Honor of the Clan

Chapter Nineteen

“Sorry to throw you in at the deep end again, Sands,” Cally apologized for about the fifth time as the black car purred quietly through the Chicago streets. “They’ve got to put together some new permanent teams with some of the DAGgers as soon as possible, and they’re all guys. Trained female agents are at a premium. Gotta have at least one for a well-rounded—”

“Urban-capable team. Yes, Cally, I know. We really did cover this shit in school. I’ll be fine,” Sands reassured her.

“Don’t get overconfident,” George reminded her seriously. “No plan survives contact with the enemy, and that goes double for our kind of ops.”

He wasn’t going along on what would normally have been his kind of job, but instead was staying outside to cover exits with Tommy. Cally found it amusing to watch him having kittens over a job that she really needed minimal backup for herself. Backup was nice, but she had done a number of these jobs over the years as the sole shooter inserted, simply because sometimes a woman could go where a man could not, could obtain intel which would not have been available to a man. Which was, again, the reason every team, if at all possible, had one female agent. Sure, they could be assigned around on an as-needed basis, but the lost unit integrity was a cost that outweighed any benefits. That might change now that they didn’t have the slab to upgrade female agents to a physical level mostly on par with the men. Policy for now was to continue the standing practice while trying to get the slab back.

Harrison crunched across a layer of rock salt as he pulled up to the curb in front of the gray building. Lighting shot up from the foot of the building, angled in to illuminate it.

Cally and Sands got out of the car with their big shoulder bags slung over their shoulders. Beneath their coats showed dark, patterned tights and high heels nobody sane would wear in Chicago in winter. Nobody, that is, but a prostitute. In their case, they were dressed high end. Visiting girls, as long as they weren’t too obvious, were completely unremarkable.

Blessing a building management that either couldn’t be bothered to change the pass code, or wouldn’t bother the tenants to do so, Cally punched in the security access code for the door. Building management could have put in a more sophisticated entry system, but few did. The more awkward it was for residents to get their friends and pizza delivery in and out, the less likely potential renters were to choose that apartment. With supply outstripping demand, landlords needed every edge they could get, and when it got down to cases, residents just wanted the feeling of security.

Amazing that someone like Johnny Stuart didn’t have a better sense of self-preservation and had lasted this long in his job. His run of luck triumphing over stupidity was about to run out. Hitting the stairs, the first thing that Cally and Sands did was ditch the impractical shoes into their bags, freeing up the rubberized soles of their tights to get a good, nonimpairing grip on the floor. The stairs, of course, were rubber treaded — landlords hated getting sued — but the stairwells and the surface under the treads were the same rough brick-red tiles as the hallway. The walls here, also like the hall, were not Galplas. However, in an attempt to look more expensive, the builders had tried to counterfeit the appearance of that substance. All the edges where walls met each other, floor, or ceiling were slightly beveled, as tended to happen with the real thing. The strip across the top of walls and stairways that would have glowed was frosted glass with diffused lighting behind the panels. Silly, but it probably raised the rent they could charge.

On the third floor, they skipped down the hall silently to position themselves quickly, ditching their cumbersome coats on the floor. Cally set the shaped charge on the wall herself. School training or not, Sands was damn green and, sorry, didn’t get to play with the stuff that went boom.

Sands popped hearing protection into her ears as Cally stepped back and they ducked down the hall a bit. The older agent shrugged apologetically. She didn’t need the stuff. Body nannites would repair her own ears as a matter of course, but the newbie was still young and au naturel, which meant if she got herself into needing a hearing job, it would take some regen, and the beancounters begrudged every penny of overhead for avoidable wear and tear.

The fuse counted down quickly, with the two women jamming their hands up against their ears and holding their mouths open. No avoidable damage. Besides, the pressure change was uncomfortable, anyway.

They were moving almost before the dust started downward, each with a Hiberzine pistol drawn and at the ready, but the first steps through the breached wall were a nightmare. Adrenaline was singing through Cally’s brain as she took in the gross intelligence failure indicated by the pink-rose walls. The next thing she saw was a child just a few years older than her Megan, down and bleeding, clearly thrown back by the blast.

Field-trained instincts about care of the wounded moved her pistol for her. Hiberzine. She pointed at the child and pulled the trigger. Click. Oh, goddamn it, a fucking jam.

“Shoot the kid, dammit,” she yelled at Sands.

The younger agent didn’t have a veteran’s reflexes, but she had graduated at the top of her class for several reasons. One of them was steadiness under pressure. She didn’t hesitate, pumping the girl with a dart from her own pistol which, thankfully, worked. Demonstrating another cool under crisis judgment, she swapped pistols with her teammate without comment, giving the functional weapon to the best shot. The jammed pistol she took for herself, as Cally noted approvingly that she was fully in the zone, watching her back and clearing the jam smoothly at the same time.

