Hell's Faire

CHAPTER TWELVE Clarkesville, GA, United States of America, Sol III 1905 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD

Tulo’stenaloor glanced at his sensors then tugged at his earring; he had better things to do than learn skills that others had.

“How much time do we have?”

“Not much,” Goloswin replied thoughtfully. “They are preparing to fire.”

The estanaar looked at the bloody read oval on the schematic and sighed. He had spent years learning to understand maps and now he wished he hadn’t. He could well imagine the results of this hell-weapon.

“And the radiation?”

“Bad,” the technician admitted. “The zone that will be hit directly by the weapon will extend up the valley almost to the town of Dillard. The primary isotope will be carbon 13, which has a high ionization rate and will induce thermal damage on uptake. My model estimates twenty percent casualties for oolt passing through the zone in the first hour with about a one percent decrease per hour thereafter. Humans, of course, are relatively fragile; unprotected humans will not be able to enter the zone for at least ten days.” He fluttered his crest and snapped his mouth in humor. “It’s actually a very… what is that human term? It is a very elegant weapon in its way. The power is frightful, of course, but it also denies territory for some time. However, the ground is fully cleared in a month or two, at least sufficient for life. Elegant.”

“Horrible,” Tulo’stenaloor replied. He turned to his operations officer with a snarl. “Pull all estanaral forces out that can be withdrawn; send only the local forces into this madness. Begin working on a plan to control the movement after the attack; we have been hitting these humans in waves which gives them time to recover. Use the estanaral forces to put gaps between blocks of the locals so that we hit the humans in a continuous stream.”

The operations officer nodded and tapped at the controls on his sensor unit. “Most of the estanaral were prepared for an exploitation attack, so they are back from the area where the weapon will hit. Should I stop the flow for a while? We’re actually getting low on local units.”

“No,” Tulo’stenaloor said after a moment. “We won’t know exactly where the weapon hits until it does. Some of them will survive. It is enough.” He flapped his crest again and keyed his communicator. “Orostan.”

Orostan looked up the hill at the gap and snarled as his communicator lit up. “Yes, estanaar.”

“The humans are going to fire a hell-weapon into the Gap.” Tulo’stenaloor gave him a brief précis of the situation and then waited.

Orostan flapped his crest in agitation and snarled. “How many of my reinforcements am I going to lose?”

“About half,” the warleader admitted.

“Too much,” the forward leader muttered. “That hellish SheVa gun has been reinforced, strengthened and given many weapons instead of just the one. It has taken a position near Savannah valley and is eating oolt as if they were abat.”

“The idea was to stop it,” Tulo’stenaloor noted. “Not have it stop you.”

“I’m trying,” Orostan snapped. “I have teams waiting for it to come through the pass. I think it is vulnerable on the flanks. When it comes through we will destroy its wheels and tracks. That will stop it. Short of where it can fire at the pass. But you were supposed to take and hold the pass, estanaar. And with the resistance that I am facing from these hell-spit humans, may the demons eat their souls, I need more forces.”

“I’m working on it,” Tulo’stenaloor said. “But the situation, as the humans say, truly sucks.”

“This really sucks,” Cally whispered. “I’m way too young to die.”

She had managed to break contact with the Posleen but they had stayed on her trail like bloodhounds. Now they were spread out on either side of her hide, beating up the hill. She had thought she could lie low and avoid them but it seemed no such luck.

“Papa wouldn’t have gotten trapped this way,” she muttered, checking her rounds. Out of grenades, two magazines left, one partially empty. One full magazine in the well. Posleen to the right so if she tried to sneak out they would have her there. Ditto on the left. Solid wall up behind her. What was that old saw? “There I was, this is no shit… Was I afraid, sure, I was afraid one of them would get away.”

She just wished they would go away.

There was a rustle in the bushes below and she lined up on where a Posleen would be bound and determined to come in view. “Well, time to get one more,” she sighed, snuggling her cheek into the stock. As the yellow-brown snout nosed around the bushes she took up trigger slack. It was the God King.

Even if she couldn’t destroy all the Posleen in the world, she could destroy this one.

The team leader paused and raised one fist, sinking into a crouch. Ahead of them through the trees there was a shot from a rifle and a crackle of railgun fire with the occasional thump of a plasma rifle.

Major Alejandro Levi had been a Cyberpunk for more years than he cared to remember. He had been recruited right out of high school, something about being a Westinghouse Scholarship Finalist and the quarterback of the football team. And over the… okay decades would be the best way to put it, he’d been in a lot of hairy missions. But wandering around in the middle of a nuclear battlefield scattered with Posleen, potentially hostile humans and potentially hostile “others,” pretty much took the cake.

He looked to his rear then to his side and stepped to the left. Suddenly, he reached out with his left hand and sank it into what appeared to be naked air.

“What do we have here?” he whispered, getting a grip with the other hand as a Himmit shifted camouflage and wrapped three of its hands onto his body. “Spying on us, were you?”

“Spying for you,” the Himmit whistled in passable English. The creature was almost man-sized but lighter than humans and resembled nothing so much as a symmetric frog. It had four “arms” set at opposite ends of its body and a sensory cluster near the center of the body. On each side of the sensory cluster it had a pair of eyes. It appeared as if you could split it down the middle and easily have two “half Himmit.”

Alejandro had it by the cranial cavity, at the center of the delicate sensory area; a twitch of the human’s strong hands would crush his primary sensors, a possibly fatal wound. “You’re here for the same reason I am!”

“How do I know that?” the Cyber said, loosening his grip lightly.

“You’re here to retrieve Cally O’Neal and Michael O’Neal, Senior,” the alien replied. “And you’re late.”

“The traffic was terrible,” Alejandro replied, dryly. “Where are they?”

“Michael O’Neal, Senior, was caught in the pressure wave fromisedander detonation and sustained mortal injuries. Cally O’Neal is the one doing the firing right now. She has been in a running battle with a group of Posleen. I believe she is now trapped.”

“O’Neal’s dead?” the team leader asked, shaking his head.

“Dead is such a definitive term,” the Himmit replied. “He is in my craft at the moment. I do not know his current state of reality.”

“Wha… never mind,” Alejandro said, shaking his head. If he asked an open-ended question the Himmit would go on all day. He was lucky this hadn’t taken longer; the Himmit was clearly out of sorts to be this abrupt. Maybe it was having fingers jabbed into the Himmit equivalent of a nose. “How many Posleen?”

“Less than when she started; she is a remarkable sub-human,” the Himmit said. “She initiated the ambush with — ”

“How many and where?” Levi asked, tightening the pressure ever so slightly.

“Fourteen, seventy-five meters,” the Himmit replied, pointing. “Spread out. She is in cover up the slope, but if she moves…”

“God King?”

“There is one Kessentai, plasma rifle, using portable sensors. He is not using them very effectively; he appears used to having his guns aimed for him.”

The Cyber straightened and made a series of gestures indicating that the team should spread out, prepare to engage the enemy and turn off all electronic devices. The last was a pain, but the God King’s sensors could pick up the slightest emission, even background.

He watched as the team seemed to appear from nowhere, a bit of leaf mold, the bark of a tree, a bush. The Cyberpunks had trained in the days before the war against the Posleen to enter enemy territory and corrupt battlefield systems that could not be “hacked” from a distance. They were trained to be ghosts, shadows, on the battlefield.

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 open 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?”