Hell's Faire

by John Ringo

  But they were also trained to be the deadliest ghosts on earth. Time to see if they were the fastest.

  The Himmit watched them as they disappeared into the woods then followed at the fastest rate consonant with remaining concealed.

  He wouldn't miss this for worlds. What a tale.

  * * *

  Cholosta'an stepped forward cautiously. His sensors said that the human had last been somewhere on this ridge. But since she had cut off her last electronic device, he had lost her. It was possible she had fled over the ridge, but the steep, open slope meant that they probably would have spotted her. She was likely hiding in the bushes along the base of the bluff. If so, they would have her soon.

  He had only gotten glimpses of her before, enough to determine that it was a human female, as Tulo'stenaloor had said.

  His last thought at the sight over the barrel of the human rifle was "A nestling?"

  * * *

  Tulo'stenaloor flapped his crest as the datum appeared.

  "So much for Cholosta'an," his operations officer muttered.

  "So much indeed," the estanaar replied. "And so much for stopping the resupply of the threshkreen unit. Or even hitting them from behind, given that all the other forces in the valley are gathering to stop the SheVa.

  "It's a simple solution set," he continued. "If we destroy the threshkreen in the pass, we can pour enough forces through the Gap to destroy the SheVa, no matter what. If, on the other hand, we can destroy the SheVa, we can eventually wear away the threshkreen. If we do neither . . . then we have failed."

  "So far we are doing neither," the essthree opined.

  "Agreed," the estanaar replied. "And we have done no better at it than Orostan. It is our job to destroy the threshkreen in the pass. Part of that is pressure. When we begin moving forces back into the battle, we must have them moving steadily. We were hitting them in fits and starts, in waves. This gives them time to recover."

  "Yes, estanaar," the lesser oolt'ondai said doubtfully. "The question is 'how.' Any time you have a line of oolt, they . . . move unsteadily, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. It is that which is causing the gaps to occur."

  "We'll spread them out," Tulo'stenaloor said after a moment. "Have elite oolt'ondai station their oolt along the route. Create gaps between the oolt that are marching into the battle. Thus, when one hits the fire of the threshkreen and is destroyed another will step into place immediately. This will give us the constant pressure we seek."

  "As soon as the hell-weapon detonates, estanaar."

  "Oh, yes, after that," Tulo'stenaloor snarled. "Why waste more oolt'os than we must?"

  * * *

  Cally checked fire as the yellow skull disintegrated under the hammer of the 7.62 rounds and tracked right to where she thought the closest Posleen might be. But as she took up the trigger slack again there was a muffled series of pops and a wild flail from a railgun that bounced ricochets off the rocks above her head.

  As far as she knew, the nearest humans (that would be fighting) was her dad's battalion or maybe the rest of the gang. But none of them had been using silenced weapons. So who was out there? Friend or foe?

  An assassin had been sent to kill Papa O'Neal years before and had only been stopped because he discounted the skills of an eight-year-old girl. But that didn't mean that more wouldn't be sent. Admittedly, sending assassins in in the middle of a nuclear fire-fight seemed to be overkill, but it wasn't paranoia if people really were out to get you.

  She heard a rustle from below, not even what a deer would make, more like a field mouse. Then there was a human standing over the dead Posleen.

  It was a special operations troop, no question. He, probably he, was wearing Mar-Cam and a ghillie net over his back. As she looked he took a step to the side and seemed to just vanish. She squinted for a moment and realized that he now looked for all the world like a bush alongside one of the poplar trees. He was good, better than Papa, probably.

  She watched as he stepped forward, slowly, testing each bit of ground, and then stopped again.

  * * *

  Alejandro stopped as he caught a faint whiff of human scent. He would have detected it, should have, before but the stench from the dead Posleen had overridden it.

  The thing about scent is that it's only mildly directional. There wasn't any real wind under the hill and the air was wet, cold and still. But somewhere there was a human lying very still. But sweating as if . . . she had been in a hard run.

