Sister Time-ARC

by John Ringo

  Cally had to admit that she wasn't as attentive as she should have been during the interview, and maybe didn't make a terrific impression. But after all, it wasn't as if she really wanted the job. She was still well within the range of credibility as she listened to the boring parade of duties, from digging through spam filters to data entry.

  Felini showed her out with the line, "We'll call and let you know, dear." The operative summoned a smile as if she really cared and asked the way to the ladies' room. Once there, she went to the second to last stall, the one least likely to get occupied, took a plastic pen and pad of sticky notes—the only things she'd dared smuggle through the front door—out of her purse. On it she scribbled, "Out of order—maintenance." Slapped on the door, it neatly ensured she wouldn't be disturbed. If someone from cleaning or maintenance did try to check, she'd have to take steps. Incapacitating but not immediately lethal—not if she could help it. Bodies, no matter how killed, tended to do immediate things that stank. Silencing live people for any significant span of time also had its problem. Not to mention the dilemma of where to put it. Hopefully, things wouldn't come to that. Considering the problem and its possible solutions took her mind off her hurts, although not in a particularly pleasant way. It would have been nice to have her PDA, but not possible. Papa was bringing a fresh one for her, ready loaded with a recent backup of her own buckley's memories and all her data. Until then, she was alone. Well, minus her PDA. Not that having a buckley with her was the same thing as not being alone. Not exactly.

  * * *

  From his uncontested position under a hot steam vent, Tommy had turned down propositions from eleven hookers—seven of them female, or apparently so—when the sweep came around just before oh-three hundred. He was one of a few caught in the net who weren't gibbering in panic. Three passed-out drunks barely stirred to grumble at being moved, before settling down in the body-heat warmth of the semi trailer. He wasn't good at panic. It didn't look credible on a man of his gargantuan size. He sat on the floor, contriving to look stupid. It was usually a good substitute.

  He had initially been clean, inside malodorous clothes designed to conceal the effects of regular bathing. After seven hours in the dirty clothes, conspicuous cleanliness was no longer a problem. The uniformed thugs doing the sweep—formally called an urban assisted renewal program—initially looked like they intended to tazer him. His slack jawed, amiable compliance, as he slid into a more central position in the terrified herd, had saved him one small discomfort. Small, of course, was relative.

  An hour later, being herded into a cold, locked, and otherwise empty room, whose corrugated steel walls shouted warehouse, he had definitely gotten tired of this game. Most of his fellows were shivering. The Special Police, SPikes, had rousted them out of warm beds. No wonder SubUrb residents were reluctant to move back above ground. The drunks may have been, for the moment, in a better situation. They would have likely frozen to death on this bitterly cold night. The room had heating—damned inadequate heating. He winced in sympathy with the folks who had to choose between freezing their asses on the concrete floor or standing on their bare feet. It wasn't like the bastards gave them time to grab anything. The SPikes were as eager to get out of the cold as anyone else, and weren't going to delay over the whining of a few trash colonists.

  Tommy earned a grateful look from a mother by picking up a crying little boy of about seven. With a toddler and a baby on each hip, she had no room for the older child. He gave the kid his jacket and the loud crying subsided to miserable, wet sniffles against his big chest. One thing the SPikes would always stop for was parents rounding up their children, as every warm body, no matter how small, helped to fill the night's quota. They treated the children like glass. Not from compassion, but from fear of setting off their mothers. SPikes had died before at the hands of suicidally enraged women. Tiny ones, even.

  After a timeless eternity, other goons shuffled them up some stairs and down a hall into a smaller holding room. The glow paint around the top of the walls was flaking off, leaving the room dim, but warm, as the galplas floor held the heat from the room better than concrete slab on the ground. A vent in the ceiling blew out hot air and the captives began to settle to the ground as, for most, fatigue and warmth overcame terror. This was awkward, as seated people took up more space in the cramped room. Tommy ended up with three little kids and a hooker's head resting on top of him, he being too heavy to be anywhere but directly on the floor. His own head was stuck on a drunk's belly. He didn't complain, just sincerely hoped he wouldn't get puked on before George sprung him from this sardine can. He tried not to let himself think about the other possibilities.

  Two hours later, Papa O'Neal crawled through the snow, ghillie suit stuffed with ice-gilded grasses and brush, poking up through rapidly falling snow that he deeply hoped would keep falling fast and heavy, the bitter wind blowing and piling it up. This was not only because it reduced visibility for both man and machine, but also because his body's tracks would need a hell of a lot of covering. He could have covered his tracks if mother nature hadn't been cooperative and chosen to help out, but it would have taken at least two additional operators from cleanup and been complicated. He was just as glad to keep it simple, even if it was damned cold humping a ruck full of black box through this mess.

