by John Ringo
"After tinkering with humans for a while they got a double rebellion on their hands," Mike said, ignoring the interjection. "And they left. So why are there no remains anywhere on Earth? Note: these Duendtor are probably nearly as tricky as a Darhel. I'm not taking anything on face value."
"Well, postulate that they had most of their Earthly infrastructure at one remote location," Colonel Ashland said. "Say an island. And they managed to sink it or something."
"Atlantis?" Mike asked, looking up. "You're serious."
"It's a very common myth in the Indo-European area," Ashland said, shrugging. "And this language is clearly Indo-European. The oral record could have been handed down in a garbled form for generations. Postulating that the Darhel also gave the sort of expanded lifetime that they gave to, well, us, that wouldn't be many generations."
"Methuselah now makes so much more sense," Corval said. "Not to mention how the Darhel had stuff like rejuv and Hiberzine ready, immediately, for human use."
"The problem is that there's nothing we can do with this," Mike said. "It's nothing but a ticking nuke in our hands. There is no way that the Darhel are going to let this story get disseminated."
"Be pretty hard to stop," General Corval said. "There are nearly twenty thousand members of the corps. And, trust me, the story is all over. At least that there are humans here."
"Recall all those stories about missing colony ships, General?" Colonel Ashland said. "I've seen the confidential reports. They weren't all rumors and they weren't all, or even mostly, accidents."
"You don't think they'd . . ." Corval said, then swallowed. "That's sick!"
"To cover this up?" Mike asked. "Oh, yeah. They'd dump us all into a hole in hyperspace in a second. I've been wondering when it was going to happen, anyway. The cost of demobilizing the corps would be saved."
"Well, the hell if I'm going to get dumped into space," General Corval said, setting his jaw. "If it was just my life, that would be one thing. But—"
"But I'm responsible for the lives of twenty thousand troopers," Mike said, nodding. "There's just one problem. We don't control the ships."
"Easy enough to change that," Colonel Ross Swartzbaugh said. The Corps G-3 was medium height and build and prematurely bald. He covered that up by shaving his head like a cueball. "Not sure what we'd do once we took them, but we've got a corps of ACS. Various opportunities come to mind."
"Every ship requires an AID to operate," Mike said. "You think they're not going to get an update telling them to dump us the first time we get near a sat? And the ships are keyed to specific AIDs. Prevents mutiny."
"Which is what we're contemplating, you realize," Colonel Ashland said.
"Not really," Mike said. "I mean, I'm still trying to figure a way around it. I just don't see one. Well, there's one."
"What?" General Corval asked.
"We send the ships back empty," Mike said. "Just sit tight here. Tell them we misunderstood the orders or something. If the ships make it back, they'll ask us what the fuck happened. I mean, a whole corps missing movement? But if they don't, they might never know."
"And we'll be marooned on this dirtball," Colonel Swartzbaugh said, rubbing his head. "Not my first choice. And how, exactly, do we explain it to the corps?"
"Lie," Mike said. "Tell them we were ordered to stand down and await transport. In a year or so it might get sticky. But they'll be alive."
There was a knock at the door and Mike looked at it furiously. Rawls had very direct orders not to interfere.
"Get it," he said, gesturing with his chin to Colonel Ashland.
"Sir, I'm sorry," Rawls said. "There's an Indowy out here saying he has to talk to you now. He says that he has information that you need about what you're talking about. He's really exercised. He said if I didn't let him in he was going to quote rip my head off and shit in my neck."
Mike looked at the NCO blankly for a moment.
"An Indowy said that to you?" Colonel Ashland said incredulously.
"Yes, sir," Rawls said, caught between his own incredulity and humor. "An Indowy."
"Show him in," Mike said. "Then shut the door."
The Indowy was, as far as Mike could tell, pretty much identical to any mid-level Indowy worker. Mid-years, about a hundred in other words. Totally indistinguishable from any of a trillion of the prolific species.
"Exalted Lord O'Neal," the Indowy said, prostrating himself. The term was one the Indowy had bestowed on Mike after his actions on Diess. It translated, as far as Mike could tell, as something like "Duke." It wasn't a clan lord but about the same status. It generally got bestowed on particularly good scientists and the Indowy equivalent of lawyers. As far as Mike was aware he was the only human with the rank and also the only warrior. "I am Indowy Tak Ockist Um'Dare. I see you."
"I see you, Indowy Tak," Mike said. "Stand and speak."
"Exalted Lord," Tak said. "You have made contact with People of the Book."
"You know about People of the Book," Mike asked, leaning back. "Why am I not surprised."
"I did not know, myself, Exalted Lord, until recently," Tak said nervously. "Exalted Lord, I am . . . Exalted Lord, this is a very long story."
"I've already heard one," Mike said, gesturing to a station chair. "Tell me. Tell me all of it, Tak. Every bit you know."
"They're what?" Cally said.
