Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  With that thought came an image of Solaricans, shaved and restrained on tables, their wrinkled heads encased in bands that looked vaguely like the anti-psi headsets Ia had seen back on Sallha at the aborted banquet. Ia pursued that thought, trying to find a time reference. She found it from three Salik Standard days before. Grabbing Rico, she pulled him after her, ignoring his wordless protests.

  The pain increased, the farther back they went. It was oddly like G-force sickness. The edges of her vision started to grey out. Each breath became a struggle. But the captain was there…and did come close enough to one of the Salik scientists for Ia to make the leap into her life-stream.

  Sexual deviancy among the Salik had nothing to do with methods of copulation. This was a Salik who had chosen to turn female without procreating. Her thoughts were cruel, vicious, and cold. Clinical, in that she thought about the torment of the Solarican prisoners simply as an exercise in observing their reactions to various anti-psi modulation exercises. She felt none of the pity the captain had felt; she did not think her prey unworthy of time or effort. To her, the felinoid aliens were objects to be toyed with until destroyed. Her hunt was all about knowledge, not adrenaline and food.

  Forcing back the flow of time, Ia found another Salik, an officer. Male again—cold and brutal, but not nearly so calculating. Then another…and a third, one who was eating a prisoner, a skreeling, shuddering, bleeding K’katta chained with all ten legs sprawled out straight, leaving it no more than a finger-width of room in any direction in which to shudder and move. Rico huddled mentally at her back, no longer reaching voluntarily for the thoughts and words of these tentacle-fingered fiends.

  Ia endured the first-person perspective of the Salik’s meal, watching them eat because it was a meal being shared by five high-ranking officers. Her detachment was dissimilar to the Salik scientist’s; hers was an effort to listen to their words because she had no other choice, not because she was intrigued by what they were doing. Thankfully, with the anti-psi machines pressing around, it wasn’t difficult to ignore the visual aspects. It was a little harder to let the flavors and scents fade, but when they did, the mental presence of her lieutenant uncurled a little, listening intently.

  What they heard surprised him, for he squeezed her hand tightly. Ia didn’t let herself think about it. Instead, she listened a little bit longer, repeating the discussion three full times to make sure both of them heard all of it. Only then did she carefully retreat, moving slowly enough that neither of them would suffer the psychic equivalent of decompression sickness. As she did so, she slid them forward through that officer’s timeline, double-checking along the way to make sure his home vessel was indeed headed where that conversation said it would go.

  The moment she had confirmation, she pulled back. The grey mist became the star field, became a single watery stream, its surrounding, grassy prairie…and with a final flip, the briefing room. Used to the disorientation that was the return to reality after such a deep descent, Ia inhaled slowly, calming her nerves. Lieutenant Rico’s face looked pasty, almost grey in spite of his natural golden brown tan.

  “Breathe, Lieutenant,” she ordered quietly, finding her voice. “Slow, deep breaths. Focus on the sound and feel of your own breath. Nice, slow, steady breaths, four times in a row…”

  Behind Ia, MacInnes rose from her seat, moving over to the alcove by the door where a drinks dispenser had been installed. Rico blinked and complied, brown eyes still unfocused. On the fourth exhale, he shuddered and released her hand. Elbow braced on the table, he lifted his fingers to his mouth, breathing hard and fast through his nose.

  Wisely, the private poured and brought back two mugs of cold water. “Drink this, sirs,” she urged, offering one cup to Ia and the other to Rico. She had to help Rico lift his to his mouth, his free hand shook that much. “Easy, Lieutenant; let me help you…There, just a sip at a time…There you go, that’s the first one.”

  Once he had taken that sip, the private dipped two fingers in the water, then stroked her damp digits across his brow. Pursing her lips, she blew a stream of air on his forehead. Ia dipped her own fingers in her cup, dabbing it from her hairline in a streak down the middle of her brow, parting her fingers to either side of her nose. She sipped slowly from the cup while the cool liquid on her skin drew some of the heat out of her temples and sinuses.

