Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship Read online

  Some of it was quite good, including Private Clairmont’s recently written song about his commanding officer—even if he kept getting the details wrong. The storm hadn’t broken until after Recruit Wong Ta Kaimong had been captured back in Basic. Ia remembered that day all too well. The chorus was catchy, though. Ia found herself humming along as she finished her sandwich.

  Bloody Mary! Of her skills you should be wary;

  When she goes into Hell, the devil knows well

  He doesn’t want to be her foe.

  Bloody Mary! Of her enemies left, there’s nary;

  For their blood runs red from her toes to her head,

  And it drips down her locks of snow!

  A gust of cold wind entered the tent, along with the poncho-draped figure of Captain Roghetti. Clairmont hesitated a couple beats, in case it was for some sort of an announcement, or someone demanding he get back to serving food, since that was his cross-duty task for this hour. He continued with his song when the Army captain merely looked around, spotted Ia, and headed her way.

  Dropping onto the bench next to her, the Army captain murmured in her ear. “I guess you were right about my coming in here. Forward surveillance shows the Salik are pushing forward south of here, mainly along the C and D front lines. How much do you know about their movements?”

  “They’re just testing the waters,” Ia murmured back, turning so she could speak into his ear. With the others listening to the lyrics and singing along with the chorus, the two of them had a fair amount of privacy. “They won’t try a big push for three more days—they want the ground to be extra-muddy so that their mechsuits can handle the terrain troubles far better than our own. General Mattox should agree to my counterattack plans before then. They’re tactically sound.”

  “You’ve only just arrived, and you’ve already worked up your big battle plans?” Roghetti asked her, skeptical.

  “You have no idea just how much I can foresee, Captain, but you’ll learn. I’ve been working on these and other plans for several years now, including a number of contingencies.” She lifted her mug in salute. “All I need from you is to make sure you and your crew help out and don’t commit any Fatalities along the way. I may have earned a little bit of trust from you and your people, but I’m staking a whole lot of trust on you, too. Just as I’ve staked it on my crew.”

  Her back itched, another memory dredged up in association with her words. The welts had long since healed scarlessly, but she still remembered the moment when everything had shattered. She wouldn’t be punished with a caning if any of Roghetti’s crew messed up, just for any big mistakes caused by her own, but there was something about the situation on Dabin that reminded her of that prickling sense of terror. Just a ghost of it, but that was enough to make her prod at the half-fogged waters of the near future.

  Ia pushed it away, biting into her sandwich. Regrets were time-wasters. She was here to reassure her crew that their CO was safe and sound, fully in command of her faculties even if she’d deliberately destroyed their ship.

  “You’ve been planning this day for a couple of years now?” he asked.

  “Battle plans for Dabin for today and the next few weeks, battle plans for Zubeneschamali, battle plans for my capture by the Salik and my subsequent escape from Sallha . . . plans for this and plans for that. Plus contingencies upon contingencies, for those times when things go seriously wrong, and the free-willed actions of others toss my original plans out the nearest airlock,” she added, answering his follow-up question before he could get to it. “I see percentages and probabilities, not absolute certainties . . . but I see all of them.

  “I can also guide the dice quite a lot, but I can’t always guarantee an exact outcome. Not without help from the people around me. Whatever rumor and my service record and even the Sh’nai faith might say about me, I’m still only one woman, Captain.”

  He shrugged, then changed the topic. Wrinkling his nose, Roghetti lifted his chin at Clairmont, and asked, “Why do your soldiers sing so much? Hell, some of ’em were singing even when they were doing KP, last night. The only thing they haven’t done is sing while out on patrol or sentry duty, thank God.”

  Ia turned her attention back to Clairmont, bringing his song into its final verse. She was still enjoying it as background noise, despite the sometimes wildly inaccurate lyrics. The bit about her cutting her enemies into three wasn’t always true, for instance . . . though in some fights, she had done just that. “It actually started as a cross-Branch rivalry.”

  “A rivalry? Over what?” Roghetti asked her.

