by Jean Johnson
Most pointed the muzzles up, the one safe direction on the top floor of a building. With her peripheral vision, she could see Mara narrowing her own eyes at the few who pointed their weapons down. Ia let her handle that violation. She kept her gaze on the brigadier general while Mara spoke, her tone cold with highly displeased authority.
“I see a few of you have forgotten the Rules of the Range, meioas.” The ex–staff sergeant hardened her tone when they didn’t move. “Stunners don’t go through floors and walls, but those are Hecks and Jellies. Muzzles up, soldiers!”
They snapped their guns up. Ia turned slightly, addressing the man still lurking mostly behind the inner door. “Brigadier General Mattox. In light of the revelation of the Meddler’s presence in your Headquarters, I strongly suggest you and your entire staff submit immediately to psychic examinations and treatments. Failure to comply carries with it automatic accusations of Fatalities Nineteen, Collusion; Six, Subversion; Three, Espionage; Thirty-five, Sabotage; and possibly Fatality Two, Treason . . . and I’ll remind you that Fatality Two is automatically an accusation of Grand Treason, given that we’re currently at war. Possibly Grand High Treason, depending on how much damage you have done to the war efforts while under Ginger’s influence.”
Major Tonkswell spoke up. “We’re the Army, Ship’s Captain. We have zero psychic attachés on our staff. The Brigadier General . . . ah . . . shova.”
“Brigadier General Mattox had asserted that they would not be necessary, yes, I figured as much the moment you said there weren’t any,” Ia finished for him. “Whether or not this was before or after ‘Ginger’ officially arriving on the scene is immaterial. The Feyori could have hidden in that restaurant across the street and still been able to influence his mind. All of your minds. They do have a limit to that range, but that’s more than close enough.”
Aston frowned at that. “Then why did she bother to disguise herself as a dog?”
“Conservation of energy,” Sunrise told the corporal. “It’s a lot easier to spy on your game pieces and keep them playing in all the right ways when you’re right there at the gaming board.”
“Exactly,” Ia agreed. “Nobody would suspect a dog of being a spy, she wouldn’t need to have her identity checked and confirmed, and those extra-sensitive canine ears would give her an increased chance to eavesdrop on anything important—Brigadier General, would you please put down the gun now?”
Mattox wasn’t aiming it at her, and in fact was now cradling it against his chest, but it was still fully charged. Despite the naturally tanned hue of his skin, he looked pale, shaken by what had just happened. “I . . . I just want to be ready. To shoot her. If she comes back . . .”
Ia wasn’t the only one to roll her eyes at that. Private Sunrise did, too. “That was a Feyori, sir,” the ex-Knifeman scorned. “You’re wielding a Heck. That’d be like smacking a starving, feral dog with a sausage.”
He flushed under the sting of her derision, the color rushing back into his sallow cheeks in splotches. “Your insolence, soldier, is—”
“—Is exactly what you need to wake up to the fact that you have been controlled, sir,” Ia interjected, defending her crew member. She softened her tone a little. “Now, I believe this situation can be salvaged. It does require everyone in this building undergoing psychic scans, behavioral evaluations, and a review of every decision you have made for as long as Ginger was here, plus an extra month or so before that point so we can pinpoint when your actions began to change under her influence.”
“And where are we going to get the psychics necessary for such evaluations, Ship’s Captain?” Major Tonkswell asked dryly. A flick from his hand dismissed the crowd at the door, Aston included. “If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been blockaded by the Salik fleet. We can’t exactly call them in from another system.”
“This is a well-established colonyworld with plenty of resources,” Ia reminded him. “Until we can get formal evaluators out here from the 6th Cordon Psi Division, we’ll use a mixture of civilian contractors and certain members of my crew. I brought plenty of psis with me, knowing I’d have to deal with the two Feyori on this world. Some of them are qualified to do formal mind scans, and I’m willing to attach some of them to Headquarters until we’re all reasonably assured that the impact of the Feyori’s Meddling has passed.”