  The water-cooling trick was the same one taught by the PsiLeague, which MacInnes was affiliated with, as well as by the Witan Order, which had trained Ia in the early uses of her gifts. It was meant to help focus thoughts as well as reduce the heat-induced headaches that often accompanied intense psychic efforts. Ia rarely suffered from them, but the anti-psi fog plus the need to shelter and escort another mind through the timeplains had taken its toll.

  “…How?” Rico finally rasped, sipping again at his water. MacInnes moved back, giving him a clear view of their CO. “How do you stay sane?”

  There were several replies she could have made to that. Out of habit, Ia checked the timestreams. Her head still hurt, but the skimming of potential reactions to various responses was quick and easy compared to the effort she had just undertaken. Settling on one of the better answers, she gave it to him.

  “Practice, and a lack of time, Lieutenant. I literally cannot afford to waste my time on something as self-indulgent as insanity. I have too many lives to save. Let me know when you’ve recovered,” she added, lifting her cup for another sip. That lifted his head sharply, his gaze meeting hers. “We still need to check the other probability cloud, to make sure that what we heard was right.”

  “Shakk,” he whispered, dropping his forehead to his palm this time. “I don’t know if I can take…experiencing…a Salik officer eating a prisoner again.”

  The others blanched. Xhuge covered his mouth, and MacInnes swallowed hard. Al-Aboudwa looked away. None of them asked any questions about it.

  “Slow breaths, Lieutenant. Focus on the scent of the air, on the sound of it filling your lungs,” Ia ordered. She waited until he complied, then said, “Don’t worry about it if you don’t want to go in again, Rico. It’s doubtful we’ll have to endure that exact scene a second time, but you don’t have to go with me again. I’ll admit your ability to translate Sallhash a lot faster than I can was an asset on this trip, and I wouldn’t mind having it again, but you don’t have to come along.” Looking over her shoulder, she added, “Xhuge, Al-Aboudwa, when he’s ready, the lieutenant has some Salik coordinates for you.”

  Xhuge nodded and tapped something into his workpad, readying it for taking notes.

  Sipping at his water, Rico managed a question. “How long were we out of it?”

  MacInnes shrugged. “A minute? Maybe a little longer?”

  Rico looked up at her, then at Ia. “…Only a minute? It felt more like half an hour!”

  “If Time didn’t flow considerably faster on the timeplains than it does in real life, I would have slit both throat and wrists in despair long ago, because I wouldn’t have had the time to find a way out of the coming apocalypse,” Ia stated. Draining her cup, she clipped it to the edge of the table and rose. “I’m going to use the head. Take a few minutes to decide whether or not you want to accompany me on a second trip while I’m gone, Lieutenant. There’s no shame in refusing if you don’t want to go. If you do, expect an even greater headache by the time we’re through.”

  Dipping her head politely, she left him to contemplate the consequences of what else he might see. The odds were very high that he would decline this time. Ia was fine with that since what she could see of his future reactions showed little disturbance in her overall plans. Whether or not he came with her, she would find the necessary confirmations and get the job done.

  That was what kept her sane: managing her priorities in the face of the relentless ticking of Time.

  CHAPTER 8

  Historians get to have the luxury of looking back upon the past and pronouncing judgment upon it from the cushioned comfort of their office c
hairs. Ask any historian when the First Salik War ended, and they’ll smugly say when the Salik High Command surrendered to the Alliance generals. Some might be more precise by saying it was when the Salik surrendered “all” of their warships, while others would say the war actually ended when they handed over all their other means of interstellar travel, too.

  Soldiers who participated in maintaining the Salik Interdicted Zone will tell you that war never actually ended. They’ll swear it just went into a lull while the Salik nursed their grudges along with their wounds. Having served on the Blockade, I cannot fault my fellow warriors for believing the war, at least for the Salik and the people trying to keep them confined, hadn’t ended.

  As for when the Second Salik War began, one could say it began in the Terran Standard year 2496. One could be more precise and pinpoint the first half of that year, which most scholars and soldiers would agree upon. Some would insist my Company’s prewar efforts be included in those war-catalyzing and -defining moments, which would narrow it down to the start of February or thereabouts. Officially, it started later, of course, with the open attacks on key Alliance homeworlds…but for my crew, it definitely started earlier.

