Yael shrieked, wide-eyed. "Devorah! Jack, she's in Chicago! The Hancock Center went over, on its side! I need to go and—"
Jack grabbed her, gently, as she started to sob. "There's nothing we can do about that, right now," he said, grimly, "but I want you to stay with Elon; I have to go back to my ship, and this isn't the time for you to go with me." He looked at the most famous man on Mars, his friend, and the only civilian for several million miles he would trust with Yael. "Can you make sure she gets somewhere safe?"
"Yes," nodded Elon, "I'll do it. Your father would do the same for my family, so that's a given. I'll get her to the offices and we'll find her a room in the visiting employees' wing. Is she on one of those cruises where you can get off, stay a while, and then catch the next ship?"
Jack nodded. "That's what Dad told me."
"Okay, that's settled then. We'll send someone to pick up her luggage from the ship. You get out of here and take care of your ship."
"Thanks, Elon. I owe you." With a final hug for Yael, Jack let her go, jumped up, and hastily exited the bar along with the rest of the Space Force spacers.
"Come along, Yael," said Elon, soothingly. "Let's find you a place where you can settle in and maybe send a message to your family, okay?"
Yael nodded, still sniffling a bit, but getting it under control. "Okay, I just realized there really isn't anything I can do . . . but my mother and two of my other sisters are going to help Devorah, and Devorah is safe. I'm sorry I screamed, it hit me like . . . I don't know. I just . . . knew."
Elon grimaced. "I knew you five were special, but wow. Come on, we'll talk about it when we get back to the office."
"I'm ready. Let's go!"
Chapter 5
The Warrior
"I hate my life," sobbed Delaney, theatrically, dropping her head to her paperwork-laden desk, and covering it with her arms.
"Come on," said her husband. "Everybody knows colonels shuffle paperwork and look good on video so lieutenant colonels and majors can tell captains what to do. Though if I recall correctly," he mused, "around here, majors fetch the coffee, and captains carry the piss bucket."
"But, an office. A desk. In durance vile. In the Pentagon!"
Lt. Colonel Norman "Harb" Harbinger shrugged. "Everybody gotta do staff time," he recited. "Even the Legend of the Corps."
Delaney peeked out from under one arm. "I thought that was Mom."
"No, your mother is the Mascot of the Corps – but never say that in front of her, since she's a general now," said Harbinger, looking around as if to spot a listening device.
The emplacement of which, in a Pentagon office that got swept daily for that sort of thing, was kind of unlikely, but had been known to happen over the 300 years since the place was built.
"Frankly," he continued, "I don't know what you're complaining about. E Ring, nice view toward the Marine Corps Memorial – if you could see through the trees – right down the hall from the Commandant, a short portal ride from his secure records storage vault to go see your Grumpaw at either Canaveral or home – what's not to like?"
Delaney lifted her arms, straightened up, and sat properly in her chair. "I miss shooting the assholes we used to chase," she confessed.
Harbinger nodded. "Same as you miss doing doors."
She rolled her eyes. "Harb, you know I never did doors."
"Not lately, no."
Choosing to ignore that, she went on, "And I do miss the chasing."
"And the trap-setting."
"Yeah, that too." Delaney grinned. "And the blowing shit up. I guess I really mean I miss all the action."
"Action," said Harbinger, straight-faced, but with a glint of humor in his eyes, "I can give you, but you'll have to wait till we get home."
Delaney stuck out her tongue at him. "Men."
"With that attitude, I find it interesting you're the only married sister in the brood."
"Ah, ah," Delaney reminded him, holding up a finger. "Raven's a widow, remember; poor girl. And Devorah had that hawt, long-time live-in boyfriend." She sighed. "Yehudit will never marry, I believe; her nose is stuck in books far too much to notice any good-looking man – or woman, I suppose, though we all seem to be pretty het – giving her the eye. And who knows with Yael, but of course, she's still young."
"True." The man looked out the window, trying to see the Marine Corps Memorial, and failing. "How do you keep track of that? Four sisters? Plus a pseudo-half brother and pseudo-half sister. I have one brother. He's a CPA in Missouri."
