Sister Time lota-9

by John Ringo

  Manufactured very carefully by the Tchpth, with multiple redundant levels of control to ensure that the makers could not self-replicate and did indeed self-destruct precisely on schedule, the nannite generators were the underpinning of virtually all Galactic technology. The use-once key codes that safely activated those generators were obtained from the Tchpth by the Darhel and traded amongst themselves and to the Indowy for all the necessities and luxuries that comprised the Galactic economy. They were too useful to be allowed to sit idle for long, but they were the ultimate basis of both the Indowy craftsman’s wage and the FedCred.

  Darhel actuaries had been in business for a thousand years by the time humans were counting cattle on tally sticks. They knew to a fraction the worth of code keys and where the nannites were flowing throughout the entire Galactic economy.

  They weren’t used to being robbed.

  Cally suppressed the temptation to hum as she pressed the button on the inside of the door to close it. The fancy lock probably had recorded that it had been accessed with a manufacturing code, but that just added to the mystery for the Darhel. She lifted the edge of a cushion and kicked the empty gas grenade shell underneath. She wanted it found, just not right away.

  I don’t know what the hell to think about all that. I’ll think about it after I’m out. First things first. She hurried to the door as one of the Indowy began to twitch. They’ll be awake any second now. She glanced at her watch again. She’d made up time on being able to just close the drawer instead of reassemble it. Thank God.

  After letting herself out of the Darhel’s suite, getting out was a simple matter of taking the elevator to the second floor and schmoozing her way through the party. As with a lot of places, there was a lot more effort put into keeping unauthorized people from getting in, than keeping people from getting out.

  The party was the kind of glittering affair that had been attended by national-level movers and shakers back in the twentieth century. It would have had diplomats, politicians, major league bureaucrats, and the occasional celebrity or industrialist. This party still had movers and shakers, but while some of the attendees were officially diplomats, the interests they really represented were one or another Darhel business group. There were a few more celebrities than would have been in attendance before, outside of fund-raisers. As artists had throughout history, they clustered where the opportunities for patronage were. Whatever else they were, the Darhel were not stupid. They understood the value of good public relations. People in the entertainment industry knew the value of a FedCred. As a business arrangement, it generally worked out rather well. In show business, people who didn’t think so tended to be conspicuous by their absence.

  Wow. That’s the first time I’ve seen a champagne fountain done in real life. Clever to have floated it over the water garden. Jewels and gold lamé had enjoyed something of a revival. The room was alive with potted trees and draped greenery. Floating lights resembling mythical will o’ the wisps made the ballroom look like something out of a materialistic reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Cally shrugged. She was a realist. As long as a collaborator didn’t actually get innocent people killed, he’d have to be into some pretty heavy-duty stuff to merit her professional attention. She didn’t think of operations like the one tonight as professional assignments. Sending her out to steal was a little like having an attorney take out the office trash. If your employer asked it, and cash flow was tight, and you could spare the time from your real job, you did it. But it wasn’t her real job. Cally O’Neal’s real job was killing people. And once she’d thought she wasn’t bothered by that at all. Now she knew she was, sometimes. And that it was better that way.

  As she eeled her way between one overly large matron and a rather sticklike pruny one, Cally couldn’t help observing the effects of bad rejuv jobs from incomplete drug sets. Okay, so there are worse things than backaches and blouses that gap at the buttons.

  “… and so my therapist said not to worry, Martin’s just entering a third childhood, and I said I’d had enough of this midlife crisis crap the first time and…”

  There are definitely worse things. She snagged a glass from a tray carried by a balding, forty-something man in an ill-fitting tux. Including being stuck in a dead-end job like waiting on these bastards. She jumped as a hand groped her butt and glanced back to see a man who looked like a seventeen-year-old geek in a tuxedo disappearing into the crowd with his matronly wife on his arm. Case in point.

  A slim socialite with the tight face characteristic of good old-fashioned plastic surgery caught her arm. Cally suppressed her reflexes, turning a blinding but polite smile on the woman.