  He looked around but, remarkably, couldn't see anything. As close as she was she should have stood out like a mountain. Either he was getting old or she was going to smoke the advanced recon course.

  "Cally O'Neal?" he whispered.

  "Breathe wrong and you're history," Cally said in more of a sigh than a whisper.

  Alejandro sighed and looked over at where the sound came from. The girl was under a ghillie net covered in leaves. He wondered how she hadn't displaced her surroundings and then realized that she had shaken the small birch bush over her to aid in the camouflage. Clever.

  "I was sent to extract you," he said, straightening but keeping his MP-5 pointed to the side.

  "Sure you were, pull the other one, it's got bells on." Cally heard another faint sound of movement to the side and realized that she was bracketed. Again. "And if your buddy gets any closer we'll just have to see how many of you I can take out. Starting with you."

  "I think we're at an imps arse," Alejandro said. "You won't trust me and I have no way of convincing you to."

  "Not quite," a voice whispered from above.

  Cally froze as a Himmit appeared out of mid-air and lowered itself to the ground.

  "Miss O'Neal, we are here for your protection," the Himmit whistled. "We have no proof of that, but I give you my word as a member of the Fos Clan, that you will come to no harm. However, there is a nuclear attack incoming in less than fifteen minutes . . ."

  "WHAT?" Cally shouted. But she was drowned out by the Cyberpunk.

  "Rally!" Alejandro shouted. "Where is it aimed at?"

  "It is aimed at the Gap, Major Levi," the Himmit said, shifting back into camouflage. The voice seemed to be moving away. "But the coverage area is . . . extensive. Consider this spot to be ground zero for a two megaton blast."

  "Wait!" Alejandro said. "Can your craft lift us out of here?"

  "Ah, so now you trust me," the Himmit said, from higher in the trees. "Head due west for six hundred meters. I'll meet you there."

  "Well, Miss O'Neal," the Cyber said, turning to the west. "You can come with us or not. Up to you."

  "Out of my way, commando dude," Cally said, scrambling to her feet and glancing at her compass. "You move too slow."

  * * *

  "Over here."

  The Himmit had again appeared as if out of thin air, its skin shifting from the color and pattern of tree-bark to its apparently "normal" purple-green. It gestured towards a crack in the ground and flowed rapidly downward and into the hole.

  Cally stopped, panting and shook her head. "Hiding in a hole isn't going to keep us alive in a nuclear explosion!" she shouted.

  "You may come or stay," the Himmit said, sticking the "rear" half of its froglike body out of the hole. "I was requested to retrieve you and the Cyber team. It was not a requirement of debt, however. And I am not going to stay here and be turned into radioactive dust! Four minutes." With that it disappeared downwards.

  "Shit," she muttered, glancing at Alejandro. "Cybers, huh?" she said, then bent over and slithered into the crack.

  It was wider than it looked but not easy to negotiate, even for her; she wasn't sure if the Cyber team would be able to make it. She crawled and slithered downward at about a twenty-degree angle through a series of turns. It quickly got dark but she crawled onward, wondering what would await her. Probably a Himmit butt, not that they had butts. She had just begun to wonder if the damned thing was simply a Stygian route to hell when she noticed a purple light. Rounding another corner she saw the op
en hatch of a Himmit ship and a compartment beyond. She quickly crawled through and then moved to the far end to see if the Cybers could make it.

  The Himmit was nowhere in sight.

  She had heard about Himmit stealth ships but never really expected to see the interior of one. It was . . . odd. Definitely alien in a way that was hard to define. The compartment was about three meters across with a set of seats on either side. While it was high enough for her, she suspected it would be cramped for the Cybers. The light was just wrong and the seats, while they appeared to be made to fit human-sized creatures, clearly were made wrong for humans. She sat in one to try it out. The seat back was too low and the seat itself too narrow; it was uncomfortable for her and she suspected that the longer-legged Cybers would find it torture after a short while. She supposed that it would be equally difficult for a human to make something comfortable for a Himmit.

  The smell in the compartment was acrid, like a leak at a chemical plant that occasionally dealt in garbage and there were odd squeaks and groans in the background. All in all, it was a pretty unpleasant place.

