Theirs Not To Reason Why: An Officer's Duty Part 4

Zezu looked like he would protest. Ia held up two fingers, cutting him off. Rabbit's own solemn look kept the others quiet. A moment after Luke pa.s.sed through the door, it opened again, admitting the Solarican waitress from the hallway. Balancing the serving platter on shoulder and hand, she eyed the cl.u.s.ter of youths.

"Wherrrre do you want yourrr food?" she asked Ia.

"Third table on the far left, the empty spot next to the pink bag," Ia directed her. Again, Zezu started to protest, and again she held up her fingers. Only when the waitress had left, shutting the door behind her, did Ia lower her hand. "Never argue about our business in front of outsiders."

He frowned. "What is this, some sort of cult? Is that what that 'blessing' shakk was all about?"

"More like a resistance movement, albeit in the preplanning stages," Ia corrected him. Stepping forward, Ia pressed her hands against his and his cousin's foreheads. "Watch, and learn."

Both shifted to move back, but it was too late. With a simple touch of her fingertips, Ia pulled them onto the timeplains. Since both young men were close friends as well as cousins, it was economical to show both of them at the same time. It would also rea.s.sure them that they hadn't hallucinated, since they would later be able to compare notes.

This time, it wasn't a fade or a flip. It was a snap, and a mental yank to get them up onto the gra.s.s. Zezu blinked and looked around. Ia was no longer touching his forehead; instead, she gripped his hand. She did the same for his cousin Leuron, immersing both of them-all three of them-firmly in the timestreams, making this moment as real as she could for them.

"What the h.e.l.l?" he gasped, peering around the undulating, sepia-toned prairie, with its Earth-yellowed gra.s.ses and crisscrossing streams.

"Where did the restaurant go?" Leuron demanded. He rubbed at his chest. "Man...my heart is racing!"

"It's still there," Ia rea.s.sured them. "And your heart-the real one, in your real body-is actually only beating once for every two or three minutes you spend in here. It's all relative."

"And where is here?" Zezu demanded, glaring at her. "Take us back!"

"Not until you've seen what Rabbit and I are really doing. What we're working for. As for where we are," Ia stated, lifting her chin as she looked around, "welcome to my world. Everything you're seeing right now is what I see...and what I see, gentlemeioas, is Time."

The word rumbled across the plains, grumbling and echoing like thunder. It disturbed everything in its path like a gust of wind, making the leaves of the scattered bushes rustle, and the blades of gra.s.s sway.

"Whoa," Leuron muttered, brown eyes widening.

"Don't say that word carelessly while you're here, or you'll stir up a storm that would put one of Sanctuary's to shame," she cautioned them. "You wanted to know what I'm doing? Why Rabbit is willing to follow me, and have everyone else do so as well? More to the point, why here, and why Sanctuary? Come see what I see."

A tug of her mind slid them up forward, the gra.s.s racing past their floating feet. Zezu gasped and clutched at her with his free hand. Leuron swallowed and braced himself. She nodded at the streams, now looking like rivulets, cracks, tiny shining hairs on the never-ending plains spreading out beneath them.

"Each one of those streams is a life. Where they cross and touch, they strongly influence other lives. Your lives travel almost side by side," she told them. "At least, for now."

"What's that up there?" Leuron asked, looking at the blighted desert approaching in the distance.

"The destruction of our galaxy." The casual way she said it made both boys glance sharply at her. Ia shrugged. "More to the point...the source of that destruction is one which both of you will find very familiar."

Drifting them down to the edge of the gra.s.s, to the point where the life faded from the timeplains, leaving cracked, dead dirt and rocks in its place, Ia dropped all three of them into one of the timestreams near the edge...

They were a Terran pilot named Terrence, suited up and seated at the controls of a starfighter...and they were afraid. In front of them lay a wall of stone and metal, impossibly huge. For five hours, they had flown at top insystem speeds, the kind that could cross half a star system in that amount of time, and they were still a long, long ways from that grey and brown surface. It could just barely be seen curving in the distance, and they knew, having seen it upon their arrival in this part of s.p.a.ce, that it was nothing more and nothing less than an unbelievably huge sphere.

A sphere with tiny, tiny baby spheres, ones the size of gas giants themselves. Those satellites had been sent out, and were swarming around a real gas giant. Devouring it. In just the span of a handful of minutes, the gas giant had shrunk perceptibly.

