Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  The other crew members stared wide-eyed at the two of them, shocked and apprehensive. Mindful of the rules, Ia freed a hand, hooked it around his head, and pulled his own cheek into reach for an equally loud-smacking kiss. “Thank you, Your Highness. Now go kiss Ann, too.”

  Ramasa laughed and rubbed his hands together in delight. “I was just on my way to do that, Ca…er, meioa!”

  “—Oh, no you don’t!” Ann protested, hand up to her mouth to cover the fact she was still eating her cake. She swallowed and waggled her fork at him. “I know your reputation with the ladies, O ‘Frog Prince,’ and I am not going to be one of your conquests!”

  “I think she’s sweet on him,” Ia stated, catching both of their attention. She gave the smirking Ramasa a warning look. “But if he doesn’t back off, she’ll thump him.”

  “It’s just a little birthday kiss!” he protested. “You didn’t mind,” he added to Ia, moving a little closer to Ann. “Why should she?”

  “You didn’t give me a chance to protest,” Ia countered, enjoying the moment.

  “Nonsense! I am quite sure you foresaw it coming, which means you chose to accept it,” Ramasa stated, sidling a little closer to his target.

  He lunged, lips puckered—and got thumped in the shoulder by the edge of Ann’s fist. The gunner yelped and backed off, pouting…and at that point, Ann relented, leaned over, and kissed him on the cheek. He grinned and kissed her back. She thumped him again, but only lightly.

  “…I’ll admit I saw that coming,” Ia stated primly, and scooped up another forkful of fluffy blue cake. Her second-in-command gave her a dirty look. “What? I’m just here to enjoy my birthday cake…and a little impromptu floor show.”

  Meyun wasn’t the only one to chuckle at that. Even Ann and Yung laughed.

  Ia nodded to herself, enjoying another bite. Mission accomplished. This portion of the crew has relaxed around me, and I got my birthday cake.

  CHAPTER 10

  Why did the Gatsugi accept my abilities faster than my own government? Well, I could quote the old maxim that a prophet is never honored on his or her own doorstep, but I think it was due to three things. I gave them the exact inward-bound sectors of the Salik attack fleet, gave them a good eighteen minutes of advance warning, and my ship and crew managed to account for the destruction of half the ships taken out of commission—three times more than the next best effort by one of their own forces.

  Keep in mind that the Gatsugi were not weak; my ship was just better aimed overall. Motherworld systems are also the most heavily defended, which is why the Salik chose to strike at them, to land psychological blows against their opponents as well as physical ones. If my ship hadn’t been able to take out so many of theirs in one blow, the number of robotic dropships would have increased exponentially.

  I also chose to aid the Gatsugi because the Terrans had already been warned about the coming war months in advance. I told my superiors when they would need to be ready for it, and what to be ready for. As it was, the fleet back in Earth’s nearspace was still damaged worse than the Gatsugi ones. Not by too much, but by enough to make my precognitive warnings clear.

  So the Terrans did believe me to an extent, particularly after the official start of the war. They just didn’t have the shock of instant power and instant proof magnifying that belief, as the Gatsugi did. Instead, the Command Staff were gradually introduced to what I could do, subtly before the Battle of the Banquet, and more openly afterward. Because it was gradual, the impact just wasn’t the same.

  ~Ia

  MARCH 19, 2496 T.S.

  SYSTEM’S EDGE, NUK NUKLIEL 83

  “Gadalah,” Ia stated, sparing a glance from her main screen to her left secondary. “Target fragment…1172. Blow it up, three missiles.”

  “Aye, sir,” Private Gadalah stated, relaying the orders on her headset to a trio of gunners.

  “Coming up on tanker midpoint in fifteen,” Fielle warned Ia. “Coming up on the drone carrier’s midpoint in…thirty-five. Fifteen, sixteen fighters behind our ninety-ninety, Captain, three stragglers behind the 270 by 90.”

  “Captain, we’re being pinged on the hyperrelays,” Al-Aboudwa warned her. “It’s asking that we switch to secured channel two—the code’s the one for the Command Staff. What do I do, sir?”

  “Be polite, Private,” Ia murmured, her attention on keeping them alive in the mix of seven midsized ships, two tankers, and a host of fighter craft. “Ping them back on the confirmation code of the day.”

