by John Ringo
"I feel guilty, a lot, for the girls growing up without a dad," he said.
"It's hard. But there's nothing we can do differently, so I try not to think about it," she said, looking away and picking at the worn bedspread, that would never have passed muster in a decent pre-war hotel.
"I'm just glad you live with your grandparents. At least they've got a grandfather around."
"Yeah," she sighed. "It's not the same, though. Growing up I always missed Daddy, and I never really got over losing my mom. But for having been a kid in the war years, I had it really good."
"I noticed a lot of the clothes you and the girls were wearing had seen better days. Same with Papa O'Neal and Shari." He didn't like broaching such an awkward subject. But having grown up poor himself, he couldn't let it lie. This was his family. "Are you guys having money problems? What's happening? It looks to me like those people aren't paying you nearly enough for what you do. Okay, there isn't enough and I wish you'd quit, but I understand why you can't. Almost. Still, how bad is it?"
"Money was pretty tight for awhile. The salaries took a severe dive after I got back, for various reasons. They'd pay more if they could. Anyway, we just had a windfall and things are better now. For awhile at least. Enough to get everybody some decent clothes and stuff. Besides, there's not a lot we could do if they weren't. They're extra paranoid about people with too high a lifestyle for their salaries, what with Jay's defection."
"Sorry about that." Stewart winced. He hadn't turned Jay, but he had provided the money to keep him turned.
"Not your fault. He would have found someone to buy his information. Traitors do. Anyway, we made a commission on finding a buyer for something for them. Brokering isn't usually in the scope of what we do and the sale was too much money to argue that they couldn't afford the commission. It was . . . large."
"Cally, what do you think would happen, really happen, if your organization found out about me?" he asked.
"Uh . . . bad things. They're really paranoid right now and they'd probably believe you were on deep cover for the Darhel and I was compromised. I'd probably be able to keep any of it from spilling over onto Grandpa or anyone else in the clan, but, well, don't ask."
His lips tightened. "And you still won't leave, right? We could go under deep enough cover that they'd never find you. The Tong is good at that. But it's still no use asking, right?" He sighed as she shook her head. "You're going to invest your windfall, right? Is it enough for that? How much are we talking?"
"A bit over six thousand fedcreds."
"Okay. That's enough to stake you for some investments." He stared off into the distance. "I . . . know some things about some businesses that aren't common knowledge. Things that will influence share prices. If I was careful to keep the tips to businesses where you could rationally decide to invest in them if you were a shrewd investor and good researcher, and tell you where to look so you could leave an electronic trail in your systems of doing your homework if they asked any questions, that's some help I could probably safely give," he said. "My boss wouldn't mind one or two people going along for the ride—just keep it in the immediate family. Really keep it close."
"I'd have to lay some red herrings by doing similar research of other companies I don't invest in," she mused. "Yeah, it could work. I could even just take my results to Grandpa and suggest an investment. But how would I get him not to share with the immediate world? What am I thinking—it's Grandpa. If I buy an investment book that's already well thumbed, like at a used bookstore while I'm here, I can just flip through it to learn how to leave plausible trails and talk the game. It's not like I'm stupid and couldn't learn it on my own. And even if Grandpa suspects I've got a source for stock tips, that would just make him more likely to keep it closer than close and not mention to anyone—especially not the Bane Sidhe. Not as upset as he still is with them about money." She leaned over and kissed him by way of a thank you, which pretty much led to the end of that conversation.
"So, back to the moon with the commuters on Monday. What about you? Off to kill people and break things, or do you get a really tough week chasing the girls?" he joked.
"A week off, then a family reunion, of all things. Wish you could be there," she said.
"That might be a bit more reunion than your family bargained for."
"I think the O'Neals would keep it quiet. But we've got a lot of miscellaneous folks around from the organization, whose loyalty is more to the Bane Sidhe than to Clan O'Neal. I do wish, but wishing doesn't work, does it?"
"Clan O'Neal. Sometimes I wonder if you realize how much Indowy has rubbed off on you."
