Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  “Wait a minute,” Xhuge said, glancing between Ia and Rico. “Are you saying the lieutenant’s a spy? We have a spy on board?”

  “He’s one of several on board,” Ia corrected. “I know who each and every one of them is, and who they report to—and before you get in a panic, they all report more or less to the Admiral-General in the end, so they’re all internal spies. Some more directly than others.” Shaking her head, she straightened. “I think I’ll just take a solo dip. That way, you don’t compromise your neutrality, and I don’t exhaust myself trying to push two or more people through that anti-psi field.”

  “I think I should go,” Rico countered. “According to what I was told, you haven’t shown anyone on the Command Staff what it’s like to be on the timeplains. Now, why is that?”

  “Because it would be considered an undue influence upon their decisions,” Ia said. “The same with yours. There might even be an accusation of Fatality Thirty-Eight, Bribery, levied at me if I tried to use it to convince my superiors to do as I request because of the fear that I’d show them lottery numbers or stock-market results. I’d rather not kick my career out the nearest airlock.”

  “I still think I should,” he asserted. “In fact, I insist, Captain. Bribery doesn’t even come into it because there’s no way in hell I’ll ever play the Salik version of a lottery.”

  Ia sighed and rubbed at her brow. She had foreseen this as a possibility. It had the risk of complicating things, but it also had the chance of getting him firmly on her side. This will be tricky. How to show enough to convince him I’m being honest without showing him so much he either resists or the Admiral-General claims undue influence…or showing so little, he knows I’m holding back. Either way, he’s going to see things he doesn’t know he didn’t want to see. Oh, this’ll be fun…

  “There’s an old saying that applies in this instance, Lieutenant,” she warned him. “‘What has been seen cannot be unseen.’ You insist a third time, I will take you…but it’ll go on the record as being your idea, of your own free will, with no accusations of Fatality Thirty-Eight ever levied my way. And you’ll do so by understanding that a trip onto the timeplains will change the way you look at things from here on out.”

  “I’m already compromised as a ‘neutral observer’ since you know about me,” he pointed out. “I don’t see how much worse it could get.”

  Xhuge winced, and Al-Aboudwa whistled softly. MacInnes shook her head slowly, a pitying look in her eyes.

  “Tell me you did not just say that, sir?” Al-Aboudwa half joked. “That’s like giving Murphy a wedgie, then asking him if it was good for him, too.”

  “Never taunt Fate, sir,” MacInnes agreed. “Even a lowly grunt knows that much.”

  Xhuge choked, smothering his laughter behind his fist.

  Dipping his head ruefully in acknowledgment, Rico murmured, “I’m sure I did just yank up on some devil’s undershorts, Private…but I still must insist, Captain. Take me onto these ‘timeplains’ of yours. I want to see what you see.”

  “Witnessed?” Ia asked the others.

  “Witnessed,” MacInnes agreed. Xhuge and Al-Aboudwa nodded, adding their confirmation.

  “Alright then. Be it on your head. There are a few rules of engagement, of course,” Ia told them. “Rule number one, no one touches either of us. My gifts can be triggered inadvertently by a touch, so if you have to get my attention, throw something at me from a distance. A datapad, a shoe, even a wrench if you must, so long as it’s something small and nonliving.”

  “That would explain Helstead’s comment about throwing boots at you, the other day,” Rico muttered.

  “Second rule, Lieutenant,” Ia said, meeting his gaze. “Do not say the word ‘Time’ while we’re on the timeplains. Time is like an entity where we are going because my abilities and my thoughts will literally be shaping whatever you see. You don’t want to sidetrack my thoughts by provoking that entity. It would be like poking a tiger repeatedly. Is that clear?”

  “Not really, but if those are your conditions, I will comply,” the tall man admitted. “Anything else?”

  “That’ll do.” She tipped her head to her right. “If you’ll move to the far end of the table, I’ll join you there. That way the others won’t be tempted to touch either of us. But they can stay and watch if they want.”

