Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  “You’re using tech you stole from the future, from another government, to reshape the hardest known substance, and you’re not gonna share it with your own superiors?” Helstead asked dubiously. “Imagine the weapons you could make—imagine the armor! I read an article stating how this stuff just absorbs laserfire, no matter how large the weapon.”

  “I will not compromise the secrets of the government which developed this tech,” Ia stated bluntly. “Just as I will not compromise the secrets of the government that will eventually develop the hyperwarp drive. One is Terran; the other is not. Both have the right to keep their temporal secrets. I will use this technology, yes, but only because I have no other way to get the job done on time and done right. I will therefore not share those secrets…and the fewer who know those secrets, the easier it is to keep them a secret. Is that clear, soldier?”

  That deflated the shorter woman. Brow furrowed in a sullen look, Helstead muttered, “Crystal clear, sir.”

  Ia pointed at her. “My silence applies to your own escapades as well, Delia. Past as well as present and future. Be glad I have both discretion and integrity. Now, give me a few minutes in private to finish what I was doing, then I’ll come join you and Rico in the briefing room. Harper, if I’m not out of here in ten, throw my other boot at me.”

  “Aye, sir,” he agreed. A tip of his head silently ordered Helstead to retreat with him. Grateful, Ia watched them go.

  Just before the door slid shut behind them, she heard Helstead ask, “Why do you have to throw her boot at her…?”

  Ia knew the answer, the same as Harper. Back in their Academy days, sharing quarters in the cadet dormitories, she had taught him to wake her by throwing something at her rather than physically touching her. These days, her sleep was relatively dreamless; minor nightmares still plagued her, but she was on track to fix the source of those nightmares. Her precognitive gift didn’t torment her as much as it used to, which meant the risk of triggering it when someone else touched her in her sleep had lessened. But lessened risk was not the same as none.

  Which means I go through life untouched, save for rare moments when it’s absolutely necessary.

  Turning back to the glob in her hand, Ia flipped her mind in, down, and out, onto the timeplains. She resisted the urge to sink fully into the rhythm of swimming, shaping, and molding blood-infused beads with chunks of crystal. Her blood. Whatever quality of Feyori Meddling lay in her genetics, it seemed to affect the crysium—which itself was another Feyori by-product. The two combined, crystalline and crimson, made the strange, peach-hued stuff capable of hooking a nonpsychic mind into the timestreams.

  She only had enough time to create a few more. There would be other stolen hours for this task, creating precognitive crystalline circlets meant to plug her fellow Sanctuarians into glimpses of their own pasts, their own futures, to guide them in the direction she needed them to go. Before the ten minutes were up, the latest wreath was locked in a storage box and her boots were back on her feet. Ia stepped through the cargo-bay door, palm-locking it behind her. Harper and Helstead waited nearby; once again, Helstead was playing with her stiletto-pins.

  “Can I at least have a closer look?” she asked Ia, moving to join her CO in heading toward the aft shuttle-bay doors.

  “No. Looking leads to touching, and touching leads to interfering. Most of what I’m making won’t even be used by the Terrans,” Ia told her. “I’d rather it wasn’t damaged in the interim.”

  Helstead frowned at that. “Wait, if it was impervious before you manipulated it, but now it can be damaged simply by handling it…that means it won’t actually retain its impervious qualities after it’s been reshaped. Why would that stuff be of any use after that point?”

  Ia ignored the question. She had meant the timelines, not the wreaths themselves, but her 3rd Platoon leader didn’t need to know that. Instead, she glanced over her shoulder at their chief engineer, addressing him instead. “Harper, I know you’ve been working on the FTL panels you pulled off the hull. How many have your repair teams salvaged?”

  “All but two,” he told her. Touching the controls for the sector seal, he joined them in transiting the airlock seals. “I’ve ordered those two broken down for parts. We have plenty of spares on board, but I’m not going to hold my breath on every battle being that smooth.”

  “Two out of, what? Twenty-tree panels? That’s not a bad attrition rate,” Ia allowed, yawning slightly to pop her ears as the air pressure shifted slightly. The second door swung open, revealing Spyder, Santori, and two long lines of shorts-and-T-shirt-clad bodies, all jogging in place.

