Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (17 page)

“But I
will not
tell you or anyone else what that plague is, where it is, or when it will start . . . because the Salik
will
turn it against us once they realize what is going wrong. We will need every single second of silence on the subject of Patient Zero we can wrench from this situation before they realize what will be happening to them, to make sure that they
don’t
successfully turn that plague on
us
.”

“The
easiest
way to
do
that is to stop the plague from spreading
at all
!” Gomez countered.

Mouth tight, Ia reached up and poked him in the forehead. Plunged him face-first into the life-stream of a man being eaten alive by the officers of a Salik warship just thirty light-years away, right at that very moment. She pulled her finger away, and he gasped for air, then scowled at her, smacking her hand away. “Don’t
do
that!”

Ia pressed the point, literally. A plunge into the timestreams, and a release. “Three.” She did it again, following him as he tried to step back. “Hundred.” He tried to retreat, only to fetch up against the back wall of his office.
“Years.”

“
Stop
it!” he ordered.

She didn’t relent, just tipped her head in acknowledgment of the irony. “Funny, but that’s exactly what their
victims
keep crying.”

He tried to protest one more time. This time, she clamped her whole hand over his face and ruthlessly hauled him upstream, plunging him into the body of a V’Dan from the First Salik War. She did so at a point just a day or so before the end of the man’s life, and just deep enough that he could feel what that other Human had felt, though not deep enough to give it any temporal context.

It wasn’t a pleasant experience, even though it was very, very mild compared to the other torture. Both she and Gomez felt how numb his borrowed limbs were, how the abdomen tingled with pinpricks, and his thoughts . . . those poor thoughts were sluggish. It was all the man could do to finish dictating a final message for his loved ones . . . and hoping that the plague would die in the intervening years of cold, dark space.

They hadn’t found that ship. Ia held her fellow Human in that life as the thoughts slowed, as the heartbeat weakened . . . she brought him out before their host could actually die, but only long enough to whisper in Gomez’s ear,
“The suffering induced by the plague—what you felt just now—is a
mercy
killing, compared to
this
.”

She plunged him into a V’Dan being carved up slice by slice, with the woman’s wounds cauterized by a Salik officer who wanted his prey to last . . . and plunged Gomez into the
Salik’s
mind, so that he experienced the cold, brutal amusement firsthand, the excitement and pleasure of torturing a V’Dan over and over and over.

Bringing both of them out, she pulled her fingers away from his face. He staggered and sagged back against the wall, then doubled over and retched. Nose wrinkling against the smell, Ia backed up physically, but did not back down verbally. “What
you
don’t understand is that
I
believe the Salik should have a right to live. I would
like
them to live. But in order to do that, they
must
get along with all the other races. Just as the Humans and the K’Katta and the Tlassians, and all the rest have chosen to do.

“Unfortunately, Director, the Salik
cannot
change. They are biologically incapable of changing their mind-set. They are sadistic as a
species
. Cooperation with another race is a hunting strategy, nothing more—cooperating with
each other
is a hunting strategy. They do it to lure their prey into a more favorable position for eventual attack. I learned long ago a very ugly and painful truth: if the rest of the Alliance is to live, the Salik
must die
.” She turned to pace around the desk to the other side, facing him from a couple meters away. “We—the Alliance—do
not
have the resources to spare to wipe them out man-to-man. We will barely have enough as it is to contain this plague,
if
you do your job.

“And your job, Director Gomez, is to save the lives that you
can
. Alliance lives. The Salik are not a part of the Alliance, and they never have been. And before you protest that
we
are killing
them
, I will tell you this.
They
created that very same plague!” she asserted, jabbing her finger off to the side. “By the sheerest chance, it was
not
released two hundred years ago. By luck and the wits of the V’Dan, who found and destroyed the research base that created it, they
lost
every last note on how to replicate it in the two centuries since, or we would
all
be long dead and gone, our worlds barren and lifeless of
anything
with a brainstem or greater.

“But while the Alliance barely escaped annihilation as a whole two centuries ago, it is a slagging
shakk
-load of trouble that is finally going to descend on us all in
this
era . . . and I find it poetic justice that they should be slain by something they themselves created. It is poetic that, in their
greed
for the taste of sentient flesh, they will devour and spread this plague among themselves, creating their own genocide.

“
Your
job is
containment
, Director. Nothing more, nothing less. You will not send out biohazard teams to try to ‘study’ the plague, you will
not
take samples, and you will not permit advisors or observers to approach, for that would be a death sentence for them. You will do nothing but
burn
whatever has been contaminated. The only ‘cure’ is frying anything touched by that plague for twenty minutes Terran Standard at one thousand degrees Celsius
or hotter
.”

Gomez blinked at her words.

“You will not even be able to touch an infected atmosphere with the skin of a spaceship, for fear of dragging it to another world,” she added bluntly. “Atmospheric reentry does
not
last long enough to destroy this plague, nor does it actually burn the hull, thanks to the hot-shockwave effect. Neither will the coldest depths of space destroy it. Rather the opposite; the coldest depths of space has preserved this plague, allowing it to lie dormant in the cold vacuum of space for two centuries. It was designed to be a weapon, one which I am turning back on its creators as the fastest means we have of stopping them before hundreds of billions of innocent sentients are slaughtered one sadistic bite at a time.
That
is more important to stop, and the only way to stop it is to stop the Salik race permanently.

“Incarceration with the Blockade did not work. You cannot isolate this patient, because the Salik will only escape to slaughter again and again. For the good of the rest of the known galaxy’s body, this limb
must
be amputated to keep it from destroying all the rest of the otherwise healthy flesh. You, meioa, are trying to argue that a lethal, gangrenous cancer is more important to keep alive than all the normal, healthy cells that can still be saved if we act now with an amputation. This is that amputation. Stop trying to save the cancer, and start trying to save the rest of the patient.”

He stared at her, visibly shocked and bewildered by her claims.
Now
she had him, with a clear path straight toward where the future needed to go at this stage. She didn’t
like
playing the bad guy in this moment, forcing him into temporal rapport . . . but it wasn’t the first time she had acted against her normal inclinations, and there were yet more points ahead where she would have to do worse. Such as the reason why she was here in the first place. Ia tipped her head in slight, ironic acknowledgment.

“As I said, Director, you and I are going to have to
redefine
‘Quarantine Extreme’ today.” She gestured politely toward his empty chair, glad that her ploys had worked. “Please, retake your seat and let us make plans to ensure that the cancer of the Salik nation and the malignant dangers of their plague are
properly
eradicated from our patient, being the Alliance as a whole, and the rest of our galaxy as well.”

“But, I . . .” he tried protesting one last time.

“If you do not comply, Director, I will have you removed from office on grounds of Fatality Thirty-Five, Sabotage, and Fatality Two, Grand High Treason . . . because I will hold you
personally
responsible for
this
.”

One last time, she dragged him into the life-waters of someone being eaten alive by their enemy. Without touching him. Stone-faced, sick inside that she had to do this, Ia held him there until she knew he would comply, then flung him back into his body. She settled back in her seat and crossed her legs, hands clasped in her lap as if she had all the time in the world. Gomez stared at her, wide-eyed and wary.

“
That
can keep happening to the whole Alliance for the next three hundred years, Director.
Or
we can end it within one year. Do forgive me for having the compassion to prefer the latter. Now, let’s get to work.”

JANUARY 23, 2499 T.S.
SIC TRANSIT

Christine Benjamin studied her white-haired commanding officer. The pressure of that long, thoughtful look was almost an energy of its own, though it had no flavor. Drawing in a deep breath, Ia let it out and slouched down in the thick-cushioned easy chair bolted to one corner of the chaplain’s counseling office. This was the one place where the eyes of the crew weren’t upon her yet wasn’t a place where she had to be alone.

Conversely—vexingly—she almost wished she were alone.

“Going to finish your caf’?” Bennie asked, picking up her own mug for a sip.

“No.”

