Yellow Eyes-ARC

by John Ringo

  The purpose of moving the wrecks was disinformation. The Posleen were going to attack and the Panamanians were, by plan, going to run. But not all Posleen were stupid. If the retreat didn't look enough like a rout, they might grow suspicious. Suspicion, even with a stupid species, might lead to noses being stuck in places they were unwelcome. Hence, the liberal placement of wrecks.

  With a final grunt the towing crew strained the burned-out M-113 into a shallowly dug, revetted position. The pusher crew leapt back as the vehicle passed its center of mass, tipped forward and splashed into the mud. The pushers then regrouped and gave the thing a final shove into a realistic position.

  Seemingly satisfied, the pusher group then started to walk away, high-fiving hands and slapping backs.

  The first sergeant called a halt. Then, with the men standing around in mild confusion, he walked over and inspected the vehicle from all sides, making note of the hole that passed through the right front quarter and out the floor of the hull near the left rear. Hmmmm. Never do. Can't count on the Posleen not noticing that the berm is unmarked where the missile should have passed through.

  Impatiently the first sergeant beckoned over the leader of the pusher group. "Do you see that hole, Sergeant Quijana?" the primero queried, pointing with a short stick.

  "Si, Primero."

  "What happens when you line up this entrance hole and the exit hole?" the first asked.

  Curiously, the junior sergeant walked over and bent down, trying to line up the two. "Can't see it, Primero; this dirt's in the way."

  Suddenly the first sergeant brought his stick down, not lightly, on the head of the stooped over Quijana, stretching him into the mud.

  "You don't leave until the whole thing looks right," the first sergeant insisted. "You aren't finished until this wreck will fool a Posleen into thinking it is fresh."

  The junior sergeant shook his head as if to clear it. For a moment he thought about swinging at the first sergeant as he rose. That notion passed with the remembrance that the first sergeant was the toughest son of a bitch he had ever known and was most unlikely to lose a fight before somebody was dead. And, since the penalty for killing one's first sergeant was unpleasant indeed . . .

  "I'll take care of it, Primero. Sorry. Wasn't thinking."

  The first sergeant leaned over the still shaken junior and said, not unkindly, "Son, you're not a bad sergeant. But if you want to live long enough to learn to be a good one you'll also have to learn to look at the details. Now I want you to do two things. The first is to dig out a chunk of the berm and make it look as if a Posleen HVM passed through it before taking out the track. You know what kind of trail they leave?" The junior nodded. "Good. Then I want you to rig the track with a couple of twenty liter cans of mixed gasoline and diesel and some demo, enough to burst the cans and set the fuel alight. Rig it so we can set it off by command or by pulling a cord. It has to look convincing."

  Disco Stelaris, Hotel Marriott Cesar, Panama City, Panama

  I'm convinced, thought Connors. This is paradise.

  The Stelaris was dark and smoky. Somehow the smoke didn't bother anyone. Perhaps it was the aroma of . . .

  Women . . . I'd forgotten how good they smell.

  A tall, lithe women, more of a girl really, she was maybe seventeen, writhed on the dance floor in a way that was both tasteful and made a man think . . .

  If only one could hang on. What a helluva ride that would be.

  If there was anyplace in Panama City more suited to meeting Panamanian girls of the better class, Connors didn't know it. The night was still young, though. He sat alone on a wall-mounted bench facing the dance floor, behind a small table. Connors nursed a double scotch over ice while watching slinky girls dance.

  Watching the girls is pleasant enough, I suppose, Connors thought. Now if only I could forget . . .

  A sudden flash of light from the lobby leaked in through an open door. Automatically, Connors swiveled his head and eyes toward the light, toward the possible threat.

  There was a girl standing there, that much was obvious from the shape, posture and hair. She seemed to be waiting for a moment, perhaps for her eyes to adjust to the dim light of the disco before proceeding. For some reason, despite the well-lit lovelies on the dance floor, Connors kept his eyes on the newcomer. That was why, when she began walking forward, he was the one she made eye contact with.

  They were the biggest and most perfectly shaped brown eyes Connors had ever seen. His heart skipped a beat. My God, she's beautiful.

  She was, too. Dark blonde hair framed a heart-shaped face with cheekbones just prominent enough, without being too much so. Her lips were full and inviting. Her brown eyes stood out, even in the dim light, against her light skin. For a moment Connors tried to remember the name of the Brazilian Victoria's Secret model she reminded him of. Never mind. That girl's eyes are not half so gorgeous as this one's.

  She was standing above him before Connors' eyes ever left her own. He hadn't realized how tall she was until she was right next to him.

  "May I sit?" she asked, in flawless, only slightly accented English.

  "Please, Miss . . ."

  "Marielena," she answered. "Marielena Rodriguez. Thank you. And you?" she asked, smiling warmly while taking a seat at the table next to Connors.

  "Scott Connors," he answered. "Call me Scott."

  "Pleased to meet you, Scott. How you would say, in Spanish, 'Mucho gusto.' "

  "That much Spanish I have, Marielena. Mucho gusto. Which, by the way, pretty much exhausts things."

