Sister Time-Callys War 2 (52 page)

Nathan picked up his AID. "Tell Aelool I need him again, but phrase it nicely. Then give me an executive summary of Michelle O'Neal's relationship with the Tchpht Planner Wxlcht." He had learned early on to ask for executive summaries as the magic words that prevented his AID from talking his ears off.

"Michelle O'Neal and the Tchpht Planner Wxlcht," it replied immediately. "They are both avid Aethal players and partner each other frequently. They communicate often, exchange favors, and are unusually close for members of their respective species. Executive summary material prepared by analysis of organizational files. Would you like me to broaden my search or elaborate on existing material?"

"That's quite sufficient. Thank you." It wasn't necessary to thank an AID, but the Priest was wise enough to know that any habit of omission of the basic courtesies would carry over into his relationships with humans and Galactics. He was always polite to his AID.

"So would he do this from friendship and to return a favor? Would he lie about representing his government?" the assassin asked the machine.

"That is not even a remote possibility," Aelool said as he entered the room, forestalling the AID's reply.

"The Tchpht would never tolerate insanity in a planning position, nor have they had an adult manifestation of insanity in a thousand years, except as a temporary reaction to some drugs. I would have noticed had Wxlcht been drugged, unlikely as that would have been. The message and authority were authentic. What did it mean?"

"Miss O'Neal informs me that the Tchpht government has requested that she kill the Darhel Pardal,"

O'Reilly said woodenly.

Aelool slumped to the floor, landing seated. "If this is a Human joke, it is in execrable taste."

"Aelool, I'm really not kidding. Even I am not that dense about inter-species relations," she said.

"Then you are mistaken," the literally floored alien stated.

"Anything is possible," she answered.

"Not this," he declared.

O'Reilly could see a situation developing and was about to intervene when Cally opened her mouth again.

"I meant, it is possible that I'm interpreting his message wrong, or that he thought it meant something different from what it means to me. This could be a misunderstanding," she allowed.

"It is. It most certainly is. Please tell me why you have come to this conclusion so that we can sort out the real meaning." The small creature wasn't happy with Miss O'Neal. Again.

The priest said nothing, wanting to hear the answer, too.

"When I met Michelle a week or so ago to give her that information she wanted from her Tong contact on the Moon, she said some nasty things about Pardal and I offered to kill him for her. More as a joke than anything."

"A bad one," Aelool said.

"Granted," she nodded. "But then she said that it was a good thing you guys kept me on a tight leash.

That's the only time Michelle and I have
ever
talked about a leash. Ever. So as ridiculous as it seems, can we at least consider what motives the Tchp— Tphk— Crabs would consider sufficient to order a specific sentient being killed?"

"Tchpht do not kill sophonts. Not even second or third hand," Aelool reiterated.

"Of course they do!" Cally contradicted. "They sure as hell commissioned humanity to kill off Posleen. In job lots."

"That was because the Posleen were a threat to all of the wise and, thereby, to all the sentient life in the galaxy." Aelool sounded positively testy.

"Don't get mad at me. I'm not giving the orders. I'm just the poor kid at the sharp end." Apparently deciding it was an oversight that she had not been invited to sit, or making a subtle Cally-esque point, she walked to the other side of the coffee table from the spot where Aelool was still seated on the floor and planted herself in a chair.

Aelool got up and moved to a chair, himself. As O'Reilly joined them, the Indowy explained, as if to a child, "The whole institution of the Wise was at stake. The whole Path was at stake. Without the Wise to guide others on the Path, the remaining sophonts would eventually destroy themselves and the galaxy with them. The Tchpht very reluctantly deemed using barbaric omnivores to kill barbaric omnivores an absolute necessity."

Nathan O'Reilly raised a hand. "A moment, Aelool." He rubbed his forehead pensively. "That Tchpht was as upset as I've ever seen one,
he
said the situation was grave 'or they wouldn't' whatever. He sure didn't like what he was having to say, and he went to a lot of trouble to let us know it was from their whole government.
He
clearly didn't think a misunderstanding would be a possibility, and it was something he couldn't or wouldn't come right out and say."

