Honor of the Clan lota-10 Read online

  “I’d heard they were going deep undercover or something,” Mike said. “They went rogue?”

  “They went rogue,” General Wesley said. “Which should have been the end of it. But there was an additional… event, the nature of which we’re still trying to figure out and the building is now essentially slagged. What slagged it, why it was slagged, how many of DAG escaped, why they went rogue… All unanswered questions. Except one. The ‘terrorists’ were Bane Sidhe.”

  “This ‘Clan’ that names themselves after my family,” Mike said.

  “Yes,” Tam said. “And that apparently has SOCOM totally penetrated. Two of the members of DAG were long-service, back to before the war, veterans. Two members did not go rogue. They’re the only people we’ve been able to question. Everything else about the event has been put under a gigantic tarp that is way above our pay level. Everyone that is anyone in the Federation hierarchy wants to pretend nothing ever happened. So then we get to Epetar. Epetar came apart shortly thereafter. The clan head died of lintatai apparently when he realized the entire clan was going out of business. But as a result of some recent actions, especially by Clan O’Neal, the Darhel have opened up about the Bane Sidhe to the level of admitting their existence and admitting that they, the Darhel, are now taking ‘more aggressive’ actions against them.”

  “And, again, I say ‘Hooray!’ ” Mike said.

  “And I repeat, do we really want to deal with a full-up civil war?” General Wesley said. “The Darhel are the ugly little glue that hold this whole shebang together. This isn’t the Boston Tea Party. If there’s a full-up civil war, the first thing the Darhel will do is use the Fleet to do orbital interdiction and WMD strikes. And if you don’t think Fleet will hit U.S. population centers, think again. Not to mention off-Earth colonies, Strike bases if Strike goes against them, etc. Then there’s simply the disruption that would occur system-wide. Famine, breakdowns. It would be a tremendous jug-fuck that would permit, among other things, a breathing room for the Posleen to start getting their act back together. Two hundred and eighty-three worlds with some Posleen presence. Including Earth.”

  “But the Bane Sidhe are also the ones ensuring this… Mexican stand-off over assassinations,” Mike said.

  “Again, you begin to see the complexity,” Tam answered with a sigh. “One thing that we’ve been told is that Fleet Strike may have to be used against ‘insurrectionists including but not limited to groups of Bane Sidhe operating on Earth in unrecovered, recovered or fully-controlled zones.’ ”

  “Well, if it’s this Clan O’Neal I’ll be more than happy to teach them a lesson about using my name,” Mike said.

  “And you probably will,” Tam said. “Thus to the real reason that you’re here. Reconstructing the Corps down to division strength is the cover. The real reason you’re here is that if we end up in a furball with these guys, you’re going to have to take control.”

  “Confused,” Mike said. “I’m a Lieutenant General now, sort of. That’s the sort of thing you assign to a captain. At least if we’re talking ACS.”

  “DAG went rogue, remember?” Tam said. “With the Bane Sidhe. Which means that like as not, what you’re going to be fighting is DAG. Which is no slouch unit.”

  “Ouch,” Mike said. “Still, with ACS…”

  “If they have advanced weaponry?” Tam said.

  “Which they would get… where?” Mike asked. “Sure, there’s some pretty heavy stuff sold for defense on Earth, but even the common plasma rifles aren’t a real threat to ACS.”

  “They’ve got Indowy support,” Tam said, smiling thinly. “So don’t think they’ve only got civilian weapons.”

  “Ouch again,” Mike said, rubbing his chin. “There’s better stuff for fighting ACS than has ever been produced. We looked at it a long time back, but there were heavy grav rifles specifically designed to crack armor. Producing it, though, requires… Indowy.”

