Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship

by Jean Johnson

  (You have deeply frightened them today, child. I’ll admit even I am a little nervous in your presence now,) Kierfando observed quietly, privately to Ia. Around them, the spheres moved toward unoccupied generators, and the overhead lights dimmed, shadowing the room deeply, making it clear that the sun had set outside at some point. (But . . . you have subdued them as well. This group, at least. There is no guarantee for those not yet in open faction to you.)

  (I know. But I have truly lost all patience with your kind, and you all need to know it. I am not kidding, Kierfando. You know what’s at stake. The rest must comply. There is no neutral faction with me anymore,) she stressed, projecting that part of her thoughts to the other silvery spheres as well. (Anyone who tries to counterfaction, I will know it, and they will die. And as you just saw, I don’t even have to be on the same planet, anymore. That is the price Miklinn made all of you pay when he forced me to manifest as one of you.

  (Do not be stupid enough to make me collect on those dues.)

  He had nothing to say to that. Nothing he could say, and nothing the others could say. Speaking out loud, Ia gave the Meddlers around her one last warning.

  “Spread the word to all the rest. The entire Feyori race has just been drafted into the war to save our mutual home galaxy, and I am your Commander in Chief. I will not tolerate any more insubordination in the ranks. Thanks to Chule’eth, you have all just shakked away your second chance,” she reminded them harshly as the lights flickered and dimmed, flickered and dimmed. “The punishment for further treason is temporal abrasion, and death. I will not stay my hand again with you. There is no place, and no time, that puts you beyond my reach within this galaxy, present, future, or past. That is your final warning. Dismissed.”

  The lights stuttered, dimmed, and blacked out completely, generators whining with the strain of being drained. When the power came back, lightstrips winking back on in twos and threes, most of the silvery spheres were gone, and the remainder were moving away. All but one, the one who had lived for a while as a dog named Ginger.

  Ginger did not speak, though Ia could tell from the swirling patterns on the alien’s silvery skin that she—for lack of a better, more accurate gender—was watching her. Ia knew the threat of death kept the Meddler in place. Ia had not been gentle with either Miklinn or Teshwun. Worse, killing the latter at a distance rather than at a touch had indeed frightened the others. If Ia didn’t have to physically touch a Feyori’s energy-sphere to use Time itself as a method of execution, then she could reach out and grab any of them, anywhere, anywhen.

  Part of her felt sick from having to kill two Meddlers. She needed their help; she wanted to spare their lives. But she could not afford any more interference. Morals versus expediency . . . ethics versus efficacy. Damned personally if I do, but damned far worse for everyone else if I do not.

  Closing her eyes, she centered her mind, and flipped downward, inward, and out onto the timeplains. Heading downstream, she found her future self sitting on the bank of her own life-waters, meditating next to the channel that was the most deeply etched in Time. Ia ducked into the point where her future self had started laying the false visions over everything, and emerged in the true timeplains. She dropped onto the green and yellow grass with a sigh.

  “I have a lot to do now. I’m hoping Ginger can fix whatever’s wrong with Mattox, though if we go that route, that does run up against the Space Force’s need to keep him from being Meddled with any farther.”

  “You know I’m not able to give you many hints without muddying my own streams,” her older self stated, opening her amber brown eyes. “I can only say that there is a difference between altering what is not there to begin with and augmenting what already is.”

  Younger Ia winced as the timeplains dimmed, threatening exactly that. The elder one smiled ruefully. Or maybe sardonically. Pushing to her feet, the version from October flexed her wrists and hands. Her false overlay pulled off the true timeplains like a transparent sheet being pulled into a wadded bundle between her palms.

  “Go on. Start figuring out how to fix all the rends and tears in the system,” her older self directed. “I have the Dlmvla to finish courting.”

  “Good luck,” her younger self said. She turned to head back upstream. “See you when I am you, if not at some point again on the timeplains.”