The real horror was, Terrence knew there was nothing he or his fellow Humans could do to stop it. No one had the resources to stop these extragalactic predators. Not even if all the sentient, star-faring races in the whole galaxy somehow miraculously combined.

It would also be another day or so before he got anywhere near the surface of that mind-boggling wall of a sphere. Three months, and the aliens would reach Earth, the Human Motherworld. His own home colony would be gone within three and a half. And the experts all agreed that within one hundred years, there wouldn't be a star left in this entire section of the cosmos, because they were already tearing apart the nearest stars as well, sucking up their fusion fires to fuel their rapacious hunger. Nothing would be left to light up any stray dust particles the invaders might have missed.

The entire galaxy was as doomed as that gas giant...which was shrinking even faster, now that the outer layers of atmosphere had been siphoned away...

Ia lifted them out of that numbed pilot's lifestream. Setting her pa.s.sengers on the ground next to it, she waited for them to recover from the shock of living someone else's life. At least she had been kind, dipping them into the memories and awareness of a fellow male.

"What...what the slag was that?" Leuron muttered, staring once more at the bone-dry desert ahead of them.

"That was the Wall, wasn't it?" Zezu asked her. "That's the Wall from the Fire Girl Prophecies! I've seen it before. That was the Wall!"

"That was, is, and will be the Wall," Ia confirmed. "More specifically, it is a Dysun's Sphere, built by an extragalactic sentient race of beings who treat other galaxies the way locust-bugs treat forests and fields. They are swarmers; they live inside their giant hive until they outgrow it, then they find a galaxy, strip it bare-the entire galaxy-and build a second hive-sphere. Then the two groups part company and head off across the intergalactic void in different directions, each in search of new material for their hive-homes, uncaring that they've destroyed thousands of sentient races, millions of inhabitable worlds, and billions of stars. Including our own."

"Shakk," Leuron muttered. "That meioa-o...he didn't think anyone could stop it. Who could stop something that huge?"

"I can."

Her calm statement caused both young men to choke. Zezu was the first to regain his voice. "Like a Church h.e.l.l, you can!"

She gave him a sardonic look. "Well, not on my own, no. I'll need your help."

"Help for what?" Zezu demanded. He swept his left hand at the barren, lifeless desert beyond them. "If all those streams are lives, then all those lives are dead. This can't be stopped. That guy, he was thinking there wasn't an army created that could stop these...these things!"

"Not an army, no," Ia agreed. Lifting them again, shifting the timestreams beneath their feat, she readjusted their position in the future. When they landed, it was beside a stream planted with bushes. She tightened her grip on their hands, particularly Leuron's, who had shifted toward the stream and the images visible beneath its ripples. "Do not touch the waters of this life. I don't have the time to put your brains back together, if you do. Even I get a raging headache when I try. Just stay on the bank and walk beside it with me."

They gave her wary looks, but followed her. She carefully expanded the timeplains, focusing down so that there was plenty of room to move between the streams. Several of them intersected and mingled with the bush-marked stream, and broad footbridges appeared, allowing the trio to cross each companion creek.

Zezu, peering at the waters, finally shook his head. "What are we looking at? This stream is exactly the same as all the rest. I think. The vidshows in the water are running by so fast..."

"Shhh...just follow it a few more meters."

Leading them up to the edge of the barren zone, Ia guided them right next to the water. The air felt thicker here, looking as warm and viscous as amber gla.s.s. She pulled them through...and stepped onto a vibrant green lawn latticed with healthy, flowing streams. It was probably aqua blue, the color of the Sanctuarian equivalent of gra.s.s, but the amber golden light pouring down around them continued to give everything a sepia hue.

"How...?" Zezu asked, peering at the gra.s.s, the streams, the vibrant signs of life.

"What this one person can do-just this one person, at the right time and the right place-can stop the coming invasion. Everyone continues to live, and the galaxy is even better off than before." She slid them backwards, back through the barrier. Back behind the view of the lifeless desert looming in their future. "All of this takes place roughly three hundred years in the future. And now...for a different view."

The streams shifted, rippled, and changed. They moved physically, and they altered visually as Ia turned them around. She pointed them now into the past.

"See all the purple waters? Those are all one lifestream. One person's life-the one person who can stop the invasion. All the blue ones, another life. All the green ones, so on and so forth for each color. The different channels, though, represent different choices. Only one choice leads to the right hole through that barrier of death and destruction behind us...and that means the blue life and the green life and the pink and so forth all have to influence the purple life to make the right choices at the right points in time."

