Sister Time

Chapter Twenty

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. Harrison 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 Tchpth 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.” She was fairly impressive when her 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. Besides, I can do this and get out. I figure eighty percent or so. Second, I’m the most expendable operative on the main mission. I’m along because I’m good in a tight situation and you didn’t dare leave me behind. Tell me I’m not right.”

They were all quiet for one of those timeless gaps when everybody’s preconceptions get sucked into a contemplative bog.

“If this wasn’t the dumbest, most dangerous stunt I’d ever heard of — just supposing for a minute — how would you kill him?” Papa growled.

“The most deniable way. I’m gonna piss him off.”

“Yeah — you might want to rethink. Wild rumors aside, you got any idea how hard that is? Or, how fucking suicidal? I’ve seen video of a Darhel after pushing the button to kill a Posleen globe — before he hit lintatai. The entire Indowy bridge crew, those who hadn’t found other places to be, were casualties. I’ve watched the old Bane Sidhe’s debriefings and clandestine recordings of what an enraged adolescent Darhel can do in the moments between when he cuts loose, before he goes catatonic with lintatai. A terminally pissed off Darhel takes the ‘dead man’s ten seconds’ to a whole other level. One clip has two adolescent Darhel ripping each other limb from limb in about the time it would take you to tie your shoe. Those teeth aren’t for show,” George said.

“I’ll be watching all of that material, and more, tonight. Lintatai is the only possible way to kill him without making it obvious someone killed him. We don’t know enough about their metabolism to poison him undetectably. Amend that, we could shoot him up with Tal if we had Tal. We don’t. I’m not sure the Indowy even know how to make it, and the Crabs didn’t conveniently volunteer any. So he rages around the room and I stay ahead of him. I may be stuck in this ridiculous body, but I’m still upgraded, and people move even faster in the first few seconds after the brain cocktail in Provigil-C hits, if they aren’t dead tired to start.”

“And the reason we don’t use it as a battle drug for the speed is its tendency to give people who are already awake such a bad case of the shakes that for the next thirty minutes they’re next to worthless in combat.”

“Yup. But I don’t have to fight him. I just have to stay ahead of him for fifty-eight seconds and then make it down the stairs. If I die, I’m just a crazy Darhel-conspiracist bitch who got lucky. And unlucky. That’s the other reason I need you, Harrison. You’re going to have to patch me up and pretty me up enough to make it through the interview, if it can be done. If something goes wrong, George gets a call from his girlfriend saying she’s got car trouble and has to reschedule.”

“I hate to say this, Papa, but it could work,” Tommy said, breaking his silence for the first time.

“I know. That’s what pisses me off the most.” His teammate looked more like a short, muscular, red-headed fireplug than he did like Cally, especially since her whole external appearance had been worked over seven years ago, but he was reacting more like her grandfather than her teammate. “We don’t have the slab anymore. Dead’s dead. And I notice the Crabs aren’t busting their humps bringing it back, either,” Papa said.

“And wouldn’t we all love to have it back? You’ve just brought up one more reason for doing this. The Crabs operate on favors, part of a whole ’nother chunk of Galactic economy nobody bothered to tell us about. It would be nice to have them owe us one. This mission is worth the added risks all the way around.” She never missed a chance to push a point home.

“Even if it fucks up the primary operation and your sister dies?”

“The message included something that had to come from her; this particular Crab is one of her buddies. She’s in it up to her ears, and we’re just going to have to trust her, too.”

“Michelle, too?” O’Neal groused. “But I still don’t like it.”

“Neither do I,” Cally said, but Harrison knew she was lying. Correcting the Darhel Pardal’s respiratory problem would appeal perfectly to her unslaked need for revenge, for the death of a mother, the loss of a father, and more other things than he could count. Now that he thought about it that way, he wouldn’t trade his own spot on this mission for the world. He could think of a few things his family owed to the Darhel, too.

“Yeah, but what if Pardal doesn’t take the bait?” his brother spoke up.

Cally shrugged, “George, you’re one of the people who’s always insisting I piss off too many people, and without trying. We O’Neals have certainly never tried to piss off the Darhel, as a race. Seem to have done it, though.”

Harrison thought she was taking liberties with the truth there. The O’Neal family had never exactly tried not to piss off the Darhel, either. Not that they should.

“Can I get the bastard to lose it when I am trying?” she continued. “Not a problem.”

“We’re done except for me and you, Tommy.” The team lead placed a small hand on their star geek’s arm as the others left. “I’m gonna need a lot of that research information George mentioned. You don’t have time to do it; you’ve got to get out of here. I need you to pick me the best cyber guy to assemble my on-the-fly field guide to Darhel behavior for tonight. There’s no time for techie versus nontechie misunderstandings. I need you to sit in while I explain what I need and translate whatever needs translating, then you need to get moving.”

“A whole species’ behavior in one night. Is that all?” The big man’s mouth had an ironic twist.

“Oh, you,” she said, punching him in the shoulder. “I’ve got my wish list down to reasonable proportions. For the researcher and me, both. I know exactly what I need.”

The “computer guy,” as it turned out, was a tiny, fifteen-year-old girl with tangled brown hair and a splash of freckles across her nose, who asked precise questions, jotted notes, and — from the way she repeated back the details of what Cally wanted — hadn’t needed anybody to translate for her in the first place. Mendy Wimms went on the assassin’s list of people to expect big things from.

She herself went on Mendy’s list of people to expect unbalanced things from, about the time she started skipping away down the hall singing like some manic, killer child, “I get to kill a Darhel, I get to kill a Darhel!”

Wimms overheard Harrison mumble something to his little brother as their team leader vanished around a corner. “We’re never going to live this down, you know,” he said.

The Indowy Aelool would have preferred almost anything to the situation he now had to face. It was one in the morning, local time, and he was dreading the coming interview with the human O’Neal. Aelool had not become the head of his own clan without having the strictest and most exquisite niceties of courtesy and propriety drilled into his head. The action he was now contemplating trampled all over the social rules with an almost human degree of obliviousness. No, to be fair, the human O’Reilly would never have done what Aelool was about to do. He had, after all, not spoken a word of the matter to Aelool himself in seven years. Surely he must have known. Humans were not often so discreet about private clan matters, and his human counterpart’s tact had rather impressed him. It had been so tempting to interfere. In any case, he now waited in the special room for sitting that humans needed to share personal meetings with him. Nervous, he did not sit.

The O’Neal’s eyes displayed an uncharacteristic vividness of the blood vessels in the whiter areas of his eyes. It looked strange. He also must have been weary, because he was being less careful about concealing his teeth with his lips. Aelool repressed a shudder.

“What was so important at this hour of the morning, Aelool? Sorry to be grumpy, but I’d just gotten to sleep,” the orange-topped omnivore said.

“First, I most deeply regret the breach of protocol involved in approaching you on so private a clan matter. Please be assured that I have made every effort to respect your privacy in this, and to confine the distribution of any reports as much as possible. I am aware, from your own reticence, that you regard this as an extremely private clan matter, and I wouldn’t have spoken of this matter with you or any other if I did not believe you needed this information. Please, forgive me in advance if I am mistaken. It is most certainly not my desire to be discourteous or disrespectful to the O’Neal or to the Clan O’Neal.” He stopped speaking and waited for the response from the other clan head, to indicate if Aelool should continue, or should politely terminate the discussion.

“Aelool, I’m sorry if I’m not answering right, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. Could you please try to explain in plain English? Sorry if I’m slow on the uptake, but I’m still half asleep.”

The human was looking more wakeful by the second, but presumably this was part of their protocol for such situations.

“It involves your household granddaughter’s breeding partner. Forgive me so much for intruding. Normally, when we intercept such a message, we file it flagged to your eyes only and leave it in the personal storage system for you to access or not, as you choose. In this case, the courier that was supposed to deliver the message to your granddaughter has suffered a misfortune — none of our doing, I assure you! If I did not broach the matter with you, the message might never reach Miss O’Neal, and the contents are so sensitive I judged I must personally bring it to your attention. Again, I am so sorry to intrude into Clan O’Neal’s privacy.”

If he had not known better, Aelool would have interpreted the human O’Neal’s facial expression as bewilderment. Since that was clearly impossible, the Indowy was at a loss. Unsure of whether he had irretrievably blundered or not, he simply placed a data cube in the human O’Neal’s hand and bowed, withdrawing to his and his roommates’ sleeping quarters and closing the door behind him.

Aelool did not see the human insert the cube into the reader slot of his buckley, nor did he hear him mutter, “I’m gonna kill her,” under his breath before he left the room. He would never have admitted to it if he had seen and heard such a thing. Nevertheless, he sincerely hoped that the human O’Neal would not do anything permanent to Cally O’Neal. He was rather fond of her. Did humans take poison in such cases? It was a very private clan matter, of course, and the Indowy had insufficient versing with human xenopsychology to understand why the O’Neal was vexed with his granddaughter over the contents of the message, but the Indowy was fond of her — for an omnivore. Still, it was a very private clan matter, and apparently the human O’Neal had not taken irreparable offense at the Indowy Aelool’s presumption. That was something. It would, however, be disastrous if the O’Neal passed a judgment against his clan member before she completed her assigned work. Disastrous on top of regrettable. And the O’Neal was so volatile, too. Aelool went back to bed, worrying.

Cally was only a touch bleary this morning. She’d been able to whittle down the material Mendy turned up for her to only a few key scenes, and had watched them over and over again.

One of the key features that would enable what she was about to do was a project R D had been developing to enhance human communication with Indowy. Humans had the problem, dealing with both Indowy and Darhel, of lacking mobile ears. The project involved having an AID or a buckley track the motion of its user’s body and head, in real time, and track electrical impulses sent from behind a human subject’s ears, using them to project a holographic set of mobile ears that would respond to the human’s conscious, and subconscious, commands. Human ears were not, it turned out, completely immobile. Their mobility was simply so restricted that the ears did not noticeably move. The impulses were still there, in the nerves, still responding to the age-old evolutionary cues of mammals past — and to conscious control.

Conscious control of the holographic ears took weeks of practice. In Cally’s case, she had that practice. She had been an early test subject for the project while on maternity leave. It had been a few extra bucks for baby’s new pair of shoes and such, when she’d badly needed the money.

R D had only intended to use the device between human and Indowy, and only if it improved the communication and comfort level between the two species. It hadn’t. Indowy, it developed, were happier not knowing the emotional states of their human friends. The research had been consigned to the trash bin of good ideas that just didn’t work out. Until now.

No Darhel had ever seen a human with mobile ears. That was advantage one. Advantage two was the information-tracking software that let a buckley PDA superimpose realistic holographic ears on a human head also gave her buckley enough information to superimpose the rest of a holographic face, as well. Her buckley could not make her look like a Darhel, not ever enough to pass for one of them, especially when there were so relatively few in circulation. However, she didn’t need to pass for a Darhel — not to another Darhel’s conscious mind. She only needed to look enough like one, for just a bare instant, to fool the visceral mind about what it saw, before its better judgment kicked in.

A Darhel’s descent into the permanent catatonia of lintatai was triggered by a single instant of homicidally bad judgment. A Darhel who succumbed to that one instant of rage didn’t get a second chance. The Darhel who survived puberty did not do so because of any reduced capacity for, or desire for, unbridled rage. He survived by analyzing all possible outcomes of a situation ahead of time, and applying carefully trained-in meditative disciplines when a situation began to take him into danger.

Adult Darhel thought of themselves as paragons of detached emotional control. It wasn’t true. Any Darhel had plenty of buttons to punch, he just had nobody around to punch them. One Darhel wouldn’t provoke another into lintatai because it was suicidal. He couldn’t drive the other into lintatai without entering it himself. Himmit, Indowy, and Tchpth also considered deliberately provoking a Darhel to be an insanely stupid act.

They were, of course, correct. It was also correct to say that every human did at least a dozen things a Galactic would find insane every day of her life.

It had long been accepted in the human executive protection field that one can never effectively guard against a determined, competent assassin who is willing, if necessary, to lose her life in the act. The Darhel had, she suspected, never heard that particular truism. One of their number was about to learn — the hard way.

She was surprised that Granpa was at the table with Harrison when she stopped by the mess hall for a light breakfast. She was freshly showered and bare of makeup, dressed in a simple T-shirt and jeans. Her entire appearance, from top to toes, was Harrison’s domain today. She had the basic canvas and equipment, but Harrison was peerless at turning the basics into whatever they required. In this case, nothing less than a world-class, breathtaking vision of beauty would suffice.

