by John Ringo
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 said, 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 go
t 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 dropped 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.
Pinky offered to hold one of the buckleys, and thankfully Eric let him. His go-to-hell plan if the other boy insisted on deviating from the deployment mission was to bump the emulation of this buckley up to seven and get it to lead them the right way home. Buckleys always listened and obeyed right away if you told them to get smarter.
Eric started insisting they go back, and was beginning to sound threatening.
“Hey, I’m just thinking of you,” Pinky said. “Jenny and Miranda have really been picking at you. You don’t want to get back and have been beat by a couple of girls do you?”
“They probably already went home,” the bigger boy sulked.
“Yeah, but we don’t know for sure. Besides, you’re better than any old girl. And even if they did go home, you just know they’ll be such brats about it,” Pinky added.
“Yeah, okay. But I’m cold and this is boring. I don’t see why we have to do it, anyway. Miranda gets so snotty sometimes I wish she wasn’t a girl so I could hit her.”
“She’s pretty bad,” Pinky agreed, even though he’d never met the girl.
“Oh, hell. If we’ve gotta, let’s just speed up and get it over with. I’m freezing.”
Now that was something Pinky could agree with wholeheartedly. The snow was really falling hard. He’d bet anything the storm was a total surprise to the grown-ups back at base, who must really be freaking out by now.
“Hey, I just thought! If we skip the last one, we can tell the buckley to get smarter and make it take us home,” Pinky said. He should make it sound like Eric’s idea, but he was getting too tired to manage the other boy so well. Best to turn him home. He wanted to go there, which should make him more manageable.
By the time they got back to base, Pinky was also reaching his limit for tired, cold, hungry, and bored. Mostly, he was bored with Eric. The other boy wasn’t a bad kid, it was just that, effectively, Pinky had been babysitting him all day and it had been unnerving, and dangerous, and he was completely worn out.
They were some of the last children back to base. He hadn’t known the buckleys had been implanted with a routine to start calling base if the kids strayed too far off the prescribed path. He really wondered why the grown ups had bothered. They’d had to go pick up a bunch of kids with snowmobiles, the kids copped out before emplacing half the buckleys, and the snowmobiles had to go back out and lay out the remaining buckleys in their places anyway, once the cold, snowy, cranky, whiny kids were all back at base.
The buckleys emplaced by adults, on the other hand, had all gotten where they were supposed to be the first time. Very few adults could fail at the simple task of being directed to a spot by a buckley, putting it down, getting oriented facing home, and walking back. Very few, and Lish was kept at base to take care of the kids as they came back in, anyway.
It was only when he was grousing about it all that night that his dad pointed out the obvious.
“Pinky, what if it hadn’t snowed?” he asked.
Duh. Pinky felt like a dope. Of course they couldn’t have used the snowmobiles, because there wouldn’t have been new snow to cover the tracks. Nobody would have ever thought to question children’s footprints in the snow. It hadn’t been a dumb plan, just a freak storm. Pinky felt better as he ate his bean soup and corn muffins. Boring food, but at least it was hot.
Lieutenant Green’s medium brown hair wouldn’t stay spiked for anything, even short. It just flopped over like something from the turn of the century. He kept it regulation and didn’t mess with it. His nose had a conspicuous bump at the bridge, not quite a hook, and he hadn’t messed with that, either. His Adam’s apple was prominent, but he felt okay about that. His last girlfriend had thought it was cute. That relationship got fucked up when the unit went O’Neal, but he hadn’t chosen the service as a career because he wanted to sit in one place and settle down. Moving around was part of the job, just as if he’d gotten his orders. Which he had, since Colonel Mosovich had taken Atlant
ic Company rogue, intact.
Given the magnitude of the unlawful orders they’d been sent to participate in on that last op, Green could live with that. He had thought through a few sleepless nights and decided that the O’Neals had as much claim to trying to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States as the official government, who were provably corrupt puppets for the Darhel. He had known the system was rotten, but he hadn’t known how much until Boomer took out some holos and walked him through exactly where, how, and why the voters lost control of everything. The Constitution was a dead letter, and he knew it. But he’d still sworn to protect and defend it, and at least the O’Neals would put it back if they could. It made them as close to good guys as he could find in this messed up world. Besides, they talked about your guys being your real family. It turned out with the O’Neals that was literal and the unit was about half either O’Neal or Bane Sidhe. That had been a huge shock. He’d felt like he’d been lied to, betrayed, and didn’t even know these guys he’d sweated beside, fought beside, drank with, bled with. It shook his world more than he could even describe. The atrocities on that last op, vile things done by what was supposed to be their side, had carried him along through the shock and into mutiny along with the rest of the unit.
It had been the dependent murders, and the sure and swift justice meted out by these people, that had finally made him into an O’Neal. He hadn’t made up his mind about the Bane Sidhe yet, but the service records of the O’Neals in the Posleen war and since — they were legendary. Tommy Sunday. James Stewart — who looked nothing like himself but Green was convinced. Papa O’Neal had fought beside the old man in ’Nam. The old man had never heard of these Bane Sidhe, or Clan O’Neal, before that final op. Colonel Mosovich and Master Sergeant Mueller were living legends in their own right, and the colonel had made the decision, even after what had to have been even more of a shock to him than it was to Green. What it had come down to for Green was that he trusted the old man and his brothers one hell of a lot more than he trusted the brass up a chain of command he already knew was fubar.
