Sister Time-Callys War 2 (42 page)

Prisoners for interrogation are not, say again, are not a desired objective. You will, of course, be authorized to take and secure surrendered prisoners, where practical, as colonization volunteers for off-planet, privatized security details. Seems it would be right up their alley, anyway, hooah. Get me some preliminary time on target options and call me back by ten hundred hours, Sierra time."

Great. That left him about half an hour to get with Mueller and run some sims. He was also going to need his AID, if she would behave. He considered ways to butter her up before grabbing a dry towel and his gym bag from the locker room on his way out the door. No time to shower and change here. First thing was to get back and take her out of his drawer. If he picked her up as soon as possible and started carrying her around immediately, she'd want to take the opportunity to prove her usefulness. It had certainly worked before. Besides, he was good and warmed up and wouldn't feel the cold on the short jog back to the HQ. Not much, anyway. He groaned as he stepped outdoors into the icy wind. Full sprint. Definitely go for the full sprint. Thank God it was dry.

Sergeant George Mauldin looked a lot like his dad. He was bit on the short side, the constant training at DAG keeping him solidly muscled. Standing still, he tended to look somewhat awkward, with arms too long for his body. The grace with which he moved, a combination of his mother's influence and lifelong martial arts training, belied his gawky appearance. His hair was a light, muddy-apricot color. He hadn't entirely escaped Papa O'Neal's red hair, but Shari's blondness had muted the shade. He kept it cut in an old-fashioned high and tight style, so there wasn't as much of it to see except in good light. What really gave him away was the fair, ruddy skin. Very red, when he'd been working out—which was most of the time, including now.

About an hour into the day's weight program, he was outside the gym cooling off with a sports drink and an energy bar. Even in the cool of November on Lake Michigan, most of the members of DAG used the outdoors as a quick way to drop some of the excess heat built up during the day's training.

He wasn't surprised to see the colonel step outside in his workout shorts, despite the cold. After all, the colonel was a juv, more than capable of keeping up, and trained as hard as any of his officers or men.

What surprised him was watching Colonel Mosovich take off at a hard sprint for the headquarters building, towel around his neck and gym bag in his hand. Colonels didn't do that, not in George's limited experience. Something was up.

George was something of a fan of gadgets. Around his neck with the dog tags he carried a miniature PDA that would take a low-emulation buckley with a minimal overlay. About the size of one of the dog tags, it naturally was voice access only. He picked it up and addressed it, "Carrie, call Major Kelly for me."

The fountain plashed softly in one corner of Michelle's office. The breeze today smelled of apple blossoms and rain. The ceiling gave the impression of clouds moving in an overcast sky. In another corner, a sohon tank stood, containing its mass of nannite jelly and some as yet ill-defined parts and bits, whose purpose and final assembly pattern were indecipherable to any of the few dozen Indowy who came and went in her private space. She knew what he must be thinking: that whatever it was, it must be very important and delicate indeed to merit the personal attentions of a Michon Mentat. The apprentice, like the dozens of others on her personal work crew outside, would ask no questions. If he needed to know something, she would tell him. Besides, they knew that there was every likelihood that anything a Mentat took on personally was a matter for those whose wisdom exceeded their own. An apprentice's teaching emphasized that if he did not involve himself in matters that did not concern him, he could make no embarrassing or damaging mistakes.

Michelle O'Neal's Indowy apprentice was twitching with excitement, despite years of Sohon discipline, and despite having shown the self-discipline to earn the position of primary apprentice on her work crew.

She ignored it as understandable in one just entering his sixth decade—not considering that she herself was close to the same age. For one thing, he had just been entrusted with the great secret of the existence of rapid transit this morning—a secret only a handful of masters held. For another, he was going to travel by that almost miraculous method himself, this very day. For a third, this important job, if he completed it with wisdom, was to be the final test of his ability to function in the journeyman post he would hold provisionally until the assignment was complete. It was a great honor, and the apprentice—journeyman, she corrected herself—was not presently operating a tank. She could allow him some high spirits on his big day.

