An Officer’s Duty (60 page)

“I trust you know what you’re doing, Lieutenant Ia?” Admiral Viega muttered, following Ia as she moved across the blood-slicked platform toward the stunned bodies of the high generals. “Because unless you can pull off an even
bigger
miracle than this…”

Ia slashed through the spines and throats of the sleeping generals, making absolutely sure each one was dead. She didn’t bother to ask how the admiral knew her name. The reputation that had earned her a place at this banquet had been earned among her fellow Terrans, and earned long before the four months that Viega had been missing.

“Trust me, sir,” she muttered, teeth clenching as the swiping of her right arm shifted her left shoulder painfully. “I know
exactly
how to get us out of here—done. Move it, Admiral!”

Turning away from the last of the bodies, she sprinted off the dais, heading for the indicated doors. Running wasn’t easy, not with her left arm clenched across her bare ribs, though turning her sword into a bracelet helped free her good arm for balance. Overturned end tables and scattered cushions were the least of their hazards; broken glass mingled with bloodied bodies, most of them Salik but not all. Ia detoured toward a stunner-slumbering body trapped between two throat-gouged enemies.

Heaving the unconscious Gatsugi out of the pile with her good arm, she dragged him as far as two of the Solaricans, a pair who looked like they were about to turn catatonic with shock at the gore and death surrounding them, and dropped him at their feet.

“You two, carry him. Don’t let him die here,” she ordered.

They flicked their ears back at that thought and quickly stooped, heaving the alien into a carrying position. One was missing half her tail, the other bore Salik teeth marks on his arms and shoulder, his body-fur streaked and matted with blood, but they picked up the unconscious Gatsugi without hesitation.

“The doorr is lllocked!” one of the other felinoids called out. “We’re trrapped in here!”

“No, we’re not!” Ia called back, freeing another sleeping, injured Alliance member from the blood and gore strewn across the floor. Viega quickly took over, directing a pair of muzzled Tlassian warrior-castes to grab and lift the curled-up K’katta.
“The door is still locked because
I
locked it. There are fifteen guards piled up behind it, and we need to be ready before it’s opened.”

“How can we be ready for something like
that
?” one of the other Humans demanded. “We’re naked, some of us can barely walk, most of us are bleeding, and only a few of us have weapons!”

“
I’ll
be ready for it,” Ia promised him. “I’m going to open the door, kill the guards, and then we’re going to run about half a klick. Do
not
let anyone get left behind—don’t touch that!” she added as one of her fellow Humans reached for the segment of head and jaws still clinging to her left shoulder. “One of his teeth is right next to my brachial artery. Pull it out and you’ll kill me. I’d rather not die today—get that Solarican!”

Pointing off to the side, she gestured for two of the survivors to grab the dazed felinoid standing alone amid a pile of throat-gouged bodies. Not waiting to see them comply, she carefully shifted the bracelet off her wrist and over to her left hand, then curled her arm up at the elbow just enough for her needs. The movements shifted the teeth jammed into her shoulder, but they were necessary. Subtly spinning the glob of crysium in her grip, she nodded at the Tlassian by the door.

“Ready? Open it in three…two…
one
…!”

The lock snapped open with an audible
clack
. Startled, the Tlassian grabbed the edge of the door and heaved. So did Ia, but with her mind instead of her muscles. The spinning glob of crysium snapped up and out in a shield, catching the laserfire aimed their way, glowing brightly where the laser from their weapons struck the nearly transparent pink material.

Everyone flinched back, except for Ia. Her attention was spent on absorbing that energy, preventing the thin shield from overloading. The only place to store it, however, was inside herself. The strands of her white hair started to rise away from her face, triggered by the conversion of photonic to kinetic to electric energy.

“Dios mio,”
she heard Viega mutter. “What in God’s Name
is
that stuff?”

“Now is not the
time
, Admiral!” Counting down to zero, Ia twisted her whole body to shift the shield aside, since she couldn’t move her left arm that much, and flung out her right arm. Tendrils of miniature lightning
cracked
down the corridor
in reply before swerving back. More laserfire scored on the shield, bright yellow and overcharged, darker orange and ugly. Somewhere in the corridors beyond, more guards were headed their way. They were running out of time.

