by John Ringo
* * *
Sunday, May 12
Mark lay in bed next to her, whoever she was, and stared at the hotel room ceiling. Pamela had seemed so nice and funny and . . . fresh when he'd met her at Old Tommy's last night. But that girl didn't exist, did she? He glared resentfully at the tangled mop snoring on his arm. God, it's almost like she killed her. If she ever was Pamela, 22, from Tidewater Tan and Nails, she sure isn't now. Hasn't been for decades at least. Damn juv. God, what am I going to say . . . I just want her out. So, wake her up and kick her out now, or wait until morning and tell her exactly what I think of her and her kind. . . .
When she stirred in the morning and snuggled against his side, fondling him with one of those too-skilled hands, he had to repress a shudder as he smiled and pushed her hair back from her face. Amazing that you can't tell by looking. No marks, nothing,
"I bet you could do some really nice things to me with your mouth, you know, down there," he said.
"Mmm. Sure could." She smiled sleepily and eased her way down his chest.
He twined his hands in her hair and tried to pretend, just for a few moments more, that there really was a "Pamela." Afterwards, he took a deep breath and pushed her off him, standing up and grabbing his pants off the chair next to the bed. He might be young, but he was old enough not to say to any woman what he had to say to her without at least a little protection.
"So, how old are you, really?" he asked coldly.
She pulled the sheet up to wipe her lip as she appraised him. "How old do you want me to be?"
"Remember I told you last night about my grandmother, just died of cancer." He had turned and was facing out the window, his voice conversational. "The Galactics could have saved her, but they wouldn't."
"I know." Her face softened with sympathy. "That must be terrible."
"Yeah, well, at least she died with her soul. You ever met a juv?" Here it comes, let her have it. "The Galactics can save your body all day long, but you sign your soul away for it, don't you, Juv? Oh, I'm sorry, Pamela."
"You didn't seem to have any complaints last night." Her eyes were icy, her tone flat.
"Remember my bike, that we rode here from the pub?" He smiled stiffly. "Brand-new Honda-Davidson 2047. I could have gotten a 2046, fully refurbed, for about half the price. I just don't much like refurbs. You juvs sell your soul away off-planet, and then, every once in awhile, when you notice something's missing you come back slumming and try to suck the soul out of some poor schmuck who's willing to be your toy for awhile. You suck real well, Pamela, but I just don't like refurbs. Please be gone when I get out of the shower, but don't hurry, I'm sure I'll be scrubbing for awhile."
"By the way," she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood, letting her cold, dead eyes slide up over his body, very slowly, "your 'soul' needs practice."
"Yours has had too much." He tossed the last word over his shoulder as he closed the bathroom door, "what's left of it."
* * *
At her apartment, Cally switched her Pamela clothes for Justine's shabby-chic clothes and changed Pamela's tan and touch of dark roots for Justine's pallor and low-lights, and the pink polish for none, took the 9:30 bus down to Market Street, and entered a small and otherwise empty café. She ordered toast and coffee from a seat at the counter. The waiter, a kid in his late teens, set a cup of coffee with three sugar cubes in front of her, along with her toast. Two of the cubes were slightly whiter than the third. While the waiter was occupied at the cash register, she palmed those two and dropped the third in her coffee. She spread a thin layer of the orange marmalade Justine preferred onto her toast. As she was drinking her coffee, the waiter came back by and asked her if he could get her anything.
She shook her head slightly.
"You're in awfully early this morning," he said.
"He wasn't a morning person." She shrugged. Just a pathetic little puppy, and all he knew to be afraid of was that I might kick him in the balls, of all things. He was right. I am too old for him.
He suppressed a grin as he walked over to the small sink and resumed doing the dishes from the small Sunday morning rush.
* * *
Back at home, Cally rinsed the thin outer layer of sugar off of each cube, dried them off, and inserted the first one into the cube reader slot of her PDA. A hologram lit up above it with an image, surprisingly, of Father O'Reilly.
