Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (58 page)

Fatality 13

Fatality.

How apt.

“Sir,” Nabouleh stated, twisting to look back at Ia. “We’re deadheaded for Station 6. We need to move. Sir?
Sir!
”

She couldn’t breathe. Claxons wailed in her ears. Ice and fire seared her nerves. Drowned under the waters removed from those vital, vital streams, she could not breathe.

“SIR!—
Shova v’shakk
,” the yeoman cursed, and whipped back to face her console. “Hotel November, override, override!” she snapped, using her emergency call sign to identify her actions for the bridge’s black box. “Taking the helm!”

The
Hellfire
slipped sideways under her hasty grab, bruising them all against their seats and restraints. Nabouleh added an abrupt downward shift as well. The collision claxons blared. The maneuver yanked them up in their harnesses and slammed them back in place as the interior safety fields pulsed. Seconds later, the shields compressed, rumbling with a strange sort of hiss.

“Good job!” Helstead gasped as they slid past. “
Good
job, Yeoman!”

“Captain, we’re getting a query on a Fatality Thirteen: Friendly Fire,” Togama called out, looking back at her. “What do I reply, sir?…Sir?”

Fatality.

Her moan shifted as her shock morphed into rage.
Fatality…FATALITY!
It emerged in a wordless scream. Straps broke as she lunged out of her seat. Behind her, she could hear her second officer’s voice. It sounded tinny against the blood throbbing through her head.

“God—Nabouleh, get us out of combat,
now
!” Helstead snapped, jabbing at her harness clasps. “Togama, tell them we have an emergency on board and nothing more!”

Vision red with rage, Ia didn’t bother to reach the door before she opened it. Her mind stabbed at the controls, sparking electricity through the system. Squeezing through before the panel finished opening, she sprinted up the hall. L-pod 4 was located on the bow, but it was controlled by L-pod 20, and that was one sector forward and two decks up. Doors hissed open, their panels sparking with electrokinetic energy.

Everything was energy. The red of her fury had altered her view. Doors and bulkheads, floors and ceilings, everything glowed. Everything pulsed. It was all just matter, but it was also oddly see-through. As if she could, if she tried just a little harder, reach out and reach right through it all.

She knew she couldn’t force open both doors of the sector seal. They were pressure-locked against being able to do that, to prevent both negligence and stupidity. Just as she crossed the first of the two thresholds, something struck her from behind. She staggered forward, throwing up her hands to shield herself from hitting the forward door.

The blow was a body. Arms and legs wrapped around Ia’s frame, heels hooking around her waist, bicep and military-issued bracer digging into her throat. Still enraged, Ia reflexively tightened her neck, staving off the pressure which her 3rd Platoon officer tried to apply.

As a force of body, Helstead’s efforts were negligible; Ia was too angry to notice her efforts as more than the wings of a butterfly beating on her back and throat. As a force of will, however, Helstead’s mind slammed down on hers like a sledgehammer.

(
Stand down, soldier!
) she snarled, hooking her right arm around the wrist of the left to apply more leverage against Ia’s windpipe. (
I said
STAND DOWN
!
)

The command exploded in her head, snuffing out half the fire and fury. Ia collapsed to one knee. Helstead squeezed again.

(
Stand down!
) she commanded. (
You will NOT attack Sung! Stay down! STAY. DOWN.
)

The word-thoughts struck her in another blow. Ia’s leg slipped out from under her. She had never faced the force of a psychodominant before, let alone one of Helstead’s high rank.
Dazed, struggling to breathe, she groped for her rage-scattered wits.

(
I don’t care
what
he’s done, you will
not
kill him!
) Helstead growled, squeezing her arm for emphasis. Ia choked and she eased up slightly—then squeezed in again. (
You
will
keep him alive!
)

(
Alright!
) she snarled back, capitulating to the sheer weight of the lieutenant commander’s demands. (
Alright, he’ll live! For
now.)

Surging to her feet as the forward door slid open, Ia strode down the hall. It wasn’t difficult to move with the shorter woman on her back; stocky as she was, Helstead didn’t weigh nearly as much as Ia’s exercise weight suit. She did stagger, though, when the ship rocked around them, attacked by enemy missiles. At least the movement forced Helstead to shift her left arm, clutching more now at Ia’s shoulders than compressing her muscular throat.

