Episode 5 -- Pariah
Hawk finds troopers chasing a child who is unknowingly carrying a plague that leaves people comatose and easy pickings for Soaron. While the team rushes to Hawk's side, Soaron attacks, forcing down the jumpship so it's a race against time to rescue both Hawk and the boy.
~*~*~*~*~
Two days.
That was how long Hawk had been unconscious. "Mitch" had been staying close, perhaps feeling protective of the first person who had shown him any kindness in possibly years. What little Jon and the others had learned from the boy, Soaron digitized his family and all the people of the town he lived in. He had no one left from his past. Scout contacted the Passages and arranged for Mitch to go there, but only after Hawk finally woke up. There was no way the boy was leaving Hawk just yet. He had a genuine affection towards the older man -- that much was evident.
A child. Dread had used a child to be the carrier of a plague. There was no depth to the man's evil. To make it worse, Mitch was just the beginning. Jon had no doubt that Dread was planning to use others as carriers and set them loose on the human populations.
Jon walked down to the landing bay to check on Jennifer. Soaron had blasted a hole in her jumpship, so she had worked all hours of the last two days to repair it. It was also a repeat of an old behavior that Jon had not seen in some time. When she had first joined the team, life was stressful for her since she had no experience dealing with everyday situations that people outside Volcania dealt with daily. Each mission had some new learning experience. Back then, when she was upset and didn't know how to deal with such a situation, she worked. She would go a couple of days without sleep, repairing or maintaining who-knows-how-many pieces of equipment until the anger worked itself out. Sometimes, talking helped, sometimes it didn't. As time passed and she learned how to understand her emotions better, the round-the-clock work marathons ended. Something about this mission had bothered her more than usual, perhaps on a more personal level, so the jumpship was getting her undivided attention.
"Cut my power supply," Jon listened to her mutter as he leaned against the wall and watched her work on the circuits in question. "Miserable flying monster blasts my ship, tries to shoot us out of the sky, and practically destroys the entire power supply." She looked at the nose of the jumpship. "Who does Soaron think he is? Doing this to my ship? He has no respect for my work or my personal property."
Jon smiled as he watched her work. Before, she would be furious and the poor parts in need of repair would bear the brunt of her anger. This time, it seemed more like irritation at Soaron and annoyance at the fact it was her jumpship that was damaged instead of 'the captain's ship.'
She did love that jumpship.
She patted the hull where she was working. "Don't you worry. I'll have you up in the air and flying like new in no time."
Right. Now she was comforting the ship. That was Hawk's influence. He had told her about how people once felt about their cars, how they imbued them with an imagined personality and talked to them. Just because it was just an inanimate object didn't mean you couldn't talk to it. In any case, if it made you feel better, what was the harm?
Talking to the jumpship in an almost cajoling tone also meant that she wasn't feeling raw anger, but there was something wrong. The fact she was being extra careful with the parts was a good sign that she wouldn't mind if he interrupted her. Maybe he could find out what was wrong and help her deal with it.
"Have you given her a name yet?" Jon asked as he pushed himself away from the wall and walked over to her.
Jennifer smiled. "No, and this ship is over fifteen years old. None of you ever named her, so it won't hurt her feelings if it takes a little longer for me to find the perfect name for her. Hawk keeps making suggestions, but nothing feels right yet. How's he doing this morning?"
"Still unconscious but the fever's gone. Mitch is with him."
Jennifer didn't say anything to that. She lost her smile and turned back to her work. Whatever was wrong was connected with Mitch. "He's been through a lot."
"More than a child should," Jon agreed. "I know Dread will stoop to any level to get what he wants, but he stole a child from his family and used him as a weapon."
Jennifer grabbed a circuit and gently pulled it free from the power supply. "That's nothing new," she muttered. She picked up a power probe and began checking every lead on the circuit. The look on her face worried him.
"Jennifer?"
When she didn't respond, Jon reached over and gently took the probe from her hands. "What's wrong?"
