Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship (9 page)

Once again, she reached Major Leotta Perkins. The brunette woman smiled politely. “Ship’s Captain Ia. It’s good to hear from you again. Is everything alright?”

“No, everything is not alright, Major,” Ia stated without preamble. “I’d like to speak with the brigadier general right away.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Perkins demurred, her smile never slipping. “An emergency came up on one of the battlefronts. He won’t be available for the next three days.”

Dipping into the timestreams, Ia checked. According to what she saw, Mattox had indeed departed for an Army camp somewhere on the northern border of the war front . . . which . . .
wasn’t
 . . . what she had seen him doing while crawling for two-plus hours through the mud. But it was what he was doing right now. If the timestreams were to be believed.

“. . . Are you alright, sir?” Major Perkins asked politely. “You look a little ill.”

“I’m fine,” Ia dismissed quickly. “Is this emergency the reason why Mattox did not deploy the troops according to the battle plans I gave him? Plans that were vetted by the Admiral-General herself?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know the Brigadier General’s reasons,” the woman on the other end of the commscreen demurred, shrugging, “but any competent battle commander knows that whatever the Command Staff may decide for its troops to do does not always suit the ever-changing needs of the actual war front. No plan is ever perfectly tailored to actual circumstances.”

“Mine are.” Biting back a retort to say more—to snarl more—Ia confined herself to a deep breath and a calmer delivery. “I am a Command Staff–recognized precognitive, PsiLeague gauged in excess of Rank 84, Major. I have single-handedly wiped out three-quarters of a Choyan fleet traveling
in
faster-than-light. My accuracy is beyond a doubt.”

Beyond a doubt . . . except reality and the timeplains no longer agree.

Shoving aside her doubts, Ia continued. “I will redraw the battle plans needed to win on this planet to account for this new delay. If need be, I will hand-deliver them to Mattox, and discuss their feasibility with him in person, so that he can have any questions answered. Tell him to be prepared for a visit from me in four days. Ship’s Captain out.”

A jab of her finger ended the transmission. Private Douglas, the current communications tech on duty in the tent, gave her a wary look. “. . . Sir?”

“Something’s wrong. Something is
grievously
wrong,” Ia muttered darkly, thoughts racing and probing, trying to find the source. Nothing but fog drifting slowly across the timestreams. She shook her head. “I don’t know what, yet. Send a message to Admiral Genibes informing him that the first attempt at getting Mattox and the 1st Division to follow my battle plans has failed. Let him know I will be trying again.”

“Aye, sir,” Douglas agreed. She shifted to set up the connection all the way to Earth, then hesitated. The look she gave her CO wasn’t quite anxious, but there was concern in her hazel eyes. “If the brigadier general won’t be back for three more days, and you can’t get the plans passed through him any sooner than four days from now, sir . . . won’t that start to screw up the timelines too much?”

“We’ll still have some leeway in the timing of things, Irene,” Ia reassured her. “Don’t worry too much about it. I’m going to go wash off this mud and get something to eat. Let me know if Admiral Genibes sends back a response.”

“Aye, sir,” Douglas said, resuming her task. With her back to her CO, she didn’t see Ia’s brief but confused, worried frown.

JUNE 8, 2498 T.S.

“And how does that make you feel?” Bennie asked her commanding officer. The quintessential psychology question was a valid one, given the circumstances.

“It’s
frustrating
.” Ia balled up another pair of socks, fresh from the sonic cleaner, and tossed them into her kitbag. “I keep going over it in my head. Over and over . . . I could
see
D Company loading their payloads into the mortars and firing them in every pertinent timestream connected to mine, but they weren’t actually
doing
it when I watched with my eyes and listened with my ears.

“All I know is, my gifts
can’t
have stopped working,” she asserted, folding and rolling up a bra next. “I’ve never seen the timeplains so clear and bright before, except for those little scudding clouds of fog. They’re like . . .”

“. . . They’re like?” her Company chaplain prodded. “What?”

“They’re like little . . . Harper-clouds,” Ia finally offered, finding the right words for it. “Little scudding knots of I-don’t-know-whats. Or like those little optical illusions you get when you’re staring at a grid of black squares on white paper, and you
see
the little fuzzy gray squares at the center of every intersecting set of white lines. But you only see them with your peripheral vision because when you stare straight at them, they vanish, and all you see is a clean white crossroads in the midst of all those black city blocks—does that make any sense?”

