quick to accept the proposal.

  Jessica, Gerald, and the New Alliance armada had left the space station knowing that their "proposal" would be the fodder for all manners of jokes around the water coolers of Reliance offices the empire over. Some would consider it a wasted effort. It would probably never make it into the history records. Only Jessica and her team knew the true significance of the meeting.

  The Reliance would no doubt go over the disks of the transcript of that meeting a dozen times, and no one would ever realize that anything of any significance had happened, because the equipment wouldn't have picked it up except as background noise.

  But Jessica had heard it, loud and clear. One of the governors had whispered to one of the others that they would have a lot of explaining to do when they got to Raha.

  " . . . so?" Gerald said with a shrug when she told him.

  Jessica sighed impatiently. "He said they'd have some explaining to do when they got to Ra—ha." She said it more slowly this time so that he might understand the significance.

  He gave her a helpless look and shrugged, "I still don't understand. It seems to me that the entire trip was a huge waste of our time and energy. They only listened to you because they were afraid not to, and they didn't argue with you for the same reason. They have no intention of taking our proposal seriously. We should have just killed them all and blown up the station . . ."

  "All right, dumbass." Jessica's sigh this time showed that she had lost all patience with him, which made him smile. She smiled back in spite of herself and said, "I don't suppose that I should expect you to be able to read my mind."

  "Especially since your brain was created to run like a computer," he reminded.

  "Fair enough. All right, he said they'd have some explaining to do when they got to Raha. The council of the twelve has been in hiding. Now we know they have moved them from Seritompia to Raha, because who else could they need to "explain" things to?"

  Gerald shrugged. He wasn't afraid of her; it was one of the things she liked about him. "So what, RJ? Raha is a whole planet . . ."

  "It's a moon," she corrected.

  "It's one of Trinidad's moons, and the smallest of Trinidad's moons is bigger than Earth."

  "I planted a tracer on the idiots' ship. That should narrow it down a bit."

  "All right, let's say we're able to find them. Then what? They won't listen to us any better than those assholes did."

  "We aren't going to talk to them, you idiot!" Jessica jumped to her feet and started pacing back and forth. "We're going to assassinate them. That's how the Reliance came to power, through a series of assassinations. It seems only fitting that they lose power the same way. We do to them exactly what they did to Earth's last governments. We're just going to do a better job than they did." She stopped pacing and looked at him. "We kill all their key people and secretly replace them with our own people. We take over the same way they did, by subverting them internally."

  Gerald nodded and smiled. "It's a superb plan."

  "Thank you," she said. Any anger she'd had for him being washed away as she looked at him. She smiled, walked over to him, sat in his lap, and wrapped her arms around his neck. If he was startled in the slightest it didn't show in his expression. "I'm very bored, Gerald," she said with a pout.

  He wrapped his arms around her. "There's nothing much to do when you're in space."

  "You'd noticed that, too." Jessica kissed him, and he kissed her right back. She looked at him and for a moment considered what she was doing. She'd wanted him for a long time, but had purposely avoided physical contact because she cared for him. She also knew, because she had felt it, that he cared for her. She started to push gently away from him, but he pulled her closer.

  "What are you afraid of?" he asked in a whisper.

  She started to give him some flip answer, but found the truth spilling from her mouth. "I want you."

  "And I want you."

  "You don't understand, Gerald," she said in a voice that sounded suddenly foreign to her. "I actually want you, not just sex. I want to be with you because I like you, I care for you, and I like that you care for me. It could get very complicated."

  "Life is filled with complications. To be enjoyed life has to be truly lived, chances taken, and obstacles overcome. I have desired you for a very long time, and I have cared about you longer than that."

  "Then why didn't you . . . Why didn't you say something, make a pass, anything?"

  "Why should I have to? I know you're an empath, I know you know how I feel, so surely if you wanted something with me you would make the first move. You know, like you are right now," he said with a laugh. She liked his laugh, and she loved his smile. She kissed him again, and he kissed her back, this time a long, hot, passion-filled kiss, and any logical thought she might have had left her brain.

  "Is it true what they say about bald men?" she asked with a sly smile.

  "They don't call me Gerald 'le Baton' for nothing."

  Jessica had known that because of their hybrid status and generations of selective breeding the Fourers were genetically superior and stronger than humans, but she had never guessed just how much so.

  Gerald hadn't had Zark's stamina, of course, but he'd made up for it in technique that the GSH had been sadly lacking. Jessica couldn't remember ever feeling quite so at peace, quite so calm. She'd never before felt so very "in the moment." It was as if nothing else mattered, not the past, not the future.

  Her back was pressed against his stomach, his head was resting on hers, and he whispered in her ear, "I love you, RJ."

  Suddenly the moment was shattered and the peace fled her mind as the past flooded in and seemed to twist like a knife in her heart. He was her man, her lover, not RJ's. He didn't even know RJ.

  She wasn't RJ.

  She untangled herself from him and jumped from bed. She grabbed her coveralls off the floor where they'd been discarded and pulled them on, suddenly hating the vulnerable feeling she had been reveling in only moments before. She needed to be dressed, and she needed to be dressed right then. She actually tore her coveralls in the process, but she didn't care.

  "What's wrong, RJ?" Gerald asked, sitting up in bed.

  "That!" Jessica screamed. "That's what's wrong. Quit calling me that. That's not me. That's not my name!"

  She sat down on the end of the bed, put her head in her hands, and for some reason she couldn't understand, she started to cry.

  Gerald moved onto his knees behind her and put his arms around her. He rested his chin on her head. "I'm sorry."

  "It's not you," Jessica cried. "I love you. It's me. I'm what's wrong. I'm always wrong."

  "You're perfect to me," he whispered.

  "You don't know what I am, who I am," she said accusingly.
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br />   "Yes I do," he whispered. "I know just what and who you are, and I love you."

  Jessica sniffled and dried her eyes with her hands. He did know her. After all, it was just a name. It didn't matter, did it? If you called a tomato an orange it was still a tomato. People didn't look at it and say, "Oh, look! An orange!" They saw a tomato. She had told them all she was RJ, but she was still Jessica Kirk. They were still seeing Jessica Kirk. She was doing good, changing the galaxy. Doing the work RJ had started, true, but she was doing it all because it had become her crusade, too. She was still herself, even if they all thought she was RJ. Even if she was doing what RJ would have done.

  RJ's friends had become her friends, her allies Jessica's allies. Gerald didn't love RJ; he didn't even know her. He loved her, Jessica. So he'd called her RJ. It didn't matter because that's who he thought he loved. He didn't know her real name and she couldn't tell him because she needed his love, and if he knew what she had been, he might not love her at all.