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  “Yes, ma’am, that’s a solid guarantee.” He swallowed hard. “Of me not running off at the mouth, I mean.”

  “As to OpSec, let’s just say that Granpa has very well-developed survival instincts,” she said.

  “Good point.”

  Chapter Nine

  Greenville, South Carolina, had been a minor manufacturing powerhouse before the war. Lockheed-Martin, Michelin, Kemet Electronics, and more — all had plants to take advantage of the non-union labor, ready to work. The original textile mills that had been the mainstay of the economy since antebellum times had lost ground to the cheaper labor overseas, but the area’s job base had continued to grow. Before that, it had been a resort for tidewater aristocrats seeking a break and some fresh scenery back in the wilderness. Now, it was ruins, with good odds that it would not be inhabited again for a long, long time. The entire county had been held back from the bounty farm program as a joint service field training area, administered by SOCOM.

  The damage to the buildings in the various sectors of the city hadn’t been done, mostly, by the Posleen. Oh, they would have gotten around to it eventually. But they had been more focused on the land held undeveloped by the country millionaires who, prewar, had wanted some acreage under their homes. So the buildings had mostly been unmolested by the invaders. The true destruction of Greenville had been wrought, in various stages, by humans. First by the owners themselves, who preferred going scorched earth over leaving their homes to the Posleen. Then, in small part, by those of their neighbors who had a true fondness for explosives — enough to make them wait beyond initial evacuations to mine and booby-trap anything they could get their hands on, regardless of ownership. The artillery had been the next source of damage. Then Fleet. When the troops came sweeping in after the war, the areas targeted by Fleet were flattened. Fleet hadn’t screwed around when it, finally, arrived to lift the siege. Any area with any indication of Posleen build-up had been scorched by plasma and hammered by kinetic energy weapons.

  The areas hit by arty had various building walls still standing. A stairway or corner here or there. Walls of half-underground almost basements.

  The areas Fleet hit were finally getting fully covered with vegetation.

  Those buildings had been rebuilt with the cheapest bulk methods available, where needed, with no regard to aesthetics. Troops needed practice urban combat as well as in different types of field terrain. So various troops worked their trade on the buildings in Greenville’s demolition area — cleared and fought through, blew up and smashed and rebuilt, sometimes even the streets, again and again. Live-fire urban training, with demo, meant their only opposition would be dummy defenders. But that was for Saturday.

  Tonight was in the blanks and VR section. Mosovich’s enhanced night-vision goggles incorporated VR software that interpreted and remapped the scene to look like an old-fashioned black and white movie in full daylight. The goggles had a setting for color, but the machine guesswork involved in colorizing the scene could be disorienting when the machine guessed wrong. Doctrine, which the colonel agreed with, was to keep the color turned off. Field testing had demonstrated, to the satisfaction of the brass, that “black and white at night” gave troops a significant advantage over an opposing force using the colorized setting.

  Tonight, Mosovich was glad for the warmth of his silks. Greenville in October could be cold at night, and tonight was an unseasonable bitch of a freeze. He had had himself declared an initial casualty, along with Mueller, so they could get a good look at the performance of the troops. On top of the observation towers, the wind and the light drizzle stung his face and ears so much they ached. His standard cover was hardly a barrier to the escaping heat. Who would have guessed South Carolina at night would be this cold? He looked over at Mueller, whistling cheerfully in his optional attached hood, mouth exposed only to drink the cup of instant coffee he’d just brewed with water from a heater canteen.

  “Sergeant Major Mueller, you know use of heater canteens on a night mission is strictly against regs. Where’s my cup?” Jake felt around for a packet of instant coffee and dumped it in the steel mug he unhooked from his web gear, holding it out for some of the hot water, himself. He suppressed a twinge of guilt about the troops below, who wouldn’t be able to use the heater canteens because of the white IR spot the goggles would show to the opposition force. They were moving, and mostly in the buildings, protected from the worst of the wind.

  “Mueller, let’s add a little incentive to the mix. Get a detachment from Bravo Team to set up some ‘loot’ of hot coffee and spare hoods in a few of those buildings.”

