Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (4 page)

“Then I’ll be glad you’re caring for her,” Arstoll said. He offered her his hand. When she lifted hers, he clasped it wrist to wrist, meeting her gaze steadily. “Make sure you take care of her. You
promise
me that, one officer to another, as well as one Squadmate to another. I’ve lost too many lives today as it is.”

“I promise I’ll take care of Garcia, Brad, to the best of my ability, and to the best of hers once I get her to believe in herself again. I’ve lost too many as well,” Ia agreed. Releasing his forearm, she clapped him on the back, then straightened, pushing away from the table. “Time for me to head to the docking bay. We still have to make planetfall, get the other two on board, and get back to the ship by the time Harper finishes our repairs.”

“And then what?” Arstoll asked her, following her toward the doors. “Or is that Classified?”

“Most of it is, and well beyond your pay grade . . . but once I have these three on board, we race for the Gatsugi homeworld. The various heads of state will be holding a meeting, where I’ll be begging for certain cross-government military powers. I’m still not entirely sure why the Admiral-General made me a four-star,” she confessed, “but she did, and it’s made my job unbelievably easier, so I’m going to run with it as far and fast as I can.”

“Hauling bus all the way?” Arstoll offered. “Like you did at the end of Hell Week?”

“Farther and faster, if I can,” Ia quipped back. “Tae says they’ve now made it an end-of-Hell-Week challenge for teams of recruits to pull a ground bus a hundred meters. And yes, they have to remember to release the parking brake, first.” She flashed him a brief, wry smile, then offered her hand. “Time to go. Good luck, Arstoll.”

“Good luck, Ia.
Eyah?
” he asked her as he clasped it one last time, using the sign and countersign of the Marines and their V’Dan counterparts.

“Hoo-rah,”
she agreed.

AUGUST 20, 2498 T.S.
SIC TRANSIT

August Ia finished the last of her battle-guiding tasks and pulled out of the timestreams. What she wanted was a hot bath and a long nap. What she had to do was leave the comfort of her easy chair—salvaged from her old quarters on the
Hellfire
and installed in the nearly identical version on the
Damnation
—and head for the practice salles. Her mind might be tired, but her body was full of energy. A nap was therefore out of the question, at least until she exhausted herself physically.

Once again, they were working and living in twice Standard gravity, and that meant working out every day to ensure everyone on board remained combat-ready. That required daily exercise. More than that, it required daily exercise in her old weight suit. At some point down the road, she
would
be back on Sanctuary, fighting on its surface for the survival of the key element that would make everything she had planned actually work:

A home, a sense of culture and family for the Savior, who would otherwise have none, and who would slowly lose her humanity without one.

Ia’s new quarters—her own version of home, or at least a place to rest—were still located amidships, just behind the new, larger bridge, and were still comparatively small. Still located on Deck 6, the journey to the exercise cabins required her to find the nearest lift to travel down to Deck 12, below the cylindrical core of the new, improved Godstrike cannon, Mark II. Of course, she hadn’t fired it yet, but that was for a very good reason. The old one had required seven or eight ships in alignment, with its caloric rating of 90.3 percent. The new one reached 94.5 percent, and being palpably larger, would require considerably more care in firing it.

The needle-shaped ship hadn’t really grown much in girth compared to the old version, maybe a dozen meters in extra armor plating and a slightly larger focal core. Instead, it had grown mostly in length by a couple hundred meters. Despite that, the ship still held twenty-four functional decks spanning five section seals. That extra distance deepened the wavelength, allowing not one but two “wolf” infrared resonances to be buried in the beam it cast. Some of the extra space right outside the core had been filled with yet more Sterling engines to capture and reuse the relatively little heat that would spill free from the main cannon and that 5.5 percent loss rate. The rest had been filled with a few useful facilities for the crew and extra water tanks.