“It does,” Bennie allowed. Leaning back against the head railing on her bunk-bed cot, she shook her head. “I’m afraid I cannot tell you if your gifts are working correctly or not. I’m not even a parapsychologist, let alone a parapsychiatrist. You’d be better off going to Jesselle for
that
kind of headshrinking.”

“Oh yes,
that’ll
inspire confidence in my troops,” Ia muttered, tossing in the last of her clean military-issue brassieres. “Tell the Company doctor I think I’m going nuts.”

“Oh, piffle,” the redhead dismissed, rolling her eyes. “I can tell you that you’re not going nuts. You’re relatively stress-free”—she paused while Ia snorted loudly—“
and
you’re dealing with the source of your frustrations calmly and rationally.”

“Except I’m
not
dealing with it because I have no idea what went wrong,” Ia pointed out honestly. She realized she had mangled the folding of her camouflage trousers and sighed, shaking them out and starting over. Bunk beds on a heavy-gravitied world weren’t usual, but Dabin’s gravity was only 1.85Gs. The bottom bunks were also set lower to the ground, leaving the top ones lower as well. That meant she was free to use her bed as a sort of high, padded counter for folding things. “I’m just dealing with my frustration as best I can.”

“So go see Jesselle,” Bennie told her. “She’s a paraphysician and a psychologist, as well as an outstanding medic. That’s why you nabbed the best Triphid you could find, remember? Mental, physical, psychic, plus optical and dental health all in one . . .”

Ia wrinkled her nose. “God, don’t remind me. I’m due for another checkup and tooth-cleaning. It’ll have to wait until we’re on the
Damnation
, though. I don’t know if Roghetti’s infirmary has the sonic picks, I
know
they don’t have any supply of the right bacteriophagic cultures down here, and we’re not taking the time to run her all the way out to a town with a dentist who does and has enough to spare us some.”

“But you
will
take the time to talk with her about your inner-vision problem, right?” Bennie pressed. “She’s also the ship’s ophthamologist.”

“
Inner
vision, Commander,” Ia retorted. “Last I checked, she wasn’t a paraophthamologist . . . if there even is such a thing.” A moment of dipping into the timestreams out of pure curiosity ended in a sigh. “. . . Yes, there is. There’s even one here on Dabin, but the nearest one is a good eight thousand kilometers away, give or take a few hundred. PsiLeague trained, of course. That is, if I’m not hallucinating his existence like I did Mattox’s compliance.”

“How cheerful. The most powerful psi on the planet is going for the broody, gothic-heroine theme.” Pushing up onto one elbow, the middle-aged chaplain asked, “Should I try to wear a cowl, curl up my fingers, and command you to ‘Give in to your uncertainties and fears! Let the power of the Doubt Side consume you!’ . . . Hmm?”

Caught off guard, Ia laughed. Belly-clenching laughter. Gasping for air, she rested her face and arms on her bunk until she could breathe normally again, then stepped back. She tried glaring at her friend, but the sight of that gamine, freckled grin diffused her attempted scorn. “Okay, fine, I’ll go talk to Jesselle. Just stop teasing me with ancient story tropes!”

“It’s a quote, not a trope,” Chaplain Benjamin asserted primly. Then relaxed, grinning again. “Okay, it’s a
mis
-quote. Go on; go schedule yourself a paraphysician’s visit.”

“Only if you agree to fold and stow my clothes,” Ia countered. She flicked a hand at the pile of laundry still waiting to be sorted on her bunk. “Any other officer of my rank would have a staff corporal to take care of stuff like this. Lucky me, I had to barter down my crew to the absolute bare necessity.”

Uncurling herself from her bunk, Bennie stood up with a grunt. Unlike Ia, she hadn’t been born a heavyworlder, though like all of Ia’s crew, she had learned to adapt to the increasingly strong pull of their former ship’s gravity plates. Patting Ia on the biceps, she nudged the slightly shorter woman aside. “Heave to, Cap’n,” she ordered Ia. “You’re lucky I’m already on your staff, and that my rank has a ‘c’ in it. Now
go
.”

