Sister Time-ARC

by John Ringo

  "Papa's got it in one," Cally said. "Our peerless leaders' willingness to play this card should give you some idea of the importance of the mission. You all know we've been skating on the edge of disaster, as an organization, since the split. The take from this mission won't come anywhere near putting us where we were, but it'll make that thin ledge we're on just a tad wider. If the device's existence and location is confirmed, if this isn't some elaborate ruse to give the Darhel a plausible excuse to eliminate Michelle as one more O'Neal, we can't let them get it developed and in production. If they get something like this, we aren't just on the edge anymore, we're out of business. We don't have a defense that would keep a captured agent from spilling his guts under this thing, and all of our agents know way too much. We aren't nearly as compartmentalized as we should be. There won't be anything to stop the enemy from running routine interrogations on all their people, potentially compromising every agent we've got inside. We've been complacent, and it's come back to bite us in the ass," she sighed.

  "Okay, to make the explanation as simple as possible, the plan is a lame duck jenny with a charlie chatter and a right angle fake. Harrison, you're charlie. Grandpa, you do the fake out. Tommy steals the ball. George, you drive and babysit the humvee. Jenny, obviously." she pointed to her own chest.

  "If nobody's got any questions so far, let's get to the positions and timing." Cally picked up a fiberglass pointer. "The plane comes in nap of the Earth at oh-five-hundred and sets down on the flat behind this hill. I've allowed a generous twenty minutes for us to unload and get into the vehicle. I expect it to take half that. Buckley, start the hummer and the clock."

  "Hold that thought, buckley," George said. "I do have a couple of questions." If Isaac's team lead objected to being interrupted, she didn't show it. Not to casual inspection. Tommy knew enough to recognize the slight tightening of her hands after she folded them in front of herself and turned a deceptively open face towards the other man. There was nothing significant to anyone about her closed body language. Cally always kept her arms close in, defensively, when she wasn't in character for a job. He didn't know if George could read her closely enough to catch the Cally-specific facial tells.

  "Yes?" Her tone of voice was pleasantly even. If Tommy hadn't worked closely with her most of her life, he wouldn't have been able to tell she was getting torqued. He was starting to wonder how tactful George had been, or hadn't been, in their prior meeting.

  "The jenny is fine, but in my experience it's almost impossible to run an obvious diversion on a military base without the senior NCO's, at least, smelling a rat. Not to mention a security lockdown of the base. And Harrison sucks at field work," he said, nodding to his brother. "Sorry, bro, but you do. Tommy's conspicuously huge, and a fucking war hero. What if he gets made? Why not switch Tommy and Papa and send Papa in with a swipe card, since the system takes them. Or a grafted fingerprint. And why do you really need me if I'm just going to be sitting on my ass in the truck? No offense, it just looks like I'm extraneous."

  Cally's expression got friendlier. Not a good sign. "Okay, first off, the diversion is anything but obvious. Operations training has a computer randomized posleen attack drill approximately once a month. It's separate from security lockdown drills because with posleen that's a waste of manpower that Fleet Strike may need. Don't sell Harrison short. He's charming, and can be made up to look inconspicuous, particularly in uniform. And he's not going to make a fuss about changing his appearance. Right, Harrison?" It wasn't really a question. "Everyone still alive who ever served with Tommy has either been riffed out or deployed off planet. He's huge, no disguising that. His hair, eyes, and facial structure will look nothing like his original identity. Fleet Strike has helped us out, there, by liberalizing the length and grooming standards for hair in the past ten years. Papa can't go in his place. A swipe card triggers a security review automatically, a graft is a dead giveaway under the most casual review, and the access end is the place most likely to need a sophisticated on-site hack. You, obviously, are our go to hell guy."

  It was impressive how she could say something like that without overselling or underselling it. It'd be interesting to know if she was fooling George or not with the Miss Friendly face. "You've just demonstrated why. You're better than anyone I know at finding potential weak points in a plan, on short notice—even though we have those specific ones covered. You improvise fast and well even for a field agent. If anything goes wrong, you get to pull our cherries out of the fire."

