Chapter 7: Chapter 7; Truth

Agent Coreance takes his head from off his hands crossed under his chin and focuses all of his forward facing eyes on Alex still sitting across from him. He is so engrossed in his own thoughts, trying to completely understand what she had told him that he had never even noticed that she had asked him something. “Excuse me?”

“Could I have some more water?” She asks with a voice little more than a whisper that echoes in the tiny room.

“Of course,” He says hurriedly, picking up the pitcher next to him and filling her cup. “I would like you to help me understand something.” He says finishing his pour “What?” She asks taking up the cup and touching it to her lips before she drinks again.

He puts down the pitcher and rests his head back down on his hands. “That one moment was enough for you to dislike and distrust Dr. Peacock?”

“I didn’t like him or hate him, I just didn’t trust him. It’s a human thing, we don’t trust all that easily, and for me it’s harder than most. It’s a survival trait some of us are smart enough to keep.” She explains with a sense of sadness underscoring her words.

“I see,” he says with no hint of skepticism, “did anything else happen after that?”

I had locked myself back in my quarters and lost myself in my work. But that had only lasted for a few minutes before I got bored and hungry and lay back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, or more I would have been laying down if I hadn’t turned off the gravity in my room and floated around a third of a meter over the top of my bed. I had been like that for near to an hour before a quite knocking on my door pulled me from my inner contemplation. I sighed and picked up the remote that controlled the gravity in my room. “Give me a second would you?” I called and I gave the remote a double click and the gravity came back on, hard, and I dropped onto my bed and bounced onto my feet without the slightest hint at grace. I could have used the remote to unlock the door but I took my time to pat myself off, thought nothing stuck to me, and walked over to it and physically unlocked it and turned away from it before it opened, which it did about two seconds after I had turned my back to it, prompted from the outside. Even though she hadn’t used her hand cybernetic hand to knock on the door I would have guessed it was Lerra, no one else would have bothered to come, no one else had bother in all the time I had been on the ship. “What are you doing here Lerra, I want to be alone.”

I should have realized by then that as stubborn, and pigheaded, as I was Lerra was just as much so and so much more perceptive than I could ever be. “I brought you what you left of your dinner.” She said putting the plate I had left siting on the table down onto my small desk.

I wish I could say I did something noble or even kind but I was still too deep in my own thoughts and my voice was as flat and unfeeling as a still pond. “Thanks.” I took the plate from the desk and sat back on my bed with the plate resting on my crossed legs.

Lerra though decided to poke and prod me into reacting to her somehow and getting out of my funk any way she could. “I wasn’t interrupting anything was I,” she joked, “some personal private time with a vibrating plastic pal perhaps?”

I wish I was a stronger person but I wasn’t since it worked just the way she wanted it to and I snapped at her, back more or less to my usual self. “Is sex the only thing your people think about?”

Lerra rolled her eyes knowing her plan had worked perfectly but not trying to be smug, and only just failing. “We also think about food and art and history, I especially like military history,” that I had not seen coming at all, “coming from a military family it makes perfect sense I guess.”

I had no idea what was coming next but I kept my mind focused on eating so as not to give away how much this subject coming up all of sudden was getting under my skin, and made me want to run to the nearest shuttle and make like a bat out of all nine hells. “Oh, me I wouldn’t know a thing about military history, I got discharged about a week after basic, something about conduct unbecoming. In laymen’s terms I punched one of my C.O. in the face”

Lerra sat down on the chair at my desk and looked at me quizzically with her arms crossed angrily and defensively over her chest. “Then I guess you wouldn’t know much about the Iowa Incident then?”

I put another piece of sushi into my mouth and chewed, slowly, to give myself time to think of a decent answer that would sound like complete crap when it came out of my mouth. “Not much,” I said with a shrug, “Alliance intelligence didn’t let much out to the general public.”

Lerra leaned back in her chair and looked up at the celling as she spoke, holding her head in her hands. “That’s strange since our intelligence told us everything. They even showed the court martial of the Alliance navigator who stopped it.”

“It was a navigator who did it?” I asked, but I was out of sushi so I had to look at her, if I stared at my plate I’m fairly certain she would realize I knew more than I was telling her not that she didn’t already.

“Oh yeah, I still have a digi of her in my room.” She admitted tilting her head to look me in the eye.

“Why the hell would you have something like that?” I asked because I really wanted to know the answer, it didn’t seem to make any sense, most people who had digis of my old face used them as target practice for shotguns not treasures. “Didn’t she kill your people?”

“That’s a dumb question.” She snapped back at me slamming her hands into her knees and staring at me just as you did when you came in. “She stopped a senseless war that would have killed hundreds of us for no reason. I promised I would thank her, the first chance I got, if I was ever lucky enough to see her. So thank you, thank you for saving my life.”

