Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (14 page)

For one Human heartbeat, she hit the kill-switch circuits on every harness aloft. Shrill buzzing erupted, alien screeches of fear. They cut off as each harness snapped back on a split second later, thrusters countering the drop with faint whines.

“
Listen
to my words,” Ia stated, strolling forward across nothing but air, as casual and sure-footed as if she were leisurely strolling through an invisible garden. “Read the translations of what I am saying. I forbid you to
join
the Alliance against the Salik.” Twisting in a slow turn, she looked around, up, and down at all the aliens gathered on the balconies, in their harnesses. “Your Queens are right to worry about being drawn into
open
conflict with the Salik. If you move to stand at the sides of the Humans, the Gatsugi, and the rest, we will
not
be able to stop our mutual enemy.

“But I agree that the Bright Speaker you just watched is
also
right . . . as you just witnessed. As I spoke for myself over a Dulshvwl year ago. If you do
not
step out and act now, fighting our common enemy, you will also
fall
.”

Again, the harnesses dropped in power, though this time for only half as long. Angry noises emerged from half or more of their occupants. One of the nearest of the original debaters snarled several words, swinging up and around to face her. A nearby screen translated his words in Terranglo as a courtesy. Ia didn’t have to read them to get the gist of what he said, though, and addressed the Dlmvlan debater directly, interrupting him midspeech, pointing her p-suited finger within centimeters of his faceted eyes.

“I let fall 4,194 lives to get that Bright Speaker’s message to
you
, meioa. I dropped them straight into the Room for the Dead to let her words and her wisdom reach
all
of you,” Ia told him. She pointed again at the larger alien’s face. “You were already willing to drop your
own
lives when you put on those harnesses to demand that your nation do the right thing . . . and I am here to tell you that I respect and
support
that demand.” She dipped her head briefly to the debater, then stepping around him, still standing on nothing but solidified will and methane-laced air. Strolling a few steps forward, she came to a stop at Attention and faced the Nestor spire. “But doing the right thing in the
wrong
way, or at the
wrong
time, in this case is just as bad as doing
nothing
.

“So listen carefully: I
forbid
you,” she repeated again, slowly and clearly, “to
join
the Alliance in
open
assistance . . .
when
you slaughter the Salik forces.”

Another rumble of protest started to rise at her high-handed alien demand. The third-tier Nestor Queen flung one limb up and smacked the forearm of the other against its plates. Projected by the speakers, the two short
clacks
were as sharp as a projectile shot. Lowering her limbs, she cocked her head, faceted eyes gleaming in the overhead ring of lights.

“Say you . . .
when
we zzlaughter dem?”

Ia held out her arm to the side, activating her headset link with a blink.
“Helstead, open the case and pull out the trays.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

She didn’t look back to see if her second officer was doing it; she knew Helstead was already in motion. Not because of precognition or even clairvoyance, but because she trusted Helstead to act swiftly and neatly when given an order. She couldn’t hear the
clicks
as Helstead set each tray on the broad, ledge-like rim of the polished-brass balcony several meters away, but nodded slightly, as much in approval of her second officer’s unseen efforts as in acknowledgment of the Queen Nestor’s understanding. On the floating screens, her head in its pressure-suit helm nodded in tandem as she answered the alien’s question

“Yes, meioa.
When
you slaughter them.”

Reaching back with her mind, she pulled the first row of chips out in a spiraling stream, then the second, and the third. This first allotment was easily four or five times the number of broken chandelier shards she had used to pluck out the throats of Salik generals three years before. Then again, this was a far less violent use of so many tiny, potential projectiles after three more years’ worth of practice with her gifts.

The Dlmvla had a policy of recording, editing,
then
rebroadcasting their grand assemblies only after the fact, to prevent nest-riots if things happening inside this hall ended up inflammatory, and to prevent state secrets from being spread openly. Ia knew the broadcasts were edited by committees of all sides involved in the debates, and that the Dlmvla were not stupid; they would edit out her visit from the widely broadcast versions to prevent the Salik from knowing what she was suggesting here. But not from all of them.

