by Jean Johnson
That knowledge would go into the information discussed at the cadre meeting in a little while, and thus into the recordings for the investigation. Ia would have to be careful to speak calmly about those losses even though each wound, each lost limb, and each lost life, seared her nerves with such senseless, brutal, arrogance-inflicted waste. She couldn’t do anything about preventing the attacks and the injuries without violating her orders, and had to show to the Command Staff that she was still rational, still capable of being a competent leader, unswayed by anger or thoughts of vengeance.
Part of her did want to pound the brigadier general into a paste . . . but just like the luxury of going insane, it was only a feeling. An indulgence which she did not have the time for. It had to be set aside and ignored.
JUNE 24, 2498 T.S.
“No, sirs,” Ia stated, shaking her head. She flexed her knees subtly as she did so. This was her fourth hour-long interrogation session today, and her knees were not enjoying the strain. At this rate, the hyperrelay’s tank would have to be refilled soon. “Until post-battle forensics uncovers more enemy surveillance footage, I cannot corroborate anything I wrote in my mission transcripts during the hours I lacked a functioning arm unit on the tenth of June. The additional enemy footage will not be available until the Salik are kicked off Dabin, and this situation needs to be resolved long before then.”
General Amalyn Gadalah, chief justice of the Special Forces’ Judge Advocate General division—and no relation to Private Gadalah—frowned at Ia. “You claim that you ‘tapped into’ someone else’s life in order to combat the Salik. I don’t understand how that works. If you tapped into someone else’s mind, did they not tap into yours, compromising your security clearance?”
Ia shook her head. “No, sir. It is not a form of telepathy, which you may be thinking it is. Instead, it is a form of immersive postcognition, and is a passive, one-way reception only, not an active two-way—it’s the equivalent of borrowing lecture notes for a class you yourself were unable to attend. There is no way via mere notes to interact with the professor giving the lecture.”
“Lecture notes?” Lieutenant General Chun Hestin of the Psi Division asked, skeptical. There were four high-ranked officers interviewing her, not the usual three, but then the person Ia had accused was a high-ranked officer himself. Hestin sat to the left of Gadalah on Ia’s screen, Sranna to Gadalah’s immediate right, and T’Tkul perched to the far right.
“That is the simplest and shortest explanation I can give, sir,” Ia told the Psi Division officer. “Trying to explain what I do is the equivalent of attempting to describe an entire three-dimensional, three-hour-long entertainment program in a simple, single, two-dimensional line drawing. I can only say that I have always used similar versions of temporally advanced postcognitive alternate life-stream analysis to determine probability rates during the last eleven years.” Her knees hurt, and the soles of her feet hurt. “Adding in superior battlecognitive sensitivities plus combat skills and reflexes borrowed from the best Human warrior in existence is merely an extension of those same skills.”
“I thought you were supposed to be the best soldier the Space Force will ever have,” General Sranna stated. “Or were my earliest impressions of you all the way back when you were a mere sergeant in the Corps wrong, Ship’s Captain?”
Sranna was there to represent the Army’s interests in the investigation. From the start, the white-haired general had taken a belligerent stance during the proceedings, despite the way he had been friendlier when working with Ia in the past. She suspected he had been asked to be hostile but didn’t know for sure. As it was, she had to deal with how he acted right now, not with how he was supposed to act.
“With respect, General, over half the soldiers on the Command Staff have been, are, and will continue to be better soldiers than I will ever be. If you refer to the unnamed individual whose skills I borrowed . . . she, too, will not have been the best soldier in the Space Force’s history,” Ia stated, twisting her grammar awkwardly around the future-perspective tenses. “She will, however, have been the best warrior.
