John Ringo: Sister Time

“God, I almost didn’t recognize you, but I said from across the room, no two girls could walk like that. Blonde really suits you. A bit dated, perhaps.” She plumped her own fashionably chestnut curls into place. “But I always say you should wear what looks good on you and to hell with little things like fashion. I’m never daring enough to do it, though. Anyway, you look marvelous ! Oh, is that Lucienne Taylor-Jones? I just must speak to her! Kiss kiss, must run!” The woman weaved off in the direction of an eighteen-year-old looking, red silk-clad grande dame on the arm of an apparently sixteen-year-old uniformed man with a pair of stars on his collar.

Cally grinned privately at her “friend’s” back. There’s always one. But it makes it easier to get to the door.

Another female hand, this one with an electric blue and white French manicure, rested lightly on her arm as she wove towards the door at an oblique angle. “Love the dress, darling. It reminds me of something from Giori’s Fall collection. Did you by any chance notice where they’ve hidden the Ladies’?”

Cally hadn’t, but she had memorized the floorplan of strategic parts of the hotel and business center. “Right over there behind the Birdwell sculpture.” She pointed across the room to a gaudy confection of Galplas and cobalt blue glass, formed to resemble yards of lace draped over a Shaker chair.

“Ah, I see the sign now. Good eye for art, by the way, and thank you.” The woman left her, hurrying as much as the crowd would permit.

As she passed a waitress in a tuxedo that was just a hair too tight for her hips, Cally drained her champagne and added the empty glass to the woman’s tray. Another tray she passed had Oysters Rockefeller, and mission or no mission, she couldn’t resist taking two. Three would have been conspicuous. Not that she wasn’t anyway. She could feel the male eyes on — well, on her everything, really. Rounded butts were apparently the thing, courtesy of some starlet or other. And the captain she’d been impersonating when the slab went away had also been not quite wasp-waisted, but close enough. In the little black dress she’d checked out from Wardrobe, it showed. Goddamn conspicuous slab job. She simpered past some guy with a Kirk Douglas chin and a martini, who moved just enough to be standing way too close, resisting the impulse to spike him in the instep with her heel. It didn’t help that her last stolen weekend with Stewart — she still didn’t understand why he insisted on her using a name that had been an alias in the first place and wasn’t even his current one — had been damned near six months ago. Between that and the overcharged female juv hormones, which must have been somebody’s idea of a bad joke, she was getting downright cranky. Well, a secret marriage sounded romantic at the time.

She carefully didn’t sigh with relief when she finally reached the door. She nodded to the door attendant as she slid past a couple who were presenting their invitations, and ducked out of the building through a fire exit. Holding her PDA up to her ear, she pretended to be dictating a voicemail to a friend, rounding a corner before telling her buckley to page the team.

A few moments later, an antique limousine pulled up and the rear door opened. She climbed in, gratefully slipping off the evil high heels and massaging her sore feet. The glass between the driver’s seat and the passenger compartment lowered slowly. A man in a green and black chauffeur’s uniform that contrasted nicely with his properly spiked red hair glanced up into the rearview mirror and met her eyes. The slight bulge in his cheek and the faint but unmistakable whif of Red Man tobacco was out of character for a chauffeur, but didn’t surprise her in the least.

The two other men in the car couldn’t have looked more different if they’d tried. Harrison Schmidt was slightly too handsome, on his worst day, to be a field agent. If he wore the right clothes to make his triangular frame look paunchy, and with the right makeup, he could look nondescript enough to get by in a support role. They tried to keep him from having to do so, since if he lost concentration his native dramatic flair tended to get in the way. He simply refused to alter the windswept, golden-brown hair that could have made a holo-drama hero die from envy. But his talents for obtaining or making virtually anything they needed, regardless of the circumstances, made him a valuable addition to the team.

“Oh, don’t tell me you went in with your hair like that!” their fixer said.

“What’s wrong with my hair?” Cally put a hand to her hair and looked around at the interior of the car trying to find a makeup mirror.

“Nothing, if you like split ends. And when you wash it you really need to work through a little mousse while it’s still wet. And a hot oil deep conditioning treatment once a month. My hairdresser has an herbal shine rinse that works wonders. You need it, hon. And if you can possibly avoid it, no more color changes for you until you can let it grow out enough to trim the damaged hair off.” He flicked a nearly invisible speck of dust off his immaculate, charcoal-gray sweater.

“This is my natural color. Well, now, anyway,” she said.

“No, dear, it’s been bleached and dyed back to your natural color. Not the same at all. When you were first back from sabbatical it was all fresh and not that bad, but the years of chemicals have taken a toll. Honey, you have got to start taking better care of it if you want to be able to pass at parties like this one.”

Tommy Sunday coughed into his hand, looking at Harrison.

“Dude, you’re blind. Cally, ignore him. You look gorgeous as always, okay?” he said.

Tommy Sunday was a large man. He seemed to crowd the back of the limousine all by himself. His hair was so dark it was practically black. In an earlier time, he wouldn’t have looked out of place among a pro-football team’s defensive line. In fact, his own father had played. It was part of the reason he was such an avid baseball fan. Oh, he’d long since made peace with his father’s memory, but the love of baseball had stuck. Cally was sure that he would be eager to get back to base as quickly as possible tonight, entirely out of a dedication to professional efficiency, and having nothing to do with game three of the World Series being due to start within the next half hour. Personally, she didn’t think the game had been the same since they let Larry Kruetz get away with betting on baseball. Sure, the only incidents they could prove were on games in the other league, but she suspected the commissioner’s leniency had more to do with the Rintar Group owning a majority stake in the St. Paul Mavericks.

“Now, if we go ahead and get the post-op review out of the way, we can all get home quicker. Everything went okay, right?”

“I got the keys, if that’s what you mean. And a line on another job. Hey, where’s my stuff?” Cally said.

“What? Run that job bit by me again.” Papa O’Neal said, glancing sharply at her in the rearview mirror

“Your other granddaughter sends her love.” Cally lied. Michelle hadn’t, actually, but she would have, of course, if she had had more time. Or at least the Indowy social facsimile thereof. She suppressed a slight grimace. In many ways it was harder to deal with the Indowy-raised humans than it was with any of the other races of aliens. You expected the Galactics to be alien. And you could always tell the Indowy-raised at a glance. They either wore robes like Michelle’s, or street clothes of a particular shade of green that no other human would ever wear. She was surprised they hadn’t developed a fabric with active chlorophyll.