An Officer’s Duty (4 page)

JULY 20, 2492 T.S.

“How much longer?” Fyfer asked, his tone bored.

“If I can put up with Mom and Ma throwing that surprise welcome home party for me at the restaurant yesterday…and then making me wash all the dishes afterwards,” Ia muttered half under her breath, “
you
can put up with a little drive into the countryside this morning.”

“The question is, how far of a drive?” Thorne asked her. Once again, he was driving, guiding the family ground car over the ruts in the unpaved, barely graded road they were following. Hovercars strong enough to counteract the local gravity were too expensive for most settlers to afford on Sanctuary, but that didn’t mean the government sank a lot of money into high-quality back roads, either.

“Yeah, you said you’re looking for a crysium field, but we’ve already passed three,” Fyfer added, shifting forward as far as his safety restraints would allow, bracing his elbows on the backs of their chairs.

“One where we won’t be interrupted. What I’m about to do, no one outside of the three of us is to ever know about, and I do mean
no one
—turn left up ahead,” Ia ordered Thorne.

He complied, carefully turning between the red-barked, purple-leaved trees. The side road she picked wasn’t even really
a road, more like a leafer-path. Aquamarine grass had sprung up in the leafer’s wake, along with small bushes, making him slow the car. “How much farther? I am not damaging Ma’s car on one of your quests if it can be avoided.”

“Quarter klick, no more. There’s a small clearing of crystals off to the right. Up there,” Ia added, pointing ahead at a gap in the growth. “You can just turn around right there. Point the car outward.”

“Ia…pointing the car
back
the way it came is the new version of the archaic handkerchief-on-the-doorknob trick,” Fyfer warned her.

“All the more reason the few who might make it this far will back up and find another spot,” Ia countered.

Thorne sighed and carefully jockeyed the ground vehicle around so that it faced back toward the dirt road. “At least with a path this wide, the leafer isn’t likely to wake up until late winter at the earliest.”

“Another thing I’m counting on.” Disentangling herself from the restraints, Ia opened her door and climbed out as soon as the panel had tucked itself beneath the floorboards. Steadying herself against the hard, half-forgotten tug of high gravity, she faced the other way. The partially recovered path ended about a hundred and fifty meters away in what looked like a brush-choked, grass-strewn slope, a modest hill that rose a good twenty-five meters at its crest, twenty or so meters in width, and probably extended for five times that in length. But a leafer was no hill.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a carnivore, either. Instead, it was the largest land-based herbivore in the known galaxy. If the beasts could have been tamed and trained, the government of Sanctuary would have done so, but the few times they had tried had proven too disastrous. Leafers were too dumb, too interested in the recyclable plastics and elastics known as plexi—a common prefab building material—and too prone to torpor and months-long hibernation after only a kilometer or so of feeding, depending on the size.

Her brother’s assessment was fairly accurate; a quick probe into the local timestreams showed that it wouldn’t bother them, so long as they didn’t try to climb up and dig a hole through the outer patina of dirt hosting all those bushes on its back.
Closing the car door, she looked over at the field bordering the leafer-path. Rocky outcrops poked up through the ground to the east, a rugged clearing too stony to permit the growth of many trees. A few bushes did their best to cling to pockets of soil, but there was plenty of evidence that this little meadow flooded whenever a heavy rainstorm came through. The back-and-forth cycle of dry-and-drowned kept most plants away from this area, making it the perfect zone for a different sort of growth.

The real growth, slow as it was, came from the sprays of crystals dotting the field, pastel and glowing faintly, just bright enough to be seen even in the light of midmorning.

The predominant color among the shafts was transparent gold, not quite amber, but here and there, other hues could also be seen. Mint green, aquamarine, lilac, and rose. All of them were clear enough to see through. They also ranged in sizes from tiny, sharp-edged sprays no bigger than her head, to towering, conifer-like shapes four times her height. Heading toward them, she stopped when her younger brother gasped, dropping to his knees.

“Fire!”
he yelled, clutching at his head, eyes wide and focused on things that weren’t there.
“The Phoenix rises! The cathedral on fire—golden birds covering the sky!”

