John Ringo: Honor of the Clan

“Wait,” Mike said, giggling. “Indowy rebels ? What do they do, send pointed memos?”

“They penetrate the Darhel for information,” Wes said, his face blank. “Very, very thoroughly.”

“Oh,” Mike said, suddenly serious. “And they pass that information to… ?”

“Mostly they just seem to collect it like misers,” Wes said with a sigh. “Look, we don’t know a lot about the Bane Sidhe. They also have a very serious counterintelligence capability. But this is what we know and suspect. First of all, there’s the name. Does it sound familiar?”

“It doesn’t sound Indowy or Darhel,” Mike said. “Or Crab for that matter.”

“It’s not, it’s Gaelic,” Wes said. “It translates as Killer of Elves. The Darhel Killers in other words.”

“Why Gaelic?” Mike asked. “I take it that’s the name for the human component.”

“No,” Wes said. “It is the name of the overall group, which existed prior to this contact.”

“So there was prior contact,” Mike said, nodding. “That was pretty evident but…”

“But now we get back around to why the Bane Sidhe matter to Fleet Strike,” Tam said. “First of all, they’re a rebel group against the Federation as it’s currently constituted. As I pointed out, much as we may both hate the Darhel, taking them out is out of the question absent creating something to replace them and having it in place beforehand. Otherwise we’re faced by a widespread civil war. Which would give the Posleen time to recover and then, depending on how long the war took and what replaced the Federation, we’d be back in a hole. Given the weapons that could be used in such a war, Earth might not survive. I don’t want that sort of war. Not now. Not absent some way to make sure it doesn’t go insane.”

“And they do?” Mike asked.

“We’re not sure what their goals and aims are except taking out the Darhel,” Wesley said. “But recently there have been several developments. The first is that we finally turned a human Bane Sidhe and got some serious information about their internal structure. At least on the human side. We were… somewhat surprised to find that their main human component is called the Clan O’Neal,” he added with a smile.

“O’Neal?” Mike said. “Why?”

“The agent never explained. Just that their main combat component, which was broken down into several teams, used that as its name. For that matter, there was a Team Papa, Team Cally, etc.”

“Bastards,” Mike said, his face hard. “How fucking dare they?”

In many ways the loss of his wife, father and daughter in the war was as fresh today as it had been sixty years ago.

“I believe it’s intended as a compliment,” Tam said, carefully.

“I don’t give a shit,” Mike said. “Pisses me off. I take it you’re getting to why we care about these guys. Besides that they’re pissing me off.”

“General Stewart was the investigation commander…” General Wesley said.

“Did those bastards kill Stewart?” Mike asked angrily.

“We’re told no,” Tam said. “Can I get more than a half sentence out, please?”

“Go,” Mike said.

“Yes, sir,” Wesley said, smiling.

“Sorry, General,” Mike said, nodding. “Please continue, sir.”

“General Stewart was the commander of the investigation. But he wanted more than the mole who was fairly low level. So he set up a trap. He let information leak out that a) we had a mole and b) the information on who the mole was was in a particular Fleet Strike office. Then General Stewart took a position as an aide in the office and eventually caught the agent the Bane Sidhe sent in to try to find the information. Well, caught the agent just after they sent out the information.”

“So we lost the mole,” Mike said.

“We lost the mole,” Wesley agreed. “But we’d captured one of their top agents with far more information. She was, in fact, the Team Leader for Team Cally.”

“Bitch,” Mike said, shaking his head.

“As you say,” Wesley said. “Female, twenties… Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Mike said.

“Maybe twenties, maybe older than us,” Tam said. “Her level of bioengineering was just unreal. Most of the investigators couldn’t figure out how her body could work. All of her surface genetics, right down to intestinal epithelials, were those of the Fleet Strike captain she’d replaced.”

“What happened to the captain?” Mike asked.

“Turned up afterwards alive and unharmed,” Tam said. “But about the agent. Never found out a real name. DNA was so screwed around it was impossible to tell what was originally hers. Muscular enhancements, neural enhancements including to the brain. Rejuv but not standard. Something different. Resistant to every interrogation drug, resistant to pretty much every drug up to and including alcohol, LSD, morphine…”

“Christ,” Mike said, frowning. “Where did she get all those enhancements?”

“Wouldn’t we like to know,” Tam said, smiling thinly. “But Fleet took over the interrogation. And then they lost her.”

“Killed trying to escape?” Mike asked, his face tight.

“More like escaped,” Tam said, shaking his head. “Oh, first reported as having died during interrogation. One gets the impression the interrogation was rather hostile and physical. But then it was ‘probable successful escape.’ Shortly afterwards, General Stewart died in a shuttle accident.”

“And you say it’s not these Bane Sidhe bastards?” Mike asked with a snort.

“We were informed that they had nothing to do with it,” Tam said. “After the incident with the agent we became officially aware of the Bane Sidhe. And with official awareness we could open up the sort of back-channels that always exist between intelligence groups. They are insistent that they had nothing to do with General Stewart’s death. Then there’s the other kicker.”

“Don’t leave me waiting,” Mike said.

“From our perspective, prior to this incident, the Protocol is that we don’t investigate pre-war contact between the Darhel and humans and the Darhel stop killing off our investigation teams. It wasn’t until we established a back-channel to the Bane Sidhe that we found out about the other side, that if the Darhel kill military personnel the Bane Sidhe start killing Darhel again.”

“So are they on our side or what?” Mike asked.

“You begin to understand the complexity,” Tam said. “Thus on to the next level. A year ago there was a major shake-up among the Darhel. Among other things, the Epetar Group went out of business and the Clan Leader suffered lintatai.”

“Hooray,” Mike said with a grin.

“Yeah, great,” Tam said. “The problem being, it wasn’t just bad business practices. At least, not the normal sort. What, exactly, happened I’m not even too sure. But we know the following. There was an Epetar facility here on Earth conducting classified research having to do with ‘neurological interfacing.’ ”

“I thought the Darhel were dead set against that,” Mike said.

“Well, for one thing, their research wasn’t anything to do with neurological interfacing,” Tam said. “What, exactly, they were researching we’re not too sure. What we’re sure of is that SOCOM got a heads up that there might be a ‘terrorist’ attack on the facility. There was such an attack. DAG was sent in to secure the facility and arrest the terrorists. DAG, instead, switched sides.”

“I’d heard they were going deep undercover or something,” Mike said. “They went rogue?”

“They went rogue,” General Wesley said. “Which should have been the end of it. But there was an additional… event, the nature of which we’re still trying to figure out and the building is now essentially slagged. What slagged it, why it was slagged, how many of DAG escaped, why they went rogue… All unanswered questions. Except one. The ‘terrorists’ were Bane Sidhe.”