Honor of the Clan

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Okay, chil — kids, today we’re going to do the interesting and important task of deploying buckleys into the field. This effort is a vital—” Lieutenant Green wasn’t at his best with children. He had none of his own, wasn’t even married, and to the extent he’d seen children in the real world he had a notion that the Bane Sidhe children were pretty damned different than the average kid from the Sub-Urbs, which was what he’d expected. Both kinds lived underground and stuff. They seemed like perfectly normal kids, inasmuch as he knew kids, and then they’d do something weird like talk about going shooting or doing some PT at the pool. Now he had a whole lot of them to brief and send on a mission. Who the hell sent kids on a mission? What the hell kind of kids seemed to half expect it?

You could tell the Bane Sidhe kids in the crowd of children; they were the ones on the edge of their chairs looking intense and eager. The norm — the DAG kids were fidgeting and looking around and poking each other. He saw a DAG kid poke a little black curly headed Bane Sidhe kid who, instead of getting mad or poking him back, gave him the look of patient disdain that children reserved for the very stupid.

The kid who had interrupted him by jumping up and down and waving his raised hand was clearly a DAG kid, although Green didn’t recognize him. “Yes?” he asked.

“Which field? There are lots of them up top. Will it have scarecrows? Is there snow?”

The last kid asked that last bit with an eagerness that suggested the child was somewhat less than dedicated to the prospective mission. Green suppressed a groan. It had started off as a pretty good day.

Pinky sat and listened to the lieutenant struggle through trying to explain they were going to hand a few buckleys to pairs of kids to set out to watch for the bad guys coming to attack the base. He guessed it wasn’t surprising that Lieutenant Green was so nervous. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Sometimes men didn’t, but in Green’s case Pinky was sure the man had never married and didn’t have children.

Finally the man finished his explanation and assigned them their buddies. To Pinky’s dismay he got stuck with the ten-year-old idiot who had been poking him all through the briefing. Eric Andrews. Pinky tried to think of anything he knew about the boy he could use. He was coming up empty until Andrews went to the bathroom. He stopped to trade insults with a pair of girls buddied up, and Pinky relaxed. Here was at least one possible handle. He nudged an older girl and pointed out the two, once his boat anchor had gone through the restroom door.

“What are their names? Those two girls,” he asked.

“Why do you care?” The girl he asked was about twelve. A bratty age, but he vaguely remembered seeing her with the freckley brunette over there.

“I’m new. I’m just trying to learn names is all,” he said.

The girl looked at him suspiciously. “That’s my little sister Jenny and her friend Miranda. I’m Sandy. If you’re learning names, then what’s yours?”

“Pinky Maise,” he said, watching shocked recognition on her face, then a mix of sorrow and anger.

“I’m so sorry. Pinky, I’m so, so sorry. They got all the ones that did it though,” she said. Then she seemed to realize that didn’t help. At all. “I’m so sorry,” she repeated, looking uncomfortable and then walking away to get out of the conversation.

That last part was the one Pinky appreciated. He could only take just so much sympathy before it started to get old. People didn’t understand that wanting to say it was about them, not him. Since he couldn’t change it, he put up with it as politely as he could. The best ones were the ones who felt awkward and found an excuse to leave. He preferred if they did it instead of making him have to. He was getting good at getting loose from awkward conversations.

He couldn’t hear what it was, but he could tell Miranda said something taunting to Eric as he came back from the bathroom.

They got outside, finally, and started following the red Christmas ball their first buckley was projecting, even though it was January. Oh, well, everybody knew buckleys were eccentric.

“My god, you’re going out alone? What are you, ten?” the buckley asked. “You’re going to get lost, freeze to death, and die.”

“Shut up, buckley,” Pinky said.

“Okay.”

He picked the PDA up off the ground from where Eric had dropped it. “We’re supposed to ignore it when it says creepy things, remember?”

“Uh, yeah. Gimme that.” Eric reached out and took the device back. Pinky didn’t resist.

“Are you a DAG kid?” Pinky asked. It was an opener that let him get Eric talking about himself. Pinky listened and prodded and looked interested, impressed, and even awestruck when he could get away with it. Naturally, it took less than five minutes for the older boy to tell Pinky he was all right, for a little shrimp. Yeah, well, it was the best way to both get in good with the kid and find out as much about him as possible.

Out in the cold, when the area could be attacked by an army any minute, with a boy he just met who was bigger than him and had a typical ten-year-old’s attitude counted to Pinky as a hazardous situation. The lieutenant hadn’t known any better, so he didn’t bear a grudge. Stuff happened.

