Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (25 page)

Reducing its energy field via electrokinesis, she pulled off a thumbnail-sized chunk and spread it out over the surface of her desk, rubbing it flatter and flatter with her hands and her mind until it spread over her desk in a faint gold-foil-thin film. She made sure to tuck it under the edges of the clipping rim, then manually dimmed the lights in her office to double-check for any glow.

No cabin and no corridor on board a military ship was ever left completely dark; that would violate every safety regulation in the books. There were faint, phosphorescent safety strips outlining the edges of the floor, but after the bright glow of her working lights, they were very dim. With the lights out, and the paper-thin film applied, the crysium wasn’t readily visible. Of course, if even the safety strips stopped working and if she stared long enough, she might just make out the rectangle where she’d spread the crysium, but it would take concentration. Satisfied, she refirmed the bracer under her gray-colored sleeve, then splayed her hands on the cool, superhard surface, concentrating.

Crysium was not sentient, but it
was
alive in its own way. Anchored by its presence, Ia was able to skim straight through the future of her office. Minutes and hours and days blurred past, until the next dessert offering came along—she snapped the timestream to a crawl, heedless of which day it was, and grabbed those hands with her mind. Or rather, the life-energy inside those hands, as she could and would grab a Feyori encountered mid-life-stream. Hauling that person onto the timeplains was an unexpected struggle, however. With an effort more akin to pulling a mechsuit out of a mud pit by hand than simply tugging a lightworlder up onto a riverbank, she found herself sweating to pull into view . . . a waist-up image of a man with a face painted like a white snowflake on a black background.

“You!”
Ia gaped at him, shocked by just who she had caught.
“But . . . you’re . . .”

He smiled and shrugged as best he could, his wrists still caught in her hands.
“I’m the Redeemer, yes. And the Savior—in
my
timeline—was quite successful.”
He paused, glanced down at the waters showing the image of her desk and its spiral of polka-dot-infused gelatin, and looked up at her.
“I assure you, the desserts are harmless. Even healthy.”

It was a good question, considering what she had done . . . or would have done . . . to him and his intended life in the far-distant future.
“Why are you giving these to me?”

Ia didn’t bother asking him how. The ability to cross temporal boundaries physically, and to do so as easily as stepping into the next room, was a trick of the Savior’s. Post-galactic salvation, that was. It was not something
Ia
could understand, for all that she knew it was possible. Nor did she have the time to learn. So the only thing that concerned her was the
why
. Particularly where this man was concerned, and her own orders regarding his life, in his past and her future.

That black-and-white-painted mouth twisted wryly. Ruefully even, before he answered simply,
“Because I forgive you. I understand now why you did what you had to do, and I forgive you for it—but I’m still going to get you for it. Now put me back; I feel like I’m being pulled in half, here.”

“Are you going to keep forcing desserts on me?”
Ia asked. She honestly wanted to know, and to know why.
“And why gelatin desserts? Why not cake, or a pastry?”

He smiled at her. A sweet, cherubic, innocent smile that immediately put Ia on edge, wary of that halo-wreathed, wing-framed hint-of-holy aura lurking in his eyes and lips and cheeks.
“Because
I
know what
you
do not.”
Pulling one hand free, he tapped her lightly on the nose.
“Your abilities, O Prophet, only extend to the ends of the universe you inhabit. Thanks to the Savior,
I
am not nearly so limited. My revenge will be very sweet . . . and very jiggly. Enjoy.”

Now he grinned like a devil, a cheeky, snowflake-faced devil. On the one hand, Ia was grateful he
had
forgiven her for her trespasses against him. But on the other hand, the Redeemer had a sense of humor utterly unlike her own . . . and if he truly did know things she did not . . . No. She didn’t have time to consider what
that
meant, let alone track it down. Pushing his mind back into his body, she released him from her temporal grip. He released the plate and vanished back into Somewhere Else, via a grasp of physics so profound, she could only See the first and foremost person to master it, above and beyond any of the feeble fumbling of a Feyori or the advanced mechanics of a Grey.

