When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 15 Franklin Sub-Urb, Franklin, NC, United States, Sol III 1048 EDT Thursday September 24, 2009 ad

“Look, buddy, do you have a problem with the concept of ‘written orders’?” Mosovich asked.

The security guard behind the armored glass looked at the piece of paper again, then gestured for them to wait. “Let me call somebody. This is the first time I’ve had to deal with this.”

“I hate these fucking holes,” Mueller grumped. And Mosovich had to agree. Mansfield was going to owe him. Big time.

The “request” to go check out this crazy bitch came at a good time, anyway. After the last reconnaissance debacle, the corps commander had ordered a halt to long-range patrols for the time being. The gap was being taken up by increased use of unmanned aerial vehicles and scout crawlers. The former were small aircraft, most of them not much larger than a red-tailed hawk, that hovered along in the trees, probing forward against the Posleen lines. The problem with them was that the Posleen automated systems identified and destroyed them with remarkable ease. So they would only get a brief view of any Posleen activity. Crawlers — which looked like foot-long mechanical ants — did a little bit better. But even they had not been able to penetrate very far; whoever was commanding the Posleen had the main encampment screened tighter than a tick.

Mosovich had heard rumor that Bernard had requested permission to nuke the encampment with SheVa antimatter rounds. It had been denied of course — the President was death on nuclear weapons — but the fact that the question might have been asked was comforting. It meant that somebody was taking the landing seriously.

However, until they figured out a way to probe the Posleen, Mosovich, Mueller and Sister Mary didn’t have a job. Since sooner or later somebody was going to notice and figure out something stupid for them to do, Mosovich was just as glad to have this “request” forwarded through corps. It had ensured a written pass from headquarters, without which getting in would have been nearly impossible. And it got them away from corps and the various idiotic projects that the staff would be coming up with.

The flip side to it was that they had to go into the Sub-Urb. He’d been in a couple in the last five years and they were depressing as hell. The sight of all those people shoved underground was somehow obscene. Especially since ten years before, ninety percent of them had been living in comfortable neighborhoods. On the lines there were times when you could almost imagine that, yeah, there was a really big war. But, fundamentally the United States was still there, still functioning. And once the off-planet forces returned, everything could go back to being more or less normal.

Then you went to a Sub-Urb and realized that you were kidding yourself.

The Franklin Sub-Urb had a particularly bad reputation and he wasn’t surprised. Half the escalators on the personnel entrance they used had been out of order and the reception area was scuffed and filthy with trash and dirt piled up in the corners. And the security point, an armor-glass-fronted cubicle something like a movie theater ticket booth, was even worse. Every shelf in the booth was piled with empty food containers, half of which were filled with cigarette butts.

Realistically, though, the conditions weren’t too surprising. Not only was it one of the oldest ones, meaning that it had people from the first refugee waves when the Posleen were really hammering civilians, but its proximity to the corps support facilities had only managed to degrade the condition. They’d had to catch a ride from their barracks in the Gap to Franklin and it was apparent on the ride that even though the Line forces in the Gap weren’t the greatest, the support groups were worse. No wonder they’d placed the Urb off limits; he’d have kept these “soldiers” out and he was a soldier. And from what he’d heard the first few months when they hadn’t kept the soldiers out boiled down to a sack.

No wonder the security was jumpy about letting them in. Especially armed.

Mosovich shifted his rifle as the female guard returned with an older male. The newcomer was overweight, but not sloppily; it was clear that a good bit of the body was muscle. He was wearing rank tabs for a security major which meant he was probably the senior officer on duty. No wonder she’d been gone for a while.

“Sergeant Major—” the security officer said, looking at the e-mail orders, ” — Mosovich?”

“The same, and my senior NCO, Master Sergeant Mueller.”

“Could I see some ID?” he asked.

“Okay,” Jake said, fishing out his ID card and gun orders.

“This is fairly irregular,” the security officer continued. “We have a few personnel that have open permission to pass back and forth. But for all practical purposes no military personnel are permitted other than that.”

“Unless they’re on orders,” Mosovich said. He supposed that he could bow and scrape and it might help. But the hell if he would to this Keystone Kop outfit.

The officer carefully considered the two IDs and then sighed. “Okay, it looks like I have to let you in…”

“Then would you mind opening the door?” Mueller growled.

The officer put his hands on his hips. “First, a few words…”

“Look, Major…” Mosovich leaned forward and peered at the badge, ”… Peanut? We’re not support pogues. We’re not the barbarians you had coming down here before. I may look 22, but I’m 57; I was in the Army when you were a gleam in your daddy’s eye. We’re here on a mission, not to fuck around. And there’s only two of us; if your department can’t take down two soldiers then you need to shitcan it and get some real guards. And, as you noted, we’ve got qualified passes. So open the door.”

