Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship (26 page)

“I know,” she murmured, thinking of her own failures in the wake of all that Feyori meddling. He had lost two soldiers under his command. She had lost three, plus all the lives in Roghetti’s Roughriders who hadn’t made it out, either. “I
hate
that we’ve been so helpless in the hands of Fate.”

He clung harder, reacting to the intensity in her murmured words. This was his first solo command, the first time Meyun Harper had been completely in charge of any of his missions. From the gathering of intelligence to the forming of battle plans, from their initial execution through to the retreat and cleanup stages, it had been all his, and only his.

Prior to this, he had been a lead mechanic, a logistics officer, a chief engineer, a junior officer, a third-in-command, her second-in-command and first officer . . . but not
in
command. Not the one ultimately responsible for every drop of blood shed by those under him. Ia knew she had placed a huge burden on his shoulders when she had handed over the majority of the Company to him, a burden she hadn’t been able to lighten with any precognitive advice.

As she stood there, embracing and supporting him, one of the bodies crowding around Private Sunrise eyed the two of them, then moved closer. Private Nesbit, a regen patch strapped to his cheek, clasped Harper on the shoulder. Ia eased back from her first officer. Meyun straightened a little but kept his head down, not yet ready to look at the other man.

“It’s okay, sir,” Nesbit murmured, his tone gentle. He couldn’t speak with great animation thanks to the regen goop doing its best to heal the scorched line marring his face, but his tone conveyed what his expression could not. “We all knew the odds of a bad die roll were high. Hell, most of us are surprised we didn’t lose a lot more. But you planned your best, and we gave you our best. Sometimes, the dice just roll like
shakk-tor
, s’all.”

He started to say more, then just squeezed Harper’s shoulder and moved back over to await his room assignment. He wasn’t the only one to speak up. So did one of the noncoms, stepping over to join them.

“Captain Ia. The Commander did his best to give the enemy hell while getting most of us in and out alive, sir,” Sergeant Santori stated, moving up from the other side. The woman had her left arm in a sling with the telltale lump of a regen pack tucked inside. She looked at Ia as she spoke, but her words were as much for Harper’s ears as the Captain’s. “I’m giving him highest marks in my post-battle reports, sir.”

Ia dipped her head in acknowledgment, her gaze still mostly on Meyun. He drew in a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and lifted his chin. One tear had escaped while he had rested in her arms, but only one. Hardening his expression, he didn’t bother to wipe it away. He just looked at her.

That moment of grief was walled off again.
Now
he was ready to be an officer once more. Her second-in-command. She could see it in the way he looked at her, competent but ready to be relieved of command. “When do you want to debrief me, sir?”

She nodded but otherwise didn’t acknowledge his brief lapse in discipline. Harper had to deal with his grief in his own way, much as she had learned to deal with her own. “Fifteen hundred, so all the officers and noncoms can hear all the news, all at once. In the meantime, coordinate with Private Sunrise on overseeing the settling of the troops in our temporary quarters. If you need me, I’ll be in conference hall Waterfall. Dr. Mishka still has a lot of patients to tend. At this point, she can do a lot more with me as a KIman, boosting her biokinetics, than she could if we tried to commandeer a hospital. The civilians will have their hands full soon enough.”

He nodded, then touched her arm as she started to move away. “When do you want to take back full command of the Company?”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I contacted the Command Staff three days ago to file a formal charge of incompetency against Brigadier General Mattox. The rest of you are on Modified Leave, but I’m on Restricted. I cannot lead this Company effectively under those conditions. Not until they’re lifted. The Damned are safer under your control for the time being, so you get the others back under A Company, too.”

She meant safer out of the line of political fire, not enemy fire. Meyun frowned a little, then nodded in understanding. “. . . Right, then. Thank you for finding us accommodations, sir. You said Private Sunrise is the one to coordinate with?”

“I put her in charge of hotel-Company liaisons, since she’s so good at doing the clerk thing,” Ia stated dryly. Harper’s mouth twitched. As her first officer, he knew Mara’s true background and knew how much her other talents were being wasted. Ia’s quip did have the right effect, though; the touch of humor lifted him out of his grief enough that he could get his work done without feeling like an instrument string tuned too tight—still tense, but not ready to snap.

