Sister Time lota-9

by John Ringo

  “The Epetar people believe we are coming up as security forces in support of them,” Jake continued. “We will encourage them in that belief as long as possible in order to infiltrate the facility. In line with that, they are expecting us to report to this area,” he pointed to a loading dock on one end of the building, “for briefing on the situation and deployment within the building. Which we will do.

  “We will be carrying buckley PDAs, and only buckley PDAs, for full compatibility of communications, secure from the enemy. We will insist on keeping members of the same platoons as close together as possible. I do not anticipate any trouble persuading the Epetar people to comply.

  “Major Kelly will brief you on the mission plan for location and liberation of hostages.”

  Specialist Quackenbush, 19, who did not know that his company XO now classed him as “the FNG with the AID,” stopped one of the other guys in his platoon as they rechecked their webgear for the mission prescribed equipment. “Hey, what the fuck is up with these mission orders? Vigilantes? Corporate terrorists? Is the old man off his nut? I mean, what the fuck are his fucking orders? Really, honest to God, is he insane? Dude, I’m seriously asking.”

  “What the fuck is your problem, Quackenbush?” Specialist Grady hissed. “If you think for one moment that the old man would disobey his orders, or maybe you don’t have confidence in the rest of your chain of command, then what the hell are you doing in the service and how the hell did you make it here?”

  “Well, excuse me for breathing, Grady. You find nothing strange about this?”

  “Cherry, did you ever maybe think we’ve got the term ‘Fucking New Guy’ for a reason? Shut the fuck up and follow your orders. The old man knows what he’s doing.”

  Quackenbush received a professional ass-chewing that took less than half a minute and left him feeling about two inches high when Sergeant Mauldin relieved him of his AID, again, before they climbed into the choppers, popping the little computer neatly into some kind of envelope and tossing it in the back of one of the jeeps in the motor pool before climbing into the bird. He grimaced as he tried to orient the PDA that the sergeant had shoved into his hands instead so that he’d be able to use the thing, and hoped it didn’t snow or something and break his AID. This buckley didn’t even have a damn personality overlay. He shut up miserably in his seat among the other Bravo guys. He was in the doghouse for sure, and right now had no idea whether the world had gone crazy or he had.

  Sergeant Major Mueller pulled him aside a few minutes later as they got off the chopper. The enlisted man resigned himself to another ass-chewing and maybe even an article fifteen.

  “Look, son.” The old sergeant clapped a hand on his shoulder in a fatherly manner. “You’re in a counterterror unit. We’re liberating civilian hostages. Just keep your eye on the ball, and your mind on the mission. You’ll do just fine. And if you don’t, I’m going to shove a size sixteen boot up your ass so far my toe is going to be kicking your tonsils.”

  The loading bay was large, for what it held. Three stories high and a bit larger than half a basketball court, it stood mostly empty. Made largely of Earthtech materials, the Galtech portions had the look of replacements and repairs, as if someone had been uninterested in building new, but had had such ready access to Galtech materials that cost was an afterthought whenever anything needed repairs. Boxes stood in palleted stacks along the walls, separated in clumps as if grouped for type. A couple of forklifts sat in the middle of the floor, as if their operators had knocked off without parking them away.

  The mass of men in green-detailed coveralls either ignored the forklifts or leaned against one as they listened to the shift supervisor explain why they had all been called in after six o’clock on a fucking Friday. Turned out one of the suits had a wild hair up his ass about some corporate raid that probably existed only in his imagination. The general mood among the guards whose shift it wasn’t was pissed off, except for the ones who really needed the double-time pay, coming up on Christmas. The general mood among the guards whose shift it was was pissed off, on account of not getting paid double-time along with the other guys.

