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Authors: Jean Johnson

Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty (69 page)

BOOK: Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty
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A door opened down the hall. It was followed by shuffling footsteps which were not quite lost under the soft, rhythmic grunts coming from Ia as she measured out a set of sit-ups, toes hooked under the living room couch for counterbalance. Her biomother, Amelia, squinted at her in the light from the reading lamp.
“Gataki mou?”
Amelia shuffled a few steps closer, her bare feet tucked into worn pink slippers and her body wrapped in a fuzzy green bathrobe. “What are you doing, child?”
A little distracted by being called her old, Greek nickname of
my kitten
, Ia struggled to finish the set. Uncurling her stomach after three more crunches, she relaxed on the springy, rubbery floor, breathing hard. “I’m doing my morning calisthenics . . . and I’m really out of shape. I did what I could on the flight from Earth, but . . . I had to leave my weight suit behind. It would’ve cost too much to transport all that mass.”
“Well . . . can you keep it down a little?” her mother asked. Behind her, the door opened again. “And maybe not start so early? I know we changed the beds in your old room so your brothers could have a little more room, which means you have to sleep out here, but . . . well, the floor here in the living room kind of squeaks, and . . .”
“Have you lost all sense of common courtesy?” Aurelia demanded, coming up behind her wife. Being slightly taller, she glared at Ia over her partner’s shoulder. “It’s five in the morning! Not even your brothers get up until seven at the earliest, and only because Thorne’s first class is at eight, this quarter!”
“Sorry.” Sitting up, Ia shrugged. “I’ll go for a run or something.”
“In this neighborhood? At
this
hour?” Amelia asked.
Pushing to her feet, Ia arched her brow, looking down at her mothers. “Would
you
mess with someone as tall as me, who can comfortably jog in
this
gravity?”
“No, but we’re not talking about vagrants or gang members,” Aurelia reminded her daughter. “The Church has been moving more and more converts into this area. They’re not going to look kindly on some . . . some solitary weirdo jogging around the block at this hour. Anything that isn’t in Church doctrine, they won’t like it.”
“
And
they’ll let you know,” Amelia agreed.
Rolling her eyes, Ia swept her hands over her hair, raking back the sweaty locks. “I
do
know, Mother. But I’m going straight into the Naval Academy after this, and they’ll be expecting me to stay in shape even while on an Extended Leave.”
It didn’t matter which one she was addressing. Amelia was Mom, Aurelia was Ma, but both were forever
Mother
to all three of their kids, and usually addressed as such when the pair were tag-teaming said kids.
Aurelia lifted her finger. “Don’t sass us,
gataki
. If you’re going to go jogging, then go. But go
quietly
. Your mother and I need our sleep. We closed the restaurant for your homecoming yesterday, but we’ll have a busy day of it today, since it’s the end of the week.”
“I’ll go put on my cammies,” Ia offered, holding up her hands. “Even Church members have seen the occasional episode of
Space Patrol
, so they should know what a soldier looks like . . . and I’m just as sure that, by now, everyone who came into Momma’s Restaurant in the last month knows that you’ve been expecting me home from the military.”
“I suppose that’ll have to do,” Aurelia muttered. She pointed a tanned finger at her daughter. “And no more getting up at ‘oh dark hundred,’ you got that? That’s an order.” She folded her arms across her chest as Amelia turned to eye her. “A mother
always
outranks her little girl.”
There were several retorts Ia could’ve made to that, but she refrained. Her mothers were trying to reduce her to the little girl they knew and loved—and they were succeeding to a point—but Ia’s universe had changed. It was an uncomfortable, unhappy realization, acknowledging that her parents were no longer the center of that universe.
Instead of replying, she sighed and grabbed her kitbag, tucked at the end of the couch where she had been sleeping. Fishing out a set of mottled browns, she headed for the bathroom. Amelia and Aurelia let her pass, then returned to their bedroom.
Her parents had never had much room in their apartment above the small but popular restaurant: just the two bedrooms, a bathroom, an office, the living room, and its small nook of a kitchen, which was rarely used to cook any meal other than breakfast. Sleeping on the couch wasn’t any worse than sleeping in a tent, and she was already in the habit of tidying her bed, so folding up the blankets right after waking and rising hadn’t been a problem.
It was the getting up part that seemed to be the problem.
I forgot to adjust my hours to Mom and Ma’s hours, not Sanctuarian hours, on the trip out from Earth. I forgot they don’t get up until almost 9 a.m. and don’t go to bed until midnight—though I’d think I would’ve noticed last night how “late” everyone stayed up, catching up with all the gossip I never bothered to scry for in the timestreams . . .
Speaking of which, I should check the timestreams, see what I need to do versus what I should do, while waiting for my family to wake up again. Better yet, I’ll take my writing pad with me and work on jotting down yet more prophecies electrokinetically while I jog,
she decided, slipping out of her plain brown T-shirt and shorts. It was a little chilly outside, the weather more autumn-like than late summer, so jogging in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt wouldn’t be too warm.
Three hundred years goes by awfully fast when you’re dead and can’t tell anyone how to stop a galaxy-wide war.
 
 
JULY 20, 2492 T.S.
 
