Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (16 page)

“I also say that, as your roommate is making you so uncomfortable in your own quarters that you’d rather deal with paperwork in your off-hours than deal with him, he definitely needs to know.”

“That’s fine for now, but your permission will last only so long as the war lasts, sir,” Mara pointed out. “What happens after it’s all over? After we’ve beat the Salik, and the Greys, and you get your high authorities yanked? That is, assuming they do get yanked. I think Myang’s aiming you at
her
seat, when she’s ready to retire.”

Sighing, Ia shrugged. “Then start pulling up the requisite paperwork for a Full and Unconditional Pardon. What you uncovered
needed
to be uncovered, even if you went about it in a rather politically
inconvenient
and technically semi-unlawful way. But you have earned my trust since joining my Company. And that means you’ve earned the trust of the Admiral-General,” she added, pausing for a second to check the timestreams. “Given you committed your so-called crimes while a soldier, it is
my
prerogative within the scope of my current powers to issue a pardon. I think I can sweet-talk Myang into signing off on it as well, making it permanent. Provided you don’t go blabbing it all over the place.”

Mara relaxed into her seat, slumping out of her stiff-backed mousy-clerk posture. “. . . That would get a huge pressure off of me, if I could indeed be myself again.”

“No time like the present . . . though technically this conversation was actually going to come up in a few more days. Except I couldn’t sleep. Are there any spare datapads in here, or do I have to go down to the storage holds on Deck 17?” she asked, changing the subject.

“Sure, I’ll get you some. How many do you need?” Sunrise asked her. She nodded at the pair in Ia’s hands even as she rose from her seat. “Beyond the two you already have, I mean?”

“Oh, six or seven. I’m going to load them up with some information and dump it all in Harper’s lap,” she explained lightly, pausing for a half-stifled yawn. “I can’t sleep because my brain is refusing to see the solution to a problem that just might have an engineering answer . . . so I might as well make
him
suffer sleeplessness instead.”

Mara chuckled. “Make sure you make it up to him, sir.”

“I plan on it. When we’re in transit, and he’s not cursing at me for all the repairs he has to oversee.” She rose as well, moving to accept the tablets the other woman pulled from the storage cabinet.

Turning to hand her the first three, Mara glanced down, then did a double take. “Sir . . . aren’t you supposed to be wearing ship boots? Or at least fitted slippers with magplates in the soles, in case of sudden gravity loss?”

“I’m a telekinetic, and don’t need artificial gravity or boots that can snap to a metal surface if the plates go out, remember?” Ia countered dryly. “Besides, we’re docked at what passes for a Tlassian repair facility, with no enemy incursions planned for the rest of the time we’re scheduled to be here.”

“Oh, sure, cloud the issue with facts,” Mara retorted. She handed over another four tablets, then closed the cupboard. “That’s all you’ll get, sir, without filling out Form 14357-98B-OSX-4 for more. And that’s only because I know where you sleep at night. If you break them, it’s coming out of your pay.”

Ia smiled slightly at the teasing. “Go pull up the paperwork on your pardon and prep it for Grizzle to work on when he comes on duty next watch. Then get back to your quarters, wake up your teammate, and give
him
a sleepless night—that’s one of my few perks, as the CO; I get to make other people suffer, too, if I can’t get any sleep.”

“Thank you so much for sharing, sir,” Mara quipped, returning to her desk. She smiled, though.

Pads in hand, Ia left the front office and slowly made her way toward the aft engineering section. She had to pause every few dozen meters to consider what to cull from the timestreams and gently input them electrokinetically into the pads—the pausing was to make sure she didn’t bump into anything while searching far-out possibilities. Putting together the Feyori-enhancing guns had taught her several things about what her chief engineer wanted to glean from alternate timestreams, at least.

By the time she reached Engineering, she was pretty sure she had everything, with one datapad to spare. She barely had to look up to see where she was going; everyone on duty in the compartment’s upper floor pointed at Harper’s office the moment they saw her. With a couple absentminded waves, Ia headed that way.

The door slid open as she approached, disgorging her first officer, who almost ran into her. Rearing back, Harper blinked at her. “. . . Ia? Didn’t you say you were going off to sleep?”

