Flesh and Blood

by Cyblade Silver

Saber and Slade, one the white armored defender of the Earth, the other his dark armored counterpart and attacker. But what if things had been just a little different?

45. 45: Transition

It was kind of strange, Balzac mused, as he continued to pull weeds in his and Rachel's front garden, the way someone's priorities could change so completely; if someone had told him earlier that he would be so completely content to be what was essentially a farmer, he probably would have laughed in their face. Or else punched them in the head for even suggesting such a stupid thing. He'd had a hell of a lot of ambition back during the early days of the War; Star had guessed that it had had something to do with how he'd grown up, and while she was right on the money, he was never going to tell her that. He and Marlowe had each been the only real person that the other could confide in for so long that to let anyone else into his confidence just felt… wrong, somehow. Not even Rachel or Rick knew everything that he and Marlowe had told each other; the things they had planned together, and just what he'd done to Saber when he'd found Marlowe's body.

He wasn't proud of it, and he would have asked the kid to forgive him, if the former member of the Space Knights' elite corps could have even remembered any of what it was that Balzac would have been asking forgiveness for. Still, knowing that Saber and his brother were all right, and that they were being cared for by some of the only people in the world that he would ever trust to take care of those kids the way they needed to be taken care of, made him feel at least a little better about the situation. Saber and Slade had given more than enough in defense of this planet and all its people, it was past time that they got something back. Sure, he knew perfectly well that neither of them had done it for power or glory, but they deserved their rest all the same.

Once he'd managed to get the last of those stubborn weeds into the sack, so he could let them dry out before he tossed them in the fire pit out back, Balzac sat back on his knees and sighed. This was the hardest work he'd done in his life, though far from the most dangerous; facing Spear would always have that dubious distinction. Shuddering again at the thought of the Radam Teknoman – the man who'd slaughtered every squad under his command as if he'd had some kind of a personal vendetta against them – Balzac grabbed the sack of weeds and rose unhurriedly back to his feet.

If he was going to get the rest of his work done, it was best that he didn't dwell on the past.

Even when that past made itself known with every step he took; every time one of his prosthetic limbs would begin to rub uncomfortably at the joints where they had been attached, he would remember smashing into the Earth like a meteorite. Every time he saw a sunrise, or even a sunset, he would remember ripping off his damaged helmet so that he could see again. Likewise, he relived the slaughter of his subordinates, of the men and women who had trusted and supported him – those in both the Allied Earth Military as well as the Space Knights themselves – by Spear on several nights. Before, the nightmares had been constant, and he had ended up buying sleeping pills out of desperation. The screams, the sight of blood, the controlled lightning that Spear had thrown at him when they'd been battling it out in the skies over the Arctic Command Center...

Every one of those encounters – he couldn't really call them fights, since Spear had done precious little fighting during the times that they had confronted each other – was burned into his mind through the new horrors that the Radam Teknoman had seen fit to unleash on him. But, the one that stood out the most in Balzac's mind, the one he would never forget for as long as he lived, was the first time that he had met the Radam Teknoman by the name of Spear. He'd been on the Space Ring, he could recall that much, though the reason for his presence had faded from his mind with the passage of time and the addition of other, more intense memories; what he saw that day, he knew, was unlikely to ever leave him.

No matter how much he wanted it to.

Spear had been unstoppable, cutting through the ranks of his support-squad like a harvesting combine through a field of wheat. None of the others, with the obvious exception of Ringo, had survived the Radam Teknoman's attention. During his more reflective moments, Balzac wondered why that was; then, he would remember just what Slade and Saber had said during their talk, he would remember that that had been their own eldest brother they were facing, and he would reflect that it was probably better that he didn't know.

Sighing, having caught himself doing something that Rachel had reminded him time and time again not to let himself do too often, Balzac rose back to his feet and stretched. Slinging the bag of weeds over his right shoulder, he made his way to the shed out back where the gardening supplies were kept. Dropping the bag in the far left corner, away from all of the other supplies, Balzac took a deep breath, then sighed; the past was never really as deeply buried as he sometimes wished it was.

Making his way back into the house, wanting to have a shower now that all of his work was done for the day, Balzac yawned and stretched. There was something intrinsically satisfying, he'd discovered, about finishing a difficult job. Especially one that you yourself had chosen to do.

Once he had made it back into his, Rick's and Rachel's shared home, Balzac smiled softly. Even after all the things he'd been through, all of the things he had done, he'd been given the chance to find at least some measure of happiness. They all had, really; even those kids of theirs, in a strange, unexpected way.

Heading for the shower, once he'd let Rachel and Rick both know that that was what he was going to do, Balzac shed his clothes and tossed them on the floor, out of the way so he could gather them up easily when he was finished. The sheen of his artificial arm, and that of his leg when he'd removed his pants, brought his attention back to his present situation. He'd been able to forget it for short times, somehow managing to convince himself that the blunted sensations in two of his limbs were something that he'd always lived with, but staring down at the limbs themselves always reminded him that that wasn't true.

It always reminded him that, no matter how much he might try to convince himself that he'd buried the memories of those days, that he'd put the War behind him and that was all there was to it, he hadn't actually escaped unscathed.

None of them had, really, not even the Earth itself; those teknoplants that the Radam had seeded all over the planet were still growing, and even though the Space Knights and the reorganized AEM had sealed off the areas where they were clustered the thickest, and the fact that both organizations were working to eradicate the last swathes of the teknoplants, still didn't change that. Without, of course, eradicating the remains of the human race, or rendering large sections of the planet uninhabitable for any longer than was strictly necessary.

Stepping into the shower, after he'd checked the linkage between his prosthetics and his own flesh and blood body, Balzac let the hot water run over him. He'd finished his chores for yet another day, so that was something. Still, nothing really seemed to be improving in the world at large; even with the Space Knights and the AEM both working to analyze and destroy the teknoplants that had been spread all over the Earth's surface by the Radam during the War, things just didn't seem to be moving as quickly as would be helpful.

Sighing as he began to wash his hair, which had been getting a bit longer lately since he hadn't had the time to have it cut, Balzac considered his options. There weren't many of them, at least not those that he could consider for more than a few minutes without wanting to scream from the sheer futility of it all. Still, there were some things that he could see himself doing that wouldn't make him lose all respect for himself; and, they would enable him to assist with the cleanup of the countryside that the Radam had covered in their teknoplants.

He'd been called a few times by the AEM, after both he and the organization itself had been allowed the time to get back on their respective feet; if only in the metaphorical sense. He was starting to see that the AEM, as competent and well staffed as they were after the time they'd been given to recover from their loses, still needed some help. They'd asked him to re-enlist, but the first few times he'd been hesitant about doing so.

He and Rachel had built very comfortable lives for themselves and Rick out here in the country, and for all that he wanted to help the Earth and her people to recover from the invasion, Balzac wasn't particularly eager to disturb his and Rachel's lives. But after he'd lived so much of his own life in the line of fire, there were times that he still couldn't believe that he'd made a life like this for himself.

Whatever else had gone on in his life, he realized, Balzac knew that a part of him would always be the street brat he and Marlowe had grown up as.

Once he'd finished with his shower, Balzac had resolved to call the AEM and tell them his decision. He was willing to become something of a consultant for them, but as of yet he wasn't quite certain if he was going to join up with them again. He might have wanted to help the Earth and her people to recover from the Radam's invasion, but he wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to give up his own life to do it.

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Once she'd helped the twins get settled back down in their room for the afternoon, Star tried not to think too much about what seemed to be happening. It didn't really help that even her parents seemed to be getting worried; even for people like Slade and Saber, twin brothers who had known each other so well, speaking and even moving in such perfect unison was completely out of the ordinary. She was worried about them, and today was the day that she was going to do something about it.

She'd been in semi-regular contact with the Commander ever since she had taken the twins into her family's home, so he knew that she was going to be bringing them in for observation today. Star just hoped that she hadn't waited too long; and, she hoped that the Commander would know what could be done to help the twins recover from whatever it was that was affecting them.

"Mom, would you help me get them into the car?" she asked, having found both her mother and father involved in a discussion in the living room. "I think I might be able to move one of them," she said, thinking back on the times that she'd carried either Slade or Saber back to their respective beds in the Command Center when they had both been staying there. "But I want to get them to the Command Center as quickly as I can, so they can get help."

"We'll be happy to help you, honey," her father said, rising from his seat next to her mother. "Those two young men have done so much for the world. I don't think I'd feel right if I refused to help them when they needed something."

"Your father's right, Star," her mother said, rising to her feet and brushing dust from her pants as she did so. "We'll be happy to help you take those boys to get help."

"Thank you, both of you," she said, smiling.

Turning to head back to the room where the twins were sleeping, Star hoped that taking them to the Command Center would help her to get Slade and Saber the help that they so obviously needed. She'd told the Commander everything that she knew about what was happening to the twins, hoping that the man who had held the Space Knights together during some of their worst moments, guiding them through battles and betrayals and the myriad horrors that the Radam had been unleashing on them on a near-daily basis would be able to help them now. She knew that the Command Center possessed the best medical technology currently available, and hence it was the most likely place to be able to help the twins get back on their feet; to say nothing of the fact that the Commander had been studying the Radam and their secrets for nearly as long as the aliens had been coming to Earth.

If anyone could be considered an expert in their biotechnology, aside from the aliens themselves, it would have to be the Commander. She just hoped that the Commander's knowledge would be enough to help them. Even if it wasn't – a possibility Star didn't like to consider, but something that she knew she had to – the twins would at least have more of a chance of recovering if they were placed under the care of the Space Knights than they would have with anyone else. And, as much as she was grateful to her parents for offering to take them in, Star couldn't avoid that fact.

As she and her father carried the deeply slumbering forms of first Slade and then Saber out into the car, Star saw that her mother had already gotten there before them. She'd started warming it up, and Star smiled softly as she heard and then felt the rumble of the engine. Settling down next to Slade, making sure that he and his brother were both as secure as they could be under the circumstances, Star sighed.

"Thanks, Mom," she said, trying to be more grateful while at the same time wishing that none of this had been necessary in the first place.

"Of course, dear," her mother said kindly, as the family car pulled out of the garage and the four of them set off on their long journey to the Space Knight Command Center. "You just make sure that those boys are all right."

"That's what I'd planned to do," she muttered, already starting to worry again about how the twins were doing.

They were both sleeping peacefully, or they at least looked like they were, and as Star turned her attention to the two of them, she found herself wondering just what was happening. She wondered if the two of them were dreaming, and if so, about what?

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There was something that he should have been thinking about, something that they were supposed to be remembering; something that he was supposed to be doing, but they couldn't remember it. There were other things that confused him as well, one thing in particular that made them doubt his sanity: he couldn't remember if he was just him, or if they were them. He supposed that it didn't matter too much, it wasn't something that could hurt them, not knowing if he was one or if they were somehow two, but it was strange. He'd never had to think about this kind of thing: if they were alone or if there was someone with him, and it made them uneasy.

There was also something else, something that seemed to call to him, waking them up out of what had felt like a sound sleep, and pulling his mind into some place they didn't know anything about. Or, not really pulling, just nudging his mind, like there was something that they were supposed to be noticing, but for some reason he couldn't. It was something that they couldn't have explained to anyone else, but for some reason he wasn't worried about explaining things.

It didn't feel like there was anyone with them who needed an explanation in the first place, it felt like everyone he could sense was someone that they knew, somehow. It felt like these were people who needed him, too, though. As if there was something that they would be able to do for those people, but he didn't know quite what it was; still, the pull toward those others was as strong as they had ever felt from anyone in his time.

The others that they kept sensing also felt far more familiar to him than anyone else that they had ever sensed over his entire life. The others surrounded them, feeling as if they were reaching out to him from somewhere far away. They didn't know quite who the others were, but he somehow felt as if they could trust the others. As if the others were people that he had known all of their life.

The others kept reaching out for him, and while they wanted to reach back, it felt like the others were out of his reach, somehow.

As they settled back into the restful sleep that he had been drawn out of by the pull of the others on their mind, he tried to relax; there was no way of telling when the others were going to make another attempt to contact them, and he wanted to be ready for it.

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Looking down on the slumbering forms of Slade and Saber, ensconced in his infirmary after they had been brought to him by Star, Hamilton Jamison, Commander of the Space Knights, wondered what he could do. It was obvious that there was something amiss with both of them, he knew this because Star had been keeping him abreast of the troubles that these two young men had been going through while they were staying with her.

He'd not expected that either of them would have been entirely unscathed by what had happened to them at the end of Earth's war with the Radam, but of all the fates that he had thought would befall them, he had never considered their specific form of telepathy overwhelming them to the point where they could no longer function as two separate entities. However, given the data that the Space Knights' medical staff were gathering from them, as well as the descriptions that Star had provided him with, it appeared that that was just what had happened.

There was also the slight oddity of how those members of the Space Knights' staff who had been transformed into pseudo-Teknomen were reacting to the presence of the twins: each and every one of them was making a point of coming into their room. None of them were doing anything untoward, at least not at the moment, and very few of them would stay in the room for more than a minute, but the fact remained that the presence of the twins within the Command Center was clearly having some sort of effect on the pseudo-Teknomen that worked for the Space Knights.

Jamison wondered for a moment if he should order the twins' room sealed off to all non-essential personnel, but then he thought better of it. None of the pseudo-Teknomen had been inside the room for long, leaving quickly as if they were embarrassed somehow, and not a one of them had attempted to disturb either Slade or Saber as they rested. Jamison was also curious to know just what kind of holds either of the twins might have on the minds of those who had been partially transformed by the Radam, so that he might be able to find some way of negating them.

