Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (33 page)

“Whose life is that?”
Rico asked her, eyeing the purple-tinted red.

“Private MacInnes; she looks up to you as a role model. Not a bad choice, either,”
Ia told him. Erasing the colors, she gestured with her free hand.
“Upstream is the past; downstream is the future. I hauled you out of your life-stream when we first arrived because the moment we arrive is always the present, and lingering in the present creates a doubled, disorienting sensation. In addition to that,
any
thought you have can trigger an associated memory from the past, rushing those memory-waters downstream into you. Think of toast, and you’ll drown under a thousand different instances of eating caramelized bread.
”

“Lovely. Why do our voices echo so much?”
he asked next, lifting the littlest finger of his free hand to his ear for a wiggle.

“We’re immersed only lightly at the moment.”
Concentrating, Ia increased her awareness of the timeplains, and with it, his. “…Is that better?”

He wiggled his finger in his ear one more time, then nodded. “Better.” Pausing, he inhaled, blinked, then inhaled again. “Amazing. I can actually
smell
the sunbaked grass. But why is it more blue now than green?”

His question provoked a smile from her. “That’s because the local equivalent to grass on Sanctuary is blue. The grass really
is
greener on Earth.”

Squinting against the sunlight, Rico studied the plains. “So, what do we do now?”

“We look for two things. Our blank spot, and our supply-requisitioner. But not like this,” Ia said. “Try not to feel vertigo.”

He glanced at her—and clutched at her hand again as the grass fell away, replaced by stars. “God!” Rico exclaimed, grip tightening around her fingers. His large, muscular frame floated awkwardly next to Ia’s. “Warn me better, next time!”

“You’re the one who wanted to come along,” Ia pointed out.

Brow furrowing in a frown, Rico gave her a pointed look. “I thought you said your abilities focused more on people, not places.”

“They do,” she admitted.

“So how is it we’re surrounded by a giant star map?” he asked. “Aren’t these places, not people?”

“Yes, but they’re a composite awareness of the stars as viewed by a large sampling of people’s life-streams,” Ia explained patiently.

He stared at her. She stared back, lifting an eyebrow in a silent dare to see if he would ask another question.

“…Right,” Rico finally muttered. “I’ll just shut up now and go along for the ride.”

Turning her attention to the stars, Ia zoomed them in toward two patches of misty grey nebulae. “We should have a slight advantage. This moment is the Now.” She paused as the stars twinkled around them, then continued. “What we’re looking for is upstream, into the past. Not just any random past, but specifically what has already happened in our own temporal lineage. That way we can rule out the fifty-fifty probability of either location, because one should have been selected by now. The difficulties will be: one, finding any life-streams in the anti-psi mist to examine; and two, finding those life-streams whose owners have actual knowledge of where they’ve gone.”

Stopping at the edge of one of the two mist-patches, Ia lifted her hand, summoning a hologram of a Salik with dull yellowish skin, the image she had lifted from MacInnes’s mind.

“G’nush-pthaachz Mulkffar-gwish. Or rather,” Ia made the image say, with the proper nostril-flap flexings,
“~`Pthaachz Mulkffar^.”
This was all inside her head, constrained only by the limits of her gifts, not the limits of her body. She switched back to her own voice, letting the Salik’s face fade slowly. “Keep him in mind.”

“Why should I?” Rico asked her. “It’s not
my
psychic abilities being used here.”

“No, but your Sallhash is better than mine,” she reminded the tall man at her side. Even floating in mental space, he was still larger than her. Proportionately larger, letting her know he was comfortable with his greater size. “You wanted to know what I see, and that means seeing it right alongside me. But this is the Space Force. You pull your weight, even what little there is in this place. There are no free rides here, soldier.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” he muttered. “Three bags full, sir.”

“That only counts if you can say it in Sallhash,” Ia quipped. A
snerk
sound escaped him; a glance showed his mouth twisted in a half smile. She returned it with a wry smile of her own. “Brace yourself, Lieutenant. We’re about to get up close and personal with Salik xenopsychology.”

