by John Ringo
"Captain Makepeace and Lieutenant Pryce, Corporal . . . Anders, is it? We're here to report in and pay our respects to the CO. I believe he's expecting us." Cally returned the corporal's salute smoothly and waited.
"Yes, ma'am, I'll let him know you're here." The corporal picked up her PDA and told it to get her the general.
"General Beed, sir?"
Cally's enhanced hearing picked up both ends of the conversation easily, and she listened in with a polite, still, waiting expression on her face.
"They here, Corporal? Thank God. About to drown in paperwork back here without a decent secretary. Send them on back."
"Yes, sir. End call." She set the PDA back down.
"You can go on back ma'am, sir." She inclined her head in the direction of the general's office.
Cally passed the corporal and made her way past several closed gray doors and down the corridor to the general's office, Pryce trailing in her wake. The light on the panel under his nameplate indicated an unlocked door, so a wave of her hand in front of it and the door slid aside. She stepped in, and walked to the front of the desk, coming to attention and saluting. With her eyes focused six inches above the general's head, she had to study him and the room with only her peripheral vision. Child's play.
Beed was certainly handsome for an officer his age. The dark blond hair and deep blue eyes were focused a bit below her face. But after the voyage out, she was becoming used to it. His handlebar mustache was perhaps a bit affected, but he was trim, and muscular. For all their warmth and durability, silks weren't the type of fabric to conceal much. Without rejuv she would have taken him for maybe thirty-four. With it, he had to be well into his second century. Still young by Galactic standards. Not as hot as Pryce, but no hardship on the eyes, either. If he decided to chase her around the desk, at least she wouldn't be fighting not to puke or anything. Bit of a weak chin, but it could have been worse.
"Captain, you're a sight for sore eyes." He swept a hand across in a gesture indicating the desk, which was stacked at least six inches deep in paper all the way across, and that was only in the valleys between the piles. Cally restrained herself from goggling with an effort. "Welcome to Titan Base. Your office is just outside and to the left. You should be basically familiar with what we do now, and I've taken the liberty of having the corporal bring in file cabinets and folders and such. I have a few things to discuss with the lieutenant, but I think the best way to do that is for us to get out of the way while you take charge and organize some sort of filing system. I don't care how you handle it so long as you can explain it simply and we can both find any of this stuff at need. We should be gone at least a couple of hours, plenty of time for you to get me a desk surface I can see." He looked at her expectantly.
"Yes, sir," she answered crisply.
"Great, honey. Take care of that, and you and I will be on our way to getting along just fine." He winked at her, of all things, and turned to the lieutenant. "Lieutenant, I understand aides de camp for general officers are authorized to wear two gold braid loops over the shoulder. A good officer always pays precise attention to presenting himself with the right appearance, understood?"
"Yes, sir. No excuse, sir." If anything, his already perfect attention position got a little straighter.
"At ease. Let's get out of here and leave Sinda to it, then." He paused, looking her up and down slowly on the way out the door. "Fine attention to detail, Captain Makepeace. Good job." Then they were gone.
* * *
Cally stared at the door as it slid closed behind them, fighting the impulse to laugh in disbelief. And I had been going over ploys to get the man out of his office and me free rein to run a search. She turned the personality overlay off and the AI up to eight on the PDA.
"Something's about to kill us, isn't it, Captain?" it said.
"Listen to the surroundings, buckley. If someone other than me approaches within six meters of the door, beep once, medium volume."
"Okay. Not that it'll do any good."
She put the PDA down in the middle of the desk and snorted as a small stack of paper fell, scattering itself across the floor. She made quick work of searching the desk drawers. It was especially quick because there was nothing to find. A few legal pads and ball point pens that she dissected without finding anything useful about them, then reassembled and replaced them. That done, she put the PDA back in order and got to work sorting and organizing the mountain of paper, which she would have needed to search through, anyway.
In the end, she wasn't finished in the two hours it took Beed to get back to the office. Pryce was not with him.
