Chapter Two

"Power is better than revenge. Power is a live thing, by which you reach out to grasp the future. Revenge is a dead thing, reaching out from the past to grasp you."

-Lois McMaster Bujold, Borders of Infinity

Valerie Gray sighed as she pushed back away from Danny's kitchen table. Her head rolled back before she looked at a plate full of smeared tomato sauce. It was a remnant of spaghetti from Romano's, the Italian restaurant up the street that she and Danny had frequented, either just the two of them or with Danny's girlfriend Sam over the course of the past year. She felt stuffy, and she wagered Danny and Tucker felt stuffy too. Then again, waging an impromptu eating contest out of sheer boredom probably wasn't the best way to pass the time.

We should have just played Halo. "No," Valerie said breathily from the pressure in her stomach, as her head fell back on her chair again. "No more."

"Ah," Danny said, sounding just as gutpunched as she did, "Is the sexy, feisty, Red Huntress giving up already?" Valerie wanted to respond with an obscene gesture, which Danny wouldn't have taken personally, but she was too full to even do that.

Instead she settled for smiling in satisfaction as Danny and Tucker collapsed in exhaustion.

"Whose idea was this?" Tucker asked through several deep breaths.

"Blame him," Valerie responded.

Danny shot her an evil look before laughing. It was his idea after all.

"I'll be back," Tucker said suddenly, and somehow finding the strength to, bound up from his chair. "I have to go to the bathroom," before tearing out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

Valerie managed to sit back up. "So do you think this Hong Kong excursion will work?"

Danny sighed. "I don't know…I want it too, but," and he enfolded his arms across his chest compulsively. "But sometimes I fear that there's just too much history there. Sam and her mother love each other, but until they both learn to accept the other as she is, warts and all, they're going to keep trying to destroy each other"

"Well, hopefully something positive happens on this trip."

"Yeah," Danny said, staring at the floor. After a long moment, he looked back up at her. "Well, I can't do anything about it right now," he said, the look of concern on his face belying his words. He opened his mouth, only she never got to hear what he had to say because the sound of the front door and several windows shattering under plasma fire.

A nanosecond thought later and her armor formed in existence around her as she charged into the living room, silvery-grey plasma rifle at the ready. The first thing she saw was Danni in full ghost form firing back out the gaping hole where Danny's front wall used to be, green ectoplasm flashing from her hands.

Valerie, her mind already calculating firing angles charged out the hole and bought her weapon to bear on the ghost. He was stocky, well-muscled, with the green skin that was the norm for most ghosts. His sturdy face a mask of rage as a swirling green plasma ball glowed brighter in his left hand. Knowing he was charging up for a major strike she drew a bead on her target and pulled the trigger. The ghost was yanked hard to the left by the blast, bring her face to face with her.

To her surprise he glared at her.

"What are you doing, girl?!" A heavily accented Southern voice shouted down at her angrily. "I'm trying to get my revenge!"

Momentarily taken aback by the almost parental chiding in his voice, and the fact that she sounded a lot like her Uncle in Tennessee, she stood there just staring at him for a few long seconds before she shook herself. "What did she do to you?!" She shouted back.

"Not her!" He said angrily. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Danny stick his head out the hole. "Him!" His face contorted with anger and green fire flashed from his hands towards Danny's head even as he pulled out of the way before charging up into the air, effortlessly bobbing and weaving his way in and out of enemy fire and bringing him to a stop nose to nose with their assailant.

"Okay," Danny said growling, "What did I ever do to you?!"

The ghost's face twisted with anger once more. "You mean you don't know! You mean your family didn't brag about it! How they slaughtered us as we were trying to surrender! About how good it felt to put us in our place! They just couldn't stand to see us wearing a uniform and carrying a gun! Sure the people who did it are dead, and they didn't become ghosts, but goddamn it!"

Valerie stared back up at him, horror flooding her as she realized just who they were dealing with; and how long he must have been gone. And how he must have died. Though considering the history of what he was talking about it could have been anywhere from three hundred years ago to as late as forty years ago.

