Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  Ia used those brief breaks to effect their escape. Varying her angles, she slip-strafed one way, then the other, accelerating in jolts with barely enough time to recover between each one. Some of the lasers struck, but only briefly each time. Two, three, five hull segments flagged yellow. One turned red.

  It was hard to say what their own lasers hit; the gunners could only fire when they were free to move without acceleration thwarting their efforts. They did hit something on the capital ship giving chase, but the navicomp’s analysis suggested it was just a few scorched sensor panels.

  The stars on the screen flashed in bright dots and turned into slow streaks. Ia increased the field strength to port, swaying everyone in their seats, though the G-force was mild compared to their actual escape. Another shift upward added to the gravity of the deckplates, then she straightened out their course.

  “All hands, you are free to move. Medical team to the bow shuttle bay, stat.” Switching off the intercom, Ia added, “Sangwan, prepare to take the helm. Ease up to full speed; now that we’re faster-than-light and sideslipped from our last known course, there’s no need to rush. Ng, double-check our heading; we’re aimed at a system with a Dlmvla presence, yes?”

  “Taking the helm in twenty, sir,” the yeoman said, straightening in his seat now that gravity was no longer pulling them this way and that.

  “Correct, sir,” Ng told Ia, checking the information on her bank of screens. “If we stay on this heading another seven light-years, we’ll reach the Llong-Jul 3127 System. Three gas giants and five Dlmvla mining colonies. Co-patrolled by Solarican forces, Captain, since they have a gas-mining station there as well.”

  “Transferring to your control in five seconds…” Ia murmured, transferring the control systems to his station. “Sangwan, you have the helm.”

  “Aye, sir. I have the helm,” he confirmed.

  Ia’s headset came to life, projecting Helstead’s voice in her ear. “Helstead to Captain Ia, is it safe for me to eat again? I’d like to finish my lunch.”

  She smiled slightly. “You are cleared to eat, Lieutenant Commander. You have fifteen minutes before you’re due back up here.”

  “Yay! Thank you, sir. Helstead out.”

  “Message for you, Captain,” Rammstein said.

  “Patch it through,” Ia told him.

  “Captain, this is Corporal Johnson down in engineering,” another male voice stated, this time in her right ear. “We have some FTL field fluctuations, and several aft sensors are on the verge of failing. When are we going to be stopping to fix them, sir?”

  “You get an hour-long stop in just over half an hour from now to get the field stabilized, then you’ll have to wait seven more hours for the rest.” Ia shifted her attention to Ng and Sangwan. “Sangwan, continue on course for System Llong-Jul 3127. Don’t push the panels too hard. Ng, plot him a course that brings us in close to the Jul II mining colony. I’d like to buy some hydrofuel from them, keep our tanks topped up while we’re making repairs.

  “Mysuri, have, ah…Private Smitt file a fund-transfer requisition form with Admiral Genibes,” Ia added, having to think for a moment about who was on duty in the clerk’s position. “Tell him it’s for purchasing hydrofuel from the Dlmvla. When it’s ready to send, have Sangwan drop out of FTL for a clear hyperrelay, and tell Corporal Johnson that’s when he’ll get his hour. Rammstein, anything that needs immediate repairs at that point, coordinate with Johnson, with a focus on the fields.

  “Beyond that, if an emergency crops up, wake Commander Harper and have him deal with it,” she added. “Otherwise, it’s Helstead’s watch, because in fifteen minutes, I’m going back to bed.”

  A couple minutes passed as the bridge crew quietly tended to their work. Rammstein finally shook his head. “…I knew the specs. I mean, I studied the specs, learned ’em inside and out…but I never thought we’d actually outrun anything as fast as that!”

  “I’m just glad we did outrun ’em,” Ng muttered.

  “Heh,” Sung chuckled. “I’ll bet they weren’t expecting to be outrun, especially as they were already moving when we took off.”

  Sangwan shook his head. “They didn’t outrun us because they didn’t want to lose sight of us. Now if we’d both been at a dead stop, then we’d have totally wiped their asteroids in our wa…uh…” He blushed, glancing briefly at Ia before returning his attention to his monitors. “That is…sorry, Captain.”

