Theirs Not To Reason Why: An Officer's Duty Part 35

"The one where the shock of his actions caused them to rethink their stubborn closed-mindedness, and call him back into their presence to listen to what he had to say. That Star of Service Yamaneuver, sir." She held Myang's gaze without wavering. The others around the room were important, but the Admiral-General was the keystone of her plan. If Ia failed to convince her, the rest would barely matter.

"There's just one big flaw in your request, Lieutenant," an admiral off to her right stated. "We are not currently at war, and we are definitely not losing that war."

That turned her head. Ia stared at the blue-uniformed man. "Admiral Fulk. You may have not noticed, but the only reason why we aren't at war is because I personally went to Sallha to stop it. That was their Eve of Battle Banquet. As soon as they finished eating us, they were going to launch the next Salik War. If I hadn't stopped them-if I hadn't slaughtered their high command, at great personal risk-we'd be eyebrow deep in body parts and broken ships by now, sir."

"I don't think-" he scoffed.

"No, Admiral, you don't think." That came from the tier behind him. Ia lifted her gaze to Admiral Viega, who was looking a lot better than the last time she had seen the other woman. Healthier and fully dressed, Viega stared down at Admiral Fulk. "That exact same information was in my debriefing report, two weeks ago. My captors told me that six Sallhan hours after the banquet, they were going to launch everything they had at us...And my captors boasted multiple times during my incarceration just how much they had ready to throw at us. I know they didn't tell me everything, either."

"They still have those resources, sirs," Ia confirmed on the heels of Viega's words. "They just don't have the leadership to use all of it. Yet. But time will not stand still, gentlemeioas. Every second we waste here is another second they have to pull together enough competency in what's left of their leadership to resume being a serious combat threat. A very serious threat."

"d.a.m.n straight," Viega agreed.

"Admiral Viega, as your viewpoint could be considered rather biased in this matter, I must request that you remain silent until addressed," Myang stated, twisting to look over her shoulder.

"Aye, sir," Viega complied.

Myang returned her attention to Ia. "All you have said so far, Lieutenant Ia, is what the Dlvmvla like to call 'all wind and no breeze.' You have risked your life and your career to barge into a closed session containing Ultra-Cla.s.sified information. Legally, I have every right to toss you in the Dungeon and throw away the key. Legally, I can have you flogged to the bone. Legally, I can have you hung until you are dead, Lieutenant.

"Now. Why don't you try to tell me why you thought it was such a brilliant idea to shakk away your career, today?"

The nausea was back, cramping in her stomach from sheer nerves. Ia struggled to keep it from her voice and her face. "I am here, sir, to hopefully help prevent you and your fellow Staff members from making a lethal series of mistakes."

That caused a skeptical outcry among the twenty-plus officers scattered around the room. There was enough room, there could have been eighty or more present, but the materials they were there to vote upon were not something the whole Command Staff had needed to know. Nonetheless, the furor roused by her claim caused enough noise for at least twice their number, if not more.

"A lethal series of mistakes?"

"Who do you think you are?"

"Of all the unmitigated gall!"

Ia opened her mouth to defend herself, but the two dozen or so generals and admirals in the chamber didn't let her. She could only make out a few of the outraged shouts and comments being aimed her way.

"You'd better explain yourself!"

"I've never heard anything so outrageous in all my career!"

"I don't see how she can explain it."

"If I were in charge of the Navy, I'd-"

"Sirs!" Ia shouted, cutting through their protests. "Admiral-General, could I please have my five minutes of uninterrupted time, so I can actually explain?"

The Admiral-General held up her hand. "Quiet, everyone!"

The others subsided. All, that was, save for one of the admirals wearing the grey uniform of the Special Forces. Leaning back in his chair, arms folded across his medal-sprinkled chest, he spoke in the silence following her words. "Technically, Lieutenant, if a single Star of Service was worth five minutes of our predecessors' time to Shikoku Yama, you should be asking for ten. You do have two of them."

"Fine. Ten minutes, then," Ia amended, seizing on his offer.

"You are no Shikoku Yama, Lieutenant Ia," Myang stated. "And this is no AI War...but you have earned your ten minutes. Spend them wisely."

