by John Ringo
Landrum and Privett, afraid that her attitude would make Kerry and Tramp twig to her age, readily agreed that of course she could drive. Besides, with Luke riding shotgun, both other men were out of arm’s reach of her. They were starting to favor him with knowing looks, though, and he didn’t like that at all.
The house they were looking for was about halfway up one of the mountainsides. Vacant neighboring house, empty lot, terrain unfavorable to clusters of homes. It was nicely isolated.
Reardon pulled into the driveway of the vacant house and cut the lights, leaving the engine running. As they got out, they could feel the cold wind scraping against their tilted faces, not buffered much by winter-bare trees. The cold bit them with all the fierceness they knew from winter trips into Chicago, but Luke hadn’t expected to find in one of the Southern states.
At shortly past midnight, the lights were off in the Tyler household. Landrum thanked God that they had somehow managed to loot their own gear and take DAG’s supply of such nice items as modern night vision goggles with them. He knew from other gear that there was no telling what shit the Bane Sidhe were sticking operators with these days. Genuine DAG goggles meant everybody was seeing like daylight in a black and white movie. Luke’s dad had lots of those. This was like “Leave it to Beaver,” if the Beave had lived in a big, falling down piece of shit house that had obviously once been a nice place, probably for someone wealthy.
He had heard houses referred to as “falling down” before, but this one actually had the porch roof propped up on one side by a series of warped, hammered-together two by fours. The only thing to indicate the windows had once had shutters was the one window that had one shutter. Two other windows were boarded up. The very small front yard sported a scattering of toys and junk.
They kicked in the front door and went in two by two, clearing the building according to their training, just as they would have in any other hostile environment. They heard the screaming of the mother and child.
Tramp and Kerry found all three cowering back in the parents’ bedroom. The wife and boy were on one side of the bed, the scumbag du jour on the other.
“Wait, wait! Not in front of my wife and kid! Okay, I’ll go, I’ll go if you want, but not here, not like this…” the man pleaded.
Still in the process of pleading for his life, he moved suddenly to bring a shotgun to bear on the DAGgers. At least, he tried. Kerry nailed him before the gun had even cleared the top of the mattress.
The screaming of the wife and kid sounded far away and horrendous, and the mother fought viciously, gouging Luke’s arms deeply with her fingernails as he pulled her onto the bed and pinned her. The boy was pounding on his back as he fished a loaded syringe out of a leg pocket and hit the woman with a shot of Recalma Plus.
Behind him, he felt the boy go limp and get peeled off his back, turning to see Privett laying the unconscious kid out on the bed beside the mom.
“I only gave him half a shot,” Cargo said.
“Right. Cover that with a sheet,” Landrum indicated the corpse. “Grab the boy, I’ve got Mom, we’ll dump them on the couch so they don’t wake up in the same room with him.”
It would be impossible to spare the two civilians the grief and horror of losing their scumbag father and husband this way. They’d wake up and find him, dead. However, the Recalma did more than get them quiet without killing them. It disrupted neurotransmitters in the brain in a way that prevented long-term memories from forming. Completely. The vision of seeing Tyler killed right in front of their eyes wouldn’t be repressed. It simply wouldn’t be there. At all.
A long time ago, there had been a saying that you couldn’t un-see things. Modern medicine had a cure for that, if you got there right on the spot. These two wouldn’t remember the last one to three days. There were several drugs that could do it. Recalma had the advantage of being fast, complete, and neutralizing all the adrenaline and related stress hormones and effects.
It was easier to get men to take the shot when they knew that any civilians watching could unsee it, after all.
While they’d close the door as best they could, it might get pretty cold in here before morning. They piled all the blankets and stuff they could easily find on top of the two survivors, placing them right next to each other for shared body heat. On the top, Cargo put a red and blue patchwork quilt with rocking horses that he’d found in the kid’s room. He noticed absently that it looked like good work — something Grandma Wendy would like. The boy was lucky somebody had cared enough to make it for him.
