Theirs Not To Reason Why: An Officer's Duty Part 7

"Congratulations, meioa. Because you wouldn't listen, your stubbornness has just caused a citywide mind-quake."

"Guh...wha...?" Kaskalla asked, blinking.

Ia shoved hard with her finger before releasing the girl. She lifted her fingers to her aching nose and focused her inner biokinetic energies into the bruised flesh, healing the inadvertent damage. Once that was done, she dipped two fingers into Leona's cup of water and dragged them across her brow, trying to use evaporation to cool the heat burning through her forehead, her sinuses.

Slumped back in her chair where she had collapsed, Leona lifted her hands to her face and groaned. "Oh, G.o.ds, not another mind-quake..."

"Ugh...what's a mind-quake?" Kaskalla asked, still a bit dazed but finally regathering her wits.

Grunting, Ortuu lifted his dark head from the table. Like Ia, he dipped his fingers in his drink and streaked them around the bridge of his nose before puffing air upward in the hopes of soothing the mental burn. "A mind-quake...is when an especially powerful psi...ungh...affects everyone within a set range. You grew up down by the sea, but even you should remember the Night of the Prophecy, from four and a half years back? It was in all the news Nets."

"The Night...? I did a report on it in high school, but everyone thought it was just some strange ma.s.s attack of the Fire Girl Prophecy!" Kaskalla protested. "No one had ever found a triggering cause!"

Lifting her free hand, Ia fluttered her fingers. Kaskalla gaped and shook her head in denial. She subsided when both Leona and Ortuu nodded in confirmation.

Leona lifted her own hand. The older woman's cheeks turned a bit pink as well. "I made the same mistake you did just now. Except I at least had Ia's permission, since we didn't know what we were doing at the time. After our second try did the exact same thing that night, we knew better than to try again."

Nose still throbbing but on its way to being healed, Ia gave Kaskalla a hard, dark look.

"People are going to come looking for the epicenter of the ma.s.s Prophecy attack, and that means they will come here. All three of you will simply say, 'I honesty cannot say what happened'...and if you have any qualms about lying, you are forbidden to say what happened, so therefore you cannot," Ia stated crisply. She aimed it mostly at Kaskalla, since Ortuu and Leona already knew what not to say. "If anyone asks about me, I was only here for a brief stop to say h.e.l.lo to some old friends...and I left over an hour ago. You will put the truth into my official evaluation, because the truth must be put into it, but then you will seal it. Got that?"

"Ah...I...guess so," Kaskalla agreed. She half shook her head, still looking a bit dazed. Then quickly grabbed her temples, grimacing. "But...I just can't believe that you were the source of...of thousands of people all experiencing a ma.s.sive surge of prophetic visions! And...and you've been offworld for two years, yet we've still been having these Fire Girl attacks. How can you be the source of them when you're not even here?"

"That's because I'm not the source of them, normally," Ia admitted, though she carefully avoided saying what that source was. "However, you are a very strong telepath, and you were hooked into my brain, with my gifts. We were in gestalt, which amplified my precognitive visions right across the city. Luckily, most everyone had enough warning to brace themselves...but because you triggered a broadcasting of my abilities, strong enough that people lost control of their senses, you have directly caused sixteen traffic accidents. Thankfully, none of them were lethal, and everyone will recover with medical aid."

Pushing to her feet, Ia swayed, then slumped back into her chair once more. Grunting, she touched her forehead, then shoved up the lid of her wrist unit.

"Great...I'm drained. I can't walk very far." Punching in the numbers for her brother's unit, she waited a few seconds. The moment Thorne answered, Ia spoke. "Thorne, to answer your question, yes, it happened again. But I'm in no shape to walk all the way out of here. Meet me in the bunker tunnels under the Church of Contemplation."

"I'm hardly in any shape to carry you, myself," he retorted, hand coming into view at the edge of the screen. He rubbed at his face, then sighed. "Fine...I'll be there shortly. Stop giving people slagging headaches."

Nodding, Ia shut the lid, ending the connection. "Remember, as far as anyone else is concerned I was here only for a short time, and not for anything psi-related. I was just here to catch up with my old church friends, and left a while ago. Volunteer nothing, because otherwise you're as clueless as anyone else as to what just happened here. And don't embellish."