"Yes, I know, I met him at the wedding. And his very nice wife, with whom I exchange letters and cards several times a year, and their two adorable kids. Well. They were adorable when they were kids. You also have a shit-ton of cousins of varying degree, just like me."
"Yeah, but I don't try to keep up with them."
"I guess," said Delaney, thoughtfully, "it keeps me centered. I like knowing I've got a big family back home, whenever we're detached way out in the middle of nowhere."
"Like Xzl5!vt. Or al-Saḥra'. Or even Coleridge, that one time."
"Exactly. When we were trying to help the Shizzle with their pirate problem, that we now seem to have inherited and they still have. And when we were taking out the RIF drug lord trash. And that crazy mob mess on Coleridge, holy shit."
"Yes. And our job right now is to find the damn pirates and eradicate them."
"Have you heard anything from Pete?"
"No, and that's odd," mused Harbinger. "I should have had a relay message from him by now, telling me they'd arrived at Devlin's Strike."
Delaney shrugged. "Maybe they're late. Or the relay is late."
"What ship were they on, again?"
"Um . . . the USS Star of the Orient, Star Interstellar Cruise Lines," Delaney rattled off from memory. "Master is Captain Gerald Jackson. The other three were booked on the RMS Queen Kate, Cunard Starship Lines, UK registry obviously, under Captain Theodore Davis."
"Hope they didn't run into any trouble."
"Yeah, me, too." A thought struck Delaney. "Hey, Raven was going to Devlin's Strike, too. Devorah told me. I think she might be on the Star, come to think of it."
Harbinger laughed. "Well, if they run into anything untoward, I imagine Pete, Rafe, and Blake will deal with it."
"They'd fucking well better," grinned Delaney. "Now, get out of here, while I try to figure out what the hell I'm actually supposed to be doing. I wonder if there's a vaccine, though."
"Huh?"
"Staph is a disease, you know."
"You are very funny. And that joke is so old, your grandmother probably heard it in the womb." Harbinger bent down and kissed his wife. She kissed him back.
"Yummy. Hey, is that a broom closet over there?"
Harbinger shook his head. "One minute she tells me I'm a typical man, the next she wants to make out in the closet. Incorrigible. I'll see myself out, and then I'll see you for lunch."
"Make it around eleven, okay? These 6AM start times are not conducive to our usual lazy schedule."
"Eleven, it is." Harbinger excused himself, and headed out the door, grinning.
Delaney sighed, looked at the paperwork on the desk in front of her, and groaned. She picked up the first folder, opened it, and started reading . . .
◆
On the tick of 11 AM, Harbinger presented himself at Delaney's office door. She sat behind the desk, hands folded, smiling; all of the paperwork he'd last seen her with was piled neatly on a cart, ready to be taken away by the clerical staff.
"See, that wasn't so bad," he chided her.
"No, it wasn't," she agreed. "I was really kind of surprised that was all they gave me for the day."
Harbinger couldn't help himself. He guffawed. Delaney looked at him, uncomprehending.
"Why are you laughing?"
Unable to speak, he beckoned to her, and she got up and came to the door.
"What?"
He pointed out into the hallway.
She l
ooked.
Two more carts were sitting there, piled high with paperwork.
"Nooooooooooooooooooo . . ."
"This is what staff time is about, hon," Harbinger consoled her, as they ate hot dogs and french fries, seated on a park bench under a tree in the central courtyard of the Pentagon. The weather was cooperating for a change; it was warm but not too hot, and a nice breeze was actually getting into the courtyard. "You're assigned to perpetuate the paperwork mill they have here, and learn both why it's important and why it never ends."
"I should have taken leave," groused Delaney.
"No, you should be right here, doing the staff time you should have done when you were a captain and a major," riposted Harbinger. "And it's a perfect time for you to be sitting behind a desk rather than charging down alleyways, shooting at people and doing doors."
"Harb. I did not do that fucking door on al-Saḥra'," growled Delaney, dangerously. "I have not done a door since I was a second lieutenant, and that was in training. Technically, I didn't even do that door in Chicago; I used the fucking key, not a wad of plastic explosive or a Carl Gustav."
