by John Ringo
“ ‘Dom! Dom! Dom! I’m a dom, I’m a dom,’ ” Harkless started singing.
“That’s sick!” Mike said.
“You know those are the words, sir,” the sergeant said, grinning. “Hey, are you going to torture your daughter, who you don’t know is your daughter, for information? In a very slightly pornographic manner?”
“Not unless Michelle happens to be on the planet,” Mike said. “Which she’s not. And I don’t think I’d try: She’s got this whole…” He stopped and shook his head. “Let’s just say that you don’t mess with the little green guy.”
“Sir…” Cuelho said, confused. “What are you talking about?”
“General,” the pilot called. “LZ in thirty.”
“I’ll explain later,” Mike said, putting on his helmet. He made some whooshing sounds. “Just not the same.”
“Well, sir,” Harkless said as soon as he had his settled. “In part it’s because you’re thinking of the wrong movie.”
“Oh?” Mike asked, picking up his rifle and checking it. Yup, thar’s bullets in it. He tucked it into a tactical carry and hit the release on the straps.
“What you really need is a great biiig black helmet.”
“Sergeant Harkless, you are sooo going to pay for that.”
Then he started humming.
“Dum! Dum! Dum-tee-dum, dum-tee-dum.”
“Sir,” Harkless said, his armor jiggling. “I’d like to be able to hit what I’m shooting at?”
“All the remaining dependents are headed for the back door,” Tommy said. “There’s… a bit of a crush.”
“Don’t let anyone get hurt in the stampede,” Cally replied in a monotone. “ACS just set down. They’ve spotted our top-side eyes and have taken them out with wonderful precision,” she added bitterly. “All we’re getting is flashes of an ACS suit and then… snow.”
“Hey, we’re…” Tommy stopped and shook his head. “They are good.”
“Where’s your head on this, Mr. Sunday?” Cally asked, spinning around in her chair. “Seriously. This has got to be fucking with you.”
“Other than the stakes, would I rather be on the other side?” Tommy asked. “Oh, hell, yeah. Wouldn’t you? Do I miss ACS? Yes. Do I think we have a chance in hell of stopping them? Depends on how good the commander is.”
“The LT doesn’t have any experience,” Cally said. “The platoon sergeant was the commander of the 501st ACS regiment during the war. That was when it was down to about a battalion, but he started as an LT in the 501st.”
“Then I’d say we’re screwed,” Tommy said, shrugging. “But all we have to do is slow them down enough that the Indowy and dependents can make it to the shuttles. That we should be able to do.”
“Our lives, our fortunes,” Cally said. “At least we don’t have to give up our sacred honor.”
“I hate elevator shafts,” Mike said, looking at the hole where a barn used to be.
The bodies from the mercenary force were still scattered amongst the snow. If it bothered the general it wasn’t obvious.
“We can just drop on grav, sir,” Sergeant Harkless said dubiously.
The platoon was spread out in a perimeter just in case there was a way for the enemy to pop up behind them. Of course, any weapon capable of defeating ACS gave off some energy trace. On the other hand, so did ACS. So while they could spot the enemy, the reverse was also true.
“And get picked off in a shooting gallery,” Mike said. He’d long before learned not to bother shaking his head in armor. He pulled out an AM grenade. The grenade was about the size of a small protein bar and shaped somewhat like one. Given that it could be dialed up to near kiloton range of output, the term “suicide bar” had come into vogue since the war. “What do you think?” he said, holding it up.
“Never use finesse when force will do, sir,” Harkless replied.
“Where have I heard that before, Sergeant?” the LT asked.
“What the hell was that?” Cally asked at the deep throom! that had boomed through the station.
“Suicide bar,” Tommy said. “Set to about a half-ton release.”
“I guess they’re not being subtle,” Cally said.
“Never use finesse when force will do,” Tommy said.
“That sounds like a quote,” Cally said, frowning.
