Sister Time lota-9 Read online

  Chapter Eleven

  Tommy Sunday looked at how badly Papa O’Neal was shivering and was very glad the older man was driving, up near those front heater vents. He might be metabolically an early twenty-something, but that didn’t make him immune to hypothermia. The man’s next task would be crawling up the back side of a hill on the cold ground, moving slowly enough under his ghillie suit not to get any body heat from exertion. George’s real-world experience, like Cally’s, was more urban. Papa was a better man in the woods, and was the logical man for the task. He needed to get his core body temperature back up, get thoroughly dried out. His hair was still dark with water from his swim, and that just wouldn’t do.

  The cyber initiated a pre-set program with his, clean, AID to track their progress and jimmy with the cameras accordingly. The AID would tell him if something unexpected came up, but adding static didn’t take much babysitting. He pocketed it, climbing into the back of the car after the unbelievably stacked blonde. Damn, it was a good thing women couldn’t read guys’ thoughts. He’d be walking around with bright red hand prints on his face all the time. She turned to stow something in her gym bag behind the seat and one of her tits pressed against his arm. Not that it had anywhere else to go. Determinedly, he thought about cleaning out the cat box when he got home. They were Wendy’s cats, but it was his week. Sand didn’t do nearly as good a job as prewar clay litter had.

  Thanks to his wife’s hobby of buying and reselling antiques, frequently after a little research and restoration, and the war-pay investments of his they had converted into anonymous accounts before they “died,” the Sundays weren’t hurting for money. Too many other people were, O’Neal, Bane Sidhe, and strangers. He and Wendy had learned how old money used to feel, back in the northeast before the war. If you were comfortable, you didn’t show it. Envy was a dangerous thing, and attracted parasites besides. He didn’t mean the first generation O’Neals. He would’ve gladly helped Cally or Papa, but they wouldn’t take it. The Bane Sidhe, though, would have pressured them to strip their assets as surely as fourteenth-century monks had latched onto anyone around their own bailiwick with land or cash. All in a good cause, of course.

  It was a good cause. But he and his risking their lives in it was plenty, especially given the lack of results and the lack of down chain loyalty the Indowy had shown towards the operatives and sleepers. Sure, the O’Neal Bane Sidhe was better for the reduction in Indowy control, but not that much better. Father O’Reilly was a good man, but with the vow of poverty and never having married, the needs of families with kids and grandkids to care for sometimes slipped by him. Tommy and Wendy lived almost as frugal a lifestyle as anyone, but he was damned if he’d give up resources they needed whenever one of the young men hadn’t come home, and would need again. The kids still needed shoes, and schooling, and braces on their teeth. They needed time with a mom who wasn’t worn out from working herself into an early grave. He didn’t at all regret working to bring the Darhel down, but the years had nurtured in him a certain bitter wariness about the Organization. They didn’t mean to be callous bastards. They meant well, bigtime. They were necessary allies. But the Sundays and O’Neals always made sure they could take care of their own, because for sure nobody else would.

  This train of thought always made him grumpy, but at least it had kept him from embarrassing himself until his “clan sister” — who sure as hell wasn’t his sister — quit wiggling around. Barely. Friend. Of. My. Wife. Down, boy. Besides being a damned dangerous woman to piss off. Don’t be stupid, man. Breathe.

  He stared out the window as they bounced their way over the river and through the woods, threading whatever path they could through the trees, using the top of the hill where the building was as a rough guide. Most of the way, the old roads had kept out enough tree growth to let the truck through. Sometimes they had to go off and find their way around fallen trees, old telephone poles or other debris. Fortunately, the ground was hard enough that the truck didn’t leave obvious fresh ruts. Not ones that would last very long, anyway. It sent creepers up his spine and left a lump in his stomach to be in Fredericksburg again. It did every time he came back to the place that had once been a thriving town. It had been the most horrible handful of days in his life. Bar none. He’d been scared shitless a lot of times through the war. He would’ve been a moron not to be. Nothing compared to Fredericksburg.

