by John Ringo
"Courtesy of Father Dwyer," he announced as he poured a generous measure into each.
Though neither Davis nor McNair could hear it, Maggie and the kittens could. From the very hull and walls of CA-134, USS Des Moines, came the joyous sound of a new birth. The felines, along with the ship herself, meowed in happiness. Morgen, Davis' favorite kitten, stropped the walls repeatedly.
The mantra which so thrilled the cats was simple. It was repeated endlessly: We are alive, We/I have a place. I/we have a history. I have a name.
Interlude
The great clans of the Posleen could afford to make up entire globes, indeed entire fleets of globes, on their own. For lesser clans, it was always necessary to contract with others to make up full globes. These lesser clans were usually the point of a Posleen migration.
When the time of orna'adar approached, the more powerful clans would squeeze out the lesser, driving them to space early. Sometimes these lessers would find planets settled by thresh. Sometimes they would be forced to migrate to a planet held by even weaker clans of the people, driven forth even earlier.
Very often, when fighting to seize living space from a weaker clan of Posleen, the newly arriving, slightly greater, clan would be so weakened that it could not recover before one of the great clans descended upon it. Sometimes, by leaving and conquering early, a lucky clan might prosper enough to hold its own when the great ones arrived.
Clans rose and fell all the time.
Guanamarioch's clan, though it had once been great, was small now. It shared a globe with several others. Thus, in the same globe as held the ship on which Guanamarioch rode, but on nearly the opposite side, traveled the clan of Binastarion.
Among his people, for that matter among the People as a whole, Binastarion was a fine figure of a Kessentai. Strong legs were topped by a solid barrel of muscled torso. The scales of his surface shone well, even by the dim light of the ships. His claws and teeth were sharp, his face cunning, and his eyes glowed yellow with intelligence. Even his crest, when erected, was of an unusual magnificence.
It was, in many ways, a great pity he had been born to a lesser clan. It might have done the People as a whole much good had Binastarion's birth been more favorable. As one measure of his ability, when the time of orna'adar had begun, and the great ones had preyed upon the lesser, Binastarion had fought two clans to a standstill, then created the circumstances that set them to battling each other. This had allowed Binastarion to escape with nearly three quarters of his clan before their threshgrounds were overrun. Already, the Rememberers spoke of adding another scroll to the clan's own set of holy books.
Binastarion's follower and son, Riinistarka, looked upon his father with respect bordering upon adulation. The juvenile Kessentai was Binastarion's chosen successor-in-training, albeit only unofficially. Indeed, to have made his son his successor, officially, at this stage of his development was to invite assassination from jealous siblings.
Of Binastarion's roughly three thousand sons, nephews, cousins—however many times removed—half were, in his opinion, idiots not much improved over the semimoronic normals. They had a full measure of the same stupidity that had driven the clan from the pinnacle of power to the bottom-feeding position they now held.
Binastarion hoped to undo that damage from long ago. Riinistarka was his chosen means, along with a very few others. Already, though the child was young, the father was breeding him and the best of the others, regularly, in the hope of producing more Kessentai of similar quality. Results, so far, were uncertain.
None of those selected for the clan's little program in selective breeding seemed to object, Binastarion noted dryly.
But breeding was only the half of it. For Binastarion's prize breeding stock, the hope and future of the clan, education was called for beyond that provided by the Rememberers or ingrained in the younglings' genes.
Chapter 5
Now, pray you, consider what toils we endure,
Night-walking wet sea-lanes, a guard and a lure;
Since half of our trade is that same pretty sort
As mettlesome wenches do practise in port.
—Rudyard Kipling, "Cruisers"
Virginia Beach, Virginia
The sea breeze cause the white pleated material to rustle and twirl as Daisy Mae stretched her legs. Ahead of her Tex, stocky and stout, lumbered along in his dumb way. Tex wasn't much to look at, Daisy Mae thought, but she felt much safer with him in the lead. Behind Tex and beside Daisy Mae was that witch Sally.
Sally, so prim and proper, thought Daisy, with annoyance. Thinks she's something special because she got that damned part in that Brit movie. Well, I am just as good looking as she is. Besides, I'm the older sister. That part should have gone to me. Twat.
Daisy let her annoyance lapse. Ahead Tex began making a broad, lumbering turn around a corner. She increased her pace to keep up even as Sally slowed.
With a slight, sexy twist of her ass, Daisy turned her two magnificent frontal projections and followed big brother Tex to the south.
Darien Province, Republic of Panama
This far south in the Darien jungle, at this time of the year, the rain came down in unending sheets. Its steady beating made a dull roar on the thick leaves of the triple canopy jungle. Beneath that canopy stood an ad hoc training base—little more than some tents and a few prefabricated huts—just down the trail from the middle of nowhere.
In that base, a mixed team of U.S. Special Forces and Panama Defense Force troopers did their best to train local Indians, a mixture of Cuna and Chocoes clan chiefs, to defend their people against the horror to come.
