Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  “I’m Special Forces, sir; we take in all kinds,” he quipped. “I’ll ask Barstow if she wants a few private pointers so she can show up Siano next time in public, then ask her what she can teach me and some others in return.”

  “Good meioa,” Ia praised, as the lift arrived. “Merry Christmas, York. Or whatever your preferred holiday is.”

  “You, too, sir,” he returned.

  Nodding to him, she headed back to her office. Standoffs like the one between Siano and Doersch weren’t going to happen often, but they were going to happen while her disparate crew was still pulling itself together. Internecine fights had to be quelled as fast as possible. Actions and offers like York’s, those had to be encouraged, even rewarded. She needed everyone working together, trusting each other, and needed it all too soon.

  Trust in each other would do as much or more to save her Company as her own efforts could.

  JANUARY 16, 2496 T.S.

  SIC TRANSIT

  The quiet thrum of a starship in motion was broken by the beeping of her arm unit. Ia finished her current prophecy by imprinting the words into the workstation electrokinetically. Physically, she reached for the comm button. “Ia here. Go.”

  “Congratulations, Captain,” Harper’s voice stated. He sounded tired, yet satisfied. “It’s a brand-new baby stardrive. Nose cone A has been rewired to your specifics, and the warp-panel control programs recoded to compensate. All five simulation tests came up positive and fully functional…though I’m sure your gifts will have the final say. Unless you’re going to leave me in suspense and not let me know?”

  She smiled and closed her eyes. “Patience, Commander. Let me double-check…” Dipping into the timestreams, Ia checked the performance of the newly combined hyperwarp drive system. “Congratulations, Commander, it is indeed a healthy baby stardrive. Feel free to rotate out the extra personnel to the Wake Zone on Aft Deck 8. Keep a full crew in engineering, though. I’m going to take ’er out for a test drive.”

  “Already?” he asked. “Ah—don’t forget, it’ll take half an hour for everything to reboot with the new codes. We need to be at a dead stop or a low drift for that. But once that’s done, may I join you on the bridge for a front-seat view?”

  “Understood, and be my guest, but no backseat driving. I’ll go order the shutdown now. Ia out.”

  “Harper out.”

  She ended the call with another touch, then sat back, sighing. It didn’t matter exactly when she did this next part, only that it was done within the next two days. Now was as good a time as any, however. Scrubbing her face, Ia braced herself for what she was about to do.

  I swore an oath, when I joined the military, to be loyal to the Terran United Planets. I agreed to abide by the laws of the Terran United Planets…and in essence, to broker no deals with foreign powers, to share no military secrets, to not betray my chosen people. She had memorized that Oath of Service long ago, and the vows she had made still haunted her. If the Admiral-General knew just how far I’d stretch that carte blanche I bartered out of her, she’d have shot me herself on the spot when I barged into that sealed meeting. Maybe even nuked me from orbit…

  The morbid thought cheered her a little, but then her sense of humor had always been a little skewed. Or almost always; it had changed at the age of fifteen. Standing, Ia secured her desk, pulled a spare datapad from one of the drawers, and headed for the side door. Not the one that led to the front office where Master Sergeant Sadneczek and his small staff of clerks managed the paperwork needs of their Company, but the side door that led to the service corridor.

  That corridor led to the backup generators and emergency lifesupport reoxygenators, to a pair of heads—the charming Navy term for bathroom facilities—plus the pocket-sized bridge galley where meals could be quickly fixed and served, and the bridge itself, bypassing the need to go out and around to either the starboard or portside main passages that ran the length of Deck 6.

  Like so much else on this ship, the bridge had also been modified, reduced to a fraction of its original size because she had only a fraction of the original crew meant to man the various posts. The extra room to the fore had been converted into a wiring shop, just one of the many necessary manufactory bays needed on a ship that had to be self-sufficient as much as possible for its repairs.

  Captain’s privilege gave her the shortest commute on the nine hundred meters and twenty-four decks of her ship, since her personal quarters were tucked right behind her office. Captain’s rank made the first bridge crew member to notice her, Corporal Fyrn Michaels, call out the warning, “Officer on deck!”