  He lost his dad, his friends, everything. In a single day. Worse was knowing they had been eaten, butchered under the boma blades of the stupid but unstoppable hordes of ravenous tyrannosaurlike centaurs as they swarmed over his hometown like a plague of locusts. They weren’t his worst nightmare. They were worse than that. He’d been in the local militia, like all the boys and men. Not that it had helped Fredericksburg, which had the misfortune to be the site of one of the first scout landings in the war. Already a proficient sniper from his prewar marksmanship hobby, he had taken up a position knowing — flat out knowing — that he would not survive the day, but determined to kill as many Posleen as he could before they got him, too.

  Somehow, he had ended up with Wendy and handed her one of his spare rifles. Not that he had really expected her to do much with it, not really. She had just deserved the chance to try. What stuck in his mind most from the day was the stench as the smoke from the various explosions on the outside of town blew in on the wind. Faint at first, by the time the horses came in the carrion reek rising from the streets and blowing into their faces had been overwhelming. At the time, the adrenaline had been pumping so hard, with him so focused trying to stay in the zone to make every shot count, he hadn’t noticed much. It only came back to him in memory, later. Maybe the memory was enhanced by the smell of the battlefields after, before he was chosen for Iron Mike’s Fleet Strike ACS. One of the best unsung advantages to fighting in a combat suit was the way you didn’t smell the Posleen.

  The yellow scales of the carnosaurs had been covered all over the front, that and all six limbs, with orange smears of mixed human and Posleen blood. More blood had leaked into the gutters as they marched down the street in their usual bunched up mass. All that was the yellow of the hermaphroditic cannibals’ own ichor. Human corpses from the hell of the scout wave’s landing had long since been consumed or passed back to ranks in the rear for processing. He hadn’t noticed at the time; his scope inadvertently swept over the gutter between the horde and the street drain as he came down from recoil to line up his next target. It was only afterwards that every detail of the day stood out starkly in his memory.

  When Wendy got hit in the back of the leg, his getting her down to the vaults under the city, quick, had been the only thing to do. They still didn’t think they’d live, not really. She had known about the vaults as a town history buff. His plan before he ended up with her had been to move from one firing position to another before ultimately dying in place. With her, he had a responsibility to at least pretend with her that his plan was going to do them some good. Then she got injured and it had been easier to contemplate dying himself than it was for him to leave a beautiful girl, his unrequited high school crush up until The Day, to die on that roof with him. Then under Fredericksburg, one thing had led to another and he and Wendy had ended up making love. At the time, they were both too much in shock for it to feel like a strange thing to do. Since then, he’d gotten used to the horniness inevitably evoked by the near death experience of battle. Some wit, he didn’t know who, had once said that the most exhilarating experience in the world was to be shot at — and missed. It was.

  As far as he knew, Shari O’Neal, his Wendy, and a handful of kids from the creche they had both worked in were the only women and children who had survived both the Fredericksburg landing and the Posleen eating the Franklin Sub-Urb, where many survivors of Fredericksbug had been sent. What a goatfuck that had been. Disarmed residents, no exits except from the top — the way the Posleen had to come in. They might as well have planted a big, neon, fast food sign on the top of the place. He
hated the Darhel more for the deliberate mis-design of Franklin than for anything else. The dying act of the men from Fredericksburg had been to Hiberzine the women and children and stash them underground, stacked like cordwood in an old pump house, hoping they’d hidden it successfully from the Posleen. Those men had acted in the purest tradition of heroism. Many had done as much in that war, but nobody had done more. Only then a lot of the survivors had been sent to Franklin, which had been made a zero-tolerance for weapons zone at the insistence of the Galactics — which meant the Darhel. Designed with no exits. Franklin had been near the Wall, just inside Rabun Gap. When the Posleen broke through, the women, kids, and old people in Franklin hadn’t had a snowball’s chance in hell. Except that Wendy and Anne Elgars, a woman soldier of the Ten Thousand who’d been recuperating from near-fatal injuries, had gotten Shari and the kids out through the ventilation shafts and a small exit in the hydroponics section. Again, Wendy’s habit of finding out everything about where she lived had saved her life. And the lives of the handful of others she’d been able to take with her.