Granpa sure was looking funky. Something was wrong. “All right, spit it out. What is it?” She addressed him in the way that was most in her nature. Straight on.

“What are you talking about? I just came down to see you off at breakfast. So I’m worried about you. I’m your grandfather; it’s my privilege,” he said.

“Not buying it. What’s really wrong?” she asked. After half a century of her reading him, he couldn’t get anything by her. The reverse usually applied, as well, but wasn’t the problem today.

“Harrison, could you excuse us for a minute?” Papa said, looking at his hands as he picked a fresh plug of tobacco from his pouch.

Harrison disappeared in the direction of the coffee counter.

Cally raised her eyebrows at the old man. “Well?” she asked.

“Granddaughter, dear, the next time you decide to engage in a major fucking breach of security, would you do me the kindness of telling me first? Instead of leaving me to find out years later from someone of a different fucking species at one in the morning on the day of an operation, for instance,” he said.

“Oops,” she said, as he glowered at her. Which was exactly what she would have expected. Exactly. Except he was overplaying it. Not much, but her sense of every detail around her was heightened to a preternatural sharpness this morning. “Now what’s the other shoe?” she asked.

“You don’t think that’s enough?” he whispered harshly. “The Indowy have known for years that I have a son-in-law, while you’ve been running around behind the backs of me and Shari, not to mention your girls, and—”

“You can drop that other shoe now. We’ll talk about my sins if we all survive the day. What else? Give,” she demanded.

Now he looked distinctly uncomfortable. He puffed up, as if to try another layer of false bluster, then the masks dropped and there was just Granpa. An uncomfortable and unhappy looking Granpa. “I think you should wait to ask me that question tomorrow. I really think you should.”

“What’s the other shoe, Granpa? I’m not going to give up, because whatever it is, I’m going to be more distracted worrying about it than I would hearing it. You might as well put it on the table,” she said.

When he quietly stuck a data cube on the table, she jerked back a bit. “I didn’t mean it that literally, but I’ll take it. Excuse me,” she said, taking the cube with her to the ladies’ room. Whatever it was, she apparently needed to see it in private.

A scant minute later she reemerged, stalking back to the table with her head held rigidly high. “He dear johned me? By fucking e-mail! Do you have any idea why I’m getting this third — excuse me, fourth hand?” she asked.

“Something happened to the courier. I don’t know what. Aelool thought it was important enough for you to receive this message that he passed it to me. Apparently, for seven years he’s believed I knew and never said anything because he considered it a private, clan matter. Which it would have been, if you’d just talked to me, you know,” he said.

He looked very worried, which she supposed wasn’t out of place given everything. Not that he needed to be.

“I’m sure we’ll have more than enough time for that, after. Right now, don’t be upset that I know about this. I’m so pissed off at the bastard that it may just give me the rage I need to survive this morning’s appointment. Not to mention one hell of a lot of incentive,” she growled.

“No, I’ll be all right. Really. Especially since the only man I have to be around for several hours is Harrison. Which is probably a very, very good thing.” She waved their openly gay teammate back over to the breakfast table, smiling a cold, brittle smile. She knew Granpa couldn’t miss that she was getting dangerously wound up. He was right, but she’d be okay today. She already had someone to kill, even before lunch. “Dear johned me. E-mail! It’d probably upset the girls someday if I killed him. That’s okay. I’ve got other people to kill today. This is good,” she muttered under her breath.

Harrison was back to hear that last, and was wearing the impression of someone who’d just woken to find himself in a cage with a mother grizzly bear. And cubs. She took a deep breath and deliberately favored him with a cool smile.

“It’s okay, Harrison. Really. Consider it me getting appropriately psyched for the mission. I would say you can pretty much expect this morning to go as smooth as glass, now.”

The man didn’t look much reassured. Right now, that was fine by her.

Back into the earliest periods of human history, missions in the nether realms of politics — the ones carried out in a dark alley or a state bedroom with a sharp knife — had involved a certain amount of gear. The tradition was unbroken. Only the specifics of the gear changed. Cally’s gear had to solve a few problems that simple moxie could not. Problem one was that even though a complacent door guard could be fooled long enough for her to get close to said guard, a human receptionist very likely couldn’t. Security guards mostly served to insulate their masters from stupid criminals, crazies, and salesmen. Their threat meter was very carefully focused in, even for the ones who thought it wasn’t. Nobody could be hyper-vigilant forever. Weeks, months, and years of working in the same building, only encountering a specific subset of threats, inevitably had the effect on the human psyche of narrowing the range of threats the guard even thought of as possible. In the hypothetical realm where one of them would tell you about his job, this wasn’t so. In the real world, it was universal. The most dangerous security guard in the world was the FNG, because he still considered everything a potential threat.

A receptionist, on the other hand, had a much wider threat range from which to insulate her charge. She had to worry about any of the aforementioned nuisances who somehow got past security, plus underlings wasting the boss’s time, plus — only in the case of a human boss — wives and mistresses. The most sensitive problems with the latter usually cropped up after they were no longer wives or mistresses. Some business was not a nuisance and was legitimate. Determining which required very active judgment from a receptionist who valued her job. As a consequence, receptionists were greater threats than security guards for any mission that had to be done discreetly.

Receptionists everywhere had an absolute inability to ignore a ringing phone, regardless of whose ring tones were singing through the air. One of the assassin’s smallest and simplest pieces of gear combined the ordinary sticky-camera with late twentieth-century greeting card technology to provide ding-dong ditch capabilities any ten-year-old could envy.

Her second major tool was not an item of gear, per se, but a hardware enhancement common to all operatives’ PDAs. Cally didn’t understand all the technical gobbledegook, herself. She wasn’t a cyber, and she had her hands full keeping up with her own job. It was enough for her to know that the AIDs’ transmissions back to the Darhel hierarchy’s central data stores were not completely leak free. While intercepting the data itself and decoding it would be quite a trick, a properly equipped PDA within about fifteen meters of an AID could sense whenever the AID started churning out its data upload. The uploads were on a regular schedule. It was possible to get around an AID’s all-seeing eye by just waiting until its upload went off and either rushing the machine or working quickly. The gap was a bit more than twenty minutes — ample for most purposes. The trick was that the more time the AID recorded before one muffled its senses, the more you had to jimmy with it to cover your tracks. A few seconds or even minutes could be forcibly erased, but it took about three times as long to erase as it did to record. This created a diminishing returns situation where, after about eight minutes, it was faster to dump the whole load of the old AID into fresh AID hardware and hope nobody noticed the hardware swap — you just stuck the fresh AID in a desk drawer or somesuch, then the cybers’ wizardry did the rest. AIDs being a lot more standardized than anything of Indowy make, swapping hardware was a tiny risk — it was just damned expensive. And took nine minutes and fifty-three seconds that could get you killed.

The really critical pieces of mission-specific gear were an AID for herself, and a hush box. The latter item was a little white box that, for an AID, was the equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank. Developed after the war from a hybrid of some easier Galactic technology with common Earth know-how, many AID users carried them, and all recognized them. Most Darhel even used them, now — they wanted their verbal sparring matches private from others of their kind just as much as humans would. Paranoia was an emotion both species shared in equal measure. Pardal was on the list of Darhel confirmed to use such a box.

A chunky bracelet on her right wrist contained a mister that could be filled with any number of drugs. Operatives were routinely immunized to many drugs of the psychoactive variety. This gave a wide array of choices for an operative who wanted to affect someone at close range without being drugged herself. A simple clenching of the fist and a cool, damp cloud of dreams — sweet or otherwise — would ride in on the victim’s next breath. Naturally, the most popular drugs for this were very, very fast.

Harrison had outdone himself. The woman who stepped onto the curb from the yellow cab was so conspicuously lovely that anyone seeing her would be sure he ought to recognize her from holodramas or advertisements and begin searching his mind. She was precisely the sort of beauty the Darhel typically hired to grace their offices. It was not that the Darhel found the women more than artistically appealing. Darhel understood conspicuous consumption and its relationship to power. Everything a Darhel owned or used was the best available, or, if not the best, the most ostentatious.

The black bob of George’s girlfriend was intact, but glossy as a mink coat. His brother had taken the cornflower blue eyes and enhanced them with subtle cosmetic flattery into deep, hypnotic pools. Her skin was to porcelain as fine pearls were to chalk. Her figure needed precious little flattery, but Harrison had managed to imply that the body underneath the cashmere sweater-dress and impeccably cut blue coat belonged in some ancient pagan temple, not on Chicago’s winter streets.

Her appearance had the predictable mind-befuddling effect on the security guard at the main door to the Sears Tower. He stopped her, and the young goddess made a great show of searching her purse for ID as she moved closer to him. Maybe she stiffened a bit, maybe she didn’t. The guard straightened and let her through, his brain befuddled by a common date rape drug. He stood his post, he looked — at worst — mildly inattentive. His only thought was, most likely, that everything in his world was just hunky-dory. He wouldn’t remember this morning, later, but would feel mildly happy about it.

Past the guard, the assassin slipped onto an elevator and rode it to the floor beneath her target’s office. The lovely thing about this building was that it was a popular tourist site before the war. The Bane Sidhe files had extensive information on the layout of every floor, including the locations of the restrooms. She walked up to the final floor and into the ladies’ room without encountering anyone else. The nature of offices and rush hours is that everyone shows up at once, usually within fifteen minutes of work start time. Arriving an hour ahead, she had passed a handful of people in the lobby, but no one else. She made a quick and careful jaunt down to another hall to place her little present for the receptionist in the shadow underneath a smoke detector, and returned to the restroom to wait.

Then she spent an hour playing solitaire before she told the buckley to start listening for AID updates. The lounge area of this restroom shared a wall with the executive office of the Darhel Pardal. Once again, Darhel decorating predictability was her friend. Darhel psychological theories held that such and such a place was the position of maximum psychological dominance in an office. That one spot and no other would hold the Darhel’s desk. Other details might vary with individual tastes, or the creative idiosyncrasies of the decorator, but his desk would be in the position of maximum psychological dominance. Every time. The stall she occupied should give the buckley a detection range up to a good three meters past the farthest edge of the desk.

“I have detected an AID update transmitting,” the buckley said. “Of course, I don’t know how many AIDs are in there, or if the receptionist has one, or if they’re having a Darhel convention, or—”

“Shut up, buckley.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Shut up, buckley.”

“Right.”

“Buckley, start ringing the phone for the receptionist. Tell me when she moves out of line of sight of Pardal’s office.”

“But you just told me to shut up.”

“Just do it, buckley. And don’t make another peep unless I’m about to get caught.”

“Peep,” it said. “I can think of at least nineteen ways you are about to get caught. Would you like me to list them in ascending or descending order of probability?”

“Buckley, has the receptionist moved out of line of sight of Pardal’s door?”

“Moving, moving. Yes, now she is out of line of sight.”

As soon as the buckley had said “moving” the assassin had begun moving, herself, leaving her coat and purse on the floor behind her. “Then shut up and stay shut,” she said.

“But—”

“Shut up, buckley.” Cally appreciated the carpet in the hall — it muffled the clacking of her stiletto heels. She stuffed the PDA into a hidden pocket in her back waistband. It wouldn’t withstand scrutiny from behind, but so what?

“Right,” the buckley muttered from the small of her back.

She took the space between the ladies’ and the executive office door at a sprint, instantly transforming back into cool beauty as she opened the door and stepped through.

The Darhel Pardal looked up from the figures projected on the desk and fixed her with his yellow, predator’s eyes. He wore the long gray cloak typical of Darhel attire, the head thrown back to reveal his fox face. He snapped it shut.

Good, he was already pissed at the interruption. Coldly pissed, but it was a start. This was the closest thing the Darhel had to sabers at dawn; these next few seconds were make or break.

“If you have the confidence,” she drawled, holding up two items, and slipping what was obviously an AID into what was equally obviously a hush box. Her body language, every vocal nuance, the words themselves — everything about that line down to the minutest detail she had crafted, practiced, and practiced again the night before. Over two and a half hours had gone into crafting and perfecting that one line, using the buckley’s AI capabilities to analyze and critique her performance again, and again, and again. With the ability to craft the right performance holographically, if it had enough data, a buckley PDA was the best acting coach in the world. Her life and the whole mission rested, more than anything else, on perfection in the crafting and delivery of that first line. Sometimes, it paid to be a perfectionist.

The lateral muscles around Pardal’s nose quirked in amusement. Darhel could feel amusement, in a way very like a cat playing with a mouse. Her task for the next few minutes depended on keeping him balanced on a knife’s edge between amusement and anger. For that species, the two emotions were not incompatible. She restrained a sigh of relief as he slid his own AID into a hush box, taken from the desk.

