Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (40 page)

Formally dismissed, Ia turned and stooped over the shoulder of the man she and Sadneczek had selected to be her JAG-trained defense attorney. Rear Admiral Hemet Johns was not related to the famous attorney John Johns, who had defended Giorgi Mishka centuries before . . . but his name would still draw attention to the parallels in the two cases, a subtle reminder that everything Ia did was bound under the statute governing that famous case. She squeezed Johns’ shoulder as she murmured in his ear, “Try not to be bored over the next several weeks, will you?”

“I
live
for courtroom minutiae,” Johns muttered back. “Try not to get killed between now and when I’ll need you on the witness stand. I’ll do whatever I can to put it off to give you more time to win the war, but eventually I
will
need you here.”

“Trust me, I would
love
to be free, so I could be seated here for the whole damned thing. I’ll let you all know when and where I can return.” Squeezing his shoulder, she edged out from behind the table and headed for the side door.

She was running late, and had known she would be running late from the moment the prosecution had decided to choose a prolonged, early lunch over justice. Forewarned, Ia had already sent the rest of her crew back to their ship, permitting no witnesses to delay her departure from the courtroom. Reshaping the thin bracer on her right arm, she crouched by the first power outlet she spotted in the hall outside the court chamber and shoved a set of golden translucent prongs into the sockets.

Five electrokinetically charged heartbeats later, she zipped as a silvery soap bubble through the bulkheads and layers of the Battle Platform, arrowing up and out, and into the hull of her ship. Staggering a little as she regained Human shape on the bridge, she braced herself on the edge of the piloting station and nodded to Yeoman Huey. “Huey, since I know everyone is back on board, you have leave to depart. Get us under way.”

“Aye, sir,” the ex-Scadian agreed, and nodded at Mysuri to start the comm procedures for decoupling from the Battle Platform. “Will you be wanting the helm, sir?”

“No, I have several more prophecies to write. I’d rather have done some of them while sitting around, kicking my heels and waiting on
lunch
,” she half growled, still irritated at the prosecution, “but that would have been seen as disrespectful—did I ever tell you how much I hate politics, Patricia?”

“Did you ever resew those buttons back onto your coat, sir?” she returned dryly.

“Indeed I did,” Ia admitted. “Telekinetically while composing prophecies, but I did.”

“Then I know how much you hate politics, sir,” Huey said.

“. . .
Warcraft IX
says we are clear to depart,” Private Mysuri informed both of them.

“Then I’m getting the ship under way, sir,” Huey confirmed.

Nodding, Ia crossed through the back corridor and the clerk’s office to her own . . . and stopped at the sight of the dish clipped onto her desk. Carefully crafted in a swirling helix spiral of grape purple, topado blue, and lime green, the gelatin dessert awaited her. Not five minutes before—while she was still back in the courtroom, listening to Somatel’s accusations—her younger self had confronted a certain snowflake-faced man from one of the possible futures. Back then, she hadn’t even considered that today was the day he had chosen to gift her with the tart-sweet colloidal dish.

The day her trial began.

Ia moved to her chair and settled herself in it, eyeing the dessert in its clear plexi cup. A scrap of white proved a note had been slipped under the base, back when he had placed it. She hadn’t noticed at the time, but there it was, a message from the Redeemer . . . one possible version of the Redeemer. Easing it free, she unfolded the sheet and read the neat script.

“Something sweet, to get your mind off your many troubles.”

Her vision blurred. Ia knew why, even though she hadn’t planned on doing this now. Not now. It was such a caring, compassionate gesture . . . from a man whose young life she would ruin, whose heart she would break . . . on a day when she would have given anything to have been able to stay behind and be
bored
in a courtroom full of accusations and presentations that would paint her over and over as a murderer.

Instead, she had to head off to face an implacable, technologically accelerated enemy over the next few months. Some of whom would be armed with a weapon that scared her witless if she couldn’t manage to outpilot her ship and crew around that lethal future beam.

