Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation Read Online Free PDF

take care of her. You
promise
me that, one officer to another, as well as one Squadmate to another. I’ve lost too many lives today as it is.”
    “I promise I’ll take care of Garcia, Brad, to the best of my ability, and to the best of hers once I get her to believe in herself again. I’ve lost too many as well,” Ia agreed. Releasing his forearm, she clapped him on the back, then straightened, pushing away from the table. “Time for me to head to the docking bay. We still have to make planetfall, get the other two on board, and get back to the ship by the time Harper finishes our repairs.”
    “And then what?” Arstoll asked her, following her toward the doors. “Or is that Classified?”
    “Most of it is, and well beyond your pay grade . . . but once I have these three on board, we race for the Gatsugi homeworld. The various heads of state will be holding a meeting, where I’ll be begging for certain cross-government military powers. I’m still not entirely sure why the Admiral-General made me a four-star,” she confessed, “but she did, and it’s made my job unbelievably easier, so I’m going to run with it as far and fast as I can.”
    “Hauling bus all the way?” Arstoll offered. “Like you did at the end of Hell Week?”
    “Farther and faster, if I can,” Ia quipped back. “Tae says they’ve now made it an end-of-Hell-Week challenge for teams of recruits to pull a ground bus a hundred meters. And yes, they have to remember to release the parking brake, first.” She flashed him a brief, wry smile, then offered her hand. “Time to go. Good luck, Arstoll.”
    “Good luck, Ia.
Eyah?
” he asked her as he clasped it one last time, using the sign and countersign of the Marines and their V’Dan counterparts.
    “Hoo-rah,”
she agreed.
    AUGUST 20, 2498 T.S.
SIC TRANSIT
    August Ia finished the last of her battle-guiding tasks and pulled out of the timestreams. What she wanted was a hot bath and a long nap. What she had to do was leave the comfort of her easy chair—salvaged from her old quarters on the
Hellfire
and installed in the nearly identical version on the
Damnation
—and head for the practice salles. Her mind might be tired, but her body was full of energy. A nap was therefore out of the question, at least until she exhausted herself physically.
    Once again, they were working and living in twice Standard gravity, and that meant working out every day to ensure everyone on board remained combat-ready. That required daily exercise. More than that, it required daily exercise in her old weight suit. At some point down the road, she
would
be back on Sanctuary, fighting on its surface for the survival of the key element that would make everything she had planned actually work:
    A home, a sense of culture and family for the Savior, who would otherwise have none, and who would slowly lose her humanity without one.
    Ia’s new quarters—her own version of home, or at least a place to rest—were still located amidships, just behind the new, larger bridge, and were still comparatively small. Still located on Deck 6, the journey to the exercise cabins required her to find the nearest lift to travel down to Deck 12, below the cylindrical core of the new, improved Godstrike cannon, Mark II. Of course, she hadn’t fired it yet, but that was for a very good reason. The old one had required seven or eight ships in alignment, with its caloric rating of 90.3 percent. The new one reached 94.5 percent, and being palpably larger, would require considerably more care in firing it.
    The needle-shaped ship hadn’t really grown much in girth compared to the old version, maybe a dozen meters in extra armor plating and a slightly larger focal core. Instead, it had grown mostly in length by a couple hundred meters. Despite that, the ship still held twenty-four functional decks spanning five section seals. That extra distance deepened the wavelength, allowing not one but two “wolf” infrared resonances to be