Sister Time lota-9

by John Ringo

  After a hour or so, he noted the blinking light on his display, indicating a courier-class ship lighting off its drives on a vector that would move it towards the Dulain System’s most probable transit points should Epetar start screaming for help. Accounting for the inevitable lag of lightspeed communication, it had taken them about five minutes longer than he had expected to recognize the registry on his ship, realize what that meant for the other group, and decide what to do about it. About a week and a half too late to do them any good. He must remember to light an incense stick after he left the bridge to eat, relax and sleep, and thank the Lords of Enterprise that the Epetar Group had been so colossally stupid and incompetent.

  Friday 11/5/54

  Epetar Factor Raddin was not happy at having been roused from his bed by the chiming of his AID. The asynchronization with his sleep cycle had been extremely unpleasant; feelings which he transferred to the ship displayed in the holo before him.

  “Industry, are you perhaps lost? Your mayday signals are not broadcasting, so I must wonder if they are defective, or whether your navigational systems are malfunctioning.” The mellifluous voice managed to imply that the brain between the captain’s ears might be the defective portion of said navigational systems.

  “Negative, Dulain caller, Dedicated Industry is in good running condition and is not lost.” Rudely, her captain, for the beautiful voice could only belong to another of his kind, did not display his own holo, leaving Raddin looking at the rather dilapidated freighter.

  He tried again, “Good running condition? That would be a surprise, since your registry is from the Gistar Group and no freighter of your group is due to arrive at Dulain at all, much less now. State your business.”

  The holo of the ship flickered, replaced by the image of a young pup whose robe was edged with the yellow trim indicative of novice captains. “We thank you for your courteous solicitations, Epetar Factor. Industry’s business is between ourselves and Dulain System Administration. Who, if you will excuse my brevity, are transmitting presently. I take my leave,” the young whelp said.

  Raddin found himself staring at empty space above the altar of communication. Muttering under his breath, he lit a spike of incense and left to seek his grooming chair, a pair of Indowy body servants following in his wake.

  “AID, monitor station logs for Gistar’s purported reason for intruding in Dulain. The business here for the near future is mine and I do not appreciate interference.” He opened his mouth to permit his servants to clean his very sharp teeth. Sleep was obviously a lost cause.

  Five hours later he had gone from annoyed to alarmed. Fact: the only ship due in the next two weeks, for anything but routine food runs, was the Fetching Price from Sol. Fact: the Gistar ship did not belong here and was being extremely cagey about her purpose. “Exploring new business opportunities” was an excellent generic description of a Darhel’s everyday life. A great believer in professional paranoia, Raddin damned the cost and commissioned the courier ship on station for the system to carry the news to Sol. The courier ship, in damned presumption, had already been moving in the right direction, anticipating his hiring their services.

  Manager Pardal, currently operating from Sol, was reportedly attempting to corner the market on humans. Personally, Raddin didn’t see the point, but managers had access to information a factor could only envy. Regardless, Epetar had a great deal of the carrying trade for Dulain locked up under iron-clad contracts and any Gistar attempts at intrusion were unwelcome and potentially serious. Even coming from such an unlikely threat as the dilapidated, garbage scow of a ship plodding in from the jump point.

  Tuesday 11/9/54

  The restaurant was a converted trawler parked along the banks of a creek, off of Old 701. It had what was quite possibly the best she-crab stew in the low country. Well, except for Shari’s. It also offered the one of a kind courtesy of serving lunch or dinner on or below deck for any boat that tied up at the adjoining dock. It was a niche market that took advantage of the ready cash of honeymooners, playboys, and fish smugglers. The latter had a good line going in unregistered catches and tax evasion. High as taxes on legitimate incomes were, that translated to quite a bit of ready cash.

  In Cally’s case, it meant that all she had to do was borrow a decent boat to have a good, discreet, business lunch. She and the smugglers had similar notions of what constituted adequate dining privacy. November was not a good time of year, in Charleston, for alfresco meals on deck. The sky was a sullen gray that seemed to merge at the edges with the gunmetal ocean in the distance. The brown marsh grasses bent in great swathes, ends fluttering in the strong wind. The sisters would eat lunch in the warm shelter of the small galley.

  A thirty-eight footer, the craft had never served to smuggle fish. Well, once in a pinch, but that was strictly as a cover for its real cargo — in that case, a political refugee who had made it as far as Norfolk on his own but who had needed more distance from civilization than even the unreclaimed wilds of the eastern coastal U.S. could offer. The problem with bounty farmers was, well, that they made their living from collecting bounties. Most places, they weren’t the sort to keep their mouths shut if a reward was offered. As she understood it, it had taken strenuous efforts to get the dead fish smell out of the living areas of the boat after that run. Fortunately, that had been a job for the cousin who owned the boat, not her.

  Eating inside was not exactly picturesque, but ideal for privacy. The galley already boasted fittings of high-quality blocks for eavesdropping. Her PDA would page the waiter when they needed service. The restaurant management, sensitive to the needs of their most discriminating and lucrative clientele, had a very fine sense of which boats not to bother with may I help you visits or incessant coffee and tea refills. It was a great restaurant. The whole family loved it.

