by Jean Johnson
“Ship’s Captain Ia of the 9th Cordon Special Forces is hereby promoted to the rank of four-starred General and placed in direct command of the 1st Division 6th Cordon Army forces which are stationed on Dabin, in addition to her command of the 9th Cordon Special Forces—your black uniform, General Ia, will have both a gray and a green stripe, in addition to those four stars. You are hereby ordered by your peers of the Command Staff to take charge of the situation on Dabin, and do anything necessary . . . within the boundaries of your conscience, your duty, and your grasp of Time itself, as you have said,” Myang stated dryly, “. . . to amend the damages wrought by Brigadier General Mattox, and to correct the situation to save the maximum number of lives in the most efficient manner possible.”
As much as this highly unexpected promotion vastly—vastly—simplified things for her, and opened up a whole host of possibilities under the purview of her new rank, Ia’s conscience burned. It prodded her like a white-hot poker into speaking. “Sir, with a promotion to the rank of four-star General, and with leave given to do anything and everything that I must . . . I will take the bit in my teeth and run with it, sir. You do know that, right?”
“I know that I am placing a great deal of faith in you and your abilities, meioa-e,” Myang told Ia, holding the younger woman’s gaze over the lag-seconds and light-years between them. “Do not make me regret this decision. But do show me what you can do with no more constraints holding you back, save for your conscience, your duty, and that unholy-strong psi of yours, General.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” Hand snapping to her brow, she saluted the Admiral-General. Myang saluted her back. The moment she was free to drop her hand, Ia snapped in a crisp left face and addressed her Company, mind racing—leapfrogging—after every possibility now opened up before her. “Attention, Damned; you heard the Admiral-General! You have exactly one hour to pack up your combat kitbags and be prepared to depart. Report back to the ballroom in whatever light armor you can scrounge, ready to travel. I will have individualized orders ready for each of you by then.”
“Capta—er, General, sir?” Commander Helstead corrected, raising her hand in inquiry as the others rose to obey. “What will we be doing?”
“I’m sending each one of you across the Army as tactical consultants. We are finally going to get this war done, and we are going to get it done right. The seven still on the seriously wounded list will be remaining behind, along with Private Jjones and myself—yes, Dr. Mishka, I expect you to go into combat as a consultant as well. Ramasa is still missing his left foot and is therefore unfit for combat, but you are uninjured. Everyone who can go must go, and you are going in his place. I will remain here to coordinate everything above and beyond the orders I will give you, and I will oversee the reorganization of the Army from this end.
“Xhuge, Douglas, and Togama, get on the comms immediately and contact every rental-hovercar agency in town. I want each and every pairing heading into the field to have their own vehicle—Private Floathawg, contact the hovercycle companies to see about leasing bikes to those personnel you know are licensed to ride. We’re going to wipe out half the rental agencies in the city, but it must be done. Clerks, file all payment vouchers on my carte blanche ticket with Sergeant Sadneczek.
“You have your orders, meioas. Dismissed!” Turning back to the hyperrelay as the others scrambled out of their seats, Ia nodded at the screen. “If you’ll forgive my eagerness and please excuse me, Admiral-General, you have just changed the entire list of game plays I had drawn up. I wasn’t expecting to be given such a free rein. If I’m to uphold your faith in me, I and my people need to get to work immediately, and I have a lot of plans to rewrite in the next ten hours.”
Myang was already nodding, listening impatiently to Ia’s relay-lagged words. “General Ia, you are dismissed to your new duties.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you, Generals, Admirals. I’ll try to keep your faith in me. Ia out.” Ia touched the controls again as the Admiral-General and the generals flanking her vanished from the screen. The blue-and-gold logo of the Space Force took their place, though the link was still active, if rerouted. “To the men and women at Army Headquarters, these are my first set of orders: Colonel Zirenja of the Military Peacekeepers, you will place Brigadier General José Mattox under house arrest, escort him to his quarters, and keep him there under armed guard. He will be allowed no visitors and no unrecorded communications. He may call or contact whoever he likes, but all communiqués are to be recorded or copied and shipped to the Command Staff on Earth unaltered.
