by Jean Johnson
PRAISE FOR
A SOLDIER’S DUTY
“Reminiscent of both Starship Troopers and Dune…Successfully balances its military and science fiction elements.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Full of suspense, danger, and intrigue, this new series shows a lot of promise. Fans of military science fiction will definitely want to check out this surprising and exciting novel.”
—SciFiChick.com
“A good read.”
—SF Signal
PRAISE FOR JEAN JOHNSON
AND THE SONS OF DESTINY NOVELS
“Jean Johnson’s writing is fabulously fresh, thoroughly romantic, and wildly entertaining. Terrific—fast, sexy, charming, and utterly engaging. I loved it!”
—Jayne Ann Krentz, New York Times bestselling author
“Cursed brothers, fated mates, prophecies, yum! A fresh new voice in fantasy romance, Jean Johnson spins an intriguing tale of destiny and magic.”
—Robin D. Owens, RITA Award–winning author
“A must-read for those who enjoy fantasy and romance. I…eagerly look forward to each of the other brothers’ stories. Jean Johnson can’t write them fast enough for me!”
—The Best Reviews
“[It] has everything—love, humor, danger, excitement, trickery, hope, and even sizzling-hot…sex.”
—Errant Dreams Reviews
“Enchantments, amusement, and eight hunks and one bewitching woman make for a fun romantic fantasy…Humorous and magical…A delightful charmer.”
—Midwest Book Review
“A paranormal adventure series that will appeal to fantasy and historical fans, plus time-travel lovers as well…Delightful entertainment.”
—Romance Junkies
“An intriguing new fantasy romance series…A unique combination of magic, time travel, and fantasy that will have readers looking toward the next book.”
—Time Travel Romance Writers
“The writing is sharp and witty, and the story is charming. [Johnson] makes everything perfectly believable. She has created an enchanting situation and characters that are irascible at times and lovable at others. Jean Johnson…is off to a flying start. She tells her story with a lively zest that transports a reader to the place of action. I can hardly wait for the next one. It is a must-read.”
—Romance Reviews Today
“A fun story. I look forward to seeing how these alpha males find their soul mates in the remaining books.”
—The Eternal Night
“An intriguing world…An enjoyable hero…An enjoyable showcase for an inventive new author. Jean Johnson brings a welcome voice to the romance genre, and she’s assured of a warm welcome.”
—The Romance Reader
“An intriguing and entertaining tale of another dimension. It will be fun to see how the prophecy turns out for the rest of the brothers.”
—Fresh Fiction
Titles by Jean Johnson
Theirs Not to Reason Why
A SOLDIER’S DUTY
AN OFFICER’S DUTY
HELLFIRE
The Sons of Destiny
THE SWORD
THE WOLF
THE MASTER
THE SONG
THE CAT
THE STORM
THE FLAME
THE MAGE
The Guardians of Destiny
THE TOWER
SHIFTING PLAINS
BEDTIME STORIES
FINDING DESTINY
THE SHIFTER
THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY
HELLFIRE
JEAN JOHNSON
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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HELLFIRE
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2013 by G. Jean Johnson.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.
ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-62488-3
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Ace mass-market edition / August 2013
Cover art by Gene Mollica.
Cover design by Annette Fiore Defex.
Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This whole series is dedicated to the men and women around the world who have been, are, and will be willing to step between their fellow sentient beings and whatever threatens them. Specifically, the military, but this includes police officers, medical personnel, firefighters, and other emergency services. As always, I have worked to create my vision of the future with a deep respect for those who serve in the present day.
While the Terran United Planets Space Force has been based along the lines of several real-world military systems, it is not meant to represent any one particular such military; for example, the TUPSF-MC is not the same as the United States Marine Corps, and the TUPSF-Navy is not the same thing as the Royal Navy of the British armed forces. Though there are several things they and other militaries have in common with the versions I have created for these four books, there are also many differences.
If you, the reader, find any difference in the various military functions in this story that you do not agree with, please remember either it was placed there because it was sifted from a different nation’s military traditions, it was deliberately chosen to be different by the author, it was simply a case of ignorance on the author’s part, it may have come from a different person’s perspective uncovered during the many interviews I have conducted with people from various military branches around the world…or it just wound up appearing in the story because it sounded cool. (When telling a fiction story, the Rule of Cool and the Rule of Funny automatically get a higher pay grade and rank than the Rule of How Things Actually Work.)
