Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (48 page)

“Inform her we are entering combat, and that I’ll send her a prerecorded one in a moment. Let her know that she’s still free to transmit the previous one in whole, unedited. I think it might be enlightening for everyone.”

“Aye, sir,” he said. “The Greys are trying to hijack the local relay hubs in an effort to ping you. They definitely want you to respond. I suspect it’s so they can translocate to your current location, wherever that might be in the Alliance.”

Her mouth curved up slightly on one side. “I suspect you’re right. Please contact Afaso Headquarters on Earth instead, and inform them to begin broadcasting file . . . 117a. And rebroadcast it when you get it, all channels, hyper and lightwave.”

“File 117 A-as-in-alpha, got it, sir.” He made the connection and murmured into his headset pickup. “Incoming on the hyper, and outgoing on the hyper and in the light . . . now, sir.”

An image appeared on the screen. The Human centered on what looked like padded practice mats in some sort of martial arts classroom was both familiar and odd. She was quite young, still in her late teens though her long, wavy hair was old-woman white. Her clothes consisted of medium blue pants, slip-on blue shoes, white socks, and a light blue, flower-sprigged, long-sleeved blouse. She stared straight into the camera pickup with amber-colored eyes framed by dark blonde lashes and brows, her expression serious, even a little sad on her naturally tanned, Asiatic face.

“’Ey! I know tha’ outfit,” Spyder exclaimed softly from his backup gunnery seat. “Innat th’ one you wore in Darwin?”

“I also wore it at Afaso Headquarters outside Antananarivo, Madagascar prefecture, Earth. Shh,” the much-older-looking, short-haired, gray-clad Ia hushed her oldest military friend. “I have something to say.”

Young Ia nodded, and began speaking. “My name is Ia. Most of you will have come to know me as General Ia, Bloody Mary, or the Prophet of a Thousand Years . . . but today . . . my name is just plain Ia. Today’s date is March 1, 2490 Terran Standard, and in three more days from my point in time, I will be arriving in Melbourne, Australia Province, to sign up for a long and harrowing career in the Terran Space Force. From
your
point in time, you are hearing this message on November 1, 2499.

“To the Shredou who are trying to find your timeline’s version of me, I already told you what will happen. You will, in your desperate arrogance, rip a chunk out of the universe. I, who have the power to destroy every last one of your worlds . . . will save everyone in this galaxy. Including you.

“You will stop fighting. You will stop trying to grab Humans,” Youngest Ia recited, her voice hard, her sentences short and clipped so there was no room for reinterpretation or misunderstanding. “You will analyze what you did. You will shut off your new weapon. You will apologize. You will go home. You will
stay there
. I have given you the new boundaries of your space and Terran space. If you violate those borders, my followers among both the Humans and the
shhnk-zii
will aim the Zida”ya straight at you.

“You have heard my words. You have had time to analyze them. You have analyzed their timing. You have seen my words come true. You
know
how accurate I am,” she asserted fiercely, hands fisting at her sides in youthful, stubborn determination to be obeyed. “You will do as I say, or you will be the first to die when your ancient enemy comes to this galaxy. My Prophetic Stamp on that. You know how accurate I am. I will still be that accurate for
ten
thousand Terran Standard years.”

Ia—the one on the ship—palmed open the lock on the main cannon as her younger self spoke. She tapped the button thrice, strafing the ship slightly as it sliced through the night. The ship’s engines charged up and fired the briefest of shots three times just as she adjusted their trajectory by the tiniest bit. A dark lump translocated straight into their previous path—and the
Damnation
strafed red death through the Grey ship that popped into close proximity and streaked past before anyone could blink.

“Ah, yeah, about that, sir,” Xhuge drawled, eyeing the glowing wreckage now visible on a rearward-facing screen. “I meant to tell you that these
ri shao gou shi bing
have managed to triangulate our position based on our broadcast signal.”

