by John Ringo
"Indowy Central Station," Papa said sourly.
"And more coming. No end in sight," Stewart agreed.
"Too many. We're gonna get found," the O'Neal looked at the rapidly deepening trench. As a holding action, it could buy them some time to get all these little buggers to safety. If not all, which he conceded would probably be impossible, then as many as they could. Right now he was not kindly disposed towards Indowy or Galactics generally, but dammit, they were civilians. You had to protect civilians, even when they were stupid and it sucked. He sighed.
"Definitely," Stewart said. "All you can do is buy as much time as you can. I'll do what I can for you, but a lot of it's going to come down to how serious the Darhel are about this little war."
"Oh, believe me, I've had to choke down way more Galactic politics than I can stomach in the last few weeks. I know. Sometimes, Stewart, it's all I can do to keep from throttling the green and ten-footed and froggy and weasel-faced bastards when they treat human beings, my family and my men, like we were expendable pieces on one of their fucking aethal boards. Some days I just hate the whole smug, superior lot of them and wish we'd been off to the side and could've just let the Posleen eat their asses."
"Like today, for instance?" Stewart asked.
"Yep. Just like today." Papa O'Neal spat bitterly on the ground and grabbed an unclaimed shovel. He could spare an hour or two. Besides, nobody could bitch at him for beating up the ground.
In the atrium, which had had all its munitions work pushed up against the wall, volunteers had set up the rows and rows of folding chairs, cafeteria chairs, office chairs, just about any kind of chair they could get their hands on.
Team Jacob was back in and all the targets accounted for. This run of targets, anyway. The victory celebration, which this was, would be grim, and not just from the loss of Agent Grannis. Revenge, justice, had a flavor of satisfaction entirely different from joy. Just as fierce, but different.
It would be a celebration. Beer kegs lined the wall, sunk in tubs of ice. Piles of freshly baked hamburger buns sat next to ketchup, mustard, pickles, and sliced cheese. Large, deep, steel trays, covered, wafted out the aroma of real goddammed cow. Beyond those, platters of lettuce, onions, and tomatoes sat invitingly. Farther down, huge bowls nearly overflowed with freshly fried potato chips.
It was a feast like few of the base staffers, the ones who still remained, had seen in years, and a true luxury for everybody.
Honest to god real, fresh-brewing coffee permeated the air, and a great big sheet cake, the kind with the fluffy frosting, sat downstream as the final destination for the hungry hordes.
There were speeches. There had to be speeches or it wouldn't have felt right, but nobody remembered a word of them. They all boiled down to, "We hunted the fuckers down and killed them dead."
A lot of people cried when they presented the medal to Kacey's mom. The organization had never been big on things like medals before. The straight line of Tommy Sunday, Papa O'Neal, Cally O'Neal, and James Stewart at the very back of the room, standing tall, made it clear that somebody had insisted. It felt right.
The few who questioned Stewart's right to be there, among the others, were quickly shushed by those next to them. It was an open secret on base that Cally O'Neal's husband was the James Stewart, part of Iron Mike O'Neal's ACS battalion back in the Posleen War. Bane Sidhe or not, a legendary war hero who had been instrumental in keeping the remnants of humanity from being eaten had earned honor enough that they were honored to have him, not the reverse. In an organization with many heroes forever unsung, an ACS war veteran was still something damned special. Particularly a war veteran from the O'Neal ACS.
The few who had to be clued in kept their mouths shut the rest of the evening, to avoid further embarrassment. At least, they did until enough beer had flowed from the kegs to loosen inhibitions and wash the self-consciousness away.
They drank to absent friends. Working full time for the Bane Sidhe, either as base staff or in the field, people tended to acquire them. Field operators weren't known for longevity; everyone had their own specific collection of memories, missing faces who belonged in the crowd.
The common bond fed the shared mood. Vengeance had been taken. It would never, never be enough. But it was a start.