“She punched me. On an op. For no damn reason. Twice!” George Schmidt danced around the court, dodging Tommy Sunday to land a nice shot through the hoop. “Nothing but net,” he crowed.
The gym they were in only had enough light to see clearly because it had a lot of high-up windows, many of which gaped, empty of glass. The shards scattered around the edges of the court revealed that the breakage had come from outside. The stray rocks lying around suggested its cause. Someone, or someones, had been awfully bored. That the vandalism was old, or had at least started long ago, showed from the water stains down the cinderblock walls and the warped and rotting edges of the floor boards under the breakages. George had taken one side of the room, Cally the other, when they arrived, just to make sure that every breakage was old. The gym was in one of many post-war ghost towns. Farming continued in the open land around the town, but large agribusiness had gotten larger with the post-war hybrid technologies. Hectares of waving wheat went from seed to harvest without a single human setting foot on the fields. Smart machines and engineered seed took care of all that.
In the heartland, the breadbasket of the world, agribusiness ruled. Where you could really see it was in the scores of ghost towns dotted all over the Midwest. The disadvantage of a ghost town for dropping any tails was that any car turning off a route or highway stuck out like a sore thumb. The advantage was that because cars back in town were so rare, it was hard for a tail to hide.
He could watch the roads into and out of town, but he could not watch every little tractor and truck trail the farmers used to use. The plan was to loop around and hit a road some small distance out from the town. Their tracks would be found, of course, but by then they hoped to have confused the trail and slipped away.
Meanwhile, Harrison and Sands were out in an ancient utility shed in the backyard of the slowly collapsing house next door repainting the car. Cally was making lunch on an ancient Coleman camp stove they had found, unaccountably half full of fuel, in said shed. She had appointed herself cook on the grounds that Harrison was the only other team member who could fix a decent meal from their box of supplies in the trunk. She had declared that she wasn’t going to eat sandwiches twice in one day if she could help it.
Hence, George and Tommy were free for a little quick PT with an old ball that it had taken Harrison about five minutes to repair, and George was free to vent about his beaut of a black eye.
“What had happened just before that?” Tommy asked, shooting carelessly over the short man’s head. To his chagrin, he missed and his opponent recovered on the rebound. He concentrated more on the game while Schmidt filled in the details of their heroic egress from the Greenville Police Station.
“Oh. So she was taking a guy down and you inserted yourself to help. Yep. That’d do it.” Tommy intercepted the ball in the air and shot again; this time he made it. “What the hell is it with you two?” he asked.
When George started to say something, Tommy just shook his head, grinning. “I know James Stewart,” he said. “You do not want to let him catch you cuddling up to his wife.”
“Cuddling up to her? Half the time I want to strangle her,” the other man said.
“You two are so junior high.” Tommy missed the grab and watched as the ball dropped through the basket from another of Schmidt’s seemingly effortless shots. Schmidt was good enough, despite his height, that the game of one on one wasn’t nearly as mismatched as it might have seemed.
“You want to fuck her. Join the club. You can’t. She thinks you’re cute, so it’s worse. You still can’t. End of story, grow the fuck up,” the big man said, but he said it in such a matter-of-fact tone that it was impossible to take offense.
“She thinks I’m cute?” George echoed.
“Dude. James Stewart’s wife. You’re damn good, but he’s better. I wouldn’t. And she won’t, anyway.”
“But she thinks I’m cute.” The little blond man missed his shot by a mile, letting Sunday recover the ball for an easy lay-up.
“You’re hopeless,” Sunday pronounced. “Just find somebody else to screw and behave yourself until it wears off. And if you don’t, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He focused and dropped another one right in. “That’s ten. My game.”
“What do you mean ‘join the club’?” Schmidt asked suspiciously as they walked off the court.
“Don’t look at me. You’ve seen my Wendy. There’s a club, all right. I didn’t say I was in it.”