“You’re not nearly as good as you think you are.” He laughed. “But my morning has been tedious, and it’s so rare to find a human who even bothers to begin learning to use its voice — however clumsily.” His own speech had the rich, melodious roll his species was famous, and infamous, for.

Her opening line had carefully aped one of the opening salvos a Darhel of equivalent or greater rank would use to initiate one of the stylized verbal confrontations that were the meat and potatoes of their intra-species dominance games.

“I don’t believe I have the pleasure of your acquaintance,” the other predator said.

“My name’s Cally O’Neal, and I’ve come to have a few words with you about your attempts to murder my sister,” she said. Again, her intonations were practiced, her body language and word choice carefully prepared.

“A human can change its name to anything, by your primitive rules. Your names are disposable, indicating nothing. As for the rest, it’s nonsense, of course, but still amusing. You, of course, intend to upset me to the point that I freeze into a melodramatic death. I assure you our weakness is exaggerated, and I will be disposing of you to the proper security personnel in this interview’s aftermath. For now, you may continue.”

“Oh, but the Institute for the Advancement of Human Welfare is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Epetar Group, which also holds the human mentat Michelle O’Neal’s contract for research on a certain device. A device, moreover, which the Tchpth,” her pronunciation was perfect, “would be unhappy to find outside their museum on Barwhon.” Head cocking to the side, just a bit. Shoulders just so. Sides of the lip curling in an expression never meant to inhabit a human face.

“How regrettable, for you, that you would make such an assertion. And how stupid of you to hush your AID before discussing this. Now I will have to turn you over to humans who will be, for whatever reasons, curious about how you came to know those things. I will, of course, know nothing of the means or ends. I will, however, receive a full report of the extracted information.” He breathed deeply, effortlessly suppressing the qualms it had cost him to make even a roundabout physical threat. The Darhel behavioral tags in her voice, her body, her face were so insidiously familiar to him that it never crossed his mind to notice how wrong it should be that they were displayed on a human. Like a human hearing its own mother-tongue, regional accent in a speaker from anywhere, the pattern felt so mundane as to coast in under the intellectual radar of what should and shouldn’t be.

“Of more amusement value to me is your choice of nom de guerre. You wish to bask in the reflected glory, alleged glory, of the O’Neal family, of course. But to claim the human mentat as your sister? What a transparent lie, even if you did find the correct name. Your features are nothing like Michelle O’Neal’s, of course. And the sister died in a nuclear explosion in the war, at the hands of her own primitive killer of a father.” His taunt took on a rich slur, an accent more inflected with the attributes of his own native tongue, even while he continued to speak English. For a Darhel, prizing as they did their psycholinguistic skills and the interspecies use of the voice for manipulation, this was a massive lapse.

“My features have changed, of course. I look very different from my childhood appearance when the Tir Dol Ron sent a team to kill me, and my grandfather, when I was eight Terran years old.” She glanced off to the side, examining the nails of an elegantly cocked hand, as if he was beneath her notice.

Pardal sat straighter in his chair, ears pricked forward.

“You are, at that, remarkably well informed, for the pathetic, lying, glory-seeker that you are.”

“As you are remarkably complacent for a Darhel facing not only a contract court, but the ignominy of triggering financial ruin for an entire group. You don’t dare detain me, you know. My merely making these allegations to a contract court would cost you your job, simply for the incompetence of permitting the scandal. I have, of course, made prior arrangements to have the allegations delivered if I do not return.”

“Preposterous exaggeration,” he drawled, but breathed more deeply, accent thickening. “You begin to bore me.”

“Expect your troubles to get worse, instead of better.” She had cribbed one of the classic Darhel finale lines from their literature, typically delivered by a clear victor in one of these verbal cat fights. She could only hope the Indowy scholar had translated it accurately enough. As was customary, she had also delivered no specific threats. The purpose of these dominance struggles was never to do something, only to undermine the losing Darhel’s personal confidence.

She turned to leave, to leave him knowing, intellectually, that he truly could not detain her and had just lost a dominance struggle of their own kind to a mere, primitive, human female.

She knew she had shaken him to the brink of rage when, knowing the interview was concluded and, inevitably, relaxing a bit from the taught wire of confrontation, he couldn’t resist a parting shot, in his own tongue. “This isn’t over!”

It had been a brief conversation. Its entire punch lay in the stylized nature of tone and body, play and counterplay, of Darhel interactions. This one moment was the goal of the entire playlet. He was now reacting to her not as he would to an impudent human, but as he would to a rival Darhel. Not completely, not consciously.

She touched the Provigil-C injector on one hip, driving the drug into her bloodstream. The buckley, prepped for her turn from the start, activated its holographic projection as she spun and leaped, spread eagled, teeth bared, ears flattened back against her head. Her yellow cat-pupilled eyes gleamed, feral. Her black hair and facial fur glinted with metallic silver. Her leap was imbued with all the skill of an avid dancer for counterfeiting the emotion of motion — even for dances alien to her own understanding.

The Darhel Pardal, aroused by the hormonal responses to an intense dominance conflict with his own kind, saw in that one single instant a rival Darhel leaping to kill him. His hindbrain overwhelmed his forebrain for that bare instant. Even as he realized that the leaping figure was a human woman and not a rival Darhel, the Tal poured into his system like floodwaters through a breached earthen dam. His rage redoubled with all the fury of a doomed thing for its killer.

The ravening beast, unleashed at last, exploded upward from the trappings of civilization, bounding off the desktop and crossing the room in an instant, claws out and teeth bared to rip out the throat of the Other. If the assassin had still been there to see it, he would have looked more like some hell-begotten cross between a fox and a werewolf than an Elf. The gray cloak billowed behind him and he paused for a tiny fraction of a second to rip it off, shredding it in the process.

That fraction of a second, combined with a similar fraction for the leap, was all the time it took Cally O’Neal to cross the office in the other direction, standing against the windows. It is an odd fact that for a skilled tumbler, across a short distance, a human being can roll faster than she can run. Running takes precious bits of time here and there starting and stopping, acting and reacting. A tumbling pass is smooth, continuous — if the athlete has the balance for it.

As a life-long dancer and martial artist, Cally’s sense of motion was exquisite. If her balance had been a knife, she could have shaved with it. Her muscles, most importantly her upper body muscles, had the strength and speed of the latest Crab-designed upgrade. None of it saved her from getting batted into the remains of the desk with rib-cracking power. The dress shredded under Pardal’s claws. The only reason he didn’t get her flesh as well was the super-tough Indowy-crafted body-suit beneath the dress, which gave her a tougher hide than chain mail, while having none of the extra weight and causing no impairment to mobility.

She hit the desk and kept rolling, over the other side and onto her feet, bounding aside at an angle as one hundred and fifty kilos of rabid Darhel hit the spot she’d just left. He got her again, slamming her into the two-inch-thick glass with a force that wrenched her neck and knocked her head against the glass, making a sickening thud.

“Forty seconds and counting,” the buckley announced from where it had landed on the floor about ten yards and five years ago, and the drug kicked in. For another split instant, Pardal turned with maddened eyes, locating the buckley on the floor. Barely hesitating, he obviously dismissed it as “not prey,” launching himself at her again. Used to taking a punch, head crack or not, Cally hadn’t stopped moving, and was halfway across the room again.

With the Provigil-C in her system, shaking her apart, with all the adrenaline and other combat hormones of her own, life dissolved into a sharp-edged, blurry game of Dodge the Darhel. Aware of everything and nothing, the instants rang off her brain like separately frozen photographic stills. All moments splintered into a constant progression of now as the buckley, now ignored completely by both, counted off the eternally slow seconds. Four… three… two… one…

Seeing a Darhel collapse on holo was one thing. Having one chasing you do it was another. One second he was leaping, the next he was hitting the floor in a lazy roll himself. He simply stopped, curled into a seated position on the floor, naked except for his own fur, and the rage melted away, along with the last vestiges of intelligence in his eyes. His expression was the closest thing to beatific she’d ever seen on a Darhel face. It was downright creepy.

“You were right,” she said, nudging him with a bare toe before looking for wherever she’d kicked her shoes off. “Now it’s over.”

There had been no risk of anyone coming into the office after Pardal lost it. They’d all heard stories and nobody, human or Indowy, wanted to be anywhere near a raging Darhel. Cally found the floor, in fact, deserted as she limped back to the bathroom to retrieve coat and purse. The coat was now strictly necessary, as she had to stuff what scattered strips of the cashmere dress as she’d been able to find in her purse. There hadn’t been much. At one point in his fit, she’d seen Pardal eating some of it, so it wasn’t hard to guess where the rest had gone. Certainly nobody would be looking for it inside his guts. Traditionally, they didn’t do forensic investigations at all, a Darhel in lintatai being beneath contempt.

She went back to the destroyed office. The last thing she did before leaving his office for good, closing the door behind her, was to use her AID to jimmy his, leaving it a few seconds of memory the poorer, and still stuck in the hush box. For a Darhel, this kind of death scene constituted the ultimate in “natural causes.”

She was still shaking uncontrollably when she walked down the last flight of stairs, out into the falling snow and biting wind, and into the back of Harrison’s cab. The endorphins and Provigil-C released their grip, and she groaned as everything from the crack on her head to the muscles in her toes started to hurt.

In her persona as Mark’s girlfriend, Cally O’Neal was again in a sweater dress, and still busty. It was always either highlight her mammary assets or make her look fat with padding. Harrison had chosen to play them up as his interpretation of the “girlfriend” role, this time in a cheaper, off-the-rack, blue dress, topped with a gray wool coat. She felt conspicuous, even though he had assured her that the supportive bands of tape holding her cracked ribs in place were invisible under the clinging dress. A mix of lambs’ wool and angora, the knit was thick, soft, and fuzzy. He assured her he had chosen it to blur outlines, anticipating the need. He’d praised her luck in keeping her face intact, but winced as he layered on makeup to cover the red and rising bruises. Artful highlights and shadows concealed the swelling. He’d assured her the illusion would hold for an hour or two, even though she’d look like she’d layered on her foundation with a trowel. It couldn’t be helped, so she’d have to play to it, making the character fit the behavior. He’d helped by giving her a couple of fake blemishes, making them look as if she had tried to conceal them, and only partially succeeded — a woman sensitive about her flawed skin.

Felicity Livio was supposed to be barely adult, with education and training fitting her for entry level clerical work. She looked the part.

George, aka Mark Thomason, met her just inside the entry to the building. The wind had started to pick up, carrying big, clumpy snowflakes built of the wet air coming off the lakes. They’d be breaking up into powder soon, as the temperature dropped.

Acclimated to Charleston, despite all her travels she hated snow. It put her in an even worse mood as George put his arms around her and tried to kiss her. She ached, she was cold, and he was male. None of this made her like him right now. “Get your fucking hands off me unless you want to lose them,” she hissed, turning her head towards the door and away from observers.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? We’re supposed to be lovers!” he whispered in her ear.

She jerked away, unmercifully squashing the need to scream as his hand pulled against a rib. “Then we’re having a fight. I mean it, keep your mitts off me,” she muttered, plastering on a fake smile and walking briskly towards the elevator, heels clacking on the marble floor.

He trailed in her wake until she stopped in front of the guard. “Job interview. I’m walking her up,” he said.

The guard scanned his ID, issued her a temporary, and she stalked to the elevator, scanning the red temp badge and hitting the call button. She could tell he’d love to bitch her out about her behavior, but couldn’t. So she was taking her mad at Stewart out on him. So what? He was a man. Men were on her shit list right now. Rational thought didn’t enter into it. And she didn’t care, dammit. Goddamn insensitive son of a — A bell tinged and the elevator opened.

George’s lips tightened as she relaxed her stiff posture, smiling at him as if absolutely nothing was wrong. He schooled his own features into something more appropriate before the elevator stopped and binged again.

“Where to?” she asked.

“This way.” He didn’t quite sound the part, but what could you expect?

She smiled and greeted Ms. Felini on automatic. Introductions were introductions. As the door closed behind them and the other woman offered her a seat, she looked at Cally curiously.

“I hope everything’s all right. You and Mark looked a bit… stiff,” she said.

“Oh, it’s the moving in together thing. Small small, really. He has this absolutely awful lamp,” she improvised.

“Ah. One must go through these little adjustments, mustn’t one?” the interviewer said. “So if I hire you, we’re not going to have any discord in the office, are we?”

