Honor of the Clan

Chapter Twenty-One

Yan Kato cut the call to Panama. His lieutenant was a good guy. Li would bust his ass, and not have kittens because he couldn’t get it perfect. Stewart hated it for DAG that their supply situation wouldn’t be perfect, but it never was. He’d check the situation before they boarded ship, but the pressure driving the schedule wasn’t coming from the Tong or him. They had civilians coming in, they had some of their dependents coming in as refugees. They had an unknown number of Indowy that he, personally, didn’t give a shit about one way or the other, but Cally and the other O’Neal powers that be did care, for whatever reasons. Soldiers did dangerous, deadly, uncomfortable things so civilians didn’t have to. Time for the DAGgers to earn whatever it was the O’Neals were paying them.

Stewart still had trouble getting his head around the fact that he was now an O’Neal. Not just any O’Neal, he was Iron Mike’s fucking son-in-law. The world was a strange place. He was in a strange place.

The shelves behind him looked ordinary enough. High shelves stacked with boxes. In front of him, however, was a great big paper-mache dragon head, painted in tie-dyed patterns, with peace signs of various sizes scrawled or painted on it. It was yellowed with age, and looked brittle under the huge layer of dust that coated it. He was so, so tempted to ask, but he didn’t. They might tell him.

He’d come in through the front of the cutlery shop, the stock of which ran to pocket knives, daggers of various grades, cheap throwing stars, and pan-Asian kitsch, with a couple of mid-grade swords to draw the oohs and aahs. In the display case with the swords, a cheap jade statue of the Buddha sat behind a neatly printed card that swore it had once been in the national museum in Beijing. If it had, it had been in the mark-down bin of the gift shop.

He had picked this place because it was the closest organization spot to one of the pickup locations Cally had told him to use. Well, not exactly a location. In this case, he just called a cab from a particular company and gave a particular address over the phone as his destination. The cabbie would call back when he was pulling up out in front.

Stewart could have gone out front and browsed through the crap. It wouldn’t have caused any notice, as the store was empty other than the owner, who already knew he was back here. Instead, he stood near a wobbly little table and had bad coffee out of a paper cup. Even bad coffee was still coffee, and he flipped a dollar into the honor jar. The stuff was expensive, and who knew if he’d get a chance at any while he was staying with the Bane Sidhe.

The trip was confusing, as always, but this time they didn’t take steps to keep him from figuring out where the hell he was going. He supposed between Tong business policies and family they had confidence in his willingness to keep his mouth shut. As a former general in Fleet Strike counterintelligence, there was no question that he was able to keep his mouth shut. He was protected against every known interrogation drug, unless the Bane Sidhe had some he’d never heard of. Come to think of it, he’d have to ask. With some of their secrets in his head, it would certainly be in their interests to have him protected to the best of their ability. What “the best of their ability” was was another secret he’d love to add to his collection.

The thing that really sucked about his afternoon was when they finally got in to the Bane Sidhe’s secret little Sub-Urb and he found out he’d missed Cally by less than half an hour. It did surprise the hell out of him, though, that Nathan O’Reilly had come to tell him himself. Then Stewart realized he’d been unconsciously thinking of himself as Cally’s husband, since he was here on her turf, instead of thinking in his persona as a fairly high ranking representative of the Tong.

His first trip here had been essentially social. On this trip, he was the man on the front end of a few boatloads of money and a final lifeline for many of their people. That being the case, he was surprised the Indowy Aelool and a ranking representative of Clan Beilil weren’t both here, as well.

O’Reilly offered a firm handshake. “Mr. Stewart, so good to see you again.”

“Just Stewart, please. Or Yan if you prefer,” he said.

“Then call me Nathan. Since Cally and her teammates call you Stewart, that would probably be less confusing.”

Stewart nodded. “My PDA tells me I missed my wife?”

“I’m afraid so. We got an opportunity to pick up a high value target and for once your wife was the person we could most count on to leave him alive.” The priest grinned wryly. “We didn’t have much time when you were here before. Would you like a tour of our little operation here? While we still have it.”

“That bad?” Stewart was genuinely concerned, and not just for the Bane Sidhe. If the Darhel were willing to go to open warfare enough to take out a major installation like this, it endangered his entire family and his organization, too. The latter was, suddenly, a barely important side thought. He was just getting used to being an O’Neal, but they were the closest thing to family he’d had in a long, long time, and his surge of protectiveness for the whole lot of them shocked him. When the hell had that happened?

