Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (24 page)

Between then and now, Ia wanted her fellow Free World Colonists to have an ear to the ground, inside. Literally. Hurrying up the steps of the altar dais, she crouched and pulled out a pair of palm-sized miniature crowbars. Inserting them carefully between two slabs of colored plexcrete, she pried the pieces apart, muscles flexing hard. Loewen reached her first. Fishing out the next piece of spying equipment, she dropped it into the small gap.

Freeing her tools, Ia checked her grip on the electronic surveillance supposedly keeping this site safe. Everything was still secure, showing nothing out of the ordinary. She waited for Loewen to peer into the crack and nod, confirming the device was properly placed, then scuttled across the dais to the area that would one day house the seats of the Church Elders as they sat and listened to the various services.

This time, Xavine reached her first and dropped a surveillance pickup into the rubbery crack she made. Normally a fancy floor might be installed last to prevent it from being damaged during construction. On Sanctuary, that cushioning was needed as soon as it could be laid down, right after the foundation was secured.

She pried apart a third spot, and a fourth, picking seemingly random locations that would bring the most benefit in eavesdropping in the years ahead. Beckoning the others onward, she led the way toward a hallway—no door, just yet—which in turn led to a set of steps. The four lightworlders grunted in the effort to try climbing them. Giving up, Loewen dropped to her knees halfway up, her shaking head nothing more than a subtle change
in the shadows of the stairwell. Ia moved back down to help her up the stairs.

“Almost there,”
Ia whispered in encouragement.
“Just seven more to place, then we can escape.”

The Troubleshooter panted, gritted her teeth, and let Ia help her back into motion.

“I’m not sure my knees can take much more of this, sir,”
Ninh whispered back, bracing himself with one gloved hand on the wall as they passed. Most of their clothes were common civilian garb, though they had taken the precaution of donning gloves and caps.
“If it’s 2Gs back home when you climb a set of stairs, that’s over 6Gs here per step.”

His wife poked him in the ribs. She breathed heavily with each step but managed to pass him all the same.
“Fire in the hole, Ninh. Fire in the hole…”

He stuck out his tongue but struggled upward in her wake. It wasn’t the fact that they were working in three times the gravity that was hard. It was the fact that climbing stairs roughly doubled the forces at work, and certainly doubled the effort. Ia let them rest at the top of the stairs but only for a minute. More than that, and they wouldn’t want to keep moving. Urging them along the plexcrete-padded hallway, she nodded at the first of three rooms.

The left-hand wall in this one had a large window opening overlooking the altar, which would eventually be covered in stained glass, obscuring the fact that the room would become the Grand Prelate’s office. Without the window, though, they were free to aim their air guns at the sculpted columns already set in place. After that was done, she guided them into dropping two more packets between the rubbery floor tiles.

Both the gels and the card-thin pickups worked on kinetic-energy principles. The noises reverberating through them would empower them, permitting them to last for a good fifty years, if not longer. Their broadcast range would be short, barely two hundred meters up and outward, and only fifty or so down through solid ground. But that would be just enough for the FWC’s transceivers to pick up and relay their scans farther down the line.

The next two offices were equally rough-walled, if smooth-floored. One would be the seat of the financial officer for the Church, the other the security officer. Both were vital for
controlling the pacing of the next two centuries. Taking their time, doing it right, took another fifteen minutes. As soon as the last pickup was dropped in place, Ia tucked her crowbars away.
“There we go. Now to get out through the back door unseen. We’re slightly ahead of schedule, but not enough to evade the security guards any other route. This way.”

The “back door” wasn’t a door, per se, but rather a set of scaffolding leading off the back of the cathedral. Accessed through a window opening, it was a short climb down the ladders to the ground. Short, but exhausting for her companions. Ia let them rest twice more before they slipped back through the slight gap in the chain-link fence guarding the site. From there, she urged them in quiet murmurs to keep going until they were physically out of sight.

“…Now, sir?”
Xavine finally asked, resting against the side of a building a block away. All four lightworlders were panting heavily from their exertions. Helstead also rested against the wall, though she recovered her breath faster than the others.