Ia didn’t have time for dessert or despair, and she wouldn’t have time. Giving in only meant that she would have to stint herself yet again on an hour or two of sleep just to catch up, exhausting herself further in the relentless ticking of the seconds slipping past, one by one, ten by ten . . .

She had work to do. She
had
work to . . . She bowed her head and let her tears fall onto the desktop and her latest parfait, unable to get her mind off all her many troubles for a few moments more.

AUGUST 29, 2499 T.S.
DLC 718 TORPETTI’S SYSTEM

The waiting was the worst part. Not the first fight, nor the second, nor even the fifth. The Greys were attacking more than one system at a time, but between the Feyori and their crysium psi-enhancement spheres, some of the psychics who lived within each system, the various other psis brought in on board various Alliance ships to help out, and Ia’s own ship, which darted from battle to battle to cover the spots that were thin on resources, the Greys were being kept at bay.

But the waiting for that damned gun to be fired was the worst of it. Even-odds possibilities meant they could use it at any time, in any of these confrontations. That required constant vigilance, and constant vigilance was exhausting. The only good news was that it had a very short range, even in space. Maneuvering her ship, not just moving it, increased the odds that they wouldn’t fire, for even Shredou translocation technology required relatively empty space to teleport a ship. If the
Damnation
was fishtailing and changing course abruptly—

She had half a second of warning, and slapped the FTL panels open down the port side of the ship. That greased and shot the
Damnation
to the left. A Grey ship appeared on the starboard, rapidly receding. She quickly cut off the field—and another appeared to the port. Eight more portaled in, matching the
Damnation
’s speed and trajectory. They swerved together, boxing her in with a ring formation that pressed dangerously close.

That also brought in the anti-psi devices, clamping around her mind like a headache-sized vise. Ia didn’t have many options; she
could
accelerate faster than a Shredou vessel, at max speed. That would put her up to half Cee, which was fast enough to safely use OTL . . . but opening a hyperrift
now
was far, far too dangerous.

“All hands, impact!”
she snapped, activating her headset electrokinetically; her fingers were too busy cutting speed abruptly. Very abruptly—bodies jolted with grunts into their harnesses, heads snapping forward. Not fast enough; the Grey ships shot forward relative to the
Damnation
, unable to react fast enough . . . but one of the ships managed to fire, and tagged near the bow.

Ba-HOOM!

The force of the explosion skewed the ship, spinning it downward. Warned precognitively, Ia cut all forward thrust and focused on gently—
gently
—correcting the force of that spin. Telltales at the operations console were blinking bright yellows and even a couple reds. Corporal Crow looked at all the stress indicators and whipped his head around to stare at Ia. “What the hell was
that
? What hit us? I can’t even see a hole!”

“Nothing hit us! By Buddha’s breath, I swear,
nothing hit us
!” Ateah protested, flinging up her hands at the gunnery seat, her eyes locked on her screens.

“Quiet!” Ia snapped, finally getting their torque under control. Facing backwards. “That was a ranging shot. The next one will kill us.”

Shocked silence met her words. Again, the Grey ships popped out of their previous location and popped into formation around her ship. In a split second of intuition, Ia realized how they knew what she was doing. She held herself still, seized the controls electrokinetically, and activated the interior safety fields a split second before shifting to FTL. Forward, not backward.

The safety field only fully covered the inner cabins and the fuel tanks; the rest of the ship groaned in partially protected protest in the fractional gap before the faster-than-light field fully enveloped the ship, greasing the palm of physics. More yellow lit up across Crow’s screens, but wrapped in FTL’s inertia-canceling field, they darted forward, away from the rapidly retreating Grey ships.
Now
she opened an OTL rift, retreating from the fight by about eight light-minutes. A careful curve, a second tunnel, and she shifted them somewhat to port by another two minutes, along the curve and slightly above the system’s plane.

Spat out the other side of the second tunnel, Ia switched back to insystem thrusters. Mind racing, she tried to think of how to counter their new tactics.

“. . . Sir?” Private York asked her. “
Are
we going to die?”