Brigadier General Mattox frowned. “You aren’t in the Space Force Army, let alone in our chain of command.”
“That will not be a problem, General. All it will take is a few moments of chatting with a member of the Command Staff to authorize my assistance. My immediate superior, Admiral John Genibes, would certainly qualify,” Ia replied. “He knows the various capabilities of my Company and can craft the necessary orders.”
Letting his rifle drop so that it dangled from just one hand, Mattox stared at her. “Captain, we don’t need your help.”
Ia raised one brow. “Did you hear yourself, just now? You have been compromised, Mattox. Yes, you have just had a terrible shock, when I shot your so-called dog—and I apologize for the shock of it—but you have been in close proximity to a Feyori for months, and most likely have been brainwashed by that Feyori. Follow procedure, Brigadier General.”
He looked away. She didn’t have to be a precognitive to know what would happen if he didn’t follow through. Ia deliberately reminded him of it when he continued to hesitate.
“That procedure means being examined as soon as possible by a qualified telepath of Rank 9 or higher, or two of Rank 6 or higher, to determine the extent of influence the Feyori known as ‘Ginger’ had on your brain. Now, I can pull in Private Mk’nonn, who is a Rank 11 Telepath, and maybe pull in Commander Mishka, who is a Rank 9 Triphid, but that depends on whether or not my Company needs her more as our chief medic. The next best I can offer you are pairs of my soldiers who are Ranks 8 to 6 in Telepathy.
“Beyond that, you’ll have to go into the civilian sector. Psis who are vetted by the PsiLeague and the Witan Order may be trustworthy, sir,” Ia said, pointing at the floor under their feet, “but every brain in this building has been working in the heart of the Army’s efforts, and those brains have been in close proximity with a Feyori for months. By offering my soldiers first and foremost, I can guarantee that whatever secrets the Army has left on this planet will remain within the Space Force. You have no such guarantees in the civilian sector, but the sheer number of people who will need to be scanned means we’ll still have to call in outsiders to scan the lower ranks, particularly the enlisted.”
“What’s the difference between a civilian psi and a mere private scanning the mind of a Division leader?” Mattox asked sarcastically. He flipped his hand at Sunrise. “Your people might be in the Special Forces, but you don’t have the kind of clearance it takes to read the secrets in my mind.”
Private Sunrise braced her palms on her hips, her look sardonic. “Begging pardon, General, but I have a higher clearance rating than you. We all do in the 9th Cordon Special Forces.”
José Mattox snorted. “Now that, I highly doubt.”
“Every single crew member in my Company is rated at High Class 9A at the very least,” Ia stated bluntly. “The only clearance higher is Ultra, and there are five . . . sorry, seven . . . who are rated for Ultra Clearance. Three of them are Ultra Class C, two are Ultra Class B, and two of us are Class A, including myself.”
She didn’t have to add that only a handful of generals and admirals at the top of the Command Staff had Ultra Class A clearance . . . and that Mattox only had a High Class 9B clearance. The widening of his eyes let her know he knew that much. The narrowing that followed it warned her there were grooves of stubborn resistance worn into his brain by the paws of his so-called pet dog.
“Follow procedure, Brigadier General,” Ia repeated firmly. “Whatever you may be thinking or feeling right now, you have an obligation to follow the orders and procedures of the Terran
Space Force. As a high-ranking officer, your resistance only proves you have been contaminated. Follow procedure, while you still have a choice in the matter.”
He looked her over and gestured with the hand holding his rifle. It was still powered down, and the muzzle pointed at the floor, thankfully. “You’re not here to make friends, are you, Ship’s Captain?”
Lightly folding her arms across her chest, Ia turned to her companion. “You know, everybody keeps asking me that question. Do you know what I always tell them, Private?”
“Sir, yes, sir. I do know what you always tell them, sir. I’ve heard you say it several times when chatting on the comms with any number of stubborn idiots.” Sunrise looked at Mattox and answered his question for her. “Ship’s Captain Ia is here to save lives. Why are you here?”
