Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (57 page)

“Nothing will be coming from that exact direction for almost a year,” Ia stated. “The force of the beam will dissipate over the next eight light-months, until at most it will be an annoying flash on the scanners of passing ships.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask how much damage it did,” Mysuri
stated wryly. “Especially if it takes eight light-months for that beam to stop being lethal.”

“We’ve just obliterated all but seven of their ships,” Ia told her. “I had to hold the beam on for that long to make sure no chunks too large for FTL would remain. What little makes it to Sol System will be slowed by the heliopause winds and the Oort cloud debris. Eyes to your boards, meioas, and thoughts on your tasks. Those seven ships will be coming into system in four more hours, as will a fleet of Salik. We need to turn back the Choya with another warning, if we can. But I’m not going to hold my breath.”

“The hell with that,” Sangwan snorted. “If I were that admiral, and I’d just lost most of my fleet, I’d get the hell out of this system the moment I spotted this ship.”

“It’ll be a touch-and-go fight with or without them. They might choose to stay and help make things worse,” Ia said. “But we will prevail…and then we’ll have a very brief six hours of Leave on Battle Platform
Freedom of the Stars II
…whereupon many of you will receive commendations for your efforts in my service.”

“About muckin’ time,” Helstead snorted, shifting back in her seat to rest her feet on the edge of her console. “I’ve been putting in recommendations right and left since we fired our first shot on this ship.”

JANUARY 5, 2497 T.S.

CONFUCIUS
STATION
DLC 718 TORPETTI SYSTEM

Lieutenant Commander Meyun Harper glared at his CO. He had to raise his voice as one of his engineers started up the cutter at the far end of the manufactory bay, adding to the cacophony of the grinders and laser welders being used. “I’m telling you, Captain, this would be considerably
easier
if we had stopped at a
regular
docking facility, or a
military
one!”

“Everyone else within sixty light-years will be needing their supplies, Commander!” Ia returned just as loudly. The cutter shut off, but the rasp of the grinders and the scorchings of the
welders kept going. “I’m telling you, you
can
modify these supplies to fix our pipe fittings!”

“Well, I’m telling you that if I
do
fix up these
shakking
pieces of pipe, we’re going to have to
weld
them in place, and that means cutting them off and replacing
three
lengths instead of one!
You’re
the one who said we only have seven hours in this place. That’s not enough time to melt them down and extrude entirely new pipes of the right size and shape,” Harper reminded her, lowering his voice as the grinder cut off.

Ia threw her hands up in the air. “Just melt and extrude some scrap into coupler rings! That’s why I got you the extralarge pipes stored down on Deck 17!”

He stared at her, then covered his goggle-protected eyes with his hand. Some of the other noises cut off as well, giving him room to speak. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that myself…”

She clasped his shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. “It’s been a long, hard series of fights, Meyun. You have kept this ship together, and
put
it back together, more times than I can count.”

One set of doors hissed open off to the side. Lieutenant Rico poked his head inside, spotted the two of them, and plucked a set of goggles out of the plexi-fronted case by the door. He didn’t bother to put them on, just held them over his eyes as he approached.

“Captain, your 12,379
kesant
are almost up,” he stated blandly. “You have roughly one hour to compose that message you promised to send to the Greys.”

It was her turn to blank out for a moment. Wincing, Ia nodded. “…Right, right. Too many battles on my brain. I almost forgot about opening up
that
war front. Time for some damage control—Meyun, do you need me for anything else?”

“Yes. A pass for a week’s Leave on a beach near Aloha City,” he quipped dryly. The grinder started up again. He flipped a hand at her, raising his voice. “Go on! I have those couplings to fit!”

Nodding, she joined Rico. They removed their goggles and secured them at the door, then left the machine-filled manufactory bay. As soon as the thick door slid shut, cutting off the majority of the noise, Ia sighed in relief. She rubbed at the back of her neck, striding alongside her tall intelligence officer.

“Any chance we’ll be getting that much Leave on Earth anytime soon?” Rico asked after several seconds had passed.

She blinked up at him in confusion, then recalled Meyun’s quip. “No. Unfortunately. And even if we did, I’d only be able to spare an hour at most for beach-lounging, myself…never mind other activities.”