"Earned them?" one of the generals in the second tier scoffed. "Have you not read the latest report? She's a psi! She manipulated those medals onto her chest!"

"Clearly, you haven't read her files, nor the correlated reports of the events that earned her those medals." That came from a familiar face, General Sranna, whom Ia hadn't seen since the incident in the Zubeneschamali System, back when she earned her Field Commission. "Lieutenant Ia's personal incident reports are rather dry and factual, with no embellishments whatsoever. It is only when you read the other accounts, the ones from the other individuals involved in each case, that you get a glimpse of just how extraordinary her actions have been. More to the point, when you contrast the vid records of what she has done, versus what she reports, she consistently comes across as boring and factual, compared to the actual events."

"There's more to it than that," another general stated, this one in the brown uniform of the Marine Corps. Ia belatedly recognized him as the general in charge of the segment in which Commander Ferrar's troops served. "Every report she has filed on behalf of another soldier, making recommendations for granting them honors and medals, have been just as factual, if slightly more detailed, than the reports of her own accounts. Starting from her very first promotion to corporal rank, when her actions and deeds caught the eyes of her immediate superiors, and all related reports wound up on my desk. Such self-effacing accounts are not the acts of a self-aggrandizing glory-hogger. Particularly not when she has so clearly done more to help others gain rightful recognition for their own heroism."

Ia unb.u.t.toned her jacket, shifting the medal-weighted folds aside so she could safely rest her hands on her hips. That bared her blue Navy shirt, and the four colorful ribbon-sashes the K'kattan government had bestowed upon her. "I do appreciate the support, sirs. Particularly from you, General Sranna-and it is good to see you looking so well after all these years. But I will not allow the salvation of our future to be derailed by any further sidebars, if you please. Not for ten full minutes."

"Excuse me, but you will not-" the Army woman protested.

Impatient with the delays, Ia snapped back, "Would you please be silent and let me explain? I have earned those ten minutes, and I will not have them p.i.s.sed away just because you want to talk!"

"You're not in the military to make friends, are you, Lieutenant?" Admiral-General Myang drawled.

Ia replied candidly, hands back on her hips as she looked at the head of the s.p.a.ce Force once more. "No, sirs, I am not here to make friends. I am here to help save innocent lives. Why are you here?"

Deliberately, Ia looked around the room, meeting as many eyes as she could in the silence following her demand. Only a handful of them met her gaze.

"Get on with it, Lieutenant," Myang ordered, avoiding the pointed question herself, though she did meet Ia's gaze.

Lifting a hand, Ia snapped her fingers. The screens turned back on, surrounding them with images of the project they had been about to discuss. More than one of the men and women around her twitched a little in startlement at the display, though not all of them moved.

"Project t.i.tania, also known as the G.o.dstrike Cannon, is the culmination of several projects run by the Oberon Mining & Research Consortium. A company which is partly a front for the Terran military's efforts to research and refine increasingly more powerful, more calorie-efficient laser weapons. The 67.19 percent caloric efficiency rating of the standard HK military rifle is nothing compared to the G.o.dstrike's unprecedented 90.3 percent conversion rating.

"You've been patting yourselves on the back for the creation of the biggest weapon in Alliance history. The G.o.dstrike cannon, at full strength, is indeed capable of cutting thirty kilometers down through the crust of a planet in one minute flat. But you have overlooked the two biggest flaws inherent in its design, and all the accompanying headaches those flaws entail," she stated.

Ia shifted the screens electrokinetically to a series of graphs detailing the quarter-scale test cannon's caloric output versus various targets. Myang sighed impatiently. "And those flaws are...?"

Enlarging one of the charts, Ia explained. "The first one is so basic, we literally learned it in Basic Training, as one of the four Rules of the Range. In case it has been a few years, I will remind you of those rules: Always a.s.sume a weapon is loaded; Always point your weapon in a safe direction until you are ready to fire; Always keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire...and Always be aware of what is downrange of your target. Just in case you miss, sirs.

