Debts

2 years later

The room hadn't changed.

Seven stasis beds lay scattered around the room. Each held two forms, one human, one not. Most of them slept peacefully. One pair did not. The male human still had tears on his face and his mouth was stretched in a silent scream even in the stasis field. The Viper had been hugging him tight as they had been frozen.

Nothing moved and then? Something did.

A barely seen form moved between the beds. It looked like a female human in a yellow gown, but she was transparent. She was shaking her head. She was also muttering.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid Elders… Was there anything dumb you didn't try? Poor kid. She was right." The being said with a sigh as she touched the bed with Mark and Alley in it. It hissed and opened.

As she has expected, Mark immediately started to scream as soon as the stasis field released him.

"MOTHER NO!" Alley was holding Mark as he alternated crying and screaming.

"Easy." The barely seen form touched Mark on the forehead even as Alley hugged him harder. Mark gasped and then shuddered and relaxed, his face going slack. "Easy, Mark." Alley jerked, staring at the half seen form and she smiled at the Viper. "Hello Alley."

"Who are you?" Alley demanded, her hands around her companion protectively.

"We have met, Alley." The other said gently. "You do not remember me. So you will not trust me. I couldn't help you then. I can now." She reached down to cup Mark's cheek.

"Leave him alone!" Alley snapped as she curled around Mark's still form protectively. "He has been hurt enough!"

"Yes, he has, dear Alley." The other agreed. "I won't hurt him. I am here to help, no more, no less. The shock has hurt him far worse than anything except what the Elders did to him when he was a child, before you met him." Alley stared at the transparent woman, clearly unsure and the other took pity on her. "Alley, this has been horrible, what you and your nest have gone through. I want to hold you, console you, kiss you and tell you everything will be better. But I can't. I am not there in the flesh. This is straining the limits of my power, but it had to be done. As you say, Mark has suffered enough. Please, let me help?"

The compassion in her eyes and the calm sincerity in her words had the Viper relaxing a little. Only a little.

"Why?" Alley demanded hugging Mark again. "What do you want from us?"

Who could blame her for such a response after so many upheavals?

"I want to pay the debt I owe your mother." The transparent form said quietly. Alley stared at her and the other nodded. "I cannot help her. I can help you. Will you let me?"

"You didn't answer my question!" Alley snapped. "What do you want?" Alley gasped as the woman touched her forehead before the Viper could dodge. Then her eyes went huge as the transparent woman started to cry. Energy flowed from her into Alley. It felt heavenly. She didn't even think of pulling back.

"So hurt, so lost and alone." The woman said through her tears. "You are not alone, Alley. None of you are alone. You have suffered. All of you have suffered. To answer your question, I want to help you and your nest. I can help. I must."

"Why?" Alley was calming as her fear abated. Whoever this woman was, she wasn't going to hurt Alley right now.

"Because once, long ago, I did not." The woman said sadly. "I stood by and watched as horrible things were done to you and your nest mates. I didn't have a choice." She stroked Alley's cheek with her insubstantial hand and Alley felt comforted. "But what I did was wrong."

"What… What are you doing?" Alley asked as her eyes slowly closed of their own accord.

"I need to talk to all of you. I need to take you someplace calm and quiet where I can explain." The woman was stroking Alley's head just like Mark did. It felt so familiar. "I am going to pull all of you into a psionic plane. Bare moments will pass in the real world, but we can talk as long as we need to for me to explain."

"Please don't hurt him." Alley begged as her eyes finally closed.

"I won't hurt him or you. You have my word." The other promised as she vanished from the room, but each and every bed was now glowing slightly yellow.

Outside of time and space

Mark was aware. He was calm, but it as imposed. Alley sat beside him as he looked around, incurious. Whatever he was sitting on was soft and yielding. It formed to his body's contours perfectly and it was large enough for Alley to perch beside him. The room he sat in was colorful. The walls were decorated with art that looked like it had been made by children. The ceiling was a pleasant blue and the floor a soothing gray. The room was familiar but he did not know it. Did he?

He felt his emotions boiling inside him, but they did not touch him as Alley snuggled close.

"Alley?" Mark was amazed at how normal his voice sounded. "What is going on?"

"I don't know." Alley sounded a bit subdued. She wasn't acting like she always had. She had always been tough as nails What had happened to her? What had X-Com done to her? She smiled at him then wrapped around him in a gentle embrace. "I grew up, Mark. I know that what I want, I can never have, but that doesn't mean I have to hurt other people to be happy."

"What did you want?" Mark asked, but Alley looked away. "Alley?" He reached out to pull her close. "What is wrong?"

"I wanted children, Mark. I still want them." Alley snuggled with him. "I knew it wasn't possible between you and me because we are very different species. I knew I was a clone, I am sterile. But that doesn't change the feelings."

"That is why you were so close to Mother." Mark said weakly. "You wanted kids. But..."

"But all I could do was watch us dwindle in number." Alley was crying softly as Mark hugged her. "And I couldn't talk about it. Not to anyone!"

