by Jean Johnson
The buttons of the interior had no symbols on them, in order to prevent outsiders from accessing their functions; instead, every soldier in the Terran Space Force had to memorize which rounded square did what. Punching in the contact codes for her second-in-command’s unit, Ia started walking toward the town.
It took him twenty seconds to answer. When he did, Meyun Harper’s voice was both startled and relieved. And sleepy-sounding. “—Captain? Ia, is that you? I, uh . . . time, time . . . You’re almost half a day late!”
“And a good evening to you, too,” Ia replied, smiling. “Turns out I didn’t have a knack for mastering the trick of interstellar flight without a ship. I had to get a lift from some friends. Any chance you could send me some matter-based transport? All I have at the moment are my clothes, ship boots, and arm unit.”
She heard a fumbling sound, followed by a loud clatter and a crude epithet. “—Sorry, dropped the arm unit. Uh . . . ground car, we can do. I think. The Army hasn’t been entirely cooperative about our presence here, mostly because of the higher-ups. Captain Roghetti has been fairly good about it. But it’ll take time. Unless you can come up with something better I can commandeer?”
“I am aware of the difficulties of our situation, Commander,” Ia admitted. “Give me a moment to check the timestreams.”
Aside from the pattering of the rain and the crunching of her boots as she walked along the gravel-paved access road leading away from the substation, there was nothing but her voice and his to break the quiet of the night. Off in the far distance, small flashes of orange and reddish light lit up pockets of the horizon, a reminder that this colony world was busy battling a ruthless, hungry enemy. But that was dozens of kilometers away. Turning most of her attention inward, down and around, she flipped her attention onto the timeplains.
Telepathy wasn’t her strongest psychic gift. Precognition was. The local timestreams were just that: a visualization of rivulets and creeks crossing a vast, grassy prairie. Each stream represented a life, and wherever they touched and crossed lay a nexus of interactions rich with possibilities and rife with probabilities.
Dabin—or at least the local corner of this world—was a particularly muddy world, both literally and temporally. There were many things the enemy could do to block them from leaving, and many things they could do to counteract their foe. But there were other enemies, too: arrogance, fear, and apathy among them. Those were doing their own work, clouding the waters, fogging the probabilities. Such factors weakened the overall war effort by eating away at the hearts of the men and women struggling to fight back a strong enemy presence on this heavy-gravitied world.
“. . . Contact Lieutenant Frederich. He has a ground car that can come pick me up. Tell him we’ll swing by the liquor store, my treat, so he can call it an official beer run if his commander asks,” Ia added.
Meyun chuckled. “This from a woman who doesn’t drink.”
“Alcohol ruins my self-control faster than sex,” she quipped back. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop others from having fun.”
“Sex and alcohol? Does this mean I get to call it a date when I come pick you up?” he asked, humor still warming his tone.
“He’ll insist on driving the car himself,” Ia warned her second-in-command. “So unless you want the lieutenant to watch . . . ?”
“Shakk that. But I will take a rain check.”
Squinting up at the clouds as the droplets started coming down in greater numbers, Ia sighed. “You would have to mention the ‘R’ word . . . Bring a thermal blanket and some towels so I can dry off on the ride back. I’ll keep my unit active, so you can trace my position. And don’t dawdle, Commander.”
“Aye aye, sir. Harper out.”
Tapping the buttons that would keep a subchannel linked between their units, Ia closed the lid. She kept walking, not having anything better to do. Examining the timestreams as she headed west, Ia peered both upstream into the past as well as downstream into the future. Her stomach rumbled with hunger, threatening to distract her, and the rain only made her thirsty. Electricity from the town’s power grid had fed her in her other form, but it did nothing for her as a matter-based Human.
Ia did her best to ignore those discomforts as there was nothing she could do about them just yet. She had bigger worries than where her next meal was coming from, or when. The Salik had landed here in force, and in person.