  “Soldiers in the Space Force Marine Corps sing,” Ia told him. She touched her own chest. “I started out in the Corps, and their drill instructors use it as a method of building esprit des corps during Basic Training. But when I handpicked my crew, I pulled in people from all four Branches.

  “Their first chance to socialize in earnest off duty, some of the ex-Army members tried to mock the ex-Marines for it, and it got to the point that Private York—he’s the one on comm duty right now,” Ia reminded Roghetti, “he came and fetched me to handle it. I told the ex-Army members to either start singing themselves and outperform me and my fellow ex-Marines, or just shut up and put up with it. Since then . . . well, they’ve learned to integrate and work together. That includes singing.”

  He started to say something more, but Clairmont’s performance came to an end. The private had a good voice, as good as the more professionally trained York, and that meant a fair amount of applause and a bit of cheering besides. Roghetti listened to the others calling for a new song, then turned back to Ia as soon as Clairmont settled them down and launched into his next a capella piece.

  “Where do they all come from?” the Army captain asked Ia. Roghetti pointed at one of the gray-uniformed women listening raptly to the performance, Philadelphia Benjamin. “I thought I heard that meioa-e talking about her family back on Mars, yet they’re walking around on Dabin like it’s their native gravity. Mars is a major lightworld. They have gravity weaves underfoot almost everywhere you go, just so they don’t grow up too weak to walk on another world, but it’s set to Terran Standard. So she can’t be from Mars.”

  “She is from Mars,” Ia told him. “I spent the last two years slowly ramping up the gravity on our previous ship because I knew we’d have to come here to help the rest of you fight, and I wanted everyone acclimated enough that they could fight. Too many things can go wrong with a gravity weave if you wear one into combat, so I just made sure they could literally stand on their own two feet on this world.” At his skeptical look, she shook her head. “Relax, Captain. You’ll learn how accurate I am soon enough.”

  “If you say so,” he murmured, sitting back against the edge of the table.

  “You’d better go double-check on C and D Companies. They’ll need supplies sent down the line in another forty-three minutes, after the shooting and screaming have stopped,” she told him, leaning close enough to be heard without speaking over the new song. “Commander Harper was going to give your supply sergeants a list of what they’ll need, but you’ll still need to sign off on them as cross-Company requisitions.

  “Use our budget authorizations, not your own. Master Sergeant Sadneczek should have included the codes for it in Harper’s paperwork—oh, and don’t forget the Salik will be shooting at us, too, shortly. You have about eight minutes, plenty of time to sign papers and redistribute the troops who haven’t budged at Commander Harper’s suggestion,” she added. “Particularly Privates Ving and Hassan, and Lance Corporal von Mitt. The attack will be over after the seventh strike, then we can all clean up and get some rest.”

  Eyeing her one last time, Roghetti shook his head and rose without a word. Pulling up the hood on his poncho, he left the mess tent just as Clairmont reached the chorus of his next composition about his commanding officer.

  Ia, Bloody Mary!

&nbs
p; Place your body between your beloved home,

  And the war’s desolation . . .

  The contents of her mug had finally lost heat. Ia sipped at the tepid caf’ anyway. She had two more hours to stay awake before things would be calm enough for her to catch any sleep.

  CHAPTER 2

  Who? Oh God . . . Brigadier General José Mattox. Oh yes, that name brings up some memories, doesn’t it?

  ~Ia

  “Captain—Ship’s Captain Ia,” Captain Roghetti corrected himself. Lengthening his strides, the camouflage-clad man caught up with her as she emerged from one of the spokes of the tent-and-pod structures comprising his Company’s base camp. “Is there a particular reason why . . . Wait,” he muttered, frowning between her and the direction she was headed. “So you do already know about the civilians insisting on seeing you in person at the perimeter?”

  “Of course. Before I hit the cot last night, I ducked back into central command and asked my comm tech to make a few calls,” Ia explained. “Those civilians are bringing me something I purchased and had stashed on this planet months ago.”

  She nodded at the gravel road that led away from the heart of the camp. In the light of local morning—though it was early evening Terran Standard time—it was easy to see that Roghetti had set up E Company’s base camp in some farmer’s unplowed fields. The local ground cover was a sort of reddish brown color and plush like moss. The mud was yellowish, and the gravel used to keep the landowner’s tractorbots from bogging down in that mud formed a ribbon of pinkish granite chips.

