Theirs Not To Reason Why: An Officer's Duty Part 5

"I'm performing an experiment. It's nothing you need worry about." Grabbing a tissue from the dispenser, Ia mopped up the stains. She scrubbed the counter with a second one and a little water, then tossed them into the recycler. s.n.a.t.c.hing up the squeeze-box of blood, Ia gave Aurelia a pointed look of her own. "Shouldn't you be working down in the restaurant right now?"

"The restrooms downstairs were full. What sort of an experiment?" Aurelia asked, pursuing it anyway.

Ia knew that Thorne's biological mother was where he had gotten his stubborn determination. Once Aurelia Jones-Quentin sank her teeth into something, it took finesse to get her to let go. Unfortunately, Ia had inherited some of that bluntness as well. Lifting her chin, Ia replied tartly, "Obviously, a prophetic sort of experiment? It's just one more thing I have to do to prepare for the future. Now, if you'll get out of my way, I'll exit the bathroom, and you can do your business and get back to work. Don't forget to wash your hands."

"Impertinent...!" Giving her daughter a sardonic look-one which mother and daughter shared, since Ia had learned it from her-Aurelia moved back, letting her exit the bathroom. She softened her look, hand gently cupping Ia's shoulder. "You are doing okay, aren't you? I know all those nightmares still kept bothering you long after you stopped screaming each night..."

Uncomfortable with even her own mother touching her, Ia's answering smile was wry at best. She patted her mother's fingers and slid out from under them. "Trust me, I'm fine. I had the Marine Corps looking out for me while I was gone. Not to mention a chaplain named Bennie who took a personal interest in my mental health and welfare."

Aurelia tipped her head at that, giving her daughter a speculative look. "Is he cute?"

"Actually, he is a she," Ia corrected her mother.

"Is she cute?" Aurelia persisted. "I wouldn't say no to either a son-or a daughter-in-law one of these days."

Unable to help herself, Ia chuckled. She leaned down and kissed her mother on the cheek. "Look to your sons for grandchildren, Mother. Or to the Free World Colony's wombpods. I won't be carrying any of my own. At least, not personally. I do plan on donating some eggs at some point, though."

The older woman grumbled under her breath. "Oh, sure, ruin my plans for spoiling your children in person, why don't you?"

Kissing her mother again, this time on the top of her sleek, dark-haired head, Ia stepped through the door to her old bedroom. "I'm giving you an entire colony...well, half of it...to dote and fuss over, Ma. Be content with that. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have weird, bizarre, future-probing experiments to conduct in secret...and no, I am not going to 'cut' myself again today."

She closed the door before her mother could interrogate her further. Turning around, Ia faced her old bedchamber. It still looked ba.n.a.l, if not quite so crowded. There were two twin-sized beds in here now, instead of a twin and a queen. That meant there were almost two full meters between the two beds, plenty of room to move around. The foot of each bed still served as seating for a built-in desk counter with drawers, and it was to the foot of Fyfer's bed that she moved.

On the counter were two large boxes. One was empty, while the other had been filled with carefully hollowed thimble-beads crafted from transparent, pastel chunks of crysium. They were pure beads, too, clear and tinted. Some were pale pink, some pale blue or pale green, but most were a pale, clear gold.

At least I could see approximately how many drops per bead I was using, through the timestreams, she acknowledged, settling everything in place. Squeezing the blood from the container into the shot gla.s.s, she picked up the first bead and the eyedropper, dipped the dropper to fill it, then carefully measured out four drops. A pull of energies with her mind softened the bead, and a rolling mush of her fingers mingled the blood with the mineral, until she had a translucent peach bead. Too much destabilizes the crysium, threatening the decay of the blood and the inability to reintegrate the beads with more of the crystalline medium. Too little dilutes the precognitive resonance between my Feyori-enhanced biology and the Feyori-discarded mineral.

I will need...approximately two milliliters of my blood per wreath. Four drops per bead and twenty per milliliter mean I need ten beads per wreath. I think...Dipping the eyedropper into the next bead, she squeezed out four more drops. A knock on the door interrupted her. Quickly pinching the bead shut, she rolled it between her palms. "Yes?"

Aurelia opened the door and peered in at her, but saw nothing but Ia rolling something between her hands, looking over her shoulder at her mother. "You do know we moved the wall harp down into the restaurant, right?"

"It was hard to miss," Ia said, plucking another bead from the box. From the doorway, she could hear the faint sounds of people chatting and tableware clattering; the later dinner crowd was still going strong, downstairs.

