Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty (68 page)

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Authors: Jean Johnson

BOOK: Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty
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The shuttle jolted again. Ia winced as the woman next to her grabbed at her forearm.
“God Almighty!” Amanda exclaimed, bouncing in her seat with the next jolt of turbulence. “
This
is
mild
?”
Prying the woman’s hand off the sleeve of her brown camouflage shirt, Ia pressed it to the armrest and tucked her own hands into her lap. “Since we’re due to arrive at the equivalent of nearsunset, yes, it’s just one of the mild, daily thunderstorms. If it were a
real
storm by Sanctuarian standards, the pilot would have delayed the flight. This one isn’t nearly as risky as you’d think.”
“. . . Oh.”
The other woman started to relax, then yelped a little as the ship bucked again. A flash of light and a not quite muffled
boom
beyond the porthole windows made her yelp a second time, along with a handful of the other passengers. The rest were either too busy enduring the ride, or like Ia and the balding believer across the aisle, weren’t fazed by the local weather. Certainly this turbulence wasn’t as bad as some of the planetfalls she and the rest of Ferrar’s Fighters had made, riding to the rescue of various colonyworlds.
Now I’m riding to the rescue of my own world, in a way. Though my efforts won’t bear results for a few more years at the earliest.
Enduring the bouncing with stoic patience, she absently rubbed her left hand over the hard cuff hidden beneath the mottled browns of the opposite shirt sleeve.
Presuming all my speculations on the trip out here are in any way accurate, that is . . .
I wonder what my brothers are going to think when I ask them literally to shed their blood for me, this week?
 