"Hmph. Not as much as you'd think. We Irish have been big on family ties for a long time. Okay, well, maybe there was some Indowy influence there, too, but it was long enough ago that it doesn't count," she said. She sure was cute when she pouted. But maybe they should watch a movie or something before getting into that again. Nah . . . well, okay, maybe. She probably didn't need a break, but a couple of hour holodrama and some microwave popcorn would almost feel like a date.
Before she left Sunday evening, he put a large enough load of sure thing tips in a read and destroy cube that she could set up a convincingly diverse portfolio of rapid gainers, with one or two modest growth stocks, to hatch her share of that commission nest egg into a chicken or two, and soon. He knew she'd memorize them later. It helped him more than she could possible know to finally be able to do something concrete to take care of his family.
Before she left, they showered. It was one of the sad little rituals they'd developed through seven years of goodbyes. The driving rain of the shower quickly changed to sex. Then, with the carpet outside the bathroom soaked, they climbed back into the shower. He rinsed the fluff from the carpet off her back while she rinsed her sweat off his skin. Soon, there was no trace of her on him at all, with only a damp floor and her scent on the hotel sheets to remind him that he had a wife. He slept on her pillow that night.
She heard them before she saw them. The nasty half-juvenile male laughs, several, and the higher pitched whimper. Her lips thinned and she dropped her leather jacket on the sidewalk, deliberately relaxing before rounding the corner of the crumbling brick wall that had once fronted the alley on this side, pretending to look in her purse for something and coming out with paper that might have been a map and a small flashlight. Six. She'd caught them out of the corner of her eye. The girl was small, either a teen or just short. Cally looked up and startled slightly, pretending to see them for the first time, silently noting that the alley was open to a parking lot on the other end.
"Hey! What do you think you boys are doing? Let go of her!" She let some of the nasal, staccato character of a northern Urbie accent into her voice, indignant, stupid. They looked up, still holding their victim. No need to guess what they'd been starting on. A couple of them looked back at the girl, undecided. She advanced into the alley a few steps, trying hard to project a sense of indignation and a tourist's naive certainty of personal invulnerability. They bit.
"Hell, I never did like sloppy seconds, anyway." Four of them detached from the girl and advanced in a pack, breaking into an easy lope as she shuffled back a few steps, eyes wide, turning to run.
As they caught up with her, her back kick slammed hard into the lead thug's knee, snapping it backward with all the force her upgraded strength could deliver. He fell, his scream subsiding into pained swearing that she barely heard. She pivoted on the ball of her foot and slammed her palm heel into the throat of number two, splintering his adam's apple, dancing back to plant a sidekick to his gut that threw him back a couple of yards to choke somewhere out of the way. Three landed a hard punch to her head as Four grabbed her wrist. Bad mistake. Ducking under his arm, she brought it up behind him, keeping his body between her and Three for the crucial moment it took to snake her arm around his neck, pulling his head firmly against her breastbone before dropping straight to the ground. Four's neck made a satisfying crunch, but Three had had
a chance to pile on top of her, which ordinarily would have worked on a woman her size. Bad luck for him, Cally O'Neal was anything but ordinary. She grabbed his head and twisted, but this one had the good sense to roll with it, bouncing back up to his feet as she reached her own, to see that thugs five and six had joined the party.
She grinned as she jumped into the air, slamming the front of her left foot on the side of his head hard enough to rattle him, but too high to kill him. She landed with bent knees on the way down, taking a fist to the jaw from Six as the price of getting another sidekick into Five and sending him tripping back over One, eliciting another scream. She danced back, rubbing her jaw. If anything, her grin widened. Six hesitated and she blocked a punch as Three came in without waiting for the other two—his first mistake. It cost him a blindingly fast pair of punches to his gut, which knocked the wind out of him right before he got a hard round punch to the nose. Predictably, blood spurted out. She didn't think she broke it, but it was going to be hell getting all the stains out of her blouse. While Three was hunched over with his hands on his knees, out of the way, Six came back with Five right behind him. The jumping backfist blacked Six's eye, causing him to hesitate again as another sidekick cracked a few of Five's ribs and knocked him out of the way.
