Chapter 11: Over And In, Last Call For Sin

"Come in for dinner," Marissa told me, with a look that begged me to join her. "My parents want to meet you. I haven't told them what happened to us though! They know there was a shooting at school, but Earth First and the principal aren't letting anyone know the details. If they meet you, it would really help them accept the concubine thing."

Lieutenant Jones looked at me through the rear view mirror. I had not taken a big beating, but the Earth First thugs were not gentle either. I still ached all over and was covered in a patchwork of bruises of various colors.

"Please," Marissa whispered. Her look intensified the plea.

"A home-cooked meal sounds wonderful. Lets' do this. I'll have dinner here with Marissa and her family, Lieutenant Jones."

Lieutenant Jones put the car in park. The other Marine stepped out and scanned the street. The Mob muscle -- one of the them did not survive the attack at the school -- got out as well to ensure the area was clear. Alyssa had called earlier to tell me that my replacement goon was waiting at the mansion. I followed once they gave me the all clear. Stepping out of the car, I stretched my legs and body, feeling every sore muscle. I turned around and handed Marissa out, like a gentleman.

"I have to tell you, Jason." Marissa looked at the ground. "My dad has Earth First leanings. He's not crazy or anything though. I think he's really just afraid about what will happen to Alba and me if we agree to be concubines."

"Maybe I can talk to him ... in private. He's a father; I've had a little experience with strong father figures now." I nodded towards the Mob muscle.

Lieutenant Jones snorted.

It was a pleasant meal. Mrs. Jessa had not started cooking, so we got to help. At the table, Mr. Jessa grilled me, but no more than a father would do with any young man whom his daughter had brought home for the first time. He did fall on the Earth First side but from a more rational perspective than most others I dealt with. He had more to say to Lieutenant Jones about the subject than to me. She answered his questions as best she could, but Lieutenant Jones had not spent a lot of time in a colony. By the end of the meal, Mrs. Jessa was treating me like a son-in-law, albeit one married to both of her daughters.

"Shall we have a cigar and drink?" Mr. Jessa asked Lieutenant Jones and me.

We followed him to the study. He held the door open for us.

"Please, Jason, sit," he said, closing the door. When he turned around, he was holding a pistol on me.

When I did not move right away, he made it a command, "Sit, boy!"

Jones' body tensed and he noticed. "You won't make it, Lieutenant Jones." His voice was ice cold.

"The weapons," he said as he glanced over to Lieutenant Jones. "Drop them!" She did what he ordered.

"Your clothes too," he told her. "Let's see what Confederacy technology does to a human body." It had nothing to do with sex; he wanted to make sure she was completely disarmed.

"Are you enjoying this?" Lieutenant Jones asked me, surprised at seeing my pants tenting at the groin.

"I really liked what happened in Mr. Berto's office," I replied. "I'm very disappointed you haven't accepted any of my subsequent offers."

Mr. Jessa moved behind his desk and sat down. He kept his gun now trained on Lieutenant Jones.

"I guess you more than 'lean' in the Earth First direction," Lieutenant Jones said to him.

"Mr. Jessa is the best Earth First hitter in the state, probably the region," I told her. "Their MVP so to speak, or MVW. Most Valuable Weapon. Most Important Weapon? Most Effective Weapon? MVH! Most Valuable Hitter. MVA! Most Valuable Assassin. MVCK? Most Valuable Contract Killer. Hmm ... it really deserves a cool acronym, like EFK for the Earth First Killer. The media loved that shit even if EFK was shooting for the other side!"

They looked at me with identical looks of shock.

"I apologize," I told them. "We have business."

"I acquired a copy of the Black List from one of the sponsors trying to fight back against us. I'm not on it," Mr. Jessa said to me. "How can you know what I do for Earth First?"

Lieutenant Jones folded her arms over her breasts. She wanted the answer as badly as Mr. Jessa did, but her mind was also calculating possible moves.

"You need to relax, Lieutenant Jones," I told her. "You are the unknown variable in this equation, an expendable variable. It would be for the best if you became a small variable that can be ignored, rather than one that must be actively considered and dealt with. I've lost good people already; one more is unnecessary." She took a deep breath, sighed and visibly relaxed.

I turned to Mr. Jessa. "To answer your question--I can read minds. It is really sub-vocalizations, micro-expressions. and body language. There are so many things people say without ever opening their mouths."

He frowned at my statement.

"I am, of course, kidding. Before she was picked up, my mother was the County Coroner. She hated mysteries. She could not stop digging until she solved a puzzle, like why there were similarities in seemingly unrelated murders. You might have gotten one assassination past my mother, but she was going to notice two murders committed by the same hand. To be honest, my mother scoring below the cutoff is only slightly less surprising than Maria's CAP score. I inherited my brains from my mother but have always thought she was more intelligent."

