by Jean Johnson
Ia grinned. She knew that last comment wasn’t meant to be on-mike. “The Gatsugi, of course. Deck 3 Mauve, got it.”
“Mauve Sector is . . . midships starboard, close to the Salik vessel.”
“Got it. Ia out.” Closing the link, Ia led the others into the Clearly-Standing. The airlock was white, but beyond that, the corridors were a soft shade of aquamarine. She ran lightly, mindful not to go too fast for either the unarmored Adams or the burdened Dexter and Hmongwa behind her. “I studied the ship schematics we were given at the debriefing. We’re entering on Deck 5. Mauve sector is on the far side of Lemon Yellow, which is the central core on these vessels.”
“If you ask me,” Dexter muttered through his external speakers, following Ia at a deck plate shuddering jog, “the Gatsugi are insane. Painting their corridors weird colors?”
“Yeah, well, at least they don’t eat people,” Adams retorted. “Did you hear what those frogtopuses did to this ship’s captain?”
“I didn’t have to hear it,” Ia muttered. “I saw it—Yellow Sector—forest green doors, that’s the lift service!” Dashing forward, she slapped the lift controls. “Up we go.”
It took a small eternity, six or seven seconds, for the lift to reach their deck. Ia and Adams ducked inside and plastered themselves against the front wall in each corner, allowing the two mechsuited men room to enter. The last thing either of them wanted was to have a foot stepped on by a half ton of moving machinery.
“Deck 3,” Adams muttered, twisting to punch the buttons. “Uhh . . . there, that should be it. Top down, left to right?”
“Correct,” Ia confirmed. “Their number 3 kind of looks like an incomplete four-point star.”
“Got it.” The doors closed. The elevator lurched upward, straining under the weight of the two mechsuits, then chimed and opened up again. Ia darted out, oriented herself, and took off to the right. Dexter and Hmongwa followed, and Adams trailed behind.
They heard the sounds of shouting, hissing, and the sizzle of laser fire striking something, though there were no screams of pain, yet. They also encountered a knot of Gatsugi, wringing their four-fingered, fourfold hands in hues of muddy yellow distress, or gripping their version of laser pistols grimly in shades of rage-mottled red. Two blue-clad Humans were there as well, one clearly dead, the other gasping in pain as a grim-brown Gatsugi did her best to bind his bloodied leg.
Ignoring him, Ia squeezed past the other aliens so she could crouch and peer around the corner. She could just make out four Choya and two hostages, one a blue-clad Human, the other a beige-clad Gatsugi. It looked like they were keeping watch both on this corridor and on the airlock into the Salik ship. Pulling back, Ia hissed at the aliens around her.
“Back/back/back! Clear/exit this corridor/hall!” she ordered, shooing them with rolling flips of her hands, Gatsugi-style. They blinked their black mouse eyes at her, then scattered. Some helped the injured Navy man retreat into a side cabin. “Hmongwa, Dexter!” she ordered in an undertone. “Four of them, just around the corridor. Two hostages, one Navy. Keep them pinned down. Don’t let them escape this way, but definitely get their attention focused on you. Adams, you’re with me.”
“We’re not armored,” Adams reminded her as he hurried after her, following her back up the corridor.
“No, we’re not.” She beckoned for one of the Gatsugi to follow her. “But if I remember the schematics right, there’s a service access panel in the bulkheads just behind where their rearguard is stationed. You, show us!”
“Access/hatchway, behind/near them?” the crewmember asked, blinking. She thought a moment, then tipped her head and gestured in affirmation. “This/This way!”
“Sneak attack?” Adams murmured, figuring it out. Grinning, he warmed up his rifle and followed. Then caught Ia by the elbow, jogging at her side. “You don’t have a weapon, Corporal!”
She shrugged off his touch. “Don’t worry, I brought a knife.”
“To a gun fight?” he scoffed.
The Gatsugi led them into a cabin before she could form a retort. It was a private cabin, crew quarters with a table, a pair of chairs, and two bunk beds. While the shapes of the furniture were normal enough, the sheer clash of colors made both Humans wince. Everything was painted, tinted, or plastered with hues both bright and pastel, and none of it arranged according to Human aesthetics. Prisms cast rainbow reflections on the walls from where they hung around the edges of the recessed overhead lights, and a strange-scented incense lingered in the air, making Adams sneeze and Ia rub hastily at her nose.
