by Jean Johnson
“Slag me,” she whispered, letting the winds of the prairie carry her stunned words across time. “Just freaking slag me…”
CHAPTER 16
Interstellar warfare isn’t won in a single year. Hell, ground-based warfare is rarely over in a single year, particularly not when the two sides are fairly evenly matched. The Salik and the Choya did their best to smash our support infrastructure. We did our best to smash theirs. They tried to shatter our fleets while strengthening and rebuilding theirs. We tried to shatter and strengthen and rebuild as well.
Some of that was successful. Some of it was not. Lives were lost, prisoners taken and eaten, colonists and soldiers and cities were saved, while others were destroyed. The various militaries of the Alliance couldn’t be everywhere, but neither could our foe. There was time to heal, time to repair, time to rebuild and build more. And time to be castigated for not moving faster, for not doing better.
The best I could do, however, was march along to the drumbeats of Fate.
~Ia
JULY 13, 2497 T.S.
ZUBENESCHAMALI SYSTEM
This time, she was still awake. Still clad in her grey slacks and paler grey shirt, too, though she had taken off her black ship boots and had her sock-clad feet levered up on the footrest of her easy chair. This time, Belini appeared in a set of black tights and tunic trimmed with red edging. At least, when she coalesced into a matter-based body, after popping into view like a silvery soap bubble in reverse.
“…If you think your colormood choice will frighten me, I’m not intimidated by death, and I am not swayed by rage,” Ia stated calmly, scrolling up through the text of her precognitive missive on the workpad screen. This one was a message to her family, requesting them to separate out a few more sprays for her to convert. She wouldn’t get to see them for over a year, but she liked having things prepared in advance. A thought that amused her.
“Smile all you want; you are trying my patience,” the not-pixie snapped. Hands on her hips, she strode across the carpet and stopped next to Ia’s chair. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not even trying to manifest?”
“I don’t have to try,” Ia told her. She sealed the message to her brothers and opened the next. “My ability to manifest will reveal itself in the right place, at the right time. In the meantime…I now have the politics of the Dlmvlan Queen High Nestors’ court to redirect.” She lifted the pad in her hands, tilting it briefly at the other woman to show the electrokinetically composed words filling the screen. She tipped it back her way and shrugged. “I’m not sure I’ve used enough of a mix of logic and illogic to sway them. I’m good at the logic part, and not too bad at drawing absurd analogies, but I’m not a poet laureate.”
“I don’t give a radioactive fart about the Dlmvlan High Nestor,” Belini snapped. “That part of the Game isn’t in my way. You are in my way.”
Ia looked up from her notes. “I give you my word, I will manifest in the right place, at the right time.”
“Ha! What good is your word?” the Feyori argued, and pointed off to one side. “Every day you fail to prove you are a player and not a pawn is a day that I lose face! Mcuinn and Gzikk are already positioning themselves to scoop up chunks of my plays.”
Slanting her an annoyed look, Ia unclipped the datapad resting on the table next to her armchair. “Here is a list of instructions on how you can position your influences to outflank theirs by the rules of the Game. And yes, this will work by the rules of Feyori politics,” she added, seeing the Meddler narrow her eyes in doubt. “Belini, when have I ever been wrong?”
That made the not-pixie snort with mirth. Hands on her hips, she surveyed the white-haired Human. “How short the memory span is in your mother’s species. Private Sung? Private N’Keth?”
Sighing, Ia waggled the second pad, gesturing for her to take it. “When have I ever been wrong about something I can control? If you take this information, the only person after that who could screw it up is you. Are you a screwup? Or are you a Meddler, a galactic reshaper of lives and worlds?”
Belini snatched the pad from Ia’s grasp, not noticing that Ia subtly tossed it upward a little, letting her hand drop to prevent contact. “If I do screw this up, I’m still going to blame you.”
It was Ia’s turn to choke on a laugh. Well, a chuckle. She let her humor fade as Belini raised her brows in surprise, then lowered them in a scowl.