“With my precognitive abilities blanketed by the Feyori sabotage efforts, there was no way I could rely upon my own battlecognition, which is based upon my ability to read the Future,” she said. “So I borrowed the battlecognition of someone whose skills will be based on her ability to read the Now, and whose reflexes will be so tied into that awareness that, despite being a Sanctuarian heavyworlder with all the attendant reflexes, I myself could not achieve that level of instantaneous awareness-response without her . . . ah, without her ‘lecture notes,’ as it were. Disrupting the Salik forces so that my Company could have a badly needed day of rest in the face of their unchecked aggressions required more than my skills alone could achieve.”
“‘Unchecked aggressions.’ Again, we come back to your accusations against the brigadier general,” General Gadalah stated, turning over a printout on the desk in front of her. “Are you sure you wish to describe the Salik pursuit of your forces in such a manner, Captain?”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Ia confirmed bluntly. “We received zero support action from any of the Companies flanking Roghetti’s command when the camp was overrun, General. I know postcognitively that you have already received and analyzed the communications from Dabin Army HQ to those Companies in question, and have noted the orders given to maintain their position. Had the lieutenant and captain to either side been allowed the leeway to react with tactics appropriate to the moment, they could have pincered the Salik 1117th and crushed them within a matter of hours. As already noted, we were instead forced to flee for two days straight before I handed over command of my Company to my first officer and went back to personally disrupt the enemy’s advance and turn it back on itself.”
“You said you did so to pull the temporal attentions of the Feyori . . . Teshwun,” General T’Tkul stated, consulting a datapad.
While the majority of the Terran military was filled with Humans, there were sections in which the alien races could and did serve as Terran citizens-turned-soldiers—an entire Division set aside for each of the non-Human species in the 2nd Cordons of each of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, in fact. The sandy-furred, spider-like general lifted the pad with a forelimb, indicating the material on it, and chittered, letting the small translator unit attached to the blue-striped black vest wrapped around her thorax project her words in Terranglo.
While the K’Katta could not physically pronounce the Alliance trade tongue, they could become quite fluent-sounding in it with the aid of translation programs, and a K’Katta’s mind wasn’t too terribly different from a Human’s. T’Tkul had therefore been included as the most neutral observer possible. Her questions so far had been to the point, and her next one was no different. “You stated you wanted to turn the enemy’s attentions away from the battle plans of your Company. Yet you claim you could not foresee the future at the same time . . . so you were, what, guessing?”
“General, yes, sir.” Ia didn’t know how many times she would have to answer the same or similar questions over and over again. Mustering her patience, she refrained from rolling her eyes, though she did flex her knees again.
On the screen in front of her, General Sranna narrowed his eyes as the five-second delay transmitted the slight shift in her posture to him and his reaction back to her. “. . . Are you bored with these proceedings, Captain?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you need to visit the nearest head, Captain?” Lieutenant General Hestin asked her.
“No, sir. I’m just flexing my legs to assist my circulation. The gravity may not be as high as my homeworld, but it does still wear on the knees a bit, sirs,” Ia added. “You were saying?”
Gadalah looked up at Ia, her dark eyes narrowed in a piercing stare. Wherever the trio were seated back on Earth, the room was dark enough that it shadowed their expressions half the time. Ia suspected the
effect was deliberate. The only one whose expression was not affected either way was General T’Tkul, but then it normally took a fellow K’Katta to read their physical nuances, and Ia hadn’t bothered to learn anything but the basics everyone learned in school.
Don’t show your teeth when you smile; the Solaricans, Tlassians, and Gatsugi will all think you’re being aggressive when you’re not. Don’t hold both your hands high over your head for any length of time, the Chinsoiy will think you’re mocking them. Don’t lie on your back with your legs and arms folded in like a dead Terran bug, the K’Katta will not be amused . . .
“Are you sure the Feyori will not interfere from this point onward?” General Gadalah asked her. Ia pulled her attention fully back to the proceedings.
“I am very sure, sirs. They know I can kill them at a distance, now. When they are needed, I will call upon them, and they will obey. Until that time, they best serve the needs of the future by continuing with what they were doing before some of them tried to counterfaction me and interfere,” Ia explained patiently, yet again.
