by John Ringo
Kessentai were no different than oolt'os in the nests. No bigger, no stronger, no smarter, just another young animal, struggling to survive. And then the Change hit.
For the oolt'os it was not so great a change. Skills began to emerge in their brain, rudimentary communication developed. But they were still much the same: larger, stronger animals.
For the Kessentai it was different. Suddenly, their mind was flickering and flashing with not only new thoughts but entire new classes of thought. Skills appeared but with them came a deeper understanding of the theory behind them. Not just rudimentary language but the full, rich flower of the Posleen tongue developed in their brains like a sculpture from within the stone. Philosophy, tactics, engineering skills and star-piloting skills, often for beings who had never seen a star.
For the oolt'os it was much the same. They fought for food, they fought for survival, they fought to survive. But the poor Kessentai could find themselves having an existentialist moment in the midst of a full-up battle for survival.
It was not until they developed crests, and at about the same time began to develop their greater bulk and the various cues that to the oolt'os proclaimed that they were their lords, that the Kessentai could feel secure.
And then they were plucked from the pens, given their first oolt and sent forth to die.
It was times like this that Cholosta'an longed to be back in the pens.
This was the third debacle that Cholosta'an had survived. In the case of the first two he had limped back to his home settlement with hardly any remaining oolt'os and no supplies. You could only return to the well so many times; if it happened again he knew that he would be denounced as Kenstain.
There were only two types of God Kings: Kessentai and Kenstain. All debts, rewards and obligations, by ancient custom, were controlled and distributed by the Net. The Net judged the actions of each Kessentai and determined what rewards they should receive and Kessentai traded materials, information and allegiances through the Net.
Kennelai were different. Kennelai could not own anything. They were of Kessentai material but had either failed in the Path or turned away from it. Some refused to enter the path and took the way of Kenstain from the beginning. Kennelai were mainly used to run things in the absence of the Kessentai who actually owned them, but they were considered the bottom of the barrel in the Posleen hierarchy, in some ways lower than high quality oolt'os.
This attack was in some ways better and in some ways worse. In the other two he had been part of huge hosts that had hit the defenses of the damned humans and been slaughtered. The bad news was that in those conditions there was nothing to loot, all you could do was run and not bother to pick anything up. The good news was that at least you were close to the point that you could be safe from their demon spawned "artillery."
In this attack the beginning had been a dream. The tactics of Orostan and Tulo'stenaloor had permitted the host to cut through the humans like a tan blade against steel. And they had struck deep, almost to the point that the humans would have been unable to recover.
But that was almost. Then the humans had changed the rules of the game, again, and started using antimatter weapons and closed the Gap with their nearly invulnerable battle suits.
As soon as the first antimatter weapon detonated, destroying half the host in one terrible fury of light and fire, Cholosta'an had seen the future and it did not include an eventual victory. He had started to the rear with what remained of his oolt and never looked back.
The up side was that he had picked up enough loot, and thresh, that he would not have to return to his nest and be forced into Kenstain. The bad side was that he was pretty much back where he had started and unless he found a real treasure trove, he was never going to be anything but a bottom rank Kessentai, always first to battle and last to the loot. Always looking over his shoulder at the threat of failure.
It was really getting to be a drag.
"Cholosta'an."
He looked at his communicator and flinched; the indicator was for the estanaar, Tulo'stenaloor. He really did not want to talk to Tulo'stenaloor right now. Or ever again. So he ignored it.
"Cholosta'an, this is Tulo'stenaloor. I have a mission for you."
* * *
Tulo'stenaloor looked at the indicators and flapped his crest. The young abat must have fled immediately after the SheVa fired its first rounds to have made it so far back; he was practically to Highway 64 and obviously heading to "safe" territory. The demon-shit little coward.
"Cholosta'an, you have retreated from the Path."
* * *
The Kessentai hissed, wanting to strike out at something, wanting to push his tenar to a higher rate of movement, but that would mean abandoning his few remaining oolt'os. So he had to fight this with words.