If you have served or are serving to help defend, protect, and better your home, wherever that home may be, I salute you with respect. If you are the spouse, relative, or friend of someone who has served or is serving, I thank you deeply for the many kinds of support you give your loved ones in these services. For those of you who aren’t familiar with what it is to either serve or have someone you know serve, thank you for reading this series; I hope I have given you a glimpse of military life. This series is not an accurate window into the real-world day-to-day lives of the men and women serving out there, but I have tried to give you a window into the hearts and minds of those who are willing to serve.
My thanks, as ever, go
to my beta editors, Buzzy, NotSoSaintly, Alexandra, and Stormi, and to my many readers for taking a chance on these books. Thank you very much for picking up this one and the others. May you continue to enjoy my efforts to entertain and inspire you.
Jean
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
PROLOGUE
The past is nothing more than a story we tell to each other. It is not meant for mere mortal hands to erase or sever…though it is not immutable. In fact, it can be changed, if only by God and madmeioas. To all others, it is indeed written in stone.
Shakespeare once said, “What’s past is prologue,” but you must understand that this is true only because the story never ends. Yes, you had a beginning in your birth, and yes, you will have an ending in your death, but the story itself never ends. Still, each segment is preserved in one shining moment, a granite tome held up to the light of the universe so that it can be revealed in all its horrors and all its glories…and thus preserved forever. But only in the past.
Eventually, even the slowest of readers will come to that last line, and must turn the story to a new page.
~Ia
SEPTEMBER 23, 2495 TERRAN STANDARD
THE TOWER
TERRAN UNITED PLANETS SPACE FORCE HEADQUARTERS
EARTH, SOL SYSTEM
The voices kept impinging on her senses, distracting her from her search. Ia wished they would shut up.
“What about Lieutenant Second Class Brad Arstoll? She served in Basic Training with him,” a middle-aged woman offered.
“Yes, he’s just finished his Marines Academy training. But that means he’s still a new officer. Can we really risk the 2nd Platoon being led by a raw cadet?” an elderly man countered.
Their voices blended together, male and female, middle-aged and older, like the babbling of a brook in the background of her awareness.
Physically, Ia stood in one of the research rooms used by the Department of Innovations, a chamber filled with banks of workstations ringing an oval table scattered with datapads and stacks of personnel printouts. The walls themselves were mostly datascreens broken by a trio of doors. Each screen displayed a larger-than-life face and the bare-bones stats of the Service record belonging to each profiled soldier, flickering and shifting with each new suggestion.
Mentally, Ia stood on the grassy banks of Time itself, a rolling plain crisscrossed by the tangled streams of millions of lives. They formed a complex tapestry where major events, which would normally stir the waters out of their banks, were actually overshadowed by the tiniest of ripples. Changes that she had to track down.
“Arstoll may be a new officer, but he is Field Commissioned, so he does have some combat leadership experience,” a second, older woman pointed out. “Plus, he’s somewhat familiar with the captain even if they haven’t seen each other in years. Not to mention their compatibility charts look pretty good.”
“Familiarity doesn’t really come into it,” another male argued. “She needs a competent, combat-trained officer. I still say Lieutenant Dostoyervski is the best match—he should be her second-in-command.”
Something was rippling the waters of Time, disturbing her carefully laid plans like a deep, unseen current. If she didn’t track it down, it could erode the bank out from under her feet. That would be bad.
“His DoI file is sticky with bigger recommendations than the other candidates have,” the first male agreed. “And his psych profile does match in both compatibility and contracompatibility measurements with Captain Ia, here. It looks like he’d get along with the other officers, too…well, maybe not Helstead, if she decides to be headstrong. But that’s a problem for their CO to sort out. Learning to manage strong personalities could be a good lesson.”
She had already dismissed Dostoyervski. He wouldn’t do at all, not when her own considerations took into account several variables not even the DoI could foresee. Their voices were annoying her with trivial details. “Shhh…”
They didn’t pay much attention to her, other than to speak a little more quietly. The men and women of the Department of Innovations were a different breed from the standard soldier. Most of them were career, with the average number of years in the various branches of Service rarely being less than fifteen, and usually above twenty. In fact, many of them were technically retirees from active duty, able to bring those years of long-term military experience to the task of figuring out who out there had the skills to be promoted and fast-tracked, or stalled and even demoted. Most had training in psychology and xenopsychology, tactics and long-term strategy. All of them were expert data miners.
