Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  This time, she wasn’t greatly weakened by an infection in her blood; this time, she had the stamina to counteract gravity for more than a few seconds. She was still weak, but she could do this. Whispering under her breath, Ia counted floors starting from the seventeenth. She reached three, two, one…and started counting alphabetically, ay, bee, cee, until she reached the highest floor, eff. It wouldn’t do to forget which floor they were supposed to be on when they returned, after all.

  There was only one corridor off this hexagonal section, a single balcony instead of an open tangle of vaulted archways. Landing them next to a control grid, she released their hands and stiffened her muscles, trying to hide the way her limbs threatened to tremble. Weeks of rest in transit with gentle exercise had restored some of her energy reserves, her mental and physical strength, but levitating a few chairs and cups for a few seconds was not the same thing as floating three muscular heavyworlders a hundred meters upward.

  She said nothing about her moment of exhaustion as Harper played his bracer-light over their surroundings; she was just grateful the strange crystalline structures distracted both him and Helstead. By the time he aimed his arm light her way, she had caught her breath again. Nodding at his unspoken question, she moved over to the nearest wall and grasped the large crystal shaft Harper’s beam of light had found. A soft clunk lit up the floor they were on when she pulled down on the lever, though unlike earlier, the other levels below this one remained dark.

  Pulling a cloth from the side pocket on her backpack, Ia wiped down the shaft, then pressed her hand to the flat, translucent gold surface positioned next to it. Energy flowed into her, preconverted from geothermal energy to kinetic inergy by the strange technology maintaining this place. Refreshed, she pulled her hand away and scrubbed at the panel, removing the traces of her touch with quick strokes. Not that there was much chance of their being found, or their visit being uncovered, but she wanted to be thorough to set an example for her restless second officer.

  Beckoning her companions to follow, Ia moved up the corridor at a pace somewhere between a lope and a run. Twenty meters down the hall, the passage cut into the mountain opened up into a largish chamber, one built with a high-vaulted dome. At the center point was a largish, throne-like contraption. Surrounding it on all six sides were half a dozen odd, huge, crystal-muzzled guns, each one braced on a pedestal mount.

  Ia stopped near the throne-thing and slung the backpack off her shoulders, lowering it to the polished stone floor. Channels had been cut into the floor and filled with the same sort of transparent crystals fitted into the gun-things; they looked vaguely like the crysium from her homeworld, but were almost colorless instead of pastel. The channels disappeared into the walls with no reason or explanation visible, though she knew from her postcognitive peeks what their function was.

  “Ia? What is this place, exactly?” The question came from Meyun. His gaze flicked back and forth between the contraptions and Ia. “It’s nothing like the rest of what we’ve seen, unless you count the light fixtures. In fact, it looks like something a…a fantasy sculptor might make—is this more of that Atannan tech you were talking about?”

  She crouched and opened up the backpack. “Yes, and no. You’re looking at the single most dangerous piece of experimental equipment ever created. If wielded incorrectly, it is capable of torturing any form of sentient life trapped within its grasp. Up to and including a Feyori.” Digging out a trio of oval hovercams, she clicked each one on, fished out their remotes, and sent them soaring up and around the room, scanning everything in their path. “In the wrong hands, it can kill a Feyori, physical or soap bubble. And in the right hands…it can turn a half-breed into a Feyori.”

  “Into a Feyori?” he repeated, crouching at her side.

  “Yes. I need you to re-create a handheld version of it, duplicate it five or ten times, depending on how strong you can make it, and shoot me with it. You have eight months to get it right, and you are not to tell anyone what you’re working on. Lie to your subordinates, lie to your superiors—though you can tell everyone you’re working on an experimental type of gun—and lie to everyone except me, of course, but figure it out and get it done.

  “One more thing, Meyun.” She gave him a sober look. “Whatever you do, do not allow anyone to copy your notes; nor are you allowed to back it up to any shipboard workstation. Keep it entirely on nonsynchronized datapads so that you can destroy the information completely, pads and all, when you are done.” Glancing to the right, she sighed. “…Delia, don’t touch that. You know better than to leave fingerprints up here.”

