An Officer’s Duty (69 page)

Myang studied her. Lacing her fingers together on the curved surface of the desk in front of her, she leaned on her elbows
and addressed Ia. “If you really are as strong a precognitive as the reports we’ve received have indicated, Lieutenant, then surely you knew Project Titania was conceived over three years ago. Given that, why wait so long before revealing your knowledge of it, and making this proposal now, of all times?”

“For one, you wouldn’t have believed me back then, sir. I’ll remind you that the roots of Project Titania started before the incidents at Zubeneschamali, back when I was a mere sergeant. For another, I didn’t have any practical experience in piloting or operating a ship’s gunnery systems at the time,” Ia confessed dryly. “For a third, there are three major leaks in the upper echelons of the Space Force. Thankfully, none in this room, but if I
had
told anyone of my psychic abilities—aside from Commander Ferrar, who figured it out on his own—the Salik would have gotten wind of it, and they would have been far more prepared against me just a few weeks ago. If they’d learned what my true capabilities were, I would’ve been so covered up in those anti-psi machines, that they would’ve been hard-pressed to find a place to
bite
me.

“I still would have broken free, but more lives would have died that day. Possibly even Admiral Viega’s. I couldn’t risk that.” She lifted her jacket again in indication. “I honestly don’t care about these medals, sirs. I am honored to have received them, yes, but I’m not in this for glittery or glory. I’m in this to save innocent lives. You put me in charge of that cannon, and you give me enough leeway to do what needs to be done, and I will turn the tide of the Second Salik War for you—and I’ll remind you that
this
time, we’re on the same level playing field that the Alliance initially suffered before we Terrans joined the fray, with our hyperrelay communication arrays and our OTL traveling speeds.
This
time, we don’t have those strong extra advantages. And with that damned machine being developed and manufactured out there, we don’t even have the advantage of our psychic abilities, right now.”

Sitting back, the Admiral-General folded her arms across her chest. “You make it sound like I should be giving you
carte blanche
, Lieutenant.”

“To an extent, yes,” Ia admitted. That caused several of the other men and women to choke and cough at her audacity. She ignored their affronted stares. “Give me the freedom to
handpick my crew, and the leeway to negotiate my patrol assignments, and I will pull off miracles for you. That ship
cannot
be assigned to a specific route. It will be needed in disparate battle zones placed hundreds of lightyears apart…and
not
always where you’d think it will be needed. Out of a thousand hovering butterflies, very few people can predict which ones might start the next hurricane, let alone
will
start that hurricane, and do so with the level of accuracy that I can provide for you. That I
want
to provide, given the limitations of Time that are at hand.”

“And who would you have for your handpicked crew?” one of the grey-clad women scoffed. “Half an entire Marine Corps division? The Troubleshooters? The entire Knifeman Corps?”

“No, sir—though I will need at least two Knifemen, a few Sharpshooters, and a handful of Troubleshooters on my crew,” Ia stated. “Mostly only those who can be spared. I will not waste our resources by asking for those who will be needed far more, elsewhere. But I
will
need them. We have a very big, very immediate problem on our hands, and it is those damned anti-psi machines.

“Our psychic abilities have been one of our few advantages over the amphibious races,” she reminded the men and women around her. “Those machines
have
to be hunted down and the source-points for their development and creation
must
be destroyed. Those machines will even slow
me
down…but they cannot
stop
me. I am therefore the best choice to spearhead the efforts to track them down. Unfortunately, I am only one woman, and I will need the expert help of others to find and destroy their production lines. This is something I know can be done during the shakedown cruise of the new ship, which kills yet another bird for you with only one stone’s throw.”

“And again, what size army do you expect us to grant you, in order to carry off such a feat?” the Admiral-General asked her.

“I only need a crew of one hundred and sixty, sir. Well, one hundred and sixty-one, if you count my DoI-appointed chaplain,” Ia amended dryly.

“Impossible,”
the admiral in grey snorted. “That ship is currently designed to be run with a minimum crew of five hundred. You’d have to cross-train everyone in three other jobs!”

