by John Ringo
What the hell? What is one of these monsters doing way the hell out here? Then she remembered. Shortly after the war there had been a big political hoo-hah. She only heard of it at all because they covered it in psy-ops class at school. A big nuclear scare had convulsed the remains of the country, about the safety of the SheVa's themselves, and the safe removal of the radioactive pebbles from their fuel systems. Politicians and the machines that owned them, whose districts and interests stood to benefit from the contracts to move the mountainous tanks, had masterfully orchestrated an avalanche of voter alarm. At ruinous cost, contractors transported the behemoths outside Fredericksburg, where destruction was total anyway and Fleet Strike was, at least, willing to have them around. More to the point, Fleet Strike being Galactic and now owning the area by treaty, there had been nobody in the United States Government with authority to refuse parking space to them.
The "dangerous" pebbles from the reactors disappeared off to power plants in the congressional districts of the key swing votes, at fire sale prices. For the rest of it, they recovered remains where profitable, stripping the tanks of easily portable and easily recyclable materials. That hadn't included the huge armored hulls, difficult to cut up, difficult to reprocess, more expensive to manipulate than basic raw materials.
Cally tried to dredge up her memory of the schematics, or anything she knew about them, to help her find a hatch. Off the frozen ground, out of the wind, perhaps with some materials protected from the damp that she could use to conserve body heat, she might just last the night. Without frostbite, even.
She found it, but it was so close to sunken onto the ground that once she got it open she had to scrape on her belly to get through the opening. At that it was like putting her damned boobs in a vice. It would almost be worth making nice with the rest of the Indowy, if that had been possible, to get the slab back and get rid of the things. She had never really appreciated her own body until she'd gotten stuck in the body of Sinda Makepeace. It didn't even help that men went so ga-ga over the things. As a married woman, even though it was a secret, they didn't even get her laid. All things considered, she was in an extremely grumpy mood.
Inside the SheVa, it was warmer than outside. Maybe about ten to twenty degrees warmer. Her breath wasn't even frosting. Still damned cold, though. She worked her way to the bridge, occasionally having to squeeze through tight spots where battle damage or the effects of time on same had knocked bits, sometimes very large bits, loose from where they were supposed to be. Finally, she made it to the equivalent of the battle bridge, whatever it had once been called. One of the operator chairs was reclined all the way back, but someone had stripped the seats down to bare metal. A red cross over against one wall, the metal outside streaked with soot, caught her eye. The mechanism had a stubborn seal of pure rust. She had to pick up a hunk of scrap and bash the catch to bits to get it open.
Inside, she found antibiotic creams long dried in their tubes, but the adhesive tape was, for a wonder, barely adequate to adhere a sterile gauze pad to a cut on her face she'd picked up somewhere. She pocketed what she thought she could use and proceeded to systematically search the bridge from one end to the other to see if anything useful, anything at all, had been overlooked. Behind a panel and some wiring she found a dented helmet. In a locker, she found a rotted backpack filled with what looked like the remains of some civilian clothes and effects, a yellowed and dog-eared paperback book, and two foil-wrapped bars of US Army iron rations circa 2004. Examination showed that one of the wrappers had been torn, the ration covered, startlingly, by a fungal rind like the one that formed on the outside of cheeses. This was startling because she wouldn't have thought any self-respecting fungus would touch Postie-war-era Army iron rats. The packing on the other bar was still intact. Well, maybe. She couldn't decide whether to wish it was or hope it wasn't.
She looked around at the inside of the mammoth tank, curious. She'd never been inside one before. It was the largest armored, tracked vehicle ever deployed in combat on Earth. The size of a mountaintop, the huge tank had been powered by nuclear fission via its pebble-bed reactor. The main gun had been capable of engaging B-Decs or C-Decs and living to tell the tale. It was the single most impressive cavalry vehicle in the history of war, ever. She knew this because her step-uncle Billy, who was more like a step brother, had told her about it at eye-glazing length the summer he built a scale model of one out of toothpicks and smooshed oyster shells. This bordered on bizarre since Billy had gone mute in the war from seeing too much, too young. Scratch the young part, it was too much for anyone. Here in Fredericksburg, it was, too. A couple of years after the war he had gotten massively talkative with her, just with her, and had never stopped. He spoke to others, but not enough so you'd notice. Functional, but now a quiet old guy who had settled with a plump, pretty wife to raise four kids in Topeka. They still exchanged Christmas cards under one of her identities.
The round trip back outside to pack the helmet with snow really sucked. Getting enough clean snow to fill it wasn't a problem. The stuff was piling up at an obnoxious rate. The nasty reek of rust and old, funky smoke was starting to be unpleasant enough to overcome her thankfulness for not being so damned cold. She wedged the helmet so that it wouldn't tip over and left the packed snow to start melting. When she checked, the buckley's diagnostic was hung. A partial report showed she should be able to restore limited functionality by raising the AI emulation level, giving the AI access to search some of the damaged areas with the capabilities usually denied it. She set the emulation to the recommended level eight, wincing.