“This way/Here,” the Gatsugi told them, manipulating the locking mechanism on a slim rectangle of wall. The space beyond was narrow for a Gatsugi, and very narrow for a Human. Ducking and squeezing in sideways, Ia worked her way after the alien, following the alien female through the mesh of bundled wires and pipes.
The crewmember did something to another panel, creating a crack of light on the left, then edged further along between the conduits. Ia hissed at her as she passed. “Stay/stay/stay, or go back/retreat!”
The alien tipped her head side to side quickly, her version of nodding. Satisfied, Ia moved. Contorting down into the opening, Ia stuck her hand out first, quickly signing a cautionary gesture in Gatsugi for the crewmembers she couldn’t see but knew were off to the left so they wouldn’t shoot.
Only then did she ease her way out as quietly as she could manage. Adams followed, managing a credible level of silence, though the noise from their two fellow Marines, shouting orders at the Choya to set down their weapons and let their captives go, helped cover the few wisps of sound they made. Just as Ia had foreseen.
She didn’t want the rearmost of the Choya to have enough time to glance back at the Gatsugi crewmembers pinning them down with their pistols, and shout a warning. Sprinting forward, she caught up with the yellow green male just as he glanced back down the corridor her way. Her palm snatched at his throat, yanking him forward into the side hall with her. Spinning both of them around to pull them out of immediate enemy view, Ia grabbed his face with her left hand, palm cupped over nasal slits. She snatched at his left shoulder with her right hand and twisted. The short, sharp crack was lost in a reply shouted by the Choya around the corner, responding to her fellow Marines.
Lowering her victim to the deck, she laid the body on the floor against the wall and eased up to the corner. A probe of the future showed none of them likely to glance her way in the next five seconds. Slipping her knife free, she eased around the corner, then dashed forward. Her left hand cupped over the next Choya’s mouth and nostril slits to keep the alien silent; her right hand sawed the blade across his throat, slicing deeply above the edge of his moisture-packs. Blue gushed from the wound. His webbed hands tensed, then slid free of the blue-clad Human in his grasp.
One of the other Choya glanced back, the female holding the Gatsugi crewman. Ia flung the dead Choya free and leaped at her, slamming her into the rose purple bulkhead, one hand on the alien’s shoulder, the other stopping her knife a mere centimeter from one of those yellow, slit-pupilled eyes. Shocked, the Choya didn’t maintain her grip on the other alien, who freed himself with a wrench, diving behind Adams for cover.
“Surrender!” Hmongwa thundered through his external speakers. “Your hostages are freed and your crewmates are dead!”
Behind him, several more Marines appeared, unarmored but taking cover behind his and Dexter’s mechsuits. The plethora of Heck muzzles pointed their way convinced the last of the Choya to carefully drop his weapon to the blue-bloodied floor and clamp his palms around his throat in surrender.
“You got her?” Ia asked Adams, whose own rifle was poking over her left shoulder.
“I got her,” he promised.
Easing back and to the right, out of his field of fire, Ia released the alien’s arm. She stepped back with careful deliberation, misplacing her foot . . . and slipped, falling flat on her back, elbow banging into the corpse of her previous opponent. Her body rolled with the fa
ll, partly from expecting it, partly from lifelong training in how to fall safely in heavy gravity, but it still knocked some of the wind out of her.
Two of the unarmored Marines hurried forward to secure the last prisoner. Ia pushed up onto her elbows, watching them work. Her backside was soaked from shoulders to hips with Choya blood, still warm and slightly greasy-feeling. They couldn’t regulate their body temperature quite as efficiently as a mammal, but more than any Terran amphibian or reptile could. Her skin wanted to crawl with the urge to scrub herself clean, but she had to wait for permission to go get cleaned up again.
“Situation under control, Lieutenant!” she heard Dexter call out. “They killed one man, but the others look like they’ll live, sir.”
