Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  Ia resumed Parade Rest, a visual, grey-and-black brick wall of military efficiency. Larkins looked between her and the ship. Henderson didn’t lower his rifle; neither did Dixon. Finally, he grimaced and moved back. The two members of C Squad Alpha lowered their weapons but did not shoulder them. A minute later, the first of the ground-sledges rolled down the ramp. Their motors whined as each one made the transition from the interior of the ship, where gravity fields in the ceiling counteracted some of the planet’s pull, to the full force of Sanctuary’s 3.21Gs.

  Santori moved up beside her, watching the sledges roll a good twenty-fives meters away from the ship before her teams stopped them for the requested visual inspection. Ia’s skin twitched at her proximity. Not because she feared the woman would touch her, triggering her precognitive gifts, but because the gravity field projected by that purple weave was messing with her sense of down.

  The tanned woman moved a little closer and quietly asked, “Do all the government officials on this planet have their heads up their asteroids? Or did we just get lucky?”

  “They all have official attitude-problem approval from the main political party, these days,” Ia confirmed, equally under her breath. “That party has been turning increasingly xenophobic in recent years—and by xeno, they include nonnative Humans lumped in among the Solaricans and such. That’s why, with the exception of myself, no one is to go anywhere alone on this world…and the crew will go in uniform at all times. I don’t want anyone mistaking them for weave-wrapped tourists.”

  “I’m not comfortable with that exception, sir,” Maria Santori warned her. “You’d be a prime target out on your own.”

  “I can fake being a loyal follower of the local religious movement far better than you can—I will have to go places in the next few days that the Terrans cannot, Sergeant,” Ia said, shifting her gaze to Santori. “This is that third war front I warned you about at the cadre meeting last week. A war of ideology so far, but a war nonetheless.”

  “Which is why you shouldn’t go alone, sir,” the sergeant countered. “The vid industry makes a fortune off stories of one-meioa armies, but that isn’t reality.”

  “Considering where I have to go, a gravity weave would scream ‘outsider’ too loudly. Even our lovely 3rd Platoon leader would have difficulty walking around for long in this gravity, and she’s the second heaviest heavyworlder on the ship,” Ia pointed out. “I won’t be alone, Sergeant. I just won’t be with fellow soldiers.”

  “That’s what has me worried. Civilians aren’t soldiers,” Santori murmured.

  A cry from inside the shuttle was followed by a clatter. The man screamed again, and started babbling something about birds setting the world on fire. Officer Larkins and his three blue-and-white-clad Peacekeeper cohorts quickly marked themselves with the corona circle, warding off personal attacks of “the Devil’s visions,” as the members of the Church of the One True God called the psychic outbreaks. They could strike anyone anywhere on or within orbit of Sanctuary, give or take a few thousand miles.

  It looked like one of her crew was suffering the first outbreak of the day. Ia sighed and turned toward the ramp. “I’ll handle this. The important thing is to make sure nobody else touches him.”

  Santori nodded. “We heard your lectures on the phenomenon, sir. Trust me, he’s all yours.”

  CHAPTER 5

  So many things to keep track of, back then. So many defenses to set up, so many reactions to be readied, and so many tricks to be traded. All in the effort of helping as many people as possible survive the coming wars. Much of it, ironically, won’t bear fruit until long after both you and I are gone, but it was worth it.

  Somehow, in that visit to my home, I actually managed to make it home. I got to see my family again. That’s a rare thing in an interstellar military. But it wasn’t the same as it had been before—and I’m not speaking hyperbole. It literally wasn’t the same home anymore. Fanaticism had seen to that, ahead of schedule.

  ~Ia

  JANUARY 19, 2496 T.S.

  CENTRAL WARREN

  The cavern was a far cry from the scorched, soaked rubble that had once been Momma’s Restaurant. Vast and rugged, it was awkwardly lit in pools of daylight hues thanks to the scaffolding that climbed the upper half of the magma-carved walls. Lights, large and small, did their best to dispel the gloom. Part of a deep, ancient system of lava tunnels, the cavern was nothing more than a giant, amorphous blob of former gas bubbles suspended permanently in cooled stone.

