An Officer’s Duty (6 page)

“Okay…now what?” Fyfer asked when she sat back.

“Now we see if there’s anything unusual about your sphere.” Picking it up, she tossed it at her younger brother.

He caught it in his cupped hands, blinked, then held it, rolled the ball between his fingers, and finally shrugged. “It’s crysium. Pink, slightly cloudy crysium.
How
you made it a ball, I don’t know, but it’s hard and cool to the touch, and that’s it. No images, no future impressions, nothing.”

He lobbed it at Thorne, who caught it, held it, and shrugged as well. Thorne tossed it back to their sister. “Crystal. Nothing more.”

Ia caught it and set it down by her right knee, the side Fyfer was sitting on. Picking up Thorne’s blooded sphere, she tossed it at Fyfer first, wanting to see what his reaction would be. He bobbled it for a moment, trapped it against his chest, then held it. Fyfer started to shrug, then paused, frowned, and scratched at the edge of his left hand…then looked at his skin, frowning.

“What the…slag? Look at that, it’s healing faster.” He shrugged and scratched his head. “At least, it itches like it’s healing fast.”

“Pass it to Thorne. Please,” Ia added. He complied, and their eldest sibling held it, frowned softly, and rubbed at the side of his hand. “Well?”

“I’m not sure, but…I think he’s right. Maybe. Here,” he said, handing it back to Fyfer. “You hold it in your left hand, and if your cut heals faster than mine, we’ll know it’s the crystal. I’ve always healed faster than you, naturally.”

“Thanks to a very minor biokinetic propensity,” Ia murmured, nodding in agreement. Both of her brothers looked at her. She shrugged. “It was nothing strong enough to bother with getting you trained, but I knew it was there—don’t go there,” she added, lifting her finger to cut off Fyfer’s indrawn breath. “That’s the wrong line of inquiry, and it would be dangerous as well as fruitless if you tried to look for the right one. Let it be, Brothers.
No one
must know how to manipulate and amplify crysium until it’s the right time. No one but me.”

“You know, you’d
think
it would be great, having a sister who could literally foresee the future…but no. It’s more of a pain in the
asteroid
,” Fyfer quipped sardonically. “Will there ever come a question where you give us the full answer?”

“Maybe.” Her lips curled up in a wicked grin as he groaned.

“So, what now?” Thorne asked her. “Are you going to cut yourself, or is that torture reserved just for us?”

“Hush, I’m developing a theory,” she muttered, thinking. Picking up one of the untainted, clear pink spheres, she studied it. “I think first…I should try and turn this into another torus. Bear with me. And don’t touch me.”

“Trust me, we know better,” Fyfer muttered.

With the sphere gripped lightly in her hands, Ia focused her mind down and in, flipping it fully onto the timeplains. The blue and purples of the forested hills around them, the golds
and pastels of the crystal sprays, and her brothers, Thorne in shades of dark green and Fyfer dressed in dark blue, vanished from view. In its place, a sunbaked, grassy plain undulated in all directions to the far, far horizon.

Stepping up out of the waters of her own timestream, Ia focused on finding the right path. Off in the future, downstream by three hundred or so years, most every life-stream ended, destroyed by the invading might of the Zida”ya, or the Soor, as they had been nicknamed by their ancient enemy. One stream, however, one convergence of actions and destinies, broke through that desert, saving and restoring the rightful lives of all those future generations.

Skimming the waters, their surfaces glimmering with glimpses of different moments in time, she followed that path, or rather, tangle of paths…then came back to herself with a deep indrawn breath. Ia opened her eyes as she exhaled. She knew her gift was strong, too strong to risk anyone touching her when she ventured fully onto the timeplains. The bracelet-like object now cradled in her hands told her that, combined with the peculiarities of crysium, her precognition could activate her other gifts as well, and do so without conscious thought.

Specifically electrokinesis, drawing energy out of the crystal to soften its otherwise impermeable surface, and telekinesis, shaping it into this rippling ring thing. Her battle precognition had without a doubt been trained by her efforts to work in tandem with her other abilities during combat, dodging shrapnel, firing at targets, whatever it took. But this was proof it could happen outside of any conscious need as well.

Ia picked Thorne, offering him the ring. “Here. See if you can sense anything.”