  ~Ia

  FEBRUARY 10, 2496 T.S.

  INTERSTITIAL SPACE

  SOMEWHERE NEAR THE TLASSIAN-K’KATTAN BORDER

  “I have the helm, Sangwan,” Ia stated.

  “You have the helm, sir,” the yeoman confirmed. Unlike the last time he had passed her helm control, his voice was unsteady. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “There’s a plastic bag in your rightmost drawer,” she offered pragmatically, checking her monitors. “But I suggest saving it for later. We’re not engaged in combat yet.”

  “Thinking about combat is what’s making me sick. I really don’t like what we’re about to do, sir,” Sangwan muttered.

  “Well, if you’d like to be dismissed from the bridge, now is the time,” Ia told him, adjusting the Hellfire’s attitude just a tiny bit more. Opening a comm channel, she contacted the 1st Platoon’s lead gunnery expert. “Captain Ia to Corporal Bagha, what’s the status on the special missiles?”

  “Locked and loaded, Captain,” Bagha reported. “We just finished sealing up the last P-pod bay half a minute ago. Give my team three or four more minutes to get into our gunnery pods, and we’ll be ready to go.”

  “You have four. Don’t waste them. Ia out.”

  The seconds ticked away. She had already given the fifteen-minute warning earlier, and a quick splash through the timestreams showed almost everyone was in place. Those who were in bed had either lashed themselves down with special webbing or moved to acceleration couches; the galleys were shut down, the gunners were getting into their pods, and the stragglers who had needed that one last trip to the bathroom were all but done strapping themselves into place. One of them was Lieutenant Commander Helstead. She hurried in at the next-to-last moment and claimed the backup navigation/scanner post.

  Ia opened the shipwide intercom as the short woman webbed herself into her seat. “This is Captain Ia to all hands. Prepare for combat, and prepare for maneuvers. I repeat, all hands, prepare for combat, prepare for maneuvers. You have one minute, mark.”

  Those seconds ticked away as well.

  “First drop in ten,” Ia warned her bridge crew as she eased back the FTL field. “Get me lightwave, meioas.”

  Flashing dots filled the bridge. Ia held them just under the speed of light for ten seconds, then pushed them over Cee once more. Ten seconds passed, then she dropped the ship below Cee for another ten. Again, they shifted faster-than-light…and a third time dropped below the grey-flashing threshold.

  “…Got it, sir!” Private Ng called out, hands flicking over the controls. “To your main, now.”

  A ghostly overlay of ship positions appeared on her screen. Ia stared at them, mind racing, gifts dipping into the timestreams. Electricity sparked from her right hand into the console. “Bagha, you got that?”

  “Aye, sir! Targets confirmed,” the other woman called back through the comm link.

  “Dropping for launch in five…four…three…two…one.” Ia pulled back on their speed one more time.

  A single, loud whump echoed down the ship. The moment she felt it, Ia squeezed them back over the FTL line, then accelerated. The navicomp was the most sophisticated computer on the ship, capable of analyzing the most minute scraps of data. It could take the faintest, starlit images and resolve them into ships, stations, asteroids, any and all manner of cosmic phenomena. It could even give a fairly accurate estimate on an updated location for everything with just two observations of a few seconds each.

  With three glimpses, it could confirm those placements and transfer the information to homemade rockets launched from the Hellfire’s projectile pods. It could not, however, accurately predict where to move its own presence in the next two minutes in order to achieve their objectives. That was Ia’s job.

  “All hands, engaging in five…four…” she counted over the intercom. At one, Ia brought the long ship down below the threshold. Yet again, the screens flashed from blurred streaks to bubbles that popped in unison, becoming simple pinpricks of light. Red circles quickly zeroed in on every object within sixty light-seconds, and a familiar ache zeroed in on Ia’s mind. Not only were there a good twenty ships ahead, ranging from a Battle Platform–sized station to several destroyers, there were hundreds of active anti-psi machines in the zone, their effects painfully accumulative.

