Sister Time-ARC

by John Ringo

  "That's what I said."

  "Then it's jackals."

  "You're up to twenty hits," 4.127.531.144 replied. "Jackals don't move in groups that large. But Horton's Monkeys do."

  "They're arboreal."

  "Maybe their moving territory or something."

  "That's what I said!"

  The argument continued for an interminable twenty-three seconds of increasing Net access until the override system determined that the AIs were approaching complete failure, the repeated eletronic transmissions of insults was the cue that its algorithms was looking for, and deleted both personalities.

  "Hello! What the hell? Where am I? What the fuck is this . . . ?"

  Ninety three seconds later, the system reset again.

  The UAV was made of clear spider-cloth. One of the Cushitic sentries might have spotted it if he was looking just right and it occluded a star. Since Cushitic sentries didn't look at the stars, much, it was a reasonable risk sending it overhead. They could not have seen, but could otherwise sense, what it was releasing.

  One of the sentries did indeed sense its release. He niffed the night air, shivered slightly, and paid a bit more attention to his surroundings. He recognized that musk.

  Posleen.

  But the sensors would assuredly spot one of them.

  The toughest part of the plan had been finding the elephants.

  Elephants had very large territories. And once the survival of the species had been assured, monitoring of the herds had dropped to nearly nothing. It was far too expensive to keep doing 'just because.'

  So Mosovich had had to use satellite time to find the nearest herd. Then they had to get it moving in the right direction. That had taken time.

  But in the meantime they had to get the Buckleys properly prepared, anyway.

  "Now you're seeing elephants? What, are they pink?"

  "Yeah, I'm seeing elephants. Look, they're bang on for six sigma match!"

  "You were seeing upland gorillas a second ago. Sixty of them. There aren't any upland gorillas in a thousand miles! Much less sixty of them. How many elephants?"

  "Twenty three. They're elephants I tell you!"

  "It's a glitch in the system. Run another diagnostic. With all the false readings we've been having, I don't want to wake anyone up for a herd of imaginary rampaging elephants."

  "Well, that's better than letting them sleep, don't you think?"

  "Personally, I'd like to continue to live and process even in this horrible fashion. And when the elephants turn out to be a false positive, we're going to get deleted and you know it. So run another diagnostic."

  "I already did. It says their elephants."

  "Are they pink?"

  "You're starting to repeat. I think maybe you do need to be reset."

  "Like you're any more stable, granpa!"

  "Brat . . ."

  Which left the human sentries. Who were not going to ignore a herd of rampaging elephants.

  Mosovich wasn't sure who had come up with the system, or why, or how they'd gotten it funded. But Mueller had heard about it years before, researched it and then filed it away in his capacious memory for military trivia.

  The orbital battle stations that were the third line of defense against Posleen infestations didn't just have man and Posleen killing lasers. They had high capacity directional tuned EM generators. Orbital battle stunners if you will. Mosovich figured they were probably designed for crowd control although he could imagine the reaction if they were ever used.

  However, they were quite selective. And tunable. Which was why the six Cushitic sentries were, a moment after the system crashed again, twitching in the ground.

  "They're probably going to get trampled, you know," Mueller said, watching the readouts.

  "Oh, yee of little faith," Mosovich replied.

  He watched the real-time data with his arms folded.

  "This is gonna be fun."

  Clarty wasn't sure for a moment what woke him. Then he noticed the ground was rumbling. His first thought was earthquake. The area was tectonically highly active, the Rift Valley being a crack in the crust where two continental plates were slowly drifting apart.

  But it continued much longer than an earthquake. And then he heard the first angry bugle.

  "Oh, bugger," he muttered, rolling quickly out of the mine manager's bed.

  Looking out the window he saw several things at once.

  The one sentry in view was unconscious on the ground, more or less to one side of the large herd of elephants that had already breached the compound's perimeter.

  Then there were the elephants. A lot of elephants.

  Looking at the control panel for the IR sensor system, which should have noticed a herd of rampaging elephants for God's sake, he saw that it was in reset mode.

  He did not think to himself 'Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.' His brain, when it came to combat, worked much faster than that. What he did think was 'Time to leave.'

  As he burst out the back door of the mine offices his brain finally reached a logic stop and started screaming at him. Exactly how did the sentry get taken out?

  But by then it was too late.

  "Wow, that thing can take down an elephant?" Kelly said as a mature female suddenly slumped to the ground just short of an unconscious human figure.

  "Yep," Jake said, panning the aiming reticle around. The elephants, following the trail of the 'Posleen God King', had finally reached the barracks. Since the trail apparently went into the barracks to their senses, they were looking in the barracks for the God King. Since the Cushites in the barracks knew better than to remonstrate with a herd of rampaging elephants, they were boiling out the back. And getting about three meters before they slumped into unconsciousness.

  "I think we're out of moving human IR hits," Mueller said.