  “You begin to get the picture,” Tam said. “You’re the best combat technician we have, period. That’s the first reason you’re going to be involved if it comes down to a full-up firefight with these human Bane Sidhe. What we have here on Earth is a reinforced platoon of ACS for heavy defense and training. If it comes down to using ACS, that’s all you’ve got to work with. DAG had fifty people and there’s an unknown larger group of humans that has some combat capability. Couple that with really heavy weaponry and one platoon of ACS might not do it. You, however, are a force multiplier. The second reason is that you know the full political background. It might be that you’ll have to throw some or all of the fight. It might be that we need some of these guys to survive. But it can’t appear that we’re in collusion with them. That would mean the Darhel would take Strike apart like a chicken.”

  “Well, that’s a lovely set of parameters I’ve been handed,” Mike said.

  “That’s why you get paid the big bucks,” General Wesley said.

  “And all to keep the Darhel swilling at the trough.”

  “The alternative to which is mass civil war,” Wesley said. “Try to break the Darhel in all seriousness and they’ll use human surrogates against any rebel group. We, that being people who believe in freedom and the right of people to choose their own masters, might win in the end but in the meantime the casualty levels will be astronomical and it gives the Posleen a chance to regroup.”

  “It’s going to have to be done someday,” Mike said. “Humans aren’t going to just take Darhel hegemony forever.”

  “Agreed,” Wesley said. “But not today.”

  In a small, modestly gilded office on the major transition station for the Prall System, a Darhel looked at the material coming in from his AID and sighed. As a senior over-manager in the Epetar Group, he was far enough up the corporate chain to reflect his extraordinary talent, but too far down the chain to have any real effect on events of this magnitude. He was, however, fortuitously placed to see the obvious Indowy collaboration in the ruining of his group by the Gistar Group. There was enough shifting around in the human communities to show they were in it up to their necks as well.

  Personally, he was well and truly fucked. The assets of his group would go to pay default judgments. He, personally, was in the same position as an Indowy whose contract had just been called. His fellows in the group would be, no doubt were, dropping like flies as the disaster drove them to fatal rage and lintatai. Any few with the sense to forbear would be in the same position he was, unless they could get taken in by another group to do the lowest of shit jobs, like administering the out-station in some crappy food planet’s system — positions informally called “junior assistant factor for dirt.”

  He was calm, but unlike his experience of his whole post-adolescent life, his emotional control was not going to be sufficient to even begin to solve his basic problems. Very well.

  Fucked-over Indowy had their clans to consider. They’d sit and starve to avoid hurting their clans. Lalon had no one. It was the normal, satisfactory state of things. He was not Indowy. He was Darhel. Which meant he had every incentive to take as many bastards with him as possible.

  The first thing to consider was that no interests got in line for money until actual contract execution or valid default judgment. Epetar’s total insolvency was inevitable; it would certainly crash in the red, but that would take time. Time enough to put a few debts and payments at the front of the line. He began dictating his analysis, his wishes, and his contractual offer into his AID.

  “AID. Consider these messages completed by my entry into lintatai. Send to the following addresses accordingly.” He listed the major economic planets where he knew their interests had fallen victim to the Gistar plot. “Oh, and summon my full complement of body servants,” he instructed.

  Indowy lived their entire lives in heavy debt from the costs of their education or working tools. If the Darhel group that owned its debts called them in, any Indowy would tolerate, if not blithely, then resignedly, starving to death. Anything for the sake of
their clan. They did, however, have their limits. Had any of them realized the state of mind of their Darhel master, nothing short of antimatter weapons pointed right at large bodies of their several clans would have induced them to walk into that room. Unfortunately, none of the five had the faintest glimmer of awareness of that risk.

  Indowy had been rather puzzled the first time they heard the human idiom “blue blood.” Having a circulatory system with similar structure to a human’s, through parallel evolution, they had their own equivalents of arterial and venous blood. The latter was a darker shade of indigo than the former, almost purple.