  "Okay, fine. Why is Papa doing the hack for the diversion, and what if that's not smooth?" he asked. "No offense." He nodded to the older redhead.

  "Tommy does the hack on the way. He's got half a dozen canned routines set up in Papa's buckley to cover contingencies. The only reason the hack isn't already done is to reduce the chance that it will be noticed beforehand. We hope it won't be noticed at all, but nobody wants a blown op, do we?" she smiled. "That it? Okay, buckley, start the humvee moving."

  "Are you sure? There are at least sixteen more things that could go wrong, you know. Would you like me to list them?" the buckley offered cheerfully.

  "Shut up, buckley," she said mechanically.

  "Right."

  Tommy and Harrison coughed, unconvincingly, as the miniature truck started moving through the hologram. The base buckley's eccentric reaction to Cally O'Neal was a running joke between them. As was Cally's ill-concealed suspicion that Tommy was hacking her system. He hadn't, which just made it funnier every time she accused him. The briefing went on, more quickly now that George had said his piece.

  "Right. We want to come as close to the base as we can without ever entering line of sight of the elevated areas of Fredericksburg Base itself. We're landing out here. Technically, it's civilian, privately-owned land. In fact, it's abandoned but not yet reverted to Homestead and Reclamation. It's as safe as it gets, but it means we need to proceed over the Rappahannock here, and do another crossing at the other side of this small island. There's an old road that will have discouraged tree growth and such, but the route might as well be off-road. Harrison, planning for getting the truck across the river is your baby. Who knows what's there now, but undergrowth analysis from the few aerial photos we have suggests that however much bridge there is, that's the one that got the most rebuilding. Both sides of that old road have been used a fair bit, most likely by civilian-type vehicles, on both sides of the river. The bounty farmers had to have been crossing it somehow. Think about contingencies. Get with Tommy, go over whatever information we've got, and come up with a list of what you'll need. Supply needs it by fifteen hundred tomorrow. Earlier if you need anything particularly exotic."

  "Obviously, there are security cams out in the area beyond the base. The difference between the cameras on base and the cameras off base is that the cameras on base are hard-wired to the data assessment center. The cameras off base are not. They broadcast or tightcast, using the same transmission protocols as the AIDs. For all that, they're pure Earthtech, which means that we can fuzz them. Enough, anyway. So, our first point of approach is here," she said, touching the pointer to the flashing red dot southeast of the base. "Harrison, Tommy and I un-ass the truck and proceed to the fence. We have fairly recent intelligence that the fence is chain link topped by razor wire. Naturally, we'll take backup, but we should be able to get onto the base itself with nothing more exotic than heavy duty wire cutters. From the fence, we split up. Two hundred meters in from the fence line, there's a guard patrol that covers the secure area containing the archive. I turn onto the road here and start jogging up towards the archive building. Tommy and Harrison parallel me and wait for me to jenny the guard. They break across the line and make their way to the building. Harrison, you're going to carry some package you need the clerk to sign for. Get together with Tommy and figure out something plausible."

  "Meanwhile, George and Grandpa take the Humvee around to here." She pointed to a second flashing red dot in the hologram. "As you can see, th
e truck can get closer in here, meaning Grandpa will get up the hill before us, overlooking the muster point for the particular Posleen attack drill we've selected."

  As she took them through the steps of the brief, Tommy tried to keep his mind on the details. This was a straightforward reconnaissance mission, despite the target, but that didn't make it okay to get complacent.

  It was good flying weather, clear and mild, as Kieran Dougherty guided the Martin Safari hybrid jet over the Virginia hills. False dawn threw purple shadows over a landscape barely touched with color in the early light. The pilot grumbled to himself because the Schmidt sitting to his right in the copilot's seat was not, in fact, his copilot—not that he needed one for this. Schmidt Two wasn't any kind of pilot at all and as far as Dougherty knew, hadn't a single hour of flight time to his name. The overgrown kid of an assassin was using the instrumentation of his plane, alright. Using it to control the surveillance cameras on the belly of the plane, taking countless pictures of the ground they were overflying, just as if it was anything more than godforsaken postwar wilderness laced with the occasional cluster of dirt-poor bounty farms.

