Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship

by Jean Johnson

  She wanted to curse and scream, but didn’t have the energy or the time. Those scudding patches of fog that vanished whenever she looked directly, the gray patches of optical illusion on the grid, they were the reality, not the all-too-clear and clean crossroads she had focused upon. Her precognition had been compromised somehow, but not her battlecognition. One relied on direct examination of the timestreams, but the other relied on the paranormal equivalent of peripheral vision . . . where the scudding clouds of psychic obfuscation lay, and could not fully cover. Someone was messing with her ability to read the timestreams . . .

  No. Meddling with her mind.

  The underbrush thickened for a moment; the need to avoid impaling herself thwarted her rising anger. Emerging in the firebreak that contained the farmer’s force-field-projected fence line, Ia nudged the two with her to the right. That fence was now down. About a hundred meters down the way, one of the escaping hovertrucks had stopped just on the other side of the inert pylons. Limping, the nurse stumbled that way. Ia and Harley helped her.

  She spotted a member of the Damned and hustled them forward a little faster. “Private Jeeves! Front and center!”

  The metrokinetic blinked, faced her, and started in shock. “Captain, your face—Medic!”

  Two more soldiers swerved and came running at Jeeves’s shout, one with a field kit in his hands. Ia pushed the Army woman at them. “Tend her, not me. My eye’s cauterized, so it’ll keep. Jeeves, get over here. KIman!”

  Private Jeeves jogged over at her command. He was barely dressed in camouflage shirt and pants, his boots hastily knotted, and his long black hair unbound in a rain-dampened, tangled mess instead of pinned up in a neat bun at the back of his head as per regulations. He wasn’t the only one who had been forced to make do with whatever they could grab to wear; others who had been on their sleeping shift wore haphazard gear, pieces of clothing, light armor, whatever they had grabbed without having the time to dig into their kitbags for full outfits just yet.

  “Whatever you need, you got it, Captain,” Private Jeeves offered. He extended his hand to offer her his personal energies.

  “Not from you. To you. I need you to muck up the weather,” she ordered, grabbing his hand. Or tried to; it took her two tries since she had no depth perception anymore. “Take my kinetic inergy, get on that truck, and wring the hardest rain you can out of those clouds. The Salik are hunters; they might like the humidity, but we need our ground tracks covered and their scanner range reduced, fast!”

  He blinked, startled, but nodded grimly. Bracing himself with a deep breath, he said, “Ready, sir.”

  Closing her good eye—ignoring the pain caused by the reflex of trying to close the bad one—Ia spun kinetic inergy out of herself. It was something like the crackling sting of electrokinetic energy, and something like the cool wash of biokinetic, and carried the flavor of both, but much more personal. It was also a lot stronger than the weather-psi was expecting. His hair snapped and fluffed out despite the drizzling, misting rain trying to keep it flattened down.

  She opened her eye just in time to see his brown ones rolling up and back in his head. Above them, the clouds boiled a little in the distance, darkening as he thickened their cover. Ia kept feeding him energy while more stragglers came out of the woods. She could still hear the Salik attacking the camp in the distance but didn’t stop until she felt dizzy, until the timestreams fogged from depleted energy.

  Releasing his hand, she clasped his shoulder, holding him steady while he swayed, all of his attention still focused inward and upward. “KImen! I need two KImen!”

  Two Army figures eyed each other, then jumped out of the truck, hurrying toward Ia. She felt a hand clasp her own shoulder. “We need to get out of here, Captain!”

  “I know that, Floathawg—you and you!” she ordered the two approaching women, nodding at Private Jeeves. “Take this soldier up on that truck and you keep him psychically fed. Cycle in whoever you need to when you get dizzy. He’ll be covering our tracks with a storm.” Raising her voice as the two soldiers grabbed and guided him away, she shouted at the others. “This is a full-on retreat, soldiers! Fall back! I want an armed rearguard detail, but do not engage the enemy if you can avoid it.

