by John Ringo
Chapter Two
Kieran Dougherty was not a tall man. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was downright short. At least, he thought so. When he was on the ground. Which was one reason he liked to fly. The gray-eyed man with short, straight mouse-brown hair and an extensive collection of freckles liked to fly the way retrievers like to swim. The biggest design flaw of airplanes, in his opinion, was that they usually had to land to be refueled. The other options were unfortunately beyond the resources of his organization at the moment. Still, he could accept that, just as he could accept that an old and perpetually restored puddlejumper was a lot less conspicuous than something with a lot more range and capability. Besides, he liked prop-driven planes. You could really feel the air in them. Not that he would have turned something newer and fancier down, mind you. He stopped daydreaming and focused his full attention as he began his descent for Charleston. Any way you cut it, his worst day flying was still better than a day stuck on the ground.
As he slid into the pattern, Schmidt strapped into the copilot seat beside him and looked out the window at the city lights as they came in. When he wasn't talking to the tower, Dougherty kept his mouth shut. He knew Schmidt was listening to the engines. It wasn't by the book, but damned if Harry wasn't the best aircraft mechanic he'd ever had. The guy loved engines, and was almost psychic in his ability to detect anything that wasn't quite right with "his" bird. He was pretty damned good with the other stray aircraft they had to cope with now and again on this crazy job, too.
After landing, he got Lucille into the hangar and left her to Schmidt while he went outside for a cigar, waving goodbye to Cally and Papa as they wheeled a couple of carefully anonymous black and gray bikes out the back door, mounting up and disappearing through the chain link fence, hair and faces hidden under the ubiquitous black helmets. Charleston airport was salty, and sandy, and the air was thick with cold moisture that smelled like rain. Wind blew sand against his cheeks and he had to squint to keep the little bits of grit out whenever the wind shift. He took deep drags off the Cuban cigar, staring at nothing and wishing he was still in the air. He finished it and dropped the butt in the ashcan by the door before going back in to hear Harry's update on his aircraft.
"So how is she?" He looked over to Schmidt, who was whistling as he pulled on a coverall and got his toolbox out of its locker.
"Well, she sounds real good. I should be able to just go down the list and have her all checked out before I leave tonight." He pulled a wrinkled and oil stained piece of paper out of the box and spread it out neatly on the rolling cart where he was beginning to lay out the well-used and carefully cared-for tools in their precise places. Harry didn't really need the list, he was just a touch obsessive. Dougherty could understand that. It was one reason he trusted the other man to work on Lucille. On the other hand, Dougherty had a personal life, sort of, when he wasn't in the air. Since he'd been assured he wouldn't get to fly again for at least seventy-two hours, he was eager to go make the acquaintance of the pitcher of stout that was calling his name. Maybe even find a girl with the right combination of looks and loneliness. And a no expectations of permanence. A few minutes later he waved cheerfully to the security guard, leaving the airport in search of beer and women. Song was optional.
Cally shared a lane with Grandpa on their way home. She still missed her little apartment, but she wouldn't trade the girls for anything, even if motherhood did mean moving back home. Oh, she hired one of Wendy's granddaughters to play nanny whenever she expected to be gone for awhile, but there still needed to be someone to watch over all the details and make sure everyone got where they should be on time and all the bills got paid. If Grandpa was Clan O'Neal's patriarch and clan head, Shari had matriarchy down pat. The O'Neal Bane Sidhe hid their headquarters in a Himmit-camouflaged mini SubUrb deep under Indiana. The Clan O'Neal hid its headquarters in plain sight in a sprawling farmhouse, in the swampy pine woods of Edisto Island.
