by John Ringo
The light in front of him turned yellow and he slowed down and stopped behind the cars in front of him.
“Switch!” He slammed the gearshift into park, hit his seatbelt release, and was out the door, yelling, “Don’t take off before I’m in the back, man!”
She snapped her jaw shut and scrambled over to the driver’s seat, grabbing the door he’d left open, adjusting the seat, and checking her mirrors as he yanked the back of the van open and squeezed in between his tanks, shutting it behind him.
“Uh, like, I need to get some stuff out back here. Hang a left at the next light, and a left onto West Main. Just, you know, keep going around the block for a little while. Please?”
She restrained the impulse to laugh as he lurched around in back, avoiding the tanks, unbolting a false panel, stubbing his toe, yanking a couple of vacuum-sealed bricks of familiar dried vegetation out of the cavity, and fumbled with the false panel, trying to get it back in place with the van in motion. Finally, he got it and sighed, grabbing his backpack and shoving the packages in the bottom, covered by clothes.
“Okay, now don’t turn this time, straight, farther up now, turn down this side street. Yeah, like, perfect. Okay, pull in beside this one, see the blue loading sign? Okay, stop right there.” He grabbed his PDA and punched in a number from memory. “Hey, Pete, guess who, dude? Yep, like, in the flesh. On your loading dock, dude. Like, now. Well, I would have called ahead, but, like, I was busy trying to avoid all these people on the streets, you know? Oh, there you are…” He hung up as a short, fat man in a white apron rushed out and yanked open the van doors.
“Geez, Re — Mister Jones, you know I only take delivery of the crabs here, I haven’t had time to get Joey in place, he’s still here, my reputation, I can’t afford to get caught. This is not good, Mister Jones.”
“Look, let’s get this shit under cover. You would have been at more risk sending Joey out with all these people around and you know it.” Cally smiled secretly to herself as some of her ride’s surfer accent fell away.
“Awright. This time. Come in and grab a bucket. I got lots of extra customers today and I can move a few more of these. Who’s she?”
“She’s cool. Come on.” He hurried the man away towards the doors. The shorter man looked like he was about to explode. After they disappeared Cally surreptitiously checked the sidearm Reefer had left for a full magazine and a round in the chamber, carefully smudging her prints as she set it back down. Not that hers were recorded anywhere, but it didn’t pay to take chances.
He came back out alone with a large bucket of salt water and shoveled a bunch of soporific crabs into it, muttering under his breath as he hefted the full load. “It’s, like, okay, Marilyn. It’s all cool. My… friend, he’s, like, shy, you know? We’ll be totally back on the road in five minutes.”
Her body language was casual and relaxed, but very still, until he came back out alone, emptier backpack on his shoulder, closed the back of the van, and came to the driver’s side, motioning her to move over. She kept one eye on the mirrors while she did it, relaxing infinitesimally after they made it onto 275 headed out of town.
“Like, excuse me for that scene back there, and thanks once again for righteously saving my ass. With the driving thing, you know?” He looked across at her, speculatively. “You know, you’re pretty cool in a pinch, Marilyn. You ever get, like, tired of college life and want a job, you come look me up. Little training and you could be pretty good at this.”
“Why, thank you, Reefer.” She looked out the window and bit her lip softly. “I’m hoping to make it on my art or my music, but you know what life’s like. I’m really flattered. I guess I’ll feel better knowing I’ve got a potential job if things, you know, don’t work out.”
He grunted and popped another piece of gum and they lapsed into silence as they followed the road through the deep cuts of the Smokies, some with loose gray shale Galplased in place, with a line of drainage holes down at the base, some of deep, black coal, rising from a Galplased base in great open hills of midnight, turning to a thin brown layer of topsoil mere inches from the upper surface of scrub and trees.
“Makes you understand the economics of strip mining,” she commented, waving one hand at the mountain of coal cut open by the interstate’s passage.