Cally O'Neal was fifty-eight and looked to be about twenty. Officially listed as killed in one of the last battles of the Siege of Earth, for most of those fifty-eight years she had been an agent of the Bane Sidhe, the secret underground among the Indowy and humans that worked to overthrow the Darhel rule. And for most of that period she'd been primarily an assassin.
In the last decade, though, things had changed in so many ways it seemed as if change would never slow down. First there was the mission where she'd met James Stewart. They'd started off as enemies fighting each other in secret and ended as lovers. Stewart had faked his own death but refused to join the Bane Sidhe. Instead he'd entered the Tongs, the Chinese mafia that had taken over most of the organized crime among humans, and fought his own battles from that vantage. He and Cally had married in secret but of late they'd had to even break off the most cursory contact.
His connections had been of premium value when Cally's sister, Michelle, had used them along with some stolen nannite codes to take down an entire Darhel clan. Michelle wasn't Bane Sidhe, either; the Darhel had just crossed the wrong human. Michelle was a Sohon mentat, a wielder of almost magical powers over space, time and matter. But she still was indebted to the Darhel. Or had been until she, Cally and Stewart had managed, through a combination of luck and deviousness, to buy her free and bankrupt her Darhel bankers.
The mission where Cally had met Stewart had caused a sundering in the Bane Sidhe, most of the organization splitting off from the O'Neal faction. But the response to the take-down of the Epetar Clan had included, among other things, a massive crackdown on the Bane Sidhe. The faction that had tossed the O'Neals aside ended up screaming for help.
The O'Neals had pulled their chestnuts out of the fire. But Papa O'Neal, the man who had been a real father to her for most of her life, had been killed by the ACS response team. An ACS response team commanded, by one of those horrible coincidences in life, by her own father.
So Cally was anything but charitable to their "fellows."
"Back up to the beginning, Terool," Father O'Reilly said. The monsignor had been a member of the Earthly Bane Sidhe since before the return of the Darhel. Bane Sidhe translated roughly as "The Death of Elves." It had remained hidden within "secret societies" since before the dawn of history. It had remnants of prehistory fable that were passed down, but none of it had ever been clear. He might, finally, get some of it filled in.
"The Darhel co-opted human guards long ago," the Indowy Terool said. He had been one of the leaders of the anti-O'Neal faction in the Bane Sidhe, so revealing the secrets he was about to reveal was like pulling teeth. "They were ga
thered mostly from Western Europe and the Mediterranean. They were trained on a small continent where the Azores are presently placed. There was a revolt, here and on Akoria, the planet your father just 'reclaimed' from the Posleen. Here on Earth a Darhel was sacrificed to lintatai to cause a massive earth movement under the continent, effectively sinking it by several hundred feet. Finding the traces of what you humans call 'Atlantis' would be very difficult even for us. But they are there.
"Your father's corps was probing along the spinward axis of the spiral arm. Akoria is on the anti-spinward axis. None of the Darhel found it of moment that the reclamation was in that region. It should have taken years for your father's corps to reach Akoria and the end of the reclamation program was well on its way to fruition.
"However, word has come back that instead of slowly proceeding across the arm, the corps jumped to the far side. Why is unclear. But they have Akoria, which they refer to as 'R-1496 Delta,' on their list. They should have reached there by now. And there is no way that they could miss traces of human habitation."
"The Posleen took the planet," Father O'Reilly said. "That will pretty much erase traces of humans."
"Even at the height of the war there were humans hiding in deep jungle and high mountains," the Indowy said patiently. "You are very hard to wipe out completely, just as the Posleen are hard to wipe out completely."
"Point," Cally said. "But get back to the corps."
"The Darhel are unwilling to allow this secret to be revealed," Terool said. "Very unwilling. Unwilling enough to destroy the entire task force."
"That would be pretty hard to do," Cally said.
"Every ship is controlled by the AIDs," Terool said. "As are the suits. They will simply enter hyper and never exit."
"That wouldn't just violate the Compact," Cally said, furiously. "It would break it beyond belief! Do they want all-out war?"
"There are too many members of the corps to cover this up," Terool said. "And if people become aware that the Darhel have been manipulating humans for this long there will be . . . other questions asked."
"About the colonist ships," Cally said, bitterly. "About fucking with us during the war. About why China was wiped out."
"Indeed," Father O'Reilly said. "But they must know what the response of the Bane Sidhe would be to something like this. There would be no end to the blood."
"We are weak," Terool said. "Their response to your ill-advised attack on the Pardal Clan nearly destroyed us!"
"Nearly destroyed you, you mean," Cally said harshly.
"Us," Father O'Reilly said, placatingly. "We are not enemies."
"Tell that to them," Cally snapped. "They were the bastards that fucked with my head then left us out to dry when I managed to break conditioning. Just talking to this fucker is making me sick. And now he's suggesting that we just let the Darhel wipe out thirty thousand soldiers and sailors? The Compact is inviolate! If it's not there's no point to this whole charade!"
