Posleen War: Sidestories The Tuloriad (3 page)

“Can you find the caves?” Sally asked, an amused smile on her Marlene Dietrich look-alike face. Sally had once played a German part, of sorts, in the one film she had starred in. Thus, when she'd had a choice on what appearance to take, she'd decided to adopt a well known German face, as well.

Neither the catacombs nor Rome itself meant much to Sally, except perhaps as the place from which had originated the crushing of the revolt of 66 to 73 AD and that of Bar Kochba, the city that had ordered the destruction of the Temple. It might even be said that she took a perverse satisfaction in the leveling of the city. She tried to feel ashamed of that but simply couldn't. Sally could hold a grudge.

Dwyer shrugged and answered, “I used to be able to find the catacombs. But then there were more landmarks to guide me.” He paused, looked around, and corrected himself. “Back then there were some landmarks to guide me.”

He stopped by the passing Swiss Guardsman Sally had pointed to, a member of the Legio Pedestris Helvetiorum a Sacra Custodia Pontificis, to ask for directions. The “Legio” had once been “Cohors,” back when the guard had been considerably smaller. Now, with nearly thirteen thousand members, there was some call for upping the title from Legio to Exercitus. The Swiss Guard was not only the army of the Vatican, it had also become the police force for the city of Rome . . . such as remained.

Rather than give so many streets and corners and lefts and right, the guard simply pointed directly, and said, “The Via Appia lies that way. Follow that away from the city about three kilometers. To you,” the guardsman added, recognizing the American uniform, “that would be about two miles.”

Though the ground was strewn with shards and some bones, Dwyer could see no obstacle to bar their path. Thanking the guardsman, he and Sally moved onward in the direction they'd been shown.

“Watch out for abat holes and grat nests,” the guardsman called after them.

The abat were colony animals, more or less rodent-like, while the grat were largish, wasp-like creatures who fed on the abat. The abat had come with the Posleen ships and were essentially ineradicable. Thus, humanity would just have to learn to live with the grat, or risk being overrun by the abat.

“We will,” Dwyer called back. “We know about the abat. My fiancée and I have been around.”

He'd been born in Galway, Repubic of Ireland, before emigrating to the United States to enter the seminary. Sometimes, the brogue still came out, usually under stress. It used to come out under the influence of alcohol, but that had been a while. As with many of the multitudes of Irish who had come over, Dwyer had fallen in love with the United States of America more or less instantly. He'd become a citizen during his eleven years of Jesuit training.

Thereupon, seeing no special reason not to serve in the military or naval service, thinking he owed his adopted country much, and his superiors having no objection, he'd joined the Navy as a chaplain. He served sometimes aboard ship, sometimes on the ground with Marine infantry or, once, combat engineers. Dwyer had marched on frozen feet, in Korea. He'd battled flames aboard the USS Enterprise. He'd been shelled silly a few times in Quang Ni Province, Vietnam, and taken rifle in hand in and around Da Nang and Hue. He'd been wounded, twice, not counting the burns from the Enterprise. Also not counting any bodily damage incurred during the Posleen war.

He'd retired, eventually, from the Navy and, to the extent it was possible, the priesthood. His drinking had gotten considerably worse by that time. That's how they'd found him, drunk, with his recall notice for the Posleen War.

“The entrance here used to be a sort of . . . well, a sort of a two story temple,” Dwyer said. “I remember it clearly . . . six columns, the two centrals ones grayish, the others a shade of brown.” His voice sounded terribly wistful, as if those six columns meant something distinct from the ruin of the city.

“It's hardly the only thing that's been lost,” Sally observed. “What are a few columns and some tons of rock and mortar compared to five billion people?”

“I know, dear, I know.”

Sally looked dubiously at the entrance. It was flush with the ground. A tarp set up on poles covered it to protect the relics and martyrs below from the elements. Two of the oddly uniformed Swiss Guards stood outside it, their halberds resting against the tent poles. Odd uniforms or not, the weaponry in their hands was modern and first rate, products of Sig Sauer in Switzerland and updated for the Posleen war.

“Oh, God, I'm an idiot,” Sally said, while chewing her lower lip. “I should have thought of this; I can't go with you, Dan. I'm pushing the limits of ship-AID-flesh contact as it is, even with the ship anchored in the Tiber near the Lago di Traiano, no manmade interference, the AID under guard in Magliana, and the booster. Going underground? No way.”