“Oh, for sure. Completely bogus for the environment, though.”
“So were the Posties.”
“Still are, man. Like, the long term damage from the grat and abat alone. Totally bogus. Damn aliens.”
“Oh, are you a humanist? I didn’t take you for the type, Reef.” She looked at him, interested.
“Well, I mean, the Crabs once you get past that whole bouncing thing seem like pretty laid back dudes. Conceited, but you get the feeling that they’re really going after the whole enlightenment thing. And the little green guys are just shy. The Frogs kind of creep me out, though. It’s like you never know if you’re being watched. The Darhel are… too corporate, you know? And, well, we all know about the Posties. I just think Earth was, you know, better, before any of them showed up. I mean, I’m glad we didn’t get eaten, but I kinda wish they’d go away now. I’m not, like, a card-carrying humanist or anything, but, I can, like, see their point. You know, we saved each other, now go the hell away. But I don’t, like, say so in public too much. Unhealthy.”
“I suppose. We’ve got humanists on campus, but it’s always seemed too much like conspiracy stuff to me.” She shrugged.
“Yeah, well, you’re what, about twenty? I’m twice that, man. If you had, like, lived and seen the saner-sounding humanists die off young, and the lunatic fringe doing just fine, and some of the accidents and such taking the sane ones looking… funny. Like, man, it smells so totally bogus… I just, you know, keep my eyes open and my mouth shut. Oh, I don’t, like, buy into that whole Darhel conspiracy theory stuff. I think it’s probably more the big corporations trying to grab as much money as they can — the military industrial complex all over again, you know. The only way to, like, fight the whole establishment thing is to drop out, you know? Sometimes I feel like the only way to get back to, you know, the garden this planet could be is for all the aliens to pack up and go home and then, you know, make the big corporations illegal. Then we could all, like, live free, you know? But all I can do is, like, live as free as I can and, like, try not to run my mouth enough to wind up on the corporations’ list, you know?”
“I guess I can see both sides. I mean, I had this pretty cool art ethics class that talked about the pressures we could expect in various kinds of jobs and their effect on creative authenticity. On the other hand, one of the most coveted class spots on campus is the live modeling ‘Aliens in Art.’ I still can’t believe I got in. They have to keep the numbers of students really small. The thikp… tchpith… crab was really funny. Said something about thinking the peaceful pursuit of art was good therapy for bloodthirsty carnivore barbarians.” She grinned. “Only he was so hard to draw, because they can’t stay still, you know?”
He chuckled and they drifted off into silence again, him concentrating on the road and her reading another of Marilyn’s romance novels.
Eventually the mountains gave way to rolling foothills of cedar, different kinds of leafy trees she couldn’t have named if you’d paid her, and the occasional weeping willow. The less mountainous the terrain got, the more the hills were covered with strips of white or black board fences with horses or ponies grazing in the fields of lush grass, many of them females with foals. She had been disappointed the first time she visited Kentucky to find that the grass was not at all blue. Even now that she knew better it was vaguely disappointing.
The extraterrestrial market for horses had been one of the stranger outcomes of contact with the Galactics. The Indowy had been delighted with the intelligent, sociable herbivores, and even the Tchpth had been known to comment that perhaps Earth had an incipient intelligent and civilized species. While the Himmit didn’t actually buy pets, they seemed fasci
nated by the interaction between equine and Indowy. The result was that the horse farms of Kentucky occupied more acreage in the state than ever and were currently selling as many animals as they could breed, particularly ponies and miniatures, as pets — making the industry one of the more reliable planetary sources of FedCreds. Once, they even passed a field where a couple of ponies were being inspected by an Indowy buyer, who seemed not the least perturbed that the mare and her foal were gently lipping its fur.
Reefer had phoned ahead as soon as they started to get into horse country, so when they pulled off the interstate into a Waffle House parking lot on the way through Lexington, he parked behind the restaurant right next to an ancient green SUV, whose driver put down his PDA and walked around to open the back glass.