The line of trucks pulled forward, bringing the vehicle with the patients too wounded to be ambulatory under the cover of the portico. Just in time, too; the gray clouds looming over the capital of the colonyworld started dropping a light drizzle again. Ia paused long enough to catch Harper’s elbow, though.

“One more thing. I’ve taken the liberty of arranging for your family to come in for dinner tomorrow night,” she told him.

His brown eyes widened in surprise and pleasure. A smile ghosted across his face. “Ah, thank you, Captain.”

“I know you’ve been keeping in touch with them via the comms, but since you’re on Leave, and they’re less than a hundred kilometers from here, I saw no reason why the Harpers shouldn’t come into town for dinner. My treat,” she added. “You’ve earned a night off, and a bit of Leave. Loxana’s Loft, the rooftop restaurant, 1830 hours sharp. Your family will arrive by 1810, tomorrow. I’ve made all the arrangements, and I’ll be picking up the tab.”

“You’ll be there, then?” he asked her.

“Only if you’re prepared to have everything recorded and dissected by the Command Staff,” Ia reminded him, tapping her arm unit. He wrinkled his nose, thinking about it.

Restricted Leave meant she could do some civilian things, but
everything
she did had to be copied from her arm unit’s black-box memory files and passed along for analysis. Previous accusations by some officers against other officers had proved quite telling when the accuser’s private moments had been analyzed; some of those officers had apparently instigated their accusations for reasons of personal dislike, ambition, and even sabotage . . . and had forgotten their every move had been placed under watch.

Ia
was
willing to be recorded and analyzed. This was the one time in her career, post–Godstrike cannon, that she would be free to have everything analyzed by others. She wasn’t on an Ultra Classified ship doing Ultra Classified work. Of course, she wasn’t going to stop being who and what she was; she wasn’t going to change her actions. The admirals and generals assigned to investigate her half of the case would interrogate her soldiers as well as herself via the hyperrelay now tucked into a large storage closet attached to the ballroom. They would do so to look for any discrepancies between her current behavior and her prior actions in years past, but that was fine with her.

They would find none, save only the hardship that Mattox had caused her.

Harper finally shook his head. “. . . I’d rather not risk it. The moment my parents realize you’re trying to get Mattox out of command, they’ll unleash their opinions. Father’s retired Army. He does
not
like how Mattox has been running things, and I don’t want his rantings coloring your situation. Perhaps another time, Captain?”

“Perhaps,” she agreed, giving him a polite nod. Unspoken between them was the chance that his mother, perceptive as parents tended to be, might notice the chemistry between her son and his immediate superior. Even if she kept silent verbally on her suspicions, Ia didn’t need the woman’s facial expressions analyzed, and she was fairly sure Meyun realized it, too.
A pity; I would have liked meeting the rest of his kin, not just Sergeant Tae . . .

With the gurneys now off-loaded into waiting hands, the paramedics and nurses attending the seven patients unable to walk were being organized by Private Jjones and Dr. Mishka. Ia joined them. Mishka gave her a relieved look; Ia nodded in return, answering her unspoken question. Without a word, Mishka directed the soldiers carrying the gurneys toward the makeshift infirmary.

The other woman looked exhausted, shadows under her blue eyes, her blonde locks falling haphazardly out of the knot that normally skewered them to the back of her head. Her personal energies had gone toward ensuring that only two members of Ia’s Damned had died and that the rest were stable enough for transport. None of the seven would be
well
until they could get missing limbs and nonvital organs regenerated, but they would survive.

They should have been shipped to a hospital. Ia knew that as well as Mishka, and Mishka knew that Ia knew it. But the doctor had finally come to trust Ia’s judgment. Ia hadn’t commandeered a civilian hospital for her troops for a reason. Not a good one, but a reason. Without the Damned playing sabotage-style distractionary tactics in the field, the Salik would be free to resume attacks on both the Army and the civilians around the edges of the battle zone hundreds of kilometers away. All the hospitals between there and here would soon be full of patients needing far more care than her crew required, injured though many were.

