An Officer’s Duty (15 page)

Time swallowed her whole, drowning Kaskalla’s shrieks as she clung to Ia’s mental back. Eons, seconds, months, minutes, centuries, years. Turn right or turn left, the fish in the river no longer had a choice in how to get around the rock in its path; the rock split, the fish split, the waters split and shattered.
Existence
shattered…

Children grew, aged, died. Trees shot up, split, decayed. A thousand leafer beasts nibbled new paths through the forests and valleys. Rocks reassembled themselves in reverse from weathered shards and sand. Silver spheres shat golden dust on everything in sight. Fire blossomed in obscene bouquets, volcanoes exploding, starships shattering, flames boiling up explosively from the base of a cathedral where giant projection screens were showing a man whipping a half-naked girl who screamed, not in pain, but a word, a phrase, a name distorted by the warping of Time.

“Iiiiiiaaaaa! Iiiiaaaaa’nnn sud’dhaaaaa’aaaaaaaaaa!”

It was the only thing that could have anchored both of them. Ia could weather anything Time threw at her, but Kaskalla had nothing to help
her
cope with the onslaught of infinite possibilities, save for her limited experience with this one, definitive, local moment. She grabbed at it, still clinging to Ia, dragging both of them into the scene.

The whip rose, snapped onto flesh, fell, swung, disjointed images of too many times, too many tries, too many variables. The girl bled, the girl burned; the girl lived triumphant, and simultaneously died. The Church fell, the Church thrived, a thousand golden birds took flight…

At least from
here
, Ia could find her way—their way—back. It felt like she was pulling that ground bus all over again, the one she had hauled on in Basic Training, but she pulled on it. Like moving a thousand, no,
ten
thousand minds back into a semblance of sanity.

Pain
cracked
across her face, mostly in her chin and nose. Groaning, Ia rolled her head to the side, sinuses throbbing from the blow. It was only the edges of the table—indeed, all furniture on Sanctuary—which were padded with the resilient, rubbery, forgiving version of plexi. The main surface of the conference table was hard and white, suitable for writing. Not for smacking into headfirst.

The inside of her skull hurt. Worse, her inner reserves were low. Dreading what that meant, Ia probed cautiously into the timestreams, holding most of her awareness at a safe distance. It took a few moments to make sense of what she saw. When she did, Ia lurched upright. Almost making it to her feet, she dropped back onto the padded seat with a
thump
and another groan.

“Slag!”
Grimacing, she gingerly touched her face, then reached over and slapped the dazed-looking girl at her side. “Wake up.”

Kaskalla squeaked, the blow more of a sting than a bruise. Ia slapped her again, just hard enough to redden her cheek. When the younger priestess focused on her for a glare, Ia pressed her finger to the girl’s forehead. Not to touch the other woman psychically, but to imprint her message
physically
, with focus-grounding pain.

“
Congratulations
, meioa. Because
you
wouldn’t listen, your stubbornness has just caused a citywide
mind-quake
.”

“
Guh
…wha…?” Kaskalla asked, blinking.

Ia shoved hard with her finger before releasing the girl. She lifted her fingers to her aching nose and focused her inner biokinetic energies into the bruised flesh, healing the inadvertent damage. Once that was done, she dipped two fingers into Leona’s cup of water and dragged them across her brow, trying to use evaporation to cool the heat burning through her forehead, her sinuses.

Slumped back in her chair where she had collapsed, Leona lifted her hands to her face and groaned. “Oh, gods, not another mind-quake…”

“
Ugh
…what’s a mind-quake?” Kaskalla asked, still a bit dazed but finally regathering her wits.

Grunting, Ortuu lifted his dark head from the table. Like Ia, he dipped his fingers in his drink and streaked them around the bridge of his nose before puffing air upward in the hopes of soothing the mental burn. “A mind-quake…is when an especially powerful psi…
ungh
…affects
everyone
within a set range. You grew up down by the sea, but even
you
should remember the Night of the Prophecy, from four and a half years back? It was in all the news Nets.”

“The Night…? I did a report on it in high school, but everyone thought it was just some strange mass attack of the Fire Girl Prophecy!” Kaskalla protested. “No one had ever found a triggering cause!”

Lifting her free hand, Ia fluttered her fingers. Kaskalla gaped and shook her head in denial. She subsided when both Leona and Ortuu nodded in confirmation.

Leona lifted her own hand. The older woman’s cheeks turned
a bit pink as well. “I made the same mistake you did just now. Except I at least had Ia’s permission, since we didn’t know what we were doing at the time. After our second try did the exact same thing that night, we knew better than to try again.”

Nose still throbbing but on its way to being healed, Ia gave Kaskalla a hard, dark look.

“People are going to come looking for the epicenter of the mass Prophecy attack, and that means they will come
here
. All three of you will simply say, ‘I honesty cannot say what happened’…and if you have any qualms about lying, you are
forbidden
to say what happened, so therefore you cannot,” Ia stated crisply. She aimed it mostly at Kaskalla, since Ortuu and Leona already knew what not to say. “If anyone asks about me, I was only here for a brief stop to say hello to some old friends…and I left over an hour ago. You will put the truth into my official evaluation, because the truth must be put into it, but then you will
seal it
. Got that?”

“
Ah
…I…guess so,” Kaskalla agreed. She half shook her head, still looking a bit dazed. Then quickly grabbed her temples, grimacing. “But…I just can’t believe that
you
were the source of…of
thousands
of people all experiencing a massive surge of prophetic visions! And…and you’ve been offworld for two
years
, yet we’ve still been having these Fire Girl attacks. How can
you
be the source of them when you’re not even here?”

