Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (44 page)

While the Admiral-General thought, Ia eased up on their acceleration, partly to spare her crew, who weren’t used to long stints in high gravity, and partly to change vectors. Some of the Salik missiles were still going fast enough to catch up with them, and the Salik lasers were getting better at targeting the
Hellfire
’s hull, now that Ia was speeding up for an escape. The faster one went, the harder it was to deviate from course, and the Salik gunners knew it. Twisting the ship counterclockwise a little, she presented a fresh section of panels for the lasers to score, and accelerated again.

“…You haven’t disappointed me with your performance yet,” Myang stated, shifting in her seat to input the codes on her end of things. “
Yet.
Transmitting the paperwork, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir. Al-Aboudwa, catch that and copy it to the Company files,” Ia ordered, easing back on the thruster fields so he could move. She had to roll the ship slightly once again as the lasers continued to tag their hull.

“For now, Captain, you have the continuing confidence of the Command Staff,” the Admiral-General told her. “Don’t
shakk
it up.”

“Sir, no, sir,” Ia agreed. “That is not my intention, sir.”

“Got it, Captain,” Al-Aboudwa told her. “Received and saved.”

“Good job, Private. Thank you, Admiral-General,” she added, eyes fixed on the screens displaying their surroundings, toes in the timestreams. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, we need to go pay for some repairs with that lovely cheque—one more thing, sir.”

She pulsed the field panels for six seconds, slipping them forward hard and fast.

Myang lifted her brows. “Considering I’ve renewed your
carte blanche
, under the same double-indemnity terms, what else could you want?”

Ia eased back. “It’s not about what I want. It’s a warning, sir. Two months from now, a couple of the Feyori are going to be very pissed at me. They may try to infiltrate and influence the minds of the Command Staff. Be on your guard.”

Again, she accelerated. This time, Myang frowned. “What are you going to do to them, soldier?”

“Actually, it’s what I already did,” Ia grunted, fighting the vector pull. She rolled the ship one last time. “I do have plans to take care of them. I’m just warning you, sir. Ia out.”

A tap of her thumb ended the comm link. Not that full FTL wouldn’t have ended it for her, since it was extremely difficult for the ship to maintain hyperrelay communications without a dedicated vacuum chamber on board while wrapped in a skin of warped physics.

A scrape of her fingertips shot them forward hard and fast, leaping ahead of the pulsing, orange streaks that were now the only weapons that could catch them. Just as the enemy’s sensors recalibrated, tagging one last shot on their aftmost panels, the stars on the screens burst and streaked, crossing the lightspeed barrier.

Gentling their acceleration, Ia checked her upper screens, tabbing through the list of damaged hull components. “That was a nasty fight. But we’re still greenlit for travel. Power your station back around, Fielle, and prepare to take back the helm. We’ll stay at FTL for another half hour to evade pursuit, then hyperwarp the rest of the way.”

“Can I hit the head first, Captain?” he asked her.

“Go right ahead. Just don’t take all shift,” she warned him. “Doobie, plot a hyperrift course for System Rau Niil 78. Line it up so we come in somewhere behind the second planet, close enough to duck behind it. There’s a sixty percent chance the star will flare up and cast out an ion storm about the time we arrive. Nelson, we have a weak stretch of FTL panels in the aft sector, starboard ventral.”

“Aft sector, five by seventeen, aye, sir,” Dubsnjiadeb agreed, as Fielle finished powering his station around and unclipped his harness. “I’m also keeping an eye on it. Engineering’s working up an internal fix in case that center panel fails. I’ve already
told Sugartoo that we got the repair authorization. She’ll pass that along to Commander Harper when he comes on duty.”

Sugartoo was actually Xhuge, as in Private First Class Meyling Xhuge, wife and teammate of Corporal Yen Xhuge, one of the four crew members who served as a comm tech for the first duty watch, and one of Lieutenant Rico’s top code crackers. His nickname, “Sugar,” had been established early on as a play on his name, and when their first CO had granted them permission to wed, Meyling had sworn she was now “a Sugar, too,” or Sugartoo for short. Oddly enough, her nickname was the only one people used these days.

