Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (26 page)

“Very,” Ia told her superior. She didn’t shift her gaze upward because she was still flying through the remnants of twenty-seven Salik ships, plus the vessels from the Tlassian, K’Kattan, V’Dan, and Chinsoiy governments. Gently swapping ends, she rippled the insystem fields so that the
Damnation
was flying backwards, and fired a half-second streak of light across a swath of Salik ships while still in midturn. Near space would be awkward flying in and out of this system for the next half light-year, but better forcing everyone into strict traffic-approach lanes than to allow a single Salik ship to land its cargo of battle robots on that colonial moon.

“Is there something particularly important that’s going to happen in three weeks?” the Admiral-General asked her.

“No, sir,” Ia replied truthfully. “But it gives us a week’s wriggle room for something in four. Still, if everyone follows the timing I’ve outlined to the second, it should all proceed smoothly enough. Anything else, sir?”

“Yes. I’ve included a set of requests from the tactical board for you to review with that precognitive juju of yours. On a personal note . . . what the hell are all those Feyori carrying around? Those golden bubble-things,” Myang added in clarification. “They’ve been moving them into various star systems and parking them in Lagrange orbits, then asserting that they must not be touched. Telepathically, to the insystem controllers and local military heads, which has
not
been going over well. If the Feyori are
yours
to command, as you’ve said, then what the hell are they up to, Ia?”

“Those spheres are the property of the Third Human Empire, and as such are not to be tampered with or touched for the next 250 years. Only the Feyori are authorized to move and utilize them . . . and as this is your lucky day, Admiral-General,” Ia added, firing one last brief, bright shot before closing the lid on the Godstrike button, “you are about to see the three parked in the Sol System being used to chase off the Greys. You have fifteen minutes to set up a surveillance feed from the satellites orbiting Jupiter from . . . mark.”

“What are they, some sort of weapon? A bomb?” Myang asked, frowning.

“Only mentally. They’re the flip-side equivalent of the Salik’s anti-psi machines. The outer casing is made from crysium to protect the components within from any possible damage, since they’ll have to last at least a quarter of a millennium in the irradiated vacuum of space, and the Feyori are therefore the only ones who can reach inside their impervious hulls to activate the machinery inside.” Again, she rotated the ship on its main axis as a particularly stubborn Salik battlecruiser tried to sear a deeper hole in the
Damnation
’s polished hull. “You’ll still want to have psychics on standby, but the Shredou will learn that a system protected by one of those spheres is a system that will not be invaded so easily.”

“Then there are enough to protect every system in the Alliance?” Myang asked her.

“No, sir. But they’ll be scattered throughout Terran and V’Dan space so that they can be quickly shifted by the Meddlers from one location to another whenever needed. Just leave them in orbit—if I had them stored on planets and moons, it’d take that much longer to get them into position. It’s easier just to park them in space—ah sir, we’re about to lose the ship’s hyperrelay hub,” Ia warned her superior, checking the text scrolling at the bottom of her upper third tertiary screen. “It won’t be repaired for thirty-six hours . . . and I have received the data packet. I’ll get back to you on that when I can. Did you have a last query?”

“What, you don’t know?” Myang asked her.

“Well, I am a little busy right now—”

Another explosion rocked the ship, the claxons blared for another hull breach, and the comm signal cut off. Ia sighed. “Five seconds early, but not unexpected.”

“General,” Darghas called out from the operations station, wincing at the invective spewing into her ear from her headset, “Commander Harper would like to impolitely inform you that you’re off his holiday shopping list yet again for what you’re doing to his ship.”

“Inform the Commander he is a son of a wonderful mother who should’ve taught him a lot more in the way of patience. C’ulosc, inform the ships on the list in your ‘repair notes’ folder that the battle will be over in thirteen more minutes and that I am appropriating all of the materials on each ship’s sublist for the
Damnation
’s needs. I’d appropriate their repair crews, too, if it still weren’t an act of Grand High Treason to let anyone else on board without permission . . . and I can’t get permission for a month or two yet.”

“I’m on it, sir,” C’ulosc agreed.