“
Sheh sheh
, Xhuge,” Ia replied, sideslipping the ship to starboard to prevent return fire. The numbers on the countdown timer were getting distressingly smaller. “I know it’s the thought that counts.”

The camera angle on the broadcast switched. The youngest version of Ia turned to face the new vid pickup. Back then, Ia had broken down all possible speeches into different segments and had repeated them for the recordings, saving each portion as soon as she had a good enough version—within two or three tries, usually—just so she wouldn’t have to say the same things over and over and over with each new subtle change. Contingencies within contingencies, all planned and accounted for even back then.

“For the rest of the known galaxy,” Youngest Ia stated from her position in the past, “I wanted to thank you one last time for trusting me. I also need to apologize to my superiors in the Space Force . . . and to my legal defense.” She smiled wryly, sadly, at her unseen future viewers. “In five more days, when I take the Oath of Service, I will lie. I will lie so perfectly that your fancy machines will never detect it. I will lie to my superiors about obeying all their orders. I will lie about giving up my citizenship with the Free World Colony on long-lost Sanctuary, I will lie by implication about upholding the Charter of the Terran United Planets, because I will break the laws for which that Charter stands, and I will lie about performing my sworn duties in solely lawful ways.

“I will conduct covert communications with alien nations and broker secret treaties. I will agree to carve up and deliver an Alliance member state on a damned
platter
, being my own homeworld . . . and I will commit murder. Over, and over,” she asserted, pointing off to the side as if pointing at a mounting pile of bodies just beyond the camera’s range, “up to and including the destruction of the entire Salik race.”

Ia wrapped her ship in FTL, gently swapped ends, tapped the button, and dropped the warp field long enough to fire before enveloping it again so that she could straighten out her course. Another Grey ship burned in the star-strewn night. Young Ia lifted her chin slightly.

“I apologize for lying to you. For concealing what I will have done. I do
not
apologize for all the things I know I must do, the stains I must take upon my soul, in order to save the majority of you.”

“Harper to Ia, I have a confession to make.”

Naturally the one man she could not predict just had to throw a wrench into her plans.
“Ia here. Go.”

“Whoa!” Private Mellow muttered from his post at navigation. Bright light flared briefly near the view of the Battle Platform and its unwanted companions. “We have an explosion fifty klicks out, system upstream from Haskin’s orbit, just off the
Osceola
. Looks like the Greys brought in an extra ship and have successfully tagged one of the crystal balls the Meddlers are flying around with, by using the new weapon.”

“I kinda took that information you gave me, about the Feyori somehow being involved in time-traveling our way out of the upcoming mess?”
Harper reminded her.

“Mostly, I am telling you this right now because I want you to understand that I am going into all of this, the next nine-plus years, with my eyes wide open . . . and my heart and mind fully aware of what tasks and terrors lie ahead,” Young Ia stated, squaring her floral-printed shoulders. She looked odd, compared to the older, short-haired version, no shadows under her eyes, no lines of weariness marring her youthful face. The sober, determined look in her gaze was the same, however. “And I will tell you that
all
of these things I do, the fighting, the slaying, and arranging that people will
die
 . . .”

“Well, I contacted that Silverstone fellow. I asked him to ask around, to look for a Feyori volunteer who could come on board. After all, they don’t
always
die when time travel is involved, right?”

Ia frowned at the words coming through her headset. She split her attention farther, dividing herself into four pieces. One part strained to listen to Harper. The second part tapped over her workstation controls, retracting the battle plates that had sheltered and hidden the hundreds of small but now electrically fed and bright-glowing crysium nodes that dotted the entire hull. The move forced a shutdown of the all the insystem thruster panels, an unfortunate side effect, but it was alright; the hull was tough enough to take the few wisps of interstellar gas that lay between them and their target . . . and she knew she had aimed the ship true.

