Honor of the Clan (35 page)

"Richard is ordinarily in classes," the small green alien said. "But this task is simple and relatively safe. So simple as to court boredom, I'm afraid."

He could see Stewart eye to eye, since the operator platform was elevated.

"I'm sorry for my outburst, Father," the kid said. "I did let boredom get to me. I thought I was getting better." He grimaced, glancing back to Stewart.

"I'm making cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine," he said self-importantly. "It's easy, but we need a lot of it, and for volume I'm the best," he bragged.

"Cyclo-what?" Stewart looked at O'Reilly.

"RDX." The priest said.

"Relatively safe?"
Stewart squeaked. He might not recognize the chemical name, but he knew the explosive that was the primary element in C-4, and it wasn't stable until stabilized.

"Yeah," the boy said. "Don't worry about the output. You can't see it, but it's got a few nannites laced through to make it pretty unlikely to explode or anything. They'll be reclaimed during the mixing process. It would be hard to mess this up." The boy looked glum, returning his full attention to his work.

As they walked on to the next tank, O'Reilly whispered, "These kids see getting pulled from work as a punishment similar to grounding. The Indowy discourage that idea, but personally I think it's beneficial."

A smaller girl worked at a smaller tank. "Don't pay any attention to Richard. He's been being a brat and he's lucky they're letting him make anything. It's because he's good at volume, and he really is," she admitted. "None of this is hard, but I'm making molds for plastic casing, then I'll move on to polyisobutylene and 2-ethylhexyl sebacate—the binder and plasticizer. The real little kids can make the plastic to go in the molds," she explained.

O'Reilly pointed to the far end of the room where cardboard boxes sat on pallets. "Motor oil, ball bearings, and washers," he said.

"Claymores?" Stewart asked.

"Sunday tells me we're going to need quite a lot of them." Nathan looked a little sad. "Such a waste. Most of those boys we expect will have no idea what kinds of things their orders can lead them into. Babes in the woods."

"They pick up a rifle, they're choosing big boy rules," Stewart shrugged. "They shoot real bullets."

"I know. But it's still a waste."

"You're not expecting professionals?" Stewart asked doubtfully. It wasn't good to count on the enemy to make mistakes. He frequently didn't get that memo.

"From the Tir? No. He has the classic Galactic fallacy. Humans are all vicious omnivores, you put a weapon in their hands and point them at something to kill."

"Fire and forget," Stewart agreed. He'd seen it before, and it was almost a universal. They could get their heads around elites facing Posleen, but they tended to chalk the improvements up to the suits and ignore the greater quality of the men in them.

"We're not just counting on him to be stupid. Who does he have to send? Sending U.S. troops would give away the Darhel game wholesale. Send West Coast DAG in as a black op? They'd know, back channel, and mutiny wholesale rather than attack their brothers. If the Darhel or their brass plants were ever afraid of a mutiny, it's now when they've just had one.

"We've been watching the contracts of known mercenary groups and we have a general range of who and what we can expect
if
we get hit with military force." Nathan said. "None of the contract forces in the range of available have ever fought trained human troops. None."

"Lambs to slaughter," Stewart grinned ferally.

O'Reilly winced.

"You're catching the O'Neal meme," he said.

"Don't worry about me, Father. I was already like this."

Tuesday, January 26, 2055

Somebody had taken some time in building this police station. The building had an exterior of standard red brick, but it wasn't stacked the boring way. Slantwise, patterns, arches. Somebody took their brickwork seriously, and had a pretty damned good artistic eye. It took imagination to get a gothic feel with simple brick. The window frames had gargoyles at the corners, and a pair also flanked the main entryway.

"More than you'd expect from a county PD," Cally said.

"Must have come up at the end of a fiscal year," Sands agreed.

"What?" Cally asked absently, surveying the building. "We're sure he's still there, right?"

"Yup." The girl held up her PDA. "Just checked."

Tommy and George were playing some kind of two-player shooter game next to her. George was short enough that Amy didn't have to sit in the middle.