He let that pass in silence until they reached her office. Ia blanked out the surveillance pickups as they entered, knowing what he was going to ask her next. Sure enough, he did. He wasn’t the wary junior officer of a year ago. She knew he was on her side, but he still asked anyway.

“Sir, you said a year ago that the Admiral-General authorized these communications with the Greys,” Rico stated. “But does she
really
know about them? Or is this just a massive stretching of your
carte-blanche
authority?”

“It’s a massive stretching,” Ia confessed quietly, taking her seat. She gestured for him to take one of the chairs across from hers. “Some would even call it an outright breaking. The probabilities are high that even after I fast-talked to her, Myang would call it Grand High Treason. But I give you my word, if I didn’t foresee this deal brokering saving hundreds of millions of lives in the future, I wouldn’t go anywhere near the Shredou.

“I just…” Frustrated that she couldn’t tell him the full truth, Ia sighed and slumped in her seat, rubbing at her temples. “I need them to
stop
when I tell them to stop, so that they don’t destroy the Terran Empire and trample onward into the rest of Alliance space. And the only way to do that is to convince them that I am a massive precog. One so powerful, I can
see
their movements with great accuracy, to the point where they…Hell, I don’t know if they
can
feel superstition as we Humans do, but I need them to stop their predations because of it.”

“Superstition?” Rico asked, one brow lifting in skepticism.

“They’re not from this galaxy. The energies are all wrong,” Ia said, sitting up again. “They’re trying to rebuild their race by melding it with local biology—Humans are the closest they can come to something both sentient and compatible, which is why they keep coming after us every few generations—but thanks to Feyori interbreeding efforts, our psychic abilities hurt them. It’s a weapon they cannot defend against because it is truly alien to them. And the fact that I can wield this weapon
against them by predicting their own movements as well as directing all the others’ is going to scare them.

“More than that, if I can show them how accurate I am with
them
, I can show them how accurate I’ll be with their ancient enemy. If you’ll recall,” Ia reminded him, “I threatened to point the Zida”ya at them and pull the trigger if they don’t comply. Proving to them that I
am
that accurate will scare them shitless, in the end. Literally. When I prove my final point to them, the Greys involved in that fight won’t be able to unpucker for three days.”

“So you’re hoping to scare them into compliance, bringing the coming war with them to an end when you
need
it to end,” he murmured, following her line of reasoning.

“Exactly.” Tapping her workstation, she raised the screens, flipping two of the tertiaries at the bottom so that he could read the information from his side of the desk. Her primary scrolled up the messages as well, facing the normal way so that she could read it, too. “Here’s the first set of messages I want to send. I
think
I’ve composed them correctly, but there are some probability variables that suggest they might be taken the wrong way. The Terranglo version’s on the left from your perspective, the Shredou on the right.”

“I’ll see what ambiguities I can fix,” Rico promised, frowning at the text.

FEBRUARY 3, 2497 T.S.

KNOT 2,330,427
HELIX NEBULA

“Never-ending battle, never-ending battle,” Helstead muttered in between pulsing the trigger for her chain of cannons. “Never-ending battle, never-ending battle.
Please
tell me, sir, that we’re going to have a bit of Leave soon? Real Leave, off-this-bloody-mucky-blasted-ship-style Leave?”

“Maybe, if you asked them very, very nicely,” Ia muttered back, slipping their much slimmer ship between two Terran Starcarrier-Class capital ships, “the Salik and the Choya might stop trying to pick all these fights with us.”

Proximity warnings beeped as a clutch of projectiles skimmed past their hull, swerving to avoid the
Hellfire
. They
were Terran missiles, programmed to identify friend from foe and adjust course accordingly. Lasers couldn’t do that, though, and two of them nearly seared the ship as they slid past. Nearly, but didn’t.

Togama, manning the comms, whistled softly. “Wow, Captain, you are
certainly
stretching the vocabulary of the comm tech for the
George Cairns
. I don’t think that one’s anatomically possible even for a jellyfish.”

“Unlike the original George Cairns, we will not die of blood loss from a severed limb,” Ia returned calmly, strafing the
Hellfire
sideways in front of the TUPSF
Powahann
.