“I’m being pessimistic. I estimate the chances of losing the base at around ten percent, overall. It just smacks of failure to be evacuating.”

“A tour would be fascinating,” Stewart changed the subject. “I presume Tommy’s with Cally. I’ve got his report from Colonel Mosovich.” He could tell Nathan was just itching to get a look at that report. Truth to tell, so was he. However, since the DAG force in Panama was strictly an O’Neal pidgin, both men knew it would be more than their lives were worth for Cally to catch them sneaking a peek. Getting caught by Tommy would be just as bad, and a lot more likely, given the other man’s formidable cyber skills.

“Unless you’ve got Michelle O’Neal hidden away somewhere around here, Nathan, I think we’re just going to have to wait,” he said it jokingly, but privately admitted that he had no idea of the Bane Sidhe’s capabilities other than by inference, and they had shown over the years that they frequently held back from things they could do for reasons unfathomable to outsiders.

“Unfortunately, no, but perhaps a walk-through of our Sohon training facility might hold your interests in the interim.” The priest grinned like a little kid about to show off his toys.

“Really? The crown jewels. That’s a flattering level of confidence.”

As they spoke, Nathan was steering him to an elevator down a side corridor, pressing the call button as they arrived. “You’re not one of ours, but you are an O’Neal. I’m not taking you around in that capacity, though, but rather in your professional persona,” he said. “You’ve made a very large deal with us. I suspect your employers may question whether a deal that good was ever intended to be repaid. It’s my insurance for you to be able to tell them you’ve seen various of our capabilities with your own eyes.”

“Pardon me for poking holes, but your capabilities aren’t very reassuring if you’re about to lose them.” James Stewart, donning his “Yan” hat, had transformed from the in-between land of relative into all business.

“Ah, but we aren’t. Tanks we can afford to lose. Not easily, but they can be replaced. Our nanogenerator is out already. From there, the next really expensive thing is the headsets and the interface that goes within the tank. Those are small. If we can’t keep our practitioners alive, then it will be because none of the rest of us are alive to defend them. All the rest of this,” O’Reilly said grimly, “is replaceable. Expendable. And all the rest of us, too.”

The elevator arrived and they boarded, the head of the O’Neal Bane Sidhe still making his case.

“I’m speaking for the benefit of your employers, of course,” he said. “We had nothing like this in the centuries before recontact, and we survived. We’ve never put all our eggs in this basket; we’re still decentralized as our core operational tradition.”

Stewart noticed the other man did not give any percentage as to what was decentralized, and avoided saying “most.” Nor did he say what quality of individuals were out as sleepers, how much they knew, how much bench strength they had. There was also the matter of the size and sophistication including the O’Neals, versus without them. The O’Neals were pretty concentrated, too, which was both a strength and a weakness.

He didn’t reply, and the elevator descended farther into the bowels of the base in silence. It was an interesting elevator. The walls were Galplas, but they had a slightly rough surface, and there were crayon scribblings all over them, spreading out from around knee level. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. “The walls?” he asked.

“That’s real crayon. We encourage the youngest children to draw on these because it’s a well-defined space. It keeps them from coloring on every wall they can find. Yes, I do mean encourage,” O’Reilly said. “This is when they’re too young to even begin the early headset exercises. We give them toy versions and encourage them to be interested in the colors of walls, because tuning the color of Galplas is a very early exercise. The children think of it a bit like playdough.”

“Galplas?” Stewart asked incredulously. He found it hard to think of the major GalTech construction material as a child’s toy. It was stronger than steel.

“Didn’t you ever wonder how a GalTech product was so comparatively cheap? And abundant?” the older man asked.

“Playdough,” Stewart repeated.

“That’s about it, yes. Primarily because if it goes wrong, it’s not a particularly high energy reaction,” Nathan said. “Ah, here we are.” He opened a very sturdy looking door that opened on to a bay about the size of a small airplane hangar. They were at the bottom, but stairs, ladders, and catwalks laced the walls, and a network of pipes hung suspended about four meters off the ground.

“The stairs and such are vertical exit routes in case the halogen foam system has to address a dangerous mistake. Here, we need these.” The priest reached out and took two pairs of safety glasses and two rubber aprons from the shelves beside the door.

