by John Ringo
"Yes," the AID said.
"Are there any in this facility?"
"Negative; the closest are in the Hydroponics section."
"Lemme know if that changes, okay?"
"Hey, computer," Wendy said. "Where'd all the techs go?"
"Clarify, please," the computer said.
"Well," Wendy said looking around. "I didn't see any Crabs or Indowy running around. And most of the gear in here is theirs. So where did they go?"
"The primary entrance to this facility is separate from the Sub-Urb," the AID answered, flashing a hologram up in the room. "The exit is on the southeastern face of Pendergrass Mountain."
"And there's a back way out," Wendy snarled. "If I ever find out who set this up and kept it secret I will rip their heart out and eat it while they watch."
"Well, that's a bit excessive," Elgars said. "Wouldn't it make more sense to just kill them?"
"No, I don't want anybody to fuck us over like this again," Wendy said. "God, I'm mad."
"At what?" Shari said sitting up.
The top had disappeared again so soundlessly that no one had noticed. Except Billy who was sitting up with an amazed expression on his face.
"Mo . . . Mommy?" he croaked.
"Billy," Shari said. "You talked!"
"Y . . . " The boy swallowed and cleared his throat. "Yo . . . you're young."
Shari looked as she must have when she was in high school. Her hair had actually lengthened slightly, as if time had been dilated inside the shell, and was a brilliant white-blonde. Her breasts were large, high and firm and any sign of an age blemish or wrinkle was gone as if it had never existed. She looked down at the bandages still on her clothes and shook her head.
"Even the bloodstains are gone," she whispered.
"It didn't fix the hole in your shirt," Wendy replied, looking at the tear and fingering the skin underneath. "There's not even a scar, though. How do you feel?"
"Fine," Shari said looking at her hands in wonder. "Good. Better than I've felt in years. Strong. What in the hell happened?"
"This is apparently the facility that repaired me," Elgars answered. "We thought you might prefer the full upgrade. Among other things it included a rejuv."
"Wow," Shari said, looking at the fineness of her skin. "Mike is going to . . ." She suddenly stopped and grimaced. "I guess not." For just a moment her eyes teared up.
"Hey, he's tough," Wendy said. "We'll head out to the northwest; we should be able to get around the Posleen that way. When we get someplace safe we'll check on them in the refugee database."
"If we can get out of here," Shari said pensively.
"It turns out there's a back door," Elgars said dryly. "Just another little item whoever built this facility failed to mention to the rest of the Urb."
"We can go directly to Pendergrass Mountain," Wendy said with a nod. "No waiting."
"Then let's go," Shari said, standing up and pulling off the bandages.
Wendy suddenly looked at the altar with a speculative air. "AID, how long until the first Posleen gets close to here?"
"There are Posleen in the Hydroponics area. Due to the chaotic nature of Posleen movement, precise timelines for their movement to this area are impossible to generate."
"Hmm," she said. "Do you think there is enough time for a full upgrade?"
"Do you think that's a good idea?" Shari asked.
"You hearing voices in your head?" Wendy asked. She took Shari's Steyr and tossed it to her. "Catch."
Shari caught it and jacked the chamber to see if there was a round in place. Then she flipped it on safe and held it barrel to the floor in a tac-team carry position. "What does that prove?"
"Look at how you're holding it," Wendy said with a grin. "Say 'fire.' "
"Why?" Shari asked warily, looking at how she was holding the weapon. It looked odd but . . . it felt right.
"Just say it," Wendy said.
"Fire."
"See," Wendy said with a grin. "Not a trace of an accent. They fixed the bugs testing it on Elgars."
"Color me guinea-pig," the captain said sourly.
"So, computer," Wendy said. "Do I have time?"
"Unknown. And when Posleen breach the outer door, my orders are to shut this facility down with prejudice," the AID said. "I will then require that you leave."
"What happens if I'm in the chamber when that time comes?" Wendy asked.
"You don't want to be," the AID replied.