  The older one chuckled and vanished into the water. Free to alter Time, Ia shifted everything into a giant graph chart. Her older self was right about one thing; there were a lot of proper streams that were now off course. Most of them were here on Dabin. Many more stretched into the future, onto other worlds. People who should have given little points of influence were either now dead and gone, or their life-paths altered so much that it would be a blatant artifice to send them where they originally needed to go, which in turn would cause more problems. Unless, that was, she spent a lifetime making subtle corrections.

  If she’d had the time and the life to spare, Ia would have made all those necessary corrections herself. As it was, she didn’t have even the resources needed to direct her normal agents, the Afaso, to make all the changes. But she did have someone who could stand in for her and them, someone who could subtly nudge minds and alter the courses of all those misplaced lives. Resolving Time back into a stream-scattered plain, she explored all the near-future conversations and efforts she could, should, would, might, and will have had with the Feyori named Ginger.

  The most damning thing she found clarified the reason behind the dull, dusky golden hue of the timeplains. Ginger hadn’t forced Brigadier General Mattox into a completely different set of tactical strategies. As her future self had obliquely warned, the Feyori had merely emphasized what was already there. Mattox wanted to be a modern-day General George Patton.

  The problem was, the war on Dabin just wasn’t going to work that way. Ia needed the 1st Division Army to disrupt the Salik entrenchment efforts, force them into the open by damaging and destroying their bunkers and shielded facilities, and maneuver them into a position where they had no choice but to be driven off-world. Straightforward, daylight-based, full-on confrontational warfare was not going to get the job done. In fact, it would only drive the Salik into entrenching and fortifying their positions.

  I cannot fix all the damage that Ginger and Teshwun did to the timestreams. Not personally. I have only enough time to fix the damage Mattox has been doing to the Army and pry him out of power. She searched side-streams, and sighed in disgust. Slag. It’s now to the point where I’ll have to do things by the book to salvage my standing in the military . . . which means leaving everything else in Ginger’s soap-bubble hands.

  Standing there on the grassy bank of Mattox’s life, Ia folded her arms over her chest for a moment, then rubbed at the ache forming in the middle of her furrowed brow. The crease felt like it was trying to iron itself into her flesh. Only twenty-six years old, and she was already on the verge of feeling forty-six going on sixty-six. Drawing in a deep breath, she ordered her mind, centered and grounded herself, then pulled up every single nexus point relevant to Dabin that had to be achieved in the next three hundred years, despite the loss of all those lives and all their influences.

  Once she had them in her grip, she shifted them into a tapestry of brocaded threads, then flipped most of her awareness back into her body. A minute or so had passed in reality. Ginger was still floating a few meters from her. The lights were fully back on, and the technicians lurking in the background looked far less nervous than before and far more curious now that there was only one Meddler left in the generator room.

  (Come here,) Ia ordered. Cautiously, the Feyori floated closer. When the silvery soap bubble was in range, Ia reached up and hooked the alien into the timeplains with just two fingers, flipping them both into the sepia-toned prairie. (Your position in the Game has now changed. You will still influence the people of Dabin, but only as directed, and far less along the original l
ines than you believed. Instead, you will spend the next three hundred years managing every single crisis point your stupidity-induced interference has created, both here and off-world.)

  Wrapping the threads through the alien’s energy matrices, Ia bound Ginger to the purposes she had isolated. It was a variation on the death-by-temporal-entropy drag; a true geas in that if Ginger resisted, the alien’s very life force would be abraded away for as long as she tried to resist. Belatedly, the Feyori realized what was happening and tried to extract herself. Ia seized her firmly and wove the temporal directives deeper into her energies.

  (Stop resisting this, Ginger,) she ordered. (You will either comply, or you will die. These are your assigned duties for the next three hundred years. The harder you try to resist, the more years you will scrape away from your life with each tug of your struggle. The more you cooperate, the longer you will survive past the point where the last of your tasks are done.)

