by John Ringo
"Can I cover them up? Can I? If it won't hurt anything, then I can, can't I? Pleeeaase . . ." he wheedled. Lish had been warned he was smart, but even if she'd paid attention to the warning, he'd have run rings around her. In his sleep. He went into full eager, slightly obnoxious kid mode. Sure enough, she agreed to let him do it just to get him out of her hair.
Not that he'd set them off, he thought as he covered the mine with ground debris, straightening up the nearby grass and grabbing a handful or two from a few yards away to dump over the top of the thing. The grass was all brown for winter, anyway, so withering wouldn't be a problem. Unless it greened up a bit when the snow melted. Pinky couldn't think of anything he could do about that, so he went on to the next mine. Lish was ahead of him, pulling along a child's large toy wagon loaded with the things. It was probably heavy to pull.
Pinky was glad of this, as it slowed the pretty but dumb lady down enough for him to keep up, if he worked fast. Bringing up the rear also gave him the opportunity to re-orient the mines in the direction they were supposed to go. He suspected Mrs. Mueller had inveigled Lish to "watch" him this morning for a reason. No, he didn't suspect, he knew. He decided he liked Mrs. Mueller anyway. After all, it was in his and his dad's best interest and, well, everybody's, for the base defense plan to work right. He sure hoped the people laying the other mines were smarter than Lish. Or had a minder.
Pinky knew full well who was babysitting whom. He made damned sure she never saw him reposition a single mine. She was the type who would just have to be right, and he'd have to send some poor man or lady out here tonight to fix her work. Or more than one. The reason everybody had turned out to position the things was that it was supposed to snow tonight.
The urgency wasn't, as Mrs. Mortenson thought, so the snow would cover the mines. It would, but you couldn't count on snow not to melt at inconvenient times. The urgency was so they wouldn't leave tracks all over snow that might end up not melting, and would certainly be conspicuous as hell, the concentric rings framing the base like a big bullseye. A very big bullseye. Just about everybody on base who didn't have a crucial job and hadn't been evacced was out following the directions of a buckley about where to emplace mine after mine after mine.
It helped that the buckley could place a bright red holographic ball over where the mine was supposed to go. Even with the buckley trying to tell her, she was facing them every which way. She was obviously bored and didn't think it mattered which direction they pointed since none of the Bane Sidhe or DAG people would be out there to be hit. She was pretty much just picking a mine up and putting it down on the red ball of light, facing any old way. What a dope.
It was also stupid to let a five-year-old play with the high explosives. Not that he could set them off without a battery or something, but she'd been warned he was smart and it apparently hadn't even crossed her mind about little boys and things that go boom. Being more than just smart enough to get himself in trouble had probably just saved his life. And hers. She'd better hope she figured out how to get herself juved, because pretty was about all she had going for her, that Pinky could see.
He was standing up to watch Lish trundling the refilled wagon back, having just finished fixing their last mine, when he saw the Himmit landing shuttle de-cloak and deposit two people—human people—who barely had time to walk away from the ship before it faded out again. He saw the grass ripple in the breeze of its wake as it took back off, immediately. Probably going back to its ship, he thought as the grass settled back to near stillness.
He could see that, pretty or not, he was going to cordially loathe his "babysitter" by the end of the day. He wondered if Mrs. Mueller had also realized he'd be too smart, and too practiced an actor, to let it show. If you didn't like a kid, it was safe to let them know it, unless they were bigger than you. Not liking a grown-up was different—better to never, never let them know. Compared to pretending to be normal, pretending to like somebody was easy.
He found it ironic that Lish Mortenson had been shipped in to the base while everybody else was being shipped out.
Papa O'Neal was glad to smell the brown, grassy smell of Indiana in winter, with miles and miles of big blue sky over his head, instead of just seeing bulkheads, the same bulkheads, all day every day while breathing eau du Himmit. The Himmit didn't really stink, but they did have a specific, subtle scent that he'd grown very tired of. Most ships probably had too many other races on them, or too many people, or too much everything, to confuse the crew and passengers' noses.