“I know. Which is one of the other reasons why I’m here
now
, before the interior has been finished, as well as before you’ve assigned the command of that ship to anyone else—this would’ve been easier if my name had already been on your list of possible captains,” she half muttered, rubbing the bridge of her nose with her free hand. “I’ll need three months to get the ship retrofitted to the right specifications, and to select and train the necessary crewmembers.

“Follow that with a two-month combination of shakedown cruise and anti-psi hunt, and we’ll be ready to go to war a month before the Salik actually do.
If
everything goes according to plan,” Ia amended. She shrugged slightly. “There is a twenty-three percent probability that the Salik and their allies will go to war a couple of weeks to a month early, which is why we’ll need to
be
ready before they actually do—if you can arrange to stall the entry of those allies into the war front, all the better, sirs.”

“The Salik
and
their allies?” one of the other Army generals asked. “Who in their right mind would ally with them?”

“Who do you think?” one of the Special Forces generals replied. He tapped something on the workstation console in front of him, and a list of names, grouped by species, appeared on several of the smaller screens ringing the room. “Not a single Choya was present at that banquet, waiting to be eaten, because the Salik find their blue hemocyanin blood to be literally distasteful. The Choya have decided they are tired of lagging behind the other races in various areas of technology and respect, and have chosen to ally with their fellow amphibians.”

“They are overconfident that the Salik will leave them off the galactic lunch menu,” Ia agreed. “Unfortunately, the Salik
will
leave them off of it, so long as the Choya are useful. And it’s mostly been the Choya slipping various bits of tech and other commodities through the Blockade lines. I tried to stop what I could reach, but most of the time, I couldn’t deviate from my orders.”

“You make it sound as if you can predict their every single move for the next century,” an admiral behind Myang muttered.

Ia shook her head slowly. “A century is as clear to me as a day, Admiral. Unfortunately, we don’t have a century. We have a matter of months before the first tidal wave of war crashes
over our heads, and only a handful of years before the second war hits.”

“Second war?” Myang asked her sharply. “What second war?”

Holding up the fingers of her free hand, Ia listed them. “I am fighting four wars, Admiral-General. The first one is the return of the Salik and their plans for galactic conquest and lunch. The second one is the return of the
Greys
, sir, which will prompt the third war, which will be a civil war on my homeworld.”

“The Greys?” Myang repeated, frowning at Ia.

“Yes, sir,” Ia confirmed. “They will come for us
before
we are through with the Salik, when our best resources will still be needed for fighting back the amphibians, sir.”

She paused to let that sink in. More than one of the officers around her blanched at the thought. Myang tightened her mouth for a moment. “And the fourth war?”

“I will tell you something nobody else in the Alliance knows, sir,” Ia said. “The Greys are
not
from this galaxy. They originally came from a galaxy that used to exist in an area the astronomers call the Blight.”

“
Used
to exist?” General Sranna challenged her.

“Yes, sir. Three hundred years from now, the ancestral enemy of the Greys, the ones who destroyed the Greys’ home galaxy, will approach the Milky Way. They are…they’re like a hive of wasps, is the best way I can express it,” Ia offered, gesturing with her free hand. “They are traveling in a Dysun’s Sphere, they are overcrowded—which is a frightening thought, to think of something that astronomically huge as
being
overcrowded—and they are looking to build a second hive.

“In order to build one, sirs, it will require the
entire
resources of a new galaxy. Our galaxy.” She met his gaze soberly, and the gaze of the general next to him, and the admiral, and the gaze of the Admiral-General herself. “I promise, I will give you and your successors instructions on how to deal with them when the time is right. But in order for the Alliance to still be
around
to deal with them, we have to fight off the Salik, and fight back the Greys. Each war has to be fought in the right way at the right time.”

“And your homeworld? You said you’ll be fighting a war
back on, what, Sanctuary is it?” Myang asked her. “Is that why your brother ‘mysteriously’ won the biggest Lottery jackpot in Alliance history? To fuel an insurrection?”

