An Officer’s Duty (52 page)

He studied her for a moment, then nodded. “Permission granted.”

Ia looked back at Harrison. “Either stuff your attitude up your recharge socket,
Captain
, or you can kiss my asteroid.”

Captain Harrison widened her eyes, affronted by the insult. Captain Yacob frowned at Ia. “Lieutenant!”

“Sorry, sir, but it goes against
my
nature to tolerate the grandstanding of a
hypocrite
,” Ia growled. Externally, she glared at Harrison. Internally, she was enjoying the ride. There were ways, and then there were ways, to advance her career. This was—at least to her warped sense of humor—one of the more enjoyable routes she could take. “I have
never
asked for a promotion. I have
never
asked for any of my medals. I have
never once
filed an incident report glorifying or exalting my actions. I have simply stated the
facts
of each matter, and moved on to the next task.

“I’m sorry if you think my standards are so low as to
fake
my devotion to service…and you may have the right to bust me all the way back down to Private for saying all of this…but I
refuse
to do less than my best just because
you
want to call it ‘grandstanding.’ So. If you have a problem with me, Captain Harrison, then I suggest you get over it. You can demote me, or promote me, or put me in charge of a garbage scow, it will
not
change my efforts, sir. You can slur my reputation all
you like, even to the point of casting lies, but
don’t
expect me to just stand here and take it.”

“You’re not in this to make friends, are you, Lieutenant?” Captain Yacob asked dryly, sitting back in his seat.

Ia relaxed her hard stance, shrugging slightly. “I’d say I’m quite capable of making friends in the Service, Captain. In fact, I
have
made several friends. I just refuse to lick asteroid while doing it. Sycophancy will only weaken and destroy the effectiveness of the Terran military. That’s why we have the Department of Innovations, to make sure that nepotism and backroom deals don’t ruin the quality of our leadership.”

Commodore Deng raised one brow at that. “Is
that
what this is all about? Are you aiming for an eventual transfer into the DoI?”

Ia blinked, her surprise genuine. She hadn’t expected him to draw that conclusion, and shook her head. “
Ah
…no, sir. To be honest, the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’m
good
at combat, and I always figured I’d
be
in combat. The DoI strikes me as too much of a desk job for my particular skill set.”

Harrison studied her for a long moment, then tapped something into her workstation. Yacob blinked, glanced at her, and tapped something into his own. Between them, the commodore nodded slowly.

“Are you going to apologize to Captain Harrison, Lieutenant?” Commodore Deng asked her.

“If I am ordered to, sir, I will, since I do still respect each of you…but I should point out that you
did
give me permission to speak freely,” Ia reminded them. “Apologizing for free speech when given permission to use it seems a bit contradictory to me.”

Captain Harrison chuckled at that. The other two glanced at her. From their puzzled looks, neither man could figure out what she found so funny. Lifting her palms, she shook her head.

“No apologies are necessary, Lieutenant. You
did
have permission. For the record, I was playing Devil’s Advocate. You do have a track record of…
mm
…bluntness about your devotion to duty, and I wanted to test it. By that, I mean more in your deeds than in your words, but I won’t fault you for turning around and matching words to deeds, this time.”

“In that case, I
do
apologize for any offense given, sir,” Ia stated.

Harrison snorted, mouth twisting wryly, then turned to look at her companions. “Are we ready, then, Commodore, Captain?”

“Quite ready, Captain.” Commodore Deng neatened the stack of printouts in front of him, then clasped his hands together, regarding Ia steadily. “It is the judgment of this review board that you are indeed stable enough to continue serving in a Blockade Patrol combat position. You will retain your current rank of Lieutenant Second Grade, and your current rate of pay. As you yourself have pointed out, you are best placed continuing to serve on board the TUPSF
Audie-Murphy
as its second-in-command. You will therefore do so.”

“Thank you, Commodore. I shall do my best, sir,” Ia promised, not at all disappointed at retaining her exact same rank for the next little while. It would give her a chance to prove her words were true…which ironically would help convince her superiors the next time her rank was up for review.

“You’d better. Dismissed, Lieutenant,” Deng told her.

Nodding, Ia saluted the three of them. They saluted her back, and she turned to go. Palming open the door to the review room—used by officers for evaluating fellow officers; enlisted went through a different, less face-to-face process—she stepped into the corridor beyond. That had gone well. Her little display of rebellion and disrespect had proven to her superiors that she wasn’t an entirely “perfect” soldier; that she had an all-too-Human side. Being
too
perfect would’ve been detrimental to her goals. It didn’t hurt that her little tirade was the honest truth about how she felt.

Just before the door slid shut, she heard Harrison’s voice. “Hey, Jake? If you ever don’t want her, I’ll take ’er.”

“Oh, hell, no. I’m—” The door sealed, cutting off the rest of his response.

Ia permitted herself a tiny smile.

OCTOBER 3, 2494 T.S.
NUK NUK 1338 SYSTEM

“C’mon, stay with me, stay with me,” Ia murmured, hands working swiftly as she mopped up Private Dixon’s wound. “Don’t you go anywhere, Helia, that’s an order! You are
not
following Private Kings into the afterlife, you hear me?”

Engineering rocked with the force of another explosion. She swayed with the quake. Private Natmah was less skilled; his fingers slipped off the grey material cupping Dixon’s inner thigh, allowing blood to spurt through what used to be her knee.

