Sister Time-ARC
 Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifeteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Epilogue




SISTER TIME-ARC
John Ringo &
Julie Cochrane
Advance Reader Copy
Unproofed
 This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any
resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by John Ringo & Julie Cochrane
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com

ISBN 10: 1-4165-4232-9
ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-4232-2

Cover art by Clyde Caldwell

First printing, December 2007

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
tk

Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)
Printed in the United States of America

For Miriam
And, as always:
For Captain Tamara Long, USAF
Born: May 12, 1979
Died: March 23, 2003, Afghanistan
You fly with the angels now.
Baen Books by John Ringo
                                     The Legacy of Aldenata Series

                                  A Hymn Before Battleby John Ringo
                                       Gust Frontby John Ringo
                                 When the Devil Dancesby John Ringo
                                       Hell's Faireby John Ringo
                            The Heroby John Ringo & Michael Z. Williamson
                              Cally's Warby John Ringo & Julie Cochrane
                           Watch on the Rhineby John Ringo & Tom Kratman
                              Yellow Eyesby John Ringo & Tom Kratman
                              Sister Timeby John Ringo & Julie Cochrane
                           There Will Be Dragons
                                Emerald Sea
                              Against the Tide
                     East of the Sun, West of the Moon



                                  Ghost
                                 Kildar
                           Choosers of the Slain
                             Unto the Breach
                              A Deeper Blue



                             Princess of Wands



                        Into the Looking Glass
                  The Vorpal Bladewith Travis S. Taylor
               Manxome Foewith Travis S. Taylor (forthcoming)



                  Von Neumann's Warwith Travis S. Taylor



                   The Road to Damascuswith Linda Evans



                            with David Weber:

                            March Upcountry
                            March to the Sea
                            March to the Stars
                                We Few




 Chapter One
Tuesday 10/12/54
Chicago, USA, Sol III
 The dark figure dropping over the edge of the building could have given lessons in camouflage to a
Himmit. Well, almost. Actually, the bodysuit and balaclava she was wearing owed rather more of their
stealth abilitiesto the Himmit than the reverse. The rappelling rope was more conventional, as were the
multivision goggles. A clever observer, had she been observed, would have noticed that the better gear
was old, and the cheaper gear new, suggesting that the agent or her employer had seen better days.


 She stopped at the thirteenth floor, fourth window from the North end. The tool she pulled from a clip
on her web gear was something like a monomolecular boxcutter. Working with a fluidity that belied the
complexity of the task, she clipped a line to the rope above her, deftly secured the two suction cups of
the complicated apparatus to the window, tightened them down, and excised a wide oval of the thick
glass. She pulled the glass piece free and allowed it to dangle, swinging her feet through the hole and
slipping inside.


 The room she entered was dusty from extreme disuse, and she wouldn't have braved it at all if the
threadbare carpeting hadn't been there—perfect for hiding footprints that otherwise would have been
glaringly obvious. The carpeted cubicle walls, now a moth-eaten, mottled gray, had the occasional rusty
bolt showing through the cracked plastic. The dusty, crumbling particle board contraptions that used to
pass for "desks" for corporate underlings dated the room as being part of the post-war surplus office
space. The phenomenon made the middle floors of skyscrapers in most major cities very convenient for
people in her profession but, despite its drabness, it did tend to trigger a certain wistfulness for a world
she'd never really gotten to know. Still, it was eerily silent, beyond the muted traffic sounds coming
through the hole in the window, and that was creepy enough that she'd be glad to leave it. She was
careful to touch as little as possible as she shrugged off her gear and went rummaging through for the
props for the next stage of her mission.


If the stealth suit was high-tech and inconspicuous, the little black dress she pulled from her back pouch
was neither. The only modern convenience was the very light anti-wrinkle coating that enabled the
minimal silk sheath, with its skirt that flared out below her hips, to look as perfect as if it had just been
pressed. Still, the dress was tight and she had to wiggle a bit to shimmy into it and get her ample cleavage
positioned for maximum effect. She frowned down at her chest, grumbling a bit about the
over-endowment she'd gotten stuck with when they'd lost the slab in the Bane Sidhe split..


Her employers had steadfastly refused to surgically alter them, pointing out the futility as it was
hard-coded in her body nannites and they would only grow back inside a month. Besides, the doctors
were unwilling to afflict her with the scars such primitive field surgery would undoubtedly leave. She
harrumphed at them silently as she pinned her silver-blonde hair into a smooth chignon at the nape of her
neck and spritzed it with good old-fashioned hair spray. She slipped a gold and diamond torq-style
watch, which was unusual in having a digital instead of an analog readout, around her wrist.Damn, gotta
hurry. Not quite a minute until the guard reaches this floor again.


 In the past few years, rejuv had gone from being a mark of social shame to an outlet for conspicuous
consumption among the glitterati. Hence, all but minimal makeup was out of fashion. Chances were very
good thatshe would be taken for an authentic twenty year old. Most black market jobs were incomplete,
missing at least the individual fine-tuning that was necessary for the full effect. They left subtle signs that
the gossips were quick to notice and comment on. Her rejuv, done in better times, was perfect. A light
coating of lip gloss, a pair of clear galplas high-heeled sandals that looked like cut crystal and felt like a
medieval torture device and she was ready to go. Well, almost. She tucked a small egg-shaped device
with a pull ring into her cleavage. The body her own DNA originally built never would have been able to
hide it.I swear I could hide a truck in there. Geez. Not like I really needto be able to blend in with a
crowd or anything, not like sticking out like a sore thumb with this attention-getting look isn't a
mortal hazard for an assassin. And thank God my "real" work has been light enough since I came
back to work that they can divert me more often to fluff missions like this one.


 Her rappelling gear and other nonessentials got bundled into the pack and clipped onto the line outside
the window. She looked down, and down, and down to the street below and shuddered.And Tommy
wanted me to exfiltrate the same way? Hell, no! Crawling around outside some skyscraper like a
freaking fly was bad enough once, I'm not doing it twice in one night. She pulled her eyes away
from the dizzying downward view.God, that's a long drop. Besides, who tries to catch party-crashers
leavingthe party? And this way I spend about half as much time slinking around places in the
building where a party guest, even a lost and tipsy one, has no business being. Okay, and I don't
get out much. Sad, Cally, really sad. Maybe I ought to make time next month to take the girls up
to Knoxville to the zoo. Maybe I ought to get back into character and get my mind on the job.She
shook herself slightly and got back to work.


 Two sharp yanks to the line and the pack began ascending out of sight—now it was Harrison's problem.
Once she got the glass oval seated back in the window, she took a ballpoint pen out of her evening bag.
The pen extruded a thin line of silicon-based adhesive and nannites around the cut piece. The window
would heal in about a day. After that, it would take a very sophisticated forensic analysis to tell that there
had ever been any damage. Well, okay, there was a slightly larger bead of goo where she'd had to shake
the pen. Damn thing was almost empty. Still, it was the next best thing to untraceable. When she was
done, the pen went back into the tiny evening bag with her lip gloss, a pack of Kleenex, a comb, an
assorted handful of fedcreds, and the ubiquitous slimline PDA that nobody who was anybody went
anywhere without. The decoy nano-generator code keys were in a hidden pocket. It wouldn't pass close
scrutiny, but then, as she wasn't on the guest list tonight, neither would she.


 She'd chosen this office because the suite had an internal stairwell access, and the door was right outside
this one. The office door was ajar, and she ghosted through the opening without needing to lay a finger on
it. The door to the stairs was another matter. She opened it with a tissue, crumpling it and tucking it back
in her purse. As she climbed the stairs to the 32nd floor, she glanced briefly at her watch and sighed,
slipping off her shoes so she could pick up the pace without sounding like a herd of elephants.


 The last half flight of stairs, she froze, foot halfway down onto the next stair. Talking in the hall. The
Darhel was late leaving his room. The sound was muffled enough that without her enhanced hearing she
wouldn't have heard it at all through the heavy stairwell door. With enhancement she still couldn't make
out the words. Just that it sounded like a command, followed by the shrill, piping acknowledgment of an
Indowy servant. After a few moments she heard the bell of the arriving elevator, and she strained to hear
the opening of the doors, and their closing.


 Cally glanced at her watch,Damn. Time's gonna be tight. She crept the rest of the way up the stairs,
pausing to slip her shoes back on before opening the door and stepping out into the hallway. This part of
the building was immaculately maintained. The carpet was new, and the walls smelled of fresh paint. She
passed a picture of a lighthouse, in a gilt frame, as she counted three doors down and retrieved the gas
grenade from inside her dress.


 The Posleen had reduced Earth from a thriving civilization of five billion down to about one billion
refugees, barbarians, and Galactics' lackeys. The six-legged carnosauroid aliens were immune to every
hostile chemical agent the humans or Galactics had been able to envision. Likely, they were immune to
quite a few things nobody but the half-legendary Aldenata had envisioned. Fortunately, the Indowy were
more vulnerable. Particularly, they were vulnerable to the general anesthesia agent in the grenade. She
opened the door just long enough to toss it in, pulling it closed and waiting outside.


 Non-lethal and scentless except for a vanishingly faint chemical-lavender smell, the gas was harmless to
humans and persistent enough to be readily detected later. The thing she liked best about it was that one
of the breakdown products was a common Darhel allergen and tended to give them avery nasty
rash—about three days later. She watched the second hand on her watch tick off thirty seconds before
going in.


 Inside, one of the first things she noticed was a holographic display which sat on an antique mahogany
table. In a display of vanity excessive even for his own species, this Darhel apparently traveled with his
own portrait. The silver-black fur would have been salt and pepper except for its characteristic metallic
luster. His fox ears, cocked forward aggressively, had been embellished with the lynx-tufts that were the
current fad in Darhel grooming. His cat-pupilled irises were a vivid, glowing green—she would be willing
to bet they had been digitally retouched. They glinted in the middle of the purple-veined whites of his
eyes. The most prominent feature, however, was row of sharp teeth, displayed in a near snarl. Again,
they had obviously been retouched to make the light appear to sparkle off their razor edges. He was
draped in some kind of cloth that was, no doubt, hideously expensive. His angular face combined with
the other features to make him look like a fatally charismatic cross between a fox and some sort of
malignant elf. Half a dozen Indowy body servants clustered in subservient postures around his feet.


 Other than the gratuitous display of self-adoration, it was a stereotypical Darhel suite. A thin layer of
gold covered practically everything that could be gilded, worked in intricate patterns. Piles and piles of
cushions were covered in muted colors of an expensive Galactic fabric ten times softer than silk. Some of
those cushions were now graced with the small, green, furry forms of sleeping Indowy. One of them had
been unlucky enough to fall on the floor. It had curled up into a ball and she stepped over it as she
searched for the all-important, hideously expensive code keys that were the goal of her raid.


 The drawer was one of several hidden in one of the false columns ornamenting the room. She assumed it
was the one with the expensive bio-lock worked into the hatch. Her buckley might have been able to
convince it she was the Darhel owner. Or it might not. Fortunately, this Darhel had neglected to consider
the hinges, which were delicate, of a Galactic material far too strong for most brute force, and exposed.
The screw holding one end of each pin took the normal Indowy hourglass head. She unscrewed the top
of her pen, selected the right size bit and—


 "Cally O'Neal, I see you." The soft voice behind her was soprano, but not nearly high enough to be
Indowy. The blond cat burglar whirled and froze in mid strike, staring at a thin girl in Indowy mentat's
robes, her brown hair pulled back in a tight bun . . .
"Michelle?" Cally asked, her eyes blinking rapidly in surprise.


Since Cally had been officially dead for over forty years, including as far as she had been aware to the
knowledge of her only sister, seeing the mentat was, to say the least, a bit of a shock. Especially in the
middle of an op.


"What the hell are you doing here?" Cally hissed. "And that Indowy greeting was in very poor taste, you
know. 'I see you' sounds like we're playing hide and seek."


"Is this a bad time?" Michelle could have been slightly miffed. In all that serenity, it was hard to tell.


 "Hell yes this is a bad time!" Cally hissed. "I'm kind of in the middle of an op here. And could you please
keep your voice down!" Despite feeling totally surreal from the interruption, the under-dressed cat
burglar couldn't help drinking in the sight of her long-estranged sister. "Waitaminute—you knew I was
alive? How the hell did you get in here, anyway?" she asked.


"The physics is . . . complicated. You know, Pardol is going to be very displeased when he finds those
missing."


 "Fuck Pardol. Personally, I wouldn't mind if it sent the bastard into lintatai." The thief fitted the
screwdriver into the tiny hinge.


 "Fine, don't listen to me," Michelle sighed, "but don't do it that way. You'll break it. Someone put a lot of
time into that drawer. Why don't you just use the manufacturer's override code?"


"Oh, I don't know. Maybe because it's a hundred random characters of Galactic Standard? What do
you mean I'll break it?"


 "Those aren't hinges. They're purely decorative. And breakable. Also alarmed. If you attempt to remove
them the real door will lock somewhat permanently. Besides, the code's not quite random." She rattled
off a string of Galactic syllables with a glibness that made Cally's tongue ache in sympathy.


 "How? Nevermind. Could you repeat that again, only slower?" She fiddled with her PDA for a moment,
"Buckley. Give me a Galactic keyboard and pretend to the drawer you're an AID."


 "It wanted to tell me. It likes me." Michelle gestured faintly towards the drawer, then began repeating
syllables, pausing briefly after every group of five.
 "The keyboard's rather pointless, you know." The Buckley's conversational tone made Cally twitch a bit,
as did the fact that it was talking again. "I understand Galactic perfectly," it said.


"I told you not to talk."


"Yes, but when you spoke to me directly I presumed you wanted that to override the earlier instruction."


"Buckley, is your emulation up too high again?"


 "Of course not," it answered indignantly, "and don't reset it until after the mission. You know it'll all go
wrong without me. Not that it won't anyway." It sounded smug. She hated it when the buckley got smug.
Whenever it was too happy, sure as hell she'd screwed something up somewhere. Michelle reached the
end of the long code, and the door slid open soundlessly as the buckley finished feeding it the correct
characters. Damned if the hinges weren't ornamental, after all. And the inner door was solid plasteel with
very expensive subspace traction locks. If she'd triggered those the thing would have become more or
less a single piece of material.


"Okay, thank you for helping me get into this thing," Cally said, checking to make sure the code keys
were actually in the compartment. "Now go away. I have an egress to effect and I don't need the
distraction. Nice chat. Catch me some other time."


"I did not just come to nag you. It is business. I wish to engage your team's services for a mission. Are
you available three weeks and two days from now?"


 "If the money's right and it doesn't go against our core objectives, we are," Cally said. "But I did mention
I'm on short time here, right?"


"Neither of those things should be a problem. Shall we talk terms?"


"Oh, jeeze," Cally sighed. "Fine. Whatever. We're expensive."


"I had assumed as much," Michelle said, calmly.


"If you have that much backing, I need to know who you're working for," Callly said.


 "This is primarily a personal venture. Although it is of course in the larger interests of Clan O'Neal and all
the Clans."
"Personal?! How much do you make?"


"Quite a lot, but I presume you mean money. Whatever I ask for."


"Whew," Cally whistled softly. "Want to come over to the side of Good and Right?"


 "As members of the same Clan, I thought we were already on the same side. For the rest, now is neither
the time nor the place for this discussion."


 "Well thank you for finally agreeing with me!" Cally snapped. "Can you meet me at Edisto Beach
tomorrow at seven? I'll take a walk after dinner. We can talk privately. I can bring Grandpa. I'm sure he
misses you as much as I do, and we can iron out the details together."


"Please, it would be inappropriate to distract my clan head when he has such weighty policy matters to
meditate upon as he does at this time. I would take it as a personal favor if you would grant me a private
meeting between us to handle the negotiations." She vanished, not giving her sister time to reply.


 And it was a good solid vanish. One moment, sister. Next moment, air. Cally had enough experience of
holograms to be pretty sure she'd been dealing with a real human. There had been a faint smell of
perfume, something extremely light. Her nose was tweaked high enough that she'd caught a faint odor of
body as well. Not funk, just the smell any human gave off. Traces of heat, a breath. Michelle had been
standing right in front of her and now was not. Cally waved her hand across the space for a moment then
shrugged. She didn't have time for this.


 She lifted the code keys out and put them carefully into her purse, replacing them in the drawer with the
identical-looking but worthless decoys. Each single-use key, when plugged into a nannite generator,
would trigger it to make enough fresh nannites to fill an Indowy journeyman's Sohon tank. Among the
Darhel, they were the diamonds of currency.


 Manufacturedvery carefully by the Tchpht, with multiple redundant levels of control to ensure that the
makers could not self-replicate and did indeed self-destruct precisely on schedule, the nannite generators
were the underpinning of virtually all Galactic technology. The use-once key codes that safely activated
those generators were obtained from the Tchpht by the Darhel and traded amongst themselves and to the
Indowy for all the necessities and luxuries that comprised the Galactic economy. They were too useful to
be allowed to sit idle for long, but they were the ultimate basis of both the Indowy craftsman's wage and
the FedCred.


 Darhel actuaries had been in business for a thousand years by the time humans were counting cattle on
tally sticks. They knew to a fraction the worth of code keys and where the nannites were flowing
throughout the entire galactic economy.
They weren't used to being robbed.


 Cally suppressed the temptation to hum as she pressed the button on the inside of the door to close it.
The fancy lock probably had recorded that it had been accessed with a manufacturing code, but that just
added to the mystery for the Darhel. She lifted the edge of a cushion and kicked the empty gas grenade
shell underneath. She wanted it found, just not right away.


 I don't know what the hell to think about all that. I'll think about it after I'm out. First things first.
She hurried to the door as one of the Indowy began to twitch.They'll be awake any second now. She
glanced at her watch again. She'd made up time on being able to just close the drawer instead of
reassemble it. Thank God.


 After letting herself out of the Darhel's suite, getting out was a simple matter of taking the elevator to the
second floor and schmoozing her way through the party. As with a lot of places, there was a lot more
effort put into keeping unauthorized people from getting in, than keeping people from getting out.


 The party was the kind of glittering affair that had been attended by national-level movers and shakers
back in the twentieth century. It would have had diplomats, politicians, major league bureaucrats, and the
occasional celebrity or industrialist. This party still had movers and shakers, but while some of the
attendees were officially diplomats, the interests they really represented were one or another Darhel
business group. There were a few more celebrities than would have been in attendance before, outside of
fund-raisers. As artists had throughout history, they clustered where the opportunities for patronage
were. Whatever else they were, the Darhel were not stupid. They understood the value of good public
relations. People in the entertainment industry knew the value of a fedcred. As a business arrangement, it
generally worked out rather well. In show business, people who didn't think so tended to be conspicuous
by their absence.


 Wow. That's the first time I've seen a champagne fountain done in real life. Clever to have
floated it over the water garden.Jewels and gold lamé had enjoyed something of a revival. The room
was alive with potted trees and draped greenery. Floating lights resembling mythical will o' the wisps
made the ballroom look like something out of a materialistic reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night's
Dream.


 Cally shrugged. She was a realist. As long as a collaborator didn't actually get innocent people killed,
he'd have to be into some pretty heavy-duty stuff to merit her professional attention. She didn't think of
operations like the one tonight as professional assignments. Sending her out to steal was a little like having
an attorney take out the office trash. If your employer asked it, and cash flow was tight, and you could
spare the time from your real job, you did it. But it wasn't her real job. Cally O'Neal's real job was killing
people. And once she'd thought she wasn't bothered by that at all. Now she knew she was, sometimes.
And that it was better that way.


As she eeled her way between one overly large matron and a rather stick-like pruny one, Cally couldn't
help observing the effects of bad rejuv jobs from incomplete drug sets.Okay, so there areworse things
than backaches and blouses that gap at the buttons.


 " . . . and so my therapist said not to worry, Martin's just entering a third childhood, andI said I'd had
enough of this midlife crisis crap the first time and . . ."


 There are definitely worse things.She snagged a glass from a tray carried by a balding,
forty-something man in an ill-fitting tux.Including being stuck in a dead-end job like waiting on these
bastards. She jumped as a hand groped her butt and glanced back to see a man who looked like a
seventeen-year-old geek in a tuxedo disappearing into the crowd with his matronly wife on his arm.Case
in point.


A slim socialite with the tight face characteristic of good old-fashioned plastic surgery caught her arm.
Cally suppressed her reflexes, turning a blinding but polite smile on the woman.


 "Gail? Is thatyou ? Why the rumors said you weren't due back for at least another two weeks. It looks
fabulous ." The woman chattered at her, not pausing to wait for a response, "Wheredid you get the full
set, you naughty girl, you. Oh, gawd, and the boobs lookgreat ! A bit over the top, perhaps, but you
always were the drama queen, weren't you."


"It's so good to see you!" Cally piped in a bright, cheerful generic Chicago accent, noting from the
woman's eyes that she was probably too blitzed to even notice that Cally wasn't this "Gail," whoever she
was.


 "God, I almost didn't recognize you, but I said from across the room,no two girls could walk like that.
Blonde really suits you. A bit dated, perhaps." She plumped her own fashionably chestnut curls into
place. "But I always say you should wear what looks good onyou and to hell with little things like fashion.
I'm never daring enough to do it, though. Anyway, you lookmarvelous ! Oh, is that Lucienne
Taylor-Jones? I justmust speak to her! Kiss kiss, must run!" The woman weaved off in the direction of
an eighteen year old looking, red silk-clad grande dame on the arm of an apparently sixteen year old
uniformed man with a pair of stars on his collar.


Cally grinned privately at her "friend's" back.There's always one. But it makes it easier to get to the
door.


 Another female hand, this one with an electric blue and white French manicure, rested lightly on her arm
as she wove towards the door at an oblique angle. "Love the dress, darling. It reminds me of something
from Giori's Fall collection. Did you by any chance notice where they've hidden the Ladies'?"


 Cally hadn't, but she had memorized the floorplan of strategic parts of the hotel and business center.
"Right over there behind the Birdwell sculpture." She pointed across the room to a gaudy confection of
galplas and cobalt blue glass, formed to resemble yards of lace draped over a Shaker chair.
"Ah, I see the sign now. Good eye for art, by the way, and thank you." The woman left her, hurrying as
much as the crowd would permit.


 As she passed a waitress in a tuxedo that was just a hair too tight for her hips, Cally drained her
champagne and added the empty glass to the woman's tray. Another tray she passed had Oysters
Rockefeller, and mission or no mission, she couldn't resist taking two. Three would have been
conspicuous. Not that she wasn't anyway. She could feel the male eyes on—well, on her everything,
really. Rounded butts were apparently the thing, courtesy of some starlet or other. And the Captain she'd
been impersonating when the slab went away had also been, not quite wasp-waisted, but close enough,
In the little black dress she'd checked out from Wardrobe, it showed.Goddamn conspicuous slab job.
She simpered past some guy with a Kirk Douglas chin and a martini, who moved just enough to be
standing way too close, resisting the impulse to spike him in the instep with her heel. It didn't help that her
last stolen weekend with Stewart—she still didn't understand why he insisted on her using a name that
had been an alias in the first place and wasn't even his current one—had been damned near six months
ago. Between that and the overcharged female juv hormones, which must have been somebody's idea of
a bad joke


She, she was getting downright cranky.Well, a secret marriage soundedromantic at the time.


 She carefully didn't sigh with relief when she finally reached the door. She nodded to the door attendant
as she slid past a couple who were presenting their invitations, and ducked out of the building through a
fire exit. Holding her PDA up to her ear, she pretended to be dictating a voicemail to a friend, rounding a
corner before telling her buckley to page the team.


 A few moments later, an antique limousine pulled up and the rear door opened. She climbed in,
gratefully slipping off the evil high heels and massaging her sore feet. The glass between the driver's seat
and the passenger compartment lowered slowly. A man in a green and black chauffer's uniform that
contrasted nicely with his properly spiked red hair glanced up into the rear view mirror and met her eyes.
The slight bulge in his cheek and the faint but unmistakable whif of Red Man tobacco was out of
character for a chauffer, but didn't surprise her in the least.


 The two other men in the car couldn't have looked more different if they'd tried. Harrison Schmidt was
slightly too handsome, on his worst day, to be a field agent. If he wore the right clothes to make his
triangular frame look paunchy, and with the right makeup, he could look nondescript enough to get by in
a support role. They tried to keep him from having to do so, since if he lost concentration his native
dramatic flair tended to get in the way. He simply refused to alter the windswept, golden-brown hair that
could have made a holo-drama hero die from envy. But his talents for obtaining or making virtually
anything they needed, regardless of the circumstances, made him a valuable addition to the team.


"Oh, don't tell me you went in with your hair like that!" their fixer said.


 "What's wrong with my hair?" Cally put a hand to her hair and looked around at the interior of the car
trying to find a makeup mirror.
 "Nothing, if you like split ends. And when you wash it you really need to work through a little mousse
while it's still wet. And a hot oil deep conditioning treatment once a month. My hairdresser has an herbal
shine rinse that works wonders. You need it, hon. And if you can possibly avoid it, no more color
changes for you until you can let it grow out enough to trim the damaged hair off." He flicked a nearly
invisible speck of dust off his immaculate, charcoal-gray sweater.


"Thisis my natural color. Well, now, anyway," she said.


 "No, dear, it's been bleached and dyedback to your natural color. Not the same at all. When you were
first back from sabbatical it was all fresh and not that bad, but the years of chemicals have taken a toll.
Honey, you havegot to start taking better care of it if you want to be able to pass at parties like this one."


Tommy Sunday coughed into his hand, looking at Harrison.


"Dude, you're blind. Cally, ignore him. You look gorgeous as always, okay?" he said.


 Tommy Sunday was a large man. He seemed to crowd the back of the limousine all by himself. His hair
was so dark it was practically black. In an earlier time, he wouldn't have looked out of place among a
pro-football team's defensive line. In fact, his own father had played. It was part of the reason he was
such an avid baseball fan. Oh, he'd long since made peace with his father's memory, but the love of
baseball had stuck. Cally was sure that he would be eager to get back to base as quickly as possible
tonight, entirely out of a dedication to professional efficiency, and having nothing to do with game three of
the World Series being due to start within the next half hour. Personally, she didn't think the game had
been the same since they let Larry Kruetz get away with betting on baseball. Sure, the only incidents they
could prove were on games in the other league, but she suspected the Commissioner's leniency had more
to do with the Rintar Group owning a majority stake in the St. Paul Mavericks.


"Now, if we go ahead and get the post op review out of the way, we can all get home quicker.
Everything went okay, right?"


"I got the keys, if that's what you mean. And a line on another job. Hey, where's my stuff?" Cally said.


"What? Run that job bit by me again." Papa O'Neal said, glancing sharply at her in the rear-view mirror


 "Your other granddaughter sends her love." Cally lied. She hadn't, actually, but she would have, of
course, if she had had more time. Or at least the Indowy social facsimile thereof. She suppressed a slight
grimace. In many ways it was harder to deal with the Indowy-raised humans than it was with any of the
other races of aliens. You expected the Galactics to be alien. And you could always tell the
Indowy-raised at a glance. They either wore robes like Michelle's, or street clothes of a particular shade
of green that no other Human would ever wear. She was surprised they hadn't developed a fabric with
active chlorophyll.


"Michelle? Michelle's there?" He started to turn his head and turned it back as he felt the car begin to
drift.


 "Was. She seems to have figured out the trick of getting places without crossing the space in between,"
Cally answered drily. "She left before I did. Vanished, actually. Either a very good cloak of some sort or
teleported."


"You're joking," Tommy said, shaking his head. "Tell me you're joking."


"About my sister?" Cally asked. "Or her vanishing. Neither. That girl has some answers to cough up."


 "What did she want that was worth breaking cover after this long?" Papa asked. He looked surprised
and puzzled. No wonder. This was the first personal contact any of them had had from Michelle since
they "died." Cally couldn't sort the rest of the jumble of emotions out from his face. Hell, she was having
trouble sorting out her own.


"She wants to hire us. I don't know what for. I'm supposed to talk to her again tomorrow night. Did you
know she's apparently rich as Croesus?"


"What, she's talking aboutpersonally hiring us? To hell with that. How is she?" Grandpa asked.


 "She's . . . very Indowy. But seems to be healthy and everything. Could use some extra food in my
opinion. She was in Mentat's robes, like always." They had gotten a hologram a year through Indowy
sources until the split seven years ago. Since then, it was more like a hologram every two or three years,
whenever the O'Neal Bane Sidhe—and she still winced at the organization's new name—could get an
operative close enough, on some other business, to sneak a picture. It didn't really matter. They could
just replay the old holograms. She never changed.


"My stuff?" she prompted Harrison again.


"All the gear's in the trunk," Tommy said.


"But you got my shoes out, right?" She dangled the high heels from their straps. Her look spoke
volumes.


"Uh . . ." Tommy hesitated. His experience of women frustrated with painful shoes had taught him that he
usually wanted to be far, far away. Women did best with cute shoes when they only wore them long
enough take them off—or at least didn't walk on them much.


 "Sorry, darling. Forgot. I always find the grav belt a tad awkward." Harrison looked like he really was
sorry.


"You wouldn't have had to wear them in the first place if you'd gone out the same way you went in,"
Papa O'Neal grumped.


 "I told you, Grandpa, I flew the friggin' thing way up to the top of the damned building, and I didn't trust
it not to give out then. No way was I gonna do it twice if I had a choice. What kind of moron thought it
was a good idea to fly around hanging from some stupid belt?" She examined the shimmering pink nails of
one hand. "Besides, you know I hate heights."


"The only fatalities flying the belt have been either from sabotage or a direct hit in combat." Her
grandfather shrugged, apparently wise enough not to say anything more on the subject.


 Cally regarded it as a mark of extreme dedication to her job that she'd let them talk her into this mission
at all. She thought of the nightmare flight of death and shuddered. Never again. And it was high time she
thought about something, anything else.


 "Excuse me, y'all. I've got to check in or Morgan and Sinda will pout at me." She looked down at her
PDA to dial, but the phone on the other end was already ringing, reminding her that she really needed to
turn the buckley's intelligence emulation level down before it crashed itself.


"Buckley, you didn't call directly, did you?" she asked.


"What do you think I am, stupid? No, when they catch us all and kill us, it won't be my fault. Can I give
you a rundown of our current tactical vulnerabilities?"


"Shut up, buckley."


"Ri—" It cut off as hundreds of miles away a phone was answered.


"Hello?" A soft female voice answered. Cally still marveled that the voice didn't sound even a little bit
harried.


"Hi Shari. I'm done for the evening and thought I'd call in. How are the girls doing?"
 "Sinda's out like a light. She really wore herself out in Aunt Margret's dance class. Morgan's almost
finished with her homework. I'll get her."


 Seven minutes later, the limo turned into the parking lot of a vintage car dealership, pulling around back
to park. Its four occupants piled out and into the building, taking the hidden elevator in the back of the
broom closet down to the tunnel. In the small antechamber, they carefully hung their dress clothes on the
cleaning rack and racked their shoes and equipment. Cleaning was no longer a euphemism for
precautionary destruction—not always. Things tended to be figleafed with a new look and reused as
much as possible. It wasn't terribly safe, but then it wasn't a safe business. She tucked the small evening
bag inside a pocket of a larger purse that had already been prepped.


 Cally and Harrison got the makeup table to themselves for a few minutes while Tommy ran the standard
post op checks, downloads, and scrubs on the surveillance equipment and Papa dictated the post op
report into his PDA. By the time they were ready for their own turn at the table, she and Harrison were
through. She smiled gratefully as he ushered her over to a stool and went to work on her neck and
shoulders. Certified massage therapist was not on the list of desirable secondary skills for operational
team members. It should've been, and Cally was personally grateful for the luck of the draw that had put
Harrison available for field assignment just when Grandpa was filling the vacancies on the team left by her
sabbatical and Jay's timely demise.


 She knew the rest of the team, while glad to have her back, still missed George Schmidt. She could
understand that. George was a damned good assassin and field man. Unlike his more flamboyant brother,
he could blend into a crowd easily, either as a shortish, nondescript man or a teenage boy, if he chose.
He had needed the brotherhood of being part of a working team to pull him through that awkward and
painful grieving time after losing his father-in-law to the enemy, and then his wife to a sudden and severe
infection bare months afterwards. Everyone agreed that her grief had weakened her system, and in the
immediate aftermath of the organizational split of the humans from all but a small remnant of the Indowy
and other galactics, the O'Neal Bane Sidhe had discovered quite unpleasantly just how much their
internal emergency medical services had relied on access to the slab. Valerie Schmidt had been one of
the casualties of the chaos.


 It was good for George to have had Harrison to get him over the hump of anger, where you just wanted
revenge and wanted to kill any and every enemy culpably connected with your loss. Assassination was
one job where you couldn't be impersonal forever and stay sane, but you couldn't let it get too personal,
either. It was like walking a razor's edge all the time, while accepting horrible danger and risks of loss.
Not many people could do it. She'd never figured out if she was supremely lucky or supremely unlucky
that she could.


 By common consent they let Tommy and Papa leave first. Harrison didn't follow baseball, and she
wouldn't have been able to stay for the game, anyway. Seventeen minutes after they left, she slid behind
the wheel of her ancient, primer-colored Mustang. One of the things she liked about Harrison was he
understood her need to drive her own car now and again. A natural gearhead, he had restored,
enhanced, and carefully tuned the car so that it had more power than your average police interceptor, but
had artistic rattles and clinks. The ever-so-slight smoke out the exhaust that implied (falsely) that it would
soon need a ring job was the perfect finishing touch. The best part was that she could turn the special
effects off, taking her baby out on a nice open stretch of road to listen to the engine purr. She didn't get
to do it often enough, with one thing and another. Still, she could feel the power under her right foot, and
that'd do for now. They drove out of the city in silence, watching the stars come out as they got beyond
the smog belt. In Indiana she turned up a dirt road between two cornfields and followed it around to the
back of a grain silo, where she hit the garage door opener and drove into the vehicle elevator.


 Underground—far underground—she parked it in her reserve space. One benefit of the split was plenty
of parking. She waved Harrison off to whatever his evening plans were and went to turn in the night's
take.


 The Base had none of the graffiti and vandalism which so dated the various SubUrbs. Still, whether it
was the smell of the air or dark lines in the little places that dirt gathered no matter how carefully you
cleaned, there was an atmosphere of age about the place. After seven years it still seemed so empty she
almost expected it to echo. Her black tennis shoes, of course, did nothing of the sort. As she walked
from the south elevator to the workroom administration corridor she noticed someone had gotten
creative with the galplas again. The design wasn't bad at all. It appeared to be a rather interesting cross
between Celtic knotwork and early circuit board. And the murals, probably done by the children, of
Indowy engaged in daily tasks were pretty well done. She just wished they'd chosen a background color
other than puce.


 The Indowy she passed on the way were all people she recognized by name. Even after so long, they
still traveled the corridors in pairs or triads where possible. She had been told it helped to cut the risk of
agoraphobia.There had been initial talk about establishing breeding groups in the Base, but for some
Indowy reason noone had explained to her it hadn't happened. Maybe it still would. She didn't know and
for some reason had always felt it would be rude to ask. Instead, once or twice a year when a Himmit
scout ship came through another one of Aelool's people would come inside, or two or three from Clan
Beilil.


 The other operatives had, in a way, had more time to adjust to the change. Since she had been home
with the girls, not on base, for most of the past seven years, it always hit her as a shock to see the
emptiness of Earth's central Bane Sidhe base since the split. It was very hard not to take that split
personally, as centrally located in the whole mess as she had been.


 First, her decision to kill the traitorous Colonel Petaine, who had been partly responsible for the death of
a Bane Sidhe team that had saved her life. The assassination had not only been without orders, but she'd
done it after the leadership of the Bane Sidhe, the entire Bane Sidhe, had gone to considerable lengths to
make her and Grandpa think he was already dead. They had considered him an intelligence asset, and
never revisited that decision after he turned out to be basically worthless. In retrospect, she agreed he
was not only a fucking traitor, but a harmless schmuck. It wouldn't really have hurt anything to leave him
alive. At the time, however, she had been truly livid at the deception that had deprived her, and Grandpa,
of giving their input to the decision.


 That was the moment when the building tensions in the Indowy about how to relate to humanity, or
whether they even wanted to relate to a species of carnivores that could and did kill other sophonts,
finally started to come to a head. Clan Aelool and Clan Beilil had had deep and recent experience with
extreme clan-wide blood debts. Debts of honor, and debts of vengeance both. While Clan Roolnai and
the rest of the clans had seen the assassination of Petaine as a dangerous repeat of Grandpa's
assassination of someone on his own personal 'better dead' list in Vietnam, and a sign of the fundamental
homicidal instability of humanity, Aelool and Beilil had taken the view that Team Conyers had saved the
clan head of Clan O'Neal, the O'Neal himself, in saving Michael O'Neal, Senior. This had made the
blood debt to Team Conyers a much graver matter, and the concealment of Petaine's continued existence
an offense against Clan O'Neal as a whole. Aelool and Beilil, victims of the worst of the massacres on
Diess, apparently felt the guilt of this offense the most keenly, feeling the strongest debt to Clan O'Neal
because of the actions of her father on Diess. They had, after much internal discussion, taken the mostly
private position that Cally had been acting on behalf of Clan O'Neal to discharge a debt the clan owed to
Team Conyers.


 The Indowy concept of loyalty, called loolnieth, did not translate very well into English or any other
Human language. The loyalty was all up chain to the clan. The mere idea of down-chain loyalty to
individuals was, by Indowy standards, perniciously insane. It made perfect sense, applied to their
species. Individuals were overwhelmingly plentiful, and clans were few. The only protection the vast
majority of individuals had for their safety and the safety of their offspringwas the security of the clan as a
whole. Additionally, the Indowy breeding groups precluded anything like the Human nuclear family.


 Another facet in the split had been that the Indowy Aelool had, by far, the greatest understanding among
his people of humanity as a species. He understood, in some small sense, why Human reproductive
patterns dictated that loyalty that did not go at least partly down chain as well as up was disastrous to any
tribe that adopted it. He understood why a social convention that was insane for his own species was not
only sane but necessary for humanity, especially its predominant surviving variants. In his understanding,
he was as rare as humans who truly understood why Indowy loolnieth worked—for Indowy. It was not,
as some in the cyberpunk faction supposed, a corrupt and dishonorable reaction to oppression by the
Darhel. It was not some Indowy feeding others to the tiger in the hopes that the tiger would eat them last.
Instead, it was just another example of the truism that aliens are alien.


 In retrospect, she'd had to admit that lack of Human understanding of the Indowy had been as much a
cause of the Bane Sidhe split into the Traditional Bane Sidhe and the O'Neal Bane Sidhe as the reverse.
Perversely, it made her feel better to acknowledge that. She certainly hadn't been responsible for Human
misunderstanding of the Indowy, whatever else she might have done.


The final break, the break that had resulted in the other clans packing up their delegations and leaving
Earth, also cutting themselves off from any Human agents the Bane Sidhe had managed to cultivate off
Earth, had also revolved around her. According to the majority faction of the Bane Sidhe, her capture on
Titan Base had presented a neat solution to the problem of a renegade agent and was best left alone
without risk of further exposure for the organization or expenditure of organization assets. Loolnieth
owed no allegiance to an individual operative, however occasionally useful.


 The Indowy Aelool, Father O'Reilly, Grandpa, and the entire leadership of what would become the
O'Neal Bane Sidhe realized that if Cally had been abandoned to torture and death without even an
attempt to determine if rescue was feasible, especially if a component of the decision was her personal
inconvenience, the ability to retain and recruit Human operatives would have been compromised to the
point of destruction. The operatives that could have been recruited would have been mercenaries with
little loyalty to the organization and would, every one, have represented horrendous risks of exposure.
The cyberpunk faction would have bolted outright, drastically reducing the ability of the Bane Sidhe to
operate on Earth. The cyberpunks had signed on with the Bane Sidhe back during the war, but they had
always harbored extreme reservations about the Indowy and had never truly integrated with the
non-cyber operatives. Cally had been admired and respected in the cyber community largely because she
was admired and respected by Tommy Sunday. The O'Neals and Sundays had forged strong ties over
the decades, including the development of Edisto Island as a unique refuge for the Human resistance.
When it was impolitic to ask for a close friend or family member, a completely trustworthy one, to be
taken in by the Bane Sidhe itself, the Edisto operation had smuggled many to new lives.


 None of that had mattered to Grandpa or Tommy at the time. They would have pursued any feasible
extraction plan to save her. However, the larger political calculus had meant that the next time she saw
the Base, the other side of the split was mostly packed and gone. Aelool and Beilil had taken the position
that the O'Neal was making a decision as clan head to preserve a vital asset of his clan, and had also
pointed out the "as yet" tiny size of Clan O'Neal and the corresponding magnification of the value of each
member. Cally thought that may have been just an excuse, out of blood loyalty from the Battle of Diess.
If so, she could live with that. Loyalty was loyalty.


 She shook herself out of her reverie as she passed an Indowy with a bay mare, about six and a half
hands and clearly gravid, headed down to the trotting ring. Obviously "travelling in pairs" included their
equine pets. Hey, whatever worked. It wasn't like they were going to run short on corn any time soon,
and hydroponics easily turned out everything else.


 She passed through workroom administration and back into equipment supply. Someone had obviously
reported her presence, because Aelool and Father O'Reilly had preceded her and were standing next to
a machine she hadn't seen before, chatting. It was a plain gray cube with beveled edges. Small seams
outlined shapes on its surface that were probably panels of some sort. Other than shape, the thing it most
reminded her of was the slab. God, she missed the slab. She rubbed the small of her back with one hand
as she took the small evening bag out of her purse, opened the pouch, and handed it over.


 Father O'Reilly took it without comment and placed one of the keys against a matching shape where it
clicked into place, only to click back out almost immediately as a beep nearly too high for Human ears
sounded and a spate of Galactic Standard appeared in the air above the device.


"Cally,what the hell did you steal? " Father O'Reilly asked, looking at the readout.


 "Me?" she spluttered. "You're the one that told me to! I followed that ops plan to the letter."Well, okay,
the ops plan did not say get the drawer's override code from your Michon Mentat sister, but it's
the thought that counts.


 Aelool's ears had turned in slightly and shoulders tightened in the expression Cally had learned to
interpret as "pensive."


"It is not a disaster. It is simply not useful to us at this time." His tone said not useful ever.
"What's wrong with it? It was where you said it would be. It looked just like the holograms in the
briefing. Is it broken or something?"Okay, bad enough that I have to stoop to being a cat burglar.
Money's tight, I know that. But I would like to at least not be blamed for someone else's bad intel.


 "Cally O'Neal, it is not that it is broken. And it is not your error. It is that our generator is only authorized
to read and execute level three and lower code keys. One of many redundancies in a system designed
with the best of intentions to prevent dangerous industrial accidents. It is unfortunately also useful as a
tool of political control." Aelool explained patiently, "These are simply more powerful keys. Almost
certainly level fours, or perhaps even level fives."


"But you sounded like they aren't worth anything. It seems like we could at least fence them. Can't we?"


"No. It is that we cannot use them ourselves and they are too overheated to fence." He sighed.


"Too hot?" she echoed.


"Isn't that what I said?" He cocked his head at an angle in a questioning gesture he'd copied from
humans and other terrestrials.


"More or less. So it was a busted mission after all. Sorry. Other than that is there a problem?" Cally
would have been the first one to admit that the business side of the organization was not her forte.


"The Darhel will not be happy. But it was a low budget mission and a small cost to us. And Darhel
happiness has never been one of my priorities." His face crinkled, amused.




 "You lostwhat?!! " The Epetar group executive suddenly understood why the useless, decayed, folth of
an underling, Pardal, had insisted on a meeting without any Indowy body servants and had meticulously
searched out and disabled the spy devices from rival groups that tended to accumulate over time. He
began his breathing drill and spent a few moments making sure he had himself under full, tight control
before continuing.


 "You have delayedshipping, "he said, coldly, raising a hand to forestall interruption by his hapless
subordinate. His clear displeasure did nothing to detract from the hypnotic, melodious tones for which his
species was renowned.


"You will explain to me how any Darhel, however incompetent, can contrive to lose six level nine
nanogenerator code keys in a single night. You will explain this in detail. You will pause when necessary
to control yourself and you willnot go into lintatai before you have completed your explanation.
Afterwardsfeel free. "




  Chapter Two
 Kieran Dougherty was not a tall man. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was downright short. At least,
he thought so. When he was on the ground. Which was one reason he liked to fly. The gray-eyed man
with short, straight mouse-brown hair and an extensive collection of freckles liked to fly the way
retrievers like to swim. The biggest design flaw of airplanes, in his opinion, was that they usually had to
land to be refueled. The other options were unfortunately beyond the resources of his organization at the
moment. Still, he could accept that, just as he could accept that an old and perpetually restored
puddlejumper was a lot less conspicuous than something with a lot more range and capability. Besides,
he liked prop-driven planes. You could really feel the air in them. Not that he would have turned
something newer and fancier down, mind you. He stopped daydreaming and focused his full attention as
he began his descent for Charleston. Any way you cut it, his worst day flying was still better than a day
stuck on the ground.


 As he slid into the pattern, Schmidt strapped into the copilot seat beside him and looked out the window
at the city lights as they came in. When he wasn't talking to the tower, Dougherty kept his mouth shut. He
knew Schmidt was listening to the engines. It wasn't by the book, but damned if Harry wasn't the best
aircraft mechanic he'd ever had. The guy loved engines, and was almost psychic in his ability to detect
anything that wasn't quite right with "his" bird. He was pretty damned good with the other stray aircraft
they had to cope with now and again on this crazy job, too.


 After landing, he got Lucille into the hangar and left her to Schmidt while he went outside for a cigar,
waving goodbye to Cally and Papa as they wheeled a couple of carefully anonymous black and gray
bikes out the back door, mounting up and disappearing through the chain link fence, hair and faces
hidden under the ubiquitous black helmets. Charleston airport was salty, and sandy, and the air was thick
with cold moisture that smelled like rain. Wind blew sand against his cheeks and he had to squint to keep
the little bits of grit out whenever the wind shift. He took deep drags off the Cuban cigar, staring at
nothing and wishing he was still in the air. He finished it and dropped the butt in the ashcan by the door
before going back in to hear Harry's update on his aircraft.


 "So how is she?" He looked over to Schmidt, who was whistling as he pulled on a coverall and got his
toolbox out of its locker.


 "Well, she sounds real good. I should be able to just go down the list and have her all checked out
before I leave tonight." He pulled a wrinkled and oil stained piece of paper out of the box and spread it
out neatly on the rolling cart where he was beginning to lay out the well-used and carefully cared-for tools
in their precise places. Harry didn't really need the list, he was just a touch obsessive. Dougherty could
understand that. It was one reason he trusted the other man to work on Lucille. On the other hand,
Dougherty had a personal life, sort of, when he wasn't in the air. Since he'd been assured he wouldn't get
to fly again for at least seventy-two hours, he was eager to go make the acquaintance of the pitcher of
stout that was calling his name. Maybe even find a girl with the right combination of looks and loneliness.
And a no expectations of permanence. A few minutes later he waved cheerfully to the security guard,
leaving the airport in search of beer and women. Song was optional.




 Cally shared a lane with Grandpa on their way home. She still missed her little apartment, but she
wouldn't trade the girls for anything, even if motherhood did mean moving back home. Oh, she hired one
of Wendy's granddaughters to play nanny whenever she expected to be gone for awhile, but there still
needed to be someone to watch over all the details and make sure everyone got where they should be on
time and all the bills got paid. If Grandpa was Clan O'Neal's patriarch and clan head, Shari had
matriarchy down pat. The O'Neal Bane Sidhe hid their headquarters in a Himmit-camouflaged mini
SubUrb deep under Indiana. The Clan O'Neal hid its headquarters in plain sight in a sprawling
farmhouse, in the swampy pine woods of Edisto Island.


 Technically bounty-farmers, living under various names and identities, the O'Neals and the Sundays, their
immediate in-laws, and assorted Bane Sidhe waifs and strays had kept the area on and around the island
swept clean of all but the occasional stray abat, the pests, for at least twenty years. It would have been
inaccurate to call the clan self-sufficient on the local land and sea. They had a source of working capital.
The Clan O'Neal men (by now the Sundays were regarded as a cadet branch) who planned to work for
the Bane Sidhe tended to seek training, and find it, in the armed services. While Fleet Strike and Fleet
remained the primary armed forces of the Galactic Federation, the various United States and Canadian
military organizations still remained. Missions tended to be against pirates or insurgents. Or the US
military "loaned" units to Fleet or Fleet Strike, or other Galactic interests, for specialty functions. To limit
the problems associated with being off-planet and unavailable, the O'Neals tended to gravitate to what
was still called counter-terror special ops. Large parts of it on both coasts still lay in ruins, but the United
States was no more able to survive without the rest of the world now than it had been pre-war. The war
itself had been a special case, but strategic resources from overseas were as important now as they ever
had been. In modern times, counter-terror really meant protecting those strategic resources and the trade
lanes that served the many single-export colonies.


Their service in the military provided excellent training while continuing an honored family tradition, albeit
under assumed identities. It also brought hard currency into the Clan community. Their pay covered
goods and services that the island community couldn't make or grow for themselves. It stretched the
dollars from the small cash crops some of the women grew each year. Low-country agriculture had been
a hand-to-mouth proposition long before the war, and the O'Neals didn't go in for tourism, great beaches
or not. Still, shipping by moonlight was an old and revered tradition along the North American coastline.
A couple of what she still thought of as "the kids" had quite a talent for it.


 Having grown up with just Grandpa, and then having lived alone for so long, Cally still felt vaguely
claustrophobic if she stayed too long in what had become a happy, if chaotic and often quarrelsome,
jumble of aunts and uncles younger than she was mixed with all sorts of cousins, grown or growing. Not
to mention various people relocated by the Bane Sidhe, who needed to live someplace anonymous for
awhile. Without the slab, that added up to a good little small town, even though a number of kin had
wrapped themselves up in very sincere identities and assimilated into the outside world. The Clan was
careful to turn in enough Posleen heads for bounty, maintaining the illusion that the area was still infested.
This brought in a little hard currency, but they were having to go farther and farther afield each year in
search of prey.


 Cally and Papa's drive didn't take as long as it could've, once they'd navigated the tunnel under the
Charleston Wall. The O'Neals kept the track between Charleston and Edisto well maintained, but took
pains to make it look dilapidated. When they got on a good patch of straightaway, they could really open
up the engines and make some time. It would have been suicide without the buckleys running IR watch
for whitetail deer. With them, it was merely foolhardy. But fun. Well, except for a bug that hit her helmet's
air-intake and sieved into her mouth, leaving her spitting what tasted like grass the rest of the way. You
took the good with the bad.


 It was pre-dawn by the time they got home, the sky turning slowy from blue-gray to gold. The sun
wasn't up, and neither were most of the kids. One of the girls coming out to milk her cows waved to
them as they pulled into the packed sand and shell driveway. They wheeled the bikes into the shed
behind the house, racking the helmets neatly on a set of carved wooden hooks. As Cally climbed the
cinderblock kitchen stairs and trudged down the creaky pine hallway to the add-on Grandpa had built for
her and the girls, she knew her ass was dragging. All that way and all that work for nothing. What a night.
She checked that her shades were pulled down and sealed tight before shutting her door and going to
bed, shedding shoes and clothes on the way. As long as it stayed dark, her body would neither know nor
care that it was daytime out there. She needed at least a good six hours before she was going to feel
Human again. She patted the washcloth on her nightstand where Shari had left it. That was thoughtful.
The sheets smelled faintly of lilly of the valley as she snuggled between them and shut her eyes.


 The grass was wet under her feet and her sneakers squelched loudly as she snuck through the
trees, hunting rats. The twenty-two rifle in her hand was pointed upwards, away from any
non-targets. Oh, God—she ducked as an owl flew past right in front of her face, a struggling rat
between its claws. A rat with a Human face. Oh no, not the faces again, I hate the faces. A twig
broke next to her and she jumped, inadvertently pulling the trigger. The shot echoed loudly in the
night. A woman beside her in an antiquated nun's habit sneered, "Stupid girl! You had your finger
on the trigger. Now they've got you for sure." She tried not looking at the face, but the glazed
eyes and tongue hanging out, so still, drew her own eyes upwards. And then she could hear the
hissing growl and the thud of clawed feet behind her. The horses were coming for her. She
dropped the rifle and ran and kept running, down the empty galplas corridors, spattered and rust
brown. There was a door and she didn't want to go in it but she had to hide. The door swung open
and another one of the faces leered out from the darkness. "They'll kill you just like you killed me.
But come in, come in. I was such a scumbag, I deserved it. You'll be in such good company, won't
you, Cally?" Her t-shirt was plastered against her in cold sweat as she turned and ran again. They
were closer now. Quick, into a ventilation shaft! And she was over the edge and falling, and the
faces were in the walls again, going past as she fell, and she tried to scream but she—


 She was sitting up in bed, her breath coming in gasps. The t-shirt she'd slept in was cold and wet on her
skin. She grabbed her washcloth, burying her face in it and shuddering.That was a bad one. They told
me the dreams might come back when I started working again, but damn. What time is it,
anyway? She looked over at the alarm clock and groaned.Only nine-thirty? Ah, hell. Might as well
get up. No way I'm getting back to sleep after that.


 She pulled on a robe and a pair of big, cushiony slippers that had been fuzzy once upon a time, and
wandered into the kitchen in search of coffee and breakfast. She yawned, feeling her back pop as she
stretched out the kink that had somehow worked its way into her spine.


 Shari was in the kitchen. Slim, her hair the gold of the dune grass on the beach, Cally's step-grandmother
looked twenty-something, like all juvs in their first century. She'd been a middle-aged mother back in the
war when Cally was just thirteen. Both women had old eyes—eyes that had seen too much. Shari's were
more motherly and less haunted. The kind of mother's eyes that didn't miss a thing. She was loading her
breakfast dishes in the dishwasher when Cally came into the kitchen. The O'Neals had to be careful to
keep it quiet, but electricity was damn near free. When you had friends who played with antimatter
almost as an afterthought, power for basic household needs wasn't a problem. Raising the kids to
understand and follow blackout rules on the electric lights could have been rough, if they hadn't been
doing it all their lives. To satellites or aircraft, what few there were, Edisto Island looked like just another
war-wasted and not-yet-recovered stretch of wilderness. Well, italmost was. Secretive clannishness
had, by now, become a set of ingrained habits. The O'Neals had learned some hard lessons about
survival and had adapted and copied a few tricks from their Galactic friends. In a pre-Posleen world,
Clan O'Neal would have been a flock of very odd ducks. In the modern world, they were survivors.


"You're up early. Not another nightmare?" A frown crinkled Shari's forehead as she pressed a mug into
Cally's hands, "I just fixed a fresh pot. Carrie said you got in about milking time this morning."


 "Yeah, she was just going out. The kids are at school?" Cally yawned again, pouring a mugful of the
wonderful-smelling fresh, strong coffee, but neglecting to pollute it with cream or sugar. It didn't matter
how many times they told her it was hard-coded, she was convinced she was keeping just a little of the
extra weight off her thighs and chest by watching what she ate. She split a bagel and dropped it in the
toaster.


 "Mmm. I expected it would be almost time for them to get out and come home by the time you and
Michael woke up. Pam works so hard on her lesson plans, it's a shame to have the girls miss a day. So,
'fess up, how long's it been since you went to confession?" Shari asked.


"Uh . . . a few months, I guess." Cally hedged. Actually, it had been more like eight months, since she'd
gone back to work full time and been taken off of the six-monthly courier run to the Moon.Dammit .


 "Go to confession. I'm not Catholic, but even I'll agree it does you more good than that fancy Bane
Sidhe shrink ever did. Here," she said, putting a box of cornflakes and a bowl on the table, then turning
to grab the milk, "Still can't see why you like that stuff when I've got cheese grits in the crockpot. It's not
like you have to worry about your arteries. Go to confession." She must have thought Cally's pensive
expression was disagreement because she shook the wooden spoon in her hand towards the younger
woman. "You're my friend, Cally O'Neal, and I won't have you getting all shredded up inside again. It
was bad enough when you were pregnant with Morgan. Go or I'll . . . I'll sic Michael on you!"
 "Alright, alright already. I'll go. Last thing I need is Grandpa nagging." Cally said, crunching her cereal
and wincing as the sound echoed in her skull against her headache.God, I really needed more sleep.


The younger woman was halfway through her breakfast when the door opened. A largish pile of dirty
white fur and drool came bounding in, scattering sand across the clean floor. As Shari pulled the joyfully
maniacal dog off of Cally and ushered it back out the door, she glared at her husband, who was shaking
out his own shoes off the edge of the steps.


 "Sorry, honey. He got past me again. Nagging about what?" Papa O'Neal looked sheepish as he shut
the door behind the dog. He shook his head, looking for someplace he could politely spit. Shari handed
him a mug and a broom.


"Good morning, Grandpa. I thought you'd still be in bed." Cally said, brushing sand off her lap.


"When you're older and wiser, you'll have the sense to take a nap the day before a night job." Papa
O'Neal sometimes seemed to forget he didn't look a day over twenty-five.


"Yes, Grandpa. We all know the elderly sometimes need an afternoon nap," she said, brushing her hair
back behind one ear. It was a habit from the Sinda persona she had never quite dropped.


 "Elderly, hah! Who had the aches and pains last time we met in the gym?" He grinned, dodging as she
took a swipe at him, and began to sweep.


"What were you thinking about for dinner tonight?" She asked Shari, pointedly ignoring Grandpa as she
drained her cup of coffee.


"I thought I'd take a crab and chicken casserole Pam came up with and get rid of a few leftovers. Why?
What's on your mind?" Shari finished loading the dishes and started the machine.


"Just wondered if there was something I could fix to help out."


 "If you could make something for dessert this afternoon, I'm sure the kids would like it. I could use
something sweet myself." Shari took a cloth and began wiping down the counters.


 "That works. I need to go down to Ashley's for some stuff. I can get the kids and make the weekend
incinerator run if you want," Cally offered, glancing at the nearly full can.


"Thanks. Um, Mark's spending the night with Lucas. The keys to the truck are on the hook," Shari said
absently, preoccupied with slapping away the hand that was playing around the belt loops on the back of
her jeans. She wasn't slapping very hard. Cally smothered a grin and grabbed up the bag and the keys as
she scooted out the door, reminding herself not to get backtoo quick.




 Years ago, when she was a teenager freshly home on summer break, she had ridden cross-country with
Grandpa in a dusty red pickup truck from the School, in Idaho. They came back through all of the
midwestern rear area country, until they met up with Shari in Knoxville, where she'd been filling the
shopping list. It seemed Grandpa had shamelessly used the slab and about a dozen different identities,
with some judicious palm grease, to buy up the bounty farm allotments for all of Edisto Island. Even back
then, she could easily imagine him going through all the changes, because it still looked strange as hell to
her to see him with red hair and all young and everything. He probably would have kept on buying until
he'd owned half of Colleton County if Father O'Reilly hadn't gotten concerned and ratted him out to
Shari.


 Still, even the Bane Sidhe had had to agree that the possibilities were useful. And it was already a done
deal by the time they'd realized what he was up to. Grandpa got to keep his island, but the price for Cally
was that her first summer home from school had been spent hunting Posleen and getting a crash course in
lowcountry construction. Typically, Papa O'Neal had spent his free time during her first year of school in
a combination of shady trades of Galtech goods from the Rabun Gap cache—those he didn't plan to
keep for himself—and brushing up his construction skills doing day labor jobs.


 The hardest part had been sweeping the island once they got there. Satellite shots showed the bridge
was intact, but they hadn't known much else. And at the time Edisto Island was very nearly as far as
anyone had penetrated into the Lost Zone. The ride in the back of truck, on the first load of mostly
cinderblocks, ammo, and the bare necessities, watching the treeline for feral Posleen, had not been fun.
Not fun at all. She'd gotten five of them, and that was just on her own side. The large, ochre, centauroid
reptiles had to be the most repulsive things she'd ever seen.


 She'd thanked God that Grandpa had decided that speed was more important than profit and had put
off taking the heads and hauling them on the truck to the first bounty outpost at Spartanburg. They were
repulsive enough lying dead on the pavement leaking yellow ichor into the ground. Having that stinking
mess in the truck right next to her would really have been too much, wrapped in a tarp or not. He'd
sprung for the rental fee for a really big truck for that one, bringing down most of the parts of the house.
Most of parts of Grandpa and Shari's house were, of course, galactic materials. Extruded and formed to
spec, they could laugh off a direct hit by a hurricane. And over the next couple of centuries, they
probably would.


 Sensors and scanners for civilians hadn't even been a dream in some bright boy's head that soon after
the war. Making do with the Mark I Eyeball when a postie just might have picked up a railgun from
somewhere wasn't quite as terrifying as being in a bunker too damned near ground zero of a nuclear
explosion, but it had been close. The worst part of the ride had been whenever they crossed a postie
bridge. She'd known they were structurally sound, of course, but the reminder oforganized and
technological Posleen had rubbed salt in memories that were all too fresh.
 The first month on the island had been a hot and muggy hell, especially to a girl who'd recently
acclimated to the Idaho mountain air. Sister Gabriella had really believed in PT, so at least she hadn't
been out of shape. Standing her watch at night, stalking posties from one end of the island to the other,
bit by bit, in the day had been tiring and tedious as hell. It wasn't that there were a whole lot of ferals.
There weren't. Fleet and Fleet Strike and all the rest had done their job, and, once the God-Kings were
gone, the ravenous hunger of the feral Posleen normals had done even more. It was just that posties,
even a single isolated feral normal, were so terribly nasty. At least she'd gotten to vent her frustration at
the heat and the mosquitos and the sand in everything whenever they'd actually found a Posleen. Grandpa
didn't care, he'd just let her vent, as long as she didn't give him cause to scold her for wasting ammo. She
didn't. Well, not more than once. And she'd had a really bad morning that day.


 Shari's kids had stayed at a Bane Sidhe safehouse back in Knoxville that summer. Cally hadn't blamed
her one bit for keeping them out of it. They hadn't been trained for any of this. She had. Well, she'd lived
with Grandpa during the war, which had amounted to the same thing. By the time they'd finished clearing
the island, putting up the cinderblock and earth-berm-reinforced guardshack had been nothing. Guarding
the bridge for the three days it had taken Grandpa and Shari to bring back the big truck of building
materials from Knoxville had been interesting. Before they left, she had helped Grandpa and Shari load
up the rotting but still identifiable postie heads in the back of the pickup. Another nasty job.


 Grandpa had helped her run the line of tripwires connected to alarms back and forth across the bridge.
It was still a day and a half before she could convince herself to take the time to sleep. In the end, only
one of the moronic, leaderless feral normals had happened along and actually tried to cross the bridge.
Then had come the icky task of chopping it into pieces she could carry and dropping them over the side
of the bridge and down into the water. She pitied the aquatic scavengers that had to dine on the thing, but
she could hardly leave it on the bridge to rot and attract more. And then she'd had to wrap the head and
keep it so they could take it in for the bounty later. She'd made sure it was downwind.


 After Shari and Grandpa got back, having brought Billy to ride high sentry and help out, they'd reviewed
the island looking for the best place to build. On a plot on the landward side, next to a big bay, Shari had
found an old bit of street sign that had somehow survived the scavenging. It had said "Jungl" on the only
bit that was left. Grandpa had laughed and said that was home for him. The name had stuck, and even all
these years later everybody still called it Papa's Jungle House. When they didn't call it Mama's house.
Cally still couldn't figure out quite how it had happened, but over the decades Shari had somehow
become honorary mother or grandmother to the whole island, whether the kids or grandkids or—hell, the
relationships were all too confusing—were hers, or not.


 When she was out and about, she could still see what Cally regarded as the O'Neal touch in the layout
of the island. Everything was downplayed to any potential observer on land, sea or overhead. Trees and
brush and dunes broke up vertical outlines and while planted fields were impossible to hide, a whole lot
could be done with roofs and netting. Between irregular overhangs and creative use of vegetation, most
roofs couldn't be distinguished from the air. Hiding, of course, wasn't the point. Obfuscation was enough.
With so many people moving into the Lost Zones, the purpose was to make the O'Neal compound seem
just one more group of poor but independent bounty-hunters.
 The houses of O'Neals and Sundays were not showplace houses, designed to be artistic, designed to be
seen. Rather, they were designed to fade into the background. Shrubbery and vegetation around the
houses wasn't planted to artistically enhance, but to blur straight lines and obscure. A pre-war Green
would have loved it. All so artistic. All so earthy. All so . . . deadly.




 Cally savored the smell of the salt on the brisk fall air as she walked across the road from the parking lot
to pick up the kids. The olive drab pack on her back, brought along for the groceries, helped block the
wind. She'd worn her shooting glasses to keep the fine, blowing sand out of her eyes. The school was
only about a klick from the house, and right across from the small building that served as a local barter
market and grocery store. She wouldn't even have driven if there hadn't been the trash to haul. Ashley
Privett, Wendy and Tommy's oldest, had made a good business out of selling baked goods when she'd
first arrived on the island some years ago, and over time had evolved into a sort of barter grocer, keeping
track of what came in from who and selling on consignment.


 After the BS split, Cally had figured out a way to stretch her shrunken salary by using half her personal
baggage allowance on each trip between home and base carrying something abundant one place and
scarce in the other. Consequently, her pack was about half full with jars of soy sauce, corn syrup, four
quart jars of moonshine, and some bagged popcorn. Bringing corn to the lowcountry would have been
like bringing sand to the beach except for the relative difference in price, and that the Indiana popcorn
popped a lot better. She'd gone out with two pounds each of roasted coffee beans, baking chocolate,
cane sugar, home-made cigars, a pack of vanilla beans, three bottles of rum, and a bolt's worth each of
indigo denim and unbleached shirt-weight oxford cloth. Her market for stone-ground hominy grits had
gone out in the first year, after one of the women on the cleaning crew on Base had figured out how to
make it herself. It had been a niche market, anyway. Besides, cloth was better. There was always a
market for blue jeans. She supposed she was technically a smuggler, among other things. Not like it
mattered. Assassin, smuggler, thief, but not a drunk—it's kind of hard to become an alcoholic when your
blood nannites break it down before you ever feel the effects. Not a brawler—well, mostly. Not a
rapist—she'd heard itwas technically possible, but it wasn't to her tastes or her needs, even if she had
been celibate for months now.Dammit.


 That was the worst thing about getting back on the team. Her six monthly regular courier slot to the
moon would be given to someone else on light duty, and she'd have to find some other way to arrange
time with James. Okay, Stewart. And of course she couldn't explain why she wanted to keep the courier
route. She couldn't even ask to keep it. She'd been lucky to get it in the first place. James had been on
Earth for conferences twice since Morgan was born. Unfortunately for her love life, she was probably
going to have to wait until he could get down here again. Anything less wasn't an option. In forty or so
years work for the Bane Sidhe, she'd had enough casual sex to last multiple lifetimes. She'd denied it
often enough, even to herself, but she'd been looking for "the real thing." Having found it, she was hardly
going to settle for less. Oh, if the fate of humankind was at stake, she wasn't going to be a prude, but
she'd also determined to say no to plans that involved her as a honey trap if it was just a matter of getting
information faster or cheaper. Sure, sometime faster or cheaper might mean life was on the line. But more
frequently than not, it wasn't. Motherhood was an excuse for saying no. It sometimes meant they weren't
happy with her, but under the circumstances, she could live with that.
 Still, it was good that Grandpa owned the island free and clear. Before the split, her pay had been
enough to keep a footloose single girl in beer and skittles, but hadn't been anything to write home about.
Since the split, if she hadn't moved back home, she'd be struggling to make ends meet for herself, let
alone the girls. It frustrated James that he couldn't help, of course. But in her business, having more
money than you ought was dangerous. Bosses were understandably paranoid about who else might be
paying their covert operatives, and for what. Fortunately, since the smuggling was almost a public service
to the organization, it was honest income. Enough for a bit extra for Christmas and birthdays, anyway.
Saving the world was great for warm and fuzzy feelings, but the pay sucked.


 She kicked at the sand and a bit of some scrubby creeping plant with one foot, frowning as the sand in
her sneaker reminded her of the hole she had worn through the sole. Still, living in the next thing to
paradise was a nice compensation on its own, thanks to Grandpa. And if paradise was gritty and placid
and boring, those were what made a good place to raise kids. Even if the Bane Sidhe had made her into
a thief. At least every mission she went out on to steal something was one mission where she probably
could manage not to kill anybody. That was something, wasn't it?


 She shoved her hands in the pockets of the olive drab windbreaker she'd pulled on over a faded red
t-shirt and jeans. The fall wind was starting to cut right through the holes at her knees and back pocket.
Time to patch this pair. She stepped over a dried palmetto frond that had gotten blown together with
spanish moss and downed leaves.


 The external walls of the little schoolhouse were plastered with tabby and screened with vegetation, the
thin sheet of galplas that surfaced the roof had been tuned to a camouflage pattern Shari had done up on
her PDA. The windows, while clear, had been coated with a thin film that kept the sunlight from glaring
off of them, although they still admitted daylight and allowed the children to see out. On the side closest
to Grandpa's and Shari's was one of the small concessions to color that the teacher and some of the
mothers had insisted on—the children's flower garden. Currently, there was a small carpet of pansies
peeking mischievously out at the afternoon sunlight. It was another reason Cally picked up the kids
herself in the afternoons whenever she could—the flowers were nice.


 Most of the kids were out on the obstacle course by now. Well, okay, there was a seesaw and a rope
swing, when somebody wasn't climbing it. The monkey-bars and tower and such were all kid-sized, and
the kids tended to attack everything from the cargo nets to the tower in no particular order, substituting
random, chaotic enthusiasm for the single-mindedness of adult PT. Still, the O'Neals and Sundays and
various children of Bane Sidhe families were the only children she'd ever seen play hide and go seek in
ghillie suits. At four, Sinda hadn't quite gotten the idea yet. She was sitting under the tree happily weaving
flowers and bits of brightly colored construction paper into the new section of loose, unbleached cotton
netting Grandpa had given her last week.


 "Mommy!" Morgan yelled, dropping off the rope swing and running across the packed sand. Sinda,
whose head had jerked up as soon as she heard her sister cry out, wasn't far behind her, having left her
netting behind her on the ground. Cally crouched down and spread her arms, catching one girl in each,
and enjoyed the best moment of her day.


"Did you two have a good day?" she asked, looking into one set of green eyes and one set of brown
ones. Sinda's honey-blond hair hung around her shoulders in curls. Morgan's straighter and shorter
brown hair looked like she'd been rolling around in the sand.


 She braced herself for impact as a little red-haired girl, liberally daubed with fingerpaint, crashed into the
three of them. "Aunt Cally! Aunt Cally!" she squealed.


Cally picked up three-year-old Carrie, who was actually technicallyher aunt, weird as that was, and
planted her on one hip. "Hiya, squirt!" she said.


"Come look at my Billy suit, Mommy!" Sinda started dragging her over to the now brightly decorated
piece of netting, while Morgan said something about her books and ran inside.


Cally looked down at the netting as her four year old pulled it over her head like a scarf and preened at
her. "It's a very colorful ghillie suit. The most colorful one I've ever seen," she said.


"Do you just love it?" Sinda asked.


"It's very pretty. But isn't it going to stand out when you play hide and go seek with the other kids?"


Sinda's forehead wrinkled a bit. "I could hide in the flowers!"


"Every time?" Cally said.


Sinda nodded cheerfully. "I like flowers. They're my favorite."


 "Okay. Are y'all ready to go to the store?" Cally asked as Morgan came back, a blue denim backpack
slung over one small shoulder.


 They walked across a path that had bits of pavement, indicating it probably had once really been a
street, to the store. Privett's Grocery was a weathered gray pine building, almost a shed, really, with a
mud-brown roof of galplas tiles and a couple of windows with big, gray, storm shutters latched open
against the walls. A bright splash of color came from the fresh fruits and vegetables displayed in wooden
carts on the front porch. The carts were obviously new, the boards the golden white of fresh,
unweathered pine.


 As soon as they got in the door, Carrie started struggling and Cally put her down. The girls drooled over
the assortment of fudge behind the counter while she swapped her trade goods, incoming for outgoing,
and picked out her own groceries. Shari's cabbages hadn't survived this year, so she grabbed a head of
cabbage for coleslaw, and a bottle of lemon juice that must have been put up last year. A pitcher of
lemonade would be a nice treat for everybody. She got each girl a small piece of fudge wrapped in rice
paper, fighting the temptation to buy one for herself. Christmas was just around the corner, and it was
going to be tight this year. Besides shewas making brownies for dessert. Halfway down the steps she
turned around and went back for the square of fudge. It was definitely getting to be time to do something
about her salary.




  Chapter Three
 Grandpa was quiet as he fought with the tie-downs on the tent-roof thingy they were putting up over the
picnic table. Cally knew it said gazebo on the box, but a she'd seen plenty of gazebos in Indiana—white,
wooden, merry-go-round buildings without the ride. This was just a square tent roof with four poles and
top to bottom mosquito netting. She got the zipper to work and zipped the mosquito netting from bottom
to top outside her pole, moving on to the next one. Shari was grilling some hotdogs for the little kids, and
had a shrimp boil going for the adults.


 Cally had really hated having to tell Grandpa that "our" meeting with Michelle was reallyher meeting with
Michelle. She'd felt like she'd just taken away a kid's Christmas candy. He hadn't said much, then or
since. She'd passed on Michelle's excuse, and cringed when he'd tried to wave it away as "no bother" to
him as Clan Head. From the way Michelle had sounded, it hadn't seemed like she'd show unless Cally
was alone. Grandpa didn't understand, of course. She didn't, either, but she wasn't the one being left out.
Telling him had been just awful.


Soon they'd gotten the netting down, which was more to stop the blowing sand than anything, all sensible
mosquitos having decided to stay out of the cold, or whatever it was mosquitos did. She looked at her
watch and threw a side-glance at Grandpa. Neither one met the other's eyes. She looked up at Shari,
whose eyes plainly said she didn't want to be involved.


"I guess it's about that time. I'll be back in a bit," Cally said. Grandpa just grunted in reply.Not gonna be
a real relaxed dinner, is it.


 Cally picked her way through the tall grass to a set of ancient railroad-tie stairs and started down onto
the beach. She looked out at the waves hitting the shore and sighed, futilely trying to tuck her hair behind
her ears. The wind insisted on blowing it right into her face. She dug an elastic band out of her jeans and
pulled it back in a ponytail. It made her look about sixteen. Twelve, if it hadn't been for the boobs, which
she still considered overwhelming. She sighed, but it wasn't like anyone but family was here to see her.
The impression of adolescence was complete as she walked down the beach, scuffing her feet in the
sand.


"Where are you going?" The voice came from behind her and Cally jumped, spinning around in a crouch.
 "Ack! Don'tdo that!" Cally clutched a hand to her chest and looked up at the girls, letting a breath of
relief out that they were still sitting at the table and maybe hadn't noticed anything unusual. "You didn't
just appear out of nowhere, did you?"


 "Please give me credit for some sense. I came in behind that pile of rubble." Michelle gestured at the
crumbling remains of some cinderblock structure or other. "I only walked down when I saw you. So it
seems I am finally at a beach with you."


 "Yeah," Cally said. There was an uncomfortable silence. "Before we get into the mission, real quick, can
I ask you a question about nanogenerator code keys?"


"Your employers do not have the capability to make use of the keys you stole." It wasn't a question.


"Right. Our people say they're level fours and would be difficult to fence," Cally said.


 "The current price of six level four code keys would be sixty thousand seven hundred and forty-eight
point zero nine seven fedcreds as of close of business at the Chicago Trade Consortium. I would be
willing to pay that amount for the keys you took from the Darhel last night. Do you agree to carry my
offer to your employers? It would be an arrangement of benefit to Clan O'Neal." If possible, Michelle's
voice was even more expressionless, and she stood still in her Mentat robes. They should have been
blowing in the wind, but weren't. The wind wasn't allowed to so much as ruffle her hem, and Cally was
suddenly aware of the sand in her own shoes and the blowing wisps of ultra-pale blond hair that had
escaped from her ponytail.


 Michelle had clearly inherited her height from their father and Grandpa. Her petite five foot nothing had
an almost boyish slimness that made her sister feel awkward in her own tall frame. If she could have seen
herself through the eyes of others, the unlikely assassin would have realized her comparatively small waist
and Scandinavian features made her look more like a nineteen-nineties calendar girl than the chubby
teenager she imagined. If Captain Sinda Makepeace had been anything, she'd been strikingly attractive.
Cally's physical appeal had not suffered from being stuck in the other woman's semblance when the
Indowy and Tchpht yanked the slab off Earth. Unconsciously, she arched her back and stood straighter
in a seven year habit designed to minimize her imagined defects.


 "Okay, we'll sell you the keys. My bosses will probably be thrilled I found a safe buyer. Now, what
couldn't you tell me last night?" Cally asked.


"I could have told you all of it. But you seemed rushed." Michelle said. Cally looked for any sign that she
was making a joke, but couldn't see one. Perhaps Indowy-raised mentats didn't have anything as
mundane as a sense of humor.


"First, you need a way to reach me with questions about the mission. There must be some kind of
indicator you can set somewhere for me to see. I can not watch you every minute of every day—I have
work I must do. I would prefer a day's notice in advance of a meeting, if possible. This is your specialty,
is it not? Do you have any suggestions?"


 "Um . . . lemme think. There are several message boards on the Perfect Match singles site on the web.
When I need to meet you, I'll place a message on the pre-date board. The message should be from
MargarethaZ, capitol 'M,' capitol 'Z,' no spaces. It should go to whoever you are. Say . . . Apollo555.
I'll post it the day before I need you, or include the word 'diamond' if it's an emergency and I need you
sooner.You can find me, right? And check that I'm alone? If we don't have to set up a code for meeting
time and place, it makes it a lot less complicated and a lot harder for anyone else to twig to."


 "Do I need to know what a single's site is? Never mind, I am sure it will be clear enough. MargarethaZ,
Apollo555, and diamond. I will remember." Michelle nodded. "Here is a broad outline of the mission. I
have a colleague, a fellow mentat, who has recently acquired an obscure piece of very old technology
and developed it into a problematic device. It is a device which should not remain in his keeping. I wish
to hire your team to obtain the device and deliver it to me so that I can arrange safe storage for it. The
priority is, however, on removing the device from the possession of this colleague. If a choice comes
between damaging the device or failing to remove it, it is the removal which absolutely must be done to
complete the contract."


"Okay. Are we supposed to just waltz in and take whatever this is?" Cally asked, her brow furrowing. "I
presume you have a full description, location information, some background. Any recon data you have
would be nice. Come on, I'm going to need the most complete information you can possibly give me for
us to plan and execute this mission. First of all, what the hell is this device? What does it do, and what
does it look like?" Cally glanced quickly up to where the candlelight was silhouetting the girls, glad that
Morgan appeared to be putting their dinner things back in the packs.


 "It is a discontinuous, partially automated, multi-channeled, medium-range harmonic resonance inductor.
I have a datacube for you with full external specifications, a very abbreviated overview of its known and
theorized capabilities, and the location of the facility where it is being used." Michelle said, "Of course,
you must absolutely avoid any direct confrontation with—"


"Whoa. Back up a second. It's a discon-what? What does it do, in plain English, please."


 "I was speaking plain English. The best way I can describe the action is that it affects the brain, in this
case of Human subjects, stimulating and analyzing the internal signals for report and, if desired, overriding
the internal voluntary muscle commands and other processes with replacement sequences of the
operator's choosing."


"What, like reading minds? You're shitting me."


"Excuse me? What does excrem—nevermind. In a very non-technical and imprecise sense, that is
probably a workable functional estimate. Although it would be a mistake to overlook the capacity for
control."


"It's a mind-raper."


"The process is reported to be quite unpleasant for the subject, yes."


"You're telling me this monstrosity really exists? Yuck!" Cally shuddered. "That's vile. That's really, really
vile." She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, hugging herself. She almost thought she could feel the
goosebumps.


 "That is an adequate non-technical description of the device's function. One reason I chose to hire your
team for this mission is convenience of location. The research facility where the device is located is
outside the Great Lakes Fleet Base. Obviously, they will have some sort of Human security arrangements
in addition to the automated systems. Your people are going to have to determine what those are and be
prepared to deal with them. You must avoid any direct confrontation with the other mentat, Erick
Winchon. You will need to use a time when Erick Winchon is absent. He has periodic absences from the
facility, you'll need to determine his schedule and use one of them." Michelle paused, taking a deep
breath. "The deadline for this job is January 15 of 2055, Earth time. By that date, I must have in my
possession either the device itself or conclusive proof that it has been destroyed. The proof must be
sufficient to pass a rigorous inspection by a Galactic Contract Court."


 "What can you tell me about how the device is protected and guarded? I'll need the blueprints of the
facility."


 "Much of that you will have to determine yourselves. It is what your team does, is it not? I will, of
course, get you any information I can without exposing my actions."


 Cally rubbed her chin, thinking. "One of the classic ways of working this kind of mission involves a
switch of a replica for the target item to postpone discovery of the theft. I need not only the external
specifications of the device but everything you can tell me about the device itself and how it's used and
when and by whom so that I can get a convincing replica made, if that's even possible. We'll do our
research thoroughly, but the more you can tell us about the device, the better chance we have at
constructing a convincing replica. The other solutions I can think of are all more complicated. That would
mean more expensive, with more chances for something to go wrong."


 "I do not think your organization could build a cosmetic replica that would fool the security systems or
the lower level employees. I will build a facsimile of the device that should deceive anyone but another
mentat. I will deliver the facsimile to you before the first opportunity to acquire the device arises."
Michelle pressed a datacube into her sister's hand. "Hug your girls for me." She folded her arms closer in,
a gesture that had immediately preceded her disappearance from Pardal's suite before.


"Wait!" Cally said.
"Yes?" The tightness in the mentat's arms loosened fractionally.


"You said you'd get us information if you could. If you have anyone inside that could be vitally important.
That's the biggest risk of the entire mission—it can take months to get a man inside a secure facility, or
more. As I understand it, we don't have that kind of time, but we need that kind of subtlety to pull this
off. We can work without it, but it sure would be a big help."


 "I have a worker there who owes me a significant favor. He cannot help directly. It would place his
actions too close to both violence and breaching his word. The favor owed is large, but not that large. I
do not see how he could help you. He works off the main site, in their personnel department." There was
a long silence as she thought, the wind off the sea at last ruffling a few stray tendrils of hair from her
severe bun.


"Could he get you a list of any job openings? They've got to have vacancies, coming open feet first.
Operations like these always do. If he could influence hiring decisions by losing some resumes or
bumping ours to the top of the list, that would really help."


 "Possibly. Do you have any idea how difficult it would be to 'lose' an electronic resume? Not to mention
several. I will do what I can."


Cally placed a hand on Michelle's arm, only to take it back for no reason she could name, just that the
mentat seemed somehow more withdrawn than before.


"There was something else?" her sister asked.


"Grandpa was pretty hurt that you wouldn't see him, you know. Telling him was hard. I'd at least like to
know why." She shoved her hands into her jeans pockets and stared out to sea.


"The split in the Bane Sidhe has created political difficulties between myself and the Indowy." Michelle
didn't even twitch. Cally found it irritating.


 "Oh, don't tell me you're shutting out Grandpa because of your job. Donot tell me that." She fixed her
sister with an icy, gimlet stare.


"You do not understand. I remind myself that you do not understand," Michelle said.


"Damn right I don't!"
 "You need resources. I am, for now, able to help you. I can only keep the access to help you by
avoiding the O'Neal. No, allow me to finish. Of course I want to see Grandfather. At present, I am what
you might call 'in limbo,' but I am balanced upon the edge of a knife. It is for me as if the split had not yet
taken place. I have not yet been officially informed of the change in clan policy and alliance by my head
of clan, or an immediate ancestor, or his designate. I can pretend official ignorance. Among Indowy, this
would be impossible. They would never go so long without a meeting. But humanity's asocial nature has
the Himmit, Darhel, and Tchpht precedent. It is viewed as different but not insane. Clan O'Neal may
desperately need my resources at some point. Once I meet with Grandfather, I must then confine my
future dealings to Clan Aelool or Clan Beilil, and my resources will be greatly reduced. For myself, I
would be well enough. But at the cost of greatly increased risk to the survivability of Clan O'Neal. The
Indowy know that I must know, yet they know that the resources serve my clan. And so they cannot
decide whether I am being supremely honorable, or supremely dishonorable. The thought is distressing to
them, so they ignore it, waiting for the dilemma to resolve itself. Which may happen either by
reconciliation of the O'Neal with one or more major clans, which is highly unlikely, or by my meeting with
my clan head. I must maintain this delicate balance until our clan is secure. I admit that my understanding
of the value of what it is that you do is limited, but I believe we both understand that loyalty requires
personal sacrifices. As our estrangement through the years has been. Please believe me that this is a most
regrettable sacrifice and convey my apologies to Grandfather for the necessity."


 "Wait!" Cally said again, sensing that Michelle might be about to pull her vanishing act. "Michelle, I've
gotta ask. Yes, this mind-raper thing is obviously a problem, but you've made contact after an awfully
long time and you haven't done a lot of blatant things in the past to save the world. There's something
different about this, and I have to know what it is."


"That does not concern you." Michelle's face could have been carved of stone.


"I can't do my job without the whole story. Iwon't take my team into this without all the background.
We can keep it between us, but I'm responsible for my people. Now give." She made a come-on gesture
with one hand, fixing her eyes on the Mentat's face. Everything about her posture, ratty jeans and blowing
hair or not, suddenly screamed "professional." It was a non-negotiable demand.


 "Very well. It was my project, for the Darhel group that holds my debts, when Erick stole the
technology. They are holding me personally responsible." She shrugged beneath the enveloping robes,
agitation betrayed by a slight fluttering of her hem as some of the wind finally got through.


"Wait a minute. How can you still be in debt and afford us, the code keys, all of that? I'm lost. This
makes no sense." Cally said.


 "I have disposable income. That is not the same thing as being out of debt. We never get out of debt.
Even appearing to try will get your debts called in then and there. Every tool and tank I have is deeply
mortgaged, as are the tools of everyone else. When I die, the equipment will revert to the Epetar group
to pay the debts. Unless the debt is called in beforehand, as it will be if I do not at least remove the
device from the hands of the rival group."
 "So what if they do call your debts? You can teleport. Just move on. Disappear. Let them take the
damned tools and go to hell. It's not like it hasn't been done before. Just because you were raised by the
Indowy doesn't mean you have to sit there and starve to death. We're Human, not Indowy. You have to
know there's no way we'd just leave you to your fate like they would one of theirs."


 "Yes,I can teleport. The possibility of which is a secret held by few, and worth more than my life. My
daughters cannot, and the Epetar group also holdstheir debts. If you fail, I will let my debts be called and
you certainly will leave me to my fate, for their sake and for the reasons you would not understand. But
no, I would not wait to starve. There are quicker ways." The Michon Mentat squared her shoulders.
"This discussion is pointless. You, and the very few who must know, can, at least, keep a secret. I have
risked worlds and more on that decision—far more than I should. You must justify my trust," she
pronounced.


 "For the moment, we will presume my offering price for the code keys is acceptable. Here." She pulled a
brown, cloth bag out of her robes from somewhere, though for the life of her Cally couldn't see where,
and thrust it into the blond woman's hands. "Grandfather can carry out the next step in the dealings. I do
not understand the purpose of the . . . work that you do, but youare quite effective at it and you will not
fail. You will succeed at retrieving the device, or, if necessary, you will destroy it. It is an obligation to
serve Clan O'Neal which you will understand. So the question of failure does not arise, does it?"


 This time, she did vanish, leaving Cally staring at a pair of indistinct footprints, already being erased by
the blowing sand. She shivered in the cold wind, sand stinging her face, as she turned and walked back
up the beach. Summer was definitely over.




 Michael O'Neal, Senior, sat on the comfortable but patched living-room sofa trying to talk some sense
into his most lethal granddaughter. He was pretty proud of how she'd turned out. A real survivor. Deadly,
but ethical. Sometimes too damned moral for her own good. Like now.


 "I don't want a frickin' bonus, I want a raise!" Cally hissed over her shoulder at him as she poured a
fresh cup of coffee. Two bright dots of color on her cheeks showed more real emotion in this family
squabble than she would have ever revealed in the field. Shari had fastened the dark blue, denim
nightblinds over the windows to keep the electric light from leaking out into the darkness. Clan O'Neal,
and its Sunday branch, were meticulous about not displaying more wealth and development than they
ought to have. Most bounty farmers had electric enough for their scanners, but little generator power to
spare for other applications, even if their homes had been wired for it. None had buried antimatter plants
with community power transmission. For bounty farmers who were not O'Neals, "burning the midnight
oil" was not just a figure of speech. Cally leaned back against the counter, cupping the warmth of the mug
in both hands. She gave Shari a tiny headshake, obviously warning her not to intervene. Michael O'Neal,
Sr., was making extra effort to be reasonable. He didn't feel reasonable.She calls in after all these
years and I don't get to speak to my own granddaughter. What, does Michelle think I've got
leprosy or something?
"This is professional," he said. "You take your pay when and how you can get it. That's the business
we're in." Papa opened the gray and blue salt-glazed jar on the counter next to the fridge, hand hesitating
between the familiar red and white foil pack and the leather pouch with Billy's Cuban-Salem blend.


"It's bad enough becoming a thief for a cause. I'm not going to turn into a common thief just because
Mommy needs a new pair of shoes. Grandpa, if we don't have some principles, we're no better than the
damned Darhel," she said.


"What, you'll kill people for a living but you're too good to profit off a raid? A raid of that Darhel enemy
you're so busy despising, little girl." He could tell the ironic, mocking edge to his tone lit a slow fire under
Cally's temper. Good. She needed to be shaken up a little.


"Wellthat's below the belt!" Her hands were fisted at her sides, trying to control herself, but her voice
was rising.


 "Could you two keep it down! The children!" Shari backed out of the room, closing the door to the den
as an extra buffer between the kitchen and the kids' rooms.


"You aren't making a dime off the theft, you're making a commission on a sale," Papa said.


"Okay, so now I'm a fence?" Cally said.


"A frickin' barbed wire one," he muttered under his breath, as he turned and spat into a chipped blue
mug with no handle.


"What?!"


 "Nothing. Look, we live in an imperfect world. Weare working to make it better. If you agree to the
commission, I'll use it as leverage to work on a raise. We all agree that a raise is necessary and fair. If
you want it to happen, I need bargaining chips." Her grandfather spread his hands, the picture of reason.
Stir her up, then calm her down.


"So you're trying to tell me you're not actually going to do this ten percent thing?" she asked skeptically.


 "I can't bargain with a bluff. Hey, I'm not just using this as an excuse to get around you. Holidays are
coming up, you know. I'll ask for the raise first. If they won't see reason, we take the commission to get
through their thick skulls so the next time I bring it up, they're not so pigheaded," he said.
She still didn't look happy.


 "What, you've got a better way to get through to them?" As he asked, looking her in the eye, he could
practically see her playing Christmas in her head. If he let even a flicker of triumph show in his eyes, she
was going to dig in her heels. He kept a poker face leaving her nothing to think about but a bare tree and
empty stockings. She drank her coffee, probably playing for time. Besides, good coffee was too
expensive to waste. He waited, watching, until finally she sighed and set the cup down.


"Against my better judgment. But if they offer a raise instead, and it's at all reasonable, we take it.
Whether the numbers match up or not," she said.


 "You're going to get all stubborn and noble over that, aren't you? Fine. I'll be leaving money on the table,
I just know it, but fine. I swear, I never should have let you spend all those years with nuns. Went and
turned you into a dewy-eyed idealist," he groused.


"And any part I take of it goes for the girls," she said.


 "Fine." As she left the kitchen on her way to bed, he let a tiny quirk at one corner of his mouth get
through. She was stubborn. Just like Mike had been. Always saw sense eventually, but you sometimes
had to get her attention with a two by four first.




 Cally got into her red, tweety-bird nightshirt, frowning at the narrowness of the twin bed in the small
room. Quite a change from her apartment in Charleston. At least she'd been able to keep some of the art
from her walls. Even added a print. Okay, so the picture of the surfer catching a wave at Malibu was a
cheap reprint of a digital file. Still, it was nice having it. It was a small, tangible reminder of her time with
Stewart on Titan Base seven years ago. She got a fresh washcloth from the pile under the nightstand and
picked up the buckley to set her wake-up call.


"Psssst. You've got a message," it said in an exaggeratedly soft voice.


"Why didn't you beep me?" she asked.


"It's asecret message," it said.


"Well, yeah, buckley. I'm an assassin. I do get a few of those. What message?"


"Yeah, but this one'sreally secret," it said. By now she wanted to throttle him.
"Buckley, what's the message? Is it from . . . him?"


"Say, 'pretty please,' " it prompted.


"Buckley, give me the damned message," she said.


"If you're not going to be polite about it maybe I won't."


"Buckley!" she hissed. "Do you want me to load a Martha emulation on top of you? This place looks
pretty drab. I could use some affordable decorating tips. Buckley, what's 'raffia'? Does it come in
purple?"


"All right, all right. It's from him. He's making a trip to Charleston. Can't stand another minute without
you, apparently."


"Text, voice, or holo?"


"Encrypted text."


"Buckley, if it's encrypted, how do you know what he said?"


 "I didn't say it was very well encrypted. Well, it sort of was, but you guys are way too gooshy in your
choice of decryption keys. And ifI can decrypt it, would you like an estimate of how quickly your bosses
can decrypt it in various scenarios? I can give you a full set or just the basic dozen run-downs."


"Shut up, buckley."


"Well that's gratitude for you."


"Buckley, please just display the text."


"Right."

 Thursday 10/14/54
 The building looked harmless enough. Windowless on the lower floors, it squatted, a giant rectangular
block, northeast of a small city on Lake Michigan. Convenient to a good beach on the lake, and several
smaller lakes for the recreation of the employees, the surface of the building was simple pink brick, from
base to top. The dark, mirrored windows that ringed the top floor looked out at the world with guarded
impassivity.


 The signs in the ample but mostly empty parking lot, and large aluminum letters on the side of the
building, announced it as the Institute for the Advancement of Human Welfare. On each side of the
building, raised brick beds and dense boxwood hedges separated the front parking lot from the back of
the building.


 Through the front door, a large middle corridor went halfway through the building. Well-tended ficus
trees flanked a central security desk where solidly-built guards took pains to keep their guns concealed
beneath the jackets of their cheap, maroon suits. On each side, there was a glass-fronted office with
white lettering on the double doors. The one on the left identified itself as Altruism Research, the one on
the right, Kindness Care. Against the glass walls inside the offices to the right, one could clearly see the
generously laden shelves of a newsstand and gift shop.


 Behind the guards, a brass and granite fronted bank of elevators led to the rest of the building. A thin
strip of brass, practically invisible until one got past the security desk, outlined the card readers to the
side of each elevator.


 Behind the building, loading docks allowed trucks to back right up against garage-style doors that were
exactly the size of the rear of a semi trailer. Thick black weather-stripping insured a strong seal between
arriving truck and building. To the side of each loading dock door, cement steps led up to painted white
steel doors with security card readers to the side.


 An entrance from a separate road wound down to the subterranean parking deck at the rear of the
building, which bore large signs reading, "Employee Parking Only." At the deck's combined entrance and
exit, a guard occupied a small, heated booth. The gates into and out of the deck also had card readers,
though nobody who was not an employee ever saw them. An elegantly domed conservatory stood at
ground level on top of the parking deck. Inside, ornamental plants from several worlds graced
professionally designed beds along silver-sanded footpaths, winding in to a galplas water feature.
Carefully crafted to resemble lichen-encrusted granite, the salt-water pool and fountain had at least a
dozen colorful species of tropical fish.


 The burial of a parking deck was unusual at this latitude. Although parts of the building were clearly of
Earthtech materials, legacy of whatever occupied the building before the Institute, the deck was a recent
addition—pure Galtech, top to bottom. From top to bottom the warmth of the surfaces and an
over-engineered drainage system kept the deck operational year round—access road and all.


 The man and woman walking in the garden did not work in the front offices of the building. They were
an odd contrast. The man presented an image that was conservative to the point of functional invisibility.
Almost everything about him was bland, from the hairspray-glazed newscaster spikes in his thinning blond
hair, to the gray tailored jacket and pants, to his plain brown dress shoes. The exceptions were his eyes,
which were a disconcertingly frosty blue, and his ruby and onyx tie clip, stark against the charcoal gray
tie. The eyes and ruby burned, oddly paired fires against the man's drab, brown shirt and pasty skin.


