“Are you sure? There are at least sixteen more things that could go wrong, you know. Would you like me to list them?” the buckley offered cheerfully.
“Shut up, buckley,” she said mechanically.
“Right.”
Tommy and Harrison coughed, unconvincingly, as the miniature truck started moving through the hologram. The base buckley’s eccentric reaction to Cally O’Neal was a running joke between them. As was Cally’s ill-concealed suspicion that Tommy was hacking her system. He hadn’t, which just made it funnier every time she accused him. The briefing went on, more quickly now that George had said his piece.
“Right. We want to come as close to the base as we can without ever entering line of sight of the elevated areas of Fredericksburg Base itself. We’re landing out here. Technically, it’s civilian, privately-owned land. In fact, it’s abandoned but not yet reverted to Homestead and Reclamation. It’s as safe as it gets, but it means we need to proceed over the Rappahannock here, and do another crossing at the other side of this small island. There’s an old road that will have discouraged tree growth and such, but the route might as well be off-road. Harrison, planning for getting the truck across the river is your baby. Who knows what’s there now, but undergrowth analysis from the few aerial photos we have suggests that however much bridge there is, that’s the one that got the most rebuilding. Both sides of that old road have been used a fair bit, most likely by civilian-type vehicles, on both sides of the river. The bounty farmers had to have been crossing it somehow. Think about contingencies. Get with Tommy, go over whatever information we’ve got, and come up with a list of what you’ll need. Supply needs it by fifteen hundred tomorrow. Earlier if you need anything particularly exotic.
“Obviously, there are security cams out in the area beyond the base. The difference between the cameras on base and the cameras off base is that the cameras on base are hard-wired to the data assessment center. The cameras off base are not. They broadcast or tightcast, using the same transmission protocols as the AIDs. For all that, they’re pure Earthtech, which means that we can fuzz them. Enough, anyway. So, our first point of approach is here,” she said, touching the pointer to the flashing red dot southeast of the base. “Harrison, Tommy and I un-ass the truck and proceed to the fence. We have fairly recent intelligence that the fence is chain link topped by razor wire. Naturally, we’ll take backup, but we should be able to get onto the base itself with nothing more exotic than heavy duty wire cutters. From the fence, we split up. Two hundred meters in from the fence line, there’s a guard patrol that covers the secure area containing the archive. I turn onto the road here and start jogging up towards the archive building. Tommy and Harrison parallel me and wait for me to jenny the guard. They break across the line and make their way to the building. Harrison, you’re going to carry some package you need the clerk to sign for. Get together with Tommy and figure out something plausible.
“Meanwhile, George and Granpa take the Humvee around to here.” She pointed to a second flashing red dot in the hologram. “As you can see, the truck can get closer in here, meaning Granpa will get up the hill before us, overlooking the muster point for the particular Posleen attack drill we’ve selected.”
As she took them through the steps of the brief, Tommy tried to keep his mind on the details. This was a straightforward reconnaissance mission, despite the target, but that didn’t make it okay to get complacent.
It was good flying weather, clear and mild, as Kieran Dougherty guided the Martin Safari hybrid jet over the Virginia hills. False dawn threw purple shadows over a landscape barely touched with color in the early light. The pilot grumbled to himself because the Schmidt sitting to his right in the copilot’s seat was not, in fact, his copilot — not that he needed one for this. Schmidt Two wasn’t any kind of pilot at all and as far as Dougherty knew, hadn’t a single hour of flight time to his name. The overgrown kid of an assassin was using the instrumentation of his plane, all right. Using it to control the surveillance cameras on the belly of the plane, taking countless pictures of the ground they were overflying, just as if it was anything more than godforsaken postwar wilderness laced with the occasional cluster of dirt-poor bounty farms.
He came in low, dropping lower, using VTOL to land on a green flat, behind a hill, in a place that used to be called Falmouth. Mere tens of meters away, an abandoned bounty-farmer’s shack sat, weathering beneath an encroaching tangle of vines, dry and dormant in preparation for winter. His landing field was an irregular patch of knee-high grass and weeds, its sole virtue that it was relatively flat and not yet overgrown with the scraggly pines eating away its edges. There were, however, signs of abat. The only blessing about this mission to the middle of nowhere was the season. This late in the year, the grat, who, like the Posleen they came with, preferred warmer weather, were already hibernating deep in the ground awaiting spring. The alien insect, which preyed on the hapless, plentiful abat, hunted in swarms. The little bastards’ poison sting could kill a grown man with a speed and ease that would have struck a hive of killer bees dumb with envy.
The amateur ecologist in Kieran automatically tracked the signs of change everywhere he got to go — one of the perks of his job. Fortunately, in Virginia the abat were slowly losing the fight to the rabbits and field mice. Once the local owls, foxes, and other night-hunters had learned the abat’s peculiar vulnerabilities, the native rodents had gotten a respite and begun to recover. The abat’s coloring and movement habits helped it avoid the senses of grat in Posleen ships and fields. Evolution had not fitted them for all terrestrial habitats. Farther south, the story wasn’t so good for the natives. Here, abat didn’t have any of the peculiar survival habits needed for winter weather. They were conspicuous as hell in the snow, tending to hop frenetically to keep warm. They had swarmed in with the Posleen, along with other pests and hangers-on from countless worlds the Posleen had devoured. The rodentlike herbivores’ reproductive rates had made their slide towards extinction in Virginia slow, but the outcome was inevitable.
As for the grat, some local insectivore or another must be pretty damned resistant to the poison, because they were reportedly declining, too. Expert opinions were divided between the black bear and the woodpeckers as the happy recipients of ecologic accident. Lack of resistance worked both ways. For every species that became invasive in a new environment, at least a hundred died out. Invasive success in one environment did not translate to invasive success in another.
In the prewar era, Japanese kudzu had inundated the American southeast, but left Alaska untouched. Rabbits and cane toads had overrun Australia, but bombed out in more habitats than they’d thrived. Felis domesticus had destroyed countless species of birds — but only in places where it had doting humans to go home to. In many other places, top level predators — and not just the Posleen — made short work of the kitty cats after their human protectors were gone.
Ecological destruction from the Posties’ hitchhikers had overturned equilibria everywhere — but it was a toss-up which species got a foothold where, and some, like the abat and grat, appeared to have a similar vulnerability to the Posleen’s absence as the house cats had to the absence of humans. In the former cases, nobody had figured out why yet.