"Mr. Jessa was the anonymous tip that came in to us about your location?" Lieutenant Jones asked me.

I shook my head. "He planned the whole thing. He was the 'boss' they were waiting for."

"Why?" she asked.

"You got what you wanted, Lieutenant Jones," I said. "I agreed to a pickup. Mr. Jessa wants a pickup too."

"But nobody knows it! Shit, we didn't sweep for bugs!", she growled. "Fuck me! They're going to hit us with everything they have, aren't they?"

I shook my head slowly and winked at Mr. Jessa.

"A pickup won't work," Mr. Jessa told me. "Earth First can't afford to let it happen. They'll lose the county if the Confederacy boldly walks in and takes whomever they want."

"You never believed in Earth First's supposed principles," I said to him. "You consciously worked for what most of them refuse to acknowledge is their true motivation."

He looked at Lieutenant Jones; she shrugged.

"We cannot apply pressure to the Confederacy, Mr. Jessa," I said. "They dictate who leaves and who stays. They dictate who will live and who will die."

He nodded.

"Earth First is a nonsensical attempt to push the Confederacy into doing what Earth First wants by taking away what the Confederacy wants," I said to Lieutenant Jones. "Most Earth Firsters know it on some level. Of course, some are real believers in 'Let us hold hands, sing hymns, and die together!' Although for people like Senator Win, it is a means to an end. Take my word for it, the man would jump to get off planet, but his ego cannot tolerate doing it on anything other than his terms."

"The Confederacy can't give in," Lieutenant Jones said and shook her head. "We could save more people by cooperating, but the Confederacy won't bow to blackmail of any kind. To top that off, Earth First is killing the very people that might save the human race!"

"Of course, you are correct. And, Mr. Jessa has finally come to understand that the Confederacy cannot be pressured. In three years, the sum total of his accomplishments is to virtually guarantee that his daughters are going to be Sa'arm food. If his actions were ever found out ... oh, wait! I've taken the CAP test twice so the AI's have known for two years about him." I raised an eyebrow at Mr. Jessa. His fingers whitened on the gun at my statement.

Tilting my head, I said, "You did not believe this was the case, Mr. Jessa. Unfortunately, your belief is not, and never was, required. If the Confederacy's races were willing to wash their hands of the entire affair ... wash their hands of the human species, they would lock down the AI's and let the Sa'arm kill everyone off, planet by planet. Does anyone believe the Confederacy races do not have a failsafe in case the AI's go nuts? To real pacifists, the AI's actions qualify as a little nuts! We're just lucky there hasn't been a real crisis in the Confederacy for so long that little things like that have been forgotten. The other species do not understand that the Sa'arm are different and how. It is an easy mistake to make--failing to understand a true 'other'. It was inconceivable to you that the Confederacy would not do everything in their power to survive. To them, we are a violent species, nearly on par with the Sa'arm. It's that violent nature that the AI's hope to use to put an end to the Sa'arm threat. However, the AI's are never going to forget that we could come to threaten the Confederacy, too. This is a case of 'the lesser of two evils' and nothing more."

"There were never any other options for us," Lieutenant Jones said to Mr. Jessa. "There are still no other options. Even the Darjee are less than reluctant allies! We scare them almost as much as the Sa'arm! Either we help them, or we die. That's it. There is no other choice. They have the technological advances we need to be effective against the Sa'arm, and we have the ability to fight the enemy on an even footing with that technology."

"The only way your daughters are getting out alive is as sex-slaves and baby factories, Mr. Jessa," I said with finality.

He cocked the gun and pointed it at my head.

"You are on the wrong side of the equation for pulling the trigger to make a difference," I told him. "That was your mistake from the beginning."

"And you're on the right side?" he asked.

"Would killing you advance my position?" I asked him. "You knew how the kidnapping was going to end. You sent your men into a meat grinder composed of Confederacy Marines, Mr. Berto's men, and my other friends."

Lieutenant Jones walked around my chair and sat down. "You have some huge fucking balls, Jason. Big motherfucking brass ones!"

I shrugged and said, "If Mr. Berto can love his daughter, this is a walk in the park. You can relax, Miranda. He isn't going to kill us."

"He's still pointing the gun at us," she replied snarkily.

"You are naked," I said to her. She looked down at her fantastic body and back at me. "He can put a gun in my hand and call it self-defense. He cannot put clothes on you before his daughters get in the room. Marissa is smarter than any explanation he might provide. Mr. Jessa has kept his second life very far from his little girls."