That was the first time I had ever been found out and I didn’t know what to do about it, I had always expected the person who found out who I was would want to kill me because of what I had done, taken out their gun and put a bullet in my head, but here was a member of the species I had killed so many of thanking me for being a mass murderer. I had no idea what to do. I crossed my chop sticks and put them down on top of my empty plate and sighed. “You know I thought I would be scared if someone found out who I was, actually I thought they would try to kill me, but how long have you known?”

“To tell the truth I only figured it out at dinner,” she admitted with a sigh of her own, “but I’ve had a hunch since we first met, all the cosmetic surgery in the galaxy can’t change the air of a person.”

I put the plate on the floor and focused my eyes, body, and soul, on her. “Have you told the others?”

Lerra looked at me as if I had gone completely insane and started hanging from the ceiling by my hips. “Are you kidding?” She almost laughed at me. “Most, if not all, humans hate you on principle.”

“Thanks,” I groaned only because I knew it was true, “can I ask one other question?”

“Sure.” She said with shrug.

I took my time to think of how best to ask what I wanted to. I leaned forward and laced my fingers together between my knees and looked at the floor about an inch away from the tip of my toes. “You said I saved you,” I finally found the will to say, “all the Zarinians on the Iowa I killed so how did I save you?”

“I wasn’t on the Iowa,” she admitted flatly, “I was on the surface, a prisoner of a human commando team in a surface to space ion cannon instillation. A team of engineers and I were sent to build the instillation in secret. That didn’t work since your people found out about it. While one of our commando teams was trying, and thanks to you failing, to take over the Iowa as it was the biggest and strongest of the human battle ships around the planet your team was taking over the cannon and aiming it at our fleet instead of yours.”

“They didn’t kill you?” I asked.

“No,” she said somberly and looked at her own feet while I still focused on my own, “they knew about our communications protocols so they left us alive so we could check in when needed and keep the fleet thinking that for the most part all was well and we were just having a bit of trouble calibrating the cannon for the planets gravity. I have no doubt that had our commandos actually succeeded in taking the Iowa they would have killed me and fired on the fleet before the last body fell to the deck in the Iowa. Your actions caused my people to come to the diplomatic table and negotiate for peace, just in time to cause a few more hours with the commandos and they would have needed to start shooting us and on the fleet cause with my arm gone in their initial attack and what was left of it bleeding I wouldn’t have lasted much longer.”

“Well I guess it’s good that I was able to do some good in the end.”

Lerra got up from the chair around the desk and sat down next to me on the bed and leaned back so she could look up at the ceiling. “More than that, your actions caused the peace treaty between our people, we now go to war together not against each other.”

“I still lost a lot of friends on the Iowa.”

“We’re soldiers,” she said somberly, “we’ve all lost friends, it comes with the territory.”

“Yeah but I killed them, not an enemy.”

“I know what happened from what was said at the Court Martial but what do you remember?”

“A lot.” I admitted to the floor and tried hard not see everything as I said it. “I remember what happened when the commando overrode my door’s lock and was pulled into the zero g environment of my room. She floated head over heels toward me and I grabbed her. Before she could realize what the hell was going on I was able to wrap my arms around her neck and snap it. I thought it would be harder to do but all it took was one simple movement just like they said in training. Strangely I got dressed calmly with a dead person floating in my room. I remember what it felt like when I transitioned from the zero gravity of my room to the gravity of the main corridors, I could so easily have turned off the ship wide gravity and possibly given the crew the upper hand but I didn’t, instead I remember the feeling of how my body regained its weight and how my muscles took to running without stopping even thought they were being used for little more than controlling my floating in the non-gravity of my room. I had done it time and again without thinking, after a month or so the engineers had stopped sending power to the gravitational manifold under the floor of my room so for months I had gone from zero gravity to gravity without even a second thought, but now I felt it and remembered it. By the time I made it to the command deck I had already come up with a plan and knew how to execute it. Without thinking of a better plan I used my navigation systems, the computers I had created and developed as a member of the Galileo Project, the system I had created which allowed me to take my best friends with me to pilot the Iowa and assist me in my capacity as the navigation chief. I typed in the override codes and rewrote the fire suppression safeties and opened the airlocks while I locked all the other human only rooms I let all the others be pulled into the cold embrace of space. In the space of a breath with only the touch of a button I killed forty people, I was a navigator I had never killed anyone, I had never shot anyone, but with one stroke of a key I had become a mass murdered with a body count to match any serial killer in history.”

“I’m sorry.” She said somberly.

“I should be saying that to you.” I said looking over to her.

“No you shouldn’t.” She said with conviction though she did look at me she only stared up at the ceiling. “I watched you through your court marshal and saw how much pain you were in, not physically but emotional. I mean you stood there in the center of the room with your shirt ripped and pulled around your waist and let them flog you.” She switched to an imitation of the admiral who had read out my punishment and commanded it be done then and there. “‘Fifty lashes across the back and don’t spare your arm.’” She said in such an eerie copy of his gruff voice that I had to fight the urge to bite at a bit of leather not in my mouth, thankfully she let her voice return to normal when she continued to talk to me. “That was the wording of your punishment to a damn cyborg, our arms don’t get tired. Every strike would have felt as hard and powerful as the first and a shit load harder than a normal human’s strike.”

