by Jean Johnson
“Aye, sir,” Douglas said, resuming her task. With her back to her CO, she didn’t see Ia’s brief but confused, worried frown.
JUNE 8, 2498 T.S.
“And how does that make you feel?” Bennie asked her commanding officer. The quintessential psychology question was a valid one, given the circumstances.
“It’s frustrating.” Ia balled up another pair of socks, fresh from the sonic cleaner, and tossed them into her kitbag. “I keep going over it in my head. Over and over . . . I could see D Company loading their payloads into the mortars and firing them in every pertinent timestream connected to mine, but they weren’t actually doing it when I watched with my eyes and listened with my ears.
“All I know is, my gifts can’t have stopped working,” she asserted, folding and rolling up a bra next. “I’ve never seen the timeplains so clear and bright before, except for those little scudding clouds of fog. They’re like . . .”
“. . . They’re like?” her Company chaplain prodded. “What?”
“They’re like little . . . Harper-clouds,” Ia finally offered, finding the right words for it. “Little scudding knots of I-don’t-know-whats. Or like those little optical illusions you get when you’re staring at a grid of black squares on white paper, and you see the little fuzzy gray squares at the center of every intersecting set of white lines. But you only see them with your peripheral vision because when you stare straight at them, they vanish, and all you see is a clean white crossroads in the midst of all those black city blocks—does that make any sense?”
“It does,” Bennie allowed. Leaning back against the head railing on her bunk-bed cot, she shook her head. “I’m afraid I cannot tell you if your gifts are working correctly or not. I’m not even a parapsychologist, let alone a parapsychiatrist. You’d be better off going to Jesselle for that kind of headshrinking.”
“Oh yes, that’ll inspire confidence in my troops,” Ia muttered, tossing in the last of her clean military-issue brassieres. “Tell the Company doctor I think I’m going nuts.”
“Oh, piffle,” the redhead dismissed, rolling her eyes. “I can tell you that you’re not going nuts. You’re relatively stress-free”—she paused while Ia snorted loudly—“and you’re dealing with the source of your frustrations calmly and rationally.”
“Except I’m not dealing with it because I have no idea what went wrong,” Ia pointed out honestly. She realized she had mangled the folding of her camouflage trousers and sighed, shaking them out and starting over. Bunk beds on a heavy-gravitied world weren’t usual, but Dabin’s gravity was only 1.85Gs. The bottom bunks were also set lower to the ground, leaving the top ones lower as well. That meant she was free to use her bed as a sort of high, padded counter for folding things. “I’m just dealing with my frustration as best I can.”
“So go see Jesselle,” Bennie told her. “She’s a paraphysician and a psychologist, as well as an outstanding medic. That’s why you nabbed the best Triphid you could find, remember? Mental, physical, psychic, plus optical and dental health all in one . . .”
Ia wrinkled her nose. “God, don’t remind me. I’m due for another checkup and tooth-cleaning. It’ll have to wait until we’re on the Damnation, though. I don’t know if Roghetti’s infirmary has the sonic picks, I know they don’t have any supply of the right bacteriophagic cultures down here, and we’re not taking the time to run her all the way out to a town with a dentist who does and has enough to spare us some.”
“But you will take the time to talk with her about your inner-vision problem, right?” Bennie pressed. “She’s also the ship’s ophthamologist.”
“Inner vision, Commander,” Ia retorted. “Last I checked, she wasn’t a paraophthamologist . . . if there even is such a thing.” A moment of dipping into the timestreams out of pure curiosity ended in a sigh. “. . . Yes, there is. There’s even one here on Dabin, but the nearest one is a good eight thousand kilometers away, give or take a few hundred. PsiLeague trained, of course. That is, if I’m not hallucinating his existence like I did Mattox’s compliance.”
“How cheerful. The most powerful psi on the planet is going for the broody, gothic-heroine theme.” Pushing up onto one elbow, the middle-aged chaplain asked, “Should I try to wear a cowl, curl up my fingers, and command you to ‘Give in to your uncertainties and fears! Let the power of the Doubt Side consume you!’ . . . Hmm?”
