Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  “Sir…if we’re really flying through a hyperrift, why aren’t we getting spacesick?” Dinyadah asked, looking up at the grey streaks of the rift tunnel on her viewscreen.

  “We’re immune because we’re wrapped in modified FTL physics, Private,” Harper answered her. “We are now moving at roughly two minutes to the light-year, slower than standard OTL, but considerably faster than FTL.”

  “But I was always told that forcing an FTL ship through a hyperrift shook the ship to pieces,” Dinyadah said. She looked around the bridge, seeking support, or at least confirmation from the room. Several of the others nodded, including Ia, so she looked back at their chief engineer. “So why aren’t we having our teeth rattled out of our heads?”

  “It’s a modified warp field, that’s why—don’t ask how it was modified,” he added, glancing at their captain for a moment. “The Captain is under orders not to divulge that particular information, and that means the rest of us are under orders, too.”

  “Or to put it another way,” Lieutenant Rico stated, studying her, “if word of how we’re doing this gets off this ship, the Salik will find out and try to use it against us. Right, Captain?”

  “Right, Lieutenant,” she agreed, her attention split between making sure the helm stayed on course in the rift and answering the unspoken questions. “Hyperwarp has far too many advantages for us not to use it, but far too many disadvantages to implement it across the fleet. The least of which is the fact that we’re still effectively communications-blind while in hyperrift transit.

  “We Terrans are not living on an isolated clutch of planets on the backside of unexplored space this time around,” Ia said, referencing Terran history. “The Salik know exactly where we are, they can find out where all of our shipyard facilities are, and they can bribe, coerce, or smash-and-grab the information if we offered it to the rest of the fleet. If we hadn’t been isolated and far from the war zones back at the start of the first Salik War, then they would’ve seized all our new, Terran-based tech offerings and done their best to defeat the Alliance.

  “Sometimes you need a lump hammer to take out a problem, as we helped provide two centuries ago,” Ia said, quoting one of her distant descendants. Drawing in a deep breath, she steeled herself for this next bit of potential trust-bending, and revealed as calmly and matter-of-factly as she could, “Sometimes you need a laser scalpel. This ship is that laser scalpel…and I have just aimed it at one of the biggest, nearest, most dangerous cancerous growths in the galaxy. As far as the rest of the ship is to know, never mind the rest of the fleet, we never strayed from known Terran flight paths. And we never crossed into the Grey Zone.

  “That is a direct order from not only your commanding officer, but from a high-ranking precognitive—and before anyone protests further, I’ll remind you I am fully authorized by the Command Staff to make this little visit. We’re going into the Grey Zone, and we are all going to keep our mouths shut about it. This particular little mission is labeled as Ultra Classified, which means you cannot even mention it to my superior without going first through me.

  “This one is completely out of your pay grades at this point in time…and it is merely the first of far too many missions with that label stuck to it. Speaking of Ultra Classified, the Admiral-General authorized me to undertake this mission, yes, but you are not allowed to discuss it with her. If you did, you’d be accused of Fatalities Four, Five, Six, and Thirty-Five, and those are just the obvious ones,” Ia told her bridge crew. “They’ll dredge up every other Fatality rule they can throw at you, too. That’s what Ultra Classified means. That’s why I have that double-indemnity regarding corporal punishment on my back—because I am responsible for the rest of you keeping your mouths shut. Please do; you may consider this your first official test for such matters.”

  That silenced her crew. Ia knew it was a grievous stretching of her carte-blanche powers, but it was necessary. Though she had given Fielle and Rico permission to leave the bridge, neither moved. Fielle stayed put because she knew he wanted to learn the new drive’s flight mechanisms. Rico stayed put because he was busy watching her. Studying her. Analyzing her methods and motives.

  It might’ve made more sense for the Command Staff to have made Helstead her onboard spy, but Oslo Rico was used to assessing tactical and strategic threats and knowing which parts of his information-gathering were troublesome enough to pass along. Helstead excelled at executing decisions based on what she found, but Rico’s job was to report if Ia stepped out of line. This would stretch his credulity limit, but she knew he wouldn’t report it precipitously.