A tiny pinpoint was moving away from the cloud. Ia dove them down toward it. The pinpoint became a Salik starship, long and five-lobed. It zoomed close, and the hull vanished, replaced instead by a splash of water, a wavering impression of a corridor, a distortion of two overlapping, separately moving views. Ia felt Rico clutching at her hand, bruising it with his mental strength, and pulled back until they stood once more on the grassy banks of someone’s life-stream.

“What’s wrong?”
she asked, gentling the intensity for a moment.

He blinked and looked around.
“We…I…That was…disorienting. Is that how they view the world?”

“Yes.”
Stepping down into the alien’s cold, thick water, she tugged him after her.
“We have to wade through several of these lives. Watch your step. I’m intensifying the connection to the timestreams again.”

“Wait,” Rico said. “If we talk to each other…will they hear us? Or if we try to talk to them?”

“No. It’d be like talking to a previously recorded vidshow broadcast and expecting the actors to hear you,” Ia said. “Whatever reception equipment I have, I don’t think it can broadcast back to them. At least, I’ve never gotten it to work with friends and family. I can’t even talk to
myself
whenever I investigate my own life-stream, which has caused some problems along the way—the proverb ‘if I’d known back then what I know now’ is singularly unhelpful since my future self cannot tell my past self a damn thing, and I don’t have enough seconds to spare to say it out loud in the future, let alone to write it down. Now come, we’re wasting our opportunity.”

Breathing deep, he stepped into the water, following the tug of her hand. Ia submerged them, tapping into that crew member. Not deep enough to hear thoughts; just enough to see what that alien saw. The view was doubled and too broad for Human vision, with eyes bulging up from the skull, pointing this way and that. She could feel a headache forming from the disorientation of it and knew Rico would be feeling it, too.

This wasn’t the first time she had investigated a Salik life, though. Swimming upstream, she skimmed through snippets of past events, a shift cycle beginning, an encounter with an officer on watch. Jumping into that stream, she followed that officer in flashes of past events to the beginning of their shift, and from there, to another officer. But that officer merely came from his sleeping tank, so she followed his life-stream down through his day…until he encountered the ship’s captain.

Leaping into his life-stream was easier now that Rico wasn’t resisting the disorientation that came with each transition. He did pull himself closer as she pushed upstream into the past, clinging as the turbulence increased. Some of that came from the speed at which she moved. Some of it came from an increasing misty pressure. Rather than letting it push them out of the water, Ia pushed them deeper into the captain’s head—and then sideslipped into the navigator’s as soon as the captain observed enough of the bridge crew for her to select the right alien.

His thoughts were murky, the terminology and grammar disjointed at first. Eventually, the distortions made sense.
More three years. Service ending, female become. Puddlings teach
to eat
, followed by an image of the captain, and a mental hiss of vicious vengeance-and-hunger.

“I don’t think he likes the captain,”
Ia whispered to Rico, her noir sense of humor surfacing for a moment.
“What do you think?
”

“If you’d studied their culture and history, you’d realize most Salik subordinates don’t,”
he whispered back. They couldn’t even see each other anymore at this level of xenoawareness, but he was still clutching her mental hand tightly.
“Wait…back it up. I think I can read the coordinates for their heading.”

Ia complied. She couldn’t exactly freeze the moment, not with the pressure of that anti-psi misting her mind, but she could replay it in slow, short passes. The navigator looked at the screens positioned over his head, one eye on the actual heading, the other on reference stars and designation numbers.

When she felt him nod, she advanced them upstream again. The mist and the pain thickened apace. Her grasp of Sallhash, written and thought, started to slip. Pushing Rico’s consciousness to the fore, she guided him upstream to the point where the navigator heard the captain order the pilot to disengage from dock and tell the navigator what course to set.

She could feel Rico’s confidence that knowledge of those coordinates would be enough to place their location. Ia wasn’t so sure. Stretching herself, she left him in the navigator’s waters and dipped into the captain’s thoughts.

Riptides of sloppiness,
she heard the captain cursing in the privacy of his mind.
Pity for those prisoners. Now useless dredge-sand.

With that thought came an image of Solaricans, shaved and restrained on tables, their wrinkled heads encased in bands that looked vaguely like the anti-psi headsets Ia had seen back on Sallha at the aborted banquet. Ia pursued that thought, trying to find a time reference. She found it from three Salik Standard days before. Grabbing Rico, she pulled him after her, ignoring his wordless protests.