Technically bounty-farmers, living under various names and identities, the O'Neals and the Sundays, their immediate in-laws, and assorted Bane Sidhe waifs and strays had kept the area on and around the island swept clean of all but the occasional stray abat, the pests, for at least twenty years. It would have been inaccurate to call the clan self-sufficient on the local land and sea. They had a source of working capital. The Clan O'Neal men (by now the Sundays were regarded as a cadet branch) who planned to work for the Bane Sidhe tended to seek training, and find it, in the armed services. While Fleet Strike and Fleet remained the primary armed forces of the Galactic Federation, the various United States and Canadian military organizations still remained. Missions tended to be against pirates or insurgents. Or the US military "loaned" units to Fleet or Fleet Strike, or other Galactic interests, for specialty functions. To limit the problems associated with being off-planet and unavailable, the O'Neals tended to gravitate to what was still called counter-terror special ops. Large parts of it on both coasts still lay in ruins, but the United States was no more able to survive without the rest of the world now than it had been pre-war. The war itself had been a special case, but strategic resources from overseas were as important now as they ever had been. In modern times, counter-terror really meant protecting those strategic resources and the trade lanes that served the many single-export colonies.
Their service in the military provided excellent training while continuing an honored family tradition, albeit under assumed identities. It also brought hard currency into the Clan community. Their pay covered goods and services that the island community couldn't make or grow for themselves. It stretched the dollars from the small cash crops some of the women grew each year. Low-country agriculture had been a hand-to-mouth proposition long before the war, and the O'Neals didn't go in for tourism, great beaches or not. Still, shipping by moonlight was an old and revered tradition along the North American coastline. A couple of what she still thought of as "the kids" had quite a talent for it.
Having grown up with just Grandpa, and then having lived alone for so long, Cally still felt vaguely claustrophobic if she stayed too long in what had become a happy, if chaotic and often quarrelsome, jumble of aunts and uncles younger than she was mixed with all sorts of cousins, grown or growing. Not to mention various people relocated by the Bane Sidhe, who needed to live someplace anonymous for awhile. Without the slab, that added up to a good little small town, even though a number of kin had wrapped themselves up in very sincere identities and assimilated into the outside world. The Clan was careful to turn in enough Posleen heads for bounty, maintaining the illusion that the area was still infested. This brought in a little hard currency, but they were having to go farther and farther afield each year in search of prey.
Cally and Papa's drive didn't take as long as it could've, once they'd navigated the tunnel under the Charleston Wall. The O'Neals kept the track between Charleston and Edisto well maintained, but took pains to make it look dilapidated. When they got on a good patch of straightaway, they could really open up the engines and make some time. It would have been suicide without the buckleys running IR watch for whitetail deer. With them, it was merely foolhardy. But fun. Well, except for a bug that hit her helmet's air-intake and sieved into her mouth, leaving her spitting what tasted like grass the rest of the way. You took the good with the bad.
It was pre-dawn by the time they got home, the sky turning slowy from blue-gray to gold. The sun wasn't up, and neither were most of the kids. One of the girls coming out to milk her cows waved to them as they pulled into the packed sand and shell driveway. They wheeled the bikes into the shed behind the house, racking the helmets neatly on a set of carved wooden hooks. As Cally climbed the cinderblock kitchen stairs and trudged down the creaky pine hallway to the add-on Grandpa had built for her and the girls, she knew her ass was dragging. All that way and all that work for nothing. What a night. She checked that her shades were pulled down and sealed tight before shutting her door and going to bed, shedding shoes and clothes on the way. A
s long as it stayed dark, her body would neither know nor care that it was daytime out there. She needed at least a good six hours before she was going to feel Human again. She patted the washcloth on her nightstand where Shari had left it. That was thoughtful. The sheets smelled faintly of lilly of the valley as she snuggled between them and shut her eyes.
