Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation, page 26
Baltrush nodded, listening to her as the hyperrelay lag caught up to him. “General, yes, sir. I’ll get my meioas on it right away. Though given we’re all supposed to be parked in orbits, watching for stray Salik ships trying to breach the Quarantine, nobody’s supposed to be expending a lot of fuel right now.”
“There will be some fighting in a week or two, but there are a couple of carriers already en route to help you guard those tanks from sabotage,” she told him. “Thank you for your cooperation, Commodore. I know it’ll be a tight schedule to get it all done in time.”
“My pleasure, General. I was told the Quarantine would get rid of the frogtopi,” Baltrush added, tipping his head. “If this helps, I’m all for it.”
“Personally, I’m sorry they have to go away. They created a lot of wonderful things,” Ia told him. “But their whole mind-set as a species won’t change. They won’t stop trying to fight and eat the rest of us . . . and I am not going to put up with another shakk-torr Blockade. Anyway, good luck. Ia out.” She glanced over at Rico while Al-Aboudwa worked on calling up the next contact on the list. “To answer your question, Rico, by goading him, he’ll do what I want, when I want.
“Even when he double-checks his actions versus his knowledge that I know what he’ll be doing . . . the Salik will still be doing what I want them to do, which is what I have planned for them to do. So long as everyone else involved follows the checklist logic-trees I made, every single scrap of the plague will be accounted for,” she finished.
“We’re cleared for departure, General,” Yeoman First Class Ishiomi warned her. “Departing Confucius Station far orbit . . . now, sir. Transiting to clearspace above the system plane.”
The stars on the viewscreens started shifting as the Damnation turned away from the last major mining hub on the back side of Terran space. Al-Aboudwa spoke up. “Still trying to raise the MRV Mary Jane in the Rain, sir,” he said. “Confucius is pinging us; they want to know if the Greys are coming back once you leave.”
“Tell them yes, but not for several more weeks. They’ll have better protection at that time. You have two more minutes to raise the Mary Jane,” she told the comm tech. “If you can’t, then fire off the automated message, and we’ll try again after we’ve strung our four OTL jumps.”
“My sickbag’s on standby, sir,” Al-Aboudwa promised her. “It’s a good thing there’s a shift change coming up soon.”
JUNE 28, 2499 T.S.
V’DARSHET, V’DAN SYSTEM
“But you haven’t slept in four days, and only then for five hours when you last did, Ia,” Jesselle argued with her commanding officer. “And not for the three days before that. I don’t care if you’re half-Meddler; that’s not healthy for a Human.”
Ia didn’t break stride. “So long as Harper keeps shooting me with the psi-guns we made, I can keep going for another eight days if need be, Commander.”
“Will you need to?” the blonde challenged her. Taller, if more slender, she moved to block Ia’s path, arms folding across her chest.
“For the next seven of them, yes. I promise to get two hours of sleep later today.”
“In one of my infirmary beds,” the doctor asserted. “So I can monitor you.”
“No.” Ia pointed at her. “You only want me in your infirmary so you can hit me with a hypospray of some sort of sleeping serum. I don’t have time for that, and you would be hauled up on charges of Grand High Treason for allowing that many people to be infected and die.”
A voice on the hall comm interrupted them, as the ship’s interior sensors located their target. “Yeoman O’Keefe to the General. We are fully fueled and cleared for departure.”
Ia tapped her arm unit. “Acknowledged, Yeoman. Depart when ready.” She released the button and stepped around the doctor. “As soon as I’m done giving my next message, I’ll go down to Engineering, get shot again, and be fine.”
Opening the door to her office, she nodded to the quartet of clerks on duty. There was now so much paperwork coming through the front office that it required all the workstations to be manned. Retreating to her office—Doctor Mishka still following her—she didn’t bother retreating all the way to her cabin, where the currently Human-shaped Feyori, Belini, was still lounging in Ia’s bed, indulging in the “quaint downtime of sleep.” It wasn’t as if there was anywhere else on board the ship to stick the Meddler.
