by John Ringo
She did climb back down long enough to let her silks slide off and puddle on the floor.
She wanted to scream with cheated frustration when he stopped in the middle and grabbed his silks to make a run for the men's room.
"I'll wait for you," she called as he left.
The only furniture in the room was a desk and chair, and there was a laptop computer in the drawer. More of Beed's paranoid dislike of AID's, probably. Not that she blamed him.
It only took a second to plug her PDA into the port.
"Crack it, buckley."
"Did you know there's a ninety-eight point two percent probability that we'll be captured and die here?"
"Shut up and crack the damned thing. The routines are on the cube."
"Right."
The other thing that had been on the cube, of course, was enough of its old data to get the buckley to be cooperative. Well, as cooperative as it ever was, anyway. Waking up the buckley was a risk, but Cally worked marginally faster with one, knowing just when to wheedle or cajole, and when to bulldoze right over its paranoia.
Time always slowed down in this part of an op. Still, she fidgeted nervously as the buckley worked. There was always the chance that the protections were more up to date than the routines chasing the security holes.
But Tommy and Jay were two of the best. She was in pretty quick. Then it was up to her human intelligence to search through the files and find the files she needed.
Oh, my god. Jay, the sonofabitch! And he burned Hector. Holy fuck.
"Send the data, buckley, send it now!"
"There's transmission protection on this room for sure. We'll be caught."
"Send, damn you! Send it now!"
"Right. It's sent. How fast can you run?" it asked.
"Fine." She punched the cube out and fished the bottle of vinegar out, dropping the incriminating material in to fizz and dissolve merrily.
"Buckley, execute full and complete shutdown. Now."
"Oh, sure, I'm expendable! What the hell, it's probably less painful this way. Bye," it finished glumly. The screen went dark.
Cally barely noticed it out of the corner of her eye, as she was busily yanking her silks back on.
The door slid open before she got the front seal half fastened. It was Pryce, and somehow she didn't think his pallor had anything to do with the drugs. She was staring down the business end of his nine mil sidearm, held very steadily.
"It was you?! Oh my God . . . You're under arrest," he said.
"Pryce—" She extended a hand.
"Actually it's Stewart. Major General James Stewart."
Her shoulders slumped. "A setup."
A splash of blood and bits of gore exploded forward from his stomach as the door slid open again, and he slid to the floor, hands clamped across the wound, staring down at it.
"That serves you, you poaching insolent pipsqueak. She was mine!" General Beed stepped over Stewart and to the side, kicking the other man's dropped gun away. He looked up at Cally. "And you get it straight—you may be a whore, but you're my wh—"
He was cut off in the middle of the word as the gray blur that was Cally rolled and came up with Pryce's gun, firing into Beed two to the chest and then into the head, firing until the slide locked back on an empty chamber.
"I think he's dead," Stewart choked wryly, "and I won't be long after. Hurry, now. As good as you are, you've got to have a way out planned." His voice was ragged but gentle.
"No." She slid across the floor to him and looked at his wound just a moment before ripping off the top half of her silks, tearing the tough Galtech fabric like paper. She folded it quickly and expertly into a field bandage and moved his hands, pressing it over the wound, hard, before it could gush.
"Never any damned Hiberzine when you need it, eh?" She smiled mistily at him, clamping the other hand over the entrance wound in his back.
"You're not going to die on me." She was firm, as if that was not allowed.
"I think I love you, whoever you are." He coughed, leaving flecks of blood on his lips.
She was actually thankful when the squad of MP's burst through the door, bare seconds later.
"He needs Hiberzine. Now!" she ordered.
One of them was already pulling a syringe from the kit at his belt.
"Captain Makepeace, or Jane Doe, you are under arrest." The Brigade XO, Colonel Tartaglia, had elected to lead the squad himself. Clearly, they had come in response to a call placed by Pry—General Stewart rather than in response to shots fired.
