Sister Time-Callys War 2 (2 page)

Cally glanced at her watch,
Damn. Time's gonna be tight.
She crept the rest of the way up the stairs, pausing to slip her shoes back on before opening the door and stepping out into the hallway. This part of the building was immaculately maintained. The carpet was new, and the walls smelled of fresh paint. She passed a picture of a lighthouse, in a gilt frame, as she counted three doors down and retrieved the gas grenade from inside her dress.

The Posleen had reduced Earth from a thriving civilization of five billion down to about one billion refugees, barbarians, and Galactics' lackeys. The six-legged carnosauroid aliens were immune to every hostile chemical agent the humans or Galactics had been able to envision. Likely, they were immune to quite a few things nobody but the half-legendary Aldenata had envisioned. Fortunately, the Indowy were more vulnerable. Particularly, they were vulnerable to the general anesthesia agent in the grenade. She opened the door just long enough to toss it in, pulling it closed and waiting outside.

Non-lethal and scentless except for a vanishingly faint chemical-lavender smell, the gas was harmless to humans and persistent enough to be readily detected later. The thing she liked best about it was that one of the breakdown products was a common Darhel allergen and tended to give them a
very
nasty rash—about three days later. She watched the second hand on her watch tick off thirty seconds before going in.

Inside, one of the first things she noticed was a holographic display which sat on an antique mahogany table. In a display of vanity excessive even for his own species, this Darhel apparently traveled with his own portrait. The silver-black fur would have been salt and pepper except for its characteristic metallic luster. His fox ears, cocked forward aggressively, had been embellished with the lynx-tufts that were the current fad in Darhel grooming. His cat-pupilled irises were a vivid, glowing green—she would be willing to bet they had been digitally retouched. They glinted in the middle of the purple-veined whites of his eyes. The most prominent feature, however, was row of sharp teeth, displayed in a near snarl. Again, they had obviously been retouched to make the light appear to sparkle off their razor edges. He was draped in some kind of cloth that was, no doubt, hideously expensive. His angular face combined with the other features to make him look like a fatally charismatic cross between a fox and some sort of malignant elf. Half a dozen Indowy body servants clustered in subservient postures around his feet.

Other than the gratuitous display of self-adoration, it was a stereotypical Darhel suite. A thin layer of gold covered practically everything that could be gilded, worked in intricate patterns. Piles and piles of cushions were covered in muted colors of an expensive Galactic fabric ten times softer than silk. Some of those cushions were now graced with the small, green, furry forms of sleeping Indowy. One of them had been unlucky enough to fall on the floor. It had curled up into a ball and she stepped over it as she searched for the all-important, hideously expensive code keys that were the goal of her raid.

The drawer was one of several hidden in one of the false columns ornamenting the room. She assumed it was the one with the expensive bio-lock worked into the hatch. Her buckley might have been able to convince it she was the Darhel owner. Or it might not. Fortunately, this Darhel had neglected to consider the hinges, which were delicate, of a Galactic material far too strong for most brute force, and exposed.

The screw holding one end of each pin took the normal Indowy hourglass head. She unscrewed the top of her pen, selected the right size bit and—

"Cally O'Neal, I see you." The soft voice behind her was soprano, but not nearly high enough to be Indowy. The blond cat burglar whirled and froze in mid strike, staring at a thin girl in Indowy mentat's robes, her brown hair pulled back in a tight bun . . .

"Michelle?" Cally asked, her eyes blinking rapidly in surprise.

Since Cally had been officially dead for over forty years, including as far as she had been aware to the knowledge of her only sister, seeing the mentat was, to say the least, a bit of a shock. Especially in the middle of an op.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Cally hissed. "And that Indowy greeting was in very poor taste, you know. 'I see you' sounds like we're playing hide and seek."

"Is this a bad time?" Michelle could have been slightly miffed. In all that serenity, it was hard to tell.