  Getting up the wall to the air exchange was a stone bitch, especially with his cold-stiffened joints. There was also no way to make his path perfectly trackless. The adhesive that held a hand or foot to the wall when the correct button was depressed, and released it simultaneously with that button, left a light, gooey residue. It couldn't be helped. Nor did he enjoy the coordination necessary to work the tongue switch that controlled his feet. He had spent a lot of time learning to use the grippers, but doubted it would ever be easy for him. The Himmit's natural version worked better than the synthetics, but the grippers were the closest copy the Bane Sidhe Indowy had ever been able to devise.

  He had to take the ruck off and push it in front of him to fit into the vent, which he was absolutely certain was smaller than George had described, the rat bastard. He almost dropped the decoy, twice, trying to get the ruck into the hole in front of him without dropping the vent cover or falling off the wall. Even with his natural physique upgraded and enhanced, a hundred kilos of gear was one hell of an awkward load.

  As his left calf cramped into yet another charley horse, Papa started to envision and enumerate painful ways for Schmidt Two to die. Sending him in through this crazy route. He was up to seventeen when he had to arch his back into an unnatural, virtually impossible position to turn a curve from horizontal to straight up. The ruck was now resting on his head, a sharp and pointy edge dug into his scalp. Nineteen. He climbed on in the darkness, counting the "steps" to his next turn.

  Every time he had to stop to remove a dusty filter from his path, he came up with one more creative and painful demise for the other assassin.

  After what seemed like two hours after he entered the shaft, but was probably less than one, he reached the designated internal vent, high on the wall of the third floor. He was pretty sure he was in the right place. A tiny descendant of the periscope, extended forward past the bulk of his ruck, had shown that the fire extinguisher, floor number, and doors were where they should be. He sure hoped he was in the right place, as only the correct vent had steel screws which had been replaced with screws made of a hard putty. They'd flow into the bolt threads and grip, enough to hold the vent cover in place indefinitely. Until it was given a good pull or push, when it would pop right out. If the putty was gently warmed, the removal was practically silent.

  It was a royal pain in the ass to contort around the ruck to put heating tabs at the corners of the vent, then trail threads tied to the pull tabs back to where he could reach them. He fed a couple of thin wires at the top and bottom of the cover, holding onto the grid. Didn't do a lot of good to open the thing quietly only to have it clatter to the floor. Vent covers only had convenient hinge
s in bad movies. People only moved around through vents in bad movies, too. What kind of idiots were so security blind as to build their ducts out of fucking Galplas. Fuck it. Their loss, his gain. Although, cramped in the dark and trying not to sneeze from the dust, he thought maybe gain was the wrong word for it. He retrieved a little plastic bottle from a ruck pocket, taking a couple of hits from the special nasal spray he should have used before entering the damn vent in the first place. There were no alarms and rushing security people, so it looked as if he'd gotten away with his sneeze a few turns ago. You always forgot something. If that was his worst mistake today, they were golden.

  Finally able to pull out his own PDA, he checked the time. Oh-eight thirty-three. Long time to wait. He did some tense and release exercises to loosen his muscles and pulled up a book on the buckley's small screen. The extremely low light screen would be invisible behind the darkness of the ruck—his eyes didn't need much. He knew the dangers of trying to stay constantly vigilant. Better to rest now than dull his edge for later. He would have slept, if he hadn't been afraid he'd snore.

  George wore a light jacket as he left his desk for the restroom. He had to. Inside, taped to its back, was a coverall of the type favored by the support staff, from cleaning and maintenance to internal security. There were some differences in the detailing, but a full set of stick-ons and a fake badge were pinned in the middle. He passed a co-worker who saw the jacket, giving him a strange look.

  "I wish they'd turn up the damn heat in here," he said, getting a nod from the other man.

  At the restrooms, he couldn't help looking around sheepishly before ducking into the women's room. The "out of order" note on a stall near the end, in Cally O'Neal's handwriting, was his signal. He shrugged out of the jacket and shoved it under the door.

  On the way out, he practically bumped into a fifty-something prune-faced personnel chick. One of his personal skills was the ability to flush beet red at will. He did so, stammering something about the wrong door to her disapproving face before disappearing into the men's room. He stayed there until his heart stopped trying to jump out of his ribcage.

  He'd spent the past week typing in scripts while trying to avoid getting caught. Vitapetroni could sharpen the memory using hypnosis-boosted mnemonics, but the information decayed quickly. The more you information you tried to remember, the faster it decayed. It had to be right, because programs with misspelled commands or the wrong punctuation didn't work too well. Since he couldn't get any other storage media inside, he had to be the storage medium. It gave him headaches. Well, that plus enduring way too many bad jokes about script kiddies from Sunday.

  Now he began pulling those scripts out and turning them loose. It took him three tries to find one that would let him into the security desk's log file. He added a "time out" for Cally that was right before shift change. The left hand rarely knew exactly what the right hand was doing.

  He set a pass code cracking program to work on the doors to the subject rooms and the doors on their route out. It took the right pass codes as well as a badge swipe to get through some of those places. Every once in a while, the cracking program would give him an action message. When that happened, he consulted a list of Tommy's instructions for contingencies, picked what he devoutly hoped was the right option, and went on.

