by Jean Johnson
Filling her senses with the sounds and the sensations and the smells evoked by each breath, she focused on just breathing, until Harper returned with a bulky case containing one of the brass and faintly glowing crystalline guns he had created. Until twenty-five curious, limping, exhausted, angry, patient, sullen soldiers crowded in as best they could under the patch of dryness their officers and noncoms had appropriated. When instinct said the moment was right, Ia stopped focusing on her breathing and spoke, without a single thought in mind for what lay ahead.
“Right. My ability to predict things has been compromised. I cannot tell you how, nor what I’m going to do about it, as that would tip off the enemy to the one card still in my hand,” she clarified, as her opening statement caused startled looks and uneasy shifting among the men and women around her, enlisted or otherwise. “Until I can do something about it, you psychics are hereby ordered to implement Company Directive ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ until further notice. Try to include Roghetti’s Roughriders if you can, but only while they’re in range.
“Otherwise, I want every last one of our fifteen Squads covered, and two of you shielding your commanding officer at all times, starting as soon as this meeting is over.” Ia paused, then smiled wryly. “Whoever thinks of the worst, most annoyingly catchy earworm of a jingle to project and protect with will earn a full-pay-grade raise as a bonus when this is all over and done. Take a moment now to start thinking of which ones you’ll use.”
While they looked at each other, from Private Jeeves in the 1st Platoon all the way through to Private Mittletech in the 3rd, Crow and his teammate Teevie already started humming a faint duet that sounded suspiciously like the theme song for a certain popular, long-running Gatsugi comedy show, Red Is Green. Ia turned to Harper. Lifting her chin, she looked at the case. He set it on the ground, used his thumbprint on the scanner locks, and opened the latches.
Helstead moved up next to him. “Do you want someone to fire it, sir?”
“Nope. I want you to organize a party,” Ia countered. That earned her more than a few odd looks. Crow and Teevie stopped humming, blinking in astonishment. Ia shifted her gaze to include them, before moving on to the others. They quickly started humming again. “You all heard me right. This Company is dangerously low on morale. You desperately need a day of rest. As your Commanding Officer, it is my prerogative as whether or not to give you one . . . and I am going to give you one. Inform Roghetti’s Roughriders that I will be giving them a day of rest as well.”
“And how, exactly, are you going to do that?” Commander Benjamin questioned her. The taller of the two redheads in Ia’s cadre, the chaplain adopted a pose near identical to Helstead’s: hands on hips, head cocked, and brow furrowed in confusion. “There’s a whole bunch of frogtopi after us, in case you’ve forgotten the last few days. We shook them off for an hour or two, but they will catch up and find us again, and they’ll do it soon.”
“You have your orders, people,” Ia stated, ignoring the question. She stooped to pluck the odd, oversized, pi-shaped gun-thing from the padding lining the case. Hefting it onto her shoulder, she balanced it muzzle up with one hand. “You will all take a day off, save for rotating out the perimeter sentries. You will enjoy whatever sort of party you can scrape together. And you will rest.
“One more thing. I am dividing the Damned into two Companies. Until further orders, Commander Meyun Harper is now officially in charge of A Company, 1st Legion, 1st Battalion, 1st Brigade, 1st Division, 9th Cordon Special Forces, as of this date and time . . .” Lifting her left arm, the one not balancing the heavy gun, she checked her chronometer, “19:13 Terran Standard, being 6:23 Local Dabin Standard. I’m still in overall charge, but B Company will be under my direct command, and A under Harper’s.”
“B Company?” Harper asked her, frowning and rising from his crouch. “Who’s going to be in B Company, besides you?”
She gave him a blithe shrug. “Commander, I have no clue. I have not a single damned thought in my head on what I’m going to do . . . because I cannot even touch the timestreams without betraying our position to the enemy—and don’t say the ‘F” word. That’s why they’ve kept chasing us all this time. So I am going to go for a little walk in an attempt to clear my head and shake them off my trail.” Ia didn’t clarify whether she meant the Feyori or the Salik. Either way, it didn’t matter. “You will have a little party while I’m gone. Your priority is now Company morale.”
