by Jean Johnson
Disgusted, she pushed a wave of Salik-style pity—a wave of you-were-not-worth-my-time—into his brain with her modest xenopathy. He keened and curled up protectively, shamed by the truth. Her ears pricked at the approaching hum of a hovercraft before she could raise her right arm to deliver the death lash he had earned. Her left hand, however, did not twitch up in the instinct to counterattack the driver of the incoming vehicle. Turning slightly, she looked with her one good eye for the source of the sound.
The hoverbike drifted into view among the smoldering remnants of Salik-style pods and tents. The one she had stolen several hours back in a previous fight had died in a fiery collision, crashing into the camp shield generator, but this one was intact. Its brown-haired rider ducked under a sagging pole formerly supporting an artificial tree’s worth of sensor arrays. Hazel eyes fixed on Ia’s upright stance, switched to the now-curled-up ball of frogtopodic misery at her feet, and blinked. One brow quirked upward. Mara Sunrise brought the bike to a stop a short distance away, letting its thruster field relax enough to rest the bike on its landing struts.
A boom in the distance was followed by a chain of louder explosions. Several clouds of smoke and flame billowed up from somewhere beyond the edge of the camp. The Salik hadn’t moved their projectile munitions fast enough to avoid the returning missile Ia had mentally smacked back their way.
“You did all of this by yourself, sir?” the ex-Knifeman murmured.
The question was a distraction. Ia brushed it off with a shrug. Not to deny, but to dismiss. The attempt at conversation, however little there was, made it difficult for her to continue to channel that future life. Finally, she sighed and shook her head to clear it of its connections. Now that she wasn’t concentrating, she could feel every ache, every bruise, every cut and burn that had gotten through her defenses. Everything hurt. “Yes. Most of it.”
Private Sunrise nodded to herself, listening to the faint whistling screams of the aliens wounded by the counterattack. “I’m impressed.”
Lifting her arm, Ia slashed down. The thin whip cut straight through the alien’s limbs and gut. It embedded itself half a meter in the muddy earth. A tug pulled it free of both. A second, more gentle flick slashed it through the not-grass, cleaning the reddish stain from the faintly glowing flail.
“Orders, Captain?” Private Sunrise asked her. A former Staff Sergeant from the Knifeman Corps, the Space Force’s assassination/counterassassination bureau, she didn’t flinch at the blood pouring from the alien’s body. Her gaze did flick away more than once from Ia’s face, but only to survey their surroundings with an eye for potential danger, not to glance at the dying Salik.
Ia didn’t give any orders. She didn’t dare give any. Turning away from the bleeding body, she started spinning. Right arm slashing up and down, she carved letters into the trampled path that had served the Salik as a makeshift road between their camp structures. The pain wasn’t important, only the message, and the outlet of her anger in each hard-slashed blow against the unflinching ground. It wasn’t meant for the Salik to read, though the survivors would eventually regroup and see it before fleeing. It was meant for the Feyori who were tracking her through the timeplains, trying to keep up with her wherever-the-wind-blows, nearly mindless movements.
SAVAA’NN SUD-DHA.
As the Savior wills it. Not the usual, commonly found Ia’nn sud-dha, As the Prophet wills it.
. . . Let them try to track that in the timestreams.
Pulling the whip from the last line of that block-printed A, she moved toward Sunrise’s bike. A sweep of her gifts sucked the crystalline cord back up under her right sleeve, restoring it as a bracer. Her command arm unit had been scorched into uselessness on her left limb at some point during her stolen sled ride to this camp, and half-healed wounds caused her to limp her way over to the hovering bike, but she was alive and able to move. She also smacked into the side of the machine, thrown off by her lack of perspective.
“. . . Orders?” Sunrise repeated, carefully not saying a word about her CO’s clumsiness, or her strange weaponry.
Grabbing the back of the bike, Ia hauled herself onto the padded seat. “None whatsoever, Sergeant. The Feyori do not have any hooks into my brain, but they are watching the timestreams for anything I choose to do. You can give me a lift out of here, but after that, you’re on your own.”
Revving the thrusters, she lifted them off and swerved between the sabotaged tents. “And then what’ll you do?”
