by John Ringo
Aelool did not see the Human insert the cube into the reader slot of his buckley, nor did he hear him mutter, "I'm gonna kill her," under his breath before he left the room. He would never have admitted to it if he had seen and heard such a thing. Nevertheless, he sincerely hoped that the Human O'Neal would not do anything permanent to Cally O'Neal. He was rather fond of her. Did humans take poison in such cases? It was a very private clan matter, of course, and the Indowy had insufficient versing with Human xenopsychology to understand why the O'Neal was vexed with his granddaughter over the contents of the message, but the Indowy was fond of her—for an omnivore. Still, it was a very private clan matter, and apparently the Human O'Neal had not taken irreparable offense at the Indowy Aelool's presumption. That was something. It would, however, be disastrous if the O'Neal passed a judgment against his clan member before she completed her assigned work. Disastrous on top of regrettable. And the O'Neal was so volatile, too. Aelool went back to bed, worrying.
Cally was only a touch bleary this morning. She'd been able to whittle down the material Mendy turned up for her to only a few key scenes, and had watched them over and over again.
One of the key features that would enable what she was about to do was a project R&D had been developing to enhance Human communication with Indowy. Humans had the problem, dealing with both Indowy and Darhel, of lacking mobile ears. The project involved having an AID or a buckley track the motion of it's user's body and head, in real time, and track electrical impulses sent from behind a Human subject's ears, using them to project a holographic set of mobile ears that would respond to the Human's conscious, and subconscious, commands. Human ears were not, it turned out, completely immobile. Their mobility was simply so restricted that the ears did not noticeably move. The impulses were still there, in the nerves, still responding to the age-old evolutionary cues of mammals past—and to conscious control.
Conscious control of the holographic ears took weeks of practice. In Cally's case, she had that practice. She had been an early test subject for the project while on maternity leave. It had been a few extra bucks for baby's new pair of shoes and such, when she'd badly needed the money.
R&D had only intended to use the device between Human and Indowy, and only if it improved the communication and comfort level between the two species. It hadn't. Indowy, it developed, were happier not knowing the emotional states of their Human friends. The research had been consigned to the trash bin of good ideas that just didn't work out. Until now.
No Darhel had ever seen a Human with mobile ears. That was advantage one. Advantage two was the information tracking software that let a buckley PDA superimpose realistic holographic ears on a Human head also gave her buckley enough information to superimpose the rest of a holographic face, as well. Her buckley could not make her look like a Darhel, not ever enough to pass for one of them, especially when there were so relatively few in circulation. However, she didn't need to pass for a Darhel—not to another Darhel's conscious mind. She only needed to look enough like one, for just a bare instant, to fool the visceral mind about what it saw, before its better judgment kicked in.
A Darhel's descent into the permanent catatonia of lintatai was triggered by a single instant of homicidally bad judgment. A Darhel who succumbed to that one instant of rage didn't get a second chance. The Darhel who survived puberty did not do so because of any reduced capacity for, or desire for, unbridled rage. He survived by analyzing all possible outcomes of a situation ahead of time, and applying carefully trained-in meditative disciplines when a situation began to take him into danger.
Adult Darhel thought of themselves as paragons of detached emotional control. It wasn't true. Any Darhel had plenty of buttons to punch, he just had nobody around to punch them. One Darhel wouldn't provoke another into lintatai because it was suicidal. He couldn't drive the other into lintatai without entering it himself. Himmit, Indowy, and Tchpht also considered deliberately provoking a Darhel to be an insanely stupid act.
They were, of course, correct. It was also correct to say that every Human did at least a dozen things a Galactic would find insane every day of her life.
It had long been accepted in the Human executive protection field that one can never effectively guard against a determined, competent assassin who is willing, if necessary, to lose her life in the act. The Darhel had, she suspected, never heard that particular truism. One of their number was about to learn—the hard way.
She was surprised that Grandpa was at the table with Harrison when she stopped by the mess hall for a light breakfast. She was freshly showered and bare of makeup, dressed in a simple t-shirt and jeans. Her entire appearance, from top to toes, was Harrison's domain today. She had the basic canvas and equipment, but Harrison was peerless at turning the basics into whatever they required. In this case, nothing less than a world-class, breathtaking vision of beauty would suffice.
Grandpa sure was looking funky. Something was wrong. "Alright, spit it out. What is it?" She addressed him in the way that was most in her nature. Straight on.
"What are you talking about? I just came down to see you off at breakfast. So I'm worried about you. I'm your grandfather, it's my privilege," he said.
"Not buying it. What's really wrong?" she asked. After half a century of reading him, he couldn't get anything by her. The reverse usually applied, as well, but wasn't the problem today.
"Harrison, could you excuse us for a minute?" Papa said, looking at his hands as he picked a fresh plug of tobacco from his pouch.
Harrison disappeared in the direction of the coffee counter.