Instead, she stripped out of her sweat-stained T-shirt, used it to wipe her face dry, and opened the drawer where she had stuffed a change of outer clothes, namely a set of Dress Blacks. Moving swiftly, she changed into the shirt and coat, leaving the pants in the drawer for the moment. “How do I look?” she asked as she buttoned up the gray shirt to the collar, then adjusted the lapels on the jacket. “Presentable?”
Jesselle tugged a couple of the medals into better alignment, then grimaced and raked her fingers through Ia’s hair. “You’ll do. You’re picking up shadows under your eyes again . . . and you don’t look twenty-seven. You look closer to forty-two.”
“Private Teevie to the General, twenty seconds to airtime.”
“I’ll live.” Ia sat at her desk, adjusting her knee-length coat one more time. She activated the main workscreen, and thumbed the comm. “Acknowledge, Teevie, thank you.”
“You’re going to kill yourself at this rate,” Mishka warned her.
Ia flicked her an annoyed, determined look. “I will not die before my work is done, Commander. I’ll drop up to ten million lives if I have to, at this point. But I am trying not to. That’s the whole point of this.”
“Right.” Jesselle started to say more, but the older woman clamped her mouth shut as the workscreen flashed, showing the TUPSF map-within-a-laurel-wreath logo.
“This is General Ia of the Alliance Armies, and Prophet of a Thousand Years. I apologize for interrupting all broadcast channels, but this warning is necessary. You are all about to receive a series of messages from the Salik Empire,” Ia stated without much preamble. “They will tell you that they have identified the few patients who have suffered from the plague infecting their world, and that those patients have one and all recovered. They will try to convince you that this Quarantine Extreme which I have imposed across the entire Alliance is not necessary. They will try to claim I am exaggerating the threat of the plague in order to damage the health of each nation’s economy, due to the closure of all travel, trade, and atmospheric interactions.
“Please do not be fooled by these claims. The handful of survivors they have identified are just that. They are the only ones who can survive this plague . . . but as they are now permanent carriers of it, they must not be permitted to leave their colonyworlds alive. The last of the Salik will be dead within one month. Make no mistake, citizens of the Alliance: The Salik created this plague two hundred years ago. Only by the grace of pure luck did they not wipe out all sentient life back during the First Salik War.
“I have been unable to see the Salik ever ending their hunger for our flesh, no matter which way I try to include them alive in our future,” Ia continued, wrinkling her nose briefly. “So I have chosen to allow them to rediscover this lost plague of theirs and spread it among themselves. What they would have unleashed upon all others has merely been returned to them unchecked. By the end of July, the Salik will devour nothing and no one. They will not wage another war. They will merely be a sad footnote in our histories.
“But they are not dead yet, and they are still quite cunning. Do not believe them, and do not be fooled. I would like to get out of this without having to destroy any of our own colonies, just to contain the plague and prevent its further spread.” She hardened her tone, staring into the pickups that would broadcast and rebroadcast her message everywhere in the known galaxy. “If it does, the infected ship, station, dome, or colony will be destroyed, even if I have to do it myself. Please continue to cooperate with the Quarantine Extreme, so that it will not become necessary.
“I know several of you think this is a joke. I wish it were, but it is not,” she continued soberly. “The reason for this Quarantine Extreme is so that it will be very obvious when the Salik start trying to contaminate our worlds in earnest . . . which they will start doing shortly.
“Just be patient, meioas, trust in me to make sure the plague is stopped, continue to follow my commands, ignore the lies of the Salik, and avoid anything they try to send your way. For those of you who will need to send out or receive needed supplies, individual orders will be sent shortly before that point authorizing exactly how to go about it without risk of contamination. Other than that . . . try to have a good day and ignore the Salik. I’ll let everyone in the Alliance know when the danger has finally passed. General Ia out.”
Tapping the comm control on her workstation, she held her square-shouldered, confident pose for a moment more while the link shut down. Once it was closed, she untied her boots and pulled the slacks out of the drawer, exchanging her mottled gray workout pants for higher-quality black ones with four narrow stripes down each side.
