by John Ringo
"Whatever can be done, I'll do," he said. That part, at least, needed no interpretation.
Chapter Twenty-One
Yan Kato cut the call to Panama. His lieutenant was a good guy. Li would bust his ass, and not have kittens because he couldn't get it perfect. Stewart hated it for DAG that their supply situation wouldn't be perfect, but it never was. He'd check the situation before they boarded ship, but the pressure driving the schedule wasn't coming from the Tong or him. They had civilians coming in, they had some of their dependents coming in as refugees. They had an unknown number of Indowy that he, personally, didn't give a shit about one way or the other, but Cally and the other O'Neal powers that be did care, for whatever reasons. Soldiers did dangerous, deadly, uncomfortable things so civilians didn't have to. Time for the DAGgers to earn whatever it was the O'Neals were paying them.
Stewart still had trouble getting his head around the fact that he was now an O'Neal. Not just any O'Neal, he was Iron Mike's fucking son-in-law. The world was a strange place. He was in a strange place.
The shelves behind him looked ordinary enough. High shelves stacked with boxes. In front of him, however, was a great big paper-mache dragon head, painted in tie-dyed patterns, with peace signs of various sizes scrawled or painted on it. It was yellowed with age, and looked brittle under the huge layer of dust that coated it. He was so, so tempted to ask, but he didn't. They might tell him.
He'd come in through the front of the cutlery shop, the stock of which ran to pocket knives, daggers of various grades, cheap throwing stars, and pan-Asian kitsch, with a couple of mid-grade swords to draw the oohs and aahs. In the display case with the swords, a cheap jade statue of the Buddha sat behind a neatly printed card that swore it had once been in the national museum in Beijing. If it had, it had been in the mark-down bin of the gift shop.
He had picked this place because it was the closest organization spot to one of the pickup locations Cally had told him to use. Well, not exactly a location. In this case, he just called a cab from a particular company and gave a particular address over the phone as his destination. The cabbie would call back when he was pulling up out in front.
Stewart could have gone out front and browsed through the crap. It wouldn't have caused any notice, as the store was empty other than the owner, who already knew he was back here. Instead, he stood near a wobbly little table and had bad coffee out of a paper cup. Even bad coffee was still coffee, and he flipped a dollar into the honor jar. The stuff was expensive, and who knew if he'd get a chance at any while he was staying with the Bane Sidhe.
The trip was confusing, as always, but this time they didn't take steps to keep him from figuring out where the hell he was going. He supposed between Tong business policies and family they had confidence in his willingness to keep his mouth shut. As a former general in Fleet Strike counterintelligence, there was no question that he was able to keep his mouth shut. He was protected against every known interrogation drug, unless the Bane Sidhe had some he'd never heard of. Come to think of it, he'd have to ask. With some of their secrets in his head, it would certainly be in their interests to have him protected to the best of their ability. What "the best of their ability" was was another secret he'd love to add to his collection.
The thing that really sucked about his afternoon was when they finally got in to the Bane Sidhe's secret little Sub-Urb and he found out he'd missed Cally by less than half an hour. It did surprise the hell out of him, though, that Nathan O'Reilly had come to tell him himself. Then Stewart realized he'd been unconsciously thinking of himself as Cally's husband, since he was here on her turf, instead of thinking in his persona as a fairly high ranking representative of the Tong.
His first trip here had been essentially social. On this trip, he was the man on the front end of a few boatloads of money and a final lifeline for many of their people. That being the case, he was surprised the Indowy Aelool and a ranking representative of Clan Beilil weren't both here, as well.
O'Reilly offered a firm handshake. "Mr. Stewart, so good to see you again."
"Just Stewart, please. Or Yan if you prefer," he said.
"Then call me Nathan. Since Cally and her teammates call you Stewart, that would probably be less confusing."
Stewart nodded. "My PDA tells me I missed my wife?"
"I'm afraid so. We got an opportunity to pick up a high value target and for once your wife was the person we could most count on to leave him alive." The priest grinned wryly. "We didn't have much time when you were here before. Would you like a tour of our little operation here? While we still have it."
"That bad?" Stewart was genuinely concerned, and not just for the Bane Sidhe. If the Darhel were willing to go to open warfare enough to take out a major installation like this, it endangered his entire family and his organization, too. The latter was, suddenly, a barely important side thought. He was just getting used to being an O'Neal, but they were the closest thing to family he'd had in a long, long time, and his surge of protectiveness for the whole lot of them shocked him. When the hell had that happened?
"I'm being pessimistic. I estimate the chances of losing the base at around ten percent, overall. It just smacks of failure to be evacuating."
"A tour would be fascinating," Stewart changed the subject. "I presume Tommy's with Cally. I've got his report from Colonel Mosovich." He could tell Nathan was just itching to get a look at that report. Truth to tell, so was he. However, since the DAG force in Panama was strictly an O'Neal pidgin, both men knew it would be more than their lives were worth for Cally to catch them sneaking a peek. Getting caught by Tommy would be just as bad, and a lot more likely, given the other man's formidable cyber skills.