Both stiffened as other forms appeared in the room. Were those beanbag chairs they were sitting on? Karina and Alina, Rachel and Adika, Jack and Aroa, Jesse and Arisha, Marina…

Mark inhaled as he saw Ami and Ana sitting with their partners. Marina and Cable looked positively radiant. Who could blame them? Their partners were alive! He was just a jubilant as he smiled at the them and Alley hugged him again. They had lost so many nest mates, to have two back was a miracle.

"The plan was to leave a bunch of dead clones for Advent to find, copies that had never been alive in the first place." Alley said quietly. "They would have quarantined you of course and Mother could have gotten you out easily enough and to us before the triggers went off. But then Alina was hurt and exposed to the agent. Mother used her personal dose of counter agent to save Alina's life"

"How long were you awake?" Mark asked.

"I woke in the room you did, after my surgery. About a day before the other humans arrived." Alley admitted. "I was bit of a mess, but Mother was calm and gentle."

"Surgery." Mark shook his head. "They took out the organ."

"They had to stun it into a stupor first." Alley shivered in remembered pain. "That was not fun." Mark gave her a squeeze. They were hardly the only pair embracing.

"Mark?" Marina said softly. "What happened? We were on the way to Oshina's secure location when the truck hit something. I… I must have hit my head." She put a hand to her head. The others who had been with her nodded. She looked at Jesse and her eyes narrowed. "What is he doing here?"

"He is all alone, Marina." Mark replied before anyone else could speak. "Just like we are. The rest of his nest is dead." Jesse looked at Mark and his eyes were hooded by grief. "I am sorry, Jesse. She told me. Thank you for not frying me." He grinned a little.

"It is a stunner." Jesse said weakly as Arisha crooned to him. "And it hurts every time I do it."

"I need to say something before anyone else. Please?" Alley said when Marina opened her mouth. The human woman nodded to the Viper. Alley took a deep breath and then nodded to Arisha. "When we met, you were hurting. You were scared and alone. You wanted comfort and I did not give it to you. I pushed you away rudely, forced you away when you pressed and for that, I am truly sorry." Arisha nodded acceptance and Alley relaxed.

"You… know… them..." Marina was hardly the only human to gawk at Alley as the Viper nodded. What?" The team medic shook her head and then looked around. "Mark? What is going on? Where are we? What happened?"

"Mother is dead, Marina." Mark said quietly. Every one of his nest mates hissed in horror. Jesse and Arisha froze as well. "The allies she found to try and save us turned on her. She stopped them, but in doing so, she died."

"What?" Marina asked, her voice suddenly small.

"There is a lot that Mother and Alley couldn't tell us." Mark hugged Alley as she wilted under the glares of her nest mates. "I do not understand it all, but I can try to explain."

"Where are we?" Cable asked suddenly. "This place is familiar, but I don't know it."

"Yes, you do." Everyone stiffened as a human woman appeared in their midst. If any of the nest mates had been armed, she might have been in trouble. They were not and she wasn't hostile. She had long dark hair and deep brown eyes. She was pretty, not beautiful. She smiled at them and they relaxed a little. "You know this and you know me. You just do not remember. Easer made sure of that."

"Oh, what did she do now?" More than one of the pairs grumped in unison. All of them stopped talking when the woman gave a sob.

"She saved your lives and souls." The newcomer said sadly. "You revile her as a villain, a traitor to the Elders and a torturer. I knew her as a hero."

"She hurt us!" Karina snapped.

"No, she didn't." The strange woman contradicted her gently. "She tried to stop them from hurting you and they killed her for it." Karina opened her mouth to retort angrily, but the woman held up a hand. "You have half of the facts. Do you want the rest? Or do you prefer ignorant anger?" Her grin was sly.

More than one in the room snorted as Karina's face turned beet red. Karina was a lot of things. Patient with willful ignorance was not one of them. Her diatribes on that subject had taken hours on occasion.

"You know her. You know us." Jack, as always, saw more than the others. "This place, you… You knew us. Know us."

"Yes, Jack." The woman said with a sad smile. "I knew you. I was one of the teachers Easer hired to help you acclimatize when the educators didn't work as planned." Everyone winced. That hadn't been fun. If she was one of them, then small wonder they didn't remember. That time was hazy, blurry at best. She looked too young though. "It has been a very long time and I am so very sorry that I could not help you as you so deserved when I first met you."

"When was that?" Mark asked.

"Twenty one years ago now." The woman said with a sigh. "I honestly thought I knew the depths to which the Elders would sink in the pursuit of their goals, but you?" Her face was angry now, but it as not directed at anyone present. "What they did to you was not warranted at all. They never needed you and left you to rot. If not for your Mother and Oshina, you would have lived out your lives in cells or stasis pods."

"Why?" The timid voice had everyone looking at Arisha who cringed under their scrutiny. The still unnamed woman, Mark and Jesse smiled at her and she subsided a bit. "Why would they do that? It doesn't make sense!"