  Everyone sat up straighter in their seats. No one took their eyes off their workstations, however. That was one of the big rules in the Company Bible; stations were to be manned and monitored at all times, even if a fellow crew member had to monitor the extra workload while someone visited the head. Only when Ia approached the pilot’s station and tapped Yeoman Fielle on the shoulder did he look up from the task of guiding their ship through the star-streaked speeds of faster-than-light.

  “Sir?” he asked. The incident with his pet minirobots was weeks in the past, but she didn’t have to be a telepath to see a hint of it lurking in his concerned gaze. “Is something wrong?”

  “Bring the ship out of FTL and power down the engines, Yeoman,” she ordered.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” he said. Sliding his fingers down over the controls, he cut their speed. Everything seemed to pull forward a little from the change in their momentum, but wrapped in an envelope of energies that warped the laws of physics, not much of their abrupt vector change could be felt. “Five minutes to dead stop, sir.”

  “Captain,” Lieutenant Rico asked, his voice deep and his tone mild. It was his duty watch, and his responsibility to ensure the ship continued on course. “Any particular reason why we’re stopping, sir?”

  “Consider it sightseeing,” she quipped, looking around the bridge, with its banks of transparent and solid monitors, its workstations and handful of crew manning the important, noncombat ones.

  There was a black-box recorder on board the ship that she knew would be recording everything they said and did, unless she altered it electrokinetically. Which she did, but it was the Human element that had to be watched. Black-box recordings wouldn’t be cracked open unless something went wrong…or was reported as going wrong.

  Rico wasn’t dumb. “Pull the other one, sir.”

  “Engineering just finished our drive-systems respec on an Ultra-Classified level. FTL needs to shut down completely so that the drive comps can be rebooted with the new programs. The operation will take approximately half an hour. Eyes to the boards, thoughts on your tasks,” she reminded the half dozen men and women on the bridge with her. “We may be a trillion kilometers from anything and everything out here, but I will not have this crew caught off guard.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  The main screens for the pilot’s station and the forward wall flashed for a moment, dazzling the room with thousands of circles of light. The blurred streak of stars turned into sliding pinpoints of light. Slowly, their motion eased, then stopped.

  “Captain, we are now at a full stop, drive-wise. Relative to galactic motion is still .0002 Cee, sir,” Fielle added, meaning relative to the average movement of stars in their sector, versus their position as they swirled around the galactic core. “If you want a true dead stop, sir, we’ll have to use correctional thrusters.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Yeoman,” she said. “Private Barstow, inform Commander Harper down in engineering that he may now upload the new warp-field drivers.”

  “I’m on it, sir.” L’ili Barstow bent her attention to that task, speaking quietly into her headset pickups. There was a slightly more melodic quality to her voice than a few weeks before; it seemed her voice lessons with York were beginning to pay off.

  Private Hulio, seated at the navigation station, glanced briefly over his shoulder. “Captain, I’ve been double-che
cking our heading. We are going to Sanctuary, correct, sir?”

  “That is correct,” Ia confirmed. This was why she had ended the audio portion of the black-box recordings.

  “Well, sir…I know you set the course in the navcomp, and…uh…I’m sure you know how to find your own homeworld, being a pilot,” Hulio added, his tone apologetic for what he was about to suggest. “But…we’re off course by seven degrees, sir. That’s taken us within a couple light-years of Grey territory, which makes me a little nervous, sir. It’s also adding sixty-two light-years to our trip, even if we correct course now. That, ah, doesn’t seem the most efficient flight path, Captain.”

  Sixty-two light-years off course was far more than merely inefficient, and everyone on the bridge knew it. Ia watched the rest of the bridge crew glancing at each other. They peeked at her over their shoulders before returning their eyes to their stations.

  She answered Hulio’s question with part of the truth. “That’s because we’re testing the new drive system out here, in the middle of nowhere. I am not about to plow this ship into my home planet, the local traffic, or anything else in that general area.”