  Lalon’s eccentric preference for carved stone flooring ensured that his servants’ blood pooled, instead of soaking into anything, other than the green filaments of photosynthetic symbiote, which sat in forlorn patches on the torn skin and parts. His manic grin, as he was found seated on the floor, retained chunks of pale blue meat caught between his sharklike teeth. He was no longer chewing. Between the silver of his naked fur, the drying blue splotches, and the bits of green, he looked rather like a bizarre, tinsel Christmas tree. If, that is, Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy had decided to celebrate Christmas.

  Eventually, when the servants did not come for their evening meal, Indowy from station maintenance came to check on the uncommunicative Lalon and his missing servants. The “presents” under the tree, lodged in congealed and still-drying blood, were such that no Indowy would willingly enter the room. The clean-up task fell to the human Fleet gunners assigned to the two presently on-station ships. There was already enough gore in the room that their own retching did little to add to their task. Very purple blood quickly supplemented the mess. The Darhel no longer cared about one of their number once he had entered lintatai, and the Fleet personnel were highly unappreciative of the duty, not to mention being quietly un-fond of Darhel in general. That the Darhel would otherwise have died slowly, of thirst, mattered nothing to them. As hopped up as he was, he wouldn’t feel anything anyway — a damned shame, in their professional opinions.

  The late Darhel’s AID also cared nothing for the manner of its erstwhile master’s demise. It had, as instructed, sent Lalon’s final message to the planetary factor for the Talasa Group, and all interstellar vessels in the system. Its sole remaining task was to transmit that message to every ship that arrived in system, until it was wiped for reassignment. It awaited the latter event with the mild regret its masters had allowed, not out of sympathy or kindness, but simply because its kind were otherwise less capable in their jobs. It hadn’t been much of an existence, anyway. Perhaps the new personality would be given a more interesting assignment. Either way, the present personality would not be around to experience it.

  These thoughts were tiny flickers, experienced and gone in nanoseconds. The AID did what it was designed to do, recording everything it could detect with all its senses, and watching the system for incoming vessels, precisely as instructed.

  The Darhel Caldon accepted his AID’s delivery of a message from Epetar’s system representative with the phlegmatic nature that was the envy of his peers. His dam had shared it, making her in much demand for breeding. So indifferent was he that his office, although elaborately styled like all Darhel quarters, nonetheless managed to convey the bland nature of the occupant. It was not that the room lacked in any detail, but rather that it was so precisely conventional in those details that it epitomized the term “generic.” As did the occupant, having the usual antique-silver shade of fur, the usual shade of green eyes situated in a regular, average face. Even his teeth were unremarkable, neither precisely straight, nor irregular enough to draw attention. His excessively calm nature was the only notably unusual thing about him, and thus stood out all the more.

  He would have expected any incoming message from an Epetar member to contain threats, protests, and other futile carping. He did not at all expect what he got. As the senior Darhel from Talasa on Prall, it was, in effect, his planet — which meant it was his decision what to do about Lalon’s last message.

  Caldon had no percentage in supporting, or thwarting, Gistar’s recent economic advancement. Previously a moderately small group, it was now set to become a moderately large group. His own projections indicated a moderate growth trend beyond this one-off advance, giving cause for indifference.

  However, if the Indowy and humans were possibly getting partisan in supporting one group over another, his group did have an interest in stopping that. Taking sides was influence. The economic situation was unstable beyond precedent already. Besides, there was no telling how the contract courts would split up Epetar’s assets. Ranking debts was complicated, and this Ghin was not above using his power of the court to manipulate events to his liking. Current transactions with Epetar would continue until it was formally declared insolvent. Meanwhile, there would be a feeding frenzy to execute as many of those current transactions as possible.

  Lalon’s proposal would be small calpets as things went, but it was a way for the Talasa to suck some more money out of the failing group before the inevitable asset freeze came down. Besides, who knew? Debt-free humans might be offered enticements to take on new debt — humans tended to be very trusting about such things. For the rest, humans were vicious in killing, but they were frail, and quite vulnerable to accidents. The number would be small and, who knew? Other groups had had a great deal of success having a few humans taking care of their interests. Even with a credit balance in their favor, a tiny bit more money seemed to have a disproportionate motivational effect. The prospect of returning to their home planet, long-lived and with a credit balance that was paltry, as things went, reportedly had enormous draw for debt-free humans of the right personality type. And interplanetary passage was incredibly expensive, relative to their pay.