Still, since the rest of the
Damnation
had been built to Ia’s specifications from scratch, its cabins hadn’t suffered the forced-conversion requirements the
Hellfire
had undergone. The Company boardroom had been relocated amidships instead of being consigned to the far end of the bow segment just to make room for a proper Wake Zone next to a decent-sized galley. Bow and stern now contained more in the way of manufactory and storage bays as well as the shuttle bays. The new, improved Wake Zone included two different lounge areas; between them rested a dedicated galley space fancy enough to be called a dining hall, almost a restaurant.

Most of the exercise areas were located either in the fore or aft sections. One of the weight rooms had a sauna, a wood-paneled steam room—an extravagance, admittedly, but almost as good as Leave away from the ship. The other had a trio of soaking tubs. The one with the locker room where her weight suit was stored, tucked into its own storage cupboard next to the one with her exercise gear, had the sauna. It was a good place to sit and think for a few minutes, letting her body relax in the sultry heat while her mind raced.

The ventilation system was doing its best to keep up with its use, but the air was still humid and ripe with sweat when she entered the locker room. Most of the latter was coming from the aft weight room. The
hiss
and
whoosh
of hydraulic fluids met her ears as she strapped on the tile-weighted webwork she had gained all the way back in Basic Training, when she had first met people like Arstoll, Mendez, Sung, and Spyder. Some of her old training mates were still alive. Some were not. Some would still die in this war, and some would live well beyond it.

Some would only live on in legend.

Philadelphia Benjamin, Cald Feldman . . .
Tugging on her weighted gloves, Ia grimly contemplated how she could use their names to inspire future generations of soldiers and civilians alike.
Benjamin’s family history could inspire the working classes. Feldman . . . well, I suppose he could inspire military and civilian prisoners trying to turn their lives around like he did his. Franke’s death will be harder to make heroic . . . being eaten alive is a bad way to go, hard to put a positive spin on that . . . But Nabouleh, she was one hell of a pilot. Not a fancy flier like Shikoku Yama, but courageous under fire.

Franke and Svarson, I’ll make them both known for heroism in how they lived, not in how they died,
Ia decided.
I’ll have to compose some messages for the Afaso to distribute across the Alliance, so they can start spreading rumors and tales of the Fallen of the Damned. And, of course, the living among the Damned. I wonder if Clairmont and York have started composing together in earnest, yet. They’ll make a helluva good entertainment team once they do.

Tired as she was, she didn’t want to take a peek into the timestreams to find out, yet. Not when she could just ask them outright after she was done exercising. They were all in transit. She had a little bit of free time.

“General, sir.”

Ia looked up at the short, stocky, muscular figure of Alexus Kardos. His deeply tanned skin looked like it might have been due to some aboriginal blood, something either from Australian Province or Oceania, maybe southeast Asia, but his large brown curls and his aquiline nose looked more European. He looked grim, as if he had something on his mind. Ia knew what it most likely was, of course. This particular confrontation had only been a sixteen percent chance for happening here and now, but it was just as well, since it would have happened at some point anyway.

So much for “free time.” Better to get it out of the way now, before it’s had a chance to fester.
Lifting her chin, Ia nodded politely. “Sergeant. I know what you’re going to say because I already know what you’re concerned about.”

“You do?” he asked, derailed by her admission. “How could you . . . ?”

She tapped the side of her head briefly. “Precog, remember? I’ve already foreseen several variations on this conversation. You’re upset by the discrepancies stirred up by the rules written into the Damned handbook, versus actual Terran Space Force regulations,” Ia stated, glad she was no longer under Restricted Leave, having to be recorded every second of every day. “You find it difficult to reconcile your duty to the Space Force, versus my standing orders to lie to our superiors about certain things taking place on board this ship.”

“Well, yes. I was raised to be honest, to act with honor. Lying isn’t honorable,” the naturalized Scadian protested.

