Balance Point

ONE

The pilot on my left tapped my shoulder as his voice crackled in my headset. “Captain Parker? There, sir!”

I looked where his gloved finger pointed. Twenty degrees right of the tilt-wing’s nose, five miles distant, an oily black rope writhed between the ground and the sky. The smoke tied together the South Georgia swamp below us and the low cloud ceiling beneath which we raced.

“Fire? Why the hell is there fire?”

“Flame thrower, sir. Apparently the animal doesn’t like ’em.”

I shook my head and swore. Of course “the animal” didn’t like ’em. No being in its right mind liked burning alive. “What idiot thought that up?”

“I just fly the bird, sir.” The pilot banked the tilt-wing toward the smoke. He had never overflown this place before and knew only what he’d been told through his headset during the last two hours. His tilt-wing was a regular Army trainer that had been diverted in flight from Ft. Stewart, a couple hundred miles northeast, because it was the only available vertical take-off and landing aircraft near enough to pick me up in a shopping center parking lot, then drop me off, that was also clearable into restricted airspace.

The pilot leveled the ship and settled it toward a landing pad. The pad was just a rectangle where the scrub had been scraped back to expose bare soil. At one corner an orange wind sock flapped from a pole. A ground-level breeze now carried the smoke from the fire across the pad like a shroud four hundred yards long.

Two turret-variant hellcats idled at the pad’s edge. Each ‘cat’s roof was stenciled “OCWTRS,” an acronym for “Okefenokee Chemical Weapons Test Range Security.” Of course, the eighty-three square miles of muggy Federal scrub woodland and restricted airspace that surrounded the pad had never seen a chemical weapon, unless you counted that flame thrower.

But the skull-and-crossbones signs on the barbed wire fencing and the overflight restrictions advisories on aerial maps discouraged the curious. The ‘cats with their turret guns, and automated triple-A ‘bot batteries along the range perimeter, discouraged the more-than-curious.

Half hidden in the trees bordering the pad, a boxy command and control hovertank hunched like a plasteel porcupine, its roof bristling with swept-back antennas.

On the pad another tilt-wing, like the one that was delivering me, but spook-black, already squatted on its landing gear alongside the vehicles. A command-and-control communications pod bulged from its back like a tumor.

“Looks like there’s some brass on the ground already, sir. Guess you could ask them about the fire.”

The tilt-wing’s props were still blowing at landing pitch when I dropped through the belly hatch and ran, eyes slitted against the dust and smoke, to the command slider. The air smelled of seared wood and jellied gasoline.

As the tilt-wing that had hauled me in lifted off, a personal security detail corporal, posted alongside the slider’s rear hatch, recognized me, saluted, then jerked his head at the command vehicle. “The Old Man’s waiting for you in the slider, Captain Parker.”

Inside the red-lit command slider only one person sat, back to me, hunched at one of the flatscreen consoles.

The rest of the consoles were dark and unattended. “Where is everybody, Howard?”

General Howard Hibble, AKA The Old Man, AKA The King of the Spooks, didn’t turn around, but in the reflection of his face off the screen I saw his gray eyebrows flick up. “Inauguration Day’s a federal holiday. If you hadn’t been moping around for the last week you’d know that, Jazen.”

Howard Hibble was the longest-serving general officer in the history of the United States Army, but not because he was conventional. He had been a professor before the Slug War, was commissioned as an intelligence officer during the Blitz, and had run his spooks his way ever since. His way included being called by his first name by everybody, and an every-day-is-casual-Friday dress code that would choke any drill sergeant. Howard’s way also included knowing more about the personality balance point between the two individuals who made up each of his officer pairs than a marriage counselor knew about her clients.

In fact I
had
taken accumulated leave to mope after Kit left. Not just because I missed waking up beside her. Case officer pairs, whether het or monogender, typically bond closer than married couples, but separation is a job requirement of military life. The trouble with this particular separation was that Kit’s job required her to spend two weeks in Paris without me, because the man in charge of the trip preferred I disappear from her life. And he happened to be her father.

I said, “It’s my leave. I can mope if I want. I’ve still got more time accumulated than I can use.”

With a bony hand Howard twisted the handlebar of the little scooter he rode around on—they didn’t call him “The
Old
Man” for nothing—and faced me. “It is, you can, and you do. I assume you’re seeing her this weekend.”

“If I can still rent an outfit. You kidnapped me in the tux shop parking lot before I got in the door.”

He adjusted the old-fashioned wire rimmed glasses that hung on his wrinkled face and stared at my jeans. “Wear your dress whites instead.”

I eyed his wrinkled flannel shirt. “What do you know about the dress code for black-tie parties?”

“As little as a man who’s survived four decades in Washington can. But I know you. You’ll be less intimidated in your own skin.” Howard shrugged as he spun back to the console and tapped up the screen image. “I didn’t send that tilt-wing so I could give you relationship counseling.”