  It wasn't much of a joke but the girl laughed lightly anyway. She looked him over more closely. "You are with the grin . . . American army?"

  "Yes," Connors suppressed a smile at her little almost faux pas. "B Company, First of the Five-O-Eighth."

  She scrunched her eyes, as if trying to remember something. "Ah . . . that is the . . . Armored Combat Suit? Is that what you call them? The ACS battalion?"

  "Yes, we came back to Panama after all these years."

  "Came back? I remember when that battalion was here. Where have you been?"

  "Back to the United States for a while," Connors answered. "Then off-world, on a planet called Barwhon."

  "You've actually been on another planet?" The girl's eyes grew—though it would have seemed to be impossible—larger and more beautiful still.

  Whoa, boy, Connors thought. Do not look into those eyes any more. They are too deep. It would be a long, long fall. But, of course, he couldn't help himself. He was falling into them even as he answered, "Yes, for a couple of years."

  "Tell me about it," she insisted, her voice growing almost imperceptibly husky.

  So Connors told her, eliding over the grisly parts, sticking to the light-hearted ones where possible. That made the tale shorter than it really deserved to be. The girl, being well educated and bright, caught onto that.

  "There is more," she said, without doubt. "Bad things. Things you do not want to talk about."

  Connors closed his eyes, stretched his lips in an almost straight, humorless grin and nodded. "There were awful things that I can't talk about, Marielena. Things I don't even want to remember. Over seven hundred of us arrived on Barwhon. Less than three hundred came back. Of those, one hundred and ten were burned out psychologically, no more use for combat."

  "And you," she asked, concern in her voice, "you were not . . . burned out?"

  "No," he answered. "I was a wreck, too. But they made me a captain and told me to shut up, stop sniveling, and get back to soldiering. So I did."

  Connors took a deep, throat-burning slug of scotch, draining the glass. Then he put the dripping glass down and placed his hand half on the table. Marielena reached out her own hand and placed it on his. Then she looked him straight in the eye, tilted her head, and asked, "Are you staying here?"

  Rio San Pedro, Panama

  "Remember, boys, we're not planning on staying here," the first sergeant said, "so a good, easy slope for a quic
k in and out is as important as a strong berm to the front."

  Hotel Marriott Cesar, Panama City, Panama

  The room was cool, well decorated and reeked of sex with just the slightest air of fresh blood.

  "Oh, God, I've died and gone to heaven," Connors said as he slid awake to the soft feel and warm, female smell of Marielena.

  He hadn't been staying there; he'd been staying in a tent pitched on the Fort Kobbe parade field. But the hotel had had a room, number 574, and the Mormons of the Marriott Corporation had had a very military-favorable billing policy.

  She'd kept her head down, shuffling her feet as he'd turned over a credit card and taken a key. He wondered if, perhaps, she was a professional, then decided she was merely shy, as if she'd never done such a thing before.

  They'd kissed all the way up in the elevator, then raced to the room. The door was still closing as she dropped to her knees, saying, "My girlfriend told me . . . about how . . . I've never done this; I've never done anything; I've 'evah 'uhn 'iz . . ."

  Almost, almost he'd let her finish him that way. But he'd wanted all of her, and wanted to give as much as he got or more. Before it was too late he'd picked her up and pushed her against the hotel door, then held her up with his body while he struggled to lift her skirt above her hips and remove her panties. She kicked one leg free of them, once they were around her ankles, and wrapped her legs around his hips.

  She hadn't been able to help him get any freer, so she held on tightly while he, too, kicked out of his trousers and used one hand to line himself up, the other still holding the girl up by a tightly squeezed buttock.

  When she'd felt the first pressure against her she'd bit her lip nervously and whispered, "I've never done this either. And I don't mean made love against a door."

  Connors had gulped and pulled himself back from the edge. Then, more slowly and carefully than he'd really wanted, he's begun to ease himself forward and upward while carefully easing her down. Marielena had given a single, pained "Ai!" and he was inside her. Oh, Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior, that is incredible. She'd leaned her head forward and bit at his shoulder as he began to move inside her.

  Between bites she'd murmured, "Ai . . . Ai Dios . . . me gusta . . . o . . . mas . . . mas . . . o mas . . . o . . . o . . . o . . . no deja . . . nunca deja . . . ooooo ai . . ."

  Sadly, there hadn't been much "mas," there against the door. It had been a long time for Connors and she had been very tight. As he ascertained for a fact once they'd uncoupled, there was a reason she was so tight. She hadn't been lying about her lack of experience. On the plus side, Connors had a young body. There had been a great deal more "mas," in the bed, before they had both fallen into exhausted sleep.

  That sleep was over now. Immediately after Connors had said, "I've died and gone to heaven," he'd also noticed the sun was well up. His next thought was, Oh, oh. Missed PT. The battalion commander is going to kill me.