“Yeah, you’re right but the lashes only hurt for a little while,” I admitted though I knew it didn’t make any sense to her, it barely made sense to me, “what really hurt came later. My parents disowned me and when I tried to tell the families of my friends I was sorry one threatened to kill me the other punched me in the face, most thought wouldn’t even open the door to talk to me. I also had to figure out what to do with my bride’s maid dress. A maid of honor isn’t supposed to kill the bride are they?”

“My people don’t have brides, or maids of honor for that matter, we’re hermaphroditic remember sexual distinction isn’t big with us,” Lerra explained as she lay back on my bed and looking at me and not the ceiling anymore, “as we are hermaphroditic and we don’t have an actual marriage ceremony as you know it so I don’t know, but I wouldn’t think so no.”

I leaned back to, all the way actually and rested on the bed, fixing myself so I laid right next to her with my head touching her arms and felt the warmth of her skin, “You know the funny thing is that I still have the damn dress. It’s in the bottom of the foot locker.” I actually swung my foot like a child and kicked my foot locker with a hallow thud. “The one thing I kept from my old life. I don’t have my name, my face, even one of my eyes, nothing. But for some damn stupid reason I kept that damn dress and…”

“And what?” She asked rolling onto her side so she could look into my eyes.

I couldn’t look her in her eyes so I closed my own before I spoke. “The scars.”

“Why not get rid of those,” she asked, “wouldn’t that have made sense? I mean how many people have whip scars on their backs?”

“I couldn’t do that ,” I said shaking my head but still not opening my eyes, “those scars are for the lives of the people I killed and for the lives they might have lived had I not killed them. I can’t get rid of them without, at least in my mind, destroying their memory’s and what they might have become had I not got in the way.”

“I think I understand that.” She said sincerely. “May I,” she asked tentatively, “may I please see them?”

I had to open my eyes to see if she was really asking me or simply trying to be polite but it didn’t take long for me to see that she really wanted to see them, and not in a morbid way like some people had but in a way more like kinship and a real want to know my pain. “They are fairly bad.” I admitted.

She flexed her cybernetic arm in front of my face, only inches between us, and gave me a twisted smile. “I’ve seen my fair share of bad wounds.” I don’t really know why I trusted her but I did so I picked myself up off the bed and leaned so I could put my elbows on my knees, not that I did yet. Instead I zipped my coverall down to my waist and pulled my arms from my sleeves and as it fell off my back I leaned forward and pulled my bra up off my back and up to my shoulders so she could see the scars that marred my skin and I could never bring myself to cover or change. “By all the Gods of the many moons.” She exclaimed in shock, rising up on her elbows. “How the hell didn’t you just fall on your knees and cry with every strike?”

“I don’t know.” I admitted.

Lerra took one of her fingers and began to trace the lines of the lash scars down my back and I felt a tingle run up my spine at the feather, no petal like touch of her skin. “You really are blessed of Xar’rin.”

“Xar’rin,” I asked hopping I hadn’t butchered the word to badly, “who or what is that?”

Lerra stopped tracing the lines of my scars and leaned forward so that I could see her in the corner of my eyes and I turned my head to look at her not once worried that my chest was naked and visible to her if she let her eyes fall even the slightest. I watched her lips as she began to form her words and wanted, I wanted a lot of things right then and all of them involved her. “Xar’rin is my people’s only goddess, and when I say goddess I mean female only so a true Goddess. She was once just a woman, but she became a warrior and was able to kill a god and become one herself by bathing in the god’s blood. In our mythology she is said to be the reason why our people are of both sexes. The Gods were male and made us only one sex but that sex was a mix of both the original sexes believing that if they did that they would keep us from murdering any more of them. Xar’rin though did not change, as she was now a god. Our people saw the change as a punishment from the Gods and burned her for it since she had not changed as everyone else had. No one listened to her please as she tried to tell them that she had only killed the god because he was attempting to kill her, his death and her ascension were purely an accident. Burned and robed of her mortal flesh she was completely reborn a goddess, in the form of a fire that never stops burning. Even when she does take a form like ours it is said that it is a mere illusion of a form inside a fire, others say she is so hot that to come within three meters of her she will burn you to death.”

The thought of me being compared to a goddess was beyond laughable, especially such a powerful and fearsome one, but Lerra looked so earnest that I couldn’t bring myself to laugh at her, or even giggle in my throat. I pulled my bra down over my breasts and pulled my cover all back up over my shoulder and arms but didn’t zip it all the way. “I’m not a goddess.”

“To me you are,” Lerra said somberly, “at least in a way.” She got up off the bed and I fallowed her with my eyes expecting her to leave since she headed toward the door but she only locked it and came back to kneel in front of me and put her hand on my chin to raise it up until our eyes and lips were level with each other. She leaned forward and kissed the nape of my neck and ran her finger across my chest to the zipper, I had only done it halfway up, and zipped it down until it stopped at my waist.