“You seem very confident they will obey,” T’Tkul stated, shifting a little on her abdomen-seat so she could curl one of her forelimbs in an almost Human, circular gesture. “Why aren’t you using the Feyori to remove the Salik from Dabin? You say you can call upon them and that they will obey,” the alien pointed out logically. “So why not use them?”
Ia breathed deep and let it go, trying not to look or sound too impatient with the question. At the edges of her awareness, she could sense the pitfalls of assumptions behind the general’s query. “That would be like using a Starstrike-class laser cannon to light all the votives in a cathedral sanctuary, sir. At the end of the battle, you’d have scorched the altar boys, melted half the wrought-iron railings, most of the votives would have been vaporized, and the pews and the choir loft would be on fire.
“I have always been interested in the most efficient use of the resources at hand. The most frugal use in the sense that I will use to their fullest extent whoever and whatever is available, yes, but also the most frugal in the sense that I will use only what I must to get a job done. Anything else is a waste of resources that others will need,” she told them, keeping her demeanor calm and rational. Logic and metaphor had to sway her superiors. “I may have to borrow a box of matches from a civilian and a taper candle from the priest to get the job done, but it is far safer to take the time to light those votives by hand, rather than haul in a starship-class cannon, sir.”
“Regardless of whether or not you care to use them, if they are now under your command, then the Feyori are under our command,” General Sranna stated.
Ia spoke on top of him, mindful of the two and a half seconds of delay in the current relay system. Her timing was intended to cut off the orders he was about to give . . . which, as a member of the Command Staff and thus in command of all four Branches, she and her troops would have been required to obey. “I’m sorry, General, but I cannot do what you were about to say. The Feyori will obey my orders because they have been forced to recognize me as a fellow Player in their infernal, alien Game, but I have in turn been forced by the same rules of their own Game to limit the moves I can make strictly to my own area of influence.
“You are a bug,” she stated flatly as he fell silent, frowning at her image on his screen. “No offense to our K’Katta allies, General T’Tkul . . . but you are all nothing more than an ant to them. An insignificant centipede, something either to be stepped around or stepped upon. As you yourself would not take orders from a tiny bug, they will not take orders from you. Nor could I successfully pretend that your orders for them are my idea because those orders are not the task for which we will need them.
“I am obligated, by my vows as a soldier and an officer, to inform my superiors when their battle plans will cause far more harm than good. I am further obligated as a precognitive to refuse to carry out any orders that I can foresee will do far more harm than good. The JAG rulings of the military case for Sergeant Casey MacOwens versus the Terran Army during the AI War permit the use of Johns and Mishka versus the United Nations to be applied in such cases.
“I would rather not have to use that ruling, sirs,” Ia stated levelly. “So I am telling you, as a duly registered and Space Force–acknowledged precognitive, that trying to get the Feyori to fight our wars for us above and beyond the limited role which I already have planned for them is a bad idea. They might get the idea they can swoop in and take over, sirs. That, and it will cause too much harm. As I said, it’s like taking a Starstrike cannon to an entire cathedral when all you need is a handful of candles lit.”
Sranna sat back in the shadows, folding his arms across his chest. “So what, exactly, are we to do with the situation on Dabin, Ship’s Captain Ia?” he asked her. “You want us to remove Mattox and his top brass for incompetency and conspiracy to support incompetency. But whom do we put into their place? You?”
“I can only stay on Dabin until my new ship is ready to be crewed, sir,” Ia reminded him. “My job here has always been to provide the best possible battle plans, not to lead. If the troops are given the leeway to resume the tactical flexibility they should have been employing from the start, with my precognitively enhanced plans assisting them with advice on how to regain all the territory lost, then my part of the job will be done. They will get the job done. Any competent strategist and leader from the 1st Division 6th Cordon can take over at that point.”
