Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (22 page)

There were people in the halls, gathered as requested along all the terraces and leaning over all the balconies. Thousands of people, young and old, dark and fair, the agnostics and the atheists rubbing elbows readily and acceptingly with those who had actual faiths they followed. It was very unlike the culture the Church of the One True God wanted, and she felt a tiny bubble of pride swelling within her.

Ia
knew
these men and women, these children and elders. She knew every face, every name, every life. They parted in a path before her and kept a respectful distance of a couple meters on each side. In a crowd this large, there should have been three or five or nine
irit’zi
, the wailing cry of someone suffering from a Fire Girl Prophecy . . . but their secret source, the crystalline sprays dotting the cavern like decorative glass evergreens, were silent.

A part of her mind wondered if they—unsentient but still very much alive, however Frankensteinian from a Feyori’s perspective—were silent out of respect for what their progeny was about to do. As much as Ia was the child of a Feyori named Albelar and a Human woman named Amelia, she was a child of Sanctuary. A child of the crystals.

The outward-projecting curve of the terrace her mothers lived on had been fitted with a platform, a clear-plexi podium, and a single thin wire that served as a comm pickup. Hovercams floated and swerved in quiet
thrums
several meters away, angling for the best views to record her final farewell. Two sets of energy conduits had been brought in and snaked up the sides of the lectern, ready for her to draw upon at the end.

Thorne was already there, as was Fyfer; her half twin cradled his stepniece in his arms as he stood at his stepbrother’s side. Their coleader and lover, Rabbit, was elsewhere right now, monitoring the surveillance recordings of the rising tensions in the Church leadership. The surface-side government did
not
like all the Feyori dashing down to the far side of the planet, pausing for the inexplicable harvesting of Devil’s Stick sprays, and swerving back up again into orbit. They definitely did not like those silvery Meddler-spheres disappearing into the long, lean, menacing needle of a Terran warship hugging Sanctuary’s atmosphere, parked geosynchronously over their precious, cathedral-graced capital.

But those things were no longer her concern. Rabbit would continue to plot and plan, thwarting the Church’s attempts at discerning the exact location and highest-ranked members of the rebel government, while keeping tabs on the Church forces. Thorne would continue to calculate the needs and direct the functionality of their new lives underneath the troubled surface of their world. And Fyfer would be the face of the government, designing and discussing ways to keep the faith these colonists, these future Zenobians, would need to hold close in their heart. One day, the descendants of these people would raise the Third Human Empire as a force to be reckoned with, creating a someday home for a broken woman who desperately needed a kind of healing she would not at the time understand.

Stepping up onto the podium platform, Ia licked her lips, breathed deep, and kept her final words confined to the truth.

“I know you,” she said. Her voice, amplified just loud enough that everyone quickly fell silent, echoed slightly across the cavern. “I know each and every one of you. I know your children, and your children’s children, and
their
children down through the generations. Down through the centuries. Down through to the moment when
you
will make—not break—the Savior of our galaxy.

“You follow me on faith, and I thank you for it. You follow me even knowing I must leave and never return, and I thank you with deep gratitude,” she said, drifting her gaze from face to face, even the ones clinging to the balconies a hundred, two hundred, five hundred meters away. Without her ceristeel armor and her silvered helm, her collar-length bob of old-woman white could be easily seen against the browns of the granite behind her, and the mottled shades of her camouflage Grays. “You follow me where I tell you to go, when I tell you, and how I tell you to go about it . . . and I thank you beyond all words for your strength, and your belief.

“I
am
going to save our galaxy with your help,” she told them candidly, nodding slightly in affirmation. “Know that it
is
by your help, for I have been, and will be, beside you every step of the way. Silent and unseen for the most part . . . but for some of you, I will reach across the void of Time itself to help guide you.

“And if you do
not
hear from me,” Ia added, warmth in her tone and a wry curve tilting her lips, “then take that as my sign of my absolute faith in
you
. The faith you will do what you need to do, when you need to do it, as it needs to be done. It will take centuries of constant effort, but there will be plenty of joys mixed in with the tedium and the pain. I thank you for knowing that, as in everything, your effort is part and parcel of what makes the end result so worthwhile.”