“Well, that covers part of it,” the major said dryly. “Here’s the rest. People down here don’t have guns. They don’t like guns; they’re afraid of them. Except for the ones that want them and will gladly take yours if you give them half a chance. Carry them slung across your back, not combat slung. Make sure you maintain control of them at all times. If you lose one, I guarantee you that the corps commander will make your life absolute hell.”

“He’d be hard pressed,” Jake said. “We’re Fleet. But I take your meaning.”

“Okay,” the major said with a sigh, activating a solenoid. “Welcome to the Franklin Sub-Urb.”

Mueller shook his head as they passed through another one of the open gathering areas. “Strange looks.” The sprite turned left out of the commons and onto another slideway.

“Yeah,” Mosovich replied. “Sheep.”

Mueller knew what he meant. The people of the Sub-Urbs were giving them the sort of look sheep gave sheepdogs. They knew that the dog wouldn’t bite them. Probably. This time. But they definitely did not like to see the uniforms or the guns. To sheep, all sheepdogs are wolves.

“Probably worried about an attack,” Mosovich added.

“I would be,” Mueller agreed. The Sub-Urb was an easy drive from the front lines; whatever idiot put it this close should be shot.

“No way out,” Mosovich said. “Stupid.”

“Lots,” Mueller contradicted. “All marked. And the armory at the front.”

Mosovich just snorted. If the Posleen ever came up the Gap, the people in the Sub-Urb were so many food animals caught in their pens. And with the Armory on the upper side of the Urb, unless they got the word in very good time, the Posleen would be sitting on their weapons.

The decision had been made to make the Urbs zero weapons zones and in the eyes of Mosovich and plenty of other people that was just wrong. If everyone in the Urb was armed it would probably mean a higher murder rate. But compared to the one hundred percent loss in the event of an attack, even one by a random landing, a few murders would be worth it. Besides, the improved defenses if everyone was armed might keep the Posleen out.

Nonetheless, through a combination of politics and Galactic intransigence the Urbs had been disarmed.

“Stupid.” Mueller shook his head.

Mosovich nodded as he turned down a brightly lit corridor. The walls had murals on them, which was unusual, and each of the doors had the nameplate of a different doctor on it. The sprite stopped in front of a door marked “Dr. Christine Richards, Psy.D.”

Mosovich touched the entry pad and the door chimed.

“Yes?” a voice asked through the pad.

“Doctor Richards? It’s Sergeant Major Mosovich. I’m here to talk to you about Captain Elgars?” The good doctor was supposed to have received an e-mail, but who knew what was really happening.

“Could this wait?” the box asked. “I’m preparing a report right now, but it’s not complete.”

“Well, you can report all you’d like, doc,” Mosovich replied to the speaker. He was getting a bit ticked about talking to a closed door. “But I suspect that the Army is going to pay more attention to me than you. And I’m going from here to run down Elgars. So this is your one chance to convince me that Elgars is crazy.”

The door opened and Dr. Richards sighed. “She’s not crazy, she’s possessed.”

Dr. Richards had spread out all the case files for Annie Elgars on her table, trying to explain why she wasn’t crazy. “I want you to look at this,” she said, laying down a long strip of paper with squiggly lines on it.

“Okay, I know my line here,” Mosovich said. “I’m supposed to say ‘Is this a brain map, doctor?’ But Special Forces guys used to get shrunk all the time and I’ve seen an EEG before.”

“Fine,” Richards said, pulling out a textbook. “You’re right, that’s an EEG and it’s Elgars’ to be exact.” She opened up the book to a marked page and pointed to the lines on the paper. “This is a normal EEG when a person is awake, or not in alpha mode. Look at it.”

Mosovich did and then at Elgar’s EEG. There was no comparison. “What are all these extra notches?” he asked, pointing to Elgars’.

“You tell me,” Richards snapped. “And here, look at this.” She riffled through the readouts until she came to another one that was marked. “When you do stuff that you’ve done thousands of times, the sort of stuff that they say ‘He can do it in his sleep.’ What’s really happening is that your brain switches to alpha mode, which really is like you’re asleep. It’s one of the bases for zen, that ‘state of nothingness.’ Look, when you’re shooting, do you actually think about what you’re doing?”