That knowledge would go into the information discussed at the cadre meeting in a little while, and thus into the recordings for the investigation. Ia would have to be careful to speak calmly about those losses even though each wound, each lost limb, and each lost life, seared her nerves with such senseless, brutal, arrogance-inflicted waste. She couldn’t do anything about preventing the attacks and the injuries without violating her orders, and had to show to the Command Staff that she was still rational, still capable of being a competent leader, unswayed by anger or thoughts of vengeance.

Part of her did want to pound the brigadier general into a paste . . . but just like the luxury of going insane, it was only a feeling. An indulgence which she did not have the time for. It had to be set aside and ignored.

JUNE 24, 2498 T.S.

“No, sirs,” Ia stated, shaking her head. She flexed her knees subtly as she did so. This was her fourth hour-long interrogation session today, and her knees were not enjoying the strain. At this rate, the hyperrelay’s tank would have to be refilled soon. “Until post-battle forensics uncovers more enemy surveillance footage, I cannot corroborate anything I wrote in my mission transcripts during the hours I lacked a functioning arm unit on the tenth of June. The additional enemy footage will not be available until the Salik are kicked off Dabin, and this situation needs to be resolved long before then.”

General Amalyn Gadalah, chief justice of the Special Forces’ Judge Advocate General division—and no relation to Private Gadalah—frowned at Ia. “You claim that you ‘tapped into’ someone else’s life in order to combat the Salik. I don’t understand how that works. If you tapped into someone else’s mind, did they not tap into yours, compromising your security clearance?”

Ia shook her head. “No, sir. It is not a form of telepathy, which you may be thinking it is. Instead, it is a form of immersive postcognition, and is a passive, one-way reception only, not an active two-way—it’s the equivalent of borrowing lecture notes for a class you yourself were unable to attend. There is no way via mere notes to interact with the professor giving the lecture.”

“Lecture notes?” Lieutenant General Chun Hestin of the Psi Division asked, skeptical. There were four high-ranked officers interviewing her, not the usual three, but then the person Ia had accused was a high-ranked officer himself. Hestin sat to the left of Gadalah on Ia’s screen, Sranna to Gadalah’s immediate right, and T’Tkul perched to the far right.

“That is the simplest and shortest explanation I can give, sir,” Ia told the Psi Division officer. “Trying to explain what I do is the equivalent of attempting to describe an entire three-dimensional, three-hour-long entertainment program in a simple, single, two-dimensional line drawing. I can only say that I have always used similar versions of temporally advanced postcognitive alternate life-stream analysis to determine probability rates during the last eleven years.” Her knees hurt, and the soles of her feet hurt. “Adding in superior battlecognitive sensitivities plus combat skills and reflexes borrowed from the best Human warrior in existence is merely an extension of those same skills.”

“I thought
you
were supposed to be the best soldier the Space Force will ever have,” General Sranna stated. “Or were my earliest impressions of you all the way back when you were a mere sergeant in the Corps wrong, Ship’s Captain?”

Sranna was there to represent the Army’s interests in the investigation. From the start, the white-haired general had taken a belligerent stance during the proceedings, despite the way he had been friendlier when working with Ia in the past. She suspected he had been asked to be hostile but didn’t know for sure. As it was, she had to deal with how he acted right now, not with how he was supposed to act.

“With respect, General, over half the soldiers on the Command Staff have been, are, and will continue to be better soldiers than I will ever be. If you refer to the unnamed individual whose skills I borrowed . . . she, too, will not have been the best soldier in the Space Force’s history,” Ia stated, twisting her grammar awkwardly around the future-perspective tenses. “She will, however, have been the best
warrior
.

“With my precognitive abilities blanketed by the Feyori sabotage efforts, there was no way I could rely upon my own battlecognition, which is based upon my ability to read the Future,” she said. “So I borrowed the battlecognition of someone whose skills will be based on her ability to read the Now, and whose reflexes will be so tied into that awareness that, despite being a Sanctuarian heavyworlder with all the attendant reflexes, I myself could not achieve that level of instantaneous awareness-response without her . . . ah, without her ‘lecture notes,’ as it were. Disrupting the Salik forces so that my Company could have a badly needed day of rest in the face of their unchecked aggressions required more than my skills alone could achieve.”