An Officer’s Duty (16 page)

“‘Who was nicknamed the White Death in World War II, Terran Standard Twentieth Century, and what trick did he use to prevent his breath from being seen?’” her mother recited aloud. “
Ugh.
You couldn’t
pay
me to study Military History in that much depth. Did you get any sleep at all,
gataki mou
?”

Struggling against another yawn, Ia nodded. “Some. There’s…
mm
…a Human on the other end of the testing Net at this time of the morning. I’ve already chatted with her. I need to have this last test witnessed so that when my transcripts arrive at the Academy, the TUPSF will be able to question and confirm that it really was me taking the exams—the voice link is active,” she added, tapping the screen. “She can hear everything we’re saying. That is, if she’s not busy with something else. This is the last question, anyway.”

“I trust you know it?” Aurelia asked, headed for the kitchen. “Fresh caf’, anyone?”

“
Mm
, that would be lovely, dear,” Amelia murmured. She sagged back on the couch, leaving her daughter free to compose her answer.

Ia touched the keys, typing each letter with her fingers, rather than her mind.

“Simo Häyhä was the ‘White Death’ of Finland. Fighting in the coldest months of winter, he would often put snow into his mouth and breathe through it, so that the ice crystals would chill his breath with each exhale, preventing any puffs of steam from giving away his position. His military service took place during the Winter War of 1939–1940 Terran Standard, involving Finland versus the invading forces of the Soviet Union, and included over seven hundred confirmed, credited kills with both sniper rifle and machine gun. His career ended March 6th, 1940 T.S. when a bullet disfigured his face.”

It was a bit more than the question actually called for, but it was an easy question, and Ia wanted to reassure the test examiners that she did, indeed, know historical military facts.
As if I couldn’t just dip into the past on the timeplains and pluck the facts from any stream I wanted—the real facts, not just the accounts written down afterward.

“There. Done.” She struck the send key, then tapped the icon for the voice link.
“Thanks for keeping me company, Meioa Giltrers.”

It took a few seconds for the reply to come back. Even at hyperrelay speeds, Sanctuary was a long, long way from Earth.
“Eh, it’s not like I have anything better to do on the night shift. You go on and have a good night’s rest, or whatever time of
day it is all the way out at wherever-the-heck you’re from.”

That made Ia chuckle.
“It’s now morning, local time.”

“Says
you
,” her biomother grunted, still slouched on the sofa, arm over her eyes.

The examiner, Giltrers, spoke up again through the link.
“Then I’ll just say good morning to you. Your test will be graded and the results will be posted in three days. If you don’t see them by then, contact the Exam Board via the conveniently named Contact the Exam Board link, and include my name, Maria Giltrers, as the test examiner for verification purposes. Now, any questions before we end this undoubtedly hellaciously expensive link?”

“None—and it’s still technically a brand-new colonyworld, so all links certified for educational purposes only are provided for free by the government. Thank you for your patience, meioa, and have a good night.”
Ending the connection, Ia powered down the workstation. Shifting it from her lap to the coffee table, she sagged back against the cushions. For a moment, all she could see was the bleak prospect of packing up her belongings and boarding a shuttle for the space station that evening.
But I only have nineteen hours left with my family, and some of those hours won’t be pleasant ones…

Curling over, she cuddled onto her mother’s lap. Amelia stroked her fingers through Ia’s short white locks. “My little white kitten…How big you’ve grown. How far you’ll roam. I do wish you didn’t have to go away…”

“
I
wish I didn’t have to go back, either,” Ia murmured. “That none of this was necessary. That I could be
normal
.”

Aurelia emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray with three steaming mugs of caf’ deftly balanced on it. “You’d be extraordinary,
gataki
, no matter what your abilities were like. I have proof of it; you were kind enough to prepare an extra pot, so I didn’t have to wait as long for it to brew.”

Ia smiled wryly at that. Sighing, she pushed herself upright and accepted the fresh mug. “So…anything planned for today?”

“Crying, weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and some breast-beating. Possibly some sobbing, if we can fit it into the schedule,” Aurelia quipped, settling on Ia’s other side. She patted her daughter on the leg, then sagged back against the sofa cushions with a sigh. “I don’t want you to go, either. It’ll be, what, two more years before we’ll see you again?”

