When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 26 Newry Cantonment, PA, United States, Sol III 1405 EDT Saturday September 26, 2009 ad

Mike touched the next e-mail in the queue, which was from Michelle, his youngest daughter, and the message flashed up on his hologram. Michelle had been evacuated off-planet, along with over four million other Fleet dependents from a variety of countries. The ostensible reason for this was to free up the Fleet personnel from worrying about the security of their children. However, since only one child was taken per Fleet “family,” the recognized reality was to create a pool of humans in case Earth was lost. When Mike was feeling really cynical he wondered if they were also hostages to ensure the good behavior of the Fleet. Practically everyone in the service had at least one child being raised by Indowy; it would be easy enough for the Darhel to arrange “accidents” if necessary.

Michelle sent him a letter once per week, whether he needed it or not. In the last year they had gotten… colder and colder. Not upset or angry with him, just… leeched of emotion. It was starting to bother him enough to want to mention it, but he’d come to the conclusion there was no way to do a darn thing about it from 84 light-years away.

Michelle was as brunette as her sister was blonde and, to make things worse, she seemed to have inherited her father’s nose. Other than the nose, however, she was starting to be the spitting image of Sharon O’Neal, down to the voice. It was hard, sometimes, for Mike to remember he was dealing with his daughter; Sharon had occasionally taken that same cold, remote tone when things were bad.

“Good day, Father,” she began, giving him a small nod. “There are four items of interest this week…”

She wore mostly Indowy fashions now and the covering that was standard Indowy dress looked something like a Mao jacket. Between that and the expressionless monotone of her delivery it was like listening to a poorly designed robot; she could have written the thing and built in more emotion. The Indowy were an almost aggressively selfless race, making the individual submission to the whole something of a religion. It was probably that influence that was making her so remote, so… alien.

He realized he had blanked on what she was saying and re-ran the video. Comments on old earth news, report on the final battle for Irmansul — he had an after-action report, a better one than she did, on his AID — discussion of a promotion, of a type he couldn’t decipher, for an Indowy he couldn’t place at the moment. It occasionally occurred to him that as an honorary Indowy lord, more like a duke or archduke, he really should take more interest in Indowy society. On the other hand, most of his brain cells these days seemed sort of wrapped up in better ways to kill Posleen.

He realized he’d drifted again and there was something important he’d missed; she’d seemed almost animated for a moment. Ah…

“The fourth and final item this individual has to report is acceptance to level two sohon training. Sohon is, as you should be aware, the Indowy field of technical metaphysics. You are, of course, trained for suit fitting which is a specialized form of level two sohon. However, as far as can be determined, this individual is the first human to be accepted for unlimited level two sohon. It is believed that a level of four or even five sohon may eventually be attained. It is to be hoped that positive acclaim may be accrued to the Clan of O’Neal by this and future accomplishments.

“Those are the four items of interest for this week. Looking forward to your reply, Michelle O’Neal.”

Mike reran that part of the tape twice shaking his head. He knew, generally, what she was talking about, but the specifics were sort of eluding him. One of the problems with GalTech was that everything had to be produced by Indowy technicians on an individual, custom, basis. Humans, even humans like O’Neal who had had some training in the technique, generally referred to it as “praying,” but that wasn’t really what was happening. Because the Indowy had been working with atomic level micro-manufacturing for, literally, thousands of years, their method of manufacture involved using swarms of nannites to build products atom by atom in vats. This gave them the capacity to build materials that violated many “known facts” of materials science; the nannites could make atoms do things that occurred only as low probabilities in any other method.

However, the process defied control by even the most advanced computers. The nannites were best controlled through a sort of direct neural interface. An individual Indowy, or, more commonly, groups, would take seats by the tank and… manipulate the nannites. It was not a direct thought process; it involved giving the nannites general directions and then… letting them use the individual’s brain as a remote processor. For a suit fitting, it mostly involved staying very still and sort of meditating while concentrating on the suit “adjusting” to the person it was being shaped on; the nannites and the suit personality handled the rest.

However, as he understood it, the problem with most forms of class two and higher was that the person or team had to hold a perfect image of the item to be produced, down to an understanding of the molecular alignments for all of the individual components. A suit, for example, was a six-month process of construction involving one level six, a grand master of sohon, and dozens of lower level Indowy, all meditating in meta-concert on a perfect image, down to the last atom; that was why a suit cost almost as much as a frigate.

He had to admit that the concept of a human advancing to class two sohon, especially an eleven-year-old, even a prodigy like his daughter, was rather amazing.