"The caloric diffusion rate of the newest HK-72 laser rifle in the SAC, Standard Atmospheric Conditions, is almost three kilometers. But in s.p.a.ce, its diffusion rate is almost half a lightsecond. Given that the G.o.dstrike cannon is a raging forest fire to the HK's tiny little match, and that your technicians have been aiming at small moons and large comets for testing its strength, huge, thick targets that are impossible to miss, you have forgotten to consider carefully what that means in relation to the fourth Rule of the Range," Ia stated. She flashed another picture on the screen, this time an archive file from one of the Border engagements, between a Terran battlecruiser and a small fleet of pirate ships. "This brings into play the second fatal flaw in the cannon's design.

"Because of the ma.s.sive amounts of energy required, and the refraction rate of the focusing crystal, it takes ten seconds to charge the G.o.dstrike cannon. At the end of those ten seconds, under the current design, the cannon must be fired or it will overload and cause a potentially catastrophic thermal reaction that will overload the thermogenerators, send feedback into the hydrogenerators, and run the risk of blowing up the entire ship." She nodded at the screens around the room. "As you can see, a lot of maneuvering takes place in ten seconds in a standard stard.o.g.g.i.ng fight. It is very difficult for even the best of combat-seasoned pilots to gauge exactly where the enemy will be, ten seconds down the road.

"The sheer caloric force of the G.o.dstrike cannon makes the Fourth Rule vital, sirs, because even with the barest minimum burst, at one twentieth of a second, its diffusion rate in the vacuum of s.p.a.ce is four lightmonths. It's even greater than that if the cannon is fired for longer than its shortest possible burst." Another flick expanded the view on the screen to a systemwide diagram. Ia streaked a line of white from the dot where the fighting had taken place to a point well beyond the system's edge. "Though it is possible for a combat-seasoned pilot to gauge where enemy ships might line up in the next ten seconds, ten seconds is nothing compared to 10.5 million seconds. That, sirs, is the number of seconds that will pa.s.s if the G.o.dstrike cannon misses its target.

"I will also remind you that the caloric force of that cannon will require a minimum of seven medium-sized warships or three capital-sized ships in alignment to be able to absorb the force of a single, twentieth-of-a-second strike. If things don't line up just right, you will literally be endangering shipping lanes for months to come."

"So what, do you expect us to sc.r.a.p Project t.i.tania? Is that it?" one of the blue-clad admirals asked.

"Or do you expect to pilot it yourself?" the admiral in grey asked, arms still folded over his chest.

"I'm the only one who safely can," Ia answered the second man. She knew his name and his face very well through the timestreams, though they had yet to be formally introduced. "Yes, the s.p.a.ce Force has great pilots, but they aren't precognitives. And your typical military precognitives have spent their careers wrapped in cotton wool, not in combat.

"Very few of them are capable of predicting anything in the chaos of combat, because they are not trained to do so," Ia said. "They cannot focus that well, and they cannot predict most combat situations with the necessary level of pinpoint accuracy. I am that capable. My entire service record proves that I am. That I have."

"Yeah, right," one of the brown-clad generals on the second tier snorted.

Ia stared at the older woman for a moment, then shrugged out of her jacket. Holding up the heavy, lumpy garment, she nodded at it. "This says I can. Everything I have done in the s.p.a.ce Force has been predicted. Every objective that I could safely meet, most of them under the heavy restrictions and hobbling parameters of my orders, which I have followed to the best of my abilities, I have met.

"Ironically, the reason why I was such a valuable war-prize to the Salik for their little prewar meal was one of the few times I deliberately disobeyed orders, sirs. I deliberately strayed far beyond my a.s.signed patrol zone, and I successfully destroyed a major Salik warship, because I knew it was carrying some sort of psychic interference capability. With nothing but a Delta-VX at my command, I destroyed an entire enemy capital ship, one the size of a Battle Platform, and I got my dual ships and her crews out of that fight alive.

"Now, meioas. Imagine what I could do for you if I had your trust and your confidence backing me," she coaxed. "If all of my moves could be made that freely. Because we are going to war. You don't have to be a precog to see that much...and I can see that they are scrambling faster than antic.i.p.ated to relaunch their war efforts against us. I am here to warn you that we will have barely half a year to get ready for the first wave of the coming frogtopodic tsunami, and you will need the G.o.dstrike effectively wielded in combat to save the people on the sh.o.r.e. Scoff all you may want, resist all you may want...but I am your only shot at safely wielding it."