  Snapping the last thread into place, she surveyed the timestreams, then added a few contingency lines. Like archaic bungee cords, there was some give and flexibility in what she had done. If the Feyori hadn’t been a being of energy, Ia wouldn’t have been able to do it. But she could, and did. Ginger could free herself . . . at the cost of cutting off about a thousand years’ worth of her life. Considering she had only two thousand or so more years to live, that kind of freedom wasn’t much of a bargain, a thousand for a mere three hundred.

  To be sure the Meddler understood what Ia had done, Ia teased up a thread of mortal awareness and tied that in as well. It would not tell Ginger how or where she would die, or at what exact point in time. Rather, it would feel like an hourglass. The more Ginger resisted, the more the alien would realize how much more sand was being shoved down through the waistline by her own actions, and how little sand remained in the reservoir.

  Any sufficiently advanced science, psychic science though it may be, can feel just like magic . . . and here I am binding a former enemy in an old-fashioned, Celtic-style geas. Marshalling her thoughts, she pinned the Feyori with a hard stare. (You can break free of these bonds, but they will shred and slice away half your remaining life span if you try. This is your choice: spend three centuries making up for the shova v’shakk you’ve caused, or lose a thousand years or more of rank and strength in the Game. Assuming you don’t piss me off to the point I hunt you down and kill you outright, of course.

  (And don’t count on waiting a hundred years, long after I’ll be dead and gone, before trying to undo everything I want done. I am the Master of Time, and I can kill you at any point in Time now that I have manifested in full. It is your choice, of course . . . but if you want my advice, I’d say you’ve been acting like a mindless idiot for long enough. Try being smart enough to know you’ve just been given a last chance.) She lifted her chin at the generators. (Take what energy you need, and go. If you are uncertain, call me, but you should know through these bindings what you’re supposed to do next.)

  The surface of the silvery sphere shifted only slightly, a subtle drift of reflective energies along its curves. Some of those energies gave off golden glints. Ginger didn’t say anything, but after a few moments, she did swirl and glide toward the hydrogenerators. Ia followed the alien’s movements with both her eyes and her mental hands trailing in the waters of the timestreams, holding her breath a little.

  It escaped with a faint sigh of relief. Ginger would do as she demanded. Not entirely happily, and she would resist a few times, testing the bonds laced throughout her energy matrix, but she would obey. One more success salvaged from this disaster. Yet more trompe l’oeil painted over the cracks on the walls of reality, if not in as painstakingly exact a match as Hollick’s sacrifice . . .

  Perhaps she could bind a fellow precognitive, as well as a Feyori? Ia made a mental note to investigate that possibility soon. There certainly would be plenty of precognitives in the future on Sanctuary, ones who could help carry forward Ia’s work on that world. None with her sheer strength and ability, but if Ia could tie their awareness into her workings, that would help solidify things. Precognitives elsewhere as well, ones living among the PsiLeague and the Witan Order, the Seers of Solarica and the crested priest caste of the Tlassians, to name but a few.

  Any magic is but an insufficiently understood science. If I had another lifetime to spare—and there probably is an alternate-me life-stream out there with this knowledge—then I could work out the how of what I can do right now by instinct. But that would require more Time than I can spare in this life, save for whatever I can scrape out of my Company’s travels sic transit between our many destinations.

  . . . Tele-pathetic powers . . . heh. That was funny . . . Miklinn’s crack at her relatively weak telepathic powers amused her for a brief moment. It was the truth; Ia wasn’t much of a ’path, xeno- or otherwise. Her smile faded as she watched the movements of the last Feyori in view.

  The alien’s surface slowly shifted from polished gunmetal to gleaming platinum. Finally, Ginger lifted up out of the generator she had picked. Swirling once in a not-quite-rude farewell, the energy-based being darted up through the ceiling at an angle. The moment she was gone . . . Ia’s legs trembled. Sinking to the floor with a knee-bruising thump, she slumped in place, palms braced on her thighs. She had been strong while the enemy had stood . . . floated before her, but now her adrenaline spike was a crash.

