THE MOTHER LODE BY ABRAXIS

Chapter 44 – Betrayal Revealed

Jenna paced the housing pod assigned her; length then breadth; back and forth, round and round. Sikes had left her free with the run of the colony but she didn't dare go outside of her pod in the mood that she was in. She wanted to kill something, two particular somethings. Not being able to get to those two, she would probably fracture all over the next person who was unlucky enough to cross her path.

Teddy Bear was dead. The sweet man who had never brought anything but a smile, good words and gentle calmness to any situation had killed himself, his crew and his ship to take out one of the transports.

Jack was in the infirmary onboard the White Cliffs, a relaxation of the rules allowed by Sikes for the worst of the colony's injured since he had to admit that Syrus' skills and equipment were hands high above his own medical facilities. She had ordered the two men of her crew into the strapped down safety of the cabin bunks and brought her ship down hot and flat to a crash landing only a short click from the colony. She was in a medically induced coma. Even though Syrus promised that she would make it; all bones properly knit, brain intact and not too many scars where they would show; Jenna knew that the probability of memory loss if not worse was still very high.

Almost a hundred of Rafferty's people were dead, including his Charlie. Sasha had died protecting the children. Jeff had lost a leg and was in the White Cliffs' infirmary as well. David and Archer were walking wounded along with Rafferty and the majority of his people who had survived. Too many of those should have still been infirmary patients but for the necessity of reserving those beds for the most critically wounded. Even a few of the children had been injured though, thankfully, not seriously.

The colony was up for grabs in the Court.

As horrific as all that was, Jenna had her own personal hell as well. She had stepped off of Sikes' yacht onto the surface of Sanctuary still confident that Jack, Jeeter and, most importantly, Riddick would soon be released from Patrol custody and free and clear of all charges. First, she had no doubt that the ownership of the colony as registered would prevail in any court. Second, the Patrol was known to be quite lenient about illegal weapons when it came to first-in colonies and they certainly wouldn't want to advertise that they had failed to prevent the merc invasion.

Most important was all the work she had gone to separating her ships' from any connection to the colony other than as hired help after their initial construction. This would leave Jack, Jeeter and Riddick in the clear. The Patrol didn't go after the small fish. It might also complicate matters and perhaps remove her a few steps from the initial purchase of the weapons, as well, and any sanctions other than disarming the ships that the Patrol might levy. She might even be able to pull David and Syrus, who had signed on as ship's crew in under this umbrella as well.

She almost immediately discovered that this was not the case. The whole house of cards that the group had built was threatening to come down around their ears. The greatest shock was that Riddick was sitting in a cell in one of the Patrol cruisers, suspected of being exactly who he was.

Sen was one of those people that Jenna wanted to kill. Though he had assured Jenna that this court action was according to plan, that he had picked this plum of a colony right from under the Company's nose for just that purpose; as had been the appearance of the Patrol; the attack by the Company mercs had not. In Sen's master plan, the Patrol had arrived before the Company could move on the colony.

Sen also hadn't anticipated the connection of the colony to the Institute escape this early in his game or the Forces making any move to openly back the Company. Oh, he had intended that their identities come into question. It was part of his plans to use the colony dispute to blow the case against the Company for control of the Institute wide open by dragging it into the Supreme Court as well. But only those of the group were to be threatened and only later, much later, during the court action. But, that had also gone to hell. So much for master plans.

The same miscalculation that had caused Sen's plotting to go awry as concerned the mercs was also the reason that the identities of Riddick, Jack and Jeeter - most especially Riddick's - were being scrutinized as well with microscopic diligence. All of this death, destruction and suffering and Jenna's own personal hell could be laid at the door of one person, the other that Jenna couldn't get to – Ben.

The betrayal was too great. As was the cost in totally innocent lives, people who had never even known Ben until arriving at the colony long after his actions had set in motion the cause of their deaths. All the affection that Jenna had ever felt for Ben had turned into its exact opposite, a deep bitter hatred. Gone was Jenna the psychiatrist, the psychologist, the therapist. Equally gone was Jen the big sister.

Nor would Jenna take any blame for what he had done. Ben had had a better shot at becoming a functioning, 'safe' sociopath than almost any other had ever had. He had the control, the ability to follow the rules. Nor had he done what he had in any uncontrollable blackout fugue. It had been a choice. He had done it consciously, with detailed plotting and execution and malicious intent. He didn't even have Sen's excuse of 'for the greater good'. He had acted out of petty revenge.

