Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (28 page)

The increased speed was necessary; when the blossom missiles hit, they impacted zones that had lost shielding. Ten lodged in the panels next to each segment that served as living quarters, just to either side. Two more smacked into the central sphere that housed the vacuum-sealed hyperrelay units, which
permitted the routing and rerouting of messages from one end of known space to the other.

For several seconds they did not detonate, though their engines did pulse, attempting to drive them deeper into each section of the overall structure. When they did, they slammed scores of smaller, needle-sharp bombs outward, blossoming like fireworks. Those bombs in turn stayed dormant for a few more seconds, giving the ones driven into open areas more time to travel outward.
Then
they detonated.

This time, the detonations were explosions, ripping huge holes in the station. The force hurled debris in all directions, making the space near the communications array dangerous to transit. With the
Hellfire
already headed outbound, the only things they had to dodge were a few still-functioning lasers. Even those ended a few seconds later, as the damage cracked the station into pieces.

Once the enemy fire stopped, Ia slowed the ship again, intending to guide it around and into reverse as she had before. As she did so, she checked the timestreams. The answer she sought came within a handful of seconds, and it was a satisfactory one.
Minimal damage to the exact units we’ll need. I know
the information we want is buried in those particular comm-traffic files, though I don’t know exactly what we’re supposed to be looking for…mainly because the subject matter recursively hides itself from me.

The best analogy she had was being sent into a grocery store with a list of spices. Those were usually kept with the baking goods, but that entire aisle could be located anywhere in the store. Once the right aisle was located, then the right shelves had to be found, and finally the right spice jars. Ia knew where the store was located—this station—and an idea of which aisle to check. The rest of it, she didn’t have time to search for herself.

That was what the others were here for.

“Private York, please inform Lieutenant Rico to get his salvage teams ready. We’ll be taking potshots at enemy weaponry for the next twenty minutes, disabling everything they can still throw at us. Those teams need to launch as soon as I give the all clear. We do not want to be here an hour from now.”

“Aye, sir.”

And at that point, I can rest,
she thought.
Once we’re under
way and I’ve plotted our next course, O’Keefe can have the helm back, and I can go sleep for nine hours straight.

Opening the intercom, Ia addressed her crew.
“Captain Ia to the crew. Good job, everyone. Third watch will be free to stand down again in twenty minutes. Maneuvers should be light between now and then. Exercise caution in moving about the ship for the next hour and a half. Ia out.”

On the one hand, energy from the food she had eaten was now keeping her awake. On the other hand, the post-battle adrenaline slump threatened to steal that energy away. Now that they were aimed back at the crumpled bits of station, she had a few seconds free. Slipping her fingers under the little door, Ia jolted herself with a little bit of electricity.

“A good day’s fight, meioas,” she murmured, praising her sparse bridge crew. “Let’s keep it up.”

FEBRUARY 5, 2496 T.S.

SIC TRANSIT

The boot that hit her did not belong to her brother. It did, however, break Ia out of her timeplains trance. Standing in her socks on the deck of the stern cargo hold, she blinked at the mangled glob of crystal in her hands. Being broken out of molding trance always did that. She could fix it, but she had left orders with Harper on when to interrupt her, and why.

“Fire, famine, flood, or finally cracked the code?” she asked, turning toward the door. Harper stood there, but so did Helstead, her shorter frame peering around his taller one.

“Finally cracked the code…we think,” Harper said. The other lieutenant commander tried to squeeze past him. He checked her with his elbow, rolling his eyes. “Helstead! You’re not allowed in this hold.”

“How can I be an effective spymaster if I’m not allowed to spy on her?” Helstead shot back, trying to dodge the other way. He checked her by spreading his legs—and she darted under them, only to be grabbed by the back of her shirt.

“Sorry, Captain,” he apologized. “Want me to throw her out?”

“
I
want to know what’s so…Wait a second,” Helstead said, green gaze darting around the hold. “There were at least
forty of those things loaded into this cargo hold. I only see thirty-six.”

