by John Ringo
Hence the informal social gathering.
Throughout talk about the players’ stats, injuries during the season, and the snow beginning to fall on the field, Mosovich and Mueller watched Sunday as closely as he watched them. He knew the history of the other two men, of course. Their work in the war, with a number of repeated postings together since, had made the officer and NCO operate as two halves of one man. Tommy had received a copy of their complete service records from Father O’Reilly, and studied it carefully. These two made a damn fine team, refining their relationship over the years to seamlessly set the standard for an officer and his senior NCO, tight as hell but each secure and precise in his own area of responsibility.
As their freshly minted boss he could have done a hell of a lot worse. The big man also knew that one hint of his discomfiture leaking through his command face would have a magnified, detrimental effect on the troops whose lives were now unquestionably his responsibility. His uncertainties were his own problem, to be buried deep for the sake of these men — his men.
He still didn’t know what the hell he was going to end up doing with them, but that was a problem that wouldn’t solve itself today.
The three men leaned forward as one. The snap, the kick, beautiful. Sixty yards if it was an inch. Waters was one of the best kickers in the game. Ohio had won two close ones on the strength of a couple of amazing field goals. Fast runners, on the team, too. Held Wisconsin to a ten return.
He got as far as third down before his son, Arthur, appeared at the door and interrupted. One look at his face and Tommy knew he could write this game off.
“Got a cube in from Indiana you better see, Dad. You too, sir. Top.” He nodded to Mueller.
“That bad, huh?” One of the problems with being so far from the main — indeed, only — Bane Sidhe base on Earth was that security necessitated messages be physically couriered if they were either routine, or sensitive. Arthur’s expression told him all he needed to know about just how sensitive, so he wasn’t surprised that the message was directly recorded by Nathan.
“Cally, I’m sorry to interrupt your holiday.” Nathan had clearly already gotten word of his promotion. “If you can, Tommy should probably see this, too. We just got word that the Maise family has been hit. Their safe house apparently wasn’t. One of the kids survived and the house operator got home to find bodies and kid. He’s called for a pickup and is waiting in place. By the time you get this, we should have him in hand at least, if not on base. I’ve got the Schmidts on it, blooding some of the new guys, and I devoutly hope that won’t be literal.
“Cally, I know your first impulse is going to be to come running up here and get in the middle of it. Good. There’s going to be blood to let and despite your current responsibilities, I cannot think of a person better suited to handling this. I can’t order the acting head of Clan O’Neal, but… come.”
“Cally’s seen this already?” Tommy asked his son as the holo flicked off, automatically returning to the now forgotten game.
“Um… nobody knows where she is.”
“Oh. Yeah, her belated honeymoon is a secret. Get it from Shari or Wendy. They both know where to find her.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, sir.” The boy’s face was tight, and his speech was beginning to take on a clipped tone. “Mom and Shari won’t tell me where she is.”
“What?” Tommy shook his head unbelievingly. “Wait, how did you know what was on this? You played it?” He looked at his son the way only a father can look at an erring child.
“No, sir. The courier…” His son shrugged, as if it was no fault of his if another guy had run off at the mouth. He’d deal with that later. Arthur swallowed hard, so his own face must have said as much.
“Mosovich, get three of your men who are the most dialed in on Bane Sidhe protocol and get them locking this down. Mueller, go get Maise. Nothing on why. My job to break the news. Yes, we’re going to go up to Indiana, all of us, and we’re going to pick up our hunting licenses. Questions?”
“No, sir,” all three responded.
“Sounds to me like the Darhel have declared open war on the O’Neals,” Tommy said, cracking his knuckles, then rotating his head and shoulders with a series of pops. “Time to show them why that’s a terminally baaad idea. Right after I explain the… gravity of the situation to my wife.”
“I need Cally. Now,” he said grimly.
Shari sighed. “Is it really that big an emergency? The woman’s recovering from broken ribs, nearly dying again, losing a child offworld, severe overwork again, just got her—”
“Yes. It’s that bad.” His face confirmed his words.