The pain increased, the farther back they went. It was oddly like G-force sickness. The edges of her vision started to grey out. Each breath became a struggle. But the captain
was
there…and did come close enough to one of the Salik scientists for Ia to make the leap into her life-stream.

Sexual deviancy among the Salik had nothing to do with methods of copulation. This was a Salik who had chosen to turn female without procreating. Her thoughts were cruel, vicious, and cold. Clinical, in that she thought about the torment of the Solarican prisoners simply as an exercise in observing their reactions to various anti-psi modulation exercises. She felt none of the pity the captain had felt; she did not think her prey unworthy of time or effort. To her, the felinoid aliens were objects to be toyed with until destroyed. Her hunt was all about knowledge, not adrenaline and food.

Forcing back the flow of time, Ia found another Salik, an officer. Male again—cold and brutal, but not nearly so calculating. Then another…and a third, one who was eating a prisoner, a skreeling, shuddering, bleeding K’katta chained with all ten legs sprawled out straight, leaving it no more than a finger-width of room in any direction in which to shudder and move. Rico huddled mentally at her back, no longer reaching voluntarily for the thoughts and words of these tentacle-fingered fiends.

Ia endured the first-person perspective of the Salik’s meal, watching them eat because it was a meal being shared by five high-ranking officers. Her detachment was dissimilar to the Salik scientist’s; hers was an effort to listen to their words because she had no other choice, not because she was intrigued by what they were doing. Thankfully, with the anti-psi machines pressing around, it wasn’t difficult to ignore the visual aspects. It was a little harder to let the flavors and scents fade, but when they did, the mental presence of her lieutenant uncurled a little, listening intently.

What they heard surprised him, for he squeezed her hand tightly. Ia didn’t let herself think about it. Instead, she listened a little bit longer, repeating the discussion three full times to make sure both of them heard all of it. Only then did she carefully retreat, moving slowly enough that neither of them would suffer the psychic equivalent of decompression sickness. As she did so, she slid them forward through that officer’s timeline, double-checking along the way to make sure his home vessel was indeed headed where that conversation said it would go.

The moment she had confirmation, she pulled back. The grey mist became the star field, became a single watery stream, its surrounding, grassy prairie…and with a final flip, the briefing room. Used to the disorientation that was the return
to reality after such a deep descent, Ia inhaled slowly, calming her nerves. Lieutenant Rico’s face looked pasty, almost grey in spite of his natural golden brown tan.

“Breathe, Lieutenant,” she ordered quietly, finding her voice. “Slow, deep breaths. Focus on the sound and feel of your own breath. Nice, slow, steady breaths, four times in a row…”

Behind Ia, MacInnes rose from her seat, moving over to the alcove by the door where a drinks dispenser had been installed. Rico blinked and complied, brown eyes still unfocused. On the fourth exhale, he shuddered and released her hand. Elbow braced on the table, he lifted his fingers to his mouth, breathing hard and fast through his nose.

Wisely, the private poured and brought back two mugs of cold water. “Drink this, sirs,” she urged, offering one cup to Ia and the other to Rico. She had to help Rico lift his to his mouth, his free hand shook that much. “Easy, Lieutenant; let me help you…There, just a sip at a time…There you go, that’s the first one.”

Once he had taken that sip, the private dipped two fingers in the water, then stroked her damp digits across his brow. Pursing her lips, she blew a stream of air on his forehead. Ia dipped her own fingers in her cup, dabbing it from her hairline in a streak down the middle of her brow, parting her fingers to either side of her nose. She sipped slowly from the cup while the cool liquid on her skin drew some of the heat out of her temples and sinuses.

The water-cooling trick was the same one taught by the PsiLeague, which MacInnes was affiliated with, as well as by the Witan Order, which had trained Ia in the early uses of her gifts. It was meant to help focus thoughts as well as reduce the heat-induced headaches that often accompanied intense psychic efforts. Ia rarely suffered from them, but the anti-psi fog plus the need to shelter and escort another mind through the timeplains had taken its toll.