Cally's War lota-6

by John Ringo

  Bane Sidhe base personnel, as opposed to operatives, did use AIDs. Clean ones. Manufactured on site, in fact. O’Reilly’s AID had information not only on comfortable light frequency combinations for humans and each alien species, but the least uncomfortable compromises for any combination.

  He had a freshly brewed pot of strong coffee, as well as an ice bucket with distilled bottled water enriched with aesthetically appropriate trace minerals, set up on a table in the corner of his office when the Indowy Aelool arrived.

  As he handed the Aelool his customary glass of iced water with an olive, even after all this time he couldn’t help being reminded of a small, fuzzy green teddy bear.

  Human and Indowy facial expressions and body language had virtually nothing in common, but those of all races who dealt with other species frequently made a habit of learning to interpret and copy as many of the other races’ nonverbal cues as possible. Consequently, the priest knew exactly what his friend meant when he reacted to the human’s addition of a large shot of Bushmill’s whiskey to his coffee by raising the fleshy muscle directly above one eye and tilting his head slightly.

  “We have a problem,” Father O’Reilly said.

  “I gathered that. You normally do not add such a substance to your drink until much later in the evening.”

  “Thomas, display the colonel, please,” the priest addressed his AID. A foot-high hologram of the late Colonel Charles Petane appeared above the coffee table.

  “Until yesterday, this man was one of our minor agents. To refresh your memory, he was recruited after he was instrumental in causing the loss of Team Conyers. It was believed that his position as the U.S. Army liaison to Fleet Strike was the first step to his eventual development as an important source of sensitive information and that that potential value outweighed any deterrent value to killing him in retaliation for the deaths of the team members,” he began, pausing to see if he had successfully refreshed Aelool’s memory.

  “If I recall correctly, that was a matter of some debate.”

  “And involved the decision to protect some of our operatives from knowledge of the decision, yes. That’s an awful euphemism, isn’t it? More to the point, we lied.” He took a large gulp of his coffee.

  “Most of my compatriots in our side of the organization did not understand the need,” Aelool said, “but, yes, I remember your people felt it necessary and I believe I can appreciate why. I don’t remember a follow up as to the usefulness of information the agent provided, but right now I am more curious about your choice of verb tense in describing him.” Aelool’s eyes appeared to be focused on the olive at the bottom of his glass, watching it roll as he tilted the glass slightly.

  “The agent is deceased as of yesterday evening. We believe that Cally O’Neal became aware that he was alive and killed him. We are still gathering information.”

  “This is no small thing.” The alien’s closed posture radiated concern to O’Reilly, who had become an expert in communication with Indowy generally and this Indowy in particular. He set his glass carefully on the table and met the human’s eyes.

  “I would be most grateful if you would add about half a shot from that bottle to this drink.” The Aelool sat very still, expressionless, as he waited for his host to fulfill the request. “I understand your expertise in the psychology of sophonts other than your own species, Father O’Reilly, but I wonder if it is possible for you to understand how very badly my people are likely to react to this incident.” He rubbed one hand across his face, slowly. “What have you done in response so far?”

  “I’ve got Michael O’Neal, Senior, en route at the moment, and I’ve just informed you of the incident. Miss O’Neal checked in late this morning, on her own, so I haven’t as yet needed to take any action to secure her. No one has as yet attempted to discuss our concerns with her.” He retrieved the bottle and added a shot to the glass. He had seen the Aelool consume alcohol perhaps twice in the past twenty years. Its effect on Indowy was slightly more intense than on humans, even after accounting for differences in body mass. They rarely indulged.

  “Good. I would suggest that you don’t. You will need to gather information from her, I understand that. It will not minimize the damage much, but it will at least be somewhat helpful if O’Neal Senior conducts all conversation with her on this matter. Although you humans do not have clans as we do, to my people it will look as though she has been brought up in front of her acting head of clan to answer for the act. This will be a small help, but it will be a help. Among Indowy, you will understand, such a meeting in a circumstance of misbehavior is a serious consequence in and of itself.”

  “Will it be enough?”

  “By no means. That you even ask illustrates some of the problem. But it will be a start, and it may make it possible to mend the rest with care and time. I will have to, as you would put it, talk fast.”

  * * *

  Cally sat in the conference room Papa O’Neal had reserved when he had arranged to meet her this morning before lunch. It had actually taken longer than she had expected for someone to talk to her, and this was an interesting opening gambit in the reckoning that was now due on both sides.

  She was playing solitaire on screen when the PDA piped up. “Now’s when it really hits the fan.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “You’re agreeing with me. Things must be far worse than I thought. Neither of us is going to leave here alive, are we?”

  “Shut up, buckley.”

  “Right.”

  A red-haired man with very old eyes and a bulge in his cheek came in the door and sat on the edge of the table. He smelled of Red Man chewing tobacco, and took a moment to spit into the otherwise empty Styrofoam coffee cup he carried in one hand, before setting it down on the table, near enough to reach but too far to be knocked over by accident.