"Could you...you know...play it tonight?" Aurelia asked her. "I've missed the sound of you practicing on it."

Ia sighed. "I don't like people knowing I have these abilities, Ma. I'm freakish enough just from my hair and my size."

Aurelia pushed the door open wider. "My daughter is not a freak. Do you hear me?"

Rolling her eyes, Ia sighed. "Fine, I'm not a freak. But I still don't want people to know I can play it telekinetically. Particularly now that I'm in the military. It's too soon for that."

Her mother lingered in the doorway. Ia molded three more beads before sighing and giving in to Aurelia's unspoken plea.

"Okay. But I won't play it while I'm in the same room. And I won't take requests...mainly because I won't be in the same room, but also because I don't want anyone to know that I'm the one playing it." Tossing the latest translucent bead into the nearly empty box on her right, Ia glanced back at her mother. "You do realize that having someone play the wall harp will only pinpoint you all the harder as heretical demon-lovers in the eyes of the Church, right?"

Aurelia snorted and folded her arms across her chest. "No more so than for being an 'unnatural man-hater' or whatever. I don't actually hate men. I just fell in love with a wonderful woman, and that was that. Anyway...when are you coming down to play the harp? And where will you be, if not in the same room?"

Sighing, Ia closed her eyes and concentrated. "I only have to know exactly where it is in relation to myself, and be within about five hundred meters of it, Mother. I could even go for a run around the block and still be able to play it, that's how good I've grown. Now, where are the picks?"

"In a basket on the credenza under the harp. Um...left corner as you look at it, but back by the wall, not the front corner."

"Five of them?" Ia asked, attention turned inward and outward, looking in the timestreams for the spot her mother mentioned.

"I think so," her mother offered. "Four, for sure. Are you really going to play it from all the way up here?"

She nodded. "I've expanded my telekinetic abilities in the last two years. Mind you, it's nice to use them for something peaceful this time around." Faintly through the open door, the first few notes could be heard. It was just a simple arpeggio to warm up her half-forgotten skills, but it still sounded good, just barely audible over the tops of conversations, cutlery, and cooking wafting up from below. "If you swing by the music store tomorrow and get me a dozen, I can play a full concert later. I'll just play a four-pick melody for now-thank you for keeping it in tune."

"We've had a few psis stop in and try to play it. And for a while, we had a dulcimer harpist performing on the occasional weekend. He brought his own hammers and used them by hand. He ended up being hired by an upscale restaurant in the downtown core, though-could you play 'La Partida' for me, gataki mou?" Aurelia asked her daughter. "Then whatever else you want, but make it something pretty and lighthearted? I have to get back down. Weston isn't bad as head waiter, but I really should get back to work."

"I'll play it," Ia promised her. "But it'll take all five picks and then some-I'll play a simplified version for now."

"Thank you, kitten." Blowing her daughter a kiss, Aurelia retreated. She left the door open behind her. Ia didn't bother to shut it, but instead just picked up another bead and the eyedropper, trying to get a feel for this new process manually so that she could replicate it telekinetically later. She would have done so now, but didn't want to mess up one of her mother's favorite songs.

The faint strains of strings being plucked in the up-and-down waves of an arpeggio s.h.i.+fted, turning much more melodic. Rising and falling with the song, the notes sang at rhythmic intervals, depending on how strongly or subtly she plucked them. The arpeggio had served its purpose, by adjusting her mind to the physical location of each string. Now she could play it in earnest as she worked.

Wall harps were not uncommon among telekinetics; it was considered a primary test just to be able to pluck the strings with the force of one's mind, let alone waft a pick into the air and flick it across the metal lines. The real benefit, however, lay in practicing it like one practiced a normal instrument; the more a telekinetic could flick and pluck and play, the stronger they could train their abilities.

Of course, there were limits to psychic training. Everyone-at least among Humans-could train into themselves a baseline level of raw empathic, clairsentient, gut-instinct level sensitivity, with time and effort. For the flas.h.i.+er abilities, one had to be born with them, and then discover them-usually in the p.u.b.erty years-and then master and train them. Raw ability could rank someone at a certain baseline, and training could push them a few ranks higher, but there were limits. Raw strength could lift and move a heavy weight, but wielding something as tiny as a string pick with enough deftness and dexterity to play a song took practice, practice, and more practice.

She hadn't lied in telling her mother it would be nice to use her abilities for something peaceful. Nor had she lied about being a lot better at subtle manipulations by now. Still, there was a difference between telekinetically guiding the outcome of a battle in her favor and plucking a charming tune from harp strings strung on a frame two meters wide and mounted on the wall of the dining half of the restaurant downstairs.