She looked at the other two women. "It's probably the only chance I'll ever get for a rejuv. If it's not eternal life, it's a close equivalent."
Shari sighed. "Go for it."
"Computer," Elgars said. "Please do a full upgrade on this patient."
"Very well," it said, opening the cover. "Get on the slab."
There was another wait as Elgars got the computer to download a schematic of the exit and Shari ensured all the children were ready to run. She settled the children and convinced them that, yes, she was really Miss Shari. After checking out the route and determining that there shouldn't be any Posleen between their current position and the surface she took over carrying Amber and started giving her a bottle.
About then the cover came off and Wendy sat up.
"Dang," she said. "It's like going into and coming out of Hiberzine. No time passed at all."
"Feel any different?" Elgars asked.
"Stronger," Wendy said. "It feels like . . . I dunno, my 'wind' is better. I feel charged up is the best way to put it."
"Well, let's go," Shari said, cradling the child in one arm and the bullpup in the other. "I don't want this place to 'shut down with extreme prejudice' on our heads."
"Do we know where we're going?" Wendy asked.
"We do now," Elgars said, holding up the pad. "But . . . computer, could we get a sprite?"
"Certainly," the AID responded as one of the micrites appeared and flashed on.
"Ready to go," Elgars said.
"Okay," Wendy replied. "Let's roll."
They exited the chamber to the left and went through a series of turns and twists, twice passing through large sphinctered openings that reminded Wendy of nothing so much as heart valves, until they came to an even larger chamber than where the rejuv device had been. In the center of the chamber, which was nearly fifty meters across and nearly as high, was something that looked just exactly like a purple loaf of round bread.
"What is that?" Elgars asked, as the sprite vanished into the distance.
"That is the transport pod," the AID answered as an oblong door opened in the side. The oblong was horizontal so the entrance was well below normal human height. In fact, Elgars had to duck so she wouldn't hit her head.
The interior was just as unpleasant and unprepossessing as the exterior, consisting mostly of purple-blue foam with occasional washes of green that looked brownish in the odd light.
"Please take a seat," the AID intoned. "This transport is leaving the station."
The group sat on the floor and looked around waiting for the device to start to move. There were no external windows so there was no way to see what was going on outside; it was for all practical purposes its own little universe.
"AID?" Elgars said after a moment. "When will we start moving?"
"You are halfway to Pendergrass Mountain, Captain Elgars."
"Oh." She looked around again and shrugged.
"Inertial dampers," Wendy said. "The sort of thing they have on spacecraft; it 'damps' the motion."
"Okay," Shari said with a shrug. "So when do we get there?"
"Now," Wendy said as the door opened into blackness.
"That's not so good," Elgars said, stepping out onto the barely visible floor. Looking around she saw a chamber that was a large and apparently natural cavern. But there was no visible entrance deeper into the mountain; it was as if the transport had gone through solid rock. "Okay, now I'm freaked."
"It's just before dawn," Shari said. "We need to let the children sleep.
I could use some rest myself for that matter."
"It's cold out here," Wendy said, pulling at her torn shirt. "Maybe we could sleep in the transport."
"And have it suddenly go back to the Urb?" Elgars asked. "I don't think so."
"We've got some blankets," Shari said. "We can bed down in here. If we all huddle up together it won't be too bad."
"Okay," Wendy said looking around. "Up near the walls. Can we light a fire?"
"Probably a bad idea," Elgars said. "The light and heat could attract attention. We just need to make it through this night; we'll find some better materials tomorrow."
"Okay," Wendy said. "Let's get some sleep. And hope it gets better tomorrow."
CHAPTER 33
They sends us along where the roads are,
but mostly we goes where they ain't:
We'd climb up the side of a sign-board
an' trust to the stick o' the paint:
We've chivied the Naga an' Looshai,
we've give the Afreedeeman fits,
For we fancies ourselves at two thousand,
we guns that are built in two bits—'Tss! 'Tss!