Gathering her willpower, Ia pushed one last time to her feet. Head aching, mind throbbing, she shuffled toward the door. Thankfully, the access hatch to the bunker tunnels was only a few doors down from this particular conference room.

"I'm...I am sorry," Kaskalla offered. She was rubbing the side of her head, which no doubt still ached.

Ia paused at the door, glancing back over her shoulder. "Try to listen a little better next time. Other people do occasionally know better than you...and some experiments should not be repeated."

Pulling the door open, Ia left them in the room. She had to brace her hand on the corridor wall to keep her trembling body from staggering, but she left. It would be another twenty-plus minutes before emergency services realized the mind-quake was more or less round in shape, and another ten minutes to realize that this location was the focal point of its kilometers-wide radius. She needed to be back home long before then, without anyone seeing her near the church.

On the bright side, the fog has cleared...and Kaskalla will indeed do whatever I or Leona or Ortuu tell her to do. She'll rise in the ranks of non-Church religious politics, and be an added touch of leverage for saving everyone when the revolution comes.

So this moment was a literal headache, and I'll have tidying-up efforts to make, based on the few people whose accidents might adversely affect the shift and flow of the future...but overall, a net gain. Small, but good.

CHAPTER 5.

My mothers never did get used to my rising early for physical training while I stayed with them. I tried to be quiet, but it was an inevitable reminder that I was now in the military and they were going to lose me again. But they did rise early with me, my last day on Sanctuary that year. It's never easy when loved ones have to leave you, and doubly hard when you know they're going to serve in the military. Even if I wasn't headed for a combat zone at that point, they knew I'd wind up in one eventually.

For myself, parting from them wasn't easy. I knew I had to do it, and I did it, but I never once said any of this was easy.

~Ia AUGUST 9, 2492 T.S.

Her head ached. Thankfully not from any overuse of her gifts or face-plants on a hard surface. Lack of sleep made her uncomfortable this time. Rubbing at her tired eyes, wishing she could just go back to bed, Ia breathed deeply several times. She also swallowed another mouth of cold caf', and stared blearily at the last three questions on her Net-based exams. They were being taken in real time over the hyperrelay channels, despite the lag between Sanctuary and Earth of roughly one second for every fifty lightyears, and had to be completed on time, or her scores would be docked.

Ia already had a Field Commission as a Lieutenant Second Cla.s.s in the s.p.a.ce Force Marine Corps. In order to retain that rank, she had to go through training at an Officers' Academy; that was standard military procedure, and smart, since it guaranteed all officers above the lowest attainable rank had the same basic leadership training. In order to advance beyond Lieutenant First Cla.s.s, however-which she would only get after distinguishing herself through at least a full decade of service, if she didn't play the military's game-she also had to have a Master's degree.

Since she needed to be able to advance at a moment's notice in the future, Ia had signed up for a series of cla.s.ses on the Nets shortly after boarding the Liu Ji, back when she was just a corporal in the Marines. This particular virtual college simply presented the course materials, expected the students to learn on their own time, and then provided the exams online, all for a reasonable fee. It worked well, but it only worked if the students actually applied themselves to their lessons. It wasn't just rote memorization, either; each question in the final exams was different enough from the information provided in the resource materials that a student had to know the subject matter to be able to answer them correctly.

The door down the hall opened. Ia answered the question on her screen and hit the send key on her parents' workstation, without bothering to correct the typo in her answer. It might count slightly against her, but that was alright; she didn't want to pa.s.s with perfect marks, just pa.s.s with reasonably good ones.

One of her mothers shuffled out of their bedroom. Thankfully toward the bathroom, not the living room. Ia focused on the next question on her test; this was her final exam in her chosen Master's field, Military History. Once she was done with it and her scores tallied and registered, she would be eligible for the fast-track program at her chosen Academy. The bedroom door opened again behind her, and she heard her other mother move to wait at the bathroom door, not quite successfully smothering a yawn.

That audio cue forced Ia to smother one of her own, then sip at the cooled remnants of caf' in her mug. By the time she reached the final question, Amelia had slipped onto the sofa next to her child. Wrapping an arm around Ia's shoulders and snuggling her head on her daughter's shoulder, she peered at the screen. With her arm cushioned from Ia's skin by her bathrobe and her cheek on the fabric covering Ia's shoulder, there was less chance for her mother to trigger a precognitive vision, but less wasn't the same as none. Ia slipped her arm around her biomother's ribs, hugging her back, then helped her biomother sit upright again.