The noise of the diners had muted a bit during her warm-up. Now the melody soared and danced, growing a little louder as her mother slipped through the door at the bottom of the stairs, leaving it, too, slightly ajar. Pots and pans rattled in the kitchen, and she could hear her birthmother, Amelia, ordering someone to clean up a spill, but over all those noises, the wall harp played on.

Ia picked up another bead and carefully measured four drops of blood into the hollow at its center. She worked in time with the tune, thumbs squis.h.i.+ng and kneading, palms rubbing and rolling. Four drops of blood per bead, twenty in a milliliter...that's eight hundred beads before I run out of blood. As soon as I've gotten a good rhythm and habit established up here, and I've played enough music for a set...I'll be able to return the picks to their bowl downstairs and use my abilities on these beads instead. Then things should go a lot faster.

A pity I wasn't born a Gatsugi, with four arms instead of two. Then I could've done this twice as fast by hand...

As much as part of her wanted to stay with her family, to be on hand to help Rabbit and the rest in their coming underground war against the Church, Ia was all too aware that her time here was running out.

CHAPTER 4.

One of the requirements of being a bona fide psychic is to be registered with a duly authorized organization that can help train and monitor the activities of psis, as a rea.s.surance to the general populace. The most widespread one, of course, is the PsiLeague, but the second largest, if less known than most people realize, is the Witan Order. Where the League is very much a scientific organization, devoted to the study, dissection, training, and improvement of paranormal abilities with a careful methodology and a healthy-but not excessive-dose of skepticism, the Witan Order is very much a religious organization. In fact, only a small part of the Witan Order actually deals with psis, with the rest being devoted to what it's really known for, the unification of wisdom and wors.h.i.+p across religious and secular boundaries. But they do deal in psychic abilities on a larger scale than most people realize.

This is not to say they don't use the same training methods as the PsiLeague, since they are indeed effective. It's just that, as a religious order, the Witan Order is capable of doing more things than a nonreligious one like the League. For instance, for certain subsects of the Witan Order, you have to be a psychic in order to be ordained as a priest or priestess for that sect. Others, you can be, and are presumed to be, but it isn't necessary to actually be one. More than that, the Witan Order may be required by law to keep files on who is psychic, so on and so forth...but those files can be sealed to the subsect of the Order if someone is a duly ordained priest or priestess of that sect, revealable only upon a court order. And they don't always talk about which subsects within the Order have these requirements...because to the Witans, that falls under the confidentiality of the confessional.

In my case, it was listed in my military application that I was a duly ordained priestess of the Witan Order, subsect Zen.o.bian. And there actually is a Zen.o.bian Sect of the Witan Order. It's just a very, very small one, confined to Sanctuary itself, which at the time contained no more than a couple dozen duly ordained clergy. And yes, you do have to be a duly registered psi to be a priestess of the Zen.o.bian Sect. They just don't talk about the requirements.

So the information has been there all the time, which by law it has to be...but also by right of privacy law, I didn't have to go around blaring it to everyone that I was indeed a psi. Provided, of course, that I was duly registered and that I underwent the required yearly ethical exams by duly authorized telepathic examiners...which, conveniently, the Zen.o.bian Sect just happened to possess.

~Ia AUGUST 3, 2492 T.S.

"No, no, and no," Ia admonished the group of grimy, gritty, coverall-clad youths lined up in front of her. "You do not go into any of these side tunnels alone. I know it seems more efficient, but it isn't."

She was just as dirty as they were, with good reason. For the last three hours, they had been climbing, rappelling, sliding, scuttling, and otherwise surveying yet another stretch in the maze of lava tube tunnels beneath the foothills of the Grampnell Mountains east of the capital. Some of it had been done in the wall-climbers Rabbit had bought just for this, but much of these tunnels had to be surveyed on foot for accuracy. Curved stone walls surrounded them, some charcoal grey, some reddish brown, and many streaked with either mineral stains, water marks, or the local equivalent of mold spores.

"You will not violate the basic laws of spelunking," Rabbit added. She held up one pet.i.te finger per point, lecturing them. "n.o.body goes caving alone, n.o.body goes without a beacon transponder in case of an emergency, n.o.body goes anywhere down here without a pack carrying enough emergency rations to sustain them for two days...and n.o.body goes down here without telling someone else in the gang."

"We do need these three-dimensional surveys," Ia added, pointing at the wall-crawler vehicles waiting to be manned again, "but we will not be careless about it."