The Cuna were mostly hopeless; they were simply too nice, too nonviolent and rather too standoffish. Still, the soldiers tried. On the other hand, the Chocoes had some promise . . . if only they could have been taught to shoot.
Antonio Ruiz, clan chief and brevet sergeant first class, Armada de Panama Chocoes Auxiliary, couldn't shoot. The men who had tried to teach him were at the end of their tether. They'd tried rifles, machine guns, pistols, grenade launchers. Nothing had worked; the chief-cum-sergeant just couldn't shoot and neither could most of his people.
Truthfully, the guns terrified him. In Ruiz's world, the loudest noise was natural thunder, or the rare crash of a tree limb cracking before dropping to the earth. Ruiz had never heard a louder sound in his life. Neither had all but a few of his people. The noise of a firearm discharging simply shocked him and most of them silly, every time, and no amount of practice seemed to help.
Silencers had been tried, but the sheer muck and corruption of the jungle made them impossible for irregular troops like the Chocoes.
Finally, in desperation, the gringo captain had made a call to his higher headquarters. Ruiz didn't know the details of that call. What he did know was that two weeks later a shipment of bows and arrows had arrived on one of the gringos' flying machines.
Culturally and racially similar, though not actually closely related, to the Yanamano of Brazil's Amazon basin, Ruiz's people were almost as ferocious as the "fierce people." They had openly hunted heads not merely from time immemorial but as recently as the 1950s. Truth be told, the ban on trading of shrunken heads had only reduced the scale of the headhunting enterprise. Ruiz and his people still took heads, occasionally, in the old fashion.
They usually took those heads from men they had killed with the bow.
Yet those native bows were trifling things when compared to the wondrous staves the gringos had brought, all gleaming wood and smooth pulleys. Truth be said, the Chocoes' bows were little, if at all, improved over the first version carried by Og, the caveman.
Ruiz fell in love with his new bow at first sight. This was something he could understand. This was something he could use . . . when the caimen-horse devils came, as the gringos insisted they would.
Ruiz shivered despite the warm rain, gripped his bow the tighter and vowed, once again, that it would happen to his people only over his dead body.
Cris
tobal, Panama
"Well, they're better than bows and arrows," muttered Bill Boyd as he watched a roll on-roll off freighter disgorging old and rebuilt American M-113 armored personnel carriers. Other vehicles, from various nations including the United States, sat guarded but unmanned in open lots near the docks.
Boyd turned a tanned and handsome face skyward, as if asking God to explain the cast-offs being sent to defend the most important strategic asset on the face of the planet from the greatest threat humanity had ever known. Ah, well, he thought, it isn't all old crap.
In Boyd's field of view, overhead, heading westward, a heavy lift helicopter crossed Lemon Bay on its way to the newly building Planetary Defense Base, or PDB, at the old gringo coast artillery position at Battery Pratt on Fort Sherman. Beneath the helicopter some indefinable, but obviously heavy, cargo hung by a sling. Landing craft, both medium and heavy, likewise plied the waters of the bay, bringing from the modern port of Cristobal to old Fort Sherman the wherewithal to build that base. Other bases, four of them, were also under construction across the isthmus. Three of these, the one at Battery Pratt and the others at Battery Murray at Fort Kobbe and Fort Grant off of Fort Amador on the Pacific side, took advantage of previously existing, and very strong, bunkers that had once made up the impressive system of coastal fortifications for the Canal Zone. Two others, and these were brand new in every way, were still being constructed atop the continental divide near Summit Heights and out at sea in the center of the Isla del Rey.
Maybe Brazil, Argentina, and Chile—all of them at United States' Department of State prodding—had suddenly become aware, once again, of the Rio Pact military aid gravy train. Maybe they were siphoning off conventional equipment that could have been used to defend Panama. But the PDBs, which would be gringo manned, were also invaluable for the defense of North America and useful for the defense of South. These were not being slighted.
Boyd turned his eyes from the fast moving, twin-rotored helicopter overhead and looked downward at himself. He wore the uniform and insignia of a major general. It felt strange, odd . . . maybe even a little perverse. Oh, he had been a soldier, yes. But he'd been a private soldier; a simple, honest soldier. And, too, he had run one of the world's foremost shipping companies based in the world's foremost shipping funnel. One would think the two would go together, that the veteran soldier and the veteran shipper would make a single person who felt like a major general.
It hadn't worked that way, though. Yes, Boyd could plan and supervise and direct the planning of others. He could run a staff. He could give orders that crackled like thunder.
But the general's uniform still made him feel faintly soiled.
Boyd had always taken great pride in having been a man who had fought bravely for a cause in which he had believed, the defeat of Nazism. And that pride was greater because he had done so without regard for his personal safety, his position or prestige, or his family's wealth. He had been offered a slot at Officer Candidate School in 1944 and he had simply refused, preferring the low prestige and honest commitment of the private soldier to the higher prestige, power and perks of being an officer. Besides, three months of OCS just might have been long enough to keep him out of the fighting, if the war ended, as it had looked that it might, in 1944. And the whole point of the exercise was to be a part of the fighting.
