An Officer’s Duty (7 page)

“We’ll back it up, if anyone calls home and asks,” Fyfer dismissed, flicking his hand.

Thorne nodded in agreement and pushed to his feet, stretching. Ia, still seated on the ground, started gathering up the tainted and clear scraps of crysium, stuffing them into her pockets.

Fyfer stood and stretched as well. He scratched his stomach, then shrugged and tipped his head. “Watching you mold that stuff while you were in your little trance reminds me of an old saying…”

“Oh? Which one?” Ia asked, looking up at him. The slightly bloodied, crystalline knife they had used finished dulling and turning into an oblong, safe-to-handle blob in her fingers.

“That any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. I know you said—or rather, implied—that it’s some sort of special psychic gift,” he told her, holding up his hands. “And that we’re not supposed to ask questions or speculate or whatever, but…it looked more like magic than science, just now.”

“Well, maybe I could’ve made a great stage magician,” Ia quipped, smiling. “You never know, we could have some Mankiller blood in our family tree. Speaking of magic, and thus vanishing acts, I need to make sure I contact Rabbit today. You’ll need a safe place on Sanctuary to store all my ‘blood beads,’ for lack of a better term. I figure the best place for that is deep in the caverns, down where the Church won’t find them.”

Fyfer lifted his chin at her. “When you do, tell her I said hi, and that I’ll call her soon, alright? Unlike
some
people who never use their wrist units to
call
anyone…or rather, didn’t bother to ask for her number.”

“I did ask, but I rarely call her because she rarely
wears
her wrist unit,” Thorne retorted. “Which you’d know if you ever bothered to talk
with
her, instead of just
at
her.”

Ia rolled her eyes. “Stop it. Both of you. She likes you
both
. She
will
like you both. This is not a competition for her affections, nor can it ever be. The three of you working together as one unit is a force not even Time can stop, and I need you to
be
that united force.”

“Well…you could’ve at least picked out another woman for one of us!” Thorne protested.

“The only other women out there are ones who would resent
the demands of your tasks. Rabbit believes as much as both of you do. Be grateful that you
will
be able to get along so well, and that you’ll all have each other for company. Some people aren’t that lucky.”

Fyfer smirked. “Careful, Sister, you sounded almost jealous, there. Haven’t you picked out someone for yourself, yet? You’ve got an infinite number of possibilities to choose from, after all.”

Ia merely quirked a brow at him. “
When
, exactly, would I have time for a relationship?”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot. The Prophet of a Thousand Years is a slagging
martyr
. Maybe they should’ve nicknamed you the Virgin Mary, instead of Bloo—
OW!
” Wincing, Fyfer flinched back from a second backhanded blow. He rubbed his bruised bicep and glared at his stepbrother.

Thorne lifted his arm in warning of a third attack, his stare now focused on the youngest of the siblings. “Get in the car. And
think
before you open your mouth again!”

“It’s alright, Thorne,” Ia muttered, pushing to her feet. “He’s not saying anything I haven’t thought, myself. I
am
female, Little Brother,” she added, fixing Fyfer with a sardonic look. “I do have urges and needs. I just don’t have the time to spare. Or the energy. I do not, however, look upon it as an act of
martyrdom
. All I’m doing is giving up sex with someone else, not to mention avoiding the risk of that someone being dragged onto the timeplains with me during intimate contact. That’s hardly a life-altering loss, which is what martyrdom requires.”

“Says someone who’s clearly never
had
—I’m going, I’m going!” Fyfer yelped and skipped back as his older brother swung at him again. Not with his full strength, of course; Thorne was readily capable of breaking bones without breaking a sweat. He was also normally quite gentle. Just the swipe of his hand through the air between them was enough warning to make the younger man retreat.

“Leave him alone, Thorne,” Ia muttered, dusting herself off. “In the first place, he’s upset that I’m making him go into law school instead of continuing as an actor. In the second, he’s unhappy that I’m encouraging you to flirt with Rabbit. Just like
you’re
upset that I’m letting him flirt with her, too.” Walking with him toward the ground car, she raised her voice enough so that Fyfer would hear as well. “Just…both of you, would
you
try
to keep your heads out of your pants for at least a few more years? Please?

“See?” she added, pressing the latch button and waiting for the door to swing down out of the way. “I
do
remember common courtesies. It’s just that usually they have a rank attached to them. The only problem is, you don’t have any rank.”

Thorne snorted. “Maybe you should
give
me a rank, given how I’m supposed to be marshalling all these impending resources for your little colonial survival scenario.”

“Dibs on General!” Fyfer called out, ducking into the backseat before either of them could protest.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Thorne snorted, climbing in across from Ia. “One look at your scrawny frame, and they’ll flock to
me
for war field leadership.”

“Ha! They’d be flocking to you to
hide
behind,” Fyfer shot back.

“Oh, please,” Ia groused. “
I’m
the one in the military, remember?
I
get to be the general in this family. Just…not yet. Besides, you’ll need a Security Chief long before you’ll need a General of the Armed Forces, and that spot is already reserved for someone else. Now, take us back home, Thorne. Please,” she remembered to add.

He looked at her, not yet activating the generator. “Didn’t you want to go get a larger chunk of crysium to experiment with, first?”

She didn’t quite slap her forehead, but mostly because she was fumbling with releasing the restraints instead of buckling them in place. “Right! Right…I’ll be right back.”

“And shape it so it doesn’t
look
like a chunk of crysium?” he called out after her, his voice following her into the crystal patch. “Since it’s supposed to be a big
secret
, and all!”

Ia flicked her hand over her shoulder, silently acknowledging and dismissing the rather obvious advice.