“In person, yes. And it’ll be three years; I have to spend one year at the Academy in Sines, Portugal, then two more years of duty before I’ll be free to come back home. But I’ll be an officer, with more leeway in making hyperrelay calls back home,” Ia offered. “Once a week, rather than once a month.”

“Scant comfort,” Aurelia groused. “It’s not the same as holding my baby girl. Not that I can hold you for long, even when you
are
here…”

Mouth twisting in wry acknowledgment, Ia leaned onto her other mother’s shoulder. Aurelia pulled her close, giving her a cuddle, then patted her on the arm and let Ia sit back up again. Drawing in a deep breath, Ia let it out. She tipped her head back, copying both of her mothers, and looked at the white-painted ceiling. “So. My last day here.”

Aurelia patted her on the thigh. “What do you need to do today, kitten?”

“
Mm.
Finish filling up those memory chips so you can print out my precognitive missives once I’m gone…experiment on my brothers nefariously…and eat Momma’s Restaurant’s famous triple topado pie.” She flashed each of her mothers a grin at that last one. “With ice cream.”

Amelia chuckled. “Opportunist.”

“What sort of experiments?” Aurelia asked, frowning.

“Just some prototype devices I need to have working and ready to go into production, next time I come back,” Ia dismissed. “They’re pretty much ready, though I wouldn’t mind running one last set of tests. Actually, I really should run them on someone…else…oh, bother.” Ia groaned under her breath, realizing there was one last thing she hadn’t covered, yet. “Mom? Ma? We need to have a talk.”

“What sort of talk?” Aurelia asked, her brow pinched and her tone skeptical.

“
The
Talk.” Sighing, Ia pushed herself upright and edged around the coffee table. Putting physical space between her and her mothers would help. Looming over them would be too aggressive, yet she had to be on her feet, to assert herself visually. Turning to face them once she was a couple body-lengths away, Ia relaxed her shoulders with a shrug. “I love you both, dearly and deeply…but it’s time to have The Talk with you.”

“Alright…so, talk,” Aurelia told her. Amelia scooted closer to her, cuddling subtly with her wife.

Taking a deep breath, Ia gave it to them. “I am
not
your little girl anymore. I have not been for years, and I will
never again
be your little girl—and I’m not just talking about being a grown-up,” she added as Amelia drew in a breath to speak. “I am talking about the fact that I need you to support me as the
Prophet
, from here on out. You are two of the most normal people I know. Everybody
sees
you as perfectly normal.”

“Except for the Church,” Amelia snorted.

“They’re not normal themselves,” Ia dismissed. “My point is, I need you to stop seeing me, addressing me, and treating me as your little girl, your daughter, your child. People need to start seeing me as the Prophet of a Thousand Years, foretold in V’Dan folklore and the Sh’nai faith, the master of the Fire Girl Prophecies, the protector and defender of the future.
Our
future, on this world. If they see
you
, two perfectly normal, sane, well-adjusted adults accepting, honoring, and following my directives…

“Look,” she tried again, raking a hand through her hair before dropping it to her hip. “There’s a certain momentum that needs to build, here in Sanctuarian society. Rabbit has the teenagers covered; the key members have met with me and they now believe in me, and she’ll keep them believing. Thorne
is working on presenting me to the support services, manufactories, and other businesses, and so forth. Fyfer will be going into the political and legal venues. I need
you
to reassure all the other perfectly normal people that I am a viable, sane alternative to falling in step with the madness of the Church. And you
cannot
do that if you keep calling me ‘kitten’ and
gataki mou
and thinking of me as your sweet little girl. It will come out in the littlest, subtlest ways…and that will undermine everything I need to do.”

She eyed her parents, waiting to see how they would take all of that. Amelia twisted her mouth, while Aurelia huffed and frowned. Arms folded, Aurelia retorted, “Well, you
are
our little girl, first and foremost.”