“Yes, but which competent soul should be picked to take Mattox’s place, in your opinion?” Gadalah asked. Unlike Sranna, who remained leaning back in the shadows, she leaned forward, fingers interlaced as her forearms rested on the table.
Grateful for the opening, Ia fished a datachip out of her pocket and slotted it into the relay’s workstation, transferring its information to the tribunal officers. “I have prepared a list of candidates to fill in the gaps in the 1st Division’s echelons, in different arrangements for the Department of Innovations to look over for their analysis and approval. They’re being transmitted on subchannel alpha . . . now. Most of the suggested officers will require promotion, and several of them by more than one grade. Of the twenty-seven possibilities, I have earmarked three top contenders here on Dabin, particularly if they follow my battle plans for clearing up the mess Mattox made of everything. After that, they should be competent enough to handle the rest of the war on Dabin on their own without any further guidance, which is my ultimate goal.
“I have also included two higher-ranked alternates in the top five, ones who could be brought in from outside when the planetary blockade has been broken if none of these three are deemed acceptable by the Command Staff as replacements in the long term. However, by immediately assigning strategic goals, then decentralizing the command structure on how to apply the tactics needed to achieve them, the various Companies of the 1st Division 6th Cordon Army will be able to handle each portion of each task under their own purview,” Ia stated. “They won’t need a Division commander right away.”
“Decentralize?” General T’Tkul asked, her translator box adding a slight lilt, no doubt translating literally the K’Kattan equivalent of skepticism.
“For at least a month Terran Standard, sir,” Ia told her. “The apparent chaos of so many disparate Companies acting on their own will be mitigated by inter-Company cooperation in tactical planning at the local level. That is, if they are given leave to organize things as they themselves best see fit, being the ones actually familiar with the local problems they face.
“Such methods haven’t been used on Dabin under Mattox’s command, but every single soldier in the Space Force Army has been trained since Basic for the flexibility of maneuver warfare, which is what this is,” Ia said, her gaze more on the shadowy form of Sranna than on the well-lit ones of Gadalah and T’Tkul, or the half-lit figure of Hestin. “The enemy is like a hive of wasps that is busy trying to build a nest. We nee
d to shake them up and smash their hive, destroying their budding infrastructure so that when the blockade is finally broken, they will be unable to dig in and resist when it is time for them to be driven from this planet. That strategy calls for individual sorties, sapper attacks, and sabotage efforts, maximizing the Army’s efforts while minimizing wasted resources and reducing unnecessary casualty lists.”
“And again we come back to your claims of efficiency and frugality,” General Gadalah said, her tone dry. To the left of her, Hestin looked like he was reviewing the lists Ia had transmitted, using a workstation embedded into the tabletop. Gadalah seemed to prefer paper. “Tell me, Captain. Which was it that prompted your actions when you hugged Commander Meyun Harper, according to not only your own arm unit, but the units of several others in your Company a few days ago? Efficiency, or frugality?”
“Neither,” Ia admitted calmly. “It was my humanity.”
“Please,” Lieutenant General Hestin snorted, lifting his gaze from his screen to the pickups for their communications link. “You claim to be the commander in chief of the Feyori nation, you freely admit that you are half-alien and that they acknowledge you as a fellow Meddler, yet you claim your humanity caused you to embrace your second-in-command? I’d say it was your past relationship with him.”
“I have never allowed any relationship, past, present, or future, to interfere with my sense of duty, General,” Ia said, flexing her knees slightly. “Until coming to Dabin, Commander Harper had never served as a Commanding Officer. As an officer, yes, but never the one in command. He lost two of our soldiers in the most recent engagement, under his command, using his plans. It may have been a very long time since you yourselves, sirs, lost that first soldier under a solo combat command directed under your own plans, but I am quite sure that if you cast your minds back to that day, you will remember the anguish, guilt, and grief over the fact that you could not change their deaths.