"I know." Free from the need to stop his blood loss by another MP taking her place, Cally let one bloody hand caress his jaw, before his eyes closed and a pair of MP's pulled her to her feet.
"You get General Stewart to the hospital." The colonel gestured to three of the MP's. "The rest of you, bring her. And pay attention!" He waved at Beed's corpse. "She's dangerous as hell."
* * *
Titan Base, Tuesday, June 18, 19:45
On the shuttle, Jay's PDA and his AID beeped at the same moment. Since the message was urgent, and their game was not, the game autopaused and opened the incoming file.
Jay was the first to react, not being surprised by the news. Unfortunately for him, reactions honed in the brutally Darwinian environment of battle do not fade as long as the body is fit. Tommy Sunday was very fit.
The desperate flying tackle knocked Sunday out of his seat, but the blow that would have shattered his trachea never landed, skidding harmlessly aside off of a raised forearm.
In the enclosed confines of the freight shuttle's cockpit, Tommy's size was not an asset. Still, in the wrestling match that followed, Jay's hand-to-hand training in the gym, while excellent for what it was, couldn't match a combat veteran's front-line down and dirty fighting experience, kept honed by regular training. Humans didn't fight like Posleen, true. But Tommy knew to within a hair what his own body would do, and had ingrained a few dirty tricks the other man had never heard of.
Later, Tommy could never precisely describe the sequence of moves in that cramped, desperate fight. At least, he never told it the same way twice. All he was really sure of was that by the time Papa O'Neal came through the door to find him sitting beside Jay's body, catching his breath, his groin was on fire with pain and Jay was missing an eye, had two broken fingers, a broken neck, and was suffering from a severe and permanent case of dead.
"Did you send it through to Earth yet?" the older man asked matter-of-factly, stepping over the corpse to get to the communications equipment.
"No, not yet." Tommy shook his head, getting up and easing gingerly into a chair.
O'Neal harrumphed and tapped at the keys for a few moments, encrypting the data and sending it through a roundabout system of radio relays that sent it out to Earth as a three times repeated squeal of noise embedded in a routinely intercepted voice signal.
"What do we do with him?" Tommy nodded at the body.
"Put him in the cargo hold. It's nice and cold in there. He'll keep." He rummaged through a shirt pocket for his tobacco pouch. "Never waste a perfectly good corpse if you can avoid it. You never know when you might need one."
"What about Cally?"
"You obviously didn't see the end of the message. Warm up the engines just in case, but . . ." His face was bleak as he inserted a plug in his cheek and repocketed the pouch.
Tommy picked his AID back up and had it display the file so he could read it, this time thoroughly, down to the codes at the bottom that meant, in the judgment of her PDA, that capture of the agent was imminent, rescue or escape unlikely, presume any future transmissions compromised.
"Hey, buckley's always pessimistic, right?" he said.
* * *
Springfield, Tuesday, June 18, 19:55
Given the Bane Sidhe's experience of thousands of years of the Darhel playing hell with their communications security for any form of electromechanical data transmission, face-to-face meetings were regarded the most relatively secure and
safe means of passing information the organization had, and was mandated as a major part of SOP. It had only taken a few catastrophic losses from the ranks of the Cybers in the early days of cooperation to convince them of the wisdom of the policy. One consequence of the policy was that in addition to specific high-impact ops, teams like Hector and Isaac were routinely rotated through information gathering assignments that involved traveling an assigned circuit and picking up physical reports from agents in place.
While it was generally the best use of limited resources, where practical, to split the team and send each agent on a segment of the route, effective coordination of efforts required periodic face-to-face meetings during the field cycle. Good intelligence had an unfortunate tendency to become stale quickly. The meeting allowed one team member to collect the take of the entire team and pass it upstream to a base courier before returning to his own circuit.