He didn't think that Slade or Saber would particularly appreciate being the subject of such a great degree of interest on the part of so many people, not even if or when they regained their memories. Slade had always been a private person, and while Saber had been the more outgoing of the pair, even he could be pushed too far if he was not given enough personal space. So, Jamison decided that he would use the opportunity presented to him to study the workings of the Teknoman-specific telepathy that Slade and Saber had both demonstrated on many different occasions.

He had learned, after reading the files that the more ethical members of the Allied Earth Military had provided for him concerning what had been done to the twins – Saber in particular – while they had been held by the orders of General Gault, that their telepathy could be suppressed by the use of drugs; specifically, those types that were used to inhibit mental focus or to induce a state of general anesthesia. However, he was not going to resort to those methods unless they proved to be completely necessary.

Walking over to the monitors that had been set to detect the brainwave-patterns of both twins, and so detect any changes before they could become a problem – though Jamison didn't truly know what he or his staff would really be able to do if such a situation arose – Jamison looked from it to the young men lying comatose in their beds.

"I honestly wish there was something more I could do for you two," he said, speaking more for his own benefit than that of the twins; he knew that coma patients were still capable of hearing what was being said around them, even though they were incapable of reacting to it, but he still spoke to them.

He had to believe that they would recover, for all of their sakes.

Walking up to the bed that Slade had been placed in, Jamison looked down at the young man as he continued to slumber. His brainwaves, as well as those of Saber, were curiously normal seeming. The two of them appeared to merely be in a deep dream-state; their brainwaves certainly resembled those of others he had seen in a state of deep REM sleep. He wondered for a moment just what it was that they were dreaming about, if indeed they were dreaming at all; however, his thoughts were soon interrupted by the entrance of one of the Space Knights' new junior officers.

"Hello, Commander," the young man said, sounding sheepish. "I wasn't expecting to see you here."

"Might I ask why you yourself have decided to come, son?" Jamison asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer.

"Well…" the young man, someone Jamison had not gotten to know particularly well during the time that he had worked for the Space Knights. " It's just… it feels right to be near them. Like that's what I'm supposed to do. I can't really explain it more than that," the young man continued, though the main focus of his attention was clearly on Slade and Saber once more.

Jamison nodded silently, knowing that anything else he said would likely as not be completely ignored by the young man in his current frame of mind. He instead focused on the interactions that he was having with the twins. Or rather, those he was not having; the young man – Jamison thought that the young man was named Lawrence, but he might have recalled incorrectly – seemed content with simply being in the same room as Slade and Saber, and Jamison wondered for a moment if such was the case for all of the pseudo-Teknomen who now worked for the Space Knights. He had never before had the chance to observe one of the pseudo-Teknomen while they were in the same room; the security staff took note of their presence, but since none of them had ever done anything but stand and watch the twins as they slept, they had eventually been deemed safe.

Now that he had the chance to personally observe one of the pseudo-Teknomen during this strange vigil of theirs, Jamison found that he agreed with that assessment. The only thing that the young man, who Jamison was at least reasonably sure was named Lawrence but he was still going to confirm it in the personnel files when he left here, was doing in the twins' room was watching over them.

He barely moved from his place, only occasionally shifting on his feet as if he was waiting for some kind of a response. Perhaps not from either of the twins themselves, since every one of the Space Knights was fully aware that such a thing was unlikely to happen without some kind of a drastic change in the status quo; something that not even he himself was quite sure how to effect. There were clearly things that he still needed to know about the Radam's transformation-process and its effects on the human body, but he was still unsure how to go about learning such things.

He was not about to subject someone else to the horrors that both Slade and Saber had been put through by the Radam. There was little chance of him acquiring the information he would need to have a chance of helping Slade and Saber to recover from whatever it was that had afflicted them in any other way, however. Still, there was always more than one way to approach a problem; something that he had learned well during the two years that the Radam had been attacking the Earth.

He would simply have to work out another way of studying the effects of the Radam's transformation process on human physiology.

Leaving the infirmary, intent on returning to his office so that he could peruse the data that he and the rest of his Space Knights had gathered about the Radam, Jamison continued to ponder things as they stood. He also thought that there might be some merit to taking a closer look at the specimens of Radam's plants that had been gathered. True, the original reason for their being gathered together as they were here was so that those who were engaged in studying them would be able to discover a method of destroying them, but the Radam's plants had been designed to transform the people of Earth into Teknomen; likely as not he would be able to discover at least something new about the Radam's transformation process by studying the plants that they used to perform it.

It wasn't the most comprehensive plan that he had ever come up with, Jamison knew, but it had at least some chance of telling him what he needed to know about the Radam's method of altering humans to serve as their soldiers. Continuing on his way down the corridors of the Nevada Command Center, still pondering just how he would be able to study the Radam's transformation-process in more detail, Jamison came upon an idea.

It would be somewhat dangerous, true, but it would also potentially offer him the means to study the effects of the transformation-process in more detail than even studying the plants in depth; it was something he would never ask any of his people to do, however. Not under any circumstances.

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While her boys rested, and she wondered if either of them would ever wake up again, Star tried to keep herself busy by finding out all she could about this new Command Center that her fellow Space Knights maintained. She hadn't had the time to visit the Nevada Command Center when it was first being built, having been busy moving back into her parents' house and trying to get the twins settled in. However, now that she was here, Star found that it looked almost exactly like the old one in Arizona.

It reminded her of the times that she had spent there, back when Slade and Saber were still awake and aware. That was both good and bad; good because it reminded her of happy times, bad because it reminded her of the War, and all that they had suffered during the course of it. All of the things that the twins had been put through by the Radam; but more than that, it reminded her of when they had all been traveling in the Green Earth together, back when they had been trying to find their way to the Alaskan Command Center.

She'd felt almost as helpless then as she did now, watching Slade and Saber fade away, slowly dying while all of the Space Knights onboard the Green Earth were left with nothing to do but watch. What made it even more painful to remember, however, was the fact that neither Slade nor Saber had cared about the fact that their transformations had been slowly killing them. All her boys had cared about was the fact that the rest of the Space Knights had still been in danger from Darkon, his remaining Teknomen, and the Spider-crabs that were always trying to attack them.

She'd worried about them both; begging Slade not to go through the transformation again. She hadn't had a chance to speak with Saber about what he was going to do, what he even could do after his teknocrystal had shattered the way it had, before Maggie had come up. When she had seen the two of them kissing in the Alaskan Command Center's loading bay that day, she had been glad for it.

Saber needed someone to help look after him just as much as Slade did; even though he'd put on a good show of being able to take care of himself, he'd really been more concerned with Slade's welfare than his own, and while it was good that the two of them were so close, and she had always seen the way Slade looked after Saber and been glad for it, there were still times that Saber had overestimated himself and ended up getting hurt because of it. Times like the one where he and Slade had gone out to assist Ringo and Balzac in making sure that they all came back alive from the mission to retrieve the computer chip that would have allowed the Blue Earth to make it to the Moon if circumstances had been different.

She honestly wished they had been; maybe if Slade hadn't been forced to fight Darkon alone, none of this would have happened. Maybe neither Slade nor Saber would have been hurt so badly that they had both lost what remained of their memories; even though the Commander had said that that was probably nature's way of being kind, and no matter how much she might have agreed with his assessment, there were times she just wanted the chance to talk to her boys again. To look into their eyes and see honest recognition, to not to have to keep telling them who she was.

That was why Maggie hadn't visited when the twins had been staying at her parents' house, even though it would have been fairly easy with all of the modes of transport that the Space Knights had access to. Star understood perfectly, though; looking at someone you had fallen in love with, and seeing nothing but confusion in their expression when you tried to talk to them about what the two of you had meant to each other… it was one of the most painful things in the world. She didn't blame Maggie for not wanting to put herself through that kind of pain; there were times that Star even wondered how she could go through what she did while she'd been looking after the twins.

Deciding that she didn't want to think about things like that anymore, the things she didn't have the power to affect in any meaningful way, Star got up and left her room. She didn't know just what she was going to do for all this time; the time that she was staying in the Nevada Command Center, the time that she was going to let the twins spend in the care of the Space Knights' medical staff while she waited for them to recover, a time she didn't know would ever end, but Star was determined that she wasn't going to spend it in her temporary quarters. If she did, Star knew that she would only spend it worrying about how her boys were doing, and she'd done more than her fair share of that while she and her parents had been taking care of them.

Making her way through the corridors of the Nevada Command Center, Star found herself almost unconsciously heading for the infirmary. Sighing softly at her own inattentiveness, Star turned and deliberately headed in a different direction. She wasn't going to go back there, at least not until or unless the medical staff informed her that they had made at least some form of progress in their efforts to help the twins.

She'd eaten earlier, so she wasn't going to head down to the cafeteria until she got hungry again, and these days sparring or working out in the gym reminded her of the twins. Which was nice, when she wanted to think about them, but not so much when she was trying to think about other things. As she continued on her way through the corridors, being careful to avoid the medical sections so she wouldn't be tempted to look in on the twins just on general principle, Star decided that she would go visit the xenobiology lab.

She knew that they were studying the teknoplants that the Radam had planted all over the world, trying to find a way to destroy them and return the Earth to the state it had been before the Radam invasion, and Star thought that if she could immerse herself in studying them, she might just be able to take her mind off of them. Or, at least she would be able to tire herself out enough that she wouldn't spend so many of her nights and days up worrying about them. Star knew that it wasn't healthy for her to try tiring herself out, but she couldn't think of any other ways to get her mind off of what might be happening to the twins.

Slade and Saber were under the best possible medical care, with people who had been studying the Radam and their Tekno-process – not to mention all the plants that had been left behind on Earth – for as long as the twins had been with them. Going over what they'd learned about that process in an attempt to bring Slade and Saber back from whatever it was that had happened to them. And, even if she couldn't do much to contribute to their research, she would at least be able to put some distance between herself and her worries.

As she made her way into the laboratory where the various pieces of the Radam's dissected teknoplants were stored, Star let her mind wander back to what had happened when Slade had gone to face Darkon. She thought that it might have had something to do with what was happening to the two of them now; after she'd found Saber, injured as he had been after the twins' battle with Spear, Saber had somehow raised his crystal. The crystal itself had started glowing, almost like Saber had been trying to transform even in spite of his injuries and the blood loss that had accompanied them.

In the end, though, Saber had remained on the Space Ring decking where she had carried him, not transforming in spite of the glow of his Lapis Crystal and all of the power that it must have been putting out. Thinking back on what she had seen during that long, terrible day, she recalled that she'd seen the same symbol that she'd seen on Slade's forehead when he used his telepathy. So Saber had obviously been in contact with Slade, but then, both of the twins had said earlier that they couldn't contact each other when one of them was unconscious.

And Saber had looked completely unconscious when she'd found him lying on the deckplates. She could still remember the sharp, coppery tang of Saber's blood, the way it had dripped slowly off the curve of his white pants, stained his pale fingers, and pooled on the decking beside him. She remembered struggling to pick him up, and being unpleasantly reminded of the time that she had been forced to carry both of the twins back into the cockpit of the Blue Earth after they'd lost consciousness in the secondary airlock. Back then, she hadn't been inured enough to the way they would lose consciousness after heavy use of their powers, and in that case the Blue Earth itself had been under attack by flying Spider-crabs; even if she had known back then that their powers affected them so badly, Star knew she would have still worried about them just as much as she had then.

Standing in front of the row of glass tanks holding the Radam's plants, preserving them and keeping them from putting out any more roots, or spreading any more of their noxious gas into the atmosphere, Star sighed. When she had found out just what kind of chemicals the plants had been pumping into the air, chemicals that were designed to knock out the intended victims of the Radam, to make them easier for the teknoplants to take them so that more innocent people could be made into slaves of the Radam's war machine, Star had come to understand why the twins had hated them so much. She had hated them too, even before that.

They were horrible, and all the worse because people could so easily mistake them for something harmless, the way even she had initially done when she had seen the vast fields of them that the Radam had planted on Earth.

Pushing those thoughts aside, not wanting to think about those horrible aliens and the things that they had tried to do to the Earth and everyone living there, Star turned her mind back to what she was about to be doing; she was just in time to see a large group of the Space Knights' scientists coming into the laboratory with her. Star was greeted cordially by most of them, nodded at by a few, and ignored entirely by a couple of the more eager workers for the tanks filled with Radam flora placed towards the back of the laboratory.

Star didn't mind, given the kinds of things she was trying not to think about at the moment, she was glad to have a bit of time to herself.

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Beneath the surface, on the dark side of the moon and hidden from all sight, the Radam construct that had been ejected from Darkon's ship before it had been utterly obliterated by Slade's dual Vortex-bolt continued to grow. The tendrils burrowing through the rocky ground, fed by sporadic bursts of power from the solar-energy collectors that had been scattered over the sunlit surface of the satellite just before the vessel that had once contained them had crashed into that selfsame satellite, began to take a vastly new shape.

One that had been programmed into its base coding at the genetic level.

Their ultimate form would not have been recognizable as yet, even if someone had been in any kind of position to observe the changes from moment-to-moment. However, as the construct continued to receive energy from the collectors, as it continued to grow, its shape would become more distinct. It would become more obvious what the end product would be.

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When he came back to the house that he and Rachel shared, having heard from Star that she had taken the twins to the Space Knight Command Center in Nevada so they could recover, Balzac decided that he had finally made his decision. He was going to go back to the AEM, if only so he could at least try to redeem the mistakes that General Gault had made; he'd have his work cut out for him, no doubt about that. Especially since the late General had been a particularly power-hungry man.