Just because the Salik weren’t yet interested in making war on the Dlmvla didn’t mean they weren’t covertly surveying the methane-breathers. In time, less-edited hard copies would be physically couriered to all High Nestors, Nestors, and the leaders of the various debate factions for private viewing and distribution, but only privately. They were neutral, but they were not politically stupid. Swirling the chips around her body was a bit of showmanship on her part, but it also allowed her to verify which ones were which. Letting the little rectangles spiral thrice around, she sent them outward again.

The first twenty-one went to the Nestor Queens and the Queen High Nestor perched at the very top of their pinnacle-thrones; the rest went to the governors and military leaders gathered for this conference. More of the chips continued to peel out of the trays and the case Helstead had balanced on the railing.

“I come before you not only as the Prophet of a Thousand Years,” Ia stated plainly, keeping her words slow and measured for the translators, “but also as the officially appointed General of the Alliance Armies. My authorization to speak on behalf of the Alliance’s war efforts against the combined Salik-Choya incursions is both authorized by all the governments I listed . . . and is absolute. I am
forbidding
you from joining the Alliance when you move to slaughter the Salik forces. I am also here to tell you what you
will
do.

“Your task is simple: You will avoid
starting
any conflict with the Salik within a particular star system’s heliosphere. You will follow these directives to the exact coordinates listed, at the exact moments in time, calculated in Dlmvlan measurements, and destroy every single Salik vessel, station, and relay you find. Every last one of them, permitting none to escape alive and permitting no facility to remain intact.

“At the same time,” she continued, “you will continue to openly
deny
any request for you to join the ongoing war effort, either for or against the Salik,” Ia stressed, keeping her expression sober. Some of the aliens watching her face, projected on the giant transparent screens, were reasonably good at reading Human emotions. “You will protect only your own stations within any given star system. You will ignore any enemy passing peacefully through a star system you control. You may even trade peacefully with both sides as you have always done . . . and you will give no mercy to any enemy vessel you catch in interstitial space. When you find them beyond each star system’s heliopause, you will hunt them down, you will open the Door for the Dead, and you will shove them all through, down to the last egg in the last nest-pond.

“Those chips will tell you
exactly
where and when to find the Salik. You have one Dlmvlan Standard day to get those lists of targets studied, memorized, and the relevant ships under way . . . and you will fight the Salik
this
way,
my
way, as the
only
way to keep the Door to the Room from closing on you, too, when the Salik themselves
fall
.”

The debaters who understood Terranglo flinched . . . but did not move. None of them dropped. Ia had left the kill switches alone this time. She turned back toward the balcony she had come from, took a few steps, then spun back to face the central spire and its bowl-chair balconies. She pointed as she moved, sweeping her finger slowly up the line of the pinnacle from the lowest seats to the highest peak.

“This way, Queen Nestors,
you
get what you want, to protect your people and manage their resources in the least wasteful way. Openly joining this war would indeed be wasteful; in that much, I agree with you.” She pointed at all the floating debaters with her other arm, at all the watching natives. “This way, your
people
get what they want, to help save their fellow sentients’ lives, regardless of which gas we breathe. It is
very
clear by all these many debaters, both the ones floating and the ones on the balconies who wish they also had harnesses, that so many of them
are
willing to risk death itself to help the rest of the Alliance.

“
This
way, by stealth and by guile, the Salik will not realize you are fully involved until it is too late, and the Door to the Room will have already begun to close,” she stated, once more headed back to Helstead. “I trust, Debaters and Nestors, that this is a reasonable, logical, yet
poetic
compromise between both sides of your debate?”

The reply from the debaters was a rumble of different noises, too many to translate, but the Queen Nestor appointed to speak for the others spoke clearly. Or as clearly as she could with her thick accent projected over the multitude of speakers. “It izz . . . agzzeptable. But leave you will. Now.”