I peered over his shoulder.

The screen showed a crowbot overhead, real time, visible light, displaying two hundred by two hundred yards. Dismounted infantry, probably the squad that normally patrolled the range’s perimeter aboard the two parked hellcats, were deployed on line, prone behind the cover of a shallow ridge at the screen’s left, west, edge.

I guessed that when things had gone bad they had been pulled off perimeter patrol. The command slider probably had been rolled out from The Barn on auto and rendezvoused with Howard’s hunchback when it landed.

The infantry were all armored up in full Eternads, and two of the GIs had flamer tanks strapped on their suits’ backs.

Fifty yards to the squad’s front, brush and scrub burned. The smoke plume now drifted south, forming a concealing barrier at ground level between the squad and anything beyond the smoke that depended on visible light to see. The Okefenokee is damp terrain, even around its edges, and the fire looked to be burning itself out.

On the other side of the smoke screen, the hovering crowbot’s feed highlighted three biologics among the trees.

The first biologic, twenty yards beyond the fire, was another GI in Eternads, lying face up. Fifteen feet from him lay a twisted metal lump that had once been the tanks and hose of a back-mounted flamer. Just beyond the trashed flamer were two larger lumps. They remained barely recognizable as a utility-variant hellcat and its flatbed trailer, both now mangled and overturned, impellers to the sky.

The GI lay motionless, and at first I assumed he was dead. But his suit vitals shimmered in orange digits displayed on the screen alongside his image. They were normal, except for elevated heart rate and respiration, which were hardly surprising considering his circumstances.

I nodded to myself. Playing dead was a logical strategy.

His circumstances were defined by the other two biologics on the screen. The first, according to the vitals displayed alongside it, was a newly dead, but still warm, truck-sized animal carcass. One of its six legs had been torn off and lay alongside the limp body, and its neck had been wrenched so that its rack haloed its head like a spiked wreath.

I pointed at a shredded harness that had tethered the recently deceased animal to the trailer. “I assume that’s his Christmas turkey woog?”

Howard nodded, then frowned. “Normally, that makes his day.”

I nodded back.

Woog were more-or-less antelope, but six-legged, bigger than elephants, and not native to South Georgia. Very not native. Downgraded Earthlike 476, known to everybody except its tourism bureau as Dead End, was about as far from South Georgia as the human race had gotten so far.

Dead End harbored a Carbon 12-based fauna so biochemically dissimilar to Earth’s that feeding an Earth animal’s flesh to a Dead End carnivore was like feeding sand to a lion. So, in order to nourish OCWTRS’ one and only guest, Howard’s xenobiologic nerds had bred, here on Earth, a herd of woog.

The nerds found that the docile, Earth-bred woogs provided dandy nourishment, but failed to offer the “robustly combative dining experience” provided to a grezzen when he chased down a natural-born wild woog back home on Dead End.

The Army has its faults, but it spares no expense to give remotely deployed GIs a taste of home. You may get your Christmas turkey dinner in a bunker, but you
will
get it. So, on each federal holiday, one of which was the inauguration day of the United States President, the Army, driven by force of habit, imported one live free-range woog, all the way across the ten jumps between Dead End and Earth, as a dietary change of pace for South Georgia’s most voracious tourist.

I squinted at the third organic on the screen, which was the intended beneficiary of the Army’s generosity. Unlike the possum-playing GI game warden who had delivered the woog, the grezzen was very much in motion. As I watched, the grezzen uprooted a thirty-foot cypress with a paw swipe that spun the tree through the air as if an eleven-ton, six legged ochre grizzly bear had swatted a salmon out of a stream. The grezzen spun like a dog chasing its tail, sprang twenty yards in a single bound to another cypress, then splintered it, too.

“Howard, what’s got up his ass?”

Howard shook his head. “Don’t know. That warden lost his helmet audio before he could elaborate.”

“He’s lucky he didn’t lose his helmet and the head in it. He knows better than to use his flamer. Does that relief squad know enough to hold
their
fire?”

“Well, I hope so.”

I blew out a breath. A dithering professor
hoped
his students knew what to do. A four-star general made
sure
they knew, then motivated them to do it. Intelligence was an unconventional business, and Howard’s resumé spoke for itself, but there were times when running a military organization like a Socratic-method graduate seminar was idiotic.

I stepped to the hatch. “I’m going over there, Howard.”

“Take the hellcat on the left. There’s an Eternad suit in your size in the right-hand seat.”

I had already slid behind the hellcat’s control yoke when I realized that, for a dithering professor, Howard Hibble excelled at motivating people to risk their lives without even asking them to. At least the gullible ones. Who never seemed to learn.

“God
damn
you, Howard.” I shifted the ‘cat into drive and steered toward the smoke.