Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (31 page)

“My sickbag’s on standby, sir,” Al-Aboudwa promised her. “It’s a good thing there’s a shift change coming up soon.”

JUNE 28, 2499 T.S.
V’DARSHET, V’DAN SYSTEM

“But you haven’t slept in four days, and only then for five hours when you last did, Ia,” Jesselle argued with her commanding officer. “And not for the three days before that. I don’t care if you’re half-Meddler; that’s not healthy for a Human.”

Ia didn’t break stride. “So long as Harper keeps shooting me with the psi-guns we made, I can keep going for another eight days if need be, Commander.”

“Will you
need
to?” the blonde challenged her. Taller, if more slender, she moved to block Ia’s path, arms folding across her chest.

“For the next seven of them, yes. I promise to get two hours of sleep later today.”

“In one of my infirmary beds,” the doctor asserted. “So I can monitor you.”

“No.” Ia pointed at her. “
You
only want me in your infirmary so you can hit me with a hypospray of some sort of sleeping serum. I don’t have time for that, and
you
would be hauled up on charges of Grand High Treason for allowing that many people to be infected and die.”

A voice on the hall comm interrupted them, as the ship’s interior sensors located their target.
“Yeoman O’Keefe to the General. We are fully fueled and cleared for departure.”

Ia tapped her arm unit.
“Acknowledged, Yeoman. Depart when ready.”
She released the button and stepped around the doctor. “As soon as I’m done giving my next message, I’ll go down to Engineering, get shot again, and be fine.”

Opening the door to her office, she nodded to the quartet of clerks on duty. There was now so much paperwork coming through the front office that it required all the workstations to be manned. Retreating to her office—Doctor Mishka still following her—she didn’t bother retreating all the way to her cabin, where the currently Human-shaped Feyori, Belini, was still lounging in Ia’s bed, indulging in the “quaint downtime of sleep.” It wasn’t as if there was anywhere else on board the ship to stick the Meddler.

Instead, she stripped out of her sweat-stained T-shirt, used it to wipe her face dry, and opened the drawer where she had stuffed a change of outer clothes, namely a set of Dress Blacks. Moving swiftly, she changed into the shirt and coat, leaving the pants in the drawer for the moment. “How do I look?” she asked as she buttoned up the gray shirt to the collar, then adjusted the lapels on the jacket. “Presentable?”

Jesselle tugged a couple of the medals into better alignment, then grimaced and raked her fingers through Ia’s hair. “You’ll do. You’re picking up shadows under your eyes again . . . and you don’t look twenty-seven. You look closer to forty-two.”

“Private Teevie to the General, twenty seconds to airtime.”

“I’ll live.” Ia sat at her desk, adjusting her knee-length coat one more time. She activated the main workscreen, and thumbed the comm.
“Acknowledge, Teevie, thank you.”

“You’re going to kill yourself at this rate,” Mishka warned her.

Ia flicked her an annoyed, determined look. “I will
not
die before my work is done, Commander. I’ll drop up to ten million lives if I have to, at this point. But I am trying not to. That’s the whole point of this.”

“Right.” Jesselle started to say more, but the older woman clamped her mouth shut as the workscreen flashed, showing the TUPSF map-within-a-laurel-wreath logo.

“This is General Ia of the Alliance Armies, and Prophet of a Thousand Years. I apologize for interrupting all broadcast channels, but this warning is necessary. You are all about to receive a series of messages from the Salik Empire,” Ia stated without much preamble. “They will tell you that they have identified the few patients who have suffered from the plague infecting their world, and that those patients have one and all recovered. They will try to convince you that this Quarantine Extreme which I have imposed across the entire Alliance is not necessary. They will try to claim I am exaggerating the threat of the plague in order to damage the health of each nation’s economy, due to the closure of all travel, trade, and atmospheric interactions.

