Sister Time-Callys War 2 (43 page)

"You will not!" Cally blushed. "We're going to be busy. You just keep your mentat mind out of there."

"Fine. I do not have time to argue, I am very busy working the prototype in around my other work commitments. Please be on the next courier flight."

"Delivering what? What am I supposed to be taking you and why?"

"Invent something. I'm sure that will not be a problem for you, as your dramatic skills far exceed mine."

There might have been something vaguely disapproving in the way she said it. She was so closed that it was impossible to tell. Cally couldn't even say anything back. Her sister was gone.

Saturday, 11/20/54

The hotel room was clean enough. Maybe. Stewart might have said the place had seen better days except that, sadly, it probably hadn't. The walls were cheap white stucco, probably slapped right over the lunar equivalent of cinder block. One wall was simply the decorative brick of the corridor outside painted a glossy white inside the room—barren cheapness trying to masquerade as decorating panache.

The blue patterned carpets were dingy, tinged brown with dirt up next to the walls. The paint on everything was fresh and clean, like someone had been desperately trying to pretend the place was not a dump. It had been the best anonymous privacy he could arrange in the base's dusty underbelly on short notice. It also featured two double beds instead of one king. They'd just have to get very close.

"Okay, what the hell was so important?" He addressed his wife, a pin-up perfect picture even in old jeans, who had arrived before him and now sat on the edge of the bed nearest the door, legs crossed.

Anyone else would have been leaning back. Cally sat, spine straight, weight balanced forward, elbows in, hands in her lap. It was body language Stewart associated with the real Cally, Cally without masks. No masks, just defensive as all hell. A muscle jumped in his cheek as his jaw clenched as he took in her disconcertingly neutral expression. She was really pissed off about something. Unfortunately, being called out of business meetings on practically no notice for a dangerous face to face rendezvous didn't have him in a receptive mood.

"My sister Michelle sends her belated congratulations on our happiness," her voice had that cheery lilt that southern women got when you were really in the shit.

"Oh fuck." He turned and walked a few steps away, his forehead clasped in a hand.

"She also sends congratulations on your debut into high level galactic politics and asks what in the hell you thought you were doing," Cally said coldly.

"Excuse me?" He tried, and apparently failed, to look innocent. He felt like a husband caught with five sealed decks of cards after promising to give up poker.

"What did you do, or are you doing, to the Epetar Group." She was giving him the deep freeze for sure.

After a long pause, he said, "I don't know if I can get into that, Cally."

"I see," she said shortly. "Fine. I'll go first. You started with what I told you about my windfall and extrapolated that, correctly, to my having stolen a set of nanogenerator code keys from the Darhel Pardal. You proceeded to plan and act on that information for the sake of your organization. Fine, my mistake for indiscretion. Now I'm going to compound that by providing more information. Whatever you planned is about to go all to shit and, your good luck, Michelle finds it in her own interests for it to succeed instead. No, that's not right. She finds it in Clan O'Neal's interests. That Indowy upbringing really took. She wants to smooth the way for it, but she needs to know what the hell you have planned."

She held up a hand to forestall his interruption. "Lest you think this is a setup, I know her situation.

You're trying to screw Epetar, she wants them thoroughly screwed but can't have her fingerprints on it.

For our part, let's just say that this ties in, in an acceptable way, to things we're working on, as well.

Fortunately." She shrugged. "You've got two choices. You can take the gamble that she's telling the truth and talk to me, or you can tell me to go to hell and take your chances." She looked at her watch. "It's late. I'm tired. Think about it all you want. I'm grabbing a shower and going to bed." She grabbed a small bag and left him to his thoughts.

Even if he had a good poker face, his wife could tell a lot about a guy's thoughts from watching him think. It was a decent gesture to leave him alone to do his thinking. Or would be if she didn't have the place bugged to the gills. It was what he would have done. He pulled a small device out of his case and began a sweep.

"You don't need to bother sweeping the place. I didn't bug it. Just applied some creative static."

"If it's not bugged, how come you knew when I started looking?"

