Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship (5 page)

“If I were you . . . I think I’d need a drink,” Roghetti finally quipped. “Maybe two or three. Given the help your Company’s given mine over the last few days, I’d be happy to spot you the first one. Dabin’s a muddy world, but the locals have come up with some rather potable brews.”

“Unfortunately, strong psis don’t have that luxury,” she muttered. “Unless you make it a hot cup of caf’; that’s a drink I could actually use.” Sighing, Ia raked a hand through her damp hair, then grimaced at the moisture and loose hairs clinging to her fingers. Loose, greasy hair. Shifting to Feyori form and back hadn’t rid her very matter-based sense of self of the need to bathe. Looking around, she oriented herself in the tent and pointed at one of the doors. “I will take a hot shower, though. My things are . . . that way, three tents down, hang a left, and one more down the side spoke, yes?”

York and Roghetti both nodded. Private Douglas spoke up from her duty station. “Yes, sir. I overheard Chaplain Bennie saying she’d put them there herself since that’s where our officers are bivouacked. The nearest showering box is two tents down the chain from that, sir. There are signs, so you can’t miss it.”

“Thank you, Douglas,” Ia told the other woman. She looked at Sharpe, who hadn’t moved his eyes from his screens, watching the current combat in the distance via hovercam drones. “If you meioas need me, you’ll know where I’ll be for the next fifteen minutes. After that, I’ll be in the mess tent set aside for our Company.”

“We should be fine, sir,” York reassured her. “At least until those potshots come our way.”

Unfocusing her eyes, Ia checked the timestreams for a moment, then nodded.

“Harper’s off making sure the appropriate tents will be evacuated by the time the Salik start shooting at us—the one
good
thing in their invasion is that they’d like this planet and its infrastructure left intact, so at least they’re not dropping hydrobombs on the cities, or lobbing asteroids from afar.” Ia sighed, rubbing her forehead. Part of the fog in her mind was from fatigue. “This is not going to be an easy fight, but it will be a worthwhile one. Call me if a low probability crops up, but we should be fine for now.”

“Aye, sir,” her crew members agreed in ragged chorus.

Roghetti joined her as she headed for the correct spoke in the interconnected tent complex. “Just one more question, Captain—and you can shoot me down if this is above my security clearance, but I’d like to ask it, if I may.”

“Yes, we need the Feyori on our side,” Ia stated as they moved down the canvas and plexsteel tunnel. “No, it has nothing to do with the Dabin engagement, other than that I need the Salik pried off this planet and shot back into space, and there are some Feyori influences I will have to deal with along the way. No, I cannot tell you why we need them. If word gets out what they’ll be used for, nearly everyone in the Alliance will wind up dead.

“No, that is
not
hyperbole,” she continued, answering his questions before he could even draw breath to ask them. “Yes, this is so far above your pay grade, not even the Admiral-General knows one hundred percent of what is coming. And yes, I can get away with keeping quiet about what’s coming under the umbrella of the old ‘Vladistad,
salut
’ and the precognitive-protective statutes governing Johns & Mishka versus the United Nations, because it
does
involve the safety of the Alliance as a whole. Any other questions?” Ia offered lightly.

Roghetti narrowed his eyes warily. “Were you reading my mind just now?”

“Nope. Just reading the future in all its infinite variety,” Ia replied, hands clasped behind her back as they walked. The rain started drumming harder on the force-field dome, sizzling as well as spattering somewhere overhead. “Telepathy is actually one of my weakest skills, being the least liked and least utilized. I truly dislike touching other people’s thoughts. It is rude, it is invasive, and it is quite frankly unnecessary for all that I have to do. I also have far too many things going on in my own head to
want
to go rummaging around in anyone else’s thoughts needlessly. I’ll see you in the mess tent in about twenty, twenty-five minutes.”

“I don’t intend . . .” Breaking off, he frowned at her, then shook his head. “Have a nice shower, Captain. There’s plenty of hot water at this time of night. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

Nodding in farewell, Ia headed for the tent spur that contained her kitbag, packed and shipped along with Harper and the others when they had left the
Hellfire
four days before. Nobody in her crew had more than a kitbag’s worth of gear and their mechsuits on hand; the majority of their personal belongings had already been packed off to the new ship to await their arrival.

Even her mechsuit had been shipped out with her Company, air-dropped with the others in a bulky packing crate two days ago and salvaged out of the swamp by her crew, since Ia herself hadn’t been in a position to wear it off her ship. Not when she had been forced by layers of circumstances to blow up that ship. Clothing, she could re-create from the constant familiarity of wearing it. Even the complexity of her officer’s arm unit was within her grasp. But the intricate mesh of machinery and electronics in a mechsuit was beyond her personal comprehension level.

Wearing it wasn’t on the schedule for the next few days. Bathing, sleeping, digging up a certain prepurchased-and-stashed hyperrelay unit and transmitting several battle plans to the general in charge of the 1st Division were. Between then and now, Ia had to figure out why things were going wrong here on Dabin, why they were going to get a lot worse over the next few weeks, and fix them firmly enough that the colonists would be able to drive the Salik fully off-world.

First, though, she desperately needed a hot shower. After her long, cold jog, a barely warm enough ground-car ride, and standing around in damp clothes in an unheated camp, her flesh-and-blood body needed to feel warm again as well as clean. At least she had the time to spare for it.

 • • • 

Her first battle came in training, in the mud when it was raining,

Of the other soldiers, one did go berserk.

He attacked the recruits’ teachers, bloody madness in his features,

But our Mary faced him down with just a smirk.

“I’ll kill ’em all!” he screamed, and success was near, it seemed,

’Til he faced the girl with hair as white as snow;

Now he’s praying for some ice while his balls are used for dice,

For she’s sent him down to live in Hell below!

Ia laughed under her breath at Clairmont’s choice of lyrics. “That is
so
not how it went! The storm hadn’t even begun yet, for one.”

“Hush, you,” Helstead admonished her. The petite lieutenant commander’s duty shift was scheduled to start in the next hour and a half. She gave her CO a mock-dirty look. “I’m trying to enjoy the song.”

Warm and dry—mostly dry; she’d had to don a poncho to get through the mist seeping through the force fields to this tent—and with her boots propped up on a spare bench across from hers, Ia lounged with her back to the mess table. She clasped the remains of a sandwich in one hand and a mug of caf’ in the other, listening to the singer. After being enthusiastically greeted and quickly supplied with steaming-hot food, she had settled in to enjoy the entertainments offered by her off-duty crewmates.

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.”