5. The Dreams of the Hopeless
An old man’s face appeared in RageChild’s mind as she slept, the kindly old man she remembered from . . . she did not remember him at all, yet he was familiar. She realized she was dreaming, but not her dream. It wasn’t Airgoidh’s either, but someone else’s.
Gaelbhan’s dream.
The old Matari, still strong despite advanced age and long years of enslavement, always smiled at her and made her laugh. RageChild didn’t fight these feelings or images that surely must be coming from her sister. They were now of the shared-mind, and she welcomed it, embraced it. She was Gaelbhan, the little child on this street in her memories, in her dreams. The sun had been hot on that day she remembered him most strongly. He carried his typical heavy poundage of goods for his Amarr slaver, a short fat man with long flowing robes typical in Sehmy. He struggled today, and she knew better than run over to him, though she wished it, wanted to laugh and see his bright smile.
The old man stumbled, dropping a bag to the cobblestones. In an instant, the short Amarr had taken his walking stick to the Matari’ s head and shoulders – such was the power of enlightenment of that Matari that even she cowered in fear as the beating became truly savage. A hand reached out and stopped the stick from its path, the old man’s hand. The Amarr slaver and those around him gasped. “Officers!” The Amarr yelled, stepping away from the old slave as if a swarm of wasps on the attack. “Officers!”
The officers came running, a mere hundred meters, having paid no attention to the beating until the slaver demanded assistance. She watched as they used their own stun guns to drop the Matari. The heady scent of lamp oil filled her nose as one of the officers dowsed him with it. The Amarr standing in the streets laughed and clapped as they watched this spectacle. The old Matari became a ball of fire, but he did not scream. He stood, amazingly he stood, still holding the slaver's walking cane. She cried. RageChild cried, and then the dream ended. She called out to her sister, but Gaelbhan’s mind was gone again. The dream, the connection with her tway was cut.
The dream was fading now, but then she remembered the feeling of completion as the shared-mind began. Gaelbhan was the light, and she was the shadow.
The comm-interlink broke the connection with Airgoidh a moment, interjecting a GalNet channel message being broadcast across a bootleg frequency. RageChild settled her mind, wishing to not have been disturbed. She had wanted to regain the shared-mind, wanted it to feel complete.
The GalNet message began. “We, the Sect of the Warden, Degraded MinMatar and banned from our families and our lives, proclaim that we are . . .”
**
Supplemental Report
To: Hedion University Medical Lab
From: Amarria Darcest, Attache Supervising Medical Officer
Status: Internal
“The worlds are turned upside down for me, here on the Emperor's Station in Amarr, the loss of life staggering not in the numbers (although there are a lot) but in the devastation on the people's faces.
This report notes for immediate release that MinMatar slaves are responding well. I state the facts as follows:
- Matari slaves do contract the infection
- Matari slaves maintain the standard symptoms for twelve hours generally
- Matari slaves recover thereafter, and seem to return to normal health within the next few hours
- Not every Matari slave survives the infection
I do not understand the reasoning why, but I suspect this virus is designed to circumvent the controls introduced to their bodies, and then continue to the next round of infection through the slaves' themselves exponentially. I have yet to check on the slaves' circumstances and control-methods. I am compiling this information now. So many dying. I cannot imagine it would have come to this . . ..”
End Report
Amarria paced in the small room that she had been given in the medical facilities here. Purely sterile, mostly an observation booth, she looked down into the quarantined labs below. In one room, Amarrians were laying in bio-beds, in the other, Matari. Med-techs in viral suits moved among the Amarrian patients, wiping their brows and talking soothingly. A single med-tech in the Matari quarantine was injecting the slaves with the latest attempts at an anti-dote. A Brutor broke his restraints, and the med-tech forced him down. He was savage, but quite delirious and easily subdued. In a moment he had been injected with the latest anti-dote developed. The Brutor calmed almost immediately, and Amarria pressed her hands against the glass.
Was this the one?
She let her hands drop as she realized why he had calmed down. He was dead.