Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship (11 page)

As she had once told a certain lieutenant colonel of the Department of Innovations, back when putting her crew together, she was
not
the only person who could measure and manipulate the flow of Time. The worst of it, however, was the fact that she couldn’t even run a headcount to see who had managed to escape the attack. Neither precognitively nor postcognitively; not and be sure she was seeing reality. If it didn’t require instinctive, split-second battle timing, she was now effectively mind-blind.

The loss of her outer eye paled in comparison to the loss of the inner one, and her anger outburned the agony of her injury as the truck rolled and bounced in its rapid retreat.

A tiny, petty part of myself still holds Brigadier General Mattox responsible for the combined Charlie Foxtrot which Roghetti’s Roughriders and my Damned went through. But the lion’s share, oh, that belonged to someone else entirely. Well, technically two someones. No commander likes a Charlie Foxtrot, and this one—what? Oh, that’s archaic military-speak for when a situation goes seriously wrong. Charlie Foxtrot, the call signs for the letters C and F, is the polite shorthand for calling it a cluster f***—

. . . You’ll actually have to bleep that one out? Sorry. I won’t mention it again, then. Suffice to say, it’s shorthand for things going very, very wrong, usually in combat. Regardless of how or when or why, we still have to deal with the resulting mess whenever we’re handed one. My first concern was therefore the safety of the people under me, and by extension those under Captain Roghetti. My second was for the breach in the Army’s line. It didn’t help that they kept pressing us back, and back, but at least they continued to pursue us rather than spread out and attack the locals.

I may have powers above and beyond most everyone out there, but I am first a soldier, and foremost an officer. Vengeance had to sit farther down the line and wait for its turn.

~Ia

JUNE 9, 2498 T.S.

KUN-BRELLER FOOTHILLS, DABIN

Ia listened to the hushed arguing of her officers and sergeants, though her gaze remained on the dark, wet forest beyond the knot of Dabin-style trees giving them temporary shelter. Jeeves’s constant metrokinetic meddling had lowered the air pressure over the region long enough to bring in strong gusts of wind and soggy rainfalls up until now.

The resulting storms hid the two Companies’ tracks alright, but the constant attacks by Salik, wind, and water left everyone wet and miserable. He also couldn’t sustain it for more than half an hour at a time, with rest breaks for a handful of hours, and was now on the dregs of his mental reserves. Unable to do anything more, Jeeves now slept; this was the last of the ongoing storm he had summoned. The last chance for the weather to aid their situation by hindering their enemies.

“. . . demanding that we return to the lowlands to protect the people of Eltegar City. I pointed out that while we’re being hunted by the frogtopi,
they’re
still more or less safe . . .”

At least her missing left eye didn’t hurt anymore. They didn’t have the facilities to regrow organs—those amenities were reserved for cities well beyond the current Salik invasion—but they did have emergency regeneration pads. With one of those strapped to her head over the wound, coupled with her modest biokinetic ability, the burns were healing. It wouldn’t replace her eye, since that was too complex an organ for a mere pad, but it was working to turn the burned tissue into smooth, scarless flesh that would more readily accept a transplant once she did have time to get one regrown.

The loss of her eye wasn’t the worst wound, however. Five members of the Damned hadn’t made it out . . . and she didn’t know if that was because they were lost in the wilderness somewhere, dead back at the abandoned camp, or because they’d been rendered CPE, Captured, Presumed Eaten, the military term for being chained up by the Salik so they could become a still-living lunch. Roghetti had lost even more than her, a good twenty-eight men and women out of his five Platoons.

Needlessly lost. She didn’t know if they were alive or dead, either.

“. . . don’t ’ave th’ forces, Doctor, an’ you don’ ’ave th’ meds . . .”

Her precognition still wasn’t working right. Her mind was thankfully unaffected; both Lieutenant Commander Mishka and one of the privates from the 3rd Platoon, Bibia Mk’nonn, had scanned her brain telepathically to look for Feyori fingerprints on her psyche. None had been found. She hadn’t sensed an attempt to breach her mental walls at any point, but it was good to have it confirmed by two other psis.

Ia knew there were two Feyori playing their Games on this world, one for the Dabin colonists and one for the Salik invaders. If they had any influence on Ia, it was thankfully indirect at best, more a case of their obscuring the truth on the timeplains than of trying to Meddle directly with her thoughts. Unfortunately, that was more than enough to
shakk
all of her original and ongoing plans.