“Why don’t you go in and get us a seat? Might as well grab lunch while we’re here.” The deadhead nodded towards the restaurant. It was a busy, major street with a lot of restaurants, but he had parked to minimize the number of people who’d see him make his sale. Unfortunately, that meant she was hit in the face with a strong reek of Dumpster as she got out onto the hot asphalt, and she couldn’t help looking a bit longingly at the upscale Italian chain restaurant across the street on the next block as she walked around to get to the Waffle House entrance.
She was seated at the counter, a seat saved beside her, had already gotten her coffee and was picking at a pecan waffle when he came in. It didn’t take him long to wolf down an omelet and Coke, then they were back on the road. Even though they didn’t go into the center of the city, almost all of Lexington was certified historic. Her throat felt a bit funny and she wondered if maybe she was coming down with a touch of a cold, or maybe allergies. It was like driving through a tiny slice of prewar Earth, and she focused determinedly on her screen as the landscape flashed past the windows at speed, slowing down occasionally when a chirping from somewhere under the dashboard betrayed the highly illegal piece of equipment hiding underneath.
The first time it went off, she could feel him looking sideways at her. When she looked up at him and shrugged, looking back to her book, he grunted noncommittally and popped another piece of gum, but he didn’t seem worried from then on whenever the detector sounded — he just slowed down until the tiny red light on the cube player turned off.
It was mid-afternoon when he dropped her off at a gas station off the Hopple Street exit in Cincinnati. As she got her backpack and suitcase out, shook hands, politely fended off another job offer, and watched the van drive back off towards the interstate on-ramp, she could hear the strains of his cube music cruising through their perpetual shuffle… can’t revoke your soul for tryin’, Get out of the door and light out and look all around. Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me; Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me…
She shook her head with a wry smile as he drove out of sight and took her stuff over to the pay phone to call herself a cab, then sat on the bus stop bench next to the phone and waited, studying her surroundings and the intermix of tall, very narrow old townhouses with small-scale industrial buildings on each side of the street. The bus stop was between the gas station and an appliance repair shop. Across the street, she could see bits of the downtown skyline through gaps between a couple of the houses and a squat, brick machine-shop, but most of it was grayed out into dim, jerky geometric shapes in the smog.
* * *
It gave General Beed a feeling of importance to be summoned — well, invited, really — to a meeting in Chicago to discuss his next assignment. After the war, well, there were a lot of old generals with a lot of experience who were, now, going to live a long time. He had been lucky to stay on active, running the Southeastern Regional Criminal Investigations Division. It was a more important position than it looked, at first, since the southeast was vital to the reclamation of the rest of the forty-eight states of the continental U.S.
This conference room would have done credit to any prewar Fortune 500 company — the glossy wood conference table, corporate art on the walls, the plush carpeting in one of those pinkish colors that probably had a fancy name, and fresh paint on the walls — it was all a throwback to a prewar opulence that you rarely saw these days, especially in the service. And the view from the Fleet Strike Tower was fabulous. Rank definitely had its privileges. He raised a hand to check by feel that his mustache was in order, running a light hand over his dark blond hair to check it as well, careful not to disarrange it — although with a good strong touch of hair spray that was not much of a hazard. He almost didn’t mind cooling his heels waiting for General Vanderberg. Almost.
The major general, when he came in, didn’t impress Beed. The exchange of salutes, as always, gave him a brief period to size the other man up and develop a first impression. Rejuv helped, of course, and he couldn’t fault the man’s uniform or grooming. Still, a general officer of Fleet Strike should look like a general officer, and this officer’s crooked nose, almost connected eyebrows, and leftover juvenile acne scars left an overall impression of, well, ordinariness, that was not, in his guest’s experience, representative of what a good general officer should be. Unfortunately, no one had asked him. Still, one showed respect for the rank, and the man at least appeared fit in a way that spoke of commendable continuing devotion to his PT. He had, like Beed, the whipcord runner’s build that one tended to associate with good soldiers, and he warmed a bit towards the other man.