Or even later. If I was lynched I'd be pissed as hell too if I came back.

She was bought back to the situation when a text message from Tucker flashed across her HUD, warning her he was about to shout for Danny to get out of the way and to be ready to catch their attacker in a crossfire. Remembering that he was trying to kill Danny for something he didn't do, she pushed it back out of her mind and surreptitiously readied her weapons.

"Get down!" Tucker's voice cracked like a whip out over them and Danny yanked himself out of the way as green plasma fired rained from the window of the guest room facing the street. Two of the shots impacted him, before he started trying to get out of the way of the incoming fire. Valerie sighted her weapon and started firing across his track, attempting to have him run into her fire rather than trying to aim for him directly.

Abruptly Danni's voice broke in over the FentonPhones. "All of you cease fire and get inside, damn it! I'm about to bring up the anti-ghost shield!"

Valerie, focused as she was with firing as many shots into the air as she could, let loose with an irritated grunt and brought her weapon back down before running back into the house, Danny flying in on her heels right as a shimmering green energy field began to envelop the house. Their attacker sent a torrent of swearing and plasma blasts hurling uselessly against the building's shields before banking hard to the left and tearing off into the night at top speed.

She turned around herself to see Danielle, in her human form, slumped against the wall and breathing heavily, sweat matting her black hair and clothes to her skin. Valerie heard Danny shift forms behind her before stepping in front of her. "You mind telling me what the hell that was?" He said harshly, either referring to the fact that they were attacked in the first place, the fact that she stopped the fight, or both.

Danni glared back at him. "In a moment," she said, clearly bone tired despite her irritation. "Follow me," she said as she shoved herself up the wall before heading into the kitchen and grabbing a duffel bag off the kitchen table before heading down into the basement. Valerie and the others followed her down the stairs.

She put the bag down on the desk and there, immersed in the green glow of the ghost portal's event horizon she reached in and pulled out…a Fenton Thermos.

"This is why I stopped the fight before you could overpower him," Danielle said as she connected the Thermos to the ghost return device.

"A Fenton Thermos?" Tucker said quizzically.

She nodded brusquely. "Containing his seven-year-old son. I swore to return him safely to his mother, and I couldn't do that if the entire place got shot out from under us could I."

Valerie looked around her and saw embarrassed shame on Danny and Tucker's faces for putting a child at risk, even inadvertently.

"Though if you were transporting his son," Valerie found herself asking. "Why did he attack you?"

She leaned back against the console, folding her arms. "I tried to stop him to explain it to him but he thought I was just trying to waylay him so he wouldn't kill Danny. Which I was, but I also hoped to use the fact that I was trying to return his son home to reason with him."

"Why does he want to kill me in the first place though?" Danny said.

"That will take some time to explain," she said looking bone-tired again, "Give me an hour to collect myself and I'll explain everything then, I promise."

Danny sat down between Valerie and Tucker at the table and watched as Danielle logged into the conference room computer and loaded the slide. He turned to view the large computer monitor on the back wall, where a divided screen showed the concerned faces of his parents. Introducing her to them had taken quite a bit of explaining, and he had taken quite a bit of flak for taking the compounds that he had used to stabilize her physiology without exploring the possible side effects. Which they were right about, but since it had worked he wasn't going to wring his hands about it now. He was however going to bring them in on it next time something like it happened, which he hoped to God it didn't. They did go along with keeping it between them for the time being though, and supporting the "distant cousin" theory in the event Jazz found out. For now they were far more concerned about the attack of course.

"Let's begin with a brief overview shall we?" Danielle said, the tone on her indicating that she was going to begin with a brief overview whatever the people she was supposedly asking thought.

"By the time of the incident in question, the American Civil War had been raging for three years, and advancing Union forces had managed to divide the Confederacy into thirds, Tennessee and Louisiana having largely been taken in the first couple years. There were a few areas in Tennessee where there was still scattered fighting. Forty miles south of Memphis, near Henning, Tennessee on the Mississippi River there was a fort that had been built in 1862 by a Confederate Brigadier General, Gideon Pillow, to guard the river entrance to Memphis. The Union Army used it for the same purpose when the Confederates pulled out.