“I know what you’re talking about here,” Mueller interjected. “You’re talking about like when you’re in a shoothouse. No, you have to turn your brain off and let go, let your training do the thinking for you. When you’re really clicking we call it ‘being in the Zone.’ ”

“Exactly,” Richards said, pointing a different set of spikes. “This is alpha state. In Elgars’ case, she doesn’t have many specific memories, but she can perform a remarkable series of actual manual tasks. If a person is that badly injured, you expect them to have to learn to walk and eat and go to the bathroom all over again. When Elgars was wheeled into the recovery room, she was lucid and capable of performing almost all normal daily functions. Furthermore, we have since determined that she has a wide variety of basic skills, including driving and operating a variety of hand weaponry from knives to very large rifles.”

She pointed to the chart, running her finger along the normal rhythms until she got to the alpha rhythm and then pulling the book up alongside. “This is the transition point, where she goes from beta to alpha. And here is a normal transition.”

Mosovich and Mueller both leaned forward and looked. Again, the transition area was completely different than the textbook version. It was somewhat longer and had numerous extraneous spikes. Mosovich pointed to the alpha rhythm on the chart.

“Her alpha looks almost textbook, though,” he noted.

“Yes, it is,” Richards said. “The differences are just those of being a different human. And that’s the other scary part; her alpha is absolutely normal.”

“So that’s why she’s possessed?” Mueller asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Look,” Richards said with a sigh, leaning back in her chair and taking off her glasses to rub her eyes. “None of us are experts at this. I was a damned family counselor before they sent me down here. We have one, repeat, one clinical psych researcher, and he was an expert on sleep disorders. We’re all out of our depth on this… phenomenon. But… yes, we have come to the conclusion that there is more than one… person, not just personality, person, living in Elgars’ head. And that the primary personality might not be, probably is not, Anne Elgars.”

“Why not Elgars?” Mosovich asked, thinking that Mansfield was really gonna owe him big time.

“Memories mostly,” Richards said, putting her glasses back on and scrabbling through her notes. “Anne Elgars has memories that she really shouldn’t have.” The doctor finally seemed to find the notes she was looking for and frowned. “Ever seen the movie Top Gun?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Mosovich admitted. “A few times.”

“You’re a rejuv though, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see it when it first came out?” Richards asked.

“I think so,” Mosovich said with a shrug. “Probably. That was, what? ’82? ’84? I think I was at Bad Tölz then. If I saw it, I saw it on post.”

“The movie came out in 1986,” Richards said, glancing at her notes. “Elgars has distinct memories of seeing it for the first time in a movie theater then going over to a friend’s house, driving herself to a friend’s house to, as she put it, ‘jump his bones.’ ”

“So?” Muller asked.

“Anne Elgars was two years old in 1986,” Richards said, looking up and taking off her glasses again. “Even the most open-minded of parent is going to question her two-year-old driving. At the least. And she has another memory of watching it for the first time on TV in a living room.”

“Oh,” Mueller said. “What about… what’s it called… ‘implanted memory syndrome’?”

“Up, got me there,” Mosovich said. “Whassat?”

“We considered classical implanted memory,” Richards said, leaning back again. “Implanted memory used to be called ‘regression analysis.’ It turned out that the process for regression analysis implants a memory that is absolutely true to the person with the memory. I could run you through a little scenario right now and you’d end up with a memory of having been a giraffe. Or a woman. Or that you were sexually abused as a child. Guaranteed. And none of them would be real.

“It caused huge problems for a while with child molestation cases; I was still dealing with the repercussions when I got moved down here. Still am for that matter. Women that have a distinct memory of having been molested by a parent or a family friend and it’s very unlikely that it ever happened. The only way to get them to even consider that the memory is false is to go through the same process with one that is clearly impossible. And then they end up with this really impossible memory. Which has its own problems.”

She shrugged and put her glasses back on. “What can I say? I’ve dealt with dozens of implanted memories in my time. This one doesn’t show any of the classic signs. She recalls small details that are not germane to the memory. That’s one sign of a ‘true’ memory versus implanted. Then there’s the EEG.” She picked up the alpha rhythm sheet and pointed to the transition. “We think that weird transition is where she is hunting for the right… call it ‘soul’… to manage the action. It only happens the first time she engages a skill, so new examples are getting harder and harder to find. But it’s consistent. And she goes alpha when she shouldn’t. When she’s writing, for example. That’s not a normal alpha moment, except when typing.”

“So what’s going on here?” Mosovich asked in exasperation.

“Like I said, we’re not experts,” Richards answered. “We can only speculate. You want our speculation?”

“Yes,” Mueller said. “Please.”

“Okay,” Richards said, taking off the glasses and setting them on the table. “Anne Elgars sustained a massive head wound in the battle of Washington. The damage was extensive and large portions of her brain showed no normal function. She was in a coma, effectively a permanent one, for nearly five years.