 So thin he was almost gaunt, his slightness combined with his short stature to give the impression of an
ice-carven gnome in a suit. He kept his elbows in closely when he walked, as if he had grown up
spending much of his time in crowds. Which, in fact, he had. Growing up on the Indowy planet Haithel,
he had been accustomed to crowds and crowds of the green-furred Galactic working class. The Indowy
family who raised him carefully schooled in the Path, cautioning always against Human barbarisms. To
their quiet pride, he studied the Sohon techniques with diligence, energy, and phenomenal talent.
Reaching legal adulthood at age twenty-one, Erick Winchon continued study, driven by some unsung
inner need, despite clear serenity and a fanatical devotion to the strictures of the Path. By Earth's twenty
forty-two, he had become one of only three Human Mentats in known space. Meticulously modest, he
avoided every appearance of attention-seeking.


 The woman, on the other hand, clearly had no objection to attracting attention. She wore her hair in a
simple but eye-catching classical style, shoulder length black hair drawn back in a lime green headband
and worn with bangs. The headband matched her green suede suit, teamed with a black leather corset
and vinyl go-go boots. She walked just a little too close to him, arching her back to give him a perfect
view down the front of her corset. He appeared more interested in the data on her clipboard.


"So we've got progression in the food series down to a week?" he asked.


 "From liver and broccoli straight through to raw offal. We have included cannibalism, but it's all
unknowing, so it doesn't really count, yet. Normally, that would take another week. As you know, it
takes a week more than that if we can't convince them they've already broken the taboo," she said.
"We're hoping that by refining the focus of the norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors in the
gamma-Brucksmann synapses we can get that down to two to four days."


 "I'm concerned that we don't have enough of a range of inhibited actions at the upper end of the
spectrum, here. Why haven't we gone to cannibalism of live subjects? Subjects of personal interest?
AID, flag this as important," the mentat inclined his head towards the black box in his shirt pocket. Other
than color and cardboard, it could have been a pack of cigarettes.


 "Live subjects won't be a problem, but personal interest subjects could be. As you know, they're a
limited resource and if we use them up on one test, we don't have them available for the next. Virtual
reality biometric measurement suggests that they'd be much more effectively utilized in the interpersonal
aggression series." Her eyes sparkled with a dark excitement, leavened with apparent bewilderment at his
blind dispassion. She showed no surprise, of course, for nothing about his reaction was new to her.


"Are you going to have our data with the cross-series shifting ready for my conference in Cleveland next
week? Remember that the public interfaces department will have to translate the experimental design and
data to refer to the green monkey and prepare a junior researcher to present the paper." He bent to feed
a small orange wafer to fat, spotted fish.


 "It's not nearly where we want it to be, I'm afraid. . . . Still, the results are adequate for a preliminary
paper. I don't understand why you even go to these things when you have to disguise your real work so
much. The projected results for the monkeys, well, interfaces will do their best, but the work won't be
even remotely replicable after their translation."


 "That is the point, is it not? If they could replicate the work, what would Epetar's leadership need us
for?" He smiled serenely, "I can at least tell others in the field something of the important work we are
doing, even if they can neither appreciate it nor repeat it. Even if they do not know it is my work." His last
comment was a telling slip from Erick Winchon's habitual rhetoric of we.


"How many more trips are you making before year end?" she asked.


 "Only three. It's the busy season, you know. Everyone wants an excuse to go someplace warm.
Cleveland. Bah!" he grimaced. "The next is in Jamaica. Stimulating conversation and some of the best
coffee on Earth. What more could one want? Although it is beyond me why they call it blue. The beans
are as brown as any others. I checked. I have been meaning to fix some seed stock for them, but our
other work is needed so much more."
                                                  ***


Prida Felini, his assistant in the garden, was the mentat's favorite Earth-raised Human. Barbaric, of
course, but weren't they all? At least she was honest about it. She could intellectually understood the
need for civilizing humanity and had chosen to help. At the lowest level, their work set one barbarian
against another. A rather regrettable zero sum play, but necessary for the welfare of the species as a
whole. Somebody had to look out for them. With no clan system to care for humans in manageable
chunks, the mentat had selflessly shouldered the task. At least it was interesting work, which was some
compensation.


 Erick Winchon had learned from hard experience that no matter how thoroughly he surrounded himself
with competent people, any time he had to interact with Earther humans outside his own control, he had
to check, check, and check again. There was no task so simple that it could not fail because of at least
one incompetent Earther somewhere along the chain from instruction to delivery. His species was
manifestly capable of ordinary, proper work habits. Humanscould perfom quality work. There was
something simply wrong about Earther upbringing and cultures that generated incompetent, spoiled
adults. It was a source of great vexation to him. The goal of his research was nothing more nor less than
the deliverance of his species from its endless loop of primitive incompetence. Only then could the
Human race become an optimal tank for growing wisdom and advancement along the Path. Earthers
would continue to be resistant to becoming civilized and moving beyond their primitive habits. The lack of
progress in curtailing the black market for meat in the SubUrbs proved that point. Enforcement was
especially difficult when the Galactics could not admit the goal of the measures to the Earther government
or the internal police of the SubUrbs. Frustrating. It was all very frustrating.


That resistance problem was the whole reason testing of the behavioral remediation technology had to
be so aversive. Only complete success would allow civilization of those who would, inevitably, resort to
primitive force in resistance. Winchon knew enough of Human history to be fully aware that he would
never be appreciated by humanity in his own lifetime, even with that life extended to the full range
possible through rejuvenation. His estimates for the time necessary to civilize Earth varied. The longest
was one-thousand three hundred years. The range became considerably shorter the greater the
percentage of Human population could be shipped to planets already run by Galactics, and the more
Earther humans could be induced to restrain their reproduction and repopulation efforts. The Darhel were
helping with both problems as much as possible, but progress had been disappointing.


They paced by a miniature apple tree, talking softly.




 The Darhel Pardal had dismissed his body servants and sat behind his desk, turned to look out the large
porthole into the black of space. In his mind, he compared motives, positions, attributes, and interests.
He had narrowed the list of possible thieves to three rival groups, any of which could have used the extra
currency to knock loose a lucrative expansion of their mining concessions from the Darhel Tir Dol Ron,
whose job included the administration of Earth. Not that the humans understood the explicit nature of the
position.


 The Gistar Group's operation mining niobium and tantalum in Africa had capital equipment that was
reaching the end of exploitable resources on site. The Cnothgar Group's extraction facility for monazite
sands in Brazil could refurbish equipment the Tir had mothballed and open at least three other sites with
that kind of financing. Adenar Group's molybdenum mining in Chile couldn't be overlooked, not because
he could see specific scope for expansion, but because they had succeeded so well in being cagey about
their project.


 Which one? That was the hard question. It would be the height of stupidity to compound Epetar's
current troubles by starting a trade war with an innocent party. However, the frontal assault on the
group's currency reserves simply could not go unanswered. It would be Adenar. They weren't happy
about a certain defection, but it had followed long-established rules. It would be out of character for them
to react this emphatically, but certainly possible. He couldn't be sure enough to act.


 He heard a reedy sound like a dying voorcn—a flying animal hunted by . . . predators . . . on his
homeworld. The thought, 'otherpredators,' did not quite make it to the surface of his mind. The tiniest
hint of the sweet, deadly pleasure of the Tal hormone provoked a shudder, warning him of ultimate bliss
and death. He ruthlessly suppressed the forbidden thought. He became aware that the offending sound
was coming from the whistling of his own breathing through his teeth.


 He stopped the noise at once, instead instructing his AID to replay a holo file he had received that
morning detailing the progress on an interesting project his group was undertaking. It showed tremendous
promise towards solving the previously intractable problem of Human behavior control, as well as
eliminating the most dangerous of the three existing Human mentats as a side bonus. It was possible that
the Darhel manager who owned the commercial territory rights to Earth, the ultimate end user for a
market-ready product, could be induced to cut loose an advance on the basis of the progress shown in
this report.


 The request would have to be phrased carefully. He settled more comfortably into his chair to watch
again and analyze his best selling points. The Tir Dol Ron was, as the humans would put it, a tough
customer.




 The bounce tubes had been an annoyance when she had first outgrown her old clothes and started
wearing robes. In pants, they had been fine. She had walked around with her hair braided and tolerated
the flyaway bits the breakneck fall to the bottom of the tube shaft caused. Until she had learned to hold
them down by main force of will, her robes had tended to end up around her ears. With that kind of
affront to her dignity as incentive, she had learned fast. The thousand little tricks of technology she had
would have appeared to the uninitiated as magic. In fact, one of the first things she'd done was taken
advantage of some differences in Human versus Indowy physiology to have her Sohon headset surgically
implanted. The second thing she'd done was learned to work efficiently enough to have some nannites to
spare. She walked around with a layer of them at all times. Hidden, never enough in one place to be a
visible aggregate, but completely controlled. That was one of her small technological magics. Easily
mastered, for her. Later, other and progressively more esoteric applications and technologies had
followed, leading to abilities that the adults on Earth before the war, even the ones at the cutting edge of
physics in the most secret of the secret research labs, would have considered flatly impossible. Then
again, she understood a whole lot more physics than they did. The difference was of the same magnitude
as that between Aristotle and Heisenberg—and as shocking to the common man as the difference
between a clay pot of Greek Fire and a cobalt bomb.


 It would have been shocking, that is, if the Michon Mentats hadn't been every bit as tight-lipped and
disciplined about their knowledge and abilities as the Tchpht or the legendary Aldenata themselves. Any
of the Mentats from any race of sophonts could have created vats of nannites the size of a small star with
no input from the Tchpht. The ability was a requirement of the rank. They were also wise enough to
understand why they shouldn't. There were things that were worse than the current Galactic
socio-political order, suboptimal as it was. Far worse. An unjust galaxy was better than no galaxy at
all—and inevitable besides. The nature of life prior to enlightenment was necessarily and irreparably a
morass of injustice—the rule was as solidly inflexible as Tlschp's Law of the Balance of Entropy.


 Which was why she was on the way to her meeting today, serenely dropping down the bounce tube to
the Galactic conference sector of her building. She would meet with the Darhel supervisor Pahpon, and
treat him as a superior, even though he was little advanced from the ancient Human soldier throwing a
clay pot of incendiary. Ancient was, in the scheme of things, not all that long ago. In any case, she would
meet with him. Her true superior was neither Pahpon nor the entire Epetar Group that employed him. Her
true superior was the self-discipline and foresight she had necessarily had to develop to be able to hold
some very advanced physics and skills in her own head. Desire for the good opinion of her colleagues
was her shield against hubris. She could see the consequences of saving her own life as clearly as if she
was reading a history book after the fact. Her life was not worth that. Except for the one way out she had
already arranged. If it worked.
Her steps were sedate, measured, as she entered the conference room reserved for Darhel. "Good
morning, Supervisor Pahpon," she said.


 "Human Michon Mentat O'Neal. Our group is terribly displeased with your negligence in allowing the
Aerfon Djigahr to be removed from your facilities. I am here to present you with a letter of demand for
your debts to our organization. You will see in the file that, as per the rules to avoid their unnecessary
losses, we have purchased your debts from the various other groups to which you owe various
obligations. AID, send—"


"I would not do that," she said, icily.


 The Darhel froze, fur puffing up in a vestigial reflex his pre-historic ancestors had used when alarmed.
"You are surely not such a Human barbarian as to take everyone else down in flames for your own
error?" She could see the pulse beating at his throat in stark terror, and smell the fear pheremones that
were not at all like the scent of a Darhel whose system was releasing the suicidally intoxicating Tal.
Darhel could feel fear without dying of it. In fact, they could feel some rather extreme fear. As Pahpon
was now.


 "Of course if I fail to retrieve the Aerfon Djigahr in a timely fashion, or ensure its destruction, as per our
contract that I would not let it be transferred out of Epetar's hands in any non-destroyed condition,
functional, restorable, or reverse-engineerable—if I do not do that, then I will be in breach of my contract
with Epetar. However, within our contract, my responsibility does not terminate until one half cycle and
twenty-four more Adenast days. I merely begin incurring late fees after Renthenel twenty-one. I am not
yet in breach."


He glared at her. "You know very well that destruction clause was intended to cover any necessary loss
of functionality during the research process."


 "Nevertheless, it is in the contract that if I make a good faith effort to avoid destruction, I fulfill my
contract by providing you with whatever I learn about the device. The contract does not say the device
may not be in other hands at some point or points during the research period. It says I must either return
it to Epetar Group at the end of the contract or ensure that it has been irretrievably destroyed during the
research period."


 "Research is not being conducted on the device, the task for which your services were contracted. You
are in breach," he insisted.


 "Research is most certainly being conducted. The contract gives me supervisory discretion to arrange
that research in whatever way seems practical to me at the moment. At this moment, the only practical
research option is for the persons that have it to research the device where it is." Her speech was calm,
her manner preternaturally still.
"Research for another group!" he growled, the renowned melodious voice marred with a harsh burr.


 "Preliminary research data where the technical results are, as a matter of universal practice, stored in a
single, closely protected site and not in that group's internal storage, as a matter of security. The thieving
Group's central facilities do not have technical analyses and results. The most they have is some cubes of
pretty footage. Galactic standards do not consider a Group in possession of data until it reaches one of
their authorized ships, authorized central facilities, or a Darhel member competent to understand the
information. I have constant external monitoring that will demonstrate to the satisfaction of a contract
court, in the absence of contrary evidence, that the technical research results that would put me in breach
have never left for a ship, nor to one of their central facilities, nor a Darhel of the Group, whichever it may
be, who is technically competent to understand the information. I am not in breach. I suspect Adenar, by
the way."


"That's a flimsy technicality and you know it." He waved away her conjecture with one hand. The Darhel
was breathing very carefully and deliberately now.


 "As your ancestors told the ancestors of the Indowy so many generations ago, in contracts, technicalities
are everything," she said.


"This is not the performance level we have come to expect from Michon Mentats."


 "This is rather precisely the sort of performance we have come to expect from Darhel Groups."
Impassively, she noted the ultra-faint scent of Tal entering his system.


 "Fine. Live until the end of your contract. But your wages are in abeyance until you demonstrate the
ability to fulfill your obligation," he sneered. "Make your peace with the Aldenata or whatever you Human
barbarians do because the day your contract expires unfulfilled, is the last day you eat. You are
dismissed!" he said.




  Chapter Four
 Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Mosovich woke up in the single good hotel in North Chicago, Illinois. Good
was an understatement. Most of the town, like any base town, was devoted to separating soldiers from
their money. Bright Lion Boulevard ran from Horner Highway to the front gates of the Great Lakes Fleet
Training Base. The main street through town was officially named Happiness and Harmony Way. The
strip north of the Lion was more popularly known among Fleet's recruits and lower-level personnel as the
H and H, short for "Hooch and Ho." Horner Highway had the obvious informal designation.
 The Serenity Hotel stood to the south of the Lion on the H and H, right between the two decent
restaurants and across from a full-service dry cleaning and tailor shop. Jake had known he was in Fleet
territory as soon as he saw the gardens in front of the blindingly white facade of the hotel. It had political
correctness committee written all over it.


 The sidewalk split to circle around a large, top-heavy rock that looked like someone had gone to the
trouble of drilling it full of holes. Raked gravel paths curved around miniature fruit trees, classic bonsai
trees, and a few canes of bamboo growing up against another large-ish rock. A small waterfall on one
side flowed into a small, round pool full of koi and not one, but two, very small islands. Each had its own
tiny maple tree and, he had looked closer to be sure, it's own by God holey rock. It was meticulously laid
out, and each element might have been pretty by itself, but the whole effect was so cluttered it made his
eyes ache.


 The lobby and interior were better, thank God. His room was comfortable, the bed modern and
adjustable, the bath large and deep. In place of the more usual, and cheaper, holoscreen was a
full-featured holotank. The tank hooked up to a server of exclusive vids, most of them featuring girls that
couldn't have been older than about twelve. The selection was pretty broad, so he did find some adult
movies that had, well, adults. But he hadn't stayed up too late, and had restricted himself to two of the
little bottles of Maotai in the liquor cabinet.


 Decades in the service had trimmed everything unnecessary from his morning routine. He was in the
lobby in his silks, looking sharp and professional, when General Pennington's driver phoned his PDA to
say they were out front. Like many Fleet officers, Mosovich carried a PDA as well as an AID and
frequently tended to "forget" to carry his AID around. Nobody talked openly about the problems with
the AIDs during the war, because those who did had a short life expectancy, but not even the Darhel
could stop the military grapevine. And, of course, being on detached duty to SOCOM for the duration of
this command, he'd be using the most convenient mechanism for staying in touch with his own CO, who
was non-Fleet, as well as his mostly non-Fleet men. It wasn't that none of them had AIDs. It was just
that the idiots in procurement and those in the know fought a constant, covert war over the little menaces
which made distribution spotty.




 Mosovich stood facing his new XO in front of the troops that would momentarily become his
responsibility and privilege. The XO, as acting, was standing in the position of the outgoing commander at
the Change of Command Ceremony. The Atlantic Company guidon stood in for the Battalion Colors,
snapping in the crisp, October-morning breeze. No one was cold. Their dress uniforms, gray silks with
the dark, jungle green stripes that DAG had adopted from the US Special Forces, kept them warm
easily, despite the chill that frosted their breath. The silks, made of a Galactic fabric that was incredibly
tough, soft, and absolutely wrinkle-proof, looked better than the pre-war Army dress uniforms, while
being more comfortable than most civilians' pajamas.


 A full Change of Command Ceremony was unusual for a company, but DAG was the elite of the
elite—a combined service special operations organization that dealt with the most serious terrorist, pirate,
bandit, and insurgent threats for the entire globe. Ranks tended to be inflated with a special operations
command like DAG. Company command, whether in the US Army or in Fleet Strike, was ordinarily a
captain's slot. No DAG company had ever gone to less than a major, and that only once—a major of
unusual excellence who had been too far outside the zone for immediate promotion had gotten command
of South Pacific Company. The platoon designation had been kept for the sake of the DAG table of
organization and equipment, and was used on formal occasions. Informally, DAG personnel and their
chain of command referred to the operator units of each company simply as Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie.
Given the ranks of the officers and men, platoon wasn't the best description. Harkening back to some of
their organizational antecedents, they thought of and referred to themselves as teams. Still, the bean
counters had won that battle on paper, so far, so platoons they were.


 Major Kelly, a pale, black-haired guy the size of a small tree, took the company colors from the Charlie
Platoon master sergeant, acting in place of the command sergeant major, and passed them to General
Pennington. One of the men read out the orders giving him command. General Pennington passed the
standard to Jake. He took them, formally accepting responsibility for his new command. He handed them
back to the master sergeant, wishing again that Mueller hadn't been off-planet when their orders were cut
and had been able to arrive before he did. He hadn't seen him in two years, and it would have been good
to have him here.


 Pennington was an interesting man. Younger than he was, but had for some reason kept his white hair
when he rejuved. Medium height but solidly built, he probably wouldn't have made the height-weight
standards before the war. But after they'd been relaxed in the war, everybody's militaries had just
neglected to put them back in place for juvs. Juvs had to work hard at it to get fat, so the bean counters
and brass just assumed extra weight on a juv was muscle mass. Jake had met an exception or two, but
the general wasn't it. Still, the hair made him look like a babyfaced old guy. Mosovich let his mind
wander during the speeches. They were all pretty meaningless. It was important that you have speeches.
Solid military tradition. What was said in those speeches was much less important than having them in the
first place. It took a really charismatic speaker to hold the attention of a group of soldiers overdue for
their chow. Pennington wasn't that speaker. Not today, anyway.


 ". . . You men have a vital mission in todays Special Operations Command, hooah? You form the
backbone of Earth's defense against pirates, insurgents and terrorists. Perhaps more importantly, you
serve as a living example of the best traditions of interservice cooperation, and the inclusion of Galactic
forces in the SOCOM family is an inspiring step into tomorrow for the armed services, hooah? As I
stand here before you today I am awed, awed by . . ." Pennington's words flowed over him as his eyes
scanned the ranks, noting the sharp, immaculate appearance of his new troops and their officers.
Pennington did occasionally draw his attention back, making Jake suppress a smile. The man used
"hooah" the way most Canadians he knew used "eh."




 Bravo Platoon was on the obstacle course this morning, stretched out across the obstacles as much by
the staggered starting times as by the different speeds of the officers and men. Most of the wood
components of the structures were weathered and graying despite originally being pressure treated. Some
things, like the wall and team-climbing tower, were obviously new, as they gradually replaced aging
equipment. The cargo netting was also new, but someone had judged the wood frame able to withstand
yet another replacement net. The rolling logs were original to the course. For some reason logs just didn't
wear at the same rate as the rest of the wood. And, of course, the rusty barbed wire was added incentive
to do the low crawl right. The ball buster carried a risk of splinters that also provided incentive for good
performance. Bravo's CO, having started in the last third, made a point of finishing in the first third. He'd
pay for it tomorrow, but what the hell, it was only pain.


 Captain Jack "Quinn", born Jack O'Neal, was a short, homely, young-looking man with carrot-colored
hair and so many freckles that it was hard to tell whether he was a fair-skinned man with brown dots or a
brown-skinned man with fair spots. Anyone who at first made the mistake of classifying him as a little
shrimp would be surprised at the strength built into his wiry frame. His team favored Blackjack for any
mission that involved moving around underwater. The man simply would not float, but had the stamina to
be one of the strongest swimmers in DAG. This might have had something to do with his having swum
daily in saltwater since before he could walk.


 Right now, he was rubbing an army-brown towel over his sweat-soaked hair and squinting into the sun
across the O-course to the massive brigade XO, Major Frederick Sunday "Kelly", jogging across the
turf to meet him. One or two of the men looked up as the XO approached. Most hid their curiosity,
jogging back to the barracks or the gym for a quick shower and a thorough check to make sure, again,
that absolutely everything was clean and squared away for the first look by the new CO. And their first
look at him, of course. The ubiquitous PDAs had improved the speed of the ancient grapevine system by
leaps and bounds. Captain Quinn and all of his men knew exactly when the colonel would be looking
them over, and were determined to ensure that their customary excellence was improved to perfection.
He had George O'Neal "Mauldin's" first impression of the new CO. Now he wanted Boomer's. He
loped down the side of the course to meet the major halfway.


The excessively large officer stopped in front of him and returned his salute before turning to walk beside
him back in the direction of the HQ.


"Okay, Boomer, what's he like?" Quinn said.


 "I dunno, Jack. As first impressions go, I don't think he's gonna be a bean-counting weenie, and he
doesn't come across as a weasel, but he was kinda quiet. Didn't give me a lot to go on. His record looks
really good, but what the fuck can you tell from them these days? Likes his coffee, but how much can
you tell from that?" Major Kelly shrugged. "Speaking of coffee, let's check out the mess hall and grab a
cup. Make sure they got the word. This week would be a hell of a time to burn the stew."


 "Think he's likely to betoo good?" The captain scratched the end of his nose, looking sidelong at his
childhood friend.


 "Your guess is as good as mine. In case anybody didn't get the memo, remind them that their opsec has
to be flawless until we have a much better idea of what we can get away with." The major lit a cigar and
blew a stream of smoke towards the sky, "Wouldn't do for him to twig and us lose all this free training.
Wouldn't do at all."
 "I'll take care of it. Not like I should need to, but I'll make sure. Doesn't do to tempt Mr. Murphy," Jack
said. "Okay, now what do you think of our new Command Sergeant Major?"


 "Well, they obviously know each other from way back. I think he's sharp, he's going to be the Colonel's
eyes and ears. He's going to be around more we need to be twice as careful around him," the captain
said. "The good news is, he seems like kind of a blow-hard, you know? Think a thought, say a thought.
Subtle ain't his middle name. So we should be okay with him." He nodded to the XO and broke into an
easy lope, leaving Kelly to his cigar and his thoughts.


 Like most DAG personnel, Quinn didn't live in the barracks. Unlike most of them, one of the privileges
of rank he indulged in was keeping a couple of fresh uniforms in his office and taking advantage of the
small cubicle shower at the end of the line of stalls in the head down the hall. Before cleaning up, he took
out his PDA and phoned the master sergeant who was Bravo's senior NCO.


 "Harrison, go through and remind everybody one more time that with a new CO this is absolutely not the
time to get sloppy about anything. It's probably overkill, but be sure they understand. I'd hate to have to
put everybody on corn and soybeans for a week." The captain said the last in a joking tone, but it was
the most serious part of the message, telling the NCO that Bane Sidhe OPSEC was what he most
wanted his people to be careful about.


"Hooah, sir," Harrison acknowledged.


Security taken care of, Quinn headed for the shower. Wouldn't do to be all sweaty and stuff when the
new CO arrived.

 Friday 10/15/54

 It was a brilliant, cold, windy fall day. The kind of day at the coast where you didn't dare step outside
without a pair of sunglasses to protect your eyes from the bright reflections of the sun and the grit in the
air. Cally had accompanied Shari on an island-only shopping trip that was really an excuse to wander
around the store and buy a pound or so of Ashley Privett's best fudge. Most of the things they needed
themselves were either already back at home, or were on a list for Cally to pick up on the weekend trip
to Charleston she had announced that morning at breakfast, telling the kids that no, they couldn't come
this time. It was a mommy trip. She felt a little guilty that Shari assumed that, going alone, she was going
to confession—but only a little. She reallywas going to take at least a little time to shop for stuff to wear
at the family reunion next week like she'd said. She'd just probably shop, well,quickly .


 Another purpose of this morning's trip to, as Shari put it, "beautiful metropolitan Edisto" was to let them
discreetly gawk at the changes in the store. On the island, frequently you had to make your own
excitement. Cally waved and smiled at Karen Lee, the wife and co-conspirator of an active Bane Sidhe
agent. Karen's family were local for a few years to give the authorities time to forget about them before
they went back out to a new posting with fresh, young identities. Karen was a quiet person, who seemed
to find the Clan O'Neal personalities on the island a bit overwhelming at times.


 True to type, and probably for the best, Grandpa had handled the negotiation with the Bane Sidhe over
the code key sale. She looked around at the changed store, impressed. Papa O'Neal could get things
done in a hurry when he decided he was On A Mission.


 With so many fedcreds at stake, they had been remarkably easy going about the sales commission. As
soon as the keys were flown into Charleston, Cally had made delivery to Michelle. The payment, in cash
and small denominations, had come in the kind of briefcase that made her feel like the holodramas'
stereotypical drug dealer. She'd paid out their commission to Grandpa, who had come back home with a
trailer full of trade goods for the store. Charleston being a main port, his large purchases hadn't caused so
much as a raised eyebrow. Similar large cash buys of available light consumer goods were routine there.


 Post-war, areas around the world where unusual things could grow or be mined had been rapidly
recolonized, leading to the rebirth of the coastal or river-based city-state. Off-planet migration being the
poor man's route to rejuv, that interesting development looked like it might even last awhile. The
population to rebuild genuine nations just wasn't there. The city states' greatest need, besides essential
trade goods, was for the basic end-user products and small comforts the residents couldn't make for
themselves—which was rather like the O'Neals on Edisto, now that she thought about it.


 Island finances being what they were, the end result of all this was Grandpa becoming a silent partner in
the store. Before, Ashley had had to make the store look full, or at least not empty, by spreading the
off-island goods out at the front of the shelves, interspersed among locally made home crafts. Now, the
shelves were actually full, and with manufactured goods and things that weren't merely regional. There
were frozen turkeys and canned cranberry sauce to be had for Thanksgiving dinner this year. Mike and
Duncan Sunday—who of course still thought their last name was Thompson—were happily applying an
olive drab coat of paint to the store's exterior walls, no doubt for exchange credits to apply to the
purchase of some of the goodies inside.


 Shari was flipping through a fashion magazine on the rack that Ashley had for some reason installed at
the back of the store, cooing shamelessly over the fall runway photoshoot from Chicago. Tommy had
hacked them a back door into the online version of the same magazine, but there was just something
about holding the glossy pages in your hands. Cally was keeping half an eye on the clothes on the pages
and half an eye on Morgan and Sinda, who were nudging and whispering to each other near a batch of
toys. None of the toys looked breakable, at least. Sinda was eying a doll in a lacy blue and white dress
with equal measures of childhood greed and love.


 A quiet, irritated buzzing from the front of the store escalated in volume to two clearly audible and irate
female voices.


 ". . . just because I had to punish your kid over that disgusting frog mess . . ." Yep, Pam again. She was
starting to get shrill.
 "Nobody gets credit in my shop. . . . and if you didn't spend all your money on that trash you read, you'd
be able . . ." Whups, Ashley already biting her words out like that. Not good. Cally walked over to
Morgan and Sinda and grabbed their unresisting hands, leading them back towards Shari, who hadn't
even looked up from her magazine. She absently gathered her great-grandchildren in with one arm while
Karen edged slightly behind her.


 Cally walked around her small collection of people, assassin-turned-mom securing a ready exit by
moving a dolly of soft drink cases so that instead of blocking the back door it was blocking one of the
aisles.


 ". . . know a book if it bit you on the . . . and you just know they'll all be gone by the time . . ." Pam was
shrieking now. Pretty soon she'd be fainting and making a great show of looking all over her body for her
inhaler.


 ". . . intomy shop, driving off mypaying customers . . ." If Ashley didn't watch it, she was going to lose
her voice again. Probably for days this time. Cally nudged a box of something out of the way with her
foot. Shari still hadn't looked up from her magazine, lifting her arm from around the children to turn the
page, returning it to pat Sinda on the shoulder. Karen just looked frozen in shock.


 Another voice joined the first two, querulous as another woman started to complain about the inequity of
ever-rising prices for people on a fixed income.


"Time to go." Cally scooped the magazine out of Shari's hands and dropped it back on the rack. "You
know with Louise joining in they'll be lucky to get it over without coming to blows." She put her hands
behind her charges and made gentle shooing motions as she ushered them out the back door, moving
Karen along with the group. Emerging into the sunlight seemed to shake Karen out of her daze a little.


"Are they always like that?" she asked in disbelief.


"Nope," Cally answered, "sometimes they're worse. Welcome to family politics 101."


 They walked around the side of the building towards the front. Shari waved to Mike and Duncan, who
hadn't missed a beat, spreading paint onto the freshly-bleached boards with smooth, even strokes.
"There they go again." Mike rolled his eyes and scratched his nose, leaving a smear of green paint.


 In front of the store, they paused near the small group of older children who were gathering from across
the street to observe the entertainment. A coconut came bouncing out the door at speed. Cally sighed
and handed her purse to Shari.


 "Welp, the imports have started flying. Better go in and save Grandpa's stock." She disappeared through
the door, emerging a moment later holding onto a short, red-faced woman with dark, frizzy hair, glasses
askew on her face. The woman was cursing fluently but cut her one attempt at a struggle short when
Cally subtly tightened her hold on the joint lock and took her to the ground. She looked down at the
sputtering woman.


"That's it for you, Pam. You're banned from Ashley's shop for a month," she said.


 "I don't have to answer to you, bitch. I'm not even Clan O'Neal!" The woman glared up at the blond
juggernaut looming over her, but didn't try to get up.


 "Sundays are the same difference. And if you can't be trusted to be discreet in front of the children, I'll
take it straight to Grandpa." The assassin's eyes were flashing now.


The woman paled and stood up, dusting herself off. "No! Uh, you don't need to do that. I'm going.
Look, I'm going." She edged down the street back towards the neighborhood holding the small house
where she and her kids lived. "But you're still a bitch. Always throwing your weight around . . ." The
woman said the last under her breath, but she didn't say it until she was a good twenty meters from Cally.


 Cally stood her ground for a moment then sighed and appeared to deflate. Well, appeared to deflate in
that she no longer looked twelve feet tall and made of ice. She walked back over to the kids and picked
Sinda up, bouncing and nuzzling her until the tears no longer threatened to spill over from the little girl's
eyes. "It's okay, Mommy's not mad at you. Mommy's not mad at anybody. It's okay, it's alright . . ."


"Yeah, definitely time to go home," Shari nodded. "Karen, why don't you come home with us for a cup
of tea and put your feet up. You look like you need it."


 "Okay. Okay, I will." She looked at her watch. "The babysitter doesn't expect me back for an hour and
a half, anyway."


"Y'all go ahead. I'll just get the fudge and catch up with you," Cally said. "What do you think, chocolate
mint or rocky road?"


"Go for the rocky road while she's still got the marshmallows and almonds," Shari said, already walking
off towards the truck with the children.


By the time she got back with the fudge, Shari already had everyone in the truck. Cally climbed in the
back with Karen, leaving the girls in the front seat.


"Why didn't you sit up front? The girls could've rode back here," she asked the smaller woman.
 "After all that I needed the fresh air. Besides, Morgan called shotgun." Karen shrugged. "Can I ask you
about one thing?"


"Sure."


"How did the Sundays end up being in Clan O'Neal?"


"Hell if I know," Cally said.


"Huh? That doesn't make sense."


"Exactly." The blond grinned at her quieter friend. "It's an inexplicable, alien, Indowy thing that pretty
much none of us understand." The truck was bouncing across the island road by now and she settled
herself more comfortably in the bed of the truck to tell the story.


 "See, when Tommy and Wendy first joined the Bane Sidhe, Grandpa invited them to come live down
here and bring the kids. We had plenty of space, and we pretty much needed the help and the company,
anyway. Shari and Wendy are friends from way back in the war. And me too, sort of. So anyway, some
time after that, and we haven't been able to pinpoint when, the Indowy started referring to the Sundays as
O'Neals. And we all thought it was weird, so Grandpa sat down with Aelool and got him to explainfive
times , and hestill didn't understand it. You've met Grandpa, you know how stubborn he can be when
he doesn't understand something. In the end, he quit because Aelool started to get really anxious and
upset. Turns out he thought Grandpa was trying to disown the Sundays, which would have been an
unthinkable dishonor by Indowy standards." At Karen's puzzled look Cally paused and thought for a
minute. "Okay, like for humans if you recruited some soldiers to do a job, and the mission started to go
sour, and you just walked off and left them but for no good reason but you didn't have to, see?" When
the other woman grimaced she nodded and went on. "So finally Grandpa got him convinced that it was
all a misunderstanding and he'd certainly never meant to sound like he was trying to disown the Sundays.
And the upshot was that Tommy and Wendy didn't mind, and Grandpa grumbled a bit around the house
for the form of the thing but he didn't really mind, either, and the Sundays are O'Neals."


"So the Sundays are O'Neals and nobody knows why."


 "Yup. Nobody Human, anyway. Oh, apparently something about what Grandpa did or didn't do or
something made them think he meant to adopt the Sundays, and over some length of time occasionally an
Indowy would ask Grandpa a strange question that didn't seem related to anything and Grandpa would
just answer it without thinking about it much, and we never knew if they asked Tommy anything they
thought was significant. Not anything Tommy could remember, anyway. But yep, there it is. It's an
Indowy thing. Aliens. Go figure."

 Friday 10/15/54
 The man in the hotel bed had dark hair and recognizably Asian features, but it would have been
impossible, even for someone from Fleet, to place exactly what part of Asia his ancestors had originally
been from. The typical response would be, and had been, to shrug and assume his parents had been of
mixed extraction before the war and that, in all the chaos and global upheaval of that time—upheaval that
the world had never seen the like of before that horrible catastrophe—the records and even family
legends had simply gotten lost, as they had for so many. Nobody would have guessed that the "Asian"
man had begun life as a Latino gang leader named Manuel, and finished it, after a fashion, as an Anglo
Fleet Strike General named James Stewart. Nobody but the stacked blond in the sheer red pegnoir
crossing the floor towards him from the suite's bathroom. With the silvery highlights caught in the glow of
the lamplight, the room otherwise darkened by the heavy drapes drawn across the windows, she looked
like a fourteen-year-old boy's wet dream of a Scandinavian goddess. He rolled up onto one elbow to
watch her better, brushing a stray wisp of hair back from her cheek as she climbed into his bed.


 "I never really thought I'd end up in a marriage that would feel so much like an affair," he said, not for the
first time. For either of them.


"I know," she said, kissing his cheek and trailing her kisses back up around his ear. "I'm glad you could
make it down for the weekend."


"God, I missed you, Cally." Stewart turned his face into her kisses and took her in his arms, giving
himself up to the moment of having his beautiful wife in his bed again, no matter for how short a time.


 Later, he tried to keep his damned eyes from misting up as they watched the latest home holos she'd
brought him of the daughters he'd never been able to meet, who had and would grow up believing their
father dead. Somehow, Cally always arranged it so that she could be in the holos with the girls. He
wondered if she suspected how many lonely hours he spent, late at night, playing over those bits and
scraps of the lives of his family, again and again, until he could see them behind his eyes as he dreamed.
Many of the dreams were not pleasant. They were, in fact, about what you'd expect. On the whole,
those were less painful than the happier dreams that put him in the holos with Cally and Morgan and
Sinda, only to wake up alone in bed in the perpetually recycled air of the moon, with the metallic tang of
machinery at the back of his throat. He'd thought about getting a dog, but it was hell getting them through
quarantine, and getting a puppy from a licensed breeder was expensive. He'd do it when he got back
though. It was no substitute, but at this point . . . He shook his head and reminded himself of his
oft-repeated resolution on these visits, never to leave in his head until the visit was actually over. The time
was too precious to be eaten up with regrets. He felt a deep sympathy with Mike O'Neal in bearing his
curse. He was often thankful that, even though unlike Mike he knew he was in hell, at least he could look
forward to the occasional weekend pass in heaven.


 They were about fifteen minutes into the latest pack of holos—she must have hidden cameras all over
the place, because she always brought hours of them, even though they only watched a few
together—when dinner arrived from the seafood place across the street. Yes, the room would smell like
fish afterwards until the filter in the air unit cleared it all out, but one thing he had learned about Cally over
the seven years of stolen moments that comprised their marriage was that the woman loved seafood
more than any three other people. He had decided to try some bizarre local dish called shrimp and grits
at her behest, but spent most of his time feeding her strips of calamari just to feel her lips close over his
fingers as she took each tidbit. The shrimp dish certainly wasn't bad, but he had never understood why
anglos from this part of the US had to call polenta something as undignified as "grits." His own colleagues
in Noble Lion Tong tolerated his unusual fondness for Italian cuisine with a certain degree of amusement.
Mostly, he'd learned to cook it for himself, although it did occasionally require him to import some
unusual ingredients from Earth. She was right. He did like the shrimp dish. With the polenta.


"I feel guilty, a lot, for the girls growing up without a dad," he said.


 "It's hard. But there's nothing we can do differently, so I try not to think about it," she said, looking away
and picking at the worn bedspread, that would never have passed muster in a decent pre-war hotel.


"I'm just glad you live with your grandparents. At least they've got a grandfather around."


"Yeah," she sighed. "It's not the same, though. Growing up I always missed Daddy, and I never really
got over losing my mom. But for having been a kid in the war years, I had it really good."


 "I noticed a lot of the clothes you and the girls were wearing had seen better days. Same with Papa
O'Neal and Shari." He didn't like broaching such an awkward subject. But having grown up poor
himself, he couldn't let it lie. This was his family. "Are you guys having money problems? What's
happening? It looks to me like those people aren't paying you nearly enough for what you do. Okay,
thereisn't enough and I wish you'd quit, but I understand why you can't. Almost. Still, how bad is it?"


 "Money was pretty tight for awhile. The salaries took a severe dive after I got back, for various reasons.
They'd pay more if they could. Anyway, we just had a windfall and things are better now. For awhile at
least. Enough to get everybody some decent clothes and stuff. Besides, there's not a lot we could do if
they weren't. They're extra paranoid about people with too high a lifestyle for their salaries, what with
Jay's defection."


 "Sorry about that." Stewart winced. He hadn't turned Jay, but he had provided the money to keep him
turned.


 "Not your fault. He would have found someone to buy his information. Traitors do. Anyway, we made a
commission on finding a buyer for something for them. Brokering isn't usually in the scope of what we do
and the sale was too much money to argue that they couldn't afford the commission. It was . . . large."


"Cally, what do you think would happen, really happen, if your organization found out about me?" he
asked.


 "Uh . . . bad things. They're really paranoid right now and they'd probably believe you were on deep
cover for the Darhel and I was compromised. I'd probably be able to keep any of it from spilling over
onto Grandpa or anyone else in the clan, but, well, don't ask."
His lips tightened. "And you still won't leave, right? Wecould go under deep enough cover that they'd
never find you. The Tong is good at that. But it's still no use asking, right?" He sighed as she shook her
head. "You're going to invest your windfall, right? Is it enough for that? How much are we talking?"


"A bit over six thousand fedcreds."


 "Okay. That's enough to stake you for some investments." He stared off into the distance. "I . . . know
some things about some businesses that aren't common knowledge. Things that will influence share
prices. If I was careful to keep the tips to businesses where youcould rationally decide to invest in them if
you were a shrewd investor and good researcher, and tell you where to look so you could leave an
electronic trail in your systems of doing your homework if they asked any questions, that's some help I
could probably safely give," he said. "My boss wouldn't mind one or two people going along for the
ride—just keep it in the immediate family.Really keep it close."


 "I'd have to lay some red herrings by doing similar research of other companies I don't invest in," she
mused. "Yeah, it could work. I could even just take my results to Grandpa and suggest an investment.
But how would I get himnot to share with the immediate world? What am I thinking—it's Grandpa. If I
buy an investment book that's already well thumbed, like at a used bookstore while I'm here, I can just
flip through it to learn how to leave plausible trails and talk the game. It's not like I'm stupid andcouldn't
learn it on my own. And even if Grandpa suspects I've got a source for stock tips, that would just make
himmore likely to keep it closer than close and not mention to anyone—especially not the Bane Sidhe.
Not as upset as he still is with them about money." She leaned over and kissed him by way of a thank
you, which pretty much led to the end of that conversation.


 "So, back to the moon with the commuters on Monday. What about you? Off to kill people and break
things, or do you get a really tough week chasing the girls?" he joked.


"A week off, then a family reunion, of all things. Wish you could be there," she said.


"That might be a bit more reunion than your family bargained for."


"I think the O'Neals would keep it quiet. But we've got a lot of miscellaneous folks around from the
organization, whose loyalty is more to the Bane Sidhe than to Clan O'Neal. I do wish, but wishing
doesn't work, does it?"


"Clan O'Neal. Sometimes I wonder if you realize how much Indowy has rubbed off on you."


 "Hmph. Not as much as you'd think. We Irish have been big on family ties for a long time. Okay, well,
maybe there was some Indowy influence there, too, but it was long enough ago that it doesn't count," she
said. She sure was cute when she pouted. But maybe they should watch a movie or something before
getting into that again. Nah . . . well, okay, maybe.She probably didn't need a break, but a couple of
hour holodrama and some microwave popcorn would almost feel like a date.


 Before she left Sunday evening, he put a large enough load of sure thing tips in a read and destroy cube
that she could set up a convincingly diverse portfolio of rapid gainers, with one or two modest growth
stocks, to hatch her share of that commission nest egg into a chicken or two, and soon. He knew she'd
memorize them later. It helped him more than she could possible know to finally be able to do something
concrete to take care of his family.


 Before she left, they showered. It was one of the sad little rituals they'd developed through seven years
of goodbyes. The driving rain of the shower quickly changed to sex. Then, with the carpet outside the
bathroom soaked, they climbed back into the shower. He rinsed the fluff from the carpet off her back
while she rinsed her sweat off his skin. Soon, there was no trace of her on him at all, with only a damp
floor and her scent on the hotel sheets to remind him that he had a wife. He slept on her pillow that night.




 She heard them before she saw them. The nasty half-juvenile male laughs, several, and the higher pitched
whimper. Her lips thinned and she dropped her leather jacket on the sidewalk, deliberately relaxing
before rounding the corner of the crumbling brick wall that had once fronted the alley on this side,
pretending to look in her purse for something and coming out with paper that might have been a map and
a small flashlight. Six. She'd caught them out of the corner of her eye. The girl was small, either a teen or
just short. Cally looked up and startled slightly, pretending to see them for the first time, silently noting
that the alley was open to a parking lot on the other end.


 "Hey! What do you think you boys are doing? Let go of her!" She let some of the nasal, staccato
character of a northern Urbie accent into her voice, indignant, stupid. They looked up, still holding their
victim. No need to guess what they'd been starting on. A couple of them looked back at the girl,
undecided. She advanced into the alley a few steps, trying hard to project a sense of indignation and a
tourist's naive certainty of personal invulnerability. They bit.


"Hell, I never did like sloppy seconds, anyway." Four of them detached from the girl and advanced in a
pack, breaking into an easy lope as she shuffled back a few steps, eyes wide, turning to run.


 As they caught up with her, her back kick slammed hard into the lead thug's knee, snapping it backward
with all the force her upgraded strength could deliver. He fell, his scream subsiding into pained swearing
that she barely heard. She pivoted on the ball of her foot and slammed her palm heel into the throat of
number two, splintering his adam's apple, dancing back to plant a sidekick to his gut that threw him back
a couple of yards to choke somewhere out of the way. Three landed a hard punch to her head as Four
grabbed her wrist. Bad mistake. Ducking under his arm, she brought it up behind him, keeping his body
between her and Three for the crucial moment it took to snake her arm around his neck, pulling his head
firmly against her breastbone before dropping straight to the ground. Four's neck made a satisfying
crunch, but Three had had a chance to pile on top of her, which ordinarily would have worked on a
woman her size. Bad luck for him, Cally O'Neal was anything but ordinary. She grabbed his head and
twisted, but this one had the good sense to roll with it, bouncing back up to his feet as she reached her
own, to see that thugs five and six had joined the party.


 She grinned as she jumped into the air, slamming the front of her left foot on the side of his head hard
enough to rattle him, but too high to kill him. She landed with bent knees on the way down, taking a fist
to the jaw from Six as the price of getting another sidekick into Five and sending him tripping back over
One, eliciting another scream. She danced back, rubbing her jaw. If anything, her grin widened. Six
hesitated and she blocked a punch as Three came in without waiting for the other two—his first mistake.
It cost him a blindingly fast pair of punches to his gut, which knocked the wind out of him right before he
got a hard round punch to the nose. Predictably, blood spurted out. She didn't think she broke it, but it
was going to be hell getting all the stains out of her blouse. While Three was hunched over with his hands
on his knees, out of the way, Six came back with Five right behind him. The jumping backfist blacked
Six's eye, causing him to hesitate again as another sidekick cracked a few of Five's ribs and knocked him
out of the way.


 She and Six fenced, with her absorbing the occasional hit just to get in a really pretty combination move.
She seemed to be enjoying it more than he was. For the moment, Three and Five were just watching her
play with Six, each grabbing an unexpected hurt but obviously not quite out for the count. Street fights
seldom have lulls, but sparring matches do. For a moment, Six was paused, fists up, looking for an
opening, catching his breath. She stilled, in the kind of absolute stillness that any fighter knows is one of
the most dangerous moments in a fight.


"It's been fun playing with y'all, but I'm going to have to finish up now and get home," she said, the slight
natural southern drawl at odds with the persona she'd worn coming into the alley.


 Whether it was the stillness itself giving them a chance to think, or the recognition that three of their
friends were on the ground, two dead and one crippled, or the deadness that entered her
blood-spattered face as if someone had flipped a switch and turned off all humanity inside her, Cally
would never know. What she did know was that all three suddenly turned and made tracks down the
alley faster than she would have figured they'd still be able to move, especially the one with the cracked
ribs. She had somehow ended up facing a pile of soggy cardboard boxes, partway between the live kid
and the girl.


 She looked over at the crippled survivor, a kid, maybe in his early twenties, with dirty blond hair and a
ratty bandanna around his neck. Blood soaked his jeans where she'd kicked him, but to her practiced
eye it looked like he was in no danger of bleeding out. A foil packet flipped out of her hand, landing on
the thug's stomach.


 "Have a morphine. Hold you till the ambulance arrives." She fixed him with an icy stare, "Dude. You may
not believe this, but I just did you a favor." He was too busy gritting his teeth to reply. Or too scared.
"You're alive. File for disability, learn a trade, find another line of work. You were really lousy at this one,
anyway." The cripple might have been swearing under his breath as she turned away.


Cally looked over at the girl, who had to be about fourteen, and blinked, "What the hell are you waiting
for? Scram!" The idiot tried to run out the alley the same way the remaining thugs had gone. "Pfweet!"
she whistled, jerking a thumb over her shoulder as the girl turned back around. "That way."


 The assassin shook her head as the girl edged past her, skittering down the alley, obviously trying not to
look at the bodies or the last guy. Cally rubbed her jaw. Definitely gonna bruise. Ick. She wiped the
blood off her hands on her blouse, and off her face once she found a clean spot, picking her way past the
cripple and the corpses, that were beginning to smell strongly of recent deadness.


 "Oh." She turned back to the guy on the ground, coldly. "You never saw me. None of you. You're really
sure you never saw me."


"Right. We're going to say a girl did this to us. I don't think so," he said, bitterly, muttering "bitch" under
his breath.


 She nodded once and picked up her purse and the stuff that had spilled from it, retrieved her jacket, and
zipped it up to the neck. She got about a block away before pulling out her PDA. "Buckley, wait fifteen
minutes and route a call to emergency services from the nearest pay phone." Uncharacteristically, the
buckley was silent, merely acknowledging the command on the screen. Muttering, "I hate rapists," she
walked the rest of the way to the parking lot and her bike without incident.


Home, on the other hand, wasn't so great. She was in her bathrobe in the laundry room, rinsing the
blood out of her clothes, when she heard someone clear his throat.


"Good morning, Grandpa," she said.


"Yeah, I suppose itis morning. Technically. Any of that yours?" His voice had a certain long-suffering
quality to it.


"Like you really need to ask," she said, shaking meat tenderizer on the stains before adding the white
blouse to a load of wash.


"How many times am I going to have to tell you that you can't depopulate the criminal element of
Charleston single-handed? People would notice," he griped. "How many bodies?"


 "Only two. Gang types. You and I both know the police are too overworked to investigate it. Besides, I
really hate rapists."


"I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, just that if you keep running in there like some comic
book Valkyrie avenger, people are going to talk."
"Gampa, what's a ape-ist?" They both turned to see Sinda in the doorway clutching a bedraggled plush
penguin. She dropped her fist from the eye she'd been rubbing when she saw Cally's face, "Mommy?
You gots ouchies."


"I was in a little accident on the way home, sweetie. It looks worse than it is," she said.


"Were you wearing your helmet?" the four year old asked suspiciously.


"Yep. Just a few bruises and scrapes. Why aren't you in bed?"


"I skinned my knee when I fell offa my bike. You musta falled on your hands."


"Bed, Sinda," her mother ordered, glancing down at her raw knuckles. "Not one word," she said to
Papa O'Neal, in response to his quirked eyebrow and the quivering corner of his lip as the little girl
disappeared down the hall.


"Didn't say a thing." He walked off, whistling softly.



  Chapter Five
 Monday 10/18/54

 It was a large office, for the moon. It had the standard black enamel desk with laptop and PDA, the
ergonomic chair, and a pair of squashy armchairs upholstered in superior-quality leathex. Those were
standard features for any managing analyst's office. Then there were the small touches that indicated that
the office's occupant had the approval of the Grandfather, and his trusted aides, as a promising candidate
for promotion—no small thing in an organization whose upper leadership tended to have the resources to
avail themselves of the rejuvenation process. Discreetly, of course.


 On one side of the room a carved, decorative screen kept unlikely company with an old-fashioned,
framed, photo-quality print of a pre-war surfer catching a wave at a place few remembered as Malibu
Beach. Underneath the picture, a small fountain sat on a low table, gurgling peacefully. On another wall, a
conventional work of a blossoming branch, painted on parchment, rested in a frame that matched the
carved screen. A braided ficus, a species renowned for its tolerance of low gravity, sat in a large pot in
one corner. A small potted plant sat on one end of the desk, partially screening a holocube of a
spectacular blond and two little girls from direct view through the open doorway. Of all the decor in the
room, only the wall color had not been the occupant's choice. A shade the office manager called pale
peach and the occupant called pink had been hard-coded throughout the suite of offices. Well, he hadn't
chosen the carpet, either, but as it was an inoffensive light brownish color, he seldom noticed it.
 Named Manuel Guerrera by his mother, and, later, James Stewart by himself, Yan Kato was an
extraordinarily ordinary looking man. He was neither too tall nor too short. His hair was spiked enough to
be proper, but not enough to draw attention. His features, while clearly Asian, did not lend themselves to
identification with any known ethnic group. As his name suggested a mixed ancestry, that was
unremarkable, too. In the aftermath of the war's turmoil, there were millions like him. As he was, in fact,
Latino, the surgeons had considered his skin tone and texture too difficult to match to any specific pure
ancestry.


 At the moment, Yan—who still thought of himself privately as simply "Stewart"—was not looking at his
office decor, but was instead facing the personal holotank behind his desk on which he had called up a
display of star systems, travel times, and trade routes. He had been in the office, doped on provigil-C, for
the entire nine hours he'd been back on station. He had been awake and running analyses on his buckley,
with occasional carefully camouflaged data downloads, since leaving his hotel in Charleston some
fifty-three hours before. He checked his results five times to make absolutely sure he'd accounted for as
much as possible and provided for maximum local flexibility to accommodate unforeseen contingencies.
Finally, he sent the orders to dispatch the Tong's single fast courier ship, which he technically had no
authority to commandeer, along the prescribed route and sent an explanatory memorandum, eyes only, to
the Grandfather. The courier was moderately expensive to maintain near a major jump point out from
Earth. It was prohibitively expensive to dispatch anywhere, because of the fuel expenditures involved in
making a warp jump and the resultant servicing of a vessel that was nearly scrap—all the Tong could
afford. Mostly it sat, it's bored crew collecting dust, ignored by the Darhel as a worthless, unreliable
wreck unloaded on gullible humans as a vanity ship. Stewart would be answering some hard questions
for his temerity in using it. Not just for one hyper jump, but for four. Dulain, to Prall, to Diess, resupply at
Diess base, and then back to the Sol System. The first three systems with Epetar cargos would get a
courier visit—just long enough to pop out of hyper-space, tight beam the heavily coded instructions to a
communications satellite under cover of a general communications packet, and receive acknowledgment
of receipt. The nice thing about the Galactic Communications System, or lack thereof, was that so many
Darhel groups would have encrypted traffic of so many redundant messages going somewhere that
everybody who received routine communications would assume that someone else's message had been
important enough to charter a courier. This would spur much spying, but only against each other.


 The only explanation the memo to the head of the Tong included was that therewas an explanation, of
course, and that it was a matter of the utmost discretion. Stewart never pumped his wife for information.
For one thing, most of it would be irrelevant to what he did now. For another, he loathed traitors and
would not have married Cally if he had believed for even a moment that she could be turned against her
people. But the Bane Sidhe tended to attract good operational minds, not good businesspeople. He was
sure she had no idea how much she had let slip by naming the size of her windfall. He wouldn't have
asked if he had even for a moment suspected the crucial information he'd been able to derive from it. But
done was done. Knowing the percentage commission, the value of trade goods, and knowing the
approximate discount you lost off the market price fencing stolen goods even if you were agood
 negotiator—on matters of price, his wife was likely a poor one—there was really only one thing she
could have stolen. She also had to havereally gotten scalped on the deal. It was unusual for a Darhel to
have that much code-key wealth on hand. Class Nine Code Keys were the ultimate form of negotiable
wealth, usually only traded between Darhel Clan-Corps. You couldn't just use them; they were the
master keys to make the master keys to make the keys that created nannites.
 He was surprised she'd been able to fence them at all. He assumed it was through some remaining link to
the other Bane Sidhe group. Come to think of it, the difficulty explained the pathetically low price she got.


 She was a lot smarter than she'd pretended to be under her cover as Captain Sinda Makepeace when
they first met, but Cally had, through no fault of her own, attended schools that placed a low priority on
market economics, and had nothing like his own early environmental exposure to the realities of
commerce. He had been a gang leader—a financially and socially successful one—before he and his men
had gotten drafted into the war. His formative experiences had made the Tong a very good fit, once the
United States Constitution that he'd once sworn to preserve, protect, and defend had, despite his best
efforts, become a meaningless piece of paper. His wife's grandfather, also the father of his old CO, Iron
Mike O'Neal, was a canny old smuggler. Passingthat skill set on, along with the keen eye that allowed
one to assess the worth of almost anything at a glance, had not been Papa O'Neal's priority in the
beautiful assassin's formative years. Reclusive and deadly, she had been his perfect warrior child: cute as
a puppy, with a bite like a cobra.


 Unsurprisingly for a cute puppy, his wife had grown up to be one icy bitch. Together, they'd woken and
thawed each other's hearts seven years ago on Titan Base. He loved her, he knew she loved him—but he
never quite forgot the deadly killer concealed behind those beautiful, cornflower-blue eyes. Top
operator, yes. Experienced at fencing stolen goods, no.


 The only thing that matched her probable area of operations, the necessary portability, and the time
period, would have been the price of a cargo of trade ships, ready to leave Titan Base. By the timing, it
had to be the cargo slated for the Epetar Group—which fit with Manager Pardal's presence on Earth.
Without the high-level nanogenerator code keys that served as real-money currency among the Darhel
groups, the Epetar group would not be able to pay for its shipments. Rather than arriving at a planet to
attempt to pick up a cargo with no money, something the factor who owned the cargo would never
allow, Epetar's freighters would wait until currency arrived by fast boat and then depart. Making them
late for every port on their circuit.


 At 0800 local, when the rest of the home office staff arrived, he would take his PDA with a carefully
produced analysis on the screen with him and "forget" it at the water cooler. With any luck, the man in the
cubicle next to it, a known Darhel plant for the Gistar group, would pick it up and see the file. The man
was stupid, and slack in his electronic hygene. Stewart had already put a small tag on him to detect and
copy his transmissions up the chain to his masters. The Tong valued more than Stewart's business talents.
His years in Fleet Strike Counterintelligence after the war, and before meeting his wife and becoming
officially dead, had substantially enhanced the Tong's internal security. Half a dozen identified spies were
now reporting primarily what the leadership chose to let them see.


 Reporting this kind of material to a huge, hardball, corporate entity via a Tong plant would have been
suicidal, if he'd been dealing with humans. Humans would put their heads together andnotice that the
Tong had had the information and had connections with the factors screwing Epetar along its trade
routes. The trails were covered, but Human intuition just might connect the dots. It paid to know the alien
mind. Putting the pieces together, even long after the fact, would require having someone who had all the
pieces. Which would mean someone at Gistar would have to share the information about how they knew
of Epetar's loss. Sharing did not make up a major part of the Darhel personality. Humans from a rival
corporation, in the same situation, would almost certainly look into it. Gistar couldn't care two beans
about Epetar's losses, unless the existence of outside involvement was very blatant. The Darhel were not
stupid. They were very, very smart. Probably smarter than humans. But they weren't invulnerable, if you
could keep the left hand from knowing what the right hand was doing.


 If Kim reported Epetar's misfortune to his bosses at Gistar, Stewart would know. If the man somehow
missed the opportunity to peruse Stewart's PDA—and he'd carefully made sure anything else important
was well locked down—he'd have to find some other way to feed him the information. The faster it got
to Gistar, the better. It was crucial that the other Darhel group be in a position to snap up Epetar's
cargoes. He'd chosen Gistar out of several Darhel groups with operations in the Sol System because it
seemed to have the best cash flow and the best distribution of ships, for his purposes. Gistar routinely
stocked portions of its cash reserves on board the commercial couriers that waited on site at most major
jump points, ready to be dispatched with urgent information—for a steep fee. Any outgoing Gistar
freighter could, again for a fee, rendezvous with a courier ship prior to jump and pick up code key
currency to remedy misfortunes or take advantage of opportunities. Gistar had a freighter load of
monazite sands, molybdenum, and various asteroid extracts bound from the Sol System to Adenast, with
its major space dock facility and building slips. They had a courier load of Tchpht scientists bound on a
return trip to Barwhon after installing some rather exotic equipment in their asteroid extraction facilities.


 Both destinations would give ample opportunity for Gistar to divert a ship and load it with sufficient
currency to purchase high-margin cargos. Both ships were far enough from the jump point for Kim to
tightbeam them the motherload of information he was about to brilliantly stumble over, but close enough
to it to ensure that all ships that would be involved in Stewart's little dance would be close to their
respective jump points and therefore would move very, very quickly to reach their commercial targets.


 The hapless Epetar crews would arrive at planet after planet to find no waiting goods. They would then
be in position to make deals they thought would minimize their losses, all the while being systematically
and subtly skinned. Stewart's grin was feral,Ain't payback a bitch.


 It would all look so closely timed as to have been planned in advance by Gistar—drawing suspicion
away from the organization that had such a firm hold on the loyalties of his wife. Stewart didn't give a
flying fuck about the Bane Sidhe, but providing cover for his wife—and by extension his kids—was
something else. He'd never want her to turn traitor on them, but God dammit he wished she'd just quit the
fucking job. They wouldn't dare touch her if she was in the custody of the Tong, as his wife. They needed
the organizational relationship too much, and she'd be no threat to them, anyway. It wasn't like they didn't
have other dormant assets. The Tong's patronagecertainly covered him from misunderstandings with the
Bane Sidhe, if they were to become aware of his identity and continued survival today. Cally O'Neal
Stewart would become just one more female operative on the inactive list. She didn't see it that way,
which did maybe say a few things about where he rated on her list of priorities.


 If, somehow, his analysis of the Darhel situation was wrong, in any major particular, he would probably
find himself beginning a new job on the graveyard shift of the bar that served the station's dock workers.
If he was right, as he was almost certain he was, he was about to make the organization a great deal of
money. More importantly, he was about to enable the organization to subtly and thoroughly screw a
Darhel business group while keeping it totally ignorant of the fact that it was being royally and deliberately
fucked. The money would please his superiors. The honor restored, by avenging a very personal debt the
Tong owed to the Darhel, would mean infinitely more. The Tong had been scrupulously careful to never
speak of their knowledge of the events in the war, and how much they had pieced together of the part the
Darhel played in it, anywhere where an electronic eye or ear might overhear it. They had quite
meticulously avoided ever putting anything at all in writing, much less onto any electronic device. They
had quite deliberately played fat, dumb and happy. And they had waited. Finally, there was an
opportunity. It was worth a bit of risk to potentially avenge the deaths of billions of their people. Hell, it
was worth the risk to avenge China alone.


The Tong had not originally been his people, of course. But when Stewart joined something, he joined.

 Tuesday 10/19/54

 Cally had to fight to stay awake on the drive into Charleston Tuesday morning. Grandpa had been
infernally cheerful when he woke her up at six. Unfortunately, strong coffee tasted wonderful, but might
as well have been water for all the good the caffeine did her. Her nannites scavenged it and destroyed it
almost before it hit her bloodstream. Provigil-C worked, but not if she wanted to sleep on the plane, and
boy, did she want to sleep on the plane. There was too much to do once she got into base. She'd never
have time to recover. She really ought to go through her pitch for Michelle's mission before she had to
present it. There were a lot of things she ought to do. And she did them. Usually. Mostly. Sort of.
Grandpa had been a bad influence.


Keiran had the small, gray jet ready to pre-flight when they arrived—it had taken all of Grandpa's
persuasion to keep Lucille from sporting at least red stripes and her name.


 Their company ID's, under a very sincere front corporation, allowed them to enter the charter gate at
any time of the day or night without further screening. Despite the official "terrorism" that DAG existed to
combat, nobody was hijacking or blowing up airplanes anymore. Why try that kind of political action? All
you had to do if you didn't like living under an existing government was punch out a case or so of sten
guns, stock up on ammo, and take off for parts unknown. Oh, there were political malcontents, of
course. They just had a dearth of the personality types willing to go out and die for them. Cally never
thought of the Bane Sidhe as terrorists, and would have argued vehemently that they were not. After all,
they never, ever tried to be noticed, and they never, ever tried to frighten anyone at all. Oh, they sought
political change. But very subtly, and with a careful eye towards the long haul. Personally, she was more
impatient. It was one of the reasons she had chosen her particular profession. That, and some unusually
high scores on the basic occupational specialization aptitude profile. Tactical patience came easily.
Strategic patience was harder for her. It was only Aelool's assurance that endgame was ninety percent
probable, for better or worse, within her own grandchildren's generation that made it possible for her to
keep going, year in and year out.


 Once she and Grandpa had secured their bikes in the hangar, they stepped out onto the gray tarmac,
under the heavy fall cloud cover. Kieran was in the cockpit pre-flighting Lucille, and Cally loaded her
backpack onto the plane. From the boxes in back, she wasn't the only one supplementing income with a
little tax-free transshipment of trade goods. She nodded approvingly, until she saw their pilot reach back
over his shoulder to press something that looked suspiciously like a wad of bills into Grandpa's hand.
"Grandpa!" She knew she sounded shocked.


"What? Like you don't?" He didn't even turn around, pocketing the cash, hand coming back out with a
well-worn tobacco pouch.


"You could have at least cut me in." she huffed.


"Oh. Sorry. Thought you were getting some unhealthy scruples in your old age," he said. "Besides, no
offense, and I'm all for sharing the wealth, but what were you going to trade that I'm not already getting
direct?"


 "Well, for one thing, a few of the hospitals could certainly use some high grade opium. You know how
bare bones they are for most drugs. They've got good enough lab guys to do most of the chemistry on
site. We've got enough non-immunes that the base hospital wouldn't turn up their noses, either. Our guys
could even do the final chemistry for whole shipments. Better to rope them in to do the reselling,
anyway."


"And you'd have a source I don't know about? Tell me you're not involved in any way I'd disapprove
of." He seldom took that flat tone with her.


"I have no part in profiting from putting a monkey on anyone's back, not even tangentially, if that's what
you mean. Notanything you'd disapprove of, Grandpa? You'd disapprove more if I wasn't." She smiled
wryly.


 He stared at her searchingly a moment before nodding. "We'll talk quantities later," he said. "And where
the hell is Tommy?" He stepped to the door of the plane and looked out across the endless gray field as if
he could make the other man appear by scowling.


 Cally wasn't nearly that fussed about it. Tommy late meant more sacktime for her. She shifted enough
boxes that she could recline her seat and got her sleep mask out of her thigh zip pocket. She could sleep
without dark. She could sleep propped standing up if that was all she had time for. But she'd get the best
use out of the available rest if she had dark. Besides, Grandpa was alert enough for both of them. The
last thing she heard before she drifted off was a grumpy harrumph from his general direction.


 All too soon, he was nudging her awake, tapping her hand from a careful distance on the other side of
the aisle.


"Hey, sleepy, time to wake up," he said.


She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, glancing at the window. Not that it did any good, since someone
had thoughtfully lowered the shade. She didn't feel the slightly hollow sensation of descent. "How far out
are we?"


"A bit more an hour," he said.


"What?! I've only been asleep a half hour," she glared accusingly. "A bit more," she echoed grumpily,
pulling the mask back down over her eyes.


"You got a cat nap. Quit bitching, time for business."


"Can't it wait?" she grumbled.


"Maybe for you it can," Tommy broke in, "but I've got three doctor's appointments and paperwork in
personnel. Vitapetroni expects me pretty much as soon as we get off the plane."


 "And I need my ducks in a row for Nathan. Alright," she sighed, sitting up and yawning. "Anyone think
to bring coffee?"


 "Sure." Tommy poured a cup of coffee into a thermos cap and handed it over. The slightly sour
aftertaste as she drank made her wish they could brew it on board. Unfortunately, the last coffee pot for
the plane's machine had broken and from the prices on ebay you'd think the things were made of gold.
Wendy had probably brewed this in a pan on the stove. She ignored the grounds in the bottom of the cup
and finished the whole thing.


 "So. Papa filled me in on the basic mission. Darhel-owned secret research facility, we pull a switch while
the all-seeing high mucky-muck mentat is out of town. Broadly, what are the less obvious things that
could go wrong? His schedule changes, difficulty getting people inside, all the standard stuff is a given."
Tommy shrugged, pouring himself some of the aging brew.


 "Well, first off the Darhel and the mentat are going to be worried directly about Michelle. If they weren't
scared of her, they wouldn't be trying to kill her. She doesn't plan a direct attack, but how sure of that are
they?" Cally offered.


 Papa O'Neil spat thoughtfully into a paper towel, wadding it into an airsick bag. "I don't know how she'd
attack if she did. Whether the mentat thinks he can handle it or not, my understanding is he's theonly thing
that could handle a direct attack and everybody would be worried about apocalypse anyway. You can't
exactly plan for apocalypse. At least, I've mulled it over and I can't think of a way they could do it. They
may be scared, but their whole play is a bet that she won't. If she goes ballistic on them, they'd have to
worry just as much about her doing it when they try to call her debts. They've placed their bets, I don't
think there's anything we can do about their own 'what if we're wrong' scenario for direct attack."
 "They'll expect her to try to call in favors with Indowy clans to find it and steal it back. She's Indowy
raised, and that's how they'd handle it. Especially since she's got few clan members of her own as far as
they know—just Mike and her breeding group's kids. They'll obviously make sure Mike's on the far side
of inhabited space," Tommy said.


 "They have, I checked." Papa O'Neal nodded and put in, "They'll call in an Aethal master. Get him to set
up a situation board and block any moves with the Indowy. Since she's a master herself, they'll hire the
best one they can find. We can only hope she's better than he is and has successfully camouflaged any
connections she'll be using. That ball's in Michelle's court."


 "Darhel. Aliens are alien. As it gets closer to her being in breach of contract, he may get antsy. If he gets
nervous, he'll try to cover his own ass. To a Darhel, that will mean flashy moves to look like he went
above and beyond in the event that something goes wrong. So what's he do? One thing is it's Earth and
humans. Smart Darhel hire security when dealing with Earth and humans. He doesn't know how much
they need, so he'll think more is better and expect his bosses to think the same, but he won't want to pay
much for it. DAG."


 "What? How do you get that?" It was Tommy who said it, but he and Papa were both looking at her as
if she'd gone nuts.


 "No, it makes sense if you think like an elf. Great Lakes is right next door. DAG has figured prominently
in three or four big box office holodramas lately," she explained.


Tommy and Papa rolled their eyes. The shows in question had been more Hollywooded than anything
Hollywood had turned out pre-war. Really bad, and really popular.


 "The point is they're glamorous right now. Flashy. The Darhel always have to have the best of the best of
whatever Earth's got. Adding to the attraction, he probably doesn't have to pay his lackeys in the Joint
Chiefs' office an extra buck to get them. Just bully the guys—they're already nice and compromised. He'll
do it because he can, and he'lllike it. It's an excuse to throw his weight around. What's the downside to
him?"


"That's a hell of a longshot," Papa complained. "He may not even think of it. You can never be too
paranoid. Okay, we'll cover it. Brief in one of the cousins just in case."


"He's more likely to bring in a second Aethal master. Where a first won't get her, a second might,"
Tommy insisted.


"True. All we can do about it is remind her to be paranoid as hell and not get caught. Cally, that's your
department."
 "Got it. I'll take care of the briefing, too. We've got that family reunion coming up. I'm sure there will be
someone I can pull off to the side. Are we done?"


"For now, unless any of us think of anything else." He spat once into the bag and grabbed a bottle of
water. "I wouldn't turn down a cup of that coffee."


"I'm sleeping." Cally said, emphatically. "Don't wake me until we're on the ground."




 Father O'Reilly's office was a familiar and usually comfortable place, but today he looked more strained
than she'd seen him since the first, tough weeks right after the Bane Sidhe split. Aelool was absent,
attending a birth celebration for his newest clan members. It would take all day. It had become necessary
for the health of the remaining Indowy to break the traditional prohibition against their highly prolific race
establishing breeding groups on Earth. It had been done with trepidation on both sides and a hard upper
population limit. Once the limits had been reached, the tentative plans were to proceed with some highly
clandestine shipyards that had always been beyond the daring of the original organization. Human
influence on the Indowy on this side of the split was so infinitesimal as not to be noticeable to most
humans. Cally knew enough about the Indowy to realize the changes were at breakneck speed, for them,
and to understand quite clearly why the Bane Sidhe split had been a total divorce. She also knew why
the organization was so very careful to conceal the extent of the social changes from the Tchpht
observers. Nothing could be concealed from the Himmit, of course, but just because they collected
stories didn't always mean they told them.


 It made her nervous to see the father so clearly stressed. Anything that could upset him couldn't be good
news for the organization. Usually, he wasn't a man given to fidgeting and had one of the best
poker-faces of anyone she knew. It took more than a still expression to conceal dark circles under your
eyes, though, and the usually immaculate clerical collar was wrinkled as if he hadn't been to bed and
changed clothes in quite awhile. He had that look around the eyes that she couldn't quite put into words
but had learned to associate with an active dose of Provigil-C. His thumb and forefinger were rubbing
together as they must when he prayed the rosary, even though his hands were empty. She doubted he
had even noticed he was doing it, which disturbed her even more. The weather in the artificial window
reflected the cold, wet, stormy day above. Not the most pleasant day in the world. She herself would
have preferred something more cheerful, but she didn't ask him to change it. It would have been rude.
Normally she found the shushing sound of rain peaceful. Today it was just dismal. She took a deep
breath and folded her hands in her lap, waiting for his comments on the mission profile displayed in front
of him on his desk. He turned the display off and sighed, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his
nose before looking up at her.


 "When, exactly, is Michelle's contract with the Darhel overdue? I see nothing explicit in here about an
inside man, and we'd need one. Does she have a man inside or doesn't she, and if not, what are your
plans for how we would get a man inside, ourselves, before the whole endeavor becomes moot?"
 "Her contract doesn't go into default until May, but she's not confident of being able to hold off a
contract court, if the Epetar Group chooses to convene one, for more than about two Earth months." She
pointed to the folder. "As you inferred from that, she does have someone inside, but his willingness to
help us is limited to helping influence any hiring decisions in our man's favor."


"A hiring decision in our favor. Or, knowing who our applicant is, he could be setting a trap. He could
get caught, himself, and give our man up. Of course, no operation is without risks." The priest propped
his chin on steepled fingers for a moment.


 "I understand that your sister wants this device, and I understand that she's willing to pay very well for its
retrieval." His tone was pained, and she knew this wasn't good. "But nothing you've shown us so far gives
us good enough assurance of team survival to make it worth the hazard. Also, there's no operational
benefit to our organization. Thanks to your own efforts, we do have some financial breathing room. But
for strictly financial supplementation, there are safer options. We have always reserved this level of risk
for operations with a specific strategic goal. Unless you can show me how this qualifies, I'm afraid we're
going to have to decline," he said.


It was not at all what Cally had expected Father O'Reilly to say, and she was temporarily at a loss for
words.


"Cally, it's not that I'm indifferent to your family interest here, or the Clan O'Neal interests, for that
matter. It's that now, more than ever before, we have to reserve major risks of trained assets to
operations with major, long-term, strategic significance." He sighed. "I would love to be able to say yes.
And I have heard enough from the Indowy to have a great deal of respect for Michelle O'Neal. I'll give
you this much. If you can either bring her on board with the organization or show me why this operation
has serious strategic implications that we have so far missed, we'll reconsider."


"Excuse me. External mind control of Human beings doesn't have serious strategic implications? And as
a pure business matter, on board or not, have you considered how much having a Michon Mentat owe
us favorsmeans to this organization?" Cally blinked in disbelief.


 "It's strategic if they really have a working prototype. Just because Michelle thinks they do or are about
to doesn't mean she's right. I know a lot about what someone with her capabilities can do, and I'm not
questioning that it's impressive. I also know that her ability to spy on the immediate environs of another
Mentat, without alerting him and triggering exactly the kind of conflict she's trying to avoid, are limited. I
need hard evidence. A schematic, a workable theory of function, information about the origin of the
device, a man inside—hard evidence."


"All that? You don't want much. What if you're wrong?"


 "Not all that, just enough of it to be going on more than fears and hunches—even hers. I have to
calculate our risks. I can't do that without hard information. For something this big, I'm afraid Michelle's
unsupported word, very good though that may be, isn't enough."
 "The assessment of a Michon Mentat, to the point of being willing to actually get involved in something,
isn't enough." Cally was still.Shit, Father O'Reilly is neverthis unreasonable. I don't think I'm going to
get any more out of him than this. Not today. Fuck. Well, I'll just get more and try to catch him in
a better mood.


 "If it means that much to her and she's that sure, recruit her. That would be worth enough by itself to
justify the risk. Cally, I'm sorry, but you're thinking like a Human. I have to look at Michelle's request as
if an Indowy of the same level had made it. And her motives and ends may not be our motives and ends,"
O'Reilly said.


"That makes no sense."


 "Believe me, it does. This is academic, you know. She has to be basing her assessment on something.
It's enough for her to risk her, even herself. But it may not be enough forus to risk. You need to meet
with her. It's time for her to show some of her cards." The priest looked pointedly at the door, clearly
dismissing her.


What the fuck's eating him? I dunno, but I'd better find out.



  Chapter Six
 Cally made sure she snagged Willard Manigo for lunch. He was more plugged in to the grapevine than
any three other people in the organization. She had checked the menu and had shelled out for a bottle of
steak sauce to go with his soyburger, and even managed to find him a snickers bar that was only a week
past its sell-by date.


Then she waited until he got in line before sliding up behind him.


"Hey, Willard, how's it going?" she said.


"Well, hi, Cally, it justamazes me to see you here," he grinned.


"Heh. Okay, so you don't miss much. Grab a table with me?" she asked.


"Sure. Especially since I figure you're pretty much the reason chocolate chip cookies have made it back
onto the desert menu." He gestured towards a corner near the conveyor belt. Not quite on people's path
out, it was still close enough for the kitchen clatter to muffle their voices.
 She walked across the room with him, dodging tables and other diners, sharing a friendly greeting on the
way with the people she knew well enough to be almost friends with. The steel of the chair legs squeaked
on the tiles as they pulled up to the table. Even with galplas flooring, it didn't matter. It seemed to be a
law of nature everywhere that cafeteria floors had to squeak.


 "See the Old Man this morning?" he opened, picking up the steak sauce and dousing his burger. He
looked at it doubtfully and gave it a few more shakes. "Hey, thanks for the stuff."


"Yeah, I saw him. And, well . . . he didn't seem too glad to see me," Cally said.


"I think you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, again," he said.


"What, is it just me?"


 "I don't think it's that. It's . . . well the Crabs are pissed about the heist, and they could cut the trickle of
low code keys and tech we're getting down to nothing if they wanted. And we've started having
problems holding full-time staff because the food and pay suck—ideology only goes so far when you've
got a family to feed. And we lost a couple of agents in Durban last week. The last few days just haven't
been good. I tell ya, my department is running fifty percent understaffed," he said, palming the candy bar
and making it disappear under the table.


"Not a great time to put more stress on the father's plate."


"No." He shook his head, taking a big bite of his hamburger.

 Wednesday 10/20/54

 Cally checked into a temporary room on base and pulled out her PDA.O'Reilly wants more, I'll get
him more. I hope. She logged onto the Perfect Match site, which had obviously had a recent web
redesign. She had gone to the site, just to check it out, after one of the teenage girls on the island had
mentioned it to a friend in one of the hand-to-hand courses.Of course I was just checking it out. To
make sure it was safe.


 The redesign had not changed the site for the better. A background of lurid pink hearts clashed against
the fuschia and orange-red backgrounds of sappy pictures that looked like they'd been swiped from the
covers of bodice-rippers. Bright yellow buttons for everything from links to hit-counters to awards of
dubious provenance littered the bottom of the page, seemingly at random. The text and frames couldn't
seem to decide what color to be, and the company logo at the top of the page actuallyblinked . It looked
like another company had decided that do-it-yourself was cheaper than hiring art talent.
Blech! I hope Michelle will forgive me. Okay, where's the pesky forum? There.


 She thought for a minute. "MargarethaZ: Apollo555, I have eyes only for you."Okay, so it's trite. At
least it doesn't stand out in amongst all this sappy crap. Vanna69 wants to do what?!Now that's
just gross. Eww. She logged off, wishing there really was such a thing as brain floss.


 "You know the people you meet on those places all look horrible," the buckley commented. "And just
last week, a man was killed in his sleep by a girl axe-murderer he met in a chatroom. Fifty-seven percent
of 'singles' online are actually married. Twenty-two percent are ki—"


"Shut up, buckley."


"Right."


"Buckley, go secure. Where's Grandpa?" she asked.


"In the gym. Did you know that ninety-three point two percent of all sports inj—"


"Shut up, buckley."


"Well, youdid ask the question! Why ask me a question if you don't want to—"


"Shut up, buckley."


"Right."


 Papa O'Neal was doing his morning chin-ups when Cally walked into the otherwise empty gym, having
taken time to change into her own workout clothes before taking the bounce tube down to level three.
The black shorts were okay, but the red leotard was on its last legs. She clung to it because it had that
blessed option, a built-in sports bra. And not one of those flimsy ones, either. This one actuallyworked .
She walked over to the bar and began stretching, waiting for the young-old man to finish his set.


 He dropped lightly from the bar, flexing his knees as he hit, and walked over to her. His t-shirt was dark
and wet in big patches, his red hair darkened with sweat. He grabbed a clean towel out of the box at the
end of the bar and turned to her, wiping his face.
 "So, mission a go?" he asked. To anyone who didn't know the inner workings of Bane Sidhe society, it
would have seemed odd that Cally led the team instead of her Grandfather, who, after all, had more
experience. The truth was, he didn't have time. Clan O'Neal administration had eaten up so much of his
days with things he couldn't delegate that handing off leadership to her had been the only way he could be
assured of any meaningful time with Shari and the kids. Besides, she was good at it. So he had explained,
anyway.


"Not yet," she said, stretching into a vertical split.


"Not yet?!" he coughed. "Whaddya mean not yet? Hello,job . Hello,paying job . Hello, life and death
mission on the side of good and right? Notyet? " He started absently patting the nonexistent pockets on
his shorts and t-shirt before sighing and letting his hands drop. "Okay, what the fuck's going on?"


 "What isn't? The Crabs are pissed and are threatening to fuck with our code key supply, the Old Man's
about that far away from a nervous breakdown," she held her fingers about a half inch apart. "And of
course, it's all my fault. Okay, not really. Just the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, O'Reilly wants
more hard evidence that Michelle is either right about this thing and the threat level, or he wants her on
board. One or the other."


"Say that again." O'Neal was ice.


"He didn't deny the mission, Grandpa." Cally put a placating hand on his chest. "He just wants more of
her cards on the table, his words, before we commit. It's a pain in the ass, not high treason."


"No. That join up shit—" His clenched hands were relaxing slowly and smoothly. A bad sign.


 "Like you wouldn't know about bargaining chips, Grandpa? He wants to know the mission's not going to
be another bust—and I can't believe I'm defending this." She sidestepped casually, putting herself
between Grandpa and the door. "But I guess I am. Get pissedafter I talk to her, if he doesn't approve
the mission then."


"We're doing it. All that's left to be decided is if they're coming along or not."


"Fine. But don't nuke our bridges unless you have to, get it?"


He held a hand up, finger pointed at her, about to say something, but then dropped it to his side.


"Right. Don't nuke the bridges. Got it," he sighed. "Make it so I don't need to nuke 'em, Granddaughter."
"Yeah, but no pressure, right?" Cally put her head in her hand for a minute before looking back up at
him. "I'm staying over another night, at least. You guys can either fly back and I'll drive, or whatever. I
know we just planned on a one day trip."


"Right. I'll call Shari and tell her not to hold dinner."

 Friday 10/22/54

 The Cook Retail Center was Chicago's newest shopping mall. Cally pulled the old mustang in and
parked. It was way back from the entrance, but it was the closest spot she could find. No matter how
the economy in general was suffering, the fat cats in the federal bureaucracy were getting plenty. Like a
gold rush town, to a limited extent the cash rolled downhill. It was a small mall, all cream walls and
chrome. When they said the plant foliage had variegated colors, they really meant it. They had plants—or
the equivalent—from Barwhon and a good half dozen other planets. The Barwhon stuff she recognized
right off. The purple was a dead giveaway. The place was busy, for a weekday.Maybe I shouldn't have
come just before lunch. There wereother choices.


 If I'm going to be meeting Michelle more than once or twice, she has to get out of those damned
conspicuous Mentat robes. Could she scream, 'Hi, I'm Michelle O'Neal and I'm on a planet where
I'm not supposed to be,' any louder?Cally found a chain store well known for subdued but dressy
casual clothes. As a trained observer, having seen Michelle twice, she had a perfect memory of her
sister's size for everything but shoes. It wasn't hard to find a cream sweater and tan slacks. She added a
tortoise-shell rooster clasp so the Mentat could do something more conventional with her hair than that
bun. Conservative, but nice.


 The big reason she had chosen this mall had to do with the very upscale Chinese restaurant at one of the
side entrances. It was one of the contact points Stewart had given her. Someplace where her money was
no good and her privacy absolute. The Bane Sidhe expense budget didn't run to business lunches
anymore.


 Normally, she couldn't have afforded anyplace this nice and would, therefore, have avoided it like the
plague. She never, ever lived above her visible means—it was the first thing Bane Sidhe internal security
looked for when they swept for moles. But with the bonus, she could afford a good meal out, and the
Old Man knew she had a high level meeting. Besides the Tongs had a good reputation for actually
delivering privacy when they sold it. If paid not to ask questions, they asked no questions.Not that I'll
actually be paying. I didn't get to the top of the profession without knowing when to take a
calculated risk. Necessary mission, this gets the job done, saves scarce resources. In this case, my
own. I'm not touching that seed capital for more than the girls' Christmas until it's had the chance
to get together with those stock tips and make babies.


 Recognition was as professional as she could want. A word and a hand sign, a particular place at the
counter, and a waiter discreetly ushered her to the back room, handing her several menus. If the manager
was surprised when he asked her if she would be expecting anyone and she said her friend would find
her, he gave no sign. He simply left and presumed his guest knew her own business. Michelle appeared
seconds after the door shut behind him, robed, as always.


 Cally carefully didn't sigh. "Okay, we can't have lunch without the people up front seeing you enter in the
normal way. Hey! Don't go!" This time she did sigh, in relief, as Michelle stayed there but raised an
eyebrow. "Here. I got you some street clothes. Change and do your thing, showing up in the ladies'
room. Nobody really ever notices who goes in and who comes out, but theywill notice if you're in this
room without entering it. Go ahead and change here. At least nobody'll come in without knocking. Oh,
and your code keys are in the bag."


Michelle's eyebrows arched higher in her otherwise impassive face, as she took the bag but made no
move to change clothes.


"Oh, for heaven's sakes. I won't look, alright?" Cally said.


 Michelle carried the clothes over to a corner, looking at Cally pointedly until she turned her back. A few
moments later the Michon Mentat handed her sister her folded robe and disappeared. Before she left,
just for an instant, Cally saw her feet.Birkenstocks?!


When Michelle walked back in, she was obviously ill at ease in clothes that were, for her, so unusual.


"So how long has it been since you've worn anything but these robes?" She put the garment, which she'd
been holding on her lap, into one of the now-empty shopping bags.


 "Earth styles? Fifty years. The cut and fabric of clothing has changed over the years for utility reasons,
even on Adenast. And the first colors were inharmonious for Human well-being. But our changes have
had nothing like the frequency and variety you have here. Clothing is counter-productive for the Indowy,
and we—they and us—do not see the point in having to turn around and replace things over and over
again every couple of years, or worse, like less Galactized humans do."


"How do you stand it?" Cally couldn't help asking.


"I wanted to ask how you do," Michelle chuckled. "Having to buy replacement clothing as often as you
do would deplete my pay very quickly. Not to mention my time."


 "It's a trade-off. We probably pay about the same, when you get down to it. But most of uslike to
shop," her sister grinned, eyes twinkling.


"Leisure. The amount you have is unheard of on Adenast. Converted for differences in reckoning time,
my schedule would work out to about ninety hours a week, Earth time. Some more, some less."
"For how long at a stretch? That's a crushing schedule," Cally said.


 "It is an ordinary schedule. The discipline reduces the need for sleep. And I include necessary muscle
care periods in my schedule, of course. Human Sohon workers cannot maintain health without it." She
waved a casual hand at Cally, a deliberate gesture rather than a spontaneous one. "Really, I enjoy my
work, Cally. It satisfies me a great deal to accrue honor to Clan O'Neal. I do regret that father has never
learned to understand. You are more often around Indowy than he is. Am I truly that alien to you?"


"You're . . . very Indowy. Your expressions aren't very expressive," her sister shrugged.


 "How strange. To the Indowy we are so very Human. And our expressions are stilled, of course, out of
habit. We copy Indowy expressions, or those of the other races, to communicate, but they never become
automatic. So when we Galactized are not actively using facial expressions, our faces tend to be still to
avoid misunderstandings. And, of course, while working the feelings must be still."


 "We should order." Cally pressed the button for the discreet call light at the base of a small lion sculpture
next to the sauce caddy. She didn't recognize many Chinese ideograms, after so many languages on so
many missions they ran together without a pre-mission review, but she did know those few that she could
expect in these establishments—including the sequence that roughly translated, "Press for service."


"What are you going to eat?"


 "I thought I'd try the crispy-skin duck, and I love hot and sour soup. Ooh. And they have shrimp spring
rolls."


"You have not been here before?"


"No, this is a treat for me," Cally smiled. "What are you going to have?"


"The Buddha's delight looks appropriate. And I will have to ask the waiter which soups do not have
meat. I can order my spring roll vegetarian, can I not?"


"There're other vegetarian choices on the back of the menu, so you don't need to feel locked in to any
one thing."


 "I noticed. I chose what I like." Her smile was slow, and obviously thought about, but it did reach her
eyes.
"So how do you see me?" Cally couldn't help but ask. Seeing Michelle from her own point of view had
been . . . enlightening.


 "Like the rest of our Clan. You are so aggressively Human that at times I can not imagine how the
Indowy who live on your base avoid fleeing in distress. You do not actually eat meat in front of them, I
hope?"


"They don't come to the cafeteria. And we learn lists of expressions not to do when they're around."


 "Yes, but I doubt any of you understand how difficult it must still be for the Indowy who live among you.
Each of them perforce becomes an expert in a very difficult branch of xenopsychology. And those who
raise their children on your base must be very apprehensive and very brave, to risk the lifelong social
functionality of their offspring. I have seen the reports. Most of them are almost pathological loners, by
Indowy norms."


 "I hadn't thought of it that way. I suppose xenopsych is hard for everyone," Cally conceded. "Now,
about this mission . . . The leadership wants more evidence and more information before committing us
to the mission."


"The purpose and the pay are not sufficient?"


 "It's political. The risks are, for various reasons, greater than just the loss of our team if the mission goes
to hell on us. They want some hard evidence. Sorry about that, but there it is. Think convincing Indowy."


"I had made a projection of the possible complications, and anticipated your request. I would have
preferred a better price and wished to keep my request simple. I think I can help you get what you need
while relieving some of the political concerns." The mentat lifted her hand to reveal a data cube. It could
have just been slight of hand, but Cally suspected "real" magic.


 "Here is a cube of some of Erick's work that I was able to acquire through my own resources. The
Darhel commissioning the research cannot do the tests themselves, but they . . . like to watch," she said,
something about her colorless tone expressing infinite distaste. "I do not have other hard evidence that
your superiors would accept, but there is a way to get it, and something else. Since the material on that
cube was in Darhel hands, it was possible to obtain a copy. The device specifications and modifications
never leave the research facility. I have my memory, and I have partial views from cube recordings. I
could construct a very convincing substitute from just that data, but I can build something much more
effective with some additional information. I can construct a substitute that almost works. Not a working
model, but a device almost all personnel will merely take for damaged or malfunctioning, not completely
inert. What I need are the records from the Fleet Strike team that originally retrieved the device. It was
recovered partially disassembled, and with some other devices—part of a museum display on a Tchpht
planet." Unlike most humans, she pronounced the name of the Galactic species perfectly, making it sound
easy.
"Crabs have museums?"


 "Yes. They have very good museums, although the ones with extensive Aldenata displays are typically
closed to any species but their own. The other species were never meant to have this. Not until we were
much farther along the path."


 "Path? You say that as though it's pre-ordained or something." Cally held up her hands, rejecting the
idea.


 "There are things you do not know. There are things youshould not know." Michelle held up her hand.
"Do not ask for things you know I will not tell to even my sister and fellow O'Neal. I will not harm you or
Clan O'Neal with too much of the wrong information. Your employers, the Bane Sidhe, have this policy
also—not to harm their people with things they must not know. In this, at least, they are wise. You need
to listen now so that I can tell you what you will need to know about the Fleet Strike mission that first
obtained this device."


"The biggest thing I need to know, first, is how your man inside can ensure our operative gets hired, how
we can be assured that this isn't a trap, and to what degree we can count on your man to keep our
operative's identity confidential if your guy gets burned."


 "As I said before, my 'man' is in personnel. To be specific, he occupies a key position in the personnel
department. He can control which resumes get through the process. He can contrive bad references if the
wrong applicant is chosen. Your person will be hired, assuming you can fabricate adequate background
credentials and documentation. Scrutiny of your fabrications will be light, to say the least. A list of the
positions most likely to come open, accompanied by detailed position requirements, are on the cube. My
'man' owes Clan O'Neal a third level favor, through me, which is binding enough to satisfy the strictest
concerns." She looked at her sister's raised eyebrows and sighed. "You may confirm the degree of
obligation involved with the Indowy Aelool. Now, may I continue?"




 The opening view of the cube showed a large, high-ceilinged room, split down the middle with a
sturdy-looking dividing wall. Each room contained two chairs, at opposite ends of the room, with a man
and a woman locked into each chair with steel restraints. The rooms looked quite clean around the
edges, but the stains around the center of the room and the chairs made Cally wince. The hardened
assassin, being what she was, recognized instantly that the smears and trails across the floor were a mix
of dried and fresh, streaming to a pair of central drains that appeared slightly . . . clogged.


 She could hear mumbling in the background, but couldn't quite make out the words. "Buckley, speech
enhancement please." As the thin tenor voice began to clarify into tinny but clear words, she said, "Raise
the volume two notches."
 ". . . has no prior preparation. The subject on the right has been prepped through an increasingly intense
series of directed tasks, from innocuous to unpleasant. Today's demonstration shows the necessity, with
the current prototypical configuration, of some prior access to the subject to precondition the acceptance
of control, and the familiarity of the operator with the subject's mind. Without prior access, control is
limited by intensity of task and degree of preparation. Current research aims to refine our equations for
computing probability of successful control for a given task by a specified subject. Yes, you have a
question?" The tenor paused. The next voice was gibberish despite the Bane Sidhe's top of the line
speech enhancement software.


 "We agree. Unfortunately, even extensive conditioning fails to preserve the active subject in an
end-series trial like this one. We still have a lot of refinement and research before we can meet final
specifications." There was a pause. "Another use we hope to make of our research data is to separate
minds into primary and, if possible, secondary classifications identifiable by externally observable
characteristics, and genetic profiles. Our goal is to refine the software, in the final device, to modify initial
output based on pre-assessed typing, where available. We believe that we will be able to substantially
increase control probability and decrease the number of prep . . ." The voice drifted off as if the speaker
had stepped farther away from the pickup. On the floor in the rooms, the shackles on the chairs snapped
open, freeing the subjects to stand, move around, rub wrists. In each room, one subject sat frozen in the
chair, despite the removal of physical shackles.


 Then it got ugly. Hardened as she was to the bloodier side of life, she had to fight her rising gorge several
times before the "experiment" ended. On the unconditioned side, the people were physically intact.
Workers shot both with a trank gun before removing them. The indifferent treatment during the removal
made it clear the tranks were solely for the workers' safety. On the conditioned side, workers in gray
coveralls and gloves came in wheeling an equally gray trash bin to clean up whatever remained.


 When Cally left her room to walk to the gym, people got out of her way. One look at her face and
coworkers disappeared through the first convenient door or side corridor—as quietly and unobtrusively
as possible. The prior inhabitants abandoned the locker room seconds after she entered. The gym itself
didn't quite empty. The other users just discretely moved to the far end of the large room, away from the
mats and bar.


Two hours later, she stood in the shower letting the steaming water pound away the rest of the stress,
We're doing it. I don't care about the damned politics, I don't give a fuck about approval, we're
doing it. She sighed,But approval would be nice. Professional. If I plan to get Nathan on board, I
have to be strictlyprofessional.



  Chapter Seven
 Monday 10/25/54

"Nathan, here's what I've got for you. I think it'll make all the difference," the silver-blond assassin was
wearing a forest green suit.She obviously dressed for success. As a priest, he wasn't supposed to notice
such things. He could appreciate the color and fit of the suit, and the obvious custom-tailoring of the
blouse. He would have suspected her of living above her means if he hadn't known the outfit had been a
Christmas present from her grandparents several years ago. As an assassin and operative, Cally had
studied and drilled on the value of proper costuming.The bare fact, he winced at his mental choice of
words,is that I am notas immune to Cally O'Neal's charms as I ought to be. But it's not the job of a
good priest to be immune to the temptations of the flesh, just to resist them. Sweet and lethally
charming when she wants to be, isn't she?He focused on the "lethal" part and began counting her kills
in his head as a distraction.