“General, you’ve been ordered here in connection with a highly sensitive counterintelligence assignment. Before I go any further, let’s get this out of the way. The information I am about to relate to you is Top Secret Codename Hartford. You will not discuss any of this information with anyone not specifically on the list of persons cleared for Hartford; you are not authorized to add persons to the list of persons cleared for Hartford. The codename ‘Hartford’ is itself classified and you are not authorized to mention Hartford to anyone not on the list cleared for this operation. Do you understand?”
“I understand, sir,” he said gravely, straightening his already perfect posture.
“We have recently become aware, and acquired conclusive proof, that an organization hostile to both the Federation and Fleet Strike exists that has demonstrated both the will and ability to place agents within Fleet Strike at a fairly high level and have those agents operate undetected for extended periods of time. That is practically the sum total of the information we have about that organization, and we wouldn’t have that without a combination of a security failure on their part and a piece of good luck and good thinking on the spot.”
“Sir, that sounds…”
“Preposterous, impossible, outrageous — yes, I know. All of those. We’ve hesitated to speculate, out of concern for getting locked into preconceptions, but we’ve prepared a list of known groups or ideologies with hostility towards the Galactic Federation, or the nonhuman races, or Fleet Strike itself. They range from elements of the government of the United States to the humanist movement to Families for Christ.”
“Families for Christ?” Beed asked disbelievingly.
“They apparently strongly disapprove of the number of marriages that have broken up after only the husband was rejuvenated. They allege a successful Satanic conspiracy to destroy the American family. And, of course, there is some cross pollination between their group and the humanists.”
“With the U.S. government I presume you’re thinking of the Constitutionalist Caucus of the Republican Party?”
“Every group has its lunatic fringe. They’re still very unhappy that the original contracts with the Galactics for construction of the Sub-Urbs forbid any change to internal rules that make them weapons free zones for civilian personnel.” Vanderberg shrugged, “As I said, this part is only speculation. Our actual knowledge is appallingly scant. Your mission relates to an operational plan we have developed for remedying this problem.”
Vanderberg stood and began to pace.
“You will shortly be assuming command of the T
hird MP Brigade, headquartered on Titan Base. Most of the brigade is forward deployed, under able subordinates. Your XO, Colonel Tartaglia, is competent enough that, absent the rejuv bottleneck created by us oldsters, he’d have been promoted long ago. Your headquarters office is in close proximity to CID, which will give you a conceptually familiar environment and ample time and energy to devote to this mission. Because you’re going to need one person you can absolutely trust, I’m going to be sending my own aide with you as your new aide de camp. He’s fully cleared for Hartford material, and I’m sure you’ll find his services as helpful as I have.”
“Forgive me a minute, General, but did you say Titan Base? While it’s a prime command, I’m rather bewildered about why we’d select it for a counterintelligence operation.”
“Physical security is significantly greater on Titan. For various reasons we don’t believe the enemy organization, whatever it is, will be as strong there. After the first phase succeeds, we don’t want to take any chances on an extraction. But let’s go ahead and get your new aide in here.” He scratched his chin briefly.
“Jenny,” he addressed his AID, “send in Lieutenant Pryce.”
“Certainly, Peter,” the cool soprano voice answered.
While he did not like having his aide de camp chosen for him without any input on his part, his first impression of the slight, dark haired young man was favorable. Understandably nervous in the presence of highly ranked superiors, the lieutenant was obviously uncomfortable that the tray of coffee he was carrying prevented him from rendering the requisite salute. The general had just had time to reflect that the young man’s gray silks were, appropriately, immaculate, when the first impression took an abrupt turn for the worse as that idiot Pryce tripped over his own feet and dumped the entire tray of hot coffee and accessories thereto into his lap.