by John Ringo
When the cab arrived, she left her suitcase and backpack in the trunk, taking only the briefcase and her purse. The cabby didn't talk to her until they pulled up to a coin laundry.
"There's a fire door at the back next to the restroom. Don't pay any attention to the sign about the alarm. Get in the back of the truck," he said, touching something on the seat beside himself that might have been a PDA screen.
"Thanks." She gave him a nice tip and a small smile, even though the meter had obviously not been running.
The single person in the coin laundry didn't even look up as she walked through and out the back. It was the kind of neighborhood that discouraged curiosity about other people's business.
In the alley, there was a squat woman in gray coveralls holding the back of the truck open. She didn't speak to Cally, just waited as she got in and closed the door behind her. Inside, the boxes of what appeared to be housewares were tightly lashed down to keep them from slipping around, and Cally blessed whoever had loaded the truck for their thoughtfulness. She found the least uncomfortable place to wedge herself for the ride and sat down.
It was well-known among upper level operatives that the Bane Sidhe had a base, a sort of mini Sub-Urb of their own, in the vicinity of Chicago. In this case, "in the vicinity" meaning within a two hour drive, give or take. Today it took longer, and she was sore and heartily tired of bouncing around in the unpadded back of the truck by the time the truck slowed, turned, and did the starting, stopping, standing, and maneuvering that indicated arrival at the base.
By the time the door opened, she was more than ready to check in and go find a deep, hot bath for a couple of hours. Her first stop was in a little office immediately off of the underground parking lot. She handed the briefcase and her car keys to a man of indeterminate age with lead gray hair and a very large nose.
"Marty, the case and contents need the full treatment." She grabbed a stylus and scribbled an address, as well as car make, model, and tag number, on the pad on the counter. "The car is also dirty, and needs pickup today—it's a hotel lot. You can clean the clothes in the trash bag in the suitcase, but I'd really like the rest of the clothes and the backpack and contents back. How's Mary?"
"Fine, fine. What have you been up to? Didn't know you were in the field."
"Target of opportunity. Wasn't able to do a full set up. Sorry about that. I know these improv jobs are harder. How are Sue and Cary?"
"She graduated this spring. Didn't pick my field or her mom's. Don't know what that girl sees in machines, but they tell me she's an artist. And I got a letter from my junior reprobate this week. Seems he's finding out that minding the nuns is more than just a good idea."
Cally returned his wicked grin.
"That all?" he asked, and as she nodded, he patted her hand gently. "Got you covered, sweetheart. Go take a load off and try to forget about it."
She logged herself in to one of the temporary suites and went down to grab that bath. By the time she got out, her trunk of personal effects would have been wheeled up and installed in the room. She left the "Do Not Unpack" sign on the dresser and went in to run her bath. The organization understood how transient and rootless field operatives could feel and believed firmly in reducing the disorientation by maintaining an assortment of personal effects on site. Maintaining entire apartments for operatives who might never return from a mission was cost prohibitive, and additionally tended to emphasize losses in peoples' minds, so the personal gear was maintained in the modern equivalent of steamer trunks which were delivered to the operative's room when he or she checked in on base, and wheeled back into storage when he or she left.
Cally appreciated having her own clothes and her own things when she was on base, but she preferred unpacking them herself or not at all rather than having them repeatedly handled by strangers, much less by friends or acquaintances.
She paid for lunch to be sent up. If she went to the cafeteria she would no doubt run into people she knew and would have to talk to. She would, in fact, have to be Cally O'Neal, and she wasn't quite ready for that yet. Which just went to show she was coming down with something and ought to stop by the medic's office just in case. Except that she didn't really feel like doing that. She decided to see if a long, hot bath, a good workout, and an early night would put her right. No sense in bothering a doctor for something as trivial as a touch of stomach upset and, well, the night sweats must have been a touch of fever. And she was neither queasy nor feverish now, just a little draggy.
In the bathroom, she added some bath salts from a jar under the counter to her bath. Scentless, of course, since housekeeping never knew if the operative in the room would be male or female, but still good for a soak. Real decadence would have to wait for the arrival of her own things.
The brown contacts came out and her own cornflower blue eyes stared back at her as she pinned her hair on top of her head, looking at a curl ruefully. She wasn't about to add a chemical relaxant, bleach, and dye on top of a perm and dye job. She'd be walking around for the next few days looking like she had a head full of broom straw. It would just have to wait until they did her new cover on the slab.
She grabbed the large white terry bathrobe from the rack outside the bathroom and hung it on the inside of the door, leaving her clothes where they fell as she stripped off and lowered herself into the hot water up to her chin.
* * *
Levon Martin looked into the mirror at his darkened skin tone and dark contacts, running his hands over the patterns shaved into his hair and shrugged. He licked his very thin lips and pulled out some lip balm. With the weather warmed up, that should quit being a problem soon. He'd be happy to get back into his own skin, but this afternoon's urban reconnaissance had required a different social face. This was not going to be a fun interview. He straightened his golf shirt and ensured it was neatly tucked into his slacks before leaving his room, listening to the electronic lock click faintly behind him as he entered the halls of the Chicago base. The transit elevator at the end of the hall didn't take long to route him to the administrative octant of the Urb, where he had a short walk down the hall to enter an outer office.