  “Yes, sir.” David Mueller grinned evilly, understanding the confusion it would add to the exercise to have a bunch of random troops running around who were working for neither side.

  The explosions on the demolitions course sent up plumes of dust and smoke through the holes in the roofs. SOCOM’s Training Command had set up the courses with dummies and VR hostiles. DAG units not only had to navigate a complicated course involving the location and “demolition” of selected targets, they had to do so under directed and suppressive virtual fire from said hostiles. The course was a fiendishly difficult test of a unit’s ability to shoot, move, and communicate in concert with a primary demo mission.

  The observation tower for the demolitions course was set well back from the activity, serving both for simulation and live runs, so that Mosovich had to use the enhanced features of his field goggles more than he would have liked. He was fine with the zoom, but he’d never quite gotten comfortable with shifting the view so that he was looking out from the eyes of one of his officers or men. He wasn’t happy using it in combat against humans at all. After Vietnam, Jake had a healthy respect for the wits of the enemy. He considered the use of the “alternate eyes” feature to be a serious breach of radio discipline and a prime example of assuming the enemy was stupid. DAG primarily fought humans. Assuming the enemy would be smart enough to do what he would do had kept him alive more than once before, and he wasn’t about to get lazy just because Posleen didn’t fight that way. Well, okay, there was that time down in Georgia, but that must have been the Posleen equivalent of military genius, because we’ve never seen it again. Not that I ever heard of, anyway.

  He turned as Mueller climbed onto the platform, holding his mug out for a cup of strong coffee from the thermos his sergeant major seemed to have grafted onto his web gear for field exercises. He zoomed back in on the action, watched for a minute, and shook his head.

  “You know, you would think that looking at a red-headed troop I should know exactly who the guy is even if I can’t see his insignia. What is it with all the redheads?” the colonel asked.

  “Yeah, it’s funny, but have you noticed we tend to get a lot of two kinds of guys? There’s the little red-head guys. Most of ’em are kinda stocky but it’s all muscle. Then there’s the really big dark-haired guys. It’s kinda weird, like the war did something to the gene pool or something.” Mueller wrinkled his forehead, taking a big sip of the steaming coffee.

  “Now that you mention it, Top, it is a bit strange. I don’t think I can even make a guess at what could cause it. Probably just some bizarre coincidence. Go figure.” The use of the traditional nickname, “Top,” for the ranking NCO in the command was a mark of respect and appreciation used by everyone, officer or enlisted, to distinguish that NCO from all others. It marked the NCO thus named as the go-to guy for all the thorniest practical problems of service life that someone hadn’t been able to solve at a lower level. He, as an infinite fount of military wisdom, would exercise near-magical powers to slice through whatever Gordian knot the Service had provided this time.

  Jake watched his men glide through the course as smoothly as if they’d done it a dozen times. He’d looked it up. The course had been substantially redesigned since the last time they’d been through. Whatever personal problems the previous CO had had, he had left behind a first-rate outfit.

  The service had
DD’ed the bastard after JAG caught him banging a sixteen-year-old girl, then flushed the unit’s senior NCO who, far from reporting it, had been blackmailing the jerk. He’d seen a picture of the girl from Mueller’s buckley, and you almost couldn’t blame the guy. Almost. Still, a juv at least three decades her senior had one hell of an unfair advantage. Which made the sonofabitch enough of a sleaze that Mosovich wasn’t too surprised to hear that shortly after discharge that pair — the guys, not the girl — had gone on a drunken binge, gotten behind the wheel and smashed themselves into whatever hell was reserved for old men who preyed on high-school girls.

  There was one thing niggling at him, though. Sure, sometimes good officers could be sleaze-balls. Soldiers weren’t by any stretch plaster saints. But everything he’d seen about the guy indicated that he was a grade-A clusterfuck. Both the commander and the sergeant major.

  Usually, when you had a grade-A clusterfuck in charge of a unit, no matter how elite, the unit went to shit. They might get the job done, but they weren’t top-drawer.