  It snaked toward the brownish tree-equivalents bordering the camp, leaving Ia with the impression the landscape was the wrong color. She kept expecting the ground to have brown mud and bluish grass-stuff, not reddish brown and yellow. Even her own clothes looked a little weird since she kept expecting to see gray at the edge of her vision, not camouflaged yellow-brown-red, though she knew she’d be wearing them for the next sixty-three local days.

  Chaplain Benjamin and Commander Harper had not only carried her belongings off the Hellfire, they had ensured the local Army equipment manufactories issued suitable camouflage clothing and equipment in her specific sizes. The only differences between her uniform and Roghetti’s were the rocket-clutching brass eagles she wore on her shirt points and the fact that the outer edges of her sleeves and pant legs had a little streaking and sprinkling of neutral gray randomly seeded through the camouflage patterning, whereas his held hints of dull green.

  Striding at her side, Roghetti followed her in silence, his gaze sweeping over the fields with their lumps of tents, container pods, hangars, and handful of vehicles in sight. The rain had quit at some point while she slept, and the ground was misting a little, the air cool but supersaturated with moisture. It wouldn’t last long, she knew. Within the hour, water would be falling again. They were on the verge of full spring, locally, and that meant plenty of showers.

  Roghetti finished his inspection and glanced at her again. “So, are you going to tell me what you’re going to insist on letting in past my perimeter?”

  “I’ll not only tell you, I’ll even let you use it,” Ia promised. She tipped her head at the tunnel of the gravel road leading into the forest. “I directed the Afaso Order to purchase a portable hyperrelay unit and mount it in a hovervan for my use.”

  “You have a big enough budget to buy a portable hyperrelay?” he asked her, dark brows quirking under the bill of his cap. “Not to mention, last I checked, the Afaso were still nonmilitant, civilian-sector, monastic practical pacifists. Hardly the type to take orders from the Space Force.”

  “They’re not. They’re taking orders from the Prophet of a Thousand Years. And my operating budget was big enough to slag the single most sophisticated, expensive ship currently in the fleet after only two and a half years of operating it,” Ia said.

  The Army captain choked. Coughing, he cleared his throat. “You what?” he rasped. “What’d you do, blow up a capital ship? Is that what your ship was? But that can’t be right. You said your entire crew is only 160 and you,” Roghetti protested. “Capital ships require crews of several thousand.”

  “It was hardly a capital ship, Captain,” Ia said. “The new Harasser Class is approximately the size of a frigate, with a normal crew complement of around five hundred. However, it hits with the firepower of somewhere between a battlecruiser and a battleship. The only problem was, I couldn’t spare that many people to be on my crew. Too many were and are still needed elsewhere in this war. So I pared it down to the absolute minimum, with a pool of about twenty replacements available.”

  “Replacements?” he asked, confused.

  She flicked her hand. “Nobodies. Talented, skillful, dedicated nobodies. People whose lives wouldn’t make a single impact anywhere else, positive or negative, in the flow of time. At least, for the most part. They’d never make an impact anywhere else, but in my Company, Captain, they can, have, and will change the course of the future. For the better, if I have anything to say about it.”

  “You call them replacements, as if you expect your people to die,” he observed dryly.

  Ia stopped walking. Roghetti stopped a couple paces after her, turning to face her.

  “We all die in the end, Luca,” she said quietly, addressing him by his given name. “I am as mortal as you, or Private York, or your supply sergeants, or . . . or just about any Human out there. I can predict how to avoid death, and I can tell people how to avoid death . . . but that doesn’t mean they’ll follow through. And it definitely does not mean they’ll succeed in avoiding it even if they do follow through. Every officer knows that the men and women under his or her command may die at some point.