The man in his pajamas, Stuart, must have been groggy, but he wasn’t moving like it. He was on the move even as his face turned to ash from the sight of his child on the floor, hitting the ground and doing something to the floor that made a trapdoor pop up. Cally got a shot off as he disappeared down the hatch, but swore as it missed. Some days you got chickens, some days you got feathers.

She grabbed Sands by the collar as the green operator tried to dive after the target. “Booby traps,” she said. “He’s gone. We clear the place.”

Yes, the word was not to linger over a search for the AID, but he might not have had time or presence of mind to grab it. It was get the AID or have a busted mission, probably her own bungle for slowing down for the child. She swore under her breath. Again, some days you got chickens.

In the other bedroom, her eyes lit on the bedside table and she snatched up the AID. “Paydirt!”

“Here.” She pressed the device into the other woman’s hands and moved smoothly back to the doorway of the breached room, scooping up the preteen girl into a fireman’s carry. It was worth the small risk to get an innocent child to medical care. Cally swore up a blue streak as they ran down the stairs, the sticky wetness of the girl’s blood, and the rust smell, reminding her of what they’d unwittingly done.

“Buckley, tell ’em we’re clear,” she announced on the way down, pelting down the hallway with Sands right behind her, slowing so the other woman could get the door for her, and out into the icy night. The cold frosted their breath, but they felt none of it through the pumping adrenaline and the body heat from running the stairs.

“What the?” George was holding the door open as they sprinted to the car. Cally ducked in holding the girl, while Sands displayed good sense once again by opening the front passenger door and squirming into Tommy Sunday’s lap, slamming the door behind herself. It was a tight squeeze for them, but allowed room for the girl in the back seat.

“What the fuck happened?” Tommy asked over his shoulder.

“Bad intel. Got the AID, so we got something.” Cally brushed her hair back behind her ear with one hand and grimaced as she pulled it away, bloody. She must look like hell. She looked down soberly at the little girl and decided she didn’t give a shit how she looked.

“Sounds like it’s going to be one hell of an AAR,” Tommy said.

Medical had that predominance of white favored in most hospitals. Cally supposed it was because white showed dirt, but she doubted any germs would dare to grow in the pervasive odor of antiseptic. They’d choke. Even if part of the antiseptic smell was Cally herself. They had doused her in an antiseptic shower, made her swish her mouth with something foul, then handed her a mask, a paper do rag, and a paper gown that caused a draft and showed her naked ass to half the world. She ignored it.

Right now, she was more concerned with Mary Lynn Stuart, laid out on the stainless steel operating table. The girl was caked in blood most places except where they had cut her clothes away. She also had the blue stain of medical’s preferred antiseptic.

“So how long will it take her to recover?” she asked the surgeon, who, unaccountably, had not yet hit the kid with the Hiberzine antidote, nor was there a regen tank pulled up to the side of the table, nor a couple of first-year interns to lift her in. One lone intern stood watching, keeping his hands to himself. Cally had seen moderate to serious wounds before and was getting alarmed. The pre-Hiberzine exam was usually routine and short, unless they had shrapnel to pull out, in which case it was a full O.R. setup. In this case, Dr. Whatsis was taking way too long with the scanner thingamajigs.

“I’m afraid it’s not a when, Miss O’Neal. It’s an if, and a how much.”

“What? She’s just got a couple of gut wounds. It should be nothing. What the hell?” she asked. Then she remembered her manners.

“Note the entry wound.” The surgeon lifted the girl’s matted hair, separating it where the strands had already been pulled apart. “This is what got her. It didn’t have enough power to exit through the skull.” He laid her head down gently, face still swollen from Hiberzining. “So it bounced around a bit. Then, to make matters worse, the last thing Hiberzine hits is the core of the brain. Everything had time to bleed a little.”

“What does that mean in real terms? Does she have some kind of chance, and how much without the damn slab?”

“I can save maybe forty percent. That’s above the twenty-five percent threshold. I happen to have another child who just missed the threshold, and some of the salvagable material from her might be usable for the patient. Otherwise, we find female patients as close to her age as possible, but they will all be below threshold, so we’ll need several. Fortunately, if you can look at it that way, we’ve acquired a few over the years. I’ll have to see exactly what we can save, and then do a database match.” He shrugged unhappily. “Twenty years ago, we couldn’t have done it without the slab. Fortunately, outside world gene therapy has progressed to the point that we can remap the blood and tissue typing in vitro for all the donors. Or, if administration believes we can have the slab back any time soon, we’ll stack her and use it to assemble the combination. She has a fifty-fifty chance if we do it without the slab, and a ninety-five plus percent chance if we use the slab. Even if the slab procedure fails,” he used air quotes on the term. “What that means in practical terms is that she’ll have a long rehab with psychiatric difficulties in line with the early slab patients. They’ll eventually integrate her, but it’s a long, traumatic, frustrating process.”

