by Jean Johnson
D’kora . . . would recover. Provided Ia played her cards right.
Ferrar lifted his glass once his cadre had settled into place around the table, squeezed elbow to elbow with their newest member. Ia obligingly raised her mug, listening patiently to his praise. “To Lance Corporal Ia . . . and to the brand-new legend of our very own Bloody Mary. You did an outstanding job on the Clearly-Standing. Meioa-e, I salute you.”
I’ll drink to that, she thought, lifting and clinking her mug, then sipping from it. And I’ll salute the whole galaxy, too.
CHAPTER 15
Everyone knows what a soldier does during times of war. We place our skills, our weapons, our bodies, and even our lives on the line, protecting the innocent from all that which would threaten them. We fight, so that others do not have to fight. We take the risks, because we know the price.
What people tend to forget is how much we also do during times of peace. We are the supporting arm, the helping hand, the strength of a friend coming to save you from the monsters that plague you in the middle of the night. We aren’t big damn heroes demanding big damn parades; most of us are nameless, faceless, and interchangeable . . . and for that reason, we are indispensable.
We serve in many ways. It is our duty, and our right.
~Ia
DECEMBER 13, 2490 T.S.
HASKIN’S WORLD
JOINT COLONYWORLD, GLIESE 505 SYSTEM
Rain lashed into Ia’s eyes as she turned, struggling to carry her burden against the rib-deep muck flowing through the trees. Cold and soaked as she was, she didn’t shiver nearly as hard as the child whimpering in her arms. The boy struggled, holding out his arms to his father, who was still clinging to the purple bark of the sheltering tree. He didn’t see his mother waiting in the low-hovering van, her own arms held out in desperate need, until Ia lifted him high enough for her to grab her son.
She didn’t bother to seek a translation in the timestreams for the babble of V’Dan as mother and son reunited with squeals and cries. They were no different than the other words exchanged by the seven others crammed into the vehicle struggling to stay aloft on the unsteady surface of the floodwaters.
“Suloc v’sulo kei’il?” she half shouted, returning to the man trying to pick his way through the branches. Are you ready?
“Ya, ya!” He pointed at the van, straining for his son. “Nii c’mosuloc, v’shail!”
Ia grabbed him around the waist as he started to fall, losing his grip. His lips were tinged blue from having picked a lower resting point than his wife and son, his body icy through the cold fabric clinging to his skin. Hefting him so that she could get her arm under his knees, Ia slogged through the mud, forcing her way against the current with mind as well as muscle.
“Hyu . . . Hyu are very . . . st-st-strong,” the colonist managed to say, stumbling over the Terranglo words.
“Neh-ya-veh,” Ia grunted, hefting him up toward the hands extending out of the side door. The other rescued colonists hauled him inside, then reached for her. Strong as she was, she was cold and tired from three hours of nonstop flood rescues. Accepting their help, Ia let them pull her inside. Squirming over the damp Humans crowding the cabin, Ia tapped Estes on the shoulder. “Gimme the scanner, I want to do one last sweep!”
Estes handed over both the scanner box and Ia’s headset, taken off so it wouldn’t be lost if she went under. Ia fitted the curve of wires over her hair, scraping her dripping white bangs back from her eyes. Clicking it on, she synched with the scanner unit, aiming it in a slow arc to extend the signal. It didn’t take her long to pick up what she wanted to see.
“Fifteen degrees east, and fast! I’m picking up another signal!”
“You want fast, tell that to the muck under our thrusters!” Estes shot back, guiding the hovervan further out across the flooded valley. “Much more weight than this and we won’t—”
The voice on both their headsets interrupted her.
“D’kora to all teams. The Plistek Dam is breaking. I repeat, the dam is breaking. The engineers say you have five minutes at most before it dumps the entire reservoir on top of you. All teams in the Plista Valley are ord—”
“—Human!” Ia shouted, drowning out what their superior was saying. “I’m getting a Human reading! Hurry it up! We’re a full twenty minutes downstream, we can save them!”
