Sister Time lota-9 Read online

  “You know the safeguards in the system. If I intervene, it will be very clear that I did,” she said.

  “That is very true. However, you have among your extended clan those who plot and intrigue in secret. One specific relative is engaged in an intrigue against the Epetar Group that is likely to fail on its own, but that you might assist without being noticed. There is risk. We trust your judgment. Look to the dealings of your sister’s mate.”

  “Mate?” Michelle’s two rapid eyeblinks were all that showed her surprise, but they were enough.

  “Correct. Shall we play?” A Tchpth would naturally treat her like an Indowy, shying away from a potentially sensitive clan matter.

  “Excuse me, but I am not sure I heard you correctly. Are you referring to Cally’s lover, who fathered her children? James Stewart is dead.”

  “Has he died recently, then?” he asked.

  “If you are counting seven years as recent,” the mentat said.

  “Oh. I am sorry if I am interfering in a closely held clan matter, but as of Earth’s last lunar cycle, he is very much alive. Forgive my discourtesy.” He paused, raising a forelimb over his mouth in the equivalent of a grimace. “For the sake of timing, you might encourage the Indowy crew on Dulain base to cooperate with the local humans before you pursue the matter with your clan. If you choose to do so, it would be best if you were highly expeditious and discreet.”

  “Um… thank you. Thank you very much. I am indebted to you,” she agreed again.

  “Pilot’s apprentice to Clan Head’s four-b, using the rest of my move to institute a third level alliance to uncommitted family Tinne,” he bounced left and right, rapidly, resembling an overcharged metronome.

  “That’s an unconventional opening. Hrmm. What could you be up to?”

  Wednesday 11/17/54

  Rictis Clarty’s medium-dark skin could have come from his indeterminate ancestry, or perhaps it was all the time he spent in the tropical regions of the East Africa Rift Zone. Clarty had been born with two talents and one dominating attribute. A natural marksman and linguist, his driving ambition, developed in the crowded underbelly of the Sub-Urb that produced him, was open space and power over other men.

  He had started out as a Posleen hunter for one of the re-release African preserves, a joint project of government and environmental organizations established out of American and Canadian zoos after the war. At the end of the war, when they first inaugurated the preserves, ecologists had faced a devastated continent in which anything larger than a beach ball had become extinct. Humans were an exception, surviving in small, isolated groups on mountains like Ras Dashan and Kilimanjaro, or on little islands off the coast or in large lakes. It had been a toss-up for years whether the ecology would crash completely or not. Now the question was firmly settled. While she would never be as she was, Africa was definitely winning. The key for the small fauna and the flora had been the original biodiversity. The key for the reintroduced species was that human settlements were tiny and the Posleen were mostly gone. Fleet and ACS efforts at Posleen elimination had greatly reduced habitat competition and the number of other predators at the top of the food chain.

  Another key, oddly enough, had been the elephants. Those terrestrial mammals were apparently considerably smarter than Posleen normals. Elephants recognized and carefully trampled Posleen eggs. Bull elephants would respond to the presence of feral Posleen by actively tracking them. A God King crest would trigger a berserker charge of an entire herd. Without advanced weaponry or overwhelming numbers on their side, Posleen facing elephants died. Since elephant family groups roamed widely in the ongoing mission of stoking their bodies with hundreds of kilograms of forage a day, and the other reintroduced animals had a sure safe zone in any elephant group’s range, reintroduction had gone faster than anyone had hoped. The animals followed the elephants. Used to the eternal footrace between the big cats and the herd beasts, most of the critters could outrun an isolated Posleen, anyway.

  The ultimate result had been that after ten years of more or less steady work as a paid Posleen hunter, Rictis had found himself out of work. Africa was by no means clear of feral Posleen or repopulated with native wildlife, but neither was the issue in enough doubt for a government crippled with debt to keep men like Rictis on its payroll.