“Insolent little—!” he growled.
“More like extremely accurate,” Ia stated blandly, “considering I’ve already asked the Admiral-General that very same question twice to her face.”
“And you still have your rank?” Major Tonkswell asked her, one of his brows rising in a skeptical frown.
“The first time I asked it, she bumped me from Lieutenant First Class to Ship’s Captain,” Ia admitted, glancing his way. The more this drags on, the more I wonder at just how much the Feyori have Meddled, and what they have blocked me from seeing in the timestreams . . . which means fixing this mess may be beyond my capabilities, given the constraints of time . . . which means I’m going to have to bind the Feyori to do it for me. Somehow . . . and I have no idea how, right now.
Slag.
“But not the second time?” Mattox asked shrewdly when she said nothing more, deep in thought.
“I didn’t need to go any higher,” Ia dismissed, “and I obviously didn’t go any lower.”
“I still wanna know why he’s here, in the Army, on Dabin,” Sunrise muttered, lifting her chin at the brigadier general. “Are you here to serve the selfish interests of a Meddler? Or what?”
Mattox frowned at her. “I am here, soldier, to win this war. Why are you here?”
The question didn’t phase Mara. “I’m here to help Captain Ia save lives while you do just that, sir.”
“General, not to rush your decision, but we are running out of time,” Ia pointed out, rubbing at her temple. “Let me have access to the comms here at Headquarters, and I’ll get you the cross-Branch authorizations you need. That way we can pull in a few psis from my Company, a few from the PsiLeague, and get your headquarters cleared to proceed.
“If you do not follow procedure, I will be forced to contact the Admiral-General herself to have you removed, and I really don’t want to have to do that,” Ia insisted. “You are not a psi, you were not trained to shield your mind, and you have had zero chance of guarding your thoughts from being scrambled by a Meddler because you had no clue Ginger was anything other than what she seemed and thus no reason to guard your brain. Follow procedure, sir. Your removal from command is the only other option here.”
Mattox grimaced, clearly not liking the choice ahead of him, but nodded. “You can use the comm out here. And get my . . . the damned not-a-dog’s blood off of you.”
“Oh, this isn’t canine blood,” Ia dismissed, flicking a hand at her brown-stained uniform. “Ginger took every scrap and droplet of herself with her across the mass-energy barrier when she shifted back into a bubble. This is Salik blood.”
“Salik blood?” Mattox asked her. “When did you pick that up?”
“When I went out for a walk a couple days ago. Specifically, when I went on a walk through the Salik 1117th. They took out one of my eyes, so I took out a few hundred of theirs. Let me get those orders processed first, sir, then I’ll go looking for a clean uniform.” Moving around to join Tonkswell on his side of the reception desk, Ia lifted her arm unit to transfer the contact codes . . . and wrinkled her nose at the scorched lid. “Slag . . . I forgot I still need to get this thing replaced. I’ll have to do this electrokinetically. Private Sunrise, don’t let me leave Headquarters without a new arm unit.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Sunrise promised, reverting to her efficient-clerk persona. “I’ll get one requisitioned for you right away, sir, along with a fresh uniform.”
• • •
Getting hold of Admiral Genibes was relatively easy even if it took an extra hyperrelay hub in rerouting and a couple minutes’ delay for him to respond. Getting hold of her Company was another matter. Her instincts didn’t twinge when she thought about them, but it took Ia half an hour of trying to contact them via the comm relays in a conference room to give up waiting for any sort of swift response. The only other recourse was to check what her crew were doing via their timestreams.
Wary of what she might find, she flipped herself into the timeplains . . . and found not a single scrap of fog. Standing on the right-hand bank of her own stream, she didn’t move immediately to search for the rest of her crew. Instead, she treated the view she had of the rolling, river-streaked prairie and its golden sunlight as warily as she would have an expanse of enemy territory.
Is everything too clear and fog-free? Are those double shadows cast by the grass? Are things moving at the right pace, or just a little too slow because they’re trying to feed me false information at my normal accelerated speed?
