Roads
By Rel Fexive
Disclaimer: I don't own Farscape or the characters. If I did, you'd be watching Season Seven by now.
Summary: Truths of many kinds are revealed.
Note: The chapters are named after companies in a regiment. On Earth, companies might be Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta. In the Peacekeepers, I say they use Alto, Bora, Calo and Dimo. The equivalent of India would, of course, be Icarion.
CHAPTER BORA
I was dragged back to consciousness by pain, like a knife being twisted in my back, before it was damped down by… painkillers? Then I was pushed back against a rough surface of some kind, which sparked different pain in my head. I groaned. A microt's pointless struggle revealed that my hands lay in my lap, securely cuffed.
A chuckle was followed by the sound of receding footsteps. Bootsteps, in fact. Standard issue Peacekeeper.
It all came back in a rush. The pursuit, the ambush… The betrayal. Shot in the back by one of my own… except they weren't mine. So whose the frell were they?
Quiet words reached me over the crackling of a fire. The accents, detectable through the wash of the translator microbes, varied between Sebacean and Vaerryn. I kept my eyes closed and listened.
"…still following the fake trails," an alien voice said in a determined tone.
"Good." Lan. "It will give us the time to get where we're going."
"Is everything ready there?" Another Vaerryn voice. A pause, perhaps a nodding of a head. "I hope so, for their sake." Sounds of mumbled assent. "Will the sensors be ready in time?"
"One of our people is working to cloud them right now," Lan said quietly. "They'll have their clear path when it's needed."
A kick at my feet made my eyes spring open before I could stop myself. Found myself staring at Goran, who was grinning down at me.
"Wakey wakey," he said. "Want dinner?"
"Frell you," I told him.
"Maybe later." He turned to campfire a few motras away. The fire was in the middle of a mid-sized cave that had the look of a temporary camp. Sat around it I could see Lan, Edan and Polen along with about half a dozen Vaerryn rebels. "Lan," Goran called. "He's awake."
"I know." The lieutenant looked at those around him. "If we're done?"
"For the moment," the owner of the second alien voice told him with a frown on it's – no, his, it was sometimes hard to tell – plastic-like face.
"My problem," Lan told him. "I'll deal with it."
"If you say so," the alien replied, apparently unconvinced, and turned to speak very quietly with his compatriots. Lan left the fire and approached me and stopped beside Goran.
"How is he?"
"Saryn says he'll be fine," Goran reported. "Armour caught the worst of it. Meds are taking care of the rest."
"Good," Lan nodded. "Now back on the perimeter."
"Aye-firmative." Goran hefted his rifle and departed.
"Just you and me, now," Lan told me.
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"Don't you wish things had gone a little different?" Lan asked me almost conversationally. As if he was commenting on the weather instead of how he was a traitor. I just glared at him, of course. "I mean," he continued, "if you had been a little less determined to do your job, Saryn wouldn't have had to shoot you. You would've stood down when ordered and we wouldn't be here, now, like this."
No, he would have killed me later instead. I was sure of that. No way this little meeting of rebels could have happened with me conscious, or alive. I wondered how many of the others he and Goran had killed.
Or had they? Could anything like whatever it was that was going on be hidden from the squad mates who knew them? Easy to conceal something like that from a newcomer, not so easy with the people you lived, worked and played with every arn of every day. Maybe the whole squad was… what?
"You're wondering what all this is about." Lan's face was without expression as he sat down close by me. His hands rested in his lap, his legs were crossed, and for a microt he almost looked like some kind of priest. I kept silent; no reason for a prisoner to speak to his captors. "They have most of the Council, you know," Lan told me suddenly. "They've kept it quiet so the hope of the Vaerryn leaders coming forth will draw the rebels out. But without leverage, the Councillors aren't being very cooperative."
I resisted the urge to ask what he meant by leverage, though I had a good idea. There were many ways to make people and rulers do as you wished… and the main way was to threaten something… or someone… they held dear.
"Children," Lan said quietly. "And some wives." He paused, looking for something in my face. I don't know if he saw it. "We're getting them out, because they asked us to. So the Councillors will be free to sacrifice themselves for their people."
