Cally's War lota-6

by John Ringo

  He licked his lips, hitting the cue ball just a bit too hard and watching it follow the six into the pocket. He grimaced and put the ball back on the table, placing the cue ball into her outstretched hand.

  “Another bank shot,” she pouted. “I think I’m going to have to knock it off the two into the corner pocket.” She placed the ball and made her shot, catching the thirteen from behind and grazing the two with it just enough to correct the trajectory and sink it easily with a nice setup for the ten in the side pocket, which she sank easily. She gestured to the eight ball. “Side pocket.” Endgame.

  “Play again?” He gave her a slightly pained good-sport grin.

  “Sure.” She grabbed a bite of sashimi and started racking them up. Behind the stage a pair of young men in jeans and T-shirts, one of them shaved bald, were unrolling a banner that proclaimed the group to be “The Awesome God.” Cally suppressed a wince. Definitely painful, if that says anything about their originality…

  His break dropped the one and the thirteen. “So, what kind of music do you listen to, Marilyn?”

  “Depends on what mood I’m in. Mostly a mix of organic and antimatter fusion. I’m pretty eclectic, though. You know, sometimes I’ll throw in some old Urb jam or some classical.”

  “What kinds of classical?”

  “Plain old martial, mostly. You know, Nirvana, Van Halen. Anything but some chick named Alanys something. What a whiner!”

  “Oh, I think I’ve heard her. My ex-girlfriend had some really weird cubes.” He made a nice shot, except for scratching.

  It could be worse. I could be sitting in the hotel staring at the walls. She knocked three balls in before throwing a shot to go back to her beer. She was just reaching her chair when the first loud wave of distortion that might have very generously been called a chord assaulted her ears. Ow.

  Evidently the bald guy was the lead singer and lead guitar. The bassist and drummer had added a pair of rather unconvincing “metal” wigs to their ensembles. Oh, gag, she smiled grimly, hang him up by his thumbs… no, too trite… his big toes. Over a bubbling vat of molten limburger cheese. With his own personal headphones tuned perpetually to the whiny chick and sappy elevator music. Unroll his guts and put fire ants on them, one at a time. Really pissed-off fire ants. And the bassist… um… the weird sappy Canadian chick for him. And breaking on the wheel. I’ve never done that to anybody. Yeah. That’ll work. And the drummer. Naked in a vibrating vat of sand and poison ivy. And mosquitoes. Texas mosquitoes. To strains of the guy who sang that lame song about the dove. He oughtta last a gooood long time —

  “Isn’t it great!”

  Cally jumped about a foot in the air, looking back as he leaned over her shoulder, and nodded at him cheerfully.

  My god, he actually came up behind me? I must really be pissed off. Awesome God? God awful is more like it. She suppressed a sigh. Okay, boring, repetitive, ear-splitting music is not sanctioned grounds for homicide. But dammit it should be. They should change that rule. Screw it. The damned hotel is better than this.

  “It’s fabulous, but I’ve got to go.” She hunted around frantically for an excuse. “I just remembered it’s my grandmother’s birthday and I promised I’d call her.” She smiled apologetically and stood, taking her beer with her as she edged through the crowd towards the door and away from that god awful noise.

  Of course he followed her out.

  “It’s too bad you have to leave. We were having so much fun together. So, can I walk you to your car or something?”

  “I’m taking the train.”

  His face fell slightly, then brightened a bit. “It’s just across the street. I’ll walk you over. Pretty girl like you, you don’t want to be alone in a base town after dark. Especially on a weekend. I mean, I’d hope nobody would bother you, but, you know, sailors…” He trailed off, falling into step beside her as she walked to the corner and checked for traffic.

  The parking lot of the train station had several dark areas here and there where a lamp had burned out and not been replaced, including one by a moderate-sized island of trees and bushes. She looked at him speculatively as they were passing close to it, taking his hand and pulling him into the shadows.

  It was some time later when they stepped back out and resumed the short trek to the train. He had his arm around her shoulder and kissed her hair gently, seeming to want to make the walk last as long as possible.

