John Ringo - Cally's War

“Yeah, well, you’re what, about twenty? I’m twice that, man. If you had, like, lived and seen the saner-sounding humanists die off young, and the lunatic fringe doing just fine, and some of the accidents and such taking the sane ones looking… funny. Like, man, it smells so totally bogus… I just, you know, keep my eyes open and my mouth shut. Oh, I don’t, like, buy into that whole Darhel conspiracy theory stuff. I think it’s probably more the big corporations trying to grab as much money as they can — the military industrial complex all over again, you know. The only way to, like, fight the whole establishment thing is to drop out, you know? Sometimes I feel like the only way to get back to, you know, the garden this planet could be is for all the aliens to pack up and go home and then, you know, make the big corporations illegal. Then we could all, like, live free, you know? But all I can do is, like, live as free as I can and, like, try not to run my mouth enough to wind up on the corporations’ list, you know?”

“I guess I can see both sides. I mean, I had this pretty cool art ethics class that talked about the pressures we could expect in various kinds of jobs and their effect on creative authenticity. On the other hand, one of the most coveted class spots on campus is the live modeling ‘Aliens in Art.’ I still can’t believe I got in. They have to keep the numbers of students really small. The thikp… tchpith… crab was really funny. Said something about thinking the peaceful pursuit of art was good therapy for bloodthirsty carnivore barbarians.” She grinned. “Only he was so hard to draw, because they can’t stay still, you know?”

He chuckled and they drifted off into silence again, him concentrating on the road and her reading another of Marilyn’s romance novels.

Eventually the mountains gave way to rolling foothills of cedar, different kinds of leafy trees she couldn’t have named if you’d paid her, and the occasional weeping willow. The less mountainous the terrain got, the more the hills were covered with strips of white or black board fences with horses or ponies grazing in the fields of lush grass, many of them females with foals. She had been disappointed the first time she visited Kentucky to find that the grass was not at all blue. Even now that she knew better it was vaguely disappointing.

The extraterrestrial market for horses had been one of the stranger outcomes of contact with the Galactics. The Indowy had been delighted with the intelligent, sociable herbivores, and even the Tchpth had been known to comment that perhaps Earth had an incipient intelligent and civilized species. While the Himmit didn’t actually buy pets, they seemed fascinated by the interaction between equine and Indowy. The result was that the horse farms of Kentucky occupied more acreage in the state than ever and were currently selling as many animals as they could breed, particularly ponies and miniatures, as pets — making the industry one of the more reliable planetary sources of FedCreds. Once, they even passed a field where a couple of ponies were being inspected by an Indowy buyer, who seemed not the least perturbed that the mare and her foal were gently lipping its fur.

Reefer had phoned ahead as soon as they started to get into horse country, so when they pulled off the interstate into a Waffle House parking lot on the way through Lexington, he parked behind the restaurant right next to an ancient green SUV, whose driver put down his PDA and walked around to open the back glass.

“Why don’t you go in and get us a seat? Might as well grab lunch while we’re here.” The deadhead nodded towards the restaurant. It was a busy, major street with a lot of restaurants, but he had parked to minimize the number of people who’d see him make his sale. Unfortunately, that meant she was hit in the face with a strong reek of Dumpster as she got out onto the hot asphalt, and she couldn’t help looking a bit longingly at the upscale Italian chain restaurant across the street on the next block as she walked around to get to the Waffle House entrance.

She was seated at the counter, a seat saved beside her, had already gotten her coffee and was picking at a pecan waffle when he came in. It didn’t take him long to wolf down an omelet and Coke, then they were back on the road. Even though they didn’t go into the center of the city, almost all of Lexington was certified historic. Her throat felt a bit funny and she wondered if maybe she was coming down with a touch of a cold, or maybe allergies. It was like driving through a tiny slice of prewar Earth, and she focused determinedly on her screen as the landscape flashed past the windows at speed, slowing down occasionally when a chirping from somewhere under the dashboard betrayed the highly illegal piece of equipment hiding underneath.

The first time it went off, she could feel him looking sideways at her. When she looked up at him and shrugged, looking back to her book, he grunted noncommittally and popped another piece of gum, but he didn’t seem worried from then on whenever the detector sounded — he just slowed down until the tiny red light on the cube player turned off.

It was mid-afternoon when he dropped her off at a gas station off the Hopple Street exit in Cincinnati. As she got her backpack and suitcase out, shook hands, politely fended off another job offer, and watched the van drive back off towards the interstate on-ramp, she could hear the strains of his cube music cruising through their perpetual shuffle… can’t revoke your soul for tryin’, Get out of the door and light out and look all around. Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me; Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me…

She shook her head with a wry smile as he drove out of sight and took her stuff over to the pay phone to call herself a cab, then sat on the bus stop bench next to the phone and waited, studying her surroundings and the intermix of tall, very narrow old townhouses with small-scale industrial buildings on each side of the street. The bus stop was between the gas station and an appliance repair shop. Across the street, she could see bits of the downtown skyline through gaps between a couple of the houses and a squat, brick machine-shop, but most of it was grayed out into dim, jerky geometric shapes in the smog.

It gave General Beed a feeling of importance to be summoned — well, invited, really — to a meeting in Chicago to discuss his next assignment. After the war, well, there were a lot of old generals with a lot of experience who were, now, going to live a long time. He had been lucky to stay on active, running the Southeastern Regional Criminal Investigations Division. It was a more important position than it looked, at first, since the southeast was vital to the reclamation of the rest of the forty-eight states of the continental U.S.

This conference room would have done credit to any prewar Fortune 500 company — the glossy wood conference table, corporate art on the walls, the plush carpeting in one of those pinkish colors that probably had a fancy name, and fresh paint on the walls — it was all a throwback to a prewar opulence that you rarely saw these days, especially in the service. And the view from the Fleet Strike Tower was fabulous. Rank definitely had its privileges. He raised a hand to check by feel that his mustache was in order, running a light hand over his dark blond hair to check it as well, careful not to disarrange it — although with a good strong touch of hair spray that was not much of a hazard. He almost didn’t mind cooling his heels waiting for General Vanderberg. Almost.

The major general, when he came in, didn’t impress Beed. The exchange of salutes, as always, gave him a brief period to size the other man up and develop a first impression. Rejuv helped, of course, and he couldn’t fault the man’s uniform or grooming. Still, a general officer of Fleet Strike should look like a general officer, and this officer’s crooked nose, almost connected eyebrows, and leftover juvenile acne scars left an overall impression of, well, ordinariness, that was not, in his guest’s experience, representative of what a good general officer should be. Unfortunately, no one had asked him. Still, one showed respect for the rank, and the man at least appeared fit in a way that spoke of commendable continuing devotion to his PT. He had, like Beed, the whipcord runner’s build that one tended to associate with good soldiers, and he warmed a bit towards the other man.