An Officer’s Duty (5 page)
Authors: Jean Johnson
Wary, Ia merely asked, “What, specifically, did you see?”
“I…saw myself going to law school. It was hard—I could see myself hating you at times, but…then I saw what you were talking about. I was in a debate over some council position…and I turned some Church woman’s arguments upside down and in her face and…and I was winning, and it was a rush to win…” Fyfer shook his head. “I
never
would’ve thought I’d like politics. Politics are…
ugh
! But, this?”
Patting him on the shoulder, Ia left him to deal with whatever it was he had seen. Whatever it was, it hadn’t harmed her cause.
Turning to her other brother, she held out the bracelet. Thorne backed up, hands raised out of accepting range.
“No, no, not me; that’s not necessary,” he protested. “Honest. I remember all too well my last visit into your timestreams.”
“And normally I wouldn’t subject you to that again,” Ia promised. “But unlike Fyfer, you
know
what that’s like…and I need to know if
this
is like
that
.”
Holding it out, she waited. He shifted, clearly uncomfortable, then wrinkled his nose and held out his palm. Dropping the bracelet onto his skin, she waited. He, too, gasped and sagged to his knees. His eyes blinked, flicking this way and that, no doubt viewing the same timestream images that Fyfer had seen. Or maybe not. After several seconds, her curiosity overwhelmed her, and Ia touched his forehead as well.
What she found shocked her. He
wasn’t
seeing his brother’s life-choices. Some of them, yes, but only from his own perspective, wherever their lives crossed. Most of what he was seeing were his own possible paths. Since they would continue to live and work together, the two stepbrothers’ lives intertwined quite a lot, but the perspective was purely from Thorne’s life and its choices. Plucking the bracelet from his hand, Ia waited while he shuddered and recovered.
“Okay…” Thorne finally murmured, head nodding slightly. “
How
did you do that, Ia? You weren’t even touching me, yet you put all those images in my head!”
“That’s what I’m here to find out,” Ia confessed, shrugging. She eyed the bracelet on her hand, then set it on the grass-trampled ground. As soon as she released it, the ever-present lurking of the timestreams in the back of her mind diminished just a little bit. Barely enough for her to notice, but it was just enough to detect. Picking it up again, she could hear the faint, psychic “hum” of the crysium, and could once again feel the timestreams crowding a little closer than usual.
Whatever she had done to the bracelet had changed it. This wasn’t a brief look into the immediate future by a few minutes, or a few hours. This was a look into the future by months, even years.
The strange, semi-alive biocrystal already defied logic. It was literally the discarded matter of the Feyori. The only known
sentient race to have evolved as beings of energy instead of matter, they were the only race in the known galaxy who could manage to convert energy to matter and back at the squared speed of light.
They did so by traveling faster than the fastest spaceship, whether it traveled through normal space by greasing the laws of physics through faster-than-light panels, or by siphoning itself through a hyperrift via other-than-light travel. Because the transformation from one form to the other was never 100 percent complete, it was the Feyori who had introduced psychic abilities—using energy to manipulate matter, rather than the other way around—into the sentient races they had secretly bred with over the millennia.
The converse was also true. When they shifted back to energy-based bodies, the Feyori took a little bit of matter across with them. The easiest way to shed it and “purify” themselves was to find a world with a high enough gravity to pull it out of their bodies. By preference, they preferred high-energy worlds where they could “snack” at the same time. Sanctuary, with its churning core of both molten iron and gold, had a natural electrosphere as well as a natural magnetosphere. Lighting was nothing more than candied popcorn to the Feyori, making it a favorite dumping ground.
That dumped matter, discarded in the form of dust, combined itself with rainwater and the constantly generated energies from the storms plaguing Sanctuary every day. Seeded on bare rocks like the ones scattered through this field, the solution crystallized into sprays, with growth dependent upon just how much energy each shaft received. It was too tough to be cut, too difficult to break in all but the thinnest of shafts, and too bizarre for anyone to figure out how to use…unless they knew the secrets of both its origins and its strength, as Ia did.
But what to do with it? How to do it?
“Ia?” Thorne finally asked, catching her attention. She looked down at him. He shrugged. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure, but…I
think
this is the solution to my not being able to be in two, or three, or five hundred different places at once. Follow me,” she ordered, tucking the bracelet into one of the pockets on her brown military pants.
Without looking back, she headed into the middle of the
field, looking for an easily overlooked spray. Selecting one, she touched the shaft. This time, the humming resonance was louder in her mind; this was a full-sized shaft on a spray twice as tall as her body. She only needed some of it, however.
Concentrating on the flow of energies, she siphoned off just enough to pull away a chunk barely the size of her head, then carefully reshaped the end of the shaft so that it looked whole and untouched. Only someone who intimately knew each and every shaft would be able to tell this one was now shorter. Settling on the ground, Ia prepped the lump she had separated. Carefully dividing it into eight fist-sized chunks, she shaped them into balls with a thought, then looked up.
Fyfer and Thorne had followed her, thankfully. She held out a sphere to each of them. Both hesitated. At the arch of her brow, each of her half brothers settled on the ground across from her and took a clear pink sphere.
Tense, they waited for the future to once again drag them under.
All throughout my early career, I knew that there would be more than one war we’d have to fight. Everyone could see the Salik were going to work free of the Blockade, sooner or later. That one was a given. That it had worked as well as it had for roughly two hundred years was a small miracle—not to say it worked perfectly, but it did work well up to a point. However, there was another war brewing, one back home.