First, during the confusion of the initial pick-ups and colonization, he had bypassed all of Jenna's precautions, disabled some of the security fail-safes and re-installed the tarantula before they had left to pick up the families. This is what had allowed the Company to locate them, to follow them back to Sanctuary and to arrange the merc attack. The Forces had been keeping a hard eye on the Company and followed the mercs in to protect their own interests. The Patrol had been watching the Company on the orders of the Court and had increased the size of their assigned force when the interest of the Forces had been detected as well. But that Forces interest had kept the Patrol from being hot on the heels of the mercs and preventing the devastation they had wrought on the colony.

The colony had survived without their help. The one transport that had managed to land had done so a little too far from the colony to use its ship's weapons, probably somebody's orders to capture rather than destroy. The colonist had no such mandate. One of the younger men, a Keller pilot in training, had used the yacht as Teddy Bear had used his lander, crashing her into the transport's main troop exit bay and detonating her self-destruct. The yacht was a lot smaller and without hyper engines. She didn't destroy the transport but she destroyed any access to the bay.

About fifteen percent of the mercs were killed and another forty or so percent trapped inside the transport with only the smaller emergency hatches for exits. While the main body of the colony fought the mercs already outside, snipers made those smaller hatches death traps. Only twenty of the mercs had made it into the colony compound proper. The women protecting the children had killed every one of them. Two other women besides Sasha had died there.

All the Patrol had done was to collect the surviving mercs, mostly from the transport, and sort them into their cruisers' brigs and infirmaries. They had taken care of disposing of the bodies, as well. The mercs were cremated aboard one of the cruisers. Not even their ashes would be allowed to remain on the planet. The Patrol also did the digging to turn the two graves of the men lost to the pack predators into too large a cemetery for such a young colony as Sanctuary.

Ben's second betrayal was a core dump on the group, Riddick, Jack and Jeeter and their changed identities. He had begun transmitting this to the Patrol Commander on a Patrol secure channel the second Sikes had finished his conversation with Jenna and the landers had been ordered back to Sanctuary. Ben had been monitoring the transmissions all during the battle and, since they hadn't died, used the only way he had left to destroy them.

The look of vicious glee on Ben's face when Sikes had informed them that First Officer Wade had been incarcerated and would remain so until these allegations had been investigated, made Jenna want to rip his throat out then and there. The only satisfaction that she got was that the expressions on the faces of Syrus and Jeeter, as murderous as her own, made Sikes put Ben in protective custody and, when it was discovered that Ben was also responsible for the mercs, he ended up in a cell just like Riddick's. The Patrol Commander didn't like traitors. However, that didn't stop him from making his investigation a very thorough one, especially in the case of Riddick.

There were only two factors that might save them. First, Ben had set up the ID's before he had turned against them and, loathe as Jenna was to admit it now, he was the best. The second was a mistake on Ben's part. He had hidden duplicate files of all of the ID manipulations to back up his story. What he hadn't counted on was Jenna and Jeeter adding to the battle damage slightly by dumping, wiping and even shorting out the hardware for all memory in the ship's system except for the 'official' ship's log and necessary nav, com, environmental and engineering functions while waiting for the Patrol repair crew to get them out.

Jenna would have loved to have seen Ben's face, personally, when he tried to retrieve his proof. But the report of her pilot on duty had been almost as satisfying. Sikes' man had threatened to put Ben in a straightjacket if he didn't stop raving and trying to rip up the auxiliary bridge with his bare hands. That he had stopped, made Jenna wonder just how long his 'blackout fits' had been faked as an excuse for not controlling himself.

She damned herself as a fool. She knew how manipulative sociopaths could be but had let her personal attachment undermine that knowledge. Well screw it! She was only a few years older than Ben. The Institute had had no right to set it on the shoulders of a twelve-year-old to deal with that sort of personality in the first place. Ben should have been institutionalized in a totally different facility. The Institute had been more interested in the possible income from his inventions than anything else. But that was over and done. The only problem Jenna was interested in was Riddick.

She had to get him out of that cell. But even that would only be a short reprieve if she couldn't manage a way to get him away from Sanctuary and the Patrol completely. If they put him back in prison for who he was, that would be the worst because the prison would be the worst they could find. But even if he was imprisoned as Rick Wade for aiding and abetting the group in their myriad of crimes, it wouldn't be much different. The proscribed weapons alone were enough to garner a sentence of forty to life if the Patrol didn't decide to be lenient. After the revelations of his plans, she couldn't trust Sen to see that that didn't happen. If Riddick went back to prison under any name, it would almost certainly be the end of that part of him that Carolyn Fry had somehow awakened on T2.

