by John Ringo
Lester sighed and tried to put a crease, of sorts, into pants never designed to look pretty.
The guy hiring them tried too hard to sound like Chicago, but Les could hear the undertone of redneck. Somebody had slapped a few sheets of plywood together into an impromptu reviewing stand and slapped a coat of blue paint on it. The client, John Stuart, looked like he was none too sure the stand would hold him up. Les wouldn't have trusted it either.
Another thing that told him "hick" was that he'd caught a glimpse of the contract on General Lehman's desk. Having learned to read upside-down as a good military habit, he had seen the client's full name: John Earl Bill Stuart. Unlike most of his comrades in arms, who were a rather thought-free bunch, Lester actually knew who J.E.B. Stuart—the original one—was. He suppressed a chuckle.
Right now, he wasn't too fond of old John up there. He was spilling out a bunch of bullshit about a rapid reaction force to secure their interests, blah blah blah. From experience, what that all boiled down to was that the cocksucker knew exactly who he wanted them to fight, wasn't ready to get off the dime yet, and wasn't about to tell them shit. Or he knew who, what, and where and wasn't telling. Maybe Gordy would have the straight shit on this contract. He usually did.
The Enterprise guys, it figured, all had dress uniforms. Pussies. So in addition to getting deluged with bullshit, he had to stand here feeling like a slob. Not one of his best days. He fixed his eyes on the bare-branched tree line in the distance and did one of a soldier's most valiant rear-area tasks—suppressing visible boredom in the face of speeches.
"Have you contacted your clan on Earth to tell them we have people coming?" Indowy Roolnai asked Michelle.
The Indowy stood almost knee deep in Earth grass. It was ankle deep on the office's owner and other occupant. The room gave the illusion of being outdoors on a primitive or agricultural planet, down to the faintly clouded blue sky—ceiling—above. The room's rectangular box shape meant corners marred the illusion of light blue shading up to indigo, but it was still nice. Although the room otherwise tended to trigger the Indowy's agoraphobia, the furniture was designed to resemble granite boulders. Between that and the almost-tall grass he had a sensation of available cover and potential hiding places that tickled away at the primitive part of his brain saying all was well. He always had to fight the temptation to crawl under the desk, particularly, as now, when the omnivorous occupant was in the room.
"I have not. The numbers are small, they have the space, my work schedule is . . . gratifyingly plentiful." She carefully kept her teeth concealed when she spoke, for which he was grateful, but at the last her lips had quirked in what he had learned was called a wry grin. In work, at least, he could sympathize.
"Then you are saved an extra communique, and I also ask you if it is possible to expedite informing them. You see, the numbers of Bane Sidhe traveling to Earth are not so few as we had hoped. Nor so many," he said gravely. "This will begin to help explain."
He handed her a data cube for her buckley. She had an AID as well, of course, but it was incommunicado for this meeting. She plugged the cube into the buckley's reader slot. "Sidona, play it," she ordered.
"I apologize for the graphic violence," he said. The apology was perfunctory. She was human, why would she care?
The apology was also redundant, as the Indowy holo that appeared over the desk immediately repeated it. "I am terribly sorry to inflict these horrible scenes on the viewers of this material. Unfortunately, it was necessary to display the extent and gravity of our troubles," it said.
The small green figure was replaced by a scene recorded by a buckley or AID, probably the former. The green, fuzzy fingers occasionally covering the camera port, as well as the angle of view, made it clear the user was an Indowy, standing in a cargo area. The scene became a bit hard to follow, as the software had obviously had to draw too many inferences to try to map the sequence into holo, and so sometimes shifted to a 2-D projection on the desk surface.
The steady part of the clip was short, showing two humans bearing down on the hapless creature, one of the men already carrying a squealing co-worker under one arm. The camera angle skewed wildly as the man in front picked up "their" Indowy. The men left the cargo area for corridors.