“It is,” Tommy replied. “Your father’s.”
“Clear,” SPC “Shark” Waters said, spotting three sensors, two visual and a subspace sensor, and taking them down. “Area is secure.”
Waters had been born in Waynesville, West Virginia after the war. So he’d never lived in Urbs. But that didn’t mean he’d never visited them. Urbs tended to run a bit more to the wild side and as Kipling put it: Single men in barracks don’t turn into plaster saints.
But he’d never seen an Urb like this one. Painting Galplas, which was the primary material used in them, was difficult. In fact, it was pretty much impossible. So the walls came in four shades of institutional ick.
Not these. They’d been painted, somehow, into a riot of colors. There were also Galplas benches lining the walls, which were not standard for Urbs.
“Something different about this place,” Sergeant Jon Akers said.
“Go figure,” Shark replied. “ ‘Sir, we have secured the entry of the rebel base!’ Hey, at least we’re not in white armor.”
“You know what always happens to those guys, right?” Akers said. “I’ve got a moving energy source.”
“Sensor bot,” Shark replied, firing through one of the Galplas walls, which dissolved in a white flash, and removing the sensor. “ ‘Look, sir! Droids!’ ”
“Follow the bouncing ball,” Akers said as a movement arrow appeared. “And keep the references to yourself.”
“You know,” Mike said, looking around the atrium. “For a place that’s apparently deserted it doesn’t feel deserted.”
“Know what you mean, General,” First Sergeant Harkless said. “Got that puckering feeling.”
“Teams aren’t encountering any resistance, sir,” Lieutenant Cuelho said.
“Noted, LT,” Mike said, looking at the building schematic.
The “secret base” was, indeed, a Sub-Urb. At least it had all the signs of being one. And not a standard one by any stretch of the imagination. As the teams moved cautiously forward they were building a map, not only of their own positions but the areas immediately surrounding them from sensor systems on the suit. But that was all they had. He still didn’t know what he was really dealing with and that was making him unhappy.
This atrium was an example. The ceiling was much higher than standard with a “view” of the sky. Also larger than standard with walls that had been Sohon modded to various pastels. If Mike had any question about the rebels’ access to GalTech it was disabused when he saw the “painting.”
“Shelly, tell me you’ve hacked into their mainframe or something,” Mike said.
“Sorry, General,” his AID replied. “They’ve got AIDs of their own. And very good cyber systems. So far I haven’t even scratched it and I’m getting outside help.”
“Well, a whole bunch of Indowys and humans came into this base,” Mike said. “They’ve got to be here somewhere.”
The sniper position was long prepared.
Advanced weaponry gave off a whole host of signatures and any decent sensor system could detect not just the antimatter signature of grav-guns but the power signatures of plasma.
For that matter, the ACS suits gathered in the atrium should have been able to detect the hidey-hole. The small shot opening was, after all, lined with a very thin layer of uniarmor, the same thing that made ACS invulnerable to nearly any weaponry.
But where there were measures, there were countermeasures. The wall was carefully constructed to appear to be nothing more than part of the Galplas wall. To any normal test it had the same resonance as normal Galplas and certainly could not retract for a moment then close after the sniper had taken his or her shot.
; Papa wasn’t certain that the wall was going to stop grav-gun fire, though, so he personally intended to take one shot and then get the fuck out. The hide also had a drop-out system under higher than normal gravity with a bouncer at the bottom. If they didn’t return fire in microseconds, he was golden. And they’d have to be very good, very good to spot him return fire and get a shot through the loophole that fast.
The ACS point, however, had eliminated all the sensors in the room. So he wasn’t quite sure exactly where they were. He knew they were in there, but not exactly where. He was, and he knew it, going on hope. If the command group, especially the commander, was in the right spot he’d get his shot and at least, for a moment, disrupt the attack.
If not, he was still planning on getting the fuck out.
“The rabbits are in the pantry,” Candy whispered.
