Sister Time-Callys War 2 (6 page)

"Mmm. I expected it would be almost time for them to get out and come home by the time you and Michael woke up. Pam works so hard on her lesson plans, it's a shame to have the girls miss a day. So,

'fess up, how long's it been since you went to confession?" Shari asked.

"Uh . . . a few months, I guess." Cally hedged. Actually, it had been more like eight months, since she'd gone back to work full time and been taken off of the six-monthly courier run to the Moon.
Dammit
.

"Go to confession. I'm not Catholic, but even I'll agree it does you more good than that fancy Bane Sidhe shrink ever did. Here," she said, putting a box of cornflakes and a bowl on the table, then turning to grab the milk, "Still can't see why you like that stuff when I've got cheese grits in the crockpot. It's not like you have to worry about your arteries. Go to confession." She must have thought Cally's pensive expression was disagreement because she shook the wooden spoon in her hand towards the younger woman. "You're my friend, Cally O'Neal, and I won't have you getting all shredded up inside again. It was bad enough when you were pregnant with Morgan. Go or I'll . . . I'll sic Michael on you!"

"Alright, alright already. I'll go. Last thing I need is Grandpa nagging." Cally said, crunching her cereal and wincing as the sound echoed in her skull against her headache.
God, I really needed more sleep.

The younger woman was halfway through her breakfast when the door opened. A largish pile of dirty white fur and drool came bounding in, scattering sand across the clean floor. As Shari pulled the joyfully maniacal dog off of Cally and ushered it back out the door, she glared at her husband, who was shaking out his own shoes off the edge of the steps.

"Sorry, honey. He got past me again. Nagging about what?" Papa O'Neal looked sheepish as he shut the door behind the dog. He shook his head, looking for someplace he could politely spit. Shari handed him a mug and a broom.

"Good morning, Grandpa. I thought you'd still be in bed." Cally said, brushing sand off her lap.

"When you're older and wiser, you'll have the sense to take a nap the day before a night job." Papa O'Neal sometimes seemed to forget he didn't look a day over twenty-five.

"Yes, Grandpa. We all know the elderly sometimes need an afternoon nap," she said, brushing her hair back behind one ear. It was a habit from the Sinda persona she had never quite dropped.

"Elderly, hah! Who had the aches and pains last time we met in the gym?" He grinned, dodging as she took a swipe at him, and began to sweep.

"What were you thinking about for dinner tonight?" She asked Shari, pointedly ignoring Grandpa as she drained her cup of coffee.

"I thought I'd take a crab and chicken casserole Pam came up with and get rid of a few leftovers. Why?

What's on your mind?" Shari finished loading the dishes and started the machine.

"Just wondered if there was something I could fix to help out."

"If you could make something for dessert this afternoon, I'm sure the kids would like it. I could use something sweet myself." Shari took a cloth and began wiping down the counters.

"That works. I need to go down to Ashley's for some stuff. I can get the kids and make the weekend incinerator run if you want," Cally offered, glancing at the nearly full can.

"Thanks. Um, Mark's spending the night with Lucas. The keys to the truck are on the hook," Shari said absently, preoccupied with slapping away the hand that was playing around the belt loops on the back of her jeans. She wasn't slapping very hard. Cally smothered a grin and grabbed up the bag and the keys as she scooted out the door, reminding herself not to get back
too
quick.

Years ago, when she was a teenager freshly home on summer break, she had ridden cross-country with Grandpa in a dusty red pickup truck from the School, in Idaho. They came back through all of the midwestern rear area country, until they met up with Shari in Knoxville, where she'd been filling the shopping list. It seemed Grandpa had shamelessly used the slab and about a dozen different identities, with some judicious palm grease, to buy up the bounty farm allotments for all of Edisto Island. Even back then, she could easily imagine him going through all the changes, because it still looked strange as hell to her to see him with red hair and all young and everything. He probably would have kept on buying until he'd owned half of Colleton County if Father O'Reilly hadn't gotten concerned and ratted him out to Shari.