“Oh, no.” Cally laughed. “I’ll let him off the hook the second he gets reasonable and ditches the lamp from hell. He’s not that attached to it, he’s just being stubborn. We’ve been through this kind of thing before.”

Prida laughed with her, and the now-relaxed job applicant eased back in the comfortable leather chair, crossing her legs.

“Can I get you some coffee? You must be cold,” the other woman said.

“Oh, oops. Yes, please.” The assassin flushed and took off her coat, hanging it on the brass tree behind the door. It doesn’t hurt, I feel fine. I feel abso-fucking-lutely fine. Ow, dammit.

Cally had to admit that she wasn’t as attentive as she should have been during the interview, and maybe didn’t make a terrific impression. But after all, it wasn’t as if she really wanted the job. She was still well within the range of credibility as she listened to the boring parade of duties, from digging through spam filters to data entry.

Felini showed her out with the line, “We’ll call and let you know, dear.” The operative summoned a smile as if she really cared and asked the way to the ladies’ room. Once there, she went to the second to last stall, the one least likely to get occupied, took a plastic pen and pad of sticky notes — the only things she’d dared smuggle through the front door — out of her purse. On it she scribbled, “Out of order — maintenance.” Slapped on the door, it should ensure she wouldn’t be disturbed. If someone from cleaning or maintenance did try to check, she’d have to take steps. Incapacitating but not immediately lethal — not if she could help it. Bodies, no matter how killed, tended to do immediate things that stank. Not to mention the dilemma of where to put one. Silencing live people for any significant span of time also had its problems. Hopefully, things wouldn’t come to that. Considering the problem and its possible solutions took her mind off her hurts, although not in a particularly pleasant way. It would have been nice to have her PDA, but not possible. Papa was bringing a fresh one for her, ready loaded with a recent backup of her own buckley’s memories and all her data. Until then, she was alone. Well, minus her PDA. Not that having a buckley with her was the same thing as not being alone. Not exactly.

From his uncontested position under a hot steam vent, Tommy had turned down propositions from eleven hookers — seven of them female, or apparently so — when the sweep came around just before oh-three hundred. He was one of a few caught in the net who weren’t gibbering in panic. Three passed-out drunks barely stirred to grumble at being moved, before settling down in the body-heat warmth of the semi trailer. He wasn’t good at panic. It didn’t look credible on a man of his gargantuan size. He sat on the floor, contriving to look stupid. It was usually a good substitute.

He had initially been clean, inside malodorous clothes designed to conceal the effects of regular bathing. After seven hours in the dirty clothes, conspicuous cleanliness was no longer a problem. The uniformed thugs doing the sweep — formally called an urban assisted renewal program — initially looked like they intended to tazer him. His slack jawed, amiable compliance, as he slid into a more central position in the terrified herd, had saved him one small discomfort. Small, of course, was relative.

An hour later, being herded into a cold, locked, and otherwise empty room, whose corrugated steel walls shouted warehouse, he had definitely gotten tired of this game. Most of his fellows were shivering. The Special Police, SPikes, had rousted them out of warm beds. No wonder Sub-Urb residents were reluctant to move back above ground. The drunks may have been, for the moment, in a better situation. They would have likely frozen to death on this bitterly cold night. The room had heating — damned inadequate heating. He winced in sympathy with the folks who had to choose between freezing their asses on the concrete floor or standing on their bare feet. It wasn’t like the bastards gave them time to grab anything. The SPikes were as eager to get out of the cold as anyone else, and weren’t going to delay over the whining of a few trash colonists.

Tommy earned a grateful look from a mother by picking up a crying little boy of about seven. With a toddler and a baby on each hip, she had no room for the older child. He gave the kid his jacket and the loud crying subsided to miserable, wet sniffles against his big chest. One thing the SPikes would always stop for was parents rounding up their children, as every warm body, no matter how small, helped to fill the night’s quota. They treated the children like glass. Not from compassion, but from fear of setting off their mothers. SPikes had died before at the hands of suicidally enraged women. Tiny ones, even.

After a timeless eternity, other goons shuffled them up some stairs and down a hall into a smaller holding room. The glow paint around the top of the walls was flaking off, leaving the room dim, but warm, as the Galplas floor held the heat from the room better than concrete slab on the ground. A vent in the ceiling blew out hot air and the captives began to settle to the floor as, for most, fatigue and warmth overcame terror. This was awkward, as seated people took up more space in the cramped room. Tommy ended up with three little kids and a hooker’s head resting on top of him, he being too heavy to be anywhere but directly on the floor. His own head was stuck on a drunk’s belly. He didn’t complain, just sincerely hoped he wouldn’t get puked on before George sprung him from this sardine can. He tried not to let himself think about the other possibilities.

Two hours later, Papa O’Neal crawled through the snow, ghillie suit stuffed with ice-gilded grasses and brush, poking up through rapidly falling snow that he deeply hoped would keep falling fast and heavy, the bitter wind blowing and piling it up. This was not only because it reduced visibility for both man and machine, but also because his body’s tracks would need a hell of a lot of covering. He could have covered his tracks if mother nature hadn’t been cooperative and chosen to help out, but it would have taken at least two additional operators from cleanup and been complicated. He was just as glad to keep it simple, even if it was damned cold humping a ruck full of black box through this mess.

Getting up the wall to the air exchange was a stone bitch, especially with his cold-stiffened joints. There was also no way to make his path perfectly trackless. The adhesive that held a hand or foot to the wall when the correct button was depressed, and released it simultaneously with that button, left a light, gooey residue. It couldn’t be helped. Nor did he enjoy the coordination necessary to work the tongue switch that controlled his feet. He had spent a lot of time learning to use the grippers, but doubted it would ever be easy for him. The Himmit’s natural version worked better than the synthetics, but the grippers were the closest copy the Bane Sidhe Indowy had ever been able to devise.

He had to take the ruck off and push it in front of him to fit into the vent, which he was absolutely certain was smaller than George had described, the rat bastard. He almost dropped the decoy, twice, trying to get the ruck into the hole in front of him without dropping the vent cover or falling off the wall. Even with his natural physique upgraded and enhanced, a hundred kilos of gear was one hell of an awkward load.

As his left calf cramped into yet another charley horse, Papa started to envision and enumerate painful ways for Schmidt Two to die. Sending him in through this crazy route. He was up to seventeen when he had to arch his back into an unnatural, virtually impossible position to turn a curve from horizontal to straight up. The ruck was now resting on his head, and a sharp and pointy edge dug into his scalp. Nineteen. He climbed on in the darkness, counting the “steps” to his next turn.

Every time he had to stop to remove a dusty filter from his path, he came up with one more creative and painful demise for the other assassin.

After what seemed like two hours after he entered the shaft, but was probably less than one, he reached the designated internal vent, high on the wall of the third floor. He was pretty sure he was in the right place. A tiny descendant of the periscope, extended forward past the bulk of his ruck, had shown that the fire extinguisher, floor number, and doors were where they should be. He sure hoped he was in the right place, as only the correct vent had steel screws that had been replaced with screws made of a hard putty. They’d flow into the bolt threads and grip, enough to hold the vent cover in place indefinitely. Until it was given a good pull or push, when it would pop right out. If the putty was gently warmed, the removal was practically silent.

It was a royal pain in the ass to contort around the ruck to put heating tabs at the corners of the vent, then trail threads tied to the pull tabs back to where he could reach them. He fed a couple of thin wires at the top and bottom of the cover, holding onto the grid. Didn’t do a lot of good to open the thing quietly only to have it clatter to the floor. Vent covers only had convenient hinges in bad movies. People only moved around through vents in bad movies, too. What kind of idiots were so security blind as to build their ducts out of fucking Galplas. Fuck it. Their loss, his gain. Although, cramped in the dark and trying not to sneeze from the dust, he thought maybe gain was the wrong word for it. He retrieved a little plastic bottle from a ruck pocket, taking a couple of hits from the special nasal spray he should have used before entering the damn vent in the first place. There were no alarms and rushing security people, so it looked as if he’d gotten away with his sneeze a few turns ago. You always forgot something. If that was his worst mistake today, they were golden.

Finally able to pull out his own PDA, he checked the time. Oh-eight thirty-three. Long time to wait. He did some tense and release exercises to loosen his muscles and pulled up a book on the buckley’s small screen. The extremely low light screen would be invisible behind the darkness of the ruck — his eyes didn’t need much. He knew the dangers of trying to stay constantly vigilant. Better to rest now than dull his edge for later. He would have slept, if he hadn’t been afraid he’d snore.

George wore a light jacket as he left his desk for the restroom. He had to. Inside, taped to its back, was a coverall of the type favored by the support staff, from cleaning and maintenance to internal security. There were some differences in the detailing, but a full set of stick-ons and a fake badge were pinned in the middle. He passed a coworker who saw the jacket, giving him a strange look.

“I wish they’d turn up the damn heat in here,” he said, getting a nod from the other man.

At the restrooms, he couldn’t help looking around sheepishly before ducking into the women’s room. The “out of order” note on a stall near the end, in Cally O’Neal’s handwriting, was his signal. He shrugged out of the jacket and shoved it under the door.

On the way out, he practically bumped into a fifty-something prune-faced personnel chick. One of his personal skills was the ability to flush beet red at will. He did so, stammering something about the wrong door to her disapproving face before disappearing into the men’s room. He stayed there until his heart stopped trying to jump out of his ribcage.

He’d spent the past week typing in scripts while trying to avoid getting caught. Vitapetroni could sharpen the memory using hypnosis-boosted mnemonics, but the information decayed quickly. The more information you tried to remember, the faster it decayed. It had to be right, because programs with misspelled commands or the wrong punctuation didn’t work too well. Since he couldn’t get any other storage media inside, he had to be the storage medium. It gave him headaches. Well, that plus enduring way too many bad jokes about script kiddies from Sunday.

Now he began pulling those scripts out and turning them loose. It took him three tries to find one that would let him into the security desk’s log file. He added a “time out” for Cally that was right before shift change. The left hand rarely knew exactly what the right hand was doing.

He set a pass code cracking program to work on the doors to the subject rooms and the doors on their routes out. It took the right pass codes as well as a badge swipe to get through some of those places. Every once in a while, the cracking program would give him an action message. When that happened, he consulted a list of Tommy’s instructions for contingencies, picked what he devoutly hoped was the right option, and went on.

He got into the permissions tables in the database right away. The cracking program ran common passwords against the three accounts with the highest level of permissions after the DBA’s. They would all belong to upper management, and one of them sure as hell would choose something stupidly obvious. The user names and password parameters he’d gotten from a run at the development database at the beginning of the week. It carried a full, recent image of the production data, under the default system manager account and password as set by the software company. Sunday hadn’t counted on that, he’d just told George to try it first. Good physical security often made people slack about data security — after all, if nobody could get in the front door anyway, why bother? At each level, the best data security system in the world was only as good as the slackest user or operator.

Once into the production database, the cracking program neatly cleared all the alarms in the log files, triggered by large numbers of failed login attempts. Also as Sunday had predicted, the automatic failed-login lockout feature had, apparently, been turned off after one too many incompetent managers had complained about it. He still would have gotten in without those particular stupid organizational tech mistakes, it just would have taken a little longer. He had ten more cracking scripts he could have run that exploited various security holes in that combination of operating system and database.

When he’d asked the cyber what if eleven attempts wasn’t enough, the big man had just broken down laughing. “If they were that technically competent, they wouldn’t have bought that piece of shit security software for their locks. Yes, I’d stake my life on it.” And he had.

Thinking of Tommy, he did the minor manipulations to get the systems running the cell cameras to give him access so he could find the guy. Even though the cyber had sworn it was minor, and it probably was for him, this was George’s hardest task because it couldn’t come canned as a script. He had to actually understand what he was doing in the system. He’d spent hours practicing with the different possibilities for how they were managing the data feeds and what the vulnerabilities were in each. The complicated part, the reason simple scripts weren’t enough, was that he had to determine which of the nearly identical cells was which on the floor plan. It didn’t do a damn bit of good to find Tommy on an observation camera and then not know which room he was looking at. He was still afraid of messing it up, to the point that he was sweating by the time he finally found the right cell.

Great. The guy was wrapped up in a fucking sheet. Until they could get him changed, that was going to be a major hazard.

