“I’m talking with Mr. Michael O’Neal, of Rabun Gap, Georgia, and his eight-year-old granddaughter, Cally O’Neal.” The reporter turned and proffered the microphone to the elder O’Neal, standing in the pouring rain like a statue.
Mike Senior’s camouflage raincoat shed the water like a duck and the hood worked much better than the reporter’s. And he wasn’t about to let the newsie bastard in the house.
“Mr. O’Neal, can you tell us what it felt like to have the Posleen assault your home?”
“Well, first of all, they never got to the house. We had ’em pretty well stopped down in the valley,” he said, gesturing towards the distant entrance.
“We?” asked the reporter, surprised. “You had help?”
“From me!” piped up the little girl. “I ran the demo!”
The reporter’s face took on that special look of false pleased surprise that adults affect when children interject unnecessarily. The report was going out live nationwide and he just had to shut the kid up as fast as possible. But what the hell was demo? “Really? Did that help?” he asked.
“Blew the shit out of the bastards,” Cally said, ingenuously. “Must have killed half the damn company. We had the whole fuckin’ woodline strung with claymores and I just blew the fuck out of them.”
The camerawoman suppressed her laughter but expertly caught the frozen look on the reporter’s face as he attempted to come up with a response to this.
“Cut to the old guy,” snapped the producer. “Ask him about the name.”
“And Mr. O’Neal, there’s another O’Neal that has become famous, again. By exactly the same name…”
“That’s my daddy!” said Cally excitedly. “He really rolled those centaur sons of bitches up, didn’t ’e?”
The reporter had assumed that out of control runaway train expression again. Mike Senior decided to twist the knife. He worked the wad in his cheek around and spit. “I teached ’im ever’thang he knows,” he drawled, looking right in the camera. And hoping like hell the damn monks could keep their vow of goddamned silence and not laugh their asses off. There were enough damn problems in the world without having to explain them.
In the background, a green Army sedan appeared out of the woodline, headed to the house. In the cold Georgia rain.
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Keren knocked on the door of the room and nodded at the nurse who was just leaving.
The room smelled of disinfectant. It was an odor that raised the hackles on the back of his neck. To the lizard hindbrain, it meant that things were bad and going to get worse.
He looked down at the figure on the bed. There were three medals pinned to the pillow; apparently something had made it into the database before it all came apart at Lake Jackson. He shook his head and sat down.
“You really missed a good party,” he whispered, pulling a bottle out of the recesses of his coat. The gold bars of a second lieutenant winked for a moment in the light over the bed. “The general was buying. Damn, he can drink. And that old snake of a warrant officer that followed him around. And the general told this story, damn it was funny, ’bout how come the warrant follows him around. It’s all about an alligator and two bottles of bourbon.”
So he told his friend the story. And he told her a couple of others, about how General Simosin and General Ford finally had it out and Ford accused Simosin of incompetence in front of a TV camera and Simosin dragged it all out in the open how Ford had opposed integrating the old-timers and screwed around so bad that there was no damn way anything could have gone right. So now Ford was out and Simosin was back at Tenth Corps and General Keeton was First Army.
And he told about the meeting between the new Prez and the Darhel. How the Prez had threatened to recall all the expeditionary forces unless the Darhel ponied up all the grav-guns we could stand. And how the Tir had finally agreed that all equipment would be at no cost and that husbanding the humans was the most important thing in the universe. But the pipeline was still plugged and the Fleet was takin’ forever and most of the PDCs were smoking holes…
And he told how some rag-head had made a stand to equal theirs, taking a bit of this unit and a bit of that and somehow putting enough steel in their spine to hold a vital pass against a whole swarm. Or so they said.
But India was a madhouse and nobody knew what was happening in the Africa swarm. And the one in Kazakhstan was just wandering around trying to find its way out of the plains…
But finally the bottle was empty and it was time to leave.
“Well, Elgars. They say you might be able to hear me. And they tell me you might come out of it someday. I left the e-mail to my… our unit with them. They’re taking all the survivors from The Stand at the Monument and making a special unit. You’re included as one of us. You and all the other… wounded. And the dead. So, you can, you know…”
He stopped and wiped a tear away. “And I watched Pittets hang. You’d be happy to hear that. They didn’t tie it the way I asked, I wanted him to kick for a while. But he’s gone. And you know about the decorations.” He tried to think of something else to say but nothing came. “I gotta go,” he said, looking at his watch and trying not to look at the lovely face behind the tubes, as the machine sucked in and out.
“The Galactics, they’re picking up the tab now. So there’s no reason to, you know… to take you off. And they’ll be moving you to a Sub-Urb. They’ve got plenty of room and really good facilities. So they’re gonna leave you hooked up in case…”
He wished now he hadn’t finished the bottle. He could use a little taste. He took her hand one last time. “Thanks for that shot on Sixth Street.” He nodded at her, one soldier to another. “I know it saved you, too. But it still saved my ass.” He nodded again, hoping that she would do the thing with grabbing his hand, but there was no response. “Well, bye, Elgars. Take care.” Finally, he turned and left the room. Behind him it was silent except for the suck and whir of the machines.