by John Ringo
As soon as she was gone, O’Reilly called his assistant and asked for some aspirin. He had developed a killer headache.
Chapter Twenty
The minute she stepped into the room for their final mission brief mid-morning, Harrison could tell that there was something. It wasn’t exactly something wrong with her so much as it was different. For one thing, she was late. Their team lead was never late. He could see apprehension combined with a terrible excitement, the kind of buzz she’d get in the final day or so before she was sent on a hit, in that adrenaline high that started ramping up before she shut down emotion and channeled everything into single-minded focus. This kind of mission didn’t typically spike her. It was a property extraction, not an assassination. Either their plans had changed for the top, or she had changed hers. At T-minus damned little, either option worried him.
“Okay, people, the good news is that we only have one change. The bad news is that it’s a major, fundamental mission change,” she said.
I knew it, the fixer thought. From the look on his face, his brother was just now registering the rising “oh shit” level in the room. It wasn’t that George was any slower to pick up on emotional cues than the rest of them, just that he hadn’t worked as much with Cally as the rest of them had.
“The change shouldn’t affect anybody but Harrison and me. We’ve got a second mission with a rush on it. It has to be tomorrow morning and it has to be me. The good news is it’s uncomplicated and I should be able to handle it with no help but a driver.”
“What the hell do you think you’re talking about?” O’Neal, Senior, drawled. He was without his usual plug of tobacco this morning. Probably only out of a rare inability to find a cup. Harrison winced. Nicotine withdrawal tended to make him… volatile. “There is no mission that could possibly justify haring off—”
“Pardal.” She dropped the one word into the room like a stone. The kind of stone that might explode if you breathed on it too hard.
“A Darhel?” Papa was on his feet now. “Are they out of their tiny minds? No mission prep, no backup, and they drop it on us now? After telling us all these years why the precious Darhel were above all possible retribution, they drop this? No way. No fucking way. Sure, we’ll kill him, if they’re finally taking the damn gloves off. But after, with full prep, full backup — we’ll do it the right way and not go in half-assed and not only miss the target but get you killed besides. What in the hell are they thinking? Scratch that, what the hell are you thinking? Why didn’t you tell them to shove it up their ass?!”
Harrison honestly didn’t know if he preferred Papa shouting or dead quiet. Either way was usually not a good sign. Right now, the O’Neal’s Irish skin was somewhere between broiled shrimp and steamed lobster. His own stomach grumbled, and he realized that his choice of metaphors probably had something to do with skipping breakfast. Which was a bizarre thing to be thinking about given the turn the mission was taking.
“Papa, I’d like to hear the mission constraints and plans, if you don’t mind, since I’m the lucky boy slated to share this little gem of a buggy ride,” he heard himself say.
The older man harrumphed, which wasn’t nearly as effective when done by a peach fuzzed juv instead of a grizzled geezer. He did, however, sit down and quit shouting. Harrison leaned back, arms crossed, and quirked a sardonic eyebrow at the stacked brunette. He really had done a great job with her hair.
“The reasons are easy enough, but they don’t go outside this room. If I didn’t think it would shake you out of peak efficiency to worry about what’s going on, I wouldn’t figure you three had a need to know.” She inclined her head towards his teammates.
O’Neal, Senior, started to puff up, but Harrison forestalled him with a raised hand.
“Fine, we’ve all got need to know. And?” He knew that in the military he’d have been bordering on insolence, or worse, but despite certain similarities to some special warfare units, this wasn’t the military, and the proposal was so harebrained he’d sure like to hear any reasons that could justify it.
“The Tchpth commissioned his elimination, and they specified me.” She took the trouble to get the awkward word out as close to correctly as she could.
“They wha — ?” Harrison was surprised his own mouth opened first. “Cally, this is a bad time to joke.”
“Okay, all of you. Shut the fuck up and listen.” She was fairly impressive when her temper started to kick in.
