Gust Front

by John Ringo

  The rest of the squad dove in and before long they were to a brick ceiling.

  "What the hell is this, sir?" asked Stewart. The captain was tracking again, which was good. It had looked rocky the first day. But he seemed to be coming around. If he didn't, there wasn't a hell of a lot they could do about it.

  "Dunno," said O'Neal, flipping through his database on Fredericksburg. "There's no mention of structures like this." A quick sonic pulse indicated that it was a single layer of brick. Mike lifted himself on his AG drive and took a slice out of the ceiling.

  The gray light and cold rain fell on two dust-covered forms, one male, one female. The two young civilians lay in each other's arms on a mattress of body armor. To either side were automatic weapons. The sensors unnecessarily confirmed that the weapons had seen use.

  Mike lifted himself out of the hole as the squad dropped in to extract the two. He snorted a few times then gave a deep braying laugh. Shelly had enough experience to know when he was talking to himself so the laugh was not broadcast. Nor was the statement, "Those poor Posleen bastards."

  * * *

  "Contact!" shouted another sensor wielder, closer to the river. "Big contact!"

  This time the construction was a concrete bunker. Mike first wondered how the hell the engineers had managed to make it during the battle, but a brief study indicated that it was an earlier construction. Although what was not obvious.

  "Whatta we got?" asked Pappas, kicking the wall of the concrete monstrosity.

  "Lots of signal," said the sensor wielder. "All hibernating as far as I can tell. If there are any conscious, it's lost in the mass."

  "How many?" Mike barked.

  "Don't know, sir," said the tech. "Lots."

  Ampele deployed his cutter and tackled an exposed corner. He was standing up to his knees in the rising river, but he didn't seem to notice. It took three cuts to get a hole in the thick concrete walls. He lifted his head up to look in and received a shotgun blast full in the face.

  The blast, gnatlike to a suit of combat armor, hardly fazed the phlegmatic Hawaiian, but he dropped down anyway. Better to let whoever was on the other side of the shotgun realize what they'd shot.

  Mike lifted himself on compensators and flew over to the opening. "This is Captain Michael O'Neal of the Mobile Infantry. We're friends." He lifted up until he was opposite the hole.

  Inside there was a woman in what appeared to be a soiled waitress's uniform. She had stringy, unwashed blonde hair and a wild expression in her eyes. Having been trapped under a building one time, Mike could well appreciate her frame of mind; he still got a bit panicky in the dark. So he could never afterwards decide if he was brilliant or stupid to take off his helmet.

  The woman took one look at the human face and burst into tears.

  Mike lifted himself up so he could see in and almost recoiled in horror. The room was filled with bodies and they at first appeared to be corpses or even vampires. Their skin was waxy with red-flushed cheeks. Their lips were swollen and flushed and their eyes were open and glassy. But the same effect was caused by Hiberzine. It was just that he had never seen hibernation patients piled willy-nilly in a sarcophagus before. He shook his head and offered his hand to the woman. "Are you alone?" he asked solicitously.

  The answer was another flood of tears but the woman took his hand and slid through the hole. "Ah, ah," she gasped for a moment then caught her breath. "There was a . . . a firewoman with me at first. But she . . . she couldn't take the walls. I had to . . . to . . ."

  "Sedate her," said Mike. He shook his head again. Strength was an odd commodity. Like hope, it sprouted in the strangest places.

  * * *

  Aberdeen Proving Grounds, MD, United States of America, Sol III

  1626 EDT October 13th, 2004 ad

  Keren watched the video for the umpteenth time. The networks, overrun with incredible images of heroism and cowardice, competence and idiocy, had settled on this one to wrap them all up in a nice neat network package.

  The crowd surged back. The lander had dropped perfectly; just far enough that none of the humans were injured, but too close for them to run far. As the giant landing door dropped the panicking crowd washed away from the single, still armored soldier in its midst.

  The foreground held a crying child, her forearm obviously broken. If any parent had been in that crowd they had been swept onward, as had the guards of the figure standing in the background, perfectly poised against the foreground of the sobbing child. As the door dropped, silently in this version, the grav-cannon on the back of the figure dropped forward. The figure took a perfect position, a picture from a Fort Benning textbook of a rifleman firing from the standing position. One hand cradled the grav-cannon while the other pulled it into the shoulder. One foot was cocked slightly backwards with feet shoulder-width apart, body slightly canted towards the target.

  As the Posleen descended from their craft, harvesting swords held high, the figure opened fire.

  * * *

  Cheyenne Mountain, CO, United States of America, Sol III

  1423 EDT October 14th, 2004 ad

  She had never planned on being President. Her position was to balance the ticket. And she sure as hell did not want to be President stuck in a concrete bunker in the middle of a mountain in Colorado.

  But she had to admit it made more sense than a combat suit in the middle of D.C.

  The cabinet was scattered to hell and gone. And so were the staffers. And there was no conventional transport faster than trains. Trains. They were reduced to using trains.

  But the Galactics weren't. The Tir Dol Ron would be here any minute, courtesy of a Himmit stealth ship. She supposed she could probably avail herself of one as well. But reassembling a staff was still going to take months.

