by Jean Johnson
Yanking her blade back out of the dying man’s armor, she spun around and sprinted for the far side of the room with a scream, mind giddily and gleefully stabbing backwards. “FIRE IN THE HOLE!”
The explosions—series, really, but rapid-fire—flung her off her feet. At the last second, she realized Nguyen had stood up to take advantage of Siddhartha’s hasty sideways scuttle, dragging his chair into the left-hand corner. Wrenching herself midair, she brought her sword around so that it wouldn’t accidentally cut him. At a cost. She cracked arm-first into the wall instead of feetfirst and dropped with a scream, landing behind the long, oval table the others were using for shelter.
The overhead lights flickered and dimmed, as much from the thick, black smoke billowing out from the far side of the chamber as from the disruption to their power. Rubble pattered down. Panting, Ia flexed her telekinesis, straightening her broken bones with an urk of pain. A second flex melted the sword, flowing the biocrystal up under her blood-soaked sleeve, until it hardened into a makeshift cast. Now that the euphoria was fading, she knew it had been a damn fool move. Successful—very successful, since no one else in this room would be injured—but foolish.
“Ha! Die, you bastard!” Nguyen shouted, crouching back down.
“You got ’im?” Ferrar asked. At the lieutenant’s nod, the Captain sighed. “Good work, everyone . . . shakk, what a mess. At least they’re not getting in that way. Keep an eye on that other door, meioas. Anyone injured?”
A list was quickly compiled. Some minor gut-wounds—laser fire, so they were self-cauterized at least—scrapes, cuts, a couple of projectile wounds to arms and legs, a shot in the back, a gut wound, both in nonvital spots, and her broken arm. Everyone would live, provided reinforcements arrived soon. Satisfied, Ferrar shifted to sit beside Ia as she sat up, cradling her arm carefully in her lap.
“So, Sergeant . . .” he murmured.
“Acting Lieutenant,” Ia corrected. “D’kora promoted me as senior-most before Doc Keating shipped her off for treatment. Broken neck, but she’ll live.”
“Good choice. I trust you have some sort of plan to back up all of this madness?” he asked her. “Like a way for us to get out of here? You did shoot the other door in the control panel.”
With her arm stabilized in its crysium cuff, the ache was bearable. Painful, but bearable. She dipped briefly into the timestreams, checking the progress of Spyder and the rest. “Right now, sir, I’d say . . . just sit tight and wait for the reinforcements to arrive.”
“Reinforcements?” Ferrar asked.
“I allowed myself to get captured so we could track these bastards down. Right about now, Sergeant Spyder should be leading the vanguard of an invasion force into . . . aaand there he is, right on time,” she murmured, grinning as they all heard an explosion off in the distance. Specifically, one behind the nearby door. It wasn’t nearly as strong as the one that had reduced the far wall to smoldering rubble, but it was an explosion nonetheless.
“Yes, I remember him chatting with that meioa-e and walking her out the door, back at the party. I hope he gets here soon . . . but we should be safe until then,” Ferrar agreed, sighing. Ia knew he was taking her literally at her word, that Spyder and the rest were temporally on time. There was just one thing wrong with his statement, something she had to correct.
“Safe, yes . . . except for the K’katta clinging to the ceiling,” Ia stated. Ferrar wasn’t the only Marine to give her a sharp look. Lifting her left hand, she pointed up. Vin, Nguyen, and Blakely bounced back onto their feet first, aiming upward. They were followed by the others who had snatched weapons from their fallen captors.
Chittering echoed down at them. The translator box snapped the alien’s words, sophisticated enough to convey feeling as well as meaning. “How did you know, Human? You didn’t even look up!”
“You keep underestimating the Marines, meioa! It’s a simple case of xenopsychology, the kind you get in Basic Training,” she catcalled back, peering up into the shadows. “Humans rarely look up because we evolved on the plains, but the K’katta evolved in the forests, and your kind always flee for the trees!” Struggling to her feet, she stepped forward, shifting far enough that she could catch a glimpse of the shadow of a shadow that was the multilimbed, spider-like alien. “Now. I am going to give you a choice, meioa. You can be smart, come down here and surrender, and you will not be harmed. But if you are stupid, if you make me come up there after you, I will rip off your own legs and beat you to death with them!
