Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (15 page)

Only when the hissing stopped and the ready lights edging the boxy chamber shifted from orange to green did they move, working to unseal their helmets. The oxygen rebreather packs built into the backs of the suits would keep them alive for another half hour of use, but it was always wise to conserve such things for a further round of need.

The inner door of the airlock opened, leading into a room filled with storage lockers. Both women moved into the new chamber and waited for the doors to cycle shut before stripping and changing back into their uniforms. Ia took advantage of the towelettes provided from a dispensary on the wall, wanting to wipe off the sweat that had started to pool under her suit. Delia grabbed a few as well but sat down on one of the benches for a few moments.

“I’ve been thinking about something, sir. I’m told that the Meddlers can teleport, too,” the redhead stated without preamble. “I know that Belini visited the
Hellfire
several times that way. And that you implied in passing that your two ‘friends’ among the silvery-soap-bubble set helped you get to Dabin that way.”

Ia shook her head. “They used faster-than-light energies that time, counteracting and suppressing the Higgs field that gives particles their mass resistance, and doing so to the point where even energy could fly faster than the speed of light—traversing the
squared
speed of light takes a lot more effort, and a lot more energy. But they can instantly transplant themselves from one location to another if they have an ‘anchor’ laid at that other place. They didn’t have one for Dabin.”

“An anchor?” Helstead repeated.

Nodding, Ia wiped away the last of the itchy-sweaty feel p-suits always gave her skin and started pulling on her underwear. Most of it was still Special Forces-issued gray in hue; only her outer clothes had changed, really. “If I understand what I observed of Belini’s comings and goings in my quarters on the
Hellfire
, she laid a memory-resonance pattern in the quantum-energy states of the exact matter-based location she wanted to be able to reach when she was charged and ready to connect.”

“. . . Uh-huh.”

Ia smiled slightly at her second officer’s flat, disbelieving tone. Or rather, not-quite-comprehending tone. “Think of it as associating a specific smell with a location—no, wait, sorry; they don’t have a sense of smell. Ah . . . more like humming a specific tune in a specific location. Always that same tune for that one specific location, only the ‘tune’ involves harnessing quantum-energy states for entanglement on a nonmatter basis, and not actual sound waves.”

“A
tune
?” the redhead asked, scrubbing under her arm with one of the wipes. “Oh. Right. The vibrational string theory of quantum entanglement.” She rolled her green eyes. “Ugh, I left all that tedious FTL physics stuff behind in high school, Ia . . . Do I really have to think about it now?”

“You did ask, and yes, they literally do attune their energy bodies to a specific location. But it’s easy enough to understand without university-level quantum-physics classes. When they want to return to an ‘entangled’ place, as you so rightly put it, they shift their energy matrices to match that specific location pattern, dump massive energy into it, and phase-transit through hyperspace,” Ia stated. She shrugged into her bra. “Without more than a tiny, tiny fraction of matter to slow them down, and being roughly Human-sized in diameter, what takes a courier ship using other-than-light many seconds to travel many light-years becomes near instantaneous for them.

“What takes a pinprick hyperrelay opening two seconds to transmit one way takes them about five seconds, but otherwise it’s essentially instantaneous . . . and since the matter they do carry is not necessary for their well-being, it imparts no quantum stress and thus no nausea or accelerated aging. It’s costly and awkward in having to regurgitate all that energy for it, but their version is very handy. By contrast, what Humans and other psychic races can do is short-distance at best . . . but it’s still pretty much the exact same process. Your teleportation is simply a very localized version of their hyperspatial quantum-singularity entanglements.”

Helstead gave her CO a flat look and worked on wiping herself clean. “Tell me sir,” she stated dryly, “did you understand
anything
of what you said just now? Because if I recall correctly, you went straight from high school into the Marine Corps, and your degree is in military history, not transportational astrophysics.”

