by John Ringo
"Yes, I see that. Hmmm." The priest turned to what he thought to be the senior of the Swiss Guards, though that guard looked to be the younger. Just how the priest knew that the appearance was false was hard for him to put a finger on. Perhaps it was something in the younger-seeming guardsman's eyes. Dwyer asked, "Is there a coffee shop or a decent restaurant nearby?"
"Yes, Father," the Guardsman answered. "But I wouldn't recommend it for a woman unescorted and alone. I wouldn't recommend anyplace in the City for a woman unescorted and alone. These weapons," and the guard indicated the resting halberds with the muzzle of his rifle, "are not just for show."
"Sally might surprise you," the priest answered. "Even so, can you . . . ?"
Instead of answering, the Guardsman touched a button on a small box clipped to a belt around his waist and said, "Wachtmeister von Altishofen to Headquarters. Send me . . . ummm . . . Hellebardier de Courten: Service to the high clergy."
Dwyer wasn't really high clergy. Yet the Wachtmeister recognized the uniform which gave a sense of sacerdotal rank. The ribbons on the priest's chest von Altishofen didn't recognize, but there were enough of them to suggest real combat service. That was "high" enough, he likely thought.
"Affirmative, Herr Wachtmeister," came the response, barely audible from a small speaker apparently located somewhere in the Guardsman's morion.
"It will be just a few minutes, Father."
"You know this is all silly, Dan," Sally muttered. "You don't need to make an honest woman of me. I'm yours for the asking and have been ever since . . ."
Golfo Dulce, Occupied Costa Rica,
May, 2008
The first major wave of Posleen to erupt northwards from Mexico had been destroyed, albeit at the cost of the destruction of the US Army's Eleventh Airborne Division (ACS). One might have expected that, given the rate of Posleen reproduction, the next major wave would have simply moved north unopposed. There never was, however, another major wave. The first, before it was crushed, had denuded the area along the border and deep past it of nearly everything edible. Subsequent waves, of which there were several, never made it very far into the United States before starving. After a while, when many had gone north only to disappear, the rest of the Posleen stopped trying. Their legends contained many stories of which the moral was something between "Curiosity killed the cat" and "Danger, Will Robinson."
That Posleen-made barrier, however, didn't stop them from breeding. Pressure within Mexico, therefore, continued to build.
As things turned to shit for the Posleen in the American southwest and Mexico, pressure had built on some weaker clans by those more powerful, driving those weak ones to find someplace else, anyplace else, to live. That was generally southward and eastward. As Central America narrowed toward the south and east, these fleeing clans were forced into closer and closer proximity, greater and greater competition for food, and more frequent and bloodier interclan battle.
Fortunately, from some points of view, the Posleen could eat each other. And, of course, they did. Yet as clans were shattered and reformed, as new chiefs arose from the carnage, there came a time when there was only one clan, and that composed of the remnants of dozens of others, left in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, only one place for that composite clan to go, and only one good route to get there.
That clan—so said Intelligence—was the Clan of Gora'sinthaloor. That place was Panama. And that route was, roughly speaking, the Pan-American Highway where it entered that part of the Costa Rican Province of Puntarenas seized from the Posleen by Panama while Panama was under the rule of the dictator, Boyd.
Salem, the last remaining warship of the American Panama squadron then left afloat, was duly dispatched to support the boys and a few girls holding the Balboa Line across what had been the Costa Rican border. Holding, was perhaps not the precise word, in the sense that the meat doesn't hold the meatgrinder; it just slows it down a bit. That's what the Panamanians—to say nothing of the Posleen normals, cosslain, and kessentai—were doing, grinding each other to sausage.
Part of that grinding machine was CA-139, the USS Salem.
Rather, it had been part of the grinder. With Posleen tenar swarming from every direction, with all three main turrets damaged, seven of nine secondaries shot away, smoke pouring out from a dozen places, the normal captain, Goldman, and his bridge crew dead, and the ship's auxiliary chaplain and a scratch bridge crew directing the counterflooding to keep her asymmetric below-the-water-line hits from capsizing her, Salem was pretty much out of the fight.
And furious about it.
"Turn around!" her holographic avatar screamed. "Bring us back around! I've still got two secondaries and I can aim my mains by turning the ship. Turn around, I said, you drunken Catholic bastard!"
"Salem," that auxiliary chaplain, Father Dwyer, S.J., had answered, his brogue leaking through, "you're a lovely girl and a lovely ship. But you've no business being in command of yourself. There is no good you can do now commensurate with the good you'll be able to do after a refit. Now, I'll make you a deal. You stop being a bitch and let me command—let me save—this ship without interruption, and I'll . . . I'll stop drinking . . . by the love of the saints, I will. But if you don't, I'll toss your blasted AID over the side, and bring the ship back for refit without you."
"You can't talk to me that way!"
Dwyer didn't answer. He simply went and took the AID from its armored box, then began walking to the edge of the metal platform half encircling the ruins of the bridge.
"You wouldn't dare!"