He thought about how to compose a suitable reply. If he was too positive, too emotional, she might see that as a rebuke of her own distance. On the other hand, if he was too wooden, she might see it the same way. Finally he gave up and gushed.

He always sent his replies as text, typing them into an old word processor program and letting the AID convert them to a suitable format and send them on the military network. A laser transmitter would add them to the queue and squirt them at a deep space satellite. From there they would be transferred to Titan Base, then sit in a Jovian communications buoy until a ship was headed out-system. Every ship carried the mail in and out of the system, dropping it at other buoys until eventually, in about six to ten weeks, faster than any but the fastest military courier, it reached Michelle’s planet, Daswan. Given that a transport ship would take over a year to make the journey, that wasn’t too shabby.

Mike looked at the message and frowned. There should be more, he should be talking about the battalion and things that they had done. But he knew that Michelle had grown very uninterested in the blindsided slaughter that was Earth; she didn’t even seem to want to return. He was losing this daughter, probably had already lost her, and he didn’t know what to do about it or even how to do anything about it. She had been dropped into the Indowy, raised by the Indowy and she was becoming Indowy. And he didn’t know what to do about that either.

Finally he gave up and hit Send.

The next message was from Cally and it, too, was everything he had come to expect. Cally’s messages were not nearly as frequent as Michelle’s and the two sisters were clearly developing in… somewhat different directions. Cally also did not have access to GalTech and, therefore, sent a standard text message.

Mike sighed, hit reply and blanked. All things considered, he preferred the Rampage to the Robot, but replying to Cally had its own problems. Should he point out that referring to her grandfather as “Baldy” was probably not the best of all possible actions? Or that at thirteen, worrying whether her grandfather was getting laid often enough was probably not her business? For that matter, it probably wasn’t her business at forty.

For that matter, was she sexually active? I mean, Dad would probably pass that on to him, but there wasn’t much Mike could do about it if she was. What was he going to do? Sitting the guy down and having a man to man talk with him was out; he was five hundred miles away.

And then there was the whole bloodthirsty edge she had developed. He had noted it in Tommy Sunday as well. The generation that was being raised in the war was a generation soaked in blood; they were desensitized to a degree that he found unhealthy.

Maybe it was a valid reaction to the conditions, but a generation so… disinterested in the value of life — it seemed to extend to humans as well as Posleen — was not going to be reconstructing a positive, growing, functional society after the war.

There was some fundamental spark, some flare of optimism, that really seemed to be missing from them. Maybe Horner was right, maybe he just wasn’t cold and hard enough for this world. God knew at times like this he just wanted to lay the burden down, to just say “get somebody else.” But there really wasn’t anybody else. To lead the battalion or even carry the spark; his was one of the last generations that was raised in the “golden age.” If they didn’t keep their eye on the prize, which was to recover the world not just to a survival level, but to recapture the beauty and art and science, then nobody would. Humanity was going to sink to the level the Darhel chose for them. And the only ones who could stop that were these feral wild-children of the war. Who had as much connection to the basic concept of positive human growth and human rights as they did to…

Well, frankly, there was nothing they were more disconnected from.

This really sucked.

He backed up and erased the last sentence unfinished. Using the phrase “ladylike” assumed both that the ladies were and that Cally wanted to be. And assumed that “ladylike” was a useful condition, which was a major assumption. Given the choice between a retiring maid and a little war-child, and given the conditions, he’d take war-child any day. Let the world and the future go hang as long as his daughter survived.

The last one was from his father.

It took him the usual two reads to interpret his father’s missive. His dad was not illiterate or unintelligent, but when Michael O’Neal, Sr. had grown up in Rabun County, going to the eighth grade was for over-educated nerd-boys. Mike’s father had been pulled out in the sixth grade to work the fields and had done so until he was seventeen and could escape to the Army.

And, unlike some of his peers, Papa O’Neal had never improved his writing. He was well-read, indeed he read military history voraciously, but the reading never seemed to translate to his written vocabulary or grammar.

That was okay by Major O’Neal, though. In a way, his father was just about the only person he could open up to, even if his advice was sometimes rough and ready.

He was just beginning to mentally compose a reply to the effect that they were getting a Rest and Recovery and that despite the fact that he was the second person to recommend that he get laid, he had so far failed to do so, when the AID cleared the screen and threw up a hologram.

“Incoming priority message from General Horner.”

So much for R R.