“Whatever my instincts tell me to do. They’re the only advantage I have left at the moment.” It felt good to sit down. “I hope the others enjoyed their day of rest.”
“They did, sir. They were rather surprised that they were allowed to rest without pursuit, but then were deeply grateful for it.” Sunrise fell quiet for a few minutes as she navigated toward the edge of camp. The officer wasn’t the only Salik Ia had cut down in her rampage through the enemy, and the bike rose and fell a little, its thruster field bumping over the carnage and debris strewn across the ground.
Ia wasn’t quite in her mindless, future-tapping fugue anymore, but neither was she trying to actively think. Not that she could concentrate much since there were several spots where her makeshift crysium armor hadn’t completely covered under her uniform, narrow strips of skin at various joints that had been scorched, scraped, bloodied, and burned. Her biokinesis was working hard to seal and repair what her body naturally could, but it was taking a toll on her.
At least she wasn’t forcing herself to ignore the pain in order to fight, anymore. Like her Company, she, too, needed a day of rest. Until then, a few minutes’ ride on the hoverbike would have to do.
Finally, Sunrise spoke again. “You know, that sounds rather pleasant, sir.”
“What does?” Ia asked.
“Following one’s instincts,” Sunrise clarified. “Mind if I do that, too?”
“I don’t mind, Sergeant,” Ia allowed. “Unless and until Helstead revokes your current operating parameters and yanks you back home, which means back under Commander Harper’s purview in A Company . . . you’re free to do whatever you want. Just try not to violate your parole too much.”
Gunning the thrusters, she skidded them up into the sky, reversing course toward the north. Ia clutched at her, then dug her hands down beneath Mara’s belt, anchoring herself in place. One of the wounds was on her inner thigh, making it painful to clutch at the body of the bike that way.
The parabolic arc Sunrise used sailed them over the latest column of smoke but didn’t land them in the woods. She brought the bike down among the tufted and spiked tops of the local trees but didn’t go any lower than that.
“Go to sleep, sir,” Sunrise directed her, speaking over her shoulder so Ia could hear her. “Or at least get some rest. I promise I won’t crash us into any trees.”
“I know you won’t. Just don’t think about where you’re going while you’re busy not-crashing,” Ia instructed the other woman. She had voluntarily blinded herself to the sights of the timeplains since they were no longer reliable, but her instincts were still there. The Feyori could play tricks on her eyes but not on her innermost instincts.
“I’ve run more than a few missions against enemy psis, sir. I know how to keep my mind free,” Mara stated. She had to raise her voice since between the hum of the bike and the whistling of the wind, it was getting hard to hear anything, but she spoke lightly all the same. “Mostly, I think about crackers. There are thousands of varieties of crackers out there, you know, both plain and tasty.”
“You do that, soldier. I think I’ll join you, too,” Ia stated. On impulse, she added, “Welcome to B Company, Sergeant. You’ll eventually have to return to being a Private in A Company, though.”
“I know, sir. I also don’t envy you explaining to the Command Staff why you activated me, when the terms of my release were that I remain hidden in your Company,”
Sunrise stated. “Particularly if a certain Provincial Governor ever hears about it.”
“That’s because he’s a skutting shakk-torr,” Ia snorted. “If he tries to get you locked up a second time for being ‘politically inconvenient,’ I’ll either blackmail the shova v’shakk out of him, or I might let you take him down for being detrimental to the welfare of the Terran Empire.”
“Ooh, sir,” Sunrise mock-purred. “You make it sound like Christmas just might come early!”
She’d forgotten what Sunrise’s true personality would be like, without her mousey, quiet clerk of a cover story. “Hush, or I’ll convert you to Taoism. I only said might.”
“Technically, if you want me to think of nothing, then shouldn’t you be converting me to Zen Buddhism?” Sunrise quipped.
“Just drive, soldier,” Ia ordered. “And think about crackers.”
Tucking her cheek against the other woman’s back, she turned her own attention inward, focusing on her biokinetic self-awareness. Ia didn’t care that the move smeared blood, both her own and alien, against Sunrise’s shirt. Not caring was part and parcel with not thinking.
