by John Ringo
“Go!” she said, pointing at the entrance where Elgars kneeled.
The boy nodded his head and sprinted across the corridor, carefully keeping to the crossing points of the tram-track, but not slowing or stopping at all.
“What’s going on?” Shari asked, pushing children through the opening.
“What do you think?” the younger woman snapped. “Elgars took care of the first scouts, but we have to move.”
“Get over there,” Shari said. “I’ll push them through. You go get a gun or something.”
* * *
Elgars nodded to the boy as he skidded through the doorway. “Left wall,” she said, with a gesture of her chin. “Grab the smallest pistol and the three boxes of ammunition by it then line up against the wall. Make sure the other kids line up with you.”
Billy picked himself up off the floor and darted to the table, grabbing the Glock and the boxes of .45 ammunition.
Elgars directed the next three children to the side of the room then ducked out of the way as Wendy ran through the door. “About time.”
“Sorry,” Wendy said. “I was hanging around.”
She had been carefully planning the quip so she was mildly annoyed when Elgars just grimaced in anger at the inconsequential.
“Grab the MP-5,” the captain said as another child came through the door. “They’re going to be back here in a second.”
“Nobody has a sense of humor around here,” Wendy said with a shrug, picking up the submachine gun and racking in a round. “It’s worse than dealing with Danes.”
“What are you talking about?” Elgars snarled.
“Never mind,” Wendy answered, kneeling on the opposite side of the door as the first Posleen came around the corner. “It’s a human thing,” she added, hitting the shotgun-toting normal in the chest with a three-round burst.
Behind that one, however, there were four more. The first stumbled over one of the bodies in the corridor and was easy meat for Elgars, but two of the others simply jumped the blockage, landing in the middle of the intersection.
Wendy fired at one of them in the air, spreading the fire like shooting at skeet, and hit it on the flank. The damage from the relatively small rounds was not fatal, however, and the normal spun in place and fired its railgun down the main corridor.
The last child, Kelly, was crossing as the normal fired. Most of the rounds flew wide, but one slashed through the back of the child’s calf in a bloody mess.
The girl slid to a stop on the hydroponics side of the tram-track, lying on her stomach and screaming.
Wendy emptied the rest of her magazine into the centauroid with a shriek of primordial anger as Elgars neatly dispatched the last survivor.
“Motherfuckers!” Wendy shouted, her nostrils flaring. “I hate the fucking Posties!”
“Give me a hand,” Shari gasped, dragging her daughter through the opening.
Elgars ripped the knife out of the juncture of the door and sealed it, coding the lock to indicate a biochem emergency on the inside; it wasn’t going to open without heavy explosives or a supervisor’s codes.
Wendy pulled out her first aid kit and first numbed the wound then wrapped it tight, cutting the flow of blood down to a trickle.
“It missed the artery,” she said, tightening the bandage. “It hit the veins, but they’ll keep. It’s going to be hard to walk on, though.”
Shari rocked her daughter, who was still wailing like a lost soul. “It’s okay, Kelly. Shhh.”
Elgars suddenly leaned forward and struck the child across the face with an open hand slap. “Quiet.”
“God damn you!” Shari shouted leaning towards the captain. She suddenly found a pistol socketed in between her nose and her cheekbone.
“We don’t have time,” Elgars said coldly. “We have zero time. She has to get up and move. And she has to do it without shrieking. Or we all die.” She pulled the pistol back and holstered it. “Now go pick up your rifle and harness; we need to go. Now.”
Shari nodded after a moment and stood the now quietly weeping Kelly on her feet. “Can you walk on it?”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Kelly said quietly. “I think so.”
“Then let’s get out of here,” Wendy said, putting the MP-5 on safe with a distinctive “click.”
Elgars suddenly realized the younger woman had been standing directly behind her. She turned around and looked at her, but Wendy just returned her appraisal coldly.
