When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 14 Rochester, NY, United States, Sol III 0928 EDT Tuesday September 15, 2009 ad

Mike looked around the room and then undogged his helmet. The command and staff of the 1^st/555^th was grouped in a kindergarten schoolroom, sitting on the floor to use the undersized tables. The battlescarred combat suits made an unpleasant contrast to the colored drawings on the walls and the prominent poster of the five food groups.

“Well, we’ve had worse meetings.” He chuckled as the last of the gel underlayer from his suit streamed off into his helmet. “Much worse.”

“Yep,” Duncan agreed as he set his helmet carefully on the desk in front of him. The plasteel was still heavy and hard enough to mar the stick drawing of a little girl with “Ashley” written below it. “At least nobody is shooting at us.”

“We’ll get back to that pretty soon,” Mike said. He worked the ball of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other and spit into his helmet. The nannites of the semibiotic underlayer gathered up the disgusting glop which, from its perspective, was simply moisture, nutrients and complex carbon molecules, and carried them off to be reprocessed. “There’s groups of Posleen holed up all along the bottom of the Plain. We’re going to help with the mop-up for the next week or so as reaction forces. After that, Horner has ordered us to move to our barracks and take some time off. Given that we had to reconsolidate without Alpha company, I think some time in barracks is called for.”

“We’ve got barracks?” Stewart asked with a chuckle. “I mean, like, real barracks that are ours and everything? Or are we going to a ‘rest and recreation’ barracks?” he asked with a grimace. The facilities were run by Ground Forces and varied wildly.

“They’re ours,” O’Neal said with a grin. “They’ve been on my books the whole damned time. They’re in the mountains in Pennsylvania. A place called Newry, just south of Altoona. We’ve even got a rear detachment.”

“We do?” Duncan asked, bemusedly. “I would have thought the S-3 would know about that sort of thing.”

“It’s not all that big,” Mike said. “And they’re all seconded from Ground Forces. But there’s a supply officer and a personnel section.”

“And barracks?” Captain Slight said with a light chuckle. “With beds and stuff?”

“The same,” O’Neal said with another grin. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep in one; the last time I tried I was up all night tossing and turning.”

“I think the troops will adjust,” Gunny Pappas said, shaking his head now that he’d doffed his helmet. “They seriously need some down time. And there’s gear that needs work, even the GalTech gear.”

“We’ll do all of that,” Mike said. “My basic plan is this. We should arrive, transportation being available, on Monday or Tuesday. We’ll spend a day cleaning up the barracks and our gear and morguing the suits. Then a day or two on short days around the barracks, getting used to wearing silks again and working on our dress stuff. Friday we’ll have a real honest to God ‘payday activities’ with an inspection of the barracks and dress uniform inspection followed by a battalion formation and dismissal by noon. Everybody to be back in formation no earlier than noon the next Tuesday.”

“You know, I don’t know how that will go over,” Captain Holder said. “Frankly, I think some of the troops will view it as… well…”

“Chickenshit, sir?” Gunny Pappas said. “With all due respect, Captain, I disagree…”

“So do I,” Stewart interjected. “And I disagree as a former troop. All of these troops are volunteers. You don’t get to the point that we’re at without realizing that there’s a reason for all the happy horseshit in garrison. Sure, you ignore most of it in combat, but the best, the most elite troops, have always been the snazziest dressers.”

“Waffen SS,” Duncan noted. “Now there were some guys who knew how to wear a uniform.”

“The 82^nd,” Captain Slight noted. “They were chosen for the role of Honor Guard in post-WWII Europe mainly on the basis of how well they dressed out. And nobody can fault their combat record.”

“Rhodesian SAS and the Selous Scouts,” O’Neal said in agreement. “Two of the baddest groups ever to come out of the Cold War and they were like peacocks in garrison; Dad still has his uniform and it looks like something from a Hungarian opera.”

“Okay, okay,” Captain Holder said, holding up his hands. “But do the troops know that?”

“We’ll give ’em evenings off,” Mike said. “Short passes; they’ll need to be back to barracks by a curfew. There’s a reason for it. Gunny?”

“You don’t just rip soldiers right out of combat and drop them on a town, sir,” Gunny Pappas said with a nod. “You have to… acclimatize them first.”

“We’ll give them a week of ‘chickenshit’ to acclimatize, and a week for the town to get used to the idea and more or less prepared, and then we’ll let them go for a weekend. I don’t see us having more than a couple of weeks, maybe a month, in garrison. We’ll let them unwind for a bit then train back up and then…”

“Back to killing Posleen,” Duncan said with a growl.