  The half dozen DAG troops who weren’t actively patrolling had positioned themselves on one side of the mass of security guards, giving them a clear field of fire across the bay. They had picked the side nearest some stacks of boxes they could retreat behind for cover. That gave them the cover boxes, and the boxes on the far side of the hostiles, to absorb ricochets in the bay. The haphazard mix of Galplas and cinderblock walls was unlikely to be fun as backstops. Better to ruin the enemies’ day than their own.

  Six specwar troopers with pistols and shotguns, versus sixty armed idiots. The odds were jimmied by the two or three juved war veterans, riffed out and working at whatever they could get on planet. That, plus the shells in the DAG guns, all of them, which were supposed to be rock salt but weren’t. Buckshot was downright unpleasant for human targets, not to mention the other little specials among the shells on their belts. The number of shells had had many of the regular guards making snide remarks about expecting ice on the roads.

  The Bane Sidhe operatives, which all of them also were, had each security guard classified more in the category of “target” than “human.” To the extent that they considered the guards people at all, the men classed every facility guard based on their willing employment in support of an organization committing atrocities against civilians. Nobody in DAG, Bane Sidhe or not, had problems with killing bad people.

  The DAG guys had no anticipation that they would be killing these particular guards in this particular place, or in the next few hours, or at all. They each followed the general principle of having a plan to kill everyone he met. When off duty, but together, the counterterror troops resembled a wolf pack between hunts. When operational, the troops — being all O’Neals and in the same unit, to boot — moved in an easy flow so coordinated it was almost telepathic.

  Their distribution now differed little in kind from their distribution around the civilian security people for the past couple of weeks. The specifics followed the tactical situation. Without ever seeming to realize why, one or two of the guards had developed a strange tendency to jump at small noises when the DAG guys were around.

  Cally, still taking point, opened the door to the loading bay and immediately tried to step backwards through it, seeing that Mr. Murphy had finally struck with a vengeance. Unfortunately, she’d been seen.

  “Hey! No, goddammit, don’t you dare leave. You’re fucking late and I’m not repeating myself just because some asshole who couldn’t be on time didn’t get the memo. Get your ass down here, and you better believe I’m docking your pay for this. Who’s your supervisor?” All of this left the shift supervisor’s mouth in a rapid-fire staccato burst, without pause for breath.

  He was approaching the base of the stairs as he said it, obviously to continue chewing her out, so instead of retreating, Cally continued down the right half-flight of stairs, noting the six-inch steel rim rising at the floor of the landing and running along the line of the stairs down on each side. She’d seen better cover, and worse.

  Having seen the troops deployed along a line at right angles from her team’s angle of entry, and realizing that an unintentional ambush could still be close enough for government work, counting the odds, she made an instantaneous decision.

  “Might as well come on guys, we’re in the soup but good,” she called back over her shoulder.

  “Oh, so there’s more of you lazy ass slack — Hey! What shift are you on anyw—”

  Cally’s draw was a smooth blur. She had whittled it free of unnecessary movement like a gunsmith floating a barrel, then embedded in muscle memory with daily dry-fire practice. The buckley monitored her progress over time. She had been stable for many years now. If draw speed had had a formal competition class, she would have long ago achieved high master status.

  The shift supervisor’s body was jerking from the big round between his eyes as t
he back of his head blasted away in a welter of red and white gore, splatters of blood flying back onto her face and coverall. Then his body was shielding hers as she carried him right with her, forward and behind a barrel. Even though she twisted to get the corpse under her as she landed, her vision went red as everything exploded in pain.

  She’d had no choice but to take him along. She might need his stuff if she ran out of ammo, his extra magazines were on his belt, and she couldn’t possibly have gotten them loose on the fly. She was damned good, but there were things even she couldn’t do. For a female operative whose full enhancement gave her the strength of a supremely fit man — with none of the extra bulk — the fastest solution was to take the magazines by taking the whole man. She hadn’t really needed the corpse for cover, since she was behind the barrel before the first round impacted on the cinderblock behind where she had been.