The third corner of her mind listened to her own broadcast . . . and the last piece of her attention span listened to her bridge crew, making sure Fonnyadtz ordered the port gunnery teams to fire on their own lesser countdown, thrust-bearing missiles soaring out from the
Damnation
’s P-pods. Right on time and on target, they immediately struck the hull of the Grey ship that popped into place beside them—they did no damage, of course, but not even the Greys could avoid the effects of physics; archaic chemical thrusters burning in full, they pushed the other ship just enough that, at half-Cee speeds, it veered wildly off course and well out of entropy gun range within a fraction of a blink.

“. . . I do it because I am willing, and ready, to pay the exact same price.”

“It didn’t work.”
Harper sighed in her ear.
“I couldn’t get any to come.”
He sounded regretful, frustrated, and defeated.
“So, before we die for sure, I just wanted you to know that I tried to help. And that I will always love you.”

Youngest Ia lifted her chin proudly. “I go into the Space Force already knowing that today,
your
day, I go to my death. I myself shall willingly pay the price that I am going to have asked of many of you.”

“I love you, too,”
Ia murmured, and cut off the comm link. She didn’t have any time or attention left for anything more. They were within moments of ground zero; her main screen was now showing a near-real-time view of the swooping, sphere-clutching Feyori pairs dodging and weaving through twenty enemy ships. The countdown timer occupying a corner of every workstation, every screen, was now down to double digits at best, and not nearly enough of them anymore.

“But I give you this final warning,” her young, fierce, determined self growled as the oldest and last version of Ia pushed down on the Godstrike button one last time, and held it down, “that I will take my enemies
with
me into the Room for the Dead. Whether it’s in my time, or your time, or
ten thousand
years ahead!”

Something swirled into view right next to one of the Grey ships fighting several kilometers out from the
Osceola
. The explosion and its abrupt, extra-deep blackness startled two sphere-bearing Feyori—no doubt the ship’s original target—into dodging erratically. The Grey ship abruptly vanished, startling them again; they dropped the sphere and sped off in opposite directions, one off to port, and the other swerving back toward the starboard, leaving their glowing cargo to roll on through the night until they could come back to fetch it.

Ia’s last words were a whisper that came from the viewscreen, her not-quite-eighteen-year-old body tight with fear, her teeth bared in determination, her amber eyes stark with a mixture of despair, determination, and love.
“For I am a soldier . . .”

The Godstrike fired, spearing that poor, rattled Meddler in bright-hot red as it crossed between the
Damnation
and the broken rift. The sensors shut off protectively, blanking out their forward view at the last second, but it did not matter. It was the last second, and only one thing mattered to Ia: checking the timestreams one last time.

It should have been hard to see with the light almost gone from the timeplains’ sky, but she could see it. In that last, slowed-down fraction of Time deep in the back of her mind . . . the Future was firmly on course. Every canal, every levee, every ridge and ditch had been dug as deep and as strong as she could make them. Every trick, every death, every sacrifice, every lie, all of it was finally, firmly in place.

Night fell on the battlefield of her efforts. As the last of the light vanished from the timeplains in her mind, as that blacker-than-black hole in space swallowed everything . . .
everything
 . . . Ia knew she had
won
.

I stay
sane
because I
am
sane! I am
sane
because I am willing to
stand up and fight,
when others would lie down and die. I will stand before you right now, and
swear
by my Prophetic Stamp:
No More!

No more violence, no more bloodshed, no more ceaseless, needless
death
—not
one
pico more! By God, I will
not
stand still for rampant death, nor let it pass me by! Not at
my
post. Not on
my
watch
! I will throw my
own
life into the danger zone and stand between our beloved homes and the war’s worst desolation—and no
other
life shall pay!

For
I
am a
soldier . . .
and
that place is
mine!

TURN THE PAGE FOR A SPECIAL PREVIEW AS JEAN JOHNSON RETURNS TO THE WORLD OF THE FLAME SEA IN

DAWN OF THE FLAME SEA

ON SALE MARCH 2015 AS AN EBOOK FROM INTERMIX!

