by Jean Johnson
His surface roiled, agitated by her words.
(Mind to mind, there is no lying,) Ia projected, staring past her distorted reflection on what passed for the energy-being’s surface. (You fight me, and your precious Game will be destroyed. Vladistad, do you understand? You try to counterfaction me, and you will be the ones destroyed. Salut, I promise you. So. When I call for you, you will answer. What I request of you, you will do. We get one shot at this, Meddler. You will not disrupt my Game. Or we will all die . . . and I will make sure you as a whole race go first.
(My Prophetic Stamp on that.)
Releasing both of them from the timeplains, Ia landed back in her body feeling more wearied than before. Most of the strength she had used had been his strength. Which would disturb him even more once he realized it, since to borrow another Feyori’s energy was an intimacy reserved mostly for either family or for procreation. But it was necessary; she simply hadn’t enough of her own.
At least I won’t get pregnant off of that, Ia knew. I’m still very much a matter-based entity.
He shuddered mentally, though didn’t seem to be enraged by what she had done to him. (For which I am grateful. I am not counterfaction to your father, but neither am I faction. Nor am I insane enough to breed with a half-breed. I have my own lineage-pawns to establish. So kindly do not do that again. As for your warnings and your demands . . . they will be considered, but that is all. Claim all you want, we will not believe that you are the Prophet of a Thousand Years until it is thoroughly proven. Or disproven.)
(Then I invoke the Right of Simmerings. You will not interfere for an agreed-upon span of years, while my plays take shape.)
(You know the Rules of the Game. I find that disturbing,) he murmured.
She smiled faintly. (I spent most of the last three years preparing myself both physically and mentally. The Game was just one of many things I have studied and learned. I invoke the Right of Simmerings for seven Terran Standard years,) she repeated mentally, (or until such time as at least one of you concedes I am the Prophet of a Thousand Years.)
He considered her offer. His mental control was good enough, she could only sense the shifting of the liquid silver still pressing against her mind. Then again, he was an energy-based being, for all he was currently in a matter-shaped body; thoughts were energy, and no one could manipulate energy like a Meddler.
( . . . Until three of us concede you are the Prophet, or six Terran Standard years have passed.)
(Agreed,) Ia confirmed, not needing to give the offer much thought.
(I accept your Right of Simmerings. I do not acknowledge you as the Prophet of a Thousand Years at this time . . . but I will watch. I will also pass the word to keep an eye on you . . . but that is all. The rest will be up to you.) He paused, then added in warning, (Be advised, if we believe you are not the Prophet . . . at the end of those six years, we will destroy you and whatever pieces you have placed in the Game. You do not have the immunity of a true Feyori.)
(Understood. Don’t count on being able to destroy me, though,) she added in warning. (I know far more than you about what you could possibly do to me.)
From the subcurrents of his thoughts, he didn’t believe her. That was alright, though; she had bought enough time for the truth to unfold. From the sub-currents in his energies, she could tell he was putting an end to the illusion that she was still unconscious.
The doctor sighed audibly, still touching her at forehead and wrist. “. . . I think she’ll be waking up, soon.”
“Good,” Sgt. Tae muttered.
Ia had only vaguely been aware of his presence in the room before now. She also got the impression from the Meddler that her chief Drill Instructor had been waiting for her to awaken for a few hours now. The Meddler had a few more things to say before she “officially” awakened, though.
(You want to keep your psychic abilities a secret. I want to keep my true nature and purpose for being here a secret. Since you claim to know how to play the Game, I propose a short-faction alliance of mutually beneficial silence on these two points. Agreed?)
(Agreed. We have a short-faction alliance of mutual silence regarding our true natures.)
(Good. Now, I believe it is time for you to wake up. They do know you have an incredibly high KI rating, but I will now state that I cannot say if you have any actual psychic abilities . . . which by the terms of our short-faction agreement, I cannot say.)
Ia smiled again. This time she felt her lips actually moving, though it was a tremulous, weak effort.
