Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (21 page)

“. . . Ia?” She flopped a hand, still a little drugged from the, brainwashing cocktail. “. . . Look terr’ble. Helmet’s not you.”

“Deep breath, Rabbit; I need your brain functioning,” Ia told her. She didn’t bother to lift her faceplate to give her friend a full visual; she knew her voice would be enough. “Did you or did you not get the transceiver codes?”

Black brows lowered further. “. . . Password?”

That threw Ia for a moment, until she realized Rabbit was
not
talking about the password needed to crack into the Church’s military channels. “
Glede ma glede
,” she recited, naming the melody that the Free World Colony had taken as its anthem. Rabbit closed her eyes, nodding in satisfaction. Impatient, aware of the clock ticking down, Ia demanded, “Did you get the codes?”

“Shhh . . . it still hurts . . . Oh!” Her hand flopped up to her face, approximating a tap on the end of her flat, tanned nose. “Extra gear. Surv-stuff. Surveillance. Planted.” She tapped her cheekbone, missing her temple by three full centimeters. “Got codes here. Think Daddy’s gonna disown me . . .”

An involuntary laugh escaped Ia. “Silly Rabbit,” she muttered, and heaved the short woman up off her back with muscles and mind. “You were disowned a long time ago, just two days from now, remember?”

“Ffffff, was still living with ’m. When you tol’ me. I’mma puke now,” Rabbit groaned, slouching over as Ia struggled to balance her upright.

“I am not teleporting her if she’s going to,” Helstead quickly asserted. “That gives a whole new meaning to projectile vomiting, sir, and you do
not
want to go there.”

Since Rabbit was short, stocky, and half-boneless from drugs, Ia couldn’t exactly let her slide back down to the floor without risking a concussion. She dropped the energy-clip still in her left hand. “Give me another, Kardos—oh, and Plan D.”

He pressed it into her hand and picked up the spent case, pinching the spring to clip it onto one of the loops on his waistband. Then whirled and slashed down. His scimitar
thock-chinnnged
, embedding not just in the flexible plexi below the interrogator’s neck, but in the stone underneath. Plan D was, if the interrogator woke up early and faked being unconscious in order to eavesdrop, Kardos was to kill him. It was a deep measure of how much he had come to trust her in the last few months that he did so without hesitation.

While the sergeant struggled to pull the stuck blade free, Ia focused on clearing more of Rabbit’s biology. Ia would rather have let the man live, as his death would have made no difference either way, but his eavesdropping would have ruined too many plans.

“Sir!” Yarrin hissed, listening from his post by the door. “Footsteps!”

“Commander,” Ia grunted, pushing up to her feet. It was
not
easy, lifting Rabbit off her feet, and a cradle-carry was less than an ideal hold on her homeworld. “She’ll be fine. Go.”

The redhead came over to the other side. The trio of men grasped a part of her as she grabbed Ia and her cargo. Closing her eyes, Ia concentrated, projecting their next destination into the redhead’s mind, then cut off her telepathy at Helstead’s nod. The lieutenant commander had warned her back before the trip to Dabin that using psychic abilities—particularly the kinetics—while being teleported by someone else risked cerebral bruising, even a possible stroke. Thankfully, Helstead didn’t take as long this time to gather her energies as she had up on the ship, since the distance was considerably less, even if their overall mass had increased by one half-drugged colonist.

A shout from down the corridor warned them they had been spotted. A second later, the world slammed and jerked around them. This time, there was no pressure change, no leap through the void between surface and orbit. Just an exchange of one level in the fortress-like structure that was Church Headquarters for another.

Again, they dropped roughly two centimeters. Ia staggered and quickly cushioned her knees with her mind, easing the strain of falling under her and Rabbit’s combined weight. She knelt there for a moment, recovering, while Rabbit spasmed in her arms. Warned just in time by a different instinct, she tilted her friend forward, letting the older, smaller woman retch, then helped set her upright. A spin and another push sent Rabbit staggering toward a console in the new, dimly lit, blessedly quiet room.