The human receptionist behind the desk was there not because he was necessary to keep track of appointments or forms, although he did both, but because his superior's time was valuable and because he had displayed a talent for guarding that time from unnecessary interruptions.
"Martin, Team Hector. I'm early."
"You are. Hang on just a second." The man got up and poked his head around the door, murmuring softly for a moment to the person on the other side. It would have been audible to Martin's upgraded hearing if he had chosen to pay close attention. Under the circumstances, he did not.
"You can go in," he said. "You're on the heels of another interruption, and we might as well combine them."
Martin walked into the inner office and sat down, waiting for the young-looking man rather eccentrically still wearing a clerical collar to look up from whatever was being displayed by his AID. The hologram was blurred from this side of the desk.
Father Nathan O'Reilly had had the credibility of his improbable good health, given his officially unrejuvenated state, wear thin twenty years before and had come inside to exercise his considerable organizational talents in the Earthside bureaucracy that had inevitably developed after the Bane Sidhe had resumed contact with their human allies.
Taking him inside had required very special planning and no little risk. Catholic priests didn't exactly have a high rate of violent death, and for various reasons at the time it had been necessary that he actually be seen by several people to be very sincerely dead. The drug used was a resource-intensive collaboration between the Indowy and Crabs, and was a timed-release variant of Hiberzine that showed none of that drug's surface symptoms. The main problems with it was that the dosage was tricky, requiring rather exact knowledge of the patient's physical stats, and the hibernatory effectiveness was degraded by the same changes that reduced t
he visible symptoms. If the dosage was off by even a tiny amount, or the antidote was not administered within twelve hours, the simulated death tended to become very real in ways even the slab couldn't fix.
The drug was so secret it didn't even have a name, customarily being packaged in a water-insoluble crunch capsule to be bitten and swallowed by the willing target of an extraction. The time delay served two purposes. One was allowing time for the patient's stomach acid to fully dissolve the capsule material. The other was preventing any possibility that some sharp-eyed observer would see the patient take the pill and immediately fall over "dead."
Still, the ten percent risk of not waking up at all had required a great deal of trust on his part, and it wasn't exactly a comfortable drug. All things considered, he was rather glad he'd never have to take it again.
Decentralized as the Bane Sidhe inherently were, a functioning planetary cell system required some central organization. Chicago Base was it. The priest had taken command of it fresh after its commissioning, its very discreet construction having been a ten year project that had required . . . encouraging . . . the Himmit with a number of exceptionally good story opportunities.
"Display off," he told his AID. "So, Levon, what's on your mind?"
"One of my agents turned up dead of a heart attack this morning," he began.
"I'm sorry to hear that. Was he known to be ill?"
"No, the reverse. He was found dead in his mistress's bed. Consensus from preliminary investigation was that the heart attack was induced by a drug overdose, consistent with the agent's drug problem."
"Were we aware of such a problem?"
"No, sir. In fact, apparently he had also provided recreational drugs to the mistress, not a known user. She doesn't remember a thing. Consensus from the investigators is that he wished to perform acts upon the mistress's body in which she would be reluctant to engage in a fully conscious state, but that the drugs he took to enhance his own pleasure and performance killed him by causing a heart attack before he could complete such acts."
"You don't believe any of this." It was not a question. The father made beckoning motions with both hands.
"Would it interest you to know that the dead druggie was one Colonel Charles Petane and that Miss O'Neal checked in today a bit after eleven, complete with a bag for the cleaning department?"
The priest paused for a moment and replied gravely, "Members of the clergy of Holy Mother Church do not use foul language."
"I'm aware of that, Father."
"I wasn't reminding you. Spill it. What else do you have?"
"A person matching the description Miss O'Neal was wearing when she came in checked out of a hotel in Chicago this morning. The same hotel where Miss O'Neal's cab picked her up on her way to report in. The same hotel where she requested the cleaning department retrieve and clean a car and assorted personal effects. The name on the hotel register, by the way, was Marilyn Grant. Miss Grant had been a guest of the hotel since Friday evening. I won't know until a discrete opportunity presents itself, but I would expect that if I check trees and other likely spots in the vicinity of the late colonel's house and his mistress's apartment that I will find traces of the adhesive we customarily use to affix temporary surveillance cameras."
"Don't. If she got by with it, I don't want to arouse any suspicions by getting caught doing belated cleaning." He called up the Petane file on his AID and reviewed it briefly. "If they do turn up foul play, Petane was sufficiently small fry that an investigation won't lead anywhere. We'll just hope it stays on the books as an overdose rather than an unsolved murder." He pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes for a minute. "I doubt she has any idea of the havoc this is likely to wreak with our Indowy friends."
He stood and walked around the desk, shaking the operative's hand as the younger man rose. "Thanks, Levon. I'll take it from here."
As he left the office, clearly having been dismissed, the operative heard his boss issuing terse instructions to the AID.
