by John Ringo
"Right." The head of operations stood up from the back of the room, blessedly cutting off their briefer. "I think that's quite sufficient for the team to start planning their operation." He nodded towards Cally and the rest. "I've sent you all a memo detailing your specific ROE, and we'll leave you now to your specialty and quit jostling your elbow," he said.
Their briefer looked very disappointed about being signaled to shut up, and in no uncertain terms. He trailed out behind his boss like an unhappy duckling.
After he was gone, the team members looked at each other and grinned, all equally glad to be rid of the IW, an acronym usually pronounced as a short "eew."
Wilson was okay as a boss. He knew when to keep his hands off, and was not unduly sensitive about his top team interacting directly with the Father Nathan, Aelool, and of course the O'Neal was directly on the team. While he was understandably uncomfortable about the latter, he had a rare ability to shut up and soldier while still being a decisive leader whenever necessary. As a manager, he was a treasure. Over the years, Cally and the others had seen enough to appreciate how good he was, even though—or perhaps especially—because he made it look so easy.
In this case, he'd increased their time efficiency enormously by getting the over-eager IW out of their hair.
"So. Let's look at the map and start with insertion routes. Buckley?" Cally set her PDA on the table, and a three-dimensional tabletop display of Chicago's north side projected onto the conference table.
Mary Lynn Stuart sat at her vanity and contemplated her dark roots with displeasure. Her hair was currently a bright blond, with blue shading into fire engine red at the tips. She and her friends absolutely ruled the seventh grade with their just peachy-sweet collection of mod rooster combs. Right now, her hair was down for bed, but the left-over hairspray had it flopping every which way like a haystack. She leaned forward and popped a zit, tracing a little line of artificial, anti-germ skin over the tiny wound. Damn it, she had forgotten her acne cream, then forgotten she forgot, and Daddy had some weird belief about the vaccinations causing Torgensen's Syndrome.
He told her that the cream worked if she used it, and that nobody noticed the artificial skin if she forgot, anyway, but Louise Alexander always noticed and teased her incessantly. Bitch.
Mary Lynn detested the muffled noise the husher gave to her music, but Daddy was already asleep and would have her hide if the loud, popping, urbie-drill chants penetrated through the walls to his room.
It had been really nice of Daddy to switch and give her the bigger room. He had said he wanted the window. Mary Lynn was just as happy with an artificial window that looked out into Lothlorien of Middle Earth rather than a real one that looked out into the dismal Chicago winter. Besides, if she plugged her PDA into the window, as now, its AI could supplement the window routine so that virtual elves walked by and climbed into the tree houses and stuff, going about their business.
The window was great, but she was going to have to badger Dad to get her wallpaper done. Pink stripes with trailing roses had been great when she was a little girl, but now it was downright embarrassing. Her disco-ball overhead light and wall of band T-shirts from concerts she'd attended were sweet as shit, but the damn wallpaper just ruined everything, and Daddy wouldn't listen. No, he had to spend money on stupid, paranoid crap like his "home invasion escape route." For god's sake, nobody, in her whole grade, had ever had a home invasion. It was Daddy being weird. He could afford to install that stupid trapdoor and drive her batshit with "drills," even on school nights, but he couldn't afford a little stupid wallpaper? Parents were just fucking morons. Okay, effing morons, she corrected herself silently, leaning into the mirror to see if that was another damn zit.
As the wall blew in, shards of the mirror impacted the girl as the force of the blast knocked her backwards into the doorway. The concussion overloaded the husher, knocking it out, but did not faze the PDA, which kept pumping the Leedos' latest hit, "Die Like the Animals," into the air. On a wall to the side, an elf in an ethereal, leaf-green and gold dress strolled languidly by the now-canted window.
Johnny was awakened by a muffled thump from his daughter's room, followed by the blaring of the infernal music she seemed to have chosen just to piss him off. "Laura, what time is it?" he asked.
"It is two thirty-four a.m., Mr. Stuart."