A blessedly empty room. There had been a seventy-one percent probability that someone was either stationed inside this room, or still in the room next to it, hence bringing Yarrin and O’Taicher to keep the guards occupied while Rabbit did her job. The job she had been captured while trying to do on a mere sixteen percent chance. No one barged in, however.

The fickle randomness of Fate gives with one hand, and takes away with the other . . .

A pale green light started blinking under a nearby counter. Ia could only see it because she was on her knees, recovering. Stooping, O’Taicher pressed another clip into her hand, exchanging it for the one wedged onto her fingers. Ia stripped it of its power, and the next one he passed to her, while Rabbit braced herself on one of the workstation consoles and let the machine scan her biometric readings.

“Hurry it up, little bunny,” Ia ordered. She pushed to her feet and clasped Helstead on the back of the neck, feeding the converted energies into her second officer. “The silent alarm’s gone off.”

“Little rabbit Foo-Foo, hoppin’ through the forest,” Rabbit crooned as the machine beeped, allowing her to pull her hand off the scanner and dance her short fingers over the unlocked controls. “Scoopin’ up the data-packs and . . .
boppin’
’em on the head! Console’s in total-slaggin’ mode!”

Spinning, the diminutive coleader of the Free World Colony shoved away from the workstation and launched herself into Ia’s arms. The impact made her stagger a little, but Ia scooped her up. Elizabeth Cheung, daughter of the recently appointed Director of Biological Warfare Research. The only person in the FWC with the ability to get inside Church Headquarters one last time, and who could do so with a sample of her father’s genetics carefully painted onto her left palm before starting this whole mess. Rabbit—her preferred name—wrapped her arms and legs around the taller, stronger woman in a carry-hold, her task complete.

“I wanna go home, now,” she whispered in Ia’s ear, her diction much clearer as her body finished flushing the drugs out of her system. The others closed in to grab them and Helstead. The smell of smoke and acid started to fill the room. “You still have to see your niece, Iulia Marie, before it’s too late.”

“I know.” Ia hugged her friend close and squeezed her eyes shut. It was not easy, keeping her eyes tear-free. Not when crying wasn’t a comfortable thing to do in the breathless jolt of one more teleportation.

—

“So?” her half twin, Thorne, asked Ia as she peered at the sleeping toddler in her crib. He spoke softly, so as not to wake little Iulia Marie.

Ia sighed, arms folded almost defensively across her chest. “She’s healthy, she has great potential, I’ve already given you notes on how to gently guide her into the future . . . and I have not a single speck of maternal feelings. She’s . . . not adorable,” she added, shrugging helplessly. “She’s not the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. Neither is she ugly; she’s just . . . a baby. Yet another life to save.”

“Wow,” Fyfer murmured from the doorway. “That’s pretty sad, Sis.”

“That’s pretty normal, actually,” she reminded her younger brother. “Everyone invokes that feeling in me.”

Tipping her head at the door, she followed Fyfer as he backed out, Thorne trailing in her wake. Once the door was shut and they were back in the living room of the apartment the three adults and one child shared, she could speak more normally without fear of waking her niece. Arms still crossed, she paced a little. The relentless ticking of time could still be heard in the back of her head.

“Like I said, she’ll be fine; just follow my instructions and use common sense, compassion, and be willing to try different approaches when teaching her, until you hit on the styles that work best at each stage of her development . . . And that is
all
the advice I am qualified to give. I am not, nor will I ever be, a mother,” Ia stated, cutting a hand through the air. “Nor do I want to be one. I have too much to do to save the galaxy.”

Thorne wrapped his arms around her from behind, hugging her for a few moments. “Do you regret it?”

“Do you regret following my directives?” she countered, knowing the answer was the same as hers even as she leaned her head into his shoulder for comfort. Not for long, since she didn’t want her gift to trigger. It was tempting, though, to linger as long as possible. Long past the ticking in her head. Pulling away with a sigh, Ia rubbed at her eyes. “Let’s not waste what little time I have left on debating whether or not a woman
has
to have maternal instincts and needs. Did you get the last of my directives stored in the Vault?”