  “Gail? Is that you? Why the rumors said you weren’t due back for at least another two weeks. It looks fabulous.” The woman chattered at her, not pausing to wait for a response, “Where did you get the full set, you naughty girl, you. Oh, gawd, and the boobs look great! A bit over the top, perhaps, but you always were the drama queen, weren’t you.”

  “It’s so good to see you!” Cally piped in a bright, cheerful generic Chicago accent, noting from the woman’s eyes that she was probably too blitzed to even notice that Cally wasn’t this “Gail,” whoever she was.

  “God, I almost didn’t recognize you, but I said from across the room, no two girls could walk like that. Blonde really suits you. A bit dated, perhaps.” She plumped her own fashionably chestnut curls into place. “But I always say you should wear what looks good on you and to hell with little things like fashion. I’m never daring enough to do it, though. Anyway, you look marvelous! Oh, is that Lucienne Taylor-Jones? I just must speak to her! Kiss kiss, must run!” The woman weaved off in the direction of an eighteen-year-old looking, red silk-clad grande dame on the arm of an apparently sixteen-year-old uniformed man with a pair of stars on his collar.

  Cally grinned privately at her “friend’s” back. There’s always one. But it makes it easier to get to the door.

  Another female hand, this one with an electric blue and white French manicure, rested lightly on her arm as she wove towards the door at an oblique angle. “Love the dress, darling. It reminds me of something from Giori’s Fall collection. Did you by any chance notice where they’ve hidden the Ladies’?”

  Cally hadn’t, but she had memorized the floorplan of strategic parts of the hotel and business center. “Right over there behind the Birdwell sculpture.” She pointed across the room to a gaudy confection of Galplas and cobalt blue glass, formed to resemble yards of lace draped over a Shaker chair.

  “Ah, I see the sign now. Good eye for art, by the way, and thank you.” The woman left her, hurrying as much as the crowd would permit.

  As she passed a waitress in a tuxedo that was just a hair too tight for her hips, Cally drained her champagne and added the empty glass to the woman’s tray. Another tray she passed had Oysters Rockefeller, and mission or no mission, she couldn’t resist taking two. Three would have been conspicuous. Not that she wasn’t anyway. She could feel the male eyes on — well, on her everything, really. Rounded butts were apparently the thing, courtesy of some starlet or other. And the captain she’d been impersonating when the slab went away had also been not quite wasp-waisted, but close enough. In the little black dress she’d checked out from Wardrobe, it showed. Goddamn conspicuous slab job. She simpered past some guy with a Kirk Douglas chin and a martini, who moved just enough to be standing way too close, resisting the impulse to spike him in the instep with her heel. It didn’t help that her last stolen weekend with Stewart — she still didn’t understand why he insisted on her using a name that had been an alias in the first place and wasn’t even his current one — had been damned near six months ago. Between that and the overcharged female juv hormones, which must have been somebody’s idea of a bad joke, she was getting downright cranky. Well, a secret marriage sounded romantic at the time.

  She carefully didn’t sigh with relief when she finally reached the door. She nodded to the door attenda
nt as she slid past a couple who were presenting their invitations, and ducked out of the building through a fire exit. Holding her PDA up to her ear, she pretended to be dictating a voicemail to a friend, rounding a corner before telling her buckley to page the team.

  A few moments later, an antique limousine pulled up and the rear door opened. She climbed in, gratefully slipping off the evil high heels and massaging her sore feet. The glass between the driver’s seat and the passenger compartment lowered slowly. A man in a green and black chauffeur’s uniform that contrasted nicely with his properly spiked red hair glanced up into the rearview mirror and met her eyes. The slight bulge in his cheek and the faint but unmistakable whif of Red Man tobacco was out of character for a chauffeur, but didn’t surprise her in the least.

