by John Ringo
“Oh, is it? I’m so sorry, I didn’t see the sign. I got a little turned around, anyway. Could you point me back to base housing? My sister-in-law is going to think I’m such a dummy,” she said.
The voices were far enough away that he had to listen carefully, and wouldn’t be easily overheard. He started forward again, carefully, beckoning with one hand. Harrison would have to go in first with his box, so he’d be looping around Tommy. The voices were moving down the hill as his female teammate succeeded at drawing the young soldier along with her. Single women on base were in short supply.
“Oooh!” The high feminine squeal of dismay was followed by a pause. “It’s my ankle…”
He couldn’t hear the rest. They kept moving, cutting in to approach the road. There was a five-yard strip of grass on each side of the road before the gate to the chain link fence surrounding the archive building, and a good fifteen yards between the fence and the building. Where the front of the building jutted out from the hillside, the structure was surrounded by neatly trimmed boxwood hedges. Fortunately, the gate was open, the guard mount a precaution against a theoretically possible intrusion that nobody seriously expected. Harrison crossed the open area at a fast sprint, setting down the box on top of the hedge as he vaulted it with more agility than Tommy had known he had, and pulling the box down out of sight. Too big to try to go over the hedge without either landing in it or hitting the wall, Tommy ducked around the back after covering the gap between the tree line and the building. He barely had room to crouch down below the top of the hedges without scraping himself to bits on the hedge or the brick wall, or lying flat on the dirt. Dammit. The pictures they studied had had a mock-up of a suit and a scale model of a SheVa tank in the courtyard. Someone had moved the damned displays. He supposed they were lucky to have any cover at all.
He thumbed his pocket open and pulled out his PDA, tapping the transmit button. “Dude, I need a beer,” he said, and ended the transmission. Seconds later, alarms began wailing across the base, sounding the drill alert. Soldiers all over the base would be grabbing their AIDs and their gear to get their information and execute their movements to set up an appropriate defense in response to the specified “Posleen attack.” Over the next few seconds, half a dozen or so men sprinted out of the building and through the gate, disappearing quickly from Sunday’s limited view. The activation phrase had been his own idea. He couldn’t think of anything less likely to be flagged as a code phrase if it was somehow overheard. Papa had grumbled that it lacked style. Tommy had told Papa that next time he was on the pointy end, he could die with style if he wanted to — again. It hadn’t been a fair thing to say. After all, it had only happened the once. Still, without the Crabs’ miracle slab to patch up even the dead, as long as there was enough brain intact, they were all being more careful.
They waited another two minutes to make sure as many men as possible were clear before Harrison went in through the front door. It wouldn’t do to wait too long and have Cally lose her grip on the attentions of the guard. Yeah, as if that was likely to happen. Getting out of the bushes wasn’t fun. Schmidt One had to crawl across the bigger man’s back on his knees so he wouldn’t leave boot prints all over his back. Silks were stain resistant as hell, but they picked up dirt like anything else. The other man brushed off his back, getting the slightly damp pine chips off him. Tommy dusted off the bottom of the coffee box and handed it back.
The morning was brightening in the way only a crisp fall day could. He was warm in his silks, but could feel the cold against his face and hands and see his breath. As he looked up to watch Harrison around the side of the building, he could see the trees down the slope bending in the wind. In the lee of the hill, he didn’t feel much wind, but he was starting to hear it. A quick glance up at the sky showed a line of heavy clouds as a colder front blew in from the northeast. Great. He gave Harrison a full minute before walking around the back of the hedge to the front of the building, PDA in hand.
He opened the door to see Harrison shrug at the counter clerk.
“No coffee maker? I dunno, maybe you’re getting one. All I know is this is the building number I got and I need a signature. Hey, even if it’s ultimately supposed to be somewhere else, it don’t say so. Might as well drink it. Hell, I would.”