  Feeling like an absolute heel he started to shake the girl awake to say goodbye. But, looking down at her body as she awakened he remembered two other things the battalion commander was fond of saying. The first of these was, "A man who won't fuck won't fight." The second? "Forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission."

  "Scott?" she asked sleepily as he buried his head once again in her breasts.

  Fort Kobbe, Panama

  "Where the fuck have you been, Captain Connors?" the battalion commander asked as he caught Connors slinking back to tent city by struggling along the staked lines.

  Connors drew himself up to his full height, saluted and shouted the answer, "A man who won't fuck won't fight, sir!" The captain's entire body, from his hair to his shoes, broadcast one huge, unmistakable smile.

  The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Wes Snyder, returned the salute, scowled, and stormed away, half furious and half pleased at having his saying turned back on himself.

  A few hours later, as Connors was standing in the mess line, a half dozen soldiers of his company passed him. As one man they saluted and sounded off, "A man who won't fuck won't fight, sir!"

  Connors responded, broadly grinning, with the ad hoc return salutation, "And forgiveness is easier than permission."

  Santa Fe, Veraguas Province, Republic of Panama

  "Forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission, Tomas," Digna insisted as a long column of trucks passed into the narrow valley and north into a small city of tents she had had erected. On the trucks were children, some forty to fifty per vehicle. The children were those of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and of those who had joined her in the trek from Chiriqui and been mustered into her service. Wide-eyed mothers, working on preparing gun positions for the 105s and launch sites for the BM-21s stared in horror as their very own kids waved to them from the back of the trucks.

  "But the children?" Herrera insisted to Digna's back. "What if we are overrun? What if the infantry to the front is overrun?"

  "Then we die," Digna answered simply. "We die and my line dies and the country dies." Abruptly, she turned around to face her chief subordinate, blue eyes flashing. "Don't you think I know what this means? Don't you think I've thought about it . . . or ever stopped thinking about it? This is it, Tomas. We win here or it is all over. For the children, if we lose, it would be only a matter of time, and not much of that. Were they far away, their mothers would console themselves with the apparent safety and not perhaps give it everything they have. But—and I know our people, Tomas, the women especially—with their children's lives hanging on what they do or fail to do here there will be no slacking, there will be no running. There will be only fighting and if need be dying TO SAVE THEIR CHILDREN."

  "You are a coldhearted and ruthless woman, Doña Digna," Tomas said, his head shaking slowly with horror.

  "I do what I must."

  SOUTHCOM, Quarry Heights, Panama

  "We must, we absolutely must, keep the ACS' AIDs from having the first clue of what we are about until it is too late for the Posleen to be warned."

  The speaker was a United States Marine Corps general named Page, the unofficial but actual replacement for an Army general far too compromised by the Darhel ever to be trusted again. In God's good time the Army general would be court-martialed in secret and in secret he would go to an elevator shaft rigged as a gallows. The sergeant who set that noose, knowing the charge, would adjust it to strangle the general slowly rather than mercifully breaking his neck.

  For now, the less the aliens knew the better. For now, the doomed, treasonous general was merely in Washington for "consultations."

  "It's possible to do, sir, but it really sucks for those who have to do it," answered Snyder, the commander of First of the Five-O-Eighth.

  Page raised a batlike eyebrow. In the dim light and musty smell of the command "Tunnel" dug deep into Quarry Heights he asked simply, "How?"

  "Right now, no one but myself, my exec, my operations officer and my company commanders know the plans. None of them were told within a mile of their AIDS. All were counseled that if one word leaked to the AIDs they would be shot; that I'd shoot 'em myself." The lieutenant colonel smiled, briefly and fiercely. "I'm pretty sure they believed me.

  "But we can't even run our suits without our AIDs. So the minute we suit up and start to move—wham!—the information will go onto the Darhel Net and the Posleen will know."

  "I'm aware of that Colonel, hence my little tirade earlier."

  "Yessir. But there is a way to do it still . . ."

  Parade Field, Fort Kobbe, Panama

  A large concrete stadium overlooked the parade field to the south. The morning breeze blew the nauseating smell of the puke trees, standing to the north, across the barracks and over the field. East was the small post headquarters over which the early morning sun now arose. To the west Howard Air Force Base, now under joint U.S.-Panamanian control, still saw fairly heavy traffic, though the aircraft that landed there flew as low as possible to avoid the Posleen automatic aid defenses to the far
west. A cargo jet screamed in from the north, struggling to balance the need to dump altitude with the equally pressing need to avoid laser and plasma fire.

  The battalion's armored combat suits, all four hundred and twenty-three remaining and serviceable, were laid out as if on parade. The combat troops stood beside the suits, which were opened to accept their soldiers. To the right, nearest the post headquarters, the battalion's headquarters company was formed in tighter formation. The few suits needed by headquarters personnel were behind the formation. The entire battalion was ringed by armed military police, some of them behind Hummer-mounted plasma cannon.

  Snyder walked briskly onto the field from the right. His exec, centered on the battalion and in front, saluted and reported, "Sir, the battalion is formed and ready."