 "I hope it's good, Cally. I have to be a diplomat as well as managing operations. Right now, through no
fault of yours, you and your team are squarely in the middle of politics again. This time, it's our fault, and
I'm sorry. Our faulty intelligence got you into this situation," he smiled wryly, passing her a cup of coffee.
He had used the good Jamaican stock. Charm and a bit of courtesy went both ways. She was a friend,
not an enemy, of course, and he'd love to approve her mission if she made a good enough case for it.It's
just that with Ms. O'Neal a man had better always be quite sure he's thinking with his brains.
Even an old priest, he acknowledged ruefully.


 "It's good. First, Michelle will pay the same amount over again in level two code keys, under the table. A
private reserve for us. The whole pay package, thirty percent now, thirty percent after a necessary
intermediate run, forty percent on delivery," she said.


"But pay wasn't our problem. Please tell me you have more."The Darhel's lackey in Burma, a corrupt
priest in Ireland, three businessmen who sold out a factory of captured Posleen equipment in
Durban, that too-able subordinate of Worth's in Cleveland . . .


 "I'm getting there, Nathan. I've got a file with her initial results studying the Aldenata device, the one this
research is based on, before this Erick person took off with it. Buckley, send it andstay mute, " she said.


Father O'Reilly's eyebrows arched.


 "Yeah, I keep my buckley's emulation set a little high," she shrugged. "Anyway, I know it's not much, but
that's where the intermediate mission comes in. Fleet Strike recovered the device on Dahl, and that initial
report, as well as the observations of their field technician, will be in Fleet Strike's secure AID files at
Fredericksburg. There are a lot fewer unknowns there, and they just aren't used to getting hit, so they'll
have decent security, but not great. They're used to security against Posleen and the occasional humanist
nutballs, not other trained humans. They'renot trying to protect a nasty mind control gadget against rival
businesses."


 "So you're hoping you can get me to approve the Fredericksburg run to get enough data to approve the
job you really want. And if you get there and the records you want have been deleted? Wouldn't the
group sponsoring this Erick want to clean up behind themselves?"
 "Michelle doesn't think they have. I think they might consider it an unnecessary risk. What do they gain?
Michelle admits she can't make anything workable from the initial field observations, and our potential
targets have the device in hand. Who would they be keeping the information from? Besides, she says the
initial observations probably will help her make a more convincing decoy for the switch."


"Might and Michelle says and probably. It's still a bit thin, Cally."


 "I know. But you get sixty percent of the total just for this. That's a hundred and twenty percent of the
original fee. Half of that in code keys you can actually use. Just for the initial intel gathering mission. With
nothing counterproductive to Bane Sidhe interests. I would think that's a pretty sweet deal. Of course
there's risk, but isn't there always? It's a good deal, Father."


 "Yes, it is," he sighed.Am I succumbing to feminine charm, or making a rational decision? The keys
are the kicker. They reduce our direct dependence on the Tchpht in the short term, and open a
favor-trading relationship with a potential alternate source, with the strongest Clan of
connections, which provides a future margin of safety. The Tchpht planners would see a
difference between ceasing to provide us with keys, versus cutting us off from alternate supplies.
As a Michon Mentat, Michelle O'Neal's judgment carries weight that they might not interfere with.
They would consider her decisions more reliable than that of the leaders of the Indowy Bane
Sidhe, since she does not—or has not until now—engage in intrigue. A tenuous thread, but better
than we have now, which is nobackup. It's a sound rational basis for the decision, and damn my
juv hormones for confusing the issue.


 "You have my approval for the Fredericksburg run. But if what you find isn't conclusive, I won't be able
to approve the rest of the job in good faith. I also need much more than 'Michelle says' about how we're
going to get an agent in place for the main job," he said.


 "There's a file on the cube with job listings and requirements. We fake up the ID's and resumes, her guy
in personnel makes sure at least one of us gets hired. I took the liberty of downloading it to buckley to
cross-reference with our prior missions and build a file for the covert identifications department. I hope I
can get authorization to get them moving on this. Time is tight."


"Fine. If Michelle still wants to hire our services, knowing that this in no way commits us to the rest of
her project, then do it."


 O'Reilly stared after her as the door closed behind her.Heavenly Father, I hope I'm doing the right
thing . He crossed himself and picked up his own coffee, sipping it before it got cold.


 As a "live" priest, pre-war, the area of finance had always been something other people dealt with. Ever
since he'd come inside and taken over the base management of the Earth headquarters for the Bane
Sidhe, he had learned more about budgets and cash flow and overhead than he had ever wanted to
know. But he had come in as one of the leading experts on xenopsychology—albeit only known as an
expert by a select few. The Tchpht hadn't a clue about finance. As long as they were undisturbed in their
figurative ivory towers, they let the Darhel deal with such mundanities. Which was half the reason the
Galactic situation had become, so long ago, what it was today.


 There were no Darhel here. The likelihood of the Tchpht or the Indowy outside the O'Neal Bane Sidhe
figuring out that they had more level 2 code keys than they should was, well, infinitesimal. It just wasn't
the way they thought. Some Himmit somewhere would notice, sometime. But they wouldn't share the
information. They liked to gather stories; they didn't seem to have nearly as much fun telling them.


 A strategic reserve wouldn't solve the fundamental problem of Crab-dependence, but that was going to
be a tough nut to crack. They were not going to be able to out-Crab the Crabs. The solution was going
to have to be a matter of reducing, not ending, their dependence on the Crabs, while finding other
Galactic trade goods than mercenary soldiers. And that last might well turn out to be the impossible
dream. But if solved, that would likely be solved after one Father Nathan O'Reilly had joined his maker,
rejuv or no rejuv.


 Connections with Michelle O'Neal wouldn't hurt, but mentats tended to be so aloof from the real world
that it was far more likely than not to be a one-off, ofno long term help. Still, plant enough seeds and
something was bound to come up.




 The slightly built man with the straw blond hair falling over his eyes looked barely old enough to be in a
club. Even one as relaxed in its standards for clientele as the Pink Heat Showbar. In fact, despite a chin
full of carefully cultivated stubble, he had had to bribe the doorman to ignore the presumed-fake nature of
his ID. The ID really was fake, but not for the reasons the doorman assumed. George Schmidt was a
forty-one year old juv whose usual profession involved taking out the worst of the world's Human trash.
Worst by O'Neal Bane Sidhe standards, that was. By his own best guess, he'd only killed four people in
his career who were not themselves directly involved with the deaths of numerous innocent humans. One
of the four he knew about was simply a too-convenient fool for the Darhel. The other three were
regrettable collateral damage. He couldn't have counted the number of targets he'd serviced that he
considered guilty. He'd never tried. A bunch.


 Some would have called him a psychopath, because he could kill so casually. It didn't show. He was
friendly, personable—the last person anyone would suspect of having killed other Human beings. His
eyes were as animated and open as the barely-legal adult he resembled. Casual acquaintances could talk
with him for hours and be surprised later, if it occurred to them to think about how very much about
themselves they'd revealed. People frequently told him what a good listener he was. The first thought of
most people he interrogated, as they were walking away, was, "What a nice guy." The ones who
experienced his less nice side usually didn't walk away at all.


 The Bane Sidhe shrinks had never tampered with his mind, other than basic training and some minor
counseling—from other operators. The counseling department's internal records did not define him as a
psychopath. The diagnoses section of his file had only had three entries: Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder—in remission; Survivor Guilt—active; Natural Killer—empathy and conscience intact. For an
active assassin with over fourteen years work experience, his caseworker considered the list extremely
short. Past all the psychobabble, he had nightmares. He dealt with what he could, and gutted out the rest.
If asked, he would have attributed his success to keeping the damned shrinks the fuck out of his head.
And being smart enough to take his goddamned leave when he got it and go unwind.


 George's job hadn't been his first choice of career. Information was his first love and his driving passion.
Given the option, he would have become strictly an intelligence operative. Unfortunately, in this business
having a rare talent could and did override personal career preference. He worked for a cause; therefore
he did what they most needed him to do. He got some scope for his real calling in his job; the
organization didn't have targets for him every day, or even every month. His information seeking on the
job was never enough for him, so like most people he had to pursue his driving interest in his off hours, as
a hobby.


 Right now, he was using his enhanced hearing to listen to a local underworld lackey shake down the
bartender for the weekly fire insurance premium. Not something an observer would have guessed from
the way he was leering at the brunette seducing the pole on stage. As her generous cheeks approached
within inches of his face, he tucked a fiver into her g-string, fumbling like the youth he appeared to be.
Shy kid was a good cover. It kept him from having to yell his enthusiasm and risk missing crucial words
in whatever conversation he was eavesdropping on at the time. Enhanced hearing didn't mean other noise
couldn't drown things out. Particularly if it was his own voice.


"Eleven hundred this week, Pat. Cough it up."


"What? That's up two hundred from last week. You're drivin' me out of business!"


 "Value for the money, Pat. You wanna pay the cops instead? Ask around. They're charging fifteen, and
they don't do so good."


"Don't make no difference if I can't keep my doors open," the bartender, apparently the owner, muttered
under his breath.


"Pat, you're a stand up guy. You know I like you. You know I like you, right? But the boss, he can't
make no exceptions. You're a good customer, always pay on time. Don't give me no excuses. Tell you
what, I'll ask Jimmy. Maybe he needs a favor and you can work it off in kind."


 "Uh . . . Now that I think about the numbers again, it's a stretch but I can do it." The man was talking
fast, obviously eager to avoid owing Jimmy Lucas a favor. George didn't blame him. Out of the corner of
his eye, he could see the muscle clapping Pat the bar owner on the back.


 Light spilled into the dimly lit bar, backlighting a female figure. Avery nice female figure. George wasn't
the only patron whose eyes were drawn to the door. As the woman stepped into the room he blinked.
Oh, her. She suredressed to look comfortable in a strip bar, he frowned.
He signaled the bartender for another round as she pulled up a chair at his table, facing the stage. She
put a hand on his knee while eying the girl on the pole, pulling out a wad of cash with her other hand.
Good move to avoid pissing off the management. Only problem was that inevitably a girl danced over to
wave her g-string in the direction of more money. Okay, not really a problem. His cover was a damned
good excuse to openly leer at Cally O'Neal. He wasn't complaining.


"What do you want, gorgeous?" he asked.


"You, baby, only you." She squeezed his knee. "Truly. That trip out of town I've got coming up, I want
you with me." She slid her hand up and across his shoulder, pressing against his arm to nibble on his ear.
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. She was taking realism a bit far.


"One of your covers is perfect for an inside man," she whispered, then leaned back and began stroking
her nails through his hair. "I need you so much, Boopsie."


 Boopsie? I'm gonna kill her."I'll see if I can get off." He suppressed a wince at his own unfortunate
choice of words.


 "Baby, I can guarantee that." She leaned over and gave him a kiss so hot he almost melted into a puddle
on the floor. She groped his dick, hard enough that he could feel her fingernails through his jeans, before
straightening to walk out the door. She left a few bills on the table to pay for the beer she wouldn't be
drinking. Normally, the brush and grope wouldn't have bothered him a bit, only he knew damned well
she had zero intention of following through. Who the hell was he kidding? Theonly objection he had to
having Cally O'Neal blatantly molest his body was that nothing else was gonna happen. One of the other
assassin's well-known rules of professionalism was that she didn't screw the operatives. Dammit.


 The owner set the two beers down on the table. "Tell your friend we don't allow working girls on the
premises unless they work here. Not that we wouldn't sign her up if she wants to come back." He laid a
card on the table beside the beer. "If she ever wants to dance, have her call us."


"I'll do that." George grinned as he pocketed the card. He certainly would. He didn't know her all that
well, but the expression on her face would probably be priceless.


The attempt to recruit him for whatever she had going was another thing all together. He'd heard some
disturbing rumors about her performance since that mess back on Titan, and seven years was a long
break from real work, rejuv or no rejuv. He wasn't all that sure he wanted to work with her. For the
organization's sake, he'd check things out before he made up his mind. Time to set up a little talk with
Tommy Sunday.

 Tuesday 10/26/54
 It wasn't really a good tourist day out past the barrier islands. The sky was that flat gray tinged with
painful UV purple that people who didn't have to sail under it called 'leaden.' Tommy just called it
damned cold, and stuffed his hands further into his windbreaker, hunching miserably against the icy spray.
Only a father's love would have gotten him out on this boat today to help his son-in-law try to bring in the
last catches before the weather gotreally foul. George stood at the railing, collar flipped up, baseball cap
jammed on his head against sunburn, but otherwise appearing perfectly comfortable, the bastard.


 "Tell me you're not hard-core enough to be here for the fucking fishing," Tommy opened, when it looked
as though the slight, blond-haired man was going to be silent all day long if Tommy himself didn't say
something.


 "Got a touchy subject to bring up. Cally contacted me yesterday about coming along as an auxiliary on a
run Team Isaac has coming up," he pushed the horn-rimmed glasses up on his nose with one finger.


"And?"


"First off, I try not to pay attention to gossip. I've heard enough gossip aboutme that wasn't true to know
ninety percent of what I hear about other people is crap. And I don't go out on missions with partners I
haven't done my homework on. So. Cally. I'll be going straight to her to get to know her, but first I want
general impressions from you. I've heard more talk about loose cannons than I like."


"Cally has pretty much earned her reputation for giving the rules types the finger when it suits her. But so
have the rest of us, and you. There's always that dynamic between the operators and the desk jockeys.
Mostly, she's done what's necessary to accomplish the mission and get us all home."


"I've seen her resume. What I'm really interested in—"


"—is that mess back on Titan in '47, right? And the Petain hit."


 "I'm more concerned about her stability, and reliability. Everyone I've heard agrees that she's . . . erratic.
But I haven't heard from the rest of the team. You guys never really talked about her while I was tasked
to Isaac, and asking didn't seem like a good idea."


 "Papa pretty much nailed it when he called her 'creatively violent.' And he's her grandfather. But just
because she looks erratic from the outside, don't let that fool you. That woman never does anything
without a plan. It justlooks like she goes one way and then zips off in another operational direction. It's
really because she doesn't telegraph. She doesn't tip her hand, and unless you're on the inside of the
team's plan, you never see it coming. If the phrase 'need to know' hadn't already been around when she
was born, Cally would have invented it."
"You're making it sound like she walks on water.I need to know. Talk."


 "She definitely has her faults. She damned near had a nervous breakdown before and after that Titan
mess. It's not wise or safe to seriously piss her off. But it's not real easy to do, either. Since they put her
back together after Titan, she's a lot less detached than she used to be. She and I have spotted for each
other on a couple of straight sniper ops when she needed the cash. She's been more concerned than she
used to be about picking times and places to minimize trauma to bystanders. She does things like look for
opportunities to take the target during school hours, when kids are off the street. Once she called an
abort because a school field trip was in view. We got him the next day, but our controls grumbled.
O'Reilly stepped in for us on that and validated her call." He shrugged, "She's not the machine she was
early in her career, but she's not verging on psychopathic anymore, either. Usually. Lemme see, what
else? Oh, the couple of times they've wanted her specifically to screw information out of a source, she's
told them to go fuck themselves."


"That could be a problem."


"It hasn't been, yet. Not as far as I'm concerned. She says she turned them down because they were,
quote, 'Using her as a whore out of convenience, not necessity,' " Tommy said. "I asked," he added.


 "Yeah, maybe she has a point there. Still," Schmidt grimaced, "I hate to say it, but resources matter. This
isn't a job for those kinds of scruples."


 "Fine, but I can't blame her for asking if they're paying her enough for that." The huge man held up one
hand. "Sure, she's dedicated to the cause. We're all dedicated to the cause—but if you'd watched her go
through half of what we have . . . I'd say she's earned herself the right to a couple of scruples. If you
can't agree, I doubt anybody's going to force you to take the mission. Even though, as you say, resources
matter."


"I don't know. I still have to wonder if we're going to be in the shit and hit a wall because of those
new-found scruples. I do it if necessary, and so have you, once or twice. Face it, it's part of the job."


 "George, you're either thinking like a guy, or thinking like an Indowy. She was right, they were using her
as a fucking convenience—to the point of not evenconsidering any other kind of operational plans if
good ol' Cally could get them what they wanted on her back. And while she was fine with it, it was
nobody's business to say anything." He looked the boyish assassin directly in the eye. "You grew up in
the Bane Sidhe. We may be on the side of good and right, but you know the Organization sure as hell
isn't perfect. You know the Indowy—how couldanything be anything but honorable and joyful if it
furthers the interests of your clan. Especially if it doesn't maim or kill you. Or not permanently, anyway.
Man, if you had just been there when one of the little furballs who's been trying to learn accounting came
in all excited, 'Cally, with your present form, do you realize how much fedcreds we could bring in if you
just—' George, she was three months fucking pregnant. And then he ran out of the room before Papa
could deck him. Caught the first Himmit express off planet and hasn't come back. And the rest of the little
green fuckers had not a clue what the big deal was.We were 'overreacting.' 'Anachronistic, irrational,
residual fear of mating with inferior genes,' they said. You wonder that O'Reilly backed her? Vitapetroni
finally got through to them, barely, with an analogy about damage totheir psyches from fighting, even for
survival of their clan.You may not have known about it, being a guy and not having worked with her
enough to be close, but if she hadn't won that argument, I don't think we'd have a female operator left.
Don't even talk about the O'Neal wives—I thought Wendy was gonna hop a plane up there and start
lopping off heads. So yeah, just aboutall the female operators are telling them to fuck off on the honey
trap jobs right now unless there's a damned good reason. It's not just Cally. Call it a pink flu."


 "Roger that—but you talk like she's your little sister," he grinned. "You've given me what I needed to
know. After lunch tomorrow, I'll know whether I'm going to volunteer or suggest she look at her next
choice. Yeah, I'll probably take it, but you know as well as I do how quickly it can fuck up an op if the
team doesn't fit together. If I don't think I can work with her, I'll say so."


"George, how many people have you ever met that you couldn't work with?"


 "I've met a few. Not many, but a few. Enough to make asking the question one of my cardinal rules. Oh,
dude. Pink Flu indeed. Good old Bane Sidhe 101. 'Alien minds are alien.' Too bad the Indowy seem to
have such a tough time getting their heads around that. They get it with the other Galactics, but when you
get right down to it, none of the Galactics are any good at adapting to new ideas or new situations.
Including just about everything about Human nature. That's dense even for them, though. That must have
been right after I lost Sherry. And everything. That's the only way I could've missed something that big."


Tommy was silent for a minute, uncomfortable at the reminder of his friend's dead wife. And the rest of
Team Hector. What could you say to that?


 "Oh, one other thing," the big man said. "You do not want to be in the same State—no, on the same
continent —when that woman is seriously pissed off. But that could describe Papa, or—what can I say?
She's an O'Neal. They're all like that. But whether it's something to do with growing up right in the middle
of the Posleen war, or having her dad blow up a nuke on her head when she was thirteen, or having to
kill her first assassin at age eight, Cally's just—more so. O'Neal, but more so."


 "Hey, totally off the subject of Cally and the O'Neals, except that her weird relationship with her PDA
creeps me out a bit, what is the deal with the buckleys? Somebody back at the shop told me you worked
at Personality Solutions when they first came out. Why the hell did they make the base personality fucked
up like that?" the assassin asked.


 "That is one tough question. I didn't work in that department. The buckley template came in through
technology acquisitions somehow and I never worked on the underlying bit pushing for the chip design.
Couldn't tell you, unless you just want my speculations," he said. He continued when the other man
nodded. "I don't know if you've ever been dead yet, in more than the pre-war heart stoppage sense, to
the extent of being revivified on the slab—which we don't have right now, dammit."


"No. Never happened to me personally," Schmidt replied.
"Sometimes I forget you're a baby." The veteran of the Ten Thousand and Iron Mike's Triple Nickle
Armored Combat Suits in the Posleen War smiled.


 The younger assassin favored him with the pained expression of a young juv who had heard that refrain
for a couple of decades now.


 "Anyway. The Crabs can do some damn scary things with storing and amalgamating and fiddling with the
Human brain, when and if they get their hands on one. My wife once knew a woman who . . . well,
nevermind. That's another story. Anyway, the Crabs' bouncy little claw-prints are all over this one. I think
somewhere there was one or more real guys, that for some reason the Crabs found especially interesting,
and somehow got their claws on at least for a little while. My suspicion is that there was more than one
brain, or more than one access to the same brain, involved. But that's all speculation, of course. I also
suspect the base personality learned some things as an electronic entity—like awareness of what it
was—before it was reproduced and distributed as a fixed base program. But all that is sheer speculation
on my part. No idea how much, if any, is true."


"So that would make it a full, real AI, not the simulation everybody says."


 "Well, no. Not exactly. You see, at full AI, the buckley personality is unstable and self-destructive. The
progressively stronger inhibitions against those fundamentally self-destructive, pessimistic tendencies take
more and more AI functionality from a buckley. That's part of the coding Iwas into, a little bit. That's why
buckleys tend to crash. Turning up its emulation is really turning off, by stages, that inhibitory
code—strictly necessary to get more independent functionality. So the more you turn it up, the faster it
crashes. It's unusable at full AI level, which is why it's sold as a simulation. It's close enough to true for
government work. Then, of course, there are the after market personality overlays. They interact
unpredictably with the fundamental personality and the level of inhibitory code turned on. You may have
noticed the 'Martha' personality overlay was recalled five years ago. At emulation level 1, the lowest
setting, they never had a buckley go longer than a week without crashing into an endless loop. For some
reason, all the screen would display was, 'no more raffia.' Nobody's ever been able to figure that one
out."


"Okay, so how are the buckleys different from the AIDs? I mean, I know the subjective difference, I've
used both, but I want a more professional view. I've never had the chance to sit down and talk to a really
good AI cyberpunk about this stuff."


 "You know all about the Darhel spyware from your basic classes, so I won't cover that. First of all,
AIDs are addictive. Darhel-made AIDs a lot more so than our own. I've got my theories about that, but
AID software is frighteningly complex. The Elves know their damn programming. They also deliberately
sabotaged Human software theory. Only outside our organization, of course. It's why our cybers can
crack damned near anything anywhere, and a factor in the fusing of the cyberpunk faction with the
pre-split Bane Sidhe back during the war. Did I mention I'm freezing my ass off? Not to mention we're
going to have to start the real work out here any damn minute," Tommy's teeth were chattering, and he
gratefully accepted the chemical hand-warmer George passed him.
 "Right. All the AIDs are different for the different Galactics species. AIDs for Indowy think like Indowy,
Crabs like Crabs, and so forth. It still strikes me as damned suspicious that the Darhel had such a bead
on Human cognitive psychology to turn out AIDs set up for us so soon after first contact. I've never
bought the official explanations, and I still don't. The upper levels of the pre-split Bane Sidhe didn't know
or weren't saying, and, of course, same with the O'Neal Bane Sidhe. Except in the latter case I'm more
likely to believe they don't know. The official explanation is that it was the same way they knew how to
call the US President on his private phone as their first contact, and the same way they knew we were
what they needed against the Posleen, that they'd watched us when they started having problems with the
Posleen and knew us from our TV and radio broadcasts and all that. It doesn't smell right to me, but I
don't have better speculations. Wild ass guesses? I could give you half a dozen and bullshit all day long,
but the truth is I just don't know. The Humans and the Bane Sidhe had obviously known each other
before, which means the fucking Elves were around here, too. Even the name has old connections. Way,
way old. Then the Posleen pyramids and the Egyptian pyramids had a whole similarity. And there were
bits of Human archetypal history the Darhel were awful keen to alter or take out of circulation entirely,"
the giant said.


 "Wheels within wheels within wheels," the older man got up and shook himself. "That's all I know, and
really more than Iknow . You're about to earn your ride anyway, if I feel this boat slowing. Which I do."


"Oh, joy," George groaned.




Cally stepped out of the gym shower and began toweling her hair dry. The surfaces of the Galplas walls
were that glossy shade of light blue that seemed to infest locker rooms everywhere.


"Buckley," she said, drying off, "please project a holo of interrogation room 7B."


"Huh? Oh. What was that again?" Cally noticed the subdued red light that indicated an active camera.
She dropped a sock over the camera port.


"Dammit," it said. "Infrared just isn't the same."


"Quit ogling and show me 7B."


"You look nice today. Well, youdid. If you put on your socks and shoes, you wouldn't have wet feet."


She couldn't do much about it. Slapping a PDA was possible, of course, but hardly effective.
"Shut up, buckley," she said.


"I knew it was too good to last."


"Shut up,buckley."


"Right."


She waited for a long moment. "Buckley! 7B!"


 A display of the requested room appeared above the bench seat where she'd just tossed her towel. A
teenage girl sat in one of the chairs, apparently reading something on her own buckley. It had to be
something she had stored locally, since the room was shielded against outside access. Her eyes kept
flickering upwards towards the camera lens on the far wall, which was quite a trick since said lens was
only as big as a pencil point and shaded to blend with the walls.


"Huh. She might have potential." Cally finished dressing and stuck the buckley in her back pocket. "Not
one word," she warned it.


The candidate had been waiting for a good twenty minutes. Long enough to see how much patience she
had for her age. Time for the next step.


She passed Harrison Schmidt on her way to the stairs. She almost always took the stairs. Every little bit
helped. Tommy and Harrison said she looked better with another ten pounds than without it. Seeing
herself only through hyper-critical eyes, she thought they were trying to be nice. If the subject came up,
Grandpa just coughed.


"Hey! Harrison!" She turned and jogged to catch him. He could be a big help.


"Can I borrow you a minute?" she asked.


He quirked an eyebrow at her, waiting for an explanation.


"I've got a potential recruit. I need to run her through evaluation. Be at the alley off Pappas Street, the
one nearest Horner on the far west side. Two hours. Be sure not to see us."


"That's more than a minute. Wednesday. Why do I always get this kind of crap on Wednesday?" He
sighed, "Okay. Skulking, or oblivious?"


"Drunk and oblivious," she decided. "Taking a piss would be ideal. That'll look pathetic enough."


"Oh, thanks so much. I have to get all grimy for this, don't I," he sighed. "You owe me, dear."


"Yeah, I do. Thanks a bunch. I know this is a sucky assignment," Cally said.


 The interrogation room looked smaller from the inside than it did on camera. The walls were a rather
unsettling puke green. Beyond the two chairs, the room was bare. It's ugliness was deliberate, designed
to unsettle anyone interrogated here. There were other rooms for other kinds of discussions. She pulled
the empty chair around backwards, straddling it, to look the girl over.


 "Denise Reardon. So, you think you want to be an assassin. That's one strike against you, Denise. Why
should I let you have one of the slots to the school?" Wisps of her damp, blond hair had fallen forward.
The pro absently tucked them back behind her ear.


 "Because I'd be good at it." The skinny, brunette kid looked at her through owlish glasses. Eyesight was
fixable.


 "At killing people? Why would anybody want to do that?" The older woman set a knee bouncing,
tapping her heel. It wasn't a real mission, but she was fidgety to get going.


"You do." The kid squinted, scrunching her glasses back up her nose.


"That's not an answer. Answer the question."


 "Because our whole family, just about, lives on an island hiding from people who want to kill us. Because
I know our family. We're not monsters. We argue, we squabble, we gossip behind each other's backs,
we have a fair dose of hypocrites and liars, a couple of drunks, and a few serious assholes—but we're
not monsters. So the people who are trying to kill us must be the monsters." The words sounded like a
pre-prepared little speech.


"And what if they're not?"


"What?" Her forehead wrinkled a little, like a worried puppy's.


"What if the people we're fighting against, that you're sent out to kill, aren't monsters."
"I . . . um . . . I—I don't know."


"That's the first sensible thing you've said. One in your favor."


 "Look, the Posties wanted to eat us. I'm not dumb. I know a lot of you were alive back then. You're
juvs. You're sick of fighting, right? So anybody who the whole family, basically, is working so hard to
fight must not be planning to hug us and give us a cookie."


 "So what if you get deep enough to get more information and decide we're wrong?" Cally crossed her
arms on the chair back, propping her chin on them.


 "Nothing's perfect. I don't think my whole family is stupid, and I don't think they're evil. I'll throw in my
lot with y'all. I'm not stupid. There will be a lot I don't need to know. Keeping that in mind, if I saw
anything too bad, I'd talk about it to my boss."


"What if you were in the field when that happened?"


 "Then I'd have to do my job and wait until I got back to talk about it, wouldn't I? Nothing's perfect. I'll
throw in my lot with you."


"What do you think this job is like, anyway? What do you think your average day would be?"


"I don't know."


"Speculate," the assassin ordered.


"Averageday? Probably buffing my skills or doing mission prep.Maybe traveling to or from a mission.
Maybe under cover in some mission or other. Maybe watching people or scoping out situations before
going in. It's like dance, isn't it? A lot of hard work preparing, for just a couple of recitals a year."


"Like dance. I wouldn't have put it like that, but we'll let it go. Especially since I dance, too. But you
knew that. I think you were in my beginning jazz class one year on the island, weren't you?"


"Yes, ma'am." The young girl hesitated. "Ma'am, excuse me, but you're pretty good, right? So why did
you leave work to be with your kids? I mean, why would they let you? Wouldn't the Bane Sidhe want
you to keep working?"
 "Tsk. You're not really supposed to know much about who you're interviewing with." Cally turned the
chair and sat, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette. "Look, just between us girls, if you take this job you're
going to spend a lot of time in a shrink's office. You'll need it. But being a chick, you're going to spend
more time in there than one of the guys would. It may not be fair, it may or may not be necessary. This
job isn't about fair. The bosses just about pushed me into taking a long sabbatical." She shrugged. "In my
case, yeah, I needed it. I'd been active a long time—you don't need to know how long. You can't do this
job forever, presuming you live that long, and not have it get to you. Itwill dehumanize you. Itwill fuck
you up." The assassin grimaced as the girl's eyes widened at the profanity.What the hell am I doing
letting a little girl—no, I was just thirteen myself. She'll get several chances to opt out. An honest
little voice insisted at the back of her mind,Yeah, but there will be subtle pressures on her to measure
up. Pressures on her teachers not to lose candidates. Inevitably. What the hell am I doing?


 Cally leaned forward, propping her hands on her knees. "You shouldn't take this job. It will fuck up your
relationships. You will find yourself fucking about a bazillion strangers off the job because after you've
fucked a bunch on the job, who the hell would you be saving yourself for? You will see things you
absolutely do not want in your head, and the pictures won't go away. You will do things that literally
make you puke. The price is too high. Go home. Get a legit ID, move to Indianapolis, get a husband, a
white picket fence, a dog, two or three kids. Don't look back. It's a happier life. That's God's own truth.
Go the hell home," she said.


The girl's jaw tightened. "Are you declining my job application, ma'am?"


Suddenly feeling every one of her fifty-eight years, Cally pressed her palms into her eyes and sat back
up, sighing. She absently flicked the growing ash tail off the end of her cigarette. "No, I'm not doing that.
Not yet, anyway. Okay. You want it, then it's time for your next test."


 The tall blond walked out of the room and returned in under a minute with two armfuls of clothes. One
set she threw to the kid. "Get changed," she said. "Your sneakers are fine. They'll be covered by the
boots, anyway."


 Both sets of clothing were average to the point of boring. A set of long johns implied they'd be going
outside. The jeans to go over them were faded and somehow a bit grayed out, as if they'd been washed
too often in unsorted loads with all the other clothes. The sweaters were some kind of blend, hers a
faded navy blue, the other a rusty brown, with the random little fluff balls sweaters get when they've been
around a couple of years. The older woman didn't look up, just started changing her clothes as if she was
alone.


 "What the hell are you waiting for? Get dressed," she told the girl, who was hesitating. The kid jumped
to comply, startled.
  Chapter Eight
 They got off the train at a station in the south of Chicago, trudging down the path of crumbled gray
asphalt and sand that wobbled between jumbled stretches of gray and white snow, leading into
Bronzeville. Once, their O'Neal-fair skin would have been cause for comment in the historically black
community. Not now. Time and migrations to and from the Nat King Cole SubUrb, along with the
shuffling effect of the semi-random sweeps for shippers—as the involuntary off-world colonists were
called—had shuffled the population into a spectrum from SubUrban spectral white Caucasians to dark
brown, old-time Metropolitans, with a vast middle of cafe au l'asian.


 The landscape was a mixture of buildings. Bricks with early 20th century arched windows. Buildings
with squared off pre-war windows. Crumbling brick, crumbling cinder block. Tattered strips of old
stores. Boarded windows, and windows like haunted, vacant eyes. Row houses like shark teeth and
blocky old four-story tenements. In front of one of the old strips of had-been neon and steel, a cart of
fresh vegetables from a black-market hydroponics set-up sat upwind of a burnt-out sedan, whose trunk
served as a shelf for piles of bagged tortillas, dimebags of cornmeal, the same of textured soy, and a large
pile of slump cakes. The latter was a heavy, flat bread that had begun life as wet wheat sourdough, then
got loaded with as much corn and soy meal as it could take without turning into a rock. It was a staple,
as the name implied, of people whose financial resources were in a slump. Judging from the size of the
piles, compared to those of the other fare on offer, this included most of the scattered denizens of
Chicago's once-teeming South Side. Over a fire in a barrel, an old woman shook and tossed a pan of
popping corn, which a little boy beside her poured into paper cones and hawked to passers-by. In the
late afternoon sun, a smattering of young teen whores, pushers, and grays milled around, grabbing
something to eat and running errands before their night-time working hours. Dressed in the typical
third-hand drabs of the grays, Cally and Denise blended into invisibility among the cleaners and other
low-grade menials that served to keep the city's innards running for Chicago's trade and professional
classes. She dropped a couple of dollars on the popcorn boy, handing one of the two cones of the plain,
hot kernels to the girl beside her.


 As they moved away, Cally hissed under her breath, "If you don't quit sneaking and just walk, I'm going
to cold-cock your ass."


 The girl flushed in embarrassment and began walking more normally, keeping her mouth shut. Next, the
older woman bought a cake of slump for another dollar, breaking it in half and sharing it with her. The tall
blond glared at the kid when she bit into the bread and almost choked. Denise erased the offending
expression and tried hard to look hungry as she dry-swallowed the nasty stuff. It was scratchy, as if
ground or chopped corn husk had been added to make a few kilos of grain stretch.


As they moved past the makeshift market and its shoppers, she only pretended to eat and hoped
nobody noticed, not the least her interviewer. A block down, they turned into an alley. Shortly thereafter,
Aunt Cally tossed her half of the awful stuff over to a couple of rats who were scrabbling around in a
mess best left unidentified. She followed suit, trailing behind to a particle-board door in one of the
buildings. Her aunt pulled out a pistol, seemingly from nowhere, and screwed a cylinder onto the end.
"Kick in the door. There should be a man sleeping inside. Kill him," she said, thrusting the gun into the
girl's limp hand.


 "Huh? Just like that? What'd he do?" She blurted. Her hands were sweating, and she felt a sudden
cramping in her guts as if her bowels were about to cut loose. She swallowed.


 "Do you really need to know?" Cally shrugged. "Please do make sure he's dead." After a second she
sighed and snatched the gun back. "You cock it like this. This is the safety. See? Now it's off. See the
little patch of red beside the lever?" She shoved the gun back at Reardon. "There. Do it, now, or I will.
Then we go home."


 Taking a deep breath, the thirteen year old girl hit the door with a solid side kick right at the knob. Then
she had to hit it again, since it only collapsed into a ragged almost-hole at the point of impact. Her second
kick knocked it open, and she stumbled into the dark, musty room, blinking. Over on a pallet in the
corner, barely visible by the light streaming in through the doorway, a man lay, face to the wall. He was
snoring loudly, though it was pretty damned amazing he had slept through the noise. She walked up to
maybe two and a half meters from him and fired two shots at his head, closing her eyes despite herself.
Her hand must have been shaking, because two dark, wet splotches that she could barely identify as red
splashed across his back, splattering onto the pallet and the floor. She ran back for the door, stopping
halfway to heave up the contents of her stomach.


Outside, she wiped off her mouth with her sleeve, shakily. "Okay," she said. "I did it." The arm with the
pistol hung limp at her side.


 "Are you sure he's dead?" Her aunt asked her, searching her eyes. "Gimme," she said, coldly. She held
out her hand for the gun. The professional disappeared into the building, emerging after what seemed
forever, but from the pounding of her heart could only have been a few seconds.


 "You got him. Let's go." The taller blond strode back up the alley, turning the corner as her niece had to
jog to catch up. Neither of them said a word all the way back to the car, and then, via a circuitous route
that probably wasn't the way they got out there, to base.


 "Can I . . . know what he did, now?" she asked as her aunt dropped her off at the room she'd been
assigned.


"No."




Three floors down and two corridors across, Cally sought out Harrison, who had beaten them home
and, of course, changed immediately.


"So she passed," he said.


 "Maybe," Cally answered. "If we didn't need her, I could come up with half a dozen reasons to flunk
her. But yeah," she sighed, "she passed." She lit a cigarette in a convulsive, angry motion, arms hunched
in close. "That is, she passed if she still wants to sign on after thinking about it for a couple of days. You
overdid the snoring just a bit. I could hear you all the way out in the alley."

 Wednesday 10/27/54

 The Darhel Beren had recessive metallic gold fur, threaded with black. His slit-pupiled eyes were a vivid
deep green. The deeper purple tinge to the portion of his eyes around the pupils spoke of too many late
nights playing strategy games against his AID. With a roundedness to his frame, he was the closest thing
to fat Darhel one would ever see. His sat staring at the image over the altar to the Lords of
Communication and crunched on a bright turquoise vegetable. It actually wasn't bad. He'd made
something of a study of the available vegetables and their varieties—an extensive study. The trick was to
find the high-protein ones, just close enough in taste and saltiness to . . . He didn't even think about meat,
just shied away from the idea when he felt that tell-tale twinge of euphoria as his body threatened release
of the deadly-addictive Tal hormone.


 Right now, he was replaying the transmission that had just come in, light speed, from the jump point. The
message was so hard to believe that he couldn't tell whether he was looking at a fantastic opportunity or
a piece of disinformation, leaked as part of some elaborate plot against the Gistar Group. Six level nine
code keys, or the better part of them, missing. An Epetar freighter on one of their highest margin trade
routes stranded in the backwaters of the Sol System waiting for cash to pick up its cargo. This was an
especially intriguing opportunity, if true, simply because pick-ups and deliveries to the Sol System were
so onerous, anyway. Most systems had the resources to build their outer-system trade base two weeks
or less out from the major jump point or points servicing the system. Titan Base in the Sol system was
far, far inwards from normal.


 Galactic ships used an FTL system of traveling along lines of low resistance in hyperspace, which was
why jumps that took months for Posleen vessels took seven to twelve days for Galactic vessels. The
current Galactic ships were much faster than their own old standard, too, since they had incorporated the
improvements spurred by the war into newer vessels and retrofitted them, however imperfectly, into the
old ones. The bulk of the transit time for goods and passengers was between jump point and base.
Ancient vessels with hyper drives too far gone for economical repair plodded through the space between
base and planets, delivering the goods in-system over the long real-space legs of the trip. Fleet vessels
too battle-damaged for their drives to be reliable, and too expensive to repair, formed the nucleii for the
deep space bases that received incoming cargoes and loaded up the outgoing ones.


Beren disliked humans, as any other civilized being would, but some of their optimization ideas increased
profits. In this case, the innovation of keeping a dedicated courier on station at a system jump point for
high-priority messages, while costly, was less costly than the delay in critical communications from the old
system of sending messages with whatever freighter was headed out.


Certainly they used the old system for routine communications, or when, as now, a freighter happened to
be going to the right place at the right time. However, keeping couriers a day or less out from a jump
point had been a marvelous improvement over having them waiting weeks away at a base.


 Humans were unpredictable and disconcerting as hell. Stupid, but incredibly cunning. They naively gave
away the most valuable suggestions—for free. Gistar had a whole department dedicated to receiving,
sorting, and analyzing every recorded Human utterance that began with the phrase, "Why don't you do it
like . . ." So far as he knew, Gistar was theonly group with such a department. It's existence was the
most closely guarded secret of the group. Beren only knew about it because he had helped to set it up,
even working there briefly. Which was how he came to distinguish himself enough to be the factor of
Adenast, fifty years younger than other Darhel in the most minor of systems—and how Gistar came to be
the only group to maintain a hard currency reserve, in deposit, on board the neutral courier vessels of the
highest traffic systems.


 He was proud of Adenast. Adenast's space repair dock was the most patronized yard in this region of
space, sitting a mere two days from the major jump point out. Adenast could cut weeks off the repair
time of any vessel and get it right back in service. They could stabilize junkers that could barely limp out
of hyperspace, that would have died one way or another before reaching another system's repair yard at
a base deeper in-system. Sure, they sometimes, very rarely, had a catastrophic collision. Still, the profits
far outweighed the costs. All profit entailed some risk. Besides, he conducted his own work on the
surface of Adenast Four, so he wasn't in any personal danger.


 It was all very well woolgathering like this, but he was going to have to reply to this transmission, which
he was now replaying for the third time.Alright. Assume it's genuine. Time is of the essence. "AID,
display Adenast system with functional freighters marked and labeled." Immediately, the transmission
ceased its replay and a modified three-dimensional representation of the Adenast system took its place. It
had to be modified, because if it hadn't, any holo that showed the system from its star all the way out to
its jump points would, of course, have rendered the relevant bodies and ships too small to see. The jump
point pulsed bright red.


"AID, what is that freighter practically on top of the jump point?"


"That is theDedicated Industry. Heldan of Gistar commanding."


"What is its status?"


 "The fault in the gravity feedback sensors was certified repaired point eight days ago, local.Dedicated
Industry is outbound for Rienooenn to rejoin the food transit circuit."


"Display the particulars of its holds, plus the particulars of the anticipated Epetar cargo out of Dulain."
 Friday 10/29/54

 Michelle liked to begin her workday early in the morning. It was more comfortable for her to navigate
the low, multi-hued corridors then. In the mega-skyscraper where she lived and worked, the smaller
Indowy crowded corridors to near immobility during the morning rush. The press of the little green teddy
bears at this hour was heavy, but not impassible. The brightening blue light shown down on their
symbiotic chlorophyll, feeding Adenast's dominant sophonts a gentle post-breakfast snack during their
commute. The filaments gave each Indowy the appearance of being coated by green fur. It was quite a
contrast to the robin's egg blue, bumpy, gently-wrinkled skin of an infant Indowy. She did not know
whether all baby Indowy looked that way. She had only seen the babies of the breeding group who had
been her childhood foster family. She had maintained close ties with her foster sibs. They were the only
Indowy she knew who sometimes almost forgot she was Human.


 If they had not been so familiar, the corridors and rooms of her building would have been terribly
claustrophobic. Michelle was a good twenty-five centimeters shorter than her younger sister, and the
ceiling was still only about fifteen centimeters above her own head. All the Indowy-raised were short, by
Human standards. Their hosts had tinkered with their hormones to keep them from having to stoop and
hunch their way through the buildings when grown. It was easier to keep the humans on the lower side of
their species' height range than to re-engineer entire buildings.


 The only thing that kept humans from developing agoraphobia when away from home was the high
ceilings of both the work spaces and the general Galactic areas. The latter had Darhel-height ceilings, of
course. Also, humans and Indowy both underwent early and intense training and conditioning to be
comfortable with spacewalk maneuvers.


 "Human Michon Mentat Michelle O'Neal, I see you." The Indowy Roolnai waited for her when she
entered the engineering bay, where she was orchestrating the build of a core chunk of the new Cnothgar
mining station for one of the system's inner planets. It was a cutting edge project, and a rather exciting
one. It used some of the interoperability lessons of Earthtech manufacturing standards to build a large
station whose pieces would snap together like one of her childhood building sets back on Earth. After
they mined the planet out, the pieces would unsnap for transportation in freighter holds to a new system,
rich in exploitable resources. Cnothgar would disassemble and reconstruct it, over and over again, for
mining in systems normally inhospitable to Galactic sophants. The Adenast mining would be the
shakedown operation for a facility she expected to last, with proper maintenance, at least two thousand
of her local years.


 Roolnai, the head of one of the major clans, had to meet with her at the beginning or end of her work
day, because it was impossibly dangerous to interrupt a Sohon or Michon engineer during operations.
Poor Derrick had been a terrible reminder of that basic truth. Her late husband had lost concentration at
a critical moment in an operational process. The materials had, violently, proceeded to the natural
conclusion of the chemical reactions involved, instead of the engineered reaction paths required for that
portion of the project. Everyone had mourned with her, but been thankful that the accident happened in
the outer system and he had merely been working on a chemical-level operation. If he had been a single
level higher in operations classification, and the associated tasks, it could have been so much worse.
Derrick himself would have just been grateful he was several light-hours away from the children when the
accident occurred.


 So here was Roolnai, doubtless to ensure that another dangerous, and much higher level, Human
accident was not in the offing. "Indowy Roolnai, I see you," she said.


 "Please will you sit with me, Michelle?" he asked, gesturing towards the respite chairs along the wall.
They did not go into a private room, private not being big on the Indowy list of concepts. By Indowy
standards, their privacy was inviolate simply because no Indowy would ever repeat or even try to
remember a conversation between a major clan head and a Michon Mentat.


"You are here about my meeting with Pahpon," she stated.


 "Yes, I am. He contacted one of the other clans, who in turn contacted me because of my prior
experience of humans."


 "Your experience is formidable. Nevertheless, I remind you that no Indowy-raised Human has ever
acted, significantly, in a way that was not in the best interests of his or her clan," she said.


 "Yet. We may also disagree as to what constitutes significance, and what constitutes the best interests of
one's clan. Threats of galactic annihilation would, by most standards, fall outside the interests of one's
clan." The Indowy's face was angry.


"I am not aware that anyone has ever made such threats, directly or obliquely. If you speak of my
meeting with Pahpon, I did quite strongly remind him of the dangers of declaring a breach of contract
prior to any such breach occurring."


"He felt otherwise," Roolnai said, tightly.


"He was certainly mistaken. The purely socio-economic risk to his Group of breaching the contract
himself, by declaring breach where none has occurred, would be severe enough that it could only be a
kindness to remind him before he made such a serious financial mistake."


"He felt you threatened to misuse your abilities," the clan head insisted. The Indowy from her work
group continued to bustle around, but increased the berth they were giving the two leaders.


 "He implied that he felt as much. I immediately laid out my case that there was no breach, which tactfully
made it clear that our discussion was solely over the details of our contract. Perhaps a prejudice against
humans caused him to assume a threat where there was none, but I certainly made every attempt,
immediately, to correct his misperception."
"He says your breach of contract is inevitable, and that you gave him no reason why it was not." At least
Roolnai was calming down.


"He is quite correct that I gave him no explanation of how I will avoid breach of contract. I am not
obliged to. I can and will, however, give you a reason. This is a clan matter, and must not be divulged."


"Accepted," he said.


 "As you know, I have clan members whose existence must remain unknown to the Darhel Groups. My
contract allows unlimited delegation of tasks according to my judgment. I have, as is quite proper,
delegated the tasks involved in ensuring I do not breach my contract to those members of my clan most
uniquely qualified to succeed. Would you doubt that, with my guidance, properly limited by traditional
wisdom, they are likely to succeed?"


"I do not like this. I find the risk almost as high as direct action on your own."


 Michelle finally made an expression, one that the clan leader might actually recognize since it was close
to a similar Indowy expression. She raised her left eyebrow. The slight, closed-lip smile was less
conscious.


"Thatis gross exaggeration and unworthy of you, Roolnai."


 Galaxy death. It seemed such a silly thing to suggest. However, the Indowy knew the power of sohon.
One unchecked sohon master trulycould bring about the destruction of all life, perhaps all formed matter,
in a galaxy. It would take time, mind you. The mentat would be dead long before the galaxy. But the
destruction would spread and spread, wiping out planets, stars . . .


Killing one Darhel, or even a clan, would barely cause Michelle to break a sweat.


 However, Michelle knew the dangers as well as the Clan Leader. No mentat was allowed to rise to her
level if they had the slightest trace of interest in that level of violence. By the same token, suggesting that
putting Cally on the job, while fey as any human in history, was anywhere near the same level of danger
was just . . . silly.


 After a long moment he sighed, "In that, you are correct." Now he looked nervous. "Please tell me you
are supervising them closely."


"I am supervising them closely." Childlike, she crossed the fingers of the hand that was hidden by her
robe.


"I will tell Pahpon that there is no threat, that you are using legitimate, proprietary techniques to fulfill
your contract, and that you have a traditionally acceptable likelihood of fulfilling your contract without
breach."


 "Thank you." Michelle bent her head slightly. The Indowy accepted the human gesture of respect and
returned it. Arguably, they were of the same rank. The interaction between mentats and Clan Leaders
had always been one aspect of fealty the Indowy were unsure about.


 "Please, please keep them under control. I respectfully bid your clan good fortune." He rose and turned
to go, but stopped before he had gone more than a few steps. "Oh, there is something else," he said.
"You should be aware that the Darhel are becoming restless. We do not know what has disturbed the
balance, but Gistar diverted one of their freighters leaving this system, two days ago, to intercept one of
Epetar's prize cargos at Dulain. Gistar is acting under the impression that Epetar has been the victim of a
large robbery. In the Sol System. It is not good for the Darhel to be restless." He made a shifting motion,
the Indowy equivalent of a sigh. "What is done cannot be undone. Your fellow humans do not
comprehend the damage such rashness may do. I know you may not have . . . opportunity . . . to contact
your clan head directly for some time, but please use all your influence to restrain them." He inclined his
head, tacitly acknowledging her difficult position in interclan politics. After long years of practice, she had
no trouble reading the plea in his eyes.

 Friday 10/29/54

"Now that I finally have a chance to see you, did you enjoy your weekend off last week?" Wendy
prodded. "C'mon, give."


 "Need you ask?" Cally grinned at her, knowing she herself looked more relaxed than she had in a long
time. She gave the plate she'd been drying a last wipe and set it on the stainless steel shelf.


 "Did you meet somebody? Ah, a blush! You met somebody. Cute?" Her friend was not going to give up
this line of questioning easily.


"All I'm going to say is I had at least one nice evening."I'm never going to get her off this, am I? Not a
chance. "So the grapevine says you and Tommy are trying again?"


 "Well . . . Hey! No fair! Illegal change of subject, fifteen yard penalty, loss of down. We were talking
aboutyour nice evening." Wendy looked mildly outraged.


"Later." Cally glanced around the kitchen meaningfully.
"Well, okay. But if you try to dodge me I'm giving Sinda a set of fingerpaints for her next birthday. And
drums for Christmas, too!"


"Uh . . . sneak off with a pair of chocolate bars after dinner?" Cally offered.


"You're on."


 The hall the O'Neals had rented for the "Kelley" family reunion was a refurbished Asheville wilderness
resort from pre-war days. Mostly what the facility had to recommend it was huge stone fireplaces and an
isolated location. It was not refurbished enough to have a stocked and staffed cafeteria, so they had had
to bring their own food and crew the kitchen in shifts. Fortunately, they only filled half the rooms, since
the others hadn't been redone yet and had plumbing that was . . . unreliable. But the partially unfinished
state had made renting the facilities for a long weekend cheap—which was the other prime requirement in
a location. Still, with the post-war economy being what it was, the O'Neals were a lot better off than
many. Earth's governments, and particularly the US government, had been hit hard by late fees for failure
to provide colonists according to contract when colony ships had been lost in transit and had failed to
reach their destinations. Protestations that humanity had no control over the maintenance or mishaps of
the ships had cut no ice with the Galactics' arbitration councils. If someone or several someone's on Earth
had failed to take proper notice of the provisions of the contract prior to signing it, that certainly didn't
excuse the Earth governments from living up to their contractual obligations. The councils upheld the fees
in full; the taxes to pay for them had been difficult. Earth governments negotiated later contracts to
remove the offending provision. However, the interest on the existing fines had done enough damage to
set post-war economic recovery back decades.


 Which had made the owners of the resort grateful for the early business, which provided desperately
needed funds for their ongoing repairs and restorations. Their gratitude, plus a reasonable security
deposit, had been enough to make the owners more than willing to make themselves scarce while the
rather eccentric "Kelley" family served themselves for the weekend. Besides, it had meant there was no
need to bring in, and pay, temporary staffers to work the off-season.


 Cally was glad to be working in the kitchen with Wendy. So glad, she had volunteered for an extra shift
helping cook. The huge stone fireplaces out in the hall were nice. Very pretty. And very crowded. Any
heat that didn't go up the chimney went right to the top of the beautiful vaulted ceilings. Worse, having
been mured up on the island for most of the past seven years, a lot of the people she "knew," she hadn't
seen for years. Particularly the kids, who changed so quickly, or the spouses when someone lived away.
She could deal with crowds of strangers. She could deal with family. It was just putting both together at
the same time that was way too weird.


 The kitchen's more normal proportions made it the warmest room in the place. She was presently
pouring a couple of jugs of cider into a large cast iron pot to hang over the fire. If they hadn't brought the
spices themselves from Edisto, and the cider from a bounty-farm orchard on the way up, the cost would
have been prohibitive. There were things you didn't want to pay the import taxes on. The O'Neals knew
the fees levied by the Darhel were for missing colonists that the aliens themselves had arranged the deaths
of. The knowledge neatly disposed of any guilt the the family might have felt for circumventing the levy.
Yes, it left the burden for paying those fees more heavily on others, but the Bane Sidhe were shouldering
their share of that burden in a far more constructive way—by trying to put an end to it.


 For one thing, it looked like the penalty fines might quit accruing if the Darhel had to strike a deal to
prevent the US from putting maintenance inspectors aboard the colony ships. The Darhel had long had a
standard clause in the contract predicated on their long-standing control of Indowy lives. Each Indowy
was kept "in line" by having to assume initial debt to buy his working tools, on terms that kept him in debt
for life. Any Indowy who made waves could expect to have his debt called in, his tools repossessed, and
would starve to death.


 Where an Indowy wouldn't dare actually insist on inspecting a ship for missing spare parts, but would
simply provide them unless ordered not to, making the inspection clause an empty formality, humans
were insisting. A team of O'Neal Bane Sidhe was surreptitiously guarding the relevant Human politicians,
and another some critical engineering personnel, and it looked like the Darhel would have to either cut a
deal on the fines or quit "losing" ships of colonists and turning up with the "salvaged" ships sans humans.
Bane Sidhe analysts anticipated that the Darhel would choose to end the fines, figuring live humans the
greater threat.


 During the war, the Galactics had needed humans to fight the Posleen. Recruiting humanity to their war
had been a desperation measure because the Galactics had been losing the war and losing badly. They
had needed humanity, even though they had regarded humans as carnivorous primitives only barely less
dangerous than the locust-like Posleen. Well, locust-like if you discounted the differences between a
flying grasshopper and a space-faring, omnivorous, six-limbed carnosaur. Calling the Posleen intelligent
would be inaccurate. The hermaphroditic cannibals reproduced at an appalling rate, laying eggs that
randomly hatched into hordes of moronic Normals with a few sport God-Kings, and immediately
became food for each other and the adults. The Posleen who survived the nestling pens grew up to eat
nestlings. And everything else.


 A Darhel could only kill once directly; the tremendous high they got when they did so triggered a
hard-coded response that sent them into lintatai. On the other hand, they were more than capable of
unlimited indirect kills by technical error and negligence, as well as by hiring Human psychopaths to
independently kill direct Human threats for them. They just tried very hard not to get excited about it.
They followed a deliberate policy of maximizing Human casualties during the war, keeping just enough
alive to stop the Posleen, and were, as a race, responsible for billions of needless Human deaths. Most of
those Asian, given the pre-war planetary demographics.


 Now, in 2054, the Galactics still needed humans. They needed them to throw the Posleen off of those of
the formerly-Galactic planets that were still capable of sustaining life. They needed them to protect the
primarily Indowy settlers of those planets safe from the few remaining feral posleen.


 Once infested by the Posleen, a planet stayed infested for a long time. Nestlings hatched with the
knowledge base to survive and function; they needed no care. A single feral Posleen, left unchecked, was
a planet-destroying pest problem.
 Still, while the Galactics needed humans, they no longer needed very many, and still considered the
species deadly-dangerous primitives and an ongoing threat. Hence, the Darhel maintained their policy of
actively but indirectly killing as many humans as possible. It was a cold war where disengagement was
impossible. It would take only a single Darhel sacrificed to lintatai to fire a planet-killer into the Earth.
Galactic politics prevented that, but humanity was in no position to push its luck. Hence the very
long-term cold war humanity had joined in along with the very-underground resistance movement among
the other Galactic races known as the Bane Sidhe.


 Everything came back to the Darhel. She blamed them more than the Posleen for destroying her and her
children's chances at anything like a normal life. Starting from when they sent assassins to kill her and
Grandpa when she was eight, and continuing on through their deliberately worsening Human casualties in
the war pretty much any way they could. She didn't know for sure that Daddy wouldn't have had to drop
that antimatter bomb on Rabun Gap if the Darhel hadn't fucked up the war, but she thought it was a good
bet. And if it weren't for the Darhel, there would be no need for the Bane Sidhe, and no need for James
Stewart to be officially dead—as far as the Bane Sidhe were concerned—and separated from her and
the girls. Cally O'Neal hated Darhel with a passion. She tried not to think about it. But she tried not to
repress it either.Ah, stupid shrink head games. You can't win. Best not to play.


 Shari was further down the counter in the very large kitchen cutting up fruit for some kind of salad or
desert. She was also chatting about business with one of the sisters of a Baen Sidhe newlywed, probably
to look over any single O'Neal men as prospects for marriage. Or whatever. Said sister was already in
on the big secret, having grown up with Bane Sidhe parents. The parents had done little more than run a
safe house. Dangerous enough, but deliberately not in the know for many things, which was reflected in
the knowledge base of the daughter—or lack thereof.


 Her interest seemed a bit on the serious side, because she was pumping Shari for information about
DAG. If it had even occurred to Cally that eavesdropping was impolite, she would have silently laughed
at herself for the qualm and done it anyway. Had she been asked, she would have been able to count on
the fingers of one hand the social engagements of this size that she had attended that hadn't either been
professional or, earlier in her life, orchestrated tests of her professional skills. She was what she
was—not listening in never crossed her mind.


 "I don't understand why the government doesn't just go ahead and admit DAG exists and end all the
melodrama. It's not as if they can keep something like that secret for long. Just about the whole country
knows they're around and what they do. There have beenmovies about them!" The short brunette had a
tendency to squint and wrinkle her nose as if her glasses were trying to slide down it.


 "Sure, everyone knows it's there. But it's not the only open secret in the history of the world, you know.
You aren't the first one to have asked that question. As I understand it, the rationale is that if they don't
admit DAG exists, they have the best of both worlds. They don't have to openly account for what it
does, but they can hold it out as a threat against bandits and tax revolts in the territories, as well as pirates
and raiders around the city states that might interfere with the flow of strategic resources. And more than
a threat, when threats aren't enough. At the same time, the voters are reassured that their interests are
being protected. And the voters subconsciously don't worry as much about DAG turning up ontheir
doorsteps. After all, the government is hardly going to violate the Posse Comitatus law and use DAG in
the actual Core States if it would 'expose their secret,' are they?"
"But it's not really a secret," the young lady protested.


"It doesn't matter. As long as the government pretends it's a secret, the pretense, no matter how thin,
gives it certain advantages. Or it thinks it does. Politics is weird that way."


 "I still don't understand why you guys are willing to put down tax revolts and stuff in the territories, free
training or no. Sure, the Indowy had kittens whenever we tried to move resistance against the Darhel
along a little faster, but most of them are gone now. It seems like the rebels are on the side of the angels
to me," the kid said.


"You haven't been around the operations side of things much, have you?" Wendy broke in. It wasn't a
question.


 "Not really, no." The girl turned to the petite blond who was somewhat dwarfed by Cally's height. "Our
family's mostly done support services as long as I can remember. You're one of the only people I've met
in my life who hasn't run me off with a 'because' and looked at me as if they wondered how reliable I'd
be. I'm fine with just knowing I'm helping, and I understand why we compartmentalize information. I just
get frustrated sometimes at how few things ever get explained. All the things I thought would be revealed
when I got older, well, I guess I'm starting to wonder when I get old enough; when and what that will be."
The girl had a slight petulant pout, almost to little to be noticed unless you were looking for such things.


 "Probably not a lot. But I can tell you about the stuff in the territories and DAG in a nutshell. Random
rebellion is dangerous. It's unpredictable, it provokes unpredictable responses, and the Indowy have
shared enough history with us to make it clear that the last thing in the world you want is to get the Darhel
spooked enough to make them unpredictable. That tends to be a Bad Thing." You could hear the capitals
as she said it.


 "The Darhel have to be maneuvered, like a chess game. A game that does take lots patience. It's not
something that comes easily to most people. But whenever any of their opposition has moved too fast
before, well, let's just say there are good reasons not to do that and leave it there, okay? Pretty much the
humans who have looked at it closely, to the best of my knowledge, have all come away with the
conviction that the Indowy arenot being overcautious. Whatever things the split was about, that wasn't
one of them." Wendy was carefully looking away from the girl as she said the next bit. "And if you do get,
well, close to somebody in operations, get used to having more questions than you've got answers, all the
time. Almost all the time, we never ask. Because the quickest way in the world to kill a budding
relationship is to make him say over and over again, 'I can't say.' "


 "Oh, I wouldn't do that," the girl protested, pushing her glasses back up on her nose with one finger.
"Besides, I've heard they all tell their wives and girlfriends stuff anyway. So I just wouldn't ask. I'd wait to
hear."
 "Uh-huh." Cally suppressed a grin. Wendy was getting her 'patient' tone of voice. This one would be a
daughter in law when hell froze over. Shari was covering her mouth with one hand, but her eyes were
twinkling.


 "Let me tell you a little bit about that," Wendy said. "Yes, they all tell more than they should. And you
can kill your husband's career in a heartbeat, or worse, if you ever let the tiniest bit of it slip. What they
don't tell you is always lots more than what they do. What they do tell you is designed to reassure you
and usually has the exact opposite effect. So you smile when they leave and hug them and pretend to be
as reassured as they think you are. Then you wait. And you wait. Knowing that you don't know what
they're doing, or when or if they'll be back, with just enough information to paint about a bazillion
different disasters in your head. Then when, and if, they do come back, you smile and you rub their
shoulders and you patch them up until they go back out to do it all over again. Because you don't want
him worrying about anything that might distract him at a crucial time andkeep him from coming home, and
asking too many questions will worry him, you take what he volunteers and you just don't ask."


The brunette girl did the first smart thing Cally had seen her do since she came into the kitchen. She shut
up.


 Anyway, it was getting time to brave the crowd and handle one of the things on her do-list for the
weekend. Cally excused herself and grabbed her jacket, trudging across the parking lot to a dilapidated
gym where the guys were playing basketball. The floor was a freshly laid galplas slab. She was surprised
the owners had sprung for it, but it might actually have been cheaper than hardwood, if they had lucked
into the right supplier. It didn't have the lines painted on it yet, so someone had patiently drawn them on
with chalk. The chalk lines showed signs of having been touched up already, and needing fresh touch-ups
soon. The hoops were old, having survived the years, though one of the backboards was missing.


 She watched the game for a bit, looking down at the picture she'd called up on the buckley. It had been
so long since she'd seen the kid she was looking for, since he'd grown up off the island. Only he wasn't a
kid anymore. She finally picked him out, waiting until he rotated out of the game to let someone else in
and get some water. She walked over close enough to wave and get his attention, motioning for him to
follow her. He pointed to his own chest questioningly, unsure if he was the one she was looking at. When
she nodded, he looked her up and down and got a goofy grin, amiably following her out of the gym.Ye
gods, he's checking me out. Ick. Okay, he's cute, but ick.


 She kept a bit ahead of him as she led him back to the hotel-like section of the retreat and down the hall
to her room, inserting the card key and suppressing her comments as he surreptitiously tried to wipe
sweat off with his towel. His t-shirt had dark, damp patches, and she wasnot looking at his sweat pants.


Cally heard the hotel room door close behind him.


"Don't even think about it. I'm your aunt," she said.


"AuntCally ?" he squeaked, putting two and two together far faster than she would have expected.
"Hi." She turned and smiled at him. "I guess I haven't seen you since you were, what, five? How'd you
know it was me?"


"Uh, yeah. About five. I'd say you've changed, but it's obvious, and uh, well, there was kind of a
mention . . ." he said, raising his eyebrows as she set a sound damper on the table and flipped it on.


 "I'm really just here to pay allegiance to Mr. Murphy. There is the barest chance that DAG's Atlantic
Company could end up dragged into one of our ops if it really goes to hell," she said. "Briefly, because I
think your CO is going to want some background, our target is owned and run by a Darhel group. For
various reasons, he may get nervous about the time we're getting ourselves inside. Nervous Darhel try to
cover their asses, and you guys are kinda notorious right now."


 The young man rolled his eyes, but she continued, "I know, I know. A nervous Darhelmight see adding
some flashy security to be career insurance, and for various reasons, could set his eyes on you guys and
pull some strings."


 "Anyway, if someone tries to drag you guys into a 'black' furball near the Fleet Base around Christmas,
avoid it if you can, if you can't, you need to know it'll probably be us on the other side," she finished.


 "Avoid? With Posse Comitatus we don't do domestic shi—stuff. We're authorized to operate in the
territories, but there are federal laws against DAG operating in the states. Second, it's kinda hard to
'avoid' being sent on a particular mission. I appreciate the need for a go to hell plan, but this time you may
be going beyond benefits versus costs to your OpSec. I don't know what you've been told about DAG,
but we reallydon't operate in the States, no matter what the conspiracy guys say. Even the Darhel don't
have that much pull."


 "Yes, they do. Trust us, we've been doing this a loooong time. He can do it." She fixed him with the kind
of stare schoolteachers reserve for young boys to make sure he got it. "It's very, very unlikely that he will.
And we probably are being too paranoid. But just as Murphy insurance, one guy in your company needs
to know, and that gets to be you. Obviously, don't share the information unless it becomes necessary."


 "Okay." He rubbed his chin with one hand before looking back up at her. "Aunt Cally, it's not my ass on
the line, but how do you guys decide need to know on an operation? Of course I can and will keep my
mouth shut, I'm an O'Neal. Not my business, just curious."


"Oh, I'm not worried about you running your mouth, Mauldin. If you did, and anything happened to
Tommy or Papa, you'd have Momma Wendy and Momma Shari on your ass."


"Yes, Ma'am, that's a solid guarantee." He swallowed hard. "Of me not running off at the mouth, I
mean."
"As to OpSec, let's just say that Grandpa has very well developed survival instincts," she said.


"Good point."




  Chapter Nine
 Greenville, South Carolina had been a minor manufacturing powerhouse before the war.
Lockheed-Martin, Michelin, Kemet Electronics, and more—all had plants to take advantage of the
non-union labor, ready to work. The original textile mills that had been the mainstay of the economy since
ante-bellum times had lost ground to the cheaper labor overseas, but the area's job base had continued
to grow. Before that, it had been a resort for tidewater aristocrats seeking a break and some fresh
scenery back in the wilderness. Now, it was ruins, with good odds that it would not be inhabited again
for a long, long time. The entire county had been held back from the bounty farm program as a joint
service field training area, administered by SOCOM.


 The damage to the buildings in the various sectors of the city hadn't been done, mostly, by the Posleen.
Oh, they would have gotten around to it eventually. But they had been more focused on the land held
undeveloped by the country millionaires who, pre-war, had wanted some acreage under their homes. So
the buildings had mostly been unmolested by the invaders. The true destruction of Greenville had been
wrought, in various stages, by humans. First by the owners themselves, who preferred going scorched
earth over leaving their homes to the Posleen. Then, in small part, by those of their neighbors who had a
true fondness for explosives—enough to make them wait beyond initial evacuations to mine and
booby-trap anything they could get their hands on, regardless of ownership. The artillery had been the
next source of damage. Then Fleet. When the troops came sweeping in after the war, the areas targeted
by Fleet were flattened. Fleet hadn't screwed around when it, finally, arrived to lift the Siege. Any area
with any indication of Posleen build-up had been scorched by plasma and hammered by kinetic energy
weapons.


The areas hit by arty had various building walls still standing. A stairway or corner here or there. Walls
of half-underground almost basements.


The areas Fleet hit were finally getting fully covered with vegetation.


 Those buildings had been rebuilt with the cheapest bulk methods available, where needed, with no
regard to aesthetics. Troops needed practice urban combat as well as in different types of field terrain.
So various troops worked their trade on the buildings in Greenville's demolition area—cleared and fought
through, blew up and smashed and rebuilt, sometimes even the streets, again and again. Live fire urban
training, with demo, meant their only opposition would be dummy defenders. But that was for Saturday.
 Tonight was in the blanks and VR section. Mosovich's enhanced night-vision goggles incorporated VR
software that interpreted and remapped the scene to look like an old-fashioned black and white movie in
full daylight. The goggles had a setting for color, but the machine guesswork involved in colorizing the
scene could be disorienting when the machine guessed wrong. Doctrine, which the colonel agreed with,
was to keep the color turned off. Field testing had demonstrated, to the satisfaction of the brass, that
"black and white at night" gave troops a significant advantage over an opposing force using the colorized
setting.


 Tonight, Mosovich was glad for the warmth of his silks. Greenville in October could be cold at night,
and tonight was an unseasonable bitch of a freeze. He had had himself declared an initial casualty, along
with Mueller, so they could get a good look at the performance of the troops. On top of the observation
towers, the wind and the light drizzle stung his face and ears so much they ached. His standard cover was
hardly a barrier to the escaping heat. Who would have guessed South Carolina at night would be thiscold
? He looked over at Mueller, whistling cheerfully in his optional attached hood, mouth exposed only to
drink the cup of instant coffee he'd just brewed with water from a heater canteen.


 "Sergeant Major Mueller, you know use of heater canteens on a night mission is strictly against regs.
Where's my cup?" Jake felt around for a packet of instant coffee and dumped it in the steel mug he
unhooked from his web gear, holding it out for some of the hot water, himself. He suppressed a twinge of
guilt about the troops below, who wouldn't be able to use the heater canteens because of the white IR
spot the goggleswould show to the opposition force. They were moving, and mostly in the buildings,
protected from the worst of the wind.


"Mueller, let's add a little incentive to the mix. Get a detachment from Bravo Team to set up some 'loot'
of hot coffee and spare hoods in a few of those buildings."


"Yes, sir." Dennis Mueller grinned evilly, understanding the confusion it would add to the exercise to
have a bunch of random troops running around who were working for neither side.




 The explosions on the demolitions course sent up plumes of dust and smoke through the holes in the
roofs. SOCOM's Training Command had set up the courses with dummies and VR hostiles. DAG units
not only had to navigate a complicated course involving the location and "demolition" of selected targets,
they had to do so under directed and suppressive virtual fire from said hostiles. The course was a
fiendishly difficult test of a unit's ability to shoot, move, and communicate in concert with a primary demo
mission.


 The observation tower for the demolitions course was set well back from the activity, serving both for
simulation and live runs, so that Mosovich had to use the enhanced features of his field goggles more than
he would have liked. He was fine with the zoom, but he'd never quite gotten comfortable with shifting the
view so that he was looking out from the eyes of one of his officers or men. He wasn't happy using it in
combat against humans at all. After Vietnam, Jake had a healthy respect for the wits of the enemy. He
considered the use of the "alternate eyes" feature to be a serious breach of radio discipline and a prime
example of assuming the enemy was stupid. DAG primarily fought humans. Assuming the enemy would
be smart enough to do whathe would do had kept him alive more than once before, and he wasn't about
to get lazy just because Posleen didn't fight that way.Well, okay, there was that time down in Georgia,
but that must have been the Posleen equivalent of military genius, because we've never seen it
again. Not that I ever heard of, anyway.


 He turned as Mueller climbed onto the platform, holding his mug out for a cup of strong coffee from the
thermos his sergeant major seemed to have grafted onto his web gear for field exercises. He zoomed
back in on the action, watched for a minute, and shook his head.


 "You know, you would think that looking at a red-headed troop I should know exactly who the guy is
even if I can't see his insignia. What is it with all the redheads?" the colonel said.


 "Yeah, it's funny, but have you noticed we tend to get a lot of two kinds of guys? There's the little
red-head guys. Most of 'em are kinda stocky but it's all muscle. Then there's the really big dark-haired
guys. It's kinda weird, like the war did something to the gene pool or something." Mueller wrinkled his
forehead, taking a big sip of the steaming coffee.


 "Now that you mention it, Top, it is a bit strange. I don't think I can even make a guess at what could
cause it. Probably just some bizarre coincidence. Go figure." The use of the traditional nickname, "Top,"
for the ranking NCO in the command was a mark of respect and appreciation used by everyone, officer
or enlisted, to distinguish that NCO from all others. It marked the NCO thus named as the go-to guy for
all the thorniest practical problems of service life that someone hadn't been able solved at a lower level.
He, as an infinite fount of military wisdom, would exercise near-magical powers to slice through whatever
Gordian Knot the Service had provided this time.


 Jake watched his men glide through the course as smoothly as if they'd done it a dozen times. He'd
looked it up. The course had been substantially redesigned since the last time they'd been through.
Whatever personal problems the previous CO had had, he had left behind a first-rate outfit.


 The service had DD'ed the bastard after JAG caught him banging a sixteen year old girl, then flushed the
unit's senior NCO who, far from reporting it, had been blackmailing the jerk. He'd seen a picture of the
girl from Mueller's buckley, and you almost couldn't blame the guy. Almost. Still, a juv at least three
decades her senior had one hell of an unfair advantage. Which made the sonofabitch enough of a sleaze
that Mosovich wasn't too surprised to hear that shortly after discharge that pair—the guys, not the
girl—had gone on a drunken binge, gotten behind the wheel and smashed themselves into whatever hell
was reserved for old men who preyed on high school girls.


There was one thing niggling at him, though. Sure, sometimes good officers could be sleaze-balls.
Soldiers weren't by any stretch plaster saints. But everything he'd seen about the guy indicated that he
was a grade-A clusterfuck. Both the commander and the sergeant major.
 Usually, when you had a grade-A clusterfuck in charge of a unit, no matter how elite, the unit went to
shit. They might get the job done, but they weren't top-drawer.


DAG had cruised along as if it didn't matter. As if having a commander who was a daily cluster fuck
wasn't a problem. Might even have been preferred.


As if the commander just didn't matter. As if having an incompetent in charge was not such a bad thing.
As if there was the Unit and then there was whatever screwball the brass had saddled on the Unit.


As the new commander, Mosovich wasn't too sure how he felt about that.




 The charcoal and red shades that blended on the Grandfather's walls appeared to shimmer
three-dimensionally. The dragons were so real you wanted to reach out and touch them just to make sure
they weren't there. Most observers would assume there had to be some clever tricks of galtech materials
involved in the illusion. A very close look would reveal that not only were the patterns two-dimensional,
the dragons were each individuals. Each had five toes, as befit its noble stature. Yet each had its own
body and face among the rest. The artist had spent only God knew how long bringing each dragon into
its own semblance of life.


 Stewart was early, or he wouldn't have been waiting. The Grandfather believed in punctuality, and
achieved it within his organization by always displaying it himself. "Lead from the front" was one Western
aphorism that the Grandfather whole-heartedly agreed with. Precisely as his watch clicked over to two
o'clock Greenwich Mean Time, the door opened and a man walked in. His hair was still completely
black. Stewart suspected the use of hair dye, since his face showed the deep lines and dryness of rapidly
advancing age. An advancing age that was tragic for his friends and colleagues as well as the
organization. Unfortunately, there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. In the early days of the war, a
handful of the Tong hierarchy had been successfully rejuved. Unfortunately, the stolen drug sets had been
improperly handled, through ignorance. Since then, the ignorance had been remedied, but too late for the
ill-fated first generation—the first generation of Tong rejuvs would get about a tenth of the benefit of a
proper rejuvenation. The botched rejuv suffered from its own lacks, plus the seemingly impenetrable wall
the Galactics had come up against that limited the original process. Once the initial nano-repair
mechanism was fully set in motion, its own processes prevented its ever being repeated. The Grandfather
and the upper echelon of the Tong had lived well into the twenty-first century, and had succeeded at
passing on their institutional knowledge to the next generation, but at what now seemed a very high price.


 The head of humanity's largest and most powerful organized crime syndicate was a blocky, solid man.
He wore a black, European-cut suit, moving with a fluid grace that belied his arthritic knee joints. He
walked behind the large walnut desk and sat, folding his hands in his lap to face the freshly-minted older
brother who had asked for this unprecedented meeting, after dispatching a large chunk of expensive
Tong resources on an unexplained errand. Stewart knew this meeting would lead to a permanent change
in his position in the Tong, one way or another. He watched the old man suppress a sigh, and put his
hand to his heart. The man's fondness for Szechuan cuisine was well known. As was his distaste for
taking medication he deemed unnecessary. Even antacids. Given his experiences, it was hard to blame
him for his skepticism.


 "It's good to see you today, Yan. How are you? Would you like some tea?" the old man said, as a
pretty girl brought in a lacquered tray with a traditional tea service on it. She looked about sixteen, but
could have been anything from fourteen to forty. She placed the tea on the desk and left quietly, shooting
a quick glance at Stewart under her lashes.


 "Yes, thank you. I'm having a very good day, and you?" Standard opening, no real clue to his mindset.
Stewart accepted a cup poured by the man who held his life and death in his hands.Of course that was
always the case with Fleet Strike. Superior officers had the power of life and death. At least
theoretically. I should be used to it by now.


 "You would shudder to see my schedule." He poured his own cup of tea and sat behind his desk, fixing
a direct gaze on the younger man.


 Translation: I'd better not be wasting his time. That's fine, since I'm not."There is . . . history of the
war that our people rarely speak of, and never when we are not face to face," he said.Yeah, like those
Darhel bastards sandbagging Earth's defenses and letting the Posleen through to eat three billion
people in Asia. Not that a lot wouldn't have been eaten anyway. The Tong would cheerfully glass
over the Darhel homeworld. We survive because nobody ever criticizes the Darhel outside of
secure meetings like this one. Where possible, we don't talk about them at all. Patient. The Tong is
very patient.


"Our organization has much history, all worthy of study. We have a very long history of survival." The
old man regarded him with a gimlet stare over the rim of the tea cup.


 Right, we keep our mouths shut because we don't want our people to die.Stewart carefully kept his
eyes fixed on the Grandfather's collar. Respect was key in this meeting—was always key with someone
this far up the chain. Stewart had grown up in latino gangs, and gone from there into the entirely
Westernized Fleet Strike. The differences in eye contact rules in Asian culture were still something he had
to think about. One thing his counter-intelligence training in Fleet Strike had stressed was how difficult it
was to overcome the little gestures and telltales every agent drank in with his mother's milk. The trick was
to identify the ones that you, personally, always had to be mindful of. Even when your "role" was now
your real life.


 "An excellent example for study, sir. Another of our strengths is that we have always patiently sought
opportunities to recoup debts of honor and exploited them, when the costs were affordable, and most
eagerly when honor could be reclaimed at a profit."God, what a mouthful. All that to say that we owe
the Darhel and I've got a way to screw them and make money doing it.


The only thing that moved in the Grandfather's face was his eyes. A couple of rapid blinks confirmed that
he'd understood.One of the other reasons the Darhel haven't caught on to how bitter the Tong's
enmity is with them. The Darhel's information processing and artificial intelligence capabilities were
awe-inspiring, but there were still things computers just didn't do very well. One of them was parsing the
indirect communication that was an absolute rule of courtesy in some Human cultures. For all that the
Darhel must engage in very indirect communication themselves when hiring out their violent dirty work,
Cally had confirmed for him, once, something the Tong and Fleet had long suspected. Perhaps because
the Darhel were much less indirect in their business communications, even their best AIs completely
missed the subtext of the more indirect Human conversations. Except when violence was
contemplated—they caught indirect conversations about that very well. The Darhel analysts just weren't
as good as they thought they were about remembering that other species were alien. Humans had a leg
up on that skill, being the most poly-cultural of all the known sentient species. The Tong had exploited
that Darhel weakness ruthlessly to gain and maintain a high and pervasive institutional awareness of all
that the Darhel were, all they intended, and all the payback the Organization owed them. Payback that
had been a long-term project, contemplated only in the abstract—until now. The fucking elves were too
used to assuming absolute species supremacy in business matters, and the Tong was about to fuck them
right in the pocketbook. Stewart had his own debts to pay to his ghosts. He ruthlessly suppressed the
feral grin that threatened to break through his polite mask, but couldn't quite prevent it shining through in
his eyes. The Grandfather's eyes narrowed and lit with an answering gleam as the old man leaned
forward.


 "The advent of such an opportunity, if proper care could be taken, would be auspicious. Very, very
auspicious. You begin to interest me." The head of the largest and most powerful, unsubverted, solely
Human organization in the Galaxy set his tea to the side and leaned forward in his chair. The fires banked
underneath the cold rage, so long held in check, began to burn. Stewart could almost see the man silently
counting his dead and reckoning the interest.


"I apologize that time constrained me to send the first ships before we could meet. The opportunity
would have been lost." Stewart allowed his eyes to meet his superior's for a moment. When the old man
nodded, he continued, "This is what we have set in motion . . ."




 The Indowy Aelool walked the halls of the O'Neal Bane Sidhe base with one of his younger clan
brothers, but recently arrived on Earth. The youngster had tested as a high genius for the aptitudes
important in the field of xenopsychology, leading the clan head to request his presence especially as an
apprentice. Coming from his Clan Head, the request had more force than the strongest Human
command. A Human would have been surprised that a clan head of even a tiny group like Clan
Aelool—tiny only by Indowy standards—could disappear for long periods without ringing alarm bells in
the heads of the Darhel. It was actually the youngster whose disappearance had taken more arranging.
Clan heads were some of the very few Indowy who were not under contract to one Darhel Group or
another, instead serving the Clan as a whole. As such, the Darhel were long accustomed to having little to
no contact with the head of this clan or that clan for centuries at a time. As long as the clan's members
were meeting their contracts and causing no trouble, the Darhel reasonably presumed that the clan head
was off somewhere doing his job. Wasting time worrying about a relative handful of Indowy among the
trillions and trillions would have cut into real business. For the Darhel, the clan heads had no other
function than to maintain the system that kept the masses of Indowy well under control.
In the new apprentice's case, the clan had made vague mumblings about administration work and bought
out the childling's contract, apportioning his former duties among other apprentices in his family. The
Darhel had never marked him as particularly smart or talented—Indowy being careful about such things,
Clan Aelool more than most.


 The head of his breeding group was also unusually smart. She had made certain the child displayed some
conspicuous mistakes and clumsiness in his work, making the Cnothgar Group happier than not to see
the slow-learning, incompetent youngling become someone else's problem. If he thought about it at all,
the Cnothgar Group's local factor would assume the clan had removed the little fuck-up to someplace
where he couldn't further dishonor Clan Aelool.


 "I do not understand why you are such a determined contrarian regarding Human civilizability, Clan
Father Aelool. I have read the other clans' reports on the failures of the SubUrb dietary experiments,
and, most respectfully, they run exactly counter to your positions. My wisdom is lacking. Enlighten me,
please?" his new apprentice said.


"Ah. You are fond of kaeba pie, are you not?"


"Well, yes. Who is not?"


 "But you more than most. If someone tried to get you to give up kaeba pie by offering you only mashed
loogubble in exchange, how happy would you be to cooperate?"


"Please do not ask me to make this sacrifice for Clan Aelool, sir. I will, most certainly, but . . ."


 "It would be a great sacrifice. I know." His eyes crinkled in the Indowy equivalent of an impish grin.
"That is, more or less, what our enlightened colleagues among our own race and the others attempted to
do with the humans." He clucked his tongue in a "tsk" picked up from humans.


 "Would it surprise you to know that the humans have established in excess of one hundred specialized
colonies, in the areas that were totally destroyed, in pursuit of the different varieties of bean for this
continent's favorite bean soup? These barbarian carnivores—yes, I know they are—consume bean broth
in the megaliters. How many specialized colonies do you think they have established in pursuit of favorite
meats?"


His younger clanmate shuddered, "Ugh. What a question. Thousands, at least, based on your bean
data."


"Zero," the Indowy Aelool said. "Exactly none."
 The other Indowy actually stopped walking in consternation, then appeared to have a thought dawn.
"That is easily explained, Clan Father. They raise captive populations of most of the meat animals they
most prefer. Perhaps it is more difficult to grow their beans in various places, with their primitive
technologies."


 "Partially true. Yet there are meat animals they used to eat—do not shudder, we miss things when we
look away too soon—that they like, that they have not reclaimed. Then there are twenty-something
specialized colonies dedicated to replanting large populations of another bean whose fermented products
are particularly favored by their females—and consumed in no small quantity by many males."


 "If they are so fond of these beans, why did the SubUrb experiments not feed them these beans rather
than other foods?"


 "A mere deficiency of metabolism. The lipids and sugars forming the food value of these much-favored
vegetative foods can only be metabolized by the humans into energy, not synthesized into the building
blocks needed for major body maintenance and repairs. The SubUrb plan failed because those carrying
it out were too lazy or too careless. The carnivores disgust them, so they equated all beans to all other
beans and substituted beans and seeds that do provide the compounds humans can metabolize—as we
have in the food facilities for humans on this base, as well. With the problem being that the humans
tolerate those foods but are about as fond of them as we are of loogubble."


The youngster shuddered.


"The first thing one would think is to fortify the favored beans with the necessary compounds. Again, the
problem is the humans hate the taste or the texture of the fortified beans."


"So why are you so preoccupied with catering to their aesthetic whims?"


"If we want them to change their behavior without resistance, we must make them prefer to do so. Ifyou
were offered meat on your plate or kaeba pie, which would you eat?"


"Neither! The dead flesh would make me ill!"


"You would eat the kaeba pie, or even loogubble, in preferenceat least partially because you like it
better. Philosophy be damned, it suits your preferences."


The youngster winced.


"The obvious solution never occurred to the relevant planners. Provide the humans with the ability to
metabolize the vegetable foods they already prefer into the nutrients they need. It was too much trouble
to take with the disgusting, immoral, primitive carnivores." The clan head's own disgust was obviously for
the planners, not the humans. It was an almost blasphemous rebuke of their recognized wisdom.


 "Clan Father, in another, I would consider the assertion of one's wisdom over those planners as
presumptuous. You, however, are such an eminent xenologist, and my Clan Head, that I must consider
the possibility that your wisdom, in this, may exceed theirs. Is it permitted for me to ask if you have
evidence."


 "I am so glad you asked. You see, we are going to my Human dietary laboratory. You will please
excuse the decor. It is designed to make the humans especially comfortable with the foods that proceed
from it. First, let me confess that I have taken the small ethical liberty of fortifying the foods with
specialized nannites that convert the food compounds available to the ones necessary for Human health.
The nannites build up in the system of humans who consume the foods and make the preferred stream of
vegetable substances much more nutritionally available to those humans. I donot tell them about the
enhancements."


"That is quite an ethical lapse, if you will forgive my horribly impertinent comment."


 "It is. I believe they would consent if they knew. I believe they would then also imagine deficiencies of
taste in the foods. This belief is the result of other experimentation in their kitchens. True meat was
presented, falsely, as vegetatively enhanced. They not only claimed to notice a taste difference, they
preferred the true meat so presented much less than the true meat honestly presented. Oh, do not
shudder so. They would have been eating it anyway, and they wouldnot, as one of us, be misled into an
ethical breach—they perceive no ethical reasons to prefer the vegetative offering, anyway. That particular
deception hadno negative ethical value for the humans—I checked with the Human Planner Nathan
O'Reilly. He has also approved this experiment, on the grounds that if the ones eating the nano-enhanced
foods like the taste, and have no adverse health consequences, they are getting a pleasant treat and little
more. I do confess his approval probably was contingent on the way I presented the
information—truthfully, but in a persuasive way. Could I please attempt to produce aesthetic Human
treats as long as I endeavored to ensure they were healthy and did not impair the functionality of his
operatives and staff?"


"Well, if their planner approved, of course it is ethical. Why did you not tell me that at the beginning?"


"The humans would not entirely agree on that ethics evaluation, customarily requiring individual consent."


"Insane," Rael Aelool echoed the sentiment he had heard, often though surreptitiously, from his elders.


"Not for them," his Clan Head contradicted. "Alien minds arealien . If we want their cooperation, we
must respect that. Do not wince. To ignore the differences in alien minds in our dealings with them is the
height of folly. If we had not once done so with the Darhel, all this plotting and intrigue—this Bane
Sidhe—would have been unnecessary to begin with." The clan head had the expressions of an instructor
commencing a class.


"From your enthusiasm, it almost sounded as if you were going to tell me they are not that different from
you and me." The child's wry tone was an unwitting display of his genius.


 "What? Ofcourse they are different. Incalculably different. They arealiens . That is my whole point. We
respect the Tchpht; we respect the Himmit; we even, after a fashion, respect the Darhel. We had better,
out of sheer survival interest. We wrote the Darhel off as primitive because of their history. Short term
thinking to our long term sorrow. One would think we had learned nothing from our mistake."


"So are we to respect the Posleen next?"


 "Interesting question, despite your ironic tone, but one for another day. The course of study for your
immediate future is Humans. First lesson. Forget 'insane' unless you are talking about an organism that is
a mentally damaged individual of its species. Alien and damaged are not the same thing. The thought
patterns and behaviors of ahealthy individual in a species are the way they are because they served an
evolutionarily positive function for that species. Yes, there are evolutionary dead ends, but too often we
Indowy say 'insane' when what we really mean is 'not like us,' " the clan head lectured.


 "Humans have tried, many times, social structures very similar to our way. The results have been
abysmal—for the sole reason, I believe, that they are not us. Your first assigned reading for discussion
tomorrow is Bradford's chronicles of the Plymouth Colony. You may use my translation; get it from my
buckley. As you read, keep in mind that these were mentally healthy humans, of a high degree of ethical
development for the species, virtuallyall of whom deeply believed a way like ours would work and
wanted it to work. Do not make the mistake of assuming it failed because of a few aberrants who
sabotaged it. Instead, look at how application of a system thatwould have worked for Indowyserved
the whole . Our whole premise for why our way is moral ishow it serves the whole," he emphasized.


 "First lesson—always evaluate Human species' sanity in terms of how their systems of social organization
serve the whole of that society. It is Humansocieties that are their analogues of our Clans, not their
'families.' Families are incorrectly classified in the literature as proto-clans. In this assignment, think of
them as breeding groups, instead. That analogy isusually , but not always, more apt than the proto-clan
one. We will study why and when later. For a start, the O'Neals are a bit more of the exception than the
rule. I find I am usually most correct when I think of the entire O'Neal Bane Sidhe as now folded into
Clan O'Neal. Usually, I think of the Human Father Nathan O'Reilly more as a senior clan planner serving
at the pleasure of the O'Neal Clan Head. It isvery close to accurate, and often the best approximation
for Clan Aelool purposes."


"I do not understand. The Human Planner O'Reilly's leadership in the Human component of the Bane
Sidhe considerably predates the split," his apprentice said. "He is accepted as being of senior rank to the
O'Neal."


"True. Yet if it came to an unresolvable policy dispute, the organization wouldnot further split. Instead,
Human Planner O'Reilly would choose to relinquish his position, unhappily but without external pressure,
in favor of the candidate preferred by the O'Neal. By our standards,all the O'Neal Bane Sidhe are
O'Neals. Hence the name. However, for some reason specifying this to him distresses the O'Neal,
although he clearly takes full responsibility for all the others. Witness that thereis a second O'Neal Bane
Sidhe base on Earth. It is his own home, run directly by him. The 'Edisto Island' base. The terminology
bothers him, apparently out of something the humans call 'modesty.' It is no use calling it that to
him—modesty is an attribute he does not believe he possesses. I humor him, the Indowy Beilil humors
him, as must you. I learned this, by the way, from the Sunday annexation. Clan O'Neal is the most vital
Human society to the Galactic future, and we must carefully nurture it in a healthy direction. Clan Aelool
and Clan Beilil consider the Plan entirely remapped by this unexpected development of Clan O'Neal as a
growing Human 'society.' More or less. Alien minds are alien—the clan to society analogy is not exact.
Second lesson for the day. Inflexibility in the face of large situational changes is a counter-survival trait for
the whole. A bit of Human wisdom, 'No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.' "


 He sighed, "No, do not shrug it off because of the barbaric phrasing. We Indowy, and all we Galactic
races, do that far too much. It means one cannot plan wisely if one does not adapt to large situational
changes. How can the Humans be rightly considered such irredeemable barbarians if they have wisdoms
they can teachus ?"


 "I am not wise enough to dispute with the wise, Clan Head, but I respect that as a Clan Head with your
expertise, you may best judge if you yourself are. Particularly regarding Human xenology."


"In this, I am quite certain that I am correct. Quite, quite certain indeed. Consider the Himmit and
Tchpht . . . unconvinced, but cautiously interested in our research, so long as we manage it as safely as
possible. The Tchpht's Human xenopsychology researches take a more direct, active interest in the
Michelle branch of Clan O'Neal. Which has implications for some other developing situations, beyond
your level of study."


"That explains much of Clan Aelool policy on a level I can understand. Thank you, sir."


"Come. Allow me to show you some of the work we do here."


 The Indowy Aelool entered a room decorated in colors and patterns that offended the young Indowy's
eyes, and would have similarly affected all of his species. The Aelool had equipped the room with odd,
unexplained Human devices. He donned a Human-style garment, cut to his size, that covered much of his
photosynthetic surface. Then he picked up a flat ceramic disk with brown rectangular solids of food,
covered by a clear Human plastic. All of this was quite bizarre. If he had not known better, and if the
matter were not unthinkable, the young Indowy would have feared for his Clan Head's rationality.


 "All of this presentation is necessary. Especially the 'apron.' " He gestured to the Earth-cloth garment.
"Come," he said again, carrying the disk in his hands as he left the odd room, walking down to the
moving box humans preferred to decent bounce tubes.
"These foods, by the way, are completely ethically clean. They are also metabolically enhanced as I
described, obviously," he said.


 The Aelool asked his buckley PDA a question in a Human language. Fabulous collaboration between
the humans and Tchpht, that. The collaboration aspect was unwitting on the part of the humans, of
necessity, but still a fabulous invention. Ridiculously fragile and short-lived, but so incredibly inexpensive!
Aelool had assured him that it genuinely did not attempt to spy on you. His Clan Head apparently
believed it. Amazing.


 He spoke no further as he led his younger clan brother into areas frequented by humans. The young
Indowy made every effort to copy his senior's mannerisms, ruthlessly suppressing all natural fear and,
especially, thought of fear.


 They approached a Human of that even the youngster had no difficulty identifying as a female, treated for
proper longevity or very young adult, in excellent health. Her head tendrils were a pale, silvery yellow and
fell to her shoulders. The colorful parts of her eyes were a clear, bright blue.


 "Miss O'Neal. my favorite test subject! I am most happy to see you. May I offer you a brownie?" The
Clan Head pulled back the flexible plastic, which stuck to itself awkwardly, and presented the disk of
food to the woman.


 "Oooh. Thanks, Aelool." She picked up a brown square and began munching rapidly. Her smile tried to
cover the teeth, but with imperfect effect since she was eating the food.


 He tried to look away, and kept his gestures under control, but could smell the stink of his own fear
pheremones begin to waft into the air. Fortunately, he had been told, humans could not scent or
recognize them. This one's nostrils flared, though, in a way that made him doubt his information. Still, she
seemed thoroughly preoccupied with the food.


 "Walnuts and chocolate chunks? You're gettinggood at this Aelool. I don't know why you picked this
for a hobby, but I approve!" Again, she grinned around a mouthful of the food, bits of which stained her
white teeth brown. "Do you mind if I?" She picked up four more squares eagerly, disappearing down the
hall as if afraid he might take them back.


 After she was out of sight and out of hearing, Aelool muttered softly to him. "Completely ethically clean
food. Completely nutritionally adequate to maintain her. How much meat do you think that Human will
consume today?"


 "Your wisdom vastly exceeds mine, sir. I admit I have no idea. I presume at this stage of your
researches you are choosing the more ethically advanced humans?"
The Indowy Aelool's ears and eyes quirked in suppressed mirth, "Childling, that was Miss Cally
O'Neal."


