When the Devil Dances

by John Ringo

  Wendy, on the other hand, came out the corrugated tunnel and popped to her feet reasonably refreshed. She knew she had made up time on the Maze and the next test, the door breach, was another "good" one for her.

  She trotted up the stairs to the roof and picked up the essential tools for the door breach test: a backpack of liquid nitrogen and a CO2-powered center-punch. The testing device was in the center of the roof; an apparently freestanding doorway with a closed memory plastic door in it.

  The design of the door necessitated the unusual gear. For safety reasons, memory plastic doors were designed so that their "base" configuration was "closed." That meant that a precisely graduated charge had to be applied to them to get them to "open" or collapse into a tube along one side of the door.

  When in their extended configuration the doors were very tough; you could hammer at them with a sledge all day long and not get them to break. And for security purposes the charge had to be applied along a recessed edge. When first confronted with this design, emergency personnel were momentarily stumped. However, a former Marine firefighter pointed out that lexan shatters fairly easily when chilled. Thus, a new entry method was born.

  The tester nodded when Wendy had the gear on, held up a stopwatch and pressed the start button with a shouted: "Go!"

  There were several steps to the door breach and each had to be done precisely. She trotted to the door, positioning herself on the left side, and removed her Nomex gloves then began running her hand over the door and doorframe. She started at the top and ran her hand rapidly across and down. As she reached the bottom left-hand corner of the door she suddenly noted increasing warmth. The bastards.

  She stepped back and shouted "Hot door!"

  The tester hit the stopwatch and made a notation on her clipboard as Wendy took the opportunity to put her gloves back on. "The door is to be considered hot, but breachable," the tester said. She did not bother to note that if Wendy had not detected the heat she would have been disqualified; that went without saying. "Continue," the tester added, hitting the stopwatch again.

  Wendy stepped back and looked at the pressure gauge for the LN bottle. The bottle had a line running out of it to a nozzle similar in appearance to a flamethrower. The outlet pressure, which was controllable at the nozzle, determined how far the stream of nitrogen would go. There was a maximum effective distance, but that really didn't matter. What was important was to reduce, as far as possible, splashback.

  The nitrogen gushed out of the nozzle in a white, foaming stream, exploding into vapor as it heated in the room-temperature atmosphere. The reason that the test was on the roof was two-fold; it permitted the gas to be carried off and it prevented having a supercooled room.

  There was a limited splashback zone, about a foot out from the door, and the small amount of liquid quickly boiled off. Before it had entirely vanished, however, Wendy stepped forward, avoiding the drops, and placed her punch against the left side of the door.

  Normally she would have placed it against the lower left, but with the single point of high temperature being there, she felt a need to adjust. As cold as the nitrogen was, the memory plastic of the doors had a fairly high specific heat and the lower left might not have cooled off enough to be cleared.

  Placing the punch, she angled it so that it would go straight in but, in the event of a refractory door, would not kick into her body, and pulled the trigger.

  The punch, which looked somewhat like a cordless electric drill, contained a twenty-centimeter steel spike, charged by a CO2 cartridge in the handle. When triggered, the spike flew out at over three hundred meters per second, penetrating the door and, if it was cold enough, shattering the plastic.

  In this case it was cold enough and the door shattered from top to bottom, breaking into chunks ranging from dust up to a few centimeters across. The sole exception was an almost perfectly circular point on the lower lefthand corner. It looked like her decision not to punch the door there was a good one.

  She looked at the person in a silver suit on the other side of the doorway. The firefighter was holding a propane torch in one hand and faintly through the layers of lexan Wendy could see a grin.

  "Bitch," she whispered under her breath with a returning grin. You always popped the door on the lower left, if you were right-handed anyway. It was the safest side and generally the bottom of a door was cool in all but the most intense fires.

  The firefighter just pointed at the start of the rope course.

  God, this was going to be a long day.

