Cally's War

by John Ringo

  * * *

  Titan Base, Fleet Strike Detention Center, Thursday, June 20, 08:00

  "Sir, recommend we cut the gravity back in at Titan ambient levels when we turn on the lights. It would be unfortunate to have her fall on her head or have some other premature fatal accident." It was difficult to tell if Senior Chief Yi Chang Ho was speaking to his lieutenant or to General Stewart himself. The lieutenant's nod was just a fraction behind his own.

  "Do it," the general ordered. The chief was one unpleasant piece of work, and Stewart wasn't going to give him another crack at Cally if he could help it. Cally. It suited her.

  The lights flicked on and Cally and the gurney bounced gently to the floor. She immediately rolled to her feet and into a ready position.

  "Holy fuck, how'd she get out?" one of the MP's, Keally, breathed.

  "I think I might be able to break her. I'd like to try before you boys get started. At best, she'll start talking and it'll save us all some time. At worst, it should make her more . . . receptive to your efforts." Stewart looked down at her. Her being loose could make this a lot easier. If she didn't kill him on sight on general principles.

  "She was your lover, wasn't she?" Yi said. Coming from a rate, it was gross insolence, but taking offense wasn't in his plan.

  "I was hers. It unmasked her in the end." He shrugged. "Too bad you boys couldn't have tried one of her blow jobs." He grinned wickedly as the other men chuckled.

  "General, I am most concerned that she would harm you. Especially with your previous injuries—" the Fleet medic began.

  "Right. Good thought. Keally, Baker, come with me. No weapons—can't take the risk she'd somehow get one away from us, can we?" He wheeled his chair around towards the service lift, "Oh, this shouldn't take long. Either it'll work and she'll start talking, or it won't. I'll try Good Guy first, and if she doesn't talk, I'll play with her head as much as I can before handing her back to you."

  * * *

  He stood at the door, waving off his men.

  "Don't nursemaid me, son. I'm only in the chair today to placate the damned medics. And I'll be right back in it in a couple of minutes." He cleared his throat, covering his mouth with one hand. "Listen up. I'm going to hang back with you when we first go in the door. I won't walk forward unless I'm reasonably sure it's safe, but if I do approach her, I need you men to stay back at the door."

  "General Stewart, sir, I'm very uncomfortable with this plan," Baker said.

  "Noted. If she rushes us, you can cover my retreat." He palmed open the door, which immediately recognized the Brigade CO and slid aside obediently. Inside, as Baker and Keally spread out to flank him, Cally eyed them warily. He took two steps forward, waving the men back and suppressing a wince at the red-brown smudges that stood out so clearly against the white floor. The room smelled of sweat and rust and something vaguely chemical.

  The gurney was tipped over on the floor, on the side of the room away from the observation lounge. He turned his head slightly toward it and winked one eye. Baker and Keally couldn't have seen it. To those in the observation lounge, if they had seen it, it would have looked like a blink. Only Cally could see both eyes. If she had noticed, she gave him no sign.

  "Sinda, please, honey, don't make them do this to you. If you don't talk, I can't protect you. If you tell them everything, honey, I'm a major general—I can cut a deal and make your part of this all go away." He took a step towards her.

  One of her eyebrows quirked upward, skeptically, above a black eye. She stood her ground.

  "Honey, they don't want you, they just want the ringleaders. All these horrible things, they're so unnecessary—but I can't protect you if you won't talk." He closed the distance, brushing an unbruised section of cheek with one hand, and praying she didn't blame him for what they'd already done to her. Well, she didn't kill him outright. Good sign.

  He leaned forward and kissed her, arms going around her ever so gently. None of the onlookers could see the pill he moved from his mouth to hers. She'd have to crunch it before swallowing, but Tommy had told him she'd guess that much.

  "Please, sweetheart, what's your real name?" he asked for the cameras.

  She stiffened in his arms and he couldn't tell if she'd just bitten down or not. Apparently. She swallowed hard.