They were okay until it started to snow as they placed their second buckley which, like the first, had directed them to the appropriate coordinates, then pointed an arrow toward where they were supposed to go next.

At first the snow was novel to the other boy, but then Eric started to gripe about being bored and cold. Pinky tried to keep his mind off it and interest him by asking about the other boy’s astounding feats, probably in every pick-up football game in his life. No good. As they finished the third one, the snow was falling heavier, and halfway or so to the fourth, Eric started complaining to the buckley to get it to tell them the way home.

The buckley, of course, loved the complaining and fed it with loads of depressing predictions of doom. But it was set on stupid, and its next task was to show them where to put it, so the only thing it would do was direct them to its next spot, as Eric started talking about which way he thought home was and taking off that way.

Pinky offered to hold one of the buckleys, and thankfully Eric let him. His go-to-hell plan if the other boy insisted on deviating from the deployment mission was to bump the emulation of this buckley up to seven and get it to lead them the right way home. Buckleys always listened and obeyed right away if you told them to get smarter.

Eric started insisting they go back, and was beginning to sound threatening.

“Hey, I’m just thinking of you,” Pinky said. “Jenny and Miranda have really been picking at you. You don’t want to get back and have been beat by a couple of girls do you?”

“They probably already went home,” the bigger boy sulked.

“Yeah, but we don’t know for sure. Besides, you’re better than any old girl. And even if they did go home, you just know they’ll be such brats about it,” Pinky added.

“Yeah, okay. But I’m cold and this is boring. I don’t see why we have to do it, anyway. Miranda gets so snotty sometimes I wish she wasn’t a girl so I could hit her.”

“She’s pretty bad,” Pinky agreed, even though he’d never met the girl.

“Oh, hell. If we’ve gotta, let’s just speed up and get it over with. I’m freezing.”

Now that was something Pinky could agree with wholeheartedly. The snow was really falling hard. He’d bet anything the storm was a total surprise to the grown-ups back at base, who must really be freaking out by now.

“Hey, I just thought! If we skip the last one, we can tell the buckley to get smarter and make it take us home,” Pinky said. He should make it sound like Eric’s idea, but he was getting too tired to manage the other boy so well. Best to turn him home. He wanted to go there, which should make him more manageable.

By the time they got back to base, Pinky was also reaching his limit for tired, cold, hungry, and bored. Mostly, he was bored with Eric. The other boy wasn’t a bad kid, it was just that, effectively, Pinky had been babysitting him all day and it had been unnerving, and dangerous, and he was completely worn out.

They were some of the last children back to base. He hadn’t known the buckleys had been implanted with a routine to start calling base if the kids strayed too far off the prescribed path. He really wondered why the grown ups had bothered. They’d had to go pick up a bunch of kids with snowmobiles, the kids copped out before emplacing half the buckleys, and the snowmobiles had to go back out and lay out the remaining buckleys in their places anyway, once the cold, snowy, cranky, whiny kids were all back at base.

The buckleys emplaced by adults, on the other hand, had all gotten where they were supposed to be the first time. Very few adults could fail at the simple task of being directed to a spot by a buckley, putting it down, getting oriented facing home, and walking back. Very few, and Lish was kept at base to take care of the kids as they came back in, anyway.

It was only when he was grousing about it all that night that his dad pointed out the obvious.

“Pinky, what if it hadn’t snowed?” he asked.

Duh. Pinky felt like a dope. Of course they couldn’t have used the snowmobiles, because there wouldn’t have been new snow to cover the tracks. Nobody would have ever thought to question children’s footprints in the snow. It hadn’t been a dumb plan, just a freak storm. Pinky felt better as he ate his bean soup and corn muffins. Boring food, but at least it was hot.

Lieutenant Green’s medium brown hair wouldn’t stay spiked for anything, even short. It just flopped over like something from the turn of the century. He kept it regulation and didn’t mess with it. His nose had a conspicuous bump at the bridge, not quite a hook, and he hadn’t messed with that, either. His Adam’s apple was prominent, but he felt okay about that. His last girlfriend had thought it was cute. That relationship got fucked up when the unit went O’Neal, but he hadn’t chosen the service as a career because he wanted to sit in one place and settle down. Moving around was part of the job, just as if he’d gotten his orders. Which he had, since Colonel Mosovich had taken Atlantic Company rogue, intact.