The entire base was wired. There was no way they were going to risk radio communication up against ACS. Candy was hooked into an outlet in the wall of the hidey-hole and another wire ran to his rather old-fashioned set of headphones.
“Initiate in five,” Papa whispered. “Candy call it and lift on command.”
“Roger,” Candy said. “Five… Four…”
Papa settled into position and snuggled the heavy grav rifle into his shoulder.
The two ACS suits moved cautiously down the corridor, shoulder-mounted grav-cannons training from side to side, hands ready to attack, defend or draw secondary weapons, the operators monitoring their sensors for any sign of the as-yet-to-reveal-himself enemy.
Sergeant Jonathan Doggette was one of the platoon’s designated Close Quarters Combat instructors. A four-year veteran of the ACS, like most of the platoon he had yet to see combat.
With the long transit times to the areas of main operation, bringing “blooded” personnel back just to be instructors was an enormous waste of time, money and manpower. Instead most instructors came straight from Advanced training, were run through a quick course and then worked their way up the chain from assistant instructor to full, then specialized in one area or another.
The entire platoon recognized the problems with the system. Despite regular communication with in-contact forces, there was really no substitute for experience. They knew, in their bones, that there were things that needed to be in the instruction program they were just flat missing.
One of the biggest problems was close quarters combat. No units had engaged in it with Posleen since the war. And then rarely. Most close quarters work in the war was on Diess in the massive megascrapers that dotted that planet. And most of that wa a harum-scarum affair of “whatever works.” Nobody had ever really sat down and worked out what worked and what didn’t with ACS from a CQB standpoint.
So Sergeant Doggette was looking forward to this engagement. It would give him valuable experience that he could pass on to his trainees and maybe keep some of them alive. It would also give him a basis to make recommendations in changes to the training manuals in the area of CQB.
If the enemy would ever show himself.
“Amy, I’ve got an energy reading at forty meters, mark two point eight minus,” Sergeant Doggette said.
“That’s a secondary fusion plant,” Amy said. “Or I would have highlighted it. There don’t seem to be any…”
The AID broke off as a karat flashed into view. Before Doggette could even begin to engage, fifty rounds of 3mm grav smashed through his frontal armor and turned him into paste.
“General, we have three units down,” Shelly said, highlighting the engagement. “Two WIA, one KIA. Very sophisticated camouflaged ports. Plasma cannons and grav-guns.”
“Roger,” Mike said, looking at the schematic. “Lieutenant?”
“We’re… giving as good as we’re getting, sir,” Cuelho said. If he was nervous it wasn’t evident. “More, in fact. All three defense points that ambushed our units have been taken out.”
“We don’t want to get caught up in furballs,” Mike said, looking at the schematic that had been built so far. “Under, over, around, take them in the side and back.”
“Yes, sir,” Cuelho said, with slightly less assurance.
“Like this,” Mike said, bringing up the schematic so that it was repeated to the lieutenant, and started to trace out paths of attack. “Alpha second goes down, over to the left, up, hook back. That puts them to the rear, flank, of this defensive position. Bring Bravo around the same way to the—”
“GENERAL!”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The port dropped and, for Michael O’Neal, Sr., time froze.
The commander of the attack had set up more or less where he expected. And he had him, unquestionably, dead to rights. A hair’s breadth squeeze. The port would drop. He would drop out. Defenses would close around him. He would live. The ACS commander would be dead and that would give some of his men, some of his family, a brief second chance.
He had the crosshairs dead on the sniper triangle of the suit. Right under the helmet there was a slight weakness. His son had mentioned it to him more than fifty years ago and if there was one thing that Papa O’Neal had an elephant’s memory for it was military trivia.
His son.
The armor was distinctive. Papa had seen it on repeated news clips over the decades. News clips that he stored and replayed over and over again in his most private moments.
His son.