  She managed to survive the gear drag and rope course. Both of them were basically gut-checks, in one case for strength and in the other for fear of heights. She wasn't the strongest person on the course and she hated heights, but she could take gut-checks all day long.

  But at the end of the rope course, the only thing left was the buddy drag. She started to trot over to the station and realized that she just didn't have any trot left. She kept wondering when that famous second wind was going to kick in, but so far the only thing that had kicked in was utter fatigue. The buddy drag was going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

  The test involved lifting a 225-pound dummy and dragging it. The dummy was on the ground, lying on its back, dressed in a bunker-coat and trousers. The candidate was required to lift the dummy up, holding it from behind with their arms wrapped around to the front, and drag it one hundred feet without dropping the dummy.

  "Don't drop the dummy," she whispered, grabbing it by the shoulder of the bunker-coat and pulling it up to a sitting position. The head flopped to the side and the arms dangled, all of the appendages getting in the way no matter what she did. Finally she maneuvered herself behind it, her arms under the dummy's, right hand gripping the front of the bunker-coat and left hand locked on her right wrist.

  With a grunt she straightened her legs, getting the dummy up, and then just paused, trying not to sway. The dummy was taller and much heavier than she was and just staying on her feet was a challenge. Finally, she leaned carefully backwards and started dragging.

  Every step was an agony and a struggle. There was no momentum to build up, that evil enemy gravity prevented anything along those lines. She just had to drag it step by painful step. Two thirds of the way there, her grip on her wrist slipped, but a quick snatch with the left hand got a handful of bunker-coat and the dummy didn't, quite, fall. Now all she had was its coat and her Nomex gloves had gotten slippery with sweat so maintaining her hold was problematic. But she could still do it. She was nearly there.

  Then disaster hit. She was within ten feet of the line, almost completely done, when she felt the first snap give way.

  The dummy, unfortunately, had been used for thousands of drags. It had been lifted and carried and hauled hither and yon and always in the same bunker-coat. A bunker-coat which chose that moment to decide to open up.

  She felt the snaps give way and frantically started scrabbling at the front of the coat, trying to get a handhold anywhere. The dummy poised for a moment on her knee, but then her last handhold slipped and it hit the floor.

  She just stood there and . . . looked at it. The dummy was on the floor. She'd dropped the dummy. After all that . . .

  She wanted to scream. She wanted to beg for another chance. And she knew that if she did either one, she'd never be accepted for another evaluation. So she just stood there, tears streaming down her face, unable to move as one of the examiners came over, buttoned up the bunker-coat and lifted the dummy into a shoulder carry to reposition it.

  Finally, Chief Connolly came over and took her by the arm. She led her over to a bench and pulled off her helmet.

  "There'll be other events," Connolly said. "All you have to do is as well as you did and don't drop the dummy."

  "How did you know?" Wendy whispered.

  "I didn't," Connolly answered turning to watch the next candidate. "I jinxed you. I knew you had screwed up your courage for the rope sequence so I decided to throw you a curve on the dummy. I didn't fidd
le with the buckles, though. That was just bad luck."

  "Bad luck," Wendy whispered. "That's the story of my life."

  "And that's why I jinxed you," Connolly said calmly. "You don't really have your head around this yet. It's all a game to you, even when it's tough. I don't want anybody going into the fire with me that's in it for the 'fun.' Or the uniform. Or anything, but the burning desire to kill the flame and save the people."

  Connolly turned back to look at her and shook her head. "You're still playing fireman, Wendy. That's what your psych profile says; that's why you're not in Security either. You're not sure that you can do it, you're not sure you can handle it and you want to play at it for a while to see if you like it. I don't want anybody in the department who's just playing. I don't want anyone who isn't perfectly, completely, confident and competent. We've got too big a responsibility for 'might.' "

  Wendy looked up at her for a moment and nodded her head. "Fuck you." She pointed her finger at the firechief as she opened her mouth. "If you say another fucking word I will kick your ass," she whispered, getting to her feet and then getting to her feet again to stand on the bench so she could look the taller firefighter in the eye.