  “Everybody, move out!” Pulling Floathawg’s hand off her shoulder, she tucked it behind her back, stuffing his fingers into her belt. “Get me to the nearest truck, Harley; I’m having trouble gauging distances at the moment.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” he agreed, picking up into a jog. The muscular ex-V’Dan didn’t quite carry her, but he did guide her as they ran in tandem, keeping her on her feet as her boots stumbled over deceptive bits of terrain. “Heave up, sir!”

  She pushed off the ground, yanked up indelicately by the belt as he boosted her into the back of the truck. Twisting around as she landed, she hauled him in as well, then awkwardly grabbed the hand of the man behind him, pulling that soldier in as well. A tree fell nearby, knocked down by an explosive blast. The truck started moving. Three more soldiers were still running their way, dodging bits of plant life turned into shrapnel.

  With an Herculean effort, all three managed to grab the truck; Ia and the others pulled them inside. As soon as she could, she pushed them off her and tucked herself into the back corner of the truck, huddled up into as small a figure as she could manage. With her reserves either bled into Jeeves for manipulating the weather or tied into her wound to keep it biokinetically stable, she did not trust her ability to control the timeplains. She didn’t trust anything about the timeplains beyond her deepest battle instincts anymore.

  Somewhere out there, a Feyori had managed to sink him- or herself deeply enough into those same timeplains that they could occlude and rewrite temporal reality. It was the only answer to this mess that made sense. Not a direct touch because she would notice that. She’d touched more than enough Meddler minds to know exactly what their energies, their thoughts, felt like . . . but not on the timeplains before now.

  As she had once told a certain lieutenant colonel of the Department of Innovations, back when putting her crew together, she was not the only person who could measure and manipulate the flow of Time. The worst of it, however, was the fact that she couldn’t even run a headcount to see who had managed to escape the attack. Neither precognitively nor postcognitively; not and be sure she was seeing reality. If it didn’t require instinctive, split-second battle timing, she was now effectively mind-blind.

  The loss of her outer eye paled in comparison to the loss of the inner one, and her anger outburned the agony of her injury as the truck rolled and bounced in its rapid retreat.

  CHAPTER 3

  A tiny, petty part of myself still holds Brigadier General Mattox responsible for the combined Charlie Foxtrot which Roghetti’s Roughriders and my Damned went through. But the lion’s share, oh, that belonged to someone else entirely. Well, technically two someones. No commander likes a Charlie Foxtrot, and this one—what? Oh, that’s archaic military-speak for when a situation goes seriously wrong. Charlie Foxtrot, the call signs for the letters C and F, is the polite shorthand for calling it a cluster f***—

  . . . You’ll actually have to bleep that one out? Sorry. I won’t mention it again, then. Suffice to say, it’s shorthand for things going very, very wrong, usually in combat. Regardless of how or when or why, we still have to deal with the resulting mess whenever we’re handed one. My first concern was therefore the safety of the people under me, and by extension those under Captain Roghetti. My second was for the breach in the Army’s line. It didn’t help that they kept pressing us back, and back, but at least they continued to pursue us rather than spread out and attack the locals.

  I may have powers above and beyond most everyone out there, but I am first a soldier, and foremost an officer. Vengeance had to sit farther down the line and wait for its turn.

  ~Ia

  JUNE 9, 2498 T.S.

 
KUN-BRELLER FOOTHILLS, DABIN

  Ia listened to the hushed arguing of her officers and sergeants, though her gaze remained on the dark, wet forest beyond the knot of Dabin-style trees giving them temporary shelter. Jeeves’s constant metrokinetic meddling had lowered the air pressure over the region long enough to bring in strong gusts of wind and soggy rainfalls up until now.

  The resulting storms hid the two Companies’ tracks alright, but the constant attacks by Salik, wind, and water left everyone wet and miserable. He also couldn’t sustain it for more than half an hour at a time, with rest breaks for a handful of hours, and was now on the dregs of his mental reserves. Unable to do anything more, Jeeves now slept; this was the last of the ongoing storm he had summoned. The last chance for the weather to aid their situation by hindering their enemies.

  “. . . demanding that we return to the lowlands to protect the people of Eltegar City. I pointed out that while we’re being hunted by the frogtopi, they’re still more or less safe . . .”