  “Fingerprints, hell,” the shorter woman shot over her shoulder, though she did back up from one of the oversized ray-gun things. “We’ve already left plenty of DNA evidence in shed hair and skin cells. I don’t see what the big deal is at this point.”

  “Hair and skin are evidence which could have wafted up from below…and most of which will be removed by at least three rounds of cleaning crews between now and the Immortal’s next scheduled visit to this exact place,” she argued back. “The Immortal would be upset to know we’d copied the information down below—and we will be copying some of it—but up here is another matter.

  “If I hadn’t screwed up a few months back, we wouldn’t even have to be up here, but we are. And we’re here only to get enough visuals so that Meyun will have a better chance of figuring out the Immortal’s construction notes,” Ia told her. “That means we touch nothing beyond planting our p-suited feet on the floor, and that I alone touch anything else up here. Including the power switch for the lights. You can look, but you only touch the floor with your boots, Lieutenant Commander.”

  Sighing, Helstead pulled a pair of her miniature stilettos from her hair and moved around the gun. She stared at its backside, then turned and looked into one of the large niches forming the sides of the space, twirling the long, thin, sheath-wrapped blades. “Joy. Yet more stacks of stone tablets. Who does this Immortal think she is anyway, Moses? Or maybe a burning bush? If I were to pick up one of these, would the first few words read ‘Thou Shalt Not’ something-or-other?”

  Harper smothered a laugh. Unsuccessfully, since it escaped as a snort.

  Ia smiled but shook her head. “I’m afraid we’re in the wrong section for anything even remotely like that. As soon as the hovercams have scanned everything, I’ll run all the tiles past their sensors. Telekinetically, since stray hairs and skin cells could be wafted up here on random currents over the decades, but fingerprints are proof positive of an actual visit to this part of the complex.”

  “Just how big is this place?” Delia asked her, walking back to where the other two still crouched. “All of it, I mean, not just this alcove.”

  “I’m not completely sure, but I think by this stage, it covers around a hundred kilometers of subterranean passageways in length, and a good twenty or more in width,” Ia estimated. Both of her companions choked. She shook her head. “The Immortal started excavating these caverns thirteen thousand years ago. What you’ve seen so far is only the beginning; it’s not just all those tablets filled with carved writings.”

  “Why stone?” Harper asked her. “The thickness of these slabs is about as far from data-storage efficient as you can get. In the thickness of one of those tablets, you could stuff an entire paper-style book with information.”

  “She chose stone because it is the cheapest permanent recording medium at hand. Paper and plexi disintegrate, magnetism can revert or be subverted, quantum entanglement requires ongoing uninterrupted power…Her notes are designed to be read by Human eyes, without needing any sort of mechanical assistance. The Immortal started these records literally back in the Stone Age, in a very primitive era. Stone was all she had access to, originally.”

  Delia grunted, strolling away again. Ia lifted her voice slightly so she could be heard, though she didn’t shout.

  “It’s true that stone takes a lot of storage space, but it won’t disintegrate, the carving
s won’t fade, and the only thing you have to worry about is the tablets breaking,” Ia continued, her attention more on the task of guiding the cameras for all the best angles than on their conversation. “Plus, as I said, the tablets aren’t the only things down here. There are uncounted kilometers of artifacts as well, all carefully preserved in cases filled with argon gas. I haven’t bothered to count just how many floors and sectors. It’s not important, here and now. Getting this stuff recorded is.”

  “Okay, I got a question,” Helstead offered, lifting her chin at the other two. “Why argon?”

  Harper answered her, watching the cameras as they made their slow recording sweeps. “Argon gas is naturally inert, and thus the best possible preservative if you want to keep something in its natural atmospheric pressure and normal temperature range.”