Caught off guard, Ia laughed. Belly-clenching laughter. Gasping for air, she rested her face and arms on her bunk until she could breathe normally again, then stepped back. She tried glaring at her friend, but the sight of that gamine, freckled grin diffused her attempted scorn. “Okay, fine, I’ll go talk to Jesselle. Just stop teasing me with ancient story tropes!”
“It’s a quote, not a trope,” Chaplain Benjamin asserted primly. Then relaxed, grinning again. “Okay, it’s a mis-quote. Go on; go schedule yourself a paraphysician’s visit.”
“Only if you agree to fold and stow my clothes,” Ia countered. She flicked a hand at the pile of laundry still waiting to be sorted on her bunk. “Any other officer of my rank would have a staff corporal to take care of stuff like this. Lucky me, I had to barter down my crew to the absolute bare necessity.”
Uncurling herself from her bunk, Bennie stood up with a grunt. Unlike Ia, she hadn’t been born a heavyworlder, though like all of Ia’s crew, she had learned to adapt to the increasingly strong pull of their former ship’s gravity plates. Patting Ia on the biceps, she nudged the slightly shorter woman aside. “Heave to, Cap’n,” she ordered Ia. “You’re lucky I’m already on your staff, and that my rank has a ‘c’ in it. Now go.”
“Commander, yes, sir!” Ia quipped, smacking her fingers against her forehead in a fluttery mock-salute. Leaving her friend to fold her laundry, Ia left the barracks tent reserved for the top female officers and noncoms in the combined camp. I’ll owe Bennie a favor for that . . .
The maze of tents, covered corridors, and expanded medical pods making up the infirmary complex wasn’t far away, but it was damp outside. At the moment, the upper force fields were down. Her gifts said the weather would remain damp but not drenching, somewhere between a mist and a drizzle, but Ia wasn’t sure anymore, so she grabbed a poncho from the stack hooked onto a tent post by the door and pulled it over her head and shoulders.
Are my gifts failing me? Am I going mad? Disconnected from reality and seeing things in my head that aren’t really there? Seeing gray spots out of the corner of my eyes when there aren’t any at the intersections of Time and probabilities?
Doubt wasn’t a comfortable state of mind for her. It crawled up her spine like a trail of bugs from the Dabin mud, itching along her nerves. The feeling increased the closer she got to the infirmary tents, until Ia found herself spinning around, searching the camp and the tree-shrouded horizon for any sign of an incoming threat. It didn’t help that she could see a cluster of technicians working on something at the base of the central projection tower for the shield generator. She did not like having that shield down, let alone down for repairs. Not with this itch of paranoia prickling her nerves.
Nothing happened, of course. Still, as much as she knew her chaplain, friend, and counselor was correct, she didn’t take herself straight into the infirmary tents. Pushing the mottled hood of her poncho back from her face so she could use her peripheral vision without restriction, Ia studied the horizon. Ears and eyes strained, seeking anything that might be a telltale sign of an attack. She even sniffed the air, trying to figure out what was wrong.
Her battle instincts felt like something was plucking them, as they had not been plucked en route to that Salik sensor tower two days before. In the timestreams, she sensed nothing wrong . . . but she had sensed nothing wrong with her battle plans. Circular thinking? Paranoia?
At least paranoia saves lives. Raising her hands, she flipped open her arm unit, ready to contact the command center to see if anything had showed
up on the scopes yet. Movement at the edge of her vision made her spin to the right.
A cluster of bird-things rose up into the sky, with long bodies and two sets of leathery, featherless wings evolved to handle the local heavy gravity. Their movement plucked sharply on her combat-trained nerves. Her fingers jabbed at the command unit’s buttons, activating an open-channel broadcast. “This is Ship’s Captain Ia. Code India Alpha. Evacuate the camp. I repeat. India Alpha, evacuate the camp now. Fall back to Beta position. This is not a drill!”
The camp roiled with movement. Bodies poured out of tent and pod openings, sprinting for the armory. Most of them had extra gray mottling their camouflage-hued sleeves, but enough of them were also green to satisfy her, reassuring Ia that Roghetti’s side of things was willing to listen.
