Cally's War

by John Ringo

  "Okay, yeah, that sounds s-stupid coming from me, but . . . you're nice, Captain, and I just hope you're . . . careful," he said.

  "Pryce, I'm okay. And I'm not looking for favors. Look, working late sometimes isn't that bad, and with, you know . . . Well, mixed marriages of juv and nonjuv are notorious in the service, aren't they? Gosh, just look at this mountain of work. But it's all right. The general, bless his heart, is happy today, and all this," she waved her hand at the paper and filing cabinets, "is much easier when he's happy, isn't it, Lieutenant?"

  "Yes, ma'am, Captain." He picked up the file he'd come in for, and paused on his way out the door. "Probably the best attitude you could take, ma'am."

  "Pryce?" she ventured.

  "It's okay, Makepeace. Really." His eyes were softer, and she had to be content with that.

  * * *

  It was six in the evening, and, at the moment, while collating presentation packets, she was currently considering the entertaining possibility of watching Bernhard Beed nibbled to death by giant carnivorous ants. Giant carnivorous poisonous ants. While staked out on ice. No, ice numbed pain too much. Hot sand? Nails. Nails was good. The insensitive, possessive, obnoxious bastard. He had actually let her sit around doing make-work most of the afternoon, only to call her in at twenty minutes till five and load the copying for this stupid presentation package that mysteriously required very elaborate collating and had to be ready for his review by seven the next morning. Just because he had to go to his wife's birthday party and couldn't make time to get a little tonight, the bastard was obviously making sure she was entirely otherwise occupied.

  Acid. Concentrated hydrochloric acid on a slow burn, from the toes up. Son of a bitch. She hadn't realized she had spoken out loud until she heard the familiar voice behind her.

  "Now, it can't be that bad," he said.

  "Aren't you supposed to be passing canapés?" She didn't turn around. She really wasn't in the mood to be cheered up.

  "Well, yeah, but the general sent me over here with three pages to be included in between the pie chart and the bar graph, and he wants me to report back."

  "Obnoxious possessive sonofabitch is checking up, is he? It's not enough that I fuck him, the bastard has to have control over my private time, too. Ooohhh!"

  "Gee, Makepeace, I don't think you should bottle your feelings up like this," he said.

  She turned and froze in the act as she was about to throw the pile of papers in his face, and something about his deadpan face and single quirked eyebrow broke her up and she lost it, laughing.

  "Okay, okay. I was a little overboard." She shook her head, holding her side and catching her breath. "No, I wasn't, but that wasn't helping."

  "Hey, you're allowed to let off steam. In private. But might want to make sure you're in private, ma'am."

  "Good point, Pryce."

  "You know, ma'am, the general obviously sent me because he felt I was 'safe.' I'm not sure how I feel about that."

  "Why, bless your heart, Pryce, did you want to stop being safe?"

  "Not tonight. Gotta get back to passing canapés. J-just didn't like the assumption."

  "It's okay, Pryce," she pouted at him as he walked out the door, "I don't think you're safe."

  * * *

  The convenient thing about this evening, for Beed, was that she was kept both busy and out of the sight of his wife. The convenient thing for her, once she got the copying and collating done, was that, with Pryce gone, she was the only person in the office and she had a perfect excuse for being there. It provided complete and uninterrupted privacy to search the entirety of CID, turning up three cubes of miscellaneous data that might or might not relate to her mission. Cally was beginning to get nervous about that. Okay, sure, she hadn't expected a big neon sign flashing, "This Way To The Secret Files," but other than that tiny bit of pillow talk by the general, they were keeping this operation pretty tight. The three agents they had considered most likely to be helping run the operation all seemed to have full-time workloads of regular CID investigations.

  The only really interesting thing she'd found so far was a map in Corporal Anders' data storage of the areas on this floor assigned to the headquarters of the 3rd. Most of them were areas she had override access for. Some were not. Of course, with the tactic of hiding in plain sight always being a possibility, everything had to be searched. Tedious, but there it was. The collating provided an excuse to go into an area marked storage down the hall. She could always be claiming to look for boxes of an obscure contrivance called "binder clips."

