by Jean Johnson
“None taken,” Roghetti replied. He held his tongue while he and Ia left the tent, aiming toward the section of camp where the patrol supplies were kept. When he was sure they were out of the other woman’s hearing, he asked, “. . . Is she always like that? She doesn’t seem to have the best of bedside manners.”
“She does for the rest of my crew. She just has a problem with me throwing her into combat. She always has,” Ia added candidly. “Jesselle came into my command thinking she needed to be safe and sound deep in the heart of some hospital in order to access her mental powers. Unfortunately, I need her out here on the front lines, able to think, act, and move.”
“Huh. With a last name like Mishka, you’d think she was trying to act like a psychic, wanting to wrap herself in armored padding far behind our defensive lines,” he joked.
“She is a psychic, a very strong biokinetic. That’s why she’s not happy about being forced to use her abilities along the front lines. A good number of my crew are,” Ia added when he glanced at her. “I disagree heartily with the PsiLeague’s belief that psychics cannot learn to wield their abilities at the same time they’re enduring the rigors of Basic Training, hostile-terrain scouting, and open combat.
“Twenty percent or so might honestly not be able to concentrate under such chaotic conditions, even with training, but that still leaves roughly eighty percent who could and should learn to do so . . . even if it means it takes them longer to master both mind and muscle. Mine have,” Ia stated, following him into the first of the supply-and-armament tents. “Even if they didn’t want to, they learned.”
“Bit of a hard asteroid on ’em, are you?” Roghetti asked, smirking. “A real rough rider?”
Ia returned it wryly. “I’m harder on myself, but yeah. What good commander isn’t?”
They walked in silence for a few more moments, then the captain looked at Ia. “So . . . precognitive. Precognition. Foretelling the future and all that.”
Ia didn’t have to be telepathic to know he had an oddball question on his mind. Not that she would read his thoughts without dire need; such things were not only rude, they bordered on outright illegal in the military. “Yes?”
“Something has always bothered me about that,” Roghetti stated, clasping his hands behind his back. “You know, mucking around in time. I think ever since I first read Oedipus Rex back in high school.”
She grasped what he meant right away. Nodding in understanding, Ia explained her own thoughts on the matter. “That story is responsible for some of the worst tropes in entertainment history—the idea that paradox will destroy the universe. Oedipus is born, his royal parents consult the Oracle, who says he’ll grow up to murder his father and marry his mother, so they cast the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. He grows up not knowing who his father and mother are, slays some rude bastard in an oblivious roadside confrontation, and marries this sexy older woman who happens to be the dead guy’s widow. He has kids with her, plays at being king for a while . . . and then finds out he’s married his own mom and murdered his dad.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. You can’t escape Fate. Paradox will bite you in the asteroid every single time,” Captain Roghetti stated. She stopped and held out her arm, blocking him from progressing across a break between the tents. A hoverbike hummed past them, its rider swerving at the last second to avoid the pair. “. . . Thanks. So are your predictions really just probabilities, when they’re going to come true anyway?”
Ia shook her head. “Like I said, that story ruined the tropes for everyone. It isn’t inevitable. Fate is just what you’re handed. What you do with it is your Destiny even if you choose to do nothing. If Oedipus’s parents had chosen to do nothing about the Oracle’s warning, kept him in the family and raised him, he probably wouldn’t have slain his father because he would have grown up knowing and respecting the man. And even if he did, most Humans don’t grow up developing sexual feelings for a mother they know and love as their mother. Even then, as an orphan not knowing anything, Oedipus could have not slain the man who turned out to be his father. He could have been careful not to slay anyone in case that person turned out to be his father in disguise.”
“But doesn’t that confirm the loop of inevitabilities?” Roghetti pressed. He gestured for them to continue moving toward the officers’ barracks, where Ia’s field gear had been stowed.
Rolling her eyes, Ia sought for a way to make him understand. “Okay . . . imagine you have a fortune cookie in your hands.”
“A fortune cookie?” he asked, arching one dark brow.
“Yes, a fortune cookie,” Ia repeated. “And you open it up to read the piece of paper inside. On that piece of paper you see the message, ‘The fortune in this cookie is not true.’ Bang! You have a paradox,” she stated, snapping her fingers in accompaniment. “Because if the fortune is true, then the words state that it is untrue, but if the fortune is a lie, then the words are wrong and fortune is not a lie. There’s your paradox. But.”
“. . . But?” Roghetti inquired when she paused for dramatic emphasis.
Ia shrugged and spread her hands. “But, the universe isn’t destroyed by it. You are not caught up in a paradox. You aren’t trapped in a causality loop or a bubble of illogic, because . . . you just aren’t. It’s just words on a page.” Opening the door to the complex of crate-like tents, she gestured him inside. “The same thing goes for time travel. Yes, you could destroy your own grandfather, but then he wouldn’t be your grandfather. Not because that would make you disappear, but because someone else would have stepped in to fill up that space, and your life would have rearranged itself to give you motivation to kill the guy who would have and should have been.