Jennifer was quiet for a moment, as if trying to decide exactly what to say. Then, "This mission brought back some bad memories. That's all."
Bad memories? Jennifer had more than her fair share. Some of her memories would horrify the casual listener if they didn't know how bad the Dread Youth could be. After all the conversations they'd had in the past, Jon recognized the signal she just gave him. Jennifer wasn't the type of person to burden anyone with unwanted conversation about her life before she joined the team. She wouldn't say anything further unless he wanted to hear it, so all he had to do was ask, and ask he did. "If you want to talk, I'm here. I may not always understand some of what you went through, but I'm more than willing to listen." Sometimes, listening was all he could do the few times she spoke directly about her past.
She twirled the circuit in her hands once or twice before setting it down. "I never told you everything that happened when I escaped, have I?"
"Not all of it," Jon agreed. "I could make a few guesses, but I know some of it had to be pretty bad."
Jennifer took a deep breath. "A lot of things happened in the span of a few days that completely changed everything for me," she confided in him. She leaned against the hull of the ship and took a deep breath. "I honestly didn't know what happened during those attacks before Sand Town . I could quote the slogans and the litanies, but I didn't know the meaning behind them until that day. I saw people killed. I saw some herded into groups. Some were taken away in small bands guarded by troopers. At one point, I walked away from the Overunit on some pretense. I don't even remember what I said to be excused. I heard a noise and when I went to investigate, I saw Soaron digitizing the people who were being taken away. They were helpless, crying, trying to protect each other and then they were just... gone."
"Like the people we saw him digitize at that camp." Jon could only imagine what she saw on a mass scale. It was the stuff of nightmares.
"After Sand Town , I knew I had to leave, but escaping the Dread Youth wasn't easy. It probably still isn't. All movement is monitored. Everyone is accounted for before and after a mission. I knew that if I could get away, I didn't know which way to go or what I was going to do. I just knew I had to leave no matter what happened to me afterwards. I needed specific geographical information about the outside. I hacked into the Territorial Sector archives and found my way into the files that were off limits to us. One of the files I found was early Youth registries buried in some of the historical files."
Youth registry histories. Jon had never thought about the pasts of the Dread Youth soldiers. Hadn't they all been born and raised in Volcania? "You found out something?" Jon prompted.
"Some things I'm sure a lot of people who lived out here knew but none of us did," she told him. "According to the data, Dread started the Dread Youth twenty-two years ago. He started secretly. Before that, he recruited an army of technicians, soldiers and scientists to help establish his dream of a mechanized world, but he knew he needed troops whose loyalty was absolute and who would die for his cause. He convinced those loyal to him to turn their children over to him so he could train them. They just handed over their children to Dread so the Machine could teach them. Others, he stole from their families. He'd send a small raiding party into areas where security was practically non-existent and take the children. They killed many of the townspeople, destroyed some of the towns to cover up what they were doing, made it look like anything or anyone other than his forces destroyed it. Every year, he increased the number of children he took. The idea was to have an army who would willingly produce more soldiers for him once they were old enough. Until then, we were weapons or cannon fodder, whichever definition works better."
Twenty-two years ago? Jon didn't realize it was that long ago. Dread had only been in power for fifteen years. He'd been planning his takeover for that long? And the children would grow up to be breeding stock as well as his army? "No wonder Dread hid all that from everybody. If people knew what he was planning before he made his move, they'd have stopped him, especially taking the children."
"He took away everything that made us an individual. He hid all the records of our identities, our names, our birthplaces -- all of it was buried in the computer files. There was even some reference to some possible genetic changes, but I couldn't find anything out about that."
That was information Jon had never considered. "So none of the Dread Youth would know who they really were or where they came from even if they found the archives." Then, another thought crossed his mind. "Does that mean that Jennifer Chase isn't your real name?"
"I don't think it is. At least, it isn't according to the data archives. I searched for Jennifer Chase as well as the names of a few other youth leaders and overunits I knew. None of them were there. The names that were listed in the file had complete histories -- who they were, where they were born, their full names -- but I had never met any of them."