“To Major Xiayan, the officer in charge of HQ Supply. Please issue me a set of Dress Blacks with the requisite green-and-gray stripes, and a set of four-star pips. Your department already has a current set of my measurements, so that shouldn’t take you long. Colonel Satsuke, have the communications department relay to all Companies of the 1st Division copies of the orders containing the change-of-command. I want them to know that I am in charge within the next ninety minutes Terran Standard.
“Colonel Zirenja, please also place the general’s chief assistant, Major Leotta Perkins, under house arrest as well as the brigadier general, under the exact same conditions. There’s a sixty-seven percent probability she’ll try to sabotage my orders and efforts at Headquarters. I will allow nothing and no one to interfere with the salvation of this colonyworld,” Ia stated bluntly. “Please do remember, I have just been given the authority and the freedom to do whatever I must by command of the Admiral-General herself. Make no mistake, I am in full charge now—and gentlemeioas? I will know if any of you fail to comply. If you do, you will also be placed under house arrest.
“Follow my orders to the spirit and the letter, and I will make you the heroes of Dabin,” she promised, staring into the camera pickups, though there was only the TUPSF logo for her to look at. “Get in my way, interfere with my calculations, and I will take you out of the equation. This is not the time to get petulant and commit a whole string of Fatalities, gentlebeings. Expect me at Headquarters in one hour twenty-eight minutes local. You have your orders. General Ia out.”
Shutting off the relay, Ia turned to find Meyun waiting patiently at her elbow. There was still a trace of shock and wonder in his brown eyes, but he didn’t let her abrupt promotion faze him. This was why he was far more suitable as a first officer than any other choice the DoI would have made. Too many off-the-wall things happened around Ia, and she knew it. So did Harper, and he of all choices had the flexibility for it, even if she still couldn’t predict most of his life.
“So what exactly is the new plan, sir?” Harper asked under his breath.
“Each and every single one of you will have to contact and deliver very specific orders to twenty-three Companies within the next three days. That’s per person, not just per team, which means that working in pairs around the clock, you’ll have to deliver orders to and brief forty-six Companies within sixty-eight hours,” Ia explained to her second-in-command, fingers and toes trailing mentally through the timestreams.
“That is a lot of Companies to reach,” he admitted.
“There are almost thirty-five hundred Companies here on Dabin, and they all need to know what each and every one of them and their neighbors can do about removing the Salik presence on Dabin—and it’s thanks to something you told me about that’ll make it that much easier to remove them. You handed me a brilliant idea for a shortcut to this planet’s part in the war, which will make up for all the time Mattox lost for us. Unfortunately, it will only work if they’re not entrenched.”
“Something I told you?” Meyun asked her, puzzled.
Ia flashed him one of her rare full grins. “Don’t worry about it right now, Harper,” she said, clapping him briefly on the shoulder. “I’ve had the civilian sector working on it for months, just like I had this hyperrelay bought and stashed for months. So long as we can disrupt the Salik efforts to entrench by breaking up their wasp nests
—and we can; we have just enough time left for that, if we all work hard—then we can kick them off your homeworld for good.”
“I’ll trust you, Cap . . . shakk,” Harper muttered, shaking his head ruefully. “General. That is going to take a lot of adjustment. You have got to be the single youngest four-star General in Terran history—how the hell did you pull that off?”
She spread her hands, letting him see her sincerity, and a touch of her giddiness. “I honestly haven’t a clue! I was fully expecting to remain a Ship’s Captain, or maybe get a promotion to Vice Commodore, maybe even promoted to be a Commodore here on Dabin after Mattox kept screwing everything up. And I was only supposed to be a Commodore at most until at least the last few months of the Salik War, when I was supposed to be promoted to a Rear Admiral at that point. But here I am, General Ia . . . and I am going to run this war how I see fit.