Ia nodded, and thumbed the ship’s commsystem with her right hand, her left sideslipping the ship with the attitude controls, bringing the curve of the gas giant back into view.
“All hands, this is the General. Combat will be finished in just under thirteen minutes. All hands will be required on duty to effect repairs to the
Damnation
. I repeat, all hands will be required to effect repairs, movement capacity first. We leave this system in twenty-seven hours, forty-three minutes. Doctor Mishka, break out the stimulants; no one sleeps until we’re under way again. Ia out.”

. . . My nickname? Yes, I suppose it’s time to talk about how I truly earned it. Not that first fight, all those years ago—I did earn it in a sort of lighthearted way . . . but no. A nickname like “Bloody Mary” is best understood in the original contexts to which it applied, and no, I don’t mean the drink made from tomato juice, vodka, and seasonings.

The original, of course, was Queen Mary Tudor, sister of the famous Queen Elizabeth I. Roughly three hundred Protestants died in her religious persecution in the attempt to bring the Anglican Empire back under Roman Catholic jurisdiction. Though that number isn’t a lot—her father, Henry VIII, is said to have slaughtered fifty-seven thousand or so in pulling the empire away from Catholicism in the first place—the nickname she earned by it has since grown to be applied to anyone who systematically kills many while proclaiming it is their duty to do so.

Ironically, just four hundred years later, the nickname “Bloody Mary” was also used as a means of precognition in the middle of the twentieth century. It was used in a child’s game by chanting the name while peering into a mirror under various conditions, in order to predict the future based upon whatever apparitions the chanter might see behind or beside their reflection after enough repetitions were made. These apparitions were capable of being benign or malicious. They could be portents of death instead of happiness, and could even be accompanied by attacks on the petitioner, or attacks on their nearest friends . . . or so people believed.

So, am I a psychotic, prognosticating poltergeist? Well, I’m still alive, so we can check off my being a poltergeist. Am I a duty-deluded, mass-murdering monarch? No one ever put a crown on my head, so one out of those three has to go away, too.

Prognosticator? Oh yes, I specialize in foreseeing the future. Psychotic? Not in the least, according to every psych evaluation I’ve ever had—and I’ve undergone scores over the years. I think . . . yes, sixty-three to date—the majority in my childhood as I struggled with my ability to foresee terrible things. So, am I duty-deluded? Perhaps, since I believe it is my most solemn duty to act to save as many lives as I can . . . but at the same time, I am also forced to see in advance the consequences of each of my decisions and their possible outcomes. So
deluded
isn’t the right word, not when I’m forced to see the truth of my actions’ consequences, over and over and over.
Driven
maybe, but not
deluded
.

Which leaves us with the last point to consider: Am I a mass murderer?

~Ia

MAY 28, 2499 T.S.
INTERSTITIAL SPACE

There were too many little details to keep track of, now. Too many, and Ia couldn’t manage it. Even with the help of her crysium transcriber whatsit wand, there were just too many details, too many little things that could go wrong at any moment.

From the perspective she’d had as a youth—as a fifteen-year-old, at the age of eighteen, even at the age of twenty, twenty-two—all these details had looked manageable. Time had been on her side. Then again, Time had also pegged her to be a Commodore by now, a one-star soldier with a modicum of trust, not a five-star warleader expected to guide two full wars. The Shredou
were
starting to back down, but the Salik were growing more and more desperate.

The battle they had just fought, helping the Dlmvla take out a heavily guarded deep-space station, was just one example. At the moment, her official non-allies were chasing the last of the one- and two-manned fighter ships, ruthlessly cutting down the few survivors among the enemy, but Ia was expected to provide them with fine-chase details for not just this battle, but a good thirty more that had to be enacted before the tenth of June rolled around.

Too many details, not enough time—and her nerves tingled, warning her something was about to go wrong. Pulling her mind out of the battles the methane-breathers would have to face, Ia didn’t wait for her office door chime to buzz. Thumbing the control on her desk, she unlocked the door. “Enter!”

Three women stepped inside. Not a good trio, either. Jesselle Mishka, who had a hypospray in her hand and a grim look on her face; Christine Benjamin, who had a worried, sympathetic expression on hers; and Delia Helstead, who looked wryly amused. One look at the doctor and the sprayer told Ia what she intended to do.

“No,” she stated flatly. “I don’t have
time
to sleep.”

