Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (43 page)

“
Enough!
General,” he stated coldly, “you promised us that if we ever came to you
before
an event happened, and asked you what was going to be, you’d tell us if you had the time. Well, right now, we
have
the time, and
we are asking
. What is going to happen after that commendation ceremony that makes you so damned
eager
to get rid of us?”

A glance around the boardroom showed that every single one of her crew was staring straight at her. Silently demanding the same. There was no getting out of this, no avoiding the stubborn determination in every face she saw. It was the same determination, the same dedication that had seen her crew through far too many difficult battles, and they were not going to stop or back down just because this one was a verbal war waged on their own CO.

Blinking, she considered what to say and how to say it. Stalled for the time to think by stepping up to the head table. The other members of the cadre who were standing moved out of habit as well, drifting to their own habitual chairs. She tucked the datapad under the clip edge and raised her gaze to the enlisted and yeomen across from her.

“Be seated.”

Reluctantly, grimly, they settled into their chairs on the risers.

“Many of you know by now the danger of the Greys’ entropic gun. You’ve felt it, you’ve seen the danger to the ship, and you have an inkling of what it means. It . . . dissolves the energy bonds of the very substances that make up our existence. It scatters everything, ripping apart not only molecules into its component atoms, but the atoms into their subatomic particles. An instant fission on the subatomic level. But what most of you don’t know is that this . . . entropy weapon . . . dissolves energy, not just matter.

“It isn’t quite an antimatter beam—it’s something else. I’m not a theoretical physicist. I’m not a xenotech. I have
no
idea how the damned thing works. I do know—I have
always
known—that when that beam impacts the edge of an OTL hyperrift . . .
when
it impacts that rift . . . it will tear a hole in reality. Not into hyperspace, but
beyond
it. Beyond everything. Beyond wormholes and string theory and quantum fluctuations and who knows what else.”

She looked around the room, meeting the eyes of her rotation groups of bridge crew, her life-support techs, her engineers and gunners, and her officers, too. Good meioas who should not have needed to hear any of this.

“That rift will widen slowly. And if the ancient enemies of the Greys weren’t going to come out of the black of intergalactic space in roughly three hundred years . . . in just over five thousand, that rift will have grown to wipe out one-tenth of the Milky Way . . . including all the stars of what everyone but the Solaricans like to call the known galaxy. It will dissolve stars and planets in a way utterly unlike the ray that exploded a tiny chunk of our ship with enough force to damage its integrity—you all know the Feyori came out at my command to fix it, but this will not be like that.

“The stars, the planets, they will not explode, they will not fall apart in fission. They will simply . . . dissolve. Through analyzing and realizing what they will have created, in just two months, the Greys will call off their attacks and retreat. They will keep an expanded set of boundaries, but they will finally leave Humans alone. Unfortunately, by then it will be far too late.”

“Wait,” Harper interrupted her. He had taken a seat with the others and tapped the table in front of him. “I thought all those fancy crysium components you had me design, which you then crafted and I installed, were to
stop
the Greys from doing something that sounds very much like this.”

“If enough matter and energy fills that hole in the universe within a handful of seconds of its creation,” Ia explained patiently, “then the edges of that hole will seal over and end the rift. Space in that region will have to be interdicted for any and all future hyperrifts, even the tiny, pinpoint, communication rifts, but the patch would hold. That is, when my
original
plan was to simply fire the Godstrike while driving the ship into it.

“With the additional types of energy radiated by those crysium nodes—kinetic inergy, exo-EM as well as regular forms of electromagnetic energy, and all that—the hole will be sealed fully. You could drive a natural, cosmic-sized wormhole over it, and nothing would tear it open again. I have foreseen that much, and that it will still stop the Greys in their version of horror and shame . . . and I
don’t
need anybody else on board to do that!”

“That ain’t yer call,
sir
,” her Company clerk growled. “That’s not yer choice t’ make.”

“You’re not leaving the
Osceola
without us, Ia,” Harper warned her.