  “MacInnes still needs more of those transmissions, Al-Aboudwa,” Rico told the comm tech. “She’s not getting enough nouns to decode it. If that’s the Command Staff, they’ll need it fast.”

  Their shields reverberated with an odd shudder. Not the thumping rumble one expected from a projectile weapon, but from the fragmentation of a loosely aggregated ice clump disintegrating on impact. Another, louder whump shook the ship, this time from an actual missile.

  Ia tipped the ship a little more down and to her right—down relative to her dead-ahead vector, that was, since “down” in starfighting terms was always the enemy’s main position, and the majority of the enemy were off to the left. Telltales flickered yellow and green, stippled here and there with unpleasant red. Rolling the ship clockwise presented fresher targets for the lasers and projectiles aimed their way. It also allowed her to strafe them sideways, through the debris of the now-scattered chunks of shuttle-sized ice that would have slammed through their shields and into the hull itself had Gadalah’s gunners not fragmented it.

  “Shakk!” Al-Aboudwa cursed. He cleared his throat. “I mean, Captain, sir, it’s the Admiral-General. She’s calling for you, sir. Should I tell her you’re busy?”

  “Not today. Patch her through to my third tertiary, Al-Aboudwa; I’ll take her call,” Ia pointed out, left hand flicking through the commands in the attitude glove, right hand dancing over the thruster controls. “Fielle, take out those fighters. Gadalah, focus on the dropship.”

  Her lower third tertiary screen dropped its bar graphs of energy outputs from the various engines around the ship, replaced by the round face and grey-streaked black hair of Admiral-General Christine Myang. “Greetings, Captain Ia.”

  The pingback icon in the lower right corner of the screen showed they were on a five-second delay. Hyperspace communications were fast, but not instantaneous. Ia shifted the ship again, glancing up at the spate of yellowlit warnings on her upper bank of monitors. “I need those fighters taken down, Fielle.”

  Myang, five seconds behind, continued talking. “As you may or may not recall, your six months of carte blanche are now up, and it is time for your performance re…view? What are you doing, Captain?”

  “Good afternoon, Admiral-General,” Ia greeted her, without looking down at the screen containing the Admiral-General’s face. “I am currently doing what I do best. Saving millions of lives by destroying a few hundred Salik. But I’m not too terribly busy, and I know you’ve allotted this half hour to talk with me, so go right ahead. I am listening—Nelson, Al-Aboudwa, I’m getting some odd flashes of light from those fighters. Try running those through the lieutenant’s code crackers.”

  Another paff of breaking ice was followed by a clang. Dubsnjiadeb cursed. “—I think they’re trying to ram us, sir! They’re hemming us in with the larger chunks.”

  “Well, blow them up!” Rico retorted.

  “Doobie, two of those ships are about to get away. Plot courses for them and coordinate with Gadalah’s teams. I want intercept arcs for each vessel,” Ia ordered. She pulled her gaze downward long enough to smile at the Admiral-General. “Go on, sir. I am listening.”

  Five seconds later, Myang responded. “Maybe I should call you back later.”

  Ia responded on top of her, mindful of the five-second delay and wanting her words to interrupt the older woman. “I’m afraid we’ll be in transit in less than fifteen minutes, sir.” Myang fell silent, so she continued. “We won’t be able to stop and t
alk for another six or seven hours, which is after we’ve helped fend off the first—Fielle, we still have four fighters on our tail, I said get rid of them—the first invasion wave on the Solarican domeworld of Rau Niil II.”

  “In four more hours, Captain, I’m supposed to be in bed, getting some badly needed rest. Unless there’s another emergency requiring my personal oversight,” the older woman muttered. “Alright. We will deal with the question of your carte-blanche demands now. Presuming you can handle it?”

  “Got ’em, Captain!” Fielle crowed as the aft gunners successfully hit the final three fighter ships. “Take that, you frogtopi! Never mess with this ship’s weaponry!”

  “Don’t get cocky, Yeoman,” Rico chided him. “You’re not Shikoku Yama, you know.”

