Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty (50 page)

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Authors: Jean Johnson

BOOK: Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty
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Each rapid-fire
zwwowwp
was followed by a pattering shower of increasingly pulverized debris. Even with her external pickups muted, the sound was a nonstop pressure. A glance to her left showed D’kora gesturing in her own half-mech armor, though her argument with whomever wasn’t being broadcast to the rest. Ia could guess, though. She waited patiently for the discussion to conclude, and through the several seconds that followed.
“Ferrar to Corporal Ia.”
The broadcast came on a private channel, just the two of them. Ia didn’t move.
“Ia here. What can I do for you, sir?”
“Well, now, isn’t
that
the question? You once swore to me, if I asked you if something could be done, you’d tell me whether or not it could be done. So. I am asking you, Corporal . . . can you get the 2nd Platoon through that stalemate? We’re taking heavy casualties on the front and side doors. We need that back entrance busted open.
Without
blowing up the dome and venting everyone to space. So, I am asking you . . .
can
you get that back door open, Corporal?”
“Sir, yes, sir. I can get it open. It won’t be quick, though. And I’ll have to do some scouting farther up, to make sure the rest of the way is clear. I’m not taking the 2nd into any deathtraps.”
“Your concern is appreciated, Corporal.”
She smiled wryly.
“Thank you, sir. Please explain to Lt. D’kora that I have an idea, and that you’ve authorized me to implement it. Stress that no one else is to follow unless and until the lasers stop. We don’t dare risk any other lives.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“You’re an uncle.”
“I said something I didn’t know. Ferrar out.”
Ia smirked.
An uncle . . . again,
she thought. She didn’t try contacting him a second time, though. Half a minute later, D’kora contacted her.
“The Lieutenant says you had an idea, Corporal. You didn’t bring it to me,”
her platoon officer stated bluntly, darkly.
“I figured that, given the risk, you’d say no, sir . . . but we need this stalemate broken. I think I know how. If I’m right,”
she argued,
“we can crack open the back door and ride to the rescue. If I’m wrong . . . I’ll be the only casualty, and the rest of you can go join the others. Now, I’m willing to take that risk, sir. I know what I face if I’m wrong, and what’s at stake if I’m right.”
“Permission granted. Tell me what you need.”
Ia moved away from where she crouched by the tunnel wall. She worked her way back down the line, and tapped Buck Sergeant Jung Baker, the new sergeant of A Squad, on his ceristeel-plated, gun-toting arm, switching to external speakers as well as her comm. “Sergeant!” she projected through the noise of the laser drills. “I need your medic kit!”
“What, are you injured?” he shot back, though he did swing open the compartment on his full-mech thigh, revealing the gear packed inside. Some of the gear was designed to be used by servo fingers, but for this, she needed greater dexterity.
Blink-coding the shutdown sequence for her armor, Ia opened the lower panels, freeing first her p-suited feet, then her hands. Straining, she reached for the goods in the sergeant’s thigh compartment. He shifted a little closer, lifting one leg on servos that whined faintly compared to the thundering of the makeshift cannons up ahead. Digging through the supplies, she fished out a pair of dust masks and a roll of paper tape. Ripping the metal strips off the nose sections, she balanced the masks on his leg, and quickly unsealed the o-ring of her p-suit from her mechsuit helmet.
Ducking, eyes squeezed shut and breath held tight against the dust filtering through the air, she fumbled the mask into place over nose and mouth, and taped it to her face, sealing it in place. Quick movements sealed the second one over the top of the first. Only then did she breathe. The metallic compounds being vaporized around her were dangerous to inhale in large quantities. They wouldn’t do her eyes much good, either. Then again, neither would the heat of the rock underfoot. Ia reached for the seals of her p-suit.
“What are you doing?” Baker asked her.
