by Jean Johnson
Ia very carefully thought about the rubbery, cushiony nature of the plain gray plexcrete under her feet, instead of whatever she might do when they reached the top floor. Aside from resting long enough to catch her breath, of course. Sunrise rested with her in the alcove. There was a drinking fountain in the same alcove as the stairwell door, though neither touched it. There was also a power outlet. Standing with her arms behind her back and her back to the wall, Ia extruded a bit of crysium down to the holes and plugged herself into the circuit. Electrical energy pulsed up the hidden line, as refreshing and filling as a long drink of cool water.
Politely waiting for the lance corporal to regain his breath once he emerged from the stairway, Ia discreetly extracted the line when he straightened and nodded. She could just start to see the edges of energy fields around her but would need more for true Feyori-style vision. She didn’t ask for more time, though.
Politely, the two fatigues-clad women followed the Dress-uniformed man away from the banks of lifts and the fire-door alcove. There hadn’t been many signs of the Army’s presence down in the foyer, but up here, everyone was dressed either in the local reddish camouflage hues with the extra speckles of Army green down each pant leg and sleeve, or in formal Dress Greens with black stripes down the outer seams—mostly in Dress uniforms, suggesting the brigadier general was a stickler for formality. By comparison, Ia and Mara were muddy, even bloody; Ia in particular not only had rents and burn holes in her garments, she still smelled of munitions powder as she walked blithely along with a dingy regen pack strapped to her head. No one they crossed paths with commented, though a few did double takes, sniffed, and stared.
One of the rooms they passed thrummed audibly from the force of the hydrogenerators working inside. The sign posted on the door read Shield Generator Room 2. Another was filled with rows of workstations filled with transparent screens displaying tactical information ranging from the colorful hues of real-time radar maps to tiny, crowded rows of words and numbers too small to be easily read at that distance. Ia wanted to see what those screens said, to try to match it up to the timeplains, but carefully refrained.
“Hey, Ginger!” Stooping, the lance corporal held out his fingers to the short-legged, slightly pudgy canine that came trotting out of the open door at the end of the hall.
It was a stubbie, the breed of well-adapted heavyworlder dog descended from a mix between a beagle, a boxer, and a Labrador. With stout, strong legs covered in short, reddish beige fur and cinnamon brown eyes, she looked very much like her namesake, only sweeter.
“Heya, girl, how are you? This is Ginger,” he stated, looking back at the two women. “She’s sorta our mascot here at HQ. Someone found her rooting around in the garbage bins out back, took pity on her, and brought her inside. General Mattox has a soft spot for dogs, so he let ’er stay. She’s really sweet, too. She’s also getting a bit fat, but then we spoil ’er. Aren’t you, girl? Who’s a sweet lil’ fatty?”
He patted her flanks, and the dog just lapped it up, wagging her sleek little tail. The dog moved closer to the newcomers, nostrils flexing in the effort to sniff them. Sunrise didn’t stoop to pet her. That surprised Ia. She hadn’t thought the woman a dog-hater.
“Aren’t you gonna say hello, meioas?” their escort asked, giving them the civilian honorific, since Ia’s and Mara’s ranks were too different to lump together.
Sunrise folded her arms across her chest, doing her best to ignore the canine sniffing around her knees. She didn’t even look at the stubbie, staring instead at the end of the hall. “I’m a cat person.”
Without warning, the dog yapped happily and scampered down the hall, dashing past Ia without so much as a hello sniff. A glance back showed the canine rushing up to a pair of men with enthusiastic displays of body-wiggling and tail-wagging. Both soldiers stooped to pet the stubbie, giving her the same enthusiastic greetings that Lance Corporal Aston had.
Once upon a time, Ia had longed to have a stubbie for a pet. But pets and restaurants did not mix well when it came time for health inspections, so both of her mothers had forbidden it. Living as she did now in the military, with most of her time spent on a spaceship, Ia still didn’t have one. The only animals allowed on board were all in life support, usually a mix of fish and fowl, and were meant strictly for food, not for companionship. It was against the rules and regs to turn any of them into a pet.
