Eye of the Storm

by John Ringo

  The Legion was also light infantry. It had no heavy weapons, no armor and didn't even use exos. It kept that Legion tradition: It mostly marched everywhere.

  "With all due respect to the Ceel," Mike said, oozing sweetness, "the answer is: No, I don't think that's a suggestion with any inherent value or merit. And that's my professional opinion. Would you care for an expansion, Admiral?"

  "Yes, please," Admiral Suntoro snarled.

  "Bullet Point One, for those who need a PowerPoint presentation, is that the ACS has taken three percent casualties getting this far, and we're finding resistance is on the same order as above ground. Legion is regular infantry; they'd get flipping slaughtered. I know they're all drunks, thieves and murderers, but they weren't given a death sentence or they'd already have been killed. Bullet Point Two: I would appreciate it if you didn't kill the morale of my corps. We took serious casualties getting to this point. We want to clear the damned mountains, kill a bunch of Posleen and take their stuff. That's what my boys do and they wouldn't be here if they didn't enjoy it. Bullet Point Three: As the captain said, getting them here would take at least two months. It is a simple military axiom that you should never give an enemy more time than necessary to prepare. I've sent orders to my division commanders to continue the assault but even this time away is a poor use of my time. Letting them get even more settled in for two months, which is one Posleen birth cycle I remind you, is militarily insane. Bullet Point Four: I've got a corps of armored combat suits pushing into this resistance. The Legion is about a division, max. The more you use, the fewer you lose. I doubt, professionally, that they have sufficient personnel to successfully assault this redoubt. In other words, they'll fight until casualties exceed the level they're willing to take and then mutiny. At which point my boys will be called in to quell the mutiny and we'll be back to square one.

  "So in my professional opinion, the Ceel's suggestion, while appreciated, fails on the points that it is murderous to the Legion, murderous to my corps' morale, unwise and unlikely to work. Are we done here? Because I've got a battle to run."

  "So you're refusing to disengage?" Commodore Ajeet asked incredulously. "But the Ceel's suggestion—"

  "Is a suggestion," Mike replied coldly. "I am the ground force commander. That means I'm in command. If the Ceel would care to put in a request to have me relieved for someone more tractable he can feel free to do so. In the meantime, I've got a battle to run. And you're late on delivering the next shipment of power cells to Alpha Base. So I would suggest that we cut this meeting short so that everyone can go do their damned jobs. I, personally, am done here. Shelly, clear."

  "I'm sorry about that, Ceel Banash," Admiral Suntoro said as soon as the conference had broken up. "General O'Neal should be more respectful of his betters."

  "General O'Neal's record speaks for itself," Ceel Banash said calmly. "He is hypercompetent in his field. As was just proven. He was right, Admiral. I had considered only the point about how long it would take to get the Legion here. The other points were equally important if not more so. I have no issues with the conference."

  "Very well, Ceel," Admiral Suntoro said, confused.

  "I shall continue my planning of the recovery of this lovely world," Ceel Banash said. "I suggest that you ensure delivery of supplies to the redoubtable ground-commander."

  As soon as the call was terminated the Ceel used all his willpower to suppress lintatai. He wanted to crush that impudent human, to rend him, to . . .

  He took a breath and muttered a mantra, trying and trying to keep the surge of hormones down to a survivable level. If only . . .

  The Legion was as thoroughly controlled as any unit in the military. The officers were utterly dependent upon the Darhel, every one having major financial problems that the Darhel were more than willing to remedy as long as they stayed in line. If the Legion had taken over the rest of the work on this planet its secret would assuredly remain safe. As it was, so far there was no indication the humans knew. But if the Eleventh remained, it would come out. The secret must NOT . . .

  Indowy Neena knew the signs. As soon as the conference call was terminated it sent a muscle-cued message to its subordinates. The transfer-neuter watched, impassively, as the young Darhel wrestled with his inner emotions, then suddenly jerked. For a moment, Neena thought it would die as the light of fury erupted in the Darhel's face. Sometimes the Darhel could survive in the thrall of tal hormones for as long as fifteen seconds, long enough to kill up to a dozen Indowy if present. But this one barely jerked, then slumped, his face going slack.

  "Send a message to the Tir Dol Ron," Neena said as a half dozen Indowy scurried into the room. "This one has entered lintatai. We're going to need a replacement Ceel. I will inform the admiral."

  "Shall we place him in the airlock until he is gone?" Indowy Tak asked. The junior servant was new, out of the megascrapers for the first time. But if he was bothered by the condition of his former master it wasn't apparent.

  "Humans are confused by such things," Neena said. "We will have to baby him until we get back to an Indowy or Darhel world. Then we can set him out."

  "I will see to his needs for now," Tak said. "I can do that by myself."

  "Very well," Neena replied, turning and leaving the compartment.

  A second Indowy left to compose a message to the Tir who had sent Banash on this assignment. The others quickly tidied the small amount of mess the Ceel had caused them, then left.

