Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (24 page)

The Shredou would attack again, aiming their efforts at a different Human colony in a different star system. Some, the
Damnation
would be able to deliver. The remaining crystalline balls would have to be transported to each needed system by her pack of Meddlers. Watching the Shredou leader, Ia gave him a few more moments to recover, then spoke again.

“As you can see, I can protect this world. You will not attack personally. You will be poisoned if you try. You will not send machines. Your machines will be destroyed. You can surround this system. You will stay away from this world. Two hundred three stellar cycles of this world will pass. This world will reach into space to reclaim this system. You will allow it. They will reach out to claim other nearby worlds with heavy gravity. You will allow it. If you resist? If you fight? I will aim the Zida”ya at you, as easily as I have aimed these energies.

“You will fight when I tell you. You will fight where I tell you. You will fight
who
I tell you. I am the Prophet of a Thousand Stellar Cycles. I will know when. I will know where. I will act across those thousand years,” Ia told the Grey on her main screen.

“You are inferior,” the alien asserted. “You will die soon!”

“Irrelevant,” she returned calmly, ignoring the threat. “My accuracy will remain. My accuracy will command you, even after I am long dead and gone. You have two
kesant
to leave this system before I open fire.”

Her right hand hovered over the still-uncovered access button; her left readjusted the
Damnation
’s position, since it was parked in geosynchronous orbit, which meant moving and turning as the planet did. Gauging the Grey’s response in the timestreams, she hit the button and held it for two seconds. Released it, and waited, over the roughly twenty seconds of light-speed distance between them.

“Irrelevant. We refuse.”

There were no buoys nearby to relay what happened in real time. It would take forty seconds from the moment of firing for the lightwave results to reach them. Ia spoke while she waited for those seconds to catch up.

“Irrelevant. You will be destroyed. You have
one kesant
to leave this system before I fire again.”

The navicomp tightened and refined its view of one of the smaller ships in the alien fleet. Her beam smacked into that vessel. It was hard to see from the angle just what happened for those two full seconds, until the dark red glow vanished. In the greenish afterimage, all that was left of the Shredou ship was a brightly glowing ring of metallic composites, materials that should have been more than 120 times tougher than even the best version of Terran ceristeel.

It was rumored Grey ships could survive even the heat of a blue-white, B-class star, where the surface temperatures ranged from 10,000K–30,000K. It had not, however, survived the heat of the Godstrike Mark II.

“Sir! We have projectiles headed our way,” MacInnes warned her. “They’re being launched from the surface.”

The Grey commander on her screen vanished, leaving her with a picture of the blue-and-silver TUPSF logo that often served as a placeholder in Terran hyperrelay channels. Ia quietly closed the dual lid on the Godstrike firing control. The Shredou had decided to leave, regroup, and consider what had just happened.

Thankfully, they had left before noticing the attack from below; the Truth Party government of Sanctuary, backed by the fanatically xenophobic Church of the One True God, had just snapped and panicked. They would attack anything and everything within reach until it all went away.

“General, should our gunners fire flak bombs, or interceptors?” Ramasa asked her.

“Neither. Private Xhuge, warn the
Popova
to keep their shields up, add that they are not allowed to return fire, and tell them to depart only when Gateway Station has been attacked and destroyed. Send the coordinates from today’s subfolder on the exact location for the
Popova
to pick up the three escape pods of surviving station personnel, and have them delivered to
Confucius
Station at their earliest convenience, along with the hyperrelay hub. Ishiomi, it’s your turn to steer again.”

“Helm to my control in twenty, sir,” the yeoman agreed.

Ia tapped the workstation, transferring control to her backup pilot. “Make sure the
Popova
picks up those pods before breaking orbit. I’m going to go have a post-battle chat with our Feyori guests and discuss the distribution and maintenance of the remaining anti-Grey spheres across the various Human star systems. After that, I’ll be asleep for a few hours. Try not to break anything on your way to System SSD-17a, where we’ll have to confront them all over again. I’d like those hours to be uninterrupted.”

“Aye, sir,” Ishiomi agreed. “I have the helm, sir. Do I have the bridge again, as well?”