“That’s because I’m
not
the source of them, normally,” Ia admitted, though she carefully avoided saying what that source was. “However, you are a very strong telepath, and you were hooked into my brain, with
my
gifts. We were in gestalt, which amplified my precognitive visions right across the city. Luckily, most everyone had enough warning to brace themselves…but because
you
triggered a broadcasting of my abilities, strong enough that people lost control of their senses, you have directly caused sixteen traffic accidents. Thankfully, none of them were lethal, and everyone will recover with medical aid.”

Pushing to her feet, Ia swayed, then slumped back into her chair once more. Grunting, she touched her forehead, then shoved up the lid of her wrist unit.

“Great…I’m drained. I can’t walk very far.” Punching in the numbers for her brother’s unit, she waited a few seconds. The moment Thorne answered, Ia spoke. “Thorne, to answer your question,
yes
, it happened again. But I’m in no shape to walk all the way out of here. Meet me in the bunker tunnels under the Church of Contemplation.”

“I’m hardly in any shape to carry you, myself,” he retorted, hand coming into view at the edge of the screen. He rubbed at his face, then sighed. “
Fine
…I’ll be there shortly. Stop giving people slagging headaches.”

Nodding, Ia shut the lid, ending the connection. “Remember, as far as anyone else is concerned I was here
only
for a short time, and
not
for anything psi-related. I was just here to catch up with my old church friends, and left a while ago. Volunteer nothing, because otherwise you’re as clueless as anyone else as to what just happened here. And don’t embellish.”

Gathering her willpower, Ia pushed one last time to her feet. Head aching, mind throbbing, she shuffled toward the door. Thankfully, the access hatch to the bunker tunnels was only a few doors down from this particular conference room.

“I’m…I
am
sorry,” Kaskalla offered. She was rubbing the side of her head, which no doubt still ached.

Ia paused at the door, glancing back over her shoulder. “Try to listen a little better next time. Other people
do
occasionally know better than you…and some experiments should not be repeated.”

Pulling the door open, Ia left them in the room. She had to brace her hand on the corridor wall to keep her trembling body from staggering, but she left. It would be another twenty-plus minutes before emergency services realized the mind-quake was more or less round in shape, and another ten minutes to realize that this location was the focal point of its kilometers-wide radius. She needed to be back home long before then, without anyone seeing her near the church.

On the bright side, the fog has cleared…and Kaskalla will indeed do whatever I or Leona or Ortuu tell her to do. She’ll rise in the ranks of non-Church religious politics, and be an added touch of leverage for saving everyone when the revolution comes.

So this moment was a literal headache, and I’ll have tidying-up efforts to make, based on the few people whose accidents might adversely affect the shift and flow of the future…but overall, a net gain. Small, but good.

AUGUST 9, 2492 T.S.

Her head ached. Thankfully not from any overuse of her gifts or face-plants on a hard surface. Lack of sleep made her uncomfortable this time. Rubbing at her tired eyes, wishing she could just go back to bed, Ia breathed deeply several times. She also swallowed another mouth of cold caf’, and stared blearily at the last three questions on her Net-based exams. They were being taken in real time over the hyperrelay channels, despite
the lag between Sanctuary and Earth of roughly one second for every fifty lightyears, and had to be completed on time, or her scores would be docked.

Ia already had a Field Commission as a Lieutenant Second Class in the Space Force Marine Corps. In order to retain that rank, she had to go through training at an Officers’ Academy; that was standard military procedure, and smart, since it guaranteed all officers above the lowest attainable rank had the same basic leadership training. In order to advance beyond Lieutenant First Class, however—which she would only get after distinguishing herself through at least a full decade of service, if she didn’t play the military’s game—she also had to have a Master’s degree.

Since she needed to be able to advance at a moment’s notice in the future, Ia had signed up for a series of classes on the Nets shortly after boarding the
Liu Ji
, back when she was just a corporal in the Marines. This particular virtual college simply presented the course materials, expected the students to learn on their own time, and then provided the exams online, all for a reasonable fee. It worked well, but it only worked if the students actually applied themselves to their lessons. It wasn’t just rote memorization, either; each question in the final exams was different enough from the information provided in the resource materials that a student had to
know
the subject matter to be able to answer them correctly.

The door down the hall opened. Ia answered the question on her screen and hit the send key on her parents’ workstation, without bothering to correct the typo in her answer. It might count slightly against her, but that was alright; she didn’t want to pass with perfect marks, just pass with reasonably good ones.

One of her mothers shuffled out of their bedroom. Thankfully toward the bathroom, not the living room. Ia focused on the next question on her test; this was her final exam in her chosen Master’s field, Military History. Once she was done with it and her scores tallied and registered, she would be eligible for the fast-track program at her chosen Academy. The bedroom door opened again behind her, and she heard her other mother move to wait at the bathroom door, not quite successfully smothering a yawn.

That audio cue forced Ia to smother one of her own, then sip
at the cooled remnants of caf’ in her mug. By the time she reached the final question, Amelia had slipped onto the sofa next to her child. Wrapping an arm around Ia’s shoulders and snuggling her head on her daughter’s shoulder, she peered at the screen. With her arm cushioned from Ia’s skin by her bathrobe and her cheek on the fabric covering Ia’s shoulder, there was less chance for her mother to trigger a precognitive vision, but less wasn’t the same as none. Ia slipped her arm around her biomother’s ribs, hugging her back, then helped her biomother sit upright again.