He'd been that way, too, though; back when he'd first joined their ranks. Though he'd learned his lesson. He hadn't died for it, not like Gault himself, but the lesson hadn't come cheap, either. Lifting his prosthetic arm back into his line of sight, Balzac smiled a small, rueful smile. No, the lesson certainly hadn't come cheap.

Making his way back into the house, he was mildly surprised that Rachel wasn't there to greet him, but then he remembered that she and Rick had gone out to do their shopping for this month; with them all living so far out in the country as they did, it was just easier for them to buy large amounts of food and then dole it out over the month. Of course, that meant that he, Rachel, and Rick had to plan out their meals in advance, so that was kind of annoying sometimes.

That wasn't really important, though; having Rachel and Rick gone meant that he would be able to make contact with the AEM more easily. He wouldn't have to explain his reasons to them, or at least Rachel, right away; he'd have the time to make a convincing argument for what he was doing. It wasn't that he didn't want to live a peaceful life, it was just that he knew how much damage the late General had done with his unchecked ambitions.

Not just to the Earth and her people by his actions, but to the prestige of the AEM as a whole. Now, he hadn't usually been the type to put much stock in prestige, at least not since he'd come out the other side of the War, but he also knew that there were a lot of people who resented the AEM. Probably for perfectly valid reasons, but that didn't mean that the damage couldn't be undone.

Really, any damage could be undone if you were willing to put some work into fixing it. Well, almost any, he mused ruefully, glancing back down at his prosthetic arm again. He hoped that the damage to the AEM's standing wasn't as severe as what had been done to his limbs at the end of the War, but even if it was, Balzac was still determined to do everything he could do to restore the esteem of the AEM in the eyes of the public.

There weren't many people as perfectly suited as he was for doing that, and that wasn't him being conceited; someone with his record of heroism, someone who'd done as much to save the planet as he had, was bound to have a lot of clout. Clout that he would use to help the people of this planet to recover, not only from what the Radam had done to them, but from the damage that Gault had done to them in his quest for power and fame.

He knew that Rachel would probably want a better explanation from him than just that, so he was going to use the time he'd inadvertently found himself with to come up with just that explanation. Still, for the moment he had more immediate things on his mind, and so Balzac continued on his way into the kitchen and picked up the phone. This was going to be a big change for him, going back to the AEM after spending so much time as a civilian, but for the sake of humanity, he'd bear up under it.

He knew that Rachel would understand his reasons, once he had explained them to her, but Balzac was still aware that this would be a sacrifice for both of them. For all three of them, really, since he and Rick had bonded so closely by this point. But he had resolved himself to this course of action, and he was going to see it through; he just had to make sure Rachel understood why.

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He'd given orders to have one of the only two intact teknoplants in the Space Knights' keeping transferred to a secured location deep within the Nevada Command Center, a place where only he and a few selected members of his staff would be permitted to go. He didn't like having to do that, keeping secrets from one's own people was something that Gault and his ilk would do, and Jamison was not particularly fond of that man's methods. On the other hand, this particular object had been heavily secured for reasons that had nothing to do with the amount of power that one could gain by holding onto it.

It was as potentially dangerous to the Earth and all life on the planet as any other of its kind; he couldn't help but know that, after all he had seen during the course of the War.

The teknoplant itself was still in the immature phase of its growth; it would need to be tended to a great deal more before he could make any real use of it. He knew that what he was doing entailed a great risk, he couldn't help but know it after the War and all its horrors, but for the two young men that had given so much more than their lives for the sake of this planet and her people, he was willing to risk a great deal, himself.

The sharp, sudden chirp of the communication console distracted Jamison from his previous thoughts. And, as he made his way over to it, Jamison wondered just what could have been so important that his staff would see the need to contact him; all of them knew their duties, and he had given strict orders that he was not to be bothered for anything but the most critical of situations. He'd not thought that those would have come up often, with the War and all its horrors slowly fading into the collective memory of humanity, but apparently he had been incorrect.

Now, Jamison could only hope that this situation, whatever it was, could be resolved quickly; for all of their sakes.

"Jamison here," he said, having made his way over to the console along the left-hand side of the room. "What the problem?"

"Just the opposite, sir," the man who had contacted him sounded pleased enough that Jamison was willing to hear him out; no one who was delivering negative news could sound so pleased. "Slade and Saber have woken up!"

For a long moment, Jamison was so stunned by the news of this latest of developments that he forgot to speak. Not a common occurrence for him by any means, but under the circumstances he felt that such a lapse could be forgiven. "I'm on my way," he said, already tracing the route back to the twins' treatment room in his mind.

He'd not expected either Slade or Saber to be able to awaken from their comatose state without the kind of outside help that he had been preparing to give them. Still, finding out that he would not, in fact, be required to risk his own life in an effort to gain the abilities of a Teknoman so that he and his staff would have another baseline comparison for Slade and Saber's powers; so that they would be able to study him in and out of his armor and thus find a way to bring Slade and Saber back, healthy and conscious the way they were meant to be, was definitely something to be pleased about.

He was honestly relieved that he would not have to resort to such measures; he knew that the risks would have been rather high if he had personally attempted to undergo the Radam's transformation process. He may not have been as old as Ulysses Carter, but he was not that much younger, either; there was a possibility that he might have been rejected, and hence suffered all of the ailments that he had seen Shara suffer from. Therefore, he and his selected staff members would only have a limited time to find the information they sought. He was glad that he had not been forced to take such a risk, however; he did still enjoy his life, and did not want it to end so soon.

Making his way down the corridors to the room where Slade and Saber had spent so much of their time being monitored in one way or another as they had remained in their worryingly unresponsive states, Jamison noticed that he was not the only one who was paying those two young men a visit. The other members of the core group of Space Knights during the War were moving down the corridor as well, some ahead of him, but when they caught sight of him they slowed to fall into step alongside the group that was gathering around him.

"Nice seeing you again, Commander," Ringo said, as the two of them caught up to one another in the corridor leading to the larger of the treatment-rooms that this Command Center maintained.

"It's good to see you again as well, Ringo," he said. "I presume Star called you when she received the information."

"Yeah," Ringo said, with a smile that had a definite nostalgic cast to it. "I was the one who called Tina, though. And, I think she was the one who called Balzac. Still, it's kind of funny."

"What is?" he asked, wondering at the small, nostalgic smile on the ace pilot's face.

"Of all the people I would have expected to come out here to welcome those two, crazy kids back to the land of the lucid, I'd have never expected that guy."

"Well, life's just full of surprises," he heard Balzac say, and Jamison turned to see the man in question striding up to the front of the group where he and Ringo stood.

"Yeah, but if anyone had told me back when we all met you that we'd be this happy to see you, or that you'd have ever been remotely interested in what was happening to our boys, I think I'd have laughed in their face."

"You know, I think I would have, too," Balzac said, a fond, nostalgic sort of smile on his face. "Especially if you'd have told me that I was actually friends with those two," the former spy, former Tekno-suit pilot, laughed ruefully. "I think that's what would shock me most of all, given the way we all felt about each other when we met."

"Yeah, you're probably right," Ringo said, slapping Balzac on the right shoulder in the manner of one comrade to another.

"Yeah." Jamison turned, watching as Tina made her way up to the front of the group with the three of them. "I mean, with the way you guys all treated each other back when you first met up, I wouldn't even have believed anyone who told me we were all going to end up being so close."

"Well, I guess it just goes to show you what a good amount of time can do for someone's character," Ringo said, turning a sidelong grin on Balzac.

"Yeah," the man in question said, with a short, sharp laugh that almost sounded like a bark. "That and a good, near-fatal lesson in humility."

"C'mon, Balzac," Ringo said, grinning at him, though the grin had a sly edge to it. "You can't deny that the old you needed that lesson. And really badly, too."

"I guess I might have," Balzac said, sounding more reflective than Jamison had ever heard him, especially considering who the man had worked for in the past. Gault had never been one for self-reflection, after all; though things likely would have been a great deal better for everyone if he had. "Somehow, though, I don't think that holds true for the squads I commanded."

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Ringo sighed, his tone no longer sounding nearly as jovial as it had before. "Those guys didn't deserve what happened to them out there. Then again, our boys didn't deserve what happened to them when the Radam showed up, and neither did their family. I guess fairness wasn't a big consideration, here."

Ringo's last statement brought the conversation among his returning Space Knights to a halt, bringing back the melancholy atmosphere that had hung over this facility for so long. Jamison could only hope that the return of Slade and Saber to consciousness would help to alleviate that feeling at last. He knew that he had never truly been one to give comfort, preferring to work from behind the scenes to ensure that his people were protected and well cared-for. He had always known that he was not one for gregarious friendships or idle chatter; even his friendship with Silas had been more reserved than most would have expected between two people who were so close as they.

Bringing his thoughts back to the present moment with a certain amount of his own melancholy, reminding himself once again that his old friend was dead and that their friendship – strong as it had been – was a part of the past, Hamilton Jamison let the rest of his Space Knights walk ahead of him on their way into the treatment room. He didn't want to interrupt the reunion of his core group of Space Knights with their once-injured comrades.

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When she'd seen Slade's eyes beginning to flutter, and the way he'd begun to shift in his bed the way he always seemed to do when he was about to wake up, she had first looked over at Saber to see if he was doing the same. When she saw that he was, she went right over to the base-wide comm. setup and contacted Maggie; she knew that the other woman would be as happy to see Saber waking up as she was to see Slade.

When Maggie had made it to the treatment room, obviously having run the whole way to get there from her usual post in the engineering division, Star smiled.

"So, it's really true?" the redhead asked, an expression of tentative happiness spreading across her face. "They're really waking up?"

"I wouldn't have called you here if they weren't," she said, feeling a swell of happiness as she made her way back over to Slade's bedside.

"I'm glad to hear it," Maggie said, and she could hear the smile in the other woman's voice; it was probably as large as the one Star could feel spreading across her own face.

Settling herself down by Slade's bedside, looking down into the face of the man she had fallen in love with during the course of the war that they had both been involved in, Star reached out and took his hand. He'd always been one for physical contact when he trusted someone, and since she had earned the same trust as Saber had, she was determined to stay by him while he and his brother were recovering.

As Slade's eyes began to open, Star heard the sound of her fellow Space Knights coming into the room. She smiled softly, but most of her attention was focused on the man whose bedside she was sitting at. She knew that the others would understand; they had all seen how close she and Slade had become over the course of the War, and there wasn't one of them who would interrupt her vigil. Ringo would probably tease her about it, though.

Come to think of it, Saber would probably do just the same; Star smiled softly in recollection.

She could see her fellow Space Knights arranging themselves around the perimeter of the recovery room, but only out of the corner of her eyes since most of her attention was taken up by the man laying in the bed. Slade's eyes were starting to open at last, having merely fluttered and then settled closed again the first time; it was almost as if he'd been waiting for the people he'd cared about to make their appearances before he woke up.

She liked that thought.

Once Slade's emerald green eyes had opened fully, he sat up in bed and looked around. His eyes seemed a lot clearer than they had when he'd first woken up in the Arizona Command Center, in the hospital that they had rushed him and Saber to once they had managed to recover the twins from the crater where they had crashed to the Earth for the second time in their lives. She held on a bit more tightly to his hand, smiling as the rest of the Space Knights' main corps closed in a bit more to the two beds that held two of their members who had been missing up until now.

Hearing someone yawn deeply, she turned with Slade to see that Saber had sat up in his bed, and was looking around just the same as Slade had done. When Slade's eyes fell on his brother, he smiled widely. More widely than she had ever seen him smile during the War; she was so glad that the two of them would have the chance they needed to recover from all the horrors they had both been put through during the course of the war.

"You finally up now, sleepy-head?" Slade called over to his brother, a smile on his face that seemed almost like it would have been more at home on Saber's; Star didn't care about that, though, she was just happy to have him back.

"Oh, like you're one to talk," Saber shot back, sitting up and rolling his eyes at his brother in that way he always when he and Slade would tease each other.

She was glad to have them back; and she clearly wasn't the only one, judging by the way Maggie pulled Saber in for a long, deep kiss as soon as he'd turned back to look at her. Star thought for a moment that there was a strange expression on Saber's face just before the other woman did so, but she didn't get to really see his face for long before Maggie pulled him in for that long, deep kiss.

Slade laughed, cheerfully, amused. "Nice going, Casanova," he said; Star laughed softly, listening to the twins' teasing. "Since when do you get a wake-up call like that?"

"Since I'm better-looking than you are," Saber returned, with the same, teasing tone that he had used before.

"How are you boys feeling? You all right, now?" Ringo asked.

"Fine," Slade and Saber both answered, almost at the same time; the fact that they had both spoken at the same time unnerved Star slightly, reminding her of the time that her boys hadn't seemed to be able to distinguish themselves from one another despite being two clearly different people. Still, the fact that they had exchanged glances beforehand, and that they seemed fairly confused at the time, helped to mitigate her unease.

"Good to hear it," Ringo said, and Star could feel the smile on her own face stretching almost to match the one that Ringo had on his own. "Now, are you kids going to be staying with Star until you get back on your feet, or are you two going to stay here with the Commander and everyone else?"

"The Commander?" Slade echoed, cocking his head slightly in that way he'd always seemed to do when he was curious or confused. "What Commander?"

For a moment, Star didn't believe what she had just heard; it wasn't possible that Slade and Saber had forgotten everything that they had all been through, everything that they had fought for, so easily. Then she remembered how badly their minds had shut down when they had fallen back to Earth, and how badly they had both suffered for their victory at the hands of Darkon and his Teknomen, and she realized that it was indeed possible; very possible.