YEAR 0, MONTH 0, DAY 0
THE SEASON OF LOW SUMMER

Energy shimmered into view, at first forming a single rippling, wavering line, then splitting and curving into an arch. It was pointed at the top somewhat like the pupil of a cat’s eye, though if the bottom was pointed as well, its point was lost under the uneven stone floor. It wasn’t the only source of light. Within moments, scudding balls of shimmering opalescent magic, like overgrown dust bunnies, soared in through the cavern walls. The energy balls impacted on the edge of the arch, brightening and strengthening it with each impact. Two, five, fifteen, then a trickle of a few more stragglers soared in to join the arch. A few seconds later, it stabilized.

A dark-clad body dashed through that shimmering portal into the dark cavern. The man spun, skidding a little as his boot soles slipped on the gritty, uneven surface. One of the marks tattooed on his tanned face shimmered briefly with an odd, faint, brownish glow. He turned in a circle, sword in one hand, crystal-tipped shaft in the other, ready to stab or smash anything that threatened the glimmering archway.

Nothing attacked. The iridescent lights played over the mottled, spotted granite of the cavern walls, and gleamed off the black hair of the only man in the chamber. The sueded silk and black leather of his clothes absorbed most of the light rather than reflected it, leaving him looking like nothing more than a head and a pair of weapon-wielding hands attached to a humanoid shadow.

“Ban?”
a feminine voice asked. It was projected through the crystalline hoop piercing the middle shell of his ear.

Something about the chamber, with its uneven folds and ragged exit, made him twist and peer all around for several extra seconds. The only sounds he could hear were his own heartbeat and breathing, the soft scrape of his feet on the stone floor, and a faint hiss from the Veil. Scents were simple and plain: warm sandstone, dust, his own body, and a hint of moisture in the mostly still air.

Unable to spot what it was, he waited . . . waited . . . then shook his head slightly and spoke. “It appears to be clear. You may come through now.”

The rippling, opalescent veil brightened, scintillating in streaks of light that pulled back to reveal a heavily wooded meadow, and a cluster of men and women moving toward the doorway in the Veil between worlds. Unlike Ban, all of them were golden-haired and golden-eyed, more lithe and lean than muscular, with ears that swept up to modest points rather than bearing the smooth curve of his own.

One of the three men stepped through and lifted a crystal in his hand. Energy flared outward, bathing the chamber in an iridescent mist before sucking itself back inside. He frowned a little, tilted the faceted oval and studied the shifting colors captured within, then shrugged. “It seems to be safe to use Fae magic, though I’ll need to study this realm in depth. There are some oddities . . .”

“When are there not? Can you be specific, Éfan?”
The voice came from the tallest and stateliest of the three women remaining on the other side. No sound escaped the portal archway; her voice was heard solely through their communication earrings.

“The portal stabilized much faster than anticipated, my lady,” Éfan stated, still pacing slowly about the cavern. “A positive sign, but still something to be cautious about.”

“It is not enough to turn us back,”
Jintaya decided.
“We will continue establishing the
pantean
.”

Two of the four women on the other side stepped through; with the two men, they formed a chain while the dark-haired Ban stood watch by the exit tunnel and the blond male with the crystal egg continued to frown softly at the device. It was not a chain of muscles and limbs, however; instead, each of the four merely lifted their hands and the various boxes, bags, chests, and crates started floating across the archway. Goods moved from one universe to the other silently, almost effortlessly, though of course using magic instead of muscle would still cost each of them in some way.

The cavern selected for this transfer was fairly large, if uneven. The Veil had been pierced at one end, the exit tunnel at the other, with a dip and three terraces between the two. Bags and boxes, chests and bundles were floated through and settled to either side, sorted by color-coded ribbons and tags to differentiate between personal belongings and shared materials. This cave was at the bottom of a long chain of caverns and tunnels leading up to the surface, around a dozen. It would make an excellent, defensible home base.