“The room is large less because of need to build large things and more as part of the safety design for the pressure-venting system. We could, of course, disassemble part of the fire suppression system if we had something big to build, but for the foreseeable future, this is a training lab and large projects are beyond the scope of what we do. Beyond the scope of what we can do,” he admitted.

Stewart noticed that only about a quarter of the tanks, down on this end of the room, were in use. The others were empty. At half of the operational tanks, one or more human child was working under the direction of several Indowy. Indowy alone were running the rest of the operating tanks. It was the first time Stewart had ever seen a Sohon tank in real life, much less one in use. They didn’t look very impressive. Just big vats with people sitting around the edge, wired in. The headsets looked a lot like the headphones on personal stereo systems when he was a kid, other than having too many pads at seemingly random places on the head.

O’Reilly gestured to the empty end of the room, “The legacy of our internal divisions. We have more headsets and tanks than we have nannites to run in them. This is why I can tell you we’ll maintain operational capability after the evacuation. We’ve got idle tools to move out, even though the practitioners we have here and their own tools will go last. As part of healing the breach, we can count on enough nannites to restore any equipment we can save to operational status. Get the Tchpth to provide enough code keys for the generator, put some of the many refugees who are high level Sohon practitioners to work, and our capacities go way, way up.”

He nodded towards the children. “Those are our real treasures, right there. No politics can take them, and the Tchpth will provide them with enough nannites to operate in exchange for being allowed to observe their development. Human Sohon practitioners are our next baby step towards, if not independence, then comparable footing with the other races. I’m afraid that’s likely to take Galactic-level time, but we do what we can.”

“They’re talking,” Stewart said, feeling kind of stupid for saying it. “I thought they had to be deep into some kind of trance or something.”

“They do talk to the instructors sometimes, a little. It’s just that what they’re making right now isn’t particularly challenging.”

“Not that side,” a child of about ten yelled at a boy that was maybe a couple of years younger. “Put it over there, between the blue marks. Blue. See ’em?” The older child pointed to an area of the large tank he was operating and the smaller child obediently walked around the tank, appeared to find the right marks and began shaking something out of a plastic jar into the tank. Stewart couldn’t see what, as the child’s body was in the way and the plastic was dark brown.

“They still need reagents, of course, but mostly they’re putting the right things together in the right order, managing heat, moving things around and monitoring. You can’t see it, but the tanks have built-in heating and cooling coils, and one of the things an operator does is use the nannites to control membranes that keep the wrong things separated from each other, everything at the right temperature and pressure, do separations, that kind of thing. My understanding is that one of the things the nannites can do is make one tank into a potentially near infinite number of vessels of varying sizes. The children understand a great deal of chemistry, of course, but a lot of the information is stored and available through the headset and managed by a limited AI. The operator’s job is to manage everything to spec. Let’s go see.”

“And give me five more of those, and be ready with my other stuff. I’m ready to start outputting,” the older child ordered, sounding calmer. A bit.

A robotic arm lowered a small, white, plastic bin down into the sludgy-looking tank, lifting it back up in less than a minute, filled with what looked like white sand. The arm moved the bin over onto a shelf on a large cart and picked up a second bin, repeating the process.

As they approached, the older boy’s face shifted more and more into the placidity characteristic of the other eight children operating tanks. “You’ve got nine of these children?” he asked.

“Oh, no. A bit more than three times that. Some are sleeping, some are in classes. We operate the tanks around the clock to make the most of our nannites’ lifespan.” He nodded to the child who was making the white stuff. “The kids go through all the normal developmental stages. It’s biochemical, and it would be bad for them to try to flatten those out. Usually when a child operator reaches a stage that he or she can’t control perfectly, either they put the child on safer tasks, or if they don’t have the work to do that, pull him from the rotation into full-time classroom education and meditation. It makes the stages considerably shorter. For one thing, kids like to work. At this,” he amended.

“Really?” This was news to Stewart, who had always equated human Sohon training with brainwashing and drudgery. “How can kids like keeping still for hours at a time?”

“Indowy have exercises for the drive to move. They’ve adapted some human games — don’t ask. As for the work, it builds on the theories of Montessori. Light years beyond, but she had a base observation that’s the keystone of all this. Children have a drive to work, especially productively. Consider it arts and crafts with results that are useful and usable. They take so much pride in that.” The priest smiled fondly at the children in the room, both the tank operators and the dozen or so children on the floor doing the various tasks to feed the tanks.

