Sister Time-ARC

by John Ringo

  "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 it was 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 he was 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 lit
tle 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 i
n 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."