"I don't feel comf'ble, lyin' to my uncle," one of the girls mumbled, arms crossed tightly over her chest. "What if he needs to get down here? And gets lost tryin' t' make sense of the maps we're givin' 'im?"

"As much as it pains me to have to deceive your uncle, too, Jula, he works for the Department of Geology, and the DoG is one of the places the Church will swarm with a thousand microscopes when it comes to open war between the colony's two main factions."

"I could've fit," the slender boy next to Jula argued. "And Rabbit, too."

"Until we can get the right equipment to widen those side tunnels, it's too dangerous. If either of you got stuck, the rest of us would have a near-impossible time trying to pull you back out," Ia stated.

"And while I'm small enough to go in after you, I'm nowhere near strong enough to pull you back out," Rabbit reminded them.

"So when do we get that equipment?" Leuron asked Ia, lifting his chin. That flashed his headlamp into her eyes, but only for a moment. "You keep promising a bunch of fancy equipment will show up. When?"

"When the time is right. I can't exactly pull a sandhog out of my kitbag, you know. As it stands-" Ia cut herself off, bemused by the beeping of her arm unit. The bracer-sized brown plexi device beeped again. Flipping open the lid, she arched a brow at the sight of the woman peering up at her from the screen inside. "Yes, Leona?"

"There's been a change in our schedule. We're going to have to move up your exams by two days."

That was unexpected. Ia frowned. "Two days early would make it today."

"Heddie had an attack of Fire Girl Prophesy, followed by a bout of precognition. She says she has to be elsewhere today, which means she'd be on duty in two days' time. You know as well as I do that sometimes two precogs cancel each other out, which was why she wasn't going to be on duty. But now she is, and I don't think it'll be a good idea for you to be scanned by her."

"She'd blab half the things she hears to her best friend, who will tell her cousin, who just happens to be dating a Church member, you mean," Ia muttered.

"You're the expert on intercausality chains, not me. How soon can you get up here? You're in the tunnels, right?" Leona asked her, squinting at the cavern ceiling beyond her view of Ia's head.

"About two hours out from the city, maybe a little more. I'll need a few minutes for instructions, and a few minutes to get cleaned up, once I'm topside."

"Call me when you're on the surface, and I'll get everything ready," Leona instructed her.

Nodding, Ia ended the call by flipping her wrist unit lid shut. Sighing roughly, she turned to the others. They had spread out a little, murmuring among themselves. "Okay. I'd much rather give you your choice in where to go and what to do for the rest of today, but I'm out of time. While for most things, I can predict certain probabilities with great accuracy...they still remain probabilities. So I'm going to show each of you where to go spelunking today, and what pitfalls to avoid. Line up and present foreheads; this won't take long."

Thankfully, they obeyed. It didn't take long, either. This wasn't an explanation of her greatest war and the reason why; this was simply a skimming of their immediate futures, showing them which paths were the best to take and which were the ones to avoid.

The volcanoes that had formed these lava tubes in the ancient days of this planet had long since gone extinct, but they had left behind a veritable maze of pa.s.sages. The s.p.a.ce Force, which had dug bunkers and shelters into the bedrock when it had looked like the Terrans and the methane-breathing Dlmvla were on the brink of going to war, had stumbled across these tunnels. Their solution had been to seal them off with tough plexcrete walls, though the Department of Geology had insisted on doors being added for future spelunking needs.

Ironically, attempts had been made to prospect for ores, but the Terran s.p.a.ce Force had shut that down, locking the bunkers with security codes so that they could only be opened in a genuine emergency. The star system containing Sanctuary also hosted two methane gas worlds, prime targets for the Dlmvla, so the bunkers had to remain inviolate. Naturally, Ia knew the release codes in advance. And just as naturally-or rather, precognitively-she knew these tunnels would form the starting point for sheltering the saner half of the coming civil war.

Leuron hesitated when she reached for his forehead. Ia did as well, arching a brow. "Yes?"

"Why do we gotta build stuff down here?" he asked her. "Why can't we just move people to the other side of the planet?"

"Duh," Rabbit answered before Ia could. "Because the Church will simply bomb the shakk outta whatever settlements we have on the surface. Gerald Fortranger runs the Department of Defense, and he's one of the Elders of the Church."

"Then why use the Terran bunkers?" another teenager asked. "Fortranger probably has the access codes memorized."

"Because the codes can be changed," Ia told him. "The next time I come back here, they will be changed. In fact, the locking mechanisms will probably be updated as well...and the new codes, the real codes, won't go to anyone on the Church's side."

