Cally's War

Chapter Twelve

Cally opened the door to her quarters and took her packages inside. It was only her second day and the institutional green and gray were boring her to tears. She tossed a large red shawl over the ugly gray plastic nightstand that came with the room and put the cut glass vase she’d bought on the table, filling it with yellow silk roses. She used tacky clay to stick a couple of posters of unicorns and pegasuses — or was it pegasi — on the walls. Strange obsession, but she’d had covers with more obnoxious ones. At least the pictures were colorful. She’d even managed to find one that wasn’t in pastels.

What is that obnoxious beeping? She looked at her PDA, but it was fine. She looked around the room for a source of the beeping, finally localizing it to the shawl-covered end table and the top drawer in it. Oh. It’s the phone. Who the hell wouldn’t just page my PDA? It’s registered in the directory… oh. Paper-boy.

She lifted the phone out of the drawer and looked at the red light blinking on it in time with the beeping. She had to look at the thing’s buttons for a moment before she found the play message button. There was no message, and she had to experiment with more buttons before she found the combination that would get the phone to display the number of the last caller. She read it off to her PDA and told it to call the number, waiting for an answer.

“Hello, Beed residence. May I help you?” a woman’s voice answered.

“Um… yes, I guess you can. Is the general in? I’m his secretary and he may be trying to reach me.”

“Oh, is this Captain Makepeace? Hang on and I’ll get him.”

Cally waited, sitting down on the bed and splitting the PDA screen so she could use the bottom half as a remote. The cube from last night still had a bunch of movies she hadn’t seen yet. It had been in the original Makepeace’s purse when they made the switch, so she supposed it reflected her taste in movies pretty well. She started it to get the advertising tease out of the way, turning the volume to mute. She still had a few seconds wait before the general finally answered. Most people in this day and age took their PDA with them everywhere. Well, unless they had an AID. Knowing Beed, he had probably been whole rooms away from whatever he was using to call her. Cally imagined a big, black, rotary dial phone sitting on a table somewhere and suppressed laughter as he started speaking.

“Hello, Captain?” It certainly sounded like the general.

“Yes, sir. You were trying to reach me?”

“Ah… yes. I was trying to get a little of the red tape squared away and realized I need the Lee file. Unfortunately, I’m expecting another call and really can’t step away right now. I know it’s an imposition, but could you possibly take a moment and drop by the office and bring it around? I haven’t caught you at a bad time, have I?”

“No, sir, not at all. I’d be glad to get that file for you,” she fibbed.

“Good, good. I was just afraid I might have caught you at a bad time because you were out when I called before. Thought you might have had plans.” His voice had a hint of a question in it.

“Yes, sir. I just got in from dinner, sir.”

“Trifle late, isn’t it?” He seemed to be waiting for some sort of explanation.

“Yes, sir. I worked a little late getting things in order, sir, and then I had some shopping to do.”

“Ah. Okay. Well, if you’ll just nip by the office and bring that file over, Captain. Thank you.” There was an audible click as he ended the call.

She glared at the phone for a minute. Is he for real? And of course he just assumes I know where he lives. It’s not like he couldn’t have called my PDA and reached me right off. The real Sinda Makepeace may have gotten the better end of this deal. And I know better than to slip out of character, even in private, dammit.

It was actually no trouble to find the general’s quarters. The base directory had no problem with telling his secretary where he lived.

It also didn’t take very long to get there, since it was a Tuesday night and in the middle of a shift. Transit car traffic was minimal, and the MPs on duty at the transit station that serviced brigade headquarters were surprised to see anyone coming in so late, but passed her through after a quick look at her ID.

Moments later, she tucked the file into a manila envelope, passed the MPs on the way out and caught a transit car three levels down.

The corridor that housed Fleet Strike general officers was not institutional green. Nor were the doors battleship gray. The cream walls and Wedgwood blue doors were set off by a strip of wallpaper across the top of the walls that had been designed to convey the impression of crown molding. The charcoal gray carpeting was thick and gave softly under her feet. In all, it reminded her of images she’d seen in movies of the sort of prewar hotel that catered to business travelers who were on a budget but did not want to feel they were staying in some cheap dive.