Two years later, on March 16, 1864, seven thousand cavalry under Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest initiated a month long raid into Western Tennessee and Kentucky, to wreck fortifications and support facilities on the line Paducah-Memphis. By 10:00 AM on April 12, when Forrest reached the fort himself, one of his subordinate commanders Brigadier General James Chalmers had already surrounded it. A stray shot got Forrest's horse, and he ordered sharpshooters deployed as they began their offensive. Within an hour they'd managed to capture two lines of barracks about 150 yards from the southern end of the fort and subjected the Union forces remaining inside to intense fire. By 3:30, he had requested their surrender, telling them that they were going to be accorded the treatment required under the rules of war. The senior surviving officer William Bradford refused, and the battle raged again for another half hour. At 4:00 PM, the garrison had started to surrender, and that's where things got worse.

Enraged at the site of blacks in Union uniform, Confederate forces refused to accept their surrenders; they'd throw down their arms and get on their knees, and they were ordered back to their feet and then shot indiscriminately, shrieking, according to eyewitness accounts, 'No quarter! No quarter!' Some eyewitness accounts reported the white officers of the colored regiments getting tortured before they were slaughtered, one, according to one statement in the records Congress compiled after the war, being nailed to the floor of the barracks before being burned alive."

A scraping of a chair being shoved violently against the carpet and Danny turned, blue eyes widened to see Valerie of all people bounding out of the room and heading towards the bathroom. He stared after her for a moment; the concept of Valerie being queasy at this sort of thing caught him off-guard, and judging by the looks on everyone's faces, so were they. A few minutes later, Valerie returned the room, resumed her seat, and gestured for Danielle to continue.

"I don't think I ned to say anything more really," Danielle said pointedly. "Bayonetted and burned alive pretty much sums it up."

"Yes," Madeline Fenton said, causing him to turn to face his mother. Like everyone else in the room she hand mingled nausea and concern for her son on her face, her Deep South accent softened but notably not gone despite living in Wisconsin and Indiana since she was eighteen, "but why is he after my son? He had nothing to do with that."

Danielle sighed and walked towards the computer screen, arms folded under her breasts, her expression unreadable. "Of course," she said as she stared at her directly in the eye, "and neither do you, but I know your family history. I know where you came from, and are you really going to tell me that no one from your side of the family fought for the Confederacy? Yes, every southern state except South Carolina had homegrown Unionist regiments, but if even half of what he said is true, at least one of your ancestors fought for the Confederacy, and at least one of them had to be with General Forrest's cavalry at Fort Pillow."

Maddie sighed, and sat back in her chair, ignoring the concerned look on her husband's face. Then she nodded, red hair bobbin up and down. "Yes." She said. "My grandma did say that her great-great grandfather fought for the Confederacy, and, legend says, with Forrest. But a lot of the records from that era are fragmentary, who's to say that there's any evidence."

Danny grunted and shifted uncomfortably in his own chair. He hadn't exactly been unaware of much of this himself, his mother was proud of herself, proud of her family's history, and along with a higher baseline knowledge of biology that he and his sister gained simply from having a biologist for a mother, she had told them what she knew of her family's history. Since history was never his favorite subject: that was always Sam and, apparently, Danielle's, favorite subject, he'd never focused in on the little details. He got the big picture. Her ancestors had fought for both sides in the war, it had been a war that split brother against brother, cousin against cousin, father against son, like it had been for so many families on both sides.

"And that's why you want to finish this with a minimum of violence, if at all possible," Tucker said softly after a long moment. "You want to show him that the world really has changed since he's been gone. That there's quite literally…no one left to blame. At least for that."

"But how?" Valerie said. "I saw the look on his face. He's been hurting for a century and a half. What can we do against that?"
"I don't know," Danny said, "I don't even know if it's possible. But I agree with Danni, we need to at least try before we resort to having to destroy him."