“You didn’t say you weren’t.”
Tommy set the ball down by the door to the old locker room, which, unlike the gym itself, was dark as hell. They just had to go through there to get to the lobby of the building. “Hopeless,” he repeated.
The gym at the base had water fountains on two sides. Miraculously, the chiller on one of them even worked. Aluminum bleachers stood collapsed against the walls on each side of the basketball court. The curtain at the far end of said court was open, leaving a good view of exercise machines, a free weight section, and a compressed obstacle course. All were in use, as was the matted martial arts area. The DAGgers on base, even the ones who were Bane Sidhe first, coped with their enforced idleness in a way that kept them fit, busy, and not coincidentally, together. PT was a near religion for them and, like people turn to faith and each other in times of trouble, the DAGgers immersed themselves in PT schedules that were frankly brutal, raising protests from the medics who they kept busy with over-training injuries. Bane Sidhe sports medicine, as a result of decades of Tchpth patronage and lack of Darhel interference, was leagues ahead of their prior experience. With fear of injury greatly reduced, the men took full advantage of their extended envelope. They did, at least, readily share the facilities with the permanent denizens of the base and the dependents.
The Bane Sidhe field operatives, however, made it subtly clear that they were sharing their facilities with DAG. With the large number of DAGgers who had started as Bane Sidhe, and the others having witnessed the performance of the upgraded field operatives, especially the women, this didn’t cause the friction it might have. There was respect between professionals. Rivalry, but it was a bit hard to get used to cute chicks who could and would run you into the ground or kick your ass, situation depending. Not that they were that far ahead of peak male athletes. They didn’t always win. It was still a novel experience for those who hadn’t previously encountered upgrades.
News that the equipment that achieved these results was no longer available was greeted with intense disappointment, a sentiment that was, of course, completely unrelated to the new tendency to overtrain and screw the transient, readily reparable injuries. Like stress fractures. The clinic director was beginning to scream about his budget.
Even though the gym was fairly crowded, the basketball goal on the far end had some space around the four people playing an energetic two on two, they having indicated a desire to be by themselves this time.
Cally paused as Tommy came in, and missed a catch.
“Hey!” George protested as one of the intel geeks they were playing snagged the ball out of the air and made a seemingly effortless shot that dropped it through the net.
“Time,” Cally called.
“Okay, but it still counts,” Boyd said as George snagged the rebound. The investigator’s usually proper rows of hair spikes were limp with sweat, and he wiped his face with his already soaked T-shirt as Cally walked over to her teammate.
“Finished with your debrief?” she asked.
“Remind me again why I do this job?” Tommy asked. The large, open space of the gym seemed to be letting him breathe easier. She knew a lot of places he went were just plain cramped for a man his size.
“That bad, huh?” She adjusted the faded red sweatband that was holding her hair out of her face.
“Apparently our ‘hunting trip’ and ‘cross-country jaunt’ delayed us from getting the goods in and caused us to commit the gross sin of being later than the e-mail and the cleaners’ fingernail,” he said grumpily. “At least, that’s what the little REMF bastard implied.”
“Yeah, never mind we had orders not to worry about how long it took to get in but put security absolutely first. Never mind that sending said fingernail in by itself was an incredibly dumbass risk of interception and or having it followed right in. Never mind that the damn deer was a piece of blind luck,” Cally sighed. “He’s probably just jealous he didn’t get any. Or a militant vegetarian.”
“Anyway, the status on the investigation is this: the fingernail was great, but she had two guys’ DNA under there which either means she was attacked by two men, or that she’s a healthy young co-ed with a social life and forgot to scrub under her fingernails. We don’t want to whack an innocent boyfriend. They only got partials on the two guys — enough to identify if we had a match, but not enough to put together a holo. They’re still analyzing the DNA we got, but it should flag one of the two as definitely guilty, and hopefully complete his code,” she said.