  “Make room, ya bloody slackers!” Spyder ordered, jogging himself as he turned to face the others. “Officers comin’ out!”

  The two lines of men and women parted, jogging up against the wall as Ia, Harper, and Helstead emerged single file from the airlock.

  “Arright! C Squad, cycle through! Two more minutes of jogging, then we go back to practicing shipboard parkour!” Spyder ordered. The first five pairs of Humans jogged into the airlock. Someone thumbed the controls, swinging the door shut.

  “I’ll give him this,” Helstead observed, glancing back at the airlock as the three officers turned a corner. “He’s certainly enthusiastic about PT. The man has almost as much energy as me in the mornings.”

  “That’s why I paired him with you on that task. Oh, speaking of exercise, Harper,” Ia added, turning slightly to address her first officer as they walked. “I’d like to gradually increase the ship’s gravity by .05Gs over the next week. Then hold it steady until the end of the month, and increase it again by .05 over the first week of March. Hold steady until April, and do it again, until this ship is running at 1.35Gs Standard, then hold it for three months.”

  “You got it,” Harper agreed.

  Helstead eyed her. “Trying to turn all these lightworlders into heavyworlders, Captain?”

  “The increase in strength will be a bonus in hand-to-hand combat, about half a year from now,” Ia admitted. “The faster reflexes will take a while to train, but will be worth it in about three years. But long before then, I want us up a lot higher, at the very least to 1.8Gs.”

  “My homeworld isn’t much higher than that,” Harper said. Then blinked and looked at her, brown eyes wide. “We’re going there, aren’t we? I remember—”

  Ia raised her hand, cutting him off. Through an accident, he had been exposed to a tumult of unchecked timestreams back at the end of their Academy days. She didn’t need the rest of the crew knowing that, though. “Some visions will come true, others will not. I’ll let you know what to prepare for when you’ll need to know it, I promise.”

  He nodded. “Alright, then. Will you need me for the databank debriefing? If not, I’ll get back to that gun project.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Helstead might be useful, though.”

  That made the other woman’s eyes roll. Tucking her bladed hairpins back into her braid, she said, “Oh, gee. I feel so special.”

  “That depends on whether or not you can focus,” Ia said. She nodded farewell to Harper, who continued aft-ward while they took a side hall that would lead them to the track lifts for the fore section.

  Helstead waved good-bye at him and shrugged. “I can focus just fine, Captain. I just…have to keep doing something, or I’ll go nuts.”

  “Then we have something in common,” Ia told her. “Only in my case, the ‘something’ I constantly have to keep doing is striving to save the future.”

  “So, how’s that working out for you?” Helstead quipped.

  The joke caught Ia by surprise. She chuckled. “We’ll see. I still have several years of work ahead of me. Feel free to help out if you get bored.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” Helstead quipped.

  Both women fell silent as they traveled up several decks to the briefing room. Located forward of the bridge, it was meant for the cadre to use, or up to two squads at a time. The monitors lining the
cabin caught Ia’s attention first, followed by the tall, broad-shouldered figure of Lieutenant Rico.

  He stood in front of screens filled with series of dots, circles, and lines that made up the written form of Sallhash, language of the frogtopus-like Salik. Around the oval table at the center of the room sat Corporal Xhuge, Private Dinyadah, Private MacInnes, and Private Al-Aboudwa, all members of the 1st Platoon. They had workstations clipped to the table; from what Ia could see of Al-Aboudwa’s and Xhuge’s screens, the two men were attempting to match location names to star charts.

  “Glad you could join us, Captain,” Rico stated in a mild tone. “I hope we didn’t interrupt anything important.”

  “I put you in charge of this project because I knew I could trust you with it,” Ia returned calmly. “You cannot compose detailed, time-sensitive instructions that will save hundreds of billions of lives. You, however, can make sense of this Salik gibberish, and that will help save hundreds of billions of lives. Now, I understand you’ve found something?”

