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  The office was a T-shaped building that doubled as a general store. The front area was normally devoted to food and sundries while the back area was devoted to tackle and live bait. On one side of the crossbar was the cash register and an empty cooler. The other side had a door with a sign over it that said “Keep Out.” It was from beyond this door that the voice had issued.

  Both areas were barren. The live bait tanks were uniformly empty and the tackle shelves were bare while the food and sundries area was nearly empty. There were a few jars of peanut butter and some quart Mason jars for sale. Other than that the store had been picked clean. For all it was nearly abandoned, it had been well cared for. The empty shelves had been covered with plastic sheets, to keep flies and their specks off, and the floor was freshly scrubbed.

  The proprietor, propped beside his antique cash register, rolled his eyes and looked out the window as the source of the voice walked into the main area. The woman was fortyish and reminded O’Neal of Sergeant Bogdanovich. She had long, blonde hair tied in a ponytail which hung down her back and wore faded jeans and a peasant blouse. She had one of the darkest tans Mike had ever seen in his life and a nice smile.

  “Forgive my husband, sir,” she said, sliding behind the counter and knocking that worthy aside with a casual bump of her hip. “He’s best suited as a hermit.”

  “I’m sorry to impose on you…” said Mike.

  “It is not an imposition,” the proprietress said, with another smile. “Harry has a lot on his mind is all. But one of them is the condition of the cabins and about that I’ve got to be frank—”

  “They’re a wreck,” said Harry with a slight snarl. “We haven’t had a visitor for nearly a year. There’s only one that the roof doesn’t have a leak!” He thought about the admission. “Well, two.”

  “And those we offer,” stated the proprietress with a tight smile.

  “We’ve used up most of our linens for other things!” said Harry.

  “We’ll improvise,” said the proprietress.

  “There’s no electricity!” the proprietor thundered.

  “There’s the generator.” The blonde smiled.

  “It’s for the ice!”

  “These are guests,” said the proprietress, reasonably, but with a hint of teeth.

  “No! We don’t get a gas ration for guests!”

  “We’ll improvise.”

  “There’s no food!”

  “Oh, pish. There’s fish, lobster, crab…” She turned to Mike, who was watching the familial argument with amusement. “No one in your family is allergic to shellfish, are they?”

  “No,” said Mike with a smile at the play. “Look, let me get a word in edgewise.” He started ticking things off on his fingers. “One, we don’t need electricity. We came prepared to camp out, so we have our own lanterns.” He thought about the argument. “Two, we have our own sleeping bags, so we don’t need linens. Having a bed, any bed, is better than the floor and a roof is better than a tent. We just want to spend a few days in the Keys and maybe get a little snorkeling and fishing in.”

  Mike turned to the proprietor as he opened his mouth to argue. “Look, I understand where you’re coming from. But let me say a few things. We’re prepared to pay and pay handsomely. But if you don’t take FedCreds, we brought stuff that people said was in short supply down here. I’m sorry to point it out, but I notice your cupboards are bare. I’ve got fifty- and twenty-five-pound monofilament, sling-spear rubber, five diving masks and two cases of large hooks.”

  Mike raised an eyebrow as Harry’s mouth closed with an audible clop. When he did not say anything Mike went on. “We’ve also got some other ‘comfort rations.’ So we’ll be okay without all the usual amenities.” He looked from proprietor to proprietress. The two exchanged a look and then Harry shrugged his shoulders.

  “Sir,” said the proprietress with a smile, “welcome to No-Name-Key Fish Camp.”

  O’Neal smiled back. “Call me Mike.”

  * * *

  The cabin was small, old and smelled heavily of the mildew as common in the Keys as mosquitoes. A chameleon had broken off its pursuit of a large antlike insect as Mike opened the door. The cabin had two beds for the adults and another had been prepared for Cally. It was divided into two rooms, the side towards the parking lot being a combination living room/kitchen/dining room, while the rear side towards the bay was the bedroom and bath.

  The furniture must have dated from the 1960s. The chairs, gleaming yellow in the fading light from a window, were all tube steel and cracked plastic padding. The countertops and floor were cracked linoleum, the patterns so worn as to be indecipherable. Mike glanced at the nonfunctional stove, television and refrigerator. The bedroom window showed signs of once sporting an air conditioner, but here under the spreading palms and salt-tolerant oaks the wind was relatively cool. There was running water but the proprietress, whose name was Karen, pointed out that it was strictly rationed and not to be trusted for drinking. There was a certain amount of imported bottled water, but the main source for drinking water was the distiller attached to the icehouse.

  The icehouse turned out to be the center of the little community, as Mike found out when he left the cabin at dusk. The rising clouds of Keys mosquitoes drove him quickly across the parking lot to the knot of men gathered in the screened porch of the large building. It turned out that they were preparing the day’s catch.

  With the exception of the baseball caps, sputtering incandescent lantern and modern clothing, the scene could have been from any time in the last thousand years. The men and women were arranged along tables, talking and laughing quietly as they expertly processed the harvest of the seas.