  “All pods, acquire targets and fire,” Private Magnan ordered calmly. Sung was serving elsewhere this hour, which meant the dark-skinned woman had taken his place as head of the gunnery teams on the bridge. Others might have wondered why Jana Bagha wasn’t on the bridge, but Bagha was a Sharpshooter, trained to shoot as an individual gunner; Ia knew Magnan had the tactical training to guide and direct other shooters in a free-for-all.

  Free from that worry, Ia concentrated through the misting pain. Left hand in the sensor glove, she flexed the FTL fields and shifted the Hellfire’s attitude, pointing the nose down just a little bit. Zooming through the void at a speed dangerously close to Cee, Ia shifted the ship a tiny bit more. Orange-red lasers lanced outward at those enemy ships, painting them as targets for the missiles riding in hard and fast at their back.

  Yellow lines intersected on her main screen, triggering collision-alert beeps. A large ship lay partly across their path. Free-falling the ship in a brief bubble of warped physics—half of one precious second of shielded real time was all she needed to predict their near future—Ia corrected course slightly and angled the nose down even more, relative to their flight. The beeps grew louder, disturbingly fast. Within a handful of seconds, the beeps became claxons, distressed sirens paired with flashing lights in imminent-collision warning.

  A slight, downward shift was all it took, just a dozen meters. The shields of the Hellfire’s nose scraped across the shields protecting the Salik warship, jolting both vessels. In less than a blink, they were past it. A second bubble-shift tilted the Hellfire, angling it perfectly for an attack on the space station beyond. The anti-psi field was also so strong now, Ia was glad she had ordered all psychically sensitive crew members to stand down for this operation.

  Jabbing the controls, Ia opened the bay doors to the second OTL nose cone. Not to extend it, but enough to give it a clear angle of fire. The claxons stopped, then shifted back to beeping a collision-alert warning.

  Ignoring the noise, Ia launched the hyperrift spark just before reaching the station. A split second later, they transited the three-kilometer station’s midpoint. She snapped the FTL field back into place around the ship and drove them forward—not along the path they had been traveling but along the line they were now facing.

  The vector change slammed their sense of momentum back and upward, rushing the blood to their heads for one uncomfortable, safety-field-squeezed moment. The pinpoints of light surrounding them burst into bubbles and smeared into streaks. Vis
ion greying, Ia slowed their acceleration, holding them just slightly faster than Cee for several seconds. That eased the pressure on their bodies.

  Flexing the fields, she reduced their speed once more for a much more gentle, sublight turn. Within two heartbeats, the massive headache eased. Pain still lingered, greying the timestreams in the back of Ia’s mind; several of those ships still had anti-psi machines active, generating their annoying, gift-masking fields. But her head didn’t feel like it was two throbs away from rupturing a blood vessel. The mass of machines on the big station were clearly gone, proving that exo-EM radiation moved faster than EM itself could.

  The proof that the two moved at different speeds was obvious. Behind them, their lightwave front caught up with them on their rearward-facing scanners. The navicomp identified the Hellfire as it skimmed past the patrolling enemy vessels, a tiny green line intersecting a tiny red blob of dots. The green line darted through a swarm of yellow bars indicating both the Hellfire’s L-pods attacking and the few attempts their enemy had made to shoot back. They had been traveling so fast, Ia hadn’t even noticed the return shots when they happened, though she could now see the tangled grid of laserfire arrowing off in all directions.

  Sangwan’s screens, directly ahead of and below Ia’s, flicked to a magnified view. Stars rippled across the Hellfire’s polished hull; a blue-white spark spat outward as the ship zipped past the station—and blipped from view in a tiny bubble-flare of all that reflected starlight as its mad, white-haired pilot took the ship back to faster-than-light speeds.

  A second later, the station crunched inward in an explosion. They couldn’t hear it on the bridge, but that magnified view showed it viscerally. The station’s matter had collapsed the edges of the hyperrift, creating a deadly pinpoint of imploded fusion. That energy slammed outward in streaks of white-gold, shearing through bulkheads and igniting rich, dark reddish fires—the colors were artificially shifted by their speed. Outward-bound as they still were, despite their gradual curve, the lightwaves were stretched out, giving them extra time to look at what was unfolding to the rear.