Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (23 page)

One of the recent installations, built in sections, looked like an artistic scribble of pipes lining the rounded corridor she chose, giving it a more oval appearance. The pipes weren’t just artistic; they were heat-transference pipes, sucking some of the underground warmth out of the air and stirring it into a refreshing, circulating breeze. The siphoned energy wasn’t wasted, either; this place, Central Warren, was over five kilometers below the surface. Thermal energy was constantly being
transformed into electrical energy, empowering the various machines and amenities the underground capital needed.

Those amenities included things like lights and doors. Reaching her mothers’ apartment, she unlocked it with her palmprint and slipped quietly inside. Another touch of her hand to the panel on the doorframe closed and locked it, allowing her to sag back against the stout plexsteel and relax.

Spine pressed to the door, she sighed slowly in relief, shutting out everything but the sound of her own heart. Then snapped her eyes open at the sound of rapid footsteps. Her younger brother, Fyfer, flew at her, all grins and dark curls bouncing. He had gained a couple centimeters since she had last seen him, but still stood shorter than her by nearly a full head. Tall for a Sanctuarian, but not abnormally so. Then again, their fellow colonists wouldn’t reattain anything close to her semilofty height for at least another five, six generations, if not more.

“Hey, gorgeous, long time no see!” Giving her a hug and a peck on the cheek, he reached up and ruffled her locks. Ia put up with it for a moment, then pushed him back and ruffled his own hair with her free hand, mindful of the mug carried in the other one. Good-natured, Fyfer stepped free and bowed, gesturing beyond the entry hall. “Welcome to our humble new abode, sister dear. Allow me to show you around.”

She waved him off. This new, underground residence was a far cry from the cramped two-bedroom home her parents had known for most of their adult lives, but it was familiar from the times she had watched her family move through its rooms as she studied the future possibilities of their lives. “Already seen it. I’m going back to the storage hall to make more wreaths.”

“Still not going to tell us how you’re doing it, hm?” her younger brother asked, following her down the hall that led past common and private rooms alike. Fyfer tsked under his breath. “Selfish of you. Crysium’s the hardest known substance. Just think of the armor we could make with it!”

“Just think of the I’m-not-telling-you-whats I could make with it,” she quipped back. “You’re lucky I brought you snow all the way from Earth.”

Fyfer snorted. “As if Mom or Ma would let us make snow
cones out of it. Me, I want to
taste
the Motherworld. Bring me my own chunk next time, will you?”

Chuckling, Ia shook her head. Palming open the lock on the door leading to the warehouse, she stepped inside. Strange blocks and lines of shadow and light illuminated the far end of the room. Fyfer followed her inside, hitting the control panel for the lights. Like most forms of illumination used by Terrans not actually living on Earth, the lamps lit up in the same spectrum of colors as Sol, the parent star for their species.

The shadows had been cast by the stacks and stacks of bead-filled boxes Ia had received, altered, and sent back over the last year and a half. The angled lines of light came from the conifer-like sprays of crysium, painstakingly broken off their rock outcrops on the planet’s surface and transported down here by Thorne’s order.

Each spray was at least two meters tall and a meter and a half wide at its base; the fifty or more shafts that made up the limbs of the spray varied in thickness from the diameter of her biceps to smaller than the span of her wrist. In Standard gravity, they would have weighed two tonnes on average. On Sanctuary, they weighed over three times that—and these were merely small ones, the kind that were relatively easy to transport. There were sprays on the surface that were easily eight meters tall and five to six in diameter, and crystalline behemoths that were even larger.

Draining her cup, Ia set it on top of a stack of emptied crates. A flick of her mind unlocked one of the waiting, full boxes. Like a swarm of peach-tinted glass bees, the beads inside swirled up and soared out of the box, following her telekinetically. Stopping in front of one of the sprays, Ia reached up and caressed the shaft; it sang faintly in the back of her mind, boosting and amplifying her abilities, though not by a lot. Unshaped, raw, natural crysium could only do so much.

Bead-bees floating at her shoulder, hands on the nearest shaft, Ia closed her eyes and flipped her mind down, in, and out, landing on the timeplains. Instinct and habit guided her, lifting the banks between the right and wrong creeks, altering the flow of the timestreams, the life-streams of the men and women who lived on this world. Instinct and habit merged crystal to crystal, some of it tainted with her own blood, the majority of it tainted with the discarded matter of passing
Meddlers. Instinct and habit, practiced in her dreams, guided hand and mind into shaping chunks of the material in a complex process achieved without conscious thought.