  "Let me tell you about bad luck, Chief 'I am God' Connolly," she whispered again, carefully stripping off the bunker gear. "Bad luck is knowing, not worrying, not wondering, but knowing that the Posleen are going to kill you and then almost assuredly eat you. Bad luck is having every single member of your family, everyone that you are going to school with, everyone you have ever known, killed in one day. Bad luck is seeing your life wiped out in an instant.

  "You came here from Baltimore before it was even invested," Wendy continued softly. "You've never seen a Posleen except on television. You've never seen them in their waves, cresting the hills and filling every corner of your town. You've never heard the crack of railgun rounds overhead or had your ears ringing from missiles slamming into the houses around you.

  "You're right. I don't want to be a fucking fireman. I don't want to pull hoses and run up and down stairs all day. I want to kill fucking Posleen. I hate them. I hate them passionately. You think you hate fire, but you love it at the same time; most firemen do. Well, I don't love Posleen at all. I take it back, I don't even hate Posleen. I despise them. I don't respect them, I don't think they are fascinating, I just want them to cease to exist."

  She'd stripped out of the bunker gear by then and she stood in the coverall tall and stone faced. "You're right, I'm playing at firefighting. Because compared to killing Posleen, firefighting ain't shit. So. Fuck you. Fuck your tests. And fuck this department. I'm done."

  "You're right," said Connolly. "You are. I'll keep you on the reserve rolls, but don't bother turning up for drills. Not until you can keep it together."

  "Oh, I've got it together," Wendy said, turning away. "Never better."

  "Cummings," the chief called.

  "What?" Wendy asked, pausing, but not bothering to turn around.

  "Don't do anything . . . stupid. I don't want to be cleaning you up from someplace."

  "Oh, you won't be cleaning me up," Wendy said, walking away. "But if anybody gives me any shit, you might as well bring the toe-tags."

  CHAPTER 15

  They do not preach that their God will rouse them

  a little before the nuts work loose.

  They do not teach that His Pity allows them

  to drop their job when they dam'-well choose.

  As in the thronged and the lighted ways,

  so in the dark and the desert they stand,

  Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren's day

  may be long in the land.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  "The Sons of Martha" (1907)

  Franklin Sub-Urb, Franklin, NC, United States, Sol III

  1048 EDT Thursday September 24, 2009 ad

  "Look, buddy, do you have a problem with the concept of 'written orders'?" Mosovich asked.

  The security guard behind the armored glass looked at the piece of paper again, then gestured for them to wait. "Let me call somebody. This is the first time I've had to deal with this."

  "I hate these fucking holes," Mueller grumped. And Mosovich had to agree. Mansfield was going to owe him. Big time.

  The "request" to go check out this crazy bitch came at a good time, anyway. After the last reconnaissance debacle, the corps commander had ordered a halt to long-range patrols for the time being. The gap was being taken up by increased use of unmanned aerial vehicles and scout crawlers. The former were small aircraft, most of them not much larger than a red-tailed hawk, that hovered along in the trees, probing forward against the Posleen lines. The problem with them was that the Posleen automated systems identified and destroyed them with remarkable ease. So they would only get a brief view of any Posleen activity. Crawlers—which looked like foot-long mechanical ants—did a little bit better. But even they had not been able to penetrate very far; whoever was commanding the Posleen had the main encampment screened tighter than a tick.

  Mosovich had heard rumor that Bernard had requested permission to nuke the encampment with SheVa antimatter rounds. It had been denied of course—the President was death on nuclear weapons—but the fact that the question might have been asked was comforting. It meant that somebody was taking the landing seriously.