“Go get packed,” she ordered, pointing at him. “Change your clothes for combat zones, grab a quick bite from the buffet, and do whatever you need to do. I’ll have your teammate assignment by the time you get back.”
Nodding, he headed for the door. That left just Private Jjones still in the Olympic Ballroom with Ia. She cleared her throat, standing in a very proper, soldierly version of Parade Rest, though she had started her military career predominantly as a surgical nurse. “Sir. What do you want me to do? You said I was to remain behind with you. Do I accompany you to Army HQ?”
Ia shook her head. “No, you’ll be in charge of our makeshift infirmary, which means you’ll stay and anchor our base as the one fully mobile member left here. I’ll be busy splitting my time between here and Army HQ. Commander Benjamin is almost ready for desk duty; when she is, she’ll take over monitoring everything from this room with Ramasa’s assistance. I couldn’t predict these injuries because of Meddler interference, but I knew I could plan for plenty of flexibility across the crew.”
Jjones lifted her brows briefly and shrugged her broad shoulders. “You put in some commands in my version of the Company bible way back when we first boarded the Hellfire, things that convinced me you really could see the future. It wasn’t pleasant to find out even you could be blinded—metaphysically, not just physically—but even so, I’ll still follow your orders, sir. You’re a good officer even without the psi stuff.”
Ia swallowed. She was touched by the transgendered woman’s faith but couldn’t dwell on it more than briefly. Too many plans had just changed. “I’ll try to be worthy, Private.”
Moving away from the hyperrelay, Ia headed for the office supplies stacked in the other corner at the back of the room. Fetching out an empty container and a box of datachips from under one of the tables, she pulled out the first dozen of the thin little rectangles with a touch of telekinesis. Light as a feather, they floated up and out, forming a halo around her hand.
“In the meantime, stand guard and make sure no one interrupts me. I have over three thousand sets of orders to revise and make perfect, and just over an hour to get it done.”
“I’ll have the hotel staff bring in a lunch sack for you at that end of the hour, something you can eat on the way to Army HQ, and I’ll fetch a couple energy drinks for starters, sir,” Jjones stated, her paramedical training coming to the fore. She moved out of her Parade Rest stance and headed for the door. “You’ll be burning through a lot of kinetic inergy to do that, so you’ll need food to replace whatever you use.”
“Thank you, Private,” Ia told Jjones, in between flipping her mind back and forth between reality and the timestreams, altering the orders inscribed on each of the many, many chips. This would indeed exhaust her if she didn’t replace all the energy spent. “I’ll have to commend you to the DoI for your thoughtfulness and good planning . . . along with everyone else who survives this debacle.”
CHAPTER 7
To this day, I still do not know what prompted the Admiral-General to pick such a long-shot option. I know I have been a pain in her plans, the ache in her head, the wrench in her neatly ordered works. I have been belligerent, uncooperative, devious, obstructive, and blunt. I have withheld vital information repeatedly, snuck around behind her back, and bent the rules on multiple occasions, and she knew all of this . . . yet the woman still elevated me to a higher rank than even I had foreseen as probable. She gave me virtual free rein to do whatever I wanted, beyond all hopes and expectations for it . . . and a good thing, too, because I needed it, on Dabin.
So yeah, you bet your sweet asteroid I ran with it. Like a horse given its head and a long flat stretch to gallop in, with nothing to hold it back but the wind and the weight of its burdens, I ran. Clenched the bit in my teeth and ran as fast and hard as I could, because while I still don’t wish Mattox any harm, I do wish to heaven and back that he hadn’t done nearly so much damage on Dabin. I’ve piled as much of the repair work on Ginger as I can, but a fair share of the meddling—that’s with a lowercase “M”—that fair share of meddling also belongs on his shoulders.
