by Jean Johnson
But that was alright. Like water running toward the sea, it was important for everything she wanted to drain into the right bay. Pick the wrong part of the coast, and one could end up mired in an aimless swamp or be sucked into the mud of a tidal flat. Ia didn’t completely understand her abilities; they operated as much by instinct as by design sometimes. But she did have faith in them, and that meant letting the instincts of her mind shape the rings more than the conscious directing of her thoughts.
Something hit her. Blinking out of her trance, Ia eyed the twisted lump of translucent mineral in her hands. Hunger struck her in the next second. In the third moment, something struck her again. Turning, she looked as it flopped to the floor. A shoe. Nearby was another, matching one.
“Do I have your attention now?” Fyfer asked her. He wiggled his sock-clad toes and grinned.
Before she could respond, Ia heard the quiet beep of the comm embedded in her arm unit. Sighing, she made sure her headset was still secured over her ear, then thumbed the audio channel open. “Ia. Go.”
“Ia? About time! Captain, where are you?” she heard Harper demand.
From the stacks of rings and absence of two whole sprays, she had been concentrating for some time. Her thoughts were scattered, her concentration fragmented. Wrinkling her nose at the rumpled lump of crystal in her hand, Ia replied, “Busy. What’s the emergency?”
“3rd Platoon B Beta, Privates Gwen Yé and Solomon Sutrara, were arrested just under an hour ago on charges of ‘conspiring to commit heresy’…whatever that means,” Harper told her. “Sutrara was smart enough to record all but the first minute on his arm unit, and managed to download it to the ship before they demanded he remove it.”
That wasn’t a move Ia had expected. “I did lecture the troops about not going into any churches, right?”
“You did, but apparently they were outside the church, on the plexcrete sidewalk near one of the side doors.”
“Tell the Peacekeepers that first off, RCS 1107.6 states clearly that all walkways, sidewalks, and so forth are public easements, and not Church property. Secondly, all military personnel who commit crimes are to be remanded into military custody for military justice, not civilian custody or justice.” She paused a moment, thinking, then nodded. “…Right. Send down 2nd Platoon A Gamma, Privates Ateah and Sousa—there should be a box in the storage locker off the officers’ mess with black Military Peacekeeper armbands in it.
“Slap a pair on those two and send ’em down to pick up Yé and Sutrara. Inform the Sanctuarian Peacekeepers that the matter will be looked into and the soldiers punished accordingly, as the Space Force takes religious rights and freedoms seriously. I can’t call up the relevant sections and paragraphs at the moment. Consult with Sadneczek on that,” she instructed him. “Then call the jail, let them know you’re sending two MPs, and that you’d like copies of all depositions for their military tribunal.”
“Sir, yes, sir. I hope this works,” Harper added. “What’s the ETA on your return to the ship?”
Ia eyed the crystalline trees still awaiting her. She had only transformed a fraction of what she needed to make, maybe a couple percent. “I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to leave anytime soon, at this rate…”
“Do I have to hit you again with a shoe?” Fyfer asked her, recapturing her attention. He spread his hands, rolling his eyes. “You’re the commanding officer of a slagging ship, Sis! One with carte blanche. Pack up all the crysium and blood beads you want, go do it on board the Hellfire at your leisure, and send the rest back to us with the Afaso. They’ll get the packages through.”
She checked the timestreams. It would crowd her schedule further on the ship but free up a bit more time here and now. Ia considered his words, then nodded. “Harper, I’m going to need a series of shuttle drops in a couple days to a site east of the mountains. We’ll need a couple of the holds set aside for bulky, heavy cargos. And tell Grizzle to order a couple hundred palm-locked cargo crates—the collapsible kind; otherwise, we won’t have the storage space. But get on those MP rescues fast. And make sure you get those arm units back. I don’t want Church officials getting their hands on military tech—intimidate them with threats of arresting them for theft of Terran government property if you don’t get them back immediately.”
“Aye, Captain. Anything else?” he asked.
“Yeah, call me in an hour if the extraction doesn’t work. You have an eighty-five percent chance that it should, though.”