The rage was coming back. Swift strides turned into jumps as she ascended the stairs, not bothering with the lift. More doors hissed open, clearing the way. Clinging to her CO, Helstead continued that low, steady, mental hiss, (
…You will not kill him…you need him alive…you will not kill him…you need him alive!
)

An outward snap of her hand hissed open the L-pod’s door. A slash snapped the restraint straps. With a startled yelp, Private Goré Sung tumbled through the door and swayed to a halt. The only thing preventing Ia from slamming him bodily into the far bulkhead was that damnable, insistent, nagging whisper named Helstead.

Jerking him closer with a clench of her fist, Ia stopped him telekinetically, halting him centimeters from her face. “You
shova v’shakk-tor
!” she snarled as he stared back at her with brown eyes so wide, she could see the full ring of their whites. “You have
slaughtered
this galaxy!”

Grabbing him physically by the throat, she dragged him—both of them—into the desert. Forced him into life-stream after life-stream at the galaxy’s end. Forced him to watch worlds being devoured and stars torn apart.

(
You need him alive!
) Helstead yelled deep in her head.

(
No.
I do not.
Not anymore.
) She flung both of them out. Not gentle. Not kind. Sung gasped for air, choking like a
drowning man, though Ia wasn’t physically squeezing his throat. Helstead clung with trembling limbs.

(
You…you can repair…
) she gasped.

“HOW can I repair a DEAD MAN?”
Ia screamed with mind and voice. Sung winced. She didn’t see what Helstead did, her attention reserved for the careless murderer in front of her. Ia flung him up with her mind and her hand, slamming him into the ceiling, provoking a pained grunt.

Helstead dropped free. She landed on hands and knees behind Ia, panting from the force of that mental counterblow. “I…I don’t believe…in the…the no-win scenario,
Captain
,” she growled between breaths. Her hand gripped Ia’s ankle, reinforcing her words mentally as well as physically. “And I know
you
don’t! You. Will.
Drop
him!”

Sung dropped. He
thudded
onto the deckplates with a groan and a faint
crack
, one hand caught awkwardly under his ribs. With a feral snarl, Ia flung the force she had been about to use on him into the bulkhead to her left. It
crunched
, denting inward by at least a third of a meter. Her hand snapped out again, and the dazed private was yanked up, body floating horizontally in her grip.

Coughing, he squinted at her. Ia leaned in close, but did not touch him. She let the madness in her gaze, the rage barely leashed in her words, do all of the damage.

“
Pray
I can find a way to fix the
dead man
you’ve destroyed.
Pray
I can find a way to replace his life! Because of
one
man’s death, unless I can fix it,
you
have doomed this entire galaxy to a fate worse than a Salik’s favorite lunch. Pray I
can
find a way,” she snarled, bringing his nose to within a centimeter of her own. “Because if I cannot…
pray I kill you before I am through
!”

Flinging him away, she let him tumble down the corridor. He grunted and yelled with each impact before skidding to a stop. For a moment, he tried to get up, then groaned and sagged to the deck.

She hadn’t killed him. By luck, and the grace of God, or at least by the demands of Delia Helstead, Ia
hadn’t
killed him. But it was a near thing. As it was, Ia could not see what to do with him. The timestreams were nothing but barren, bleak desert around her, empty fields with nothing left but cracked and lifeless dust.

Behind her, she heard the other woman pushing to her feet. “…Orders, sir?”

Oddly enough, Helstead’s simple question centered her. Ia still couldn’t See a damned thing, but her training as an officer kicked in. There were rules and regulations for this sort of thing. Rules and regs that had to be followed. Hands fisted against the urge to physically express the rage morphing back into grief, Ia swallowed.

“Take the prisoner to the Infirmary. He has a cracked wrist. When it has been set, lock him in the brig. The prisoner is
not
allowed to speak to anyone about anything other than his wrist,” she added tightly, glaring at Sung as he started to stir again. “Unless and until I can figure out what to do with this
nightmare
he’s caused, this ship stays on lockdown, category Ultra Classified. No messages out but for the fact that we’re on lockdown.”

“That won’t cut it with the rest of the fleet, Captain,” Helstead told her. “They
know
about the Friendly Fire. They
will
be expecting an acknowledgment and an arraignment.”

