Colonel Okonkwo squinted at her through the smoke from the cigarette in her lips. She stood slowly and saluted back. It wasn’t a textbook salute and the hard muscles of a combat-ready officer didn’t seem to be driving the woman’s movements. But the pistol holstered at her waist was unclasped. Okonkwo sat back down, slouching slightly, extinguishing her cigarette and motioning her in. Iekanjika stepped through and closed the door uncertainly.
“It’s late, isn’t it, corporal?” Okonkwo asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Iekanjika said. Now that she was here, all the words that had sounded plausible in her head felt flimsy, insufficient to hold the weight of what she was trying to do.
She’d read Colonel Okonkwo’s personnel files as part of her mission prep. Okonkwo was a special kind of officer. Despite only modest accomplishments, she’d been chosen at mid-career to be the middle wife of the previous colonel of auditing. When the old colonel had died early in the Union’s time on this ice world, Okonkwo was promoted two grades, from major to colonel and given a commendation. Her personnel record was utterly silent on the reasons behind those honors.
Militaries reserved such explanation-free commendations and promotions for people possessing extraordinary and secret accomplishments. Although she’d never been in command or weapons or tactics, a few weeks after the death of Brigadier Iekanjika, Colonel Okonkwo would be promoted to brigadier and given command of Bioweapons Research, a post she would quietly and efficiently occupy to the end of her days. Okonkwo was a layered officer whom it would be unwise to underestimate. Yet Okonkwo’s stare was soft and patient.
“Could I speak privately with you, ma’am?” Iekanjika said.
Okonkwo gestured to a chair and Iekanjika took it and dragged it closer to the colonel.
“What’s your name, corporal?” Okonkwo asked.
Iekanjika took a deep breath.
“I’m Colonel Iekanjika,” she said.
Okonkwo’s hand drifted to the butt of her pistol and her eyes narrowed through the cigarette smoke.
“You look like her,” Okonkwo said, “but we both know there’s only one Iekanjika in the Force, don’t we, corporal?”
The essential madness of this conversation hit her all at once and she wanted to run, retreat back in time five minutes and erase it all.
“I’ve come back in time thirty-nine years, colonel, through the time gates. I’ve been sent here on a mission by the Commander of the Sixth Expeditionary Force.”
Okonkwo’s hand rested lightly on the butt of her pistol. She took the cigarette from her lips. Anyone close enough to the Expeditionary Force Command had seen or read about the early experiments in sending information back through the time gates.
After lasers and other EM signals hadn’t survived, they’d tried floating metal blocks back through the gates, with information encoded in the spacing of microscopic perforations. Lieutenant-General Rudo still had such a block in her office. On its exiting from the gate, they found the disfiguring abrasions weren’t just on the outside of the block; the inside itself was abraded, as if the scouring forces had bypassed the external surface.
The interior of the time gates was destructively abrasive in dimensions of space-time the Union could not access. At times, talk around the tables in the officer’s mess might drift to what they would do if they ever encountered evidence of more substantive time travel, but that was always just talk. In a way, she could understand Colonel Okonkwo’s feelings.
“Now would be the right time to show some evidence to back up your astounding claim,” the colonel said.
“I had proof, but it would be meaningless to you, and maybe even unhelpful,” Iekanjika said.
“That’s not much to go on. Surely you planned better than that?”
A cautionary note hid beneath Okonkwo’s light tone, along with a slight widening of her eyes; the deep fight-or-flight response struggling to overcome the skepticism of the modern mind.
“I gave the proof to Captain Rudo. She issued us with a couple of temporary identities and some work orders. Unfortunately, she’s been arrested and can’t help us anymore.”
Okonkwo stiffened. Anger washed over her face.
“Why?” Okonkwo asked.
Iekanjika could only hang her head as if this were her shame. However, both of them were married to Rudo.
“The unauthorized use of a MilSec pass-code,” Iekanjika said.
“Where did she get it?”
