An Officer’s Duty (53 page)

“Anything I can do, sir?” Kipple asked her.

“Yes, actually.” Gently prying up a misplaced sucker, she tugged the tentacle into better position and carefully pressed
the segment of flesh back into place. “Okay, I’m going to need some help on this. Private Natmah, you’re already out of your suit. Get over here. Kipple, get out of your suit and join us. We’ll need at least five hands to pull this off, if I remember right.”

“Aye, sir.” Moving over to join her, Natmah wrinkled his nose at the dead pair of limbs sprawled over the otherwise smooth-surfaced console. “Uhh…what sort of help, sir?”

Ia winced as something
banged
into the sealed doors protecting them from invasion by the rest of the ship’s very much alive crew. “We’re going to save ourselves, that’s what.”

“How?”
Culpepper demanded over the whines and hisses of Kipple powering down and opening up his mechsuit. “Our ship had to
flee
to draw off that second cruiser while we were still in the act of boarding
this
one. The rest of the
shakking
frogs out there could blow us up at any moment, or burn through and
eat
us!
How
are we going to save ourselves?”

“We’re in the
engineering
section, Private,” Ia reminded him. “With the bridge destroyed and voided to space,
we
control what’s left of this ship. Natmah, pay attention. When I tell you to, on count one, I need you to press down right here, and pull up over here. Then on count two, you’ll press down on
these
two spots, and on count three, end with pulling up on these two, and stretching your pinky finger over to press down
here
.”

Kipple, free of his armor, joined her. “Lemme guess, we’re playing with the controls, sir? Gonna muck up lifesupport for ’em?”

She shook her head. “By now, lifesupport is on independent systems in the intact parts of the ship. No, we’re going to mess with the one thing we
can
affect. As for you, Kipple, on count one, I need you to pull up here, and here. On count two…”

“Wait, sir. I have a highlighter in my thigh pocket,” Kipple told her. Retreating to his armor, he opened up the compartment. Grabbing the oversized pen, he brought it back and uncapped it. “Here, mark all the spots, so we know exactly where to touch, sir.”

“Good idea, Corporal,” Ia praised, pleased by his creativeness.

Natmah grimaced. “It won’t be easy to see, given this meioa was chartreuse and the pen is yellow, but I suppose it’s better than getting the wrong spot…”

Nodding, Ia took the pen and carefully marked with tiny numbers and up or down arrows. She didn’t dare press hard, but she did ink over everything a few times to intensify the color. When she was through, she tucked the pen over her ear, under the band of her headset, and grabbed her own spots on the carefully draped limbs. “Places, everyone…”

Another explosion shuddered through the hull, making Natmah’s fingers pull up unexpectedly. He quickly released the tentacle, but the monitors up above their heads—placed so that the eyes of a Salik could comfortably read them, not the eyes of a Human—flickered and changed, a symbol appearing. Both men froze while Ia carefully pressed down and up in three spots, two of them thankfully close together. The screen returned to its normal view.

At her nod, they returned their hands to their starting positions. “Okay…on the letters countdown. Charlie…bravo…alpha…
One!
And…
two!
And…
three!
Good job!”

They lifted their hands away, Natmah surreptitiously scrubbing his fingertips against the edge of the console below the sensitive zone. Ia noticed it peripherally, but it wasn’t important. Most of her attention was on the rising blue bar on the center right screen. It gradually darkened, slowly turning purple. Orange lights started flashing, and an almost musical alarm started wailing up and down. Reaching down, she grabbed two of the tentacles and lifted up on certain spots, then pressed down on a third control. The indigo violet hue stalled and stabilized, and the Salik version of a klaxon cut off, though the orange lights still flashed, clashing with the greenish hue of the overhead lights.

“What did we just do, sir?” Kipple ventured to ask as she sighed and straightened.