“Back to making Posleen sausage,” Mike agreed. “What we do best.”

“We getting any replacements, sir?” Pappas asked. “We’re… getting a little low on bodies in case nobody had noticed.”

“There are twelve suits in the pipeline,” O’Neal said. “They’re all supposed to be waiting for us when we get to Newry.”

“And bodies?” Captain Slight asked. “Even with the troops we picked up from Alpha, we’re under manning.”

“And bodies,” Mike agreed. “Given that we have some mopping up to do, the bodies should be there in time to get the suits fitted and even dialed in. I understand we’re even getting a couple from the Ten Thousand.”

“Ten shut!” Sunday called as Colonel Cutprice entered the room.

The conference room was in the offices of a factory, long since abandoned, just west of the Genesee River. The blasts from SheVa rounds, which had levelled practically every prominence east of the Genesee, had blown out the windows of the room and Cutprice strode across crackling glass as he entered. But it was better than being outside; the rains had set in again and it looked to be turning to snow soon.

“At ease, rest even,” Cutprice said, striding over to the group of four troopers. He was trailed by Mansfield, carrying a set of boxes, and the sergeant major, similarly weighed down.

“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” he continued, suiting action to words as he pulled out a pack of Dunhills. They were getting hard to find so he saved them for special occasions.

“You might be wondering why I called you here and all that…” He smiled and nodded at the boxes. “All of you transferred in from other units, and when you got here we took a rank away from you to make sure that you could cut the mustard, that you weren’t just garrison rangers with great counseling statements and no damned heart for war.” He looked at Sunday and shook his head.

“As it turned out, you all were what the Ten Thousand wanted; warriors to the core, psychotic motherfucking Posleen killers, willing to walk into the fire over and over and never flinch.” He shook his head again, this time in sorrow. “And now we’re losing you to those ACS bastards.

“Well, those ACS bastards do the same thing,” he noted, taking the first box. “They take a stripe away when you get there, just to make sure you’re what they need in a warm body. Then they stuff you in a can until you look like a worm that crawled out from under a rock.” He glanced at the note attached to the box and nodded.

“Sunday, get your ass over here,” he growled. “I don’t know if your old unit did this before you came here, but they should have. Most of you is getting bumped a rank before you leave, that way when you get to the damned clankers you’ll end up at the rank you have, by God, earned.

“The exception,” he continued, looking up at Sunday, “is you, Tank. I’d been thinking about doing this for a while and I don’t know what took me so long.” He glanced at Mansfield then looked away. “Some paperwork problem. Anyway, I’m going to screw you for all time. You ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Sunday said in confusion. “Whatever you think is best.”

“Okay, if you’re that trusting,” Cutprice said with an evil grin, “you deserve this. Attention to orders!

“Staff Sergeant Thomas Sunday, Junior, is released from Service of the United States Ground Forces September 17, 2009, for the Purposes of accepting a commission as a Regular Officer of the United States Ground Forces and concurrent reentry to the United States Ground Forces as First Lieutenant. First Lieutenant Thomas Sunday, Junior, is ordered to active duty this September 17, 2009, with date of rank September 17, 2009.” Cutprice stopped reading, reached in his bellows pocket, pulled out a battered pair of first lieutenant’s bars and replaced Sunday’s staff sergeant collar stripes. “You don’t owe me anything for these, by the way. I had them rattling around in the back of my desk.”

“Very well, Orostan,” Tulo’stenaloor said. “I’ll send Shartarsker in to make sure they are not coming closer to the base.” He looked at the map and considered the report the oolt’ondai had sent in. “Good luck.”

Goloswin looked up from the sensor readout. “It does not go well?”

“The team apparently has escaped,” Tulo’stenaloor said. “After ravaging Orostan’s oolt’ondar.”

“Well, they are not in the sensor region,” Goloswin said, gesturing at the map. “Or at least not marking themselves as such. I’m not sure if they can at this point. There is a way to communicate with these boxes without other devices, but this assumes the humans are as clever as I am.”

“So even if they are in the sensor net, we might not know it?” Tulo’stenaloor asked.