"Your attack has failed, estanaar," Cholosta'an snarled. "You took the flower of the host and fed it into a meat grinder. When an attack has failed, it is permissible to withdraw."
"But others still fight," the distant warleader said coldly. "You are one of the few who is withdrawing."
"And why did Orostan choose me as one of his elite? Because I'm smart! I know when the humans, may the gods of the sky eat their souls, have won. All that you are doing is throwing more bodies away in a futile attempt to cover your own failure! And I will not be one of them!"
* * *
Tulo'stenaloor took a deep breath and flapped his crest. He was, unfortunately, coming to the same conclusion. It was certainly the case that it would be . . . harder if the suits were resupplied. But he could not get a force to cut the resupply team off in time, not through the havoc of the lower valley. Cholosta'an was the only one in a position to do so.
Thus he had to be convinced.
"I have a mission for you. You chose to follow in this attack. If you refuse to attempt this extremely simple mission, I will gather a conclave of oolt'ondar and have you declared Kenstain."
* * *
Which was what Cholosta'an knew was coming.
Some days it just didn't pay to polish your crest.
"What is the mission?"
* * *
Jake silently watched as the line of suits made their way up the road. They had salvaged Posleen boma blades and were using them to clear the trees off the road. The monomolecular-edged blades, especially in the hands of an armored combat suit, sliced through the thickest trunks as if they were tissue paper and then the suit troopers picked up the sections of trunk and tossed them aside.
But he had to wonder, given the fact that the trees were more of a nuisance to the Posleen than to the humans, why they were doing it.
Finally, the suit unit had the road cleared to its satisfaction and bounded over to the ruins of the house. Four of the suits were what Mosovich recognized as Reaper suits, specialized heavy weapons suits. By the design of the suit and the weapon he was carrying, the fifth was apparently an officer; command suits were a little slimmer and sleeker than the Reapers or the standard Marauder suits.
"Sergeant Major Jacob Mosovich," he said, saluting the ACS officer as the suit skidded to a stop. "What can I do for you, sir?"
"Hello, Sergeant Major," the officer said, taking off his helmet. "I understand you've been dallying with my girlfriend."
* * *
Wendy let out a howl and bolted across the ruined yard, throwing herself onto the suit. She grabbed his shoulders and wrapped her arms and legs around him in a full-body hug.
"Tommy?" she gasped, kissing him on the head and neck. "Is that really you?"
"It'd better be," he muttered. "Or some guy in a suit is in trouble."
"Uh, sir?" McEvoy said. "I . . . uh . . ."
"Wendy, meet McEvoy, the most incompetent Reaper in the whole wide world," Tommy said, kissing her back and then gently prying her off. "We'll have a minute or two, but I need to talk to the sergeant major. And I understand there's a captain around here?"
"That would be me," Elgars said, stepping out of the shadow of th
e house. "I recognize you from Wendy's picture."
"So do I," Mueller said, wandering over. "She uses it like a cross to keep guys away."
"Now, Wendy," Tommy said, thumping her with his arm. "That's not very friendly."
"I'm only friendly with people I want to be friendly with," she answered, taking his hand. "Okay, business first. What in the hell are you doing here?"
"You're Cally," Tommy said, pointing at the teenager. "Right?"
"Right," Cally replied. She'd taken a position halfway around the wall of the house, where she could peer around but back out if necessary.
"She's a frigging tiger when she's cornered," Wendy said, quietly. "But she's shy around strangers."
"You're okay, right? Your dad asked me to make sure."
"I'm fine," Cally said. "What are you doing here?"
Tommy looked around the group and ran his fingers over the stubble on his head. "That's . . . complicated."
* * *
Tommy looked at the back of the cache for a moment and then drove his hand forward.
The group had moved back to the cache and then gotten the children, who were at last mostly functional, outside on the dripping hillside. Tommy had been warned that opening up the real cache would be somewhat energetic.