  He had had to seek other employment. He had found it in the needs of the human survivors for things out of song and memory. They had never had many of the benefits of modern civilization — not compared to first worlders. Those they had grew in story and song until the young men were eager to earn any hard currency they could to buy these fabled luxuries.

  Across Africa and all the depopulated continents, the Darhel had extorted mining concessions in partial payment of Earth’s debts. Preferring Indowy employees to human ones, the Darhel facilities offered few employment opportunities to survivors. With an eye to extorting future mining rights, the Darhel looked with extreme disfavor on human city states springing up to exploit even the mineral resources they themselves did not own. Wary of the clauses in the colony transport contracts that had caused Earth so much trouble, Earth’s government — which at this time amounted to what was left of the United States government, in consultation with the Asian-Latin Coalition, Indonesia and the Phillipines — had explicitly refused any responsibility to secure Darhel mining facilities against rogue humans. The result had been a thriving market in human mercenaries, mostly comprised of local survivors.

  With satellite phones an expensive luxury, traveling middlemen, known to the local bands, recruited and employed local mercenaries. The middlemen, like Clarty, stayed in areas of the world with phone or radio contact until they drummed up a new contract and it was time to go back out in the field. The satellite phone in his pack was a short-term rental he would expense in his bill. An ugly piece of shit, he coveted it nonetheless, remembering the once-upon-a-time convenience, in another life, of walking around with a cell phone glued to his ear, yacking to his friends.

  In the morning, a Darhel mining facility would be on the receiving end of their destructive power. A columbite-tantalite mine in the northward portion of the East Africa Rift System was the unlucky target of his attentions today. His combined band of Cushitic warriors from the Simien Mountains to the northwest and the Dahlak Archipelago in the Red Sea aimed to form up behind some of the terrain blocking this part of the rift from the view of the mining complex. The complex had human security, if you could call it that. Upper level Darhel managers were brilliant. Lower level Darhel supervisors were also brilliant, but less cosmopolitan and prone to jumping to conclusions about humans based on Galactic stereotypes. Unless they observed substantial contrary data themselves, they were unlikely to ever get beyond that attitude. Lord, but it made Rictis’s job easy.

  Low level Darhel, like the rest of the mainstream Galactics, viewed all humans as bloodthirsty carnivores, good only for killing or being killed. A human who presented himself as a security guard and knew one end of a gun from the other was automatically accepted at face value as a security guard. Why would any sane being falsely claim to be a bloodthirsty killer? Security guards hired to protect such facilities typically walked or stood around with dirty, poorly maintained rifles slung across their backs. The poor maintenance would have mattered less if they had been carrying AK-47s instead of old, prewar M-16s. They used to say you could bury an AK in the mud for ten years, dig it up, and take it right into an engagement. You sure couldn’t do that with an M-16. Like as not, half the rented uniforms down there would find their rifles jamming on them, if they lived long enough to shoot back. All guys like them were good for was presenting a visible presence, wearing token uniforms, and drinking their pay.

  Right now, in the gathering twilight, his men clustered around the rough map scratched into the ground for a final refresher. This morning they had infiltrated most of the way in a silent anti-grav shuttle, flown in low, nap of the Earth. The closest they could get was to park behind a rise fifteen klic
ks away, give or take, and walk in through the tall grass. They’d marched, if you wanted to call it that, in a double-file line, two men out to the side as flankers, and three scouting to the front. Clarty would be the first to admit that his men were not the best of soldiers — weren’t soldiers at all, not to speak of. But they were experienced hunters and knew how to use the AKs they carried. Also, they worked cheap. The boys he’d had to hand rifles got to keep them, their villages got a couple of cases of ammo, and other than that, they didn’t take much paying at all. There was plenty of cheap stuff he could bring in, easy, that these people only knew now from legends told around the fire. It didn’t occur to him to worry about the boys who might, as some certainly would, fall in the engagement. If someone had asked him about that, it would have honestly puzzled him. Their villages counted losing some young warriors as part of the nature of young warriors. If they didn’t care, why should he?