  At least her missing left eye didn’t hurt anymore. They didn’t have the facilities to regrow organs—those amenities were reserved for cities well beyond the current Salik invasion—but they did have emergency regeneration pads. With one of those strapped to her head over the wound, coupled with her modest biokinetic ability, the burns were healing. It wouldn’t replace her eye, since that was too complex an organ for a mere pad, but it was working to turn the burned tissue into smooth, scarless flesh that would more readily accept a transplant once she did have time to get one regrown.

  The loss of her eye wasn’t the worst wound, however. Five members of the Damned hadn’t made it out . . . and she didn’t know if that was because they were lost in the wilderness somewhere, dead back at the abandoned camp, or because they’d been rendered CPE, Captured, Presumed Eaten, the military term for being chained up by the Salik so they could become a still-living lunch. Roghetti had lost even more than her, a good twenty-eight men and women out of his five Platoons.

  Needlessly lost. She didn’t know if they were alive or dead, either.

  “. . . don’t ’ave th’ forces, Doctor, an’ you don’ ’ave th’ meds . . .”

  Her precognition still wasn’t working right. Her mind was thankfully unaffected; both Lieutenant Commander Mishka and one of the privates from the 3rd Platoon, Bibia Mk’nonn, had scanned her brain telepathically to look for Feyori fingerprints on her psyche. None had been found. She hadn’t sensed an attempt to breach her mental walls at any point, but it was good to have it confirmed by two other psis.

  Ia knew there were two Feyori playing their Games on this world, one for the Dabin colonists and one for the Salik invaders. If they had any influence on Ia, it was thankfully indirect at best, more a case of their obscuring the truth on the timeplains than of trying to Meddle directly with her thoughts. Unfortunately, that was more than enough to shakk all of her original and ongoing plans.

  Ia would have taken some time to seek out and confront the Feyori in the timestreams, save for two things: her future self, who had warned her against contacting them directly on the timeplains; and the fact that the Salik had continued to chase them. There just hadn’t been enough time to do so safely. As it was, they were all being forced to sleep in shifts with the most exhausted riding in the trucks while they continued to run, curving this way and that up into the nearby foothills.

  At the moment, her instincts were telling her that they had two, maybe three hours to rest before the Salik struck again. She had forced herself to sleep for a little bit in the back of one of the trucks in the last six hours, but it wasn’t the same as real sleep in a safe location. The others were even worse off; most didn’t have alternate ways of resting and regaining energy.

  Outlying scouts—mostly Private Sunrise, still somewhere out there on her hoverbike—reported that the Salik were ignoring the little burg of Eltegar City for now, a small but very important blessing. The fallback Beta site had been prepared with an ambush as Ia had feared, one a little too large for the former Knifeman to handle, but the ex-counterassassin had spotted it in time to alter their retreat to another location.

  “. . . going to need to resupply soon, or the grunts will start bitching about the food . . .”

  That was Helstead’s attempt at humor. One of the trucks that had escaped had been loaded with nearly haphazardly picked crates of weapons and ammunition, as well as Harper’s special psi-guns; that alone, the ability to return fire, had kept the Salik from overrunning them. One had been loaded with boxes of rations, so at least they weren’t fleeing on empty stomachs . . . but they were ration packs, as opposed to real food.

  A third truck had already been loaded with light armor, which meant their rear guard and nearby scouts had a modicum of protection. Another had actually been the self-transporting surgery pod, retracted and evacuated by Dr. Mishka without a care for the tents connecting to it the moment Ia ordered everyone to move out. If it weren’t for those latter two, their constant forced retreats would have suffered more fatal casualties . . . but that only covered so much. Their medical supplies, things like the gel-laden sponge strapped to her face, were now running low.

  Morale was even lower. One eye was more than enough to see the dirty looks aimed her way by Roghetti’s soldiers. The Roughriders’ lack of faith, she could understand and forgive. They hadn’t understood that when she gave an order like the one to evacuate, it wasn’t on a whim. It was a real order, with a real need behind it. The stricken, puzzled, and angry looks from her own crew . . . she could understand those, too, given what had happened, but she couldn’t forgive herself.