For a moment, it looked like Estes was going to obey that half-heard order to return to base. Ia waited, holding her breath. Her fellow corporal gripped the steering wheel and gunned the thruster. The van sped forward incrementally faster, kicking up a spray of water behind them.
Ia probed the timestreams . . . and winced. There was more trouble up ahead than she had anticipated. Ia swore and dumped the scanner onto the lap of the V’Dan-born colonist occupying the front seat next to Estes. “There’s a pack of grampass getting too close to that life sign. I want ramming speed, and a quick turn at the last second, Corporal.”
“A quick turn? Aren’t you going to shoot from the doorway?” Estes argued.
“We won’t get there in time.” She turned and squirmed toward the side door, switching to V’Dan. It took her a moment to find the words she wanted to say. “Uhh . . . Ni-holl vassa v’gista, zamma-vi’doulie. Jalak! Kei’il suloc jalak!”
The muddied, shivering survivors nodded and clutched at whatever they could find, from the brackets that had held the seats formerly occupying the back of the hovervan, to the seat restraints still dangling down the side walls. Ia checked the latches on her knife and pistol holsters, probing the timetsreams. One of the younger men, half pressed against her thigh, gasped and looked up at her. Ia tightened her shields.
“Estes, I’ll need another e-clip!”
“E-clip, hell! Take my p-gun!” Fumbling it free with one hand, steering with the other, Estes offered it over her shoulder. Ia stretched and snatched it before one of the civilians could mishandle the projectile weapon. “Blow out its brains!—Holy! There are ten of them?”
Ia grimaced and checked the safety before shoving it down the back of her pants. What she needed was the electrical energy in that spare e-clip. Projectile cartridges would do her no good, later on. So we do this the hard way. Great.
Something rumbled in the distance. It wasn’t thunder. “I think the dam just broke. Don’t stop now! Fast turn to the left, on my mark! Three . . . two . . .”
“Ia, I can’t . . .”
“. . . . Mark!” she shouted.
Estes sloughed the hovervan sideways. It rocked from inertia, several of the occupants inside yelping and tightening their hold on the interior and each other. The van darted off to the side, escaping the knot of predators. Ia, however, used the original momentum of the vehicle to fling herself out, leaping straight at the back of the first of three dinoid predators. A wrenching flip drove her feetfirst instead of headfirst, allowing her to clear the hump of its spine and snap her boot heels into the base of its long, long neck.
The grampass gronked with pain, staggering. Ia tumbled and wrenched again, grabbing for the gun at the small of her back and the one at her right hip. A flick of her thumbs released the straps. A second shoved the safeties off. Landing on her feet, flinging water everywhere, she continued her cartwheeling spin and fired.
A shot to the head of the grampass whose back she had broken. A shot to the head of the one rearing over the man wielding his shotgun at the crest of the rock outcrop. A shot at the one stabbing with that long-necked head at the woman frantically rolling back and forth, trying to protect both herself and her pet. A fourth at the one lunging now for her, diverted from their original pair of prey. Shot after shot, as fast as she could fire them.
Even with two of them being used, the pistols couldn’t reload fast enough. They could only fire single shots. The man with the shotgun, doing his best to stave off the pack, screamed as a toothy head clamped onto his leg, dragging him down with a scream. Ia lofted her pistol and lashed her hand down to her waist, spinning with heavyworlder spee
d. Her knife thocked deep into the overgrown carnivore’s eye socket, but she had already completed her spin and was grabbing the falling pistol again, whirling and firing at the rest.
The grampass grunted and dropped its bleeding prey, dead. Its companions, faced by so much whirling, confusing injury and death, kerwhonked at each other and beat a hasty retreat. They splashed into the mud and dove, swimming away. Panting, Ia safetied the guns and shoved them back in place. Scraping the water from her face, she hurried to check the fallen farmer. His leg was pumping blood. Not yet fatally, but it was bad.