It was difficult to tell.
Wary of the too-tranquil scene, Ia pulled back into herself. Silently, she surveyed the conference room she and Private Sunrise had been given. Mara sat off to one side with a portable comm similar to the one in front of Ia. From the sound of things, the other woman was finalizing the hiring of a quintet of high-ranked PsiLeague telepaths to come by Headquarters for mind scans. Dressed in clean clothes after a quick, sketchy wash in one of the building’s restrooms, Ia should have been happy to finally have Mattox’s cooperation. She wasn’t because she still could not trust anything she could foresee.
Mara ended her call. Glancing up from the portable screen, she lifted one brow. “Something wrong, sir?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t see any fog patches in the timestreams. I don’t know if it’s because the Feyori aren’t trying to cloud my vision anymore or if it’s because both of them have joined forces to further enforce a false reality on my view of the fourth dimension. If that makes any sense,” Ia added, catching the wrinkle in the private’s brow. “They’re not in my mind, so much as they’re attempting to alter my view of reality on a higher plane of consciousness. Like they’re pasting layers of illusion over the buildings I’m trying to look at in the distance.”
“It makes sense,” Sunrise demurred, though she didn’t lose the frown. “Sir . . . I don’t really know how your, ah, time sense works. Does it take a lot of energy out of you to access the timestreams?”
“Me? No,” Ia said. At Mara’s skeptical look, she considered the question more carefully. “Well, not really. Not anymore. I’ve been doing it since I was an infant. Of course, that was more involuntary than anything until I was fifteen and had a sort of . . . breakthrough. But I had three years of solid practice before I hit the Marines,” she continued, shrugging off the unpleasant memory, “and even then, it was more a matter of learning how to concentrate and focus my thoughts. I’ll admit it’s easier to limit my scope to a matter of minutes and hours when in the midst of battle, but ten minutes or ten thousand years, it’s all one and the same to me now, and no more or less exhausting than concentrating on any other task. Paperwork, calisthenics, breathing . . .”
“Well, what about the Feyori? If they can access Time itself, how exhausting is it for them?” Sunrise asked next. “How far into the future can they push themselves, and how deeply? Do you even know?”
“Based on what I’d investigated prior to coming to Dabin . . . it’s relatively exhausting for them. As exhausting as juggling large objects telekinetically. Particularly if they try to push into the future,” Ia told her. �
��The farther ahead a Feyori tries to push, the heavier the metaphorical objects become in their juggling act. It’s much easier for them to peek backwards into the past because the past is more or less complete, and thus lacking in as much psychokinetic resistance, trying to push their way through alternate possibilities. They can access it a lot better than the future . . . but still only by so much.”
“Oh? How so?” Mara asked, bracing her elbows on the edge of the table. “And what about their supposed ability to time-travel?”
She gave it a few moments of thought, trying to find the right analogy to help the other woman understand. “Think of viewing or even touching the past like it’s a river winding through a valley edged by mountains. You can shift the course of the river along the valley floor by digging a new channel or two on either side,” Ia explained, using her hands to shape the images in her words; she had zero holokinetic abilities, so it was the only way to show Sunrise her meaning. “But there comes a point where you just cannot fight the pull of gravity.
“The farther up the valley—into the past—the closer the mountainsides are to the river, and the harder it is to reach that point and change the river’s course. So they can send someone back in time to the past, but that person can only change the course of that river by so much. It takes a handful of Meddlers to send just one of them back . . . and it almost always costs the life-force energies of at least one Feyori, if not more. Fifteen thousand years cost twenty Feyori lives out of over five thousand cooperating.”
Mara thought about it for a few moments, then nodded slowly. “So the future is more like a river that’s free of the foothills and is now trying to cross a wide, flat plain. There aren’t any mountains holding it to a single valley, and you can dig as many experimental canals as you want, exploring said future. But because there are so many possible places you can put the water, you—or rather, they—cannot afford the energy expended in trying to explore them all. Right?”