"You're rather full of yourself," one of the generals in green on the first tier snorted.

Ia lifted her jacket a little higher. "Am I?" She lowered it to her side. "Anyone else want to discuss the proof of my qualifications? Medal for medal, kilo for kilo, wound for wound? All I ever have done is my a.s.signed job, sirs. But that job has not utilized my abilities to their fullest extent, yet."

Myang studied her. Lacing her fingers together on the curved surface of the desk in front of her, she leaned on her elbows and addressed Ia. "If you really are as strong a precognitive as the reports we've received have indicated, Lieutenant, then surely you knew Project t.i.tania was conceived over three years ago. Given that, why wait so long before revealing your knowledge of it, and making this proposal now, of all times?"

"For one, you wouldn't have believed me back then, sir. I'll remind you that the roots of Project t.i.tania started before the incidents at Zubeneschamali, back when I was a mere sergeant. For another, I didn't have any practical experience in piloting or operating a ship's gunnery systems at the time," Ia confessed dryly. "For a third, there are three major leaks in the upper echelons of the s.p.a.ce Force. Thankfully, none in this room, but if I had told anyone of my psychic abilities-aside from Commander Ferrar, who figured it out on his own-the Salik would have gotten wind of it, and they would have been far more prepared against me just a few weeks ago. If they'd learned what my true capabilities were, I would've been so covered up in those anti-psi machines, that they would've been hard-pressed to find a place to bite me.

"I still would have broken free, but more lives would have died that day. Possibly even Admiral Viega's. I couldn't risk that." She lifted her jacket again in indication. "I honestly don't care about these medals, sirs. I am honored to have received them, yes, but I'm not in this for glittery or glory. I'm in this to save innocent lives. You put me in charge of that cannon, and you give me enough leeway to do what needs to be done, and I will turn the tide of the Second Salik War for you-and I'll remind you that this time, we're on the same level playing field that the Alliance initially suffered before we Terrans joined the fray, with our hyperrelay communication arrays and our OTL traveling speeds. This time, we don't have those strong extra advantages. And with that d.a.m.ned machine being developed and manufactured out there, we don't even have the advantage of our psychic abilities, right now."

Sitting back, the Admiral-General folded her arms across her chest. "You make it sound like I should be giving you carte blanche, Lieutenant."

"To an extent, yes," Ia admitted. That caused several of the other men and women to choke and cough at her audacity. She ignored their affronted stares. "Give me the freedom to handpick my crew, and the leeway to negotiate my patrol a.s.signments, and I will pull off miracles for you. That ship cannot be a.s.signed to a specific route. It will be needed in disparate battle zones placed hundreds of lightyears apart...and not always where you'd think it will be needed. Out of a thousand hovering b.u.t.terflies, very few people can predict which ones might start the next hurricane, let alone will start that hurricane, and do so with the level of accuracy that I can provide for you. That I want to provide, given the limitations of Time that are at hand."

"And who would you have for your handpicked crew?" one of the grey-clad women scoffed. "Half an entire Marine Corps division? The Troubleshooters? The entire Knifeman Corps?"

"No, sir-though I will need at least two Knifemen, a few Sharpshooters, and a handful of Troubleshooters on my crew," Ia stated. "Mostly only those who can be spared. I will not waste our resources by asking for those who will be needed far more, elsewhere. But I will need them. We have a very big, very immediate problem on our hands, and it is those d.a.m.ned anti-psi machines.

"Our psychic abilities have been one of our few advantages over the amphibious races," she reminded the men and women around her. "Those machines have to be hunted down and the source-points for their development and creation must be destroyed. Those machines will even slow me down...but they cannot stop me. I am therefore the best choice to spearhead the efforts to track them down. Unfortunately, I am only one woman, and I will need the expert help of others to find and destroy their production lines. This is something I know can be done during the shakedown cruise of the new ship, which kills yet another bird for you with only one stone's throw."

"And again, what size army do you expect us to grant you, in order to carry off such a feat?" the Admiral-General asked her.

"I only need a crew of one hundred and sixty, sir. Well, one hundred and sixty-one, if you count my DoI-appointed chaplain," Ia amended dryly.

"Impossible," the admiral in grey snorted. "That ship is currently designed to be run with a minimum crew of five hundred. You'd have to cross-train everyone in three other jobs!"