“Yes,” Goloswin answered, ruffling his crest. “There is a way to modify their software to make them detect humans. The sensors ‘see’ the humans, but they also see the thresh of the woods and all the greater thresh of this planet. The ‘deer’ and ‘dogs’ and such-like that have survived. The humans have designed the systems, quite efficiently I might add, to sort through the information they collect in several different ways. And it sorts out anything but Posleen and humans that are ‘in the net’ and telling it they are there and want to be tracked. Thus I would have to tell all the boxes to change their filters to find humans. And even then it would assume the humans are not cloaking themselves in any of several ways. I could do it — I am, after all, clever. But the humans might, probably would, notice. They, too, have clever technicians.”

“And then they would know that we… How did you put it?” Tulo’stenaloor asked.

“They would know that they have been ‘hacked,’ ” Goloswin said. “That we ‘own’ their system.”

“We don’t want to do that,” Tulo’stenaloor mused. “Yet.”

“What do you want to do in the meantime?” Goloswin asked. “Or can I go back to tinkering?”

“Just one last question,” the War Leader said. “Can you set the system to ‘filter’ out the Po’oslena’ar?”

Wendy shook her head as she watched Elgars finish up her workout. The sniper always closed with an exercise that was peculiar to her. She had suspended a weight, in this case fifty pounds of standard metal barbell weights, from a rope. The rope, in turn, was wrapped around a dowel; actually a chopped down mop handle.

Elgars would then “winch” up the weights by twisting the rope in her hands. Up and slowly back down, fifty times. Wendy was lucky if she could do it five times.

“I gave up on that one,” Wendy admitted. They generally worked out once a day for about an hour switching between strength and cardiovascular sessions. Lately, though, they had been concentrating more on weight training; Wendy was trying out for a “professional” emergency services position and Elgars was backstopping her training. Today Wendy had stuck to warm-ups; when they were done she was going to go to the tryouts and she didn’t even want to think about going through that SOB after a full workout.

“You ought to start at a lower weight and rep,” the captain said. “It’s good for the wrists.”

“I can see that,” Wendy admitted, looking at the captain’s; the woman’s forearms were starting to look like a female Popeye’s.

“Makes it easier to climb ladders among other things, most of the stuff in your PPE.”

“Yeah, well, time to go to that now,” Wendy said nervously.

“One of these days I will figure out the purpose of a fire department in this place,” Elgars said, wiping off her face with a towel and wrapping the towel around her neck. “Every fire that has broken out was extinguished before the crew arrived; that is what sprinklers and Halon are for. I think they’re just a very overtrained clean-up crew.”

“Well, at least it feels like you’re doing something,” Wendy said sharply.

“And caring for screaming children is not doing something?” Annie asked with a thin smile.

“Do you want to do it the rest of your life?” Wendy asked.

“No,” the captain said, leading the way out of the gym. “But, then again, you don’t get the desire to disembowel the little bastards.”

“You get along with Billy,” Wendy said with her own tight smile.

“That is because he doesn’t say anything.”

“Well, there is that,” Wendy snapped. “You weren’t in Fredericksburg; you can’t know what it was like.”

“No, I can’t,” Elgars said. “Thank you very much for pointing that out. I was not in Fredericksburg and I wouldn’t remember anyway.”

Wendy stopped and looked at the officer for a moment. “When did we start fighting?”

Elgars stopped in turn and cocked her head. “I think when I complained about the fire department.”

“Okay,” Wendy said. “It’s something to do that helps. Yes, I’m tired of the daycare center. I was tired of it when most of this damned place was open cavern and it was just a couple of hundred shaken up Virginians. I’m sick and tired of it now. I’ve watched those kids grow up without sunlight or anyplace to play but a few rooms and I just can’t do it any more.

“I’m tired of wiping noses. I’m tired of not making a contribution. I’m tired of being treated like some sort of brood mare, especially since the only guy I’m willing to be one with is NEVER HERE!”

“Okay,” Annie said, raising a hand. “Gotcha.”

“As to Billy,” Wendy continued, leading the way down the corridor, “Shari was the last person out of Central Square. Billy… looked back.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Elgars said with a sigh. “What and where is Central Square?”

“It was the big shopping center outside of Fredericksburg,” Wendy explained patiently. “The Posleen dropped right on it. Shari just… walked away. Carrying Susie and leading Kelly and Billy. Billy… looked back. He’s never been right since.”

“Okay,” Elgars said patiently. “I still don’t understand. Looked back? At the shopping center? Whatever that is.”

“The Posleen were… eating the people there.”

“Ah.” Elgars thought about that for a second. “That would be bad.”

“And they apparently were… spreading out towards Shari. She says she doesn’t really know because she wouldn’t look back. But Billy did.”