Levon liked the Wexford. Not so much this particular pub as cheap little dives that attracted a such a mixed bag of people that as long as you didn't get loud or dance on the tables, nobody looked at you twice. They never used a particular place for a field face-to-face more than three times in ten years if they could help it. This was the Wexford's second time for that dubious honor.
Automatically, he scanned the bar with his eyes as he came in, taking a quick visual overview and mentally cataloging what he'd seen as he picked an empty table against the wall and sat in a seat that gave him a good easy view of the door. A man and woman at the bar, looks like he's trying to pick her up and possibly succeeding. A couple of gentlemen in a booth, very fit, but also obviously interested in each other. A man drinking alone at a table by the window, staring out at the street. A man and woman in the back booth, holding hands across the table somewhat furtively. Path past the kitchen to the back exit was clear.
A determinedly cheerful waitress came over and he ordered a pitcher of hard cider and a cheeseburger. Okay, so it was junk food. At least it didn't have any corn or soybeans in it.
Barry got there before the cider did, so he was able get his food ordered and pour himself a cold pint, using the cover of looking through the menu to pass a cube out onto the table, blocked from prying eyes by the various items on the table. Levon lit a cigarette, palming the cube while adjusting the ashtray. He wasn't, personally, all that fond of the taste of the things, it just made such a damned good cover for moving your hands around.
Sam came in almost on Barry's heels, a short, gently rounded girl with mouse brown hair curling around her ears. He felt her cube drop in his jacket pocket as she leaned over to give him a peck on the cheek before walking back around to sit by Barry.
George, predictably, was late. You could set a clock by his son-in-law. When you saw him walk through the door, it was invariably twenty minutes after he'd been supposed to be there. He swore he didn't do it on purpose, and he could always spin you a yarn about whatever it was that had delayed him. The only time he was on time was when he had to make a hit or coordination was absolutely mission critical—then he was there on the dot. His wife liked to tease him about it. Personally, Levon thought he just got so caught up in his cover role that sometimes he acted like the teenager he was supposed to be.
The first sign he had that something was wrong was when everybody but the waitress and bartender started moving at once. He barely had time to dump the cubes in his cider before one of them was on him, taking advantage of his momentary distraction to jab something into his thigh. He tried to get his pistol in play from under his shirt, but the man knocked it from his hand. Barry and Sam each had their first man on the floor by the time he recovered his balance enough to snap the neck of his. And he doubted he would have taken him down that soon if the man hadn't hesitated, obviously expecting whatever he'd injected to have an immediate effect. The ring of shots told him that at least one of his people had gotten a pistol into play, but the dead man's ten seconds worked against them, the shots ending after the first two.
As he traded blows with the woman from the back booth, he had an instant to reflect that whatever was in the needle must have been one of the things his nannites were programmed to sweep out immediately, thank God. This girl was pretty good, but she lacked the strength and power of one of the Bane Sidhe's upgraded female agents. After years against agents in the gym, and men in the field, it was easy to forget how low on upper body strength unmodified women were.
The two gay guys joining in against him made it a real fight, and as he saw and heard the uniformed Fleet Strike troops pouring through the front and back doors, the bar staff having wisely disappeared behind the bar, he knew that this wasn't one they were going to get out of. Fighting that many without maneuvering room it was impossible to block everything. He saw the fist coming towards his head for just a second. Oh, fuck . . .
* * *
Afterwards, Bobby was real proud of his agents. They'd patiently waited until all three of the targets—the fourth one hadn't shown—were clear of the building before taking their shots. The first two were in near unison. The third had taken a couple of seconds too long and as a result needed three shots to put his target down.
Fortunately, his backup men were good enough to use their own rifles to confuse the Fleet Strike pukes about the direction of incoming fire long enough to cover their withdrawal.
The only bad thing was that the no show kept the mission from being a complete success. Some things just couldn't be helped.
* * *
Cheryl Martin barely restrained herself from throwing her PDA to the floor of the cab and stomping on it. Bare seconds after the shots started, the damned thing had beeped at her.