The irony of that wasn't lost on Jenna. Riddick had begun his hajj, though he would really hate that term being used for it, because of one woman's plea for him to stay and save them. He might now end it and return to what he had been before because he wouldn't listen to another woman's plea for him not to stay. Oh why hadn't he run when he had the chance? Jenna would rather have lost him that way than this.

While Jenna had gone through every level of emotional hell possible, Sikes spent almost two weeks having his personnel put people to the question. Everyone Ben had accused of having false identities, only the comatose Jack excluded, were grilled on their full personal histories. At least, after he had finished this questioning and repeatedly denied having known Wade prior to being hired as ship's crew, Jeeter was allowed to return to Jack's side. There was no such respite for the others.

The members of the group had additionally been questioned about their version of Ben's personal history, the ways that they had come together as a group, the reasons that they had decided to colonize, the means and methods they had used to procure their ships and equipment, Jenna's hiring of Elric 'Rick' Wade and Michael 'Jeeter' Lazarus, and finally their encounter with Rafferty, Jack, Nagia and the New Meccan children, and Rafferty's recruitment of people to join the colony.

Rafferty was questioned about his New Meccan passengers, particularly Jack, he had been paid to take them off of New Mecca for political reasons and had no other knowledge of their histories; his encounter with the group, they had answered the distress signal he had been forced to broadcast due to engine problems; and his decision to begin recruiting people for the colony, the simple truth served for that one.

Nagia exempted herself from questioning quickly by pretending almost total ignorance of anything other than a basic functioning vocabulary in any language but New Meccan and Sikes didn't consider her important enough to bother with once she had confirmed the political nature of the problems on New Mecca. Syrus also minimized his by refusing to leave his patients for the procedure. After conducting most of the questioning over various operations, his inquisitioners ceased and desisted.

Everyone held to their cover stories and denied all of Ben's 'fantasies'. Even Sen had agreed to do so once he had been threatened with violent bodily harm for having included Rafferty's people in his dubious plotting. Allegations had been raised that he had wanted 'body-count' to use against the company in court. An unmarked grave somewhere in the forest didn't appeal to him nearly as much as a rather ostentatious statue in the center of the 'Capital City' of the colony naming him its founder.

Oddly enough, Sikes had personally handled the questioning of Jenna about her battle with the transport. Still, it was a fairly brief session, more for the record and possibly a military man's interest in such things. He seemed impressed with her tactic of playing the almost helpless colony ship in a running game of tag until Jeeter had every vital area of the transport targeted before turning and, using her pod structure to absorb the worst of its fire to get right on top of it for a massive broadside of killing salvos. He seemed more interested in Riddick's conduct during the battle, especially his refusal to take the hyper-capable BC and make an escape attempt when the White Cliffs couldn't.

She had also been questioned only briefly about the switch of the ships to her private ownership, with a long-term contract with the colony, as a settlement for her services. The reasoning she gave, though not the truth, was very believable. Private ownership would allow the ships to provide significant income from commercial shipping contracts that the colony would not have been allowed to enter into, the laws limiting government shipping to colony exports and imports only and then only until commercial shipping could be established. Turning the ships over to her had also protected the colony from the Company or some other commercial entity demanding those shipping rights to and from the colony.

However, the greatest role in discrediting Ben fell to her. Part of her cover story, keeping to reality as much as possible since she had wished to retain her profession at the time, was that she had initially been hired by the group as Ben's therapist. She was required to give endless pages of testimony about his mental history and the possible causes of his alleged delusions. She hit heavily on the problem of patients becoming fixated on their therapists and the difficulty of recognizing this once she had become a member of the group.

Her testimony also included the fact that her own studies of the criminal psyche had included Richard B. Riddick and that Ben had found that particular subject fascinating to an undesirable degree. This was her explanation for his including the dead criminal in his fantasy construction. She explained away his knowledge of Imam, Prince Casmir and Princess Mira with the tales that Jack and Rafferty had told him of New Mecca. It was a yoyo snow job of the highest caliber.