“Okay,” the captain said with a frown. “I guess that would be bad.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Wendy asked. She’d noticed that sometimes the sniper was sometimes almost inhumanly dense about stuff.

“No,” Elgars replied.

“It was like one of those nightmares,” Wendy said with a shudder. “Where something’s chasing you and you can’t get away no matter how fast or where you run. The docs think he’s sort of… locked up in that. Like he can’t think about anything else; he’s just replaying the nightmare.”

“I still don’t get it,” Elgars opined. “I don’t have that nightmare.”

“You don’t?” Wendy asked. “Never?”

“I did once,” Elgars admitted. “But I turned around and killed the thing that was following me.” She shuddered. “It was one of the octopuses again.”

“Octopuses?” Wendy stopped and turned to the captain. “What octopuses?”

“You don’t dream about giant purple octopuses?” Elgars asked in surprise. “I do. Usually I’m watching from the outside and they’re pulling out my brain. It’s like it’s all squiggling worms and they lay it out on a table and hit the worms with mallets to get them to quit squiggling. Every time they hit one of the worms, I can feel it in my head. You never have that dream?”

Wendy had gone from astonishment to wide-eyed shock and now turned back towards their destination shaking her head. “Huh, uh. And, friend that you are, I have to admit that that falls into the category of TMI.”

“TMI?” Elgars asked.

“ ‘Too Much Information.’ ”

“I wouldn’t have run, for that matter.”

“Even with three kids that were your responsibility?” Wendy asked.

“Ah…” Elgars had to stop to think about that. “I probably would have fought anyway. I can’t imagine running from the Posleen. It seems like a losing proposition.”

“Shari’s alive,” Wendy pointed out. “So are her children. All the other people, adults and children, who were at Central Square are dead. Unless you’ve got the force to hold ground, staying is a losing proposition.”

Elgars shrugged as a double set of high blasplas doors, similar to an airlock, retreated into the walls. The room beyond was large: high-ceilinged, at least sixty meters across and even taller than it was wide. The walls were covered in white tiles and there were large fans on the distant ceiling.

In the center of the room was a large structure made out of vitrified stone. It looked something like a small, separate building, about six stories high, but it was covered in black soot and had dozens of different pipe-ends sticking out of it. The numerous windows were all unglazed, with edges cracked as if from hammering or, perhaps, really intense heat. A series of catwalks led off of it to lines arrayed up to the ceiling.

Arrayed along the base of the walls were hundreds of small openings. As Elgars and Wendy entered, the overhead fans kicked on with a distant howl and a faint draft came out of the nearest opening. The fans were drawing the air in the room fast enough to slightly reduce the pressure; if it was not for the hundreds of air-vents along the floor wherever the air did enter would be a hurricane.

The walls were lined with lockers and rescue gear and near the structure in the middle were some of the “fire-carts” that the rescue teams used for transportation in the Sub-Urb. The carts were sort of like a large golf cart with a high pressure pump and racks for rescue gear on the back. With the pump removed they could double as ambulances.

There were about twenty people gathered in the room, most of them females in good to excellent condition. Elgars had met a few of them when Wendy went to her EMS meetings and the captain had to admit that Wendy was in the middle range from a physical perspective. Wendy worked out every day, but she wasn’t very well designed for high-strength, especially upper body strength; among other things she had parts that got in the way. It also appeared that a once a day workout was not quite enough; more than half of the women waiting to try out looked like female triathletes; their arms were corded with muscles and their breasts had shrunk to the point where they were practically nonexistent.

There was a group of emergency personnel confronting them, ten of them in a line. They were wearing the standard day uniform of the emergency, a dark blue Nomex jumpsuit. All of them were female and most looked like ads for a muscle magazine; Elgars had the unkind thought that they probably opened doors by chiseling through with their chins. In front of them was an older female in a bright red coverall. As Wendy joined the group, she glanced at her watch and nodded.

“Okay, I think everybody’s here that’s going to try out,” the firechief said. Eda Connolly had been a lieutenant in the Baltimore Fire Department until she received a politely worded order to leave Baltimore as “excess to defense needs.” She had found herself one of the few fully trained emergency personnel in this hole, but in the last four years she had built a department to be proud of. And she was fundamentally uninterested in lowering her standards.

“You all know what you’re here for,” she continued, gesturing behind her. “You want to join this line. You want to be in emergency services instead of whatever hole the powers that be have stuck you in.