"I know. Which is one of the other reasons why I'm here now, before the interior has been finished, as well as before you've a.s.signed the command of that ship to anyone else-this would've been easier if my name had already been on your list of possible captains," she half muttered, rubbing the bridge of her nose with her free hand. "I'll need three months to get the ship retrofitted to the right specifications, and to select and train the necessary crewmembers.

"Follow that with a two-month combination of shakedown cruise and anti-psi hunt, and we'll be ready to go to war a month before the Salik actually do. If everything goes according to plan," Ia amended. She shrugged slightly. "There is a twenty-three percent probability that the Salik and their allies will go to war a couple of weeks to a month early, which is why we'll need to be ready before they actually do-if you can arrange to stall the entry of those allies into the war front, all the better, sirs."

"The Salik and their allies?" one of the other Army generals asked. "Who in their right mind would ally with them?"

"Who do you think?" one of the Special Forces generals replied. He tapped something on the workstation console in front of him, and a list of names, grouped by species, appeared on several of the smaller screens ringing the room. "Not a single Choya was present at that banquet, waiting to be eaten, because the Salik find their blue hemocyanin blood to be literally distasteful. The Choya have decided they are tired of lagging behind the other races in various areas of technology and respect, and have chosen to ally with their fellow amphibians."

"They are overconfident that the Salik will leave them off the galactic lunch menu," Ia agreed. "Unfortunately, the Salik will leave them off of it, so long as the Choya are useful. And it's mostly been the Choya slipping various bits of tech and other commodities through the Blockade lines. I tried to stop what I could reach, but most of the time, I couldn't deviate from my orders."

"You make it sound as if you can predict their every single move for the next century," an admiral behind Myang muttered.

Ia shook her head slowly. "A century is as clear to me as a day, Admiral. Unfortunately, we don't have a century. We have a matter of months before the first tidal wave of war crashes over our heads, and only a handful of years before the second war hits."

"Second war?" Myang asked her sharply. "What second war?"

Holding up the fingers of her free hand, Ia listed them. "I am fighting four wars, Admiral-General. The first one is the return of the Salik and their plans for galactic conquest and lunch. The second one is the return of the Greys, sir, which will prompt the third war, which will be a civil war on my homeworld."

"The Greys?" Myang repeated, frowning at Ia.

"Yes, sir," Ia confirmed. "They will come for us before we are through with the Salik, when our best resources will still be needed for fighting back the amphibians, sir."

She paused to let that sink in. More than one of the officers around her blanched at the thought. Myang tightened her mouth for a moment. "And the fourth war?"

"I will tell you something n.o.body else in the Alliance knows, sir," Ia said. "The Greys are not from this galaxy. They originally came from a galaxy that used to exist in an area the astronomers call the Blight."

"Used to exist?" General Sranna challenged her.

"Yes, sir. Three hundred years from now, the ancestral enemy of the Greys, the ones who destroyed the Greys' home galaxy, will approach the Milky Way. They are...they're like a hive of wasps, is the best way I can express it," Ia offered, gesturing with her free hand. "They are traveling in a Dysun's Sphere, they are overcrowded-which is a frightening thought, to think of something that astronomically huge as being overcrowded-and they are looking to build a second hive.

"In order to build one, sirs, it will require the entire resources of a new galaxy. Our galaxy." She met his gaze soberly, and the gaze of the general next to him, and the admiral, and the gaze of the Admiral-General herself. "I promise, I will give you and your successors instructions on how to deal with them when the time is right. But in order for the Alliance to still be around to deal with them, we have to fight off the Salik, and fight back the Greys. Each war has to be fought in the right way at the right time."

"And your homeworld? You said you'll be fighting a war back on, what, Sanctuary is it?" Myang asked her. "Is that why your brother 'mysteriously' won the biggest Lottery jackpot in Alliance history? To fuel an insurrection?"

"No, sir. That war will be started by the other side. My brother's money is being used to create defensive fortifications, and stockpile sentientarian resources," she explained. Ia held up her finger, cutting off the older woman. "Before you make any other accusations, sir, think of where Sanctuary is located. Think about it."