Nobody expected a race of flipper-footed aliens from a lightly gravitied planet to want to invade a heavyworld. But Dabin was a mostly warm, M-class planet without too many inimical native life-forms, and none of them sentient beyond the Humans who had claimed it. Dabin was ideal for most oxygen-breathing, carbon-based life-forms to colonize and inhabit once the gravity problem was overcome.
Normally, that took a couple generations of adaptation as people moved from one world to the next, increasing their gravitational endurance generation by generation. The Humans back on her own homeworld, Sanctuary, were still struggling to adapt to its exceptionally high gravity, but Humans had evolved as fairly sturdy creatures. Only the Solaricans and the K’Kattans could match them. The K’Kattans themselves were natural heavyworlders, evolved with a dual endo-exo skeletal system, but even they had to spend a few generations adapting to planets outside their comfort zone.
The Salik had done something similar via the gradually increasing tug of artificial gravity, slowly breeding several generations of their kind in crèches hidden in the black depths of interstitial space. They still couldn’t invade truly heavy-gravitied worlds, but then not every M-class world was as water-rich a prize as Dabin. With low mountains, shallow oceans, and mild winters, the planet was nearly ideal for their amphibious species, very much like their Motherworld, Sallha.
Ia knew through the timestreams of the past that this invasion had been carefully planned for almost 150 Terran years. She also knew through the streams stretching into the future that if the Salik gained the upper hand on this world here, it would take far too long to dislodge them. She needed them pushed off this planet, and pushed off soon, before the worst of the war unfolded.
The colonists did have a few advantages on this planet. Elsewhere, the Salik were using robots to augment their troops in combat. Mostly they were used on various domeworlds, where the vacuum of space or the thin atmospheres outside those self-contained biospheres wouldn’t slow them down for long. But robots, however cleverly programmed, had three weaknesses.
One, they were mechanical, so they were vulnerable to water, weather, and the sucking muds of the wilderness, however well sealed they might be made. Two, destroying them outright or turning them off was far less of an ethical problem for troops than slaying living sentients; colonists rarely hesitated to shoot robots when the two forces were even vaguely close to being equal. And three, they were reprogrammable, either to shut them off en masse, or turn them against their masters.
Humans didn’t use artificially intelligent robots anymore. Not after the mistakes of the AI War . . . and the Salik were beginning to relearn the cost of those mistakes thanks to the Alliance’s counterprogramming efforts. But that was on other worlds. This fight was on Dabin.
For this world, the Salik had bred organic weapons. They liked the thrill of the hunt—needed to hunt, psychologically—and had maintained many of their wilderness areas on their Motherworld with a near-fanatic zeal. The Salik had brought in fast-growing carnivorous vines, hunting beasts that would herd the colonists into easily contained zones . . . even nuisance pests. Those were supposed to inject a narcotic into their victim’s blood to make each colonist and planetary defender sleepy.
They hadn’t worked all that well once the bugs had been released into the field. Apparently, the local leathery-winged avians were thoroughly enjoying them as a special snack, snapping them up faster than they could infect and breed. It was a modest break for the colonists. Ia smiled to herself as she checked a
report on that fact in the life-stream of a local xenobiologist. She only skimmed the waters of the man’s life, though, before moving on to the next key checkpoint.
The colonists knew the terrain and were used to dealing with potentially dangerous wildlife. They had various weapons, plenty of ingenuity, and a certain tough, survivalist mind-set on their side. They even had almost four hundred thousand soldiers from the Space Force Army on their side, culled either from Dabin’s own recruits or from colonists from similar heavyworlds. Those troops had been dropped off to protect the planet before the blockade had gone up, preventing the Space Force from bringing in any more.
Unfortunately, four hundred thousand wasn’t nearly enough since those forces were scattered across a colonyworld one and a half times the size of Earth. The Salik had more than twice as many troops, top-quality arms and armaments for all their soldiers, and ships in orbit blockading most sources of outside help. Beyond their systematic pogrom of destroying anything mechanical that took to the skies above a thousand meters, the frogtopus-like aliens had plenty of psychological horror on their side, too. They ate their captives, after all, preferably while still kicking and screaming.