"This is the primary Dulain out-station," a voice-over informed them, as the corridor scene cut to the entry to an airlock, where the victims were pushed in, then unceremoniously cycled to space.
In the cold black, the buckley tumbled. A small bit of green suggested it was still in the possession of its erstwhile owner, as did the crazy skewing of stars and station as the poor creature thrashed.
The view shifted to the bridge of a ship, and from there into another holo, this time of suited teams retrieving spaced corpses.
"This is not as futile as it appears. We had barely enough warning for about half our people to hide Hiberzine injectors from the first-aid kits upon their person. Of those, about sixty percent managed to inject and avoid death or serious injury, and another ten percent survived but will need extensive regeneration."
The view shifted again to a cramped hold packed with Indowy, bare and blue as newborns, with patches of green coming in as they began to regrow their symbiotic covering.
"We have been advised to seek refuge on Earth, of all places. I find the reasoning bizarre, myself, but others are wiser. Any world looks good when your drive is going out," it finished philosophically. "Even that one," it added, abruptly disappearing as the cube ended.
"I have similar reports from a dozen worlds," the clan chief added.
Michelle O'Neal regarded him with a still face whose expression he could not interpret. It was distressing indeed to have so many clans needing high level favors from a clan and species they had come perilously close to spurning outright.
"Why," Michelle asked, "do you not simply allow the plotters to give themselves up for the overall security of their clans and be done with it? Why put yourselves so far in debt to a clan you so obviously . . . have concerns about?"
He was glad she had not said "despised." The sentiment would have been too close for comfort, as it was already uncomfortable enough indeed to have to confront the magnitude of one's own error.
"My race's clan heads rarely support the Bane Sidhe, become involved with the Bane Sidhe, or even pay much attention to the Bane Sidhe. That doesn't mean that we, and the Tchpth do not find it convenient for the Bane Sidhe to exist."
She raised an eyebrow at him, a gesture he knew was a request for further information.
He pointed to her aethal board over near the plashing fountain. "A seemingly insignificant piece can add disproportionate complexity to the game. Plotters and plots are irrelevant in the short and medium term." To his race, medium term meant at least a thousand years. "The increased range of action available, however . . ."
"Lubricant has nothing to do with an engine," Michelle said, blinking just once. "But without it an engine seizes. And many lubricants are, under different pressures and conditions, abrasives. The Bane Sidhe . . ." She cocked her head to the side for a moment in thought and then laughed. Loudly.
"My sister's whole life, all of her effort," Michelle said, trying very hard not to giggle. "All the blood and the pain and the conspiring and the covers for what?" She ended angrily. "To squeeze a better deal out of the Darhel?"
"Mentat, calm yourself," Roolnai said nervously.
"Oh, I am calm," Michelle said. "You don't want to see me angry. The last person who saw me angry was Erik Winchon." She paused and let that sink in. "Briefly."
"Mentat . . ."
"All those years, decades, centuries? Of plotting," she said. "All spoiled because while the Bane Sidhe were wonderful as a threat in potential, when Clan O'Neal did real damage to the Darhel you found out how pitifully weak you actually are."
"Mentat," Roolnai started, again.
"Save it," Michelle said. "Here is the Deal. There are over one hundred and twenty-six trillion Indowy. How many are
Bane Sidhe I do not know nor care. There are less than a billion humans. Very few of whom are Bane Sidhe. The value of Indowy is nothing. The value of human Bane Sidhe fighters, of my Clan, is in this instance infinite. To . . . oil your machine we are going to have to use our life's blood and my Clan is very attached to their blood. Do you understand that?"
"Yes, Mentat," Roolnai said in a beaten tone.
"The debt you are about to incur is huge," Michelle said. "If I was contracting upon this on the basis of profit and loss I could cast you to the Darhel myself. However, I am O'Neal. We, unfortunately, also have a code of something called 'honor.' We will honor this debt. I will contact my sister and inform her of the full gravity of this matter. Your people will be secured to the best of my Clan's capabilities."