“You have been up for over five days straight,” the blonde argued. “I don’t care if you’re half Feyori; five days is four days too long to be healthy.”

“You really need to think about getting some rest, so that the choices and decisions you’re making are the best,” Bennie added.

Ia looked at Delia, to see what the petite redhead had to add. She merely shrugged, hands tucked in her back pockets. “Is this a mutiny? Because I’ve lasted longer on less sleep, as Bennie well knows. And I don’t have time to sleep. I have allies to keep informed. It is vital that by the time we hit mid-June, the only Salik left will be the ones contained within their own star systems . . . and only I know where they all are.”

“Delia?” Mishka asked, deferring to her.

Sighing, the lieutenant commander pulled something out of her back pocket. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to use this, but . . .”

Ia tensed, wary, but the former Knifeman officer didn’t haul out a weapon. Nor did she use her powerful psychodominancy ability on Ia’s mind, as she had once before with the force of a sledgehammer dropped from orbit. Instead, she held up a standard-issue hand mirror, wrapped in gray plexi backing, and aimed it at Ia’s face.

“You look like
shakk
, sir,” she stated bluntly. “You may be able to last a while longer, but your
appearance
is starting to worry the crew. When was the last time you had a decent meal, and let your
body
rest, even if your mind cannot?”

Ia looked at the mirror. The other woman’s hand-eye coordination was more than good enough to have it angled just so over the three or so meters between them to reflect the image of Ia’s face right back at her. But she didn’t see the dark circles under her eyes, the exhaustion etching fine lines into her forehead and the corners of her mouth. She saw a round, silvery, mirror-smooth sphere, and the golden red hair of her chaplain—and made a mental leap.

Ginger. Feyori. Geas-threads woven in the tapestry.

This was going to give her a major headache in the next few days, with even less chance for sleep . . . but it would ease a huge burden off her shoulders.
If
she could find time for it.

“Sir, you will either—”

“Shh,”
she shushed the doctor, lifting a finger as her eyes unfocused onto the timeplains. “I’m looking for what you need.”

“What
I
need?” Mishka repeated, arching her brow. “You’re tipping right over into delusional, General!”

“No, no, she’s got that ‘I’m about to be clever’ look on her face,” Helstead soothed the doctor. “At least, I hope so. Either that, or she’s having an aneurysm.”

“Shh.”
She
was
tired, and the least little distraction kept threatening her concentration. But when all three women fell silent, Ia was able to see a path to what they wanted and she needed. She thumbed the comm controls on her desk workstation.
“All hands, this is the General. Change of plans. Commander Harper, reschedule the work to get this ship under way in three hours, not five, prioritize all external repairs; internal ones will be made
sic transit
. Ia out.”

“So you’ll agree you need some sleep?” Mishka asked her, lifting the hypospray.

“I won’t get any for another eighteen hours.
Then
I will sleep for twenty-four straight,” Ia promised. “Monitored, in one of your infirmary beds, hooked up to a nutrient drip. We’ll be skipping the battle at Attenborough Epsilon 14, though I’ll still have to direct it from the timestreams to make up for our absence.”

“So what will we be doing instead?” Helstead asked her.

“Gathering the Feyori around the moon world of Glyker III in the Chinsoiy-held system of Glyker N-Tau. Your mirror just gave me the idea on how to answer a big problem that’s been building up. I tied Ginger into the timestreams, on Dabin,” Ia added, pointing at the silvered glass still in Helstead’s hand. “Forced her to be aware of what to do and when to do it in an old-fashioned
geas
, or suffer the consequences of having her life-energies abraded away whenever she resisted. When the Admiral-General promoted me to General, it opened up a whole host of new possibilities for saving as many as I could . . . but that meant an exponentially greater number of details to have to keep track of . . . and as you’ve seen, I haven’t been handling the extra workload very well. So instead, I’ll be foisting it off on about a thousand Feyori to manage
for
me . . . and
they’ll
do it or suffer the consequences.”

“Well, at least you’ve
admitted
it,” Mishka muttered.

“Jesselle,” Bennie chided her. Then eyed Ia. “She is right, though, Ia. If you
weren’t
going to admit it . . . We’ve been worried about you, that’s all.”