“Hey, Cally, are you playing, or what?”
“Yeah, just a sec,” she called over her shoulder, then turned back to Tommy. “There probably is a second baddy, but she’s female. A couple of students noticed the niece walking off with a woman they hadn’t seen before. One of her friends thought it was odd that she didn’t smile or wave when they passed each other, but just assumed she hadn’t seen her. But she noticed the stranger female, so they got a pretty good description of her.” Cally pointed over her shoulder at the investigators.
“Hey, I gotta go. Bottom line, they’re closing in on identifying us some targets, so cheer up!” Her grin was predatory as she clapped Tommy on the shoulder, and there was an extra bounce in her step as she jogged back onto the court.
Chapter Fifteen
Tuesday, January 12, 2055
Papa O’Neal was in the best shape he’d been in in half a century or so. Specifically, the best shape he’d been in since the “new” wore off on what his rejuved and upgraded body could do at the tail end of the Postie War. His fitness this time had an entirely different reason, which was that if he hadn’t kept himself PT-ed to the gills he’d have died of boredom. Or killed somebody.
Since the only somebodies on this tub were the Himmit pilot and owner, and Nathan O’Reilly’s personal assistant, that would have been bad. Particularly, he had the feeling that Nathan would miss the PA and would be rather cranky if he were throttled and stuffed down the head.
He looked around his cabin. Same old bulkheads and extremely boring crap. The only reason he was in here at all was because he’d just woken up. The food was the same shit, more or less, that they served at base. He always carried a small bottle of hot sauce, periodically refueling it from a large bottle. Unfortunately, he hadn’t had time for any of that and was finding hot sauce much less effective when one had to ration it. He was still running out.
He had already gone through Candy’s supply of various kinds of stored entertainment, having had little time to gather up cubes before boarding this mobile purgatory. He had traded all entertainment back and forth with Alan and gone through all of that. It was bad when you started to look forward to telling war stories to the Himmit. Titan was positioned all wrong for them to pick up transmissions of broadcast entertainment, and reception from Earth was practically nil due to solar weather.
Hard PT was one of the few ways he had to exhaust his brain into semi-passivity and get past the boredom. He used it. He had manage
d to persuade the Himmit to cobble odds and ends together into bars for chin-ups and dips. Hadn’t been able to get an obstacle course out of it. Did get amplification for Candy to project the ones he didn’t have to climb on and buzz at him if he, for example, snagged himself on the holographic barbed wire overhead, tipped over a hurdle, or let the ball-buster live up to its name. It was something to do, and he thought he almost had talked the Himmit into kitting out one of the bulkheads in the cargo bay as a climbing wall. He just hadn’t hit on a story quite good enough to get it to “deface its ship” in such a fashion. He was also campaigning for a resistance-based weight training equivalent. His offer to lift the Himmit hadn’t gone over well.
Between training times, he amused himself by trying to compose original dirty limericks, which was surprisingly difficult. Alan was having better luck with dirty haiku. Papa had taken to sitting with him while he did so, because the process and content tended to confuse the Himmit, which in itself was at least a little amusing.
Then there were the interminable lessons in xenopsychology from “the diplomacy expert.” He had gotten to where he could get his head around the Indowy, Darhel, and the Crabs, but he still couldn’t say Tph… Tic… Tch, oh, dammit, Crab. His understanding of the Himmit was more limited, but that just put him in the same boat as all the other races. They were still alien as hell, and he’d always have to think about it to try to see from their point of view, or try to understand something they were doing. Alan said this was actually an advantage, in that it protected him from forgetting the first rule: “Alien minds are alien.”
He breakfasted alone, since he needed less sleep than Mr. Alien Expert, and so got up “earlier.” Only this morning he was halfway between some nasty stuff that was supposed to copy eggs when he realized he was not alone and looked up to see the Himmit perched on his wall. Odd time for it to request a story. Not that he minded an interruption while eating, in the case of this junk.