The last of the crates and barrels came through, and now furniture floated past. Everything they would need to set up an initial observation outpost would be sent through for their use, including stores of food to last them long enough to either find edible things to cultivate and domesticate here on this world, or long enough to realize nothing was edible by their kind, in which case other plans would be made. The upper caverns would be claimed and occupied as rough living, working, and storage quarters, and eventually they would reshape the very rock of this place into something much more civilized. But that would take time.

With the Veil portal opened and stabilized, the light pouring from its magics was now equally steady. However, a hint of light off to the left of the archway flickered faintly, erratically. Narrowing his eyes, Ban watched out of the corner of his eyes—and sprinted for the spot, sword stabbing into the narrow rift even as he reached it. A frantic yell from the other side of the crack stopped his thrust, but only so he could pull the blade out and peer inside. Flames flickered and wobbled, casting weird shadows, but it did allow him to see a man running away from the crack, up a twisting tunnel raggedly illuminated by the burning torch in his hand.

“Ban! What is it?” Éfan called out. Parren and Fali looked up briefly from their levitation efforts, but had to keep working.

“A spy!” Unsure if that passage connected to the others or not, he wedged his hand into the narrow crack and flexed the muscles under one of the many tattoos painting his tanned hide. Between one breath and the next, he shrunk down, scrambled through, and re-enlarged himself as soon as he could. Ban flexed another tattoo to keep track of the twists and turns of the mazelike caves so he could find his way back, and gave chase.

The wand in Ban’s hand was brighter than the torch in the native’s, making his passage hard to see whenever the other man got around a curve or a bend up ahead. The smell and sight of its soot lingering in the air, and the thumping of his feet on the cavern stone, kept the black-clad warrior on the fleeing man’s track. A spy who saw the Veilway was not allowed to speak of it to anyone else. That meant catch, or kill.

Jintaya will want him caught, so that we can attempt to erase his memories,
Ban knew, long legs catching up on the fleeing native slowly at best, thanks to the smaller man’s evident agility.
Now how did he get in so close, on a path we could not see . . . ? Ah.

These caverns were indeed connected to the others, though the connecting point was so low, he had to drop onto his belly to slither through the low gap the other man used more readily in a rapid, scuttling crawl. Ban’s glowing wand remained steady, but the native’s crude pitch torch nearly guttered out from being scraped along the floor. It didn’t stop his flight, though. By the time he got through, the native was halfway across the sun-lit cave. It was not a direct exit, but the next passage was broad and led out to a cave that was half crevasse.

Finally free to run unimpeded by twists and turns in the granite face, Ban let his longer legs close the distance between him and his fleet-footed quarry. In the bright sunlight angling down from overhead, he could see the young man was about as heavily tanned as he was, with matted dark hair, some sort of primitive leather kilt wrapped around his hips, and very worn leather sandals strapped to his feet. One of those straps broke as he darted out of the crack they were following. He tripped, stumbled, then started yelling and waving his free arm, torch still held aloft. Sour sweat trailed in his wake, the scent of fear and an unwashed body, along with hints of pungent greenery and a drier kind of air than the caverns had held.

Abruptly wary, Ban skidded to a stop at the edge of that opening. Beyond it lay the green-speckled, wind-and-water carved ravine that the scrying spells of the others had scouted and checked. There should have been—and were—a number of wild-growing bushes, trees, grasses, even a few flowers, and a half-dried, somewhat muddy pond suggesting that this area did flood from time to time, despite the palpable heat radiating off of the rocky walls of the canyon.

There should
not
have been a good two hundred and more men, women, and children, ranging from babes in arms to graybeards. Most of whom looked thin, dusty, haggard from hard travel on little food, and whom had apparently pulled sledges of primitive belongings, of leather goods and grass-woven baskets. Though the wind was shifting the air only a little bit, he could smell how desperately everyone needed a bath. There was water nearby for bathing, and he could see dampness on clothes and skin where some had slaked their thirst, but they must have only just arrived within less than an hour.

Just over one hour ago, when Jintaya herself had checked through the initial hair-thin opening of the Veil, the cave system and its immediate surroundings had been native-free. Natives who were now grabbing for their spears, their slings and primitive bows, and who were pushing their children back out of harm’s way as they faced the black-clad stranger who had chased one of their own out of the caves.