  At close enough to the same instant, all hell broke loose as the Bane Sidhe operatives, every one of whom recognized Aunt Cally instantly despite the short, black hair, opened up on the guards while backing to take up their preselected positions behind one stack of boxes or another.

  The rest of the switch team used the device and cart as a visual distraction and cover, coming in low behind it and pitching it down the opposite half-flight of concrete and steel stairs, hitting the floor of the upper landing behind what paltry cover there was.

  Glancing aside and through the gaps in the stair risers, Cally amended that impression. Tommy Sunday had somehow managed to either precede, follow, or pace the cart and land himself behind a screen of toilet paper boxes that she was surprised he’d had time to find and pick, much less get to. Her already high opinion of the ACS veteran’s practical survival skills rose another notch. Cover it wasn’t, but for a man as big as he was, the concealment was a better tactical choice. She realized that ninety percent, at least, of the enemy wouldn’t even think to shoot through the boxes. The rest would almost certainly miss anything vital. Good choice.

  The Darwinian process of war generally has to apply over several engagements, or several battles, to make veterans of survivors. The enemy survivors of the first seconds of this engagement were made up of both the fitter and the luckier of their fellows. At least one veteran of combat against the Posleen, unknown to the Bane Sidhe people, now lay bleeding out on the floor. Being a veteran had not equated to being a good man, in his case. Any ship making port had its rats, and Nicholas Rondine had left a trail of beaten and broken ex-wives behind him.

  Being in a bad place did not always equate to being a bad person, either. Willard Burns was a forty-three-year-old dry alcoholic, recently unemployed from a shoe factory, whose next door neighbor had gotten him this job. He had been unhappily working his two week notice because his five-year-old daughter wanted a toboggan from Santa. Now he had ceased feeling pain from the shotgun blast to his chest. Forty extra pounds of beer gut had rendered him slower than too many of his fellows.

  Whether fitter or luckier, most of the guards behind the boxes had, unfortunately, either through presence of mind or awareness of limited ammo, chosen to at least attempt to aim their fire. The DAG guys had taken out at least three times their number in that first burst of action before the survivors were under cover. The good news was that the enemy was minus about a third of his strength. The bad news was two thirds of the enemy, both the unwounded and lightly grazed, had made cover.

  DAG itself was not without losses. One man lay DRT, in a position too hot to Hiberzine him — an almost certainly permanent loss. Another lay behind the boxes, sporting the swollen lips and other visual signs of a Hiberzined man, chest perforated by a skilled or lucky pistol shot. Not like it mattered which.

  One guy had taken it in the meat of the leg, and was combat effective again after a few precious seconds spent dosing and binding it. The other three made it completely untouched and fully effective.

  The numerical odds were essentially unchanged from the beginning of the fight. The Cally team made little functional difference as they were so lightly armed.

  With a few minutes to get organized and start thinking, even forty untrained idiots could take on the best soldiers, especially if they had an accepted chain of command and were armed with weapons tactically appropriate to the situation, as these were.

  Cally had absorbed the change in resources and positioning instantaneously and with almost no conscious thought, part of the battle gestalt of one of the youngest living veterans of the Posleen War, irregular though she’d been. Her barrel was on the same side of the room as the DAG troopers, so she had been positioned perfectly to run the numbers on friendly troops. Not like six minus two was a hard calculation to make. In their military uniforms, DAG troopers were instantly distinguishable from the enemy.

  The DAG troopers, in turn, would have absolutely no trouble tracking the friendlies on the switch team, all but Schmidt being their close kin, known to them from birth.

  At the moment, Cally was more busy swearing and providing covering fire than anything else. Granpa just had to have a gun, and had slithered down the stairs after the body of a guard who had staggered their way to die.

  It wasn’t actually completely stupid, she allowed grudgingly. One shooter was a big difference, one lump might as well be dead for the immediate engagement, and the best time to risk this partial exposure was in the first seconds, while the most confusion reigned among the enemy.

