Sister Time-Callys War 2 (7 page)

Still, it was good that Grandpa owned the island free and clear. Before the split, her pay had been enough to keep a footloose single girl in beer and skittles, but hadn't been anything to write home about.

Since the split, if she hadn't moved back home, she'd be struggling to make ends meet for herself, let alone the girls. It frustrated James that he couldn't help, of course. But in her business, having more money than you ought was dangerous. Bosses were understandably paranoid about who else might be paying their covert operatives, and for what. Fortunately, since the smuggling was almost a public service to the organization, it was honest income. Enough for a bit extra for Christmas and birthdays, anyway.

Saving the world was great for warm and fuzzy feelings, but the pay sucked.

She kicked at the sand and a bit of some scrubby creeping plant with one foot, frowning as the sand in her sneaker reminded her of the hole she had worn through the sole. Still, living in the next thing to paradise was a nice compensation on its own, thanks to Grandpa. And if paradise was gritty and placid and boring, those were what made a good place to raise kids. Even if the Bane Sidhe had made her into a thief. At least every mission she went out on to steal something was one mission where she probably could manage not to kill anybody. That was something, wasn't it?

She shoved her hands in the pockets of the olive drab windbreaker she'd pulled on over a faded red t-shirt and jeans. The fall wind was starting to cut right through the holes at her knees and back pocket.

Time to patch this pair. She stepped over a dried palmetto frond that had gotten blown together with spanish moss and downed leaves.

The external walls of the little schoolhouse were plastered with tabby and screened with vegetation, the thin sheet of galplas that surfaced the roof had been tuned to a camouflage pattern Shari had done up on her PDA. The windows, while clear, had been coated with a thin film that kept the sunlight from glaring off of them, although they still admitted daylight and allowed the children to see out. On the side closest to Grandpa's and Shari's was one of the small concessions to color that the teacher and some of the mothers had insisted on—the children's flower garden. Currently, there was a small carpet of pansies peeking mischievously out at the afternoon sunlight. It was another reason Cally picked up the kids herself in the afternoons whenever she could—the flowers were nice.

Most of the kids were out on the obstacle course by now. Well, okay, there was a seesaw and a rope swing, when somebody wasn't climbing it. The monkey-bars and tower and such were all kid-sized, and the kids tended to attack everything from the cargo nets to the tower in no particular order, substituting random, chaotic enthusiasm for the single-mindedness of adult PT. Still, the O'Neals and Sundays and various children of Bane Sidhe families were the only children she'd ever seen play hide and go seek in ghillie suits. At four, Sinda hadn't quite gotten the idea yet. She was sitting under the tree happily weaving flowers and bits of brightly colored construction paper into the new section of loose, unbleached cotton netting Grandpa had given her last week.

"Mommy!" Morgan yelled, dropping off the rope swing and running across the packed sand. Sinda, whose head had jerked up as soon as she heard her sister cry out, wasn't far behind her, having left her netting behind her on the ground. Cally crouched down and spread her arms, catching one girl in each, and enjoyed the best moment of her day.

"Did you two have a good day?" she asked, looking into one set of green eyes and one set of brown ones. Sinda's honey-blond hair hung around her shoulders in curls. Morgan's straighter and shorter brown hair looked like she'd been rolling around in the sand.

She braced herself for impact as a little red-haired girl, liberally daubed with fingerpaint, crashed into the three of them. "Aunt Cally! Aunt Cally!" she squealed.

Cally picked up three-year-old Carrie, who was actually technically
her
aunt, weird as that was, and planted her on one hip. "Hiya, squirt!" she said.

"Come look at my Billy suit, Mommy!" Sinda started dragging her over to the now brightly decorated piece of netting, while Morgan said something about her books and ran inside.

Cally looked down at the netting as her four year old pulled it over her head like a scarf and preened at her. "It's a very colorful ghillie suit. The most colorful one I've ever seen," she said.

"Do you just love it?" Sinda asked.

"It's very pretty. But isn't it going to stand out when you play hide and go seek with the other kids?"

Sinda's forehead wrinkled a bit. "I could hide in the flowers!"

"Every time?" Cally said.