He gave Cally a long, steady look. “You’re more likely to know when or whether we can expect the slab back, or not.” His expression said plainly that even though he wasn’t cleared for the higher level negotiation information, it would have a major effect on his treatment decisions.

Cally jumped as her buckley vibrated at her hip.

“I’m supposed to tell you to take this call in your quarters,” it said.

“Stack her for now. I have to take this call right now.” Her look at him was serious, and carried more information than she should give away. “That information could change within days. Keep your mouth shut.” She jerked a thumb at the intern, “And give him a scrubber. You’re a mature juv physician. He looks like a kid because he is.”

The intern jumped. A scrubber was another name for a common interrogation drug that had the side effect of memory loss of several days prior. Cally could see the consequences of forgetting his past forty-eight hours, and that must be a wrench in this case.

“Sorry, son,” she said, turning to the doctor. “I know you would, anyway, but please put him on retroactive leave, not charged to him, and generally do all you can to blunt the consequences.” She looked back at the young man. “Before he gives it to you, in these kinds of cases it’s common to debrief you of any important information or appointments you may have to or want to compensate for.”

The kid relaxed immediately, and with her wealth of life experience, Cally suspected the concern was a girl. Bummer. She suppressed a smile.

“I’ll let you know anything I can as soon as I get it,” she promised the surgeon. “And now I have to go.”

Cally was in a new room from the one she usually had at base. Her old one was bigger, with a connecting door, and hence had been assigned out to one of the dependent families. She’d been too busy to do more than get the number from her buckley, although of course somebody had carted up her steamer trunk of on-base clothes and gear.

The room smelled dusty, although it had clearly been cleaned and vacuumed, since the marks were still on the carpeting. This had probably just made the dust worse, and she sneezed as she walked in and flipped on the light. She hadn’t expected voice activation in these quarters.

The bedspread was whole, but grayed out as if a newer one had long been traded out someplace else, and the furniture style was late-period Bane Sidhe dinged up. No holoprojection center to play cubes. That was not really a big deal, as her buckley was fully loaded and had the capability to project a cube point seven five meters on a side rather than the usual ten centimeters. The only thing that sucked about it was buckley had this annoying habit of talking during the holo, and her efforts to shut him up had spotty results, at best.

Right now, she didn’t have any need for a holo, because her sister was standing in the middle of the room.

“Hi. How are you?” Cally asked her, because she certainly couldn’t tell from the mentat’s placid exterior, immaculate if dull brown robe, not a hair out of place in the bun on her head, except that said bun was now held in place by a pair of red and gold enameled chopsticks. “Nice do,” she nodded towards the hair. On Michelle, anything colorful or personal was a major fashion statement.

“You really like them? They were a pres—” She sighed. “Busy. Very busy, which is why I have not spoken to you until now about matters I really wish I could have given you all possible time to prepare for. I truly had no idea how widespread and general the pogroms against the Indowy Bane Sidhe were. It appears that many Darhel drew the same conclusion at once. The number of refugees coming to Earth is much larger than I had originally believed.”

“How much larger?” Cally asked. “We haven’t got unlimited resources.”

“Several thousand,” Michelle said. “Up to and including major clan leaders.”

“Michelle,” Cally said angrily. “We can’t support that. We especially can’t support that given that those same Indowy cut us off not two months ago! We get support from them, not the other way around!”

“Your purpose is not support,” Michelle said. “They are coming here because they are being hunted by humans. Your job is to keep them alive until we can calm the Darhel enough to reintegrate them or find some other place to put them. And it’s not really up for discussion. I don’t like being caught in your intrigues, but if you’re going to catch me up in them at least give me credit for sense. The credits associated with this action are going to put the Clan in a very comfortable position. Not agreeing to protect them would cause a final disavowal of the Clan and quite probably give the Darhel the information as trade. There really is no choice in the matter. I must go.”

With that she, as usual, vanished. The hoity-toity mentat-fuck.

Cally sank down onto the bed, dumbfounded.

“You are sooo screwed,” her buckley said cheerfully.

“Yeah, buckley, this time I agree with you.”

“Awww. You’re no fun.” It shut up on its own and Cally was sure it was pouting.