  After retrieving the pistol from the floor in front of the man’s hand, and the body of the spare magazines, Granpa sprinted for the nearest real cover. He made the DAG box line, but she felt a hard thwack to her thigh as a round penetrated the barrel and continued through her leg. She absently noted the lack of an exit wound and figured a chunk of the lucky bullet’s momentum must have been sapped off by impacting the barrel. Dammit. He exposes himself and gets me hit. If we survive this, I’m gonna kill him.

  As a top-level field operative, Cally O’Neal and the rest of her team had very complete nannite packages in their bodies. In her case, this meant that the blood coagulated almost at once, and a highly selective nerve block made it feel like she’d been smacked with a broom handle rather than a sledge hammer. She automatically and unconsciously diverted her other pain through a post-hypnotic melange of Vitapetroni’s that acted like a psychic Demerol, without the loss of function. You still felt all of it, you just didn’t give a damn. Ongoing blood loss was a weeping trickle from the constricted capillaries whenever movement cracked the jelled proto-scab.

  “Wish we had a magic pill for morphine,” she groused, picking off one of the hostiles who had picked the interior wall to try to rush around the corner. Tommy and George got one each, and she got another one, as they went past. The only reason they got so close to the far wall before Granpa and the closest trooper got the last of them was they had to hold back until their field of fire didn’t include Tommy.

  That took seven more, but the odds were real bad. Men, even untrained ones, fought far better per individual than Posleen. The horses had overwhelmed with sheer numbers, the literally moronic Posleen normals being totally heedless of danger in service to their own God Kings, driven by a hunger that made voracious a pathetically inadequate descriptor. Men, contrariwise, were each as smart as a single God King. They’d spend their lives, but not heedlessly. Unfortunately, it had yet to occur to these dumbasses that they could just break off, quit firing, and be allowed to run away whole and healthy. Or, more likely, they were under a light compulsion that hadn’t yet broken under the instinct of self-preservation and a glimmer of nonpanicked thought.

  She winced, not at her wound, but at the knowledge that a similar rush up the other side, with more people, would likely make it — at least with a couple of people to negate DAG’s cover by exposing them to fire on all sides of each box stack. Tommy and George would be unable to provide supporting fire, having to conserve nearly nonexistent ammo for clearly hittable targets. Two of their remaining DAG guys, and Granpa, would have th
eir line of sight obscured by other stacked boxes. That left the two closest and Cally to take down a rush. Good shot though she was, with only three people exposing themselves to hostile fire, one of them was certain to be hit. None of these ruminations took more than a tenth of a second to come together in her brain as a unified picture of their (bad) tactical position.

  Two minutes is an eternity in situations like theirs. Inevitably, the rush down the other side occurred to the enemy, which would likely have been the end for them except for the absurd entry of yet another DAG trooper through the far door, face to face with the lead guys in said rush. The moment that followed was one of those that perfectly illustrated the concept of time dilation.

  Both sides faced each other, and even though Cally couldn’t see their facial expressions, she could imagine as both retreated back to their previous cover in a jumble. Geez! Couldn’t they hear the shots outside? What the hell kind of acoustics did this place have, anyway?

  Somebody in their relief force was on the ball, though, for what happened next was a crack of the outside door and what looked like a slap of something on the top and bottom of the inner door frame. She was subconsciously bracing for an explosion when a voice, amplified by the stereo separation of the tiny speakers, poured in the room at a volume loud even to people who’d just been in an indoor firefight.

  “Security personnel. This is Colonel Jacob Mosovich of the United States Army Direct Action Group. This facility is under assault for violation of Federal law and terrorist activities. Drop your weapons and come out, one by one, slowly. You will not be harmed. Your names and job titles will be taken and you will be released to go home or seek medical attention. People, we are interested in the big guys, not you. You’re little fish, and immunity may be offered in exchange for testimony.” The voice paused, as if to let the orders and information sink in.