She and Six fenced, with her absorbing the occasional hit just to get in a really pretty combination move. She seemed to be enjoying it more than he was. For the moment, Three and Five were just watching her play with Six, each grabbing an unexpected hurt but obviously not quite out for the count. Street fights seldom have lulls, but sparring matches do. For a moment, Six was paused, fists up, looking for an opening, catching his breath. She stilled, in the kind of absolute stillness that any fighter knows is one of the most dangerous moments in a fight.
"It's been fun playing with y'all, but I'm going to have to finish up now and get home," she said, the slight natural southern drawl at odds with the persona she'd worn coming into the alley.
Whether it was the stillness itself giving them a chance to think, or the recognition that three of their friends were on the ground, two dead and one crippled, or the deadness that entered her blood-spattered face as if someone had flipped a switch and turned off all humanity inside her, Cally would never know. What she did know was that all three suddenly turned and made tracks down the alley faster than she would have figured they'd still be able to move, especially the one with the cracked ribs. She had somehow ended up facing a pile of soggy cardboard boxes, partway between the live kid and the girl.
She looked over at the crippled survivor, a kid, maybe in his early twenties, with dirty blond hair and a ratty bandanna around his neck. Blood soaked his jeans where she'd kicked him, but to her practiced eye it looked like he was in no danger of bleeding out. A foil packet flipped out of her hand, landing on the thug's stomach.
"Have a morphine. Hold you till the ambulance arrives." She fixed him with an icy stare, "Dude. You may not believe this, but I just did you a favor." He was too busy gritting his teeth to reply. Or too scared. "You're alive. File for disability, learn a trade, find another line of work. You were really lousy at this one, anyway." The cripple might have been swearing under his breath as she turned away.
Cally looked over at the girl, who had to be about fourteen, and blinked, "What the hell are you waiting for? Scram!" The idiot tried to run out the alley the same way the remaining thugs had gone. "Pfweet!" she whistled, jerking a thumb over her shoulder as the girl turned back around. "That way."
The assassin shook her head as the girl edged past her, skittering down the alley, obviously trying not to look at the bodies or the last guy. Cally rubbed her jaw. Definitely gonna bruise. Ick. She wiped the blood off her hands on her blouse, and off her face once she found a clean spot, picking her way past the cripple and the corpses, that were beginning to smell strongly of recent deadness.
"Oh." She turned back to the guy on the ground, coldly. "You never saw me. None of you. You're really sure you never saw me."
"Right. We're going to say a girl did this to us. I don't think so," he said, bitterly, muttering "bitch" under his breath.
She nodded once and picked up her purse and the stuff that had spilled from it, retrieved her jacket, and zipped it up to the neck. She got about a block away before pulling out her PDA. "Buckley, wait fifteen minutes and route a call to emergency services from the nearest pay phone." Uncharacteristically, the buckley was silent, merely acknowledging the command on the screen. Muttering, "I hate rapists," she walked the rest of the way to the parking lot and her bike without incident.
Home, on the other hand, wasn't so great. She was in her bathrobe in the laundry room, rinsing the blood out of her clothes, when she heard someone clear his throat.
"Good morning, Grandpa," she said.
"Yeah, I suppose it is morning. Technically. Any of that yours?" His voice had a certain long-suffering quality to it.
"Like you really need to ask," she said, shaking meat tenderizer on the stains before adding the white blouse to a load of wash.
"How many times am I going to have to tell you that you can't depopulate the criminal element of Charleston single-handed? People would notice," he griped. "How many bodies?"
"Only two. Gang types. You and I both know the police are too overworked to investigate it. Besides, I really hate rapists."
"I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, just that if you keep running in there like some comic book Valkyrie avenger, people are going to talk."
"Gampa, what's a ape-ist?" They both turned to see Sinda in the doorway clutching a bedraggled plush penguin. She dropped her fist from the eye she'd been rubbing when she saw Cally's face, "Mommy? You gots ouchies."
"I was in a little accident on the way home, sweetie. It looks worse than it is," she said.
"Were you wearing your helmet?" the four year old asked suspiciously.
