Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (12 page)

Ia held up her hand, chuckling. “You thought you’d do something nice for me in return. Breathe, Private,” she added as the brown-haired young woman tugged nervously on one of her two braids. Garcia looked even younger than her twenty-one years, with her hair plaited in two short little pigtails. She didn’t know where the other girl had gotten a recipe for topado-flavored gelatin, but even if it tasted nasty—which it wouldn’t; her gifts weren’t twinging in warning—she wouldn’t hurt Garcia’s feelings. “I’m flattered. And I could probably use the energy from the protein and the carbs and all.”

Nodding quickly, Garcia flapped a hand at the bowl and the spoon clipped on the tray next to the mug. Then started and quickly picked up the caf’ packs. “I’ll just, um, refill your dispenser, General, sir, while you have your little snack. The caf’ in the mug’s fresh, roasted not two minutes ago. Um, I was gonna bring up the bowl with your supper, but that’s not for another three hours, an’ I was going to be off duty at that point. That’s when the Wake party’s gonna happen, you know, and I was hoping to attend, but I finally got the recipe just right this morning for the gelatin—at least, uh, I think I did, and—”

“
Breathe
, Private,” Ia ordered, though she softened it with a chuckle. “I’d know in advance if it were awful. My gift protects me instinctively against stuff like that. I know it’s not that bad . . . though I don’t know
what
it tastes like. Yet.”

“Yes, sir,” Garcia mumbled, and concentrated fiercely on the super-complicated—not—task of replacing the depleted caf’ packs in the dispenser.

Picking up the spoon, Ia dipped it into the confection. She bypassed the whipped cream, wanting to taste one of the cream-free cubes of gelatin. It wiggled and gleamed on the spoon in a nearly transparent shade somewhere between sky and cobalt blue, but with hints of Prussian and aquamarine wherever shadows touched the stuff. Aside from the fact it was topado blue . . . it looked like any other gelatin dessert out there.

Ia lifted it to her mouth. It tasted meaty, sweet, and smooth, almost like a Jerusalem artichoke, only with a slight tang to it, the tang of topado-flour starch. The flavor pleased her; Ia hadn’t had topado-flour starch—a fine, pale blue powder unlike the richer blue of straight topado flour—in far too long. While she had patches of topadoes growing in each of the five life-support bays, those were usually not made into flour, let alone flour starch. With other kinds of starch available far more cheaply on every colonyworld out there, there hadn’t been any reason to export the labor-intensive version away from Sanctuary. She literally had not had it since her last visit home.

A soft sound escaped her, and she dug in with the spoon again, taking another mouthful. This time with the whipped cream. The dairy fat added a richness that made her mouth water, and her throat grunted louder in surprise.

“Sir?” Garcia asked, moving close enough to peer over Ia’s right shoulder. “Is it okay? Do you want me to take it away?”

Instinct made her scoop her arm protectively around the bowl. Instinct, and a growled, blunt,
“Mine!”

The ex-Marine gaped at her . . . and then laughed. Giggled breathlessly even, until the brunette had to half sag against the wall and half sit on Ia’s desk while she wiped at the tears on her cheeks. Blushing a little, Ia smiled sheepishly at her, waiting until the other woman could breathe normally.

“. . . It really
is
that good,” Ia told Garcia once she was sure the younger woman would be able to actually listen. “In fact, if it’s not an imposition, could you please write up the recipe and be willing to give it to my parents?”

“To your . . . parents, sir?” Garcia asked, blinking in confusion.

“My mothers run a restaurant on Sanctuary, and they specialize in topado-based cuisine, but they’ve never made anything like this. It must be a new recipe or something. Either way, we’ll have one last stop on my homeworld before the
shakk
hits the fan, and this stuff is good enough, they’d be willing to
pay
you to learn how to make this,” Ia assured her.

Garcia’s blush returned to her heart-shaped face, and deepened. She ducked her head. “I thought about runnin’ a restaurant when I got out, but, um . . . that’ll have to wait until the frogtopusses are dead. Can’t think about stepping down from the Space Force until we got peace again, or it won’t be worth it. I mean, I’m just one little person in a military two billion strong, but, uh . . .”

Ia nodded.
This
was why she had picked Julia Garcia. “You’re here for the same reasons I am. One person’s efforts might not seem like much, but it’s one more than we’d otherwise have, and one more might be just enough one day to make that crucial difference between failure and success when we need it to matter the most.”