"It's important that you understand both your job and the reasons for it. The Darhel Epetar Group has done something very unwise. Unwise to the point that the appropriate people have decided upon the appropriate responses. The Darhel Gistar Group is neither particularly wise nor particularly unwise, but happens to have a ship conveniently positioned in the Dulain area—never mind how. A group of humans, also neither particularly wise nor particularly virtuous, happens to have been set in motion by others to assemble the rudiments of a cargo with no planned shipping. That is, if a ship suddenly becomes available to carry it, they can appear to have merely scraped a cargo together on short notice, without any prior plan. The Epetar ship will be late to drop off its cargo of humans and pick up a mixed cargo of uninitialized Sohon headsets and tools. The Epetar ship will have defaulted on its shipping contract—ordinarily a matter of simple fines. In this case the Rontogh factor will have re-booked the cargo onto the conveniently available, and timely, Gistar vessel. The Epetar ship will not want to depart with empty cargo holds. They will book the cargo 'hastily assembled' by the humans." She faced the journeyman with quiet, serene eyes. If she had any personal feelings about this matter, they didn't show.

"Obviously, this would normally be a minor annoyance and profit loss," she continued. "The Epetar ship would simply skip its next stop and jump directly to its third scheduled port of call. This is where the Human plan against Epetar would ordinarily fail. Because of Epetar's gross lack of wisdom, we will help the plan to succeed. The Epetar ship will also be late for its third port of call. This is the reason for your assignment."

"Remember, for purposes of the station's employment log, you have just debarked from the ship
High
Margins
. With your orders from me, neither the ship's real crew nor the station's crew will gossip or pry. The station master is Aem Beilil. You will convey my message to him to expedite the loading of Gistar shipping and delay the loading of Epetar shipping, and to do so unobtrusively. He is to discretely facilitate the operations of humans with the replacement cargo, who will stall the loading of the Epetar ship after it is irrevocably committed. The humans will most likely seem sincere but incompetent. This is not to put him off dealing with them. They are neither. Do you have any questions about your assignment?" The question was rhetorical. The instructions were clear.

"Mentat O'Neal," the young Indowy asked tentatively, "isn't the Epetar group the one that holds your contract for—"

"This decision comes from those far wiser than myself," she said, holding the little green Galactic's eyes until his ears narrowed in embarrassment at his own presumption. The only people who would ordinarily be considered wiser than a Mentat—any Mentat—would be major clan heads or Tchpht policy planners.

Michelle would never have involved herself in large scale Galactic politics without the sanction of higher authority. Wxlcht's seemingly casual comments over a game of Aethal would, in the military, have amounted to a direct order. In the hierarchy of established Galactic wisdom, almost everyone took the

"suggestions" of Tchpht planners of any rank very seriously indeed. She did not like to think that personal friendship might have colored such a major decision, but was not about to let minor misgivings divert her from following the considered advice of someone whose wisdom was as far above her own as hers was above—well, above her sister's, for example.

"We will be going now," she took his hand, then released it as they appeared in a purplish-brown maintenance closet. The intense crowding in the destination space was unremarkable to him, but he did startle slightly at the abruptness of the transition. He only had an instant to blink before she was gone, leaving him alone with his new job.

Cally was on the last leg of her morning five mile run. With the buckley clipped to one hip and a supplemental speaker clipped to the other side, she had music that projected to her own ears in stereo with little leakage. The sound was a bit scratchy. The speaker was older than the girls, having been part of her shopping splurge on the moon after the escape from Titan Base. That is, before she found out Stewart was alive. After he'd tracked her down in a bar, valiantly trying to drown her sorrows, her stay had been a frenzy of activity as they found a priest, put him under seal of the confessional before enlisting his cooperation, got married secretly, and stole precious private moments. All of this had had to be managed as she gave the performance of her life for Grandpa and Tommy, moping around and pretending to be heartbroken and bereaved, slipping away here and there for a few hours on the pretext of shopping and long walks alone through the endless, anonymous corridors of Heinlein Base. The corridor she'd seen the most was a rent by the hour strip in the red light district where she and Stewart had snatched a furtive, rushed, passionate, and pitifully brief honeymoon.