“Good job, meioas,” Lt. Ferrar called back. Ia rolled up onto her hip and her hand, and pushed to get up . . . and faked another pratfall, landing on her side with a soft oof. Ferrar frowned and stepped forward. He stopped before reaching the edge of the puddle on the floor. “Corporal Ia? Is that you? You’re . . . ah . . .”
That was her cue to stand. Rolling onto her knees, Ia got one foot underneath her. She pushed to stand up and face her commanding officer—and her foot caught on the slick ichor the wrong way.
Knee twisting painfully, Ia slipped for real and splapped onto the deck. She caught herself with her forearms, absorbing most of the impact, but still thumped chin-first into the hemocyanin. Only the twisting of her neck and the clamping of her lips kept the bitter stuff out of her mouth.
A quick check of the timestreams relieved her. It was the only relief, though. Now she was coated up the front of her body from toe to chest, mostly on her right side, and her knee throbbed, warning her of the need to visit the Infirmary. Self-disgust warred with a tiny spark of her twisted sense of humor. Bloody Mary, indeed . . .
The smell clung to her, subtle but coppery and, well, alien. Not like Human or even Salik blood. Keeping her expression confined to a wrinkled nose and a grimace, Ia—carefully—pushed back up onto her feet.
Lieutenant Ferrar was waiting for her. Staring, rather. He blinked twice, swallowed, blinked again, then met her stiff salute with a salute of his own. “Corporal . . .”
“Lieutenant. I apologize we didn’t get here fast enough to save the Navy one of their own, sir,” Ia stated, lifting her chin and doing her best to ignore the cooling liquid staining her cheek, hands, and brown casuals. She stood mostly At Attention, not wanting to put too much weight on her right knee, and waited for the comment she knew was coming.
He stared at her, dragging his gaze down to her brown leather boots and back up again. “Are you that determined to earn your nickname, soldier?”
“Sir, no, sir. I fell and twisted my knee, sir; I wouldn’t do that deliberately.” She grimaced, showing some of her pain. “In fact, it hurts like hell right now. Permission to report to the Infirmary, sir?” she asked.
“Granted—after you run through decontamination on your way back to the ship, if that’s your only injury,” the dark-skinned man added, pointing a finger at her bloodied clothes. “I don’t care how deep you wade into it in future battles, Corporal; you will be cleaned up and ready for inspection within an hour after each Stand Down. Dismissed . . . ‘Bloody Mary.’ ”
“Thank you, sir.” Slowly, carefully—her knee twinging with each step—Ia picked her way out of the mess smeared across the floor, limping back toward the Liu Ji. No one offered to help her, wary of the inky mess making her clothes cling to her body, but a few did offer her grins.
She knew why they grinned. Bathed literally in the blood of combat, she was now officially one of them: a Space Force Marine.
“Please, sit down, Corporal,” Chaplain Christine Benjamin urged Ia. “Would you like something to drink? Water? Caf’?” The redheaded woman gestured at the dispensary in the corner of her office. “I just put in a fresh packet a few minutes ago. It should be hot by now.”
“Water would be fine, thank you.” Ia sat in one of the cushioned chairs across from the chaplain’s desk and waited while the other woman dispensed a mug of water for her and a cup of caf’ for herself. Accepting the plain white plexi cup, she sipped from it while the chaplain settled herself into the other chair and crossed her legs. She was clad in the Dress Blues of the Space Force Navy, but her trousers bore a grey stripe next to the black one, indicating she was part of the Special Forces. The Special Forces weren’t just about Sharpshooters, Troubleshooters, the Department of Innovations, or even the Psi Division; they were the catchall for various nonstandard, highly trained groups.
“Well . . . I suppose you know why you’re here, Corporal—actually, do you mind if I just call you Ia?” the older woman asked. “Please call me Bennie. Everyone does.”
“No, I don’t mind. And yes, I do know why I’m here,” Ia added.
“Well, it was your first combat, and the medical divisions, the Department of Innovations, your superior officers, so on and so forth all want to make sure you came through it okay,” Bennie stated. “Not to mention me, as both your chaplain and the ship psychologist. You had an extraordinary day, you know.”
“You could say that again,” Ia muttered, sipping again from her cup. It gave her hands something to do. She knew this interview was necessary, but knew it was also a minefield of potential career traps. “This session is being recorded, right?”