“I gave it to her. The Commander of the Sixth Expeditionary Force in the future gave it to me, dug from MilSec auditing records.”
“You really are from the future? And you’re incompetent enough to get a stupid innocent caught?”
“Rudo isn’t so innocent.”
“What?”
“MilSec doesn’t know, and history doesn’t know, but it looks like Rudo is involved in a plot on Brigadier Iekanjika’s life.”
Okonkwo’s expression crumbled. She stood unsteadily, still facing Iekanjika, fingers twitching over the grip of her pistol. She sucked on her cigarette, staring at Iekanjika through coils of smoke.
“Are you serious?” she whispered. “Your mother?”
In Iekanjika’s own past, key officers took standard Safe Use of Future Information courses, no different from the yearly review modules on the safe handling of radioactives or biohazards. For thirty-eight of the forty years they’d been on the run, information from the future had simply been another controlled asset, requiring handling protocols as strictly administered as weapon launch permissions or engineering specs. It was reassuring to see that discipline all the way back here.
“So you have no proof of your story?” Okonkwo said.
“My commander didn’t prepare me for this. My history doesn’t record Rudo being arrested. My presence here may have changed things.”
“Being the daughter of Brigadier Iekanjika, you were raised as fleet royalty, no doubt? First choice of all assignments and groomed for command from an early age? What are you, a warship commander or a staff officer?”
Okonkwo’s reaction stung her. Iekanjika had not indulged in many fantasies of what it would have been like to have grown up with a mother, much less what it might have been like to be raised by the second-ranking officer in the whole Expeditionary Force. It might have been a childhood of privilege and influence. And she had been groomed, by Rudo herself. But was it for command, or to come back in time, to prevent a grandfather paradox?
“I’m the Chief of Staff,” Iekanjika said quietly.
“Put your sidearm on the table, corporal, and I’ll take a blood sample.”
Iekanjika pulled her pistol out and set it on Okonkwo’s desk. The auditor slid it away from her, leaving her hand on the butt of her own sidearm.
“Rudo in the future warned me that a genetic query on the brigadier might be noticed,” Iekanjika said.
Okonkwo’s eyebrow rose. “Rudo is just starting as an auditor. She doesn’t know about every audit I do or what records I have access to as a matter of course.” Okonkwo pulled out a small case from a cupboard and slid it across the desk. “Swab,” she said.
Iekanjika opened the case, revealing a field DNA sequencer about the size of her fist, surrounded by sample collection tubes. She broke the crinkled wrapper around one rough plastic stick. She scraped it along the inside of her cheek and held it out to the auditor. Okonkwo let the device run while she reconfigured her desktop. Different yellow holograms appeared, diffusing into foggy halos in the lingering cigarette smoke and the clouds of their breaths.
After a moment of waiting, Okonkwo pulled a small metal case from an inner jacket pocket, tapped it, and held out a hand-made cigarette. Iekanjika hadn’t had a cigarette in days. Okonkwo lit hers, then resuscitated her half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray. Iekanjika took a cautious drag and coughed.
“What is it?” Iekanjika asked.
“What do you smoke in the future?” Okonkwo asked.
“The Expeditionary Force grows its own tob
acco,” she said, grimacing. “Better than this, sorry to say.”
“We weren’t meant to be out this long. Six month mission, sooner if we took too many losses. It’s been a year. Hobbyists made these by synthesizing tobacco DNA from records.”
Iekanjika took a longer drag, and held it up. “You can look forward to this getting better.”
The holograms over Okonkwo’s desk started moving, listing, drawing linkage trees. Iekanjika resisted the urge to lean in. Okonkwo’s half-smoked cigarette drooped in her lips.
“Câlice,” the auditor said.
Iekanjika exhaled a cloud of stinging smoke and waited.
“You are her daughter,” Okonkwo said wonderingly. “With Colonel Bantya.”
“What? Who?” Iekanjika said, sitting forward. “I’m sorry. I never knew my father. I’ve never even heard that name.”