“No, sir. That war will be started by the
other
side. My brother’s money is being used to create defensive fortifications, and stockpile sentientarian resources,” she explained. Ia held up her finger, cutting off the older woman. “Before you make any other accusations, sir,
think
of where Sanctuary is located.
Think
about it.”

Snapping her fingers, she projected a map of the galaxy on the central viewscreen behind her. One which outlined the Terran Empire in blue, Sanctuary in gold a short distance away, and, directly behind it, a huge blob of silvery grey.

“My homeworld, gentlemeioas, is on the backside of Terran space, in the direction that the
Greys
retreated. It is, in fact, on the very border of Grey territory. The only things that will save my people from being
farmed
by the Greys are its extreme high gravity, and the xenophobic isolationism of its current ruling government. When the Greys do attack, this will fuel their paranoia to a near-catastrophic degree, to the point where they will destroy any starship, orbital shuttle, and even their own
space station
in the effort to cut themselves off from the rest of the universe.

“That money has been given by my brother to a nonprofit organization to make
sure
my planet can survive two hundred years of isolation behind enemy lines. You cannot evacuate them, either,” she stressed as two of the generals on her right started to speak. “Aside from the sheer logistic improbability, and all those families stubbornly refusing to give up their first-worlder colonial rights, you cannot move the
children
of Sanctuary without adversely affecting their health. The gravitational differences between Sanctuary and Parker’s World are too great.

“I could go into far greater detail as to
why
their continued survival on Sanctuary is so important,” Ia dismissed, “but for now, I will only say this: What the people of Sanctuary are destined to become when it’s safe for them to reemerge will be
vital
for the war effort three hundred years from now. It is enough for me, a daughter of Sanctuary, to know that they
will
survive, and to help them in the only way I can, giving them the funds to ensure they have the means for it.

“You and I have bigger problems on our hands right now, Admiral-General,” Ia told Myang. “Ones that are a lot closer to
your
homeworlds. Things that
we
can handle, just as there are things only my family and their friends can handle back home. Let them handle it. We have enough troubles of our own, right now.”

Myang subsided. Her brown eyes studied Ia thoughtfully, though the rest of her expression was shuttered. Ia lifted the jacket still held in her other hand.

“Admiral-General, sir. You have been apprised of the two hidden, lethal flaws of the Godstrike cannon. You have been advised on how best to still utilize it, in spite of those flaws. You have been offered a better than fair chance at neutralizing the enemy’s latest weapon, those anti-psi generators, and you have been warned with plenty of time to prepare for the return of an enemy so advanced, even the
Feyori
tread carefully near their territory.

“I thank all of you for giving me these ten minutes and more of your time…but arrogant as it may be, by the weight of this jacket, and all the honor, effort, and regulation-constrained duty that it represents, I
will
have an answer. Choose carefully, Admiral-General Myang: Should I spit up a lung on all that
this
represents, as my predecessor was forced to do? Or would you have me put it back on and let me
fight
for you, as I
truly
can?”

Silence stretched between them. Two or three of the other officers opened their mouths to speak, then thought better of it. Ia tried very hard not to think, not to project, not to do anything in any way which could be misconstrued as undue influence. The man in grey on her right, second tier, was General Jolen Phong. Head of the Psi Division of the Special Forces, and a Rank 15 telepath, he was more than strong enough to pick up on any stray projected thoughts. Ia carefully did not do that.

The Admiral-General sat forward, folding her hands on top of one another on the curved tabletop between her and Ia.

“I don’t care
how
many medals you may have earned, soldier. I will
not
hand control of our most advanced ship into the care of a mere Lieutenant First Grade.”

Sick fear pooled in the pit of Ia’s stomach. She forced her numb fingers to tighten a bit more on the collar of her heavy jacket, keeping it carefully aloft. She was quite sure that the Admiral-General’s dark eyes didn’t miss the sudden paling of her face, nor the clenching of her hand, either.