by John Ringo
“Pinky, I am the best.” She paused for a moment and then grinned. Pinky’d seen a show about sharks one time and it was like a great big white shark had just opened up her mouth and smiled. “I am going to make you one promise. I am going to find the people who killed your mom and brother, and the people who ordered the killing of your mom and brother, and I am going to nail them to a wall. With nails. To a wall.”
His dad now looked like he was about to really object.
“Before you get upset at me being frank with your son, Mr. Maise, you really need to watch his debrief video. Then you and Pinky need to have a really long talk.” She hadn’t bothered to look at his dad, just kept Pinky locked with her cornflower-blue eyes. “I’m also a mom. You need to come clean with your dad. You’re really going to need each other from now on. OPSEC is for outside families not inside. Get me?” she asked.
“I like you,” Pinky said. “Dad. She’s right. I’m way smarter for my age than I’ve been pretending. Damn, Daddy, you would too if you had to worry about being pounded for it!” He couldn’t help sounding exasperated, because the need to hide had been biting his butt for so long, but it probably hadn’t been a good idea to cuss in front of his dad.
“Pinky?”
Pinky reflected that sometimes telling the truth was very, very hard.
Practical Solutions, Inc., and Enterprise Risk Management Group, LLC, were usually competitors. Once, they’d almost been hired to fight on opposite sides. They had a policy against it. There were enough contracts killing off two-bit gangs of pirates and raiders without fighting other professionals. Besides, the second employer hadn’t wanted to pay enough.
Being hired onto the same side was a first. And Lester Caine wasn’t sure he liked it. Sure, he was ready to get back to work. Last year had finished up great, after a rocky start. The Italian job had been nice and easy. Well, if not extravagantly, financed by the Swiss, it had not been the usual run of rescuing a colony of idealists who let their Posleen problem get too big for them. Those were depressing. People ended up paying all that they had just to get pulled out with their skins intact and returned to civilization. Italy had been a nice change. The Swiss had engineered their reclamation project like an antique watch.
There was still some bad feeling between the two companies about that job. Enterprise had expected to get it because their stick-up-the-ass culture was more likely to appeal to the staid Swiss. PS had underbid them, and was a better outfit. True to the bottom line, the Swiss had gone with PS.
And now they had to work with those guys.
The military cultures couldn’t have been more different. Oh-five-hundred and those clowns come running past their tents singing out Jody calls, waking everybody up an hour early. His head was still pounding from the morning after the night before, and an hour less of sleep hadn’t helped. He’d tried the medic for a cure, but he was all out of hangover pills, and had handed Les a couple of pre-war painkillers that hadn’t done shit.
Then all day all they’d heard about was how slack their discipline was and how PS — called by a much less flattering name — didn’t PT. Of course they did PT. Not a flabby one among them. General Lehman’s view was that if you couldn’t keep yourself fit for duty and ready to do your job on your own, you were in the wrong business. Himself, he did loads of basketball and lifting. No matter where they went in the world, there was always room to set up for some hoops.
Just because they didn’t get up at oh-five-hundred and run two miles, or do all that calisthenics bullshit, didn’t make them any less soldiers, and their record in the field proved it.
One of General Lehman’s favorite sayings was that no combat ready unit has ever passed inspection, and no inspection ready unit has ever passed combat. Enterprise was constantly inspection ready, with its officers chosen more for ability to keep the troops looking pretty than fighting. They weren’t bad in a scrap, but oh lord the bullshit. They didn’t take too many contracts against human enemies, which explained the miracle of any of their officers surviving being saluted in the field and the other idiocy that passed for discipline with those clowns.
Okay, they weren’t complete clowns. When it came right down to it, Les had a certain respect for the guys over there. It was just that bitching about them was traditional and his head hurt like a motherfuck.
To top it off, here he was shining up boots and pressing his goddamn BDUs because they had parade at four to listen to the bullshit of the client. Mostly it was so the client could see with his own eyes what he was buying, but rather than admit that up front, they had to sit and listen to the man bullshit until he got tired of listening to himself talk.
Geez, they were here, they were armed and equipped, their record with clients spoke for itself. What was the point of some fucking civilian coming and goggling at them, pretending he would be able to tell the difference between a crap outfit and a crack outfit by looking? But that was a part of the bullshit that simply could not be dispensed with no matter how much he would have preferred otherwise.
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 -