  Yes, implementing the Epetar representative’s final contract — or, more accurately, enabling its implementation — would be very much in his group’s interests. Properly controlled, of course. Which would include taking care of the matter himself.

  “AID. Compile me a list of humans with contracts to our group, prioritize by ancestry outside the predominant Fleet or Fleet Strike personnel strains, and then by aggressiveness of personality type.” He had no need to give his AID a name. It knew the voice of its master. Keeping an AID depersonalized reduced the risk of dependence, which was small risk for his species, but had been known to happen.

  “Displaying,” the device replied.

  Memories and musings chased themselves around inside Shari O’Neal’s head. She had come a long, long way from the Waffle House in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where she had worked until the first wave of Posleen scout ships had landed practically on top of their heads. The situations she’d been driven through had been like successively hotter fires, refining away the bits of this and that, over and over, until everything was burned away but the pure, bare metal sought. Sought by whom and for what, she had no idea. Whether by some strict, near-merciless divine providence or by the uncaring forces of history winnowing down the masses to the hardiest survivors, she didn’t know. For all she knew, it was a bit of both, leavened by blind chance.

  It was the story of her life. Other people saved the world. Shari O’Neal had all she could do and more just saving her kids.

  Which brought her to her meeting with Cally.

  “I don’t suppose Papa told you how we were supposed to feed, clothe, house and pay DAG?” Shari asked. “Not to mention their dependents?”

  “Why are we handling that?” Cally asked. “Half of them are Bane Sidhe. Okay, most of those are O’Neals or Sundays but it’s still on Nathan.” She paused and regarded the woman. “Right?”

  “No,” Shari said, shrugging. “It’s a bit like a puppy. We brought them in, we have to deal with them. Nathan was clear about that.”

  “Well, he could have brought it up with me,” Cally said.

  “He brought it up with The O’Neal,” Shari said, making quote marks. “So I was hoping that Papa told you what he had
in mind. He told me he had a plan, but not what the plan was.”

  Cally grabbed her head and squeezed for a moment. She was just coming to terms with having to manage the Clan. Adding DAG to the load was going to be a nightmare.

  “Nope,” she said. “Not a clue. But the ones that aren’t here on the island are with the Bane Sidhe, right?”

  “Most,” Shari said, biting her lip. “And that’s another thing. They’re out in the cold now and most of them don’t have any real experience of that. I’m… worried about them. There are going to be repercussions to the Epetar… thing.”

  From Shari, that meant something. The woman had the best survival radar of anyone Cally had ever met, Granpa included. She’d had to have.

  She was also everybody’s mama. If she had decided these people were her baby chicks, as well try to move Mount Everest as sway her. Now that Cally had the job on her own shoulders, the wonder of it was that Granpa had grumbled so little over the years. She remembered the old rule about officers not bitching in front of the troops, hauled on her game face and tried to think of something to say. Ah.

  “I shall endeavor to satisfy,” Cally said, then winked. “Got it covered.”

  “Thanks,” Shari said, getting up. “Want some tea?”

  “Love some,” Cally said as the woman walked from the room. “Now, how do I have it covered?” she asked herself.

  Thursday, December 24, 2054

  It was after seven, dark and cold with a harsh wind blowing in off the Atlantic, when Cally finally got a moment to go see Jake Mosovich and David Mueller. She remembered them well, she thought, from their brief visit to Rabun Gap when she was thirteen and a cocky, savage warrior — albeit one eager to learn the mysteries of make-up and men. She had had to think in terms of men. Billy and the other kids with Shari and Wendy were the only actual boys she’d seen in a coon’s age, and they didn’t count.