Unclasping her hands, she reached out to either side and slipped thin wires from her split-in-half crystal bracer into the recessed holes of the power cables’ sockets. Her right hand still hurt, but she ignored it, choosing instead to address her neighbors, her friends, her followers.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Ia stated. “Not like the Church wants you to believe, that it’s for some Divine Creator’s unclear and capricious-minded purpose. We are more than game pieces to be pushed around a playing board. We are more than just the cards held in our Creator’s hand. But rather, because it is mostly, simply, the way that this universe works . . . and it is the culminated, interacting, interconnected efforts of
everyone
on this world, beneath and above its surface.

“The interactions of the people on all the other worlds out there will have their impact as well, though none of your great-grandchildren’s children will get to see them before Sanctuary opens up to the rest of the Alliance again.” She paused, watching the silent, sober people gathered around her. Watching their bodies and the power cables and even the plants lining the terraces as they started to glow, Ia dipped her head. “I know that’s not the most
cheerful
of messages I can give you . . . but I swear to you, the end result will be worth everything . . . and the galaxy will know the part you have played in saving more lives than even I can take the time to know.

“You have my Prophetic Stamp on that. In the meantime . . . prepare this world for its long, slow civil war, and prepare among yourselves the home that our Savior . . . secular, stubborn, and cynical . . . will so desperately need. Thank you.”

One last electrokinetic pull, and she popped into Feyori form. A metaphysical sip for a little extra boost, and she flung herself straight up, slipping through solid bedrock for a long, dark, ham-flavored span of thermally warmed rock, a flutter of cheese layers from the power conduits in a home directly overhead, and a wash of cool, tart apple juice from the slowly gathering thunderheads that bespoke the approach of yet another evening lightning storm.

One last taste of the ozone in the air, and only a taste of its chemical energy, from a body that could not smell because it could not at the moment breathe.

Ice-cold of the void invaded her energy-based senses, sapping her reserves. Highly charged particles zipped through her darkened mirror-skin, tasting like the fizzle in a carbonated drink. A shock of energy and flavor, savory and sweet, as she dove into the skin of her ship. At the last moment, she noticed the
Nadezhda Popova
slowly gliding into position a few kilometers away, nudging up close to Sanctuary’s gaseous skin. Lightning jets and sprites danced up along both hulls, rife with electromagnetic power, but they were more than adequately shielded against such jolts.

Satisfied both ships were in position, she zipped to her quarters, plugged herself into the power grid in the corner of her sitting room, and popped back onto legs that trembled and staggered in the abruptly-too-light 2.3Gs of her ship. No time to rest, though. Ignoring the fact that her hand was still cut, still raw and sore despite shifting shape, Ia headed out of her sitting room physically. Psychically, she reached into the timestreams to gauge all the crystal-wrapped machines her soap bubble soldiers had made.

On schedule, and . . . every last one in perfect form. Good.
Reaching out, she tapped the mind of the first Feyori she had ever spoken with as she passed through her office. Sadneczek was on duty, but the grizzled sergeant didn’t look up from his task. Paperwork had to be filed on the coming breach of contract by the main Sanctuarian government against the Terran Space Force, a lot of it, and he was doing his best to fill out the many, many forms in advance. (
Doctor Silverstone, please pass along to the others my thanks for their timely and properly made constructs.
)

(
I will . . . though I am wondering what I did to get on your “shit list,” as the archaic saying goes,
) the alien returned.

(
You’re on it with the others because I trust each of you to get it done right, which you have. You’re also on it because you are reliable witnesses to my threatening the Greys to toe the line,
) she added, passing through the short back corridor separating her office from the bridge, its two heads, and its pocket galley. (
They do know how to capture and kill your kind. This is my show of my faction-protection being extended to all of
you
.
)

(
Perhaps. But I feel like I am being reduced to a Terran monkey, flinging my own filth at my foes.
)

Her mouth curved in lopsided, morbid humor. (
Maybe they’ll catch a disease?
) Pulling her mind back, she hooked her fingers in the door controls and stepped onto the bridge, announcing herself. “General on Deck!”