Shaking it off, she moved toward the open door at the end of the hall. Inside was a modest front office with a man seated behind the front desk. The name tag pinned to his Dress Greens said Major Tonkswell and his gray-streaked hair formed a wiry halo around his dark head. Behind and to the right stood a pair of fine wooden doors, suggesting this office had originally been meant for some sort of business executive. One of the doors stood slightly open but not enough to see into the next chamber.
Ia recognized the wall behind the major’s chair and felt a brief wash of relief that it wasn’t Major Perkins who was currently on duty. If she’d had to face that woman’s artificially constant smiles, she might have done something a little too instinctive. Maybe even downright impulsive. As it was, she had no idea what she was going to say to the head of the Army’s 1st Division, 6th Cordon.
“Major Tonkswell, this is Ship’s Captain Ia, and . . . Private Second Class Sunrise,” the lance corporal introduced them, taking a quick moment to peer at the name patch stuck to the front of Mara’s mottled shirt and the single stripe on her sleeve for her rank.
“You’re both Branch Special Forces, yes?” Major Tonkswell asked, eyeing the two women. Ia and her companion nodded. He gave them a brief smile. “Welcome to the Dabin Army HQ. The Brigadier General will be free in just a few minutes. Can I have the lance corporal get you anything?”
“Some water, please?” Sunrise asked, giving the lance corporal a shy, mousey-clerk sort of smile. “I should’ve drunk from the fountain.”
“I’ll take an electrical outlet,” Ia quipped.
She’d half meant it as a joke, but with only a brief, bemused look at her odd request, the major pointed at the wall to her left. Glancing that way, she spotted the socket holes. Since it wasn’t a bad idea, Ia shifted that way, crouched, and pressed her hand over the opening. Leaving just enough room under her palm, she shifted the now faintly peach-hued, transparent gold bracer tucked beneath her right sleeve, extruding a set of prongs on a self-flexing cable.
Plugging it into the wall, she drew firmly from the outlet, rather than gently as she had earlier; having permission meant not having to hide any energy-drain spikes on the maintenance-system monitors. The overhead lights dimmed a little, though the effect wasn’t overly blatant in the daylight glowing through the windows over the outlet. Stuffing herself with energy, Ia didn’t stop until their escort had come back with a clutch of bottles. By that point, everything was glowing firmly.
Restoring her bracer, Ia straightened and accepted one of the bottles the lance corporal offered to her. His short hair fluffed up a little with static energy as their hands briefly touched. It amused her. It also drained a tiny bit of the glow. Stepping back with the bottle in hand, Ia cast her gaze around the room.
She could now see the power conduits in the walls, the convection currents caused by a mix of warm sunlight streaming in through the windows and the cooling effect of the building’s ventilation currents, the glow of all four bodies in the room, and a blob-shaped hint of a glow from the next room to her left, which looked like it could have been the brigadier general seated at his desk. More glows radiated through the thermal patches of the walls in the other direction. One of them trotted their way, low to the ground, very bright and pug-shaped, replete with a happily wagging tail and panting jaws.
Ia watched the stubbie approach, mind carefully blank. Or as blank as a mental dissertation on the ratio of flaky crackery crunch to savory thickness could get. Her precognitive sense was still locked down, wrapped up in a
tight ball so that she didn’t try to touch the timeplains. It made her head feel oddly lightweight, and not in the least bit clear-headed.
It felt a bit like mentally holding one’s breath in hope that the monsters under-the-bed/in-the-closet wouldn’t hear.
As the bright-hued dog came through the front office door, she found herself asking lightly, “Private Sunrise, do you suppose Melba toast counts as a cracker? Or is it too bready? What do you think?”
Turning to face her CO, Sunrise opened her mouth to reply. That brought her right hip into Ia’s reach. Without a thought in her head, Ia plucked the gun from the other woman’s holster, flicked off the safety, and fired, all in a swift, smooth motion. The bang of the gun echoed loudly in the small room, accompanied by a puff of acrid smoke and a sharp yipe of pain from the stubbie as it was flung back across the floor by the force of her shot.