He blearily glared at the wall and ranted to himself about Mary Lynn's current junior high stage of brat. He flat didn't need this on a work night. He swung himself out of the tangle of covers, scratching his ass through his pajamas as he stumbled out the door to go yell at his wayward child.
Her door was practically next to his, the door along a wall at right angles. A door which was canted off its hinges, showing his baby girl in a heap on the floor, blood everywhere.
"Shoot the kid, dammit!" he heard a female voice bark out, and saw Mary Lynn jerk suddenly. So much blood. She couldn't possibly still be alive. He realized he was completely unarmed, and facing a team of strangers coming in through the wreckage of a wall. His heart clenched as his body did the next logical thing, processing the situation instantaneously. He dived for the emergency exit, hand reaching under the pocket in the floor to trip the quick release. The door popped open like a jack in the box, and Johnny was head-first down the chute behind it, before said door even reached full extension. He heard a shot behind him and a wheet as something went by, thankfully missing him.
The chute, a grown up version of a child's covered slide, took him first out to the outer wall of the building, and then next on a diagonal slope down to one floor below ground. He slapped the activating button on the wall next to the shoot and said, "Capricorn Omega." The chute was hot now. Nobody would be following him down that route.
"Alpha Aquarius." The door with the broken exit sign gave an audible click as the bolt slammed back. He ran through it without slowing, throwing the bolt manually behind him and pelting down the hall, whose lights came on in response to his body heat.
A forty-five degree turn ran him diagonally under a street intersection, where he emerged in the bottom stairwell of a parking deck, whose exit was on the far side out from the apartment building. His back-up car responded to his voice, and less than eight minutes from rolling out of bed, Johnny was driving out of the deck onto a one-way street going exactly his way. Away from there. His heart was pounding like a hammer, bashing at the door of the numbed, shocked place at the back of his brain.
Chapter Nineteen
"Sorry to throw you in at the deep end again, Sands," Cally apologized for about the fifth time as the black car purred quietly through the Chicago streets. "They've got to put together some new permanent teams with some of the DAGgers as soon as possible, and they're all guys. Trained female agents are at a premium. Gotta have at least one for a well-rounded—"
"Urban-capable team. Yes, Cally, I know. We really did cover this shit in school. I'll be fine," Sands reassured her.
"Don't get overconfident," George reminded her seriously. "No plan survives contact with the enemy, and that goes double for our kind of ops."
He wasn't going along on what would normally have been his kind of job, but instead was staying outside to cover exits with Tommy. Cally found it amusing to watch him having kittens over a job that she really needed minimal backup for herself. Backup was nice, but she had done a number of these jobs over the years as the sole shooter inserted, simply because sometimes a woman could go where a man could not, could obtain intel which would not have been available to a man. Which was, again, the reason every team, if at all possible, had one female agent. Sure, they could be assigned around on an as-needed basis, but the lost unit integrity was a cost that outweighed any benefits. That might change now that they didn't have the slab to upgrade female agents to a physical level mostly on par with the men. Policy for now was to continue the standing practice while trying to get the slab back.
Harrison crunched across a layer of rock salt as he pulled up to the curb in front
of the gray building. Lighting shot up from the foot of the building, angled in to illuminate it.
Cally and Sands got out of the car with their big shoulder bags slung over their shoulders. Beneath their coats showed dark, patterned tights and high heels nobody sane would wear in Chicago in winter. Nobody, that is, but a prostitute. In their case, they were dressed high end. Visiting girls, as long as they weren't too obvious, were completely unremarkable.
Blessing a building management that either couldn't be bothered to change the pass code, or wouldn't bother the tenants to do so, Cally punched in the security access code for the door. Building management could have put in a more sophisticated entry system, but few did. The more awkward it was for residents to get their friends and pizza delivery in and out, the less likely potential renters were to choose that apartment. With supply outstripping demand, landlords needed every edge they could get, and when it got down to cases, residents just wanted the feeling of security.