Ia would have taken some time to seek out and confront the Feyori in the timestreams, save for two things: her future self, who had warned her against contacting them directly on the timeplains; and the fact that the Salik had continued to chase them. There just hadn’t been enough time to do so safely. As it was, they were all being forced to sleep in shifts with the most exhausted riding in the trucks while they continued to run, curving this way and that up into the nearby foothills.

At the moment, her instincts were telling her that they had two, maybe three hours to rest before the Salik struck again. She had forced herself to sleep for a little bit in the back of one of the trucks in the last six hours, but it wasn’t the same as real sleep in a safe location. The others were even worse off; most didn’t have alternate ways of resting and regaining energy.

Outlying scouts—mostly Private Sunrise, still somewhere out there on her hoverbike—reported that the Salik were ignoring the little burg of Eltegar City for now, a small but very important blessing. The fallback Beta site had been prepared with an ambush as Ia had feared, one a little too large for the former Knifeman to handle, but the ex-counterassassin had spotted it in time to alter their retreat to another location.

“. . . going to need to resupply soon, or the grunts will start bitching about the food . . .”

That was Helstead’s attempt at humor. One of the trucks that had escaped had been loaded with nearly haphazardly picked crates of weapons and ammunition, as well as Harper’s special psi-guns; that alone, the ability to return fire, had kept the Salik from overrunning them. One had been loaded with boxes of rations, so at least they weren’t fleeing on empty stomachs . . . but they
were
ration packs, as opposed to real food.

A third truck had already been loaded with light armor, which meant their rear guard and nearby scouts had a modicum of protection. Another had actually been the self-transporting surgery pod, retracted and evacuated by Dr. Mishka without a care for the tents connecting to it the moment Ia ordered everyone to move out. If it weren’t for those latter two, their constant forced retreats would have suffered more fatal casualties . . . but that only covered so much. Their medical supplies, things like the gel-laden sponge strapped to her face, were now running low.

Morale was even lower. One eye was more than enough to see the dirty looks aimed her way by Roghetti’s soldiers. The Roughriders’ lack of faith, she could understand and forgive. They hadn’t understood that when she gave an order like the one to evacuate, it wasn’t on a whim. It was a real order, with a real need behind it. The stricken, puzzled, and angry looks from her
own
crew . . . she could understand those, too, given what had happened, but she couldn’t forgive herself.

“. . . heard some of Roghetti’s talking the equivalent of
mutiny
, if we don’t split up from them soon,” she heard Rico rumble in that deep, quiet voice of his. The m-word pulled her attention back to the meeting behind her.

“Mutiny, hell,” Sergeant Maxwell growled, “I’ve heard some of our
own
headed that way. I don’t like that.”

“Ia.” That was the voice of her first officer. Harper’s words cut her to the bone, striking into wounds already laid over the last few days. “You know I don’t mean to doubt your decisions, but what
good
does this constant retreat do?”

Instinct said that if she didn’t address the m-word problem
now
, they’d be in a world of hurt later. Despite how they’d done their best to elude pursuit time and again, the Salik had found them. In specific, whenever Ia started to
plan
some sort of counterattack, the Salik had still found them. When she
chose
to follow Roghetti’s plans instead . . . the Salik had still found them.

She was getting tired of the Salik finding them. She was getting tired of the Feyori finding
her
. So she addressed his question obliquely.

“Commander Harper,” Ia stated, turning to face the knot of her cadre. “Get me one of your guns.”

He blinked, frowned at her, and asked, “. . . Just
one
of my guns, sir?”

“One gun. Now,” she ordered, staring at her first officer.

“. . . Sir, yes, sir.” Shaking his head slightly, Harper moved out of the little dry patch formed by the closely spaced trunks, too closely spaced to allow any branches for the first five meters.

She didn’t have to specify which gun, since there was only one type of gun which she would ask
him
to fetch. Any other kind, she would have asked one of the Platoon Sergeants to bring.

When he had moved away, Ia turned to her second officer. “Lieutenant Commander Helstead.”

“Yes, sir.” Helstead squared her shoulders, her gaze level and steady. Of all of them, she was actually the least restless right now. Then again, she looked like she’d had the least sleep of all of them, having volunteered for both coordinating the night watch and the sabotage efforts meant to slow, deter, or derail the enemy at their backs.

