“Shit,” she muttered, glancing at Alejandro. “Cybers, huh?” she said, then bent over and slithered into the crack.
It was wider than it looked but not easy to negotiate, even for her; she wasn’t sure if the Cyber team would be able to make it. She crawled and slithered downward at about a twenty-degree angle through a series of turns. It quickly got dark but she crawled onward, wondering what would await her. Probably a Himmit butt, not that they had butts. She had just begun to wonder if the damned thing was simply a Stygian route to hell when she noticed a purple light. Rounding another corner she saw the open hatch of a Himmit ship and a compartment beyond. She quickly crawled through and then moved to the far end to see if the Cybers could make it.
The Himmit was nowhere in sight.
She had heard about Himmit stealth ships but never really expected to see the interior of one. It was… odd. Definitely alien in a way that was hard to define. The compartment was about three meters across with a set of seats on either side. While it was high enough for her, she suspected it would be cramped for the Cybers. The light was just wrong and the seats, while they appeared to be made to fit human-sized creatures, clearly were made wrong for humans. She sat in one to try it out. The seat back was too low and the seat itself too narrow; it was uncomfortable for her and she suspected that the longer-legged Cybers would find it torture after a short while. She supposed that it would be equally difficult for a human to make something comfortable for a Himmit.
The smell in the compartment was acrid, like a leak at a chemical plant that occasionally dealt in garbage and there were odd squeaks and groans in the background. All in all, it was a pretty unpleasant place.
She had just come to that conclusion when the first Cyber clambered out of the narrow passageway and stooped his way into the compartment. He quickly moved to the seat across from her and leaned back, taking off his camouflage hood.
“Himmits,” the guy muttered. “Why’d it have to be Himmits?”
“I take it you’ve been on one of these before?” Cally said, wondering what response she’d get.
“It’s how we got here,” the Cyber replied, looking to the entrance. “We were supposed to walk out and link up with vehicles. I’d rather walk a hundred miles than spend fifteen minutes in one of these things.”
“Well, any port in a storm,” Cally said, philosophically, then frowned. “Not to bitch to a stranger, but this has been a lousy couple of days. My dog’s dead, the horses are dead, my cat’s dead and my grandfather’s dead. My dad is in a fucking forlorn hope and will probably be gone by morning. Oh, and I’ve been in two nuclear bombardments. Being in a Himmit ship is starting to look pretty good.”
She shook her head as the next Cyber entered the compartment, rapidly followed by the rest of the team; the team leader was the last through the hatch. As he stepped through it started to cycle shut. At almost the same time what appeared to be the “front” wall of the vessel dilated open and a young human stepped through.
All of the Cybers froze at the sight of the unknown visitor but Cally couldn’t look away. Except for height, build and hair color he looked a lot like her father; it could have been a brother if Mike O’Neal had one.
On second glance that wasn’t quite the case. The visitor’s arms were longer, hanging almost to his knees, and his nose was much smaller than her dad’s. Actually, except for his age, he looked like…
“Grandpa?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Knoxville, TN, United States of America, Sol III
2200 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD
The massive cannon belched in flame and that was it. The shot had left too fast for the human eye to follow.
The main viewscreen, though, was slaved to a tracking camera that could manage a view of the projectile as it flew through the air, and everyone let out a sigh of relief at still being there. Next to the image was a shot clock that estimated exit of rounds and detonation. The round was “smart” in that it determined its location and height to lay down its lethal cargo precisely, and the only actual drop that was visible was the first. But after first sub-munition ejection a detonation clock started ticking.
“Seven, six…” Castanuelo said. “Damn, I wanted to be outside to watch this!”
“Could we see it?” President Carson asked.
“They’ll see this in Pennsylvania!”
Horner suddenly opened a metal case and ripped out his AID. “O’Neal! Splash in… one second!”
At the warning O’Neal just shrugged as well as he could inside his armor. He had been tossed around by… Jesus, he’d lost count. At least five nukes in his time. Not to mention being buried in a building by a near-nuclear class explosion, run over by a SheVa gun — twice on that one — and had various and sundry other unpleasant items occur while he was in a suit. Then there was that poor bastard Buckley who had had a space cruiser fall on him.
Frankly, being buried five meters in the ground at the ground zero of a two megaton nuclear explosion wasn’t anywhere near the bottom of his experiences. It was sort of comforting in a way.
“Gotcha,” he said, flipping frequencies to internal. “Battalion, splash over.”
There was a brief rumble, high frequency ground shocks, that preceded the impact, but in less than a second after the first shudder the ground began to spasm around his suit. The shocks went on for about five seconds, about as bad driving a jeep across rough ground, and then it was done.
“That’s it?” someone queried on the general frequency.
“Grandpa?” Cally said softly, looking up at the stranger.
“Yeah, sweetie,” he replied, stepping forward and ruffling her hair. “It’s really me. Sort of. I guess.”
“But you… I thought…”
“Dead?” he said with a snort.
“Um, yeah.”
“Well, there’s a Tch… Tph… a Crab around here that can explain it better. Basically, the Galactics sort of consider death to be not quite the is/isn’t thing that humans perceive.”
“So were you or weren’t you?” Cally asked, angrily.
“Cally, Princess Bride?”
“Oh. So you were ‘mostly dead.’ ”
“Bingo. I think I was flatlined, if that’s what you mean. But the Himmit got to me in time to administer Hiberzine and then the Crab here… restarted me.”
Cally looked at him again and shook her head. “So are you you?”
“I think so,” Papa said, shrugging his shoulders. “I think there are some holes in my memory. I’m younger though. Strong. It feels… amazingly good.”
“Hah, you’re not the only one!” Cally said. “You should see Shari. You’d pop your shorts.”
“Shari?”
“Long story, I didn’t understand all of it. But they survived and got out of the Urb.”
Papa O’Neal nodded and then frowned. “Out of the Urb? Survived?”
“You didn’t know the Franklin Urb was gone?” Cally asked. “Or that the Posleen are all down the Valley?”
“I’ve been out of it for the last few days. What’s happening?” He looked around at the Cyber team who had started to stow their gear. “And are these white hats or black?”
“White, I think,” Cally said. “And we’re about to get hit with a nuke…”
“Oh, shit,” he said, shaking his head. “Another one?”
Something about the way he said it caused Cally to burst into giggles that led inevitably to a belly laugh and then she found herself crying and holding her sides, unable to stop laughing. “Yeah…” she gasped after nearly a minute, wiping her eyes and at the snot running out of her nose. “Another one.” As she said it, the floor began to rumble.