“The Indowy equipment, it’s like it was scaled for children, anyway,” Stewart said.

“Another one of Montessori’s observations. It helps tremendously to give children tools and facilities that are size appropriate, without patronizing them. Patronize a child and he will try to please you by behaving childishly. Human children are the size of Indowy adults. I’ve never seen an Indowy patronize a child.”

They had arrived at the tank of the first boy. Stewart liked him already. He was a real kid.

“This guy’s still safe to operate a tank?” he asked the Indowy standing at the boy’s arm.

“Richard is ordinarily in classes,” the small green alien said. “But this task is simple and relatively safe. So simple as to court boredom, I’m afraid.”

He could see Stewart eye to eye, since the operator platform was elevated.

“I’m sorry for my outburst, Father,” the kid said. “I did let boredom get to me. I thought I was getting better.” He grimaced, glancing back to Stewart.

“I’m making cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine,” he said self-importantly. “It’s easy, but we need a lot of it, and for volume I’m the best,” he bragged.

“Cyclo-what?” Stewart looked at O’Reilly.

“RDX.” The priest said.

“Relatively safe?” Stewart squeaked. He might not recognize the chemical name, but he knew the explosive that was the primary element in C-4, and it wasn’t stable until stabilized.

“Yeah,” the boy said. “Don’t worry about the output. You can’t see it, but it’s got a few nannites laced through to make it pretty unlikely to explode or anything. They’ll be reclaimed during the mixing process. It would be hard to mess this up.” The boy looked glum, returning his full attention to his work.

As they walked on to the next tank, O’Reilly whispered, “These kids see getting pulled from work as a punishment similar to grounding. The Indowy discourage that idea, but personally I think it’s beneficial.”

A smaller girl worked at a smaller tank. “Don’t pay any attention to Richard. He’s been being a brat and he’s lucky they’re letting him make anything. It’s because he’s good at volume, and he really is,” she admitted. “None of this is hard, but I’m making molds for plastic casing, then I’ll move on to polyisobutylene and 2-ethylhexyl sebacate — the binder and plasticizer. The real little kids can make the plastic to go in the molds,” she explained.

O’Reilly pointed to the far end of the room where cardboard boxes sat on pallets. “Motor oil, ball bearings, and washers,” he said.

“Claymores?” Stewart asked.

“Sunday tells me we’re going to need quite a lot of them.” Nathan looked a little sad. “Such a waste. Most of those boys we expect will have no idea what kinds of things their orders can lead them into. Babes in the woods.”

“They pick up a rifle, they’re choosing big boy rules,” Stewart shrugged. “They shoot real bullets.”

“I know. But it’s still a waste.”

“You’re not expecting professionals?” Stewart asked doubtfully. It wasn’t good to count on the enemy to make mistakes. He frequently didn’t get that memo.

“From the Tir? No. He has the classic Galactic fallacy. Humans are all vicious omnivores, you put a weapon in their hands and point them at something to kill.”

“Fire and forget,” Stewart agreed. He’d seen it before, and it was almost a universal. They could get their heads around elites facing Posleen, but they tended to chalk the improvements up to the suits and ignore the greater quality of the men in them.

“We’re not just counting on him to be stupid. Who does he have to send? Sending U.S. troops would give away the Darhel game wholesale. Send West Coast DAG in as a black op? They’d know, back channel, and mutiny wholesale rather than attack their brothers. If the Darhel or their brass plants were ever afraid of a mutiny, it’s now when they’ve just had one.

“We’ve been watching the contracts of known mercenary groups and we have a general range of who and what we can expect if we get hit with military force.” Nathan said. “None of the contract forces in the range of available have ever fought trained human troops. None.”

“Lambs to slaughter,” Stewart grinned ferally.

O’Reilly winced.

“You’re catching the O’Neal meme,” he said.

“Don’t worry about me, Father. I was already like this.”

Somebody had taken some time in building this police station. The building had an exterior of standard red brick, but it wasn’t stacked the boring way. Slantwise, patterns, arches. Somebody took their brickwork seriously, and had a pretty damned good artistic eye. It took imagination to get a gothic feel with simple brick. The window frames had gargoyles at the corners, and a pair also flanked the main entryway.