“The Tch… Tchfe…” she paused.

“We usually just say Crabs, doc,” Mosovich said. “Although the best pronouncement a human can get along with is Tch-fet.” He smiled. “I’m one of the few people I know who has ever had to try to speak Crab. And even I don’t try when I don’t have to.”

“Very well, the… the Crabs approached the therapy team, us that is, with an offer to try to heal her. They noted that she might die in the process, but that if it worked it would permit various others who had sustained damage to be recovered as well.

“We had… authorization to do whatever we liked, except cut off her lifeline, so we acquiesced. She disappeared with the… Crabs and reappeared… as she is. In less than a week, with significant muscular improvement. ‘Miraculous’ was the most minor word we used.”

Richards paused and shrugged. “From there on out, it’s speculation.” She frowned and shook her head. “Crazy speculation if you don’t mind my using the word.

“Say you have a computer that is broken. You pull out the broken parts, clear out the memory and load on new software. We think that’s what the Crabs did… All of it.”

“Shit,” Mueller whispered. “You mean they…”

“They probably had to cut portions of the brain away,” Richards said. “Or something just as radical. The damage was extensive and not just a result of bruising; she had some comintuated fractures in her tissue. Repairing that would require cutting and regeneration in, say, your liver. At least for us humans. But whatever the Crabs did, it was just as extensive. And when you finish that, you still have a ‘dead’ computer. So we think they took a… personality, a person if you will, that they had… hanging around, and loaded it in Elgars. And the memory stuff that we’re seeing is the result of the sort of little fragments of code you just have… hanging around. You rarely can get rid of all of it in a computer, much less a human.”

“So, Anne Elgars the person is dead,” Mosovich said. “This is a different person entirely.”

“Sort of,” Richards said with another sigh. “Don’t ask me about souls. Who or what a person is is a religious debate as much as a psychological one. For one thing, nature does have some influence on it; that’s been repeatedly proven. People seem to tend to… fill a mold that is somewhat prepared. They’re not locked in deterministically, but it is unlikely that the person Anne Elgars eventually becomes is either Anne Elgars or the person that the Crabs apparently ‘loaded into her.’ ”

“What about the thing with the alpha waves?” Mueller asked.

“Ah, that’s different,” she answered. “Anne not only seems to have been loaded with a person, but also, separately, loaded with skills. And we think that some of them are ‘integral’ to the base personality, or even the original Elgars, and others are separate. So when she runs across a new situation, she has to ‘hunt’ for the right file so to speak. It’s quite unconscious on her part; she has no idea what she is doing. But that’s the reason for the odd transition.”

“Well, I don’t know who she is,” Mosovich said. “But the question is, can she do her job? Right now we need every rifle we can get. Can she soldier or not?”

“She can do a job,” Richards answered. “Quite easily. She’s programmed to be a soldier, arguably a ‘supersoldier.’ She has skills ranging from advanced marksmanship to field expedient demolitions. She can certainly soldier. The question is, what else is she programmed for?”

Wendy opened the door at the buzz, tucked a squirming Amber under one arm and frowned at the figure in camouflage filling the door. “We gave at the office.”

Mueller frowned. “I’d think this was your office.”

“It is, but we already contributed,” Wendy answered. “In other words, what are you here for?”

“Ah, we were told we could find Captain Anne Elgars here,” Mueller said. “From the picture, you are not Captain Elgars. However, it is nice to make your acquaintance Miz… ?”

“Cummings,” Wendy said, wincing at the anticipated joke. She had lived with her name her whole life. “Wendy Cummings.”

“Master Sergeant Mueller,” Mueller said. “Charmed. And is Captain Elgars available?” he continued as the baby let out a howl like a fire engine.

“Sure, I’ll get her,” Wendy said. “Come on in.”

She stepped around Kelly, who had chosen the middle of the floor as the obvious place to do a life-sized Tigger puzzle, and walked towards the back.

Mueller looked over his shoulder at Mosovich and shrugged, then stepped through the door. The room was filled with the sort of happy bedlam you get with any group of children, but the noise was dying as the kids noticed the visitors. Before too long Mosovich and Mueller found themselves in a semicircle of kids.

“Are you a real soldier?” one of the little girls asked. Her eyes were brown and just about as big around as saucers.

Mueller squatted down to where he wasn’t much over their height and nodded his head. “Yep. Are you a real little girl?”

The girl giggled as one of the boys leaned forward. “Is that a real gun?”

“Yes,” Mosovich said with a growl. “And if you touch it you’ll get a swat.”

“Guns aren’t toys, son,” Mueller added. “What’s your name?”

“Nathan,” the kid said. “I’m gonna be a soldier when I grow up and kill Posleen.”

