As far as he knew, Shari O’Neal, his Wendy, and a handful of kids from the creche they had both worked in were the only women and children who had survived both the Fredericksburg landing and the Posleen eating the Franklin Sub-Urb, where many survivors of Fredericksbug had been sent. What a goatfuck that had been. Disarmed residents, no exits except from the top — the way the Posleen had to come in. They might as well have planted a big, neon, fast food sign on the top of the place. He hated the Darhel more for the deliberate mis-design of Franklin than for anything else. The dying act of the men from Fredericksburg had been to Hiberzine the women and children and stash them underground, stacked like cordwood in an old pump house, hoping they’d hidden it successfully from the Posleen. Those men had acted in the purest tradition of heroism. Many had done as much in that war, but nobody had done more. Only then a lot of the survivors had been sent to Franklin, which had been made a zero-tolerance for weapons zone at the insistence of the Galactics — which meant the Darhel. Designed with no exits. Franklin had been near the Wall, just inside Rabun Gap. When the Posleen broke through, the women, kids, and old people in Franklin hadn’t had a snowball’s chance in hell. Except that Wendy and Anne Elgars, a woman soldier of the Ten Thousand who’d been recuperating from near-fatal injuries, had gotten Shari and the kids out through the ventilation shafts and a small exit in the hydroponics section. Again, Wendy’s habit of finding out everything about where she lived had saved her life. And the lives of the handful of others she’d been able to take with her.
Thank God his mother and sister had gone to Asheville instead of Franklin. They didn’t get eaten, but what with the war and all, and the way everybody changed, by the time he and Wendy officially died, he and his surviving family hadn’t been close.
He knew he was in Fredericksburg, which brought back all the ghosts he thought he’d laid to rest decades ago, but he couldn’t recognize anything. Every once in awhile he’d get a glimpse of something he thought might once have been familiar, but he wasn’t sure if he really remembered it or was kidding himself. The woods were anything but a healthy forest. There were plenty of trees, but mostly large patches of weeds and grass. Their roots and the elements had done a job on the rubble and compressed ground, which was punctuated by falling scraps of walls. The rusted spikes of rebar that crested above the weeds in places contrasted sharply with the twisted girders. Between one thing and another, not all of the metal in the ruins of Fredericksburg had gone into the Posleen nano-tanks. Some cities, in the rear of the Posleen occupation, or under more efficient God Kings, had been totally obliterated, so thoroughly had they been scoured for resources to feed the Posleen’s infinite needs for war materiel. His home town had been left with its ghosts. He didn’t know whether that was good or bad.
With difficulty, he shook himself out of his involuntary review of The Day. It didn’t do any good to get caught up in past shit. There was just too much of it. Fuck it, drive on. Going fishing with one of his sons or grandsons was usually how he straightened himself out. Which it would be time to do when he got home, but now was time to have his head in the game.
The Fleet Strike silks threatened to pull him back into more unwanted reverie, of the months he’d spent fighting with the Ten Thousand, after getting dug out of Fredricksburg. Shortly after, he’d been transferred from the U.S. Army to Fleet Strike ACS — where he’d gotten used to wearing silks, in the rare times when he wasn’t living in his suit. Now he was back. His conversion away from the system had come at the very end of the war, when to stay alive and keep the Posleen from pouring into the American heartland they had had to hide their moves from their Darhel-issued AIDs. Even back then, he was every bit as good with a computer as he was with a rifle. There was no way for the Posleen to be reading the AID network unless the Darhel had deliberately given them access. Put together with the designed-in vulnerabilities of the Franklin Sub-Urb, that were also too comprehensive to be accidental, nobody had needed to draw him a picture. Now he was back. For an hour or so, anyway.
He checked the blue stripe on the back of his buckley for what must have been the fifth time, reading over Michelle O’Neal’s data on the mission that discovered the alleged Aldenata device. On a Crab planet the ACS had nicknamed Charlie Foxtrot, being unable to pronounce the Galactics’ name for the place, Fleet Strike had engaged in heavy fighting with pockets of Posleen resistance in areas the powers-that-be deemed too sensitive to be neutralized by Fleet from orbit. According to Michelle, Fleet Strike had received orders to divert some equipment recovered from the Crab equivalent of a museum, and deliver it up the line. The museum was listed in all official Galactic records as a total combat loss. Cally’s sister believed, and his experience agreed, that Fleet Strike kept more information in its records than it acknowledged to its Galactic bosses. Especially when ordered to do something it might have to cover its ass for later. He sure hoped the Michon Mentat was correct in her information about what they’d find in the records this time. It would really, really suck to have come all this way for nothing. Not to mention how much longer it would take to come up empty. Finding something was quick. Finding nothing was what took time.
Date, planet, coordinates, unit, commanding officer. If it was there, he should be able to find it. If it was there. He checked the blue stripe on the back of his PDA again.
“You’re not nervous, are you?” Cally asked. “That’s about the tenth time you’ve checked that thing.”
“No, I’m good. It’s just… Fredericksburg.”
“Yeah, that’s gotta suck.”
“No shit,” he agreed. “On the other hand, it takes my head right back to when I was with Fleet Strike, so it’s not all bad.”
“I wouldn’t have minded being with Fleet Strike,” Harrison observed, pouting. “Parts of it, anyway.”
“Very funny. Keep a lid on the camp. It wouldn’t play well with the target. Stick to the sports,” Cally said. “You’re checking your notes, right?” From what Tommy could see, he was playing solitaire.
“I’ve got it. I drilled it until I’m blue in the face. I can talk baseball with George for God’s sakes. Don’t jostle my elbow, dear.”
“You’ll be fine,” she assured him.
“I know.” Harrison winked at her. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep it simple.”
“We’ve got the fence ahead,” Papa said, softly, pulling the Humvee up. He stopped it short of the expanse of chain link topped with razor wire that cut a line through the woods. The woods on this side looked very much like the woods on that one, with nothing obvious about the land to tell why the fence was here and not there.
Harrison was out of the truck first, approaching the barrier with an old-fashioned multimeter and a black leather bag that looked like something an old country doctor would have carried. The fence was probably electrified, but its main purpose was as a simple barrier to announce the presence of a stupid Posleen normal charging through it. It also served to keep out equally stupid humanist radicals, seeking street cred with others in the protester set.
Tommy nodded to himself when the fixer started pulling out assorted wires and clippers. Electrified. He and Cally got out, breath frosting on the air. He put his buckley in the pocket of his silks and sealed it in, patting the other pocket to make sure his emergency field kit was in place, dropping the AID into the seat. Unlike conventional clothing, the pockets on his silks would stay reliably closed until he pressed the top corner again with a finger. They were comfortable as hell. He’d regret turning them back in at the end of the mission. Not that the Bane Sidhe had another operative who would fit silks made for Tommy Sunday. They didn’t have anybody else as big as him. Which incidentally also meant Harrison had to cut the hole in the fence big enough for him to get through. The smaller man was used to it by now. Still, it was a good thing silks didn’t snag.