Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (60 page)

As he said it, she could sense the near future of the cometary knot. Nothing was destined to wash through for another eighteen hours, though in nineteen, the more damaged ships would do well to hide behind that sail. “Right. Here’s what I can tell you.”

That caught the attention of her bridge crew. Nabouleh, Wildheart at navigation, Togama, Yé at ops, Aquinar, and Spyder all stared at her. Ia nodded.

“Private Sung did indeed cause the incident of Friendly Fire. And he will pay for his damage to the
Hardberger
’s hull. But…he did
not
kill the gunner who was manning their turret.”

“’E whot?” Spyder asked her, blinking.

“I will tell this
entire
crew what happened at a special boardroom meeting,” Ia promised them. “But for now, you are to maintain communications silence, and you are not to speak of it outside this bridge. Private Yé, I will probably need a great deal of energy routed somewhere on the ship. Probably to my quarters. I don’t know yet. How full are the tanks?”

“Ah…we’re at fifty-six percent capacity, sir,” she stated, glancing at the data on her screens. Ia grimaced, then shook it off.

“I just hope that’ll be enough. Everything must be self-contained until our little Ultra-Classified Situation has been fixed.” Moving over to her normal station, Ia leaned over the console, pushed up the hatch, and pressed her fingers against the hidden electrodes. Pressed, held, and absorbed electricity until her hair crackled and rose off the nape of her neck. Eyes wide, Spyder leaned back from her, though he sat a good three meters away. She gave him a slight, lopsided smile. “Relax. You’re not my target.”

“Ah, beggin’ pardon, but…th’ lieutenant commander said you weren’t allowed t’ kill anybody,” he reminded her.

Her mouth twisted in rueful bitterness. “I know. If the Admiral-General calls, inform her that we still have an Ultra-Classified Situation to contain, and that it is too dangerous a situation to explain over the comms. Reassure her that I
will
explain in due time, then end transmission.”

Togama cleared his throat. “Right. Tell her to mind her own business, then hang up on the Admiral-General herself. I always wondered what it would feel like to be caned…”

“I suggest you
not
joke about that in my presence,” Ia stated flatly, flinching inside at his careless, unknowing words. “Not today, and not for the rest of this week. As you were, meioas.”

Nodding to Spyder, she retreated through the back door to her office, and from there, to her private quarters.

Summoning her faction protector was not too terribly difficult. Ia had already practiced the mental twist of energies that opened up the tiny thread of a cosmic string permanently linking Belini to the corner wall of her living room. The one thing it did take was power, which was why she had stocked up at the command console.

It took a while for Belini to respond. As she waited, Ia probed at the timestreams, trying to shift herself away from
that endgame desolation. The interior of her head felt broken and bruised. She did manage to shift her viewpoint back to where she should be, in the here and now…but every time she pulled out, then flipped back in, the desert at the end of the game was the first thing she could see. Not the waters of her own life and not the grassy banks of a thriving prairie.

The flash of light against her closed lids and the slight shift in air pressure that teased across her face warned her that the Feyori had arrived. Opening her eyes, Ia watched the silvery-dark sphere dip partway into the wall. That dimmed the overhead lights for several seconds, until the overgrown bubble lightened from deep grey hematite to an almost platinum shade. A flash of light popped the soap bubble, depositing Belini on the carpeted deck.

Bare toes digging into the light grey pile, she shifted her hands to her pink-clad hips, once again looking like a demented, wingless pixie. “Well. I certainly didn’t expect
you
to call.” She paused, eyed Ia, then shook her head. “Almost made it, didn’t you? Like I told you, I’m not going to help.”

“What?” Ia frowned for a moment in confusion, then shook it off. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I called you because I need a very big favor. One that is in
your
best interests…because if you don’t help me, to my exact needs, the Game ends. In fact, the Game
has
ended.”

That made the Feyori frown. “What do you mean, the Game has ended?”

Ia sighed and explained. “One of my stupidest gunners refused to stop firing when I ordered him to. His weapon impacted on a fellow Terran ship, and destroyed one of the projectile turrets…and with it, destroyed its gunner. That gunner was to have been the great-plus-grandfather of one of the key figures I needed to have in place to guide the Savior into preventing the destruction of this galaxy. The destruction that would have put an end to everything your race is currently doing with the matter-based species.

“That destruction
will
put an end to everything…unless you and I can fool the universe into thinking that that gunner is still alive and still available to take his rightful place.”

Belini wrinkled her nose. “No,” she stated flatly. “Absolutely not. I have my
own
places to be—”

“Not
you
,” Ia dismissed, rising from her couch. “Private
Finnimore Hollick has volunteered to be the body and soul to be sculpted into the missing gunner’s place. I
do
need you to stick around long enough to pretend to be Hollick in his place, but there should be a chance to kill him off in a bodiless way in about a week if we do everything right. At that point, you can pop off to wherever, and the broken bits of the universe will have been duct-taped back together.”

She considered Ia’s words, her eyes aquamarine, not quite silver. “What about this Hollick fellow? What about
his
rightful place in the universe?”

Ia shook her head, raking one hand through her hair. Again, her bangs were irritating her, a stupid little bother in the face of this disaster.