  She had had damn little staff with her when the landings started. And not many more had made it here so far. One of those, though, had turned out to be a goldmine. The girl was a total airhead about everything outside her narrow specialty, but she had an immense understanding of the Galactics and their punctilious protocol.

  Which might make or break the war.

  * * *

  Washington Monument, Washington, DC

  United States of America, Sol III

  1430 EDT October 14th, 2004 ad

  "It is you people, and other soldiers like you, who will make or break the war to come," said General Taylor.

  Immediately following the battle, the two colonels and their sergeant majors had gathered the survivors of the Battle of The Monument and made a list. The six hundred or so that survived, along with a dazed platoon of engineers extracted with some difficulty from the Memorial, were now gathered at the site of their triumph to be decorated.

  The tall black general looked around at the group with a penetrating eye. "Many of you, in years to come, will belittle that moment. That is a fundamental nature of true heroes. But I tell you now, this battle will be remembered with Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord. Not only because those were battles that formed a great nation, as this was a battle that saved one. But because they were small skirmishes that presaged a great and terrible war. And the survivors from those small skirmishes formed the core of the great army that arose from their ashes." He smiled faintly.

  "But enough of the words. We all know there ain't no extra pay, and rations will be catch as catch can. But we still got plenty of medals!"

  * * *

  Rabun County, GA, United States of America, Sol III

  1820 EDT October 14th, 2004 ad

  The reporter from the local station shook water from the hood of his raincoat and looked at the camera.

  "And three, two, one . . . Good afternoon, this is Tom Speltzer from WKGR, reporting from Habersham, Georgia. It seems like there are plenty of medals for the soldiers, but it wasn't only soldiers that beat the Posleen.

  "I'm talking with Mr. Michael O'Neal, of Rabun Gap, Georgia, and his eight-year-old granddaughter, Cally O'Neal." The reporter turned an
d proffered the microphone to the elder O'Neal, standing in the pouring rain like a statue.

  Mike Senior's camouflage raincoat shed the water like a duck and the hood worked much better than the reporter's. And he wasn't about to let the newsie bastard in the house.

  "Mr. O'Neal, can you tell us what it felt like to have the Posleen assault your home?"

  "Well, first of all, they never got to the house. We had 'em pretty well stopped down in the valley," he said, gesturing towards the distant entrance.

  "We?" asked the reporter, surprised. "You had help?"

  "From me!" piped up the little girl. "I ran the demo!"

  The reporter's face took on that special look of false pleased surprise that adults affect when children interject unnecessarily. The report was going out live nationwide and he just had to shut the kid up as fast as possible. But what the hell was demo? "Really? Did that help?" he asked.

  "Blew the shit out of the bastards," Cally said, ingenuously. "Must have killed half the damn company. We had the whole fuckin' woodline strung with claymores and I just blew the fuck out of them."

  The camerawoman suppressed her laughter but expertly caught the frozen look on the reporter's face as he attempted to come up with a response to this.

  "Cut to the old guy," snapped the producer. "Ask him about the name."

  "And Mr. O'Neal, there's another O'Neal that has become famous, again. By exactly the same name . . ."

  "That's my daddy!" said Cally excitedly. "He really rolled those centaur sons of bitches up, didn't 'e?"

  The reporter had assumed that out of control runaway train expression again. Mike Senior decided to twist the knife. He worked the wad in his cheek around and spit. "I teached 'im ever'thang he knows," he drawled, looking right in the camera. And hoping like hell the damn monks could keep their vow of goddamned silence and not laugh their asses off. There were enough damn problems in the world without having to explain them.

  In the background, a green Army sedan appeared out of the woodline, headed to the house. In the cold Georgia rain.

  * * *

  Walter Reed Army Hospital, Washington, DC

  United States of America, Sol III

  2015 EDT October 15th, 2004 ad

  Keren knocked on the door of the room and nodded at the nurse who was just leaving.

  The room smelled of disinfectant. It was an odor that raised the hackles on the back of his neck. To the lizard hindbrain, it meant that things were bad and going to get worse.

  He looked down at the figure on the bed. There were three medals pinned to the pillow; apparently something had made it into the database before it all came apart at Lake Jackson. He shook his head and sat down.

  "You really missed a good party," he whispered, pulling a bottle out of the recesses of his coat. The gold bars of a second lieutenant winked for a moment in the light over the bed. "The general was buying. Damn, he can drink. And that old snake of a warrant officer that followed him around. And the general told this story, damn it was funny, 'bout how come the warrant follows him around. It's all about an alligator and two bottles of bourbon."

  So he told his friend the story. And he told her a couple of others, about how General Simosin and General Ford finally had it out and Ford accused Simosin of incompetence in front of a TV camera and Simosin dragged it all out in the open how Ford had opposed integrating the old-timers and screwed around so bad that there was no damn way anything could have gone right. So now Ford was out and Simosin was back at Tenth Corps and General Keeton was First Army.