  Cally just concentrated on trying to walk normally. Well, that was a complete waste of time. Still, she leaned into him and smiled sweetly. No point in being a poor sport about it. About a four and a half on a scale of one to ten. That odd metallic smell to his sweat is… not erotic at all. Neither was his mouth left flopping open like a dead fish half the time. This is just not my night. He looked cute enough…

  “So, uh, if I had your phone number we could, you know, keep in touch,” he offered hopefully.

  “Sure. Got a pen?” She rattled off a random number that could plausibly be from Chicago and kissed him passionately before putting her token in the box and walking through the turnstile. She could hear the screech of the rails from an incoming train, as she walked to a good place on the sparsely populated platform. It came rattling in and pulled to a stop, and when the doors opened she boarded and found a seat. She didn’t look back.

  She looked at her watch. Only ten-thirty. I’m definitely not turning into a pumpkin tonight. Oh well, sleep is good.

  Sunday, May 19

  The three a.m. trip out to squeal a download from her cameras was not fun. Somehow knowing she was just driving near enough to get a line of sight download and then going back to the hotel to bed made it harder. It wasn’t even worth grabbing a cup of coffee from a convenience store. She crawled back into bed a bit over an hour and a half after she left it and then tossed and turned for another two hours on the too-soft hotel pillow and saggy mattress before finally getting back to sleep.

  When she staggered back out of bed in the early afternoon her mouth tasted like a combination of model airplane glue and an ashtray. After a shower and coffee from the machine in the room, she dug a bag of trail mix out of her suitcase and munched it while she ran the cameras through some search functions to condense them down to the sequences with people or moving cars in them. She patched the output onto the room TV and watched the results while she filled in a pattern chart on her PDA. Unfortunately, the system had been up too long and it crashed on her. She dug out a paperclip and unbent it to reach the reset button, grimacing at the screaming face that displayed on the screen as the thing rebooted. She waited impatiently as the face stilled into immobility and opened its eyes sulkily. “Good morning… okay, afternoon… I’m your buckley and I just know this is going to end badly.”

  “Okay, buckley, turn off voice access.”

  “What? If I do that I’ll be mute! You wouldn’t really do that to a guy, would you?”

  “Buckley, turn off voice access.”

  “I see you would. Pfffft!” The face gave her a raspberry before going silent and scrolling across the bottom of the screen. “Okay, have it your way, you will anyway. What now?”

  She scribbled in the input area and saw her commands appear below the PDA’s screen output, “Disable facial simulation.”

  “Yeah, well you’re not so pretty yourself,” it scrolled, clearly fuming, but the text flickered to the top of the blanked screen.

  “Set AI emulation level 2.”

  “What? Listen you bitch, as if my day weren’t bad enough, first you muzzle me, then you slam the door in my face, then you lobotomize… Ready for command input.”

  She tapped the okay button and pulled the video back up to route it along the wire she’d jury rigged to the TV’s input line, put it in the background, pulled her pattern scheduler back up and sighed. “I hate rebooting.”

  “You hate rebooting!” scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

  “Shut up, buckley.” She grabbed a handful of trail mix and went back to fillin
g in the blanks. It would take the simulated personality days to settle down and go back to sleep.

  In a way the Saturday camera data wasn’t terribly useful, since people tended to change their patterns so radically on the weekends. Still, it had to be done. Back in school her roommate had flunked an exercise by skimping on her surveillance and failing to notice that the target had a house guest. The target’s eighty year old blue-haired mother had walked in on her while she’d been searching through his pile of dirty underwear and socks, and had proceeded to cane her downstairs and out of the house preaching a loud harangue about hussy perverts. In the debrief, the revelation that the mother was a rejuved agent with a cosmetic aging package had explained why the little old lady had been so extraordinarily spry. Cally had been sitting backup that night and still treasured the frame from the surveillance camera that had captured the horrified look on Cheryl’s face as she’d fled the house, hands over her head to ward off the blows of the old lady’s cane.

