by Selina Rosen
The planet was hot and humid with rain falling for at least an hour around the middle of every day. Crops grew and flourished as long as you grew them on raised ground that drained. The other things that did really well were disease, deadly venomous insects, reptiles, and poison fungus of every shape and size.
On most days just breathing was like trying to pull oxygen from water. The humidity was so high that gills would have come in handy.
Everyone was hot all the time. The whole planet seemed to reek of body odor, raw sewage, and rotting plant life.
Ventilation fans and the extreme depth of the mines made them the coolest places to work. Unfortunately the noise of those fans and the pumps, which had to constantly pull water out of the mines to keep them from flooding, was enough to drive you completely crazy.
No place on the planet, not one single place that Jessica had found, would be comfortable to either humans or Argy. Hell, Jessica could barely tolerate it. Yet the Reliance and Argy had fought over this piss hole for years. Thousands on both sides had died before the Argy claimed victory and the Reliance let them have it.
In Jessica's opinion it showed the full extent of their greed.
It was safe to say that Jessica hated Pete. That she in fact hated everything about the stinking planet. But beggars couldn't be choosers, and as wretched as the place was it was one of the few places in the universe that Jessica Kirk could live. She wasn't safe anywhere in the Reliance. Since RJ had seen fit to inundate the airwaves with pictures of herself, and since she and Jessica were clones from the same batch of GSH's, everyone in the Reliance now knew exactly what Jessica was. She hadn't helped her position any by killing a Reliance bigshot and several dozen other people in a Reliance Sector Capital on Earth. The Reliance had plastered her picture up right alongside RJ's with the same description and order, "Dangerous rogue GSH, approach only with deadly force."
Jessica had ordered the burning of the rebels' stronghold, Alsterase, so she wasn't too terribly loved by the rebels in the New Alliance, either.
Worst of all, she had ordered RJ and her lover killed, and while the GSH she had sent to do the job hadn't succeeded in killing RJ, he had killed her lover. So there was a very good chance that the relentless bitch was never going to rest till she had Jessica's head on a pike. And Jessica had no doubt that RJ could do it; after all, RJ had bested her in every battle except Alsterase, and even then she'd come back, blown up Capitol, and taken one of Jessica's eyes.
Everyone knew what she was, and that she should never have been. Everyone knew what she had done and considered her crimes to be unforgivable.
There was no human quarter to which she could turn for help, and no hope of redemption.
For all of these reasons hiding in Reliance space had been completely out of the question.
If she had tried to get on Deakard or any of the Argy Alliance's prime planets she would have undergone a complete body scan which would have shown that not only was her DNA not on file anywhere, but also that she was half human, and genetically engineered at that. They would have drawn the obvious conclusion that she was a Reliance military officer. They wouldn't have let her live if they could help it.
The only logical place for her was on one of the Argy dredge planets. The places so hungry for "colonists" that they didn't question where you came from or how you got there, much less run a scan on you. Profiles cost money, and you just didn't spend money to profile cattle.
It was pretty clear-cut really. No one in their right mind would want to be someplace like Pete. No one with any real options would go there. Therefore just the fact that you wanted to be there meant that you were too stupid to be suspect.
"You, One-eye!" the Argy taskmaster named Shlerb yelled. "Get up and get back to work."
His name matched his physique. She had sworn long ago that someday she was going to kill the fat ugly bastard.
Jessica took in a deep breath of stale, water-rich air, stood up, picked up her pick and bucket, and headed back into the mine. There was high tech equipment that could pull fifty times what pick and shovel crews could pull out of here, but at this time in the game, both to the humans and the Argy, people were a renewable resource. High tech equipment was worth more than people, and if a cave collapsed and killed twenty men they were not nearly as upset as if one of the water pumps or a fan broke. They would sometimes charge repair costs to the workers by cutting their pay until the repair was paid for.
Once in the mine, Jessica took slow steady swings at the wall. She could work ten times as fast as the fastest person here. She could strike that pick in exactly the right spot and with enough force and accuracy to take out a whole section of wall, but if she did that they would know what she was.
In fact, it seemed to her that she had spent most of her rather long life hiding what she really was. Had spent most of her life being like the people who came in and took all their product in return for shoddy merchandise, making sure that they couldn't do anything more than exist. She'd been like Shlerb back there . . . No, worse, because she'd never had to get dirty to benefit from the fruit of other people's labors.
She was learning firsthand what she had inflicted on those under her authority. She had sat in judgment over her fellow man. Made decisions with the flick of her hand that had changed thousands of lives forever. In the blink of an eye, with no thought of the callousness of her actions, she had ordered "clean-up" expeditions. Whole villages of unarmed work units had been killed, every man, woman and child, young and old, for no other reason than they cost the Reliance more in supplies than they produced in product. She did it because it was her job; that was the way things were done. She didn't make the rules, but she'd loved them.