“Honey? What the hell’s going on?” Wendy asked.
“You two need to know because you need to quash rumors and, whoever’s in the hot seat, a lot of the grunt work of clan stuff is going to fall on you.” The look he gave the two women was bleak. “The bastards hit one of our safe houses. Not agents, they went for the dependents. It was the Maises.”
“Oh my God.” Shari’s hands were clapped to her mouth, while Wendy hadn’t moved, stunned.
“It was a deliberate hit which means somebody is gunning for Bane Sidhe dependents,” Tommy said. “The younger boy made it. Of course we have to tell Maise and he goes with. Mosovich and Mueller know and will take care of breaking it to the men. Which will be when we know more. You’ll want to coordinate with them, and with whoever takes over clan management. If that’s not you.” He nodded to Shari.
Shari had survived the Posleen war solely by her virtues of not hesitating and being rock steady in a crunch. She didn’t hesitate now, pulling a buckley out off her back pocket and punching out its unlock sequence.
“Sam. Call Stewart. Tell him ‘drama queen.’ ” She paused and then looked puzzled.
“Tommy,” she asked in a very small voice. “One, how did they know where the safe house was and two, what else do they know?”
“Drama queen,” Stewart’s buckley announced.
“Your PDA has gotten to know you, honey.”
Cally rolled up on one side, laughing at him. It was only early evening, but after a supper of oysters Rockefeller, strawberries, and champagne, eaten in bed, they had decided to test the oyster myth. Having just agreed that more tests would be necessary, they were cooling off before sharing the shower.
“It’s for you. A call.” Instead of laughing, his mouth had twisted in annoyance. “Sorry,” he said, handing her the buckley.
“Drama queen?” she asked, taking it. “Yeah, gimme the call,” she told the machine, not waiting for an answer from her husband.
“Yan? This is Shari. I’m so sorry, but I need Cally. I hope I haven’t inter—” Her friend and step-granma poured the words out in an apologetic rush.
“It’s me,” Cally said. “What’s up?” She plucked idly at the red satin sheets the maid service had brought up this morning.
“You need to get to the airport. Now.” The other woman’s voice issued starkly from the buckley, tense and strained. “Okay, you’ve actually got about two hours. Talk to your friend about arrangements and just get there. Bye.”
“Call ended,” the PDA said.
Cally didn’t waste time trying to ask Stewart what was going on. He’d had emergency contact arrangements — which she’d assumed. There was an emergency. That was all they knew. She was unsurprised that the details hadn’t been forthcoming over a buckley connection. It was encrypted, of course, but as Tommy had told her so often, encryption algorithms were made to be broken.
“Okay, honey, what arrangements have you made for egress?” she asked.
“Bike. Being babysat by one of your relatives as insurance it stays in operable condition.”
“Right. I do need a shower. Do I need to pack my shit, or do I have a bug-out bag?” she asked hopefully.
Her husband clapped a hand to his chest, “Darling, I am shocked, shocked, that you thought I’d neglect something so fundamental.”
“Yeah, yeah. Thank you, I love you, and I’m going to wash off this stink. I am not going to show up to team and base smelling like a cross between a girls’ gym and a whorehouse.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“If you do, what do you figure the odds are of it being just a shower?” she asked, smirking.
“Nil, but you do have the time.”
“Point. I’d love company,” she purred.
In the event, it took her more than two hours to get to the airport. She’d forgotten what day it was, and thus forgotten about Friday traffic. She was still the first one there, traffic being an equal-opportunity hazard.
She stood on the tarmac, having bummed a smoke from Kieran, and hunched a bit under the cold mist that had started coming down. She could move into the hangar, but it felt kinda good to be outside, and the airport was a change. She and Stewart had immured themselves and spent an awful lot of time in the hotel room. Fantastic time, but still enough to give that cooped up feeling. Besides, while she’d given some control over to her other half for fun and games, now she was back full-on into her professional self. The transition was instant, for practical purposes, as soon as the call had come in.
