by John Ringo
The O’Neals had a name for Sandy’s sunny optimism. They called it “condition white,” and the same things that made her so hard to peg as a juv made it impossible to train out. Mrs. Swaim had over a decade of unarmed combat training and was hell on wheels in the dojo. She never saw the man who stepped out from behind the rose of Sharon vine and grabbed her, thrusting a stiletto up through the base of her brain.
Robert Swaim batted the tennis ball off the garage door again. They still called it a garage, even though the door had been made so it wouldn’t go up when they made the space into a guest room. Right now, three guests were sharing it. Mrs. Catt, and her two kids Karen and David. Karen was okay, for a girl. David was a little kid who had thankfully attached himself to his sister, Rose, and not him. David, in his turn, was incessantly followed by the youngest of the Swaims, his two-year-old sister, Sheely. Robert tried not to get too attached to guests, because they never stayed long, but Mom had told him these might be around for awhile.
Usually it didn’t matter that they didn’t have a garage, but the Catts had a car. Nobody much liked leaving it outside, but there wasn’t any choice, really. To Robert, it was just an annoyance he had to work around in finding room to work his skills.
Mrs. Catt was weird. She seemed to have two driving passions: soap operas and tarot cards. Mom said to just be thankful she was here, because it meant he didn’t have to watch Sheely and Rose every day after school, and they could save the money from Sheely’s day babysitter.
He was fine with the saving money and not having to watch his little sisters, but Robert honestly wasn’t sure he could take another evening of hearing that he or some other family member was in grave danger. That seemed to be Mrs. Catt’s specialty in her tarot readings. She said it wasn’t, but she was a nervous woman who jumped at small noises, and he figured it was probably because she did all that scaring herself.
Mom had finally gotten tired of the cards and asked her to quit, but Rose was all about it, and he could hear her inside asking for a reading. He thought about telling her Mom said no, but then he realized he didn’t have to be in charge and could keep practicing with his new racquet, so he bounced the ball and hit it again. He didn’t have to hurry, even if he decided to say something, because Mrs. Catt told Rose to wait until after her show. His watch said twenty after four, and most of those things ran an hour long — if she didn’t go right into another one. Mom should be home by then, anyway. He hit the ball again, trying to keep his wrist straight.
A squall of rain came in just before five, so he went inside looking for a snack. There was Rose, shuffling the big cards of Mrs. Catt’s deck. Mom was late, and he thought again about saying something, but she had cut them and stacked them and, really, if she gave herself a nightmare, maybe she’d learn.
“Is your mother often late getting in, Robert?” the woman asked him.
“Not very often. Maybe she got something from the store,” he said.
She looked out the window at the rain doubtfully. If Mom was in it, she was getting drenched. “I’d think she would have come and gotten the car,” the other mom said. “Well, if she’s not home in half an hour I’ll go ahead and start your dinner.”
She was kind of fat, so she huffed as she eased herself down on the floor to sit cross-legged in front of the deck.
He couldn’t see the attraction of the game, himself, but he did prop himself on the arm of the couch with his baloney sandwich and watch as the woman went into her now-familiar spiel, and she was in fine form, almost as good as a ghost story. Only this time, when she hit about the fourth card she did something he’d never seen her do before. She stopped talking and dealt out the other cards, bing bing bing. Then she turned dead white and looked up at Rose.
“Car. Get in the car, now,” she said. When Rose just looked at her funny, she smiled a strange, strained smile. “We’re going to Disney World! My treat! We’ll pick up your mom on the way, stay overnight, get new stuff, everything! Won’t that be fun?” She was trying to sound cheerful, but she really sounded shrill.
She was talking about picking up Mom, so he figured Mom would straighten her out. But just in case, since she was getting real weird, he grabbed Mom’s buckley quietly. She’d forgotten to take it to work, and he wasn’t supposed to use it, but this was different. He tapped it on. “Marlee, record everything,” he said. “Um… send it to Mom’s voicemail. Real time.”