“Now,” Ia agreed, speaking in a normal tone, if still quietly. Relieved, the other five turned their gravity weaves back on, to the lowest setting that could tolerate the presence of other weaves nearby and still counteract a good chunk of the gravity. Relieved for a different reason, she gently released her grip on the low-light cameras, infrared detectors, and other sensors scattered around the large construction zone, though she didn’t sag against the wall like her crewmates had.

Finally adapted to her home after several days of more or less living on the surface while her ship stayed parked in orbit, Ia removed her knit cap, worn to hide her too-pale, damp hair. The others had sweated from the gravity, while she had sweated from trying to electrokinetically hide their actions from the construction site’s surveillance equipment. Doing so without also tripping the KI sensors placed around the Cathedral hadn’t been easy.

The Church Elders hated psychic abilities. The mental exercises required to discipline a psi’s mind lent strength to that mind, strength and resistance to outside influences. Strong minds were not easily swayed minds, and that meant rebellious minds, according to internal Church doctrine. The last thing they wanted was a strong telepath or a clairvoyant spying on them.

“Well. That was fun,” Helstead finally said, tucking her gloves into her shirt pocket. “Back to the pub?”

“Back to the pub,” Ninh agreed. “I could use a stiff drink.”

“I think I’m going to
be
stiff,” Loewen countered, flexing her back. The push-pull force of her weave’s field nudged into Ia, who staggered sideways and swallowed against the wobble in her inner ear. Loewen grimaced and straightened up again. “Sorry, sir.”

Ia waved it off. “It happens. You heard Helstead. Back to the pub, meioas. Drinks are on me. One lightly alcoholic, the rest non. You don’t want to stagger in this gravity.”

The lightworlders groaned but pushed away from the wall, heading up the street. It was late, but the pub selected as their return point was the kind open all night. As they walked, Helstead moved up beside Ia.

“So, Captain…sorry, Ia,” she amended, dropping the rank. “You said you couldn’t just waltz in and use your own gifts in a solo mission because manipulating everything would trigger KI sensors. I get that. It’s a perfectly valid concern, especially at your strength. And I can understand why you’d want to bug the offices. But why the main sanctuary? Nothing’s going to be said out there that’s particularly sensitive.”

“Yeah, why
did
we do that? I’ll follow your orders, sir,” Xavine muttered, “but, well, I’m not too comfortable with targeting a religion. It’s far too easy to turn offended members of a faith into violently righteous fanatics,” he added under his breath. “So I’m not comfortable with any of what we did. I
did
it, but…”

Loewen shook her head, though not in a disagreeing way. “Welcome to the military, meioa; if it doesn’t break the most common laws of ethics and sentients, you do what you’re told. But
I’d
like to know, too, Cap…uh, Ia. If it’s okay for us to ask?”

“It’s okay. And it’s simple. Propaganda. Whatever the Church Prelates preach from the pulpit will be taken as gospel truth by the topside masses,” Ia told them. “Some of it actually will be the truth, though much of it will be distorted and edited. In order to fight that propaganda, the other half will need to know what’s being said so they can separate truth from falsehood.”

“I still don’t get why you can’t just help these people to win the fight right away,” Bagha said. She shook her head. “Two hundred years of civil war sounds like an awful lot of deaths.”

“Seventy-five percent of it will be a cold war, if not more, so it’s not as many deaths as you’d think,” Ia said. She saw the doubt in their eyes and shook her head. “I
know
how you feel. A large part of me doesn’t like it, either. But if I’m given a choice between three people dying now, or three million people dying later—for-sure-dying, not just maybe-dying—then I’ll take the three people now and do it with my own hands if I must.

“If I have to be screamed at in my conscience for the rest of my life, I’d rather it were by the ghosts of just those three, and not the three million,” she finished quietly. Honestly.

“Well, we’re talking about a lot more deaths than just three, sir,” Xavine argued, as they approached the back door of the pub. It was owned and visited by friends of the FWC, which meant everyone inside would be willing to testify that the six off-worlders—Ia counted, now that she was in the military—had been in the back room all night, on the slim chance their proximity to the Cathedral had been noticed.

