by John Ringo
“Okay,” Ryan answered bemusedly. “What the hell, my sergeant at Occoquan was named Leon…”
“I’m a clerk typist, sir,” the soldier replied loudly. “You know, all the antimatter in that thing must not have gone up. Otherwise this bunker would have collapsed like a tinfoil hut.”
“That’s not usually the sort of thing that a clerk typist knows,” Ryan pointed out. The motorpool fence had been shredded by the expanding shockwave so he walked around the gate and through a gap.
“I read a lot of manuals.”
“Uh, huh. I guess that’s why you made for the bunker when they started pounding the SheVa?”
“You betcha,” she answered with a grin. “I helped build these things, the hell if I was gonna let ’em go to waste!”
“Well, if we’re not all going to go to waste we need to beat feet,” Ryan commented, striding down the hill.
“Where are you… we going?” she asked. “And shouldn’t we be… I dunno, organizing the defenders or something?”
“Nope,” Ryan said. “In just about five minutes it’s going to sink in with most of the support units that the Posleen are coming and nothing’s gonna stop ’em. When that happens they’re going to rout. And that means that all the roads will be jammed.”
He pulled open the door of the first reasonably intact Humvee and tried to start it. After he reset a breaker it cranked up.
“What we’re going to do is head for the nearest ammo depot,” he continued. “Along the way we’re going to pick up about four more bodies. And then we’re going to head for the hills.”
“Like I thought,” she said, getting in the other side. “Running away.”
“Nope,” he grinned. “Hills where roads get steep. Because what we’re going to pick up at the ammo depot is all the explosives that will fit in this thing…”
* * *
Mueller walked out of his quarters and looked down the valley as the first concussion of the space-based weaponry echoed up the mountains. He couldn’t see the SheVa gun from his angle, but he did see the signature of its firing and the track of the “silver bullet” heading down range. Nonetheless it was fairly obvious a major attack was underway and he stroked his chin for a moment thinking about what their mission should be. The recon groups were pretty useless in a heavy assault. But these Posleen were acting out of character already by using the landers to assault the Wall.
He stood there for a moment as other NCOs started to filter out of the barracks until he saw the flight of Posleen flying tanks.
“AID,” he said, holding his wrist up where the device could observe them. “Do you see those?”
Most of the group had moved out of sight to the right, presumably attacking the artillery park. But one group could be seen sweeping up and down in singles, apparently assaulting something on the east side of the valley.
“I do, Sergeant Mueller. Be advised, the target of those weapons is SheVa Fourteen. Given their weaponry and the number of passes, it is likely that they are going to penetrate its containment system.”
“Map the corps forward areas,” he said, glancing at the hologram. “Map probable destruction zone of SheVa catastrophic kill.”
The results were not good; if… when SheVa Fourteen went, it would gut the corps.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered. “Get me Sergeant Major Mosovich… and you’d better make sure General Horner is aware of this.”
* * *
Horner looked at his own hologram and shook his head. He had, indeed, been apprised of the situation in the Gap by a call from Eastern Headquarters, and he had to admit that it looked rather bad. He recalled one of his favorite maxims for a moment like this, coined by one of the few really effective British generals of World War II, to the effect that things are never quite as good or bad as first reports indicate. In that case what had just happened in the Gap was simply a disaster rather than the end of the war.
He also noted that even with an AID, the map was not the reality. And it never hurt to ask an on-scene observer.
“AID, where is Sergeant Major Mosovich in that mess?”
“Sergeant Major Mosovich is about four miles west of the Corps Bachelors Noncommissioned Officers Quarters.”
“Get him for me, please.”
* * *
Mosovich adjusted the strap of his pack as the team reached the top of the ridge. From there it was easy to see the stream of vehicles that indicated a corps in full “bug-out boogie” mode. Not that he could blame them; the detonation of the SheVa was bad enough, but he could see the rear group of landers swarming over the main valley of the Gap; without a functional SheVa gun there was no way to resist those.
“Sergeant Major,” his AID chimed. “General Horner calling.”
“Put him through.” Mosovich sighed. “Afternoon, sir.”
“I notice you don’t say ‘Good afternoon,’ Sergeant.” The AID threw up a hologram of the officer in the distant headquarters and he had his habitual tight, grim smile locked down. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Full tilt bug-out boogie, sir,” Mosovich said. “We’re heading up into the hills to try to swing down and take a look at them as they pour past or, if it goes the way I’m figuring, try to E E out to the west. The AID says they’re pouring through one hundred thousand an hour and that matches my rough guess of the ones I can see. And we saw flying tanks; the AIDs have visuals on them now. I don’t see the corps rallying either, sir. And there’s a Sub-Urb just to the north; I’m afraid that’s going to be on its own, sir. I’ll tell you the truth, sir, I don’t like it at all.”