No matter how much she personally disliked the idea, and she disliked the idea quite a lot considering everything that had happened, she wasn't the one who had been tortured by the knowledge of everything she'd lost and everything she'd had to do to the people who had meant so much to her. Under those circumstances, she could at least understand why the twins' minds were so reluctant to retain that information.

Their conscious minds, at least; she had no real way of knowing what was going on in either Slade or Saber's subconscious. Not unless they told her, anyway.

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When he'd first woken up, Ness had figured that this was just one of the standard medical checkups that were always performed whenever any number of people, large or small, returned from a long-duration mission in space. The fact that he woke up in the same room as Cain only served to strengthen the impression. Still, he didn't know what all of these other people were doing in their room. They couldn't all be doctors; besides that, the fact that they'd mentioned a "commander" probably meant that they were some branch of the military or other.

None of their crew had been involved with the Allied Earth Military in anything more than the most indirect of ways; the Argos had been a civilian expedition, and Dad had never been particularly fond of the AEM in the first place. Cain had figured that it had had something to do with the "old friend" that Dad had talked about when he was in one of his more introspective moods. Some guy named Random, or something like that; kind of a funny name, really.

Or, that was what he'd always thought, anyway.

The people who'd come into his and Cain's shared room – Ness had already decided that they couldn't be doctors, both since they weren't dressed right, and since there were just a few too many of them to just be checking up on him and Cain – all seemed to be looking at him strangely. For a long few seconds, Ness was tempted to cross his eyes at them, just to see how they would react.

But, all of them seemed to be worried about him – he didn't know why they'd have been worried, since Ness was completely and utterly sure that he'd never even met any of these people before; and he knew Cain hadn't, either, since not only would his younger twin have been talking animatedly to people he knew, Cain would have already introduced these people to him. He'd have already known their names. Really, even he'd have known them by sight if they were friends of his, or even people that Cain had known.

None of them were, so that begged the question of just who all of these people actually were, and why all of them were so clearly concerned about him and Cain when it was obvious – at least to him – that none of them had ever met before. Sure, it was nice to be the center of attention, and having people who had never met him or Cain taking an interest in their well-being, but it was also pretty weird.

None of the people standing around his and Cain's beds had a history with him, and with none of them being doctors or anything, Ness was left wondering just what was going on.

"You're kidding, right?" the blue-eyed blond with the mole – someone distinct from the greenish-eyed blond who had a pointier chin – asked, looking from him to Cain. "I mean, you kids don't really expect us to believe that you've forgotten us again. Do you?"

"It's kind of hard to forget someone you don't actually know in the first place," he said, tilting his head as he looked more closely at the blond with the mole. "Nope; still not ringing any bells." Grinning slightly as Cain laughed, Ness considered the people surrounding them once more. They all seemed nice enough, so he decided to give them a chance.

Maybe they could actually become friends of the family, once he and Cain had gotten to know them better. Still, the looks on their faces told him plainly that, whatever they had been expecting him to say, that sure as hell hadn't been it. The two older women in the room looked especially affected by what he'd said; the redhead was staring at Cain as if she could make him remember her through sheer force of will.

It wasn't at all likely to work, but it was pretty touching all the same; whoever the redhead was, she clearly really thought that she knew Cain, so it was possible that she'd read a lot about him in the dossiers all of them – well, Dad, really – had submitted for the records before the Argos had launched, but that didn't really bode well for any of them. Dad had told him about those kinds of people; people who would read up on someone famous – even if they weren't all that famous; it'd just been a research mission, in the end – and try to get close to them by pretending to be a close friend of the family or something like that.

Whoever the redhead was, Ness made a mental note to keep an eye on her; Dad had said that some people who did that, harmless as most of them could ultimately be, could get a little… intense if they were pushed too far. The last thing he wanted was for some crazy stalker to pin all of her hopes on his younger brother and then end up losing it because Cain wasn't who she thought he was.

"So," he said, once the silence had stretched on long enough that it had started to become uncomfortable. "What are all of you people here for? I mean, me, Cain, and the rest of us couldn't have gotten that famous just from one space-mission, right?" he laughed, inviting these people to share in the joke; even the one who might have been stalking his younger brother, since she seemed fairly nice at this point. "I mean, it's not like we made first contact with aliens out there, or anything."

"You're hilarious, Nessie," Cain said, and he smirked as he saw his younger twin rolling his eyes. "Aliens; yeah, right."

Even as he and Cain were laughing at his little joke, Ness noticed that none of the other people in the room were laughing with them; he thought that was a bit strange, but then these people did seem kind of uncomfortable around him and Cain now that he'd told them that he didn't know them. It was kind of strange, but then these people had seemed to be trying to be friendly, even if they were going about it in a really weird way.

Right then and there, Ness decided that he would give these people a chance; they might have been strange and a bit overbearing, but they hadn't given him any reason to think that they were bad people.

"So, considering that none of us really know each other," he said, opting to ignore the fact that these people were claiming to know him, since that was just entirely too confusing at this stage. "Why don't you guys introduce yourselves?"

The new people in the room – well, all except for the odd, tall, albino man at the back of the group – all turned to look at each other. They seemed to be fairly close, or at least that was the impression Ness got from the obvious non-verbal communication going on between almost all of them. Really, the only person not participating in all of the non-verbal back-and-forth was the albino himself. Ness was starting to realize, though, that the albino had a sort of natural reserve.

In a weird way, the man kind of reminded him of Sam; and not just because his youngest brother was an albino, too. Come to think of it, I haven't heard anyone mention Sam. Or Conrad, or anyone else who came in here with us. Cocking his head slightly as he mentally reviewed the conversation that had lead up to him asking for introductions from this group of people, Ness found that he couldn't recall a single mention of any of the other Carters.

Or, when he thought harder on it, any mention of anyone who had been a part of the Argos' crew except for the two of them. That was… well, Ness didn't really know what that was, but he knew he didn't like it.

"Hey," he called, wanting to get their attention since it almost seemed like they had forgotten about him and Cain entirely now that they were actually talking amongst themselves. "I don't mean to interrupt whatever you guys're discussing, since I'm sure it's really important and all," he said, in spite of the facts that he really had meant to interrupt them and he wasn't at all sure that what they were discussing was really all that important to anyone but them. "But, if it's all the same to you guys, I'd like to know where the others are. I mean, you guys have been nice and all, but I'd really like to see the rest of our family. I'm sure Cain does, too."

Before anyone else even had a chance to say anything, Ness knew that something was up; something was wrong. Every one of the people who had come into the treatment room to see them for whatever reason – with the obvious exception of the reserved albino standing at the back of their group – looked incredibly uncomfortable once he'd finished talking. Ness still didn't know what was up with them, but he was completely sure by now that he didn't like it.

"I'm sorry to have to inform you of this," the albino said, stepping forward for the first time since that strange group of people had come into the room with them. "However, the Argos suffered a catastrophic malfunction when she re-entered Earth's atmosphere; nearly all hands were lost-"

He didn't really hear anything else that the albino said after that; because nothing else was important after he heard that. He thought that Cain and the albino might have still been talking, that the albino might have even introduced himself to Cain at one point, but Ness' thoughts were still stalled on the fact that almost everyone he and Cain had ever known or cared about was dead. There was nothing that anyone could say that would ever make something like that all right.

He knew that Cain knew that, too, but his younger twin had always seemed to be a bit more mentally resilient than he was; even Dad had said so, when he'd finally come around. Oh God, Dad, Conrad… I never knew. I'm sorry, closing his eyes as a wave of profound sorrow washed over him, Ness scrubbed ineffectually at his face as the tears that had begun welling up in his eyes when the albino had told him about the ultimate fate of the Argos and almost all of her crew finally spilled over.

He was glad to have survived that kind of thing, sure, and he was extremely grateful that Cain was still with him, but Ness couldn't deny the fact that – without the almost all of the people who had been a part of his life – the fact of his own survival felt hollow.

Suddenly finding the black-haired woman who had been a part of the group wrapping her arms around him, Ness allowed himself to relax into her embrace. He might not have known just who she really was, he might not have had many reasons to trust that she honestly had his best interests at heart, but here and now she was offering him the sympathy that he so desperately needed at the moment, so he would let himself relax a bit around her.

As the woman held him and he cried on her shoulder, Ness tried not to think so deeply about what he'd learned on this day of all days; he'd be perfectly willing to call it the worst day of his life.

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She didn't know quite how to react; seeing Slade – Star couldn't quite bring herself to think of him as Ness Carter, despite the fact that that was obviously how he thought of himself – clearly feeling so lost and alone that he couldn't even function… It seemed worse than the time that he and Saber had first lost their memories, but maybe that was just because he and Saber were confronting something so completely horrible, with none of the mental defenses that they had developed in response to the horrors of the War and everything that they had faced before it. Now stripped of all of their mental toughness, and suddenly confronted with the horror that had befallen their family…

She really couldn't blame either of them for reacting the way they had.

As Slade continued to cry, Star felt another arm wrapping around her back, and when she turned to look to her left where the feeling had been coming from, she saw that Saber had joined the two of them. He and the Commander had been talking even after Slade had lost his remaining composure, but then Saber had always seemed to be the more levelheaded of the twins. Still, everyone had their limits; the War had made that perfectly clear.

Still, now that their long battle was over at last, they could all concentrate on healing their various wounds. Not so much the physical ones, of course, since they had pretty much completely recovered from those during the course of the War itself, but the mental scars that lingered long after all but the most grievous of injuries had healed almost as good as new. It would take some time, she knew, to help Slade and Saber recover from this new trauma they were dealing with, but she was determined to help them all the same.

Wrapping her free arm around Saber, Star saw Maggie coming over to join them. As Saber continued to lean on her, his breathing ragged but his eyes still dry for the moment, Star rubbed his back gently. He'd always seemed to like things like that. Looking up as Maggie wrapped her own arms around the three of them, Star smiled gently as she saw the other woman settling down next to Saber on Slade's bed.

For a few, long moments – happy moments, during which Star could almost forget how much Slade and Saber had suffered at the hands of the Radam – the four of them simply sat, breathing together and letting the tension and sorrow slowly bleed out of them. She knew even then that this wouldn't be the end of things; the kind of horrors that Slade and Saber had been forced to endure weren't going to be recovered from quickly or easily.

When Slade and Saber both seemed to be regaining their composure, Slade's tears drying up and Saber's ragged breathing both beginning to even out, though neither of them seemed completely recovered, Saber was the first one to start pulling back. Letting him up, Star saw that while his eyes were fairly red, he hadn't actually been crying. She didn't quite know what to think about that, but seeing his red-rimmed blue eyes staring up at her with such clear gratitude made Star feel warm inside.

"Thanks," he said, smiling. "Really, I don't normally do-"

"It's all right," she said, reaching out to gently stroke Saber's hair. "Today hasn't really been the best day for you two; I understand."

Slade sniffled, looking up at her with a watery, cracked sort of smile. "Yeah, I guess you could say that." Scrubbing at his still-watering eyes with his right sleeve in a clear effort to make himself look a bit more presentable, he looked more closely at her when he was finished. "Look, I'd really like to thank you for all this. Here we are, two guys you don't even know, and you're willing to help us out like this. It's not every day you find someone like that."

Slade's smile seemed genuine, though still a little pointed, as if he was trying to subtly remind her of the fact that they hadn't met before. Still, all things considered, the three of them really hadn't met before; Slade had all but admitted to her that he hadn't thought of himself as Ness Carter back during the War. And, after she had found out what he had suffered – what Ness Carter's life had been like and hence what he'd been forced to give up during the course of the War – she'd completely understood his reasons for that.

In light of all of that, she could understand Slade's insistence that she didn't know him; she really didn't know him, not as Ness Carter, anyway.

"Well, that's the kind of person I try to be," she said, smiling softly. She might have ended up having to get to know the twins all over again, but even that was better than the alternative.

Better than she had ever expected it to be, those first two weeks after she and the rest of the Space Knights had pulled Slade from that crater and brought him to the infirmary to recover with Saber. Back then, neither she nor Maggie had known if the two of them would ever recover from the damage that their constant transformations had done to their minds; to say nothing of the wounds that Spear had inflicted on Saber during that last battle. This, even though she wouldn't have wished for anything like it to happen to any of her friends, was certainly a better alternative than having Slade and Saber remaining in the state they had been since Slade's battle with Darkon had ended.

"So, since we all seem to be getting along so well, why don't you guys introduce yourselves?" Saber asked reasonably, tilting his head in his usual curious pose.

"All right," she said, taking a breath and trying not to think so much about the two friends – or one friend and someone that she had fallen in love with – that she had effectively lost. "My name is Star Summers, and these are my friends," she continued, sweeping her left arm across the room to encompass all of the various people – Space Knights and not – inside it.

"My name is Maggie, Maggie Matheson," the woman sitting next to her said, and Star thought there was something false about the cheerfulness of her expression; it wouldn't have come as any sort of surprise, really.

"It's nice to meet you, Maggie," Slade said, wiping the last of the tear-tracks from his face. "Sorry, I guess we're not really the best company right now."

"You've both suffered through something horrible." Really, more than they knew at this point. She almost wished, for just a moment, that neither of them had to remember, but that wasn't fair to them. She'd had those thoughts before, and while the circumstances had been drastically different, Star had long since found that she couldn't wish that kind of fate on the men she cared for so much. "Anyone who expected you to be good company after finding out something like that is either stupid or completely insensitive."

