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The foreground held a crying child, her forearm obviously broken. If any parent had been in that crowd they had been swept onward, as had the guards of the figure standing in the background, perfectly poised against the foreground of the sobbing child. As the door dropped, silently in this version, the grav-ca
As the Posleen descended from their craft, harvesting swords held high, the figure opened fire.
* * *
Cheye
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She had never pla
But she had to admit it made more sense than a combat suit in the middle of D.C.
The cabinet was scattered to hell and gone. And so were the staffers. And there was no conventional transport faster than trains. Trains. They were reduced to using trains.
But the Galactics weren't. The Tir Dol Ron would be here any minute, courtesy of a Himmit stealth ship. She supposed she could probably avail herself of one as well. But reassembling a staff was still going to take months.
She had had damn little staff with her when the landings started. And not many more had made it here so far. One of those, though, had turned out to be a goldmine. The girl was a total airhead about everything outside her narrow specialty, but she had an immense understanding of the Galactics and their punctilious protocol.
Which might make or break the war.
* * *
Washington Monument, Washington, DC
United States of America, Sol III
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«It is you people, and other soldiers like you, who will make or break the war to come,» said General Taylor.
Immediately following the battle, the two colonels and their sergeant majors had gathered the survivors of the Battle of The Monument and made a list. The six hundred or so that survived, along with a dazed platoon of engineers extracted with some difficulty from the Memorial, were now gathered at the site of their triumph to be decorated.
The tall black general looked around at the group with a penetrating eye. «Many of you, in years to come, will belittle that moment. That is a fundamental nature of true heroes. But I tell you now, this battle will be remembered with Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord. Not only because those were battles that formed a great nation, as this was a battle that saved one. But because they were small skirmishes that presaged a great and terrible war. And the survivors from those small skirmishes formed the core of the great army that arose from their ashes.» He smiled faintly.
«But enough of the words. We all know there ain't no extra pay, and rations will be catch as catch can. But we still got plenty of medals!»
* * *
Rabun County, GA, United States of America, Sol III
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The reporter from the local station shook water from the hood of his raincoat and looked at the camera.
«And three, two, one . . . Good afternoon, this is Tom Speltzer from WKGR, reporting from Habersham, Georgia. It seems like there are plenty of medals for the soldiers, but it wasn't only soldiers that beat the Posleen.
«I'm talking with Mr. Michael O'Neal, of Rabun Gap, Georgia, and his eight-year-old granddaughter, Cally O'Neal.» The reporter turned and proffered the microphone to the elder O'Neal, standing in the pouring rain like a statue.
Mike Senior's camouflage raincoat shed the water like a duck and the hood worked much better than the reporter's. And he wasn't about to let the newsie bastard in the house.
«Mr. O'Neal, can you tell us what it felt like to have the Posleen assault your home?»
«Well, first of all, they never got to the house. We had 'em pretty well stopped down in the valley,» he said, gesturing towards the distant entrance.
«We?» asked the reporter, surprised. «You had help?»
«From me!» piped up the little girl. «I ran the demo!»
The reporter's face took on that special look of false pleased surprise that adults affect when children interject u
«Blew the shit out of the bastards,» Cally said, ingenuously. «Must have killed half the damn company. We had the whole fuckin' woodline strung with claymores and I just blew the fuck out of them.»
The camerawoman suppressed her laughter but expertly caught the frozen look on the reporter's face as he attempted to come up with a response to this.
«Cut to the old guy,» snapped the producer. «Ask him about the name.»
«And Mr. O'Neal, there's another O'Neal that has become famous, again. By exactly the same name . . .»
«That's my daddy!» said Cally excitedly. «He really rolled those centaur sons of bitches up, didn't 'e?»
The reporter had assumed that out of control runaway train expression again. Mike Senior decided to twist the knife. He worked the wad in his cheek around and spit. «I teached 'im ever'thang he knows,» he drawled, looking right in the camera. And hoping like hell the damn monks could keep their vow of goddamned silence and not laugh their asses off. There were enough damn problems in the world without having to explain them.
In the background, a green Army sedan appeared out of the woodline, headed to the house. In the cold Georgia rain.
* * *
Walter Reed Army Hospital, Washington, DC
United States of America, Sol III
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Keren knocked on the door of the room and nodded at the nurse who was just leaving.
The room smelled of disinfectant. It was an odor that raised the hackles on the back of his neck. To the lizard hindbrain, it meant that things were bad and going to get worse.
He looked down at the figure on the bed. There were three medals pi
«You really missed a good party,» he whispered, pulling a bottle out of the recesses of his coat. The gold bars of a second lieutenant winked for a moment in the light over the bed. «The general was buying. Damn, he can drink. And that old snake of a warrant officer that followed him around. And the general told this story, damn it was fu
So he told his friend the story. And he told her a couple of others, about how General Simosin and General Ford finally had it out and Ford accused Simosin of incompetence in front of a TV camera and Simosin dragged it all out in the open how Ford had opposed integrating the old-timers and screwed around so bad that there was no damn way anything could have gone right. So now Ford was out and Simosin was back at Tenth Corps and General Keeton was First Army.
And he told about the meeting between the new Prez and the Darhel. How the Prez had threatened to recall all the expeditionary forces unless the Darhel ponied up all the grav-guns we could stand. And how the Tir had finally agreed that all equipment would be at no cost and that husbanding the humans was the most important thing in the universe. But the pipeline was still plugged and the Fleet was takin' forever and most of the PDCs were smoking holes. . . .