by John Ringo
The amateur ecologist in Kieran automatically tracked the signs of change everywhere he got to go — one of the perks of his job. Fortunately, in Virginia the abat were slowly losing the fight to the rabbits and field mice. Once the local owls, foxes, and other night-hunters had learned the abat’s peculiar vulnerabilities, the native rodents had gotten a respite and begun to recover. The abat’s coloring and movement habits helped it avoid the senses of grat in Posleen ships and fields. Evolution had not fitted them for all terrestrial habitats. Farther south, the story wasn’t so good for the natives. Here, abat didn’t have any of the peculiar survival habits needed for winter weather. They were conspicuous as hell in the snow, tending to hop frenetically to keep warm. They had swarmed in with the Posleen, along with other pests and hangers-on from countless worlds the Posleen had devoured. The rodentlike herbivores’ reproductive rates had made their slide towards extinction in Virginia slow, but the outcome was inevitable.
As for the grat, some local insectivore or another must be pretty damned resistant to the poison, because they were reportedly declining, too. Expert opinions were divided between the black bear and the woodpeckers as the happy recipients of ecologic accident. Lack of resistance worked both ways. For every species that became invasive in a new environment, at least a hundred died out. Invasive success in one environment did not translate to invasive success in another.
In the prewar era, Japanese kudzu had inundated the American southeast, but left Alaska untouched. Rabbits and cane toads had overrun Australia, but bombed out in more habitats than they’d thrived. Felis domesticus had destroyed countless species of birds — but only in places where it had doting humans to go home to. In many other places, top level predators — and not just the Posleen — made short work of the kitty cats after their human protectors were gone.
Ecological destruction from the Posties’ hitchhikers had overturned equilibria everywhere — but it was a toss-up which species got a foothold where, and some, like the abat and grat, appeared to have a similar vulnerability to the Posleen’s absence as the house cats had to the absence of humans. In the former cases, nobody had figured out why yet.
The key, as always, was that evolution was not an upward path towards some predestined goal. Evolution had no goals — it simply described an observed sequence of causes and effects. Evolutionary fitness in one environment did not translate to evolutionary fitness in another. The Posleen, in their adaptability of diet and environment, were a wholly remarkable, one in a gazillion aberration.
Their hitchhiker species demonstrated more the rule of species transplantation than the horses’ own bizarre exception. Any hitchhikers that couldn’t eat earth life started dying out as soon as the Posleen were gone. Any hitchhikers that could eat earth life could, as a rule, be eaten by it. It tended to level the playing field.
He sighed and shook loose from the woolgathering that tended to catch up with him all at once whenever he got safely back on the ground.
“Thank you for flying Bane Sidhe Air, please don’t forget your baggage, we hope you have a brilliant day. Guys, watch your step on the ground out there. It’s an abat field.” Kieran busied himself with flipping switches and checking gauges, preparatory to going out and getting his aircraft squared away for the team’s return.
“Oh, lovely. Can you give us a second to double check the harness before you drop the ramp? I know it’s fine, just exercising constructive paranoia.” Cally was first out of her seat and bouncing on the balls of her feet, already buzzing on adrenaline.
“Yeah, secondary to Kieran’s constructive paranoia. He checked everything about five times before we took off in the first place.” Harrison grinned easily, standing and getting what little stretch was available in the cabin.
“Great. Still, you never know what might have worked loose on the trip.” She looked like she was about to jump to the ground. Looking over his shoulder, Kieran could almost see the words “abat field” walk across her forehead before she turned and took the ladder down.
“If it makes you feel better. We’ve got time.” Papa O’Neal yawned and began patting down his pockets.
“Looks good. Drop the ramp. Tommy, you and Granpa get the camo net over the plane. Harrison, help me start disconnecting the Humvee,” she called.
“You mean now that we know everything’s connected?” Schmidt One had a quirk at the corner of his mouth.
“Exactly,” she said.
“Did anybody ever tell you you’ve been listening to your buckley too much?” George asked.
“She has not. If she listened to me, she’d know that it’s not the aggregate failure rate on the straps you have to worry about. Do you know how many field missions have ended in death and mayhem, not to mention blatant destruction of sensitive and valuable electronic equipment, caused by vehicular failures? I’ve prepared a list of the top twenty-five most likely causes for mission failure resulting in three or more team fatalities. I can recite it if you’d like,” the buckley volunteered helpfully.
“Shut up, buckley,” Cally called over her shoulder at the PDA still resting in her vacated seat.
“Right.”
While they were talking, Kieran had gotten the ramp down and joined Cally and Harrison, rapidly unfastening the heavy-duty harness that had held the mostly mud-colored truck immobile in the belly of the plane. It was amazing what you could carry in a smallish plane when you didn’t have to carry large amounts of jet fuel. Cally ignored the door, swinging her feet in through the driver’s side window and starting the engine, before backing the vehicle down the ramp. Parking clear of the plane so her team members could get the cover in place, she got out and fished a gym bag from the floorboard behind the driver’s seat. The guys were set already. This time of year the gray silks, with Fleet Strike’s blue stripe up the leg, would certainly be the uniform of the day. Fleet Strike uniform would be the best camouflage possible on base for Tommy and Harrison. George and Papa were in old-style BDUs and snivel gear. Cally, of course, had a different role to play.