The Tir disliked Earth's single, overgrown moon, even more than he disliked the whole civilization-forsaken, monkey-barbarian, upstart, omnivorous-puking Sol System. For one thing, he seldom came here, so his quarters sucked. They were decorated to his tastes of several years ago, and he spent so much time in his quarters that he liked a bit of variety. Also, something had gone wrong with the useless blasted Earthtech artificial window and he hadn't been able to get another one yet. Cheap, ephemeral, worthless Earth crap, but they were the only ones who made the things. Just one more reason he loathed humans. At first, he had felt a kind of amused contempt. That was the appropriate emotion, after all. They were intellectual sub-morons, their understanding of the larger universe was pathetic and they had no concept of mature social interaction or they'd understand and fall in with their place in the Galactic order—namely, their place at the bottom of it.
Any one of the Galactic races could slag their whole vile little, single home world without breaking a sweat. The Indowy wouldn't, the Tchpth wouldn't, the Himmit were too damned curious for their own good. For his race, however, it would take a single Darhel finally annoyed enough to break into lintatai at the helm of a ship with weaponry that was uncommon, but not that uncommon.
If the Darhel had simply wanted to kill Posleen in the trillions, they could have gone out slagging planets. The only thing they needed humans for was to act as a kind of counterinfection, the balancing germ to reduce the Posleen illness of a Galactic planet to a sustainable level—like digestive system microbial balances—so the Galactics could re-take possession. That's what the humans were in the Galactic order—digestive microbes to be excreted out with the other wastes.
The thing that had changed his emotions from amused contempt to pure loathing, which he insisted to himself was not so pure and was still mixed with contempt, was their persistent refusal, morons that they were, to have that simple truth finally dawn on them.
His main payoff for this job, his primary anticipated satisfaction, was being a close witness to that fabulous enlightenment that must come sooner or later to the tree-swinging, barbarian, fucking stupid omnivores.
His growing frustration was that it hadn't happened yet. Humans were, in fact, that stupid. They might actually be too stupid to ever comprehend the truth. They were like their obligate carnivore symbiotes, their dogs. They knew they had a master, but they fancied him on their own level, as part of the same pack. Humans were, in fact, far closer to their dogs in intellect and ability than they were to the real sophont races. They were just bad dogs. Very, very bad dogs. The Tir had found, among the humans, a dim analog to his own feelings. He was, in essence, "not a dog person."
And worst of all, the blasted barbarians insisted on getting in his way.
The only good thing about Earth's barren moon was that it was so very barren. So many fewer of the Aldenata-be-damned humans.
He had interrupted his post-workout, daily grooming massage to return to the inner sanctum of his lunar quarters, which housed the Altar of Communication for the Sol System. His AID had informed him that not only was the Darhel Ghin seeking him, but that he was quite inconveniently and with incomparable rudeness refusing to be put off for a few hours. The Tir was extremely annoyed. His annoyance was safely quite cold, but he was extremely annoyed.
"What?" he snapped as he answered the call. If the Ghin was to be so rude as to interrupt someone's personal grooming, he could blasted well live with a return in ritual-bare rudeness.
"You will be more civilized when you realize that my haste was a courtesy to you, not, as you falsely imagine, an imposition," the Ghin said calmly.
"Very well." The Tir was conditionally mollified—if, as the Ghin sai
d, the haste actually was to his own benefit.
"You have been seeking the intriguers' hiding place on Earth. I contact you to provide the information that will help you find it, and quickly. I understand that you entrusted uncovering its location to human hirelings, and agree the decision was personally prudent of you. As long as your intriguers were mostly human and so forth, it was for the best." The Ghin paused for effect.
Tir Dol Ron took a deep, slow breath, wishing for the other Darhel to simply get on with it.
"The new information I have for you is that Indowy are traveling to Earth in large numbers, destined for exactly that nest of annoyances. Ships can be camouflaged, but they do have to move from ship to doorway. I do not believe the intriguers have the facilities to hide embarking or debarking from the shuttles. There will be a large number of landings, one after another. Use the human satellites, and simply have an AID search for and take note of masses of Indowy. You'll find them almost immediately, I believe. Somewhere in the North American continent near the town of . . . Chicago?"