“No. I am not,” Ia countered. “Not anymore, not ever again.
Think.
You’re resisting me right now. You’re not taking me seriously now. Hell—you don’t even take the fact that I’m in the
military
seriously!” She flipped her hands up, then dropped them back to her hips, hoping and wishing her parents could see why this was necessary. “I would give up
almost
anything to still
be
your little girl…but I cannot, and
will not
, give up all the lives that will be slaughtered if I cannot pull off a gods-be-slagging
miracle
, both here and abroad. And
I cannot be here
.

“I need
you
to do what I cannot. I need you to be my hands and my arms and my legs here on Sanctuary. I need you to lead by
example
. You’re still very strong figures in the local community. You’re business leaders. People look up to you, they like you, they’re friends with you…discounting the Church’s brainwash victims and persecution hounds,” Ia allowed. “You need to be
more
active in local business meetings. You need to circulate more, and talk about the things your sons are trying to do. You need to make friends and contacts, and be
the
couple to go to for safe, sane solutions in an increasingly
insane
political environment. And you need to do it with an unshaking faith in both myself as the Prophet and in the future predictions I have made. Which
you
must distribute when the time is right. Not Thorne, not Fyfer, not Rabbit.
You.

“Which means you must stop thinking of me as your ‘little girl.’ Stop trying to shelter me, stop trying to protect me, and stop trying to defend your status as my parents and thus ‘always
superior’ to me.” Realizing her shoulders were tensing up, Ia shrugged and sighed, relaxing them. “It’s like your joke earlier, that a mother will always outrank her daughter. I’m sorry, Mom, Ma…but you do not, you cannot, and you
must
not ever think that way again, or it will ruin the things I’m striving for.”

Her biomother didn’t look too happy. Her other mother looked even less pleased. Aurelia rolled her eyes. “Fine. So we can’t call you our little girl anymore. We get the point.”

“We’ll do what you want,
gata
…er, Ia,” Amelia amended. “I’m sorry. You can’t expect us to give up being your mothers in a heartbeat! I mean, we’ll try, but…”

Ia didn’t have to probe the timestreams to know it was a reluctant, unhappy acceptance. She did anyway, double-checking the probabilities. What she found didn’t make her happy, either. Raking her hands through her hair, Ia checked her options. The potential possibilities ended with her angling a hand back toward the hallway. The door to her brothers’ bedroom opened silently, telekinetically, and two faintly glowing circlets floated out of the darkness.

“I’m treading a very fine line, here,” she told her mothers, catching a head-sized, lumpy ring in each hand, matched pairs of her prophetic circlets. “The Church tricks its followers with its rhetoric and its verses and its dogmatic interpretations. They even do subtle subliminal advertisings already. And they will one day resort to outright brainwashing, and worse. I do realize the irony of what I myself am trying to do in return. I
am
building up my own cult of followers, filling them with my own dogmas and my own demands.”

The words hurt to admit, but Ia admitted them bluntly, accepting responsibility to her parents for what she needed to do to the saner half of their homeworld.

“I am, in so many ways, doing
exactly
what they are doing. My methods may be slightly different, and my message vastly different…but the end result is the same. Two ideologically opposed camps filled with fanatics on both sides. Their side, and my side. What they do with rhetoric and coercion, I must do with truths and persuasion.” She looked down at the lumpy, wreath-shaped, translucent peach rings in her hands. “And, like them, I must use tricks to get my message across…and I must use them on my own mothers.”

“What are those things?” Aurelia asked her, eyeing them warily. “I know you’ve been working on them, but…what, exactly, are they?”

“Technically…I suppose you could call them biokinetically activated, parapsicognitive, temporal consequence feedback enhancers.” At her mothers’ blank looks, Ia let a touch of humor twist the corners of her mouth. “Don’t worry about it. Just call them the Rings of Truth. It’s a lot easier to say.

“This one,” she said, lifting the one shaped vaguely like a crown of brambles, with lumpy bits suggestive of thorns, “is the Wreath of Pain. And this one is the Wreath of Hope.” She lifted the other one, which had rounder, less linear blobs, which, in a certain light, suggested the thought of flowers. Looking back at her mothers, she lowered them, her smile fading. “You will get to try on both.”