  “I know I can handle it, sir, or I’d have contacted you earlier when we were repairing from the engagement at CS-35,” Ia said. “You’ve seen the recordings we’ve mailed your way. You know what I’m capable of doing with this ship, given the freedom to use it appropriately. I have only done so freely for the last six weeks. Imagine what I can do with six more weeks, and six again beyond that.”

  Around her, the screens flared with streaks of light, silent and not-so-silent explosions, and shifting stars as she maneuvered the long ship. The cometary fragments were their best defense against the Salik vessels, even as they caused problems of their own; the Hellfire had been built with multiple redundant shielding systems and extra hull plating just for this purpose: surviving heavy enemy fire. Not without cost, though; several more items appeared on her upper screens in red.

  “I take you want more carte blanche,” Myang stated after a pause of about ten seconds. “Another six months’ worth?”

  Ia dipped her head, her gaze still on her main screen, piloting the Hellfire through the debris. “Yes, sir; that would be lovely, sir. If you could authorize it right now, having that on hand when we reach Rau Niil will shave ten hours off our repair time since it means we can commandeer their biggest low-grav repair cradle. That means we’ll have just enough time to make it back downstream on the Arm to defend the colonies at Proxima Carinae. It’s a small engagement, but a vital one, temporally.”

  “Sir, getting a ping from the system buoy we dropped,” Al-Aboudwa warned her. “Three…no, five Salik vessels inbound from insystem. They’re free of the belt, star-ward vector 15 by 330, and closing fast. If they don’t slow down below three-quarters Cee, ETA in two minutes forty seconds.”

  “How is it vital temporally?” Myang asked Ia.

  “In about five weeks, if most of the colony survives, they’ll discover a mother lode of ore containing molybdenum, which is a component in ceristeel manufacturing. In eight weeks, the London Metal Exchange will be shipping tonnes of it to manufactory sites throughout the Alliance, and it will continue to produce high-quality ore well into the second war,” Ia revealed. “Gadalah, I need ice fragments 503 and 1257 destroyed.”

  “Aye, sir, I’m on it!”

  “Admiral-General,” Ia continued, “if we don’t show up, the colonists will still find it in about eight months, but by the time they get the ore to the ceristeel manufacturers, we’ll have lost over 327,000 soldiers, and far too many civilian lives.” Dropping her gaze to her lower-center tertiary, Ia met the older woman’s gaze through her screen pickups. “I can list the names, ages, and favorite foods of each and every single soldier and civilian who will die, if you like.”

  Her gaze snapped back up to the main screen as three lasers hit their hull, red-lighting two FTL panels and turning a third amber. A few more hits on that sector, and they’d be unable to form a complete field. With a hiss of triumph, Rico lifted his head and glanced her way.

  “Got it! Captain, MacInnes cracked the code. Part of it was in the running lights. Permission to send it to the Admiral-General on a subchannel, sir?” Lieutenant Rico asked.

  “Permission granted, Lieutenant,” Ia told him, before returning her attention to Myang. “Sir, you’re going to receive today’s Salik code for the war effort within one to two parsecs of Nuk Nukliel 83,” Ia told her superior, slipping the ship toward the bottom of the ice cluster. “They’re changing up codes every few days and using lightwave signals as well as hyperrelays, so I cannot guarantee it will work for long, or even work in another sector, but it will for this one. Firing the Godstrike cannon in fifteen.”

  “You know, sir, we could really use sunglasses for that thing,” Nelson quipped from the operations station.

  Ia unlocked the box, flicked on the system, adjusted their attitude slightly, and thumbed the firing control. The lights on the bridge dimmed, while the thrum of the hydrogenerators and whoosh of the heat pumps joined the smashing of ice and clashing of projectiles. One sanguine-bright flash later, Ia checked the lightwave readings versus the spare system buoy they had dropped, making sure she had killed the inbound ships, then glanced down. Admiral-General Myang winced as she watched, tanned face and grey-streaked hair briefly flaring pink in the glow from her monitor.

  “I trust you know exactly where that beam will be three or four light-months down the road?” Myang asked her dryly.

  “Sir, yes, sir. What little didn’t chew through four large ships and a swath of the local Kuiper belt will be busy dissipating harmlessly in off-plane and interstitial space.”

  “Captain!” Dubsnjiadeb called out. “Navicomp’s showing inbound objects at near-Cee. They’re trying to throw rocks at us, sir!”

