“Restitution?”
She regarded me. “Minister Iquar’s defenses destroyed two of the Jag’s tau missiles and the third failed to explode. The fourth hit.” Quietly she said, “Kryx Iquar is dead. A third of his Cylinder was destroyed. The civilian sections weren’t hit, but his military force was wiped out. Several hundred thousand people died.”
I stared at her. “I tried to stop the Jag. It wouldn’t listen.”
“Yes. We know. Your protest is in its files.” She shook her head. “We don’t yet fully understand what went wrong. The El link between Althor and the Jag has evolved to a more advanced level than previously achieved, more even than believed possible. Its brain is a new model, and Althor has more extensive biomech than any other Jagernaut. He’s also Rhon. Apparently in combination, they attained a remarkable symbiosis.”
“It loves him,” I said.
“Yes, it appears so.”
“Are you going to destroy it?”
“We must. We can’t have Imperial warships bombing colonies.”
She was right, of course. Although they didn’t physically destroy the Jag, they reworked its entire brain. It was several years before it returned to duty with Althor, and ISC now periodically checks all Jags to ensure they remain rational. Althor’s passes every test. I have to admit, sometimes I suspect it simply gives them the answers they want, and that if Althor were ever harmed again it would seek vengeance with the same single-minded intensity as before. If that is true, though, I have no proof.
Dehya also told me that as soon as Jag notified her people about my Rhon genetics, the Assembly charted the history of Mesoamerica from 1987 onward. Virus wars in the late twenty-first century wiped out a quarter of Earth’s population. When the United Nations finally established peace, Earth was exhausted, her people grateful for the respite and terrified of losing it. So after centuries of fighting for lands lost to the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the Maya reached an agreement with Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras. Large tracts of our ancestral lands were returned.
Under the Isolation Act of 2192, the Maya formed a closed nation, choosing to live independent of Earth’s international community in much the way the Abaj sought isolation on Raylicon. In a sense, they ceased to exist as far as the rest of Earth was concerned. That was why Ming, and many others, mistakenly believed they were extinct. The Imperialate was the first government the Maya Independent State agreed to open relations with, and that was only because of the Abaj. We still don’t know what universe the Abaj’s ancestors came from or why they were brought here.
“Even so,” Dehya said softiy. “Just to know the identity of their ancestors means much to the Abaj. Eldrin and I, Althor, all of the Rhon—we feel it too. We have found our lost siblings.”
“Your kin. My kin.” I tried to absorb it. “Or not kin, but our people.”
“For you, Tina, kin. Your descendants are spread throughout the Allied Worlds.”
“Descendants?”
She regarded me. “Althor didn’t tell you, did he?”
“Tell me what?”
“He discovered it when he checked the Jag’s files on the Caltech students. We verified it. Heather James discovered the inversion drive in this universe without prior knowledge of it. No record exists that an alternate Althor came here in 1987.” She paused. “Perhaps the Ragnar of his universe never betrayed him. Or perhaps Althor died as Ragnar intended.” Pain touched her voice. “Or he may never have existed. Given the genetic problems Eldrin and I bequeathed to our son, a good chance exists that in other universes he never lived. Whatever the reason, he never came here. You married a man named Joaquin Rojas.
He wasn’t Rhon, so none of your descendants are either. But hundreds of them are alive now.”
Jake and I married? It made sense. But after knowing Althor, I could never imagine a life without him.
Dehya glanced past me. Turning, I saw Althor and his father a few yards away, talking to each other. As they came over, Althor regarded his mother warily. “Well?”
“Don’t frown so,” Dehya said. “I haven’t been terrorizing your bride.”
Althor snorted. “I’ll bet.”
Her face gentled. “You chose well, my son.”
Althor smiled and held out his hand to me. “Bienvenido, ’Akushtina. Welcome home.”
Catch the Lightning Page 35