  He got into the permissions tables in the database right away. The cracking program ran common passwords against the three accounts with the highest level of permissions after the DBA's. They would all belong to upper management, and one of them sure as hell would choose something stupidly obvious. The user names and password parameters he'd gotten from a run at the development database at the beginning of the week. It carried a full, recent image of the production data, under the default system manager account and password as set by the software company. Sunday hadn't counted on that, he'd just told George to try it first. Good physical security often made people slack about data security—after all, if nobody could get in the front door anyway, why bother? At each level, the best data security system in the world was only as good as the slackest user or operator.

  Once into the production database, the cracking program neatly cleared all the alarms in the log files, triggered by large numbers of failed login attempts. Also as Sunday had predicted, the automatic failed-login lockout feature had, apparently, been turned off after one too many incompetent managers had complained about it. He still would have gotten in without those particular stupid organizational tech mistakes, it just would have taken a little longer. He had ten more cracking scripts he could have run that exploited various security holes in that combination of operating system and database.

  When he'd asked the cyber what if eleven attempts wasn't enough, the big man had just broken down laughing. "If they were that technically competent, they wouldn't have bought that piece of shit security software for their locks. Yes, I'd stake my life on it." And he had.

  Thinking of Tommy, he did the minor manipulations to get the systems running the cell cameras to give him access so he could find the guy. Even though the cyber had sworn it was minor, and it probably was for him, this was George's hardest task because it couldn't come canned as a script. He had to actually understand what he was doing in the system. He'd spent hours practicing with the different possibilities for how they were managing the data feeds and what the vulnerabilities were in each. The complicated part, the reason simple scripts weren't enough, was that he had to determine which of the nearly identical cells was which on the floor plan. It didn't do a damn bit of good to find Tommy on an observation camera and then not know which room he was looking at. He was still afraid of messing it up, to the point that he was sweating by the time he finally found the right cell.

  Great. The guy was wrapped up in a fucking sheet. Until they could get him changed, that was going to be a major hazard.

  George's last violation of the computer systems for the day would be changing his own records in the permissions tables to give his own badge access to every door in the building. Retrieving the cyber would be his own task, since his badge was the only genuine one. A purely cosmetic badge wouldn't crack that door. He stuffed a small, extra-thin roll of black duct tape from the gym bag into his pocket. He'd be passing through some of the doors Cally and Papa would need. A small wad of tape back in the hole for the bolt and its latch would almost, but not quite, engage. He never taped across the top of a hole because it was too visible. The door monitoring system had come with an alarm that triggered if the bolt did not connect with a plate at the back of the socket. As with many security measures, when it became a nuisance to the people who worked there, the feature was disabled. New security features came and went, but Human nature endured.

  Erick Winchon was one of the few people who was actually comfortable on the crowded Boeing 807 passenger liner. He would have been equally comfortable riding in coach—or so he told himself. He habitually rode first class. It was a horrid waste of space and the primitive, grossly inefficient, hydrocarbon fuel, but first class was a status display among Earthers. Earther humans did not respect a person who did not display the proper status behaviors. He deplored the system, of course, but regretfully bowed to its necessities.

  The Darhel, though they had started on the Path with a great handicap, understood the leadership value of such displays on the less enlightened. They used it to great effect in reinforcing their own species' rule of the wise. Granted, their selection process was imperfect, but considering their starting point, Darhel civilization was quite an achievement. Winchon admired them greatly.

  He shook his head, looking away from the fluffy piles of clouds underneath the plane. The problem with airplanes, besides being slow, was that they tempted passengers to too much woolgathering at productivity's expense.

  "Misha, connect me with the convention hotel, please," he instructed his AID.

  "Yes, sir," it replied.

  He had no doubt that Ms. Felini, his capable assistant, had done everything possible t
o ensure his arrangements were correct, but there were other people who would be implementing those arrangement. He had learned the hard way that with Earthers outside his own company he had to check behind them, multiple times, or some incompetent somewhere would ruin the assignment. It amazed him that Earther humans could quote an aphorism, Murphy's Law, as part of a casual acceptance of their own failings. Back home, if he had pulled any one of the many stunts he had seen on Earth, he would have been on half-meals for a week. Indowy children, and the humans they raised, outgrew such incompetence by the time they were half grown. True, there had been losses among the adolescent humans, but the results in the adults had more than justified the expenses wasted in raising the failures. Besides, fewer would be lost each generation as civilization continued to develop. Eighty percent was a phenomenally commendable success rate for the Indowy foster groups, especially with their own broods to raise. The survivors had bred to cover the lack, and more. Second generation humans raised by Human breeding groups were proving the first serious test of the system. It was, as expected, not without problems.

  There he went, woolgathering again. Odd that a Human phrase for inefficient daydreaming came from a functional, useful—however primitive—task. One more Earther perversity.