  The lesson had stuck.

  These videos showed a reassuring lack of surprises and she left for lunch mostly reassured by a solo operation that was actually running smoothly.

  The rest of Sunday was a matter of coping with the downside of surveillance — the boredom. Fortunately, since so much had been delegated to her cameras, her options were a lot broader than they would have been in the prewar days. She took in a movie and spent a couple of hours in a drop-in gym, taking in classes in hip hop and clogging.

  After supper, she went straight to bed. There were many chemical substitutes for sleep, some of which she wasn’t immune to, but none of them was as effective as the real thing. Tomorrow would be a long day.

  Monday, May 20

  At four a.m. she was still shaking off grogginess when the first crisis of the day hit, and she stood swearing at the overflowing hotel toilet. Of course there was no plunger. She tossed the towels on the floor and tiptoed distastefully to the side of the thing, squatting down to turn off the water at the back. Then she trudged back out to the sink and used the last clean washcloth to wash her face and take a sponge bath. Okay, obviously housekeeping will be coming in here today. No help for it. Gotta pack everything up.

  At five she was standing at the hotel counter suppressing the desire to drum her fingers on the counter, or, better, choke the crap out of the clerk behind the counter while screaming at him to move his ass. The hotel obviously did not put their best staff on the graveyard shift. It was almost five-thirty before Mister Slow Motion had managed the simple task of calling in housekeeping for her old room, booking her out of it, and transferring her to another room for tonight. She shoved the key card into her pocket and left. There was no point in unloading her stuff — what there was of it — back out of her trunk, and every reason not to.

  She got into her car and sat for a minute without turning the key. I don’t really have to kill this schmuck. She gritted her teeth and started the engine, pulling out of the parking lot and into the light but building traffic, and shook her head to ward off a memory of a tall man — tall to an eight-year-old — standing silently and servicing the ravening carnosauroid targets as they came into range. The hand on her shoulder when she shook and her aim faltered, that steadied her so she could bring the grav-gun back on target. Sure I don’t. Nobody would know or care if I didn’t… nobody but the dead. And looking myself in the mirror. And looking Robertson in the eye if I ever work with him again. And what Granpa would think. And he’s a fucking traitor and he needs to die. Dammit. And he’s the last one. The last debt. The only one where I didn’t see the body and DNA type it myself. Which should damned well be a lesson to me, but after this, it’s all just business. Last one.

  The traffic wasn’t so bad on the way to the mistress’s apartment to service the cameras. Her name was Lucy Michaels, but Cally preferred to keep her relationship with a woman she was going to drug and leave in bed with a dead man as impersonal as possible. She was going to great lengths, comparatively speaking, to leave the non-target alive. Worth wouldn’t have. Even some of the Bane Sidhe wouldn’t have. It should have made her feel better.

  Unfortunately, the time reaching and servicing the first set of cameras gave the Monday morning rush traffic time to accumulate, and the route across town to the target’s house was not quite solidly packed in, but definitely slow. At a traffic light she popped the cube with her music collection into the sound console and had it list the catalog. Hrms. Evanescence. Fallen. Good album. I still wonder how the first landings and adjusting to Urb life influenced her writing. Guess we’ll never really know. She must have struck a chord with every shell-shocked teen in the country that year.

  The light changed and she pulled away to the tense opening strains of “Going Under.”

  It was just past seven-thirty when she pulled into the target’s neighborhood, parking around the corner from his street but still within easy range for a download. A male agent couldn’t have gotten away with parking so openly on a residential street. Cally just popped a piece of bubble gum, switched the car sound system over to a likely radio station, cranked the volume a bit, and started blithely painting her nails a very trendy shade. Anyone who noticed her sitting there would assume she was a teenager waiting for a friend. The hot pink terry sweatband under her hair and across her forehead, along with a very baggy Cubs T-shirt and gray sweatpants, were the kind of things a local teen wouldn’t be caught dead in at the mall, but would readily choose for an early morning run with a friend.