That made Ia smile. “Technically, I didn’t even finish high school. I took my equivalency exams before I turned sixteen, and that was that. Besides, I don’t have to
understand
it all in this particular lifetime, Delia. I just have to
know
. Finish getting dressed,” she added, letting her humor fade back into the seriousness of their visit. “Vice Commodore Jilsen will be needing a debriefing on what to expect in the aftermath of my visit, and then we’ll need to catch the mail courier back to Battle Platform
Stagecoach Mary
and see how far Harper’s come along with the
Damnation
’s repairs.”

The look the redhead slanted her let Ia know Delia wasn’t fooled by the euphemism.
Repairs
meant
special modifications
of a nature which only Ia herself knew, and maybe Harper, too. Huge, heavy, mysterious crates had been shipped to Battle Platform
White Mouse
on their last docking session, the crystalline contents of which Ia had altered in the privacy of the bow storage bays.

Helstead didn’t address that, though, but returned to the previous topic with a shove of the towelette through the recycler flap. “So. Being half-Feyori . . . can
you
teleport, too?”

“I probably could,” Ia admitted, voice briefly muffled by her undershirt. “
If
I had the time to learn. Which I don’t. That’s why I dragged you along; you’ve already done all the hard work for me.”

“Of course I have . . . you lazy, cheating, superior officer.” Delia worked on donning her own clothes, then tipped her head thoughtfully. “You think we could arrange for a shipment of those fart-fruits while we’re here? The little methane-grown berry things you traded an old teddy bear for, a few years back? . . .
Ksisk
, that was it. Everybody liked them.”

“It’s already on the manifest for the mail courier,” Ia reassured her.

NOVEMBER 8, 2498 T.S.
SUN-VENH SYSTEM

She couldn’t get the subject out of her mind. Helstead’s words weren’t a huge distraction, but Ia kept finding herself turning over their conversation in her thoughts. Thinking of being Feyori, and being able to suppress the Higgs field that gave matter particles their mass, allowing them to travel faster-than-light. Being psychic, and being able to teleport through brief hyperrift wormholes in an imitation of other-than-light travel. The problem of the upcoming Grey weapon and how to stop it from destroying the universe.

Her body really needed sleep. Defending this Tlassian system and its three colonies—with three separate, simultaneous battle zones, requiring numerous short, other-than-light hops—had been taxing on both her nerves and her energy reserves. But Ia’s mind would not let her sleep in anything more than snatches. Thoughts and ideas kept circling around and around, pulling in disparate images. The rift in the universe. FTL energies incompletely plugging the hole caused by entropy and OTL. The chance for that hole to come unplugged. An androgynous face masking a terrifyingly brilliant mind.

Why am I thinking of Jack?
Staring up at the plain, gray-painted ceiling of her sleeping cabin, Ia couldn’t think of a single reason why. Except one.
Okay, she, at least, would be brilliant enough to figure out
why
my brain won’t let go of Delia’s comments about psychic abilities and Feyori abilities and science and technology all accomplishing the same things . . . but I can’t ask Jack for help with anything like this because even if she
would
cooperate—which there’s no guarantee she would—
she
thinks too fast for me to follow her thought processes. Combat, yes, but thoughts . . . Not even the accelerated speed of the timeplains could help me keep up with
her
thoughts.

If only she were a more
normal
sort of genius, like Mey . . . like
Meyun
! Of course! I couldn’t see
him
involved in all of this because he
might
end up being the solution to the problem. Right . . . right.
Pushing up onto one elbow, she fumbled for the lighting controls, then squinted against the carrot-flavored, white-hued light that blinded her for a few seconds.
Lovely. Months since I last took on Feyori form, and I’m
still
occasionally tasting energies like weird flavors of food . . .

Oh, now
that’s
a thought . . . is aphasia a form of psychic ability, only it’s scrambled up instead of working straight?
She knew that historically some cases of schizophrenia—not all, but some—had proved to be psychic abilities left unrecognized, untrained, and uncontrolled.
Probably not in general,
she dismissed, resisting the urge to go looking for that information. She released the bed’s webbing and swung her legs off the mattress. For a moment, her head swam with exhaustion; Ia stayed put for a few seconds.
Focus, Ia. You have a mystery wherein your brain, filled as it is with near-infinite but purely instinct-level information, cannot pull together an answer on its own.