CHAPTER 4
I’m quite sure I was equally memorable, and I know I am equally to blame for some of the actions on Dabin—it was not so much a matter of breaking any rules or regs as it was a matter of shocking and appalling the meioas around me.
In hindsight, it’s easy to claim I had a purpose for what I did, but at the time, it was nothing more than the sheerest instinct to deliver an horrendous, overwhelming shock. A slap to the face to wake everybody up. And . . . maybe a touch of revenge. I am mostly Human, after all.
~Ia
“The hell?” Major Tonkswell bolted up from his seat, only to grab for his gun and crouch behind the bulk of the drawers holding up one side of his desk. Out in the hall, voices shouted and footsteps thundered, some fleeing, others drawing near. “Put down the gun!”
Lance Corporal Aston also gaped and blinked, then grabbed for his own pistol. Both men aimed their weapons at Ia’s head. She didn’t move, just stood there with an unopened bottle of water in her left hand and a smoking projectile weapon in the other, still aimed at the dog. Silently, she studied the last gasping breaths from the dying animal. A third gun poked through the opening of the brigadier general’s office, this time the muzzle of an HK-74 laser rifle, replete with the faint whine that said it was charging. Only a narrow strip of its wielder could be seen, however.
Blinking a couple times from shock herself, Private Sunrise finally shrugged and answered her commanding officer’s question. “I’m . . . not really sure, sir. It’s usually about the size of a large cracker, it is crisp, and you can certainly spread things on Melba toast like a cracker . . . but it technically does start out as bread, first. Yeast-risen, not sodium or some other means.”
“What the mossy red hell is wrong with you two?” Aston demanded, hands no longer shaking, though sweat now beaded visibly on his brow. “You shot the General’s dog, and you’re talking about toast?”
“Put down the gun, sir!” Tonkswell asserted loudly, his own hands quite steady.
Ia didn’t take her eyes or her aim off the still-glowing, dying canine. She could see the potential chemical energy in the explosive powders of the projectile cartridges loaded into Aston’s, Tonkswell’s, and her borrowed handguns. The glow from the power conduits in the walls lit up the nearby walls in angular bars, and the glow from the brigadier general’s now fully charged laser rifle was even stronger as it poked past the edge of the inner-office door . . . but none of those were as bright as the dog’s glow. Paradoxically, that glow kept getting brighter, not dimmer as the creature twitched and bled.
Still, Corporal Aston’s question deserved an answer. As did the major’s demand. She answered in a tone as dry as the toast in question, though her gaze never left the dog. The little hitches of Ginger’s bloodied rib cage were slowing down.
“I apologize, gentlemeioas. It would have been an instant kill, but I am missing an eye, and the bitch moved at the last second. And technically, the subject is crackers, not bread. As for the gun . . . Private Sunrise?”
Reversing the gun, she held it grip-first to her companion, gaze never wavering from the dying dog. In Ia’s mind, “Ginger” was a modern-day leprechaun; she didn’t even allow herself a moment to blink. She couldn’t get close enough to touch the dog, not with so many weapons aimed at her head, but Ia didn’t blink and didn’t look away.
She did, however, address the ex-Knifeman. “I am surprised this wasn’t still loaded with splatters, Private. That would’ve made this a lot faster.”
“Sorry, sir. I swapped ’em out at our last rest stop when it occurred to me we were deep in civilian territory,” Sunrise admitted, taking the pistol back. “Controlled expansion bullets are frowned upon by most Peacekeeper forces, sir. But . . . now I’m wishing I’d kept them in there. I brought us here because a part of me realized someone in Mattox’s immediate environment had to be controlling him.”
“Controlling me?” Mattox demanded from behind the shelter of his office door. “Nobody’s controlling me.”
Sunrise ignored him. “For the record, Captain, I had picked the dog, too . . . but mine was just a paranoid guess. Ah . . . not that I doubt you, but I do hope your choice is the right one, sir. I’d really rather not be incarcerated for this.”
The stubbie finally stopped breathing. Her awareness of the other energy sources in the room was starting to fade, but the dog’s glow only increased. Eye itching from the need to blink away the mounting dryness, Ia counted down inside her head from ten. “Oh, I know I’m right.”
