by John Ringo
“Are we at a stalemate here?” Nathan O’Reilly clearly was not talking about the chessboard, which had at least five moves to mate, if the Indowy across from him made a particular mistake. And that was one of the shorter options.
“I do not know. Possibly. And it gives me grief to admit it. You humans cannot, or will not be other than what you are. And I have observed enough humans and read enough of your history to know that human organizations without what you call down chain loyalty simply do not work. They collapse of their own weight, as a tower whose antigrav fails.” His hands crossed briefly in the equivalent of a shrug.
“I understand why loyalty that only goes up the chain, Your Loolnieth, works for the Indowy. But don’t you have true reciprocal obligations in arrangements between clans? Can’t your people be persuaded to see the analogy?”
“I truly do not think relations between the Indowy of the Bane Sidhe and our human friends can go on as they have been. But your analogy interests me. Would it be possible for me to ask for some time to contemplate it without offending you? I do not know what may be done with it, but there is a leaf just beyond the reach of my hand. Alone, perhaps my thoughts can climb the tree.” He stood and almost turned, stopping and putting a hand on O’Reilly’s arm, instead.
“You do realize that I do not turn away from you or your species, that my need for contemplation is genuine, do you not?” The slight tilt of his head evinced concern.
“You don’t have to prove yourself to me, old friend. I trust you.” The priest withdrew and was gone.
Titan Base, Fleet Strike Detention Center, Wednesday, June 19, 10:00
General James Stewart’s doctors were none too happy to have him up and about the morning after being gut-shot. He had given them little choice. When they had waked him briefly to ask about certain necessary arrangements while he was undergoing regen, he had instead ordered them to stitch what could be stitched, and use surgical synthetics for what had to be patched. While true regen on the stitched parts could be continued with injections, the synthetics would have to be removed and would cause the regeneration process to ultimately take twice as long as it should.
The doctors had been even more unhappy when General Vanderberg had refused to allow them to overrule the general on medical grounds. But then, the military medical profession was pretty much agreed that general officers made lousy patients.
So here he was this morning, looking down at Sind… Sometime in the night Mata Hari had been abbreviated by the watchers to Mahri. He supposed there was some logic to having something to call her. For him, it only underscored the pain of not even knowing her name.
Two tall robed figures trailed by a couple of Indowy — strange sometimes how quickly humanity had gotten used to little green men — were approaching him, or the line of seats placed near him. Apparently, they had some interest in him, since they were stopping by his wheelchair, ignoring the medic hovering behind him with syringes full of medical nannites.
The Tir Dol Ron, and the Tir Dad Lin, according to his AID. He knew enough not to laugh or smirk or even show surprise at the Darhel with the funny name. One was the trade minister and the other the minister of education, who actually handled propaganda and public relations, such as it was. What they really were were cabinet level officials of a Galactic Federation where the Cabinet ran the show. In the words of Sergeant Franks, to whom he owed at least a mental apology, the V-est of IP’s.
“We wish to express our appreciation and approval for the apprehension of this person. We would like to assure you that you have greatly enhanced the interests of Galactic Security. We are certain that you have a bright future within the Fleet Strike Organization.” The voice was so beautiful he barely restrained the urge to vomit. The Tirs appeared to be waiting for something from him. When he merely nodded silently, the Tir Dol Ron started to lift one corner of his lip, revealing the edge of a very pointed tooth, but his eyes flickered to Stewart’s injuries and he appeared to relax. The two turned abruptly and proceeded to a pair of the seats, hesitating for a moment while the Indowy with them moved the seats closer to the glass.
Below, “Mahri” was still dancing frantically, nonstop, in the fluorescent orange jumpsuit that had replaced her grays. It made his chest hurt.
