Chapter 12

The Phoenix III was powered up and accelerating once again at one-quarter gravity. This time it would only be for a few hours. That's how long it would take to arrive where the great ship drifted as it slowly followed Mars around the sun.

Not wanting to wait, the Femme Fatales and their new trainees, the Necrotwins, all teleported from the Phoenix into the dark, dead hulk. Béla and Lisa went together. Jackie went with Alicia. Tabatha teleported to the cargo hold with the Necrotwins to take inventory of what they could use aboard the Phoenix.

Béla and Lisa appeared in the officer's quarters near the communal baths. She wanted to check them first. The artificial gravity was still working, so they didn't have to worry about floating away.

"Why didn't we go to the bridge, first?" Lisa wanted to know.

"Because," her mother replied, stopping at a darkened door and directing her light sphere toward it.

The light sphere was another mental marvel that Tabatha and Lisa had dreamed up. It was, of course, another teleportation device, or rather, phenomenon; a wormhole that teleported light from one place to another – just like the ones Tabatha and Lisa had created to supply air and water to the Phoenix III.

"Know where you are now?" Béla asked, grinning at her now-daughter who had accompanied her on this long journey as her then-sister, Beth.

There was no power, so Béla simply teleported the door into the slot where it would have gone had it slid open. There was no air in the compartment (there was no air in the entire ship, as about a quarter of it was completely missing).

Their old quarters were clean, neat, and unoccupied. They both felt an empty longing for those simple days. Then Béla frowned and turned away. "Wishing for things that were," she murmured to herself, then angrily turned and left the compartment.

Lisa followed, silent for once, making sure to keep their bubble of air around the both of them as they walked.

Their next stop was the communal baths. Here, there were several corpses, well preserved in the frozen water. Béla stared down at her old friends for several minutes, not radiating any emotion at all, then turned and left.

Jackie and Alicia were standing outside the door panel that led to the bridge.

"You don't remember that old flat-screen, 'Alien', do you?" Alicia asked her daughter.

"I never saw the original flat-screen version," Jackie admitted, "but the Tri-d remake was pretty gruesome. Two actors were actually killed by that animatronic creature as part of the script."

"I remember," Alicia said. "The remake was really gory, but the flat-screen version was a lot spookier. This team was wandering through this dark, lifeless alien vessel and there wasn't a straight-line bulkhead anywhere in the entire ship – almost as if it was organic or something. And it had these rib-like support structures with conduits running along them like huge, mummified blood vessels. It was like they were exploring some monstrous beasts' belly."

"That sounds wicked," Jackie grinned.

"Yeah!" her mother said. "I spent most of the movie watching my boyfriend watch it. I drove him nuts! 'What are they doing now?' 'What's happening?' And he'd say, 'Will you shut up and fucking WATCH?' And I'd glance at the screen for half-a-second and something really scary was happening and then I'd stare a hole in the side of his head to keep from turning my head toward the screen and start the whole spiel all over again all the time shaking like a leaf!"

They were both laughing by now.

"Oh, God, Mom," Jackie laughed. "How did he ever stand you?"

"Well, he liked me well enough that he forgave me," Alicia admitted. "He even married me!"

"What?" Jackie asked, stunned and surprised. "You were talking about Dad?"

"Um-hum," Alicia replied, recognizing that her daughter was asking about the father she grew up with, not the one who'd sired her. "Out of all my husbands, your father was my first and favorite."

"Hmm," Jackie said thoughtfully, then decided to finally ask what she'd wondered about for a couple of months, now, since her mother had returned. "You remember when you left a few years back? You know, to visit the Confederacy?"

"Uh, yes, I remember," Alicia replied, hoping her darling daughter wasn't going to ask certain personal questions but pretty sure she was.

"You haven't talked about it," Jackie continued. "About your adventures, or what you did there."

"What's there to talk about? I learned what getting filthy dirty felt like," Alicia said, hoping that she could scare her daughter away from the subject. "I learned what it is to be owned, and to be shot at, how to steal and what it's like to be a fugitive. I learned how it feels to stand in front of a firing squad and get gunned down. I learned ... how it feels..." she took a deep breath, not knowing if her voice would give out or not.

"I learned what its like to be gang-raped," she continued, her voice slightly shaking. "And I know what it feels like to be imprisoned. So I don't talk much about my 'adventures' in the Deep South."

"Please forgive me, Mom," Jackie whispered. "I had no idea..."

Alicia laughed. It sounded unpleasant. "They say, 'Ignorance is bliss', you know?"

She stared at her daughter in the dim light of the little wormhole fireball that illuminated them. "But it's not. Ignorance is cruelty. Ignorance is racism and hating someone who's different than you. Ignorance is enslaving half the population because they're females and because you have the power to do it. And killing someone just for the fun of it or because they have something you want."

Alicia's voice was very quiet now. "And ignorance is taking your child away from his mother because she might teach him compassion and love..."

"Mom?" Jackie cried out as Alicia burst into tears. Jackie reached out and hugged her mother tightly. Alicia sobbed into her daughter's shoulders for a moment, then became quieter.

"I'm so sorry, Mom," Jackie whispered. "I really had no..." She stopped, realizing she had said that before. "Didn't anything good happen to you there?" she asked, needing to know.

Alicia was quiet for a moment. Her tear-streaked face looked almost serene. She sighed then, and looked at her first-born.

"Jonathan," she said, then smiled at the slight confusion on her daughter's face. "His name was Jonathan. My son."

"You had a son?" Jackie whispered. "Where is he now?" The brief serenity vanished from her mother's face now. She looked sad and broken.

"He's probably dead," she said, her voice flat and emotionless. "My darling step-daughter probably killed him when she nuked Nashville."

Jackie didn't know what to say. A girl can only apologize so many times for dredging up horrible memories, so she stayed silent, and felt ashamed that she didn't know what to say to make anything better. So she simply hugged her mother tightly and let the tears roll down her face.

After several minutes of silence, they heard Béla and Lisa talking to each other as they approached.

"Speak of the devil," Jackie murmured, understanding something more of her mother's attitude toward Lisa, then smiled and called out to them, "We've been waiting for you. We thought you'd want to enter the bridge first."

The truth was that neither Jackie nor Alicia wanted to go onto that bridge at all. So far, the sections of the ship they'd explored were devoid of life, or rather, devoid of death. But they were both certain there would be alien corpses on the bridge, so they'd waited for reinforcements.

Béla didn't say anything, but pushed gently between them and faced the entrance panel. There was no power to it, so she teleported it into the bulkhead like she had the entrance panel to her old quarters. Light from their two light-spheres dimly illuminated the bridge for the first time since the destruction of the ship over fifty years ago.