Chains of Redemption Page 5

  Five, he was lusty, and because of his looks and foul odor probably only got sex when he took it—which she imagined he did every chance he got, without giving his victims a second thought. So six, he wasn't deserving of any compassion or consideration, since he had hurt others just because he could.

  Seven, he would be easy to use to get what she needed when the time came. Because an enemy as stupid, unambitious, and instinct-motivated as Shlerb could easily be turned into an unwitting ally, and then disposed of when he was no longer necessary.

  Chapter Five

  Mickey walked the wall of the old prison and looked out at the mainland, which was no longer barren and empty. There were now thousands of people mixed with the goats there.

  Just a few short months ago they had discussed what should be done concerning the ever-growing goat population grazing, actually overgrazing, what had once been Alsterase. Now that was no problem. The Beta 4 humanoids were eating the goats as fast as they could hunt them down.

  Trucks arrived daily with food and building supplies. From the island he could see the new construction now dotting the mainland. He swore that if he concentrated when the wind blew just right he could hear the hammers and saws as the city took shape.

  The Beta 4 humanoids were hardworking and strong. What was more, they seemed to absorb information like a sponge. They only had to be shown something once to be able to copy the action.

  They seemed to be truly happy with their new home. He never heard one of them say they wished to return to their homeworld. When Mickey had expressed that he found this curious, Gerald had explained to him that their home world was barely habitable.

  After the initial panic of setting the process in motion, the relocation of the aliens and the rebuilding of Alsterase was more or less running itself. Which was a good thing because Mickey just couldn't deal with any of it right now.

  He was barely able to carry out the functions necessary for his own survival, much less function as leader of a new nation. Fortunately, his close aides had stepped in to take over during this time. The supercomputer helped to make the temporary transfer of power unnoticeable.

  Everyone seemed to be sure that at any minute he would step up and take over again.

  Mickey wasn't quite as sure.

  He was completely consumed with his grief, and he was really having a hard time remembering what they were all fighting for at all. First Whitey and Sandra and everyone else who had died in the raid on Alsterase, and now RJ, Levits, Poley and Topaz were lost forever to the all-consuming void of space. All dead.

  For what? Freedom. It hardly seemed worth it. What good was freedom without the people you loved to enjoy it with you?

  He remembered the long endless weeks that RJ herself had walked this very wall, looking at the same strip of land, and he now realized most probably asking herself the same questions he was now asking. What did it—any of it—matter? Life was short, fleeting, and what real difference could anyone, dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people make? In the end everyone died, even the best, the strongest, even those specifically built and fashioned not to do so succumbed to the nothingness of death.

  Some people believed in an afterlife. A place where people hung out with some sort of god or gods, and relished in the rewards that had eluded them in life. If they were horrible people they went to a place where they were tortured 24/7 and paid for the sins they had committed in life.

  Mickey believed in neither place. Neither made sense to him. If they were going to live forever, then they must have always been, and if they had always been, then where had they been before? And why didn't he remember it? Why would a benevolent god waste so much energy punishing people for all eternity? Besides, if you were always being punished, wouldn't it eventually become old hat? On the four hundred and eighty second time they shoved a red hot poker up your ass, didn't you just shrug and say, "You know, it just isn't that bad anymore." Pain was caused from the body's desire not to die. Once you knew you were going to live forever even pain must eventually lose its edge.

  The Reliance had—according to Topaz—used and then tried to eradicate such belief systems, but had never truly succeeded, because the more ignorant the people were the easier it was for them to believe in such utter crap. The worse their lot in life was, the more they desperately wanted to believe that there would be something better for them and worse for their oppressors in some afterlife.

  People suffered—he guessed they always had—from the delusion that somehow life was fair. Since it obviously wasn't, they had made up something so that they could pretend that it was. I ain't got shit now, and my life sucks, but by god when I die . . .

  It would be nice to be that ignorant. Comforting to think that there was some reward in a world after you died, but Mickey couldn't make himself believe that his friends were anywhere but floating as particles in space.

  Mickey wanted desperately for things to be fair, but knew they weren't. He knew now that this was what had been bothering RJ as she walked this wall. She had known that they were all gone. Truly and forever gone. Not someplace waiting for her to get there.

  Mickey remembered wishing that RJ would just snap out of it, become herself again. Quit brooding and just come back to the land of the living.

  He imagined that was what Diana and the others were wishing he would do now.

  He realized only now that it wasn't really something you could control. Grief wasn't just losing the people you cared about. It was having a little piece of yourself ripped away from you. It was waking up in the morning feeling like a piece of you was missing, that was lost forever. Your soul was torn apart. You felt shredded and barely alive, and yet everyone was demanding that you put yourself back together and get back to work.

