Free Dadr'Ba by Tetsu'Go'Ru Tsu'Te

connection as she thought of her parents, her brother, aunts, uncles and cousins and she responded in kind. She took comfort in that privately, within the small, tight circles of the resistance she’d be honored and above all she knew beyond all doubt that Ba would be proud of her.
    As with all Ol’Dr’s or firstborns, Su’Zi’s alignment is more tightly linked through the parents to the grandparents, who she never met. Parents see or feel a similarity between the Ol’Dr and their own parent, so Su’Zi’s parents treated her more maturely, almost honorably and expect more from her as well. Yng’Gr’s usually born a year or so later are much more tightly aligned with the parents. Su’Zi is confident that next year when her brother Sa’To graduates, her parent’s pride will have a different flavor.
    Sa’To was the Bo’Ba of the family, got more favors, more lenient treatment for infractions, and more displays of affection than Su’Zi got. But Su’Zi received a more mature kind of love, almost as an equal and perhaps in some ways more profound.
    It was time to exit the Stadium, Su’Zi’s stomach was grumbling; the graduates were told not to eat for ten hours before the ceremony. She noticed the group in front of her beginning to rustle preparing to stand.
    No one that Su’Zi talked to would say anything about what happens next and from what Su’Zi could tell nothing was told to any of the other graduates as well. All the graduates know is that they leave the Stadium and go to the Church for the Touch of God Initiation Ceremony. Nothing is told about what happens in this Ceremony, it’s not a CA secret, it’s a Church Secret, even more than that, it’s a Dadr’Ba secret, one linked to their very existence, and one that every citizen of Dadr’Ba learns upon adulthood.
    They all stand and begin filing out of the stadium to a standing ovation. Su’Zi recalls the last words from her mother before leaving for the ceremony; she said: “learn from what you don’t know and think twice before acting.”
     

Chapter 7, Su’Zi’s ToG Ceremony
     
    As the initiates grouped up outside the stadium, Su’Zi spotted something that froze her with fear. Then she desperately looked for a way to escape as five soldiers moved in from quickly opening gaps in the crowd of onlookers that met them outside the stadium. The soldiers quickly formed a perimeter around them. They were armed with riot batons, dual wielded, one in each of its primary arms, which in the hands of soldiers can be lethal. Su’Zi wanted to run but knew it would be useless.
    Soldiers are rare, the last time she saw one was during the early morning raid when her father was apprehended and arrested, having already been convicted by the CA council without ever being able to present a defense.
    The soldiers swept into their home in the middle of the night, using their great strength to force the door locks like they had been made of putty. The soldiers rushed down the narrow hallway of their cargo container turned camp trailer home closing and sealing Su’Zi’s and Sa’To’s bedroom doors with some strange material that held fast for hours then just crumbled away.
    They knew just where to find Ba, who knew better than to try to resist. Even though they didn’t resist the soldiers stunned both Ma and Ba, and took Ba. They were in and out in less than a minute.
    The raid had been totally unexpected. It was at a mining camp filled with psychically aware miners at the lower reaches of zone three. The CASS soldiers got away with it by using stealth mode soldiers wearing special suits that dampened the sound of their muscles firing, and being robots, were undetectable psychically. There were none of the usual D’En handlers accompanying them whose psychic presence would have tipped the community off to their approach.
    All they left was their stench and an arrest warrant/conviction/notification tag that provided the computer link to view the referenced