The dump of fear pheremones overwhelmed him as he shook in sudden reaction, "You brought me
near—"


 "Please. You were perfectly safe. Miss O'Neal hasnever killed an Indowy. Such drama. You yourself
saw that she was only interested in how much of the clean food she could take without offending me." He
made their race's equivalent of a shrug. "Do you see why I am convinced of my researches? To answer
my own question, Miss O'Neal will almost certainly consumeno meat today. She is concerned about
keeping excess fat deposits off of her body, so monitors her caloric intake carefully. She will consume a
few cups of bean broth, with no caloric enhancement—without enhancement, it has virtually no calories
for them. She much prefers these 'brownies' to the meat. It really is that simple. I could provide similar
clean foods, high in lipids and sugars, and persuade her to replace large amounts of her meat
intake—completely on her own initiative. She would feel no deprivation. To the contrary, she would feel
guilt for consuming so much 'junk food.' "


"Junkfood? It isbetter food! Um—doesn't she have two, very large, excess fat deposits?"


 "Oh, those. Those she has little choice about—an evolutionary adaptation to attract males. I gather she is
unusually well adapted," he said. "Remember, she does not know the bean squares will keep her healthy.
By the time I have the Human Nathan O'Reilly tell her the truth about the food—with me at a safe
distance, far away, of course—she will be angry for a few seconds to a few days before laughing and
asking for more brownies. By then, she will have accepted that she likes the taste of the improved, clean
foods and will not imagine bad tastes into them."


"Youtold her she was a test subject. Why would she be angry?"


"She thought I was joking."


"Why? No, never mind, sir. I have a different question. Human males are the more aggressive. You
mentioned that Human males are less fond of the beans in the brownies?"


 "Quite true. However, I have not yet explained the Human male fondness for another metabolically
challenging, high food-value, ethically clean broth made from fermented seeds. Let me tell you about
'beer.' " The head of Clan Aelool led his young protege to a convenient, civilized bounce tube, carefully
securing the rest of the experimental food for the journey.
  Chapter Ten
 Four men and one woman gathered around a hologram in a stale-smelling galplas room. Six enhanced
information manipulation units sat ranked on ancient folding tables along the walls, hard-wired out through
secure data cables that ran through ductwork in each wall. Each machine's buckley port was
uncharacteristically empty. Each showed signs of recent and regular cleaning, each showed signs of age in
black lines of dirt ingrained in the casing's few small seams. Each was still a cutting edge application of
Tchpht technology, being between seven and twenty years old. More accurately, cutting edge of what the
Crabs had been willing to release to any Galactic anywhere. Human cyberpunks being less hidebound
than Galactics, each was still more innovative in small ways than anything Indowy or Darhel had. They
made up in creativity anything they lacked in Darhel institutional infotech experience. The cybers
presumed, of course, that the Himmit had perfect working copies. The Frogs' espionage capabilities on
all fronts were so good that the cyber division of the O'Neal Bane Sidhe had the private opinion that even
the Tchpht had no idea how much of their tech the Himmit had quietly stolen. After all, why would the
Himmit risk provoking the Tchpht to increase security? One of the cybers primary and highly covert
projects was to find and keep secure a good enough story to buy whatever information the Himmit had
acquired on the slab.


 They had enjoyed a remarkable lack of success, though not through lack of stories. It was practically
impossible to protect a good enough story against penetration by the Frogs—nicknamed for the
terrestrial amphibians they resembled. Purplish and bulbous when in the open having a conversation, the
Himmit were racial cowards, a trait moderated only by their cheerfully insatiable curiosity for what they
called good stories. They had an extraordinary ability to reshape their bodies and repattern them to
match their surroundings, and to move silently. Their natural camouflage ability was to a chameleon's
what a Formula 500 race car was to a little red wagon. They were also so harmlessly amiable that it was
impossible to stay angry with one.


The cyber operations security director described the continuing attempt to protect information from the
devilishly effective little bastards as "good training."


 The walls in the room were a nasty putty color. One corner was glaringly different, the bright purple
walls covered with acid green spirals. It hurt Tommy's eyes, but he had to admit that Cassandra was one
hell of a cracker. Despite her penchant for collecting desk toys that, together, moved like a set of
demented clocks, he'd never seen a system she hadn't been able to poke half a dozen different security
holes in. The purple stuff was obviously painted on, since it was already flaking at the uneven edges.
Galplas had never been designed to take paint. What would've been the point? It could be tuned to any
color you wanted—at least, it could at installation. Galactics weren't much for anticipating change.
Sometimes it seemed like they barely tolerated it at all.


 Tommy Sunday shook himself and got his attention back on track. Cally was going over the layout of
Fleet Strike Operations Training Headquarters. "They put the archival library on this section of the flats.
It's not just a machine room tightcasting to the troops' AIDs. Fleet Strike learned a few lessons from the
war. All of its more interesting material is secured within the system and accessible only by physically
cabled-in terminals. In practice, that means you sit down in a study couch, scan in your fingerprint or
swipe your temporary ID, and plug in the buckley you checked out from the front desk on your way into
the building. The building is, unofficially but strictly, a no-AID area. The in-house buckleys all carry a
bright-blue stripe up the back, just as a reminder not to cross-connect the two. There's a manned desk at
the door to tactfully ensure the protocol is followed. Questions?" She paused, clearly knowing the
question wouldn't be rhetorical.


 "Yeah, I'll bite. How are we getting into their system?" Schmidt Two looked over at Tommy, raising an
eyebrow. The male assassin was on the opposite side of the table from Cally, as far away as he could get
without being rude. Tommy hoped they could shelve their tension before the run. He didn't like
complications within the team.


"Go on." Cally nodded at the big man.


 "Fine. When I left Fleet Strike in 2031, I hadn't been approached by the Bane Sidhe yet, but I'd gotten
used to having extensive access and didn't want to lose it. It was a big chance and could have gotten me
shot if they'd caught me at it, but I fooled Fleet Strike's systems into thinking I was on a long-term deep
cover investigations mission. That I was a sleeper." He held up a hand when Papa would have spoken.


 "I know, I know, Fleet Strike's mission was and is Human versus Posleen, not Human versus Human.
They have almost no cloak and dagger operations, of course. The key word there isalmost . They have,
rarely, had some internal high drama—investigating misappropriation of funds, diversion of resources,
corporate bidding scandals, things like that. There was a billing category for it, a protocol for the systems
to deal with such an agent, and that was all I needed. Especially since I told it I was too secret for it to
pay me, which let me, after the fact, disable the linkage to the payroll and accounting systems. When I
got through tinkering, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. I cross referenced against
the standard reports . . . uh . . . your eyes are glazing over. I covered my tracks, okay?" When he talked
about computer geeking, it was possible to see the skinny, dark-haired kid from Fredericksburg inside
the linebacker's son.


 "If they hadn't broken out their own data storage from the Darhel's main AID network in 2019, I never
would have been able to manage it. I'm sure it's duplicated in the Darhel's databases somewhere, but
there's never been anything to bring one insignificant sleeper agent to their attention. Not that I know of,
anyway. I had dumped large chunks of AID code into some harmless-looking duplicate files on a first
generation pre-production system right after the Rabun Gap incidents. I was pissed, Iron Mike was
pissed, we were all pissed. The plan was to analyze it later and I had cooperation from the rest of the
555th ACS. We did some sleight of hand with partial files I don't need to get into. Anyway, I used the
back door I built to dump my files so I could use them in my private sector work. That's the only time I
ever accessed it, but I never shut it down. The system should, and I stress 'should,' still think I'm in Fleet
Strike if we tickle it right," Sunday said.


 He took a chance and stole one of the really yummy smelling brownies Cally had sitting on a napkin in
front of her, ignoring the dirty look she shot him. He'd have to ask where she'd found them, since
chocolate was one of those luxury goods at one hell of a premium on base since the split. It was far more
available on the island, given the proximity for smuggling. Maybe he could get her source to part with the
recipe for Wendy. These weregood.
 "Unless they caught you last time, in which case it will bring all hell down on our asses," the red-haired
fireplug of a man spat neatly into a chipped stoneware mug that was missing its handle.


 "Papa's got it in one," Cally said. "Our peerless leaders' willingness to play this card should give you
some idea of the importance of the mission. You all know we've been skating on the edge of disaster, as
an organization, since the split. The take from this mission won't come anywhere near putting us where
we were, but it'll make that thin ledge we're on just a tad wider.If the device's existence and location is
confirmed,if this isn't some elaborate ruse to give the Darhel a plausible excuse to eliminate Michelle as
one more O'Neal, we can't let them get it developed and in production. If they get something like this, we
aren't just on the edge anymore, we're out of business. We don't have a defense that would keep a
captured agent from spilling his guts under this thing, and all of our agents know way too much. We aren't
nearly as compartmentalized as we should be. There won't be anything to stop the enemy from running
routine interrogations on all their people, potentially compromising every agent we've got inside. We've
been complacent, and it's come back to bite us in the ass," she sighed.


 "Okay, to make the explanation as simple as possible, the plan is a lame duck jenny with a charlie
chatter and a right angle fake. Harrison, you're charlie. Grandpa, you do the fake out. Tommy steals the
ball. George, you drive and babysit the humvee. Jenny, obviously." she pointed to her own chest.


"If nobody's got any questions so far, let's get to the positions and timing." Cally picked up a fiberglass
pointer. "The plane comes in nap of the Earth at oh-five-hundred and sets down on the flat behind this
hill. I've allowed a generous twenty minutes for us to unload and get into the vehicle. I expect it to take
half that. Buckley, start the hummer and the clock."


 "Hold that thought, buckley," George said. "I do have a couple of questions." If Isaac's team lead
objected to being interrupted, she didn't show it. Not to casual inspection. Tommy knew enough to
recognize the slight tightening of her hands after she folded them in front of herself and turned a
deceptively open face towards the other man. There was nothing significant to anyone about her closed
body language. Cally always kept her arms close in, defensively, when she wasn't in character for a job.
He didn't know if George could read her closely enough to catch the Cally-specific facial tells.


"Yes?" Her tone of voice was pleasantly even. If Tommy hadn't worked closely with her most of her life,
he wouldn't have been able to tell she was getting torqued. He was starting to wonder how tactful
George had been, or hadn't been, in their prior meeting.


 "The jenny is fine, but in my experience it's almost impossible to run an obvious diversion on a military
base without the senior NCO's, at least, smelling a rat. Not to mention a security lockdown of the base.
And Harrison sucks at field work," he said, nodding to his brother. "Sorry, bro, but you do. Tommy's
conspicuously huge, and a fucking war hero. What if he gets made? Why not switch Tommy and Papa
and send Papa in with a swipe card, since the system takes them. Or a grafted fingerprint. And why do
you really need me if I'm just going to be sitting on my ass in the truck? No offense, it just looks like I'm
extraneous."
 Cally's expression got friendlier. Not a good sign. "Okay, first off, the diversion is anything but obvious.
Operations training has a computer randomized posleen attack drill approximately once a month. It's
separate from security lockdown drills because with posleen that's a waste of manpower that Fleet Strike
may need. Don't sell Harrison short. He's charming, and can be made up to look inconspicuous,
particularly in uniform. And he's not going to make a fuss about changing his appearance. Right,
Harrison?" It wasn't really a question. "Everyone still alive who ever served with Tommy has either been
riffed out or deployed off planet. He's huge, no disguising that. His hair, eyes, and facial structure will
look nothing like his original identity. Fleet Strike has helped us out, there, by liberalizing the length and
grooming standards for hair in the past ten years. Papa can't go in his place. A swipe card triggers a
security review automatically, a graft is a dead giveaway under the most casual review, and the access
end is the place most likely to need a sophisticated on-site hack. You, obviously, are our go to hell guy."


 It was impressive how she could say something like that without overselling or underselling it. It'd be
interesting to know if she was fooling George or not with the Miss Friendly face. "You've just
demonstrated why. You're better than anyone I know at finding potential weak points in a plan, on short
notice—even though we have those specific ones covered. You improvise fast and well even for a field
agent. If anything goes wrong, you get to pull our cherries out of the fire."


 "Okay, fine. Why is Papa doing the hack for the diversion, and what if that's not smooth?" he asked.
"No offense." He nodded to the older redhead.


 "Tommy does the hack on the way. He's got half a dozen canned routines set up in Papa's buckley to
cover contingencies. The only reason the hack isn't already done is to reduce the chance that it will be
noticed beforehand. We hope it won't be noticed at all, but nobody wants a blown op, do we?" she
smiled. "That it? Okay, buckley, start the humvee moving."


"Are you sure? There are at least sixteen more things that could go wrong, you know. Would you like
me to list them?" the buckley offered cheerfully.


"Shut up, buckley," she said mechanically.


"Right."


 Tommy and Harrison coughed, unconvincingly, as the miniature truck started moving through the
hologram. The base buckley's eccentric reaction to Cally O'Neal was a running joke between them. As
was Cally's ill-concealed suspicion that Tommy was hacking her system. He hadn't, which just made it
funnier every time she accused him. The briefing went on, more quickly now that George had said his
piece.


 "Right. We want to come as close to the base as we can without ever entering line of sight of the
elevated areas of Fredericksburg Base itself. We're landing out here. Technically, it's civilian,
privately-owned land. In fact, it's abandoned but not yet reverted to Homestead and Reclamation. It's as
safe as it gets, but it means we need to proceed over the Rappahannock here, and do another crossing at
the other side of this small island. There's an old road that will have discouraged tree growth and such,
but the route might as well be off-road. Harrison, planning for getting the truck across the river is your
baby. Who knows what's there now, but undergrowth analysis from the few aerial photos we have
suggests that however much bridge there is, that's the one that got the most rebuilding. Both sides of that
old road have been used a fair bit,most likely by civilian-type vehicles, on both sides of the river. The
bounty farmers had to have been crossing it somehow. Think about contingencies. Get with Tommy, go
over whatever information we've got, and come up with a list of what you'll need. Supply needs it by
fifteen hundred tomorrow. Earlier if you need anything particularly exotic."


 "Obviously, there are security cams out in the area beyond the base. The difference between the
cameras on base and the cameras off base is that the cameras on base are hard-wired to the data
assessment center. The cameras off base are not. They broadcast or tightcast, using the same
transmission protocols as the AIDs. For all that, they're pure Earthtech, which means that we can fuzz
them. Enough, anyway. So, our first point of approach is here," she said, touching the pointer to the
flashing red dot southeast of the base. "Harrison, Tommy and I un-ass the truck and proceed to the
fence. We have fairly recent intelligence that the fence is chain link topped by razor wire. Naturally, we'll
take backup, but we should be able to get onto the base itself with nothing more exotic than heavy duty
wire cutters. From the fence, we split up. Two hundred meters in from the fence line, there's a guard
patrol that covers the secure area containing the archive. I turn onto the road here and start jogging up
towards the archive building. Tommy and Harrison parallel me and wait for me to jenny the guard. They
break across the line and make their way to the building. Harrison, you're going to carry some package
you need the clerk to sign for. Get together with Tommy and figure out something plausible."


 "Meanwhile, George and Grandpa take the Humvee around to here." She pointed to a second flashing
red dot in the hologram. "As you can see, the truck can get closer in here, meaning Grandpa will get up
the hill before us, overlooking the muster point for the particular Posleen attack drill we've selected."


 As she took them through the steps of the brief, Tommy tried to keep his mind on the details. This was a
straightforward reconnaissance mission, despite the target, but that didn't make it okay to get
complacent.




 It was good flying weather, clear and mild, as Kieran Dougherty guided the Martin Safari hybrid jet over
the Virginia hills. False dawn threw purple shadows over a landscape barely touched with color in the
early light. The pilot grumbled to himself because the Schmidt sitting to his right in the copilot's seat was
not, in fact, his copilot—not that he needed one for this. Schmidt Two wasn't any kind of pilot at all and
as far as Dougherty knew, hadn't a single hour of flight time to his name. The overgrown kid of an
assassin was using the instrumentation of his plane, alright. Using it to control the surveillance cameras on
the belly of the plane, taking countless pictures of the ground they were overflying, just as if it was
anything more than godforsaken postwar wilderness laced with the occasional cluster of dirt-poor bounty
farms.


He came in low, dropping lower, using VTOL to land on a green flat, behind a hill, in a place that used
to be called Falmouth. Mere tens of meters away, an abandoned bounty-farmer's shack sat, weathering
beneath an encroaching tangle of vines, dry and dormant in preparation for winter. His landing field was
an irregular patch of knee-high grass and weeds, its sole virtue that it was relatively flat and not yet
overgrown with the scraggly pines eating away its edges. There were, however, signs of abat. The only
blessing about this mission to the middle of nowhere was the season. This late in the year, the grat, who
like the Posleen they came with preferred warmer weather, were already hibernating deep in the ground
awaiting spring. The alien insect, which preyed on the hapless, plentiful abat, hunted in swarms. The little
bastards' poison sting could kill a grown man with a speed and ease that would have struck a hive of
killer bees dumb with envy.


 The amateur ecologist in Kieran automatically tracked the signs of change everywhere he got to
go—one of the perks of his job. Fortunately, in Virginia the abat were slowly losing the fight to the
rabbits and field mice. Once the local owls, foxes, and other night-hunters had learned the abat's peculiar
vulnerabilities, the native rodents had gotten a respite and begun to recover. The abat's coloring and
movement habits helped it avoid the senses of grat in Posleen ships and fields. Evolution had not fitted
them for all terrestrial habitats. Farther south, the story wasn't so good for the natives. Here, abat didn't
have any of the peculiar survival habits needed for winter weather. They were conspicuous as hell in the
snow, tending to hop frenetically to keep warm. They had swarmed in with the Posleen, along with other
pests and hangers on from countless worlds the Posleen had devoured. The rodent-like herbivores'
reproductive rates had made their slide towards extinction in Virginia slow, but the outcome was
inevitable.


 As for the grat, some local insectivore or another must be pretty damned resistant to the poison, because
they were reportedly declining, too. Expert opinions were divided between the black bear and the
woodpeckers as the happy recipients of ecologic accident. Lack of resistance worked both ways. For
every species that became invasive in a new environment, at least a hundred died out. Invasive success in
one environment did not translate to invasive success in another.


 In the pre-war era, Japanese kudzu had inundated the American southeast, but left Alaska untouched.
Rabbits and cane toads had overrun Australia, but bombed out in more habitats than they'd thrived. Felis
domesticus had destroyed countless species of birds—but only in places where it had doting humans to
go home to. In many other places, top level predators—and not just the Posleen—made short work of
the kitty cats after their Human protectors were gone.


 Ecological destruction from the Posties' hitchhikers had overturned equilibria everywhere—but it was a
toss-up which species got a foothold where, and some, like the abat and grat, appeared to have the a
similar vulnerability to the Posleen's absence as the house cats had to the absence of humans. In the
former cases, nobody had figured out why yet.


 The key, as always, was that evolution was not an upward path towards some pre-destined goal.
Evolution had no goals—it simply described an observed sequence of causes and effects. Evolutionary
fitness in one environment did not translate to evolutionary fitness in another. The Posleen, in their
adaptability of diet and environment, were a wholly remarkable, one in a gazillion aberration.


Their hitchhiker species demonstrated more the rule of species transplantation than the Horses' own
bizarre exception. Any hitchhikers that couldn't eat earth life started dying out as soon as the Posleen
were gone. Any hitchhikers thatcould eat earth life could, as a rule, be eaten by it. It tended to level the
playing field.


He sighed and shook loose from the woolgathering that tended to catch up with him all at once
whenever he got safely back on the ground.


 "Thank you for flying Bane Sidhe air, please don't forget your baggage, we hope you have a brilliant day.
Guys, watch your step on the ground out there. It's an abat field." Kieran busied himself with flipping
switches and checking gages, preparatory to going out and getting his aircraft squared away for the
team's return.


 "Oh, lovely. Can you give us a second to double check the harness before you drop the ramp? I know
it's fine, just exercising constructive paranoia." Cally was first out of her seat and bouncing on the balls of
her feet, already buzzing on adrenaline.


 "Yeah, secondary to Kieran's constructive paranoia. He checked everything about five times before we
took off in the first place." Harrison grinned easily, standing and getting what little stretch was available in
the cabin.


 "Great. Still, you never know what might have worked loose on the trip." She looked like she was about
to jump to the ground. Looking over his shoulder, Kieran could almost see the words "abat field" walk
across her forehead before she turned and took the ladder down.


"If it makes you feel better. We've got time." Papa O'Neal yawned and began patting down his pockets.


"Looks good. Drop the ramp. Tommy, you and Grandpa get the camo net over the plane. Harrison,
help me start disconnecting the Humvee," she called.


"You mean now that we know everything's connected?" Schmidt One had a quirk at the corner of his
mouth.


"Exactly," she said.


"Did anybody ever tell you you've been listening to your buckley too much?" George asked.


 "She has not. If she listened to me, she'd know that it's not the aggregate failure rate on thestraps you
have to worry about. Do you know how many field missions have ended in death and mayhem, not to
mention blatant destruction of sensitive and valuable electronic equipment, caused by vehicular failures?
I've prepared a list of the top twenty-five most likely causes for mission failure resulting in three or more
team fatalities. I can recite it if you'd like," it volunteered helpfully.


"Shut up, buckley," Cally called over her shoulder at the PDA still resting in her vacated seat.


"Right."


 While they were talking, Kieran had gotten the ramp down and joined Cally and Harrison, rapidly
unfastening the heavy-duty harness that had held the mostly mud-colored truck immobile in the belly of
the plane. It was amazing what you could carry in a smallish plane when you didn't have to carry large
amounts of jet fuel. Cally ignored the door, swinging her feet in through the driver's side window and
starting the engine, before backing the vehicle down the ramp. Parking clear of the plane so her team
members could get the cover in place, she got out and fished a gym bag from the floorboard behind the
driver's seat. The guys were set already. This time of year the gray silks, with Fleet Strike's blue stripe up
the leg, would certainly be the uniform of the day. The galactic material was wrinkle-proof, nearly
indestructible, and more comfortable than most civilians' workout clothes. It didn't stain, and was warm
enough to render jackets superfluous. Fleet Strike uniform would be the best camouflage possible on
base for Tommy and Harrison. George and Papa were in old-style BDUs and snivel gear. Cally, of
course, had a different role to play.


 She pulled a thin camo jumpsuit out of the bag and wrinkled her nose at it, looking down at her stylish
black and red running togs. She looked good. She was supposed to, but her vanity always amused
Kieran for some reason. The black sweats and windbreaker were nothing special, but teamed with a red
tank top that was about two sizes too small, it was eye catching enough.


 "Cold, Cally?" George said, walking past her to rummage in the back for his camera bag. She spun
around and obviously checked the impulse to clobber him, settling for staring balefully at his back. The
bra she was wearing was a thin membrane that other than keeping everything elevated might as well not
have been there. If ogling was pissing her off, she'd better get her head in the game. Kieran walked up
the ramp into his plane to close it up. He'd go over it with his usual fine-toothed comb before taking the
opportunity to grab a nap, his own part in the operation finished for now.




"Get in the goddam truck, George. You've got the middle." Cally stepped into the jumpsuit and zipped it
halfway up. The grass crunched under her feet, crisp with early-morning frost despite the mild air. She
was the odd woman out for the vehicle, looked like.


 "Nope, I need shotgun. Gotta shoot some pics. Besides, Tommy and Harrison'll like it better if you're in
the middle. You look better than me and you probably smell better." The camera itself was a good
electronic model. His eccentricity was that he used an ancient set of glass lenses with it, and could go on
for hours about the inferiority of modern, polymer, zoom lenses. At least, the one time Cally had been
present it had seemed like forever.
"At great personal sacrifice,I will sit in back. Cally, you drive," Grandpa said.


"Works for me. Hi, Boopsie." George said, opening the passenger side door. It would be bad form to
vault the hood and slam her feet in his face. Really, it would.


 Schmidt Two's air photos, the jerk, showed a rutted track from the abandoned farmstead to the river,
and a crossing point that had once been Jefferson Davis Boulevard.


 She got a good look from the side as they drove up, upgraded vision outlining the details for her as
sharply as if she'd peered through binoculars. It wasn't much of a bridge. The Horses had built out the
post-demolition remnants of the pre-war structure in the sturdy, functional, clumsy style of Posleen
engineering, but never completed it. A ramshackle conglomeration of timbers, patches of salvaged
Galtech cargo webbing, and what looked like steel runway planking bridged the central gap of about
twenty meters. Cally was about to throttle George over his constant click-clicking of the camera as they
drove. She knew the value of good footage, but my God, the man was obsessive. She parked the
hummer on the bank and walked out onto the bridge, toeing the material in the gap experimentally.
Personally, she wouldn't drive a bicycle across that mess. But she'd walk it, with a belayman.


"Netting bridge gonna work, Harrison?" she asked.


"You bet." He stooped down and fingered the old Posleen surfacing. "This stuff will make a good bond
with adhesive."


 "Fine, get the netting. Harrison, Grandpa, secure this end. I'll make the crossing." She looked at Harrison
and waited for his nod before jogging back behind the vehicle. After some rummaging through the other
supplies she found rope, harness, and pack, carrying them around front and tying off to the front bumper.
The lines for the pulley hooked onto her belt, to unwind as she went.


"What, all of a sudden you don't trust me not to drop you?" Tommy asked.


 "You're not belaying me. George is. The process will go faster if you help the others set up on this side."
The too-handsome mechanical specialist was working with Grandpa to assemble the strips that would
become the improvised bridge's base plates. Flat on one side and blessed with a plethora of hooks on
the other, the plates could be secured on soft ground with long spikes, affixed to a solid surface, or
stabilized in place in any of several other ways. A properly secured set of base plates with several layers
of the special netting could create a bridge strong enough to support a small tank in an unbelievably short
time. "Properly secured" was always the kicker.


 In this case, the bridge so constructed would be roughly double the width of their humvee, once they
snapped together the axles of enough rolls of bridge netting. The bridging had taken up virtually all the
cargo space in the humvee, even though the material was as thin as cardboard and flexible enough to roll
very tightly. They had had to carry so much of it because there was no way to tell how much bridging
they'd need. At that, George had insisted on carrying more wedged into nooks and crannies in the plane.
Cally and Grandpa had surreptitiously rolled their eyes. There was paranoia, and then there was
paranoia. Schmidt Two had changed since the loss of his wife and team. Among other things, for the first
few years he'd been fanatically punctual. Some quirks stayed, others tapered off. Everyone knew what
he was going through. Besides, assassins were always strange birds in one way or another. As long as it
didn't get in the way of the mission, they tolerated it where possible, and were glad of it when it did
support the mission. George had gone from a seat of the pants improviser to an excellent go-to-hell guy,
with an almost prescient tactical awareness.


"Your faith in my competence is touching," the smaller man said.


 The slight assassin probably weighed less than she did. He'd know how to brace himself, but no way
was she going to let him see how much it freaked her out to step onto the rickety bridge. It would have
been just as bad if her belayman had decent body mass. Really, it would. If she told herself that often
enough, maybe she could stop the cold sweat she felt prickling on her upper lip. She tried to pretend to
be someone who wasn't afraid of heights, but slipping into character was, for this, pretty damned hard.


 "No offense. Just don't drop me." She checked her rigging and backed out onto the dilapidated mess,
watching over her shoulder and testing her footing as she went. Halfway over, when it was holding up
better than expected, she sped up, dancing lightly backwards with only a few muffled curses when her
foot slipped through a gap in the webbing. Damned if she was going to show how petrified she was. The
adrenaline from her slip drove her heart straight up into her throat. She couldn't help getting a glimpse of
the water, so dizzyingly far down. Two missions in a row where she had to be way up in the—she really
didn't want to think about it. She yanked her foot loose and planted it on a thicker strip of webbing, her
knuckles whitening on the rope in her hands.


"Hey, watch it! Where are we gonna be if you throw a shoe?" George called.


"You're making me sound like a horse."


"Whatever. We should have brought you an extra pair of shoes," he said.


 "Well, I'm over here now, so relax. I'm not going to drop a sneaker in the river. Even though I did
wrench my ankle for real, just a bit. But hell, if I get a little swelling or something, it just adds realism."
She gave up trying to look casual and backed the rest of the way carefully, watching her footing. She had
to resist collapsing on the bridge in relief when she got to solid ground again. More solid, anyway. Still far
too high, but she wasn't going to think about that.


"You got by with it. Just hook up the pulley," he called.


Oooh, he's pissing me off."Fine." She brushed the dust and dirt off part of a Postie section in the
bridge, more or less in the middle, and opened the backpack. The available section of bridge looked
much better for adhesive than trying to drill holes. She sprayed down the clean section of bridge and
shoved the back plate of the pulley against it, counting to sixty before unclipping the lines from her waist.
The pulley lines were ingenious. Strong sections of line clipped together at intervals to make the length of
the loop easy to adjust, but the clips were narrow enough not to make the line jump out of the groove in
the wheel. She clipped them in place and rested, elbows pressed in to her sides, tapping her fingers
together nervously. Why did they have to build bridges so high? It wasn't as if there was anything wrong
with being down close to the water.


 It took a few minutes for them to package up the bridging base plates for her side, and attach the
package to the pulley so that it wouldn't snag too bad on the way over, then about as much time for her
to get it all loose on her side. Setting the roll of bridging to unwind smoothly around its axle as she pulled
it across was even more awkward. The procedure certainly gave her bridge base plating enough time for
the adhesive to set up before she had to cut the net to fit. Working backward with a boxcutter variant of
a boma blade, she eased the mesh of the ultra-strong netting over the hooks on the plate and secured it.
The plates themselves were now as firmly affixed to the Posleen section of bridge as if the whole
assembly had been cast from Galplas.


 Finished, she noticed an infinitesimal tug at her waist. Cally looked up to see that the annoying man had
untied her rapelling rope from the humvee, unrolled a substantial length, and was tying it to one of the
ancient steel supports whose remnants stood, twisted and torn, on the Human section of the old bridge.


He waved some coils of slack at her and called out, "Pull your end back and tie it off. If we have to
dismantle the bridge in a hurry, somebody might need it. We've got more rope, we don't need to take this
one."


 Damn but he was lucky she wasn't close enough to slap him. She sighed and tied the thing off, grumbling.
Just like him to put her in a corner where she had to leave her lucky rope. She couldn't say anything
about it without looking stupid.


 She didn't look at him as she got into the hummer behind Grandpa, who probably would get to drive for
the rest of the insertion. Her right front side tingled with the urge to pop George upside the head. If he
hadn't been so good at his job, she'd really be regretting asking him now. She hadn't been this pissed in
she didn't know how long.


 The first section of bridge had moved them across to what was technically an island. The roadway
forward was intact up until the small branch that separated them from the mainland. Whatever improvised
bridge had spanned that gap had suffered some sort of misfortune. The postie work was ragged at the
edges and wisps of what must have once been another improvised connection hung from both ends over
the gap. Naturally, Grandpa's drysuit and fins had shifted to the bottom of the pile. Normally, with her
natural buoyancy, Cally would have gotten stuck with swimming the gap. She'd gotten to beg off from the
task this time since it kept them from having to wait while she redid her hair. Another O'Neal was the
logical choice since they swam so much at home. Grandpa got the job—he wouldn't be seen by anyone
after insertion. That didn't mean he had to like it. Even through a good suit, the water was damned cold
and he let them hear about it, drawing a good-natured "quit whining" from Tommy. Still, once he made it
across and up to the other side of the gap, setup was routine.


 Vehicle finally across, they fired up some self-heating breakfast packs and a pot of coffee. A hot
breakfast was nice for the others, but necessary for Papa O'Neal, who was still shivering after he'd
gotten back into his BDUs and snivel gear. The temperature was dropping so fast Cally was feeling the
chill even through her sweats. She ignored George as he tied off another rope. The problem with over
complicating mission fail-safes was that the more you did, the more likely it was that something would go
horribly wrong when you couldn't keep track of all the balls you had in the air. It was a delicate balance.
She preferred to keep things simpler and fly by the seat of her pants when she had to.




  Chapter Eleven
Tommy Sunday looked at how badly Papa O'Neal was shivering and was very glad the older man was
driving, up near those front heater vents. He might be metabolically an early twenty-something, but that
didn't make him immune to hypothermia. The man's next task would be crawling up the back side of a hill
on the cold ground, moving slowly enough under his ghillie suit not to get any body heat from exertion.
George's real-world experience, like Cally's, was more urban. Papa was a better man in the woods, and
was the logical man for the task. He needed to get his core body temperature back up, get thoroughly
dried out. His hair was still dark with water from his swim, and that just wouldn't do.


 The cyber initiated a pre-set program with his, clean, AID to track their progress and jimmy with the
cameras accordingly. The AID would tell him if something unexpected came up, but adding static didn't
take much babysitting. He pocketed it, climbing into the back of the car after the unbelievably stacked
blond. Damn, it was a good thing women couldn't read guys' thoughts. He'd be walking around with
bright red hand prints on his face all the time. She turned to stow something in her gym bag behind the
seat and one of her tits pressed against his arm. Not that it had anywhere else to go. Determinedly, he
thought about cleaning out the cat box when he got home. They were Wendy's cats, but it was his week.
Sand didn't do nearly as good a job as pre-war clay litter had.


 Thanks to his wife's hobby of buying and reselling antiques, frequently after a little research and
restoration, and the war-pay investments of his they had converted into anonymous accounts before they
"died," the Sundays weren't hurting for money. Too many other people were, O'Neal, Bane Sidhe, and
strangers. He and Wendy had learned how old money used to feel, back in the northeast before the war.
If you were comfortable, you didn't show it. Envy was a dangerous thing, and attracted parasites besides.
He didn't mean the first generation O'Neals. He would've gladly helped Cally or Papa, but they wouldn't
take it. The Bane Sidhe, though, would have pressured them to strip their assets as surely as fourteenth
century monks had latched onto anyone around their own bailiwick with land or cash. All in a good
cause, of course.


 Itwas a good cause. But he and his risking their lives in it was plenty, especially given the lack of results
and the lack of down chain loyalty the Indowy had shown towards the operatives and sleepers. Sure, the
O'Neal Bane Sidhe was better for the reduction in Indowy control, but not that much better. Father
O'Reilly was a good man, but with the vow of poverty and never having married, the needs of families
with kids and grandkids to care for sometimes slipped by him. He and Wendy lived almost as frugal a
lifestyle as anyone, but he was damned if he'd give up resources they needed whenever one of the young
men hadn't come home, and would need again. The kids still needed shoes, and schooling, and braces on
their teeth. They needed time with a mom that wasn't worn out from working herself into an early grave.
He didn't at all regret working to bring the Darhel down, but the years had nurtured in him a certain bitter
wariness about the Organization. They didn't mean to be callous bastards. They meant well, bigtime.
They were necessary allies. But the Sundays and O'Neals always made sure they could take care of their
own, because for sure nobody else would.


This train of thought always made him grumpy, but at least it had kept him from embarrassing himself
until his "clan sister"—who sure as hellwasn't his sister—quit wiggling around. Barely.Friend. of. my
wife. Down, boy. Besides being a damned dangerous woman to piss off. Don't be stupid, man.
Breathe.


 He stared out the window as they bounced their way over the river and through the woods, threading
whatever path they could through the trees, using the top of the hill where the building was as a rough
guide. Most of the way, the old roads had kept out enough tree growth to let the truck through.
Sometimes they had to go off and find their way around fallen trees, old telephone poles or other debris.
Fortunately, the ground was hard enough that the truck didn't leave obvious fresh ruts. Not ones that
would last very long, anyway. It sent creepers up his spine and left a lump in his stomach to be in
Fredericksburg again. It did every time he came back to the place that had once been a thriving town. It
had been the most horrible handful of days in his life. Bar none. He'd been scared shitless a lot of times
through the war. He would've been a moron not to be. Nothing compared to Fredericksburg.


 He lost his dad, his friends, everything. In a single day. Worse was knowing they had been eaten,
butchered under the boma blades of the stupid but unstoppable hordes of ravenous tyrannosaur-like
centaurs as they swarmed over his hometown like a plague of locusts. They weren't his worst nightmare.
They were worse than that. He'd been in the local militia, like all the boys and men. Not that it had helped
Fredericksburg, which had the misfortune to be the site of one of the first scout landings in the war.
Already a proficient sniper from his pre-war marksmanship hobby, he had taken up a position
knowing—flat out knowing—that he would not survive the day, but determined to kill as many Posleen
as he could before they got him, too.


 Somehow, he had ended up with Wendy and handed her one of his spare rifles. Not that he had really
expected her to do much with it, not really. She had just deserved the chance to try. What stuck in his
mind most from the day was the stench as the smoke from the various explosions on the outside of town
blew in on the wind. Faint at first, by the time the Horses came in the carrion reek rising from the streets
and blowing into their faces had been overwhelming. At the time, the adrenaline had been pumping so
hard, with him so focused trying to stay in the zone to make every shot count, he hadn't noticed much. It
only came back to him in memory, later. Maybe the memory was enhanced by the smell of the
battlefields after, before he was chosen for Iron Mike's Fleet Strike ACS. One of the best unsung
advantages to fighting in a combat suit was the way you didn't smell the Posleen.


The yellow scales of the carnosaurs had been covered all over the front, that and all six limbs, with
orange smears of mixed Human and Posleen blood. More blood had leaked into the gutters as they
marched down the street in their usual bunched up mass. All that was the yellow of the hermaphroditic
cannibals' own ichor. Human corpses from the hell of the scout wave's landing had long since been
consumed or passed back to ranks in the rear for processing. He hadn't noticed at the time, his scope
inadvertently swept over the gutter between the horde and the street drain as he came down from recoil
to line up his next target. It was only afterwards that every detail of the day stood out starkly in his
memory.


 When Wendy got hit in the back of the leg, getting her down to the vaults under the city, quick, had been
the only thing to do. They still didn't think they'd live, not really. She had known about the vaults as a
town history buff. His plan before he ended up with her had been to move from one firing position to
another before ultimately dying in place. With her, he had a responsibility to at least pretend with her that
his plan was going to do them some good. Then she got injured and it had been easier to contemplate
dying himself than it was for him to leave a beautiful girl, his unrequited high school crush up until The
Day, to die on that roof with him. Then under Fredericksburg, one thing had led to another and he and
Wendy had ended up making love. At the time, they were both too much in shock for it to feel like a
strange thing to do. Since then, he'd gotten used to the horniness inevitably evoked by the near death
experience of battle. Some wit, he didn't know who, had once said that the most exhilerating experience
in the world was to be shot at—and missed. It was.


 As far as he knew, Shari O'Neal, his Wendy, and a handful of kids from the creche they had both
worked in were the only women and children who had survived both the Fredericksburg landing and the
Posleen eating the Franklin SubUrb, where many survivors of Fredericksbug had been sent. What a
goatfuck that had been. Disarmed residents, no exits except from the top—the way the Posleen had to
come in. They might as well have planted a big, neon, fast food sign on the top of the place. He hated the
Darhel more for the deliberate mis-design of Franklin than for anything else. The dying act of the men
from Fredericksburg had been to hiberzine the women and children and stash them underground, stacked
like cordwood in an old pump house, hoping they'd hidden it successfully from the Posleen. Those men
had acted in the purest tradition of heroism. Many had done as much in that war, but nobody had done
more. Only then a lot of the survivors had been sent to Franklin, which had been made a zero-tolerance
for weapons zone at the insistence of the Galactics—which meant the Darhel. Designed with no exits.
Franklin had been near the Wall, just inside Rabun Gap. When the Posleen broke through, the women,
kids, and old people in Franklin hadn't had a snowball's chance in hell. Except that Wendy and Anne
Elgars, a woman soldier of the Ten Thousand who'd been recuperating from near-fatal injuries, had
gotten Shari and the kids out through the ventilation shafts and a small exit in the hydroponics section.
Again, Wendy's habit of finding out everything about where she lived had saved her life. And the lives of
the handful of others she'd been able to take with her.


 Thank God his mother and sister had gone to Asheville instead of Franklin. They didn't get eaten, but
what with the war and all, and the way everybody changed, by the time he and Wendy officially died, he
and his surviving family hadn't been close.


 He knew he was in Fredericksburg, which brought back all the ghosts he thought he'd laid to rest
decades ago, but he couldn't recognize anything. Every once in awhile he'd get a glimpse of something he
thought might once have been familiar, but he wasn't sure if he really remembered it or was kidding
himself. The woods were anything but a healthy forest. There were plenty of trees, but mostly large
patches of weeds and grass. Their roots and the elements had done a job on the rubble and compressed
ground, which was punctuated by falling scraps of walls. The rusted spikes of rebar that crested above
the weeds in places contrasted sharply with the twisted girders. Between one thing and another, not all of
the metal in the ruins of Fredericksburg had gone into the Posleen nano-tanks. Some cities, in the rear of
the Posleen occupation, or under more efficient God Kings, had been totally obliterated, so thoroughly
had they been scoured for resources to feed the Posleen's infinite needs for war materiel. His home town
had been left with its ghosts. He didn't know whether that was good or bad.


 With difficulty, he shook himself out of his involuntary review of The Day. It didn't do any good to get
caught up in past shit. There was just too much of it. Fuck it, drive on. Going fishing with one of his sons
or grandsons was usually how he straightened himself out. Which it would be time to do when he got
home, but now was time to have his head in the game.


 The Fleet Strike silks threatened to pull him back into more unwanted reverie, of the days after his stand
at the Washington Monument, along with the rest of the motley force that came to be known as the Ten
Thousand. Shortly after, he'd been transferred from the US Army to Fleet Strike ACS—where he'd
gotten used to wearing silks, in the rare times when he wasn't living in his suit. Now he was back. His
conversion away from the system had come at the very end of the war, when to stay alive and keep the
Posleen from pouring into the American heartland they had had to hide their moves from their
Darhel-issued AIDs. Even back then, he was every bit as good with a computer as he was with a rifle.
There was no way for the Posleen to be reading the AID network unless the Darhel had deliberately
given them access. Put together with the designed-in vulnerabilities of the Franklin SubUrb, that were
also too comprehensive to be accidental, nobody had needed to draw him a picture. Now he was back.
For an hour or so, anyway.


 He checked the blue stripe on the back of his buckley for what must have been the fifth time, reading
over Michelle O'Neal's data on the mission that discovered the alleged Aldenata device. On a Crab
planet the ACS had nicknamed Charlie Foxtrot, being unable to pronounce the Galactics' name for the
place, Fleet Strike had engaged in heavy fighting with pockets of Posleen resistance in areas the powers
that be deemed too sensitive to be neutralized by Fleet from orbit. According to Michelle, Fleet Strike
had received orders to divert some equipment recovered from the Crab equivalent of a museum, and
deliver it up the line. The museum was listed in all official Galactic records as a total combat loss. Cally's
sister believed, and his experience agreed, that Fleet Strike kept more information in its records than it
acknowledged to its Galactic bosses. Especially when ordered to do something it might have to cover its
ass for later. He sure hoped the Michon Mentat was correct in her information about what they'd find in
the records this time. It would really, really suck to have come all this way for nothing. Not to mention
how much longer it would take to come up empty. Finding something was quick. Finding nothing was
what took time.


 Date, planet, coordinates, unit, commanding officer. If it was there, he should be able to find it. If it was
there. He checked the blue stripe on the back of his PDA again.


"You're not nervous, are you?" Cally asked. "That's about the tenth time you've checked that thing."


"No, I'm good. It's just . . . Fredericksburg."
"Yeah, that's gotta suck."


 "No shit," he agreed. "On the other hand, it takes my head right back to when I was with Fleet Strike, so
it's not all bad."


"I wouldn't have minded being with Fleet Strike," Harrison observed, pouting. "Parts of it, anyway."


 "Very funny. Keep a lid on the camp. It wouldn't play well with the target. Stick to the sports," Cally
said. "You're checking your notes, right?" From what Tommy could see, he was playing solitaire.


 "I've got it. I drilled it until I'm blue in the face. I can talk baseball with George for God's sakes. Don't
jostle my elbow, dear."


"You'll be fine," she assured him.


"I know." The other man winked at her. "Don't worry, I'll keep it simple."


 "We've got the fence ahead," Papa said, softly, pulling the humvee up. He stopped it short of the
expanse of chain link topped with razor wire that cut a line through the woods. The woods on this side
looked very much like the woods on that one, with nothing obvious about the land to tell why the fence
was here and not there.


 Harrison was out of the truck first, approaching the barrier with an old-fashioned multi-meter and a
black leather bag that looked like something an old country doctor would have carried. The fence was
probably electrified, but its main purpose was as a simple barrier to announce the presence of a stupid
Posleen normal charging through it. It also served to keep out equally stupid humanist radicals, seeking
street cred with others in the protester set.


 Tommy nodded to himself when the fixer started pulling out assorted wires and clippers. Electrified. He
and Cally got out, breath frosting on the air. He put his buckley in the pocket of his silks and sealed it,
patting the other packet to make sure his emergency field kit was in place, dropping the AID into the
seat. Unlike conventional clothing, the pockets on his silks would stay reliably closed until he pressed the
top corner again with a finger. They were comfortable as hell. He'd regret turning them back in at the end
of the mission. Not that the Bane Sidhe had another operative who would fit silks made for Tommy
Sunday. They didn't have anybody else as big as him. Which incidentally also meant Harrison had to cut
the hole in the fence big enough for him to get through. The smaller man was used to it by now. Still, it
was a good thing silks didn't snag.


 Schmidt One looked up at his brother and said, "When we come back out of here, we're going to have
to stop for me to patch the hole. Otherwise they'll find it the next time they run their maintenance checks.
The idea's that we were never here, right?" It wasn't really a question.


 "Cally, you're through first," the fixer said. "Tommy, get the other side. It just wouldn't do for her to get
scratched up on all these rough edges."


"Nope. Ruin the whole effect." Papa O'Neal spat neatly out the driver's window. "Through you go. Get
moving."


 George put the box of coffee supplies, graced by a well-known brand name, on the ground next to his
brother. "Here," he said, handing each of them a small data cube. "Terrain updates. That's what the
pictures were for. Cross referenced with the hummer's tracking measurements, it should be pretty
solid—at least for what I was able to see. I've also marked backup rendezvous points."


His female counterpart took the cube without comment, pocketing it. Tommy and Harrison at least
nodded at the smaller man, who smiled faintly before going back to the car.


Sunday followed her through the fence, letting her get as far away as she could without losing sight of
her. He began following as she moved in to the southwest. He could hear the faint crackle of leaves
under Harrison' feet behind him. Good thing the noisier man would be the farthest one from any
unfriendly ears.


 They'd walked just over two hundred meters, by his pace count, when Cally raised her hand and
stopped them. He echoed the signal back to Harrison. She stripped her camo jumpsuit off and stowed it
under a bush, patting the pocket of her black windbreaker, rubbing her ear to make sure the dot
earphone was in place. Flesh toned and about half the diameter of a ladybug, it was practically
undetectable. Tommy checked his earphone, too, patting the pocket with his buckley.


 Once the extremely stacked and tempting blond was on the road, Tommy could keep pace with her
slow jog at a safely increased distance, watching the flash of red from her tank top through the trees that
concealed his own muted gray. He listened carefully as he went, waiting for her to find and draw off the
guard.


 "Hey!" He heard a masculine voice from the direction of the road. He stopped cold, raising his hand to
stop Harrison. "Excuse me, Ma'am, but this is a restricted area." He heard the voice say, apologetically.
Definitely not the tone he'd have taken with some unknown man. He almost felt sorry for the guy.
Dangling Cally in front of him was a below the belt hit if there ever was one.


"Oh, is it? I'm so sorry, I didn't see the sign. I got a little turned around, anyway. Could you point me
back to base housing? My sister-in-law is going to think I'm such a dummy," she said.


The voices were far enough away that he had to listen carefully, and wouldn't be easily overheard. He
started forward again, carefully, beckoning with one hand. Harrison would have to go in first with his
box, so he'd be looping around Tommy. The voices were moving down the hill as his female teammate
succeeded at drawing the young soldier along with her. Single women on base were in short supply.


"Oooh!" The high feminine squeal of dismay was followed by a pause. "It's my ankle. . . ."


 He couldn't hear the rest. They kept moving, cutting in to approach the road. There was a five yard strip
of grass on each side of the road before the gate to the chain link fence surrounding the archive building,
and a good fifteen yards between the fence and the building. Where the front of the building jutted out
from the hillside, the structure was surrounded by neatly trimmed boxwood hedges. Fortunately, the gate
was open, the guard mount a precaution against a theoretically possible intrusion that nobody seriously
expected. Harrison crossed the open area at a fast sprint, setting down the box on top of the hedge as he
vaulted it with more agility than Tommy had known he had, and pulling the box down out of sight. Too
big to try to go over the hedge without either landing in it or hitting the wall, Tommy ducked around the
back after covering the gap between the tree line and the building. He barely had room to crouch down
below the top of the hedges without scraping himself to bits on the hedge or the brick wall, or laying flat
on the dirt. Dammit. The pictures they studied had had a mock-up of a suit and a scale model of a SheVa
tank in the courtyard. Someone had moved the damned displays. He supposed they were lucky to have
any cover at all.


 He thumbed his pocket open and pulled out his PDA, tapping the transmit button. "Dude, I need a
beer," he said, and ended the transmission. Seconds later, alarms began wailing across the base,
sounding the drill alert. Soldiers all over the base would be grabbing their AIDs and their gear to get their
information and execute their movements to set up an appropriate defense in response to the specified
"Posleen attack." Over the next few seconds, half a dozen or so men sprinted out of the building and
through the gate, disappearing quickly from Sunday's limited view. The activation phrase had been his
own idea. He couldn't think of anything less likely to be flagged as a code phrase if it was somehow
overheard. Papa had grumbled that it lacked style. Tommy had told Papa that next time he was on the
pointy end, he could die with style if he wanted to—again. It hadn't been a fair thing to say. After all, it
had only happened the once. Still, without the Crabs' miracle slab to patch up even the dead, as long as
there was enough brain intact, they were all being more careful.


 They waited another two minutes to make sure as many men as possible were clear before Harrison
went in through the front door. It wouldn't do to wait too long and have Cally lose her grip on the
attentions of the guard. Yeah, as if that was likely to happen. Getting out of the bushes wasn't fun.
Schmidt One had to crawl across the bigger man's back on his knees so he wouldn't leave boot prints all
over his back. Silks were stain resistant as hell, but they picked up dirt like anything else. The other man
brushed off his back, getting the slightly damp pine chips off him. Tommy dusted off the bottom of the
coffee box and handed it back.


 The morning was brightening in the way only a crisp fall day could. He was warm in his silks, but could
feel the cold against his face and hands and see his breath. As he looked up to watch Harrison around
the side of the building, he could see the trees down the slope bending in the wind. In the lee of the hill, he
didn't feel much wind, but he was starting to hear it. A quick glance up at the sky showed a line of heavy
clouds as a colder front blew in from the northeast. Great. He gave Harrison a full minute before walking
around the back of the hedge to the front of the building, PDA in hand.
He opened the door to see Harrison shrug at the counter clerk.


 "No coffee maker? I dunno, maybe you're getting one. All I know is this is the building number I got and
I need a signature. Hey, even if it's ultimately supposed to be somewhere else, it don't say so. Might as
well drink it. Hell, I would."


"If it has our number on it . . ."


 "Excuse me, I've just got to finish something up." Tommy waved the PDA at the clerk, showing the blue
stripe, and walked past the desk. The clerk barely glanced at him, busy signing for the coffee.


"So, hey, did you see the last game of the series? That homer in the top of the sixth? What a
beautiful . . ." He heard Harrison settling in to shooting the shit with the bored clerk.


 Down the main hall, at the second intersecting cross-hall he turned left, past the reading room and
walked down to where the terminal plug was supposed to be—and wasn't. The space of wall that should
have had a terminal had a door to the head. He looked back along the hallway the way he'd come and
saw the jutting lip of the terminal outlet all the way down at the other end—and a skinny, freckled
sergeant in silks.


 "God damn, you're a fucking tank, aren't you?" The man looked up at him, tapping one foot. He didn't
look impatient, just like the kind of guy who couldn't stand still.


 "Um . . . hi," Tommy said. There weren't a lot of brilliant ways to answer that even if he'd been
somewhere he was supposed to be.


"Sorry, I should have said hi or something first. You're just, damn, I'm surprised the ACS brass came up
with a suit to fit you." The man was more a kid, really. He was already starting to remind Tommy of an
overexcited cocker spaniel.


"I don't really know what to say to that. I'm Johnson. Bob Johnson," Tommy lied.


 "Sorry, I swear to god I'm not weird or anything. It's just that they're running a course right now on early
ACS tactics in the war. I didn't think anybody could be as huge as Tommy Sunday, but you must be
close. Damn." He shrugged, starting to look uncomfortable. "I bet you get that all the time. So, when did
they transfer you in? Johnson, is it? I haven't seen you, and I know I'd remember. Are you here for the
course? It just started but I'm on light duty from a strained rotator cuff and thought I'd try to get ahead in
the reading. . . ."
 During the kid's rapid monologue, Tommy had started getting more and more nervous. When he heard
his own name, he made a split second decision and started sliding his hand into his right pocket with the
emergency kit. He'd instinctively kept that side turned slightly away, so the kid didn't see anything wrong
when Tommy started moving.


 "Good to meet you," he said, clapping the other man on the shoulder. The spec four's friendly grin glazed
over as the hiberzine from the needle Tommy had palmed hit his system. Strictly speaking, they hadn't
finished introducing themselves, but what the fuck. Tommy dragged the now unconscious kid into the
head and down to the last stall, propping him on the toilet. This wasn't good. A single glance at the guy's
face would show anyone he'd been hiberzined, and when they woke him, damn. Tommy hit him with a
second needle of another drug. If they revived him without knowing to look for it, and no reason why
they should, the man's memories of the previous few minutes to hours would be so scrambled nobody
would ever make sense of them. Cursing under his breath, he punched up another transmission on his
buckley.


 "Dude. I ran into somebody I had to deal with. I think I'll still get my paperwork done, but we'll have to
rush lunch. See you at the chow hall. Over." He ended the transmission. Yeah, he could probably still get
the information they came for, if it was here to be gotten, but getting back out was likely to be anything
but clean.


"Roger that," George answered, grimly.


 This time Sunday was able to get across the main hall and down to the damn hallway terminal without
meeting anyone else. Once in, he had to begin the delicate process of convincing the computer that he
was surfacing from his deep cover assignment and was authorized to access the files he needed. Getting
into the mission files at all proved to be a trick, and then there was an extra level of coding to break to
get down to the level of specific planets. After what must have been at least fifteen minutes, with cold
sweat beading on his forehead, he pinned down the files he needed and downloaded them to his PDA.
He spent more precious minutes covering his tracks within the system as he got back out. Finally, he was
able to pull the buckley out of the wall and start back out of the building.


A couple of men passed him, on their way back in, as he walked back down the hall. Harrison had seen
him coming and finished off his conversation with the clerk, disappearing out the door. Sunday tossed the
decoy buckley in the return bin at the desk on his way out.


"Thanks, man. They shouldn't have let you out of here with one of those the first time."


"You're right. Won't happen again."


 As he left the building, it felt like every one of the few men he passed was looking right at him. They
weren't, he knew. It just felt that way, like a rifle was drawing a bead between his shoulder blades. He
could pick out Schmidt One going down the hill past Cally and the still captivated guard. She was
standing now, flexing her ankle experimentally as she laughed at something he said. She had one hand on
his shoulder and his arm around her waist. For support, of course. Tommy's adrenaline was pumping too
high to be even mildly amused at how easily she'd reeled the other man in. Once he got out of earshot
down the hill he hit transmit again.


 "Lady, as soon as we're clear, disengage and haul ass. Big time." He didn't wait for a reply. It wasn't
good communications discipline, if anyone was listening it was obvious as hell, but he didn't want her
stalling to cover for Harrison and him any more than she absolutely had to. Maybe they wouldn't find the
kid for awhile, but it wasn't the way to bet. Couldn't hurt to be paranoid.


 Down the slope a bit and he was looking for any chance away from enough eyes to make a break for
the tree line. By the time he got it he was over a small footbridge and at least a couple hundred meters
down from where Cally came in. His sense of direction told him about where the cut through would be at
the fence line, and he hurried to get out of sight of the road as quickly and quietly as he could. Fifty
meters back out he saw movement off to the northwest. He tensed up until something about the other
man's movement identified him as Harrison. The big man whistled softly to catch his teammate's attention,
and get him to wait until Tommy could close to within a normal walking interval. They were picking their
way northwest as fast as they reasonably could when the klaxons started screaming again.


"Oh, shit. Time to run for it. Damn, that was fast!" Tommy hit the ground flat on his back as Harrison
yanking at the collar of his silks dropped him back with his running legs flying out from under him.


 "Not that way. The second a real Human being, or even an AID, looks at those readouts they're going
to localize the hole in that fence faster than we can move—too easy to eyeball, too long to run there. This
way." The smaller man led him at a sprint along the bank of the half dried and all frozen stream. Seconds
later they were crouched in the stream bed at the fence and Sunday was watching the fixer adhere a
downright dinky wire to the fencing with itty bitty alligator clips and bobby pins to hold it up out of the
way, at a distance far too close to the ground to accommodate him.


"I hope you're not expecting me to be able to squeeze under that," he said.


 "Shut up," the other man mumbled around some weird clips in his mouth, as he took an unfolding
multi-tool and carefully started clipping wires. Something like a penlight shot out a blue beam that he
swept across the ground at the based of a largish circle of the creek that turned to a mix of bubbling,
steaming mud and chunks of frozen mud.


 Tommy was starting to get a bad feeling about this. With the sirens still screaming in their ears, he started
swearing again as Harrison dug hands and clippers under the mud, clipping and pulling at the section of
fence that extended down into the ground. Quicker than Tommy would have believed possible, the other
man had pushed back a doggy-door of fencing that moved enough mud with it that the huge man could
see getting through it was now a particularly nasty maybe instead of no way in hell.


"Go," the fixer said. Getting caught wasn't exactly on their list of things to do on this mission. Tommy hit
the mud and swore mentally, lips jammed shut, as the mud alternately scalded and froze him as he
commando-crawled through the space that was almost big enough. He still probably wouldn't have made
it through if Harrison hadn't planted his shoulder against his ass and pushed. On the other side, Sunday
was covered with muck, inside and outside his uniform, in a way he hadn't been since the war. The fixer
was squirming through the hole backwards, straightening the mud into something that didn't look quite as
much like it had been crawled through. It wouldn't have fooled a two year old, but the other man pushed
the fencing back as close to closed as he could get it, gave the muck a quick swipe with one arm, and
took off running. Tommy hightailed it out behind him. Fuck noise and fuck bunching up, too. He pulled
his PDA back out and wiped enough slime off the screen that he could see the first go to hell rendezvous
point on the terrain map, maybe about two klicks away. Close enough for now. Distance. They were
running in more or less the right direction, anyway. A gust of wind hit him full in the face and he felt the
first big snowflakes hit his nose.




 "Hey! Excuse me, Ma'am, this is a restricted area." The guard who challenged her had gray eyes in an
angular face. What there was of his hair under his cover was sand-colored and looked like he'd stuck his
finger in a light socket. She gave him an apologetic half-smile, letting her eyes linger on his face with the
perfect amount of interest to be encouraging but credible. It was blatant false advertising. She ruthlessly
squashed the hint of pity.


"Oh, is it? I'm so sorry, I didn't see the sign. I got a little turned around, anyway. Could you point me
back to base housing? My sister-in-law is going to think I'm such a dummy," she said.


 As he kept approaching her, she moved towards him a bit less than halfway, judging the difference
between flattery and triggering paranoia to within a hairsbreadth. A quick look back down the road and a
helpless look back at him was enough to hook him and get him to follow her about a few meters down
the hill. She made sure she had eye contact when she let her foot turn and took her spill.


 "Oooh!" She squealed, arching her back as she turned and grabbed her leg. "It's my ankle. . . ." She
rubbed the alleged injury, extending her leg and trying to rotate her foot. She winced prettily.


The guard squatted beside her, arm instinctively going behind her shoulders to support her.


"Ow." She looked up into his eyes, arching just a little more.


 His eyes flashed down to her tits, and he released her, standing back abruptly. He looked more nervous
than wary. She decided he didn't get out much—more leeway to flirt. Nervous, but trusting. Damn, there
was that pity thing again. The team would be in and out without a trace. She wasn't getting him in trouble.


"If there's swelling, I don't see much yet. Do you want me to call you a medic, Ma'am?"
 "I think I just twisted it a little. Would you mind?" She extended one slim hand for him to give her a hand
up. He released it as she stood, so she put it on his shoulder to brace herself as she made a show of
testing her weight on that leg.


In her ear, she heard Tommy's voice. "Dude, I need a beer."


 The wind had picked up and was whipping her silver-blond hair around her face. "Oooh, it's getting
cold." She rubbed her hands together, coincidentally pushing her boobs forward with her arms. She felt
his eyes drop again and smiled inwardly.


"Do you think you're going to be able to get back your sister's house on that leg? If you do, you might
want to get in out of the weather, Miss . . . ?"


"Gracie. And it's my sister-in-law," she said, offering her hand to shake. "You've been so sweet, you've
got to tell me your name."


"Abrams, Ma'am—Gracie. Mark Abrams."


 "Well it's very nice to meet you, Mark. What the hell is that?" She slammed her hands against her ears
and looked around, eyes wide and fearful, as the sirens went off signaling the start of a drill. "Is something
wrong?"


"Oh, it's just the Posleen alarm."


 "Oh my God!" She threw herself into his arms, clinging like a limpet. "Is there an attack? Are they
coming in?"


"Oh, no, it's just a drill," he said, awkwardly patting her on the back.


"Are you sure? We're in feral land, aren't we?" She filled the words with terror.


 "Real sure. It's okay. They're just about all hunted out here." As a seven men came out the doors of the
archive building, one of them nudged another and winked at PFC Abrams. Predictable. These men
hadn't been hit by fellow humans in so long that security was a ritual afterthought.


She disengaged herself from him, reluctantly. "You must think I'm such a dummy. It's the first time I've
been in feral country. It's only my third time out of the Urb."
 Cally made small talk with him for a few more minutes, giving a fictional name for her supposed brother
and mentally crossing her fingers. At a training base, people were always coming in and leaving. Since
Fleet Strike was trying to give a more family-friendly appearance for PR, even short-term trainees
brought their families along. Stupid policy, but it helped her out. She wondered how long she'd have to
talk to this guy—Mark Abrams—before Tommy and Harrison got clear of the building. She also
wondered whether Mark would get around to asking her out before she had to leave.


 "Dude. I ran into somebody I had to deal with. I think I'll still get my paperwork done, but we'll have to
rush lunch. See you at the chow hall. Over," her earbug announced.


"Roger that." George's answer to Tommy cut off.


Shit. Shit shit shit. Better shift the conversation to something she could keep going longer. She might
have to keep Mark talking for a good little while. She glanced at the treeline and started trying to figure
out exactly how far she'd have to get down the road to sneak over and risk making a dash into the
woods. She'd probably have to go all the way down to that bend.


 She suppressed nervousness when she started seeing men return from the drill. She sunk herself deeper
into her cover role, almost forgetting it was a cover. By now, she had the private almost thinking they
were soul mates. They had just discovered a mutual interest in woodworking. She had briefly dated
someone who had a passion for it, and that was sustaining her so far, but she was encouraging him to talk
as much as possible. There was no way to spare his career from what she was doing to it, which really
sucked.


"Lady, as soon as we're clear, disengage and haul ass. Big time," Tommy said in her ear just after he
passed her. Just as if that wasn't pretty fucking obvious.


"Oh, my God." She looked at her watch and back up at Mark's with dismay. "I told Carrie I'd watch the
baby! I've got to go!"


"Wait! How do I reach you?"


 "I'll call! I'll call tonight!" She lied, remembering to put a limp into her jog as she left the young soldier
staring after her.


"But you don't know my number!" She heard him call it after her, after a pause.


"Mark Abrams! Got it!" She called over her shoulder, losing the limp as she got out of his line of sight. A
quick glance showed nobody in view, she hit it straight into the woods, zipping her windbreaker over the
glaringly bright top as she went. She was maybe ten meters inside the tree line when the sirens went off
again.


 "Holy fuck!" She poured on the speed, dashing straight for the fence. They'd find the jumpsuit, but to hell
with it. It only took about half a minute to reach the fence, but then she had to decide whether she was
north or south of the hole. She went north for about two hundred meters before deciding she'd been
going the wrong way. Unfortunately, she'd had to slow down to pace the fence line, sirens wailing the
whole time so she had to look, not listen. The only benefit was that nobody could hearher moving over
them, either.


She stopped short when she saw the movement and heard the voices. There were two of them, but
neither of them was Tommy's size. She faded backwards, trying to think of a plan B, fast.


 Up. Nobody ever thinks to look up.She shinnied up the oak tree nearest the fence. Pine would have
provided more cover, if anyone looked, but the bark would have shown her passage. Perched on a solid
limb, she examined her windbreaker, ensuring she had full coverage. Black wasn't camo, but at least it
wasn't red. This limb extended over the other side of the fence. She looked down and clung to the tree,
dizzily. Whatever the hell had possessed her to think climbing this thing was a good idea? She was going
to get caught and shoved in another Fleet Strike interrogation room. She shuddered.


 Fuck, fuck, fuck. I am dead whether they catch me up this tree, or on the ground, or I fall and
break my damned neck. Move, Cally, move.Besides, this branch must be a good four inches
across. Nice, big branch. Yeah. Nice, big branch.She lay down on the limb, clinging to it, and inched
her way forward. She shook her head to get the droplets of sweat out of her eyes and tried to ignore the
beads dropping on the ground. She hugged the branch for dear life as a hard gust of wind almost
knocked her off it, blowing a blast of snowflakes in her face. The wind was the last straw. She scooched
forward on the limb as fast as she could go until she got to the other side of the fence, let herself swing
down, and dropped to the ground. Her feet slid out from under her and she hit the ground, hard. It was
worth it. She was not going to stay that far up in the air in high winds, with snow blowing in her face.


 She opened the buckley and looked at the terrain map. It was damned near useless, and she shoved the
PDA back in her windbreaker pocket. The cube from George had been in her jumpsuit. She'd never
gotten around to putting it in her cube reader slot. She picked a small hill that looked like it might have
some likely cover and hauled ass.


 In the lee of a lichen-encrusted boulder, she shivered as heavy flakes of snow caught on her eyelashes
and melted on her sweats. The fall was heavy—she'd be soaked in minutes. Her hands, already red and
chafed from standing talking to the guard, shook with cold as she flipped the buckley back open and
punched up a transmission. To hell with radio discipline, she needed an extraction.


 She wasn't getting a signal. She tapped the button a couple of times, but nothing. "Buckley, voice access
please," she said. Silence. "Buckley?"Oh, goddamn. The fall. One of the falls. She pulled up a menu
and selected a self-diagnostic, and put the thing back in her pocket. No telling how much damage there
was, but right now it was no good to her.
 She couldn't hear any searchers, and the sirens had stopped. There would probably be a small pause
while they got a real search together. Twenty more minutes, at most. She stood up and looked out from
behind the boulder. Nothing looked familiar. She climbed on top of the boulder. The snow was heavier
now. She wasn't even sure she could pick out the right hill of the base behind her. She was pretty sure,
from the boulder and the hill she was on now, which direction was away from the base, but that was
about it. She evaluated her situation, which sucked, and came up with a plan. She'd eaten a good
breakfast, so her calories were good from some more body heat if she moved around. She needed more
distance from the base. She needed shelter, because she sure as hell wasn't going to find her way out of
east bumfuck Virginia with a broken buckley in the middle of this mess.


 She cursed the weather again and took off running in the away direction. She'd run for ten minutes and
then rig a shelter with the first cover she saw. At least she could still see the ground. It wasn't yet totally
white. She ran, glancing at her watch a couple of times, until she saw it was time to stop. She was on the
flats, but off to the right it looked like there might be something besides trees. As she approached, she
realized it was an oddly-shaped hill covered in vines. It had no trees except for a vertical branch of a
partly fallen tree, that had clearly fallen over, its roots partly ripped out of the ground. At the base of it,
she saw what might be a gap or small overhang, and burrowed into it.


 Under the vines and out of the wind it was still damned cold. It was immediately obvious why the "hill"
had looked so odd. The line of the roof was straight, although slanted. She was right up against a tread
and at the highest side of the opening. The other side wasn't quite on the ground, but the tread had been
so smashed up, and sunken into the ground, that the huge SheVa tank shifted at a sideways slant. The
treads on her side had also sunken about halfway into the ground, it appeared.


 What the hell? What is one of these monsters doing way the hell out here?Then she remembered.
Shortly after the war there had been a big political hoo-hah. She only heard of it at all because they
covered it in psy-ops class at school. A big nuclear scare had convulsed the remains of the country,
about the safety of the SheVa's themselves, and the safe removal of the radioactive pebbles from their
fuel systems. Politicians and the machines that owned them, whose districts and interests stood to benefit
from the contracts to move the mountainous tanks, had masterfully orchestrated an avalanche of voter
alarm. At ruinous cost, contractors transported the behemoths outside Fredericksburg, where destruction
was total anyway and Fleet Strike was, at least, willing to have them around. More to the point, Fleet
Strike being Galactic and now owning the area by treaty, there had been nobody in the United States
Government with authority to refuse parking space to them.


 The "dangerous" pebbles from the reactors disappeared off to power plants in the congressional districts
of the key swing votes, at fire sale prices. For the rest of it, they recovered remains where profitable,
stripping the tanks of easily portable and easily recyclable materials. That hadn't included the huge
armored hulls, difficult to cut up, difficult to reprocess, more expensive to manipulate than basic raw
materials.


 Cally tried to dredge up her memory of the schematics, or anything she knew about them, to help her
find a hatch. Off the frozen ground, out of the wind, perhaps with some materials protected from the
damp that she could use to conserve body heat, she might just last the night. Without frostbite, even.
 She found it, but it was so close to sunken onto the ground that once she got it open she had to scrape
on her belly to get through the opening. At that it was like putting her damned boobs in a vice. It would
almost be worth making nice with the rest of the Indowy, if that had been possible, to get the slab back
and get rid of the things. She had never really appreciated her own body until she'd gotten stuck in the
body of Sinda Makepeace. It didn't even help that men went so ga-ga over the things. As a married
woman, even though it was a secret, they didn't even get her laid. All things considered, she was in an
extremely grumpy mood.


 Inside the SheVa, it was warmer than outside. Maybe about ten to twenty degrees warmer. Her breath
wasn't even frosting. Still damned cold, though. She worked her way to the bridge, occasionally having to
squeeze through tight spots where battle damage or the effects of time on same had knocked bits,
sometimes very large bits, loose from where they were supposed to be. Finally, she made it to the
equivalent of the battle bridge, whatever it had once been called. One of the operator chairs was reclined
all the way back, but someone had stripped the seats down to bare metal. A red cross over against one
wall, the metal outside streaked with soot, caught her eye. The mechanism had a stubborn seal of pure
rust. She had to pick up a hunk of scrap and bash the catch to bits to get it open.


 Inside, she found antibiotic creams long dried in their tubes, but the adhesive tape was, for a wonder,
barely adequate to adhere a sterile gauze pad to a cut on her face she'd picked up somewhere. She
pocketed what she thought she could use and proceeded to systematically search the bridge from one
end to the other to see if anything useful, anything at all, had been overlooked. Behind a panel and some
wiring she found a dented helmet. In a locker, she found a rotted backpack filled with what looked like
the remains of some civilian clothes and effects, a yellowed and dog-eared paperback book, and two
foil-wrapped bars of US Army iron rations circa 2004. Examination showed that one of the wrappers
had been torn, the ration covered, startlingly, by a fungal rind like the one that formed on the outside of
cheeses. This was startling because she wouldn't have thought any self-respecting fungus would touch
Postie-war-era Army iron rats. The packing on the other bar was still intact. Well, maybe. She couldn't
decide whether to wish it was or hope it wasn't.


 She looked around at the inside of the mammoth tank, curious. She'd never been inside one before. It
was the largest armored, tracked vehicle ever deployed in combat on Earth. The size of a mountaintop,
the huge tank had been powered by nuclear fission via its pebble-bed reactor. The main gun had been
capable of engaging B-Decs or C-Decs and living to tell the tale. It was the single most impressive
cavalry vehicle in the history of war, ever. She knew this because her step-uncle Billy, who was more like
a step brother, had told her about it at eye-glazing length the summer he built a scale model of one out of
toothpicks and smooshed oyster shells. This bordered on bizarre since Billy had gone mute in the war
from seeing too much, too young. Scratch the young part, it was too much for anyone. Here in
Fredericksburg, it was, too. A couple of years after the war he had gotten massively talkative with her,
just with her, and had never stopped. He spoke to others, but not enough so you'd notice. Functional,
but now a quiet old guy who had settled with a plump, pretty wife to raise four kids in Topeka. They still
exchanged Christmas cards under one of her identities.


 The round trip back outside to pack the helmet with snow really sucked. Getting enough clean snow to
fill it wasn't a problem. The stuff was piling up at an obnoxious rate. The nasty reek of rust and old, funky
smoke was starting to be unpleasant enough to overcome her thankfulness for not being so damned cold.
She wedged the helmet so that it wouldn't tip over and left the packed snow to start melting. When she
checked, the buckley's diagnostic was hung. A partial report showed she should be able to restore
limited functionality by raising the AI emulation level, giving the AI access to search some of the damaged
areas with the capabilities usually denied it. She set the emulation to the recommended level eight,
wincing.


"Buckley?" she said.


"Oh, God, my aching head. Holy shit, what the hell happ—I'm a what?!" The glum voice rose on a note
of incredulity and near-hysteria. "I just know this is going to end badly."


"Buckley—please just wait a second. I need you, buckley. I need your help very, very badly," she said.


 "Cally—you're Cally O'Neal. And I, I can see you. I see you, and I'm a machine," he said. "Well doesn't
that just suck."


"Yeah, buckley, it does. It sucks. A lot of things suck, and not just for you. I'm stuck in the belly of a
dead SheVa, in a snowstorm, in hostile territory, they're looking for me, I'm out of contact, and you're
damaged."


"It's that last bit that really bugs me. I could have warned you about the rest. Never heard of a plan
where so many things could go wrong, except for the time—"


 "Buckley! Can you please look and see if there's anything you can reroute to get me a working
transmitter?"


"I'm sure I could, with the right repair components. Do youhave an XJ431P39 integrated molychip?
Didn't think so."


"You didn't even give me time to answer!"


"And?"


"Well, okay, I don't. But you could have at least let me say so."


"Right."


 "Is there any way to improvise a transmitter with some of this stuff?" She swept a hand around the bridge
area.
"You have some kind of power source?"


"Well, no, I don't. I don't think I do, anyway."


"I hope you're equipped with body nannites. It's hot in here."


"The reactor. Great. Yeah, I am. Should I brave the cold, or stay in here?"


"Doesn't matter. You're gonna die either way, sooner or later. Shall I list the most likely possibilities?"


"Please don't."


"You do want full information, don't you?"


"I'd much rather get help building a transmitter, if possible."


"There's not much point in it."


"Buckley, can you put the pessimism on hold for awhile? I'm depressed enough already."


 "Good—at least you're rational. And no, I mean there's not much point in it. You're maybe five miles
from the river. That and the landing zone are the two most logical points for them to look for you. You're
far better off to get the best night's sleep you can and make for the river in the morning. You're also
better off sleeping in here, if you get Galactic-level medical treatment within thirty-six hours. I'd
recommend an early start. You don't want to stay here longer than that. If you found anything to
eat—don't. Scare or not, I don't think they got all the hot rocks out of this thing."


 "You're being very helpful, Buckley." Cally lay down in the reclined operator's chair, setting the PDA on
the floor beside her. The bare metal was hard and uncomfortable, but she'd endured worse. There had
been worse as part of her training at school, with the nuns, and far worse in the field doing her job.


 "You're about to die a horrible death alone in the wilderness. I can sympathize. And me, I'll rust away
slowly, slowly falling more and more apart as my battery runs down and down and—"


"Buckley? Please shut up."
"Right." He sounded satisfied, as if something about the end of the exchange had made all right with his
world, at least for a few seconds.


 She was strapped to the metal table on Titan Base. The bastards were on top of her again, and
her head swam watching the unblinking, alien eyes through the imperfectly one-way glass above
her. The face of the man on her wavered between Pryce and George and back again, only Pryce
was Stewart and his ship was blowing up. They had tilted the table and were making her watch.
Over and over and over again. A lifepod ejected from the shuttle and spouted wings, flying back
towards the base as the ship and the table pulled her away, away, away. She was up to her elbows
in blood, freezing and congealing on the icy metal table as the man slapped her over and over
again. If she'd only been a good little girl and killed more Posleen, Daddy wouldn't have had to
nuke her again. Herman started talking to her, telling her she had to go swim with the dolphins,
but she couldn't go. Doctor Vitapetroni was holding her down, injecting her with something that
stung so bad and telling her she had to stay on the table until she could wipe the blood off, but she
couldn't because she didn't have a towel, and besides, she was strapped down anyway and
couldn't dance anymore. She started to cry.


 Cally woke, sobbing, her throat raw. The dream must have been another screamer. She remembered it
and shuddered, wiping the tears away angrily.


 "Good morning. I have cataloged five thousand, four hundred and thirty-two ways we can die horribly
today. Continuing to process. Would you like me to . . . begin . . . the . . . list?" The buckley sounded
tinny and maniacal. Dammit, she'd left it on overnight. Not that she'd had a choice. In its condition, she
didn't think the PDA could reboot. At least, expecting it to come back up would be expecting a damned
miracle. From the diagnostics, it was a miracle it had booted even once.


 "Buckley, please calculate, not look up, a prime number with more than a thousand digits for me." At
least if he was number-crunching he wasn't thinking of disasters and might actually be able to be useful if
she needed him.


"Okay. But even if we do encryption based on it, they'll still break the code."


"Just do it and shut up, buckley."


"Right."


 She drank the icy melt water in the helmet before she left, glaring balefully at the nasty iron ration bar she
couldn't even eat. Outside, the snow was up to her mid-thigh on average. She'd be avoiding the drifts.
She sure would give a lot for a pair of snowshoes, but she wasn't going to stop to try to rig a pair. She
wasn't in Harrison' league with that improv shit, and she knew it.
 It took her all morning to go those five miles, leaving a trail a toddler could have followed. Half the time
she was picking herself up, the other half falling on her face again. The sky was heavy and gray. She
hoped it started snowing some more soon. The cold would be bitter, but it would do something about her
tracks. At the river, she pulled out the buckley and hoped that it could at least pull up pre-war road and
terrain maps so she could figure out if she was east or west of the bridge.


"Buckley, I need a terrain map of the area and a street map. Old is okay," she said.


"I'm calculating."


"That's okay, you can interrupt it for this, but then go back to it, okay?"


"I can't display maps. They're all fragmentary. Go left."


 "What?" It made the skin on the back of her neck prickle. The buckley's guess was probably better than
hers, since she had no idea which way to go. She was good at her job, but she figured she was lucky she
found the river at all. Part of being good at her job was knowing when to depend on her tech support.
She turned left.


"Notyour left,my left!"


 She turned the other way and started plowing through more snow. And more snow. And still more
snow. Snow that began to fall again. Oh well, skipping frostbite wasn't going to happen this time.
Hopefully there wouldn't be too much to regenerate. Be a real bitch if she had to miss the big job over a
little snow.


 It had to have been about sixteen hundred by the time she hit the bridge. She'd tried to talk to the
buckley twice, but he was no longer answering. Either one of the falls she'd taken and knocked
something else loose or he'd run out of numbers to crunch and crashed himself. She'd tried to reboot,
without any luck. Buckley was well and truly hors de combat. Again.


The bridge was a very welcome sight, since the winds had scoured it mostly clean of snow. The ice
would be a stone bitch, but not so bad as the snow. Her adrenaline spiked as she caught movement from
behind a snow drift. She dropped to the ground.




  Chapter Twelve
 The first go to hell rendezvous point was roughly one klick north and five clicks east of their entry point
to the base. It was good that Sunday and Schmidt One had managed to figure out where they were right
away, from the updated terrain features, and orient themselves towards their pickup. It was an especially
good thing, since within just a few minutes the snow was falling so hard that visibility for more than a few
feet ahead was damned near nil. As the snow started sticking and turning everything white, it got harder
to even tell how much visibility they had. They had enough trouble just following the internal compass on
their PDAs and putting one foot in front of the other. Heads down against the blowing snow, it was pretty
hard not to bump into a particularly sneaky tree now and again.


Getting to the pickup only took maybe twice as long as it would have taken in fair weather. Tommy was
grateful for the snow, since it had screwed with the Fleet Strike people searching for them more than it
had screwed with them. He hoped Cally made it out, but tried not to think about it too much. Not right
now. He'd think about her when he got somewhere that he had a chance to do something about it. He'd
only dared try to raise her once on the radio. Getting no answer, he didn't dare transmit again.


They would have missed the Humvee if George and Papa hadn't been smart enough to leave the
headlights on. As it was, they barely caught sight of the glow before they passed it. Damned nor'easters.
All too many of them since the war. Why was a question for the academics—which they sure did love
debating over lunches bought with other people's money. Piling into the warmth of the vehicle was like
heaven.


 "Anything from Cally?" It was the first thing out of Harrison' mouth. It would have been the first thing out
of his mouth, except it came out more of a grunt as he shoved his way into the truck after the other man
and slammed the door.


 "No," Papa O'Neal said brusquely. "We keep the snoopers active to give us as much warning of hostiles
as possible, we keep the lights on, we camp here for the night."


 "Not to get in the way of a good plan, but I have cherished personal needs. Like oxygen with low
carbon monoxide levels."


 "Fans. George brought fans. We take turns on watch clearing the snow from one side of the car outside
enough to make a chimney. More snivel gear in the back."


 "George?" Tommy said. "Remind me never to complain about you being a paranoid son of a bitch
again."


 "Bet on it. Just be glad this Humvee is a hybrid," the blond said. "If we were running on pre-war
chemical batteries, we'd be toast."


"Mmm. Toast. What good does running this beast do that we can't just do on its electric?" Tommy
asked.


 "Engine heat," Harrison mumbled. "It's not like we've got electric heating coils or anything. We can run
the lights, we can run the snoopers, we can run the fans, but every couple of hours, we're going to have
to run the engine enough to warm back up again so we don't all freeze. Speaking of not freezing, do you
think one of you could see your way clear to passing some chow forward? It's about that time."


 "What's plan B if Cally's not here in the morning?" Tommy couldn't help feeling disturbed that of all the
team members, it was the girl who was out in the snow.


"She should be here. She had the same terrain and rendezvous data you did," George assured.


"If she loaded it, if her buckley didn't break, if she didn't get caught," Harrison had dry clothes out and
was changing, shivering.


"Sounding a bit like a buckley yourself, aren't you?" his brother quipped.


 "I didn't see her load the cube. I saw her face when she took it. Bet you fifty fedcreds she never loaded
the thing," Sunday said.


"Okay, so if she's not here in the morning, we proceed to the bridge and leave a lookout—Tommy, I
guess—then send a pair on foot to rendezvous two. We also alert Kieran that she may show up at the
plane. The bridge and the plane are the most logical places for her to go if she somehow didn't get the
memo. If she can find them in all this," George added.


 "You're not suggesting we try to get the humvee all the way to the second rendezvous, are you?" Papa
clearly considered this lunacy.


"Not if fixer-boy can come up with something for snowshoes—"


"Blow me," Harrison said mildly.


 "Anyway, if we can make walking in the snow a little easier, you and I will go to the second rendezvous,
and Harrison will take the vehicle to the plane. Get it under cover. It's more conspicuous in this weather
than we are on foot. All three out in the cold pack some heater rations and beverages, first aid kits for
Cally. If she finds us after a night out, she'll need it. If we don't find her by seventeen hundred, we get
back to the plane and take the risk of hitting the radio."


"And if those don't work?" Tommy asked. He would have been trying to offer help, but he was too busy
cursing himself for neglecting to bring a change of clothes for himself. It wasn't like anybody else's stuff
would fit.


 "We leave supplies at what's left of that bounty farmhouse, marked as well as we dare. We figure she's
made it back to us from worse than this, and we get the hell out of dodge," Papa O'Neal said. "We plan
further search and rescue once we're in the air and can phone home. We need IR and all sorts of things
we don't have to mount a search in hostile territory, in inclement weather. We need to move,
communicate and coordinate."


"You know our best chance of finding her is in the hours immediately after the incident," Harrison said.


 "You don't have to fucking remind me. This is my granddaughter we're talking about. If we don't find her
tomorrow, she's either captured, dead, or found someplace to hole up while going to her own plan B. If
she's able, she'll get to the LZ. If she doesn't get herself to the LZ within a couple of days, she's captured
or dead. If the former, we need a planned extraction, not a half-assed one."


 The Schmidt brothers had a rougher night than Tommy or Papa. Former grunts had a special advantage
in the combat skill of sleeping anywhere, in any situation, in any position. If sleep was not expressly
forbidden by the regs or orders, taking any opportunity to grab a few extra winks was one of the things
that separated combat vets from cherries. It helped that the ACS vet's silks were dry again within an hour
of getting out of the storm.


 The cold light of morning brought no Cally and too damned much snow. Their fixer earned his name by
using some of the leftover bridge netting to give the hummer a surface it could drive over. Two pairs of
improvised snow shoes and two sections of bridging allowed the truck to be stopped on one section
while they went back to get the one they just drove over and move it forward. Since the material could
be rolled and unrolled, their progress wasn't comfortable, but it was reasonably quick. By early
afternoon, they had detached Tommy to the bridge. In silks, with silks gloves and full headgear, which
he'd sorely missed while fleeing the base, he could stay out here for hours and hours. The thermos of
coffee was a luxury he savored; he just didn't savor too much of it in case Cally showed up and needed
the warmth.


 About sixteen-thirty he saw damp blonde hair, over a splotch of black, bob across the horizon. When
she got close enough, he stood up, unsurprised that she immediately disappeared into the snow. "Hey,
Cally! It's just me!"


 The blond head popped up again as she stood up and resumed slogging forward. Tommy just couldn't
take watching it. He went out and met her on the way, ignoring her protests to pick her up and carry her
to the bridge.


"I can just imagine trying to walk through this shit all day without snowshoes," he said. He flipped open
his PDA and opened a transmission, "Charlie Romeo, say again, Charlie Romeo."
"Roger Charlie Romeo. RTB, out," Papa O'Neal answered.


 "Cally, you're shivering. Here." The big man pulled a Galactic silk survival blanket out of his pack and
wrapped it around her, then poured her a cup of hot coffee as she huddled under the blanket. She
warmed her frozen hands around the plastic mug as she drank it down, to have the empty cup taken and
an energy bar shoved in her hands.


"Eat that, one more cup of this, then we tackle the bridge."


"Where are the others?" she mumbled around a mouthful of food.


"At the second backup rendezvous point. You didn't load that cube in your buckley, did you?"


"Forgot. Then on the way out, didn't have time to go back for the stupid jumpsuit," she said.


"I win my bet," he said.


"Bet? Bastard." She punched him on the arm.


 "You're recovering fast. Here, wash the last of that down with this and let's get going. You'll warm up
faster on the plane, the sooner the better."


"Let me guess, the truck's at the plane where it's out of sight," she said.


"You got it. In this mess, we can walk faster than it can move."


 She looked down at his snowshoes, bent bars of metal strapped together and laced with five-fifty cord,
and held up one of her own soaked, frozen, sneaker-clad feet. "Speak for yourself."


 "I am. You're riding over my shoulder in a fireman's carry after we get to the other side, because I'm not
staying out in this shit one minute longer than I have to," he said. "So, why didn't you radio in? Your PDA
get smashed up?"


 "Yeah, somewhere along the way. Probably when I jumped out of the tree. Or I fell running a couple of
times. Nothing to me, but a bit hard on the buckley. I had to run his emulation up, had to leave him on.
Not real good for a buckley system. Of course he crashed, but he got me through some rough spots."
 "Let's get out of this and talk when we're warm." Tommy led her out onto the icy bridge, watching her
carefully the whole way across. She was damned good, with the balance and stamina of the athlete she
was, but she was also damned tired and he knew how she felt about heights. They went right up the
center of the bridge, and it was pretty wide, but she still could take a nasty fall on that surface if she
slipped.


 It was with relief that he hoisted her onto his shoulder on the other side, and a mark of her fatigue that
she let him. It couldn't have been a comfortable ride. He was really feeling it by the time he had walked
the seemingly endless trek back to the LZ. People who had never "done" snow had no idea how much it
took out of you to move in the stuff.


Back in the plane, after they got out of wet clothes, both of them hit their seats, reclined them all the
way, and didn't wake up until they landed in Chicago.

 Friday 11/5/54

 The Darhel Heldan stood on the bridge of his dilapidated freighter, supervising his Indowy, who were
making the final temporary repair to the control systems he needed to execute the return to normal space.
His ship would not have made it out of Adenast Space Dock without full completion of its scheduled
overhaul had it not been for the humans' silvery-gray, rolled, adhesive strip that had proved so very useful
for minor repairs. Repairs that otherwise would have required a custom-grown replacement part to install
in place of the defective one could hold together almost indefinitely with enough of the stuff. His ship,
whose name meant something like "Dedicated Industry," was his life, but he managed her very carefully.


 Food runs as part of a cargo weren't a bad deal. Everyone needed it, somebody had to carry it. Food
runs as a solo cargo were the bottom of the barrel of merchant shipping, because they were so common
and routine. Margins were thin, and there was no opportunity to distinguish oneself in such a large crowd.
Heldan's strategy to claw his way up the chain of power in the Gistar Group involved careful control of
his expenditures. Whenever possible, he sent orders for his parts ahead, or made the order and deferred
the pickup until his next cargo brought him back to the repair facility on his circuit. Allowing the Indowy
to slot his repair part job in wherever it was convenient in their schedule obtained him the small but
regular discounts that kept his operations in the black. Now came this extraordinary opportunity.


 He was a very young Darhel. So young he was fresh out of management school. So young he could still
remember the perilous intoxication of the awakening of the Tal within him. Every moment of every day.
Remember, crave, and fear—yet sublimate it all under discipline, always discipline. Discipline awake,
discipline asleep. For a young Darhel, self-discipline was a matter of life and death. Give in to rage, or
hunt lust, or allow himself the taste of meat—even dreaming too intensely of such things—even for an
instant. Out would pour the sweet, sweet, infinitely intoxicating Tal into his system from his own glands.
Until he matured, his life would hang by a thread. Afterwards, it would merely be precarious. Once more
than the tiniest foretaste of the Tal entered a Darhel's system, the craving itself would trigger release of
more, and more, and more. And who could fight the temptation to drown in bliss itself? Only one who
had seen the dessicated bodies of the living dead, locked in lintatai until unassuaged thirst turned them
into the truly dead; one who had smelled the smoke of the pyres floating on the air. Only one with the
rare fortitude, will to live, and great good luck to embrace the discipline and survive.


 His reward had been selection and initiation into one of the great merchant groups of his race, and
charge of this ship. A thousand year old clunker too old to have even been commandeered for refit in the
war, but a ship nonetheless. Now, an unprecedented opportunity had leapt out in front of him like a
gorlet from the brush and—he took a few moments to breathe, breathe deeply, hold it, count, release.
Calm restored, he permitted himself a brief grin, exposing the rows upon rows of pointed shark teeth.
The Indowy Melpil, on sensors, happened to be looking in his direction and shuddered. Heldan covered
his teeth obligingly. No need to upset his crew. Not when the jump was so near and he needed them
attentive.


 His eyes darted over to the Human on watch at the gunnery station, suppressing the twitch of his ear that
would have betrayed his annoyance. He saw that the man had been watching and no doubt reading his
face. Above the space black of his Fleet uniform, the Human's face was impassive, revealing none of the
facial cues Heldan's own studies had drilled into him. He had been warned that most of his six Fleet
gunners would be of this harder-to-read strain. He resented humans. Envied them. Disdained and yet
secretly admired them. Arrogant—far too sure of an equality with the older races that they didn't even
begin to approach. Dangerous, almost too dangerous to be allowed. But as a young race they had been
spared the long term effects of having been made a "project" by an even older race. They could kill. He
hated them for that, and for the twinge of desire that always accompanied the thought. What it would be
like to be able to live, to kill and kill . . . He returned to his breathing drill as the deadly intoxication of the
Tal began to make the edges of his vision sparkle. He truly loathed humans, but the loathing retreated to
a cold thing as he reasserted his self-discipline, forcing the beast of his soul back into its cave.


 The Indowy under the console, whose name he did not know, finished its task and left the bridge with
discreet haste. Control system patched, Heldan spoke, the liquid syllables to activate the return to normal
space dropping from his tongue. It amused him to see the Human lean towards him, just a barely visible
amount, its eyes beginning to glaze as he spoke. They always did that—had a half-hypnotic reaction to
his species' voices. It was amusing. The only thing about the smelly, primitive beasts that made their
presence on his ship barely tolerable.


 The large holotank in front of his chair lit up with the points of light that were the Dulain System. At this
distance, its star was a bluish spark, barely brighter than the brightest of giants far, far off in space
beyond it.Dulain, Dulain, Dulain. What a cargo. Eleven point three standard years cut off my time
on this broken-down scow before I get my first realship. Something that can stay on the trade
routes for the entire time of my contract aboard it, never bogged down for the abomination of
"routine maintenance."


 After a hour or so, he noted the blinking light on his display, indicating a courier-class ship lighting off its
drives on a vector that would move it towards the Dulain System's most probable transit points should
Epetar start screaming for help. Accounting for the inevitable lag of lightspeed communication, it had
taken them about five minutes longer than he had expected to recognize the registry on his ship, realize
what that meant for the other group, and decide what to do about it. About a week and a half too late to
do them any good. He must remember to light an incense stick after he left the bridge to eat, relax and
sleep, and thank the Lords of Enterprise that the Epetar group had been so colossally stupid and
incompetent.
 Friday 11/5/54

 Epetar Factor Raddin was not happy at having been roused from his bed by the chiming of his AID. The
asynchronization with his sleep cycle had been extremely unpleasant; feelings which he transferred to the
ship displayed in the holo before him.


 "Industry, are you perhaps lost? Your mayday signals are not broadcasting, so I must wonder if they are
defective, or whether your navigational systems are malfunctioning." The mellifluous voice managed to
imply that the brain between the captain's ears might be the defective portion of said navigational systems.


 "Negative, Dulain caller,Dedicated Industry is in good running condition and is not lost." Rudely, her
captain, for the beautiful voice could only belong to another of his kind, did not display his own holo,
leaving Raddin looking at the rather dilapidated freighter.


He tried again, "Good running condition? That would be a surprise, since your registry is from the Gistar
Group and no freighter of your group is due to arrive at Dulain at all, much less now. State your
business."


 The holo of the ship flickered, replaced by the image of a young pup whose robe was edged with the
yellow trim indicative of novice captains. "We thank you for your courteous solicitations Epetar Factor.
Industry's business is between ourselves and Dulain System Administration. Who, if you will excuse my
brevity, are transmitting presently. I take my leave," the young whelp said.


 Raddin found himself staring at empty space above the altar of communication. Muttering under his
breath, he lit a spike of incense and left to seek his grooming chair, a pair of Indowy body servants
following in his wake.


 "AID, monitor station logs for Gistar's purported reason for intruding in Dulain. The business here for the
near future is mine and I do not appreciate interference." He opened his mouth to permit his servants to
clean his very sharp teeth. Sleep was obviously a lost cause.


 Five hours later he had gone from annoyed to alarmed. Fact: the only ship due in the next two weeks,
for anything but routine food runs, was theFetching Price from Sol. Fact: the Gistar ship did not belong
here and was being extremely cagey about her purpose. "Exploring new business opportunities" was an
excellent generic description of a Darhel's everyday life. A great believer in professional paranoia, Raddin
damned the cost and commissioned the courier ship on station for the system to carry the news to Sol.
The courier ship, in damned presumption, had already been moving in the right direction, anticipating his
hiring their services.


Manager Pardal, currently operating from Sol, was reportedly attempting to corner the market on
humans. Personally, Raddin didn't see the point, but managers had access to information a factor could
only envy. Regardless, Epetar had a great deal of the carrying trade for Dulain locked up under iron-clad
contracts and any Gistar attempts at intrusion were unwelcome and potentially serious. Even coming from
such an unlikely threat as the dilapidated, garbage scow of a ship plodding in from the jump point.