Sinda nodded cheerfully. "I like flowers. They're my favorite."

"Okay. Are y'all ready to go to the store?" Cally asked as Morgan came back, a blue denim backpack slung over one small shoulder.

They walked across a path that had bits of pavement, indicating it probably had once really been a street, to the store. Privett's Grocery was a weathered gray pine building, almost a shed, really, with a mud-brown roof of galplas tiles and a couple of windows with big, gray, storm shutters latched open against the walls. A bright splash of color came from the fresh fruits and vegetables displayed in wooden carts on the front porch. The carts were obviously new, the boards the golden white of fresh, unweathered pine.

As soon as they got in the door, Carrie started struggling and Cally put her down. The girls drooled over the assortment of fudge behind the counter while she swapped her trade goods, incoming for outgoing, and picked out her own groceries. Shari's cabbages hadn't survived this year, so she grabbed a head of cabbage for coleslaw, and a bottle of lemon juice that must have been put up last year. A pitcher of lemonade would be a nice treat for everybody. She got each girl a small piece of fudge wrapped in rice paper, fighting the temptation to buy one for herself. Christmas was just around the corner, and it was going to be tight this year. Besides she
was
making brownies for dessert. Halfway down the steps she turned around and went back for the square of fudge. It was definitely getting to be time to do something about her salary.

Grandpa was quiet as he fought with the tie-downs on the tent-roof thingy they were putting up over the picnic table. Cally knew it said gazebo on the box, but a she'd seen plenty of gazebos in Indiana—white, wooden, merry-go-round buildings without the ride. This was just a square tent roof with four poles and top to bottom mosquito netting. She got the zipper to work and zipped the mosquito netting from bottom to top outside her pole, moving on to the next one. Shari was grilling some hotdogs for the little kids, and had a shrimp boil going for the adults.

Cally had really hated having to tell Grandpa that "our" meeting with Michelle was really
her
meeting with Michelle. She'd felt like she'd just taken away a kid's Christmas candy. He hadn't said much, then or since. She'd passed on Michelle's excuse, and cringed when he'd tried to wave it away as "no bother" to him as Clan Head. From the way Michelle had sounded, it hadn't seemed like she'd show unless Cally was alone. Grandpa didn't understand, of course. She didn't, either, but she wasn't the one being left out.

Telling him had been just awful.

Soon they'd gotten the netting down, which was more to stop the blowing sand than anything, all sensible mosquitos having decided to stay out of the cold, or whatever it was mosquitos did. She looked at her watch and threw a side-glance at Grandpa. Neither one met the other's eyes. She looked up at Shari, whose eyes plainly said she didn't want to be involved.

"I guess it's about that time. I'll be back in a bit," Cally said. Grandpa just grunted in reply.
Not gonna be
a real relaxed dinner, is it.

Cally picked her way through the tall grass to a set of ancient railroad-tie stairs and started down onto the beach. She looked out at the waves hitting the shore and sighed, futilely trying to tuck her hair behind her ears. The wind insisted on blowing it right into her face. She dug an elastic band out of her jeans and pulled it back in a ponytail. It made her look about sixteen. Twelve, if it hadn't been for the boobs, which she still considered overwhelming. She sighed, but it wasn't like anyone but family was here to see her.

The impression of adolescence was complete as she walked down the beach, scuffing her feet in the sand.

"Where are you going?" The voice came from behind her and Cally jumped, spinning around in a crouch.

"Ack! Don't
do
that!" Cally clutched a hand to her chest and looked up at the girls, letting a breath of relief out that they were still sitting at the table and maybe hadn't noticed anything unusual. "You didn't just appear out of nowhere, did you?"

"Please give me credit for some sense. I came in behind that pile of rubble." Michelle gestured at the crumbling remains of some cinderblock structure or other. "I only walked down when I saw you. So it seems I am finally at a beach with you."

"Yeah," Cally said. There was an uncomfortable silence. "Before we get into the mission, real quick, can I ask you a question about nanogenerator code keys?"

"Your employers do not have the capability to make use of the keys you stole." It wasn't a question.

"Right. Our people say they're level fours and would be difficult to fence," Cally said.