His arm punched through about a foot of reinforced concrete and into an opening. With a wrench and a twist he pulled out a large chunk, then reached in and started ripping out the rebar. As he worked at it, it became apparent that the cache was not a small cave, but a much larger opening into the mountain.
"Major O'Neal told me that his family has been slowly mining this mountain for almost a century," Tommy said. "Half of it is mine shafts. That's what this is."
"How far does it go in?" Mosovich asked, looking through the growing hole.
"I don't know," Tommy replied. "Not too far. It gets blocked off again." With that he pulled a large segment of wall out and the light from the Coleman lantern finally penetrated into the interior of the tunnel. Five feet farther in the tunnel was blocked again. This time by a wall of GalTech plasteel.
"Curiouser and curiouser," Mueller said, pulling at some of the concrete himself. "And how many people knew that Major O'Neal had installed a Galactic weapons container on his father's farm?"
"Apparently not many," the lieutenant replied tonelessly.
"Is Dad in trouble?" Cally asked.
"Well, I'm not sure," Tommy answered truthfully. "First of all, I'm not sure what the Galactic regulations on something like this are, especially when you throw in all of your dad's secondary ranks like his Indowy rank. Second of all, as I understand it he was tasked with setting up caches along the eastern seaboard. . . ."
"He was," Cally said. "I remember. We . . . took a vacation just before the first landing. He spent some of the time planting power systems and ammo boxes." She looked at the structure through the hole that was now almost completely clear. "This is . . . bigger though."
"I guess he wanted to make sure that Rabun Gap was never out of power," Mueller said dryly. "Shit!"
"What?" Mosovich asked.
"Where'd O'Neal's power come from?" the master sergeant said in a disgusted tone. "What a fuckin' idiot! Hardly anyone in the mountains has power anymore, nobody to maintain the lines. But his house always had power."
"No lines," Mosovich said, shaking his head. "I should have guessed."
"And I noticed an Indowy storage box when we were here," Mueller continued. "I figured that O'Neal had just given an empty to his dad. But those things are worth their weight in gold; they're armored like a tank and climate controlled; you don't just give them away."
"What?" Elgars asked. "What's the importance of no line?"
"No power lines," Mueller expanded. "When we came up here for dinner, I noticed that there weren't any power lines coming into the house. So where was he getting electricity from? Areas like this are getting to where electricity is pretty damned scarce, but Papa O'Neal had enough to run all his appliances and security systems. I dismissed it as a generator."
"And it was one," Tommy said. "An antimatter generator at a guess." He pulled a last bit of concrete away and put his palm on the lock of the plasteel door, which obediently opened.
"Jesus Christ," Mosovich muttered, looking into the tunnel. The walls were gray plasteel; from the exterior view they were at least six inches thick, which about equalled the armor of a space cruiser. The cache was about eight meters deep by four wide and the the interior was filled from floor to ceiling with Indowy storage boxes. Most of them were marked with the complex woven pattern, resembling a Celtic brooch, that indicated antimatter containment systems. There was enough raw antimatter in the cache to wipe out Georgia.
"Woo," Mueller whistled. "No wonder this thing is armored like a fortress."
"Are those all ammunition?" Cally asked quietly.
"Yep," Tommy said, yanking the top box down and opening it up. "This here is the motherlode; standard grav-gun ammo with antimatter teardrop initiators. If one of these went up, there wouldn't be any more mountain." He looked at the thousands of reloads in the box and shook his head. "McEvoy, get your ass over here and let's find out what we've got."
* * *
The cache had been partially emptied into the outer cave and the materials sorted out by order of preference. First priority were the three antimatter power packs. Each was rated to resupply one company of ACS for four full days of use in standard terrain. Excepting the power to drive the guns, they should last the remaining suits about six days in the current conditions.
Second priority was standard rifle ammunition. This was "the good stuff," Indowy manufacture complete with their own antimatter power system on each round, which meant the suits wouldn't have to draw power to run the guns.