They gaped at her. The Salik were mind-blind as a race, not as mere individuals. That the strongest psi among them was admitting the Salik could trace her precognitive efforts was an impossibility, but only because she didn’t dare mention the F-word to them. Feyori. She faced her first officer.
“Harper, you are the only person whose moves I cannot predict,” Ia told him, taking advantage of their stunned silence. “I need you to take over and lead A Company for me because they’re trying to predict us based on me. But the Damned also need a day of rest . . . so my one order for the lot of you is to take that day of rest. After that, you get to decide what the larger share of our two Companies will do. In the meantime, B Company is going for a walk. I’ll be rejoining you shortly,” she promised, thinking firmly about doing so within half an hour. Believing she would do so. “I just need to go for a little walk first and clear my head. I won’t go far, but I do need to get away.”
Turning, she started picking her way through the trees, bizarre gun on her shoulder. Behind her, Helstead filled in for the still-stunned first officer. “You heard the Captain! Teevie, Crow, shadow Captain Ia. Mankiller, MacInnes, you’re with Commander Harper. The rest of you, we have no one covering 1st E Squad, and no one covering 2nd D Squad, until those four are relieved of their duty.”
“I’ll take 2nd D Squad, Commander,” Mishka volunteered. “We’ve caught up on all the current injuries, so I have the inergy to spare.”
“Alright, then I’ll take 1st E,” Helstead stated. “Thank you, Doc.”
Ia heard footsteps crunching over the dried leaves on the ground. It wasn’t just Crow and Teevie, who had shifted up to flank her on either side, humming the theme of their favorite show, but Harper as well. She didn’t face him, though. “You have your orders, Commander. Take over A Company, give them a day of rest, then do as you see fit.”
“And if I see fit to order the Company to follow you anyway?” he asked.
She swung around to face him and tangled the oversized, lumpy muzzle of her gun in the branches of a waist-high bush. Dislodging it impatiently, still lacking depth perception, she lowered it far enough to look at him. “They are using my own abilities against me, Meyun. You are therefore the only person with any hope of slipping past them unseen. However, everyone in this Company is exhausted. You need a day of rest. We all do. Go organize a Wake or something, and use the intervening time to figure out what you’re going to do. Just make sure it’s nowhere near me.”
“And what about the enemy, while we’re sitting still?” Harper asked her, one hand catching and holding back a branch as a gust of wind threatened to sway it into his face.
“If you try to rely on my precognition, you will die. Which means I am left with no plans for doing anything but to go stretch my legs by taking a walk. Teevie, Crow, keep humming psychically,” she directed her male-and-female shadows. “I’ll see you later, Commander.”
“Be sure that you do see me later,” he ordered, pointing at her. Flicking his hand at the two female psis shadowing him, he headed back to the others.
Ia meandered her way toward the perimeter of their makeshift resting spot. Teevie took a brief break from her humming as they drew near the sentry line. “You really have no clue what to do next, sir?”
“Not a damned thing. My mind is as blank and directionless as an autumn leaf . . . and it is a very uncomfortable place for me to be.” She fell silent as they passed the resting figures of a clutch of Roughriders.
Thankfully, Teevie didn’t ask anything more. She did clear her throat as Ia almost walked into a branch—stereoscopic vision was beyond her capabilities—but her danger sense allowed Ia to sidestep it at the last moment. Another two minutes of walking brought them to a spot between the light-armored soldiers straining to see any enemy movements through the rainy gray twilight of dawn. They were counting bushes and trees manually, checking the few portable scanners they had managed to snatch up during the evacuation, and were keeping themselves as discreetly hidden as their skills could allow, but she knew they were there.
“Right,” Ia murmured. “This is where you two and I part company. Report back to your Squad, and follow Commander Harper’s orders.”
“Sir?” Corporal Crow asked, still following her. “You’re not seriously going to walk out of here alone, are you?”