“…This is idiotic,” Belini finally growled. “You have me giving ground, with these instructions! Concessions right and left, up and down, even helically spiraled…!”
“It does seem that way, but look at what they have to give up. It’s in the fine print,” Ia added helpfully.
Belini didn’t have to scroll the screen to read it. Feyori were natural electrokinetics on a level above and beyond what Ia could do. She did blink twice, though, gaze unfocusing. “That’s…That…would require…You’re going to Gather us?” she asked, shifting her gaze back to Ia. “But the energy requirements…and that you are the party listed as the Summoner, to trigger these conditions? No.
“No. There’s no way that you could pull that off! Not when you can’t even manifest yet,” Belini scoffed. She tossed the pad back into Ia’s hands. “You may think you can manipulate energy just because you’re an electrokinetic, but a Summoning is a manipulation of hyperspatial energies, on a scale your puny little meat-mind cannot grasp. That chance is so slender, it’s see-through!”
Ia brought her knees up, bracing her sock-covered heels on the seat of her chair. She did so to avoid even the slight chance that Belini would touch her; once she did, the Meddler’s greater telepathic abilities had an equally slim but dangerous chance of reading her subthoughts. The ones where she knew she’d already manifested. It was safer to avoid contact. That, and she’d been sitting in one position for too long. The sensors in the easy chair quietly folded the leg rest back into place as Ia spoke.
“Believe as you will. I have foreseen it. All you need to do is make those agreements and hold to them, so that they have no grounds to back down from their bargain when my prophecies come true. And for the record, my ‘puny little meat-mind’ has already grasped the fullness of Time in every direction I’ve ever cared to stretch. Hyperspatial manipulations are child’s play by comparison.”
That creased the not-pixie’s brow with another frown, a skeptical one. “You may be able to see ‘the fullness of Time,’ but can you understand everything you see? Can you fully grasp it?”
Slightly sheepish, Ia shrugged. This was not something she could lie about, not without its coming back to bite her later on. “Mostly. I know enough to be able to do what I need to do—I don’t have to understand how to create a hyperspace nose cone from nothing, like some engineering pioneer, in order to grasp the principles of how it works and how it is used. That’ll take me one more lifetime,” she added in a muttered aside to herself. At the pixie’s frown, Ia shook her head, dismissing her words. “Luckily, I don’t need to go that far in this life.
“And you don’t need to, either. All you have to do is follow through on what I’ve told you to do.” Gesturing with the returned datapad, Ia said, “I see, I plan, I act. That is enough for now.”
Snorting, Belini took the device, finished absorbing the information on the smaller pad, then tossed it one more time to Ia. Not bothering to watch the heavyworlder catch it one-handed, she turned back toward her corner of the small living room. “Well. You’d better be right. I’ll hold up my end of the bargain, even though it seems like I’m losing face…and I will be. If you fail, I will devour your life-energies myself.”
“If I fail, it won’t matter what you do. You’ll be left trying to flee across the intergalactic void—good luck with that, by the way,” Ia added. “Even if you glomp up en masse, the strongest clutch would only get about halfway before starving to death. And the Greys won’t share their teleportive technology with you. They’ll have already fled to the next galaxy, and they won’t stop to pick up yo
u. You’re nothing but salt and lime juice with a chaser of tequila to their mental wounds.”
“Don’t knock the salt and lime juice. Margaritas are one of the few delights that a digestive tract can experience. That, and chocolate,” Belini admitted. Sucking electricity out of the wall, she flashed into her true shape. (Don’t make me regret this factioning for you.)
(It’s a factioning with,) Ia corrected. (My part of the payment just has a bit of a time delay on it, is all.)
It shouldn’t have been possible for a silvery ball of semireflective energies to snort. Snorting was sound, which usually required the collision of matter against matter to create, so a Feyori in its natural state rarely made noise. Still, the peculiar swirl on the center focal point of Belini’s surface managed to re-create a visual snort, before she slid away.
Or possibly a visual raspberry. Amused, Ia went back to work.
NOVEMBER 15, 2497 T.S.