  From the rough-shaped terrace of what would become the cafeterium, the level where many restaurants would bloom, Ia could see the shadowed cleft that would eventually be turned into the Director’s Grove, a private garden for the successive leaders of the Free World Colony. The main cavern would be a combination of leisure gardens, farm gardens, and water-treatment gardens, aquaculture and aquaponics similar to the lifesupport bays found on most starships.

  Some of the gardens were being sculpted as she watched, by hand labor and by robotics, by shovel and bulldozer. The rumble of sandhogs in the distance bespoke the efforts of digging crews to expand the network of side tunnels leading away from the ragged corners of the echoing cavern. There were other noises, too. People chatted and called out instructions. Hammers and picks banged into stone; shovels and buckets chuffed through piles of dirt. And from close by, someone sighed.

  Sinking onto the cushion-lined bench someone had carved into the balcony wall overlooking the activities, Aurelia Jones-Quentin offered her daughter a cup of cocoa thickened with cream. “It’s not so bad. Noisy day and night…or what passes for day and night, but not bad. Prime real estate, gataki mou.”

  Despite her ongoing efforts to get her parents to see her as an adult, as the soldier and the prophet instead of their little “kitten,” Ia let the nickname pass. Hot cocoa and the reassurances that her family was alright were the things she wanted to dwell on right now. “I’m sorry they sped up the timetable on the restaurant. I saw the rubble.”

  “All the important things had long since been evacuated,” Aurelia dismissed. “Unless you count some of your old toys and the actual bedding. Thorne remembered your warning him there was a small chance it might happen early. He insisted on stripping the kitchen, so most of that was salvaged, too. And you saw the new kitchen, so it’s even better, eyah?”

  “Eyah,” Ia agreed. Twisting on the bench, she put her back to the low wall and stared at the coarse frontage that would one day gleam with colorful tiles and polished stone. “How much of the food is still coming from overhead?”

  “Ugh. Sixty percent or more. We’re a long ways from the arcological self-sufficiency you’ve demanded,” Aurelia muttered. Off in the distance, one of the three or four hundred Free World Colonists dropped and clutched at her head, wailing in the irit’zi, the Fire Girl Prophecy cry. Aurelia rolled her eyes. “It’d go a lot faster, too, if that didn’t keep interrupting our daily lives. Is there any way you know of to stop the damn visions, gataki mou?”

  “If you’re asking your little girl, then no,” Ia shot back dryly.

  Her mother stared at her for a long moment, then sighed. “Fine. You’re not my little kitten anymore. Is there any way to stop these visions, O Prophet of a Thousand Years?”

  “No.” This time, she accompanied her reply with a wry smile, amused at the older woman’s eye roll in response. “Endure and learn from them. Well, okay,” she amended, “there is a way to tone them down. When everyone in the FWC has studied, practiced, and reinforced their minds with basic psychic mental centering and shielding techniques, then they will be less likely to be overwhelmed by Fire Girl visions. But stop them? No. They won’t stop. Welcome to Sanctuary.”

  The older woman let out a rude noise at that, somewhere between a raspberry and a sigh. “If we could afford to move off-world, we would. And yes, I’m including the cost in lives as well as the monetary expense.”

  She started to say more, but a clutch of workers came into view, laughin
g and chatting as they headed for the restaurant. Right now, it was doing more walk-up business than sit-down, with a modified menu. There were plenty of tables, but few servers. Rolling her eyes, Aurelia leaned back in a moment of rest, gathering her energy to get up and go take their orders.

  “Relax, Ma,” Ia told her, and nodded at a dark-skinned man coming out from behind the counter. “Marble has this covered. I can’t stay out here for long. I have to go back to work turning all those blood-beads I sent you into precognitive wreaths in a few moments. How’s Mom doing?” Ia meant her biological mother, Aurelia’s wife Amelia.

  “Upset at the loss of the wall harp, frustrated that she only gets to see the surface one day out of three, and settling back into her element now that she can cook again,” her other mother admitted. “She’s also not too sure about Fyfer and Thorne both moving in with Rabbit in the next few months. Not that the girl couldn’t use the help, but she’s stubborn.”