Saber chuckled softly. "I like how you think." He looked over the other Space Knights, head tilting slightly once again. "So, how about the rest of these guys?"

"I'm Balzac St. Jaques," Balzac said, smiling; Saber snickered. "Yeah, yeah; I know all about the alliteration. Laugh it up; it's not like I haven't heard it before."

Both Saber and Slade shared a laugh, and Star found herself reminded again that these weren't quite the men that she had come to care so deeply about during the two and a half years that had passed since the beginning of the War.

"I'm Ringo Richards." Star turned, catching the expression on her old friend's face; he didn't seem particularly happy to have to reintroduce himself to people he'd known – that they'd all known – so well for more than two and a half years, but he also didn't look like he was going to say anything about it. "Good to see you kids up and about; I was starting to get worried."

"You'd seen us in the infirmary while we were being patched up, huh?" Saber asked, though it was clear from the tone of his voice that he considered that question entirely rhetorical.

It wasn't, of course, but Star didn't think there was really a good way to tell either of the twins what had actually happened; at least, not for the moment. Not when they were still so obviously mentally fragile.

"I'm Tina. Tina Corman," the youngest of the core group of Space Knights said, clearly trying to keep smiling for the twins, but just as clearly having the same kind of trouble with that as Star herself was. "It's nice to see you guys, now that you're finally awake."

"I'm Mac McElroy," Mac said, his Scottish accent becoming slightly more pronounced, the way it always seemed to be when he was feeling a particularly strong emotion; Mac was obviously just as worried as the rest of them. "It's good to see you lads are feeling better now."

"Thanks," Slade said, smiling as he looked over all of the gathered Space Knights. "It's nice to know there's still someone who cares about what's happening to us."

"Yeah; that's always a good feeling," Ringo said, sounding like he was trying to put on a brave face for the sake of the twins but wasn't quite up to it.

"My name is Hamilton Jamison," the Commander introduced himself, stepping forward. "I am the Commander of this group; we are called the Space Knights."

"Are you guys military, or something?" Slade asked, looking dubious. "Dad's never been particularly fond of the military. At least, he wasn't," Slade turned away slightly, staring blankly at a spot on the wall, just over Star's right shoulder. "I mean… before."

"The Space Knights have never been affiliated with the military, son," the Commander said, making his way forward to stand just in front of the twins. "We're part of the Outer Space Development Agency."

"Oh, I've heard of them," Saber said, leaning back slightly as he studied the Commander. "I think I remember Dad saying that the Argos had some crewmembers that were a part of that organization."

"I suspect that that's very possible," the Commander said, looking kindly down on the twins as the two of them sized him up; Star didn't know just what the two of them were thinking, since neither of them seemed to remember that they knew the rest of the Space Knights – and had even been a part of the organization that had helped to save the world from the Radam when they had invaded. "The OSDA would have certainly taken an interest in something like your father's expedition. Perhaps even providing the funding to get him the ship in the first place."

"Yeah, I remember hearing that those guys had a hand in helping to set up the colony on Io," Slade said, nibbling his lower lip; for a moment, he seemed so far away that Star couldn't help but wonder just what he was thinking. "What… what are we going to do, now? I mean, not that you Space Knights haven't been great and all, helping me and Cain out the way you did, but… where are we going to be able to stay? I mean, I guess we could go back home, but…"

"I have a house out in the country," Star blurted impulsively; she'd seen how the both of them had reacted, the first time they had gone into their old house. It hadn't been easy, on either them or her, watching Slade and Saber basically bidding farewell to the place where they had grown up; for her, she had been forced to watch her boys poking at old wounds… she knew what they'd been thinking, while they had been making their way through the halls and empty rooms of their old house, but she had also been able to see how badly was hurting them, as well. "You two can stay with me… if- if you want."

"That's really nice of you," Saber said, smiling in that happy, cheerful way he did when he wasn't feeling particularly happy or cheerful at all.

"Yeah," Slade said, smiling in that same bright, false way that his younger twin was doing; Star didn't know just what the two of them were trying to prove – to themselves or anyone else – but she really wished that they would give up the pretense. It couldn't be good for either of them. "That is really nice of you, Star. I think we just might take you up on that offer of yours. I mean… I don't think our old house would be really comfortable after all this time." An expression of confusion overtook Slade's face, then, and Star knew before he even spoke just what question he was going to ask; she just didn't know how to answer it. "How long has it been, anyway?"

"It's… well…" looking at Slade and Saber – no matter what names her boys went by, Star knew that she would always think of them as Slade and Saber – Star found that she couldn't quite bring herself to say anything.

If she told them that it had been two years since they had lived in the Carter house with the rest of their family – two years since any of their other family members had been alive – she had no way of knowing how either of them would react. To say nothing of their reaction if either of them found out about the invasion and everything that had gone on during that – everything that the Radam had forced them to do everyone that they had cared about – so she could only hope that they wouldn't find out. For their sake, as well as her own; Star didn't like to see her boys hurting, and finding out about the invasion – or remembering it, if that was what ended up happening – would hurt them almost as bad as the initial invasion. She was sure of it.

"It's been two years, and three months," the Commander said, clearly trying to be as gentle as anyone could when they were giving people that kind of news. "None of us was entirely certain when either of you would wake up, after we recovered you from the crash site."

Star didn't quite know why the Commander was lying like this, but when she thought about what had really happened to the twins, Star realized that what the Commander said could be considered the truth. Depending on how you looked at things; it had been obvious to anyone that had known them that both Slade and Saber had done everything that they could to separate themselves from the people that they had been, before the invasion, before the war that the Radam had brought to Earth… They had both tried to forget Ness and Cain Carter, and had almost completely succeeded, until they had been forced to go through the second evolution of their powers in order to save their own lives.

They'd adamantly refused to answer to the names that they themselves had given, all those months ago when their two groups had met; it had been disconcerting to all of them, but she and Maggie had borne the brunt of it.

Now, seeing the shock and dawning anguish on the twins' faces, Star could barely restrain herself from holding the two of them tighter. Neither Slade nor Saber – Ness or Cain Carter – had any of the memories that would help them to understand just why she cared for them so much. That was probably why Maggie wasn't holding them, or kissing Saber the way she had seen the other woman do so many times in the past. There was no real way of knowing how Saber would react; not now, when neither he nor Slade possessed the memories of just what she and Maggie had come to mean to him and Slade.

It hurt, but Star couldn't deny that it was the truth; not after all she'd seen and heard.

"So, is there any word on just when we're going to be able to get out of here?" Saber asked, tilting his head slightly.

"I could take you now, if you'd like," she said, pulling back slightly as Maggie did the same; it wasn't easy, to distance herself like this, and she was sure that Maggie felt the same, but Star had seen more than enough to know that – as familiar as they might have looked and sounded – these weren't the men she knew.

She had already been through this once before, and though it had been a harsh lesson at the time, Star was determined not to make herself repeat it.

"Thanks," Slade – well, Ness Carter, but thinking of him that way was going to be difficult after all the time she'd spent with him as Slade – answered, with a soft, sad sort of smile. "And thanks again, for letting me and Cain stay with you."

"You're welcome," Star said, only just managing to stop herself from calling him Slade.

"You kids take care of yourselves," Ringo said, stepping forward to clap both twins on the shoulder nearest to him. "All right?"

"Right," Sa-Cain said, sounding like he was still getting used to the idea of people that he and Sl-Ness didn't know caring about them so much.

After that, almost all of the other Space Knights, with the obvious exception of Commander Jamison himself, came forward to either hug the twins; in the case of Tina, Maggie, and Star herself, or to offer a friendly back-slapping; in Mac's, Ringo's, and Balzac's cases. The Commander, on the other hand, stepped forward to shake first Ness and then Cain's hand, and then wished them well in whatever they chose to do with their lives.

"Come on, you two," she said, making her voice as gentle as she could. "I'll take you out to my house in the country and help you get settled in."

She didn't think it would have been the best idea to take the twins back to her parents' house, since her mother and father had become so accustomed to dealing with Slade and Saber that she didn't know how either of them would react to Ness and Cain Carter. More than that, though, it didn't seem like either of the twins were quite up to dealing with people who they didn't remember knowing.

She didn't know if they ever would be again, not really. Still, for all that Ness and Cain didn't remember what they had meant to each other, they were still her friends. Nothing would ever change that.

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It was kind of strange, Ness reflected as the three of them traveled out to Star's house in the country, how he didn't feel any of the anguish he'd have expected. After hearing that the Argos' crew – which had included the rest of his and Cain's family, some family friends, and a lot of coworkers of his father's – had been killed in the reentry to Earth, and that he and Cain had gone into a just-over-two-year coma from the after-effects, he'd cried about it, sure, but now Ness found that he didn't feel anything. Maybe he'd just gone numb from the shock, but if so he just hoped that this feeling of not-feeling could last awhile longer; it was horrifying enough just to think about what had happened to the people aboard the Argos, if he had to feel what it meant to him…

He just didn't want to feel for awhile, that was all.

The car's engine was louder than he remembered his family's old car being, but then Star's car could easily have been a different brand then what Dad had liked back in… those days. Looking over at Cain, he found that his younger twin was staring out at the scenery passing them by without actually seeming to see any of it. Ness could definitely sympathize, and for a moment Ness wished more than anything that he'd still had his MP3 player; music had always helped him to forget during times like these, and he could really do with a little forgetfulness right about now.

I guess Star wasn't kidding when she said her house was out in the country, he mused, watching the buildings thin out in favor of houses, and the houses grow farther and farther apart. Now and then, he would see strange forms that looked like a cross between dead trees and – oddly enough – some form of giant flower, but as he was feeling completely wrung-out and hence more than a bit exhausted, Ness dismissed the weirdness as something his imagination had conjured up to distract him.

Not that he wasn't grateful or anything, since he didn't particularly want to think about what he'd found out today, but those trees had probably been knocked over by a storm or something and the forest service just hadn't gotten around to picking them up yet.

"Must have been some storm," Cain said, drawing Ness' attention back to his younger twin, looking out the window just the same as he'd been doing for most of the ride to Star's house.

"What?" he asked, a bit surprised that Cain had thought of just the same kind of thing he'd been thinking about; sure, they were twins, but Cain hadn't ever made a habit of sounding like he was responding to one of Ness' thoughts. Still, maybe Cain had been having the same kind of thoughts, himself.

That was always possible; on top of being twins, the two of them had been raised together all their lives. It was only natural they would think alike, sometimes.

"You said it was probably a storm that had knocked those trees over," Cain said, turning to look at him with a raised eyebrow, seeming surprised by what he'd just said; Ness, for his part, was more startled by his younger twin's eyes than anything Cain was actually saying.

Cain's eyes were blue; a very bright, clear, and above all noticeable blue. Cain's eyes were not supposed to be blue, they never had been blue, so finding himself staring into the bright blue eyes of his younger twin was incredibly disconcerting.

"Ness, why in the heck are you staring at me like that?" Cain asked, bringing Ness' attention sharply back to the present moment.

Still, there were more important things for Ness to focus on now than comforting his younger twin: things like finding out just what the hell had happened to Cain's eyes. "Hey, Star, did something happen to Cain? Like, something with his eyes?"

"What do you mean, Ness?" Cain asked, sitting back up and turning worried – and worrying – bright blue eyes back to him. "What's wrong with my eyes?"

"I think you should look for yourself, Cain," he said, still more than a bit unnerved by the sheer wrongness of seeing Cain with blue eyes. "The rear-view mirror should be close enough for you to see."

Cain must have looked, because the next thing Ness heard from his younger twin was an inarticulate, startled yelp. "What- Did something happen to my face that you Space Knights forget to tell me about?"

"I don't know what the medical staff had to do, to save you and your brother's lives, Cain." Ness took note of Star's slight pause before she said his younger twin's name, but under the circumstances he didn't much care about something like that. "But, I'm sure that – whatever it was they had to do – it was for the best."

Ness wished he could be so sure, but saying something would probably worry them. And, while he didn't know Star well enough to worry about her feelings, Cain was someone he'd grown up with – someone he'd spent all his life with – and Ness didn't want Cain worrying any more than his younger twin so clearly was at the moment.

"I'm sure it was," he said, in spite of the fact that he wasn't really sure at all, and the fact that he was starting to suspect that Star knew more about their situation than she was letting on.

Wrapping his left arm around Cain's shoulders, Ness relaxed as he felt his younger twin leaning into his hold. They might not have been able to go home – might not really want to go home to that big, empty house with all the memories of happy times that would never come again, but he and Cain had survived. In the end, that was what Ness forced himself to focus on; in the end, it was all that really mattered.

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(Brother Nemo, I can sense them; the Light and Dark Messiahs, they're coming this way!) she exclaimed, having felt – if only for a few fleeting, glorious moments – the brush of Earth's twin saviors against her own mind.

(Good work, my sister; grant me your location. I will bring the flock to you,) Brother Nemo – the man who had brought her and her fellow Primary Bodies together into the closest thing that most of them had to a family – responded, allowing her to feel some measure of the happiness he felt about the fact that the Brotherhood would soon be in the presence of Earth's greatest heroes.

The world had changed since the Radam had touched the planet; even when they had been forced off the planet by the efforts of the Light and Dark Messiahs, the changes had been clear and permanent to anyone who cared to look. Yes, those who had not been touched by the Change had tried to undo it, but she and the other members of the Brotherhood knew that the Change was not going to be undone.