  DAG had cruised along as if it didn’t matter. As if having a commander who was a daily clusterfuck wasn’t a problem. Might even have been preferred.

  As if the commander just didn’t matter. As if having an incompetent in charge was not such a bad thing. As if there was the Unit and then there was whatever screwball the brass had saddled on the Unit.

  As the new commander, Mosovich wasn’t too sure how he felt about that.

  The charcoal and red shades that blended on the Grandfather’s walls appeared to shimmer three-dimensionally. The dragons were so real you wanted to reach out and touch them just to make sure they weren’t there. Most observers would assume there had to be some clever tricks of Galtech materials involved in the illusion. A very close look would reveal that not only were the patterns two-dimensional, the dragons were each individuals. Each had five toes, as befit its noble stature. Yet each had its own body and face among the rest. The artist had spent only God knew how long bringing each dragon into its own semblance of life.

  Stewart was early, or he wouldn’t have been waiting. The Grandfather believed in punctuality, and achieved it within his organization by always displaying it himself. “Lead from the front” was one Western aphorism that the Grandfather wholeheartedly agreed with. Precisely as his watch clicked over to two o’clock Greenwich Mean Time, the door opened and a man walked in. His hair was still completely black. Stewart suspected the use of hair dye, since his face showed the deep lines and dryness of rapidly advancing age. An advancing age that was tragic for his friends and colleagues as well as the organization. Unfortunately, there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. In the early days of the war, a handful of the Tong hierarchy had been successfully rejuved. Unfortunately, the stolen drug sets had been improperly handled, through ignorance. Since then, the ignorance had been remedied, but too late for the ill-fated first generation — the first generation of Tong rejuvs would get about a tenth of the benefit of a proper rejuvenation. The botched rejuv suffered from its own lacks, plus the seemingly impenetrable wall the Galactics had come up against that limited the original process. Once the initial nano-repair mechanism was fully set in motion, its own processes prevented its ever being repeated. The Grandfather and the upper echelon of the Tong had lived well into the twenty-first century, and had succeeded at passing on their institutional knowledge to the next generation, but at what now seemed a very high price.

  The head of humanity’s largest and most powerful organized crime syndicate was a blocky, solid man. He wore a black, European-cut suit, moving with a fluid grace that belied his arthritic knee joints. He walked behind the large walnut desk and sat, folding his hands in his lap to face the freshly-minted older brother who had asked for this unprecedented meeting, after dispatching a large chunk of expensive Tong resources on an unexplained errand. Stewart knew this meeting would lead to a permanent change in his position in the Tong, one way or another. He watched the old man suppress a sigh and put his hand to his heart. The man’s fondness for Szechuan cuisine was well known. As was his distaste for taking medication he deemed unnecessary. Even antacids. Given his experiences, it was hard to blame him for his skepticism.

  “It’s good to see you today, Yan. How are you? Would you like some tea?” the old man said, as a pretty girl brought in a lacquered tray with a traditional tea service on it. She looked about sixteen, but could have been anything from fourteen to forty. She placed the tea on the desk and left quietly, shooting a quick glance at Stewart under her lashes.

  “Yes, thank you. I’m having a very good day, and you?” Standard opening, no real clue to his mindset. Stewart accepted a cup poured by the man who held his life and death in his hands. Of course that was always the case with Fleet Strike. Superior officers had the power of life and death. At least theoretically. I should be used to it by now.

  “You would shudder to see my schedule.” He poured his own cup of tea and sat behind his desk, fixing a direct gaze on the younger man.

  Translation: I’d better not be wasting his time. That’s fine, since I’m not. “There is… history of the war that our people rarely speak of, and never when we are not face to face,” he said. Yeah, like those Darhel bastards sandbagging Earth’s defenses and letting the Posleen through to eat three billion people in Asia.

  “Our organization has much history, all worthy of study. We have a very long history of survival.” The old man regarded him with a gimlet stare over the rim of the tea cup.

