An Officer’s Duty (9 page)

“What?” Luke gaped at her. He wasn’t the only one. Several others stared, too.

Rabbit was the first to recover. “Right. Luke, you’re banished. Pack up, get out, and don’t come back.”

“You can’t be serious! I’d never report to the Church!” he protested.

“You can’t just take the word of this…stranger!” Zezu argued, eyeing Ia with disgust.

“You were wearing a green hooded shirt and brown pants yesterday. You exited the northern door on the west side of Our Blessed Sanctum of Pialla Square at five thirty-nine in the morning. You stopped to adjust your shoe, because it looked like your toe was starting to poke through the side of your sneaker—black, grey, and white sneakers, though I can’t be completely sure about the white, given how ratty they were,” Ia stated flatly.

Luke glanced down at his running shoes. So did the others. They were black and brand-new looking. Leuron frowned at him. “You said you went and bought those shoes yesterday, ’cause you just found out they were comin’ apart at the seams!”

“How would
you
know anything like that?” Luke asked, eyeing Ia warily.

“I was out jogging at that hour,” Ia told him. “You had your hood up, but the streetlamp showed your face when you straightened and turned down Settler Avenue. I have a good memory for faces…and you looked rather furtive when you left the church.”

“You’re crazy,” Luke protested. “Okay, I’ll admit I did stop in and use the restroom, but that doesn’t make me a Church
skut
! It’s all just coincidence!”

“It doesn’t take much to put all that together,” a girl named Diselle muttered. Ia remembered her from over two years ago. “Looks pretty damned suspicious to me, too.”

“I trust Ia’s judgment, Luke,” Rabbit told him, moving up and patting his arm. “You might as well follow Cassia and help her feel better about her decision to leave us. She’s probably feeling pretty bad right now.”

He gave Ia and the others—the ones who had been around longest—a dismayed look, then frowned and shook his head. “She’s right. You
are
mad. You’d turn on one of your own just because of some…?”

Rather than finishing that statement, he shook his head a second time and turned to go collect his own things.

Zezu looked like he would protest. Ia held up two fingers, cutting him off. Rabbit’s own solemn look kept the others quiet. A moment after Luke passed through the door, it opened again, admitting the Solarican waitress from the hallway. Balancing the serving platter on shoulder and hand, she eyed the cluster of youths.

“Wherrrre do you want yourrr food?” she asked Ia.

“Third table on the far left, the empty spot next to the pink bag,” Ia directed her. Again, Zezu started to protest, and again she held up her fingers. Only when the waitress had left, shutting the door behind her, did Ia lower her hand. “
Never
argue about our business in front of outsiders.”

He frowned. “What is this, some sort of cult? Is that what that ‘blessing’
shakk
was all about?”

“More like a resistance movement, albeit in the preplanning stages,” Ia corrected him. Stepping forward, Ia pressed her hands against his and his cousin’s foreheads. “Watch, and learn.”

Both shifted to move back, but it was too late. With a simple touch of her fingertips, Ia pulled them onto the timeplains. Since both young men were close friends as well as cousins, it was economical to show both of them at the same time. It would also reassure them that they hadn’t hallucinated, since they would later be able to compare notes.

This time, it wasn’t a fade or a flip. It was a snap, and a mental yank to get them up onto the grass. Zezu blinked and looked around. Ia was no longer touching his forehead; instead, she gripped his hand. She did the same for his cousin Leuron, immersing both of them—all three of them—firmly in the timestreams, making this moment as real as she could for them.

“What the hell?” he gasped, peering around the undulating, sepia-toned prairie, with its Earth-yellowed grasses and crisscrossing streams.

“Where did the restaurant go?” Leuron demanded. He rubbed at his chest. “Man…my heart is racing!”

“It’s still there,” Ia reassured them. “And your heart—the real one, in your real body—is actually only beating once for every two or three minutes you spend in here. It’s all relative.”

“And where is here?” Zezu demanded, glaring at her. “Take us back!”