“I only chose him to be a crew member because of three things. He has the right skills and instincts to do his job well. His presence or absence in any other part of this war will not have made a damn difference one way or another. And because a part of me knew there was something he could do that would help my cause. I thought it was just be a steadying, faith-filled influence among my crew, but…

“This is probably the most extreme thing I could have asked of him, aside from maybe asking him to pull out his own intestines with a rusted spoon,” she quipped sarcastically. “But I did ask, and he did agree to it. And don’t tell me you can’t do it. I
know
you can.

“You said yourself you saved Jesse Mankiller’s life, and that you can take on any shape you like. I know the Feyori calling himself Doctor Silverstone can read thoughts and reshape his own body to copy the life and memories of a man whose hovercar crashed in the Australian bush. And with
my
help,” she stated, “plugging the two of you directly into the missing gunner’s original life-stream, we can guide him into having the right memories and making all the right choices the original would’ve made. A perfect
trompe l’oeil
replacement. Or at least one hopefully good enough to fool Time itself.”

Belini considered her words. Drawing in a breath, she asked shrewdly, “And how will you explain how this gunner survived?”

Ia spread her hands. “Lieutenant Commander Helstead is a teleporter. She sensed the danger he was in, and teleported him blindly onto this ship.” Her own words made her pause; Ia
realized with another sick flush of ice and heat that such a thing would be a violation of the Admiral-General’s command to permit no one else aboard…Feyori notwithstanding. Swallowing, she added, “That’s why we’ve been locked down under the claim of an Ultra-Classified Situation. The teleport stunned him psychically. I then ordered him to be kept sedated while I figured out where he came from and what to do with him.”

Nodding slowly, Belini accepted that line of reasoning. “That might actually work.”

“It has to,” Ia murmured. “I can’t see any other options.”

There
was
another option, but Ia knew it would involve the deaths of a good three or four Feyori. That was not something any of them were prepared to do. Not at this point in the Game, not when Ia herself was still a mere pawn and not a powerful fellow player.

“So,” Belini muttered, ticking off the options on her pixie-slender fingers. “We have a willing body and soul to take the gunner’s place. We have myself to take this Hollick fellow’s place for about a week, until I can safely pretend to die and head off on my own business. And you’ve covered how the gunner gets on board. Do you at least have bits of this missing gunner’s body on hand, so I can get a direct reading of his genetics?”

Ia opened her mouth, then closed it. Tightening her jaw, she pushed past the desert now occupying the back of her mind, forced herself to the present patch in the timestreams, and rooted around in the very recent past. Finally, she nodded. “I don’t have the whole body available, but there is a surviving bit of it tumbling through space. It’s badly burned and frozen, but it should still be enough for you to read his DNA and rebuild Hollick in his shape.”

Belini held out her hand. “Show me.”

Nodding, Ia gripped it and complied. When she was sure the Feyori knew exactly where to look, she released the other woman. “While you go do that, I’ll fetch Hollick up here.”

Belini rolled her eyes. “If he’s going to be sedated, he’ll have to be stashed in the Infirmary, now won’t he? Come on,
think
, woman. That’s what that blob of grey stuff in your skull is supposed to be good for, with you fleshies.”

“Well, if you’ll excuse me, I just had my entire reason for living
smashed
at my feet,” Ia retorted, hands going to her hips.
“And for some God-be-damned reason, I cannot approach the timestreams from my usual spot in the present but am instead stuck with the pain of arriving in the midst of the desolation caused by the Zida”ya fleet! I think, given all the
shakk
I’ve just gone through, that I am holding it together fairly well in spite of all that!”

The look the Meddler gave her was a cool, assessing one. Finally, Belini nodded. “Right, then. Keep holding it together. This will take a lot out of both of us. Go make yourself useful by hauling several power cables to the Infirmary. This isn’t reshaping myself, and it isn’t restoring a woman’s rightful body from a broken to a whole state. And you had
better
be right about being able to pattern his mind and his life-choices, or all this effort will go to waste. All this
energy
will go to waste.

“I’m a Feyori, child,” Belini reminded Ia. “I don’t like to waste my food.” Popping with a flare of light, she re-formed as a silvery soap bubble and swooped through the cabin wall, vanishing.

Ia sighed and scrubbed at her face.
Yet another person to drag into the conspiracy. God,
she begged,
help me. Make sure Jesselle Mishka is in a cooperative mood.

He was perfect. Joseph N’ablo N’Keth, twenty-seven years old and identical to the original in every way that frozen chunks of DNA and increasingly easier pre- and postcognitive forays onto the timeplains could make him to be. Exhausted yet elated, Ia probed the timestreams one more time and nodded in satisfaction.

The original paths were still damaged, but much of it could be salvaged. Only a few things would have to be changed here in the near future, and at about one hundred to one hundred and twenty minor, major, and key timing points down the way, depending on how things panned out. She’d have to stint herself on sleep again to rewrite several of her prophetic directives, but it wouldn’t be a waste of energy.

“Blood pressure 103 over 65, encephalographic activity normal, delta brainwaves declining,” Mishka reported. “You even managed to re-create traces of mucus in his lungs from a minor chest cold. A pity your kind won’t cooperate more often to help heal the injured and dying.”

Belini narrowed her eyes but didn’t deign to speak.

Ia did it for her. “Doctor, have you ever contemplated the philosophy of
why
people die? Even the Feyori do it. There is a reason for it.”