They were also managing to secretly monitor all of Sikes' official communications. He had not only run the most comprehensive ID checks possible, he had also attempted to contact Imam, Prince Casmir and Princess Mira for conformation of the cover story for Jack. The answer he got to that one was not only amusing in that he was denied those witnesses but also gratifying for the information it gave everyone about their recent shipmates. Sikes was advised that the political situation on New Mecca was not something that the Patrol wished to stir in any way, particularly by attempting to question the New Emir, his bride or his personal religious advisor.

But when that message had been received, three days ago, a second message had been received almost on its heels in an encryption that they couldn't decipher. After that the questioning had abruptly ceased and Sikes had begun sending and receiving messages in that encryption, a great many of them, with no further mention of the colony in any unencrypted communications. After a day of that, Sikes had sent an escort to bring Max to the Excalibur. Max hadn't returned and the encrypted communications had become almost constant.

So, Jenna was pacing; pacing and worrying, worrying and pacing. Max had an agenda of his own and now, removed from anyone's ability to influence him, he could easily revert to it. The increase in encrypted communication since his disappearance suggested that he was definitely up to something. Also, Riddick's time in that damned cell was stretching beyond what she could tolerate, possibly what he could tolerate as well.

Jenna had barely slept more than an hour at a stretch for those three days. She was living on caffeine and adrenalin. She needed someone to talk to but the only two she would trust, Syrus and Jeeter, weren't available. Even with the help of the newly recruited doctors, Syrus was still up to his chin in patients. Jeeter was holding vigil over Jack. Jenna was deep into further futile attempts to form a plan for Riddick's rescue and a subsequent escape from the planet when the com beeped and caused her to start so violently she threw her coffee cup half-way across the pod.

It was Sikes, … requesting permission to visit her in her pod. He made it sound like a social request rather than an official one. Shit! What was the man up to? There was only one way to find out. She quickly agreed to his request. As she cleaned up the pieces of the cup and the spilled coffee, she mulled over all the impressions that she had formed of the man in their few brief face-to-face encounters.

Physically he was beyond impressive, an almost seven foot tall wall of solid muscle. He was older, probably in his fifties, though that was hard to judge with those who spent their life in space. She suspected that he had worked his way up through the ranks and hadn't let sitting behind a commander's desk soften him one little bit. He was also extremely intelligent, a dangerous man with whom to play the kind of games they were playing. And, he was too damn by-the-book to be arranging 'dates' with suspects under his jurisdiction but flexible enough to extend his investigation beyond that book if he thought it was necessary.

Jenna made two more accommodations for the impending visit. She made a fresh pot of coffee and set up a proper service tray. Then, she added a piece of jewelry to her attire, a lovely jeweled and engraved collar-necklace with a long rectangular matching pendent attached by a snap-away ring. She wished for more but Sikes had disarmed the colonists, putting his own men on predator patrol. Jeeter's gift would just have to do. Also, she still had her earrings.

Whatever Sikes was up to, his pretense at a social visit could work to her benefit as well. By stepping out of his official persona, he had made his subsequent actions vulnerable to question should something 'unfortunate' happen to him as a result. He might be the biggest human being Jenna had ever seen but, if going through him would get Jenna to Riddick, she would do her best to do that. Of course, if she thought about that idea too long, she would have to start questioning her own sanity.

She moved the coffee table so that it would be more of an impediment to someone seated on the couch than in the side chair and arranged the service tray on it. Then, she sat in the side chair, facing the hatch of the pod, and tried to force herself to appear as relaxed as possible. She was fairly certain that she just looked tired beyond reason but that would work almost as well. When the expected knock came, she called, "Come in" in as neutral a voice as she could manage.

The hatch open and Sikes shifted through it with a quick, easy grace and shut it behind him. As he removed his uniform cap and tucked it between his arm and his side, his eyes made a seemingly casual scan of the room before alighting on Jenna. Jenna was quite sure that he could now give a detailed description of every inch of it. A dark amusement glittered in his stone gray eyes for a second before he accepted her gestured invitation and seated himself on the couch, setting his cap beside him. He accepted her offer of coffee, as well, but waved her back with a, "Please, allow me.", and served them both.

She couldn't be sure if this was a courtesy due to her strained demeanor or a natural caution on Sikes' part. However, she noted that he prepared his coffee with the same mixture of cream and sugar that she requested and sat his cup on his knee, untasted, until she had taken a good sip of hers. Sikes might be a courteous man but he was also a very careful one. Well, Jenna could be cautious, too. She continued to sip her coffee in silence. Sikes had asked for this meeting. He could damn well be the one to make the first move. It didn't take long for him to do just that.