  "No," she said.

  He pushed her away, roughly, and strode back to the door, turning in the doorway.

  "What, you thought you were a good enough lay that I'd get you out of this without you telling what you know? Sorry, sweetheart. Oh, you were enthusiastic enough, but I've had better." He looked her naked and abused body up and down. "Oh, and no more fun and games with the men. When you get horny enough to talk, maybe we'll let you have one back. But not me. I'm not a fan of damaged goods."

  Baker and Keally barely managed to yank him out and get the door shut before she bounced off the other side, swearing creatively enough to draw an appreciative whistle from the private.

  If she hadn't stood there with her mouth hanging open for a second, they never would have made it.

  "I think you made her mad, sir." The MP helped him back into the wheelchair.

  "Yeah, Keally, it does sound like it. Back up to the lounge." He wheeled off to the lift, hoping she'd understand why he'd had to say the worst things he could think of. He didn't look back.

  * * *

  Titan Base, Fleet Strike Detention Center, Thursday, June 20, 12:32

  The delayed-effect pill kicked in between four and five hours later, just as Stewart had been promised. The Fleet bastard was doing unspeakable things to her fingernails when she started to go into shock. Her condition rapidly went downhill, despite everything the medic did trying to revive her. He wouldn't have known, but Mike's dad had told him that this particular pill pretty much exactly mimicked the torture cases where a previously unsuspected heart condition causes the victim to just shut down.

  The medic was obviously desperate. And with good reason. His ass was almost certainly on the line for failing to detect the "heart condition." Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

  They tried transferring her to the infirmary which was a mass of hospital green Galplas and surgical steel. It had all the GalTech equipment a physician could want, but somehow still managed to smell of disinfectant. By the time they got her there, she had flatlined. Not even GalTech could bring somebody back from that.

  The attending physician shook his head and waved over a couple of orderlies to take her down to the morgue. He wasn't sure, but the red-haired guy might have been new. The big, dumb-looking one certainly wasn't the type to find manual labor a hardship.

  * * *

  After they wheeled her around a corner, nobody noticed the needleful of Hiberzine antidote the redhead stuck in her leg.

  The morgue was one corridor over from an emergency air lock. The flat, institutional beige of the Galplas walls contrasted with the blinding shine of the polished white tile floor. The astringent smell of the infirmary had faded to the faint but unavoidable burnt pork whiff of the morgue's crematory.

  They'd cremated Jay this morning. Not only were system records on the equipment poorly protected, they also revealed the morgue was rarely used—Tommy had checked. The first thing he did after getting her down there was to change the time on that cremation to the current time. The second thing was to retrieve the very sincerely labeled box of Jay's ashes from behind the table and put them on the shelf where her ashes would have gone had she really been dead.

  They had her stuffed into a black ship jumpsuit and heavily padded boots by the time she started coming around. Then Papa ran interference long enough for them to get to the lock, put on their pressure helmets and parkas, climb into the waiting power sled, send the preprogrammed command to make the lock forget they were ever there, and they were gone.

  * * *

  One of the few good things about the rabid fascism of the Darhel was the effect it had on the operating rules of most starports. The standard rule was that you f
iled for a departure time slot on a first-come first-served basis. Then those times were saleable on whatever terms the slot-holder wished. In practice, it meant that landing was free, but taking off cost money. It also meant that Darhel never had to wait for a takeoff slot, nor were they constrained by any hard and fast departure times.

  Today, Darhel fascism suited Tommy fine. As per instructions, the real freighter crew had her hot and ready to launch as soon as they loaded, and there was another freight shuttle more than happy to make a quick buck off someone else's impatience.

  They were airborne an hour after leaving the prison air lock.

  Two and a half hours later, they had Cally on the slab in the Indowy portion of the freighter, in a room that had housed six Indowy crew before the freighter was commissioned for this trip. The freighter's human leaseholders had no awareness of the room. Nor did the holding company's Darhel owners. After the freighter next docked, the equipment would be offloaded to disappear wherever it was needed next, six Indowy would be onloaded, and no one who did not already know of the room's presence ever would know.