“Yes, and yes, they’re being organized and filed as we speak,” Fyfer reassured her. “The extra crystal sprays you wanted are in the storage hall behind Mom and Ma’s place. I was hoping, if you finish with them early, we could throw you a little going-away party . . .”

Ia shook her head. “No parties. A final speech in the main cavern, but that’s it. Are the refugee specialists in place, ready to accept everyone fleeing the surface?”

“They’re in the last stages of prepping the outer strongholds to receive all the people who’ll be fleeing the fighting on the surface tomorrow. Warrens,” Thorne corrected himself. “I know you authorized it, but I’m not sure I like calling them that. Sometimes I think Rabbit takes her nickname and its associations a little too closely to heart.”

“Well, that’s because she has
me
in her life,” Fyfer said, touching his chest with his fingers. At his siblings’ blank looks, he added, “
Watership Down
? One of the classics of twentieth-century fiction? Oh come on, it’s that long story with the rabbits that have to go traveling to find a new home, and the stories-within-the-story that Ma always read to us when we were children?”

“Oh, right, that story. I’d forgotten about that,” Thorne apologized.

“It wasn’t important to me, so I let it go from my memory,” Ia said. She quickly raised her hand as Fyfer drew in a breath to protest. “Look, I know it’s important to you. I’m glad it’s important to you. I just . . . I’m running out of time, Fyfer. I have three, maybe five minutes left to say good-bye to both of you, then I’m going to have to devote every spare second to the last of the crysium shaping I need to do, before the final speech to everyone and having to leave. I’ve said my goodbyes to Rabbit. I’m going to have to say good-bye to our mothers . . .”

Fyfer moved forward at the rising distress in her tone. Gently, he wrapped his arms around his tall sibling and hugged her. “It’s okay, Ia. It’s okay. We
know
this is the last time we’ll see you. Aside from that speech.” Releasing her, he backed up and lightly bopped her on the nose. That earned him a dirty look from her, but at least it lightened the mood. “You just go out there and take care of everything else. We’ve got the homeworld covered for you.”

“Do you want us to be with you when you walk out to the main cavern and address everyone?” Thorne asked. “If so, we’ll need the exact time to show up.”

Ia shook her head quickly. “No. That would require you being on hand for when I say good-bye to our parents. Unfortunately . . . it’s a gray spot. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I
do
know that if either of you are there, in their apartment before I emerge, it’ll disturb too many possibilities down the line.”

Fyfer folded his arms across his chest. “Iantha Iulia, are you going to pick a
fight
with our mothers?”

“No?” she offered, though her uncertainty over that mist-shrouded spot made it more of a question than a statement. “At least, I don’t think so, at this time?”

“Well, try not to, or I’ll be very upset you didn’t let me have a ringside seat for it,” her younger brother teased, grinning at her.

Rolling her eyes, Ia turned to Thorne. He opened his arms one more time for her, and she went into them, hugging him back. She felt safe in his arms despite the chance that her precognition could trigger. Knowing that she would not be able to step into them again was
almost
enough to make her want to ignore the driving ticktock of time. But with a handful of seconds to spare, she pulled free. Thorne, thankfully, let her go.

“I’ll see you in the timestreams,” she promised, taking one last look at her siblings. “I love you both.”

Thorne, tall and muscular, with thick brown hair, her rock in appearance as well as metaphysically. Fyfer, short and slender by comparison, celebrity-handsome with his curling locks and charming smile. Right now, his smile was a bit lopsided, more sad than charming. Thorne didn’t even bother, though he was careful not to frown or scowl. Neither one wanted to say an actual good-bye, which was fine with Ia. She wasn’t sure if she could get the words out past the lump trying to form in her throat.

“. . . I’ll see you in the timestreams,” she repeated under her breath, as much to reassure herself as them. Backing up a few steps, she forced herself to turn and head out the front door, no backward glance. She had work to do, and only so many hours left in which to get it all done.

