Sister Time-ARC

by John Ringo

  Cally leaned forward, propping her hands on her knees. "You shouldn't take this job. It will fuck up your relationships. You will find yourself fucking about a bazillion strangers off the job because after you've fucked a bunch on the job, who the hell would you be saving yourself for? You will see things you absolutely do not want in your head, and the pictures won't go away. You will do things that literally make you puke. The price is too high. Go home. Get a legit ID, move to Indianapolis, get a husband, a white picket fence, a dog, two or three kids. Don't look back. It's a happier life. That's God's own truth. Go the hell home," she said.

  The girl's jaw tightened. "Are you declining my job application, ma'am?"

  Suddenly feeling every one of her fifty-eight years, Cally pressed her palms into her eyes and sat back up, sighing. She absently flicked the growing ash tail off the end of her cigarette. "No, I'm not doing that. Not yet, anyway. Okay. You want it, then it's time for your next test."

  The tall blond walked out of the room and returned in under a minute with two armfuls of clothes. One set she threw to the kid. "Get changed," she said. "Your sneakers are fine. They'll be covered by the boots, anyway."

  Both sets of clothing were average to the point of boring. A set of long johns implied they'd be going outside. The jeans to go over them were faded and somehow a bit grayed out, as if they'd been washed too often in unsorted loads with all the other clothes. The sweaters were some kind of blend, hers a faded navy blue, the other a rusty brown, with the random little fluff balls sweaters get when they've been around a couple of years. The older woman didn't look up, just started changing her clothes as if she was alone.

  "What the hell are you waiting for? Get dressed," she told the girl, who was hesitating. The kid jumped to comply, startled.

  Chapter Eight

  They got off the train at a station in the south of Chicago, trudging down the path of crumbled gray asphalt and sand that wobbled between jumbled stretches of gray and white snow, leading into Bronzeville. Once, their O'Neal-fair skin would have been cause for comment in the historically black community. Not now. Time and migrations to and from the Nat King Cole SubUrb, along with the shuffling effect of the semi-random sweeps for shippers—as the involuntary off-world colonists were called—had shuffled the population into a spectrum from SubUrban spectral white Caucasians to dark brown, old-time Metropolitans, with a vast middle of cafe au l'asian.

  The landscape was a mixture of buildings. Bricks with early 20th century arched windows. Buildings with squared off pre-war windows. Crumbling brick, crumbling cinder block. Tattered strips of old stores. Boarded windows, and windows like haunted, vacant eyes. Row houses like shark teeth and blocky old four-story tenements. In front of one of the old strips of had-been neon and steel, a cart of fresh vegetables from a black-market hydroponics set-up sat upwind of a burnt-out sedan, whose trunk served as a shelf for piles of bagged tortillas, dimebags of cornmeal, the same of textured soy, and a large pile of slump cakes. The latter was a heavy, flat bread that had begun life as wet wheat sourdough, then got loaded with as much corn and soy meal as it could take without turning into a rock. It was a staple, as the name implied, of people whose financial resources were in a slump. Judging from the size of the piles, compared to those of the other fare on offer, this included most of the scattered denizens of Chicago's once-teeming South Side. Over a fire in a barrel, an old woman shook and tossed a pan of popping corn, which a little boy beside her poured into paper cones and hawked to passers-by. In the late afternoon sun, a smattering of young teen whores, pushers, and grays milled around, grabbing something to eat and running errands before their night-time working hours. Dressed in the typical third-hand drabs of the grays, Cally and Denise blended into invisibility among the cleaners and other low-grade menials that served to keep the city's innards running for Chicago's trade and professional classes. She dropped a couple of dollars on the popcorn boy, handing one of the two cones of the plain, hot kernels to the girl beside her.

  As they moved away, Cally hissed under her breath, "If you don't quit sneaking and just walk, I'm going to cold-cock your ass."

  The girl flushed in embarrassment and began walking more normally, keeping her mouth shut. Next, the older woman bought a cake of slump for another dollar, breaking it in half and sharing it with her. The tall blond glared at the kid when she bit into the bread and almost choked. Denise erased the offending expression and tried hard to look hungry as she dry-swallowed the nasty stuff. It was scratchy, as if ground or chopped corn husk had been added to make a few kilos of grain stretch.

  As they moved past the makeshift market and its shoppers, she only pretended to eat and hoped nobody noticed, not the least her interviewer. A block down, they turned into an alley. Shortly thereafter, Aunt Cally tossed her half of the awful stuff over to a couple of rats who were scrabbling around in a mess best left unidentified. She followed suit, trailing behind to a particle-board door in one of the buildings. Her aunt pulled out a pistol, seemingly from nowhere, and screwed a cylinder onto the end.

  "Kick in the door. There should be a man sleeping inside. Kill him," she said, thrusting the gun into the girl's limp hand.

  "Huh? Just like that? What'd he do?" She blurted. Her hands were sweating, and she felt a sudden cramping in her guts as if her bowels were about to cut loose. She swallowed.

