Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship Read Free Page A

overall war effort by eating away at the hearts of the men and women struggling to fight back a strong enemy presence on this heavy-gravitied world.
    “. . . Contact Lieutenant Frederich. He has a ground car that can come pick me up. Tell him we’ll swing by the liquor store, my treat, so he can call it an official beer run if his commander asks,”
Ia added.
    Meyun chuckled.
“This from a woman who doesn’t drink.”
    “Alcohol ruins my self-control faster than sex,”
she quipped back.
“But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop others from having fun.”
    “Sex and alcohol? Does this mean I get to call it a date when I come pick you up?”
he asked, humor still warming his tone.
    “He’ll insist on driving the car himself,”
Ia warned her second-in-command.
“So unless you want the lieutenant to watch . . . ?”
    “
Shakk
that. But I will take a rain check.”
    Squinting up at the clouds as the droplets started coming down in greater numbers, Ia sighed.
“You would have to mention the ‘R’ word . . . Bring a thermal blanket and some towels so I can dry off on the ride back. I’ll keep my unit active, so you can trace my position. And don’t dawdle, Commander.”
    “Aye aye, sir. Harper out.”
    Tapping the buttons that would keep a subchannel linked between their units, Ia closed the lid. She kept walking, not having anything better to do. Examining the timestreams as she headed west, Ia peered both upstream into the past as well as downstream into the future. Her stomach rumbled with hunger, threatening to distract her, and the rain only made her thirsty. Electricity from the town’s power grid had fed her in her other form, but it did nothing for her as a matter-based Human.
    Ia did her best to ignore those discomforts as there was nothing she could do about them just yet. She had bigger worries than where her next meal was coming from, or when. The Salik had landed here in force, and in person.
    Nobody expected a race of flipper-footed aliens from a lightly gravitied planet to want to invade a heavyworld. But Dabin was a mostly warm, M-class planet without too many inimical native life-forms, and none of them sentient beyond the Humans who had claimed it. Dabin was ideal for most oxygen-breathing, carbon-based life-forms to colonize and inhabit once the gravity problem was overcome.
    Normally, that took a couple generations of adaptation as people moved from one world to the next, increasing their gravitational endurance generation by generation. The Humans back on her own homeworld, Sanctuary, were still struggling to adapt to its exceptionally high gravity, but Humans had evolved as fairly sturdy creatures. Only the Solaricans and the K’Kattans could match them. The K’Kattans themselves were natural heavyworlders, evolved with a dual endo-exo skeletal system, but even they had to spend a few generations adapting to planets outside their comfort zone.
    The Salik had done something similar via the gradually increasing tug of artificial gravity, slowly breeding several generations of their kind in crèches hidden in the black depths of interstitial space. They still couldn’t invade truly heavy-gravitied worlds, but then not every M-class world was as water-rich a prize as Dabin. With low mountains, shallow oceans, and mild winters, the planet was nearly ideal for their amphibious species, very much like their Motherworld, Sallha.
    Ia knew through the timestreams of the past that this invasion had been carefully planned for almost 150 Terran years. She also knew through the streams stretching into the future that if the Salik gained the upper hand on this world here, it would take far too long to dislodge them. She needed them pushed off this planet, and pushed off soon, before the worst of the war unfolded.
    The colonists did have a few advantages on this planet. Elsewhere, the Salik were using robots to augment their troops in combat. Mostly they were used on various domeworlds, where the