“And that’s a fine thing to want to do,” Mueller opined. “But you don’t start off with a big gun. You learn on little guns first. And someday, if you eat your vegetables, you’ll be big like me. And you can kill Posleen all day long.”

“Without getting tired?” one of the girls asked.

“Well…” Mueller said, flipping a surreptitious finger at Mosovich for laughing, “you do get tired.”

“Okay, let’s start getting ready for lunch, children,” Shari said, coming out of the back with Elgars and Wendy. “Leave these gentlemen alone. Wash hands then sit down for grace.”

“I’m Elgars,” said the captain, ignoring the children. She had white powder on her hands and a cheek.

“Captain, I’m Sergeant Major Mosovich with Fleet Recon and this is my senior NCO Master Sergeant Mueller.” He paused and then nodded as if he’d done some sort of a mental checklist. “Your commander, Colonel Cutprice, sent a message to one of my troops asking him to come down here and find out if you needed rescuing from the shrinks. I don’t know if you remember Nichols, but you two went through sniper school together. He got banged up on our last op and is still down in the body-and-fender so I came down here with Mueller instead. Anyway, here I am.”

“Okay,” Elgars said, with a nod. “So am I being rescued from the shrinks?”

“Is there someplace we can talk, ma’am?” Mosovich temporized. “Someplace quieter?” he added as the children trooped back from the bathroom.

“Not really,” Elgars said, raising her voice slightly over the children. “The kitchen isn’t much better. We’d have to go to my quarters and I can’t really afford the time for that.”

“Is this where… Do you work here, ma’am?” Mosovich asked.

“Sort of,” she answered. “I help out. I’m following Wendy around, getting my bearings again.”

“Well,” Mosovich frowned. “Okay, the question, ma’am, is, how do you feel about going back on active duty?”

“I feel okay about it,” Elgars said. “Can I ask a question?”

“Of course, ma’am.”

“Are you here to evaluate me?”

It was this question that had made Mosovich pause early in the discussion. The question was whether to answer honestly or do the two-step. He finally decided that honesty was the right policy even if it wasn’t the best.

“I guess you could say that, ma’am,” the sergeant major admitted. “I got told to come down here and check you out then report back to your commander in writing as to your perceived fitness. You don’t normally use a sergeant major to report on an officer and I’m not a psychologist. But I’ve been beating around this war for quite a while and I guess the powers that be trust my judgement.”

“Okay,” Elgars said. “In that case I’ll be honest too. I don’t know what the hell a captain does. I can shoot, I know that. I can do other stuff. But I keep finding holes. And I have no idea what the job of a captain even is. So being a captain would be tough.”

Mueller tapped Mosovich on the shoulder and whispered in his ear. Mosovich turned and looked at him with a quizzical expression and held a finger up to Elgars. “Captain, could you excuse me for just a moment.”

He and Mueller went over into a corner of the daycare center and spoke for a moment. Elgars could see Mosovich shaking his head and Mueller gesturing. After a moment, Wendy came over to ask Elgars what was going on.

“I dunno,” the captain replied. “But I don’t think I’m gonna like it.”

Mosovich came back over and looked at both of them. He opened his mouth for a moment, stopped, glanced over his shoulder at Mueller. Looked at Wendy for a second then looked at Elgars.

“Captain,” he said over the shrilling of the children in the background. “I don’t think we can get a good read on how you really feel about your abilities in this environment.”

Elgars looked at him for second, looked at Wendy then looked back. “So, what would you suggest?”

“Mueller suggests that the four of us go take a turn up on the surface. Maybe go to dinner, go to a range, see how you feel about being in an environment other than…” at which point Shakeela started with one of her patented howls ”… a daycare center.”

“Sergeant Major Mosovich,” Wendy asked with a raised eyebrow, “are you suggesting a double date?”

“No,” Mosovich said. “Just a chance to talk somewhere other than in here.”

“Uh, huh,” Wendy said, glancing at Mueller, who returned a look that said butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Well, Shari can’t take care of the children alone. I think that Captain Elgars is capable of taking care of herself, however, so why don’t the three of you go?”

“Okay,” Mosovich said with a shrug. “Works for me.”

“Hold it,” Elgars said. “Wendy, how long has it been since you’ve been to the surface?”

“November?” Wendy asked with a frown.

“Uh, huh,” Elgars said. “What year?”

“Uh…” Wendy shook her head. “2007?”

“And how long has it been since Shari had anything resembling a break?” Elgars asked.

“Taking the kids to the surface wouldn’t be a break,” Wendy noted. “But… I don’t think she’s been out of the Urb since we came here from Fredericksburg. And the last time I was up there was… was to give testimony,” she continued with a stony face.

