Minutegirls

by George Phillies

  "You did it, Stars, you did it. You got him to listen," Monica shrilled as soon as the door closed.

  "This time we got across the goods, guys," Melissa answered, "Thanks to one Dreadstar, troop leader, not being afraid of rain. And Wonderchick leaving the bodies where even the MinuteMorons could find them."

  "And Morbius sending out someone with some brains above his shoulderblades," Rachel said. "Not to mention good-looking enough he wasn't painful to distract from dumber MinuteMoron arguments when needed. Which I spent the last three days doing. He was even fun to distract."

  "He really is kind of cute, just chubby," Melissa agreed.

  "He's more than just cute. He's nice, too. He treated us like people. He was patient, thoughtful, considerate, listened to me when I gave him background between visits. And I watched him when he went swimming this morning. That is body armor, N-O-T not chubby," Rachel said. "He's more than cute. Lots more, maybe."

  "You planning to find out?" asked Monica.

  "He's also staying in the security section," Melissa noted. "With an armed guard at the end of the corridor. You can't get in, Wonderchick."

  "What do you bet, Stars?" Rachel answered.

  FLYING CRANE SPA

  VLADIVOSTOCK, KHAMCHATKA

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  July 28, 2174, 1:00 AM HLT

  Grant woke from a shallow sleep. He'd listened carefully to everything that was said, taken notes, tried to be suspicious of what he was hearing. He'd checked details. Other parts of the American frontiers had no reports of 'detector ghosts'. Only the Manchurian Frontier had that oddity. Was he supposed to be suspicious of the ghosts, was he supposed to be puzzled that the ChiComms had started by sending platoons rather than lone infiltrators across the border, or should he suspect that other parts of the border hadn't even noticed having ghosts yet?

  And why was he awake? He could generally count on sleeping the night through. He stared at the shadows cast through the porch windows, outlines of table and lamps thrown up against the far wall. Pause. There was not a floor lamp at the far end of the room, especially not a two foot radius period antique. He looked more carefully.

  "Hello?" he spoke. He had seen burglars in a video, hadn't he? A historical reconstruction on the American Civil War, it had been. The Union Lancer Regiments, all well-built women in full plate armor, had been more interesting than the espionage operations, especially when they rode down the Confederate cavalry at Gettysburg. Of course, his visitor could be an assassin, but in that case he'd already be dead.

  "Oh, good, you eventually do wake up." A girl's voice. Oh, of course. He’d almost given up on seeing her. This was still a fourth floor suite, with a swimming lake underneath, deep right up to the wall.

  “You didn’t knock,” he said.

  "Sometimes you want more privacy," she announced. “Besides, the code worked fine on your balcony door.”

  "I've promised not..." he began. Perhaps this hadn’t been a completely good idea.

  "You promised you don't pursue us. You didn't promise to fight people." He had just finished rolling onto his back, pushing back the blanket and counterpane, preparatory to getting out of bed, when she landed on top of him. "Or are you going to be stubborn about it?"

  He started. She was wearing nothing except a pair of bands just above the ankles. Hideout knives, he thought, those must hold her knives. "Aren't you cold? How did you get in here?" he asked.

  "Grappling line off the roof," she answered. "If I completely mistook your stares, whenever you forgot my ultracamo skintights have full-circle enhanced vision, not to mention the code you passed, I am apologizing for waking you and being out of here.”

  "There was nothing wrong with what I was staring at...except I doubted you'd notice me against the competition," he answered. "I hope you weren't expecting me to fight you off."

  "You might as well keep still. I can beat you hand-to-hand any day of the week." Her hands were very definitely not still.

  He gasped. "You said hand to ha..." When his fighting instructors discussed floor-level combat, they had had something else in mind. The injunction against the frontal use of the double under-armpit grapple was clearly inappropriate.

  "That's WonderChick. And I see you aren't being... stubborn." Afterward, he allowed that she had lived up to her name, even before she exited via a 4:30 AM swan dive off the balcony.