"Well, you made good progress, Captain." He moved around behind her and stood just a little too close to where she was bending over the desk to pick up yet another sheaf of papers. The maneuver coincidentally drew the gray fabric against her buttocks, giving him an excellent view of the contours of her behind.
"Do you mind if I ask you to work late? We usually do knock off around five but . . . if you'd like, I'll buy you dinner. Since I'm asking you to work late." He was almost breathing on her neck.
She stood and turned, bringing the papers in close and looking up at him. He was definitely in her personal space.
"Why bless your heart, sir, you don't have to do that." Her blue eyes widened ingenuously.
"Of course I don't, Captain. Still, it would give you a chance to brief me about where you're putting everything. I'd take it as a personal favor if you would, Sinda. You don't mind if I call you Sinda, do you?" His smile was charming. He was quite good at it, the charm thing. She could appreciate that.
"Not at all, sir." She smiled, "And dinner would be just fine."
* * *
He took her to a rather elaborate Cantonese place down on the Corridor. Cally tried not to gawk like a tourist. Not too much, anyway. Calling it the corridor was something of a misnomer. Actually, the main commercial zone in Titan Base was a ground plate floor-to-dome stack of corridors, with spaces cut through the layers so you could stand at the railing on one level and look all the way up and all the way down. It was one of the few places that it was possible to visually appreciate the immenseness of the base. Okay, so it wasn't so big compared to the holograms she'd seen of Indowy skyscrapers, but she was actually here, and Titan felt so real. She supposed it was probably the presence of so much Earthtech. Well, there was a lot of assimilated Galtech, too, but when it came from human labor in Earth companies, it didn't really seem to count.
According to Beed, the Corridor bisected the base from east to west—directions had been assigned based on the moon's axis of rotation, there being no geomagnetic activity to speak of. To the north, the Fleet Strike MP's supervised their own quadrant, the spares, fabrication, and galactic races' quadrant, and the Corridor itself. To the south, Fleet's SP's supervised their own quadrant, the colonist, transient, and civilians' quadrant, and the passenger shuttle port. To someone without an appreciation of the Darhel's ultra-Machiavellian tendencies it might seem strange that Fleet Strike was in charge of guarding spares and supplies mostly used by Fleet. To Cally, it was just one more example of things being made more complex to make them easier to manipulate.
The restaurant had obviously spent a fair bit on the décor to impart an Eastern feel, covering the Galplas walls in red and gold wallpaper that carried a dragon motif. The glow paint of the sign had been adjusted in a reasonable imitation of neon and proclaimed the name of the establishment, in English, "The Golden Dragon." It appeared to be one of the more upscale of the places catering to officers, well-heeled businessmen and the occasional colonist willing and able to blow some hard currency on one good meal out on the outbound leg of the trip.
Still, it wasn't even nearly full on a Monday evening, and they were quickly shown to a table in a corner, lit by a small globe that flickered almost, but not quite, like candlelight. Beside the plates there was a folded cloth napkin, a fork, and a pair of plastic chopsticks. She ordered the sweet and sour chicken and an e
gg roll. The place had a carefully cultivated ambience, but looked very touristy to her experienced eyes. Best to pick something hard to screw up.
"Conservative tastes?" he asked, after ordering the phoenix and dragon.
"Why, did I choose something I shouldn't have, sir?" She looked down and to the side, embarrassed. "I just thought it looked interesting. Would you think I was too . . . well, rural, if I admitted that I could count my visits to a restaurant like this on the fingers of one hand?"
"No, Captain—Sinda—sweet and sour chicken is fine." He smiled, almost gently. "I sometimes forget how young some of our officers are." Her hand was resting on the table and he reached across and stroked the back of it. She licked her lips, nervously, left hand brushing a stray wisp of hair out of her face.
"Young, but very much a grown woman. From what I've seen so far, you're a fine young officer, Sinda," he said.