  “Kind of stupid, if you ask me,” Nelson muttered from the operations seat. “Most of ’em will break up in the ice field.”

  “Thank you, Doobie. They’re desperate, Nelson. Gadalah, dump fifty proximity mines in our wake. Fielle, keep firing. All hands, brace for acceleration,” Ia warned through her headset, before slipping the ship dorsal-ward, pressing everyone down into their seats.

  “Never give the enemy a weapon you wouldn’t want turned on yourself, Captain,” Myang added through the hyperlink, apparently having heard Dubsnjiadeb’s warning.

  The pull of vector change that made it through the pulsing ripple of greased physics felt heavier than Ia’s homeworld, making it hard to breathe. Several ice chunks broke noisily against their shields, but it was the fastest way out of the Kuiper field. She shifted them forward, transitioning into a rising arc that would skim the upper edges of the tumbling bits of frozen and metallic debris.

  “Don’t worry, Admiral-General, they want us and our planets mostly intact, so they won’t sling boulders at our colonies. Just rocks at our ships. We’re on our way out of here now, sir. If you’re willing to grant me another six months of carte blanche, now would be a very good time to transmit the updated authorizations, before we have to end the link.”

  While the Admiral-General thought, Ia eased up on their acceleration, partly to spare her crew, who weren’t used to long stints in high gravity, and partly to change vectors. Some of the Salik missiles were still going fast enough to catch up with them, and the Salik lasers were getting better at targeting the Hellfire’s hull, now that Ia was speeding up for an escape. The faster one went, the harder it was to deviate from course, and the Salik gunners knew it. Twisting the ship counterclockwise a little, she presented a fresh section of panels for the lasers to score, and accelerated again.

  “…You haven’t disappointed me with your performance yet,” Myang stated, shifting in her seat to input the codes on her end of things. “Yet. Transmitting the paperwork, Captain.”

  “Thank you, sir. Al-Aboudwa, catch that and copy it to the Company files,” Ia ordered, easing back on the thruster fields so he could move. She had to roll the ship slightly once again as the lasers continued to tag their hull.

  “For now, Captain, you have the continuing confidence of the Command Staff,” the Admiral-General told her. “Don’t shakk it up.”

  “Sir, no, sir,” Ia agreed. “That is not my intention, sir.”

  “Got it, Captain,” Al-Aboudwa told her. “Received and saved.”
<
br />   “Good job, Private. Thank you, Admiral-General,” she added, eyes fixed on the screens displaying their surroundings, toes in the timestreams. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, we need to go pay for some repairs with that lovely cheque—one more thing, sir.”

  She pulsed the field panels for six seconds, slipping them forward hard and fast.

  Myang lifted her brows. “Considering I’ve renewed your carte blanche, under the same double-indemnity terms, what else could you want?”

  Ia eased back. “It’s not about what I want. It’s a warning, sir. Two months from now, a couple of the Feyori are going to be very pissed at me. They may try to infiltrate and influence the minds of the Command Staff. Be on your guard.”

  Again, she accelerated. This time, Myang frowned. “What are you going to do to them, soldier?”

  “Actually, it’s what I already did,” Ia grunted, fighting the vector pull. She rolled the ship one last time. “I do have plans to take care of them. I’m just warning you, sir. Ia out.”

  A tap of her thumb ended the comm link. Not that full FTL wouldn’t have ended it for her, since it was extremely difficult for the ship to maintain hyperrelay communications without a dedicated vacuum chamber on board while wrapped in a skin of warped physics.

  A scrape of her fingertips shot them forward hard and fast, leaping ahead of the pulsing, orange streaks that were now the only weapons that could catch them. Just as the enemy’s sensors recalibrated, tagging one last shot on their aftmost panels, the stars on the screens burst and streaked, crossing the lightspeed barrier.

  Gentling their acceleration, Ia checked her upper screens, tabbing through the list of damaged hull components. “That was a nasty fight. But we’re still greenlit for travel. Power your station back around, Fielle, and prepare to take back the helm. We’ll stay at FTL for another half hour to evade pursuit, then hyperwarp the rest of the way.”

  “Can I hit the head first, Captain?” he asked her.