Still, even the Bane Sidhe had had to agree that the possibilities were useful. And it was already a done deal by the time they'd realized what he was up to. Grandpa got to keep his island, but the price for Cally was that her first summer home from school had been spent hunting Posleen and getting a crash course in lowcountry construction. Typically, Papa O'Neal had spent his free time during her first year of school in a combination of shady trades of Galtech goods from the Rabun Gap cache—those he didn't plan to keep for himself—and brushing up his construction skills doing day labor jobs.

The hardest part had been sweeping the island once they got there. Satellite shots showed the bridge was intact, but they hadn't known much else. And at the time Edisto Island was very nearly as far as anyone had penetrated into the Lost Zone. The ride in the back of truck, on the first load of mostly cinderblocks, ammo, and the bare necessities, watching the treeline for feral Posleen, had not been fun.

Not fun at all. She'd gotten five of them, and that was just on her own side. The large, ochre, centauroid reptiles had to be the most repulsive things she'd ever seen.

She'd thanked God that Grandpa had decided that speed was more important than profit and had put off taking the heads and hauling them on the truck to the first bounty outpost at Spartanburg. They were repulsive enough lying dead on the pavement leaking yellow ichor into the ground. Having that stinking mess in the truck right next to her would really have been too much, wrapped in a tarp or not. He'd sprung for the rental fee for a really big truck for that one, bringing down most of the parts of the house.

Most of parts of Grandpa and Shari's house were, of course, galactic materials. Extruded and formed to spec, they could laugh off a direct hit by a hurricane. And over the next couple of centuries, they probably would.

Sensors and scanners for civilians hadn't even been a dream in some bright boy's head that soon after the war. Making do with the Mark I Eyeball when a postie just might have picked up a railgun from somewhere wasn't quite as terrifying as being in a bunker too damned near ground zero of a nuclear explosion, but it had been close. The worst part of the ride had been whenever they crossed a postie bridge. She'd known they were structurally sound, of course, but the reminder of
organized
and technological Posleen had rubbed salt in memories that were all too fresh.

The first month on the island had been a hot and muggy hell, especially to a girl who'd recently acclimated to the Idaho mountain air. Sister Gabriella had really believed in PT, so at least she hadn't been out of shape. Standing her watch at night, stalking posties from one end of the island to the other, bit by bit, in the day had been tiring and tedious as hell. It wasn't that there were a whole lot of ferals.

There weren't. Fleet and Fleet Strike and all the rest had done their job, and, once the God-Kings were gone, the ravenous hunger of the feral Posleen normals had done even more. It was just that posties, even a single isolated feral normal, were so terribly nasty. At least she'd gotten to vent her frustration at the heat and the mosquitos and the sand in everything whenever they'd actually found a Posleen. Grandpa didn't care, he'd just let her vent, as long as she didn't give him cause to scold her for wasting ammo. She didn't. Well, not more than once. And she'd had a really bad morning that day.

Shari's kids had stayed at a Bane Sidhe safehouse back in Knoxville that summer. Cally hadn't blamed her one bit for keeping them out of it. They hadn't been trained for any of this. She had. Well, she'd lived with Grandpa during the war, which had amounted to the same thing. By the time they'd finished clearing the island, putting up the cinderblock and earth-berm-reinforced guardshack had been nothing. Guarding the bridge for the three days it had taken Grandpa and Shari to bring back the big truck of building materials from Knoxville had been interesting. Before they left, she had helped Grandpa and Shari load up the rotting but still identifiable postie heads in the back of the pickup. Another nasty job.

Grandpa had helped her run the line of tripwires connected to alarms back and forth across the bridge.

It was still a day and a half before she could convince herself to take the time to sleep. In the end, only one of the moronic, leaderless feral normals had happened along and actually tried to cross the bridge.

Then had come the icky task of chopping it into pieces she could carry and dropping them over the side of the bridge and down into the water. She pitied the aquatic scavengers that had to dine on the thing, but she could hardly leave it on the bridge to rot and attract more. And then she'd had to wrap the head and keep it so they could take it in for the bounty later. She'd made sure it was downwind.

After Shari and Grandpa got back, having brought Billy to ride high sentry and help out, they'd reviewed the island looking for the best place to build. On a plot on the landward side, next to a big bay, Shari had found an old bit of street sign that had somehow survived the scavenging. It had said "Jungl" on the only bit that was left. Grandpa had laughed and said that was home for him. The name had stuck, and even all these years later everybody still called it Papa's Jungle House. When they didn't call it Mama's house.