Dwyer began to wind up for a long toss. "Boston College baseball," he announced, over one shoulder. His arm began to straighten, as if for a long fly when . . .
"Stop! I'll shut up."
The father did stop, if barely.
"Will you really stop drinking?" the avatar asked.
"To save you, yes."
"I didn't know you cared."
"Then you have much to learn."
"Would you really have tossed me," Sally asked.
"Not a chance," the priest answered. "But I had to give you a good excuse to overcome your conditioning and values."
"True," she agreed.
The Wachtmeister interrupted by coughing politely. "Your escort is here, Miss. And, Father, you may proceed."
The caves were narrow, cramped, dusty and musty. No amount of cleaning seemed able to do much about any of that. They were well lit enough, though, for easy navigation; the Indowy-produced light panels on ceilings and walls lending a gentle but pervasive yellow glow.
Briefly, Dwyer laid a single ungloved hand upon the walls of the catacombs. For just a moment, he felt an almost electric connection with his predecessors, those early co-religionists who had met here . . . that, and with their all too frequent martyrdom.
There were slits, many of them, carved into the tunnels at varying heights. These, Dwyer suspected, were firing ports. He stopped at one doorway, its thick steel door hanging open, and followed a very narrow—too narrow for a Posleen—corridor to a room. There, in the Indowy-made light, he saw about what he'd expected to see, a firing slit and step, a quarter cylinder of galactic metal armor, a simplified range card, a crucifix, and a field telephone.
Yep; no wonder the Posleen never penetrated the catacombs very deeply.
Having fought the Posleen in the close confines of a warship's interior, Dwyer could just picture the poor beasties, stuck here below in a traffic jam of flesh, bleating, panic-stricken as they were trapped, fore and aft, by the fallen bodies of the others.
It hadn't been easy, but after a time Dwyer had learnt a degree of Christian compassion even for the inhuman enemy. That that enemy had spared him once, when he need not have, had helped.
Leaving the underground bunker, Dwyer proceeded further down into the Earth. The Wachtmeister had told him that any changes in direction would be clearly marked with the "IHS" symbol of his order. This he found to be true as the cavernous tunnel branched and that symbol, tog
ether with an arrow, directed him leftward.
"Turn left here, miss," Hellebardier de Courten said, as he and Sally reached the entrance of an unusually large shack, about a third mud brick, a third wood, and a third cardboard, set back from the Appian Way about forty feet. Two burly, beefy guards, swarthy and with hair sticking up above the collars of their t-shirts, each armed with a shotgun, stood in front of the shack's main entrance. They and de Courten nodded warily at each other.
Reaching the entrance, Sally looked over the menu, hand-scrawled with chalk on a large blackboard. "Oh, crap," she said. "I forgot about this. I can't eat any of it."
"Miss?" de Courten asked, his head cocking to one side.
Among clergy Dwyer was unusual, as most chaplains were unusual, in being subject to more than one master. One was God. The other was the branch of service, in his case the Navy. The third, and in many ways the most important, was the rail thin, cassocked man seated before him. Rather, it was the order that man represented.
That rail-thin, aesthetic-faced priest, Father Perales, an assistant to the Father General of the order, shook his head wearily. "Father," Perales said, "it isn't that she's an artificially created body; His Holiness has already ruled that, in the interests of propagating the faith, artificial bodies are, under certain circumstances, acceptable.
"And it's not that her intelligence is machine; since your former ship, the USS Des Moines, was declared by the Nuncio of Panama to be a Servant of God, which declaration His Holiness implicitly approved."
Perales stood, and began to pace behind his desk. His hands clasped behind him, only to be unclasped and reclasped. Reaching for the words, unclasping his hands and throwing his arms wide, Perales exclaimed, "But for the love of God, Father, don't you realize the problem? She's Jewish!"
"It's not kosher," Sally said. "Nothing here is fit for me to eat. Aboard ship I've got my own . . . oh, never mind. And damn, damn, damn; I was hungry, too."
"Ohhh," de Courten agreed. "Hmmm . . . there is a small Jewish restaurant—well, it's more of a bed and breakfast, if not much of a bed—not too far away. I don't know how strictly kosher they are but—"
"Lead on, Hellebardier," Sally said. "Maybe I can bend a rule if it's not too much of a bend."
"Jewish is a problem, is it?" Dwyer asked, rhetorically. He bent over and picked up the phone. He dialed a number he knew by heart.
"Is the Holy Father in?" the priest asked. After a short period of silence, while Perales stared open mouthed at his underling, Dwyer said, "Joe? It's Dan . . . yes, Dan from the United States . . . not bad, you? . . . Still in the Navy . . . sort of. Yes, it has been a long time. Why, sure, I'd love to come to dinner. Do you mind if I bring my fiancée? Well, we're supposed to get married next year but Father Perales seems to think there's a problem . . . well . . . she's Jewish, Joe . . . sorta Jewish, anyway. What's that? Oh . . . sure. But he's not really a pig."
Dwyer took the phone from his ear and, handing it to Father Perales, said, with pseudo-warmth, "His Holiness would like a brief word with you."