  After two hours on the slab, Cally was up and around in her room. Unfortunately, she'd need to spend the rest of the trip in her cabin with himself or Papa bringing her her meals. There was no help for it. The freighter crew had gotten a look at her when she staggered onto the shuttle and there was no acceptable explanation for her rapid healing. He had explained it away as a bad mugging, but when they offloaded at Selene Base, on the Moon, he figured it was going to take splints, bandages, makeup, and careful planning to get her off the ship without raising crew eyebrows.

  It was probably for the best. He'd noticed that Cally didn't tend to have her very best interpersonal interactions with strangers in the first days after a rough mission.

  * * *

  Titan Orbit, Thursday, June 20, 20:00

  Cally looked up brightly as Tommy came in with her supper, giving him a big smile. The contents of the big bag of cosmetics and toiletries and other girl stuff that he'd put together before the extraction, knowing in advance that she'd need those old-fashioned tools of feminine camouflage, but not which ones and how much, were strewn out across her bunk. She had a look of slightly guilty pleasure, like a kid caught opening the Christmas presents a day early. She swept them back into the bag as if they didn't really mean a thing, but her eyes were bright and misty.

  "Hey, hero. You guys got me out of the spot from hell," she said. "Oh, and thanks for the stuff."

  "Yep. We did at that. Papa'll be in in a little while. The crew naturally don't know you two are related, and he got his arm twisted into a game of spades." He saw her face. "No, really. It would have looked conspicuous as hell if he'd run off here. They think you're my girlfriend."

  "What?" She looked dangerous, standing and folding her bunk up into the wall and taking down and unfolding the stool that stowed securely in a rack under the bunk.

  "Whoa! Hang on! It wasn't my idea—and Papa would have felt just too weird even pretending to the crew to be hot over his own granddaughter." He set the tray down on her fold-down table and folded the guest stool down from the wall, holding up his hands placatingly as he sat.

  "He's pretended to be my date before." There was a slight note of outrage. "I mean, okay, ick, but he has!"

  "For a day here or an evening there, but you have to have noticed it's . . . a tough role for him," he finished tactfully.

  "Okay, okay. I guess I just miss him after all that. They were real amateurs at the whole torture thing, it's just I was so sure I wasn't going to get out of there alive." She shuddered.

  "And you finally had something to live for?" he prompted.

  "He helped. He had to have been sympathetic. Are—when are we going to get him out?" There was a glitter to her eyes he hadn't seen before. Her cheeks were flushed, too.

  "Oh, yeah. Special delivery." He grinned and handed her a message cube.

  "Is that from—why didn't you? Nevermind." She looked around frantically for her PDA, then remembered. "Buckley. I lost buckley."

  Tommy was surprised to hear a note of real grief in her voice. People weren't supposed to get attached to the personalities of their PDAs the way they did to real AIDs. Then again, almost everyone he knew used a personality overlay. He didn't know anybody who'd used the base personality as much as she had. Maybe he grew on you after awhile.

  "Here, use my AID," he offered. "Sarah, help her, okay?" Since clean AIDs were somewhat less persnickety than the originals, he could trust her to behave.

  "Thanks." She stuck the cube in the reader slot and it immediately displayed. Oh my God, they've got him in a wheelchair? Fleet Strike medicine's better than that. Oh. This must have been made yesterday. Yeah, I guess if they've got him up and around instead of sleeping through regen he would have to be taking it easy. That bastard Beed.

  "Cally, my love. Your name suits you. If you're seeing this, we made it. We got you out. Good. If so, I hope to be joining you soon. Without a prisoner, I'm only here long enough to promote the XO and then it's back to Earth for me. Tommy and your grandfather have told me how this whole thing works. As soon as I've got my affairs wrapped up they'll be bringing me in, sooner rather than later. At some point the Darhel will wonder, even if Fleet Strike won't, whether I slipped you a suicide pill. So I'll see you soon, love—and I hope that you'll be looking forward to that as much as I will. Tell Tommy it's okay if he talks about me. Vaya con Dios, Cally." The hologram disappeared.