  How they kept up with whose was whose was a mystery to Mike as rubber tubs of fish were dumped on the communal table. The piscines would slither outward, some of them still faintly thumping, until they reached an available preparer. There they would be filleted or simply gutted.

  Mike was amazed at the speed and technique of the workers. The gutting was different from what he was used to. When he gutted fish he generally inserted the knife into the anus and cut towards the gills. Then the head could be cut off and the guts dragged out with it or the guts could be pulled out by hand and the head left on.

  The fish that were being gutted here, mainly yellowtail grunt and mangrove snappers, were being done in the opposite direction. The knife was drawn across the fish’s throat just forward of the gills then the belly was slit back to the anus. A twist of the hand brought out gills and guts in a smooth motion and the fish was flipped away and the next one expertly snatched up.

  The filleting was, if anything, faster. A cut would be made across the meat of the fish, just behind the pectoral fins down to the backbone. Then a cut would be made along the backbone itself. A third sweeping motion lifted the meat off, leaving a flap of skin attached to the tail. A swift slice along this flap lifted away a clean fillet. Then the fish was flipped over and the same motions cleared its other side. The remains of the fish were going into a bucket; they were useful in traps and for trolling lures. The filleters would stop after every couple of jobs and run the knives over a sharpener, then get back to work.

  Once prepared, the harvest slid down the steel table to the tubs at the end. At that point a group of children under the direction of a young teen female sorted them by type, washed them and iced them down. Whenever a tub got full it would be covered and wheeled into the icehouse, only to be replaced by another.

  After watching quietly for a few minutes Mike picked up an abandoned knife and gloves and joined in. He chose only the types to be gutted, recognizing that his filleting technique was not up to par. He tried his own gutting technique and quickly found that not only did it require more motions, it left more junk in the body cavity. So he started experimenting with the new technique.

  The conversation went on around him, much of it in such a thick cracker accent as to be nearly incomprehensible. The conversation, whether it was the no
rm or censored for the visitor in their midst, centered around the weather to be expected for the next few days, fair, and the fishing, fair, and the price the fish might fetch when the buyer came through in a few days, poor. Despite price stabilization supports and general inflation the price per pound of all the major fish types, even the prized black grouper and red snapper, had been going consistently down.

  Mike kept his face in its habitual frown when Harry and a fisherman called Bob got into another argument about power. Bob was of the opinion that Harry was being stingy in not providing electricity for the regular Saturday-night party at the No-Name-Key Pub. Harry pointed out the consequences of overusing fuel in a way that was so oblique as to be opaque to an outsider. Thereafter the conversation slid to less ominous topics, leaving Mike metaphorically scratching his head.

  Finally the last fish was gutted and Mike stripped off the chain mail gloves. The fisherman called Bob looked him up and down and tossed over a cut lime. “Let’s get washed up and head to the pub,” he said in general. There was a chorus of muttered agreement which Mike decided to take as invitation. The worst that would happen was that someone would try to throw him out.

  Good luck.

  Harsh, homemade soap and the strong Key limes took away the worst of the fish smell and the crowd headed out of the screening to brave the mosquitoes. The distant pub was lit by kerosene lanterns hung over the doorway, but the path to it was pitch-black darkness. Mike found himself walking between Harry and Bob and decided that he was more or less being escorted.

  “It was good of you to help with the cleaning,” said Harry, somewhat stiffly.

  “The more hands the better,” was Mike’s only comment.

  The walked a little farther in silence.

  “You in the Army?” asked Bob, noncomitally.

  “Fleet Strike,” said Mike and heard a faint snort.

  “Really,” said Harry in a sarcastic tone. “I bet you’ve been off-planet and everything, huh? Got a chest full of medals from Barwhon. Pull the other one.”

  “We had a guy down here a couple of times,” said Bob in explanation. “He was a SEAL based at Homestead Airforce Base, or so he said. The cops finally caught up with him. He was a deserter from a Guard unit in Missouri.”

  “He sure could talk the talk, though,” said Harry, bitterly.

  “He stiffed Harry for a goodly bill. And ate us out of house and home,” Bob commented.

  Mike’s nod was unseen in the darkness but they stopped when he did. He reached into the depths of his jacket and extracted a card from his wallet. It was easily discerned by the faintly glowing purple stripe around the edges.

  “You forgot to ask for my ID,” Mike noted, handing it to Bob instead of Harry. As he did he tapped a control on the lower face of the electronic ID.

  A full-length hologram of Mike at parade rest in combat silks sprung up as an electronic voice intoned the appropriate statistics. Name, rank, service, Galactic ID number, height, weight, sex and age were all recited by the combination ID and dog tag. The IDs were made of the same refractory material as the suits, designed to take damage and still be able to identify their users. In a pinch they made a dandy weapon in trained hands.

  The group had stopped when the hologram blossomed. When the recording ended the only thing that could be heard was the buzz of mosquitoes and the occasional idle swat. Bob handed the ID back.

  “Hmmph,” said Harry, noncommitally. “Okay, you’re really in Fleet Strike. Big deal.”