The world had changed, even as the Unchanged struggled against it, and it would change more in the future. All that was needed for the Change to be completed was a firm hand – or rather hands – to guide it, and someone with the vision to lead the Changed to victory over those who chose to remain Unchanged. Brother Nemo had gathered them together for just that purpose, and to ensure that those who had been Changed were not in any more danger from those Unchanged that had turned against them. There were those among the ones who had not been touched by the Change who felt that those who had were a reminder of the Radam's failed invasion.

There were even those of the Unchanged who felt that she and the others who had been Changed were working for them even now; attempting to subvert the population of Earth so that the next time those vicious, depraved aliens attempted to invade, they would have a much easier time doing so.

Not a word of that was true, of course; the Changed were merely those who had been caught up in the chaos of the last days of the Radam's invasion. Still, enough of the Unchanged had believed such nonsense that she and the others who had been Changed had been forced to band together to survive. It was dangerous for any of the Changed to be caught alone these days; that was also why the group that would be called the Brotherhood had been formed, bringing the Changed together so that they would be better protected than in even the small groups that they had formed out of the need to protect themselves.

It had been some time later that Brother Nemo had emerged, uniting the Changed still farther. It was because of Brother Nemo that the Changed had begun to realize that those who had not been touched by the Change would always be a threat to those who had been changed; because of him that those Changed had realized that they would never be free, would never be safe, if they didn't act to preserve their own interests.

If those Changed did not act to preserve themselves, then they were doomed to die; to die at the hands of those Unchanged who believed them to be nothing more than a legacy of the Radam that had been left behind.

That was why they needed the help of the Light and Dark Messiahs: only those two had the power necessary to ensure that all of the Changed not only survived in this new world that they had found themselves in, but to ensure that they prospered, as well.

No matter the cost, she wanted herself and all of her people – all of the Changed that had gathered together under the protection of Brother Nemo – to be safe in the new world; and, if she was forced to act as those Unchanged thought the Radam would in such a situation, then so be it.

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As she pulled into the driveway of the county house that she hadn't yet sold, Star could only think that it was a good thing that she had been too preoccupied with taking care of Slade and Saber to think of what to do with the house that she had left behind when the two of them had started showing signs of regaining themselves in some small fashion. Those first days in this isolated place had been the hardest, especially given the fact that Maggie's own responsibilities to the Space Knights – helping them to rebuild in the aftermath of the War – had kept the other woman away.

She had clearly seen how much the other woman had wished to stay, to help both Saber and Slade to recover from the ordeal that the war against the Radam had put them through, but in a strange way, Star was actually grateful that Maggie's work had kept her so busy during the first few months while the twins had been recovering. She'd had a hard enough time dealing with her own anguish at seeing Slade reduced to a mute, nearly helpless shell of himself; she didn't think she could have helped Maggie to deal with her own feelings while suffering through that anguish.

Still, now that neither of the twins remembered any of their fellow Space Knights – not even their own time during the War – Star found that she didn't know if she would have preferred to have the other woman here with the three of them or not.

Watching Ness and Cain – she found that it was getting easier to think of them that way, given the fact that they were so clearly different than the men that she had come to know so well during the Radam's two-year siege on Earth – as they puttered around the house, both of them seeming not so much restless as like they needed to keep moving, Star bit her lip. It was like they thought if either of them stopped, something terrible would happen. It was so much like what she had known of Slade and Saber's habits back during the War that it almost made her heart ache; it also let her know that this was a coping mechanism that had carried over from who the twins had been before their encounter with the Radam, rather than being something that they had developed afterward.

"Why don't I help you two settle in?" she offered impulsively, not quite feeling up to seeing two people that she had come to care so deeply about looking and acting so lost; even if they weren't quite the men that she remembered.

She still thought of them that way, even with how clear it was becoming that neither of the twins remembered those times. Still, even if she had to rebuild the friendship that the three of them had shared during the course of the War, Star knew that she couldn't ever regret the fact that it was over.

"Thanks," Ness said, a slight, tired smile on his face. "Sorry to be so much trouble," he paused, glancing toward the large window at the far end of the living room. "I don't know why Cain and I are so restless all of a sudden."

Cain laughed softly, sounding about as rueful as she had ever heard him. "You know, normally I'd try to say this kind of thing was Ness' fault," he said, smirking at the sharp 'hey!' from his older twin. "But, I'm feeling weirdly restless, myself."

"It's all right," Star said, smiling at the two of them as she gently shepherded them toward the back of the house. "It's been a very hard day for the both of you," she said, trying to put aside the memories that she still had of the men she had known for all of two years.

Two years; a time that had seemed to stretch onward infinitely during those hard days and nights of the War, but now that the War was over and the Radam had been driven away, now that she was spending her time taking care of strangers who had once been two of her closest friends, now seemed entirely too short. Star wouldn't have ever believed that she could have missed those tumultuous times, and to be honest even she couldn't really bring herself to feel anything but honest relief now that they were over, but she was honest enough to admit that she did miss the relationship that she had formed with Slade and Saber during the first half of the War.

As she lead Cain and Ness deeper into the small house, half-listening to the boys as they talked about inconsequential little things in what seemed to be an effort to take their minds off of what had happened to them today – or maybe off of the fact that they couldn't remember anything that had gone on in the last two years and some months – Star smiled softly. It wasn't that easy for her to put aside what she had known about Slade and Saber while they had worked with the Space Knights, but Star found that if she tried to think of them as entirely different people – which they kind of were, under the circumstances – things became easer on her.

Ness mentioned that he was hungry, leading Cain to agree with him, and so Star lead the twins to the kitchen so she could make some food for all of them. Then, noticing the way that Ness was watching her, and more than that the way his eyes seemed fixed on her – as if he couldn't quite make himself look away for some reason – Star turned to look at him.

"Is there something wrong, Ness?" she asked, hoping that there wouldn't be; Star didn't know how she was supposed to handle helping someone she barely knew.

"No, there's nothing really wrong," Ness said, seeming to be making a concerted effort to focus on her rather than what she was currently doing. "It's just… Conrad really enjoyed cooking."

"Ah; I understand," she said. In the end, she did: for Ness and Cain, with no memories of the War, and all of the friendships that they had formed during that time to sustain themselves, it must have felt like only a day since they had lost their family. "If you want to leave, I'll call you when I'm done here."

"Yeah…" Ness said, seeming to deliberately turn away from what Star was doing. "Yeah; I think I'll do that. C'mon, Cain."

"Right with you, Nessie," Cain said, as the twins left the kitchen.

Watching her friends – the men she had gotten so close to, during the two-year siege of planet Earth by the Radam – make their way out of the kitchen, and remembering the lost expressions on their faces, Star sighed. She knew that there wasn't really anything that she, personally, would be able to do for them in this situation. All that she could do – all that anyone without either telepathic powers or extensive knowledge of the Radam's biotechnology, though both would have probably been better, would have been able to do – was to help those boys of theirs settle in, and hope that their minds would recover on their own.

Or not, as the case might end up being.

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Knowing that both the Light and Dark Messiahs were inside that small building, either alone with one another or with merely one of the Unchanged to keep them company, made it particularly difficult to just stand outside the house and wait. Knowing that she was so very, very close to those with the power to guide and protect the Changed, and also that the only thing she could actually do without the support of her brethren and Brother Nemo himself was to hide herself outside the building and use her own telepathic powers as a beacon to the members of the Brotherhood that would follow in her footsteps, drove her nearly mad.

Still, Brother Nemo himself had ordered her to stand vigil at the house, to act on behalf of the members of the Brotherhood who had not been fortunate enough to be the one to find the house where their Messiahs were staying, and that was what she was going to do.

Moving in as close as she dared to one of the large windows of the house, she wrapped her mind in the mental shields that Brother Nemo and the others had helped in instructing her to construct. Looking in through the window that overlooked the room where she had sensed their Messiahs, she found them sitting at a table with one of the Unchanged. It was a mildly disconcerting thing to see, since both Brother Nemo's teachings and her own experiences indicated that the Unchanged were implacably hostile to the Changed, but as she continued to observe the interactions so that she could better report on the situation to Brother Nemo and those that he would choose to accompany him, she found herself smiling.

Clearly, their Messiahs had managed to calm the hatred that this woman would have otherwise felt toward them as the foremost of the Changed.

The thought of that, seeing someone who had not been touched by the Change interacting so peacefully with the two who had ultimately been responsible for bringing the Change to Earth, was a happy one to her. Perhaps this woman, whoever she was, would be willing to embrace the Change, herself.

(Brother Nemo, I feel that there is something else that I must tell you: there is someone else – a woman – in the home where our Messiahs have chosen to settle themselves. She is not one of the Changed, but,) she paused for a moment, reflecting on the expressions that she had seen not only on the White and Black Messiahs but on the woman that they had invited to stay with them, and smiled. (I think that she very well may be receptive to us.)

(That is a good thing to hear, my sister,) Brother Nemo responded, and the tone of his telepathic voice was indeed pleased. (I shall keep that in mind.)

She was pleased to know that she had found something so worthy of Brother Nemo's notice, and as she turned her attention back to their Messiahs and the Unchanged woman that they had invited into their home, she smiled; this was indeed a happy moment, not only for the Brotherhood, but for their Messiahs as well.

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As she tried to relax enough to fall asleep, Star found that she couldn't help wondering what had been bothering the twins. She'd known that something had to be, since both Ness and Cain had seemed agitated, and given what she had learned about Cain's – or Saber's, but from what he had told her he'd made an effort not to change too much from the person he'd been before the War – personality he wasn't really the type to get agitated by things. She'd asked them more than a few times during dinner just what had been bothering them, but neither of them had seemed to know just what it was that was causing them such discomfort.

It hadn't been a good meal for any of them; the twins, because they had been distracted all night by whatever it was that had been out there, and Star herself because she was worried about them. She also had the distinct feeling that she knew what had been getting to them, even if just in a general sense: all Teknomen could sense each other telepathically, and since the only two Teknoman who still existed were Slade and Saber themselves – even if they didn't remember being Teknomen – their telepathic awareness of the other must have been making them edgy.

Star wished that there had been something that she could have done for them, but the twins themselves had both told her that the only real way to block a Teknoman's telepathic abilities was to drug them into insensitivity or to knock them unconscious. Since she wasn't about to do that to Ness and Cain, since even with their memory problems they were still the men she cared deeply about, Star resolved herself to instead do everything she could to make sure that Ness and Cain were both as comfortable as they could be, under the circumstances.

With that thought firmly in mind, Star was finally able to relax to the point where she felt like she might actually be able to get some real sleep, instead of restlessly stewing over what might have been bothering the twins.

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As the structure continued to rebuild itself, following plans that had been ingrained into the failsafe's memory-core before it had ever been jettisoned from the Deep Scout that had spawned it, the biomechanical circuitry within the newly formed main spire began slowly to activate. It had only one, true directive at this point in time: to make contact with the most powerful representatives of the force that had created it, and to draw them to this place so that they could take an active part in shaping it. So that they would be able to use it to expand the territory of the Radam Empire.

There was no power flowing through the biocircuits of the Spire, nothing to draw those it was programmed to seek towards it, for the moment; however, as the energy from the distant – and not so distant – collectors on the sunlit side of the moon was funneled toward the growing form of the new Deep Scout that was being constructed, the main focus was on the structure of the Spire. There were very few minds suited to interfacing with the Radam-derived biotechnology; only two, in fact, and the power necessary to contact them would need to be stored up until it was sufficient to reach them through the intervening distance.

Strong enough to draw them back to their proper place.

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When he'd made it back home to Rachel, still troubled by the way Slade and Saber – those kids would always be Slade and Saber to him; he'd just never known them well enough by any other name to think of them any differently – hadn't even reacted when they'd seen him, he'd wanted to be alone for awhile to brood. Rachel wasn't about to let him get away with that, of course; she'd put their child Marlowe – Rachel had named him that; said she'd wanted him to have a link to his past that didn't cause him pain; he'd thanked her for the gesture, since it was nice of her to think of him like that – in his arms, and they'd all gone out to have a picnic in the fields behind their house.

Now, with little Marlowe in his lap, playfully tugging on the finger that his son had grabbed such a firm hold of, Balzac found that he finally, really understood what the Space Knights' Commander Jamison had meant when he said that their amnesia was nature's way of being kind. They had ended up having to kill the remaining members of their family, after the Radam had gotten their hooks into them. He wouldn't have wanted to remember being forced to hunt down and kill his family, now that he could actually say that he had one.

Leaning back on his left hand, Balzac sighed softly. He might have understood what the Space Knights' Commander had meant when he said that, but he couldn't help feeling sympathy for Ringo's desire to have the twins remember him, their fellow Space Knights, and all of the things they had been through, either.

"You're still thinking about them, aren't you, Balzac?" Rachel asked kindly, though it really sounded like more of a rhetorical question.

It pretty much was, at this point. "Yeah; I guess I understand better, now. About what Commander Jamison said; about Slade and Saber's amnesia."

"Yes," Rachel said, looking down at the faded blanket they were all sitting on. "I think I understand it, too. Those boys must have been devastated once they realized what they would have to do to their family, just to be able to save the rest of the world."

"Yeah," he muttered, looking down at their son as he continued to tug at the baby's fisted hand. He didn't know how those two had felt about what they'd had to do, not having been close to them during the time they'd spent settling in with the Space Knights; besides, back then he hadn't even had a family. He honestly doubted he'd have been capable of understanding the Space Knights' boys, back then. "I think I know what you mean."

They both sat in silence for a long time, only the sound of little Marlowe's happy burbling to keep them company. He didn't know quite what Rachel was thinking, but Balzac couldn't help thinking about how he'd acted in the early days of the War. He'd been almost as power-hungry as General Gault, back then. He didn't really like to think about it, what he'd been like back then, but he couldn't really deny it, either.