"Yep. Just a few bruises and scrapes. Why aren't you in bed?"
"I skinned my knee when I fell offa my bike. You musta falled on your hands."
"Bed, Sinda," her mother ordered, glancing down at her raw knuckles. "Not one word," she said to Papa O'Neal, in response to his quirked eyebrow and the quivering corner of his lip as the little girl disappeared down the hall.
"Didn't say a thing." He walked off, whistling softly.
Chapter Five
Monday 10/18/54
It was a large office, for the moon. It had the standard black enamel desk with laptop and PDA, the ergonomic chair, and a pair of squashy armchairs upholstered in superior-quality leathex. Those were standard features for any managing analyst's office. Then there were the small touches that indicated that the office's occupant had the approval of the Grandfather, and his trusted aides, as a promising candidate for promotion—no small thing in an organization whose upper leadership tended to have the resources to avail themselves of the rejuvenation process. Discreetly, of course.
On one side of the room a carved, decorative screen kept unlikely company with an old-fashioned, framed, photo-quality print of a pre-war surfer catching a wave at a place few remembered as Malibu Beach. Underneath the picture, a small fountain sat on a low table, gurgling peacefully. On another wall, a conventional work of a blossoming branch, painted on parchment, rested in a frame that matched the carved screen. A braided ficus, a species renowned for its tolerance of low gravity, sat in a large pot in one corner. A small potted plant sat on one end of the desk, partially screening a holocube of a spectacular blond and two little girls from direct view through the open doorway. Of all the decor in the room, only the wall color had not been the occupant's choice. A shade the office manager called pale peach and the occupant called pink had been hard-coded throughout the suite of offices. Well, he hadn't chosen the carpet, either, but as it was an inoffensive light brownish color, he seldom noticed it.
Named Manuel Guerrera by his mother, and, later, James Stewart by himself, Yan Kato was an extraordinarily ordinary looking man. He was neithe
r too tall nor too short. His hair was spiked enough to be proper, but not enough to draw attention. His features, while clearly Asian, did not lend themselves to identification with any known ethnic group. As his name suggested a mixed ancestry, that was unremarkable, too. In the aftermath of the war's turmoil, there were millions like him. As he was, in fact, Latino, the surgeons had considered his skin tone and texture too difficult to match to any specific pure ancestry.
At the moment, Yan—who still thought of himself privately as simply "Stewart"—was not looking at his office decor, but was instead facing the personal holotank behind his desk on which he had called up a display of star systems, travel times, and trade routes. He had been in the office, doped on provigil-C, for the entire nine hours he'd been back on station. He had been awake and running analyses on his buckley, with occasional carefully camouflaged data downloads, since leaving his hotel in Charleston some fifty-three hours before. He checked his results five times to make absolutely sure he'd accounted for as much as possible and provided for maximum local flexibility to accommodate unforeseen contingencies. Finally, he sent the orders to dispatch the Tong's single fast courier ship, which he technically had no authority to commandeer, along the prescribed route and sent an explanatory memorandum, eyes only, to the Grandfather. The courier was moderately expensive to maintain near a major jump point out from Earth. It was prohibitively expensive to dispatch anywhere, because of the fuel expenditures involved in making a warp jump and the resultant servicing of a vessel that was nearly scrap—all the Tong could afford. Mostly it sat, it's bored crew collecting dust, ignored by the Darhel as a worthless, unreliable wreck unloaded on gullible humans as a vanity ship. Stewart would be answering some hard questions for his temerity in using it. Not just for one hyper jump, but for four. Dulain, to Prall, to Diess, resupply at Diess base, and then back to the Sol System. The first three systems with Epetar cargos would get a courier visit—just long enough to pop out of hyper-space, tight beam the heavily coded instructions to a communications satellite under cover of a general communications packet, and receive acknowledgment of receipt. The nice thing about the Galactic Communications System, or lack thereof, was that so many Darhel groups would have encrypted traffic of so many redundant messages going somewhere that everybody who received routine communications would assume that someone else's message had been important enough to charter a courier. This would spur much spying, but only against each other.