"No." The woman gave herself shake and shook her head. "It doesn't. Paranoia comes easy when one is in the conqueror business which is one reason I avoid it like the plague." She frowned and everyone stared at her, but then she relaxed and smiled again. Everyone relaxed with her. "The humans you Vipers bonded to do not have trainable levels of psionic ability. To the Elders, that made you less than desirable. Alley here has the most power available, but even she would be considered a failure by them. And for that? I consider them morons." Everyone was staring at her now and she nodded. "You were loyal to them and they were not loyal to you."

"But they are the Elders." Ami said weakly. Marina hugged her partner. "They made us."

"Creation alone does not mean that you owe them unthinking obedience, Little Ami." She grinned as Ami goggled at her. Ami was physically the largest of the Vipers. Ami giggled and Marina hugged her again. "That is a conundrum of children and parents that has baffled philosophers of many races for as long as history has been recorded. You owe them something, true. Your lives? Your souls?" She shook her head. "They had no reason and no right to do what they did to you."

"What did they do?" Marina asked. "I see the signs of surgery on all of us. What did they do?"

"They implanted us with a bio-weapon, Marina." Mark looked at the floor. "Every human had a bio-weapon capsule implanted and every Viper had the trigger for it. They are all gone now." At his words, every humans face went white. Every Viper looked at the floor. "Mother told you all, didn't she?" They all nodded but Arisha who looked terrified.

"She told us all at the same time. I was the last to go in for surgery and she told us all when I woke." Alley said sadly. "Only Arisha was lost to us. Mother's allies sent a team after her, but Jesse was hurt when they arrived and the team had to drop them off at the hospital for treatment when they couldn't wake Jesse up."

"Which also served as a very good diversion." Mark shook his head. "Oshina?"

"He doesn't know what happened." The woman said quietly. "As far as he knows, he lost all of you and is searching for you even now, two years after you vanished. Your Mother didn't confide the whole truth to him, but she did tell him some. He assumes she is dead or she would have contacted him by now, but he walks his own way."

"You knew Mother more recently, didn't you?" Mark was not surprised when the woman nodded. "Did she know you?"

"She found one of my agents when she was looking for allies. She knew who I was then, she didn't know what I was and am. It was a bit of a shock for her." The woman sighed deeply. "I have had to hide what I am from all kinds of people, but I wasn't going to let my child out into the wide crazy world without watching over him as best I could. Teaching you was a joy." Tears were falling. "And I failed you as badly as Easer did."

"Why couldn't you?" Alley asked. "This isn't real. This is all in our minds. You have power beyond belief if you can pull us all into such a thing."

"This isn't me." The woman said with a smile as the nest mates stared at her. "This is you. This is what Easer planned for you all along. A meeting of like minds. Not slaves, not hidden weapons, friends."

"She wiped our minds." Marina said weakly. "Even if she didn't hurt us, she wiped our minds. She cost us everything!"

"Did she?" The woman took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. It wasn't quite a sigh or a groan. It was sort of both. "All of your survived the Elder's conquest but most of you were badly hurt. I don't know who any of you were before. If there are records, I do not know where to look for them. Easer was tossed a pile of humans that the Elders considered dross, useless. She had a reputation for making gold our of straw to use a human idiom. You were all broken when she took you. Would you have preferred to die?"

She was not snide or sarcastic. She was honestly curious.

"I don't know. Marina admitted. "I don't know who I was. I cannot imagine life without Ami." She hugged her partner and Ami hugged her back. "Is that…?" She broke off, obviously unsure of what to say.

"No." The woman reassured her with a smile. "Easer could have altered your brain chemistry, programmed you to love one another. You know biochemical combinations, Marina." She waited for Marina nod. "But it wouldn't have lasted. Especially into human puberty." She winced at that and several others shared it. They had been a handful. "If she had? As soon as all of you, human and Viper alike, had realized how badly you have been abused..." She made a face. "I don't need to say it. The Elder's tools learned that lesson, didn't they?"

"That they did." Every Viper chorused in unison, even Arisha!

"So, mother was guarding us? Protecting us?" Rachel asked softly. "Or holding us?"

"All that and more." The woman said with a nod. "The Elders thought she was preserving their hidden weapons and allowing their slaves some small measure of freedom so they didn't start to question. She was following Easer's long laid plan to free you all and maybe her clan too. She wasn't perfect, and she had a temper, but she was a good friend, Shinaora was. I failed her and you before. Now I have a second chance and I beg of you to let me try to make it right."

"Trust has to begin somewhere." Mark looked at his nest mates but none looked uneasy. They had always followed Mother's orders and assumed her loyalty to the Elders was absolute. Without her, they were lost. Directionless. "But… Even if we did know you, we do not remember you. What is your name?"

His eyes went huge as the woman in front of him smiled and expanded. Suddenly a huge yellow form hovered in midair in the midst of the, it should have been terrifying. It wasn't. She was happy. They could feel her happiness, her sadness, her loss, her grief, but also her joy, her love, her faith, her devotion to… To them.

"Once, my name was Shamash." The Ethereal said a tone that seemed to ring of joyful bells.

"But you may call me 'Lady'."