“Yes, you
are
. You don’t
have
to die!” Ia argued back, leaning over him with her hands on her hips. Her eyes stung, but she knew if she blinked them, she would start crying. “And if you don’t
have
to die, then you are
not
going to die!”

He shoved out of his chair, towering over her by the few centimeters of difference in their heights. “I would rather spend one hour in Hell with you, than a
hundred
years in Heaven without!”

It was hard, but she knew she had to do it. She sneered at him, trying not to let her tears fall. He was being so stubborn, so blind—! “I don’t care what you
think
you feel for me. I am
not
taking some lovesick
stubbie
with me.”

He slashed his hand between them, scowling at her. “This has
nothing
to do with that! This is about me being a soldier, and an officer! This is about me doing what is
right
!”

“I would rather be damned for what I do,”
Christine Benjamin asserted, while Ia was still drawing in a sharp breath. The chaplain’s words—a direct quote—cut her off before she could speak. “
Than be damned for what I didn’t do.
Is that not what you have always said, Ia? Isn’t it? All these years of talking with and listening to you?” She rose from her seat, hands this time fisted at her sides, her hazel eyes brimming with unshed tears. “Well, guess what? You don’t have the
exclusive right
to feeling that way!”

“Dammit,
Bennie
!”
Ia yelled at her chaplain, her friend.
“Do you
want
to die?”

“SIR, YES, SIR!”

Startled, Ia jumped and whirled, facing the tiers . . . where every last one of her crew had jumped to their feet, at Attention, chins raised proudly. Ready to serve.

Ready to die. With her.

The tears fell, with a sob she couldn’t contain, couldn’t control. Huddling in on herself, feeling as horrible as she hadn’t felt since that damned, damnable morning, Ia cried. She felt arms wrapping around her and flinched from their touch, fearing a mind-quake, but Harper hung on anyway, pulling her against his chest.

He held her as she cried, as steady as her lost brother, as solid as her lost homeworld. Ready and willing as the rest to die. She didn’t lose control of her gifts; rather, the more Meyun cradled her, the more she felt grounded instead of cast adrift. He had no psychic training, no abilities beyond basic gut-level instincts, but he grounded her as solidly as stone in the face of a storm.

A voice spoke up from the ranks as her sobbing died down. Julia Garcia. She recognized the voice, and quelled the last of her tears with a hard sniff. At some point most of the others had reseated themselves, she didn’t know when, but Garcia was on her feet.

“I once called and asked my old CO back on the
Leo
, why me? Why ‘Wrong-Way Garcia’ out of all the billions of soldiers you could’ve picked? And you know what he said?” she asked. “He said that
you
told him you didn’t dare pull away anyone else who was
needed
in their original post. That my life—
our
lives—wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference spent anywhere else. But that on your ship, he said, we
would
make a difference. That we’ll finally count for something.

“Well, on board this ship, sir, I
have
made a difference,” Garcia asserted, no longer the breathless, rambling young private she had been when Ia first brought her on board. “I have shot down the enemy as a gunner, and I have repaired this ship as an engineer, and I have been a member of the finest Company in the known galaxy because we
have
been doing what you needed us to do. An’ like Bennie says, sir, I’d rather be damned for dying doing what’s
right
than for living doing nothin’ at all!”

Ia pushed Harper away, scowling up at the defiant brunette. She opened her mouth to counter that argument, but Helstead cut her off.

“Oh,
do
shut up, sir,” the ex-Knifeman drawled in a disgusted tone. She arched her neck and back so that she could look Ia in the face behind Harper’s back, but true to her nature, didn’t bother to sit up, let alone stand. “If you try to throw us off this ship by force, not only will we
not
go, we will toss
you
off the ship and go do it ourselves—and you
know
we’ll muck it up without you. But you know what? That’s a risk we’re willing to take if you continue being a mucking
fool
!”

A glance at Harper showed one of his dark brows rising, silently daring her to argue. Turning away from him, Ia braced her hands on the table, head bowed. Her first officer pressed further.