This highly limited menu, too, was handscrawled on a blackboard. As with the prior restaurant, there was a strong Italianate flavor to the offerings.
"Well," Sally said, after scrutinizing, "at least there's no pork on the menu. And I don't see any impermissible mixes like dairy with meat . . . no tref."
De Courten had the good grace not to mention the possibility that there might be pork on the menu, going under another name. Instead, he observed, "No Posleen on the menu, either."
"I couldn't eat those either," Sally answered. "Even if they were kosher, they taste, so I'm told, vile beyond description. And that's even if you hang 'em by the heels and cut their throats to let 'em bleed out." Indicating the door, she asked, "Shall we?"
Reaching for the door's handle, de Courten pulled it open for Sally, then, apparently having thought better of it, held up one hand to stop her and, taking his own rifle in hand, preceded her inside.
If it was an unusual event to see a Swiss Guard enter the restaurant, nobody indicated it. Yes, people, the few there were, looked up but, having looked up, immediately went back to their business. In most cases this was eating. One thing de Courten did notice that was a bit unusual was the bartender bending behind his bar as if returning a weapon to a handy shelf.
"It's clear, Miss," the Hellebardier said over one shoulder. "You can come in now." He held the door open for her, at least partly for the excuse it would give him to admire her gently swaying rear end as she passed.
I think she must be the most beautiful woman I've ever seen, the boy thought. A contender, anyway.
Sally entered as de Courten held the door. The Swiss boy's eyes never more than glanced down. Once inside, she stopped only long enough to accustom her eyes to the dimmer light inside. "Thank you, Hellebardier," she said.
The maitre d', if such a title could be given in such an establishment, came over immediately. "You don't look Jewish," he said to Sally, suspiciously. Then, turning to de Courten, he added, "and by your uniform you surely are not."
"It's the only religion I've ever followed," Sally answered. "Will you seat us?" Seeing that he would, Sally added, "And while we're here, I have a few questions about the menu."
Perales was never given the chance to question the Holy Father's words. Dwyer tried not to smirk as his superior's narrow face blanched under the telephonic tongue-lashing. Within a few moments of it, the senior priest had arisen from his office chair and come to a fair approximation of the position of attention. Perales gulped once, answered, "Yes, Holy Father," and replaced the telephone on its receiver.
"It seems I was in spiritual error," Perales said, after reseating and recomposing himself. "There'll be no problem with your fiancée, Jewish or not."
Chapter Three
Of boma blades and the Kessentai I sing
Who first from shameful defeat led forth his people
To found a new life in the depths of space
—The Tuloriad, Na'agastenalooren,
Anno Domini 2009
Himmit Ship Surreptitious Stalker
The debris of battle in space was everywhere. Inasmuch as things can be thick in the vastness of space, that debris could be said to have been "thick." Here was a recognizable section of a Posleen globe's bulkhead; there was the bloated, half-exploded body of a normal, its blood congealed in icicles around its muzzle and the rent in it midsection. A small human space fighter drifted by, its pilot carbonized, burned almost to ash, yet held in place by the remnants of his battle suit and the restraining straps. Further away, the forward section of a human light cruiser tumbled end over end as its edges glowed and sparked where it had been sheared from the rest of its ship. Furthest of all, in Tulo'stenaloor's view, a nearly whole battleglobe exploded by sections as the humans pounced upon it from every angle.
"We're so fucked," Brasingala muttered, too low for Tulo to hear.
This is defeat, a tiny voice whispered in Tulo's mind. Avoid it.
If I'd known how, I would have, the God-king whispered back.
Ahead, yet another of the countless millions of spinning Posleen bodies that littered space seemed destined to smash directly onto the Surreptitious Stalker. All eyes—all those, at least, that faced forward—saw it and braced for an unpleasant impact. Closer and closer the body came. By bits, it seemed to dissolve as it reached a certain distance from the Himmit ship. A restless muttering from behind them caused Tulo, Brasingala, and Goloswin to turn their heads. Yes, there behind them, still spinning, the same corpsicle twisted away.
"I wonder how they do that." Goloswin said.
"We all wonder how they do half the things they do," said Aelool. "A very strange species, the Himmit, and there is more to them then they'll ever let you see."
"Yes," agreed Goloswin. "But instantaneous transmission of matter? That's something special."
"It appears they can only do it over very short distances," Aelool said. "That, or they're only
willing to let us see them transmit matter over very short distances. As I said, there's more to the Himmit than they'll ever let on."
"Admirable, then," Goloswin answered. "Better to be more than you seem."
"Admirable, no doubt," Aelool agreed. "Yet it is hard to trust someone who may have a dagger poised in their hidden hand."
"You have reasons to be suspicious?" Tulo asked.
"Yes," Aelool answered, but then wouldn't say any more.
The viewing screens showed a brace of human light cruisers, racing on what had to be an intercept course for the Surreptitious Stalker.
"If you believe in a higher being," the Himmit captain, Argzal, announced over the ship's intercom, "pray to it now. Aelool, if you could come to the bridge?"