Time.

The timestreams dragged her briefly under. For one moment, she ignored the lasers brightening the shield not just in dots of light, but in broadening patches of peach gold color. Instead, she saw with her inner eyes a much larger box being hauled up from below, grey and ugly with the hint of impending, future mist, though it was not yet active. But the box had to come up an elevator shaft, and in that shaft were safety cables and safety latches, and a host of interior safety fields.

Ia ruthlessly ripped them out, drawing on her tenuous, laser-peppered shield for enough energy to work at that distance. The startled whistles and gurgling
skreels
of the crew hauling that box into the elevator couldn’t be heard at this distance, but the faintest of crashes as it dropped did vibrate through the floor. Twisting the shield aside, this time Ia grabbed and flung shards of bloodied glass with her mind. Bodies gurgled and dropped as the slivers darted past, while doors slammed shut in their wake.

Breathing hard from the effort, Ia gathered her energy. “Right…That should do it. Everybody, move out! Viega, Jophuran, Michaels, Chong, form a rearguard. Krraul, K’sith, you’re on point with me. No one gets left behind!”

The pain in her shoulder grew steadily worse. Ia had at least two splinters of glass in her right foot, making her half run, half lurch. She had only the one bite wound, but it stank of blood, both Salik and Human, as well as other things. Slowly, the shock-locked muscles of the general’s jaws relaxed, allowing more of her own vital fluid to seep free.

They reached a bank of elevators, and an emergency stairwell next to it. Sweat beaded on her skin as they jogged further down into the depths of the complex. Her head swam from the effort of keeping doors and shafts sealed shut against the advance of the furious Salik forces trying to get at them. Her teeth ached, clenched tightly against the urge to groan, and her skin crawled, hyperaware of each drop of blood she was losing.

Somewhere out there, lesser generals were tracking their progress. Somewhere out there, orders were being given to set
the docking bays to self-destruct. Somewhere out there, Salik technicians flung Sallhash curses at Ia’s blood-streaked white hair as she slid doors open and shut, navigating them almost sightlessly all the way to the hidden gantries of two courier ships. Both were visible through the thick plexi windows looking into the vast bay, suspended from gantries above rows of similar ships.

One was entirely Salik in design, while the other was a captured V’Dan vessel. Unlocking both of them with a thought, Ia turned and started pushing bodies randomly toward the open doors with her good hand. “Get inside and strap yourselves down! Use every space you can think of! We have only two pilots, and not enough time to look for a third ship!
No
one gets left behind, got that?”

Admiral Viega pushed herself forward through the limping, bleeding bodies. She almost grabbed Ia’s injured arm, but caught herself in time. Instead, she demanded, “Who is the other pilot?”

“
You
are, sir,” Ia told her superior, flicking her hand to point people to either side. Most of her attention was focused on counter-commanding the frantic coding of the hidden base’s technicians, but she spared enough awareness to look Viega in the eyes.

Viega returned that stare with fierce embarrassment, hissing, “Lieutenant, I haven’t piloted an OTL ship in
fifteen years
.”

“Sir, do you trust me?” Ia asked. Viega blinked. Ia repeated her question with terse emphasis.
“Do you trust me?”

“I…Yes, I do,” Viega finally swore.

Before she could babble anything about Ia having gotten them this far, Ia clapped her fingertips to the side of the admiral’s grey-haired head, holding it in place. “Then
trust
me, and this will work.”

Stabbing into the older woman’s mind, Ia laid the patterns of what must be done.
Thus
, and
there
.
This
and
that
…and just enough V’Dan to cope with
these
counter-possibilities. It took maybe five, six seconds of real time, though in the speed of the timestreams, Ia spent more than a minute to lay her contingencies. Releasing Viega, she nodded.

“Take K’sith with you,” Ia ordered, lifting her chin at the V’Dan male helping sort the escapees into the two different ships.
“He knows the comm and ops, and can be your backup, even though he isn’t a pilot. Do everything
exactly
as I have showed you, and you’ll get everyone out of here. Now, get to your ship!”

Viega turned to go, then turned back with a scowl. “Would you stop ordering me around?”