It would be expensive as hell, and she’d probably ground him for a month, but Dad had told him to look out for the family and it just seemed like a good thing to do. Especially with Mrs. Catt grabbing him by the collar, shoving Sheely into his arms — she was too startled to cry — and practically dragging them all out the door.
The Catts’ blue sedan was beat up to hell and gone. It had lots of rust, and foam stuck out in a couple of places where the seats were ripped. It smelled like someone had once left the windows open to the rain. But it ran good, and it started right up almost as soon as she put the key in. He tried to complain that they didn’t have a car seat for Sheely, but the woman wasn’t listening to him. She was kind of scary. He tried not to get attention as he set the buckley down on the seat beside him.
Rose and David were in front. In the back it was just him with Sheely and Karen. Karen was cool for a girl. She saw him put it on the seat, but shrugged instead of saying anything. She didn’t look too sure about how her mom was acting, either. He kept Sheely distracted from what otherwise might have become a tempting toy by making faces at her until she laughed. He kept her busy as they went out from town and onto park land, which had grown up wild but you had to go through to get to the parking lots.
The rain made the road slippery so when the car passing them hit them in the side, it knocked them into the canal. The water wasn’t deep, but there was really no way to get clear of the car before the men with guns came for them.
“So about all we’ve got now is running the DNA, pulling the winner in and squeezing him like a zit.”
“Picturesque, Cally, but yeah, that’s basically it.”
They were so used to food made of varying combinations of corn, soy, eggs, and cheese now that they didn’t even bitch, and it was a strangely silent crew who sat and picked at their morning meal. What was there to say? Each of them wanted to explode outward in violent rage at the bastards who murdered the Maise family, but the rage was focused in a circle of frustration. Did they have somebody inside who’d burned the safe house?
They knew the coals of rage would grow to white fury as consciousness returned and they absorbed more detail throughout the day. Right now, however, it was oh-five-thirty-something and they were, despite not having been able to actually sleep, groggy with morning.
For now, they sat and glumly shoveled in their morning fuel, an action that they interrupted, almost relief, to dive as one for their buzzing, beeping, or vibrating buckleys.
“O’Reilly’s office?” Harrison asked unnecessarily as all four of them were moving in the same direction like fingers on the same hand.
Cally’s anger was a palpable thing, like half-molten rock that had taken up residence inside her gut and was fast building its twin in her brain. She was allowing the feelings free rein now on the theory that getting them out of her system would help when it came time to lock everything down and take care of business. She knew that was just an excuse. Things like this didn’t get out of your system. To complicate things, she was, and knew she was, having a mother bear response to the murder of the children until she looked out on the world through a red mist, needing someone to kill. Letting the emotion run away inside her like this was not good, but for once it just wasn’t responding to her attempts to exercise training and lock it down anyway.
She looked at the cold professionalism on the face of the rest of the team and felt ashamed for her weakness, not knowing that every one of them was looking at her the same way. While she was unable to imprison her feelings in icy compartmentalization, her face had responded to
muscle memory and training, forming a mask of stone except for a tiny, almost imperceptible tic at the corner of her lower lip.
Aware of everything, deviating for nothing, the team stalked upward through the Sub-Urb-style base, a wolf pack, albeit a pack with an acute sense of the emotional hole where their missing member should be.
The sense of oneness disintegrated abruptly as they entered their superior’s office and beheld the spectacle that was unfolding live on HV, with the gruesome gleefulness only those in the news business can display when provided with especially lurid fodder.
Cally sank into one of the chairs around the tank, others of which were already occupied by the priest and the Indowy Aelool. Without speech or thought, the two Schmidts split right and left, taking station on opposite sides of the room, while Tommy moved to stand behind Nathan’s left elbow.
“One of ours?” she asked, ashen.
“Niece,” O’Reilly said shortly.
The reporter stood outside the police tape, saying they couldn’t show some of the images they had taken on HV, and asking parents to send the children out of the room for the ones they were willing to show — after coming back from a commercial break, of course. Cally reflected on how much she did not give a shit about stupid breath mints at the moment.