Rising from the bench—surpassing him in height by several centimeters despite the fact they had both been born and raised on the same homeworld—Ia sighed and worked on strapping on her weight gloves. “I myself would rather tell the truth, Sergeant. But however honorable a knight may be in a duel . . . well, there comes a point where deception must be employed against an opponent in order to secure an objective. It doesn’t even have to be a melee feint or an ambush in a war. It can be as simple as refraining from mentioning something to an ally, so that the ally in question does not act precipitously or react wrongfully.

“A lot of those standing orders in the Company bible are there because of the lattermost reasons. It would simply be too
dangerous
for others outside this ship to know certain of our secrets.” Ia sought for a way to get him to understand why such things were necessary. “They would interfere, like a . . . like a bystander with absolutely no understanding of either architecture or stained-glass construction trying to push aside a master craftsman in the middle of assembling a rose window in a cathedral.”

“A rose window,” he repeated skeptically.

“A stained-glass window of great depth and complexity,” Ia told him. “This window I am building exists not just in three dimensions, but in four. Some things, I am free to admit to here and now. Some things, I have revealed slowly, over many months and years. And some things cannot be revealed at all. Not for a very long time, if ever. But these things, managing these secrets, is
my
task.
Your
task is simply to keep your mouth shut, serve as a Squad leader and a sergeant, and prepare yourself to serve a very worthy group of people on Sanctuary with every scrap of fighting skill, innate honor, and security-trained cunning you possess.”

“For how long?” Kardos challenged her. “How long do I have to serve on your homeworld before I get to return to Scadia?”

Oh, lovely.
This
percentage. Let’s see how I can make this end well.
Dipping her fingers into the timestreams, Ia sought for a way to get out of this without either his resentment or a very unfair verbal fight. She rubbed at her forehead with a weight-suited hand, then sighed, stared at it, and peeled off her glove. Once it was bare, she offered it to him, palm up. “Take my hand, and come see what great deeds
you
would do on Sanctuary if you gave yourself wholeheartedly to the task I need to assign to you.”

Kardos knew what she was and what she could do. There had been plenty of time for him to hear about her abilities from the other members of the crew. Ia also knew that psychic abilities were not exactly a point of open discussion on Scadia. Such things might have been scientifically proved for the last several centuries, but they did not belong in a medieval setting like the kind the Societatis tried to emulate.

To his credit, he hesitated only a moment before clasping her hand. She flipped them both onto the timeplains, pulling him quickly out of his own life-waters before the overlapping images could confuse him.

“You already know that I need you to go to Sanctuary to protect the lives of the Director and other key government members of the Free World Colony,”
Ia stated, guiding him along the grassy banks, heading downstream into the future.
“I do not doubt your willingness to teach others how to fight, how to defend themselves, and how to treat the people around them, and placed under them, with respect and courtesy.

“I could remind you of how I bartered alliance in perpetuity between the people of Scadia and the eventual Third Human Empire, in exchange for your presence on our mutual birthworld. I could speak for hours on how the leaders of the Church of the One True God intend to use treachery and deception, sabotage and even assassination to clear out all rivals against their power, the foremost of which will be the FWC.

“But you know all of this, or you will as soon as you see the situation on Sanctuary for yourself,”
Ia dismissed. She strolled along the stream banks, shrinking them down to rivulets they could easily step over as she searched for just the right one to make him understand.
“What you haven’t seen is what the pressures of two hundred years of vicious, cold, implacable, carefully paced civil war will do to the people of the Free World Colony.”

“Two hundred years of war? Another blockade?”
Alexus asked her.

“Sort of. Sanctuary must remain isolated for two hundred years, and that means not only enduring being lost behind the shifting of the Grey border in the next few years, they must endure an ongoing civil war for roughly two hundred years before it can be allowed to end. Generations of maintaining their independence and uniqueness in the face of harsh adversity.

“Because of this, they must not only learn the patience of a shield wall as each generation takes on the burden of holding their ground for the day their descendants can break free, they must also have an
outlet
for their frustrations. Exiled underground, with each community under constant threat of attack, they must one and all learn to fight . . . but they must learn to fight with
honor
amongst themselves, or they will rip each other apart while they wait.