Gust Front

by John Ringo

  "Softy," said Sharon with a smile and gave him a thump on the shoulder.

  Karen smiled at the byplay then turned to Cally. "You want to swim with Shirlie?" she asked.

  "Sure!" said Cally with a grin. "That'd be spar!"

  "Go get a suit," Karen said, and smiled as the girl scampered off. "Harry and I don't really think children are a good idea," she commented without looking at them as Cally went around the corner.

  Mike grimaced. "I can understand that."

  "She carries a pistol with her?" Karen asked, carefully.

  "You don't?" Mike snorted. "Yeah. And she knows how to use it. She also knows all about firearm safety. Don't worry about Cally; Dad's turning her into a survivor."

  "Our other daughter is off-planet," Sharon said, quietly. She was looking at the dolphin racing around the small harbor. "Could I join you?" she asked.

  "Sure!" said Karen. "The more the merrier. The boys'll probably show up around ten, after they're done foraging. Shirlie's just so lazy she'd rather be fed." Karen turned to Mike. "What about you? Want to join us?"

  "Maybe later," Mike said. "I think I'm gonna go try to butter Harry up. You guys have got a couple of cases of hooks coming."

  Karen exhaled in relief at that the thought. "That would be great. You don't have any idea how bad it's been lately."

  "Yeah," growled Mike. "We've got a few things to thank the Posleen for."

  * * *

  Mike set the case of fishhooks on the counter and smiled. "There's another case in the Tahoe, and the other stuff. I've also got a Number-Ten can of coffee, but you can't have all of it."

  Harry shook his head and smiled faintly. "You sure know how to make friends," he said. He opened the case and pulled out a box of hooks. "We've been making them out of nails and tearing up lures. But, believe it or not, we've got coffee."

  Mike reached behind his back and extracted a hip flask. "I've got some of this out in the Tahoe, too." He took a hit and passed it to Harry. "I'll even give some of it up for some goddamn explanations."

  Harry regarded the clear liquid carefully. "Well, it's a little early," he said, then took a swig. He grimaced and coughed. "Oh! Smooth!" he gasped. "Jesus, what is that?"

  "Georgia Mountain Dew," Mike answered with a laugh. "Only the finest. Now what the hell is going on around here?"

  * * *

  Mike had never had a conch omelet before. He had to admit it wasn't bad, but the thought would take a little getting used to. He scraped up the last of the grits and wiped his mouth with the provided hand towel. The Key did indeed have coffee, and Mike had to admit that wherever it came from it was better than the issue can he had with him. He took another sip of the excellent brew and cleared his throat.

  "So let me get this straight. All fuel is rationed. Okay, got that; it's that way all over. Fuel for the boats is rationed on the basis of their production. High-producing boats get more fuel."

  "Right-on so far," said Harry, taking a sip of the java as well.

  "And power to the islands has been out for months. So you have to have a generator to distill the water and make the ice. And the fuel for the icehouse has to come out of the pool of fuel for the boats?"

  "Right."

  "And every month the price of the fish has gone down along with the fuel ration."

  "Yep," said Harry. "Next month there won't possibly be enough fuel for all the boats and to make ice. If we can't store the fish until the trucks arrive, we might as well give up."

  "What about the stuff you've been holding back?" asked Mike, carefully.

  Harry was cool. "What stuff?" he said, blandly.

  Mike laughed and held up his wrist to reveal the AID. "My AID analyzed satellite imagery of this place for the last year. It says you're holding back about twenty percent of your production."

  Harry grimaced and nodded. "Yeah. But that goes to a lot of places. It's not really . . . available."

  "Maybe you'd better make it available," said Mike, quietly. Hoarding was becoming a real problem as more and more people reacted to the coming invasion with a panic mentality.

  Harry sighed. "If we did that it would take away the only things that make working here worth living." He paused and thought about it for a moment. "The spare isn't just in fish. It's in stuff that's more transportable. It's in dried conch and lobster tails. Shells. Stuff like that."

  "What the hell do you use that for?" asked Mike.