  However, until they figured out a way to probe the Posleen, Mosovich, Mueller and Sister Mary didn't have a job. Since sooner or later somebody was going to notice and figure out something stupid for them to do, Mosovich was just as glad to have this "request" forwarded through corps. It had ensured a written pass from headquarters, without which getting in would have been nearly impossible. And it got them away from corps and the various idiotic projects that the staff would be coming up with.

  The flip side to it was that they had to go into the Sub-Urb. He'd been in a couple in the last five years and they were depressing as hell. The sight of all those people shoved underground was somehow obscene. Especially since ten years before, ninety percent of them had been living in comfortable neighborhoods. On the lines there were times when you could almost imagine that, yeah, there was a really big war. But, fundamentally the United States was still there, still functioning. And once the off-planet forces returned, everything could go back to being more or less normal.

  Then you went to a Sub-Urb and realized that you were kidding yourself.

  The Franklin Sub-Urb had a particularly bad reputation and he wasn't surprised. Half the escalators on the personnel entrance they used had been out of order and the reception area was scuffed and filthy with trash and dirt piled up in the corners. And the security point, an armor-glass-fronted cubicle something like a movie theater ticket booth, was even worse. Every shelf in the booth was piled with empty food containers, half of which were filled with cigarette butts.

  Realistically, though, the conditions weren't too surprising. Not only was it one of the oldest ones, meaning that it had people from the first refugee waves when the Posleen were really hammering civilians, but its proximity to the corps support facilities had only managed to degrade the condition. They'd had to catch a ride from their barracks in the Gap to Franklin and it was apparent on the ride that even though the Line forces in the Gap weren't the greatest, the support groups were worse. No wonder they'd placed the Urb off limits; he'd have kept these "soldiers" out and he was a soldier. And from what he'd heard the first few months when they hadn't kept the soldiers out boiled down to a sack.

  No wonder the security was jumpy about letting them in. Especially armed.

  Mosovich shifted his rifle as the female guard returned with an older male. The newcomer was overweight, but not sloppily; it was clear that a good bit of the body was muscle. He was wearing rank tabs for a security major which meant he was probably the senior officer on duty. No wonder she'd been gone for a while.

  "Sergeant Major—" the security officer said, looking at the e-mail orders, "—Mosovich?"

>   "The same, and my senior NCO, Master Sergeant Mueller."

  "Could I see some ID?" he asked.

  "Okay," Jake said, fishing out his ID card and gun orders.

  "This is fairly irregular," the security officer continued. "We have a few personnel that have open permission to pass back and forth. But for all practical purposes no military personnel are permitted other than that."

  "Unless they're on orders," Mosovich said. He supposed that he could bow and scrape and it might help. But the hell if he would to this Keystone Kop outfit.

  The officer carefully considered the two IDs and then sighed. "Okay, it looks like I have to let you in. . . ."

  "Then would you mind opening the door?" Mueller growled.

  The officer put his hands on his hips. "First, a few words . . ."

  "Look, Major . . ." Mosovich leaned forward and peered at the badge, " . . . Peanut? We're not support pogues. We're not the barbarians you had coming down here before. I may look 22, but I'm 57; I was in the Army when you were a gleam in your daddy's eye. We're here on a mission, not to fuck around. And there's only two of us; if your department can't take down two soldiers then you need to shitcan it and get some real guards. And, as you noted, we've got qualified passes. So open the door."

  "Well, that covers part of it," the major said dryly. "Here's the rest. People down here don't have guns. They don't like guns; they're afraid of them. Except for the ones that want them and will gladly take yours if you give them half a chance. Carry them slung across your back, not combat slung. Make sure you maintain control of them at all times. If you lose one, I guarantee you that the corps commander will make your life absolute hell."

  "He'd be hard pressed," Jake said. "We're Fleet. But I take your meaning."

  "Okay," the major said with a sigh, activating a solenoid. "Welcome to the Franklin Sub-Urb."

  * * *

  Mueller shook his head as they passed through another one of the open gathering areas. "Strange looks." The sprite turned left out of the commons and onto another slideway.