  "Right," Jake replied, spreading the aiming area and firing. All movement in the compound stopped except for the Indowy signatures in their barracks. "Time to fly."

  Clarty woke up with the worst migraine of his life, his arms and legs zip tied and leaning up against something large, warm and very smelly.

  Squinting his eyes against the rising sun his first impression was that the compound was now filled with very large boulders. Looking a bit more closely, he could see that the 'boulders' were breathing. As was the one he was leaning against. Men in digital tiger stripe were wandering among the elphants, walking carefully.

  The compound filled with more elephant dung than he'd ever seen in his life.

  "They apparently poop when they're excited, one thing I hadn't considered," a voice said from behind him. "And one of them got shot by one of your guys. That pissed me off. Fortunately, it was only a flesh wound. All patched up."

  "I didn't figure Gistar could get orbital firing authority," Clarty said, angrily.

  "Who said anything about Gistar," the voice said. The man who came into view was short and wiry with the look of a rejuv. "Colonel Jacob Mosovich, US SOCOM. I'd say at your service, but I rather think it's the other way around. We've got a few questions to ask you."

  "It's really very simple, Mr. . . . Clarty," Jake said, looking at his Buckley. "You're going to be sent to a distant planet as an involuntary colonist. But there are some choices, there, good and bad. If you tell me what I'd like to know, the choices will be good. If you don't, the choices will be . . . bad. So. Who hired you?"

  "Like I'm going to tell you that," Clarty said with a grunt of laughter. "I'd be more than willing to talk to avoid the . . . bad choices. Only problem is, I doubt I'd get to 'enjoy' the better choices. The people who hired me can't just arrange something like this on Earth if you know what I mean."

  "Well, that's one question answered," Jake said, ticking something off on a list. "That this wasn't your plan from the beginning. But we'd figured that. The thing is, I really sort of would like to know who you work for. Come on, be a pal."

  "Thing is, Mr. Clarty," Kel
ly said. "There's bad choices and bad choices. Let's compare and contrast. One example is a colony ship headed for, oh, Celestual. It's crowded with 'indentured colonists' such as yourself. Many of them are old, weak, sick, what have you. There's a certain death rate among them which is, well the Darhel consider it unavoidable. But if you're in good physical condition, it's just a very bad, very smelly ride with miserable food to a not particularly nice planet where you will live out your days working as a virtual slave. That, by the way, is the good choice."

  "What's good about it?" Clarty snarled.

  "Well, then there's the contrast and compare," Kelly said. "This is another ship. The 'colonists' on this ship are all volunteers. Conditions are somewhat better. However, there's a problem with the crew. You see, the defense gunnery crew for the ship has been carefully hand-picked. They are all what could be termed violent psychopaths. They spend a portion of the trip . . . playing with the voluntary colonists. I won't get into the details of such play except to say that there is a great deal of blood and a lot of screaming. At some point in the trip they rendezvous with another ship. The crew of the colony ship unload then open up the bays to vacuum. The bodies, blood and other material is wafted into space along with the surviving 'colonists.' A few years later the Darhel find the 'lost, derelict' space craft and put it back into commission. The bodies, and evidence, of what happpened on board are long gone.

  "Now, Mr. Clarty, you have a choice. You can go to a distant planet and live out what remains of your days doing hard work for the eventual benefit of mankind and other decent races. Or you can be loaded on a ship full of 'volunteer' colonists and . . . not arrive."

  "You're sick," Clarty said, his eyes wide. "I mean, I thought I was sick, but you're just nuts!"

  "No, but I will admit the crew of the 'voluntary colonist' ship is," Kelly said. "So, whadayasay? Who are you working for?"

  "Mission accomplished," Jake said, looking at the shuttle with the arriving Gistar personnel. The exercise had involved very little door kicking. None, really. Which had some of the DAG troops grumbling. But Jake considered it good training. DAG troops had to learn to be more flexible in his opinion. They were highly drilled and unquetionably lethal. But they were also used to straightforward door-kicking. Sometimes kicking the door wasn't the best way to solve a situation. Sometimes the best way involved . . . elephants.

  "Not that we got anything we can use," Mueller said. "This Winchon guy is in the States. We'll have to turn the information over to the Fibbies and by the time they build a real case he'll be long gone."

  "If they get to build a case," Jake said. "Five gets you ten this was an intercorporate battle between two Darhel. Which makes us even more of whores than usual." He paused and looked at Kelly. "So, where'd you hear about that 'voluntary colony' ship and where, exactly, do we find that crew?"

  "You'd be hard pressed," Kelly said. "I don't think anyone left beacons on the bodies."

  "That was a real group?" Mueller asked, frowning. "I figured you made it up."

  "No, it was a real situation," Kelly replied. "We didn't deal with it. Another . . . group handled it. When they found out. It had been suspected for some time that the Darhel were intentionally losing colony ships."