“We’re getting what?” Father O’Reilly’s face alternately purpled and turned ashen. “Callista, get the Indowy Aelool. Tell him it’s urgent.” He looked up at Cally again. “And it is urgent. The only irreplaceable thing in the universe is time.”

“You say she couldn’t tell you more about the number of refugees than ‘several thousand’?” he asked.

“No sir.” Cally sat without being invited because the shock was still hitting her and she decided she really, really needed to.

“And all you got was an order to take care of them somehow and negotiating power to do it. The latter isn’t small, mind you, it’s just a question of whether it can be done.” He rubbed his hand worriedly as if fingering a rosary around his neck. “We can’t buy that much food, let alone move it around, but we’re going to have to get in motion what we can do, and now.” He looked at Cally helplessly. “All our evacuation plans postulate temporary dispersion to hiding, and then exfiltrating by dribs and drabs into various rogue city states, in the hope of rebuilding somehow, and we don’t know how. Can Clan O’Neal help at all?”

As he asked this, the small Indowy clan head entered the office, ears nearly flat with concern. “Your AID said you sounded very worried.”

To those who knew how to read Indowy expressions, and by now Cally was an expert, “very worried” was an understatement. One she agreed with.

“First off, let me make quite clear that any help Clan O’Neal gives in any way in anything remotely touching on this whole problem does not constitute adopting or taking responsibility for anyone.” She fixed Aelool with a stern stare. “Your customs aren’t ours. Aliens are alien. Got it. You get it that there will be no misunderstandings here. Anybody who’s not our responsibility and in our Clan right now does not become our responsibility by any of this. By ‘any of this’ I mean any event we say is associated with this. Are we all absolutely clear on that?” She looked at the priest, and then back to Aelool.

“Yes, absolutely,” Aelool said.

Father O’Reilly nodded. Cally O’Neal angry was a formidable thing. “Crystal,” he said.

She thought about the other DAGgers on base. Some of the Indowy might be very useful to have at some point, even if it did entail responsibility. She’d better be clear on that, too. “Also, that does not completely rule out us adopting any person or persons at a later date, but if we do, it will be a specific invitation and by that I mean what we say is a specific invitation. You will respect that our alien minds are alien to you as well. Get it?”

She waited for both to respond in the affirmative before continuing.

“Good. Now that that’s straight, Edisto Island is overloaded with the number of DAGger families we can handle without anyone noticing from satellite or air. That is, if they’re looking, and we have to presume they will be.”

Nathan O’Reilly sunk his head in his hands, drawing them down his face as he absorbed the grim truth.

“I understand the need to evacuate. If we make this place Grand Central station, it will be found. Especially given our little war with the Tir’s people right now,” she said.

“The only other large, covert organization I know of who has the resources to help at all are the Tong, and they may not take the job, and even if they do, they don’t come cheap,” she said. “Especially when they know you’re desperate.”

“If it is a matter of debt—” Aelool began.

“The Tong aren’t like the Darhel. They will not hold your debt at interest, or at least not for long. They couldn’t care less about politically controlling you, they just want money and power. Their own kind of power, not the Darhel’s. They want sufficient power and control to support and further their efforts to make money,” Cally told him. His expression was so bewildered that she thought she’d better at least sort of explain.

“It’s what they do,” she said. It was all the explanation she had without going into a lot of what would be xenopsych to the Indowy, and she wasn’t even sure it was possible for him to get his head around the concept, because all they had experience of in business was the Darhel.

“They are going to insist on being paid regular payments, sufficiently large to pay off the debt in a set period of time. No, don’t relax. Think human lifespan without rejuv. I am almost certain they will not take a debt schedule that takes more than thirty years to pay off completely.”

The alien looked shocked and even a little offended, and Cally couldn’t help thinking “welcome to the real world.” Even the Indowy Aelool tended to assume it was humanity’s job to understand the minds of the Galactics and adjust to them, rather than each Galactic race having an equal need to understand humans. They looked down on what they thought of as vicious, primitive omnivores, and then got surprised whenever it came back to bite them in the ass. Despite the gravity of the situation, Cally couldn’t help but take small satisfaction in that.

“I might could negotiate something,” she said. “I don’t know what, I don’t know how much, and I don’t even know if. Michelle was right about one thing, though. Our vital interests are at stake here. I know I’ve got negotiating power for the refugees. Do I have it for you?” She looked at O’Reilly and Aelool in turn, ensuring their agreement. Her buckley was recording nonverbal gestures of assent, anyway. She didn’t strictly need them to say it out loud as long as they were clear.