Yes, I lost family when Sanctuary fell behind enemy lines. No, we cannot get them out of there. That whole system is lost to the Terran Empire, and seventeen other unoccupied star systems at this time. We’ll lose a few more before it’s over, but none of the others are occupied, thank God.
If
we stay out of Shredou—Grey—space, that is.

. . . Which god? Seriously? You’re asking me
now
about my religious beliefs? . . . Agnostic Unigalactan. I know the Sh’nai holy texts have me quoted as saying, “There is no God but the Future, and Ia is Her Prophet,” and that may be very true for the actions driving my purpose in life, but I . . . What do
I
think God’s plan is?

Look, from my perspective, God plays poker. Dragon poker. Look it up; it’s from half a millennia ago. Now, I play a form of it, too. I knew that throwing my homeworld behind enemy lines looks like I’m throwing away the three of a kind in a full house, but I know
every
card that’s going to come up in that deck. Not just in this game, not in the next game, but every card in more than three hundred shufflings of the deck from now. I knew that throwing away a seemingly good full house in our time frame would guarantee all aces and royal flushes in every hand that would need it three centuries from now.

I’d throw
Earth
behind enemy lines if I thought I could save this galaxy in doing so. I suggest you be grateful that it wasn’t necessary—and be grateful again that the only ones severely affected by Sanctuary’s disappearance are those very few who had actual, direct ties to its inhabitants. Like me. But then I won’t let anyone suffer through something I’m not willing to endure myself.

~Ia

MAY 9, 2499 T.S.

After nineteen solid hours of constant reshaping and retuning of spray after crysium spray, real food tasted odd in Ia’s mouth. The orange juice was fresh-squeezed, or as fresh as a few hours ago could qualify, but it tasted like licking an e-clip on the power nodes: metallic and coppery. The ham sandwich, layered with lettuce, cheese, sauces, and tomatoes grown in the same hydroponic gardens as the oranges, reminded her of cardboard and freeze-dried emergency rations. It compared poorly to the thrumming, fresh-baked bread of crystalsong in the back of her mind, the sizzling bacon of electrical cords and the rich, spicy stir-fry of rare earth magnets.

Kardos had gone off hours ago to settle into his new quarters and integrate into his new life. O’Taicher and Yarrin had been taken back up to the ship by her second officer as soon as Helstead had finished a nap and a meal of her own. Since she no longer needed others to help manage the worst chances—bodies to throw into the fray as living shields against the slings and arrows of the most malfeasant of percentages—Ia had ordered Helstead to retreat with the other two.

Now she had just three tasks left. The first was to eat a physical, biological, matter-based meal. The last was to give a speech to everyone in less than half an hour. Her eyes felt like sandpaper from the crying she had done while she worked, her nose was still slightly stuffed, and what she wanted to do was fling aside the food and go hug her brothers. Her mothers. Her world. But no, she had to eat, and she had to give a speech.

The last speech.

She tried not to think about whatever it was she had to get through when her mothers came by.

Over two hundred light-years away, dozens of Grey ships were gathering around one of their colonyworlds, preparing to translocate from that system to this one, to begin seizing Humans for yet another attempt at preserving their truly alien, exogalactic species by infusing it with biology gleaned from this one. Those plans were laid, and the Shredou would not deviate from their path. Of course, they were also going to be receiving a message from the hyperrelay unit Ia had offered them a handful of years back, just prior to her last visit to this system. A recorded message, not a broadcast one, giving them the exact date of their attack, and the exact pattern of systems they were going to invade and claim, expanding their dying empire in search of resources and a buffer zone.

The Shredou commanders back home would spend a few days dissecting the Terran storage technology to determine it was indeed a message originally recorded on the datachips years ago, but the fleet would have already been launched. Ia sat there at her mother’s age-stained but polished dining table and stared sightlessly at the fancy china cabinet they had bought and installed in their spacious underground apartment. All she could see were gray-skinned, long-lived, vaguely humanoid but
not
Human aliens deciding coldly, rationally, that Humans were still their best bet at generating another generation.