"'Who was nicknamed the White Death in World War II, Terran Standard Twentieth Century, and what trick did he use to prevent his breath from being seen?'" her mother recited aloud. "Ugh. You couldn't pay me to study Military History in that much depth. Did you get any sleep at all, gataki mou?"

Struggling against another yawn, Ia nodded. "Some. There's...mm...a Human on the other end of the testing Net at this time of the morning. I've already chatted with her. I need to have this last test witnessed so that when my transcripts arrive at the Academy, the TUPSF will be able to question and confirm that it really was me taking the exams-the voice link is active," she added, tapping the screen. "She can hear everything we're saying. That is, if she's not busy with something else. This is the last question, anyway."

"I trust you know it?" Aurelia asked, headed for the kitchen. "Fresh caf', anyone?"

"Mm, that would be lovely, dear," Amelia murmured. She sagged back on the couch, leaving her daughter free to compose her answer.

Ia touched the keys, typing each letter with her fingers, rather than her mind.

"Simo Hyh was the 'White Death' of Finland. Fighting in the coldest months of winter, he would often put snow into his mouth and breathe through it, so that the ice crystals would chill his breath with each exhale, preventing any puffs of steam from giving away his position. His military service took place during the Winter War of 19391940 Terran Standard, involving Finland versus the invading forces of the Soviet Union, and included over seven hundred confirmed, credited kills with both sniper rifle and machine gun. His career ended March 6th, 1940 T.S. when a bullet disfigured his face."

It was a bit more than the question actually called for, but it was an easy question, and Ia wanted to rea.s.sure the test examiners that she did, indeed, know historical military facts. As if I couldn't just dip into the past on the timeplains and pluck the facts from any stream I wanted-the real facts, not just the accounts written down afterward.

"There. Done." She struck the send key, then tapped the icon for the voice link. "Thanks for keeping me company, Meioa Giltrers."

It took a few seconds for the reply to come back. Even at hyperrelay speeds, Sanctuary was a long, long way from Earth. "Eh, it's not like I have anything better to do on the night shift. You go on and have a good night's rest, or whatever time of day it is all the way out at wherever-the-heck you're from."

That made Ia chuckle. "It's now morning, local time."

"Says you," her biomother grunted, still slouched on the sofa, arm over her eyes.

The examiner, Giltrers, spoke up again through the link. "Then I'll just say good morning to you. Your test will be graded and the results will be posted in three days. If you don't see them by then, contact the Exam Board via the conveniently named Contact the Exam Board link, and include my name, Maria Giltrers, as the test examiner for verification purposes. Now, any questions before we end this undoubtedly h.e.l.laciously expensive link?"

"None-and it's still technically a brand-new colonyworld, so all links certified for educational purposes only are provided for free by the government. Thank you for your patience, meioa, and have a good night." Ending the connection, Ia powered down the workstation. Shifting it from her lap to the coffee table, she sagged back against the cushions. For a moment, all she could see was the bleak prospect of packing up her belongings and boarding a shuttle for the s.p.a.ce station that evening. But I only have nineteen hours left with my family, and some of those hours won't be pleasant ones...

Curling over, she cuddled onto her mother's lap. Amelia stroked her fingers through Ia's short white locks. "My little white kitten...How big you've grown. How far you'll roam. I do wish you didn't have to go away..."

"I wish I didn't have to go back, either," Ia murmured. "That none of this was necessary. That I could be normal."

Aurelia emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray with three steaming mugs of caf' deftly balanced on it. "You'd be extraordinary, gataki, no matter what your abilities were like. I have proof of it; you were kind enough to prepare an extra pot, so I didn't have to wait as long for it to brew."

Ia smiled wryly at that. Sighing, she pushed herself upright and accepted the fresh mug. "So...anything planned for today?"

"Crying, weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and some breast-beating. Possibly some sobbing, if we can fit it into the schedule," Aurelia quipped, settling on Ia's other side. She patted her daughter on the leg, then sagged back against the sofa cushions with a sigh. "I don't want you to go, either. It'll be, what, two more years before we'll see you again?"