  She had just come to that conclusion when the first Cyber clambered out of the narrow passageway and stooped his way into the compartment. He quickly moved to the seat across from her and leaned back, taking off his camouflage hood.

  "Himmits," the guy muttered. "Why'd it have to be Himmits?"

  "I take it you've been on one of these before?" Cally said, wondering what response she'd get.

  "It's how we got here," the Cyber replied, looking to the entrance. "We were supposed to walk out and link up with vehicles. I'd rather walk a hundred miles than spend fifteen minutes in one of these things."

  "Well, any port in a storm," Cally said, philosophically, then frowned. "Not to bitch to a stranger, but this has been a lousy couple of days. My dog's dead, the horses are dead, my cat's dead and my grandfather's dead. My dad is in a fucking forlorn hope and will probably be gone by morning. Oh, and I've been in two nuclear bombardments. Being in a Himmit ship is starting to look pretty good."

  She shook her head as the next Cyber entered the compartment, rapidly followed by the rest of the team; the team leader was the last through the hatch. As he stepped through it started to cycle shut. At almost the same time what appeared to be the "front" wall of the vessel dilated open and a young human stepped through.

  All of the Cybers froze at the sight of the unknown visitor but Cally couldn't look away. Except for height, build and hair color he looked a lot like her father; it could have been a brother if Mike O'Neal had one.

  On second glance that wasn't quite the case. The visitor's arms were longer, hanging almost to his knees, and his nose was much smaller than her dad's. Actually, except for his age, he looked like . . .

  "Grandpa?"

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Knoxville, TN, United States of America, Sol III

  2200 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD

  * * *

  The massive cannon belched in flame and that was it. The shot had left too fast for the human eye to follow.

  The main viewscreen, though, was slaved to a tracking camera that could manage a view of the projectile as it flew through the air, and everyone let out a sigh of relief at still being there. Next to the image was a shot clock that estimated exit of rounds and detonation. The round was "smart" in that it determined its location and height to lay down its lethal cargo precisely, and the only actual drop that was visible was the first. But after first sub-munition ejection a detonation clock started ticking.

  "Seven, six . . ." Castanuelo said. "Damn, I wanted to be outside to watch this!"

  "Could we see it?" President Carson asked.

  "They'll see this in Pennsylvania!"

  Horner suddenly opened a metal case and ripped out his AID. "O'Neal! Splash in . . . one second!"

  * * *

  At the warning O'Neal just shrugged as well as he could inside his armor. He had been tossed around by . . . Jesus, he'd lost count. At least five nukes in his time. Not to mention being buried in a building by a near-nuclear class explosion, run over by a SheVa gun—twice on that one—and had various and sundry other unpleasant items occur while he was in a suit. Then there was that poor bastard Buckley who had had a space cruiser fall on him.

  Frankly, being buried five meters in the ground at the ground zero of a two megaton nuclear explosion wasn't anywhere near the bottom of his experiences. It was sort of comforting in a way.

  "Gotcha," he said, flipping frequencies to internal. "Battalion, splash over."

  There was a brief rumble, high frequency ground shocks, that preceded the impact, but in less than a second after the first shudder the ground began to spasm around his suit. The shocks went on for about five seconds, about as bad driving a jeep across rough ground, and then it was done.

  "That's it?" someone queried on the general frequency.

  * * *

  "Grandpa?" Cally said softly, looking up at the stranger.

  "Yeah, sweetie," he replied, stepping forward and ruffling her hair. "It's really me. Sort of. I guess."

  "But you . . . I thought . . ."

  "Dead?" he said with a snort.

  "Um, yeah."

  "Well, there's a Tch . . . Tph . . . a Crab around here that can explain it better. Basically, the Galactics sort of consider death to be not quite the is/isn't thing that humans perceive."

  "So were you or weren't you?" Cally asked, angrily.

  "Cally, Princess Bride?"