  For your own good.

  A lot depended on him. Part of him knew that he owed it to his dead comrades to keep their dream alive, but a larger and louder part screamed, This is what killed them! Do you really want to keep it alive and watch it kill still more people you love, maybe even Diana? Do you want to die for this cause?

  Diana walked out then. She didn't talk to him, just sat on a piece of wall and watched. He wanted to talk to her, to at least acknowledge that he knew that she was there, but found that even trying to find words was impossible. It was then that he realized that he was crying, sobbing in fact. He wondered how long he had been doing so, and tried to stop. He looked up at Diana and saw that there were tears in her eyes, too.

  "I . . . I'm sorry," he said.

  She got up, walked over to him, knelt down and hugged him. He hugged her back, probably holding her too tightly but if she cared she didn't say so.

  "I love you, Mickey."

  He cried harder. "I love you, too. I just . . . I can't take this."

  "I know . . . It's been hard for everyone, but I know it's much worse for you."

  "RJ . . ." His voice broke and he swallowed hard before continuing. "She was the first person who ever gave a damn about me. She risked her life for me, saved me; she made me the man I am today. Hell, I could hardly talk."

  "I know."

  "They were the only family I've ever known. Now they're all gone."

  "I want to say something. Something wonderful and profound that will make all your pain go away, because I can't stand to see you hurting. But what could I . . . what could anyone say? What could we do? Nothing," Diana said in a soft voice. A voice filled with pain and with love.

  And suddenly his pain just wasn't as sharp.

  She didn't realize that she had just said those very words that she was so sure she didn't have. He couldn't even have repeated what she had said that had started to fill the empty spot in him. Maybe it was just the sudden realization that everyone wasn't gone. He was here and Diana was here, and they had to fight the Reliance. They couldn't give in now, because in the Reliance neither he nor Diana was considered worthy of food, water or even air. He was a midget, not even three feet tall. Diana had a deformed foot, and that
was all the reason the Reliance needed to kill them.

  That's what they were fighting. That was why you risked your life and the lives of those you cared about, because by giving in to the Reliance you weren't saving yourself or anyone else. You were just condemning them to a different kind of death. One where they didn't die fighting, they died because they didn't fight. They died because they didn't fit the Reliance's needs so they hunted them down, lined them up and shot them.

  He'd rather die fighting, and so had they. That was the choice they had all, every one of them, made.

  He pushed gently away from Diana, dried the tears from her face with his fist, and then dried his own tears. He took a deep breath and looked into her eyes.

  "You are amazing."

  Diana looked more than a little confused, "Me? But, what . . ."

  He put a finger over her lips. "Shush." He moved his finger and kissed her lips gently. "Don't say anything else. I remembered something RJ said. She said I had to live a normal life for all of them. That's more true now than ever." He took her hand, and she stood up and followed him to their room.

  Poley didn't lose track of time. He wished he could because it would have made life easier. As it was he was fully aware of the one week, two days, three hours and forty-seven minutes that had passed since he'd sealed the others into their cryogenic sleeping chambers.

  It had only taken him a few hours to secure everything on the ship so that it wouldn't be floating around free when he turned the artificial gravity off. Now he wished he had taken his time, stretched the duty out. Of course he couldn't do that because the artificial gravity took more energy than the life support; more energy, in fact, than everything except the actual propulsion of the ship.

  So now it was off and he was wearing gravity boots, which was all he really needed to walk around the ship without bumping off walls, ceilings and floors. Weightlessness didn't affect him like it did a human. He was, of course, incapable of losing muscle mass since he didn't have muscles. Bouncing around in zero-gee did, however, screw with his internal gyros, making it hard to control his movements and the direction in which he was trying to go. While he wasn't as easily broken as a flesh and blood being, he could still take damage, and certainly his body bouncing into things could break them. Poley couldn't afford to damage anything, and he sure didn't want to hurt himself. He had to take care of everything, maintain himself and the ship regularly, and make sure he stopped to recharge when necessary, because they were all counting on him. He was in charge.

  He was lonely.

  Poley walked to the bridge to check the data boards again, though he knew the chances that they were any closer to an Earth-type planet since he had looked five minutes ago were forty six million four hundred nine thousand to one.

  He sighed, something that seemed to help the humans deal with stress, but didn't see why it worked for them.

  He wondered if what he was feeling actually was stress.

  He missed his sister, he missed having her ask him questions, listen to his answers, and then make decisions that seemed in many cases to go directly against the data he had given her. He guessed the emotion he felt because she trusted him to take over the ship and to make all the decisions himself was pride. Further, Poley calculated that the anxious feeling he got when he thought he might let them down was caused by a fear of failure.