  “Relax, I don’t mind a little blunt speaking on my bridge,” she reassured Sangwan. “We’d have wiped their asteroids in our wake from a double dead stop, yes. But most of that is because we’re less than a seventh the mass of that capital ship. And we didn’t get away cleanly,” Ia added, nodding at her lower rightmost tertiary screen. “The Infirmary reports three cracked ribs, a bitten tongue, and Private Franke has a dislocated shoulder and two compression fractures. By preference, I’d like to limit the number of Purple Hearts my crew earns.”

  Sung snorted. “All you have to do is tell us when you see it coming, sir,” he stated. “You’ve been dead-on accurate about everything so far.”

  “Not entirely dead-on, Private; I only deal in probabilities, and free will still plays a big part in all of this. I can tell you what the biggest chances are, and how to influence the numbers, but God still rolls the dice, not me,” Ia said. She spoke quietly, letting her gentle tone convey the seriousness of her message. “We will get injured in the course of this job. Some of us may even die…and I will not stop that from happening when it must, because my job is to make sure those who do die will perish only because they are doing what must be done, regardless of the cost. In the right place, at the right time, getting the right job done.”

  Her words sobered the others. They exchanged looks, glancing at her before returning their attention to their workstations.

  “I know that isn’t what you wanted to hear,” Ia told them, looking up from her screens. “The only guarantees I can give you are that I’ll be taking the same risks as the rest of you, and that I’ll be doing my best to minimize those risks along the way. But minimized risk is not the same as risk-free.”

  “And you just accept that, sir?” Ng asked, voicing the concerns of the rest. “That some of us will be hurt and killed?”

  “It’s the same realization that every officer has to face, Ng,” Ia told her. “Mine is just shoved home all the more thoroughly because I can see the results in advance. But I’ll tell you what I’ve told Chaplain Benjamin through the years. I’d rather be damned for trying to do what’s best and right, even if I fail, than be damned for not doing anything at all.

  “I handpicked this crew because I know each one of you feels that same way deep down inside,” she stated, stifling a yawn with effort. She didn’t want her crew to think she was bored with their conversation, and she didn’t want them to think she wasn’t at her sharpest, even when tired. This wasn’t the first time she would have to interrupt her sleep cycle for combat, after all. “Now, eyes to your boards and thoughts on your tasks.”

  FEBRUARY 8, 2496 T.S.

  JUL II MINING STATION

  LLONG-JUL 3127 SYSTEM

  “Your request for round rocks we have processed,” the Principal Nestor of Jul II stated. She dipped her head, with its multilensed eyes, and uncurled a clawed hand-thing. The gesture finished somewhere beyond the pickup range of the commscreen. “But this peet-zah thing I am uncertain. Datafiles indicate it is a Human food. We do not available have this Human food.”

  Ia smirked. She was taking this call in the briefing room forward of the bridge after a good night’s sleep. “That’s because you are fat, and covered in velvet.”

  The Nestor lowered her head farther, eye-skins puckering a little. “I do not…Ah. Illogic. You are courting me?”

  “I’m declaring war on you,” Ia countered calmly. “I think you’re too purple, and you smell when you sneeze.”

  The Principal Nestor blinked a sideways-sliding membrane over her compound eyes.
“Dlmvla do not sneeze. Regrettable it is, you cannot breathe with us. I think you are…metal foot garment. With lactations. For a Human. Anything else?”

  Ia dipped her head in turn. “Nothing else. I look forward to firing upon your people in unprovoked madness, then inviting you into my home. Thank you for handling my extra request, Principal Nestor. I hope you like the vidshows I used for payment. They’re more than old enough, copyright doesn’t apply.”

  “Comedy entertainment transcends madness between our species. Copyrights are madness to exist at double the artist’s life. Another point of similarity. Feathery secretions upon you,” the Nestor added. “End transmission.”

  Ia closed the channel on her side as well. Shutting her eyes, she sat back in her seat at the head of the table and contemplated her efforts on the timeplains. A bit of intrigue…but not much. Not yet. I’ll have to work harder at provoking them. Get them to spread the word about how strange I am.