“Yes. Anything you say here will be held in confidence, and will not go on your permanent open record against you. But it will be a permanent part of your sealed files,” Bennie explained candidly. “Those are only opened in case you, oh, go absolutely insane and start murdering everyone in sight. Then the psychologist and parapsychologists would obtain permission to crack them open and pick through your past to see where things started to unravel. But unless you do that, they remain sealed. Not even Admiral-General Christine Myang, the highest-ranking military officer of the entire Space Force, can crack them open casually.”
Ia nodded. It was good to know what she was about to say would be a part of her permanent record . . . but not easily accessible. Depending on how she phrased things, she could cover her asteroid legally here in these sessions. There were rules and regs regarding those with psychic abilities to hedge around, after all.
“I understand. And I’ll be as candid as I can, since I know you want to make sure I get any help I might need,” she stated.
“You put that rather conditionally,” Bennie observed, pouncing on Ia’s phrasing. “Do you feel you don’t need help?”
Ia smiled wryly. “Sir . . . Bennie,” she amended, “I have already been parapsychologically evaluated. Repeatedly, through the years. I grew up as the second child of the second generation of a nearly brand-new colonyworld. A heavyworld, where literally falling down the wrong way could kill a grown man. I saw . . . things . . . as a child. Things that children from more developed, more civilized worlds shouldn’t ever have to see.
“My parents made sure that the Witan Order—they had the cheapest rates—evaluated me fully on all levels. Psychologically, parapsychologically, even psychically. I’ve had my head rummaged through on multiple occasions to make sure I was—and am—mentally stable, and I have received their stamp of approval for my sanity, stability, and morality in all categories.”
Her next evaluation wasn’t due for almost a full year. Still, Ia had already made arrangements to “meet up with old friends” on board the Hum-Vee, her friends being a trio of registered telepathic evaluators. All psychics had to undergo morality and ethics checks at least once a year. They could keep their abilities private, but they had to be registered, and they had to be scanned, to reassure the rest of the galaxy that a particular psi wasn’t using their abilities illegally.
Her own actions could very well qualify as illegal at times, except for two special words protecting her.
“Were you, now?” the chaplain asked her, sipping at her mug of caf’. The drink was a hybrid between the Terran and V’Dan versions of coffee, without
the acrid bitterness of the Terran kind, and with more stimulants than the V’Dan. Ia liked the beverage, but didn’t want the caffeine running through her system so close to her bedtime. “Are you stable?”
“Once the parapsychologists and I figured out how best to work through my nightmares . . . yes. And I do mean work through them,” Ia added, knowing she had to turn the session to her advantage.
“Please, explain,” Bennie urged, gesturing with her free hand.
“I’m good at helping people. Because of the things I saw as a child, I developed the urge to help others. But I’m also good at fighting. Combining the two, helping people, fighting to defend others, striving to stop other people from being violent . . . these things soothe my psyche. I’m stable in combat because I know I’m helping save innocent lives. Put me behind a desk . . . and, well,” Ia shrugged, “. . . the memories start to eat at my soul. I cannot not help people.”
“You saw . . . things . . . as a child, but combat as an adult doesn’t bother you?” Bennie asked. “The blood, the gore, the screams of the dying?”
Ia gave the chaplain a level look. “I never said it doesn’t bother me. I said I figured out how to work past all that. For the record, it does bother me. I want to make it stop. More than that, I want to make it stop happening to other people. And it makes me want to try harder the next time. My reflexes, my skills, my grasp of tactics, these things make me a natural warrior. My will to place these things between innocent lives and whatever threatens them, that makes me a natural soldier.”
Her claim to natural warrior skills was a lie; she had forced herself to work hard at training everything for over two years before joining the Marines. By now, the habits were ingrained into her muscles, but it hadn’t been easy, let alone natural, at the beginning.
“I have certain abilities which the average person does not,” Ia continued. That statement was the absolute truth, counterbalance to her lie. “It would be wasteful if I didn’t use them, particularly if I could help others,” Ia pointed out. “Someone has to stand between the innocents of the world and anything that might try to harm them. To not use these abilities when I know I can, and I know I should . . . that would be the real nightmare.”