“Commander Harper, grab the special guns,” she ordered, turning in a slow circle, searching for more spooked avians. “Private C’ulosc, evacuate the van. Roughriders and Damned alike, fall back to Beta now. This is not a dr—”
Bright orange light flashed out of the trees even as she spun on pure instinct. It slammed with searing heat into her left eye and scorched across her temple. Screaming as she dropped, Ia hit the ground in a squelch of wet moss-grass.
Instinct rolled her onto her side and stomach, pressing the wound into the damp plant life. Superheated flesh sizzled and steamed, adding a boiled aroma to the stench of scorched meat, as well as a fresh layer of blinding-hot agony.
“Captain!” she heard someone shout. “Medic! The captain’s been shot!”
Teeth clenched against the pain, Ia grabbed the hand of one of the privates trying to turn her over. “Run, you slagging idiots!”
“Shakk that!” she heard one of her own soldiers swear; who, she couldn’t see, and the pain was too much still to tell by voice alone. Hands snagged the belt strung through her pants, heaving her off the ground. “We’re running with you!”
Somehow, she got her feet under her. It took her several meters of being dragged awkwardly, head throbbing with unholy agony and barely able to see out of her muddied, uninjured eye, but she got her feet under her. Shoving hard to the left, she pushed the three of them behind a tent, forcing the two men half carrying her into staggering and dropping in a bruising heap. A slap of her arm knocked the one on top of her back down just as he started to get up.
“Stay out of sight, you fools!” she hissed, vision streaked with coruscating bands of nerve-damaged pain. She couldn’t see their faces as anything more than tear-blurred blobs. Behind her, she could hear the whining of servos, several startled shouts, and the tearing and tangling of fabric being moved. “I’m their primary target! Crawl that way!”
He rolled a bit more behind the shelter of the tent, then got up. Together, he and her crew member—Private Floathawg, she could see the burgundy blotches on his face—pulled her a couple meters past its edge. Sizzling sounds from laser rifles and the tat-tat-tat of projectile fire told her someone was counterattacking.
Blinking her right eye caused more pain in her left, but she saw a hand-shaped blur lift to a nonblotched face. Or rather, to his ear; the Army man still had on his headset. Hers was tucked in her shirt pocket. “Captain Ia, there are no other signs of an outright attack. It looks like it was just a lone sniper. Captain Roghetti wants to know if you want to cancel that evacuation order, sir.”
Having her eye scorched out of her head hurt worse than being shot in the shoulder, but pain was nothing new. She pushed onto her knees, head swimming for a moment. A shaky check of the timestreams showed his report looked to be true . . . but her instincts were still demanding that they run. “No. The local bird-things flew up on the northwest side of camp, and that shot came from the east—evacuate the camp! That’s an order!”
“With respect, Ship’s Captain, you are not in our chain of command,” the private retorted.
“With respect, Private, shove it!” she heard Floathawg snap. Wrapping his arm around her ribs, he hauled her to her feet with a grunt. “When my Captain says we all move, we all move!”
Forcing her legs to cooperate, Ia stumbled along at Harley’s side as they left Roghetti’s man behind. Her crewman kept the two of them to the edges of the tents. Getting used to the pain along the left side of her face, Ia moved as best she could with him. At least she could see more and more clearly with her right as the seconds stretched into a minute. She didn’t need a mirror to know her left eye was gone; she had no depth perception, and her precognition wasn’t working properly. But she did physically see members of her Company executing their retreat plan, grabbing packs of essential supplies, weapons, and whatever else they could lay their hands on that was of any use within a single minute.
An orange-speckled body moved up at her side, a field medic with the faint green stripe of the Army. “Sir, we need to get you to the infirmary. At least, the part not being stolen by that crazy chief medi—”
Something boomed in the distance. The sky crackled with momentary static. Orange light flashed, bright and strong.
Her instincts snapped again. Grabbing the woman, Ia flung both her and Harley to the ground with another shove. Something whistled in and WHOMMED bare meters away. Debris from the shelled tent showered down around them. The woman thrown prone next to Ia shrieked, peppered with shrapnel from the backsplash, but Ia’s instincts said not badly, not lethally. Most of the impact had continued onward in the direction of the strike. Harley hadn’t been touched, and she had only picked up a few stings, a cut on her cheek. She didn’t know if anyone inside that tent had been injured or killed, though.