Suite G one-oh-three was about fifty meters from the transit car doors. It had the standard electronic lock and a little glowing button in a brass plate cast in curlicues that might have been stylized leaves.

“Captain Sinda Makepeace to see General Beed, please,” she announced clearly to the door. Nothing happened. She waited, and then announced herself again. Still nothing. He couldn’t. They wouldn’t have… What the hell, I’ll try it. She pushed the button and immediately heard a ringing tone from inside the apartment. They must have actually drilled through the Galplas to install that damned thing.

As the door slid open, she caught a distinct whiff of men’s cologne. Beed was just inside the doorway, but he didn’t move to take the envelope from her.

“Ah, good. You have it. If it won’t be too much trouble, why don’t you come in. I may need you for a couple of things. That’s not a problem, is it?”

“No, sir. Of course there’s no problem, sir.” She stepped inside the door and it closed behind her. It may have been phrased like a request, but she knew an order when she heard one. Besides, he was a safe way to get rid of some excess hormones while furthering her mission. A good deal all around.

“I didn’t really need the file.” He met her eyes and held them as he took the envelope from her and tossed it onto a small table just inside the door.

“I didn’t really think you did, sir.”

“Quit sirring me, Sinda. In public, yes, but… Would you like a glass of wine?”

“Only if it’s not local, thanks. If the air does that to coffee beans, I’d hate to think what it would do to a poor, defenseless grape.”

“It’s up from Earth. A nice California chardonnay. You’ll like it.” He led her out of the foyer into the living room. On the coffee table was an ice bucket and a chilled bottle of the wine, with two glasses. He uncorked and poured it smoothly, handing her a glass and saluting her with his own. He was right. It was crisp and cool.

“Excuse me for asking, but where is Mrs. Beed this evening? And if I don’t call you ‘sir,’ what do I call you?”

“My friends call me Bernie. And Mrs. Beed has her movie night with some of the other wives. They grab a drink together afterwards. She won’t cross the threshold before oh-one-hundred at the earliest.”

“I — I haven’t done this much.” She took a largish gulp of her wine and dropped her eyes.

He set his glass down, taking hers and setting it beside the other, then stepped forward until he was nearly touching her. He cupped her face in his hands and bent to kiss her lingeringly.

“I think I’m going to enjoy walking you through it,” he said.

His breath tasted like peppermint and his mustache tickled her lip as she ran her hands up his chest to twine her arms around his neck. His hands were playing with her breasts and her breathing started to quicken and she pressed closer, up against him.

Then his hands were at the seal of her silks, parting the front of them to show the white lace of her bra. One hand slid around to the small of her back, pressing her closer still, while the other kneaded her breast. She arched against him, clutching her fingers in his hair as he traced a line of kisses along her jaw, down her neck, across her collarbone as she clutched at his back. Okay, this isn’t going to be so bad. Umm… mmm… good spot.

“Not here,” he murmured against her skin. She let him take her hand and lead her back down a hall to a bedroom. It smelled faintly dusty, like a guest room, and everything in it was too neat and too perfect. And too feminine. A master bedroom for a couple would never have a pink flowered bedspread. She tilted her head up to kiss him again while he slid the silks off her shoulders, freeing her hands to grab his hips. She wiggled slightly and her uniform slid down to pool at her feet. She fumbled a bit with the catch on his uniform before getting the pressure seal open, so she could slide her hands in and press them flat against the heat of his back.

She moved with him as he eased her back onto the bed, lying on top of her, but considerately holding his weight on his hands and toes. As they kissed, she helped him get his uniform out of the way as he slid a hand under her to unclasp her bra. After it was out of the way, he sat back for a moment to look. Men always liked to look. She gave him a smile and reached out to pull him back down. His chest was smooth and hairless, as was his jaw line, and she wondered for a second whether he used depilatory foam on it, before deciding that she didn’t care. A good lay was just what the doctor ordered, and so far this looked like it was going to turn out to be a good lay.

Afterwards, she helped him change the sheets and remake the bed. She thought it would be a dead giveaway, but when he took out the clean set of sheets, they were identical to the ones that had just come off.

“Won’t your wife notice the extra sheets in the wash?”