A form of hunger not too dissimilar from the Salik’s,
she thought, with little appetite left.
Save that the frogtopi are honest about wanting to destroy what they devour.
Looking down at the half-eaten sandwich she had made, the half-drunk glass of juice, she felt odd that there were no clips edging the table, no means of securing her family’s tableware from sudden maneuvers. Shaking it off, Ia stood and bent over the table, ready to take everything back to the kitchen for composting and cleaning.

She did not know what made her glance up at the cabinet after picking up her glass, but she did. At that height, at that exact angle, she could see it. The glass slipped and
thunked
on the table, thankfully not breaking. Ia ignored the cool liquid on her fore and middle fingers, the droplets on her thumb. She stared at the rose-shaped teacup so proudly, safely displayed on the topmost shelf in her mother’s glass-fronted cabinet.

The teacup. The heirloom, brought all the way from Earth. It had been shaped like a literal heirloom rose, with five thin, delicately sculpted, pink-painted porcelain petals, with a handle sculpted to look like an extra-long, curled green sepal.

It sat on a saucer that had been sculpted and painted to look like a flattened version. The saucer, she knew, had been broken on the very first planet her biomother Amelia’s great-plus-grandfather had moved to, generations ago. It had been repaired in the
kintsukuroi
style, with gold lacquer spiderwebbing the frail plate, holding the carefully preserved pieces together. But the reddish cup itself . . .

In her mind’s eye, that cup had
always
been shattered. Broken. Perpetually left in chunks and pieces, bleeding its bone white innards along each fractured edge, instead of the deep reddish pink one would have expected from the flesh of a still-fresh wound.

Leaving her plate and glass still on the table, the latter miraculously still upright despite its short fall, Ia moved around the table to the cabinet. She stared for long, long seconds through the glazed panels, then opened the door. She had to let go of the knob because she could not bring her left hand to lift toward that top shelf. But the right one . . . yes, she could. Her right hand. Her dominant one. Her choice for action rather than reaction.

The hand-painted porcelain felt cool and glossy-smooth under the hesitant touch of her fingertips. She played them over the curves, the unchipped edges, memorizing every little detail she could without actually picking it up. She did not want to pick up the cup, did not want to risk seeing her vision come true.

But time was running out.

Determined to conquer the long-standing fears stirred by those visions from her preawakened youth, Ia gently lifted the cup out of the cabinet. Cradled it in her right palm, staring down into the depths of the bowl, where some artisan had gently painted little golden stamens and pistils at the very center. She heard footsteps approaching, and glanced over her shoulder in time to see her mothers enter the room, the slightly taller, creamy brown-skinned Aurelia, and the shorter, curly-haired Amelia, her cheeks freckled from the daily UV treatments everyone in the now underground Free World Colony endured from the light strips lining all corridors and halls.

“What are you . . . ? Ah,” Aurelia said, catching sight of the painted cup gently cradled in her daughter’s hand. “I see you finally picked it up.” She smiled warmly, visibly pleased that her wife’s family heirloom had finally been acknowledged by the last of their children to hold it.

Amelia, however, frowned.
“Kardia mou?”
she asked, briefly falling back on the Greek endearment from her mother’s side of the family. The side that had preserved that teacup and saucer. The side that had given birth to her only daughter. “Are you planning on taking it with you? I . . . I could pack it for you, if you like . . .”

The gray mist of too many choices clouded her view of the timestreams, now that her parents were in the dining room. Ia returned her gaze to the cup, but her other mother spoke.

“Take it, hell!” Aurelia asserted, speaking her mind as her hands planted on her hips. “She can leave it right here,
and
come back for it, for her own dining room one day. On her world, living among her people.”

“She’s said she has to leave us behind!” Amelia half argued, half pleaded, touching her wife on the elbow. “Respect her wishes,
agape mou
. She is the Prophet, and we will respect our daughter for her choices.”