“They got the mother, too.” The priest was wooden, the Indowy inscrutable.
“Let me guess. One of ours was close to his sister,” Tommy said.
“One of the DAGgers. His twin.”
“The evidence from the scene would inevitably ‘disappear,’ ” O’Reilly said. “So we’ll get there first. I’m sending you a list of possibles to fill out your team. Pick a cyber and get ready to do a collection run for tonight. You’ll take the equipment to preserve it, you’ll take as long as it takes to shake the bastards — who are no doubt drawing us exactly for the purpose of locating more of our network and this base. I think if they had us here, we’d already have gotten a visit. Get as open as you have to without leaving anyone behind. Concealment would be nice, but is a low second to recovery and egress.”
He looked at the tank in disgust and loathing. “Turn it off,” he said. “Don’t watch this excrement. Go sort through your options, my recommendations are there. Get prepped for a busy night.”
“She’s cherry as hell,” George grumped as they viewed the holo of the eleventh candidate and looked over her profile.
“Yeah, but she’s cute. Her other quals are good, but don’t underestimate cute. You can dress it down as needed, but making someone inherently prettier is hard. It’s an unfair world. Our job is to make it even more unfair — for the enemy.” Cally pushed her hair back behind her ear. It didn’t cooperate. The bitch of shorter hair was that it fell into her face easier than when it was long, and damned if she was going to go around in barrettes like a prepubescent schoolgirl.
“She looks… sweet,” Tommy said dubiously.
“She’s not. Look at her aggressor record,” she said. Cally had been to the same school the candidate had just graduated from. It didn’t make her biased, as far as she could see, but it did mean she had a much clearer idea of how to translate the candidate’s training record and evaluations into a big picture of actual performance. In this case, one of the final tests of a senior’s temperament came when they were assigned to act as enemies and opponents in the training exercises of junior high and underclassman girls. A student who couldn’t be thoroughly vicious to trainees, in the right way, and without breaking them, would have bad marks for aggressive-mindedness, and might even have been rolled back a year to see if maturation could train it out. Usually not.
This girl, on the other hand, not only had top marks in that area, but the graders had included notes on some particularly evil twists the young lady had devised for her hapless victims. All constituting good training, of course. Cally liked her instantly.
“Whew. Nasty. And a decent athlete, for a non-upgrade.” George nodded.
“She’s in,” Tommy echoed.
“Works for me,” Harrison said. “She’s mostly cyber support, in case anyone had forgotten. She’s solid. I’ll take creativity over rote grades any day.”
“Amy Sands it is. For now.” Cally nodded, adding her blessing to the girl who would sub into Papa’s slot. The girl’s golden brown hair and rosy cheeks just radiated midwestern wholesomeness. The kind of girl next door that nobody actually got to live next door to. They should be so lucky.
“Are you through sealing her fate?” her buckley asked.
“What’s up?”
“There’s a courier from Edisto. Non-urgent, he said. Wouldn’t hear of interrupting you, he said. It’s not my fault that everything’s going to fall apart from the late message. I told him I’d put him through, but no…”
“Shut up, buckley. Where the hell is he?”
“In the cafeteria when he called me, having a beer with a few of the guys from DAG,” the machine told her. “I’m sure by now he’s told them half the secrets of the whole island, and the latest gossip, too. But no, it wasn’t urgent, he said.”
“A few beers with… wait, is this the same courier?” Tommy asked sharply. He didn’t wait for an answer, but began striding down the hall at a fast walk.
Given his height, Cally had to jog to keep up. “Is who the same courier?” she asked.
“I don’t understand the question. Same courier as what?” the buckley asked.
“Oh, you wouldn’t know.” The big man shook his head. “The guy who brought the message about the Maises was… loquacious. Even without alcohol. I don’t know what he’s carrying, but beer, other guys, and mister diarrhea mouth doesn’t sound like a good combination.”