“Right about what?” Aston demanded. “About hating a poor, sweet dog so much you . . . you . . .” A flash of light made him whip his head to the side. “What the shakking . . . ?”
The stubbie’s corpse had vanished in that flash. Even the blood spatters were gone. Had anyone looked closely at the faux-granite pattern of the plexcrete flooring, they might have noticed a thin dusting of tiny golden specks, which hadn’t been there before. No one bothered, though; everyone but Ia gaped at the oversized, mirror-smooth, dark soap bubble that now hung in the air in the absent dog’s place. She knew the dust had been left behind, but only because she knew Dabin’s gravity was just barely high enough to pull some of that residual matter out of the alien hovering in midair.
“I will give you one warning, Meddler,” Ia stated calmly, eyeing the dark gray sphere. “Drop your faction with Miklinn, swear a new faction to me, and I will arrange things so that you gain position in the Game. Run from me, or continue to counterfaction me, and I will—”
The Feyori turned and bolted out through the window. Ia spun and dashed after it to the window, hand slapping against the broad pane just centimeters short of touching that sphere. It slowed a few meters away at the shield boundary, causing a cascade of sparks to arrow down into the slowly brightening alien as it fed briefly, then zipped off into the sky.
“Slag!” Ia growled, watching the bubble shrink into the distance. She thumped the transparent plexi pane again, this time with a curled-up fist. “Shakking v’shova v’carra v’slag!”
The cursing didn’t alleviate her frustration. Nor did it add anything to it. Unfortunately, her anger wasn’t nearly enough to tip her over the energy/matter border. Part of what held her back was how a little too much of the excess energy had bled away. Part was from the realization that she would be leaving Private Sunrise in a very indelicate position if she did leave to go bubble-chasing across the planet.
The rest came from acknowledging to herself that she now had the mess of the 1st Division’s blatant contamination by Meddling to clean up. The Admiral-General would expect nothing less of her. So would her parents, in a lesson Ia had learned long ago. If you are the one who saw the mess, that means you are the one expected to clean it up, and you’re not allowed to just walk by and leave it to rot . . .
I love you, Mom and Ma, but sometimes I wish you hadn’t dented such a strong sense of responsibility into my head!
Her hand slapped one last time into the plexi surface. Drawing in a deep breath, she let it out again slowly
. Stepping away from the window, Ia turned to face the others . . . and found a host of weapons still pointed at her. Tonkswell had tilted his gun up, pointing it ceilingward as the only safe direction, but Aston, Mattox, and the cluster of soldiers filling the front doorway continued to aim at her. Rolling her eyes, Ia shifted her hands to her hips.
“As you just saw for yourselves, I did not shoot anybody’s dog. I shot an enemy spy. You have all been contaminated by Feyori Meddling, thanks to ‘Ginger’ disguising herself as a friendly canine. Think, meioas, about what you have all just seen.” She waited for them to lower their weapons. When they didn’t, she firmed her expression. “I have been authorized by Admiral-General Christine Myang to deal with the Feyori, including the right to intercede in covert Human-Feyori interactions. My actions are completely within the realm of my orders.”
They didn’t move. Excepting Sunrise, the men and women around her looked dazed, as if not quite registering her words. It was possible “Ginger” had implanted a last-minute telepathic suggestion. Ia could only guess, though; telepathy was not one of her strengths by any means. Still, every word she said was true, under her terms of carte blanche and the Admiral-General’s awareness of her dealings with the Feyori.
This would be so much easier with Helstead on hand. I am not a psychodominant . . .
“You will put. Your weapons. Away,” she ordered, her tone edged with the authority Myang had entrusted to her. (Now!)
That single thought pulse, hard and forceful, jolted through them. It also drained the last of the glow, leaving Ia with nothing more than normal senses and a faint, burgeoning headache. Like a slap to the face, they shook their heads and drew in sharp breaths. Blinking, the men and women slowly lowered their weapons, looking as if they had just woken up from a weird dream. Ia wasn’t completely fooled; the subtle depths of Feyori mind games would take more than a single mental demand from her to wipe them away. But they did activate the safeties on the projectile guns and shut off the e-clips for the energy ones.