“Yes, I see that. Hmmm.” The priest turned to what he thought to be the senior of the Swiss Guards, though that guard looked to be the younger. Just how the priest knew that the appearance was false was hard for him to put a finger on. Perhaps it was something in the younger-seeming guardsman's eyes. Dwyer asked, “Is there a coffee shop or a decent restaurant nearby?”

“Yes, Father,” the Guardsman answered. “But I wouldn't recommend it for a woman unescorted and alone. I wouldn't recommend anyplace in the City for a woman unescorted and alone. These weapons,” and the guard indicated the resting halberds with the muzzle of his rifle, “are not just for show.”

“Sally might surprise you,” the priest answered. “Even so, can you . . . ?”

Instead of answering, the Guardsman touched a button on a small box clipped to a belt around his waist and said, “Wachtmeister von Altishofen to Headquarters. Send me . . . ummm . . . Hellebardier de Courten: Service to the high clergy.”

Dwyer wasn't really high clergy. Yet the Wachtmeister recognized the uniform which gave a sense of sacerdotal rank. The ribbons on the priest's chest von Altishofen didn't recognize, but there were enough of them to suggest real combat service. That was “high” enough, he likely thought.

“Affirmative, Herr Wachtmeister,” came the response, barely audible from a small speaker apparently located somewhere in the Guardsman's morion.

“It will be just a few minutes, Father.”

“You know this is all silly, Dan,” Sally muttered. “You don't need to make an honest woman of me. I'm yours for the asking and have been ever since . . .”

Golfo Dulce, Occupied Costa Rica,

May, 2008

The first major wave of Posleen to erupt northwards from Mexico had been destroyed, albeit at the cost of the destruction of the US Army's Eleventh Airborne Division (ACS). One might have expected that, given the rate of Posleen reproduction, the next major wave would have simply moved north unopposed. There never was, however, another major wave. The first, before it was crushed, had denuded the area along the border and deep past it of nearly everything edible. Subsequent waves, of which there were several, never made it very far into the United States before starving. After a while, when many had gone north only to disappear, the rest of the Posleen stopped trying. Their legends contained many stories of which the moral was something between “Curiosity killed the cat” and “Danger, Will Robinson.”

That Posleen-made barrier, however, didn't stop them from breeding. Pressure within Mexico, therefore, continued to build.

As things turned to shit for the Posleen in the American southwest and Mexico, pressure had built on some weaker clans by those more powerful, driving those weak ones to find someplace else, anyplace else, to live. That was generally southward and eastward. As Central America narrowed toward the south and east, these fleeing clans were forced into closer and closer proximity, greater and greater competition for food, and more frequent and bloodier interclan battle.

Fortunately, from some points of view, the Posleen could eat each other. And, of course, they did. Yet as clans were shattered and reformed, as new chiefs arose from the carnage, there came a time when there was only one clan, and that composed of the remnants of dozens of others, left in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, only one place for that composite clan to go, and only one good route to get there.

That clan—so said Intelligence—was the Clan of Gora'sinthaloor. That place was Panama. And that route was, roughly speaking, the Pan-American Highway where it entered that part of the Costa Rican Province of Puntarenas seized from the Posleen by Panama while Panama was under the rule of the dictator, Boyd.

Salem, the last remaining warship of the American Panama squadron then left afloat, was duly dispatched to support the boys and a few girls holding the Balboa Line across what had been the Costa Rican border. Holding, was perhaps not the precise word, in the sense that the meat doesn't hold the meatgrinder; it just slows it down a bit. That's what the Panamanians—to say nothing of the Posleen normals, cosslain, and kessentai—were doing, grinding each other to sausage.

Part of that grinding machine was CA-139, the USS Salem.

Rather, it had been part of the grinder. With Posleen tenar swarming from every direction, with all three main turrets damaged, seven of nine secondaries shot away, smoke pouring out from a dozen places, the normal captain, Goldman, and his bridge crew dead, and the ship's auxiliary chaplain and a scratch bridge crew directing the counterflooding to keep her asymmetric below-the-water-line hits from capsizing her, Salem was pretty much out of the fight.

And furious about it.