  Silence followed her words, silence and a few puzzled glances. Ia turned her attention to the workpad in her hands, writing prophecies electrokinetically. Every spare minute had to be filled with writing prophecies for her family since there would only be two more chances to visit them in person in the coming years. Once the two wars got going in this corner of the galaxy, it would be too dangerous to try for more visits than that.

  After several minutes, Lieutenant Rico spoke up, his tone calm, almost phlegmatic. “Begging pardon, Captain, but aren’t you a massive precognitive? Wouldn’t you know what to avoid, when and where?”

  “That’s why we’re out here, Lieutenant,” she replied in kind, equally as calm. “I got shot in the shoulder once, on a three percent chance I’d discounted as being too low to worry about. I’m not taking chances with the new drive, just in case some of those low-probability bugs haven’t been worked out enough. Nothing out here in our test zone will harm us. Now relax and enjoy the pretty stars while the upgrades get loaded.”

  Silence filled the bridge, broken only by the occasional murmur from the operations post, monitoring the ship’s functions and coordinating them with engineering, lifesupport, and so forth. Ia returned her attention to her precognitive messages.

  Bored, since they were only drifting slightly through empty space, with no need for anyone to guide the helm, Fielle finally asked her a question. “So…Captain. Statistically speaking, what is the safest spot in the universe?”

  “In bed, with the covers pulled over your head,” Ia said, her attention more on her task than on her answer. “Having been kissed good night by your parents, who have just checked under your bed and in your closet for all the things that might go bump in the night.”

  Snickers broke out at her quip, as well as grins. She smiled slightly. The other thing she could’ve said was, “In your grave,” but that one would’ve been too morbid to reply. The point was to encourage her troops, not discourage them. Keeping her mouth shut, she continued scrolling her thoughts onto the datapad. She would have to stay up half an hour extra to ensure all the messages were printed out tonight, but that wasn’t much different from most other nights, these days.

  “…Is that anywhere near this ship, sir?” Hulio dared to ask her after several seconds.

  “This ship will be about as far from that as you can get and still be alive,” Ia said, ending one message and starting on the next. “But for the moment, we’re safe. Eyes to the boards, thoughts on your tasks.”

  More minutes passed. The main bridge door finally opened, admitting Commander Harper. Judging from his tousled black locks and the mussed, slightly stained state of his grey coveralls, he had apparently been working personally on the engine upgrades and hadn’t bothered to change. Moving over to her side, he pulled himself to Attention and addressed her. “Captain Ia, the new programs are loaded, and have been test-simulated five more times. Everything’s green for go, sir.”

  “Excellent work, Lieutenant Commander. Lieutenant Rico, stand down. I’ll take the command station now,” Ia stated. She tucked her pad into her shirt pocket, moving from the pilot’s station to the command chair. “Yeoman Fielle, I’ll be taking the helm from here. Both of you can stick around, or go take a break for the next hour. If you go, be back on duty at nine hundred.”

  Rico narrowed his brown eyes, giving Ia a thoughtful look. Unbuckling his harness, he stood. “I think I’d like to stay, Captain.”

  “Have a seat,” she directed, giving him room to step out from behind the curved workstation console. Nodding, Rico moved to one of the unoccupied seats, the backup station for communications. Harper took the backup station for operations on the other side.

  Taking the abandoned chair, Ia sat down, strapped in, and logged in with her bracer. The chair, already programmed for her preferences, slid forward to accommodate her average height. Strapping her left hand into the flight controls, she tapped the workstation controls, rearranging the status displays on her main, two secondary, and ten tertiary screens.

  “Right, then. I’m ready for the transfer, Yeoman,” she said. “If you’re ready, helm to my control in ten.”

  “Aye, sir. Helm to yours in ten,” Fielle agreed, free hand moving over his console.

  “…I have the helm,” Ia stated a few seconds later. “Bringing engines back online.”

