“You don’t like Posleen, do you?” Cally asked. Billy shook his head.
“They die,” she said with a grin. “You shoot ’em and they die. Fall down and go boom. The point is that you have to shoot ’em, and you have to shoot ’em before they shoot you. Now shoot it again.”
They spent the next few hours on the range, eventually going back to the house for a picnic lunch, feeding the baby and more ammunition. All the children were permitted to fire something, even if it was the target air gun from the armory. After putting a couple of thousand rounds, combined, downrange, Cally called a halt.
“I think that’s enough for one day,” she said, taking a Sig-Sauer .40 from a reluctant Kelly; the six-year-old had just scored two bull’s-eyes at twenty-five meters and was suitably awed with herself. “Maybe you guys can come back some time and we’ll do some more. But I have to go make sure the pig hasn’t caught on fire.”
“That would be a shame,” Wendy said. “I’m going to be hungry. And I’m sure the walkers are as well.”
“Speaking of which, I wonder where they are?” Shari said.
From high on the mountains a resounding “Booom” echoed across the holler.
“Somewhere around Cache Four, it sounds like,” Cally said.
“What was that?” Wendy asked.
“At a guess, Granpa’s hand cannon.”
“Is he all right?” Shari asked, shading her eyes against the glare to fruitlessly look up the mountain.
“Oh, yeah,” Cally said, setting the kids to policing the brass. “If he wasn’t you would have heard everyone else open up as well.”
Papa O’Neal pointed down what appeared to be a sheer bluff about fifteen meters high then to a hickory sapling growing on the edge.
Looking closely, Mosovich could see where there was a worn patch on the trunk of the sapling. He nodded and gave the farmer a quizzical look.
Papa O’Neal smiled, shouldered his rifle and swung his feet out over the edge, dropping straight down.
Looking over the edge, it was clear now that there was a thin ledge below, upon which O’Neal was now perched. With a grin he ducked and disappeared into the mountain.
Mosovich shrugged and grabbed the tree, repeating the maneuver. He noted that O’Neal was now crouched in a cave opening, apparently prepared to catch the sergeant major should the likely event of his falling outward have occurred.
Mosovich shook his head at the local’s grin and shuffled to the side; Mueller would have a tougher time than he did. Mueller, though, came down slightly more circumspectly, grasping a hand- and foothold on the wall and lowering himself carefully to the ledge. He then shuffled past O’Neal and deeper into the cave.
Elgars looked down the cliff and shrugged. She grabbed the tree and dropped, landing slightly off-balance. But before Mosovich or O’Neal could react, one hand reached up in a smooth slow-looking maneuver and grabbed a small protuberance between index finger and thumb, seizing the tiny handhold like a mechanical clamp. She slowly pulled herself vertical then ducked to enter the cave.
There was a short passageway, high enough at the center that a person could duckwalk through, and then the cave opened up and out to either side. On the right the roof sloped quickly down to the floor, bringing with it a trickle of water that collected in a small apparently man-made basin. On the left the wall was more vertical and the floor extended further back. At least, it seemed to; the actual left-hand wall was obscured with boxes.
There were metal and wood ammo boxes, plastic “rough tote” waterproof containers and even a few Galplas ACS grav-gun and grenade cases. There were also about a dozen cases of combat rations.
“It’s not all ammo,” Papa O’Neal said, going over and hauling down a long, low case that had “Ammo, 81mm, M256 HE” stamped on the side. The box turned out to contain several old style BDU combat uniforms, wrapped in plastic and packed with mothballs. “There’s a full outfit, including combat load out, for a squad. And four days rations. Water?” he gestured to the pool. “And there are filters in one of the boxes.”
“How many caches like this do you have?” Mosovich asked, shaking his head. “This is… Jesus, just the thought of the cost makes my teeth ache.”
“Oh, it took a few years to set them all up,” Papa O’Neal said with a laugh, sending a stream of tobacco juice to the floor. “And I did it bit by bit, so the cost wasn’t all that bad. Also… there’s some government programs now to do this sort of thing. At least that’s what they’re really about if you read the fine print: The BATF would shit if Congress had come right out and said as much. And recently, well…” He grinned and shook his head. “Let’s just say that my son has done pretty well financially in this war.”
Mosovich had to admit that was probably the case. The Fleet used something similar to prize rules, a combination of Galactic laws and human application. Since the ACS was generally the lead assault element, they got the maximum financial benefit of all the captured Posleen weaponry, ships and stores that generally were lying around in a retreat. He also noted that Papa O’Neal had neatly sidestepped the question of how many similar caches there were.
“And he’s a great source of surplus,” Mueller said, kicking a grav-gun ammo case.
“Uh, yeah,” Papa O’Neal said with another grin. “They go through a lot of grav-gun ammo.” He duckwalked back to the entrance and gestured down the hill where the farm and the pocket valley beyond were faintly visible. The main valley of the Gap was still shrouded by a shoulder of the hill, but Black Mountain was in clear view — it dominated the southern horizon — and a corner of the wall was faintly visible. “This spot makes a fair lookout, but of course there’s no back door. I don’t like going to ground when there’s no back door.”
“Yeah, I been treed by the Posleen a couple of times,” Mosovich said, glancing down the bluff. It was climbable, with difficulty. “I don’t care for it.”
As he stepped back Elgars gasped and shook her head. “Now that was a bad one,” she said with an uneasy chuckle.
“What was a bad one?” Mueller asked, ducking through to crowd the ledge.
“You ever get flashbacks, Sergeant?” she asked.
“Occasionally,” Mueller admitted. “Not all that often.”
“Well, I get flashbacks of stuff I’ve never done,” Elgars said with a grim chuckle. “And you know, I’ve never been to Barwhon, but I’ve come to hate that cold-assed rainy planet.”
“It is that,” Mosovich said. “I’ve only been once and I have no desire to return.”
“I understand that it has a high species diversity,” Papa O’Neal said with a chuckle, reaching up to climb up the bluff. “Every really nasty place I’ve ever been — Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Congo, Biafra — had the same damned description.”
“It does that,” Mueller agreed. “It has about a billion different species of biting beetles, all the size of your finger joint. And forty million species of vines that get in your way. And sixty million species of really tall trees that screen out the light.”
“And lots and lots of Posleen,” Mosovich said with a laugh. “Well, it used to.”
“I had this sudden really clear image of a Posleen village, a few pyramids and some other stuff. I was looking through a scope, right eye in the scope, left scanning outside. I know that in just a second a Posleen’s gonna come through a door and I have to engage it. Then there were some explosions and, sure enough, a Postie comes right in view. Ah take it out, and some others, then there’s a God King and it’s all okay, Ah’m in the zone, servicing the targets. Ah’ve got an IR blanket on and the signature’s covered so Ah’m safe, counterfire is not an issue. The gun’s big, probably a Barrett, and I have to reposition a couple of times cause Ah’m on this really big branch or something. Then the tree I’m shooting in starts shuddering and Ah look down and there’s this line of shot-marks walking up the tree and then it goes white.”