Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  “I missed you,” Meyun murmured into her hair. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you—I worried about all my friends on Blockade Patrol, as well as my own hide,” he added quickly, mindful of the hidden cameras. He ended the hug and stepped back, tucking his hands into his pockets. “Chaplain Bennie told me you’d been assigned to boarding-party duties for a small patroller. And then, when I heard you’d gone missing and were listed as Captured, Presumed Eaten…I worried even more. CPEs are far less likely to come back than MIAs. Even ones like you.”

  “You should’ve had more faith in me,” she teased lightly, giving him a lopsided smile. Ia gestured at the two cushioned chairs tucked into the corner opposite her desk. Her office wasn’t large, and definitely wasn’t ostentatious—in fact, she was pretty sure Bennie’s office was both bigger and had more comfortable furniture in it—but she did have some amenities. “Want some caf’ while we sit and catch up with each other?”

  “Decaf’, dash of cream, please,” he murmured. “I’d like to get some sleep tonight.”

  Nodding, Ia programmed the controls on the caf’ dispenser built into the wall behind her desk and set the first mug in the slot. It didn’t take long for the machine to dispense two mugs of the hybrid brew. “Here you go…”

  Accepting it, he settled in one of the chairs. “I know you can’t tell me everything, but…was one of the reasons why you never contacted me because you knew I’d live long enough to wind up here?”

  That wasn’t the question she’d anticipated. Ia had thought he was going to ask her about her time as a prisoner. This one was relatively easy to answer, though. Seating herself, she gave him the truth. “That was one of the reasons. Except I didn’t really think you’d be my first officer, in all the main probabilities. I already had someone else picked out, up until a month ago.”

  “So what changed your mind?” he asked, blowing on the liquid in his mug before sipping at it.

  She cradled her own mug in her hands, curling up one ankle under the other knee. “I accidentally made a potential future enemy. In specific, a Feyori.”

  Meyun choked a little. He coughed and cleared his throat. “How the shakk did you manage that? You’re normally too careful about that stuff.”

  “To make a long story short, I thoughtlessly uncovered his asteroid while I was busy covering up my own,” Ia told him. “The Meddler in question has since taken increasing offense at being left with his bits dangling in the stellar breeze, and will begin moving to oppose me in roughly a year.”

  He shook his head, then snickered. “…The DoI should be a little more worried about you fraternizing with a Feyori than you fraternizing with me.”

  Ia narrowed her eyes. “Don’t even suggest that, Harper. For one, if you meant dating, the Feyori never rebreed their half-blooded progeny with a full-blooded. Or one half-blood with another, if they can prevent it. That’s how the Immortal happened. Pieces are not supposed to become players to their way of thinking, so they only breed downward, dispersing their genetics into a specific species’ gene pool. For another, if you meant in a business-association sense, I need all of them on my side. Our side, the TUSPF, the Alliance, everyone’s side.

  “Besides, even if I were fully Human and tried to ‘fraternize’ with a Feyori, I’d instantly be factioned with her or him, and that means I’d be counterfaction to everyone they were counterfactioned with. No, thank you,” she dismissed, lifting her mug to her lips. “That would undo almost everything I’m hoping to do. I’m saving that as a last resort.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to deal with them somehow,” he reminded her, unconsciously echoing her thoughts of a month ago. “The only thing that can back down a Feyori is another Feyori.”

  “I know. I already have some ideas on how to go about it,” she confided after she finished swallowing. Knowing their words were being recorded, she turned the subject back to business. “But I’m not going to borrow from future troubles when I have current ones to handle. What I want right now is your impression of the others. Officers, enlisted, whoever or whatever you’ve observed so far. I’ve missed the clarity of your mind. I’d like to have that back again, and on my side.”

  He shrugged and settled back in his chair. “Well, for starters, I think Helstead’s going to be a handful…”

  Sipping again at her mug, Ia settled back as well, content to listen to him talk. She did miss him—a part of her missed his touch as well as his friendship—but talking was all either of them could afford to do.

  NOVEMBER 4, 2495 T.S.

