by John Ringo
The Indiana legislature had decided it was better to pay a bit more for Sub-Urbanites once and get rid of them than it was to keep paying, and paying, and paying. They had a vigorous program of job training for careers that, coincidentally enough, would take the graduates someplace other than Indiana. A condition of training being vacating the Sub-Urb upon graduation, Indiana was slowly emptying the behemoths with a view to eventually shutting them down.
Indianapolis West Urb, home to one Gordy Pace, was about half empty. Gordy’s own hall was even emptier than that. The man lived alone in three-bedroom quarters intended for a family. He’d had one, until he came home one day to find his wife had taken the kids and skipped off with a freshly trained bounty farmer wannabe. He supposed he could’ve smacked her less when he was drunk, but the woman had been damned irritating sometimes, and the kids loud. He didn’t miss her at all, even though the place seemed kinda empty and he cooked worse than his ten-year-old daughter. He ate the crappy food in the crappy mess hall and tried to ignore his crappy life. Except that was all changing now.
Gordy was smart with his money. He had a brand new car, a union spot for the steel mills up north, and money to buy himself someplace to live that he could afford. Someplace out of this crappy hole in the ground. Only reason he wasn’t gone yet was because he had had to get it all set up, and it wouldn’t have been any fun without partying around a bit in front of friends, acquaintances, the sanctimonious bastards who got him kicked off the force, and the two bit whores who had been too good for him until he got himself his ticket out. And not to no shitty bounty farm.
He sure as hell wasn’t putting off the trip out of any love for this goddamned rat hole. Hell, he was still tripping over the kids’ discarded toys and crap.
Tonight, he was taking a break from crowing it up to have a quiet evening watching the latest blockbuster holo and downing a six pack or two of beer. Same as he’d done last night. Tomorrow he was really going to have to start packing up his shit. He stretched and noticed his T-shirt was tight. Good thing he was buying new clothes. There was a downside to being able to afford more beer.
The money had come in exchange for a really nasty piece of work, but if he had it to do over again he’d do the same. It was a ticket out of here. Life was unfair, and when bad things happened, it was better if they didn’t happen to him.
Team Jacob specialized in the trickiest short-term cover assignments. Each of them was a seasoned operator, slabbed over ten years ago. They all looked perfectly ordinary, yet different enough to not be attention-getting identicals. Medical had carefully balanced their DNA changes to pass cursory examination of the commonly typed DNA factors as ninety-nine plus percent certainly a single, individual. Charlie Smith had a well-constructed record as a jobless, alcoholic laborer in Minneapolis, a sad victim of homelessness. The females typed as first degree relatives of the males.
They were the best team for a Sub-Urb hit, and frequently performed same. Old jeans, old sneakers, and a faded, dark blue T-shirt were as invisible as they themselves. Team Jacob had the lowest cover and costuming overhead in the whole organization.
For this job, they used a standard four-man entry team, their two female field operatives playing lookout. Since they couldn’t and shouldn’t be strikingly attractive, team members were scintillatingly charming and witty — but only at will. Charisma from someone who wasn’t too good looking was effective on both sexes, depending on how they played it. The women stood lookout, invisible until and unless they needed to divert someone away from the action.
If there was any trace DNA at all, the “crime” would have been committed by one man, acting alone. Ex-cops always had enemies.
The entry team took the subtle approach on Pace’s wooden replacement door — they kicked it in, not even bothering with hushers. The hall was half vacant, and the crime rate in the Urb tended to cause residents to conspicuously mind their own business. Sub-Urb quarters had no front windows to peek through. Noise would keep the other residents in their quarters better than silence.
Sometimes building clearing went quicker than others. This time was as quick as you could get. The bastard was in his easy chair in front of the HV. Cap him beyond repair, and get the hell out.
“Done,” the team lead dropped the single word to his PDA, its only transmission, getting the instant receipt codes that told him the message got to both lookouts unjammed.
Getting into a Sub-Urb for a mission, even undetected, was easy. Out… not so much. The watching opposition would find it easy as hell to shut down the elevators and exit.
Agent Kacey Grannis retreated to the nearest public lounge and grabbed a table. She typed a single word into the virtual keyboard of her AID and her tiny foot in the door to the Sub-Urb’s system expanded to complete control. She had to have the AID. The opposition sure as hell would have one, if they were any good. Parity made this a matter of skill. The mission hung on the bet that Kacey would be better and luckier than the competition.
Unfortunately, measures, countermeasures, and counter-countermeasures were a neverending arms race. She had to stay at her post until the rest of Jacob was all the way out, then hope her final run of hacks held long enough to get out herself. She had prepared herself mentally and physically in case she wasn’t good enough or lucky enough. This time. Many a cyber had learned that you didn’t tell a Bane Sidhe AID to purge beyond possibility of retrieval unless you really meant it. Virtually indestructible, it did the person capturing it little good to have a machine scrubbed all the way down to the hard-coded OS and blank personality. Unless the first guy to get his hands on it happened to want his own AID.