—Rudyard Kipling
"Screwguns"
Betty Gap, NC, United States, Sol III
0714 EDT Sunday September 27, 2009 ad
Pruitt stared into the rising sun, pretty sure he'd never been this exhausted in his life. Whatever the drugs were telling him.
"I feel like I haven't slept in a week," he muttered. "Or at least like I could sleep for a week." He wasn't exactly tired; the Provigil was making sure that he wouldn't feel that way and a tiny bit of methamphetamine was ensuring that he was alert. But it had been a long day with a lot of stress and it didn't look to be ending any time soon.
The route over the mountain had been a long drawn out nightmare and one where he couldn't do anything except hold on and hope for the best.
The SheVa gun had not been designed to climb mountains and a couple of times he was pretty sure they were just going to go tumbling back down a slope; once just west of Chestnut Gap when they had to ascend a ten-foot bluff while already on a very steep slope and another time when the mountainside was just a bit steeper than it looked on the map. The SheVa often felt like it was going straight up and knowing that there was a multiton gun and two stories of steel above you, pulling the gun over and backwards, was pretty nerve-wracking. It was almost worse the few times that they had had to straddle a ravine with one giant tread half supported on either side; the undercarriage would creak and groan, sounding like it was going to shatter at any moment.
It had been worse for Reeves; the large and airy compartment occasionally got thick with the fear sweat from the driver. But every time that Major Mitchell told him to take a slope, he'd just nod his head and put his foot to the floor. It took a special kind of courage to simply place your faith in a hunk of machinery, that it would take the hill and not turn into a gigantic iron boulder.
The trek had to have been nearly as bad for the Meemies. The Abrams tank was certified to negotiate a sixty degree slope—amazing what placing most of sixty tons of metal near the ground could do for center of gravity—but that didn't mean that anyone but an idiot liked to go up them. And in places the laboring SheVa had torn the slope to such an extent that its tread holes, which were the only clear route for an Abrams, easily approached sixty degrees. But the commander of the MetalStorm tracks had taken them into and out of those ersatz fighting positions without any apparent qualm.
It would almost have been better if he'd just turned off his screens and gone to sleep, but they didn't know when the Posleen might do a flyover. And now that he was reloaded, he was ready to kick some Posleen butt.
Where the Posleen were was a big question. Between Major Mitchell and the Storm commander they had managed to scrape up a few other surviving units on the radio. It turned out that the horses had taken the Rocky Face slope and Oak Grove, cutting off a good part of the surviving Corps. But engineers had blown the bridges at Oak Grove and Tennessee before the horses got there and at both points the Posleen were rebuilding the structures while laboriously ferrying troops across.
That last was bad news; nobody liked to think about Posleen having combat engineers; among other things that meant that the entire lower Tennessee was potentially crossable. But it was taking them a few hours to do the structure and the advance was slowed down in the meantime. Currently Major Mitchell intended to head down into Betty Creek and then over Brushy Fork mountain to Greens Creek. After that they would practically have to debouche into the Savannah Creek valley; they had to get ahead of the Posleen and filtering through mountain passes wasn't going to let them do that.
They had reports that a company of mixed MPs and infantry were holding the bridges over the Tuckasegee River. It wasn't a big deal to the SheVa—there wasn't a bridge in the world that would support Bun-Bun—but the Storms needed one to cross the river. If they could make it to the crossing ahead of the horses all would be relatively well. If they didn't, on the other hand, things would get sticky.
There was also the issue of destroying the bridge. The MPs indicated that they didn't have any engineers; they had piled explosives around, but the bridge was pretty sturdy and they weren't sure it would go down. If worse came to worse, of course, Bun-Bun could take care of that little detail as well.
It was near the Tuckasegee crossing, at Dillsboro, that the roads forked. There, Highway 23 separated off and went to Asheville. That was a critical juncture; just up the road at Waynesville was another Urb and if the Posleen got that far it was a mostly open plain all the way into the city. For that matter, at Balsam Gap the road crossed the Blue Ridge Parkway. Since that was a support road for the majority of the Appalachian Line, getting up onto it would permit the Posleen to spread nearly at will. And just east of Waynesville they would hit Interstate 40; that would permit them just about unrestricted movement.