“Well, I think we should all take a trip up to the surface,” Elgars said.

“With the kids?” Mosovich asked incredulously.

“Sure,” Mueller said. “With the kids. Stress testing for the captain.”

“Christ, okay, whatever,” Mosovich said, raising his hands. “Stress testing for me. We’ll all go up top and have dinner someplace in Franklin. See how Elgars handles being out and about. I’ll include that in my report and we’ll see what Colonel Cutprice says.”

“I could use some help,” Shari said, walking over.

“Well, that clarifies that,” Wendy said with a laugh.

“Clarifies what?”

“The sergeant major needs to spend some time around Captain Elgars,” Mueller noted. “I recommended going to the surface, along with Wendy so that the captain wouldn’t be completely alone. Wendy pointed out that you needed too much help with the kids for her to leave. So it came down to inviting all of you to the surface.”

“Where, on the surface?” Shari asked nervously.

“There’s at least one decent place in Franklin, I think,” Mosovich noted. “It’s an R R area for the corps. There’s got to be someplace.”

“I dunno,” said Shari, reluctantly. “Franklin? It…”

“It doesn’t have a very good reputation down here,” Wendy noted with a grim chuckle.

“We don’t go there much either,” Mueller said. “But, trust me, the food’s better than down here.”

“I’m not sure…” Shari said.

“Well, I am,” Wendy argued. “How long have we been down here? Five years? How long since you’ve seen the sun?”

“Long time,” Shari whispered with a nod. “Except for Billy, I don’t think any of the kids remember what it looks like.”

“There will be three trained soldiers with us,” Wendy noted. “It will be safe. It will be a chance for the kids to look at the surface. How bad can it be?”

“There’s basically no Posleen activity at the moment,” Mosovich pointed out. “There’s a globe around Clarkesville acting funny, but they haven’t done anything either. Except chase us around the hills.”

“Okay,” Shari said after a moment’s thought. “Let’s do it. Like you said, Wendy, how bad can it be?”

“You’ve completely outgrown this, Billy,” Shari said, adjusting Billy’s windbreaker as Wendy negotiated for her personal weapon.

“This is… unbelievable,” she said looking at the weapon. It was an Advanced Infantry Weapon, the standard issue weapon for the Ground Forces, a 7.62 semi-automatic rifle with a 20mm grenade launcher on the underside. This one had been personalized with a laser sight on the top.

Had.

“Where’s my laser sight?” she asked angrily, turning the rusted weapon over and over. “I turned this in with a Leupold four power scope that was laser mounted. There does not appear to be a Leupold scope on this weapon. There also were three more magazines. And you made me turn in my two hundred rounds of ammo that weren’t in the mags. So where is all that?”

“The inventory just lists the weapon,” the guard said, looking at his screen. “No ammo, no scope, no magazines.”

“Well, bugger that,” Wendy said, leaning forward to shove a faded receipt against the greenish glass. “You want to read this motherfucking receipt, asshole? What the fuck am I supposed to do with a weapon and no goddamned rounds?”

“Wendy,” Mosovich said, pulling at her arm. “Give it up. There’s no scope. There’s no rounds. These assholes shot them off long ago. And the scope is probably on this dickhead’s personal weapon. That he hasn’t shot in a year.”

“You want to get out of here at all you better jack up that attitude, Lurp-Boy,” the guard snarled from behind the glass.

Mueller leaned forward until his nose was within inches of the armored glass and smiled. “HEY!” he shouted, then laughed as the guard jumped. He reached into the billow pockets of his blouse and pulled out a charge of C-4. Pulling off an adhesive cover he applied it to the glass then began patting his pockets, muttering “Detonators, detonators…”

Mosovich smiled. “You wanna open the doors or you want I should come in and press the button?”

He smiled and nodded as the armored doors behind him slid back. “Thanks so very much. And if you’re thinking about dicking around with the elevators, let me just point out that that means we’ll have to come back.”

“And… have a nice day,” Mueller said, taking Kelly’s hand and heading for the door.

“I can’t believe this,” Wendy snarled as she turned the rifle over and over in her hands. “I dropped this thing off immaculate. Like the day it came from the factory.”

“I doubt it would even work now,” Mueller said with a sigh. “Those things are a bastard when they rust. It’s the firing mechanism; it’s fragile as hell.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mosovich said. “It’s not like we’re going to get jumped by the Posleen in Franklin.”

“We heard they were all over the place,” Shari asked nervously, as they reached the elevators to the surface. “That people are killed every day.”