  The two other men in the car couldn’t have looked more different if they’d tried. Harrison Schmidt was slightly too handsome, on his worst day, to be a field agent. If he wore the right clothes to make his triangular frame look paunchy, and with the right makeup, he could look nondescript enough to get by in a support role. They tried to keep him from having to do so, since if he lost concentration his native dramatic flair tended to get in the way. He simply refused to alter the windswept, golden-brown hair that could have made a holo-drama hero die from envy. But his talents for obtaining or making virtually anything they needed, regardless of the circumstances, made him a valuable addition to the team.

  “Oh, don’t tell me you went in with your hair like that!” their fixer said.

  “What’s wrong with my hair?” Cally put a hand to her hair and looked around at the interior of the car trying to find a makeup mirror.

  “Nothing, if you like split ends. And when you wash it you really need to work through a little mousse while it’s still wet. And a hot oil deep conditioning treatment once a month. My hairdresser has an herbal shine rinse that works wonders. You need it, hon. And if you can possibly avoid it, no more color changes for you until you can let it grow out enough to trim the damaged hair off.” He flicked a nearly invisible speck of dust off his immaculate, charcoal-gray sweater.

  “This is my natural color. Well, now, anyway,” she said.

  “No, dear, it’s been bleached and dyed back to your natural color. Not the same at all. When you were first back from sabbatical it was all fresh and not that bad, but the years of chemicals have taken a toll. Honey, you have got to start taking better care of it if you want to be able to pass at parties like this one.”

  Tommy Sunday coughed into his hand, looking at Harrison.

  “Dude, you’re blind. Cally, ignore him. You look gorgeous as always, okay?” he said.

  Tommy Sunday was a large man. He seemed to crowd the back of the limousine all by himself. His hair was so dark it was practically black. In an earlier time, he wouldn’t have looked out of place among a pro-football team’s defensive line. In fact, his own father had played. It was part of the reason he was such an avid baseball fan. Oh, he’d long since made peace with his father’s memory, but the love of baseball had stuck. Cally was sure that he would be eager to get back to base as quickly as possible tonight, entirely out of a dedication to professional efficiency, and having nothing to do with game three of the World Series being due to start within the next half hour. Personally, she didn’t think the game had been the same since they let Larry Kruetz get away with betting on baseball. Sure, the only incidents they could prove were on games in the other league, but she suspected the commissioner’s leniency had more to do with the Rintar Group owning a majority stake in the St. Paul Mavericks.

  “Now, if we go ahead and get the post-op review out of the way, we can all get home quicker. Everything went okay, right?”

  “I got the keys, if that’s what you mean. And a line on another job. Hey, where’s my stuff?” Cally said.

  “What? Run that job bit by me again.” Papa O’Neal said, glancing sharply at her in the rearview mirror

  “Your other granddaughter sends her love.” Cally lied. Michelle hadn’t, actually, but she would have, of course, if she had had more time. Or at least the Indowy social facsimile thereof. She suppressed a slight grimace. In many ways it was harder to deal with the Indowy-raised humans than it was with any of the other races of aliens. You expected the Galactics to be alien. And you could always tell the Indowy-raised at a glance. They either wore robes like Michelle’s, or street clothes of a particular shade of green that no other human would ever wear. She was surprised they hadn’t developed a fabric with active chlorophyll.

  “Michelle? Michelle’s there?” He started to turn his head and turned it back as he felt the car begin to drift.

  “Was. She seems to have figured out the trick of getting places without crossing the space in between,” Cally answered drily. “She left before I did. Vanished, actually. Either a very good cloak of some sort or teleported.”

  “You’re joking,” Tommy said, shaking his head. “Tell me you’re joking.”

  “About my sister?” Cally asked. “Or her vanishing. Neither. That girl has some answers to cough up.”

  “What did she want that was worth breaking cover after this long?” Papa asked. He looked surprised and puzzled. No wonder. This was the first personal contact any of them had had from Michelle since they “died.” Cally couldn’t sort the rest of the jumble of emotions out from his face. Hell, she was having trouble sorting out her own.

  “She wants to hire us. I don’t know what for. I’m supposed to talk to her again tomorrow night. Did you know she’s apparently rich as Croesus?”

