by John Ringo
"Shut up, 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 how wrong 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 to do 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 silv
er. 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 and not 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 of now 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. "Now it'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 to hurt.
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 absolutely awful 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 not that 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.