The Space Force didn’t mind it if soldiers married each other, so long as their relative ranks and positions weren’t in conflict with Fatality Forty-Nine: Fraternization. Since both were enlisted and close to each other in rank, there wasn’t enough conflict in their position as teammates to bother most commanding officers, including Ia. It helped that the two of them worked in different parts of the ship normally; while her husband served on the bridge, Sugartoo was an excellent mechanic and made a good engineering lead for those times when Commander Harper wasn’t around. Of course, she was just one of four on her duty watch, since everyone had to swap duties every hour or two to prevent boredom, work fatigue, and glazed-eye syndrome, but she was good at her job.

“Don’t anybody tell the Admiral-General,” Ia quipped, “but I actually wanted that
carte blanche
just so our first officer wouldn’t yell at me about what I’ve been doing to his ship while he slept.”

Her joke provoked a few chuckles. Rico snorted. “If he could sleep through
that
fight, I’ll have to ask the doctor what meds she’s been slipping into his hot cocoa. I could use ’em, too.”

“Careful, or she might try to slip them into
my
cocoa,” Ia retorted. “She thinks I’ve been stinting myself on sleep.”

“Technically, you have been, Captain,” Rico pointed out. “You’ve been running thirty-two-hour days lately instead of twenty-four.”

“I’ll survive, Lieutenant.” She held the helm steady with her left hand and used her right to access the workpad clipped to her console. Now that she had a few free moments, she had to go back to composing prophecies. Time wasn’t entirely on her side. Thankfully, the Admiral-General was. “The important
thing is that by short-sheeting myself, many others will survive as well.”

MARCH 29, 2496 T.S.

CHIMERA V ORBIT
JORDAN TAU-CETI 28 SYSTEM

“How’s your shoulder?” Chaplain Benjamin asked Ia. She offered a cup of caf’ to the younger woman. Ia accepted it, and the redhead curled up in the stuffed chair across from her. “And how many times have I asked you that, anyway?”

“Three…four times now, and I’m under orders not to use it or stress it for two days,” Ia confided, cradling the mug in her right hand. Her left arm hung in a sling. “The mechanics tell me I won’t be able to use the suit arm for two weeks, it’s that badly mangled.”

“But you got the control node for the robots,” Bennie pointed out. “And you took them out before they could take out the dome defenses from underground. A task which you could’ve left to Lieutenant Spyder.”

“He’s good, but that one required precision shooting. You haven’t seen the vidlogs. I shot through a gap about this big.” She made a circle out of her thumb and forefinger with her left hand since her right one was busy, then winced at the pain the movement stirred. She relaxed her fingers. Sipping from the mug in her right hand, Ia shook her head. “Besides, it served a second purpose. Eighteen of my crew got to see me in ‘Bloody Mary’ mode, and that’s good for morale.”

Bennie snorted, almost choking on her caf’. She lowered her mug, rubbing at her nose. A few sniffs cleared it. “Ow…Your sense of humor is terrible…Not to mention, I’d think that seeing their CO’s arm getting crunched by an oversized, motorized monkey wrench would be
bad
for morale.”

“Nope. It shows them I’m willing to take the same risks that they do. Besides,
that’s
what Spyder was good for. He’s the one who cut through the tensor cables, freeing my arm before it could be pulverized.”

“Instead of dislocated. Again,” Bennie stated dryly. “So…how are you sleeping at night?”

Ia lifted her brows, mouth busy with her cup. She swallowed,
and asked, “What, no cracks about how little I’ve been sleeping?”

Bennie shook her head. Her hair had grown long enough that the auburn plait barely moved across her shoulders. “I figured if Jesselle didn’t drug you insensate, then she thinks you’re doing alright, medically.”

“Well, we did get into a little argument over that while she was patching me up,” Ia admitted. “But I convinced her I was going to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours after seeing you.”

At that, the chaplain lifted a brow. She gave Ia’s cup a pointed look. “Oh, really?”

Ia grinned. “I will. In about four more hours, when I’ve finished filling out the paperwork on the battle and written twenty more prophecies.”

Bennie kept her brow arched.

“I promise!” Ia protested. Then added honestly, “Unless an emergency happens, and I’m needed on the bridge.”

Her truthfulness earned her a gimlet stare from her friend. “And
will
there be one?”

“Fifteen percent probability,” she admitted, leaning back in the padded chair. “This is a very comfy chair…Is this the chair I saw on Grizzle’s requisitions manifest? Nice chair…Anyway, that fifteen percent is only if the TUPSF
Zizka
leaves the system early, and I’ve asked them to stay. I told their captain if they do extend their stay by an hour or so, they’ll be better placed to scare off the Salik scoutship headed our way, looking for weakness in the local defenses. You know, I think I need to get one of these seats for my own office.”