  As sure as he could be that each man knew his position and job, Clarty doled out the three precious pairs of night vision goggles in his pack to the men he considered most competent. He took out his own goggles, and familiarized the chosen with the minimal controls and how the world looked in varying shades of black and green. His goggles, of course, had a few extras like built-in binoculars and range finders. The ones for his picked lieutenants were cheaper, but serviceable.

  Rictis had worked with Abebe, Tesfa, and Alemu before. All three were old enough to have some sense, but hadn’t started to slow down from age yet. Tesfa was one of his inland Cushites. At twenty-five or thereabouts he had a wife and four children. An expert hunter, his eyes didn’t miss much, and what his eyes did miss his nose picked up on. He also shot abat from fifty meters for fun, when he had the ammo. If he didn’t stuff his ears with soft hide when he shot, he’d probably be deaf as a post by now. Abebe was his second best, islander stock that had moved back to the mainland for more room. Unusually for the area, he had the local high cheekbones but midnight-dark skin. Tall, his perfect teeth flashed paper-white when he smiled. He herded goats and managed to keep them safe from the other wildlife who also thought goats tasted pretty good. Clarty figured keeping goats from straying wasn’t much different from watching for stray men — not the stray men facing them, anyway. Alemu was the youngest of his best three, oldest of three brothers himself, and a damned sharp hunter. Clarty had heard their names, of course, but simplified his own life by bestowing noms de guerre. Shooter, Goatherd, and Hunter seemed more flattered than offended.

  He took his thirty men and stretched them out in a long single file line. He spaced his men with goggles evenly, putting Shooter on point, followed by his nine men. Goatherd was on the tail end with his nine in front of him. He and Hunter bracketed Hunter’s nine men in the middle, with Rictis taking the middle front position. When it was good and dark, he gave the command to move out. He had ensured radio silence to complement the darkness by giving radios only to his three chosen lieutenants.

  They filed over the hill in the darkness, being careful rather than fast — they had all night to get into position. As they approached the lip of land surrounding the mining camp, the formation split, Shooter taking his spotter and the heavy weapons team around to the east. His two next best marksmen and a pair of spotters proceeded around to the west to line up on the guard towers on that side. Goatherd and Hunter were good shots, but Clarty needed them leading the assault squads. Since he was older and more experienced handling young men, Goatherd and his team would be taking the guard barracks while Hunter secured the administration building and provided close-in fire support. Hunter was his youngest lieutenant, with plenty of energy but not nearly as much experience as he could want. Rictis suspected that if he wasn’t personally on the scene, Hunter would put himself first in through the door and orders be damned. He really wanted to keep his three most reliable men alive to help him manage the looting and loading phase before they pulled out.

  The self-styled mercenary leader stood at the front of the line pulling cheap, pre-set digital watches out and handing them to one member of each departing group. With the vibrate alarm set for first light, the watches served two functions. One, they were a pretty reliable way to kick off separated groups at the same time. Two, the locals liked the watches. They wouldn’t last long, they broke if you half looked at them funny, but they were reliable for about a week from the time you broke the seal on the plastic bags they came in, which was better than some brands and good enough for him.

  The site of the mining camp had been chosen with an eye to convenience, not defensibility. The collection of quonset huts sat in a natural bowl, out of which the company had cut a drainage ditch to lead the very polluted runoff out to the nearby creek. As Hunter and Goatherd positioned their men on the ground, Clarty crawled up to the top of the lip to kick in the binocular function on his goggles and get a good look at the camp. Secondhand photographs made him nervous.

  Men in place, Hunter and Goatherd tapped their chosen scouts to make the crawl down the hill with wire-cutters to open a hole in the chain link fence. The four guard towers at the corners of the fenced area had made him think twice. The easiest thing would have been to take them out with RPGs, but he needed them intact for the same reasons the mining camp needed them. The local wildlife had recovered only too well, and he respected the associated hazards. Hit and run pirates less organized and funded than his own force could still make trouble, and occasionally did. That, and someone would come to clean his men out eventually. If they came in sooner rather than later, he’d rather have enough warning to at least save his own skin.