  Ia sipped at her cocoa, keeping quiet on that subject. Her brothers would sort out their living situation without her interference. That, and it was good cocoa.

  Thick and rich, delicately bordered between bitter and sweet, it conjured up memories of their old, cramped home. Memories of listening to the winter rains pound on the plexi roof over their upstairs apartment. The smell of baked topado cakes and pastries. The sight and sound of her biomother explaining why she preferred cilantro to parsley in her dishes, even though the herb was less sturdy and less likely to grow well in Sanctuary’s heavy gravity.

  The cries in the distance ended. Whoever it was, the woman would be picking herself up and shaking off the mind-clouding images. Everyone down here knew what the standard visions were: a woman with a burning bird on her back, the spires of the now half-built main cathedral wreathed in flames, of great golden-glowing ships taking to the skies. A horrific wall of stolen star-stuff threatening to engulf and snuff out all the light in the galaxy. Someone being whipped in public, among dozens of other images.

  If she saw something new, Ia knew the woman would report it to one of the clergy who had also begun to move down below the surface of their beleaguered world. Time pressed in on her, reminding Ia she didn’t have enough hours in the day, and few minutes. Rising, she lifted the cup in her hand.

  “Mind if I take this with me?” she asked her mother.

  Aurelia, sipping from her own cup, nodded. “Make sure you leave it in the kitchen sink—the apartment sink, that is. I’ll send Amelia to you with something to eat when she has another break.”

  Nodding, Ia bent and kissed her mother on the cheek. The contact, brief as it was, let her sense her mother’s mood. Tired, stressed, but still strong. Still capable of doing what her daughter—scratch that—of doing what the Prophet had asked of her. But she was still her mother’s child. “I love you, Ma. I’m glad I have you and Mom on my side.”

  “And Thorne, and Fyfer, and that not-so-evil mastermind pretending to be a little girl,” Aurelia quipped. She flipped her hand, first at her daughter, then at the dirty plate and silverware on the low table in front of the bench. “Go on, go back to the apartment and finish your holy task. I’ll bus your dishes back to the restaurant. Though next time, you’ll owe me a tip.”

  Nodding her thanks, Ia moved away. Her mothers’ commute was a bit longer than before. Rather than living directly over their restaurant, they lived five levels up, though they did have one of the largest apartments currently available. Mostly because it abutted a warehouse cavern that would one day be turned into a combination of multidenominational chapel and dance hall. Freedom of faith was a core tenet of the Free World Colony. Freedom of movement was vitally important to the psyches of the residents who would soon live out their lives underground.

  Her red-hued civilian clothes didn’t set her apart from the others using the lifts to get from floor to floor. Everyone wore cheerful colors down here, to liven up the dull curves of stone surrounding them. Bright shades of blue and yellow, purple and green mingled with orange and plenty of red. Her height and her shock of chin-length hair were what set her apart, taller than most everyone else by at least two dozen centimeters and readily recognized by her snow-white locks. Old-woman hair.

  In fact, a few of the men and women she passed did double takes, recognizing her. A few more started to reach out to her, to touch the Prophet each one knew was responsible for finding and settling this place. A subtle shake of Ia’s head was all it took to keep their fingers to themselves. As unsettling as the Fire Girl outbursts were for others to endure, Ia didn’t want to give them a worse mental ride if her gifts decided to destabilize while she was down here.

  Some of them murmured condolences over the loss of her parents’ shop. Others drifted in her wake, wanting to say something, or to hear her say something. She nodded or shook her head where appropriate, but didn’t actually say much. The last thing Ia needed was to have a stray word or phrase misinterpreted by her followers.

  One of the recent installations, built in sections, looked like an artistic scribble of pipes lining the rounded corridor she chose, giving it a more oval appearance. The pipes weren’t just artistic; they were heat-transference pipes, sucking some of the underground warmth out of the air and stirring it into a refreshing, circulating breeze. The siphoned energy wasn’t wasted, either; this place, Central Warren, was over five kilometers below the surface. Thermal energy was constantly being transformed into electrical energy, empowering the various machines and amenities the underground capital needed.