  THE HOUSE OF LOST DREAMS

  PAXTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  July 29, 2174, 11:50 AM EST

  Sandra Miller sat with Cheryl Copperwright, Arthur Smith, and Peter Gustaphson under a gazebo in Gustaphson's garden. Gustaphson had presented hot sandwiches and tea, then led them to a point overlooking his fishponds. Scarlet and gold carp swam idly along the bottom. Only after dark would their polychrome fluorescence light the waters from below.

  Copperwright and his friends had told her that she needed more background on the Incursion. They seemed to be in the middle of an oft-told tale of EU efforts to promote democratization by suppressing fundamental freedoms. Gustaphson had earlier described winning his election, thereby causing his party to be disqualified from fielding more candidates. "They said our popular-vote victory proved we had corrupted the democratic process with our reactionary propaganda, so in the interests of democracy our elected candidates were to be replaced with appointees they had vetted. That was about the point where matters started to go seriously downhill for the O'Brien Administration. They'd been playing up the arrangements with the FEU as cooperation and training, but at that point 'training' was really lame as an explanation. President O'Brien was actually a decent man, personally, but lacked a guiding star or the wits to see a single domino fall."

  Now it was Copperwright's turn. "So there would be some shooting," Copperwright said. "And a few FEU Peace Enforcers would be ambushed, always at considerable range. The FEU Army would show up, demand to know which houses had the guns, search the houses, find the guns and burn the houses. Until late in the Incursion, they let the residents leave their houses first."

  "They found the houses with guns? Americans would inform on fellow Americans?" aa shocked Sandra asked.

  "Well, I would hope they found the guns. I spent considerable effort organizing the Popular Army's corps of informants." Sandra stared at the man she had thought to be a friend. "After all, we spent considerable effort planting the guns first. In places the FEU could find," Smith explained. "That's harder than it sounds. If you live with reinforced concrete and breezeblock construction, it gets hard to remember where there can be cavities in wooden buildings."

  "You planted the weapons?" Sandra whispered. What had gone on? This was terrible. And Arthur had been supplying tactics. What had they been thinking?

  "It was truly amazing," Copperwright said. "The FEU forces were shocked, truly shocked, at the perfidy of Americans. Here were all these people who were supportive editorialists, outspoken supporters, collaborators...by day. And by night they were the core of the Popular Army, proven by the weapons they had...some of which would even fire after enough cleaning. They even had encrypted lists of fellow Popular Army members across the country. Most were outspoken friends of the FEU. Of course, the FEU supporters denied all knowledge of those lists, proving that the lists were authentic. The saving grace from the FEU viewpoint was that Popular Army encryption was terrible. As if it had been done on a Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Ring." Suddenly Sandra understood. "I had to work very hard to find an authentic ring," Copperwright said mournfully. Sandra tried, not entirely successfully, to suppress her giggles.

  "Eventually the FEU gave up on guessing who was guilty, and who was innocent. There'd be a shooting and the nearest homes would be burned. It's not my fault they didn't keep track of their own collaborators. Nor is it my fault that shootings took place on collaborators' doorsteps. It had to happen someplace, after all. Their random terror was a recruiting tool for our side. I do not know if a segment of the Popular Army started staging terror incidents while pre
tending to be FEU Peace Enforcers. Faking atrocities, yes. Staging them...there were some very desperate people out there."

  "You planted...." Sandra began to laugh. Copperwright had led her along, described one Unamerican deed after the next...and it had all been devoted to using the FEU to deal with FEU collaborators.

  "For a while we were inserting fake orders in their command system," Smith said. Sandra was, he observed, even prettier when she laughed. "Arrest these people because they are terrorists -- they were rather weak at inviting the surrenders they would certainly have gotten from their supporters. After all, against terrorists holed up in a house a Giscard-D antitank rocket was the safer invitation to surrender. After a piece, they went over to hand-carrying arrest orders. They didn't realize for quite a time that their comms had hardware bugs in a few American components."

  "Were they always so inept?" she asked.

