Sister Time lota-9

by John Ringo

  “You tell me. How is that goo going to react if we scrape off as much as possible and swap out black tentacle thingies.”

  “Dunno,” the ACS veteran said.

  “You don’t suppose we could, kinda, rip off some of those black thingies from his box and tape them to our box, or something, do you?” Granpa asked. Technology still wasn’t really his thing. Unless it went boom.

  “Probably not,” the three younger operatives said, almost simultaneously. Growing up in the virgin age of television apparently left a guy… different… from growing up just a few decades later. Very different.

  “Okay. Here’s what we try. Tommy, you pick up the gooey shoggoth or whatever the hell it is, and scrape any goo you can off it — keep as much goo as you can in their box. George and I will pick up the decoy and put it in there and see if we can get any of the goo to stay on it. Maybe they still won’t notice for awhile,” Cally said, doubtfully.

  “And me?” Granpa asked.

  “Uh… go watch the door, Granpa. Somebody needs to watch the door,” she said. He harrumphed grumpily at being shuffled off. Everybody in the room would hear someone approaching the door, so a watchman was strictly unnecessary. She expected he’d grouse at her about it when they got home. But they had to get there first.

  Tommy picked up the object of their endeavors with about the enthusiasm of a fourteen-year-old boy for a baby’s dirty diaper. The goo tried hard to stick to the device, but by dint of a lot of brushing and pulling and wrestling, the big man managed to get about half of it to stay in the box.

  At least, it stayed long enough for them to fit the decoy in. Then, to their immense relief, it swarmed up and around the decoy as if they were best friends. If nano-goo could have friends. The bits on Tommy even crawled down his arms and into the box, obediently wrapping around the decoy. Both devices had less goo, but at least their decoy had green goo. She’d been really afraid of how the stuff would react.

  “Gross,” she said. “Lids on the boxes, me and George. Tommy, finish up with that AID. Granpa, how’re we looking?”

  Instead of answering, he held up a hand and slid silently out the door, moving sideways down the wall.

  After her AID terminated Erick Winchon’s call, Prida sat and stared, silently, at the far wall. Dahmer had, of course, made a valiant effort to insinuate itself into her affections over the couple of years she’d had it. The artificial human personality was limited, however, in the fundamental lack of same in the psyche of its charge. Prida had known, and still knew, of the machine’s efforts. They amused more than alarmed her. She had never become attached to her AID for the simple reason that she had never been attached to anyone, in anything but the most temporary physical sense.

  When debating her course of action, in any circumstance, Prida had and used an excellent poker face. Now, she was considering the amount of trouble and risk someone would have to go through to kill or incapacitate a Darhel, as well as the amount of power that indicated. She had idly considered, herself, what it would take to kill a Darhel. She had investigated only to the extent of hitting absolutely no tripwires. Paranoid herself, she had an uncanny ability to estimate where others would put measures in place for their own safety. In particular, she had noticed very early that the Darhel tended towards the same self-honesty in their emotions as she did herself.

  Anybody with the will and ability to eliminate a Darhel necessarily had the ability, and perhaps the will, to eliminate Prida Felini. Erick Winchon was a good employer. She had found some of their interactions truly delicious, although she had been a bit piqued that he had not derived equal pleasure from their mental trysts through the machine. It would have been so much more convenient if he had.

  She knew Erick’s psyche, more or less. If she left his employ, even precipitously, he would simply write her off as no longer in his employ. She would not have believed the indifference if she hadn’t found it such a persistent irritation. She would also lose a terrific salary and unparalleled fringe benefits.

  On the other hand, there was someone in the game who not only could take out a Darhel, but had. There was also the probable reaction of the other Darhel upon anything or anyone in the vicinity. Fringe benefits or not, Prida had more than four hundred years in which to find and enjoy jobs as good as or better than this one. Provided she was alive to enjoy them.