Ia cursed under her breath. Her head hurt, throbbing with the ache of her unsatisfied rage. Scrubbing at her scalp to try and ease it enough to let her think, she dislodged her headset. Impatiently, she stripped it completely off, glared at it, then wrestled the thin curve of plexi back over her head.
“Captain Ia to Private Togama.”

“Togama here, Captain. Uh…is everything alright?”

“No. Acknowledge and register the Friendly Fire with the TUPSF
Hardberger.
The accused is Private Second Class Goré Sung. Inform them we will be contacting them with the details of his arraignment and tribunal at a point in the near future, then broadband cast to the fleet that we are experiencing technical difficulties of an Ultra-Classified nature and will be disengaging from combat and remaining silent while those difficulties are addressed.”

Wincing, she tried to focus her thoughts on the timeplains. The wafting dust of the empty desert clung to her feet like cement. Head throbbing, she forced herself all the way back to the present, to survey the wreckage of the Now with a dispassionate eye.

“Addendum, inform the TUPSF
La Granger, Sword’s Breath,
and
Saibo-Maru
to stay out of the sunward side of Station 3’s
wreckage. Tell the TUPSF
Dian Wei
to break off in two minutes and spend a full minute coming about before reentering the fight. And tell Admiral P’thenn aboard Battle Platform
Hum-Vee
that there are sabotage systems still active on Stations 1, 3, 5 and 8. Boarding parties must use extreme caution. Repeat
that we are going to be running silent under an Ultra-Classified-Situation flag, then do just that.”

“Ah…Aye, sir. I got all that,”
Togama replied.
“Sir, what is the situation?”

“That
is on a need-to-know basis, and you do not need to know.”
Pulling off the headset, she let the band curl up and stuffed it into her pocket.

Helstead had edged around her in order to approach the injured private. Pulling him to his feet, she wrapped her arm around his ribs. “With permission, Captain, I’ll take him to the Infirmary.”

Ia dipped her head, giving it. That did require the two of them to shuffle past her. She moved into the alcove of the L-pod’s door, but only just enough to let them by. As he came within arm’s reach, Ia held his gaze.

“Start.
Praying.
Private,” she warned him, clipping off each word like a bite. Like the snap of a spark in an overheated fire. Like an ice-cold funeral pyre.

He swallowed and looked away.

Only when he was gone from her sight did the fire and the fury still seething within her finally die. Without it, ice-cold fear washed through her veins, prickling her skin with gut-deep dread. The horror robbed the strength from her flesh. Sagging to the deck, Ia doubled over. She struggled against the nausea, but nothing helped. It just built and built until she doubled over and retched.

Not much came out, the smallest of blessings. It had been too long since she last ate, too long since she entered combat. Too long since she had believed she could win against Time and Fate. She heaved again and again for a full minute or more, then sagged back on her heels.

The ship swayed gently around her, bumping her shoulder into the wall. Drained, numb but for the aching, chilling pain, Ia pushed slowly back to her feet. She didn’t know where to go or what to do, only that she couldn’t stay there. Couldn’t stop that arrowing laser, couldn’t stop that emerging missile, couldn’t
stop the gaping hole in the aging
Hardberger
’s hull, its old-fashioned turret and its precious, progenitive cargo now utterly destroyed.

Over and over, those last few seconds replayed in her mind. One hand braced on the wall, she shuffled forward, turning occasionally, moving sightlessly. The
Hellfire
swayed again, then steadied. Noises echoed down the corridor. They belonged to Togama, issuing orders no doubt relayed either from Nabouleh, who had the helm, or Helstead, who was in charge of the watch. They made no sense to her, being just a babble of noise.

Nothing made sense anymore. Nothing
meant
anything anymore. It was all gone, drained away with the loss of a single, precious, supposed to be anonymous life. But that life was gone.

Private First Grade Joseph N’ablo N’Keth. Gone. TUPSF-Navy five years, and a competent gunner. Gone. Retired from active service in five more years. Gone. Settled on his homeworld of Eiaven. Gone. Great-plus-grandfather of the Redeemer, whose life had been meant to redirect the Savior’s, so that she would be in the right mind as well as the right place…