“You have the bridge until relieved by Lieutenant Rico, Yeoman Ishiomi,” Ia agreed. Releasing her restraints, she paused long enough to siphon a bit of energy from the outlet built into her station, then rose and headed for the main doors. “Good job, everyone. Keep your nerves steady since we’ll have to face them again three more times before we can go back to hunting down the Salik.”

MAY 13, 2499 T.S.
SIC TRANSIT

Ia looked at the datapad Grizzle had handed her the moment she entered the main boardroom. The list of names and requests was fairly extensive. She had expected this, knew it was coming, but . . .

“Thirty-three marriage requests?” Ia asked, looking up at the couples seated in the risers across from the head table. Mostly male and female, some male and male, some female and female. York and Clairmont, Teevie and Crow . . . even Mishka and Spyder, who had chosen to sit in the tiers with the rest.

Spyder, his left hand clasping Jesselle’s right, lifted one purple-dyed eyebrow. Instead of going back to green after Dabin, he had started experimenting with non-Terran camouflage colors. “Y’ can’t tell us this’s a
surprise
, ‘Bloody Mary.’ Ye’r th’ bleedin’ Prophet!”

“Well,
your
particular pairing was an unexpected percentage, but I’ll not object to it,” Ia retorted. “No, my problem is, these were supposed to trickle in over a few weeks, not slam into one giant stack of simultaneously submitted requests. This will look very odd to the DoI.”

“Is that going to be a problem, General?” Private Davies demanded, folding her arms across her chest. She and her teammate Private Unger had come a long, long way from their early, troubled partnership days. “Or are you expecting us to back up and submit them one at a time in some preordained order?”

Palms flat, leaning on the table, Ia met the other woman’s arch look. “My question is, are you asking for a
mass ceremony
? All of you, all at once, all on board this ship? With Chaplain Benjamin presiding? Or individual services on board? Or are you asking as a group for when we’ll next have a real Leave on some planet? Because
that
option won’t be for a long while to come; sorry, but there it is.”

Over sixty pairs of eyes exchanged looks, glancing at their partners and their neighbors. Finally, Spyder spoke up again after craning his neck to do a face check of expressions. “Well . . . s’a pity we won’t be getting Leave soon, ’n all, but I s’ppose onna ship’s fine. Um . . . dunno about individual versus mass, but I s’ppose we could all have a confab ’bout that. When d’you need an answer back?”

This was throwing her schedule off. As much as she
wanted
to protest that yes, they
had
to submit in the correct order and get married like clockwork . . . frankly, nearly anything her crew did in their personal lives on board this ship would not make a damn bit of difference either way, save to make them a little happier or a little more irritable. Hurricane-causing butterfly wings lurked inside any crew’s morale, true, but at least she knew she could rely on her crew to be willing to correct themselves if they started going off course.

Personally, she would rather have a happy crew. Not just because it would make her job easier in the long run but because she wanted them to have whatever happiness they could grasp, within the confines of duty, conscience, need, and precognition. Bowing her head, Ia skimmed through the timeplains.

“. . . Two weeks,” she said after a few seconds in reality. Straightening, she faced the couples sitting across from her. “I need to know within two weeks. Feel free to discuss this freely among the rest of the crew, in case the others want to make up their minds ahead of schedule—and you are all very lucky I have
carte blanche
strong enough to handle this mass request, too,” she added, sweeping a finger along the rows. “Or else I’d have to explain to the Admiral-General the rash of happy unions among my crew.

“I’m supposed to be the Prophet of Saving This Galaxy, not the Prophet of Happily Ever After,” she stated tartly. “Still, I thank you for taking the time to come talk to me all at once. See Grizzle for any further paperwork you need handled right now, and don’t forget to consider carefully your individual spiritual or religious needs for any specific ceremonies. One more thing: You will
remain
, one and all, on beecee shots for the duration of your service on board this ship. That service will end when
I
say it will end, and not one pico sooner. Is that clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” they replied in crisp chorus, rising to their feet. Previous sessions in a boardroom very much like this one, albeit on a different ship, had taught this crew how to properly respond to their commanding officer when she used those words. Their prompt response pleased Ia.