  As soon as he was alone, Tak lifted the body and dragged the unresisting Ceel to the comconsole. Few humans realized the strength of the diminutive Indowy but, like chimpanzees, their appearances were deceptive. The only problem with carrying the much larger Darhel was getting his limp legs not to dangle on the floor. The Tak sought a particular message, then laid the Darhel's hand on the control pad and positioned his face in front of the screen. Last, he slid a small device over the Darhel's eyes. Darhel secure messages were, quite literally, for their eyes only. The laser would only shine into the Ceel's eyes and could only be decrypted if he was physically watching it. Having him go into lintatai was a real coup for the junior Bane Sidhe.

  The Indowy downloaded the decrypted message, then picked the Darhel up and set him on the large bed. It was going to be a long time before anyone came to relieve him but he had some interesting reading to pass the time.

  Tak was not, in fact, "straight out of the megascraper." A member of the rebel faction called the Bane Sidhe by humans, he had travelled extensively and spent more time with humans than was considered either normal or proper. And despite extensive training in covert operations, he had developed some very bad habits.

  One of them was to emit a very human whistle when he was surprised.

  "Whoooo," the Indowy shrilled as he read the missive. "As Cally would say: The Darhel are sooo fucked!"

  Chapter Three

  A month. Thirty-two days, actually. That was how long it had taken to get to this point.

  Mike shook his head as he looked around the cavern. Adjectives were bothering him.

  "So, is this a cavernous cavern?" he muttered.

  "How 'bout one big motherfucking cavern, sir?" Rawls suggested. "And chock full of salty goodness, too."

  The . . . facility was clearly the center of the Posleen's industrial capacity in the redoubt. Nearly two thousand meters under ground, deep enough in the bedrock that it was damned well hot, the six-hundred-meter long, one hundred and twenty-meter high facility was packed with Posleen auto-forges. Enough in this one facility to outfit a dozen factory ships. At a billion credits a pop, on the open market, Mike was looking at a serious haul.

  Getting there, though, had been tough. Casualties had approached ten percent in the first week. The unit was being decimated in all but the truly literal sense. However, the resistance had dropped off from there. The much more dangerous God Kings thinned out, replaced by hordes of half-wild, but heavily armed, normals. They had thrown themselves into the ACS troops in wild char
ges in narrow tunnels, in some cases blasting so much firepower into same that the tunnels were collapsed.

  Other tunnels were intentionally rigged by the remaining God Kings, dropping on units as they advanced. But having a mountain fall on you was old hat for ACS troops; they'd been dealing with that since almost their first battle. And they could dig like gophers.

  Slowly, in the face of mass charges and collapsed tunnels and feints and flanking maneuvers, the corps had slowly ground its way to the center of the redoubt, finally taking this cavern.

  By that time, it was mostly mopping up. There were still feral Posleen filling the extensive tunnels and mines of the redoubt, but the last crop of God Kings, probably the commander and his "staff," had been killed only a few hours before.

  "How much do you think?" Rawls asked.

  The Darhel had actually instituted the program of paying units for "recovered materials." Human commanders from Western societies had initially argued against what they saw as archaic "prize" rules but the law was encoded in Galactic regulation.

  Over the years, Mike had made a tidy sum from prizes. But . . .

  "Enough for a drunken weekend for every survivor," Mike said coldly. "Even after the triple tithe for the next of kin. But add it all up and it won't even pay for the suits, much less the SheVas. And while there are bean counters aplenty that can give you a precise value for every one of my boys killed, I'm not going to even try."

  "Sorry, sir," Rawls said.

  "It's not enough, Sergeant," Mike said. "It's never ever enough."

  "Madre de Dios," Julio muttered, looking into the pit.

  "What'cha got?" Sergeant Dylan Glover asked.

  Julio's team had been attached, more or less of necessity, to the general's bodyguards as the assault ground forward. The Hammers had taken even higher casualties than the rest of the division, trying to protect their headstrong commander. While Julio's team hadn't had their same level of training or experience, more bodies were more bodies.

  The Hammers had started out with nine NCOs and enlisted; Julio's team, by the time it got officially linked up, with one and three. Sergeant Glover and Julio were the only remaining from his team and there were only four Hammers. It had been a bloody slog.

  Along the way Julio had seen some things he hoped would eventually fade from consciousness. When thousands of Posleen normals were killed in a nine-foot-wide passage, it was necessary to do more than just wade through the bodies. He'd found himself hacking parts out of the way, stomping through them, his suit becoming covered in yellow blood.

  Broken and flayed suits had become a thing of norm. Passages choked with a mixture of suits and Posleen and rubble.

  But this was something new. It appeared to be a pit filled with nothing but bones. There was a bit of flesh on them and some sort of bug had infested the pit, but it was the bones that showed through.

  "Charnel pit," Sergeant Glover said, stepping up beside him. "Looks like mostly Posleen. They must have been eating the normals to keep them from eating the food supply. Look, see the little ones?"

  "Yeah," Julio said, his eyes wide.