That didn’t mean it wasn’t a bit disorienting, and it was convenient to stand in the open air, let her eyes rest on the main terminal building, which was a fair way off across the main runways, and give her headspace time to really adjust. The difference between waking up alert and ready to fight, versus taking the time to “really” wake up. Professional minus the adrenaline.
She ground the cigarette butt under the toe of her bike boots and reached for another. White-market cigs were supposed to be nonaddictive and noncarcinogenic, although that was recently debatable. They also cost the earth, with the Darhel-driven taxes, damn the fucking Elves to hell. Again. The far cheaper black-market smokes were the same old bad shit from before the war, which mattered for ordinary people. Cally and Kieran weren’t ordinary. Like any operators or critical staff, they were immune to cancer, the other lung diseases, and immune to nicotine as well. That didn’t mean there wasn’t a certain comfort from the taste of good tobacco and the hand-to-mouth habit.
A bit later, she flicked the unsmoked half of her third down onto the pavement, as Kieran climbed into the plane to do whatever pilots did. She shrugged, greeting Tommy, his son, and a guy named Maise whose vaguely haunted, zombie look spoke volumes.
She waived Maise and Arthur onto the plane before pulling Sunday aside out beyond a wing. She didn’t know if Maise had enhanced hearing or not, and wasn’t chancing it.
“Brief me,” she said quietly.
“Dependents murdered. His family. Pretty gruesome. One of his sons survived.”
Cally’s knuckles whitened in clenched-fist fury. “We know,” she said in a tone that was more statement than question.
“We know,” Tommy confirmed. “They weren’t subtle about who, and the why is obvious. For all practical purposes, the balloon has gone up.”
“Roger that. Do we have any word on scope and ROE?” she asked. “Are our troops on alert?”
“You know as much as I do. As for DAG, we’ve kept a lid on it. They’re on alert. They’ll notice Maise is gone, but I think we kept it pretty secure. The courier was the big risk; Wendy and Shari have him nailed down tight. Mueller and the other NCOs will be on search and destroy for rumors.”
He held his hand out under the increasingly insistent drops. “By the way, you may not have the sense to go in out of the rain, but I do,” he said.
Cally was suddenly conscious of her hair plastered to her head. She was soaked to the skin.
“Fuck it,” Cally said. “Getting wet and miserable’s just going to make me happier to kill somebody.”
When the plane was in the air and she found herself staring out the window at nothing, she finally shook loose of the black nowhere she’d been inhabiting.
“Buckley, play me something. Anything. I don’t care, as long as the music is violent.”
“Oh, dear. Some disaster has happened. Are we in the air?” it squeaked. “Don’t you know how dangerous it is to be in the fucking air, those rail guns—”
“Shut up, buckley. Just play it.”
“Right,” it said, its habitual pessimism tinged with an actual note of fright. The base buckley personalities all loathed flying. Nevertheless, the order for violent music was one it understood, and it called up the historical record of the ACS playlist from the Posleen war, and ran a search of similar material.
Metallica was just what the doctor ordered, the buckley concluded, and it started with “No Remorse.”
Chapter Eleven
Saturday, January 2, 2055
Pinky understood the next morning when Father O’Reilly turned him over to another one of the moms — he sniffled at the word before controlling himself. Besides, Mrs. Mueller was much nicer than Miss Veldtman. Miss Veldtman tried to be nice, but Mrs. Mueller just was nice. With the other lady he could tell it was her job to try to be nice to him, and help him not hurt over his mom and Joey, or even Jenny. Pinky thought that was the stupidest idea any adults had ever had. It was gonna hurt anyway and he didn’t damn well want to talk about it. He felt better for thinking about that with the “damn” in it. It was more emphatic that way.
Mrs. Mueller had him playing in the kids’ gym with her kids Davey and Pat. They were older than Joey, but they were all right. Father O’Reilly had told him it really was okay to let his real self show around the Muellers. Pinky had been doubtful, but he tried it a little, and a little more when it worked out okay.