“Well, yeah,” Garcia agreed, shrugging. “That, ’n you think I’ll be the most useful here, so how could I step down when the V’Dan Prophet says I’m needed? I’m agnostic, but my granny took me to Sh’nai services whenever I visited her, so I know how important you are.”

“Well, don’t start worshipping me, or I’ll make you scrub the toilet in my head after I’ve had Private van de Kamp’s version of chili,” Ia half joked.

Garcia blanched and shook her head quickly. “
No
thank you, sir. I just about fainted from the pepper fumes in the galley last time, and I didn’t dare taste it. I don’t even want to think about the other end of the digestive process.” Straightening, she returned to the caf’ dispenser. “I’ll just get this fixed up for you while you enjoy your treat, sir. And I’ll get that recipe written up for your folks, too.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Ia murmured. She took another bite of the parfait, then concentrated on her reports. “Thank you for the parfait, by the way. It’s making the tedium of all this paperwork more palatable. Literally.”

The younger woman coughed, trying to cover up a laugh, then said, “You’re welcome, sir. Um . . . are you going to the party? We’re all going to zombie-dance at the Wake, since it’s Interstellar Zombie Day, back on Earth. Doesn’t matter if you aren’t any good; Private von Florres is teachin’ everybody how to do the moves in the first hour.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have the time,” Ia said, filling out more of the forms by poking at her keyboard. The parfait was giving her a nice boost of energy; in a few more bites, she might even feel up to handling the forms electrokinetically. She continued absently, her mind more on her work, “Not even if Nuin N’Keth himself somehow showed up and offered to teach me how—actually, if he
did
show up, I would definitely make the time, but he can’t, and he won’t, so . . .”

“Um, who’s that, sir?” Garcia asked her, frowning in confusion.

Lifting her head and her attention from her paperwork, Ia thought about the question. Or rather, the chain of events leading to its answer. That chain had been rewritten with the first “death” in her Company, that of Finnimore Hollick, who had volunteered to give up his very existence so that a dead man could live, love, and sire a whole slough of descendants . . . in particular, a very important man three hundred years from now.

“Technically, he hasn’t been born yet, and won’t be until after we’re all long gone,” she said, “But he’s one hell of a good dancer. Or will be, one day in the distant future. A pity none of us will live to see him, save for myself in the timestreams.”

“Nothin’ personal, sir, but um, I’m not the least bit interested in seein’ the future,” Garcia murmured, snapping the front panel back into place. She tossed the empty caf’ packs into the recycler and missed seeing Ia’s raised brows. Her next words clarified her meaning. “I got too much work to do in the here an’ now to fret over stuff I can’t do a damn about. You’re all set for fresh caf’, sir. Um, lemme know if you need more packs . . . or more parfait.”

“Will do, Private.” Nodding in both acknowledgment and dismissal, Ia scribbled her name with a stylus and tapped the point against one of the commands on her workstation console. “Have fun lurching about at the Wake, Julia.”

“Will do, sir,” Garcia agreed, taking herself out of the office.

OCTOBER 26, 2498 T.S.
DULSHVWL, ZZNGH PRIME SYSTEM
DLMVLAN MOTHERWORLD

Yet another Dlmvlan guard towered over the two short-by-comparison Humans, the sixth or so in their trip so far. All the Dlmvla towered over the two Humans, and for once in her life, Ia actually felt small. She had always been tall for her age and heavyworld gravity back home, and had been roughly normal for the Space Force, average at worst. But here, she finally felt short. It was an interesting sensation.

His iridescent, faceted eyes scrutinized the authorization slips they had picked up from the orbiting Terran embassy. His deep-rumbling voice made the faceplate of Ia’s pressure-suit buzz. She didn’t speak his language, but she knew the proper responses to make and had programmed them into the arm unit clasped around the outside of her pressure-suit.

Touching the right buttons gave him the correct response via the patch between her unit and her suit speakers, allowing the translation program to do her talking for her. He rumbled something else, gesturing with a claw-like hand. Consulting the timestream, she typed out another reply, then stooped and unlatched the case she was carrying. Opening it up, she pulled out two trays of neatly slotted datachips, and showed him the otherwise-empty interior.