Wendy walked over to the table and looked at the remaining weapons and ammo. “Shari, come over here.”
Shari took the combat harness from the younger woman and threw it over her shoulders and accepted the Steyr bullpup assault rifle.
“You arm it by pulling back on the charging handle,” Wendy said, pointing to the device. “And here’s the safety.”
“Got it,” Shari said nervously. “I’ve fired before, but not much.”
“That’s why I want you to take the nitrogen,” Wendy added, pulling off the pack. “You’ve seen how I do it. You open the doors, we’ll cover and do the entry on them. I’m also going to pile you with anything that the kids can’t carry; that means I can move faster.”
“Okay,” Shari said.
“Billy,” Elgars said. “You’re going to have to carry more ammo.”
“He’s just a boy,” Shari protested quietly. “He’s carrying enough.”
“He can carry more,” Elgars pointed out. “Can’t you?”
The boy nodded and took the additional boxes of ammunition and a harness.
“You know the different kind of magazines?” Elgars asked. “If you do, when we’re running out, come up and give us more ammo. And reload them when you have time. Clear?”
Billy nodded and smiled then pulled out a magazine for the AIW and gestured at the rifle.
Elgars smiled back and dropped her partially expended magazine, replacing it with the one he had offered.
“Okay,” Wendy said. “Let’s roll.”
* * *
Wendy looked at the PDA and at the doors; according to the schematic she had picked up there should only be one door at this point, but there were two.
They had passed through a processing area for the fruit and vegetables produced by the section; much of it piled high and already beginning to wilt. Billy had sniffed out a bin full of boxes of strawberries and the children stuffed their mouths full of the tart-sweet fruits. Wendy realized at that point how long it had been since the attack. It must have been at least three hours with the humans staying just ahead of the front ranks of the Posleen.
Now, though, they were in an actual “green” room; the sixty foot high, several hundred meter long room was packed, floor to ceiling, with trays upon trays of legumes growing in nutrient solution. The ones closest to their position were just sprouts, but in the distance she could see full-sized plants and harvester bots passing back and forth across them.
None of which helped her determine which of these two doors was right. The area that they were headed for was the seed and grain loading zone. There were eight supply elevators, most of which the Posleen would have already taken. But there was also a grain elevator that went two ways. It was possible that they could activate it and ride to the surface. Barring that, she was willing to gather some more climbing gear and climb them out. It would take some time, but if they sabotaged the elevator they would have all the time in the world; as long as they were in the tube, the Posleen weren’t going to be catching them.
The problem was getting there without using any of the main corridors; the two times they had intersected corridors there had been Posleen in the area. To do that they needed to go into the nutrient pumping section next, then into the seed storage which connected. From there it was a hop, skip and jump to the main receiving area. There might be, probably would be, Posleen there. But they’d deal with that when they came to it.
“What’s wrong?” Shari asked, nodding at the door. “Left or right?”
“I
dunno,” Wendy said. “There’s only supposed to be one door.” She palmed the controls for the right-hand door, but it wouldn’t open even after she punched in the override code. Neither would the left-hand door. But they’d dealt with that before.
“Blast the right door,” she said.
Shari stepped forward and carefully pointed the nitrogen wand at the center of the door; she had been splashed lightly once, painfully, and had, thereafter, donned one of the hazardous materials suits. The light ramex suits were no proof against Posleen railgun rounds, but they were dandy for keeping off the occasional splashes of hyper-cold liquid.
Normally the door would harden and turn brittle; the memory plastic was not proof against the cold of the liquid nitrogen. In this case it simply cascaded to the floor and ran off to the side, rapidly boiling off.
“Step back,” Wendy warned. “That stuff could make you anoxic in a heartbeat. Interesting, the door looks like memory plastic, but it’s blasplas.”
“What’s that mean?” Shari asked, exhaustedly. The trek had drained her to the floor.