“If it has our number on it…”
“Excuse me, I’ve just got to finish something up.” Tommy waved the PDA at the clerk, showing the blue stripe, and walked past the desk. The clerk barely glanced at him, busy signing for the coffee.
“So, hey, did you see the last game of the series? That homer in the top of the sixth? What a beautiful…” He heard Harrison settling in to shooting the shit with the bored clerk.
Down the main hall, at the second intersecting cross-hall he turned left, passed the reading room and walked down to where the terminal plug was supposed to be — and wasn’t. The space of wall that should have had a terminal had a door to the head. He looked back along the hallway the way he’d come and saw the jutting lip of the terminal outlet all the way down at the other end — and a skinny, freckled sergeant in silks.
“God damn, you’re a fucking tank, aren’t you?” The man looked up at him, tapping one foot. He didn’t look impatient, just like the kind of guy who couldn’t stand still.
“Um… hi,” Tommy said. There weren’t a lot of brilliant ways to answer that even if he’d been somewhere he was supposed to be.
“Sorry, I should have said hi or something first. You’re just, damn, I’m surprised the ACS brass came up with a suit to fit you.” The man was more a kid, really. He was already starting to remind Tommy of an overexcited cocker spaniel.
“I don’t really know what to say to that. I’m Johnson. Bob Johnson,” Tommy lied.
“Sorry, I swear to god I’m not weird or anything. It’s just that they’re running a course right now on early ACS tactics in the war. I didn’t think anybody could be as huge as Tommy Sunday, but you must be close. Damn.” He shrugged, starting to look uncomfortable. “I bet you get that all the time. So, when did they transfer you in? Johnson, is it? I haven’t seen you, and I know I’d remember. Are you here for the course? It just started but I’m on light duty from a strained rotator cuff and thought I’d try to get ahead in the reading…”
During the kid’s rapid monologue, Tommy had started getting more and more nervous. When he heard his own name, he made a split second decision and started sliding his hand into his right pocket with the emergency kit. He’d instinctively kept that side turned slightly away, so the kid didn’t see anything wrong when Tommy started moving.
“Good to meet you,” he said, clapping the other man on the shoulder. The spec four’s friendly grin glazed over as the Hiberzine from the needle Tommy had palmed hit his system. Strictly speaking, they hadn’t finished introducing themselves, but what the fuck. Tommy dragged the now unconscious kid into the head and down to the last stall, propping him on the toilet. This wasn’t good. A single glance at the guy’s face would show anyone he’d been Hiberzined, and when they woke him, damn. Tommy hit him with a second needle of another drug. If they revived him without knowing to look for it, and no reason why they should, the man’s memories of the previous few minutes to hours would be so scrambled nobody would ever make sense of them. Cursing under his breath, he punched up another transmission on his buckley.
“Dude. I ran into somebody I had to deal with. I think I’ll still get my paperwork done, but we’ll have to rush lunch. See you at the chow hall. Over.” He ended the transmission. Yeah, he could probably still get the information they came for, if it was here to be gotten, but getting back out was likely to be anything but clean.
“Roger that,” George answered grimly.
This time Sunday was able to get across the main hall and down to the damn hallway terminal without meeting anyone else. Once in, he had to begin the delicate process of convincing the computer that he was surfacing from his deep cover assignment and was authorized to acces
s the files he needed. Getting into the mission files at all proved to be a trick, and then there was an extra level of coding to break to get down to the level of specific planets. After what must have been at least fifteen minutes, with cold sweat beading on his forehead, he pinned down the files he needed and downloaded them to his PDA. He spent more precious minutes covering his tracks within the system as he got back out. Finally, he was able to pull the buckley out of the wall and start back out of the building.
A couple of men passed him, on their way back in, as he walked back down the hall. Harrison had seen him coming and finished off his conversation with the clerk, disappearing out the door. Sunday tossed the decoy buckley in the return bin at the desk on his way out.
“Thanks, man. They shouldn’t have let you out of here with one of those the first time.”
“You’re right. Won’t happen again.”