“Please do not be fooled by these claims. The handful of survivors they have identified are just that. They are the only ones who
can
survive this plague . . . but as they are now permanent carriers of it, they must not be permitted to leave their colonyworlds alive. The last of the Salik will be dead within one month. Make no mistake, citizens of the Alliance: The Salik
created
this plague two hundred years ago. Only by the grace of pure luck did they not wipe out all sentient life back during the First Salik War.

“I have been unable to see the Salik
ever
ending their hunger for our flesh, no matter which way I try to include them alive in our future,” Ia continued, wrinkling her nose briefly. “So I have chosen to allow them to rediscover this lost plague of theirs and spread it among themselves. What they would have unleashed upon all others has merely been returned to them unchecked. By the end of July, the Salik will devour nothing and no one. They will not wage another war. They will merely be a sad footnote in our histories.

“But they are not dead yet, and they are still quite cunning. Do not believe them, and do not be fooled. I would like to get out of this without having to destroy any of our own colonies, just to contain the plague and prevent its further spread.” She hardened her tone, staring into the pickups that would broadcast and rebroadcast her message everywhere in the known galaxy. “If it does, the infected ship, station, dome, or colony
will
be destroyed, even if I have to do it myself. Please continue to cooperate with the Quarantine Extreme, so that it will not become necessary.

“I know several of you think this is a joke. I wish it were, but it is not,” she continued soberly. “The reason for this Quarantine Extreme is so that it will be very obvious when the Salik start trying to contaminate our worlds in earnest . . . which they will start doing shortly.

“Just be patient, meioas, trust in me to make sure the plague is stopped, continue to follow my commands, ignore the lies of the Salik, and avoid anything they try to send your way. For those of you who will need to send out or receive needed supplies, individual orders will be sent shortly before that point authorizing exactly how to go about it without risk of contamination. Other than that . . . try to have a good day and ignore the Salik. I’ll let everyone in the Alliance know when the danger has finally passed. General Ia out.”

Tapping the comm control on her workstation, she held her square-shouldered, confident pose for a moment more while the link shut down. Once it was closed, she untied her boots and pulled the slacks out of the drawer, exchanging her mottled gray workout pants for higher-quality black ones with four narrow stripes down each side.

“Right, I have twenty-three minutes to thumbprint sign all the paperwork in Grizzle’s ‘Requires Formal Authorization’ pile,” she muttered. “Then it’s down to Engineering to get an energy shot, then back up to the aft-galley lunch . . . breakfast? Food,” Ia dismissed, relacing her boots. “Food with the 2nd Platoon while I discuss repair priorities coming up with Harper and listen to
him
telling me I’m not getting enough sleep. Then we join the Dlmvla 3.723 light-months from the V’Dan colony of Pa-Ren to destroy an attempted Salik stockpiling point, and I spend half of that battle chatting with would-be Quarantine breakers, trying to convince them not to kill off their own side out of greed or whatever.

“The same as I spent most of my workout just now, speaking on the comm with sentients across the known galaxy—if you really want to do something to help, Jesselle?” Ia added, standing so she could tuck in her shirt and fasten her trousers. “Get me something to drink to keep me from going hoarse with all this talking I’ve been doing. I can feel my throat getting a little sore, in spite of my biokinetics.”

Jesselle sighed. “You are going to kill yourself at this pace, you know . . .”

“Not today, and not anytime soon,” Ia said, heading for the door. “I have far too much work to do.”

That is the question, isn’t it? Am I a mass murderer?

I know what my head says. Every time I use my precognitive abilities, I am forced to remember that I am a soldier and an officer. That I am trying to do my damnedest to save the most lives and waste the least resources in doing so. If there were another way that could save as many lives, I’d take it in a heartbeat. But as a soldier and an officer, I have an objective—the saving of as many Alliance lives as possible, and the lives of civilizations we haven’t met, and won’t meet for hundreds of years—and I have to follow through on that, even if it means having to kill. The objective is too important for the good of all.

Am I a murderer? My head solidly says, “No,” and it points to all the reference matter for the legality, morality, and ethics of everything I’ve been trying to accomplish. No, no, and no.

I am not a murderer; I am a soldier.