  “I’d like to watch, Captain,” MacInnes said, as Rico unfolded his long, large frame from his chair. “I’m not due for my shift on the bridge for another forty minutes. Did you, ah, want me to come along? I know what this Mulkffar-gwish fellow looks like. Would that help?”

  “I’m enough of a telepath, I could pick it up from your thoughts first, if you’re willing,” Ia said, stepping back to give the lieutenant room to pass. “I’d rather limit who comes with me onto the timeplains, particularly as we’ll be navigating areas clouded by those damned machines. I’m strong, but I have my limits.”

  “I’m willing, sir.” Squaring her shoulders, MacInnes focused her gaze on her workstation screen for a long moment, then nodded. “I’ve got him in my mind now.”

  Nodding, Ia moved close. A touch of her hand on the private’s wrist was all it took. Part of her gifts threatened to lean over the other woman’s life-stream a little too far; Ia reined in the impulse to dive in, and focused instead on her thoughts. The image of a yellow-skinned, broad-faced, ostrich-legged alien came across clearly, clad in a leather-like tan-and-blue uniform dotted with rank markings and the circle-based language of his kind, listing his name and deployment affiliations.

  Carefully withdrawing her hand, Ia clung to that image. “To quote the PsiLeague, ‘What was yours is still yours. I thank you for allowing me this glimpse of your thoughts.’”

  “Not a problem, sir. Um…what will we see when you do this?” the other woman asked.

  “Not much. He might react a little, gasp or widen his eyes,” Ia said, moving carefully down the length of the table. She wasn’t really seeing the table, concentrating instead upon the image of the Salik named Mulkffar-nostril-flap-exhale. Gripping the back of the chair next to the dusky-skinned lieutenant, she turned it enough to drop into it, and stretched out her left arm with her palm up on the table. “You might get a headache from this, Lieutenant. Our thoughts will be racing faster on the timeplains than our bodies will be living out here in the real world, like a modified, unshielded race through OTL. Last chance.”

  “I’ll take that risk, sir.” Turning his chair to face her, knees almost bumping hers, he stretched out his right arm, covering her palm with his.

  Ia curled her fingers over his hand. “Remember, I warned you. Take two slow, deep breaths, and relax.”

  “Does that help?” he asked, one brow quirked skeptically.

  “Not really,” she joked. “You’re just less likely to choke.”

  That was all the warning she gave. Closing her eyes, Ia flipped both of them down and in—and hauled up on her passenger’s mind, pulling him out of his own life-stream before he could drown in the overlapping sensations of a thousand potential possibilities.

  “Welcome to the plains,” Ia stated as she steadied him. Rico blinked and looked around, clinging to her hand with both of his. All around them was a vast, rippling field of gold-and-green grass crisscrossed in a thousand rivulets, all drenched in bright golden sunlight. Nothing but grass, sun, and water as far as the eye could see.

  “Where…? Or rather, what is this place?” he corrected himself, straightening.

  “This is how I most often visualize Time.” The word rippled grass and streams like a harsh wind. It even seemed to roil clouds across the sky for a moment, before the impression faded. Ia let it fade before speaking again. “But I can change it. Shape it. Intensify it, codify it, itemize it…”

  The tall man blinked and frowned. “I don’t understand. You say you can see all possibilities. What future possibility is this from?”

  “Most of them. It’s a matter of scale, Lieutenant,” she said, and gestu
red at the rivulet of a stream closest to them. “That’s your life.” A twist of her thoughts enlarged it until it was a meter deep and wide, large enough to show images flickering in the water. Images from his immediate past. “I can watch scenes from moments in your existence, past and future. I can even step inside the stream and experience from your own perspective what you’ve already experienced, or will, or might. And I can shrink it down and trace how your life interacts with others’ lives, and how they stain each other in colors of influence.”

  She shrunk the streams back down again, then turned his stream blue and a nearby one red, and showed them interacting, staining each stream with hints of purple, one more strongly than the other.

  “Whose life is that?” Rico asked her, eyeing the purple-tinted red.