  "Oh. So you were 'mostly dead.' "

  "Bingo. I think I was flatlined, if that's what you mean. But the Himmit got to me in time to administer Hiberzine and then the Crab here . . . restarted me."

  Cally looked at him again and shook her head. "So are you you?"

  "I think so," Papa said, shrugging his shoulders. "I think there are some holes in my memory. I'm younger though. Strong. It feels . . . amazingly good."

  "Hah, you're not the only one!" Cally said. "You should see Shari. You'd pop your shorts."

  "Shari?"

  "Long story, I didn't understand all of it. But they survived and got out of the Urb."

  Papa O'Neal nodded and then frowned. "Out of the Urb? Survived?"

  "You didn't know the Franklin Urb was gone?" Cally asked. "Or that the Posleen are all down the Valley?"

  "I've been out of it for the last few days. What's happening?" He looked around at the Cyber team who had started to stow their gear. "And are these white hats or black?"

  "White, I think," Cally said. "And we're about to get hit with a nuke. . . ."

  "Oh, shit," he said, shaking his head. "Another one?"

  Something about the way he said it caused Cally to burst into giggles that led inevitably to a belly laugh and then she found herself crying and holding her sides, unable to stop laughing. "Yeah . . ." she gasped after nearly a minute, wiping her eyes and at the snot running out of her nose. "Another one." As she said it, the floor began to rumble.

  * * *

  Pruitt maneuvered the pack up out of the bowels of the gun and swung it over to MetalStorm Nine. Nine, for some reason, had done a double fire at some point and was flat out of packs. Getting more up, fast enough, would be tough.

  The job wasn't particularly fun. The Posleen had noticed the MetalStorms and were trying, at very long range, to successfully engage them. So stray rounds, railgun, hypervelocity missiles and plasma fire, were flying by on a regular basis. But, on the other hand, at his height he was pretty sure he had the best view of any being in the battle. And it was one hell of a view; the battle was intense.

  The infantry had moved back into position on both sides, although at a fair distance, and in the twilight their red tracers could be seen flickering through the darkness, striking, disappearing and bouncing off into the distance. And, of course, the continuous rain of artillery was fascinating. Then, at intervals, the MetalStorms would open up and spit liquid fire into the valley. And all the while the Posleen were filling th
e air with streams of plasma.

  Really spectacular.

  As he thought that, a bright flash to his right, over the mountains, caused him to look up from the monitors. Before his head could even come up, the entire horizon behind the mountains flashed bright white in a lightning ripple of strobes, as if klieg lights the size of a state had been flicked on and then off, lighting up the valley for almost four seconds as if it was bright daylight.

  He threw his arm up against the light but it was too late to help. Each of the blasts was a nuclear fireball and in the continuous stream of flashes he could see mushroom clouds rising even as the last lightbulb winked out. It was as if the world to the south had been consumed by a sun and then gone back to black.

  "Holy shit," he muttered, his eyes watering, as ground rumble caused the SheVa to sway back and forth. "I've got to redefine my definition of spectacular."

  He sat shaking his head to try to get some night vision, hell any vision, back and then gave up.

  "Holy shit."

  * * *

  Cally stopped laughing as the rumble died away and then grinned at her grandfather. "So, there any cards in this tub?"

  "As if I need to lose money on top of everything else," Papa O'Neal said with an answering grin. "Damn, Granddaughter, it's good to see your face again."

  * * *

  Within the cache the impacts caused one corner of the container to buckle and Billy to slip out of Shari's arms. And then it returned to the silence of a tomb.

  * * *

  "UP AND AT 'EM!" O'Neal bellowed over the battalion frequency. "Head for the Gap."

  He put actions to words, scrabbling at the dirt above him and pushing down with his feet. It was a bare fifteen feet to the surface but it still took time, time he was afraid they might not have. Finally he saw an opening above him and popped his head out to look around at total devastation.

  As far as the eye could see, and from the edge of the mountain that was a fair distance, there was nothing but scrubbed dirt. Not a stick, not a house, not a scrap of vegetation survived; the very soil had been stripped off in the titanic fire.