Harbinger shrugged around a mouthful of hot dog. "Whatever you say, dear."
"I want another hot dog. Are you going to finish those fries?"
"Hungry, dear one?"
"Eating for three is not what I had in mind, but here I am doing it anyway."
He laughed. "Del, they're only, what, a month along now?"
"Yes." Delaney grabbed the bag of crinkle-cut fries he was holding out, and ate two of them, greedily. "And if they're this hungry now, I hate to think what I'm going to look like in eight more months. I'm about half convinced they're both boys."
"That would be nice, for a change. Your family seems to gravitate toward girls."
"Grandma had two boys with her first husband, Marc, before they got divorced and she married Grandpa. Then they had Mom, and even though Grandma could have more, I think she's leery of the fact that Mom ended up with lupus, and doesn't want to chance that again, even with nanos." Delaney ate a couple more fries. "I really don't understand how Mom ended up hitting the XX lotto five times in a row, but she did. Fred's family doesn't run to girls any more than Marc's family did."
"And such a delightful, beautiful bevy of sisters your mother created."
"Well." Delaney chewed her fries for a moment, considering, then swallowed. "The others are gorgeous. I’m just me. My face is too round, my jaw is too square, my breasts are so huge they need custom armor, and my hips are too big. And I hate my hair."
Harbinger grunted. "You have to keep it short so it fits in a helmet."
"True. But no comment about my other hated features?"
He looked at her. "Delaney, you are the most beautiful woman I've ever met, and that's no lie. You have curves where other women just wistfully think about having them. And yet, you're fit, healthy, and going to have twins. So why are you complaining?"
"I'm not. I'm just stating facts. I nearly flipped when I met Caryn Sundstrom, remember her, down in New Orleans? Wow. She was, is, the complete package, bar none."
"I've heard this story more times than I can count," sighed Harbinger, but grinning anyway. "And it ends with, 'damn, I almost considered switch-hitting when I saw her.'"
She punched him in the arm. "I like boys too much. Well. Men. Men like you. Buff. Tanned. Ripped. Able to fill out a set of swim trunks very nicely. Plus, you make me laugh."
Harbinger chuckled. "Well. So if it's not breaking security, what's all that paperwork they loaded you with?"
Delaney rolled her eyes. "Believe it or not, it's all reports and suchlike on piracy, and investigations into same. Trial records from the impromptu courts-martial held on hijacked ships. That sort of stuff. Buford stuck me on it because it was collected for our analysis." She sighed. "Well, in fairness, it was supposed to have been analyzed by the actual analysts in SFMID, but he decided to give me first crack at it, since it was just piling up and not being worked. There was a note from Great-Uncle Chris on top of the stack, apologizing all over himself for SFMID's failure to follow through, but apparently they have a lot on their analysts' plates, right now."
"And it is our mission," Harbinger pointed out.
Delaney bobbed her head. "Yes, it is. And it's actually sort of useful going through all of it rather than just looking at a sanitized, edited report. Primary sources versus secondary."
"So, what have you found?"
"Not a bleepity-bleep thing," mourned Delaney, looking stricken. "Just a complete waste of time. Because none of the pirates will talk. And nobody thinks to stick them with talky-juice and interrogate them before they put on their show trials and march them to the airlock."
"What?" Harbinger looked stunned. "Why the hell not?"
Delaney tossed her hands in the air. "Civilians."
"All these pirates walking the airlock plank in the last hundred and twenty-plus years, and none of them properly interrogated?"
"That would be an aye-firmative, Harb. At least," she said, thoughtfully, "so far as I can tell from what I've looked at. There are those other two carts. What are you doing for the rest of the day?"
"Nothing, as yet. I've been handling some onerous errands around the building for the General this morning, and he promised to try to find something else for me to do this afternoon. I'm guessing he'd be perfectly happy for me to help you out."
"Goody!" said Delaney, brightly. "We'll do just that, and get those files sorted out. Are you ready to go back?"
"Sure."