"Buckley?" she said.
"Oh, God, my aching head. Holy shit, what the hell happ—I'm a what?!" The glum voice rose on a note of incredulity and near-hysteria. "I just know this is going to end badly."
"Buckley—please just wait a second. I need you, buckley. I need your help very, very badly," she said.
"Cally—you're Cally O'Neal. And I, I can see you. I see you, and I'm a machine," he said. "Well doesn't that just suck."
"Yeah, buckley, it does. It sucks. A lot of things suck, and not just for you. I'm stuck in the belly of a dead SheVa, in a snowstorm, in hostile territory, they're looking for me, I'm out of contact, and you're damaged."
"It's that last bit that really bugs me. I could have warned you about the rest. Never heard of a plan where so many things could go wrong, except for the time—"
"Buckley! Can you please look and see if there's anything you can reroute to get me a working transmitter?"
"I'm sure I could, with the right repair components. Do you have an XJ431P39 integrated molychip? Didn't think so."
"You didn't even give me time to answer!"
"And?"
"Well, okay, I don't. But you could have at least let me say so."
"Right."
"Is there any way to improvise a transmitter with some of this stuff?" She swept a hand around the bridge area.
"You have some kind of power source?"
"Well, no, I don't. I don't think I do, anyway."
"I hope you're equipped with body nannites. It's hot in here."
"The reactor. Great. Yeah, I am. Should I brave the cold, or stay in here?"
"Doesn't matter. You're gonna die either way, sooner or later. Shall I list the most likely possibilities?"
"Please don't."
"You do want full information, don't you?"
"I'd much rather get help building a transmitter, if possible."
"There's not much point in it."
"Buckley, can you put the pessimism on hold for awhile? I'm depressed enough already."
"Good—at least you're rational. And no, I mean there's not much point in it. You're maybe five miles from the river. That and the landing zone are the two most logical points for them to look for you. You're far better off to get the best night's sleep you can and make for the river in the morning. You're also better off sleeping in here, if you get Galactic-level medical treatment within thirty-six hours.
I'd recommend an early start. You don't want to stay here longer than that. If you found anything to eat—don't. Scare or not, I don't think they got all the hot rocks out of this thing."
"You're being very helpful, Buckley." Cally lay down in the reclined operator's chair, setting the PDA on the floor beside her. The bare metal was hard and uncomfortable, but she'd endured worse. There had been worse as part of her training at school, with the nuns, and far worse in the field doing her job.
"You're about to die a horrible death alone in the wilderness. I can sympathize. And me, I'll rust away slowly, slowly falling more and more apart as my battery runs down and down and—"
"Buckley? Please shut up."
"Right." He sounded satisfied, as if something about the end of the exchange had made all right with his world, at least for a few seconds.
She was strapped to the metal table on Titan Base. The bastards were on top of her again, and her head swam watching the unblinking, alien eyes through the imperfectly one-way glass above her. The face of the man on her wavered between Pryce and George and back again, only Pryce was Stewart and his ship was blowing up. They had tilted the table and were making her watch. Over and over and over again. A lifepod ejected from the shuttle and spouted wings, flying back towards the base as the ship and the table pulled her away, away, away. She was up to her elbows in blood, freezing and congealing on the icy metal table as the man slapped her over and over again. If she'd only been a good little girl and killed more Posleen, Daddy wouldn't have had to nuke her again. Herman started talking to her, telling her she had to go swim with the dolphins, but she couldn't go. Doctor Vitapetroni was holding her down, injecting her with something that stung so bad and telling her she had to stay on the table until she could wipe the blood off, but she couldn't because she didn't have a towel, and besides, she was strapped down anyway and couldn't dance anymore. She started to cry.
Cally woke, sobbing, her throat raw. The dream must have been another screamer. She remembered it and shuddered, wiping the tears away angrily.
"Good morning. I have cataloged five thousand, four hundred and thirty-two ways we can die horribly today. Continuing to process. Would you like me to . . . begin . . . the . . . list?" The buckley sounded tinny and maniacal. Dammit, she'd left it on overnight. Not that she'd had a choice. In its condition, she didn't think the PDA could reboot. At least, expecting it to come back up would be expecting a damned miracle. From the diagnostics, it was a miracle it had booted even once.
"Buckley, please calculate, not look up, a prime number with more than a thousand digits for me." At least if he was number-crunching he wasn't thinking of disasters and might actually be able to be useful if she needed him.
"Okay. But even if we do encryption based on it, they'll still break the code."
"Just do it and shut up, buckley."
"Right."
She drank the icy melt water in the helmet before she left, glaring balefully at the nasty iron ration bar she couldn't even eat. Outside, the snow was up to her mid-thigh on average. She'd be avoiding the drifts. She sure would give a lot for a pair of snowshoes, but she wasn't going to stop to try to rig a pair. She wasn't in Harrison' league with that improv shit, and she knew it.