“I’m merely going to go for a little walk,” Ia promised. “One just far enough to clear my head.”
They exchanged a look. No doubt they were also exchanging telepathic words because both firmed their jaws at the same moment.
“We’re not leaving you, sir,” Crow stated, flanking Ia’s other side. “Lieutenant Commander Helstead ordered us to shadow you, and she’s in charge of all psychic operations.”
“And I say you’re staying here—I am still in your chain of command, meioas,” Ia growled when they didn’t peel off. “Return to camp, soldiers, or I will break off the nearest branch and cane you myself for Fatality Five.”
Again, an exchange of looks. Crow cleared his throat. “. . . You won’t be gone long, will you, sir?”
“I’m just going for a little walk,” she repeated, and started forward. “You have your orders. Do not disobey them.”
She kept moving. After a few seconds, she heard her two shadows turn and start back. Walking steadily, if obliquely forward through the forest-cloaked valley, Ia waited until her instincts said she was out of sight of the sentries. As soon as she was, she sunk her electrokinetic senses into the crystals and the e-clips of the gun-thing, and pulled energy out of all of them.
Electricity crackled into her blood, stinging her nerves with a hint of seared eggplant, but it also softened the tough mineral. She pulled the thick, crystalline goo out of the weapon telekinetically, pooling it in her left hand. Bits of brass and other metals dropped off the gun as she did so. Ia left them in a scattered trail, crushing the more delicate components underfoot so that even if they were found, no one would know what their purpose had been.
When only the housing was left, she tossed that into a thicket of Dabin-style brambles and focused her kinetics on the biomineral. At one point, the crysium in her hands had been a fine, matter-based dust cast off by the Feyori back on her homeworld of Sanctuary. Energy-based beings, they had mastered the trick of accelerating themselves to the squared speed of light and back, transforming into matter and back . . . but there was always a little bit of one or the other left over.
Excess energy and the ability to manipulate it usually got bred into whatever matter-based species they chose for a brief mating. That was why Ia and the other psis had psychic abilities, which by definition were the direct manipulation of energies by a sentient mind. The Salik and the Choya had no such abilities, and Ia had never bothered to find out why, but the other races had them.
For the Feyori, excess matter got dumped out whenever a Meddler skimmed a world heavy enough to pull the bits of leftover mass from their silvery soap-bubble bodies. Dabin’s gravity wasn’t quite high enough to pull out all of it, though some of it would fall. Parker’s World might have been, being 2.98Gs, but Sanctuary, her home, came with an excess of electrical energy in the air as well as a decently high gravitational pull. Restaurant and restroom all in one place.
No one but Ia knew how to manipulate crysium, the incredibly tough crystals that grew from that discarded matter-dust. She guided it under her clothes by withdrawing enough innate energy within the mineral to make it pliable under a touch of telekinesis, then restored that energy, forming plates of armor. Like its creators, crysium ate energy, including laser fire. It was more impact-resistant than ceristeel. And it was definitely lighter than her old exercise weight suit, though not nearly as light as a matching suit of plexi would have been.
She didn’t know exactly what she was going to do, that was the truth, but that was just fine. Picking up into a steady, ground-eating lope, Ia ran as quietly as she could through the forest. Somewhere up ahead, a Company of fully armed and armored Salik soldiers were taking a brief break from pursuing the two undergeared, highly demoralized Human Companies in desperate need of rest behind her.
Her plan—her only plan—was to tap so far into the future that no Feyori could possibly follow her to spy on her choices. Not to find the right path in the nearest timestreams to get through the trap of misinformation they had laid for her but to find the right person with the right instincts to get herself alive through the next several hours. She wasn’t a one-person army, capable of taking on whole Companies, even Legions on her own . . . but she did know of someone who was. Or rather, someone who one day would be. A life located so far into the future, no Feyori alive could even hope to reach even a quarter as far . . . which meant it was a life they could not hide precognitively.