“Neither do I, Sergeant Major,” Horner replied. “Normally this corps would be backstopped at some point, but this area…” He shrugged. “There’s also the fact that, apparently in support of this move, the Posleen all up and down the eastern seaboard are pushing at all the passes, gaps and roads, everywhere. There’s even a small incursion that has made it into the Shenandoah between Roanoke and Front Royal. I expect other small incursions as things go by. For that matter, I wouldn’t be surprised if we lost more than one Sub-Urb in this campaign; we’ve never been under a full court press before.”
“That’s… not good,” Mosovich said. “Among other things, we’ve got a lot of industry in the Shenandoah, don’t we?”
“No, it’s not good,” Horner agreed. “The area that they are in actually has three SheVas; unfortunately all of them are under construction and none of them are armed; we’re looking at losing them half built, which is four months production down the tubes. Move as you see fit, Sergeant Major. If we need you at a particular point, I’ll call.”
“Can I ask what you intend, sir?” the sergeant major asked diffidently. “In this area, I mean.”
“I’ll probably try to plug the hole,” Horner said. “Eastern Command is moving units to close the roads out of the area; there’s a recovering division east of Knoxville that is being spread out and pushed forward. But, realistically, the Gap is like the bottom of a funnel; once you get out of the gap, there are roads in every direction. Closing all of them against that much Posleen pressure is going to be hard; better to close the Gap again and deal with the landers if and when.”
“Plugging the hole will be… difficult, sir,” Mosovich said, shaking his head. “Whatever unit is in there is going to be hit from four directions at once; there’s probably still over five million Posleen down in Georgia trying to force their way up, there’s going to be nearly a million at their back, there’s landers in the air… Just about anybody would evaporate like spit on a hot griddle. With all due respect.”
“You’re right, Sergeant Major,” Horner said with a very tight smile. “Just about anyone would.”
CHAPTER 26
Newry Cantonment, PA, United States, Sol III
1405 EDT Saturday September 26, 2009 ad
Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but swiftly they hav
e sidled back to power
By the favor and contrivance of their kind?
— Rudyard Kipling
“Mesopotamia” (1917)
Mike touched the next e-mail in the queue, which was from Michelle, his youngest daughter, and the message flashed up on his hologram. Michelle had been evacuated off-planet, along with over four million other Fleet dependents from a variety of countries. The ostensible reason for this was to free up the Fleet personnel from worrying about the security of their children. However, since only one child was taken per Fleet “family,” the recognized reality was to create a pool of humans in case Earth was lost. When Mike was feeling really cynical he wondered if they were also hostages to ensure the good behavior of the Fleet. Practically everyone in the service had at least one child being raised by Indowy; it would be easy enough for the Darhel to arrange “accidents” if necessary.
Michelle sent him a letter once per week, whether he needed it or not. In the last year they had gotten… colder and colder. Not upset or angry with him, just… leeched of emotion. It was starting to bother him enough to want to mention it, but he’d come to the conclusion there was no way to do a darn thing about it from 84 light-years away.
Michelle was as brunette as her sister was blonde and, to make things worse, she seemed to have inherited her father’s nose. Other than the nose, however, she was starting to be the spitting image of Sharon O’Neal, down to the voice. It was hard, sometimes, for Mike to remember he was dealing with his daughter; Sharon had occasionally taken that same cold, remote tone when things were bad.
“Good day, Father,” she began, giving him a small nod. “There are four items of interest this week…”
She wore mostly Indowy fashions now and the covering that was standard Indowy dress looked something like a Mao jacket. Between that and the expressionless monotone of her delivery it was like listening to a poorly designed robot; she could have written the thing and built in more emotion. The Indowy were an almost aggressively selfless race, making the individual submission to the whole something of a religion. It was probably that influence that was making her so remote, so… alien.
He realized he had blanked on what she was saying and re-ran the video. Comments on old earth news, report on the final battle for Irmansul — he had an after-action report, a better one than she did, on his AID — discussion of a promotion, of a type he couldn’t decipher, for an Indowy he couldn’t place at the moment. It occasionally occurred to him that as an honorary Indowy lord, more like a duke or archduke, he really should take more interest in Indowy society. On the other hand, most of his brain cells these days seemed sort of wrapped up in better ways to kill Posleen.
He realized he’d drifted again and there was something important he’d missed; she’d seemed almost animated for a moment. Ah…
“The fourth and final item this individual has to report is acceptance to level two sohon training. Sohon is, as you should be aware, the Indowy field of technical metaphysics. You are, of course, trained for suit fitting which is a specialized form of level two sohon. However, as far as can be determined, this individual is the first human to be accepted for unlimited level two sohon. It is believed that a level of four or even five sohon may eventually be attained. It is to be hoped that positive acclaim may be accrued to the Clan of O’Neal by this and future accomplishments.
“Those are the four items of interest for this week. Looking forward to your reply, Michelle O’Neal.”