“Understood. Harper out.”
Shutting off the comm link, she glanced at her brother. He shrugged and gestured at his shoes. “Can I put them back on, now?”
“Yeah.” Nudging them with her foot, she tumbled them his way physically, rather than using her telekinesis. Using a combination of her precognition, her electrokinesis, and her telekinesis to make all these wreaths was exhausting enough. She didn’t need to waste the mental energy when a flick of her foot would work. “You may need to get my attention again in about an hour, so stick around. And in two hours, I have to head to my psychic ethics review. I don’t dare miss that. It’s the last one I’ll get before heading off to war.”
Her brother bowed dramatically, palms pressed together like a djinn. A lock of dark brown hair flopped over his brow as he did so. “I shall be your personal shoe-throwing alarm clock, O Prophet. Ia’n sud’dha, I live to serve!”
The mock-dirty look she gave him only provoked a laugh from her brother.
JANUARY 21, 2496 T.S.
Crouched beside Bei Ninh, former Sharpshooter and bronze medalist, Ia could smell his sweat. Same with Jane Loewen, though her odor wasn’t quite as rank. Neither of them seemed happy at having to move without the benefit of the deactivated gravity weaves wrapped around their bodies, never mind skulk through the shadows of the half-built Sacred Cathedral of the Light and the Truth on an excessively heavy world. The exertion required for moving silently as well as swiftly expressed itself in tired muscles and sweat-soaked skin.
The same could be said for Ninh’s wife, Bagha, and her temporary teammate for this mission, William Xavine. Like Loewen, Xavine was a former Troubleshooter, and something of an expert in surveillance gear. Each of the two crouched by their Sharpshooter partner, special cartridges in hand. Kneeling between the pair, Helstead peered through a set of enhancement goggles at the half-built walls. Finally, she nodded and whispered coordinates.
The two Sharpshooters, both wearing goggles of their own, nodded and lifted their guns. Helstead’s job was to identify the spots in the architecture that her compatriot, Lieutenant Rico, had selected, with some help from Ia. Elbows braced on a packing crate, they each took aim through their scopes and fired. The soft phunt of the air guns was echoed a second or so later by the faint splat of the gel-based projectiles hitting their targets. The two Troubleshooters quickly consulted their palm scanners. Xavine nodded, but Loewen shook her head.
“It broke on impact,” she warned Ninh, and handed him another cartridge. “Shoot again.”
Nodding, he replaced the expended shell with the fresh one, aimed carefully once it was loaded, and fired. Their movements were subtle, difficult to see in the darkened interior of the cathedral. The hiss and thwap of the payload’s being delivered was more blatant than their careful moves. Ia did see his satisfied nod, though. He knew he’d made the shot.
“Perfect.” Closing her scanner, Loewen tucked it back into her bag, agreeing with him.
“Next target,” Ia whispered, and led the way out onto the main floor. Like all man-made walking surfaces on Sanctuary, it was made from plexcrete, the odd amalgamation of several rubbery substances that cushioned impacts. It was still possible for someone of her height to badly injure her head if she should fall wrong, but the odds of actually cracking that skull hard enough to break it or the brain encased inside were survivably low.
Plexcrete came in several varieties, many of which were patterned to look like various long-lasting shades of granite. The Church E
lders had spared no expense; this particular plexcrete floor had been laid out in an elaborate pattern of dark and light diamonds, lines, squares, triangles and more. In the daylight, it would appear polished, unscuffed as yet by the passage of thousands of worshipping feet. It would also glow, she knew, with bright golds and rich blues, blood reds, silvery greys, and regal greens once daylight touched it.
The scaffolding along the southern wall would eventually be replaced by a great stained-glass window marked with a similar pattern, carefully positioned so that when the planet aligned just right with the local star at the solstices and equinoxes, the sunlight shining through at noon would match the colorful patterns at certain points along the floor. Side windows to the east and west, nestled between the old-fashioned flying buttresses, would show colors that would overlap and blend. Between the floor and the windows, the carvings on the walls and the paintings on the ceiling, the Sacred Cathedral of the Light and the Truth, Our Blessed Mother, would be the single most spectacular structure on the whole planet, and remain so for at least two hundred years.