Alan, beside him, appeared to be relishing the same thing.
"Did you ever notice that Himmit smell kinda like grape soda?" he asked the PA.
"I would have said more like cherry cola, but there's that faint, almost chemical tang to it," the other man mused.
Papa patted his shirt pocket out of habit before remembering that it was empty. Even the weeks of the trip had been unable to break the habit of so many years. Whether it was there or not, he reached for it, that was all. He shouldered his duffel bag, striding for the grain silo and barn that concealed the building's main entrances and elevators. The freight elevator, in the barn, was a clever thing. The barn was real. It was also essentially a box within a shell that moved down and sideways, out of the way, for the main platform to ascend and descend.
Both elevators opened on the large staging room the Bane Sidhe thought of as the surface. It was about the size of a medium-large aircraft hangar, if someone had squished it down to half height. Big fans ran the room's air through filters to take out the vehicle exhaust that otherwise would have built up over time.
The room was fairly crowded, lately, as all traffic had to route through a single choke point, wide and tall enough for a single big rig to drive through before bearing away onto the ramp down and down to the loading dock all the way at the bottom of the cube. Cars used the same ramp. Thankfully, once through the choke point, the ramp itself at least went both ways.
Traffic in and out of the base was quite limited, or it would have been impossible to keep secret. The designers had put in the choke point as much for that reason as for security from attack. The choke point contributed to secrecy by forcing administration and personnel to keep traffic low. The usual use of all that parking was as a lot for the mechanics' shop, as well as pre-positioning for a small fleet of ready vehicles and staging for the vehicles for individual ops. The cleaners had their own facility next to the mechanics' shop to sanitize returning vehicles before moving them below. Covers and costuming had a shop which applied the appropriate litter, grit, and dirt for mission-verisimilitude.
Attack, on the other hand, was never supposed to happen. Bane Sidhe base relied on concealment and took extreme care to preserve it. The O'Neals had never thought much of this strategy, but they had neither funded the base nor built it.
Papa O'Neal was more than concerned, therefore, to see a backed up line of cars waiting to go in, and rows of buses parked side by side on the lot.
"What the fuck is going on here?" he asked Alan, who of course could give no answer. "How does this," he waved his buckley, indicating the updates they'd gotten, "translate to this?" He waved the opposite hand across the room in general.
"Beats the hell out of me," Alan admitted with rare candor.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It took Papa O'Neal less than ten minutes to revise his opinion. O'Reilly was right. His PA was a treasure. By the time he was through talking to Tommy and getting the short version update of what the hell was going on, Alan had a subordinate up with a pouch of the good stuff and an empty, disposable plastic cup. God, but that good. He sighed blissfully at the taste of good tobacco, and the relief hitting his nicotine-starved veins.
He looked around at the atrium and the civilians industriously assembling claymores for the DAGgers to wire up, with more than a few operators mixed in among them helping out. Bane Sidhe operators, he corrected himself. They were all operators, of course. It wasn't going to take much getting use
d to, because the men and women instantly identified as fellow members of the spec ops profession. It would still take some. For the DAGgers it must be like getting folded, whole, into something like Delta Force if you hadn't known such a thing existed. Something like that, except different.
He looked around again, at the large room with its fake blue-sky window overhead letting in "natural" light, people distributed throughout assembling high explosives into convenient devices, and smiled. It was good to be home.
After an hour of watching the saved news coverage of the Indianapolis Sub-Urb fire, one hundred and eighty-three people dead from an as yet unidentified "suicide bomber." A double handful of people had gotten basically cooked by proximity to the blast, or having their burning clothes melt on them—three cheers for cotton/polyester blends.
When the foam fire suppression system in the cafe finally went off, it had merely served to impede emergency personnel from getting to the injured. Several people had died of third degree burns from the decorative "wood beam" ceiling falling in on them. It all just happened too fast for them to get out.