  Clarty had Hunter set the two-man watches and laid his head down on his hat to catch a nap. The last watch would wake him ten minutes before time.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Thursday 11/18/54

  Barb “Carrots” Schimmel brushed her teeth in the chipped-enamel sink, already dressed in the rough jumpsuit that served the Awasa Mine’s security force. She greatly regretted having taken this job. In fact, the guard was counting the days until her contract was up and she could leave. She didn’t dare leave early — Darhel Groups were hell on breach of contract. If she could have, she’d have been out of Ethiopia and off this godforsaken continent on the next flight out.

  One of a handful of female former Israeli grunts, later enlisted in the U.S. Army, juved early on in the Postie War, she had been among the first group riffed out afterwards. The wartime army hadn’t wanted female soldiers after the realities of combat with the Posleen hordes had made the issue unmistakably clear, but hadn’t been inclined to actually discharge them until after Earth had been rescued by last chance advent of the Fleet.

  There hadn’t been a lot of jobs immediately after the war. Actually, there had been no jobs. She would have been in a world of hurt if she hadn’t seen the writing on the wall and saved as much of her meager pay as she could stand. The former grunt held no illusions about her looks. Income supplementation by some of the methods other women used weren’t an option for her — not with anyone she could stand to screw, anyway. She’d bought a rifle and attached herself to anyone who needed troublesome Posleen dead, from bounty farmers to convoys to resource colonies, which, between one thing and another, had barely kept her fed and clothed. Which had brought her to this side of the ass end of nowhere on the only decent paying job she’d had in years.

  That should have made her happy, but she’d reckoned without being the only female in a pack of slack-ass, woman-deprived mouth-breathers she wouldn’t touch with a stick and a pair of rubber gloves. Getting up an hour ahead of those bastards was the only way she managed to shower without the other guys on her shift. She was zipping up her dock kit when she heard the shots.

  She was sprinting for the door by the time the echo faded. Barb hadn’t survived damned near eighty years of hostile Arabs, man-eating alien carnosaurs, and scum-of-the-earth pirates by being slow on the uptake. Multiple shots from multiple directions, nearly simultaneously, meant only one thing. For once,
she blessed the cheap-assed Darhel that wouldn’t even shell out for a quonset hut armory, as she ran hell for leather for one of the gun lockers on either side of the door, grabbed her rifle and stuffed a handful of loaded magazines in a cargo pocket. She darted out the door with barely a glance outside, knowing speed at getting to her next position would serve her better than caution this early in an attack. Making the cover of the administration building as she began to hear other shooting and noise, she kicked the door in to gain access to the supervisor’s office. Behind his desk, she bashed the locked center drawer with her rifle butt. The cheap wood splintered, letting her yank the remains of the drawer open and pull out a small, black rectangular box. The supervisor’s AID was about the size of a pack of cigarettes and could be counted on to get the message out through the jamming she assumed would be hitting the regular com.

  “AID, notify Gistar’s Chicago office that we are under attack by multiple gunmen, repeat, we are under attack by multiple gunmen.” She ignored the obnoxious thing’s queries for more information she didn’t have and dropped it behind a potted plant. “Shut up, AID. If they find you, you can’t eavesdrop on them you stupid machine!” she said.

  If silence could sound offended, the AID’s abrupt cut-off spoke volumes — not that Schimmel had time to care. With the word out, her next priority was survival, job or no job. She made for the back door and peered out the window in its top half. This building was sure to be one of their first targets, and a death trap.

  A handful of scrubby bushes grew near the fence line at the base of the hill that held the mine entrance. It was meager cover, but better than none, and it had the virtue of not being in any building likely to be a target of hostile action. Its other good point was also its main bad point. It had a good view of the center vehicle yard and the front of the guard barracks, as well as the tracks up to the mine, which meant anyone assaulting the barracks would have a good view of her if they looked her way. She went out the back door, backing up against the building to get a good look and see if she dared make a run for it.