“Why wasn’t he benched?” Cally asked sharply.
“Hadn’t gotten to it yet. Mosovich and Mueller knew, so they would have taken care of it, it’s just…” He trailed off, shrugging.
“He’s carrying a girl,” buckley volunteered helpfully. “Well, not carrying her carrying her. He brought one with him.”
It had that worried tone it got when it couldn’t think of any specific disaster to predict. Cally resisted the bizarre urge to reassure it.
The gentleman in question looked up expectantly as they entered the cafeteria, which was otherwise mostly empty, she noticed gratefully.
The four other men pulled up around the table were unfamiliar to Cally, but her practiced eye would have made them for military, even if she hadn’t otherwise known. If there had been any doubt, it would have been cleared up when the eyes of one of them widened and he set down the beer, sitting sharply to attention, followed a split second later by the others. The courier remained in a slump with a grin of “I’ve got a secret” on his fat face.
“Ma’am, about the Maises—”
“I take it you’ve heard the news,” Cally said. She walked over to the courier and yanked him up by his collar until he was dangling off the ground. One hand slipped in to his front pocket and pulled out two data cubes. She tossed them to Tommy, then looked the dangling courier in the eye. “Do you know who I am? Given that you’ve apparently blabbed and gossiped your way across half the country?”
“Gurk?”
“I’ll take that for a yes,” she hissed, holding up a hand like a knife. “Right now I’m looking for someone to kill. I’d prefer five people who killed one of our dependent families. Barring that, anyone will do. What I don’t need is couriers going around delivering unsolicited information and making my life harder than it already was. What I’m contemplating, somewhat seriously, is just driving this up into your chest and ripping out your still beating heart. Do I make my point?”
“Gurk?”
“Go to your quarters, do not communicate, do not leave, I’ll deal with you later.” Cally dropped him unceremoniously and watched him scurry out of the cafeteria. “Do you know who I am?” she asked without turning to look at the foursome.
“Yes, ma’am,” one of them answered.
“If your friends are
wallowing in ignorance, they are now allowed access to that compartment,” Cally said coldly. “To answer your interrupted question, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are riding. The Darhel have apparently declared open warfare on Clan O’Neal. Which gives us our hunting license.”
“Oo-rah,” one of the DAG murmured.
“You’ll be given target lists as soon as they’re prepared,” Cally said, still looking towards the entrance. “But you’ll have to pass on the really juicy ones.”
“Why?” one of the soldiers challenged.
“Because they are mine,” Cally purred.
Chapter Thirteen
Pinky allowed himself to be introduced to the new lady, Lish. She looked like it was her first time here at Bane Sidhe base — he’d learned this whole place was a headquarters for a whole underground resistance to Darhel oppression. Underground both ways, like a Sub-Urb and like spies. He also figured he’d better get to like it here. Since they had to tell him, they might not let him leave until he was an adult. He hadn’t bothered to ask. If they said anything except that he had to stay, was he gonna believe them? Eyes open, mouth closed. First rule of spying. Besides, the blonde lady had said she was going to kill the people that killed Mom and Joey. And Jenny, he reminded himself.
Cally. That was her name. When she promised, her eyes had looked like some of the other guys in his dad’s unit sometimes did. He believed her.
Lish, the new lady, was nothing like Cally. For one thing, he’d bet she was really as young as she looked. For another, she didn’t seem very smart. The big thing, though, was that if Cally ever looked as uncomfortable as Lish looked right now, Pinky would bet a dollar she’d be faking it.
It seemed like it was just Mrs. Mueller’s day to get stuck with new people. He shrugged it away and ran off to play with Davey and Pat.
“All set,” Amy Sands was clearly thrilled with her first professional assignment, as well she might be. There was no more prestigious operational team than the one that held both senior O’Neals, three if you counted Tommy Sunday, and not just because they were damned good. It was the other way around. The other Bane Sidhe respected the O’Neals so much because so many of them were so good.