She'd treated people with less regard than farm animals. The Reliance trained an Elite to believe that they were better than even other soldiers. Certainly she had never even considered that mere work units were capable of serious thought, much less feelings.
The Reliance picked who could breed and who couldn't by what the projected weather for the next twenty years in any given area was, and if they happened to be wrong and crops, forests, or animals died, then the area was considered "unproductive," and people were killed for no other reason than some weather forecasting program had screwed up.
Jessica had signed such orders. They made up a lie about spies being harbored in a village, and armed troops marched into villages full of unarmed work units and killed everything that moved.
It had all been very cut and dried. People were supposed to earn their keep, and if they couldn't, well, then some of them had to go. Tough problem—simple solution.
She supposed that it was poetic justice that she who had without pity dominated and mistreated those under her was now forced to live under the same sort of tyrannical rule that she had once dished out and lavished in. However, Jessica didn't think herself stupid, and she felt that after more than three years of this shit she had truly learned her lesson.
She took in another deep breath and started picking away at the wall.
Gee, if I work really, really hard I may be able to buy a piece of cheese. Or I could just get tired of all this shit and start my own little rebellion right here on Pete. The problem with that, of course, was that the Argy equivalent of a GSH was a hairless, sexless, almost featureless creature who looked like the freak that human GSH's were called. There was only one on Pete, no doubt because any more would have been overkill, but she didn't want to go toe to toe with him. After all, he was twice her size, and RJ had all but killed her. If Jessica did anything that would show the Argy what she was, they would not listen to her and follow her in battle to topple their oppressors. No, they would most probably attack her and continue to attack her until the GSH arrived and finished her off. And if by some miracle she managed to beat the resident GSH, and escape from Pete, where would she go?
Therein lay the real problem. Jessica Kirk had run out of places to hide, and she couldn't afford another enemy. So here she stoo
d in water up to her ankles, in a mine where the air stank of sulfur and urine, picking at a wall with an archaic tool being very careful not to outwork the others for fear of being found out, and making just enough to barely eke out a living on a planet named after a human who had died shortly after he discovered it.
The lucky fuck! He didn't live long enough to grow to hate this floating sewer of a planet.
Jessica on the other hand had, and every day her conviction grew to find some way off Pete. And every day saw another perfectly good plan completely scrapped because it lacked one key element: plausibility.
What she actually needed was to be someone, damn near anyone else.
She carried her full bucket up out of the mineshaft and to the payment station. Her ore was weighed, poured into a waiting wheelbarrow, and she was given a fist full of chads that could be used at the Argy-run store to buy things for ten times what they were worth. She buried the chads deep in her pocket with the others from the day and started on the long walk home. There were some things they needed at home, but she just didn't feel like ending the day by getting screwed over by the government store. If she had, she just might have had to kill someone.
It was easy to hide on Pete. People didn't really look at each other; it was just too much to see your own despair etched onto another person's face. They were all Argy and all empathic. It was enough to feel the hopelessness all around you without seeing it, too.
Home wasn't much to look at. Like most of the huts on Pete, it was built up on wooden stilts about eight feet off the ground. The walls and roof were made of woven plant fronds, the roof then covered with pitch. Plastic guttering collected the daily rainwater off the roof and it ran into a fifty-gallon barrel placed in the eves of the hut. This was where they got all their running water.
There was a small porch on the front of their hut, which was seen as rather a luxury, as were the small bank of solar panels which were lashed to the roof and used to power one light and a ceiling fan in the one room dwelling. There was a ramp that led up to the porch, and by the time she had climbed it she was completely drained of hope. She flopped into one of the woven reed chairs that sat on the porch and looked out over the village.
The whole place smelled of human shit. No small wonder, since the toilets were raised areas in the corner of each dwelling. You basically raised the lid, shit in the corner, and the turds fell eight feet into a composting bin of straw. Once every three weeks the slop man came around with his wagon, cleaned out the bins and took the contents to the fields. Then he came back and brought fresh straw. If it rained hard enough to cause a flood—which it did at least once a month and was the reason for the dwellings being on stilts in the first place—the whole place became a giant cesspool. Fortunately for them the Argy government was kind enough to spray the place with something—most possibly lethal if you were exposed over a period of years—that killed ninety percent of the bugs. Of course, the ten percent that didn't die were pissed off and caused as much damage as was possible.
"Did you get any cheese?" Right asked as he hobbled out onto the porch.
