John Ringo - When the Devil Dances

The atmosphere, slightly ammoniacal and earthy before, now reeked of ammonia: it stung the eyes and clawed at the nostrils.

Elgars tossed her a mask and donned one herself. “Sorry, but all I really needed was the baling wire, tape and spray paint,” she said, her voice muffled by the respirator. “Thanks for the rest of it, though. What happened to your shirt?”

Wendy’s shirt had taken a beating with three of the buttons torn away.

“I caught it on the damned ladder,” she snapped, looking down at herself. “I thought about duct taping it together, but that was just too redneck.”

“Don’t let Papa O’Neal hear you say that,” Elgars said, chuckling.

“You’re sounding normal again,” Wendy noted, opening up the toolbox and tossing her a hard candy. “You had me creeped out for a second there.” She adjusted the mask and refit it carefully. Without careful fitting, masks tended to leak and she could smell a trace of ammonia still.

“What did I sound like?” the captain asked. She had stripped out the primary power leads for one of the mixing tanks and brought it under the catwalk so that it reached the tank on the opposite side. Taking the spray paint can from Wendy she proceeded to tape the three-phase leads onto the can.

“Sort of… British I think. All this ‘there’s a good lass’ stuff.”

“I sort of remember it,” Elgars admitted. “All this stuff is just sort of ‘coming’ to me as I go along. I think the shrinks were right; I think the Crabs implanted… more than just skills, but sort of ‘memories’ in me. When I dredge one up, the… personality associated with it comes up to the front too. Then when I use it for a while, when I get used to it, the personality fades. Sometimes I get real memories along with it. Sometimes I even seem to be the person for a while. I think they might have given me most of my day-to-day skills through a single entity and she’s who comes to the fore most of the time.”

“So who is the real you?” Wendy asked.

“I dunno,” Elgars said softly. “But for the time being I’ll take what I can get; better than getting eaten by the Posleen.”

Wendy nodded for a moment then grinned. “So, you’re channeling the spirit of a British mad bomber? Does he know any good drinking songs? The Brits usually know all the good drinking songs…”

Elgars laughed and went back to the main control board. “Trust you to see the humor of it.”

“Nah, it’s just a matter of looking on the bright side of any really fucked up situation,” Wendy said with a muffled chuckle. “I didn’t know how to do that at first; I really had a hard time understanding how Tommy could be so… comfortable in Fredericksburg. I mean, we were all getting ready to be either blown up or killed and eaten. It’s because the rest of us had had our heads in the ground for years about the Posleen. But he had been thinking about what fighting them would be like, getting beaten by them would be like, for years. So when the time came, he just did it while I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, crying and worrying and half useless.”

“That I have a hard time believing,” Elgars said. She cut the power to the tank that the leads had been run to and walked back. She carefully leapt to the mixer arm and waved at the wires. “Hand those to me, would you?”

“Sure,” Wendy answered, pushing the bundle across the gap. “But really, the difference now is that most of us have been thinking about what might happen down here for years. Oh, there were some that thought the Posleen would never come; just like there are some that planned on getting drunk enough not to notice. But most of us realized that they might, and thought about what we would do about it. Generally, that was ‘head for a defense point and hold out until we’re relieved,’ but even that is wishful thinking; the Posleen will overrun those in an hour or two. There’s no way that the Army is going to be back before we’re all snacks.”

“Was this your plan from the beginning?” Elgars asked. She carefully leaned over the edge and lowered the wires into the ammoniated muck in the bottom, pressing the wires and spray can deep into it.

“No,” Wendy said with a sigh that could barely be heard over the grinding of the other motors; the material in the bottom was mostly anhydrous ammonia and the mixture was harder than cookie dough. The motors were designed to drive against liquid and although they were about thirty percent overrated for that, they were quickly reaching the point where failsafes were going to pop out. “My plan had been to be in the emergency crews; they would have been at the front lines, trying to hold the Posleen back for as long as possible. But that presumed that we got some warning; I don’t know why we didn’t.”

“So the longest that the defense points could hold out is… what?” Elgars asked, wiping her gloves off on a rag and jumping back to the catwalk. She walked back over to the central console and started shutting down the pumps.

“Three to six hours,” Wendy said. “That’s the estimated time for a Posleen force to eliminate ninety percent of resistance and presence. Of course, nobody says that, but I’ve seen the estimates. That presumes this wasn’t just a Lamprey, but if it was there wouldn’t be Posleen down here already.”

She keyed the information terminal and dove into the database. She had to enter her password twice, but she finally found the appropriate file.

“Two hours after reduction of primary defense — that’s the security forces in A section — ninety percent of the population will have been removed,” Wendy said, referring to the document. “Within six hours after reduction, ninety-eight percent will have been removed.”

“I guess we’re in the two percent then,” Elgars said.

“I think it’s a bit pessimistic,” Wendy answered. “But there’s one way to find out.” She keyed up a schematic of the Sub-Urb then opened up the emergency services database. “I was wondering, earlier, how we could figure out where the Posleen are. I finally realized you could track them by emergency calls.” She pulled up the call records and patched them into the schematic. “We’ve been on the run for four and a half hours. Penetration was about five hours ago, I’d guess.” She scrolled the schematic back five hours. “See the red dots? Those are calls, both initiating calls and support calls. There’s a bunch of them around the entrances and then they spread out.” She scrolled the schematic forward in time and Elgars could see what she meant; the red dots spread out with a solid “outline” for a while then started to dissipate.

“You can see that there’s starting to be fewer people to put in calls,” Wendy said emotionlessly. “This is by two hours after the entry; we were on our way down at that point. Cafeteria 3-B is already well inside the Posleen perimeter; Dave was gone by then or shortly afterwards.” She scrolled it outward further and now there was a light scattering of red dots. “At this point, almost all the population areas have been overrun and the Posleen are scattering into the industrial sectors. And trying to track them is pointless because nobody is calling for help anymore.”

“So in four more hours?” Elgars asked, tapping at her console.

“There will probably be three or four thousand people alive, trapped and hiding in various compartments,” Wendy said coldly. “Out of two million to start.”

“And they’re not getting out, right?” the officer said, looking at her sharply. “They’re for all practical purposes dead.”

“As a doornail.” Wendy nodded. “Ground Forces have not entered and have not responded and the Posleen are going to totally occupy this facility. There might be a Newt or two left, but for all practical purposes they’re all dead men walking.”