~Ia

JULY 14, 2499 T.S.
SELDUN IV
ISC 197 SYSTEM

There wasn’t much left of the original domes, but the Salik had dug in, establishing a base for a little while. Bombardment had broken up most of that, leaving the rock surface pockmarked with craters visible on high resolution. But Ia wasn’t here just to destroy the deeply buried colony of only two thousand or so Salik. While that makeshift settlement was not yet infected, buried deep as it was in the bedrock-dug caverns that were required for emergency retreats beneath all domes by Alliance-wide law, their leaders back on Sallha had decided that “revenge seeding” was in order.

They had sent a ship with launch drones to drop canisters on the surface, Tlassian-style pressure-sealed barrels marked in Tlassian and Trade Tongue as relief supplies, rare ores—anything the Salik thought would entice a salvage team in the future into bringing the canister into an atmosphere and open it up. The refugees would have to be burned out with the main cannon, but Spyder had taken a team down to an abandoned ore-mining base to use the few intact drones to find and collect the canisters into a single location easily destroyed by hydrobomb.

They had been here for seven hours now, and while Ia continued to make and field calls across the known galaxy, the rest of her crew had been given a mini-Wake, taking three hours in rotation for each duty shift—minus Spyder’s group—to party and relax.

“Eyah, Ia,”
Spyder’s voice came over the comm.
“We’re jes’ ’bout ready fer yer lil’ light-’n-fire show. ETA four minnits.”

“The bomb’s already been launched,”
Ia relayed.

Helstead, lounging with her feet on the pilot’s console, since they were parked in a stable orbit, joined the conversation.
“Navicomp says we’ll see the light show from here, too. That’s a quadruple-load tank on that hydrobomb.”

“Eh . . . I’m feelin’ paranoid, down ’ere. Ready-check that we got ’em all, eh?”
he asked.

Nodding—he couldn’t see her, since the mining base didn’t have functioning vid at the moment—she dipped her mind into the timestreams . . . just in time to see a probability levee collapse along the channels she had painstakingly dug. On a world that should have remained safe. A reddish world, close to many others. A world with an atmosphere, even if everyone on it lived in domes.

“No . . . no no no
no— MARS!
” (
BELINI!
) Ia shouted, panic boosting her broadcast.

Helstead flinched, clapping her hands to her head. “Muckin’
shakk
, sir!”

The air
popped
next to Ia’s command station. Clad in a skimpy, leaf-patterned dress that made her look even more like a faerie creature, a margarita glass in her hand, Belini scowled at Ia. “Excuse me, but I was in the middle of chatting up—”

(
Shut up!
) Ia snapped. Reaching up, she snagged the other woman’s wrist, ignoring the flavored, alcohol-laced ice that splashed onto her sleeve in favor of pushing the exact problem and its coordinates on the Meddler. (
We’re about to lose Mars! Grab that hydrobomb and
go
!
)

“Shakk.”
Eyes wide, Belini slapped the console with her other hand to grab enough electrical energy and accepted the kinetic inergy Ia shoved into her. In two seconds flat, she glowed and popped into a silvery soap bubble, then vanished from the bridge.

Ia didn’t care that the margarita glass dropped and cracked, its contents splattering on the deck; it could be cleaned up later. Mars had to be cleaned up
now
. She closed her eyes and reached out through the timeplains to the trio of Feyori in the Sol System nearest the red planet. That wouldn’t be enough to protect the nearest dome from the force of a bomb that strong, so she shifted the streams into a tangled skein of Feyori-style anchor points, and
tugged
on fifteen more, all of whom had anchors near enough to help.

Not to pull them to Seldun IV but to
push
them to Mars. Only because they were already in their energy forms could she make this work. The moment they arrived, disoriented, Ia swept their minds into a single group and relayed their instructions, then let them go. One and all, the eighteen spheres raced down into the atmosphere.

“
Sir
, what’s happening on Mars?” Helstead snapped.

“Everything within fifty klicks of Red Castle 53 is—” Ia started to explain.