"Pardal is trying to kill Michelle. She'd be one of your 'Wise,' wouldn't she? How would the Crabs extrapolate events from that? Or could Pardal be into something else that big or that dangerous?"

"Wait." Aelool held up a green, furry hand for silence—a human gesture—and thought.

After a moment, he looked directly into her eyes—for the first time, ever. "The consequences if you are wrong would be unthinkable."

Finally, the Human leader of the O'Neal Bane Sidhe did intervene. "Plausibly, the highest Tchpht Planners could have extrapolated events from the Darhel's planned murder—don't equivocate, that's what it is—of one of the first Human mentats to some sort of galactic threat.
I
can't see it, but I can't understand their physics, either. Aelool, I hate to ask you, but how close is your wisdom to theirs?"

"It is not close." He cringed. "You asked him if he was very, very sure. On their own heads be it, and I hope the Tchpht can be made to see it that way if she is wrong. All we can wisely do is just exactly what it told us. We turn loose her leash." He turned to the priest, "My friend, do you still keep the Human custom of prayer?"

"Of course," the Jesuit answered.

"I hope very much that you will never find a better time to practice it. Please excuse me. This is more distressing than any Human can imagine." The little green alien left the room without another word.

"So. How do you plan to kill him, and when?" O'Reilly, having resigned himself to the business at hand, was determined to see it come off successfully.

"Did the Crab say when?" she asked.

"He only said, 'Soon. Very soon.' " O'Reilly had no idea what to make of this. It would take time to sort through the implications. At least, to sort through as many of them as a Human could follow.

"Then it has to be tomorrow," she announced.

"What? Are you crazy?"

"Not recently. We can't reschedule the run for Michelle, there isn't time. We'd never get another chance before she died. On the other side of that coin, if either target learns the other has been hit, the security walls are going to go way, way up and whichever mission is second will be impossible short of nukes—and maybe not even then. They have to be done as close together as possible."

"You're the second inside man at the target. They know your appearance. You have to be there personally or it doesn't come off. The hit on Pardal also absolutely has to be you, because the Tchpht said so—rather, they said you, so we use you. In case you're somehow wrong, as is distinctly possible, our only possible excuse is that they picked the message, and the recipient, after being specifically warned. I also specifically declaimed responsibility for the consequences of delivering such a message to you."

"I love you, too, Nathan."

"Cally, that message is something I would never, ever have chosen to say to you on my own. There's just no telling who or how many would die next." She looked affronted as hell. "You are very good at your job. Good assassins
always
need target control in the hands of someone other than themselves. Which, in this case, it still is. If, may the Good Lord and all of the Saints preserve us, you're right." And so help him, if she made an inappropriate joke about his appeal to the almighty,
he
just might kill
her.

"Okay. My interview isn't until late afternoon. So I kill Pardal in the morning, and you have Harrison waiting for me with the car and my interview clothes. I'll change on the way."

"It's damned late to be making radical changes of plans. How are you going to kill him?" he asked. He didn't add that she might be overreaching in assuming her success and survival. He didn't need to.

"Don't know yet," she shrugged. "Hey, no plan survives contact with the enemy. This is what you pay me for. I'll shoot you a revised mission plan just as soon as I've got it—tonight at the latest. Honest, just relax. Trust me."

As soon as she was gone, O'Reilly called his assistant and asked for some aspirin. He had developed a killer headache.

The minute she stepped into the room for their final mission brief mid-morning, Harrison could tell that there was something. It wasn't exactly something
wrong
with her so much as it was different. For one thing, she was late. Their team lead was never late. He could see apprehension combined with a terrible excitement, the kind of buzz she'd get in the final day or so before she was sent on a hit, in that adrenaline high that started ramping up before she shut down emotion and channeled everything into single-minded focus. This kind of mission didn't typically spike her. It was a property extraction, not an assassination.

Either their plans had changed for the top, or she had changed hers. At t-minus damned little, either option worried him.

