Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (41 page)

“Aye, sir,” Prudhomme agreed, subdued.

“Are you sure we’re not going to die today, sir?” York asked, glancing briefly at her. Ia frowned, and the comm tech shrugged. “I wouldn’t be so concerned if we could see them coming, but that damned teleport tech of theirs is like being blind in one eye—we know they’re out there, but we have no clue how close or far away.”

Blind in one eye . . . of course!
“York, if you weren’t married to Clairmont, I’d kiss you.”

He craned his neck again, this time his expression baffled instead of worried. “Ahh . . .”

“Crow, inform Harper that I’m going to have the Feyori fix the damned ship,” she ordered. At his own uncertain look, she explained. “The main cannon is fine, but we don’t have time to take the ship apart and replace all the systemically stressed structures. So I’m going to make the Meddlers do it for us. If I can fix my own eye, and they can change one of our crew members into Private Joseph N’Keth, they can fix a damned ship.

“I don’t want to have to disrupt interstellar shipping lanes for months to come, but better a minor disruption or nine than to have us die before the Greys are stopped. How much fuel have we got?”

“Over seventy-five percent, sir,” Crow reported. “I’m trusting you when you say the main cannon’s fine. I don’t want to know what would happen to all that power if there’s a microfracture somewhere in its path. I certainly don’t want to die.”

The others nodded as well, echoing the sentiment. Ia tightened her jaw. Their agreement only solidified a decision she had made long ago. Pushing open the upper lid, she scanned her palm, opened the inner one, and sunk her mind into the timestreams. Left hand twitching, turning the ship in slow, easy movements, she lined up her first shot. Fired. Lined up the second. Fired. Lined up the third, fourth, and fifth. The rest required swapping ends.

Carefully, she did so. Fired a sixth time. Since the Greys were still looking for her, that was a solid probability as to where their ships would relocate next after each scan-and-hop. It wasn’t a case of will-they-won’t-they-fire. Holding off on firing at the last four ships, she opened her eyes. “York, ping me the Greys.”

“Ah . . . yes, sir,” he agreed. “They are hot to answer; we have pingback.”

The moment the black-eyed, gray-skinned, bald alien appeared on the screen, Ia spoke. “I warned you not to use that weapon. You used it. I will not tolerate its use. If you keep using it, you will cause a terrible hole in the universe. If you keep attacking Humans and the other Alliance members, I will destroy you. If you attack me, I will destroy you.”

“You are nothing. You are tiny life-form,” the alien retorted, uncurling her or his longish fingers. “You are stain on surface.”

“Tell that to your
other
ships. I always know
where
they appear. I always know
when
they will appear. I am Death,” she asserted, knowing that in that moment, two of her shots were tagging their targets. “Understand this, Shredou:
I do not need you to live.
Your lives are immaterial. Your deaths are immaterial. I will save this galaxy from the Zida”ya with or without you. I let you live as a
kindness
. As a form of courtesy. But I do not
need
you to live.

“Now, get out of Terran space,” she ordered, repeating herself one more time to drive her point home. “
I do not need you to live.
So you will leave now. Before I
end
this courtesy.”

Two more beams slammed into the alien ships in the distance as she spoke; Ia could see it in the timestreams. They were closing in on her position, having caught lightwave readings as they translocated to within light-seconds of her position . . . and another shot destroyed the fifth ship. The sixth abruptly changed course, translocating straight out of the system, so that the Godstrike shot that would have intercepted it kept going without interruption.

The Grey on the screen vanished, cutting the communication link. York eyed his own screen, then glanced warily at her. “. . . Did we win, sir?”

“This time. And . . . we’ve put off a couple of fights between now and the next engagement,” she added, checking the streams. The remaining four ships had vanished when the link had been dropped, removing themselves from the local system. As she peered into the waters in the back of her mind, the damaged ships vanished, too; the Greys were not going to leave any scraps of their technology behind for the jumped-up insects to study. They would be back, though. “But we did not scare off all of them, and we’ll need to hurry after we get refueled so we can get into position to start shooting up the skies in other places.”

“Speaking of which, sir,” Prudhomme announced, her gaze still on her calculations, “the navicomp’s done calculating the worst-case path of those shots. If the Godstrike didn’t hit anything, then we know exactly how far into the future it’ll affect the shipping lanes. If you’ll give me the stats on how much each connecting shot was absorbed, I can crunch those numbers for you.”

