John Ringo: Sister Time

The DAG guys had no anticipation that they would be killing these particular guards in this particular place, or in the next few hours, or at all. They each followed the general principle of having a plan to kill everyone he met. When off duty, but together, the counterterror troops resembled a wolf pack between hunts. When operational, the troops — being all O’Neals and in the same unit, to boot — moved in an easy flow so coordinated it was almost telepathic.

Their distribution now differed little in kind from their distribution around the civilian security people for the past couple of weeks. The specifics followed the tactical situation. Without ever seeming to realize why, one or two of the guards had developed a strange tendency to jump at small noises when the DAG guys were around.

Cally, still taking point, opened the door to the loading bay and immediately tried to step backwards through it, seeing that Mr. Murphy had finally struck with a vengeance. Unfortunately, she’d been seen.

“Hey! No, goddammit, don’t you dare leave. You’re fucking late and I’m not repeating myself just because some asshole who couldn’t be on time didn’t get the memo. Get your ass down here, and you better believe I’m docking your pay for this. Who’s your supervisor?” All of this left the shift supervisor’s mouth in a rapid-fire staccato burst, without pause for breath.

He was approaching the base of the stairs as he said it, obviously to continue chewing her out, so instead of retreating, Cally continued down the right half-flight of stairs, noting the six-inch steel rim rising at the floor of the landing and running along the line of the stairs down on each side. She’d seen better cover, and worse.

Having seen the troops deployed along a line at right angles from her team’s angle of entry, and realizing that an unintentional ambush could still be close enough for government work, counting the odds, she made an instantaneous decision.

“Might as well come on guys, we’re in the soup but good,” she called back over her shoulder.

“Oh, so there’s more of you lazy ass slack — Hey! What shift are you on anyw—”

Cally’s draw was a smooth blur. She had whittled it free of unnecessary movement like a gunsmith floating a barrel, then embedded in muscle memory with daily dry-fire practice. The buckley monitored her progress over time. She had been stable for many years now. If draw speed had had a formal competition class, she would have long ago achieved high master status.

The shift supervisor’s body was jerking from the big round between his eyes as the back of his head blasted away in a welter of red and white gore, splatters of blood flying back onto her face and coverall. Then his body was shielding hers as she carried him right with her, forward and behind a barrel. Even though she twisted to get the corpse under her as she landed, her vision went red as everything exploded in pain.

She’d had no choice but to take him along. She might need his stuff if she ran out of ammo, his extra magazines were on his belt, and she couldn’t possibly have gotten them loose on the fly. She was damned good, but there were things even she couldn’t do. For a female operative whose full enhancement gave her the strength of a supremely fit man — with none of the extra bulk — the fastest solution was to take the magazines by taking the whole man. She hadn’t really needed the corpse for cover, since she was behind the barrel before the first round impacted on the cinderblock behind where she had been.

At close enough to the same instant, all hell broke loose as the Bane Sidhe operatives, every one of whom recognized Aunt Cally instantly despite the short, black hair, opened up on the guards while backing to take up their preselected positions behind one stack of boxes or another.

The rest of the switch team used the device and cart as a visual distraction and cover, coming in low behind it and pitching it down the opposite half-flight of concrete and steel stairs, hitting the floor of the upper landing behind what paltry cover there was.

Glancing aside and through the gaps in the stair risers, Cally amended that impression. Tommy Sunday had somehow managed to either precede, follow, or pace the cart and land himself behind a screen of toilet paper boxes that she was surprised he’d had time to find and pick, much less get to. Her already high opinion of the ACS veteran’s practical survival skills rose another notch. Cover it wasn’t, but for a man as big as he was, the concealment was a better tactical choice. She realized that ninety percent, at least, of the enemy wouldn’t even think to shoot through the boxes. The rest would almost certainly miss anything vital. Good choice.

The Darwinian process of war generally has to apply over several engagements, or several battles, to make veterans of survivors. The enemy survivors of the first seconds of this engagement were made up of both the fitter and the luckier of their fellows. At least one veteran of combat against the Posleen, unknown to the Bane Sidhe people, now lay bleeding out on the floor. Being a veteran had not equated to being a good man, in his case. Any ship making port had its rats, and Nicholas Rondine had left a trail of beaten and broken ex-wives behind him.

Being in a bad place did not always equate to being a bad person, either. Willard Burns was a forty-three-year-old dry alcoholic, recently unemployed from a shoe factory, whose next door neighbor had gotten him this job. He had been unhappily working his two week notice because his five-year-old daughter wanted a toboggan from Santa. Now he had ceased feeling pain from the shotgun blast to his chest. Forty extra pounds of beer gut had rendered him slower than too many of his fellows.

Whether fitter or luckier, most of the guards behind the boxes had, unfortunately, either through presence of mind or awareness of limited ammo, chosen to at least attempt to aim their fire. The DAG guys had taken out at least three times their number in that first burst of action before the survivors were under cover. The good news was that the enemy was minus about a third of his strength. The bad news was two thirds of the enemy, both the unwounded and lightly grazed, had made cover.

DAG itself was not without losses. One man lay DRT, in a position too hot to Hiberzine him — an almost certainly permanent loss. Another lay behind the boxes, sporting the swollen lips and other visual signs of a Hiberzined man, chest perforated by a skilled or lucky pistol shot. Not like it mattered which.

One guy had taken it in the meat of the leg, and was combat effective again after a few precious seconds spent dosing and binding it. The other three made it completely untouched and fully effective.

The numerical odds were essentially unchanged from the beginning of the fight. The Cally team made little functional difference as they were so lightly armed.

With a few minutes to get organized and start thinking, even forty untrained idiots could take on the best soldiers, especially if they had an accepted chain of command and were armed with weapons tactically appropriate to the situation, as these were.

Cally had absorbed the change in resources and positioning instantaneously and with almost no conscious thought, part of the battle gestalt of one of the youngest living veterans of the Posleen War, irregular though she’d been. Her barrel was on the same side of the room as the DAG troopers, so she had been positioned perfectly to run the numbers on friendly troops. Not like six minus two was a hard calculation to make. In their military uniforms, DAG troopers were instantly distinguishable from the enemy.

The DAG troopers, in turn, would have absolutely no trouble tracking the friendlies on the switch team, all but Schmidt being their close kin, known to them from birth.