  She also knew there were other spies tapped among her crew. Her 1st Platoon lieutenant was the most important of them, since even spies had to report up through a chain of command; the Command Staff wanted to know only the important bits, rather than be pestered by petty half worries.

  For now, they kept their mouths shut and their eyes on their workstation screens. All except for Yeoman Fielle, who had nothing to do. Seated at the pilot’s station, ahead and below her own post at the back of the room, Fielle fidgeted. He wasn’t quite as bad about it as Lieutenant Commander Helstead could be, but he did sigh and shift in his seat every now and again, visibly bored.

  “Yeoman Fielle, would you like to warm up the feedbacks and see what hyperwarp flight feels like?” she finally offered.

  “Sir, yes, sir!” he agreed quickly, sitting forward so he could reach for the controls.

  She smiled. “If you learn quickly enough—not that there’s much more to learn—I’ll let you oversee most of the flight. I’ll be taking the helm back a few minutes before we emerge, though.”

  “If we’re emerging inside Grey space, sir, you can have the helm at that point,” he muttered, strapping his hand into the control glove. “I don’t want that level of responsibility on my hands. In fact, I don’t even want to go there at all.”

  “Relax, Yeoman; we’ll get out alive,” she promised.

  Her 1st Platoon lieutenant wasn’t the only one to glance her way at those words, but his eyes did linger. As did Harper’s, though his gaze was at least more trusting than dubious.

  L-3 POINT, TAUS’EN IV

  N-TAU 1158 SYSTEM

  The Hellfire emerged from hyperspace without fanfare. Grey streaks blossomed into stark black filled with pinpoints of light. Warned that they were about to emerge, Private Hulio moved quickly to synch what little they knew of the system with the information coming their way. Considering they were still traveling fast, he worked with crisp urgency.

  “Scanners are up and running, Captain. Gravity and lightwave data coming in…We’re just outside the fourth planet’s orbit, sir, at the third Lagrange point—Madre de Dios, there’s a space station at the L-3, sir!” he announced, looking up from his lower screens to the primary and back. “It’s huge! Five kilometers across. We’re not on a collision course, but we’ll pass within thirty thousand klicks. The hull configuration’s a bit strange, but scanners are matching the materials to known Grey technology, sir. We have light-seconds before they detect us.”

  “Orders, Captain?” Rico asked in a deceptively mild voice.

  “Private Hong,” Ia stated, her tone crisp but calm. “Power down all guns. I repeat, power down all guns. This includes all personal weapons here on the bridge as well as the hull. We’re about to be scanned, and we don’t want to alarm the locals by doing the wrong things.”

  Hong complied with a shake of his head. “…Aye, sir. Powering down all guns, sir. Putting my faith in you, sir—and requesting permission to haunt you in the afterlife if you’re wrong, sir.”

  “Permission granted. Corporal Xhuge, if you’ll look in the Alliance folder, subfolder Grey Interactions, you will find a comm file marked ‘Neutral Parley.’ Use that to send a ping to the station,” Ia said.

  “Neutral parley?” Rico asked her. One of his brows rose on his tanned face. “Is that even in their vocabulary? If it weren’t for the psis, they’d have squished us
like bugs long ago. We aren’t even worth the time it takes to spit to them, or whatever their equivalent is.”

  “Considering most of their past interactions with us have either fallen into the categories of ‘ignore the inconsequential jumped-up slime molds’ or ‘plunder their primitive biology for nefarious experimentation purposes,’” Fielle quipped, “I for one wouldn’t fight over the concept of an actual chance to talk like civilized sentients.”

  “I’m just grateful we’re on a ship with a powerful psi,” Dinyadah muttered. “That’s the only thing that’s backed them down in the past.”

  “The file has been sent, Captain,” the corporal at the communications station informed her. He didn’t look happy to have done it, but at least he hadn’t hesitated. “We’ve received pingback, so I know they got it. I can’t make heads or tails out of the language in the recording I sent, though.”