“Not a chance. I’ll have them clean and put away in no time. I don’t completely shun modern technology, Sinda.”

He seemed a bit uncomfortable as the afterglow wore off. Edgy, as if he didn’t quite know what to say to her. She made her excuses and left. No use trying for pillow talk with him in that mood. Maybe next time. She had gotten at least part of what she came for. That was something. Tea and sympathy at the office, make him comfortable. Meanwhile, she had that cube to scan on the off chance that something worthwhile was buried on it. The problem was that the general could be working with anybody, so everything had to be checked.

And, of course, she had to check in. In the old days of humans versus humans, an in-person meeting was the most dangerous thing there was for an active agent. The Bane Sidhe’s experience knew better. The expertise of the Darhel at electronic wizardry had led them to conclude thousands of years before that face-to-face meetings were the best security there was. While it was possible that human electronic information warfare would surpass the Darhel’s in time, it hadn’t to date. As a result, critical information was sent electronically or over the airwaves only when there was absolutely no other alternative.

She was getting used to the transit cars now and didn’t have any trouble finding one going in her direction and taking it back to the Corridor.

On the second level from the bottom, on the Fleet and Engineering side, was a sports bar that attracted a solid mix of everything on Titan but colonists, tourists, and nonhumans. It was popular with its clientele because the drinks were relatively cheap, the food filling, and the games on the tank were as close to live as it was possible to get, being tight-beamed up as part of the normal Earth-to-Titan bandwidth. A perceptive client would have noted that people tended to drink more when the drinks were cheap, that drunk people tended to gamble unwisely, and that the establishment provided very convenient access to the house bookie should anyone wish to make a friendly wager on the game.

The sign above Charlie’s was a work of art. Instead of glow paint that looked like neon, it was an actual neon light. Well, neon or one of those other gases. Anyway, it was a big curvy tube of glass instead of glow paint. Like a lot of establishments on the corridor, the bar had double doors to reduce the mixing of too much station air with the air inside. In the case of Charlie’s, this was more to keep the pollution in than out. It was one of the few places on base you could smoke tobacco without either carrying around a filter to clean up after yourself or paying an extra air-scrubbing tax. The proprietor, whose name bore no resemblance to “Charlie,” believed, correctly, that the distinctive bar smell held many nostalgic associations for the class of patrons he wished to attract, and tended to drive away prudes, tourists, and colonists — all of whom would be bad for business in his particular niche.

The briefing materials from the Bane Sidhe had warned Cally what to expect when they chose this particular bar for any necessary in-person meetings, but it was almost impossible to describe the reality, as she found when she stepped through the double doors and into the fog of intermingled stale and fresh tobacco and cheap beer — with almost no undertones of Titan’s particular mix of swamp gas. It was the first place she’d been since the shuttle port in Chicago that actually smelled like anywhere on Earth. She felt a sharp prickling at the back of her eyes as she took a deep breath. The smoke must be irritating them.

The bar wasn’t packed, but it had a healthy crowd for a weeknight. She wove her way through the tables and the clouds of smoke to get to the bar. She had read that at one point Charlie’s had tried a holotank, but forced to choose between holos and tobacco, it had been no contest. Consequently, the tables were all grouped in easy view of large high-definition flatscreens. It wasn’t the flatscreen above the bar that caught her attention, though. The thing that really made her glad she came, regardless of the mission, was the sign, posted next to the impressive array of bottles behind the bar, that said, “Proudly Serving 100% Imported Jamaican Coffee.”

“Coffee, please. With a shot of crème de cacao.” She put some cash on the counter and left a tip out of her change, turning slightly to watch the screen. Baseball. Indianapolis versus Topeka. The Braves were down by two. She didn’t look around the bar. It would have been bad tradecraft, and she had scanned the room thoroughly as she came in. He wasn’t here yet. When he arrived, he’d let her know.

The score was unchanged, but McKenzie had just allowed a double with a runner already on, and she was on her second coffee, when a redheaded man approached the bar and ordered a shot of Kentucky bourbon, and a spare cup. After downing the shot, he tucked a wad of chewing tobacco from a small pouch in his jaw, and looked up at the screen, rubbing his jaw for a second before spitting in the cup. He looked back up at the screen and muttered something that would have been difficult for anyone without enhanced hearing to weed out from the general noise of the bar.