Mike looked at Horner’s image and sighed. “Where?”

Horner opened his mouth as if to start a spiel and then seemed to deflate. “Rabun Gap. It’s… gone, Mike.”

Major O’Neal set his jaw and tapped the AID. “Schematic, Shelly.”

When he saw the map of the Gap it had red covering all the zones around the Gap including the O’Neal farm. Mike looked at it a moment in disbelief then dropped his face into his hands. “Did the corps last a whole five minutes?”

“I don’t know how well they would have done under normal circumstances,” Horner answered, “but these Posleen aren’t acting like Posleen at all. They have some sort of armored flying tank that took out the SheVa gun that was forward deployed. It apparently was parked too close to the main force of the Corps and it took out the second and third line of defense. To make things worse, they are using their landers for a straightforward airmobile operation; they used C-Decs to take out the Wall, to literally smash it flat, and look like they’re getting ready for a bound forward. Then they have come in and, apparently, rebuilt the road. I’m impressed. And frightened. I don’t like the idea of Posleen combat engineers. What next? Artillery?”

“Shelly, how solid is this information?” Mike asked hoarsely.

“Resetting image,” Shelly said. “Red is eyewitness reports or video or Posleen transmissions, shading to blue for maximum estimate of expanse.”

Modified that way, the O’Neal farm was only a light violet; it was possible that Cally and Papa O’Neal were still alive.

“Shelly, try to raise somebody at the farm and keep an ear out for intelligence as to their condition,” Mike said. “So, what do you want me to do?”

“The Gap has to be plugged…” Horner said.

“Oh, blow that!” Mike exclaimed angrily. After all the years of fighting it took him barely a second to imagine the broad outline of the proposed mission. And it was not survivable. “You’re joking, right!”

“No, I’m not joking,” Horner said coldly. “We still have Banshees, not enough to loft a full battalion but…”

“But we’re not a full battalion,” Mike snarled. “God dammit, Jack, my middle name may be Leonidas, but it doesn’t mean I want to die like him! And the damned Spartans died because they got surrounded; we’d already be surrounded. And just how the hell are we supposed to fight our way into the Gap? How? There are, what, fourteen or fifteen million Posleen waiting to move through? Where in the fuck are we supposed to land?”

“I need the Gap plugged,” Horner said inexorably. “I need it plugged for seventy-two hours.”

“Un-fucking-believable,” Mike said. “Are you listening to yourself? I’ve got three hundred and twenty effectives! We couldn’t carry in enough ammo for three days! And there’s no way you’re going to be able to get anyone to us in three days! Not in the teeth of the Posleen!”

“I’m moving the Ten Thousand, they’ll be backstopped by the best artillery I can find,” Horner said. “They’ll take positions and wait for the Posleen to come to them then hammer them with artillery. With you in the Gap, the Posleen won’t be able to push through any more; they’ll only have to take care of the ones that are already through.”

“And the ones in the landers,” Mike said. “Remember? They’re using airmobile, your words.”

“SheVa guns,” Horner said. “There’s one surviving in the valley; it’s got some technical problems, but it will get up. I just need the Gap plugged. And you’re going to plug it for me.”

“Like hell we are,” Mike said. “Nobody will be able to. I’d need a damned brigade of ACS, which we don’t have, and continuous shuttles of ammo and power.”

“Look, Major, every minute that we spend arguing, sixteen or seventeen hundred Posleen go through the Gap. I’m sending the Banshees to your location. Get your battalion moving.”

“Look, General, get the wax out of your ears!” Mike shouted. “We’re Not Going. The fucking shuttles wouldn’t make it to the ground! We’d need a cold LZ! And we’ll need spare shuttles for supplies! And we would last about four hours! We are not going! Period!”

“God damn you, Mike!” Horner shouted back. “I am not going to lose the entire eastern seaboard because you don’t want to lose your fucking battalion! You will take and hold the Gap to the last man or so help me God I will have you court-martialled and shot if it is the last thing I do!”

“Fuck you, Jack! You should have thought of that before you let them put Bernard in charge of the GAP! You got me into this fucking mess! You put me in that plasteel fucking coffin, that I’ve been trapped in for the last nine years, you took away my family, you took away my wife! And the only thing I have LEFT is this fucking battalion and you are not going to piss that away too, you murdering BASTARD!”

The door practically left its hinges as Gunny Pappas stepped through. “Sir, what in the hell is going on? They can hear you down in the damned barracks.”