* * *
When the Fleet team came trooping back in, Stewart watched them from behind his best poker face — and his best was very good indeed. Tartaglia, perhaps anticipating his new CO’s likely needs, had sent Baker home for sleep around zero hundred, electing to stay in command of observation through the night. Consequently, when the medic wheeled him in this morning, Baker had been here, bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to brief him in person. Experientially, Beed’s paranoia hadn’t been a total loss. Following Baker’s lead, Stewart had handed his AID to the Medic and ordered the visibly unhappy man to take a walk.
At that point, Baker had been free to fill Stewart in with a complete no-shitter on each of the Fleet personnel, the Darhel delegation, and events of the night before. Which meant that when the Fleet platoon, plus fresh meat and Dr. Mengele, came trooping in, he knew who was who.
Baker was in his forties. Old enough to think he’d seen the world and be mostly right, but remarkably sheltered in some ways. In Baker’s world the MP’s and the good soldiers were the good guys, and the tongs and the scumbags were the bad guys. You prosecuted one, and the other helped you. Well, more or less.
Baker had no idea what was coming. Or if he did, it was just at the level of a slight foreboding that he shrugged off. Stewart, with his considerably more complex understanding of the world knew exactly what was going to happen, and exactly how little power he had to stop it.
He was also going to have to watch Baker and protect his ass. Underneath an agent’s gruff exterior, Baker really was the boyscout Pryce had pretended to be. It had been an asset in his work with the tongs, rendering him amazingly incorruptible. In the present situation, it was more likely than not to get him killed or at least ruin his career when he decided he needed to Do Something.
Preventing that from happening was just one of the extra little complications life just loved to throw his way. In this case, he welcomed the distraction. He’d been sent to catch the spy, and he’d caught her. What he hadn’t expected was to be involved. On the other hand, getting involved with anybody in the office, in the circumstances, had been damned stupid and his current feelings were his own damned fault. Including the guilt. The girl had sacrificed herself to save his hide, and wasn’t that a fine thing for a man to have to live with.
He couldn’t help swallowing heavily as the goon squad disappeared around the corner towards the lifts, reappearing shortly in the room below.
He saw immediately why the SP’s had one in the infirmary and two in the morgue already. Whether she’d heard them coming or was just in a favorable position, her departure from the dance was so fluid and seamless, there were two SP’s on the floor before his brain had even registered that she’d stopped dancing. Well, sort of stopped.
This time one of the SP’s was either a bit smarter or a bit quicker and managed to club her over the head, dropping her so they could strap her to the gurney while she was still groggy from the knockout.
It meant the guy hanging his head and taking a few sharp words from the chief, presumably for endangering her life.
Stewart didn’t realize his hand had curled into white-knuckled claws against the arms of the chair until he felt his babysitter jab him with a hypo.
“General Stewart, sir, if you don’t tell me when you’re in pain I won’t be able to manage it properly. Please tell me next time before it gets that bad,” the medic said.
“Do you have something in that pack to counteract the wooziness, son? You’d better.” Great. All I need is to have my inhibitions to saying something indiscreet, stupid, and entirely truthful dropped in this political minefield. The ache in his gut disappeared. The one in his chest didn’t, but then, it had damn-all to do with his physic
al injuries.
The medic stuck something else in his arm and his head cleared almost immediately.
“Thank you. Son, if you ever again stick a mind altering drug in my conscious body without my permission, you can be prepared to receive your hypodermic as an enema. Sideways. Are we clear on that.”
The man’s lips tightened and it appeared he only just restrained himself from rolling his eyes, but he said, “Yes, sir,” and his eyes dropped before Stewart’s did.
When he noticed that her legs were strapped to the corners of the gurney, and they cut her prison jumpsuit off and removed it from under the straps in pieces, he broke out in a cold sweat.
The medic bent close to her ear, but the pickups in the room caught his voice clearly, playing it into the observation area.
“Why don’t we avoid this part? What’s your name?”
She tilted her head slightly away from him, staring up at the ceiling. She looked… bored.
Her expression didn’t change when the chief motioned the first man on top of her.
