Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY)

by Jean Johnson

  “Finish with this and the next two patients, then return to the ship,” Ia ordered. “We’re leaving within half an hour.”

  Her brow furrowed, but she nodded. “Understood, sir.”

  “Good meioa-e,” Ia praised. Moving along, she caught up with Isagawa, who was smoothing down the self-sealing end of a clean wrap. “Good work, Isagawa. Finish two more, then join Private T’enku-o in returning to the ship.”

  “We’re leaving, then?” Isagawa asked her. At Ia’s nod, she lifted her chin off to her left. “I saw Private Orange over that way a few minutes ago. You want me to find and tell him?”

  “I’ll do it,” Ia said. “You have patients to attend.”

  Pausing to allow another gurney to go past, Ia went in search of Privates Orange, Attevale, and Smitt. Orange and Attevale were assisting a pair of Gatsugi nurses in setting a broken leg; the nurses watched the monitors, giving instructions in awkward Terranglo, while Orange and Attevale used their greater Human strength to pull the limb straight and realign the bones. She didn’t interrupt them, just let the pair know they were leaving soon, and moved on to find the next one.

  Ia found Smitt in a storage locker not far from the surgery rooms, coordinating hasty inventory work with a Solarican warship coming into the system, since the station hospital was running low on key supplies. He was only a field medic but was adept at logistics and clerical work. More importantly, he could read and speak both Gatsugi and Solarican well enough to translate, albeit with a little help from his military arm unit and the language databanks back on the Hellfire.

  Spotting her, he lifted a finger in acknowledgment, but continued talking into his headset in Solarican, reaching over the teardrop-shaped head of the short, pink-not-haired Gatsugi nurse working with him. Whatever-it-was slipped and fell down behind the shelving, making the alien crouch and root for it. Smitt pulled down another plexi-wrapped packet and added it to her basket, still talking in the rolling sounds of the Solarican trade tongue.

  As soon as he finished his conversation, he nodded at his CO. “Captain Ia, sir. Do you need me?”

  “You have about ten more minutes to wrap this up. Orange and Attevale will be in Exam Room 17 when you’re done; assist them, then head for the ship when they do. I’m here to get Doctor Mishka.”

  “Good luck, sir,” he snorted. “They brought in the crew of some V’Dan merchanter an hour ago, and she took over their care. Last I saw of her, she said she was scrubbing up for surgery.”

  “Then I think I’ll join her,” Ia told him. She smiled at his bewildered look. “I’m a biokinetic, too, soldier. Not strong enough to be a surgeon, but I can be her KIman. Ten minutes, Private, then grab Orange and Attevale. The doctor and I will follow shortly after.”

  “Aye, sir, I’ll see you on board,” he confirmed. He offered a hand to the nurse so she could grasp it with two of hers and rise, and smiled at Ia. “I don’t suppose the ship can leave without her Captain. Good luck with the Doc.”

  “Tank you/Grat-tude, meioa,” the nurse murmured, her accent in Terranglo almost too thick to be intelligible, explaining why the two had been using Solarican instead. Smitt turned his smile on her, and she blushed blue with pleasure.

  Amused, Ia turned away. Some people preferred to stick strictly to their own species, while others were more open-minded. Personally, Ia didn’t care either way; what her crew did in their off-duty hours—including volunteering in an alien medical facility—was their own business. As cliché as hospital romances were, she knew it wouldn’t go anywhere anyway; neither of them would ever see each other again.

  Two turns and two doorways later, Ia stepped into the sterilization hall. The ultrasonic scrubbers tingled unpleasantly as she passed between the banks of projectors, and the heat of the water at the sinks reddened her skin, but they were necessary. Emerging on the far side, she garnered wide eyes and confused-chartreuse looks from the staff. One of the nurses helpfully pointed toward a room off to the left. Ia already knew it was her goal but nodded politely to the gentlebeing in thanks for his help.

  She didn’t stop at the observation window. Waving her hand over the access panel, Ia stepped inside, passing through another sterilization arch. Assisted by three Gatsugi, one of them a hesitant xenophysician, Mishka stood at the manual controls for the surgery bot, guiding its tools in cauterizing the Human patient’s internal wounds.

