John Ringo: Sister Time

Cally shared a lane with Granpa on their way home. She still missed her little apartment, but she wouldn’t trade the girls for anything, even if motherhood did mean moving back home. Oh, she hired one of Wendy’s granddaughters to play nanny whenever she expected to be gone for awhile, but there still needed to be someone to watch over all the details and make sure everyone got where they should be on time and all the bills got paid. If Granpa was Clan O’Neal’s patriarch and clan head, Shari had matriarchy down pat. The O’Neal Bane Sidhe hid their headquarters in a Himmit-camouflaged mini Sub-Urb deep under Indiana. The Clan O’Neal hid its headquarters in plain sight in a sprawling farmhouse, in the swampy pine woods of Edisto Island.

Technically bounty-farmers, living under various names and identities, the O’Neals and the Sundays, their immediate in-laws, and assorted Bane Sidhe waifs and strays had kept the area on and around the island swept clean of all but the occasional stray abat, the pests, for at least twenty years. It would have been inaccurate to call the clan self-sufficient on the local land and sea. They had a source of working capital. The Clan O’Neal men (by now the Sundays were regarded as a cadet branch) who planned to work for the Bane Sidhe tended to seek training, and find it, in the armed services. While Fleet Strike and Fleet remained the primary armed forces of the Galactic Federation, the various United States and Canadian military organizations still remained. Missions tended to be against pirates or insurgents. Or the U.S. military “loaned” units to Fleet or Fleet Strike, or other Galactic interests, for specialty functions. To limit the problems associated with being off-planet and unavailable, the O’Neals tended to gravitate to what was still called counterterror special ops. Large parts of the country on both coasts still lay in ruins, but the United States was no more able to survive without the rest of the world now than it had been prewar. The war itself had been a special case, but strategic resources from overseas were as important now as they ever had been. In modern times, counterterror really meant protecting those strategic resources and the trade lanes that served the many single-export colonies.

The clan members’ service in the military provided excellent training while continuing an honored family tradition, albeit under assumed identities. It also brought hard currency into the Clan community. Their pay covered goods and services that the island community couldn’t make or grow for themselves. It stretched the dollars from the small cash crops some of the women grew each year. Low-country agriculture had been a hand-to-mouth proposition long before the war, and the O’Neals didn’t go in for tourism, great beaches or not. Still, shipping by moonlight was an old and revered tradition along the North American coastline. A couple of what she still thought of as “the kids” had quite a talent for it.

Having grown up with just Granpa, and then having lived alone for so long, Cally still felt vaguely claustrophobic if she stayed too long in what had become a happy, if chaotic and often quarrelsome, jumble of aunts and uncles younger than she was mixed with all sorts of cousins, grown or growing. Not to mention various people relocated by the Bane Sidhe, who needed to live someplace anonymous for awhile. Without the slab, that added up to a good little small town, even though a number of kin had wrapped themselves up in very sincere identities and assimilated into the outside world. The Clan was careful to turn in enough Posleen heads for bounty, maintaining the illusion that the area was still infested. This brought in a little hard currency, but they were having to go farther and farther afield each year in search of prey.

Cally and Papa’s drive didn’t take as long as it could’ve, once they’d navigated the tunnel under the Charleston Wall. The O’Neals kept the track between Charleston and Edisto well maintained, but took pains to make it look dilapidated. When they got on a good patch of straightaway, they could really open up the engines and make some time. It would have been suicide without the buckleys running IR watch for whitetail deer. With them, it was merely foolhardy. But fun. Well, except for a bug that hit her helmet’s air-intake and sieved into her mouth, leaving her spitting what tasted like grass the rest of the way. You took the good with the bad.

It was predawn by the time they got home, the sky turning slowly from blue-gray to gold. The sun wasn’t up, and neither were most of the kids. One of the girls coming out to milk her cows waved to them as they pulled into the packed sand and shell driveway. They wheeled the bikes into the shed behind the house, racking the helmets neatly on a set of carved wooden hooks. As Cally climbed the cinderblock kitchen stairs and trudged down the creaky pine hallway to the add-on Granpa had built for her and the girls, she knew her ass was dragging. All that way and all that work for nothing. What a night. She checked that her shades were pulled down and sealed tight before shutting her door and going to bed, shedding shoes and clothes on the way. As long as it stayed dark, her body would neither know nor care that it was daytime out there. She needed at least a good six hours before she was going to feel human again. She patted the washcloth on her nightstand where Shari had left it. That was thoughtful. The sheets smelled faintly of lily of the valley as she snuggled between them and shut her eyes.

The grass was wet under her feet and her sneakers squelched loudly as she snuck through the trees, hunting rats. The twenty-two rifle in her hand was pointed upwards, away from any non-targets. Oh, God — she ducked as an owl flew past right in front of her face, a struggling rat between its claws. A rat with a human face. Oh no, not the faces again, I hate the faces. A twig broke next to her and she jumped, inadvertently pulling the trigger. The shot echoed loudly in the night. A woman beside her in an antiquated nun’s habit sneered, “Stupid girl! You had your finger on the trigger. Now they’ve got you for sure.” She tried not looking at the face, but the glazed eyes and tongue hanging out drew her own eyes upwards. And then she could hear the hissing growl and the thud of clawed feet behind her. The horses were coming for her. She dropped the rifle and ran and kept running, down the empty Galplas corridors, spattered and rust brown. There was a door and she didn’t want to go in it but she had to hide. The door swung open and another one of the faces leered out from the darkness. “They’ll kill you just like you killed me. But come in, come in. I was such a scumbag, I deserved it. You’ll be in such good company, won’t you, Cally?” Her T-shirt was plastered against her in cold sweat as she turned and ran again. They were closer now. Quick, into a ventilation shaft! And she was over the edge and falling, and the faces were in the walls again, going past as she fell, and she tried to scream but she —

She was sitting up in bed, her breath coming in gasps. The T-shirt she’d slept in was cold and wet on her skin. She grabbed her washcloth, burying her face in it and shuddering. That was a bad one. They told me the dreams might come back when I started working again, but damn. What time is it, anyway? She looked over at the alarm clock and groaned. Only nine-thirty? Ah, hell. Might as well get up. No way I’m getting back to sleep after that.

She pulled on a robe and a pair of big, cushiony slippers that had been fuzzy once upon a time, and wandered into the kitchen in search of coffee and breakfast. She yawned, feeling her back pop as she stretched out the kink that had somehow worked its way into her spine.

Shari was in the kitchen. Slim, her hair the gold of the dune grass on the beach, Cally’s step-grandmother looked twenty-something, like all juvs in their first century. She’d been a middle-aged mother back in the war when Cally was just thirteen. Both women had old eyes — eyes that had seen too much. Shari’s were more motherly and less haunted. The kind of mother’s eyes that didn’t miss a thing. She was loading her breakfast dishes in the dishwasher when Cally came into the kitchen. The O’Neals had to be careful to keep it quiet, but electricity was damn near free. When you had friends who played with antimatter almost as an afterthought, power for basic household needs wasn’t a problem. Raising the kids to understand and follow blackout rules on the electric lights could have been rough, if they hadn’t been doing it all their lives. To satellites or aircraft, what few there were, Edisto Island looked like just another war-wasted and not-yet-recovered stretch of wilderness. Well, it almost was. Secretive clannishness had, by now, become a set of ingrained habits. The O’Neals had learned some hard lessons about survival and had adapted and copied a few tricks from their Galactic friends. In a pre-Posleen world, Clan O’Neal would have been a flock of very odd ducks. In the modern world, they were survivors.