Sister Time lota-9

by John Ringo

  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. A very 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. He frowned. She sure dressed to look comfortable in a strip bar.

  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? The only 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 farther 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, Pete, try to bring in the last catches before the weather got really foul.

  He stood at the railing, collar flipped up, baseball cap jammed on his head against sunburn, but otherwise appearing perfectly comfortable, the bastard. George, in a fit of what Tommy considered insanity, had volunteered
to come along for the ride.

  “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 about me 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 Petane 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 just looks 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 even considering 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 could anything 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 to their 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 about all 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 prewar 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.”