“Another way of looking at it is like this tangle of tents. You want to get to the command center, so you do have to open a door, but you don’t have to always take the same door or path to get there. The job still gets done. You read the fortune in the fortune cookie, but you’re not trapped in a logic loop of illogic.” Ia opened another door in the series of container- and fabric-tents, gesturing for Roghetti to go first. She followed in his wake. “You can eat the cookie, toss the paper, and move on. Or you can eat the paper, toss the cookie, and move on. Eat both, toss both, find someone to hand them to . . . The cookie’s job is done: it has delivered you a fortune.
“The key is to remember that what you do with the fortune you’ve been handed is not bound irrevocably to that fortune,” Ia stated. “My abilities are simply a case of being able to see the shortest, easiest path to the heart of this complex for each person coming in from whatever angle of approach they might have. I can tell you how to get to the center in the most efficient manner possible from wherever you might be standing. I can also turn blue in the face telling you . . . but if you choose not to follow, there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it without picking you up and dragging you there. Which I don’t have time to do.
“All I can do is remind people that if they don’t follow my instructions, a lot of people will be inconvenienced,” she told him, stopping outside the door to her temporary quarters. “In fact, a lot of people will be literally inconvenienced to death. Which is why I want to go look at the perimeter, so I know exactly what our combined troops will actually be facing, rather than just taking a fortune-cookie-based guess. Information is the biggest source of power I have for making sense out of what I foresee, and in getting the fortune untangled, off the paper, and out into the real universe, where it can do a lot of good.
“Give me two minutes to grab my gear, Captain, and I’ll be ready to hook up with that patrol,” Ia promised.
Looking only halfway convinced, Roghetti gestured for her to proceed.
JUNE 6, 2498 T.S.
The tuft of vegetation was just a little too bushy to be Terran grass, but it served its purpose: camouflage and cover on the crawl toward enemy lines. Reaching it, Ia peered cautiously through the
branching blades. Not more than forty meters away, a mechsuited figure with long servo-limbs coiled around a bulky, stunner-like weapon stood watch. Half lying over her legs, Private Ch’zun of Roghetti’s Roughriders waited patiently for her to gauge the right moment to strike, as did his teammate, Private Pumipi.
That moment would come when Ia heard the telltale sounds of D Company bombing in the distance. Until then, their orders were to get within striking distance of the frogs and wait. Most of her crew picked for this assault had been broken up and paired with an Army team. Mattox’s orders to this point had been for straightforward confrontations. She knew the TUPSF Army trained in maneuver-combat scenarios, but the Roughriders hadn’t had a lot of practice lately, hence the partnering. Spyder practiced and led his people in nothing but small-force maneuvers versus larger forces; pairing the two would help refresh the old training memories for the Roughriders.
This approach was one such example. No matter how good modern surveillance gear was, it could always be fooled, particularly at a distance. By crawling in a slithering line three soldiers long and sticking to all the lowest points in the terrain, they could fool the Salik base sensors into thinking they were an allipede, a local, multilimbed cross between an Earth alligator and a very large insect in shape. Rather than using mechsuits, which bogged down in the muddy, soft soil, particularly near Salik encampments, Ia had ordered light armor to be worn under camouflage suits. The ceristeel plating would reflect infrared and sonar sweeps in ways similar to the thick-plated scales of the allipede, furthering the illusion.
They might be able to get closer in the increasingly dim light of the falling night, but Ia did not intend to risk a premature discovery. The clump of Dabin reddish beige bushgrass was a good one. When the missile strikes began somewhere off to her right, she would take the time to crawl her team forward another twenty, maybe even thirty meters to take out that sentry.
A well-thrown grenade would simulate a projectile strike in the confusion, adding further distraction. That would allow a second allipede-style team to crawl up to the base of the surveillance tower thirty meters beyond the sentry, where they would place a time-delayed bomb to take out the local node for lightwave communications. Other teams were scheduled to take out similar towers, plus listening posts, sentry stations, even projectile-gun bunkers.
All of it had to be done up close and personal, as quietly as possible. It was of greater individual risk to pit Humans in light armor against Salik in mechanized battlesuits, but not an impossible feat. It did, however, require timing and trust. While the flanking units distracted the Salik’s main forces with a two-pronged, standard-seeming attack from B and D Companies, C Company and the Damned would run the greater risk of infiltration and sabotage. But she had the trust of Roghetti, and her Damned had the trust of the Roughriders. They would succeed.
As soon as D Company began their bombardment.
Any second now . . .
Ears straining, Ia waited for the telltale concussion shocks to boom in the distance. Nothing happened. She checked her chrono, subtly scraping away some of the mud smeared on her arm unit, and listened again. Nothing. Nothing but the itch of her instincts telling her something was wrong. It was faint, though, because there literally wasn’t any threat for her to fight. Nothing for her battlecognition to target and analyze, even on a subconscious level.
Narrowing her eyes, she dipped her fingers into the waters of Time. If she hadn’t had several years of practice under her belt, keeping her ears aware of her surroundings while checking the fog-dusted timeplains, she might have missed the boom. She could feel the projectiles being launched, both a few seconds into the past, and in the present, and into the future, could hear them reverberating through the waters of D Company’s gunners as they loaded and launched payload after payload . . . but . . . heard nothing with her real ears.
Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. A chirruping from bird-like creatures in the trees, the faint clicking of insects in the bushgrass, and the soft hiss and whine of the enemy’s mechsuit servos as the Salik shifted his weight, independently pointing eyes surveying the horizon through his half-silvered suit dome.
“. . . Sir?” Ch’zun breathed as the seconds stretched into a full minute past the point where they should have been free to move forward.
She looked again in the timestreams, grateful their combined layers of armor and clothing were enough to shield Ch’zun from what she was doing. Pulling out again, she whispered back. “Private . . . do you hear any bombardment, or have I gone deaf?”
“No bombs, sir,” he confirmed.
Shakk. Something was seriously wrong. She could see the bombardment happening on schedule in this timestream. Her own timestream! But it wasn’t happening. Dr. Mishka’s diagnosis came back to her. The patient is in denial . . .
. . . Am I the patient? Have my abilities forsaken me?
Impossible. Not because she wanted to deny it but because her abilities had never worked like this. Under the cover of the bushgrass tuft, Ia opened her arm unit and sent a silent alert to the two Companies with a one-word message, along with her authorization code for the day.
Retreat.
Quietly closing the lid, she twitched her right leg four times, a pause, then four times again.
“Sir?” Ch’zun asked, a bare breath of sound. She repeated the pattern, and he passed it along to Pumipi. Without further protest, both he and the stocky man at the end of their fake allipede formation followed silently as she crawled in a careful, bush-hidden turn to make their way laboriously back over all the terrain they had just crossed. It would take a full hour or more to get far enough out of sensor range to be able to stand up and move, but that was the price of infiltration maneuvers.
• • •
An hour of crawling, half an hour of jogging through night-darkened woods, and another half hour spent counting heads as each of the teams came back to the rendezvous point left Ia very frustrated. Another half hour of riding ground trucks did not improve her mood, though it did bring them safely back to base. Jumping off the back of the rearmost truck before it had even stopped, Ia strode straight for the shielded tent holding the beige van.
Once again, she reached Major Leotta Perkins. The brunette woman smiled politely. “Ship’s Captain Ia. It’s good to hear from you again. Is everything alright?”
“No, everything is not alright, Major,” Ia stated without preamble. “I’d like to speak with the brigadier general right away.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Perkins demurred, her smile never slipping. “An emergency came up on one of the battlefronts. He won’t be available for the next three days.”
Dipping into the timestreams, Ia checked. According to what she saw, Mattox had indeed departed for an Army camp somewhere on the northern border of the war front . . . which . . . wasn’t . . . what she had seen him doing while crawling for two-plus hours through the mud. But it was what he was doing right now. If the timestreams were to be believed.
“. . . Are you alright, sir?” Major Perkins asked politely. “You look a little ill.”
“I’m fine,” Ia dismissed quickly. “Is this emergency the reason why Mattox did not deploy the troops according to the battle plans I gave him? Plans that were vetted by the Admiral-General herself?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know the Brigadier General’s reasons,” the woman on the other end of the commscreen demurred, shrugging, “but any competent battle commander knows that whatever the Command Staff may decide for its troops to do does not always suit the ever-changing needs of the actual war front. No plan is ever perfectly tailored to actual circumstances.”
“Mine are.” Biting back a retort to say more—to snarl more—Ia confined herself to a deep breath and a calmer delivery. “I am a Command Staff–recognized precognitive, PsiLeague gauged in excess of Rank 84, Major. I have single-handedly wiped out three-quarters o
f a Choyan fleet traveling in faster-than-light. My accuracy is beyond a doubt.”
Beyond a doubt . . . except reality and the timeplains no longer agree.
Shoving aside her doubts, Ia continued. “I will redraw the battle plans needed to win on this planet to account for this new delay. If need be, I will hand-deliver them to Mattox, and discuss their feasibility with him in person, so that he can have any questions answered. Tell him to be prepared for a visit from me in four days. Ship’s Captain out.”
A jab of her finger ended the transmission. Private Douglas, the current communications tech on duty in the tent, gave her a wary look. “. . . Sir?”
“Something’s wrong. Something is grievously wrong,” Ia muttered darkly, thoughts racing and probing, trying to find the source. Nothing but fog drifting slowly across the timestreams. She shook her head. “I don’t know what, yet. Send a message to Admiral Genibes informing him that the first attempt at getting Mattox and the 1st Division to follow my battle plans has failed. Let him know I will be trying again.”
“Aye, sir,” Douglas agreed. She shifted to set up the connection all the way to Earth, then hesitated. The look she gave her CO wasn’t quite anxious, but there was concern in her hazel eyes. “If the brigadier general won’t be back for three more days, and you can’t get the plans passed through him any sooner than four days from now, sir . . . won’t that start to screw up the timelines too much?”
“We’ll still have some leeway in the timing of things, Irene,” Ia reassured her. “Don’t worry too much about it. I’m going to go wash off this mud and get something to eat. Let me know if Admiral Genibes sends back a response.”