“Colonel Bantya isn’t your father. You have two mothers.”
Okonkwo faced her. Sympathetically? Kindly? Pityingly?
She had two mothers. Such a thing was certainly possible with artificial help. She hadn’t known that the Force had carried that tech, and that, more than anything else, made her realize that she’d never seen a fully kitted Expeditionary Force. Two mothers. And she finally had a name for her second parent. She felt hollow and full at the same time.
“I was told my father was an executed criminal.”
“Colonel Bantya was the former Chief of Staff to the late Major-General Nandoro,” Okonkwo said, referring to the original commander of the Sixth Expeditionary Force. “She was convicted of treason six months ago, busted to officer cadet and executed.”
The world tilted and swam before her eyes. Iekanjika slumped back in her chair. Okonkwo scanned the analysis listlessly for errors, double-checking telomere lengths and time-dependent methylation patterns in the DNA for proof of aging.
“Câlice,” Okonkwo whispered.
“Câlice,” Iekanjika repeated.
A silence settled over the women. They smoked their cigarettes, staring into space. Iekanjika’s stomach did slow painful turns. Two mothers? She’d known her... other parent had been an executed criminal, but that she’d also been the Chief of Staff... That meant that Iekanjika was the direct professional successor of one of her mothers in some strange echo across the decades.
They shared the ashtray until they finally crushed out the butts.
“Why go to Rudo?” Okonkwo said. “Why not someone more powerful?”
“Rudo is still alive forty years from now,” Iekanjika said.
“The little traitor is alive? Isn’t there justice?”
For all the auditor knew, Rudo spent the next forty years in the brig. Okonkwo looked like she wanted to ask real questions about her future, but she didn’t. Iekanjika would have. She hoped no one from the future ever visited her.
“Why did you come back?” Okonkwo said.
“In the future, we need fresh core samples of the surface of Nyanga.”
“The fleet didn’t keep the core samples.”
“Data yes. Samples no. We have new tools in the future to extract additional information.”
“And you couldn’t take a new sample forty years in the future,” Okonkwo guessed. “Not so soon after the flare.”
“Something like that.”
“You came through the time gates. So in the future, we learn to travel through the time gates themselves.”
“We’re drilling right now,” Iekanjika said, “using work orders from Captain Rudo. We haven’t been bothered yet, but we’ll need authorizations to get the core samples through the security perimeter and back to the gates so we can carry them through.”
Okonkwo’s eyes widened slightly. “Not a small request.”
“I have a bigger one. Rudo can’t be convicted of anything. That’s not part of the future I come from. The only thing I can hope for now is that the charges are dropped or turn out to have been falsified.”
“Are they false?” Okonkwo asked.
“Maybe not.”
“If I’d known she were this kind of person, I never would have married her.”
“I... sympathize,” Iekanjika said.
Knowing what she knew now, would she still have joined Rudo’s political marriage? It startled her to have to ask herself the question.
“We need to worry about the timeline first,” Iekanjika said.
“I don’t have any power to get her out of the brig.”
“You’re a highly-placed auditor. Evidence can be planted. Erased.”
Okonkwo straightened. “You can’t be serious!”
“Rudo has nothing on her record in the future.”
“Maybe she should, but that’s for a court martial to decide! There are some things that officers don’t do. That people don’t do.”
Iekanjika didn’t disagree. Lieutenant Nabwire lived and he would be tried under the Code of Service Discipline. Just like Okonkwo could be if she falsified evidence. What was Iekanjika becoming? Morals mattered. But did they matter as much as causality?
“I’m sorry to have to say this about your mother, but Brigadier Iekanjika is an awful person, a brutal officer obsessed with advantage and politics. But her murder would be worse.”
“We’re all political,” Iekanjika said without conviction.
“Maybe you are, and maybe most of the officers are,” Okonkwo said, “but it doesn’t have to be this way, if people believed in some higher goal.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a rare officer, then,” Iekanjika said.