  “Private MacInnes; she looks up to you as a role model. Not a bad choice, either,” Ia told him. Erasing the colors, she gestured with her free hand. “Upstream is the past; downstream is the future. I hauled you out of your life-stream when we first arrived because the moment we arrive is always the present, and lingering in the present creates a doubled, disorienting sensation. In addition to that, any thought you have can trigger an associated memory from the past, rushing those memory-waters downstream into you. Think of toast, and you’ll drown under a thousand different instances of eating caramelized bread.”

  “Lovely. Why do our voices echo so much?” he asked next, lifting the littlest finger of his free hand to his ear for a wiggle.

  “We’re immersed only lightly at the moment.” Concentrating, Ia increased her awareness of the timeplains, and with it, his. “…Is that better?”

  He wiggled his finger in his ear one more time, then nodded. “Better.” Pausing, he inhaled, blinked, then inhaled again. “Amazing. I can actually smell the sunbaked grass. But why is it more blue now than green?”

  His question provoked a smile from her. “That’s because the local equivalent to grass on Sanctuary is blue. The grass really is greener on Earth.”

  Squinting against the sunlight, Rico studied the plains. “So, what do we do now?”

  “We look for two things. Our blank spot, and our supply-requisitioner. But not like this,” Ia said. “Try not to feel vertigo.”

  He glanced at her—and clutched at her hand again as the grass fell away, replaced by stars. “God!” Rico exclaimed, grip tightening around her fingers. His large, muscular frame floated awkwardly next to Ia’s. “Warn me better, next time!”

  “You’re the one who wanted to come along,” Ia pointed out.

  Brow furrowing in a frown, Rico gave her a pointed look. “I thought you said your abilities focused more on people, not places.”

  “They do,” she admitted.

  “So how is it we’re surrounded by a giant star map?” he asked. “Aren’t these places, not people?”

  “Yes, but they’re a composite awareness of the stars as viewed by a large sampling of people’s life-streams,” Ia explained patiently.

  He stared at her. She stared back, lifting an eyebrow in a silent dare to see if he would ask another question.

  “…Right,” Rico finally muttered. “I’ll just shut up now and go along for the ride.”

  Turning her attention to the stars, Ia zoomed them in toward two patches of misty grey nebulae. “We should have a slight advantage. This moment is the Now.” She paused as the stars twinkled around them, then continued. “What we’re looking for is upstream, into the past. Not just any random past, but specifically what has already happened in our own temporal lineage. That way we can rule out the fifty-fifty probability of either location, because one should have been selected by now. The difficulties will be: one, finding any life-streams in the anti-psi mist to examine; and two, finding those life-streams whose owners have actual knowledge of where they’ve gone.”

  Stopping at the edge of one of the two mist-patches, Ia lifted her hand, summoning a hologram of a Salik with dull yellowish skin, the image she had lifted from MacInnes’s mind.

  “G’nush-pthaachz Mulkffar-gwish. Or rather,” Ia made the image say, with the proper nostril-flap flexings, “~`Pthaachz Mulkffar^.” This was all inside her head, constrained only by the limits of her gifts, not the limits of her body. She switched back to her own voice, letting the Salik’s face fade slowly. “Keep him in mind.”

  “Why should I?” Rico asked her. “It’s not my psychic abilities being used here.”

  “No, but your Sallhash is better than mine,” she reminded the tall man at her side. Even floating in mental space, he was still larger than her. Proportionately larger, letting her know he was comfortable with his greater size. “You wanted to know what I see, and that means seeing it right alongside me. But this is the Space Force. You pull your weight, even what little there is in this place. There are no free rides here, soldier.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” he muttered. “Three bags full, sir.”

  “That only counts if you can say it in Sallhash,” Ia quipped. A snerk sound escaped him; a glance showed his mouth twisted in a half smile. She returned it with a wry smile of her own. “Brace yourself, Lieutenant. We’re about to get up close and personal with Salik xenopsychology.”