"I'm your wife, genius. Go ahead if it makes you feel better."

Damn but she was good. He sometimes forgot how good. Now, did he bring her in or pass? Obviously, bring her in. First, she
was
good. Good enough maybe even to read her mentat sister right for motivation.

Second, said mentat sister, like all the Indowy raised, would put her loyalty to her clan—as she saw it—above everything else. However much he disapproved of Michael O'Neal, Senior, for letting his son continue to think he was dead, Michelle had to know her grandfather was alive, which would make him the O'Neal clan head. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Michelle could have sunk Stewart himself any time she wanted, and still could, just by pointing a finger. She didn't need proof. Darhel paranoia would kick in and that would be that. Helping it succeed was the only possible reason she could have for wanting the full plan.

It still messed with his sense of reality to call people with the highest levels of the Indowy's production voodoo "mentats." He kept having flashbacks to a fucking long science fiction movie he'd seen years ago with freaky looking Human calculators. He knew how it had all happened. When they translated Indowy labor ranks into English, or coined words for them, they had classified all the levels at the top of the list as different grades of "adept." Well, that had been great until they found out that there was another voodoo level above the adept grades that was so qualitatively beyond them as to be a whole different ballgame.

There was apparently a very sudden, massive jump in ability from the top grades of adept to this new thing. It hadn't been on the lists of Indowy labor ranks because it wasn't one. All the other grades had a set wage rate for assigned work. These folks had variable pay based on negotiated contracts, and were the direct employers of the various Indowy work teams. As much as you could translate something as individualistic as "employment" to Indowy, anyway. So they needed another word for someone super-skilled, something so way up there as to be almost unimaginable. Some wit had borrowed the term

"mentat" from the same book that inspired the old movie. Stewart still couldn't hear someone spoken of as a mentat without picturing a fat guy with toothbrushes for eyebrows.

He was flipping through the channels on the holoviewer, mostly reruns with the occasional hologized pre-war show, when his wife came out of the dinky hotel bathroom, still vigorously toweling her hair. He immediately did a double take.

"Footy pajamas? You wear flannel footy pajamas?" He managed to keep his jaw dropping, but only just.

"Sometimes," she squeaked. "They keep it damned cold in some of these corridors. Besides, I didn't have my good stuff with me when I booked my ticket up here. They were a present from the girls," she admitted self-consciously, walking over to the wall heater and fiddling with it.

"I checked. It's broken. We're stuck with central ambient," he said.

She held her hand over the weak stream of warm air coming from the vent, glared at it and gave it a kick. The result was a light dent added to its already battered appearance, and louder noises coming from the thing as it shifted into higher gear. She made a satisfied harrumph and came back to sit on the bed beside him, cross-legged so that the toes of the absurd flannel pajamas peeked out from under her knees. He silently vowed to dispose of the offending garment as quickly as possible. Over against the wall, the heater lapsed back into an apathetic wheeze.

Cally rolled her eyes at it, brushing her hair back behind one ear and looking at him expectantly. "So, what's it gonna be?" she asked.

"Fine. You're in. Here's how the plan goes," he began. "First, you made Epetar's ship three weeks late shipping out for Dulain. They needed that money plus their Human cargo to pay for a big load of tech gear for Diess. The gear is high-margin—you've interrupted an extremely valuable run. I don't know if you knew it, but when cargo ownership transfers between Darhel groups it's strictly cash on the barrel head. No fedcreds, just hard value in hand. Fedcreds aren't really Galactic money, anyway. Not the way we think of money. Close, but not the same. So anyway, Epetar's ship had to wait for more cash to get here, or it would have been pointless to go on to Dulain. From Dulain, that ship's scheduled to go on to Diess, then Prall, and beyond that is irrelevant for purposes of the plan. The point is it's a very high profit, complicated route with half a dozen stops before it comes back with a mixed hold of goods for Earth and the Fleet repair facilities on Titan. You don't see a lot of Galactic goods on the Earth market because—well, never mind. You can't learn the shipping business in a day," he said. "Are you following me so far?"

