An Officer’s Duty (12 page)

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 petite finger per point, lecturing them. “Nobody goes caving alone, nobody goes without a beacon transponder in case of an emergency, nobody goes anywhere down here without a pack carrying enough emergency rations to sustain them for two days…and nobody 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 passages. The Space 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 Space 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 sex 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 passage we found last week, and get to ‘third base’ while the Prophet’s handing out assignments?”

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 glass 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 shirt and plain dark blue slacks left over from the years before she had left for Earth and the Space 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 stitched. 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 associations. 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 God declaring such things an abomination of nature and a sin against God, 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 basement 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 fashion 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.”

Ia refrained from rolling her eyes. “She’s something of a friend, and something of a watchdog. I think the Department of Innovations asked her to keep a closer eye on my mental and emotional stability, considering how I’ve been constantly deployed in a combat hot spot for the last two years. You’re listed on my personnel file as my family pastor, so naturally she’d call you.”

“Department of Innovations?” Leona asked, leading her down a side corridor. “What’s that?”

“It’s part of the Branch Special Forces in the Terran military. They oversee merit-based promotions, and fast-track those with leadership potential,” Ia explained. “Or slow the advance of those who have,
ah
, reached their maximum capacity for competence.”

Leona smiled. “Then let us hope they do not have reason to slow you down. We’re in the east conference room,” she told Ia, opening the door. “Your examiners will be myself, Priest Ortuu, and Priestess Kaskalla. Be gentle on Kaskalla, as this will be her first time participating in these sessions.”

Ia nodded at the familiar figure of Ortuu. Like Leona, he had the white tabard of the Witan Order arrayed over his blue robes. Like his compatriot, his was decorated around the edges with fire and lightning, symbols of the Zenobian Sect. Unlike her, he was resting in a chair with his feet propped up on a second seat, sipping from what smelled like a cup of caf’.