The men and women of the 1st Platoon sat up straighter in their seats, clothing rustling faintly against restraint harnesses, but did not look up from their monitoring tasks. When they had arrived in her home system, it had been second watch; twenty hours later, the duty shifts had cycled around to first watch. Tired as she was, Ia was used to staying up for long stretches of time by now. Doing so had ensured she spent plenty of time getting to know each Platoon’s bridge crews.

At the moment, what she wanted was Private Ramasa, nicknamed the Frog Prince for his generous-sized mouth, slightly bulging eyes, and absurd sense of humor. That mouth was fixed in a straight line at the moment, not a smile. “Ramasa, report.”

“The scatter-bombs were launched promptly on time, seventeen minutes ago,” he said, calling up a set of timers on his fourth tertiary screen. “The loading teams in the bow have been rolling the spheres into position for launch, and . . .” he checked his tertiary fifth, “. . . the last of them are in position now, sir. We can fire when ready, but it would help if we either rolled the ship or lifted orbit a little, to avoid an accidental sprite jet getting into the bay.”

Ia settled herself in the empty command seat, pulling the straps into place. “Yeoman, roll the ship, coordinate the launch of the orbs, and release them when ready.”

“Aye, sir,” Ishiomi said. He cleared his throat. “We had an orbital query from the
Popova
a minute before you boarded, sir. They wanted to know if they should go geosynchronous, too. I told them yes, as the Lieutenant is still down in the foremost hold overseeing the special project.”

“You made a good choice, Yeoman,” Ia praised him. It was something she hadn’t considered herself, a little detail that had slipped between the cracks. A looping orbit wouldn’t have changed much either way, other than made it less clear that the Church was firing upon the TUPSF in general and not just on a ship led by one of their former citizens. “I think you just saved our Company clerk about two dozen pieces of paperwork.”

“Thank you, sir.” He smiled, turning his head slightly to aim it over his shoulder before returning his attention to the boards. “Rolling the ship in five . . . four . . .”

They rotated and stopped, altering the view of the planet from filling the lower half of their exterior-shot screens to filling the upper half; thanks to artificial gravity, that was the only thing that proved their position had changed. It took a few extra minutes for the Humans in the bay to clear out. Ia watched on her fifth upper tertiary screen. The others on the uppermost row should have been showing scanner feeds from the various system buoys, but those had been shut off and collected by Attinks’ ship. So all she had to watch was the work of her own crew. The bow docking bay doors slid open with only a faint, distant hum, more felt than heard from as far away as the bridge.

The two shuttles in that bay had been relocated to the stern bay for this maneuver, a tight fit, but necessary. Well over a hundred golden, glowing orbs the same size as the fifteen swirling, silvery Meddler-spheres had been packed into the bay. As she watched, Ishiomi coordinated with Private Nelson at the operations station to cut gravity to that deck.

The microgravitic pull of their upside-down position in geosynchronous orbit over the planet shifted the orbs. They slowly started drifting “up” on Ia’s viewscreen. The Feyori grabbed the nearest of the orbs in pairs, disappearing for a few moments only to reappear and grab another sphere. Though “grab” wasn’t exactly the right word; they had no hands but instead overlapped an edge of each golden orb before lifting it out of the pack and vanishing.

“Query from the
Popova
, sir,” Private Xhuge said. “They want to know what the
Damnation
is doing, and what both ships are supposed to be waiting for—ah, incoming ping from the planet,” he added. “Official channels. It’s the government. President Augustus Moller.”

“Right on schedule. Tell the
Popova
to sit still and wait, and put Moller on my main screen,” Ia ordered.

The dark-haired image of President Augustus Moller, leader of the Truth Party and third-highest-ranked member of the Church of the One True God, appeared on Ia’s main screen. His hair had picked up a hint of gray and white salting through the dark strands in the years since she had last seen him. That had been during the fateful broadcast when her brother had officially received his Alliance Lottery money. Unlike back then, the President of Sanctuary was not smiling. Not even a fake one.