He stared out the cave mouth for a time, giving me a while to digest this… information. Did I believe it? Could I believe that Peacekeepers would risk their lives, risk the living death, for aliens? For their children? Of course not! How could any of us believe inferior beings worthy of such consideration? We brought order, we kept the peace, we protected ourselves against our foes; we did not seek to protect aliens at our own expense. We did not help inferiors.
You are inferior.
I pushed the whispered voice from out of my memory back where it belonged, with the rest. It did not belong. It never had. I had proven the lie false.
When I pulled my eyes away from watching the rebels – the aliens – around the fire, Lan was watching me intently. Something in his face, his eyes, suggested he had finally seen what he had been looking for before. It scared me like nothing else did, not even the thought of being killed there in that cave and left to rot, deprived of the space burial I deserved as a loyal Peacekeeper.
"I checked your record," the lieutenant told me. "Origin, training, deployment." I clamped down on my fear and set my jaw, unwilling to show it. "You were inducted at an early age, rather than bred for service. Inducted, in fact, from a prison. Very precocious." A slight smile. "The only inductee in your cadre, brought straight into Youth Training first grade with others who had known only the Peacekeeper life from birth. It took you a while to adjust." Eyes flicked aside, then back, as he spoke.
I did not need him to remind me of my own past. Some parts of it I did my best to forget, others stayed with me however much I wished they did not.
"It was harder for you than most," Lan continued. "They all resented you, and you didn't want to be there. You resisted every attempt to conform." A pause, staring. "You were up for termination three times in the first cycle, did you know that?"
The shock must have shown on my face. Termination of Youth Trainees was reserved for the very worst cases, the most intractable recidivists. To be that close to a public execution three times in the first grade, when I was only ten cycles of age… I must have been considered more rebellious, more disobedient, than I had thought.
Lan was nodding.
"Of course, you never knew. The first you would have known was when they took you to face the firing squad." He shrugged. "It never happened, of course. Instead… Lorin Hess happened."
You are inferior.
He had been the bane of my life. He amongst all the others, leading them, made my life more difficult than the Educators ever did. Whispered comments about my "filthy lineage" and how I was not worthy to be amongst "real Peacekeepers". It felt like he had pushed me, whispered in my ear, every single solar day for a quarter cycle.
You are inferior.
"Deaths in a cadre are not uncommon," Lan reminded me coolly. "Expected, maybe, even looked for in some cases. During physical training, live fire exercises and the like. To weed out the weak, ensure only the strong survive. And sometimes… the trainees are expected to do the work themselves."
I remembered the look on his face when my private practicing of hand to hand techniques paid off and I deflected the blow that would have blinded me before. I followed through with a strike to his throat that sent him onto his back, my knee coming up to land in the same spot as he hit the training mat. The snap, the choking. The feeling of triumph.
"After his death," Lan continued, "you showed more promise. More discipline. Made allies. Survived."
"I wasn't inferior." The words came out of me before I could stop them. The lieutenant watched me for a moment, careful not to let anything show in his face. I tightened my flagging grip on myself and waited for the man – the traitor, I reminded myself – to continue.
"You proved yourself worthy to be a Peacekeeper," was how Lan described it. "But looked at from a certain… perspective, many of your actions since then show you to be less than perfect."
Suddenly angry, I glared at him. "Explain yourself," I growled, as if talking to a mere Trooper instead of a lieutenant and a traitor to Peacekeepers everywhere.
"I've looked at a number of reports," Lan explained, his expression hard, "and there's a pattern, if you care to look. You are not as ruthless as you seem to be, I think." His face softened slightly. "Call it an unwillingness to prey on the weak, if you like."
I tried to look like I did not know what he was talking about. "You are lying," I told him coldly. "I do my duty, unlike you."
"Perhaps, but not as fully as High Command might like. An order than sounds like a call for extermination would be read as such by most, but not necessarily by all. Sometimes orders can be… wilfully reinterpreted. 'Pacify' can mean 'discourage through persuasion' as well as 'kill everyone'."
"I do not disobey orders," I said stubbornly.
"I do," Lan told me plainly. "I reinterpret them, and disregard them entirely a lot of the time."
"Then you are a traitor."
"No more than you, in the eyes of High Command at least. But I am not a traitor, because I don't owe my allegiance to the Peacekeepers. Call me a spy, an insurgent, if you wish. But I am loyal to those to whom I have pledged myself."