"Well, I'm not. Where's my other hot dog?"
Harbinger rolled his eyes. "You said you wanted one, then you ate my fries, and then we started talking about pirates. If you still want another, I'll go get it for you."
"Thanks! And more fries, please." Delaney considered for a moment. "With extra salt. Those were kind of bland."
Harbinger sighed, and didn’t bother to tell her they'd almost been too salty for him. But he got up and walked over to the hot dog stand, laughing quietly at life.
◆
When they returned to the office, there were four carts sitting in the corridor. "Son of a bitch," seethed Delaney.
"Go inside, sit down, calm down," advised Harbinger. "Let me go get something straight with the General."
Delaney, still fuming, did as she was advised. Harbinger walked down the corridor and entered Buford's outer office. "Afternoon, Janet," he greeted the confidential secretary, "any chance I could bend the General's ear for a couple of minutes?"
"He's free till 1400," replied Janet. "Go on in. I suspect he's expecting you."
"Uh-oh."
Harbinger knocked on the closed door, opened it, and walked through. John Buford looked up from his putting stance. "Just a sec," he said, looking back down and concentrating. He pulled the putter back just so, and swung it back, precisely kissing the ball with the face of the club, the ball obediently rolling down the fake grass mat and dropping neatly into the hole.
Harbinger couldn't help it. He gave Buford a golf clap.
"Hi, Harb," said the general, straightening up.
"I'd ask 'what's up?' but it looks like the answer would be 'nothing much,'" observed Harbinger. "Maybe someday I'll get brigadier stars and learn to play golf."
Buford looked wistful. "I'd rather shoot skeet, but I suspect my colleagues in the other services would frown on that. Besides, I don't have a window in this office that opens."
Harbinger laughed. Not out loud. It was one of those, "God help me, I have to laugh, and all I can do is close my eyes and quake quietly until it passes" laughs. The ones where you can't breathe, and you're afraid you're going to snort and bring the whole thing to a bad end.
"You think that's funny? Well, you're right. It is. But I'd still like to spend an afternoon shooting skeet, once in a while."
Harbinger, finally mastering the urge to guffaw, said, "Well, you could always take the portal to Canaveral and then to Lake Monroe. I imagine Delane
y's grandfather has a skeet setup on his range, though I've never thought to ask. He'd probably even go out and shoot with you."
"Not a bad idea. I'll give him a call tomorrow. Anyway, yes, I know, there are more carts and more documents. And I'm sorry. We're looking at a century's worth of backlog that nobody ever seems to have looked at." He sighed. "Most of that crap came over from the merchant service when I put out the word we were looking for old intelligence on piracy. Why the hell it ended up there instead of with SFMID, I have no idea, but that practice is now officially over; anything with the mere whiff of piracy is now to be sent directly to SFMID, with copies wherever else it needs to go. So saith the Chairman and the Joint Chiefs, and I've been leaning on the Space Merchant Service as well. SMS know they'd better cooperate, or they're going to lose our cooperation until they do."
"General," said Harbinger, quietly, "we're going to need a couple of SFMID analysts or we're going to be buried in this stuff."
"Ah? You're working with Delaney? Seems like a good idea, piracy being FTSA's bailiwick anyway. Let's just assume that's what you're going to do here until your staff time is complete, or until all the data is run through. I suspect there will still be some here when you go back to real work. But yes, I'll call von Barronov and tell him to free up a couple of the SFMID analysts for you."
"Thank you, sir. That will be a great help. Particularly as Delaney gets, hmm, great."
"Yes. Well, for the next few months I imagine she'll be fine," mused Buford, "but when she hits six months, I will probably insist she take maternity leave and go home, where Kat can take care of her. Doesn't mean she can't work from there if she wants to keep her hand in, but I don't think there will be any reason for her to hang around this dark and dreary dungeon in her last trimester or so. It's twins, right?"
"Yes, sir. She seems to be about thirty days in."
"Good job. The world needs more Delaney Foxes. Or Norman Harbingers. Whichever way they turn out."
Harbinger did snort, that time. "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
The Lion in Paradise Page 22