  “What, she’s talking about personally hiring us? To hell with that. How is she?” Granpa asked.

  “She’s… very Indowy. But seems to be healthy and everything. Could use some extra food in my opinion. She was in mentat’s robes, like always.” They had gotten a hologram a year through Indowy sources until the split seven years ago. Since then, it was more like a hologram every two or three years, whenever the O’Neal Bane Sidhe — and she still winced at the organization’s new name — could get an operative close enough, on some other business, to sneak a picture. It didn’t really matter. They could just replay the old holograms. She never changed.

  “My stuff?” she prompted Harrison again.

  “All the gear’s in the trunk,” Tommy said.

  “But you got my shoes out, right?” She dangled the high heels from their straps. Her look spoke volumes.

  “Uh…” Tommy hesitated. His experience of women frustrated with painful shoes had taught him that he usually wanted to be far, far away. Women did best with cute shoes when they only wore them long enough take them off — or at least didn’t walk on them much.

  “Sorry, darling. Forgot. I always find the grav belt a tad awkward.” Harrison looked like he really was sorry.

  “You wouldn’t have had to wear them in the first place if you’d gone out the same way you went in,” Papa O’Neal grumped.

  “I told you, Granpa, I flew the friggin’ thing way up to the top of the damned building, and I didn’t trust it not to give out then. No way was I gonna do it twice if I had a choice. What kind of moron thought it was a good idea to fly around hanging from some stupid belt?” She examined the shimmering pink nails of one hand. “Besides, you know I hate heights.”

  “The only fatalities flying the belt have been either from sabotage or a direct hit in combat.” Her grandfather shrugged, apparently wise enough not to say anything more on the subject.

  Cally regarded it as a mark of extreme dedication to her job that she’d let them talk her into this mission at all. Never again. And it was high time she thought about something, anything else.

  “Excuse me, y’all. I’ve got to check in or Morgan and Sinda will pout at me.” She looked down at her PDA to dial, but the phone on the other end was already ringing, reminding her that she really needed to turn the buckley’s intelligence emulation level down before it crashed itself.

  “Buckley, you didn’t call directly, did you?” she ask
ed.

  “What do you think I am, stupid? No, when they catch us all and kill us, it won’t be my fault. Can I give you a rundown of our current tactical vulnerabilities?”

  “Shut up, buckley.”

  “Ri—” It cut off as hundreds of miles away a phone was answered.

  “Hello?” A soft female voice answered. Cally still marveled that the voice didn’t sound even a little bit harried.

  “Hi, Shari. I’m done for the evening and thought I’d call in. How are the girls doing?”

  “Sinda’s out like a light. She really wore herself out in Aunt Margret’s dance class. Morgan’s almost finished with her homework. I’ll get her.”

  Seven minutes later, the limo turned into the parking lot of a vintage car dealership, pulling around back to park. Its four occupants piled out and into the building, taking the hidden elevator in the back of the broom closet down to the tunnel. In the small antechamber at the bottom, they carefully hung their dress clothes on the cleaning rack and racked their shoes and equipment. Cleaning was no longer a euphemism for precautionary destruction — not always. Things tended to be figleafed with a new look and reused as much as possible. It wasn’t terribly safe, but then it wasn’t a safe business. She tucked the small evening bag inside a pocket of a larger purse that had already been prepped.

  Cally and Harrison got the makeup table to themselves for a few minutes while Tommy ran the standard post-op checks, downloads, and scrubs on the surveillance equipment and Papa dictated the post-op report into his PDA. By the time they were ready for their own turn at the table, she and Harrison were through. She smiled gratefully as he ushered her over to a stool and went to work on her neck and shoulders. Certified massage therapist was not on the list of desirable secondary skills for operational team members. It should’ve been, and Cally was personally grateful for the luck of the draw that had put Harrison available for field assignment just when Granpa was filling the vacancies on the team left by her sabbatical and Jay’s timely demise.