Chains of Redemption (24 page)

Topaz leaned forward, buried his face in his hands and mumbled, "And he was doing so well right up till then."

Levits still wasn't aware that he'd said anything wrong. He really thought the old man was just having one of his insane moments till he heard a low, throaty growl emanating from the throat of his beloved. He gave her a curious look and then quickly went over what he had just said. He swallowed hard and must have looked as horrified as he felt, because RJ quit growling, glared at him with eyes that were almost glowing with rage, and then she got up and stomped out of the room. He got up and ran after her.

"Now, RJ . . . you know I didn't mean it that way . . ."

Topaz ran his hands down his face and raised his head to look at the confused native he shared the room with. "You see, the real problem is that no one is ever really happy with things the way they are, so they start trying to make them better." The native said some snot gargling thing, and Topaz continued as if they understood one another. "That's right, Taral, exactly, it's all about wanting what you don't have. Food, shelter, sex, it ought to be enough, but invariably it's not. People start out wanting simple things like better food and better sex, and wind up making multileveled attachment dildos that sing and roll and vibrate, and buildings that touch the clouds, and hand-held hair dryers, because of course your hair will never dry otherwise." Taral said something else. "Call me crazy all you like, but you know it's true. You could get along just fine with these creatures if you would just stop wanting so much. And RJ and the Ocupods wouldn't be here at all if people would have been happy with creatures the way they had evolved, and hadn't decided to play God."

RJ wasn't talking to Levits, as much because she had more important things on her mind as the fact that he could be so clumsily insensitive and she wanted to punish him.

Not that she wasn't enjoying making him feel at least as badly as he'd made her feel. It seemed to bother him no end that she walked out of any room he walked into, and when she told him she didn't want to talk about it she could feel the waves of frustration coming off of him like heat. He kept saying he was sorry, and she would say, "It's all right. Forget about it." But her tone was very dismissive, and his head would all but explode. She'd let him roast in his own juices until she wanted to have sex, and then she'd suddenly forgive him, knowing damn good and well that he'd say something just as insensitive in another day or two.

Human nature, humanoid nature, you couldn't get away from it. Sentient beings did thoughtless things.

"The suits are the problem," RJ said to Poley as she walked away from the viewing port she'd been standing at. "Take away the suits and the Ocupods can't attack the Abornie, or us for that matter. Take away the suit and they become just another genetically engineered freak on this planet, swimming happily in the ocean until the Abornie totally overrun the planet and decide to enslave them again. Vicious cycle."

"Do you think they have the ability to make new suits?" Poley asked.

"I don't know, but I don't see how. To make metal you have to smelt ore and it's damn hard to keep a decent fire going under the water. If they were doing it on the surface surely the ship would have detected the activity. They at least have the technology to repair them though, or after all these hundreds of years they would be dysfunctional. I wish we could have brought one back to the ship."

"That would have been most useful."

"If they aren't capable of making the suits, then how many could they have? No matter how well you maintain something, there are certain things that go wrong that can't be fixed. Over several hundred years how many would have had to be parted out to keep the others going?" RJ turned to look back out the viewport again. Frionia was a beautiful world. Reclaimed by plant life, the air was clean and rich. The planet was covered with crystal clear rivers and streams. "Poley."

"Yes, RJ."

"If we get rid of the Ocupods, or at least stop them from attacking the Abornie, how long before that stream is running in sewage and toxic waste?"

He walked up behind her and looked at the stream in question. "There's no way of knowing, perhaps never."

"What, no long stream of numbers, Tin Pants?"

"Where people are involved you can make no accurate numeric predictions. Perhaps knowing the mistakes of their forefathers they will curb their destructive natures, and . . ."

"You've been talking to Topaz," RJ said with a laugh.

"That doesn't make me wrong," Poley said.

"No it doesn't." RJ turned and kissed his check. "Thanks, Poley."

Poley smiled, pleased with her praise. "Are you really angry with Levits?"

"I'm more angry at what he said than I am at him," RJ explained.

"He doesn't think of you that way. That's why he said it, RJ, because he doesn't think of you as a GSH, just like you don't think of me as a robot."

She had noticed before that it distressed him when any of them fought, but he'd never actually tried to intervene before.

"I love you, Tin Pants." She patted his shoulder and moved around him towards the door. She turned in the door and looked at his back; he was still looking out the window at the jungle. He was a machine, but he was so much more to her. He had been given an artificial intelligence, and he had as far as she was concerned become sentient. But to the Ocupods he'd just be another machine. He was a machine, but he was her brother, and those things would take him completely apart if given half a chance.

Dilemma over.

As she had calculated, the Ocupods appeared one day in full force, but she had prepared carefully for the day and they were as ready as they could be.

In the weeks it had taken the Ocupods to put an army of this size together RJ had worked up a defensive strike plan that would very quickly turn defender into aggressor.

She had armed as many of the Abornie as she could with the Reliance weapons on the ship, then she'd taught them to use the laser sidearms.

With Levits ready at the weapons console and watching the scanners carefully for any activity, RJ, Poley and Topaz had taken teams of the Abornie out onto the surface to make traps and primitive weapons with which to supplement the ship's weapons. The ship's power supply needed to last throughout the duration of the battle, and the only way to make sure of that was to use its weapons as little as possible.

RJ had been sure they were fully prepared for an attack, but now . . . There were just so damn
many
of them. RJ looked at the scanner as hundreds of spider shaped images started crawling across it. She ran her hands down her face.