As he left the building, it felt like every one of the few men he passed was looking right at him. They weren’t, he knew. It just felt that way, like a rifle was drawing a bead between his shoulder blades. He could pick out Schmidt One going down the hill past Cally and the still captivated guard. She was standing now, flexing her ankle experimentally as she laughed at something he said. She had one hand on his shoulder and his arm around her waist. For support, of course. Tommy’s adrenaline was pumping too high to be even mildly amused at how easily she’d reeled the other man in. Once he got out of earshot down the hill he hit transmit again.
“Lady, as soon as we’re clear, disengage and haul ass. Big time.” He didn’t wait for a reply. It wasn’t good communications discipline, if anyone was listening it was obvious as hell, but he didn’t want her stalling to cover for Harrison and him any more than she absolutely had to. Maybe they wouldn’t find the kid for awhile, but it wasn’t the way to bet. Couldn’t hurt to be paranoid.
Down the slope a bit and he was looking for any chance away from enough eyes to make a break for the tree line. By the time he got it he was over a small footbridge and at least a couple hundred meters down from where Cally came in. His sense of direction told him about where the cut through would be at the fence line, and he hurried to get out of sight of the road as quickly and quietly as he could. Fifty meters back out he saw movement off to the northwest. He tensed up until something about the other man’s movement identified him as Harrison. The big man whistled softly to catch his teammate’s attention, and get him to wait until Tommy could close to within a normal walking interval. They were picking their way northwest as fast as they reasonably could when the klaxons started screaming again.
“Oh, shit. Time to run for it. Damn, that was fast!” Tommy hit the ground flat on his back as Harrison yanking at the collar of his silks dropped him back with his running legs flying out from under him.
“Not that way. The second a real human being, or even an AID, looks at those readouts they’re going to localize the hole in that fence faster than we can move — too easy to eyeball, too long to run there. This way.” The smaller man led him at a sprint along the bank of the half dried and all frozen stream. Seconds later they were crouched in the stream bed at the fence and Sunday was watching the fixer adhere a downright dinky wire to the fencing with itty bitty alligator clips and bobby pins to hold it up out of the way, at a distance far too close to the ground to accommodate him.
“I hope you’re not expecting me to be able to squeeze under that,” he said.
“Shut up,” the other man mumbled around some weird clips in his mouth, as he took an unfolding multitool and carefully started clipping wires. Something like a penlight shot out a blue beam that he swept across the ground at the based of a largish circle of the creek that turned to a mix of bubbling, steaming mud and chunks of frozen mud.
Tommy was starting to get a bad feeling about this. With the sirens still screaming in their ears, he started swearing again as Harrison dug hands and clippers under the mud, clipping and pulling at the section of fence that extended down into the ground. Quicker than Tommy would have believed possible, the other man had pushed back a doggy-door of fencing that moved enough mud with it that the huge man could see getting through it was now a particularly nasty maybe instead of no way in hell.
“Go,” the fixer said. Getting caught wasn’t exactly on their list of things to do on this mission. Tommy hit the mud and swore mentally, lips jammed shut, as the mud alternately scalded and froze him as he commando-crawled through the space that was almost big enough. He still probably wouldn’t have made it through if Harrison hadn’t planted his shoulder against his ass and pushed. On the other side, Sunday was covered with muck, inside and outside his uniform, in a way he hadn’t been since the war. The fixer was squirming through the hole backwards, straightening the mud into something that didn’t look quite as much like it had been crawled through. It wouldn’t have fooled a two-year-old, but the other man pushed the fencing back as close to closed as he could get it, gave the muck a quick swipe with one arm, and took off running. Tommy hightailed it out behind him. Fuck noise and fuck bunching up, too. He pulled his PDA back out and wiped enough slime off the screen that he could see the first go to hell rendezvous point on the terrain map, maybe about two klicks away. Close enough for now. Distance. They were running in more or less the right direction, anyway. A gust of wind hit him full in the face and he felt the first big snowflakes hit his nose.
