Time/Date Error (Damned of the 2/19th-Book Six) - Done

How It Went Down

COMBAT PROTOCOLS OFFLINE
>>WARNING! CORRUPTION DETECTED IN NEURAL NETWORK>>
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ix
>F
>>WARNING! CRC ERROR!<<
Running Repair Systems
TIME/DATE ERROR
GPS ERROR!
Inertial System Online

COMBAT SYSTEMS ON STANDBY!
>>DANGER! DO NOT TAKE OFFLINE!<<

"So give me the Cliff Notes version of what happened," I told the nine female troops sitting with me around the small stove. I'd opened the Arms Room and the a few other rooms, including giving them access to the Dispensary War Stocks. Now they sat dressed in BDU's, wearing nametags of other people, with Kevlar vests and XM-16E3's in their hands. They'd each eaten two or three MRE's, and Diana had made two of the others stack four dozen MRE boxes against one of the walls.

I'd kept the keys I'd pulled from the Dispensary OIC's office.

They all looked at each other for a long moment, then Diana cleared her throat.

"The Colonel, Colonel Bradford, put Charlie Company out here at the TMC," Diana said slowly, her words picking up speed. She clenched her fists and I could see she was furious. "There was over sixty of us at first. After two weeks we went on rations. One MRE a day. Captain Drake told us that it was only temporary, that food would be brought up," She looked at me, "But the snow was deep, the vehicles were all covered, and nobody could find the keys to the locks."

I nodded at that. "Your unit was instructed to liaison with Main Post, they know you need at least four months of food supply for when it starts to snow."

"Captain Drake said that someone hadn't bothered, that we only had the MRE's that your unit left here," Necro-Girl said.

I shook my head, then lit a cigarette, "We don't keep our War Stocks out in the open for food. We lock it down." I snapped the lighter shut, "It's listed as 'War Stocks' in the lower basement of the barracks."

One of the foursome who had seen me come in laughed bitterly. "How much food are we talking about, Sergeant? I heard that it wasn't enough to last two weeks with hard rationing."

Two of them flinched when I grinned. "A-Rats and MRE's are stacked to the walls, enough food for five hundred people to be fully combat ready fed for just over a year, and to top it off they have a 10% spoilage redundancy built in. That's thirty boxes of MRE's per person, which is a half-pallet. There's nearly a thousand goddamn pallets of MRE's down there."

One snorted in disbelief and I turned and stared at her. The lizard hissed at her, exposing his fangs, and she jerked back. "I helped put them there, and as a War Fighter NCO I'm one of the ones who supervises and inventory of all that shit."

Necro-Girl put her hand on the leg of the one who had flinched. "Don't worry about how brightly that eye is glowing, sweety, worry if he starts having blood drip off his hands again and is suddenly like ten feet tall."

The lizard ran another systems check, looking for a way to purge the contamination that had to be doing that. I didn't feel half dead, but from the way they acted, the way Aine had reached out and touched me, the way Cromwell had controlled me, told me that the slow feeling of my thoughts and my razor thin control on my temper had to be part of the problem.

Flinchy looked at Necro-Girl, then at me, then blew out a sigh and sagged slightly.

Diana was shaking her head, chuckling ruefully. She looked up at me. "You have to be kidding me. Pallets of goddamn food in the barracks, they're sitting right on top of a year's worth the food for a goddamn Brigade,"

"That's without the Event Stocks or the Deep Storage Stocks," I told her. "Those are locked in the deep storage areas below the barracks, but there's enough food stored there to fight World War Three and supply any civilian survivors and any allied units that survive the initial nuke blasts." I grinned at her. "We're Special Weapons."