Chains of Redemption (14 page)

"I didn't say there wasn't enough food, and certainly we have seen a long and profitable time of peace, while the Earth has seen much war. I just know that RJ never does anything without more than one reason, and I wanted to know why she sends all the war orphans here. The fact that it's safe and we have plenty of food isn't her only reason. I dare say it isn't even her main reason." Taleed was calm; his manner was far from confrontational. He really did just want to know. He was curious. David also knew that Taleed's manner could change completely if he didn't get a satisfactory answer to his question.

David and Taleed had become good friends; in many ways he had replaced RJ in David's life. Yet David knew that if he had to make a choice between what RJ wanted and what Taleed wanted, he was going to choose RJ every time. He wasn't sure whether RJ would want Taleed and the others to know or not, but if she did she no doubt would have told them herself. Since she hadn't told David anything he didn't feel particularly guilty not telling Taleed what he thought, even if it meant Taleed was going to throw one of his now infamous royal fits.

David shrugged. "I don't know."

"You're full of shit!" Taleed said very unmajestically. "I think you know exactly what she's up to."

David looked to where Baldor, now ten, and his six year old sister Sandra were playing with the king's three year old. Taleed had married and given the planet the male heir to the throne—Taheed the second, who the kids all called Two—as was expected of him. Only a handful of people knew where Taleed's true heart lay, and they kept silent. David didn't really understand, but he had learned the hard way just what happened when you tried to tell your friends who they should or shouldn't love. The queen, for her part, was happy not to be part of an uncared-for harem as had been the old tradition. She enjoyed a comfortable life in the palace, and if rumor was true, the attention of several of the palace guards. No one seemed to be hurt by the arrangement and everyone seemed happy, so who was he to push the limitations he'd learned under a Reliance enslaved population onto these people who had grown up in a different world with a different culture?

David watched the children play and smiled, for the moment forgetting about the meeting at hand, or that he was supposed to be part of it.

By the time David was Baldor's age he had known the bite of slavery, brutal work, hunger, and grief. There had been no playtime for him. He had succeeded in giving his children a better life than he had.

So far.

"Some of my people are worried," Taleed said. "Many of them still can't quite let go of the old ways. They are afraid that our world will be populated with more of you than there are of us. They still believe we may be punished for not following the breeding programs of The Ancestor. First we absorbed all of the Reliance personnel from the space station, and now we are absorbing all these children, over a thousand of them already. Some of the older ones, the ones who worry that we have abandoned the gods, are becoming hostile towards your people. They are worried about the mixing."

"Taleed, you know the history of your world, of your people. We are the same people except for the fact that your race gets half your DNA from the Argys. You have already been mixed. You were purposely mixed. If your people were to mix with us they would become less mixed, not more so."

"I know that, but as much as we have tried . . . some of my people still don't understand. There will be trouble with them; it might even escalate to fighting in the streets. Fighting between us—like in the old days—and I would just like to know why . . . The real reason why she is sending them here?" Taleed asked.

The Argy blood was the problem, because though it had been homogenized, the Fourers still had empathy far above that of a normal Reliance-born human. Taleed could feel, or at the very least had a nagging sense, that David wasn't telling him everything he knew. Still, he didn't have to be the one to tell Taleed.

"For the last ten years in every combat situation, RJ has chosen our people alone to fight with her," Janad said. "The answer is obvious. RJ is going to live forever. She is going to fight the Reliance till they are gone. Not just here, not just on Earth, but everywhere. She's going to need troops. Troops that she trusts. Where is she going to get them? She's going to make them. She's sending the war orphans here, so that they will grow up in our gravity, so that they will grow up learning our skills, our way of hunting and fighting, a way that she has grown to admire and trust. She sends them here so that when the time comes and she needs them, she will have a new army."

Stratton normally didn't even bother to address anything that didn't deal directly with the moon-based space station or the planetary defense system they'd built. She was in charge of the military, and most days it seemed that was really all she cared about. In fact, every day she reminded David more and more of RJ. The difference being, there seemed to be no sense in her single-mindedness, since they hadn't been attacked since they had evacuated the space station and destroyed it. Of course according to what Bradley had told David, that battle had been bloody, hundreds of people had died, and she'd felt personally responsible.

Stratton had been in command, and David knew what it was like to be in command when people were dying all around you. You couldn't help but feel responsible, and people dealt with guilt in different ways. Maybe Stratton was just trying to make sure that they were so well prepared that such a bloodbath would never again occur on her watch.

Whatever her normal motivation was, Stratton wasn't silent on this issue, and she was obviously upset. "What's the difference between what she's doing and the Reliance raising children to be Elites?"

"We aren't going to force them into war if they don't want to go. We aren't raising them in barracks. They are being put with willing families, and the families are raising them as their own," David said quickly.

"Then they'll be pulled away from those families and shipped wherever RJ needs them to fight in a war they won't understand any more than the Fourers she's fighting with now understood what the Reliance was doing to them," Stratton said.

"Then maybe we should make sure they do understand," Taleed said quietly. Still everyone heard him.

"What!" Stratton exclaimed. "You can't be thinking of helping her in this craziness. These are children we're talking about."