BATTLE PLATFORM PLENITIA III
MARS, SOL SYSTEM
“That’s the last of the boxes, sir,” Sergeant Halostein said, dipping his head at the hoversled being guided into their amidships storage bay. “I still don’t get why we had to strip the bow sector of all the supplies and emergency cabinets but for the stuff on those lists, Captain. Care to explain?”
Ia shook her head. She had encouraged her crew to display the level of familiarity inherent in his question, but this was something she couldn’t talk about. Feyori eyes were now focused on her in the timestreams. The strongest among them could only see a few months ahead, but a few months was enough to cause problems. At least, she couldn’t mention the real reason.
“I’m about to be keelhauled, Sergeant, and I need those unused supplies shipped off to pad my hide instead of my bottom line—you do know what keelhauling means, don’t you?” she added, glancing at him.
Halo frowned a moment, then scratched the fringe of pale blond stubble circling his head, freshly buzz-cut by one of the crew. “…Not really. The keel part refers to the bottom of a sailing ship. I know that much.”
“It’s a very old nautical term, yes,” she agreed. “And an ugly form of punishment. A rope would be looped around under the hull of the ship. Usually from starboard to port, or if the offense was deemed truly heinous, from bow to stern. The sailor to be punished would then be lashed into the loop, and dragged under the ship.
“Since the hull would often be covered in barnacles and other forms of sea life by that point, he would either be dragged fast enough to scrape the flesh from his body, possibly even causing limb loss or decapitation, or dragged slowly enough that his weight might slacken the rope enough to avoid the barnacles and such, but at that low a speed, it would be more likely for him to drown.”
He glanced at her sharply, blue eyes wary. “And you’re about to be keelhauled?”
“Well, the alternative euphemism is raked over the coals, but I do believe my enemies would rather have me lacerated, decapitated, and drowned than merely burned. Scorching my hide under the pretext of discussing unpleasant subjects isn’t nearly so evocative.” She paused, dipped her head, and added, “Though if it makes you feel better, I will be trying to steer the conversation in that direction.”
Halostein chuckled. “Well, if anyone can, you can, sir,” he murmured. “If you’ll excuse me, Captain, I’ll disembark and seek out the dock officer so we can get this mess off our ship.”
“Carry on, Sergeant,” Ia agreed, gesturing for him to walk ahead. Her bracer beeped. She didn’t have her headset on her, though. Unsnapping her left sleeve, she pulled up the unit’s screen. “Ia, here. Go.”
York’s face filled the screen. “We’ve just received orders for you, Captain, from the Admiral-General. Transmitting them to your unit.”
“Inform Lieutenant Commander Harper that he is in charge of the ship in my absence. Status quo until I return,” she instructed. She checked her arm unit. “…Orders received.”
“Aye, sir. I don’t know why they keep sending you these things, when you already know,” Private York muttered. Then rolled his eyes and corrected himself. “Well, yes, I do know; they have to have a paperwork trail—please don’t mind me, sir, it’s been a long watch, and Private Teevie’s slightly overdue. Said she was taking a head break before hitting the bridge.”
“She’ll be there in three more minutes. Ia out,” she added, ending the link with a touch of the screen. Another tap opened up the file transferred to her. The paperwork in question—electronically written and about as far from wood-pulp sheets as they were from Earth—directed her to report to one of the Plenitia III’s briefing rooms immediately.
Flipping the lid shut, she rebuttoned her left sleeve, dusted off her Dress Grey jacket with its minimum glittery of rank and zone pins—now more than two years out of date since there was no ribbon bar designated to cover all of Alliance space—and headed for the airlock in Halostein’s wake.
The briefing room was a heavily guarded, scaled-down version of the one she had invaded just over two years ago. This time, her palm and bracer were scanned, her identity confirmed, and herself formally escorted in by two of the guards. Blank when she entered, the screens around the room stayed dark until the guards left, and the doors sealed behind them.