Cally raised her eyebrows at the old man. "Well?" she asked.
"Granddaughter, dear, the next time you decide to engage in a major fucking breach of security, would you do me the kindness of telling me first? Instead of leaving me to find out years later from someone of a different fucking species at one in the morning on the day of an operation, for instance," he said.
"Oops," she said, as he glowered at her. Which was exactly what she would have expected. Exactly. Except he was overplaying it. Not much, but her sense of every detail around her was heightened to a preternatural sharpness this morning. "Now what's the other shoe?" she asked.
"You don't think that's enough?" he whispered harshly. "The Indowy have known for years that I have a son-in-law, while you've been running around behind the backs of me and Shari, not to mention your girls, and—"
"You can drop that other shoe now. We'll talk about my sins if we all survive the day. What else? Give," she demanded.
Now he looked distinctly uncomfortable. He puffed up, as if to try another layer of false bluster, then the masks dropped and there was just Grandpa. An uncomfortable and unhappy looking Grandpa. "I think you should wait to ask me that question tomorrow. I really think you should."
"What's the other shoe, Grandpa? I'm not going to give up, because whatever it is, I'm going to be more distracted worrying about it than I would hearing it. You might as well put it on the table," she said.
When he quietly stuck a data cube on the table, she jerked back a bit. "I didn't mean it that literally, but I'll take it. Excuse me," she said, taking the cube with her to the ladies' room. Whatever it was, she apparently needed to see it in private.
A scant minute later she reemerged, stalking back to the table with her head held rigidly high. "He dear johned me? By fucking email! Do you have any idea why I'm getting this third—excuse me, fourth hand?" she asked.
"Something happened to the courier. I don't know what. Aelool thought it was important enough for you to receive this message that he passed it to me. Apparently, for seven years he's believed I knew and never said anything because he considered it a private, clan matter. Which it would have been, if you'd just talked to me, you know," he said.
He looked very worried, which she supposed wasn't out of place given everything. Not that he needed to be.
"I'm sure we'll have more than enough time for that, after. Right now, don't be u
pset that I know about this. I'm so pissed off at the bastard that it may just give me the rage I need to survive this morning's appointment. Not to mention one hell of a lot of incentive," she growled.
"No, I'll be alright. Really. Especially since the only man I have to be around for several hours is Harrison. Which is probably a very, very good thing." She waved their openly gay teammate back over to the breakfast table, smiling one of those cold, brittle smiles that she knew Grandpa associated with her getting dangerously wound up. He was right, but she'd be okay today. She already had someone to kill, even before lunch. "Dear johned me. Email! It'd probably upset the girls someday if I killed him. That's okay. I've got other people to kill today. This is good," she muttered under her breath.
Harrison was back to hear that last, and was wearing the impression of someone who'd just woken to find himself in a cage with a mother grizzly bear. And cubs. She took a deep breath and deliberately favored him with a cool smile.
"It's okay, Harrison. Really. Consider it me getting appropriately psyched for the mission. I would say you can pretty much expect this morning to go as smooth as glass, now."
The man didn't look much reassured. Right now, that was fine by her.
Back into the earliest periods of Human history, missions in the nether realms of politics—the ones carried out in a dark alley or a state bedroom with a sharp knife—had involved a certain amount of gear. The tradition was unbroken. Only the specifics of the gear changed. Cally's gear had to solve a few problems that simple moxie could not. Problem one was that even though a complacent door guard could be fooled long enough for her to get close to said guard, a Human receptionist very likely couldn't. Security guards mostly served to insulate their masters from stupid criminals, crazies, and salesmen. Their threat meter was very carefully focused in, even for the ones who thought it wasn't. Nobody could be hyper-vigilant forever. Weeks, months, and years of working in the same building, only encountering a specific subset of threats, inevitably had the effect on the Human psyche of narrowing the range of threats the guard even thought of as possible. In the hypothetical realm where one of them would tell you about his job, this wasn't so. In the real world, it was universal. The most dangerous security guard in the world was the FNG, because he still considered everything a potential threat.
A receptionist, on the other hand, had a much wider threat range from which to insulate her charge. She had to worry about any of the aforementioned nuisances who somehow got past security, plus underlings wasting the boss's time, plus—only in the case of a Human boss—wives and mistresses. The most sensitive problems with the latter usually cropped up after they were no longer wives or mistresses. Some business was not a nuisance and was legitimate. Determining which required very active judgment from a receptionist who valued her job. As a consequence, receptionists were greater threats than security guards for any mission that had to be done discreetly.
Receptionists everywhere had an absolute inability to ignore a ringing phone, regardless of whose ring tones were singing through the air. One of the assassin's smallest and simplest pieces of gear combined the ordinary sticky-camera with late twentieth century greeting card technology to provide ding-dong ditch capabilities any ten year old could envy.
