Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (2 page)

Mentally, Ia stood on the grassy banks of Time itself, a rolling plain crisscrossed by the tangled streams of millions of lives. They formed a complex tapestry where major events, which would normally stir the waters out of their banks, were actually overshadowed by the tiniest of ripples. Changes that she had to track down.

“Arstoll may be a new officer, but he is Field Commissioned, so he does have some combat leadership experience,” a second, older woman pointed out. “Plus, he’s somewhat familiar with the captain even if they haven’t seen each other in years. Not to mention their compatibility charts look pretty good.”

“Familiarity doesn’t really come into it,” another male argued. “She needs a competent, combat-trained officer. I still say Lieutenant Dostoyervski is the best match—
he
should be her second-in-command.”

Something was rippling the waters of Time, disturbing her carefully laid plans like a deep, unseen current. If she didn’t track it down, it could erode the bank out from under her feet. That would be bad.

“His DoI file
is
sticky with bigger recommendations than the other candidates have,” the first male agreed. “And his psych profile does match in both compatibility and contracompatibility measurements with Captain Ia, here. It
looks like he’d get along with the other officers, too…well, maybe not Helstead, if she decides to be headstrong. But that’s a problem for their CO to sort out. Learning to manage strong personalities could be a good lesson.”

She had already dismissed Dostoyervski. He wouldn’t do at all, not when her own considerations took into account several variables not even the DoI could foresee. Their voices were annoying her with trivial details. “Shhh…”

They didn’t pay much attention to her, other than to speak a little more quietly. The men and women of the Department of Innovations were a different breed from the standard soldier. Most of them were career, with the average number of years in the various branches of Service rarely being less than fifteen, and usually above twenty. In fact, many of them were technically retirees from active duty, able to bring those years of long-term military experience to the task of figuring out who out there had the skills to be promoted and fast-tracked, or stalled and even demoted. Most had training in psychology and xenopsychology, tactics and long-term strategy. All of them were expert data miners.

In a unified military composed of roughly two billion soldiers, they were the best at knowing who was who in the Terran United Planets Space Force and where that person should probably go. It was their job to debate who should be one of the three Platoon lieutenants Ia needed. Their job to select the best soldiers for a particular set of tasks. Their job to make the final decision, normally.

Normally, someone in Ia’s situation wouldn’t even be here, let alone have much say in the process. If the psychological filtration programs and the best judgments of the DoI members came up with matches too close to call, they might contact a superior officer to solicit their opinion, yes, but that officer never came to the physical headquarters of the DoI, or even to one of its many branch offices scattered through Terran space.

However, this situation was not normal. Ia was already inside the Tower, the nickname for the sprawling, administrative heart of the Space Force on Earth. This particular branch of the DoI was located no more than a kilometer or so from the office of her new commanding officer, Admiral John Genibes of the Branch Special Forces. She was already operating under special
dispensation for other reasons, including a form of
carte blanche
—albeit one with a very strict double-indemnity clause—so Ia had arranged to visit this data-crammed room in person.

All she wanted to do was to select the perfect-for-her crew, comparing their potential actions to the needs of the right future, the one that would save their descendants from a massive calamity three centuries away. Unfortunately, the men and women around her were trying to help her select the
perfect
crew. She didn’t need perfect, as if the soldiers in question were diamonds, prepolished and cut. She needed raw material, flexible and bold, obedient yet innovative, men and women capable of doing truly great things under
her
command, yet very carefully not needed elsewhere. Carbon fibers, not jewels.

Those who would be needed elsewhere had to remain elsewhere. What she needed were the nobodies, the throwaways whose lives wouldn’t make a palpable difference anywhere else. Straw soldiers who, under her guidance, could be spun into threads of pure gold for the tapestry she needed to weave.

It should have been easy for her to sort through the many possibilities lining the path she needed the future to follow. Easy to pluck out the names, the personalities, the faces of everyone she needed. But something was wrong.