Given the magnitude of the unlawful orders they’d been sent to participate in on that last op, Green could live with that. He had thought through a few sleepless nights and decided that the O’Neals had as much claim to trying to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States as the official government, who were provably corrupt puppets for the Darhel. He had known the system was rotten, but he hadn’t known how much until Boomer took out some holos and walked him through exactly where, how, and why the voters lost control of everything. The Constitution was a dead letter, and he knew it. But he’d still sworn to protect and defend it, and at least the O’Neals would put it back if they could. It made them as close to good guys as he could find in this messed up world. Besides, they talked about your guys being your real family. It turned out with the O’Neals that was literal and the unit was about half either O’Neal or Bane Sidhe. That had been a huge shock. He’d felt like he’d been lied to, betrayed, and didn’t even know these guys he’d sweated beside, fought beside, drank with, bled with. It shook his world more than he could even describe. The atrocities on that last op, vile things done by what was supposed to be their side, had carried him along through the shock and into mutiny along with the rest of the unit.

It had been the dependent murders, and the sure and swift justice meted out by these people, that had finally made him into an O’Neal. He hadn’t made up his mind about the Bane Sidhe yet, but the service records of the O’Neals in the Posleen war and since — they were legendary. Tommy Sunday. James Stewart — who looked nothing like himself but Green was convinced. Papa O’Neal had fought beside the old man in ’Nam. The old man had never heard of these Bane Sidhe, or Clan O’Neal, before that final op. Colonel Mosovich and Master Sergeant Mueller were living legends in their own right, and the colonel had made the decision, even after what had to have been even more of a shock to him than it was to Green. What it had come down to for Green was that he trusted the old man and his brothers one hell of a lot more than he trusted the brass up a chain of command he already knew was fubar.

It had been the dependents that clinched it, though. Any side that would stoop to killing dependents, even of mutineers — he refused to flinch from the word — was no side of his.

The murders were why he had picked Maise to go with him and check out the armory. Sunday had told him to go down here and put together a wish list for what his men would be most comfortable fighting with.

Green tried to keep Maise busy with the most interesting tasks he could find, keep him involved, keep him moving. He’d have his grieving with all of them, at the memorial, when they got through all this. Right now, the best thing for him was to get him back in the saddle as much as possible. Charlie was perfect for this, because he had grown up Bane Sidhe, knew his way around even though he’d never lived on base, and knew the system.

Now he stood looking at the fucking huge room these people called an armory and his jaw dropped. From Bane Sidhe’s overall mission, number of operators, the specific missions their teams handled, the DAG lieutenant had expected a room the size of the room they’d quartered him in. Maybe double. Holy shit. He felt like a man who had expected to walk into a small chapel and found himself in a cathedral. He closed his mouth, then opened it again.

“I don’t understand. If they never expected to defend this place, why the hell do they have all this hardware?” he asked Maise, walking into the room and turning around, just looking at the rows of neatly racked rifles, the ammo bunker, and all the goodies Santa brought down the chimney.

“I mean, look at this shit!” he exclaimed, walking over to an M26 — looked like an A6 — racked a bit away from the others and picking it up. “Oh holy fuck. A thing of beauty is a joy forever, Maise. Match grade, got its own ammo — loaded special, I’m sure. Whaddya wanna bet this baby is accurized to hell and back?”

Green lifted the rifle to his shoulder reverently and sighted down the barrel. He’d heard the talk of triggers breaking like glass, but this one was sweet — just sweet.

“Nice. As to your first question, guess who made the decisions about stocking the armory?” Maise answered his question with a question.

“Oh,” the lieutenant nodded. “Yep. I’m starting to recognize the O’Neal touch. So we’re loaded for bear.”

“Dude, we’re loaded for a whole fuckin’ oolt of bears,” Maise agreed with a vicious grin.

Green nodded. “Damn, am I glad I’m on the same side as these guys.”

“God favors the side with the heaviest artillery,” he said. “Oh, now that’s a new one on me.” Maise pointed to a short row of big olive drab tubes — launchers — with red fire extinguishers banded in white underneath them.