All she was going to do—which she kept firmly in her mind as she moved rapidly through the woods—was plug herself into the life-stream of that ultimate one-person warrior and go for a walk on Dabin. She would just do so by walking in a way that would ensure her and Roghetti’s Companies would be able to have that promised day of rest.
JUNE 10, 2498 T.S.
SALIK 1117TH INFANTRY BASE CAMP SH-SHWUUN-GWA-GISH
DABIN
A line of flexible, translucent peach-gold dangled from her right wrist in an elongated, lethal parody of a Salik’s tentacle-limb. Other bits of transparent gold gleamed in the thin sunlight where it struck the holes torn and scorched in her muddied, bloodied uniform. Dragging the makeshift whip slowly along the ground, flicking it occasionally forward in a sinuous line, Ia stalked through the smoldering, bloodied rubble. Stalking her prey.
Her mind had split itself into three layers. One layer focused purely on her senses, from sight and sound all the way through to the instant knowing of battlecognition. The second layer stayed tapped into a life-stream nearly three hundred years down the way, connecting her thoughts, her instincts with a mind far more attuned to the Now than Ia’s own ever could be. A life-stream no Feyori could reach or predict, it lay that far ahead. Time, after all, was her best battle arena . . . even if her greatest enemies here on Dabin had blasted huge, invisible craters into her path, hoping to make her stumble, fall, and break her metaphorical neck.
The third corner of her mind reserved itself for pure tactical analysis. She honestly didn’t know what she was going to do until the upper two layers absorbed her surroundings and processed them down to that bottommost level. It made her highly unpredictable, almost mindlessly so, but still kept her actions on a three-phase track.
Step one, hunt down the nearest cluster of Salik. Step two, discern their strengths and weaknesses. Step three, distract them during her approach, divert their attention from the Damned, and destroy everything she could, all as swiftly and as simultaneously as possible to narrow down whatever reactions the two Feyori counterfactioning her might use. Preferably by using sapper and other infiltration techniques, followed by outright attacks. Once the current knot was handled, she started the process all over again, but not on a predictable pattern or discernible path.
She had distracted and diverted the forces closing in on the Damned and the Roughriders, destroyed more than enough of their vehicles, munitions, and equipment to piss them off, stolen a Salik-style hoversled, and led them in a chase all the way back through the demolished remnants of Roghetti’s camp to their own base in the last nine hours. She was tired, hungry, and tingled all
over from sucking on stolen e-clips and power cables for sustenance, but it didn’t matter.
Her current prey was a crawling, whistle-burbling Salik officer trying to push himself away from the ferally grinning Human. He wasn’t getting very far; she had already sliced off one of his flipper-feet to the backwards-facing knee, cauterizing each slice with the Salik-style laser pistol gripped in her left hand. Her mind sliced into his, digging via xenotelepathy for anything that might give her a location for her true quarry.
It was doubtful any of these Salik knew where to find a Feyori, but that was alright. He was dead anyway. She didn’t mind taking her time getting him there—or rather, Ia minded, but she was channeling someone else’s attitudes right now.
Instincts twinged; her left hand snapped up and fired off a shot. Someone screeched in the distance, paying the price yet again for trying to sniper her. A tiny corner of her mind wondered why they were still trying after seventeen fai—eighteen failures. Her right hand lashed up, swinging the crysium whip. Not to destroy the inbound projectile, since she knocked that off course telekinetically while it was still several meters away, but to strike through the crawling alien’s thigh, severing part of it. Her left hand came back down and seared across his flesh in an orange line of hot alien laser fire, keeping him from bleeding to death.
It pushed the alien too far. His mind shattered from too much pain and too much fear. Rather than images of commanders and orders and authorities that might have come from or been influenced by one of the Feyori she was hunting, she got an image of his huntress-mother, of hunkering in an underwater cave for protection . . . and of a longing for his old youthful classmates to be the ones to tear out his guts. It would be, she read in the cold, jumbled thoughts of her prey, a far less shameful death than being sliced apart but not eaten by an all-too-worthy foe.