The attack startled her. She hadn’t felt anything building up around her. Normally, those who were the most psychically sensitive suffered the most from the phenomenon, and her brother Fyfer was about as mind-blind as any second-generation resident of Sanctuary could possibly claim to be. Slightly more sensitive than the rest of the Humans in the known galaxy, but only slightly.

Thorne rolled his eyes and aimed a kick at his brother’s rump. “Get up. Your acting isn’t
that
good.”

Laughing, Fyfer dropped his hands and pushed to his feet. He grinned at his siblings, brushing the dirt from his knees. “
You
know I’ve been practicing…but I’ll bet I had
her
fooled!”

“If I weren’t so sensitive to the buildup of precognitive KI—or rather, the lack of it this time—then yes, I would’ve been fooled,” Ia agreed. “You were good in every other detail I could see.”

“Annoying is more like it,” Thorne snorted, eyeing his younger brother. He returned his attention to their sister. “So,
why are we out here? I’m supposed to be studying for my second big test in Economics.”

“We’re here to experiment.” Ia removed the cuff from her right arm. Not the left one, which was her military ident unit, but the one hidden under her right sleeve. Molding it with a touch of electrokinetic energy to soften the material and a nudge of telekinesis to shape it, she formed it into a round, pink peach sphere. Unlike the sprays, it wasn’t completely transparent, as the pink infusing the gold clouded the material. She held it out on the palm of her hand, displaying it to her siblings. “Do you know what this is?”

“A holokinetic illusion?” Fyfer asked, dropping his jester’s attitude with a shrug. Underneath the charming jokester, he was quite bright for such a young man. “Or maybe some sort of psychic gelatin? At least, I’m presuming it’s one or the other, either holokinesis of something that doesn’t exist, or telekinetic manipulation of something that does. Except the last I checked, you weren’t a holokinetic.”

Thorne, for all that he looked like a walking mountain of muscle, frowned at the sphere on her palm, then looked at the sprays. “It sort of…That
can’t
be…can it? Is that crysium?”

Ia drew out energy from the sphere, making the solid ball sag. She poured energy back into it, enough that her palm crackled with miniature lightning, and the ball crystallized. Literally, it grew crystals, turning into a miniature version of the much larger, cone-spoked spray around them. Both of her brothers swore under their breath, eyes wide.

“How…?” Thorne managed.

“Special abilities,” she dismissed, carefully staying vague even in front of her own siblings. “The next person to be able to do this won’t come around for another two hundred years…and she will
be
Phoenix, the Fire Girl of Prophecy. The thing is,
this
stuff isn’t your standard crysium.”

Drawing energy out, which destabilized the otherwise tough mineral, she reshaped it as ball, then tossed it at Thorne. He caught it on reflex…and stiffened and stared at nothing. Blinked. Breathed. Blinking again, he focused on her. “You…this…what…”

She crossed the few meters between them and plucked the sphere from his palm. “What did you see?”

“The…time moved. The day sped up and raced by. The evening lightning storm came by…but I
knew
I was still standing here in midmorning,” he finished, confusion creasing his brow. “Ia…I saw the
future
.”

She nodded, and held out the ball to Fyfer. He quirked one of his dark brows but took the crystal ball—and sucked in a sharp breath, as real as the previous one had been faked. He didn’t drop to his knees, but he did shudder. Taking pity on him, Ia took it back.

“What did
you
see?” she prodded him when he just blinked and breathed.

“Uh…the crew, the other students from school…they’re going to call me on my wrist unit…ask me out to dinner with the group,” he revealed.

Ia probed the future, and nodded. “Go ahead and accept…but tell them you plan to shift majors at the end of the se-mester.”

“Shift majors?” Fyfer protested. “Why would I want to shift majors? I’m great at acting! I actually enjoy it. Besides,
you
told me to go into acting school.”

She pinned her brother with a firm look. “Because I also told you that you would need to shift majors. You’re going to start studying law—”

“Law!” he protested, throwing up his hands. “Why me? Why law?”