  The male nurse with the lilac not-hair was the first to spot Ia. He lifted his upper hands. “No/No/Not supposed/authorized to be/enter here,” he asserted, though he didn’t leave his post at the anesthetics machine. “This room/place is to be/remain surgery/sterile!”

  Mishka looked up briefly and scowled before returning her gaze to the control screens. “Captain, this is a restricted environment. You are compromising the safety of my patient.”

  “I’m here to assist, actually. Your job, Commander, is to stabilize this patient,” Ia stated, moving up beside the other woman. “Not prep him for a full repair.”

  “This man has internal injuries,” Mishka protested. “If I don’t finish this now, he’ll die within the week. These people have too many other patients to handle it.”

  “Your job is to stabilize him, Doctor,” Ia repeated gently. “Two days from now, the TUPSF Granger VII will enter the system. They have the equipment and medicines to spare. For now, cauterize the last two major bleeders, then biokinetically stabilize him and install a drain shunt in his gut.”

  “I’m a little exhausted from trying to psi-stabilize our own crew, Captain,” Mishka retorted, guiding the microlasers to the next spot, “or I’d have done that already. And there aren’t any xenohealers on board to help. I already asked. That means I have to seal off every leaking artery, then pack his guts with regenerative gel and monitor his recovery. Gut wounds are nothing to trifle with.”

  “The locals will need that gel for more Human casualties when the Salik come back in five days. I’m here to be your KIman, so you can save this one and still obey orders.”

  That got Mishka to look up. She studied Ia a long moment, before returning her attention to her task. “You won’t let me bring him with us, will you?”

  “Not unless you want to be drawn and quartered for Grand High Treason. We’re officially at war now, Doctor,” Ia told her. “The Admiral-General won’t allow it. Earth, Beautiful-Blue, and two dozen other worlds are right now fighting off invasions of robots, attack vehicles, and mechsuited frogtopi. If you disobey my orders, your punishments will be doubled because we’re at war…and doubled again because I am a duly acknowledged military precognitive. So no, I will not let you bring him on board.

  “I say to you now—as a precog—that all you need to do is stabilize him so that he’ll survive for at least three days, and in two days, the Granger VII will be by to pick him up and finish caring for him.” Ia held out her hand. “You’ve just cauterized the last of the major bleeders in his abdomen. Encourage his body to heal what else it can, and move on. You’re a very good doctor, but a terrible triage nurse. You need to know how to prioritize. Now, take my kinetic inergy and stabilize him. I have it to spare, and you have the training to use it.”

  Mishka looked between Ia and the unconscious man on the table. Nose wrinkling, she spat out a Russian word, no doubt a curse, and programmed the robot to withdraw its arms. “Get a drain shunt,” she ordered the green-tufted prep nurse, moving around the end of the console. “His guts will continue to leak despite the cauterization, and they’re much like yours; abdominal pressure can build up and kill him. I’ll need to resterilize my hands. Doctor Nuwii, you’ll need to close up the patient once we’re done. Captain, if you’ll move up on my left, you can grab that hand—I trust you’ve been sterilized, but have you done a KI transfer before?”

  “I’ve already suffered once from xenobacterial sepsis myself, Doctor,” Ia replied dryly, moving as bidden. Sharing KI wasn’t difficult for her. The hard part would be making sure her precognition didn’t trigger with the prol
onged skin-on-skin contact. “I have no intention of making anyone else suffer like that, either. And yes, I have shared kinetic inergy before. Let’s get him stabilized. We have to be out of here in eight minutes or we’ll be too late to help the next batch of civilians under attack.”

  Three Gatsugi officials awaited them at the airlock leading to the gantry connecting the Freely Flowing to the Hellfire. Arrayed in formal white clothes accented with blue, peach, and other hues, they bowed with supple grace as Ia and Jesselle approached.

  “Captain/Officer Ia,” the shortest of the three stated, the one with the extralong lavender not-hair. “We are/represent the Collective War Council. We wish/intend to present/give/honor you/your crew with awards/medals/honorifics for your valor/courage/skill/assistance this evening/tonight.”

  “I would like/be honored to accept, meioas, but my ship and crew have to go/be on our way now/immediately,” Ia told them.

  “Is it not the Terran way/style to honor your soldiers/warriors?” the tallest, pink-haired alien asked.