Stewart started making a list of people he really needed to kill. The first man seemed to be having some sort of trouble. In any case, he was swearing in one of the Asian languages. The automatic, literal translation from the AIDs was fairly colorful. Something about monkey vomit.
The medic finally waved him off and moved between her legs, checking something before injecting a local of something into her thigh, checking his watch, waiting a few moments, reaching between her legs.
“Obviously, miss, you are not immune to muscle relaxants. What’s your name?” he said.
After a few seconds of silence, he motioned the hapless sailor back into place.
The prisoner made eye contact with him and spoke.
“Sorry this is going to be about as exciting for you as screwing a soggy washcloth,” she said.
“I like blondes.” He grabbed a breast crudely.
“If you ate strong mint gelatin after the kimchee, you might meet more of them.” The boredom on her face was absolute. He stilled suddenly, swearing again before backhanding her, scrambling off and back, his face flushed as he zipped and turned away. Her cheek reddened, but her head had never moved.
She laughed.
“Aw, too bad! Next?” If her sarcasm had been a liquid, it would have eaten a hole in the floor.
To say that the next sailor singled out by the chief looked unenthusiastic would have been an understatement.
“You’ll need rape survivor therapy after this. The tongs can put you in touch with someone discreet,” her voice was clinical.
“Chief, make her stop!” He looked to his NCO in rather embarrassed desperation.
Above, in the observation lounge, Baker spluttered into his coffee. Stewart had so far managed to keep him under control with a hand on his arm whenever he looked in danger of losing it.
The Darhel were virtually panting like overheated dogs, over by the glass. Stewart was glad he’d elected not to wear a sidearm.
The chief grabbed her chin and wrenched it around by main force. “You’re being raped, you stupid bitch, don’t you get that?! What’s your name!”
“I’m not being raped. He’s being raped. I’m just lying here watching amateur night.”
In the lounge, one of the Darhel twitched suddenly, towards the glass, before rising and withdrawing smoothly from the room.
Below, the goon squad was withdrawing from the room, leaving “Mahri” where she was. Obviously, they were reevaluating their tactics. Poor hapless bastards. His heart just bled for them. Not.
Titan Base Freight Port, Wednesday, June 19, 12:00
Tommy was smacking his head against the heel of his palm, repeatedly, when Papa O’Neal came up for air from the Detention Center blueprints.
“Sunday, what in the hell is your problem?” The older man patted his pockets and finally came up with an empty pouch, sighed, and began digging through his backpack.
“Papa, I fucked up. I fucked up big time. It’s been so long, I just never recognized him.” His skin had gone a strange, sick shade of gray.
“Recognized who? Run it back to start, I’m not tracking it.” He found a fresh pouch and absentmindedly cut himself a plug, turning and regarding his teammate with a patient expression.
“I should have known it was a setup. We would have known, if I’d been on the ball. Oh my God, did I ever fuck up.”
“Son, if you don’t start from the beginning, I’m gonna have to hurt you. Come on, take a deep breath and tell me about it.”
“The beginning. Okay. Sarah, display the hologram of Lieutenant Joshua Pryce from our initial briefing.” The AID obediently put the requested image in the air in front of them.
“So?” O’Neal’s hands motioned for more.
“So I know the sonofabitch. Served with him in ACS forty-some years ago. It’s just, after forty years… We were both in the Triple-Nickle with Mike Junior. He was the S-2 of the battalion in Rabun. If I had recognized him, we wouldn’t have lost Cally.”
Papa O’Neal was silent for a few seconds.
“That’s a big one.” He was silent for a long moment. “But after forty years… Besides, if you had recognized him, we wouldn’t have pulled Jay out into the open. Then we would have lost no telling how many other people, possibly the whole ball game, with whoever else Jay gave up,” he reminded quietly. “So, who the hell is he, really? Obviously a juv, of course.”