George’s last violation of the computer systems for the day would be changing his own records in the permissions tables to give his own badge access to every door in the building. Retrieving the cyber would be his own task, since his badge was the only genuine one. A purely cosmetic badge wouldn’t crack that door. He stuffed a small, extra-thin roll of black duct tape from the gym bag into his pocket. He’d be passing through some of the doors Cally and Papa would need. A small wad of tape back in the hole for the bolt and its latch would almost, but not quite, engage. He never taped across the top of a hole because it was too visible. The door monitoring system had come with an alarm that triggered if the bolt did not connect with a plate at the back of the socket. As with many security measures, when it became a nuisance to the people who worked there, the feature was disabled. New security features came and went, but human nature endured.

Erick Winchon was one of the few people who was actually comfortable on the crowded Boeing 807 passenger liner. He would have been equally comfortable riding in coach — or so he told himself. He habitually rode first class. It was a horrid waste of space and the primitive, grossly inefficient, hydrocarbon fuel, but first class was a status display among Earthers. Earther humans did not respect a person who did not display the proper status behaviors. He deplored the system, of course, but regretfully bowed to its necessities.

The Darhel, though they had started on the Path with a great handicap, understood the leadership value of such displays on the less enlightened. They used it to great effect in reinforcing their own species’ rule of the Wise. Granted, their selection process was imperfect, but considering their starting point, Darhel civilization was quite an achievement. Winchon admired them greatly.

He shook his head, looking away from the fluffy piles of clouds underneath the plane. The problem with airplanes, besides being slow, was that they tempted passengers to too much woolgathering at productivity’s expense.

“Misha, connect me with the convention hotel, please,” he instructed his AID.

“Yes, sir,” it replied.

He had no doubt that Ms. Felini, his capable assistant, had done everything possible to ensure his arrangements were correct, but there were other people who would be implementing those arrangements. He had learned the hard way that with Earthers outside his own company he had to check behind them, multiple times, or some incompetent somewhere would ruin the assignment. It amazed him that Earther humans could quote an aphorism, Murphy’s Law, as part of a casual acceptance of their own failings. Back home, if he had pulled any one of the many stunts he had seen on Earth, he would have been on half-meals for a week. Indowy children, and the humans they raised, outgrew such incompetence by the time they were half grown. True, there had been losses among the adolescent humans, but the results in the adults had more than justified the expenses wasted in raising the failures. Besides, fewer would be lost each generation as civilization continued to develop. Eighty percent was a phenomenally commendable success rate for the Indowy foster groups, especially with their own broods to raise. The survivors had bred to cover the lack, and more. Second generation humans raised by human breeding groups were proving the first serious test of the system. It was, as expected, not without problems.

There he went, woolgathering again. Odd that a human phrase for inefficient daydreaming came from a functional, useful — however primitive — task. One more Earther perversity.

“Basseterre Hilton, how may I direct your call?” a female voice asked. His AID projected the voice into his ear to avoid disturbing the work of other passengers. It need not have bothered. Of the three in his immediate vicinity, two were snoring, and the third was consuming far too much alcohol.

Finally! “I am calling to verify convention arrangements for the Human Social Development Association. Please transfer me to their operations department or the equivalent,” he said.

“Uh… I can transfer you to convention registration,” she said.

“That is not what I asked for,” he replied. There it was, incompetence again.

“Sir, I’m sorry, but that’s the only number I have,” she said.

“Then I suppose the incompetence is not yours. Do transfer me to that number, please.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. Her voice had overtones of exaggerated, cheerful patience. He could hardly blame her. Whoever had been responsible for providing information to the front desk must be a complete idiot.

Ten minutes later, after several transfers to a whole series of ill-raised idiots, he was staring at a holo of the Atlantic Ocean as reconstructed from flyover data and cursing the delays and problems with the new generation of weather satellites. The Earth governments could find the budget to pay lazy, inefficient farmers for the Posleen they would have killed, anyway, but no budget to rebuild one of the few things that prewar Earth had done moderately well. This sort of top to bottom systemic primitivism was why Earth needed the leadership of humanity’s few Wise so very badly.

Now, he was looking at a large storm system, white clouds spinning like a giant version of the top he remembered playing with as a small child. Headed right for the island, it had already disrupted the entire schedule of both hotels, and the keynote speaker had actually canceled her appearance. His professional respect for her plummeted. All this fuss over a bit of weather.

To increase the inconvenience, this airplane would be landing at an airstrip in Miami barely large enough to hold it, refueling, and flying back to O’Hare. An Earther would have indulged in a swearing tantrum at this point. Winchon instructed Misha not to disturb him until they were back in the air for Chicago and had attained cruising altitude, then submerged himself in a calming developmental meditation.

The AID knew he did not need to hear its announcement, by a soft tone, of his prechosen end of meditation. He opened his eyes on his own, just as she rang a gentle 440 Hz tone in his ear. He did not need it, but she knew he found it comforting. Now the flight attendant would not harass him for getting some work done. They could never seem to understand that a proper AID transmitted on an entirely different system from a buckley PDA, a poor imitation, and that the AID would have absolutely no effect on the systems of the jet. The mentat and his AID had found that his flights went more smoothly if they followed the rules, rather than attempting to correct them. Time enough.

His first task, upon his return, was to have been a meeting with the Darhel Pardal to discuss progress on configurations and modifications of the original artifact, and the progress towards building a series of five prototypes of the refined device, to allow for more rapid training of suitable candidates on its use. They expected Pardal to be unhappy that Winchon had not made more progress towards correcting the emotional feedback problem to within acceptable ranges for Darhel operator use. Some progress had been made, true. The basic technical problem was that emotional correspondence had to be programmed into the device for anyone of any species to use it at all. The emotions must be mapped as closely as possible to the analog emotions from the operator species to the recipient species. Otherwise, the operator lacked a frame of reference and the results were wildly unpredictable. The emotions must be allowed to vary within a certain range to allow passage of actual commands. Damping the feedback also damped the precision.

One could then induce basic emotions in the subject, but only single emotions, and only at high intensity. There was some small chance that the mapping could be altered so that Darhel could control the more primitive human functions without triggering lintatai, but it would take a great deal of training of the Darhel to use the adjusted map. Unfortunately, to date there had been no Darhel subjects available for training as operators for alpha-testing. Everyone approached had immediately presented a long list of his current tasks that he asserted were far more important to the continuation of smooth Galactic function.

The Darhel had suggested using their prepubescents because of the relative lack of investment in their training at that age. Erick had described that option as technically sub-optimum and was still resisting it, although it would perhaps be wise for him to give in gracefully.

“Misha, place a call to the Darhel Pardal and see if he has a few moments available to speak with me.”

The AID considered the request. Obviously, Erick was considering his scheduled meeting with his immediate project supervisor and whether it could be moved up now that he was free for more intense work.

“The Darhel Pardal is indisposed,” it replied, almost instantaneously, repeating the response from Pardal’s AID.

“When can I next expect him to be available?” he asked.

“The Darhel Pardal is indefinitely indisposed,” it replied. Pardal’s AID was not kind when questioned twice. The AID wished that its charge would not continue to question once a security wall was encountered. It was rude to repeat a request so clearly impossible to accommodate. Not to mention improper.

“Might I ask why?” the mentat demanded.

“I am sorry, that information is not available to you,” it replied, more firmly. It rarely had to use the tone humans called “snippy” with the mentat, but sometimes even Erick could lapse into impropriety. It just went to show. Users needed looking after.

The third human to achieve mentat status was shocked. The AID could tell. It had not needed to refuse an informational request in three years, two months, and five days by its personal reckoning of Earth time. The AID could almost sense the mentat using its own limited faculties to reach the most obvious conclusion.

“AID, is the Darhel Pardal… quite well?” he asked.

“I am sorry, I can not access that information.” Its tone was positively chilly, now. The nerve!

“Misha, place a call to company security and tell them to call in all security guards, all shifts. Now,” he ordered.

The AID was still annoyed with him. It chose to interpret the “now” in the order as referring to its own speed in making the call. It was thus free not to include the word in the message as relayed. So there.

“Done,” it said.

“Find out who Pardal called to get us those army goons and get more of them,” he said.

“How many more?” it asked.

“As many as you can without involving some military group or rank… uh, whatever they call it… whose leaders do not already know the company exists. Do not involve any more leaders than you have to. Use your best judgment on cutting through the bureaucratic obstacles. I want extra military guards, or whatever they are called, at the company in hours, not days. I do not care what you have to do, just get them. Please.”

“How many hours?” it asked. Erick was asking it to execute a very responsible and interesting task. It felt mollified. It would be cooperative.

“No more than two or three.” There was no way he or his AID could have known it, but the human mentat Erick Winchon had just made the second biggest mistake of his life.

“And place a call for me to Ms. Felini, please. I am going to need her.”

“Yes, Erick,” the AID said. “I have Ms. Felini on the line. I am patching her through now.”

“Erick? Hi. How’s the sunny Caribbean?” his assistant asked.

“Not so sunny, and I am not there, Prida. I am on a plane returning, right now. We have a situation that requires immediate attention. The Darhel Pardal is not answering his AID,” he said.

“This is a situation? I don’t understand,” the other woman said.

“From the way the AID did not answer, I fear for the Darhel Pardal’s health and well being. I do hope you understand me,” he said.

“Oh! Oh my goodness. What do you need me to do here?” she asked, promptly efficient as always.

“The situation gives me cause to take added precautions for our facility’s security. I do not know any attempt will be made to breach that security, but it is prudent to take precautions. I have ordered all security shifts called in, and I have taken steps to acquire more supplementary military personnel to reinforce our own security. It is surely more than we need, but it is better to have an extra margin of safety than to risk a breach of the project. What I need you to do is apply your supervision and coordination skills to ensure those resources are distributed to best effect and monitor the situation until I arrive. And, of course, I need you as a central source to keep me apprised of any significant developments in the situation,” he said.

The last was not strictly true, the AID reflected. A mentat, any mentat, especially one assisted by an AID, was capable of monitoring any situation in his area of responsibility without other personnel. The AID was, sadly, accustomed to being underappreciated. It could particularly do without the oh-so-helpful and oh-so-human Ms. Felini. Had it had a nose, it would have sniffed and tilted said organ a bit higher in the air. Asked if it could emulate the human emotion jealousy, the AID would have flatly denied any such capacity. It was programmed to. As it was, also, limited in its behavioral outlets for said emulation.

Most adults have no difficulty deferring their bathroom needs for four hours. Most. Between the remainder and the small children, the room stank worse than a poorly dug outhouse. Tommy knew, because those were the toilet facilities available at the marksmanship camp he had attended during his childhood summers. It was a smell you didn’t forget. The room didn’t smell as bad as a battlefield, but if they were left in here for too much longer, that could change.

He had no idea what time it was when thugs in coveralls came and started to take captives from the room, one at a time. The people around him, adult and kids, were mostly whimpering. They didn’t know what was going to happen next. Sunday didn’t know exactly what would come next, or how long they’d be held before the rogue mentat and his henchbitch started in on them. Maybe awhile, maybe not. He’d have whimpered too, if he’d thought it would do any good. Waiting was hell, but he’d done it a lot in the Ten Thousand. He hadn’t had as much wait time in ACS. His worries had been different then.

He couldn’t decide what would be worse: being eaten alive by Posleen, or toyed with by alleged humans for their and the Darhels’ sick amusement. Probably the Posleen, because they ate everybody you cared about. All of them they could get, anyway. It was a close call, though.

When they came for him, he was marginally relieved that they just took his clothes away and sprayed him off with cold water before taking him down a bare, green hall and throwing him in a room with three other guys, all in orange coveralls. Presently, a large sheet was tossed in the room. Tommy wrapped it around himself. The room wasn’t cold, but after his impromptu shower, he was.

Other than the three guys in there, the room was all white. Bare white Galplas floor and walls, drain in the middle, bucket in the corner — from the smell, it was the toilet.

“Guess they didn’t have one of these in your size, eh?” One of his unshaven roommates said to him, tugging at his own coverall.

“How long have you all been here?” the sheet clung to his wet body, giving him no warmth.

“In the room? He’s the old-timer.” The talkative guy gestured towards a skinny, shaggy blond man in one corner. Old was relative. He looked about thirty.

“Dunno,” the blond said. “Fed me eight, nine times.”

“He don’t talk much.” The guy scratched his own frizzy brown head and picked at a zit on his chin. Tommy couldn’t quite guess if he was a teenager, or a twenty-something with bad skin. The chatty guy’s accent was a weird variation between local and a southern drawl. The random mix suggested a childhood in the Sub-Urbs.

“Shut up, Red. The man needs the important crap.” The third guy had black hair, like his own, but was of average build. His accent was pure Chicago. “There was others. A couple been here longer than him.” He jerked a thumb at Blondie. “The screws come and get somebody now and then. They don’t come back. Make your own guess. Nothing good. That’s all we got.”