  Michelle was late. That surprised Cally more than she’d been surprised in a long time. She didn’t think a Michon Mentat could be late. It didn’t go with the labeling on the package. She looked cool and unflappable when she walked down the pier, wearing the street clothes her sister had purchased for her in Chicago, plus a duster of Galactic silk that matched the color of her pants. The assassin noted a bulge in the right pocket of the duster. If it had been anyone else, Cally would have suspected a weapon.

  “I apologize for being late. I thought I would look strange if I did not wear a coat. Does it look appropriate?” the mentat asked

  “You… made it?” Cally asked, sliding a menu across the table.

  “Is it obvious? Is that a problem?” She might have been any woman, for a moment, as she critically examined the garment.

  “I can only tell because it’s Galactic silk and made in a single piece, and no, no problem. It looks great.” And worth about ten years of my salary, I think.

  “Good. Were you able to obtain the information I requested?” The other woman’s clear tones betrayed the tiniest hint of her childhood Georgia accent, but only to an experienced operative like her sister.

  “Oh, yeah. We got it. It was a milk run,” the assassin assured.

  “That is good. Were your superiors sufficiently satisfied to agree to the rest of my contract? Also, I hope the milk was good?”

  “Milk? Oh. That was just a figure of speech. Milk run, I mean,” she said. “Yes, we have a go for the mission. Here. This has everything we found.” She passed a cube across the table and Michelle took it.

  “Let’s go ahead and order. It would look strange if we just sat here for too long.” Cally looked down the menu, running her finger over the options, “I know you can’t, but it’s a shame you can’t eat meat. They have the best she-crab stew in Charleston.”

  Michelle winced.

  “It’s a regional specialty. Have you really never eaten meat since we were kids?”

  “I have not. If I were to eat it after all this time, I would probably have to make an extra effort just to be able to digest it. I would prefer a salad.”

  “Can you do dairy,
then? They do a very good Caesar salad.”

  “We have dairy. It was not appropriate for the Indowy themselves, but because humans are mammals, they made allowances. Also, I think they like the cows. Though the Indowy do not eat other animals, their population density has made large, mobile species a certain rarity on their worlds. I think I will try your caesar salad, thank you.”

  “Do you mind if I just message it to them? I know you don’t get the full restaurant experience that often, but we’re more secure if the waiter just brings our food out.”

  Michelle laughed, the first real laugh Cally had heard from her. “You must be making a joke. For me, this is nearly unimaginable seclusion. One waiter or ten, I am amazed that it would make that much difference,” she said. “At home, security means being in the company of your own clan, or clans with close affiliations to your clan. Being alone like this would be like…” She paused for a long moment, nonplussed. “I do not remember. What would be so strange on Earth that nobody would think of it, and anyone doing it would be — you would think they were ill in their brain? Now being in a room alone, I understand. I sometimes work that way. Just… this.” She waved her hand around to include the space around them, from the river to the sky to the dock between their boat and the restaurant. It had never felt empty and open to Cally quite the way it did now. It was kind of peaceful.

  “When you put me on the spot like that, that’s a good question — about what would be the same level of weird here on Earth,” Cally said after a long pause. “I would say stripping naked in the middle of a state funeral, but it’s been done. I don’t know if there is anything so strange that some person somewhere hasn’t done it just to make a point.” She thought some more. “Wow. Now that you say it, all I can think of is random destruction of life or property for no good reason.”

  “I thought that was what you did?” Michelle said.

  Cally stiffened until she realized that the question was totally sincere and not at all intended to be insulting. “I always have a good reason.”

  “What do people here consider a good reason?” Michelle might have been talking to the Mad Hatter at a tea party.

  “I can’t speak for the whole planet.” She shrugged. “For me, it’s whatever Granpa and Father O’Reilly consider a good reason.”

  “Of course you listen to the O’Neal. Are you saying that you have not yet begun training in the evaluation of reasons for what you do?”

  “No, I’m saying that it’s not a good idea to have people in my profession pick and evaluate their own targets. Also, I don’t always have all the information my superiors have in determining whether someone should or shouldn’t be a target,” she said. “Oh, here’s our food. Hang on.”

  Michelle waited until the waiter had delivered the food and left before holding up the data cube her sister had provided. “Will it bother you if I look at this while we eat?” she asked.

  “No, that’s fine. It’s what we’re here for,” Cally said. “Not that I’m not glad to see you. That didn’t come out right. Anyway, our resumes for the job listings are on there, too.”

  “I am not offended.” The mentat took a buckley PDA out of her pocket and inserted the datacube.

  Cally raised her eyebrows, but didn’t comment. It must really bite the Darhels’ butts that buckley PDAs were slowly and quietly spreading out from Earth to be used instead of AIDs, when the user wanted something not to be recorded. The Darhel certainly never shipped the competing devices anywhere, and never authorized them for sale. They had made alleged consumer protection laws banning their sale off Earth. Unfortunately for the Darhel, with a human gunner team aboard almost all freighters and human colonists everywhere, the Darhel were becoming more and more aware of the difficulties of trying to suppress black market activities among humans. She knew from Stewart that the Tong was ecstatic at the advertising effects the Darhel’s attempts at suppression were providing in their target markets. Cally suppressed a smile as she glanced up at Michelle’s PDA. Obviously market penetration was good.