"It seems that the Company has really stepped in it this time. Too many people in high places have been waiting a long time to find a way to put a leash on it and your Mr. Sen is giving them the perfect chance to do that. Much as I enjoy the thought of that happening, the politics was getting too deep for an old soldier. I thought that I might find the conversation more pleasant with someone closer to my own kind."

Jenna wasn't accepting that one at face value. Though she had known, with that increase in encrypted communications, that Sen had to be up to his usual machinations, having Sikes make it all too clear with that term 'politics' sent her heart into her throat and her adrenaline levels sky high again. It was time for flight or fight and, with Riddick's fate hanging in the balance, Jenna didn't have a choice. She fingered the pendent of her necklace as she went on the attack.

"I wouldn't think that one battle that was won more by blind luck and the stupidity of my enemy would exactly qualify me for that, Commander. But, if it does, may I take the liberty of asking why my First Officer is still locked up while all the rest of us are given free range of the colony? Especially when we have proven that there is no truth in Ben's delusional accusations? That is what you've come here to discuss, isn't it?"

That somewhat amused glint was back in Sikes' eyes.

"Now, that's what I meant about someone more like me. You get right to the point. Therefore, I will do the same. Your Mr. Sen has found it beneficial to admit that Mr. Good was telling the truth as far as the identities of the members of your group are concerned but still insists that Mr. Michael Lazarus, Miss Jacqueline West and Mr. Elric Wade are not involved in this deception; that they are indeed only employees of the group that Mr. Good has included in his accusations because of his sexual fixations, first on you and subsequently on Miss Good, that Mr. Wade and Mr. Lazarus have interfered with. Our own independent psychiatric consultants have agreed that this is quite possible; that the destabilizing elements of the identity changes and environmental changes on Mr. Good could have caused him to add fantasy to reality in that manner.

"Now, as far as Mr. Lazarus and Miss West are concerned, no one particularly cares. They are not, shall we say, problematic. 'Could have' is good enough in their cases. However, Mr. Good's claim that Mr. Wade is in fact Richard B. Riddick is very problematic. That 'could have' becomes extremely shaky when it might mean turning a criminal like that loose again. I'm sure that you can understand why."

He paused briefly. Jenna didn't take the bait and remained silent. With a small straightening of his shoulders, Sikes continued.

"To be blunt about it, my superiors have dumped this ball of snakes in my lap. As far as they are concerned, they would be happy if Mr. Wade simply ceased to exist and the problem along with him. You should also know that your Mr. Sen is in agreement with them. Mr. Wade has no value in the games they are playing; just the opposite, in fact, as he could prove to be a rather large embarrassment. I thought I would talk to someone to whom he does have value before I decided whether or not to risk my future career and my retirement benefits on him."

Jenna's exhausted mind was in overload trying to deal with too much information given too quickly. Would Sen have revealed the group for what it was? Most definitely, since that had been his plan from the beginning. Would he have protected Jack's, Jeeter's and Riddick's new identities? Probably, since abetting a known felon of Riddick's reputation would be a definite negative in the eyes of the Court. But what was Sikes telling her with all the rest of it?

Cease to exist? That didn't sound like a threat to drop Riddick in a cell and forget about him. It sounded like cold blooded murder. But that couldn't be true. Riddick had said it himself; it was more profitable to lock criminals up than to execute them. Only Riddick wasn't just a criminal now. He was a possible political embarrassment, especially since it would take proper documentation to prove his real identity and imprison him again or even to imprison Rick Wade for crimes that the rest of the group wouldn't, couldn't, be charged with if the Court wished to make a clean ruling against the Company. People were murdered everyday for a lot less reason.

"What can I say to you, Commander, other than what I have already said, what Mr. Sen has also said, that Mr. Wade was not part of any identity deception? Is this all the 'honor' of the Patrol is worth, to destroy an innocent man for the sake of expediency? Or because of the paranoid fear of a ghost?"

Sikes ran the fingers of one hand through his short cropped graying hair. "As I thought, your battle with the transport was not a matter of blind luck. You have an innate sense of how to create a tactical advantage. However, there is one flaw in your attack this time. You see, Captain Blakeney, I saw Richard Riddick in person once, just after that Forces debacle that 'didn't happen'. We both were a lot younger but I know exactly who I have sitting in a cell in one of my cruisers."