“Oh, they are,” Mueller said walking over to hit the elevator button. The elevator was huge, easily large enough to carry a semi-trailer, separated into lines by a chain and post arrangement. Several of the chains dangled free and one of the posts rolled on the ground as it lurched sideways. “There must be three or four civilians killed every day by ferals. You know how many people were killed every day in car wrecks before the war?”

“Yeah,” Mosovich agreed. “Death rates, excepting combat casualties, have dropped in the States.”

“Why are we going sideways?” Elgars interjected.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot you’ve never been in one,” Mosovich said. “There are multiple elevators for each shaft, so that incoming refugees could be shuttled down really fast. There’s an ‘up’ shaft and a ‘down’ shaft and they slide between the two.” He nodded as the structure shuddered and began to rise. “I’ve been on one that got stuck; wasn’t pleasant. Anyway, where were we?”

“Reduced death rate,” Shari said.

“Not reduced overall, mind you,” Mueller said. “Combat casualty rates have made up for it.”

“How many?” Elgars asked. “I mean, combat casualties?”

“Sixty-two million,” Mosovich said. “In the U.S. and of American military forces. And that’s just the military losses. Pales compared to China and India, mind you, but still pretty bad.”

“Six…” Shari gasped. “Could you say that again?”

“Sixty-two million,” Mueller said quietly. “At the height of the war there were nearly that many under arms in the Contiguous U.S., what they call CONUS, and in the Expeditionary Forces. But in the last five years, most combat units, most infantry battalions, have had three casualties for every position in them. That is, they have had three hundred percent casualties. At its height, the American portion of the EFs had nearly forty million personnel. But the total casualties have topped that and the AEF is below twelve million, and only half of that is actual ‘shooting at the Posleen’ fighters.”

“And there’s a steady attrition in the interior,” Mosovich added. “There’s still landings from time to time; there was a globe that made it down, mostly intact, near Salt Lake just last year.”

“We heard about that,” Wendy said. “But… nothing like those casualty figures.”

“They’re not very open with them,” Mosovich agreed. “Add in the forty million or so civilian casualties and the fact that we’re fighting this war in the middle of a ‘drop’ in males of prime military age and we’re… well, we’re getting bled white. Even with rejuving older guys, taking a person that has never held a weapon in their hands and teaching when they are eighteen is one thing, doing it when they’re fifty is… different. They, generally, aren’t stupid enough to be good soldiers. Not cannon fodder soldiers. Young guys want to be heroes so the women will love them and have their babies. Old guys just want to live to see the next sunrise.”

“Which just makes keeping women out of combat units stupid,” Wendy said, shaking her head at the condition of her rifle. “This is…” She shook her head again. “I know that I can depend on you big strong men to protect me. But I don’t want to have to!”

“Don’t sweat it,” Mosovich said with a chuckle. “We’ll find you a weapon. And women generally aren’t stupid enough either; they can have babies any time they want. That being said; I don’t agree with the policy either, but nobody can seem to get it changed.”

He stepped through the door into a concrete room. It was about fifty meters wide and a hundred deep with black lines painted on the floor. The walls were covered in condensation and a steady breeze blew out of the elevator towards the glass doors at the end. Halfway down the room there was a series of small bunkers. As they approached them it was clear that most of them were half filled with dirt and garbage, some of it blown in, but much of it dropped into them by passersby. Many of the lines on the floor had peeled up and there was trash all over the room, although clearly little of it was new.

“I think I know the real reason that it’s nearly impossible for females to get in Ground Force these days,” Mosovich noted. “But it’s a nasty reason and you won’t like it.”

“I’ve dealt with a lot of stuff I don’t like,” Wendy said. “My life seems to consist of dealing with stuff I don’t like.”

“In that case I think the casualties are the answer, two answers really,” Mosovich said.

“The first reason is that we’re being bled white. We’ve lost about eighty percent of our productive-age male population. But even with combat casualties, we’ve only lost about thirty of our productive-age females…”

“We’re breeders,” Wendy said.

“Yep,” Mosovich agreed. “The powers that be are obviously thinking that when the Posleen are kicked off planet, it won’t do much good to have nobody left but a bunch of old women and a few children to ‘carry on.’ So they’re conserving the breeding population.”

“It takes two to tango,” Shari pointed out, adjusting Shakeela’s coat. The bunker was quite cool compared to the underground city they had left and it was clear that the fall had settled in up here. “Where are the ‘breeders’ going to find…”

“Guys?” Mueller asked. “It’s not a nice answer, but it doesn’t take many guys to make lots of babies, but it’s a one for one ratio with women.”

“He’s right,” Mosovich said. “It’s not nice, but it is true. That’s only half the story, though.