Amazing that someone like Johnny Stuart didn't have a better sense of self-preservation and had lasted this long in his job. His run of luck triumphing over stupidity was about to run out. Hitting the stairs, the first thing that Cally and Sands did was ditch the impractical shoes into their bags, freeing up the rubberized soles of their tights to get a good, nonimpairing grip on the floor. The stairs, of course, were rubber treaded—landlords hated getting sued—but the stairwells and the surface under the treads were the same rough brick-red tiles as the hallway. The walls here, also like the hall, were not Galplas. However, in an attempt to look more expensive, the builders had tried to counterfeit the appearance of that substance. All the edges where walls met each other, floor, or ceiling were slightly beveled, as tended to happen with the real thing. The strip across the top of walls and stairways that would have glowed was frosted glass with diffused lighting behind the panels. Silly, but it probably raised the rent they could charge.
On the third floor, they skipped down the hall silently to position themselves quickly, ditching their cumbersome coats on the floor. Cally set the shaped charge on the wall herself. School training or not, Sands was damn green and, sorry, didn't get to play with the stuff that went boom.
Sands popped hearing protection into her ears as Cally stepped back and they ducked down the hall a bit. The older agent shrugged apologetically. She didn't need the stuff. Body nannites would repair her own ears as a matter of course, but the newbie was still young and au naturel, which meant if she got herself into needing a hearing job, it would take some regen, and the beancounters begrudged every penny of overhead for avoidable wear and tear.
The fuse counted down quickly, with the two women jamming their hands up against their ears and holding their mouths open. No avoidable damage. Besides, the pressure change was uncomfortable, anyway.
They were moving almost before the dust started downward, each with a Hiberzine pistol drawn and at the ready, but the first steps through the breached wall were a nightmare. Adrenaline was singing through Cally's brain as she took in the gross intelligence failure indicated by the pink-rose walls. The next thing she saw was a child just a few years older than her Megan, down and bleeding, clearly thrown back by the blast.
Field-trained instincts about care of the wounded moved her pistol for her. Hiberzine. She pointed at the child and pulled the trigger. Click. Oh, goddamn it, a fucking jam.
"Shoot the kid, dammit," she yelled at Sands.
The younger agent didn't have a veteran's reflexes, but she had graduated at the top of her class for several reasons. One of them was steadiness under pressure. She didn't hesitate, pumping the girl with a dart from her own pistol which, thankfully, worked. Demonstrating another cool under crisis judgment, she swapped pistols with her teammate without comment, giving the functional weapon to the best shot. The jammed pistol she took for herself, as Cally noted approvingly that she was fully in the zone, watching her back and clearing the jam smoothly at the same time.
The man in his pajamas, Stuart, must have been groggy, but he wasn't moving like it. He was on the move even as his face turned to ash from the sight of his child on the floor, hitting the ground and doing something to the floor that made a trapdoor pop up. Cally got a shot off as he disappeared down the hatch, but swore as it missed. Some days you got chickens, some days you got feathers.
She grabbed Sands by the collar as the green operator tried to dive after the target. "Booby traps," she said. "He's gone. We clear the place."
Yes, the word was not to linger over a search for the AID, but he might not have had time or presence of mind to grab it. It was get the AID or have a busted mission, probably her own bungle for slowing down for the child. She swore under her breath. Again, some days you got chickens.
In the other bedroom, her eyes lit on the bedside table and she snatched up the AID. "Paydirt!"
"Here." She pressed the device into the other woman's hands and moved smoothly back to the doorway of the breached room, scooping up the preteen girl into a fireman's carry. It was worth the small risk to get an innocent child to medical care. Cally swore up a blue streak as they ran down the stairs, the sticky wetness of the girl's blood, and the rust smell, reminding her of what they'd unwittingly done.
"Buckley, tell 'em we're clear," she announced on the way down, pelting down the hallway with Sands right behind her, slowing so the other woman could get the door for her, and out into the icy night. The cold frosted their breath, but they felt none of it through the pumping adrenaline and the body heat from running the stairs.