“Commander, yes, sir!” Ia quipped, smacking her fingers against her forehead in a fluttery mock-salute. Leaving her friend to fold her laundry, Ia left the barracks tent reserved for the top female officers and noncoms in the combined camp.
I’ll owe Bennie a favor for that . . .

The maze of tents, covered corridors, and expanded medical pods making up the infirmary complex wasn’t far away, but it was damp outside. At the moment, the upper force fields were down. Her gifts
said
the weather would remain damp but not drenching, somewhere between a mist and a drizzle, but Ia wasn’t sure anymore, so she grabbed a poncho from the stack hooked onto a tent post by the door and pulled it over her head and shoulders.

Are my gifts failing me? Am I going mad? Disconnected from reality and seeing things in my head that aren’t really there? Seeing gray spots out of the corner of my eyes when there aren’t any at the intersections of Time and probabilities?

Doubt wasn’t a comfortable state of mind for her. It crawled up her spine like a trail of bugs from the Dabin mud, itching along her nerves. The feeling increased the closer she got to the infirmary tents, until Ia found herself spinning around, searching the camp and the tree-shrouded horizon for any sign of an incoming threat. It didn’t help that she could see a cluster of technicians working on something at the base of the central projection tower for the shield generator. She did not like having that shield down, let alone down for repairs. Not with this itch of paranoia prickling her nerves.

Nothing happened, of course. Still, as much as she knew her chaplain, friend, and counselor was correct, she didn’t take herself straight into the infirmary tents. Pushing the mottled hood of her poncho back from her face so she could use her peripheral vision without restriction, Ia studied the horizon. Ears and eyes strained, seeking anything that might be a telltale sign of an attack. She even sniffed the air, trying to figure out what was wrong.

Her battle instincts felt like something was plucking them, as they had
not
been plucked
en route
to that Salik sensor tower two days before. In the timestreams, she sensed nothing wrong . . . but she had sensed nothing wrong with her battle plans.
Circular thinking? Paranoia?

At least paranoia saves lives.
Raising her hands, she flipped open her arm unit, ready to contact the command center to see if anything had showed up on the scopes yet. Movement at the edge of her vision made her spin to the right.

A cluster of bird-things rose up into the sky, with long bodies and two sets of leathery, featherless wings evolved to handle the local heavy gravity. Their movement plucked sharply on her combat-trained nerves. Her fingers jabbed at the command unit’s buttons, activating an open-channel broadcast.
“This is Ship’s Captain Ia. Code India Alpha. Evacuate the camp. I repeat. India Alpha, evacuate the camp
now
. Fall back to Beta position. This is not a drill!”

The camp roiled with movement. Bodies poured out of tent and pod openings, sprinting for the armory. Most of them had extra gray mottling their camouflage-hued sleeves, but enough of them were also green to satisfy her, reassuring Ia that Roghetti’s side of things was willing to listen.

“Commander Harper, grab the special guns,”
she ordered, turning in a slow circle, searching for more spooked avians.
“Private C’ulosc, evacuate the van. Roughriders and Damned alike, fall back to Beta now. This is
not
a dr—”

Bright orange light flashed out of the trees even as she spun on pure instinct. It slammed with searing heat into her left eye and scorched across her temple. Screaming as she dropped, Ia hit the ground in a squelch of wet moss-grass.

Instinct rolled her onto her side and stomach, pressing the wound into the damp plant life. Superheated flesh sizzled and steamed, adding a boiled aroma to the stench of scorched meat, as well as a fresh layer of blinding-hot agony.

“Captain!” she heard someone shout. “
Medic!
The captain’s been shot!”

Teeth clenched against the pain, Ia grabbed the hand of one of the privates trying to turn her over. “
Run
, you slagging idiots!”

“
Shakk
that!” she heard one of her own soldiers swear; who, she couldn’t see, and the pain was too much still to tell by voice alone. Hands snagged the belt strung through her pants, heaving her off the ground. “We’re running
with
you!”

Somehow, she got her feet under her. It took her several meters of being dragged awkwardly, head throbbing with unholy agony and barely able to see out of her muddied, uninjured eye, but she got her feet under her. Shoving hard to the left, she pushed the three of them behind a tent, forcing the two men half carrying her into staggering and dropping in a bruising heap. A slap of her arm knocked the one on top of her back down just as he started to get up.