“Choose.”
Her threat echoed off the walls. The shadow hesitated, then moved. Dangled. Dropped, flipping just enough to extend all ten legs and cushion most of the alien’s landing. The twelve-meter drop wasn’t that dangerous for him, despite the thump of his landing; like Ia, he was a native-born heavyworlder. All of his species were heavyworlders: K’katta had evolved with a dual skeleton, sturdy bone on the inside and chitin-armor on the outside, allowing them to attain two-meter leg-spans as well as brains big enough for sentience.
“How very smart of you, meioa,” Ia told him as the K’katta crimelord drew up his legs close to his body, his posture an alien version of surrender.
“Chun, Vin, go look at that cart they brought in, see if it has anything to bind the meioa with,” Ferrar ordered. “Nguyen, take Blakely and Lok’tor, and make sure all the guards are dead or bound.”
Lok’tor choked on a laugh. “You think some of ’em are still alive? After the mess our Bloody Mary made?”
“Hey, I only knocked mine unconscious,” Blakely countered, keeping her gun trained on one particular target as she picked her way around the table. “With my luck, he’s just faking it.”
“I don’t even want to look at the mess she made,” Lieutenant Konietzny muttered. He was one of the ones shot in the leg, and couldn’t stand. Someone had dragged him behind the oblong table when the retreat had been called, though the act had left a literal trail of blood leading all the way from the puddles staining the far sections of the floor. Some of it was his; most of it thankfully wasn’t.
Ia returned to the wall, sagging down it to sit on the floor. She had passed off her injury as a greenstick fracture, though it was actually a full pair of breaks. The lie was enough to get her out of having to work, though, and that was good enough for her.
“Speaking of messes, Ser . . . Acting Lieutenant,” Ferrar corrected himself, looking back at her. “Where is that sword of yours?”
“I can’t say right now, sir. I lost track of it in the explosion.”
He gave her a dubious look. She flicked her eyes ceiling-ward. Twice, when it looked like he was going to speak. Subsiding, he eyed his own blood-splattered clothes and grimaced. “Bloody Mary . . . you’ve coated even us in your crimson mess. I should make you clean it all up.”
Another explosion, this time much closer, trembled the stone wall behind them. Ia rested her head back against that wall, smiling. “Don’t be silly, sir. I’m an officer, now. Officers don’t clean up messes. They make the enlisted do that.”
Ferrar wasn’t the only one who busted up laughing. He recovered enough to give her a dirty look. “Then I’ll bust you back down to Private!” He sighed, losing most of his humor. “These shakk-tor told us they were going to torture and kill us. Thank you for riding to the rescue.”
“You’re welcome, sir. But thank the others,” she added, lifting her chin at the still-intact door off to the side. “They’re the ones fighting off the rest of the Lyebariko’s private army. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to get out of this room alive.”
Nodding, he relaxed against the wall beside her. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
CHAPTER 21
. . . Okay, fine, since you won’t let it go, I did not beat that K’katta to death with his own limbs. I just threatened him. I guess the threat was so amusing to the rest, they just kept retelling it and retelling it, until it took on a life of its own.
For the record . . . if he had forced
me to climb up after him? Yeah. I would have beaten him to death with his own limbs. You don’t mess with the Marines. Hell, you don’t mess with any Branch of the Space Force. But the moment he surrendered, he became a prisoner of war. I didn’t touch him after that point.
~Ia
APRIL 2, 2492 T.S.
The door beyond Ia’s desk hissed open. Despite her field promotion to Acting Lieutenant, she was still the Company Sergeant, and that meant filling out paperwork on the battle that had just passed. Filling it out with one hand, since her right arm was now firmly secured in a sling-supported cast while the bone-setting enzymes did their work, but working on it all the same.
“Could I have a moment of your time, Ia?” Ferrar asked her.
Nodding, she keyed the workstation to save her files. Even without the timestreams, she could guess what he needed to discuss right now. It was something that had bugged her since the fight on Beta Librae V two days ago.