“Yes, she’ll awaken shortly. She’s drifting in and out. She’s quite strong-willed. Of course, I’ve given her back enough KI so that she won’t suffer from depletion shock while she recovers. The rest of it will simply be a case of waiting for her to physically recover.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Now, when can I yell at her some more?”
The “doctor” chuckled. “Oh, I think she’s doing enough of that to herself, mentally. Wake up, Recruit!” he asserted, raising his voice enough to make her flinch a little, startled by it. “You’re not allowed to dodge the rest of your Basic Training by hiding in your dreams—wake up!”
Prying open her eyes, Ia squinted up at him. His expression was friendly enough, from his cheery bedside smile to the gleam in his grey eyes, but she knew the truth. She was just a Game piece to him—a potentially inconvenient Game piece—and while a player might have a particular fondness for the color red, it didn’t guarantee a fondness in that player for every red piece and pip encountered on the board.
Withdrawing his touch, he slid off the bed and nodded to the Drill Instructor. Sergeant Tae came over to the side of her bed. His hat was resting on his back, revealing the grey-salted black stubble passing for his hair. He eyed the intravenous drip supplying her blood with nutrients and glucose, the monitors quietly scanning her body every few seconds in a soft hum, and grimaced.
“Don’t you ever push yourself this hard again. You got that, Recruit?” he growled, though there was more concern than contention in his tone.
“Permission to speak freely, Sergeant?” Ia countered. Her mouth was dry and her throat was a little hoarse, but otherwise her tone was crisp.
“Granted.”
“Don’t you ever give me an impossible task, and then threaten me with a court-martial mere seconds later for not completing it. Sergeant.” She watched his nose wrinkle in disgust and just had to point out, “The only thing that kept me from moving that bus right away was the fact that it had been parked and the brake set.”
“Why the hell did you do it?” Tae asked. “If it was so impossible, why the hell did you do it?”
She was free of the grey-spot; she could sense the immediate pathways now. Clearer and easier than before, in fact, though she didn’t have much in the way of toe-dabbling energy to spare. Answering with the full truth was not an option, but then neither was Fatality Forty-Three, Perjury: lying to a superior officer, within or without the confines of a military court. She did have the historical impact of what happened at Vladistad on her side, but the fewer lies she gave, the less trouble she would get from her superiors.
What she could do, however, was choose to misinterpret. Technically, it wasn’t the truth he wanted . . . but neither was it a lie. Technically, it didn’t invoke Fatality Forty-Three.
“I told you,” Ia said, gazing up at him. “I wasn’t going to let you win. Somewhere along the way, it feels like you took my heavyworlder strengths and my willingness to strive to be a model soldier as some sort of personal affront. I am here to serve, and you don’t have the right to hate that about me, Sergeant. I will not screw up just because you expect me to.”
Bracing his hands on the edge of her bed, Tae leaned over her. “I wasn’t expecting you to screw up. I was fearing that you wouldn’t know when you screwed up! There is no room for a starry-eyed real-estater in the Corps. If you act out of arrogance, you can and will get your teammates killed. You can go out and buy yourself a star all you wa
nt—hell, you can splatter yourself from here to Zubeneschamali, just so long as you do it on your lonesome—but you do not endanger your fellow soldiers!”
Ia waited in silence, knowing he had one more thing to say. He confessed it after a long, hard pause.
“And I do not endanger my Recruits.” He looked down and away as he said it, half muttering to himself. “Not if I can help it.”
“I do know that, Sergeant. I was too tired at the time, and I didn’t think clearly. If I had, I’d have realized that there was no way you could court-martial me for failing to obey an impossible task . . . impossible merely because the brake was set,” Ia acknowledged lightly. “I also know, Sergeant, that it is your job to test us, so that we don’t fail under real-world conditions. Our enemies won’t be softhearted. They won’t rescind orders. There’s nothing you could do to us that will be as dangerous as the real risks of combat and war. Yet it is still your job to prepare us to the best of your ability. I know. And I don’t hold it against you.”
Tae studied her. “Just how much preparing and studying did you do, before joining the Corps, Recruit?”
