Finally, the suit unit had the road cleared to its satisfaction and bounded over to the ruins of the house. Four of the suits were what Mosovich recognized as Reaper suits, specialized heavy weapons suits. By the design of the suit and the weapon he was carrying, the fifth was apparently an officer; command suits were a little slimmer and sleeker than the Reapers or the standard Marauder suits.
“Sergeant Major Jacob Mosovich,” he said, saluting the ACS officer as the suit skidded to a stop. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“Hello, Sergeant Major,” the officer said, taking off his helmet. “I understand you’ve been dallying with my girlfriend.”
Wendy let out a howl and bolted across the ruined yard, throwing herself onto the suit. She grabbed his shoulders and wrapped her arms and legs around him in a full-body hug.
“Tommy?” she gasped, kissing him on the head and neck. “Is that really you?”
“It’d better be,” he muttered. “Or some guy in a suit is in trouble.”
“Uh, sir?” McEvoy said. “I… uh…”
“Wendy, meet McEvoy, the most incompetent Reaper in the whole wide world,” Tommy said, kissing her back and then gently prying her off. “We’ll have a minute or two, but I need to talk to the sergeant major. And I understand there’s a captain around here?”
“That would be me,” Elgars said, stepping out of the shadow of the house. “I recognize you from Wendy’s picture.”
“So do I,” Mueller said, wandering over. “She uses it like a cross to keep guys away.”
“Now, Wendy,” Tommy said, thumping her with his arm. “That’s not very friendly.”
“I’m only friendly with people I want to be friendly with,” she answered, taking his hand. “Okay, business first. What in the hell are you doing here?”
“You’re Cally,” Tommy said, pointing at the teenager. “Right?”
“Right,” Cally replied. She’d taken a position halfway around the wall of the house, where she could peer around but back out if necessary.
“She’s a frigging tiger when she’s cornered,” Wendy said, quietly. “But she’s shy around strangers.”
“You’re okay, right? Your dad asked me to make sure.”
“I’m fine,” Cally said. “What are you doing here?”
Tommy looked around the group and ran his fingers over the stubble on his head. “That’s… complicated.”
Tommy looked at the back of the cache for a moment and then drove his hand forward.
The group had moved back to the cache and then gotten the children, who were at last mostly functional, outside on the dripping hillside. Tommy had been warned that opening up the real cache would be somewhat energetic.
His arm punched through about a foot of reinforced concrete and into an opening. With a wrench and a twist he pulled out a large chunk, then reached in and started ripping out the rebar. As he worked at it, it became apparent that the cache was not a small cave, but a much larger opening into the mountain.
“Major O’Neal told me that his family has been slowly mining this mountain for almost a century,” Tommy said. “Half of it is mine shafts. That’s what this is.”
“How far does it go in?” Mosovich asked, looking through the growing hole.
“I don’t know,” Tommy replied. “Not too far. It gets blocked off again.” With that he pulled a large segment of wall out and the light from the Coleman lantern finally penetrated into the interior of the tunnel. Five feet farther in the tunnel was blocked again. This time by a wall of GalTech plasteel.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Mueller said, pulling at some of the concrete himself. “And how many people knew that Major O’Neal had installed a Galactic weapons container on his father’s farm?”
“Apparently not many,” the lieutenant replied tonelessly.
“Is Dad in trouble?” Cally asked.
“Well, I’m not sure,” Tommy answered truthfully. “First of all, I’m not sure what the Galactic regulations on something like this are, especially when you throw in all of your dad’s secondary ranks like his Indowy rank. Second of all, as I understand it he was tasked with setting up caches along the eastern seaboard…”
“He was,” Cally said. “I remember. We… took a vacation just before the first landing. He spent some of the time planting power systems and ammo boxes.” She looked at the structure through the hole that was now almost completely clear. “This is… bigger though.”
“I guess he wanted to make sure that Rabun Gap was never out of power,” Mueller said dryly. “Shit!”
“What?” Mosovich asked.
“Where’d O’Neal’s power come from?” the master sergeant said in a disgusted tone. “What a fuckin’ idiot! Hardly anyone in the mountains has power anymore, nobody to maintain the lines. But his house always had power.”
“No lines,” Mosovich said, shaking his head. “I should have guessed.”
“And I noticed an Indowy storage box when we were here,” Mueller continued. “I figured that O’Neal had just given an empty to his dad. But those things are worth their weight in gold; they’re armored like a tank and climate controlled; you don’t just give them away.”
“What?” Elgars asked. “What’s the importance of no line?”
“No power lines,” Mueller expanded. “When we came up here for dinner, I noticed that there weren’t any power lines coming into the house. So where was he getting electricity from? Areas like this are getting to where electricity is pretty damned scarce, but Papa O’Neal had enough to run all his appliances and security systems. I dismissed it as a generator.”
“And it was one,” Tommy said. “An antimatter generator at a guess.” He pulled a last bit of concrete away and put his palm on the lock of the plasteel door, which obediently opened.
“Jesus Christ,” Mosovich muttered, looking into the tunnel. The walls were gray plasteel; from the exterior view they were at least six inches thick, which about equalled the armor of a space cruiser. The cache was about eight meters deep by four wide and the the interior was filled from floor to ceiling with Indowy storage boxes. Most of them were marked with the complex woven pattern, resembling a Celtic brooch, that indicated antimatter containment systems. There was enough raw antimatter in the cache to wipe out Georgia.
“Woo,” Mueller whistled. “No wonder this thing is armored like a fortress.”
“Are those all ammunition?” Cally asked quietly.
“Yep,” Tommy said, yanking the top box down and opening it up. “This here is the motherlode; standard grav-gun ammo with antimatter teardrop initiators. If one of these went up, there wouldn’t be any more mountain.” He looked at the thousands of reloads in the box and shook his head. “McEvoy, get your ass over here and let’s find out what we’ve got.”
The cache had been partially emptied into the outer cave and the materials sorted out by order of preference. First priority were the three antimatter power packs. Each was rated to resupply one company of ACS for four full days of use in standard terrain. Excepting the power to drive the guns, they should last the remaining suits about six days in the current conditions.
Second priority was standard rifle ammunition. This was “the good stuff,” Indowy manufacture complete with their own antimatter power system on each round, which meant the suits wouldn’t have to draw power to run the guns.
Last priority was Reaper ammunition. The Reapers were flat out but, like the MetalStorms, they ran through enormous quantities of material in firing.