At that point, they lit up again with various data, some of it statistics from the Damned’s various activities, some of it with surveillance footage. A part of her flinched away from the shot at the back left of the round, two-tiered chamber. It had been taken from someone else’s helmet pickups from back when that one robot attempted to rip off her mechsuited arm. Her shoulder was long healed, but the memory of the pain was still there in her subconscious.
Focusing on the nine men and women seated around the lower of the two horseshoe-shaped tables, Ia searched for the face of her immediate superior. As she had foreseen, he wasn’t there. Two others represented the Special Forces instead, both of them from the Psi Division. One of them was a middle-aged blonde, a lieutenant general who hadn’t been at the previous meeting. Ia knew her name, Mercea Wroughtman-Mankiller. The other was General Jolen Phong, who had been there. Every Branch had two representatives, which suggested a formal review board.
Seated in their center, Admiral-General Christine Myang returned Ia’s respectful salute, laced her fingers together, braced her elbows on the table, and spoke without preamble.
“Tell me why we shouldn’t throw you in the brig for Fatality One, Ship’s Captain Ia.”
“Let me guess,” Ia returned, unfazed. “Lieutenant General Wroughtman-Mankiller is pressing the unspoken charges in question. Correct?”
Mercea leaned forward as well, though she didn’t clasp hands. “These allegations are very serious, soldier. You have failed to undergo your yearly ethics examinations as a duly registered psychic. Your last one took place on January 19, 2496, as registered on your homeworld of Sanctuary…and yes, I did subpoena the Witan psi-priests in question for a face-to-face and mind-to-mind interview of all your past reviews.”
“Are you aware, Lieutenant General Wroughtman-Mankiller, that at this point in time, you are acting under the influence of Feyori Meddling?” Ia asked, turning to face the blonde in the grey-striped black jacket. “I believe that falls under Fatalities Two and Six: Treason, and Subversion. Inadvertent or not, your accusations against me are intended by a Feyori named Miklinn to be counterproductive and subversive to the continued safety, operation, and success of the Terran United Planets Space Force and the government it supports. Those definitely qualify as both Treason and Subversion.”
The Special Forces woman scowled. “I am a Rank 14 Xenopath, soldier. More than strong enough to sense the presence of a Meddler and keep it out of my thoughts.”
“Not when you’re making love.” Her blunt rejoinder made the other woman blush. A few of the others did as well. Ia shrugged. “At that blissful moment of the orgasmic crux, a psi’s mental defenses are lowered—I myself have suffered from the same phenomenon. Your longtime partner,
Brad Blackburn, has unwittingly been tapped to be a conduit in those moments. As a Rank 4 telepath, he has just enough strength to be used to influence your mind but not enough sensitivity to notice he is being used to do it at such moments.
“The Feyori Miklinn, whose normal purview would be the Solarican military, has counterfactioned my efforts to ensure that this war progresses to the best possible ending for all the races of the Alliance,” Ia continued. “He has received dispensation from the Feyori who normally controls all Meddling in the Terran Space Force to have an indirect influence upon your activities…hence using your moments of intimacy against you.” Her mouth twisted in a wry imitation of a smile. “I’d tell you how to prevent it from happening again, but that would be an open counterfactioning of his efforts. An act which I am not prepared at this time to perform because it would spiral this mess out of control.”
Wroughtman-Mankiller flushed again but did not argue the point. “That may or may not be the truth, but my own situation will have to be examined later. You are the point of this High Tribunal.”
“This is not a High Tribunal,” Admiral-General Myang countered. Then added in warning, “Yet. But the accusation is still there, Ship’s Captain. Have you undergone a psychic ethics evaluation since January of 2495?”
“No, sir, I have not,” Ia stated calmly. She continued before the nine men and women around her could do more than sit back in shock at such a free admission. “However, my lack of an ethics examination is completely covered by two words, rendering said examination unnecessary.”
General Sranna of the TUPSF-Army tapped his finger on the surface of the long, curved desk. “I’m sorry, Captain, but ‘Vladistad, salut’ does not exempt you from being examined. In fact, it makes it all the more imperative that you are examined on a yearly basis.”