“Would you stop lagging behind?” Ia shot back. She cut off the former Fleet Admiral with a flick of her hand. “You know as well as I do,
sir
, that the officer in charge of a rescue mission is the
only
officer in charge of said mission! Now get in the V’Dan ship and get ready to undock. I can only hold off the Salik techs for another five minutes before they burn enough holes through their own blast-doors to manually blow up this place!”

A tight smile quirked the corner of the older woman’s mouth. “If we weren’t in the middle of a rescue operation, you’d be perilously close to insubordination,
Lieutenant
.”

“Well, I’m in a lot of pain right now,
sir
, so I’m perilously close to
not caring
. Go!” Ia ordered, lifting her chin sharply in the direction of the last of the bloodied bodies boarding the ship to her left. Turning, she counted heads, making sure the last of the stragglers got on board.

Everyone was making sure that everyone else got on board. Herding each other, reassuring each other. Bloodied, battered, scared, but working together. The possibility of freedom had snapped even the worst of them out of their fear-generated stupors, leaving only the unconscious unable to help effect their own rescue. More stunned bodies had been found than the ones Ia had dug out—almost all of them, in fact.

Almost.

But I could only save the most important souls, the…the ones with the greatest impact…No time. No
time
for this!
Gritting her teeth against the ache of regret, she scrubbed with the back of her right hand at the tears blurring her tired vision and followed the last of the escapees into the Salik-built courier.

Turning at the airlock, she called across to Viega, “Remember, Admiral,
you
have to go first. I’m the only thing keeping the enemy at bay!”

A flip of her hand was Viega’s only reply. Ia let her go. Her head was starting to ache badly, enough that it was noticeable
against the pain in her foot and the agony of her shoulder. Mist was beginning to close in again, and—the mist. Ia stopped in the airlock, eyes widening.
They…they’re cobbling together another mass anti-psi generator. It’s going to block everything I do!

Her head swam with snatches of possibilities. Forcing herself to move, attention more on skimming the timestreams than on her physical surroundings, she fumbled her way into the cockpit. Her best choice—the one that would buy everyone in the Alliance the most time—was deceptively simple. This entire underground base was wired to explode in the event of discovery by Alliance forces. All she had to do was trigger every last one of those devices…and then hold off the final leap of the detonating electrons.

The trick was doing it under the onslaught of increasing interference from those infernal creations, holding on just long enough for all of them to escape.

Somehow, she made it to the pilot’s seat, half blind from the massive division of her attention span. The Salik version of seating wasn’t comfortable, more like straddling an awkwardly curved bench than anything else, but at least the restraint harness was the same four-point strap system. The only problem was, she couldn’t do it manually, not with the Salik jaws still clamped to her shoulder.

“Hey, aren’t you going to strap in?” That came from the Human seated behind her and to her left. To either side sat one of the rescued Solaricans—the one with the bloodied, half-eaten tail, using her own weight for a compression bandage on its end—and the V’Dan, still wearing one of the anti-psi crowns strapped to his head.

“I can’t move my left arm,” Ia muttered. “And I can’t exactly spare the attention. I’m juggling chain saws, tap-dancing on coals, and yodeling before a tone-deaf audience, here.”

“I’ll do it.” Unstrapping himself, he leaned over her position, carefully strapping in three of the four points. The chunk of severed head cupping her shoulder interfered too much with the fourth strap to have placed it. The psi grimaced, but didn’t try to latch that strap. “Sorry, meioa; I’m a xenopath, not a biokinetic—hang on, I’m almost out of your way…”

Ia didn’t have to be able to see the console to activate it, let alone
reach it. Not that touching it would have mattered; it was designed for Salik suckers, after all. Pulling and pushing telekinetically on the controls, Ia started the engines, then activated the comm system, hooking it into the other vessel so she could address everyone.

“This is Lieutenant Ia. All hands strap in or wedge yourselves flat against an aft wall. We have to slingshot out of here, in order to achieve sufficient speed for OTL escape velocity. Acceleration forces will exceed 12Gs Standard for a minimum five seconds. Most of you will pass out. Some of you will suffer broken bones. I repeat, wedge yourself flat against an aft wall if you are unable to find secure seating. We have room for two K’katta on the aft wall of the cockpit in the Salik vessel. Admiral Viega, launch the second you are ready. Ia out.”