The battles that he and Cally had engaged in for decades were important. He would have given up the strife long before if he didn’t believe that. Would have dragged his granddaughter away if he didn’t think they mattered. But they were cold, dank, bitter. There was an honor there, but it was constantly tarnished. There were no parades, few medals and damned well nothing to write home about.
His son.
Of all of his children, his grandchildren, even the immensely successful Michelle, Mike was the one who carried everything, from Papa’s perspective, good and right and clean and perfect in the world. It was not something he would ever mention to Cally. Ever hint. Nothing that his children by Shari would ever suspect. Which is why he replayed those clips only when he was in his most private moments. Really, only Candy ever knew.
A hint, a flinch, a deep breath and the nanometers left of trigger squeeze would be complete.
And his son would be a puree inside of his customized Armored Combat Suit.
They would not win the battle but it would help immensely. The ACS, their most cherished hero dead, would be livid but confused. If Mike O’Neal could die, what were they facing?
If his son could die…
It was an instant, a flash of neurons that processed more information in less time than the most sophisticated AID. A gestalt of total oneness.
A perfect moment for any warrior.
Mike didn’t really need Shelly to scream. He was looking more or less right at the sniper. The positioning had been… superb. It was as if the man had read his mind. The sniper had him dead to rights. And Mike knew, looking at the weapon, at the shooter, that he, Lieutenant General Michael O’Neal, holder of two Medals of Honor and the Globe of Valor, was dead.
There were other things that Mike, in that brief moment, knew. The man, he was certainly a man despite the concealing clothing and body armor, was a juv. How Mike knew he couldn’t say. His steadiness? His calmness? The set of his perfect shooter’s position? It didn’t matter. This was a man who had been in combat for a long time. There was no way in hell he was going to miss.
Blue eyes. The shooter was all away across the atrium, far too far away to see that sort of detail, and firing through a narrow port. But it was suddenly as if Mike had the vision of an eagle. The man had blue eyes.
His rig-out was… perfect. Every item was placed just so. Some of them had subtle angles to them that made it almost look messy, but it wasn’t. The placement was more… combat feng shui. Sometimes it wasn’t best for a magazine holder to be directly up and down. Tilted, slightly, might work a bit better.
This was a man w
ho had honed his skill for years, decades. Centuries?
Training, experience and sheer monkey survival instincts lifted Mike’s right arm at lightning speed, bringing his under-arm microgrenade launcher in-line. The slot was remarkably small but it wasn’t as if Mike hadn’t hit smaller targets.
Before the first grenade was out of the launcher, however, he knew two more things.
The sniper recognized him. There was no motion, no widening of the eyes. But something, a form of telepathy in the zen state of that moment, told General O’Neal he was both recognized and that the recognition was unexpected. That the sniper was as shocked as he was.
The second thing almost made him check his fire.
The sniper lifted his finger from the trigger.
The armored door snapped back up but two of the antimatter grenades had made it through. The hide vanished in a ball of plasma as antimatter touched matter and engaged in an orgy of mutual annihilation. Whoever the sniper was, whyever he had chosen not to kill General Michael O’Neal, was a mystery.
“Jesus, General,” the lieutenant snapped, practically jumping into the air. “Are you okay?”
“Never better,” Mike replied, calmly. “As I was saying…”
Cally had her hands together as if praying, thumbs under her chin and index fingers pressed against her lips. Tears were streaming down her face.
Tommy reached over and put his hand on her shoulder.
“Cally… Do you want me to take it?”
“I’m just focusing,” she said. “Dammit! How in the hell did they take him down? The hide was cloaked, the position was armored and it was Papa!”
“They’re… very good,” Tommy said, gently. “Some better than others.”
“Miss O’Neal,” the AID said carefully.
“What?”
“I’ve parsed data from your late grandfather’s PDA,” the device replied. “I have an identification on the enemy commander. Who also was the person who… fired on your grandfather’s position.”