"But there are so many Dread Youth... could those particular individuals been assigned to a different section?" Jon asked.
"I thought of that, but what I saw disproved that idea. The files were cataloged by the sectors the children were taken from and the names of the children taken. I ran a search on the names from a particular town, and they didn't exist in any current registry. The names of people I knew and searched for didn't exist in the registries until they were brought into Volcania, so --"
"Dread changed all your names," Jon finished for her. "He was making sure that Volcania was your home and the Dread Youth was your family in every way possible." But twenty-two years ago? How had everyone missed what was going on years before the Metal Wars?
Jennifer picked up the circuit again, stared at it as if it held all the secrets of the universe. "Maybe. He might have done that so that if anyone came looking for their son or daughter, they wouldn't be able to find them. I'm sure there are files somewhere in Volcania that would have the cross-references, but I didn't look for them. There wasn't time. I was being sent on another mission that day, and I was going to escape when we got to our destination. At the time, it didn't matter that I didn't know where I came from or which direction to go. I knew if I was caught, I'd be killed or digitized or I would die out there in the wilderness. After what happened in Sand Town , I didn't deserve better."
"You didn't know," Jon told her. He had said it before; in fact, he repeated it the few times she spoke of Sand Town , but it didn't assuage her guilt.
Jennifer took the probe back and started to work on the circuit again. "Dread stole us as children and used us as weapons. He did the same thing with Mitch, and he hid it all behind slogans. It was all for the glory of the Machine." She tested the relays on the circuit board, yes, it was working again, and it only took two days to get it back into working condition. "I believed them. There I was, a weak, imperfect organic who served the Machine." Then, sarcastically, she said, "All those stories about how a squad would trap organics some place and then Soaron would swoop in and digitize them? It was a good thing. We were told that since those organics were all enemies of the Machine, Soaron's actions were highly laudable and commendable."
"Very commendable to Dread," Jon agreed.
"I didn't know it was all lies until Sand Town . That's when I saw it all for what it was, and none of what I had been told was true. There was no honor in those actions. It was just murder and digitization of innocent people who were trying to survive. There was nothing perfect about the Machine, it was what was destroying everything and Soaron was more than happy to help."
"So when we saw Soaron digitize those comatose townspeople --"
"All of it brought up a lot of bad memories. None of us had a choice, not Mitch, not anyone in the Dread Youth. Dread turned us into something we're not, and it wasn't our choice." She placed the circuit back into the power supply. "I'm sorry. I don't have a right to feel sorry for myself. It's just seeing Soaron then meeting Mitch -- it just hit me all at once and made me angry. Dread keeps doing whatever he wants without caring how his actions destroy people. No one should have the ability to turn children into weapons."
Jon stood up and moved behind her. He placed his hands on her shoulders to let her know that he would always stand behind her, no matter what. How could one so young be so strong as to shoulder so much guilt and responsibility for what someone else forced her to do? It took a courage and a strength Jon didn't think he had. He admired her all the more. "The one thing you have never done is feel sorry for yourself. And it's okay to be angry when the memories are stirred up like this. Sometimes, you just have to let yourself be angry."
Jennifer flipped a switch and the power supply came online. "Ever notice we all have to remind each other of that from time to time?"
"Yeah, maybe one day we'll remember it." Jon stood on his tiptoes to see inside the hole in the hull. Now, there was only the outer structural damage that needed repairing. "Do you think Mitch will be able to get past the anger and the bad memories?"
Jennifer nodded her head. "He's a strong kid. There's a lot of hope for him. There'll be people in the Passages who'll help him, and he has Hawk now. I didn't know what it was like to have friends until I met all of you, but there's one thing I know for certain -- having friends is one of the best ways to help someone through something like that. They help you realize that there's a better life out there with people who care about you and want to be there for you no matter what."
He looked back at her, into those smiling, appreciative gray eyes and immediately realized the double meaning. She was grateful for her friends who helped her through the bad times too.
The End