“She’s the Prophet, yes! And
that
means she could
find
a way to stay here if she looks hard enough,” the taller woman shot back.

“Enough.”

The barely voiced word cut off their rising argument. In the moment of silence that followed, Ia knew she’d had it wrong all along. It wasn’t that this life she had followed, through blood and murder and tears, was a matter of having no choice but to do everything she had done and more. No. It
was
her choice.
By
her choice.

“You once told me all those years ago that this cup was fine,” she murmured, her gaze still on the carefully preserved work of art in her hand. This
trompe l’oeil
attempt at an oversized, half-unfurled, antique porcelain rose. She turned as she spoke. Not to face her mothers, but to face the table. To put the hand holding the cup
over
the table. “That it was intact. That it had always been intact and, with care, always would be. And if you had told me once, then you had told me a hundred thousand times. I heard you every single time. Every single word . . .

“But this cup,” she said, voice gaining strength in the conviction, the
choice
she made. “This cup has
always
been broken. By.
Me.
”

Her fingers clenched inward, hard and fast. The paper-thin porcelain
crunched
. Pieces immediately pattered and clattered onto the age-stained dining table. As her mothers gasped, shocked and horrified, Ia turned her hand over and gently flexed fingers and thumb, letting the remaining pieces drop. Two of the larger shards cracked further, for the surface was lightly padded for most tableware, but still far too firm for such a delicate thing in their homeworld’s high gravity.

A few drops of her own blood stained the porcelain, dripping from the thin wounds on her inner two fingers and the deeper cut on her palm. Without expression, without flinching, Ia reached up with her other hand and pulled out a slender little sliver of a chip from the heel of her hand. That, too, landed on the table, coated in a deeper, darker red than anything the artist had ever used.

“What the . . . ?” Amelia breathed.

“How
could
you?” Aurelia added on the heels of her wife’s words, both of them horrified.

Ia turned to face them.

“How? Because I have
always
chosen to destroy this teacup, Mothers.
Chosen.
Not by accident, not by carelessness, but by my free-willed choice. Save all the pieces,” she ordered, her tone hardening in order to bring their full attention back out of their shock. Ia knew that this was a path she could add into the timestreams without ruining anything, but she had to get her parents to listen to her words, not gape at her actions. The teacup had already been broken, after all.

It had
always
been broken . . . but one day, there was a chance it could be fixed, with a level of both knowledge and understanding that she would never possess in the whole span of her current life.

“You can save them in a box, or use the same
kintsukuroi
method to hold them together like the saucer. The choice is yours. But know that this cup will remain broken, even if it is repaired, until the Savior remakes it whole, undamaged and unbroken, in a way that
I
cannot . . . and as I will
never
do. By my choice.”

She moved away from the table, hand clenched to help staunch the flow of blood while waiting for her innate abilities to work. Stopping a meter away, she met her mothers’ eyes, seeing the hurt feelings, the wishes and hopes she had just broken and shattered along with a simple little cup.

“I love you, Mom; I love you, Ma. I always have, and I always will. And I already know how proud you are of me . . . in spite of this momentary shock. Know that I have always been proud of you. But I do have to go, and I will
not
come back again. By. Choice.

“I’ve already said my good-byes to my brothers,” she added, clasping her hands behind her back. Or rather, clasping the wrist of her clenched fist. The timelines had shifted just enough that her mothers would remain in this suite, rather than join her on the balcony overlooking the central cavern, but it wouldn’t ruin anything; in time, they would recover. “And I’ve already hugged you in farewell. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to say it to everyone else, too.”

Sidestepping both women, she strode for the door. Swiftly, trying to move gracefully so it did not look like she was escaping that final, tear-streaked, recrimination-laden good-bye her instincts screamed they were going to try to give to her. A mental nudge of the doors between her and the corridors of Central Warren, burgeoning underground capital of the Free World Colony, allowed her to depart without leaving any more smears of blood on the place.