Chains of Redemption (32 page)

"Do you think that makes it easier or something?" Dax all but screamed at him. "I just told you it's always the same. People you love are dead, and you just don't know what to do about it, how to feel or how to act. Whether to do the things you love to do and try to pretend like they're still there or maybe that they never were, or whether you should just lock down, sit in the dark and cry. Sometimes you do all of it." He took a deep breath and calmed down. "The point is that what I thought was normal isn't. The world, the universe, isn't what I thought it was. I just realized that I don't know anything that I thought I knew, and that everything I know is worthless." Baldor was conspicuously silent. "What?" Dax asked.

"Well . . . I was just wondering if you were going to eat that?" Baldor asked of the neglected tray of food.

Dax pushed the tray towards him and said in a disgusted tone, "Knock yourself out."

For the first few weeks Baldor had been more than entertained just exploring the planet of his father's birth, and the city his father and RJ had started the New Alliance in. Or at least the city built on the ruins of that city. The ocean was of particular interest to him, and he enjoyed hours just running from the waves and staring out at the never-ending body of water.

Alsterase was an excellent city for him to have come to. Since most the population was Fourers, as the Earthers called them, he was able to delight in all the pleasures of this new world without actually feeling like a foreigner.

Dax's father had even accompanied him on a trip to the mainland and introduced him to his favorite place. He explained that it was—as close as he could remember—a reproduction of the old bar that had stood in the same place before the Reliance's invasion of Alsterase. It was called The Golden Arches. A huge, bilious yellow, double plastic arch loomed over the roof of the place with a sign under it that said "Billions Served." Baldor had asked what the symbol and the sign meant, but the little man had shrugged. "Damned if I know. Topaz knew but wouldn't say, he said it would ruin the mystery of the place for us."

Baldor was confused. "Why recreate something that you didn't know the meaning of in the first place?"

"Because it was so important to the feeling of the place. The Golden Arches." He'd gotten a faraway look then. "It's where it all began. I had so many good memories of the place, I just wanted to try to recreate it as closely as possible. I wanted to recreate the feeling I used to get when we were all here together. We were all so young then, and everything seemed possible. I just wanted to feel that way again."

"And did you?" Baldor had asked.

Mickey had smiled. "Almost." The old man looked tired then. "Topaz used to say you can never go home. I always just thought it was one of the crazy things he said that made no sense because he'd come from a different time. Then I had this bar built exactly the way I remembered it. When it was all done I walked in with RJ, expecting to feel the same way I had before. It was the same bar in the same place, but everything was different. See, the way I had felt had very little to do with the place and everything to do with us. All of us together. Whitey, Sandra, Topaz, Levits, and Poley. I met my wife here, and now . . . they're all dead. Your father's on a different planet, and RJ . . . well, RJ is so different now than she was then. Topaz was right. You can never go home."

Baldor thought on that a moment. "Then why is this your favorite place now, if it was such a disappointment?"

"Because sometimes second best is really the best you can do. People see what they want to see." He took a long drink of the beer he held in his hand and then pushed Baldor's beer closer to him. "Better drink that before it gets hot."

Baldor had known that this meant he didn't want to talk about it anymore.

Baldor had soon seen why his father and his friends had liked the bar so much, and he'd spent a lot of time there, getting drunk and chasing women, thus carrying on his father's legacy. He was having a good time, but he hadn't left his mother and father, his sister and his friends to come to Earth to party. He'd come to carry on another of his father's legacies—to fight at RJ's side against the Reliance. To make his mark on the New Alliance, and therefore the universe, as his father had done.

On the island and in Alsterase he'd heard talk of conflict erupting here and there between the New Alliance forces and the Reliance. Pockets of resistance against New Alliance control. He waited for RJ to pick a front and take him with her into battle, but she spent all day, every day, either walking back and forth on "The Wall," or watching one old movie after another as if trying to numb her brain. Dax told him that he was worried about her.

"My father says she's done this before, and she did some really weird shit when mom died, but I've never seen her like this. I try to talk to her, and she just acts like she doesn't hear me at all. She doesn't eat and she doesn't drink, and I know she doesn't have to eat as much or as often as we do, but I know she has to eat sometime or even she isn't going to make it. She sleeps twelve hours a day, and I know she doesn't need much sleep at all."

"Maybe she's so tired because she isn't eating or drinking like she should be," Baldor suggested.

"Maybe, I just know something's got to give. My dad says to leave her alone, that she needs to grieve in her own way, but I think he's forgetting that she doesn't grieve in very healthy ways."

"Maybe I could talk to her," Baldor had suggested.

"It couldn't hurt," Dax said, but he didn't look very hopeful.

Deciding he was never going to do anything more important than drinking and getting laid if RJ didn't snap out of her depression, Baldor steeled himself and went looking for her. He'd found her on the wall just staring at the mainland.

"RJ . . . I was thinking you might feel better if we went to one of the fronts and fought a battle." His father had been the great word man, and as Baldor stumbled over the moronic words that seemed to come from his mouth without any thought whatsoever, he wondered why that gene seemed to have hopped right over his head and slammed into a big rock. "I . . . I mean. They say keeping busy helps."

Her complete silence and the fact she didn't even turn to face him wasn't making it very easy to talk to her.

"All my life my father has told me great stories of your bravery. There is no battle that you can't fight, and no fight that you can't win . . ." and he had absolutely nothing to follow that up with. "So, ah, maybe if you were fighting you'd feel better."

