John Ringo - When the Devil Dances

“Neither do I, Sergeant Major,” Horner replied. “Normally this corps would be backstopped at some point, but this area…” He shrugged. “There’s also the fact that, apparently in support of this move, the Posleen all up and down the eastern seaboard are pushing at all the passes, gaps and roads, everywhere. There’s even a small incursion that has made it into the Shenandoah between Roanoke and Front Royal. I expect other small incursions as things go by. For that matter, I wouldn’t be surprised if we lost more than one Sub-Urb in this campaign; we’ve never been under a full court press before.”

“That’s… not good,” Mosovich said. “Among other things, we’ve got a lot of industry in the Shenandoah, don’t we?”

“No, it’s not good,” Horner agreed. “The area that they are in actually has three SheVas; unfortunately all of them are under construction and none of them are armed; we’re looking at losing them half built, which is four months production down the tubes. Move as you see fit, Sergeant Major. If we need you at a particular point, I’ll call.”

“Can I ask what you intend, sir?” the sergeant major asked diffidently. “In this area, I mean.”

“I’ll probably try to plug the hole,” Horner said. “Eastern Command is moving units to close the roads out of the area; there’s a recovering division east of Knoxville that is being spread out and pushed forward. But, realistically, the Gap is like the bottom of a funnel; once you get out of the gap, there are roads in every direction. Closing all of them against that much Posleen pressure is going to be hard; better to close the Gap again and deal with the landers if and when.”

“Plugging the hole will be… difficult, sir,” Mosovich said, shaking his head. “Whatever unit is in there is going to be hit from four directions at once; there’s probably still over five million Posleen down in Georgia trying to force their way up, there’s going to be nearly a million at their back, there’s landers in the air… Just about anybody would evaporate like spit on a hot griddle. With all due respect.”

“You’re right, Sergeant Major,” Horner said with a very tight smile. “Just about anyone would.”

Mike touched the next e-mail in the queue, which was from Michelle, his youngest daughter, and the message flashed up on his hologram. Michelle had been evacuated off-planet, along with over four million other Fleet dependents from a variety of countries. The ostensible reason for this was to free up the Fleet personnel from worrying about the security of their children. However, since only one child was taken per Fleet “family,” the recognized reality was to create a pool of humans in case Earth was lost. When Mike was feeling really cynical he wondered if they were also hostages to ensure the good behavior of the Fleet. Practically everyone in the service had at least one child being raised by Indowy; it would be easy enough for the Darhel to arrange “accidents” if necessary.

Michelle sent him a letter once per week, whether he needed it or not. In the last year they had gotten… colder and colder. Not upset or angry with him, just… leeched of emotion. It was starting to bother him enough to want to mention it, but he’d come to the conclusion there was no way to do a darn thing about it from 84 light-years away.

Michelle was as brunette as her sister was blonde and, to make things worse, she seemed to have inherited her father’s nose. Other than the nose, however, she was starting to be the spitting image of Sharon O’Neal, down to the voice. It was hard, sometimes, for Mike to remember he was dealing with his daughter; Sharon had occasionally taken that same cold, remote tone when things were bad.

“Good day, Father,” she began, giving him a small nod. “There are four items of interest this week…”

She wore mostly Indowy fashions now and the covering that was standard Indowy dress looked something like a Mao jacket. Between that and the expressionless monotone of her delivery it was like listening to a poorly designed robot; she could have written the thing and built in more emotion. The Indowy were an almost aggressively selfless race, making the individual submission to the whole something of a religion. It was probably that influence that was making her so remote, so… alien.

He realized he had blanked on what she was saying and re-ran the video. Comments on old earth news, report on the final battle for Irmansul — he had an after-action report, a better one than she did, on his AID — discussion of a promotion, of a type he couldn’t decipher, for an Indowy he couldn’t place at the moment. It occasionally occurred to him that as an honorary Indowy lord, more like a duke or archduke, he really should take more interest in Indowy society. On the other hand, most of his brain cells these days seemed sort of wrapped up in better ways to kill Posleen.

He realized he’d drifted again and there was something important he’d missed; she’d seemed almost animated for a moment. Ah…

“The fourth and final item this individual has to report is acceptance to level two sohon training. Sohon is, as you should be aware, the Indowy field of technical metaphysics. You are, of course, trained for suit fitting which is a specialized form of level two sohon . However, as far as can be determined, this individual is the first human to be accepted for unlimited level two sohon . It is believed that a level of four or even five sohon may eventually be attained. It is to be hoped that positive acclaim may be accrued to the Clan of O’Neal by this and future accomplishments.

“Those are the four items of interest for this week. Looking forward to your reply, Michelle O’Neal.”

Mike reran that part of the tape twice shaking his head. He knew, generally, what she was talking about, but the specifics were sort of eluding him. One of the problems with GalTech was that everything had to be produced by Indowy technicians on an individual, custom, basis. Humans, even humans like O’Neal who had had some training in the technique, generally referred to it as “praying,” but that wasn’t really what was happening. Because the Indowy had been working with atomic level micro-manufacturing for, literally, thousands of years, their method of manufacture involved using swarms of nannites to build products atom by atom in vats. This gave them the capacity to build materials that violated many “known facts” of materials science; the nannites could make atoms do things that occurred only as low probabilities in any other method.

However, the process defied control by even the most advanced computers. The nannites were best controlled through a sort of direct neural interface. An individual Indowy, or, more commonly, groups, would take seats by the tank and… manipulate the nannites. It was not a direct thought process; it involved giving the nannites general directions and then… letting them use the individual’s brain as a remote processor. For a suit fitting, it mostly involved staying very still and sort of meditating while concentrating on the suit “adjusting” to the person it was being shaped on; the nannites and the suit personality handled the rest.

However, as he understood it, the problem with most forms of class two and higher was that the person or team had to hold a perfect image of the item to be produced, down to an understanding of the molecular alignments for all of the individual components. A suit, for example, was a six-month process of construction involving one level six, a grand master of sohon , and dozens of lower level Indowy, all meditating in meta-concert on a perfect image, down to the last atom; that was why a suit cost almost as much as a frigate.