“Fine,” she said with a nod. “I’d love for you to be in emergency services too. I think that if we had three times the number of emergency personnel it would be grand; too many times we find ourselves being run ragged because we don’t have enough hands. But every single hand that we have can do every single job that needs to be done. And that’s not always the easiest thing in this hole.

“There are two million people in this hole. Two million people that, every, single, day, seem to find a new way to get hurt. Arms caught in drains, knifings, shootings, industrial explosions. There are grain elevators that catch on fire, a situation where if you turn off the ventilation the whole thing just blows up. There’s chemical plants and showers to slip and fall in and four thousand foot vertical air shafts that kids manage to climb out into and then panic.

“And all there is keeping them alive, half the time, are these gals,” she said with another gesture behind her. “Every one of them have passed this test. And then, within a week or two, found something harder than this test that they had to complete. Or someone, probably themselves, would die.

“So today you get tested,” she said with a sigh. “And if you complete the course in time, making all the requirments, you’ll be considered for inclusion. I’ve got seven slots to fill. My guess is that only five or six of you will pass. But… I’d rather have five that pass than seven that don’t.”

One of the group behind her stepped forward and handed her a clipboard. She glanced at it and nodded. “As I call your name, step forward, join up with one of the officers behind me to draw bunker gear and get ready to start your evaluation.” She looked up one more time and smiled thinly. “And good luck. Anderson…”

Wendy threw on the bunker-coat and buckled it up. Once upon a time she had heard that there were multiple ways to put on a bunker-coat, most of which could get you killed. It had always seemed silly to her; like having a gun that shot you if you loaded it backwards. The gear was heavy and hot, but it had its purpose. On the wall above the lockers was a sign: “Like a rich armor, worn in the heat of the day.” She’d tried for years to find the source of the quote, but the firefighters weren’t telling and she’d never been able to find it anywhere else.

She reached into her locker and pulled out the breath-pack, spitting into the facescreen and wiping the saliva around to prevent condensation. There were various products to do the same thing, but strangely enough saliva was the least unpleasant at high heat conditions; you could use baby shampoo but it had a vaporization point well below that of the lexan visor and the fumes were unpleasant. Saliva had a low vaporization point as well, but it just smelled a bit of burning hair. Which, if you were vaporizing it off your faceshield, you were already smelling.

She checked the air and all the rest of the gear. There weren’t supposed to be any booby traps built in at this point, but she wasn’t willing to go for “might”; among other things, for part of the test the firehouse would be filled with smoke and she’d need the air.

Everything appeared to be right, though, so she donned the breath-pack, put on the respirator, put on her helmet and turned around.

By that point, the smoke was already streaming out of the smokehouse. The smoke was generated — there was no actual fire involved in the event — but it looked real. It looked as if the smokehouse was going to billow with flames at any moment.

She was supposed to be the fifth person to take the test, but there was only one person in front of her. As she noted that, the first testee exited the smokehouse on the roof and started the rope portion. The various lines above the smokehouse, which stretched around the room in a spiderweb, were an integral portion of the event. The Urb had some awesome chasms in it and emergency personnel never knew when they might be dangling over a two thousand foot drop. Being able to do specific rope work — and more importantly, being fundamentally unafraid of heights — was an important portion of the test.

Wendy shivered. She was not fundamentally unafraid of heights. Quite the opposite. But she could still do the job.

“Cummings.”

She shook herself and tore her eyes away from the testee who had just jumped across a small gap onto a swaying platform. “Yes?”

“You’re up,” said the firefighter who had led her through the preparations.

“Okay.” She knew the firefighter; she knew most of them. But at the test it was all supposed to be totally impersonal. She knew why; she understood why. But it would be nice if somebody acknowledged her; acknowledged that she’d been a reserve ER for four goddamned years and this was the first time she’d managed to even make the pre-quals for the PPE. She paused a moment, but there was nothing else. Then she stepped forward.

“Cummings,” Chief Connolly said. “Eight events. Ladder move, ladder raise/lower, high-rise pack, hydrant manipulation, the Maze, door breach, vertical environment, hose drag and dummy drag. You are familiar with each test?” she asked formally.

“I am,” Wendy answered just as formally, her answer muffled behind the faceshield.