“Nonsense, you’d fall asleep and never get any work done,” Bennie scoffed.

This time it was Ia who arched her brow. “First you want me to sleep, but now you
don’t
want me to sleep?”

“Consistency, you cannot have,” the older woman quipped, hiding her grin in a sip from her mug.

Chuckling, Ia sat up and fitted her cup into the clip on the edge of the coffee table, then sighed and leaned back again. “I could use some decent sleep, yes. But every clunk and thump from the repair teams is going to keep me awake, worrying that something will break on the wrong side of the probability curve during their work, making us further delayed. We
replaced five pods at Rau Niil, but we lost too many sensor arrays this fight. If nothing bad happens, Harper’s teams will be done in about four hours, which means third watch will be free to get the ship under way. If anything does, I can be on top of it with exactly what’s wrong, and we’ll be under way in five.
Then
I can sleep.

“If not, if I go to sleep now, and something happens…more damage, more delays. More problems for me to fix.” She eyed her cup of caf’, debating whether or not to drink more of it. Sighing, she sat forward and unclipped it, choosing caffeine over common sense. “I can’t wait until my arm gets out of this sling. It’s throwing off my balance, and I’m not allowed to exercise in high gravity like this. Every day I lose while I wait for my body to heal is five extra days of struggling to recover the strength I’ve lost.”

“At least your suit’s safety cage held, and you didn’t lose the arm. So how
are
you sleeping these days?” Bennie pressed, not deterred by the change in subject. “No avoiding the question, Captain. Any nightmares?”

A slight but genuine smile tugged at Ia’s lips. “Pretty well, and very few, Commander. Especially after the
carte-blanche
extension.”

Bennie smiled. “Good. Now, since you’re more or less mentally stable…for you…let’s chat about the rest of your crew. Private Davies is coming along slowly in her misandry therapy, but she is making progress. I’ve been watching her spar with her teammate, and she’s not quite so conflicted about hitting him—and when she does, she’s not wasting her blows in anger.”

“Mm…I’ve only seen them spar a few times, but that’s good,” Ia agreed, sipping at the cooling brew. “What about Private Kim? Ah, Kimberly Kim. Has she mentioned Sergeant Maxwell?”

Bennie narrowed her eyes. “Are you trying to pry past the sacred seal of both the therapy session and the confessional?”

Ia snorted. “For one, I’m a fellow priestess, duly ordained, blah blah blah. For another, I already know where those two are headed, more or less. As far as I’m concerned, since they’re not posted to the same Platoon and so long as they’re still fit for work when their watch comes up, they can bounce on the bedsheets all night long whenever they’re off duty. Just not on
my
bedsheets.”

That made the chaplain choke on her drink. She coughed a bit, laughing. “
Shakk!
God bless you, Ia, but you’re
not
supposed to be trying to kill me with laughter, here. And you made me swear! Bad girl!”

Smirking, Ia shrugged, unrepentant in the face of her chaplain’s finger-waggling. “Hey, I’ll take my humor wherever I can get it. It’s also nice to know you’re Human, too.”

“I’ll save my prayers of repentance for later, just in case you make me do it again,” Bennie dismissed. She rose, asking, “More caf’? If you’re going to stay up four more hours, that is?”

“Please,” Ia agreed, holding out her cup. “Back to the crew, and Kim versus Maxwell.”

“Careful, Ia,” the chaplain cautioned as she retreated toward the dispenser, “or I’ll think you’re secretly a romantic at heart.”

Ia didn’t deny it. “Why shouldn’t I be? I love this galaxy so much, I’m willing to marry my life to it.”

“That’s a hero/martyr complex,” Bennie dismissed. “I’m talking
romantic
love.”

“A girl has to amuse herself somehow, and I am still female deep down inside. Besides, all this chastity sucks like a black hole,” she muttered. “Might as well hear about it secondhand.”

“You haven’t renewed anything with Meyun yet?” Bennie asked Ia, glancing her way. She came back and returned Ia’s cup to her. “Considering how he looks at you…”

“He can look all he wants.” She sighed, accepting the mug. Slouching back, she sagged in the seat in an uncaptainly way. “Nothing can happen between us until the whole crew is on our side. The Command Staff’s spies are still watching for that sort of thing, and they won’t convert to the Church of Ia for a couple more years, in most scenarios.”