“And politics,” Ia finished. Sphere cupped in her right hand, she ticked off three of the fingers on her left hand. “Rabbit is studying sociology, psychology, and behavioral sciences. Thorne is studying economics, business management, and logistics.
You
need to study law, acting, and politics. I’ve
told
you this, Fyfer. Over and over and over.

“Rabbit will be in charge of organizing the Free World Colony and its resistance movement. She can write a very moving speech, but she is
not
a public speaker, and thus not a public motivator. We all know that the adults wouldn’t take her seriously just because of her size. Thorne will be in charge of the FWC’s physical needs, making sure the cities are well-planned and well-provisioned, with strategic defenses, housing and feeding, powering and cleaning needs all carefully considered and arranged.
You
will be the face of the Free World Colony,
but you need to be
more
than just a face to motivate people. You need to know the difference between wrong and right, just and unfair, and that means studying acting, politics, and law.”

“Only Church slaves study law and politics. All those classes at Thorne’s college are filled with forehead-circling fanatics.” He wrinkled his nose in disgust, then mockingly scribbled his finger on his forehead, making a face.

Ia gave him a disgusted, sardonic look. “How else did you think the Church was going to take over the government? They’re going to do it
by the book
, Fyfer. The Church’s leaders have been planning this since they funded their half of the push to find a new heavyworld to settle. It may have been a cosmic accident that they ended up on
this
world along with the saner contingents from Eiaven and the other heavyworld colonies who contributed, but they are here, and we have to deal with them.
Your
job will be to stave off the too-rapid degeneration of Sanctuarian society from within the political and legal framework.”

“Isn’t there some other way?” Fyfer protested, throwing up his hands. “
Any
other way? You’re supposed to be able to see all the twists and turns for a thousand years! Isn’t there some other way than…than to turn me into a Kennedy, or a MacKenzie, or some other historically big-named
politarazzi
?”

She wished there was. Ia clenched her hands and closed her eyes. She searched on the timeplains, the great, amber-hued prairie of existence crisscrossed by a thousand million life-streams. What she
needed
was a way to show him what his best future path could be, without the trauma of actually dragging him into his own timestream and holding him there. Fyfer had the grace to stay silent while she dipped into stream after stream in rapid, practiced succession, but pouted when she opened her eyes and shook her head, fingers tightening on the ring in her grasp.

“I’m sorry, Fyfer. But I need you to do what I’m telling you. You’re very charismatic and quick-witted when you want to be, and you know how to skirt the fine line between believability and showmanship.
You
are going to save a lot of people from slipping into the madness of believing the Church’s doctrines and dogmas in the coming years.” Ia held his gaze, though she softened her expression. “I
need
you, Brother. I need you to do what I myself cannot.

“
Everyone
on this world needs you…and they will need you to study law and politics, so you can
use
those as your sword and shield in the fight against the fanatics of the One True God!” She flung out her left hand in the direction of the city…and realized her right hand was no longer clutching a sphere. Instead, it now held a pink peach bracelet, a wrist-sized torus of rippling, stiffened crystal shaped something like either a turbulent stream or a fluttering veil. Confused, Ia stared. She hadn’t consciously tried to shape it…or…had she?

Acting on impulse, Ia grabbed Fyfer’s wrist with her free hand and dropped the torus-bracelet-thing on his palm. He shuddered, eyes widening much like they had when it had been a mere sphere, but this time dropped to his knees as well. Sagged, more like it. Thorne hissed and shifted forward, ready to catch Fyfer in case he didn’t fall safely, but Fyfer ended up merely kneeling. Rather than touching his brother, Thorne stopped next to him, glancing up in confusion at their sister.

Unsure what was happening to him, Ia extended a finger and brushed his temple very lightly, intending to use her minor telepathic skill to probe his thoughts. What she got instead was swept onto the timeplains next to her brother, who stood waist-deep in the waters of his own stream, his gaze fixed on the surface as scene after scene rushed past. Hissing, she hauled herself out and snatched the overgrown ring from his hand, freeing him as well.

Fyfer sucked in a deep breath and let it out again, coughing a bit. “God! God above!” He blinked and looked up at her. “Is…is
that
what you always see? Like a series of 3-D movies, snippets of…of moments…?”