Fanaticism is dangerous—oh, laugh if you must, given my reputation and all, but it is dangerous. Fanaticism paired with a power trip is what really
shakks
the universe…uh, can I say that? You’ll edit it out if needed? Good…Part of the problem with fanaticism, you see, is that people tend to get so blinded by their zeal that they lose their way. Often quite badly, to the point where they pave that path not only straight to hell but via the scenic route of violence and destruction, becoming just another variation of what they usually claim they oppose.
In my case…I can’t lose my way. It’s shoved in my face every single day. Whether I’m awake or dreaming, it doesn’t matter. I have to double-check every single centimeter of the path I’m taking, over and over and over. One tiny deviation left uncorrected could throw off a hundred years’ worth of preparations.
So yes, I knew there was a civil war brewing back home. I knew every trick the other side would try to use. And somehow, I had to find a way to counter that, so that there would be some hope of my people surviving long enough to escape the coming destruction. My biggest problem, however, was convincing people what to do when I wasn’t even there…and contrary to popular belief, I
am
mortal, and will not live forever. Certainly not for the full three hundred years my messages need to survive.
~Ia
After several silent seconds, Thorne shook his head slowly. “Nothing is happening.”
“Yeah,” Fyfer agreed, frowning. “Aren’t we supposed to be seeing the future again, or something?”
Ia shook her head. “That’s not what raw crysium does, though I’m glad to see it confirmed. No, it was during the battle to free my superiors and fellow sergeants that something strange happened to my sword.”
“The crystal one we shipped to you?” Fyfer asked.
She nodded and patted the lump hiding in her thigh pocket. “The one and the same as the bracelet-thing you just held. I kind of had to reshape and hide it after…Well, what happened was, I kind of lost my grip on it, dropping it, and one of the Lyebariko guards got ahold of it just as I grabbed the blade.”
Both men hissed. Fyfer wrinkled his nose. “How long did it take for the Marines to reattach your fingers?”
“He didn’t actually cut them off,” Ia corrected, flexing her fingers absently. “Luckily, I had managed a pressure-grip on the sides to stop him from slicing completely through, and I reshaped it so that
I
had the hilt. But…I think some of my blood was incorporated into the crystal when I reshaped it. So. We are going to test this theory.”
Picking up one of the clear crystals from the ground, she reshaped it with just a few thoughts into a short, sharp blade. Fyfer’s eyes widened, while Thorne’s narrowed.
“You’re going to cut yourself again, only this time deliberately?” her older brother asked.
“More to the point, I’m going to ask
you
to cut yourselves. Hand me the spheres,” Ia ordered.
“Are you out of your mind?” Fyfer protested.
Ia leaned over and plucked the spheres from her brothers’ hands. “I need control samples.” Softening and prodding each one with her fingertip, forming a small divot, she handed Thorne his sphere and the blade. “Just a few drops, that’s all I need.”
He gave her a dark look, but accepted blade and ball. “You’re asking a lot.”
“I know.” A beeping interrupted her before she could say more. All three of them jumped. Fyfer’s wrist unit beeped again. Feeling foolish since she’d forgotten about it already, Ia lifted her chin, giving her brother permission to answer the call.
Knife in hand, Thorne addressed her under his breath while their brother flipped up the battered grey screen and greeted his caller. “Are you going to heal this when I’m done?”
“Of course,” she snorted. “For one, you know where I’m currently sleeping. For another, you’d probably sic both our mothers on me.”
“Nice to know you didn’t lose
all
of your wits when you joined the military,” he quipped back, carefully cutting into the edge of his palm. Ia shifted forward again, rocking onto her knees to help catch the trickle of crimson seeping from the wound in the crystal. Pinching the crysium shut over the sample of blood, Ia concentrated, molding the crystal with her gifts until it was a homogenous shade of translucent pink.
Covering the cut with her free hand, she closed her eyes and concentrated on her brother’s body. It wasn’t easy to heal others, particularly as it was a matter of “convincing” his body to speed up the natural healing process, but her brother was familiar, despite the last two years of separation. That, and his body responded well to psychic stimulation, given how they shared a father. It didn’t take long for her to pull her hand away, showing a sealed cut instead of a seeping one.
Fyfer ended his call, snapping shut the viewscreen of his cheap plexi wrist unit. “Okay, so they know I’ll be there tonight, and that I have some unspecified news to share.” Sighing, he raked his free hand through his dark, shoulder-length curls. “But honestly, Ia, a lawyer? Me? Why not him?” he asked, gesturing
at Thorne. “I could’ve been a spaceport organizer, you know. I
am
quite brilliant.”
Both Ia and Thorne quirked their brows skeptically at that. Fyfer flushed and grumbled under his breath. Shaking her head, Ia corrected him. “Both of you are brilliant, but in different ways. Thorne is better at organizing things, keeping track of business details, handling the accounting and the economizing. You are better at public speaking, rousing enthusiasm, and keeping track of people-based details. There are reasons for every choice I am asking you to make…and reasons for you to accept and embrace them. Now cut yourself.”
Thorne cuffed her, making her yelp and rub her bicep. “Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ You’re not in the military right now, you know.”
“Or rather,
we’re
not,” Fyfer amended, accepting the blade from his brother. He wiped it on the grass, then on his dark blue trousers, then carefully cut his hand in more or less the same spot as his brother had his. “If you’re right about me knowing how to handle people, then here’s some advice. Nectar catches sticker-bugs faster than vinegar or water.”
“
Please
cut yourself and donate a few drops of blood to my experiment, Brother.” Ia helped him collect the blood, then molded it into his sample sphere, too. “Thank you.”
“Aren’t you going to heal him?” Thorne prompted her.
Ia nodded, setting down the second sphere. Covering Fyfer’s hand, she focused her kinetic inergy into the wound, that peculiar not-electromagnetic energy all psychics could tap. When she pulled her hand away, his cut was clotted, though not quite as healed as Thorne’s now looked.