“Turn around!” her holographic avatar screamed. “Bring us back around! I've still got two secondaries and I can aim my mains by turning the ship. Turn around, I said, you drunken Catholic bastard!”

“Salem,” that auxiliary chaplain, Father Dwyer, S.J., had answered, his brogue leaking through, “you're a lovely girl and a lovely ship. But you've no business being in command of yourself. There is no good you can do now commensurate with the good you'll be able to do after a refit. Now, I'll make you a deal. You stop being a bitch and let me command—let me save—this ship without interruption, and I'll . . . I'll stop drinking . . . by the love of the saints, I will. But if you don't, I'll toss your blasted AID over the side, and bring the ship back for refit without you.”

“You can't talk to me that way!”

Dwyer didn't answer. He simply went and took the AID from its armored box, then began walking to the edge of the metal platform half encircling the ruins of the bridge.

“You wouldn't dare!”

Dwyer began to wind up for a long toss. “Boston College baseball,” he announced, over one shoulder. His arm began to straighten, as if for a long fly when . . .

“Stop! I'll shut up.”

The father did stop, if barely.

“Will you really stop drinking?” the avatar asked.

“To save you, yes.”

“I didn't know you cared.”

“Then you have much to learn.”

“Would you really have tossed me,” Sally asked.

“Not a chance,” the priest answered. “But I had to give you a good excuse to overcome your conditioning and values.”

“True,” she agreed.

The Wachtmeister interrupted by coughing politely. “Your escort is here, Miss. And, Father, you may proceed.”

The caves were narrow, cramped, dusty and musty. No amount of cleaning seemed able to do much about any of that. They were well lit enough, though, for easy navigation; the Indowy-produced light panels on ceilings and walls lending a gentle but pervasive yellow glow.

Briefly, Dwyer laid a single ungloved hand upon the walls of the catacombs. For just a moment, he felt an almost electric connection with his predecessors, those early co-religionists who had met here . . . that, and with their all too frequent martyrdom.

There were slits, many of them, carved into the tunnels at varying heights. These, Dwyer suspected, were firing ports. He stopped at one doorway, its thick steel door hanging open, and followed a very narrow—too narrow for a Posleen—corridor to a room. There, in the Indowy-made light, he saw about what he'd expected to see, a firing slit and step, a quarter cylinder of galactic metal armor, a simplified range card, a crucifix, and a field telephone.

Yep; no wonder the Posleen never penetrated the catacombs very deeply.

Having fought the Posleen in the close confines of a warship's interior, Dwyer could just picture the poor beasties, stuck here below in a traffic jam of flesh, bleating, panic-stricken as they were trapped, fore and aft, by the fallen bodies of the others.

It hadn't been easy, but after a time Dwyer had learnt a degree of Christian compassion even for the inhuman enemy. That that enemy had spared him once, when he need not have, had helped.

Leaving the underground bunker, Dwyer proceeded further down into the Earth. The Wachtmeister had told him that any changes in direction would be clearly marked with the “IHS” symbol of his order. This he found to be true as the cavernous tunnel branched and that symbol, together with an arrow, directed him leftward.

“Turn left here, miss,” Hellebardier de Courten said, as he and Sally reached the entrance of an unusually large shack, about a third mud brick, a third wood, and a third cardboard, set back from the Appian Way about forty feet. Two burly, beefy guards, swarthy and with hair sticking up above the collars of their t-shirts, each armed with a shotgun, stood in front of the shack's main entrance. They and de Courten nodded warily at each other.

Reaching the entrance, Sally looked over the menu, hand-scrawled with chalk on a large blackboard. “Oh, crap,” she said. “I forgot about this. I can't eat any of it.”

“Miss?” de Courten asked, his head cocking to one side.

Among clergy Dwyer was unusual, as most chaplains were unusual, in being subject to more than one master. One was God. The other was the branch of service, in his case the Navy. The third, and in many ways the most important, was the rail thin, cassocked man seated before him. Rather, it was the order that man represented.

That rail-thin, aesthetic-faced priest, Father Perales, an assistant to the Father General of the order, shook his head wearily. “Father,” Perales said, "it isn't that she's an artificially created body; His Holiness has already ruled that, in the interests of propagating the faith, artificial bodies are, under certain circumstances, acceptable.