They were still in the Zubeneschamali System, handling some of the cleanup details from the fight, but mainly just waiting for Battle Platform Justicar to finish reaching the system. The Liu Ji could still fly, but she was definitely battered from her trip through the natural rift, and would need several repairs before being redeployed anywhere. The Platform would have the equipment and supplies needed to get them moving again. The rest would be taken care of at the shipyards in orbit around Mars when they swung by on the back to their regular patrols on the Terran/Gatsugi border.
Entering his office, she closed the door behind her and took the same chair she had first used roughly two years before. Ferrar seated himself, shut down his workstation, and rested his elbows on his desk.
“Now. About your sword,” he stated flatly.
She settled back in her chair. She couldn’t quite fold her arms, given her cast, but she could and did hook the fingers of her left hand into her belt. “Yes, about my sword. You acted rather strangely when I tossed it at you. I was hoping you’d go and cut the last of the others free, but you didn’t, sir. Why didn’t you?”
“When I picked it up, I saw things. Flashes of things.”
Ia sat up a little at that. “. . . Things?”
He gave her a significant look. “Future things. The next few moments in time. I know . . . because you took that sword and did exactly what I saw you ended up doing. And that we needed to get behind that table for cover, when the corridor blew.”
Her jaw dropped. It took Ia a few seconds to realize it was sagging. She snapped it shut, sitting up fully. “You . . .”
“You said you lost that sword in the explosion. But I remember seeing you flying through the air with it in your hand,” Ferrar stated. “ And it wasn’t in the mess we left behind in our little makeshift foxhole. So. Where did it go?”
Mind racing, Ia pondered the implications. If he could see the future . . . why could he see it when he touched it? Crysium does have some mild precognition-projective abilities, but only in large masses back on Sanctuary. I know it’s the source of the Fire Girl Prophecies . . .
“Ia, I asked you a question,” her commander stated quietly. “I’d appreciate an answer.”
“Shhh, I’m thinking,” she murmured.
“Ia. The sword. Now,” Ferrar ordered flatly.
Sighing, she shifted and bent over, tucking her fingers up the cuff of her pant leg. When she pulled them out again and lifted her hand up into his line of view, she was holding the sword. It gleamed in her hand, sharp and transparent pink gold.
“I . . . am not going to ask where you were hiding that,” Ferrar muttered, eyeing the long, thin blade warily. “You told General Sranna it was some mineral from your homeworld. But that is no natural mineral. Which means you lied to a superior officer.”
“Technically, I didn’t lie. It is a real mineral native to my homeworld. I simply didn’t reveal all that this stuff is,” Ia replied. “As for what it is . . . you don’t need to know. I am, however, curious about your reaction to it back in the Lyebariko’s lair.”
Reversing the blade, she offered the weapon to him on her palm. Ferrar hesitated a moment before wrapping his brown fingers around the hilt. Lifting it carefully, he . . . froze again. Blinked. Stared, and carefully set it down on his desk.
“That . . . is something I am not meant to know,” he finally murmured, staring at the gleaming, crystalline schlager.
“No, sir. You’re probably not. But I would like to know what you saw.”
He looked up at her, mouth twisting wryly. “More of the near future. We have about four, five minutes before Sudramara pays me a visit. Put it away . . . wherever you were hiding it.”
Nodding, Ia tucked it back below the edge of the desk, drawing and reshaping it into an innocuous ankle-cuff.
“Anything you can share with me, Acting Lieutenant?” he asked.
“No, sir. But . . . I’ll have to figure out what this means. You shouldn’t be seeing the future like that.” Ia shrugged. “Something happened. Something involving my sword. I’ll have to give it some thought. If I can harness this . . . inadvertent precognitive ability in someone who has shown absolute zero ability before now . . .”
“That’s a dangerous-sounding power,” Ferrar warned Ia. “As much as I or any other commander would love to be able to see even a few glimpses of the future, particularly on the battlefield . . . the future is fluid. I don’t even know how you can navigate all of the possibilities with such accuracy. The rest of us would have far worse luck steering the currents. Not to mention if that power fell into the wrong hands . . .”