"Hell yes this is a bad time!" Cally hissed. "I'm kind of in the middle of an op here. And could you please keep your voice down!" Despite feeling totally surreal from the interruption, the under-dressed cat burglar couldn't help drinking in the sight of her long-estranged sister. "Waitaminute—you knew I was alive? How the hell did you get in here, anyway?" she asked.

"The physics is . . . complicated. You know, Pardol is going to be very displeased when he finds those missing."

"Fuck Pardol. Personally, I wouldn't mind if it sent the bastard into lintatai." The thief fitted the screwdriver into the tiny hinge.

"Fine, don't listen to me," Michelle sighed, "but don't do it that way. You'll break it. Someone put a lot of time into that drawer. Why don't you just use the manufacturer's override code?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe because it's a hundred random characters of Galactic Standard? What do you mean I'll break it?"

"Those aren't hinges. They're purely decorative. And breakable. Also alarmed. If you attempt to remove them the real door will lock somewhat permanently. Besides, the code's not quite random." She rattled off a string of Galactic syllables with a glibness that made Cally's tongue ache in sympathy.

"How? Nevermind. Could you repeat that again, only slower?" She fiddled with her PDA for a moment,

"Buckley. Give me a Galactic keyboard and pretend to the drawer you're an AID."

"It wanted to tell me. It likes me." Michelle gestured faintly towards the drawer, then began repeating syllables, pausing briefly after every group of five.

"The keyboard's rather pointless, you know." The Buckley's conversational tone made Cally twitch a bit, as did the fact that it was talking again. "I understand Galactic perfectly," it said.

"I told you not to talk."

"Yes, but when you spoke to me directly I presumed you wanted that to override the earlier instruction."

"Buckley, is your emulation up too high again?"

"Of course not," it answered indignantly, "and don't reset it until after the mission. You know it'll all go wrong without me. Not that it won't anyway." It sounded smug. She hated it when the buckley got smug.

Whenever it was too happy, sure as hell she'd screwed something up somewhere. Michelle reached the end of the long code, and the door slid open soundlessly as the buckley finished feeding it the correct characters. Damned if the hinges weren't ornamental, after all. And the inner door was solid plasteel with very expensive subspace traction locks. If she'd triggered those the thing would have become more or less a single piece of material.

"Okay, thank you for helping me get into this thing," Cally said, checking to make sure the code keys were actually in the compartment. "Now go away. I have an egress to effect and I don't need the distraction. Nice chat. Catch me some other time."

"I did not just come to nag you. It is business. I wish to engage your team's services for a mission. Are you available three weeks and two days from now?"

"If the money's right and it doesn't go against our core objectives, we are," Cally said. "But I did mention I'm on short time here, right?"

"Neither of those things should be a problem. Shall we talk terms?"

"Oh, jeeze," Cally sighed. "Fine. Whatever. We're expensive."

"I had assumed as much," Michelle said, calmly.

"If you have that much backing, I need to know who you're working for," Callly said.

"This is primarily a personal venture. Although it is of course in the larger interests of Clan O'Neal and all the Clans."

"Personal?! How much do you make?"

"Quite a lot, but I presume you mean money. Whatever I ask for."

"Whew," Cally whistled softly. "Want to come over to the side of Good and Right?"

"As members of the same Clan, I thought we were already on the same side. For the rest, now is neither the time nor the place for this discussion."

"Well thank you for finally agreeing with me!" Cally snapped. "Can you meet me at Edisto Beach tomorrow at seven? I'll take a walk after dinner. We can talk privately. I can bring Grandpa. I'm sure he misses you as much as I do, and we can iron out the details together."

"Please, it would be inappropriate to distract my clan head when he has such weighty policy matters to meditate upon as he does at this time. I would take it as a personal favor if you would grant me a private meeting between us to handle the negotiations." She vanished, not giving her sister time to reply.