The rest of the deaths came from a flash fire of the grill's grease trap. Heat had ignited decades of crud and lint in the ducting system, allowing the fire to spread. Badly maintained—or simply unmaintained—fire suppression systems malfunctioned, and the flames ate up the interior of five blocks before the Urb's volunteer fire department got it under control. It hadn't helped that the fire had set off a meth lab that had apparently been a fairly large operation. Urbies still cooked their crank the old-fashioned way.
After getting the "facts" of the collateral damage from the hyped up newsies, he'd gotten a terse but clear briefing on the op itself, both plan and AAR, from Bryan Wilson of Operations. In Papa's role as a field operator, Bryan was his boss. The O'Neal was another matter, and Papa had his clan head hat on. Technically, he ranked as an equal with the Indowy Aelool.
After getting the real information, he'd patiently listened as Aelool had a cow, at length, and O'Reilly tried to diplomatically soothe, at length, both other leaders making the same functional error. He caught Bryan's eye and wordlessly let him know that he was not making the same mistake. Not for a minute. He was just waiting until they wound down.
Eventually, the both of them ran out of words, looking at him as if just then realizing that he hadn't spoken.
"There's one thing both of you are forgetting. Men are not potatoes," Papa O'Neal, Vietnam and Bane Sidhe veteran said.
"Potatoes?" Aelool looked completely bewildered.
"You buy and sell potatoes by the pound. More potatoes are worth more, less potatoes are worth less. Men are not commodities to be traded off by the numbers." He held up his hands, forestalling Aelool and O'Reilly respectively. "My turn," he said.
He looked at both men and sighed, which came out in a single huff, then spit his tobacco into the cup so he could talk without his face distorted. People seemed to pay more attention that way.
"I'm not going to explain that; the explanation isn't relevant. You can look it up." His eyes made it clear to both leaders that he still held the floor. Bryan didn't like his moving on from that so quickly. Tough, for now.
"The relevant facts in a nutshell: A man who horribly massacred dependents of our men, targeted because they were dependents of our men, lived in that Sub-Urb. We sent a team in to take him down. They took him down. We had an exfiltration plan which was fundamentally sound. Since the enemy commissioned the massacre of dependents to make the perpetrators his stalking horse and find this base, the team members were equipped to deny the enemy vital information by denying capture and destroying evidence. In the course of the operation, it became necessary for one member of Team Jacob to use her self-destruction measures. In the course of her self-destruction, civilian collateral damage occurred. We lost a really good operator because if she hadn't sacrificed her life it would have put all of our lives, and those of the Indowy we're trying to protect, in danger. Those are the relevant facts. If you'd rather just call the Darhel, give them our location, and give yourselves up for slaughter," Papa said, tossing his PDA onto the desk, "pick up the phone."
Micheal O'Neal, Sr.'s, face could have been carved of granite.
"This is not pleasant," Aelool said unhappily.
"I've been out there doing 'not pleasant' for a long time, Aelool," Papa said. "This isn't unpleasant, this is everyday business."
"My actions led to the deaths of innocents," Aelool said. "I am trying to explain so that you understand."
"And I am understanding far better than you can believe," Papa said. "We have fought in the shadows for many years. But in those battles, innocents have died no matter how hard we try to avoid it. Now our enemies are targeting our innocents. To protect them and to maintain our Clan and our community, by human culture and genetics, we must not only protect those innocents but strike back at the enemy. That has been what Bryan has been doing. And fighting at that level means that others are going to get hurt. Again, you can surrender or you can let us do our jobs. And go back to not thinking about what that means. But send me a memo because I am done with this discussion."
Papa gestured to Bryan and headed out the door, giving them no time to start in again.
"Thanks for backing me up in there, man," Bryan said.
"Just doing my job, same as you," Papa shrugged roughly. "But you're welcome."
The squat redhead hit the floor with a thump as he found himself bowled over by a great, painfully enthusiastic hug. "Granpa!" Cally said.