But that was alright. Like water running toward the sea, it was important for everything she wanted to drain into the right bay. Pick the wrong part of the coast, and one could end up mired in an aimless swamp or be sucked into the mud of a tidal flat. Ia didn’t completely understand her abilities; they operated as much by instinct as by design sometimes. But she did have faith in them, and that meant letting the instincts of her mind shape the rings more than the conscious directing of her thoughts.

Something hit her. Blinking out of her trance, Ia eyed the twisted lump of translucent mineral in her hands. Hunger struck her in the next second. In the third moment, something struck her again. Turning, she looked as it flopped to the floor. A shoe. Nearby was another, matching one.

“Do I have your attention now?” Fyfer asked her. He wiggled his sock-clad toes and grinned.

Before she could respond, Ia heard the quiet beep of the comm embedded in her arm unit. Sighing, she made sure her headset was still secured over her ear, then thumbed the audio channel open.
“Ia. Go.”

“Ia? About time! Captain, where are you?”
she heard Harper demand.

From the stacks of rings and absence of two whole sprays, she had been concentrating for some time. Her thoughts were scattered, her concentration fragmented. Wrinkling her nose at the rumpled lump of crystal in her hand, Ia replied,
“Busy. What’s the emergency?”

“3rd Platoon B Beta, Privates Gwen Yé and Solomon Sutrara, were arrested just under an hour ago on charges of ‘conspiring to commit heresy’…whatever that means,”
Harper told her.
“Sutrara was smart enough to record all but the first minute on his arm unit, and managed to download it to the ship before they demanded he remove it.”

That wasn’t a move Ia had expected.
“I did lecture the troops about not going into any churches, right?”

“You did, but apparently they were outside the church, on the plexcrete sidewalk near one of the side doors.”

“Tell the Peacekeepers that first off, RCS 1107.6 states
clearly that all walkways, sidewalks, and so forth are public easements, and not Church property. Secondly, all military personnel who commit crimes are to be remanded into military custody for military justice,
not
civilian custody or justice.”
She paused a moment, thinking, then nodded.
“…Right. Send down 2nd Platoon A Gamma, Privates Ateah and Sousa—there should be a box in the storage locker off the officers’ mess with black Military Peacekeeper armbands in it.

“Slap a pair on those two and send ’em down to pick up Yé and Sutrara. Inform the Sanctuarian Peacekeepers that the matter will be looked into and the soldiers punished accordingly, as the Space Force takes religious rights and freedoms seriously. I can’t call up the relevant sections and paragraphs at the moment. Consult with Sadneczek on that,”
she instructed him.
“Then call the jail, let them know you’re sending two MPs, and that you’d like copies of all depositions for their military tribunal.”

“Sir, yes, sir. I hope this works,”
Harper added.
“What’s the ETA on your return to the ship?”

Ia eyed the crystalline trees still awaiting her. She had only transformed a fraction of what she needed to make, maybe a couple percent.
“I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to leave anytime soon, at this rate…”

“Do I have to hit you again with a shoe?” Fyfer asked her, recapturing her attention. He spread his hands, rolling his eyes. “You’re the commanding officer of a slagging
ship
, Sis! One with
carte blanche
. Pack up all the crysium and blood beads you want, go do it on board the
Hellfire
at your leisure, and send the rest back to us with the Afaso.
They’ll
get the packages through.”

She checked the timestreams. It would crowd her schedule further on the ship but free up a bit more time here and now. Ia considered his words, then nodded.
“Harper, I’m going to need a series of shuttle drops in a couple days to a site east of the mountains. We’ll need a couple of the holds set aside for bulky, heavy cargos. And tell Grizzle to order a couple hundred palm-locked cargo crates—the collapsible kind; otherwise, we won’t have the storage space. But get on those MP rescues fast. And make
sure
you get those arm units back. I don’t want Church officials getting their hands on military tech—intimidate them
with threats of arresting them for theft of Terran government property if you don’t get them back immediately.”

“Aye, Captain. Anything else?”
he asked.