“That gentlemen, is a B14 multipurpose rocket launcher, and you’d better bet we can and will use it,” Tommy said from the door. “That tube is GalTech, which is why it’s light as hell. The rounds are pretty light, too, but they pack a wallop. The reduced weight of the rounds means it takes less thrust to launch, substantially reducing backblast. Typical deployment in the case of a fixed position is that this baby can be dug right in if you have time to prepare. It’s called butterfly wings. You position it in the middle of a line of riflemen, just as if you were above ground. Behind each firing position you dig a cone shaped hole. Then you spray a foam to cover the interior of the butterfly wing, heavy on the outside end. That shit sets up hard as concrete, but porous. It soaks up the heat and the blast like nobody’s business. Fire that thing in a properly constructed butterfly wing and you barely get your ass warm. I’ve done it. You’ve got paired wings so you can shoot either way, obviously. You can still go up top if you need to, of course, but not taking fire in the first place is always good,” he added.

Green whistled softly before looking around further. “You’ve got a good supply of 240s. Limas? Shit, I thought those were canceled.”

“Not by us,” Sunday said. “Tie right into your goggles, just like the A6. It didn’t take much to work out the technical hitches since we didn’t have corrupt contractors and the government procurement process to deal with.”

“Wow.” Green turned full around as a big grin started to climb his face. Then he walked around the corner of a rack of shelves and stopped cold, “Wait a minute. What the fuck? You’ve got grav-guns down here? Plasma? And are those… ? This is more GalTech shit than I’ve seen in one place in my life.”

“Yeah, you don’t get to play with those toys,” Sunday said. “Sorry. We have a pretty good idea of what’s coming next, and we can’t afford to waste the good shit on mercs. Just hope you don’t get a chance to use those, because if we have to pull out the GalTech, gentlemen, we’re having a real bad day.”

It wasn’t quite dark yet. They had enough light to see by, and cold or not, after dinner was a good time for a walk on the surface.

General Sunday stepped off the elevator up top with Papa O’Neal at his side. Cally was at the edge of the barn checking the demo. The trench lines stretched right up to the edge of the vehicle elevator platform, which they’d lowered down just above man height, even with the edge of the trench. The mixed force of DAGger units and Bane Sidhe teams had constructed a standard L-shaped ambush, trench and elevator platforms covered with steel plates. Indowy workers had cut back the sides of the barn and replaced them with a thin and flammable facade to cover their absence.

They had completed work on the recesses for rocket launcher back blast on the east-west trench, but the north-south guys were still digging.

“We got the tents down and the cover plates hinged up late last night,” Tommy said. “Fake snow is all we can do on the in-barn part of the trenches, but the out-barn stuff is real.”

Papa O’Neal squatted down and looked at the fluffy stuff covering the floor of the barn. “What’d you use?” he asked.

“Asbestos and white spray paint,” Tommy said.

“Nice. Won’t catch fire when the barn blows. I presume it’s going to collapse thataway?” He pointed away from the L.

“Yup, we’ve got ammo stacked from hell, but you know how it is: we can find productive use for any time they give us. Which we’d have more of if we didn’t have damned shuttles of Indowy landing every hour and — say, the next one’s ten minutes overdue…” Tommy and Papa looked at each other simultaneously.

“Alert! This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill. All men to your stations,” Sunday spoke into his buckley, which fed into the clean AID battle coordinator and out to the men.

With the first few phrases, the AID had gone on alert itself, picking up the locations of the men’s VR goggles even as the previously off-duty ones ran into the trenches, the previously sleeping ones just a bare few seconds behind them.

“Spray up the launcher areas on the north-south trench, sir?” Lieutenant Green’s voice came through the ear dot Tommy wore day and night.

“Are you still digging?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Green answered.

“We’re awaiting confirmation of the attack,” Sunday said. “Keep digging for now. Start spraying as soon as we confirm they’re actually here. That stuff’s a bitch to dig out if we’re wrong.”

“Yes, sir. Copy keep digging, ready to spray on confirmation.”

“Sunday out,” he looked around at the few workers still piling fake snow around in the barn. “Everybody on the elevator. You too, Cally. Papa, you’re going down below if I have to pick you up and carry you,” he ordered.

Papa O’Neal looked for a minute as if he was going to argue, but if he had been, Sunday’s massive size reminded him that despite his own extraordinary strength, the younger man could indeed make good on his threat.

They packed the elevator tight to get everyone down in the one trip. It might be nothing, but if the balloon was going up, time was an irreplaceable, precious thing.

“We have confirmation of attack, coming in from the east,” the AID said in a pleasant female voice that made it distinctive from all but a few on the line. Upgraded Bane Sidhe operators had been disinclined to be left out regardless of gender, and the thirty DAGgers were a very light force, even to defend a fortress from fixed positions. Every soldier counted, and every Bane Sidhe operator was sniper qualified, with their teams as smooth in motion as a single creature.