  “It is, but I won’t have time to stop by for a ceremony for three months and seventeen days, Gatsugi Standard,” she said.

  The middle-sized one, the female with peach not-hair, tipped her head and studied Ia with those black mouse eyes, which could see partway into the infrared. “It is true/true, then/yes? You are she/the Prophet/the subject/person of V’Dan prophecy?”

  “Yes/Yes/I am she,” Ia confirmed. Unsnapping the breast pocket of her Dress Greys jacket, she pulled out three datachips. “Here are the prophecies I can give you/reveal at this moment/point in time. They are cross-referenced/indexed under both Terran and Gatsugi Standard time references. The first two are not vital to obey/heed; they are merely/predominantly to prove/benchmark my abilities/accuracy. Please heed/follow the rest.”

  “You give/share these/this information to save/spare our people/race?” Lavender-not-hair asked her, accepting the chips.

  “Some of it, yes. Some of it, no. Not everyone can be saved. Some will still die despite our best efforts,” Ia stated simply. Soberly. “I grieve in shades of grey for their loss/demise. But I am a warrior/soldier. I will save/rescue those/what I can, and avenge the rest. If you will excuse/pardon us, we have to leave/go, now. The war has only begun/started, and many other lives/sentients need vengeance/saving/our help.”

  They bowed, and Ia and the doctor bowed back. Mishka stayed silent until they were halfway up the long, chilly gantry. “If you didn’t want any more medals from them, why did you wear those?”

  “They needed to know who I was, so I could come fetch you. Since there’s only one Terran warship in the area, by wearing my glittery—and with it, the colorful Gatsugi medals the locals would recognize—most of the authorities on the station could figure out who I was without stopping and bothering me,” Ia told her.

  Mishka peered at Ia’s jacket. “So what are those medals for?”

  “The Red Badge of Combat, the Brown Badge of Courage, the Green Badge of Compassion, and the White Badge of Survival. I earned them helping all those prisoners to escape from the banquet on Sallha last year,” she dismissed.

  “Okay, I get the others, but why ‘Survival’ as a badge?” the doctor asked.

  “It’s a special category for escaping Salik tentacles after having been captured and presumed eaten.” Ia smiled wryly, her rare, dark sense of humor surfacing. “It means I’m entitled to state-sponsored psychological care, Gatsugi-style, for the rest of my life.”

  Jesselle wasn’t xenoignorant. She arched one of her brows. “Gatsugi-style? For the woman who constantly wears nothing but grey-mourning-colored clothes? You do realize Gatsugi counselors all have degrees in fashion design and color sense, right?”

  “Then maybe you’ll find the fact I’m about to go change clothes and put on bloodred civvies a little disturbing,” Ia quipped back. “By the way, you, Doctor, need to attend Lieutenant Spyder’s tactical debriefing and discussion session with the troops who boarded this station. You need to learn how to gauge a battlefield for strategic defense, offense, and combat creativity.”

  Mishka gave her a dubious look. “Me? Excuse me, Captain, but I am a Triphid. A doctor. I am not a battle commander.”

  Ia caught her elbow, forcing both of them to stop and face each other. She didn’t let go, either. “You have less than two years to learn, Commander. If you do not, you will be directly responsible for the lost lives and injuries of over two hundred thousand soldiers and civilians. You were given that fancy medical mechsuit because you are going into combat…and at one point in the coming future, you will have to instruct the soldiers placed under your command in field maneuvers in hostile enemy territory, because we will be on the ground in hostile enemy territory. That means you will learn how to be an officer of the Space Force as well as a doctor.

  “Do you want to see what will happen to all those people if you refuse to learn how to lead them to the best of your ability?” Ia asked pointedly. Mishka looked down at the hand on her arm, but Ia didn’t press her point telepathically or precognitively. Not yet. “You and I follow the exact same code, Jesselle. Our goal is to save as many lives as possible.

  “Sometimes you can save them with a laser scalpel, as you did today. But sometimes you have to save them with a laser rifle, and you need to know how.” Ia released her elbow but held the other woman in place with her gaze. There was a reason why this confrontation was taking place in the docking gantry, rather than on board. This was as close to neutral territory as the two women could come, and both knew the gantry was being monitored.