  By the time she finished getting herself dusty looking through boxes of backup cubes, an old coffee machine, stacks of uniforms and uniform parts, three blank new-in-box PDA's, a half a box of night-sticks, fairly new-looking full and partial boxes of paper supplies, and, inexplicably, an ancient-looking half-box of blue and silver children's party hats, her stomach was growling fiercely. The backup cubes, except for the most recent, looked as though they had sat exactly where they were, undisturbed, for quite a long time. She would only waste her time searching them if absolutely nothing else panned out.

  In a way, it was getting annoying going out for every meal. After getting a fried chicken salad and a bowl of gazpacho from a café just off one of the transit car docks on the Corridor, she found an Oriental Market and bought a sackful of sealed self-heating dinners. Lemon chicken, mu shu pork, General Tsu's, hot and sour soup, sizzling rice soup, egg rolls, spring rolls, duck with plum sauce, California roll with sashimi . . . Yum.

  These packages were great. The heater was in the bottom of the package; you just pulled the tab and the chemicals mixed in the heater pack and the heat rose through the food. Well, okay, for some specialty foods, like the egg rolls, the food was spiked on metal conductive toothpicks hooked to the bottom of the package. Still, yum, yum, yum. And no having to go out for it. Things being what they were, she'd still probably be taking most meals out. But at least now she would at least sometimes have another option. Microwaveable was quicker, but the self-heaters tasted better. Okay, it was a matter of personal taste. And whether you'd rather throw packages away or scrub out the microwave once a week. Cally wasn't real big on housework.

  * * *

  Thursday, June 6

  Stewart told his AID to shut off the hologram and leaned back, rubbing his eyes. The problem with an investigation like this was that until you caught someone you really couldn't eliminate anyone. Some were just more likely than others.

  He twirled a ballpoint pen as he thought, a habit revived from his first staff position, way back before the general demise of paper as the medium of military bureaucracy. He stared unseeingly at the matted and framed poster he'd had printed out to break up the unrelieved light green of the office walls. The agents had eyed the print knowingly when he'd hung it, figuring he was opting for paper instead of a window-simulating view screen as a way of brown-nosing the boss.

  In fact, it was a reprint of a poster that had been tacked to the wall of his Aunt Rosita's apartment in his childhood gang days. With the exception of Beed, everyone else was too young to recognize pre-war Malibu Beach. And Beed was from the wrong part of the country. One of the things he appreciated about Sinda was that no matter what else went over her head, he had several times caught her looking wistfully at his poster and had gotten the ineffable impression that somehow, on some level, she actually got it. Even though there were so many things that he just couldn't talk to her about, she somehow managed to make him feel . . . understood.

  Which could maybe explain why he was so hung up over some fluff-headed ditz that he was sitting here woolgathering instead of getting his work done.

  "Diana, turn my monitor back on and give me a keyboard and track spot." Instantly, a keyboard appeared on his desktop. The red circle projected to the right of the keyboard and the two buttons below it served the function of an old-fashioned mouse. Having learned to type before the war, he could work much faster this way. Fortunately, everything b
ut true AI was well within the reach of a modern PDA, so he didn't have to worry about Beed twigging to the presence of a real AID and how very much of his daily work activity was being recorded. An aide de camp, naturally, was often at his general's elbow.

  As part of the mission, they had approved attempts to transfer in or out of the office a bit more freely than normally would have been the case. The cover was that a new CO would of course want to pick as many of his own headquarters people as possible. They had managed to replace eleven of the seventeen headquarters and CID office staffers. Out of the now thirteen staffers with a documented humanist connection, nine had both the connection and were new to their position.

  Makepeace was on the list, of course, but so was over half the office after you subtracted himself and Beed. Franks was the obvious prime suspect. Sixty plus years of living had taught Stewart that, unlike in holovids or movies, the obvious suspect very frequently was the guilty party. Still, the enemy organization had already proven you couldn't count on it to obligingly do the stupid or obvious thing.

  What it amounted to was that he had fifteen people to watch for patterns, eleven to watch closely, and nine to watch very closely.