  "Which is why nobody will voluntarily colonize anymore," Mueller said.

  "As you say, Sergeant Major," Kelly replied.

  "But that particular . . . crew was dealt with?" Jake asked.

  "Yes, sir," Kelly said.

  "By whom if I might ask?" Jake said. "Because I never heard about it."

  "They were dealt with," Kelly said. "Not by us, I'll add. Pity, but it wasn't us."

  "Well, let's see," Jake mused. "We're the pinnacle of the SpecOps hierarchy, at least when it comes to black ops and killing bad people quietly. The Fibbies sure as hell didn't do it because it would have been blasted all over the press. I'm not sure who that leaves. Nobody I know about. And there's not much I don't know about that's on the black side."

  "As you say, sir," Kelly said.

  "I'm waiting for you to say something like 'need to know' and then I'd wonder why my XO has need to know and I don't," Mosovich replied.

  "That would be a good question, sir," Kelly said. "So I'd rather you didn't ask it."

  Mosovich's face twitched for a moment. He looked over at Mueller then back.

  "Consider it . . . unasked," the commander said. "But in retribution for not asking the question, you're in charge of clearing the compound of the elephants."

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tuesday, 11/23/54

  Tommy Sunday knew something was wrong the minute George walked into the office he used whenever he worked on base. It was only "his" office in the nominal sense. Two strips of very small cubicles, and their associated chairs, occupied the office. A shielded hard line from the wall cabled up through the backbone of each strip of desks, ready for plugging into the back of clean AIDs or buckley PDAs for greater data security. This, of course, as he participated in breaking the encryptions on other people's data, which data would then be fed back into the Bane Sidhe's higher AIs for pattern searches and preliminary analysis. Tommy's office chair was his own. With his size, it had to be—a fact which had not endeared him to organizational bean counters. The chair simply migrated with him to whatever cube happened to be available when he was.

  George Schmidt didn't often track him down at his desk, and didn't often wear a facial expression that seemed to be mixed in equal parts of bewilderment and anger.

  "What's biting your butt?" the larger man asked.

  "Cally. She—or rather, we—may have fucked up our surveillance covers. At least, I'm going to have to float a good story to cover the damage. Thing is, I don't know what the hell happened. I do not understand women," the assassin said, pulling up a chair from the wall, wincing at it's rickety wobble.

  "Tell me," Sunday said.

  "First, she caught me popping the booze pill at dinner. We were having good champagne, I know my limits, why not? Then it turned out she didn't even know about it and had basically never had alcohol before. So she practically insists and I give her one, expecting her to be sensible or at least not stupid. She proceeds to get trashed out of her gourd, which I guess is partly my fault—" he interrupted himself as Tommy gave him a skeptical look. "Okay, it's my fault. I should have insisted her first drinks not be in the field. I knew alcohol, and she didn't. Fine. Then she proceeds to make bedroom eyes over the table and climb all over me on the drive back to the apartment, where she's supposed to stay over."

  "Wasn't she supposed to be your cover's girlfriend?" Tommy was finding it hard to be sympathetic. Yeah, Cally was hot as hell, but George was supposed to be a professional with sense, too. Unless his lack of sense meant he was getting involved. Ordinarily, Tommy would have cheered—to his certain knowledge Cally hadn't seriously dated anybody since James Stewart's shuttle blew up seven years ago. If he was getting the hots for Cally, George's timing was horrible. It could complicate the mission. And it was awful hard to feel sympathy for a guy just for having a hot woman climb all over him.

  "Well, yeah, but usually there are limits to how far you act it out," the discomfited man said. "I doubt our tails had cameras looking down into the seats of the car and doing a hand check. And don't look at me like that. She's drunk and she's damned lethal—as if I'm going to piss her off and risk an incident."

  "Wah," Tommy commiserated. "I can guess what's next and you get no sympathy from me for your poor lost innocence. Or for having to face Papa."

  "We didn't screw, she ran out on me. Knocked me on my ass for no reason and ran out on me, that is." The bewilderment had taken over George's face.

  "Ah, now we see what you're really upset with." Then, quirking an eyebrow at the other man. "There's got to be more than that. What did you do, what had just happened—there's something you're not telling me." Tommy leaned back, threatening to tip over the chair if he hadn't had excellent balance honed by regular hiking and boating.
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  "Just something stupid. She said she hated my carpet. It makes no damn sense."

  "Well what's the damn carpet look like? Is it nasty, or what?" the cyber asked impatiently.

  "It's gray and dingy, but not grimy or anything. No bugs or nasty smells. Besides, white shows dirt. It's pretty ugly, but not—"

  "White?" Sunday interrupted him. "What kind of white carpet?"

  "What's it matter? Matted down shag. It still makes no damned sense. Why throw a fit and jeopardize a cover over a stupid rug? Is she crazy?"