He buzzed an order and gestured, and a smaller, junior guard came trotting up, scanner equipment in hand. He—or she, it was hard to tell at that beige-hued age—scanned the contents, saluted the Dlmvlan with an odd bend of the arm, and trotted back into place, tucked off to one side. Ia approved of the precautions being shown even if they did slow her arrival. They were taking her presence seriously and were allowing her to pass after each challenge.

From somewhere beyond them, a great roar echoed up the broad corridor, the sound of a hundred thousand alien voices, if not more. The guard didn’t even glance that way. He did gesture for Ia to repack her case. Helstead, waiting for Ia to do all the work, activated her headset link, though not her suit speaker.
“I will be very glad to get back to actual combat, sir. All this political muck is just that: gross mud that I don’t want to wade through. I feel like I’m slogging across Dabin again.”

“I sympathize with how you feel, Delia,”
Ia replied under her breath, so that their conversation didn’t pass through her helmet and into the alien guard’s version of ears.
“But it is necessary. Thankfully, this is the last of it for a while . . . or at least before the mountain of fertilizer explodes and hits the atmospheric scrubbers.”

Checking the latches on the case, she straightened and waited patiently while the guard consulted yet another three-meter-tall native of Dulshvwl.

“I am also getting rather warm in this suit, sir,”
Helstead added pointedly.
“This style of p-suit is designed to reflect stellar radiation while retaining body heat in the chilly depths of space. They’re not meant for tramping around in Alliance-standard temperatures for hours on end.”

“Duly noted, Commander, but we’ll be here as long as we’ll be here.”
This time, the second guard was the one who beckoned them to follow.
“Time to move.”

The corridor was a long one, broad enough for three or four Dlmvla to have walked together, or a good six or seven Humans in p-suits. The lighting was a little strange, mushroom-like lamps glowing in alternating shades of orange and green. The noise of the crowd grew as they progressed along its length, too, until they emerged in a vast, egg-shaped chamber lined with tiers of petal-like balconies. The same orange and green lights continued in little balls and bulges here and there, but they were joined with pink and blue, yellow and lilac, with a great white ring of light shining down from far overhead.

The place looked like a pinecone in a way, or rather, more like someone had turned a rounded pinecone inside out and upside down, and painted it in pastels. Most of the scale-balconies started one-third of the way up from the bottom and were painted in shades of pink and a grayish lavender. But at regular intervals, some of the balconies had been crafted from brass so well polished, it gleamed like gold.

Ia and Helstead had been escorted to one such platform about halfway up from the bottom, a third of the way up the tiers. Racks to either side of the broad alcove tucked at the back of the balcony held what looked like harness suits. They were sized and shaped for Dlmvlan bodies and came with what looked like antigravity thrusters. Other than that, the brass-edged balcony they had been escorted to was empty of all seats, Dlmvlan-style or otherwise.

Each of the other balconies held tiered ranks of bowl chairs filled with dozens of Dlmvla of all sizes and shades: cream, beige, red, brown, lavender-gray, and even a few that were near black, the eldest of the elderly for their race. Ommatidia-like eyes glittered on all sides, and though their species were not technically anything like insects as Human knew them, they did have a few spots on their bodies where their scales were as hard as armored plates. They certainly had no dual skeletons like the K’Katta, with chiton all over the outside and bones on the inside, just those few points of toughened, scaly hide outside and the usual vertebral frames inside.

In the center of the vast hall, a mound rose with twenty-one spikes, each one terminating in a broad, cupped dais. Upon each was seated one of the huge Nestor Queens, easily four meters tall, if not more; it was hard to tell exact sizes since they were seated and being attended by beige-scaled younglings, but the queens were huge. There were Nestors aplenty, and many High Nestors, but only the twenty-and-one Nestor Queens at the very top of Dlmvlan politics. Normally five at a time were permitted to tour their various colonies, but all twenty-one had gathered here on their homeworld for this particular debate.

They were not, however, the current focus of attention. All around the chamber floated huge hoverscreens. So did roughly fifteen Dlmvlan. Only one of them was being displayed on roughly half of the screens at the moment, however; the other half displayed an image quite familiar to both Ia and her second officer though Ia had never displayed the video feed for it at the time, just the audio component. She had seen it in the timestreams and had listened to it live when it had happened.