“We just increased the gravity field in every other part of the ship that still
has
gravity. Specifically, to 3.1Gs Standard. I can guarantee that any unsuited Salik within range of the weaves under the deckplates is flat on their front or back at the very least, and most likely suffering from broken flipper-joints…and struggling just to breathe. The suited ones might be upright, but they’re struggling just to breathe, too.” She looked away from the monitor and smiled grimly at the others, including the unnerved Culpepper. “Salik are lightworlders,
like the Gatsugi. Their bodies are not designed to stand in anything heavier than 2.5Gs max for anything longer than a handful of seconds. The only reason their gravity weaves go higher than that is for the insystem safety fields, to help counteract abrupt acceleration forces. The moment I realized their lightworlder physiology had a weakness, I asked an engineering friend versed in Sallhash how to disable the standard Salik overrides a few years back.”

“Well, that’s just fine and dandy for
you
, sir,” Private Bissel retorted, “but the rest of us are lightworlders. You could stroll out of here at any time, but
we’re
stuck in here.”

“Yes, we are, Private, but only until we’re rescued. It’ll take a few hours, but most of the Salik will have passed out or died from oxygen deprivation by then,” Ia told him. “I need to stay in here and monitor the controls, since I’m the only one fluent enough in Sallhash to try something like this. But I need two of you to volunteer to go back into the boarding pod, and cycle through the other airlock. There’s a chance there were suited Salik in the non-gravitied parts of the ship. We cannot afford to let any survivors blow a hole in that pod. Not when it’s the only thing keeping the air in
this
section of the ship.”

“I’ll go, sir,” Kipple volunteered, heading back toward his mechsuit.

“And I’ll go,” Lee volunteered, hefting her oversized rifle.

“Good meioas. It won’t be more than a couple hours at most,” Ia promised her crew. “The fleet knows we encountered two Salik ships, and launched boarding pods. They’ll be coming in force to read the lightwaves and look for survivors. Use your suits to broadcast on lightwave bandwidths about our situation. I would try to figure out the communication system on this ship, but I suspect that the comm systems are probably booby-trapped with passcodes, to prevent their enemies from figuring out what frequencies they use.”

Nodding, both meioas headed for the side chamber where the rearmost of the two boarding pods had clamped onto the enemy ship. Ia lifted her chin at the monitors overhead.

“Natmah, keep an eye on that screen. If
anything
on it changes, tell me at once,” she ordered. “I need to check on Private Dixon again.”

Crossing to the woman on the floor, Ia knelt at her side.
When Ia touched her face, Dixon managed to pry open her eyes. “I…heard you…sir. I held on…”

“Good meioa,” Ia praised. “Keep it up, and I’ll take you back into the fold as soon as your leg’s been restored.”

A twitch of her lips might have been a smile, or might not. Dixon parted her lips, breathed in deep, then stiffened. “How…how bad, sir?”

Ia didn’t sugarcoat it. “You’ve lost everything from the knee down, right side. But I cauterized it fully. Of course, this means they’ll have to cut off the dead flesh, and then you’ll probably have to spend four or five months stumping around with your leg in a goo-cast.”

“If they…get in here…shoot me first,” Dixon muttered.

“Like hell I will, Private,” Ia countered. “I’m shooting
them
first! You’ll just have to wait for your turn, like everyone else.”

That provoked something closer to a hint of a smile than the first one. Patting her on the shoulder, Ia rose, glad the other woman would live. Helia Dixon was very, very good at repairing and working with force field technology.

Ia intended to recommend the private be placed on board one of the capital ships patrolling the Blockade after the first month of regenerative healing had begun; on a capital ship, she could stump around and still do her job. From there, things would start to fall into place for the other woman. With the right roll of the percentages, Ia would be getting a better-trained, combat-ready force field tech, one used to the needs of a much bigger vessel than a Delta-VX, and a force field tech who was comfortable serving under Ia and her sometimes unorthodox ways.

She looked at the others, Kipple sealing up the last panels of his suit, Lee waiting by the door that led to the pod, Bissel and the others.

“Remember this trick, and try to think of others for situations like this. There are
always
options. Even giving up and allowing yourself to be captured is technically an option,” she added, earning a few odd looks. “Between the moment of being captured and the moment of being eaten, there
is
the possibility that you can escape. But do try to find other ways, first. Your duty as soldiers is to complete your mission. My duty as an officer is to see the mission is completed with the greatest effect for the least loss of lives and supplies. I cannot do that without you.

