Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (73 page)

Ia stared at the contents of the crate she had just unpacked. Everything was there. Power cables to hook it up, Terran-designed controls that no longer needed a sucker-hand on the boxy body of the infernal device, and a jury-rigged transmitter sphere. After pain-filled experimentation with the original captured machine and the ones salvaged from various wrecked Salik vessels, the Space Force’s Psi Division had figured out how the Salik broadcasted the anti-psi field unilaterally over a larger area than an individual victim’s helmet could.

For the next twenty or so hours, this would be a literal headache, if a necessary one. If it blocked all but the strongest of psychic abilities, it would block attempts by the Feyori to peek through the skin of her ship.

Sighing, she pulled the main box out of the crate, carried it over to the workbench Harper had cleared for her, and secured it to the surface. It felt a little heavy, but only because she and her crew were now living and working in 1.8Gs Standard, just about the right gravity to match their upcoming assignment. She turned back to fetch the cable and the emitter, but Harper had already grabbed those.

Bringing them over to her, he wordlessly helped her hook them up to the ship’s power grid. All of her orders in the last few weeks regarding this day had been delivered telepathically to her crew. She disliked touching people while speaking telepathically—and had accidentally tripped herself and a few of her members of the crew into the timestreams while doing so, on those few occasions where she had to touch someone to deliver a message—but it was imperative that the Feyori
watching her from their own version of the timeplains did not hear any actual orders regarding what they were about to do.

If they knew, they wouldn’t walk into the trap she needed to set for one of them. A trap in which she hoped to snare many more.

Harper didn’t spill the details, but he did make his displeasure known. “…Would it do any good to protest?”

“Not a single bit. I am turning on this machine and pointing this ship at your homeworld. We will wait about a light-month out from the system, then swoop in at the right moment and destroy the blockade currently in orbit.” Webbing the emitter to the gridboard above the workbench, she glanced at him. “I know you’re not happy about Dabin’s falling to their forces. And I know you’re
not
happy about the genetically engineered monsters they’ve let loose on your homeworld. But we will go there, and we will arrive in time to save it, and do so in such a way that my goals will be met.”

He looked away. She knew that wasn’t his real protest. Touching his shoulder, Ia sent, (
I will survive, I promise you that. You have my Prophetic Stamp.
)

…Only because I gave you the tools to do so. Are you sure this thing will foil their vision?
Harper thought back. He couldn’t project his thoughts, but he could form them clearly enough for her to read.

(
At the right setting, both machines will block their view of what lies inside each ship, without blocking their view of exactly where this ship will sit.
) Squeezing his shoulder, she lifted her chin. “You’re lucky you’re not a psi. This thing will hurt like a bite from one of your Dabin swamp rats, the ones you said clamp onto their prey and don’t let go.”

Releasing him, she turned to the machine and started it with just a few button pushes. The ache built quickly. Within seconds, her head from brow to nape throbbed. Another set of taps on the position-sensitive controls modulated that pain into a dull ache. An ache similar to the one already awaiting them on the ship docked one gantry up from theirs.

“You have your orders, Lieutenant Commander. Carry them out,” she instructed.

“Sir, yes, sir.” Unhappy, he turned on his heel, picked up the packing crate, and strode out, leaving her alone in the main engineering compartment.

Without the warmth of his personality and presence to fill it, the stripped-down compartment echoed. Every sector and cabin on the ship had been stripped to its barest necessities. Ia knew the Feyori stalking her took that as a sign that they would succeed in their coming attempt. That she intended to deny them every scrap of resources she could. To them, the coming nexus point was muddied, misted over, but there
was
a timeline where they very well could succeed. She didn’t need to hide from the Feyori the fact her ship was empty; the anti-psi device was needed to hide that successful path from them.

