AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I hesitated, but then I said determined, "You might win the warlords over, but most of their troops would baulk at the idea of aligning themselves with your soldiers. Our warriors don't always follow blindly." The last part was meant to be a small barb against her, but she didn't flinch.
"And the bloodshed in all this doesn't disturb you?"
I countered, "Isn't it bloodshed what your people are bringing?"
"We just want to free the humans on Thyre," she reiterated her point.
"At what cost? What price of lives are you willing to pay for that goal?"
"Freedom comes at a cost."
"We are free." I stood my ground. "We are free to choose. None of us are forced to stay in the same place. If we don't like our warlord, we can move into a different territory, serve a different warlord."
"Serve," she said sharply.
"Isn't that what you are doing? Serving the army of the Terran Confederation?"
She went still, mulling my argument over and I ceased the moment to press further, "We can live wherever we want. Can your people? Tell me about Earth. I don't know much about it, only what my grams remembered from her grandmother."
"And what is that?" Chrissy asked.
"Only that they were unhappy, that my great-grandfather had wanted to become a horse breeder, but the Terran government didn't allow him to do that. Only certain people were allowed to work with animals, so he was forced to work in a factory."
"Hmm, yes, that sounds true enough," she allowed. "Our computer systems chose the job a person is most apt to perform."
I balled my fists around the rake because I was tired of her judging us and telling me she and her people had come for us, to free us, when her society was anything but free.
"It turned out that my great-grandfather was an excellent horse handler. His talent for breeding the right horses was groundbreaking for the Thyres. We wouldn't have horses like Vespa and Samju if it hadn't been for him. And your people wanted him to waste his life away in a factory." I spat and took advantage of her being quiet. "And you? Have you always wanted to be a soldier?"
"I'm damn good at it," she countered.
"But is that what you always wanted to be?"
"Who cares about the dreams of a seventeen-year-old?" she replied heatedly. "What does a girl of seventeen know of what she wants? The computer—"
"Chose army for you," I interrupted, letting go of my rake and pointing my finger at her, "but what didyouwant to be?"
She threw up her hands. "I wanted to be a mother, okay? I wanted a family. But you can't have that unless you served the Terran Confederation Forces, so I became a soldier and then I found out I liked it. I had talent for it and stayed after my five-year contract was up."
"You're not allowed to have children? A family?" I asked, aghast.
Her expression darkened. "Previous overpopulation has caused many genetic birth defects. Having children has to be strictly monitored. It costs a lot of credits to do the genetic screening and if you don't have those credits, you can earn the privilege by serving in the Terran Confederation Forces."
"And you are okay with that? Being told what you can and can't have?" I checked.
"It's for the greater good."
"You know what else is for the greater good?" I knew I was talking louder than I usually did, but my blood was on fire. I was outraged and incensed like never before. Here was this woman, representing a great threat to our planet, our society, blabbering about freedom and justice while she had none where she came from.
I didn't even wait for her to answer, I was too fired up, because suddenly I had an idea what this was all about. "So rescuinglost coloniesopens a whole new, fresh gene pool for the Confederation then, doesn't it? How convenient."
She opened her mouth to say something, but I shook my head and left. Left her standing in Samju's half-cleaned stall, for once not caring about finishing a task. A handler would come by and give Samju clean straw and take out the muck I had already raked up. Right then, I just needed to get away, because for the first time in my life, I felt like I wanted to punch somebody.
I liked Chrissy, I did, but right then she represented a group of people that were coming for us, that were going to attack us like they had the Vandalls. They were technologically advanced, had spaceships and fighters, bombs, guns and all the war equipment my grams told me about.
I paused, because suddenly I remembered something my grams had told me a long time ago and icy water was beginning to rush through my veins. Dear gods, please, no, they would come and destroy Thyre, they would kill the warlords, my warlord, to declare us free, only to shackle us like they had shackled their own people. Worse yet, they might turn us into some kind of breeding stock.
I felt impotent to stop this wave of destruction and Chrissy was a representation of it. My hands literally itched to clasp around her neck and that scared me. Not because she most likely would have been the better fighter and kicked my ass, but because I had never before wanted to do bodily harm to another person. Not even Bertram.
