John Ringo: Yellow Eyes

The Undersecretary for Extraterrestrial Affairs did smile, but with an altogether grim and even regretful satisfaction. He had — he believed — thoroughly screwed the defense of Panama, and done so with a subtlety worthy of the United States Department of State. Thus, there was a certain satisfaction at a job well done. But he had screwed the United States and humanity as well, and that was no cause for even the mildest mirth. The fact was that the undersecretary loathed the Darhel but had no choice but to cooperate with them and support them if his own family was to survive the coming annihilation. The fact was also that, however they might couch it, the Darhel’s purpose was inimical to humanity.

The alien twisted uncomfortably in his ill-fitting chair. The undersecretary had been around the elflike Darhel enough to recognize the signs of discomfiture. In truth, he enjoyed them.

“I am at a losss to underssstand your current sssatisssfaction,” complained the Darhel. “You have failed completely. The losss to our interessstsss and, need I add, your own isss incalculable. We asssked you to stop thisss wassste of resssourcccesss on a sssecondary theater. Inssstead you have arranged to commit your polity to a much larger defensssive allianccce. Inssstead you have exssspanded the wassste beyond all boundsss of logic.”

“Didn’t I just ?” observed the undersecretary cryptically.

The inspector had gathered a half a dozen of the rejuvs in a conference room, once an operating room, on the western side of the hospital, facing the Canal. Like all the rest of the building, the room stank of disinfectant. The walls were painted the same light green as half the hospitals in the world. The mostly empty conference table was good wood, and Hector wondered where it had come from, or if it had been here continuously since the gringos left… or perhaps since they’d first arrived.

Hector sat now — like his mother — looking for all the world like a seventeen-year-old. Opposite Hector was an Indian in a loin cloth fashioned from a white towel. The Indian also looked like a near child despite the many faint scars on his body. To Hector’s left was Digna and beside her another man unknown to either, though Digna seemed to be almost flirting with him. Handsome, Rabiblanco, Hector thought. Two more men, seated to either side of the Indian, completed the complement. The conference room was not crowded.

Hector was initially terribly upset that his mother should be flirting, period, and more so because it was with such a youngster. And then he saw the youngster’s eyes and realized that he, too, was one of the old ones who had seen the elephant.

“William Boyd,” announced the “youngster,” reaching out an open hand to Hector. “Call me Bill. And I can’t imagine why I am here and why I am seventeen again. God knows, I didn’t like it much the last time.”

The inspector then spoke, “You are here, Mr. Boyd, because you, like these others, were once a soldier.”

Boyd looked at Digna and incredulously asked, “ You were a soldier, miss?”

“The Thousand Day War,” Digna answered, “but I was more of a baby than a real soldier. I helped Mama do the cooking and the dishes. Certainly I didn’t fight or carry a gun. I was too little to so much as pick up a gun.”

“You are, nonetheless,” corrected the inspector, “listed on the public records as a veteran of that war, Mrs. Miranda. You are a veteran. Your son, Hector, served when a boy as a volunteer rifleman in the Coto River War. Mr. Boyd here volunteered for service as an infantry private in the United States Army during the Second World War, fighting in some of the closing battles in Belgium, France and Germany.”

“I didn’t exactly volunteer,” Boyd corrected. “I went to school in the United States and was drafted upon graduation. I made sergeant before I was discharged,” he added proudly.

“A minor distinction,” the inspector countered. “You could have left the United States. Your family certainly had the money and the connections.”

Boyd shrugged. He could have, he supposed, but it wouldn’t have felt right. Maybe he had been drafted by his own sense of obligation rather than by law.

The inspector turned to the other side of the conference table, pointing at the small, brown, scarred — and now that one looked closely, rather ferocious seeming — Indian. “Chief Ruiz, there, was taken from Coiba,” Panama’s prison island, “where he was serving time for murder. The fact is, though, that the murder was more in the nature of an action of war… despite his having taken and shrunk the heads of the men he killed. He has been pardoned on condition of volunteering to return to his tribe of the Chocoes Indians to lead them in this war.”

Again the inspector’s finger moved, indicating a short and stocky brown man, and an elegant seeming white. “The other two, First Sergeant Mendez and Captain Suarez, are retired veterans of our own forces, both of whom fought the gringos in the 1989 invasion.

“I have your next assignments,” the inspector announced. “Four of you are heading to Fort Espinar on the Atlantic side for various courses. Officer Candidate School for Mrs. Miranda and her son. Captain Suarez, you are going to a gringo-run version of their War College — a somewhat truncated version of it, anyway — after which you can expect to command one of the new infantry regiments we are raising, the tenth, I believe. Mendez is slated to become your regimental sergeant major after he completes the new Sergeant Majors Academy.

“Chief Ruiz, from here you will be returned to your tribe. Another group of gringos will be along presently to train you and your people. Your rank, honorary for now, is sergeant first class. When it becomes official you will receive back pay.”

Boyd noticed, and didn’t much like, that he had been left for last. People always saved the worst news for last.

“Mr. Boyd, you will go from here to the presidential palace. There you will be offered a direct commission as a major general. It is planned that you will become the chief logistics officer for the entire force we are raising, three full corps.”

“I know how to be a private,” Boyd protested. “I don’t know a thing about being a general.”

“That,” countered the inspector, “is your problem, señor. But infantry privates we can find or make. We cannot so easily replicate the CEO of the Boyd Steamship Company. So a general you are going to be, sir.”

The worst problem, Guanamarioch decided, was the mind-numbing boredom.

And there’s nothing to be done for it. I can stay awake and be bored, or I can join my normals in sleep and be asleep still when we come out of hyperspace. If this were a normal planet we were heading to, that would be fine. But against the new thresh, these amazing human threshkreen, we might well be destroyed in space. I would not want to die asleep. How would I find my way past the demons with my eyes closed? How would my body be preserved except by nourishing the people? How would I petition my ancestors to join their company with the record, “I never fought for the clan but was ordered evacuated and then was killed while sleeping”?

The Kessentai shuddered with horror, as much at the idea of the complete disappearance of his corporeal self as at the thought of being denied his place among the eternals of his clan.

Still, boredom does not overcome horror; it is a form of horror itself. Thus the Kessentai found himself resting his hindquarters on a bench plainly made for a different species, staring at a holographic projection, and reading.