“More than you’d expect from a county PD,” Cally said.

“Must have come up at the end of a fiscal year,” Sands agreed.

“What?” Cally asked absently, surveying the building. “We’re sure he’s still there, right?”

“Yup.” The girl held up her PDA. “Just checked.”

Tommy and George were playing some kind of two-player shooter game next to her. George was short enough that Amy didn’t have to sit in the middle.

Cally got out of the car and walked into the station, broad daylight, nothing special. After Tommy verified that one Reginald Erbrechen was still in police custody, they’d reluctantly crashed at a truck stop overnight so they could sack out and pick their time today. It was two in the afternoon. Too late for the lunch rush, too early for people to be going home. She didn’t have to look like anyone in particular for this mission. Just not-Cally. A wig and cheek pads had been enough.

The pickup really did go off as a milk run for once. She just went to the window and bailed out Reginald Erbrechen, in cash, and waited until they brought him out.

“Boy am I glad to see you!” he said. “Ellen got you, right? I knew she’d raise the money to pay you guys.”

“Your lucky day,” Cally lied as she walked him out of the building. Anybody who bailed you out of jail was, of course, your friend. Nobody put up bail money as a throwaway expense.

“Oh, wow. That was the worst place I’ve ever been in in my life.”

“Never been in jail before?”

“Oh, no. I’ve always been lucky. Oops. Sorry. Hey, I admit it, I’m a bad man. But I’m a bad man with really good luck,” he grinned. “Should I try it with you?”

She hit him with the Hiberzine. The organization made the shit by the boatload. “Your luck just caught up with you, asshole,” she said.

Tommy had gotten out of the car to help her with the dead weight of the puker. She didn’t need help, but for the look of the thing it was better that she had some. They had decided that speed and lack of complication was their best strategy. Do it quick, do it smooth. Risk of somebody noticing, but less risk if they just did it and got out of there. They’d taken precautions to ditch pursuit effectively if they got unlucky, but sometimes get in and get out was the best way to play it.

Tommy froze and Cally could see him looking behind her. Damn. This time, their luck wasn’t holding so good either.

“Hey! You’re not gonna kill him, are you?”

Cally turned her head and saw that it was one of the guys who’d brought Reginald from the back, come out for a smoke break.

“No,” Tommy lied smoothly.

“Oh. Okay,” the cop shrugged. “Just get him back for his court date.”

“No problem. When the time comes, he’ll be present for justice,” Cally dished out the half truth with a vicious appreciation of the irony.

A road trip plus a few hours later, Cally stood up from the uncomfortable plastic seat in the interrogation room. It was easier watching it happen to somebody else. Besides, he wasn’t immune to any drugs, so it was soft as hell. Sadly.

“He’s repeating a lot. Have we gotten everything we’re going to get out of him?” she asked the intelligence specialist.

“Yeah, I’m done,” he said.

“Good enough.” Cally drew the pistol from her side and put two rounds into his skull, to the visible discomfort of the intel weenie. “You didn’t need to worry. They’re frangible,” she said, then realized. “Oh. You mean him. Saves debate.”

Tommy Sunday stood with James Stewart in the atrium, a room approximately two floors down from the surface, converted to a combination manufacturing facility and pre-ready room. The actual ready rooms were immediately at the surface, but for now, the atrium was convenient as long as they had power. They didn’t anticipate losing power, but in one corner a backup generator idled just to make sure. Two of the three elevators that serviced the atrium sat locked out from other users, one at the final pre-surface level, one at the atrium level itself. Traditional exit signs marked the stairs. All of these entries to the facility had blast doors as part of the base’s built-in defenses.

The designers of the Bane Sidhe’s Indiana facility had never expected to hold the facility in case of attack. The powers that be, and residents, had always understood that the primary defensive strategy of the base was, as that for the Bane Sidhe itself, concealment. In a direct fight the whole organization was screwed, anyway. The organization’s primary strategy to avoid that was inter-species politics. Unfortunately, sometimes politics fell through on you.

The base did have secondary defenses, but those were all designed to buy time in the event of attack for scuttling anything of use to the enemy and covering evacuation and retreat if possible.