Except she couldn’t help but glance into the immediate, immutable past. The Salik’s thrust through the Army’s line had been broken. The Damned and the Roughriders hadn’t been pursued or pestered in any way about two hours after she had left the others behind. She very carefully did not look to see what either Company had done in the last nine hours. But she did peek enough to know the Salik weren’t able to continue their Feyori-backed persecution. For now, at least.
Tugging her fingers firmly out of the timestreams, she forced herself to think about crackers as well. Just in case the Feyori Meddling with her timestreams was still waiting to thwart and follow her. Big ones, little ones, square ones, oblong ones, flavored with vegetables, flavored with sweeteners, thick fluffy airy ones and thin hard brittle ones . . . nothing but crackers as far as the mind can see.
A moment later, a soft chuckle escaped her, the sound of it almost lost to the wind. I’m definitely going crackers.
JUNE 11, 2498 T.S.
LANDING CITY
“Wakey, wakey, breakfast shake-y . . .”
Ia hadn’t exactly been asleep, but neither had she been fully awake. Unnervingly enough—and perhaps proof the Feyori were still trying to suppress her gifts—not once had she triggered a dip onto the timestreams, postcognitively or precognitively, despite being snugged up against Sunrise’s cloth-covered back for hundreds of kilometers. Drawing in a deep breath, she uncurled herself slowly from Sunrise’s back, stiff from her half-healed wounds. “Hmm?”
Mara eased back on the bike’s thrusters, bringing it down to rest its support pods on the plexcrete surface of a parking lot. She nodded to her left. “Restaurant, Captain. Where we can find breakfast. You know, real food? Or at least a reasonable facsimile?”
They hadn’t needed to stop for anything other than three brief breaks, once to eat a couple of ration packs which the officially-still-a-private had liberated at some point during her long-range scouting forays, and twice more to use the bushes. Like all modern transports, the hoverbike itself ran on a compact hydrogenerator; a liter’s worth of water was enough to keep it running for two or more years. Only its riders needed frequent refueling.
Skimming the treetops in nearly random directions for hours, the pair hadn’t otherwise touched down or even selected a conscious heading, as far as Ia had been able to tell. With her precognition locked firmly away, and her others gifts worn down from constant use during those nine hours, Ia had taken the time to reinforce her mental shields while her companion thought most firmly about a thousand different varieties of crackers, and all the things one could do with them: eat them, destroy them, bake them, top them with objects both edible and indigestible, even use them as building materials in various different ways both decorative and practical.
But at some point in their meanderings, Mara Sunrise had pointed the hoverbike toward the colonyworld’s capital, or rather, to the section of the hundred-year-old town where the Terran Space Force, Branch Army, had appropriated a stout, four-story office building for its Division Headquarters. Specifically, to the parking lot shared by the restaurant and the grocery store across the street from that building.
To Mara’s surprise, as soon as her CO dismounted, Ia didn’t head for the smaller, green-painted building. Instead, she headed for the intersection.
“Sir? Restaurant? . . . Food?” Reversing course as soon as she noticed, Sunrise followed her toward the crosswalk zone. Shrugging, she gave up on the subject of food. “Sir . . . before we get into trouble—not that I’m going to start any, but I’m always prepared for it—I just wanted to say thank you. For pulling me out of that holding brig on the Moon. What I did to wind up in there wasn’t wrong, so much as . . . as . . .”
“Politically inconvenient?” Ia offered. Both women shared a brief, wry smile. The light changed, permitting them to cross the street. “I don’t believe in letting anyone with good, useful talents go to waste.”
“What, everyone? Even serial killers?” Sunrise asked, glancing her way. Across the street, a four-winged bird-thing tried to fly close to the building. It smacked into the unseen force field covering the upper floors of the structure with a shower of sparks and an indignant squawk. Undulating rapidly, it flapped off to find a safer perch.
Ia, watching the Dabin-style bird flee, nodded. Her brother was doing exactly that, back home. Under her orders. “If they’re particularly good at it, yes. Provided they’re willing to cooperate and toe the line. There does come a point where they could stop being useful and start being harmful . . . and at that point, I’d take ’em out and find someone else to carry on with their job.”