Light lanced through the rain, sizzling and steaming as it zapped through the water. Estes had managed to get the hovercar swung around and was firing her laser pistol through her side window at the retreating predators, further encouraging them to flee. Yanking her knife free of the dead beast, Ia stabbed through her left sleeve, ripping the fabric free. Lashing the scrap around the man’s leg at midthigh, she pulled it tight enough to make him grunt with pain. That stopped the flow of blood, but it was a temporary solution at best.
Beside her, Estes steered the hovervan to an approximation of a landing on the tilted stone outcrop. “Get everyone on board, Corporal!”
Helping hands pulled the battered, bruised woman and her pet inside. More hands helped take the man from Ia when she carried him to the open side door. Only when he was lying across the laps of the others did Ia cut off the tourniquet. She quickly grabbed the hand of one of the other colonists, forced it into a fist, and pressed it to the farmer’s inner thigh. “Sii-sek! V’tukol’eh! Put pressure here!”
The man blinked, clearly uncomfortable at his hand being so close to the other man’s groin, then nodded. He leaned, applying enough pressure to stop the arterial blood from flowing. A tourniquet cut off too much blood all over a limb, both into it and out of it, but pressure on the femoral artery would still allow blood flow and from to the rest of the leg from the other, lesser vessels.
The hovervan lurched, thrusters whining. Estes tried again, cycling the controls. She tried five times, then looked back at Ia, hazel green eyes wide with fear. “We . . . we’re too heavy! I can’t take off!”
Ia looked at the scared faces of the men, women, and children crowded into the van with them. Estes struggled with the controls, but couldn’t lift off.
“KerHONnnk!” WHAM!
The blow knocked Ia out of the opening. Estes swore as the hovervan rocked and bounced up four meters. “Dammit! Ia!”
Ia knew her weight would drag the car down. “I’m too heavy for the van! Go!”
“Ia, dammit—!”
“Get out of here, Corporal! GO!”
Cursing audibly through the open side window, Estes lurched the van into gear. A rooster tail finally started to form, allowing Estes enough momentum to angle off to the left, back toward base. Behind Ia, the rumble was getting louder.
Ia yelled and waved her arms, distracting the grampass that had returned, hoping to still snag a two-legged snack. It stared after the sluggishly moving van, sagging dangerously low on the water as Estes did her best to pick up speed, then dove for Ia. She had her weapons drawn and a pair of cartridges slammed through its muzzle before it could finish opening its toothy jaws. Dodging as the dead beast fell, Ia watched the van, anxious to make sure it picked up enough speed. Wisely, Estes had pointed it straight down the valley in a dead run.
She turned just in time to see a second grampass rising up out of the murk . . . and then gronk and slosh right past her, half galloping, half swimming for the shoreline. Ia wished she could flee with him. The churning, frothing, debris-laden wall sweeping down the valley was a terrifying sight to see.
The grampass wouldn’t make it. Ia had no choice; she had to survive. Closing her eyes was the hardest thing Ia had done since Basic. She shut them, drawing in a deep breath and letting it go. A second deep breath allowed her to drop straight into her own timestream. She would have at most a few seconds of pre-echoed future to find and follow, if she was to survive. She had trained for this, as best as her brothers and cousins and friends could help her to train . . . but this wasn’t dodging flung objects and climbing stationary obstacles.
Eyes flicking open, she ran to the left of the floodwall. A deep-kneed spring flung her up high in the colonyworld’s relatively light .92gs. The wave struck as she came back down, boots slamming into a tree trunk, only to bound her body upward again. Mind and Time linked as one, Ia moved with a fast, faltering rhythm, thrusting off of a chunk of masonry here, a roof beam there, the dead back of an herbivorous suker and even part of a bathtub. She leaped and spun, skipped and skimmed. Nothing existed but the next foothold and the next after that.
Lurching backwards across the face of the flood wave, Ia finally landed on her target: a chunk of corrugated metal, formerly part of a shed roof. A twist of her hips, a digging of her heels, and the front end lifted up out of the muck before it could complete its tumble. It was broad, and it was awkward, but it was long. Long enough to form a makeshift surfboard that could ride the front crest of that churning brown wave.