“Right, I have twenty-three minutes to thumbprint sign all the paperwork in Grizzle’s ‘Requires Formal Authorization’ pile,” she muttered. “Then it’s down to Engineering to get an energy shot, then back up to the aft-galley lunch . . . breakfast? Food,” Ia dismissed, relacing her boots. “Food with the 2nd Platoon while I discuss repair priorities coming up with Harper and listen to him telling me I’m not getting enough sleep. Then we join the Dlmvla 3.723 light-months from the V’Dan colony of Pa-Ren to destroy an attempted Salik stockpiling point, and I spend half of that battle chatting with would-be Quarantine breakers, trying to convince them not to kill off their own side out of greed or whatever.
“The same as I spent most of my workout just now, speaking on the comm with sentients across the known galaxy—if you really want to do something to help, Jesselle?” Ia added, standing so she could tuck in her shirt and fasten her trousers. “Get me something to drink to keep me from going hoarse with all this talking I’ve been doing. I can feel my throat getting a little sore, in spite of my biokinetics.”
Jesselle sighed. “You are going to kill yourself at this pace, you know . . .”
“Not today, and not anytime soon,” Ia said, heading for the door. “I have far too much work to do.”
CHAPTER 7
That is the question, isn’t it? Am I a mass murderer?
I know what my head says. Every time I use my precognitive abilities, I am forced to remember that I am a soldier and an officer. That I am trying to do my damnedest to save the most lives and waste the least resources in doing so. If there were another way that could save as many lives, I’d take it in a heartbeat. But as a soldier and an officer, I have an objective—the saving of as many Alliance lives as possible, and the lives of civilizations we haven’t met, and won’t meet for hundreds of years—and I have to follow through on that, even if it means having to kill. The objective is too important for the good of all.
Am I a murderer? My head solidly says, “No,” and it points to all the reference matter for the legality, morality, and ethics of everything I’ve been trying to accomplish. No, no, and no.
I am not a murderer; I am a soldier.
~Ia
JULY 14, 2499 T.S.
SELDUN IV
ISC 197 SYSTEM
There wasn’t much left of the original domes, but the Salik had dug in, establishing a base for a little while. Bombardment had broken up most of that, leaving the rock surface pockmarked with craters visible on high resolution. But Ia wasn’t here just to destroy the deeply buried colony of only two thousand or so Salik. While that makeshift settlement was not yet infected, buried deep as it was in the bedrock-dug caverns that were required for emergency retreats beneath all domes by Alliance-wide law, their leaders back on Sallha had decided that “revenge seeding” was in order.
They had sent a ship with launch drones to drop canisters on the surface, Tlassian-style pressure-sealed barrels marked in Tlassian and Trade Tongue as relief supplies, rare ores—anything the Salik thought would entice a salvage team in the future into bringing the canister into an atmosphere and open it up. The refugees would have to be burned out with the main cannon, but Spyder had taken a team down to an abandoned ore-mining base to use the few intact drones to find and collect the canisters into a single location easily destroyed by hydrobomb.
They had been here for seven hours now, and while Ia continued to make and field calls across the known galaxy, the rest of her crew had been given a mini-Wake, taking three hours in rotation for each duty shift—minus Spyder’s group—to party and relax.
“Eyah, Ia,” Spyder’s voice came over the comm. “We’re jes’ ’bout ready fer yer lil’ light-’n-fire show. ETA four minnits.”
“The bomb’s already been launched,” Ia relayed.
Helstead, lounging with her feet on the pilot’s console, since they were parked in a stable orbit, joined the conversation. “Navicomp says we’ll see the light show from here, too. That’s a quadruple-load tank on that hydrobomb.”
“Eh . . . I’m feelin’ paranoid, down ’ere. Ready-check that we got ’em all, eh?” he asked.
Nodding—he couldn’t see her, since the mining base didn’t have functioning vid at the moment—she dipped her mind into the timestreams . . . just in time to see a probability levee collapse along the channels she had painstakingly dug. On a world that should have remained safe. A reddish world, close to many others. A world with an atmosphere, even if everyone on it lived in domes.
“No . . . no no no no— MARS!” (BELINI!) Ia shouted, panic boosting her broadcast.