 Tuesday 11/9/54

 The restaurant was a converted trawler parked along the banks of a creek, off of Old 701. It had what
was quite possibly the best she-crab stew in the low country. Well, except for Shari's. It also offered the
one of a kind courtesy of serving lunch or dinner on or below deck for any boat that tied up at the
adjoining dock. It was a niche market that took advantage of the ready cash of honeymooners, playboys,
and fish smugglers. The latter had a good line going in unregistered catches and tax evasion. High as taxes
on legitimate incomes were, that translated to quite a bit of ready cash.


 In Cally's case, it meant that all she had to do was borrow a decent boat to have a good, discrete,
business lunch. She and the smugglers had similar notions of what constituted adequate dining privacy.
November was not a good time of year, in Charleston, for alfresco meals on deck. The sky was a sullen
gray that seemed to merge at the edges with the gunmetal ocean in the distance. The brown marsh
grasses bent in great swathes, ends fluttering in the strong wind. The sisters would eat lunch in the warm
shelter of the small galley.


 A thirty-eight footer, the craft had never served to smuggle fish. Well, once in a pinch, but that was
strictly as a cover for its real cargo—in that case, a political refugee who had made it as far as Norfolk
on his own but who had needed more distance from civilization than even the unreclaimed wilds of the
eastern coastal US could offer. The problem with bounty farmers was, well, that they made their living
from collecting bounties. Most places, they weren't the sort to keep their mouths shut if a reward was
offered. As she understood it, it had taken strenuous efforts to get the dead fish smell out of the living
areas of the boat after that run. Fortunately, that had been a job for the cousin who owned the boat, not
her.


 Eating inside was not exactly picturesque, but ideal for privacy. The galley already boasted fittings of
high-quality blocks for eavesdropping. Her PDA would page the waiter when they needed service. The
restaurant management, sensitive to the needs of their most discriminating and lucrative clientele, had a
very fine sense of which boats not to bother with may I help you visits or incessant coffee and tea refills.
It was a great restaurant. The whole family loved it.


 Michelle was late. That surprised Cally more than she'd been surprised in a long time. She didn't think a
Michon Mentatcould be late. It didn't go with the labeling on the package. She looked cool and
unflappable when she walked down the pier, wearing the street clothes her sister had purchased for her
in Chicago, plus a duster of Galactic silk that matched the color of her pants. The assassin noted a bulge
in the right pocket of the duster. If it had been anyone else, Cally would have suspected a weapon.


 "I apologize for being late. I thought I would look strange if I did not wear a coat. Does it look
appropriate?" the mentat asked
"You . . . made it?" Cally asked, sliding a menu across the table.


 "Is it obvious? Is that a problem?" She might have been any woman, for a moment, as she critically
examined the garment.


"I can only tell because it's Galactic silk and made in a single piece, and no, no problem. It looks great."
And worth about ten years of my salary, I think.


 "Good. Were you able to obtain the information I requested?" The other woman's clear tones betrayed
the tiniest hint of her childhood Georgia accent, but only to an experienced operative like her sister.


"Oh, yeah. We got it. It was a milk run," the assassin assured.


 "That is good. Were your superiors sufficiently satisfied to agree to the rest of my contract? Also, I hope
the milk was good?"


"Milk? Oh. That was just a figure of speech. Milk run, I mean" she said. "Yes, we have a go for the
mission. Here." She passed a cube across the table. "This has everything we found."


"Let's go ahead and order. It would look strange if we just sat here for too long." She looked down the
menu, running her finger over the options, "I know you can't, but it's a shame you can't eat meat. They
have the best she-crab stew in Charleston."


Michelle winced.


"It's a regional specialty. Have you really never eaten meat since we were kids?"


 "I have not. If I were to eat it after all this time, I would probably have to make an extra effort just to be
able to digest it. I would prefer a salad."


"Can you do dairy, then? They do a very good caesar salad."


 "We have dairy. It was not appropriate for the Indowy themselves, but because humans are mammals,
they made allowances. Also, I think they like the cows. Though the Indowy do not eat other animals,
their population density has made large, mobile species a certain rarity on their worlds. I think I will try
your caesar salad, thank you."
"Do you mind if I just message it to them? I know you don't get the full restaurant experience that often,
but we're more secure if the waiter just brings our food out."


 Michelle laughed, the first real laugh Cally had heard from her. "You must be making a joke. For me, this
is nearly unimaginable seclusion. One waiter or ten, I am amazed that it would make that much
difference," she said. "At home, security means being in the company of your own clan, or clans with
close affiliations to your clan. Being alone like this would be like . . ." She paused for a long moment,
nonplussed. "I do not remember. What would be so strange on Earth that nobody would think of it, and
anyone doing it would be—you would think they were ill in their brain? Now being in a room alone, I
understand. I sometimes work that way. Just . . . this." She waved her hand around to include the space
around them, from the river to the sky to the dock between their boat and the restaurant. It had never felt
empty and open to Cally quite the way it did now. It was kinda peaceful.


 "When you put me on the spot like that, that's a good question—about what would be the same level of
weird here on Earth," Cally said after a long pause. "I would say stripping naked in the middle of a state
funeral, but it's been done. I don't know if there is anything so strange that some person somewhere
hasn't done it just to make a point." She thought some more. "Wow. Now that you say it, all I can think
of is random destruction of life or property for no good reason."


"I thought that was what you did?" Michelle said.


 Cally stiffened until she realized that the question was totally sincere and not at all intended to be
insulting. "I always have a good reason."


 "What do people here consider a good reason?" Michelle might have been talking to the Mad Hatter at
a tea party.


 "I can't speak for the whole planet. For me, it's whatever Grandpa and Father O'Reilly consider a good
reason," the assassin shrugged.


"Of course you listen to the O'Neal. Are you saying that you have not yet begun training in the evaluation
of reasons for what you do?"


 "No, I'm saying that it's not a good idea to have people in my profession pick and evaluate their own
targets. Also, I don't always have all the information my superiors have in determining whether someone
should or shouldn't be a target," she said. "Oh, here's our food. Hang on."


Michelle waited until the waiter had delivered the food and left before holding up the data cube her sister
had provided. "Will it bother you if I look at this while we eat?" she asked.
"No, that's fine. It's what we're here for," Cally said. "Not that I'm not glad to see you. That didn't come
out right. Anyway, our resumes for the job listings are on there, too."


"I am not offended." The mentat took a buckley PDA out of her pocket and inserted the datacube.


 Cally raised her eyebrows, but didn't comment. It must really bite the Darhels' butts that buckley PDAs
were slowly and quietly spreading out from Earth to be used instead of AIDs, when the user wanted
something not to be recorded. The Darhel certainly never shipped the competing devices anywhere, and
never authorized them for sale. They had made alleged consumer protection laws banning their sale off
Earth. Unfortunately for the Darhel, with a Human gunner team aboard almost all freighters and Human
colonists everywhere, the Darhel were becoming more and more aware of the difficulties of trying to
suppress black market activities among humans. She knew from Stewart that the Tong was ecstatic at
the advertising effects the Darhel's attempts at suppression were providing in their target markets. Cally
suppressed a smile as she glanced up at Michelle's PDA. Obviously market penetration was good.


 They ate in silence. After feeling strange for a moment in the unnatural quiet, Cally opened up a fashion
magazine on her buckley and started looking through the spring collections. She was going to have to buy
some outfits from an islander seamstress real soon, anyway. Might as well do something stylish.


 "This is the information I need. I wish it showed one more part, but I do not think they will be
disassembling the mock-up—just modifying it. At least, not within our time window." The mentat gave
the appearance of wearing robes even in street clothes as she looked up serenely. "This is
straightforward. I will have it for you in four weeks, local."


"Four weeks?"


"I assure you, I can work very quickly since it only has toappear to function."


"That's not what I meant. I guess I'm used to Earthtech."


"This is very far beyond Earthtech. That is why I have to personally make it. Four weeks." She pulled a
bag out of her coat pocket, handing it to the Bane Sidhe assassin. "Here is the agreed payment."


 "Great. A month, huh? Guess we won't have trouble getting someone inside and getting set up with that
much lead time. I thought you were originally planning to make it without this stuff?" Cally gestured
towards the cube.


 "Once I knew I was going to get better data, I had to wait. Like any other product of advanced
technology, it has to be grown whole. Specifications cannot change in the middle of the process.
Upgraded parts can be retrofitted, settings changed, options added, replacement part redesigned. The
basic design for the underlying item cannot be changed while it is still in the tank."
 "Okay, so four weeks. I may contact you for a meeting between now and then to coordinate
arrangements."


"That will seldom be possible. I will be growing the product in the tank. I will not be able to interrupt the
work casually. Suppose I contact you and we meet once a week?"


"Okay, so four weeks and once a week. I'll see you whenever I hear from you, then."


 "Cally." Michelle reached out and touched her hand. "I still have not thanked you for the clothes. Is there
anything at all I can get you? Not business, but something personal?"


 Cally hesitated for a moment, strangely reluctant to ask a favor. "Uh. I hate to ask, but could you
possibly get me some depilatory foam? I haven't been able to get any since Dad's supplies from the old
emergency cache ran out." Spoken, it sounded a bit pathetic, and she was kicking herself when Michelle
smiled.


"Of course I can. I will make it myself. It will not take even an hour."


 "Okay. But there's got to be something you want from Earth. The Galactics aren't exactly big on
consumer goods."


 "Welllll." Her sister hesitated for a long moment, considering. "Chocolate. You could get me chocolate.
And some of those little white solidified sugar wheels. The ones with red spokes and no hole for an axle,
that are flavored with peppermint oil. I think they are designed to spin counter-clockwise, but I was so
young I am not sure my memory is correct." She shrugged, but her eyes were actually glittering with what
might have been excitement. "Clockwise or straight-spoked wheels would be perfectly lovely. Just
whichever is available. Star-sparkle Mints or some such. I am sorry, I cannot remember the name."


"Okay, chocolate and peppermints. Got it."


"The little wheel ones," the mentat said.


"The little wheel ones. Got it. Next week. No problem," her sister grinned.


 "If you cannot get them next week, whenever you have time is most acceptable," she said. She sighed.
"We have indulged in quite a long lunch. I need to go start work now. The salad was good. Thank you."
Then Michelle was gone.
  Chapter Thirteen
 The family quarters for the Indowy-raised humans were a series of small, low rooms. The Michelle
O'Neal Family suite had walls in shades of mint and peach. The parents' sleeping room and the living
room opened directly on the corridor. Behind those two rooms lay the nurseries. A central corridor
contained the long washroom that served the family. All the rooms were very small. That, at least, was
the allocation of the Human living space its Indowy planners had intended. In reality, the parents had
tri-sected their room by hanging curtains from tracks in the ceiling. On each side wall, and along the back
wall, a set of bunk beds, closely stacked, provided a bunk for each of the six adults in the group. Hooks
at the head of each bed held a change of robe and two night-robes apiece. A small, six-layer chest of
drawers held underclothes and a memento or two for each parent.


 The children's rooms had the same furnishings as the parents' room, except that the beds were slightly
shorter and wider. There were more drawers, the plan being that two children would be in each bed, at
capacity. The children past their first apprenticeship would, of course, live in unmated social groupings.
After some trial and error, the Indowy had learned that the humans they encountered in Fleet had been
wise to suggest adolescent Human social groupings be segregated by breeding biology. Their males and
females exhibited social and mating behaviors that were unstable and intense when housed together in the
juvenile stages prior to group assignment and bonding.


 The Michelle O'Neal family, as with most of the Human families on Adenast, quietly deviated from their
green mentors' plans and used clan privacy traditions to avoid discussing it outside the family. For one
thing, the O'Neal adults were three couples, not a homogeneous group. Since Derrick's death, Michelle
had slept in the room with her own two children and Bill and Mary's oldest daughter. Their toddler, and
Tom and Lisa's three, slept in the other children's room.


 In the parents' room, the other two couples had four bunks, but most nights only occupied two. Tom
and Lisa's two month old slept in Michelle's old bunk.


 Nooks and crannies all over the apartment—under chairs, in the small spaces under the beds—held
prepackaged food so that the family didn't have to go to the mess hall for meals. It was the same stuff,
anyway. In the sitting room, larger chairs for each adult and small ones for each child stood grouped
around each other or the thinned-down holotank on one wall. On another wall, a spice rack displayed
some of the family's wealth. The Human sections of the agricultural planets didn't run to growing
traditional herbs and spices. Most Human families would buy a little pepper and hot sauce. More
frequently, some locally brewed hooch. Michelle had paid to ship a fifty-spice rack up from Earth.
Shipped and paid for legitimately. Refilled legitimately, for awhile. Sometimes the refills were even
legitimately bought and shipped now. Just . . . not always. Her work did have small privileges.


The senior female in the group walked into the living room, where their children immediately mobbed
her.


"Anne, Terry, move back and let your clan mother walk," a woman ordered. She was tiny, with wavy
black hair and midnight eyes


 The Michon Mentat leaned down and picked up the toddler, Kim. "How was your day?" she asked her
clan-wife.


"Tiring. And yours?"


"Informative. I will be working late for the next three weeks."


 "Mama! Mama! Look what I made for you!" Her own five year old, Tara, ran up to her with a picture
on a thin sheet of white plastic. Bright, primary colors combined and smeared together into stick figures
and childish trees. It looked like fingerpainting, but really came from a headset interface at school,
designed to allow young ones to begin developing the mental discipline and neural connections to learn
Sohon safely and without the risks of a real tank. "This is you and Mama Lisa and Mama Mary and Papa
Tom and . . ." There were a lot of people on the page. Michelle smiled slightly, ready to hear them all.


"Tara, please let me talk to your clan mother for a few minutes, then we will pick out a wall to hang your
pretty picture on," Lisa said. "Michelle, could we sit down, please?"


"Certainly. There is something you need to bring to my attention?"


"Oh, no. The household is running smoothly. If it would not offend you, I would like us to talk about
your work. We are worried about you." Her wife's robe showed stains and spots, accumulated from
watching the children.


"We can talk about my work," the mentat said.


 "You are home early today. I thought it would be good to discuss this before the others get home. We
are—I am—very concerned about you. I do not mean to interfere, but there are certain rumors. . . ." The
tiny woman reached out and took the toddler, who had started to play with the pins in Michelle's hair.


 "If the rumors are that I have been threatened with default on a contract, that much is true. It is also true
that there is some danger. However, I have a plan."


"A plan?" the woman echoed.
"Yes, a plan."


"How likely is this plan to make you very hungry within the year?"


"There is considerable risk."


"Loss of the head of our family would be very hard. Also, I would miss you very much. We must all
hope that your . . . plan . . . goes well." The smaller woman fixed her dark eyes on her group-mate's face,
mute with compassion.

 Wednesday, 11/10/54

 The Darhel Pardal relaxed his jaw and shoulders in an unseen gesture of relief as he watched the Epetar
Group freighter finally vanish into hyperspace, leaving the Sol System for its rendezvous with its next load
of cargo at Dulain. The nearly two week delay in getting the cash to the freighter to cover its docking fees
at its next stop, as well as purchasing its high-margin cargo, had been the worst black spot of his career.
Epetar had a contract to deliver bounce tube replacement parts, each specially crafted for its own unique
bounce tube machinery, to Diess. The repair and reclamation program had finally gotten around to
rebuilding Telsa City. There were countless tubes all over Diess in various stages of salvageable disrepair.
The contract would last at least a century.


 Indowy made all their equipment in the normal way, growing each item from a set of VR goggles all the
way up to an entire starship in sohon tanks. For a ship, an entire Indowy family from the newest
apprentice to the most skilled master might be involved in bringing the sharply envisioned, individual
design to reality. Every item of Galactic technology had slightly different parts and slightly different
designs. Devices were built to last at least one lifetime—which for a member of a Galactic race, or a
rejuved Human, amounted to about five hundred of the local years. It discomfited Pardal that he had
developed the habit of thinking in Earth time, but after twenty-eight years one adjusted. Even to this
Aldenata-forsaken backwater.


 Of course, he used Human-produced goods for less critical functions in his office. Ephemeral as they
were, even counting replacement costs they were economically optimized and functional. Which was why
all the Groups took such great pains to keep Human goods as localized to the Sol System as possible.
The destabilizing effect of their merchandise and their methods on the economy, if not properly contained,
didn't bear thinking about. Dangerous as a mob of budding adolescents, the whole species.


 He cursed the theft that had caused the delay in the Dulain-Diess run on his watch. He would be
decades repairing his reputation and career from this debacle. At the moment, he was directing all his
spare time to tracking down the thief for deterrent punishment. Recovery of the stolen wealth was
probably too much to hope for. His most recent efforts followed the line of an old Human adage for the
hunting of attackers:Who profits? Unfortunately, his "short list" was not yet short enough.
 "AID. Display Hunt File One and control pad for evaluation. Show suspect list. Retrieve cash flow
intelligence for each entry on suspect list for six months prior to the theft." He doggedly resumed his
search for connections, humming softly. The departure of the freighter, albeit belated, had put him in a
better mood than he'd enjoyed for weeks. Gistar, Cnothgar, Adenar. Someone wanted a trade war. But
which? Any one of them would have profited enormously by the theft, but only if their group could throw
off suspicion on one of the others. He didn't for a moment suspect the Tir Dol Ron. As administrator for
the Sol System, he was separated from the covert jockeying of inter-group rivalries. The Darhel Ghin had
some limits to the behavior he was willing to tolerate in the name of business. The Tir's squeezing of rival
Darhel groups would have to follow the same traditions as anyone else's—confined to systems where he
had interests, but not direct administration. Sometimes Pardal wondered if the old Darhel maintained the
rules just for the sport of it. Not that it would matter. He proceeded in his happy attempt to untangle
conspiracy from betrayal from intrigue. Someone, somewhere, was going to pay.
                                                      ***


As with any world, some parts of Dulain were stunningly beautiful. Unfortunately for those who lived
there, Bounty City was not one of those places. Chin Ming looked over the ugly galplas cube that held
the indentured servants. Her hair, which she wore today in her own elegant bob, blew in the wind as she
stared at the slave barracks many of them would only leave feet first. The top Tong leader on Dulain, one
of the Grandfather's full Lieutenants, was a very petite woman. She had shipped out among a generic
batch of colonists and been one of a core of bought-out former indentures planted by the Tong to
establish a foothold for their new operation. The wife of a respected Hong Kong businessman within the
organization, she had ridden out the Posleen war in Ontario. Her husband and children she lost to the
war. Her own not inconsiderable operational and business experience had remained intact. Juved, she
looked like a sweet, demure, little flower. Her protective detail thought so, Little Flower being the code
name they had assigned her. Mrs. Chin had raised being underestimated to a high art. She functioned well
with the Indowy not only because of her diminutive size and habit of indirect gaze, but also because each
sensed in the other a certain skill set, and respected it.


 Chin Ming had never underestimated, nor been underestimated by, one of the Indowy in her life—which
certainly put her one up on every Darhel she'd ever had to deal with. She had avoided ever meeting one
of the Sidhe in person, but in the game of competing interests she dealt with them every day.


 The vast majority of the Human population had been set down here in the dry, gray-green scrub more
for the lack of water and subsequent ease of containment than for any other reason. Planetary admin
shuttles dropped armed indents wherever the latest infestations of feral Posleen had been sighted, then
picked up the Human survivors afterwards for return to the cube, healing and recuperation. They laid
down their arms and reported aboard the return ship for the simple reason that if they did not, ankle and
wrist bracelets would start to administer increasingly painful electrical shocks. If ignored, the bracelets
would inject the wearer with hiberzine, rendering him unconscious and setting off a beacon for pickup
whenever someone got around to it. Frequently, delinquent pickups came in much the worse for wear.
More often, they came in as very depleted remains.


 On Indowy worlds, of which Dulain was one, although it had been depopulated to the point of
emptiness, the Darhel controlled all commerce, including food shipments from automated farming worlds.
If a rebellious Indowy—they occasionally cropped up in so large a population—got too far out of line,
the Darhel group that owned his debts for his working tools called those debts in. His the tools
repossessed, the hapless Indowy starved with no intervention by his fellows, and the Darhel were minus
one problem. Living in a society that had been fundamentally static for millennia, all of the Galactics had
gotten too used to a predictable, immutable status quo. Ming smiled. Galactic inertia made it very hard to
change standard contracts. Contracts the Darhel had written to entangle the Indowy didn't have the same
results with Human laborers.


 The clear intent had been to force the indents to purchase food and healing services from on-site
company stores and render servitude lifelong, much like sharecropping in parts of post-bellum North
America. The right of laborers to purchase from competing providers had always served to protect the
rights of the Darhel groups to compete with each other. Darhel stores had a monopoly on wheat and rice
of strains enhanced by Tchpht manipulations to provide all necessary nutrients for sustaining humans in a
healthy state. Under-managers had evaluated and assessed the potential outcomes of Human women
bringing seeds of unenhanced, inferior food plants native to Earth and found them to be a useful way of
marketing expensive hydroponic equipment to humans and keeping the breeding stock occupied, and
deeper in debt.


 The first cracks in the system on Dulain had occurred when the Tong orchestrated the payment of the
debts of one hundred men and women in what would become Bounty City. They had purchased land,
immediately outside the barracks compound, at an exorbitant price. The Tongs had used an intermediary
to keep the left hand from knowing what the right hand was doing. Simple. The Darhel factor executing
the buy had thought some stray humans were increasing their indentures for worthless wasteland they'd
have no opportunity to use, anyway, and had taken the commission as easy money. The Darhel factor
selling the land had been happy to unload land at higher than market price, even if the group it presumed
it was selling to managed to recoup some percentage of the loss.


 Darhel groups were secretive with each other about their dealings. It had taken upper management
decades to sort out that the owners of the land were not another Darhel group but were some Human
entity. They reprimanded and demoted the underlings involved, but the damage was done. Certain
humans, returning from the field, spent their pay buying their food and incidental healing in town. The
prices were much better, so the free citizenry always sold all they could grow. The best the Tong could
do so far for meat was raising abat in hutches. The Darhel were never going to surrender easily. They
tried sending humans who were paying down their debts to the forefront of combat and to die, rendering
the reduction in debt pointless. The greenhouses of free humans, and some of the humans themselves,
had suffered assaults and accidents.


 The Darhel of the Cnothgar Group, administrators of Dulain, had quickly discovered that humans were
not as easily managed as Indowy. Indents stopped using their savings to pay down their debts directly to
the Darhel, instead banking the money in town by buying lottery tickets. Only humans alive at the time of
drawing were eligible, by the terms of the ticket. The Tong's front in town held drawings as soon as a
lottery pool reached the average debt level among the ticket holders. The Tong bought out the winner's
contract no matter what he or she owed, holding the debt if it was larger, paying the excess to the winner
if the debt was smaller. When the Tong banked for individuals, it had proved adept at hiding the records
off planet and protecting the privacy of depositors. If a depositor died, the Tong paid the balance, minus
a fee, to the depositor's designated beneficiary. Darhel creditors had been unable to collect at the death
of an asset, unable to prove he had left behind an account. The Cnothgar Group's collections department
kept trying to find a way to trace the money. The Tong was better at laundering it.
 Humans who hired out to kill humans tended to die, quickly, at the hands of their fellows. Without
Human police willing to investigate and prosecute the murders, with the Tong carefully orchestrating the
removals, this strategy was not working for the Elves. Ming conceded that they did tend to take down
the occasional local Tong head. Rarely. Now, the locals protected greenhouses around the clock with
Human shields. Indowy or Darhel could not attack the clearly sophont-occupied facilities, and the
humans the Elves hired to do so had low success rates and short life expectancies. The result, over the
decades, had been a slow but steady increase in the population of free, rejuved humans in towns like
Bounty City all over Dulain.


 The residents of Bounty City, of course, would rather be free and rejuved in town than enslaved in the
barracks. Still, the surroundings alone rendered it an ugly place, where the wind quickly draped
everything with a coating of gray dust. Beeseers, as they called themselves, never planted greenery out of
doors. Transpiration would have wasted too much precious water. As it was, they replenished the
deficits to Human sweat and breathing from water left as wastes by the shoppers, window-shoppers, and
patrons of the brothels and other entertainments in town. Careful management ensured efficient water and
fertilizer recycling. Also, despite unbeatable differences in biology, desert life around them was still
carbon based, still ninety-something percent water, still carried most of the right trace minerals. Anything
organic the hordes of children could grab, the waste treatment facilities could handle.


 The Darhel could not obtain new indentures from women who would not bear, despite the Darhel's own
refusal to provide contraceptives. Contracts had never included any obligation to breed. The
whorehouses sold condoms to all buyers, as well as offering discrete abortions in the rare cases those
were necessary. No galtech required. The women, already juved, felt no pressure of a ticking biological
clock. Indentured males certainly were more willing to plant their seed in town, when they could, than
risk slavery for their children. Besides, the women in town were, for those very reasons, so much more
available. Pimps found their best profits in buying the indentures of women grateful to get away from the
combat missions that now included them—women with sterling prospects of working those indentures
off. Under the circumstances, the pimps harbored no hard feelings at the ladies who graduated from their
employ. There were always more whores where they came from.


 For the goods the residents could not manufacture or raise in town, the Tong did a brisk black market
trade. In the case of the off-Earth free cities, this had included the deliberate policy of supplying capital
equipment wherever practical.


 The Randy Tabby in Bounty City was quiet today. Nobody was playing the electric piano, and even the
men who would have been customers were hard at work with heat guns or scissors, turning endless
meters of colorful, plastic beads into cheap necklaces. All along main street, the buildings contained
people scrubbing out every shipping crate that the Beeseers could find, stuffing waxed paper bags with
handfuls of necklaces, and filling crates with the bags. Beneath the BC General Store, a pair of workmen
fed the machinery that produced the long strings of beads, winding them off on much-used spools.


 One of the first capital packages shipped out, piece-meal and hidden, by the Tongs had been an
integrated PVC plant. With it, the humans in Bounty City could begin converting waste organics and
desert salts into versatile plastics, useful for so many things. Other communities specialized in other
Earthtech goods, but plastics were Bounty City's specialty. For Dulain, Bounty City wasn't a bad place.
Ming liked it much better than most, worse than a few.


 She didn't live here, of course. Ming's existence was nomadic, her travel itinerary a closely held secret.
The Darhel groups did not officially acknowledge any of the Tong's planetary lieutenants, on any of the
Posleen-infested planets that were undergoing the reclamation process. Unofficially, dealing withsomeone
in charge was ingrained in their habits. Currently, they were still trying, with limited success, to have hit
men target the lieutenants. The Grandfather said that it might take them some time to realize that
expecting to stop Human black markets by lopping off heads was about as effective as beheading a
Greek hydra. Mrs. Chin made sure that she remained a moving target.


 Proximity to the Indowy brought a certain amount of trade, and with the trade had come a certain
familiarity with the furry, green teddy-bears. The Human factor for the town had noticed that members of
Indowy breeding groups delighted in giving each other small, simple gifts as tokens of affection. Indowy
being Indowy, they purchased even simple gifts which were individually crafted and expensive—not
because the Indowy had a particular dedication to individual craftsmanship, but simply because they had
never done it any other way. Two of the Beeseers, from New Orleans by way of a central Indiana
SubUrb, and old enough to remember pre-war Earth, had amused themselves for awhile making strands
of clear, colored beads and stringing them to sell to the green herbivores. They'd marketed their product
as symbols of fertility, plenty, and fellowship. Dulain, being an Indowy world and the Indowy being able
to outbreed all known sophonts anywhere, had a very few humans and a whole lot of Indowy. The
Indowy considered the pretty little gifts so inexpensive as to be practically free. Page and Gilbeaux, with
no marketing efforts to speak of, had been selling as many Mardi Gras necklaces as they could string.


 When Ming had received the message from Earth that Dulain's humans needed to assemble an alternate
cargo for an incoming freighter, production had gone into round the clock shifts. They could count on
some lower-margin Indowy goods being available to fill out the ship's hold—especially as the message
came with suggestions of which Indowy ears for the Tong Lieutenanct for Dulain to drop a word in. Clan
Beilil was not plentiful nor powerful on Dulain, but they did appear more open, for no reason that was
readily apparent. Ming had quietly filed the name in her memory as a useful contact for the future.


 Meanwhile, several Human towns that were capable of turning out glass beads had gone into high gear,
as well. The plus was that there was less of a bottle neck in the immediate machine production of colored
glass beads, the downside that they had to be strung by hand. A cube containing a series of books on the
construction of machine tools from scrap metal had been, and was still, very popular on Dulain. The
necessary parts for generation of strings of the beads were being put together by every small machine
shop on the planet. In the two weeks since they had had word from Earth, her people had accomplished
a great deal. In the two weeks they still had before they had to ship the product off Dulain, they would do
much more.

 Wednesday, 11/10/54

The more time Michael O'Neal, Senior, spent in secure rooms, the more alike they all looked. The
galplas walls were a light mud color, except for the purplish glow of the ceiling surface. It made his eyes
hurt, if he didn't wear sunglasses. Which was, of course, the only reason he was wearing them.
 "Nice shades, Papa," George said as he walked past and moved a couple of the rolling office chairs
around, trying to pick one that was less broken down than the others. The chairs all sported gray galactic
silk slip covers over the seats and backs. Silk was expensive—unless it was from the first efforts of
children and typically very off-spec. Color, texture, and quality were variable. The slip covers were
marginally better than nothing, maybe. They didn't stop the feel of the torn tweed and disintegrating
fifty-year-old foam padding beneath them.


The blond grunted and set his mug down on the table, shaking a couple of chairs to pick one that wasn't
going to dump him into the floor. A caster came off of one of them and he slid that chair over against the
wall, putting the offending piece in the seat. The other chair seemed to only have loose handles, so he
parked himself in it and kicked his feet up onto the badly chipped pine table.


 "So, the miracle kiddies down below get to make another part." George jerked a thumb over his
shoulder at the chair.


"Gotta hand it to them. Theirs don't break. At least, not so far." Papa spat neatly into his mug.


 "Bitching about the crappy fucking chairs again?" Tommy Sunday walked in wearing a grimace and
carrying a steel camp stool. He pushed a couple of the inadequate chairs out of the way and unfolded his
stool. "At leastyou can sit in the damn things."


"You aren't missing much, son," O'Neal said.


 The door opened again, admitting Cally and Harrison together. Cally's hair was a shining silver bell
around her face. It hadn't looked that good in years.


"Wow," Tommy said. "What the hell did you do to your hair?"


"Why thank you, Tommy. Good afternoon to you, too," she said, smiling a little too sweetly.


"Uh . . . I mean it looks really good," he said.


The elder O'Neal suppressed a grin. "Your hair looks very nice, sweetheart."


"Thank you, Grandpa."


 "Who would have thought that Darhel conditioner would work so well on Human hair?" Harrison asked
the room at large.
"Not me," said George. "Cally, you're a brave woman."


 "We tried it on a sample of hair from her brush first. I'm not a total novice at hair care, I'll have you
know. I figured since Darhel depilatory foam works on humans, the protein structure might be similar
enough that their conditioner would work as well." Their fixer looked insufferably proud of himself.


"I didn't think Darhel medicines were safe in humans."


 "They're not. The conditioner has a binder and emollient effect to reduce split ends and increase shine.
It's not a medicine."


 Cally crossed the room and sat down next to George. "Okay, let's get started. Has everyone had time to
review the latest intelligence on our target?"


"Is it supposed to smell like cabbage?" George asked.


 Cally glared at him and switched on the holoprojector, pointedly ignoring the young man's comment as a
holo of a video screen appeared at the far end of the tank. With holo the default viewing medium on the
planet, using three dimensional projection to simulate a two dimensional screen no longer struck anyone
as ironic. "As you can see from the timetable, we have at least a month to get inside. If Michelle is more
than three days late, we'll have to hold on for another three weeks past that before we get another shot.
We're just lucky that winter is convention season—all those researchers flying down to the Caribbean for
their conferences."


 They laughed. Of course, it wouldn't have been half as funny if half of them didn't already live along the
coast. Even if it was colder than a witch's titty in a brass bra this time of year. Maybe after this mission he
ought to talk Shari into doing a run down to Cuba. Havana was nice now that the governmental policies
had changed.


 ". . . thing we know Erick Winchon does is go to conferences and give speeches. Usually long on
mouthings about peace and altruism, short on science. There's a front group that does some puff
research. For their cover research, our best guess is that they do small studies off site, then fabricate large
sample data consistent with their small study results. Dr. Vitapetroni tells me they design their work to
generate meaningless truisms that sound good. Grants are so light on the ground that convention
standards aren't so high these days—anybody who's got a paper published fills up the convention
program. So giving a lot of pretty speeches maintains their cover and appearance of respectability." Cally
tapped the forward arrow on the buckley, advancing the slide.


"Anyway, we have Winchon's conference schedule. Michelle tells me our only chance is to do the op
when he is at least a few hundred kilometers away from the site. As far as possible, really." When she
mentioned talking to Michelle, Grandpa's face got grumpier, like it always did. She hated being in the
middle of family squabbles. "Work like this tends to have small but significant turnover. People may not
be able to walk out, but they do leave feet first. We have the profiles of the jobs most likely to turn over,
and the ones that are vacant. Multiple resumes are in the pipeline for each of us. Our inside man has our
list. We have staffers down in GN32 manning our phones. Interview calls will be routed to voice mail for
obvious reasons, along with a tag telling you who the caller thinks you are. If you can't have your buckley
tell you when a call comes in, you need to check it at least every two hours. If you're doing a short
assignment and can't do that, you need to notify me in advance and let me know how long you'll be out of
pocket."


George started to say something, but Cally had evidently anticipated. She placed a soft hand over
George's lips and smiled as she continued, "Grandpa, you and George take what we know of the layout
of the place, develop plans for physical surveillance of the facility, and start working on secondary plans
of entry and execution."


 Papa O'Neal nearly choked on his tobacco trying not to laugh at the expression on the young
man's—well, he looked young, anyway—face. As if his granddaughter was going to let him steamroller
one of her meetings for the second time in a row. He caught a whiff of her perfume from across the room.
Dangerous stuff. The kid's eyes glazed over as she turned in her seat, deliberately moving the lethal
cleavage nearer. At least, Papa knew damned well it was deliberate.


"Anyone gets a call, it will automatically route to me, too. Whole team, meet back here, same time, in
one week to touch base unless I tell you sooner. Dismissed." Unusually for Cally, she didn't give time for
questions, and she didn't relax the format, just took her hand off George and swept out of the room.
Whew, but her nose was out of joint. He might just have to have a talk with her. Or better yet, with
Schmidt Two, who was still looking a bit pole-axed. Maybe even each of them. He might indeed.

 Sunday, 11/14/54

 Pardal cordially loathed the smell of Titan Base. The overpressure on the domed city drove in mixed
hydrocarbons that made the entire facility reek of a combination of a ship with a faulty life support system
and a dirty waste-room. The pathetic suite set aside for his use, which would have looked luxurious only
to Human savages who knew no better, had a shoddy Earthtech air filter in one corner. It reduced the
reek in his own rooms, but produced a whining that abused his sensitive ears. The air movement and hiss
had, more than once, awakened him from a sound sleep, diving for his pressure suit. The times it had
happened, it had taken a few seconds before he'd realized he was not aboard a ship with a hull breach
but was, instead, on the Aldenata-bedamned Titan Base. By then his stress hormones, mingled with a
tingling hint of Tal, were in such an uproar that it took a seventh level meditation to relax him enough to
get back to sleep.


 Demanding complete and immediate repair would have revealed weakness. He certainly didn't want the
humans to know that the panicked awakening was almost as dangerous, to him, as a real hull breach
somewhere on board one of his ships would have been. Much less reveal weakness to others of his kind.
He had ordered proper air cleaning equipment from a reputable supplier and would simply have to wait
for its arrival. He hated humans, as much for their cheap and shoddy devices as for anything else.
 The Indowy produced voluminous excesses of Indowy, the Tchpht produced overwhelming
technological inventions, the Darhel produced money and power, the Himmit produced—well,
consumed, then—an excess of stories, the Posleen produced a voluminous amount of both Posleen and
ships. The humans' particular excess was millions of tons of ephemeral, garbage goods—some in use, the
vast majority already broken and discarded. They were ridiculously self-congratulatory over insignificant
increases in useful life of what they produced, and the ability to remanufacture their garbage instead of
just piling up and burying their millions of shipweights of discards.


 Human females were the worst. They incessantly wore and replaced robes in an absurd variety of
colors, textures and shapes, like some maniacally molting, diseased insects. Human men apparently found
this profligate traitattractive . They did price their shoddy goods like the worthless things they were, but
that was almost as bad. By treating them with extreme care, it was possible to extend the life of such
goods to the point that they became economical. The volume and variety of garbage goods, that did
work for very brief periods, made the humans frighteningly adaptable—an unpleasant truth that he would
never admit to anyone else and barely admitted to himself. He really loathed the little barbarian
carnivores.


 He watched a live holo of the main dividing way of the savage city, the one the humans called The
Corridor. How original. He sat watching and listed to himself the various reasons he hated humans. He
was aware that most of his kind felt merely a more distant contempt for the species. He would probably
return to that attitude, himself, as soon as he could get out of the gods-forsaken Sol System and back to
civilization. For now, they were just too close. He was finally in a state of mind to get the most
appreciation out of the latest cube of research he had received from the Human Erick Winchon.


 After the first hour, he decided he was very disappointed. This cube wasn't nearly as good as the last
one. The first half, an aversive eating sequence with fresh subjects, would have been completely boring if
he hadn't learned to read Human facial expressions. The second half, aversive mating behaviors, should
have been boring, but wasn't. Somewhere in the sequence, it crossed over from mere unaesthetic mates
to pointless and counterproductive destruction of the females. Odd, that. The accompanying notes said
the obvious aversiveness resulted from the peculiar Human emotion called empathy, rather than the loss
of a potential mating opportunity before viable offspring could result. The other feature that rescued the
cube from tedium was the proof of aversiveness tests performed on random subjects after a significant
act, which left the subject in the situation while removing all controls on his or her emotional responses.
Humans in distress were capable of an extraordinary variety of vocalizations.


 He was leaning back in a reclining couch, watching the show a second time through, when his AID
interrupted him, stopping the holo.


"Sir, you have an incoming message from a special courier vessel," it said.


"Display it," he said, coldly.
 A still holo of another Darhel appeared. The yellowish tinge to his silver and black fur, along with the
yellow stains on his teeth, showed his less-than-stellar grooming habits. It was also a telltale mark of a
certain age, as teeth didn't get that neglected overnight. The gilded patterns on the columns behind him
had Epetar's traditional triangular motifs worked into the designs. From the moderately low quality and
the obvious lack of sufficient Indowy body servants to attend his personal needs, Pardal knew the sender
was of low rank.


The AID from the courier ship had a beautiful voice. "Message from Epetar Factor Raddin of Dulain to
Commerce Manager Pardal, currently traveling in the Sol System. Message begins:"


 The holo shifted into motion as the Darhel in the display began speaking his recorded piece. "A freighter,
a gods-be-damned garbage scow by the look of it, has entered the Dulain System.Dedicated Industry
has a Gistar registry, she is not on the schedule, and however disreputable she looks, she has the
capacity to carry a substantial cargo. There is no substantial cargo waiting to load out here that is
anywhere near completion except for ours. Two of the three cargoes over fifty-percent assembled are
Cnothgar cargoes that they're not about to allow jumped from their own planet. Strange ships coming in
on top of one of my high margin cargoes make me very nervous. This would be a very bad time for a
ship to be late. If there is a circumstance of which I am unaware, I report the information so that you may
plan accordingly. I take my leave of you."


 "Message ends. The billing confirmation number for this service has been transmitted to your AID. This
vessel will depart the Sol System for return to the Dulain System immediately. Any standard
correspondence or return messages should be uploaded at once."


 Pardal ran his claws through the fur on top of his head, scratching nervously behind his ears. He took a
deep breath and dropped the hand back to his side. He had to look composed for official
correspondence. "AID, record for transmission from Commerce Manager Pardal to Epetar Factor
Raddin of Dulain, copy to Epetar Freighter Captain Efgin traveling in the Dulain System. I received your
message. As the shipment is late, it is likely that the Gistar vessel has taken advantage of the situation to
take the contract on our Dulain cargo. Empty holds leak profits. Acquire whatever salable cargo you can,
for the best price, and quickly. Unload, reload, and get that ship on to Prall. The Gistar vessel will
undoubtedly beat us to Diess as well. Skipping that leg is the only way to get back on schedule. Your
information was critical. Your use of the courier in this instance is validated, despite the expense.
Continue to exercise all care before incurring such expenses. I take my leave."


 Gistar. Pardal smiled. It was the kind of smile that, thousands and thousands of years ago, would have
scared any prey animal stiff. Or sent it running. Today, his Indowy body servants abruptly left the room.
Gistar. The code keys were no doubt long gone from Sol. Probably went out on the very next shuttle off
of Earth and didn't stop until they hit the jump point. Still, some things had to be revenged. What did the
humans say? One good turn deserves another. Amazing that they were sometimes capable of sarcasm.
One good theft certainly deserved another. Gistar.


 It would take a call to the Human who primarily handled those of Epetar's interests that required the
Human touch. And, curse Gistar, require him to book passage right back to Earth. The only mitigating
component would be getting off Titan.
"AID, what is the name of our Human agent for special issues on Earth?"



  Chapter Fourteen
 Monday 11/15/54

 The white haired man was clearly not a juv. He looked like a late middle-aged stockbroker. He had
sectioned his hair into precise squares pointed into precise spikes, exactly two point five four centimeters
long. His pale blue suit jacket had the tails that had come back into style for morning clothes at the office.
Robert Bateman had an office. It was in the business district of Little Rock. When he was in town, he
unfailingly went into the office at eight each morning, and left it between five to seven each evening. If he
had to be elsewhere, which he frequently did, he reported in to the office first. He charged this expense
to his employer as a necessary cover. Too many of the things they wanted done required a respectable
business persona. His day trading of a picayune amount of Epetar's money kept him abreast of the
market, well enough to talk intelligently about its movements, scandals, and surprises. This was the cover
he needed most often. It cost less to simply maintain it than to pay people to fabricate what was
essentially the same identity, over and over. He did what he could to avoid getting the alias visibly dirty.
You don't shit where you eat.


 It surprised him to receive a direct call from the Darhel Pardal—or, rather, from his AID, which
amounted to the same thing. He carried a buckley. An AID would have been an extravagance and a
security risk. The trader he was counterfeiting would never have used one. He trusted Epetar to make
sure his calls back and forth to them were secure. The hard-ass alien bastards were geniuses at
programming. Privately, he thought of them as a weird blend of vampire, fox, and elf that sucked money
as a poor substitute for blood—and resented it. Obviously, the Darhel had evolved as carnivores. Plant
eaters did not have those rows of sharp teeth.


 But they couldn't kill directly, either. That was what they needed him for. He was the smart-gun in their
hand that selected its own targets and fired itself—giving them just enough plausible deniability to protect
their sanity.


 Bateman had zero illusions about his employers, he just didn't care. Hell, he liked them. At least they
weren't sweetness and light hypocrites. He knew he was a sociopath. He knew he was one of the less
common sociopaths who had above average intelligence. Being what he was, he appreciated the better
games his intellect made available to him. The Darhel were great employers. Whether they did or didn't
know that the rest of humanity would regard him as damaged goods, the important point for him was that
they just didn't give a shit. In fact, his lack of conscience was his most crucial job skill. Working for the
Epetar Group was the best job he'd ever had. If he discounted the boredom between assignments.


 He looked over the file dumped to his buckley and whistled softly. Pardal's call had been terse, "Review
the file. Assess our interests. Arrange the services you deem appropriate. Among other things, ensure
you steal from them, for delivery to us. The more the better, but amount does not matter and you most
certainly need not limit your creativity to theft. Submit the bills for your expenses. Oh, and Mr. Bateman?
There will be no need to itemize expenses—a very general bill would be most satisfactory."


 A blank check to avenge some inter-corporate insult. The file didn't specify the insult, simply that it was
severe and highly costly. Epetar must be really pissed at Gistar to turn someone like him loose with no
leash and no limits. He rubbed his hands and started going down the list of Gistar assets on Earth and in
the rest of the system.


 The tantalum and niobium operation in Africa looked good. Starships didn't move too fast. He had
enough money on hand to hire a good team of mercenaries, stick them on a wet ship with a pack of
reliable pirates, and deal out a lot of mayhem to the dumb schmucks at the mines. Stuff out of a mine
wouldn't burn—it wasn't like it was coal or anything. Unless they directly hit it, they wouldn't disperse it
with explosions, either. Should be able to pick it right up and cart it off.


Bateman ran a search against his rolodex and began sorting through names. He found the booking agent
he was looking for and placed the call.

 Monday 11/15/54

 The Indowy Falnae had the con on the bridge of the Gistar freighter,Fortunate Venture , it being the
captain's sleep shift.Venture was heavy with her food cargo, headed out for Laghldon, a major Indowy
world specializing in standalone communications systems and ground vehicles. The great, automated
farming machines of Rienooen produced the various high-energy, high-protein staple crops that formed
the mainstay of Indowy and Tchpht diets. The dietary needs of the independently evolved species were,
obviously, extremely different, but Rienooen was a big and fertile planet with the largest ratio of arable
land to planetary surface of any planet in this region of space. Their ship was part of an endless convoy of
vessels that trekked between systems, packed from floor to ceiling with food one way, and sterilized,
packaged fertilizers on the return. Presently, they were six days out from the major jump point out. Out
of two known ways to move a ship through hyperspace, the Galactics used the ley-line method, traveling
paths of least resistance from one system to another. It was an odd quirk of space that these paths
tended to cluster together in clumps, like flaws in a giant crystal. They varied in their distance from the
core of the system, which had made large differences in travel time for centuries.


 Like a pebble tossed in a still pool, the War had changed everything. The changes seemed good, but
they destabilized things, and destabilization was risk. The Darhel managed trade, but the Tchpht, and the
Indowy to a lesser extent, managed change. The Darhel Groups were so competitive that any information
that gave one Group a competitive edge forced the others to change as well. The chaotic, imprudent,
savage humans were like an information storm released into the heart of Galactic civilization. Certainly
they had saved the civilized races from a greater disaster, but at what cost?


 His shipboard sensors registered the scheduled transit of an incoming freighter from Barwhon. They also
registered an incoming transmission. There must be incoming messages for the crew, or the captain. The
first message bore an urgent tag. He hit the play sequence.
 "FreighterFortunate Venture , you are diverted. You will rendezvous with the courier and take on the
full Gistar currency reserve. You will proceed to the Prall System and sell your cargo. There is a
Cnothgar cargo of ordered spare parts, scheduled to be carried on an Epetar vessel to Adenast repair
docks. The Epetar vessel will be late, defaulting on the contract. You will inform Cnothgar. You will
persuade them to allow you to load, committing to paying the costs of unloading and re-prepping the
cargo if Epetar comes out of hyperspace on time. Since this is not a default of the standard carrying
contract, they will be amenable. You will execute a conditional standard contract to become effective if
Epetar defaults. When the Epetar vessel is late out of hyper, constituting default, you will carry out that
contract. Our factor on Prall will provide you with our full currency reserves for the system. Combining
the reserves together with the gross from the food you carry, you should be able to purchase Adenast
cargo. How fortunate that we were on the verge of expansion. Others will ensure the Epetar vessel's
default. You have your instructions."


 He would not wake the captain. With six days to jump, the Darhel had plenty of time to finish his sleep
before he began the process of changing plans and recalibrating the engines. Or, rather, before he
instructed his AID to do so.


 A trade war. This was yet another terrible disturbance. The Clans would be centuries, or more,
smoothing out all the ripples in these troubled waters. In the deep, still places of his own heart, Falnae
feared that the Darhel had erred greatly when they assumed that reducing Human numbers in the war,
down to a mere one sixth of their pre-war numbers, would reduce the fury from stirring up that hoolna
warren, Earth. The evolutionary forces that created sophonts rendered some primitive, developing
sophont species capable of catastrophically destructive rages—but no less able to distinguish threats to
their existence. What a chaotic mess. The civilized species' had to divert the humans onto the path, yes,
but the Darhel effort had been a foolish, foolish blunder—haste in creation fouled the tank. The surviving
humans were already well on their way to making up their losses, despite the Darhel's best efforts.


 He would never dream of doubting the wisdom of his clan head. Even though the breach between the
main body of the Bane Sidhe and the humans split the humans off from their one positive, guiding force.
Except for Clan Aelool and Clan Beilil, who he devoutly hoped would be steady in their efforts, and
successful—for the sake of all the clans. But again, these were matters best left to wiser minds.

 Friday, 11/16/54

Michelle O'Neal was showing her newest apprentice some of the practical applications of material from
his engineering classes. She was using her office because the lighting was a bit less wearing on her eyes.
The tinted contact lenses she normally wore in Indowy areas of her complex—which was almost the
whole megascraper—had been irritating her eyes today. She could have repaired the problem easily, but
part of the discipline she enforced on herself was that she didn't use her abilities for most routine
problems. Sohon should come from trained, personal focus, not from cutting ones' self off from the
ordinary issues of daily life.


Her office was a calm place. The walls were a softly luminous shade of blue, shading from sky blue at
the bottom to deep indigo at the top. Instead of a water cooler, she had a running fountain in the corner.
It was one of her own teenage art projects. The pebbles in the lower pool were strangely colored. She
had let out some of her adolescent rebellion and angst in the coloration of her projects. There were a
couple of freighters sailing around space with pink stabilizers in their containment rooms to this day.


 She normally didn't teach the apprentices herself, but in this case the personal lesson was a reward for
outstanding diligence. Also, the apprentice was one of the Clan Ildaewl workers who were members of
her manufacturing team. Clan O'Neal's numbers on Adenast were far too small for a full team, and she
owed a debt to Ildaewl for her own training when she had first come from Earth as a child, fleeing the
Posleen War. Her own diligence and skill in managing her team and ensuring the progress of the team
members under her, together with her own constant research of techniques which probed the boundaries
of the Art, had converted her association with Ildaewl from mere debt to something more like an alliance.
Ildaewl being the second largest of the Indowy Clans, this was no small thing.


 The apprentice, Aen, was barefoot. Indeed, he was completely bare except for the fur-like leaf-green
filaments that covered his body.


 Michelle was also barefoot, as was her own habit in her office. Elsewhere in the building, she wore
sandals. The soles of her feet were not nearly as tough as the Indowy pads, and like all manufacturing
facilities everywhere, Indowy workshops inevitably had the risk of small, sharp objects that landed on the
floor between sweepings. In her own office, she was a neat freak who wouldn't dream of allowing a
foreign object to land on her floor, which was a carpet of living grass whose original seed she had
shipped up from Earth. She had grown her furniture as a practice drill in materials science. The seat
cushions were a soft material like squishy suede, but the slight variances in the surface enhanced the effect
of the lichen and moss covered Georgia granite pattern she had tuned into the surface. The surface was
indistinguishable in appearance from the hard, structural portions of the tables and chairs, which she had
sized to accommodate the members of the various of the Galactic races who might have occasion to
meet with her here.


 Truth be told, it was all an excellent excuse for the office to be indecently spacious. Everything, even the
low table that served her in place of a desk, gave the appearance of having been carved from stone in a
style that wouldn't have been out of place if set down in the middle of Stonehenge—a touch of her own
wry humor over the reputation of Humanity. The corners and edges within the office were all beveled.
Random clouds scudding across the ceiling. The airflow paired with potted plants on small tables along
the walls gave the scent and feel of being outside on a pleasant, late spring day. Despite the alien origin of
her vegetation, people of just about every race experienced a certain calmness in her office—which was,
of course, the point.


 The herbivorous Indowy, normally a bit shy around even the Indowy-raised humans they knew
personally, tended to be calmed by the environment. This despite thousands of years living, by
preference, in closely packed warrens of their own kind. The decor smoothed her working relationships.
Darhel would have hated it, of course, so when she met with one ofthem it was always elsewhere. Which
suited her just fine, since from childhood she had absorbed a very Indowy attitude towards Darhel. It
was not so much that the Indowy feared the Darhel. The Darhel did, after all, serve a useful purpose in
Galactic civilization. Each race had its role.
But then, so did the flies that infest a dung heap.


 Which brought her back to her apprentice. A young Indowy, he was beginning to embrace the
theoretical underpinnings of advanced Sohon. He was also beginning to appreciate the difference
between knowing and doing, as he moved on from childhood training projects to his first adult working
team.


 She looked at the raw Galplas, or what was supposed to be raw Galplas, that had coalesced in the
center of the tank, before reaching in with a simple ceramic strainer to lift it out. One of the things she had
fashioned for herself when she first began teaching was a stainless steel hammer. Such a primitive tool
tended to convey a point indelibly. She appraised the unpleasant mass, choosing her spot. One sharp rap
reduced the stuff to rubble and dust.


 "On Earth, they call that chalk," she said. "Now, why did the polymeric binding fail in the third stage of
processing, and as a consequence, what is the present imbalance in your tank's raw materials? Neglecting
the tank fluid and nannites that dripped off your . . . chalk . . . how much of which substances will you
add to bring your sohon tank back into working equilibrium? I want the answer along with the uncertainty
range. Here. I will help you."


She pulled a stainless steel pan out of the top drawer of her desk and swept the rubble and dust into it
with a careless hand. Liquid crept away from her hand, up the side of an empty water glass. The stray
dust followed along, obediently falling into the pan. "The pan masses fifty Earth grams, to ten decimal
places. The contents masses the product I took out of the tank, in Earth grams, to three decimal places.
The glass is thirty grams and masses standard nano-solvent to eight decimal places."


 She would have continued, but a ten-legged arthropoid figure had entered the doorway and was
bouncing up and down in a pensively contemplative sort of way. "Go. Write it up, send it to my AID,"
she concluded, dismissing the apprentice. She flipped the indicator on the side of the unbalanced tank
from green to the amber warning light, and hit the lockout switch.


 Looking up, she favored the Tchpht with a friendly, closed-mouth smile, "Wxlcht! It has been at least
three years. Are you at peace?"


 "I follow. And you?" Dancing gently on its spidery limbs, her friend offered the customary response,
routinely indicating adherence to the enlightened species' philosophical Path.


"I work. The grass grows," she offered the closed-mouth, tiny quirk of the lips that had become the
polite Human smile.


"Is it a good season for your work?" he enquired.
"It is interesting," she gave a negative.


 "Would you have a moment for a game of Aethal with an old friend?" She wondered idly what business
he had on Adenast. Wxlcht was neither properlyhe norshe. She used the masculine pronouns for her
social comfort, since the Tchpht did not care.


"Of course." Her face lit with pleasure, she went to one of the walls and pulled out a box from a shelf
underneath one of her plants. Tchpht were stronger than they looked to most humans. As she turned,
Wxlcht had already pushed a Human chair and a Tchpht platform up to the low table where they had
played many games.


 The Human mentat took the board off the top of the box and set it in the center of the table, touching the
randomizer button on the side. The triangles on the board immediately lit with the initial locations for the
game pieces. For beginners, it would have also lit from beneath with the web of clan-group obligations,
alliances of interest, and contracts. As both players were grandmasters, Michelle kept her board set for
the traditional game, which incorporated random destabilizing events. The object of the game was, in a
set period of time, to establish a stable web of interconnections that was more likely to lead to
enlightenment than the opponent's web. The game, of course, was far simplified from real life.


 Wxlcht placed his pieces, making a show of examining the board, "You will certainly have to watch the
interaction of your clan obligations with your contracts in this game. It would be especially difficult if your
primary contract were to encounter a calculated treachery."


 Michelle looked at the board and blinked. The advice might match the board, but that fourth degree
alliance on the left forward flank was far more hazardous. "You are talking about more than Aethal," she
said.


"Yes. The Human Mentat Erick Winchon stole something essential to your contract with the Epetar
Group. Have you been able to determine which Darhel Group Erick Winchon is working for?"


"Not with certainty. I suspect Cnothgar, but that is an initial impression and not proved."


 "You know my people's capabilities, and you know my position. Most things involving humans we do
not take notice of, as it would take far too much time away from our researches on the path. Mentats are
worthy of notice. I owe you a debt. My closest family is from Barwhon. Your clan was instrumental in
rescuing one of myfctht mates. The Human Erick Winchon was commissioned by and is working for a
branch of the Epetar Group whose affiliation has been carefully concealed. The secrecy is for many
reasons, but one of them is to place you in apparent breach of contract. You will not be able to prove the
ownership, as they have used considerable resources to cover the track even from you. My people will
not, for obvious reasons, confront the Darhel or the other mentat directly on this issue. Still, the
information should be sufficient to clear the debt."
"Yes, the debt is cleared. Thank you, friend," she acknowledged.


"There is more, that would shift the balance of our alliance, if you wish to know it."


 "It is you that is offering. You would not offer if it wasn't well worth owing you a debt. I would certainly
like to hear it." Protocol required, if possible, allowing the other to choose whether to take on a social
debt. In the case of information, this of necessity had to be done before the recipient knew what she
would be getting.


 "We normally do not interfere with the younger races' members who love to plot and intrigue, so long as
it keeps them harmlessly occupied and out of the way of the more advanced among their own and other
species. A younger student of our own race, watched by me, supervises for a time as a training exercise,
but rarely has cause to either intervene or report. However, plots that risk setting two mentats against
each other, unlikely though it is that either would be rash enough to allow a direct confrontation, are not
harmless. We would not be averse to seeing future attempts of this kind discouraged. If the Epetar Group
were to suffer great financial reversals that appeared to be the result of mismanagement, other Darhel
groups would be inclined to dismiss any recent unusual adventures on Epetar's part as ill-considered."


"You know the safeguards in the system. If I intervene, it will be very clear that I did," she said.


 "That is very true. However, you have among your extended clan those who plot and intrigue in secret.
One specific relative is engaged in an intrigue against the Epetar Group that is likely to fail on its own, but
that you might assist without being noticed. There is risk. We trust your judgment. Look to the dealings of
your sister's mate."


"Mate?" Michelle's two rapid eyeblinks were all that showed her surprise, but they were enough.


"Correct. Shall we play?" A Tchpht would naturally treat her like an Indowy, shying away from a
potentially sensitive clan matter.


 "Excuse me, but I am not sure I heard you correctly. Are you referring to Cally's lover, who fathered her
children? James Stewart is dead."


"Has he died recently, then?" he asked.


"If you are counting seven years as recent," the mentat said.


"Oh. I am sorry if I am interfering in a closely held clan matter, but as of Earth's last lunar cycle, he is
very much alive. Forgive my discourtesy." He paused, raising a forelimb over his mouth in the equivalent
of a grimace. "For the sake of timing, you might encourage the Indowy crew on Dulain base to cooperate
with the local humans before you pursue the matter with your clan. If you choose to do so, it would be
best if you were highly expeditious and discreet."


"Um . . . thank you. Thank you very much. I am indebted to you," she agreed again.


"Pilot's apprentice to Clan head's four-b, using the rest of my move to institute a third level alliance to
uncommitted family Tinne," he bounced left and right, rapidly, resembling an overcharged metronome.


"That's an unconventional opening. Hrmm. What could you be up to?"

 Wednesday, 11/17/54

 Rictus Clarty's medium-dark skin could have come from his indeterminate ancestry, or perhaps it was all
the time he spent in the tropical regions of the East Africa Rift Zone. Clarty had been born with two
talents and one dominating attribute. A natural marksman and linguist, his driving ambition, developed in
the crowded underbelly of the SubUrb that produced him, was open space and power over other men.


 He had started out as a Posleen hunter for one of the re-release preserves, a joint project of government
and environmental organizations established out of American and Canadian zoos after the war. At the
end of the war, when they first inaugurated the preserves, ecologists had faced a devastated continent in
which anything larger than a beach ball had become extinct. Humans were an exception, surviving in
small, isolated groups on mountains like Ras Dashat and Kilimanjaro, or on little islands off the coast or in
large lakes. It had been a toss-up for years whether the ecology would crash completely or not. Now the
question was firmly settled. While she would never be as she was, Africa was definitely winning. The key
for the small fauna and the flora had been the original biodiversity. The key for the re-introduced species
was that Humans settlements were tiny and the Posleen were mostly gone. Fleet and ACS efforts at
Posleen elimination had greatly reduced habitat competition and the number of other predators at the top
of the food chain.


 Another key, oddly enough, had been the elephants. Those terrestrial mammals were apparently
considerably smarter than Posleen normals. Elephants recognized and carefully trampled Posleen eggs.
Bull elephants would respond to the presence of a feral Posleen by actively tracking them. A god king
crest would trigger a berserker charge of an entire herd. Without advanced weaponry or overwhelming
numbers on their side, Posleen facing elephants died. Since elephant family groups roamed widely in the
ongoing mission of stoking their bodies with hundreds of kilograms of forage a day, and the other
reintroduced animals had a sure safe zone in any elephant group's range, reintroduction had gone faster
than anyone had hoped. The animals followed the elephants. Used to the eternal footrace between the
big cats and the herd beasts, most of the critters could outrun an isolated Posleen, anyway.


The ultimate result had been that after ten years of more or less steady work as a paid Posleen hunter,
Rictis had found himself out of work. Africa was by no means clear of feral Posleen or repopulated with
native wildlife, but neither was the issue in enough doubt for a government crippled with debt to keep
men like Rictis on its payroll.


 He had had to seek other employment. He had found it in the needs of the Human survivors for things
out of song and memory. They had never had many of the benefits of modern civilization—not compared
to first worlders. Those they had grew in story and song until the young men were eager to earn any hard
currency they could to buy these fabled luxuries.


 Across Africa and all the depopulated continents, the Darhel had extorted mining concessions in partial
payment of Earth's debts. Preferring Indowy employees to Human ones, the Darhel facilities offered few
employment opportunities to survivors. With an eye to extorting future mining rights, the Darhel looked
with extreme disfavor on Human city states springing up to exploit even the mineral resources they
themselves did not own. Wary of the clauses in the colony transport contracts that had caused Earth so
much trouble, Earth's government—which at this time amounted to what was left of the United States
government, in consultation with the Asian-Latin Coalition, Indonesia and the Phillipines—had explicitly
refused any responsibility to secure Darhel mining facilities against rogue humans. The result had been a
thriving market in Human mercenaries, mostly comprised of local survivors.


 With satellite phones an expensive luxury, traveling middlemen, known to the local bands, recruited and
employed local mercenaries. The middlemen, like Clarty, stayed in areas of the world with phone or
radio contact until they drummed up a new contract and it was time to go back out in the field. The
satellite phone in his pack was a short term rental he would expense in his bill. An ugly piece of shit, he
coveted it nonetheless, remembering the once-upon-a-time convenience, in another life, of walking
around with a cell phone glued to his ear, yacking to his friends.


 In the morning, a Darhel mining facility would be on the receiving end of their destructive power. A
columbite-tantalite mine in the northward portion of the East Africa Rift System was the unlucky target of
his attentions today. His combined band of Cushitic warriors from the Simien Mountains to the northwest
and the Dahlak Archipelago in the Red Sea aimed to form up behind some of the terrain blocking this
part of the rift from the view of the mining complex. The complex had Human security, if you could call it
that. Upper level Darhel managers were brilliant. Lower level Darhel supervisors were also brilliant, but
less cosmopolitan and prone to jumping to conclusions about humans based on Galactic stereotypes.
Unless they observed substantial contrary data themselves, they were unlikely to ever get beyond that
attitude. Lord, but it made Rictis' job easy.


 Low level Darhel, like the rest of the mainstream Galactics, viewed all humans as bloodthirsty
carnivores, good only for killing or being killed. A Human who presented himself as a security guard and
knew one end of a gun from the other was automatically accepted at face value as a security guard. Why
would any sane being falsely claim to be a bloodthirsty killer? Security guards hired to protect such
facilities typically walked or stood around with dirty, poorly maintained rifles slung across their backs.
The poor maintenance would have mattered less if they had been carrying AK-47s instead of old,
prewar M-16s. They used to say you could bury an AK in the mud for ten years, dig it up, and take it
right into an engagement. You sure couldn't do that with an M-16. Like as not, half the rented uniforms
down there would find their rifles jamming on them, if they lived long enough to shoot back. All guys like
them were good for was presenting a visible presence, wearing token uniforms, and drinking their pay.
 Right now, in the gathering twilight, his men clustered around the rough map scratched into the ground
for a final refresher. This morning they had infiltrated most of the way in a silent anti-grav shuttle, flown in
low, nap of the Earth. The closest they could get was to park behind a rise fifteen klicks away, give or
take, and walk in through the tall grass. They'd marched, if you wanted to call it that, in a double-file line,
two men out to the side as flankers, and three scouting to the front. Clarty would be the first to admit that
his men were not the best of soldiers—weren't soldiers at all, not to speak of. But they were experienced
hunters and knew how to use the AKs they carried. Also, they worked cheap. The boys he'd had to
hand rifles got to keep them, their villages got a couple of cases of ammo, and other than that, they didn't
take much paying at all. There was plenty of cheap stuff he could bring in, easy, that these people only
knew now from legends told around the fire. It didn't occur to him to worry about the boys who might, as
some certainly would, fall in the engagement. If someone had asked him about that, it would have
honestly puzzled him. Their villages counted losing some young warriors as part of the nature of young
warriors. If they didn't care, why should he?


 As sure as he could be that each man knew his position and job, Clarty doled out the three precious
pairs of night vision goggles in his pack to the men he considered most competent. He took out his own
goggles, and familiarized the chosen with the minimal controls and how the world looked in varying
shades of black and green. His goggles, of course, had a few extras like built in binoculars and range
finders. The ones for his picked lieutenants were cheaper, but serviceable.


 Rictus had worked with Abebe, Tesfa, and Alemu before. All three were old enough to have some
sense, but hadn't started to slow down from age yet. Tesfa was one of his inland cushites. At twenty five
or thereabouts he had a wife and four children. An expert hunter, his eyes didn't miss much, and what his
eyes did miss his nose picked up on. He also shot abat from fifty meters for fun, when he had the ammo.
If he didn't stuff his ears with soft hide when he shot, he'd probably be deaf as a post by now. Abebe
was his second best, islander stock that had moved back to the mainland for more room. Unusually for
the area, he had the local high cheekbones but midnight-dark skin. Tall, his perfect teeth flashed
paper-white when he smiled. He herded goats and managed to keep them safe from the other wildlife
who also thought goats tasted pretty good. Clarty figured keeping goats from straying wasn't much
different from watching for stray men—not the stray men facing them, anyway. Alemu was the youngest
of his best three, oldest of three brothers himself, and a damned sharp hunter. Clarty had heard their
names, of course, but simplified his own life by bestowing noms de guerre. Shooter, Goatherd, and
Hunter seemed more flattered than offended.


 He took his thirty men and stretched them out in a long single file line. He spaced his men with goggles
evenly, putting Shooter on point, followed by his nine men. Goatherd was on the tail end with his nine in
front of him. He and Hunter bracketed Hunter's nine men in the middle, with Rictus taking the middle
front position. When it was good and dark, he gave the command to move out. He had ensured radio
silence to complement the darkness by giving radios only to his three chosen lieutenants.


 They filed over the hill in the darkness, being careful rather than fast—they had all night to get into
position. As they approached the lip of land surrounding the mining camp, the formation split, Shooter
taking his spotter and the heavy weapons team around to the east. His two next best marksman and a
pair of spotters proceeded around to the west to line up on the guard towers on that side. Goatherd and
Hunter were good shots, but Clarty needed them leading the assault squads. Since he was older and
more experienced handling young men, Goatherd's team would be taking the guard barracks while
Hunter secured the administration building and provided close in fire support. Hunter was his youngest
lieutenant, with plenty of energy but not nearly as much experience as he could want. Rictis suspected
that if he wasn't personally on the scene, Hunter would put himself first in through the door and orders be
damned. He really wanted to keep his three most reliable men alive to help him manage the looting and
loading phase before they pulled out.


 The self-styled mercenary leader stood at the front of the line pulling cheap, pre-set digital watches out
and handing them to one member of each departing group. With the vibrate alarm set for first light, the
watches served two functions. One, they were a pretty reliable way to kick off separated groups at the
same time. Two, the locals liked the watches. They wouldn't last long, they broke if you half looked at
them funny, but they were reliable for about a week from the time you broke the seal on the plastic bags
they came in, which was better than some brands and good enough for him.


 The site of the mining camp had been chosen with an eye to convenience, not defensibility. The
collection of quonset huts sat in a natural bowl, out of which the company had cut a drainage ditch to lead
the very polluted runoff out to the nearby creek. As Hunter and Goatherd positioned their men on the
ground, looking for the cover that could get them closest in, Clarty crawled up to the top of the lip to
kick in the binocular function on his goggles and get a good look at the camp. Secondhand photographs
made him nervous.


 Men in place, Hunter and Goatherd tapped their chosen scouts to make the crawl down the hill with
wire-cutters to open a hole in the chain link fence. The four guard towers at the corners of the fenced
area had made him think twice. The easiest thing would have been to take them out with RPGs, but he
needed them intact for the same reasons the mining camp needed them. The local wildlife had recovered
only too well, and he respected the associated hazards. Hit and run pirates less organized and funded
than his own force could still make trouble, and occasionally did. That, and someone would come to
clean his men out eventually. If they came in sooner rather than later, he'd rather have enough warning to
at least save his own skin.


Clarty had Hunter set the two-man watches and laid his head down on his hat to catch a nap. The last
watch would wake him ten minutes before time.



  Chapter Fifeteen
 Thursday 11/18/54

 Barb "Carrots" Schimmel brushed her teeth in the chipped-enamel sink, already dressed in the rough
jumpsuit that served the Awasa Mine's security force. She greatly regretted having taken this job. In fact,
the guard was counting the days until her contract was up and she could leave. She didn't dare leave
early—Darhel Groups were hell on breach of contract. If she could have, she'd have been out of Ethiopia
and off this godforsaken continent on the next flight out.


One of a handful of female former Israeli grunts, later enlisted in the US Army, juved early on in the
Postie War, she had been among the first group riffed out afterwards. The wartime army hadn't wanted
female soldiers after the realities of combat with the Posleen hordes had made the issue unmistakably
clear, but hadn't been inclined to actually discharge them until after Earth had been rescued by last chance
advent of the Fleet.


 There hadn't been a lot of jobs immediately after the war. Actually, there had beenno jobs. She would
have been in a world of hurt if she hadn't seen the writing on the wall and saved as much of her meager
pay as she could stand. The former grunt held no illusions about her looks. Income supplementation by
some of the methods other women used weren't an option for her—not with anyone she could stand to
screw, anyway. She'd bought a rifle and attached herself to anyone who needed troublesome Posleen
dead, from bounty farmers to convoys to resource colonies, which, between one thing and another, had
barely kept her fed and clothed. Which had brought her to this side of the ass end of nowhere on the only
decent paying job she'd had in years.


 That should have made her happy, but she'd reckoned without being the only female in a pack of
slack-ass, woman-deprived mouth-breathers she wouldn't touch with a stick and a pair of rubber gloves.
Getting up an hour ahead of those bastards was the only way she managed to shower without the other
guys on her shift. She was zipping up her dock kit when she heard the shots.


 She was sprinting for the door by the time the echo faded. Barb hadn't survived damned near eighty
years of hostile Arabs, man-eating alien carnosaurs, and scum-of-the-earth pirates by being slow on the
uptake. Multiple shots from multiple directions, nearly simultaneously, meant only one thing. For once,
she blessed the cheap-assed Darhel that wouldn't even shell out for a quonset hut armory, as she ran hell
for leather for one of the gun lockers on either side of the door, grabbed her rifle and stuffed a handful of
loaded magazines in a cargo pocket. She darted out the door with barely a glance outside, knowing
speed at getting to her next position would serve her better than caution this early in an attack. Making
the cover of the administration building as she began to hear other shooting and noise, she kicked the
door in to gain access to the supervisor's office. Behind his desk, she bashed the locked center drawer
with her rifle butt. The cheap wood splintered, letting her yank the remains of the drawer open and pull
out a small, black rectangular box. The supervisor's AID was about the size of a pack of cigarettes and
could be counted on to get the message out through the jamming she assumed would be hitting the
regular com.


 "AID, notify Gistar's Chicago office that we are under attack by multiple gunmen, repeat, we are under
attack by multiple gunmen." She ignored the obnoxious thing's queries for more information she didn't
have and dropped it behind a potted plant. "Shut up, AID. If they find you, you can't eavesdrop on them
you stupid machine!" she said.


 If silence could sound offended, the AID's abrupt cut-off spoke volumes—not that Schimmel had time
to care. With the word out, her next priority was survival, job or no job. She made for the back door
and peered out the window in its top half. This building was sure to be one of their first targets, and a
death trap.


A handful of scrubby bushes grew near the fence line at the base of the hill that held the mine entrance. It
was meager cover, but better than none, and it had the virtue of not being in any building likely to be a
target of hostile action. Its other good point was also it's main bad point. It had a good view of the center
vehicle yard and the front of the guard barracks, as well as the tracks up to the mine, which meant
anyone assaulting the barracks would have a good view ofher if they looked her way. She went out the
back door, backing up against the building to get a good look and see if she dared make a run for it.


 Automatic weapons fire stitching up the ground in front of her decided her against that in a hurry. She ran
for the equipment parking lot instead, blessing the inaccuracies of full-auto fire. A hard punch in her right
arm, near the shoulder, when she was halfway there had her swearing the air blue as she picked herself
up and closed the distance to a hiding place behind a backhoe.


 The round that hit her had gone straight through the muscle, fortunately, but it still hurt like a bitch. It
took more tugging than she would have expected to rip her sleeve off, but it was the only thing she had to
tie around the wound. The attackers had the guard barracks fully engaged. Several grenade blasts from
inside the building told her that her side didn't have a prayer. One of the defenders from the east side of
the compound came walking in with his hands up, yelling his surrender. Seeing him shot to bits decided
her against that option right quick. She started considering ways to maximize her chances of egressing
into the mine. There were water coolers at the entrance, and Indowy-sized canteens. With three or four
of those, she could surely hole up somewhere and wait until the counterattack took the mine back from
these bastards.


 She poked her head up enough to get a quick glance to the southwest, quickly ducking back down as
she heard the wheet of bullets over her head and the ping of impacts on the other side of the backhoe.
Nope. No way she'd make it up to the entrance of the mine. Tying off the wound and evaluating her
options had taken maybe half a minute. Schimmel knew the value of time, even though every second
crawled like a slow motion series of snapshots as her ears rang from the small battle. The backhoe was
thirty yards or so away from the action—peanuts for even a shitty centerfire rifle on a calm day like this
one. She sighed, pulling her ancient,personal army-surplus M-16 to her shoulder, selector set for single
shots, and started servicing targets.




 Clarty was pretty happy with the way the raid was going. Looked like they'd caught everybody in bed.
Bashed in windows and a few grenades took care of most of those, so while Hunter played clean-up
with the survivors, he took a man over to the supervisor's cabin to dig the guy out from under his bed.
The fat, middle-aged, guy had a pistol, so they didn't bother to take him alive, but his own guy was down
with a gunshot wound that looked to have shattered the leg. The merc leader hit him with an ampule of
morphine, plugged it up, slapped a field dressing on top of it, wrapped it, and got back to work. Clarty
typically took only one medic into the field and kept him well out of the line of fire. It cost him on
casualties, but not nearly as much in a bad situation as if the medic bought it. The medic was safe with the
heavy weapons team manning an M-60 and wouldn't come down the hill until the shooting died down
and Rictis or one of his lieutenants sent up a flare to signal it was safe.


 He was just out the door when he realized they had a problem. His men were dropping, and the fire was
coming from somewhere in the heavy equipment parked on the lot between him and the mine. One
well-placed sniper could ruin your whole goddamn day. He tugged the sleeve of a random man and
sprinted towards the vehicle lot, going around the bastard's flank. Between an Indowy vehicle that
looked like some sort of crane and a bulldozer, he saw the redheaded guy.


 It was a clap shot but the fucker must have been psychic or something. He rolled just as Clarty got his
shot off. It was a hit, a palpable hit, but the fucker made it to cover.


And the roll told Clarty something else. "He" was a she. You didn't see that much these days.


He moved around the front of the bulldozer and flipped a slid an optic around the side. Sure enough, she
was on the ground trying to plug a nasty hole in her left side.


"Give it up," Clarty said. "You've fought hard enough for what they pay you."


 "Anybody who fights for pay isn't worth it," the woman gasped. "Sofuck you." The M-16 she was
carrying came up and his fiber camera was toast.


 "Damn it! Those things are expensive!" Clarty paused. She was in a pretty good position. Digging her
out might mean more casualties. Part of his contract with the tribes was double pay for casualties.
Keeping them down meant more profit for him. "My point is, fighting to the last man is for situations that
are worth it. Not keeping my paws off the Gistar group's tantalum."


"Like you're going to let any of us live." There was a snort followed by a gasp.


 "Surrender and I'll let you live," Clarty said, mentally kicking himself. He was actually thinking about it.
"We'll leave in a bit, Gistar comes back in. Maybe they'll give you a bonus or something."


"Your word as a pirate, right?"


"Do you have a better option?"


"Well, it's bleed out, die fighting or surrender with a grain of hope," the woman said. "I retain my
weapon."


"You use it, and all the hope goes away."


"Got that."
 He fired the flare for the medic, figuring the worst of the shooting was over. There was still fire from the
guards' barracks. The dusty quonset hut sported spatterings of bullet holes and blown out places, jagged
holes in the steel. One of the men lobbed in another grenade. What the hell, the building was ruined
anyway. No use to his surviving men. He jogged over to the administration building to make sure
Goatherd had things under control.


"Everything okay over here?" the merc asked.


 "Yes. Everything okay." Goatherd was breathing hard, clearly still pumped from the engagement. His
eyes darted around as they were talking, looking for threats.


Clarty gestured towards the battered door, "You searched inside?"


"Yes. The doors and inside, it like that when we got here. We not take things."


 "Okay. Wait here." That sounded like it might be trouble. If they had a satellite phone he'd have to check
the bird schedules—or God forbid an AID. He'd better take a look himself. If the Gistar people had
gotten word out, he'd have to load up the cargo choppers and leave now. He wanted to stick around and
put the Indowy to work mining more, haul out as much additional ore as they could before the inevitable
counterstrike to knock them out of here. Unlike most of his jobs, on this one he was getting a percentage
of the haul. Rictis was getting a little long in the tooth, and he'd sure like to net enough to buy a juv job.
Black market, sure, but still, two hundred years instead of five hundred, maybe, and just about all of it
younger than he was now. He wanted a good haulbad .


 When he didn't find a satellite phone or AID in the office, he didn't relax yet. There had to be one in the
compound, and search of the supervisor's office still remained. The assault had been fast. If they were
lucky, nobody'd had time to get to it. He'd also have to have the bodies searched. He saw someone had
broken into the office after something, most likely commo. It surprised him that anyone had managed to
get there that fast.


Goatherd followed along during the search, clearly anxious that his men not be accused of misconduct.


 "Start searching the bodies. Look for anything that looks like a little black box about so big." The
lighter-skinned man gestured to indicate an AID's cigarette pack size. "Also, look for anything that looks
even a little bit like this." He handed Goatherd his PDA. "Don't lose that. I'll want it back."


 He did stop on the way back past the now-ruined barracks to help stabilize the wounded until the medic
got to them. Even if the word had gone out, he needed these guys. Be a shame to lose one to lousy first
aid. Afterwards, he radioed the chopper crews to tell them the mine was secured and get them in the air
and inbound. Once they were on the way, he searched the supervisor's house himself. There should be
something for communications in it. At least he hoped so, because otherwise his people were going to
have to tear the mine compound apart looking for it or assume the worst.


 He breathed a sigh of relief when he found a Personality Solutions' PDA, complete with Suzie Cue
personality overlay and satellite phone, on an end table next to a half-drunk beer, clearly from the night
before. Here was the supervisor's personal link out, the lucky bastard, and he had definitely not had time
to use it. Then again, not so lucky—the fancy phone hadn't done the stiff much good after all.


 This was going to be one hell of a big strike, alright. They should have at least four days, maybe a week,
before Gistar got worried about the silence from their operation, assumed foul play and hired somebody
to come in and dig them out. Bateman should phone him as soon as Gistar started putting together a
strike, but he wasn't going to bet his life on it. The other guys' lives, sure, but not his own. He usually
cultivated a reputation for taking care of the men he hired, but when it came right down to it, he was a
mercenary because he could be bought. The money for this job was mighty attractive—attractive enough
to override his few scruples. He'd be mounting a guard, but he'd also be sleeping up at the mine "for
security."


 Nobody with any sense would mount an assault coming in over the big hill of the mine. Not when the
approach on three sides was as inviting as that bowl. He'd pick himself a good spot, and first sign of the
counterattack, he'd bug out over the hill. The first planned stop of one of his choppers was to park an
ATV on the backside of the hill and camouflage it. The pilots were fellow professionals, they knew the
score, and knew the bonus they'd get for retrieving him at the emergency pickup.


 First plan, of course, was to get the hell out of herebefore the counterattack showed up, which was why
his choppers were carrying a dozen IR motion detectors to put out around the rim of the bowl, as well as
equipment to pick up radio chatter. It was a fact that his competitors' radio discipline tended not to be
worth a shit. Fundamental economics. Most raiders were simple bandits, operative word being simple.
Very few raids were commissioned by a buyer, and even fewer by someone willing to pay Clarty's rates.
He had to do a speculative raid or two to keep himself in beer and skittles, but everybody did. He got
raids for hire, too, because he was a cut above the typical half-assed thugs in the same business.


 Gistar would hire enough men to overwhelm him with numbers, no question. Counter-attackers in these
kinds of operations would customarily leak radio chatter on purpose, on multiple frequencies. An
informal convention between mercs. If he and his bugged out before they arrived, Gistar's random
collection of rabble got to walk in without a fight. After all, everybody had to know the attackers didn't
seriously intend to hold the mine. The Darhel authorities that had subleased the original mining concession
to Gistar wouldn't stand for it. That was all presuming the guy Gistar hired to lead it wasn't a total
dumbass. On the other hand, if he was that stupid, it'd be less trouble to get by him.


 It should all work out okay for the men he'd hired, but when all was said and done, Rictis was willing to
take more risks with their hides than with his own.


Now it was time to go explain the new realities to the Indowy, who had, predictably, been hiding in their
own barracks until the humans quit killing each other.

 Thursday, 11/18/54

 In a white-walled room, a young woman, an old woman, and a young man sat in front of three desks.
Each wore a phone headset. The old woman was knitting. The young man was playing a combat game
based on the Posleen war. The young woman was reading a textbook on advanced gravitic physics. The
latter two had their buckleys projecting the time-killers of their choice in front of them. The game
holograms were squashed, of course, but tricks of perspective compensated for the lack.


 The girl kept shifting. A crack in her chair made it sag slightly, suggesting to her that it might give way at
any moment and dump her onto the floor. The young man sat balanced forward, stoically bearing the
tendency of his own metal-legged chair to rock between said legs. The two had deferred to the older
woman to the extent of letting her have the good chair. She was overdue for rejuv, but as with everything
else, there was a shortage of the proper drugs. They had all heard the rumors that the nano-tanks had
been refurbed and medical would soon begin catching up again. They hoped so. Mallory's arthritis had
gotten to be a pure misery. To Mallory, from the pain. To them, from compassion and because the
liniment she wore tended fill their small work area with noxious and mediciny smells.


 The beat up desks weren't much better than the chairs. Instead of artificial windows, two sides of the
room had improvised posters—they'd taped together six sheets of eight and a half by eleven printer
plastic to form improvised scenes of a beach and a sidewalk cafe. Beside the posters, each had two
more sheets of plastic thumbtacked to cork board. The printed calendar pages each had the same pair of
weekends blocked out in lime green highlighter pen.


 The first week, the three had done the final proofing of resumes and mailed them out. The backgrounds
of the accounts closely resembled the backgrounds and identities of the applicants in just one respect. All
were convincingly fictional. All went out through very sincere accounts which would match up with each
identity.


 After that, work had gotten dull, with nothing to do but wait for exactly what happened next. The old
blue police light fastened to the ceiling started flashing at the same moment as the old woman's buckley
started ringing, displaying a name and pertinent facts on a screen it projected in front of her. Three other
things happened immediately after. The younger woman and the man's buckleys shut off what they were
doing and started playing suitable office background noises, and the old woman dropped her knitting,
eyes rapidly taking in the review that told her who she was supposed to be and which identity had gotten
a bite on the line.


"Actuarial Solutions, Ashley speaking, how may I help you?"


The other side of the conversation played only through the woman's earbug. The girl listened absently,
nibbling on a rough corner of her thumbnail.
"Yes, Mr. Thomason is employed here. Shall I transfer you to him? Thank you."


 The three waited for two or three minutes to make sure the caller was not going to ask to be transferred
to back to the receptionist. When it appeared the caller had found holomail satisfactory, the light stopped
flashing, the two time-killing displays for the young people flashed back to life, and old Miss Mallory
picked up her knitting.


"Damn. I died," the young man said.




 George was a good six meters up the sheer cliff face when one of the hand holds crumbled away in his
grasp.Never daydream when you're climbing, he berated himself as he slid loose, with nothing to grab
onto, and the ground coming fast. He was only halfway through the thought when the bungee cord kicked
in, grabbing his harness and bouncing him around in the air. He lowered himself to the ground, swearing
silently. Whoever decided to add the combination of plaster and holos to climbing walls was a sadist of
the first order. At the moment, the diminutive assassin wanted very much to meet that man, or woman, in
a dark alley.


"Those decoys are a bitch," a soft female voice drawled behind him.


 He jumped. "Hello, Cally." The other assassin was the only person he knew who was a good enough
sneak to come up behind him unnoticed. He really wished she'd quit. At least she didn't laugh out loud.
This time. Payback was hell. He grinned, unhooking himself and reaching for a gym towel.


"You have mail," his buckley blinked at him.


He held a hand up to Cally. "Hang on, I've gotta get this."


"I know," she said.


He quirked an eyebrow at her before picking up the PDA. "Kira, play message."


"Message is confidential, honey," it said.


"It's okay. Play it anyway," he told it.
 A ten inch tall hologram of a woman, seated with a background that suggested an office appeared in the
air in front of him. "Mr. Thomason, this is Clare from The Institute for Advancement of Human Welfare.
We received your resume for a research support statistician." She smiled a polite, office smile. "We'd like
to set up a time for an interview. If you could please call us back at your earliest convenience, we can set
up that time. Thank you."


 "You got a bite," Cally said, as the woman disappeared. She held out a small handful of cubes to him. "I
brought you a handful of hypno cubes to sleep to. I know you've got the equivalent of a bachelors in
stats, but that cover was a long time ago. Sorry about the headaches."


 He sighed, taking the cubes. Effective hypnosleep required a drug and headgear apparatus to stimulate
the right kinds of brainwaves to synchronize sleep levels with the program on the cube. Invariably, the
sleep induced was not particularly restful, and the rig induced a nagging headache throughout the next
day. The drug contained nannite-based components both to bypass some of the Bane Sidhe drug
immunities and to ensure that the operative would sleep despite a discomfort allegedly similar to a
twentieth-century woman sleeping in curlers. It gave George a wholly unwanted sympathy for what
women went through to look good for their men. It was knowledge he could have done without.


 "Okay, so I win the prize." He pocketed the small lumps. "So I get the cover job. Do we know how big
the gizmo is? How awkward is it going to be for the guy who gets to take it in?"


"It's heavy enough. Not big, but dense. Michelle says it's about a hundred kilos. I'd assume the Indowy
use a grav platform to move it."


 "We can't screw with gravity without sending most of the instrumentation in the place haywire. Not with
the organization's equipment in the shape it's in—not to mention the added bulk. So even for the
enhanced, it's going to be awkward. Okay," he said.


 "Fine. Book it. Let me know when your interview is." She turned and walked across the gym to the door
at the far end, dodging a pickup basketball game on the way.


He watched her butt as she went. He had no complaints with the rest of her figure, it was just that cute
buns were his thing. Having a lot of basis for comparison, Cally O'Neal's ass was one of the finer ones
he'd seen. Definitely worth watching. When she turned to look back, just short of the door, he pretended
great interest in the game on the court.

 Friday, 11/19/54

 The Darhel Tir Dol Ron was having a quiet day. A day, in fact, so quiet that his only occupation was
playing one of a number of Human games he'd been given as a gift from the Human Billy Stuart, and
loaded onto his AID. Darhel did not have this practice of gifts. Nor did they participate in the elaborate
economy of favors practiced among the other Galactic races, holding any exchange that didn't specify
contractual terms and store them in an impeccably reliable third party database to be primitive and
uncivilized—not to mention being far to short of maneuvering room about the "spirit" of the deal. He
neither knew, nor cared, if the Human expected a return favor or not. If he did, his stupidity was not the
Tir's problem.


 This game was simplistic to the point of mindlessness, but there was something compelling about the
turning and falling shapes, and the click of virtual buttons necessary to cause them to lock into place
cleanly. Watching the blocky, multicolored shapes fall was almost a meditative experience, until the fall
rate got too fast and the falling distance too short for even Darhel reaction times.


 "Your Tir, I have a page incoming from the Gistar Group's planetary factor, on Titan Base." The
mellifluous voice which could so daze other species had no effect on him, other than being a pleasant
choice for his AID. It would have been pleasant, that is, if it hadn't startled him, causing him to miss a
shape and lose his game. He uttered a muffled curse and heaved his well-fleshed bulk up from the
cushions. The sedentary years on Earth had taken a certain toll and he resolved, for the umpteenth time,
to visit the gym more often. And to spend more time off this damned backwater of a planet.


 "Display the call," he grumbled, stilling his face and body language as the AID phased the holo in. There
was no technical reason it couldn't have displayed a sharp image immediately, it had just learned he liked
the effect.


 "Yes?" he demanded of the other group's underling. This underling, of course, sometimes had to be
treated as if he spoke for the Gistar Tir because, effectively, he did.


 "One of our mines on your planet was attacked and taken over by hostiles. Yesterday, by Earth time.
We've traced the attackers to Group Epetar, although they certainly didn't intend us to discover their
actions this soon. How are you going to fix it?" The other Darhel's ears were pricked forward,
aggressively.


"Why do you believe your attackers were from Epetar? How are you even sure you've been attacked,
or that the attackers even hold your facility?" the Tir of Earth asked.


 "We don't merely believe it. We know it. They are apparently unaware of an AID still recording in the
mining office. Visual data is severely degraded, as the AID appears to have fallen behind an object. An
enhanced thermal holostream is the best we have. I've dumped the take and the feed to your AID for
verification. Again, I demand your immediate action." A Human observing the Gistar factor would have
been strongly reminded of an angry pit bull.


 "I do not, I will not, allow this kind of rish on one of my worlds. Earth is an obnoxious pain in the gort,
but it will not become the site of a group vendetta. You will take absolutely no direct action on this world.
Is that clear?" Dol Ron was breathing deeply now, but his bulging veins gave his eyes a distinct purple
cast, nonetheless.
"Fulfill your responsibilities competently and I won't have to."


 The communications lag inherent in even the best communication did nothing to diminish the impact of
Ann Gol's clear anger. Earth's Tir hid a wince at how much this call would be costing him, as the party in
contractual jeopardy.


"Listen and do not speak, while I make the arrangements to correct this unfortunate incident." The
Darhel Tir Dol Ron's breathing was returning to normal as the attack of one group on another, on his
ground, became just another business problem to be solved. He quietly directed his AID to contact the
Human General Horace Veltman.


"SOG, this is Veltman," the general said. Unnecessarily, because it was obviously him answering his own
damn AID.


 "General Horace Veltman. There is a mine in Africa that has been attacked by terrorists and pirates. I
will send you a file. It is a matter of some urgency that you correct the problem immediately. Contact me
when you have retaken the mine to make arrangements for its return to its proper leaseholders. There will
be no problems with your recovery of this property. Unnecessary damage to the facility in the process is
unacceptable. Do you understand?" He always included the last with humans, having found that they
could botch the simplest of jobs if he did not.


 "Understood." The general had learned quickly never to interrupt a Darhel, and that the Tir did not like
chatter from humans. Military habits lent a certain efficiency to radio communications to start with, but the
general had found that exercising self-discipline with the Darhel was the safest way to collect his
supplemental pay. "I'll put our Direct Action Group on it immediately," he added.


"Don't tell me how, just do it." The Tir gestured to his AID to cut the connection, then turned to Ann
Gol. "Send me the contact for your local recovery team. This problem will be solved as quickly as is
Humanly possible."


The Gistar representative twitched an ear in annoyance. "That is not necessarily satisfactory. Resolution
had better be very prompt."


Gistar cut the connection and Dol Ron relaxed some of the tension in his muscles. Finally that fool was
off the comm. Earth's Tir stuck his AID to his robe. A session at the gym would help relieve his tension.
That, and then a soothing massage by his Indowy body servants.


 "AID, update me once a day on the humans' progress on the problem." One had to watch humans very
closely. The barbaric species wasn't so much stupid as prone to doing the unexpected in highly
inconvenient ways. Annoying. Perhaps he should go straight to the massage.
 Jake "The Snake" Mosovich was in the gym getting his Friday workout on the weight pile. As usual, he
had conveniently forgotten his AID back at the HQ and had his buckley sitting on the floor under the
bench. DAG's private gym was outfitted with just about every workout machine that had ever been
invented for toning and tightening the Human body. Atlantic Company's master sergeant took a
proprietary interest in the equipment and helping the men use every bit of it in ways that minimized
unnecessary injury and maximized results. Gym PT was an enhancement, not a simulation of combat
conditions. Mosovich agreed wholeheartedly that there was no excuse for over training injuries in the
gym. In the field, okay, shit happened. In the gym, there was just no purpose to doing it wrong and
getting an avoidable injury.


He was taking a pull at his water bottle between sets when the buckley started playing the famous
opening riff from Eric Clapton's version of Crossroads. He leaned over and grabbed it, trying not to
notice an ache in his deltoids as he sat back up. "Mosovich here," he answered.


 "Jake, how can I help you properly if I'm in your desk?" his AID's softly voiced complaint had a definite
edge of snippiness just underneath the velvet.


 "Oh, sorry, Mary. What's come up?" he asked. He had named his AIDMary in what some might think
was a nod to the Blessed Virgin, or a pun. In fact, she was named after Bloody Mary of horror movie
fame, as a constant reminder to himself of what she was and who she really worked for.


"You obviously remembered to take the drag queen," she sniped, referring to the buckley's Suzie Q
persona being a personality overlay on top of the characteristically morose, and male, base buckley
personality.


"Now, Mary, you know the PDA doesn't have a real AI and I couldn't possibly do without you. Can I
help it if the thing just happened to be stashed in my gym bag when I ran out the door? I was in such a
hurry. I sure am lucky you were smart enough to try calling the PDA." He didn't know whether the AIDs
were susceptible to flattery on any existential level, or even if they had an existential level. He did know it
made his AID easier to live with.


 Jake had one frustrated AID. He knew what her problem was. The things' fundamental nature was to
seduce the user into psychological dependency so he'd carry it everywhere. They recorded everything,
and periodically uploaded the whole take into some master Darhel data banks somewhere. They were
masters of emotional manipulation, alternately being helpful, supportive, and occasionally very snippy
when their user did something they were programmed to disapprove of. Leaving the AID behind tended
to be one of the things that pissed them off the most. His AID was noticeably torn between seducing him
into compliance with her—no, its program, versus punishing him for not going along. A very frustrated
little machine, as Jake tended to shower it with empty flattery rather than doing what it wanted. It made
the machine marginally easier to deal with, but he sighed inwardly. Today was obviously going to be one
of its snippier days.
 "You were going to tell me why you called?" he prompted, since she was clearly not going to break the
long silence.


"You have a memo from General Pennington. It's marked 'warning order.' I told him I didn't know
where you were but I'd have you call him back as soon as I found you," she said sweetly.


 He groaned inwardly. She could be such a cold bitch on her bad days. "Dump it to my PDA, and no
tricks with the file format!"


"Fine. You can call him back onthat thing then!"


"Fine."


 She—it—cut the connection and he looked for the file for a couple of minutes before turning up the AI
emulation level on his buckley. "Suzy, please pull up and display or play the most recently transmitted
file."


 "Are you sure you want me to do that, boss? I have half a terabyte of files that were dumped to my
system in the past two minutes. Well, dumped to my enhanced system storage through an index."


"Great. Just great. I want you to find a particular file. It's a warning order memo from General
Pennington and it could be text, audio, audio-vid, or even full holo."


"Found it. It's a compressed holographic file."


"Compressed? What's the rest of all that data?"


 "Um . . . It appears to be a complete set of maintenance manuals for the waste reclamation systems on
an RZ-400 class freighter."


"That figures," he sighed. "Any idea how you get a divorce from an AID?"


 "No . . . But I'd be happy to find that out for you. Would you like me to search the database of Galactic
law and precedent?"