The Humans and handful of other races who had settled on this world for more than a century and a half had the superior numbers, true. Before the war started, Dabin had boasted a population of over 300 million Humans. But this was a Joint Colonyworld, neither fully Terran nor fully V’Dan, one that was still a few decades away from true independence. They were still trying to build up their local military and defense forces, which meant relying upon whatever the Terrans and the V’Dan could spare . . . which wasn’t much, at the moment. The Salik had the superior force multipliers, and were slowly winning the war on this world.
That was why the Damned were here. Something which Ia and her Company would do in the next two months would tip the scales in the Alliance’s favor, but Ia didn’t know what, yet. She had battle plans that would work, but it was something else, something more. Something that required her to personally be here to pull it off. Most days, the timestreams were fairly easy for her to see. Do X, and Y would happen, or do G, and H would follow, depending on which outcome she wanted. Dabin, however, was a nexus. Too many possibilities, with too many tiny little butterfly effects tipping the scales wildly out of balance one way or another. Mainly because there were two Feyori at work here, neither of them yet in faction to—
Ia stopped. Something wasn’t right. She’d turned the correct way when her boots reached the paved road, heading away from the town. She knew she had. Her forces were bivouacked with one of the Companies from the 1st Division 6th Cordon Army, camped halfway to the nearest battle line somewhere several kilometers ahead of her. Salik scouts, if they slipped through the 1st’s lines, would be approaching most likely from ahead. The sense of danger came from behind her.
The road had solar lights embedded in the slightly bouncy plexcrete, forming three parallel, dotted lines that stretched off in either direction. They delineated the driving lanes for ground cars and gave aircars a point of reference for night flying. One of those pale yellow lights a couple hundred meters away winked out for a brief moment. Trailing mental fingers through the waters of her immediate future, Ia bit back a curse. She was being hunted by a not-cat.
That was the best way to describe the beast: not a cat. Not a typical cat by three meters long, with a prehensile, poison-barbed tail, armor-tough scales, long claws, and overly sharp teeth on a jaw that could unhinge itself on a frighteningly wide scale, much like a cobra’s. The only weapons she had with her were her psychic abilities and the crystal bracer encircling her right wrist. The psychic ones were a little underpowered at the moment. It was cold out, she was wet, and she had a long way to go before she could rest, which meant conserving her energy.
Though she had eaten energy in the last couple of days, she hadn’t eaten physically. That made a difference. There were little things she could do. Telepathy, a short spot of telekinesis in a pinch, even a little electrokinetic manipulation. Not much more than that, though. Not until she ate and slept. The attempt at flying through the depths of space Feyori-style had exhausted her, forcing her to call on two of her faction-allies for a lift, which had drained her even more.
She did what she could do, though. Drawing energy from the crysium bracelet, she molded it down out of her sleeve, reshaping it with a couple of practiced thoughts. The biokinetic mineral glowed faintly, forming the slender lines of a swept-hilt schlager. A touch of electrokinesis rehardened the tough mineral, making it radiate a slightly brighter shade of peach-gold. It might have been a few years since she last served in the Marines, but Ia hadn’t neglected her combat training. That included wielding a sword as well as a laser rifle.
That ambient, crystalline glow blurred when she slashed the weapon up, ducking down and to her left at the same moment. She hadn’t seen the not-cat pounce with her eyes, but she wasn’t looking at this battle physically. Her psychic abilities, her battlecognition, had been honed in hand-to-hand combat years ago even if this fight was technically sword-to-claws.
The blade smacked through something, evoking a howling hiss. It was probably expecting a tasty civilian. A soft, frightened colonist. What it got was a Terran Marine who had not stopped her daily weapons drills just because she’d moved on to serve in the Navy as an officer, then into the Special Forces as the captain of her own ship.