  “God alive, this is a huge ship,” Bennie muttered, following Ia down the corridor of the ventral storage deck. “We’re going to rattle around like a handful of ball bearings in a gymnasium—do you even know where we’re going?” she added, as Ia took a side hall.

  The corridor she chose was virtually identical to every other side hall they had passed on this deck. No one had yet decorated the plain grey walls with paintings, pictures, or other means of personalizing a ship, as was so often the case on other vessels. The lack of art made everything bland and boring. Forgettable.

  Ia didn’t bother to snort. She turned a second corner, palmed open a door, paused a moment on the threshold of the cargo locker, then stepped up in time to help catch a crate just as it started to topple. Not without a cost; the contents were heavy, making both her and the two crew members oof from the awkward near impact. Once the crate was stabilized back on top of its mates, and the female of the pair had climbed back up to reattach the security straps, Ia addressed both of them.

  “Make sure you’ve secured each of these before you apply the next one, Siano, Marshall,” she cautioned the teammates of B Squad Gamma, 2nd Platoon. “Another mistake like that could cost you a broken arm, a broken instep, and several smashed toes.”

  Private Siano wiped the sweat from his eyes. He was taller than Ia and quite muscular, though he wasn’t a heavyworlder. “Thanks. Captain. Uh…what’s in them, sir? Why are they so blasted heavy?”

  “And how did you know we were down here, sir?” Marshall asked, climbing back down again.

  “These crates are filled with metal parts for the manufactories, so naturally they’re heavy,” Ia told both of them. She smiled slightly. “And I told you. I’m a massive precog. Be mindful of what you’re doing; we can’t afford to lose several days of training with you two waiting for your bones to heal.”

  “Sir…” Marshall jumped down from the racks, a frown creasing her brow. “I don’t get our schedules. They’re all over the place. Every hour, we change up whatever we’re doing. Siano and me, we’ve been put in the galley, served time at the scanner boards, barely familiarized ourselves with the gunnery pods, even been put on laundry duty midcycle,” she pointed out, then shook her head and poked her thumb at her partner. “He’s a weapons engineer, so I get why he’d be running around the ship. We keep passing gunnery-pod doors, and all that. But I’m a nurse, sir.

  “I should be in the Infirmary, familiarizing myself with the layout and the gear,” the slender woman asserted. “Yet I haven’t even stepped foot inside more than once yet because of my schedule, and it’s been ten days. With respect, Captain…this is a little crazy.”

  “I know it is,” Ia admitted. “But there will be many times in the days ahead when you in particular will be needed to run these parts to the engineers because you won’t have any patients to fuss over, and you’ll be the only one free. I need you to know exactly where to look for them. You’re not just a fine nurse, Private; you’re also going to be mastering many other duties on board this ship. This includes sitting in on all tactical debriefing sessions for both ship and melee combats. You will learn how to repair the ship, craft sound tactics, and defend yourself and your fellow soldiers to the best of your ability.

  “I need you ready to go the moment we leave this shipyard…and that means being able to do any number of jobs before you’ll need to do them.” Clasping Marshall’s shoulder, Ia smiled wryly at her and h
er teammate. “Luckily for me, I already know you can do it. If you pay attention to everything you’re learning right now. Carry on, you two.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” Siano muttered. Heaving a sigh, he turned back to the remaining crates needing to be lifted into place.

  Leaving the pair to their work, Ia rejoined Bennie in the hall. She spoke when they were out of hearing range. “They’re good meioas. They can do everything that needs doing. I just have to convince them that they can before they’ll need to do it. With luck, they’ll start believing in me sooner rather than later.”

  “She has a point, though,” Bennie agreed, clasping her hands behind her back and studying Ia as they moved away. “Nurses working like stevedores?”

  “She’s also an excellent shot,” Ia stated. She knew the door to the storage room was still open, and that the members of B Squad Gamma, 2nd Platoon, had paused to listen to her words echoing off the walls. “Far better than anyone in the military has realized. Putting her in full-mech with heavy firepower as well as a field medic’s rig will save fifteen of her fellow crewmates’ lives within the next year, and I’m just counting from the accuracy of her shots. I’m not counting the lives she’ll save through her nursing skills.”