  Thank God his mother and sister had gone to Asheville instead of Franklin. They didn’t get eaten, but what with the war and all, and the way everybody changed, by the time he and Wendy officially died, he and his surviving family hadn’t been close.

  He knew he was in Fredericksburg, which brought back all the ghosts he thought he’d laid to rest decades ago, but he couldn’t recognize anything. Every once in awhile he’d get a glimpse of something he thought might once have been familiar, but he wasn’t sure if he really remembered it or was kidding himself. The woods were anything but a healthy forest. There were plenty of trees, but mostly large patches of weeds and grass. Their roots and the elements had done a job on the rubble and compressed ground, which was punctuated by falling scraps of walls. The rusted spikes of rebar that crested above the weeds in places contrasted sharply with the twisted girders. Between one thing and another, not all of the metal in the ruins of Fredericksburg had gone into the Posleen nano-tanks. Some cities, in the rear of the Posleen occupation, or under more efficient God Kings, had been totally obliterated, so thoroughly had they been scoured for resources to feed the Posleen’s infinite needs for war materiel. His home town had been left with its ghosts. He didn’t know whether that was good or bad.

  With difficulty, he shook himself out of his involuntary review of The Day. It didn’t do any good to get caught up in past shit. There was just too much of it. Fuck it, drive on. Going fishing with one of his sons or grandsons was usually how he straightened himself out. Which it would be time to do when he got home, but now was time to have his head in the game.

  The Fleet Strike silks threatened to pull him back into more unwanted reverie, of the months he’d spent fighting with the Ten Thousand, after getting dug out of Fredricksburg. Shortly after, he’d been transferred from the U.S. Army to Fleet Strike ACS — where he’d gotten used to wearing silks, in the rare times when he wasn’t living in his suit. Now he was back. His conversion away from the system had come at the very end of the war, when to stay alive and keep the Posleen from pouring into the American heartland they had had to hide their moves from their Darhel-issued AIDs. Even back then, he was every bit as good with a computer as he was with a rifle. There was no way for the Posleen to be reading the AID network unless the Darhel had deliberately given them access. Put together with the designed-in vulnerabilities of the Franklin Sub-Urb, that were also too comprehensive to be accidental, nobody had needed to draw him a picture. Now he was back. For an hour or so, anyway.

  He checked the blue stripe on the back of his buckley for what must have been the fifth time, reading over Michelle O’Neal’s data on the mission that discovered the alleged Aldenata device. On a Crab planet the ACS had nicknamed Charlie Foxtrot, being unable to pronounce the Galactics’ name for the place, Fleet Strike had engaged in heavy fighting with pockets of Posleen resistance in areas the powers-that-be deemed too sensitive to be neutralized by Fleet from orbit. According to Michelle, Fleet Strike had received orders to divert some equipment recovered from the Crab equivalent of a museum, and deliver it up the line. The museum was listed in all official Galactic records as a total combat loss. Cally’s sister believed, and his experience agreed, that Fleet Strike kept more information in its records than it acknowledged to its Galactic bosses. Especially when ordered to do something it might have to cover its ass for later. He sure hoped the Michon Mentat was correct in her information about what they’d find in the records this time. It would really, really suck to have come all this way for nothing. Not to mention how much longer it would take to come up empty. Finding something was quick. Finding nothing was what took time.

  Date, planet, coordinates, unit, commanding officer. If it was there, he should be able to find it. If it was there. He checked the blue stripe on the back of his PDA again.

  “You’re not nervous, are you?” Cally asked. “That’s about the tenth time you’ve checked that thing.”

  “No, I’m good. It’s just… Fredericksburg.”

  “Yeah, that’s gotta suck.”

  “No shit,” he agreed. “On the other hand, it takes my head right back to when I was with Fleet Strike, so it’s not all bad.”

  “I wouldn’t have minded being with Fleet Strike,” Harrison observed, pouting. “Parts of it, anyway.”