"Thank you, sir." She turned trusting cornflower blue eyes on him, and smiled. Searching his office didn't turn up what I needed. Maybe searching the general will. Besides, it's a good excuse for ditching some of these excess hormones. Play the near-innocent? Probably best.
* * *
Tuesday, June 4
The next morning at work she passed Pryce at the coffee machine early on, but after he walked back over towards CID she didn't see him again that morning. General Beed, however, was very much in evidence. Her first duty of the morning was, he told her, to use her PDA to access his e-mail account and print out his correspondence, sorting it into categories for his review. She had to bite her lip to keep from pointing out that if he had an AID or a PDA he could have it sorted, ranked by importance, and in routine cases, answered—all just for the asking. Then, after he had sorted through the correspondence and noted what he wanted done with it all, she retrieved the stack from his out box and took it over to CID to run it through an only slightly improved version of a prewar photocopier, with one copy going to his incoming correspondence file before any of it could be answered or otherwise acted upon.
The man was positively a dinosaur, and several times when he spoke to her she had to avoid gritting her teeth as she smiled.
She did brace him about one issue, though. Whoever was making the coffee ought to be shot.
"Sir, have you noticed anything . . . er . . . strange about the coffee?" she began.
"It's grown locally in hydroponics, Makepeace. Something about the air—you'll get used to it." He shrugged, humming slightly as he plowed through some reports from the Fleet Strike Detention Center.
The prison was on base, but its dome was entirely separate. Escape was possible, of course. It had even been done. Several times. Apparently the biggest inconvenience to Fleet Strike was sending a crew out in suits to retrieve the bodies. Cally wasn't sure she could blame the prisoners. Freezing in unbreathable smog was probably a more comfortable death than an accident doing zero gee work in orbit, which was the usual ultimate fate of any prisoners who didn't have very limited sentences. And prisoners with minor problems didn't usually get shipped all the way to Titan Base.
After dealing with his correspondence, which was a matter of dictating what she thought the answers should be based on notes scribbled in the margins, printing the responses out, running them by Beed for changes, and then yet another printed version by him for approval before sending them out, there was yet another mound of paper in his outbox. She noticed he made a couple of excuses to come to her office, ostensibly to check on some bit of work she was doing. From the way he stood too close behind her, resting a hand on her shoulder as he bent over behind her to deliver comments that were always plausible but never strictly necessary, it was clear the general had more than work on his mind. His profile had said he was married, a fact he had neglected to mention and which was conveniently unobvious since he didn't wear a ring. However, it also mentioned that his wife was an unrejuved forty-seven. The wife had accompanied him out to Titan Base, but Cally could well believe that the poor woman was slowing down.
A bit after eleven-thirty he came in and made a great show of opening file drawers and browsing through the files.
"Good work getting things organized, Sinda. Now that you've got a system set up, it should be a lot easier to find things when I need them." He looked at the watch on his wrist and back at her. "It's about lunch time. Why don't we go grab a sandwich and you can brief me on the new filing system over lunch?"
"Certainly, sir. When would you like to leave?"
"I was thinking now, Captain." He smiled disarmingly at her. "I don't know about you, but my stomach is starting to growl."
"Bless your heart, sir, we can't have that. Give me just a moment to print out a list of files and I'll be ready to go." She offered him a smile that was open, friendly, and oblivious, turning back to her PDA and speaking to it softly. "There. We can pick it up from the printer in CID on our way out."
He stood back from the door a bit, clearly waiting for her to precede him out the door, gently—and unnecessarily—guiding her through with a hand on the small of her back. A hand he was careful to remove before they came around the corner and into the general reception area.
He waited while she got the printout from down the hall. As they left, Anders seemed to be very absorbed in the holographic display of whatever form she was working on.
* * *
The lunch rush had barely started, so they had a short wait for a car to the Corridor.
"Isn't there a cafeteria or anywhere to eat in Fleet Strike's quadrant, sir?" Cally tilted her head at him curiously.