Cally got out of the car and walked into the station, broad daylight, nothing special. After Tommy verified that one Reginald Erbrechen was still in police custody, they'd reluctantly crashed at a truck stop overnight so they could sack out and pick their time today. It was two in the afternoon. Too late for the lunch rush, too early for people to be going home. She didn't have to look like anyone in particular for this mission. Just not-Cally. A wig and cheek pads had been enough.

The pickup really did go off as a milk run for once. She just went to the window and bailed out Reginald Erbrechen, in cash, and waited until they brought him out.

"Boy am I glad to see you!" he said. "Ellen got you, right? I knew she'd raise the money to pay you guys."

"Your lucky day," Cally lied as she walked him out of the building. Anybody who bailed you out of jail was, of course, your friend. Nobody put up bail money as a throwaway expense.

"Oh, wow. That was the worst place I've ever been in in my life."

"Never been in jail before?"

"Oh, no. I've always been lucky. Oops. Sorry. Hey, I admit it, I'm a bad man. But I'm a bad man with really good luck," he grinned. "Should I try it with you?"

She hit him with the Hiberzine. The organization made the shit by the boatload. "Your luck just caught up with you, asshole," she said.

Tommy had gotten out of the car to help her with the dead weight of the puker. She didn't need help, but for the look of the thing it was better that she had some. They had decided that speed and lack of complication was their best strategy. Do it quick, do it smooth. Risk of somebody noticing, but less risk if they just did it and got out of there. They'd taken precautions to ditch pursuit effectively if they got unlucky, but sometimes get in and get out was the best way to play it.

Tommy froze and Cally could see him looking behind her. Damn. This time, their luck wasn't holding so good either.

"Hey! You're not gonna kill him, are you?"

Cally turned her head and saw that it was one of the guys who'd brought Reginald from the back, come out for a smoke break.

"No," Tommy lied smoothly.

"Oh. Okay," the cop shrugged. "Just get him back for his court date."

"No problem. When the time comes, he'll be present for justice," Cally dished out the half truth with a vicious appreciation of the irony.

A road trip plus a few hours later, Cally stood up from the uncomfortable plastic seat in the interrogation room. It was easier watching it happen to somebody else. Besides, he wasn't immune to any drugs, so it was soft as hell. Sadly.

"He's repeating a lot. Have we gotten everything we're going to get out of him?" she asked the intelligence specialist.

"Yeah, I'm done," he said.

"Good enough." Cally drew the pistol from her side and put two rounds into his skull, to the visible discomfort of the intel weenie. "You didn't need to worry. They're frangible," she said, then realized. "Oh. You mean him. Saves debate."

Wednesday, January 27, 2055

Tommy Sunday stood with James Stewart in the atrium, a room approximately two floors down from the surface, converted to a combination manufacturing facility and pre-ready room. The actual ready rooms were immediately at the surface, but for now, the atrium was convenient as long as they had power. They didn't anticipate losing power, but in one corner a backup generator idled just to make sure. Two of the three elevators that serviced the atrium sat locked out from other users, one at the final pre-surface level, one at the atrium level itself. Traditional exit signs marked the stairs. All of these entries to the facility had blast doors as part of the base's built-in defenses.

The designers of the Bane Sidhe's Indiana facility had never expected to hold the facility in case of attack. The powers that be, and residents, had always understood that the primary defensive strategy of the base was, as that for the Bane Sidhe itself, concealment. In a direct fight the whole organization was screwed, anyway. The organization's primary strategy to avoid that was inter-species politics. Unfortunately, sometimes politics fell through on you.

The base did have secondary defenses, but those were all designed to buy time in the event of attack for scuttling anything of use to the enemy and covering evacuation and retreat if possible.

The designers had known the Bane Sidhe resources did not extend to maintaining standing troops for actually defending the place like the fortress it was. Its fortresslike nature was more a matter of convenience than anything else. A Sub-Urb was optimal for concealment of a facility of this size, and they were natural fortresses unless someone obligingly disarmed the defenders and threw open the gates to the enemy, as had happened at Franklin during the war. Since they had a fortress anyway, the designers had put in any defenses that were easy, cheap, and not too inconvenient for the inhabitants.