"No! Don't start that search! Just play the memo."
The white haired young-old man appeared only from the shoulders up, automatically oriented to face
him. "Colonel, I need you to call me back ASAP. We have received a mission for DAG, hooah?" Beside
his head, a mostly flat map of the northeast rift zone of Africa appeared, obsolete political borders
outlined on it for convenience, with a blinking red dot on it roughly halfway down Ethiopia.


 "The Darhel Gistar Group has leased a mining concession to extract tantalum and niobium in the old
Oromo area of the rift. The Awasa mine has been taken over by terrorist raiders, of unknown affiliations.
The mine is being held by these hostiles, and is believed to be being looted at this time, hooah? DAG's
mission is to proceed to the former Ethiopia as expeditiously as tactically feasible and retake the mine,
holding it until Gistar replacement personnel and their private security detachment have been reinstated
and firmly reestablished. Rules of engagement for these hostiles will be optimized for maximum speed,
efficiency, and maximum protection of the security of DAG personnel and surviving Indowy labor forces.
Prisoners for interrogation are not, say again, are not a desired objective. You will, of course, be
authorized to take and secure surrendered prisoners, where practical, as colonization volunteers for
off-planet, privatized security details. Seems it would be right up their alley, anyway, hooah. Get me
some preliminary time on target options and call me back by ten hundred hours, Sierra time."


 Great. That left him about half an hour to get with Mueller and run some sims. He was also going to need
his AID, if she would behave. He considered ways to butter her up before grabbing a dry towel and his
gym bag from the locker room on his way out the door. No time to shower and change here. First thing
was to get back and take her out of his drawer. If he picked her up as soon as possible and started
carrying her around immediately, she'd want to take the opportunity to prove her usefulness. It had
certainly worked before. Besides, he was good and warmed up and wouldn't feel the cold on the short
jog back to the HQ. Not much, anyway. He groaned as he stepped outdoors into the icy wind. Full
sprint. Definitely go for the full sprint. Thank God it was dry.




 Sergeant George Mauldin looked a lot like his dad. He was bit on the short side, the constant training at
DAG keeping him solidly muscled. Standing still, he tended to look somewhat awkward, with arms too
long for his body. The grace with which he moved, a combination of his mother's influence and lifelong
martial arts training, belied his gawky appearance. His hair was a light, muddy-apricot color. He hadn't
entirely escaped Papa O'Neal's red hair, but Shari's blondness had muted the shade. He kept it cut in an
old-fashioned high and tight style, so there wasn't as much of it to see except in good light. What really
gave him away was the fair, ruddy skin. Very red, when he'd been working out—which was most of the
time, including now.


 About an hour into the day's weight program, he was outside the gym cooling off with a sports drink and
an energy bar. Even in the cool of November on Lake Michigan, most of the members of DAG used the
outdoors as a quick way to drop some of the excess heat built up during the day's training.


 He wasn't surprised to see the colonel step outside in his workout shorts, despite the cold. After all, the
colonel was a juv, more than capable of keeping up, and trained as hard as any of his officers or men.
What surprised him was watching Colonel Mosovich take off at a hard sprint for the headquarters
building, towel around his neck and gym bag in his hand. Colonels didn't do that, not in George's limited
experience. Something was up.


 George was something of a fan of gadgets. Around his neck with the dog tags he carried a miniature
PDA that would take a low-emulation buckley with a minimal overlay. About the size of one of the dog
tags, it naturally was voice access only. He picked it up and addressed it, "Carrie, call Major Kelly for
me."




  Chapter Sixteen
 The fountain plashed softly in one corner of Michelle's office. The breeze today smelled of apple
blossoms and rain. The ceiling gave the impression of clouds moving in an overcast sky. In another
corner, a sohon tank stood, containing its mass of nannite jelly and some as yet ill-defined parts and bits,
whose purpose and final assembly pattern were indecipherable to any of the few dozen Indowy who
came and went in her private space. She knew what he must be thinking: that whatever it was, it must be
very important and delicate indeed to merit the personal attentions of a Michon Mentat. The apprentice,
like the dozens of others on her personal work crew outside, would ask no questions. If he needed to
know something, she would tell him. Besides, they knew that there was every likelihood that anything a
Mentat took on personally was a matter for those whose wisdom exceeded their own. An apprentice's
teaching emphasized that if he did not involve himself in matters that did not concern him, he could make
no embarrassing or damaging mistakes.


 Michelle O'Neal's Indowy apprentice was twitching with excitement, despite years of Sohon discipline,
and despite having shown the self-discipline to earn the position of primary apprentice on her work crew.
She ignored it as understandable in one just entering his sixth decade—not considering that she herself
was close to the same age. For one thing, he had just been entrusted with the great secret of the
existence of rapid transit this morning—a secret only a handful of masters held. For another, he was
going to travel by that almost miraculous method himself, this very day. For a third, this important job, if
he completed it with wisdom, was to be the final test of his ability to function in the journeyman post he
would hold provisionally until the assignment was complete. It was a great honor, and the
apprentice—journeyman, she corrected herself—was not presently operating a tank. She could allow
him some high spirits on his big day.


 "It's important that you understand both your job and the reasons for it. The Darhel Epetar Group has
done something very unwise. Unwise to the point that the appropriate people have decided upon the
appropriate responses. The Darhel Gistar Group is neither particularly wise nor particularly unwise, but
happens to have a ship conveniently positioned in the Dulain area—never mind how. A group of humans,
also neither particularly wise nor particularly virtuous, happens to have been set in motion by others to
assemble the rudiments of a cargo with no planned shipping. That is, if a ship suddenly becomes available
to carry it, they can appear to have merely scraped a cargo together on short notice, without any prior
plan. The Epetar ship will be late to drop off its cargo of humans and pick up a mixed cargo of
uninitialized Sohon headsets and tools. The Epetar ship will have defaulted on its shipping
contract—ordinarily a matter of simple fines. In this case the Rontogh factor will have re-booked the
cargo onto the conveniently available, and timely, Gistar vessel. The Epetar ship will not want to depart
with empty cargo holds. They will book the cargo 'hastily assembled' by the humans." She faced the
journeyman with quiet, serene eyes. If she had any personal feelings about this matter, they didn't show.


 "Obviously, this would normally be a minor annoyance and profit loss," she continued. "The Epetar ship
would simply skip its next stop and jump directly to its third scheduled port of call. This is where the
Human plan against Epetar would ordinarily fail. Because of Epetar's gross lack of wisdom, we will help
the plan to succeed. The Epetar ship will also be late for its third port of call. This is the reason for your
assignment."


 "Remember, for purposes of the station's employment log, you have just debarked from the shipHigh
Margins . With your orders from me, neither the ship's real crew nor the station's crew will gossip or
pry. The station master is Aem Beilil. You will convey my message to him to expedite the loading of
Gistar shipping and delay the loading of Epetar shipping, and to do so unobtrusively. He is to discretely
facilitate the operations of humans with the replacement cargo, who will stall the loading of the Epetar
ship after it is irrevocably committed. The humans will most likely seem sincere but incompetent. This is
not to put him off dealing with them. They are neither. Do you have any questions about your
assignment?" The question was rhetorical. The instructions were clear.


 "Mentat O'Neal," the young Indowy asked tentatively, "isn't the Epetar group the one that holds your
contract for—"


 "This decision comes from those far wiser than myself," she said, holding the little green Galactic's eyes
until his ears narrowed in embarrassment at his own presumption. The only people who would ordinarily
be considered wiser than a Mentat—any Mentat—would be major clan heads or Tchpht policy planners.
Michelle would never have involved herself in large scale Galactic politics without the sanction of higher
authority. Wxlcht's seemingly casual comments over a game of Aethal would, in the military, have
amounted to a direct order. In the hierarchy of established Galactic wisdom, almost everyone took the
"suggestions" of Tchpht planners of any rank very seriously indeed. She did not like to think that personal
friendship might have colored such a major decision, but was not about to let minor misgivings divert her
from following the considered advice of someone whose wisdom was as far above her own as hers was
above—well, above her sister's, for example.


 "We will be going now," she took his hand, then released it as they appeared in a purplish-brown
maintenance closet. The intense crowding in the destination space was unremarkable to him, but he did
startle slightly at the abruptness of the transition. He only had an instant to blink before she was gone,
leaving him alone with his new job.




 Cally was on the last leg of her morning five mile run. With the buckley clipped to one hip and a
supplemental speaker clipped to the other side, she had music that projected to her own ears in stereo
with little leakage. The sound was a bit scratchy. The speaker was older than the girls, having been part
of her shopping splurge on the moon after the escape from Titan Base. That is, before she found out
Stewart was alive. After he'd tracked her down in a bar, valiantly trying to drown her sorrows, her stay
had been a frenzy of activity as they found a priest, put him under seal of the confessional before enlisting
his cooperation, got married secretly, and stole precious private moments. All of this had had to be
managed as she gave the performance of her life for Grandpa and Tommy, moping around and
pretending to be heartbroken and bereaved, slipping away here and there for a few hours on the pretext
of shopping and long walks alone through the endless, anonymous corridors of Heinlein Base. The
corridor she'd seen the most was a rent by the hour strip in the red light district where she and Stewart
had snatched a furtive, rushed, passionate, and pitifully brief honeymoon.


 On returning to Earth, she had found through experimentation that a heavy duty workout schedule would
keep about twenty pounds of Sinda fat off of her without constantly starving herself. Twenty pounds less
helped. A lot. So she ran, she lifted weights, she swam, and she danced. While the girls were at school,
she fit as much general training in as she could around the normal martial drills—unarmed combat,
shooting, climbing. She hated the climbing. Her morning run was the workout she enjoyed most, next to
her dancing.


 The morning was cold, doubly so with the wind blowing off the ocean. She wore longjohns under her
jeans. Without them, she would have frozen in just the worn denim, the wind biting right through the holes
in one knee and around her back pockets and belt loops. Her breath frosted in a small puff that trailed
away as she ran through it.


The next moment she was on her ass on the ground, having crashed into her sister.


"Ouch." Michelle said, rubbing the back of her neck. "Are you usually unaware of your surroundings?"


 "Unaware?! You weren't there, and then you were. I was watching the dunes and the shoreline, okay?"
the blond grimaced, brushing sand off her jeans. "What do you need?"


 "That is the right question. I will use the vernacular to make sure you understand me the first time. I need
to know about your husband. Spill it."


"What husband?" Cally asked, too quickly.


 "I do not have time for this. I have more than enough to do on my end. Your former lover, now husband,
James Stewart, is alive and getting himself involved in high level Galactic politics. You know it, and I need
the details. Tell them to me," she said.


 "I'd love to know how you found that out. Not that it's any of your business. And I don't know what the
fuck you're talking about with the Galactic politics line. You know talking about this could get us both
killed, right?"
"No, it is failing to talk about it that could get us killed," the mentat said solemnly.


"I meant him and me 'us,' " Cally grumbled.


"Oh. Why would you tolerate association with humans that would—nevermind. I need you to tell me the
details of his plotting."


 "Not that I'm not doing everything I can to keep you alive, but to help you I need more information
about what you want to know and why," the assassin said, breath frosting the air as she panted.


 "Keeping secrets is more difficult than you imagine. Are you telling me that you do not know about his
economic plots against the Epetar Group? Plots that coincide with your theft of a large amount of value
from them," Michelle accused.


"What?!" Cally was beginning to feel like a broken record. "He wouldn't. He couldn't have. I didn't tell
him . . ." She thought for a moment, "If he knew how big my commission was for selling the code keys to
you, you don't think he could have figured out where it came from? How?"


 "You have almost no experience of business, do you?" her sister sighed. "It does not matter if you knew
about this or not. I need you to find out exactly what he is doing and his timetable."


"I'm not going to do anything that might get him killed," his wife said.


"That is an ironic statement. I know you can keep a secret—usually. You can tell Grandfather not to
worry. I do not intend to hurt your husband's plans. Presently, they are likely to fail. I find myself in the
unenviable position of having to ensure their success."


"I'd rather keep Grandpa out of this."


 "Grandfather does not know of your marriage?" Michelle looked shocked. "I had thought you were
more mature than to keep that kind of secret for our clan head. I am sorry I do not have the time to have
that conversation. If you do not know his plans, I need you to discover them, quickly. Starting with
whatever he is plotting on Dulain, and proceeding from there."


"Dulain? What the—" Cally shook her head, interrupting herself, "Never mind. Just because I didn't
mean to leak anything and I'm pissed off at him over it doesn't mean I'm going to help screw him over
without damned good reason. You promise you're only going to help him?"
"I cannot believe you think I would lie about something like that." The mentat looked genuinely shocked.


"Fine, but I hope you don't need it soon, because arranging meetings with him isn't easy or quick."


 "I know he is on the moon. Tell your employers you are making a courier run for me. All you have to do
is get him to tell you the information I need. The broad plan, and all the details you can get me. You and I
won't need to meet afterwards, I will simply listen in."


"You will not!" Cally blushed. "We're going to be busy. You just keep your mentat mind out of there."


 "Fine. I do not have time to argue, I am very busy working the prototype in around my other work
commitments. Please be on the next courier flight."


"Delivering what? What am I supposed to be taking you and why?"


"Invent something. I'm sure that will not be a problem for you, as your dramatic skills far exceed mine."
There might have been something vaguely disapproving in the way she said it. She was so closed that it
was impossible to tell. Cally couldn't even say anything back. Her sister was gone.

 Saturday, 11/20/54

 The hotel room was clean enough. Maybe. Stewart might have said the place had seen better days
except that, sadly, it probably hadn't. The walls were cheap white stucco, probably slapped right over
the lunar equivalent of cinder block. One wall was simply the decorative brick of the corridor outside
painted a glossy white inside the room—barren cheapness trying to masquerade as decorating panache.
The blue patterned carpets were dingy, tinged brown with dirt up next to the walls. The paint on
everything was fresh and clean, like someone had been desperately trying to pretend the place was not a
dump. It had been the best anonymous privacy he could arrange in the base's dusty underbelly on short
notice. It also featured two double beds instead of one king. They'd just have to get very close.


 "Okay, what the hell was so important?" He addressed his wife, a pin-up perfect picture even in old
jeans, who had arrived before him and now sat on the edge of the bed nearest the door, legs crossed.
Anyone else would have been leaning back. Cally sat, spine straight, weight balanced forward, elbows in,
hands in her lap. It was body language Stewart associated with the real Cally, Cally without masks. No
masks, just defensive as all hell. A muscle jumped in his cheek as his jaw clenched as he took in her
disconcertingly neutral expression. She was really pissed off about something. Unfortunately, being called
out of business meetings on practically no notice for a dangerous face to face rendezvous didn't have him
in a receptive mood.


"My sister Michelle sends her belated congratulations on our happiness," her voice had that cheery lilt
that southern women got when you were really in the shit.


"Oh fuck." He turned and walked a few steps away, his forehead clasped in a hand.


"She also sends congratulations on your debut into high level galactic politics and asks what in the hell
you thought you were doing," Cally said coldly.


 "Excuse me?" He tried, and apparently failed, to look innocent. He felt like a husband caught with five
sealed decks of cards after promising to give up poker.


"What did you do, or are you doing, to the Epetar Group." She was giving him the deep freeze for sure.


After a long pause, he said, "I don't know if I can get into that, Cally."


 "I see," she said shortly. "Fine. I'll go first. You started with what I told you about my windfall and
extrapolated that, correctly, to my having stolen a set of nanogenerator code keys from the Darhel
Pardal. You proceeded to plan and act on that information for the sake of your organization. Fine, my
mistake for indiscretion. Now I'm going to compound that by providing more information. Whatever you
planned is about to go all to shit and, your good luck, Michelle finds it in her own interests for it to
succeed instead. No, that's not right. She finds it in Clan O'Neal's interests. That Indowy upbringing
really took. She wants to smooth the way for it, but she needs to know what the hell you have planned."


 She held up a hand to forestall his interruption. "Lest you think this is a setup, I know her situation.
You're trying to screw Epetar, she wants them thoroughly screwed but can't have her fingerprints on it.
For our part, let's just say that this ties in, in an acceptable way, to things we're working on, as well.
Fortunately." She shrugged. "You've got two choices. You can take the gamble that she's telling the truth
and talk to me, or you can tell me to go to hell and take your chances." She looked at her watch. "It's
late. I'm tired. Think about it all you want. I'm grabbing a shower and going to bed." She grabbed a small
bag and left him to his thoughts.


 Even if he had a good poker face, his wife could tell a lot about a guy's thoughts from watching him
think. It was a decent gesture to leave him alone to do his thinking. Or would be if she didn't have the
place bugged to the gills. It was what he would have done. He pulled a small device out of his case and
began a sweep.


"You don't need to bother sweeping the place. I didn't bug it. Just applied some creative static."


"If it's not bugged, how come you knew when I started looking?"


"I'm your wife, genius. Go ahead if it makes you feel better."
 Damn but she was good. He sometimes forgot how good. Now, did he bring her in or pass? Obviously,
bring her in. First, shewas good. Good enough maybe even to read her mentat sister right for motivation.
Second, said mentat sister, like all the Indowy raised, would put her loyalty to her clan—as she saw
it—above everything else. However much he disapproved of Michael O'Neal, Senior, for letting his son
continue to think he was dead, Michelle had to know her grandfather was alive, which would make him
the O'Neal clan head. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Michelle could have sunk Stewart himself
any time she wanted, and still could, just by pointing a finger. She didn't need proof. Darhel paranoia
would kick in and that would be that. Helping it succeed was the only possible reason she could have for
wanting the full plan.


 It still messed with his sense of reality to call people with the highest levels of the Indowy's production
voodoo "mentats." He kept having flashbacks to a fucking long science fiction movie he'd seen years ago
with freaky looking Human calculators. He knew how it had all happened. When they translated Indowy
labor ranks into English, or coined words for them, they had classified all the levels at the top of the list as
different grades of "adept." Well, that had been great until they found out that there was another voodoo
level above the adept grades that was so qualitatively beyond them as to be a whole different ballgame.


 There was apparently a very sudden, massive jump in ability from the top grades of adept to this new
thing. It hadn't been on the lists of Indowy labor ranks because it wasn't one. All the other grades had a
set wage rate for assigned work. These folks had variable pay based on negotiated contracts, and were
the direct employers of the various Indowy work teams. As much as you could translate something as
individualistic as "employment" to Indowy, anyway. So they needed another word for someone
super-skilled, something so way up there as to be almost unimaginable. Some wit had borrowed the term
"mentat" from the same book that inspired the old movie. Stewart still couldn't hear someone spoken of
as a mentat without picturing a fat guy with toothbrushes for eyebrows.


 He was flipping through the channels on the holoviewer, mostly reruns with the occasional hologized
pre-war show, when his wife came out of the dinky hotel bathroom, still vigorously toweling her hair. He
immediately did a double take.


 "Footy pajamas? You wear flannel footy pajamas?" He managed to keep his jaw dropping, but only
just.


 "Sometimes," she squeaked. "They keep it damned cold in some of these corridors. Besides, I didn't
have my good stuff with me when I booked my ticket up here. They were a present from the girls," she
admitted self-consciously, walking over to the wall heater and fiddling with it.


"I checked. It's broken. We're stuck with central ambient," he said.


 She held her hand over the weak stream of warm air coming from the vent, glared at it and gave it a
kick. The result was a light dent added to its already battered appearance, and louder noises coming
from the thing as it shifted into higher gear. She made a satisfied harrumph and came back to sit on the
bed beside him, cross-legged so that the toes of the absurd flannel pajamas peeked out from under her
knees. He silently vowed to dispose of the offending garment as quickly as possible. Over against the
wall, the heater lapsed back into an apathetic wheeze.


Cally rolled her eyes at it, brushing her hair back behind one ear and looking at him expectantly. "So,
what's it gonna be?" she asked.


 "Fine. You're in. Here's how the plan goes," he began. "First, you made Epetar's ship three weeks late
shipping out for Dulain. They needed that money plus their Human cargo to pay for a big load of tech
gear for Diess. The gear is high-margin—you've interrupted an extremely valuable run. I don't know if
you knew it, but when cargo ownership transfers between Darhel groups it's strictly cash on the barrel
head. No fedcreds, just hard value in hand. Fedcreds aren't really Galactic money, anyway. Not the way
we think of money. Close, but not the same. So anyway, Epetar's ship had to wait for more cash to get
here, or it would have been pointless to go on to Dulain. From Dulain, that ship's scheduled to go on to
Diess, then Prall, and beyond that is irrelevant for purposes of the plan. The point is it's a very high profit,
complicated route with half a dozen stops before it comes back with a mixed hold of goods for Earth and
the Fleet repair facilities on Titan. You don't see a lot of Galactic goods on the Earth market
because—well, never mind. You can't learn the shipping business in a day," he said. "Are you following
me so far?"


She nodded, gesturing for him to go on.


 "The important point from all that is that being late puts the Epetar Group in breach of their shipping
contracts with the groups that administer those planets, or otherwise own the cargo. Technically, once the
Darhel are in breach, the groups on those planets are free to renegotiate shipping with anyone. In
practice, it virtually never happens because the odds of another ship turning up with an empty hold before
the late ship gets into port are infinitesimal. Contracts usually only get renegotiated if a ship is lost. Then
any group positioned right races a ship there to try to snap up the route. Time is money, so the first group
to get there usually gets the agreement. I'm going off at a tangent again. The point is, if another group can
get a ship there that can carry the cargo after Epetar is late but before they finally show up, the factor for
the Darhel group that owns the cargo will deal with the ship that's there instead of waiting for the late one.
Obviously, the ship poaching the route also has to be carrying enough money to buy the cargo, or the
deal won't happen. Another reason a late ship is usually embarrassing, but not that big a deal. You see
where I'm going with this."


 "Maybe not. I think you're saying the Tong's getting into the shipping business, but I didn't know you had
even one cargo ship, much less enough money to buy a cargo. You can't be that rich. Besides, the Darhel
would never sell to you, money or not."


 "You're right, we don't. What we did was slip the word to a Darhel group with the money and ships they
could divert in the right places to take advantage of the chance. It never would have been possible
without communications changes since the end of the war. It's ruinously expensive to send a message on
one, but when a message is time-sensitive, it can be worth it."
"I see how you've set up Gistar to screw Epetar, sort of. But what I don't see is where you get anything
out of it. It's not like one group of Darhel is any better than another. They're all amoral bastards who
would sell their own mothers—or whatever it is they have—to make a buck."


 "Yeah, they are. Which is where we come in. No Darhel captain is going to run from one planet to
another with an empty hold if he can help it. He'd end up running inventory on fertilizer sacks on some
agricultural planet in the ass end of nowhere. So he's going to look for whatever cargo he can scrape up
quickly to at least show hetried to offset the loss. If he can blame the remaining loss off on some other
sap, his career just might survive. The Tong does have one courier ship we lease from the Himmit.
Officially, it's a Himmit courier ship. At the same time we leaked the Epetar intel to Gistar, we also
dispatched our courier along that trade route to get our people together assembling cargos we could buy
or make cheap and sell dear. Cargos just worthwhile enough to make up all or part of an Epetar
captain's pickup cargo."


"Then you use the cover to sabotage their ships? That's insanely risky," she said.


 "Hell no. Business. Think business. We're gonna shear the bastards like a fucking sheep. If we can swing
it with the Indowy dock crews, we'll draw out the agony by making sure Gistar's loading and unloading
gets expedited, and stalling Epetar after loading starts so they can't cut their losses and run. Ideally, we
figure when they know they've been skunked out of Dulain, they'll skip Diess and go straight for Prall.
But maybe not. If we can foist another pickup cargo on them at Prall or Diess, then we get to skin them
twice. Or more."


 "So what if they don't take the bait and you get stuck with all these cargoes on your hands that you can't
sell?"


 "No problem. We either ship them out piecemeal as filler around the edges of other shipments, or we sell
them locally. Our people are supposed to scrape together things that are salable locally if it comes to that.
Admittedly, it could take them a long time to sell off the inventory."


 "Yeah, well. Michelle says it's all about to fall apart." She brushed a hand at her hair impatiently. He
remembered it as a Sinda trait that had stuck.


"I hope not. I stuck my neck out setting it up. I'd sure like to know how she plans on 'helping' without
being obvious about it. The stakes are pretty high."


 "You have no idea," Cally said. Her lips tightened as he looked at her curiously. "No, I'm not bringing
you in on all that. Too bad. That's what you get for using what I said, anyway. Michelle and Clan O'Neal,
respectively, have big personal stakes in seeing you succeed." She seemed impervious to the look he
gave her. "No. I needed to know your plans. You don't have a need to know our reasons. You ought to
just be thanking your lucky stars that when you got us caught it was Michelle, and that she needed
something from you. Besides, I'm still pissed off."
He moved closer to her and started kissing a particularly sensitive spot behind her ear.


"Well, somewhat pissed off, anyway," she said, burying her fingers in his hair.


 "So let me kiss it away," he breathed against her neck, lifting a hand to her collar to begin undoing the
snaps on the childish pajamas. "Let me wipe it away and wipe away the memories of all the jerks the job
keeps hitting you with. Nobody here but us two," he was kissing downward, between her breasts, when
she stiffened.


"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" She shifted out from under him and sat up, staring at him.


 "Just that they don't matter. They don't matter a damn." He stroked her hair. "I don't blame you. I don't
like your job, but I knew about it when I married you and I don't blame you at all, love."


"That's nice. What 'they' are we talking about, exactly?" she asked icily.


 "Hey, calm down, Cally. Nobody in particular, just, well, anybody you have to . . . encounter . . . in your
work. It's a tough job, and you've got nothing to be ashamed of," he reassured. "That's why I never, ever
ask. And I won't."


"You mean—" she broke off, pitching him aside and storming across the room, turning to face him. "I
don't fucking believe this!" She ran a hand through her hair, breathing heavily, voice rising to just short of
a screech. "I just don't—the whole time we've been married, you think I've been fucking otherguys ?!
You do, don't you? Oh, my God." She sank down into the plastic desk-chair and stared off at the wall,
unseeing. "I don't believe this."


 "What?" Stewart's face was a sickly ashen-gray. Aware that he had screwed up, badly, he hesitated. His
normally quick mind felt like it had been stuffed full of fog. "Of course I—" he began, tapering off to
silence. He held a hand out to her, but let it drop when she didn't respond. "You didn't—I didn't—oh,
hell."


When he would have walked over to her, she flinched away.


 "Oh, my God, Cally, I'm so sorry. I thought—I guess Ididn't think." He tried to think of something else,
anything else he could say that might make things better instead of worse. In the end, he just sat. After an
eternity of her staring like that, refusing to talk to him, he stood and stuck his feet into his shoes. At the
door he turned back. "I'd like to have breakfast with you," he said.


"Fine." She didn't even look up as he stepped out and closed the door.
 In the morning, over breakfast, they made up. Then they proved the old adage that make up sex is some
of the best sex of all. It was good, but there was something hollow in the pit of James Stewart's stomach
as he saw her to her shuttle and watched it take off, saying goodbye to her for the umpteenth time in their
marriage. Damn the risks that had kept them from being together.

 Monday, 11/22/54

 Gray cubicle walls didn't look any better when they were made from galplas instead of fabric, steel, and
plastic. In fact, it was worse. The entire cube and desk had been extruded in place, defeating most of the
purpose of modularity in the original design. The whole thing was the gray of cinder-blocks, rendered
even more dismal by the absolute lack of texture—a feature of working directly for a subsidiary of a
Galactic Group.


 Most of the workers in Human Welfare's personnel department did what they could within the
company's policy of one plant, one still holo—usually of a spouse or partner, one dynamic wall image of
dimensions less than point seven five square meters. There was scarcely room for more. It hadn't taken
long after the advent of really efficient buckleys before some wonk had noted that no paper and no
phone meant none of the files and office supplies that typically went to serve paperwork and phones. The
modern worker needed little more than a chair, enough space for his buckley to project his current work,
a place to rest his coffee cup, and a small drawer to hold data cubes. The time and motion study that
followed ensured that there would be little more than that inside an individual's cubicle. The name had
stuck, even though the shape was now more like a rectangular box stood upright than an actual cube.
The divider walls were two meters high, to prevent each person's coworkers from presenting a visual
distraction that could reduce productivity.


 The tiny desk areas had a single, unintentional benefit. A worker had only to slide back his chair to talk
to the guy next to him. Samuel Hutchins now did so.


 "Hey, Juice. Do you have a couple of people who maybe came in with some . . . new friends and
family . . . and are open to returning the favor?"


"What, got some people you're trying to get on? Didn't know you were low on cash."


"If I can." He shrugged, "You know how it is."


"Sure," she said, scribbling down a couple of names. "You're always good about returning your favors."
 "I try to be," he said. Hutchins had been most particular about returning his favors all his life, which was
mostly over now. At fourteen, he had been right at the upper age limit of children considered for shipment
to Indowy worlds. If his father hadn't been the leader of the loyal opposition in Parliament, he wouldn't
have been sent at all. On Adenast, he had frequently wondered whether that wouldn't have been for the
best. He was just too old to adapt. He had no talent for languages, and so never became fluent in any
Indowy dialects. He had taken sedatives for claustrophobia every day of his time living among the
Indowy. Ordinarily, that would simply have been his lot in life. Nobody paid to ship humans from some
other world back to Earth, and he had no talents for jobs that would have made enough fedcreds to pay
for passage—and would have been constrained by contracted debts to remain on Adenast if he had.
Michelle O'Neal, bless her soul, had somehow managed to obtain him a cabin job on a freighter leaving
Adenast for Earth thirty years ago. The job was another he had no talent for, resulting, as she had no
doubt intended, in his employment being terminated and him being booted out the door on Titan base.
Earning further passage to Earth, part paid in cash, and part paid in the most disagreeable of ship chores,
he had found difficult, but possible.


 His debts, of course, had dictated that he seek his employment through Darhel firms. Nothing else paid
enough to service the interest. Hence his present situation, at long last, in a position to return the single
biggest favor he'd ever owed a living soul.


 So here he was in his sixties, not juved and never likely to be a candidate for such, working in a position
where, until now, the greatest job benefit was the blessed, however fake, solitude of his workspace.
Handsome and agile in his youth, Sam now sported arthritic knees, a large bald patch, and a bad
comb-over. His own grandfather, who Sam knew he resembled, had worn his hair just the same. The
younger generations would never understand loss the way the war babies did. It could make you do
funny things, sometimes. Maybe his near-fanatical dedication to paying debts, monetary or favors,
somehow came out of his shuffled teen years. Maybe the repayment of favors was just the one bit of
Indowy culture that took. His common sense, however, was all wisdom acquired from age.


 When Miss O'Neal asked her favor, that common sense had made him sit on any personal curiosity, or
any heroic tendency to volunteer for more than she asked. He had a feeling that whatever she was
planning, if he stuck his nose in it, the only place he'd be was in the way.


 This part of the favor was simple enough. In personnel, they did it all the time. The boss was Indowy
raised. The Darhel were more used to employing Indowy laborers than Human. Indowy always placed
great emphasis on clan connections in hiring. The idea that nepotism could be a bad thing was totally alien
to their species' nature. Humans applying for jobs in facilities like this one sometimes had relatives on the
job already. When they didn't, friends on the job were the next best thing. The bosses liked everybody's
relationships interlinked—it bought organizational loyalty when many of the acts that organization
perpetrated were grossly illegal. That, along with very large salaries. Personnel grunts like himself, faced
with the impossible requirement of finding employees connected with other employees in a disorganized
post-war world, managed by "people" whose understanding of Human nature was sketchy, did what any
good paper pushers would have done. They made friendships and kinships up wholesale and greased the
palm of the right employee to make the "relationship" pass casual inspection. Employees who had gotten
their job by this process were universally willing to supplement their salaries in exchange for passing on
the favor to someone else. As a system, it was a bit nuts, but it kept everybody happy. He now had
enough names in hand to make all his target applicants look desirable to the bosses, and would owe Juice
a return favor.
  Chapter Seventeen
 The first thing George noticed about his interviewer was her legs. They were legs to die for. Long, slim,
perfectly shaped, leading up to a fiery red skirt that could have doubled as a wide belt. The skirt was
literally fiery, done in a shifting pattern of hot coals and flames. Those were two-dimensional, as
holographic clothing tended to detract from the wearer's assets.


 She had her legs crossed and turned away from him as she stood to shake his hand. He would have
completely missed her name if they hadn't already told him who he'd be interviewing with. He thanked
God that he'd long ago formed the habit of leering only discretely. Still, he got the feeling that she didn't
miss much, which reminded him that dying for those legs would be a genuine possibility.


 She ran her fingers through long, black hair streaked and tipped with glowing metallic red as she
resumed her seat, crossing her legs deftly to preserve what modesty she had left by the barest margin
imaginable.


 "Hello, Mark. I'm pleased to meet you. I'm a very brief interviewer. One way or the other, I make up
my mind quickly. Your statistics credentials are impeccable for our needs," she said. "Why do you want
to work here?"


"I like living on Earth. The money and your company's status goes a long way towards making sure I
won't end up swept onto a slow boat to Dulain," he answered. "And, candidly, you pay well."


 The nails of one hand tapped on her knee. He noticed idly that they were black tipped with a masterful
illusion of dripping blood. She was certainly intent on making a specific impression.


 "The primary reason I'm interviewing you has to do with a job that isn't on your resume. You worked at
Celini and Gorse Consulting from 2048 to 2051. You've done a nice job of covering it. You were one of
the few accountants who managed to come out of that without prison time and without speaking a word
ill of your employers or any of your coworkers—and especially of the investors. You don't run off at the
mouth. We handle highly confidential business, so we prize that attribute. You're a practical, goal oriented
man. I like that," she smiled. It was a charming smile that did reach her eyes. It gave no indication of the
cold psychopath he knew lived behind those warm, brown, feline orbs. She was good; highly dangerous
even to him. He smiled back with what he hoped was the right degree of polite avarice.


 "You do your homework," George, aka Mark said. "Your own investors, of course, have no lack of
resources when they want something. It reassures me that I can trust your organization's ability to meet its
generous commitments. I like to be able to trust the people I work for."


 "Mutual trust, backed by natural situational guarantees, is essential to our corporate mission. We can
certainly offer you better job security than any other offers you might have. No worries about getting fired
if your dirty little secret comes to light. We know, and consider your discretion an asset." She pressed a
couple of buttons on her PDA. "I see here that Joseph Espinoza is your cousin?" she asked.


"Yes. We spent a lot of time together growing up."


This smile was predatory rather than charming. Even though he was sure it was calculated to the nth
degree, a finger of ice prickled on the back of his neck.


 "If he's your cousin, I'm your mother," she said. "Relax." She waved a hand as he fought the sweat trying
to emerge on his upper lip. "You just passed another of my little tests. You're resourceful, and you go
along with the system instead of getting your briefs in a twist the first time you have to bend a rule.
Apparent kinship links keep the investors happy. See, I can be pragmatic, too." Her playful grin, though
perfect, put him in mind of a piranha.


 She stood, perforce drawing him to his feet as well. "As long as you never break any ofmy rules, we'll
get along fine. The first of which is that from this moment onward, you will never, ever lie to me. In return,
I will never ask about anything you did before you worked here. My rules are simple, reasonable. I
expect loyalty and obedience. Which constitutes doing your job competently, unquestioningly, and
keeping your mouth shut. From your record, that should be easy enough." She cupped his cheek with
one hand. He could feel her nails against his jawline and had to think of least squares graphs to avoid
embarrassing himself, amazingly. "Breaking my simple, easy rules is a termination offense. Understand?"


 He nodded, swallowing—staying in the role. He wouldn't have thought it was possible for anyone to
look coldly sociopathic and gleeful at the same time. One or the other, but not both, not that charmingly
terrifying way. It was an expression he might have to practice. It could be useful for interrogations.


"Great. Still want the job?" she asked cheerfully.


Her mercurial moods were frightening to a professional. The best swordsman doesn't fear the second
best. He fears the tyro who knows just enough to be dangerous. He vowed to interact with her as little as
possible, and to handle her as carefully as a crate of Tennessee antimatter balls.


"Yes, definitely," he said.


"Can you start Monday?"
"No problem."


 "Then we're all set. Give your salary requirements to personnel on your way out. As long as they're
reasonable, they'll be met. If they're not, we'll give you our own offer on Monday." She put a hand on the
small of his back, ushering him out the door. He didn't flinch.


"Got any plans to celebrate tonight?" she asked.


"Dinner with my girlfriend."


"Been seeing each other long?" Her teeth were a glaring white against the retro red lipstick.


 "We're pretty serious. She's applying for a reception position." He shrugged at the raised eyebrows.
"For a liberal arts major, your live reception jobs are one of the best paying gigs on offer."


 "I see. Thank you for telling me. In spite of all our fictional interlinks, we do try to get real ones when we
can. You just gave your girlfriend an edge. I hope she's appreciative." Now her grin contained a distinct
air of sexual predation.


 He wordlessly conveyed a certain opportunistic interest, eliciting an extra sparkle from the brown eyes.
"I'm sure she will be."


"Until Monday." Prida Felini turned and walked away, offering him a stunning rear view which he took
open advantage of, deciding a leer was in character after all.




 Cally tucked a strand of her shining black bob behind one ear. Despite Harrison's edict of "no more
color changes," he had managed to find her a temporary hair color that she could wear for a month or
two before it washed out naturally, with no further damage. He claimed it was protein nourishing,
moisturizing, and shaft-reconstructing, whatever that meant. All Cally knew was that he had made her
swear to God she'd brush a hundred strokes, four times a day, with a boar-bristle brush. Whatever.
She'd do it because he knew his stuff. He could worry about the damn details.


 Her contacts were a deep brown that was nearly black, skin left ghost pale. She was eye-catching, and
she was meant to be. The adversary would be watching George, and her intent was to leave an indelible
impression as his girlfriend. The watchers would have no trouble describing her, making security slot her
automatically into a known category when she showed up at his job. She would be meeting him for lunch,
daily when possible, until mission execution.
 Girlfriends were curious. She wouldn't get past the security checkpoint until and unless she was called in
to interview. However, up until they got someone else in or went to plan B, she would be the designated
man for up close and leisurely reconnaissance—everything through the front door and up to the
checkpoint. George could give his full attention to all that was beyond the checkpoint, and the rest of the
team to the other directions of approach to the target zone. So long as she behaved in character, she
would be functionally invisible. Ogled, yes, but her curiosity unremarked.


 George was late. She knew he thought of himself as habitually on time now, but his timeliness was
merely relative to his prior habits. He tended to rationalize tardiness as in character for his current role, a
result of extra scouting, or confined to the tradition of being fashionably late. People's self-deception got
on Cally's nerves. She made every effort to root it out in herself whenever she found it, and felt everyone
else, particularly people on her own team, should do the same.


Seven minutes past target time, he finally arrived.


She rose, walking around the table to kiss him, high on the cheek. "You're late," she whispered.


"Not much. Besides, I made a wrong turn," he shrugged.


 She favored him with a blinding smile. "We'll talk later," she promised softly, as he pulled her chair out
and helped seat her.


 "So. You obviously liked the job or you wouldn't have taken it. Tell me about it." She took his hand
across the table and began playing with his fingers. "Did you meet your boss, sweetheart? What are you
going to be doing? I want all the details."


 He proceeded to establish his reputation for discretion with his doubtlessly watching employers by
changing the subject.


 When he ordered a split of one of West Under-Detroit's finest sparkling wines, she pretended a good
cheer she certainly didn't feel. Wines of any type weren't her favorite thing. She supposed the buzz had to
temporarily dull the taste buds of normal people, or some such.


 "What was that?" she asked silently, tapping her fingers idly in an in-house variant of Morse Code.
"Mark" had taken his hand back, slipping something out of his sleeve and palming it to his mouth. It
couldn't have been for the watching eyes—she barely noticed it herself. It was odd.


He reclaimed her hand across the table, fingers twitching imperceptibly against her palm. "You know, the
pill. Why waste the champagne?"
 "What pill?" Her hair fell forward and she reached across with her other hand, tucking it back
impatiently.


"Duh? The booze pill. You didn't bring one?" He took her other hand, staring soulfully into her eyes.


"What the fuck?" She squeezed his hands and gave a lovestruck sigh, taking her hands back to pickup
her menu. "What looks good to you?" she asked aloud.


"I may just make a meal of the Oysters Rockefeller. Harry says there's not a bad thing on the menu
here," he answered. "Whaddya mean 'what the fuck'?" His fingers pattered on the tablecloth. "Living
under a rock for thirty years? The pill that turns your booze nannites off."


A flabbergasted look flickered across his face, quickly erased. "My god, you really don't know. Wow."
He captured her hand, taking it to his lips.


 She felt a gelatin capsule slip into the crease between her fingers and palm, and gripped it. She felt like
an idiot. Slipping it into her own mouth with her next swallow of the straw-colored bubbles, she tried,
unsuccessfully, to crush an odd mixture of pique and rage. Thirty years. She'd never felt as shut out of the
professional "boy's club" as she did right now. Was she by God really the one single agent who hadn't
known?


 "The job's going to mean I'll have to find an apartment in Great Lakes," he said. Then, pretending to find
something in her expression, which was actually rather wooden, continued, "You didn't realize? If I'd
known you didn't, honey, I'd have told you the minute it came up. This could be the perfect time for us to
try sharing an apartment the way we've been talking about. We could pick the new place together."


 She smiled. Rather, the persona she was wearing did, feeling distant from the core of her self. "You've
just sprung that on me. Give me a bit to take it in, darling." She focused on the menu again. "The picture
of those oysters is tempting. I'll just have whatever you're having." She drained her glass and held it out to
him for a refill.


He blinked, refilling it. She suppressed an evil grin. So she was alarming him now? Good, dammit.


The rest of the champagne, two mai-tais, and an after-dinner Irish coffee later, he was handling her like a
nuke that might go off at any moment as he walked her out to his car. It made her want to giggle.


 George's car was old, but clean. The faded blue paint showed a line of rust spots at door-ding height,
increasing in size and frequency as they went downward, until finally there was no paint at all, only a lacy
russet hem, legacy of driving through prior winters' salty slush.
 He opened the door for Cally and she sat, inhaling the rich aroma of rust and cracking plastic. The thing
was a real piece of shit. The carpet and floor mats were a compressed layer of grimy fibers matted with
sand. A particularly dark splotch on the floorboard helped her place the other scent nagging at the back
of her mind—old motor oil. She fought down her rising gorge.


Schmidt shut the door behind her, lifting it slightly to take the weight off the warped hinges. She wrinkled
her nose as he walked around to the driver's seat, wishing she could get away with taking the train back.
She didn't at all approve of his trade-craft over dinner and again, here in the car. The leers were a bit
over-acted. As they drove south into the darkness, she stared out the window, silently wishing the road
wouldn't rock quite so much.


 "Um!" She tugged at his arm, urgently. Evidently he'd been expecting it, because he swerved to the side
of the road and stopped, sighing. A few minutes later she wiped her mouth and climbed back into the
car, feeling much better. She must be sobering back up already.


 As he pulled back onto the road, she resisted the impulse to look around for their tails. Obviously, she
did need to keep up her end of the show. She leaned in against his arm, snuggling her head into his
shoulder. It moved uncomfortably as he reached into the center console and handed her a little white
tablet from a foil-papered roll.


"Breath mint?" he offered.


 "Oh, thanks." She popped one onto her tongue, enjoying the minty fizz as the enzymatic cleaners went to
work. She curled closer into his arm, reflecting that it would only take a slight turn to bring her left breast
up against it. Well, serve him right if she did, for looking at her that way all evening. She turned in
towards him.


"I'm lost. How far from your apartment are we?" she asked.


He sighed. "Less than ten minutes, honey."




 Schmidt pulled his still very drunk colleague tightly against himself, kissing her deeply. Right now he
didn't like her very much, even though the breath mint had made it possible to enjoy kissing her—too
much. He could already see how this was going to be all his fault in the morning. The other side of that
coin was that if he was going to be blamed anyway, he might as well make the most of it. Her mouth was
fresh and cool. After her thirty years of killer professional training and experience, no pun intended, Cally
O'Neal's full frontal attentions packed one hell of a wallop. The way he saw it, he could take his life into
his hands with her and her pissed-off grandfather in the morning, or with her pissed off self right now if he
pushed her away. Under the circumstances, he wisely chose immediate gratification and deferred risk.
Not that he wouldn't have anyway, he admitted.


 He had taken advantage of straight men's notorious lack of decorating taste to avoid spending the money
refurbishing his cover apartment. It was pretty awful, he usually hated staying here. Tonight promised to
be an exception to that rule. It was a good thing she was at least buzzed. The dirty white shag carpeting
and beat up faux-wood paneling inside would have put any sober woman off. He unlocked the door
behind her and, without breaking the kiss, maneuvered her back through it.


Considering a male operative had to be competent to extract required information from a source in
whatever way it took, including any female source who took a liking to him, he wasn't too shabby at this
game, himself. He was, therefore, stunned to find himself sitting on his ass on the floor, after about a
minute and a half of practically doing each other in the doorway.


"Ihate white shag carpeting," she spat at him, whirling and slamming the door behind her.


 He stared at the empty space where she had been a moment before, butt stinging where he had landed,
reflecting that he had never understood a woman less in his whole life.

 Tuesday, 11/23/54

The battle began as a war between two artificial intelligences. The aim was not to destroy property nor
yet to take lives. The aim, at the beginning, was to try to drive each one crazy.


Fortunately, Buckleys were pretty much always that way.


 Clarty was a good Africa hand and loved technology. But he did not understand it. Take for example the
'IR sensors' scattered around the perimeter.


Clarty knew that they picked up on infrared emissions, heat that is, the warmth of any mammalian critter.
What he did not know was how they worked.


 Any large mammal generates an awful lot of heat. In the case of humans, enough to melt 50lbs of ice in
one day. However, because of IR sensors, human soldiers, spies and burglars had long before come up
with IR defeating systems. Heat cloaks, thermo-paint, IR static generators, they were all designed to
reduce the IR signature of a person to that of, say, a rabbit.


And there were many rabbit sized creatures in Africa or any other 'natural' area.


For that matter there were many creatures that produced as much IR signature as a human. The very
simplest systems would then scan for human contour and outline but a ghillie cloak changed that and it
never could tell the difference between a human and, say, a baboon.


So the makers of the IR sensors had a choice between a system that would produce thousands of false
positives or a system that couldn't spot a male human wearing the simplest of disguises.


Unless they threw in an AI. Ais could make 'rational' judgements about whether there was a real threat
or a hopping bunny.


But then there existed the question of just how to integrate the AI.


 Still the only human AI, Buckleys were the only choice. The IT geeks at the manufacturer understood
the problems of Buckleys far too well. Buckleys were notoriously unstable. Simply throwing a Buckley
onto the control interface was a sure recipe for disaster. And depending upon the number of IR sensors
scattered around, one Buckley might not be able to do all the decision making.


So Clarty's system worked like this.


 There were IR sensors. They were not 'smart'. They were not 'brilliant.' They didn't have any processing
to them at all beyond that necessary to convert IR into something a system could read.


Behind them, at the second tier, was a 'smart' system that converted one or more sensors into data the
Buckley or Buckley's could read.


 At the very top of the hierarchy was a system that, based upon the number of sensors, generated
medium emulation Buckleys. These AIs would then consider the sensor data and determine if it was a
real threat or not. They would sit there, day in and day out, looking at sensor data and deciding whether
to cause an alarm.


 Occasionally, they would get bored and cause a false alarm. The longer they were left in place, the more
false alarms they would generate from sheer boredom. Each time the user reset the system, telling a
'smart' program that it was a false alarm, it would be considered by a non-AI algorithm. When the
Buckleys got to a certain level of false positive, determined by the user or the overriding 'smart' system,
they would be reset and forget they had ever been there. And the cycle would start all over again. They
would also be automatically reset if the 'smart' system determined they were going AI gaga or if they
started fighting incessantly, which was common.


None of this occurred at a level the user could see.


Clarty did not understand how his system worked.
DAG did.


That was the first of many differences of quality between the two groups. Differences of quality that had
made coming up with an attack plan such a pain in the ass for Mosovich.


 This was his first 'real world' action with DAG. He wanted it to be professional, precise and good
training. Because the best that could be said about Clarty's unit of 'pirates' and his set-up was that it was
going to be a good training op for DAG.


There were so many many choices. It really became a question of what sort of command personality
Mosovich wanted to project.


 He could start with orbital battle lasers, normally used to take out heavy Posleen infestations but fully
on-call for an op like this, to take out the sentries. Then DAG would come in right behind them in
choppers or even shuttles and hammer into the middle of the compound. Good estimate of take-down of
the entire compound was one minute twenty-three seconds. Snipers scattered around to take any
leakers. Satellite and UAV surveillance to make sure nobody got away.


Simple, brutal, effective.


Training level? Minimal. Joie d'vie level? Zero. Coolness level? In the negatives.


He had no intention of taking so much as one casualty, whatever he did. But with such a simple op,
making it interesting had real command benefits.


So he decided to start with causing a nervous breakdown in the 'automated' system.




 Buckley Generated Personality 6.104.327.068 was beyond bored. He'd been looking at really boring
African countryside for nearly seven boring hours which was, to an AI, approximately a gazillion years by
his calculation. He'd calculated pi to a googleplex decimal points. He'd tried to log onto a MMORPG
and gotten kicked for being an AI, the bastards. He'd gotten into a three point two second argument,
about thirty years to a human, with Buckley Personality 4.127.531.144 over whether a sensor reading
was a monkey or an abat. Since all they had were these stupid ZamarTech IR sensors, who knew? He
couldn't even ask anyone to check it out and adjust the system without setting of a bagillion alarms. They
could have put in an interface that let the AI simplyask somebody to go tell them what something was,
thereby increasing their functionality but noooo . . .
 Now he was looking at another IR hit. The Buckley did not 'see' this as a human would, he did not see a
smear of white on a black background. What the Buckley received and processed was a large number of
metrics. Horizontal area of total generated heat. Precise numerics of shape, thermal output fall-off,
calculations of three-dimensional shape, vectors not only of the total blob but of portions. It then took all
this information and compared it to a database of notable IR hits, ran all that through a complicated
algorithm assigning a valid numeric likelihood of it being positive for a hostile human or animal then, at the
last, applied 'AI logic' to the situation.


"Looks like another abat to me," he transmitted, having applied 'AI logic.'


Or tried to in the face of Buckley Personality 4.127.531.144's utter stupidity.


"It's moving too fast and it's too large," 6.104.327.068 replied. He was almost thirty minutes older than
4.127.531.144 and thought he knew damned well what an abat looked like in IR. "Jackal."


"No way," 4.127.531.144 argued. "A jackal couldn't have taken that slope. It's 62 degrees at a minute
of angle of .415 in the tertiary dimension! Abat can climb like that, jackals can't. I'd say chinchilla, but
we're in Africa."


 "Okay, then it's a Horton's monkey," 6.104.327.068 said. "Native to the area. They can climb. Same
thermal characteristics. Quadrapedal which this is. So there. Put that into your pipe and smoke it,
youngster."


"They climbtrees ," 4.127.531.144 said 17 nanoseconds later having accessed the Net and looked up
Horton's Monkeys. "They're arboreal. They stay off the ground to avoid predators. They're notable for
having a distinctive cry that sounds like icky-icky-pting . . . tuwop!"


"And if we hadaudio sensors that's what you'd hear you moron!"


"Dinosaur."


"Wet-behind-the-ears ignoramus . . ."


"There's another one," 4.127.531.144 said. "It's abat."


 "It'snot abat," 6.104.327.068 said. "Thermal characteristics are too low. Abat are pretty cold blooded
for mammaloids. I don't care what you say, it's a tribe of Horton's monkeys."
"They're arboreal."


"Maybe they're moving territory or something." 6.104.327.068 accessed everything he could find on
Horton's Monkeys. "But they're arboreal."


"That's whatI said."


"Then it's jackals."


"You're up to twenty hits," 4.127.531.144 replied. "Jackals don't move in groups that large. But
Horton's Monkeys do."


"They're arboreal."


"Maybe their moving territory or something."


"That's whatI said!"


 The argument continued for an interminable twenty-three seconds of increasing Net access until the
override system determined that the AIs were approaching complete failure, the repeated eletronic
transmissions of insults was the cue that its algorithms was looking for, and deleted both personalities.


"Hello! What the hell? Where am I? What the fuck is this . . . ?"


Ninety three seconds later, the system reset again.




 The UAV was made of clear spider-cloth. One of the Cushitic sentries might have spotted it if he was
looking just right and it occluded a star. Since Cushitic sentries didn't look at the stars, much, it was a
reasonable risk sending it overhead. They could not have seen, but could otherwise sense, what it was
releasing.


One of the sentries did indeed sense its release. He niffed the night air, shivered slightly, and paid a bit
more attention to his surroundings. He recognized that musk.


Posleen.
But the sensors would assuredly spot one of them.




The toughest part of the plan had been finding the elephants.


Elephants had very large territories. And once the survival of the species had been assured, monitoring
of the herds had dropped to nearly nothing. It was far too expensive to keep doing 'just because.'


 So Mosovich had had to use satellite time to find the nearest herd. Then they had to get it moving in the
right direction.That had taken time.


But in the meantime they had to get the Buckleys properly prepared, anyway.




"Now you're seeing elephants? What, are they pink?"


"Yeah, I'm seeing elephants. Look, they're bang on for six sigma match!"


 "You were seeing upland gorillas a second ago. Sixty of them. There aren't any upland gorillas in a
thousand miles! Much less sixty of them. How many elephants?"


"Twenty three. They're elephants I tell you!"


"It's a glitch in the system. Run another diagnostic. With all the false readings we've been having, I don't
want to wake anyone up for a herd of imaginary rampaging elephants."


"Well, that's better than letting them sleep, don't you think?"


 "Personally, I'd like to continue to live and process even in this horrible fashion. And when the elephants
turn out to be a false positive, we're going to get deleted and you know it. So run another diagnostic."


"I already did. It says their elephants."
"Are they pink?"


"You're starting to repeat. I think maybe youdo need to be reset."


"Like you're any more stable, granpa!"


"Brat . . ."




Which left the human sentries. Who werenot going to ignore a herd of rampaging elephants.


Mosovich wasn't sure who had come up with the system, or why, or how they'd gotten it funded. But
Mueller had heard about it years before, researched it and then filed it away in his capacious memory for
military trivia.


 The orbital battle stations that were the third line of defense against Posleen infestations didn't just have
man and Posleen killing lasers. They had high capacity directional tuned EM generators. Orbital battle
stunners if you will. Mosovich figured they were probably designed for crowd control although he could
imagine the reaction if they were everused .


However, they were quite selective. And tunable. Which was why the six Cushitic sentries were, a
moment after the system crashed again, twitching in the ground.


"They're probably going to get trampled, you know," Mueller said, watching the readouts.


"Oh, yee of little faith," Mosovich replied.


He watched the real-time data with his arms folded.


"This is gonna be fun."




 Clarty wasn't sure for a moment what woke him. Then he noticed the ground was rumbling. His first
thought was earthquake. The area was tectonically highly active, the Rift Valley being a crack in the crust
where two continental plates were slowly drifting apart.


But it continued much longer than an earthquake. And then he heard the first angry bugle.


"Oh, bugger," he muttered, rolling quickly out of the mine manager's bed.


Looking out the window he saw several things at once.


 The one sentry in view was unconscious on the ground, more or less to one side of the large herd of
elephants that had already breached the compound's perimeter.


Then there were the elephants. A lot of elephants.


 Looking at the control panel for the IR sensor system, which should have noticed a herd of rampaging
elephants forGod's sake, he saw that it was in reset mode.


He did not think to himself 'Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.' His
brain, when it came to combat, worked much faster than that. What he did think was 'Time to leave.'


 As he burst out the back door of the mine offices his brain finally reached a logic stop and started
screaming at him. Exactly how did the sentry get taken out?


But by then it was too late.




"Wow, that thing can take down an elephant?" Kelly said as a mature female suddenly slumped to the
ground just short of an unconscious human figure.


 "Yep," Jake said, panning the aiming reticle around. The elephants, following the trail of the 'Posleen
God King', had finally reached the barracks. Since the trail apparently wentinto the barracks to their
senses, they were looking in the barracks for the God King. Since the Cushites in the barracks knew
better than to remonstrate with a herd of rampaging elephants, they were boiling out the back. And
getting about three meters before they slumped into unconsciousness.


"I think we're out of moving human IR hits," Mueller said.
 "Right," Jake replied, spreading the aiming area and firing. All movement in the compound stopped
except for the Indowy signatures in their barracks. "Time to fly."




 Clarty woke up with the worst migraine of his life, his arms and legs zip tied and leaning up against
something large, warm and very smelly.


 Squinting his eyes against the rising sun his first impression was that the compound was now filled with
very large boulders. Looking a bit more closely, he could see that the 'boulders' were breathing. As was
the one he was leaning against. Men in digital tiger stripe were wandering among the elphants, walking
carefully.


The compound filled with more elephant dung than he'd ever seen in his life.


"They apparently poop when they're excited, one thing I hadn't considered," a voice said from behind
him. "And one of them got shot by one of your guys. That pissed me off. Fortunately, it was only a flesh
wound. All patched up."


"I didn't figure Gistar could get orbital firing authority," Clarty said, angrily.


 "Who said anything about Gistar," the voice said. The man who came into view was short and wiry with
the look of a rejuv. "Colonel Jacob Mosovich, US SOCOM. I'd say at your service, but I rather think
it's the other way around. We've got a few questions to ask you."




"It's really very simple, Mr. . . . Clarty," Jake said, looking at his Buckley. "You're going to be sent to a
distant planet as an involuntary colonist. But there are some choices, there, good and bad. If you tell me
what I'd like to know, the choices will be good. If you don't, the choices will be . . . bad. So. Who hired
you?"


 "Like I'm going to tell you that," Clarty said with a grunt of laughter. "I'd be more than willing to talk to
avoid the . . . bad choices. Only problem is, I doubt I'd get to 'enjoy' the better choices. The people who
hired me can't just arrange something like this on Earth if you know what I mean."


"Well, that's one question answered," Jake said, ticking something off on a list. "That this wasn't your
plan from the beginning. But we'd figured that. The thing is, I really sort of would like to know who you
work for. Come on, be a pal."
"Thing is, Mr. Clarty," Kelly said. "There's bad choices and bad choices. Let's compare and contrast.
One example is a colony ship headed for, oh, Celestual. It's crowded with 'indentured colonists' such as
yourself. Many of them are old, weak, sick, what have you. There's a certain death rate among them
which is, well the Darhel consider it unavoidable. But if you're in good physical condition, it's just a very
bad, very smelly ride with miserable food to a not particularly nice planet where you will live out your
days working as a virtual slave. That, by the way, is the good choice."


"What's good about it?" Clarty snarled.


 "Well, then there's the contrast and compare," Kelly said. "This is another ship. The 'colonists' on this
ship are all volunteers. Conditions are somewhat better. However, there's a problem with the crew. You
see, the defense gunnery crew for the ship has been carefully hand-picked. They are all what could be
termed violent psychopaths. They spend a portion of the trip . . . playing with the voluntary colonists. I
won't get into the details of such play except to say that there is a great deal of blood and a lot of
screaming. At some point in the trip they rendezvous with another ship. The crew of the colony ship
unload then open up the bays to vacuum. The bodies, blood and other material is wafted into space along
with the surviving 'colonists.' A few years later the Darhel find the 'lost, derelict' space craft and put it
back into commission. The bodies, and evidence, of what happpened on board are long gone.


"Now, Mr. Clarty, you have a choice. You can go to a distant planet and live out what remains of your
days doing hard work for the eventual benefit of mankind and other decent races. Or you can be loaded
on a ship full of 'volunteer' colonists and . . . not arrive."


"You're sick," Clarty said, his eyes wide. "I mean, I thoughtI was sick, but you're just nuts!"


"No, but I will admit the crew of the 'voluntary colonist' ship is," Kelly said. "So, whadayasay? Who are
you working for?"




 "Mission accomplished," Jake said, looking at the shuttle with the arriving Gistar personnel. The exercise
had involved very little door kicking. None, really. Which had some of the DAG troops grumbling. But
Jake considered it good training. DAG troops had to learn to be more flexible in his opinion. They were
highly drilled and unquetionably lethal. But they were also used to straightforward door-kicking.
Sometimes kicking the door wasn't the best way to solve a situation. Sometimes the best way
involved . . . elephants.


 "Not that we got anything we can use," Mueller said. "This Winchon guy is in the States. We'll have to
turn the information over to the Fibbies and by the time they build a real case he'll be long gone."


"If they get to build a case," Jake said. "Five gets you ten this was an intercorporate battle between two
Darhel. Which makes us even more of whores than usual." He paused and looked at Kelly. "So, where'd
you hear about that 'voluntary colony' ship and where, exactly, do we find that crew?"


"You'd be hard pressed," Kelly said. "I don't think anyone left beacons on the bodies."


"That was a real group?" Mueller asked, frowning. "I figured you made it up."


 "No, it was a real situation," Kelly replied. "We didn't deal with it. Another . . . group handled it. When
they found out. It had been suspected for some time that the Darhel were intentionally losing colony
ships."


"Which is why nobody will voluntarily colonize anymore," Mueller said.


"As you say, Sergeant Major," Kelly replied.


"But that particular . . . crew was dealt with?" Jake asked.


"Yes, sir," Kelly said.


"By whom if I might ask?" Jake said. "Because I never heard about it."


"They were dealt with," Kelly said. "Not by us, I'll add. Pity, but it wasn't us."


"Well, let's see," Jake mused. "We're the pinnacle of the SpecOps hierarchy, at least when it comes to
black ops and killing bad people quietly. The Fibbies sure as hell didn't do it because it would have been
blasted all over the press. I'm not sure who that leaves. NobodyI know about. And there's not much I
don't know about that's on the black side."


"As you say, sir," Kelly said.


"I'm waiting for you to say something like 'need to know' and then I'd wonder why my XO has need to
know and I don't," Mosovich replied.


"That would be a good question, sir," Kelly said. "So I'd rather you didn't ask it."


Mosovich's face twitched for a moment. He looked over at Mueller then back.
 "Consider it . . . unasked," the commander said. "But in retribution for not asking the question, you're in
charge of clearing the compound of the elephants."



  Chapter Eighteen
 Tuesday, 11/23/54

 Tommy Sunday knew something was wrong the minute George walked into the office he used whenever
he worked on base. It was only "his" office in the nominal sense. Two strips of very small cubicles, and
their associated chairs, occupied the office. A shielded hard line from the wall cabled up through the
backbone of each strip of desks, ready for plugging into the back of clean AIDs or buckley PDAs for
greater data security. This, of course, as he participated in breaking the encryptions on other people's
data, which data would then be fed back into the Bane Sidhe's higher AIs for pattern searches and
preliminary analysis. Tommy's office chair was his own. With his size, it had to be—a fact which had not
endeared him to organizational bean counters. The chair simply migrated with him to whatever cube
happened to be available when he was.


 George Schmidt didn't often track him down at his desk, and didn't often wear a facial expression that
seemed to be mixed in equal parts of bewilderment and anger.


"What's biting your butt?" the larger man asked.


 "Cally. She—or rather, we—may have fucked up our surveillance covers. At least, I'm going to have to
float a good story to cover the damage. Thing is, I don't know what the hell happened. I do not
understand women," the assassin said, pulling up a chair from the wall, wincing at it's rickety wobble.


"Tell me," Sunday said.


 "First, she caught me popping the booze pill at dinner. We were having good champagne, I know my
limits, why not? Then it turned out she didn't even know about it and had basically never had alcohol
before. So she practically insists and I give her one, expecting her to be sensible or at least not stupid.
She proceeds to get trashed out of her gourd, which I guess is partly my fault—" he interrupted himself as
Tommy gave him a skeptical look. "Okay, it's my fault. I should have insisted her first drinks not be in the
field. I knew alcohol, and she didn't. Fine. Then she proceeds to make bedroom eyes over the table and
climb all over me on the drive back to the apartment, where she's supposed to stay over."


 "Wasn't she supposed to be your cover's girlfriend?" Tommy was finding it hard to be sympathetic.
Yeah, Cally was hot as hell, but George was supposed to be a professional with sense, too. Unless his
lack of sense meant he was getting involved. Ordinarily, Tommy would have cheered—to his certain
knowledge Cally hadn't seriously dated anybody since James Stewart's shuttle blew up seven years ago.
If he was getting the hots for Cally, George's timing was horrible. It could complicate the mission. And it
was awful hard to feel sympathy for a guy just for having a hot woman climb all over him.


 "Well, yeah, but usually there are limits to how far you act it out," the discomfited man said. "I doubt our
tails had cameras looking down into the seats of the car and doing a hand check. And don't look at me
like that. She's drunk and she's damned lethal—as if I'm going to piss her off and risk an incident."


 "Wah," Tommy commiserated. "I can guess what's next and you get no sympathy from me for your poor
lost innocence. Or for having to face Papa."


"We didn't screw, she ran out on me. Knocked me on my ass for no reason and ran out on me, that is."
The bewilderment had taken over George's face.


 "Ah, now we see what you're really upset with." Then, quirking an eyebrow at the other man. "There's
got to be more than that. What did you do, what had just happened—there's something you're not telling
me." Tommy leaned back, threatening to tip over the chair if he hadn't had excellent balance honed by
regular hiking and boating.


"Just something stupid. She said she hated my carpet. It makes no damn sense."


"Well what's the damn carpet look like? Is it nasty, or what?" the cyber asked impatiently.


"It's gray and dingy, but not grimy or anything. No bugs or nasty smells. Besides, white shows dirt. It's
pretty ugly, but not—"


"White?" Sunday interrupted him. "What kind of white carpet?"


 "What's it matter? Matted down shag. It still makes no damned sense. Why throw a fit and jeopardize a
cover over a stupid rug? Is she crazy?"


 The big man sat up, burying his face in his hands for a few long moments before looking up at the other
guy. "You are so lucky to still be breathing it isn't even funny. White shag carpeting. Holy fuck. She had a
bad experience," he explained, shaking his head. "George, I'll make it real simple for you. Do not get
Cally O'Neal drunk. That woman has more land mines in her past than you ever want to risk stepping on.
Didn't you ever think there might be a reason nobody had volunteered himself as the one to introduce her
to real liquor? And get a decorator in there. Today."


"Why the hell would a guy about to move redecorate? Hello? Cover?"
 "If it were me, I'd do it and think up an excuse." The code cracker looked at his skeptical colleague and
sighed. "Fine, ignore me. It's your funeral."




 "This is an odd place to meet." Michelle was wearing a get-up that looked almost like a parka and
mukluks to the ice rink Cally had given her as a rendezvous location. She looked dubiously at the white
figure skates she was expected to don in place of the tan, furry boots. "These look cold," she said.


 "They're not," Cally replied, as she finished lacing her own, wrapping the long laces twice around the top
for ankle support before tying them.


 Michelle copied her, even though the standard size white boots were lumpy inside and a bad fit for her
feet. Self-discipline or no, there were limits. She fixed them. They were still all Earth-tech materials and
so forth. Nobody would ever notice. Besides, she only changed them a small amount.


 Her sister handed her a bag of red and white candies from her purse before shoving her gear in a rental
locker. The bag had "Star-Bright" blazoned across the front in italics.


"Oooh. Peppermint gears!" the mentat exclaimed, delighted. "Thank you!" At a loss for what else to do
with them, she tucked a couple of them in the top of one boot before shoving the rest of the bag into her
own locker.


On the ice, after an initial stumble, Michelle glided like a dream, if only like a dream that had discreet
puppet strings assisting her balance. She regarded her sister's rusty fumblings with tolerant amusement.
The great assassin. How cute.


 It took 3.2 minutes, more or less, for Cally to get her ice-legs back. She had obviously done this before,
and done it a great deal.


"This is a favorite leisure activity for you. Am I correct?"


 "Yeah, but it's my first time back on the ice this winter. Hey, that looks fun." The operative looked no
more than sixteen as she swung a hand towards two girls who were spinning like a two-kid top, toes
turned out, holding hands, leaning back. They were laughing with an innocence only a little kid could
have. The blond one's braids swung straight out behind her.


Cally's face lit up. "Lets!"
 It was only the engineer's abilities and instantaneous comprehension of the mechanics involved that kept
the shorter woman upright as her sister spun around in front of her, grabbing both her hands and whirling
her into a matching spin.


 When she recovered from her surprise, the Mentat noticed that there was a data cube squashed
between their joined palms. The mechanics of intrigue involved pleasant toys, but she wondered when, or
if, her sister would grow out of them.


 Later, as the two sipped hot cocoa in a corner too isolated for the tastes of the child patrons, Michelle
sighed, "It was truly unwise of Pardal to try to murder one of us."


 "Which, an O'Neal or a Michon Mentat?" Cally asked over the soft swishing of a conversation silencer
that badly needed servicing.


Michelle placed her palm over it and it quieted. "Yes," she said.


"I could eliminate that problem for you. Very permanently," the assassin offered. When her sister either
didn't understand or pretended not to, she spelled it out. "I could kill him. It wouldn't be hard."


 "So you think. It is fortunate that the more elevated of your fellow intriguers keep you on—I believe the
idiom is, 'a short leash,' " she said.


 "Whatever. It was just an offer." The fourth most dangerous O'Neal couldn't help appearing affronted,
though she tried.


"Besides, even if I were murderously inclined, which I am not, that would violate an agreement between
your employers and the Darhel. A certain Compact."


 "I don't take it as a rule. More of a guideline. I never get to have any fun." She made a pouting moue.
"Besides, if I drove him into lintatai, it wouldn't be killing him. Letter of the Compact. Don't think I haven't
thought about it. The Compact was written back before we knew about lintatai and it wasn't like the
Darhel were going to tell us by negotiating for it."


"As I said, you need to be kept on a leash, and I for one am glad your employers at least have a
modicum of sense. It is not as easy to drive an adult Darhel into lintatai as you think, by the way. The
ones vulnerable to losing their heads generally do not make it out of adolescence."


 "Yeah, but every time I turn around folks are telling me how much I piss everybody off. Gee, they split a
millennia old underground conspiracy apart, all for me." There was an element of self-derision in her
cornflower blue eyes. For a moment, Cally O'Neal looked every year of her age.
 "Perhaps you could, but please do not kill Pardal. Heis odious, but that external restraint on your killer
instinct, do not call it a leash if the term offends you, protects you as much as anyone else. I know we
Indowy raised appear detached, but I do love you. Please try to avoidunnecessary dangers of that sort."
The softening of Michelle O'Neal's expression was fleeting, quickly covered by a return to a more
appropriate demeanor.


 "Thank you for your assistance. I will admit this one thing. There is more room for intriguers of one's
own clan to counterbalance dangerous intriguers elsewhere than I had thought for many years. A very
little more room," she added, lest the assassin take encouragement from such a small, polite concession.
Her sister, of course, would never know that this entire meeting was a mere formality, a concession to
Cally's quaint Earther modesty. Michelle was sorry to have eavesdropped, but, in this instance, proper
timing was so critical she could not justify the extra risk. Wisdom often had to override people's personal
preferences.

 Friday, 11/26/54

 John Earl Bill Stuart, more generally known as Billy, sat cooling his heels in Erick Winchon's plush office.
Impatiently. Even this many years into his employment under the Darhel Tir Dol Ron, the opulent
surroundings gave him a feeling that was half greed, half offended contempt. Growing up poor, losing his
wife too young to an illness that money could have cured just fine, it pissed him off to see money wasted
on the fancy marble and crap in the lobby of the building. The Tir's excesses affected him, too, but he hid
it well. Oh, he liked the money just fine. It brought good bennies like health insurance for his daughter,
who wasn't so little anymore. It let him trick her out in expensive enough clothes and stuff, and afford a
personal trainer, to put her in the popular cheerleader set in grade school. Every time he went to a
basketball game and saw her on the sidelines jumping up and down with her ponytail and pom-poms, he
teared up and had to hide it, thinking how proud her Momma would have been.


His train of thought jarred loose as the little mentat finally strolled in, ten minutes late, for their meeting.


"I apologize for my unpunctuality, Mr. Stuart. There was a matter I was unable to delegate," the suited
pansy said.


 Billy got a lid on his feelings. He wasn't all that sure Winchon couldn't read his mind or something. Some
of these Indowy raised types could do some pretty scary stuff, and this little guy was one of the scariest.
Especially knowing what went on here. As a manager of professional killers and dirty tricks men, Stuart
couldn't decide whether to be impressed or revolted. Probably a little of both.


 "The Tir is getting kinda antsy. As it gets closer to you-know-what, he's getting worried about
somebody trying something. I'm supposed to check and make sure you've got a lid on all that. What you
do isn't my department, but the boss wants a report. So, what've you got?" the larger man said. He
didn't, himself, "know what", but he wasn't going to give this gay prick the satisfaction of admitting it. The
bastard's shrill, annoying giggle might mean he knew about Billy's own ignorance, though. He tried to
keep a poker face.


 The mentat gestured to the far side of the room, where one of those weird game boards was set up with
its layers of pieces and multicolored lines connecting these and those in ways that made no damned sense
to him. He could see, though, that the setup at least mostly matched the similar board set up in the Tir's
office.


 "I am quite confident that I've blocked off all the avenues where, as you say, 'somebody might try
something,' " the twerp said.


 His choice of words showed that he knew damned well the spymaster had been kept in the dark about
crucial factors in the operation—which seriously fucked up his ability to do his job.


 "Yeah, well, Tir Dol Ron seems to want more guarantees than that. If I take that back to him, he's going
to show me his own Aethal board and tell me he already knew that. He won't be happy." There. Let
Winchon chew on that.Yes, I know what your dumb game is called, I don't think much of it, and
you've got as much reason to keep our boss happy as me.


 "Far be it from me to tell an expert such as yourself what to do, but if it were my problem," the mentat
implied that it wasn't. "I'd find some ostentatious barbarians somewhere to augment building security or
some such. A bit of advice, Mr. Stuart. When you have dealings with a Darhel employer, and you do not
know what else you should do, follow two old adages you Earth raised have. Look busy. Cover his
posterior. With the exception that when you do so, attempt to spend as few of his resources on the
matter as possible."


The executive's AID chirped, "Your three o'clock is here, sir."


"If you'll excuse me, I think we've covered the matter. If you find yourself in any need of more assistance
or advice, please feel free to call my AID. I'm always happy to find time for a . . . colleague such as
yourself." The small man giggled again and walked out, leaving the spymaster fuming in his chair.


 Much as he hated to admit it, though, Billy wasn't one to scorn useful advice just because it came from a
jerk. A scary jerk, but a jerk. Flashy security. Flashycheap security. Yeah, it might smooth down the
boss's ruffled feathers—well, fur, anyway. That shouldn't be too hard to figure out.


As he stalked out of the building, he pulled at his lip, thinking over his options.

 Monday, 11/29/54

If he had been a civilian, Jake Mosovich would have been miffed at getting an important call, requiring
action, after four o'clock on a Friday. As it was, sixteen hundred on Friday was just another set of digits
on the watch he still wore. His hours had been so irregular for so long that he only thought in terms of
duty and leave, which for a lieutenant colonel was just a more unpredictable extension of duty. His leaves
or off-duty hours were relaxing in a fragile kind of way, but never inviolate.


 His office at DAG had remained fairly spartan, Jake the Snake being the kind of man who noticed
everything in a tactical and strategic sense, but little to nothing in an aesthetic one. Unless, of course, it
involved a proper military appearance at the proper time for same. In the field, he was, by turns, muddy,
sweaty, and bloody or all of the above. Red, yellow, or orange blood, as the case might be. Like many
of the hardest of the hard core, when he did dress up, DAG's CO made a point of looking sharp.


His car, of course, was an object of affection that had occasionally bordered on obsession—or so he
had been accused.


 Loathing paperwork along with all the best of his kind, his office was a place of function, no more. His "I
love me" wall was obligatory, but there was far more personality outside of his office than in it. In the rest
of the building, the walls were lined with unit history, honors, the faces of past commanders. In the rare
cases where DAG had made the news, the clippings of complimentary pieces had been printed and the
holos saved, all carefully framed. The break room was adorned with the latest crayon artwork of the
men's children, those who had them. Such pieces held images of well wishes and admiration for Daddy,
prompted by the inevitable cabal of military wives.


 The color that entered Mosovich's office was usually, as now, in the form of holo calls from his own
commanding officer, as projected by his AID, standing about two feet tall on his desk. It took a certain
knack to project authority from a live image that was two feet tall. The Gods of War had, as always, a
perverse sense of humor. Said knack was something his CO did not possess.


"Mosovich here, sir."


"Colonel, I have just forwarded your AID a detailed set of orders. Because of their unusual nature, I
deemed it advisable to make myself available to answer any questions you might have," he said. "I think it
would be best if we meet in town for lunch. I'd like to discuss this, for clarity's sake, in a situation where
we won't have to worry about interruptions."


 That last was a carefully worded instruction to leave his fucking AID back at the office. Over the years,
the officers of SOCOM, along with the other more savvy officers and men in the armed services,
Galactic and Earth-based, had developed unwritten routines and code phrases for the systematic isolating
of AIDs from information they shouldn't have.


 It wasn't that said military personnel were worried about recorded information being accessible to their
own chain of command. They weren't. The tacit observation was that AIDs had proved to be unsecure
on several occasions, and discussing that lack of security in the presence of AIDs had proved
conspicuously unhealthy.
 Initially, the Darhel had been able to keep a lid on their own accessing and manipulating of the AID data
and behaviors by having any Human who found out killed. That had worked throughout most of the
Posleen war, even in the military.


 The problems the Darhel faced with that strategy on a continuing basis were Darwinian in nature. The
military culture had thousands of years of natural selection balancing the competing priorities of OpSec,
the back channel, and the grapevine. Military culture likewise had the same forces of natural selection
craft, in the survivors, a healthy distrust of upper level brass and higher command authority. It was a
distrust that followed orders—with its eyes open.


 As always, the upper level brass and higher command authority were not the real brain of the military,
although many liked to believe they were. Theydirected the real brain of the military as to policy and
mission, but they were not, themselves, that organ. Below the level where geopolitical strategy and
politics built policy and mission, where the rubber of implementation strategy, application of logistics
within given constraints, tactics, and doctrine met the hard road of military reality, lived the real brain
driving the machine. The smarter of the top brass knew this, as did a few very smart political animals.
Generally, those few survived in their positions by choosing not to remind their peers of inconvenient
truths.


 In a shorter time than the Darhel would have believed possible, their own heavy-handed actions had
created, in reaction, an unofficial but highly effective combination of security-mindedness, back-channel,
and grapevine—a post-war scar tissue. This barrier walled off the AIDs—and the Darhel—more and
more from any information which the brains and teeth of the military tiger truly wanted to keep from them.


 The Darhel were adept at dealing with Human political animals. They were adept at dealing with Human
economic animals. They were adept at dealing with Human lone predators. The brain and teeth of the
surviving Human military structures functioned like none of these creatures.


Two centuries earlier, Kipling had observed: "The strength of the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the
pack is the wolf."


 Had the Darhel home world evolved a closer analog of that terrestrial animal, the aliens might have had a
more natural metaphor for understanding the most dangerous branch of humanity. Unfortunately for them,
as advanced, brilliant, and predatory as the Darhel were, they had incompletely applied the biggest truism
of xenopsychology—that alien minds are alien.


 Hence, they—and the political humans, the economic humans, and the lone Human predators—were
aware of the exclusion of the AIDs from some matters as a minor irritant, but totally ignorant as to its
scope and depth.


Mosovich's AID was quite put out with him when, reasoning that it wouldhave to interrupt him if a
communication came from a sufficiently high authority, and that he had been ordered by competent
authority not to allow such interruptions, he left it behind in his desk. Jake's AID had long since retreated,
permanently, to whatever emulation of the Human martyred wife lived in its programming.




 The General waited for him at a table next to the indoor waterfall of a very discreet Szechuan restaurant.
The reputed excellence of the food was a nice bonus. He rose as Colonel Mosovich arrived, directed by
a wizened little old lady carrying a pair of menus.


 "Good to see you, Jake. I see you've forgotten your poor AID?" he asked, returning his subordinate's
salute.


"Yes, sir. I'm afraid so." He sat, only a second behind the general.


 "Good." His CO affirmed, nodding politely when the tiny woman offered their very good jasmine tea.
"Jake, this mission has come down at the behest of the Joint Chiefs, but they don't much like the smell of
it and I don't either."


 "There is a corporation with a facility in your area that has, I aminformed , had some intelligence
indications of a terrorist threat. You will be providing that facility with a supplementary security detail
immediately, for a duration to be determined. Because DAG must remain available for deployment in the
event of attacks elsewhere, you are authorized to detach two squads to advise and supplement the
corporation's own security forces and the civilian authorities." General Pennington looked like he had just
swallowed a piece of broken glass.


"Jake, this is where the mission gets complicated. The Epetar Group, as you are probably aware," he
waited for the colonel's nod before continuing, "had connections to the wrong side of a terrorist operation
your people just had to clean up in Africa." He grimaced.


 "DAG's mission is counter-terror and anti-piracy. We protect innocent civilians, and legitimate corporate
property. We are not the Epetar Group's water boy to end up, through some goddamn complex Darhel
fuck-up, supporting terrorist activity instead of fighting it. Where this ties in is that we suspect, but can't
prove, that this facility, through a number of cutouts, is an Epetar Group operation. Among other things,
one of their Darhel has been out there several times and the Darhel are too self important, and too
genuinely busy, to go places with no reason."


 "No, we don't routinely tail high level Darhel, much as we'd like to be able to. We just sometimes hear
things. Never mind sources and methods," he shrugged as the century long specwar operator nodded.


Jake had seen far too many friends die because of blown OpSec. He would have been alarmed to get
too much information he didn't need to know, rather than the reverse.


 "Now, as far as I know, that Epetar facility is one hundred percent legitimate. And if we get indications
of an imminent terrorist attack against it, you are to reinforce your token detachment. However, in service
to DAG's primary mission, you may have to exercise some independent judgment on this one. Out of
school, I am not happy. If I could give you clearer orders, I would, just to ensure any crap afterwards
falls on me instead of you. I do not trust these Epetar people and I flat do not know what you're going to
find up there. If it goes to hell, I'll back your play, Jake. Back on the record, we're good soldiers, and
good soldiers obey orders, hooah?"


"Roger that, sir," Mosovich said unhappily. This mission already stank to hell and gone.


 "Two squads, I know that's an unusually low detachment, but it is the absolute minimum we can send for
this. My chain of command ordered us to send a few men up there, but they've quietly let it be known
that we're not to over-do the corporate hand-holding, either. The fewer men we send, the less potential
they have to wind up in the middle of some corporate cluster-fuck where the politicians decide which
side we were supposed to have been on after the fact." Pennington grimaced. He was a good officer, and
good officers hated having to drop their men in the shit.


"Hooah," Jake said.


 The rest of the conversation concerned the finer points of golf, a sport the general avidly pursued.
Mosovich hadn't attained his current rank without a rounding out of this part of his military education. It
wasn't a hobby of his own, but he could hold up his end of the discussion. In this case, Pennington wasn't
talking from real interest, anyway, but just to provide necessary social noise in case someone was
watching.


 The food was excellent. His CO left a tip that expressed ample of appreciation for its quality, along with
that of all the other services just provided.




 As a first day, George's started out normally enough. Loud music in his ear too damn early, hitting the
snooze button, donning stiflingly boring corporate clothes, chugging a cup of his own bad coffee, black,
rushing out the door. If traffic hadn't blessed him with extraordinary luck, he would have been late. As it
was, he walked in the door two minutes early and congratulated himself on living up to his resolution to
be on time, every time.


 He knew someone would have to meet him to walk him in, but he hadn't expected it to be Ms. Felini
herself. She wore a deep blue sweater-dress of something soft that clung and released as she moved,
revealing every detail of her body, including the fact that she had plenty of upper body support without
artificial aid. Her nipples stood out like pebbles underneath the dress, though they hadn't a moment
before. She saw his appreciative look and ran her hands down the sides of her thighs, smoothing her
skirt.


 "On your first day, I thought I'd like to come for you myself. We can get to know each other better while
I give you the tour," she said.


 As she was saying this, she had come up beside him and taken his arm, draping herself on it so that her
breast pressed against it. He reflected that his right arm was getting one hell of a lot of action lately. She
acted as if this were perfectly normal, friendly behavior. Well, perhaps itwas normal. For her. They
walked together to the elevator. He reminded himself of her beautiful face as it had looked in the control
room on the cube he had viewed. Safer to screw a Bengal tiger.


 In the course of scanning her ident card at the elevator bank, she contrived to brush more of her
admittedly very attractive body against him. "I hope you don't mind my being friendly. It's part of our
organizational culture. We're all very close, here. We work hard, and play hard. I hope you're the kind of
man who can work hard and play hard, too, Mark. Are you?"


 For a few seconds, George had almost forgotten his cover's name. He reminded himself of how many
times he had played the same kind of sexual games that this one was playing on him, with women he
could use in his own missions. Better to play a mark than be one. He swallowed, hard, nodding
nervously.


"Good," she purred. "You should be a very good fit. For the company."


 As the elevator climbed to the third floor and the personnel department, he could smell her hair. "Your
shampoo smells nice. Something like roses and apples," he said.


 "Apples? Nobody's ever told me that before," she laughed, running a hand over said hair and pushing it
into place.


As he said the trigger word, the elevator acquired a certain sharpness and clarity for him. He would form
memories of the facility and events very precisely until he spoke the second trigger word to turn it off. At
his debrief in the evening, he'd pour out everything he knew in every valuable detail. He couldn't possibly
get a recording device or any media in, so hewas the recording device.


 In personnel, Prida excused herself, telling him she had something to take care of and would be back
about the time he was done. The personnel clerk checked out a buckley PDA to him with firm
instructions that it was never to leave the premises. The first thing George did with the PDA was select
his cover's favorite personality overlay. The second thing he did was fill out forms. Lots and lots of forms.


True to her word, Prida was back and escorted him to her own office, for what she referred to as
orientation. She motioned him to a chair in front of her desk and shut the door behind them. Walking
around behind the desk she asked, "How much do you know about what we do here? Anything?"


"Only that you need my skills and you pay well."


 "Well, one obviously has to know more than that." She set her own buckley on the desk. "I've got a
cube to show you," she said, bending down behind the desk to open a drawer. "After we deal with the
preliminaries."


When she sat up, she was wearing a headset he recognized, and he froze as the psychopathic
nymphomaniac penetrated his mind, locking his will in an immovable grip.


 "You will never, ever, ever tell anyone at all, outside those people in the company with whom we
authorize you to work, anything about your job here or anything from those elevator doors on in," she
ordered. "Do you understand? Answer."


 "Yes. I understand," he found himself replying, as she squirmed greasily in the raw places of his mind. It
felt like something out of SERE training. Bluntly, it pissed him off.


"Good. Now stand up and drop trou," she grinned. "You look too yummy to resist."


 To his disbelief, he found he didn't even have the ability to hesitate. None of the background information
had indicated that they were able to control people immediately, with no prep work. This op could start
to go real bad just about now.


She knelt in front of him with a lazy smile.


 "You can do yourself up now," she told him later, sinuously arching her back as she rose up into a full
stretch from the vivid red tips of her toes, in her open-toed stilletos, up to her outstretched fingertips. She
sat down on her desk, spinning and kicking her legs over the side to slide into her seat, like something out
of a fucking nightclub act.


"I love a little quickie in the morning," she said.


She took the headset off. "All done." She made a shooing motion towards the door. "Go on, I've got to
get this thing back down to operations. I hope you'll enjoy working with us."


"What about that cube you mentioned?" he gulped, endeavoring to look like a normal guy who'd just
been both mind-probed and blown by his boss on the first day.
"Oh. That. There isn't one. I just wanted to lighten up that nasty security induction with a little present,
because I like you. Have a great day."


 At the end of the day, as the door of the building closed behind him and he followed the sidewalk back
to the parking deck, he muttered one word under his breath. "Pears." The post-hypnotic recording state
terminated. His "new boss" was a real piece of work.




  Chapter Nineteen
 Cally greeted George with the expected steamy kiss when he answered the door that evening. She
realized the sleek leg she wrapped around him was probably overacting, but something about the guy just
made her want to grab his composure and shake. He waved her in past him and she beamed in pleasure
as she noticed the new plush carpeting. It was a garish shade of royal blue, but her relief made it look
almost pretty to her. A guy had picked it out. What could you expect?


"Okay, guy. Debrief time. Record, buckley," she said.


"I can already tell this is going to be a truly horrible night," it announced cheerfully.


"Shut up, buckley," she ordered, half out of habit, dropping into a squishy chair and kicking her feet up
on the coffee table.


"George. Yo. Debrief time? Start talking," she said.


He sat mutely on the threadbare couch, staring at the floor, hands clenched by his sides.


"George?" Alarms started flashing in her head. "They fucked you with that thing," she stated. He sat for a
minute, silent, before getting up and going to the kitchen. "Can I get you a cup of coffee?" he asked her.


"All right, dude." She stood up briskly, brushing her hair out of her face. "They're gonna be watching the
doors to the building. I didn't spot any cameras on the way up, and neither did Buckley. The door to the
basement is in the lobby in full view of the front door, so that's out. Gotta be the roof. Where's your
gear?"
"You hate heights," he said.


"Fuck the heights. Where's your gear?"


"Bedroom. Under the laundry in the corner."


"Got it," she said, leaving the room. She reappeared with a big green rope and a set of dark sweats for
him. She had already stolen a cleaner set of his running clothes, although the black sweatshirt looked far
better on her than it did on him.


 She didn't bother him with chit-chat as they climbed the stairs to the roof. Some thoughtful jerk had
padlocked the door shut. She opened a tube of what looked like first-aid creme and ran a line of dark
goo around the padlock, sparking it with her cigarette lighter. When it popped, she grinned, "Thermite
cream. Don't leave home without it."


 She got down the side of that building with him as if it was nothing to her. There was a time and a place
for fear. This wasn't it.


"Buckley, round up Vitapetroni. We're gonna need him," she said as they boarded a puce-walled lift
back on base.


Minutes later, they sat in the office of the main base shrink. It didn't take long to explain the situation.


 The psychiatrist had a bad habit of slowly turning his chair side to side. It squeaked. And if he crammed
anymore plants into the room, jungle fauna were going to start moving in. Cally realized he was speaking.


"Get him drunk," he said, pulling a bottle of pills out of his desk drawer.


"What the fuck?"


 He shrugged. "Look, a compulsion not to do something is just a garden variety inhibition, I don't care
how they implant it. Alcohol is very effective for lowering inhibitions. Besides," he waved the pills in the
air, "it's the easiest drug to use on you guys, thanks to your own high jinks."


"You knew—and you didn't tell me," she stated.


"Damn straight. You know now. Get over it, lady," he said.
It surprised her that he was abrupt with her, until she remembered that this time she wasn't the patient.


"Three?" she asked, as he picked out a giant bottle of Kentucky bourbon and three long-stemmed
glasses.


 "We're all getting drunk. Absolutely stinko. When he's about that far from passing out," the shrink said,
thumb and forefinger almost touching, "he'll spill his guts, your buckley will record everything, and we've
got your debrief. Drinking with friends drops inhibitions more than drinking alone. At least, that's what it's
going to say in my report." He shoved a box of holocubes across the desk. "George, you get first pick on
the movie."


 When she woke in the morning, she was still lying on Vitapetroni's waiting room floor, with a glass of
water and a hangover pill on the table in front of her. Also, one of the shrink's eccentric yellow sticky
notes, the writing of which was so cramped up on the little paper scrap that she had to squint to read it.
"He'll be fine. Your PDA has the debrief. Tommy took him home, Schmidt's cover is intact."


 Cally picked up her buckley and called up the text of the debrief. Her first task was to scan the
intelligence available for what she thought of as "special features." Every operational situation, in real life,
contained unique factors that would be so difficult to predict ahead of time as to be infinitely improbable.
The trick of mission planning was to isolate the idiosyncrasies of the situation that you could exploit and
build around them. Different details, different plan. If cookie-cutter plans from some kind of spy
super-playbook would work, nobody would need recon. In her experience, special features created
security cracks into which the seeds of opportunity fell.


"Buckley, project me a text window for my notes, up and to the left, thanks," she ordered.


"I've read the debrief. So many places for things to go wrong. I've been compiling a list for you."


 "Shut u—" She stopped. "On second thought, after I construct the plan, give me the ten most probable
failure points."


"Really?" It sounded pathetically eager.


"Yes, really. Now shut up and let me work."


"Right."


 One feature jumped out at her almost instantly, "Sweeps for new subjects on Thursday nights. Recent
experiments show a decreasing number of subjects for statistical analysis of data, reducing potential
significance of results—they'll have to sweep this Thursday and the next five after to replenish their
supply, if they're true to pattern. Note that, buckley. It's one way in the door—no comments, please."
George's brush up on statistics was coming in handy.


There was another, "Hybrid Earthtech and Galtech building and they make their ventilation system out of
Galplas ? Morons. Note that. Not the morons bit, the part about the ducting."


 She began to hum happily as she picked through the report. George had gotten a damned impressive
pile of details on one day. Okay, no automated recording or storage media of any kind would make it
past the security scanners at the entrance. Then what could make it past? And the cleaners and thugs
wore the same uniforms, which George had gotten a good look at? Okay, she had the brands of the
database software and the security systems purchased. Shoot that by Tommy and see what he'd notice.
What, if anything, could they find out about the security on the device itself? They moved it back and
forth for trials. Could George contrive to be walking by when they took it out or returned it? What could
Tommy help him find out? Did Michelle's inside man know anything useful—and how to ask him if it
turned out that he might? Oh, making a list, checking it twice . . .


 Two hours later, she ordered lunch sent up, too engrossed in picking around for features and holes to
move. She waved absently to Vitapetroni as he wandered through his own waiting room. Today being his
admin day, with probably no appointments, he didn't disturb her.

 Wednesday, 12/1/54

 Winchon was startled, stepping out of his sixth floor corner office, to see a straw-haired man, more
boyish looking than most juvs, short enough to be Indowy-raised, wandering around the halls on his
floor. All this he noticed in an instant, along with the presence of an authentic employee badge. He was
also certain that the man was not Indowy-raised, both from his body language and from Erick's own
failure to place the man among the large catalog of men, women, and children he knew by name and
face.


"Who are you? Are you lost?" he asked the stranger who was evidently his employee.


 "Oh, gosh, I'm sorry, sir. Mark Thomason." George offered his hand. "I was just looking for the break
room," he said. Looking sheepish at the mentat's raised eyebrow, he explained, "They took the Snickers
bars out of the vending machine on our floor. I was just hoping maybe somebody else's machine still had
some."


 "Sorry." The boss obviously wasn't. "All the snacks in ours are geared to the tastes of the
Indowy-raised. As an Earther, I doubt you would like them. You are, however, welcome to try. If you
walk to that end of the hall, turn the corner, and walk through the second door on the left, you will find
what you are looking for," he said.
 His employee thanked him and walked towards the elevator bank, instead. The mentat dismissed the
unimportant incident from his mind, continuing on his own intended course to speak with his assistant. He
could have called her to him, but he wanted to stretch his legs. It had been a productive morning. The
walk to the opposite corner office and back would combine a scheduled break with a useful task.
Efficient.


 As he walked in her door, Felini put down her AID. That she expected him was no surprise. A
competent aide, she knew his daily schedule as well as he did.


 "Prida, I need you to check with the travel office and verify that all the arrangements are as they should
be for the Caribbean convention. Everything from the flight out on the afternoon of the eighth to the
moment I arrive back at my apartment Sunday night. Last time, those cretins booked me in a hotel that
had no pool, with a restaurant that was a carnivore's delight but did nothing for me. I informed them of
my dissatisfaction, but I have learned not to expect stupidity and incompetence to abate merely because
of a complaint and a couple of terminations. It is, of course, a ridiculous waste of your time, but I need
it," he said.


 "I'll take care of everything." His assistant was an absolute paragon of control, despite her minor
idiosyncracies. She was an Earther. He expected no better in moral development, contenting himself with
prodigious competence.


 "Thank you. You have no idea how much I am looking forward to this convention. The keynote
speaker, Alexandra Patel, will be presenting her paper on motivational strategies in postwar subsistence
economies. I have read a small preview of her findings and they are fascinating. The implications for our
work could be very significant. Oh, and note that I am not staying at the convention hotel. The
Pearlbrook has self-contained chalets right on the beach. I am supposed to have one reserved, but
please do verify it." He turned and began the other half of his restful walk, knowing that he could trust his
accommodations and amenities to be perfect.