She ignored him, stripping out of the rubbery grey suit. Underneath, she wore nothing, not even underwear. For a pressure-suit to work at its most efficient, it had to cover as many pores on a wearer’s skin as possible. In an emergency, they could be pulled on over clothing, but preparing for battle usually meant having enough time to do things properly.
A couple of the others catcalled and whistled via their suit speakers, peering through the dust at what she was doing. Ia ignored them as well. Grabbing one of the rolls of bandaging in his medic kit, Ia balanced first on the toes of one foot, then the other, stripping off the booties for the suit and replacing them with wads of cotton gauze that she taped in place. It protected her bare skin somewhat from the heat of the rocks, but this was several meters away from those lasers.
Once she was safely balanced on her wrapped toes, she unlatched her wrist unit and held it up to the silver-faceplated sergeant. “Keep track of this for me!”
He accepted it reluctantly. Ia quickly wrapped her hands in gauze mittens and awkwardly taped them in place, then stored everything back in his full-mech thigh compartment.
D’kora made her way to Ia’s side. She flipped up her blast shield, though she kept her suit sealed. For the first time since Ia had met her, the other woman asked her an actual question. Demanded it, rather. “Corporal . . . what the
hell
are you doing?”
“Metal, sir! Those lasers are aiming at anything metal!” she shouted back. The heat was beginning to make her sweat, which made the dust cling to her skin. “Even a p-suit has metal on it! They might also have motion sensors, so I’m going to have to move very slowly. The scanners can’t tell much about what’s up ahead; the dust and heat are screwing up the sensors. But we do know the drill emplacements are about twenty meters up the corridor. Give me twenty minutes to get to them, and . . . I don’t know, another ten to figure out how to kill their power switches. If they don’t stop firing in half an hour, find another way in without me!”
“Corporal, you are currently bare-asteroid naked!” D’kora argued.
Glancing down at her torso, naked curves and muscles smudged in pulverized dust, Ia spread her taped hands, letting her rare sense of humor out to play. “Well, I guess I am. Enjoy the free show, sir! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go break this stalemate.”
Leaving the lieutenant to stare after her, Ia slipped between the other mechsuited soldiers. Some of them grinned, some of them rolled their eyes, and some kept their silvery grey blast plates down, their expressions hidden. She didn’t care. The closer she got to the corner where the lasers were still searing away, the hotter the floor and the air became.
This really was the only way in for the 2nd Platoon. Posing as merely a metallurgical refinery, the Oberon Consortium was actually a military contract facility. In a way, it was ironic, even poetic, that she should be the one to help keep its secrets out of the wrong hands, given how those secrets would eventually end up in hers.
Dropping to hands and toes, she flexed her muscles in a modified push-up stance. Slowly, carefully, as low as she could go without burning her bare skin on the floor, Ia crept around the corner. The laser drills were targeting anything above knee-high that moved or had metallic components. Unfortunately, nothing in a mechsuit, even half-mech, could hunker down that low.
Centimeter by slow centimeter, she worked her way around the corridor, stalking with the patience of a sloth. Oberon’s Rock, a mineral-rich, air-poor world, was only slightly heavier than Earth’s gravity, 1.14gs instead of 1.01. The slow movement was more of a strain on her patience than on her muscles. Eventually, she managed to get her whole body around the corner, and up the corridor by a full meter, beyond any safe viewing range by her fellow soldiers.
She took a moment to rest her body, still sprawled in a modified push-up position. Now it was time to let her mind go to work. Sweating muddy, metallic droplets, she pushed static energy out from her body. That caused the swirling dust clouds to shift and scatter, but it also obscured what little the others would be able to detect with their scanners. Then, she focused her thoughts forward, on the electrical pulses and programming guiding the lasers firing over her head.
“Ia! Are you still alive?” she heard Estes shout.
I am not here . . . I am not here . . . you do not see me . . . you do not detect me . . . there is nothing here, along the right-hand wall . . .
“Corporal, report!” That came from D’kora.