“At each station there will be a firefighter to direct you to the next station. Each station is timed. Movement from station to station is timed. If you ‘bump up’ on the person in front of you, you may wait and rest and the time does not count against you. The entire course, method and time, is graded and you must make a minimum grade of eight hundred points to qualify. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“In addition there are specific items that are automatic fails. If you lose the high-rise pack, it is a fail. If you skip a step of the door breach or misevaluate it is a fail. If you enter the smooth tube in The Maze instead of the corrugated it is a fail. And if you drop the dummy, it is a fail. Are you aware of these fail points?”

“I am.”

“Do you fully understand the requirements to pass the evaluation?”

“I do.”

“Very well,” Connolly said. She looked around for a moment then leaned forward and whispered, very definitively, “Don’t. Drop. The dummy.” Then she straightened up, looked at her watch, pointed at a rack of ladders and said: “Go.”

Wendy trotted over to the ladders at a fair pace. She could have run, but this evaluation was as much about pacing as capability; she’d seen women in fantastic condition wear themselves out halfway through.

Three ladders were racked on the wall, hung vertically. Beside each one, to the left, was a spare, empty rack. The test was simple; lift off each ladder and move it over one rack.

The ladders weighed forty-seven pounds and were awkward in addition; it was quite a test of upper body strength and balance for a one-hundred-and-twenty-pound female to lift and move one, much less three. Add in forty pounds of bunker gear, a breath-pack and all the rest and it was a challenge. And only the first.

She managed the ladders in good time. And managed the second evaluation which was to fully raise and lower, “extend and retract” one of the ladders. Harder than it sounded, it had to be done hand over hand, maintaining control, or the ladder simply “dropped.” A drop was not an automatic fail, but it would count heavily against her.

The third evaluation, the high-rise pack, was the first that she knew was going to kick her ass. This involved carrying an “assault pack,” two fifty foot sections of 1¾-inch attack line, a nozzle, a gated Wye valve and a hydrant wrench, to the fifth floor of the smokehouse. Forget that the smokehouse was living up to its name, with thick black smoke belching from a generator on the ground floor and billowing up through the stairwells. Just lifting the pack — which was about a hundred pounds, or more than seventy percent of her body weight — off the ground was a struggle. The requirement was to move “expeditiously” up the stairs, but in reality nobody managed so much as a trot. Each step was a struggle and by the time she reached the third level she knew that if she paused for even a moment she could never get going again. But finally, panting in the heat from the suit and gasping for air, she saw the firefighter at the top. It was through a haze of gray that was only half to do with the smoke, but she’d made it. She carefully lowered the pack to the ground and just rested on her knees for a moment until the red haze over her vision cleared. Then she stood up and, following the pointed finger, went back downstairs to the Maze.

The Maze was the confined spaces test chamber on the third floor. A plywood and pipe “rat-maze,” it filled only one room but encompassed a total of a hundred and sixty-five feet of linear “floor.” The Maze was multi-level with a series of small passages and doorways, many of which could be slid open or closed at the whim of the testers. None of the passages permitted so much as crouched movement; the entire maze was done on the belly, sometimes crawling at an angle or twisting through three (some suggested four) dimensions to reach a new passage.

Strangely, Wendy had never had a problem with the Maze, even when it was blacked out. Perhaps being buried alive in Fredericksburg had some compensations; she had come out of it with a fundamental lack of claustrophobia. Much the same could be said for Shari, who had waited out the weeks awake. If she had tended to claustrophobia, she would have put herself under like the firefighter who was trapped with her.

That didn’t mean it was easy. The movement method was difficult. But Wendy didn’t have a problem, including remembering not to take the smooth tunnel. The plastic tunnel was greased after a few feet and anyone who went in wasn’t backing out. And it dumped them out right at the feet of the grader.

Wendy, on the other hand, came out the corrugated tunnel and popped to her feet reasonably refreshed. She knew she had made up time on the Maze and the next test, the door breach, was another “good” one for her.

She trotted up the stairs to the roof and picked up the essential tools for the door breach test: a backpack of liquid nitrogen and a CO₂-powered center-punch. The testing device was in the center of the roof; an apparently freestanding doorway with a closed memory plastic door in it.

The design of the door necessitated the unusual gear. For safety reasons, memory plastic doors were designed so that their “base” configuration was “closed.” That meant that a precisely graduated charge had to be applied to them to get them to “open” or collapse into a tube along one side of the door.

When in their extended configuration the doors were very tough; you could hammer at them with a sledge all day long and not get them to break. And for security purposes the charge had to be applied along a recessed edge. When first confronted with this design, emergency personnel were momentarily stumped. However, a former Marine firefighter pointed out that lexan shatters fairly easily when chilled. Thus, a new entry method was born.