“Hey! Excuse me, ma’am, this is a restricted area.” The guard who challenged her had gray eyes in an angular face. What there was of his hair under his cover was sand-colored and looked like he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. She gave him an apologetic half-smile, letting her eyes linger on his face with the perfect amount of interest to be encouraging but credible. It was blatant false advertising. She ruthlessly squashed the hint of pity.
“Oh, is it? I’m so sorry, I didn’t see the sign. I got a little turned around, anyway. Could you point me back to base housing? My sister-in-law is going to think I’m such a dummy,” she said.
As he kept approaching her, she moved towards him a bit less than halfway, judging the difference between flattery and triggering paranoia to within a hairsbreadth. A quick look back down the road and a helpless look back at him was enough to hook him and get him to follow her about a few meters down the hill. She made sure she had eye contact when she let her foot turn and took her spill.
“Oooh!” She squealed, arching her back as she turned and grabbed her leg. “It’s my ankle…” She rubbed the alleged injury, extending her leg and trying to rotate her foot. She winced prettily.
The guard squatted beside her, arm instinctively going behind her shoulders to support her.
“Ow.” She looked up into his eyes, arching just a little more.
His eyes flashed down to her tits, and he released her, standing back abruptly. He looked more nervous than wary. She decided he didn’t get out much — more leeway to flirt. Nervous, but trusting. Damn, there was that pity thing again. The team would be in and out without a trace. She wasn’t getting him in trouble.
“If there’s swelling, I don’t see much yet. Do you want me to call you a medic, ma’am?”
“I think I just twisted it a little. Would you mind?” She extended one slim hand for him to give her a hand up. He released it as she stood, so she put it on his shoulder to brace herself as she made a show of testing her weight on that leg.
In her ear, she heard Tommy’s voice. “Dude, I need a beer.”
The wind had picked up and was whipping her silver-blonde hair around her face. “Oooh, it’s getting cold.” She rubbed her hands together, coincidentally pushing her boobs forward with her arms. She felt his eyes drop again and smiled inwardly.
“Do you think you’re going to be able to get back your sister’s house on that leg? If you do, you might want to get in out of the weather, Miss… ?”
“Gracie. And it’s my sister-in-law,” she said, offering her hand to shake. “You’ve been so sweet, you’ve got to tell me your nam
e.”
“Abrams, ma’am — Gracie. Mark Abrams.”
“Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Mark. What the hell is that?” She slammed her hands against her ears and looked around, eyes wide and fearful, as the sirens went off signaling the start of a drill. “Is something wrong?”
“Oh, it’s just the Posleen alarm.”
“Oh my God!” She threw herself into his arms, clinging like a limpet. “Is there an attack? Are they coming in?”
“Oh, no, it’s just a drill,” he said, awkwardly patting her on the back.
“Are you sure? We’re in feral land, aren’t we?” She filled the words with terror.
“Real sure. It’s okay. They’re just about all hunted out here.” As seven men came out the doors of the archive building, one of them nudged another and winked at PFC Abrams. Predictable. These men hadn’t been hit by fellow humans in so long that security was a ritual afterthought.
She disengaged herself from him, reluctantly. “You must think I’m such a dummy. It’s the first time I’ve been in feral country. It’s only my third time out of the Urb.”
Cally made small talk with him for a few more minutes, giving a fictional name for her supposed brother and mentally crossing her fingers. At a training base, people were always coming in and leaving. Since Fleet Strike was trying to give a more family-friendly appearance for PR, even short-term trainees brought their families along. Stupid policy, but it helped her out. She wondered how long she’d have to talk to this guy — Mark Abrams — before Tommy and Harrison got clear of the building. She also wondered whether Mark would get around to asking her out before she had to leave.
“Dude. I ran into somebody I had to deal with. I think I’ll still get my paperwork done, but we’ll have to rush lunch. See you at the chow hall. Over,” her earbug announced.