  “We actually have a couple dozen psis on board, Private Dinyadah, some of them quite strong for the average psychic,” Ia corrected her, addressing the scanner tech first. “But we won’t need them, just me. They’re on board for another reason. As for the language, Corporal, it’s called Shredou, which is the name for their species as well as for the language of the Greys. I pieced together a greeting specifically addressed to the being who serves as their station master and, coincidentally, the chief military officer for this system. One specific enough, it will catch his attention.

  “And they do have terms for neutral parley in their culture; they just don’t share those terms with non-Greys,” Ia said, eyes on the slightly enlarged dot that was the space station in the distance. They were still traveling at a quarter the speed of light, but she didn’t alter their course. “The fact that I know those terms, and the exact location and circumstances he’ll be in when the message reaches him, will stay his hand. They may be the single most alien race in the entire known galaxy—above and beyond the Feyori—and the single most technologically advanced, but they do share the trait of curiosity with us.”

  “So what is this parley of yours going to discuss?” Rico asked her.

  “Sir! Energy buildup in the—” Hulio started to report. He was cut off by a flare of light, and a slight pressure change in the bridge, one that puffed air outward. Air that had occupied the clear space just to the right of Ia’s command station, between her and the seats claimed by her two fellow officers. A space now occupied by something, or rather someone, else.

  Cocking his head slightly—and calling the alien a “he” was only a guess on Ia’s part, since their gender was hard to discern—the Grey surveyed the stunned occupants of the bridge. He blinked his large black eyes and unfurled one of his slender, grey-skinned hands, focusing on the white-haired, grey-clad woman next to him.

  “Speak.”

  His voice sounded strange, as if two sets of vocal cords worked at once, and not quite in harmony.

  “I know you plan to invade,” Ia said, keeping her sentences short. Longer ones would be open to misinterpretation. “I know when. I know where. I will tell you the battles we will fight.”

  Rico hissed at that statement. Even Harper gave her a dubious look. The others looked up from their boards, then hastily turned back to their monitors as the Grey, short and slender, glanced their way.

  “You betray your kind.” The Grey didn’t speak with the intonation of a Human. His voice spoke flatly, his thin lips moved and shaped the words, but whether it was a statement or a question could not be discerned.

  Ia took it as a question. “No. I do not betray my kind. Your technology will destroy this universe. I will stop you. I will tell you when. I will tell you where. You will see my words are true. When you do, you will surrender. You will obey the second treaty. My treaty.”

  He blinked and curled his fingers. “Irrelevant.”

  “…Another energy surge, sir,” Hulio whispered, gaze fixed firmly on his screens.

  “Obey me,” Ia stated calmly, “and I will save you from the Zida”ya.”

  The double click was difficult to manage, considering she had only a soft tongue and the inner side of her teeth to work with. Nor was it in the language of the Greys. It did, however, have the desired effect.

  The Grey’s large black eyes widened to their fullest extent. He did not move, however, other than to say, “Speak.”

  “They are coming. I know where. I know when. You doubt me right now,” she added, dipping her head slightly. “I will show you my accuracy. You will accept my deal. If you refuse, I will not save you. I will aim them at you. I will know when. I will know where. You will die. All the Shredou will die.

  “Take the indicated hyperrelay unit, and leave,” she added, uncurling her right hand in a similar gesture to the Grey’s. “I will contact you. Then you will know when, and you will know where. You will see my words are true.”

  “Arrogant.” The Grey did not move and did not leave the ship as ordered.

  Ia breathed deep. As she exhaled slowly, she poured her mental energies into her psychic shields, adding a twist of electrokinesis. The air around her station crackled, and her monitor screens flickered. Capacitors absorbed the energy, stabilizing their views of the stars outside and the navigation data overlaid on her secondary screens. She didn’t move, other than to breathe and tense her body.

  The bubble of energy expanded outward like a spherical force field, visible only where the field encountered motes of dust in the air, causing them to snap and spark. It wasn’t exactly electricity, however, but rather, kinetic inergy.

