Witness [A First Contact Romance]

14. Commander Vehru

Lumiea

Year -20 (L.D.)

Commander Vehru stood on top of the world, her boots planted on the roof of the tallest skyscraper on the planet, and her eyes set on the tiny people in the city below. Icy wind ripped at her from this height like a thousand stabbing needles.

Right now, hundreds of kids were getting to know their new squads, already giving into the undeniable pull of kinship when they had been denied it for so long.

It was a cruel thing Vehru did to them, teaching them a life of isolation only to immediately thrust them into a blood bond. Vehru had told the young–so incredibly young–new privates that this was her favorite night of the year.

Oh, the lies she told.

Tonight was like some sick ritual sacrifice where she offered up babies to the gods, only it wasn't gods. It was the Federation.

These poor privates never had a chance to defend themselves against Vehru and her kind.

A child taken from their home and isolated from their family would cling to whatever they could get their hands on–and in this case, it was whatever Vehru gave them. But an adult without someone to love would either find it on their own, outside of Vehru's control, or have nothing to fight for. These kids were so starving for family, they would love each other immediately and fully. Tonight they drank poison in the form of camaraderie. They'd found their people and all they would ever know and love belonged to Vehru. Under her control.

This was why they encouraged their soldiers to marry and have children after rearing them to abandon their families in childhood. Love would make a person do anything. It was a human's greatest power. And greatest weakness.

What a cruel thing, indeed, giving these kids new families tonight.

Her partner, Morfrain, liked having this power over people. Vehru resented it. After more than six hundred years in her biomechanical body, the memory of flesh and vulnerability was so distant that often she could not recall how her original body had felt. That life was gone. But there were moments that she viscerally remembered being young and wanting nothing more than to discover her own life. She could imagine how these young people felt.

Vehru looked down at the bottle in her hand and remembered the first time she'd returned home after successfully liberating a world. Well, not liberating. Listen to her. She'd spent so much time on this planet having to play the part for the soldiers here that she'd started believing her own lies. Vehru had not become Death, the Conqueror of Worlds, by liberating the oppressed throughout the galaxy. It was not liberation she brought and this was a fact that she refused to deny to herself.

So, it was not the first time she returned home after liberating a world, but after conquering one, that her sweet mother took her hand, drew her close, and whispered against her ear. "How do you sleep at night? I can't sleep anymore, knowing what you're doing."