  “I’ve been lucky that, up until now, my crew has stayed mostly aboard our ship. I’ve been able to pilot it safely through every life-threatening engagement we’ve faced,” she added, striding forward again. He turned to join her as she moved. “But now we’re on the ground, we will have to scatter ourselves across a wide stretch of terrain, and we will face a very large number of the enemy. I can single-handedly control the flight of a starship less than a kilometer long. I cannot control a thousand kilometers of enemy-infested terrain.”

  They had reached the tree line. The perimeter checkpoint was another two hundred meters down the way. Such a large camp would have been difficult for her crew to have patrolled even with the use of surveillance equipment, but then Ia only had three Platoons, plus a small cadre. Roghetti commanded five Platoons of six Squads each and a full cadre, including Squad-level sergeants, supply officers, and so forth. The TUPSF Army could afford to be more support-heavy than the trimmed-down needs of the Marines, and when she had served in the Navy, Ia’s support had been whatever Battle Platforms her small Delta-VX had touched.

  Since neither she nor the captain strolling at her side were bothering to hide their approach, the sentries flanking the gate had plenty of time to identify them. One soldier, she could see openly; he gently cradled his stunner rifle as he stood by the fence gate, its bulbous black-and-white curves painted over in the local camouflage colors. She only knew the other soldier’s location from the timestreams, for the woman had taken that much care to blend in with her surroundings.

  Beyond the gate sat a beige hovervan. Next to it parked a hoverbike. Both sets of thrusters had been turned off, leaving them parked on their landing pods. Leaning against the front bumper of the van were a pair of batik-clad Human males.

  One was dark-skinned, rather short, and boasted whipcord muscles, visible thanks to his sleeveless tunic. The other was about as tall as Ia, pale and freckled, but built like a brick door. Not quite as broad as Ia’s brother Thorne, but meaty all the same. Both had their hair shorn close to their heads in buzz cuts that would have done any Space Force soldier proud, straight out of Basic.

  The private at the gate nodded to them. “Captain, sir,” he greeted Roghetti, then glanced at Ia
. “Lieutenant Colonel.”

  “Ship’s Captain,” Roghetti corrected, lifting his chin at Ia. Or rather, at her collar points. “That eagle has a rocket. Navy insignia and rank, not Army.”

  “Sorry, sir. Ship’s Captain, sir,” the private corrected himself. The name patch above his shirt pocket read Gulvigsson. Like the two Afaso, he was stocky and muscular, bred for heavyworlder life, with pale skin and dark lashes.

  “It’s alright. Captain, would you like to inspect the van before permitting it into camp?” Ia offered politely.

  Roghetti eyed it, her, the Afaso, then her again. “Will you vouch for it?”

  Focusing her attention inward, down, and out in a peculiar mental flip, Ia checked the timestreams. Not to trace the future of the van—since she had plans for it—but to check its past. What took her a couple minutes within the expanse of her mind only took a second or two in reality. Nodding, she lifted her chin. “It’s clean. Nothing’s been tampered with.”

  “That’s it?” Captain Roghetti asked her. “You just roll up your eyes for a moment, and that’s it? You just know?”

  “I’ve learned to be both very fast and very thorough at checking the past and future. That, and they are who they appear to be: vowed monks from the Eltegar City Dojo. Full Master Mark Saunders,” Ia introduced. The shorter man gave them a short bow at her gesture, and the taller nodded. “And Senior Master Brian Apowain. Good morning, gentlemeioas. Thank you for bringing this out here.”

  The taller man bowed to her as his partner sagged back against the hovervan once more. Apowain fished a set of keys from the pocket of his wax-resist dyed trousers. The patterns on his clothes echoed the frilly leaves of the local Dabin-style trees, as was the usual custom for local monk batiks. “Good morning, Prophet. I believe these are now yours.”

  He tossed the starter keys, a pair of black plexi rods connected by a ring, toward Ia. The high arc of it curved and fell faster than it would have back on Earth, thanks to Dabin’s higher gravity, but it did clear the tall fence. Lifting her hand, Ia pulled the keys out of their arc telekinetically, slowing and wafting them into her grip. “Thank you. Return to the city and prepare to carry out the defense plans I sent to you. Remember to wait for the signal, and match it to the right plans before executing. Do not engage the enemy unless you absolutely have to.”