  Yet, one didn’t want to jump the gun and throw away a good thing needlessly. Perhaps good old Pardal had just gone off and had himself a major snit, all by himself. One heard of such things happening to Darhel now and again. The thing to do, she decided, was to appear to be totally invested in the project for as long as possible, while covering her routes of escape if things suddenly blew up. Literally or figuratively.

  “Dahmer, get me the head of security,” she said.

  “Security, John Graham here, Ms. Felini. What can I do for you?”

  She absently inquired as to Erick’s orders and more or less repeated them, telling the security head to also take over and coordinate the loaner guards from the military along with his own people. This was harmless cover for her real announcement — that she intended to spend the night at the facility, or several nights if necessary, and therefore would be making a brief run to her apartment to pick up a few necessities.

  She declined the assistance of a staffer to run the errand for her, of course. Wouldn’t dream of it. Morons.

  There. She could keep herself out of the way of any real hazards until she was more confident the situation was stable, and without jeopardizing her job. After all, she would be doing her job, and doing it well. From a safe distance.

  Jerry Rydell did not appreciate being called in on a weekend, for no damn reason at all that he could see, to patrol a damned near empty building. Entering middle age and already picking up a little weight, despite a job that kept him on his feet and walking, Jerry didn’t often get dates with attractive women. Belinda Scarpelli was about as good as it got for him. Pretty, about six years younger than he was, only a bit plump herself. Having to cancel his date with her had put him in a goddam lousy mood. Especially not when what he got in exchange was having to walk the floors with Nigel Pinkney, otherwise known as Nigel the Prick.

  “So, bet you’re real glad to be in here on Friday, mate. Do a little honest work for once,” the prick said.

  “Nigel? Blow me.” He’d been up one sixth floor corridor and down the other with this cheese-dick and it had gotten old before he’d taken the second step.

  “Eh, what? Don’t like the sixth floor, do you?” In some stupid attempt to play up his name, Nigel affected a very corny English accent, copied out of old prewar stuff that had been badly holo-enhanced to fill in the dead air in the wee hours of the morning. He seemed to think it helped him get women. Jerry allowed that that might be so — but only the stupid ones.

  He clenched his fists as they walked, yet again, past the old biddy’s office. Said woman was some nameless corporate drone on the sixth floor who had the most grating voice he could imagine — worse than his mother-in-law from his first marriage. It didn’t matter what time you walked past her office, day or night, she was loudly talking at her PDA, on some kind of call to someone, with that grating twang that echoed halfway down the hall in both directions. On and on and on. In his nightmares sometimes, he’d be patrolling this hall and stop, wrenching her face open with a crowbar. Inside would be only a buckley and a large, round speaker, embedded in miscellaneous wires and plastic casing, droning on in a computerized loop, forever.

  They were really responsible for both the sixth and seventh floors, but on this job that meant walking the halls of the sixth floor in endless loops, trying futilely to break the pattern by looping here instead of there, running the route backwards, etc. But no matter where you went on the hall, you could always hear the old biddy, at least a little bit. He had, more than once, fantasized about breaking into her home some night and bludgeoning her to death in her bed. He wasn’t a particularly violent person,
but it was the only way he could conceive of continuing to draw his paycheck while never, ever having to listen to that scraping, screechy, rasping voice ever again.

  They could only patrol the sixth floor because the big boss and his bimbo minion were housed on the seventh, and they were too good to be bothered with the presence of lowly rent-a-pigs. Jerry’s fists clenched tighter and he harrumphed silently. Damned snot-nosed suits. Except — her highness the bimbo was out of the building and the creepy big boss was out of town. They were allowed to patrol the seventh floor when their majesties weren’t there.

  “Hey, Nigel. We really oughtta do a few loops around the seventh floor, seeing as we’re on such high alert and the suits are all out. Ya think?” Please let him not be a prick just for once, the portly man wished, adjusting the too-tight, loaner gun belt. Paranoid snot-nosed suits, he amended morosely.

  “Right you are. I could do with a change. That old bird could peel paint off the walls, if you ask me.”

  What a prick. “Let’s take the elevator.” As a rule, Rydell avoided stairs.