Taking it from her, he started to say something, then hesitated. Thorne blinked and stared at nothing. After a long moment, he shook it off. “It’s…not as strong as the ring. The first one, I mean. But…I could see things. Little hints of things. I couldn’t place them in time though. Nothing pinpointed to a specific hour or date.”

He offered it to Fyfer, who took it, hesitated, and stared. It took him longer to come back to himself, and when he did, their younger brother quickly dropped the ring on the ground. It
chinged
off a piece of rock and thumped into a patch of dirt.

“Something wrong?” Thorne asked.

Fyfer scrubbed his right hand, then quickly shifted the translucent pink sphere out of his left hand. “
Ah
…yeah. Sort of. The cut’s almost healed…and whatever this trick is, Ia, you
have
to put in some sort of time-limit modifier,” he warned his sister. “This one wasn’t as strong as the first ring, but it took effort to pull away from the images I was seeing. The previous one…it was too intense. I couldn’t stop looking.”

Thorne nodded.

“Duly noted,” she murmured. Leaning forward, Ia picked up both the clear ring and the blade. The ring, she put into her other thigh patch-pocket. Then she carefully cut her hand and bled onto a clean sphere, molded the blood into the ball, and flipped her mind onto the timeplains.

This time, she limited herself to key moments—nothing specific, just whatever caught her eye in the shifting images of the streams she passed, soaring through the amber-hued skies in her mind—and limited herself firmly to just a few minutes. When she pulled out and came back to herself, the pink-clouded sphere had become more of an oval-shaped ring.

This time, when Fyfer tried it, he stayed enthralled for only a little while. Glancing at the chrono on the bracer-style wrist unit covering her left forearm, Ia timed it. Two minutes and thirteen seconds Standard later, he came back to himself and set the ring on the ground. Thorne tried it as well…and came back to himself after only one minute forty-nine seconds. The moment she announced that in a puzzled murmur, both her brothers frowned. Fyfer snatched up the ring again.

“Time it again,” Fyfer told her.

“…Two minutes, two seconds,” Ia told him when he blinked out of whatever it was he was seeing. While Fyfer recovered, Thorne tried it a second time. Ia monitored the length of that session as well. “And your trip was two minutes, thirty-six seconds this time.”

Thorne frowned, rubbed at the nape of his muscular neck, then shrugged. “I suppose that makes sense, since I saw something different this time. It was important, but not the same. You?”

Fyfer nodded. “Something different each time,” he agreed. “The question now is what good is this peek-into-the-
future ability for anyone else? We know what
you
can do with it, but anyone else?”

“Well, I’m
hoping
to make use of it in convincing people to follow me when I’m no longer around to give directives,” Ia admitted. “But…I have very little clue as to what I’m doing. I know I’ve seen something
like
this in the timestreams,” she added, lifting the latest, wrist-sized ring. “But it was sized to fit on someone’s head, and there were two types: one to encourage people, and one to discourage them.”

“So just ask your future self how to make them!” Fyfer groused, rubbing at the edge of his palm. “Why bother experimenting on us?”

“Because I
can’t
ask my future self how to make them. It’s like…like watching a vid with the sound turned off,” Ia offered, groping for an analogy her brothers could understand. “You can kind of get the gist of what’s happening in the show, but without the words and the noises, you’re just as likely to get only parts of it right and parts of it wrong. Only in this case, I can see the sights and hear the sounds, but I cannot
be
inside my own head, listening to my own thoughts, when crafting these things.

“Which I’ll do at some point in the future. Even my abilities have their limits.” Dropping the ring on the ground, she sighed. Idly, she touched one of the remaining, undifferentiated crystal balls. The transparent sphere didn’t do anything special, other than look pink and round rather than crystalline and fractal.

“Predestination paradox,” Fyfer offered, making her look up. He shrugged. “You’re the only one who knows how all of this weirdness works, so you’re the only one who could possibly crack open the mysteries of it…which means you actually have to do the work.” Leaning forward, Fyfer smirked and poke-tapped her on the forehead a couple of times. “
No
cheating by copying someone else’s notes on
this
life-test, Sister.”