Papa O'Neal and James Stewart walked along the side of the trench the men were carving out of the frozen ground by brute force, with picks and shovels, underneath an improvised canopy of white sheets to match the snow. It was like something out of the nineteenth century, but what use did a clandestine underground base have for things like bulldozers and backhoes? They hadn't even had the picks and shovels until the Sohon kids made them out of some kind of nobody knew what. Nobody but them and the Indowy, anyway. Nobody had time or energy to care.
Papa spat on the ground and harrumphed. "At least Michelle screwed the Indowy and not us, thank God," he said.
Stewart grinned. "Too funny. Those were pretty much Cally's first sentiments. Once she was speaking to me again."
"Yeah, well. Michelle didn't get off too badly. I've followed some of her business deals over the years. Somebody gets left holding the bag, but it won't be her. She'll take it out of their hides with no mercy if they miss a payment, or try to pay late."
"I knew she would, or I wouldn't have written the deal that way. She'll make one hell of a collection agency. It's not like the Indowy clans can't afford it. It's a lot of money, but they've got a lot of people to spread the pain around to. A large tax base, if you will. They find it easier to sacrifice individuals to debt than distribute a cost across the clan, but screw 'em. The people they're shipping here are obviously too valuable for them to just allow to starve. Fine. The clans can show a little responsibility for once. Or, they can pick some individuals to sacrifice as unpaid labor."
"If they try that on Michelle, she won't blink," Papa warned.
"I was counting on it. You guys are in this because you think it can save humanity from Darhel domination. I don't see it making much of a difference, but if that's what you want to do, it's your life. My organization is in it to make money. We're more than happy to help—for the right price." Stewart shrugged. "I think we'll ultimately have more effect than you do. You have to trust the other Galactics to share your goals. Darhel domination is economic. The human way of working together is a lot more effective at countering that than the Indowy way of working together. We're going to beat the crap out of the murdering bastards in the long run—at one hell of a profit," Stewart said. "Not to change the subject, but have you got your head around all the changes yet?"
"Close enough. Did Cally just have a wild hair when she made us responsible for all of DAG? Troops are expensive," Papa grumbled. "But to hear the
m tell it, it must have been the greatest speech since St. Crispin."
"Hardly." Stewart laughed. "I've seen the holo." He stopped and looked at Papa seriously. "She may suck at business, but while we're chuckling, remember who she is. The business thing is mostly—all—ignorance. You always did all that for her. It—the mass adoption I mean—was inspired leadership. She recognized her moment and took it. You know how bad a blow the DAGgers have to have taken to their sense of identity, as a unit, by defecting. Sure, they're a unit, but who are they, what are they, what are they for? She gave them an acceptable new self-identity. Their emotions were all stirred up, they were one big mass of rage and purpose. Sure, they're still a unit; they were all feeling the same thing, but they weren't unified." He clasped his hands together. "They wanted to be a whole again, needed to be one, all they needed was an excuse that led them in the direction they wanted to go."
"And a Bane Sidhe moron saying the right stupid thing at the right time took all that emotion and crystallized their formation of loyalty and identity to Clan O'Neal instead of the Bane Sidhe, pulling them one way instead of two," the O'Neal finished. "My own private army. How about that." He grinned, shaking his head disbelievingly.
"It's not like it isn't ensured you'll have funding to keep them up and running, and work for them, and without having to rent them out to strangers. Strategically I'd say your granddaughters did you proud," James Stewart puffed up a little in pride for his wife.
"You're probably right." Papa said.
They had walked out to the end of the trench as they talked, and now turned to walk back, facing a sight neither of them particularly wanted to see. A mass of little green Indowy crunched around on the much-trampled, muddy snow, having poured out of the shuttle in a packed jumble, and now moved to and through the barn doors in the same blob, waiting for the elevator to take them down into the base. In less than an hour, the shuttle would land with another load, as it had all morning, disgorging lot after lot of refugees from the first Himmit scout ship to arrive.