“Not on my watch,” she denied grimly, still thinking. The problem was, she could only do so many things at once. She needed her psis free to do more than just tend their normal duties—like her, they had grown used to the pains of the machines used by the Saliks, and could work normal, nonpsychic tasks while the things were active, but the emanations had to be shut off before their extrasensory abilities could be put fully to work. The anti-psi machines would have to be destroyed.

“What
was
that?” Crow asked her, checking his screens. “The ship’s stressed from bow to stern, as if someone tried to bend us like a bow, but the sensors say we only lost a chunk of the hull half the size of a credit chit!”

“That, Corporal—for lack of a better name for it—is the entropy gun,” Ia told her bridge crew. “The Greys have figured out a way to dissolve nuclear forces, introducing chaos into whatever it strikes—in other words, disorder on a level that renders protons, neutrons, electrons, even quarks, gluons, and so forth equal to each other. Explosive power. It has no visible component, so there’s no telling when it’s being fired; we can only suffer when it hits.

“Their technology is so advanced, they can blink their ships out of range before we’ve more than begun exploding from the sheer fission of it.”

Yes . . . the anti-psi machines are the key to getting out of this. I’ve been focusing too much on physical attacks and counters.
She double-checked the timestreams. She hit the switch for the interior comms.

“All psis, report to the boardroom double-time! Douglas, get to the bridge.”
Shutting it off, she lifted her chin at her current operations tech, who was still in his seat. “Crow, as soon as Douglas gets up here, race down and get everyone ready to focus on KI-streaming straight into the Greys’ minds. Link with your mate and lead the gestalt. I’m going to take out their anti-psi field, but I
won’t
be able to help you smack their arrogant brains. I’ll be too busy keeping us alive for most of the fight.”

He looked up at his screens and slowly shook his head. “I don’t think we can withstand a prolonged fight like that last one, sir. Not if we get spun again, or have to do vector maneuvers—in fact, I think the only thing that kept us from snapping in half is whatever material makes up the Godstrike’s core, and I don’t know its tensile strength.”

Ia frowned and checked in the timestreams. He was right; while there was no such thing as wind resistance or a strong enough pull of gravity in the depths of insystem space, far from the immediacy of an actual planet, spinning the ship had put centripetal strain on the frame. More than she had realized, and all from a tiny fission explosion. Even if they weren’t tagged again, just maneuvering would worsen the effects of shear-force strain on the frame of her ship.

They couldn’t retreat, however. Torpetti’s System had an ice-processing station and two protocolonies, both oversized research-dome complexes. One lay on an L-Class planet with an atmosphere similar to Mars’, but with more oxygen, and the other had been established on its barren, airless, geosynchronously locked moon. Whatever they were researching was unimportant; what mattered was the fact they were sitting ducks for the Greys to swoop in and teleport out as many of their own research subjects as they wanted.

The only grace of God in this moment is that they’re too busy popping around the system, trying to quarter it looking for my ship. They know they have to destroy us to keep us from stopping them. No surrender, no retreat.
Shakk
, I’m going to have to mess up interstellar travel for months . . . and then figure out how to fix my ship without sticking it in dry dock for several months so the techs can take it apart and put it back together again . . .

She hit her intercom button again.
“All hands, stand down and return to stations.”

Scrubbing her face with her free hand, she checked the timestreams. The Greys were still popping in and out in search patterns, trying to check the lightwave signatures for signs of her ship. Since they were still traveling at half Cee, she sparked another hyperrift and wrapped the ship in faster-than-light—straight OTL would have shaken the ship too much. Skipping forward by three more light-minutes along the middle reaches bought them a few more minutes of time.

“Prudhomme,” she stated after drawing in a deep, bracing breath. Her hands shifted the ship, dropping speed. Though it would make them a sitting target, the
Damnation
had to be relatively still to make it a lot easier for her to line up her shots in the timestreams. “I am going to fire the Godstrike several times. I want you tracking every single beam that passes through this system and into interstitial space, and I want that data packaged up for York to send to System Control to be rebroadcast to all adjacent systems. We have an overshoot of nearly a full light-year with the Godstrike Mark II. I don’t want any ships running into any of those beams.”