She pulled a thin camo jumpsuit out of the bag and wrinkled her nose at it, looking down at her stylish black and red running togs. She looked good. She was supposed to, but her vanity always amused Kieran for some reason. The black sweats and windbreaker were nothing special, but teamed with a red tank top that was about two sizes too small, it was eye catching enough.
“Cold, Cally?” George said, walking past her to rummage in the back for his camera bag. She spun around and obviously checked the impulse to clobber him, settling for staring balefully at his back. The bra she was wearing was a thin membrane that other than keeping everything elevated might as well not have been there. If ogling was pissing her off, she’d better get her head in the game. Kieran walked up the ramp into his plane to close it up. He’d go over it with his usual fine-toothed comb before taking the opportunity to grab a nap, his own part in the operation finished for now.
* * *
“Get in the goddam truck, George. You’ve got the middle.” Cally stepped into the jumpsuit and zipped it halfway up. The grass crunched under her feet, crisp with early-morning frost despite the mild air. She was the odd woman out for the vehicle, looked like.
“Nope, I need shotgun. Gotta shoot some pics. Besides, Tommy and Harrison’ll like it better if you’re in the middle. You look better than me and you probably smell better.” The camera itself was a good electronic model. His eccentricity was that he used an ancient set of glass lenses with it, and could go on for hours about the inferiority of modern, polymer, zoom lenses. At least, the one time Cally had been present it had seemed like forever.
“At great personal sacrifice, I will sit in back. Cally, you drive,” Granpa said.
“Works for me. Hi, Boopsie,” George said, opening the passenger side door. It would be bad form to vault the hood and slam her feet in his face. Really, it would.
Schmidt Two’s air photos, the jerk, showed a rutted track from the abandoned farmstead to the riv
er, and a crossing point that had once been Jefferson Davis Boulevard.
She got a good look from the side as they drove up, upgraded vision outlining the details for her as sharply as if she’d peered through binoculars. It wasn’t much of a bridge. The horses had built out the postdemolition remnants of the prewar structure in the sturdy, functional, clumsy style of Posleen engineering, but never completed it. A ramshackle conglomeration of timbers, patches of salvaged Galtech cargo webbing, and what looked like steel runway planking bridged the central gap of about twenty meters. Cally was about to throttle George over his constant click-clicking of the camera as they drove. She knew the value of good footage, but my God, the man was obsessive. She parked the hummer on the bank and walked out onto the bridge, toeing the material in the gap experimentally. Personally, she wouldn’t drive a bicycle across that mess. But she’d walk it, with a belayman.
“Netting bridge gonna work, Harrison?” she asked.
“You bet.” He stooped down and fingered the old Posleen surfacing. “This stuff will make a good bond with adhesive.”
“Fine, get the netting. Harrison, Granpa, secure this end. I’ll make the crossing.” She looked at Harrison and waited for his nod before jogging back behind the vehicle. After some rummaging through the other supplies she found rope, harness, and pack, carrying them around front and tying off to the front bumper. The lines for the pulley hooked onto her belt, to unwind as she went.
“What, all of a sudden you don’t trust me not to drop you?” Tommy asked.
“You’re not belaying me. George is. The process will go faster if you help the others set up on this side.” The too-handsome mechanical specialist was working with Granpa to assemble the strips that would become the improvised bridge’s base plates. Flat on one side and blessed with a plethora of hooks on the other, the plates could be secured on soft ground with long spikes, affixed to a solid surface, or stabilized in place in any of several other ways. A properly secured set of base plates with several layers of the special netting could create a bridge strong enough to support a small tank in an unbelievably short time. “Properly secured” was always the kicker.
In this case, the bridge so constructed would be roughly double the width of their Humvee, once they snapped together the axles of enough rolls of bridge netting. The bridging had taken up virtually all the cargo space in the Humvee, even though the material was as thin as cardboard and flexible enough to roll very tightly. They had had to carry so much of it because there was no way to tell how much bridging they’d need. At that, George had insisted on carrying more wedged into nooks and crannies in the plane. Cally and Granpa had surreptitiously rolled their eyes. There was paranoia, and then there was paranoia. Schmidt Two had changed since the loss of his wife and team. Among other things, for the first few years he’d been fanatically punctual. Some quirks stayed, others tapered off. Everyone knew what he was going through. Besides, assassins were always strange birds in one way or another. As long as it didn’t get in the way of the mission, they tolerated it where possible, and were glad of it when it did support the mission. George had gone from a seat of the pants improviser to an excellent go to hell guy, with an almost prescient tactical awareness.
“Your faith in my competence is touching,” the smaller man said.
The slight assassin probably weighed less than she did. He’d know how to brace himself, but no way was she going to let him see how much it freaked her out to step onto the rickety bridge. It would have been just as bad if her belayman had decent body mass. Really, it would. If she told herself that often enough, maybe she could stop the cold sweat she felt prickling on her upper lip. She tried to pretend to be someone who wasn’t afraid of heights, but slipping into character was, for this, pretty damned hard.