On returning to Earth, she had found through experimentation that a heavy duty workout schedule would keep about twenty pounds of Sinda fat off of her without constantly starving herself. Twenty pounds less helped. A lot. So she ran, she lifted weights, she swam, and she danced. While the girls were at school, she fit as much general training in as she could around the normal martial drills—unarmed combat, shooting, climbing. She hated the climbing. Her morning run was the workout she enjoyed most, next to her dancing.

The morning was cold, doubly so with the wind blowing off the ocean. She wore longjohns under her jeans. Without them, she would have frozen in just the worn denim, the wind biting right through the holes in one knee and around her back pockets and belt loops. Her breath frosted in a small puff that trailed away as she ran through it.

The next moment she was on her ass on the ground, having crashed into her sister.

"Ouch." Michelle said, rubbing the back of her neck. "Are you usually unaware of your surroundings?"

"Unaware?! You weren't there, and then you were. I was watching the dunes and the shoreline, okay?"

the blond grimaced, brushing sand off her jeans. "What do you need?"

"That is the right question. I will use the vernacular to make sure you understand me the first time. I need to know about your husband. Spill it."

"What husband?" Cally asked, too quickly.

"I do not have time for this. I have more than enough to do on my end. Your former lover, now husband, James Stewart, is alive and getting himself involved in high level Galactic politics. You know it, and I need the details. Tell them to me," she said.

"I'd love to know how you found that out. Not that it's any of your business. And I don't know what the fuck you're talking about with the Galactic politics line. You know talking about this could get us both killed, right?"

"No, it is failing to talk about it that could get us killed," the mentat said solemnly.

"I meant him and me 'us,' " Cally grumbled.

"Oh. Why would you tolerate association with humans that would—nevermind. I need you to tell me the details of his plotting."

"Not that I'm not doing everything I can to keep you alive, but to help you I need more information about what you want to know and why," the assassin said, breath frosting the air as she panted.

"Keeping secrets is more difficult than you imagine. Are you telling me that you do not know about his economic plots against the Epetar Group? Plots that coincide with your theft of a large amount of value from them," Michelle accused.

"What?!" Cally was beginning to feel like a broken record. "He wouldn't. He couldn't have. I didn't tell him . . ." She thought for a moment, "If he knew how big my commission was for selling the code keys to you, you don't think he could have figured out where it came from? How?"

"You have almost no experience of business, do you?" her sister sighed. "It does not matter if you knew about this or not. I need you to find out exactly what he is doing and his timetable."

"I'm not going to do anything that might get him killed," his wife said.

"That is an ironic statement. I know you can keep a secret—usually. You can tell Grandfather not to worry. I do not intend to hurt your husband's plans. Presently, they are likely to fail. I find myself in the unenviable position of having to ensure their success."

"I'd rather keep Grandpa out of this."

"Grandfather does not know of your marriage?" Michelle looked shocked. "I had thought you were more mature than to keep that kind of secret for our clan head. I am sorry I do not have the time to have that conversation. If you do not know his plans, I need you to discover them, quickly. Starting with whatever he is plotting on Dulain, and proceeding from there."

"Dulain? What the—" Cally shook her head, interrupting herself, "Never mind. Just because I didn't mean to leak anything and I'm pissed off at him over it doesn't mean I'm going to help screw him over without damned good reason. You promise you're only going to help him?"

"I cannot believe you think I would lie about something like that." The mentat looked genuinely shocked.

"Fine, but I hope you don't need it soon, because arranging meetings with him isn't easy or quick."

"I know he is on the moon. Tell your employers you are making a courier run for me. All you have to do is get him to tell you the information I need. The broad plan, and all the details you can get me. You and I won't need to meet afterwards, I will simply listen in."