Snapping her fingers, she projected a map of the galaxy on the central viewscreen behind her. One which outlined the Terran Empire in blue, Sanctuary in gold a short distance away, and, directly behind it, a huge blob of silvery grey.

"My homeworld, gentlemeioas, is on the backside of Terran s.p.a.ce, in the direction that the Greys retreated. It is, in fact, on the very border of Grey territory. The only things that will save my people from being farmed by the Greys are its extreme high gravity, and the xenophobic isolationism of its current ruling government. When the Greys do attack, this will fuel their paranoia to a near-catastrophic degree, to the point where they will destroy any starship, orbital shuttle, and even their own s.p.a.ce station in the effort to cut themselves off from the rest of the universe.

"That money has been given by my brother to a nonprofit organization to make sure my planet can survive two hundred years of isolation behind enemy lines. You cannot evacuate them, either," she stressed as two of the generals on her right started to speak. "Aside from the sheer logistic improbability, and all those families stubbornly refusing to give up their first-worlder colonial rights, you cannot move the children of Sanctuary without adversely affecting their health. The gravitational differences between Sanctuary and Parker's World are too great.

"I could go into far greater detail as to why their continued survival on Sanctuary is so important," Ia dismissed, "but for now, I will only say this: What the people of Sanctuary are destined to become when it's safe for them to reemerge will be vital for the war effort three hundred years from now. It is enough for me, a daughter of Sanctuary, to know that they will survive, and to help them in the only way I can, giving them the funds to ensure they have the means for it.

"You and I have bigger problems on our hands right now, Admiral-General," Ia told Myang. "Ones that are a lot closer to your homeworlds. Things that we can handle, just as there are things only my family and their friends can handle back home. Let them handle it. We have enough troubles of our own, right now."

Myang subsided. Her brown eyes studied Ia thoughtfully, though the rest of her expression was shuttered. Ia lifted the jacket still held in her other hand.

"Admiral-General, sir. You have been apprised of the two hidden, lethal flaws of the G.o.dstrike cannon. You have been advised on how best to still utilize it, in spite of those flaws. You have been offered a better than fair chance at neutralizing the enemy's latest weapon, those anti-psi generators, and you have been warned with plenty of time to prepare for the return of an enemy so advanced, even the Feyori tread carefully near their territory.

"I thank all of you for giving me these ten minutes and more of your time...but arrogant as it may be, by the weight of this jacket, and all the honor, effort, and regulation-constrained duty that it represents, I will have an answer. Choose carefully, Admiral-General Myang: Should I spit up a lung on all that this represents, as my predecessor was forced to do? Or would you have me put it back on and let me fight for you, as I truly can?"

Silence stretched between them. Two or three of the other officers opened their mouths to speak, then thought better of it. Ia tried very hard not to think, not to project, not to do anything in any way which could be misconstrued as undue influence. The man in grey on her right, second tier, was General Jolen Phong. Head of the Psi Division of the Special Forces, and a Rank 15 telepath, he was more than strong enough to pick up on any stray projected thoughts. Ia carefully did not do that.

The Admiral-General sat forward, folding her hands on top of one another on the curved tabletop between her and Ia.

"I don't care how many medals you may have earned, soldier. I will not hand control of our most advanced ship into the care of a mere Lieutenant First Grade."

Sick fear pooled in the pit of Ia's stomach. She forced her numb fingers to tighten a bit more on the collar of her heavy jacket, keeping it carefully aloft. She was quite sure that the Admiral-General's dark eyes didn't miss the sudden paling of her face, nor the clenching of her hand, either.

"I am therefore promoting you to Ship's Captain," Myang stated dryly, her brown eyes fixed implacably on Ia's face, watching her every reaction.

Ia swayed in relief, blood rushing back to her head, making her ears roar and the Admiral-General's next words sound a bit odd for a moment.

"...But not without a cost," Myang was saying. "First of all, you will be moved into the Branch Special Forces and placed under the direct oversight of Admiral John Genibes."

The admiral in grey who had half challenged, half supported Ia dipped his head in acknowledgment. Ia barely spared him a glance, though she did give him a slight nod in return. She had already known that, if she won this fight, she would be working with him. The only doubt had been that very big if. The Admiral-General continued, forcing Ia to focus on the older woman's words.