  And he told about the meeting between the new Prez and the Darhel. How the Prez had threatened to recall all the expeditionary forces unless the Darhel ponied up all the grav-guns we could stand. And how the Tir had finally agreed that all equipment would be at no cost and that husbanding the humans was the most important thing in the universe. But the pipeline was still plugged and the Fleet was takin' forever and most of the PDCs were smoking holes. . . .

  And he told how some rag-head had made a stand to equal theirs, taking a bit of this unit and a bit of that and somehow putting enough steel in their spine to hold a vital pass against a whole swarm. Or so they said.

  But India was a madhouse and nobody knew what was happening in the Africa swarm. And the one in Kazakhstan was just wandering around trying to find its way out of the plains. . . .

  But finally the bottle was empty and it was time to leave.

  "Well, Elgars. They say you might be able to hear me. And they tell me you might come out of it someday. I left the e-mail to my . . . our unit with them. They're taking all the survivors from The Stand at the Monument and making a special unit. You're included as one of us. You and all the other . . . wounded. And the dead. So, you can, you know . . ."

  He stopped and wiped a tear away. "And I watched Pittets hang. You'd be happy to hear that. They didn't tie it the way I asked, I wanted him to kick for a while. But he's gone. And you know about the decorations." He tried to think of something else to say but nothing came. "I gotta go," he said, looking at his watch and trying not to look at the lovely face behind the tubes, as the machine sucked in and out.

  "The Galactics, they're picking up the tab now. So there's no reason to, you know . . . to take you off. And they'll be moving you to a Sub-Urb. They've got plenty of room and really good facilities. So they're gonna leave you hooked up in case . . ."

  He wished now he hadn't finished the bottle. He could use a little taste. He took her hand one last time. "Thanks for that shot on Sixth Street." He nodded at her, one soldier to another. "I know it saved you, too. But it still saved my ass." He nodded again, hoping that she would do the thing with grabbing his hand, but there was no response. "Well, bye, Elgars. Take care." Finally, he turned and left the room. Behind him it was silent except for the suck and whir of the machines.

  * * *

  Beyond the path of the outmost sun though utter darkness hurled—

  Further than ever comet flared or vagrant star-dust swirled–

  Live such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved and made our world.

  They are purged of pride because they died, they know the worth of their bays,

  They sit at wine with the Maidens Nine and the Gods of the Elder Days,

  It is their will to serve or be still as fitteth Our Father's Praise.

  'Tis theirs to sweep through the ringing deep where Azrael's outposts are,

  Or buffet a path through the Pit's red wrath when God goes out to war,

  Or hang with the reckless Seraphim on the rein of a red-maned star.

  They take their mirth in the joy of the Earth–they dare not grieve for her pain.

  They know of toil and the end of toil, they know God's Law is plain,

  So they whistle the Devil to make them sport who know that Sin is vain.

  And ofttimes cometh our Wise Lord God, master of every trade,

  And tells them tales of His daily toil, of Edens newly made;

  And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid.

  To these who are cleansed of base Desire, Sorrow and Lust and Shame—

  Gods for they knew the hearts of men, men for they stooped to Fame,

  Borne on the breath that men call Death, my brother's spirit came.

  He scarce had need to doff his pride or slough the dross of the Earth—

  E'en as he trod that day to God so walked he from his birth,

  In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth.

  So cup to lip in fellowship they gave him welcome high

  And made him a place at the banquet board—the Strong Men ranged thereby,

  Who had done his work and held his peace and had no fear to die.

  Beyond the loom of the last lone star, through open darkness hurled,

  Further than rebel comet dared or hiving star-swarm swirled,

  Sits he with those that praise our God for that they served His world.

  Author's Afterword

&nbs
p; On September 10, 1998, my father died of a stroke while watching a rerun of Seinfeld.

  It was the first cool day of the fall after an awful, sticky summer of blazing heat, repeated heart attacks and kidney failures. The day had been his first good one in six months and fall was his favorite time of year, so it was doubly auspicious.

  There is no such thing as "a good day to die." But there are better and worse. Taking the alternative of D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge or the Hurtgen Forest or Iwo Jima, where so many of his fellow age-mates died, an apparently fast stroke while laughing at Jerry's antics is fair.

  I mention my father for two reasons. The first is that I keep his generation in mind while writing my books. The societal conditions that provided the soldiers for the American Army in WWII were unprecedented in history. It was a society that was as technologically adept as any in the world, but that had fallen upon hard times so that there was a great need for work. Also those hard times had hammered out some of the impurities in the metal already. What was left was pretty good iron that was turned to steel by 1944.

  Which, if a similar situation were to occur today, would not be the case. Personally, I like the present day. This is, unless anyone is confused, a golden age. With all the ills of a golden age. (Read The Decameron and tell me that there is a new ill under the sun.) But, given the choice between a decadent golden age and a stoic time of privation and war . . . give me the golden age.

  But—there is always a but, isn't there? But, if a situation were to occur today which called for a national will to survival, it would be difficult to replicate that "Greatest Generation." First we would have to go through the sort of pre-tempering that occurred with the Great Depression, getting out all the "lesser" impurities. Only then would we as a nation be prepared for the greater tests.