  "They were never inept," answered Gustaphson. "However, they often proceeded from inaccurate assumptions. The Arizona event proved that. Governor Gomez was talked by his FEU advisors into the brilliant idea of issuing an executive order confiscating all guns in the state. He assumed his decree would lead to a few shootouts, which the State Police and National Guard would win with overwhelming force, carefully inflicting massive collateral damage while taking a serious lack of prisoners, and people would then be so terrified that they would hand over their weapons without further ado. He didn't allow that people who disagreed would not duel National Guard tanks with their pistols. I think he was truly surprised when people started shooting his advisors, sympathetic judges, supportive newspaper and TV personalities, businessmen who donated to his campaigns..."

  "I suppose that was a surprise at the time," Sandra said.

  "On somewhat more current matters," Gustaphson said, "we have a little trip for you. The commander of the Alpha Centauri planetary fleet is an old friend of mine, and an old friend of Morbius's. Senator Meyer thinks the Federal authorities aren't taking the Clarksburg event seriously enough. He's convinced Morbius that you ought to go to listen to him." Gustaphson hoped the 'you' was clear enough. Morbius had a stock of interns, but the young lady's deceptively clear smile tended to make her targets loquacious.

  Sandra nodded in agreement. The last week's newspaper headlines had been filled with the raucus exchanges in the Federal Senate, debating whether or not to override President Schuykill's veto of a special appropriations Bill increasing mobilization levels for the American Solar Navy. If Meyer wanted public support for Federal mobilization, winning Morbius's endorsement was surely a way to generate it.

  "You should understand that Meyer is an Initiate," said Gustaphson, "the Holy Order having no objection to public service as a career. His lead officer, Grand Commodore Kalinin, is also an Initiate."

  "After the way Harbin heated up, I expected Schuykill to be more cooperative. Captain Mors thought he'd turn out well, but she seems to be having second thoughts," Copperwright said.

  "Part of the Harbin frontier has heated up," Sandra said, a prim smile on her lips. "After the first night, their boys plumb lost interest in tangling with American women."

  "Let's see. The MinuteMoms saw them coming, let them in, dropped a blocking company in power armor behind them, took them out. Our casualties zero. And left them in a row of bodybags, right on the border," Copperwright said. "Your people had a ready squad in power armor, pinned the Chinese down, took them out, left them hanged from trees, right at the border. Our casualties zero. The Girl Guides lost contact with cadre, repelled the attacks after providing reconnaissance, rescued their reserve force on their own initiative, actually killed two ChiComms in hand-to-hand, all with no better than even forces."

  "The interesting matter," said Gustaphson, "is that you just said the Chinese can _tell_ who is manning each frontier section. They consistently hit down the center of each formation, not at the edge of a command zone where you'd expect flank security to be most annoying. That is lousy counterintelligence on our part. If you think back, Cheryl, to Arthur’s 2108 capture of the National Championship in Stalin Moves West, he pulled several of those off wins by selectively targeting the German allies, the way the real Russians did. That's not a good position in real life, letting the enemy know your positions, and it's not a good move off the game table either."

  "Also," Copperwright said, "were I a border scout, I would expect my backup to be faster off the mark. The 18th Alabama seemed...disassociated."

  Sandra bit her lips. Having lunch with these three was the intellectual match for sticking your arm into a sausage maker. The worst part was that Gustaphson and the Hexagon Lord viewed reality as what happened on the game table, unreality being Harbin and New Washington. "Point," she admitted. "I'll nag the Dark Lady. Did that before. Girl Guides train to be our scouts, Minutegirls supporting them. MinuteD...the Men's Popular Army uses different doctrines. Girl Guides should have the right backup."

  "And if you had been commanding the reserve platoon," Cheryl asked innocently, "Would you have come out in the rain?"

  "Doctrine is a hand forward in the Guide cantonment, power armor on, everything ready to go. The Guides were outgunned. Ambushing the reaction reserve was something the ChiComms planned in advance. Rescuing it was really sharp. Goldsmith taking those ChiComm squads by herself, that was nervy, not counting two guys walking into her and walking away in small pieces. Squad forward would have meant they got watched all the way, stomped by the reserve platoon before they got any rounds off." She told herself she had thought that one out more than once. If they wanted to game it and try to prove she was wrong, she was ready to give them a thrashing across the game table.