  The Dlmvla were “neutral” where the Salik were concerned. They had agreed not to supply the Salik with anything but weren’t contributing ships to the Blockade, either. As methane-breathers, they had long ago figured they were low on the lunch menu, as it were. At least, compared to the oxygen-breathing species.

  Of all the races, only the Chinsoiy were truly immune to the Salik appetite for living sentient flesh, but then they were silicon-based life-forms. The Chinsoiy also required daily irradiation for survival, at levels that would kill a chitin-covered K’katta, never mind a softer-skinned species like Humans or the frogtopusses. But once the Salik whittled away the Terran and V’Dan Humans, the Solaricans, the Tlassians, and the K’katta, they would make war on the Dlmvla—whose flesh would be deemed edible, even if acquiring it while the owner still breathed was problematic—and then they would destroy the Chinsoiy to make sure no one in local space could thwart their ambitions. Only then would the Salik finally fall upon the Choya, their own allies.

  By then, the Salik would be nigh unstoppable. If Ia let the future unfold in their favor, that was. They were more prepared than anyone but she herself knew in the Alliance. Not even their Choya collaborators knew just how much effort the Salik had put into building their forces for the coming war. Deep, slow, treacherous plans. The only thing holding them back was a lack of personnel to command all the equipment they had mustered, even with Choyan assistance.

  The door slid open. Rico walked inside, along with Xhuge, MacInnes, and Al-Aboudwa. All four were carrying portable workstations. They clipped them onto the table, claiming seats down either side. Ia smiled. “I’m glad you could join me, meioas.”

  “Ha-ha,” Rico returned dryly, opening his workpad screen. “How funny. Shall we get down to business, Captain?”

  “Certainly, Lieutenant. What’ve you found?” she asked them.

  MacInnes spoke first. “They’re using different code words for this set of datanodes—which would be rather smart of them, having two sets for steganography—but I was still able to pick out the nouns. Even some of the verbs, now that I’m getting a grip on how they talk and think.”

  Xhuge, who had linked his workstation to the briefing-room screens, looked up at the starcharts his efforts displayed. “Good thing, too, since they’re on the move.”

  “Even with that difficulty, the work still went a lot faster this time,” Al-Aboudwa stated. “The code words were different, but the security protocols were the same. Decrypting everything took a while, but only a fraction of the first time.”

  Ia smiled wryly. “Long enough for me to get a good night’s sleep, though. Thank you.”

  Xhuge nodded. A touch of the controls highlighted three regions, one in yellow, one in orange, and one in green. A second touch overlaid a purple ring, which bisected the green blob. “Green is where they were, which corresponds with the hundred-light-year search ring we’d established. Yellow and orange are the two locations they were directed to travel to. Unfortunately, we don’t know which.”

  “I hope you indeed got a good night’s sleep, Captain,” Rico told her. “We’re expecting you to pull the correct location out of your magic hat.”

  “Not only a good night’s sleep, but a fair bit of battle preplanning,” Ia said, studying the charts. She rose from her seat and moved over to the main screen behind Rico and MacInnes. “Anything distinctive about either of these regions? Local stellar features, planetary arrangements, visible nebulae?”

  “Not a damn thing, sir,” Xhuge replied. “Either you pull a rabbit out of your hat, or we’re stumped.”

  “There might be an easier way, Xhuge. With the extra comm nodes we pulled, I’ve been playing some pattern analyses on the extra data,” Al-Aboudwa said. A tap of his workpad pulled up a set of charts on the screen next to the one Ia was studying. One of them, he enlarged, displaying the spiked line squiggling across time. “The anti-psi manufactory sends out certain signals once every eight-day Salik week. We’d have to wait five more days for the next spike, then hit another comm hub, but…”

  “We don’t have five days,” Ia finished for him.

  “Here’s a brilliant idea,” MacInnes offered, catching their attention. “Why don’t we just remind ourselves to put up a big note on the briefing-room wall saying which zone we went to, and just have you look at that precognitively, Captain?”

  Twisting in his seat, Rico looked up at her, brows raised. “Good thought, MacInnes. I don’t see why it couldn’t work. Captain, care to take a peek?”