“Answer us this: Are you
sure
you’ll die, if you take this ship through that rift you described?” he challenged her. “Absolutely, one hundred percent sure?”

“Harper, I
don’t
come out the other side. Not in any percentile even close to the miniscule chance it took for the Admiral-General to make me a Command Staff General instead of a mere Rear Admiral—and I’ll remind you I did
not
foresee that promotion coming.”

“But there
is
still a chance?” he pressed. He lifted his chin at her. “How would it work?

She rolled her eyes. “It involves a Feyori somehow, because somehow, it involves
time travel
. But virtually every last one of them is needed exactly where they are, and not a single one of them would volunteer for the job. I’ve looked. For over twelve
years
, I have looked. Nor would I sacrifice a single one of them. I may command them, but I will not destroy them when it is not necessary, and it is
not
. I go. I go alone. I die. Because
no one else
has to. That is
final
.”

“No, it isn’t,” Harper asserted.

Ia bowed her head in frustration. This argument was going nowhere.

“You are not
needed
to be on board.” It was all she could think of to say. “That means I have to set you free, so you can live, and do whatever you want. And some of you
have
to leave this ship. I have to stay, and die, because the future needs me as a martyr. But some of you
have lives
ahead of you. Important paths that you must undertake, if all of my efforts to save this galaxy are going to come true. The rest of you
deserve
long and happy lives . . . so
all
of you will leave.”

“Horseshit,”
her Company Sergeant repeated, echoing his words from two days before. “Now, I’ll still fill out all that paperwork, sir,” he told her, “an’ some of it
might
be needed . . . but you
are
going to give the rest of us other choices as well.
Including staying on this ship.
You don’t treat the people who’ve been watching your back like something to scrape your barn-mucking boots over.”

“Grizzle—”

Harper caught her arm. “How many of us are
must
-leaves?” he asked her. “How many of us
must
take certain paths? Ignore everything else, and just give us the truth. Who absolutely
has
to leave and survive, at the bare minimum?”

Ia stared at him, then looked down at the fingers gripping her black-sleeved arm. Pointedly. He released her, and she sighed, closing her eyes. A flip inward, outward . . . The timeplains were clear now, but while she could see each stream and river, each bush and blade of tall, golden-bleached grass, there were storm clouds gathering in the distance. Shifting the view into a chart, she checked the flow of time for those needs.

“Chief Yeoman Patricia Huey. You’ll go on to first train, and then teach for a while at the Shikoku Yama Flight Academy. You’ll then head back to Scadia and teach what you’ve learned there. Your people will need those skills, and they’ll need to know that I’m a woman of my word. Your kings and queens will continue to have and hold to that treaty I signed, as will the Third Human Empire when it rises.

“Private First Grade Moira MacArroc, and Private Second Grade Wade Redrock. You talked about settling down and raising kids, if you got off of Dabin alive—and you did get married—so that’s what you’re going to do. Not because I want you to have a happy ending, though I do, but because two of your great-plus-granddaughters are going to be inspired by their family legends about the two of you, and go into the military. One will be a Special Forces General, and the other, her sister, will be the Admiral-General three hundred years from now.

“You wouldn’t have been selected for this task,” Ia stated dryly, opening her eyes to look up at the blushing pair, “but you’ll be settling on Dabin and your offspring will help fill in the gaps of a dozen or so people who would’ve otherwise influenced everyone down the line. I’ve already arranged for my
favorite
Meddler, Ginger, to ensure your family line helps fill in those holes she and her idiot partner tore in my plans for that world.

“Private First Class Angel Ng, you have been a fine navigator and scan tech,” Ia continued, seeking the woman’s face in the tiers of seats. “You will also have a role to play. You’ll retire after a few more years, enjoy your civilian life, and eventually be asked to become a councilor for your hometown. You can rise as high as councilor for your regional prefecture, but don’t rise any higher, and resist becoming an advisor. I won’t tell you which way to vote, other than to listen to your fellow citizens, and listen to your heart, but that is your task.