  “Shall we, then?”

  Papa O’Neal heard the squeaking in the elevator well and had his back to the wall by the time it dinged. The first guard, a little weaselly man, hit the floor, sapped and stunned, but not out. The taller, fat one was still slightly in the elevator, and had to be grabbed before he could hit the door button. The neck break would have normally only worked for someone catching his victim from behind, by surprise. Those men did not have Michael O’Neal’s squat, muscular build and gorillalike arms. His massive upper body strength and juv’s agility let him muscle the guard’s neck around by main force, snapping it like a twig.

  Almost as an afterthought, his heel jammed down, hard, on the neck of the first man, before he twisted, bringing the opposite knee down, with his full body weight, onto the spot where his foot had been just an instant before. Both hands buried in the little man’s hair, he pulled it up and back, past a right angle, until he heard the familiar crunch.

  A body in each hand, he dragged them free from the elevator doors before that conveyance could start complaining too loudly about the obstruction. A novice killer, or someone who had not yet made up his mind to kill a particular individual, could be hesitant — read “slow” — in action. Decisions to target or not target took time. Thinking about which move to use next took time. The techniques of an active martial artist, who had only trained but never killed, took time.

  It is a truism in fighting that reaction takes longer than action. The techniques of a practiced, active, master who had killed many times at close quarters, and had already targeted a particular man, took very little more time than the remorseless fall of a guillotine blade.

  Papa O’Neal had come into the facility classifying all its employees as not only enemies, but “bad people.” The guillotine blade had felt no more nor less for those it once felled than he felt for his own kills. Now, he no longer classified them as either enemies or bad people, simply as bodies in need of safe disposal. Safe, in this case, being defined as providing the least risk to the mission.

  Around the corner, Tommy Sunday gestured him to the open door of the closest empty office, stripping the PDAs, guns, and security cards from the bodies as they went. Working quickly, he dumped their buckleys down to emulation level one. He was relieved to see that they had only been on three in the first place. A three would not have had enough initiative to place an alert call on its own. He routed their security radio feeds, over very short transmission, to earbugs for Cally and Papa. Each also got a working secure card in a front pocket, guaranteeing that every member of the team could get through almost any door in the place.

  “So much for a quiet, subtle switch,” Cally said, frowning at the bodies.

  “We already had to leave one downstairs,” Tommy confessed.

  “It couldn’t be helped,” Schmidt explained.

  After giving all three of them a chastising glare, she reached into the carry bag and pulled out the belt with the .50 A.E. Desert Eagle and three spare magazines back to the top. Having given his own “take” to George, Papa looked unhappy, but didn’t contest her claim.

  She took point, followed by Tommy with the box and cart, which were flanked by Papa, with George bringing up the rear. Sunday, with his massive size, was the only one able to carry the cart down the stairs, in his own arms, quietly and without help. He could make twice the safe speed on a staircase as any other pair of them.

  “Dead people,” she grumbled. “A whole goddamn trail of dead people. Can’t take you guys anywhere.”

  The O’Neal, as even he thought of himself occasionally, didn’t like having his granddaughter on point one little bit. But she was a professional, a damned good one, and the most likely to befuddle the mind of any real security officer they encountered for at least long enough to deal with the problem. In a practical sense, this meant that the stunningly distracting assassin “patrolled” like the security guard she was supposed to be, for long enough to get to the next door or corner and see beyond it, then beckoned the rest forward.

  The third and fourth floors were crawling with guards, enough that those more-desired routes of egress were impassable. In both cases, upon encountering hostiles, their team leader had managed to smile and nod, pacing and turning just as if she had reached the end of her own assigned route, and getting them all the hell out of there.

  The problem with the second floor was that it contained one of the observation decks for a central double-floor demonstration area. It was very likely the place from which Michelle’s spy had filmed their initial cube of enemy operations. This meant that the route across the second floor to the necessary freight elevator was more than three times as long as any of the other floors. That one freight elevator was the only access to the loading dock through which all routine supplies came in, and all innocuous trash traveled out.