"In person, yes. And it'll be three years; I have to spend one year at the Academy in Sines, Portugal, then two more years of duty before I'll be free to come back home. But I'll be an officer, with more leeway in making hyperrelay calls back home," Ia offered. "Once a week, rather than once a month."

"Scant comfort," Aurelia groused. "It's not the same as holding my baby girl. Not that I can hold you for long, even when you are here..."

Mouth twisting in wry acknowledgment, Ia leaned onto her other mother's shoulder. Aurelia pulled her close, giving her a cuddle, then patted her on the arm and let Ia sit back up again. Drawing in a deep breath, Ia let it out. She tipped her head back, copying both of her mothers, and looked at the white-painted ceiling. "So. My last day here."

Aurelia patted her on the thigh. "What do you need to do today, kitten?"

"Mm. Finish filling up those memory chips so you can print out my precognitive missives once I'm gone...experiment on my brothers nefariously...and eat Momma's Restaurant's famous triple topado pie." She flashed each of her mothers a grin at that last one. "With ice cream."

Amelia chuckled. "Opportunist."

"What sort of experiments?" Aurelia asked, frowning.

"Just some prototype devices I need to have working and ready to go into production, next time I come back," Ia dismissed. "They're pretty much ready, though I wouldn't mind running one last set of tests. Actually, I really should run them on someone...else...oh, bother." Ia groaned under her breath, realizing there was one last thing she hadn't covered, yet. "Mom? Ma? We need to have a talk."

"What sort of talk?" Aurelia asked, her brow pinched and her tone skeptical.

"The Talk." Sighing, Ia pushed herself upright and edged around the coffee table. Putting physical s.p.a.ce between her and her mothers would help. Looming over them would be too aggressive, yet she had to be on her feet, to a.s.sert herself visually. Turning to face them once she was a couple body-lengths away, Ia relaxed her shoulders with a shrug. "I love you both, dearly and deeply...but it's time to have The Talk with you."

"Alright...so, talk," Aurelia told her. Amelia scooted closer to her, cuddling subtly with her wife.

Taking a deep breath, Ia gave it to them. "I am not your little girl anymore. I have not been for years, and I will never again be your little girl-and I'm not just talking about being a grown-up," she added as Amelia drew in a breath to speak. "I am talking about the fact that I need you to support me as the Prophet, from here on out. You are two of the most normal people I know. Everybody sees you as perfectly normal."

"Except for the Church," Amelia snorted.

"They're not normal themselves," Ia dismissed. "My point is, I need you to stop seeing me, addressing me, and treating me as your little girl, your daughter, your child. People need to start seeing me as the Prophet of a Thousand Years, foretold in V'Dan folklore and the Sh'nai faith, the master of the Fire Girl Prophecies, the protector and defender of the future. Our future, on this world. If they see you, two perfectly normal, sane, well-adjusted adults accepting, honoring, and following my directives...

"Look," she tried again, raking a hand through her hair before dropping it to her hip. "There's a certain momentum that needs to build, here in Sanctuarian society. Rabbit has the teenagers covered; the key members have met with me and they now believe in me, and she'll keep them believing. Thorne is working on presenting me to the support services, manufactories, and other businesses, and so forth. Fyfer will be going into the political and legal venues. I need you to rea.s.sure all the other perfectly normal people that I am a viable, sane alternative to falling in step with the madness of the Church. And you cannot do that if you keep calling me 'kitten' and gataki mou and thinking of me as your sweet little girl. It will come out in the littlest, subtlest ways...and that will undermine everything I need to do."

She eyed her parents, waiting to see how they would take all of that. Amelia twisted her mouth, while Aurelia huffed and frowned. Arms folded, Aurelia retorted, "Well, you are our little girl, first and foremost."

"No. I am not," Ia countered. "Not anymore, not ever again. Think. You're resisting me right now. You're not taking me seriously now. h.e.l.l-you don't even take the fact that I'm in the military seriously!" She flipped her hands up, then dropped them back to her hips, hoping and wishing her parents could see why this was necessary. "I would give up almost anything to still be your little girl...but I cannot, and will not, give up all the lives that will be slaughtered if I cannot pull off a G.o.ds-be-slagging miracle, both here and abroad. And I cannot be here.