“Not until you’ve seen what Rabbit and I are really doing. What we’re working for. As for where we are,” Ia stated, lifting her chin as she looked around, “welcome to my world. Everything you’re seeing right now is what I see…and what I see, gentlemeioas, is
Time
.”

The word rumbled across the plains, grumbling and echoing like thunder. It disturbed everything in its path like a gust of wind, making the leaves of the scattered bushes rustle, and the blades of grass sway.

“Whoa,” Leuron muttered, brown eyes widening.

“Don’t say that word carelessly while you’re here, or you’ll stir up a storm that would put one of Sanctuary’s to shame,” she cautioned them. “You wanted to know what I’m doing? Why
Rabbit is willing to follow me, and have everyone else do so as well? More to the point, why here, and why Sanctuary? Come see what I see.”

A tug of her mind slid them up forward, the grass racing past their floating feet. Zezu gasped and clutched at her with his free hand. Leuron swallowed and braced himself. She nodded at the streams, now looking like rivulets, cracks, tiny shining hairs on the never-ending plains spreading out beneath them.

“Each one of those streams is a life. Where they cross and touch, they strongly influence other lives. Your lives travel almost side by side,” she told them. “At least, for now.”

“What’s that up there?” Leuron asked, looking at the blighted desert approaching in the distance.

“The destruction of our galaxy.” The casual way she said it made both boys glance sharply at her. Ia shrugged. “More to the point…the source of that destruction is one which both of you will find very familiar.”

Drifting them down to the edge of the grass, to the point where the life faded from the timeplains, leaving cracked, dead dirt and rocks in its place, Ia dropped all three of them into one of the timestreams near the edge…

They were a Terran pilot named Terrence, suited up and seated at the controls of a starfighter…and they were afraid. In front of them lay a wall of stone and metal, impossibly huge. For five hours, they had flown at top insystem speeds, the kind that could cross half a star system in that amount of time, and they were still a long, long ways from that grey and brown surface. It could just barely be seen curving in the distance, and they knew, having seen it upon their arrival in this part of space, that it was nothing more and nothing less than an unbelievably huge sphere.

A sphere with tiny, tiny baby spheres, ones the size of gas giants themselves. Those satellites had been sent out, and were swarming around a real gas giant. Devouring it. In just the
span of a handful of minutes, the gas giant had shrunk perceptibly.

The real horror was, Terrence knew there was nothing he or his fellow Humans could do to stop it. No one had the resources to stop these extragalactic predators. Not even if all
the sentient, star-faring races in the whole galaxy somehow miraculously combined.

It would also be another day or so before he got anywhere near the surface of that mind-boggling wall of a sphere. Three months, and the aliens would reach Earth, the Human Motherworld. His own home colony would be gone within three and a half. And the experts all agreed that within one hundred years, there wouldn’t be a star left in this entire section of the cosmos, because they were already tearing apart the nearest stars as well, sucking up their fusion fires to fuel their rapacious hunger. Nothing would be left to light up any stray dust particles the invaders might have missed.

The entire galaxy was as doomed as that gas giant…which was shrinking even faster, now that the outer layers of atmosphere had been siphoned away…

Ia lifted them out of that numbed pilot’s lifestream. Setting her passengers on the ground next to it, she waited for them to recover from the shock of living someone else’s life. At least she had been kind, dipping them into the memories and awareness of a fellow male.

“What…what the slag was that?” Leuron muttered, staring once more at the bone-dry desert ahead of them.

“That was the Wall, wasn’t it?” Zezu asked her. “That’s the Wall from the Fire Girl Prophecies! I’ve seen it before. That was the Wall!”

“That was, is, and will be the Wall,” Ia confirmed. “More specifically, it is a Dysun’s Sphere, built by an extragalactic sentient race of beings who treat other galaxies the way locust-bugs treat forests and fields. They are swarmers; they live inside their giant hive until they outgrow it, then they find a galaxy, strip it bare—the
entire
galaxy—and build a second hive-sphere. Then the two groups part company and head off across the intergalactic void in different directions, each in search of new material for their hive-homes, uncaring that they’ve destroyed thousands of sentient races, millions of inhabitable worlds, and billions of stars. Including our own.”