“Now, let’s keep an eye on our situation, inside and out. We still have a few more hours before we’re out of this mess.”

MARCH 11, 2495 T.S.
SYSTEM’S EDGE
SS’NUK LULK 53

Part of one of the outlying star systems beyond the Blockade dropped off her internal radar. When Ia finally realized it was missing, she discovered why. Sort of. Ia already knew it was one of the secret Salik military bases, but not one that she could reveal to her superiors, so she hadn’t kept more than a peripheral awareness of it in the back of her mind. For one, there was no way
to
reveal it, without revealing her own abilities. That, she could not yet risk. For another, after the third week, the blank spot started to move away from the hidden base.

Whatever it was, it stayed away from inhabited systems, tracing a snaking course between stars at FTL speeds. She knew it was “missing” because anything to do with that part of space/time had turned a misty, impenetrable shade of grey. The problem was,
any
deviation from the expected was a danger to her mission. The base, she could still leave alone. This blank spot was the problem.

It was almost as if the Salik had developed their own version of Meyun Harper. Which was impossible, because there was no way in a slimy hell that Ia would ever fall in love with one of
them
. Yet whatever-it-was acted just like a Meyun-style void, thwarting her ability to predict its immediate surroundings, and being detectable mostly only because of the fact that it left a bubble-shaped void in the waters of Time.

Now she sat on the edge of a system the void would soon skim. It had taken her four weeks to both build up the courage to confront that void and find a spot in her patrol schedule where she and her crew weren’t actually needed. The risks of the unknown it represented had to be confronted, however. If she didn’t, many, many more voids would pop up in the near future, that much was clear. That would threaten to unravel her careful weaving of the coming wars, and
that
, she could not allow.

Taking the
Audie-Murphy
two full star systems beyond their assigned patrol zone would raise numerous eyebrows among her superiors. Doing so without reporting their new position the moment they emerged from hyperspace would raise even more. It was a double-violation of procedures that could get her into serious trouble.

Waiting in the dark, with most of the ship’s systems shut down to minimize their lightwave signature, Ia practiced her excuses over and over in her mind, fine-tuning them depending upon each version’s shift of the probabilities.

“Sir?” Corporal Kipple finally asked from his position at the engineering station. “Shouldn’t we be changing duty shifts by now, sir? It’s been two and a half hours.”

Ia shook her head. In the next few minutes…more or less…the epicenter of that blank spot would reach this point and stay here for a little while. Probably to refuel, considering they’d emerged perilously close to the thin band of ice chunks floating in the system’s Oort cloud zone. “Stay alert, and stay at your posts. Eyes to the boards, thoughts on your tasks.”

“What
are
we waiting for, sir?” Culpepper asked, his tone skeptical. He was another rising problem, but one that would be easy enough to deal with, sooner or later. If they survived whatever-it-was that was headed their way, that was. She had placed him at the ship’s systems post, since he was very good at multitasking in a crisis, but there was no way she would’ve let him get near the gunnery controls. That position was covered by Private Sikmah.

For the first time since she was a child, Ia felt the urge to chew her nails. She refrained; any show of nervousness on her part would make her bridge crew equally unsettled. Or rather, more unsettled. Culpepper’s question needed to be answered with the same unflappable calm she had displayed on all other, more temporally visible occasions.

Plus,
she decided,
it might help cover my asteroid if my crew knew my “reasons” for deviating so far from their orders.
“I’ve been having dreams, for the last few weeks. A very strong and disturbing dream. The world
I
come from, you learn to pay attention to repeating—
Holy!
”

Her shout startled the bridge crew. Zapping out of faster-
than-light in a flash that lit up their primary screens, a huge monstrosity appeared. Simultaneously, a wave of white static overwhelmed Ia’s brain. Gasping in pain, she curled over against her restraints. Her left hand was still stuck in the flight glove, and instinct kept it carefully still, but her right came up to clutch at her forehead in a futile attempt to contain the pain.