The Mueller kids were nothing like Joey, or even Jenny, or the other neighborhood kids. After about five minutes they had looked at each other, then looked at him, and Pat said, “It’s like you’re a juv, only a kid version. Cool.”
“Our dad’s a juv,” Davey informed him, watching him as if he wasn’t sure of the reaction the disclosure was going to get.
“Cool,” Pinky echoed. Then the three of them had grinned at each other, and since then the other two boys had been patiently initiating him into the rudiments of handling the combination of a baseball and a glove. The guy at the gym counter even had one close to his size, which was cool because Mom could never aff — Pinky suppressed another sniffle.
The kids’ gym, as far as he could see, was about the same size as an adult basketball court at the Y, doubled. He noticed pretty quick that the playground equipment looked a lot more like a kid-sized Q-course than the kind of stuff you got in preschools or public parks. He approved. The park stuff was boring, like the grown-ups that built it would have a heart attack if you so much as stubbed your toe. The five-year-old eyed the monkey bars with a mix of lust and glee.
The floor underneath all the stuff was padded, at least a little, but it didn’t look too heavy. Besides, Pinky didn’t want to actually get hurt if he fell; it just made him indignant to feel like they were so afraid he’d break just from a little damn play. Grown-ups could be damn stupid sometimes.
The boys took the hint and he got to play on them a little before Mrs. Mueller came over and told them they had to go.
Davey and Pat looked at her like she was crazy. “Mooommm! It’s not even lunchtime!”
“Hush.” She looked at him. “Pinky, your daddy’s here. We’re going up to the cafeteria where you can meet him and grab a snack.” Her eyes were real sad, and he could tell she felt sorry for him. He wished she wouldn’t, because it made him have to fight that much harder not to cry in front of Davey and Pat.
It was the first time Pinky had been in the base cafeteria. It looked like a grown-up version of the cafeteria at Joey’s school, except the adults got to tell the people behind the counter what they wanted to eat.
They were already at a table when three people walked in, and Pinky was surprised to find himself getting out of his chair so fast he knocked it down, and spilled the milk all over himself, but he didn’t care and just ran for the big man in the middle. “
Daddy!”
And then it didn’t matter that he was crying in front of people because Daddy was crying, too. He was wrapped up in a big hug, and he didn’t care that it was too tight, not even a little.
Pinky saw that the part of his mind that noticed things was still clicking along like a clock, as he heard the really huge man, who had walked behind him, telling Mrs. Mueller he had a cube from her husband. He noticed that the blond woman with real big breasts standing beside his dad wasn’t reacting to the crying at all except for maybe being a little impatient. She was just mad. Madder than he’d ever seen anybody. Ever.
He could tell it wasn’t at them, so it was probably at the people who killed Mom and Joey. And Jenny, he added. He squirmed in his dad’s arms, wiping the snot from his nose on his sleeve.
“Who are you?” he asked the woman. Somehow “lady” didn’t seem to fit her at all.
“My name’s Cally. Hi, Pinky.”
She didn’t squat down on her haunches, which he always found kind of patronizing from adults. She was another one who just plain talked to him like a human being. He liked her, instantly, mostly because he could tell that she’d just love to kill the people who murdered his family, very violently. It was a sentiment he could appreciate, but it was another one he didn’t really think would fit the role of five-year-old, which he couldn’t quite discard in front of his dad.
“I saw your debrief video,” she said. “Good job. You’re solid, kid. Solid as a damned rock.”
His dad glanced at her about the cuss word, but he himself liked her better for it.
“Are you a spy?” he asked.
“No. I’m an assassin. I do spying sometimes, when I have to. But mostly I kill people.”
His dad really wasn’t sure about her telling him that. Pinky, however, felt otherwise.
“Good,” he said, his lips compressing into a thin line. “I’m glad they called the right kind of person in for when you find them. I hope you’re good at it.”
