John Ringo: Into the Looking Glass

Bill thought, frantically, about his instructions. He hadn’t asked what happened if the code entry was interrupted. Better to try finishing it. He hit the last symbol and was rewarded by a blinking light. He started pressing the counter.

“How long?” he yelled.

“Not very,” Miller replied, looking around. There were only two SEALs still firing besides himself.

Bill pressed five increments on the counter, about seven seconds, thought about having to key the second code, and pressed five more. Then he keyed the code, took the box in both hands and threw it through the gate as hard as he could.

It entered the gate and he started to get up but it bounced back and landed behind him. Immediately following it was a centipede tank.

“Fuck!” Bill shouted. “IT’S LIVE, ARDUNE IS LIVE, CENTIPEDE!”

Miller turned around and pulled out his last thermite grenade. He had noticed that the centipedes seemed to have some sort of mouth or breathing organ on their front. It was heavily armored and turned down, impossible to hit with a round, but he wasn’t planning on shooting it. He pulled the pin on the grenade, took two steps and shoved it up the opening as hard as he could, leaning the mecha into the face of the tank and pushing back, trying to keep it from extruding all the way out of the gate. His feet started sliding back as he counted.

“Three, two, one,” he muttered, wondering what hell was like. Probably pretty similar to Leavenworth, but longer.

Bill got one hand on the box and turned around. The centipede more than half filled the gate opening but he took two steps and leapt onto it, directly between two of the hornlike plasma generators. Taking the box in both hands he threw it towards the gate again, as hard as he could.

Bill never was sure what he saw in that moment. For just a second he thought that stars appeared in the gate as it turned black and lights flashed in it. But they seemed to be moving lights, moving in some complex pattern that defied explanation. The image was there for only a moment but it seared itself on his soul. He knew, in his heart, that they were not just stars, not burning bits of gas, but souls, entities. Perhaps even fuzzy children’s toys, waving a farewell salute. He felt, in that brief instant, that he truly knew what it meant to touch the face of God.

Then the world went white.

Miller saw the gate go black for a moment, then disappear, leaving the rest of the centipede, and Dr. Weaver’s suit arms, either on the other side or in some nowhere place. And then he felt the thermite grenade pop.

The explosion was not a plasma explosion. More like a very large transformer blowing up. Very large. Miller felt himself picked up and thrown through the air. It was a vaguely peaceful feeling, much better than the desperate combat he had been involved in a moment earlier. Right up until he hit the burning oak tree.

“Dr. Weaver?”

Pain. All-enveloping pain. Lots of it.

Weaver got one eye opened and groaned, or tried to; it came out as a croak. He swore that if God made the pain go away he’d live a good life and never, ever, do anything even slightly risky again. Wah-Lum? Hah, no chance. Mountain biking? And risk road rash? He’d buy a house on one level, never climb stairs again, never run, just walk. Nothing that could cause so much as a scrape. Blunt knives in the house. Put rubber on all the corners. His nerves felt jangled. Please, God, just let the pain go away.

He got a look at the ceiling and it wasn’t good. It looked like the inside of a tent. There was a groaning from nearby and then a hoarse shriek. He tried to move his fingers and was rewarded with a lance of pain again, bad enough that he nearly passed out.

“Dr. Weaver?” the voice said, again.

“Ow,” was all he could get out.

“Are you in pain?”

“Owwwww!”

“I’ll get a doctor.”

He swiveled his one good eye around and saw that there was a line of beds, filled with casualties. It was a tent, a big one.

“Dr. Weaver?” a female voice said. “I’m going to give you some liquid Valium. We’re running low on morphine; we’ve got more casualties than we’re supposed to have for a field hospital this size. You’re in no danger. You have some serious burns from an electrical fire and a broken arm. Other than that, you’re in good shape compared to most of the rest of the injured. We’re going to be moving you, soon, to another hospital. Just rest as well as you can.”

“Uhhh,” Bill said and then God answered his prayers and made the pain go away.

“Hey, Doc, you’re not out of bed, yet?”

Weaver looked up from the mess of gruel that the hospital consider a nourishing meal to where Miller was being wheeled in the door by a candy striper. The chief had a big bandage over one eye, an arm and a leg in a cast and a very nonpermissible cigar in his teeth. He’d managed to find a set of BDUs, somewhere, though and he had a new set of rank pinned on his collar, a yellow bar with a black check in it that Bill recognized, now, as the insignia of a warrant officer.

“Like a bad penny, you keep showing up,” Bill said, grinning. He grinned a lot these days; the world hadn’t come to an end.

Things were still bad. The gates, and the track three bosons that generated them, were well and truly gone. But the Titcher/Dreen had established large bridgeheads before that happened. They were using their surviving forces and the bridgeheads to begin colonization, continuing to create monsters that were a tough battle to destroy. But, slowly, they were being pushed back. Where the bridgeheads were observable from the distance, it was apparent that the Dreen, as they were being called now, built special-purpose structures to produce their fighting forces, some for dog-demons, some for thorn-throwers, others for the mosquito-missiles. As that became obvious, artillery was brought to bear from long range, saturating the air defenses until the structures that provided the missiles and centipede tanks, which were the only things that stopped air assaults, were destroyed. After that it was a matter of killing the monsters and their structures faster than they could be produced. It was working, slowly.

In the meantime, the “real” world had continued though. Units had had to be redeployed from Iraq and the nascent democracy in that country was having a hard time with ongoing guerilla activity. Terrorists had exploded a truck bomb in New York, killing nearly fifty people. But that was probably going to be some post-9/11 high water mark; the Middle East had other problems.

Dreen pockets had broken out in several different, decidedly odd, places. They were all out of the way and most had not been noticed until they were well established and started spreading.

One was in the Bekaa Valley, in Lebanon, near a center for Hamas and Hezbollah recruitment and training. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Syrians who actually owned the territory, immediately blamed it upon the United States and sent out proclamations that they would reduce the incursion in short order. The proclamations had been going out, steadily, for a week. There was no indication that they had had any real success. Indeed, news reports filtered from the U.S. government said that satellite imagery indicated at least a twenty-five percent spread.

Another was just north of the holy city of Qom in Iran. It had apparently started at the head of a valley which housed an experimental farm run by the Iranian Ruling Council, the fundamentalist religious council that ruled upon shariah law in Iran and was the actual government behind the scenes. An “unnamed U.S. spokesperson” had pointed out that the farm was one of several sites in Iran suspected of running a clandestine biological weapons program. The Iranians hotly denied the accusation and stated that it was a plot of the Great Satan and the forces of the Revolutionary Guard would quickly contain and destroy the infestation. Like the infestation in the Bekaa Valley, it was still spreading.