  "Trade goods, partly," Harry answered, holding up the cup of coffee. "There are small traders who move stuff around the islands and up to the mainland. Conch keeps for a long time. There's a market for it in Florida. The traders get stuff in Miami you can't get in places like Cuba and bring back rum and coffee."

  "Oh," said Mike, nodding his head. He was aware that the shortages had created a thriving black market, but this was almost like pioneer days. It sounded like a triangle trade.

  "Some of it goes to the dolphins," Harry pointed out. "They do a lot of their own foraging, but we still eke out their feed. And we do a little dealing on the side with the general goods trader that comes through." He grimaced again. "The damn thief."

  "That bad?" asked Mike.

  "Half the stuff he carries he'll only sell at black market prices. He'll have two cases of corn flour, but officially it's only one case. Once the first case is sold the rest sells at whatever the market will bear."

  "Damn," said Mike with a stronger than habitual frown. "That's not the way it's supposed to work."

  "There's not enough fuel for us to go up to Miami every week or even every month. So we have to depend on the one 'official' trader or the free traders. But the free traders are totally black market and there's no way to be sure what they're going to be carrying."

  "And every month the price of the stuff is going up and the price of the fish is going down," said Mike sourly.

  "Right," Harry said with the same tone. He looked like he'd bitten a Key lime.

  Mike nodded in thought. He had had a thought the night before but it was firming up now. "Let me ask you this, Harry. What happens if you take the icehouse out of the equation?"

  "What do you mean?" asked Harry. "We have to run the generator to keep the fish iced. Besides that, the distiller is our only consistent source of fresh water. We can't take it out of the equation."

  "But what if you could not use the fuel for the generator?" Mike asked. "What then?"

  "Well, that puts off a reckoning," Harry admitted. "We've thought about a windmill or something. We'd be pretty okay then. Hell, I've got an electric car stashed. We could load up on spare batteries and make it to Miami and back with at least some of the stuff we need." He shook his head in despair. "But we don't have a windmill and they're impossible to buy these days. Even if we had the cash. And it wouldn't produce enough electricity to matter. And the first good storm would tear it up."

  "Ay-aaaah-ah," Mike whispered and whistled a scrap of melody.

  Harry smiled. "It's not quite that bad. We haven't had a Viking raid. Yet."

  Mike smiled. "It's an old memory. Who's your electrician?"

  Harry wrinkled his brow in question. "Why the twenty questions?"

  "I'm getting to that," Mike said. "Is it you?"

  "No," admitted Harry. "It's one of the guys on Bob French's long-line boat."

  "Okay," Mike said. "Well we'll have to wait for Bob to get back in to get it installed, but let me show you something I just happened to have brought along."

  * * *

  Good day, thought Bob French as he navigated the cut up to No-Name-Key. The world might be going to hell in a handbasket, but the lack of tourists, fuel and markets had reduced fishing pressure to the point of recovery. Since the types of fishing that prevailed put more pressure on the upper end of the food chain, the stocks of feeder fish recovered in the first year of the emergency. Since then the increases in catch size across the board had been phenomenal. On ledges where he used to be lucky to get one legal-sized snapper he now was taking doze
ns a day. Lobster pots were coming in brimming with "keeper" langostino and occasionally had a real monster, the sort of lobster that hadn't been seen in the Keys since the '60s. And he had always thought that the tales the old-timers told of multi-square-mile shoals of herring and sardines were sea-stories until he saw one just this year.

  This day he was coming in with a boat loaded to the gunnels with giant groupers and snappers. Unfortunately, the thought of what that meant was disheartening. Every month the price was going down for all the fish, even the best cuts. And the official trade company paid in warbucks instead of pre-war dollars or, best of all, FedCreds. The warbuck was deliberately inflationary, so the cost of everything went up nearly as fast as the price of fish went down. It should have been the other way, but it wasn't.

  He suspected, hell, all the fishermen suspected, that it wasn't supposed to be that way. But without any way to communicate with the mainland except mail or driving, nothing seemed to be happening. He had finally used up his hoard of gas tickets and gone to Miami to complain. After two days of getting shuffled from one department to the next at the Marine Fisheries offices he had to get back. If he wasn't fishing he'd find himself on the shore.