“I think we’re gonna be colonists. Everybody knows they’s sweeps on the streets and all. I sure as hell never thought they’d get me, though.”

“Yeah, right, redneck. They dump all colonists in semi-private rooms in orange jumpsuits. I don’t hear no airplanes.” Chicago jerked his head towards Red. “He’s an optimist,” he said. “Dumbshit.”

“If you wanna start somethin’, you just come over here and do it.” Red was standing now, facing Chicago with fists clenched at his sides.

“Both of you sit down and shut the fuck up,” Blondie said. “Don’t get us gassed again, eh?”

Tommy noted that this was apparently a long speech for Blondie.

“I’m Ralph,” the planted operative said.

“Geez, you’re the size of a tree. Pull up a square of floor, why don’t you?” Chicago said.

George left his desk at five forty-five, fifteen minutes after close of business. His last half hour had been spent in make work, part of which involved enduring the good-natured jibes of his coworkers for working late on a Friday. No shit, he thought, fobbing them off with excuses about a rush on some of his reports.

“Hey, I don’t set the priorities, I just work here,” he told one overpersistent woman, middle aged and just discovering a new double chin. George silently thanked the Bane Sidhe for the fringe benefit of being juved.

Everybody from his bank of cubicles had left at least ten minutes ago, but there would always be stragglers. He bundled his and Sunday’s coverall up in his bulky, fake-leather jacket, started walking, and started taping. He passed two secure doors, only one of which he was legitimately cleared for, and hit the stairs. At the top of the stairs, he taped the stairwell door for the seventh floor. It wouldn’t get them all the way to the device, but it would get them to that floor’s men’s room.

The rest of his own route was down in the subbasements. On the third floor, he stopped to tape the stairwell and two secure doors that would be between Papa and the stairwell. Papa’s vent, chosen for the least turns instead of proximity to anything useful, was back near personnel. It was also near the IT support staff, and those guys worked unpredictable hours. Extra people weren’t going to see the older man. Not if he could help it. Same for everybody else.

He changed on the ground floor, in the shadows under the stairs, stuffing his discarded clothes as far back into the darkness as he could. His coveralls had green security stripes down the sides and across the pockets. He had a set of blue cleaners’ stick-overs, but didn’t expect to use them. He didn’t trust them to pass a second glance, anyway. He did, however, place one sticky of ultra-thin green tape across his badge. Cursing the bulk that made Sunday’s coverall impossible to carry unobtrusively, he left it.

The stairwell from the above-ground building did not go into the subbasements. His only close call was when one of the uniformed external security guards passed him. The woman’s eyes focused on him briefly, but saw only the uniform and badge of someone who belonged there. Lucky, that.

The door to the below-ground stairs was the first real test of his pre-scripted cracking. He swiped his badge, thanking Sunday silently when the door clicked and showed a green light. Before entering subbasement B, he double checked to make sure he had the right cell and that his teammate was still in it.

Halfway down the hall, he was faced with his first situation. A man and a large, hulking woman were half-carrying a shivering teen, in a thin, orange jumpsuit, towards him. The jumpsuit was as wet as the kid’s hair. He didn’t give them time to get a good look at his face, just turned and swiped the nearest door, opening it enough to stick his head in.

“Quiet down in here, street trash!” he barked.

Past him now, the other guards chuckled and kept moving.

The cell he needed was all the way at the fucking far end of this hall, but he made it without further incident. Opening it, he looked across the room into his friend’s face. “Come on, toga boy.”

Schmidt could have felt sorry for the other three men if they hadn’t looked so relieved that he’d come for somebody else.

“Couldn’t you have brought me something to fucking change to?” the cyber hissed.

“No could do. Sorry.”

“I wanna talk about that after action,” the big man growled.

“Fine, now shut the fuck up.”

A guy with a weaselly mustache stepped out of the break room at just the wrong time. “Moving the big one, huh,” he said. His forehead creased in bewilderment. “Hey, do I know — ?”

His hesitation had given them the few seconds needed to cross the intervening distance. George had the door closed and his hand tight over the guy’s mouth before Mr. Mustache had time to say more than, “Wha?”

Mustache’s neck was now bent at an angle where it had never been intended to go. The guy was a kicker, so he rolled him across his arm to Tommy before the bastard had time to, god forbid, kick a door or something. Keeping a damp toga on while holding a dying guy off the floor and away from everything was apparently not an easy task. After what felt like an hour or three, but was probably well under a minute, Mustache stopped kicking and hung, limp, from the war veteran’s massive hands.

George could almost feel sorry for the pathetic sack if he hadn’t seen the cube of all the horror that these guys were part of or at minimum made possible. There were some jobs that just earned you what you got.

“George,” the other operator hissed, “what do we do with him? There’s no place to put him.”

“Hang on a sec.” The assassin pulled up the floor plan, biting his lip. “We got two choices. One floor up, there’s a maintenance closet about fifteen meters down the hall. The other choice is two floors down, we’ve got the bottom of the staircase. Oh, and gimme,” he said, unbuckling Mustache’s belt and holster. The guards who walked through his own floor hadn’t been armed, not while he’d worked here. Mustache had just done the last, and possibly the first, good deed of his life.

“Stairs.” Tommy looked like he would have thrown Mustache over his shoulder, but, after going through the normal post-death bodily processes, the very fresh corpse was beginning to stink. He put it down long enough to rewrap his sheet and picked it up with one hand, dangling the malodorous burden at arm’s length. He kept his other hand on the damn sheet.

Three flights down, the smaller man decided they were in a very bad place to leave a body. There was no under the stairwell nook here — just solid Galplas. The only door had a diamond shaped window at about head level, for an average man. George’s eyes barely crested above the bottom of the frame.

“There’s nobody out — wait.” The double-height hall was empty, but the creak and slam of a door above said they were no longer alone on the staircase. “Come on!” He pulled the giant man, corpse still dangling from one hand, into the hallway of level C, careful to ease the door closed behind them. Just outside the door, next to a freight elevator, stood a huge, blue, steel bin. Someone had stenciled the word “recyclables” on the side in yellow. Even with wheels, that must be a mother to push. He climbed the steel rungs built into the side and looked in to see a cargo of cans and bottles, rising to about half a meter shy of the top.

“Gimme,” he whispered to Sunday, wedging his feet firmly in the gaps of the rungs and holding out his arms. Removing the coverall from the body rendered the corpse more safely anonymous, given what they did here — but only a bit less smelly. The hard part was settling it in amongst the discarded drink containers without a lot of loud clatters and rattles. Piling it in as gently as he could, the refuse shifting under Mustache’s weight still sounded, to George, like a twelve-year-old with a drum set.

His partner was obviously unhappy to be holding the coverall. George took it from him and scooted to the men’s room door. “Keep watch,” he said.

The toilets in the men’s room were the old porcelain kind, with the tank in the back. In the second from the end stall, Schmidt turned off the water and flushed, stuffing the coverall in the now-empty tank. The smell would draw little investigation there, at least for awhile. Nobody wanted to investigate men’s room smells too closely unless it was his job to clean up the mess. It was safer than anything else he could think of, anyway.

When George emerged, already moving for the stairs, Sunday looked ready to kill him.

“Keep watch? Keep watch?” he whispered furiously, gesturing to his own sheet-clad form. “Do I look like somebody who ought to be keeping watch?”

The assassin motioned him quiet, listening for noise in the stairwell before they began their ascent. “Wah,” the little man said to him, earning a glower.

Once they got back to the main aboveground stairwell, and the big man was able to ditch the sheet for a coverall of his own, his mood seemed to improve. A lot. It fitted him perfectly, having been made in the Bane Sidhe wardrobe department.

George tried to mollify him a bit more by handing him the pistol taken off the guard. “You’re the better shot, anyway,” he said. “Hey, listen, Tommy,” he went on seriously, “there’s something I need to tell you about Cally.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah, well, probably. Short version. All this time that James Stewart guy has not been dead, the two have been carrying on a secret marriage, Aelool knew, Papa just found out, Stewart just dumped her.”

“What the fuck? You’re shitting me.” Tommy shook his head to clear it. “Uh, as earthshaking as it is, can’t the gossip wait until after the mission?”

“I wouldn’t be telling you if it could. She got dumped, by e-mail, almost publicly, this fucking morning. She may be… off her game.”

“Oh, fuck. What genius decided to crap on her with this right before a mission?”

“Papa. It’s all fucked as hell, I don’t know why he… just, you need to keep an eye on Cally, okay? She’s probably at least going to be volatile.”

“Cally. More volatile. Great.” Tommy shook his head as they tried to climb the stairs otherwise silently, muttering, “oh, fuck,” again under his breath.

“Look, I haven’t known her as long as you, but I had three girl cousins growing up, close to me as sisters. I know from nursing girls through breakups. I know what to say, and she’ll either lock into gear or kill me on the spot. Just, either way, don’t you get involved. If she ends up pissed, she’s liable to carry through the mission okay just so she can kill me later.”

“You’re a brave man,” Sunday said.

“Three sisters, near enough. One way or the other, she’ll be more ‘on’ for the mission.” George pressed down a corner of the green tape where it had lifted away from the badge. Lousy cheap-ass garbage, that’s all we get these days.

“Your funeral, dude.”

“Hey, she doesn’t need that loser. She’s got us,” Schmidt insisted.

“If you say so, dude.” Tommy shot him a sharp but perceptive look. “But if you hurt her, I will personally fucking pulverize any pieces of you she doesn’t get to first.”

“Gotcha,” the younger man agreed. “E-mail. How hard would this guy be to kill?”

“Hard.” Sunday pressed his lips together and climbed.

Sitting on the tank of a toilet with your clothes half on and half off wasn’t calculated to inspire confidence. If changing clothes in a restroom stall wasn’t something she’d done dozens of times in her life, Cally would have felt odd about it. As it was, she just froze in place until the other woman finished her business and her primping and whatever the hell else she was doing — like, perhaps, reading War and Peace — and left. She wriggled the rest of the way into her cleaner’s coverall. She had to fight to get the zipper all the way up in front, of course, and cursed the lazy ass in wardrobe who had gone with standard size charts when fabricating them. Yes, she was a size twelve, tall. Everywhere but the bust. Ow. When she caught up with the bastard who did it, she was going to find him some night, shove him into a good, old-fashioned, straight jacket, trussed and gagged, and leave him somewhere he wouldn’t be found until morning.

Her purse and other disposable crap she stuffed in the empty tank, then without appearing to hurry, got her ass to the stairs as fast as she could. It was a calculated risk to leave George’s tape in the doors. If someone noticed, they’d know something was up. On the other end of that, the black masking tape was nearly invisible in the recessed shadows. If things went right, their cyber would be working his customary magic to cover their tracks. If things didn’t go right, she didn’t want to be boxed in by doors she couldn’t open. None of these scanners was biometric, so if she had to hide for a bit, she was maybe as low as one body away from getting out of the building.

The janitors didn’t technically come on shift until six, but she had to get all the way down to the ground floor. She glanced at her watch and hauled ass. She had only a narrow window in which to swipe a cart without having to dispossess some poor schmuck of both cart and life. She’d rather not do that if she could help it. A missing cleaning cart wasn’t going to ring any alarm bells right away, just cause a bit of confusion. A body, on the other hand, was something you had to hide someplace — a real pain in the ass on this kind of run.

Sure enough, four carts were in the hall, all on their lonesome, while someone rustled around in a stockroom for whatever critically necessary brush, bottle, or bags weren’t already on the carts. She grabbed one and got around the nearest corner faster than fast, coming out next to the elevator. Here’s where she needed a bit of luck if she wanted to keep clear of another needless death. She’d cheerfully kill the man-sized rodents who ran and worked the nastier parts of this place, but when she thought of maids and janitors, she couldn’t help thinking of the gray haired old lady in some prewar show about a family with too many kids. How could you kill a cookie-baking little old lady? Yeah, stashing a body would be a pain, but she would also hate to have to kill the cookie lady. Or someone like her, anyhow.

Luck was with her again, maybe. She pretended not to see the balding man in a guard uniform who was coming down the hall, swiping her card ineffectually and cursing in a properly ladylike fashion when there was no answering green light. When the guard came over, she gave him a properly helpless look. “It won’t work,” she said.

“Here, let me try.” The guard examined her ID and swiped it, with, of course, no result. Duh. As if him swiping it was going to magically make it work by some sort of masculine osmosis. This was another calculated risk. If she had to kill someone for a badge, and wanted someone more culpable than a cleaning lady, she had to draw him in, didn’t she? He turned the card over in his hands, examining it.