  I have not done a good thing, today. I was cruel. I was brutal. I was spiteful and vindictive. But I have done a necessary thing, she acknowledged silently, waiting for her nerves and her reserves to recover. They’ll hate me for it, and fear me for it, and I really did not want to have to . . . to murder . . .

  There was no denying that murder was what she had done, particularly to Teshwun. She had challenged Miklinn and killed him more or less fairly according to the Feyori rules for such things. She had done so only after giving him a chance to repent, which he had refused of his own free will to do. But the timestream-meddling Feyori? That was her being a vindictive bitch, exactly as she had said. Lifting her fingers to her face, to her whole, healed, two-eyed, scarless face, Ia buried her awareness of the world in the heels of her hands.

  Ah, God . . . Yet another stain on my soul . . . and all I can give in payment for all of this is what I’ve already pledged to give. I could’ve spent an hour convincing Teshwun to work with me, and I probably had the hour to spare, but . . . It was a shortcut to her goals, expediently executing the second Feyori in front of his peers. However, it was not nearly so noble as, say, hunting down a fellow recruit. Returning her hands to her lap, she focused on her breathing, ordering her thoughts. I shouldn’t waste the hour I’ve stolen with the loss of his life, then. Even with Ginger handling most of the damage for me, there are still days’ worth of damages to control . . . and a certain brigadier general to deal with. Somehow.

  “Ah . . . parrrdonn me? Meioa Feyorrri?”

  Opening her eyes, Ia looked over her shoulder. One of the felinoid technicians had approached tentatively, coming within three or so meters of her. His dark brown ears were down and back a little in uncertainty, but his whiskers were forward and his tail tip twitched, visible bravery in the face of a potential adversary.

  Ia climbed to her feet, shifting to face him. “I’m only a half-breed, meioa-o. The rest of me is fully Human and quite happy to remain so. You have a question?”

  “Ah, yes. Will there be anny morrre of, ah . . . your kinnd drrropping by? Using our gennneratorrs?” he asked, one ear flicking.

  “Not really, no. Maybe a single one in the future, but he, she, or it will be more discreet in what they take. For now . . . consider it a wartime appropriation of civilian resources. If your company wishes monetary reimbursement, I can arrange for it,” Ia told him. “I have the authority to reimburse you for your production losses. But you’ll have to let my Company clerk onto the property so she can give you the necessary paperwork. If that’s
alright?”

  The Solarican studied her a moment, then nodded curtly. “Fairrr enough—annnd we will give you a bill for all the powerrr you took.”

  Ia nodded her acceptance. At the moment, all she wanted was to have Mara come pick her up, maybe wait long enough for the paperwork to be filled out and filed, then head somewhere for a rest and a bit of solid, matter-based food. Tomorrow, she would have to find a formal uniform to don so that she could face off against Mattox. It was possible she could try to shift herself a set of Dress Grays or even Dress Blacks by turning from matter to energy and back, but now that the crisis was over, she was too tired to want to bother.

  She also didn’t want to be a Feyori for any longer than she absolutely had to be. The longer she stayed in that form, the more she thought like a Meddler. Her Human nature, her humanity, was too precious to be set aside so quickly or easily.

  CHAPTER 6

  I did not go into the military because I liked the politics.

  ~Ia

  JUNE 16, 2498 T.S.

  ARMY HEADQUARTERS

  LANDING CITY, DABIN

  It took two days for her polite, formal, repeated requests to see Brigadier General José Mattox to actually get her a moment of his time. Enough time for Private Sunrise to leave Headquarters, track down the rest of the Company, and bring back the hovervan with the hyperrelay packed inside. By the time he let her into his office, clad in formal Dress Grays with her half glittery of one medal type apiece—fetched from the recovered remains of their camp by Mara—Ia was more than ready for the confrontation.

  It went about as she expected, too.