Dropping back into her own body, into her own time, Ia stared at the pie chart on her plate. There was literally nothing
she
could see, all the way to the ends of her life in a wide variety of possible futures, that would cause her harm if she ate the damned thing.
So whatever his “sweet, jiggly” vengeance is . . . is that a Hell made out of gelatin?

And how is this forgiveness and vengeance in one? I don’t understand. I do
not
understand anything of this . . .
She did grasp that the several flavors of gelatin in the bowl before her were one and all perfectly safe to eat. But not the why, and not the how. Confused, Ia unclipped the spoon and poked at the stuff, watching it shimmy.
Considering what I owe him, some sort of bizarre dessert-based “vengeance” is probably a small price to pay. Like . . . I don’t know . . . going to my grave never understanding why?

That might be it. Of course, there were hundreds of thousands of mysteries in the universe she’d take to her grave without a chance to understand. Shaking her head, Ia dug into it and set aside her doubts. As far as vengeance-based punishments went, this was a very mild one to have to suffer. Downright pleasant-tasting, in fact.

Now that Ia knew where the non-Garcia desserts were coming from—however bizarre a source—she had more immediate matters to contemplate. Such as the little details that had been slipping through unseen cracks in her temporal vigilance of late.
I cannot afford to let any details slide, or the slightest deviation could send everything careening wildly off course. I cannot . . .

An idea crossed her mind.
String theory, wormhole vibrations, universal constants, yet the multiverse lies just beyond . . . Accessing transdimensional energies is
not
impossible, since it does eventually get accessed, and hyperrifts are simply a crude preliminary, like how the old insystem drives were a crude preliminary to FTL, before Terrans realized it was possible to go faster-than-light without violating the constant speed of light
squared
. I already know the connotations of negative energy impacting on the quantum vibrations of a hyperrift opening, but where there’s a negative, there’s always a
positive
—!

Inspired, Ia dug in her desk for a blank datapad. Then winced.
Not enough time, never enough time—if only I could access directly from the timestreams, but I’d have to have a way of throttling down the energy flow, some sort of psychic capacitor—
Gah! Ia smacked her forehead, then pulled off a chunk of her diminishing crysium bracer.
This is its own capacitor! If I touch only
this
while it’s plugged into a datapad—I’ll have to shape an appropriate plug, first—then I should be able to connect the two a lot more directly!

Abandoning her dessert entirely, Ia shoved it under the clip edge on the side of her desk and started experimenting. She fried three datapads in just over a minute before she got a configuration on the interface that was big enough to resist the excess energies for the fourth one. She also could only use it for a few seconds at a time—real-time seconds—before those energies had to be bled off, but it worked.

It
worked
!

But those were tentative tests. She stared at the thumb-shaped bit of peach-hued crystal in her hand. The interior had turned more translucent than transparent, etched with a fine maze of striations deep inside, but it
would
work. Ia plugged it into one of the data ports on her office workstation, sank her mind into the timestreams, and plunged into a full-on prophecy culled directly from the timestreams.

Pulling back into her body, she sniffed the air, cracked open one eye . . . and sagged with relief. No smoldering wreckage from overloaded circuits. Her bracer was now a mere bracelet, reduced to a dagger’s worth of crysium instead of a sword’s, but that was fine. She could always reshape everything in a matter of mere seconds now that she knew how.

Excellent. Now to try to find the right alternate-universe me who knows what the hell I’m trying to think about—Meyun is going to
love
this, when I show him I can drastically speed up my timestream-based search efforts . . . and none of this is something I would have thought of without that little gelatin-based visit to spur it.

I owe you even
more
now, Nuin. I’m sorry I cannot change the worst parts of your fate, but I am glad you’ve forgiven me for them.
She paused, thinking, then shook her head.
Even if I
don’t
know if you came from the timeline I’m aiming for, or not. Meyun might try to blow this up, saying it’s proof I succeed . . . but if there’s no true paradox in shooting one’s former grandfather when traveling back in time . . . then there’s no paradox in his visiting me from a successful timeline when I’m actually living in a timeline where I
don’t
succeed.