“He’s Major General James Stewart, now. He just took command of the Third MP Brigade. He’s the bastard who caught her, and he’s the bastard who’s in charge of whatever they’re doing to her. And Mike is a fucking father to him!”
O’Neal stared coldly into the distance for a few minutes, jaw working. He took a long breath and released it slowly.
“That’s mostly right. Don’t tell me you don’t know by now that the Darhel are in charge of whatever they’re doing to her. Stewart is probably just now experiencing for the very first time how very closely they’re pulling his strings. I mean, he has to have known it. But knowing it and experiencing it are two different things.” He spat into his cup, tilting his head a bit as if something had just occurred to him.
“Don’t beat yourself up, Sunday. You may have just handed us the break that’s gonna get her out of there. Just… give me a few minutes, okay? And I mean that, no more beating yourself up.” As the older man walked aft and began to pace, Tommy could actually hear him begin to hum tunelessly.
Titan Base, Fleet Strike Detention Center, Wednesday, June 19, 18:30
James Stewart had long since numbed out to the additional indignities being visited on Sinda. He supposed the numbness was composed of equal parts shock, rage, and the necessity of keeping a poker face if he was ever to get the opportunity of avenging Sinda. He wouldn’t call her “Mahri” — that was the name they were using. Sinda wasn’t her name, but it was what she had called herself to him, and that was the best he had.
He had seen some indescribably horrible things as an ACS trooper, things done by Posleen to humans, things done by humans to Posleen. In the gang, he thought he had seen some pretty horrible things done to humans by humans. A few murders, anyway.
But he had never seen anything like this done by a group of humans to another human being. He had thought he was hardened to anything. He was wrong. Still, without the ability to click on and move his mind to that cold, efficient place that built a temporary barrier against the horror, he probably would be in a cell now, or shot — well, shot again — and no use to anybody.
The Fleet chief, Yi, was currently giving an end-of-day report on the status of the prisoner. The list of injuries — smashed and “merely” broken bones, cuts, bruises, and burns replayed vivid images in his head. The first thing they had done, of course, had been to finish gang-raping her after resorting to the simple expedient of an improvised gag. It rendered her incapable of providing information, but the bastards had apparently decided it would have been bad form to let her win
that psychological battle. And in a total bastard kind of way, he could see their point. He was still going to kill every last one of them, but he could see why they did it.
The hardest thing he’d done in years, next to calling the MPs on her in the first place, was leaving at the end of the day to go home, looking perfectly normal. He had watched them turn out the lights and run the gravity down to zero for the night, leaving her strapped down and injected with Galactic Decameth — the C part in Provigil-C, minus the Provigil. And then he’d had to turn and wheel himself out the door, trailed by his own medic, who looked like a saint next to Fleet’s pet monster.
Titan Base, Wednesday, June 19, 19:00
In the small room, Tommy sat on the bed, waiting, a white container the size of a cigar box in his hands, open at one end. A clean AID was clipped to his belt. It looked just like any other AID. Tonight, that was its most important job. He wore gray silks with the insignia and unit identification of long ago. If any of the surviving members of the triple nickel ACS saw him, it would look to them like they were seeing a ghost. He had gone back to his original hair and eye color, and he had never needed as much facial alteration as Cally or Papa, anyway. Oh, he was different — but not that different unless he wanted to be. And, of course, his frame was pretty hard to camouflage.
Out of the two vacant rooms on the hall with the quarters formerly occupied by lowly Lieutenant Pryce, and now occupied by a general the system had not yet had the opportunity to reassign, he and Papa had chosen the one closest to the transit car. Not that it mattered. One was as good as the other. A very small sticky camera sat in the slight shadow cast by the door jamb.
Papa O’Neal was in the chair, watching the hall on the screen of his PDA. He was actually watching a fast-forward of the past five minutes, since the camera only squealed its encrypted transmission when pinged, and they didn’t need particularly high resolution.