“I guess I can’t complain, then. And I know I’ve been useful, even as a mere ‘mousey, boring clerk.’ Of course, rumor has it the first batch of Knifemen were alleged serial killers,” Sunrise added. She offered her arm unit to be scanned by the sergeant guarding the nearest door into the office building. “My history teachers told us that they and the people who became the first Troubleshooters were recruited to fill the gaps in the various old Earth intelligence and counterintelligence bureaus that got broken up and amalgamated into the TUP’s one-world government. There’s a couple divisions similar to the Troubleshooters in the Peacekeepers’ organizations from what I hear, but nothing quite like the Corpse.”
Knowing she meant the Knifeman Corps, Ia nodded and turned her attention to the building. Instinct had brought her here—Sunrise’s instincts—but now that she was here, she might as well go in. However, there was one slight problem. “You’ll have to use a palm scanner instead of my ident,” Ia told the sergeant waiting at the door they had approached. She lifted her left arm, showing the blackened case of her arm unit. “Mine got slagged in combat.”
“I’m surprised your whole arm didn’t get slagged, sir. Those units are tough, but they aren’t meant to be armor,” he stated. Poking through a couple of the pockets scattered over his fatigues, he found and extracted his portable palm scanner. His brows rose after the beam swept over her upturned hand. “—Ship’s Captain Ia? Sir! Brigadier General Mattox has standing orders regarding your visit, sir.”
Ia had no clue what those orders were. There were too many possibilities, all of them ruined by certain meddling forces. Clamping down on the reflexive need to check the timestreams, she shook her head. “Oh, we’re not here to see the brigadier general. That’s a visit for another day.”
“Sir, the Brigadier General left strict orders for you to be escorted upstairs right away,” he stated. Touching his arm unit, he spoke into the pickup wire on his headset. “Sergeant Kukley to Major Tonkswell . . . Yes, sir, it’s important. I have Ship’s Captain Ia at the southwest entrance . . . Yes, sir, right away, sir.”
Opening the door, he leaned inside the foyer and called out a name. “Corpo
ral, front and center!”
A clean-cut man in crisp fatigues and lance-corporal stripes jogged out to join them. Saluting the sergeant, he held himself At Attention. “You needed me, Sergeant?”
“Lance Corporal Aston, escort these two meioas to the Brigadier General’s office,” Sergeant Kukley instructed, saluting back. He then saluted Ia with one hand and opened the door with the other. “Ship’s Captain Ia, welcome to the 1st Division 6th Cordon Army Headquarters. I hope you have a nice day, sir—you, too, Private.”
Ia saluted him in return, then followed Sunrise and the lance corporal into the building. They were halfway to the bank of lifts when Mara murmured in V’Dan, “Ma’a ni-uol s’tiettra a’amul’o, neh-yah-veh?”
“Neh-yah-veh,” Ia agreed. She, too, thought this warm welcome was rather odd coming from a man and his staff who had deliberately lied to them about their willingness to follow Ia’s battle plans. It was definitely going too smoothly.
Mara gestured at a door recessed a couple meters from the lifts. Ia nodded; it was an instinctively better choice. They swerved to the side. It wasn’t until the heavy door clicked open that their escort realized they were no longer following him to the elevators.
“. . . Sir? Sir! The lifts are over here, sir,” he called out. Hurrying to catch up with them, he pushed the closing door back open in their wake. “Captain, why are you taking the stairs to go up on a heavyworld? You’d be pushing almost 4Gs with each step!”
“Lance Corporal, I used to take the stairs on my homeworld,” Ia stated briskly, mounting the stairs at a steady pace. “That’s over 6.4Gs of pure upward force, every single step.”
“But it’s four full floors up, and the lift is faster,” he protested.
“My Captain is being kind by accompanying me,” Sunrise interjected. “She knows I dislike small, enclosed spaces. Don’t worry; we’ll meet you on the fourth floor.”
He hesitated so much, they got a full floor ahead of him before the two women heard his exasperated sigh. Footsteps echoed up the stairwell in their wake. Glancing back at Ia, Mara rolled her eyes, but she didn’t stop climbing the stairs. They both knew the reason why Sunrise had picked a different way to get to the top floor. Laborious as it was, no one could cut power to a stairwell and trap the people trying to use it, like they could to an elevator car.