She knew seconds before something heavy slammed into the roof. Knew in time to leap high, and to press down and around with her mind, spinning the section of roof so that it landed just flat enough to accept her falling weight again. A twist of her hips, a thrust of her legs, arms spread for counterbalance, and the roof slashed sideways across the muddy, foaming waters. That forced her to squeeze her eyes tight against the murk, but she swiped at her face and opened them again on the far side of the broken crest.
Here was a moment of relative calm, in this stretch of the front wave. Relative meaning she had fewer tree chunks to dodge. Enough time to spare to flip open her wrist unit and punch the emergency transponder, activating her pickup signal. She had just enough time to grab her laser pistol and yank out the e-clip, letting her damp hand press into the contact sockets and suck out the precious juice inside.
She was cold, wet, exhausted, and in dire need of more energy for the next phase of her rescue from death. Her headset sputtered briefly with static, then cleared.
“Sir!” she heard Soyuez shouting on her headset, broadcasting on the platoon frequency. “I’m getting a signal! It’s Corporal Ia—her transponder went off! Requesting permission to deviate and search!”
“That dam water is racing down the valley, Private,” Lt. D’kora argued back. “Estes reported she had to abandon the corporal to the flood.”
“Sir, we have a light load, we can stay above the floodwaters—at least we can track where her body goes, sir!”
As much as she wanted to tell them that she was still alive, Ia didn’t have the time. She was about to lose her surfboard to—the flood, as it crashed into a series of buildings and houses. The small town had already been evacuated, long since submerged to those upper windows by the initial flooding that had diverted not only the Liu Ji as the nearest source of manpower, but Battle Platform Hum-Vee as well, following in their wake as fast as its mass could move, bringing the sentientarian supplies it carried on board.
Sprinting forward, scrambling over the rooftops before they could be crushed by the waves, she leaped from building to building until she was several seconds ahead of the incoming fury. Panting, Ia positioned herself by a plexcrete chimney and slapped her comm link on.
“Souyez, get your asteroid out here!” she shouted into her headset.
“Ia? Gods alive! You’re actually—”
She didn’t hear the rest of the lieutenant’s exclamation. The crackling crashing smashing wall of mud and debris had caught up with her. Once again, she leaped high and hard, and scrambled from wall to window, carnivore to chair, table to tree.
“. . . her transponder, sir! Speeding to her location!”
The flood reached the floating logs that had once been a paper mill farm of transplanted Terran trees. Now it was as much a matter of luck and telekinesis that kept her leaping from branch to trunk, rather than slipping and falling, perhaps impa
ling herself, perhaps simply drowning and being crushed under the flood.
“Holy shakk! She’s . . . I’ve never seen anything so . . . !”
“Get over here!” Ia yelled, activating her comm link with her mind, since her hands were too busy flinging this way and that, correcting her balance and providing extra momentum for each dodging leap. She slipped as one of the logs underneath her feet lurched upward unexpectedly, and was forced to thrust with her tired mind, “climbing” with faked steps that finally made actual contact.
“On our way!” she heard Souyez promise, and aimed for that intersection point in his space and her time. She thrust off the end of that sapling, only to leap from pole to lurching, tumbling pole. Squinting against the sting of the rain, she finally spotted the dark shape of the borrowed hovervan swooping up from her right. She could also see Estradille in his Marine Browns gesturing out the open back doors . . . but he wasn’t her goal.
There was too high a chance the recoil of her falling weight would knock both of them out of the van. Dodging left, leaping right, Ia scrambled up one of the larger chunks of tree farm debris and jumped high and hard. Her feet skidded on the very back edge of the van, catching purchase just long enough to propel the rest of her body forward. She slammed into the roof, palms slipping uselessly on the rain-slick surface, and felt something crack inside her chest. Pain stabbed through her nerves, already stretched tight by her harrowing need to survive.
Stunned, breathless, she lay sprawled on the roof, muscles hunching protectively. That made the pain even worse. Oh . . . God . . . I think I broke a rib. Aching, struggling for air, Ia twisted awkwardly onto her side. Away from the hard metal ridge housing the van’s traffic transceiver.