That’s the damnation of it all. “Oh, hey, just go talk to yourself in the timeline where you succeed and find out how to do it!” As if there’s no effort involved between getting from Here to There, with no need for me to police a thousand and ten hundred things. As if there’s no need to depend on the whims and vagaries of others . . .

I will have no guarantee of success until I play my final move. Not until I can see if I’ve dug the channels deep enough and built the levees high and long enough to withstand the floods of Time. Still . . .
She eyed the dessert, then unclipped her spoon and scooped up a bite, lifting it briefly in solemn salute.
Here’s to the hope that his visit means I
do
succeed.

MAY 17, 2499 T.S.
GLAU
TLASSIAN COLONY 7

“The Admiral-General’s on the line, sir,” C’ulosc stated from the comm station. The ship swayed around them as Ia dodged Salik fire, making him grab at his console to keep his arms near his controls; the safety harness only kept his torso in its seat. “Are you busy?”

“Yes, but I’ll take it anyway,” Ia stated, hands shifting over the controls and in the attitude glove. “Upper third tertiary; don’t shift any of my lower screens,” she added, glancing down at the tactical displays. This was a messy fight; the Salik were desperate to take Glau, under the carefully planted rumor that it had no passion-moss infestation. It didn’t, though there were sealed canisters on the tidally locked moon, containers waiting to be cracked open just in case the enemy’s troops got through the blockade.

The Salik were desperate enough, they had brought more than fifty ships to conquer a colony that numbered just over a quarter million. There weren’t more than a dozen military ships on the Alliance side in this system, but there were a total of fifty vessels in all, thanks to the addition of merchant reserves—civilian ships outfitted and licensed for combat. Spyder had agreed to sit in on this fight even though it wasn’t his shift, helping coordinate insystem maneuvers between the various factions. He worked side by side with Lieutenant Rico, who was being kept busy translating some of Spyder’s more thick-accented Terranglo commands into much more intelligible versions in the makeshift fleet’s various native tongues.

Her thumb graced the button for the main cannon just as Myang’s face appeared over her head. “General Ia, you do realize Logistics, Strategics, and the DoI are all screaming slagging murder over how many supply movements, personnel transfers, and patrol-route changeups you’ve just sent through their systems?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” she agreed, her gaze firmly on the lower bank of screens while the central one flashed deep red for a moment. She tapped the button again and made a course correction while the cannon recharged itself. “Over thirty-seven thousand personnel reassignments, trillions of crates of food and other supplies to be shipped ahead of schedule, thousands of hydrobombs released from cold storage . . . and all of it to be delivered on time within three weeks with a full-scale mobilization of the fleet.

“But they’ll all have to get in line behind the Guardianship of the K’Katta,” she added tightly, spinning her ship on its main axis, “who are having seventy thousand personnel shipped, and I’m moving over twenty thousand personnel among the Tlassians, as soon as I’m finished punching red-hot holes through this system’s light-space. Plus the”—she paused while hull breach claxons blared for the amidships sector, until Darghas at the operations station cut them off—“Chinsoiy are having to move forty thousand or so around, and the V’Dan a good fifty grand . . . and the Gatsugi will have the highest number of personnel swapped in and out, at over ninety thousand bodies moved about the known galaxy.”

“Is there any particular point to all of this?” Myang asked dryly.

“Yes, sir, I’m saving an additional 13,716 lives for absolute sure . . .” She fired again and sloughed her ship sideways through a set of debris that made the telltales for the ship’s shields fluctuate in blips of green-turned-yellow, then thumbed the main cannon again. “And adding in a twenty-six percent chance of saving an additional fourteen percent of the Choya nation, give or take half a percent—that would be well over a billion lives,” Ia stated. Red flared briefly from every forward-viewing screen. “Instead of a mere eleven percent chance.”

“You’re serious about saving enemy lives,” Myang stated. Her tone reminded Ia of her old Platoon Lieutenant, D’Kora, who never spoke a question if she could help it.