Her own preparations would, sadly, almost certainly cause collateral damage. High enough heat guaranteed full destruction of DNA. Kacey was wired to hell, and it wasn’t with caffeine.
Her counterpart took point on the way out. Stephanie Lyle had wired up for a different reason. Far enough ahead of the others, her destruction would be a diversion, if necessary, in a last-ditch effort to get the rest of the team out.
The boys in the rear had preparation, but less complete. While partial destruction would reveal the fake genome in the event of a thorough search, with the entire team burned, the genome became expendable. The hitters had made a trade-off between risks if Pace’s quarters contained too many surprises. No need to set one of them off by accident and kill them all.
Grannis sighed resignedly. Her competition was good. Too good. As fast as her routines created security holes for her, the other guy found and shut them down. No AID had the intuition to keep up with a top cracker like herself — or her opponent. At their level, this was strictly a PvP game. She got the rest of the team out, barely, but she was about out of tricks.
“Joseph, send by voice, then do a complete purge,” she told the AID, while backing into a Galplas corner as far away from people as possible, and under a vent. The blast would have somewhere else to go in addition to the lounge itself. For whatever good that did.
“Are you sure?” it asked.
“Asherah,” she replied.
“Ready,” it answered. As loyal to the Bane Sidhe as she was, the AID still sounded faintly regretful.
“Goodbye, guys,” she said simply. Nobody ever said an “I’m fucked” code had to be meaningless.
As a man dropped from the vent onto her head, Kacey Grannis’ final words ignited her implosion, joining her with her enemy in what he had never expected to be his final union.
The AID landed fused into what remained of the granite tile flooring, Joseph having already departed for whatever afterlife might be reserved, somewhere, for martyred AIs.
Jacob had scatter-and-go-to-ground engraved by long experience. Dogs, or the technological equivalent, couldn’t even follow them. They all smelled the same. A crowded and very large club downtown had gear pre-planted. A club with four convenient exits, all in common use.
The driver ditched the car at the curb, ignoring the complaints of the guy at the
door and the line by stuffing a wad of bills into the door dude’s hands.
“Rest of the current line, no cover charge, on us,” Stephanie said.
There was still grumbling, but as the word passed back it subsided to a few disgruntled murmurs.
The survivors of Team Jacob were into the club before the men following them were half out of their own cars. The tails had not come prepared with wads of cash, which didn’t really matter as the same trick wouldn’t have worked twice, anyway.
Inside, the five men and one woman dispersed into the crowd, making for restrooms in different parts of the three-story building, themed on heaven, hell, and purgatory. Jacob came prepared. In less than ten minutes, most of those taken up getting through the crowds, the five were in club clothes with very different hair. In less than fifteen, they had met up with their prearranged dates, broken the news to Kacey’s date that she wouldn’t be coming, after all, and began exfiltrating in pairs mixed in with groups.
The dates, hired from an escort service and told to look like real dates — a not uncommon request — were happy to get paid their full fees for simply delivering each team member to a motorcycle at various locations. Smaller and more agile than a car, bikes could shake anything they could outrun, which in this case was damned near everything.
A nice game of drunkard’s walk later, the cycles went into the back of a semi for later retrieval, and five nondescript people piled into a middle-aged minivan and took off for home. The ride was silent and sober. They’d lost one of the family. That they’d exchanged a seasoned professional for a brainless wife-beater didn’t come into it. Every last killer of the Maise family had to die. Any time they went out, all of them knew they might not come back. Kacey had died taking care of business. Sooner or later, each of them expected to do the same. It was an hour before Stephanie finally gave in to the silence and dialed up a song off the current cube. Whether horses drank beer or not, the song felt right. Nobody had whiskey, which was a damned shame. The team stopped at a liquor store just off the interstate and fixed that problem; they hit repeat a lot on the way home.
Shane Gilbert didn’t complain about having to be the sober driver in a car full of drunks. It wasn’t the night for complaining. He just grunted at the bottle of Bushmills Black they’d put aside for later, five brand new glasses clicking lightly in a brown paper bag. It must have cost a fortune, but who gave a fuck?
Pinky Maise looked down at the claymore mine Lish Mortenson, whom he’d been told to just call Lish, had just planted and restrained a groan. The grass around it was bent every which way and it was sitting right out visible, with a bare handful of grass scattered casually over the top.
“Aren’t we supposed to camouflage them?” he asked her.
“Oh, the snow tonight will cover that right up,” she said.
“What if it melts?” he asked.
She sighed like an adult faced with a child who was at the age to ask questions about everything. Pinky mentally acknowledged that he was at that age, but that didn’t mean the questions weren’t sometimes important. Unfortunately, Lish had the brains of a frog.
“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.