  He came in low, dropping lower, using VTOL to land on a green flat, behind a hill, in a place that used to be called Falmouth. Mere tens of meters away, an abandoned bounty-farmer's shack sat, weathering beneath an encroaching tangle of vines, dry and dormant in preparation for winter. His landing field was an irregular patch of knee-high grass and weeds, its sole virtue that it was relatively flat and not yet overgrown with the scraggly pines eating away its edges. There were, however, signs of abat. The only blessing about this mission to the middle of nowhere was the season. This late in the year, the grat, who like the Posleen they came with preferred warmer weather, were already hibernating deep in the ground awaiting spring. The alien insect, which preyed on the hapless, plentiful abat, hunted in swarms. The little bastards' poison sting could kill a grown man with a speed and ease that would have struck a hive of killer bees dumb with envy.

  The amateur ecologist in Kieran automatically tracked the signs of change everywhere he got to go—one of the perks of his job. Fortunately, in Virginia the abat were slowly losing the fight to the rabbits and field mice. Once the local owls, foxes, and other night-hunters had learned the abat's peculiar vulnerabilities, the native rodents had gotten a respite and begun to recover. The abat's coloring and movement habits helped it avoid the senses of grat in Posleen ships and fields. Evolution had not fitted them for all terrestrial habitats. Farther south, the story wasn't so good for the natives. Here, abat didn't have any of the peculiar survival habits needed for winter weather. They were conspicuous as hell in the snow, tending to hop frenetically to keep warm. They had swarmed in with the Posleen, along with other pests and hangers on from countless worlds the Posleen had devoured. The rodent-like herbivores' reproductive rates had made their slide towards extinction in Virginia slow, but the outcome was inevitable.

  As for the grat, some local insectivore or another must be pretty damned resistant to the poison, because they were reportedly declining, too. Expert opinions were divided between the black bear and the woodpeckers as the happy recipients of ecologic accident. Lack of resistance worked both ways. For every species that became invasive in a new environment, at least a hundred died out. Invasive success in one environment did not translate to invasive success in another.

  In the pre-war era, Japanese kudzu had inundated the American southeast, but left Alaska untouched. Rabbits and cane toads had overrun Australia, but bombed out in more habitats than they'd thrived. Felis domesticus had destroyed countless species of birds—but only in places where it had doting humans to go home to. In many other places, top level predators—and not just the Posleen—made short work of the kitty cats after their Human protectors were gone.

  Ecological destruction from the Posties' hitchhikers had overturned equilibria everywhere—but it was a toss-up which species got a foothold where, and some, like the abat and grat, appeared to have the a similar vulnerability to the Posleen's absence as the house cats had to the absence of humans. In the former cases, nobody had figured out why yet.

  The key, as always, was that evolution was not an upward path towards some pre-destined goal. Evolution had no goals—it simply described an observed sequence of causes and effects. Evolutionary fitness in one environment did not translate to evolutionary fitness in another. The Posleen, in their adaptability of diet and environment, were a wholly remarkable, one in a gazillion aberration.

  Their hitchhiker species demonstrated more the rule of species transplantation than the Horses' own bizarre exception. Any hitchhikers that couldn't eat earth life started dying out as soon as the Posleen were gone. Any hitchhikers that could eat earth life could, as a rule, be eaten by it. It tended to level the playing field.

  He sighed and shook loose from the woolgathering that tended to catch up with him all at once whenever he got safely back on the ground.

  "Thank you for flying Bane Sidhe air, please don't forget your baggage, we hope you have a brilliant day. Guys, watch your step on the ground out there. It's an abat field." Kieran busied himself with flipping switches and checking gages, preparatory to going out and getting his aircraft squared away for the team's return.