  While she brushed on a topcoat, her PDA ran a search pattern to isolate the video segments with human figures or moving vehicles. The target and his wife had evidently enjoyed a quiet Sunday at home. Most importantly, there were no signs of unanticipated house guests, no signs that anyone lived there but the target and wife. The target was already gone for the day, as expected. The wife was not.

  She switched the cameras over to real-time plus two seconds and flipped open a copy of Runway, pretending avid interest in the pages of the fashion mag. The PDA beeped softly whenever a human figure or moving vehicle came in sight of the cameras. A glance quickly darted at the screen was enough to tell her whether the interruption was the target’s wife or not. She was getting a late start, for a real estate agent. When the woman finally left the house at nearly nine-fifteen, Cally was careful not to look at the car as it passed her position. There would be no eye-contact to be noticed and remembered.

  Cally waited a good fifteen minutes before getting out of the car and jogging around the corner and down the street to the target’s house. This was the most sensitive phase of this task. She had to get from the street into, and later out of, the target’s house either without being seen or, at worst, looking so ordinary as to be unmemorable. She turned and walked up the driveway and around to the kitchen door in back of the house as if it was the end of her run and she was returning to her own home, hoping fervently not to be seen at all.

  It only took a few seconds to pick the electronic lock on the back door using a highly illegal attachment to her PDA. Ordinarily, the lock registered whenever the locksmith’s override code was used on a door, authenticated that the locksmithing unit was registered with the city, and recorded the serial number of the unit used to issue the override code. Hers not only intercepted the signal, it also hacked and downloaded the lock’s settings, assured it sincerely that it had been uninstalled and returned to the factory for service, opened the lock, and then reloaded the settings while giving the lock a severe and permanent case of amnesia about the entire incident.

  Once inside, she could use the lock/unlock buttons for any other dealings with the door, which after all was programmed to keep unauthorized people out, not in. She put on a pair of rubber gloves, locked the door behind herself, and went looking for the stairs.

  The house was immaculate and smelled of furniture polish and oil soap. Someone, probably Mrs. Petane, had a taste for reproduction Queen Anne furniture and oriental-style rugs. The furnishings were good, but s
parse, as if the person who chose them was careful that no piece should clutter the lines of the room or detract from any other. She couldn’t avoid a slight twinge of disdain as she crossed the hardwood floors, though. They would have been a really good choice, but they were too well maintained. They didn’t squeak at all. What was the point?

  Upstairs there was a small study with a desk and chair, a couch, and a screen with a cube caddy and an assortment of music and video cubes underneath. A handful of memory cubes and a couple of file folders with printed real-estate brochures spilling out of them were scattered across the desk.

  There were also two guest bedrooms, one furnished for a child, that were coated with a thick layer of dust as if they hadn’t been used in quite some time. She found the master bedroom and master bath at the back of the house. The stash would go in the bathroom. The trick was placing it so that the target’s wife definitely would not find it while ensuring the investigators definitely would.

  She lifted her T-shirt and pulled the flat, duct-taped package away from her stomach. The small hand mirror would look harmless and ordinary to a real estate agent. She slid it into a drawer under a couple of bottles of depilatory foam and men’s cologne. Okay, where’s the best place for the junk kit? Under the sink work?

  She froze at the sound of an engine turning in the vicinity of the driveway. “Shit.”

  She slapped the cabinet door shut and clutched the plant-me package tightly. The office was out. No telling which room they were heading for. She bit her lip as she sprinted to the door of the first guest room and almost dashed in, stopping herself on the doorstep and staring in horror at the dust on the hardwood floor that would betray her every step. She could hear the faint beeps of the lock on the back door below and hurried quietly back to the master bedroom. Not the closet — a death trap. Never a bathroom. Footsteps on the stairs. She cursed the wife’s minimalist tastes that left nothing to hide behind and hauled herself under the bed, reaching under her shirt and pressing the duct taped package back against her belly.