“Tell that to my brain. Address the troops and handle the problem that just cropped up,” she directed him, sidestepping so he could get past her and she could get into his office, “then come back in here when you’re done. I have another ‘special’ project I need to drop in your lap, only with less information on the end product than before.”

“Okay . . . I’ll be back within half an hour or so,” he promised. Then did a double take, staring at the deck. “Your feet are bare. This is the
engineering
section. Your feet are
not
supposed to be bare, General.”

“The probability of my feet being damaged within the next five days is smaller than the chance of someone on board this ship spontaneously combusting,” Ia dismissed, her attention more on the pads in her hands as she added and adjusted more information to them. “And since no one is scheduled to do that during the entire length this crew will be aboard, it doesn’t matter.”

Harper sighed heavily, and asked, “Fine. Sir. Can you at least go sit in the safety of my office? And perhaps give me a clue about what you need me to do?”

“I need you to stitch up a hole in the universe, one which has not yet happened, but will . . . and we may have to use the same special crystals as before.
If
my instincts are right. I already have a solution that will work . . . but I’m getting the feeling there is a better solution out there. One I might be able to piggyback off the Grey solution you’ve been prepping the ship for.” She looked up at him, her gaze frank and direct. “But
I’m
not a genius engineer, and I haven’t more than the faintest clue of where we could possibly begin with this particular task, other than that it’ll involve psychics, Feyori abilities, faster-than-light field projections, and some other odds and ends,” she muttered, gesturing vaguely with the datapads in her hands. “And my brain won’t stop
circling
this problem even though I need to sleep while I can, when I can.

“On the upside, you’ll have over a year before it’s absolutely necessary. On the downside . . . we’ll only have
one
shot at getting it right,” she warned him. “For that matter, I don’t even know if this is something that’s been considered yet in any of the
other
universes.”

Harper pointed a finger in warning at her. “Except you’ve just thought of something, which means it now
does
exist somewhere out there. That means we
can
test it in alternate-universe possibilities, which means you need to fill your time while you’re waiting in tracking down those alternate realities, and filling in what you can on those pads in your hands,” he said, backing up along the walkway overlooking the banks of hydrogenerators that fed the interior ship systems, excluding the various laser cannons. “I’ll be back as soon as I’ve overseen the last of the mods to the Tlassian scanner systems we’re installing—you’re damned lucky we
can
retrofit Tlassian gear into Terran sockets. And no, that is
not
a cross-species innuendo, no matter how much the Tlassian supplier xeno-smirked about it.”

Ia let the corner of her mouth curl up. “That reminds me of a time when I was in the Navy, and one of my crew members got asked out for a drink by a Tlassian. He—the saurian—didn’t realize the Human he was asking out was a fellow male. But I’ll be just as happy if you turn this one down, thank you. I’ll keep your chair warm for you.”

“Keep my
ship
unharmed, and I’ll be a lot happier!” he called over his shoulder, moving off toward the stairs.

Ia waved him off, retreating into his front office.
He’s right about the theory of it . . . Now that I’ve thought of it, and have vague ideas of what to look for, I can start testing the various infinite possibilities for more solid probabilities on how to restitch the universe back together,
she thought, thumbing through some of the information she had gleaned from the timestreams.
One which would be a lot safer than just plug it up awkwardly with a miniature Big Bang . . .

—

Three hours later, Ia dragged herself back to her quarters. She was exhausted from cushioning Harper while he tried to read the minds of similar-but-not-himself engineers in alternate realities. But she felt satisfied that her chief engineer was going to come up with some sort of solution to the problem that had been plaguing her brain all night. She almost detoured toward the bridge galley for a snack, needing some way to make up for the energy lost from staying awake for so long, but exhaustion warred with the distaste of having to fix her own food.

As it was, at first she missed seeing the parfait bowl clipped to her office desk by its broad, flat base. Her attention was on the door to her private quarters, and the hope of at least two or three hours of sleep. The tangy-sweet scent of
ksisk
fruit caught her attention, though, making her wonder for a moment what it meant.

No source of energy in either her office or her sitting room “tasted” like the fart-fruit berry to her Feyori-altered senses, so it had to be a real scent . . . and that was when she saw the bowl. The gelatin sat in the clear-plexi goblet, piled in layers of purple and red, a spoon clipped to its side, ready to eat. Simple, yet satisfying. It drew her to her desk instead of her much-needed bed.