Cally still couldn't figure out quite how it had happened, but over the decades Shari had somehow become honorary mother or grandmother to the whole island, whether the kids or grandkids or—hell, the relationships were all too confusing—were hers, or not.

When she was out and about, she could still see what Cally regarded as the O'Neal touch in the layout of the island. Everything was downplayed to any potential observer on land, sea or overhead. Trees and brush and dunes broke up vertical outlines and while planted fields were impossible to hide, a whole lot could be done with roofs and netting. Between irregular overhangs and creative use of vegetation, most roofs couldn't be distinguished from the air. Hiding, of course, wasn't the point. Obfuscation was enough.

With so many people moving into the Lost Zones, the purpose was to make the O'Neal compound seem just one more group of poor but independent bounty-hunters.

The houses of O'Neals and Sundays were not showplace houses, designed to be artistic, designed to be seen. Rather, they were designed to fade into the background. Shrubbery and vegetation around the houses wasn't planted to artistically enhance, but to blur straight lines and obscure. A pre-war Green would have loved it. All so artistic. All so earthy. All so . . . deadly.

Cally savored the smell of the salt on the brisk fall air as she walked across the road from the parking lot to pick up the kids. The olive drab pack on her back, brought along for the groceries, helped block the wind. She'd worn her shooting glasses to keep the fine, blowing sand out of her eyes. The school was only about a klick from the house, and right across from the small building that served as a local barter market and grocery store. She wouldn't even have driven if there hadn't been the trash to haul. Ashley Privett, Wendy and Tommy's oldest, had made a good business out of selling baked goods when she'd first arrived on the island some years ago, and over time had evolved into a sort of barter grocer, keeping track of what came in from who and selling on consignment.

After the BS split, Cally had figured out a way to stretch her shrunken salary by using half her personal baggage allowance on each trip between home and base carrying something abundant one place and scarce in the other. Consequently, her pack was about half full with jars of soy sauce, corn syrup, four quart jars of moonshine, and some bagged popcorn. Bringing corn to the lowcountry would have been like bringing sand to the beach except for the relative difference in price, and that the Indiana popcorn popped a lot better. She'd gone out with two pounds each of roasted coffee beans, baking chocolate, cane sugar, home-made cigars, a pack of vanilla beans, three bottles of rum, and a bolt's worth each of indigo denim and unbleached shirt-weight oxford cloth. Her market for stone-ground hominy grits had gone out in the first year, after one of the women on the cleaning crew on Base had figured out how to make it herself. It had been a niche market, anyway. Besides, cloth was better. There was always a market for blue jeans. She supposed she was technically a smuggler, among other things. Not like it mattered. Assassin, smuggler, thief, but not a drunk—it's kind of hard to become an alcoholic when your blood nannites break it down before you ever feel the effects. Not a brawler—well, mostly. Not a rapist—she'd heard it
was
technically possible, but it wasn't to her tastes or her needs, even if she had been celibate for months now.
Dammit.

That was the worst thing about getting back on the team. Her six monthly regular courier slot to the moon would be given to someone else on light duty, and she'd have to find some other way to arrange time with James. Okay, Stewart. And of course she couldn't explain why she wanted to keep the courier route. She couldn't even ask to keep it. She'd been lucky to get it in the first place. James had been on Earth for conferences twice since Morgan was born. Unfortunately for her love life, she was probably going to have to wait until he could get down here again. Anything less wasn't an option. In forty or so years work for the Bane Sidhe, she'd had enough casual sex to last multiple lifetimes. She'd denied it often enough, even to herself, but she'd been looking for "the real thing." Having found it, she was hardly going to settle for less. Oh, if the fate of humankind was at stake, she wasn't going to be a prude, but she'd also determined to say no to plans that involved her as a honey trap if it was just a matter of getting information faster or cheaper. Sure, sometime faster or cheaper might mean life was on the line. But more frequently than not, it wasn't. Motherhood was an excuse for saying no. It sometimes meant they weren't happy with her, but under the circumstances, she could live with that.