  “We think so, sir,” Corporal Xhuge said, speaking before Rico could. Ia had to give him credit for getting the discussion back on topic. “Since you said you were able to pinpoint the exact comm nodes containing information on where and how these anti-psi machines were being manufactured, once we cracked open the databank cases, we broke down all the various messages in the selected banks and started sorting each by type.”

  Rico joined the explanation. “Most of them were about the transport of goods, involving timetables, ships, requisitions…standard stuff. Much of it used cryptography, or the substitution of things like letters and numbers, which can be cracked by any competent computer system. Even the most sophisticated ones back in their day from Old Earth’s Enigma machines all the way up through the AI War codes were breakable, given time and understanding. But some of the messages were different.

  “They were asking for weird things with no apparent context. That meant they were using steganography,” he told Ia. “It’s the art of substituting one word for another. The catch is, you have to know which words substitute for which. Like the Navajo code talkers on Old Earth, same era as the Enigma machines. But it’s always heavy on the nouns, even among the xenospecies, and that’s where MacInnes came in handy.”

  MacInnes nodded quickly, her carrot curls bouncing around her ears. “My Sallhash still isn’t the best, sir, but it works in conjunction with my xenopathy and clairvoyancy. I can ‘see’ a noun in my head when I’m translating it mentally. The nouns the lieutenant handed me on the weird requisition cases weren’t the ones I was actually seeing and writing down.”

  “I figured her gifts would be useful that way when I read the notes you appended in her personnel file,” Rico interjected.

  “Like I said, I picked the right man to head up this job, and the right meioas to work with you,” Ia reminded him. She nodded at the other woman. “Go on, MacInnes. What were the disparities?”

  “Instead of…uh…” She blushed and nodded at her workstation. “Well, we can’t pronounce most of these words without the nasal flaps and such, so we’re using the Terran phonemes. Anyway, the weirdest one was a message about an order of po-jeem ang-nu-gwish-tick-wa, which is a kind of amphibious creature they like to eat on their M-class colonyworld of Hawhonn. But instead of alien breakfast food, I was getting images of anthikeriate coils, which are used in the PsiLeague’s KI machines to sense kinetic-inergy emanations, and I only knew that much because I helped refurbish a couple during a summer job back in high school.”

  “And some of the other nouns?” Helstead asked, dropping into one of the chairs at the table and swirling it around.

  “Electronics components, mostly. But also…test subjects,” Al-Aboudwa stated quietly. “We found dates and times for prisoner swaps.”

  “The images I saw were meant to imply tasty-smart food,” MacInnes muttered, looking a little pale. She wasn’t the only one. Xhuge and Al-Aboudwa didn’t look comfortable, either.

  “—Found it!” Dinyadah exclaimed, pointing at her workscreen. A couple of taps transferred the star charts to the monitors around the room. “God bless methodical mapmaking. Ss’gwish Gaff 117-N, a system with a small class B white star, three asteroid belts, at least four gas giants, and an extensive Kuiper belt with a break in it from a rogue planet expelled by the explosion of a downstream neutron star. That’s our second starting point, gentlemeioas, and it’s approximately twenty light-years from the endpoint in the message.”

  “Good job,” Rico praised. “Now all we need is a third location, to triangulate the manufacturing point—the Kuiper belt break has several ice chunks trailing outsystem in the wake of the rogue planet,” he explained to Ia. “The first system we found has the requesting point located approximately eighteen light-years from Nngu 120-N. But that still leaves us a ring zone with a circumference of one hundred light-years, give or take a few. Since we don’t have any third reference point in the data files, I was hoping you could provide us with one, Captain.”

  Ia gave him a level look. “What part of ‘these machines can counteract even my abilities’ did you not comprehend at our initial task briefing, Lieutenant?”

  “The part where you said you’re an omniscient precog?” Rico replied, one brow lifted in skepticism.

  “I’m not omniscient. I’m all-seeing, not all-knowing. And this thing is like a black hole on my internal radar, or a thick cloud obscuring an island,” Ia said, pointing at one of the screens. “I can only tell its general vicinity from the lack of things I can sense about it directly, and from the things I can sense indirectly. Like our next target.” Moving over to the largest of the screens, she poked at the surface, rotating the stars slightly. “I can sense what people do, Lieutenant, from the effects their lives, their timestreams, have on the timeplains in general.