“Good. Dismissed . . . and congratulations on each of your impending nuptials.” Nodding to Sadneczek, she strode out of the boardroom. Once out of sight, she rubbed at her temple, wondering just how many
other
details were beginning to slip through her grasp.

Tired and worried that she wasn’t worrying enough about the little things, she returned to her quarters. She had three hours before they were due to confront the Greys again. The ship
thrummed
with the faint rumble of hyperwarp, sucking through its artificial wormhole while wrapped in a blanket of inverted Higgs-field greasing physics.

A glance at her desk as she passed through her office showed that Garcia had struck again. This time, the gelatin had been formed in a flat disc divided into eight different-colored wedges, like a pie chart. She was more tired than she was hungry, and though it was tempting, Ia swerved to her desk to thumb the comm button, not to pick up the spoon clipped to the edge of the plate.
“Ia to Private Garcia, I appreciate the gesture, but I’d rather have it for dessert. Would you please come pick it up before it melts?”

Several seconds passed, then Garcia responded.
“Uh, sir? What . . . what are you talking about? You want me to pick up something?”

Ia frowned and thumbed the button for the link . . . then released it, thinking. This was . . . this was Garcia’s sleep cycle. Thumbing it again, she asked,
“Did you, or did you not, arrange for another gelatin dessert to be delivered to my office?”

“Sir, no, sir,”
came the crisp, prompt reply. Garcia sounded like she was waking up a bit more.
“I haven’t done anything with gelatin in . . . about a week? Someone else must’ve done it.”

“. . . Sorry to interrupt your sleep. Get some good rest,”
she added, frowning in puzzlement at the comm controls.

“Thanks, sir. Garcia out.”

That was odd. Very odd. Taking the time to seat herself at her desk, Ia stared at the pie-chart-style dessert. It sat on a clear plate, looking neatly sculpted and smelling of nothing more than various kinds of fruit. Innocuous.
But if Garcia didn’t do this one . . . I know she did the first, but did she do the layered one, with the apples and fart-fruits? Or did someone else? And if so, who?

Who
should have been easy to discern. Closing her eyes, Ia flipped in, around, and up onto the timeplains. Instead of turning to the right, however, she turned to the left, facing upstream into the past. It wasn’t easy, struggling to observe a room during a time frame when there hadn’t been a person physically present, but the
Damnation
was her ship. It had always been her ship, from bow to stern, dorsal to ventral, starboard to port.

Starting with the moment she had left her office to answer Sadneczek’s request to gather with the others in the boardroom less than twenty minutes ago—when she knew her desk had been gelatin-free—she struggled to linger within view of her desktop. It did not help that the lights automatically dimmed a couple minutes after she had left, reducing the available lighting. The lights did not brighten, did not brighten, did not . . .

They brightened just as she—her younger self, that was—palmed open the door from the outside and stepped in, heading toward the door to her private quarters at the back of the modest-sized office. The plate was already there. Scowling, Ia reinserted herself higher in the stream, and watched carefully again. This time, it wasn’t as hard to stay focused. A faint shift of shadows, a hint of movement in the last thirty seconds before her entry . . .
there
!

Except . . . it made no sense. Hands appeared out of nowhere—
out of nowhere
—and set the plate on her desk with the practiced little slide that said whoever-it-was was clipping the plate carefully in place via the slightly raised rim edging the flat surface. Then those hands retreated into nothing.
Nothing!
It did not make sense!

Sliding the plate free, she checked underneath. No note, just a rainbow of desserts. A dip into the near future showed the dessert was completely harmless, and even tasty, if the slightly puzzled but pleased look on her future self’s face was any indication. Ia didn’t reach into those waters close enough to consult herself, however. Instead, she skimmed back to the two-fruit version.

Hands, appearing out of nowhere, with nothing but deep darkness on the intersection plane side.
Feyori? Some new form of teleportation?
Uncertain, Ia sat there and pondered, eyeing the pie-chart gel. One of the colors was fairly close to the peach-toned hue of her crystalline bracer . . . and that gave her an idea.