Still, the Admiral-General took him out of the equation, for which many on Dabin thanked God, and gave me my shot at running the war on that world in the best ways that I saw fit. And maybe that’s my answer, right there. What would you do to set everything right again, or as right as the vagaries of Fate would allow? . . . Or rather, what would you let someone else do if you thought there was a chance they could do it?
~Ia
JULY 2, 2498 T.S.
“You’re on, sir, in five, four . . .” The technician held out his hand as he looked up, counting down silently with his fingers. This was a broadcast to the entire Division, something that would be picked up and eventually decoded by the Salik forces on Dabin in spite of the heavy encryptions used by the military, but it was something she couldn’t avoid.
Waiting a beat after he silently reached one, Ia addressed the dozen hovercameras floating in front of her. There was no corresponding viewscreen because this was a broadcast, not a workstation-to-workstation comm link. “Greetings. I am General Ia of the Space Force Command Staff. As you were informed by dispatch within the last few days, Brigadier General Mattox has been retired from combat command, and I have been appointed by Admiral-General Myang in his place.”
Retired was a euphemism that would hopefully smooth things over between those troops who were still loyal to Mattox and those who wanted him gone. The messages delivered by her own soldiers had contained official news of the change in command and a set of preliminary orders that would get every group currently being engaged by the enemy out of immediate danger in time for this broadcast, as well as certain specific orders and general directives for the coming weeks.
This broadcast would cover the new command structure and the types of orders that they would now have to follow. First, though, she had to get the unseen ranks of men and women in almost thirty-five hundred individual Companies to trust her.
“As sometimes may happen with a major change in combat command,” Ia stated calmly, “there comes a change in command structure, strategies, and tactics . . . and yes, I do know the Salik are decoding this broadcast even as I send it. I do wish them good luck in figuring out what I am going to have you do, for they will need it.”
Mattox had approached his organization top-down, from the Division level to the Brigade, to the Battalion, the Legion, and finally down to the Company level. Below that were Platoons and Squads and teammate pairings. A good fifth of what Ia had sent out were Squad-level orders, but only when they absolutely had to have direction. What she needed now was to remind every single soldier listening to this broadcast, either right now or on a replay later, of what they had been taught to do back in Basic.
Not the hand-to-hand combat or the target practice, and not the monkey-gym antics of the confidence courses, but the group practices. Things that weren’t openly discussed in the civilian sectors because they were the real weapons in the hands of the Terran military. Battle tactics, the kind that d
epended on the on-the-spot information only a Squad, Platoon, or Company would know in time to make decisions that would do any actual good.
Her plans hinged on each person being able to act independently because she literally did not have the time to direct each and every piece of combat personally, second by second. It would be polar opposite to what Mattox had done to them and expected of them. Ia needed to remind the men and women watching this broadcast that they did have the training for this task.
“I realize many of you have little reason to trust a complete stranger. But while I have never served in the Army before now, I began my career as a Marines grunt, enlisted, ordered about, and expected to shoulder my share of the combat burden just like you. The Marines aren’t that much different than the Army, save that they’re mostly stuck in space, while you have the advantage in knowledge and skills when it comes to planet-side fighting, and a far better support system at your backs.”
A lie, but a face-saving one. The Marines and the Army were different in many ways, some blatantly so, others subtly. But morale, as she had reminded her interrogators, was the single most important tool in their hands. These were soldiers who had suffered heavy losses, restrictive orders, and a planet-side top brass who hadn’t given a damn for their suffering or their ideas on how to alleviate it, save where it would enhance Mattox’s own biased ideas of glory and strategy.
“If you are unsure of my reputation in small-unit tactics as General Ia . . . well, I know that many of you have at least heard of my reputation as Bloody Mary,” she said, smiling slightly, wryly, for the cameras. “Rest assured, I have kept that reputation fresh and dripping from my first week in Marines to my field promotion as an officer in the Navy, all the way to my years in the Special Forces. My service in the Army here on Dabin will be no different. I promise you this: follow my orders, and the enemy will bleed before we are through.”