“I’m on it!” Mysuri called out from the comm station. “Routing . . . routing . . . ping!
Red Castle Region, emergency override, Martial Law authorization India Alpha. Evacuate, Evacuate! Everyone within fifty kilometers of Dome 53, Evacuate, Evacuate! This is not a drill! I repeat, Martial Law authorization India Alpha, subauthorization Sierra Mike. Evacuate, Evacuate! This is not a drill!
”

Caught off guard, Ia checked the timestreams . . . and clasped her hands over her mouth, stifling a sob of relief. Sixteen of the nineteen Feyori were spreading themselves thin over the curve of Dome 53 that faced the epicenter; it was too late to grab the artificial prions themselves, because they had already made it to the atmosphere and were using the thin light of the system’s sun to start breaking down and reassembling the local molecules. The winds weren’t storm strong, but they were carrying those dangerous molecules along too fast and too chaotically for Ia to pinpoint exactly which bits of air to nab by the energy-based species.

They were dangerously near an atmospheric processor as it was, a processor that had far too many of the right materials for prion-replication. It would be a race to see if Belini or the prions got there first. It would also be a race to see if the other two Meddlers managed to get the two dozen technicians manning the processor to safety. At least seven of them
had
to survive, or Ia’s plans would start collapsing as the floodwaters broke through the channels she had carefully laid farther downstream.

“Satellite, satellite . . . got it!” Private Mysuri added, popping several screens around the bridge into showing a three-second-delayed view of the Red Castle region.

It was just a geosynchronous, somewhat static view of a span of Mars’ surface from close orbit, maybe only two, three hundred kilometers wide. Nothing happened . . . and nothing happened . . . and nothing . . . A sharp, double-pulsed light flashed halfway to the upper right corner of their view. Seconds later, a dark bright pimple grew on the surface of Mars.

“Did we get it, sir?” Mysuri asked.

Dipping into the timestreams, Ia checked. The domes were cracked from the force of the explosion . . . but they
were
holding, including the one closest to the blast, the one sheltered by the Meddlers she had sent. There were now eighteen
very
overfull Feyori, and twenty-one shook-up atmospheric miners who had found themselves abruptly teleported to an emergency bunker twenty kilometers away. The remaining three . . . didn’t make it. There hadn’t been time. But they weren’t absolutely necessary to the timestreams, and the timestreams
could
be repaired from the damage this shake-up had caused. Pulling out, she nodded, lowering her fingers from her mouth.

“Private Mysuri? You are officially my hero,” Ia told the other woman. “You did
exactly
what needed to be done. Only three casualties. The rest will finish evacuating before the cracks in the domes cause any real safety concerns.”

“Don’t let our pet Meddler hear you saying that, sir,” Rammstein told Ia. He twisted to look at her since there wasn’t much his operations station needed to monitor when the ship wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything taxing. “She’s the one who nabbed that hydrobomb and teleported it over three hundred light-years away.”

“True,” Ia admitted.

“Speaking of which, sir,” Private Sung spoke up from the gunnery position. “That was
my
hydrobomb. What the hell am I going to destroy the plague on
this
world with? ’Cause the loss of that one is
not
coming out of my paycheck, and I am
not
going through another caning for something I didn’t do.”

Relief made Ia chuckle, though she tried to stifle it. Canings were very serious business—and she had been there right with him, stroke for stroke—but she was just too relieved not to feel a little giddy. “Relax, Goré. This one’s on me. I’ll use the main cannon. We’ll just have to pick up a little extra fuel on our next stop.”

“Sir,
how
did the plague get past your defenses?” Helstead asked pointedly, craning her neck to look at Ia. “You have the fleet in the Sol System scanning for everything bigger than a baseball, and the Feyori tracking everything else on top of that, and I
know
you gave them details on what to look for and where to find it.”

Realizing she didn’t know, Ia tipped her head and dipped her mind into the timestreams. Not into the immediate future, but into the immediate past. It wasn’t easy tracking a molecule, but . . .
ah. Eighteen fat-and-fed Feyori. Not nineteen. That’s what happened.
“We lost a Feyori.”