"Well?" Levits asked.

"Fire at the ones on the front line when they come into range . . . No, wait." RJ looked thoughtful for a minute and mumbled the word cannon fodder and then started calculating again. She smiled when she was done. "Wait till the ones in the middle come into range."

"RJ . . . By the time that happens the ones in the front will be on top of us."

"No, because we're going to go out to fight them. Don't you see, Levits?" She was excited now. She was going to do battle. She wasn't afraid; this was where everything she was came into play. Only in battle was her full potential ever put to the test. "Cannon fodder. These things have probably employed every viable suit they have. I'm sure they can't make the suits themselves, and they've been parting them out for hundreds of years. Some of those suits, maybe most, are in varying states of decay, and if I'm right the worst of those will be in the front lines. Cannon fodder. The damaged ones will be easier for us to take out. We take out the strong ones in the middle and the back, and maybe we won't run out of power before we run out of big metal spiders."

Levits nodded. "I hope you're right. Be careful!" he yelled at her departing back, though he knew it wasn't very likely. Still, when your girlfriend was a GSH with a legendary talent for battle, you didn't really worry too much about her. Mostly you just felt bad for her opponents.

Unless they were slimy tentacled guys, and then you just didn't care.

The children stayed on board as RJ led every other Abornie on the ship out into the jungle to face their mortal enemy. They were afraid, but they were also fed up. They were tired of losing and tired of running. They had been kept down because they'd had no way to fight their enemy, and now they did. Most of them were excited, ready to have it over. On this day, maybe only on this day, they became one people. All thoughts of self were for a split second put behind them. RJ had been half afraid that when it came down to the wire they'd run into the jungle to hide and leave her and her crew to face the Ocupod army on their own. But today they were fighting for the freedom of their race, for the chance of a better life. They believed they were going to win. They believed their new "friends" were going to lead them to a new age, an age of comfort and security. RJ only hoped they didn't lead them into a time of overpopulation, pollution and constant war.

RJ called her troops to battle stations as the Ocupods fired their first barrage of plasma blasts on the ship. Most of the blasts fell short, and the others bounced off the ship's defense shield. She and Poley ran into the fray as Topaz took his troop to arm the traps that had been mostly designed by him. Of course his first trap didn't have to be armed at all, as became evident when the first row of Ocupods fell into the limb-covered pit.

As RJ had expected, the machines in the front were in the worst shape, so half of the ones that fell in the pit broke—sometimes immediately killing the slimy alien inside. As the other half tried to climb out, the first line of Abornie fired their lasers at the glass domes of their tentacled oppressors, and as they cracked, a second wave of Abornie ran in with wooden clubs and smashed the domes.

With their front line basically destroyed and making an obstacle between the ship and the rest of their troop, the Ocupods slowed, seeming to take a collective minute to think. While they were doing this Topaz unleashed his second trap. He gave the order, and the Abornie cut through the ropes holding back the mountains of logs on both the left and right sides of the Ocupods.

The logs rolled from their devices, bowling an entire row of the Ocupods down and crushing about a third of them. Most of the machines in the front lines were in worse repair than even she had calculated; many were barely operational. The Abornie pressed forward and once again attacked the fallen Ocupods. RJ and Poley ran into the fray, RJ taking the left flank while Poley took the right. They targeted healthy looking machines, ran beneath them and shot out their hydraulic systems. The machines then lurched around hampering the movements of the fully operational units behind them.

All the while RJ could hear and see the ship's laser and plasma cannons picking off the Ocupods on the back line. Beside her one of the creatures stuck a tentacle all the way through the chest of an Abornie. The Ocupod fired at her and she rolled away from the blast and came up underneath him where she then fired on his hydraulic system. As he was lurching around, he hit RJ with the dead Abornie still stuck on his tentacle and sent her flying through the air. She landed on top of another Ocupod and hung on. She targeted the glass dome with her laser until it cracked and then smacked the glass. As the machine started to lurch in the creature's death spasms she jumped from the top of it to the top of another and did the same thing. She continued to do this till none of them were close enough to jump onto, and then she jumped to the ground and continued her assault from below, again targeting the hydraulic systems.

By dusk only a dozen of the creatures were still standing, and they were beating a hasty retreat.

"Levits, hold fire," she ordered and the cannons stopped. "Finish these off," RJ ordered the exhausted Abornie, and pointing at the still lurching Ocupods. "Poley, you with me."

He nodded and ran after her. "RJ . . . why are we chasing them? Why not let Levits finish them off?"

"Because they have a communal intelligence," she answered. "Come on . . . we have to beat them to the water."

"Water . . . RJ, I can't go in the water," Poley reminded.

"You won't have to. We have to stop them getting back in." She increased her speed.

"RJ . . . I can't keep up," Poley said.

"It's all right, Poley you can take the rear."

He wasn't sure he knew what that meant, but his sister was gone, so he just moved towards the ocean as fast as he could and hoped she was telling him the truth about her plan not including him going into the water.

RJ pulled out all the stops. It had been a long time since she'd run as fast or jumped as high as she could. It felt good to be pushing herself to the max. She easily got around the Ocupods without them being the wiser and moved between them and the ocean. When they saw her they turned to retreat into the jungle, but Poley was blocking their way. One of them fired upon her, and she once again ran under them, easily knocking out their hydraulic systems, and Poley did the same. In minutes all twelve units were lurching around on the beach.