Two back doors led out ten to fifteen miles away from the facility. The Himmit had done the concealment, and the Bane Sidhe maintained those doors and passages carefully, but never, never ever used them. Even the present evacuation was all going out the front door. Those back doors were not on the official plans, and were a closely held secret between the Himmit and the human faction of the Bane Sidhe. They were entirely of human construction, and Himmit concealment.

Human double-conspirators had used GalTech materials and hybrid equipment. They trusted the Himmit with the secret for three reasons: one was that they had no choice if they were going to get their help; two was that the Himmit would find out anyway; and three was that the Himmit preferred to collect secrets, not divulge them. It had taken very few additional stories to bribe the Himmit to hold it close.

The Bane Sidhe did trust each other. With too much. Nathan was as careful as possible to keep a watchful eye for anything that would indicate discovery of Project Luft Three. Papa was careful to grouse just the right amount about the lack of a back door, finally declaring that
he
certainly wasn't going to live there. They had read Tommy Sunday in later on the theory that a back door was no good if nobody knew it was there when the need came. Cally had gotten herself read in by the simple fact that she had flatly refused to stay in the facility, even occasionally, until Papa took her aside for reassurance. If the Indowy assumed it was a clan head giving instruction to a clan member, so much the better.

Now, the inner circle of those in the know had expanded by thirty. Each man from DAG had proved absolutely reliable with national-security level sensitive material, each man had thorough protection from drugs, each man had a need to know. These were their defenders. In extremis, any of these men could end up the last man covering retreat, or the man leading the civilians to whatever safety there was. In the fog of war, secrets too closely held could get lost. Tommy had also briefed in the members of every field operational team on base. In the event that they held the base, far too many people would know the secret, but they would all be people immune to drugs, all people who grokked opsec. It was a trade-off, and this was his best call. Besides, even if the Indiana base survived this crisis, there was strong likelihood of its location being compromised and its protection reduced to the vagaries of Galactic politics. He would recommend constructing a new main base, stripping and abandoning this one.

He and Stewart silently contemplated the civilians assembling claymore mines, and the DAGgers wiring them up. Crates of the devices were building up against a far wall, glowing lights along the walls and in the potted trees coming on to illumine the room as the huge artificial window overhead deepened to the indigo of twilight.

"Got some others up top digging in?" Stewart asked his old ACS buddy.

"Yup. You know it," Tommy said.

"You know Iron Mike's on Earth, don't you?" Stewart looked at the sky contemplatively.

"Yup. I think the chances of them sending him in are slim and nil, because it gives away the whole damn game. We're talking about Darhel conspiracy believers increasing by a couple of orders of magnitude. It's a deluded democracy out there, it's a corrupt one, but they still vote and the declared winners still bear a decent resemblance to the actual count. I don't think we have to worry about facing suits. If we do, we're fucked anyway, so my plan for that is limited. It sure as hell wouldn't waste any troops outside. Nor am I wasting any of my limited GalTech shit on what we're likely to get. But yes, I have a go-to-hell plan. Please tell me you don't think I'm stupid."

"I don't think you're stupid," Stewart repeated dutifully.

"Asshole." Tommy grinned at him and clapped him on the back. "Let's go shell out for some real black-market coffee. Your wife smuggles in some good shit."

"Cally has real coffee?
Good
coffee? She's been holding out on me. I may kill her. I guess I'm buying." He paused. "You wouldn't happen to be able to lay your hands on some black-market beer, would you?"

"Hell, yeah. You think a couple of old vets like we who don't exist are going to get together and not get trashed out of our gourds at least once? O ye of little faith," Tommy said. "While I'm at it, how do you feel about moonshine? Fine corn whiskey aged in Galplas barrels for at least twelve days, to be specific. Well, maybe a week."

"I think it makes the closest thing to good Irish coffee I will have had in a decade," Stewart said.

"Done. You and Cally meet me in my quarters. Yours suck, and I bribed one of the permanent residents for an upgrade."