"If you wanna keep up, Leuron, you'll have to start following religion and politics," Rabbit stated wryly. Then wrinkled her nose. "Add in s.e.x and sports, and you'll have the Forbidden Four Topics."

One of the other teen boys grinned and nudged the girl next to him. "You wanna go off in that side pa.s.sage we found last week, and get to 'third base' while the Prophet's handing out a.s.signments?"

His target wasn't the only one to groan at the bad pun. Ignoring them, Ia touched her fingertips to Leuron's forehead, giving him a touch of forewarning on what to look for while he was busy surveying the network of lava tunnels. She finished going down the line, then nodded at the last two, a pair of girls. "You two are with me. The laws of spelunking apply even to myself, so you'll escort me up, then help each other back down before resuming the surveys. Whatever you do, don't drop your scanners. They cost Rabbit a glossy cred chit, and you'll make her cry if you break one."

Rabbit mock-rubbed her eyes, miming crying if they should ruin the equipment, then grinned. Her child-like soprano voice echoed off the rough, rounded walls. "Well, you heard Ia. We have a long, hard slog ahead of us, but it'll be fun! Pizza and topado cakes when we're done, everyone!"

Leaving her to marshal her unlikely, cave-crawling troops, Ia nodded to the two girls and turned toward one of the wall-crawlers with four seats instead of two. "Come along. As fun as it is down here, I have to get back up to the surface."

"You think this is fun?" one of the girls asked, wrinkling her nose. She plucked at her coveralls in distaste. "I'm only down here because Rabbit and you asked me to help."

Ia looked down at her grime-covered clothes, then eyed the younger woman, equally smeared in lava grit. "Compared to being covered head to toe in alien guts? Yes, I do think this is fun. Unfortunately, I have to go and get my head cracked open now."

The Witan Church of Contemplation was quiet, peaceful, and well-lit. Not just from the tasteful spiral-galaxy chandeliers in the foyer, narthex, and sanctuary, visible through the large plexi windows separating each section of the ground floor, but also by the lightning flickering outside. It lit up the stained gla.s.s windows with their geometric, almost crystalline patterns, and brought the scents of ozone and a hint of rain into the front hall with her, the smells that said she was home.

Closing the door behind her, Ia pulled off the light jacket she had donned to ward off the slight chill in the air. She had stopped long enough at her parents' home to shower and change into clean civilian clothes, a flowery blue s.h.i.+rt and plain dark blue slacks left over from the years before she had left for Earth and the s.p.a.ce Force. They weren't quite SF-Navy blue, but she'd be wearing those colors soon enough.

Leona, an older woman with greying auburn brown hair and hints of gravity stress-lines creasing her face, met her in the narthex beyond the foyer. Befitting her rank in the Witan Order, and the fact that she was on duty, she wore a white tabard over a blue robe. The Unigalactan sword-in-galaxy had been embroidered in silvery thread on the front and back of the tabard, and she had embellished it further along the edges with stylized flames intertwined with lightning bolts.

On the pommel-nut of the downward-pointing sword, a tiny, gold-threaded Radiant Eye had been st.i.tched. Originally done in black as the symbol for the PsiLeague, it had been adopted by several psychic registration organizations, including the Witan Order. The difference from a standard sword-in-galaxy was subtle, but the Order preferred discretion for its psychic a.s.sociations. Even in the late twenty-fifth century, there were still those who feared to let others know they had actual paranormal abilities.

Then again, with the Church of the One True G.o.d declaring such things an abomination of nature and a sin against G.o.d, who could blame anyone for wanting to be a little cautious?

"Are you ready to confess your sins, meioa-e?" Leona asked her. The older woman quirked her mouth up on one side as she did so, acknowledging the irony of those words on this world.

"I am ready, yes," Ia replied, twisting her own lips.

"This way, then." Gesturing, Leona led the way to the stairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt level. Not that Ia needed guiding, since this was the church nearest her family's home, the church where her gifts had first been diagnosed and trained.

There was something new about the place. She eyed the mottled shades of blue underfoot as they descended. "New rugs?"

"A bit of an extravagance if you ask me, since most people take the lifts going back up, but the Church committee insisted," Leona told her. "'One day soon, our people won't get breathless just going up and down the stairs, so they might as well look good,' and all that."

"If it's any consolation, they do look good," Ia offered.

"Have you gone into fas.h.i.+on and interior design, then?" Leona asked dryly.

"Not in this life," Ia retorted crisply. "It's just a nice change from military hues, that's all."

"Ah, yes. I received a vid-call from a Chaplain Benjamin, regarding you," the older priestess told Ia. "She wanted to know if you were handling civilian life alright."