“I told him their bullpen was weak,” he said.

Cally waited until she saw his eyes skim over and past her, fixing intently on someone off to her left for a moment, as if he had found who he was looking for. She finished her drink and got down from the barstool. Contact had been made, the full team was in place. As she wove back through the tables on her way out a particularly large spacer intercepted her with an outthrust arm, sweeping her into his lap as she let out a shriek.

“Hey, baby, I got something you’re just gonna love!” he leered.

Cally delivered a ringing slap that rocked his head to the other side, leaving a bright red handprint on the side of his face. The other hand slipped a cube into his pocket as she pushed herself out of his lap and stalked off towards the door, the picture of feminine indignation. There were rough chuckles from the mostly male assemblage as the large and apparently very drunk spacer rubbed his cheek in bewilderment.

“What’d I do?!” he protested to the air.

Wednesday morning the coffee at the office tasted even worse, since she had had something recent to compare it to. And General Beed was apparently not the kind to be contented with a little roll in the hay now and again. When they were alone, he insisted on touching her, grabbing bits here and there. It wasn’t that she was against a little mutual sex here and there in a fuck buddy sense, but good God, had the man no notion of personal space? Apparently not. She smiled at the annoying beast when he came around now and then and generally took it in stride. Honestly, the man was worse than a lonely cat!

Fortunately for her, one of the general’s theories of proper leadership was that a leader should be seen, frequently and unpredictably, by the men he commanded. While in practice this worked out to a tendency to micromanage his subordinates and get in their hair instead of letting them get on with the job at hand, Cally had to be somewhat grateful for it because it tended to get him out and about for a few hours each afternoon during which she could finally have a few minutes peace.

This particular afternoon he had elected to make a visit to the detention facility, which would keep him out of the office for half the afternoon, at least. Pryce had not gone with him, being busy making arrangements for the general’s wife’s birthday party, the sort of social obligation which was one of the strange but true realities of military bureaucracy in the Galactic age.

And thinking of Pryce, the one absolutely completely good thing about screwing Beed is getting some of those built-up hormones under control so I won’t be tempted to drag anything male behind a bush… or, well, okay, potted miniature tree. So thank God for getting decently laid… or, well, okay, that was a little bit blasphemous… um… whatever. After this mission, I’m definitely hunting down Father O’Reilly and asking him to hear my confession. I’ve… kind of let that slide.

She was filing the printouts of the morning e-mails, while envisioning creative and artistic ways for Beed to die, when she heard a crash and jumped, whirling to find the lieutenant sitting on the edge of her desk, her stapler lying nearby on the floor. He shrugged apologetically.

“Good Lord, Pryce! Don’t sneak up on me like that!” She clapped a hand to her chest. “You scared the hell out of me.” How the hell did he sneak up on me? Me? Nobody sneaks up on me. It’s just… wrong. I feel okay, I don’t think anything’s wrong… geez, he’s quiet. Well, until he trips over something or knocks something over, anyway.

“S-sorry, ma’am. I just dropped by to see how you were settling in.” He grinned mischievously. “Well, and to take a break from my canapé passing and preparations thereto.”

His eyes, and that grin, made her feel like her bones had all suddenly just melted away. She stood there blinking at him for a couple of seconds before managing to get her brain back in gear and move back to her desk.

“I’m settling in okay, I guess.” She pushed her hair back with a hand. “Are there many canapé situations on Titan?”

“Some.” He shrugged. The brass have to do something for fun.”

“That’s a rather irreverent attitude, Pryce.”

“Yes, ma’am. No excuse, ma’am.” But his eyes twinkled at her, and she smiled.

“I’d ask you to dinner again tonight, if we weren’t in the same chain of command.” His eyes focused on hers.

“I’d accept, if we weren’t in the same chain of command,” she met his eyes and looked away, “and if I didn’t think I was likely to have to work late tonight.”

He reached a finger under her chin and pulled her head around, gently, looking her in the eyes. She met his scrutiny for a moment that seemed to last an hour, or maybe a year.

“Okay.” He nodded, and somehow she got the feeling that he understood. She didn’t know how he could have, or how she knew, but she knew he did.