  "They walked into Goldsmith?" Gustaphson asked.

  "She was in maxed ultracamo. They walked into her like she was a tree stump they were taking cover behind. She got them while they were still reacting to 'soft tree'," Sandra responded.

  "She did live up to her name," Copperwright said. "It will be fine recruiting. Don't dwell on her being top one percent of the population."

  "No," Gustaphson said. "Dwell on training. Or too many other girls will think they can do that, too." Sandra nodded politely. Major Rubenstein's private 'what did you think you were doing?' lecture to Goldsmith reportedly should have been audible in Peking. WonderChick's innocent and literal answer 'killing them' had more merit for brevity than thoughtfulness.

  THE LIBRARY

  THE PALAZZO SPLENDEROSO MORBIUS

  RUTLAND, MASSACHUSETTS

  July 31, 2174, 10:03 AM EST

  "Grant, I have to hand it to you," Charles said, "You did an excellent job of pulling all this together. It does look like the Popular Army could use some advice again." He sipped at his tea and looked at his dear wife, who was nodding affably.

  "That's completely true," Barbara announced. "Recorders or no, battles are what happen when you disorganize chaos. Those sims show where each person went, who said what, when things did well or poorly."

  "Things went poorly too often," Charles pronounced. "What if this had been the whole People's Liberation Army, all 40 PLA heavy divisions? Sandra's people did OK," he continued, "if you ignore the Girl Guides getting left without cadre or heavy support, MinuteDads blundering into an ambush Girl Guide reconnaissance is supposed to prevent, MinuteMoms expending ammo like there was no tomorrow ... Other than a few minor details, everything worked. I suppose the Ancient and Honorable Corps of Artillery gets some credit for limiting their steeltsunami burst to a millisecond--that was only ten thousand shells in the target zone."

  "There are some loose ends," Grant said. "The Chinese infiltrating through the security zone for the past year or more is the most interesting that I've found." Charles, Barbara, and Morbius were staring at him as though he'd grown horns. Gustaphson looked unsurprised. "I didn't find any of this. It got handed to me by the Bella Abzug Brigade." He made a handpass over his TabletComp. Sometimes parastatic switches let you do really impressive tricks.

  Windows darken
ed. Holoprojectors put up the map of Harbin State and the US-Chinese border. Melissa's explanation of the feud between the Men's Citizens' Forces and the detector manufacturers was repeated.

  "This is how the ChiComms knew where to attack, which areas are the easiest to penetrate. They've been exploring," he announced. If you stack those traces graphically in time order, you can see when they identified interesting places to attack, concentrated on them, then dropped in their tracks for two months so everyone would relax." Grant showed further details of the records, grateful all the while that Melissa Moriarty had spent the time to find repeated patterns.

  "There is one modestly interesting feature of this that you've skipped," Charles said. "The heavy detector grid is only five miles deep. The trails stop when the ChiComms are five miles inside the USA. Is that because that's how far they are going, or because they leave the border zone? On its far side."

  "I don't have information on that," Grant answered uncomfortably. He should have asked the question. Now he'd have to send a message back asking for clarification. Through Moriarty, he told himself; it was her idea. And hope the trio was not more interesting in discussing details of his other, later performance. He still could not quite believe that Wonderchick had pulled her final stunt. Not that he was complaining, not at all, except that he might have to wait a while for a repeat. "I'd thought the grid was deeper than you're saying," he added, trying to sound thoughtful.

  "It is in North America," said Gustaphson. "Someone trying a sneak from Mexico has a good 30 miles of skulking before they enter unwatched areas."

  "Alas," Morbius announced, "We approach the appointed hour, and the three of us must endure another hour of advisory committee meeting." Gustaphson smirked. "Yes, Peter, I know you told me this was going to be an extremely expensive way to earn a little extra money. Expensive in time, expensive in patience...or would you rather have the advice come from complete idiots."

  "You knew what you were getting into," Gustaphson said. "I'm sure the young man and I will find something to discuss, without my stealing a march on you in reviewing your data."