"So, you're really going to go back to the military?" Rachel asked, looking up at him with an expression that he couldn't quite decipher at the moment.

"Well, someone has to try to undo the damage Gault did," he said, shifting little Marlowe in his arms so that he could rock the boy gently back to sleep. "And, not just that," he said, looking down at the child – their child; his first and only son – resting in his arms. "None of us really think that the Radam are finished with this planet. Not with all of the resources they found, and definitely not considering all of the people they managed to convert. They'll be back; it's just going to be a matter of if we're all ready for them, or not."

"I thought it might be something like that," Rachel said, tucking her left knee up under her chin and leaning slightly forward. "I don't really want to believe that something like that could happen, but you and your Space Knight friends all know what those horrible Radam are like a lot better than I do."

"Yeah, and I really hope that it stays that way," he muttered.

He'd seen, first hand, the horrors that the Radam inflicted on anyone they managed to get their various stolen appendages on; hearing the stories that both Saber and Slade had had to tell – back when they'd actually remembered that they'd actually had stories to tell in the first place – about the Radam and what they had done just made it all the clearer. He wasn't about to allow anyone, least of all his new family, to suffer under the yoke of those tyrannical aliens.

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Standing at the podium, facing the representatives of Earth's remaining civilian governments and military forces – all of them having begun the arduous process of rebuilding themselves – Commander Hamilton Jamison, representing not only the Space Knights, but the militant arm of the Outer Space Development Agency that was beginning to be formed to combat threats that might approach from outside the solar system, composed himself for the speech he was about to make.

It was a mark of the general population's memories of the Radam – or perhaps simply their fear that such creatures would return someday; something that even a sensible person would be forgiven for fearing such a thing, given how thoroughly they had devastated not only Earth's infrastructure, but also the planet's population – that this plan of theirs, formed by the higher-ranked members of the Space Knights and approved by the upper-echelons of the Outer Space Development Agency as well as the Allied Earth Military, was even being considered in the first place.

Still, this plan of theirs hadn't been merely formed to give those that had been transformed into pseudo-Teknomen a purpose in their lives beyond that which the Radam would have been all too happy to give them; Slade and Saber's minds had clearly been adversely affected by what had happened to them in their final battle against Darkon. Whatever that had been, in the end.

They clearly needed more information about the Tekno-system than could be provided merely by studying it from a distance, or even asking those who had been transformed by it what they had felt while they were being changed. To that end, more in-depth research would need to be made on the Radam's biotechnology. They would also need to begin training an elite corps of Teknomen, to repel the inevitable return of the Radam to Earth.

"I know that many of you have been hoping that this would be the last we saw of the Radam, but in light of all that the Space Knights have learned of them, I can safely say that the Radam will indeed return. Earth simply presents far too enticing a target for them to ignore; the fact that our population and our infrastructure has been so badly damaged resisting a previous incursion will only convince whatever hierarchy they answer to that Earth is indeed worthy of closer investigation."

He might not have known precisely what kind of hierarchy the Radam Empire had, but he knew at least that they had one; after all the information that he had convinced Saber and Slade to share about the aliens that had transformed them, he at least knew that much.

Needless to say, none of the representatives attending this council meeting were particularly pleased to hear that; none of them wanted to consider the extremely high likelihood of the Radam's return to this planet. Still, his task now was not to coddle those people who didn't wish to think about the future, but to prepare the people of Earth for the dangers that they would be facing sooner than later.

"It is for this reason." And others, but those were a personal thing among the main corps of the Space Knights; it was, therefore, not important to share with these people. "That I ask for the cooperation of the Allied Earth Military, to form a corps of Teknomen loyal to Earth."

"Seconded," a familiar voice said, from the part of the room that Jamison could remember himself and Gault sitting at when he had been a part of the Allied Earth Military himself.

Seeing Balzac sitting in the same chair that Gault had once been sitting in – where the man who had once been leading the AEM had once sat – Jamison was admittedly surprised. He didn't show it, of course, but he'd have been the first to admit that he would not have expected Balzac himself to be the first to re-enlist in the armed forces after everything that he had sacrificed during his career. Still, the young man clearly had his own reasons for choosing to do as he did; Jamison would thus leave him to them.

The measure that he had proposed was voted in with an almost overwhelming majority – the few holdouts being only those who had reservations about the process itself – and so he thanked the members of the council for their consideration, even those who had voted against the measure that he was proposing, and left the meeting hall to attend to the needs of his Space Knights. There would be many preparations needed, before they could even begin to move into the preliminary stages of this plan.

The reports that Star had made regarding the mental states of the twins – that they had not, in fact, recovered from whatever damage or trauma had been caused by whatever had happened to them during their final confrontation with Darkon – were a concern to all of them, and so this proposal he had made before the council members would serve not only to give the Earth a viable defense against the Radam, but also to allow them to unravel the mysteries surrounding Slade and Saber.

For that, it was really the best method that anyone could have proposed.

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Making his way into the kitchen, Ness sighed as he looked at the stove. For a few moments, in those early hours before sunrise, when things seemed like they still weren't quite part of the real world but you knew you weren't quite dreaming anymore, Ness could have sworn that he saw Conrad standing there. He'd mostly been the one who'd prepared meals for them all, after Dad's job had started to take him longer, forcing him to either be away from their house for more hours out of the day, or to stay at his desk at home for those same hours.

Conrad had always been there, and now – just like that – he was gone; had been gone for two years and however many months, and Ness himself was just being forced to come to terms with that.

Ness didn't know quite how he was going to cope with that – he knew that Cain would manage; his younger twin had always seemed to be more levelheaded than he was – but he knew that he didn't like it. No one would, Ness was sure; finding out that almost all of your family and most of your close friends had died in some kind of cosmic disaster, and that you and your brother had only survived through cruel providence or some kind of fluke… It wasn't something that a sane person would ever enjoy thinking about.

Still, at times like these – when everyone else in the house was asleep, and there was nothing else to think about – Ness found that he really couldn't help himself.

Still, that wasn't the only reason that he was out here now, before Star would have woken up, or Cain would have gotten out of bed. He'd been hearing things… or, not so much hearing them, as just somehow knowing that there were one or more people out there, somehow. Cain would have probably said that he was just being oversensitive; thinking about things too much, the way he'd always seemed to do, at least according to his younger twin. He wasn't about to stop, though; even if Conrad had still been alive, he would have done just the same thing. He'd made a promise to their father to take care of Cain; and, even though the both of them had both agreed to protect each other after they'd had a talk with each other, Ness was still determined to hold up his end of the bargain.

It was all he really could do, now.

Making his way to the front of the house, Ness pushed back the curtains and peered out the large window in the living room. As usual, he couldn't actually see anyone outside the house where he, Cain, and Star were all staying, but there was still something that he was aware of. It still felt like there was something out of place; that there was someone or something watching them all. He didn't know if Cain felt the same way, but he thought that his younger twin would have at least said something if he had.

Although, Cain's habit of staring up at the moon – late at night when he obviously thought no one was watching – was starting to worry him; sure, all of them had been interested in astronomy in one way or another, but there was something about Cain's fascination with the moon that seemed… unnerving, somehow.

Ness wouldn't have known how to explain it to anyone better than that; not that anyone had actually asked him to explain himself in the first place, but he thought that that might have been because he'd been taking care only to watch Cain from inside the house's kitchen; making sure the lights were all off while his younger twin stood out under the moonlight staring up. It was strange, seeing Cain stand so still, the way he always seemed to be doing when he would stare up at the moon. Cain had never been so still and silent before; even while he was sitting still, there would always be an air of vibrancy and life about his younger twin.

Ness couldn't see any evidence of that when Cain would stand and stare up at the moon each night; it was like Cain's mind was somewhere else entirely. Like his younger twin wasn't even aware that there was an entire world outside of just him and the moon; like there couldn't ever be anything more important than that. Like there was something so fascinating about the moon at night that he either couldn't or didn't want to tear his eyes away from it. It was kind of strange, but given the fact that Ness had found himself imagining that he was hearing people talking at almost all hours of the day, he really couldn't say anything about that without ending up having to talk about what was getting to him.

He didn't want to worry Cain as much as Cain clearly didn't want to worry him; still, the two of them would probably make the time to talk to each other about what was going on soon, if only because this whole thing had gone on entirely too long to be even remotely considered normal.

Still, it'd be about an hour yet before either Star or Cain woke up; he still had some time to himself, before he had to bring up the strange things that they were both clearly going through right now. Making his way over to the stove, needing to do something to keep his mind off of the voices that he wasn't even sure he was hearing in the first place, Ness gathered the ingredients for breakfast as he passed the fridge. Cain had always liked pancakes and hash browns in the morning, and Star seemed to enjoy them at least well enough not to complain when they ate them.

He didn't quite know if she liked them, exactly, but if she wasn't unhappy, he wasn't going to go making things any more complicated than they needed to be.

As he began to work, Ness gritted his teeth as the not-voices started up again. He always kept trying to ignore them, to tell himself that something he couldn't hear – that he wasn't hearing in the first place – couldn't possibly be real. There was no reason for him to go running off into God knew where, just to satisfy the curiosity that Ness found growing in his mind almost against his will.

No reason at all.

As the sounds of people moving around inside the house began to become more apparent, Ness breathed a sigh of relief. It was always so much easier to ignore voices in your head if you were paying attention to someone outside of it. Someone who was actually there, and not just some product of his overworked imagination.

"Morning, Nessie," Cain said, making his way into the kitchen; as usual for his younger twin during early mornings, Cain looked like he would be perfectly happy to go back to bed and sleep for as long as he could get away with.

Which would… probably be a fairly long time, considering that neither of them really had anything that they were really supposed to do right now. Of course, considering the time Cain spent out under the moon – just staring up at it, like he was searching for something – Ness thought that that might also explain why Cain was so reluctant to get up in the morning.

"Morning, Cain," he said, smiling softly as he turned his attention back to the stove.

"Good morning, you two," Star said, as she made her way into the room.

He still didn't quite know what to make of her, even after all the time that he and Cain had spent with the woman. Really, she was nice enough, but he always had the feeling that she wanted something from the two of them. She tried to be subtle about it – she didn't pester either of them, and even now he'd never heard her actually say anything – but he'd caught her staring at them at odd moments, with a wistful look in her face that he couldn't really interpret. They didn't actually know her, in spite of all the time that the three of them had spent together, but there were times that it honestly seemed like she thought she did.

Star hadn't ever pestered them for anything, and she did seem to be genuinely fond of them both… still, every time she talked to them, it seemed like she wanted something more than either of them could really offer.

As he continued preparing the morning meal for the three of them, Ness tensed slightly. It was that same feeling, again: like someone was watching him, from just out of his range of vision. Of course, trying to ignore the feeling of someone watching him only served to remind him of all of the other, stranger things that kept happening. He'd been trying harder and harder not to think about those kinds of things.

Not to think about how much clearer his vision seemed to be during the day, or how much better his night-vision seemed to be; nor the way he and Cain seemed to be so much more… aware of each other now, or the way he was starting to get the feeling that the two of them were connected more deeply than any other twins that Ness had ever heard of. Sure, some people said that twins shared some kind of quasi-mystical connection with each other, but after having lived alongside someone for all of your life and all of theirs, you got a better feel for them than anyone else.

As far as he knew, that was the way it worked for every family. Heck, Cain and Conrad – as painful as that was to think about, under the circumstances – had been nearly as close as the two of them had ever been. But then again, he'd read somewhere that twins – particularly identical twins like him and Cain – were pretty rare overall. That was probably why Star was so fascinated by them.

And some of those other people, too; they'd probably never seen a pair of identical twins that resembled each other as much as he and Cain did.

They all ate breakfast in a sort of easy silence, but Ness couldn't help noticing the way every sound at the table seemed a bit louder than he remembered. It was strange, but their shared meal was over quickly enough that Ness wasn't forced to spend too much time thinking about it; that was nice. Gently bumping Cain's right shoulder, just as Star had turned and began to gather up her dishes to go clean them, he tilted his head toward their shared room.

It was one of the stranger things about their situation, but Star seemed to know at least some of the subtle signals they used to communicate when they didn't want other people to know what they were about. Sure, she respected their privacy and all, but Ness still felt better if he could avoid being seen altogether. The private language that he and Cain had developed wasn't for just anyone to know. And sure, while Star seemed to respect that and all, it really would have made him feel better if she just didn't see it in the first place.

It wasn't exactly rational, but then emotions rarely were, he knew.

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As the power that had been gathered from the various solar-collectors was channeled into the main spire, the bio-circuitry began to steadily power up. It did not yet have the means to reach beyond the lifeless, rocky expanse of the satellite it had been set loose to grow upon, but as the power stored within the clumps of cells – biological storage batteries – began to be transferred into the Spire, the pseudo-telepathic waves it was generating began to grow steadily stronger.

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He could feel something – no, it wasn't really a feeling so much as it was some other kind of sense – sort of pushing at the back of his mind; like an itch in the back of his brain that he could only be bothered by rather than actually being able to do anything about it. He didn't know if Ness felt the same way he did, but Cain made a mental note to speak to his older twin about what he'd been feeling lately. At least, when they could find some time away from Star.

Not that she wasn't nice to have around or anything, but some things could only be discussed among family.

The three of them had breakfast together, with him doing the cooking since Ness had decided that he was tired of doing that kind of thing and wanted to take a rest for a few days. Star had offered to take care of it, but he'd seen that – her willingness to take care of the two of them for whatever her reasons were in the end aside – she hadn't been particularly eager to take up cooking duties on this particular morning, either. So, he'd taken care of it himself.