  “Cally, did you kill Colonel Petane?” He spoke each word slowly, as if he already knew the answer.

  “Why, yes, Granpa. As a matter of fact I did.” She flipped the PDA closed and dropped it in her purse, took out a cigarette, lit it, all without taking her eyes off of him. Her arms stayed close in as she took a pull, her elbow propped in one hand. She regarded him steadily, waiting for him to speak.

  He was silent for a moment, resting his forehead in one hand, before wiping it down his face and rubbing his chin. He picked up the cup and spat again before putting it back down.

  “You know, you always hope that you can somehow keep the next generation from making the mistakes that you made. Part of getting old, I guess.” He took a deep breath and was silent for another long moment. “Would you mind telling me just what you were thinking when you decided that this was a good idea?”

  “Sure. No problem. I became aware, on my vacation, that someone on our Targets of Opportunity list was falsely carried on the list as inactive because the database had him, inaccurately at the time, listed as deceased. Naturally, he couldn’t be properly regarded as inactive since he was, in fact, alive. Therefore, since he was on the list as a Target of Opportunity, I followed standing organizational doctrine, took out the target, and reported back in to file my after action reports and prep for the next mission.”

  “I never raised you to be a guardhouse lawyer, young lady.”

  “Hardly young.” She blew a perfect smoke ring which wafted away towards an air vent.

  “You’re acting it.”

  “You didn’t raise me to crap all over my responsibilities to my fellow team members, either.” She picked up her Styrofoam cup of coffee, frowned at the dregs and tapped her ashes into it.

  “One, Team Conyers wasn’t your team. Two, do you honestly think they would have condoned elimination of a potentially useful source merely for revenge? Do you?”

  “One, you’re correct. They weren’t my team, they were a fellow team. Two, Petane was not placed on the Targets of Opportunity list by me, and he wasn’t placed there for revenge. He was placed there, as I understand it, because it’s bad
policy to allow fucking traitors who have ratted out your field operatives and gotten them killed to keep breathing. That he wasn’t removed from the list indicates to me that at some level someone was fully aware that a mistake had been made. Three, thorough interrogation revealed that Petane was not only not a useful source to date, but that his potential for future usefulness as a source was insignificant. Would you like my report?” she offered coldly.

  “Cally, you knew full well this was above your pay grade. Did it never even occur to you to come in and discuss the issue and propose a formal, official reevaluation of the worthless scumbag’s status? Did it even cross your mind? Tell me something, what do you think your role in this organization is?”

  “I like to think of myself as the chlorine in the gene pool.”

  “If you think this is a time to be flip, we’ve got a much bigger problem than I thought.”

  “Okay, I don’t. I believe that deciding to keep a traitor alive who had betrayed operatives to their deaths was a very questionable decision. Even had he been a very high quality source. However, had he been a high quality source, I would have left him breathing and with the belief that the interrogation had been a field review — a test that he had passed. I would have let him live despite my strong conviction that the decision to do so was wrong.”

  “What, you just set yourself up all on your own to evaluate an agent’s value? Who made you God, Cally?”

  “I became aware of his lack of value at the same time I became aware he was alive. The interrogation was merely confirming that information. Still, had he had any significant redeeming value as a source, he would still be breathing.”

  “Yeah, we found that leak. Fortunately, he’s not my problem,” he said.

  “Would you like my report?”

  “Do I want it? No. Am I going to need it as part of cleaning up this mess, if it even can be cleaned up? Yes. Load it over.”

  “Buckley, transmit the interrogation data and after action report to Michael O’Neal, Senior’s AID.” For once, the buckley made the correct decision to stay silent.

  “Miss O’Neal, you are to consider yourself confined to quarters pending a determination in this matter,” he said formally, and added, “And Cally — don’t take any liberties with that order. That would include any electronic liberties with the computers of this base or anywhere else. Meals will be delivered. If the Bane Sidhe need you to go anywhere else on base, you will receive those orders from me. You are not to communicate with anyone else without a direct order from me. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” Cally’s face was absolutely still as she accepted her dismissal, retrieved her purse, and left the room to return to her suite.

  * * *

  When she got back to her quarters the cleaning people had gotten her luggage from the road trip back to her. It killed a whole fifteen minutes or so to go through the pack and see what was still there. She didn’t know whether to be surprised or not that everything except the plastic bag of operation-tainted clothes was there. Someone had even, thoughtfully, retrieved her music cube from the car sound system. A second cube and a small bottle of clear liquid was next to it in the case. She turned the buckley’s AI emulation all the way off to use the PDA as a dumb cube reader and inserted the cube.

  “Not everyone thinks you did the wrong thing. The shit can’t be stopped from hitting the fan, but at least you can have your stuff back. This message will self destruct in ten seconds, but please scrub and flush the cube, anyway. Thanks for keeping the faith, Miss O’Neal.” She read the words off a hologram of an old-fashioned video screen. After, she took the cube out and dropped it into the vinegar her anonymous admirer had supplied. In the bathroom, she dumped the vinegar down the toilet and flushed. If they weren’t specifically watching for it, it would never come up.