There was even a little card caught under the goblet’s base. Pulling it out, Ia unfolded the paper. Graceful but unfamiliar handwriting—probably Private Garcia’s—formed a simple, sweet message.

You’re on the right track, General. Keep up the good work!

Smiling wistfully, she unclipped the spoon and dug in.
I guess Mara and I aren’t the only ones working off-shift tonight. I should look up where she is and go thank her for the snack, but . . . eh, I’m too tired. And dammit, I
deserve
a little pampering,
she decided, sucking the wobbly stuff off of her spoon. Two mouthfuls later, she dug down past the purple layer to the reddish-hued one and brought it to her mouth.
I
deserve
gelatin parfait gifts . . . ooh, apple-flavored? That’s what the red layer is? That goes
really
well with the
ksisk
 . . .

Abandoning half-formed plans to track down the junior galley crew member and thank her, Ia concentrated on this unexpected but most welcome snack. It wasn’t Leave on an M-class planet, and it did deprive her of ten extra minutes of badly needed sleep, but it was ten minutes all to herself, with no thoughts on her mind but the wonderful mingling of tart and sweet in a delicate, jelly-like texture. She’d just have to remember to thank Garcia at some point for the gift.

Yes, we’re getting close to the point in the chronology where the Salik issue is dealt with . . . but we’re not quite there, yet.

Actually, it’s funny. I didn’t even think much about this at the time, other than that I had to keep him alive, but there was one man I had to ignore and treat rather normally during Basic so that I wouldn’t inadvertently influence him out of the life-path he needed to take. “Happy” Harkins. I had to keep him alive, particularly in that very first battle in Ferrar’s Fighters, so I could one day ask him a favor regarding his eventual civilian job, which was to help guard and guide the Terran head of the Alliance Center for Disease Control.

Lieutenant Commander Helstead once mentioned an old song about hurricanes being started by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings. I cannot even count just how many butterflies I have nudged into flight . . . but I do remember each and every one. Thankfully, most of them ended in helpful hurricanes. Unfortunately . . . they were still hurricanes in the end, not exactly under my control . . . and sometimes
not
strong enough to do the deed I needed to have done for me. Sometimes I had to step in directly.

~Ia

JANUARY 21, 2499 T.S.
SPACE STATION
ACDC HQ
SUGAI SYSTEM

“So. General Ia. General of the Alliance Armies, no less.” Alvin Gomez, Director of the Terran branch of the Alliance Center for Disease Control, looked up through the transparent workstation screen between them. A touch of his desk controls lowered the monitor to half height. “Every time this office gets a visit from someone in the military, it means
someone
has been playing with molecules they shouldn’t.”

“They’re not
my
molecules, meioa-o,” Ia replied, keeping her tone light. Somewhere in the next few minutes, she would hit a small but dense gray patch. She didn’t know what the problem would be, beyond that she would have to figure out how to get through to this man that he needed to do what
she
said was necessary, not what
he
thought was necessary. Out loud, she merely said, “Nor will it be anything the Terrans have touched.”

“So, then, you claim no knowledge of, oh, releasing
Dabinian passion-moss spores
on every inhabited colonyworld out there?” he asked her, arching one dark brow in blatant skepticism. “Domeworlds as well as M-class planets?”

“The ACDC will receive the information and the counteragents it needs to eradicate the passion-moss problem on non-Dabinian worlds
after
the Salik have been dealt with, Director,” Ia countered calmly. “I’m here to discuss a completely different threat. Now, given that my ship leaves in less than two hours, I’d like to make this meeting as brief and to the point as possible. So if we could move past the political posturing and the size-comparing of our respective immune systems, I’d deeply appreciate it.”

As she’d calculated, her dry-voiced quip made him smile wryly. “The ‘size-comparing of our respective immune systems.’ That’s funny. I’ll have to remember that one. Okay, then, what disaster have you got for me today, General?” he asked, gesturing her toward the seat across from his. “I don’t deal with Fire or Flood, so which is it, Famine or Pestilence? You may be touted as someone who can foresee the future, but if you’re not going to give us a cure for the xenospecies invasions you’ve caused, then
I
have no clue why you’re here.”

