An Officer’s Duty (3 page)

Chuckling, Ia hugged him back. Unlike their elder brother, Fyfer was normal for a Sanctuarian. Naturally muscular, but short and not nearly the brick-walled body that Thorne was. So she squeezed and sort of picked him up. Just a few inches, but enough to prove she was still stronger. He
oofed
in turn, then laughed and slapped her on the back.

“Slag, Ia! You used to pick me up higher than that! What happened to you in the Army?” he joked.

“It was the
Marine Corps
,” Ia shot back, dropping him gently onto his feet. “And I’ve been living in lesser gravity. I’ve been working out as heavy as I can get it for several hours a day, but still
living
in lightworlder spaces.”

Releasing her younger brother, she faced her half-twin. They had different mothers but the same father, both of them born barely half an hour apart. Both were anomalies in a world of gravitationally challenged heights. Thorne just held open his arms, and Ia walked into them, nestling her head on his shoulder and her arms around his waist. He didn’t threaten her ribs, just hugged her back.

“Mizzu,”
he murmured, his voice a quiet bass rumble.
I missed you.
The word was the shorthand speech from their childhood, raised like full-blooded twins, treated like twins, thinking like twins, until her gifts started developing in earnest.

“Mizzu tu,”
she agreed.
I missed you, too.
She hugged him, relaxing for a long moment…until her skin crawled, warning
her that her precognitive gift was trying to open, trying to read all the possibilities of his future. Thankfully, the moment she shifted back, he released her. It might have been two years, but he still remembered how touchy her abilities could be.

“You okay?” Thorne asked her as she stepped back. He wasn’t the only one giving her a concerned look.

Ia nodded…then shook her head. This was more than just the timestreams prickling at his proximity. Holding up her hand, she squeezed her eyes shut and focused on strengthening the walls in her mind.
No. Not right now. Not here and now, among all these people. I will
not
succumb to the Fire Girl Prophecy right now…

Pushing it away, resisting, she breathed hard for a few moments. Someone else screamed, making her jump and snap her eyes open again. It wasn’t a member of her family that had collapsed; instead, it was a familiar, purple-wrapped body. The Christian missionary, Amanda Something-or-Other, had dropped to her knees.

“Fire!”
Amanda screamed, startling the mostly Human collection of tourists into wide-eyed, wary looks. “Fire! Birds in the sky! A girl—fire in her eyes! Fire in the world! A…a cathedral—a wall in the sky—
aaaaaaah
!”

Those who were native to Sanctuary looked at her, too. They, however, weren’t confused by her outcry. Instead, they were broken into three groups. A few concerned-looking spaceport personnel hurried forward, mostly to ward off the few concerned tourists who were about to touch her—never a good idea, since the Fire Girl attacks tended to spread on contact more often than not. The rest were either blasé about the attack, looking for a few moments in curiosity before shrugging and moving on, or they hastily backed up, sketching corona-circles on their foreheads and muttering under their breath, no doubt prayers warding off any evil influence from the “demonically possessed.”

Since it looked like the missionary would get some of the help she needed, a sketchy explanation of the phenomenon and suitable reassurances from spaceport staff, Ia herself settled into the non-Church category of natives and ignored the poor woman’s plight. Stooping, she picked up her kitbag and the locked travel case stuffed with her writing pad and all the
postdated letters she had printed out during the journey home. “I’ll be fine. We have a lot to do. Move out.”

She didn’t miss the look her mothers exchanged, nor the glance they shared with Thorne, but Fyfer immediately started chatting about all the things she had missed, his graduation half a year early and subsequent enrollment in an acting school, Thorne’s fast-paced progress in his space station governance degree, and of course questions on what her own last two years had been like. Ia did her best to listen and respond, but Fyfer didn’t cease the steady stream of chatter until they were at the family ground car, and he finally noticed that Ia wasn’t moving to put her things into the vehicle parked on one of the tiers of the spaceport’s garage.