  "Nestlings. They eat their young, too."

  "Madre de Dios," Julio repeated. "That is sick."

  "Hey, they reproduce so fast that . . ." The sergeant paused.

  "So fast that what, Sergeant?"

  "That is not a Posleen bone," the sergeant said. "Go get me some rope. I need to get down there."

  "We get anybody captured?" Mike said, rotating the bone back and forth.

  Posleen were aliens, their physiology wildly different from that of humans. And over the past fifty years he had seen more bones, of both species, than he cared to remember. Back on Earth during the Retaking there had been thousands of charnel pits filled with the remnants of the humans the Posleen used as "thresh." By the same token, Posleen bodies, consumed or just shattered, littered the earth to the point where their toxic blood made some areas untillable for years.

  But the point was, Posleen bones and human bones did not look much alike. Among other things, Posleen bones had a very distinct "ridge" down the center. Human bones were much more rounded. And whereas there were some terrestrial animals that had bones remarkably similar to a human femur, they were on Earth. Not three hundred light-years galactic inward.

  "Not even any unaccounted for," Colonel Shan Gilman, the Eleventh ACS personnel officer, G-1, raised a hand in a shrug. "Every human that dropped on this world is accounted for. There are a few legs missing, but—"

  "But it don't account for this, sir," Sergeant Major Rolph Tilton said, walking over. He held up the skull in his hand and waggled it back and forth. "More we dig in there, the more of these we're finding. And this ain't a full grown guy."

  "Girl," Mike said, looking at the skull. "Female. Teen." He took it and turned it back and forth. "Malnourished for that matter. And with really bad teeth."

  "So how did it get here?" Colonel Gilman asked, desperately. "We didn't bring any teen females with us!"

  "Interesting question," Mike said, turning the skull back and forth. "But I don't think we're going to solve it today. Clean out that pit and find out what's all in there. Keep me posted. Rawls."

  "Sir?"

  "Attach Private Garcia and his sergeant to the Hammers. We're heading back to the ship."

  "Roger, sir."

  As the hatch of the Banshee shuttle closed, the helmets came off as if on cue.

  Mike flicked the helmet of undergel to let it know it might as well crawl back into the helmet then looked around.

  "Julio!"

  "Sir?" the private squeaked, trying to figure out if he was supposed to have kept his helmet on or something.

  "What do you think?"

  "Uh," Julio said, blinking furiously in thought. "I think I'm glad to be back on a shuttle headed for the ship, sir. I know the suits keep you clean but I'm looking forward to a shower and some rack time."

  "Spoken like a true soldier," Mike said, smiling at the chuckles from the veterans in the shuttle. "But I was actually talking about the bones."

  "Don't know what to think, sir," Garcia replied. "I mean, they're not our guys. And we're the only humans on this planet."

  "So how did they get there?" Mike asked, leaning back with his eyes cleared.

  "Not sure, sir."

  "Gimme an answer, Private," Mike said. "Any answer is fine."

  "Okay . . ." the private said, nervously. "Well . . . The Posleen could have brought them here. Sir. I mean as food or something. Maybe some sort of trade."

  "Sergeant Glover."

  "Sir?" the sergeant replied. He and Garcia had been around the general for a month but it didn't mean he was any less nervous in his presence. He wasn't even sure what he was doing here.

  "You've been in the ACS for six years. Enlisted from an unrecovered part of Florida. Bounty hunter?"

  "My father was, sir," Glover said, his brow furrowing. "I did some Posleen hunting before I joined up."

  "Since then you've participated in the retaking of five worlds. Ever seen human sign?"

  "No, sir," Glover replied. "I mean, I saw something like this, an old pit that is, in Florida. But not since I've been off-world. All the planets where humans had gotten caught by the Posleen were cleared by the time I joined up."

  "So what do you think of Private Garcia's theory?" the general asked.

  "It's possible but it doesn't match past record, sir," Glover said. "If the Posleen were going to be trading in human thresh, you would expect to see it closer to Earth. This is a long way from home, sir."

  "That it is," Mike said. "Okay . . . Clarke."

  "Sir?" Corporal Edgar Clarke was a two-year veteran of the Hammers. Six foot two inches tall he, like most of the Hammers, looked a bit incongruous next to their "primary."

  "Alternative theory."

  Clarke hated this. When the general wasn't busy with something else he'd pose these little "think sessions." Clarke was more than happy to kill Posleen or, hell
, throw his body between Posleen fire and his boss. But he hated when he was asked to think.

  "Humans evolving on another world, sir?" Clarke said. "Or maybe being put there by God or something."

  "Two theories, equally queriable," O'Neal replied. "The first being convergent evolution by name. That is that similar species occur with similar conditions. Thus you get rat-looking creatures in Australia and rats in England. Not well thought of by the scientific community but they're pretty inbred anyway. Chalk that up as a possible. The test will be determining if they have human DNA. DNA don't lie. In which case we get to the 'God made it that way' theory. Which is actually my first choice."