“Once I knew where my talents were best suited? Quite a lot, Sergeant. Living on a brand-new colonyworld teaches you that survival requires preparation. The more prepared you are, the more likely you’ll survive, and maybe even thrive.” She gave him a lopsided smile. “And no, there aren’t a hundred more like me back home. We can’t afford to spare that many colonists just yet.”
“So you keep saying—you’re already a full day behind the rest of your class, Recruit,” Tae warned her, straightening and changing the subject. “Doctor Silverstone says it’ll take you two or three more days of recovery before you’ll be fit enough to go back to duty. In the meantime, you’ll be missing out on basic mechsuit instruction, which you and fourteen of your fellow recruits qualified for. The rest will be focusing on life-suit drills and career path classes. Or did you already study mechsuit mechanics, too, in your rush to get prepared for the SF-MC?”
“Oh, I studied it, Sergeant . . . but it’s all still just theory,” Ia temporized, giving him another lopsided smile. “Until I actually try it, I won’t know how well I can shift from theory to practical application.”
Sgt. Tae grunted. “Just don’t overdo it. You can kill yourself by doing too much, just as you can by not doing enough. Learn to strike the balance, and you might just make a good soldier. Screw it up, and both you and a whole lot of others will die.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. Believe me, I am aware of that.” Tired, she watched as he gave her a curt nod and left. The man with the grey coat and the grey eyes returned. Ia quirked an eyebrow at him. “Dr. Silverstone, I presume?”
“Indeed. I’m going to get you sitting upright in a few minutes, run a couple tests of your muscle density, range of motion, and reflexes, and then hopefully clear you for real food, instead of this drip-fed junk,” he agreed, bending over her bed frame so he could poke at the controls. (I can also hear you laughing mentally over the name. It wasn’t my choice. My insertion point came via a bush doctor named James Silverstone who died from a hovercar crash a thousand kilometers east of here, three and a half years ago. I discovered him, assumed his identity, and walked out of the bush as him.)
(With amnesia?) Ia asked, adjusting her position on the bed as he levered the upper half higher. (Isn’t that a bit cliché?)
(He wasn’t dead when I found him . . . and don’t think those thoughts. I didn’t kill him. His neural injuries were too severe even for me to heal. Since I couldn’t stop his death, I scanned his mind just before he died, and assumed his identity.) Running a palm scanner down her body, he stopped it over some of her worst bruises and tutted. “I’ll have to do some deep-tissue biokinesis here . . . and here. And over there, I think. That’ll take place after you eat, so your body has the biomatter it needs to replace what I’ll be psychically encouraging your own tissues to hurry up and use.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” (How many of you use dead or dying people as your “insertion points” anyway?)
(For a Right of Breeding? Not as often as you’d think. At least not when we’re male. Like your father undoubtedly did, it’s usually just a case of finding a suitable candidate, shifting shape into the appropriate type of male, swooping in, seducing, impregnating, and flying off again, to observe from afar to make sure the implantation isn’t rejected, one way or another. If we’re female . . . modern identity tracking methods make it harder to establish an identity long enough to stay in matter form and carry the progeny to term. Still, Belini likes being female, so “she” does it fairly often—that is, often by our terms. We do live for thousands of your years.)
(You should try Parker’s World.) At his sharp look, Ia smiled. Faintly, but she smiled. (Twenty years from now, lawlessness and laziness will start pervading and perverting their original organization and bureaucracy. Bribes will become accepted practice, and false idents not too difficult to purchase. Not to mention, you’ll be able to buy a new identity outright with feeble documentation in about fifty years, then you can go just about anywhere as a Terran citizen. So long as you can play the part of a heavyworlder, of course.)
(You insult our acting skills,) he quipped, tapping on her knees to gauge her reflex points.
Her legs twitched. (As the Gatsugi put it, “actor” and “liar” are one and the same thing.)
(And you insult us once again, little one. Perhaps I should jab you with an old-fashioned hypodermic needle, instead of a nice, numbing spraystick?)