The blast left her ears ringing. Using her hands, Ia stroked the crying woman’s face to refocus her attention, pressed two muddy fingers to her lips, then helped her onto hands and knees. Other concussions from exploding projectiles rumbled through the ground and the air, more felt than heard. Adrenaline made the pain in her head and body fade, allowing her to see and think more clearly, though she could still barely hear.
Pointing the way in pure instinct, she led three of them in a crawling shuffle through the smoke until they could gain their feet. Trucks were already on their way out of the field, swerving wildly to avoid the incoming rounds. Yanking the hood of her poncho up over her distinctive white hair, Ia tugged on the strings to bring it close to her face. That scraped the edge of the burn mark, blurring her vision from the pain. Teeth clenched, she ignored it, grabbing Harley and the Army medic by the shoulders.
“Run for it on three . . . Three!”
Shoving them forward, Ia tugged and pushed them right and left as her battle instincts demanded. Arms spread wide for balance when she wasn’t grabbing one or the other either for avoidance or for support—her eyesight and her ears weren’t doing too well, meddling with her sense of balance—she dodged as well. Laser fire scorched her poncho and bullets paffed through the soil at their feet, but they reached the bush-choked edge of the forest with no more real injuries. A handful of reddish-leaved branches scraped her face, searing pain across her nerves, but once past the sunlit, leaf-choked edge, most of the branches were high enough, she didn’t feel like she was going to poke out her other eye just yet.
Movement caught her eye. Skimming through the shrubs at head height, someone pulled up a hoverbike next to them. It was Private Mara Sunrise, one of Sadneczek’s full-time clerks and Floathawg’s teammate. “Captain, are you alright?”
“Yes, some real transport! Permission to take that bike to cover our retreat, sir,” Private Floathawg hissed, slowing down. He started to reach for the gun holstered at his hip and did a double take at his teammate. “Wait, how do you know how to ride a hawg? I thought you said they were too dangerous for your tastes.”
“Stow it, Harley!” Ia snapped, pushing him forward. She squinted up at Sunrise and enunciated clearly through the agony in her head. “Staff Sergeant, our position is compromised. Grab whatever you need and ride ahead to secure
the Beta site. If you cannot secure it, report to Lieutenant Commander Helstead on the situation why.”
“Staff Sergeant?” Floathawg asked her, bewildered. His teammate, however, stiffened, blinked, and narrowed her eyes at their CO.
“Morning has broken, sir?” Sunrise asked Ia cryptically.
“Someone go fix it,” Ia replied, sign and countersign. “Tag, you’re it.”
“Oh rapture. I finally get to violate my parole.” Swaying the hoverbike closer to her teammate, the mousey-haired woman leaned down and snatched the projectile pistol from his hip. A second fast yank unsnapped the pouch of c-clips at his waist. Before he could do more than yelp in protest, she gunned the bike’s thrusters and took off, with his weapon and ammunition.
“—The hell?” Floathawg protested, gaping as she left. “Captain? What the hell was that about? Why’d she take the hoverbike? And my gun!”
“Not now. Keep moving.” Ia ordered. Her ears were now free enough from the ringing to hear the hissing of lasers striking into the trees, and the concussions of more missiles. Off to her right, thankfully within her functioning peripheral vision, she saw the nurse staggering, the torn fabric of her shirt and slacks showing patches of blood from her shrapnel wounds. Ia swayed that way to catch her. Harley followed her.
“Captain, you just sent a clerk to secure the Beta site,” he hissed, moving to assist the Army woman. “No disrespect, sir, but did that laser penetrate your brain? Hell, I’m a better shot, and I’m a mechanic!”
“I just sent a Knifeman to secure that site, soldier,” Ia countered grimly. “But you keep that part quiet; she’s not supposed to violate her parole. And I’m not brain-damaged. The laser didn’t strike that deep. Unfortunately, we have been compromised somehow, and right now, I don’t know if the Beta site is secure or not.”
The moment she said it, Ia realized she had used the wrong pronoun . . . Not we’ve been compromised. I’ve been compromised. Little fuzzy patches . . . !