  "Do you really need to know?" Cally shrugged. "Please do make sure he's dead." After a second she sighed and snatched the gun back. "You cock it like this. This is the safety. See? Now it's off. See the little patch of red beside the lever?" She shoved the gun back at Reardon. "There. Do it, now, or I will. Then we go home."

  Taking a deep breath, the thirteen year old girl hit the door with a solid side kick right at the knob. Then she had to hit it again, since it only collapsed into a ragged almost-hole at the point of impact. Her second kick knocked it open, and she stumbled into the dark, musty room, blinking. Over on a pallet in the corner, barely visible by the light streaming in through the doorway, a man lay, face to the wall. He was snoring loudly, though it was pretty damned amazing he had slept through the noise. She walked up to maybe two and a half meters from him and fired two shots at his head, closing her eyes despite herself. Her hand must have been shaking, because two dark, wet splotches that she could barely identify as red splashed across his back, splattering onto the pallet and the floor. She ran back for the door, stopping halfway to heave up the contents of her stomach.

  Outside, she wiped off her mouth with her sleeve, shakily. "Okay," she said. "I did it." The arm with the pistol hung limp at her side.

  "Are you sure he's dead?" Her aunt asked her, searching her eyes. "Gimme," she said, coldly. She held out her hand for the gun. The professional disappeared into the building, emerging after what seemed forever, but from the pounding of her heart could only have been a few seconds.

  "You got him. Let's go." The taller blond strode back up the alley, turning the corner as her niece had to jog to catch up. Neither of them said a word all the way back to the car, and then, via a circuitous route that probably wasn't the way they got out there, to base.

  "Can I . . . know what he did, now?" she asked as her aunt dropped her off at the room she'd been assigned.

  "No."

  Three floors down and two corridors across, Cally sought out Harrison, who had beaten them home and, of course, changed immediately.

  "So she passed," he said.

  "Maybe," Cally answered. "If we didn't need her, I could come up with half a dozen reasons to flunk her. But yeah," she sighed, "she passed." She lit a cigarette in a convulsive, angry motion, arms hunched in close. "That is, she passed if she still wants to sign on after thinking about it for a couple of days. You overdid the snoring just a bit. I could hear you all the way out in the alley."

  Wednesday 10/27/54

  The Darhel Beren had recessive metallic gold fur, threaded with black. His slit-pupiled eyes were a vivid deep green. The deeper purple tinge to the portion of
his eyes around the pupils spoke of too many late nights playing strategy games against his AID. With a roundedness to his frame, he was the closest thing to fat Darhel one would ever see. His sat staring at the image over the altar to the Lords of Communication and crunched on a bright turquoise vegetable. It actually wasn't bad. He'd made something of a study of the available vegetables and their varieties—an extensive study. The trick was to find the high-protein ones, just close enough in taste and saltiness to . . . He didn't even think about meat, just shied away from the idea when he felt that tell-tale twinge of euphoria as his body threatened release of the deadly-addictive Tal hormone.

  Right now, he was replaying the transmission that had just come in, light speed, from the jump point. The message was so hard to believe that he couldn't tell whether he was looking at a fantastic opportunity or a piece of disinformation, leaked as part of some elaborate plot against the Gistar Group. Six level nine code keys, or the better part of them, missing. An Epetar freighter on one of their highest margin trade routes stranded in the backwaters of the Sol System waiting for cash to pick up its cargo. This was an especially intriguing opportunity, if true, simply because pick-ups and deliveries to the Sol System were so onerous, anyway. Most systems had the resources to build their outer-system trade base two weeks or less out from the major jump point or points servicing the system. Titan Base in the Sol system was far, far inwards from normal.

  Galactic ships used an FTL system of traveling along lines of low resistance in hyperspace, which was why jumps that took months for Posleen vessels took seven to twelve days for Galactic vessels. The current Galactic ships were much faster than their own old standard, too, since they had incorporated the improvements spurred by the war into newer vessels and retrofitted them, however imperfectly, into the old ones. The bulk of the transit time for goods and passengers was between jump point and base. Ancient vessels with hyper drives too far gone for economical repair plodded through the space between base and planets, delivering the goods in-system over the long real-space legs of the trip. Fleet vessels too battle-damaged for their drives to be reliable, and too expensive to repair, formed the nucleii for the deep space bases that received incoming cargoes and loaded up the outgoing ones.

  Beren disliked humans, as any other civilized being would, but some of their optimization ideas increased profits. In this case, the innovation of keeping a dedicated courier on station at a system jump point for high-priority messages, while costly, was less costly than the delay in critical communications from the old system of sending messages with whatever freighter was headed out.

  Certainly they used the old system for routine communications, or when, as now, a freighter happened to be going to the right place at the right time. However, keeping couriers a day or less out from a jump point had been a marvelous improvement over having them waiting weeks away at a base.