“Don’t bother. Just transmit the full-strength data. Rerouting ships slightly won’t affect the timestreams by that much, in most cases. O’Keefe, take the helm, and take us in to the ice station to top up the tanks,” Ia ordered. “Nice and easy. I’m going to trance and look for engineering-minded Feyori who know how to ‘rewrite’ flawed starship structures.”

“Helm to my control in twenty, sir,” O’Keefe agreed, getting herself ready. “Here we go . . . nice and easy, so we don’t stress anything else . . . because I can’t afford to have the ship fall apart on my watch.”

“None of us can, Yeoman,” Ia agreed grimly. “Not your watch, and not mine.”

SEPTEMBER 17, 2499 T.S.
SIC TRANSIT

Never-ending battle, never-ending battle . . . I know exactly how Helstead felt, the day Sung shot the wrong ship.
Her comm unit chimed. Ia saved her current round of prophecies and activated the link. “Good evening, Admiral-General. You’re lucky I knew this call was coming, and slowed to FTL speeds.”

The timing-lag stamp in the lower-right corner showed there was a two-second delay at each end. Four seconds round-trip. Myang eyed her a few seconds, nodded as she listened, and spoke. “I’m glad you did, because even if you know what’s coming, it all still has to go through official channels. Admiral Ioseph Leonidovich has called off the tribunal . . . and strongly suggested you cancel the Martial Law over all but the last of the plagued systems. We’ll need the Blockade to continue to protect those inbound planetary bodies your soap-bubble buddies sent on their merry way.

“And as you probably
also
know, the civil suits are still pending,” the older woman warned her. “That defense lawyer of yours is rather sharp; I’ve looked over some of the proceedings and have been admiring his clear-cut counterpoints.”

“Feel free to borrow Admiral Johns when this is all over, sir,” Ia offered lightly. “The civil suits can start whenever they’re ready. However, I’m still very much needed out here, so they’ll just have to start without me. I’ve instructed the rear admiral to inform the next court of the reasons behind my continuing absence. As for the Martial Law, now that I don’t have to worry about being dragged into a courtroom anytime soon, go ahead and inform the Premiere and the other leaders to lift it, save for in those interdicted systems. I’m sending the confirmation orders on a subchannel now, sir.”

“I’m so glad you’re usually so well prepared. Speaking of being needed somewhere, the TUP Council wants to commend your entire crew in a special ceremony,” Myang told her. “They want it to take place on Earth, at the capital on Kaho’olawe. I’m supposed to order you to show up on October 30.”

“Like hell we will, sir,” Ia retorted. “We can’t take the time off for a trip all the way back to Earth. But I can arrange for a nine-hour layover at Battle Platform
Osceola
on October 29. It’ll be in System Gliese 505 at that point for reprovisioning from the farms and mines on Haskin’s World.”

“I figured you wouldn’t want to come in,” the Admiral-General said dryly. She leveled Ia a stern look. “We’re going to have to have a little talk about your devotion to combat duty. After the war ends, of course . . . but you haven’t said
when
the war ends. Not yet. I’d like to know. Are you
ever
going to tell me?”

“The first of November,” Ia answered promptly.

Four seconds later, she watched the head of the Terran military choke on her own spit. Spyder might have chosen to amuse her by playing hard-and-fast with military rules and orders, but this was her own choice moment of levity; it wasn’t every day that the most powerful, unflappable person in the whole Terran military was so visibly flapped by fate. Ia smiled only briefly, though, and schooled her expression into a sober one.

“. . . That is,
if
everything goes right. If not, it’ll take several weeks to several months more to set up another round of circumstances that are just right to force the Greys into surrendering and standing down . . . so I’d appreciate it if you kept that date to yourself. I’d rather not promise openly when this war ends, only to have the probabilities roll the wrong percentile on the dice and disappoint everyone.”