"So...what? What can we do?" Leuron asked her. "If this is all three hundred years in the future, what can we do about it?"

"There's nothing we can do!" Zezu dismissed.

"On the contrary, there's quite a lot you can do." Tightening her grip on their hands, she lifted them up and sent them forward, soaring over the multihued waters intersecting and interweaving. "All you have to do is look at the water. Some channels are deeper than others; some choices are more obvious and likely than others. Each person's actions influence those after them, just as each person is influenced by those who come before them. It's all a great chain. We just have to set up the dominos in advance, and tend to each junction as it comes to pa.s.s...and encourage those who follow us to tend each choice in the coming paths.

"I don't know about you, but having seen all of this, I can't turn my back on it. I can't walk away." Ia shrugged, surveying her stream markers. "Those who see the problem, and know of a good solution for it, those are the people who are responsible for fixing that problem."

Leuron shook his head. "This is too much, meioa. I can't take it in right now..."

"I got a question," Zezu stated, glancing over his shoulder. "That life...the one that punches through the desert and saves everybody from the Wall? Is that the Fire Girl?"

Ia shook her head. "No. She comes along in about two hundred years, give or take."

"Shakk," he muttered. "Are we gonna keep suffering from the Fire Girl Prophecies for two hundred more years?"

"The answer to that question is a resounding 'yes,'" she returned dryly. "Sorry to be the bearer of such annoying news, but there it is...and there is nothing which can be done to stop it, save abandoning the entire planet. Of course, if you do that, the Savior won't be in the right places at the right times, won't make the right choices, and won't save the galaxy from complete annihilation."

"Well, what the shakk can we do about it?" Leuron demanded.

Ia lifted her chin. In a moment, they had zoomed back to a moment close to their entry point. "I'm glad you asked. Both of you have a talent for martial arts. Increase your training. Zezu, I need you to go into mining as soon as you graduate. You're going to need to learn how to operate sandhog drills, and learn them well enough not only to operate any kind of deep ground drill you can get your hands on, but also teach it to others. Leuron, you have an untapped gift for aquaponics. You need to apply for s.p.a.ce station lifesupport training as soon as you graduate."

"s.p.a.ce station lifesupport?" Leuron asked, wrinkling his nose. "You want me to go into s.p.a.ce?"

"Actually, I need you to go underground. Everyone will have to go underground...everyone except for the Church and its followers, that is," Ia amended. "Look, you've both seen it. They're already trying to tighten their grip on this planet. Trying to spread and enforce their fanaticism on everyone. They will succeed in taking over. The problem is, the Savior is bound to head for this world, and if the Church is still in control when she gets here, the wrong things will get done, and all that will be left is death, destruction, and an endless, empty desert."

"So, what? We have to fight a war with the Church and win?" Leuron asked. He flexed his shoulders a little, tilting his head until his vertebrae cracked. "I can fight 'em!"

She gave him a quelling look. "Save it, Leuron. If the Church loses at the wrong point in time, it will be just as bad as if they win in the end."

"So what is the right point in time?" Zezu asked, exchanging a look with his cousin.

The answer made her smile. A wry smile, but a smile all the same. "About two hundred years in the future, when the Fire Girl arises and sets their biggest cathedral on fire-the Fire Girl Prophecies are exactly that: prophecies of the future. And the Church fears them. It doesn't fit in with their doctrine, save as the works of the Devil...and we have to go."

"We have to go?" Zezu asked her, while his cousin peered at the water-crossed, sunlit prairie surrounding them.

She nodded. "Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to spare...and you need time to think about what I've shown you. Unlike the Church, who will be trying to brainwash everyone into following their directives blindly in a couple of decades, I and the others who will be opposing them expect you to think for yourselves. To choose of your own free will. But choose quickly. And I hope you follow through on what your conscience tells you to do.

"Remember, do not discuss any of this anywhere near a member of the Church. They will mark you as rebels and heretics, and come after you with a self-righteous vengeance that neither h.e.l.lfire nor d.a.m.nation will stop. In fact," Ia added wryly, "they'd consider it G.o.d's True Work to destroy you. Including anyone a.s.sociated with you...and that includes Rabbit."

"How do we know you didn't brainwash her into following you?" Leuron asked.