Hopefully they would be blocked by the device from reading the timestreams, given their milder abilities. That nexus was still somewhat clear to her. Mild as its broadcast was—poisonous as it was to the Feyori—the machine was already starting to mist up the timestreams ahead. She hadn’t seen any mists this strongly since manifesting. Not for the first time, Ia wondered why her half-breed life was so oddly immersed in such a vast ocean of prognostication when not even her father-progenitor could do a single percent of the things she could do.

She took her time leaving engineering and made sure to use the port side of the ship to return to the bridge. That permitted her to avoid everyone but Lieutenant Rico, the last person on duty. Ironically, for all that he would have been loyal to her anyway after his trip into the timestreams with her, he would have strenuously protested this plan right alongside Harper if it hadn’t been for Private Sung’s indiscretion.

But they were hers now. The Damned were solidly hers. If she said, “Jump,” they paused only to ask, “How high?” then did their best to hit that exact mark, no more and no less. Even Hollick’s replacement, Private Nesbit, was hers. He had asked plenty of questions among her crew, watched her actions and plans unfolding in combat after combat, and had developed a solid level of faith in his CO.

After more than two years of open war, two and a half if one counted their preliminary strikes, and after enduring three to four times as many fights as any other crew, they had lost only one soldier from their Company. There was no doubt that Ia’s Damned were the finest fighting force available to the war. Two things made them that way: Ia’s trust in them to be the
right people for the right job at the right point in time, and their trust in her to let them know what the right job was.

Knowing all of that, believing in all of that, didn’t stop Rico from giving her a dirty look as he left the bridge, though. Ia didn’t have to read his thoughts to know why. As far as the tall Platoon officer was concerned, his CO was being an idiot for doing all of this on her own. Unfortunately, he had no way to escape along with her, and she wasn’t about to waste his life needlessly. He knew all of that, but it didn’t make him any happier with her.

Settling into the command seat, Ia levered the chair forward and buckled herself in. The harness straps had long since been replaced but were starting to show some wear and tear from their constant use. With nothing to do but wait, Ia pulled a trick out of both Helstead’s and Spyder’s bags and put her bootheels up on the console. Not near anything sensitive, of course. Then again, she didn’t need to touch the controls to activate them.

Screens flicked to life around the bridge. With her primary screen blank and thus transparent, she read the distant displays monitoring the ship’s statistics. The engines looked good, tiny little green bars indicating energy consumption was running low. The shields displayed their status in two levels, low on the starboard, toward the Battle Platform, high on the port side, standard wartime procedure whenever docked, in case of an unexpected attack. The
Hellfire
’s scanners were sweeping passively, collecting and collating data with the navicomp’s help.

Lifesupport, however, was nothing more than a series of red lines and blanks, save for a few tiny green bars. Plants had been boxed up, fish bagged, hens crated, and all of it shipped out. Including her precious supply of carefully nurtured topadoes, with their beautiful dark purple and sky blue striped foliage, and their tasty aquamarine roots. The ship was running purely on mechanical reoxygenators now, with the air scrubbed chemically instead of biologically.

The emergency systems could easily reoxygenate the ship long enough to keep the original crew complement of five hundred or so alive for at least two months, though the air would start to smell a bit ozone-ish and stale after the first three weeks. With just Ia on board—well, her, and a last clutch of crew members slipping out the amidships starboard airlock with a few last-minute kitbags of belongings slung over their
shoulders—the air supply could easily last a year. Food would be the biggest problem; all but the bridge galley had been stripped of everything, and even that one only had a few ration packets left.

The Salik had already tried several times to board and capture the
Hellfire
. Every single time, Ia had precognitively thwarted them. Missiles had breached their hulls, but not a single ostrich-legged flipper had landed on their decks. They weren’t a concern, though. Even if they had, they’d never be able to use the Godstrike cannon.

The Feyori…were a different matter. All they needed was a bit of Ia’s DNA and enough time to read her mind, and they could replicate her body and personality in the flesh of a volunteer, much as she and Belini had turned Private Hollick into Private N’Keth. Belini hadn’t ever mentioned that possibility, but Ia knew it could be done. Once they had a duplicate clone of herself, they would be able to access the Godstrike cannon. It was debatable whether or not they would be able to replicate her psychic abilities, since even among identical twins such things varied, but the cannon did not require that much accuracy for access. All of these things, she had carefully explained to Myang in a message embedded in that latest datachip.