“And I’m talking about a lot more deaths than just three million. Here’s the pub, so this subject is dropped. Pick a new one. Like the fact that the first round of drinks are on me,” Ia stated, lifting her chin at the far door as they entered, the one that led to the front of the tavern. “You’ve earned it.”

Helstead wrinkled her nose. “I think not. Every time I try to drink with a gravity weave on, the damned water in the glass sloshes to the left and tries to go up my nose.”

“Then stop drinking with your left hand,” Xavine teased her.

Helstead pointed at him. “Watch it, meioa; we’re not always gonna be off duty, you know.”

Wisely, he ducked behind Ia, who merely shook her head. Opening the bag slung over her shoulder, she held it out. “Give me the transceivers. I’ll get them to the right people.”

Xavine pulled his out. He hesitated before placing the first palm-sized unit inside, though. “This
is
approved of by the Command Staff, right?”

“Of course it is,” Ia told him. “Everything I do has been approved.”

Technically, her words were true. Technically, she could say them with a straight face. Technically…she was abusing her
carte blanche
. But Xavine and the others didn’t know that.

Nodding, he deposited the other transceivers into her bag. Loewen did the same, then hooked her arm around his and dragged him off to the front room for a snack run. They staggered a bit as their weaves interacted, but weren’t too fazed. Ia detoured into the kitchen halfway down the hall. Turning down the heat on his cooking unit, the short-order cook accepted the bag with a silent nod of thanks and took it into the basement.

There was a door down there that led to an old Terran-installed bunker, which in turn led down into the lava tunnels the Free World Colonists were using as their new home. On the other side of the first door, a bored agent of their underground government waited for the promised bag. Those devices were the top-of-the-line in Terran military espionage. She had already checked the timestreams, and knew the Church had nothing on hand that could detect them.

As for the Command Staff finding out about this little mission, by the time they did, Ia hoped to have far more important battles under way to serve as a distraction, and as proof of the justification behind her actions.

Or to put it another way, it’s a simple case of Jack’s Law #213,
she thought, amused.
When all else fails, cloud the issue with facts.

JANUARY 23, 2496 T.S.

The last of the cargo crates hummed downward out of sight, thanks to the floor lift. Satisfied the supplies would be safe, Ia turned away. She gave her attention to the five waiting members of her family instead. First was her biomother, Amelia. Seen in the clear light of day rather than the dimmer light found underground, a lot more grey salted her mother’s curls than Ia remembered seeing before. Worry lines creased Amelia’s freckled brow, but her arms were still strong and warm.

“I hate this,
gataki mou
,” her mother muttered into her chest, heavyworlder strong but heavyworlder short. “Just the one more time, right?”

“Just once more, unless things go seriously wrong,” Ia
promised. Patting Amelia on the back, she released her and turned to her other mother, Aurelia.

The slightly taller woman squeezed her hard, then stepped back, looking up at her stepdaughter’s face. “You go out there,
kardia mou
,” she ordered Ia, “and you kick frogtopus asteroid, you hear me? Laser-fried calamari as far as the eye can see.”

Fyfer wrinkled his nose. “Eww! Ma!”

Aurelia spread her hands, shrugging. “What? I didn’t say she had to
eat
it.”

Wrapping an arm around her younger brother, Ia ignored the stares of the soldiers lining up near the main entrance to the spaceport warehouse. Scrubbing her knuckles over his scalp, she mussed his carefully styled hair one last time, then hugged him hard enough to lift him a few centimeters off the ground. She got painfully pinched for her troubles, but laughed, gently letting him drop back down.

Next in line was Rabbit, not a blood relative, unless one counted the fact she was in a complicated relationship with both of Ia’s brothers. Rabbit wasn’t her birth name, but rather the nickname she had adopted; her two front teeth, prominent in her plain, round face, made the reason self-evident. Her smile dispelled any illusions about a lack of beauty, though.

Kneeling in front of her, Ia held out her arms; even for a heavyworlder, Rabbit was short. She was also pregnant, five months along and having the child naturally rather than via a wombpod. That would put stress on her stocky frame in this gravity, but Ia knew her old school friend could handle it.