“Of course. Have a good day, gentlebeings,” Ia added, lifting a hand in farewell over her shoulder. “Have a very good day. Try a Saturday. Those usually work well for most gentlebeings.
Helstead,
” she ordered, switching to her headset alone, “
step up onto the railing and prepare to teleport us back to the embassy.
”

“Gladly, sir.”
Emptied trays replaced and case closed, Helstead pulled herself up onto the railing, which came up to her nose on her and midthigh on the Dlmvla behind her. The Dlmvlan homeworld was a lightworld, though; maneuvering was not difficult for the athletic woman. Once on her feet, the handle of the case still in her hand, she eyed Ia warily.
“Sir . . . you do know that when I translocate us from here to there, I’ll also be taking along several cubic liters of local air, and replacing it with the Human version, yes?”

“I am very well aware of the way teleportation most commonly works among those rare psis who possess it, Lieutenant Commander, and of the resulting drawbacks it sometimes carries,”
Ia quipped. Reaching the railing, she held out her hand, and clasped the gloved fingers Helstead offered her in return.
“Take us out of here, Delia . . .
before
these kind and gentle beings realize I have deliberately chosen to depart with a giant
fart
left behind in their assembly hall.”

The dirty look Helstead shot her—broken as it was with an involuntary chuckle—was not for mentioning the residue of their departure. Rather, Ia knew it was because she had made the other woman laugh at a moment when Helstead needed all of her concentration focused on her target, a semifamiliar room on a space station several hundred kilometers away in thankfully geosynchronous orbit.

The breath of oxygen-laced air they were leaving behind was deliberate, a last courting gift as it were. The Dlmvla would at first be offended, even outraged, then alarmed by the realization that
two
powerful psychics had been present. Alarmed that the lesser known of the pair was powerful enough to have altered the very air they breathed. Once they thought about her parting “gift,” however, then the aliens would be entranced, even flattered. At least, once they reconciled the atmospheric insult with the fact that Ia and her second officer had come all this way to
help
the Dlmvlan fight against the Salik.

The Dlmvla loved illogical words, actions, gifts . . . It was art to them, an entertaining amusement. She wasn’t this particular world’s best poet by any means, but Ia knew they would give her points for trying.

“Brace yourself, sir.”

Between one breath and the next, several things happened. Outside energies seized her nerves, and the world slammed away. The shock of searing cold and freezing heat, of not being able to breathe for a precious second, lungs overfull, gave way to a massive jolt and the need to gasp for air when Ia dropped three or four centimeters to a white-enameled floor. It felt like the very first time she had turned from a Feyori back into a human and had forgotten how things like bones and joints and muscles had worked, only worse because she wasn’t the one in control.

It was enough to make her stumble, then drop to one knee, releasing Helstead’s hand. The nausea hit a bare heartbeat after, slamming into her blood and her guts without warning. At the last moment, she swallowed down the taste of her bile—vomiting was
never
a good idea in a sealed pressure-suit—and struggled to hold the rest of it down, breathing fast and shallow through her nose.

Ia wanted to rip off her helmet and breathe clean air, but knew better. As much as Helstead had just replaced a handful of cubic meters of methane with oxygen back down in the assembly hall, she had also just replaced a handful of cubic meters of oxygen with methane and a pair of p-suited bodies.
Oxygen and nitrogen and trace elementals . . . breathe, Iantha . . . breathe and move forward. One step at a time, nice and easy on your stomach . . .

Limbs trembling with the adrenaline aftermath of her abrupt translocation, she pushed to her feet and staggered across the airlock. Helstead, far more accustomed to the effects, had already moved out of the fart zone, though she had yet to release her helmet. Instead, the petite soldier poked at the buttons of the airlock she had memorized so carefully. Both women listened to the air cyclers hissing, though they couldn’t feel the breeze against their pressure-suit-wrapped bodies.