  Cally stopped, up ahead, and started backpedaling towards the rest of them. The old man tensed, then relaxed into a certain boneless looseness — the kind of looseness that in cats and warriors presages a flurry of preternatural speed. Weight forward on his toes, he could feel the air singing between the team members, buzzing with channeled adrenaline, as their point faded back, just in front of Tommy and himself. He heard voices around the corner, voices of the guards that had caused her to stop.

  “Are you cold? I’m freezing. Here’s a couple of bucks. Why don’t you go back down to the break room and grab us each a cup of coffee while I finish the loop of this floor?”

  The mumble that followed was unintelligible.

  “That’s why they have us in pairs, right? Nah, it’s okay. Have a cup on me. Yeah, meet you back at this floor’s lobby, all right? Good.”

  The first guard’s voice was friendly, decent. Too bad the guy was probably about to die. The team waited, standing silent.

  Then Cally was moving forward again, motioning them to follow, then stay. She walked ahead to the corner, peered around, nodded, and motioned them forward again. There was something… different. Still, he’d trained her since she was a child. His confidence in her field abilities was absolute.

  As they turned the last corner to the freight elevator, he understood. Leaning against the wall, out of their way, waited a large, dark-haired soldier in the uniform of U.S. SOCOM and Fleet Strike’s Direct Action Group for Counterterror. He stood, silently, as they approached, pausing only to touch the front of his cover with one hand as they passed.

  “Hi, Aunt Cally,” he said. “Dad,” he nodded as Tommy wheeled by.

  The Bane Sidhe agent watched them safely onto the elevator, team and cargo together. As the doors closed, Papa saw the young man resume his patrol, down the hall and away from them. Always a pleasure to see a well-grown, respectful, young man.

  Tommy had had a few seconds near enough to George to, after watching Cally go all misty and then snap right back into gear, hiss, “I give the fuck up. How?”

  Their rear guard shrugg
ed, keeping his words quiet enough that he hoped she couldn’t hear him, when she’d gone up ahead. “Kick the hardest guy hard enough and he rattles — in a guy way. Kick a hardass woman hard enough and she rattles, too. Give a token soothing to the little girl, and you’ve got the operative back. Cally was hung up in a rare, girl moment. She’s better now,” he said.

  Sunday nodded. “No shit.”

  Just for a moment, Papa looked suspiciously like the side of his mouth was trying to quirk upwards. Then the rest of the team was past the moment, too.

  “Whaddya wanna bet she kicks his ass?” the deadly little man muttered.

  “No bet,” the ACS vet and long-married man muttered out of the corner of his mouth as the subject of their clandestine conversation beckoned them forth, shooting them a darkly suspicious glare.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  General Robert Foxglove, a one-star staff officer within SOCOM, had been less than thrilled to get a call from an AID outside the service. Particularly an AID he had to listen to, like the one belonging to the Darhel Pardal’s pet mentat. Foxglove owed a lot to the Epetar Group. One thing in particular was the ability to live comfortably on his own salary while his ex-wife enjoyed the life to which she had once become accustomed. The counter-intel guys didn’t twig to it because the money wasn’t coming to him. His ex-wife was merely too occupied with a conveniently rich toy-boy to bug him about money for alimony or to support his ex-kids. Nobody suspected a man was being paid off merely because he lived within his own salary. He was just a guy lucky enough to have an ex who wasn’t a platinum-plated, grasping bitch. She was, of course, but the Epetar Group had long insulated him from that reality in return for a few discreet favors.

  The favor required, in this case, was going to be a royal pain in the ass. He had tried to confirm it with the Darhel himself, in the hope of getting out of it. Unfortunately, his own AID had been typically snippy about getting that august personage on the line — even more so than usual. The general interpreted the silence to mean discussion of his alien master’s instructions, delivered by proxy, was neither necessary nor desired. The humiliation stuck in the man’s craw, but he was, by now, used to the myriad small humiliations and indignities that the Darhel heaped on their minions.