  A tiny pinpoint was moving away from the cloud. Ia dove them down toward it. The pinpoint became a Salik starship, long and five-lobed. It zoomed close, and the hull vanished, replaced instead by a splash of water, a wavering impression of a corridor, a distortion of two overlapping, separately moving views. Ia felt Rico clutching at her hand, bruising it with his mental strength, and pulled back until they stood once more on the grassy banks of someone’s life-stream.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, gentling the intensity for a moment.

  He blinked and looked around. “We…I…That was…disorienting. Is that how they view the world?”

  “Yes.” Stepping down into the alien’s cold, thick water, she tugged him after her. “We have to wade through several of these lives. Watch your step. I’m intensifying the connection to the timestreams again.”

  “Wait,” Rico said. “If we talk to each other…will they hear us? Or if we try to talk to them?”

  “No. It’d be like talking to a previously recorded vidshow broadcast and expecting the actors to hear you,” Ia said. “Whatever reception equipment I have, I don’t think it can broadcast back to them. At least, I’ve never gotten it to work with friends and family. I can’t even talk to myself whenever I investigate my own life-stream, which has caused some problems along the way—the proverb ‘if I’d known back then what I know now’ is singularly unhelpful since my future self cannot tell my past self a damn thing, and I don’t have enough seconds to spare to say it out loud in the future, let alone to write it down. Now come, we’re wasting our opportunity.”

  Breathing deep, he stepped into the water, following the tug of her hand. Ia submerged them, tapping into that crew member. Not deep enough to hear thoughts; just enough to see what that alien saw. The view was doubled and too broad for Human vision, with eyes bulging up from the skull, pointing this way and that. She could feel a headache forming from the disorientation of it and knew Rico would be feeling it, too.

  This wasn’t the first time she had investigated a Salik life, though. Swimming upstream, she skimmed through snippets of past events, a shift cycle beginning, an encounter with an officer on watch. Jumping into that stream, she followed that officer in flashes of past events to the beginning of their shift, and from there, to another officer. But that officer merely came from his sleeping tank, so she followed his life-stream down through his day…until he encountered the ship’s captain.

  Leaping into his life-stream was easier now that Rico wasn’t resisting the disorientation that came with each transition. He did pull himself closer as she pushed upstream into the past, clinging as the turbulence increased. Some of that came from the speed at which she moved. Some of it came from an increasing misty pressure. Rather than letting it push them out of the water, Ia pushed them deeper into
the captain’s head—and then sideslipped into the navigator’s as soon as the captain observed enough of the bridge crew for her to select the right alien.

  His thoughts were murky, the terminology and grammar disjointed at first. Eventually, the distortions made sense. More three years. Service ending, female become. Puddlings teach to eat, followed by an image of the captain, and a mental hiss of vicious vengeance-and-hunger.

  “I don’t think he likes the captain,” Ia whispered to Rico, her noir sense of humor surfacing for a moment. “What do you think?”

  “If you’d studied their culture and history, you’d realize most Salik subordinates don’t,” he whispered back. They couldn’t even see each other anymore at this level of xenoawareness, but he was still clutching her mental hand tightly. “Wait…back it up. I think I can read the coordinates for their heading.”

  Ia complied. She couldn’t exactly freeze the moment, not with the pressure of that anti-psi misting her mind, but she could replay it in slow, short passes. The navigator looked at the screens positioned over his head, one eye on the actual heading, the other on reference stars and designation numbers.

  When she felt him nod, she advanced them upstream again. The mist and the pain thickened apace. Her grasp of Sallhash, written and thought, started to slip. Pushing Rico’s consciousness to the fore, she guided him upstream to the point where the navigator heard the captain order the pilot to disengage from dock and tell the navigator what course to set.

  She could feel Rico’s confidence that knowledge of those coordinates would be enough to place their location. Ia wasn’t so sure. Stretching herself, she left him in the navigator’s waters and dipped into the captain’s thoughts.

  Riptides of sloppiness, she heard the captain cursing in the privacy of his mind. Pity for those prisoners. Now useless dredge-sand.