"Who?" I had to know. Who had he sold himself to? The Scarrans? Or… who was worse than them? I could not think.
"The Sebacean people."
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Lan got called away after he made that strange pronouncement. His friends asking him to solve some problem of their own making, no doubt. Which left me alone to think. That was almost certainly part of the plan too.
How could he say he was serving the Sebacean people? What did he think I was doing? What did he think the Peacekeepers did?
Why was I even paying attention to what a traitor was telling me?
And how did he know about… What had he called it? 'An unwillingness to prey on the weak'. That was the most important question. With the information he claimed to have he could have me up for execution by the living death right after him and his band of… whatever they were.
How would I describe it? The things I had done… actions that would make me anything less than the exemplary Peacekeeper I was… or appeared to be. Orders disobeyed, enemies of the Sebacean people left alive when they were supposed to be dead, the times I had looked the other way. And for what?
Non-combatants. Women. Children. Beings who could not be a threat to anyone… except perhaps until cycles later. There was something in me that meant I could not do what needed to be done. Something I could not describe, because I did not know what it was. It had no name that I knew… or would admit to knowing, even to myself.
"We weren't always like this, you know," Lan interrupted my thoughts, driving them deep under the Peacekeeper mask I always did my utmost to wear. Not many saw past it… Lena, maybe. When I let her. She knew me best, better than anyone.
I looked up at the lieutenant as he wanted me to, another audience of one for his little performance.
"The Peacekeepers, I mean," he continued, crouching down within arms reach, if I had been free to do so. "Aggressive. Warlike. Conquerors. We weren't always this way. Once we lived up to our name, and kept the peace. Enforced it, if necessary. Always in service to other races, never for our own gain. Made the galaxy a safe place to be. But the last… thousand cycles? Two? We are more concerned with ourselves, with our… superiority." He said the word as if it tasted bad in his mouth.
"We are superior," I reminded him, repeating the truths at the heart of everything it meant to be a Peacekeeper. "We keep the peace, we bring order when lesser races can not." These truths were at the heart of everything we did. But they had never seemed that self-evident to me, not after everything I had seen in my years of service. So much of what the Peacekeepers had done, what I had done for them, was not born of a need for order or peace, but from hatred, distrust and thirst for power. "We are superior," I repeated, almost plaintively, the words sounding hollow.
"We are not superior," Lan told me quietly. "Only stronger. And only stronger than those we are stronger than." He stared at me intently. "Are you superior to a child because you have a pulse rifle and he does not?" I could not answer him, not with my throat as constricted as it was by… what was it? Another unfamiliar emotion… Such things were considered a weakness by the Peacekeepers, one that could get you killed, either by your foes… or your friends.
"Our strength should make us protectors," Lan pressed on, "not conquerors. But because of this so-called superiority, we, all Sebaceans, are hated everywhere we go. Where once we were protectors, servants of justice and keepers of the peace, now we are mistrusted and treated with suspicion." He leaned closer to me. "But that can change." There was a sincerity, a fervour, in his eyes, his voice. "The Peacekeepers can be changed."
"You're crazy." When I told him that obvious truth, Lan laughed.
"Probably," he agreed with a smile. "But someone has to try. And there are a lot of us trying. Trying to turn the tide of Peacekeeper aggression as best we can, offering some resistance to the path our leaders are taking us down. Some redirect supplies to the needy in war zones. Others lose pacification orders, or turn a blind eye to escaping non-combatants." He looked at me seriously for a long moment. "Some receive counter-orders, missions to subvert or spoil Peacekeeper operations… like now."
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked him. It seemed the proper time, and the way he had been looking at me prompted the question.
"Because you're already halfway there," Lan grinned. "All you lack is the direction, the purpose. And we can give you both. Something bigger than any of us here, and more important than the Peacekeepers. Saving us from ourselves." He stared intently again, looking as if he was trying to see through my skull and make out what I was thinking. "You've got the most important part down already."
"And what's that?" I asked, tired of this stupidity. All this talk was going to get us was two chairs sat side by side in the execution chamber.
"Compassion."
I closed my eyes.
Frell, I thought. The unnamed emotion. That was it's name. Compassion. I'm frelled.
END OF CHAPTER BORA