This isn’t getting me anywhere.
Working at her usual perception level, a woman standing on a low-rolling prairie crisscrossed by life-streams, she couldn’t see where the subtle problems all began.
So either it’s macroscale measurements, or microscale. Micro would be more accurate, but I don’t even know where to start, and there’s too much out there to just drop into the waters of some life-stream randomly…So, macro it is.

Visualization was usually a psychic’s best friend. Grounding and centering exercises helped stabilize the mind, and mental bubble-shields walled out unwanted influences. Most of the time, exercising these abilities was analogous to humming a tune for background noise, or carrying an object; once a psi learned how, it didn’t take much effort. It did, however, take time. Ia had spent the last eight years of her life training her mind to carry the weight of Time itself.

Instead of standing on a vast field, she shrunk the timeplains down to a brocaded tapestry. Life-rivers became threads as the rolling grass and rippling waters vanished. They ran in ways contrary to the normal warp and weft, more like a complex
skein than a formal weave, but the analogy wasn’t meant to be perfect. Lifting it up with mental hands, she peered along the edge of Time, checking for anomalies in the fabric.

She couldn’t hear the voices of the others anymore, couldn’t see them at the periphery of her vision. Focused on the nearly two-dimensional image held in her mind, Ia spotted the first slub a few years down from the moment of now in the pale golden tapestry stretched out before her. It was subtle indeed, visible only as a metaphor, but the beige thread was palpably thicker than the others.

It was also not alone. Now that she could see the first one, others here and there caught her attention. They were noticeable because they were just a little bit thicker than they should have been. Narrowing her attention to a close knot of those thickened life-threads, Ia queried her precognitive abilities.

Whose lives are these? What do they have in common?

Visualization was the key. Her vast abilities knew what was going on, but only on a subconscious level at best. Subconsciously, she sensed a hint of danger in the timeplains, just enough to prick at her instincts. Her conscious mind was still mortal, though; her intellect, smart as she was, couldn’t yet sort out the differences. A merging of the two, instinct and thought, might help.
So, what parts of these threads are in common with each other, and what bits are distinct?

Color seeped into the threads, delineating each life and its impact on the others around it. Not just the ones she saw, but new ones, extra slubs of undue influence. Lifting herself above the tapestry, Ia could see the colors, plural. More than one influenced the timestream-threads…but the later ones seemed to come into play only after the first one, a purple hue not too far off from the petals of an iris flower, had wreaked most of the initial damage over a dozen key lives.

Zooming in close, mentally floating above the weave, she examined the wisps of thread-fibers where the purple taint in the slub came close to an aquamarine one. The tiniest threads connected the two. So tiny, they looked…silver.

Feyori.

Cursing, Ia backed up—and flinched instinctively out of the timestreams, left hand snapping up, mind snapping out. Opening her eyes, she stared at the frightened sergeant dangling centimeters from her grip and centimeters off the floor, caught
in her telekinetic grip. If she had lingered in there one moment more, the middle-aged woman might have actually touched her.

That would have been bad.

“Y…You…” the greying brunette panted, eyes wide. “You…”

“I said,” Ia stated, as gently as she could, “that I did
not
want to be touched.” Carefully, she lowered the older woman back to her feet. “I apologize for my instinctive reaction just now—and I’m grateful I didn’t hurt you with my combat reflexes—but it was either grab you with my mind, or let you injure
your
mind precognitively. Now, did you want something?”

Licking her lips, the woman clutched her portable workstation in her dark brown arms and nodded. “Uh, yes, sir. We’ve completed your roster for you, Captain. All it needs is your…your…I can’t believe I’m saying this,” the reservist master sergeant muttered, her shock fading, replaced by a touch of startlement-induced anger. “This whole situation is highly irregular!
We
decide who gets promoted and where they go, particularly when it’s a transfer into the Special Forces.”

“I know it’s irregular, Narine,” Ia told her, making the woman blink. Only her last name, Plimstaad, was visible on the name patch fixed to the pocket of her brown Dress jacket. “I know that very little of this is according to standard procedure. But it’s necessary. As for that list of names, do not send it yet. It’s still incomplete.”