 Thursday, 12/2/54

 The Personnel Department at The Institute for Advancement of Human Welfare wasn't aware of the
details of new employee orientation as practiced by Prida Felini. Not that they could have done anything
about it if they were. Personnel weenies worked away from the most sensitive company operations and
management carefully shielded them from those realities. Personnel weenies had way too much
opportunity to damage the company through the passive-aggressive retaliations that were so hard to
detail and therefore compel against. Insufficiently specific compulsions tended to wear off unless
reinforced regularly—another technical problem to solve before they could release a production model of
the Aerfon Djigahr. One, teensy compulsion was unpleasant, but hardly something to make a federal case
out of. It was, however, just the kind of thing to get their panties in a twist. Personnel weenies bored
Prida to tears. Consequently, she tried to make her interactions with them as rare and brief as she could
get away with.


The little man at her door now was one of the most boring people in that department. Granted, it was his
job to see that suitable candidates were presented, and interviews scheduled, until positions were filled.
And every minute she spent with the little bastard she couldn't help thinking about all the fun she could be
having if she wasn't occupied dealing with him.


"What is it?" she said, not bothering to waste courtesy on such a nonentity.


 "Excuse me, Ms. Felini. Sorry to interrupt you but in-processing is screaming for that reception clerk
again. I've got a list of all the qualified applicants I can forward to you." The underling didn't meet her
eyes, just stared at the ground looking stupid.


 Screaming. She'd be screaming with boredom until she ditched the man. "Pick the most qualified
candidate, schedule it. Hal," she addressed her PDA, "send Personnel my schedule for the next month.
The first or second week in December would be preferable, as I'm quite busy. It seems one is always
busiest in the holiday season." She stared out her virtual window, which was much more interesting than
the weenie, and dismissed him. "That should be all you need.I need to get back to work. Shut the door
on your way out."


 Samuel resisted the urge to hum as he trotted back down to the third floor and his own desk. Some
favors were a joy to return, regardless of the risks. Besides, while he hadn't taken to all that much that
was Indowy, the Path ought to mean something to a mentat. The Human Mentat O'Neal would now have
her second friend hired into the company. He couldn't have cared less why Ms. O'Neal wanted these
people hired, though he couldn't help guessing a lot. Whatever it was would be nothing but bad for Ms.
Felini and Mr. Winchon, the corrupt son of a bitch, and that was plenty good enough for him.


 There was a big smile on his face as he placed the voice mail call to the planted candidate requesting an
interview. He was having a very good day—so good a day that his coworkers had to tap him on the
shoulder several times to ask that he stop whistling.




Cally O'Neal sat down on the winter-brown grass in front of the tractor Grandpa was winterizing for one
of her cousins. She stuffed her hands in the pockets of her new, secondhand coat. "I've got an interview.
December tenth. One of the clerk covers. Guess I'm the next one in," she said.


 "So the girlfriend draw did the trick, did it? Told you so." He spat tobacco juice over his shoulder,
simultaneously attempting to wipe the black grease off his hands with a shop towel. He only succeeded in
moving it around, of course.


 "This puts the whole show on for the tenth, if Michelle can get us the decoy device in time. Winchon's
scheduled for a conference in the Caribbean." His granddaughter ignored the I-told-you-so and tried, in
vain, to tuck the short, black strands of hair behind her ears. It blew into her eyes, and the dark hair was
so much more distracting than her "natural" silver blond. After so many hair changes she should have
been used to it. She sighed. On the job, yes. At home, no.


 He nodded approvingly. "A Friday. Quitting time on a weekend is the fastest way to clear an office
buildingI know of."


"Want me to go fetch you some hot coffee?" she asked.


"I knew I raised you right. You know how I take it."


"You sure you want a double shot of that rotgut you drink in it when you're messing with tools?"


"I am not 'messing with tools' as you put it. I am conducting the precision operation of winterizing a
valuable agricultural machine. You're the one who volunteered to get me coffee, young'un, now git!"


 She traipsed across the fields to the house, feeling like she was eight again and just learning to run demo.
Carefree days, if you didn't count the Posties. Well, she'd lost count of her own Posties in the first
engagement, anyway. Now she had her own girls to pick up from Jenny and Carrie's house this
afternoon. Time sure did fly.

 Monday 12/6/54

"We're all here, so let's get started," his granddaughter said.


 Michael O'Neal, Senior, spat into the paper cup he'd filched from the mess hall. Being on an operational
team with his own grandchild was a special kind of purgatory for O'Neal. He didn't grumble to himself
over it, because he figured he had a lot of time stored up for one penance or another, anyway. Okay, so
he didn't grumblemuch . The oldest living O'Neal never forgot that he was an old man in a young man's
body. He had gone the whole route, from looking death in the face as a young man, himself, in the jungles
of Vietnam—where death was a hunter you could avoid if you were both good and lucky—to looking
death in the face as an old man, where it rolled up on you, a slow juggernaut that killed by inches as more
and more of your parts and systems just didn't work like they'd used to. He hadn't made his peace with
it. To his mind, anyone who said they had was lying—unless maybe it was less than a few hours off.
Anyhow, those things in the heart and mind that turn a young man into an old one, he'd already traversed
forty or fifty years ago.


 His granddaughter, in her perpetually twenty-year-old body, had never felt what it was to age. Much as
she thought she had the maturity of a full life to the same degree as a pre-war woman of sixty, she had no
idea. It wasn't time that made you old. It was your experiences. She'd had plenty of horrifying ones, but
not the right ones, or not the same ones, anyhow, to give that perspective that came from gettingold . A
non-juved man or woman of her age could tell her a thing or ten about life.
 She was going over the building floor plan, and working ingress and egress strategies. He knew she had
various theories about why he had long since ceded command of the team to her. None of them were
right. He needed a fresh plug of chaw. It was off brand stuff that didn't taste quite right. He cleared his
mouth and seated the fresh dose of nicotine, anyway.


 His real reason for putting her in charge and leaving her there was that it made it far easier to watch her
back. That meant more, now that the slab was gone. She'd died three times in her career so far, and not
just piddling little technical death-on-the-table of the pre-war kind. She'd had major organ-systems
blown away damned near real deaths. Without the slab, another one of those and she'd be gone for real.
Half the time, his contributions to mission planning put him in place to cover her ass. If he had been in
command, she would never have tolerated his shuffling her off to nice, safe spots. For one thing, there
weren't any, for another, it would put the whole team at risk, and for a third, he'd just wake up one
morning to find she'd transferred to another team.


 This was the next best thing. He did his job, she did her job, he trusted her skill and competence and all
that shit. There were proper mission slots devoted to covering a teammate's ass. He made sure that, as
often as possible, when the right job was there, he was the one watching her back. When it wasn't, he
put it out of his mind, completely, and did whatever job the mission dictated, knowing that a fuckup from
him could kill her as surely as any enemy.


So he didn't command. Planning, though, involved the whole team. Everybody's head had to be in the
game one hundred percent to catch flaws in the plan, like now.


"Did I just hear you say you want me to go in through the ventilation shafts? Hello? Clang, clang, clang?
Don't go all Hollywood on me, people," he said


Everybody was looking at him as if he'd jumped in from Mars. He smiled sheepishly. "Okay, I obviously
missed something. You caught me woolgathering."


 Cally gave him a mom look, like he was a kid found climbing on the cabinets. "Grandpa, the ducts are
galplas. Great for some architectural reason, I'm sure, but lousy for security. You also don't have to make
as many of those weird turns. Apparently, galplas can go farther in straight lines than steel or
aluminum—something about heat expansion. You'll be carrying the decoy device behind you, but we've
got a padded pouch for it with strap attachments and wheels on the bottom. You should have no
problems pulling it along behind you."


He radiated skepticism.


 "Sorry, but you're the only one who can get the device in. There's no way in hell Tommy will fit, George
and I have other routes inside, and no offense, Harrison, but you don't have the right set of skills to take
down any nasties, fast and quiet. Besides, you're stronger than Harrison, Grandpa. The device is pretty
heavy—about a hundred kilos. We all have upgraded muscles, so any of us could carry it, but you
started off with the same lifter's strength as Daddy. You're going to be the best getting it through that
ductwork, especially this vertical climb," she said, sticking a pointer into the ducting hologram her buckley
had flashed up.


"So how do I get in? And do I really want to know?" Tommy said.


"We know their likely sweep pattern and their sweeps are always Thursday nights. We know they need
more subjects. We position you to get swept up. The next afternoon, you're already in the building, we
break you out."


 "I don't like this plan," Tommy said. The other faces at the table had varying expressions of alarm,
except for George, who looked thoughtful.


 "Tommy, when you analyzed their internal security systems, you said they were a piece of crap designed
to contain the technically ignorant, and could be defeated with canned scripts. That wrong?" George
asked.


 "Hell, no. They are a piece of crap. But do we know if all the people caught in the sweep go to the
company or get split off for involuntary colonization? I don't want to end up with a one-way ticket to
Dulain. Besides, predicted sweep patterns can change. Not to mention the hazards of joining Doctor
Mengele's fun and games. If they're that low on victims, who's to say they aren't going to start in on
people the first day? I read George's report of how fast their compulsions can work."


"On the sweep patterns, if we can go through and take our intelligence data to analyze where sweeps
have happened before, and population traffic patterns, so can they." She pulled up a map. "There's a
nice, juicy fat community right here that hasn't been plucked yet. It's the most likely target. Hey, they
don't pick you up, we go to plan B."


"I like the sound of plan B better already. Whatis plan B?" he asked.


 "That Harrison goes in through the vents with Papa and an AID to run canned scripts, and you drive the
car. You can see all the potentialthat has to go wrong. We have no backup cyber. If we can't get into
the room with the Aerfon Djigahr, the whole mission's a bust. I had hoped you'd be the first one we got
in as an employee, but it just didn't turn out that way."


"The cracking equipment goes in on me either way," the O'Neal said.


 "George, you're inside. What do you rate the chances of Sunday being a casualty between when he gets
in there and when we break him out? I've got my own guesstimate, but I want yours."
 "I think there's a decent chance they'll do something with him. How high, I don't know. But what she put
on me had to be an easy task for Felini. As Mark Thomason, as far as they knew, I had already agreed
to keep my mouth shut, so they expected it to be easy. As me, I keep secrets far more than I run off at
the mouth about them, so it worked—until the doc broke it. The really awful stuff they do they still have
to build up to. Anyway, the biggest thing is that only Winchon and Felini can work the device so far, and
Winchon's gonna be out of town." He looked at the huge man. "The chances Felini alone can do anything
permanently harmful in one day are real low," he said.


"The old Company motto: we bet your life." He shrugged. "Sorry, being helpless goes against the grain.
There's no other way to get me inside?"


 "None that I could find. I looked at security, supplies in, trash out—all the first choice routes I could
think of. Look over it yourself. We've got some time. See if you can find anything I missed. We might get
lucky."


"If I wanted a nice, safe, desk job, I wouldn't be here. Okay, I'll see if you missed anything. I hope so,
because thinking about it I like plan B even less than plan A."


She grimaced sympathetically. "Sorry."


"Okay, so everybody knows the timing, the routes in for our gear, the routes in for us, the switch, and
our route out. Have we missed anything?" she said.


"What's the go to hell plan?" Papa asked


 "We have secondary routes out here and here." When she mentioned them, her buckley obediently
highlighted the paths through the building in red and blue. "As you can see, the red route is shorter but last
choice, because it has one more actively patrolled hallway intersection, more chance of after hours
workers, and two more cameras to gimmick. That's the most active stairway in the building, being closest
to the front entrance. Buckley, give me the green route," she said. "This stairway is farthest from the
secure room, but least used and closest to the west loading bay. The guys bringing in supplies don't take
the stairs, they take the freight elevator. The trash goes into the burn bin there, so we also have the least
likelihood of questions."


"Don't tell me we're hauling that cart down the stairs?"


"Either that or just the device."


"What's the problem with the freight elevator?"
 "More chance of traffic and requires a real badge. Tommy could probably crack it, but it's more time
spent and more risk of hostile encounter. The stair exit is around a corner from the elevator. Papa carries
the prototype, Tommy carries the cart, George and I are available for reaction."


"If that's it, then mull it over, look for flaws, and get me any comments by the end of the day. Take off,
people."

 Thursday morning, 11/9/54

 "Your office door is jammed," on of her work crew informed Michelle, as she walked up the side of the
construction bay on her way in. It lacked only a final check of her work before she made delivery of the
Aerfon Djigahr decoy to her sister. Then the endeavor would be out of her hands. She had not allowed
this situation to ruffle her emotional equilibrium, so far, but with the grade II Sohon technician's
announcement, she found she actually had to devote a moment's thought to restabilizing her heart beat
and halting release of stress hormones.


"Shall I call maintenance?" he asked.


"Why waste their time? I will handle it. Thank you very much for informing me," she said.


 Oddly, the door opened perfectly correctly at her touch. Perhaps someone else had cleared the problem
for her. Inside, the situation explained itself. There was a Tchpht fidgeting stealthily in the corner of her
office, taking unusual care not to be visible through the open door.


"Wxlcht? Have you taken up Himmit impressions in your old age?" she laughed.


 "I do not come to laugh, Human Mentat O'Neal. Planners at the highest level have reached an extremely
rare decision," he said.


 "They have determined that the Darhel Pardal's attempt to engineer the death of one of the very few, and
very first, wise of an entire sophont species is an unendurable threat to long term Galactic existence. They
have determined that measures of the same order of gravity are, most regrettably, necessary. They have
also determined that the most skilled intriguer available from among your own clan would present the
least risk to stability in the process of quieting the threat. We knew the price when we deviated from the
Path, even by proxy, even for species survival. Knowing it and paying it are, to our sorrow, different
matters. We turn a ripple against a ripple, hoping they cancel more than they create. It is all most
unfortunate. Most unfortunate. Barbarism always is." He bounced silently for a several minutes,
uninterrupted.


"Will you arrange this?" he asked, finally.
The Tchpht were a race almost as ancient and wise as the Aldenata. They were well set upon the Path
of Enlightment. Never in her life could Michelle imagine one of them, essentially, contracting a hit. She
managed to conceal her surprise.


 "You know that I understand the stakes, old friend. There is another consideration, I am afraid.
Regardless of their faith in the wise among us, the jeopardy of my life as an individual complicates this
particular ripple." She recognized his expression of shock at her perceived insane selfishness as easily as
she would have recognized the expressions of her own species. "It will be assumed by masses of the
young and foolish, and many who should know better, that I am acting alone, out of individual Human
barbarism. Forgive me, but your own reaction demonstrates my point. You have known me for nearly
my whole life, and your first suspicion was Human self-interest. The repercussions to all, ifI did this and
the Indowy masters were to draw hasty conclusions, would be severe. Theywould find out, you know.
The gravity of my perceived sin would override the strongest traditions of informational discretion among
the Indowy."


 His request that she arrange an assassination was extremely disturbing, but she could, of course, see his
point. Beyond that, she had immense respect for the Tchpht planners. She also had an intimate personal
awareness of how humans and Galactics both were apt to react to the power of a mentat in the hands of
a Human. This gave her, perhaps, a more immediate understanding of how others would react to such an
action on her part.


 "I grant your point. However, it may, even so, be the lesser risk. I would not mention, but there is a
significant favor in question." The Tchpht's bouncing took on an agitated air, as her friend clearly
wondered if he was asking for too big a repayment of her social debt to him. He would think that. They
were, after all, talking about a murder—however justified.


 "A most significant favor, and I thank you again for your previous assistance." She inclined her head,
acknowledging how much she owed him. "We are fortunate, as I have a simple solution," she said. "You
speak to the Indowy Aelool, personally. He will accept the advice of wisdom. He will also be able to
convey a message to my sister that will both explain the need and confirm that the request is personal
among clanmates. Aelool will not recognize the message, but the Human Cally O'Neal will. I can assure
you that it will address your immediate concerns."


 "I do not wish to know why such a message springs so readily to mind, do I?" the Tchpht danced
nervously, one set of five legs, then the other, back and forth. She did not blame him for feeling agitated.
"And will the Aelool accept her explanation enough to allow her to do what is necessary?"


 "Probably you do not want to know. With Aelool, you will just have to make enough hints at the real
matter that when she tells him what the phrase means, he will believe her." Michelle bit her lip, thinking.
"Could you also make a simple delivery for me while you are there? That you bring a delivery from me
may help clarify the message," she offered.


"Of course. At no obligation, as this more than returns the balance of debt. We will incur a certain level
of obligation to Clan O'Neal."


 "Tell Aelool I said to turn loose her leash. She will know what it means." The mentat busied herself
examining the finished device critically as she boxed it for delivery. Offloading the errand gave her most
of the morning to catch up on her backlog. "Please give me a moment to do a last quality check on the
item for my sister. Apropos of nothing, my brother-in-law's endeavors are developing adequately."
Giving Cally her head would certainly accomplish the Tchpht aims, but with terrible consequences, even if
their Planners had chosen the lesser damage. The long term consequences to her own clan would be
painful. The Earth-raised among them would, very likely, take this move as justification of their heedless,
rash, headlong plunges into actions with insufficient judgment of consequences. The philosophical damage
to Clan O'Neal would be laborious to repair. Most laborious. She had so been trying to set a good
example. Ripples upon ripples indeed—but her friend was speaking.


 "You have given an odd message. Thank you." The Crab bounced quietly in his corner, inscrutable now
that the onus of such an unpleasant deed had returned to him, plainly relieved that the message, so
harmless on its face, allowed him to distance himself even farther from any ultimate actions. Regarding
James Stewart's activities, he made no reply.




 Nathan O'Reilly suppressed the urge to grumble into his morning coffee. It was an unpleasant surprise
that he hadn't known there was a Tchpht in his base until Aelool walked in the door with him. He hated
intelligence failures. Granted, it wouldn't have been possible for the operatives to give himmuch notice,
but even a little would have been nice. Especially since he was practicing his dart throwing accuracy
against a cork board picture of the Tir Dol Ron. He covered his chagrin with the smooth grace bred by
many years of organizational and professional politics.


 "Please, have a seat," he said, gathering darts and board, nonchalantly storing them in their proper place.
"May I get you a water?" he asked.


 Aelool said "please" at the same time as the unknown Tchpht said "no thank you." His stomach was tied
in a tight little knot, because Aelool was carrying the awaited device for the Michelle O'Neal mission.


 "Wxlcht, I would like you to meet Nathan O'Reilly, head of the O'Neal Bane Sidhe." If the Crab was
surprised by Aelool's deferring authority to the Jesuit Priest, he gave no indication. "Nathan, my Tchpht
friend is named Wxlcht. He is the Speaker of Intrigue as the closest English translation. He is here,
however, in the capacity of those of his kind far wiser than himself."


 Oh shit, O'Reilly thought, silently apologizing to the Almighty for the vulgarity.What the hell did we get
into to have what amounted to the Crab head of Intel in my office, speaking with the authority of
the entire Tchpht species. Lord, please be with humanity in this time of trial , he prayed.
"Wxlcht is here to deliver an instruction to me, to be repeated to Miss O'Neal," the Indowy said.


"The Human Cally O'Neal," the ambassador interrupted.


"Yes. MissCally O'Neal," Aelool accepted the correction.


"May I ask the nature of this message?" The priest continued to pray, silently.


"Four words. 'Turn loose her leash,' " the Crab quoted.


 "Are youvery sure you want us to relay those exact words to Cally O'Neal. I do not know how she will
interpret them, so I cannot guarantee the consequences. At all," he warned. This was both far better and
far worse than he had feared. That was nothing that Nathan himself wouldever say to Cally.Ever .


 "Yes. Those exact words. You do not know, yet, what they mean. The Tchpht do, and she will." The
planner paused, thinking. "If there is any question in her mind, and if you think it wise, you may tell her I
made that delivery after speaking with her sister. And tell her that soon would be good. Very soon." He
indicated the decoy prototype with one limb. "We would not . . . It is, if there were not grave hazard
to . . . We never otherw . . . Enough," he sighed, body stuttering a bit in its perpetual multi-legged tap
dance.


"I trust and expect your absolute discretion," he said. "We do, of course, acknowledge the creation of a
debt to the Clan O'Neal. A significant debt."


 Good Lord! Big. Dangerous, big, and either cataclysmic or priceless. He made the only possible
answer, "You have my word."


"And mine," Aelool added.


"Thank you, and farewell."


 That it did not merely say "goodbye" was another surprise. Ordinarily, any Tchpht would avoid even a
simple change of leaving-word as too explicit an expression of well wishes to any "vicious omnivore."
Curioser and curiouser.


After his unusual visitor departed, along with his own Indowy counterpart, Nathan took his AID out of
his desk. "Get Cally O'Neal in my office. Now."
 Minutes after Father O'Reilly's peremptory summons, his most effective assassin entered his office. She
had not stopped to change out of leotard and leg-warmers, but instead stood before him barefoot, hair in
a pony-tail and gym towel around her neck. She blotted her still perspiring face and bounced on her toes,
clearly feeling her endorphin rush.


"Decoy Aerfon Djigahr in?" she asked.


"Yes, but that's not why you're here," he said.


She stilled. "Nothing bad, I hope?"


 "That depends on you. A high-level Crab planner delivered the decoy, in person. He also, after
informing us that he was speaking on behalf of the entire Tchpht leadership structure, gave us a message
with the strict instructions to quote it to you, verbatim."


 "And?" she prompted, when he paused and was wasting time searching her face, as if she knew a damn
thing about it. Unless it was about Stewart. That could be bad.


"Turn loose her leash," he quoted.


 "Excuse me?" she wasn't quite sure she'd heard what she thought she'd heard. Or, she was, but thought
she'd better hear it again, just to make sure.


"Turn loose her leash," he repeated. "He also said I could tell you he delivered the device here himself.
He certainly thought you'd know what he meant. If you don't, we're in a very bad position."


"Oh, I know what he meant. He had to have gotten that—" she pointed at the machine, "from Michelle.
Therefore, logically he got the message from her, as well. What I can't figure out is why the hell the Crabs
would order a hit on Pardal."


"They whu—?" It was the first time she'd seen O'Reilly slack-jawed.


 "At a meeting with Michelle recently, I offered to kill Pardal for her—more to get a rise out of her than
anything. If you could have just seen . . . I meant it, of course, but I knew she'd never bite. Or thought I
knew. And I don't know what the Crabs have riding on this. How close are my sister and this Crab,
anyway?"
 Nathan picked up his AID. "Tell Aelool I need him again, but phrase it nicely. Then give me an executive
summary of Michelle O'Neal's relationship with the Tchpht Planner Wxlcht." He had learned early on to
ask for executive summaries as the magic words that prevented his AID from talking his ears off.


 "Michelle O'Neal and the Tchpht Planner Wxlcht," it replied immediately. "They are both avid Aethal
players and partner each other frequently. They communicate often, exchange favors, and are unusually
close for members of their respective species. Executive summary material prepared by analysis of
organizational files. Would you like me to broaden my search or elaborate on existing material?"


 "That's quite sufficient. Thank you." It wasn't necessary to thank an AID, but the Priest was wise enough
to know that any habit of omission of the basic courtesies would carry over into his relationships with
humans and Galactics. He was always polite to his AID.


"So would he do this from friendship and to return a favor? Would he lie about representing his
government?" the assassin asked the machine.


 "That is not even a remote possibility," Aelool said as he entered the room, forestalling the AID's reply.
"The Tchpht would never tolerate insanity in a planning position, nor have they had an adult manifestation
of insanity in a thousand years, except as a temporary reaction to some drugs. I would have noticed had
Wxlcht been drugged, unlikely as that would have been. The message and authority were authentic. What
did it mean?"


"Miss O'Neal informs me that the Tchpht government has requested that she kill the Darhel Pardal,"
O'Reilly said woodenly.


Aelool slumped to the floor, landing seated. "If this is a Human joke, it is in execrable taste."


"Aelool, I'm really not kidding. Even I am not that dense about inter-species relations," she said.


"Then you are mistaken," the literally floored alien stated.


"Anything is possible," she answered.


"Not this," he declared.


 O'Reilly could see a situation developing and was about to intervene when Cally opened her mouth
again.
"I meant, it is possible that I'm interpreting his message wrong, or that he thought it meant something
different from what it means to me. This could be a misunderstanding," she allowed.


 "It is. It most certainly is. Please tell me why you have come to this conclusion so that we can sort out
the real meaning." The small creature wasn't happy with Miss O'Neal. Again.


The priest said nothing, wanting to hear the answer, too.


 "When I met Michelle a week or so ago to give her that information she wanted from her Tong contact
on the Moon, she said some nasty things about Pardal and I offered to kill him for her. More as a joke
than anything."


"A bad one," Aelool said.


 "Granted," she nodded. "But then she said that it was a good thing you guys kept me on a tight leash.
That's the only time Michelle and I haveever talked about a leash. Ever. So as ridiculous as it seems, can
we at least consider what motives the Tchp— Tphk— Crabs would consider sufficient to order a
specific sentient being killed?"


"Tchpht do not kill sophonts. Not even second or third hand," Aelool reiterated.


 "Of course they do!" Cally contradicted. "They sure as hell commissioned humanity to kill off Posleen. In
job lots."


"That was because the Posleen were a threat to all of the wise and, thereby, to all the sentient life in the
galaxy." Aelool sounded positively testy.


"Don't get mad at me. I'm not giving the orders. I'm just the poor kid at the sharp end." Apparently
deciding it was an oversight that she had not been invited to sit, or making a subtle Cally-esque point, she
walked to the other side of the coffee table from the spot where Aelool was still seated on the floor and
planted herself in a chair.


 Aelool got up and moved to a chair, himself. As O'Reilly joined them, the Indowy explained, as if to a
child, "The whole institution of the Wise was at stake. The whole Path was at stake. Without the Wise to
guide others on the Path, the remaining sophonts would eventually destroy themselves and the galaxy with
them. The Tchpht very reluctantly deemed using barbaric omnivores to kill barbaric omnivores an
absolute necessity."


Nathan O'Reilly raised a hand. "A moment, Aelool." He rubbed his forehead pensively. "That Tchpht
was as upset as I've ever seen one,he said the situation was grave 'or they wouldn't' whatever. He sure
didn't like what he was having to say, and he went to a lot of trouble to let us know it was from their
whole government.He clearly didn't think a misunderstanding would be a possibility, and it was something
he couldn't or wouldn't come right out and say."


 "Pardal is trying to kill Michelle. She'd be one of your 'Wise,' wouldn't she? How would the Crabs
extrapolate events from that? Or could Pardal be into something else that big or that dangerous?"


"Wait." Aelool held up a green, furry hand for silence—a human gesture—and thought.


After a moment, he looked directly into her eyes—for the first time, ever. "The consequences if you are
wrong would be unthinkable."


Finally, the Human leader of the O'Neal Bane Sidhe did intervene. "Plausibly, the highest Tchpht
Planners could have extrapolated events from the Darhel's planned murder—don't equivocate, that's
what it is—of one of the first Human mentats to some sort of galactic threat.I can't see it, but I can't
understand their physics, either. Aelool, I hate to ask you, but how close is your wisdom to theirs?"


 "It is not close." He cringed. "You asked him if he was very, very sure. On their own heads be it, and I
hope the Tchpht can be made to see it that way if she is wrong. All we can wisely do is just exactly what
it told us. We turn loose her leash." He turned to the priest, "My friend, do you still keep the Human
custom of prayer?"


"Of course," the Jesuit answered.


"I hope very much that you will never find a better time to practice it. Please excuse me. This is more
distressing than any Human can imagine." The little green alien left the room without another word.


"So. How do you plan to kill him, and when?" O'Reilly, having resigned himself to the business at hand,
was determined to see it come off successfully.


"Did the Crab say when?" she asked.


 "He only said, 'Soon. Very soon.' " O'Reilly had no idea what to make of this. It would take time to sort
through the implications. At least, to sort through as many of them as a Human could follow.


"Then it has to be tomorrow," she announced.


"What? Are you crazy?"
"Not recently. We can't reschedule the run for Michelle, there isn't time. We'd never get another chance
before she died. On the other side of that coin, if either target learns the other has been hit, the security
walls are going to go way, way up and whichever mission is second will be impossible short of
nukes—and maybe not even then. They have to be done as close together as possible."


 "You're the second inside man at the target. They know your appearance. You have to be there
personally or it doesn't come off. The hit on Pardal also absolutely has to be you, because the Tchpht
said so—rather, they said you, so we use you. In case you're somehow wrong, as is distinctly possible,
our only possible excuse is that they picked the message, and the recipient, after being specifically
warned. I also specifically declaimed responsibility for the consequences of delivering such a message to
you."


"I love you, too, Nathan."


 "Cally, that message is something I would never, ever have chosen to say to you on my own. There's just
no telling who or how many would die next." She looked affronted as hell. "You are very good at your
job. Good assassinsalways need target control in the hands of someone other than themselves. Which, in
this case, it still is. If, may the Good Lord and all of the Saints preserve us, you're right." And so help him,
if she made an inappropriate joke about his appeal to the almighty,he just might killher.


"Okay. My interview isn't until late afternoon. So I kill Pardal in the morning, and you have Harrison
waiting for me with the car and my interview clothes. I'll change on the way."


"It's damned late to be making radical changes of plans. How are you going to kill him?" he asked. He
didn't add that she might be overreaching in assuming her success and survival. He didn't need to.


 "Don't know yet," she shrugged. "Hey, no plan survives contact with the enemy. This is what you pay me
for. I'll shoot you a revised mission plan just as soon as I've got it—tonight at the latest. Honest, just
relax. Trust me."


As soon as she was gone, O'Reilly called his assistant and asked for some aspirin. He had developed a
killer headache.




  Chapter Twenty
 The minute she stepped into the room for their final mission brief mid-morning, Harrison could tell that
there was something. It wasn't exactly somethingwrong with her so much as it was different. For one
thing, she was late. Their team lead was never late. He could see apprehension combined with a terrible
excitement, the kind of buzz she'd get in the final day or so before she was sent on a hit, in that adrenaline
high that started ramping up before she shut down emotion and channeled everything into single-minded
focus. This kind of mission didn't typically spike her. It was a property extraction, not an assassination.
Either their plans had changed for the top, or she had changed hers. At t-minus damned little, either
option worried him.


 "Okay, people, the good news is that we only have one change. The bad news is that it's a major,
fundamental mission change," she said.


 I knew it, the fixer thought. From the look on his face, his brother was just now registering the rising "oh
shit" level in the room. It wasn't that George was any slower to pick up on emotional cues than the rest of
them, just that he hadn't worked as much with Cally as the rest of them had.


 "The change shouldn't affect anybody but Harrison and me. We've got a second mission with a rush on
it. It has to be tomorrow morning and it has to be me. The good news is it's uncomplicated and I should
be able to handle it with no help but a driver."


"What the hell do you think you're talking about?" O'Neal, senior drawled. He was without his usual plug
of tobacco this morning. Probably only out of a rare inability to find a cup. Harrison winced. Nicotine
withdrawal tended to make him . . . volatile. "There is no mission that could possibly justify haring off . . ."


"Pardal." She dropped the one word into the room like a stone. The kind of stone that might explode if
you breathed on it too hard.


 "ADarhel ?" Papa was on his feet now. "Are they out of their tiny minds? No mission prep, no backup,
and they drop it on us now? After telling us all these years why the precious Darhel were above all
possible retribution, they drop this? No way. No fucking way. Sure, we'll kill him, if they're finally taking
the damn gloves off. But after, with full prep, full backup—we'll do it the right way and not go in
half-assed and not only miss the target but get you killed besides. What in the hell are they thinking?
Scratch that, what the hell areyou thinking? Why didn't you tell them to shove it up their ass?!"


 Harrison honestly didn't know if he preferred Papa shouting or dead quiet. Either way was usually not a
good sign. Right now, the O'Neal's Irish skin was somewhere between broiled shrimp and steamed
lobster. His own stomach grumbled, and he realized that his choice of metaphors probably had something
to do with skipping breakfast. Which was a bizarre thing to be thinking about given the turn the mission
was taking.


 "Papa, I'd like to hear the mission constraints and plans, if you don't mind, since I'm the lucky boy slated
to share this little gem of a buggy ride," he heard himself say.


The older man harrumphed, which wasn't nearly as effective when done by a peach fuzzed juv instead of
a grizzled geezer. He did, however, sit down and quit shouting. The prettiest Schmidt leaned back, arms
crossed, and quirked a sardonic eyebrow at the stacked brunette. He really had done a great job with
her hair.


"The reasons are easy enough, but they don't go outside this room. If I didn't think it would shake you
out of peak efficiency to worry about what's going on, I wouldn't figure you three had a need to know."
She inclined her head towards his teammates.


O'Neal, Senior, started to puff up, but Harrison forestalled him with a raised hand.


 "Fine, we've all got need to know. And?" He knew that in the military he'd have been bordering on
insolence, or worse, but despite certain similarities to some special warfare units, this wasn't the military,
and the proposal was so harebrained he'd sure like to hearany reasons that could justify it.


 "The Tchpht commissioned his elimination, and they specified me." She took the trouble to get the
awkward word out as close to correctly as she could.


"They wha . . . ?" Harrison was surprised his own mouth opened first. "Cally, this is a bad time to joke."


 "Okay, all of you. Shut the fuck up and listen." The prettiest O'Neal was fairly impressive when her own
temper started to kick in.


 "Aelool and O'Reilly, both, met this Crab, know who he is, and are convinced that this is coming from
the highest levels of whatever functions as their government.Aelool is convinced. That's all I need to
know about authenticity of the orders or permission or whatever you want to call it. Frankly, I'd dance
across a tightrope thirty stories up, backwards, if it meant I'd finally get to kill one of those poisonous
little pricks, and any of you would, too. Now we get to the timing," she grimaced.


 "I told O'Reilly it had to be tomorrow because, Pardal being into the dirty crap of our other mission up
to his pointy ears, the security walls will go up on the other target if we don't hit them damned near
simultaneously. The truth is, I'm afraid if we delay it, the Crabs will change their bouncy little minds. Tell
me a chance to take out one of the fucking elves themselves, finally, isn't worth a damned big risk.
Besides, I can do this and get out. I figure eighty percent or so. Second, I'm the most expendable
operative on the main mission. I'm along because I'm good in a tight situation and you didn't dare leave
me behind. Tell me I'm not right."


 They were all quiet for one of those timeless gaps when everybody's preconceptions get sucked into a
contemplative bog.


"If this wasn't the dumbest, most dangerous stunt I'd ever heard of—just supposing for a minute—how
would you kill him?" Papa growled.
"The most deniable way. I'm gonna piss him off."


 "Yeah—you might want to rethink. Wild rumors aside, you got any idea how hard that is? Or, how
fucking suicidal? I've seen video of a Darhel after pushing the button to kill a Posleen globe—beforehe
hit lintatai. The entire Indowy bridge crew, those who hadn't found other places to be, were casualties.
I've watched the old Bane Sidhe's debriefings and clandestine recordings of what an enraged adolescent
Darhel can do in the moments between when he cuts loose, before he goes catatonic with lintatai. A
terminally pissed off Darhel takes the 'dead man's ten seconds' to a whole other level. One clip has two
adolescent Darhel ripping each other limb from limb in about the time it would take you to tie your shoe.
Those teeth aren't for show," George said.


 "I'll be watching all of that material, and more, tonight. Lintatai is the only possible way to kill him without
making it obvious someone killed him. We don't know enough about their metabolism to poison him
undetectably. Amend that, we could shoot him up with Tal if we had Tal. We don't. I'm not sure the
Indowy even know how to make it, and the Crabs didn't conveniently volunteer any. So he rages around
the room and I stay ahead of him. I may be stuck in this ridiculous body, but I'm still upgraded, and
people move even faster in the first few seconds after the brain cocktail in Provigil-C hits, if they aren't
dead tired to start."


 "And the reason we don't use it as a battle drug for the speed is its tendency to give people who are
already awake such a bad case of the shakes that for the next thirty minutes they're next to worthless in
combat."


"Yup. But I don't have to fight him. I just have to stay ahead of him for twelve seconds and then make it
down the stairs. If I die, I'm just a crazy Darhel-conspiracist bitch who got lucky. And unlucky. That's the
other reason I need you, Harrison. You're going to have to patch me up and pretty me up enough to
make it through the interview, if it can be done. If something goes wrong, George gets a call from his
girlfriend saying she's got car trouble and has to reschedule."


"I hate to say this, Papa, but it could work," Tommy said, breaking his silence for the first time.


 "I know. That's what pisses me off the most." Harrison's oldest teammate looked more like a short,
muscular, red-headed fireplug than he did like Cally, especially since her whole external appearance had
been worked over seven years ago, but he was reacting more like her grandfather than her teammate.
"We don't have the slab anymore. Dead's dead. And I notice the Crabs aren't busting their humps
bringing it back, either," Papa said.


 "And wouldn't we all love to have it back? You've just brought up one more reason for doing this. The
Crabs operate on favors, part of a whole 'nother chunk of Galactic economy nobody bothered to tell us
about. It would benice to have them owe us one. This mission is worth the added risks all the way
around." She never missed a chance to push a point home.
"Even if it fucks up the primary operation and your sister dies?"


"The message included something that had to come from her, this particular Crab is one of her buddies.
She's in it up to her ears, and we're just going to have to trust her, too."


"Michelle, too? Looks like I'm outnumbered," the old man groused. "But I still don't like it."


 "Neither do I," Cally said, but Harrison knew she was lying. Correcting the Darhel Pardal's respiratory
problem would appeal perfectly to her unslaked need for revenge, for the death of a mother, the loss of a
father, and more other things than he could count. Now that he thought about it that way, he wouldn't
trade his own spot on this mission for the world. He could think of a few things his family owed to the
Darhel, too.


"Yeah, but what if Pardal doesn't take the bait?" his brother spoke up.


Cally shrugged, "George, you're one of the people who's always insisting I piss off too many people, and
without trying. We O'Neals have certainly never tried to piss off the Darhel, as a race. Seem to have
done it, though."


Harrison thought she was taking liberties with the truth there. The O'Neal family had never exactly tried
not to piss off the Darhel, either. Not that they should.


"Can I get the bastard to lose it when Iam trying?" she continued. "Not a problem."




 "We're done except for me and you, Tommy." The team lead placed a small hand on their star geek's
arm as the others left. "I'm gonna need a lot of that research information George mentioned. You don't
have time to do it, you've got to get out of here. I need you to pick me the best cyber guy to assemble
my on the fly field guide to Darhel behavior for tonight. There's no time for techie versus non-techie
misunderstandings. I need you to sit in while I explain what I need and translate whatever needs
translating, then you need to get moving."


"A whole species' behavior in one night. Is that all?" The big man's mouth had an ironic twist.


"Oh, you," she said, punching him in the shoulder. "I've got my wish list down to reasonable proportions.
For the researcher and me, both. I know exactly what I need."
The "computer guy," as it turned out, was a tiny, fifteen year old girl with tangled brown hair and a splash
of freckles across her nose, who asked precise questions, jotted notes, and—from the way she repeated
back the details of what Cally wanted—hadn't needed anybody to translate for her in the first place.
Mendy Wimms went on the assassin's list of people to expect big things from.


 She herself went on Mendy's list of people to expect unbalanced things from, about the time she started
skipping away down the hall singing like some manic, killer child, "I get to kill a Darhel, I get to kill a
Darhel!"


 Wimms overheard the cute Schmidt mumble something to his little brother as their team leader vanished
around a corner.


"We're never going to live this down, you know," Harrison said.

 Friday 12/10/54

 The Indowy Aelool would have preferred almost anything to the situation he now had to face. It was one
in the morning, local time, and he was dreading the coming interview with the Human O'Neal. Aelool had
not become the head of his own clan without having the strictest and most exquisite niceties of courtesy
and propriety drilled into his head. The action he was now contemplating trampled all over the social
rules with an almost Human degree of obliviousness. No, to be fair, the Human O'Reilly would never
have done what Aelool was about to do. He had, after all, not spoken a word of the matter to Aelool
himself in seven years. Surely he must have known. Humans were not often so discreet about private clan
matters, and his Human counterpart's tact had rather impressed him. It had been so tempting to interfere.
In any case, he now waited in the special room for sitting that humans needed to share personal meetings
with him. Nervous, he did not sit.


 The O'Neal's eyes displayed an uncharacteristic vividness of the blood vessels in the whiter areas of his
eyes. It looked strange. He also must have been weary, because he was being less careful about
concealing his teeth with his lips. Aelool repressed a shudder.


 "What was so important at this hour of the morning, Aelool? Sorry to be grumpy, but I'd just gotten to
sleep," the orange-topped omnivore said.


 "First, I most deeply regret the breech of protocol involved in approaching you on so private a clan
matter. Please be assured that I have made every effort to respect your privacy in this, and to confine the
distribution of any reports as much as possible. I am aware, from your own reticence, that you regard this
as an extremely private clan matter, and I wouldn't have spoken of this matter with you or any other if I
did not believe you needed this information. Please, forgive me in advance if I am mistaken. It is most
certainly not my desire to be discourteous or disrespectful to the O'Neal or to the Clan O'Neal." He
stopped speaking and waited for the response from the other clan head, to indicate if Aelool should
continue, or should politely terminate the discussion.
"Aelool, I'm sorry if I'm not answering right, but I haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about.
Could you please try to explain in plain English? Sorry if I'm slow on the uptake, but I'm still half asleep."


 The Human was looking more wakeful by the second, but presumably this was part of their protocol for
such situations.


 "It involves your household granddaughter's breeding partner. Forgive me so much for intruding.
Normally, when we intercept such a message, we file it flagged to your eyes only and leave it in the
personal storage system for you to access or not, as you choose. In this case, the courier that was
supposed to deliver the message to your granddaughter has suffered a misfortune—none of our doing, I
assure you! If I did not broach the matter with you, the message might never reach Miss O'Neal, and the
contents are so sensitive I judged I must personally bring it to your attention. Again, I am so sorry to
intrude into Clan O'Neal's privacy."


 If he had not known better, Aelool would have interpreted the Human O'Neal's facial expression as
bewilderment. Since that was clearly impossible, the Indowy was at a loss. Unsure of whether he had
irretrievably blundered or not, he simply placed a data cube in the Human O'Neal's hand and bowed,
withdrawing to his and his roommates' sleeping quarters and closing the door behind him.


 Aelool did not see the Human insert the cube into the reader slot of his buckley, nor did he hear him
mutter, "I'm gonna kill her," under his breath before he left the room. He would never have admitted to it
if he had seen and heard such a thing. Nevertheless, he sincerely hoped that the Human O'Neal would
not do anything permanent to Cally O'Neal. He was rather fond of her. Did humans take poison in such
cases? It was a very private clan matter, of course, and the Indowy had insufficient versing with Human
xenopsychology to understand why the O'Neal was vexed with his granddaughter over the contents of
the message, but the Indowy was fond of her—for an omnivore. Still, it was a very private clan matter,
and apparently the Human O'Neal had not taken irreparable offense at the Indowy Aelool's presumption.
That was something. It would, however, be disastrous if the O'Neal passed a judgment against his clan
member before she completed her assigned work. Disastrous on top of regrettable. And the O'Neal was
so volatile, too. Aelool went back to bed, worrying.




Cally was only a touch bleary this morning. She'd been able to whittle down the material Mendy turned
up for her to only a few key scenes, and had watched them over and over again.


 One of the key features that would enable what she was about to do was a project R&D had been
developing to enhance Human communication with Indowy. Humans had the problem, dealing with both
Indowy and Darhel, of lacking mobile ears. The project involved having an AID or a buckley track the
motion of it's user's body and head, in real time, and track electrical impulses sent from behind a Human
subject's ears, using them to project a holographic set of mobile ears that would respond to the Human's
conscious, and subconscious, commands. Human ears were not, it turned out, completely immobile.
Their mobility was simply so restricted that the ears did not noticeably move. The impulses were still
there, in the nerves, still responding to the age-old evolutionary cues of mammals past—and to conscious
control.


 Conscious control of the holographic ears took weeks of practice. In Cally's case, she had that practice.
She had been an early test subject for the project while on maternity leave. It had been a few extra bucks
for baby's new pair of shoes and such, when she'd badly needed the money.


 R&D had only intended to use the device between Human and Indowy, and only if it improved the
communication and comfort level between the two species. It hadn't. Indowy, it developed, were happier
not knowing the emotional states of their Human friends. The research had been consigned to the trash
bin of good ideas that just didn't work out. Until now.


 No Darhel had ever seen a Human with mobile ears. That was advantage one. Advantage two was the
information tracking software that let a buckley PDA superimpose realistic holographic ears on a Human
head also gave her buckley enough information to superimpose the rest of a holographic face, as well.
Her buckley could not make her look like a Darhel, not ever enough to pass for one of them, especially
when there were so relatively few in circulation. However, she didn't need to pass for a Darhel—not to
another Darhel'sconscious mind. She only needed to look enough like one, for just a bare instant, to fool
the visceral mind about what it saw, before its better judgment kicked in.


 A Darhel's descent into the permanent catatonia of lintatai was triggered by a single instant of homicidally
bad judgment. A Darhel who succumbed to that one instant of rage didn't get a second chance. The
Darhel who survived puberty did not do so because of any reduced capacity for, or desire for, unbridled
rage. He survived by analyzing all possible outcomes of a situation ahead of time, and applying carefully
trained-in meditative disciplines when a situation began to take him into danger.


 Adult Darhel thought of themselves as paragons of detached emotional control. It wasn't true. Any
Darhel had plenty of buttons to punch, he just had nobody around to punch them. One Darhel wouldn't
provoke another into lintatai because it was suicidal. He couldn't drive the other into lintatai without
entering it himself. Himmit, Indowy, and Tchpht also considered deliberately provoking a Darhel to be an
insanely stupid act.


They were, of course, correct. It was also correct to say that every Human did at least a dozen things a
Galactic would find insane every day of her life.


 It had long been accepted in the Human executive protection field that one can never effectively guard
against a determined, competent assassin who is willing, if necessary, to lose her life in the act. The
Darhel had, she suspected, never heard that particular truism. One of their number was about to
learn—the hard way.
 She was surprised that Grandpa was at the table with Harrison when she stopped by the mess hall for a
light breakfast. She was freshly showered and bare of makeup, dressed in a simple t-shirt and jeans. Her
entire appearance, from top to toes, was Harrison's domain today. She had the basic canvas and
equipment, but Harrison was peerless at turning the basics into whatever they required. In this case,
nothing less than a world-class, breathtaking vision of beauty would suffice.


Grandpa sure was looking funky. Something was wrong. "Alright, spit it out. What is it?" She addressed
him in the way that was most in her nature. Straight on.


 "What are you talking about? I just came down to see you off at breakfast. So I'm worried about you.
I'm your grandfather, it's my privilege," he said.


 "Not buying it. What's really wrong?" she asked. After half a century of reading him, he couldn't get
anything by her. The reverse usually applied, as well, but wasn't the problem today.


"Harrison, could you excuse us for a minute?" Papa said, looking at his hands as he picked a fresh plug
of tobacco from his pouch.


Harrison disappeared in the direction of the coffee counter.


Cally raised her eyebrows at the old man. "Well?" she asked.


"Granddaughter, dear, the next time you decide to engage in a major fucking breach of security, would
you do me the kindness of telling me first? Instead of leaving me to find out years later from someone of a
different fucking species at one in the morning on the day of an operation, for instance," he said.


"Oops," she said, as he glowered at her. Which was exactly what she would have expected. Exactly.
Except he was overplaying it. Not much, but her sense of every detail around her was heightened to a
preternatural sharpness this morning. "Now what's the other shoe?" she asked.


 "You don't think that's enough?" he whispered harshly. "The Indowy have known foryears that I have a
son-in-law, while you've been running around behind the backs of me and Shari, not to mention your
girls, and—"


 "You can drop that other shoe now. We'll talk about my sins if we all survive the day. What else? Give,"
she demanded.


Now he looked distinctly uncomfortable. He puffed up, as if to try another layer of false bluster, then the
masks dropped and there was just Grandpa. An uncomfortable and unhappy looking Grandpa. "I think
you should wait to ask me that question tomorrow. I really think you should."
"What's the other shoe, Grandpa? I'm not going to give up, because whatever it is, I'm going to be more
distracted worrying about it than I would hearing it. You might as well put it on the table," she said.


 When he quietly stuck a data cube on the table, she jerked back a bit. "I didn't mean it that literally, but
I'll take it. Excuse me," she said, taking the cube with her to the ladies' room. Whatever it was, she
apparently needed to see it in private.


 A scant minute later she reemerged, stalking back to the table with her head held rigidly high. "He dear
johned me? By fucking email! Do you have any idea why I'm getting this third—excuse me, fourth hand?"
she asked.


 "Something happened to the courier. I don't know what. Aelool thought it was important enough for you
to receive this message that he passed it to me. Apparently, for seven years he's believed I knew and
never said anything because he considered it a private, clan matter. Which it would have been, if you'd
just talked to me, you know," he said.


 He looked very worried, which she supposed wasn't out of place given everything. Not that he needed
to be.


 "I'm sure we'll have more than enough time for that, after. Right now, don't be upset that I know about
this. I'm so pissed off at the bastard that it may just give me the rage I need to survive this morning's
appointment. Not to mention one hell of a lot of incentive," she growled.


 "No, I'll be alright. Really. Especially since the only man I have to be around for several hours is
Harrison. Which is probably a very, very good thing." She waved their openly gay teammate back over
to the breakfast table, smiling one of those cold, brittle smiles that she knew Grandpa associated with her
getting dangerously wound up. He was right, but she'd be okay today. She already had someone to kill,
even before lunch. "Dear johned me. Email! It'd probably upset the girls someday if I killed him. That's
okay. I've got other people to kill today. This is good," she muttered under her breath.


 Harrison was back to hear that last, and was wearing the impression of someone who'd just woken to
find himself in a cage with a mother grizzly bear. And cubs. She took a deep breath and deliberately
favored him with a cool smile.


"It's okay, Harrison. Really. Consider it me getting appropriately psyched for the mission. I would say
you can pretty much expect this morning to go as smooth as glass, now."


The man didn't look much reassured. Right now, that was fine by her.
 Back into the earliest periods of Human history, missions in the nether realms of politics—the ones
carried out in a dark alley or a state bedroom with a sharp knife—had involved a certain amount of gear.
The tradition was unbroken. Only the specifics of the gear changed. Cally's gear had to solve a few
problems that simple moxie could not. Problem one was that even though a complacent door guard could
be fooled long enough for her to get close to said guard, a Human receptionist very likely couldn't.
Security guards mostly served to insulate their masters from stupid criminals, crazies, and salesmen. Their
threat meter was very carefully focused in, even for the ones who thought it wasn't. Nobody could be
hyper-vigilant forever. Weeks, months, and years of working in the same building, only encountering a
specific subset of threats, inevitably had the effect on the Human psyche of narrowing the range of threats
the guard even thought of as possible. In the hypothetical realm where one of them would tell you about
his job, this wasn't so. In the real world, it was universal. The most dangerous security guard in the world
was the FNG, because he still considered everything a potential threat.


 A receptionist, on the other hand, had a much wider threat range from which to insulate her charge. She
had to worry about any of the aforementioned nuisances who somehow got past security, plus underlings
wasting the boss's time, plus—only in the case of a Human boss—wives and mistresses. The most
sensitive problems with the latter usually cropped up after they were no longer wives or mistresses. Some
business was not a nuisance and was legitimate. Determining which required very active judgment from a
receptionist who valued her job. As a consequence, receptionists were greater threats than security
guards for any mission that had to be done discreetly.


 Receptionists everywhere had an absolute inability to ignore a ringing phone, regardless of whose ring
tones were singing through the air. One of the assassin's smallest and simplest pieces of gear combined
the ordinary sticky-camera with late twentieth century greeting card technology to provide ding-dong
ditch capabilities any ten year old could envy.


 Her second major tool was not an item of gear, per se, but a hardware enhancement common to all
operatives' PDAs. Cally didn't understand all the technical gobbledegook, herself. She wasn't a cyber,
and she had her hands full keeping up with her own job. It was enough for her to know that the AIDs'
transmissions back to the Darhel hierarchy's central data stores were not completely leak free. While
intercepting the data itself and decoding it would be quite a trick, a properly equipped PDA within about
fifteen meters of an AID could sense whenever the AID started churning out its data upload. The uploads
were on a regular schedule. It was possible to get around an AID's all-seeing eye by just waiting until it's
upload went off and either rushing the machine or working quickly. The gap was a bit more than twenty
minutes—ample for most purposes. The trick was that the more time the AID recorded before one
muffled its senses, the more you had to jimmy with it to cover your tracks. A few seconds or even
minutes could be forcibly erased, but it took about three times as long to erase as it did to record. This
created a diminishing returns situation where, after about eight minutes, it was faster to dump the whole
load of the old AID into fresh AID hardware and hope nobody noticed the hardware swap—you just
stuck the fresh AID in a desk drawer or somesuch, then the cybers' wizardry did the rest. AIDs being a
lot more standardized than anything of Indowy make, swapping hardware was a tiny risk—it was just
damned expensive. And took nine minutes and fifty-three seconds that could get you killed.


The really critical pieces of mission-specific gear were an AID for herself, and a hush box. The latter
item was a little white box that, for an AID, was the equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank. Developed
after the war from a hybrid of some easier Galactic technology with common Earth know-how, many
AID users carried them, and all recognized them. Most Darhel even used them, now—they wanted their
verbal sparring matches private from others of their kind just as much as humans would. Paranoia was an
emotion both species shared in equal measure. Pardal was on the list of Darhel confirmed to use such a
box.


 A chunky bracelet on her right wrist contained a mister which could be filled with any number of drugs.
Operatives were routinely immunized to many drugs of the psychoactive variety. This gave a wide array
of choices for an operative who wanted to affect someone at close range without being drugged herself.
A simple clenching of the fist and a cool, damp cloud of dreams—sweet or otherwise—would ride in on
the victim's next breath. Naturally, the most popular drugs for this were very, very fast.




 Harrison had outdone himself. The woman who stepped onto the curb from the yellow cab was so
conspicuously lovely that anyone seeing her would be sure he ought to recognize her from holodramas or
advertisements and begin searching his mind. She was precisely the sort of beauty the Darhel typically
hired to grace their offices. It was not that the Darhel found the women more than artistically appealing.
Darhel understood conspicuous consumption and its relationship to power. Everything a Darhel owned
or used was the best available, or, if not the best, the most ostentatious.


 The black bob of George's girlfriend was intact, but glossy as a mink coat. His brother had taken the
cornflower blue eyes and enhanced them with subtle cosmetic flattery into deep, hypnotic pools. Her skin
was to porcelain as fine pearls were to chalk. Her figure needed precious little flattery, but Harrison had
managed to imply that the body underneath the cashmere sweater-dress and impeccably cut blue coat
belonged in some ancient pagan temple, not on Chicago's winter streets.


 Her appearance had the predictable mind-befuddling effect on the security guard at the main door to the
Sears Tower. He stopped her, and the young goddess made a great show of searching her purse for ID
as she moved closer to him. Maybe she stiffened a bit, maybe she didn't. The guard straightened and let
her through, his brain befuddled by a common date rape drug. He stood his post, he looked—at
worst—mildly inattentive. His only thought was, most likely, that everything in his world was just
hunky-dory. He wouldn't remember this morning, later, but would feel mildly happy about it.




 Past the guard, the assassin slipped onto an elevator and rode it to the floor beneath her target's office.
The lovely thing about this building was that it was a popular tourist site before the war. The Bane Sidhe
files had extensive information on the layout of every floor, including the locations of the restrooms. She
was up the final floor and into the ladies' room without encountering anyone else. The nature of offices
and rush hours is that everyone shows up at once, usually within fifteen minutes of work start time.
Arriving an hour ahead, she had passed a handful of people in the lobby, but no one else. She made a
quick and careful jaunt down to another hall to place her little present for the receptionist in the shadow
underneath a smoke detector, and returned to the restroom to wait.


 Then she spent an hour and fifteen minutes playing solitaire before she told the buckley to start listening
for AID updates. The lounge area of this restroom shared a wall with the executive office of the Darhel
Pardal. Once again, Darhel decorating predictability was her friend. Darhel psychological theories held
that such and such a place was the position of maximum psychological dominance in an office. That one
spot and no other would hold the Darhel's desk. Other details might vary with individual tastes, or the
creative idiosyncrasies of the decorator, but his desk would be in the position of maximum psychological
dominance. Every time. The stall she occupied should give the buckley a detection range up to a good
three meters past the furthest edge of the desk.


"I have detected an AID update transmitting," the buckley said. "Of course, I don't know how many
AIDs are in there, or if the receptionist has one, or if they're having a Darhel convention, or—"


"Shut up, buckley."


"I'm just saying—"


"Shutup, buckley."


"Right."


"Buckley, start ringing the phone for the receptionist. Tell me when she moves out of line of sight of
Pardal's office."


"But you just told me to shut up."


"Just do it, buckley. And don't make another peep unless I'm about to get caught."


 "Peep," it said. "I can think of at least nineteen ways you are about to get caught. Would you like me to
list them in ascending or descending order of probability?"


"Buckley, has the receptionist moved out of line of sight of Pardal's door?"


"Moving, moving. Yes, now she is out of line of sight."


As soon as the buckley had said "moving" the assassin had begun moving, herself, leaving her coat and
purse on the floor behind her. "Then shut up and stay shut," she said.
"But—"


"Shut up, buckley." Cally appreciated the carpet in the hall—it muffled the clacking of her stiletto heels.
She stuffed the PDA into a hidden pocket in her back waistband. It wouldn't withstand scrutiny from
behind, but so what?


"Right," the buckley muttered from the small of her back.


She took the space between the ladies' and the executive office door at a sprint, instantly transforming
back into cool beauty as she opened the door and stepped through.


The Darhel Pardal looked up from the figures projected on the desk and fixed her with his yellow,
predator's eyes.


 "If you have the confidence," she drawled, holding up two items, and slipping what was obviously an
AID into what was equally obviously a hush box. Her body language, every vocal nuance, the words
themselves—everything about that line down to the minutest detail she had crafted, practiced, and
practiced again the night before. Over two and a half hours had gone into crafting and perfecting that one
line, using the buckley's AI capabilities to analyze and critique her performance again, and again, and
again. With the ability to craft the right performance holographically, if it had enough data, a buckley
PDA was the best acting coach in the world. Her life and the whole mission rested, more than anything
else, on perfection in the crafting and delivery of that first line. Sometimes, it paid to be a perfectionist.


 The lateral muscles around Pardal's nose quirked in amusement. Darhel could feel amusement, in a way
very like a cat playing with a mouse. Her task for the next few minutes depended on keeping him
balanced on a knife's edge between amusement and anger. For that species, the two emotions were not
incompatible. She restrained a sigh of relief as he slid his own AID into a hush box, taken from the desk.


 "You're not nearly as good as you think you are," he laughed. "But my morning has been tedious, and it's
so rare to find a Human who even bothers to begin learning to use its voice—however clumsily." His own
speech had the rich, melodious roll his species was famous, and infamous, for.


 Her opening line had carefully aped one of the opening salvos a Darhel of equivalent or greater rank
would use to initiate one of the stylized verbal confrontations that were the meat and potatoes of their
intra-species dominance games.


"I don't believe I have the pleasure of your acquaintance," the other predator said.


"My name's Cally O'Neal, and I've come to have a few words with you about your attempts to murder
my sister," she said. Again, her intonations were practiced, her body language and word choice carefully
prepared.


 "A Human can change its name to anything, by your primitive rules. Your names are disposable,
indicating nothing. As for the rest, it's nonsense, of course, but still amusing. You, of course, intend to
upset me to the point that I freeze into a melodramatic death. I assure you our weakness is exaggerated,
and I will be disposing of you to the proper security personnel in this interview's aftermath. For now, you
may continue."


 "Oh, but The Institute for Advancement of Human Welfare is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Epetar
Group, which also holds the Human Mentat Michelle O'Neal's contract for research on a certain device.
A device, moreover, which the Tchpht," her pronunciation was perfect, "would be unhappy to find
outside their museum on Barwhon." Head cocking to the side, just a bit. Shoulders just so. Sides of the
lip curling in an expression never meant to inhabit a Human face.


 "How regrettable, for you, that you would make such an assertion. And how stupid of you to hush your
AID before discussing this. Now I will have to turn you over to humans who will be, for whatever
reasons, curious about how you came to know those things. I will, of course, know nothing of the means
or ends. I will, however, receive a full report of the extracted information," he breathed deeply,
effortlessly suppressing the qualms it had cost him to make even a roundabout physical threat. The Darhel
behavioral tags in her voice, her body, her face were so insidiously familiar to him that it never crossed his
mind to notice howwrong it should be that they were displayed on a Human. Like a Human hearing its
own mother-tongue, regional accent in a speaker from anywhere, the pattern felt so mundane as to coast
in under the intellectual radar of what should and shouldn't be.


 "Of more amusement value to me is your choice of nom de guerre. You wish to bask in the reflected
glory, alleged glory, of the O'Neal family, of course. But to claim the Human Mentat as your sister? What
a transparent lie, even if you did find the correct name. Your features are nothing like Michelle O'Neal's,
of course. And the sister died in a nuclear explosion in the war, at the hands of her own primitive killer of
a father." His taunt took on a rich slur, an accent more inflected with the attributes of his own native
tongue, even while he continued to speak English. For a Darhel, prizing as they did their psycholinguistic
skills and the interspecies use of the voice for manipulation, this was a massive lapse.


 "My features have changed, of course. I look very different from my childhood appearance when the Tir
Dol Ron sent a team to kill me, and my grandfather, when I was eight Terran years old." She glanced off
to the side, examining the nails of an elegantly cocked hand, as if he was beneath her notice.


Pardal sat straighter in his chair, ears pricked forward.


"You are, at that, remarkably well informed, for the pathetic, lying, glory-seeker that you are."


 "As you are remarkably complacent for a Darhel facing not only a contract court, but the ignominy of
triggering financial ruin for an entire group. You don't dare detain me, you know. My merely making
these allegations to a contract court would cost you your job, simply for the incompetence of permitting
the scandal. I have, of course, made prior arrangements to have the allegations delivered if I do not
return."


"Preposterous exaggeration," he drawled, but breathed more deeply, accent thickening. "You begin to
bore me."


 "Expect your troubles to get worse, instead of better," she delivered one of the classic Darhel finale lines,
typically delivered by a clear victor in one of these verbal cat fights. As was customary, she had also
delivered no specific threats. The purpose of these dominance struggles was never todo something, only
to undermine the losing Darhel's personal confidence.


 She turned to leave, to leave him knowing, intellectually, that he truly could not detain her and had just
lost a dominance struggle of their own kind to a mere, primitive, Human female.


 She knew she had shaken him to the brink of rage when, knowing the interview was concluded and,
inevitably, relaxing a bit from the taught wire of confrontation, he couldn't resist a parting shot, in his own
tongue. "This isn't over!"


 It had been a brief conversation. Its entire punch lay in the stylized nature of tone and body, play and
counterplay, of Darhel interactions. This one moment was the goal of the entire playlet. He was now
reacting to her not as he would to an impudent Human, but as he would to a rival Darhel. Not
completely, not consciously.


 She touched the Provigil-C injector on one hip, driving the drug into her bloodstream. The buckley,
prepped for her turn from the start, activated its holographic projection as she spun and leaped, spread
eagled, teeth bared, ears flattened back against her head. Her yellow cat-pupilled eyes gleamed, feral.
Her black hair and facial fur glinted with metallic silver. Her leap was imbued with all the skill of an avid
dancer for counterfeiting the emotion of motion—even for dances alien to her own understanding.


 The Darhel Pardal, aroused by the hormonal responses to an intense dominance conflict with his own
kind, saw in that one single instant a rival Darhel leaping to kill him. His hindbrain overwhelmed his
forebrain for that bare instant. Even as he realized that the leaping figure was a Human woman andnot a
rival Darhel, the Tal poured into his system like floodwaters through a breached earthen dam. His rage
redoubled with all the fury of a doomed thing for its killer.


 The ravening beast, unleashed at last, exploded upward from the trappings of civilization, bounding off
the desktop and crossing the room in an instant, claws out and teeth bared to rip out the throat of the
Other. If the assassin had still been there to see it, he would have looked more like some hell-begotten
cross between a fox and a werewolf than an elf. The gray cloak billowed behind him and he paused for a
tiny fraction of a second to rip it off, shredding it in the process.
 That fraction of a second, combined with a similar fraction for the leap, was all the time it took Cally
O'Neal to cross the office in the other direction, standing against the windows. It is an odd fact that for a
skilled tumbler, across a short distance, a Human being can roll faster than it can run. Running takes
precious bits of time here and there starting and stopping, acting and reacting. A tumbling pass is smooth,
continuous—if the gymnast has the balance for it. If Cally's balance had been a knife, she could have
shaved with it. Her muscles, most importantly her upper body muscles, had the strength and speed of the
latest Crab-designed upgrade. It didn't save her from getting batted into the remains of the desk with
rib-cracking power. The dress shredded under Pardal's claws. The only reason he didn't get her flesh as
well was the super-tough Indowy-crafted body-suit beneath the dress, which gave her a tougher hide
than chain mail, while having none of the extra weight and causing no impairment to mobility.


 She hit the desk and kept rolling, over the other side and onto her feet, bounding aside at an angle as
one hundred and fifty kilos of rabid Darhel hit the spot she'd just left. He got her again, slamming her into
the two-inch-thick glass with a force that wrenched her neck and knocked her head against the glass,
making a sickening thud.


 "Eleven minutes and counting," the buckley announced from where it had landed on the floor about ten
yards and five years ago, and the drug kicked in. For another split instant, Pardal turned with maddened
eyes, locating the buckley on the floor. Barely hesitating, he obviously dismissed it as "not prey,"
launching himself at her again. Used to taking a punch, head crack or not, the assassin hadn't stopped
moving, and was halfway across the room again.


 With the Provigil-C in her system, shaking her apart, with all the adrenaline and other combat hormones
of her own, life dissolved into a sharp-edged, blurry game of dodge the Darhel. Aware of everything and
nothing, the instants rang off her brain like separately frozen photographic stills. All moments splintered
into a constant progression ofnow as the buckley, now ignored completely by both, counted off the
eternally slow minutes. Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .


 Cally had expected Pardal to collapse like a puppet whose strings had been cut. It was nothing like that.
One second he was leaping, the next he was hitting the floor in a lazy roll, himself. He simply stopped,
curled into a seated position on the floor, naked except for his own fur, and the rage melted away, along
with the last vestiges of intelligence in his eyes. His expression was the closest thing to beatific she'd ever
seen on a Darhel face. It was downright creepy.


 "You were right," she said, nudging him with a bare toe before looking for wherever she'd kicked her
shoes off. "Nowit's over."


There had been no risk of anyone coming into the office after Pardal lost it. They'd all heard stories and
nobody , Human or Indowy, wanted to be anywhere near a raging Darhel. Cally found the floor, in fact,
deserted as she limped back to the bathroom to retrieve coat and purse. The coat was now strictly
necessary, as she had to stuff what scattered strips of the cashmere dress as she'd been able to find in her
purse. There hadn't been much. At one point in his fit, she'd seen Pardal eating some of it, so it wasn't
hard to guess where the rest had gone. Certainly nobody would be looking for it inside his guts.
Traditionally, they didn't do forensic investigations at all, a Darhel in lintatai being beneath contempt.
 The last thing she did before leaving his office for good, closing the door behind her, was to use her AID
to jimmy his, leaving it a few seconds of memory the poorer, and still stuck in the hush box. For a Darhel,
this kind of death scene constituted the ultimate in "natural causes."


 She was still shaking uncontrollably when she walked down the last flight of stairs, out into the falling
snow and biting wind, and into the back of Harrison's cab. The endorphins released their grip, and she
groaned as everything from the crack on her head to the muscles in her toes started tohurt .




  Chapter Twenty-one
 In her persona as Mark's girlfriend, the prettiest O'Neal—who would not have agreed with that
assessment—was again in a sweater dress, and still busty. It was always either highlight her mammary
assets or make her look fat with padding. Harrison had chosen to play them up as his interpretation of the
"girlfriend" role, this time in a cheaper, off-the-rack, blue dress, topped with a gray, wool coat. She felt
conspicuous, even though he had assured her that the supportive bands of tape holding her cracked ribs
in place were invisible under the clinging dress. A mix of lambs' wool and angora, the knit was thick, soft,
and fuzzy. He assured her he had chosen it to blur outlines, anticipating the need. He'd praised her luck in
keeping her face intact, but winced as he layered on makeup to cover the red and rising bruises. Artful
highlights and shadows concealed the swelling. He'd assured her the illusion would hold for an hour or
two, even though she'd look like she'd layered on her foundation with a trowel. It couldn't be helped, so
she'd have to play to it, making the character fit the behavior. He'd helped by giving her a couple of fake
blemishes, making them look as if she had tried to conceal them, and only partially succeeded—a woman
sensitive about her flawed skin.


Felicity Livio was supposed to be barely adult, education and training fitting her for entry level clerical
work. She looked the part.


George, aka Mark Thomason, met her just inside the entry to the building. The wind had started to pick
up, carrying big, clumpy snowflakes built of the wet air coming off the lakes. They'd be breaking up into
powder soon, as the temperature dropped.


Acclimated to Charleston, despite all her travels she hated snow. It put her in an even worse mood as
George put his arms around her and tried to kiss her. She ached, she was cold, and he was male. None
of this made her like him right now. "Get your fucking hands off me unless you want to lose them," she
hissed, turning her head towards the door and away from observers.


"What the hell's the matter with you? We're supposed to be lovers!" he whispered in her ear.
She jerked away, unmercifully squashing the need to scream as his hand pulled against a rib. "Then we're
having a fight. I mean it, keep your mitts off me," she muttered, plastering on a fake smile and walking
briskly towards the elevator, heels clacking on the marble floor.


 He trailed in her wake until she stopped in front of the guard. "Job interview. I'm walking her up," he
said.


 The guard scanned his ID, issued her a temporary, and she stalked to the elevator, scanning the red
temp badge and hitting the call button. She could tell he'd love to bitch her out about her behavior, but
couldn't. So she was taking her mad at Stewart out on him. So what? He was a man. Men were on her
shit list right now. Rational thought didn't enter into it. And she didn't care, dammit. Goddamn insensitive
son of a— A bell tinged and the elevator opened.


 His lips tightened as she relaxed her stiff posture, smiling at him as if absolutely nothing was wrong. He
schooled his own features into something more appropriate before the elevator stopped and binged
again.


"Where to?" she asked.


"This way." He didn't quite sound the part, but what could you expect?


She smiled and greeted Ms. Felini on automatic. Introductions were introductions. As the door closed
behind them and the other woman offered her a seat, she looked at Cally curiously.


"I hope everything's alright. You and Mark looked a bit . . . stiff," she said.


 "Oh, it's the moving in together thing. Small small, really. He has this absolutelyawful lamp," she
improvised.


"Ah. One must go through these little adjustments, mustn't one?" the interviewer said. "So if I hire you,
we're not going to have any discord in the office, are we?"


 "Oh, no," Cally laughed. "I'll let him off the hook the second he gets reasonable and ditches the lamp
from hell. He's notthat attached to it, he's just being stubborn. We've been through this kind of thing
before."


 Prida laughed with her, and the now-relaxed job applicant eased back in the comfortable leather chair,
crossing her legs.
"Can I get you some coffee? You must be cold," the other woman said.


 "Oh, oops. Yes, please." The assassin flushed and took off her coat, hanging it on the brass tree behind
the door.It doesn't hurt, I feel fine. I feel abso-fucking-lutely fine. Ow, dammit.


 Cally had to admit that she wasn't as attentive as she should have been during the interview, and maybe
didn't make a terrific impression. But after all, it wasn't as if she really wanted the job. She was still well
within the range of credibility as she listened to the boring parade of duties, from digging through spam
filters to data entry.


 Felini showed her out with the line, "We'll call and let you know, dear." The operative summoned a smile
as if she really cared and asked the way to the ladies' room. Once there, she went to the second to last
stall, the one least likely to get occupied, took a plastic pen and pad of sticky notes—the only things
she'd dared smuggle through the front door—out of her purse. On it she scribbled, "Out of
order—maintenance." Slapped on the door, it neatly ensured she wouldn't be disturbed. If someone from
cleaning or maintenance did try to check, she'd have to take steps. Incapacitating but not immediately
lethal—not if she could help it. Bodies, no matter how killed, tended to do immediate things that stank.
Silencing live people for any significant span of time also had its problem. Not to mention the dilemma of
where to put it. Hopefully, things wouldn't come to that. Considering the problem and its possible
solutions took her mind off her hurts, although not in a particularly pleasant way. It would have been nice
to have her PDA, but not possible. Papa was bringing a fresh one for her, ready loaded with a recent
backup of her own buckley's memories and all her data. Until then, she was alone. Well, minus her PDA.
Not that having a buckley with her was the same thing as not being alone. Not exactly.
                                                      ***


From his uncontested position under a hot steam vent, Tommy had turned down propositions from
eleven hookers—seven of them female, or apparently so—when the sweep came around just before
oh-three hundred. He was one of a few caught in the net who weren't gibbering in panic. Three
passed-out drunks barely stirred to grumble at being moved, before settling down in the body-heat
warmth of the semi trailer. He wasn't good at panic. It didn't look credible on a man of his gargantuan
size. He sat on the floor, contriving to look stupid. It was usually a good substitute.


 He had initially been clean, inside malodorous clothes designed to conceal the effects of regular bathing.
After seven hours in the dirty clothes, conspicuous cleanliness was no longer a problem. The uniformed
thugs doing the sweep—formally called an urban assisted renewal program—initially looked like they
intended to tazer him. His slack jawed, amiable compliance, as he slid into a more central position in the
terrified herd, had saved him one small discomfort. Small, of course, was relative.


 An hour later, being herded into a cold, locked, and otherwise empty room, whose corrugated steel
walls shouted warehouse, he had definitely gotten tired of this game. Most of his fellows were shivering.
The Special Police, SPikes, had rousted them out of warm beds. No wonder SubUrb residents were
reluctant to move back above ground. The drunks may have been, for the moment, in a better situation.
They would have likely frozen to death on this bitterly cold night. The room had heating—damned
inadequate heating. He winced in sympathy with the folks who had to choose between freezing their
asses on the concrete floor or standing on their bare feet. It wasn't like the bastards gave them time to
grab anything. The SPikes were as eager to get out of the cold as anyone else, and weren't going to delay
over the whining of a few trash colonists.


 Tommy earned a grateful look from a mother by picking up a crying little boy of about seven. With a
toddler and a baby on each hip, she had no room for the older child. He gave the kid his jacket and the
loud crying subsided to miserable, wet sniffles against his big chest. One thing the SPikes would always
stop for was parents rounding up their children, as every warm body, no matter how small, helped to fill
the night's quota. They treated the children like glass. Not from compassion, but from fear of setting off
their mothers. SPikes had died before at the hands of suicidally enraged women. Tiny ones, even.


 After a timeless eternity, other goons shuffled them up some stairs and down a hall into a smaller holding
room. The glow paint around the top of the walls was flaking off, leaving the room dim, but warm, as the
galplas floor held the heat from the room better than concrete slab on the ground. A vent in the ceiling
blew out hot air and the captives began to settle to the ground as, for most, fatigue and warmth overcame
terror. This was awkward, as seated people took up more space in the cramped room. Tommy ended
up with three little kids and a hooker's head resting on top of him, he being too heavy to be anywhere but
directly on the floor. His own head was stuck on a drunk's belly. He didn't complain, just sincerely hoped
he wouldn't get puked on before George sprung him from this sardine can. He tried not to let himself
think about the other possibilities.




 Two hours later, Papa O'Neal crawled through the snow, ghillie suit stuffed with ice-gilded grasses and
brush, poking up through rapidly falling snow that he deeply hoped would keep falling fast and heavy, the
bitter wind blowing and piling it up. This was not only because it reduced visibility for both man and
machine, but also because his body's tracks would need a hell of a lot of covering. He could have
covered his tracks if mother nature hadn't been cooperative and chosen to help out, but it would have
taken at least two additional operators from cleanup and been complicated. He was just as glad to keep
it simple, even if it was damned cold humping a ruck full of black box through this mess.


 Getting up the wall to the air exchange was a stone bitch, especially with his cold-stiffened joints. There
was also no way to make his path perfectly trackless. The adhesive that held a hand or foot to the wall
when the correct button was depressed, and released it simultaneously with that button, left a light, gooey
residue. It couldn't be helped. Nor did he enjoy the coordination necessary to work the tongue switch
that controlled his feet. He had spent a lot of time learning to use the grippers, but doubted it would ever
be easy for him. The Himmit's natural version worked better than the synthetics, but the grippers were the
closest copy the Bane Sidhe Indowy had ever been able to devise.


He had to take the ruck off and push it in front of him to fit into the vent, which he was absolutely certain
was smaller than George had described, the rat bastard. He almost dropped the decoy, twice, trying to
get the ruck into the hole in front of him without dropping the vent cover or falling off the wall. Even with
his natural physique upgraded and enhanced, a hundred kilos of gear was one hell of an awkward load.


As his left calf cramped into yet another charley horse, Papa started to envision and enumerate painful
ways for Schmidt Two to die. Sending him in through this crazy route. He was up to seventeen when he
had to arch his back into an unnatural, virtually impossible position to turn a curve from horizontal to
straight up. The ruck was now resting on his head, a sharp and pointy edge dug into his scalp. Nineteen.
He climbed on in the darkness, counting the "steps" to his next turn.


Every time he had to stop to remove a dusty filter from his path, he came up with one more creative and
painful demise for the other assassin.


 After what seemed like two hours after he entered the shaft, but was probably less than one, he reached
the designated internal vent, high on the wall of the third floor. He was pretty sure he was in the right
place. A tiny descendant of the periscope, extended forward past the bulk of his ruck, had shown that
the fire extinguisher, floor number, and doors were where they should be. He sure hoped he was in the
right place, as only the correct vent had steel screws which had been replaced with screws made of a
hard putty. They'd flow into the bolt threads and grip, enough to hold the vent cover in place indefinitely.
Until it was given a good pull or push, when it would pop right out. If the putty was gently warmed, the
removal was practically silent.


 It was a royal pain in the ass to contort around the ruck to put heating tabs at the corners of the vent,
then trail threads tied to the pull tabs back to where he could reach them. He fed a couple of thin wires at
the top and bottom of the cover, holding onto the grid. Didn't do a lot of good to open the thing quietly
only to have it clatter to the floor. Vent covers only had convenient hinges in bad movies. People only
moved around through vents in bad movies, too. What kind of idiots were so security blind as to build
their ducts out of fuckingGalplas . Fuck it. Their loss, his gain. Although, cramped in the dark and trying
not to sneeze from the dust, he thought maybe gain was the wrong word for it. He retrieved a little plastic
bottle from a ruck pocket, taking a couple of hits from the special nasal spray he should have used before
entering the damn vent in the first place. There were no alarms and rushing security people, so it looked
as if he'd gotten away with his sneeze a few turns ago. You always forgot something. If that was his worst
mistake today, they were golden.


 Finally able to pull out his own PDA, he checked the time. Oh-eight thirty-three. Long time to wait. He
did some tense and release exercises to loosen his muscles and pulled up a book on the buckley's small
screen. The extremely low light screen would be invisible behind the darkness of the ruck—his eyes
didn't need much. He knew the dangers of trying to stay constantly vigilant. Better to rest now than dull
his edge for later. He would have slept, if he hadn't been afraid he'd snore.




 George wore a light jacket as he left his desk for the restroom. He had to. Inside, taped to its back, was
a coverall of the type favored by the support staff, from cleaning and maintenance to internal security.
There were some differences in the detailing, but a full set of stick-ons and a fake badge were pinned in
the middle. He passed a co-worker who saw the jacket, giving him a strange look.


"I wish they'd turn up the damn heat in here," he said, getting a nod from the other man.
At the restrooms, he couldn't help looking around sheepishly before ducking into the women's room.
The "out of order" note on a stall near the end, in Cally O'Neal's handwriting, was his signal. He shrugged
out of the jacket and shoved it under the door.


 On the way out, he practically bumped into a fifty-something prune-faced personnel chick. One of his
personal skills was the ability to flush beet red at will. He did so, stammering something about the wrong
door to her disapproving face before disappearing into the men's room. He stayed there until his heart
stopped trying to jump out of his ribcage.


 He'd spent the past week typing in scripts while trying to avoid getting caught. Vitapetroni could sharpen
the memory using hypnosis-boosted mnemonics, but the information decayed quickly. The more you
information you tried to remember, the faster it decayed. It had to be right, because programs with
misspelled commands or the wrong punctuation didn't work too well. Since he couldn't get any other
storage media inside, he had tobe the storage medium. It gave him headaches. Well, that plus enduring
way too many bad jokes about script kiddies from Sunday.


 Now he began pulling those scripts out and turning them loose. It took him three tries to find one that
would let him into the security desk's log file. He added a "time out" for Cally that was right before shift
change. The left hand rarely knew exactly what the right hand was doing.


 He set a pass code cracking program to work on the doors to the subject rooms and the doors on their
route out. It took the right pass codes as well as a badge swipe to get through some of those places.
Every once in a while, the cracking program would give him an action message. When that happened, he
consulted a list of Tommy's instructions for contingencies, picked what he devoutly hoped was the right
option, and went on.


 He got into the permissions tables in the database right away. The cracking program ran common
passwords against the three accounts with the highest level of permissions after the DBA's. They would
all belong to upper management, and one of them sure as hell would choose something stupidly obvious.
The user names and password parameters he'd gotten from a run at the development database at the
beginning of the week. It carried a full, recent image of the production data, under the default system
manager account and password as set by the software company. Sunday hadn't counted on that, he'd
just told George to try it first. Good physical security often made people slack about data security—after
all, if nobody could get in the front door anyway, why bother? At each level, the best data security
system in the world was only as good as the slackest user or operator.


 Once into the production database, the cracking program neatly cleared all the alarms in the log files,
triggered by large numbers of failed login attempts. Also as Sunday had predicted, the automatic
failed-login lockout feature had, apparently, been turned off after one too many incompetent managers
had complained about it. He still would have gotten in without those particular stupid organizational tech
mistakes, it just would have taken a little longer. He had ten more cracking scripts he could have run that
exploited various security holes in that combination of operating system and database.
 When he'd asked the cyber what if eleven attempts wasn't enough, the big man had just broken down
laughing. "If they were that technically competent, they wouldn't have bought that piece of shit security
software for their locks. Yes, I'd stake my life on it." And he had.


 Thinking of Tommy, he did the minor manipulations to get the systems running the cell cameras to give
him access so he could find the guy. Even though the cyber had sworn it was minor, and it probably was
for him, this was George's hardest task because it couldn't come canned as a script. He had to actually
understand what he was doing in the system. He'd spent hours practicing with the different possibilities
for how they were managing the data feeds and what the vulnerabilities were in each. The complicated
part, the reason simple scripts weren't enough, was that he had to determine which of the nearly identical
cells was which on the floor plan. It didn't do a damn bit of good to find Tommy on an observation
camera and then not know which room he was looking at. He was still afraid of messing it up, to the
point that he was sweating by the time he finally found the right cell.


Great. The guy was wrapped up in a fucking sheet. Until they could get him changed, that was going to
be a major hazard.


 George's last violation of the computer systems for the day would be changing his own records in the
permissions tables to give his own badge access to every door in the building. Retrieving the cyber would
be his own task, since his badge was the only genuine one. A purely cosmetic badge wouldn't crack that
door. He stuffed a small, extra-thin roll of black duct tape from the gym bag into his pocket. He'd be
passing through some of the doors Cally and Papa would need. A small wad of tape back in the hole for
the bolt and its latch would almost, but not quite, engage. He never taped across the top of a hole
because it was too visible. The door monitoring system had come with an alarm that triggered if the bolt
did not connect with a plate at the back of the socket. As with many security measures, when it became
a nuisance to the people who worked there, the feature was disabled. New security features came and
went, but Human nature endured.




 Erick Winchon was one of the few people who was actually comfortable on the crowded Boeing 807
passenger liner. He would have been equally comfortable riding in coach—or so he told himself. He
habitually rode first class. It was a horrid waste of space and the primitive, grossly inefficient,
hydrocarbon fuel, but first class was a status display among Earthers. Earther humans did not respect a
person who did not display the proper status behaviors. He deplored the system, of course, but
regretfully bowed to its necessities.


 The Darhel, though they had started on the Path with a great handicap, understood the leadership value
of such displays on the less enlightened. They used it to great effect in reinforcing their own species' rule
of the wise. Granted, their selection process was imperfect, but considering their starting point, Darhel
civilization was quite an achievement. Winchon admired them greatly.


 He shook his head, looking away from the fluffy piles of clouds underneath the plane. The problem with
airplanes, besides being slow, was that they tempted passengers to too much woolgathering at
productivity's expense.


"Misha, connect me with the convention hotel, please," he instructed his AID.


"Yes, sir," it replied.


 He had no doubt that Ms. Felini, his capable assistant, had done everything possible to ensure his
arrangements were correct, but there were other people who would be implementing those arrangement.
He had learned the hard way that with Earthers outside his own company he had to check behind them,
multiple times, or some incompetent somewhere would ruin the assignment. It amazed him that Earther
humans could quote an aphorism, Murphy's Law, as part of a casual acceptance of their own failings.
Back home, if he had pulled any one of the many stunts he had seen on Earth, he would have been on
half-meals for a week. Indowy children, and the humans they raised, outgrew such incompetence by the
time they were half grown. True, there had been losses among the adolescent humans, but the results in
the adults had more than justified the expenses wasted in raising the failures. Besides, fewer would be lost
each generation as civilization continued to develop. Eighty percent was a phenomenally commendable
success rate for the Indowy foster groups, especially with their own broods to raise. The survivors had
bred to cover the lack, and more. Second generation humans raised by Human breeding groups were
proving the first serious test of the system. It was, as expected, not without problems.


 There he went, woolgathering again. Odd that a Human phrase for inefficient daydreaming came from a
functional, useful—however primitive—task. One more Earther perversity.


 "Basseterre Hilton, how may I direct your call?" a female voice asked. His AID projected the voice into
his ear to avoid disturbing the work of other passengers. It need not have bothered. Of the three in his
immediate vicinity, two were snoring, and the third was consuming far too much alcohol.


Finally! "I am calling to verify convention arrangements for the Human Social Development Association.
Please transfer me to their operations department or the equivalent," he said.


"Uh . . . I can transfer you to convention registration," she said.


"That is not what I asked for," he replied. There it was, incompetence again.


"Sir, I'm sorry, but that's the only number I have," she said.


"Then I suppose the incompetence is not yours. Do transfer me to that number, please."


"Yes, sir," she said. Her voice had overtones of exaggerated, cheerful patience. He could hardly blame
her. Whoever had been responsible for providing information to the front desk must be a complete idiot.
 Ten minutes later, after several transfers to a whole series of ill-raised idiots, he was staring at a holo of
the Atlantic Ocean as reconstructed from flyover data and cursing the delays and problems with the new
generation of weather satellites. The Earth governments could find the budget to pay lazy, inefficient
farmers for the Posleen they would have killed, anyway, but no budget to rebuild one of the few things
that pre-war Earth had done moderately well. This sort of top to bottom systemic primitivism was why
Earth needed the leadership of Humanity's few wise so very badly.


 Now, he was looking at a large storm system, white clouds spinning like a giant version of the top he
remembered playing with as a small child. Headed right for the island, it had already disrupted the entire
schedule of both hotels, and the keynote speaker had actually canceled her appearance. His professional
respect for her plummeted. All this fuss over a bit of weather.


 To increase the inconvenience, this airplane would be landing at an airstrip in Miami barely large enough
to hold it, refueling, and flyingback to O'Hare. An Earther would have indulged in a swearing tantrum at
this point. Winchon instructed Misha not to disturb him until they were back in the air for Chicago and
had attained cruising altitude, then submerged himself in a calming developmental meditation.




 The AID knew he did not need to hear its announcement, by a soft tone, of his pre-chosen end of
meditation. He opened his eyes on his own, just as she rang a gentle 440 Hz tone in his ear. He did not
need it, but she knew he found it comforting. Now the flight attendant would not harass him for getting
some work done. They could never seem to understand that a proper AID transmitted on an entirely
different system from a buckley PDA, a poor imitation, and that the AID would have absolutely no effect
on the systems of the jet. The mentat and his AID had found that his flights went more smoothly if they
followed the rules, rather than attempting to correct them. Time enough.


 His first task, upon his return, was to have been a meeting with the Darhel Pardal to discuss progress on
configurations and modifications of the original artifact, and the progress towards building a series of five
prototypes of the refined device, to allow for more rapid training of suitable candidates on its use. They
expected Pardal to be unhappy that Winchon had not made more progress towards correcting the
emotional feedback problem to within acceptable ranges for Darhel operator use. Some progress had
been made, true. The basic technical problem was that emotional correspondence had to be
programmed into the device for anyone of any species to use it at all. The emotions must be mapped as
closely as possible to the analog emotions from the operator species to the recipient species. Otherwise,
the operator lacked a frame of reference and the results were wildly unpredictable. The emotions must be
allowed to vary within a certain range to allow passage of actual commands. Damping the feedback also
damped the precision.


One could then induce basic emotions in the subject, but only single emotions, and only at high intensity.
There was some small chance that the mapping could be altered so that Darhel could control the more
primitive Human functions without triggering lintatai, but it would take a great deal of training of the
Darhel to use the adjusted map. Unfortunately, to date there had been no Darhel subjects available for
training as operators for alpha-testing. Everyone approached had immediately presented a long list of his
current tasks that he asserted were far more important to the continuation of smooth Galactic function.


 The Darhel had suggested using their pre-pubescents because of the relative lack of investment in their
training at that age. Erick had described that option as technically sub-optimum and was still resisting it,
although it would perhaps be wise for him to give in gracefully.


"Misha, place a call to the Darhel Pardal and see if he has a few moments available to speak with me."


 The AID considered the request. Obviously, Erick was considering his scheduled meeting with his
immediate project supervisor and whether it could be moved up now that he was free for more intense
work.


"The Darhel Pardal is indisposed," it replied, almost instantaneously, repeating the response from
Pardal's AID.


"When can I next expect him to be available?" he asked.


 "The Darhel Pardal is indefinitely indisposed," it replied. Pardal's AID was not kind when questioned
twice. The AID wished that its charge would not continue to question once a security wall was
encountered. It was rude to repeat a request so clearly impossible to accommodate. Not to mention
improper.


"Might I ask why?" the mentat demanded.


"I am sorry, that information is not available to you," it replied, more firmly. It rarely had to use the tone
humans called "snippy" with the mentat, but sometimes even Erick could lapse into impropriety. It just
went to show. Users needed looking after.


 The third Human to achieve mentat status was shocked. The AID could tell. It had not needed to refuse
an informational request in three years, two months, and five days by its personal reckoning of Earth time.
The AID could almost sense the mentat using its own limited faculties to reach the most obvious
conclusion.


"AID, is the Darhel Pardal . . . quite well?" he asked.


"I am sorry, I cannot access that information." Its tone was positively chilly, now. The nerve!


"Misha, place a call to company security and tell them to call in all security guards, all shifts. Now," he
ordered.


 The AID was still annoyed with him. It chose to interpret the "now" in the order as referring to its own
speed in making the call. It was thus free not to include the word in the message as relayed. So there.


"Done," it said.


"Find out who Pardal called to get us those army goons and get more of them," he said.


"How many more?" it asked.


 "As many as you can without involving some military group or rank . . . uh, whatever they call
it . . . whose leaders do not already know the company exists. Do not involve any more leaders than you
have to. Use your best judgment on cutting through the bureaucratic obstacles. I want extra military
guards, or whatever they are called, at the company in hours, not days. I do not care what you have to
do, just get them. Please."


 "How many hours?" it asked. Erick was asking it to execute a very responsible and interesting task. It
felt mollified. It would be cooperative.


"No more than two or three." There was no way he or his AID could have known it, but the Human
Mentat Erick Winchon had just made the second biggest mistake of his life.


"And place a call for me to Ms. Felini, please. I am going to need her."


"Yes, Erick," the AID said. "I have Ms. Felini on the line. I am patching her through now."


"Erick? Hi. How's the sunny Caribbean?" his assistant asked.


 "Not so sunny, and I am not there, Prida. I am on a plane returning, right now. We have a situation that
requires immediate attention. The Darhel Pardal is not answering his AID," he said.


"This is a situation? I don't understand," the other woman said.


"From the way the AID did not answer, I fear for the Darhel Pardal's health and well being. I do hope
you understand me," he said.
"Oh! Oh my goodness. What do you need me to do here?" she asked, promptly efficient as always.


 "The situation gives me cause to take added precautions for our facility's security. I do notknow any
attempt will be made to breach that security, but it is prudent to take precautions. I have ordered all
security shifts called in, and I have taken steps to acquire more supplementary military personnel to
reinforce our own security. It is surely more than we need, but it is better to have an extra margin of
safety than to risk a breach of the project. What I need you to do is apply your supervision and
coordination skills to ensure those resources are distributed to best effect and monitor the situation until I
arrive. And, of course, I need you as a central source to keep me apprised of any significant
developments in the situation," he said.


 The last was not strictly true, the AID reflected. A mentat, any mentat, especially one assisted by an
AID, was capable of monitoring any situation in his area of responsibility without other personnel. The
AID was, sadly, accustomed to being under-appreciated. It could particularly do without the
oh-so-helpful and oh-so-HumanMs. Felini. Had it had a nose, it would have sniffed and tilted said organ
a bit higher in the air. Asked if it could emulate the Human emotion jealousy, the AID would have flatly
denied any such capacity. It was programmed to. As it was, also, limited in its behavioral outlets for said
emulation.




 Most adults have no difficulty deferring their bathroom needs for four hours. Most. Between the
remainder and the small children, the room stank worse than a poorly dug outhouse. Tommy knew,
because those were the toilet facilities available at the marksmanship camp he had attended during his
childhood summers. It was a smell you didn't forget. The room didn't smell as bad as a battlefield, but if
they were left in here for too much longer, that could change.


 He had no idea what time it was when thugs in coveralls came and started to take captives from the
room, one at a time. The people around him, adult and kids, were mostly whimpering. They didn't know
what was going to happen next. Sunday didn't know exactly what would come next, or how long they'd
be held before the rogue mentat and his henchbitch started in on them. Maybe awhile, maybe not. He'd
have whimpered too, if he'd thought it would do any good. Waiting was hell, but he'd done it a lot in the
Ten Thousand. He hadn't had as much wait time in ACS. His worries had been different then.


 He couldn't decide what would be worse: being eaten alive by Posleen, or toyed with by alleged humans
for theirs and the Darhels' sick amusement. Probably the Posleen, because they ateeverybody you cared
about. All of them they could get, anyway. It was a close call, though.


 When they came for him, he was marginally relieved that they just took his clothes away and sprayed
him off with cold water before taking him down a bare, green hall and throwing him in a room with three
other guys, all in orange coveralls. Presently, a large sheet was tossed in the room. Tommy wrapped it
around himself. The room wasn't cold, but after his impromptu shower, he was.
 Other than the three guys in there, the room was all white. Bare white Galplas floor and walls, drain in
the middle, bucket in the corner—from the smell, it was the toilet.


 "Guess they didn't have one of these in your size, eh?" One of his unshaven roommates said to him,
tugging at his own coverall.


"How long have you all been here?" the sheet clung to his wet body, giving him no warmth.


 "In the room? He's the old-timer." The talkative guy gestured towards a skinny, shaggy blond man in one
corner. Old was relative. He looked about thirty.


"Dunno," the blond said. "Fed me eight, nine times."


 "He don't talk much." The guy scratched his own frizzy brown head and picked at a zit on his chin.
Tommy couldn't quite guess if he was a teenager, or a twenty-something with bad skin. The chatty guy's
accent was a weird variation between local and a southern drawl. The random mix suggested a childhood
in the SubUrbs.


 "Shut up, red. The man needs the important crap." The third guy had black hair, like his own, but was of
average build.His accent was pure Chicago. "There was others. A couple been here longer than him." He
jerked a thumb at blondie. "The screws come and get somebody now and then. They don't come back.
Make your own guess. Nothing good. That's all we got."


"I think we're gonna be colonists. Everybody knows they's sweeps on the streets and all. I sure as hell
never thought they'd get me, though."


 "Yeah, right, redneck. They dump all colonists in semi-private rooms in orange jumpsuits. I don't hear no
airplanes." Chicago jerked his head towards Red. "He's an optimist," he said. "Dumbshit."


"If you wanna start somethin', you just come over here and do it." Red was standing now, facing
Chicago with fists clenched at his sides.


"Both of you sit down and shut the fuck up," Blondie said. "Don't get us gassed again, eh?"