“Fine. It’s easier if I send a courier to fetch my husband, if possible, since I need to be here probably more than he needs to be wherever he is. I happen to know he’s on Earth indefinitely, anyway. It’s business. Potentially big business. Even if he doesn’t get a deal, the Tong will be content with him trying.” She brushed at her hair nervously with one hand. “No, on second thought, I’ll meet him partway. Like you said, time’s irreplaceable. It’s quicker and easier if we don’t have to take him through a bunch of special rigamarole to get him in here.” She waved her hand, indicating the base.

“Is anyone sorry I’m married, now?” she asked sweetly, not waiting for a reply as she left.

James Stewart, aka Yan Kato, reflected on how much trouble he’d be in if his employers knew he’d given his wife this extensive a list of their network of safe meeting places. A business organization like the Tong ran on negotiations and deals. Each organization to its nature: the Bane Sidhe needed safe houses; the Tong needed privacy for business. Of course, he’d be in lethal trouble if they knew he had a wife, and who she was. However, in this case, it was going to make them a buttload of money.

This meeting place was especially well camouflaged, because while it was a restaurant, one ordinarily did not associate the Tong with places like Harry’s Barbecue Palace in West Bumfuck Indiana, even if one knew the owner’s wife was Chinese. At nineteen hundred, it was pitch dark outside except for a couple of parking lot lights and the great big pink neon sign on the roof outside, announcing the name of the place to any of the locals too braindead to remember it or, more optimistically, to stray travelers coming in off the interstate.

Pine trestle tables had a thick coating of some kind of clear varnish. Stewart supposed they could afford real pine because it was the quickest growing, lowest grade of wood there was. Ceiling fans churned slowly above, despite the season, to circulate the patrons’ after-dinner smokes. A cheap plastic carnation sat in an equally cheap vase beside a steel napkin holder, salt and pepper shakers, barbecue sauce and ketchup. He really loathed this shit, but he wasn’t going to criticize his wife’s choice of restaurant. He’d just order a cheeseburger and be done with it. He looked at the menu and winced at the prices for real meat.

His wife walked in the fire exit of the meeting room, all five foot ten of luscious. He really hated it that their belated honeymoon had been cut short, but acknowledged wryly that the miracle was that it wasn’t cut short sooner. He had seen pictures of her before, but the only Cally he had ever known wore the body of one Captain Sinda Makepeace for a cover role seven and a half years ago. If, probably when, Cally got her real body back, it would be a major change for him to adjust to. The original Cally was also quite beautiful, not that he was biased. It would just be like she was in a new, different body to him, while it would be going back to the same original one for her. The original had smaller tits, among other things, but he really looked forward to exploring all the differences himself, whenever.

Part of him was regretful for what he was about to do to her. Part of him had that competitive buzz that he mentally slapped himself for, but that was there regardless. The sad truth was, his wife totally sucked at business, and whoever sent her out to negotiate a major deal had to be a fucking moron. However, she had already told him that she was negotiating for a bunch of Indowy clans, not even for the O’Neals, so he had zero conflict of interest in taking them for all he could wring out of her. Which would be a lot.

The truth, which she couldn’t possibly know, was that he had already made the beginnings and inquiries of expanding the Tong’s new shipping venture completely on their side. It became very profitable to smuggle from various unreclaimed parts of the world when truly competent people were available for hire to kill Posleen, rather than the usual crop of low-grade mercenaries. One of the hitches in the plan had been lack of available labor that could be spared from the network, disappeared from where it was, and relocated to the new ventures. Indowy worked like little green labor machines, and if the Bane Sidhe were evacuating their base, they’d be evacuating their admittedly few Sohon tanks, tools, and other necessaries, which would then also become available for hire. Hey, any covert GalTech production availability was priceless. He mentally rubbed his hands together.

Then there was the slab. Dear God let her be naïve enough to undervalue the use of the slab. He was, alas, confident that his prayers would be answered. He suppressed a grin and slapped himself again. Then again, a man was supposed to enjoy taking advantage of his wife. Boy was she gonna be pissed when she caught him. He was pretty sure he would survive this. Pretty sure. He’d just explain that it hadn’t been her money, what a good job it did of setting his employers’ minds to rest about his loyalty, and how much less likely the Tong was to kill him when they eventually found out about the marriage. That’s it. Present it as a when. It was close enough to true, anyway. Yeah, he was pretty sure.

There was a reason he watched her stock picks and portfolio very carefully. It wasn’t that she was dumb. Far from it. She just had no idea of the economic value of things beyond casual consumer purchases and light, backpack-level smuggling. And, poor girl, she trusted him.

“Good evening, Mr. Yan,” Michelle said as she slid into the booth with Cally.

“Oh… shit.”