“The list
is
complete, sir,” she argued. “All you needed was a competent lieutenant for your 2nd Platoon. You have a first officer and three Platoon lieutenants. You have a Company and three Platoon sergeants, you have a full roster of enlisted and have claimed one of the best full-care doctors in the Space Force. You may be missing all of your squad sergeants, but you have every single person you requested. Dostoyervski has been selected for you, since you were taking so long in making up your mind. Standing there like a statue, no less,” the DoI sergeant muttered. “Sir.”

“Dostoyervski won’t work for me, Sergeant,” Ia dismissed. “I’ll need to find someone else.”

She shrugged and tapped something on her workpad. “Fine. Arstoll it is, then. Sign it with your thumbprint, Captain, and have a nice day.”

Ia shook her head. “I won’t sign that, Sergeant. I’ve found an anomaly—a huge anomaly—and I have to track down the right way to fix it, first.”

“
What
anomaly, Captain?”

The impatient question came from the oldest man in the room, and the only soldier whose rank matched her own. The main differences between them were that he wore brown stripes on his black uniform, and that his brass eagle did not carry the rockets in its claws that hers did, making her a ship’s captain and him a lieutenant colonel. As dark-skinned as the sergeant, but with three times as many wrinkles and none of the hair, Lieutenant Colonel Luu-Smith flicked his hand irritably.

“You’ve already taken up hours of our time this morning with a task normally left to the experts, Captain Ia. What anomaly could
possibly
throw everything we’ve done out the window at this point in time?” he demanded. “I thought you said you were some sort of massive precog. Shouldn’t you have already foreseen it?”

“With respect, Colonel,” Ia returned, “I am
not
the only being who can see into the future, and that means I’m not the only one who can act to change the things they foresee.” At his skeptical look, she rolled her eyes. After several years of playing her cards close to her chest, ingrained habit had kept her from revealing what she apparently needed to reveal. “…The
Feyori
are now involved. They cannot see as far as me, but they
can
see, and they will interfere, if they think it will somehow promote their own positions in their gods-be-stupid Game.

“Unfortunately, some of them are now considering me a threat. It’s incredibly shortsighted of them because I’m not their enemy, but there it is. Now, if you’ll just be a little more patient, please, I was in the middle of tracking down where the anomalies started when I was interrupted.” She glanced briefly at Sergeant Plimstaad. “And I did mean it when I said do not touch me. You do not want to see what is inside my head; I’m dealing with scales that most people aren’t prepared to deal with, at speeds that would give you a raging migraine.

“I do thank you for your efforts on my behalf,” Ia added. “I’ll try to be quick about this, but there are a lot of lives at stake. More than you know.”

Closing her eyes, Ia breathed deep and let it out, then did it again, calming and centering her mind. A flip of her thoughts
landed her in the grass next to the waters of her own life. From there, it didn’t take much effort to condense Time back into a thin, interwoven sheet, though she did have to spend a few moments refinding the slub-nodes of Feyori influence in the future. Once she had her mental metaphor adjusted so that her conscious mind could comprehend it, she stained the lead one purple again and followed it up-thread into the past, trying to find the moment where the anonymous Meddler in question had decided to begin interfering.

The
recent
past, she discovered with an unpleasant jolt.
Ah, slag…The initial slip in the streams took place just thirteen days ago. That was the day I left the Solarican Warstation
Nnying Yanh.
More precisely, this is the Feyori whose presence I uncovered and threw off the Warstation. The same day I was tested and my father’s legacy had to be revealed, explaining the strengths of my psychic powers.

Which was also the day I stupidly didn’t check to see
what
effects his abrupt exposure would have on the timelines,
she castigated herself, wincing.

She didn’t have to touch that thread to know the Feyori in question would be upset enough to try to counterfaction her. The energy-based beings converted themselves into matter-based beings so that they could meddle with her fellow sentients’ lives. They did not like it when the pawns in their great Game started playing by different rules, and they
really
didn’t like it when a pawn ousted a player.