“I appreciate the worry—and thank you for using a mirror instead of your psychodominancy, Delia,” Ia added to her second officer. Helstead shrugged and tucked her hands and her palm mirror into her back pockets again. “We’ll arrive in the N-Tau System in two days. I’ll have to spend about five hours summoning and binding the Feyori—even working at the speed of psychic abilities, it’ll still take time to parse and bind each set of instructions for a thousand or more of them—but once that’s done, then I can return to a normal work-and-sleep schedule.”

“Normal for a Human, or normal for you?” Jesselle asked archly. “Because you have had a very bad habit of running a thirty-six-hour workday every few days.”

“Normal for me. I’ll survive,” Ia countered flatly. “I’ll need something to keep me going until I can sleep, though—Helstead, go to the Commander and have him unlock one of the special guns, then come back and shoot me a couple of times. I’m at the point where traditional stimulants like caf’ aren’t enough to keep me going.”

“I’m tempted to shoot you myself,” Jesselle muttered, but at a nudge from the chaplain she headed for the door. Helstead left with her. Palming it shut, Bennie came back to Ia’s desk, and braced her palms on the edge.

“You really are pushing yourself too hard, Ia,” the middle-aged woman warned her. “You have half the crew spying on you because nobody’s seen you take more than an hour’s break in the last five days. We’re
worried
. And if he didn’t have to keep repairing all the holes you keep putting in his ship,
and
sleep like a normal being, Meyun would be in here, too, ready to help hold you down while Jesselle shot you. Meyun and Oslo,” she added, mentioning the 1st Platoon lieutenant, who was currently on duty. “I’d ask Spyder to help, but he doesn’t seem to think you’re in the trouble zone yet.”

“I’m not . . . but I
was
getting close,” Ia confessed quietly. She gripped the peach-gold wand plugged into her desk . . . then let go of it. “When I was young, I thought I could handle all of this. I had all the time back then to go slowly and be thorough in looking over all the details. But now . . . now I’m running out of time, and there’s so much more to do, thanks to my promotion. I can’t
not
do it, Bennie,” she told her friend, her counselor, her expression sober. “It’s not in my nature to ignore all the chances I have to help everybody.

“But . . . I can’t do it on my own. I’m going to have to rope the Feyori into managing planet-wide details. Hopefully, by spreading it out among many of them, it won’t interfere much with their normal plays in the Game, which do still have to take place.” Shaking her head, she reached for the transcription wand again. “In the meantime, I still have to help the Dlmvla track down over fifteen hundred more Salik vessels that have gone astray in the depths of space. I
promise
, I’ll sleep well for those twenty-four hours.
If
you’ll let me get my work done right now.”

Nodding, Chaplain Benjamin headed for the door. “Just remember, you promised. I’m holding you to it, young lady.”

Ia nodded. The energy needed for the Gathering of so many Feyori would be provided by an ion storm, a strong magnetic field, stellar radiation, and a few shots from the
Damnation
’s guns while her ship and crew waited. She would also be able to advise the Chinsoiy government on a few extra moves they could make in the near future, too. Too many details, not enough time, but at least she
could
delegate a good chunk of it to her Meddler minions to handle and watch.

JUNE 8, 2499 T.S.
BATTLE PLATFORM
AMAZING GRACE HOPPER

Breathing deep, Ia squared her shoulders and braced herself. The side entrance to the
Damnation
’s main boardroom was off the main corridor, but at least it did have an alcove she could partially hide in while the last of her crew entered through the main doors several meters away. Once again, the ship was on full lockdown, and every member of her crew had been ordered to attend. Not because anyone had broken a law . . . yet . . . but because this was a speech, an explanation, which Ia owed to the men and women serving under her.

When the last man had entered, and the main doors had slid shut, she counted to fifty, then took another deep breath and palmed her door open. Her Dress Black jacket had the minimum of glittery on it, but the fact she was wearing it instead of her more casual Grays pulled everyone inside onto their feet at Attention.

“At Ease, and be seated,” she directed them.

A week’s worth of “normal” sleep schedules—aided by drugs and monitoring at first—had removed some of the shadows from under her eyes, but she still felt the weight of Time pressing down on her. Taking her place in front of the center chair at the head table, Ia waited for the men and women around her to settle into place. She remained standing, however.