"There's the mess hall, the officers' club, and a snack bar in the rec room for the enlisted men. Food at the officers' club is pretty decent, but it's a little . . . crowded. Not the best place for a working lunch," he said.
The grill where he took her was on one of the upper levels. The booths were constructed with high Galplas walls that had been adjusted to reflect in shades and patterns of a rosy brown that resembled cherry wood. From the relative hush and the slightly hollow sound when the waiter introduced himself and dropped off their menus, she could tell the place used electronic sound damping. Low level. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the edge of a small disk adhered behind the napkin holder.
He ordered a Reuben, she ordered an almond chicken salad on pita bread.
"So, you were going to give me an overview of the filing system," he invited, beckoning with a hand.
"Yes, sir. It's separated first into the headquarters material, CID, and the various units by unit. Within all that, it's alphabetical by subject."
"Can I see the list?" He didn't wait, but reached out for the paper, brushing her hand with his not quite accidentally along the way. His eyes were fixed on hers, watching for her reaction. She allowed a mischievous twinkle into her eye.
He didn't actually turn her on, but he didn't much turn her off, either. Ah well, it wouldn't be the first time she'd needed to use sex on a mission, and it wouldn't be the last. And he was more likely to be a mediocre lay than an actually bad one. Most men were.
* * *
The weekly State of the War briefing was late in the afternoon. It was always scheduled close to the change between first and second shifts so that the senior brass of both services, no matter what shift, could arrange to attend.
This got the general out of the office and Cally managed to stack up enough work for herself to justify staying late. She had a good chance of getting enough unobserved access to some of the areas over in CID to do a physical search. CID worked normally. The general's bizarre obsession with paper apparently didn't apply to things that didn't have to go through his hands, so she had been able to do a fair bit of her searching through the computers her first night. As the general's secretary, she had enough access to get her in the door, and then it was only a matter of expanding on it and covering her tracks. She hadn't found anything of interest, and was hoping that a physical search might turn up data cubes of material not stored directly in the systems.
/> After first shift, headquarters did have a pair of MPs posted out at the base car terminus to monitor comings and goings and keep out the unauthorized, but Anders and the CID agents generally left at or soon after seventeen hundred. She waited until seventeen-forty-five before deliberately misfiling a file the general had mentioned at lunch and heading for the water cooler, which was conveniently over in CID.
CID was a hallway of six offices flanking a conference room. The walls between the doors were bare except for the name plates and lock panels. The office beside the conference room had the water cooler and Beed's paper equipment. As she walked past the closed doors, she was able to observe the door panels of each office, and listen for voices inside. From the closed doors and the silence, it was pretty likely that the agents had gone for the day.
She got a drink from the cooler, listening for another moment before stepping out and gingerly opening Agent Carlucci's office door. The agents' doors were locked, of course, but since the general could ask for a file at any time, she was on the list of people with override access.
Carlucci's office had a desk of heavy plastic. Most nonstructural things were, since the raw materials for organics were abundant locally and didn't have to be shipped up from Earth or other Sol system real estate. His I-love-me wall was refreshingly sparse, with his certificate of graduation from the investigators course, and a plaque commemorating ten years of service in CID. His desk had an old-fashioned photo of his wife and not much else. There was a braided ficus tree on the floor, and a Boston fern in a pot on a stand of heavy plastic painted to look like wrought iron. Other than a pair of hand grippers, three packaged protein bars, and a couple of five-pound dumbbells, his desk contained nothing but dust, which she was careful not to disturb.
On to Baker's office. Baker's office was much like Carlucci's, different plants, no photo. He had a framed print of a Monet on his wall. He also had an unlabeled cube in his desk. She read it into active memory. It looked like music files, but she'd have to go over them with a fine toothed comb this evening, anyway, to check for hidden data. It wouldn't be the first time important data had been stored beneath or within something innocuous for extra security.