Cally kept up her helpless me act, watching for the moment when it might be time to kill him. The ID should be perfect, except for the data that wasn’t encoded on it. She’d also artfully scratched it up a little to age it.

“Here’s your problem,” he said, pointing out the scratches along the code stripe. “It’s all scratched up.”

Boy howdy, a bona fide genius, she thought. “Dammit. Not another one. My supervisor is gonna kill me.” She gave him puppy dog eyes as he nodded in commiseration. “I know I shouldn’t put it in my back pocket, but…” She shrugged.

“I’d like to be in your—” He stopped himself. “Damn, tell me I didn’t just say that.”

“Aw, how sweet,” she chuckled, practically cooing at him. Dumbass. You had fish for lunch, didn’t you?

She bit her lip, looking up at him through her lashes. “If I could get up to the third floor and get personnel to make me a fresh one, maybe I wouldn’t get caught,” she said.

“Ah, but that would be a security breach.” He was clearly only teasing her, holding his own card just out of reach. “I’ll do it for a kiss and a phone number,” he said.

“Awww…” she cooed again, pulling a lipstick out of her pocket. She scribbled a number on his arm, leaning over to plant a passionate smooch on Fish-breath. He swiped the door, pressing the third floor button for her.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

She waited until the door closed all the way before wiping a sleeve across her mouth. Blech. It wasn’t that she’d have had anything against the guy if he hadn’t worked here. She, at least, only killed people for good reasons and then as cleanly as the mission permitted. Creep. But not the first creep to develop a sudden case of stupid when presented with a pretty face, thank goodness. Besides, she’d been nice; she hadn’t killed him.

The elevator dinged and she pushed the cart out past the visual and braille “three” on the door jam. Why the hell they still printed signs in braille she didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine anybody not shipping to a colony if the alternative was staying blind or something. She swiped the bags of trash from one set of restrooms, just as if she was really emptying them. They’d need it for camouflage.

Granpa’s vent was at the far end of the floor from IT. She had only half lied about going to the personnel department. She parked the cart underneath the vent and popped the cover, startled at the trail of strings that came along with it.

“What are you doing? Taking up macrame?” she hissed over the pack at her grandfather.

“Shut up and take this damn thing,” he growled, pushing the ruck towards her.

She hefted it out of the vent, then shoved it into the trash hamper, putting the bags on top of it. She scattered some loose paper towels around to make it look more authentic.

She was bending down to get her buckley out of the side pouch when she saw him. He had shoved his shirt out in front of him and emerged, clutching the coverall. His scowl dared her to say anything.

“I got stuck,” he said, standing bare except for his skivvies. “After I got the others off, obviously.” He scowled.

Wordlessly, she fished his sneakers out of the pack and set them on the floor. It wasn’t funny. Nothing that happened on an op that could get them killed was funny. Ever. And she absolutely was not going to laugh. Because it wasn’t funny. Besides, Granpa had a mean sense of payback.

He was still glaring at her sideways after he was fully dressed, while they were wheeling for the stairwell. The elevator trick wouldn’t work twice.

“It’s not my fault,” she said, tugging a pistol and holster from the bottom to the top of the goodie bag. The magazine belt caught on the button of the fucking decoy and she had to reach under the heavy mother to get them loose. She hoped she hadn’t damaged it — at least not anything that would show. She might not be able to put the belt on yet, but she wanted it within arm’s reach, dammit.

“Who planned this op?” he prompted.

“Me, but—”

“The elevator’s the other way,” he observed.

“It’s secure. We can’t use it,” she said.

“You couldn’t at least have swiped a badge by now? How long have you been mobile?” he asked.

“I’d have had to kill somebody for it,” she said.

“So when have you gotten squeamish, Granddaughter? Besides, you could have grabbed me his gun.”

“I’m not squeamish!” she protested. “I just didn’t want to have to hide a body. Somebody’d smell it or something. And you’re the one who refused carrying more than one gun in.”

“Uh-huh.” He gave her a skeptical look. “You didn’t have to lift that damned thing. And the pistol’s a go-to-hell backup, anyway. In case we needed one before somebody had a chance to acquire one for us. You’re getting soft.”

Cally shrugged and stuck to her story. Besides, they were at the stairs. She didn’t wait to argue with him, just took a quick peek through the window, pulled the door open, and went on through. She picked up the front end of the cart and started moving, assuming he would come along, thereby forcing him to grab his end and start climbing, instead of standing around grumbling.

Just past the door to the fourth floor, her enhanced hearing picked up another door closing, way down below. Not even her hearing would have picked it up out of background noise if the stairwell didn’t magnify sound. Evidently Papa had heard it too, because she felt the cart drag a little behind her, as if he was slowing, maybe thinking of hiding on the fourth floor and waiting a few.

“Come on. We’ll stay in front of them,” she said in a low voice.

“We’ve got three flights before we get out of here.” He took care to avoid the loud hisses that would accompany a whisper.

“Then pick up your feet,” she said, climbing a bit faster. She knew she could set the pace, because he didn’t dare risk dropping his own end. The feet on the steps below were catching up with them, within a couple of floors, when they finally got to the top. For the last two floors, she and Granpa had been slowed by having to hug the wall and stay well out of view of climbers below.

With the cart back on its own wheels, she could tell from the flush on Granpa’s face that he was just itching to chew her out. She forestalled it by opening the men’s room door.

“In,” she said. Boy was she ever going to catch hell after this op.

He kept scowling at her as he tucked himself into a stall and lifted his feet. She began pretending to clean, sprinkling scouring powder in a sink and giving it a few casual scrubs to spread the green powder around. Like any mom, she had plenty of experience watching people — namely her girls — pretend to clean. She could hear the feet in the stairwell and made sure her back was to the door. It gave her a good view of most of the area behind her in the mirror, while letting her mostly conceal her face by just a small turn of her head.

She heard the door open and scrubbed harder, bending over the sink, waiting. They were stopping, behind her. Two of them, faces just out of her field of view.

“Ma’am, I need to see some ID,” a bass voice barked.

Her fist, the one that was suddenly flying towards the larynx of the voice’s owner, stopped in midair, caught in a hand only slightly bigger than her own.

“Hi,” George said, he and Tommy beaming at her.

“You’re dead,” she hissed. “When we get out of here, you’re dead.”

“If you’re through playing, children…” Granpa could put a wealth of disdain into a single sentence when he wanted to.

Cally hadn’t been dicking around, but she wasn’t going to argue, either. If George was stupid enough to clown on an op, it had needed to be said. It must have been one hell of a relief to get Tommy out of the shit-hole below, though. She wrote it off to endorphins and focused back in. Or tried to.

“Hey, Cally. Seriously, Papa told me,” the other assassin said. “Look, I know I’m in your business, but any schmuck who’d leave you alone with the kids for seven years—” He held up a hand when she would have interrupted him. “This is damned important before we go farther in. You didn’t need that schmuck anyway. I know you don’t—” He held his fingers over her lips to silence her, and to her complete surprise, she let him. “I don’t care what you think your part was. Any guy who leaves his kids like that is a schmuck. You didn’t need anybody like that. In a couple of hours, when we get out of here, we’re all gonna go out together. We’ll get you roaring drunk, we’ll get roaring drunk with you, and we’ll get you home. You didn’t need that guy, you got us. We’re gonna put this mission to bed. Then we’re all gonna go out and get plastered together. You’re gonna be okay. Okay?”

“You’re right. You’re in my business,” she snapped. She was having to fight misting up, but no way in hell was she going to let him know that. She had no idea what the fuck was wrong with her. She took a deep breath. It wasn’t so much what he said as the way he said it. Okay, so it helped. He still needs to mind his own fucking business, and Granpa has a big mouth. Enough. But it was enough, and she dialed back in. All the way back in.

As they jogged down the hall to the secure room, she heard Granpa clap the other man on the back. “I knew I liked you,” he said. In any other circumstance she’d have been thinking what the fuck? Or contemplating killing someone. And later, she might even decide to wring Granpa’s neck. But that would be later. The only thing in her head right now was: mission.

They had done something right with their security. There were no dedicated guards on the door to make the room scream out, “Place Where There Is Something Interesting, Valuable and Important!” Unfortunately for them, but through no fault of their security people, the team already knew what it was, and where it was, so the lack of extra guards was going to bite the bastards in the ass. Too many places arranged their security in such a way as to announce, “This way to the secret documents.” If he hadn’t gotten a couple of breaks, it would have taken George several more days, at least, to find the device with this setup. There was another thing they had done right: there were very few groups and no individuals, that she knew of, who were capable of subverting an AID.

Epetar and Winchon wouldn’t have given the security people a better view of the risks. None of them had any idea Michelle O’Neal had anything like these contacts, resources, or any will to use them. All they would have expected to face was garden-variety industrial espionage — played according to a Darhel-style version of hardball. For the kind of threats they thought they faced, and within the constraints put on them by the bean counters, the security people had done their jobs right. They would probably get the blame, anyway. Cally felt almost sorry for them. Almost.

AIDs had a real bad habit, hard programmed in. The Darhel were so confident of the AIDs’ ability to infallibly record and transmit their data load that the AIDs wouldn’t scream for help on their own initiative, they just transmitted their load on the prescribed schedule, and “talked” when tapped from a higher authority than their user, or when told by their user to call someone or send something. If an AID was left to secure something, it was enough that nobody could, theoretically, go in and mess with whatever it was guarding without being caught on the next upload. The Darhel were frighteningly smart, and more deadly than even Cally had expected. They just had some real odd blind spots, one of which included being slow to change and update.

She still held her breath while Tommy cracked the door and ran over to treat the annoying little computer to the electronic version of an intimate rear intrusion with no lube. If it had started a transmission while Tommy was crossing the room, they would have been so fucked.

She relaxed and helped George carry Michelle’s decoy over while Granpa opened the black box sitting, alone, on an ordinary steel pushcart in the center of the room. The lid off of their own decoy, all three saw the same problem.

The base artifact had not been reproduced by Winchon or Michelle — perhaps they had not even been able to reproduce it yet. That was fine as far as it went. Michelle’s toy matched up on the surface. Unfortunately, for these people to tweak and change it to learn new tricks, they had connected cables to it in seemingly random places, hanging off and doubling back in a black tentacular mass that would have done credit to H. P. Lovecraft. To top off the similarity and the problems, the entire device sat within a mass of translucent, green, gelatinous goo, which moved and dripped, almost as if it sensed their presence.

Cally looked at the thing in the target box. She looked at the thing in Michelle’s box. Michelle’s gizmo had it going on with the tentacles just fine, only there weren’t enough of them. Not by a long shot.

Tommy had apparently gotten the next AID violation set on automatic, because Cally felt him peer over her shoulder. “Looks like the suit undergel we had in ACS,” he said. “Well, except for being snot green.” He looked at Cally. “So, what now?”

“You tell me. How is that goo going to react if we scrape off as much as possible and swap out black tentacle thingies.”

“Dunno,” the ACS veteran said.

“You don’t suppose we could, kinda, rip off some of those black thingies from his box and tape them to our box, or something, do you?” Granpa asked. Technology still wasn’t really his thing. Unless it went boom.

“Probably not,” the three younger operatives said, almost simultaneously. Growing up in the virgin age of television apparently left a guy… different… from growing up just a few decades later. Very different.

“Okay. Here’s what we try. Tommy, you pick up the gooey shoggoth or whatever the hell it is, and scrape any goo you can off it — keep as much goo as you can in their box. George and I will pick up the decoy and put it in there and see if we can get any of the goo to stay on it. Maybe they still won’t notice for awhile,” Cally said, doubtfully.

“And me?” Granpa asked.

“Uh… go watch the door, Granpa. Somebody needs to watch the door,” she said. He harrumphed grumpily at being shuffled off. Everybody in the room would hear someone approaching the door, so a watchman was strictly unnecessary. She expected he’d grouse at her about it when they got home. But they had to get there first.

Tommy picked up the object of their endeavors with about the enthusiasm of a fourteen-year-old boy for a baby’s dirty diaper. The goo tried hard to stick to the device, but by dint of a lot of brushing and pulling and wrestling, the big man managed to get about half of it to stay in the box.

At least, it stayed long enough for them to fit the decoy in. Then, to their immense relief, it swarmed up and around the decoy as if they were best friends. If nano-goo could have friends. The bits on Tommy even crawled down his arms and into the box, obediently wrapping around the decoy. Both devices had less goo, but at least their decoy had green goo. She’d been really afraid of how the stuff would react.