  Ia held up one hand, thumb and forefinger pinched closely together. “There’s a slight problem with that. I don’t see one timeline. I see all of them.” Turning back to the starchart, she traced her finger over the screen, electrokinetically drawing a set of lines. “If we go to fight at location yellow, here, then that’s fine and dandy; we all do our jobs right, the main manufactory center gets destroyed, and we go merrily on our way to this green blob here, which will represent our next task in the continuum.

  “But if we start at this orange spot here…we all do our jobs right, the main manufactory center gets destroyed, and we go merrily on our way to this green blob here, which will represent our next task in the continuum.” Turning back to the others, she sidestepped the drawing and extended her arm, tapping the yellow and the orange blobs, now connected to the green one by a pair of white lines. “The problem is, I see both locations as viable possibilities. At about a fifty percent split, no less.

  “This green blob down here, our next task, is actually two green blobs, overlapping each other because they’re almost identical in every single way…except one has a sign in the briefing room that says ‘We defeated them at Yellow!’ And the other says ‘We defeated them at Orange!’ I see both, fifty-fifty. Equally valid, equally probable,” she concluded, shrugging. “I need something more than a sign that could be posted in either possible reality. Something distinctive enough to tip the balance either way. Even an unusual star formation from the local point of view would give me a clue.”

  “Captain, I told you; there’s nothing special about either location,” Xhuge reminded her. “No stellar phenomena, no planets, nothing. They’re both interstitial space, they’re equidistant from ordinary, uninhabited star systems with large amounts of water ice in their Kuiper belts and Oort clouds, and no reason for them not to go to either spot. For all we know, the commander of the manufactory vessel flipped a coin to decide where to go.”

  “If they had, we could almost have you watch the coin being flipped,” MacInnes joked, folding her arms and leaning her elbows on the table. “Except it’s on a mobile station that gives everyone a raging headache when you get close. Or doesn’t seem to exist, or however that works.”

  Al-Aboudwa sighed and slouched back in his chair. “So how are we going to find where our target has gone?”

  “The same way I’ve been finding it all along,” Ia said. “Narrow down the search sites—which we have done—and investigate it for blank-space anomalies. Negative proof is still a proof, in a way.”r />
  Lieutenant Rico tapped two of his fingers lightly, thoughtfully on the table. “Captain Ia…you said a few days back that you watch people, not things, correct?”

  “Correct,” she confirmed. “I could literally enter their life-stream and experience snippets of whatever they experience, if I wanted to.”

  “And Private MacInnes sees nouns…” he mused.

  “Oh. Oh!” MacInnes said, sitting up with wide eyes. “G’nush-pthaachz Mulkffar-gwish! He’s the requisitioning officer signing most of the orders we found. Maybe you can see him flipping a coin?”

  Ia gave her a flat stare. Not because the idea was absurd, but because the way she pronounced Sallhash phonemes was absurd. Ia’s odd sense of humor kicked in, quirking the corner of mouth and brow. “I think I’ve finally found someone with an accent even worse than mine. I don’t have even a tenth of your command of their language, but your accent amuses me. Thank you, Private.”

  “The question is, can you take someone else with you into these timestreams?” Rico asked her as the private blushed. “Maybe a clairvoyant? I’m presuming it would have to be a fellow psi.”

  “I could take you,” Ia countered flippantly. “The closest you get to a psychic ability is your uncanny aptitude for languages…which isn’t a bad idea,” she allowed, thinking it through. “I can get into an alien’s life-stream, and hear their thoughts, but I’m not a strong xenopath, and I’m no linguist. The Tlassian and Solarican mind structures are similar to Humans’. K’katta, Choya, less so. Gatsugi is a headache of nuances to sort through. Dlmvla as well. But Salik? They’re cold and brutal, aggressive and cunning. Wading through their life-thoughts is like wading through cold, opaque slime.

  “You may not have the mind-set of a Salik, but you know their language, which means you’re closer to understanding their thoughts than I am,” Ia allowed. Stepping closer to MacInnes, she leaned her palms on the back of the other woman’s chair, giving her 1st Platoon lieutenant a frank look from across the table. “But if I take you onto the timeplains, Oslo, you’re no longer a neutral observer. I don’t think the people you report to would be happy about that.”