  “I cannot track things as easily as I can track people. Unfortunately, most of the people directly involved in this anti-psi project are being protected by the machines.” Tapping the screen, she drew a circle around three stars in relatively close proximity in green. “Somewhere in here is another communications station. We’re going to attack the second hub, extract the right data nodes, and extrapolate that third point. We’ll have to hurry, since the one thing I am sure about is that the manufacturing equipment is on the move.”

  Another tap drew a much larger circle in yellow, one at least forty light-years across. Ia looked over her shoulder at Rico.

  “This area is the general area I think it’s in, but as you can see, it’s rather large,” she said. “They’re distributing the machines, too; I get flashes of foreknowledge in between stretches of nothing. Once we do get that third coordinate for triangulation, we move in for the kill and wipe out their main manufacturing facility.”

  “D’un yi shia…” Xhuge muttered, eyes widening as he stared at the yellow-circled zone. “Da shiong la se la ch’wohn tian!”

  Rico narrowed his eyes. “Excuse me, soldier?” he snapped at Corporal Xhuge. “You do not swear like that in front of me. I’ll remind you, I do speak all three main dialects of Chinese.”

  “Yeah, what he said,” Al-Aboudwa agreed, giving his crewmate a puzzled look. “Either swear in Terranglo, or at least tell us what you said, will you?”

  “I’m sorry, sirs, meioas,” Xhuge apologized, blushing. He lifted his hand, pointing at the yellow blob. “But that whole zone, if they’re distributing anti-psi machines to their ships, then that’s where the main Salik fleet is gathering. If we go in there pods blazing, they’ll swarm in and kill us. Not to mention, they’ll have to figure out which databanks we’re stealing sooner or later. No offense, Captain, but that’s a tze sah ju yi!”

  “It would be a suicidal idea under normal circumstances, yes,” Ia agreed. “But my abilities strengthen with proximity, both temporally and spatially. My first encounter, I had no clue what these machines were, but I still managed to destroy a giant capital ship, and I did it with a tiny little Harrier-class Delta-
VX. My second time? I rescued dozens of sentients from the Salik Motherworld, and I did it in a room filled with those machines. The third time I was in the room with one of these kuh wu machines, I still managed to slam the needle of a KI gauge off the far side with it churning away at full power, sitting right next to me while I was demonstrating the strength of my precognitive abilities.

  “As for this actually being a suicidal idea?” she repeated, hands resting on her hips as she studied the corporal. “I’ll tell you something about the future, Xhuge. It’s a suicidal idea for the Salik to go to war because by their own efforts, they will destroy themselves. But they are doing it, and we have to stop them. At the right time, in the right way. Now, we have two more days before we’ll be in striking range of the new hub. Let’s keep working at this.”

  Dinyadah looked up from her workstation screen at that. Like everyone else on the ship, she traded duty posts every two hours, including stints on the bridge crew. “Sir, I thought the hyperwarp drive was faster than that. When I was last on the bridge, we were only thirty-nine light-years away from the target zone.”

  “We could get there faster, yes, but right now, some of that fleet Xhuge’s worried about is still within counterstriking range of the hub,” Ia said. “Not to mention hyperwarp uses almost three times the fuel. If we don’t need to hurry, then we travel FTL. That gives the enemy fleet plenty of time to move on and be well past the turnaround point by the time we come diving in.” Looking at the others, she dipped her head and offered some sincere praise. “You’ve done very well so far. I can’t wait to see what else you can do.”

  “Oh, how patronizing. Are you sure you can’t do this yourself?” Rico asked her.

  The others gave the two of them watchful, wary looks, not quite sure why Lieutenant Rico was being belligerent. Ia knew why. It wasn’t just that he didn’t believe in her cause, yet—he didn’t—but also because he didn’t like being asked to spy on her. At the same time he didn’t want her to become suspicious of his being too agreeable to her plans right from the start. She knew he was smart enough to know that too many spies tried being best friends with their targets too soon, and that he knew she was smart enough to realize it, too.