"Miss O'Neal, you are seeing me instead of your usual mission profiler because this mission is a bit special. We have reason to believe that the Bane Sidhe have been penetrated at a very high level. As a result, all knowledge of this mission on the headquarters end has been confined to three people, including myself. Your mission is to find and plug the leak by any means that you in your personal judgment deem necessary. You will use your usual backup team for this mission. Because of the highly sensitive nature of this mission the briefings of your fellow team members will be limited to those details necessary to insert you into your cover position. You are not authorized to expand on that briefing material until the on-base briefing, which will happen no earlier than the Thursday before insertion is made, and will require any team members briefed in to remain in secure circumstances until insertion. Your team members' insertions to back you up are significantly less complicated than your own. You will review them and make any setup changes you deem necessary in the two weeks between today and your insertion date. Any time not necessary to your preparations you are authorized and instructed to charge as some of your extensive backlog of vacation time. Cally, if you don't take at least a week of that as vacation I will personally guarantee that you will be benched for at least a month. You are an excellent agent, one of our best, but even the best need some down time. We would prefer that you take it voluntarily, of course."
The hologram flickered and was replaced by a revolving still hologram of an officer whose collar stars belied his apparent age of thirty. "The officer you see now is one General Bernhard Beed, of the Fleet Strike Security Directorate. Ostensibly, Beed's office handles the Third MP Brigade and criminal investigations functions of Titan Base. With two of his battalions forward deployed, you'll notice he's potentially got time for extra duties. We have information that indicates our leak may be using a non-Bane Sidhe member of one of the tongs on Titan Base as a cutout. We believe that in reality Beed has been detailed to head developing counterintelligence and operations against our organization. We therefore believe that Beed's office is the best place to begin looking for the identity of our leak." The display flickered and now the still was of a young woman of roughly Cally's own height and build, in Fleet Strike gray silks. Well, my build if you ignore that she's a pudgette. The slab is going to have to do one hell of a boob job. But her thighs . . . can't tell if that's muscle or fat in what she's wearing. Maybe muscle. Her waist and stomach look okay, thank God. My eyes are fine, but the hair—it'll be the first time I've had to go lighter than my natural color in a long time.
"Your cover, Captain Sinda Makepeace, is slated to transfer from the office of Fleet Strike Bureau of Personnel in Chicago to Titan Base as General Beed's new administrative assistant. We have been able to verify that no one assigned to Beed's office has ever met Miss Makepeace face to face." The hologram flickered and was replaced with a dark-haired young officer who was probably shaving every day now. "This is the general's aide, Lieutenant Joshua Pryce. On Sunday, May 26, Miss Makepeace is scheduled to take the 08:15 shuttle from Chicago to Titan Base. You will have approximately one hour between when Miss Makepeace passes through port security and the shuttle begins boarding to make the switch. You will report in person for appropriate physical adjustments no less than forty-eight hours before the switch to allow time for your system to stabilize. Cally, Titan Base is an extremely hazardous area of operations. I have to warn you that if you or any member of your team are caught, chances of our being able to mount a successful extraction are very poor. We need this information, Cally. Get it, and get out. All files on this cube will be automatically
erased in five seconds."
She waited until the frozen hologram disappeared and pulled the cube and dropped it into a glass of vinegar, where it fizzed merrily as it dissolved. She put the second cube into the reader and was surprised when a hologram of Shari O'Neal popped up in the air in front of her. "Hi, sweetie. I know I'm not supposed to raid the supply of these for personal things, but these days it seems like the only way to be sure I reach you. I know you're off work right now, so Wendy and I have planned a little beach picnic and we aren't taking no for an answer. Not the walled section of Folly, but that nice little strip just north of it. I checked, there hasn't been a feral there for two months, so we can take turns on sensor watch. You don't need to bring a thing but your swimsuit and yourself. Tomorrow. Eleven thirty. Call it a girl's day out. Five seconds and all that, bye."