Back on her homeworld, Ia had ordered the sprays lashed to the outer walls, with large lockboxes stacked and secured down the center. The extra flights had added a day to their itinerary, but the successful early integration of the hyperwarp system had given them an extra day. Some of those lockboxes now contained crysium wreaths, shaped in her spare time since leaving Sanctuary.

Helstead narrowed her eyes, staring at the lump of crystal in Ia’s hands. “Is that…?”

Harper hauled back on her collar, interrupting her question. “You are in a restricted area, Lieutenant Commander. Only myself and Captain Ia have access to this part of the ship.”

Twisting, Helstead broke his grip with a sweep of her arm. She didn’t grab him back, just planted her hands on her hips. “And maybe I should report
you
for keeping secrets from the Command Staff! I did some research on this crysium stuff when it was brought on board. It’s the hardest substance known to sentientkind. So how the hell did the Captain reshape it? She’s quite clearly holding a re-formed chunk of it in her hands.”

“
I
don’t like the implications that you’re a
spy
,” Harper countered, hands going to his own hips. “Your loyalty is up through the chain of command, to me, to Captain Ia,
then
to the Command Staff.”

“I’d believe you a lot more,” Helstead snorted, “if every time you looked at her, you
didn’t
look like a lovesick turtle. You don’t hide it nearly well enough, soldier.”

He flushed at that. Sighing, Ia interrupted the pair. “
Enough
, both of you, or I’ll make you clean the lifesupport filters while all the off-duty privates watch. Helstead’s not the spy on this ship. I know exactly who they are, and she’s not one of them.”

That got Helstead’s attention, swinging the shorter woman around. Ia lifted the glob in her hand.

“As for what I’m doing with it, I’m borrowing technology from the future to alter the crystals. That technology is
not
the property of the Terran United Planets…and I cannot in good conscience explain that tech
or
share it with anyone else. That’s why this cargo bay is off-limits.”

“You’re using tech you stole from the future, from another government, to reshape the hardest known substance, and you’re
not gonna share it with your own superiors?” Helstead asked dubiously. “Imagine the weapons you could make—imagine the
armor
! I read an article stating how this stuff just absorbs laserfire, no matter how large the weapon.”

“I will not compromise the secrets of the government which developed this tech,” Ia stated bluntly. “Just as I will not compromise the secrets of the government that will eventually develop the hyperwarp drive. One is Terran; the other is not. Both have the right to keep their temporal secrets. I will
use
this technology, yes, but only because I have no other way to get the job done on time and done right. I will therefore not share those secrets…and the fewer who know those secrets, the easier it is to
keep
them a secret. Is that clear, soldier?”

That deflated the shorter woman. Brow furrowed in a sullen look, Helstead muttered, “Crystal clear, sir.”

Ia pointed at her. “My silence applies to your own escapades as well, Delia. Past as well as present and future. Be glad I have both discretion and integrity. Now, give me a few minutes in private to finish what I was doing, then I’ll come join you and Rico in the briefing room. Harper, if I’m not out of here in ten, throw my other boot at me.”

“Aye, sir,” he agreed. A tip of his head silently ordered Helstead to retreat with him. Grateful, Ia watched them go.

Just before the door slid shut behind them, she heard Helstead ask, “Why do you have to throw her boot at her…?”

Ia knew the answer, the same as Harper. Back in their Academy days, sharing quarters in the cadet dormitories, she had taught him to wake her by throwing something at her rather than physically touching her. These days, her sleep was relatively dreamless; minor nightmares still plagued her, but she was on track to fix the source of those nightmares. Her precognitive gift didn’t torment her as much as it used to, which meant the risk of triggering it when someone else touched her in her sleep had lessened. But lessened risk was not the same as none.

Which means I go through life untouched, save for rare moments when it’s absolutely necessary.

Turning back to the glob in her hand, Ia flipped her mind in, down, and out, onto the timeplains. She resisted the urge to sink fully into the rhythm of swimming, shaping, and molding blood-infused beads with chunks of crystal. Her blood. Whatever quality of Feyori Meddling lay in her genetics, it seemed
to affect the crysium—which itself was another Feyori by-product. The two combined, crystalline and crimson, made the strange, peach-hued stuff capable of hooking a nonpsychic mind into the timestreams.