“Huh?” Helstead asked. She pulled her boots off the edge of the console so she could turn and look at Ia fully. “How do you lose a Feyori?”

“Nunsen. He was old, over seven thousand years Terran Standard,” Ia explained, mental fingers still trailing through the past. “They
do
eventually get so old, so worn in their energy matrices, that they get the equivalent of dementia. He missed a small pocket of the plague during the missile crisis from the ninth of July. Just a scrap on a chunk of missile plating large enough to survive the heat-shock of entering Mars’ thin atmosphere once its orbit decayed.

“But he
thought
he had gotten it . . . and he was a past master of the timeplains. For a Feyori,” she allowed dryly. “So . . . his belief clouded my view until it was too strong a probability for his belief to occlude. Then . . . he just took in too much energy when the bomb went off, and lost control of his matrices. The bubble popped one last time . . . and now there’s nothing left of him. I have to find a replacement from outside the known galaxy, because everyone else is . . . yep, on schedule,” Ia reported, catching up with the present and slightly into the future, over on Mars. “The others, fat and full, are popping back to their original positions, which means our personal Meddler will be back in less than a minute.”

“Well, I’m not cleanin’ up the mess she made, dropping her margarita like that,” Delia told her, turning back to settle in her seat and prop her heels up on the pilot’s workstation. She held up a hand, forestalling any argument from her CO. “I’m not saying I’d prefer Belini had been delayed, ruining the saving of everything and everyone; I’m just sayin’
I’m
not cleaning it up.”

“Just for that, you
are
cleaning it up,” Ia ordered.

Head thumping against the padded rest of her seat, Delia whined, “Awww,
muck
it!”

Sighing, the redheaded psi scowled at the ceiling of the bridge, then swirled her hand. Air
popped
on Ia’s right. Leaning over, Ia peered at the floor. Every last scrap of the drink, from stray salt crystals to the cracked rim of the plexi glass, had vanished. “Dare I ask what you did with all of that?”

“I gave the planet a margarita,” Helstead said flippantly. “Something to kill the pain of being shot with the Godstrike laser cannon. Mark II, no less.”

“You did
not
,” Private Balle stated, watching her screens at the navigation post. “You gave the planet’s
orbit
a margarita. Tracking trajectory now . . . and . . . yeah, we’d better be gone in about ninety minutes, or it’s going to smack us in the aft, sirs.”

“Oy! Bloody Mary! Did we get all th’ canisters, ’r what?”
Spyder asked, reminding everyone that his comm link was still active.
“Or d’y’ got more confabbin’ an’ arm-flappin’ t’ do, up there? We got limited breath on our mechsuits, in case y’don’t remember, yakkos.”

Ia quickly checked the local timestreams, and nodded.
“Lieutenant, you are free to leave the colonyworld,”
she confirmed.
“All hands, this is the General. We will be breaking our stationary orbit to get into position to destroy the plague on Seldun IV, then moving to destroy the final Salik base on this world. This means we will be behind schedule, so everyone is going to have to double-time it on repairs and refueling after the fight around the Salik colonyworld of Nuk-Pwish’Gwan in three hours. Ia out.”

“Sir . . . I’m sorry, but the Premiere is calling,” Mysuri stated as soon as she finished.

“Bottom third tertiary,” Ia directed, fitting her hand into the attitude glove and tightening the straps with two practiced tugs. The Premiere’s face appeared on her lower-center screen. She spared him a glance, taking note of the lines that had started to crease his dark brow and the gray hairs salting the edges of his tight black curls, and spoke without preamble. “Premiere, yes, sir, I know why you are calling, sir.”

At the same time, he said, “I want to know
exactly
what just . . . Go on,” Mandella stated as her lag time caught up to him, 2.7 seconds according to the ping mark in the lower-right corner of the screen. “Explain to me what happened . . . and make it good, so that I can hopefully explain it to everyone else here at home.”