  “This machinery would be preserved in a gas-filled cabinet, too,” Ia added, nodding at the chair and its odd cannons, “except the Immortal actually uses it from time to time. Which means she has to repair it occasionally, which means she’d notice fingerprints.”

  The cameras came swooping back, their task complete. So did Helstead, though she strolled instead of swooped, too restless to stay in one spot for long. “So what does she use it for?”

  Ia wrinkled her nose and lifted a finger to her temple, circling it slightly. “Her memory’s not quite stable. When she wants to remember everything in detail—when she wants her memories organized, rather than cluttered up and overlaid by a hundred thousand similar days of a hundred thousand similar routines, eating drinking, et cetera—she zaps herself with this contraption.

  “I’d put myself in the chair and fire it up right now, since I need to make that transition within the next year or so…but the spike in the power chart from the energy required would stand out at a sixty-two percent chance whenever she’d check those maintenance charts, and I really do not want the Immortal knowing I was here, if I can help it,” Ia finished.

  Rising, she fiddled with the remotes for each of the cameras. They soared off toward one of the tablet-stacked alcoves. Picking up the empty bag, Ia followed in their wake.

  “You could’ve come down here on your own,” Harper told her. “Why bring us?”

  “For Helstead, it’s a show of trust. She needs to know I can trust her with dangerous secrets, and I need to know she can keep her mouth shut when it comes to the biggest secret on Earth. Or under it,” Ia amended, glancing at the shorter woman. She received a sardonic smile in return. Looking back over her shoulder at her first officer, Ia added, “For you, I wanted you to see the machines. The tablets have schematics drawn on them, and you’ll have enough video to re-create them in three dimensions on your datapads, but the Immortal’s notation system is a bit more eclectic than the standards used by the Space Force Engineering Corps.”

  Lifting her hand, she started peeling tablets off the top of the nearest stack. The hovercams swooped and hummed, moving up into position. Each tablet soared past all three cameras, moving just slow enough to let their neatly carved surfaces be thoroughly scanned. At the end of the stack, all the tablets flipped over and soared back the other way, displaying their other sides, with the last in the row being scanned first.

  “I’ve already programmed the cameras with a numbering algorithm,” she told Harper in a quiet aside. As the tablets returned to their spot, they flipped over and clicked very softly as they landed in place. The noise they made was no louder than fingernails lightly drummed on a tabletop, if said nails and table were made out of stone. “They’ll be listed by 0001a, 0001b, 0002a, 0002b, so on and so forth, in the order they come out of the stacks. You’ll have to do a lot of reading in your spare time in order to make your deadline.”

  “That’s assuming I can decipher whatever writing system she’s used,” he pointed out wryly. “I only know two languages by heart, Terranglo and Mandarin, with scraps of Gaelic thrown into the mix. If she’s really fourteen thousand years old, I’m not exactly fluent in Paleolithic cave drawings,” he quipped wryly.

  “Meyun, she was born in our future. The near future, roughly two centuries from now. She thinks and speaks in Terranglo,” Ia reassured him. “Of course, she knows a couple hundred other languages, but the Terran trade tongue is the one she wrote most of her observations in. At least, here on Earth. She has another Vault on V’Dan, with the tablets there mostly written in High V’Dan. You’ll be able to read these tablets; don’t worry.

  “Mind you, the Immortal organized them chronologically, from her earliest experimental stages all the way through to the Scholar War and beyond, so you’ll have to sort out the relevant bits—I’d do it myself, but while I can see this, it doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m not an engineer. Some of what you need may be near the beginning, some of it near the end,” she cautioned. “I don’t know. I’m counting on you to figure it out.”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m going to be dating anyone,” he grumbled. “So I’ll have plenty of time in my off-duty hours, I guess.

  That made her smile wryly. Another gesture of her hand sent the next stack of tiles soaring out and back. “Welcome to my life.”

  “No, thank you,” he muttered.

  “Too late,” she teased dryly. “You already agreed to it.”

  “Only for a year,” Meyun whispered under his breath.