“Aelool and O’Reilly, both, met this Crab, know who he is, and are convinced that this is coming from the highest levels of whatever functions as their government. Aelool is convinced. That’s all I need to know about authenticity of the orders or permission or whatever you want to call it. Frankly, I’d dance across a tightrope thirty stories up, backwards, if it meant I’d finally get to kill one of those poisonous little pricks, and any of you would, too. Now we get to the timing.” She grimaced.
“I told O’Reilly it had to be tomorrow because, Pardal being into the dirty crap of our other mission up to his pointy ears, the security walls will go up on the other target if we don’t hit them damned near simultaneously. The truth is, I’m afraid if we delay it, the Crabs will change their bouncy little minds. Tell me a chance to take out one of the fucking Elves themselves, finally, isn’t worth a damned big risk. Besides, I can do this and get out. I figure eighty percent or so. Second, I’m the most expendable operative on the main mission. I’m along because I’m good in a tight situation and you didn’t dare leave me behind. Tell me I’m not right.”
They were all quiet for one of those timeless gaps when everybody’s preconceptions get sucked into a contemplative bog.
“If this wasn’t the dumbest, most dangerous stunt I’d ever heard of — just supposing for a minute — how would you kill him?” Papa growled.
“The most deniable way. I’m gonna piss him off.”
“Yeah — you might want to rethink. Wild rumors aside, you got any idea how hard that is? Or, how fucking suicidal? I’ve seen video of a Darhel after pushing the button to kill a Posleen globe — before he hit lintatai. The entire Indowy bridge crew, those who hadn’t found other places to be, were casualties. I’ve watched the old Bane Sidhe’s debriefings and clandestine recordings of what an enraged adolescent Darhel can do in the moments between when he cuts loose, before he goes catatonic with lintatai. A terminally pissed off Darhel takes the ‘dead man’s ten seconds’ to a whole other level. One clip has two adolescent Darhel ripping each other limb from limb in about the time it would take you to tie your shoe. Those teeth aren’t for show,” George said.
“I’ll be watching all of that material, and more, tonight. Lintatai is the only possible way to kill him without making it obvious someone killed him. We don’t know enough about their metabolism to poison him undetectably. Amend that, we could shoot him up with Tal if we had Tal. We don’t. I’m not sure the Indowy even know how to make it, and the Crabs didn’t conveniently volunteer any. So he rages around the room and I stay ahead of him. I may be stuck in this ridiculous body, but I’m still upgraded, and people move even faster in the first few seconds after the brain cocktail in Provigil-C hits, if they aren’t dead tired to start.”
“And the reason we don’t use it as a battle drug for the speed is its tendency to give people who are already awake such a bad case of the shakes that for the next thirty minutes they’re next to worthless in combat.”
“Yup. But I don’t have to fight him. I just have to stay ahead of him for fifty-eight seconds and then make it down the stairs. If I die, I’m just a crazy Darhel-conspiracist bitch who got lucky. And unlucky. That’s the other reason I need you, Harrison. You’re going to have to patch me up and pretty me up enough to make it through the interview, if it can be done. If something goes wrong, George gets a call from his girlfriend saying she’s got car trouble and has to reschedule.”
“I hate to say this, Papa, but it could work,” Tommy said, breaking his silence for the first time.
“I know. That’s what pisses me off the most.” His teammate looked more like a short, muscular, red-headed fireplug than he did like Cally, especially since her whole external appearance had been worked over seven years ago, but he was reacting more like her grandfather than her teammate. “We don’t have the slab anymore. Dead’s dead. And I notice the Crabs aren’t busting their humps bringing it back, either,” Papa said.
“And wouldn’t we all love to have it back? You’ve just brought up one more reason for doing this. The Crabs operate on favors, part of a whole ’nother chunk of Galactic economy nobody bothered to tell us about. It would be nice to have them owe us one. This mission is worth the added risks all the way around.” She never missed a chance to push a point home.
“Even if it fucks up the primary operation and your sister dies?”
