by John Ringo
“Roger that.” George’s answer to Tommy cut off.
Shit. Shit shit shit. Better shift the conversation to something she could keep going longer. She might have to keep Mark talking for a good little while. She glanced at the treeline and started trying to figure out exactly how far she’d have to get down the road to sneak over and risk making a dash into the woods. She’d probably have to go all the way down to that bend.
She suppressed nervousness when she started seeing men return from the drill. She sunk herself deeper into her cover role, almost forgetting it was a cover. By now, she had the private almost thinking they were soul mates. They had just discovered a mutual interest in woodworking. She had briefly dated someone who had a passion for it, and that was sustaining her so far, but she was encouraging him to talk as much as possible. There was no way to spare his career from what she was doing to it, which really sucked.
“Lady, as soon as we’re clear, disengage and haul ass. Big time,” Tommy said in her ear just after he passed her. Just as if that wasn’t pretty fucking obvious.
“Oh, my God.” She looked at her watch and back up at Mark’s with dismay. “I told Carrie I’d watch the baby! I’ve got to go!”
“Wait! How do I reach you?”
“I’ll call! I’ll call tonight!” She lied, remembering to put a limp into her jog as she left the young soldier staring after her.
“But you don’t know my number!” She heard him call it after her, after a pause.
“Mark Abrams! Got it!” She called over her shoulder, losing the limp as she got out of his line of sight. A quick glance showed nobody in view; she hit it straight into the woods, zipping her windbreaker over the glaringly bright top as she went. She was maybe ten meters inside the tree line when the sirens went off again.
“Holy fuck!” She poured on the speed, dashing straight for the fence. They’d find the jumpsuit, but to hell with it. It only took about half a minute to reach the fence, but then she had to decide whether she was north or south of the hole. She went north for about two hundred meters before deciding she’d been going the wrong way. Unfortunately, she’d had to slow down to pace the fence line, sirens wailing the whole time so she had to look, not listen. The only benefit was that nobody could hear her moving over them, either.
She stopped short when she saw the movement and heard the voices. There were two of them, but neither of them was Tommy’s size. She faded backwards, trying to think of a plan B, fast.
Up. Nobody ever thinks to look up. She shinnied up the oak tree nearest the fence. Pine would have provided more cover, if anyone looked, but the bark would have shown her passage. Perched on a solid limb, she examined her windbreaker, ensuring she had full coverage. Black wasn’t camo, but at least it wasn’t red. This limb extended over the other side of the fence. She looked down and clung to the tree, dizzily. Whatever the hell had possessed her to think climbing this thing was a good idea? She was going to get caught and shoved in another Fleet Strike interrogation room. She shuddered.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. I am dead whether they catch me up this tree, or on the ground, or I fall and break my damned neck. Move, Cally, move. Besides, this branch must be a good four inches across. Nice, big branch. Yeah. Nice, big branch. She lay down on the limb, clinging to it, and inched her way forward. She shook her head to get the droplets of sweat out of her eyes and tried to ignore the beads dropping on the ground. She hugged the branch for dear life as a hard gust of wind almost knocked her off it, blowing a blast of snowflakes in her face. The wind was the last straw. She scooched forward on the limb as fast as she could go until she got to the other side of the fence, let herself swing down, and dropped to the ground. Her feet slid out from under her and she hit the ground, hard. It was worth it. She was not going to stay that far up in the air in high winds, with snow blowing in her face.
She opened the buckley and looked at the terrain map. It was damned near useless, and she shoved the PDA back in her windbreaker pocket. The cube from George had been in her jumpsuit. She’d never gotten around to putting it in her cube reader slot. She picked a small hill that looked like it might have some likely cover and hauled ass.
In the lee of a lichen-encrusted boulder, she shivered as heavy flakes of snow caught on her eyelashes and melted on her sweats. The fall was heavy — she’d be soaked in minutes. Her hands, already red and chafed from standing talking to the guard, shook with cold as she flipped the buckley back open and punched up a transmission. To hell with radio discipline, she needed an extraction.
She wasn’t getting a signal. She tapped the button a couple of times, but nothing. “Buckley, voice access please,” she said. Silence. “Buckley?” Oh, goddamn. The fall. One of the falls. She pulled up a menu and selected a self-diagnostic, and put the thing back in her pocket. No telling how much damage there was, but right now it was no good to her.
She couldn’t hear any searchers, and the sirens had stopped. There would probably be a small pause while they got a real search together. Twenty more minutes, at most. She stood up and looked out from behind the boulder. Nothing looked familiar. She climbed on top of the boulder. The snow was heavier now. She wasn’t even sure she could pick out the right hill of the base behind her. She was pretty sure, from the boulder and the hill she was on now, which direction was away from the base, but that was about it. She evaluated her situation, which sucked, and came up with a plan. She’d eaten a good breakfast, so her calories were good for some more body heat if she moved around. She needed more distance from the base. She needed shelter, because she sure as hell wasn’t going to find her way out of east bumfuck Virginia with a broken buckley in the middle of this mess.
She cursed the weather again and took off running in the away direction. She’d run for ten minutes and then rig a shelter with the first cover she saw. At least she could still see the ground. It wasn’t yet totally white. She ran, glancing at her watch a couple of times, until she saw it was time to stop. She was on the flats, but off to the right it looked like there might be something besides trees. As she approached, she realized it was an oddly-shaped hill covered in vines. It had no trees except for a vertical branch of a partly fallen tree, its roots half ripped out of the ground. At the base of it, she saw what might be a gap or small overhang, and burrowed into it.
Under the vines and out of the wind it was still damned cold. It was immediately obvious why the “hill” had looked so odd. The line of the roof was straight, although slanted. She was right up against a tread and at the highest side of the opening. The other side wasn’t quite on the ground, but the tread had been so smashed up, and sunken into the ground, that the huge SheVa tank shifted at a sideways slant. The treads on her side had also sunken about halfway into the ground, it appeared.
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 repr
ocess, 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 into 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 vise. 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, 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 U.S. 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’s league with that improv shit, and she knew it.