  They ate in silence. After feeling strange for a moment in the unnatural quiet, Cally opened up a fashion magazine on her buckley and started looking through the spring collections. She was going to have to buy some outfits from an islander seamstress real soon, anyway. Might as well do something stylish.

  “This is the information I need. I wish it showed one more part, but I do not think they will be disassembling the mock-up — just modifying it. At least, not within our time window.” The mentat gave the appearance of wearing robes even in street clothes as she looked up serenely. “This is straightforward. I will have it for you in four weeks, local.”

  “Four weeks?”

  “I assure you, I can work very quickly since it only has to appear to function.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I guess I’m used to Earthtech.”

  “This is very far beyond Earthtech. That is why I have to personally make it. Four weeks.” She pulled a bag out of her coat pocket, handing it to the Bane Sidhe assassin. “Here is the agreed payment.”

  “Great. A month, huh? Guess we won’t have trouble getting someone inside and getting set up with that much lead time. I thought you were originally planning to make it without this stuff?” Cally gestured towards the cube.

  “Once I knew I was going to get better data, I had to wait. Like any other product of advanced technology, it has to be grown whole. Specifications cannot change in the middle of the process. Upgraded parts can be retrofitted, settings changed, options added, replacement parts redesigned. The basic design for the underlying item cannot be changed while it is still in the tank.”

  “Okay, so four weeks. I may contact you for a meeting between now and then to coordinate arrangements.”

  “That will seldom be possible. I will be growing the product in the tank. I will not be able to interrupt the work casually. Suppose I contact you and we meet once a week?”

  “Okay, so four weeks and once a week. I’ll see you whenever I hear from you, then.”

  “Cally.” Michelle reached out and touched her hand. “I still have not thanked you for the clothes. Is there anything at all I can get you? Not business, but something personal?”

  Cally hesitated for a moment, strangely reluctant to ask a favor. “Uh. I hate to ask, but could you possibly get me some depilatory foam? I haven’t been able to get any since Dad’s supplies from the old emergency cache ran out.” Spoken, it sounded a bit pathetic, and she was kicking herself when Michelle smiled.

  “Of course I can. I will make it myself. It will not take even an hour.”

  “Okay. But there’s got to be something you want from Earth. The Galactics aren’t exactly big on consumer goods.”

  “Well…” Her sister hesitated for a long moment, considering. “Chocolate. You could get me chocolate. And some of those little white solidified sugar wheels. The ones with red spokes and no hole for an axle, that are flavored with peppermint oil. I think they are designed to spin counter-clockwise, but I was so young I am not sure my memory is correct.” She shrugged, but her eyes were actually glittering with what might have been excitement. “Clockwise or straight-spoked wheels would be perfectly lovely. Just whichever is available. Star-sparkle Mints or some such. I am sorry, I cannot remember the name.”

  “Okay, chocolate and peppermints. Got it.”

  “The little wheel ones,” the mentat said.

  “The little wheel ones. Got it. Next week. No problem.” Her sister grinned.

  “If you cannot get them next week, whenever you have time is most acceptable,” Michelle said. She sighed. “We have indulged in quite a long lunch. I need to go start work now. The salad was good. Thank you.” Then Michelle was gone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The family quarters for the Indowy-raised humans were a series of small, low rooms. The Michelle O’Neal family suite had walls in shades of mint and peach. The parents’ sleeping room and the living room opened directly on the corridor.
Behind those two rooms lay the nurseries. A central corridor contained the long washroom that served the family. All the rooms were very small. That, at least, was the allocation of the human living space its Indowy planners had intended. In reality, the parents had tri-sected their room by hanging curtains from tracks in the ceiling. On each side wall, and along the back wall, a set of bunk beds, closely stacked, provided a bunk for each of the six adults in the group. Hooks at the head of each bed held a change of robe and two night-robes apiece. A small, six-layer chest of drawers held underclothes and a memento or two for each parent.

  The children’s rooms had the same furnishings as the parents’ room, except that the beds were slightly shorter and wider. There were more drawers, the plan being that two children would be in each bed, at capacity. The children past their first apprenticeship would, of course, live in unmated social groupings. After some trial and error, the Indowy had learned that the humans they encountered in Fleet had been wise to suggest adolescent human social groupings be segregated by breeding biology. Their males and females exhibited social and mating behaviors that were unstable and intense when housed together in the juvenile stages prior to group assignment and bonding.

  The Michelle O’Neal family, as with most of the human families on Adenast, quietly deviated from their green mentors’ plans and used clan privacy traditions to avoid discussing it outside the family. For one thing, the O’Neal adults were three couples, not a homogeneous group. Since Derrick’s death, Michelle had slept in the room with her own two children and Bill and Mary’s oldest daughter. Their toddler, and Tom and Lisa’s three, slept in the other children’s room.

  In the parents’ room, the other two couples had four bunks, but most nights only occupied two. Tom and Lisa’s two-month-old slept in Michelle’s old bunk.