General Beed did not request her presence at a working dinner this evening. Nor did he return to the office this afternoon. Instead, he phoned the office — another eccentricity of his, there was an actual phone on her desk, when she had a perfectly capable PDA that actually was with her when she was away from the desk. On the phone, he requested that she grab a bite of dinner and then bring the Leave File with her, and asked if it would be convenient for him to stop by her quarters on his way between meetings to edit and finalize the changes so she could get the document printed and ready for a staff meeting early Thursday morning. She had, of course, agreed. Sure, General darling. You screw me so maybe I can screw you.

So here she was at Super Burgers with a double deluxe cheeseburger, fries, a double strawberry shake, and a manila envelope, enjoying the fluorescent orange and acid green Galplas décor while she stuffed her food down prior to going to her quarters to try to make some progress on her real job. Oh, joy. He’s not bad looking, and not a bad lay, if he were just a little bit less insensitive.

The restaurant décor had its intended effect and she finished quickly and left, stuffing the trash through the disposal slot on her way out the door. In the transit car on the way back to her quarters she brought up the room controls on her PDA and adjusted the lights, temperature, and background music to reflect the right mood. Relaxed was good.

She hadn’t been home long when he arrived. She’d considered ditching her silks in favor of something less comfortable but more tempting, but had decided it was out of character. Which was just as well. She didn’t actually object to Beed, and he was a step above being alone, and she wanted to find out whatever he knew. Still, she was more comfortable meeting him in the ordinary uniform of her cover than something else. Lingerie would have been a tad too personal. Which was odd because usually by now she would have been so subsumed in the role she wouldn’t consciously think of it being a cover.

As he came in the door, letting it slide closed behind him, she brushed at her hair with one hand in deliberate Sinda-ness. It reminded her of who she was as she shyly, but with increasing eagerness, met his kiss.

Some few minutes later as she rolled with him through yet another position change she almost had to fight for a straight face. Okay, so it’s acrobatics night. Why do men always do this? It’s always either the first or the second lay, and they always go through the same damn five positions, like they’re trying to demonstrate how cosmopolitan or kinky or educated they are, or whatever. Eyes slightly wide, of course I’ve never done this before. Back into character, roll with it, I’d… really… rather… not… have… to fake it. Um… good spot… okay… that works… let’s be nice and enthusiastic so he knows it works. “Oh… oh god that’s so good! God… please, please, please don’t stop… ah… um… ah…” Okay, he’s… getting… the point. Yeah. That’s… g — . Aaah. Okay. Good. All right, your turn, here we go, yeah, that’s right, you taught me to do that you stud you. Sure you did. Come on, come on… There. Good. Now, question is, are you relaxed enough.

“Oh, Bernie, thank you. That was so good.” She hugged him gently, kissing his chest and playing across it idly with her fingers while she lay curled on his shoulder.

“It’s never been like that for me, before. There’s a sense of… I don’t know… authority, maybe. I don’t know, put like that it sounds kind of mundane, and,” she walked her fingers up his chest, “it was wonderful.” She hugged him and gave him a giddy smile, planting another kiss on his chest.

“Oh, I don’t think it’s — what did you say — mundane at all.” He cupped his hand around her breast, idly playing the nipple through his fingers. “You’re a very intuitive woman, Sinda. It’s one of your charms.”

“You,” she started kissing her way down his chest, “are flattering me.” She began idly licking and kissing his skin, enough to be distracting, but not enough to actually render him speechless.

“It doesn’t take any particular intuition to know you’re a general, General.” She traced a circle with her tongue at the crease where his thigh met his hip. “But a little flattery’s okay. I like it. Is it, you know, okay if I do this? You don’t mind, do you? Tell me if, you know, I’m not doing it right.”

“You’re doing fine, sweetheart. Just let your imagination go. Just… uh… no teeth, okay?”

“Mmm… no problem.

“Did I do… that… right?” Her voice was tentative, with a hint of nervous little girl in it, as she snuggled back up against him.