And it was a good solid vanish. One moment, sister. Next moment, air. Cally had enough experience of holograms to be pretty sure she'd been dealing with a real human. There had been a faint smell of perfume, something extremely light. Her nose was tweaked high enough that she'd caught a faint odor of body as well. Not funk, just the smell any human gave off. Traces of heat, a breath. Michelle had been standing right in front of her and now was not. Cally waved her hand across the space for a moment then shrugged. She didn't have time for this.

She lifted the code keys out and put them carefully into her purse, replacing them in the drawer with the identical-looking but worthless decoys. Each single-use key, when plugged into a nannite generator, would trigger it to make enough fresh nannites to fill an Indowy journeyman's Sohon tank. Among the Darhel, they were the diamonds of currency.

Manufactured
very
carefully by the Tchpht, with multiple redundant levels of control to ensure that the makers could not self-replicate and did indeed self-destruct precisely on schedule, the nannite generators were the underpinning of virtually all Galactic technology. The use-once key codes that safely activated those generators were obtained from the Tchpht by the Darhel and traded amongst themselves and to the Indowy for all the necessities and luxuries that comprised the Galactic economy. They were too useful to be allowed to sit idle for long, but they were the ultimate basis of both the Indowy craftsman's wage and the FedCred.

Darhel actuaries had been in business for a thousand years by the time humans were counting cattle on tally sticks. They knew to a fraction the worth of code keys and where the nannites were flowing throughout the entire galactic economy.

They weren't used to being robbed.

Cally suppressed the temptation to hum as she pressed the button on the inside of the door to close it.

The fancy lock probably had recorded that it had been accessed with a manufacturing code, but that just added to the mystery for the Darhel. She lifted the edge of a cushion and kicked the empty gas grenade shell underneath. She wanted it found, just not right away.

I don't know what the hell to think about all that. I'll think about it after I'm out. First things first.

She hurried to the door as one of the Indowy began to twitch.
They'll be awake any second now.
She glanced at her watch again. She'd made up time on being able to just close the drawer instead of reassemble it. Thank God.

After letting herself out of the Darhel's suite, getting out was a simple matter of taking the elevator to the second floor and schmoozing her way through the party. As with a lot of places, there was a lot more effort put into keeping unauthorized people from getting in, than keeping people from getting out.

The party was the kind of glittering affair that had been attended by national-level movers and shakers back in the twentieth century. It would have had diplomats, politicians, major league bureaucrats, and the occasional celebrity or industrialist. This party still had movers and shakers, but while some of the attendees were officially diplomats, the interests they really represented were one or another Darhel business group. There were a few more celebrities than would have been in attendance before, outside of fund-raisers. As artists had throughout history, they clustered where the opportunities for patronage were. Whatever else they were, the Darhel were not stupid. They understood the value of good public relations. People in the entertainment industry knew the value of a fedcred. As a business arrangement, it generally worked out rather well. In show business, people who didn't think so tended to be conspicuous by their absence.

Wow. That's the first time I've seen a champagne fountain done in real life. Clever to have
floated it over the water garden.
Jewels and gold lamé had enjoyed something of a revival. The room was alive with potted trees and draped greenery. Floating lights resembling mythical will o' the wisps made the ballroom look like something out of a materialistic reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Cally shrugged. She was a realist. As long as a collaborator didn't actually get innocent people killed, he'd have to be into some pretty heavy-duty stuff to merit her professional attention. She didn't think of operations like the one tonight as professional assignments. Sending her out to steal was a little like having an attorney take out the office trash. If your employer asked it, and cash flow was tight, and you could spare the time from your real job, you did it. But it wasn't her real job. Cally O'Neal's real job was killing people. And once she'd thought she wasn't bothered by that at all. Now she knew she was, sometimes.

And that it was better that way.

As she eeled her way between one overly large matron and a rather stick-like pruny one, Cally couldn't help observing the effects of bad rejuv jobs from incomplete drug sets.
Okay, so there
are
worse things
than backaches and blouses that gap at the buttons.

" . . . and so my therapist said not to worry, Martin's just entering a third childhood, and
I
said I'd had enough of this midlife crisis crap the first time and . . ."