Sister Time-ARC

by John Ringo

  "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 A
elool 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 offspring was 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. Ot
her 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 lost what?!!" 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 delayed shipping," 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 will not go into lintatai before you have completed your explanation. Afterwards feel free."