Thorne was the easiest of her family to spot. He stood literally head and shoulders above everyone else waiting on the far side of the Customs Peacekeepers, as tall as a local doorway and as broad as a tank. His dark brown hair had been trimmed with bangs in the front since she had last seen him in person, though it looked like it was as long as ever, pulled back in a ponytail.
She’d seen the change in the timestreams, but seeing it in person was another matter. It struck her just how much everything had changed back home. How much she had changed, even though Ia had known it would happen.
His hazel eyes met hers within moments, drawn to her thumb-length white locks and mottled brown uniform. There were other tall-by-comparison people arriving, mostly visitors from light-gravitied planets who were wrapped in gravity weaves, but she wasn’t lost in a crowd; the others had spaced themselves out so that their personalized repelling fields, now set to full strength, wouldn’t conflict and cause each wearer to stagger off balance.
The only thing that made her want to stagger was the full resumption of her home gravity, which she hadn’t felt in over two years. Weight suits and artificial gravity could compensate somewhat, but she could tell she was out of shape by home standards. Until she saw her mothers.
Aurelia Jones-Quentin had gained a few fine worry-lines between her brows and at the corners of her eyes, but her straight, dark brown locks were as grey-free as her son’s. Amelia Quentin-Jones had picked up a few more streaks of silver among her lighter brown curls, but no extra lines on her face. They were clad in the same soft pastels the two women had always favored, and both their faces lit up with the same delight as they spotted her in the queue. Just the sight of her parents banished most of the annoying drag of the planet on her body. Gravity could not stop the lifting of her spirits.
As soon as she cleared the last checkpoint, Ia hurried forward. She dropped her bags to the plexcrete floor as her family moved up to meet her, and swept both of her mothers into a hug. Both of the older women laughed and sniffled and hugged her right back. She’d forgotten how stooping to hug them could put a crick in her back from the awkward angle, but Ia didn’t care. Given everything that had happened since she had left, the pain was an old, revived pleasure by comparison.
For a moment, she let herself be a young woman again, saying good-bye to her family before heading to her destiny. Then one of her brothers ruffled her hair; from the downward pull of his palm, it was Fyfer, too short to have been seen immediately, compared to their elder brother.
“Look at that hair, all short and ugly, now!” Fyfer crowed, ruffling it again.
“Fyfer!” Aurelia scolded.
As her mothers released her, Ia pushed his hand away, then pulled him into a half hug and rubbed her knuckles over his brown locks. He squirmed and spluttered a protest, then twisted into her grip and pinched her inner bicep in the spot she had taught him. Even toughened up by her life in the military, it hurt like hell. Grunting and flinching, Ia released him. Then
oofed
as he flung his arms around her ribs in an enthusiastic hug.
Chuckling, Ia hugged him back. Unlike their elder brother, Fyfer was normal for a Sanctuarian. Naturally muscular, but short and not nearly the brick-walled body that Thorne was. So she squeezed and sort-of picked him up. Just a few inches, but enough to prove she was still stronger. He
oofed
in turn, then laughed and slapped her on the back.
“Slag, Ia! You used to pick me up higher than that! What happened to you in the Army?” he joked.
“It was the
Marine Corps
,” Ia shot back, dropping him gently onto his feet. “And I’ve been living in lesser gravity. Working out as heavy as I can get it for several hours a day, but still
living
in lightworlder spaces.”
Releasing her younger brother, she faced her half-twin. They had different mothers but the same father, both of them born barely half an hour apart. Both were anomalies in a world of gravitationally challenged heights. Thorne just held open his arms and Ia walked into them, nestling her head on his shoulder and her arms around his waist. He didn’t threaten her ribs, just hugged her back.
“Mizzu,”
he murmured, his voice a quiet bass rumble.
I missed you.
The word was the short-hand speech from their childhood, raised like full-blooded twins, treated like twins, thinking like twins, until her gifts started developing in earnest.
“Mizzu tu,”
she agreed.
I missed you, too.
She hugged him, relaxing for a long moment . . . until her skin crawled, warning her that her precognitive gift was trying to open, trying to read all the possibilities of his future. Thankfully, the moment she shifted back, he released her. It might have been two years, but he still remembered how touchy her abilities could be.
“You okay?” Thorne asked her as she stepped back. He wasn’t the only one giving her a concerned look.
Ia nodded . . . then shook her head. This was more than just the timestreams prickling at his proximity. Holding up her hand, she squeezed her eyes shut and focused on strengthening the walls in her mind.
No. Not right now. Not here and now, among all these people. I will
not
succumb to the Fire Girl Prophecy right now . . .
Pushing it away, resisting, she breathed hard for a few moments. Someone else screamed, making her jump and snap her eyes open again. It wasn’t a member of her family that had collapsed; instead, it was a familiar, purple-wrapped body. The Christian missionary, Amanda Something-or-Other, had dropped to her knees.
“Fire!”
Amanda screamed, startling the mostly Human collection of tourists into wide-eyed, wary looks. “Fire! Birds in the sky! A girl—fire in her eyes! Fire in the world! A . . . a cathedral—a wall in the sky—aaaaaaah!”
Those who were native to Sanctuary looked at her, too. They, however, weren’t confused by her outcry. Instead, they were broken into three groups. A few concerned-looking spaceport personnel hurried forward, mostly to ward off the few concerned tourists who were about to touch her—never a good idea, since the Fire Girl attacks tended to spread on contact more often than not. The rest were either blasé about the attack, looking for a few moments in curiosity before shrugging and moving on, or they hastily backed up, sketching corona-circles on their foreheads and muttering under their breath, no doubt prayers warding off any evil influence from the “demonically possessed.”
Since it looked like the missionary would get some of the help she needed, a sketchy explanation of the phenomenon and suitable reassurances from spaceport staff, Ia herself settled into the non-Church category of natives and ignored the poor woman’s plight. Stooping, she picked up her kitbag and the locked travel case stuffed with her writing pad and all the postdated letters she had printed out during the journey home. “I’ll be fine. We have a lot to do. Move out.”
She didn’t miss the look her mothers exchanged, nor the glance they shared with Thorne, but Fyfer immediately started chatting about all the things she had missed, his graduation half a year early and subsequent enrollment in an acting school, Thorne’s fast-paced progress in his space station governance degree, and of course questions on what her own last two years had been like. Ia did her best to listen and respond, but Fyfer didn’t cease the steady stream of chatter until they were at the family ground car, and he finally noticed that Ia wasn’t moving to put her things into the vehicle parked on one of the tiers of the spaceport’s garage.
Instead, she had stopped, closed her eyes, and was simply breathing. Deep, steady breaths, the kind that sought to fill every last corner of her lungs.
“Hey,” Fyfer admonished her. “Are you falling asleep already? I thought you Marines were tough!”
“I’m not
that
tired. I’m just enjoying the smell of home. You don’t get ozone like this on other worlds, unless you deliberately go around creating sparks. Or the dampness, or the flickering of lightning pressing through your eyelids like little feathery touches . . .” She sighed and opened her eyes, smiling wryly. “It’s just not the same, elsewhere.”
“So what
is
it like on other worlds?” Thorne asked her, taking her bags and tucking them into the boot.
She held up her hand and gestured for the others to climb into the car, then took the front passenger seat, her preferred spot so her gifts didn’t trigger. Thorne took the driver’s seat; with his broad, muscular shoulders, it was either let him drive or be squished in the backseat as he took up half of the space usually meant for three people. Once they were moving, Ia answered his question.
“. . . What’s it like on other worlds? Bouncy, until you get used to the gravity. The air can smell like a million different things. Recycled and dusty if it’s a mining domeworld. Slimy and moldy if you’ve set down in a rainy spot on an atmospheric world, like that planet where we helped out the flood victims. And then there’s the recycled air of a starship, with cleaning products and sweating bodies in the gym, lubricants and hydraulics fluids in the mechsuit repair bays . . . and of course the greenery in lifesupport, but they limit access to that part of the ship. The Motherworld didn’t smell bad,” she added. “Lots of flowers and green growing things. Not enough thunderstorms, but not bad.”
“Ooh! Tell us about the Motherworld!” Amelia interjected.
“Yes, please,” Aurelia urged Ia. “What’s it like? I’ve always wondered.”
Smiling, Ia complied. “My first view was from orbit. It’s really not that much different from Sanctuary, except the nightside glows with a million cities, and not from crystal fields and the few settlements we have. And only so many lightning storms can be seen, and only so many aurora curtains and sprite jets . . . You can’t really see the lightning on Earth from space unless it’s in a really big storm. And then of course my first stop was Antananarivo, on Madagascar Island. It’s very tropical in the lowlands, but where I was, which was up in the hills, it’s a bit cooler. More like around here.”
“That was at the Afaso Headquarters, right?” Thorne asked her, directing the car into the flow of traffic skirting the capital city.
Ia nodded. “That’s right. Grandmaster Ssarra says hello, by the way. They have a lot of land, much of it established as a nature preserve as well as farmland for self-sufficiency. There are
lots
of green plants there, compared to here—yes, the grass really
is
greener, on Earth.” That made her family laugh. Enjoying their humor, Ia smiled and continued. “They have none of the blue plants like we have, not even as imports, and very few that look even vaguely purple. There are some yellow ones—grass when it’s dry, for one—but the first impression you get of a non-desert landscape on Earth is of a million different shades of green . . .”

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