Mike reran that part of the tape twice shaking his head. He knew, generally, what she was talking about, but the specifics were sort of eluding him. One of the problems with GalTech was that everything had to be produced by Indowy technicians on an individual, custom, basis. Humans, even humans like O’Neal who had had some training in the technique, generally referred to it as “praying,” but that wasn’t really what was happening. Because the Indowy had been working with atomic level micro-manufacturing for, literally, thousands of years, their method of manufacture involved using swarms of nannites to build products atom by atom in vats. This gave them the capacity to build materials that violated many “known facts” of materials science; the nannites could make atoms do things that occurred only as low probabilities in any other method.
However, the process defied control by even the most advanced computers. The nannites were best controlled through a sort of direct neural interface. An individual Indowy, or, more commonly, groups, would take seats by the tank and… manipulate the nannites. It was not a direct thought process; it involved giving the nannites general directions and then… letting them use the individual’s brain as a remote processor. For a suit fitting, it mostly involved staying very still and sort of meditating while concentrating on the suit “adjusting” to the person it was being shaped on; the nannites and the suit personality handled the rest.
However, as he understood it, the problem with most forms of class two and higher was that the person or team had to hold a perfect image of the item to be produced, down to an understanding of the molecular alignments for all of the individual components. A suit, for example, was a six-month process of construction involving one level six, a grand master of sohon, and dozens of lower level Indowy, all meditating in meta-concert on a perfect image, down to the last atom; that was why a suit cost almost as much as a frigate.
He had to admit that the concept of a human advancing to class two sohon, especially an eleven-year-old, even a prodigy like his daughter, was rather amazing.
He thought about how to compose a suitable reply. If he was too positive, too emotional, she might see that as a rebuke of her own distance. On the other hand, if he was too wooden, she might see it the same way. Finally he gave up and gushed.
Dear Michelle,
It’s really great to hear about your advancement. I have to say that your success is a very good reflection upon the family and that you should be very proud of it, as I am. I hope to someday be able to congratulate you in person and I look forward to the day that we can all be together again as a family.
Your loving father,
Dad
He always sent his replies as text, typing them into an old word processor program and letting the AID convert them to a suitable format and send them on the military network. A laser transmitter would add them to the queue and squirt them at a deep space satellite. From there they would be transferred to Titan Base, then sit in a Jovian communications buoy until a ship was headed out-system. Every ship carried the mail in and out of the system, dropping it at other buoys until eventually, in about six to ten weeks, faster than any but the fastest military courier, it reached Michelle’s planet, Daswan. Given that a transport ship would take over a year to make the journey, that wasn’t too shabby.
Mike looked at the message and frowned. There should be more, he should be talking about the battalion and things that they had done. But he knew that Michelle had grown very uninterested in the blindsided slaughter that was Earth; she didn’t even seem to want to return. He was losing this daughter, probably had already lost her, and he didn’t know what to do about it or even how to do anything about it. She had been dropped into the Indowy, raised by the Indowy and she was becoming Indowy. And he didn’t know what to do about that either.
Finally he gave up and hit Send.
The next message was from Cally and it, too, was everything he had come to expect. Cally’s messages were not nearly as frequent as Michelle’s and the two sisters were clearly developing in… somewhat different directions. Cally also did not have access to GalTech and, therefore, sent a standard text message.
Hey Daddyo
We had visitors this week; some ladies from the nearby Sub-Urb and a couple of snake-eater buddies of Baldy. They had some kids with them who were, like, totally weird. They’d never been outside or shot anything and the weirdest shit freaked ’em out. I mean, don’t even mention Posties around these guys or they got, like, spastic.
No big news other than that. Baldy shot a fer
al up the hill, but that’s no big news. I mean, I got a deer, Baldy shot a feral, Wow!
Oh, Baldy’s made some mention of one of the ladies that was visiting shacking up with him. Maybe. I’ll believe it when I see it. She’s a nice old biddy and I think it would be good for him to get laid once in a while; maybe he’d lighten up. But I’ll believe it when I see it.
Oh, yeah, DUDE! Way to stack some horse up in Rochester! Can we O’Neals kick ass or what?
:-)
Take care and remember: HVMs Smart!
Cally
Mike sighed, hit reply and blanked. All things considered, he preferred the Rampage to the Robot, but replying to Cally had its own problems. Should he point out that referring to her grandfather as “Baldy” was probably not the best of all possible actions? Or that at thirteen, worrying whether her grandfather was getting laid often enough was probably not her business? For that matter, it probably wasn’t her business at forty.
For that matter, was she sexually active? I mean, Dad would probably pass that on to him, but there wasn’t much Mike could do about it if she was. What was he going to do? Sitting the guy down and having a man to man talk with him was out; he was five hundred miles away.
And then there was the whole bloodthirsty edge she had developed. He had noted it in Tommy Sunday as well. The generation that was being raised in the war was a generation soaked in blood; they were desensitized to a degree that he found unhealthy.
Maybe it was a valid reaction to the conditions, but a generation so… disinterested in the value of life — it seemed to extend to humans as well as Posleen — was not going to be reconstructing a positive, growing, functional society after the war.