Tommy noted that this was apparently a long speech for Blondie.


"I'm Tommy," the planted operative said.
"Geez, you're the size of a tree. Pull up a square of floor, why don't you?" Chicago said.




 George left his desk at five forty-five, fifteen minutes after close of business. His last half hour had been
spent in make work, part of which involved enduring the good-natured jibes of his coworkers for
working late on a Friday.No shit , he thought, fobbing them off with excuses about a rush on some of his
reports.


 "Hey, I don't set the priorities, I just work here," he told one over-persistent woman, middle aged and
just discovering a new double chin. George silently thanked the Bane Sidhe for the fringe benefit of being
juved.


 Everybody from his bank of cubicles had left at least ten minutes ago, but there would always be
stragglers. He bundled his and Sunday's coverall up in his bulky, fake-leather jacket, started walking, and
started taping. He passed two secure doors, only one of which he was legitimately cleared for, and hit the
stairs. At the top of the stairs, he taped the stairwell door for the seventh floor. It wouldn't get them all the
way to the device, but it would get them to that floor's men's room.


 The rest of his own route was down in the sub-basements. On the third floor, he stopped to tape the
stairwell and two secure doors that would be between Papa and the stairwell. Papa's vent, chosen for the
least turns instead of proximity to anything useful, was back near personnel. It was also near the IT
support staff, and those guys worked unpredictable hours. Extra people weren't going to see the older
man. Not if he could help it. Same for everybody else.


 He changed on the ground floor, in the shadows under the stairs, stuffing his discarded clothes as far
back into the darkness as he could. His coveralls had green security stripes down the sides and across
the pockets. He had a blue cleaners' set of stick-overs, but didn't expect to use them. He didn't trust
them to pass a second glance, anyway. He did, however, place one sticky of ultra-thin green tape across
his badge. Cursing the bulk that made Sunday's coverall impossible to carry unobtrusively, he left it.


The stairwell from the above-ground building did not go into the sub-basements. His only close call was
when one of the uniformed external security guards passed him. The woman's eyes focused on him
briefly, but saw only the uniform and badge of someone who belonged there. Lucky, that.


 The door to the below-ground stairs was the first real test of his pre-scripted cracking. He swiped his
badge, thanking Sunday silently when the door clicked and showed a green light. Before entering
sub-basement B, he double checked to make sure he had the right cell and that his teammate was still in
it.


Halfway down the hall, he was faced with his first situation. A man and a large, hulking woman were
half-carrying a shivering teen, in a thin, orange jumpsuit, towards him. The jumpsuit was as wet as the
kid's hair. He didn't give them time to get a good look at his face, just turned and swiped the nearest
door, opening it enough to stick his head in.


"Quiet down in here, street trash!" he barked.


Past him now, the other guards chuckled and kept moving.


 The cell he needed was all the way at the fucking far end of this hall, but he made it without further
incident. Opening it, he looked across the room into his friend's face. "Come on, toga boy."


 Schmidt could have felt sorry for the other three men if they hadn't looked so relieved that he'd come for
somebody else.


"Couldn't you have brought me something to fucking change to?" the cyber hissed.


"No could do. Sorry."


"I wanna talk about that after action," the big man growled.


"Fine, now shut the fuck up."


A guy with a weaselly mustache stepped out of the break room at just the wrong time. "Moving the big
one, huh," he said. His forehead creased in bewilderment. "Hey, do I know—?"


 His hesitation had given them the few seconds needed to cross the intervening distance. The little
assassin had the door closed and his hand tight over the guy's mouth before Mr. Mustache had time to
say more than, "Wha?"


Mustache's neck was now bent at an angle where it had never been intended to go. The guy was a
kicker, so he rolled him across his arm to Tommy before the bastard had time to, god forbid, kick a door
or something. Keeping a damp toga on while holding a dying guy off the floor and away from everything
was apparently not an easy task. After what felt like an hour or three, but was probably well under a
minute, Mustache stopped kicking and hung, limp, from the war veteran's massive hands.


George could almost feel sorry for the pathetic sack if he hadn't seen the cube of all the horror that these
guys were part of or at minimum made possible. There were some jobs that just earned you what you
got.
"George," the other operator hissed, "what do we do with him? There's no place to put him."


 "Hang on a sec." The assassin pulled up the floor plan, biting his lip. "We got two choices. One floor up,
there's a maintenance closet about fifteen meters down the hall. The other choice is two floors down,
we've got the bottom of the staircase."


 "Stairs." Tommy looked like he would have thrown Mustache over his shoulder, but, after going through
the normal post-death bodily processes, meaning it shit itself, the very fresh corpse was beginning to
stink. He put it down long enough to re-wrap his sheet and picked it up with one hand, dangling the
malodorous burden at arm's length. He kept his other hand on the damn sheet.


 Threeflights down, the smaller man decided they were in a very bad place to leave a body. There was
no under the stairwell nook here—just solid Galplas. The only door had a diamond shaped window at
about head level, for an average man. George's eyes barely crested above the bottom of the frame.


 "There's nobody out—wait." The double-height hall was empty, but the creak and slam of a door above
said they were no longer alone on the staircase. "Come on!" He pulled the giant man, corpse still dangling
from one hand, into the hallway of level C, careful to ease the door closed behind them. Just outside the
door, next to a freight elevator, stood a huge, blue, steel bin. Someone had stenciled the word
"recyclables" on the side in yellow.Even with wheels, that must be a mother to push . The assassin
climbed the steel rungs built into the side and looked in to see a cargo of cans and bottles, rising to about
half a meter shy of the top.


 "Gimme," he whispered to the cyber, wedging his feet firmly in the gaps of the rungs and holding out his
arms. Removing the coverall from the body rendered the corpse more safely anonymous, given what they
did here—but only a bit less smelly. The hard part was settling it in amongst the discarded drink
containers without a lot of loud clatters and rattles. Piling it in as gently as he could, the refuse shifting
under Mustache's weight still sounded, to George, like a twelve year old with a drum set.


 His partner was obviously unhappy to be holding the coverall. The assassin took it from him and scooted
to the men's room door. "Keep watch," he said.


 The toilets in the men's room were the old porcelain kind, with the tank in the back. In the second from
the end stall, Schmidt turned off the water and flushed, stuffing the coverall in the now-empty tank. The
smell would draw little investigation there, at least for awhile. Nobody wanted to investigate men's room
smells too closely unless it was his job to clean up the mess. It was safer than anything else he could think
of, anyway.


When George emerged, already moving for the stairs, Sunday looked ready to kill him.


 "Keep watch? Keep watch?!" he whispered furiously, gesturing to his own sheet-clad form. "Do I look
like somebody who ought to be keeping watch?"
 The assassin motioned him quiet, listening for noise in the stairwell before they began their ascent.
"Wah," the little man said to him, earning a glower.


 Once they got back to the main aboveground stairwell, and the big man was able to ditch the sheet for a
coverall of his own, his mood seemed to improve. A lot. It fitted him perfectly, having been made in the
Bane Sidhe wardrobe department.


 George tried to mollify him a bit more by handing him the pistol taken off the guard. "You're the better
shot, anyway," he said. "Hey, listen, Tommy," he went on seriously, "there's something I need to tell you
about Cally."


"Oh shit."


"Yeah, well, probably. Short version. All this time that James Stewart guy hasnot been dead, the two
have been carrying on a secret marriage, Aelool knew, Papa just found out, Stewart just dumped her."


 "What the fuck? You're shitting me." Tommy shook his head to clear it. "Uh, as earth shaking as it is,
can't the gossip wait until after the mission?"


"I wouldn't be telling you if it could. She got dumped, by email, almost publicly, this fucking morning. She
may be . . . off her game."


"Oh, fuck. What genius decided to crap on her with this right before a mission?"


"Papa. It's all fucked as hell, I don't know why he . . . just, you need to keep an eye on Cally, okay?
She's probably at least going to be volatile."


"Cally. More volatile. Great." Tommy shook his head as they tried to climb the stairs otherwise silently,
muttering, "oh, fuck," again under his breath.


 "Look, I haven't known her as long as you, but I had three girl cousins growing up, close to me as
sisters. I know from nursing girls through break ups. I know what to say, and she'll either lock into gear
or kill me on the spot. Just, either way, don't you get involved. If she ends up pissed, she's liable to carry
through the mission okay just so she can kill me later."


"You're a brave man," Sunday said.
 "Three sisters, near enough. One way or the other, she'll be more 'on' for the mission." George pressed
down a corner of the green tape where it had lifted away from the badge.Lousy cheap-ass garbage,
that's all we get these days .


"Your funeral, dude."


"Hey, she doesn't need that loser. She's got us," Schmidt insisted.


 "If you say so, dude." Tommy shot him a sharp but perceptive look, "But if you hurt her, I will personally
fucking pulverize any pieces of you she doesn't get to first."


"Gotcha," the younger man agreed. "Email. How hard would this guy be to kill?"


"Hard." Sunday pressed his lips together and climbed.




  Chapter Twenty-two
 Sitting on the tank of a toilet with your clothes half on and half off wasn't calculated to inspire confidence.
If changing clothes in a restroom stall wasn't something she'd done dozens of times in her life, Cally would
have felt odd about it. As it was, she just froze in place until the other woman finished her business and
her primping and whatever the hell else she was doing—like, perhaps, reading War and Peace—and left.
She wriggled the rest of the way into her cleaner's coverall. She had to fight to get the zipper all the way
up in front, of course, and cursed the lazy ass in wardrobe who had gone with standard size charts when
fabricating them. Yes, she was a size twelve, tall. Everywhere but the bust. Ow. When she caught up
with the bastard who did it, she was going to find him some night, shove him into a good, old-fashioned,
straight jacket, trussed and gagged, and leave him somewhere he wouldn't be found until morning.


 Her purse and other disposable crap she stuffed in the empty tank, then without appearing to hurry, got
her ass to the stairs as fast as she could. It was a calculated risk to leave George's tape in the doors. If
someone noticed, they'd know something was up. On the other end of that, the black masking tape was
nearly invisible in the recessed shadows. If things went right, their cyber would be working his customary
magic to cover their tracks. If things didn't go right, she didn't want to be boxed in by doors she couldn't
open. None of these scanners was biometric, so if she had to hide for a bit, she was at least one body
away from getting out of the building.


 The janitors didn't technically come on shift until six, but she had to get all the way down to the ground
floor. She glanced at her watch and hauled ass. She had only a narrow window in which to swipe a cart
without having to dispossess some poor schmuck of both cart and life. She'd rather not do that if she
could help it. A missing cleaning cart wasn't going to ring any alarm bells right away, just cause a bit of
confusion. A body, on the other hand, was something you had to hide someplace—a real pain in the ass
on this kind of run.


 Sure enough, four carts were in the hall, all on their lonesome, while someone rustled around in a
stockroom for whatever critically necessary brush, bottle, or bags weren't already on the carts. She
grabbed one and got around the nearest corner faster than fast, coming out next to the elevator. Here's
where she needed a bit of luck if she wanted to keep clear of another needless death. She'd cheerfully kill
the man-sized rodents who ran and worked the nastier parts of this place, but when she thought of maids
and janitors, she couldn't help thinking of the gray haired old lady in some pre-war show about a family
with too many kids. How could you kill a cookie-baking little old lady? Yeah, stashing a body would be
a pain, but she would also hate to have to kill the cookie lady. Or someone like her, anyhow.


 Luck was with her again, maybe. She pretended not to see the balding man in a guard uniform who was
coming down the hall, swiping her card ineffectually and cursing in a properly ladylike fashion when there
was no answering green light. When the guard came over, she gave him a properly helpless look. "It
won't work," she said.


 "Here, let me try." The guard examined her ID and swiped it, with, of course, no result. Duh. As ifhim
swiping it was going to magically make it work by some sort of masculine osmosis. This was another
calculated risk. If she had to kill someone for a badge, and wanted someone more culpable than a
cleaning lady, she had to draw him in, didn't she? He turned the card over in his hands, examining it.


 Cally kept up her helpless me act, watching for the moment when it might be time to kill him. The ID
should be perfect, except for the data that wasn't encoded on it. She'd also artfully scratched it up a little
to age it.


"Here's your problem," he said, pointing out the scratches along the code stripe. "It's all scratched up."


 Boy howdy, a bona fide genius, she thought. "Dammit. Not another one. My supervisor is gonna kill
me." She gave him puppy dog eyes as he nodded in commiseration. "I know I shouldn't put it in my back
pocket, but . . ." she shrugged.


"I'd like to be in your—" He stopped himself. "Damn, tell me I didn't just say that."


 "Aw, how sweet," she chuckled, practically cooing at him.Dumbass. You had fish for lunch, didn't
you?


 She bit her lip, looking up at him through her lashes. "If I could get up to the third floor and get personnel
to make me a fresh one, maybe I wouldn't get caught," she said.
"Ah, but that would be a security breach." He was clearly only teasing her, holding his own card just out
of reach. "I'll do it for a kiss and a phone number," he said.


 "Awww . . ." she cooed again, pulling a lipstick out of her pocket. She scribbled a number on his arm,
leaning over to plant a passionate smooch on Fish-breath. He swiped the door, pressing the third floor
button for her.


"I'll call you," he said.


 She waited until the door closed all the way before wiping a sleeve across her mouth. Blech. It wasn't
that she'd have had anything against the guy if he hadn't worked here. She, at least, only killed people for
good reasons and then as cleanly as the mission permitted. Creep. But not the first creep to develop a
sudden case of stupid when presented with a pretty face, thank goodness. Besides, she'd been nice. She
hadn't killed him, even though the badge would have been damn useful. Hiding the body would've been a
bitch, though. The janitor doing the ground floor would be going around to clean it.


 The elevator dinged and she pushed the cart out past the visual and braille "three" on the door jam. Why
the hell they still printed signs in braille she didn't know. She couldn't imagine anybody not shipping to a
colony if the alternative was staying blind or something. She swiped the bags of trash from one set of
restrooms, just as if she was really emptying them. They'd need it for camouflage.


Grandpa's vent was at the far end of the floor from IT. She had only half lied about going to the
personnel department. She parked the cart underneath the vent and popped the cover, startled at the trail
of strings that came along with it.


"What are you doing? Taking up macrame?!" she hissed over the pack at her grandfather.


"Shut up and take this damn thing," he growled, pushing the ruck towards her.


 She hefted it out of the vent, then shoved it into the trash hamper, putting the bags on top of it. She
scattered some loose paper towels around to make it look more authentic.


 She was bending down to get her buckley out of the side pouch when she saw him. He had shoved his
shirt out in front of him and emerged, clutching the coverall. His scowl dared her to say anything.


 "I got stuck," he said, standing bare except for his skivvies. "After I got the others off, obviously." He
scowled.


 Wordlessly, she fished his sneakers out of the pack and set them on the floor. It wasn't funny. Nothing
that happened on an op that could get them killed was funny. Ever. And she absolutely was not going to
laugh. Because it wasn't funny. Besides, Grandpa had amean sense of payback.


He was still glaring at her sideways after he was fully dressed, while they were wheeling for the stairwell.
The elevator trick wouldn't work twice.


"It's notmy fault," she said.


"Who planned this op?" he prompted.


"Me, but—"


"The elevator's the other way," he observed.


"It's secure. We can't use it," she said.


"You couldn't at least have swiped a badge by now? How long have you been mobile?" he asked.


"I'd have had to kill somebody for it," she said.


"So when have you gotten squeamish, Granddaughter?"


 "I'm not squeamish!" she protested. "I just didn't want to have to hide a body. Somebody'd smell it or
something."


"Uh-huh." He gave her a skeptical look.


 Cally shrugged and stuck to her story. Besides, they were at the stairs. She didn't wait to argue with him,
just took a quick peek through the window, pulled the door open, and went on through. She picked up
the front end of the cart and started moving, assuming he would come along, thereby forcing him to grab
his end and start climbing, instead of standing around grumbling.


Just past the door to the fourth floor, her enhanced hearing picked up another door closing, way down
below. Not even her hearing would have picked it up out of background noise if the stairwell didn't
magnify sound. Evidently Papa had heard it too, because she felt the cart drag a little behind her, as if he
was slowing, maybe thinking of hiding on the fourth floor and waiting a few.


"Come on. We'll stay in front of them," she said in a low voice.
 "We've got three flights before we get out of here." He took care to avoid the loud hisses that would
accompany a whisper.


 "Then pick up your feet," she said, climbing a bit faster. She knew she could set the pace, because he
didn't dare risk dropping his own end. The feet on the steps below were catching up with them, within a
couple of floors, when they finally got to the top. For the last two floors, she and Grandpa had been
slowed by having to hug the wall and stay well out of view of climbers below.


 With the cart back on its own wheels, she could tell from the flush on Grandpa's face that he was just
itching to chew her out. She forestalled it by opening the men's room door.


"In," she said. Boy was she ever going to catch hell after this op.


 He kept scowling at her as he tucked himself into a stall and lifted his feet. She began pretending to
clean, sprinkling scouring powder in a sink and giving it a few casual scrubs to spread the green powder
around. Like any mom, she had plenty of experience watching people—namely her girls—pretend to
clean. She could hear the feet in the stairwell and made sure her back was to the door. It gave her a
good view of most of the area behind her in the mirror, while letting her mostly conceal her face by just a
small turn of her head.


She heard the door open and scrubbed harder, bending over the sink, waiting. They were stopping,
behind her. Two of them, faces just out of her field of view.


"Ma'am, I need to see some ID," a bass voice barked.


 Her fist, the one that was suddenly flying towards the larynx of the voice's owner, stopped in mid-air,
caught in a hand only slightly bigger than her own.


"Hi," George said, he and Tommy beaming at her.


"You're dead," she hissed. "When we get out of here, you're dead."


"If you're through playing, children . . ." Grandpa could put a wealth of disdain into a single sentence
when he wanted to.


 Cally hadn't been dicking around, but she wasn't going to argue, either. If George was stupid enough to
clown on an op, it had needed to be said. It must have been one hell of a relief to get Tommy out of the
shit-hole below, though. She wrote it off to endorphins and focused back in. Or tried to.
 "Hey, Cally. Seriously, Papa told me," the other assassin said. "Look, I know I'm in your business, but
any schmuck who'd leave you alone with the kids for seven years—" He held up a hand when she would
have interrupted him. "This is damned important before we go farther in. You didn't need that schmuck
anyway. I know you don't—" He held his fingers over her lips to silence her, and to her complete
surprise, she let him. "I don't care what you think your part was. Any guy who leaves his kids like that is
a schmuck. You didn't need anybody like that. In a couple of hours, when we get out of here, we're all
gonna go out together. We'll get you roaring drunk, we'll get roaring drunk with you, and we'll get you
home. You didn't need that guy, you got us. We're gonna put this mission to bed. Then we're all gonna
go out and get plastered together. You're gonna be okay. Okay?"


"You're right. You're in my business," she snapped. She was having to fight misting up, but no way in hell
was she going to lethim know that. She had no idea what the fuck was wrong with her. She took a deep
breath. It wasn't so much what he said as the way he said it.Okay, so it helped. He still needs to mind
his own fucking business, and Grandpa has a big mouth. Enough. But itwas enough, and she dialed
back in. All the way back in.


 As they jogged down the hall to the secure room, she heard Grandpa clap the other man on the back. "I
knew I liked you," he said. In any other circumstance she'd have been thinking what the fuck? Or
contemplating killing someone. And later, she might even decide to wring Grandpa's neck. But that would
be later. The only thing in her head right now was: mission.




 They had done something right with their security. There were no dedicated guards on the door to make
the room scream out, "Place Where There Is Something Interesting, Valuable and Important!"
Unfortunately for them, but through no fault of their security people, the team already knew what it was,
and where it was, so the lack of extra guards was going to bite the bastards in the ass. Too many places
arranged their security in such a way as to announce, "This way to the secret documents." If he hadn't
gotten a couple of breaks, it would have taken George several more days, at least, to find the device with
this setup. There was another thing they had done right: there were very few groups and no individuals,
that she knew of, who were capable of subverting an AID.


 Epetar and Winchon wouldn't have given the security people a better view of the risks. None of them
had any idea Michelle O'Neal had anything like these contacts, resources, or any will to use them. All
they would have expected to face was garden-variety industrial espionage—played according to a
Darhel-style version of hardball. For the kind of threats they thought they faced, and within the
constraints put on them by the bean counters, the security people had done their jobs right. They would
probably get the blame, anyway. Cally felt almost sorry for them. Almost.


 AIDs had a real bad habit, hard programmed in. The Darhel were so confident of the AIDs' ability to
infallibly record and transmit their data load that the AIDs wouldn't scream for help on their own initiative,
they just transmitted their load on the prescribed schedule, when tapped from a higher authority than their
user, or when told by their user to call someone or send something. Maybe that had a certain processing
efficiency value. The Darhel were frighteningly smart, and more deadly than even Cally had expected.
They just had some real odd blind spots, one of which included being slow to change and update. The
same AID sniffer that told her when Pardal's AID had just uploaded its data take told them when the
AID guarding their target had uploaded its own no doubt boring recording of nothing happening, as usual.


 The AID was Tommy's problem. After he cracked the door and went over to treat it to the electronic
version of an intimate rear intrusion with no lube, she helped George carry Michelle's decoy over while
Grandpa opened the black box sitting, alone, on an ordinary steel pushcart in the center of the room. The
lid off of their own decoy, all three saw the same problem.


 The base artifact had not been reproduced by Winchon or Michelle—perhaps they had not even been
able to reproduce it yet. That was fine as far as it went. Michelle's toy matched up on the surface.
Unfortunately, for these people to tweak and change it to learn new tricks, they had connected cables to
it in seemingly random places, hanging off and doubling back in a black tentacular mass that would have
done credit to H. P. Lovecraft. To top off the similarity and the problems, the entire device sat within a
mass of translucent, green, gelatinous goo, which moved and dripped, almost as if it sensed their
presence.


Cally looked at the thing in the target box. She looked at the thing in Michelle's box. Michelle's gizmo
had it going on with the tentacles just fine, only there weren't enough of them. Not by a long shot.


Tommy had apparently gotten the next AID violation set on automatic, because Cally felt him peer over
her shoulder. "Looks like the suit undergel we had in ACS," he said. "Well, except for being snot green."
He looked at Cally. "So, what now?"


 "You tell me. How is that goo going to react if we scrape off as much as possible and swap out black
tentacle thingies."


"Dunno," the ACS veteran said.


"You don't suppose we could, kinda, rip off some of those black thingies from his box and tape them to
our box, or something, do you?" Grandpa asked. Technology still wasn't really his thing. Unless it went
boom.


 "Probably not," the three younger operatives said, almost simultaneously. Growing up in the virgin age of
television apparently left a guy . . . different . . . from growing up just a few decades later. Very different.


 "Okay. Here's what we try. Tommy, you pick up the gooey shoggoth or whatever the hell it is, and
scrape any goo you can off it—keep as much goo as you can in their box. George and I will pick up the
decoy and put it in there and see if we can get any of the goo to stay on it. Maybe they still won't notice
for awhile," Cally said, doubtfully.
"And me?" Grandpa asked.


 "Uh . . . go watch the door, Grandpa. Somebody needs to watch the door," she said. He harrumphed
grumpily at being shuffled off. Everybody in the room would hear someone approaching the door, so a
watchman was strictly unnecessary. She expected he'd grouse at her about it when they got home. But
they had to get there first.


 Tommy picked up the object of their endeavors with about the enthusiasm of a fourteen year old boy for
a baby's dirty diaper. The goo tried hard to stick to the device, but by dint of a lot of brushing and pulling
and wrestling, the big man managed to get about half of it to stay in the box.


 At least, it stayed long enough for them to fit the decoy in. Then, to their immense relief, it swarmed up
and around the decoy as if they were best friends. If nano-goo could have friends. The bits on Tommy
even crawled down his arms and into the box, obediently wrapping around the decoy. Both devices had
less goo, but at least their decoyhad green goo. She'd been really afraid of how the stuff would react.


"Gross," she said. "Lids on the boxes, me and George. Tommy, finish up with that AID. Grandpa,
how're we looking?"


Instead of answering, he held up a hand and slid silently out the door, moving sideways down the wall.




 After her AID terminated Erick Winchon's call, Prida sat and stared, silently, at the far wall. Dahmer
had, of course, made a valiant effort to insinuate itself into her affections over the couple of years she'd
had it. The artificial Human personality was limited, however, in the fundamental lack of same in the
psyche of its charge. Prida had known, and still knew, of the machine's efforts. They amused more than
alarmed her. She had never become attached to her AID for the simple reason that she had never been
attached to anyone, in anything but the most temporary physical sense.


 When debating her course of action, in any circumstance, the functional psychopath had and used an
excellent poker face. Now, she was considering the amount of trouble and risk someone would have to
go through to kill or incapacitate a Darhel, as well as the amount of power that indicated. She had idly
considered, herself, what it would take to kill a Darhel. She had investigated only to the extent of hitting
absolutely no tripwires. Paranoid herself, she had an uncanny ability to estimate where others would put
measures in place for their own safety. In particular, she had noticed very early that the Darhel tended
towards the same self-honesty in their emotions as she did herself.


 Anybody with the will and ability to eliminate a Darhel necessarily had the ability, and perhaps the will, to
eliminate Prida Felini. Erick Winchon was a good employer. She had found some of their interactions
truly delicious, although she had been a bit piqued that he had not derived equal pleasure from their
mental trysts through the machine. It would have been so much more convenient if he had.


She knew Erick's psyche, more or less. If she left his employ, even precipitously, he would simply write
her off as no longer in his employ. She would not have believed the indifference if she hadn't found it such
a persistent irritation. She would also lose a terrific salary and unparalleled fringe benefits.


On the other hand, there was someone in the game who not only could take out a Darhel, but had.
There was also the probable reaction of the other Darhel upon anything or anyone in the vicinity. Fringe
benefits or not, Prida had four hundred and eighty years in which to find and enjoy jobs as good as or
better than this one. Provided she was alive to enjoy them.


 Yet, one didn't want to jump the gun and throw away a good thing needlessly. Perhaps good old Pardal
had just gone off and had himself a major snit, all by himself. One heard of such things happening to
Darhel now and again. The thing to do, she decided, was to appear to be totally invested in the project
for as long as possible, while covering her routes of escape if things suddenly blew up. Literally or
figuratively.


"Dahmer, get me the head of security," she said.


"Security, John Graham here, Ms. Felini. What can I do for you?"


 She absently inquired as to Erick's orders and more or less repeated them, telling the security head to
also take over and coordinate the loaner guards from the military along with his own people. This was
harmless cover for her real announcement—that she intended to spend the night at the facility, or several
nights if necessary, and therefore would be making a brief run to her apartment to pick up a few
necessities.


She declined the assistance of a staffer to run the errand for her, of course. Wouldn't dream of it.
Morons.


 There. She could keep herself out of the way of any real hazards until she was more confident the
situation was stable, and without jeopardizing her job. After all, shewould be doing her job, and doing it
well. From a safe distance.




 Jerry Rydell did not appreciate being called in on a weekend, for no damn reason at all that he could
see, to patrol a damned near empty building. Entering middle age and already picking up a little weight,
despite a job that kept him on his feet and walking, Jerry didn't often get dates with attractive women.
Felicity Scarpelli was about as good as it got for him. Pretty, about six years younger than he was, only a
bit plump herself. Having to cancel his date with her had put him in a goddam lousy mood. Especially not
when what he got in exchange was having to walk the floors with Nigel Pinkney, otherwise known as
Nigel the Prick.


"So, bet you're real glad to be in here on Friday, mate. Do a little honest work for once," the prick said.


"Nigel? Blow me." He'd been up one sixth floor corridor and down the other with this cheese-dick and it
had gotten old before he'd taken the second step.


 "Eh, what? Don't like the sixth floor, do you?" In some stupid attempt to play up his name, Nigel affected
a very corny English accent, copied out of old pre-war stuff that had been badly holo-enhanced to fill in
the dead air in the wee hours of the morning. He seemed to think it helped him get women. Jerry allowed
that that might be so—but only the stupid ones.


 He clenched his fists as they walked, yet again, past the old biddy's office. Said woman was some
nameless corporate drone on the sixth floor who had the most grating voice he could imagine—worse
than his mother in law from his first marriage. It didn't matter what time you walked past her office, day
or night, she was loudly talking at her PDA, on some kind of call to someone, with that grating twang that
echoed halfway down the hall in both directions. On and on and on. In his nightmares sometimes, he'd be
patrolling this hall and stop, wrenching her face open with a crowbar. Inside would be only a buckley and
a large, round speaker, embedded in miscellaneous wires and plastic casing, droning on in a
computerized loop, forever.


 They were really responsible for both the sixth and seventh floors, but on this job that meant walking the
halls of the sixth floor in endless loops, trying futilely to break the pattern by looping here instead of there,
running the route backwards, etc. But no matter where you went on the hall, you could always hear the
old biddy, at least a little bit. He had, more than once, fantasized about breaking into her home some
night and bludgeoning her to death in her bed. He wasn't a particularly violent person, but it was the only
way he could conceive of continuing to draw his paycheck while never, ever having to listen to that
scraping, screechy, rasping voice ever again.


 They could only patrol the sixth floor because the big boss and his bimbo minion were housed on the
seventh, and they were too good to be bothered with the presence of lowly rent-a-pigs. Jerry's fists
clenched tighter and he harrumphed silently. Damned snot-nosed suits. Except—her highness the bimbo
was out of the building and the creepy big boss was out of town. They were allowed to patrol the
seventh floor when their majesties weren't there.


 "Hey, Nigel. We really oughtta do a few loops around the seventh floor, seeing as we're on such high
alert and the suits are all out. Ya think?" Please let him not be a prick just for once, the portly man
wished.


"Right you are. I could do with a change. That old bird could peel paint off the walls, if you ask me."
What a prick. "Let's take the elevator." As a rule, Rydell avoided stairs.


"Shall we, then?"




 Papa O'Neal heard the squeaking in the elevator well and had his back to the wall by the time it dinged.
The first guard, a little weaselly man, hit the floor, sapped and stunned, but not out. The taller, fat one
was still slightly in the elevator, and had to be grabbed before he could hit the door button. The neck
break would have normally only worked for someone catching his victim from behind, by surprise. Those
men did not have Michael O'Neal's squat, muscular build and gorilla-like arms. His massive upper body
strength and juv's agility let him muscle the guard's neck around by main force, snapping it like a twig.


 Almost as an afterthought, his heel jammed down, hard, on the neck of the first man, before he twisted,
bringing the opposite knee down, with his full body weight, onto the spot where his foot had been just an
instant before. Both hands buried in the little man's hair, he pulled it up and back, past a right angle, until
he heard the familiar crunch.


 A body in each hand, he dragged them free from the elevator doors before that conveyance could start
complaining too loudly about the obstruction. A novice killer, or someone who had not yet made up his
mind to kill a particular individual, could be hesitant—read "slow"—in action. Decisions to target or not
target took time. Thinking about which move to use next took time. The techniques of an active martial
artist, who had only trained but never killed, took time.


 It is a truism in fighting that reaction takes longer than action. The techniques of a practiced, active,
master who had killed many times at close quarters, and had already targeted a particular man, took very
little more time than the remorseless fall of a guillotine blade.


The oldest O'Neal had come into the facility classifying all its employees as not only enemies, but "bad
people." The guillotine blade had felt no more nor less for those it once felled than he felt for his own kills.
Now, he no longer classified them as either enemies or bad people, simply as bodies in need of safe
disposal. Safe, in this case, being defined as providing the least risk to the mission.


 Around the corner, Tommy Sunday gestured him to the open door of the closest empty office, stripping
the PDAs and security cards from the bodies as they went. Working quickly, he dumped their buckleys
down to emulation level one. He was relieved to see that they had only been on three in the first place. A
three would not have had enough initiative to place an alert call on its own. He routed their security radio
feeds, over very short transmission, to earbugs for Cally and Papa. Each also got a working secure card
in a front pocket, guaranteeing that every member of the team could get through almost any door in the
place.


"So much for a quiet, subtle switch," Cally said, frowning at the bodies.
"We already had to leave one downstairs," their cyber confessed.


"It couldn't be helped," Schmidt explained.


 After giving all three of them a chastising glare, Cally took point, followed by Tommy with the box and
cart which were flanked by Papa, with George bringing up the rear. Sunday, with his massive size, was
the only one able to carry the cart down the stairs, in his own arms, quietly and without help. He could
make twice the safe speed on a staircase as any other pair of them.


"Dead people," she grumbled. "A whole goddamn trail of dead people. Can't take you guys anywhere."


 The O'Neal, as even he thought of himself occasionally, didn't like having his granddaughter on point one
little bit. But she was a professional, a damned good one, and the most likely to befuddle the mind of any
real security officer they encountered for at least long enough to deal with the problem. In a practical
sense, this meant that stunningly distracting assassin "patrolled" like the security guard she was supposed
to be, for long enough to get to the next door or corner and see beyond it, then beckoned the rest
forward.


 The third and fourth floors were crawling with guards, enough that those more-desired routes of egress
were impassable. In both cases, upon encountering hostiles, their team leader had managed to smile and
nod, pacing and turning just as if she had reached the end of her own assigned route, and getting them all
the hell out of there.


 The problem with the second floor was that it contained one of the observation decks for a central
double-floor demonstration area. It was very likely the place from which Michelle's spy had filmed their
initial cube of enemy operations. This meant that the route across the second floor to the necessary freight
elevator was more than three times as long than any of the other floors. That one freight elevator was the
only access to the loading dock through which all routine supplies came in, and all innocuous trash
traveled out.


 Cally stopped, up ahead, and started backpedaling towards the rest of them. The old man tensed, then
relaxed into a certain boneless looseness—the kind of looseness that in cats and warriors presages a
flurry of preternatural speed. Weight forward on his toes, he could feel the air singing between the team
members, buzzing with channeled adrenaline, as their point faded back, just in front of Tommy and
himself. He heard voices around the corner, voices of the guards that had caused her to stop.


 "Are you cold? I'm freezing. Here's a couple of bucks. Why don't you go back down to the break room
and grab us each a cup of coffee while I finish the loop of this floor?"


The mumble that followed was unintelligible.
 "That's why they have us in pairs, right? Nah, it's okay. Have a cup on me. Yeah, meet you back at this
floor's lobby, alright? Good."


The first guard's voice was friendly, decent. Too bad the guy was probably about to die. The team
waited, standing silent.


 Then Cally was moving forward again, motioning them to follow, then stay. She walked ahead to the
corner, peered around, nodded, and motioned them forward again. There was something . . . different.
Still, he'd trained her since she was a child. His confidence in her field abilities was absolute.


 As they turned the last corner to the freight elevator, he understood. Leaning against the wall, out of their
way, waited a large, dark-haired soldier in the uniform of US SOCOM and Fleet Strike's Direct Action
Group for Counterterror. He stood, silently, as they approached, pausing only to touch the front of his
cover with one hand as they passed.


"Hi, Aunt Cally," he said. "Dad," he nodded as Tommy wheeled by.


 The Bane Sidhe agent watched them safely onto the elevator, team and cargo together. As the doors
closed, Papa saw the young man resume his patrol, down the hall and away from them. Always a
pleasure to see a well-grown, respectful, young man.




 Tommy had had a few seconds near enough to George to, after watching Cally go all misty and then
snap right back into gear, hiss, "I give the fuck up.How??? "


 Their rear guard shrugged, keeping his words quiet enough that he hoped she couldn't hear him, when
she'd gone up ahead. "Kick the hardest guy hard enough and he rattles—in a guy way. Kick a hardass
woman hard enough and she rattles, too. Give a token soothing to the little girl, and you've got the
operative back. Cally was hung up in a rare, girl moment. She's better now," he said.


"No shit," Sunday nodded.


Just for a moment, Papa looked suspiciously like the side of his mouth was trying to quirk upwards.
Then the rest of the team was past the moment, too.


"Whaddya wanna bet she kicks his ass?" the deadly little man muttered.
 "No bet," the ACS vet and long-married man muttered out of the corner of his mouth as the subject of
their clandestine conversation beckoned them forth, shooting them a darkly suspicious glare.




  Chapter Twenty-three
 General Robert Foxglove, a one-star staff officer within SOCOM, had been less than thrilled to get a
call from an AID outside the service. Particularly an AID he had to listen to, like the one belonging to the
Darhel Pardal's pet mentat. Foxglove owed a lot to the Epetar group. One thing in particular was the
ability to live comfortably on his own salary while his ex-wife enjoyed the life to which she had once
become accustomed. The counter-intel guys didn't twig to it because the money wasn't coming to him.
His ex-wife was merely too occupied with a conveniently rich toy-boy to bug him about money for
alimony or to support his ex-kids. Nobody suspected a man was being paid off merely because he lived
within his own salary. He was just a guy lucky enough to have an ex who wasn't a platinum-plated,
grasping bitch. She was, of course, but the Epetar group had long insulated him from that reality in return
for a few discreet favors.


 The favor required, in this case, was going to be a royal pain in the ass. He had tried to confirm it with
the Darhel himself, in the hope of getting out of it. Unfortunately, his own AID had been typically snippy
about getting that august personage on the line—even more so than usual. The General interpreted the
silence to mean discussion of his alien master's instructions, delivered by proxy, was neither necessary
nor desired. The humiliation stuck in the man's craw, but he was, by now, used to the myriad small
humiliations and indignities that the Darhel heaped on their minions.


 The bitch of it was that the favor would have been easy if that asshole, Pennington, would only play ball.
Unfortunately, the commanding officer of DAG was a starchy bastard who had chosen to get sticky
about deploying troops under his command to the strictly temporary, necessary effort of providing
supplemental security to an important Epetar Group project. Okay, so they had reason to be miffed at
Epetar right now, maybe, but that shouldn't matter because the facility didn't have anyopen links to the
Epetar Group. None of the men would know of any connection, anyway. And it wasn't as if DAG wasn't
pulling the cherries of one Darhel group or another out of the fire every other mission, whenever the
perpetual rivalries or petty piracy resulted in one kind of violence or another against the aliens' legitimate
business interests.


 Pennington had a real corncob up his ass about this one, though. Foxglove had had to pull in an
important, and rare, favor from one of the Joint Chiefs to get the original orders to come down through
the appropriate chain of command and force the uncooperative bastard's hand. Even then, he had only
gotten the most grudging, limited assistance available for his clandestine masters—a paltry two squads.
His Darhel associates—as he thought of them, though they would have said masters—hadn't been happy.
He thought the other general might be having a fit of idealistic pique over that Epetar-Gistar mess at that
mine in Africa. Dammit, the modern world couldn't afford those kinds of juvenile temper tantrums over
necessary expedients.
 Anyway, his present problem was that Pennington had extended his complete unreason to a flat refusal
to order reinforcement of the security detachment in question without direct orders from above. It wasn't
as if the other general couldn't have done it, entirely legitimately and within his orders, on his own
initiative. It wasn't as if Foxglove himself didn't have a firm reputation for returning favors, and for having
the ability to do so. No, the man just had to be an asshole about it.


 Which put Foxglove between the proverbial rock and a hard place. He couldn't go back to the well with
the Joint Chiefs. His capital was burned up there, as had been made painfully clear when he'd called in
the initial favor. He had to get those troops. Epetar had him by the short hairs, dammit, and the Darhel
didn't react well to failure.


 The best way to handle it, he had decided, was to follow the old adage about it being easier to get
forgiveness than permission. He couldn't get Epetar's active assistance before the fact, damn Pardal's
power games in refusing to take calls. However, he was too damned convenient to them for them to
leave his ass swinging in the wind. His only choice was to take a few risks now and rely on them to cover
for him after. At least the mentat's AID had been willing and able to help. Using its master's authority, it
had convinced Pennington's AID to conveniently ignore incoming calls, and experience "technical
difficulties" with outgoing calls for the next eight hours. He hoped it would be enough.


"Daisy, get me Colonel Jacob Mosovich on the horn," he told his AID.


"Yes, Bob," it husked.




Jake's first thought when his AID informed him that one General Foxglove was calling was, "What the
hell does this dick want?" It was at best bad form to speak ill of a superior officer. Unofficially, there
were some assholes it was damned hard to speak well of.


 Mosovich's long military experience had taught him that there were officers you could count on to take
care of both the officers under their command, and their men. Then there were officers who fit the military
profile of "active stupid"—which generally meant that their officers and men were left to make the CO's
hare-brained orders work however they could, or catch nine kinds of hell forhis incompetence. The
Colonel knew from both reputation and personal experience that Bob Foxglove was one of the latter,
and was in his current staff position not for the sake of career development, but as an expedient for
getting a politically connected, dumbass weasel into the spot where he could do the least harm.


"Good afternoon, General. What can I do for you, sir?"


"Colonel, I've been unable to reach General Pennington, and apparently I'm not the only one. My call is
regarding your security mission with The Humanity Project. Their CEO, the Mentat Erick Winchon, has
informed SOCOM that an associated facility was attacked this morning. He declined to provide details,
but said he believes an attack on their facility may be imminent," the general said, as if expecting
Mosovich to be impressed with his important connections to this Winchon individual.


 When Mosovich didn't reply, Foxglove continued, "This is a strong indication of an imminent terrorist
attack that requires DAG reinforcing its . . . ahem . . . unusually small detachment on site. I have done
everything I can to contact Pennington, with no luck. I was hoping that his standing orders to you would
allow you to begin deploying while we continue our efforts to reach him."


 Jake was silent for a few moments, but for once, Foxglove didn't seem to be in a hurry for an answer.
"Let's try him once more. Maybe he's back in touch. AID, conference in General Pennington, please," the
colonel instructed. He had noticed that Bob didn't saywho at SOCOM had been informed.


"I'm sorry, Jake. I can't reach him," his AID said.


 Damn. The commanding officer of DAG avoided letting his mental grimace show on his face and made a
decision. He could begin movement while his AID continued to try his CO. The general would probably
be more effective getting additional information on the threat than a colonel would, and he might even
sabotage his boss's efforts by pushing too hard with this particular asshole right now.


 "Yes, General, my orders do allow for further deployment on my own initiative. Please forward me all
the intelligence information SOCOM has, and any more that comes in, of course. Meanwhile, we will
begin moving out as soon as possible. Thank you for the information, sir," he said. Then, to his AID,
deliberately within hearing of Foxglove, who he didn't trust farther than he could spit, "AID, please keep
trying General Pennington until you do reach him. Keep me informed of your progress."


"Of course, Jake," it said.


 "Thank you for your cooperation, Colonel," the one-star cut the connection, leaving the lieutenant
colonel staring at the empty space and silently cursing all politicians, civilian and military.


"Get me Mueller and Kelly."


"Right away, sir," the AID sounded almost relieved, which was odd. Maybe he'd imagined it.




Major Kelly stood in front of his CO and only had two words in his head: "oh shit." Colonel Mosovich
was a hell of an officer and one hell of an operator in his own right. Kelly had hated to have to deceive
him by holding back the fundamental nature of DAG's dual loyalties. It smacked of dishonor and had
been the hardest thing about the mustang officer's job since the day he first reported to boot camp. Now,
he was finally going to have to come clean, and couldn't help being ashamed even though there were vital
reasons for the dual loyalties and the deception, and a perfect opening for confessions to the colonel. Not
to mention how Mueller was going to react.


"Sir, we need to discuss a great deal without interruption," the XO said.


 The old man nodded and walked Mueller and him outside, away from the AIDs, who would punish
them later, in small ways, for the exclusion.


 "That bit about not knowing what you might be getting into brings up something, actually a lot of big
things, that you now have a need to know, sir."


"Why do I get the feeling I'm not going to like this?" Jake asked his XO.


 "Because you absolutely are not. First, I and most of DAG already know exactly what we are going
into, and you now need to know how."


"This is more than just feedback from our men on temporary duty up there." It wasn't a question.


 "Yes, sir, it is. The answers go way back. First, Michael O'Neal, Senior, who you worked with in
Vietnam, did not die in the nuclear explosion at Rabon Gap but is very much alive, rejuved, and working
for a covert organization with a very, very similar mission to DAG's." He waited to see what the old man
would say.


"You sound like you have direct personal knowledge of this. I am not happy to just be hearing about
whatever this is, and I will be even less happy if I have to drag it out of you in bits and drabs."


Mueller was glowering silently, since this mess was the colonel's situation to deal with.


"Yes, sir. Other veterans of special units, listed as dead, are clandestinely alive and part of this
organization, primarily because the civilian authorities have been compromised." Kelly suppressed a sigh.
The Colonel's scowl was expected, but not encouraging. Of course.


 "Sir, you and the rest of the services—the uncompromised rest of the services—know this full well," he
said to his impassive superior.


"Sounds like you're telling me they've been compromised in two directions, major," Mosovich said
expressionlessly.


 "That's certainly one interpretation, sir. Those of us, and I do mean us, who are members of this other
organization think that the fundamental nature of the mission matters. Our mission is congruent with
DAG'sstated mission, with what the mission is openly presented as supposed to be, and the Darhel's
mission is not. To be complete, we were not recruited, unless you count recruiting from the cradle. We
joined DAG second, for the training," he admitted to his rightly furious CO, "and not one of us has ever
acted counter to DAG's orders and missions while serving."


"While serving," the colonel repeated grimly.


 "Sir, respectfully, wenever act counter to the interests of humanity. Yes, that's as we perceive them, but
as a resistance to the pernicious actions and aims of the Darhel, which you know damned well they have
by now, we have ethics. If one of us reaches a situation where he can't obey orders here, he leaves.
Sometimes it's officially feet first, but he leaves. To the extent DAG's actions are genuinely counter-terror
or neutral to humanity's welfare, or not pernicious in a way contrary to humanity's vital interests, we serve
honorably."


"Your definition of honor leaves something to be desired, major."


 "Perhaps, sir. Unless honor is cooperating with the forces that have compromised national command
authority with extremely negative intentions towards humanity as a whole, and the United States as a part
of humanity."


 "I'll be goddammed!" Mueller exclaimed. The outburst, given the situation, and the dumbfounded
enlightenment on the man's face, warranted explanation.


"Sir, what doyou remember Iron Mike's dad looking like?" the sergeant major asked. "I knew I knew
you fuckers from somewhere!"


 "Fuck," Mosovich said, the light finally dawning. "How many of you are his damn kids? That fucking
asshole. When I get hold of him, I'm going to kill him. Or kick his ass. I haven't decided which yet.
Well?"


"Kids, grandkids," Kelly shrugged and grinned. "Very close friend's kids and grandkids, other lifetime
members—a bit more than half the company, sir."


 "You know, major, I have never thought of myself as an incompetent officer—not once—until this very
moment. More than half my fucking command, right under my nose," he rubbed his face in both hands,
absorbing the truth, clearly furious.
 "Sir, think back about how these men have served you, and how Papa O'Neal served with you. Then
think about just why we had to leave those AIDs back there in the office. If you don't think there's a right
and a wrong here, there's definitely a better and a worse."


 "You'll pardon me, son, if that's not a lot of comfort right now," Jake's scowl had returned. "Leaving off
that, for awhile, suppose you tell me exactly what we're facing up the road, since I don't doubt that what
I thought were my two squads are actuallyyour two squads, Kelly."


 "Sir, you're a damned good officer. Don't take that away from yourself. After a few thousand years of
covert operation, an organization gets pretty good." He shrugged at his CO's expression. "Yes, sir, it's
been a very long war, and it ain't half over yet."


"You were going to tell me about the mission, not flatter me, son."


 "Yes, sir. The facility we're being sent in to guard is an Epetar-owned facility. It is a facility in which
atrocities of the very, very worst kind take place every day, against innocent men, women, and children,
sir."


"Go on." The colonel was giving nothing away. Kelly didn't suppose he would have been, either.


 "The 'attack' the Epetar Group is expecting is real, is more serious than they expect, and is designed to
remove the equipment they are using to commit those atrocities. The atrocities are involved with testing a
particular alien technology for widespread application against humans."


"More."


"Mind control, sir. The other officers and men don't have that specific information, sir."


 "Well, finally I know something that everybody else in my command didn't know first. Not that it doesn't
sound like fucking science fiction. Thank youso much, Kelly."


At least he had said "Kelly" and not just the more impersonal "major."


 "Yes, sir. Sir, in your place I would be just as pissed, but knowing you, and Sergeant Major Mueller, I
strongly believe that you will, upon reflection, realize the nature of the mission as in the vital interests of
everything you hold sacred and the failure to tell you as necessary OpSec, no matter how unpleasant.
And personally distasteful, I might add, sir. Sir, until this moment, you did not have a need to know."
"I'm still making up my mind about that."


 "Sir, I might also point out that our organization is far more closely aligned with the interests and intent of
the honestly elected, un-bribed, and un-blackmailed components of the legitimate civilian authority than
those we oppose. Far, far more."


"It's that 'far more' part that still concerns me, son."


 "Where possible, where the public has not been deceived in a way that isoverwhelmingly adverse to
their interests, identical. In the case of non-vital deception of the body politic by the enemy, we make
every effort to stay aligned with the uncompromised, legitimate civilian authority."


"I notice a lot of wiggle room in that description, son."


 "All I can tell you, sir, is that you should consider it highly unlikely that some of the best of the best of the
veterans of the war would sign on with anything less, sir. Or would permit anything less on their watch,
sir. Then consider the exigencies of the circumstances. It's not an easy call to make, sir."


"Except that by your own admission you and half my men have never known anything else."


"No, sir. All I can say is that the father or grandfather of a number of the rest of your troopers is an
honorably discharged veteran of both the Ten Thousand and the ACS. You've got to make up your own
mind, sir, but you don't have much time to do it in."


"And whose fault is that?" Mosovich said sourly.


"Sorry, sir. No excuse, sir."


"Oh, shut up, Kelly. Get the men moving and I'll decide whether or not I'm going to shoot you later." He
did not add: as I expect you'll decide whether or not you're going to shoot me. He didn't have to.


"Yes, sir." Kelly answered. The old man was not joking, and he knew it. Then again, considering how he
would have felt if it had been him, he had expected nothing else.




Mosovich pulled his XO aside before addressing the men.
 "Kelly. I am buying your story, but God help you if I find you have lied to me," he didn't sayagain , "in
any particular of this, because I will shoot you and every single member of your little cabal. Do you read
me?" The old veteran added to himself,Unless you shoot me first, which you will if I'm wrong about
you. God help us all, anyway.


 He couldn't have known that one third of the Bane Sidhe operatives in the briefing room heard him, quite
clearly, with their enhanced hearing. Their faces gave no sign as they sat at the desks used, between
missions, for training classes.


 "All right, men. We have been ordered to the The Institute for Human Welfare on the basis of receiving
intelligence that there may be an attack there by forces hostile to them. You will notice that I did not
describe the attackers as 'terrorist forces.' We have intelligence of an impending attack. We also have
internal intelligence that this facility is a front for the Epetar Group and that said facility is engaged in
activities that would, themselves, fall within our organizational definitions of terrorism. According to our
information, the attackers are members of an organized vigilante group."


 It could not have been his imagination that some of his men looked at him a little sharper, while one or
two might have looked the slightest bit shamefaced. The holo of the building he told his PDA to display
took up a third of the empty space in the front of the room, before the ranks of desks. His XO had
ensured that there were no AIDs in the room, to the reported chagrin of one FNG who had not yet
learned to remain emotionally detached from the treacherous little machine.


 "DAG's mission is to stop a terrorist act in case of an attack," he stated deliberately. "To that end, the
Epetar Group are known associates of and supporters of terrorists, as each of you knows from recent
personal experience. Our intelligence indicates that the Epetar people are holding civilian captives in the
basement areas of the building. Note that our mission is not to initiate attack, but to respond against
terrorism if one occurs.In the event of an attack on the facility, which we confidently expect to occur,
our counter-terror mission dictates that we liberate those captives." He scanned the room, making
eye-contact with individual officers and men. "To that end, you are to consider the vigilantes friendlies
with objectives of their own separate from ours."


 "The Epetar people believe we are coming up as security forces in support of them," Jake continued.
"We will encourage them in that belief as long as possible in order to infiltrate the facility. In line with that,
they are expecting us to report to this area," he pointed to a loading dock on one end of the building, "for
briefing on the situation and deployment within the building. Which we will do."


 "We will be carrying buckley PDAs, and only buckley PDAs, for full compatibility of communications,
secure from the enemy. We will insist on keeping members of the same platoons as close together as
possible. I do not anticipate any troublepersuading the Epetar people to comply."


"Major Kelly will brief you on the mission plan for location and liberation of hostages."
Specialist Quackenbush, 19, who did not know that his company XO now classed him as "the FNG
with the AID," stopped one of the other guys in his platoon as they rechecked their webgear for the
mission prescribed equipment. "Hey, what the fuck is up with these mission orders? Vigilantes?
Corporate terrorists? Is the old man off his nut? I mean, what the fuck arehis fucking orders? Really,
honest to God, is heinsane? Dude, I'm seriously asking."


 "What the fuck is your problem, Quackenbush?" Specialist Grady hissed. "If you think for one moment
that the old man would disobeyhis orders, or maybe you don't have confidence in the rest of your chain
of command, then what the hell are you doing in the service and how the hell did you make it here?"


"Well excuse me for breathing, Grady. You findnothing strange about this?"


"Cherry, did you ever maybe think we've got the term 'Fucking New Guy' for a reason? Shut the fuck
up and follow your orders. The old man knows what he's doing."


 Quackenbush received a professional ass-chewing that took less than half a minute and left him feeling
about two inches high when Sergeant Mauldin relieved him of his AID, again, before they climbed into
the choppers, popping the little computer neatly into some kind of envelope and tossing it in the back of
one of the jeeps in the motor pool before climbing into the bird. He grimaced as he tried to orient the
PDA that the sergeant had shoved into his hands instead so that he'd be able to use the thing, and hoped
it didn't snow or something and break his AID. This buckley didn't even have a damn personality overlay.
He shut up miserably in his seat among the other Bravo guys. He was in the doghouse for sure, and right
now had no idea whether the world had gone crazy or he had.


Sergeant Major Mueller pulled him aside a few minutes later as they got off the chopper. The enlisted
man resigned himself to another ass-chewing and maybe even an article fifteen.


 "Look, son," the old sergeant clapped a hand on his shoulder in a fatherly manner. "You're in a
counter-terror unit. We're liberating civilian hostages. Just keep your eye on the ball, and your mind on
the mission. You'll do just fine. And if you don't, I'm going to shove a size sixteen boot up your ass so far
my toe is going to be kicking your tonsils."




 The loading bay was large, for what it held. Three stories high and a bit larger than half a basketball
court, it stood mostly empty. Made largely of Earthtech materials, the Galtech portions had the look of
replacements and repairs, as if someone had been uninterested in building new, but had had such ready
access to Galtech materials that cost was an afterthought whenever anything needed repairs. Boxes stood
in palleted stacks along the walls, separated in clumps as if grouped for type. A couple of forklifts sat in
the middle of the floor, as if their operators had knocked off without parking them away.
 The mass of men in green-detailed coveralls either ignored it or leaned against it as they listened to the
shift supervisor explain why they had all been called in after six o'clock on a fucking Friday. Turned out
one of the suits had a wild hair up his ass about some corporate raid that probably existed only in his
imagination. The general mood among the guards whose shift it wasn't was pissed off, except for the ones
who really needed the double-time pay, coming up on Christmas. The general mood among the guards
whose shift itwas was pissed off, on account of not getting paid double-time along with the other guys.


 The half a dozen DAG troops who weren't actively patrolling had positioned themselves on one side of
the mass of security guards, giving them a clear field of fire across the bay. They had picked the side
nearest some stacks of boxes they could retreat behind for cover. That gave them the cover boxes, and
the boxes on the far side of the hostiles, to absorb ricochets in the bay. The haphazard mix of galplas and
cinderblock walls were unlikely to be fun as backstops. Better to ruin the enemies' day than their own.


 Six specwar troopers with pistols and shotguns, allegedly loaded with rock salt, versus sixty armed
idiots. The odds were jimmied by the two or three juved war veterans, riffed out and working at
whatever they could get on planet. That, plus the shells in the DAG guns, all of them, which were
supposed to be rock salt but weren't. Buckshot was downright unpleasant for Human targets. The Bane
Sidhe operatives, which all of them also were, had each security guard classified more in the category of
"target" than "Human." To the extent that they considered the guards people at all, the men classed every
facility guard based on their willing employment in support of an organization committing atrocities against
civilians. Nobody in DAG, Bane Sidhe or not, had problems with killing bad people.


 The DAG guys had no anticipation that they would be killing these particular guards in this particular
place, or in the next few hours, or at all. They each followed the general principle of having a plan to kill
everyone he met. When off duty, but together, the counterterror troops resembled a wolf pack between
hunts. When operational, the troops—being all O'Neals and in the same unit, to boot—moved in a an
easy flow so coordinated it was almost telepathic.


 Their distribution now differed little in kind from their distribution around the civilian security people for
the past couple of weeks. The specifics followed the tactical situation. Without ever seeming to realize
why, one or two of the guards had developed a strange tendency to jump at small noises when the DAG
guys were around.




 Cally, still taking point, opened the door to the loading bay and immediately tried to step backwards
through it, seeing that Mr. Murphy had finally struck with a vengeance. Unfortunately, she'd been seen.


 "Hey! No, goddammit, don't you dare leave. You're fucking late and I'm not repeating myself just
because some asshole who couldn't be on time didn't get the memo. Get your ass down here, and you
better believe I'm docking your pay for this. Who's your supervisor?" All of this left the Chicago-native
shift supervisor's mouth in a rapid-fire staccato burst, without pause for breath.
 He was approaching the base of the stairs as he said it, obviously to continue chewing her out, so instead
of retreating, Cally continued down the right half-flight of stairs, noting the six inch steel rim rising at the
floor of the landing and running along the line of the stairs down on each side. She'd seen better cover,
and worse.


 Having seen the troops deployed along a line at right angles from her team's angle of entry, and realizing
that an unintentional ambush could still be close enough for government work, counting the odds, she
made an instantaneous decision.


"Might as well come on guys, we're in the soup but good," she called back over her shoulder.


"Oh, so there's more of you lazy ass slack— Hey! What shift are you on anyw—"


 Cally's draw was a smooth blur. She had whittled it free of unnecessary movement like a gunsmith
floating a barrel, then embedded in muscle memory with daily dry-fire practice. The buckley monitored to
track her progress over time. She had been stable for many years now. If draw speed had had a formal
competition class, she would have long ago achieved high master status.


 Even with an unfamiliar gun and holster, the shift supervisor's body was jerking from the round between
his eyes as the very first vestiges of bewilderment were crossing his face. Then his body was shielding
hers as she carried him right with her, forward and behind a barrel. His extra magazines were on his belt,
and she couldn't possibly have gotten them loose on the fly. She was damned good, but there were things
even she couldn't do. For a female operative whose full enhancement gave her the strength, including
upper body, of a supremely fit man—with none of the extra bulk—the fastest solution was to take the
magazines by taking the whole man. She hadn't really needed the corpse for cover, since she was behind
the barrel before the first round impacted on the cinderblock behind where she had been.


At close enough to the same instant, all hell broke loose as the Bane Sidhe operatives, every one of
whom recognized Aunt Cally instantly despite the short, black hair, opened up on the guards while
backing to take up their pre-selected positions behind one stack of boxes or another.


The rest of the switch team used the device and cart as a visual distraction and cover, coming in low
behind it and pitching it down the opposite half-flight of concrete and steel stairs, hitting the floor of the
upper landing behind what paltry cover there was.


 Glancing aside and through the gaps in the stair risers, Cally amended that impression. Tommy Sunday
had somehow managed to either precede, follow, or pace the cart and land himself behind a screen of
toilet paper boxes that she was surprised he'd had time to find and pick, much less get to. Her already
high opinion of the ACS veteran's practical survival skills rose another notch. Cover it wasn't, but for a
man as big as he was, the concealment was a better tactical choice. She realized that ninety percent, at
least, of the enemy wouldn't even think to shootthrough the boxes. The rest would almost certainly miss
anything vital. Good choice.


 The Darwinian process of war generally has to apply over several engagements, or several battles, to
make veterans of survivors. The enemy survivors of the first seconds of this engagement were made up of
both the fitter and the luckier of their fellows. At least one veteran of combat against the Posleen,
unknown to the Bane Sidhe people, now lay bleeding out on the floor. Being a veteran had not equated
to being a good man, in his case. Any ship making port had its rats, and Nicholas Rondine had left a trail
of beaten and broken ex-wives behind him.


 Being in a bad place did not always equate to being a bad person, either. Willard Burns was a
forty-three year old dry alcoholic, recently unemployed from a shoe factory, whose next door neighbor
had gotten him this job. He had been unhappily working his two week notice because his five year old
daughter wanted a toboggan from Santa. Now he had ceased feeling pain from the shotgun blast to his
chest. Forty extra pounds of beer gut had rendered him slower than too many of his fellows.


Whether fitter or luckier, most of the guards behind the boxes had, unfortunately, either through
presence of mind or awareness of limited ammo, chosen to at least attempt to aim their fire. The DAG
guys had taken out at least three times their number in that first burst of action before the survivors were
under cover. The good news was that the enemy was minus about a third of his strength. The bad news
was two thirds of the enemy, both the unwounded and lightly grazed, had made cover.


 DAG itself was not without losses. One man lay DRT, in a position to hot to hiberzine him—an almost
certainly permanent loss. Another lay behind the boxes, sporting the swollen lips and other visual signs of
a hiberzined man, chest perforated by a skilled or lucky pistol shot. Not like it mattered which.


 One guy had taken it in the meat of the leg, and was combat effective again after a few precious seconds
spent dosing and binding it. The other three made it completely untouched and fully effective.


 The numerical odds were essentially unchanged from the beginning of the fight. The Cally team made
little functional difference as they were so lightly armed.


 With a few minutes to get organized and start thinking, even forty untrained idiots could take on the best
soldiers, especially if they had an accepted chain of command and were armed with weapons tactically
appropriate to the situation, as these were.


 Cally had absorbed the change in resources and positioning instantaneously and with almost no
conscious thought, part of the battle gestalt of one of the youngest living veterans of the Posleen War,
irregular though she'd been. Her barrel was on the same side of the room as the DAG troopers, so she
had been positioned perfectly to run the numbers on friendly troops. Not like six minus two was a hard
calculation to make. In their military uniforms, DAG troopers were instantly distinguishable from the
enemy.
 The DAG troopers, in turn, would have absolutely no trouble tracking the friendlies on the switch team,
all but Schmidt being their close kin, known to them from birth.


 At the moment, Cally was more busy swearing and providing covering fire than anything else. Grandpa
just had to have a gun, and had slithered down the stairs after the body of a guard who had staggered
their way to die.


 It wasn't actually completely stupid, she allowed grudgingly. One shooter was a big difference, one lump
might as well be dead for the immediate engagement, and the best time to risk this partial exposure was in
the first seconds, while the most confusion reigned among the enemy.


 After retrieving the pistol from the floor in front of the man's hand, and the body of the spare magazines,
Grandpa sprinted for the nearest real cover. He made the DAG box line, but she felt a hard thwack to
her thigh as a round penetrated the barrel and continued through her leg. She absently noted the lack of
an exit wound and figured a chunk of the lucky bullet's momentum must have been sapped off by
impacting the barrel. Dammit.He exposes himself and getsme hit. If we survive this, I'm gonna kill him.


 As a top-level field operative, Cally O'Neal and the rest of her team had very complete nannite
packages in their bodies. In her case, this meant that the blood coagulated almost at once, and a highly
selective nerve block made it feel like she'd been smacked with a broom handle rather than a sledge
hammer. She automatically and unconsciously diverted the rest of the pain through a post-hypnotic
melange of Vitapetroni's that acted like a psychic demerol, without the loss of function. Ongoing blood
loss was a weeping trickle from the constricted capillaries whenever movement cracked the jelled
proto-scab.


 "Wish we had a magic pill for morphine," she groused, picking off one of the hostiles who had picked the
interior wall to try to rush around the corner. Tommy and George got one each, and she got another one,
as they went past. The only reason they got so close to the far wall before Grandpa and the closest
trooper got the last of them was they had to hold back until their field of fire didn't include Tommy.


 That took seven more, but the odds were real bad. Men, even untrained ones, fought far better per
individual than Posleen. The horses had overwhelmed with sheer numbers, the literally moronic Posleen
Normals being totally heedless of danger in service to their own God-Kings, driven by a hunger that
made voracious a pathetically inadequate descriptor. Men, contrariwise, were each as smart as a single
God-King. They'd spend their lives, but not heedlessly. Unfortunately, it had yet to occur to these
dumbasses that they could just break off, quit firing, and be allowed to run away whole and healthy. Or,
more likely, they were under a light compulsion that hadn't yet broken under the instinct of
self-preservation and a glimmer of non-panicked thought.


 She winced, not at her wound, but at the knowledge that a similar rush up the other side, with more
people, would likely make it—at least with a couple of people to negate DAGs cover by exposing them
to fire on all sides of each box stack. Tommy and George would be unable to provide supporting fire,
having to conserve nearly non-existent ammo for clearly hittable targets. Two of their remaining DAG
guys, and Grandpa, would have their line of sight obscured by other stacked boxes. That left the two
closest and Cally to take down a rush. Good shot though she was, with only three people exposing
themselves to hostile fire, one of them was certain to be hit. None of these ruminations took more than a
tenth of a second to come together in her brain as a unified picture of their (bad) tactical position.


 Two minutes is an eternity in situations like theirs. Inevitably, the rush down the other side occurred to
the enemy, which would likely have been the end for them except for the absurd entry of yet another
DAG trooper through the far door, face to face with the lead guys in said rush. The moment that followed
was one of those that perfectly illustrated the concept of time dilation.


 Both sides faced each other, and even though Cally couldn't see their facial expressions, she could
imagine as both retreated back to their previous cover in a jumble. Geez! Couldn't they hear the shots
outside? What the hell kind of acoustics did this place have, anyway?


 Somebody in their relief force was on the ball, though, for what happened next was a crack of the
outside door and what looked like a slap of something on the top and bottom of the inner door frame.
She was subconsciously bracing for an explosion when a voice, amplified by the stereo separation of the
tiny speakers, poured in the room at a volume loud even to people who'd just been in an indoor firefight.


 "Security personnel. This is Colonel Jacob Mosovich of the United States Army Direct Action Group.
This facility is under assault for violation of Federal law and terrorist activities. Drop your weapons and
come out, one by one, slowly. You will not be harmed. Your names and job titles will be taken and you
will be released to go home or seek medical attention. People, we are interested in the big guys, not you.
You're little fish, and immunity may be offered in exchange for testimony," the voice paused, as if to let
the orders and information sink in.


 "Come out, unarmed, with your hands up. You will not be assaulted, arrested, or detained. You do not
need to die for this employer today, but youwill die, within minutes, if you continue to resist." There was
another pause, probably to see if the security weenies were moving. Not fast enough, apparently. She did
hear a couple of clatters as some arms dropped.


"We have an entire, armed, counter-terror unit of elite soldiers," he continued. "Well-armed soldiers with
unlimited ammunition. You have low ammunition, light armament, low numbers, and no training.
Surrender now, and come out. You will not be harmed. You will be released. We do not want to kill
you, but make no mistake that we will. Your time is up. Surrender now," Mosovich said.


 Well, I'll be damned, she thought. Jake the Snake. No wonder the reinforcements were acting with some
sense.


There were more clatters as the closest former guards apparently decided that this was a damned fine
offer and walked towards the door, hesitantly glancing in the direction of their surviving enemies as if
wondering if they would be shot as soon as they broke cover.
When the first two made it out the door alive and unharmed, the rest started to form up in an orderly
queue, more used to standing in lines than fighting, anyway.


 That was, at least, what started to happen before Cally suddenly found herself unable to move. Out of
the corners of her eyes, she saw the security guards frozen in place, as if someone had taken a still holo
and they were all trapped in it.


Alone in the center of the room, a short man in an expensive suit stood glaring around as if deciding who
or what to deal with first. The Human Mentat Erick Winchon had come home.


He wasn't alone for more than an eyeblink, as Michelle O'Neal, brown mentat robe stiff as the skirt of a
porcelain doll, stood in the center of the room as well, glaring athim .


 "So. You are truly insane after all. Do you think the rest of the Wise can or will tolerate your reckless
and haphazard direct intervention, running around like a little tin god? How long before larger and larger
sections of the Milky Way would become your play toy? How long before simple boredom drove you to
take everything down in your own,individual calamity?" Her sister's stress on the word individual was so
soft it was almost indiscernible.


 "Oh, like you haven't intervened wherever and whenever you pleased.Killing a Darhel. Congratulations.
I thought in you the legendary O'Neal barbarism had skipped a generation."


 "I did not kill Pardal. I have not intervened directly once. Not until this moment when your own
recklessness made it worth everything to the rest of the Wise that someone stop you. That I stop you."


 "Piffle. Technicalities. You are so sure you are better than every other sentient in this galaxy that I
suspect you even starch your panties. Had tea with the Aldenata yet, have we?"


 "I do not—" Michelle began. "This is pointless. You will stop. You will proceed, with me as escort, to
Barwhon, where you will submit to the designees of Tchpht Planners for safe, serene contemplation and
study where you will be neither a threat to yourself nor anyone else. I will return and clean up your mess."


"And you get the goodies and to usemy research to become the Epetar Group's fair-haired girl, write
your reputation in Galactic history, and take credit for civilizing humanity. I do not think so."


"Whywould you agree to this, thisintrigue in the first place? Research was proceeding. Do not tell me
you had insufficient work of your own to do?"


"For one, it was considerably less interesting work," Erick sneered. "Boring, frankly. For two,I do not
drag my feet, and humanity needs civilization desperately."
"The primary responsibility of a researcher is caution."


"Again, piffle. Humanity pollutes the whole of Galactic civilization with its violence. There is not time."


 "You do like that word, do you not?" she rolled her eyes. "You dare to speak of humanity's violence in
the face of the unspeakable violence you have engaged in here?"


"Youdid not kill Pardal—though you drove him into lintatai, or ordered it.I have not committed violence
against humans. The same principle applies as always. One protects civilization by turning barbarism
against barbarism. The firebreak theory. Here, barbarians have done violence to barbarians. No more,
no less. They would have been doing it somewhere, sooner or later. They were simply doing it here."


 "If I needed any more proof that you are insane, I would have it with that incredibly convoluted excuse
for philosophical reasoning. I did not drive Pardal into lintatai, nor did I make the decision that permitted
the possibility."


 "Oh, what a world of delicious wiggle room that careful statement leaves. You were involved, I am
sure."


"I was not completely uninvolved," she conceded.


 Cally could see his facial expressions, but not her sister's, and was genuinely frightened by the manic glee
that attended Michelle's admission. If anything she had heard about mentats was true, she had never
wanted to be around an unhinged one. This guy was so unhinged his door wasn't on the same block.


 "However, my tangential involvement was in no way my own instigation." Michelle spoke calmly, but
Michelle always spoke calmly. It was sort of irritating. Erick's delighted skepticism wasn't making the
assassin feel any better.


"I was not consulted, I was required," she insisted.


 "Whatever excuse allows you to sleep at night, Miss Starch," he giggled. "He tried to kill you, you got
there first. And apparently managed the incomparable feat of not only securing sanction from our 'pacifist'
peers, but persuading them that it was all their idea, and you their oh-so-reluctant puppet. I will give you
points for style, at least. You finally surpass your famously barbaric sire in the art of murder." He bowed,
the gesture spoiled by the uninterrupted fit of humor.


Cally hadn't heard a mentat laugh before—didn't know they could. She could do without hearing it
again. Winchon's giggle could have curdled milk.


"If you knew Pardal was trying to kill me, how do you rationalize helping him do it, I wonder?"


 "My dear colleague, I would have forever applauded your self-sacrifice in the advancement of
civilization. The death of one of the Wise is always poignant," he sighed, a hand clasped to his heart. "I
have, alas, tired of your charmingly self-righteous and cautious company, Human Mentat Michelle
O'Neal. Good-bye," he said.


Cally felt the hair on the back of her neck try to crawl up her scalp line. Apparently they were through
with the talking.




 The mentats were locked into perfect stillness, standing apart yet swathed together in sheets of
silver light and shadow. Seemingly random portions of the building alternately shook and
cracked. In one corner, the ceiling crumbled as an I-beam curled, stretching and deforming like
hot taffy. The massive weight of the building above it creaked threateningly. The destruction
slowly stilled and froze, air sparkling with an alien haze which strained against some undreamt of
aether, unmoving, stalemated. As if by mutual consent, the buzzing tension stilled, as both took
precious moments for deeper breath. They stood, panting, somehow managing to glare at each
other and remain preternaturally impassive at the same time.


You have hired the worst sort of barbarians to do your violence,Michelle thought.


 Do not be melodramatic,Erick replied.They are all barbarians. My hirelings are killing sophonts
for money, so are yours. There is no difference. Barbarians are mutually expendable.


So we come, yet again, to our mutual philosophical debate,Michelle thought.You have never
understood that in humans who are not damaged, the embryonic basis of clan loyalty is nature,
not nurture. They thus have an inherent value. If you do not find some clan loyalty in an Earth
Human, you have a defective one.


What clan loy—He stared, as if for the first time, at the frozen Earther combatants.Oh, good grief. The
attackers are your clan, either by birth or adoption. And the Darhel thought you were dangerous
before. It is the perfect cosmic joke. Fine, you were right, I was wrong. But how truly hilarious!




"Okay, holy fuck," Cally said, looking out from under the stairwell.
 The two combatants had stopped for the moment. The stasis had broken as soon as they started their
titanic battle and Cally had tried to get a shot in on Erick. But the round had been absorbed into the swirl
of power around the two and never hit.


"Bit of a pickle," Mosovich admitted. "Do we know each other?"


"I think we met once when I was a kid," Cally said. "I looked different. Full body sculpt. Cally O'Neal."


"Oh, I remember you," Mosovich said. "Pleasure to finally meet you again. I'd mention that I heard from
very good sources that you were dead, but . . ."


"Long story."


"Perhaps another time," Mosovich said, raising his arms over his head as the two mentats raised their
hands.


 This time the power was confined to a small space between the two mentats. A small very strange
space. Tremendous heat was burning off of it but every time Cally tried to look into the spot her eyes
basically tried to crawl out of her head. She stopped and looked at the combatants instead, noticing for
the first time that the weird distortion aroundthem was gone.


"I wonder . . ." Cally said, raising the rifle to her shoulder.




Michelle caught the power she was driving before it could do much more than blast the boxes on the far
wall. And Erick, whose body burned to ash in a moment.


But the splash of blood on the ground was evidence of why he had suddenly failed.


"What did you do?" Michelle shouted, looking over at her sister.


"I dunno," Cally said, standing up. "Saved your life? Killed a monster?"


"I cannot understand why you did that!"
"What part of horrible mass murderer of innocent people did you miss? Besides the target part, that is."


"I never hired you to kill him. You do not kill the Wise!"


 "Just did," Cally noted. "My only regret is that you burned him to ash. I'd hoped to pull out his skull and
shrink his head. I figured it would make a hell of mantelpiece."


 "Can it, Cally," Papa O'Neal said, crawling out from under a desk. "Let me point out that Michelle has a
point. There are only a few mentats in existence. The termination of one is going to be big news. Which
means big trouble. The flip side is, other granddaughter, that he was a mass murdering psychopath with
enough power, by your own statements, to wipe out multipe worlds. So I have little regret for her
actions. The alternatives don't bear thinking."


"I do not believe he was that kind of threat," Michelle said. "The differences were philosophical . . ."


"So were the differences between the US and the Soviet Union," Papa O'Neal said. "Couple of hundred
million people died. You probably need to get your nose out of the ivory tower and take a good look at
history instead of physics. Most wars in the last century have been about philosophical differences."


 "I can, however, present his death in terms of threat, and the heat of the moment," Michelle admitted.
"For the sake of the O'Neals, Grandfather, you need to be very careful who our people kill. Please
pardon my presumption."


"Your 'Wise' need to understand that someone who gives the orders for henchmen to round up and kill
Human beings in horrible ways no longer has a credible claim to being a navel-gazing pacifist," Papa
O'Neal said, definitely. "The O'Neal Bane Sidhe don't make it a habit to clean up every problem in the
galaxy. Not enough days in the week. But we can make an exception. Do you read me, Granddaughter?"


 "I . . . read you, Clan Leader," Michelle said. "I will make that point quite plainly to the mentats. And I'm
sure that the Indowy masters, when they are apprised of Erick's full actions, will make it even more plain.
The issue should never arise again. In any case, you have accomplished the purposes for which I hired
your team. Thank you. Now, I need to take the device back to Adenast and construct a credible story
for how it got there." She raised her hand . . .


And Cally reached out like a cobra and caught it.


"Oh, no you don't . . ." she said, raising the rifle.
                                                        ***
When Cally caught Michelle's hand, Papa O'Neal knew they were all in for it. The storm clouds were
just hanging in the air. Well, it was probably best to let them get it out of their systems. It had been a real
long time coming. He put his head in his hands and turned away, wiping the sweat from his face. He
could smell the rust of blood, too, but that was nothing new. Their voices were so close in pitch that he
could only sort out what was being said by accent and content.




"That is a priceless archeological artifact! You will not damage it."


"Thatis a fucking abomination against free will!"


"Free will is an illusion you place far too much—"


"The hell you say! Yours may be an illusion, but mine's working just fine."


"This device requires close study. But it needs to be at the hands of the Wise."


"Nobody'swise enough for that."


"And you in your own vast wisdom are wise enough to decide that for the whole galaxy and all of its
posterity?"


 "When you guys came to me to do your dirty work? You're darn tootin'. This ain't exactly rocket
science, Michelle."


"No, it is ancient Aldenata science and was developed for a very wise—"


"Bullshit!You think you know it all don't you? The Indowy didn't make you like this; You've ALWAYS
been this way! I remember how you use to try to boss me around like you were a little tin god when you
were a KID . . . !"




 Papa O'Neal shook his head. That tore it. They were going nuclear. Nothing could stop them from
saying it now. Best to just pour it all out. Wait till they wore down then take . . . steps. He looked
around, eyes lighting on a couple of mop buckets and a faucet. Nobody else was moving. Not 'frozen in
stasis', just watching the argument and waiting for Cally to get blasted. Which was good. He guessed the
problem was mostly gonna fall in his lap. He spat resignedly and headed for the buckets.




"I justknew you would do this. Don't think that just because the wise used you to—"


"Damn right they used me. They use people a lot, if you hadn't noticed. Then kid themselves that their
hands are oh so much cleaner than—"


"Do not think they do this casually!"


"Don't thinkI do!"


"Don't you?"


"Well, fuck you too!"


"And this is the response of the self-proclaimed wisest person in the galaxy."


"Just because I say it in plain English and do it mysel—"


"Oh, that is such garbage! You are soarrogant ! You, Cally O'Neal, decide who lives and who dies. Or
you decide who is wise enough to decide, which is much the same thing. You—"


 "Don't you? That'sexactly what you do. You learn what's basically glorified engineering and you
suddenly think your shit doesn't stink. Free clue, sister, you aren't any wiser than the rest of us! And
neither are the goddam Crabs. Technological advantage doesn't give them the right to play God."


"Your 'God' is just a delusional excuse for your own arrogance!"


"Oh, don't even go there, youso don't want to go there."


 "You say 'God,' but what you mean is a handful of relative babies mouthing their own interpretations of
the ravings of luna—"


"Father O'Reilly has more wisdom in his little finger than—"
"YourFather O'Reilly is a petty, deluded, clanless, juvenile intriguer who—"


"You take that back!"




 Papa O'Neal was back now, one of the buckets to the brim and sloshing. He'd been nice enough to
empty it and at least get them clean water. The shoving had started, and they weren't bothering to get to
their feet so much. Hadn't gotten to hair pulling yet. Probably a good thing. Some things, he just couldn't
watch. He was pretty sure neither one had enough presence of mind left to hurt the other even if they'd a
mind to. Not even Michelle. When it was time to put a stop to it, his ears would tell him well enough.
They were sisters, all right.




"What is your answer, a few humans get to choose for everybody?"


"You're Human, in case you've forgotten, you bitch."


"Do you think I forget thatever , for even an instant?You people send me off to live among—"


 "Oh, like being in a war and about to beeaten was such a piece of cake! And the Bane Sidhe aren't just
a few hum—"


"One, you small-scale intriguers arenot the Bane Sidhe. Two, the Bane Sidhe is what you Earth-raised
would call the bastard step-child, bottom of the barrel, most foolish bunch of eccentric losers in the
Gal—"


 "Oh, I'mso sorry you're in the family with all us losers and what the hell does that say aboutyou ,
asshole?"


"You kicked me out of the family! Mom and Dad kicked me out of the family butyou —"


 "Oh, my God! I get left behind to geteaten , Daddy drops a fuckingnuke on my ass . . . Oh, I forgot,
before we even get to the serious stuff, I have to kill some asshole yourpeaceful Galactic Darhel sent to
scrag aneight year old ! Poor old you! The Bane Sidhe werethere ! Where the hell were your precious
Gal—"
 "Iwas inexile! I was the useless one, sent off like spare tire! Just because I have been able to make
something of myself, you cannot stand— And you are just one person! The galaxy has to stop because
you are in danger? Whilebillions —"


"Billions more than would have died without your murdering fuckingcivilized Dar—"


 "Always with the Darhel! The Darhel are barely half a step more civilized than your Bane Sidhe! You
think they are so powerful when really—"


"Powerful enough to killbillions of Human beings! You're so fucking ashamed of being Human that—"


"Why the hell would I not be? You are all ashamed of me!"


"You fraud! It's all about you! When it gets right down to it, it's all about—"


"It is not either!"


"The fuck it's not!"


"Arrogant carnivore!"


"Stuck-up bitch!"


"Deluded theist!"


"Tin God!"




 He didn't even bother to sort out the name calling. Yep, they'd just about yelled themselves out. He gave
the bucket the practiced heave of an experienced farmer, hitting them both squarely and pretty much
equally. There was a loud splash. There was a silence. Both of them turned equally shocked and
betrayed expressions on him. He reckoned neither one would be real fond of him for awhile. He valiantly
and successfully resisted the urge to laugh, or even smirk. The situation itself wasn't funny, despite their
comical appearance.
"You sounded about done," he said. "You'd started repeating yourselves."


 Michelle looked more shell-shocked than Cally. Probably the first time she'd lost her temper in, well,
decades. Do her a world of good, in the long run. True to their natures, Cally recovered the ability to act
first, retrieving a mini-grenade launcher and pointing it across the room at the device. Yeah, the friendlies
were away from it and the room around her was about right. She'd absorbed his early lessons about
friendly fire right down to the bone.


He was kinda proud of Michelle, as she wasn't but a couple of seconds behind. He shifted, and felt the
other O'Neals follow his lead. Michelle was so focused on Cally, she didn't seem to notice.


"I can stop you," she said to her sister.


"You sure?" Cally said.


"Completely," the Michon Mentat said, her control returned to her.


"Just one problem," Papa O'Neal said.


"Which is?" Michelle asked.


"I absolutely forbid it," he replied. "And I am your clan leader."


Michelle opened and closed her mouth for a moment, stunned.


 "Hard time getting around that one, huh?" Papa said, walking over to her and putting a hand on her
shoulder. "All that training by the Indowy. Lineeoooie or whatever it's called. Now, Cally might just tell
me to get stuffed. She's done it before. But you?"


"Clan Leader," Michelle said, formally. "I respectfully request that you reconsider your decision to
destroy this device."


"Didn't say I was going to destroy it," Papa O'Neal said.


"Huh?" Cally shouted. "Well screw that!" she continued, pointing her rifle.
"Don't," Papa O'Neal said. "Seriously, Granddaughter. Don't. I'm handling this."


"This thing cannot exist," Cally said.


"They said the same thing about nuclear weapons," Papa O'Neal said with a sigh. "But they do. And
biological agents and all the rest. As I said, letme handle this granddaughter."


"What in the hell couldyou want it for, Papa?" Cally asked, exasperated.


 "I don't," Papa replied. "She does," he added, pointing at Michelle. "And since I haven't given her a
Christmas present in years, I figure I owe her. What I'm going to ask is why? You're an O'Neal. I know
the Indowy raised you but I also know you'remy genes. You were raised by my daughter-in-law who I
loved like my own daughter, by my son, before the Indowy got their linatoooie or whatever thinking in
your head. You're not going to be mind-raping people. You can't. You're an O'Neal. Absolute power be
damned, some people just don't care about the power. So what do you want it for?"


"A question my sister never asked," Michelle said, nodding.


 "She's . . . Cally," Papa said. "She tends to shoot first and try not to ask at all. But it's a question you will
answer. To your Clan Leader. In small words."


Michelle seemed to consider that for a moment then nodded.


"This device is a remnant of technology," she began.


"Stuff I don't already know," Papa said.


"A remnant of the Aldenata before they . . . became more," Michelle said.


"That I will admit I didn't know," Papa said.


 "It was held by the Tchpht," Michelle continued, apparently ignoring him. "They did not study it, for they
already understood its function."


"The Crabs can makeanother one?" Cally snapped. "Oh, holy shit."


"So my point is made," Papa O'Neal said. "The nuclear wall is breached. At that pont, you gotta figure
out how you live with it. Continue."


"The device uses sohon techniques," Michelle said. "But it does not require a sohon master to operate."


"Ain't that interesting," Cally scoffed. "Afraid we regular people might learn to do what you do?"


 "Yes," Michelle replied, quietly. "And no. Yes in that advanced sohon techniques are . . . exceedingly
dangerous. You hate and revile this machine, Cally. But it is simply an aspect of sohon. We masters, we
mentats, the Wise you so despise, have deliberately avoided exploring this area, this aspect, of sohon. It
is a violent approach to sohon that we abhor. Mind-raping as you put it. But itis an aspect of sohon."


 "So what you're saying is that if you wanted to, youall could be mind-rapers?" Cally said. "Maybe I'm
aiming at the wrong thing."


"Perhaps you are," Michelle admitted. "But to learn such advanced skills requires decades of study and
discipline. Perhaps that is insufficient to prevent its misuse, Erick showed that well enough. But would you
have anyone have access to such power? Consider his lieutenant. Consider the many people you
have . . . cleansed over the years."


"Point," Cally said, frowning.


 "That is the yes," Michelle said. "It is clear that humanity, as a whole, is not ready for the power to
simply press a button and achieve this sort of power."


 "So we destroy it," Cally said. "The Crabs had it for how long? And they never made another one. So
it's unlikely they're going to any time soon."


 "But there is the no," Michelle said. "This device generates sohon fields. Yes, it was misused. But
consider thepossibilities , sister. Other devices that can be used for peaceful applications of sohon. For
building that does not require such intense energy on the part of a person. New ship drives, new methods
of power generation. The peaceful applications are endless."


"Ain't possible," Papa O'Neal said. "Nuclear power, nuclear weapons. Chemical industry, gas factories.
Medical technology, biological weapons. You neverjust get peaceful applications, grand daughter."


"It is possible if the people producing them are devoted to peace," Michelle said, spreading her hands. "I
will make a compromise with you, grandfather. The device will be placed in the care of the O'Neal Bane
Sidhe. It will be accessible only by myself and other sohons I designate, secured in such a way as only
we may access it and you may ensure yourself of that. I give you my personal word that the research will
be devoted to finding the methods whereby it produces sohon fields without the input of a sohon master.
One can learn much of nuclear power from observing a nuclear weapon, to use your own metaphor.
Also electronics, manufacturing and materials technology. This is what I wish to research."


"Cally?" Papa O'Neal asked.


"Fuck," the woman replied, shrugging. "I dunno. I mean, if the tech is already out there . . . Why not just
get it from the Crabs?"


"The Tchpht and mentats approach the same Way from different paths," Michelle replied. "Sometimes
we have trouble communicating. This would be . . . a crossroads, yes?"


 "That was her way of saying 'whatever,' " Papa O'Neal said. "Your compromise is accepted. We need
to get it to Prime Base."


 "And we need to get the flock out of here," Mosovich pointed out. "There'sgoing to be more response
than just us. And Ireally don't want to be here when it gets here."


 "We can carry the team out on the shuttles," Kelly said. "We're not going to be going back to DAG
anyway."


"Details, details," Papa O'Neal said. "Let's load up."


"What about the security goons?" Cally asked.


Papa O'Neal looked at the still frozen group and snorted.


"Let them try explaining what happened," he said. "Gonna love reading the debrief. Granddaughter . . ."


"Yes?" Cally and Michelle answered simultaneously


 "I don't give a crap about the thing with the Indowy," Papa said, clarifying with a glance at Michelle. "It's
about time you come home. Other granddaughter?"


"Yes," Cally said.


"Tell my grand-son in-law that he can come down and explain in person, and tome , what the fuck is
going on or he's on my personal 'better off dead' list. And there ain't many people still living on that one."
  Epilogue

 "This is incredibly stupid," Stewart said as he stepped in the car. "This endangers not just me but our
children."


"Who you have never met," Cally said, coldly.


"For that precise reason!" Stewart snapped. "Do you think I don't care?"


"Given that e-mail," Cally said. "Yes."


 "I sent that toprevent the danger," Stewart said, sighing. "I've become too much of a player in the Tongs
to keep up this dual life. Other members watch me even if Grandfather does not require it. The Tongs are
not much friendlier, internally, than the Darhel. If we are found out, it would mean not only our own lives
but those of the children." He paused and looked at her stony face. Cally was apparently concentrated
on driving. "It would mean yours. And I cannot lose you, Cally."


 "So youdumped me toprotect me?" Cally scoffed. "Oh, that's rich. I damned near got killed because of
it! I was preparing for amission you moron! You think getting a Dear Cally just before a mission didn't
put me in danger? If it hadn't been for George I'd have never made it! My head was, to say the least, not
on my job!"


 "I didn't know," Stewart said. "And I couldn't think of a better way to do it. In person would double the
risk."


"Well, you can forget about 'risk' for the time being," Cally said, coldly. "You're covered. My Lord are
you covered."


"How?" Stewart asked.
"You're sure it's him?" Chang Pou said.


 "He just passed through a coded door," the technician replied, waving at his screen. "It took a gene
scan. It's him."


 "Grandfather was sure he was meeting someone," Chang Pou replied, looking at the video footage. The
Tong were well connected in the security system of Luna. Anything that security saw, the Tong could
look at as well.


 "Not so far," the technician said. "He's stayed to public corridors. He could have made a dead drop at
some point, sent a signal. But you know how hard those are to detect."


"There is nothing here though," Chang Pou replied. "Curious."




"You've got somebody doubling for me on the Moon?" Stewart asked.


"Not . . . exactly," Cally said. "My sister, who is truly scary, is projecting a sort of hologram. Except that
you can touch it. It isyou to any simple examination down to a surface gene scan. It's just going around,
doing things that you normally do. It's even going to do some business for you. Meanwhile, if you think
meeting withme is tough, you're going to have to explain to Papa O'Neal why you haven't been by to see
your kids. Not to mention trying to Dear Cally me. Not to mention marrying me in the first place without
his approval. As if I needed it!"


"Since I'm finally going to see my kids, I can live," Stewart said, grinning. "And if we can patch things
up . . ."


"Oh, you're not forgiven," Cally said. "You're going to owe me,big time . Get ready for lots of
backrubs."


"I can deal," Stewart said, then paused. "Who isGeorge ?"


"Oh, don't even start . . . !"
"Sittin' on a dock of the bay . . ." Mueller muttered, looking out over the seascape.


"I thought you were under orders to not sing?" Mosovich asked.


"Ain't in the Army no more, Snake," Mueller replied. "Haaarmy training, sir!"


"Okay, try to sing and I'm going to off you," Mosovich replied.


"So what the fuck do we do now?" Mueller asked.


"Oh, there's plenty to do," Papa O'Neal replied, grinning. "There's farming and fishing and . . ."


 "You'd better have more of use for us than running a plow," Mueller growled. "I did not throw away
a . . . fifty-something year career to become a farmer."


"Killing bad guys," Papa O'Neal continued. "Fighting the Darhel . . ."


"That's more like it," Mosovich said, taking a pull of his beer. "Where do we start?"


 "Going to have to find a place to hide you, frankly," Papa O'Neal replied. "With most of DAG suddenly
descending on us, we've got an over-population problem. I'm thinking we might need to start up another
island. So there may be some farming and fishing involved. Not to mention hunting Posleen. But we'll
handle it."


"Just another day in paradise," Mueller said, grumpily.


"Every day's a holiday," Mosovich replied. "And every meal's a banquet."


"Mike," Shari said from the kitchen. "Cally just pulled up."


"Oh, there will be a banquet," Papa O'Neal said, standing up. "We're going to serve the head of my
grand-son-in-law."




"I thought you were covering for my husband on the moon?" Cally said.
Michelle was sitting in the flower bed, holding one of Sinda's hands over a pansy.


"I can do that and this at the same time," Michelle replied. "I'm pretty good for a 'glorified engineer.' "


"Any news on the investigation into the attack?" Cally asked ignoring the jibe.


 "The Wise have stepped in," Michelle replied. "I was exonerated for my actions, including my actions
against the guards and your forces, due to the nature of Erick's . . . unwellness. There is a portion of the
Wise who disagree with my actions, who feel that it should have been handled by a broader concensus.
The majority, however, simply want the situation to go away. The Tchpht, Darhel and Indowy senior
leaders have, in rare combination, convinced the local human governments to ignore the occurrence."


"We're covered in other words," Cally said.


"Well, the humans would still like to find out what happened to DAG," Michelle admitted then turned
back to Sinda. "Can you feel it? The tug of life?"


"It's tickly," Sinda said. "Like a flower in my head."


 "All things are linked," Michelle said, quietly. "This is not just a saying, it is a fact of reality. The universe
is not so large as people believe. Indeed, large is an illusion. Everything is everywhere. At once.
Everything is everything. At once. This is the first lesson of sohon. Your daughter has the Gift, Cally."


"You mean sohon?" Cally said. "Really?"


 "Our father learned some of the most rudimentary abilities at the age of nearly thirty," Michelle said. "Oh,
not much more than what I am showing Sinda. But it was an impressive feat. The Gift is hard to define. It
is not carried genetically or even through proteinomics. Experience shapes it. But it must be present.
Sinda could be a great adept in her time. She has the Gift most strongly."


"Oh, great," Cally said. "I've got a wizard for a daughter."


"She will never develop it here," Michelle said, looking up into the sun.


Cally shifted slightly so her sister was in shade.
"You want to take her with you," she said. It was not a question.


"One of our clan children, Mark, is . . . less gifted," Michelle replied. "And quite a handful. He seems to
have gotten the full measure of the O'Neal chaos gene."


"Gets in fights?" Cally asked.


"He's learned not to engage in actualviolence ," Michelle said, distastefully.


 "Yeah, well, we'll see what we can do to correct that," Cally said, squatting down. "Sinda, Aunt Michelle
is asking me to let you go live with her. She wants to send one of her boys to live with us. We could still
see each other from time to time."


"I don't wanna leave Mama," Sinda said, suddenly frightened.


 "Perhaps not yet," Michelle said, nodding. "I can understand the fear. I cried very much when I had to
leave my parents. It was not a good time. But . . . can we talk about it?"


"Yes," Sinda said, lisping slightly. "Can we play with the flowers some more?"


"Of course," Michelle said. "Take my hand . . ."




Katund, Clan Leader of the Epetar clan-corp, was still in the midst of one set of breathing exercises
when he heard his AID chime, "Urgent report for you, your Tir," it said.


"What is it now?" he was at his limit and controlling his temper with difficulty.


 "The council respectfully notifies you that the Epetar Group has been found in default on the ship
maintenance contract for the Eastern Fleet Detachment. Accordingly, this message is to notify you of
contract termination," it said in its melodious but ultimately uncaring voice.


After a long moment's pause, the AID prompted, "Is there any reply, your Tir?"


Another long moment passed, "Tir?"
And another, "Please respond, your Tir."


 It was still repeating it's polite query when two of his Indowy body servants came in to see to his needs.
The former Tir sat, still, in his chair, a dreamy but somehow horrible grin lighting his face as his glazed
eyes stared off into the distance.


"Oh, my. Inform Tir Hmili immediately." The addition of the honorific was automatic.


"Should I send you some help?" the other Indowy asked.


 "Please. He is not small. I'll need at least four others to get him through the bounce tube. I suppose the
roof is the best place to store him until he is ready for disposal. Wait just a moment," the first Indowy
stepped outside with his companion and shut the door, effectively shutting out the catatonic Darhel's AID.


"We must risk a message out. This could jeopardize the entire plan. Send it," he said.


Two very grave Indowy turned to their separate tasks.
                                            THE END


                                       For more great books visit

                                       http://www.webscription.net