The tester nodded when Wendy had the gear on, held up a stopwatch and pressed the start button with a shouted: “Go!”

There were several steps to the door breach and each had to be done precisely. She trotted to the door, positioning herself on the left side, and removed her Nomex gloves then began running her hand over the door and doorframe. She started at the top and ran her hand rapidly across and down. As she reached the bottom left-hand corner of the door she suddenly noted increasing warmth. The bastards.

She stepped back and shouted “Hot door!”

The tester hit the stopwatch and made a notation on her clipboard as Wendy took the opportunity to put her gloves back on. “The door is to be considered hot, but breachable,” the tester said. She did not bother to note that if Wendy had not detected the heat she would have been disqualified; that went without saying. “Continue,” the tester added, hitting the stopwatch again.

Wendy stepped back and looked at the pressure gauge for the LN bottle. The bottle had a line running out of it to a nozzle similar in appearance to a flamethrower. The outlet pressure, which was controllable at the nozzle, determined how far the stream of nitrogen would go. There was a maximum effective distance, but that really didn’t matter. What was important was to reduce, as far as possible, splashback.

The nitrogen gushed out of the nozzle in a white, foaming stream, exploding into vapor as it heated in the room-temperature atmosphere. The reason that the test was on the roof was two-fold; it permitted the gas to be carried off and it prevented having a supercooled room.

There was a limited splashback zone, about a foot out from the door, and the small amount of liquid quickly boiled off. Before it had entirely vanished, however, Wendy stepped forward, avoiding the drops, and placed her punch against the left side of the door.

Normally she would have placed it against the lower left, but with the single point of high temperature being there, she felt a need to adjust. As cold as the nitrogen was, the memory plastic of the doors had a fairly high specific heat and the lower left might not have cooled off enough to be cleared.

Placing the punch, she angled it so that it would go straight in but, in the event of a refractory door, would not kick into her body, and pulled the trigger.

The punch, which looked somewhat like a cordless electric drill, contained a twenty-centimeter steel spike, charged by a CO₂ cartridge in the handle. When triggered, the spike flew out at over three hundred meters per second, penetrating the door and, if it was cold enough, shattering the plastic.

In this case it was cold enough and the door shattered from top to bottom, breaking into chunks ranging from dust up to a few centimeters across. The sole exception was an almost perfectly circular point on the lower lefthand corner. It looked like her decision not to punch the door there was a good one.

She looked at the person in a silver suit on the other side of the doorway. The firefighter was holding a propane torch in one hand and faintly through the layers of lexan Wendy could see a grin.

“Bitch,” she whispered under her breath with a returning grin. You always popped the door on the lower left, if you were right-handed anyway. It was the safest side and generally the bottom of a door was cool in all but the most intense fires.

The firefighter just pointed at the start of the rope course.

God, this was going to be a long day.

She managed to survive the gear drag and rope course. Both of them were basically gut-checks, in one case for strength and in the other for fear of heights. She wasn’t the strongest person on the course and she hated heights, but she could take gut-checks all day long.

But at the end of the rope course, the only thing left was the buddy drag. She started to trot over to the station and realized that she just didn’t have any trot left. She kept wondering when that famous second wind was going to kick in, but so far the only thing that had kicked in was utter fatigue. The buddy drag was going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

The test involved lifting a 225-pound dummy and dragging it. The dummy was on the ground, lying on its back, dressed in a bunker-coat and trousers. The candidate was required to lift the dummy up, holding it from behind with their arms wrapped around to the front, and drag it one hundred feet without dropping the dummy.

“Don’t drop the dummy,” she whispered, grabbing it by the shoulder of the bunker-coat and pulling it up to a sitting position. The head flopped to the side and the arms dangled, all of the appendages getting in the way no matter what she did. Finally she maneuvered herself behind it, her arms under the dummy’s, right hand gripping the front of the bunker-coat and left hand locked on her right wrist.

With a grunt she straightened her legs, getting the dummy up, and then just paused, trying not to sway. The dummy was taller and much heavier than she was and just staying on her feet was a challenge. Finally, she leaned carefully backwards and started dragging.

Every step was an agony and a struggle. There was no momentum to build up, that evil enemy gravity prevented anything along those lines. She just had to drag it step by painful step. Two thirds of the way there, her grip on her wrist slipped, but a quick snatch with the left hand got a handful of bunker-coat and the dummy didn’t, quite, fall. Now all she had was its coat and her Nomex gloves had gotten slippery with sweat so maintaining her hold was problematic. But she could still do it. She was nearly there.