She stuck out her tongue at him. He stuck out his in return. Thorne raspberried them both, breaking up their silent fight with a bout of snickering. Calming down, he shook his head, his braid sliding across his shoulders. “Enough. This ground is hard, and my asteroid is growing numb. I’d like to get moving again soon. Besides, a handful of bracelets, or circlet-things, won’t be enough to go around. You’re asking me to plan for a population base of several million. We barely have a third of
a million people on Sanctuary right now, and that’s only because Population Expansion is subsidizing large families, with every wombpod in every crèche producing full time.”

Fyfer sighed and propped his elbows on his knees, plucking at a tuft of something greenish blue attempting to grow up through the dried mud coating the rocky ground. “I would’ve loved to have had a few more siblings. A pity Mom and Ma decided they couldn’t handle another round of pregnancies, and couldn’t afford any more mouths to feed, even if Pop Ex footed the bill.”

“You’ll have plenty of kids of your own to look after,” Ia promised him. “Both biological ones and ones from wombpod manufactories.”

“Yeah, with what money?” Fyfer shot back. “You also said Pop Ex will be in the hands of the Church by then, and all their wombpods with them.”

“I told you, you’ll get the numbers when the time is right,” she admonished him. “Just keep buying tickets, handpicking each and every set of numbers. Then you’ll be able to afford your own version of Population Expansion.”

A quick exchange of looks with her older brother promised Thorne that
he
would get the right numbers first, and be the one to dole them out at the right moment. She knew the many burdens she was piling onto his shoulders, but Ia had little choice. Fyfer was still too young for the heavy responsibilities waiting for him. How ironic that she, who had so little time to spare, was being forced by Time to be patient.

Changing the subject, Ia gathered up the rings. “Obviously, something in my blood is enough to trigger precognitive episodes. And something in the shape of these lumpy rings does it as well, if not quite to the same degree. But combining the two makes it far more effective than either one alone.

“The question is, how much of a combination will make it effective? I can’t exactly open up a vein and bleed myself to death; that’s counterproductive,” Ia stated, mulling through the problem. “I’ll have to experiment to see what size dose of blood is an absolute requirement, and experiment to see what size and shape of crystal is the best. Not to mention the differences between positive and negative reinforcement. And I’ll have to pull it off
before
I leave…and then figure out how to get
enough
blood into them…I don’t know. I don’t know how I could possibly fit enough blood into the few windows of opportunity I’ll have, the few times I’ll be coming back here.”

“Not without bleeding yourself to death,” Fyfer agreed. “I may grumble and gripe, but I really don’t want to lose you. Particularly to something stupid.”

She gave him a wry half smile. “Thanks.”

Thorne shrugged, rubbing his chin. “Why not…make a whole bunch of tiny little spheres, and just have us ship ’em to you? Standardized sizes, each one dosed with a few drops, and you mix ’em up, resphere ’em, and ship ’em back to us? That way you can donate a few drops every day without worry about massive blood loss.”

“Uh, presuming the blood doesn’t go bad in transit, that is,” Fyfer cautioned both of them. “That may be a factor you’ll have to consider.”

Ia shook her head, fishing out her original bracelet from its thigh-pocket. “I bled on this one months ago, and it hasn’t changed color, let alone lost strength as far as I can tell. Not that
I
can tell much, since I can barely sense it augmenting my abilities…but based on your reactions, it’s still quite strong.”

“A literal drop in the bucket of your abilities, no doubt,” Thorne agreed, eyeing her from head to toe. He lifted his chin at the rings in her hands. “Figure out how much blood you need, and how big a crystal ball or bubble to preserve it, then go from there.”

“A ball, I’d think. And…only a marble in size. I can always combine little spheres into large ones, but a bubble would only let the blood spoil. Blending it is what seems to preserve it.” Lifting her gaze to the crystals surrounding them, she tried to calculate how much she would need. “I’ll need to convert several dozen mature sprays, at the very least…but that’s a task for another day.”

“Have you given any thought as to how you’ll explain shipping all those beads back and forth?” Fyfer asked his sister.

Ia shrugged. “Something along the lines of ‘holy beads’ shaped and blessed by an active-duty warrior, something-something local religious beliefs. I
am
listed as a Witan priestess in my Service records, for all that I’m not serving as a chaplain.”