  "We'll be staying in orbit another two or three days so we can take information about his intended travel plans back with us," Tommy said.

  "Good. You know him? From where? You didn't say anything in the pre-mission briefing," she said.

  "Cally, I'm sorry. I fucked up. I knew him forty years ago in ACS and when I heard 'lieutenant,' I just didn't make the connection. Not until we saw the CO change after you were captured." He tensed for the storm he just knew was coming.

  "Okay. What was he like back then?" she asked.

  "What?" Okay? I fucked up and got her captured and tortured and her answer is "okay"? Damn, she is in love. "Oh. Well, first, his name wasn't always James Stewart. That really is his name now, and was back then, but his mother named him Manuel. . . ."

  * * *

  Titan Base, Thursday, June 20, 20:00

  Mary's Diner was not the sort of place anyone would associate with the tongs or anything other than cheap meals for out-migrating colonists on a budget. They got all kinds at all hours. They had a break room for staff—unnecessary because the only staff were Mary and her husband. Mary was an incessant gossip—about everything that didn't matter. She also made a mean cup of tea.

  All of which was why James Stewart was sitting in her break room over a cup of tea, talking to the dai dai lo of the Black Dragons Tong.

  "You know what you're asking for is very expensive, don't you?" The other man savored his tea. His host had excellent taste. He preferred to drink his imported oolong while it was hot. The room was pleasantly appointed, with a miniature fountain burbling and plashing gently along one side, and a branch of silk cherry blossoms in a crystal vase on the table. It was a good place to do business.

  "Oh, come on. I know how this works. Where else are you going to make any profit at all on this? Don't you think I'm worth it?" Stewart grinned.

  "Perhaps. I won't promise anything, but I'll ask my grandfather," he said.

  "That's all I ask. When do you think you can give me an answer?" The former gang leader turned general sipped his own tea.

  "Tomorrow. I'll know tomorrow," he said.

  "Then I'll see you tomorrow." Stewart excused himself politely and left. He had a promotion to announce.

  * * *

  Titan Base, Friday, June 21, 10:15

  At the diner, after Mary had poured their tea and left, the dai dai lo handed him a ticket, glancing at the AID sitting on the table.

  "Your passage to Earth is confirmed on our inbound combination liner, the
Kick 'Em Jenny from Dulain. We are not embarking or disembarking passengers, except for Uncle's favorite nephew for a vacation. If he doesn't show up, you shouldn't panic. The boy's a bit scatterbrained. Your shuttle leaves at eight thirty-five tonight," he said.

  "Thank you. I'm very grateful. This has been an upsetting trip and I'm looking forward to getting back to work on Earth as soon as possible." The general rose, taking his ticket and AID from the table.

  "Of course. If there's ever anything else we can do for you, don't hesitate to call on us again. Have a pleasant voyage." He shook the other man's hand, palming the cube hidden in the handshake.

  As the general left, he spoke briefly to the cigarette-pack-sized machine.

  "Diana, please transmit my travel itinerary to General Vanderberg. God, I can't wait to get home." He walked out and the dai dai lo could just hear the musical female voice as the door swung shut behind him.

  "Yes, James. Transmission complete," it said.

  * * *

  Titan Orbit, Friday, June 21, 13:30

  It was too bad Cally couldn't be up here. The crew lounge was probably the most comfortable area on the whole ship. The chairs were upholstered in a really good imitation of brown leather, and a holographic fireplace crackled merrily against one wall. A discreet air freshener at the bottom corner of the fireplace's vidscreen released a faint, homey odor of hot wood smoke. There were several small tables that could lock together in groups, or not, and they actually had a decent wet bar. Of course, the coffee can for donations and their immunity to alcohol dampened the fun of that, but you couldn't have everything.