“Oh, trust me, I want to avoid that possibility even more than you,” Ia promised him quickly, fervently. “I’ll save experimenting with it until I get back home. Until then . . . well, sir, I lost track of my sword in the battle, and that’s the story I’m sticking to.”
“Good. That’s an order, by the way,” he added, pointing at her. “A standing order, until you hear differently from me. That way you can lie about it and still avoid that particular Fatality. The responsibility for this particular lie will rest on my shoulders . . . and I’m protected from it by the fact that a precognitive told me I couldn’t tell anyone else.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” she agreed, smiling slightly.
“Good.” Lacing his hands together, Ferrar studied her. “In the meantime, we have something else to discuss. Lieutenant D’kora will be months recovering from her injuries. That leaves me without an officer in charge of the 2nd Platoon. I have assembled the paperwork to permanently approve your Field Commission. All it requires is your authorization . . . temporal or otherwise. That . . . glimpse at the future tells me that this is a power I do not want to mess with.”
Well, at least something good came of that, if it’s convinced him not to rush ahead. Maybe I can harness that for everyone else I need to convince, Ia thought. If I can only figure out how.
“So. Do you want the field honor? And, more importantly, can you handle it?” he asked her, giving her a pointed look.
She nodded. “Sir, yes, sir. I can handle it. But I’ll want to take off for an Academy when my current duty posting is up. Actually, I’ll be required to, by military law. All field-promoted officers still have to go through Academy training at some point.”
“That’s in, what, three months?” Ferrar asked. He nodded. “Granted. By then, D’kora should be back on her feet, or if not her, the Corps will be able to assign me another junior officer to take her and your place.”
His door chimed. Thumbing a control on his desk, Ferrar opened the panel. Captain Sudramara stepped inside. He nodded politely at both Marines.
“Captain . . . Lieutenant. We just received word. Battle Platform Justicar will be in the system in less than three hours. Repairs are estimated to take three days, then we’ll be underway. The Command Staff has authorized two weeks of Leave while we’re at the Deimos dockyards,” Sudramara revealed. “You should be getting your official orders shortly.”
Ferrar nodded. He glanced
at Ia. “Are you going to finally take some extended Leave, Ia? Or are you going to continue to volunteer for yet more work?”
“My homeworld is on the backside of Terran space, sir. The far backside, by about seven hundred light-years,” she reminded him. Their one-day stops at Battle Platforms didn’t exactly count on the vacation roster, though she had stood guard duty a couple of times in the past year-plus. “The more off-Platform Leave I can accumulate, the more time I’ll have to spend on getting home . . . and actually having some time to visit before I’ll have to spend the rest of it on coming back. I’ll probably take it between the end of this duty posting and heading for an Academy. Sort of a break before beginning the next phase of my career.”
“Make sure you do come back to that Academy, Lieutenant Ia,” Sudramara stated, surprising her a little. He lifted his chin. “You stood up to me and shot me down in front of my own crew. But you were in the right, and you did it within the lines. You’ll make one hell of an officer some day. Of course, my ship is battered and barely spaceworthy, but those friends of yours behaved themselves and cracked that fortress wide open for our side.”
“Just don’t go around thinking I can pull it off a second time, sirs,” Ia warned both men. “Drek’s debt to me has been repaid, and I don’t exactly have a lot more ‘friends’ like him wandering around the galaxy at the moment.”
“I just wish I knew who leaked enough information for those bastards to set us up like that. But, with luck, we’ve bloodied the noses of these so-called crimelords hard enough, they won’t come back looking for more,” Ferrar said. “You can work guard duty on the ship while it’s undergoing repairs at Mars. There’ll be a brief stop at Earth first, however. The Command Staff wishes to recognize the acts of valor and courage so many of you displayed in riding to our rescue.”
“Just doing my job, sir,” Ia demurred. She rose from her seat. “Speaking of which, I still have a ton of paperwork to wade through. At least, until you can get a Company Sergeant to take over for me. It’s a different enemy, but it still needs to be vanquished.”