She could tell from the brightening of the silver sphere in her mind that he was joking. Mostly. (You know what they say, a soldier just calls a comet a comet. Which means I’m a half-breed, so I’m only half the liar . . . excuse me, actor . . . that you are.)
(Careful. Everything you say and do can and will be shared with my fellow Feyori.)
(Bring ’em on. Just don’t violate my Right of Simmering. Even a half-breed is allowed that much leeway in the Game.)
(Only when the pieces are aware of it.) Finished with his cursory exam, Dr. Silverstone straightened. “. . . I’ll bet you’re hungry after all that exertion, particularly with that extra heavyworlder appetite of yours. I’ll have the cafeteria bring up something right away.”
“I’m so glad you could finally join us, Recruit Ia,” Sgt. Tae drawled two mornings later. He pointed at a bulky brown packing crate as big as an extra-wide coffin, which sat in solitary splendor in a corner of the gymnasium-sized classroom. “There’s your mechsuit. Since you seem to be such a good little student, so quick on the spot and so eager to study things in advance, I’m going to give you one chance to get into that suit, without any help . . . and if you can get at least seventy percent of it right, you won’t have to do any push-ups today. You don’t have to do it in a p-suit today, but you will learn tomorrow.”
Ia nodded and crossed to the case. Hauling it out on its wheels, she opened the case door. The suit inside looked like a humanoid robot, silvery and silent. Opening the lid of her military ident, she powered up the suit with a few coded taps of her fingers. Powered it up, and opened it up. Since she didn’t have to wear the weight suit for this drill—the mechsuit itself would become her resistance training, in a way—all she had to do was take off her boots and set them to one side, then make sure her pants were tucked into her socks so they wouldn’t catch on anything.
An examination of the various parts proved they were inspection ready, freshly minted in a military manufactory. Turning around, Ia stepped back and up into the case, slotting her feet one at a time into the balance receptors, which were fitted to accommodate her feet. The pelvic joints felt like they rode a little high, but she knew she would get used to them. Closing the lid of her arm unit, Ia slotted her arms into the half-open flexor gloves, leaned back into the thoracic cavity, and flexed her fingers in the glove controls.
Hissing faintly, the legs, arms, pelvis and torso plates snapped shut, sealing themselves with a low thru
m. A pull freed her arms from the padding. That gave her the leverage to haul her upper body partway out of the close-fitted foam, then her legs, and lastly her hips as the center-point of her balance. Stepping down and free, she tested the suit with a few steps. The floor was slightly uneven in spots, since while it was designed to accept the two hundred or more extra kilos in weight each mechsuit added to a recruit, even plexcrete could only withstand the machine-augmented force of a mechsuited soldier for so long before cracking and crumbling. Mindful of the patches underfoot, she tested her balance carefully.
“Twenty sit-ups for neglecting to also don your helm in a timely manner, Recruit,” Tae chastised her. At her quick look, he smirked. “I only said you wouldn’t have to do push-ups. Put on your helmet, and do your demerits in your suit, Recruit. Count off through your suit speakers at Volume 2 . . . assuming Hell Week didn’t burn away the memory of your mechsuit theory classes.”
“Sergeant, yes, Sergeant; no, they didn’t, Sergeant,” Ia agreed. She knew why he was picking on her again. Nobody else had needed two days to recover, and he wasn’t about to retard the rest of Class 7157’s advancement through their training program.
“And don’t gouge any chunks out of the floor,” Tae added briskly as she reached into the packing case for the helmet. “Fire up your helmet and run a level 1 diagnostics before your demerits, then a level 3 afterward. And pay attention to the rest of the class. We will not slow down just so you can bore us in the attempt to catch up.”
“Sergeant, yes, Sergeant.” Pulling the helm into place, she lined up the self-sealing neck flanges which would turn the mechsuit from a simple exoframe into a self-contained spacesuit, once the faceplate was sealed and a portable oxy-pack was hooked into her back. They didn’t need to be that tightly self-contained just yet, and both she and Tae knew it. She just didn’t want to give him any other reasons to nitpick her performance right now.