  Franks had several Earthside communications from his quarters, one to a known humanist activist who was also his wife's brother-in-law, another to a friend of the family who had not been noted to express humanist sympathies but who, on examination, turned out to have a large number of humanist friends and associates. The calls had been encrypted with a relatively strong public cryptography system that had been released to the public by some anonymous wiseass. The authorities had been chagrinned, and Stewart supposed he ought to be, too, but he couldn't help being secretly just a bit happy about it. He chalked it up to his misspent youth. Which had actually been rather fun, come to think of it.

  Anders had called a boyfriend back home every night the first week and had tapered off since. The hometown honey appeared to be on his way out.

  Makepeace had sent e-mail replies to two long letters from her mother, but had kept the discussion to inconsequentials such as descriptions of coworkers and the restaurants and shops in the Corridor.

  Sanchez had sent an order to a freight company to ship up a private supply of cigars, bourbon, and Tabasco sauce. Otherwise, he seemed to be fairly typical in that Fleet Strike was becoming his family as age and anti-juv prejudice separated him from his previous connections.

  Keally kept contact with his wife and daughter who had not accompanied him up to the Base, but had had no apparent contact with his high school best friend, who taught Sunday school at North Topeka First Methodist, which had taken a notable stance against differential rejuvenation of one member of a married couple.

  The rest was more of the same. It was looking more and more like Franks was his man. Only problem was that so far all he had was circumstantial. There had been no overt act. Which meant he could be wrong. Which meant he had to keep digging into the private lives of fourteen innocent people, any way you sliced it.

  "Turn it all off, Diana. Time to blow this taco stand." Tacos. Hmm. It seemed, and was, a lifetime ago that he'd anglicized so painstakingly in his efforts to move beyond the privations of his childhood. At the time, he'd thought it was necessary. In retrospect, he now knew that it hadn't been. Oh, it had kept him out of the way of some people's prejudices now and again, but what had really turned him around had been the good influence and example of Gunny Pappas and Mike O'Neal. They'd given him a dream bigger than just himself and his friends, a dream a man could hitch his star to. They'd sold him on America and the dreams of democracy and liberty, sometimes without even saying a word. Good men at the tail end of a good age. Too bad the dream had died. He didn't know how it had happened. Maybe it had been when the President moved the Capitol to Chicago by decree. The excuse for not changing the Constitution had been the national emergency and the number of states that were overrun by the enemy. Maybe it had been when the candidates for office and the remains of the political parties started accepting anonymous donations in FedCreds and nobody had done anything about it. Maybe it had been when they made the residents of the Sub-Urbs sign waivers of certain rights as a condition of residency. Maybe it had been when the offices of the Toledo Blade were firebombed. No, the damage had already been done well before then. That was just the most obvious nail in the coffin of the dream. Instead of a real investigation, there had been a very thin whitewash, and the rest of the papers had fallen into line. Not that he could blame them, really. He had seen the post mortem pics of the editorial staff.

  He walked around the edge of his desk and laid a hand, gently, on the cold glass covering the paper beach. It had been a great dream while it lasted. He sighed. Combination plate from La Colima it is.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Thursday, June 13

  A week later, after having had three liaisons with the general and no more meaningful information, and having thoroughly searched everywhere near the general's headquarters that she had access to with no luck, Cally had come to the conclusion that it was time to try plan B. The areas she did not have access to had some serious security on the door locks. Not even a custom crafted tools package from Tommy had been enough to let her crack it safely, the one time she'd gotten a solid chance at one of them without an MP in visual range of the door.

  She had, however, been able to copy the security permissions file to cube and the report back from Tommy had turned up the interesting information that while she didn't have access to those areas, as the general's aide de camp, Pryce did. Which left her organizing the morning e-mail printouts for Beed contemplating the not at all unhappy prospect of plan B. Not at all unhappy.

  Of course, stalking Pryce was going to be complicated by Beed's infernal, possessive, controlling habits, which had gotten worse if anything. Still, she had a few things on her side. Foremost that the general seemed willing to trust his aide around her, while being annoyingly paranoid about other males. Whether it was Pryce's low rank or that his terrible clumsiness and slight stutter tending to worsen in the general's presence, the general's paranoia had a blind spot where the lieutenant was concerned.