Her second major tool was not an item of gear, per se, but a hardware enhancement common to all operatives' PDAs. Cally didn't understand all the technical gobbledegook, herself. She wasn't a cyber, and she had her hands full keeping up with her own job. It was enough for her to know that the AIDs' transmissions back to the Darhel hierarchy's central data stores were not completely leak free. While intercepting the data itself and decoding it would be quite a trick, a properly equipped PDA within about fifteen meters of an AID could sense whenever the AID started churning out its data upload. The uploads were on a regular schedule. It was possible to get around an AID's all-seeing eye by just waiting until it's upload went off and either rushing the machine or working quickly. The gap was a bit more than twenty minutes—ample for most purposes. The trick was that the more time the AID recorded before one muffled its senses, the more you had to jimmy with it to cover your tracks. A few seconds or even minutes could be forcibly erased, but it took about three times as long to erase as it did to record. This created a diminishing returns situation where, after about eight minutes, it was faster to dump the whole load of the old AID into fresh AID hardware and hope nobody noticed the hardware swap—you just stuck the fresh AID in a desk drawer or somesuch, then the cybers' wizardry did the rest. AIDs being a lot more standardized than anything of Indowy make, swapping hardware was a tiny risk—it was just damned expensive. And took nine minutes and fifty-three seconds that could get you killed.
The really critical pieces of mission-specific gear were an AID for herself, and a hush box. The latter item was a little white box that, for an AID, was the equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank. Developed after the war from a hybrid of some easier Galactic technology with common Earth know-how, many AID users carried them, and all recognized them. Most Darhel even used them, now—they wanted their verbal sparring matches private from others of their kind just as much as humans would. Paranoia was an emotion both species shared in equal measure. Pardal was on the list of Darhel confirmed to use such a box.
A chunky bracelet on her right wrist contained a mister which could be filled with any number of drugs. Operatives were routinely immunized to many drugs of the psychoactive variety. This gave a wide array of choices for an operative who wanted to affect someone at close range without being drugged herself. A simple clenching of the fist and a cool, damp cloud of dreams—sweet or otherwise—would ride in on the victim's next breath. Naturally, the most popular drugs for this were very, very fast.
Harrison had outdone himself. The woman who stepped onto the curb from the yellow cab was so conspicuously lovely that anyone seeing her would be sure he ought to recognize her from holodramas or advertisements and begin searching his mind. She was precisely the sort of beauty the Darhel typically hired to grace their offices. It was not that the Darhel found the women more than artistically appealing. Darhel understood conspicuous consumption and its relationship to power. Everything a Darhel owned or used was the best available, or, if not the best, the most ostentatious.
The black bob of George's girlfriend was intact, but glossy as a mink coat. His brother had taken the cornflower blue eyes and enhanced them with subtle cosmetic flattery into deep, hypnotic pools. Her skin was to porcelain as fine pearls were to chalk. Her figure needed precious little flattery, but Harrison had managed to imply that the body underneath the cashmere sweater-dress and impeccably cut blue coat belonged in some ancient pagan temple, not on Chicago's winter streets.
Her appearance had the predictable mind-befuddling effect on the security guard at the main door to the Sears Tower. He stopped her, and the young goddess made a great show of searching her purse for ID as she moved closer to him. Maybe she stiffened a bit, maybe she didn't. The guard straightened and let her through, his brain befuddled by a common date rape drug. He stood his post, he looked—at worst—mildly inattentive. His only thought was, most likely, that everything in his world was just hunky-dory. He wouldn't remember this morning, later, but would feel mildly happy about it.
Past the guard, the assassin slipped onto an elevator and rode it to the floor beneath her target's office. The lovely thing about this building was that it was a popular tourist site before the war. The Bane Sidhe files had extensive information on the layout of every floor, including the locations of the restrooms. She was up the final floor and into the ladies' room without encountering anyone else. The nature of offices and rush hours is that everyone shows up at once, usually within fifteen minutes of work start time. Arriving an hour ahead, she had passed a handful of people in the lobby, but no one else. She made a quick and careful jaunt down to another hall to place her little present for the receptionist in the shadow underneath a smoke detector, and returned to the restroom to wait.
Then she spent an hour and fifteen minutes playing solitaire before she told the buckley to start listening for AID updates. The lounge area of this restroom shared a wall with the executive office of the Darhel Pardal. Once again, Darhel decorating predictability was her friend. Darhel psychological theories held that such and such a place was the position of maximum psychological dominance in an office. That one spot and no other would hold the Darhel's desk. Other details might vary with individual tastes, or the creative idiosyncrasies of the decorator, but his desk would be in the position of maximum psychological dominance. Every time. The stall she occupied should give the buckley a detection range up to a good three meters past the furthest edge of the desk.
"I have detected an AID update transmitting," the buckley said. "Of course, I don't know how many AIDs are in there, or if the receptionist has one, or if they're having a Darhel convention, or—"
"Shut up, buckley."
"I'm just saying—"