"Okay, people, the good news is that we only have one change. The bad news is that it's a major, fundamental mission change," she said.

I knew it, the fixer thought. From the look on his face, his brother was just now registering the rising "oh shit" level in the room. It wasn't that George was any slower to pick up on emotional cues than the rest of them, just that he hadn't worked as much with Cally as the rest of them had.

"The change shouldn't affect anybody but Harrison and me. We've got a second mission with a rush on it. It has to be tomorrow morning and it has to be me. The good news is it's uncomplicated and I should be able to handle it with no help but a driver."

"What the hell do you think you're talking about?" O'Neal, senior drawled. He was without his usual plug of tobacco this morning. Probably only out of a rare inability to find a cup. Harrison winced. Nicotine withdrawal tended to make him . . . volatile. "There is no mission that could possibly justify haring off . . ."

"Pardal." She dropped the one word into the room like a stone. The kind of stone that might explode if you breathed on it too hard.

"A
Darhel
?" Papa was on his feet now. "Are they out of their tiny minds? No mission prep, no backup, and they drop it on us now? After telling us all these years why the precious Darhel were above all possible retribution, they drop this? No way. No fucking way. Sure, we'll kill him, if they're finally taking the damn gloves off. But after, with full prep, full backup—we'll do it the right way and not go in half-assed and not only miss the target but get you killed besides. What in the hell are they thinking?

Scratch that, what the hell are
you
thinking? Why didn't you tell them to shove it up their ass?!"

Harrison honestly didn't know if he preferred Papa shouting or dead quiet. Either way was usually not a good sign. Right now, the O'Neal's Irish skin was somewhere between broiled shrimp and steamed lobster. His own stomach grumbled, and he realized that his choice of metaphors probably had something to do with skipping breakfast. Which was a bizarre thing to be thinking about given the turn the mission was taking.

"Papa, I'd like to hear the mission constraints and plans, if you don't mind, since I'm the lucky boy slated to share this little gem of a buggy ride," he heard himself say.

The older man harrumphed, which wasn't nearly as effective when done by a peach fuzzed juv instead of a grizzled geezer. He did, however, sit down and quit shouting. The prettiest Schmidt leaned back, arms crossed, and quirked a sardonic eyebrow at the stacked brunette. He really had done a great job with her hair.

"The reasons are easy enough, but they don't go outside this room. If I didn't think it would shake you out of peak efficiency to worry about what's going on, I wouldn't figure you three had a need to know."

She inclined her head towards his teammates.

O'Neal, Senior, started to puff up, but Harrison forestalled him with a raised hand.

"Fine, we've all got need to know. And?" He knew that in the military he'd have been bordering on insolence, or worse, but despite certain similarities to some special warfare units, this wasn't the military, and the proposal was so harebrained he'd sure like to hear
any
reasons that could justify it.

"The Tchpht commissioned his elimination, and they specified me." She took the trouble to get the awkward word out as close to correctly as she could.

"They wha . . . ?" Harrison was surprised his own mouth opened first. "Cally, this is a bad time to joke."

"Okay, all of you. Shut the fuck up and listen." The prettiest O'Neal was fairly impressive when her own temper started to kick in.

"Aelool and O'Reilly, both, met this Crab, know who he is, and are convinced that this is coming from the highest levels of whatever functions as their government.
Aelool
is convinced. That's all I need to know about authenticity of the orders or permission or whatever you want to call it. Frankly, I'd dance across a tightrope thirty stories up, backwards, if it meant I'd finally get to kill one of those poisonous little pricks, and any of you would, too. Now we get to the timing," she grimaced.

"I told O'Reilly it had to be tomorrow because, Pardal being into the dirty crap of our other mission up to his pointy ears, the security walls will go up on the other target if we don't hit them damned near simultaneously. The truth is, I'm afraid if we delay it, the Crabs will change their bouncy little minds. Tell me a chance to take out one of the fucking elves themselves, finally, isn't worth a damned big risk.