She only had enough time to create a few more. There would be other stolen hours for this task, creating precognitive crystalline circlets meant to plug her fellow Sanctuarians into glimpses of their own pasts, their own futures, to guide them in the direction she needed them to go. Before the ten minutes were up, the latest wreath was locked in a storage box and her boots were back on her feet. Ia stepped through the cargo-bay door, palm-locking it behind her. Harper and Helstead waited nearby; once again, Helstead was playing with her stiletto-pins.

“Can I at least have a closer look?” she asked Ia, moving to join her CO in heading toward the aft shuttle-bay doors.

“No. Looking leads to touching, and touching leads to interfering. Most of what I’m making won’t even be used by the Terrans,” Ia told her. “I’d rather it wasn’t damaged in the interim.”

Helstead frowned at that. “Wait, if it was impervious before you manipulated it, but now it can be damaged simply by handling it…that means it won’t actually retain its impervious qualities after it’s been reshaped. Why would that stuff be of any use after that point?”

Ia ignored the question. She had meant the timelines, not the wreaths themselves, but her 3rd Platoon leader didn’t need to know that. Instead, she glanced over her shoulder at their chief engineer, addressing him instead. “Harper, I know you’ve been working on the FTL panels you pulled off the hull. How many have your repair teams salvaged?”

“All but two,” he told her. Touching the controls for the sector seal, he joined them in transiting the airlock seals. “I’ve ordered those two broken down for parts. We have plenty of spares on board, but I’m not going to hold my breath on every battle being that smooth.”

“Two out of, what? Twenty-tree panels? That’s not a bad attrition rate,” Ia allowed, yawning slightly to pop her ears as the air pressure shifted slightly. The second door swung open, revealing Spyder, Santori, and two long lines of shorts-and-T-shirt-clad bodies, all jogging in place.

“Make room, ya bloody slackers!” Spyder ordered, jogging himself as he turned to face the others. “Officers comin’ out!”

The two lines of men and women parted, jogging up against the wall as Ia, Harper, and Helstead emerged single file from the airlock.

“Arright! C Squad, cycle through! Two more minutes of jogging, then we go back to practicing shipboard parkour!” Spyder ordered. The first five pairs of Humans jogged into the airlock. Someone thumbed the controls, swinging the door shut.

“I’ll give him this,” Helstead observed, glancing back at the airlock as the three officers turned a corner. “He’s certainly enthusiastic about PT. The man has almost as much energy as
me
in the mornings.”

“That’s why I paired him with you on that task. Oh, speaking of exercise, Harper,” Ia added, turning slightly to address her first officer as they walked. “I’d like to gradually increase the ship’s gravity by .05Gs over the next week. Then hold it steady until the end of the month, and increase it again by .05 over the first week of March. Hold steady until April, and do it again, until this ship is running at 1.35Gs Standard, then hold it for three months.”

“You got it,” Harper agreed.

Helstead eyed her. “Trying to turn all these lightworlders into heavyworlders, Captain?”

“The increase in strength will be a bonus in hand-to-hand combat, about half a year from now,” Ia admitted. “The faster reflexes will take a while to train, but will be worth it in about three years. But long before then, I want us up a lot higher, at the very least to 1.8Gs.”

“My homeworld isn’t much higher than that,” Harper said. Then blinked and looked at her, brown eyes wide. “We’re going there, aren’t we? I remember—”

Ia raised her hand, cutting him off. Through an accident, he had been exposed to a tumult of unchecked timestreams back at the end of their Academy days. She didn’t need the rest of the crew knowing that, though. “Some visions will come true, others will not. I’ll let you know what to prepare for when you’ll need to know it, I promise.”

He nodded. “Alright, then. Will you need me for the databank debriefing? If not, I’ll get back to that gun project.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Helstead might be useful, though.”

That made the other woman’s eyes roll. Tucking her bladed hairpins back into her braid, she said, “Oh, gee. I feel so special.”

“That depends on whether or not you can focus,” Ia said. She nodded farewell to Harper, who continued aft-ward while they took a side hall that would lead them to the track lifts for the fore section.