“Oh, yeah,” he breathed. “You should always trust your intuition, dear, especially in bed. You know, I’m not just any general.” His chest inflated slightly. “Generals are a dime a dozen. I’m in this position because I’ve been entrusted with a very important project.” He chuckled, stroking her hair. “You’re not a spy, are you?” he teased. “Anyway, I haven’t really told you anything. Just confirmed your intuition.” He kissed the top of her head gently before swinging his legs over the side of her bed.

“Do you have to go?” She ran a finger down his hip. He caught her hand and lifted it to his lips, gently, before setting it back down at her side.

“I’m afraid so. Clarice gets… querulous… if I’m away overnight.”

She watched him, apparently fascinated, as he dressed, as he kissed her, as he left. As the door slid shut behind him she flipped on the filter next to her bed and lit a cigarette.

“Lights out.” She sat with her back propped against the Galplas wall that served in place of a headboard, eyes open, unfocused, as the single orange point threw shadows on the walls.

Thursday morning, Pryce stopped in to her office while the general was indisposed. Damn this kid. You would think getting laid twice in as many days would have the old hormones down to a dull roar. Nobody should smell this good. It ought to be… I don’t know… illegal or something.

“What’s on your mind, Pryce?”

“I’ve just got a minute.” He turned away from her, running a hand through his hair. Not a good idea with Beed’s emphasis on appearance.

“You’re not… investing too much emotionally in working late… I hope… Dammit, Makepeace, you’re too damn young and I don’t want you to get hurt!”

“I’m young, Pryce? Hello?”

He turned back, stumbling a little, and flushed.

“Okay, yeah, that sounds s-stupid coming from me, but… you’re nice, Captain, and I just hope you’re… careful,” he said.

“Pryce, I’m okay. And I’m not looking for favors. Look, working late sometimes isn’t that bad, and with, you know… Well, mixed marriages of juv and nonjuv are notorious in the service, aren’t they? Gosh, just look at this mountain of work. But it’s all right. The general, bless his heart, is happy today, and all this,” she waved her hand at the paper and filing cabinets, “is much easier when he’s happy, isn’t it, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, ma’am, Captain.” He picked up the file he’d come in for, and paused on his way out the door. “Probably the best attitude you could take, ma’am.”

“Pryce?” she ventured.

“It’s okay, Makepeace. Really.” His eyes were softer, and she had to be content with that.

It was six in the evening, and, at the moment, while collating presentation packets, she was currently considering the entertaining possibility of watching Bernhard Beed nibbled to death by giant carnivorous ants. Giant carnivorous poisonous ants. While staked out on ice. No, ice numbed pain too much. Hot sand? Nails. Nails was good. The insensitive, possessive, obnoxious bastard. He had actually let her sit around doing make-work most of the afternoon, only to call her in at twenty minutes till five and load the copying for this stupid presentation package that mysteriously required very elaborate collating and had to be ready for his review by seven the next morning. Just because he had to go to his wife’s birthday party and couldn’t make time to get a little tonight, the bastard was obviously making sure she was entirely otherwise occupied.

Acid. Concentrated hydrochloric acid on a slow burn, from the toes up. Son of a bitch. She hadn’t realized she had spoken out loud until she heard the familiar voice behind her.

“Now, it can’t be that bad,” he said.

“Aren’t you supposed to be passing canapés?” She didn’t turn around. She really wasn’t in the mood to be cheered up.

“Well, yeah, but the general sent me over here with three pages to be included in between the pie chart and the bar graph, and he wants me to report back.”

“Obnoxious possessive sonofabitch is checking up, is he? It’s not enough that I fuck him, the bastard has to have control over my private time, too. Ooohhh!”

“Gee, Makepeace, I don’t think you should bottle your feelings up like this,” he said.

She turned and froze in the act as she was about to throw the pile of papers in his face, and something about his deadpan face and single quirked eyebrow broke her up and she lost it, laughing.

“Okay, okay. I was a little overboard.” She shook her head, holding her side and catching her breath. “No, I wasn’t, but that wasn’t helping.”

“Hey, you’re allowed to let off steam. In private. But might want to make sure you’re in private, ma’am.”

“Good point, Pryce.”

“You know, ma’am, the general obviously sent me because he felt I was ‘safe.’ I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“Why, bless your heart, Pryce, did you want to stop being safe?”

