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Strategos (A Great Captain Roberts Tale!!) - Part 2
Chapter 15 - Heir and a Spare[]
"Uncle Alex left me there…"[]
She looked like a woman in her…
…early forties. "Elizabeth? We have a visitor for you…"
She looked up from the puzzle, as her visitor entered the day-room. "You're not real," she said immediately. "She isn't real, doctor!! I'm not real, nothing is real!!"
Hssst! The auto-injector hissed as it administered sedative.
The woman was obviously badly beaten during her life and the stress of her life had clearly aged her as well but despite it all there was no mistaking her big sister.
Helena felt her heartbreak again. She had worried that she had lived too long and seen too much for that to still happen.
Logically she knew she had no way to know Elizabeth Cameron was still alive, but emotion was another thing. Logic failed in the face of that foe all too often.
Helena began to question herself again. She always felt like hiding away as long as she had made her at the very least a moralistic coward even if she had valid military and political reasons to do so.
Hell, part of her was wondering if it might be more merciful to allow Elizabeth to fade away all together. Too let this woman she was looking at from an observation room have her alternate identity and what little peace that would bring her.
No, that really would make her a moralistic coward and worse a hypocrite. Even if it became her focus and took the rest of her life she would try and put her sister back together again.
For now though, there was someone else she needed to meet that she owed a reunion and based off everything Loremaster Howe had told her she had one more duty to carry out before she could even begin to help Elizabeth.
“Loremaster Howe, if I did not think it would do more harm than good I would ask you to let me be seen by your patient. But she has a long way to go before that is a good idea even if it would prove our identities. There is another person I can meet though that will recognize me for who I claim to be.” Helena wiped a tear from her eyes.
“Director Roberts.” Acton Howe was Loremaster for a reason.
“Yes. Her Desmond will know. It is in protected memory. As close to impossible to remove, overwrite, or circumvent as the Star League’s best could make it. Even with their control over Terra and access to the Hegemony and League’s secrets, even that is something beyond the Word or Republic Intelligence to overcome or we would be in a lot more trouble right now. Amanda herself is all the proof of that you need. If they could tamper with the protected memory of a Desmond unit there is no doubt she would be working for the them right now.” Helena stared at her sister through the one way mirror.
“Your logic is sound. I still feel it is a risk letting you near Director Roberts but it is one that can be mitigated with proper precautions.” Acton Howe studied the “young” woman carefully.
“I probably should also call my friends so they do not do something rash,” Helena looked at Acton Howe.
“Oh? What kind of rash are we talking?” Acton Howe raised an eyebrow.
“Well let me just say one of them is the sort to think it is okay to teach a toddler how to safely mix napalm, another thought the lesson after my scolding was that it should have been thermite, and a third thought a good lesson in physics, electricity, and radio principles was learning how to set, prime, and wire a block of C8 to take down a tree. And when she started dating? Yeah, one of the reasons my daughter went full Folk on me was she did not like the kind of overprotective surrogate parents they proved to be. But I never did have to worry about the boys she was seeing keeping her out past curfew,” Helena could not keep the laugh out of her voice at the absurdity that was her daughter’s early life.
“I think that would be acceptable.” Acton Howe nodded.
Crimes of False Star League[]
"Do you smell…
…it?" Amanda asked. "Or is that expression because one of you bit into a lemon?" The barracks were almost inhumanly filthy, huddled forms shied from the light.
'Savashri" Ruel Chistu couldn't find the words. He had seen reports, dry things. The people here were barely human-looking, more like… skeletons.
Skeletons with prominent collars, bomb-collars, slave collars.
"Do you see it now, Ruel Chistu?" Amanda Roberts almost growled. "This is the Star League to them. This is the one many of these people grew up with-when they survived long enough to grow up." Her organic eye burned in fury, and even the artificial seemed to take on a glint of wrath.
"Eighteen thousand?" Aletha Kabrinski had to cover her mouth to hide the nausea.
"This isn't even the first one of these I've seen," Amanda confirmed. "The worst, but not the first. These people were growing food… and surviving on less than eight hundred calories a day, working until they collapsed." Her fist clenched unconsciously.
"What do you need?"
"Doctors, medical people, nutritionists, psychologists?" Amanda recited. "Administrators to help them translate back to a human lifestyle? Name it, Khan Ward," she growled. "There are more, out there. We are standing on a crime."
The Khans could not deny that one. Amanda led them out the work doors, "This is what I'm fighting, and anything that gets more resources into the fight, I'm okay with. Let justice be done or the universe burn. Does that sound like… a… Cameron to you?"
A Mobile Kitchen Truck was being set up, and she took off her jacket. Handing it to one of her crewmen, she rolled up her sleeves. "Now, if we're done, I have work to be doing." Foster was already helping the cook's mates set up.
"Miss Lori, could you have the medical teams set up in grid eleven, it's almost feeding time and we don't need to kill the people we're here to save," Amanda recited into a commlink.
"What are you doing?"
"What I can," Amanda said. "We need the medics because if you just give food to people who've endured starvation like this, you can kill them, or make them so sick they die. Since I don't want more dead? Medics to supervise. I need to be working now. Are we done with the foreign affairs, Khan Crowe?"
"For the moment. I will have the field hospital come in and relieve you soon, Director."
"Thank you."
"Why are you not sending…
…the whole of your Touman. Why did you not tell us earlier??" Elsa Ward was fit to be tied as soon as the Khans were out of earshot.
"Because even I did not believe it at first." Alberto Crowe said quietly. "My Loremaster showed me the reports from Trespass, Joan's Post, and Devil's Breath. Yet, I did not believe it." he stated. "Would you believe it if I told YOU, without showing it first?"
The others were quiet, and then: "Neg," Chistu said. "I would not have believed it… I would not have believed this kind of horror was still possible on this kind of scale. That such an enemy had slipped past."
"I would." Aletha Kabrinski stated. She glanced at the others, "Allies? Remember?"
This lured a weak chuckle from the other Khans, and a few embarrassed looks. "There are other… crimes. Farther away, rumors of them, distant ones, the Marian Hegemony." Kabrinski added. "But this? This is practically in our back yard."
"What of the falsely under a Star League banner?" Chistu scowled. "The girl is right, this deserves an answer. Is there one?"
"We are working based on intelligence we have gathered in these operations. Are you interested, Ruel Chistu?" Crowe asked.
"I think we all are." Elsa Ward stated. "I think the rest of the Grand Council in the Inner Sphere will ALSO be interested."
"I dislike being merely a spectator," Chistu noted. "we still have the question of the Roberts girl's legacies yet to address."
"You assume she will be brought into the breeding program?" Crowe inquired. "After her statements?"
"Aff," Ruel said. "Especially given her statements. How you stumbled onto a True Cameron defies the logic of the universe… but you apparently have. Even if she is not? She is close enough to serve… get her samples, and we can trial honorably for them. Once the Sons of Plunder and their false Star League are driven into the dustbin of history."
There is more to life than…
…mere survival, more to Glory than simple battlefield victories, and more to honor than obeying rules. David Foster observed silently as the Khans of four Clans reminded themselves of that.
Then, he walked off to help organize the relief work. There is, after all, more to pride than merely self-love. Amanda Roberts had done her mentors proud today.