"Thank you, Mentat," Roolnai said, finally breathing out.
"Don't thank me until I send you the bill," Michelle said.
"Yes, Mentat."
"And Roolnai. You should move into my quarters for the duration. Clan O'Neal quarters are the only place on Adenast where the Darhel's paid murderers would be afraid to go. And if they are not, they will learn to be."
Roolnai reflected, even as he agreed, that it seemed he had something in common with even the most barbaric of human monsters.
Chapter Twelve
Sandy Swaim was in the minority among O'Neals and Sundays. She actually liked the present day "outside world" away from Edisto. If the O'Neals had a flaw, it was a tendency to hide away and go hermit. Sandy liked getting to know new people, and she had an open, natural manner that put the people she met instantly at ease. Her highlighted hair bushed out around her head in curls, around a fresh, bright face with adolescent puppy fat giving it a youthful glow.
Youthful was the key there. In Sandy's case, you really were as young as you felt. Her optimistic and curious attitude towards the world had lasted despite all the odds against, and was probably the deciding factor in securing her a spot on the juv list as a trained safe house operator. Her eyes really were as young as the rest of her, in a way that no lapse could ever betray. She'd had something else going for her, too. Having been born destined for a libido that was sluggish in the extreme, juving had given her a new lease on life in that department, too, by making her "normal." Again, no lapses could reveal a juv "tell" she simply didn't have.
The catch was that warming up romantically had handed her a problem she hadn't expected. She'd fallen in love and married, which in their case meant enduring separations that could only be considered short and fleeting when looked at in the context of a juv lifespan. Juv parents or not, human children still grew up at the same rate, which meant she spent a lot of time functioning as a single parent and reminding the children that they did have a daddy and that, yes, Daddy really wished he was here.
Right now, she didn't know whether to be more worried about Mike than before, or not. On the one hand, he wasn't going out with DAG on missions to quash pirates and terrorists right now. On the other hand, he was back on that damned island with her crazy in-laws who now had their hands on the rest of DAG, practically, and Sandy could no more imagine O'Neals having troops and not using them than she could imagine water not being wet. Sure, in a better world. But in this one? O'Neals plus private army was quite possibly scarier than having Mike going all over the world putting out fires for the government. Maybe. Maybe they'd settle down to something safer and more reputable, like smuggling.
One thing she knew for sure. Florida in January was a better place to be than South Carolina, even if she wasn't at the beach. God knew why Disney World had been the first big tourist draw to reopen in Florida, but it had.
New Orlando was a dinky place compared to Charleston or Norfolk, not having port traffic coming through. Land was cheap enough, and housing cheap enough, that living on waitress pay from Waffle House was just fine in tourist season—and for one group or another it was always tourist season in Orlando. The job wasn't because she had no skills for a better job. Obviously she did. She was doing it. Her sucky cover pay made it a mystery to nobody whenever she had renters come and stay at random in her little house. The neighbors shrugged, clucked that it was a pity what single mothers had to do to make ends meet, and wasn't it too bad such a nice girl had made the classic dumb mistake. She didn't volunteer personal information, and the neighbors felt they could fill in the blanks well enough without prodding what were obviously sore spots.
The only thing she really hated about working at Waffle House was that her feet hurt so bad when she got off shift, and then she had to walk home since somebody had stolen her bike a week ago, but thankfully it was just around the corner—
The O'Neals had a name for Sandy's sunny optimism. They called it "condition white," and the same things that made her so hard to peg as a juv made it impossible to train out. Mrs. Swaim had over a decade of unarmed combat training and was hell on wheels in the dojo. She never saw the man who stepped out from behind the rose of Sharon vine and grabbed her, thrusting a stiletto up through the base of her brain.