Her mouth twisted once more. "Even the most sophisticated brainwashing technique breaks down over time, Leuron. People wise up, or they grow resistant, or the illogical inconsistencies in the neurotic dogmas of their would-be programmers eventually trip them up. The only way I can convince you to put in a true long-term effort is if I have your full, free-willed cooperation. Particularly you, Leuron, since I know for a fact you've studied martial arts. I'll need you to train others, to form a bodyguard for key members, such as Rabbit.

"Now, brace yourselves. I'm bringing you back to your bodies. Keep your mouths shut while I deal with the other two. They need to see for themselves, and to decide for themselves," she warned them.

They nodded, and Ia reached out and up with her mind, flipping them back into their bodies.

Both young men drew in deep breaths, opening their eyes. Once more, they were surrounded by the plebian decor of the Italian-themed restaurant. Removing her fingertips from their foreheads, Ia stepped back. A glance at the chrono on her wrist unit showed that only half a minute had pa.s.sed. She nodded solemnly to the two cousins, then turned to the remaining two, James and Aru.

James eyed her warily. "What was that all about?"

"I'm glad you're so willing to volunteer and find out, James." Stepping up to him, Ia lifted her hand to his forehead.

So tedious, having to do this over and over...I really, really have to figure out how to make those crystalline wreaths work. Maybe if I take one into the timestreams with me, the next time I do this? It did seem to work-at least to shape it-when I took myself onto the timestreams. But to...program it, for lack of a better term...I'll have to try it after today. As soon as I handle Aru, I'll need to eat. Traversing Time doesn't happen for free, after all. Not even for me.

Gently, she touched James's brow with the pads of her fingers, connecting her meager telepathy and her major precognition with his unsuspecting mind. Between one breath and the next, reality dissolved around her and James Chong-Wuu. The world turned amber gold and gra.s.sy in undulating, stream-crossed plains. Patiently, Ia hauled her companion out of the waters of his own life, before the images of his potential-possible futures could overwhelm and drown the poor boy.

Once more, she led another hopeful, potential helper on a heavily edited exploration of the horrors lurking in the future. "Come and see what I see, James, and see what Rabbit knows we must do."

JULY 24, 2492 T.S.

The average Human body can recover about forty milliliters of blood a day...

Ia set the measuring shot gla.s.s on the bathroom counter, along with a small box and an eyedropper. The room was kept very clean; life on a triple-gravitied planet was hard enough without risking a careless infection by some local or imported disease. Counters, toilet, sink, and k.n.o.bs were wiped down every day, the floor and showering tub scrubbed every week on the one day the restaurant downstairs was closed. Her parents had never been afraid of hard work, particularly when it came to caring for family.

Anyone who donates blood on a regular basis, particularly in small, consistent amounts, needs to increase the iron and other nutrients in their diet...

Today's lunch had been a generous serving of medium-rare roasted slices of q'al, a salad of chartreuse b.u.t.ter-mung leaves, and a colorful ca.s.serole of topadoes au gratin, with the bright blue tubers sliced into medallions and layered with orange-hued, tangy-sharp cheeses. So she had eaten her protein for the day, plenty of other vitamins and nutrients in the topadoes, plus the local equivalent of leafy greens to process all that protein and iron with folic acid.

The extraction of blood is still a somewhat primitive process medically, particularly in doses larger than a fraction of a milliliter...

Scrubbing her hands at the sink, she carefully wiped them on a fresh towel, then rubbed antiseptic sanitizer on her skin from the pump dispenser for added safety. The stuff smelled like crisp apples, an exotic, imported treat on Sanctuary, where real apples and other fruit often ended up falling off the tree before it could ripen. Local scientists were still working on breeding varieties with stronger, st.u.r.dier stems, but even with advanced horticultural techniques, it still took years to mature, breed, and crossbreed enough trees before anyone could come up with a healthy, viable variation.

Not to mention the original extraction equipment often had to be discarded after each use, wasting resources and clogging disposal facilities...

The contents of the small box she had set beside the shot gla.s.s hadn't been easy to get. Not without someone tracing the transaction back to her. A little luck and a bit of digging through the timestreams on Ia's part had allowed a friend of Rabbit's to acquire it for her. Expensive in terms of time, but worth it.