"Get Mike O'Neal, Sr., here as soon as possible, I don't care if you have to dispatch a shuttle just for him to do it. Get the rest of Team Isaac in with him if you can, but don't hold up his departure more than two hours maximum for their sakes."
Chapter Eight
The furniture in Father O'Reilly's office had been discreetly changed since this afternoon, as had the lighting. A small storeroom on the same hall contained furniture suitable for any of the species a Bane Sidhe base commander was likely to deal with in the course of his duties. The area in front of his desk had been set up with a comfortable chair for a human, one for an Indowy, and a low coffee table that would be appropriate for both. He had placed his AID on the coffee table to reduce his tendency to fidget with it when he had to discuss something particularly unpleasant.
Bane Sidhe base personnel, as opposed to operatives, did use AIDs. Clean ones. Manufactured on site, in fact. O'Reilly's AID had information not only on comfortable light frequency combinations for humans and each alien species, but the least uncomfortable compromises for any combination.
He had a freshly brewed pot of strong coffee, as well as an ice bucket with distilled bottled water enriched with aesthetically appropriate trace minerals, set up on a table in the corner of his office when the Indowy Aelool arrived.
As he handed the Aelool his customary glass of iced water with an olive, even after all this time he couldn't help being reminded of a small, fuzzy green teddy bear.
Human and Indowy facial expressions and body language had virtually nothing in common, but those of all races who dealt with other species frequently made a habit of learning to interpret and copy as many of the other races' nonverbal cues as possible. Consequently, the priest knew exactly what his friend meant when he reacted to the human's addition of a large shot of Bushmill's whiskey to his coffee by raising the fleshy muscle directly above one eye and tilting his head slightly.
"We have a problem," Father O'Reilly said.
"I gathered that. You normally do not add such a substance to your drink until much later in the evening."
"Thomas, display the colonel, please," the priest addressed his AID. A foot-high hologram of the late Colonel Charles Petane appeared above the coffee table.
"Until yesterday, this man was one of our minor agents. To refresh your memory, he was recruited after he was instrumental in causing the loss of Team Conyers. It was believed that his position as the U.S. Army liaison to Fleet Strike was the first step to his eventual development as an important source of sensitive information and that that potential value outweighed any deterrent value to killing him in retaliation for the deaths of the team members," he began, pausing to see if he had successfully refreshed Aelool's memory.
"If I recall correctly, that was a matter of some debate."
"And involved the decision to protect some of our operatives from knowledge of the decision, yes. That's an awful euphemism, isn't it? More to the point, we lied." He took a large gulp of his coffee.
"Most of my compatriots in our side of the organization did not understand the need," Aelool said, "but, yes, I remember your people felt it necessary and I believe I can appreciate why. I don't remember a follow up as to the usefulness of information the agent provided, but right now I am more curious about your choice of verb tense in describing him." Aelool's eyes appeared to be focused on the olive at the bottom of his glass, watching it roll as he tilted the glass slightly.
"The agent is deceased as of yesterday evening. We believe that Cally O'Neal became aware that he was alive and killed him. We are still gathering information."
"This is no small thing." The alien's closed posture radiated concern to O'Reilly, who had become an expert in communication with Indowy generally and this Indowy in particular. He set his glass carefully on the table and met the human's eyes.
"I would be most grateful if you would add about half a shot from that bottle to this drink." The Aelool sat very still, expressionless, as he waited for his host to
fulfill the request. "I understand your expertise in the psychology of sophonts other than your own species, Father O'Reilly, but I wonder if it is possible for you to understand how very badly my people are likely to react to this incident." He rubbed one hand across his face, slowly. "What have you done in response so far?"
"I've got Michael O'Neal, Senior, en route at the moment, and I've just informed you of the incident. Miss O'Neal checked in late this morning, on her own, so I haven't as yet needed to take any action to secure her. No one has as yet attempted to discuss our concerns with her." He retrieved the bottle and added a shot to the glass. He had seen the Aelool consume alcohol perhaps twice in the past twenty years. Its effect on Indowy was slightly more intense than on humans, even after accounting for differences in body mass. They rarely indulged.
"Good. I would suggest that you don't. You will need to gather information from her, I understand that. It will not minimize the damage much, but it will at least be somewhat helpful if O'Neal Senior conducts all conversation with her on this matter. Although you humans do not have clans as we do, to my people it will look as though she has been brought up in front of her acting head of clan to answer for the act. This will be a small help, but it will be a help. Among Indowy, you will understand, such a meeting in a circumstance of misbehavior is a serious consequence in and of itself."
"Will it be enough?"
"By no means. That you even ask illustrates some of the problem. But it will be a start, and it may make it possible to mend the rest with care and time. I will have to, as you would put it, talk fast."
* * *
Cally sat in the conference room Papa O'Neal had reserved when he had arranged to meet her this morning before lunch. It had actually taken longer than she had expected for someone to talk to her, and this was an interesting opening gambit in the reckoning that was now due on both sides.
She was playing solitaire on screen when the PDA piped up. "Now's when it really hits the fan."