“I am here because you and I are going to redefine ‘Quarantine Extreme’ today, Director Gomez,” Ia stated. She offered the puzzled Director a small box before seating herself in one of the chairs across from his. “You will find a set of total self-containment protocols and procedures on those datachips, with each chip coded and labeled for every known race . . . save only the Feyori. Practicing these scenarios is not an option. It is a wartime mandate. Moreover, the ACDC will practice these procedures in conjunction with all known militaries, excepting only the Salik.”

“And the Choya,” Gomez pointed out, opening the case. He pulled out the first chip, labeled “TUP-QE” and slotted it into his workstation.

Ia gave him a level look through the screen rising back up into place. “No, meioa. Excepting
only
the Salik. There will come a point in time when the Choya will desperately want our help in containing the coming plague, and we will give it to them. For now, we are still at war with their race, but your people
will
practice the drills and procedures for ensuring Choyan survival under the new Quarantine Extreme measures. When the moment comes, you must be ready to save everyone from the Salik’s worst mistake.”

“Yeah, right,” he dismissed. Turning his attention to the data flowing across the transparent screen, he narrowed his eyes. “Wait . . . this is . . .” Brows pinching together, he frowned at the screen and tapped down through the summary page. “This is insane! You’re asking us to fire on our own people?”

“Technically, I’ll be having the military fire on infected ships, though merchant reserve vessels will be drafted into those forces where necessary. This is
not
an option, Director Gomez,” Ia repeated. “This is what
will
happen, and this is what your department will do to ensure it does not spread to the rest of sentientkind.”

“This is
not
how you fight a plague!” he countered sharply, glaring at her through the text on his screen. “If you’re such a precise and powerful, all-seeing precognitive, where is the information on how to
counter
this plague? Where are the details on its genome, its molecular structure, how it replicates, and how it infects its hosts? For that matter, what kind of plague
can
infect every single life-form out there, even the Chinsoiy? Is it mutagenic? Retroviral? What?”

This was the start of the fog. Ia shook her head. “There is no cure, other than to kill it in a fire hotter and longer than that required for a cremation.”

“No,”
Gomez denied, shaking his head in turn. “I don’t accept that.
Every
disease has a survival rate.
Every
disease has a cure.” His finger thumped into his desk in emphasis.

“Oh, there is a survival rate,” Ia told him candidly. “But it’s a rate of less than one in one billion, and of those who can survive it, they already have serious health problems of their own. Even accounting for the fact that the remaining population would consist of only a few hundred people per race . . . if they were to have normal, healthy children, which rebuilding their species would require,” she reminded him, her words grim, “those normal children would still die.”

“Then we’ll just have to prevent it from spreading in the first place,” the Terran Director asserted. “Who is Patient Zero, and where are they, or where will they be? If you can see everything, like all the rumors flying out of V’Dan space claim you can, then you
can
see that, and
that
is what I demand to know. Let’s stop it right here, right now, and have done with the whole thing.”

Ia stared at him. Religious zealotry, she could understand. She had faced it back home on Sanctuary, after all, a level of fanaticism she still had to face when she went home for the last time before losing her homeworld behind enemy lines.
Karl Marx once decried that religion was the opiate of the masses. That it was a drug that dulled their wits and their minds, removing their ability to think rationally. But medical zealotry . . . ?

“Tell me where and when this plague will start, and we will stop it at Patient Zero,” Alvin Gomez repeated, thumping his desktop once again with a finger.

How do I get it through his head how wrong he is? He’s one of those men who believes only in what he himself believes. What he himself . . .
She could see it, a glimmer of a path through the fog, one which led out of the mist and into the future where she needed this moment to go. Rising from her seat, Ia stepped around the end of the bulky furniture separating them. One hand came down on the edge of his desk, the other lifted up near her shoulder. He stared up at her warily.
At least I have some of his attention. Unfortunately, I need to seize
all
of it.

“Director Gomez, the entire Salik
race
is Patient Zero. They
have
to die. As. A. Species.” She moved her free hand to within centimeters of his face. “Because if they do not die within the next year,
this
is what will happen, and keep happening, for the next
three hundred years
.”

Closing the distance between them, she pressed her fingertips to his brow, touching him with skin and gifts even as he tried to lean back out of range. She didn’t submerge herself very deeply, but she did give him a thorough soaking.