“There are twenty-five enlisted psis available in the Damned, not counting yourself and the doctor. Get them here,” Ia ordered.

The petite redhead didn’t even wait for a “now” from her commanding officer. She just moved off, arms lifting to tap commands into her command unit, summoning the psis in question.

Spyder straightened his shoulders, coming to a modified Attention. He had forgone his favorite shades-of-green hair dye and had instead patterned his normally sandy brown hair in shades of brick, brown, and beige to match the local terrain. “Wha’re your plans, Cap’n?”

“I don’t have any.” It was the honest truth, and it dropped Spyder’s jaw. It also made Mishka’s mouth sag.

Rico blinked, then narrowed his eyes. “There’s something you’re not telling us.”

“There’s a lot of things I’m not telling you,” Ia admitted dryly. At least in tone; her clothes were damp despite the torn and scorched poncho she still wore to protect herself from the near-constant rain outside this little grove of trees. “But that doesn’t matter.”

“Then what
does
?” the large man pressed, shifting forward a step as if to loom over her. Lieutenant Rico didn’t normally use his muscular height to intimidate; he was her Intelligence Officer, not her Combat Officer. He was, however, frustrated and angered by their situation.

She couldn’t blame him for feeling that way. She felt the same. Unfortunately, getting angry would do absolutely nothing to fix the damned situation. Ia kept her tone calm, unruffled. Now more than ever, her troops needed to have faith in her. “You’ll find out when the time is right.”

“
Shakk
that,” Sergeant Sadneczek muttered. He spat to the side, his grizzled jawline already growing a salt-and-pepper beard. Without the toiletry supplies found in a kitbag, several of the men in both Companies were starting to sprout stubble. His just grew faster. Her Company Sergeant eyed her, looking rough and ragged, and not ready for any
shova
-shoveling. “Either you tell us now, or you’re gonna start losin’ our faith, Captain.”

“
After
the psis have come,” she countered, keeping her thoughts calm. A plan was starting to form. She squelched it firmly and just breathed while they waited for the others to return.

Filling her senses with the sounds and the sensations and the smells evoked by each breath, she focused on just breathing, until Harper returned with a bulky case containing one of the brass and faintly glowing crystalline guns he had created. Until twenty-five curious, limping, exhausted, angry, patient, sullen soldiers crowded in as best they could under the patch of dryness their officers and noncoms had appropriated. When instinct said the moment was right, Ia stopped focusing on her breathing and spoke, without a single thought in mind for what lay ahead.

“Right. My ability to predict things has been compromised. I cannot tell you how, nor what I’m going to do about it, as that would tip off the enemy to the one card still in my hand,” she clarified, as her opening statement caused startled looks and uneasy shifting among the men and women around her, enlisted or otherwise. “Until I can do something about it, you psychics are hereby ordered to implement Company Directive ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ until further notice. Try to include Roghetti’s Roughriders if you can, but only while they’re in range.

“Otherwise, I want every last one of our fifteen Squads covered, and two of you shielding your commanding officer at all times, starting as soon as this meeting is over.” Ia paused, then smiled wryly. “Whoever thinks of the worst, most annoyingly catchy earworm of a jingle to project and protect with will earn a full-pay-grade raise as a bonus when this is all over and done. Take a moment now to start thinking of which ones you’ll use.”

While they looked at each other, from Private Jeeves in the 1st Platoon all the way through to Private Mittletech in the 3rd, Crow and his teammate Teevie already started humming a faint duet that sounded suspiciously like the theme song for a certain popular, long-running Gatsugi comedy show,
Red Is Green
. Ia turned to Harper. Lifting her chin, she looked at the case. He set it on the ground, used his thumbprint on the scanner locks, and opened the latches.

Helstead moved up next to him. “Do you want someone to fire it, sir?”

“Nope. I want you to organize a party,” Ia countered. That earned her more than a few odd looks. Crow and Teevie stopped humming, blinking in astonishment. Ia shifted her gaze to include them, before moving on to the others. They quickly started humming again. “You
all
heard me right. This Company is dangerously low on morale. You desperately need a day of rest. As your Commanding Officer, it is my prerogative as whether or not to give you one . . . and I am going to give you one. Inform Roghetti’s Roughriders that I will be giving them a day of rest as well.”