  “Very funny. Keep a lid on the camp. It wouldn’t play well with the target. Stick to the sports,” Cally said. “You’re checking your notes, right?” From what Tommy could see, he was playing solitaire.

  “I’ve got it. I drilled it until I’m blue in the face. I can talk baseball with George for God’s sakes. Don’t jostle my elbow, dear.”

  “You’ll be fine,” she assured him.

  “I know.” Harrison winked at her. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep it simple.”

  “We’ve got the fence ahead,” Papa said, softly, pulling the Humvee up. He stopped it short of the expanse of chain link topped with razor wire that cut a line through the woods. The woods on this side looked very much like the woods on that one, with nothing obvious about the land to tell why the fence was here and not there.

  Harrison was out of the truck first, approaching the barrier with an old-fashioned multimeter and a black leather bag that looked like something an old country doctor would have carried. The fence was probably electrified, but its main purpose was as a simple barrier to announce the presence of a stupid Posleen normal charging through it. It also served to keep out equally stupid humanist radicals, seeking street cred with others in the protester set.

  Tommy nodded to himself when the fixer started pulling out assorted wires and clippers. Electrified. He and Cally got out, breath frosting on the air. He put his buckley in the pocket of his silks and sealed it in, patting the other pocket to make sure his emergency field kit was in place, dropping the AID into the seat. Unlike conventional clothing, the pockets on his silks would stay reliably closed until he pressed the top corner again with a finger. They were comfortable as hell. He’d regret turning them back in at the end of the mission. Not that the Bane Sidhe had another operative who would fit silks made for Tommy Sunday. They didn’t have anybody else as big as him. Which incidentally also meant Harrison had to cut the hole in the fence big enough for him to get through. The smaller man was used to it by now. Still, it was a good thing silks didn’t snag.

  Schmidt One looked up at his brother and said, “When we come back out of here, we’re going to have to stop for me to patch the hole. Otherwise they’ll find it the next time they run their maintenance checks. The idea’s that we were never here, right?” It wasn’t really a question.

  “Cally, you’re through first,” the fixer said. “Tommy, get the other side. It just wouldn’t do for her to get scratched up on all these rough edges.”

  “Nope. Ruin the whole effect.” Papa O’Neal spat neatly out the driver’s window. “Through you go. Get moving.”

  George put the box of coffee su
pplies, graced by a well-known brand name, on the ground next to his brother. “Here,” he said, handing each of them a small data cube. “Terrain updates. That’s what the pictures were for. Cross referenced with the hummer’s tracking measurements, it should be pretty solid — at least for what I was able to see. I’ve also marked backup rendezvous points.”

  Cally took the cube without comment, pocketing it. Tommy and Harrison at least nodded at the smaller man, who smiled faintly before going back to the car.

  Sunday followed her through the fence, letting her get as far away as she could without losing sight of her. He began following as she moved in to the southwest. He could hear the faint crackle of leaves under Harrison’s feet behind him. Good thing the noisier man would be the farthest one from any unfriendly ears.

  They’d walked just over two hundred meters, by his pace count, when Cally raised her hand and stopped them. He echoed the signal back to Harrison. She stripped her camo jumpsuit off and stowed it under a bush, patting the pocket of her black windbreaker, rubbing her ear to make sure the dot earphone was in place. Flesh toned and about half the diameter of a ladybug, it was practically undetectable. Tommy checked his earphone, too, patting the pocket with his buckley.

  Once the extremely stacked and tempting blonde was on the road, Tommy could keep pace with her slow jog at a safely increased distance, watching the flash of red from her tank top through the trees that concealed his own muted gray. He listened carefully as he went, waiting for her to find and draw off the guard.

  “Hey!” He heard a masculine voice from the direction of the road. He stopped cold, raising his hand to stop Harrison. “Excuse me, ma’am, but this is a restricted area.” He heard the voice say, apologetically. Definitely not the tone he’d have taken with some unknown man. He almost felt sorry for the guy. Dangling Cally in front of him was a below the belt hit if there ever was one.