  And, of course, she intended to make sure that her public behavior continued to foster that blind spot.

  "Good morning, sir," she said cheerily as she bounced into his office and put the stack of printouts in his in tray, scooping up an inch and a half of assorted paper from his out tray.

  "Come here a second, Sinda, I need to go over this with you." He waved her around to his side of the desk, using explaining his proofreading markups to her as a transparent attempt to get her close enough to grope her left breast. She affected excitement, gasping slightly, but honestly! Beed wasn't bad looking, and he was at least decent in bed, but sometimes he got on her nerves so bad she had to physically restrain herself from throttling the man.

  "Yes, sir, I'll get right on that, sir."

  "Oh, and Sinda," he sighed, "I'm afraid I won't be able to see you tonight, dear. Clarice has planned a dinner party and absolutely insists on my presence."

  "Awww." She looked regretful. "Well, I've got a cube of movies I've been meaning to watch and those self-heaters, maybe I'll just have a quiet night, sir." She wanted to slap him for the hint of approval she saw in his eyes. She didn't think any of that had made it past her eyes, but she turned away to make sure, taking the stack of papers with her. It wasn't really out of character. After all, the real Sinda probably would have been pissed, too.

  Later, Pryce came in with a notepad and propped himself on the edge of her desk, knocking off her stapler and a paperclip dispenser.

  "I'll get that on my way out. Did the general tell you about his speech?" he asked.

  "Speech?" she echoed.

  "Yeah, the dinner tonight is a little more than he may have told you. His wife is trying to organize a Toastmasters on base, along with General Harrison's wife. Anyway, I've got the draft here. I'd appreciate it if you could be my second set of eyes p
roofing the thing for grammar."

  "Sure." She reached out and accepted the pad from him. "So, another wild and wacky evening for you, eh?"

  "A-actually not. We had booked the back dining room at the officers' club, but after the kitchen fire last week, well, the smoke damage is awful. So I really had to scramble rebooking it at Cherry Blossoms, and then we were two seats short so Colonel Lee and I made the gracious sacrifice of foregoing the pleasure of the occasion." He grinned wickedly. "Of course, I'm all broken up about it."

  "I can see that, Pryce." The corners of her mouth twitched slightly and her eyes danced. "So, no canapés tonight. Why, bless your heart, Pryce, what will you do with the time?"

  His eyes snapped to hers, and—and that intent, perceptive look in—his eyes were really dark, and there was a hot, tight feeling in the pit of her stomach. She shifted in her chair slightly, licking her lips. She saw his glance flicker to her chest briefly, and back to hold her eyes, almost as if he hadn't really intended to look.

  "Are you sure you want to go down that road, Captain? I'm no general. And I'm definitely not General Beed."

  "Um . . . road?" she squeaked. Was that me? Oh, great, Cally, way to sound like a complete idiot.

  "Ahem. I mean, I don't know what your plans are, Pryce, but with all this paperwork, I mean, I have half a dozen transfers alone. And it'll probably take me all afternoon just to get Simkowicz's pay situation straightened out. I expect I'll be here very late tonight." She could tell she was babbling, but her mouth seemed to be in overdrive, which was in character for Sinda, so that must be why she was doing it. She jumped at the slight shock when his hand touched hers.

  "Y-you know, suddenly I just remembered I've got loads of paperwork to do, myself."

  * * *

  Cally had actually squared away most of what needed to be done by the time Beed departed, speech in hand. Of course he had loaded her down with additional assignments at the last minute. He thought. She had been able to anticipate most of it. His pattern for these little extras was to take work that had to be done anyway, but later, and come up with a reason he absolutely had to have it first thing in the morning. If she had actually waited until he told her, at seventeen-thirty, it would have added a good three hours onto her workload. As it was, she had more like half an hour of work left as he swanned out the door, and the relevant files heaped around in an artistic disorder on her desk. Asshole.