The designers had known the Bane Sidhe resources did not extend to maintaining standing troops for actually defending the place like the fortress it was. Its fortresslike nature was more a matter of convenience than anything else. A Sub-Urb was optimal for concealment of a facility of this size, and they were natural fortresses unless someone obligingly disarmed the defenders and threw open the gates to the enemy, as had happened at Franklin during the war. Since they had a fortress anyway, the designers had put in any defenses that were easy, cheap, and not too inconvenient for the inhabitants.

Two back doors led out ten to fifteen miles away from the facility. The Himmit had done the concealment, and the Bane Sidhe maintained those doors and passages carefully, but never, never ever used them. Even the present evacuation was all going out the front door. Those back doors were not on the official plans, and were a closely held secret between the Himmit and the human faction of the Bane Sidhe. They were entirely of human construction, and Himmit concealment.

Human double-conspirators had used GalTech materials and hybrid equipment. They trusted the Himmit with the secret for three reasons: one was that they had no choice if they were going to get their help; two was that the Himmit would find out anyway; and three was that the Himmit preferred to collect secrets, not divulge them. It had taken very few additional stories to bribe the Himmit to hold it close.

The Bane Sidhe did trust each other. With too much. Nathan was as careful as possible to keep a watchful eye for anything that would indicate discovery of Project Luft Three. Papa was careful to grouse just the right amount about the lack of a back door, finally declaring that he certainly wasn’t going to live there. They had read Tommy Sunday in later on the theory that a back door was no good if nobody knew it was there when the need came. Cally had gotten herself read in by the simple fact that she had flatly refused to stay in the facility, even occasionally, until Papa took her aside for reassurance. If the Indowy assumed it was a clan head giving instruction to a clan member, so much the better.

Now, the inner circle of those in the know had expanded by thirty. Each man from DAG had proved absolutely reliable with national-security level sensitive material, each man had thorough protection from drugs, each man had a need to know. These were their defenders. In extremis, any of these men could end up the last man covering retreat, or the man leading the civilians to whatever safety there was. In the fog of war, secrets too closely held could get lost. Tommy had also briefed in the members of every field operational team on base. In the event that they held the base, far too many people would know the secret, but they would all be people immune to drugs, all people who grokked opsec. It was a trade-off, and this was his best call. Besides, even if the Indiana base survived this crisis, there was strong likelihood of its location being compromised and its protection reduced to the vagaries of Galactic politics. He would recommend constructing a new main base, stripping and abandoning this one.

He and Stewart silently contemplated the civilians assembling claymore mines, and the DAGgers wiring them up. Crates of the devices were building up against a far wall, glowing lights along the walls and in the potted trees coming on to illumine the room as the huge artificial window overhead deepened to the indigo of twilight.

“Got some others up top digging in?” Stewart asked his old ACS buddy.

“Yup. You know it,” Tommy said.

“You know Iron Mike’s on Earth, don’t you?” Stewart looked at the sky contemplatively.

“Yup. I think the chances of them sending him in are slim and nil, because it gives away the whole damn game. We’re talking about Darhel conspiracy believers increasing by a couple of orders of magnitude. It’s a deluded democracy out there, it’s a corrupt one, but they still vote and the declared winners still bear a decent resemblance to the actual count. I don’t think we have to worry about facing suits. If we do, we’re fucked anyway, so my plan for that is limited. It sure as hell wouldn’t waste any troops outside. Nor am I wasting any of my limited GalTech shit on what we’re likely to get. But yes, I have a go-to-hell plan. Please tell me you don’t think I’m stupid.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” Stewart repeated dutifully.

“Asshole.” Tommy grinned at him and clapped him on the back. “Let’s go shell out for some real black-market coffee. Your wife smuggles in some good shit.”

“Cally has real coffee? Good coffee? She’s been holding out on me. I may kill her. I guess I’m buying.” He paused. “You wouldn’t happen to be able to lay your hands on some black-market beer, would you?”

“Hell, yeah. You think a couple of old vets like we who don’t exist are going to get together and not get trashed out of our gourds at least once? O ye of little faith,” Tommy said. “While I’m at it, how do you feel about moonshine? Fine corn whiskey aged in Galplas barrels for at least twelve days, to be specific. Well, maybe a week.”

“I think it makes the closest thing to good Irish coffee I will have had in a decade,” Stewart said.

“Done. You and Cally meet me in my quarters. Yours suck, and I bribed one of the permanent residents for an upgrade.”

“Works.”