“Not tonight. Gotta get back to passing canapés. J-just didn’t like the assumption.”

“It’s okay, Pryce,” she pouted at him as he walked out the door, “I don’t think you’re safe.”

The convenient thing about this evening, for Beed, was that she was kept both busy and out of the sight of his wife. The convenient thing for her, once she got the copying and collating done, was that, with Pryce gone, she was the only person in the office and she had a perfect excuse for being there. It provided complete and uninterrupted privacy to search the entirety of CID, turning up three cubes of miscellaneous data that might or might not relate to her mission. Cally was beginning to get nervous about that. Okay, sure, she hadn’t expected a big neon sign flashing, “This Way To The Secret Files,” but other than that tiny bit of pillow talk by the general, they were keeping this operation pretty tight. The three agents they had considered most likely to be helping run the operation all seemed to have full-time workloads of regular CID investigations.

The only really interesting thing she’d found so far was a map in Corporal Anders’ data storage of the areas on this floor assigned to the headquarters of the 3^rd. Most of them were areas she had override access for. Some were not. Of course, with the tactic of hiding in plain sight always being a possibility, everything had to be searched. Tedious, but there it was. The collating provided an excuse to go into an area marked storage down the hall. She could always be claiming to look for boxes of an obscure contrivance called “binder clips.”

By the time she finished getting herself dusty looking through boxes of backup cubes, an old coffee machine, stacks of uniforms and uniform parts, three blank new-in-box PDA’s, a half a box of night-sticks, fairly new-looking full and partial boxes of paper supplies, and, inexplicably, an ancient-looking half-box of blue and silver children’s party hats, her stomach was growling fiercely. The backup cubes, except for the most recent, looked as though they had sat exactly where they were, undisturbed, for quite a long time. She would only waste her time searching them if absolutely nothing else panned out.

In a way, it was getting annoying going out for every meal. After getting a fried chicken salad and a bowl of gazpacho from a café just off one of the transit car docks on the Corridor, she found an Oriental Market and bought a sackful of sealed self-heating dinners. Lemon chicken, mu shu pork, General Tsu’s, hot and sour soup, sizzling rice soup, egg rolls, spring rolls, duck with plum sauce, California roll with sashimi… Yum.

These packages were great. The heater was in the bottom of the package; you just pulled the tab and the chemicals mixed in the heater pack and the heat rose through the food. Well, okay, for some specialty foods, like the egg rolls, the food was spiked on metal conductive toothpicks hooked to the bottom of the package. Still, yum, yum, yum. And no having to go out for it. Things being what they were, she’d still probably be taking most meals out. But at least now she would at least sometimes have another option. Microwaveable was quicker, but the self-heaters tasted better. Okay, it was a matter of personal taste. And whether you’d rather throw packages away or scrub out the microwave once a week. Cally wasn’t real big on housework.

Stewart told his AID to shut off the hologram and leaned back, rubbing his eyes. The problem with an investigation like this was that until you caught someone you really couldn’t eliminate anyone. Some were just more likely than others.

He twirled a ballpoint pen as he thought, a habit revived from his first staff position, way back before the general demise of paper as the medium of military bureaucracy. He stared unseeingly at the matted and framed poster he’d had printed out to break up the unrelieved light green of the office walls. The agents had eyed the print knowingly when he’d hung it, figuring he was opting for paper instead of a window-simulating view screen as a way of brown-nosing the boss.

In fact, it was a reprint of a poster that had been tacked to the wall of his Aunt Rosita’s apartment in his childhood gang days. With the exception of Beed, everyone else was too young to recognize pre-war Malibu Beach. And Beed was from the wrong part of the country. One of the things he appreciated about Sinda was that no matter what else went over her head, he had several times caught her looking wistfully at his poster and had gotten the ineffable impression that somehow, on some level, she actually got it. Even though there were so many things that he just couldn’t talk to her about, she somehow managed to make him feel… understood.

Which could maybe explain why he was so hung up over some fluff-headed ditz that he was sitting here woolgathering instead of getting his work done.