Robert Swaim batted the tennis ball off the garage door again. They still called it a garage, even though the door had been made so it wouldn't go up when they made the space into a guest room. Right now, three guests were sharing it. Mrs. Catt, and her two kids Karen and David. Karen was okay, for a girl. David was a little kid who had thankfully attached himself to his sister, Rose, and not him. David, in his turn, was incessantly followed by the youngest of the Swaims, his two-year-old sister, Sheely. Robert tried not to get too attached to guests, because they never stayed long, but Mom had told him these might be around for awhile.
Usually it didn't matter that they didn't have a garage, but the Catts had a car. Nobody much liked leaving it outside, but there wasn't any choice, really. To Robert, it was just an annoyance he had to work around in finding room to work his skills.
Mrs. Catt was weird. She seemed to have two driving passions: soap operas and tarot cards. Mom said to just be thankful she was here, because it meant he didn't have to watch Sheely and Rose every day after school, and they could save the money from Sheely's day babysitter.
He was fine with the saving money and not having to watch his little sisters, but Robert honestly wasn't sure he could take another evening of hearing that he or some other family member was in grave danger. That seemed to be Mrs. Catt's specialty in her tarot readings. She said it wasn't, but she was a nervous woman who jumped at small noises, and he figured it was probably because she did all that scaring herself.
Mom had finally gotten tired of the cards and asked her to quit, but Rose was all about it, and he could hear her inside asking for a reading. He thought about telling her Mom said no, but then he realized he didn't have to be in charge and could keep practicing with his new racquet, so he bounced the ball and hit it again. He didn't have to hurry, even if he decided to say something, because Mrs. Catt told Rose to wait until after her show. His watch said twenty after four, and most of those things ran an hour long—if she didn't go right into another one. Mom should be home by then, anyway. He hit the ball again, trying to keep his wrist straight.
A squall of rain came in just before five, so he went inside looking for a snack. There was Rose, shuffling the big cards of Mrs. Catt's deck. Mom was late, and he thought again about saying something, but she had cut them and stacked them and, really, if she gave herself a nightmare, maybe she'd learn.
"Is your mother often late getting in, Robert?" the woman asked him.
"Not very often. Maybe she got something from the store," he said.
She looked out the window at the rain doubtfully. If Mom was in it, she was getting drenched. "I'd think she would have come and gotten the car," the other mom said. "Well, if she's not home in half an hour I'll go ahead and start your dinner."
She was kind of fat, so she huffed as she eased herself down on the floor to sit cross-legged in front of the deck.
He couldn't see the attraction of the game, himself, but he did prop h
imself on the arm of the couch with his baloney sandwich and watch as the woman went into her now-familiar spiel, and she was in fine form, almost as good as a ghost story. Only this time, when she hit about the fourth card she did something he'd never seen her do before. She stopped talking and dealt out the other cards, bing bing bing. Then she turned dead white and looked up at Rose.
"Car. Get in the car, now," she said. When Rose just looked at her funny, she smiled a strange, strained smile. "We're going to Disney World! My treat! We'll pick up your mom on the way, stay overnight, get new stuff, everything! Won't that be fun?" She was trying to sound cheerful, but she really sounded shrill.
She was talking about picking up Mom, so he figured Mom would straighten her out. But just in case, since she was getting real weird, he grabbed Mom's buckley quietly. She'd forgotten to take it to work, and he wasn't supposed to use it, but this was different. He tapped it on. "Marlee, record everything," he said. "Um . . . send it to Mom's voicemail. Real time."
It would be expensive as hell, and she'd probably ground him for a month, but Dad had told him to look out for the family and it just seemed like a good thing to do. Especially with Mrs. Catt grabbing him by the collar, shoving Sheely into his arms—she was too startled to cry—and practically dragging them all out the door.
The Catts' blue sedan was beat up to hell and gone. It had lots of rust, and foam stuck out in a couple of places where the seats were ripped. It smelled like someone had once left the windows open to the rain. But it ran good, and it started right up almost as soon as she put the key in. He tried to complain that they didn't have a car seat for Sheely, but the woman wasn't listening to him. She was kind of scary. He tried not to get attention as he set the buckley down on the seat beside him.