And of course with the advent of interorbital travel, it became prohibitively expensive to send fully trained medical personnel along with each and every s.p.a.ceship...which is why the Triple-S, or Subdermal Strap-on Sampler, is the best friend of doctors, nurses, paramedics, and ship medics. For any sample larger than a few drops but smaller than a quarter of a liter, this tool, made from completely recyclable, easily cleaned and sterilized, environmentally friendly, medical-grade plexi, will be your new best friend...

Opening the box, Ia followed the instructions both written on the box and recited in the back of her mind. The words of the lecture came from herself, albeit from a far-removed possible life wherein she had taken up a career in medicine, instead of gone into the military. A life wherein she lectured younger nursing students on how to draw blood for various tests. A large number could be done with the blood still safely inside the body, but there were still certain kinds of medical procedures where it had to be placed in a vial or a beaker before it could be experimented upon.

Or in her case, in a shot gla.s.s.

Most importantly, so long as the body involved has a functional cardiovascular system, it requires no power setting to withdraw the blood once you have set the volume marker to indicate how much you wish to extract...and since it works on the vacuum principle, it can work in free fall as well as our local Sanctuarian gravity...

Carefully centering the crosshairs over one of the blue veins on the back of her left hand, Ia strapped it in place, set the volume marker, and depressed the accordion-folded container on the back slowly, pressing the air out of the extraction chamber. Once it was depressed to the right depth for forty milliliters, she braced herself.

Ia hesitated, thumb on the puncturing lever.

Oh, this is ridiculous! Scowling, she glared at her reflection in the mirror. The same face as always scowled back. Almond-shaped amber eyes, brown eyebrows and lashes, crone-white hair that needed a good combing, and probably could stand to be a little longer in front, as Rabbit had suggested. Did you or did you not unflinchingly take a d.a.m.ned kitchen knife through your palm last year? Through your palm? Stop being such a wimp, Iantha. It couldn't possibly hurt any more than an overcharged laser through the shoulder, you know.

Yeah, the fear flinching behind her glaring eyes replied, but those were one-time pains. This is something you'll have to do again and again and again and again, day after day after day after day...

Closing her eyes, Ia gritted her teeth and pictured the barren, lifeless desert of the future. Failure is not an option. It never was, and it never will be. Opening them again, she looked down at her hand and shoved the little lever. Once past the tension point, it snapped into place. Pain pinched the soft skin on the back of her hand, and the compressed extraction chamber started expanding again. The translucent white plexi turned darker, redder as she watched.

When it filled to the right depth, the lever snapped back into position. Unstrapping the peculiar little machine, Ia grimaced at the blood trickling from the back of her hand. A few drops made it to the countertop. Again, she closed her eyes, this time to flex her mind and seal the injury. It worked faster than it had for Fyfer and Thorne, but that was only natural; her biokinetic abilities worked best on her own flesh, drawing far greater power from the direct application of her own peculiar energies.

A slow, deliberate count to one hundred, and she opened her eyes, reaching for the sink faucet. Scrubbing and drying her skin, she found the wound sealed and mostly healed, just a pink dot not much bigger than the head of a pin. Painful and unpleasant...but bearable. Though I don't know how people like diabetics and such went through this day after day, back at the beginnings of modern medicine...

Right. The next step. Picking up the Triple-S, she extracted the container from the back of the device-and yelped as the door swung partway open. It quickly shut again, followed by the sound of her mother's voice.

"Ia? Is that you? I'm sorry, kitten," Aurelia called through the panel. "I didn't hit you, did I?"

"Uh, no...no," Ia called back, quickly gathering her supplies. She could stuff the eyedropper and the shot gla.s.s into her shirt pocket, but the Triple-S and the extraction vessel were a little more awkward. She managed to get the mechanism back into the box, but her mother opened the door again, this time by a handspan.

"What are you doing, gataki mou? Wait-is that blood?" She pushed the door open further, poking her head through. "Ia, are you cutting yourself?"

It wasn't the container that had caught her mother's eyes, but the drops on the counter, which she hadn't cleaned up yet. Worse, her precognitive instincts twinged, warning her of the coming, headache-sized conversation.

"Mother, no. No, I am not 'cutting' myself. I am not emotionally depressed, I am not thinking suicidal thoughts, I do not need to go into psychiatric therapy again," she stressed, rolling her eyes at her mother's reflection.

Aurelia rolled her own eyes. "Then what are you doing bleeding all over our bathroom counter, young lady?"