Myang cleared her throat. “So. November 1. Where will it take place, if and when you pull it off?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t tell you that. I can’t tell you any of the details because much like the Salik plague, I don’t dare let any outside influences screw up this play. All I can say is, it’s a matter of very delicate timing,” Ia stated. Honest words, if only a small fraction of the truth. She had spent every single day since that fateful morning at the age of fifteen planning for the end of the Second Grey War. “There’s also a percentage chance that some of my crew may die in the attempt, even with my best efforts . . . so I’d rather not put off the commendation ceremony. It’s better to pin a medal on a live hero’s chest than to send it home in a box to their next of kin.”

“True,” Myang allowed. She studied Ia a long moment, then sighed. “You know, you
are
a major pain in my asteroid. A loose cannon I cannot control . . . though I have tried. Either you are the luckiest woman alive, or the smartest who will ever live, and I cannot help but wonder if I should envy you for either one of that.”

Ia wrinkled her nose. “I’m not lucky, and I’m not the smartest, sir. I’ve been
cheating
my way through life from day one. My only defense is that I recognized I was
able
to cheat and decided I’d do my best to cheat in a way that benefited the greatest number of lives, not just my own—in fact, if you haven’t noticed from my latest mission reports, I don’t even dare get
close
to the Greys in the latest confrontations. Whatever that entropic fission ray-gun-thing they have is, I have to sniper them with the Godstrike from several light-minutes away, or risk losing everything, because if they get close enough to scan my ship, then they know exactly what moves my hands make.

“That’s how they nearly caught me the first time with that ray-thing, analyzing my own movements to predict my ship’s movements. It’s scary to think the Greys can penetrate ceristeel with their scanners so easily, but there it is. So yeah, I’m not lucky, and I’m not smart,” she repeated. “I’m just cheating my way as best I can, to help keep everyone else alive.”

Myang nodded. “Well, for your sense of conscience and your sense of duty, I salute you, soldier. And you’re smarter than you think. I’m sure you’ve foreseen this, too, but I’m going to make it very clear to you right here and now: When this Second Grey War is over—however long it takes—I expect you to be reassigned to my office—
office
, not a starship—to help the Space Force clean up all the postwar messes that are left. And you’ll have to pick a training camp or an academy, or maybe even a flight school that you’ll want to teach at for a year.

“While I do still have a few years left in me to give to the Service, I am finally getting too old for this
shakk
,” the Admiral-General stated, “and I am picking you to be my successor. I don’t care what precognitive
shakk-torr
you think makes you qualified for this job, you will jump through the rules hoops and climb over the regulation hurdles to do it all by the book. Is that clear?”

“Crystal clear, sir,” Ia replied. “And for the record, I’ve given some thought to creating a system of boot camps for psychics, so they can learn to focus and use their abilities midcombat, rather than wrapping them up in space insulation and hull plating fifty meters deep.”

“Well, your credit is damned high in the Command Staff and the Council alike, even if the civilian idiots are trying to revile you for a mass murderer in the press. And if we can train more psis to be as effective as you . . .”

“Not everyone will be able to master using their abilities in the midst of a fight, sir,” Ia cautioned her. “But it is a necessary skill I would like to see trained . . . and it’s one of the few areas where I did
not
cheat. I had to learn how to do it from the ground up and managed to invent and learn most of it before I joined up. The rest was just practice, practice, practice.”

“I’ll start prodding the budget committees into figuring out how to apportion some facilities. Once the last of those plague planets hit their stars, we won’t need the Blockade funds anymore. It’ll be a smaller military, and I don’t know how the civilian sector is going to employ all those dismissed soldiers, but it will be a huge fiscal relief not to have to support a two-hundred-year war.”

“Amen to that, sir. I couldn’t agree more. I’ll leave you to set up the commendation ceremony on Battle Platform
Osceola
on the twenty-ninth. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go tell my bridge crew to step it back up to hyperwarp speed to go shoot down a few more enemy ships,” Ia said.

“Are you ever going to tell us how you’re managing near-OTL speeds?” Myang asked.

Ia shook her head. “You’ll figure it out in about two hundred years. Or rather, our descendants will. Ia out.” Touching the control that ended the call, she hung her head for a moment.
One month, twelve days, three hours . . . and one month, fifteen days, seven hours to go. Then the damned war will be over.
Scrubbing at her tired, stinging eyes, she activated the comm.
“General Ia to Yeoman Huey, resume hyperwarp transit when ready.”