"Yes?" she snapped.
"Pinwheel. Pinwheel. Repeat, pinwheel." It had that slight colorless quality she associated with synthesized voices.
"Kevin, is there something I can kill around here?" she said.
"Cheryl, I'm so sor—wait!" He spun the cab up on the sidewalk, blocking the forward progress of a short, brown-haired man. "Grab him. Gently."
The rear driver's side door of the cab swung open and the man stopped in the middle of what had been a smooth, rapid motion, swaying a bit as he recovered his balance from suddenly aborting whatever he'd been going to do.
"Cheryl?" he croaked.
"No time, get in. Trade codes on the way." She yanked him, unresisting, into the back of the cab, which didn't even wait for the door to finish closing before backing up and finishing its U-turn, speeding off into the night.
"Pumpernickel. It all went to hell. We think you're the only one that got out. Good to see you, son, but why the hell weren't you in there?" She fidgeted with her purse, coming up with a pack of tissues she knew she was going to need any minute now.
"The rest of my team?"
"Not good. Come on, George, answer her." Kevin met his eyes in the rearview mirror.
"I was . . . I was late." His shoulders slumped.
"And you were walking because?" the other man prompted.
"I . . . I . . . ah, hell, I got stuck behind the second big fucking wreck I ran into on the way here just a mile up the road, and it was so screwed up I figured I'd get here faster on foot. If I'd been there . . ." He trailed off numbly.
"It wouldn't have helped," Cheryl mumbled.
"You don't know that." His voice was bitter.
"Yeah, we do. Unfortunately." The cab drove on.
* * *
Titan Base, Tuesday, June 18, 20:00
The Tir was awakened out of a sound sleep by the melodious chiming of his AID. It took the usual three measured breaths to fight down the urge to kill something. The AID, out of long experience, heard and correctly interpreted the change in the pace of his breathing, waiting patiently until its master was more controlled.
"Intercept of local transmissions indicates the live capture of an enemy agent. Agent is in the custody of Fleet Strike personnel, currently in transit to the Detention Facility Dome for processing and interrogation," it said.
"Get
me the Human Minister of Defense. Date a resolution of a Council of Ministers' vote from now appointing me an authorized observer for the Council based on the commercial ramifications of the espionage. Cite appropriate precedents and get the signoffs of the other Ministers' AIDs, of course. Forward the resolution to the Human Minister." His ears pricked in sudden alertness, whiskers twitching in barely leashed excitement.
"Resolution transmitted. Stand by for the human Li." The cool, melodic voice combined with his breathing exercise to restore him to his usual full control.
"Cancel that personal contact. Instruct him to pass the relevant orders down the line. Have his AID ensure that it is done immediately. Monitor the passage of orders and inform me when they get down to the guards at the detention center." Avoiding personal contact was better in this case. The more intelligent and competent the human underling, the more nervous they tended to be as recipients of direct, personal Darhel attention. Normally, this was a plus, but at the moment he needed efficiency more than intimidation.
He motioned with one hand for his body servants to attend him. He hated going out late at night, but it couldn't be helped. They had his sleeping robe halfway over his head when the AID chimed again.
"Traffic analysis data, Your Tir."
"Report." At least he was already awake.
"Our human service providers report the unfortunate demise of three hostile agents. Traffic records a transmission immediately prior to the capture of local enemy agent by Fleet Strike personnel. Area of transmission was department that initially provided the intercepted data revealing these specific enemy agents. Projected transmission and processing times suggest this leak as the probable cause of the fourth identified hostile agent failing to meet as scheduled with our human service providers," it said.
"One in the hand here, for one out of reach there. A favorable trade." He stalled the Indowy with the waking robe with a brief gesture, motioning for another to bring a plate of food. After it left, he allowed the first to resume robing him. He would need to eat before transit to the Detention Center. He would also have his traveling attendant bring stimulants. It was likely to be a long night.