  Humans were unpredictable and disconcerting as hell. Stupid, but incredibly cunning. They naively gave away the most valuable suggestions—for free. Gistar had a whole department dedicated to receiving, sorting, and analyzing every recorded Human utterance that began with the phrase, "Why don't you do it like . . ." So far as he knew, Gistar was the only group with such a department. It's existence was the most closely guarded secret of the group. Beren only knew about it because he had helped to set it up, even working there briefly. Which was how he came to distinguish himself enough to be the factor of Adenast, fifty years younger than other Darhel in the most minor of systems—and how Gistar came to be the only group to maintain a hard currency reserve, in deposit, on board the neutral courier vessels of the highest traffic systems.

  He was proud of Adenast. Adenast's space repair dock was the most patronized yard in this region of space, sitting a mere two days from the major jump point out. Adenast could cut weeks off the repair time of any vessel and get it right back in service. They could stabilize junkers that could barely limp out of hyperspace, that would have died one way or another before reaching another system's repair yard at a base deeper in-system. Sure, they sometimes, very rarely, had a catastrophic collision. Still, the profits far outweighed the costs. All profit entailed some risk. Besides, he conducted his own work on the surface of Adenast Four, so he wasn't in any personal danger.

  It was all very well woolgathering like this, but he was going to have to reply to this transmission, which he was now replaying for the third time. Alright. Assume it's genuine. Time is of the essence. "AID, display Adenast system with functional freighters marked and labeled." Immediately, the transmission ceased its replay and a modified three-dimensional representation of the Adenast system took its place. It had to be modified, because if it hadn't, any holo that showed the system from its star all the way out to its jump points would, of course, have rendered the relevant bodies and ships too small to see. The jump point pulsed bright red.

  "AID, what is that freighter practically on top of the jump point?"

  "That is the Dedicated Industry. Heldan of Gistar commanding."

  "What is its status?"

  "The fault in the gravity feedback sensors was certified repaired point eight days ago, local. Dedicated Industry is outbound for Rienooenn to rejoin the food transit circuit."

  "Display the particulars of its holds, plus the particulars of the anticipated Epetar cargo out of Dulain."

  Friday 10/29/54

  Michelle liked to begin her workday early in the morning. It was more comfortable for her to navigate the low, multi-hued corridors then. In the mega-skyscraper where she lived and worked, the smaller Indowy crowded corridors to near immobility during the morning rush. The press of the little green teddy bears at this hour was heavy, but not impassible. The brightening blue light shown down on their symbiotic chlorophyll, feeding Adenast's dominant sophonts a gentle post-breakfast snack during their commute. The filaments gave each Indowy the appearance of being coated by green fur. It was quite a contrast to the robin's egg blue, bumpy, gently-wrinkled skin of an infant Indowy. She did not know whether all baby Indowy looked that way. She had only seen the babies of the breeding group who had been her childhood foster family. She had maintained close ties with her foster sibs. They were the only Indowy she knew who sometimes almost forgot she was Human.

  If they had not been so familiar, the corridors and rooms of her building would have been terribly claustrophobic. Michelle was a good twenty-five centimeters shorter than her younger sister, and the ceiling was still only about fifteen centimeters above her own head. All the Indowy-raised were short, by Human standards. Their hosts had tinkered with their hormones to keep them from having to stoop and hunch their way through the buildings when grown. It was easier to keep the humans on the lower side of their species' height range than to re-engineer entire buildings.

  The only thing that kept humans from developing agoraphobia when away from home was the high ceilings of both the work spaces and the general Galactic areas. The latter had Darhel-height ceilings, of course. Also, humans and Indowy both underwent early and intense training and conditioning to be comfortable with spacewalk maneuvers.

  "Human Michon Mentat Michelle O'Neal, I see you." The Indowy Roolnai waited for her when she entered the engineering bay, where she was orchestrating the build of a core chunk of the new Cnothgar mining station for one of the system's inner planets. It was a cutting edge project, and a rather exciting one. It used some of the interoperability lessons of Earthtech manufacturing standards to build a large station whose pieces would snap together like one of her childhood building sets back on Earth. After they mined the planet out, the pieces would unsnap for transportation in freighter holds to a new system, rich in exploitable resources. Cnothgar would disassemble and reconstruct it, over and over again, for mining in systems normally inhospitable to Galactic sophants. The Adenast mining would be the shakedown operation for a facility she expected to last, with proper maintenance, at least two thousand of her local years.

  Roolnai, the head of one of the major cl
ans, had to meet with her at the beginning or end of her work day, because it was impossibly dangerous to interrupt a Sohon or Michon engineer during operations. Poor Derrick had been a terrible reminder of that basic truth. Her late husband had lost concentration at a critical moment in an operational process. The materials had, violently, proceeded to the natural conclusion of the chemical reactions involved, instead of the engineered reaction paths required for that portion of the project. Everyone had mourned with her, but been thankful that the accident happened in the outer system and he had merely been working on a chemical-level operation. If he had been a single level higher in operations classification, and the associated tasks, it could have been so much worse. Derrick himself would have just been grateful he was several light-hours away from the children when the accident occurred.