  Of course, it could be a test, but when it came right down to it, she wasn’t as young as she looked and was way too old to be that paranoid. She turned the AI emulation back on.

  “So, buckley, is there a Bane Sidhe regulation for people confined to quarters that would make downloading a few books and movies from the base library count as ‘electronic liberties’?”

  “They’ll probably shoot you and I’ll get wiped and handed to some kid as a video game box.”

  “Is there a regulation, buckley?” she repeated coldly.

  “No, but you don’t really imagine that that’s going to matter to them, do you? Would you like me to list the five top policies they could use to justify shooting you?”

  “Shut up, buckley.”

  “Really, it would be no trouble.”

  “Shut up, buckley.”

  “Right.”

  One of the things in her backpack from the road trip was the cube where she had stored the initial take from the research on Sinda Makepeace. It said she grew up in Wisconsin. In addition to a broad selection of really old movies, the base library had a textbook with a junior high level history of the state, including a rather large volume entitled The Complete and Unabridged History of Cheese, and a whole pack of Fleet Strike manuals for training generally, and Makepeace’s MOS in particular.

  If they didn’t decide to send her out on the mission, it wouldn’t matter. If they did, being unprepared could really suck. And between that and watching Fred and Ginger cut a rug — flat and not colorized, thank you very much — she managed to kill time until a knock at her door told her lunch had arrived.

  She looked at the single link of soy sausage, cornbread, creamed corn, carton of milk, and apple on the tray with a touch of disbelief.

  “I ain’t believin’ this. I think they’re really pissed at me, buckley.”

  “You’re just catching on to that? You used to be smarter. Incoming message from Michael O’Neal, Senior. Do you want the bad news now, or after you eat?”

  “Play it, buckley.”

  A foot-high hologram of her grandfather, from the shoulders up, appeared a foot or so above the PDA. She had to move around to see his face. The buckley wasn’t smart enough to display the message at a conversational distance in front of her like a true AID would.

  “Cally, you have a three-fifteen appointment in medical. Please be a few minutes early.”

  Well, it didn’t sound like he was coming to deliver her personally or sending an escort. That was something.

  * * *

  Doctor Albert Vitapetroni had a well-developed poker face and empathetic manner. It was a professional necessity for a psychiatrist. As the head of psychiatry for the clinic at Chicago Base, he might have to see any human member of the large organization. It would have been humanly impossible, not to mention in specific cases irrational, to like all of his charges.

  The lean and fit, though balding, man pacing in his office and playing idly with one of his desk toys was not one of his favorite fellow Bane Sidhe. He couldn’t actually say the man was a patient, because as a computing operative the man generally stayed out of the line of fire enough not to require his services. And, of course, he was not here for those services now. Instead, the operative was making a bit of a nuisance of himself rambling on about his three-fifteen patient.

  “That’s the trouble with operatives in her branch of the business. You can only make somebody kill over and over for so many years before they go sociopath on you.”

  “Mr. Wallace, you have just illustrated why professionals are so chagrinned by laypeople’s use of psychiatric jargon. Miss O’Neal is most certainly not a sociopath.”

  “Psychopath, whatever. And you can’t exactly say that if you haven’t seen her yet, can you? If you have preconceived notions before you even see her, seems to me you’d do everyone a service by, well, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but by—”

  “Operative Wallace, while I admired your father as a professional colleague, I feel I need to remind you that growing up with a parent who is a psychiatrist does not make you a psychiatrist.” He took a deep breath and tried to recover his professional calm. “Jay,
if you need to talk or something, feel free to talk with my receptionist and she’ll fit you in. We don’t have to even call it an appointment if you’d rather not, but right now I really need to get some of this paperwork done before this afternoon’s round of patients. Sorry to shove you out the door, but if you’ll excuse me…”

  “Sure. No problem. I guess I’ll see you later or something.” The operative held up both hands in a gesture of acceptance and backed through the door, shutting it behind him.

  The doctor watched him go and sat staring at, or really past, the closed door for a minute. I don’t have any rational reason I can put my finger on, other than minor little annoyances like what happened just now, but I just plain don’t like him. I’ve never caught him doing anything underhanded — well, more than any operative has to — and there’s nothing in his file, test results are fine, but I just can’t stand the little weasel. And this whole Cally O’Neal mess is extra stress I did not need this week. Dammit, I told them years ago what would happen if she ever found out that rat bastard was alive. I told them to keep that secret and keep her out of Chicago to reduce the risk of an unfortunate coincidental meeting. So somebody doesn’t listen well enough and now the mess lands in my lap. God, I need a vacation.

  * * *

  Vitapetroni answered the knock on his door at ten after three. It was like her to be early. It would take longer to jot down his impressions than it would to make them. Subject was neatly but casually dressed. Faded but neat jeans and olive drab T-shirt consistent with Cally persona. Head carried slightly awkwardly. Probably uncomfortable with a hair color and texture that doesn’t match current role. No contact lenses, eyes natural color.