“It means somebody wants it looking absolutely normal, but impenetrable,” Wendy said. “Try the left door; we don’t have time for mysteries.”
The second door immediately turned to gray and then white, the memory plastic hardening from the cryogenic bath. When the fog began to clear she stepped forward and placed the punch gun against the door, firing it and shattering the brittle plastic.
The Posleen normal on the other side looked down at the suddenly disappeared door then up at the human blocking the doorway and started to raise his boma blade.
Shari let out a yell and pointed the wand at the Posleen, firing a stream of the liquid into his face.
The normal let out a shrill garbled cry that only served to open his mouth to the stream. Shrilling in pain it tumbled backwards into the room as Wendy leaned over Shari and fired two bursts into his chest. The first burst bounced off of and shattered the flattened breast bone that armored the Posleen’s chest and, but the second burst pierced through to the heart and the normal slumped to the ground as if genuflecting.
Wendy swept the rest of the room but, as far as she could tell, it was all clear.
The vast chamber was obviously a mixing room of some sort, nutrients from the smell of it. There was a rich stench of ammonia and phosphate in the air and the floor was lined with massive tanks, ten or twelve feet high and thirty or forty feet across. The room was gigantic; the ceiling was high with large fans at the top and it was at least a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards across.
The doorway had opened onto a small metal-grate platform. A catwalk led from it, between rows of tanks, to a door on the wall in the distance. In the middle it was bisected by another catwalk that crossed the room side to side and there was a large control station at the intersection.
Wendy waved the others in and trotted towards the center. It had been decided that since the greatest threat was the Posleen coming up behind them, Elgars would cover the rear. She was backed up by Billy, who had his pistol and reloads for her. Shari had the nitrogen tank and the bag full of uniforms and respirators while Shannon carried Amber. Wendy led the way, both as the second best fighter and the one who knew the route.
The children followed wearily behind her. The trek had been long and extremely tiring, but they understood that they had to keep up. One of the adults, usually Wendy, would carry the youngest ones from time to time. And they slowed down for them when they felt they could. But the children had grown up with the war and the Posleen were the ultimate bogey-men; they would keep running until they dropped of exhaustion or were told to stop by an adult.
Wendy had reached the intersection before the captain entered the room. When she got there she consulted her map, but the last “secure” area would, according to the map, be through the right-hand door. She considered it then walked over, palming the pad. From the inside, the door opened easily. Sticking her head through, she checked the far room. It was, as the map said, a storage room for the nutrient materials. She waved the rest to follow and waited for them to catch up.
Elgars swept her rifle from side to side, turning to cover back and sides as she closed up the group. As she passed through the intersection something seemed to scream at her from the back of her mind. She had learned to listen to these little internal comments and she did now, looking around the room for whatever threat the voice was trying to tell her of.
After a moment she leaned her rifle up against the console and considered it thoughtfully while rubbing the bridge of her nose.
Wendy checked the far room again, but it was still clear. When she saw Elgars put her rifle down she swore.
“Shari, get the kids through to the other side; I have to go find out what the captain is up to.”
“Got it,” the older woman said wearily.
“Take a break, but we won’t be long.” She paused and contemplated the captain again. “I hope.”
By the time Wendy had reached the center consoles there was a massive gurgling sound echoing through the room and Elgars had headed to the nearest tank.
She walked over to the ladder on the side of the tank and started to climb up it, drawing her combat knife.
“Hey, Captain America,” Wendy said. “We’re on our way out of here in case you’d forgotten.”
“I know, ’twon’t take a minute,” Elgars said in a strangely deep voice. “Could you possibly rummage me up a spot of wire, baling wire will do well, and a few scraps of duct tape and… oh… a can of spray paint? There’s a good lass.”
“Hey!” Wendy said, catching Elgars’ eye. “Hello! Anne! We have to make like a tree and leaf!”