"They won't always be children," Taleed said. "Yes, we are making our land more fertile. David has taught us much about farming and getting the most out of our land. The New Alliance has helped us with supplies, and we are now using birth control to hold our own population at a sustainable number, but still . . . Children grow, they will eat more. Why let them tax the land when they could serve our world and the New Alliance as RJ's army? You are forgetting that on our world we trained our children from the time they could walk to fight battles against their own kind for no other reason than to further the dreams of a long dead madman. I say we train these children in the ways of battle as we have always trained our own young. We tell them always what their purpose is . . ."

"Many of them will remember the deaths of their parents. That they had another life and it was stolen from them. They will
want
to fight." Even if he hadn't seen her or recognized her voice David would have known it was Janad simply because she was the only person he knew who interrupted the king without so much as an "excuse me." And one of only a handful of people who could get away with it.

"Exactly," Taleed said. "They will want to fight the people who took their families, and forced them from their world. And as long as our people know they aren't going to stay, why should they object?" He looked at Stratton for her approval. "An army has to come from somewhere, why not from here? Why not these children with no families to grieve for them if they are killed?"

"Do either of you hear how callous you sound? I'm not convinced this is what's best for them, for anybody. You're making decisions for them. Molding them for a life they may not want. Is this our brave new world? One in which we emulate the practices of the very Reliance we say we hate?" Stratton didn't look like she was going to back down any time soon.

Taleed looked at David for help. David took a deep breath. He had been trained for this. This was, in fact, a life he had chosen for himself, which he had long ago decided he didn't want. There was, however, no turning back. He was the speechmaker. He knew how to sway people with his words. How to make even the impossible sound plausible and the detestable like a good idea. It was his gift, and it had been his and RJ's great undoing. Maybe it could help her now. "Our children have grown up in a world none of us knew as children, and yet we have carefully taught them about all manner of fighting and of war. We have carefully explained to them what it's like to be a slave. To have no rights. What they must watch for, the signs. All the things they must guard against if we are to keep tyrants from taking over our world. We teach children of the harshness of reality in the hopes they never have to see it, live through it, but knowing that in all probability they will. Peace rarely lasts. We have peace here only because the Reliance is too busy with the New Alliance on Earth and the Argy to come after us. The more we improve this planet, the more we terraform it, shape it to make a better world for ourselves and our children, the more inevitable that the Reliance will come and take it away from us. We are only living in this time of peace now because others are dying someplace else.

"The ethics we teach our children today; loyalty, honor, bravery. The true horror of our lives, the real despicable truth is that they will only learn the true value of these things if they are forced into battle. Only in desperation are we truly tested. We are teaching our own children the rules of war. Training them for battle, knowing it's probably inevitable. What makes these orphaned children any better than our own? If RJ needs troops and she comes here to get them . . . Well, having trained our children as we have, to believe that freedom is worth fighting for, that another's freedom is just as important as their own . . . how many, if any, of our own children will choose to stay behind if she calls for troops?"

Stratton nodded, though it was hard to tell whether she actually understood and approved or was just resigned. It didn't matter. Either way she would now go along with their plans. And in the end, who really knew what was right? Only time would tell whether the decision they had made here today was the right one. After all, none of them would actually be affected by this decision. No, they had made this decision for others. Children, children who would be trained into an army to serve under a crazy, genetically engineered humanoid who had so much hate in her soul, so much pain, that she was never going to rest until the Reliance was completely eradicated. She didn't care about the cost.

And today he had helped her. Today he had put all other reason out of his mind and he had helped her cause with the gift of speech he had been born with and that Topaz had later nurtured with hours of careful study and tutoring. He had led them in the direction he was sure she wanted them to go, for no other reason than she was RJ. He owed her everything, and he had helped to make her what she was today—single-minded and crazy.

And she was. He hadn't actually seen her since she'd come back from the dead. She was far too busy to come to Beta 4, and he seriously didn't care if he ever got on a spaceship again, as sick as he had been the first and last time. Besides, he couldn't leave here, he had a family, responsibilities here that he'd never had anywhere else. So he hadn't actually had physical contact with RJ since her return. But even over the monitor he could tell she had changed. He supposed he couldn't really expect her not to have. She'd been through hell and back more than once, and somewhere along the way something had snapped. Snapped? Hell, it had blown up.

It didn't matter. She was still RJ. She still knew how to run a campaign, and she was still in charge. She still knew what she was doing.

He hoped.

The rest of the meeting followed a more or less normal path for this small group of people who had the job of making decisions that affected an entire planet, and today, David figured, the future of the universe itself.

Jessica returned to the fort after yet another successful campaign as her loyal troops stayed on the mainland partying in the streets of Alsterase.

Mickey's son ran to greet her at the dock. The black-headed, three-foot tall eleven-year-old hit her with such force that had she been a normal woman he would have bowled her over. She picked him up and swung him around effortlessly before she set him down and messed his hair with her fist.

He laughed and hugged her again. "What did you bring me, RJ?"

Jessica laughed. "What makes you think I brought you anything?"

"Because you always do."

She put her hand on his shoulder and started walking with him towards the old prison. She reached into her left hand pocket with her free hand and pretended to be looking for something. Finally she pulled out a small glass ball about three inches in diameter and handed it to him. He grinned wildly and started jumping around so much she had to release him. He ran around in front of her, forcing her to stop in her stride or plow over the top of him. "It's the biggest marble I've ever seen."