A glance at the chrono showed she had twenty hours and fourteen minutes to prevent them from trying.

When the airlock sealed shut behind Rico, the last of the Damned to leave, she unstrapped from the command chair and visited the head. Fixed herself a mug of water with a sipping lid. Brought it and a snack packet back to her station and redonned the safety harness. Tapping in a command manually, she shifted the view on her right secondary screen from blank nothingness to the dorsal view of the slightly oversized OTL courier parked one gantry up from hers.

Like her old Delta-VX from her time on the Blockade, it fell into the Harrier Class of ships, though it was a single vessel, not two mated together. It was also small enough; it could’ve fit into one of the hangar bays on board the
Saratoga Jones
. The captain had agreed to park it at a gantry instead, in order to make the short trip of her crew from ship to ship as inconspicuous as possible.

As she watched, sipping from her mug, the oversized courier finally detached from the Battle Platform. It drifted away, then
gently turned and shimmered, activating its insystem thrusters. The insystem field was more primitive than FTL warp panels, yet more fuel-efficient at speeds below three-quarters Cee. With a pulse that fluttered and rippled the starlight along the Harasser’s polished grey hull, the ship soared away from the Battle Platform.

Ia’s yeomen pilots maneuvered their much larger ship with thrusters. FTL was tricky; milliseconds of misuse could literally translate to kilometers of travel at higher speeds. With her reflexes coupled to the timestreams, using FTL had allowed her to dodge laserfire from both enemy and allied ships. For instances where accuracy was vital, such as that Choya task force sent to Earth, she used the insystem method like a sane pilot would.

A simple maneuver such as leaving the
Saratoga Jones
was a lot saner than the madness of combat. Finishing her mug, she returned it to the galley, tossed the emptied plexi packet into the recycler—out of habit, not because she expected the material to be recycled—and used the head one more time. When she sat down at her station for the third time, she activated the comms.

“This is TUPSF
Hellfire
to Battle Platform
Saratoga Jones,
requesting permission to undock and depart.”
This was usually handled by the comm tech, one of the many operations that happened seamlessly, smoothly in the background of a well-run bridge. She waited for a reply, and got one within a few moments.

“Hellfire,
this is Docking Control. You have permission to decouple and depart. Godspeed, and go smash some more of the enemy for us,”
the unnamed comptroller added. This was the first time they’d docked briefly at this particular Battle Platform. The reputation of the Damned, which she had painstakingly built over the last two years, had preceded them, however.

“Thank you,
Saratoga Jones,” Ia acknowledged, smiling slightly.
“We’ll do our best.
Hellfire
out.”

Flying the ship solo required several command overrides. It was an attempt by the Space Force at preventing their ships from being hijacked by their enemies, whether amphibious or criminal. Ia manipulated each one electrokinetically, decoupling the clamps that held them to their gantry. A gentle pulse of the thrusters drifted them away from the oversized hybrid
of warship and space station. Another gentle pulse turned her ship onto a vector similar to the courier’s.

Warming up the insystem thrusters, she set the
Hellfire
on a course that would take it away from the Battle Platform by a good thousand klicks. A slide of her fingertips over the helm controls brought the FTL panels online, trembling them forward by the pulsing of the fields that greased the palms of normal physics, making Newton and Einstein roll in their graves.

The Harrier-Class dropship carrying her crew vanished via OTL before she even reached one-quarter Cee, punching open a hole into hyperspace and sucking itself through. On the far side, Ia knew the ship would arrive somewhere near Dabin’s outermost gas giant. At that point, her entire crew would climb into their mechsuits and await a short hop that would bring them skimming in close to Dabin’s atmosphere. From there, it would be a matter of a short dip down to a low enough altitude to be air-dropped behind friendly lines.