"Indowy? What in the . . . ? What has been happening?" the Tir asked.
"You have not heard?" the Ghin sounded so patronizing, the misbegotten folth. "I have just sent you a file with an update on recent events in civilized space."
"And?" the Tir asked impatiently. "When are all these Indowy supposed to be arriving?"
"Now. Or soon. Or already. You see the reason for my haste. I did not wish for you to miss your opportunity," the Ghin said.
"I . . . thank you," Tir Dol Ron said grudgingly. "If this information proves truly useful," he added.
"I'm certain it will," the Ghin said. "I take my leave."
He closed the transmission without waiting, but this time the Tir didn't mind in the least. "Start going through the human satellite records. Now," he ordered his AID. "Then bring up the blasted update file," he groused. "Ass end of the galaxy and I always hear everything last."
On the other end of the connection the Darhel Ghin carefully completed the ritual propitiations at the altar. He hadn't really skipped them, just moved them around a bit to needle the Tir. He knew he shouldn't but Tir Dol Ron rose to the bait so very well, and the Ghin was a Darhel with much work and few amusements.
"There," he said to the Himmit in the corner. There were no Indowy in the room, which was a rarity. He had dismissed all of them. This call had required privacy.
"The humans have a term for this situation. A marriage of convenience. Or is it an arranged marriage? Arranged reconciliation? Convenient rec—" He stopped, twitching an ear and looking straight at the Himmit, which was trying vainly to camouflage itself against the riotously busy patterns of the room. The Ghin had discovered he could spot the Himmit every time by carefully designing his décor so that a few spots were just a bit more regular in their decorative patterns than the rest of the place. The Himmit invariably went for one or another of them, then tried to camouflage itself. It was still hard to see. Anywhere in the room it would still be difficult to see. By narrowing the likely locations, though, the Ghin had ensured he could spot it every time, making it look easy. A little intimidation could serve as a large power multiplier.
"In any case," he said, climbing back into his comfortable nest of cushions, "if I've got the timing right, the results should be just about perfect. The pieces are in place and in motion; all I can do now is wait." He looked directly at the Himmit; it made them uneasy. "Can I offer you a drink?" he asked. "It may be premature, but I feel a bit like celebrating."
A large power multiplier, the Ghin repeated to himself as the Himmit gave up and resumed its natural form, approaching the low coffee table the Ghin had made ready in anticipation. "AID, instruct my servants that I require them now," he said.
Chapter Twenty-Six
"Okay, chil—kids, today we're going to do the interesting and important task of deploying buckleys into the field. This effort is a vital—" Lieutenant Green wasn't at his best with children. He had none of his own, wasn't even married, and to the extent he'd seen children in the real world he had a notion that the Bane Sidhe children were pretty damned different than the average kid from the Sub-Urbs, which was what he'd expected. Both kinds lived underground and stuff. They seemed like perfectly normal kids, inasmuch as he knew kids, and then they'd do something weird like talk about going shooting or doing some PT at the pool. Now he had a whole lot of them to brief and send on a mission. Who the hell sent kids on a mission? What the hell kind of kids seemed to half expect it?
You could tell the Bane Sidhe kids in the crowd of children; they were the ones on the edge of their chairs looking intense and eager. The norm—the DAG kids were fidgeting and looking around and poking each other. He saw a DAG kid poke a little black curly headed Bane Sidhe kid who, instead of getting mad or poking him back, gave him the look of patient disdain that children reserved for the very stupid.
The kid who had interrupted him by jumping up and down and waving his raised hand was clearly a DAG kid, although Green didn't recognize him. "Yes?" he asked.
"Which field? There are lots of them up top. Will it have scarecrows? Is there snow?"