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE, GUNNY!” O’Neal screamed. He grasped the heavy wooden desk, raised it over his head and slammed it into the window behind him. When it didn’t fit he let out a shriek of fury and slammed it into the wall repeatedly until the hole was large enough. Then the desk flew through with a bellow.

It was a full-bore rage, as controllable as a hurricane and nearly as destructive. There was nothing between the world and O’Neal’s blind anger at reality; if he could have twisted a button and turned off the universe he would have. Instead, he took it out on his office and the battalion headquarters building. In seconds the few scraps of mementoes on the walls had followed the desk. He threw everything in the room through the hole then started widening it by punching the walls.

The headquarters was a simple wood frame structure; the interior walls were gyp-rock and the outer was a layer of pressboard covered by vinyl siding. Despite being only five foot four, Michael O’Neal, Jr. could bench press four hundred pounds and each punch slammed through all three layers as if they were tissue; two by fours shattered with no more than two blows. His knuckles were bleeding within a few punches, but he no more noticed than he noticed the fact that portions of the ceiling were buckling; the pain felt good in his universe of rage. The worst part of the rage, beyond losing his father and his daughters and his life, was that he knew in the end that the battalion would go. And the only thing in his mind besides the rage was that evil plotting bastard at the back of his brain, that little thinking bastard that was already figuring out the mission even as every other fiber of his being was denying that they would ever commit suicide in such a clear and stupid fashion.

Finally the rage spent itself fully; there was no emotion left to feel. His office now had a new door, one big enough to fit a car through, and a circle of interested and worried onlookers. He ignored them and strode through the debris path to where the AID still showed a picture of Horner floating in the air.

“Nukes,” O’Neal rasped. “We’ll go. But only if that entire area is slagged to the ground. I’ll have my staff work up a fire plan. You will fire it. If the President balks, tell her it is an order of a Fleet officer and she is under treaty to follow military orders of Fleet officers. You will follow our fire plan, and stand by for on-going nuclear support. We will prepare for the mission. We will board the Banshees. We will fly south. If we don’t get the nukes, you can kiss my fat, hairy ass before we will go near the Gap. And if at any point I feel that we are receiving insufficient support, I will withdraw on my cognizance alone. Call me when you have nuke release and only when you have nuke release, and it had better be open release. Shelly, end transmission.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, cutting off Horner.

“Shelly, I don’t ever want to talk to that bastard directly ever again,” Mike rasped. “When he sends nuke release, just tell me.”

He looked around at the group that had gathered. Most of them were enlisted from Bravo Company — Pappas must have been telling the truth about hearing him at the Barracks — the rest were officers and NCOs from battalion.

“Okay, boys,” he rasped, looking around at the group. “Let’s all go get kil’t.”

It had been nearly thirty minutes since the last sound of activity around the Wall. There was sound down in the valley, but it was the sound of thousands of feet and the occasional crack of a railgun or plasma cannon, drifting up the hills on the light wind.

“Damn,” Cally whispered as the first Posleen came into sight at the notch. “I don’t think there is a corps anymore, Granpa.”

“Yeah,” O’Neal said. “But that’s not the worst,” he continued, pointing at the tenaral floating up into sight over the eastern edge of the holler. “That’s worse.”

Cally looked out the firing slit to the west and tapped his arm. “No, that’s worse.”

Papa O’Neal flinched at the shadow that was looming over the farm; the Lamprey was heading west from the Gap at about four thousand feet above ground level. As he watched, a beam of silver stabbed downward into the valley and there was a secondary explosion from the direction of the artillery park.

“Are we gonna get shot by that if we fire at them?” Cally asked nervously as the first mine went off. “I don’t like that idea at all.”

“Neither do I,” Papa O’Neal said. “Okay, Plan B is activated.”

“Run like hell?” Cally asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Or at least as far as the mine; it is reinforced for a nuke; we’ll hole up there for a while until the first wave should be past, then we’ll head up into the woods.”

“Let’s go,” Cally said, turning around and pressing in the plywood on the back of the bunker. It pushed inward slightly then popped out on hinges revealing a heavy steel door set well into the hill. She undogged the hatch and stepped through. “You are coming right?”

“Yeah,” Papa O’Neal said, “keep the door open, I’ve got to set all these command mines on a timer. And rig the final destruct sequence; the hell if these bastards are gonna have my house.”

“Well, move it,” Cally said nervously. “I don’t want to go crawling around these hills on my own.”

“Be there in a minute,” Papa O’Neal said. “Get moving.”