Between then and now, Ia wanted her fellow Free World Colonists to have an ear to the ground, inside. Literally. Hurrying up the steps of the altar dais, she crouched and pulled out a pair of palm-sized miniature crowbars. Inserting them carefully between two slabs of colored plexcrete, she pried the pieces apart, muscles flexing hard. Loewen reached her first. Fishing out the next piece of spying equipment, she dropped it into the small gap.
Freeing her tools, Ia checked her grip on the electronic surveillance supposedly keeping this site safe. Everything was still secure, showing nothing out of the ordinary. She waited for Loewen to peer into the crack and nod, confirming the device was properly placed, then scuttled across the dais to the area that would one day house the seats of the Church Elders as they sat and listened to the various services.
This time, Xavine reached her first and dropped a surveillance pickup into the rubbery crack she made. Normally a fancy floor might be installed last to prevent it from being damaged during construction. On Sanctuary, that cushioning was needed as soon as it could be laid down, right after the foundation was secured.
She pried apart a third spot, and a fourth, picking seemingly random locations that would bring the most benefit in eavesdropping in the years ahead. Beckoning the others onward, she led the way toward a hallway—no door, just yet—which in turn led to a set of steps. The four lightworlders grunted in the effort to try climbing them. Giving up, Loewen dropped to her knees halfway up, her shaking head nothing more than a subtle change in the shadows of the stairwell. Ia moved back down to help her up the stairs.
“Almost there,” Ia whispered in encouragement. “Just seven more to place, then we can escape.”
The Troubleshooter panted, gritted her teeth, and let Ia help her back into motion.
“I’m not sure my knees can take much more of this, sir,” Ninh whispered back, bracing himself with one gloved hand on the wall as they passed. Most of their clothes were common civilian garb, though they had taken the precaution of donning gloves and caps. “If it’s 2Gs back home when you climb a set of stairs, that’s over 6Gs here per step.”
His wife poked him in the ribs. She breathed heavily with each step but managed to pass him all the same. “Fire in the hole, Ninh. Fire in the hole…”
He stuck out his tongue but struggled upward in her wake. It wasn’t the fact that they were working in three times the gravity that was hard. It was the fact that climbing stairs roughly doubled the forces at work, and certainly doubled the effort. Ia let them rest at the top of the stairs but only for a minute. More than that, and they wouldn’t want to keep moving. Urging them along the plexcrete-padded hallway, she nodded at the first of three rooms.
The left-hand wall in this one had a large window opening overlooking the altar, which would eventually be covered in stained glass, obscuring the fact that the room would become the Grand Prelate’s office. Without the window, though, they were free to aim their air guns at the sculpted columns already set in place. After that was done, she guided them into dropping two more packets between the rubbery floor tiles.
Both the gels and the card-thin pickups worked on kinetic-energy principles. The noises reverberating through them would empower them, permitting them to last for a good fifty years, if not longer. Their broadcast range would be short, barely two hundred meters up and outward, and only fifty or so down through solid ground. But that would be just enough for the FWC’s transceivers to pick up and relay their scans farther down the line.
The next two offices were equally rough-walled, if smooth-floored. One would be the seat of the financial officer for the Church, the other the security officer. Both were vital for controlling the pacing of the next two centuries. Taking their time, doing it right, took another fifteen minutes. As soon as the last pickup was dropped in place, Ia tucked her crowbars away. “There we go. Now to get out through the back door unseen. We’re slightly ahead of schedule, but not enough to evade the security guards any other route. This way.”
The “back door” wasn’t a door, per se, but rather a set of scaffolding leading off the back of the cathedral. Accessed through a window opening, it was a short climb down the ladders to the ground. Short, but exhausting for her companions. Ia let them rest twice more before they slipped back through the slight gap in the chain-link fence guarding the site. From there, she urged them in quiet murmurs to keep going until they were physically out of sight.