  “And my wife’s an XO of a frigate in Fleet,” said Mike mildly. “And if you give her the same ration of shit I’ve gotten I’ll feed you your left arm.”

  There was a general chuckle from the group in the darkness and a movement towards the pub. “I think he means it,” said Bob, chuckling at the store owner’s discomfiture.

  “Yeah, well,” said the aging hippie. “It’s been so long since I had any red meat, it might not be all that bad.”

  “Things are getting a tad complicated,” admitted Mike.

  CHAPTER 24

  Washington, DC, United States of America, Sol III

  1937 EDT October 2nd, 2004 ad

  Monsignor O’Reilly regarded the small piece of electronics that had mysteriously appeared in his cassock pocket. It looked like a standard flash memory card, but there were no manufacturer’s marks on it. Nor were there any instructions. He finally put it in the flash reader attached to his computer and checked its directories.

  The chip was apparently named “Religious Documents.” The first directory was titled “Rig Veda,” the second “Koran,” the third “Talmud” and the fourth “The Franklin Bible.” He opened up this directory and stared at the single file titled “Install.” He twisted his face a few times, took a deep breath and double-clicked the file.

  It asked for a password. He thought about it. He had not been given a password. The likelihood was that if the first guess was wrong, the chip would erase instantly. Finally he typed, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” The computer chirped and the installation began.

  Either the chip had more memory than any flash card should or the file had been hyper-compressed. The tiny file was expanding to dump a mass of files into his computer. If he had to destroy the evidence it would be nearly impossible to track them all down. He nearly pulled the chip in panic, but the file dump finally ended and a text box popped up.

  “Welcome,” it read, “To The Franklin Bible Complete Study of Human Archetypes And Pre-Historic Myths.”

  There was a new icon on his taskbar, a tiny blue world with a telephone on it. He drifted the mouse across it and the caption “New Messages” popped up. He clicked it.

  “Dear Monsignor O’Reilly,” the simple text box read, “in the event that you do not want this program to stay on your computer, simply uninstall it using the uninstall icon on your desktop. Uninstallation will remove all files created with this program, all messages associated with this program and every bit of evidence that it ever existed on your computer. This will take less than fifteen seconds with the system it is currently installed on. You may also do this by simply saying, ‘Dump the Post Office.’

  “At this time these are the critical messages for the Society of Jesus.

  “The Tir Dol Ron is en route to Earth. His first stop will be the United States.”

  The message that followed was much the same information he had received from Kari. It did, however, include some expansions. Apparently the reason that the Tir was coming to finalize the negotiations was that the humans could not possibly kill this messenger.

  The message contained detailed data on requested defensive systems, construction rates for Galactic-supplied weapons and Fleet construction rates. Actual rates were graphed against planned and currently reported rates and the difference was obvious. The bottom line was that less than half the equipment requested for Terran Forces would be available before the invasion. There would, however, be sufficient materials to equip all the expeditionary forces. Those forces, by solemn and binding agreement, came first.

  With America asking for more grav-guns and fewer being available, it should be an interesting meeting.

  The final piece of information was a note on subsystem suppliers. He nearly overlooked it but a particular note caught his eye. All sixteen Darhel clans were participating in supplying materials for the Fleet and the Terran Defense systems. And all of them were behind on their schedules. However, one particular clan, the Tindar, was farther behind than any of the others.

  He narrowed his eyes and wondered about the significance of that bit of information. The list had been intentionally sorted by negative production rates. It was definitely a clue to something. After a moment’s introspection and a mental memo he returned to reading the primary message.

  “We have no suggestions or requests at this time. The installed software has complete plans for a variety of Galactic systems including descriptions of production and use.

&n
bsp; “All messages will completely clear themselves five minutes after reading; there will be no trace of them on the system. The flash card will erase itself in twenty seconds and will dissolve if submerged in water. We are happy to once again be in contact with our human comrades.

  “The Bane Sidhe.”

  CHAPTER 25

  No-Name-Key, FL, United States of America, Sol III

  0922 EDT October 3rd, 2004 ad

  Mike woke to the to sound of the wind-up radio they had brought with them. It was forecasting four more days of perfect weather to be ended in the season’s first severe cold front. Hurricane Janice was proceeding to the north of Bermuda and was not expected to make landfall in the United States. The United States Ground Force command had recently upgraded its forecast likelihood of early Posleen landings. The new forecast called for small-scale landings to begin occurring no later than two months from the date of forecast.

  Mike snorted and threw aside the poncho liner he had been sleeping in, flipping a small lizard nose-over-tail through the air. The silky, smooth nylon and polyester blanket was a near-perfect camping accessory. It was the one item that Fleet Strike had eliminated from its inventory that Mike disagreed with. Although he understood that the replacement item was supposed to be better in every way, there was an atavistic thrill to the simple polyester fill product that the newer one did not have. In addition to that, there was also the fact that the GalTech version was virtually unavailable, whereas the South Carolina factory that made poncho liners was running three shifts and had ample supplies on hand. It had recently been moved up the waiting list for Sub-Urb production facilities on the basis of the product being designated “critical warfighting supplies.” Not bad for an ersatz blanket.