When the Devil Dances

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.”