It took her all morning to go those five miles, leaving a trail a toddler could have followed. Half the time she was picking herself up, the other half falling on her face again. The sky was heavy and gray. She hoped it started snowing some more soon. The cold would be bitter, but it would do something about her tracks. At the river, she pulled out the buckley and hoped that it could at least pull up pre-war road and terrain maps so she could figure out if she was east or west of the bridge.
"Buckley, I need a terrain map of the area and a street map. Old is okay," she said.
"I'm calculating."
"That's okay, you can interrupt it for this, but then go back to it, okay?"
"I can't display maps. They're all fragmentary. Go left."
"What?" It made the skin on the back of her neck prickle. The buckley's guess was probably better than hers, since she had no idea which way to go. She was good at her job, but she figured she was lucky she found the river at all. Part of being good at her job was knowing when to depend on her tech support. She turned left.
"Not your left, my left!"
She turned the other way and started plowing through more snow. And more snow. And still more snow. Snow that began to fall again. Oh well, skipping frostbite wasn't going to happen this time. Hopefully there wouldn't be too much to regenerate. Be a real bitch if she had to miss the big job over a little snow.
It had to have been about sixteen hundred by the time she hit the bridge. She'd tried to talk to the buckley twice, but he was no longer answering. Either one of the falls she'd taken and knocked something else loose or he'd run out of numbers to crunch and crashed himself. She'd tried to reboot, without any luck. Buckley was well and truly hors de combat. Again.
The bridge was a very welcome sight, since the winds had scoured it mostly clean of snow. The ice would be a stone bitch, but not so bad as the snow. Her adrenaline spiked as she caught movement from behind a snow drift. She dropped to the ground.
Chapter Twelve
The first go to hell rendezvous point was roughly one klick north and five clicks east of their entry point to the base. It was good that Sunday and Schmidt One had managed to figure out where they were right away, from the updated terrain features, and orient themselves towards their pickup. It was an especially good thing, since within just a few minutes the snow was falling so hard that visibility for more than a few feet ahead was damned near nil. As the snow started sticking and turning everything white, it got harder to even tell how much visibility they had. They had enough trouble just following the internal compass on their PDAs and putting one foot in front of the other. Heads down against the blowing snow, it was pretty hard not to bump into a particularly sneaky tree now and again.
Getting to the pickup only took maybe twice as long as it would have taken in fair weather. Tommy was grateful for the snow, since it had screwed with the Fleet Strike people searching for them more than it had screwed with them. He hoped Cally made it out, but tried not to think about it too much. Not right now. He'd think about her when he got somewhere that he had a chance to do something about it. He'd only dared try to raise her once on the radio. Getting no answer, he didn't dare transmit again.
They would have missed the Humvee if George and Papa hadn't been smart enough to leave the headlights on. As it was, they barely caught sight of the glow before they passed it. Damned nor'easters. All too many of them since the war. Why was a question for the academics—which they sure did love debating over lunches bought with other people's money. Piling into the warmth of the vehicle was like heaven.
"Anything from Cally?" It was the first thing out of Harrison' mouth. It would have been the first thing out of his mouth, except it came out more of a grunt as he shoved his way into the truck after the other man and slammed the door.
"No," Papa O'Neal said brusquely. "We keep the snoopers active to give us as much warning of hostiles as possible, we keep the lights on, we camp here for the night."
"Not to get in the way of a good plan, but I have cherished personal needs. Like oxygen with low carbon monoxide levels."
"Fans. George brought fans. We take turns on watch clearing the snow from one side of the car outside enough to make a chimney. More snivel gear in the back."
"George?" Tommy said. "Remind me never to complain about you being a paranoid son of a bitch again."
"Bet on it. Just be glad this Humvee is a hybrid," the blond said. "If we were running on pre-war chemical batteries, we'd be toast."
"Mmm. Toast. What good does running this beast do that we can't just do on its electric?" Tommy asked.
"Engine heat," Harrison mumbled. "It's not like we've got electric heating coils or anything. We can run the lights, we can run the snoopers, we can run the fans, but every coup
le of hours, we're going to have to run the engine enough to warm back up again so we don't all freeze. Speaking of not freezing, do you think one of you could see your way clear to passing some chow forward? It's about that time."
"What's plan B if Cally's not here in the morning?" Tommy couldn't help feeling disturbed that of all the team members, it was the girl who was out in the snow.
"She should be here. She had the same terrain and rendezvous data you did," George assured.
"If she loaded it, if her buckley didn't break, if she didn't get caught," Harrison had dry clothes out and was changing, shivering.
"Sounding a bit like a buckley yourself, aren't you?" his brother quipped.
"I didn't see her load the cube. I saw her face when she took it. Bet you fifty fedcreds she never loaded the thing," Sunday said.
"Okay, so if she's not here in the morning, we proceed to the bridge and leave a lookout—Tommy, I guess—then send a pair on foot to rendezvous two. We also alert Kieran that she may show up at the plane. The bridge and the plane are the most logical places for her to go if she somehow didn't get the memo. If she can find them in all this," George added.