  And he was sure that all the reasons he kept calculating for why he should wake them up added up to only one thing—he was lonely.

  And bored.

  He started drumming his fingers on the console, listening to the rhythm of the drumming. He did this for three hours, fourteen minutes and twenty-three seconds.

  What else did he have to do? Not too much went wrong with a ship when most of the systems were turned off. Once every two or three months he'd have to transport some more of the radioactive gold to the fusion reactor, but even after using all the precautionary measures and equipment it wouldn't take him more than a couple of hours.

  He found himself wishing it took longer to recharge, because it was the same for him as the humans sleep cycle. A time when he wasn't really thinking, just shut down, recharging till his internal alarm told him he'd had enough.

  He had interacted with them every day for an average of ten hours a day, for eight years, six months, eleven days, six hours and thirty-two minutes. Before that he'd always been with Stewart. Now he had nothing but the running of the ship and the search for their home space and/or an inhabitable planet to occupy his vast mind and his time. The real problem being that there was no action he could take to make a habitable planet jump onto their scanners, and the ship more or less ran itself.

  Boredom.

  He was sure Topaz would have made some joke about a robot being bored, Levits would have laughed and when Poley looked hurt—and he had learned very quickly how to do that, and just what it could get him—and RJ would tell them to lay off.

  These random thoughts made him miss them all the more.

  He needed to find something to do, anything to occupy the hours he would otherwise spend trying to figure out good excuses to wake the others up.

  On Earth he had carved things, and RJ always praised his carvings. He searched the ship for twenty-four hours but found nothing he could carve up that might not be of use to them when they landed on a planet—if only he hadn't carved it up that is. His practicality didn't allow him to even consider doing damage to something they might actually need later.

  He leaned against the wall with a deep sigh. He still didn't feel any better. Nothing. He had nothing to do but run the ship and check the scanners for suitable planets, which took maybe one hour of a twenty-four hour day.

  He'd go crazy. He was sure they'd all have some joke about that. He wondered what a robot's mental breakdown would be like and envisioned frayed fiber optics and charred circuits. This made him smile for a minute, then he frowned. It wasn't really funny. He needed something to do, some task to carry out. After all, that was his function. But there was nothing.

  Then he saw the long, bare white walls of the hall. He knew it was just paint over a metal surface. He smiled his best mechanical smile, dug his carving knife from his pocket and started to scrape it along the walls. It left a silver line in the otherwise white walls, but it couldn't actually be considered damage since it didn't weaken the ship. He had found his canvas, and this time he wouldn't make a geometric shape. He missed his sister most, so he would etch a picture of her into the wall. He smiled again. She would be humming; she liked to hum, even though she wasn't terribly good at it.

  Chapter Six

  Right watched in disgust as Jessica shoved the shit covered, stinking sack into their shower.

  "Jessica, what on Pete are you playing at?" he demanded for the fifth time, though he was sure he knew. Only two short days ago the searches and interrogations had stopped. After having beaten half the population and totally intimidated the other half the Argy had finally admitted defeat and were punishing the entire population of the village by docking the amount paid for buckets of ore until the debt of the stolen computer was paid off. Or until the Argy government felt they had all been duly punished for the theft.

  Jessica ignored him and continued cleaning the bag.

  "Jessica, if that is what I think it is . . . if you're caught with it . . . if we're caught with it."

  "We aren't going to be. They've stopped looking for it. We're all paying for it . . ."

  "Some people have died, Jess."

  "So . . . people die for lesser causes every day. Don't pretend to care. How many lives did you destroy as Governor General Right? Did you even care? No, you didn't give one good damn, and those were your people. Don't try to force me into some hypocritical moral dilemma, Right. We both know that your only real motivation for doing so is that you've figured out that I am no longer blind to the suffering of others and you hope to sway me to bury this thing before someone finds out I have it and tortures you to death. The damage to the p
opulace has been done, some have died, and many have suffered and will continue to suffer. If I bury this now it will have all been for nothing. I knew of the possible consequences when I stole it and deduced that in fact the end did justify the means, as with this I can start to put things right. So shut the fuck up, stay out of my way, and out of my business."

  Right watched as Jessica carefully unwrapped the items in question. Even clean the sack smelled awful, and so for that matter did the shower. Right threw the sack into the trash and then scrubbed the shower out. Even expelling this small amount of energy made him weak. Less money for ore meant less money for protein, and less protein meant the worms would move on up his body. She didn't care. She didn't care about all the others who had suffered for her theft, and she sure as hell didn't care about him.

  He walked across the small room and sat down, exhausted. He watched as Jessica went to work tinkering with the electronic equipment like a child with a new toy.