A face appeared on the screen of her PDA, and a tight, somewhat morose voice issued forth, "That was a security breach. Guess we'll have to move apartments now so the minions of the Darhel won't find us and kill us in our sleep. Would you like me to run a search of available rental real estate? I can list the results in increasing order of risk, if you like," it offered helpfully.
"No thanks, buckley. I think I'll just put up with the risk of staying here." She never could tell if the AI emulation of the buckley was good enough to know when she was being tongue in cheek. Personality Solutions, Inc., had never been forthcoming about how it had initially developed the base personality used for AI emulation in modern PDA's. Most people found the standard personality emulation somewhat pessimistic for their tastes, and purchased an aftermarket buckley with a personality overlay more compatible with their own preferences. Cally didn't. She routinely used her PDA for high performance applications, and the sad truth was that buckleys overlaid with other personalities had a distressing tendency to crash catastrophically, requiring low-level system reformats. The more different the personality overlay from the original buckley, and the higher the AI emulation was set, the sooner it crashed. Of course, one of the main differences of the buckley from true AI was that even just running the base personality, if you set the emulation too high you were inviting a crash. A buckley on a high setting could just envision way too many potential catastrophes.
After thirty years, she was pretty adept at wheedling, cajoling, and threatening the base buckley personality into acceptable performance. She tapped a few screen buttons and checked her settings. Sure enough, she'd left the AI turned up too high. She dialed it down a couple of notches and ignored the swearing and references to lobotomies. It really handled better day to day if you didn't run the emulation above level five.
Once, ten years ago, it had somehow figured out how to manipulate its own emulation level. The poor thing hadn't lasted two days.
She dropped the second cube into the glass and ignored it as it began fizzing into oblivion. As Justine, she had a gym membership, paid several months in advance, at an old prewar high school. The gym had survived the war with an intact roof and had initially been snapped up by the local defense forces for their own use, but had been let go to Deerfield Spa and Fitness once the Citadel had reopened as a Fleet Strike academy and the corps of cadets had taken over much of the work of manning the Wall.
Justine liked it for the one curtained section entirely given over to jazzercise and its sixteen hour, seven days a week drop-in schedule for members. She shoved some basic black workout togs and a pair of jazz shoes into a gym bag and turned out the lights on her way out the door.
Three hours and what must have been a gallon of sweat later, she felt she just might be fit for human company again. Well, okay, definitely after a shower. As she walked back to the locker room, a guy with a towel over his shoulder and apparently headed toward the weight room bumped into her, apologized curtly, and kept going. She blinked twice but walked on without looking down at the cube he had planted in her hand.
In the locker room, she looked at the small slip of paper around the cube and sighed, Okay, legitimate codeword. There had better be a good reason for this extra message because it is lousy tradecraft. What do they think I am, a walking chatboard? If it's not a genuine emergency I will have someone's ass.
She took a much quicker shower than she wanted and skipped her plans for an al fresco lunch down at the Battery. There was an open air vendor there who made what she would swear were the best crab cakes in town. And Justine liked to feed the seagulls. She frowned at the bag of cheese curls in the passenger seat and drove home.
At least she could, and did, run a hot bath to soak in while she viewed the thing. To her surprise, the hologram that popped up was Robertson, a computer geek who had several times given her team additional specialized backup on more technical missions.
"Cally, first, I'm sorry for taking the risk of contacting you like this. Second, this is not strictly a Bane Sidhe authorized communication." He ran a hand through frizzy brown hair and frowned. "If I could, I'd deal with it myself, but it's not my line. I know you took down several of the guys who ordered and did the strike on Team Conyers." Cally sat up in the tub and her face was etched in cold lines as the hologram continued. "I was only in on one of those runs, but I remember you felt . . . unusually strongly about them. I know they were sent to save your life as a kid. There's no easy way to say this, Cally. The bastards lied." The hologram flickered to show a U.S. Army light colonel with a receding reddish-brown hairline, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a weak chin. Her stomach clenched in remembered hatred. The cube now had her undivided attention.