She nodded, gesturing for him to go on.

"The important point from all that is that being late puts the Epetar Group in breach of their shipping contracts with the groups that administer those planets, or otherwise own the cargo. Technically, once the Darhel are in breach, the groups on those planets are free to renegotiate shipping with anyone. In practice, it virtually never happens because the odds of another ship turning up with an empty hold before the late ship gets into port are infinitesimal. Contracts usually only get renegotiated if a ship is lost. Then any group positioned right races a ship there to try to snap up the route. Time is money, so the first group to get there usually gets the agreement. I'm going off at a tangent again. The point is, if another group can get a ship there that can carry the cargo after Epetar is late but before they finally show up, the factor for the Darhel group that owns the cargo will deal with the ship that's there instead of waiting for the late one.

Obviously, the ship poaching the route also has to be carrying enough money to buy the cargo, or the deal won't happen. Another reason a late ship is usually embarrassing, but not that big a deal. You see where I'm going with this."

"Maybe not. I think you're saying the Tong's getting into the shipping business, but I didn't know you had even one cargo ship, much less enough money to buy a cargo. You can't be that rich. Besides, the Darhel would never sell to you, money or not."

"You're right, we don't. What we did was slip the word to a Darhel group with the money and ships they could divert in the right places to take advantage of the chance. It never would have been possible without communications changes since the end of the war. It's ruinously expensive to send a message on one, but when a message is time-sensitive, it can be worth it."

"I see how you've set up Gistar to screw Epetar, sort of. But what I don't see is where you get anything out of it. It's not like one group of Darhel is any better than another. They're all amoral bastards who would sell their own mothers—or whatever it is they have—to make a buck."

"Yeah, they are. Which is where we come in. No Darhel captain is going to run from one planet to another with an empty hold if he can help it. He'd end up running inventory on fertilizer sacks on some agricultural planet in the ass end of nowhere. So he's going to look for whatever cargo he can scrape up quickly to at least show he
tried
to offset the loss. If he can blame the remaining loss off on some other sap, his career just might survive. The Tong does have one courier ship we lease from the Himmit.

Officially, it's a Himmit courier ship. At the same time we leaked the Epetar intel to Gistar, we also dispatched our courier along that trade route to get our people together assembling cargos we could buy or make cheap and sell dear. Cargos just worthwhile enough to make up all or part of an Epetar captain's pickup cargo."

"Then you use the cover to sabotage their ships? That's insanely risky," she said.

"Hell no. Business. Think business. We're gonna shear the bastards like a fucking sheep. If we can swing it with the Indowy dock crews, we'll draw out the agony by making sure Gistar's loading and unloading gets expedited, and stalling Epetar after loading starts so they can't cut their losses and run. Ideally, we figure when they know they've been skunked out of Dulain, they'll skip Diess and go straight for Prall.

But maybe not. If we can foist another pickup cargo on them at Prall or Diess, then we get to skin them twice. Or more."

"So what if they don't take the bait and you get stuck with all these cargoes on your hands that you can't sell?"

"No problem. We either ship them out piecemeal as filler around the edges of other shipments, or we sell them locally. Our people are supposed to scrape together things that are salable locally if it comes to that.

Admittedly, it could take them a long time to sell off the inventory."

"Yeah, well. Michelle says it's all about to fall apart." She brushed a hand at her hair impatiently. He remembered it as a Sinda trait that had stuck.

"I hope not. I stuck my neck out setting it up. I'd sure like to know how she plans on 'helping' without being obvious about it. The stakes are pretty high."

"You have no idea," Cally said. Her lips tightened as he looked at her curiously. "No, I'm not bringing you in on all that. Too bad. That's what you get for using what I said, anyway. Michelle and Clan O'Neal, respectively, have big personal stakes in seeing you succeed." She seemed impervious to the look he gave her. "No. I needed to know your plans. You don't have a need to know our reasons. You ought to just be thanking your lucky stars that when you got us caught it was Michelle, and that she needed something from you. Besides, I'm still pissed off."