“…Now, sir?” Xavine finally asked, resting against the side of a building a block away. All four lightworlders were panting heavily from their exertions. Helstead also rested against the wall, though she recovered her breath faster than the others.
“Now,” Ia agreed, speaking in a normal tone, if still quietly. Relieved, the other five turned their gravity weaves back on, to the lowest setting that could tolerate the presence of other weaves nearby and still counteract a good chunk of the gravity. Relieved for a different reason, she gently released her grip on the low-light cameras, infrared detectors, and other sensors scattered around the large construction zone, though she didn’t sag against the wall like her crewmates had.
Finally adapted to her home after several days of more or less living on the surface while her ship stayed parked in orbit, Ia removed her knit cap, worn to hide her too-pale, damp hair. The others had sweated from the gravity, while she had sweated from trying to electrokinetically hide their actions from the construction site’s surveillance equipment. Doing so without also tripping the KI sensors placed around the Cathedral hadn’t been easy.
The Church Elders hated psychic abilities. The mental exercises required to discipline a psi’s mind lent strength to that mind, strength and resistance to outside influences. Strong minds were not easily swayed minds, and that meant rebellious minds, according to internal Church doctrine. The last thing they wanted was a strong telepath or a clairvoyant spying on them.
“Well. That was fun,” Helstead finally said, tucking her gloves into her shirt pocket. “Back to the pub?”
“Back to the pub,” Ninh agreed. “I could use a stiff drink.”
“I think I’m going to be stiff,” Loewen countered, flexing her back. The push-pull force of her weave’s field nudged into Ia, who staggered sideways and swallowed against the wobble in her inner ear. Loewen grimaced and straightened up again. “Sorry, sir.”
Ia waved it off. “It happens. You heard Helstead. Back to the pub, meioas. Drinks are on me. One lightly alcoholic, the rest non. You don’t want to stagger in this gravity.”
The lightworlders groaned but pushed away from the wall, heading up the street. It was late, but the pub selected as their return point was the kind open all night. As they walked, Helstead moved up beside Ia.
“So, Captain…sorry, Ia,” she amended, dropping the rank. “You said you couldn’t just waltz in and use your own gifts in a solo mission because manipulating everything would trigger KI sensors. I get that.
It’s a perfectly valid concern, especially at your strength. And I can understand why you’d want to bug the offices. But why the main sanctuary? Nothing’s going to be said out there that’s particularly sensitive.”
“Yeah, why did we do that? I’ll follow your orders, sir,” Xavine muttered, “but, well, I’m not too comfortable with targeting a religion. It’s far too easy to turn offended members of a faith into violently righteous fanatics,” he added under his breath. “So I’m not comfortable with any of what we did. I did it, but…”
Loewen shook her head, though not in a disagreeing way. “Welcome to the military, meioa; if it doesn’t break the most common laws of ethics and sentients, you do what you’re told. But I’d like to know, too, Cap…uh, Ia. If it’s okay for us to ask?”
“It’s okay. And it’s simple. Propaganda. Whatever the Church Prelates preach from the pulpit will be taken as gospel truth by the topside masses,” Ia told them. “Some of it actually will be the truth, though much of it will be distorted and edited. In order to fight that propaganda, the other half will need to know what’s being said so they can separate truth from falsehood.”
“I still don’t get why you can’t just help these people to win the fight right away,” Bagha said. She shook her head. “Two hundred years of civil war sounds like an awful lot of deaths.”
“Seventy-five percent of it will be a cold war, if not more, so it’s not as many deaths as you’d think,” Ia said. She saw the doubt in their eyes and shook her head. “I know how you feel. A large part of me doesn’t like it, either. But if I’m given a choice between three people dying now, or three million people dying later—for-sure-dying, not just maybe-dying—then I’ll take the three people now and do it with my own hands if I must.
“If I have to be screamed at in my conscience for the rest of my life, I’d rather it were by the ghosts of just those three, and not the three million,” she finished quietly. Honestly.