“In the first wave there were massive conventional casualties. There was a real question whether we were going to hold everywhere and we didn’t hold a couple of places. Losses among combat formations were huge. And there was a… a disparity in female losses versus male. Losses among women in combat units were nearly equal to males, but they only comprised a third of the force at the maximum.

“I read your whole packet, Captain,” he continued doggedly. “And I’d already read a classified after-action report in which you were a minor bit player. You did a good job at the Monument, no question, but if it hadn’t been for Keren, you’d be dead right now. And your… experiences in the retreat from Dale City are one of the classic egregious examples.”

“Who’s Keren?” Elgars asked. “And what do you mean by that?”

“Keren is a captain with the Ten Thousand,” Mueller said as they reached the doors. There were two sets with a chamber in between and they acted as partial airlocks, reducing the blast of wind that was trying to escape the bunker. “He was in a mortar platoon near the rear of the retreat. He apparently picked you up during the retreat and you rode with him all the way to the Monument.”

“You’d been dumped by another unit,” Mosovich said tightly. He turned left and headed up the wide stairs on the exterior. There were two sets of those as well, one on each side of the entrance. There was a walkway on the wall opposite the doors that joined them near the top. Running along the surface on that side were small concrete combat positions, which were accessible from the walkway. On the far side was an open area nearly two hundred meters across and then a large parking lot filled with dirt covered cars and trucks and one Humvee, parked on the grass on the verge.

“That was what happened to a good many females in that retreat and others. Some units returned with nearly one hundred percent female casualties versus fifty to sixty percent casualties among the males.”

“Well, the actual incidence of why she was dumped wasn’t that high,” Mueller pointed out.

“Why was I ‘dumped’?” the captain said carefully.

“You’d been raped,” Mosovich said tightly. “Then they took away your sniper rifle and dumped you with an AIW and a single magazine.”

“Oh,” Elgars said. “That’s… annoying in a distant way.”

“So, you’re saying that they don’t want me in the Ground Forces because I might get raped in a retreat?” Wendy said angrily. “Then they shouldn’t ought to let their damned soldiers in the Sub-Urbs!”

“Am I to take it that’s why you were so uncomfortable coming to the surface with us?” Mueller said. “In that case, I’m sorry I asked. And if you’ll give me a name and unit I’ll take care of it.”

“I was just giving testimony,” Wendy said. She stopped at the top of the stairs blinking her eyes against the light and looked down at the town.

Franklin had been a small, somewhat picturesque city nestled in lightly inhabited hills before the war. Its main industry was supporting the local farmers and retirees who had moved up from Florida to get away from the crime.

With the change to a war footing, it became a vital linchpin in the southern Appalachian defenses. Units from just south of Asheville to Ellijay depended upon it for supply and administration.

The city was now overrun by soldiers and their encampments stretched up the hills on either side of it. The small strip mall that the entrance overlooked had been taken over by pawnbrokers and T-shirt shops with the only sign of “normal” presence being a dry cleaner.

She looked down over the bustle and shrugged. “When… when the Urb was first set up anyone could come and go at any time. That was… good at first. The corps did a lot of good in the Urb. And… there was a lot of dating. Most of the corps was male and most of the Urb is female so… things naturally happened. Then… the… the attitude sort of changed.”

“A lot of the girls in the Urb were… lonely,” Shari said. “They would take up with the soldiers and some of the soldiers practically moved into the Urb. A lot of what you could call ‘black market’ transfers went on; you used to be able to find coffee even. But then things started getting out of hand. The security force wasn’t large enough, or effective enough, to keep the soldiers under control and they had an authority dispute with the corps MPs, who were numerous enough and quite ready to crack heads.”

“We ended up having a…” Wendy shrugged her shoulders and shuddered. “Well, one of the officers that was involved in the investigation referred to it as a ‘sack’ during a long weekend. Something like a riot with a lot of rapes. I made it to the range and Dave and I sort of stood off the couple of groups that came around us.”

“I had a… well, a group of… boys really that were like kids I was taking care of,” Shari noted. “A couple of them were there when the riots started. I was okay.”

“Others weren’t,” Wendy said darkly. “So we don’t like the corps in the Urb. Anyway, the Urb was put off-limits to military personnel…”

“Unless they had orders,” Mueller pointed out.

“Unless they had orders to go there,” Wendy agreed. “And now they stay up here and we stay down there and any girls who want to go…”

“Ply a trade?” Mosovich asked. “I get the point. But you don’t have to worry about human threats either.”

“Oh, I’m not worried,” Wendy said, stroking her rusted rifle. “It might be a bit screwed up, but it will do for a club if it comes to that…”