There was part of a division out of Asheville headed towards the Balsam mountains. But Asheville was under heavy attack on two fronts and couldn't spare much in that direction. Major Mitchell had, therefore, decided to head up the road to Balsam, using the SheVa and the MetalStorms to slow the Posleen advance. This program was not without its detractors; the main road to Balsam Gap was not going to be usable by the SheVa, which meant going off-road. And the terrain around Balsam Pass was worse than what they were crossing at the moment.
But that obstacle was far off. For now it was simply a matter of surviving the descent.
"Good Lord," Indy said, looking at her own screen. "It's even worse in daylight!"
The route down from Betty Gap was a normal Appalachian mountainside, carpeted in a mixture of moutain laurel and deciduous trees with a thin covering of loam over schist and gneiss rocks; the morning light had brought with it a thin layer of the wispy fog that gave the Smoky Mountains their name and the pearlous light made the scene almost unreal. Especially since it also was an almost six-hundred-foot drop to the valley in less than a mile, a good bit of it relatively unbroken slope. They had discovered to their occasional despair that the thin coating of loam tended to strip off and act as a lubricant when a seven-thousand-ton tank tried to cross it.
"Sir?" Reeves said in an exhausted tone.
"Go slow," the major replied. "If we start to slip just . . . put it in reverse."
"Yes, sir," the private said, gently revving the tank in idle. "Of course, I could just put it in forward and try to go down really fast."
"Please don't joke," Indy said. "I'm surprised we haven't blown a track or a bar yet; I don't want to think about what hitting the valley floor at ninety miles an hour would be like."
"Just . . . take it slow, Reeves," the major repeated, gripping the arms of his chair and leaning back.
"Bun-Bun would have something quippy to say right about now," Pruitt said, leaning back like the major. "But at the moment I'm too terrified to come up with anything."
"Just think of it as skiing?" Reeves mutt
ered.
"I don't think this will slalom very well."
"Captain Chan," Mitchell said, switching to the Storms' frequency. "We're going to have to attempt this slope. There is a road along the ridge that should handle your tanks; I suggest you try that first, rather than trying to toboggan after us."
"Agreed," Chan replied. "And . . . good luck."
* * *
Wendy slid from between two of the children and walked to the entrance of the cave. She should have been out like a light, but for some reason she had started awake about ten minutes before and been unable to get back to sleep. Elgars was standing watch, staring off to the east where the first faint glimmer of light could be discerned. The lights of Franklin had been extinguished, but fires had been set throughout the valley, the Posleen being nearly as incendiary as Old World mercenaries. She could barely see the forms moving down below, but she knew that thousands, tens of thousands, millions of Posleen were pouring past to the north, headed for Knoxville, headed for Asheville. Many of them perhaps pouring into their former home.
She looked at her watch and nodded. That was probably what had awakened her.
"Has it gone off yet?" she asked.
Elgars shook her head. "I thought it should have gone off about five minutes ago."
" 'There should have been an earth-shattering kaboom,' " Wendy intoned. " 'Where was the earth-shattering kaboom?' "
"The Martian, right?" Elgars asked.
"You remember?"
"Nah, I saw it while I was watching the kids the other day," the captain said. As she did, there was a faint shudder in the floor of the cave, and then a second stronger one. It felt like a very small earthquake. To the east, there was a gout of light and a section of land settled slightly then formed a giant, smoking crater.
"I feel, really ambiguous about this," Wendy said after a moment. "I just lost quite a few friends. People that I care about. On the other hand . . ."
"On the other hand they were already dead," Elgars said, standing up and brushing off her butt. "Or as good as. Most of them would have become rations for the Posleen, a use that we have prevented. And we got who knows how many Posleen in there. Yes, it wasn't pretty. War isn't."