Instead, she had stopped, closed her eyes, and was simply breathing. Deep, steady breaths, the kind that sought to fill every last corner of her lungs.

“Hey,” Fyfer admonished her. “Are you falling asleep already? I thought you Marines were tough!”

“I’m not
that
tired. I’m just enjoying the smell of home. You don’t get ozone like this on other worlds, unless you deliberately go around creating sparks. Or the dampness, or the flickering of lightning pressing through your eyelids like little feathery touches…” She sighed and opened her eyes, smiling wryly. “It’s just not the same, elsewhere.”

“So what
is
it like on other worlds?” Thorne asked her, taking her bags and tucking them into the boot.

She held up her hand and gestured for the others to climb into the car, then took the front passenger seat, her preferred spot so her gifts didn’t trigger. Thorne took the driver’s seat; with his broad, muscular shoulders, it was either let him drive or be squished in the backseat as he took up half of the space usually meant for three people. Once the doors had slid up into place and they were moving, Ia answered his question.

“What’s it like on other worlds? Bouncy, until you get used to the gravity. The air can smell like a million different things. Recycled and dusty if it’s a mining domeworld. Slimy and moldy if you’ve set down in a rainy spot on an atmospheric world, like that planet where we helped out the flood victims. And then there’s the recycled air of a starship, with cleaning products and sweating bodies in the gym, lubricants and hydraulics fluids
in the mechsuit repair bays…and of course the greenery in lifesupport, but they limit access to that part of the ship. The Motherworld didn’t smell bad,” she added. “Lots of flowers and green growing things. Not enough thunderstorms, but not bad.”

“Ooh! Tell us about the Motherworld!” Amelia interjected.

“Yes, please,” Aurelia urged Ia. “What’s it like? I’ve always wondered.”

Smiling, Ia complied. “My first view was from orbit. It’s really not that much different from Sanctuary, except the night-side glows with a million cities, and not from crystal fields and the few settlements we have. And only so many lightning storms can be seen, and only so many aurora curtains and sprite jets…You can’t really see the lightning on Earth from space unless it’s in a really big storm. And then of course my first stop was Antananarivo, on Madagascar Island. It’s very tropical in the lowlands, but where I was, which was up in the hills, it’s a bit cooler. More like around here.”

“That was at the Afaso Headquarters, right?” Thorne asked her, directing the car into the flow of traffic skirting the capital city.

Ia nodded. “That’s right. Grandmaster Ssarra says hello, by the way. They have a lot of land, much of it established as a nature preserve as well as farmland for self-sufficiency. There are
lots
of green plants there, compared to here—yes, the grass really
is
greener, on Earth.” That made her family laugh. Enjoying their humor, Ia smiled and continued. “They have none of the blue plants like we have, not even as imports, and very few that look even vaguely purple. There are some yellow ones—grass when it’s dry, for one—but the first impression you get of a nondesert landscape on Earth is of a million different shades of green…”

A door opened down the hall. It was followed by shuffling footsteps, which were not quite lost under the soft, rhythmic grunts coming from Ia as she measured out a set of sit-ups, toes hooked under the living room couch for counterbalance. Her biomother, Amelia, squinted at her in the light from the reading lamp.

“Gataki mou?”
Amelia shuffled a few steps closer, her bare feet
tucked into worn pink slippers and her body wrapped in a fuzzy green bathrobe. “What are you doing, child?”

A little distracted by being called her old, Greek nickname of
my kitten
, Ia struggled to finish the set. Uncurling her stomach after three more crunches, she relaxed on the springy, rubbery floor, breathing hard. “I’m doing my morning calisthenics…and I’m really out of shape. I did what I could on the flight from Earth, but…I had to leave my weight suit behind. It would’ve cost too much to transport all that mass.”