Okonkwo’s hands shook. She flustered another cigarette out of the beaten little metal box and lit it; her cheekbones reflecting the glowing ember. She looked away, tapping desultorily at icons. Thirty and forty years from now, the Expeditionary Force would be different. Officers would be different. The majority of those alive and serving when the Expeditionary Force broke out of the Puppet Axis had mostly grown up in a strengthening belief in the mission and the dream. Where had that dream started? From what she’d seen, it hadn’t been born in Rudo’s heart. Colonel Okonkwo was part of the Union’s political elite, and she carried parts of it. At the very least she believed in morals bigger than herself.
Okonkwo cleared the holographic display.
“Aside from your worry about Rudo and the timeline, you must be relieved your mother will survive,” the auditor said.
Iekanjika had not worked Internal Affairs and Auditing as long as Okonkwo, but the best of them were keen investigators. Okonkwo’s statement was a probe.
“What Rudo did transcends military law,” Iekanjika said. “This mess was caused by my presence. The Expeditionary Force has many trials ahead of it, but after a lot of sacrifice, we end up in a good place. That’s in jeopardy. Rudo is important to those events.”
“Rudo and some co-conspirators had been planning murder on a fellow officer before you arrived in the past,” Okonkwo said. “That’s unconscionable.”
“She made a mistake,” Iekanjika said. “Don’t let a focus on that one mistake undo the sacrifices of decades of loyal officers and crew.”
Okonkwo considered her for a long time.
“I’ll help you, but I won’t cover up anything for a criminal. Rudo can hang.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
BELISARIUS HATED THAT he existed. His self-loathing radiated fever-hot. If he’d been born human, or mongrel, or even a Puppet, he couldn’t have been more miserable, but neither would he have wreaked so much destruction. He gasped, as if the weight of his guilt were a physical, crushing force.
He stepped towards the Hortus quantus herd.
They were still. No amount of waiting would make them move before his engineered eyes. He turned away and walked as quickly as he could to the tool sheds without drawing attention. The chest plate translator he’d used to speak with the Hortus quantus was still there. He signed it out, and strapped it on as he rushed back.
“What a
re you doing?” Saint Matthew asked. “You’re looking conspicuous!”
“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said. The con man in him heard the desperation in his own voice.
He stopped at the edge of the herd, as if it were no longer a living field but a cemetery with a sanctity to be violated. Guiltily, he picked his way through the frozen, alien bushes and grasses, towards the small rise where he’d spoken to the Hortus quantus elders. The herd stood eerily still.
He recognized the one who had spoken the most: one point three six meters tall, not including fronds that clawed another seventy-one centimeters into the faint wind, and small horizontal lesions in the black skin of the forward right leg, where scraping had exposed the unliving ice beneath.
Elder, Belisarius wrote. The chest plate hissed as piezoelectric stomata released the scents. For long minutes, the word was alone on the screen.
What had he done to their world? The Hortus quantus’ present had been twenty-two years wide, perhaps far more; mediated, he now understood, not just by the pollen from the future and sent into the past, but by a tapestry of quantum entanglement. Their present now might just be a moment wide, like his; strobing flashes of a world moving too fast, bereft of context and relationships. It might feel to them like it felt for Belisarius to step down from the quantum fugue or savant to being just baseline human.
Belisarius’ chest plate registered incoming scents, but instead of turning into words on the inside of his faceplate, whatever was said made his word Elder fade. The elder had sent the negative or opposite of elder, had rewritten the conversation to not have occurred.
Help, Belisarius wrote. The word was semi-faded, half there, half not there, a question.
Another word appeared beside his. Then another.
Dark. Alone.
Tears stung his eyes. His stomach churned. The Hortus quantus had been a communal being, knit by quantum entanglement into a greater consciousness, and now he’d broken them into a series of solitudes. Unprotected by each other, cut off from each other, the world now inflicted itself upon them. He wanted desperately to be punished, with any sentence, if this could just be reversed.
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