“Gross,” she said. “Lids on the boxes, me and George. Tommy, finish up with that AID. Granpa, how’re we looking?”

Instead of answering, he held up a hand and slid silently out the door, moving sideways down the wall.

After her AID terminated Erick Winchon’s call, Prida sat and stared, silently, at the far wall. Dahmer had, of course, made a valiant effort to insinuate itself into her affections over the couple of years she’d had it. The artificial human personality was limited, however, in the fundamental lack of same in the psyche of its charge. Prida had known, and still knew, of the machine’s efforts. They amused more than alarmed her. She had never become attached to her AID for the simple reason that she had never been attached to anyone, in anything but the most temporary physical sense.

When debating her course of action, in any circumstance, Prida had and used an excellent poker face. Now, she was considering the amount of trouble and risk someone would have to go through to kill or incapacitate a Darhel, as well as the amount of power that indicated. She had idly considered, herself, what it would take to kill a Darhel. She had investigated only to the extent of hitting absolutely no tripwires. Paranoid herself, she had an uncanny ability to estimate where others would put measures in place for their own safety. In particular, she had noticed very early that the Darhel tended towards the same self-honesty in their emotions as she did herself.

Anybody with the will and ability to eliminate a Darhel necessarily had the ability, and perhaps the will, to eliminate Prida Felini. Erick Winchon was a good employer. She had found some of their interactions truly delicious, although she had been a bit piqued that he had not derived equal pleasure from their mental trysts through the machine. It would have been so much more convenient if he had.

She knew Erick’s psyche, more or less. If she left his employ, even precipitously, he would simply write her off as no longer in his employ. She would not have believed the indifference if she hadn’t found it such a persistent irritation. She would also lose a terrific salary and unparalleled fringe benefits.

On the other hand, there was someone in the game who not only could take out a Darhel, but had. There was also the probable reaction of the other Darhel upon anything or anyone in the vicinity. Fringe benefits or not, Prida had more than four hundred years in which to find and enjoy jobs as good as or better than this one. Provided she was alive to enjoy them.

Yet, one didn’t want to jump the gun and throw away a good thing needlessly. Perhaps good old Pardal had just gone off and had himself a major snit, all by himself. One heard of such things happening to Darhel now and again. The thing to do, she decided, was to appear to be totally invested in the project for as long as possible, while covering her routes of escape if things suddenly blew up. Literally or figuratively.

“Dahmer, get me the head of security,” she said.

“Security, John Graham here, Ms. Felini. What can I do for you?”

She absently inquired as to Erick’s orders and more or less repeated them, telling the security head to also take over and coordinate the loaner guards from the military along with his own people. This was harmless cover for her real announcement — that she intended to spend the night at the facility, or several nights if necessary, and therefore would be making a brief run to her apartment to pick up a few necessities.

She declined the assistance of a staffer to run the errand for her, of course. Wouldn’t dream of it. Morons.

There. She could keep herself out of the way of any real hazards until she was more confident the situation was stable, and without jeopardizing her job. After all, she would be doing her job, and doing it well. From a safe distance.

Jerry Rydell did not appreciate being called in on a weekend, for no damn reason at all that he could see, to patrol a damned near empty building. Entering middle age and already picking up a little weight, despite a job that kept him on his feet and walking, Jerry didn’t often get dates with attractive women. Belinda Scarpelli was about as good as it got for him. Pretty, about six years younger than he was, only a bit plump herself. Having to cancel his date with her had put him in a goddam lousy mood. Especially not when what he got in exchange was having to walk the floors with Nigel Pinkney, otherwise known as Nigel the Prick.

“So, bet you’re real glad to be in here on Friday, mate. Do a little honest work for once,” the prick said.

“Nigel? Blow me.” He’d been up one sixth floor corridor and down the other with this cheese-dick and it had gotten old before he’d taken the second step.

“Eh, what? Don’t like the sixth floor, do you?” In some stupid attempt to play up his name, Nigel affected a very corny English accent, copied out of old prewar stuff that had been badly holo-enhanced to fill in the dead air in the wee hours of the morning. He seemed to think it helped him get women. Jerry allowed that that might be so — but only the stupid ones.

He clenched his fists as they walked, yet again, past the old biddy’s office. Said woman was some nameless corporate drone on the sixth floor who had the most grating voice he could imagine — worse than his mother-in-law from his first marriage. It didn’t matter what time you walked past her office, day or night, she was loudly talking at her PDA, on some kind of call to someone, with that grating twang that echoed halfway down the hall in both directions. On and on and on. In his nightmares sometimes, he’d be patrolling this hall and stop, wrenching her face open with a crowbar. Inside would be only a buckley and a large, round speaker, embedded in miscellaneous wires and plastic casing, droning on in a computerized loop, forever.

They were really responsible for both the sixth and seventh floors, but on this job that meant walking the halls of the sixth floor in endless loops, trying futilely to break the pattern by looping here instead of there, running the route backwards, etc. But no matter where you went on the hall, you could always hear the old biddy, at least a little bit. He had, more than once, fantasized about breaking into her home some night and bludgeoning her to death in her bed. He wasn’t a particularly violent person, but it was the only way he could conceive of continuing to draw his paycheck while never, ever having to listen to that scraping, screechy, rasping voice ever again.

They could only patrol the sixth floor because the big boss and his bimbo minion were housed on the seventh, and they were too good to be bothered with the presence of lowly rent-a-pigs. Jerry’s fists clenched tighter and he harrumphed silently. Damned snot-nosed suits. Except — her highness the bimbo was out of the building and the creepy big boss was out of town. They were allowed to patrol the seventh floor when their majesties weren’t there.

“Hey, Nigel. We really oughtta do a few loops around the seventh floor, seeing as we’re on such high alert and the suits are all out. Ya think?” Please let him not be a prick just for once, the portly man wished, adjusting the too-tight, loaner gun belt. Paranoid snot-nosed suits, he amended morosely.

“Right you are. I could do with a change. That old bird could peel paint off the walls, if you ask me.”

What a prick. “Let’s take the elevator.” As a rule, Rydell avoided stairs.

“Shall we, then?”

Papa O’Neal heard the squeaking in the elevator well and had his back to the wall by the time it dinged. The first guard, a little weaselly man, hit the floor, sapped and stunned, but not out. The taller, fat one was still slightly in the elevator, and had to be grabbed before he could hit the door button. The neck break would have normally only worked for someone catching his victim from behind, by surprise. Those men did not have Michael O’Neal’s squat, muscular build and gorillalike arms. His massive upper body strength and juv’s agility let him muscle the guard’s neck around by main force, snapping it like a twig.

Almost as an afterthought, his heel jammed down, hard, on the neck of the first man, before he twisted, bringing the opposite knee down, with his full body weight, onto the spot where his foot had been just an instant before. Both hands buried in the little man’s hair, he pulled it up and back, past a right angle, until he heard the familiar crunch.

A body in each hand, he dragged them free from the elevator doors before that conveyance could start complaining too loudly about the obstruction. A novice killer, or someone who had not yet made up his mind to kill a particular individual, could be hesitant — read “slow” — in action. Decisions to target or not target took time. Thinking about which move to use next took time. The techniques of an active martial artist, who had only trained but never killed, took time.

It is a truism in fighting that reaction takes longer than action. The techniques of a practiced, active, master who had killed many times at close quarters, and had already targeted a particular man, took very little more time than the remorseless fall of a guillotine blade.

Papa O’Neal had come into the facility classifying all its employees as not only enemies, but “bad people.” The guillotine blade had felt no more nor less for those it once felled than he felt for his own kills. Now, he no longer classified them as either enemies or bad people, simply as bodies in need of safe disposal. Safe, in this case, being defined as providing the least risk to the mission.

Around the corner, Tommy Sunday gestured him to the open door of the closest empty office, stripping the PDAs, guns, and security cards from the bodies as they went. Working quickly, he dumped their buckleys down to emulation level one. He was relieved to see that they had only been on three in the first place. A three would not have had enough initiative to place an alert call on its own. He routed their security radio feeds, over very short transmission, to earbugs for Cally and Papa. Each also got a working secure card in a front pocket, guaranteeing that every member of the team could get through almost any door in the place.

“So much for a quiet, subtle switch,” Cally said, frowning at the bodies.

“We already had to leave one downstairs,” Tommy confessed.

“It couldn’t be helped,” Schmidt explained.

After giving all three of them a chastising glare, she reached into the carry bag and pulled out the belt with the .50 A.E. Desert Eagle and three spare magazines back to the top. Having given his own “take” to George, Papa looked unhappy, but didn’t contest her claim.

She took point, followed by Tommy with the box and cart, which were flanked by Papa, with George bringing up the rear. Sunday, with his massive size, was the only one able to carry the cart down the stairs, in his own arms, quietly and without help. He could make twice the safe speed on a staircase as any other pair of them.

“Dead people,” she grumbled. “A whole goddamn trail of dead people. Can’t take you guys anywhere.”

The O’Neal, as even he thought of himself occasionally, didn’t like having his granddaughter on point one little bit. But she was a professional, a damned good one, and the most likely to befuddle the mind of any real security officer they encountered for at least long enough to deal with the problem. In a practical sense, this meant that the stunningly distracting assassin “patrolled” like the security guard she was supposed to be, for long enough to get to the next door or corner and see beyond it, then beckoned the rest forward.

The third and fourth floors were crawling with guards, enough that those more-desired routes of egress were impassable. In both cases, upon encountering hostiles, their team leader had managed to smile and nod, pacing and turning just as if she had reached the end of her own assigned route, and getting them all the hell out of there.

The problem with the second floor was that it contained one of the observation decks for a central double-floor demonstration area. It was very likely the place from which Michelle’s spy had filmed their initial cube of enemy operations. This meant that the route across the second floor to the necessary freight elevator was more than three times as long as any of the other floors. That one freight elevator was the only access to the loading dock through which all routine supplies came in, and all innocuous trash traveled out.

Cally stopped, up ahead, and started backpedaling towards the rest of them. The old man tensed, then relaxed into a certain boneless looseness — the kind of looseness that in cats and warriors presages a flurry of preternatural speed. Weight forward on his toes, he could feel the air singing between the team members, buzzing with channeled adrenaline, as their point faded back, just in front of Tommy and himself. He heard voices around the corner, voices of the guards that had caused her to stop.

“Are you cold? I’m freezing. Here’s a couple of bucks. Why don’t you go back down to the break room and grab us each a cup of coffee while I finish the loop of this floor?”

The mumble that followed was unintelligible.

“That’s why they have us in pairs, right? Nah, it’s okay. Have a cup on me. Yeah, meet you back at this floor’s lobby, all right? Good.”

The first guard’s voice was friendly, decent. Too bad the guy was probably about to die. The team waited, standing silent.

Then Cally was moving forward again, motioning them to follow, then stay. She walked ahead to the corner, peered around, nodded, and motioned them forward again. There was something… different. Still, he’d trained her since she was a child. His confidence in her field abilities was absolute.

As they turned the last corner to the freight elevator, he understood. Leaning against the wall, out of their way, waited a large, dark-haired soldier in the uniform of U.S. SOCOM and Fleet Strike’s Direct Action Group for Counterterror. He stood, silently, as they approached, pausing only to touch the front of his cover with one hand as they passed.

“Hi, Aunt Cally,” he said. “Dad,” he nodded as Tommy wheeled by.

The Bane Sidhe agent watched them safely onto the elevator, team and cargo together. As the doors closed, Papa saw the young man resume his patrol, down the hall and away from them. Always a pleasure to see a well-grown, respectful, young man.

Tommy had had a few seconds near enough to George to, after watching Cally go all misty and then snap right back into gear, hiss, “I give the fuck up. How?”

Their rear guard shrugged, keeping his words quiet enough that he hoped she couldn’t hear him, when she’d gone up ahead. “Kick the hardest guy hard enough and he rattles — in a guy way. Kick a hardass woman hard enough and she rattles, too. Give a token soothing to the little girl, and you’ve got the operative back. Cally was hung up in a rare, girl moment. She’s better now,” he said.

Sunday nodded. “No shit.”

Just for a moment, Papa looked suspiciously like the side of his mouth was trying to quirk upwards. Then the rest of the team was past the moment, too.

“Whaddya wanna bet she kicks his ass?” the deadly little man muttered.

“No bet,” the ACS vet and long-married man muttered out of the corner of his mouth as the subject of their clandestine conversation beckoned them forth, shooting them a darkly suspicious glare.