"What the?" George was holding the door open as they sprinted to the car. Cally ducked in holding the girl, while Sands displayed good sense once again by opening the front passenger door and squirming into Tommy Sunday's lap, slamming the door behind herself. It was a tight squeeze for them, but allowed room for the girl in the back seat.
"What the fuck happened?" Tommy asked over his shoulder.
"Bad intel. Got the AID, so we got something." Cally brushed her hair back behind her ear with one hand and grimaced as she pulled it away, bloody. She must look like hell. She looked down soberly at the little girl and decided she didn't give a shit how she looked.
"Sounds like it's going to be one hell of an AAR," Tommy said.
Medical had that predominance of white favored in most hospitals. Cally supposed it was because white showed dirt, but she doubted any germs would dare to grow in the pervasive odor of antiseptic. They'd choke. Even if part of the antiseptic smell was Cally herself. They had doused her in an antiseptic shower, made her swish her mouth with something foul, then handed her a mask, a paper do rag, and a paper gown that caused a draft and showed her naked ass to half the world. She ignored it.
Right now, she was more concerned with Mary Lynn Stuart, laid out on the stainless steel operating table. The girl was caked in blood most places except where they had cut her clothes away. She also had the blue stain of medical's preferred antiseptic.
"So how long will it take her to recover?" she asked the surgeon, who, unaccountably, had not yet hit the kid with the Hiberzine antidote, nor was there a regen tank pulled up to the side of the table, nor a couple of first-year interns to lift her in. One lone intern stood watching, keeping his hands to himself. Cally had seen moderate to serious wounds before and was getting alarmed. The pre-Hiberzine exam was usually routine and short, unless they had shrapnel to pull out, in which case it was a full O.R. setup. In this case, Dr. Whatsis was taking way too long with the scanner thingamajigs.
"I'm afraid it's not a when, Miss O'Neal. It's an if, and a how much."
"What? She's just got a couple of gut wounds. It should be nothing. What the hell?" she asked. Then she remembered her manners.
"Note the entry wound." The surgeon lifted the girl's matted hair, separating it where the strands had already been pulled apart. "This is what got her. It didn't have enough power to exit through the skull." He laid her head down gently, face still swollen from Hiberzining. "So it bounced around a
bit. Then, to make matters worse, the last thing Hiberzine hits is the core of the brain. Everything had time to bleed a little."
"What does that mean in real terms? Does she have some kind of chance, and how much without the damn slab?"
"I can save maybe forty percent. That's above the twenty-five percent threshold. I happen to have another child who just missed the threshold, and some of the salvagable material from her might be usable for the patient. Otherwise, we find female patients as close to her age as possible, but they will all be below threshold, so we'll need several. Fortunately, if you can look at it that way, we've acquired a few over the years. I'll have to see exactly what we can save, and then do a database match." He shrugged unhappily. "Twenty years ago, we couldn't have done it without the slab. Fortunately, outside world gene therapy has progressed to the point that we can remap the blood and tissue typing in vitro for all the donors. Or, if administration believes we can have the slab back any time soon, we'll stack her and use it to assemble the combination. She has a fifty-fifty chance if we do it without the slab, and a ninety-five plus percent chance if we use the slab. Even if the slab procedure fails," he used air quotes on the term. "What that means in practical terms is that she'll have a long rehab with psychiatric difficulties in line with the early slab patients. They'll eventually integrate her, but it's a long, traumatic, frustrating process."
He gave Cally a long, steady look. "You're more likely to know when or whether we can expect the slab back, or not." His expression said plainly that even though he wasn't cleared for the higher level negotiation information, it would have a major effect on his treatment decisions.
Cally jumped as her buckley vibrated at her hip.
"I'm supposed to tell you to take this call in your quarters," it said.
"Stack her for now. I have to take this call right now." Her look at him was serious, and carried more information than she should give away. "That information could change within days. Keep your mouth shut." She jerked a thumb at the intern, "And give him a scrubber. You're a mature juv physician. He looks like a kid because he is."