  Those amenities included things like lights and doors. Reaching her mothers’ apartment, she unlocked it with her palmprint and slipped quietly inside. Another touch of her hand to the panel on the doorframe closed and locked it, allowing her to sag back against the stout plexsteel and relax.

  Spine pressed to the door, she sighed slowly in relief, shutting out everything but the sound of her own heart. Then snapped her eyes open at the sound of rapid footsteps. Her younger brother, Fyfer, flew at her, all grins and dark curls bouncing. He had gained a couple centimeters since she had last seen him, but still stood shorter than her by nearly a full head. Tall for a Sanctuarian, but not abnormally so. Then again, their fellow colonists wouldn’t reattain anything close to her semilofty height for at least another five, six generations, if not more.

  “Hey, gorgeous, long time no see!” Giving her a hug and a peck on the cheek, he reached up and ruffled her locks. Ia put up with it for a moment, then pushed him back and ruffled his own hair with her free hand, mindful of the mug carried in the other one. Good-natured, Fyfer stepped free and bowed, gesturing beyond the entry hall. “Welcome to our humble new abode, sister dear. Allow me to show you around.”

  She waved him off. This new, underground residence was a far cry from the cramped two-bedroom home her parents had known for most of their adult lives, but it was familiar from the times she had watched her family move through its rooms as she studied the future possibilities of their lives. “Already seen it. I’m going back to the storage hall to make more wreaths.”

  “Still not going to tell us how you’re doing it, hm?” her younger brother asked, following her down the hall that led past common and private rooms alike. Fyfer tsked under his breath. “Selfish of you. Crysium’s the hardest known substance. Just think of the armor we could make with it!”

  “Just think of the I’m-not-telling-you-whats I could make with it,” she quipped back. “You’re lucky I brought you snow all the way from Earth.”

  Fyfer snorted. “As if Mom or Ma would let us make snow cones out of it. Me, I want to taste the Motherworld. Bring me my own chunk next time, will you?”

  Chuckling, Ia shook her head. Palming open the lock on the door leading to the warehouse, she stepped inside. Strange blocks and lines of shadow and light illuminated the far end of the room. Fyfer followed her inside, hitting the control panel for the lights. Like most forms of illumination used by Terrans not actually living on Earth, the lamps lit up in the same spectrum
of colors as Sol, the parent star for their species.

  The shadows had been cast by the stacks and stacks of bead-filled boxes Ia had received, altered, and sent back over the last year and a half. The angled lines of light came from the conifer-like sprays of crysium, painstakingly broken off their rock outcrops on the planet’s surface and transported down here by Thorne’s order.

  Each spray was at least two meters tall and a meter and a half wide at its base; the fifty or more shafts that made up the limbs of the spray varied in thickness from the diameter of her biceps to smaller than the span of her wrist. In Standard gravity, they would have weighed two tonnes on average. On Sanctuary, they weighed over three times that—and these were merely small ones, the kind that were relatively easy to transport. There were sprays on the surface that were easily eight meters tall and five to six in diameter, and crystalline behemoths that were even larger.

  Draining her cup, Ia set it on top of a stack of emptied crates. A flick of her mind unlocked one of the waiting, full boxes. Like a swarm of peach-tinted glass bees, the beads inside swirled up and soared out of the box, following her telekinetically. Stopping in front of one of the sprays, Ia reached up and caressed the shaft; it sang faintly in the back of her mind, boosting and amplifying her abilities, though not by a lot. Unshaped, raw, natural crysium could only do so much.

  Bead-bees floating at her shoulder, hands on the nearest shaft, Ia closed her eyes and flipped her mind down, in, and out, landing on the timeplains. Instinct and habit guided her, lifting the banks between the right and wrong creeks, altering the flow of the timestreams, the life-streams of the men and women who lived on this world. Instinct and habit merged crystal to crystal, some of it tainted with her own blood, the majority of it tainted with the discarded matter of passing Meddlers. Instinct and habit, practiced in her dreams, guided hand and mind into shaping chunks of the material in a complex process achieved without conscious thought.