A few years back, she had taken her 1st Platoon leader, Lieutenant Oslo Rico, into the timeplains in search of the location for the manufactories for the anti-psi machine the Salik had created. During that temporal walk, the two of them had been forced to witness a living K’Katta being torn apart and eaten one piece at a time. That was what the Salik loved to do, after all: eat sentient beings while they were still alive and aware enough to scream in pain.

Ia did not show him that exact memory. Instead, she submerged the Terran Director into the last few life-stream moments of a fellow Terran being slowly eaten alive under similar circumstances.

He didn’t scream. Gomez
tried
to, but the only sounds that emerged were hissing breaths from his terror-locked throat. Ia pulled him out after only a few seconds at most of objective, real-world time. Subjectively, though, he had suffered for at least a full minute or more.

Breathing hard, the middle-aged Terran stared at her in horror. “You . . . You . . .”

“Not convinced yet? Do I need to remind you that we have
already
suffered two hundred years of
this
?” She plunged him back in again ruthlessly, into the body and mind of a Tlassian of the worker caste. Again, he suffered a subjective minute or so of torment before she pulled him out. It wasn’t quite as intense since some of the alien nerve sensations didn’t quite translate into Terran physiology—Humans did not have tails, for one—but it was still painful. “. . . Didn’t like that, did you? No? Of course not.

“No one
sane
would enjoy such suffering. But we
have
suffered it, Director Gomez. We have suffered two hundred years of
that
for a plague,
Director
Gomez,” she emphasized. “Two hundred years of
this
as a covert, hidden
cancer
on the body of the Alliance.”

Again she pressed her fingers to his skin and made him suffer. A V’Dan this time, alien in that the language being thought by the victim was different, but the pain being suffered, oh, the pain translated completely. Eloquently. Brutally. She held him under for an extra half second/half minute in the waters of his fellow Human’s agony, then pulled him out again.

Panting, he stared at her, brown eyes wide and wild. “. . . Will you
stop doing that
?” he finally demanded, clutching at the armrests of his chair. He flinched back when she extended her hand a second time. “Don’t
do
that! Don’t touch me!”

Ia lowered her hand to her hip, the other one still braced on his desk. “
That
, Director, was two hundred years of
covert
lunch. If we do not stop the Salik completely in the next year, then it will be three hundred years of that being inflicted upon everyone in what will be left of the Alliance, and it will be inflicted
openly
. Entire colonies will fall. Millions and billions will be enslaved, chained, and devoured.
That
is what the Salik have all been promised by their leaders. That even the lowliest-ranked among them will finally get to savor the sweet, bleeding screams of sentient
meat
.

“
You
need to pull your head out of your asteroid and look at the
real
plague trying to kill off the Alliance worlds.” Straightening, she dropped her arms at her sides and waited for him to think his way out of the fog of secondhand pain and terror she had inflicted. “We are not going to stop the release of this plague on the Salik, but we
will
contain it so that it only kills
them
. That part is
your
job.”

“Stopping
diseases
is my job,” Gomez growled, rising from his chair with a glare. “
Not
genocide.”

Ia matched him stare for hard stare. “The Salik population currently stands at just over fifty-three billion. If they stay alive, they will slaughter one hundred fifty
trillion
sentients. You tell me which set of deaths
needs
to be prevented.”

He opened his mouth to argue.

“
Which
plague will you prevent, Director? The one that claims fifty-three billion lives in a matter of weeks, or the one that tortures and devours one hundred and fifty trillion sentient, living, thinking beings over three hundred screaming, bleeding, bred-to-be-
eaten
years?” She did not blink, did not relent. “Is
that
what you want? Do you
want
to aid the Salik in their efforts? Because
that
is what it is coming down to.”

“It . . . You . . . !” Raking his hands over his short-cropped hair, he finally railed at her, “It isn’t about the
math
! You can’t just randomly decree that X number of lives is more valuable than X other number! It’s not
just
about the math.”

Relaxing her hard stare, Ia shook her head slowly. “No, meioa. It’s not just about the math. It’s about quality of life, and mercy. By permitting them to die by the plague, I will be giving them mild fevers, chills, some pins-and-needles sensations . . . then numbness . . . paralysis . . . and a peaceful, quiet death. It will be far more merciful a death than their victims have
ever
felt. It will be far more merciful an ending than the Salik
deserve
. But I will give it to them . . . and I will
deny
that death to the rest of the Alliance as a whole.