  Bennie narrowed her eyes. “You can’t be that accurate, Ia. The future is constantly shifting and changing.”

  Now Ia snorted, though it was more a sound of outright amusement than scorn. “Trust me, I’m very good at calculating the odds these days.”

  The chaplain lifted her chin. “Wasn’t it from some old vidshow where the hero quipped, ‘Never tell me the odds’…? Wouldn’t calculating them be an act of hubris, which would tempt the universe into thwarting them?”

  “That depends upon the odds,” Ia said. She lifted her chin as well, at cross-corridor Foxtrot. “This way to the belt lifts.”

  “So where are we headed next?” Bennie asked her.

  “To prevent another mistake. Then after that, to the gun range, where you get to show me how well you can shoot.” Touching the buttons to summon the lift, Ia waited in silence. Door controls for sensitive areas, such as engineering, the bridge, and so forth, required curling one’s fingers into a small alcove to press recessed buttons, a method that would thwart Salik tentacle arms. Elevators were too commonly used for such security precautions, however.

  Chaplain Benjamin didn’t like waiting in silence. She sighed, bounced on her toes, then finally asked, “So what’s the next mistake? Another dropped box to catch?”

  “Not a dropped box, and nothing official,” Ia said. A faint hum announced the arrival of the lift. The doors slid open, revealing a small, padded room with safety handles. Stepping inside, she punched the button for Deck 3S, third deck starboard, and grabbed a handle. Bennie grabbed one of her own.

  The doors slid shut, and the lift moved up and to the side, moving in an arc that followed the curve of the ship. The track wasn’t completely circular; the engineers had built it more like a truncated cat’s eye in shape, an oval with flattened ends.

  “Ugh. Curving elevators. This’ll take some getting used to,” the chaplain muttered, swaying with the vector changes.

  “Well, it’s not like they could build straight shafts that cover all the decks,” Ia pointed out. They hit the uppermost deck and slid sideways with a clunk. Wrinkling her nose, she glanced at the ceiling. “It looks like the timing chains are off. Remind me to have them fix that before we leave dry dock.”

  The lift stopped, and the doors slid open. The lanky, dark-skinned man started to step inside, then stopped, staring at the two officers. “Ah…Captain. Chaplain, sir.”

  “Get inside, Aquinar,” Ia ordered lightly. “It’s a free lift.”

  “Uh, yes, sir.” Stepping fully inside, he found the controls and punched the button for Deck 4S. The doors slid shut, and the lift clunked again. Ia sighed.

  “Captain, I do believe you asked me to remind you to have the shipyards fix the timing chain,” Bennie teased, as they slid sideways.

  Chuckling ruefully, Ia flipped open the screen of her command unit and tapped in a note to the foreman in charge of lift construction and maintenance. She wasn’t wearing a jacket and didn’t need to unsnap any sleeves this time. Just a plain grey shirt and matching slacks, striped in black down each leg, black belt, black shoes, and the absolute minimum of her glittery, being her rank pins and the two striped bars indicating her past duty posts, one for her time on the Terran-Gatsugi Border, and one for her time on the Salik Interdicted Zone, the Blockade. Each one had a little pip for extra tours of duty at each post.

  Bennie was similarly clad, though she had a couple more service pins. Aquinar, clad in grey pants, a matching unbuttoned shirt, and a mottled grey T-shirt beneath, had four pins of his own. He peered at Ia’s service bars as the lift clunked again and started descending down the starboard curve. Catching her glancing at him, he quickly looked away. Ia let the corner of her mouth quirk up. She answered his unspoken curiosity.

  “Yes, Private; I’ve only served in two locations. One of them was the Blockade. We’re about to serve in over two hundred, with an intensity that will match the Blockade, if not outstrip it.” The lift stopped. Gesturing for the chaplain to exit first, Ia followed her, turned, and flashed a grin at the dubious private. “It should be exciting.”