  Right, we keep our mouths shut because we don’t want our people to die. Stewart carefully kept his eyes fixed on the Grandfather’s collar. Respect was key in this meeting — was always key with someone this far up the chain. Stewart had grown up in latino gangs, and gone from there into the entirely Westernized Fleet Strike. The differences in eye contact rules in Asian culture were still something he had to think about. One thing his counterintelligence training in Fleet Strike had stressed was how difficult it was to overcome the little gestures and telltales every agent drank in with his mother’s milk. The trick was to identify the ones that you, personally, always had to be mindful of. Even when your “role” was now your real life.

  “An excellent example for study, sir. Another of our strengths is that we have always patiently sought opportunities to recoup debts of honor and exploited them, when the costs were affordable, and most eagerly when honor could be reclaimed at a profit.” God, what a mouthful. All that to say that we owe the Darhel and I’ve got a way to screw them and make money doing it.

  The only thing that moved in the Grandfather’s face was his eyes. A couple of rapid blinks confirmed that he’d understood. One of the other reasons the Darhel haven’t caught on to how bitter the Tong’s enmity is with them. The Darhel’s information processing and artificial intelligence capabilities were awe-inspiring, but there were still things computers just didn’t do very well. One of them was parsing the indirect communication that was an absolute rule of courtesy in some human cultures. For all that, the Darhel must engage in very indirect communication themselves when hiring out their violent dirty work, Cally had confirmed for him, once, something the Tong and Fleet had long suspected. Perhaps because the Darhel were much less indirect in their business communications, even their best AIs completely missed the subtext of the more indirect human conversations. Except when violence was contemplated — they caught indirect conversations about that very well. The Darhel analysts just weren’t as good as they thought they were about remembering that other species were alien. Humans had a leg up on that skill, being the most polycultural of all the known sentient species. The Tong had exploited that Darhel weakness ruthlessly to gain and maintain a high and pervasive institutional awareness of all that the Darhel were, all they intended, and all the payback the Organization owed them. Payback had been a long-term project, contemplated only in the abstract — until now. The fucking elves were too used to assuming absolute species supremacy in business matters, and the Tong w
as about to fuck them right in the pocketbook. Stewart had his own debts to pay to his ghosts. He ruthlessly suppressed the feral grin that threatened to break through his polite mask, but couldn’t quite prevent it shining through in his eyes. The Grandfather’s eyes narrowed and lit with an answering gleam as the old man leaned forward.

  “The advent of such an opportunity, if proper care could be taken, would be auspicious. Very, very auspicious. You begin to interest me.” The head of the largest and most powerful, unsubverted, solely human organization in the Galaxy set his tea to the side and leaned forward in his chair. The fires banked underneath the cold rage, so long held in check, began to burn. Stewart could almost see the man silently counting his dead and reckoning the interest.

  “I apologize that time constrained me to send the first ships before we could meet. The opportunity would have been lost.” Stewart allowed his eyes to meet his superior’s for a moment. When the old man nodded, he continued, “This is what we have set in motion…”

  The Indowy Aelool walked the halls of the O’Neal Bane Sidhe base with one of his younger clan brothers, but recently arrived on Earth. The youngster had tested as a high genius for the aptitudes important in the field of xenopsychology, leading the clan head to request his presence especially as an apprentice. Coming from his Clan Head, the request had more force than the strongest human command. A human would have been surprised that a clan head of even a tiny group like Clan Aelool — tiny only by Indowy standards — could disappear for long periods without ringing alarm bells in the heads of the Darhel. It was actually the youngster whose disappearance had taken more arranging. Clan heads were some of the very few Indowy who were not under contract to one Darhel Group or another, instead serving the clan as a whole. As such, the Darhel were long accustomed to having little to no contact with the head of this clan or that clan for centuries at a time. As long as the clan’s members were meeting their contracts and causing no trouble, the Darhel reasonably presumed that the clan head was off somewhere doing his job. Wasting time worrying about a relative handful of Indowy among the trillions and trillions would have cut into real business. For the Darhel, the clan heads had no other function than to maintain the system that kept the masses of Indowy well under control.