  “I shouldn’t have to go into combat. I’m a doctor,” Jesselle argued. “I’m not a soldier!”

  “You bought all those fancy medical skills on the Space Force Education Bill,” Ia reminded her. “This is the price you have to pay. You can complain about it all you like, but you’ll have to get in line.”

  Jesselle folded her arms across her chest. “Behind who?”

  “Me. I never wanted to be a soldier, growing up,” Ia admitted candidly. “But here I am, doing my absolute strategic and tactical best to save lives in the face of rampant enemy aggression. And here you are, because you are the right woman for the job. That job includes learning how to be a soldier and an officer—if a backwater nobody of a wannabe singer like me can do it, you can do it, too.”

  Ia pointed up the gantry toward their ship. Muttering under her breath in Russian, Mishka moved. Her accent in Terranglo was nowhere near as thick as one of Ia’s Naval Academy instructors’ had been, but she sounded like a cat fighting to get out of a canvas sack as she started marching that way. Ia followed.

  “Report to Lieutenant Spyder tomorrow at thirteen hundred hours in the bow boardroom. You will listen to the soldiers under his command as they dissect their post-combat reports on what went right, what went wrong, and why. Bring a datapad to take notes. You have no patients on board the Hellfire who are in critical condition, so you will have no excuse to remain in the Infirmary,” she added.

  “Your philosophy of so-called ‘free will’ is a piece of hypocrisy, Captain. You’re ordering me to do something against my will,” Mishka muttered.

  “Like I said, get in line,” Ia muttered back, matching her stride for stride. “I suggest you blame the Salik instead of me. If they hadn’t chosen to go to war, we wouldn’t have to be out here to stop them.”

  They reached the airlock, guarded by Private First Grade Terry Warren, 2nd Platoon B Epsilon. Clad in light armor consisting of plates of silvery grey ceristeel on plexleather backing and a silvery grey helm, he looked like a redux of a medieval knight. At their approach, he held out a scanner wand. Ia and Jesselle held out their arm units.

  “Welcome back, sirs.” Private Warren greeted them as soon as the scanner greenlit their identities. “You’re the last of the stragglers. Yeoman Yamasuka said we’re clear to depart as soon as the three of us are on board.”

  “How’s the hull?” Ia asked him, as they moved into the
airlock.

  “Private Warren to Lieutenant Spyder. Captain Ia and Doctor Mishka are now on board.” He touched the side of his helmet where his headset rested, then nodded. “We’re gearing up for departure now, sir. Commander Harper told me to tell you most of the panels have been replaced, thanks to the Gatsugi repair gantries we borrowed. L-Pod 45 will still be out of commission until we can catch up with the replacement parts for the pod turret,” Warren added. “He just needs to know where the Navy should send ’em, sir.”

  They stepped through the inner-airlock hatch into the portmost corridor of Deck 12. The door sealed behind them. A moment later, a soft thunk warned them that the ship and station were indeed parting company.

  “I’ll look into it and let him know by the end of the day,” Ia promised. “If you’ll excuse me, meioas, today is my birthday, and I’ve allotted myself half an hour in the Wake Zone to party. If I’m not mistaken, Commander Harper has arranged a surprise party for me.”

  Mishka snorted. “It’s hardly a surprise if you already know about it.”

  “True,” she allowed, moving away, “but I very carefully did not peek at what kind of cakes he asked the forward galley crew to bake.”

  “Captain,” Mishka called out. Ia halted and turned to face her. The older woman sighed. “Our other argument aside…thank you for your KIman’s help, earlier. I hate leaving a Human patient in alien hands, but with your help, at least he’s stable.”

  “You’re welcome.” Ia waited, sensing Jesselle wanted to say more. The ship moved away from the station, tugging them slightly aft-ward.

  “I am curious as to what information you gave those Gatsugi soldiers,” the doctor added, hands tucked behind her back. “And why now? Why not earlier?”

  “The why is easy. It’s the right time to give it to them. Up until recently, no one knew I was a precog,” Ia told her. Behind the doctor, Warren lurked, trying to make himself inconspicuous. Ia knew he would gossip to the others about whatever she said here, so she picked her words carefully. “From this point onward, I have the trust of most of the Command Staff, but that only affects what the Terrans do with the information I give them. The other nations in the Alliance also need to have that level of trust.