Helstead flinched, clapping her hands to her head. “Muckin’ shakk, sir!”
The air popped next to Ia’s command station. Clad in a skimpy, leaf-patterned dress that made her look even more like a faerie creature, a margarita glass in her hand, Belini scowled at Ia. “Excuse me, but I was in the middle of chatting up—”
(Shut up!) Ia snapped. Reaching up, she snagged the other woman’s wrist, ignoring the flavored, alcohol-laced ice that splashed onto her sleeve in favor of pushing the exact problem and its coordinates on the Meddler. (We’re about to lose Mars! Grab that hydrobomb and go!)
“Shakk.” Eyes wide, Belini slapped the console with her other hand to grab enough electrical energy and accepted the kinetic inergy Ia shoved into her. In two seconds flat, she glowed and popped into a silvery soap bubble, then vanished from the bridge.
Ia didn’t care that the margarita glass dropped and cracked, its contents splattering on the deck; it could be cleaned up later. Mars had to be cleaned up now. She closed her eyes and reached out through the timeplains to the trio of Feyori in the Sol System nearest the red planet. That wouldn’t be enough to protect the nearest dome from the force of a bomb that strong, so she shifted the streams into a tangled skein of Feyori-style anchor points, and tugged on fifteen more, all of whom had anchors near enough to help.
Not to pull them to Seldun IV but to push them to Mars. Only because they were already in their energy forms could she make this work. The moment they arrived, disoriented, Ia swept their minds into a single group and relayed their instructions, then let them go. One and all, the eighteen spheres raced down into the atmosphere.
“Sir, what’s happening on Mars?” Helstead snapped.
“Everything within fifty klicks of Red Castle 53 is—” Ia started to explain.
“I’m on it!” Mysuri called out from the comm station. “Routing . . . routing . . . ping! Red Castle Region, emergency override, Martial Law authorization India Alpha. Evacuate, Evacuate! Everyone within fifty kilometers of Dome 53, Evacuate, Evacuate! This is not a drill! I repeat, Martial Law authorization India Alpha, subauthorization Sierra Mike. Evacuate, Evacuate! This is not a drill!”
Caught off guard, Ia checked the timestreams . . . and clasped her hands over her mouth, stifling a sob of relief. Sixteen of the nineteen Feyori were spreading themselves thin over the curve of Dome 53 that faced the epicenter; it was too late to grab the artificial prions themselves, because they had already made it to the atmosphere and were using the thin light of the system’s sun to start breaking down and reassembling the local molecules. The winds weren’t storm strong, but they were carrying those dangerous molecules along too fast and too chaotically for Ia to pinpoint exactly which bits of air to nab by the energy-based species.
They were dangerously near an atmospheric processor as it was, a processor that had far too many of the right materials for prion-replication. It would be a race to see if Belini or the prions got there first. It would also be a race to see if the other two Meddlers managed to get the two dozen technicians manning the processor to safety. At least seven of them had to survive, or Ia’s plans would start collapsing as the floodwaters broke through the channels she had carefully laid farther downstream.
“Satellite, satellite . . . got it!” Private Mysuri added, popping several screens around the bridge into showing a three-second-delayed view of the Red Castle region.
It was just a geosynchronous, somewhat static view of a span of Mars’ surface from close orbit, maybe only two, three hundred kilometers wide. Nothing happened . . . and nothing happened . . . and nothing . . . A sharp, double-pulsed light flashed halfway to the upper right corner of their view. Seconds later, a dark bright pimple grew on the surface of Mars.
“Did we get it, sir?” Mysuri asked.
Dipping into the timestreams, Ia checked. The domes were cracked from the force of the explosion . . . but they were holding, including the one closest to the blast, the one sheltered by the Meddlers she had sent. There were now eighteen very overfull Feyori, and twenty-one shook-up atmospheric miners who had found themselves abruptly teleported to an emergency bunker twenty kilometers away. The remaining three . . . didn’t make it. There hadn’t been time. But they weren’t absolutely necessary to the timestreams, and the timestreams could be repaired from the damage this shake-up had caused. Pulling out, she nodded, lowering her fingers from her mouth.