  Turning away, she led Bennie down the hall and around the corner. The redhead studied her in a sidelong look. “That was awfully cheerful-sounding of you. I thought you preferred doom-and-gloom.”

  “They have to know I’m not a monster, Bennie. That I can be serious when needed, but that I’m also a fellow Human, deep down inside—that I was raised to be Human, and consider myself one,” she amended. “Even if I’m only half of one.”

  Their destination wasn’t far, just to the starboard end of the deck. Hooking her fingers into the controls for the gunnery-pod door, she triggered it with a flex. The door hissed open, startling the occupant. He started to rise out of his seat, dropping his legs from the console to the floor so that he could bolt upright…then oofed and thumped back down, held in by his restraint straps. On the console of his control panel, a trio of tiny little robots whirred and moved, exploring the surface with the child-like patterns of simplistic artificial intelligence.

  “Ah! Captain! Aah…how can I help you?” the soldier in the seat managed to ask, scrambling for dignity.

  Ia took a moment to look around the gunnery pod, letting him recover. Everything in these pods was fire-by-wire, remotely controlled by analysis computers. Banks of monitors surrounded the gunner’s seat, which looked like a modified eggshell, designed to slide and rotate so that the gunner could face and fire along the same fields of view as the weapons themselves. Currently, the screens were active, though they only showed the interior of the huge dry-dock bay holding the Hellfire in place for her retrofits. The curved span of that view made the gunnery-pod chamber look large, but in reality it was barely two meters square.

  The actual weapons’ towers for this projectile pod and its missile bays lay on the other side of a couple of storage bays and triple-thick armor plating, all designed to protect the gunner from what many weapons techs across the Space Force half-grimly, half-jokingly referred to as “projectile reflux.” Given the distances involved in ship-to-ship combat, it was still possible, if rare, for an enemy laser to impact a missile on its way through the external launch tube of a P-pod. The resulting chain reaction could be lethal, particularly if the security measures failed to detect and seal off the main missile blast from the rest of the attached storage bay in time.

  On some of the smaller, older ships, the actual control seat was part and parcel of that pod tower, sacrificing some of the usual extra layers of protection in exchange for greater flexibility, lower construction costs, and the ability for the gunner to manually load projectile missiles in case of power failures or battle-plan changes. The usefulness of having the gunner and the missiles in the same location allowed many gunners to “fi
re by the seat of their pants,” using their physical sense of the ship’s movement in addition to the targeting computers.

  Ships on the Blockade had extra plating and fire-by-wire controls like the Hellfire’s, but many of the ships on the more peaceful Border routes didn’t need it. Even so, on the fire-by-wire vessels, most construction placed the gunners at the same point along a ship’s hull as the tower, so as to preserve some of that kinesthetic, seat-of-the-pants advantage. Because of the extra slave-driven pods, any one gunnery pod along the length of this ship could be used to guide the rest linked in tandem with it, with most meant to sit empty until needed.

  In other words, this was an out-of-the-way location for one of her pilots to slack off from his training duties and pretend for a few minutes that he was just a simple gunner.

  “Yeoman Fielle,” Ia finally stated, sharpening her tone slightly beyond normal. “While I realize it is currently your rest hour, I shouldn’t have to remind you that the gunnery pods are for gunnery techs to familiarize themselves with, and not normally the position of pilots and navigators…or at least, not according to your schedule, it isn’t. And if I were to take official notice of this potential breach in Company-Bible protocol, I would also have to take official notice of any unauthorized robotics on board.

  “I shouldn’t have to remind you that the majority of this ship is Ultra Classified, which means any deviation in equipment from the authorized list would have to be viewed as a breach of security. If I were to notice such things officially,” Ia finished dryly. “Breaches of security at this ship’s level of clearance usually involve far more than two strokes of the cane.”

  Glancing at his console, Fielle swallowed. “Ah. Well, I can explain—”

  “Unofficially,” Ia interrupted him, “I would recommend you confine any robots I do not officially see to your quarters until further notice…with the understanding that said notice won’t come anytime soon…and that you aren’t to discuss their presence with anyone other than your teammate until said further notice.”