The trio of cannons shifted their fire ever so slightly, avoiding the right side of the corridor. Pushing upright, Ia sprinted forward, skimming along the narrow path she had cleared for herself. She wasn’t her biological father; she couldn’t take a laser beam as powerful as one of these drills and hope to survive.
Her goal wasn’t the drills or their controls. Yet. Ignoring them, Ia raced up the corridor, flinging herself down a side passage and up a long flight of stairs. Every turn, she already knew. Every step, she had already practiced in her mind.
Flinging herself into the third storage room on the left at the top of those stairs, she grabbed shoulders and snapped necks. Vertebrae crackled like broken kindling under her fingers. Two, three, five half-naked men died. The sixth managed to pull off of his victim and grab for his rifle. She grabbed his wrist just as he brought it around and slammed her other palm into his elbow, inverting the joint with a sickening
crunch
. Before he could do more than gasp at the pain, she broke his neck as well and dropped his half-naked body on top of the rest.
The battered, bloodied woman sprawled on the table tugged on the tape binding her wrists and knees to its corners. “Oh, God, I’m rescued! Help me! Get me free!”
Ia closed her eyes. As the brunette struggled to free herself, Ia probed the timestreams. Precious seconds ticked by while she searched for any other path. Any other way.
There was none.
It was a terrible choice to have to make . . . but not her first, and not the worst.
“Aren’t you going to free me? Get me off of this thing!” the woman demanded, shaking the table with her struggles. Ia sighed and peeled off first her hand wrappings, then the dustcaked double-masks.
“I’m sorry.” Approaching her side, Ia leaned over the woman. Met her wide, green stare. “But any children you have . . .
any
descendants . . . they will sabotage the future. You might
or
might not have been killed, had I not broken through . . . but I did, so that makes me responsible for anything you or your descendants do. I cannot allow them to exist. I’m sorry.”
The woman blinked up at her through her puffy, swollen eyelids. “What . . . ?”
Reaching down and in, Ia compressed two key arteries inside the woman’s mind. “Sleep,” she murmured. “Sleep.”
The woman struggled, then slowed. She slumped. Ia kept the pressure in place until she felt the other woman’s kinetic energy spike, then fade . . . in an eternal sleep.
“. . . Maybe heaven will let you know just how sorry I am.”
Mindful of the ticking of time, Ia turned away. Grimly, she grabbed the discarded shirt of one of the dead woman’s rapists and scrubbed the dust, sweat, and the threat of tears from her face.
I don’t have time to cry. I can’t take the time. I have too much to do to waste my time on . . . on regrets . . . and choices.
I am damned for what I must do. I accepted that a long time ago. I had to.
Ia scrubbed as much of the dirt from her body as she could spare time for. Stripping two of the men to get the right sizes, she donned socks, boots, trousers, and a T-shirt. The lack of undergarments chafed a little, but it was better than the alternatives. Particularly since some of them had died messily as their muscles abruptly relaxed. Hurrying, she checked the time. She didn’t have her chrono with her, but she could and did dip into the timestreams.
I have . . . twelve minutes to spare, before I have to get back.
Sorting through the weapons, she snatched up two laser pistols and a pair of knives. The pistols were over-clocked, illegal models jury-rigged to fire double-intensity beams in the infrared zone. They would hit almost as hard as a military rifle could, if at less than half the usable e-clip life. The focusing crystals in the pistols weren’t military quality . . . never mind Oberon quality.
Time to go wreak some havoc with the Lyebariko.
Darting out the door, she headed up one more level and pelted down a long corridor. The hardest part, running full-tilt in such light gravity, was keeping herself from hitting the ceiling with each bounding stride. Most of the civilians had been rounded up and herded into the storage rooms she was passing, trussed hand and foot and locked inside. She didn’t dare take the time to free them just yet; if anyone who later survived noticed her at this point in time, comparisons might be made on just where and when she was located.

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