  The Grey winced, then stepped back. She expanded the bubble, until he clutched at his head. A high-pitched hiss escaped him, not much different from a teakettle’s whistle. Ia eased back her energies.

  “Powerful, not arrogant,” she corrected him, relaxing. “You will obey. Now get off my ship.”

  Opening his large eyes, larger than a Gatsugi’s mouse black orbs, he stared at her a long moment. Then vanished. Air flowed inward slightly in a faint pop as the molecules slapped back together. Grey technology permitted translocation, a mechanical, technological method of psychic teleportation, but the energies used were not at all the same. Psychic energy, the kind wielded by those Humans descended at least partially from the Feyori, was the equivalent of acid to their species’ senses.

  The fact that they could make the translocation instantaneously onto a ship moving at half the speed of light spoke volumes about the rest of their technology. As did the arrogance of sending a single speaker to visit the insects daring to invade their space.

  “Right. Time for us to get the hell out of here. Sparking the rift in thirty seconds,” Ia warned her crew, right hand moving over the controls. “We’ll be taking a short jump with a course correction to follow. Once we’re en route—after this little jaunt,” she added, sparking the rift, “we’ll be able to relax and stand down. Not even the Greys can catch us in hyperspace. This is why we will stay in it on the second jump until we reach Sanctuarian space, putting us well ahead of schedule.”

  “And the treason you just committed?” Rico asked her, his voice still calm, his expression still neutral. Behind him, his screen showed the mouth of the wormhole swallowing them in streaks of grey light. It made his deeply tanned skin look sickly, underscoring his accusation. “Is that on the schedule?”

  “It’s not treason if I am authorized to commit it, Lieutenant. Nor is it treason when these precognitive actions will be directly responsible for saving the Terrans from being destroyed by the Shredou in several years,” Ia countered, knowing he couldn’t let such a huge security breach pass unchallenged. “I also expect you personally to assist me in properly wording my communiqués with the Greys in our future exchanges of information. But that won’t happen for almost a year, so you can relax.”

  “I will not relax until I have examined your next message, sir,” he added. “And preferably this last one, too. I’d feel a lot better knowing what you said to them.”

  The tunnel of streaks ended. They e
merged in realspace on the far side of the system, far from the light of the local star. Ia began the careful process of not only slipping them sideways and down a little, more in the direction of her home system, but gently altering their trajectory so that they would be able to hit the next hyperrift dead on, rather than at an angle. Touching the edges of a rift was never a good idea, which was why speed was essential in getting their ship both in and out at just the right moment.

  “So will I, Lieutenant. Some of the words have no easy translation into Terranglo, since my description of what he was doing at the moment of contact have no correlation in our own culture…but the important words are perfectly clear. Including the fact that I will not be using that hyperrelay unit to contact them until 12,379 kesant have passed. You’ll need to figure out how to translate Grey Standard into Terran Standard time systems, but it’s just under a Terran Standard year.” She looked up at him, then over at Hulio. “Private Hulio, get me a dead-reckon heading for the Sanctuary System. Line it up with our current speed and heading, and plot an appropriate course correction arc.”

  “Aye, sir,” he agreed, turning his attention back to the boards.

  “Sir?” Dinyadah asked. “Captain?”

  “Yes, Private?” Ia asked, watching the unfocused crosshairs that appeared on her main screen, thanks to Hulio’s efforts.

  “Thank you for getting us out of there alive,” the other woman said. “I mean, not for getting us into that situation, sir, but…er, I mean…shakk. Sorry, sir.”

  “I suggest pulling your foot away from your mouth before you swallow it, Private,” Harper ordered her, his tone gentle but pointed. “Put your faith in our CO as I have, and she’ll get all of us out of this alive.”

  Not everyone, Meyun, Ia thought grimly. To herself, behind tight mental walls. But I’ll save those that I can.

  JANUARY 18, 2496 T.S.

  OUR BLESSED MOTHER

  INDEPENDENT COLONYWORLD SANCTUARY