Last priority was Reaper ammunition. The Reapers were flat out but, like the MetalStorms, they ran through enormous quantities of material in firing.
Tommy determined that with clamps the three suits could carry all three of the antimatter packs (about the size of a large suitcase, mostly due to the armoring) and a couple of ammunition packs each. The unarmored humans could probably carry one ammo pack apiece for a total of twenty. He decided to make it eighteen standard packs and two of the Reaper packs, both flechettes.
In addition there was one oversized box that indicated a weapon. He looked at it and smiled inside his suit.
"W . . . AID?" he said.
"Yes, Tommy?" the AID answered in Wendy's voice.
"Can you . . . delete some of the information about this cache? Or modify the information about what we're going to carry?"
"I can," the AID answered. "But I've already uploaded the data."
Tommy frowned and worked his face in the gel. "Okay, correct your inventory of what we're carrying. I don't want this item on the inventory. Substitute a case of Reaper ammunition."
"Very well, Tommy," the AID replied sweetly. "Care to tell me why?"
"Because I don't want the Posleen to know that we're carrying it back," he grinned, ferally. "And make sure that the other AIDs don't show it."
"I'll try," the AID said.
"McEvoy, I've got a special job for you," Sunday said. . . .
* * *
"Okay," the lieutenant finally said, "McEvoy, you and Pickersgill move the packs to the top of the hill. Just clamp them together in a chain and haul them up."
He turned to the refugee group as the two troopers got to work and raised his hands. "I need each of the adults to carry a pack."
"We can do that," Elgars replied. "Where?"
"It's going to be a bit of a hump," Sunday admitted. "We need to get them across the valley and up the side of Lookout Mountain." He generated a map and put a pinpoint on the spot.
"I take it you're not talking about the one in Tennessee," Shari said sharply.
"No, it's a pretty common name for mountains," Tommy replied, equanimably. "You're uncomfortable leaving the kids?"
"Very," Shari said. "I
didn't pull them out of a madhouse then drag them across the mountains just to have them killed by some passing Posleen."
"Shari, they'd have to get through me," Cally said. "I'm strong, but not strong enough to carry one of those boxes. So I'll be staying." She reached down and tapped Billy on the shoulder and grinned. "And Billy will be here to protect me."
The boy shook his head and grinned back. He had developed a severe speech blockage right after the first Posleen landing way back in Fredericksburg. Lately, it had started to clear up. But he still didn't talk if he didn't have to.
"I'm glad that you'll be here, but . . ."
"Shari," Wendy interrupted. "I was there the whole time, too. I don't want anything to happen to the kids, either. But if I had the choice of leaving you or leaving Cally . . ."
"You'd leave Cally," Shari said. "I understand that. But I don't think Cally is enough. What if the Posleen do come. I want Mueller or Mosovich to stay."
"Ma'am, I understand," Tommy said. "But we need to get this stuff to the battalion. And we need to do it as soon as possible." He stepped aside as the line of gray boxes started snaking out of the cave, dropping a load of wet soil onto the ledge outside the entrance. "And we need all that we can get; there are a sh . . . a bunch of Posleen to kill." He paused and waved his hands around wildly. "If we don't stop them, it doesn't matter what cave you hide in, they'll still come . . ."
"Hiding was good enough in Fredericksburg," Shari said.
"Only because the ACS came along and dragged us out," Wendy corrected. "The same unit, come to think of it, that's in the Gap."
"And if that don't beat all for coincidence," Mueller said with a grin. "Shari . . . we can't stay. And you're not going to be a hell of an addition to having Cally here. We need you to carry boxes and quit fighting it."
She sighed and looked at the children. They had started to move around and she and Wendy had gotten them fed. But even with children's usual ability to bounce back they weren't going to be up to another trip real soon.
"Okay, I'll quit complaining," she said, looking at Tommy. "But if one hair on their heads is harmed . . ."