“…Ooh, even nastier,” Togama quipped, touching his headset. “The
Powahann
’s claiming you’re completely off next year’s Christmas card list, Captain.”

“Really?” Helstead asked, perking up a little. “That bad?”

“Well, somehow I doubt ‘Die in a Salik frying pan, you Shikoku Yama Flightschool reject; get the hell out of our path’ qualifies us for fondly remembered relative status,” he replied. The humor broke up some of the tension in the crew, though not the majority of it.

“Eyes on your boards, thoughts on your tasks,” Ia gently admonished. “Just seven more minutes of close-quarters fighting should see the Salik threat contained.” She flicked on the intercom.
“All gunners down the starboard flank, continue to fire on the enemy ships for two more minutes, then cease fire.”

The knots ejected by the shockwave shell from Helix’s age-old supernova made for a rough transition at anything but sublight speeds. Few ships cared to traverse the barriers. Few ships were armored enough to survive the radiation found inside for long, either.

However, each cometary knot was roughly the size of the Sol System, which meant it made for an excellent hiding place for a rather large Salik base. With giant solar sails erected to capture the echoing, last radiations from the exploded star and provide both shelter and power for at least eight major stations, the Salik had parked a sizeable chunk of their shipyards in one of these knots, sucking up all that free energy.

This fight marked one of the few times Ia had agreed to the Admiral-General’s request that she and her crew join a specific battle rather than dash off somewhere else. One more random
ship in a joint fleet of over a hundred might not make a difference, but
her
ship might, and she was striving hard to make sure it did. That meant being hyperaware of exactly where all those lasers and missiles and chunks of debris might fly at any given moment.

“L-pod 53, cease fire in ten seconds,”
Ia ordered.
“All starboard gunners, L-pod and P-pod, cease fire in one minute.”

Vector change slung them around in their seats as she swapped ends. Fightercraft scattered as they slipped past, their plethora of thrusters firing this way and that. Ia didn’t even hear the proximity beeps anymore; it was only the claxons she cared about.

“L-pod 53, good job,”
she praised, as the private remotely manning that cannon excluded it from his firing commands. Rippling the thrusters shoved them back in their seats, allowing her to dart the ship toward one of the heavily damaged shipyard stations.
“Starboard gunners, thirty seconds to cease fire.”

“Station 5 midpoint in thirty seconds, sir,” Nabouleh told her.

“Shouldn’t we still be firing by that point?” Helstead asked.

“No, that would be bad,” Ia murmured, shifting them to avoid incoming fire from the half of the shipyard station that wasn’t crumpled and on fire.
“Starboard gunners, cease fire in ten…nine…eight…”

Missiles swerved in from behind, arcing around to strike at the heart of the damage. Blossom missiles, they impacted in puffs of light, then burst a second time like fireworks going off.

“…Two…one. Cease fire,”
Ia ordered.
“Cease fire. CEASE FIRE!”
she yelled as the timestreams surged up and yanked her down. She could see nothing but the explosions of those blossom bombs ripping apart the shipyard, hear nothing but the click of a trigger being squeezed in ferocious glee…feel nothing but that pulse of light from Starstrike L-Pod 4 burning through the protective nose cone of the missile emerging from the depths of the TUPSF
Hardberger
’s P-pod 29. That nothingness emerging in a too-late scream.
“SUNG, CEASE FIRE!
”

Too late. Too late…Too. Late.

The timestream overflowed as it swallowed her down, drowning her. Freezing her with the inability to stop the inevitable. Nothing stopped that bright red beam of light. Not her
order, not her wishes, not the chunks of shipyard forced apart by the force of all those explosions.

Water vanished. Water vanished from one lifetime, from a handful, from a hundred and more. The Redeemer’s life dried up and disappeared. The Savior’s course flowed on unaltered. The desert claimed all.

All.

Someone was crying in ragged gasps. Shaking with shock, skin flushed in fire, muscles prickled with ice, Ia stared at her right secondary screen, focused on the cloud of debris. A red circle and line flashed on the screen amid the chaos of battle, along with a simple, death-knelled message: