by John Ringo
“My name’s Cally O’Neal, and I’ve come to have a few words with you about your attempts to murder my sister,” she said. Again, her intonations were practiced, her body language and word choice carefully prepared.
“A human can change its name to anything, by your primitive rules. Your names are disposable, indicating nothing. As for the rest, it’s nonsense, of course, but still amusing. You, of course, intend to upset me to the point that I freeze into a melodramatic death. I assure you our weakness is exaggerated, and I will be disposing of you to the proper security personnel in this interview’s aftermath. For now, you may continue.”
“Oh, but the Institute for the Advancement of Human Welfare is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Epetar Group, which also holds the human mentat Michelle O’Neal’s contract for research on a certain device. A device, moreover, which the Tchpth,” her pronunciation was perfect, “would be unhappy to find outside their museum on Barwhon.” Head cocking to the side, just a bit. Shoulders just so. Sides of the lip curling in an expression never meant to inhabit a human face.
“How regrettable, for you, that you would make such an assertion. And how stupid of you to hush your AID before discussing this. Now I will have to turn you over to humans who will be, for whatever reasons, curious about how you came to know those things. I will, of course, know nothing of the means or ends. I will, however, receive a full report of the extracted information.” He breathed deeply, effortlessly suppressing the qualms it had cost him to make even a roundabout physical threat. The Darhel behavioral tags in her voice, her body, her face were so insidiously familiar to him that it never crossed his mind to notice how wrong it should be that they were displayed on a human. Like a human hearing its own mother-tongue, regional accent in a speaker from anywhere, the pattern felt so mundane as to coast in under the intellectual radar of what should and shouldn’t be.
“Of more amusement value to me is your choice of nom de guerre. You wish to bask in the reflected glory, alleged glory, of the O’Neal family, of course. But to claim the human mentat as your sister? What a transparent lie, even if you did find the correct name. Your features are nothing like Michelle O’Neal’s, of course. And the sister died in a nuclear explosion in the war, at the hands of her own primitive killer of a father.” His taunt took on a rich slur, an accent more inflected with the attributes of his own native tongue, even while he continued to speak English. For a Darhel, prizing as they did their psycholinguistic skills and the interspecies use of the voice for manipulation, this was a massive lapse.
“My features have changed, of course. I look very different from my childhood appearance when the Tir Dol Ron sent a team to kill me, and my grandfather, when I was eight Terran years old.” She glanced off to the side, examining the nails of an elegantly cocked hand, as if he was beneath her notice.
Pardal sat straighter in his chair, ears pricked forward.
“You are, at that, remarkably well informed, for the pathetic, lying, glory-seeker that you are.”
“As you are remarkably complacent for a Darhel facing not only a contract court, but the ignominy of triggering financial ruin for an entire group. You don’t dare detain me, you know. My merely making these allegations to a contract court would cost you your job, simply for the incompetence of permitting the scandal. I have, of course, made prior arrangements to have the allegations delivered if I do not return.”
“Preposterous exaggeration,” he drawled, but breathed more deeply, accent thickening. “You begin to bore me.”
“Expect your troubles to get worse, instead of better.” She had cribbed one of the classic Darhel finale lines from their literature, typically delivered by a clear victor in one of these verbal cat fights. She could only hope the Indowy scholar had translated it accurately enough. As was customary, she had also delivered no specific threats. The purpose of these dominance struggles was never to do something, only to undermine the losing Darhel’s personal confidence.
She turned to leave, to leave him knowing, intellectually, that he truly could not detain her and had just lost a dominance struggle of their own kind to a mere, primitive, human female.
She knew she had shaken him to the brink of rage when, knowing the interview was concluded and, inevitably, relaxing a bit from the taught wire of confrontation, he couldn’t resist a parting shot, in his own tongue. “This isn’t over!”
It had been a brief conversation. Its entire punch lay in the stylized nature of tone and body, play and counterplay, of Darhel interactions. This one moment was the goal of the entire playlet. He was now reacting to her not as he would to an impudent human, but as he would to a rival Darhel. Not completely, not consciously.
She touched the Provigil-C injector on one hip, driving the drug into her bloodstream. The buckley, prepped for her turn from the start, activated its holographic projection as she spun and leaped, spread eagled, teeth bared, ears flattened back against her head. Her yellow cat-pupilled eyes gleamed, feral. Her black hair and facial fur glinted with metallic silver. Her leap was imbued with all the skill of an avid dancer for counterfeiting the emotion of motion — even for dances alien to her own understanding.
The Darhel Pardal, aroused by the hormonal responses to an intense dominance conflict with his own kind, saw in that one single instant a rival Darhel leaping to kill him. His hindbrain overwhelmed his forebrain for that bare instant. Even as he realized that the leaping figure was a human woman and not a rival Darhel, the Tal poured into his system like floodwaters through a breached earthen dam. His rage redoubled with all the fury of a doomed thing for its killer.
The ravening beast, unleashed at last, exploded upward from the trappings of civilization, bounding off the desktop and crossing the room in an instant, claws out and teeth bared to rip out the throat of the Other. If the assassin had still been there to see it, he would have looked more like some hell-begotten cross between a fox and a werewolf than an Elf. The gray cloak billowed behind him and he paused for a tiny fraction of a second to rip it off, shredding it in the process.
That fraction of a second, combined with a similar fraction for the leap, was all the time it took Cally O’Neal to cross the office in the other direction, standing against the windows. It is an odd fact that for a skilled tumbler, across a short distance, a human being can roll faster than she can run. Running takes precious bits of time here and there starting and stopping, acting and reacting. A tumbling pass is smooth, continuous — if the athlete has the balance for it.
As a life-long dancer and martial artist, Cally’s sense of motion was exquisite. If her balance had been a knife, she could have shaved with it. Her muscles, most importantly her upper body muscles, had the strength and speed of the latest Crab-designed upgrade. None of it saved her from getting batted into the remains of the desk with rib-cracking power. The dress shredded under Pardal’s claws. The only reason he didn’t get her flesh as well was the super-tough Indowy-crafted body-suit beneath the dress, which gave her a tougher hide than chain mail, while having none of the extra weight and causing no impairment to mobility.
She hit the desk and kept rolling, over the other side and onto her feet, bounding aside at an angle as one hundred and fifty kilos of rabid Darhel hit the spot she’d just left. He got her again, slamming her into the two-inch-thick glass with a force that wrenched her neck and knocked her head against the glass, making a sickening thud.
“Forty seconds and counting,” the buckley announced from where it had landed on the floor about ten yards and five years ago, and the drug kicked in. For another split instant, Pardal turned with maddened eyes, locating the buckley on the floor. Barely hesitating, he obviously dismissed it as “not prey,” launching himself at her again. Used to taking a punch, head crack or not, Cally hadn’t stopped moving, and was halfway across the room again.
With the Provigil-C in her system, shaking her apart, with all the adrenaline and other combat hormones of her own, life dissolved into a sharp-edged, blurry game of Dodg
e the Darhel. Aware of everything and nothing, the instants rang off her brain like separately frozen photographic stills. All moments splintered into a constant progression of now as the buckley, now ignored completely by both, counted off the eternally slow seconds. Four… three… two… one…
Seeing a Darhel collapse on holo was one thing. Having one chasing you do it was another. One second he was leaping, the next he was hitting the floor in a lazy roll himself. He simply stopped, curled into a seated position on the floor, naked except for his own fur, and the rage melted away, along with the last vestiges of intelligence in his eyes. His expression was the closest thing to beatific she’d ever seen on a Darhel face. It was downright creepy.
“You were right,” she said, nudging him with a bare toe before looking for wherever she’d kicked her shoes off. “Now it’s over.”
There had been no risk of anyone coming into the office after Pardal lost it. They’d all heard stories and nobody, human or Indowy, wanted to be anywhere near a raging Darhel. Cally found the floor, in fact, deserted as she limped back to the bathroom to retrieve coat and purse. The coat was now strictly necessary, as she had to stuff what scattered strips of the cashmere dress as she’d been able to find in her purse. There hadn’t been much. At one point in his fit, she’d seen Pardal eating some of it, so it wasn’t hard to guess where the rest had gone. Certainly nobody would be looking for it inside his guts. Traditionally, they didn’t do forensic investigations at all, a Darhel in lintatai being beneath contempt.
She went back to the destroyed office. The last thing she did before leaving his office for good, closing the door behind her, was to use her AID to jimmy his, leaving it a few seconds of memory the poorer, and still stuck in the hush box. For a Darhel, this kind of death scene constituted the ultimate in “natural causes.”
She was still shaking uncontrollably when she walked down the last flight of stairs, out into the falling snow and biting wind, and into the back of Harrison’s cab. The endorphins and Provigil-C released their grip, and she groaned as everything from the crack on her head to the muscles in her toes started to hurt.
Chapter Twenty-One
In her persona as Mark’s girlfriend, Cally O’Neal was again in a sweater dress, and still busty. It was always either highlight her mammary assets or make her look fat with padding. Harrison had chosen to play them up as his interpretation of the “girlfriend” role, this time in a cheaper, off-the-rack, blue dress, topped with a gray wool coat. She felt conspicuous, even though he had assured her that the supportive bands of tape holding her cracked ribs in place were invisible under the clinging dress. A mix of lambs’ wool and angora, the knit was thick, soft, and fuzzy. He assured her he had chosen it to blur outlines, anticipating the need. He’d praised her luck in keeping her face intact, but winced as he layered on makeup to cover the red and rising bruises. Artful highlights and shadows concealed the swelling. He’d assured her the illusion would hold for an hour or two, even though she’d look like she’d layered on her foundation with a trowel. It couldn’t be helped, so she’d have to play to it, making the character fit the behavior. He’d helped by giving her a couple of fake blemishes, making them look as if she had tried to conceal them, and only partially succeeded — a woman sensitive about her flawed skin.
Felicity Livio was supposed to be barely adult, with education and training fitting her for entry level clerical work. She looked the part.
George, aka Mark Thomason, met her just inside the entry to the building. The wind had started to pick up, carrying big, clumpy snowflakes built of the wet air coming off the lakes. They’d be breaking up into powder soon, as the temperature dropped.
Acclimated to Charleston, despite all her travels she hated snow. It put her in an even worse mood as George put his arms around her and tried to kiss her. She ached, she was cold, and he was male. None of this made her like him right now. “Get your fucking hands off me unless you want to lose them,” she hissed, turning her head towards the door and away from observers.
“What the hell’s the matter with you? We’re supposed to be lovers!” he whispered in her ear.
She jerked away, unmercifully squashing the need to scream as his hand pulled against a rib. “Then we’re having a fight. I mean it, keep your mitts off me,” she muttered, plastering on a fake smile and walking briskly towards the elevator, heels clacking on the marble floor.
He trailed in her wake until she stopped in front of the guard. “Job interview. I’m walking her up,” he said.
The guard scanned his ID, issued her a temporary, and she stalked to the elevator, scanning the red temp badge and hitting the call button. She could tell he’d love to bitch her out about her behavior, but couldn’t. So she was taking her mad at Stewart out on him. So what? He was a man. Men were on her shit list right now. Rational thought didn’t enter into it. And she didn’t care, dammit. Goddamn insensitive son of a — A bell tinged and the elevator opened.
George’s lips tightened as she relaxed her stiff posture, smiling at him as if absolutely nothing was wrong. He schooled his own features into something more appropriate before the elevator stopped and binged again.
“Where to?” she asked.
“This way.” He didn’t quite sound the part, but what could you expect?
She smiled and greeted Ms. Felini on automatic. Introductions were introductions. As the door closed behind them and the other woman offered her a seat, she looked at Cally curiously.
“I hope everything’s all right. You and Mark looked a bit… stiff,” she said.
“Oh, it’s the moving in together thing. Small small, really. He has this absolutely awful lamp,” she improvised.
“Ah. One must go through these little adjustments, mustn’t one?” the interviewer said. “So if I hire you, we’re not going to have any discord in the office, are we?”
“Oh, no.” Cally laughed. “I’ll let him off the hook the second he gets reasonable and ditches the lamp from hell. He’s not that attached to it, he’s just being stubborn. We’ve been through this kind of thing before.”
Prida laughed with her, and the now-relaxed job applicant eased back in the comfortable leather chair, crossing her legs.
“Can I get you some coffee? You must be cold,” the other woman said.
“Oh, oops. Yes, please.” The assassin flushed and took off her coat, hanging it on the brass tree behind the door. It doesn’t hurt, I feel fine. I feel abso-fucking-lutely fine. Ow, dammit.
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 should ensure 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. Not to mention the dilemma of where to put one. Silencing live people for any significant span of time also had its problems. 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 sa
me 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 Sub-Urb 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.