Unlike Thorne, who constantly wore his wrist unit, but disliked using it out of some silly fear of accidentally aiming the video pickups into his nostrils, Rabbit didn’t like wearing hers very often. Rabbit believed that Church-planted members of the government were attempting to infiltrate the emergency services
systems, which used a wrist unit’s transponder to track the movements of each citizen. It was just one more step, she felt, that the Church of the One True God was taking on a path toward a coup of the colonyworld’s government, and a totalitarian level of control over its colonists.

Ia had never disabused her friend of that seemingly wild idea. She knew better. So she knew that Rabbit didn’t always wear her wrist unit. Thorne might not
like
using his to talk with people, but he did wear it every day. Then again, he had classes to attend, public transport to catch, and myriad responsibilities requiring identification and a link to his bank account. Rabbit was independently wealthy, thanks to a little help from Ia and a sizeable winning lottery ticket, and preferred walking wherever possible. Then again, her lighter mass made it easier for her to walk everywhere.

So Ia knew better than to call Rabbit on her wrist unit. Instead, Ia dipped into the timestreams once she was done creating a small pile of marble-sized beads back home. Ia carefully verified that her friend hadn’t changed her mind and gone spelunking in the many ancient lava caves and tunnels under the plateau on which the capital city, Our Blessed Mother, had been built, and headed into the heart of the city.

Rabbit’s gang wasn’t hanging out at the old haunts anymore. Ia didn’t bother to probe the past as to why. It could have been an economic downturn; it could have been pressure from the Church which closed the previous business, or whatever reason, but it didn’t really matter. Rabbit and company had moved their hang-out location from a restaurant serving spicy V’Dan-style cuisine to a Terran Italian restaurant named “Frrrangelico’s”…with a triple
R
for a reason.

Frrrangelico, the owner, was a Solarican: a furred, bipedal, tail-bearing, claw-fingered, felinoid sentient race. It was rumored they had colonies scattered all across the Milky Way, not just in the unfashionable sub-arm containing the region colloquially referred to as the “known galaxy.” It was known, however, that their home system was located as far above the flat plane of the galaxy as Earth was located out from its core; the only reason why they had managed to colonize other worlds was because of a peculiarity of space, or rather, hyperspace, near their home system.

As a race, they were almost as careful as the spider-like K’katta in getting along with others. Most people assumed it was because the Solaricans were so powerful, they could afford to be polite. Ia knew it was simply a matter of logistics. The Solarican Empire was so widely spread, each pocket of settlement had to be as autonomous as possible when it came to self-defense; they simply couldn’t afford the large fleet everyone assumed they surely must have, not without stripping vital protections from the other pockets of settlements around the galaxy.

The spider-like K’katta, with their dual skeletal systems, bones on the inside, and chiton on the outside, had evolved in 2.3Gs Standard. The four-armed Gatsugi, amphibious Choya, and the equally amphibious but blockaded and interdicted Salik couldn’t tolerate more than twice the Standard measurement for habitable-world gravity; their physiology simply wasn’t capable of withstanding that much compression.

Solaricans had evolved in gravity just a little above 1G Standard; like Humans, they could tolerate three times as much gravity
if
they were bred for it, which always took a few generations per half-G. In fact, most of their colonyworlds in the known pocket of the galaxy were above the dividing line of 1.5Gs Standard, classifying them officially as heavyworlders in the Alliance lexicon, since that was the majority of their local population. So while it wasn’t common for an alien to live on Sanctuary, with its gravity of 3.21Gs, it wasn’t unheard of, either.

Not that the non-Human residents would be here for much longer, Ia knew. It was a fact not only underscored by her forays into the timestreams, but by the presence of a middle-aged diner attempting to lodge a protest in the front lobby as Ia entered. Frrrangelico, his grey and cream ears flattened so low that the earrings piercing the back edge couldn’t be seen, was attempting to keep his teeth from showing as he patiently dealt with the vocal woman.

“—if I’d choked on it?” the middle-aged redhead was grousing, flicking her hand through the air. “Not only is it unhygienic, I could’ve died!”

“Meioa…perrrhaps in your agitation, you are exaggerrrating?” the Solarican male asked patiently.

“Well, maybe I’m allergic!” she snapped. “It
was
a cat hair!
I demand a refund—and you can bet I’ll get this place shut down for health code violations, too!”

Rolling her eyes, Ia stepped in. Literally, between the two. That forced the woman to look up, since her eyes were at the level of Ia’s brown-covered breasts, and that meant she had to take a step back to save herself from neck-strain.

“Meioa,” Ia stated calmly, “the odds of you experiencing an allergic reaction of
any
sort are as high as a meteorite successfully striking Our Blessed Mother Cathedral.
Every
Human on this world, native or traveler, has been inoculated with the
jungen
virus. As for the health code, it’s clearly posted outside this restaurant that there are Solaricans on staff…and I can see a row of certificates on the wall in here guaranteeing they passed inspection earlier this year, and have passed them every year.”

Ia smiled, a polite curve of her mouth, and waited.

With a twist of her mouth that wasn’t anything near polite, the red-haired woman turned and headed for the door. She muttered an insult as she left, though, glancing briefly, darkly at Ia before shoving open the door. “
Animal
lover…”

While there had been quite a lot of religious turmoil among each of the sentient races after finally contacting and confirming the existence of other extrastellar intelligences, such turmoil had died down within a century or so. Particularly after each religious faction had compared notes across species, which was what the Unigalactan movement had been all about. God, it was finally—if grudgingly—admitted by most faiths, had created a wide variety of sentient races, beings who were smart enough to ask the ultimate question of
why
, smart enough to codify similar actions as immoral, unethical, or unjust, and smart enough to be able to compare and find more similarities than differences across the xenodivide.