“Yeah, call me in an hour if the extraction doesn’t work. You have an eighty-five percent chance that it should, though.”

“Understood. Harper out.”

Shutting off the comm link, she glanced at her brother. He shrugged and gestured at his shoes. “Can I put them back on, now?”

“Yeah.” Nudging them with her foot, she tumbled them his way physically, rather than using her telekinesis. Using a combination of her precognition, her electrokinesis, and her telekinesis to make all these wreaths was exhausting enough. She didn’t need to waste the mental energy when a flick of her foot would work. “You may need to get my attention again in about an hour, so stick around. And in two hours, I have to head to my psychic ethics review. I don’t dare miss that. It’s the last one I’ll get before heading off to war.”

Her brother bowed dramatically, palms pressed together like a djinn. A lock of dark brown hair flopped over his brow as he did so. “I shall be your personal shoe-throwing alarm clock, O Prophet.
Ia’n sud’dha
, I live to serve!”

The mock-dirty look she gave him only provoked a laugh from her brother.

JANUARY 21, 2496 T.S.

Crouched beside Bei Ninh, former Sharpshooter and bronze medalist, Ia could smell his sweat. Same with Jane Loewen, though her odor wasn’t quite as rank. Neither of them seemed happy at having to move without the benefit of the deactivated gravity weaves wrapped around their bodies, never mind skulk through the shadows of the half-built Sacred Cathedral of the Light and the Truth on an excessively heavy world. The exertion required for moving silently as well as swiftly expressed itself in tired muscles and sweat-soaked skin.

The same could be said for Ninh’s wife, Bagha, and her temporary teammate for this mission, William Xavine. Like Loewen, Xavine was a former Troubleshooter, and something
of an expert in surveillance gear. Each of the two crouched by their Sharpshooter partner, special cartridges in hand. Kneeling between the pair, Helstead peered through a set of enhancement goggles at the half-built walls. Finally, she nodded and whispered coordinates.

The two Sharpshooters, both wearing goggles of their own, nodded and lifted their guns. Helstead’s job was to identify the spots in the architecture that her compatriot, Lieutenant Rico, had selected, with some help from Ia. Elbows braced on a packing crate, they each took aim through their scopes and fired. The soft
phunt
of the air guns was echoed a second or so later by the faint
splat
of the gel-based projectiles hitting their targets. The two Troubleshooters quickly consulted their palm scanners. Xavine nodded, but Loewen shook her head.

“It broke on impact,”
she warned Ninh, and handed him another cartridge.
“Shoot again.”

Nodding, he replaced the expended shell with the fresh one, aimed carefully once it was loaded, and fired. Their movements were subtle, difficult to see in the darkened interior of the cathedral. The
hiss
and
thwap
of the payload’s being delivered was more blatant than their careful moves. Ia did see his satisfied nod, though. He knew he’d made the shot.

“Perfect.”
Closing her scanner, Loewen tucked it back into her bag, agreeing with him.

“Next target,”
Ia whispered, and led the way out onto the main floor. Like all man-made walking surfaces on Sanctuary, it was made from plexcrete, the odd amalgamation of several rubbery substances that cushioned impacts. It was still possible for someone of her height to badly injure her head if she should fall wrong, but the odds of actually cracking that skull hard enough to break it or the brain encased inside were survivably low.

Plexcrete came in several varieties, many of which were patterned to look like various long-lasting shades of granite. The Church Elders had spared no expense; this particular plexcrete floor had been laid out in an elaborate pattern of dark and light diamonds, lines, squares, triangles and more. In the daylight, it would appear polished, unscuffed as yet by the passage of thousands of worshipping feet. It would also glow, she knew, with bright golds and rich blues, blood reds, silvery greys, and regal greens once daylight touched it.

The scaffolding along the southern wall would eventually be replaced by a great stained-glass window marked with a similar pattern, carefully positioned so that when the planet aligned just right with the local star at the solstices and equinoxes, the sunlight shining through at noon would match the colorful patterns at certain points along the floor. Side windows to the east and west, nestled between the old-fashioned flying buttresses, would show colors that would overlap and blend. Between the floor and the windows, the carvings on the walls and the paintings on the ceiling, the Sacred Cathedral of the Light and the Truth, Our Blessed Mother, would be the single most spectacular structure on the whole planet, and remain so for at least two hundred years.