The older woman swallowed. “Got something on your mind?”

“No.”

“I think ‘yes,’” Bennie countered. “For the last few days, ever since we left the Gatsugi motherworld . . . No, correction,” she murmured, changing her mind. “Since you came back from your visit to the ACDC, you’ve been . . . Oh, what’s the word for it? That thing that Abraham Lincoln suffered from.”

Ia frowned and slanted her friend and counselor a puzzled look. “Bipolar disorder?”

“No, no, not that,” Bennie negated, fluttering her hand. “No, the
word
for it, back in the day—ah!
Melancholy.
You have been melancholic.”

Ia frowned. “That sounds like ‘colic,’ and all I know about colic is that you increase the humidity to help ease the congestion and coughing.”

The redhead snorted. “. . . You are pathetically undereducated in any area other than your calling, Ia.”

Sighing, Ia rolled her eyes and slouched a bit more. “No
shakk
, Sherlock. Everything I know is on a need-to-know basis. If I don’t need to know it, then I don’t bother wasting my time learning it. I haven’t learned more than a handful of things just for the sheer sake of learning since I was fifteen.”

“I’m sure Private Tomas Orange would be disappointed to learn he’ll never have the chance to teach you a French knot.” Bennie weathered Ia’s hard, bemused look with equanimity. “He’s swapped up his duty shift—with Helstead’s permission—in order to teach embroidery and card weaving to some of the meioas who are interested in it on second watch. Even Spyder’s taking lessons.”

“Still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ia dismissed. “If it doesn’t harm the timelines, I don’t care.”

“A French knot is a stitch in embroidery, but that’s not what we’re talking about. Did Director Gomez know what you were talking about?” Bennie asked next, her tone quiet but pointed.

Ia flinched. Shifting her hand to her forehead, she rubbed at her eyes, the original right one and the Meddling-restored left, which felt as natural and real as ever. She knew what her friend was doing. Her confidante. Her DoI-appointed psychologist. Bennie was doing her job, which meant
she
had to do her job, too. Except . . .

“I bullied him . . . and I hate myself for it.” The words were out. They were said. They were the truth, but Ia knew they weren’t enough.

So did Bennie. After almost seven years of knowing each other, of talking and listening and sharing caf’ after cup of caf’, Christine Benjamin knew her fairly well. The chaplain sipped again at her mug and waited.

“I hate my job.” The confession emerged as the barest of whispers. Warmth pooled at the corners of her eyes. Ia rubbed away the tears before they could fall free, and confessed her sins to her chaplain. “I
bullied
him into going my way, Bennie. He wasn’t going to listen to reason—he’s as fanatic as the damned Church! Only
his
prayer book is the Xeno-Genome Project, and his corona symbol is a molecular scanner. And I.
Bullied.
Him.” She thumped her finger on the padded arm of the chair before letting it flop back into her lap.

“Did you succeed in getting him to cooperate?” Bennie asked calmly. “Without any major problems down the line coming back to bite your asteroid off? Like they did with that Feyori, Miklinn?”

“Yes, and
yes
,” Ia admitted, irritated. “There will be no problems. I bullied him with images and sensations of what it’s like to be eaten by a Salik . . . and what it’s like to
be
a Salik taking pleasure in his victim’s screams. I just want that all to end, and yet . . .”

Almost a minute ticked by. Bennie finished her cup of caf’ and clipped it back into its holder on the side table set in the corner between their chairs. “. . . And?”

“And yet I can hear the relentless ticking of time.” It was another quiet, too-quiet confession. She rubbed at her brow, at her eyes again.

“Why is it relentless?”

Ia flopped her hand down on the padded armrest. “Because I’m afraid to go home.”

“Will the fighting be that dangerous?”

“What? No,” Ia denied, frowning. “It’ll be like any other fight. Difficult in trying to keep the
right
people alive, but no more or less dangerous or difficult than any other battle. Even with the Greys coming, and having to face down their greater tech, there are plenty of high probabilities I’ve set up in advance to see that we succeed.”