In a unified military composed of roughly two billion soldiers, they were the best at knowing who was who in the Terran United Planets Space Force and where that person should probably go. It was their job to debate who should be one of the three Platoon lieutenants Ia needed. Their job to select the best soldiers for a particular set of tasks. Their job to make the final decision, normally.
Normally, someone in Ia’s situation wouldn’t even be here, let alone have much say in the process. If the psychological filtration programs and the best judgments of the DoI members came up with matches too close to call, they might contact a superior officer to solicit their opinion, yes, but that officer never came to the physical headquarters of the DoI, or even to one of its many branch offices scattered through Terran space.
However, this situation was not normal. Ia was already inside the Tower, the nickname for the sprawling, administrative heart of the Space Force on Earth. This particular branch of the DoI was located no more than a kilometer or so from the office of her new commanding officer, Admiral John Genibes of the Branch Special Forces. She was already operating under special dispensation for other reasons, including a form of carte blanche—albeit one with a very strict double-indemnity clause—so Ia had arranged to visit this data-crammed room in person.
All she wanted to do was to select the perfect-for-her crew, comparing their potential actions to the needs of the right future, the one that would save their descendants from a massive calamity three centuries away. Unfortunately, the men and women around her were trying to help her select the perfect crew. She didn’t need perfect, as if the soldiers in question were diamonds, prepolished and cut. She needed raw material, flexible and bold, obedient yet innovative, men and women capable of doing truly great things under her command, yet very carefully not needed elsewhere. Carbon fibers, not jewels.
Those who would be needed elsewhere had to remain elsewhere. What she needed were the nobodies, the throwaways whose lives wouldn’t make a palpable difference anywhere else. Straw soldiers who, under her guidance, could be spun into threads of pure gold for the tapestry she needed to weave.
It should have been easy for her to sort through the many possibilities lining the path she needed the future to follow. Easy to pluck out the names, the personalities, the faces of everyone she needed. But something was wrong.
This isn’t getting me anywhere. Working at her usual perception level, a woman standing on a low-rolling prairie crisscrossed by life-streams, she couldn’t see where the subtle problems all began. So either it’s macroscale measurements, or microscale. Micro would be more accurate, but I don’t even know where to start, and there’s too much out there to just drop into the waters of some life-stream randomly…So, macro it is.
Visualization was usually a psychic’s best friend. Grounding and centering exercises helped stabilize the mind, and mental bubble-shields walled out unwanted influences. Most of the time, exercising t
hese abilities was analogous to humming a tune for background noise, or carrying an object; once a psi learned how, it didn’t take much effort. It did, however, take time. Ia had spent the last eight years of her life training her mind to carry the weight of Time itself.
Instead of standing on a vast field, she shrunk the timeplains down to a brocaded tapestry. Life-rivers became threads as the rolling grass and rippling waters vanished. They ran in ways contrary to the normal warp and weft, more like a complex skein than a formal weave, but the analogy wasn’t meant to be perfect. Lifting it up with mental hands, she peered along the edge of Time, checking for anomalies in the fabric.
She couldn’t hear the voices of the others anymore, couldn’t see them at the periphery of her vision. Focused on the nearly two-dimensional image held in her mind, Ia spotted the first slub a few years down from the moment of now in the pale golden tapestry stretched out before her. It was subtle indeed, visible only as a metaphor, but the beige thread was palpably thicker than the others.
It was also not alone. Now that she could see the first one, others here and there caught her attention. They were noticeable because they were just a little bit thicker than they should have been. Narrowing her attention to a close knot of those thickened life-threads, Ia queried her precognitive abilities.
Whose lives are these? What do they have in common?
Visualization was the key. Her vast abilities knew what was going on, but only on a subconscious level at best. Subconsciously, she sensed a hint of danger in the timeplains, just enough to prick at her instincts. Her conscious mind was still mortal, though; her intellect, smart as she was, couldn’t yet sort out the differences. A merging of the two, instinct and thought, might help. So, what parts of these threads are in common with each other, and what bits are distinct?
Color seeped into the threads, delineating each life and its impact on the others around it. Not just the ones she saw, but new ones, extra slubs of undue influence. Lifting herself above the tapestry, Ia could see the colors, plural. More than one influenced the timestream-threads…but the later ones seemed to come into play only after the first one, a purple hue not too far off from the petals of an iris flower, had wreaked most of the initial damage over a dozen key lives.