“Shakk,” Leuron muttered. “That meioa-o…he didn’t think anyone could stop it. Who
could
stop something that huge?”

“I can.”

Her calm statement caused both young men to choke. Zezu was the first to regain his voice. “Like a Church hell, you can!”

She gave him a sardonic look. “Well, not on my
own
, no. I’ll need your help.”

“Help for what?” Zezu demanded. He swept his left hand at the barren, lifeless desert beyond them. “If all those streams are lives, then all those lives are dead. This
can’t
be stopped. That guy, he was thinking there wasn’t an army created that could stop these…these things!”

“Not an army, no,” Ia agreed. Lifting them again, shifting the timestreams beneath their feat, she readjusted their position in the future. When they landed, it was beside a stream planted with bushes. She tightened her grip on their hands, particularly Leuron’s, who had shifted toward the stream and the images visible beneath its ripples. “Do not touch the waters of this life. I don’t have the time to put your brains back together, if you do. Even I get a raging headache when I try. Just stay on the bank and walk beside it with me.”

They gave her wary looks, but followed her. She carefully expanded the timeplains, focusing down so that there was plenty of room to move between the streams. Several of them intersected and mingled with the bush-marked stream, and broad footbridges appeared, allowing the trio to cross each companion creek.

Zezu, peering at the waters, finally shook his head. “What are we looking at? This stream is exactly the same as all the rest. I think. The vidshows in the water are running by so fast…”

“Shhh…just follow it a few more meters.”

Leading them up to the edge of the barren zone, Ia guided them right next to the water. The air felt thicker here, looking as warm and viscous as amber glass. She pulled them through…and stepped onto a vibrant green lawn latticed with healthy, flowing streams. It was probably aqua blue, the color of the Sanctuarian equivalent of grass, but the amber golden light pouring down around them continued to give everything a sepia hue.

“How…?” Zezu asked, peering at the grass, the streams, the vibrant signs of life.

“What this one person can do—just this one person, at the
right time and the right place—can stop the coming invasion. Everyone continues to live, and the galaxy is even better off than before.” She slid them backwards, back through the barrier. Back behind the view of the lifeless desert looming in their future. “All of this takes place roughly three hundred years in the future. And now…for a different view.”

The streams shifted, rippled, and changed. They moved physically, and they altered visually as Ia turned them around. She pointed them now into the past.

“See all the purple waters? Those are all one lifestream. One person’s life—the one person who can stop the invasion. All the blue ones, another life. All the green ones, so on and so forth for each color. The different channels, though, represent different choices. Only one choice leads to the right hole through that barrier of death and destruction behind us…and that means the blue life and the green life and the pink and so forth all have to influence the purple life to make the right choices at the right points in time.”

“So…what? What can we do?” Leuron asked her. “If this is all three hundred years in the future, what can
we
do about it?”

“There’s nothing we can do!” Zezu dismissed.

“On the contrary, there’s quite a lot you can do.” Tightening her grip on their hands, she lifted them up and sent them forward, soaring over the multihued waters intersecting and interweaving. “All you have to do is look at the water. Some channels are deeper than others; some choices are more obvious and likely than others. Each person’s actions influence those after them, just as each person is influenced by those who come before them. It’s all a great chain. We just have to set up the dominos in advance, and tend to each junction as it comes to pass…and encourage those who follow us to tend each choice in the coming paths.

“I don’t know about you, but having seen all of this, I can’t turn my back on it. I can’t walk away.” Ia shrugged, surveying her stream markers. “Those who see the problem, and know of a good solution for it,
those
are the people who are responsible for fixing that problem.”

Leuron shook his head. “This is too much, meioa. I can’t take it in right now…”

“I got a question,” Zezu stated, glancing over his shoulder. “That life…the one that punches through the desert and saves everybody from the Wall? Is that the Fire Girl?”