Elgars shook her head and looked down at her hands, which had started to strip out the wiring harness for the tank motor. She shook her head again and nodded. “I know,” she said in a normal, if distant, voice. “But I think the Posties should have a something to remember us by, don’t you?”
“So you’re mixing up a really nice batch of nutrients?” Wendy asked sarcastically.
“Not exactly,” Elgars said with a death’s-head grin. “What’s in nutrients, Wendy?”
Wendy thought about it then said: “Oh.”
“Roight,” Elgars said, her head going back down to her task. “Now go get me a spot of wire and some duct tape, there’s a good lass.”
* * *
“Wire and duct tape,” Wendy muttered, shifting the MP-5 to a better grip. “Where in the hell am I going to find wire and duct tape?”
There would be some in a maintenance section, but the nearest one on the map was further away than the elevators and in an area the Posleen were bound to have overrun. She walked to the far end of the room and thought about it. Something one of the long-time “pro” firefighters had told her floated up to the surface of memory and she smiled. She looked at her map and figured out which door an administrative puke would come in. All things considered, either the one they came in or the one they were going out. So, where was the furthest away from that you could get?
She climbed down from the catwalk and began hunting along the walls of the room until she found what she was looking for. On the south wall, the furthest from the door they had come in, behind the last tank, carefully hidden from all but a determined search, was a chair.
And a toolbox.
And a pile of oily rags and roll of baling wire. And a can of gray spray paint, half full.
And a pin-up calendar.
“Well, at least he had some taste,” she said sourly. “Although that chick has no idea how to carry a rifle. And I guarantee that’s a dye job! If she’s a natural blonde, I’m Pamela Anderson.”
She opened up the toolbox and, after extracting a hard candy from the bag in the top, found the roll of duct tape in the lower compartment.
“Okay, all the comforts of home,” she muttered, rolling the candy around in her mouth. She put the baling wire in the toolbox, closed it up and picked up the can of spray pain
t. “Now if I can just get it all up the ladder.”
* * *
“What took you so long?” Elgars asked.
“Gee, sorry, Captain,” Wendy snapped back. “I just found a toolbox I thought you could use and all the other shit you asked for. I guess I should have hurried carrying the heavy fucker up the ladder! And trying to breathe in here isn’t helping!”
The atmosphere, slightly ammoniacal and earthy before, now reeked of ammonia: it stung the eyes and clawed at the nostrils.
Elgars tossed her a mask and donned one herself. “Sorry, but all I really needed was the baling wire, tape and spray paint,” she said, her voice muffled by the respirator. “Thanks for the rest of it, though. What happened to your shirt?”
Wendy’s shirt had taken a beating with three of the buttons torn away.
“I caught it on the damned ladder,” she snapped, looking down at herself. “I thought about duct taping it together, but that was just too redneck.”
“Don’t let Papa O’Neal hear you say that,” Elgars said, chuckling.
“You’re sounding normal again,” Wendy noted, opening up the toolbox and tossing her a hard candy. “You had me creeped out for a second there.” She adjusted the mask and refit it carefully. Without careful fitting, masks tended to leak and she could smell a trace of ammonia still.
“What did I sound like?” the captain asked. She had stripped out the primary power leads for one of the mixing tanks and brought it under the catwalk so that it reached the tank on the opposite side. Taking the spray paint can from Wendy she proceeded to tape the three-phase leads onto the can.
“Sort of… British I think. All this ‘there’s a good lass’ stuff.”
“I sort of remember it,” Elgars admitted. “All this stuff is just sort of ‘coming’ to me as I go along. I think the shrinks were right; I think the Crabs implanted… more than just skills, but sort of ‘memories’ in me. When I dredge one up, the… personality associated with it comes up to the front too. Then when I use it for a while, when I get used to it, the personality fades. Sometimes I get real memories along with it. Sometimes I even seem to be the person for a while. I think they might have given me most of my day-to-day skills through a single entity and she’s who comes to the fore most of the time.”