“How much longer?” Fyfer asked, his tone bored.
“If I can put up with Mom and Ma throwing that surprise welcome home party for me at the restaurant yesterday . . . and then making me wash all the dishes afterwards,” Ia muttered half under her breath, “
you
can put up with a little drive into the countryside this morning.”
“The question is, how far of a drive?” Thorne asked her. Once again, he was driving, guiding the family ground car over the ruts in the unpaved, barely graded road they were following. Hovercars strong enough to counteract the local gravity were too expensive for most settlers to afford on Sanctuary, but that didn’t mean the government sank a lot of money into highquality back roads, either.
“Yeah, you said you’re looking for a crysium field, but we’ve already passed three,” Fyfer added, shifting forward as far as his safety restraints would allow, bracing his elbows on the backs of their chairs.
“One where we won’t be interrupted. What I’m about to do, no one outside of the three of us is to ever know about . . . and I do mean
no on
e—turn left up ahead,” Ia ordered Thorne.
He complied, carefully turning between the red-barked, purple-leaved trees. The side road she picked wasn’t even really a road, more like a leafer-path. Aquamarine grass had sprung up in the leafer’s wake, along with small bushes, making him slow the car. “How much farther? I am not damaging Ma’s car on one of your quests if it can be avoided.”
“Quarter klick, no more. There’s a small clearing of crystals off to the right. Up there,” Ia added, pointing ahead at a gap in the growth. “You can just turn around right there. Point the car outward.”
“Ia . . . pointing the car
back
the way it came is the new version of the archaic handkerchief-on-the-doorknob trick,” Fyfer warned her.
“All the more reason the few who might make it this far will back up and find another spot,” Ia countered.
Thorne sighed and carefully jockeyed the ground vehicle around so that it faced back toward the dirt road. “At least with a path this wide, the leafer isn’t likely to wake up until late winter at the earliest.”
“Another thing I’m counting on.” Disentangling herself from the restraints, Ia opened her door and faced the other way. The partially recovered path ended about a hundred and fifty meters away in what looked like a brush-choked, grass-strewn slope, a modest hill that rose a good twenty-five meters at its crest, twenty or so meters in width, and probably extended for five times that in length. But a leafer was no hill.
Thankfully, it wasn’t a carnivore, either. Instead, it was the largest land-based herbivore in the known galaxy. If the beasts could have been tamed and trained, the government of Sanctuary would have done so, but the few times they had tried had proven too disastrous. Leafers were too dumb, too interested in the recyclable plastics and elastics known as plexi—a common prefab building material—and too prone to torpor and months-long hibernation after only a kilometer or so of feeding, depending on the size.
Her brother’s assessment was fairly accurate; a quick probe into the local timestreams showed that it wouldn’t bother them, so long as they didn’t try to climb up and dig a hole through the outer patina of dirt hosting all those bushes on its back. Closing the car door, she looked over at the field bordering the leafer-path. Rocky outcrops poked up through the ground to the east, a rugged clearing too stony to permit the growth of many trees. A few bushes did their best to cling to pockets of soil, but there was plenty of evidence that this little meadow flooded whenever a heavy rainstorm came through. The back and forth cycle of dry-and-drowned kept most plants away from this area, making it the perfect zone for a different sort of growth.
The real growth, slow as it was, came from the sprays of crystals dotting the field, pastel and glowing faintly, just bright enough to be seen even in the light of midmorning.
The predominant color among the shafts was transparent gold, not quite amber, but here and there, other hues could also be seen. Mint green, aquamarine, lilac, and rose. All of them were clear enough to see through. They also ranged in sizes from tiny, sharp-edged sprays no bigger than her head, to towering, conifer-like shapes four times her height. Heading toward them, she stopped when her younger brother gasped, dropping to his knees.
“Fire!”
he yelled, clutching at his head, eyes wide and focused on things that weren’t there.
“The Phoenix rises! The cathedral on fire—golden birds covering the sky!”
The attack startled her. She hadn’t felt anything building up around her. Normally, those who were the most psychically sensitive suffered the most from the phenomenon, and her brother Fyfer was about as mind-blind as any second-generation resident of Sanctuary could possibly claim to be. Slightly more sensitive than the rest of the Humans in the known galaxy, but only slightly.
Thorne rolled his eyes and aimed a kick at his brother’s rump. “Get up. Your acting isn’t
that
good.”
Laughing, Fyfer dropped his hands and pushed to his feet. He grinned at his siblings, brushing the dirt from his knees. “
You
know I’ve been practicing . . . but I’ll bet I had
her
fooled!”
“If I weren’t so sensitive to the buildup of precognitive KI—or rather, the lack of it this time—then yes, I would’ve been fooled,” Ia agreed. “You were good in every other detail I could see.”
“Annoying is more like it,” Thorne snorted, eyeing his younger brother. He returned his attention to their sister. “So, why are we out here? I’m supposed to be studying for my second big test in Economics.”
“We’re here to experiment.” Ia removed the cuff from her right arm. Not the left one, which was her military ident unit, but the one hidden under her right sleeve. Molding it with a touch of electrokinetic energy to soften the material and a nudge telekinesis to shape it, she formed it into a round, pink peach sphere. Unlike the sprays, it wasn’t completely transparent, as the pink infusing the gold seemed to cloud the material. She held it out on the palm of her hand, displaying it to her siblings. “Do you know what this is?”
“A holokinetic illusion?” Fyfer asked, dropping his jester’s attitude with a shrug. Underneath the charming jokester, he was quite bright for such a young man. “Or maybe some sort of psychic gelatin? At least, I’m presuming it’s one or the other, either holokinesis of something that doesn’t exist, or telekinetic manipulation of something that does. Except the last I checked, you weren’t a holokinetic.”
BOOK: Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty
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