So it’s up to you to dump this headache in someone
else’s
lap because you need your sleep, and you don’t have any other time to spare.
Pushing to her feet, she headed for the door. Then abruptly reversed course and headed for her storage drawers.
And walking out of your cabin in nothing but your underwear would be a
bad
idea. Totally the wrong sort of presentation the captain of the ship needs to make.

Captain, not General. She didn’t feel like a four-star general, let alone a five-star. The reason for that was simple enough: She didn’t
want
the rank. So long as she had enough authority for what needed to be done, Ia would be satisfied. Part of her couldn’t quite trust how easily she had gained it, either.
Somewhere out there, an alternate universe “me” is struggling with too little power—if everything I do goes right in this universe, that means an alternate universe me is having things go wrong . . .

I do feel sorry for her universe, but I have to be selfish and cleave to what
this
one needs.

Pants donned and T-shirt tucked in, she padded out of her bedroom on bare feet. Passing through the front cabin, and into her office, Ia scrounged for spare datapads. Only finding two, she sighed and walked into the Company office. Sadneczek, Company Sergeant, wasn’t on duty . . . but Mara Sunrise was.

Ia raised her brows. “Working when you’re scheduled to be off duty?”

Mara flicked her an annoyed look. “Roommate troubles.”

“What? Oh . . . right.” She scrubbed her free hand over her face. “The whole you turning out to be a kick-asteroid warrior instead of a mousy, boring clerk-thing.” Flicking her hand, Ia shrugged. “You know you don’t
have
to be a boring little clerk on board this ship anymore. Just spread the word to be discreet about it off ship, on my orders, and the others won’t say a word.”

“Except I still need to do the work of my boring mousy clerk’s position,” Sunrise pointed out. “And that doesn’t cure the problems I’m having with Floathawg. God! Even his
name
is pretentious! Arrogant little . . .”

She could have let it go and dealt with it in two days, but Ia knew it was better to stop that line of reasoning now. After all, Mara wouldn’t be thinking it if Ia hadn’t come out of her quarters. “Mara, it’s not what you think. Harley had a very hard time making the transition from V’Dan culture to Terran when his parents moved to Earth. He’d already suffered the
jungen
-fever at an early age, and had developed all those burgundy stripes. On V’Dan . . .”

Mara nodded, following her explanation. “On V’Dan, it’s a lingering mark of great honor, I know . . .” She thought about a moment, and sighed. “I suppose on Earth, it would’ve left him feeling ostracized.”

“Exactly,” Ia said. “And when he met up with some hoverbike enthusiasts, they welcomed him in and considered his
jungen
-marks to be something fantastic, a retro rebellion. It gave him a reason to be proud of what in essence was a simple random genetic throwback to the pre-Terran days, something that was otherwise alienating him from his new homeworld. Hanging out with the hoverbike crowd gave him a sense of
Terran
identity in the face of his blatant, literally in-his-face V’Dan lineage.”

“So
that’s
why he changed his name? That part’s not in the DoI files,” Mara muttered. “They just list him as being a hoverbike enthusiast.”

“Well, if you hadn’t noticed, he
does
love hoverbikes,” Ia pointed out dryly. She didn’t mind that Mara had snuck a look at her teammate’s files. The other woman had the clearance for it and the access as one of the Company clerks. “As for getting along with him . . . I think if you marched in there and told him
why
you had to change your name, your identity, and even your personality, I think he’d understand
you
a lot better.”

The sergeant-turned-private slanted her a skeptical look. “General, sir, I am not supposed to tell anyone what happened, as part of the conditions of my parole from my political-based imprisonment.”

Ia settled her hip onto the edge of Mara’s workstation desk and clasped the two scrounged datapads in her lap. “First of all, you’re not supposed to tell anyone, period, unless it becomes a need-to-know basis. Second, the only personnel with the right to need-to-know are those with extremely high Clearance ratings. Thirdly, every single person on board this ship
has
that level of Clearance. And fourth of all, you have not only a massive, military-acknowledged precog telling you it’s okay to tell Harley Floathawg the truth behind your presence here, you have the General of the Alliance Armies telling you
it’s okay
.