“The message included something that had to come from her; this particular Crab is one of her buddies. She’s in it up to her ears, and we’re just going to have to trust her, too.”
“Michelle, too?” O’Neal groused. “But I still don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” Cally said, but Harrison knew she was lying. Correcting the Darhel Pardal’s respiratory problem would appeal perfectly to her unslaked need for revenge, for the death of a mother, the loss of a father, and more other things than he could count. Now that he thought about it that way, he wouldn’t trade his own spot on this mission for the world. He could think of a few things his family owed to the Darhel, too.
“Yeah, but what if Pardal doesn’t take the bait?” his brother spoke up.
Cally shrugged, “George, you’re one of the people who’s always insisting I piss off too many people, and without trying. We O’Neals have certainly never tried to piss off the Darhel, as a race. Seem to have done it, though.”
Harrison thought she was taking liberties with the truth there. The O’Neal family had never exactly tried not to piss off the Darhel, either. Not that they should.
“Can I get the bastard to lose it when I am trying?” she continued. “Not a problem.”
“We’re done except for me and you, Tommy.” The team lead placed a small hand on their star geek’s arm as the others left. “I’m gonna need a lot of that research information George mentioned. You don’t have time to do it; you’ve got to get out of here. I need you to pick me the best cyber guy to assemble my on-the-fly field guide to Darhel behavior for tonight. There’s no time for techie versus nontechie misunderstandings. I need you to sit in while I explain what I need and translate whatever needs translating, then you need to get moving.”
“A whole species’ behavior in one night. Is that all?” The big man’s mouth had an ironic twist.
“Oh, you,” she said, punching him in the shoulder. “I’ve got my wish list down to reasonable proportions. For the researcher and me, both. I know exactly what I need.”
The “computer guy,” as it turned out, was a tiny, fifteen-year-old girl with tangled brown hair and a splash of freckles across her nose, who asked precise questions, jotted notes, and — from the way she repeated back the details of what Cally wanted — hadn’t needed anybody to translate for her in the first place. Mendy Wimms went on the assassin’s list of people to expect big things from.
She herself went on Mendy’s list of people to expect unbalanced things from, about the time she started skipping away down the hall singing like some manic, killer child, “I get to kill a Darhel, I get to kill a Darhel!”
Wimms overheard Harrison mumble something to his little brother as their team leader vanished around a corner. “We’re never going to live this down, you know,” he said.
Friday 12/10/54
The Indowy Aelool would have preferred almost anything to the situation he now had to face. It was one in the morning, local time, and he was dreading the coming interview with the human O’Neal. Aelool had not become the head of his own clan without having the strictest and most exquisite niceties of courtesy and propriety drilled into his head. The action he was now contemplating trampled all over the social rules with an almost human degree of obliviousness. No, to be fair, the human O’Reilly would never have done what Aelool was about to do. He had, after all, not spoken a word of the matter to Aelool himself in seven years. Surely he must have known. Humans were not often so discreet about private clan matters, and his human counterpart’s tact had rather impressed him. It had been so tempting to interfere. In any case, he now waited in the special room for sitting that humans needed to share personal meetings with him. Nervous, he did not sit.
The O’Neal’s eyes displayed an uncharacteristic vividness of the blood vessels in the whiter areas of his eyes. It looked strange. He also must have been weary, because he was being less careful about concealing his teeth with his lips. Aelool repressed a shudder.
“What was so important at this hour of the morning, Aelool? Sorry to be grumpy, but I’d just gotten to sleep,” the orange-topped omnivore said.
“First, I most deeply regret the breach of protocol involved in approaching you on so private a clan matter. Please be assured that I have made every effort to respect your privacy in this, and to confine the distribution of any reports as much as possible. I am aware, from your own reticence, that you regard this as an extremely private clan matter, and I wouldn’t have spoken of this matter with you or any other if I did not believe you needed this information. Please, forgive me in advance if I am mistaken. It is most certainly not my desire to be discourteous or disrespectful to the O’Neal or to the Clan O’Neal.” He stopped speaking and waited for the response from the other clan head, to indicate if Aelool should continue, or should politely terminate the discussion.