Then disaster hit. She was within ten feet of the line, almost completely done, when she felt the first snap give way.

The dummy, unfortunately, had been used for thousands of drags. It had been lifted and carried and hauled hither and yon and always in the same bunker-coat. A bunker-coat which chose that moment to decide to open up.

She felt the snaps give way and frantically started scrabbling at the front of the coat, trying to get a handhold anywhere. The dummy poised for a moment on her knee, but then her last handhold slipped and it hit the floor.

She just stood there and… looked at it. The dummy was on the floor. She’d dropped the dummy. After all that…

She wanted to scream. She wanted to beg for another chance. And she knew that if she did either one, she’d never be accepted for another evaluation. So she just stood there, tears streaming down her face, unable to move as one of the examiners came over, buttoned up the bunker-coat and lifted the dummy into a shoulder carry to reposition it.

Finally, Chief Connolly came over and took her by the arm. She led her over to a bench and pulled off her helmet.

“There’ll be other events,” Connolly said. “All you have to do is as well as you did and don’t drop the dummy.”

“How did you know?” Wendy whispered.

“I didn’t,” Connolly answered turning to watch the next candidate. “I jinxed you. I knew you had screwed up your courage for the rope sequence so I decided to throw you a curve on the dummy. I didn’t fiddle with the buckles, though. That was just bad luck.”

“Bad luck,” Wendy whispered. “That’s the story of my life.”

“And that’s why I jinxed you,” Connolly said calmly. “You don’t really have your head around this yet. It’s all a game to you, even when it’s tough. I don’t want anybody going into the fire with me that’s in it for the ‘fun.’ Or the uniform. Or anything, but the burning desire to kill the flame and save the people.”

Connolly turned back to look at her and shook her head. “You’re still playing fireman, Wendy. That’s what your psych profile says; that’s why you’re not in Security either. You’re not sure that you can do it, you’re not sure you can handle it and you want to play at it for a while to see if you like it. I don’t want anybody in the department who’s just playing. I don’t want anyone who isn’t perfectly, completely, confident and competent. We’ve got too big a responsibility for ‘might.’ ”

Wendy looked up at her for a moment and nodded her head. “Fuck you.” She pointed her finger at the firechief as she opened her mouth. “If you say another fucking word I will kick your ass,” she whispered, getting to her feet and then getting to her feet again to stand on the bench so she could look the taller firefighter in the eye.

“Let me tell you about bad luck, Chief ‘I am God’ Connolly,” she whispered again, carefully stripping off the bunker gear. “Bad luck is knowing, not worrying, not wondering, but knowing that the Posleen are going to kill you and then almost assuredly eat you. Bad luck is having every single member of your family, everyone that you are going to school with, everyone you have ever known, killed in one day. Bad luck is seeing your life wiped out in an instant.

“You came here from Baltimore before it was even invested,” Wendy continued softly. “You’ve never seen a Posleen except on television. You’ve never seen them in their waves, cresting the hills and filling every corner of your town. You’ve never heard the crack of railgun rounds overhead or had your ears ringing from missiles slamming into the houses around you.

“You’re right. I don’t want to be a fucking fireman. I don’t want to pull hoses and run up and down stairs all day. I want to kill fucking Posleen. I hate them. I hate them passionately. You think you hate fire, but you love it at the same time; most firemen do. Well, I don’t love Posleen at all. I take it back, I don’t even hate Posleen. I despise them. I don’t respect them, I don’t think they are fascinating, I just want them to cease to exist.”

She’d stripped out of the bunker gear by then and she stood in the coverall tall and stone faced. “You’re right, I’m playing at firefighting. Because compared to killing Posleen, firefighting ain’t shit. So. Fuck you. Fuck your tests. And fuck this department. I’m done.”

“You’re right,” said Connolly. “You are. I’ll keep you on the reserve rolls, but don’t bother turning up for drills. Not until you can keep it together.”

“Oh, I’ve got it together,” Wendy said, turning away. “Never better.”

“Cummings,” the chief called.

“What?” Wendy asked, pausing, but not bothering to turn around.

“Don’t do anything… stupid. I don’t want to be cleaning you up from someplace.”

“Oh, you won’t be cleaning me up,” Wendy said, walking away. “But if anybody gives me any shit, you might as well bring the toe-tags.”