Gods, why don't I just shut up. Everything I say is stupider than the thing I said before. Killing people will make her feel better about losing her husband? How freaking stupid is that. The woman has lost three mates. Every one of them has died in battle. A battle is probably the last thing on her mind. More death isn't going to magically heal her broken heart
.

"I'm sorry, RJ, I'm being very selfish. The truth is I don't really care about your pain. I just want to go fight because that's what I want."
Gods, did I really say that out loud? What do I have, a death wish?
"I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I am being selfish, but it's not like I don't care about your pain. I do, I just meant that I wasn't actually thinking about the way you felt, and I'm very sorry to have bothered you." Baldor turned and ran across the wall and back through the door.

Dax looked at him. "Well?"

"I suck!" Baldor said in an astonished whisper. "I have never felt so utterly and completely stupid in my entire life."

Dax smiled. "Don't be so hard on yourself. It's hard to talk to someone when they don't even seem to know you're there."

Just then Mickey showed up carrying something in his arms. "Get the door for me," he ordered, and Baldor and Dax nearly tripped over each other opening the door.

"What have you got, Dad?" Dax asked.

Mickey turned to look at the young men. "You can come with me, but only if you promise to be quiet."

Intrigued, both Baldor and Dax nodded silently and followed Mickey through the door.

Mickey walked up to RJ's back. "RJ . . . I have something for you."

To Baldor's surprise, she turned around, and the look on her face startled him. She looked lost, her cheeks were drawn in, and her skin was an unhealthy, almost green hue. Mickey held the bundle in his arms up to her.

"That won't help, Mickey," she said sadly. "It will just die, and then I'll be alone again."

"No, it won't die, RJ. Because he's truly yours. Your DNA, yours and Gerald's," Mickey said. "He's the child the two of you would have had, if you could have had children."

Her face immediately changed, her features transformed. She reached down and took the bundle from Mickey's arms, uncovered the newborn's face, smiled and held him to her. She kissed his cheek and then knelt down and kissed Mickey's. "Thank you," she whispered. "It's a little cold out here, I think I better take my son inside." She walked past them all into the building.

Dax was the first to find his voice. "Dad . . . How? Why?"

"How is easy. She and Gerald left DNA everywhere, and we have a group of the best genetic engineers in the universe in our employ. Why should be obvious. She's my friend, my best friend. Except for you and your mother I have never loved anyone more. I knew he was dying, we all did, and I knew she was going to take it hard. She needs someone to love who will love her, who can't die, or she's going to go crazy, and what the New Alliance
never
needs is a crazy GSH at the helm. She needs him, and more importantly, she
deserves
him."

"How did you know having a baby GSH would help her?" Baldor asked.

"Because when mom died RJ tried to find Topaz's formula. She wanted to make all of us immortal," Dax answered. "Gerald said the only thing she truly feared was being alone."

Baldor pretended to understand, but he really didn't. How could a test-tube-built, vat baby replace her man? How could a tiny baby of any kind return RJ to the warlord the New Alliance needed to finish the war? It just made no sense at all to him, till three weeks later, the baby strapped on her back, RJ announced that they were going to the planet Sheows to fight a pocket of Reliance resistance there.

The baby sat next to RJ in a special seat during take-off.

They were all silent till they had made it through the jumpgate, then the baby started crying. As soon as the ship had leveled out, RJ got up and took the child out of the seat. She talked baby talk to him, which made Baldor think that perhaps she had lost her edge as a warlord.

"Have you named him yet?" Baldor asked, because when last he had heard a week ago, she still hadn't chosen a name for him.

She nodded and said over the baby's head as she rocked him back and forth, "I have decided to call him Pete."

"Pete . . . what does it mean?" Baldor asked.

RJ shrugged. "Nothing I guess."

"Then why did you name him that?"

"Why did your father name you Baldor? Because it meant something to him. Well, Pete means something to me."

"What?"

"It was where my redemption began, and Pete is another beginning for me."

Baldor pretended to understand, but he had no idea what she was talking about.

When they landed on Sheows, RJ strapped Pete on her back and carried him with her into battle.

Now Baldor knew that it had been a tradition amongst his people to carry their infants into battle, and he knew that RJ had adopted many of his people's ways. In fact, most of the time she acted more like a Fourer than he did, but he was still shocked to see RJ fighting with one hand and pushing a bottle into the infant's face with the other.

He didn't care what his people's heritage was, it just seemed wrong to carry a tiny baby into a battle, even if he was a GSH. By the end of the first day of fighting poor Pete had picked up his first battle wound. He was scared, but not really hurt, and RJ comforted him as the wound closed in—by Baldor's watch—under two minutes.

Baldor had also suffered his first wound that day when a laser blast clipped his right arm. It had landed him in the ship's infirmary.

The day's fighting had been brutal, but they had managed to shove their opponents back by several miles and put them into a poor strategic position, so that now the ship's cannons were finishing them off. Jessica cradled her son close to her. He smiled, his earlier mishap completely forgotten, and she kissed the top of his head.

Jessica had enjoyed ripping the heart from the chest of the man who had dared to nick her son.

Someone rang her doorbell, and she frowned at the interruption. "What is it?" she growled as she moved to open the door.

The doctor stopped, fidgeting with a medscan unit in his hand. "Yes?" she asked impatiently when he just stood there.

"It's Baldor, RJ, he's . . ."

"Is he all right?" she asked quickly, all animosity suddenly gone. "I didn't think he was hit that badly."