  "Oh, lovely. Can you give us a second to double check the harness before you drop the ramp? I know it's fine, just exercising constructive paranoia." Cally was first out of her seat and bouncing on the balls of her feet, already buzzing on adrenaline.

  "Yeah, secondary to Kieran's constructive paranoia. He checked everything about five times before we took off in the first place." Harrison grinned easily, standing and getting what little stretch was available in the cabin.

  "Great. Still, you never know what might have worked loose on the trip." She looked like she was about to jump to the ground. Looking over his shoulder, Kieran could almost see the words "abat field" walk across her forehead before she turned and took the ladder down.

  "If it makes you feel better. We've got time." Papa O'Neal yawned and began patting down his pockets.

  "Looks good. Drop the ramp. Tommy, you and Grandpa get the camo net over the plane. Harrison, help me start disconnecting the Humvee," she called.

  "You mean now that we know everything's connected?" Schmidt One had a quirk at the corner of his mouth.

  "Exactly," she said.

  "Did anybody ever tell you you've been listening to your buckley too much?" George asked.

  "She has not. If she listened to me, she'd know that it's not the aggregate failure rate on the straps you have to worry about. Do you know how many field missions have ended in death and mayhem, not to mention blatant destruction of sensitive and valuable electronic equipment, caused by vehicular failures? I've prepared a list of the top twenty-five most likely causes for mission failure resulting in three or more team fatalities. I can recite it if you'd like," it volunteered helpfully.

  "Shut up, buckley," Cally called over her shoulder at the PDA still resting in her vacated seat.

  "Right."

  While they were talking, Kieran had gotten the ramp down and joined Cally and Harrison, rapidly unfastening the heavy-duty harness that had held the mostly mud-colored truck immobile in the belly of the plane. It was amazing what you could carry in a smallish plane when you didn't have to carry large amounts of jet fuel. Cally ignored the door, swinging her feet in through the driver's side window and starting the engine, before backing the vehicle down the ramp. Parking clear of the plane so her team members could get the cover in place, she got out and fished a gym bag from the floorboard behind the driver's seat. The guys were set already. This time of year the gray silks, with Fleet Strike's blue stripe up the leg, would certainly be the uniform of the day. The galactic material was wrinkle-proof, nearly indestructible, and more comfortable than most civilians' workout clothes. It didn't stain, and was warm enough to render jackets superfluous. Fleet Strike uniform would be the best camouflage possible on base for Tommy and
Harrison. George and Papa were in old-style BDUs and snivel gear. Cally, of course, had a different role to play.

  She pulled a thin camo jumpsuit out of the bag and wrinkled her nose at it, looking down at her stylish black and red running togs. She looked good. She was supposed to, but her vanity always amused Kieran for some reason. The black sweats and windbreaker were nothing special, but teamed with a red tank top that was about two sizes too small, it was eye catching enough.

  "Cold, Cally?" George said, walking past her to rummage in the back for his camera bag. She spun around and obviously checked the impulse to clobber him, settling for staring balefully at his back. The bra she was wearing was a thin membrane that other than keeping everything elevated might as well not have been there. If ogling was pissing her off, she'd better get her head in the game. Kieran walked up the ramp into his plane to close it up. He'd go over it with his usual fine-toothed comb before taking the opportunity to grab a nap, his own part in the operation finished for now.

  "Get in the goddam truck, George. You've got the middle." Cally stepped into the jumpsuit and zipped it halfway up. The grass crunched under her feet, crisp with early-morning frost despite the mild air. She was the odd woman out for the vehicle, looked like.

  "Nope, I need shotgun. Gotta shoot some pics. Besides, Tommy and Harrison'll like it better if you're in the middle. You look better than me and you probably smell better." The camera itself was a good electronic model. His eccentricity was that he used an ancient set of glass lenses with it, and could go on for hours about the inferiority of modern, polymer, zoom lenses. At least, the one time Cally had been present it had seemed like forever.