"I'm sure you remember Colonel Petane, who sold the team's safe house out to the Darhel. You were told, we were told, that team Hector had terminated Petane. Cally, he's still alive. Somebody in that batch of pragmatists," he made the word an epithet, "upstairs decided that the good colonel would be a good source of information and traded him his life to turn him. Which I would reluctantly be okay with if he was the only source of some vital stuff, but this little pissant only ever has access to give secondary or tertiary confirmation of things we already know. He's a living example of the Peter Principle, and he's been passed over for promotion twice. The pragmatists, it seems, don't like to admit their errors."
"They covered it up pretty well. Got him transferred to the Army Fleet Strike liaison office in Chicago and have carefully assigned any missions likely to go near that office to team Hector. If you've ever wondered why your job rarely takes your team to Chicago, that's why. Mine didn't, either, until I got assigned to back up Hector on a couple of jobs over the winter. I guess the powers that be figured I didn't have a personal stake and was safe. They needed an in-person meet with Petane, and I was there to watch the countermeasures and make sure we didn't get burned. I know I've sometimes had to do some things that made it hard to sleep nights, but nothing like this. Loyalty has to go down the chain as well as up. I . . . well, we've worked together and I knew you'd want to know. What you do about it's your call. This message will be gone in five seconds."
Of course he couldn't do it the normal way. The hologram of the traitor blew up in a welter of gore that faded into a really spectacular sunset. She pulled the cube out and walked to the kitchen to destroy it, heedless of the water dripping into her carpet.
"Well, they wanted me to go on vacation. Okay. So I'll go on vacation." Her mouth was a grim line as she thawed a salad in the nuker and rinsed the crisper gel off the lettuce into the sink, then dumped a packet of crab chunks on top and covered it in horseradish sauce. It was a poor substitute for Herman's crab cakes, but she hardly tasted it anyway.
After doing her hair and grabbing a black off-the-shoulder cotton shirt and faded jean shorts, she pulled up a list of acts on the web, twisting the bangles on her left wrist absently. Justine preferred ultra-modern Cleveland-crash style music. A group called Anger Management was playing at The Riverside Dive. That sounds like something I could use right about now. I hope their pub grub isn't too obnoxious.
* * *
Charleston, Monday, M
ay 13
Cally came home in the wee hours of the morning, alone. Music tonight, yes. Company, no. If I got another anti-juv bigot pup like last night, I just might forget it's not my job to kill them. The cleanup crew would not be pleased, and the paperwork's a bitch. She grinned and kicked off her heels, swinging them by the straps as she hummed her way to her room.
Makeup off, check. Fresh washcloth, check. ID's put away, check. She stripped off Justine's clothes and tossed them in the basket, frowning. "Laundry tomorrow morning."
She dialed up some Creed onto the vidscreen's audio for the night, turned on countermeasures, set the alarm for eight, and snuggled into her pillow.
Bhutan. A banker who got on too well with nonhuman bankers. He had a taste for street whores, but didn't treat them well. One of them had been happy to retire in the South Pacific after his heart attack. The nannite poison had been untraceable even with Galactic equipment. In the closet, watching. Checking the body and injecting the now hysterical whore with a merciful tranquilizer before getting her onto her shuttle. Death was so different up close.
Rabun Gap, she puts the front sight on the assassin and squeezes, gently, and the red splash and the death smells. Efficient men in white, cleaning, and then the Posties are coming and the men in black are so silent, and so efficient at killing. Rosary calluses on his hand. And in school the nuns won't tell her anything and then there's Father O'Reilly. Team Conyers is gone. Gone, all gone Father? Our Father, who art . . .
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. How long? Nineteen years, two months, three days. Father, it's a long list. There was a prostitute specializing in industrial nano-researchers. Two of them died after she made her report. I had to . . . Father? Father? In a rage she smashes the screen and glares at the empty seat and there is no door, and no door she came in through. There had to have been a door, wasn't there? And no ceiling, just the walls going up and up.