It pounced and lashed again. Droplets of rain sprayed outward from the whipping tail. She swirled, swiped, then stabbed, catching it in the shoulder. Her reflexes were dulled a little from exhaustion and hunger. The not-cat’s were slowing from its injuries. Lights appeared in the distance, coming from a trio of ground cars. It wasn’t Harper and Frederich, though; these lights were coming from the direction of the town.
The not-cat attacked again, trying to take advantage of her distraction. Bred for high gravity, it was fast, and slashed at her thigh. Bred for even higher gravity, Ia lopped off its right forepaw. Crysium was not only tough, it was a monocrystal shaped to a monofractally flawless edge. Biological armor wasn’t nearly strong enough to slow the blade down, let alone stop its attack.
Yowl-screeching, the cat hopped back. Its long tail lifted and whipped toward her, barely visible in the night. Ia slashed again, severing the lashing limb based on the probabilities of its incoming position, not on pure sight. The stinger hit her, but not point-first; chopped off, it tumbled, struck her shirt with a splat of warm blood, and fell to the pavement. Torn between the instinct to fight and the sheer instinct for survival as its leg and its now stump of a tail bled, the not-cat hesitated.
The poor thing never had a chance. Ia lunged hard, stabbing it deep in the side, piercing its circulatory organ. Hot breath and angry teeth snapped shut centimeters from her face. Her arm jolted, hilt cracking the creature’s ribs. A touch of overkill, maybe, but she still had to yank the blade out and scramble backwards while it thrashed and snarled and tried to deny it was dead.
Dark blood pooled on the road and coated her blade in a translucent crimson smear. The scaly hide of the shuddering creature glistened in a damp shade of bluish green smeared with deep red when the approaching lead car activated a spotlight, flooding the road with bright white light. Like many of the living creatures found on various worlds, its blood was hemoglobin-based; the floodlight picked out the puddle of it now spreading across the damp road.
Squinting against that bright glow, Ia raised her left arm to protect her eyes from the light and waited. The not-cat slumped, twitched, and lay still. All three cars—trucks—rolled to a stop a few meters from the beast’s body, their engines whisper-quiet. The floodlight cut off, and a voice called out, “. . . Meioa-e, are you alright?”
With her clothes half-plastered to her body from the rain, it wasn’t difficult to guess her gender, hence the feminine suffix on the honorific. Ia nodded, lowering her arm since she didn’t have to protect he
r eyesight. She couldn’t see the speaker, but she could hear him. “I’m fine, meioa-o. Just one less not-cat for you to have to deal with.”
“What are you doing all the way out here? And who are you, anyway?” the man challenged her, opening the passenger-side door. She could see his silhouette in the light of the other two vehicles as he jumped down. “I don’t recognize you.”
“That’s because I’m not a local. Ship’s Captain Ia, A Company, 9th Cordon Terran Special Forces,” Ia stated, giving the abbreviated introduction. “I just made planetfall, and I’m on my way to connect with my Company. My first officer is trying to scrounge up a ground car to come pick me up, but it’s several klicks to their camp, so I thought I’d start walking. Of course, if you meioas wanted to give me a ride out that way, I’d appreciate it,” she added, gesturing behind her with her free hand.
“You just made planetfall? In shirt and slacks, no kitbag, no sign of a vehicle, or any other means of getting here?” the man asked her skeptically.
He finally moved close enough, she could see his features in the faint glow from the embedded lights in the road: Asiatic like Harper, but with darker brown skin. Like Harper, his ancestors had lived just long enough on Dabin for the generations to breed their way back to a more normal sense of height, leaving his head level with hers. He lifted his chin at her.
“Pull the other leg, meioa. We checked the scanner records,” the colonist added. “Nothing dropped into local airspace but a couple of damned frog ships looking for airborne targets.”
“That’s because I arrived via stealth tech—I’d tell you about it, but I’m under the standard ‘but then I’d have to kill you’ clause, and I’d rather be out killing Salik. Or not-cats, as the case may be.” She started to say more, but her arm unit beeped. “. . . Excuse me, I have to take this.”