“Diana, turn my monitor back on and give me a keyboard and track spot.” Instantly, a keyboard appeared on his desktop. The red circle projected to the right of the keyboard and the two buttons below it served the function of an old-fashioned mouse. Having learned to type before the war, he could work much faster this way. Fortunately, everything but true AI was well within the reach of a modern PDA, so he didn’t have to worry about Beed twigging to the presence of a real AID and how very much of his daily work activity was being recorded. An aide de camp, naturally, was often at his general’s elbow.

As part of the mission, they had approved attempts to transfer in or out of the office a bit more freely than normally would have been the case. The cover was that a new CO would of course want to pick as many of his own headquarters people as possible. They had managed to replace eleven of the seventeen headquarters and CID office staffers. Out of the now thirteen staffers with a documented humanist connection, nine had both the connection and were new to their position.

Makepeace was on the list, of course, but so was over half the office after you subtracted himself and Beed. Franks was the obvious prime suspect. Sixty plus years of living had taught Stewart that, unlike in holovids or movies, the obvious suspect very frequently was the guilty party. Still, the enemy organization had already proven you couldn’t count on it to obligingly do the stupid or obvious thing.

What it amounted to was that he had fifteen people to watch for patterns, eleven to watch closely, and nine to watch very closely.

Franks had several Earthside communications from his quarters, one to a known humanist activist who was also his wife’s brother-in-law, another to a friend of the family who had not been noted to express humanist sympathies but who, on examination, turned out to have a large number of humanist friends and associates. The calls had been encrypted with a relatively strong public cryptography system that had been released to the public by some anonymous wiseass. The authorities had been chagrinned, and Stewart supposed he ought to be, too, but he couldn’t help being secretly just a bit happy about it. He chalked it up to his misspent youth. Which had actually been rather fun, come to think of it.

Anders had called a boyfriend back home every night the first week and had tapered off since. The hometown honey appeared to be on his way out.

Makepeace had sent e-mail replies to two long letters from her mother, but had kept the discussion to inconsequentials such as descriptions of coworkers and the restaurants and shops in the Corridor.

Sanchez had sent an order to a freight company to ship up a private supply of cigars, bourbon, and Tabasco sauce. Otherwise, he seemed to be fairly typical in that Fleet Strike was becoming his family as age and anti-juv prejudice separated him from his previous connections.

Keally kept contact with his wife and daughter who had not accompanied him up to the Base, but had had no apparent contact with his high school best friend, who taught Sunday school at North Topeka First Methodist, which had taken a notable stance against differential rejuvenation of one member of a married couple.

The rest was more of the same. It was looking more and more like Franks was his man. Only problem was that so far all he had was circumstantial. There had been no overt act. Which meant he could be wrong. Which meant he had to keep digging into the private lives of fourteen innocent people, any way you sliced it.

“Turn it all off, Diana. Time to blow this taco stand.” Tacos. Hmm. It seemed, and was, a lifetime ago that he’d anglicized so painstakingly in his efforts to move beyond the privations of his childhood. At the time, he’d thought it was necessary. In retrospect, he now knew that it hadn’t been. Oh, it had kept him out of the way of some people’s prejudices now and again, but what had really turned him around had been the good influence and example of Gunny Pappas and Mike O’Neal. They’d given him a dream bigger than just himself and his friends, a dream a man could hitch his star to. They’d sold him on America and the dreams of democracy and liberty, sometimes without even saying a word. Good men at the tail end of a good age. Too bad the dream had died. He didn’t know how it had happened. Maybe it had been when the President moved the Capitol to Chicago by decree. The excuse for not changing the Constitution had been the national emergency and the number of states that were overrun by the enemy. Maybe it had been when the candidates for office and the remains of the political parties started accepting anonymous donations in FedCreds and nobody had done anything about it. Maybe it had been when they made the residents of the Sub-Urbs sign waivers of certain rights as a condition of residency. Maybe it had been when the offices of the Toledo Blade were firebombed. No, the damage had already been done well before then. That was just the most obvious nail in the coffin of the dream. Instead of a real investigation, there had been a very thin whitewash, and the rest of the papers had fallen into line. Not that he could blame them, really. He had seen the post mortem pics of the editorial staff.

He walked around the edge of his desk and laid a hand, gently, on the cold glass covering the paper beach. It had been a great dream while it lasted. He sighed. Combination plate from La Colima it is.