“Tighter!”
Ia snapped. Dixon grunted as Natmah regained his pressure on her femoral artery. There was also a tourniquet around her lower thigh, but it couldn’t be applied for very long. The other woman grunted again as Ia rubbed across the torn flesh with the scrap of cloth she had found. It was dirty with petrochemicals, but that didn’t matter; water-based moisture was Ia’s enemy right now, moisture which would make cauterizing this wound rather difficult.

The hissing sound of welders stopped. “Sir!” one of the other members of the boarding party shouted. “The last hatchway to Engineering is sealed. I don’t know how long it’ll be until they bring up cutters of their own, though!”

“Understood!” Ia called back. Shifting back, she picked up her mechsuit rifle. It really wasn’t designed to be fired by someone outside of their suit, but she’d had no choice. Fixing the biggest problem on their hands meant ditching both her and Dixon’s armor. A crude cauterizing had cut down most of the bleeding from the other woman’s maiming, but the future needed Helia Dixon to survive. Ia needed her to survive. Dixon’s leg from the knee down could be regenerated, given enough time. Her whole life couldn’t be restored if it was wasted.

“Brace yourself, Dixon; this is going to hurt like
v’shova sh’naan
…”

Aiming carefully, arms stretched to their fullest to clutch both the oversized trigger and the matching e-clip brace, Ia pulled the trigger. Deep red light seared slowly across the edge of Dixon’s flesh. Dixon screamed and slumped, passing out.

Steam and smoke boiled up from the wound. She cut off the beam two-thirds of the way through, rocked with another
deck-shaking explosion, and finished searing the last few centimeters of the stump. Stripping the e-clip from the rifle in a swift, subtle move, she tossed the bulky weapon aside and leaned forward over the comatose private, fluttering her hand to signal Natmah to let go of the comatose woman’s artery and strip off the tourniquet.

Nothing leaked. The cauterization was solid.

“Stay with me…Stay with me…” Energy crackled into the fingers of her left hand, jammed as they were against the power points at the top of the energy magazine. Her right hand pressed over Dixon’s throat, ostensibly to feel for a pulse. Instead, Ia spun the electrical energy from the clip into her biokinetic gift, and poured that into the unconscious young woman.

Nothing seemed to happen. Then again, only another psychic, one trained to sense the subtle flow of kinetic inergy, would have noticed anything. Beneath her fingertips, Ia could feel the private’s faltering heartbeat strengthen. She couldn’t forge miracles in flesh, unlike her father’s kin, but she could give the other woman enough biokinetic energy to survive. As soon as her instincts told her Dixon would survive within a comfortable probabilities margin, Ia slumped back, exhausted but relieved.

“She’ll live.”

Private Culpepper turned to face her, his fear visible since he had raised up both his outer and inner faceplates. “She’ll
live
? The hell with that, sir!
Nobody’s
gonna live! Kings is dead, Dixon’s down—they’ve got us
trapped
in here. We’re helpless!”

The sheer absurdity in his claim pricked Ia’s rare sense of humor. Sagging back onto her p-suited hip, she laughed. Culpepper did not take that well.

“You’re
laughing
?” he demanded. He pointed one servo-hand back at the main doors, almost smacking it into Corporal Kipple, who was obeying the spacer’s law of Lock and Web by carefully returning the welding gear back to its storage locker, even though it was Salik gear on a badly damaged Salik ship drifting dead through space without any functional engines. “Any minute now, the goddamn
frogtopuses
are gonna cut through those seals, and have us for dinner, and you’re
laughing
?!”

Corporal Kipple grinned through his faceplate. “
Eyah.
You haven’t served with the Lieutenant very long, have you, Culpepper? What, two patrols, now? Not quite two and a half?”

“What has
that
got to do with anything?” Culpepper snapped.

“
Everything
, Private,” Ia stated, drawing in a deep breath. “Kipple knows I don’t believe in the ‘no-win’ scenario. We have
plenty
of options, if we just open our eyes.”

Pushing to her feet, she swayed a little, exhausted, but made it over to her mechsuit, open and waiting in standby mode. She didn’t climb back into it, however. Instead, she dug out her holdout knife from one of the thigh compartments, then crossed to the pile of dead Salik which Privates Bissel and Lee had dragged into a corner. Bracing herself for the disgusting task, she sorted out one of the tentacle arms, and started sawing through the flesh just above the macrojuncture, where the bone ended and the lithe muscles began.

Culpepper gasped, then gagged. “Sir!”

“If you are having problems with the sometimes extreme requirements of Blockade duty, Private, I’d quite understand,” Ia told him, most of her attention on her task. “But I’d prefer you to wait until we have escaped this situation before voicing them. In the meantime, please remain calm. What I am doing does not violate the protocols of Blockade Service. He’s already dead, so this isn’t torture.”

She severed the four-limbed “hand” from the rest of the dead alien, then cut through the joint of the macrojuncture, ignoring the blood seeping from the limb. From the elbow at the end of the arm-bone to about where the midforearm would be on a Human, the Salik version of an arm split into two suckered tentacles. Below the macrojuncture lay the microjunctures, where each tentacle again split in two, forming four longish, tapered digits lined with yet more suckers.

Carrying the severed pair of limbs over to one of the consoles, Ia studied the controls for a long moment, long enough to rock through another explosion. Then, with great care to match up what she saw in the timestream possibilities, she draped the tentacles just so over the pressure-sensitive controls. Prodding into the flesh with the flat of her knife, she gently squeezed air out of key suckers, working more patiently than quickly.