“Ban, what is happening?”
he heard Jintaya demand, even as the man he had chased, a middle-aged fellow with a good amount of stamina, started pointing his way and babbling in the local tongue.

“Jintaya . . . we have a problem,” he murmured, carefully lowering his sword so that it was not quite so threatening. The subtle blue tattoo marked around his eye, his ear, and all the way down to his throat twitched and itched a little, struggling to comprehend and translate their language.

“Tell me you did not kill the spy, Ban,”
she stated reprovingly.

“No, but I should have,” he replied quietly, counting numbers, gauging weapon skills, and debating just how much of a fight he might have on his hands. The pale blue tattoo marking him from right eye to ear to throat and linked permanently to his personal, alien magics, finished making sense of their language. Syllables, vowels and consonants became sounds imbued with meaning. Words such as
magic
and
great power
and
anima beings
, whatever
anima
was, made him flinch. “He’s now telling about . . . two hundred twenty people more what he has seen. Male and female, young and old. A tribe of some sort. They look like they have traveled far to get here, and have only just arrived.”

“Shae? Tash keleth!”
she swore. He blinked a little, not used to hearing the great lady curse like that, but otherwise kept himself calm and ready . . . until he heard several more running up behind him. Twisting sideways so he could face both groups, he held out his curved blade in warning, the pale gold metal reflecting the light like a slice of the sun.

Five more men and two women for a total of seven humans appeared behind him. They carried torches and were wrapped in rough leather garments held on with crudely woven cords, stumbling to a stop in the ravine behind him. They eyed his weapon and unfamiliar, neatly tailored garments with wide, wary eyes. The crevasse was narrow enough, Ban could easily keep them blocked off from the rest of their tribe. He could hold off both groups, so long as he stayed in the narrow opening, unless the larger one decided to start slinging spears and shooting arrows at him all at once.

“I need guidance, my lady,” he murmured, prodding the woman on the other end of the crystal earrings linking the expedition members together. “Do I kill them, or not?”

She sighed heavily.
“The damage is done. Do not harm them. Return to the
pantean
.”

Seven versus one, fully blocking his path, with an order not to harm any of them? Sighing roughly, he shifted his weight, rolled an ankle to activate another tattoo, and leaped at the wall on his right. Foot clinging for a brief, magic-assisted moment, he whirled and leaped higher, bounding back and forth across the gap of the narrow chasm. Each step angled him back, up, and over the heads of the gaping men and women, until he was free to drop to the ground and sprint back the way he had come without fear of being in range of an attack.

Or rather, he ran back almost the same way. Taking the main passages their spells had scouted, he reached the mouth of the innermost cave in time to find all six of the others waiting for his return, and the Veil Arch sealed against normal eyesight. He could still feel the Veil, the traces of warm, sunlight-like Fae energies radiating from where it had stood, but the portal was now hidden behind an illusion of the cavern wall having been moved forward by a few feet.

Only Fae powers could shift that wall back. Of the eight members of the
pantean
, Ban had not the right kind of magic to move it and access the way back. Then again, of the eight of them, he had no reason to go back. As soon as he crossed into the cavern, Éfan passed his hand over the opening. More rock sprang up—an illusion of rock, sealing them inside for their protection. A glance to the left showed the crack in the wall had a similar faux-stone patch.

The other two men, Adan and Kaife, had finished passing through supplies and belongings, and had joined their wives, Fali and Parren. They were busy donning the flexible, overlapping scales of
faeshiin
armor in the same shade of gold as Ban’s blade. If this moment came to a fight, Ban would not be the only one armed and ready. The third woman in their group, however, did not look ruffled by the thought of combat. Instead, she was studying the water inside a silver bowl balanced in her hands, clad in a flowing golden gown that shimmered in the light of the crystal torches rapped and set around the chamber for illumination.