  And he was better off than most of the fishermen. His boat was free and clear and one of the larger ones still operating. Two of the guys working for him had lost their boats to the repo companies after they couldn't make the payments. He couldn't pay his crew much—hell most everybody got paid in fish or supplies—but it was something. The communities had pulled together so nobody starved and everybody had a little something extra. But nobody, not even he or Harry, had much.

  What was going to happen when the invasion finally came was another question. But that was a worry for another day. For today there was gutting a bumper haul of fish that would just put him more in the hole for gas.

  He made the cut ahead of the tide race and finally saw something to smile about. John Samuels had made harbor, which was the first bright spot he'd seen in a month of Sundays.

  They called Samuels "Honest John" as a joke. The free trader ran a sixty-foot sloop that carried small cargoes from Miami to Cuba and back. He stopped at all the islands, buying delicacies "on the left" and trading at prices lower than the "official" black marketers. He and the other traders were practically the only source of tobacco and alcohol in the islands.

  The trader was sitting on the dock of the harbor office with Harry and the "visitor" from Fleet Strike. The little fireplug probably was an actual Fleet officer; his casual demonstration of Galactic technology the night before had been impressive. Before everything went south they had watched the video from Barwhon and Diess. Fighting the aliens was going to be hell. He didn't envy the frowning little bastard his job.

  The visitor seemed to have mended his fences with Harry. As the boat took the final turn to the dock the sound of their laughter was clear over the quiet chugging of the diesel. He killed the engines and drifted into the dock; every bit of fuel was worth saving. As Harry and Honest John caught his tossed lines the visitor flicked the butt of a cigar into the waters. Unless Bob was mistaken it was one of John's prized Havana Panatellas. The Fleet guy was making friends fast.

  "How's the fishing?" John asked, taking the boat captain's hand as he jumped ashore.

  "Oh, it was a hell of a haul," Bob answered bitterly. "For what it's gonna fetch."

  "Smile, Bob," Harry said with a grin of his own. "We just got a new set of buyers and suppliers."

  The fisherman looked from one grinning face to the other in puzzlement. "You want to explain that?"

  "FBI agents just performed raids on your suppliers' and buyers' offices along with the offices of the Miami Rationing Board and the Marine Fisheries Board," the visitor answered for them.

  "Why the hell would they do that?" he asked in surprise. "And how did we find out so fast?"

  "Well," answered the visitor, with a slight smile violating his habitual frown, "they are required to perform an investigation at the registered request of a Galactic Enforcement Officer. All Fleet officers are also law officers. A second request from the office of the Continental Army Commander just got them moving faster than you can say 'posse comitatus.' "

  "That black thing around his wrist is a communicator," Harry added with a laugh. "The FBI has already called him back. They said it was the best black market bust they've made since the start of the emergency. It's gonna make national news."

  "Things are gonna be screwed up for a while still, man," Honest John cautioned. "They're gonna have to find a replacement that ain't part of the Cubano Mafia that's been controlling it." He shook his head. "Ain't gonna be easy. The Cubanos have gotten used to having their way in South Florida. One raid ain't gonna stop it."

  "Cooperate," said the Fleet officer. "The assets of the companies have been seized. Ask the FBI to turn them over pending the completion of the investigation. They don't need the trucks to prosecute the perps. And you can probably get them permanently as the 'victims.' Get some materials and convert the old Piggly Wiggly to a warehouse so you don't have to base in Miami."

  "That takes electricity," said Bob, with his own shake of a head. "Which is something we ain't got. We can't afford the diesel to run a generator that big. Even if we're in a co-op with the whole Keys."

  "Ah, well, as to that," said the visitor, with a real grin while John and Harry just laughed.

  "What?" asked the captain, as the crew started to unload. The four of them joined in as tub after tub of prime grouper and snapper were unloaded. He looked at Harry again, waiting for him to go on. "What's so funny?" he asked again, heaving a hundred-pound tub to the Fleet Strike officer. The heavyset dwarf caught it like it was a feather and slid it across the dock. He was even stronger than he looked.