The last kid asked that last bit with an eagerness that suggested the child was somewhat less than dedicated to the prospective mission. Green suppressed a groan. It had started off as a pretty good day.
Pinky sat and listened to the lieutenant struggle through trying to explain they were going to hand a few buckleys to pairs of kids to set out to watch for the bad guys coming to attack the base. He guessed it wasn't surprising that Lieutenant Green was so nervous. He wasn't wearing a wedding ring. Sometimes men didn't, but in Green's case Pinky was sure the man had never married and didn't have children.
Finally the man finished his explanation and assigned them their buddies. To Pinky's dismay he got stuck with the ten-year-old idiot who had been poking him all through the briefing. Eric Andrews. Pinky tried to think of anything he knew about the boy he could use. He was coming up empty until Andrews went to the bathroom. He stopped to trade insults with a pair of girls buddied up, and Pinky relaxed. Here was at least one possible handle. He nudged an older girl and pointed out the two, once his boat anchor had gone through the restroom door.
"What are their names? Those two girls," he asked.
"Why do you care?" The girl he asked was about twelve. A bratty age, but he vaguely remembered seeing her with the freckley brunette over there.
"I'm new. I'm just trying to learn names is all," he said.
The girl looked at him suspiciously. "That's my little sister Jenny and her friend Miranda. I'm Sandy. If you're learning names, then what's yours?"
"Pinky Maise," he said, watching shocked recognition on her face, then a mix of sorrow and anger.
"I'm so sorry. Pinky, I'm so, so sorry. They got all the ones that did it though," she said. Then she seemed to realize that didn't help. At all. "I'm so sorry," she repeated, looking uncomfortable and then walking away to get out of the conversation.
That last part was the one Pinky appreciated. He could only take just so much sympathy before it started to get old. People didn't understand that wanting to say it was about them, not him. Since he couldn't change it, he put up with it as politely as he could. The best ones were the ones who felt awkward and found an excuse to leave. He preferred if they did it instead of making him have to. He was getting good at getting loose from awkward conversations.
He couldn't hear what it was, but he could tell Miranda said something taunting to Eric as he came back from the bathroom.
They got outside, finally, and started following the red Christmas ball their first buckley was projecting, even though it was January. Oh, well, everybody knew buckleys were eccentric.
"My god, you're going out alone? What are you, ten?" the buckley asked. "You're going to get lost, freeze to death, and die."
"Shut up, buckley," Pinky said.
"Okay."
He picked the PDA up off the ground from where Eric had d
ropped it. "We're supposed to ignore it when it says creepy things, remember?"
"Uh, yeah. Gimme that." Eric reached out and took the device back. Pinky didn't resist.
"Are you a DAG kid?" Pinky asked. It was an opener that let him get Eric talking about himself. Pinky listened and prodded and looked interested, impressed, and even awestruck when he could get away with it. Naturally, it took less than five minutes for the older boy to tell Pinky he was all right, for a little shrimp. Yeah, well, it was the best way to both get in good with the kid and find out as much about him as possible.
Out in the cold, when the area could be attacked by an army any minute, with a boy he just met who was bigger than him and had a typical ten-year-old's attitude counted to Pinky as a hazardous situation. The lieutenant hadn't known any better, so he didn't bear a grudge. Stuff happened.
They were okay until it started to snow as they placed their second buckley which, like the first, had directed them to the appropriate coordinates, then pointed an arrow toward where they were supposed to go next.
At first the snow was novel to the other boy, but then Eric started to gripe about being bored and cold. Pinky tried to keep his mind off it and interest him by asking about the other boy's astounding feats, probably in every pick-up football game in his life. No good. As they finished the third one, the snow was falling heavier, and halfway or so to the fourth, Eric started complaining to the buckley to get it to tell them the way home.
The buckley, of course, loved the complaining and fed it with loads of depressing predictions of doom. But it was set on stupid, and its next task was to show them where to put it, so the only thing it would do was direct them to its next spot, as Eric started talking about which way he thought home was and taking off that way.