“Well…can you keep it down a little?” her mother asked. Behind her, the door opened again. “And maybe not start so early? I know we changed the beds in your old room so your brothers could have a little more room, which means you have to sleep out here, but…well, the floor here in the living room kind of squeaks, and…”

“Have you lost all sense of common courtesy?” Aurelia demanded, coming up behind her wife. Being slightly taller, she glared at Ia over her partner’s shoulder. “It’s five in the morning! Not even your brothers get up until seven at the earliest, and only because Thorne goes to school that early.”

“Sorry.” Sitting up, Ia shrugged. “I’ll go for a run or something.”

“In this neighborhood? At
this
hour?” Amelia asked.

Pushing to her feet, Ia arched her brow, looking down at her mothers. “Would
you
mess with someone as tall as me, who can comfortably jog in
this
gravity?”

“No, but we’re not talking about vagrants or gang members,” Aurelia reminded her daughter. “The Church has been moving more and more converts into this area. They’re not going to look kindly on some…some solitary weirdo jogging around the block at this hour. Anything that isn’t in Church doctrine, they won’t like it.”

“
And
they’ll let you know,” Amelia agreed.

Rolling her eyes, Ia swept her hands over her hair, raking back the sweaty locks. “I
do
know, Mother. But I’m going straight into the Naval Academy after this, and they’ll be expecting me to stay in shape even while on an Extended Leave.”

It didn’t matter which one she was addressing. Amelia was Mom, Aurelia was Ma, but both were forever
Mother
to all
three of their kids, and usually addressed as such when the pair were tag teaming said kids.

Aurelia lifted her finger. “Don’t sass us,
gataki
. If you’re going to go jogging, then go. But go
quietly
. Your mother and I need our sleep. We closed the restaurant for your homecoming yesterday, but we’ll have a busy day of it today, since it’s the end of the week.”

“I’ll go put on my cammies,” Ia offered, holding up her hands. “Even Church members have seen the occasional episode of
Space Patrol
, so they should know what a soldier looks like…and I’m just as sure that, by now, everyone who came into Momma’s Restaurant in the last month knows that you’ve been expecting me home from the military.”

“I suppose that’ll have to do,” Aurelia muttered. She pointed a tanned finger at her daughter. “And no more getting up at ‘oh dark hundred,’ you got that? That’s an order.” She folded her arms across her chest as Amelia turned to eye her. “A mother
always
outranks her little girl.”

There were several retorts Ia could’ve made to that, but she refrained. Her mothers were trying to reduce her to the little girl they knew and loved—and they were succeeding to a point—but Ia’s universe had changed. It was an uncomfortable, unhappy realization, acknowledging that her parents were no longer the center of that universe.

Instead of replying, she sighed and grabbed her kitbag, tucked at the end of the couch where she had been sleeping. Fishing out a set of mottled browns, she headed for the bathroom. Amelia and Aurelia let her pass, then returned to their bedroom.

Her parents had never had much room in their apartment above the small but popular restaurant: just the two bedrooms, a bathroom, an office, the living room, and a small nook of a kitchen, which was rarely used to cook any meal other than breakfast. Sleeping on the couch wasn’t any worse than sleeping in a tent, and she was already in the habit of tidying her bed, so folding up the blankets right after waking and rising hadn’t been a problem.

It was the getting up part that seemed to be the problem.
I forgot to adjust my hours to Mom and Ma’s hours, not Sanctuarian hours, on the trip out from Earth. I forgot they don’t
get up until almost 9 a.m. and don’t go to bed until midnight—though I’d think I would’ve noticed last night how “late” everyone stayed up, catching up with all the gossip I never bothered to scry for in the timestreams…

Speaking of which, I should check the timestreams, see what I need to do versus what I should do, while waiting for my family to wake up again. Better yet, I’ll take my writing pad with me and work on jotting down yet more prophecies electrokinetically while I jog,
she decided, slipping out of her plain brown T-shirt and shorts. It was a little chilly outside, the weather more autumn-like than late summer, so jogging in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt wouldn’t be too warm.
Three hundred years go by awfully fast when you’re dead and can’t tell anyone how to stop a galaxy-wide war.