John Ringo: Sister Time

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

“Oh, jeeze,” Cally sighed. “Fine. Whatever. We’re expensive.”

“I had assumed as much,” Michelle said calmly.

“If you have that much backing, I need to know who you’re working for,” Callly said.

“This is primarily a personal venture. Although it is of course in the larger interests of Clan O’Neal and all the clans.”

“Personal? How much do you make?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They weren’t used to being robbed.

Cally suppressed the temptation to hum as she pressed the button on the inside of the door to close it. The fancy lock probably had recorded that it had been accessed with a manufacturing code, but that just added to the mystery for the Darhel. She lifted the edge of a cushion and kicked the empty gas grenade shell underneath. She wanted it found, just not right away.

I don’t know what the hell to think about all that. I’ll think about it after I’m out. First things first. She hurried to the door as one of the Indowy began to twitch. They’ll be awake any second now. She glanced at her watch again. She’d made up time on being able to just close the drawer instead of reassemble it. Thank God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are definitely worse things. She snagged a glass from a tray carried by a balding, forty-something man in an ill-fitting tux. Including being stuck in a dead-end job like waiting on these bastards. She jumped as a hand groped her butt and glanced back to see a man who looked like a seventeen-year-old geek in a tuxedo disappearing into the crowd with his matronly wife on his arm. Case in point.

A slim socialite with the tight face characteristic of good old-fashioned plastic surgery caught her arm. Cally suppressed her reflexes, turning a blinding but polite smile on the woman.

“Gail? Is that you ? Why the rumors said you weren’t due back for at least another two weeks. It looks fabulous .” The woman chattered at her, not pausing to wait for a response, “Where did you get the full set, you naughty girl, you. Oh, gawd, and the boobs look great ! A bit over the top, perhaps, but you always were the drama queen, weren’t you.”

“It’s so good to see you!” Cally piped in a bright, cheerful generic Chicago accent, noting from the woman’s eyes that she was probably too blitzed to even notice that Cally wasn’t this “Gail,” whoever she was.