The grass was wet under her feet and her sneakers squelched loudly as she snuck through the trees, hunting rats. The twenty-two rifle in her hand was pointed upwards, away from any non-targets. Oh, God—she ducked as an owl flew past right in front of her face, a struggling rat between its claws. A rat with a Human face. Oh no, not the faces again, I hate the faces. A twig broke next to her and she jumped, inadvertently pulling the trigger. The shot echoed loudly in the night. A woman beside her in an antiquated nun's habit sneered, "Stupid girl! You had your finger on the trigger. Now they've got you for sure." She tried not looking at the face, but the glazed eyes and tongue hanging out, so still, drew her own eyes upwards. And then she could hear the hissing growl and the thud of clawed feet behind her. The horses were coming for her. She dropped the rifle and ran and kept running, down the empty galplas corridors, spattered and rust brown. There was a door and she didn't want to go in it but she had to hide. The door swung open and another one of the faces leered out from the darkness. "They'll kill you just like you killed me. But come in, come in. I was such a scumbag, I deserved it. You'll be in such good company, won't you, Cally?" Her t-shirt was plastered against her in cold sweat as she turned and ran again. They were closer now. Quick, into a ventilation shaft! And she was over the edge and falling, and the faces were in the walls again, going past as she fell, and she tried to scream but she—
She was sitting up in bed, her breath coming in gasps. The t-shirt she'd slept in was cold and wet on her skin. She grabbed her washcloth, burying her face in it and shuddering. That was a bad one. They told me the dreams might come back when I started working again, but damn. What time is it, anyway? She looked over at the alarm clock and groaned. Only nine-thirty? Ah, hell. Might as well get up. No way I'm getting back to sleep after that.
She pulled on a robe and a pair of big, cushiony slippers that had been fuzzy once upon a time, and wandered into the kitchen in search of coffee and breakfast. She yawned, feeling her back pop as she stretched out the kink that had somehow worked its way into her spine.
Shari was in the kitchen. Slim, her hair the gold of the dune grass on the beach, Cally's step-grandmother looked twenty-something, like all juvs in their first century. She'd been a middle-aged mother back in the war when Cally was just thirteen. Both women had old eyes—eyes that had seen too much. Shari's were more motherly and less haunted. The kind of mother's eyes that didn't miss a thing. She was loading her breakfast dishes in the dishwasher when Cally came into the kitchen. The O'Neals had to be careful to keep it quiet, but electricity was damn near free. When you had friends who played with antimatter almost as an afterthought, power for basic household needs wasn't a problem. Raising the kids to understand and follow blackout rules on the electric lights could have been rough, if they hadn't been doing it all their lives. To satellites or aircraft, what few there were, Edisto Island looked like just another war-wasted and not-yet-recovered stretch of wilderness. Well, it almost was. Secretive clannishness had, by now, become a set of ingrained habits. The O'Neals had learned some hard lessons about survival and had adapted and copied a few tricks from their Galactic friends. In a pre-Posleen world, Clan O'Neal would have been a flock of very odd ducks. In the modern world, they were survivors.
"You're up early. Not another nightmare?" A frown crinkled Shari's forehead as she pressed a mug into Cally's hands, "I just fixed a fresh pot. Carrie said you got in about milking time this morning."
"Yeah, she was just going out. The kids are at school?" Cally yawned again, pouring a mugful of the wonderful-smelling fresh, strong coffee, but neglecting to pollute it with cream or sugar. It didn't matter how many times they told her it was hard-coded, she was convinced she was keeping just a little of the extra weight off her thighs and chest by watching what she ate. She split a bagel and dropped it in the toaster.
"Mmm. I expected it would be almost time for them to get out and come home by the time you and Michael woke up. Pam works so hard on her lesson plans, it's a shame to have the girls miss a day. So, 'fess up, how long's it been since you went to confession?" Shari asked.
"Uh . . . a few months, I guess." Cally hedged. Actually, it had been more like eight months, since she'd gone back to work full time and been taken off of the six-monthly courier run to the Moon. Dammit.
"Go to confession. I'm not Catholic, but even I'll agree it does you more good than that fancy Bane Sidhe shrink ever did. Here," she said, putting a box of cornflakes and a bowl on the table, then turning to grab the milk, "Still can't see why you like that stuff when I've got cheese grits in the crockpot. It's not like you have to worry about your arteries. Go to confession." She must have thought Cally's pensive expression was disagreement because she shook the wooden spoon in her hand towards the younger woman. "You're my friend, Cally O'Neal, and I won't have you getting all shredded up inside again. It was bad enough when you were pregnant with Morgan. Go or I'll . . . I'll sic Michael on you!"