  “Heading, sir?” Hulio asked, glancing up from the navigator’s post. It was the navigator’s job to coordinate with the navcomp for plotting a safe course into a selected star system, working on the macroscale to avoid all the large hazards that the FTL field couldn’t grease out of the way. It was the pilot’s job to avoid hazards on the microscale, usually while traveling at insystem speeds.

  “Engines are now online, Captain,” Harper said, beating Private Dinyadah to it. She shut her mouth, glanced at him, and shrugged. Harper smiled in Ia’s direction.

  “Right. Let’s bring the Hellfire up to insystem speeds. Forward to one-quarter Cee,” she warned the others, bringing the thrusters online. The faint whoosh that was the cycling systems for lifesupport grew a little louder, picking up a thrummm from the engines again. The stationary field of stars displayed in the various monitors around the bridge slowly shifted as Ia made a slight heading correction. “Just a few more minutes, and we’ll be up to half Cee, since we’re taking it easy.”

  “And then what, sir?” Rico asked her. “Three-quarters lightspeed? I thought we were testing the FTL panels, not the insystem drives.”

  Harper smiled, looking at Ia. “No, Lieutenant. When we hit half lightspeed, we open a rift and take ’er for a spin. Right, Captain?”

  “Right, Commander.” Technically, he was a lieutenant commander, but since he outranked the other two on board—and the doctor wasn’t even in the chain of command, officially—it was acceptable to shorten his rank. That, and she knew he would eventually earn a promotion. “Navigation, pull up the star charts for System N-Tau 1158.”

  “Aye, sir.” Hulio tapped his console, letting the advanced processors calculate their course. “N-Tau 1158 is…twenty-nine light-years from here, or a day and a quarter, deadheaded FTL, sir. We don’t have much information on its insystem hazards, though. We also have the Kirkenn Nebula between here and there. It’s a new gas cloud, so it’s a significant navigation hazard. If you wanted to go there, you’d have to…wait…

  “The Kirkenn Nebula is in the Grey Zone.” He looked up from his station. “Sir, why did you want to know about that star system? No one is allowed to go there, per treaty. It’s part of the buffer zone we won from them.”

  “You know that, and I know that, but the Greys have conveniently forgotten about it, Private. Cycling the OTL hyperwarp in twenty seconds,” she warned everyone. It wasn’t much of a warning. Telltales turned amber as she gripped the trigger for the hyperspace generators. Panel
s opened on the nose of the ship, displayed on the second of her lower tertiary screens, the one to the middle left. The shallow camera view showed the relay nose cone lifting into position. The moment the lights switched to green, she pulsed the trigger.

  A blue-white energy packet spat out from the cone, an elongated sphere crackling with warped physics. It shrunk down, collapsing in on itself, and punctured a hole in reality. That hole swirled open in a much larger, greyer version. It expanded and swallowed the ship just in time as they dove nose-first into the grey-streaked tunnel. Behind them, the aft view on her fourth tertiary screen showed the tunnel collapsing about two lengths behind them.

  The thrum picked up from a quiet background noise to a palpable low rumble. Ia frowned at her shivering console. “Harper, I thought you said you implemented the new software. Why is my ship shaking?”

  “So did I, Captain,” he muttered back, tapping in a string of queries on his workstation. “Tracing the relays now…Ah! Here it is. I forgot I left it on manual for the tests, which means we just have to switch it to fully automated and let the computer compensate for the two different systems instead of us absentminded engineers…which I have just done…now.”

  The rumbling eased back with the last thump of his finger on the operations-station controls. It was now quieter, bearably so, though the new hum was stronger than the faint hum from before. Harper gave her an apologetic look.

  “Sorry, sir. I’ll get the code for that patched in by shift’s end, sir. I figured you’d need the manual programming for those instances where we’re beating the speed of the OTL-spark and need to wedge it open, or are still getting up to hyperrift speed. Or if anything happens to the engine comps, like damage in battle.”

  “A good piece of foresight planning,” she praised. “Right. This transit will take just under an hour. Commander Harper, Private Hulio, double-check the navcomp’s link with the engine comps. I want to make sure this ship flies as smoothly as a courier does on straight OTL autopilot.”