"Unless you've got Michelle O'Neal hidden away somewhere around here, Nathan, I think we're just going to have to wait," he said it jokingly, but privately admitted that he had no idea of the Bane Sidhe's capabilities other than by inference, and they had shown over the years that they frequently held back from things they could do for reasons unfathomable to outsiders.
"Unfortunately, no, but perhaps a walk-through of our Sohon training facility might hold your interests in the interim." The priest grinned like a little kid about to show off his toys.
"Really? The crown jewels. That's a flattering level of confidence."
As they spoke, Nathan was steering him to an elevator down a side corridor, pressing the call button as they arrived. "You're not one of ours, but you are an O'Neal. I'm not taking you around in that capacity, though, but rather in your professional persona," he said. "You've made a very large deal with us. I suspect your employers may question whether a deal that good was ever intended to be repaid. It's my insurance for you to be able to tell them you've seen various of our capabilities with your own eyes."
"Pardon me for poking holes, but your capabilities aren't very reassuring if you're about to lose them." James Stewart, donning his "Yan" hat, had transformed from the in-between land of relative into all business.
"Ah, but we aren't. Tanks we can afford to lose. Not easily, but they can be replaced. Our nanogenerator is out already. From there, the next really expensive thing is the headsets and the interface that goes within the tank. Those are small. If we can't keep our practitioners alive, then it will be because none of the rest of us are alive to defend them. All the rest of this," O'Reilly said grimly, "is replaceable. Expendable. And all the rest of us, too."
The elevator arrived and they boarded, the head of the O'Neal Bane Sidhe still making his case.
"I'm speaking for the benefit of your employers, of course," he said. "We had nothing like this in the centuries before recontact, and we survived. We've never put all our eggs in this basket; we're still decentralized as our core operational tradition."
Stewart noticed the other man did not give any percentage as to what was decentralized, and avoided saying "most." Nor did he say what quality of individuals were out as sleepers, how much they knew, how much bench strength they had. There was also the
matter of the size and sophistication including the O'Neals, versus without them. The O'Neals were pretty concentrated, too, which was both a strength and a weakness.
He didn't reply, and the elevator descended farther into the bowels of the base in silence. It was an interesting elevator. The walls were Galplas, but they had a slightly rough surface, and there were crayon scribblings all over them, spreading out from around knee level. Finally, he couldn't take it anymore. "The walls?" he asked.
"That's real crayon. We encourage the youngest children to draw on these because it's a well-defined space. It keeps them from coloring on every wall they can find. Yes, I do mean encourage," O'Reilly said. "This is when they're too young to even begin the early headset exercises. We give them toy versions and encourage them to be interested in the colors of walls, because tuning the color of Galplas is a very early exercise. The children think of it a bit like playdough."
"Galplas?" Stewart asked incredulously. He found it hard to think of the major GalTech construction material as a child's toy. It was stronger than steel.
"Didn't you ever wonder how a GalTech product was so comparatively cheap? And abundant?" the older man asked.
"Playdough," Stewart repeated.
"That's about it, yes. Primarily because if it goes wrong, it's not a particularly high energy reaction," Nathan said. "Ah, here we are." He opened a very sturdy looking door that opened on to a bay about the size of a small airplane hangar. They were at the bottom, but stairs, ladders, and catwalks laced the walls, and a network of pipes hung suspended about four meters off the ground.
"The stairs and such are vertical exit routes in case the halogen foam system has to address a dangerous mistake. Here, we need these." The priest reached out and took two pairs of safety glasses and two rubber aprons from the shelves beside the door.
"The room is large less because of need to build large things and more as part of the safety design for the pressure-venting system. We could, of course, disassemble part of the fire suppression system if we had something big to build, but for the foreseeable future, this is a training lab and large projects are beyond the scope of what we do. Beyond the scope of what we can do," he admitted.
Stewart noticed that only about a quarter of the tanks, down on this end of the room, were in use. The others were empty. At half of the operational tanks, one or more human child was working under the direction of several Indowy. Indowy alone were running the rest of the operating tanks. It was the first time Stewart had ever seen a Sohon tank in real life, much less one in use. They didn't look very impressive. Just big vats with people sitting around the edge, wired in. The headsets looked a lot like the headphones on personal stereo systems when he was a kid, other than having too many pads at seemingly random places on the head.
O'Reilly gestured to the empty end of the room, "The legacy of our internal divisions. We have more headsets and tanks than we have nannites to run in them. This is why I can tell you we'll maintain operational capability after the evacuation. We've got idle tools to move out, even though the practitioners we have here and their own tools will go last. As part of healing the breach, we can count on enough nannites to restore any equipment we can save to operational status. Get the Tchpth to provide enough code keys for the generator, put some of the many refugees who are high level Sohon practitioners to work, and our capacities go way, way up."
He nodded towards the children. "Those are our real treasures, right there. No politics can take them, and the Tchpth will provide them with enough nannites to operate in exchange for being allowed to observe their development. Human Sohon practitioners are our next baby step towards, if not independence, then comparable footing with the other races. I'm afraid that's likely to take Galactic-level time, but we do what we can."