"Alright, alright already. I'll go. Last thing I need is Grandpa nagging." Cally said, crunching her cereal and wincing as the sound echoed in her skull against her headache. God, I really needed more sleep.
The younger woman was halfway through her breakfast when the door opened. A largish pile of dirty white fur and drool came bounding in, scattering sand across the clean floor. As Shari pulled the joyfully maniacal dog off of Cally and ushered it back out the door, she glared at her husband, who was shaking out his own shoes off the edge of the steps.
"Sorry, honey. He got past me again. Nagging about what?" Papa O'Neal looked sheepish as he shut the door behind the dog. He shook his head, looking for someplace he could politely spit. Shari handed him a mug and a broom.
"Good morning, Grandpa. I thought you'd still be in bed." Cally said, brushing sand off her lap.
"When you're older and wiser, you'll have the sense to take a nap the day before a night job." Papa O'Neal sometimes seemed to forget he didn't look a day over twenty-five.
"Yes, Grandpa. We all know the elderly sometimes need an afternoon nap," she said, brushing her hair back behind one ear. It was a habit from the Sinda persona she had never quite dropped.
"Elderly, hah! Who had the aches and pains last time we met in the gym?" He grinned, dodging as she took a swipe at him, and began to sweep.
"What were you thinking about for dinner tonight?" She asked Shari, pointedly ignoring Grandpa as she drained her cup of coffee.
"I thought I'd take a crab and chicken casserole Pam came up with and get rid of a few leftovers. Why? What's on your mind?" Shari finished loading the dishes and started the machine.
"Just wondered if there was something I could fix to help out."
"If you could make something for dessert this afternoon, I'm sure the kids would like it. I could use something sweet myself." Shari took a cloth and began wiping down the counters.
"That works. I need to go down to Ashley's for some stuff. I can get the kids and make the weekend incinerator run if you want," Cally offered, glancing at the nearly full can.
"Thanks. Um, Mark's spending the night with Lucas. The keys to the truck are on the hook," Shari said absently, preoccupied with slapping away the hand that was playing around the belt loops on the back of her jeans. She wasn't slapping very hard. Cally smothered a grin and grabbed up the bag and the keys as she scooted out the door, reminding herself not to get back too quick.
Years ago, when she was a teenager freshly home on summer break, she had ridden cross-country with Grandpa in a dusty red pickup truck from the School, in Idaho. They came back through all of the midwestern rear area country, until they met up with Shari in Knoxville, where she'd been filling the shopping list
. It seemed Grandpa had shamelessly used the slab and about a dozen different identities, with some judicious palm grease, to buy up the bounty farm allotments for all of Edisto Island. Even back then, she could easily imagine him going through all the changes, because it still looked strange as hell to her to see him with red hair and all young and everything. He probably would have kept on buying until he'd owned half of Colleton County if Father O'Reilly hadn't gotten concerned and ratted him out to Shari.
Still, even the Bane Sidhe had had to agree that the possibilities were useful. And it was already a done deal by the time they'd realized what he was up to. Grandpa got to keep his island, but the price for Cally was that her first summer home from school had been spent hunting Posleen and getting a crash course in lowcountry construction. Typically, Papa O'Neal had spent his free time during her first year of school in a combination of shady trades of Galtech goods from the Rabun Gap cache—those he didn't plan to keep for himself—and brushing up his construction skills doing day labor jobs.
The hardest part had been sweeping the island once they got there. Satellite shots showed the bridge was intact, but they hadn't known much else. And at the time Edisto Island was very nearly as far as anyone had penetrated into the Lost Zone. The ride in the back of truck, on the first load of mostly cinderblocks, ammo, and the bare necessities, watching the treeline for feral Posleen, had not been fun. Not fun at all. She'd gotten five of them, and that was just on her own side. The large, ochre, centauroid reptiles had to be the most repulsive things she'd ever seen.