"I need you to do what I cannot. I need you to be my hands and my arms and my legs here on Sanctuary. I need you to lead by example. You're still very strong figures in the local community. You're business leaders. People look up to you, they like you, they're friends with you...discounting the Church's brainwash victims and persecution hounds," Ia allowed. "You need to be more active in local business meetings. You need to circulate more, and talk about the things your sons are trying to do. You need to make friends and contacts, and be the couple to go to for safe, sane solutions in an increasingly insane political environment. And you need to do it with an unshaking faith in both myself as the Prophet and in the future predictions I have made. Which you must distribute when the time is right. Not Thorne, not Fyfer, not Rabbit. You.

"Which means you must stop thinking of me as your 'little girl.' Stop trying to shelter me, stop trying to protect me, and stop trying to defend your status as my parents and thus 'always superior' to me." Realizing her shoulders were tensing up, Ia shrugged and sighed, relaxing them. "It's like your joke earlier, that a mother will always outrank her daughter. I'm sorry, Mom, Ma...but you do not, you cannot, and you must not ever think that way again, or it will ruin the things I'm striving for."

Her biomother didn't look too happy. Her other mother looked even less pleased. Aurelia rolled her eyes. "Fine. So we can't call you our little girl anymore. We get the point."

"We'll do what you want, gata...er, Ia," Amelia amended. "I'm sorry. You can't expect us to give up being your mothers in a heartbeat! I mean, we'll try, but..."

Ia didn't have to probe the timestreams to know it was a reluctant, unhappy acceptance. She did anyway, double-checking the probabilities. What she found didn't make her happy, either. Raking her hands through her hair, Ia checked her options. The potential possibilities ended with her angling a hand back toward the hallway. The door to her brothers' bedroom opened silently, telekinetically, and two faintly glowing circlets floated out of the darkness.

"I'm treading a very fine line, here," she told her mothers, catching a head-sized, lumpy ring in each hand, matched pairs of her prophetic circlets. "The Church tricks its followers with its rhetoric and its verses and its dogmatic interpretations. They even do subtle subliminal advertisings already. And they will one day resort to outright brainwashing, and worse. I do realize the irony of what I myself am trying to do in return. I am building up my own cult of followers, filling them with my own dogmas and my own demands."

The words hurt to admit, but Ia admitted them bluntly, accepting responsibility to her parents for what she needed to do to the saner half of their homeworld.

"I am, in so many ways, doing exactly what they are doing. My methods may be slightly different, and my message vastly different...but the end result is the same. Two ideologically opposed camps filled with fanatics on both sides. Their side, and my side. What they do with rhetoric and coercion, I must do with truths and persuasion." She looked down at the lumpy, wreath-shaped, translucent peach rings in her hands. "And, like them, I must use tricks to get my message across...and I must use them on my own mothers."

"What are those things?" Aurelia asked her, eyeing them warily. "I know you've been working on them, but...what, exactly, are they?"

"Technically...I suppose you could call them biokinetically activated, parapsicognitive, temporal consequence feedback enhancers." At her mothers' blank looks, Ia let a touch of humor twist the corners of her mouth. "Don't worry about it. Just call them the Rings of Truth. It's a lot easier to say.

"This one," she said, lifting the one shaped vaguely like a crown of brambles, with lumpy bits suggestive of thorns, "is the Wreath of Pain. And this one is the Wreath of Hope." She lifted the other one, which had rounder, less linear blobs, which, in a certain light, suggested the thought of flowers. Looking back at her mothers, she lowered them, her smile fading. "You will get to try on both."

Amelia slipped her hand into her gynowife's, gripping it. Aurelia eyed the devices warily. "Why does the thought of putting on something nicknamed the Wreath of Pain fill me with deep reluctance, Daughter?"

Aware that both mothers shared that reluctance, Ia answered obliquely.

"The difference between the Church's methodology and my own is that the Church wants to take away the free will of its followers. To brainwash everyone into following its dogmatic beliefs, smothering logic, truth, and free thought. 'You will follow the teachings of the Church of the One True G.o.d, because G.o.d says that there is no other way,'" she mocked dryly. "'Every other way is a sin, and to follow any other path means condemning your souls and the souls of those who follow you into the agonies of eternal h.e.l.lfire and d.a.m.nation...' And for the Church in the decades to come, that eternal h.e.l.lfire and d.a.m.nation will become a very real and physical fire for those condemned as heretics. Stop thinking and conform, or die.