“No offense. Just don’t drop me.” She checked her rigging and backed out onto the dilapidated mess, watching over her shoulder and testing her footing as she went. Halfway over, when it was holding up better than expected, she sped up, dancing lightly backwards with only a few muffled curses when her foot slipped through a gap in the webbing. Damned if she was going to show how petrified she was. The adrenaline from her slip drove her heart straight up into her throat. She couldn’t help getting a glimpse of the water, so dizzyingly far down. Two missions in a row where she had to be way up in the — she really didn’t want to think about it. She yanked her foot loose and planted it on a thicker strip of webbing, her knuckles whitening on the rope in her hands.
“Hey, watch it! Where are we gonna be if you throw a shoe?” George called.
“You’re making me sound like a horse.”
“Whatever. We should have brought you an extra pair of shoes,” he said.
“Well, I’m over here now, so relax. I’m not going to drop a sneaker in the river. Even though I did wrench my ankle for real, just a bit. But hell, if I get a little swelling or something, it just adds realism.” She gave up trying to look casual and backed the rest of the way carefully, watching her footing. She had to resist collapsing on the bridge in relief when she got to solid ground again. More solid, anyway. Still far too high, but she wasn’t going to think about that.
“You got by with it. Just hook up the pulley,” he called.
Oooh, he’s pissing me off. “Fine.” She brushed the dust and dirt off part of a Postie section in the bridge, more or less in the middle, and opened the backpack. The available section of bridge looked much better for adhesive than trying to drill holes. She sprayed down the clean section of bridge and shoved the back plate of the pulley against it, counting to sixty before unclipping the lines from her waist. The pulley lines were ingenious. Strong sections of line clipped together at intervals to make the length of the loop easy to adjust, but the clips were narrow enough not to make the line jump out of the groove in the wheel. She clipped them in place and rested, elbows pressed in to her sides, tapping her fingers together nervously. Why did they have to build bridges so high? It wasn’t as if there was anything wrong with being down close to the water.
It took a few minutes for them to package up the bridging base plates for her side, and attach the package to the pulley so that it wouldn’t snag too bad on the way over, then about as much time for her to get it all loose on her side. Setting the roll of bridging to unwind smoothly around its axle as she pulled it across was even more awkward. The procedure certainly gave her bridge base plating enough time for the adhesive to set up before she had to cut the net to fit. Working backward with a boxcutter variant of a boma blade, she eased the mesh of the ultra-strong netting over the hooks on the plate and secured it. The plates themselves were now as firmly affixed to the Posleen section of bridge as if the whole assembly had been cast from Galplas.
Finished, she noticed an infinitesimal tug at her waist. Cally looked up to see that the annoying man had untied her rapelling rope from the Humvee, unrolled a substantial length, and was tying it to one of the ancient steel supports whose remnants stood, twisted and torn, on the human section of the old bridge.
He waved some coils of slack at her and called out, “Pull your end back and tie it off. If we have to dismantle the bridge in a hurry, somebody might need it. We’ve got more rope; we don’t need to take this one.”
Damn but he was lucky she wasn’t close enough to slap him. She sighed and tied the thing off, grumbling. Just like him to put her in a corner where she had to leave her lucky rope. She couldn’t say anything about it without looking stupid.
She didn’t look at him as she got into the hummer behind Granpa, who probably would get to drive for the rest of the insertion. Her right front side tingled with the urge to pop George upside the head. If he hadn’t been so good at his job, she’d really be regretting asking him now. She hadn’t been this pissed in she didn’t know how long.
The first section of bridge had moved them across to what was technically an island. The roadway forward was intact up until the small branch that separated them from the mainland. Whatever improvised br
idge had spanned that gap had suffered some sort of misfortune. The Postie work was ragged at the edges and wisps of what must have once been another improvised connection hung from both ends over the gap. Naturally, Granpa’s drysuit and fins had shifted to the bottom of the pile. Normally, with her natural buoyancy, Cally would have gotten stuck with swimming the gap. She’d gotten to beg off from the task this time since it kept them from having to wait while she redid her hair. Another O’Neal was the logical choice since they swam so much at home. Granpa got the job — he wouldn’t be seen by anyone after insertion. That didn’t mean he had to like it. Even through a good suit, the water was damned cold and he let them hear about it, drawing a good-natured “quit whining” from Tommy. Still, once he made it across and up to the other side of the gap, setup was routine.
Vehicle finally across, they fired up some self-heating breakfast packs and a pot of coffee. A hot breakfast was nice for the others, but necessary for Papa O’Neal, who was still shivering after he’d gotten back into his BDUs and snivel gear. The temperature was dropping so fast Cally was feeling the chill even through her sweats. She ignored George as he tied off another rope. The problem with overcomplicating mission fail-safes was that the more you did, the more likely it was that something would go horribly wrong when you couldn’t keep track of all the balls you had in the air. It was a delicate balance. She preferred to keep things simpler and fly by the seat of her pants when she had to.