They'd had pancakes this morning, and Star had even complemented him on his cooking skill.

It had been nice, being complemented like that; it'd almost reminded Cain of when Conrad or sensei Goddard were trying to teach him things, and the way he'd felt when he'd managed to impress them with the progress that he had made in whatever field of study they'd had him working on. Although, all things considered, that feeling could just as easily end up being as much of a double-edged sword as anything. Still, he tried not to think of it that way, and so far he'd succeeded.

Now, with Ness settling himself down in the room they both shared, the two of them having managed to secure some time alone for themselves without worrying Star – who, really, seemed to worry about the smallest things – Cain plopped down on his own bed.

"So, I'm guessing this is about that weird feeling, or whatever it is, that we both seem to be getting." Ness said.

Cain sighed; sure, he hadn't really been anticipating having to explain something so completely out of the ordinary – at least, something that he was reasonably sure wasn't a dream – to his older twin when it seemed that they had just managed to settle down, but that hadn't meant that he'd wanted Ness to end up having to deal with that kind of thing himself.

"That's about the size of it," he said, leaning back on his hands and trying to look relaxed; he was almost completely certain that Ness wasn't buying it, but it at least made him feel better. "Gotta say, though; I kinda wished I was the only one dealing with this."

Looking down slightly, Ness chuckled. "And this after all the times you've lectured me about being stupidly noble." Ness grinned back up at him. "Never imagined I'd be on the other side of the table, I have to say."

He chuckled ruefully, conceding the point. "Yeah, yeah; laugh it up, Nessie. It's not like you don't do more than your fair share of worrying about me."

"Yes, well older brothers do tend to do that about their younger siblings," Ness said, giving him a halfsmile. "Anyway, what do you think we should do about this? I don't know about you, but all of this is seriously starting to give me the creeps."

"You mean, the voices-in-the-head, and the feeling of being watched at all hours of the day is kind of freaking you out? Perish the thought," he said, gently ribbing.

"Very funny, wiseass," Ness retorted, giving him that deadpan, half-lidded Look he always did when Cain needled him like he was doing. "Let's try to be serious for a bit. We already know that this… whatever it is doesn't seem to be affecting Star."

"Or, if it is, she hasn't been saying anything about it," he said, not wanting to leave any possibilities unstated.

Ness sighed. "Let's not borrow trouble."

"Fair enough," he rolled his head in an abbreviated nod. "What do you propose we do about this… whatever it is?"

"I think we're best off investigating," Ness said, his tone as serious as befitted their situation as it was. "We should go after Star's asleep, though," he continued, looking off toward the other rooms of the house; the inner rooms, where Star was staying. It was kind of strange, he thought; the way they acted seemed to make her uncomfortable, and yet she still seemed to want to stay around them. "She's not really involved with this."

"Yeah." He nodded; no matter what, he just didn't feel right about getting uninvolved people into something like this. "This kind of thing… it's not something she needs to be worrying about."

They talked for a few more minutes after that; both of them agreeing that the best time for them to move was at night; once they were sure Star had gone to sleep, since it wasn't likely that she'd be willing to leave them to their own devices while they investigated just what it was that had them so antsy lately. Whatever it was that seemed to be scratching at the back of both their minds, like some kind of compulsion that they couldn't quite put a name to, but somehow all the stronger for that.

Once the two of them had made up their minds, he and Ness also agreed that it would be in their best interests to act as if everything were perfectly normal. For some reason, Star kept acting like the three of them were closer friends than they were; and if she got the feeling that they were keeping secrets from her, and if she really did care about them as much as it was clear she thought she did, Star wouldn't just let them go off to investigate this weird feeling they were both apparently having without trying to go with them.

And neither of them were going to get her involved in something like this; even if it was probably nothing. There was always the chance, however slight, that this feeling they were having would amount to something; it wouldn't be right to risk Star's life for something that didn't affect her. That was why he and Ness were going to wait; tonight, though, they were going to find out just what was going on.

One way or another, they would manage to settle this.

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Standing before the bulbous, oversized-looking form of the teknopod that he and Sylvia Woolfe had cultivated from one of the teknoplants that hadn't been destroyed during humanity's efforts to reclaim their planet after the Radam's attempt to forcibly colonize it, Jamison sighed. It didn't seem as if they were being given much choice in the matter; the updates he continued to receive from Star concerning Slade and Saber's recovery, or rather their pronounced lack thereof, were on the whole rather less than promising.

Also, there was the fact that they still seemed to be troubled by some presence that only they could sense.

He'd taken time to consult with some of those who had been transformed into pseudo-Teknomen in the wake of the invasion, and it seemed that their desire to be close to Slade and Saber had not abated in the slightest. If anything, it appeared to have grown all the stronger with the forced separation that had been imposed by the needs of those young men, and the responsibility that his Space Knights had volunteered to take on.

"There are times that I honestly can't believe it's come to this, Sylvia," he said, staring up at the teknopod that she had aided him in cultivating from the teknoplants that they had collected.

"What do you mean, Commander?" she asked. "Weren't you yourself the one who proposed creating the Earth's own corps of Teknomen from this very technology?"

"I know; and I still think that this may very well help us to understand just what Slade and Saber – rather, Ness and Cain Carter – were subjected to by the Radam, and perhaps even allow us to find a way to restore them to the way they once were." He narrowed his eyes as he continued to contemplate the structure before him. "Still, there are so many dangers associated with this, more than any other untested technology that we of Earth have ever encountered before." He narrowed his eyes. "One could quite easily come to the conclusion that it is evil, that which we've staked so much on."

"No technology is evil, in and of itself," Sylvia said calmly, in that way she had of making statements of such complete certainty that it often made one want to agree with her, no matter what it was that she had said. "How the technology is received depends entirely on how the ones who created the technology act to implement it." Sylvia's own blue eyes narrowed, a clear sign that she too was contemplating the very alien piece of technology – biological technology, but still designed with a concrete purpose for all that – that sat before them. "Still, I have to admit, the uses the Radam put this technology to make that kind of assumption all the easier."

"Yes," he muttered.

However, as Sylvia had helped him to recall, there were no technologies that could be rightfully considered evil. What came of them, yes; and the uses that the Radam had put this particular technology to were nothing less than horrifying, but even that did not mean that the technology itself was evil. There were other uses that this new technology they had captured from the Radam could be put to, they simply had yet to be discovered.

However, all of those considerations would be best left for later; some time when the survival of Earth and her remaining people did not depend on them obtaining the secrets of the Tekno-Power System for their own use. Some time when the very real threat of a second Radam invasion could be countered; some time when they had the means to restore the memories of the two young men who had sacrificed so much for the sake of humanity at large. Everyone owed their freedom, even their lives as they knew them, to Slade and Saber; and yes, while there were those who would claim that it was the fault of the Carter family that the Radam had discovered Earth in the first place, the simple fact was that it could just as easily have been another deep-space expedition that ended up stumbling onto the Radam's galactic scout-ship.

People without the strength of will that Ulysses Carter and his close friends and family members had proven themselves to possess an abundance of.

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Night had fallen, though you couldn't prove it by him; the room looked too bright for the time he was seeing on the clock. Still, most people weren't likely to be up at two in the morning, and hence there wasn't going to be a much better time for looking into… whatever it was that had been getting to him and Cain ever since a few days after they'd come here on Star's offer. Levering himself up and out of bed, Ness paused for a long moment to listen to the sounds of the house.

He could hear footsteps; heading for his door, so he was pretty sure that Cain was the one coming to see him.

There was also another thing – something that he was studiously trying not to notice – that told him that Cain was the one just outside his door, now. Making his way over, Ness opened the door, to find that Cain had indeed just started to reach out for the knob.

"Nice to know you remembered, big brother," Cain said, smiling faintly.

That wasn't what caught his eye first, though; no, the fact that his younger twin's eyes glowed in the dark was what took most of his focus. Closing his own eyes, Ness rubbed them in an effort to make sure there was no way that they could be playing tricks on him; he didn't want to freak Cain out over something that might have just as easily been his own imagination playing tricks on him. At least, he was hoping it was just his own imagination.

Ness wasn't sure what he would do if something like this was really happening.

"Ness, is something wrong?" he heard Cain ask, even as he opened his eyes and looked again. "What the…" Cain's eyes were still glowing, but now his younger twin was looking at him like there was something wrong. Or, maybe not wrong, but definitely something out of place. "Ness… your eyes, they're… glowing."

"So are yours," he said, beginning to feel the same detachment from this particular situation that he always felt when he was confronted with a situation that was so completely, undeniably strange.

Cain sighed, turning away slightly. "You know, I'd been thinking something weird was up ever since I saw I actually had blue eyes. I didn't want to start thinking like that, though. You know?"

"I know." Heck, he hadn't wanted to consider the idea that their two-year long coma had been caused by anything more than just hideously bad luck, but it was beginning to look like that was the case. "Do you think she had anything to do with this?"

"Honestly? If she does, I'm pretty sure she was brought in on the end of it," Cain said, folding his arms and looking toward the room where Star was still sleeping; and where, if they had anything to say about it, she'd stay for the rest of the night.

"Yeah," he conceded. "She really doesn't seem like the kind of person who'd approve of… any of this." Folding his arms, he slanted a glance back at her room, then sighed. "I guess I was just…"

"Looking for someone to blame?" Cain finished, tilting his head slightly in wry understanding; he'd probably been doing just the same.

Sure, looking for someone to blame for the crash of the Argos was pretty much entirely stupid, not to mention futile in light of all of the people who'd had a hand in the project while it was still getting off the ground. But now… the fact that he and Cain had both been knocked out for over two years, combined with the so-clearly-transhuman abilities that both of them were displaying after the fact – to say nothing of how drastically Cain's eyes had changed both color and shade – clearly pointed to the fact that something was up.

Something had happened to the both of them, and now it only remained to find out what.

"C'mon, we should go before anyone can miss us," he said, not quite able to resist the urge to look back over his shoulder to Star's room even after all of this.

When Cain fell in beside him without a word, and he saw the understanding on his younger twin's face, Ness smiled. Whatever was going on, whatever had happened to them during the two years that none of those so-called Space Knights seemed at all comfortable about discussing with them, none of that mattered right now. He and Cain would find out just what was going on, on their own if they had to, but they would do it together.

They would both stand together, even if they had to stand against the world; that was the way things had always been.

As he and Cain made their way out of the house, Ness couldn't help but notice the fact that he was hearing a lot more than he ever remembered being able to, or that his surroundings seemed to be illuminated by some kind of invisible lighting; in particular, whatever he focused his eyes on almost looked like it was lit up by a spotlight. It was strange to think about now, the fact that he hadn't noticed something this drastic, but then he'd had a lot of other things on his mind before this.

Ness still didn't like to think about it, but he just hadn't had the time to take everything that was going on around them into account.

It seemed like someone had turned up the volume on the world, once Ness found himself standing outside the house that Star had been sheltering him and Cain in. Licking his suddenly-dry lips, as the sights and the sounds that he'd have never been able to see if he'd still been human came to his senses, Ness tensed slightly as something – something that he couldn't possibly manage to describe; something that no human could have described, since no human had ever possessed these senses – came over him.

"Ness, did you feel that?" Cain said, looking out into the darkness that wasn't nearly as dark as it should have been.

"Yeah," he muttered, shuddering briefly. "I felt it."

Whatever it was; like some kind of sixth sense – something that no human would or should have been able to get in the first place – and whatever was causing it, well it seemed to be getting closer. Nodding slightly to Cain, Ness heard his younger twin falling into step with him as he moved deeper into the late-night – or it could have been early morning by now; it wasn't like either of them had a watch – darkness.

They were far enough away from Star's house that he honestly doubted she'd be out looking for them, and Ness couldn't help but be grateful for that for two rather contrasting reasons. The first was that he didn't particularly want to be interrupted during his and Cain's search for whatever it was that they were looking for. The second was that, whatever it was that was coming closer to them – even as they kept moving farther away from Star's house so that she wouldn't be in any danger from whatever it was that they were going to be stirring up – seemed, somehow, to be… connected to them, or something.

Or… not so much connected, as trying however it could to establish some sort of a connection. It would have been nearly impossible to explain to anyone who wasn't able to sense these kinds of things, and so Ness was glad that there wasn't anyone he actually needed to explain things to.

Turning toward where the sense of… of whoever – or whatever – it was that he, and by extension Cain, could sense was strongest, Ness found his fists clenching almost against his will. The feeling of familiarity he was getting wasn't helping much, since there were precious few of his and Cain's friends who hadn't been with them on the Argos, but there was also the sense that – whoever this newcomer was – he was dangerous in some way or other. It was also becoming clear that he was a he, the closer he got.

It was the same as the sense he had of Cain – he was trying not to think of how strange all of this ultimately was – but as the… the feeling became clearer, Ness could somehow feel that, whoever this new guy was, his signature was weaker than either his own or Cain's.

Drawing himself up to his full height, knowing the kind of intimidation that he was capable of given the fact that pretty much all of them – well, all of the male side of the family – had looked to be taking after Dad as far as height, weight, and that kind of thing went, Ness watched warily as the man he'd been sensing since they'd left the front yard of Star's house came out of a small copse of trees off to his and Cain's left.

"My name is Nemo," the strange man; masked, hooded, and wearing a heavy black cassock-style coat with heavy-looking pants and boots, said. "And I am very pleased to meet you, my Light and Dark Messiahs."