Even now he remembered those bitter days of battle in the winter of '44, physically miserable and mentally terrifying though they had been, as the best days of his life. And he had missed them, every day of them, every day since.
Similarly, although scion of one of the foremost families of the Republic of Panama, and although some members of the family had entered into, and—naturally, given the clan's wealth—been successful at, politics; he had always despised politics and politicians. It wasn't just that "power corrupts," though Boyd believed it did. Rather, it was that power had the stink of corruption, of form over substance, of lies sanctified.
And so, outside of the economic realm (where he really had had no choice, given his responsibilities to his clan), Boyd had avoided power, the stench of power, and the falsehoods of power like the plague.
Until now.
I feel ridiculous, he thought, and not for the first time. Every day he looked in the mirror before departing home for the crisis of the day. Every day he saw a seventeen-year-old face staring back at him, a seventeen-year-old face hovering over the uniform of a major general.
"Ridiculous." And I feel like a fraud. And it isn't my fault!
In the presidential palace, the afternoon of his rejuvenation, Boyd had tried to beg off, to volunteer as a private soldier again. That, however, had not been an option.
"You can take this job, and the rank that goes with it," Presidente Mercedes had thundered, "or you can go to prison."
And so Bill Boyd had found himself a very old seventeen again, but wearing the uniform and accoutrements of an office which he simply did not want.
Mentally, he sighed. Ah, well, it could have been worse. They're scraping the bottom of the barrel so hard they just might have tried to make me take command of an infantry division. And wouldn't that have been a disaster?
Boyd paused then, in reflection. He had met all the other generals appointed since the president's emergency decree. Most of them he knew from private life; knew and cordially despised as one of the greatest band of knaves that ever went unhanged.
Especially that swine, Cortez . . .
Poligono de Empire (Empire Range Complex),
Republic of Panama
Manuel Cortez, Major General, Armada de Panama, West Point, Class of '80, and commander of the rapidly raising 1st Mechanized Division, looked with more curiosity than satisfaction at the gringos training the cadre of his new corps in the intricacies of armored vehicle operations.
It was as well that he had the gringos, thought Cortez, because he—West Point education or not—had not the first clue about employment of the armored vehicles and artillery that were to be the core of his new division.
He did know that he wasn't getting first class equipment, for the most part. His uncle, the president, seemed unaccountably pleased about that; Cortez couldn't begin to guess why. When Cortez had asked the president, that worthy had merely patted him on the shoulder, incongruous as that was with the president now looking more like a—much—younger brother, and told him not to worry about it.
The gringos seemed worried about it, though, as did the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, and even Finns who had also come to teach the new Panamanian soldiers the nuances of their new equipment.
Cortez laughed, without mirth. "New?" Some of it was, of course. Most of it, however, was rebuilt. This was true of all of the American-supplied armored personnel carriers, and most of the Chinese-purchased light tanks. Some of the Russian artillery had seen service in the Second World War and spent the intervening decades in naturally cold storage in Siberia.
Yes, most of the equipment was rebuilt. Some—notably the Finno-Israeli heavy mortars—was new. Much, though, was not only old and used, but shoddily made and ill–cared-for since manufacture.
Mentally Cortez added up his building assets: three light mechanized regiments with a mere forty-two real tanks between them, an artillery regiment with nearly one hundred tubes but most of those obsolescent, an armored cavalry regiment with another fourteen real tanks, about one-hundred Chinese light amphibious tanks, something over a three-hundred armored personnel carriers . . . some few other odds and ends.
Against that tally Cortez weighed the debit side: anywhere from several hundred thousand to several million centauroid aliens whose standard small arms could shred most of his armor as if it were tissue paper.
Cortez tallied the one against the other and came up with the only logical decision for a man in his shoes and of his temperament: flight.
Battery Pratt, Fort Sherman, Panama
Though by now the flight to Fort Sherman and the landing at Battery Pratt had become routine
, nonetheless the inbound helicopters were always met by a ground party to guide and direct the landing. Though there were plans to pave the landing zones, or LZs, at some point in time, for now they were simple dirt and grass patches hacked out of the jungle.
The pilot searched for the LZ in the solid green carpet below. Even here, one thousand feet above the jungle, the smell of rotting vegetation mixed with flowers hung heavy. Spotting the LZ, the pilot aimed his bird and carefully eased up on his stick . . . coming lower . . . lower . . . lower until both the ground guide's arm signal and his own feeling for the suddenly reduced load told him his cargo was safely aground. The crew chief confirmed this over the helicopter's intercom. The pilot's finger automatically moved to cut the load, then hesitated, waiting for the ground guide's signal. This came—a slicing motion of the right hand under the left armpit—and the pilot cut the load free.