  "Mike had a little present with him," said Harry with a grin.

  "It's not a present," said the visitor, seriously. "It isn't even a loan. One of the things I was doing on my vacation was finding places to plant energy caches. We're seeding the coastal plains with power sources to recharge suit units that get caught behind the lines. When I was on Diess it was a pain in the ass trying to find power. So I came down with three antimatter generators. They've got a finite amount of power, but it's enough to run a small city for a year, so . . ." He shrugged and smiled again.

  "Damn," said the boat captain, tossing him another tub. "Thanks."

  "Well, the priority is any unit that needs it," Mike said severely. "And, technically, you're not supposed to tie into it. But since you don't have a power grid, it's not like the whole Keys are going to be hooked up to it." He shrugged again and frowned. "As screwed up as it is down here, it seems the least I could do for you. Just don't overuse it. It's like a really big battery and once it's gone, it's gone."

  "Well, thanks anyway," said Harry, stacking the last tub on the dock. The three hands were already loading up dollies to carry the fish to the icehouse for cleaning. "This means we don't have to waste fuel for generation so the boats can stay out longer. Hell, we've got a satellite dish, so we can hook up a TV in the pub and even get real news."

  "Getting news again will be great," said Bob, with a smile. "Hell, before you know it we might even have telephones again!" He laughed. "And then it's faxes . . ."

  " . . . and cell phones . . ." laughed Harry. The electronic impedimentia they had all grown up with was as distant as buggy whips these days.

  "Well, enjoy it as long as you can," said Mike grimly. "The first serious invasion will hammer the satellites. And there goes your reception again."

  "Yeah," said Bob, "that's true. But it's a hell of a long time since we got any news but radio. I got a question to ask on that, if you don't mind."

  "Shoot," said Mike, but there was a hint of wariness.

  "You said you were on Diess, right?"

  "Right."

  "There was this guy that won the Medal. They said he got blown up in a nuclear explosion and lived. What really happened?"

  * *
*

  Sharon squealed and spun around in the water as Herman goosed her.

  Karen laughed in return and slapped the dolphin on the flank as it went by. "You have to watch that one. There's a reason we named him Herman Hesse."

  The three of them had been dragged off to a tidal pool by the dolphins. Here, on the Florida Bay side of the island, they had been swimming with the big cetaceans most of the day. Cally had stayed firmly attached to Shirlie, who at less than five hundred pounds was the lightest of the four. The other three were males: Herman, who had more or less attached himself to Sharon, Charlie Brown and Ted. Ted had left for a few hours in the midafternoon, but the others had stuck with them.

  The day had not been for pure fun. The pool was home to a vast collection of the sorts of rare marine organisms that could be traded for luxury goods. Seven species of anemones, several more types of urchins, two types of lobster and various other items had been gathered. Sharon watched Cally as she rode the small dolphin to the bottom of the pool. There, in about fifteen feet of water, the eight-year-old let go and began plucking at the reef. A sponge, a spider crab and an anemone found their way into her mesh bag before she began to claw for the surface and air.

  "This has been great," said Sharon, finning slightly and spinning in place to keep Herman in sight, "but I'm getting worn out."

  Karen smiled. "A little different than what you usually do, huh?"

  "A bit," Sharon admitted. She could see the dolphin trying to get into position behind her.

  "What do you do?" Karen asked. Most of the conversation of the day had been taken up by the tasks that they had been learning.

  Karen had prepared well. The dolphins had taken turns toting the three humans and an inflatable boat full of the necessities of the expedition. She had packed a light lunch of cold lobster salad and some cut fruits along with plenty of fresh water. Sharon had been careful to wear a T-shirt and to insist that Cally wear one as well. The hot South Florida sun would still have burned their legs badly, but Sharon kept Cally well covered with sunscreen. In Sharon's case, the same nannites that scoured Fleet bodies for radiation damage would make short work of the sunburn.