"The current price of six level four code keys would be sixty thousand seven hundred and forty-eight point zero nine seven fedcreds as of close of business at the Chicago Trade Consortium. I would be willing to pay that amount for the keys you took from the Darhel last night. Do you agree to carry my offer to your employers? It would be an arrangement of benefit to Clan O'Neal." If possible, Michelle's voice was even more expressionless, and she stood still in her Mentat robes. They should have been blowing in the wind, but weren't. The wind wasn't allowed to so much as ruffle her hem, and Cally was suddenly aware of the sand in her own shoes and the blowing wisps of ultra-pale blond hair that had escaped from her ponytail.

Michelle had clearly inherited her height from their father and Grandpa. Her petite five foot nothing had an almost boyish slimness that made her sister feel awkward in her own tall frame. If she could have seen herself through the eyes of others, the unlikely assassin would have realized her comparatively small waist and Scandinavian features made her look more like a nineteen-nineties calendar girl than the chubby teenager she imagined. If Captain Sinda Makepeace had been anything, she'd been strikingly attractive.

Cally's physical appeal had not suffered from being stuck in the other woman's semblance when the Indowy and Tchpht yanked the slab off Earth. Unconsciously, she arched her back and stood straighter in a seven year habit designed to minimize her imagined defects.

"Okay, we'll sell you the keys. My bosses will probably be thrilled I found a safe buyer. Now, what couldn't you tell me last night?" Cally asked.

"I could have told you all of it. But you seemed rushed." Michelle said. Cally looked for any sign that she was making a joke, but couldn't see one. Perhaps Indowy-raised mentats didn't have anything as mundane as a sense of humor.

"First, you need a way to reach me with questions about the mission. There must be some kind of indicator you can set somewhere for me to see. I can not watch you every minute of every day—I have work I must do. I would prefer a day's notice in advance of a meeting, if possible. This is your specialty, is it not? Do you have any suggestions?"

"Um . . . lemme think. There are several message boards on the Perfect Match singles site on the web.

When I need to meet you, I'll place a message on the pre-date board. The message should be from MargarethaZ, capitol 'M,' capitol 'Z,' no spaces. It should go to whoever you are. Say . . . Apollo555.

I'll post it the day before I need you, or include the word 'diamond' if it's an emergency and I need you sooner.You can find me, right? And check that I'm alone? If we don't have to set up a code for meeting time and place, it makes it a lot less complicated and a lot harder for anyone else to twig to."

"Do I need to know what a single's site is? Never mind, I am sure it will be clear enough. MargarethaZ, Apollo555, and diamond. I will remember." Michelle nodded. "Here is a broad outline of the mission. I have a colleague, a fellow mentat, who has recently acquired an obscure piece of very old technology and developed it into a problematic device. It is a device which should not remain in his keeping. I wish to hire your team to obtain the device and deliver it to me so that I can arrange safe storage for it. The priority is, however, on removing the device from the possession of this colleague. If a choice comes between damaging the device or failing to remove it, it is the removal which absolutely must be done to complete the contract."

"Okay. Are we supposed to just waltz in and take whatever this is?" Cally asked, her brow furrowing. "I presume you have a full description, location information, some background. Any recon data you have would be nice. Come on, I'm going to need the most complete information you can possibly give me for us to plan and execute this mission. First of all, what the hell is this device? What does it do, and what does it look like?" Cally glanced quickly up to where the candlelight was silhouetting the girls, glad that Morgan appeared to be putting their dinner things back in the packs.

"It is a discontinuous, partially automated, multi-channeled, medium-range harmonic resonance inductor.

I have a datacube for you with full external specifications, a very abbreviated overview of its known and theorized capabilities, and the location of the facility where it is being used." Michelle said, "Of course, you must absolutely avoid any direct confrontation with—"

"Whoa. Back up a second. It's a discon-what? What does it do, in plain English, please."

"I was speaking plain English. The best way I can describe the action is that it affects the brain, in this case of Human subjects, stimulating and analyzing the internal signals for report and, if desired, overriding the internal voluntary muscle commands and other processes with replacement sequences of the operator's choosing."