“Aelool, I’m sorry if I’m not answering right, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. Could you please try to explain in plain English? Sorry if I’m slow on the uptake, but I’m still half asleep.”
The human was looking more wakeful by the second, but presumably this was part of their protocol for such situations.
“It involves your household granddaughter’s breeding partner. Forgive me so much for intruding. Normally, when we intercept such a message, we file it flagged to your eyes only and leave it in the personal storage system for you to access or not, as you choose. In this case, the courier that was supposed to deliver the message to your granddaughter has suffered a misfortune — none of our doing, I assure you! If I did not broach the matter with you, the message might never reach Miss O’Neal, and the contents are so sensitive I judged I must personally bring it to your attention. Again, I am so sorry to intrude into Clan O’Neal’s privacy.”
If he had not known better, Aelool would have interpreted the human O’Neal’s facial expression as bewilderment. Since that was clearly impossible, the Indowy was at a loss. Unsure of whether he had irretrievably blundered or not, he simply placed a data cube in the human O’Neal’s hand and bowed, withdrawing to his and his roommates’ sleeping quarters and closing the door behind him.
Aelool did not see the human insert the cube into the reader slot of his buckley, nor did he hear him mutter, “I’m gonna kill her,” under his breath before he left the room. He would never have admitted to it if he had seen and heard such a thing. Nevertheless, he sincerely hoped that the human O’Neal would not do anything permanent to Cally O’Neal. He was rather fond of her. Did humans take poison in such cases? It was a very private clan matter, of course, and the Indowy had insufficient versing with human xenopsychology to understand why the O’Neal was vexed with his granddaughter over the contents of the message, but the Indowy was fond of her — for an omnivore. Still, it was a very private clan matter, and apparently the human O’Neal had not taken irreparable offense at the Indowy Aelool’s presumption. That was something. It would, however, be disastrous if the O’Neal passed a judgment against his clan member before she completed her assigned work. Disastrous on top of regrettable. And the O’Neal was so volatile, too. Aelool went back to bed, worrying.
>
Cally was only a touch bleary this morning. She’d been able to whittle down the material Mendy turned up for her to only a few key scenes, and had watched them over and over again.
One of the key features that would enable what she was about to do was a project R D had been developing to enhance human communication with Indowy. Humans had the problem, dealing with both Indowy and Darhel, of lacking mobile ears. The project involved having an AID or a buckley track the motion of its user’s body and head, in real time, and track electrical impulses sent from behind a human subject’s ears, using them to project a holographic set of mobile ears that would respond to the human’s conscious, and subconscious, commands. Human ears were not, it turned out, completely immobile. Their mobility was simply so restricted that the ears did not noticeably move. The impulses were still there, in the nerves, still responding to the age-old evolutionary cues of mammals past — and to conscious control.
Conscious control of the holographic ears took weeks of practice. In Cally’s case, she had that practice. She had been an early test subject for the project while on maternity leave. It had been a few extra bucks for baby’s new pair of shoes and such, when she’d badly needed the money.
R D had only intended to use the device between human and Indowy, and only if it improved the communication and comfort level between the two species. It hadn’t. Indowy, it developed, were happier not knowing the emotional states of their human friends. The research had been consigned to the trash bin of good ideas that just didn’t work out. Until now.
No Darhel had ever seen a human with mobile ears. That was advantage one. Advantage two was the information-tracking software that let a buckley PDA superimpose realistic holographic ears on a human head also gave her buckley enough information to superimpose the rest of a holographic face, as well. Her buckley could not make her look like a Darhel, not ever enough to pass for one of them, especially when there were so relatively few in circulation. However, she didn’t need to pass for a Darhel — not to another Darhel’s conscious mind. She only needed to look enough like one, for just a bare instant, to fool the visceral mind about what it saw, before its better judgment kicked in.