"They're talking," Stewart said, feeling kind of stupid for saying it. "I thought they had to be deep into some kind of trance or something."
"They do talk to the instructors sometimes, a little. It's just that what they're making right now isn't particularly challenging."
"Not that side," a child of about ten yelled at a boy that was maybe a couple of years younger. "Put it over there, between the blue marks. Blue. See 'em?" The older child pointed to an area of the large tank he was operating and the smaller child obediently walked around the tank, appeared to find the right marks and began shaking something out of a plastic jar into the tank. Stewart couldn't see what, as the child's body was in the way and the plastic was dark brown.
"They still need reagents, of course, but mostly they're putting the right things together in the right order, managing heat, moving things around and monitoring. You can't see it, but the tanks have built-in heating and cooling coils, and one of the things an operator does is use the nannites to control membranes that keep the wrong things separated from each other, everything at the right temperature and pressure, do separations, that kind of thing. My understanding is that one of the things the nannites can do is make one tank into a potentially near infinite number of vessels of varying sizes. The children understand a great deal of chemistry, of course, but a lot of the information is stored and available through the headset and managed by a limited AI. The operator's job is to manage everything to spec. Let's go see."
"And give me five more of those, and be ready with my other stuff. I'm ready to start outputting," the older child ordered, sounding calmer. A bit.
A robotic arm lowered a small, white, plastic bin down into the sludgy-looking tank, lifting it back up in less than a minute, filled with what looked like white sand. The arm moved the bin over onto a shelf on a large cart and picked up a second bin, repeating the process.
As they approached, the older boy's face shifted more and more into the placidity characteristic of the other eight children operating tanks. "You've got nine of these children?" he asked.
"Oh, no. A bit more than three times that. Some are sleeping, some are in classes. We operate the tanks around the clock to make the most of our nannites' lifespan." He nodded to the child who was making the white stuff. "The kids go through all the normal developmental stages. It's biochemical, and it would be bad for them to try to flatten those out. Usually when a child operator reaches a stage that he or she can't control perfectly, either they put the child on safer tasks, or if they don't have the work to do that, pull him from the rotation into full-time classroom education and meditation. It makes the stages considerably shorter. For one thing, kids like to work. At this," he amended.
"Really?" This was news to Stewart, who had always equated human Sohon training with brainwashing and drudgery. "How can kids like keeping still for hours at a time?"
"Indowy have exercises for the drive to move. They've adapted some human games—don't ask. As for the work, it builds on the theories of Montessori. Light years beyond, but she had a base observation that's the keystone of all this. Children have a drive to work, especially productively. Consider it arts and crafts with results that are useful and usable. They take so much pride in that." The priest smiled fondly at the children in the room, both the tank operators and the dozen or so children on the floor doing the various tasks to feed the tanks.
"The Indowy equipment, it's like it was scaled for children, anyway," Stewart said.
"Another one of Montessori's observations. It helps tremendously to give children tools and facilities that are size appropriate, without patronizing them. Patronize a child and he will try to please you by behaving childishly. Human children are the size of Indowy adults. I've never seen an Indowy patronize a child."
They had arrived at the tank of the first boy. Stewart liked him already. He was a real kid.
"This guy's still safe to operate a tank?" he asked the Indowy standing at the boy's arm.
"Richard is ordinarily in classes," the small green alien said. "But this task is simple and relatively safe. So simple as to court boredom, I'm afraid."
He could see Stewart eye to eye, since the operator platform was elevated.
"I'm making cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine," he said self-importantly. "It's easy, but we need a lot of it, and for volume I'm the best," he bragged.
"Cyclo-what?" Stewart looked at O'Reilly.
"RDX." The priest said.
"Relatively safe?" Stewart squeaked. He might not recognize the chemical name, but he knew the explosive that was the primary element in C-4, and it wasn't stable until stabilized.
"Yeah," the boy said. "Don't worry about the output. You can't see it, but it's got a few nannites laced through to make it pretty unlikely to explode or anything. They'll be reclaimed during the mixing process. It would be hard to mess this up." The boy looked glum, returning his full attention to his work.
As they walked on to the next tank, O'Reilly whispered, "These kids see getting pulled from work as a punishment similar to grounding. The Indowy discourage that idea, but personally I think it's beneficial."
A smaller girl worked at a smaller tank. "Don't pay any attention to Richard. He's been being a brat and he's lucky they're letting him make anything. It's because he's good at volume, and he really is," she admitted. "None of this is hard, but I'm making molds for plastic casing, then I'll move on to polyisobutylene and 2-ethylhexyl sebacate—the binder and plasticizer. The real little kids can make the plastic to go in the molds," she explained.
O'Reilly pointed to the far end of the room where cardboard boxes sat on pallets. "Motor oil, ball bearings, and washers," he said.
"Claymores?" Stewart asked.
"Sunday tells me we're going to need quite a lot of them." Nathan looked a little sad. "Such a waste. Most of those boys we expect will have no idea what kinds of things their orders can lead them into. Babes in the woods."