"Or be 'reeducated'...which for the psychically gifted will include lobotomizing certain portions of the brain in an effort to stop such abilities from forming and being used. After all, if you can read another person's thoughts, that means someone out there is actually still thinking, and isn't being a perfect little sheep in their flock. Or worse," Ia added sardonically. "The psi in question might find out what the Church Elders are really plotting behind the woolly little backs of that flock."

"And your methods?" Amelia asked her quietly.

"My methods?" Ia asked. She spread her arms slightly. "I believe in free will. As ironic as it is for me to say this, of all people, I have always believed in it. I believe in people choosing the best lives possible, both for themselves and for others. But how can you make a good choice if you do not yet know the consequences of your decisions? These will show people those consequences.

"Both of the things they have done in the past," Ia stated, lifting the Wreath of Pain, then the Wreath of Hope, "and the things they should do in the future. I need people on my side, working for my cause, because they know it's the right thing to do. People who, after having been fully informed, have consciously decided to do the right thing...these people can move mountains, worlds, and even whole star systems when they put their minds and their wills and their efforts into it.

"So I am...I am asking you," Ia said, stumbling a little over the words, because these were her parents, her beloved mothers, and she knew this would change their relationship that last little irrevocable bit, "to put these on. To see with your own eyes what I have seen-just a fraction of what I have seen-and to choose. I need you to decide of your own free will whether you will follow me as the Prophet of a Thousand Years, and not just because I'm Iantha Iulia Quentin-Jones, your very strange, very troubled, but well-meaning little girl.

"You raised me both to see the problems around me, and to step up to the responsibility of fixing them. You raised me to do the right thing," she reminded her mothers. "For that, you should be proud as my mothers...but it is time to let me go and let me do it. And it is time for you to decide whether or not you'll do it as well. After you have seen the choices and the consequences that await."

Stepping around the coffee table, Ia held up the Wreath of Pain. Her mothers eyed it for a long moment, then Amelia started to reach for it. She hesitated, though. "Um...gataki...isn't this the one you called the Wreath of Pain?"

"I need you to wear both. For the next thirty years, everyone will have to try on both. It's the best way to get the right kind of momentum going. And I need you to try the Wreath of Pain first, so that...well, so that you'll have the Wreath of Hope to look forward to-don't worry so much," she said, rolling her eyes as that statement made her biomother hesitate even more. "You aren't a ma.s.s murderer, so you won't be seeing the points of view of your victims. You'll just see some of the consequences of bad decisions you've made in the past. I won't lie; it will be unsettling. But you'll come out of it okay. My Prophetic Stamp on that."

Aurelia let out a short, dry chuckle at that. "You keep saying that, little kitten. I suppose I ought to see if you really mean it. Ah...is there anything I should do?"

"Well, Mom should move away from you," Ia told her, grateful when Amelia complied. "But otherwise, the only thing you need to do is be sitting or kneeling when trying one of these things. I've foreseen that some people might sag a little if they're startled by what they see. Here, let me put it on you, Ma..."

The device had a subtly tapered, thicker segment on the inner side. Part of that was to help augment the psychic resonances of the device, but part of it was simply to ensure that it would fit on any head it encountered. Almost any head; the K'katta, the Chinsoiy, and the Dlmvla didn't keep their brains in the same physiologically a.n.a.logous location as most of the other currently known sentient races. But since her mother was a fellow Human-more so, given who and what Ia's father had been-it was just a matter of aligning the ring so that it settled comfortably onto the crown of Aurelia's skull.

Her mother sucked in a sharp breath, brown eyes widening until the whites could be seen all around them. Amelia eyed her partner warily, then looked to Ia for rea.s.surance. Holding up her empty hand, Ia waited. Trial and error over the last three weeks had led her to this version of the torus rings, which she hoped was the final one. In particular, the Wreath of Pain was the most difficult to judge. She had tried it on her brothers, and Fyfer-who had broken more laws than Thorne-had reacted more strongly to what he saw, but neither of her brothers were lifelong criminals. Neither of them had lived all that long, period.