They had gone to a very expensive geneticist to have Right's hair, eye and skin color genetically altered so that he could pass as an Argy. It had cost Jessica most of the money she'd managed to smuggle off Earth and had been a huge risk. It hardly seemed worth all the trouble now. Right hadn't been on Pete for two weeks when one of the local nasties drilled a hole in his leg and laid its eggs. The insect in question laid several hundred eggs. The larvae hatched in six weeks time, and then the real fun began, because they started eating their host. If you tried to remove or kill them they secreted a poison so lethal that the host died instantly. Then, of course, they could continue to eat the host's carcass. The larvae stayed in that stage for five years.
The eggs had been laid in Right's right leg. You could actually see the things moving around just under the skin. The doctors told them that if he ate plenty of protein the larvae would most likely stay in the leg area, and that in five years they would make a single hole in his skin and all crawl out where they could then easily be killed. In the meantime the larvae moved around in him, eating his flesh and making him miserable.
He just wasn't very good company anymore. She really didn't know why she continued to let him live. Far from enhancing her life, he detracted from it. All he did was take and take; he gave back nothing, as he had in fact nothing to give. He was sick. Jessica guessed she felt responsible for him, knowing that it was only because of her that he was forced to live on Pete in the first place.
She didn't understand him at all. If she were a mere mortal forced to live in this gods-forsaken place with bugs eating her flesh and nothing to do but sit around in a shack all day smelling the neighbors' shit and waiting for cheese, she wouldn't want to live. Yet every time she offered to end his suffering he acted like she was some sort of psycho.
"I have to have cheese, Jess," Right whined, hobbling over to a chair and sitting down. "If I don't get enough protein . . ."
"We still have a couple of eggs left, Right. I'll get you some cheese tomorrow."
"That's what you said yesterday, Jess . . ."
"I said . . ." Jessica glared at him, "that I would get it tomorrow."
"OK," Right said, sighing complacently. "How was work?"
She turned her head slowly to glare at him, a look of utter disgust on her face.
"Sorry," Right said. "It's just . . . what else is there to talk about?"
He had a point. The only other topic of interest was the bugs in his leg, and she had ordered him to quit talking about them two years ago.
She sighed. "I filled six buckets with ore, and I have enough chads to buy your cheese. My feet were wet all day, and I'm almost tired."
"Are you not feeling yourself, Jess?" Right asked carefully.
"No! I am feeling myself. I'm feeling just like myself. That's the freaking problem!"
Chapter Three
Mickey stood on an elevated platform on the mainland looking out at the sea of brown faces.
"There are thousands of them," he said in an awed whisper.
"One hundred and thirty thousand," John Henry supplied.
Mickey looked up at him and grimaced. "What in hell's name are we going to do with a hundred and thirty thousand aliens that think you're a god?"
John Henry smiled down at the President of New Freedom. "I've thought of a couple of uses for their more attractive women folk." The brown make-up he had been wearing for weeks was smeared and looked as ridiculous as the handless man's statement sounded. Mickey would have probably laughed if there were anything to laugh about.
It had taken them the better part of three weeks to get the aliens all here. He had come to the conclusion that splitting them up and shipping them all around New Freedom would have been far too problematic. It would be much easier to deal with them if they were all in one spot, and he had decided that Alsterase, or what used to be Alsterase, was as good a place as any.
Or so Mickey had thought. Now, looking out at this mass of humanity that was waiting anxiously for answers that he didn't really have, he wasn't so sure. Food and clean water supplies were running low, and they couldn't seem to build latrines fast enough.
A hundred and thirty thousand aliens, most of whom didn't understand or speak their language. Aliens with different customs and beliefs than their own, who were going to need food and shelter and clothes to name just a few of the problems, and where was he supposed to get those things? Yank them out of his ass?
His attempts to reach David on Beta 4 had been futile, because of that stupid magnetic pulse thing, he supposed. But attempts the last couple of days to reach RJ hadn't been any better. He thought maybe Marge was losing her touch, or maybe RJ's ship's communications system was damaged. He had contacted the people on the space station, but they had their hands full just repairing the damage to the station and preparing for the Reliance attack they were sure was going to come at any minute.
"Do we have some sort of interpreter?" Mickey asked John.
John nodded. "Hey, Gerald! Come on up here, man!" John yelled.
Gerald was a mountain of a man with a head so bald it shone in the sunlight, and a huge smile that put Mickey instantly at ease.
"Yes, my king," he said bowing to John Henry. Mickey gave John Henry a dirty look. "Hey, I didn't ask for this job, remember?"
Mickey nodded. He looked up at Gerald. "My name is Mickey. I am the President, that's like king of this place, New Freedom. Do you understand?"
Gerald smiled again and nodded. "I understand everything, except why you talk so slowly."
Mickey felt like an idiot now, because the guy spoke better Reliance than he did. Or at least better than Mickey had a few years ago.