"Are they sending the orders to destroy the task force?" Father O'Reilly asked.
"They are already sent," Terool said miserably.
"Can we intercept them?" Cally asked. "Corrupt them?"
"It would be . . . difficult," Terool said.
"I don't care for difficult," Cally said. "Can you do it?"
"Perhaps," Terool said. "And then again perhaps not."
"And there's more," Father O'Reilly said.
"We must clarify this matter," Terool said.
"Indowy think that they are inscrutable to humans," Father O'Reilly said. "And, indeed, to most humans they are. But not to all. What else?"
"I'm more worried about the Fleet," Cally said. "And, okay, my bastard of a father."
"He is your clan lord," Terool said, upset.
"He can rot in hell for all I care," Cally snapped. "But I don't want the damned Darhel to leave him stuck in hyper until his air runs out."
"Terool!" Father O'Reilly said. "Tell us!"
"It is about . . . your father," Terool said, miserably. "You see, the Darhel . . ."
"Owe you a lot of money," Tak said.
"Define a lot," Mike said. "I've been paid way too much as it is."
"Exalted Lord," Tak said, carefully. "Recently, you may have heard, a Darhel Clan fell."
"Epetar," Colonel Ashland said.
"The same," Tak said. "The were, in fact, destroyed. By your daughter, Michelle."
"Really?" Mike said. He got a message from Michelle every year at Christmas. If she'd taken down a Darhel Clan it was news to him. "Good for her!"
"There were others working with her, Bane Sidhe and Tong. But it was primarily your clan which did this. The Darhel could not react against you nor against Michelle. But they would much wish to."
"Why couldn't they?" General Corval asked.
"Early in the conflict against the Posleen one of your generals, General Taylor, began a program to investigate Darhel manipulation of both politicians and war supplies."
"That's what got him killed," Mike said, nodding. "Isn't it?"
"Indeed, Exalted Lord," Tak said, carefully. "However, some of your people, notably the Cyberpunks and human factions of the Bane Sidhe reacted. They killed several high-level Darhel and missed the Tir Dol Ron by a mere shred."
"Too bad they missed," Corval said.
"Thus was the Compact born," Tak said. "The Darhel would not attack current duty humans and the Cybers and the human Bane Sidhe, of whom the Cybers are now a faction, would not kill Darhel."
"This is making my head hurt," General Corval said. "Ancient societies. Midnight assassinations. Darhel manipulation. Does any of this have a point?"
"This is the last point," Tak said. "I do not know if even my masters are aware of this fact. It was contained in the communication to the Ceel that I intercepted when he went into lintatai. Further complicating things are that each of you is owed much more money than the Darhel ever told you. General O'Neal, for certain specific reasons, is owed . . . Well, the amount that your daughter used to take down the Pardal clan is but a fraction of what you are owed. One tenth of all you recover is, by rights, property of the capturers."
"Yeah," Mike said. "I know. We picked up a few billion credits worth here off those Posleen forges we captured intact."
"The full implications were never explored," Tak said. "Let me ask you this, General. On Diess. Would the planet have fallen absent your actions?"
"Oh, I doubt it," Mike said. "There was a whole corps there and they were getting some pretty solid defenses built."
"Bullshit, sir," General Corval said. "We've all seen the analysis. You hamstrung the Posleen at a critical juncture, the schwerpunkt. The Line would have fallen if the full weight fell on it. And you took out the only God King using airmobile in that battle. To answer his question without the false modesty, yes, Tak, it would have."
"Thus you, General O'Neal, are owed ten percent of the gross production value of Diess," Tak said. "For the entire period of your life. Oh, some is owed to the many other soldiers and officers in the battle. But a large percentage of it falls to your account. Equally other planets. There are many humans who are owed much by the Darhel. But especially with penalties and interest, you are far in advance of them. You have done almost nothing but fight the Posleen for decades. Led critical defenses of multiple cities on Earth. Holding the pass in Rabun Gap gives you a margin of all goods and services in the Central North American provinces. Several of the recovery worlds of which you were a senior commander are now producing goods. You have gotten none of these additional monies. Your current calculated worth, according to the message, is approximately fifteen percent of all the Darhel clans' worth. Mostly due to penalties. Payable, as all Darhel debts are, immediately and in full at your request."
"Nobody has that much capital," Mike said, blinking.
"That is the point," Tak replied. "If you call their debt, every Darhel clan in the galaxy is immediately and totally bankrupt."
"Good God," Cally s
aid, her eyes wide. "Holy . . . How in the hell did the Darhel let that happen?"
"They wrote a very bad law," Terool said. "Back when we were first attacked by the Posleen. They attempted to buy our action. But we rejected them. The Way is the only way that we choose. So they kept increasing the amount they were willing to pay if we would only fight. But we would rather die than stray from the Way. So now they owe your father, all humanity for that matter, for a fraction of the price of the entire Confederation plus all the recovered worlds. They knew this from the beginning. But they also thought the humans would never figure it out."