  “. . . heard some of Roghetti’s talking the equivalent of mutiny, if we don’t split up from them soon,” she heard Rico rumble in that deep, quiet voice of his. The m-word pulled her attention back to the meeting behind her.

  “Mutiny, hell,” Sergeant Maxwell growled, “I’ve heard some of our own headed that way. I don’t like that.”

  “Ia.” That was the voice of her first officer. Harper’s words cut her to the bone, striking into wounds already laid over the last few days. “You know I don’t mean to doubt your decisions, but what good does this constant retreat do?”

  Instinct said that if she didn’t address the m-word problem now, they’d be in a world of hurt later. Despite how they’d done their best to elude pursuit time and again, the Salik had found them. In specific, whenever Ia started to plan some sort of counterattack, the Salik had still found them. When she chose to follow Roghetti’s plans instead . . . the Salik had still found them.

  She was getting tired of the Salik finding them. She was getting tired of the Feyori finding her. So she addressed his question obliquely.

  “Commander Harper,” Ia stated, turning to face the knot of her cadre. “Get me one of your guns.”

  He blinked, frowned at her, and asked, “. . . Just one of my guns, sir?”

  “One gun. Now,” she ordered, staring at her first officer.

  “. . . Sir, yes, sir.” Shaking his head slightly, Harper moved out of the little dry patch formed by the closely spaced trunks, too closely spaced to allow any branches for the first five meters.

  She didn’t have to specify which gun, since there was only one type of gun which she would ask him to fetch. Any other kind, she would have asked one of the Platoon Sergeants to bring.

  When he had moved away, Ia turned to her second officer. “Lieutenant Commander Helstead.”

  “Yes, sir.” Helstead squared her shoulders, her gaze level and steady. Of all of them, she was actually the least restless right now. Then again, she looked like she’d had the least sleep of all of them, having volunteered for both coordinating the night watch and the sabotage efforts meant to slow, deter, or derail the enemy at their backs.

  “There are twenty-five enlisted psis available in the Damned, not counting yourself and the doctor. Get them here,” Ia ordered.

/>   The petite redhead didn’t even wait for a “now” from her commanding officer. She just moved off, arms lifting to tap commands into her command unit, summoning the psis in question.

  Spyder straightened his shoulders, coming to a modified Attention. He had forgone his favorite shades-of-green hair dye and had instead patterned his normally sandy brown hair in shades of brick, brown, and beige to match the local terrain. “Wha’re your plans, Cap’n?”

  “I don’t have any.” It was the honest truth, and it dropped Spyder’s jaw. It also made Mishka’s mouth sag.

  Rico blinked, then narrowed his eyes. “There’s something you’re not telling us.”

  “There’s a lot of things I’m not telling you,” Ia admitted dryly. At least in tone; her clothes were damp despite the torn and scorched poncho she still wore to protect herself from the near-constant rain outside this little grove of trees. “But that doesn’t matter.”

  “Then what does?” the large man pressed, shifting forward a step as if to loom over her. Lieutenant Rico didn’t normally use his muscular height to intimidate; he was her Intelligence Officer, not her Combat Officer. He was, however, frustrated and angered by their situation.

  She couldn’t blame him for feeling that way. She felt the same. Unfortunately, getting angry would do absolutely nothing to fix the damned situation. Ia kept her tone calm, unruffled. Now more than ever, her troops needed to have faith in her. “You’ll find out when the time is right.”

  “Shakk that,” Sergeant Sadneczek muttered. He spat to the side, his grizzled jawline already growing a salt-and-pepper beard. Without the toiletry supplies found in a kitbag, several of the men in both Companies were starting to sprout stubble. His just grew faster. Her Company Sergeant eyed her, looking rough and ragged, and not ready for any shova-shoveling. “Either you tell us now, or you’re gonna start losin’ our faith, Captain.”

  “After the psis have come,” she countered, keeping her thoughts calm. A plan was starting to form. She squelched it firmly and just breathed while they waited for the others to return.