  Helstead eyed both of them. She had stopped several meters away, but it was possible she could have heard his final comment anyway. “Knock it off, you two. No fraternizing among the cadre. Captain’s orders.”

  That made Ia choke on a laugh. “Yes. Yes, they are.”

  “What about the other thing we’re here to find, the OTL-to-FTL conversion or whatever?” Harper asked Ia.

  “It’s not in a sensitive area,” Ia dismissed, already moving on to the third stack. “We won’t have to ditch the AIs and fly off. In fact, that session will go faster than this one since there aren’t nearly as many tablets to record. You’ll find the Immortal’s notes on those much easier to read, Meyun, because she wasn’t the one experimenting with hyperwarp transit; she just wrote down what she already knew. The problem most engineers of our era have had is that they keep trying to treat the problem of wedding FTL to OTL like the way atmospheric pilots treated subsonic versus supersonic speeds before realizing it was a matter of inversion.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Harper muttered, staring at her. “It’s that simple?”

  “The theory, yes. The implementation, no. When you go supersonic, which is like what hyperwarp does, all the flight controls on an aircraft get flipped around,” she warned him. “You can sort of get where you need to go by cramming FTL warp fields into an OTL hyperrift, but a courier-sized vessel isn’t big enough to convert the energy needs for both OTL and FTL. And to open a hyperrift big enough to accommodate a ship large enough to carry panels for both, the Solaricans have had to rely upon naturally occurring wormholes as opposed to machine-made ones—which means they can use properly modulated shield energies to open the rift once it’s been found, but it also limits the entry and exit points to wherever that natural rift wants to go.”

  “How does the Immortal know about OTL/FTL conversions?” he asked her, his attention split between the swirling stacks of tablets and his captain’s face.

  “Her mother will run the first nonmilitary ship fitted with the first official version of the hyperwarp drive…and will at some point accidentally trip over the same natural hyperrift that my homeworld’s first wave of colonists tripped over, squirting her into Sanctuarian orbit about two hundred years from now, where she will run across the Immortal’s father,” Ia related, her attention split between his question and the tiles swooshing out and clacking back into place. “Shey—the Immortal—will be born within Sanctuarian jurisdiction, grow up a spacer’s brat, and learn all manner of interesting things from her mother, including the history of the hyperwarp drive’s development.”

  “And then you’ll exile her to the distant past, where she’ll b
e stuck living through all that history,” he said.

  “Tell me something, Captain,” Helstead asked, completing another circuit—without touching—of the throne-like chair and its bizarre ray-gun things, “does the older version of the Immortal live past the point where her younger self is born? Or does she vanish, in order to prevent her from contacting herself, accidentally or otherwise?”

  “She has a beginning just like all of us, and she has an ending,” Ia told the shorter woman. “It’s just that a large part of her life has been bent out of the normal flow of time so that it takes place in the past. As for the exact nature of her ending point…let’s just say it’s complicated and leave it at that.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Helstead muttered sardonically, standing in place and rocking from toes to heels and back. “Of course, sir. Whatever you say, sir. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say three bags full, sir!”

  Ia bit her lip to keep from smiling at Helstead’s quip, not wanting the tablets to waver in her amusement. Or at least, she tried. It was hard to remain sober when the other two snickered outright.

  Several hours later, Ia, Harper, and Helstead found themselves bowed into the presence of the Grandmaster of the Afaso Order. Their mottled camouflage Greys, obviously military in cut and style, didn’t match the more peaceful-looking green and brown batiks worn by the monks escorting them, but the smile curling the broad lips of the Grandmaster—a smile with closed lips, displaying no teeth—was as warm and welcoming as if they were all close friends.

  “Ahhh, Ia, my mok’kathh, what a pleasssurrre it isss to sssee you againnn,” he half hissed, holding his arms out as he rose from his Tlassian-style stool and moved around the corner of his desk. Ia quickly shrugged out of her backpack, aware of his intent. Smiling herself, Ia turned her back on him, letting the saurian hug her from behind.