John Ringo - Cally's War

When he left to go home, she followed him to note down his home address, found a cheap motel and paid cash for three nights. She settled in, set her alarm for four a.m. and laid out her clothes in easy reach. On the one hand there was no point surveiling him on Saturday since she had to have the job done by Thursday. Weekend patterns were useless. On the other hand, she could pick up some random piece of information helpful in evaluating his value as a source, and some access to his house Monday would be nice, if it were possible.

New Orleans. Mardi Gras parade, no war, no training, freedom for a long weekend. Strings of cheap plastic beads and hurricanes, and a young-looking soldier of the Ten Thousand who looks like he puts in a lot of time in the weight room. She’s Lilly tonight and laughing up into his face and she tries not to go this time but she always does, and now it’s morning and he’s telling her about his wife, again, and she’s trying and trying to get off the bed and kick the bastard in the crotch, but she can’t move, and she’s back in survival training in Minnesota, and the snow falls, and falls, and falls.

She slapped the off button to stop the annoying beeping and rolled out of bed, keeping the lights off to preserve her night vision. This early in the morning her face was clammy and damp, but not quite soaked yet. Oddly enough, she couldn’t remember whatever it was she’d been dreaming about. But then again, when she had to get up in the middle of the night, she never did. The baggy jeans, T-shirt, and windbreaker were all in medium shades of gray. The cotton bandana she shoved in a pocket had once been black and white, but several washings with dark clothes had turned the bits of white patterning a dingy gray-brown. The canvas-topped skate sneakers had started off light blue, but were well broken in and had picked up a solid coating of casual dirt and dust. The hem of the windbreaker covered the black nylon strap of the gray canvas butt pack she fastened around her waist.

She went to his home first, parking down the street and jogging in. Placing the cameras was a matter of setting the little gray dots, half the size of a dime, for short range IR transmission, using the PDA screen to line them up and securing them in place with a bit of adhesive putty. Once they were secured on target, a tap on a screen button set them to record only. Half a dozen of them covering the target’s garage and strategic intersections from trees and signposts and she was back in the car and headed for the mistress’s place. It was five thirty and the pre-dawn gray was beginning to be tinged with pink when she planted a couple of cameras on trees and posts in the apartment parking lot, watching carefully for early risers — a possibility even on a Saturday. Somebody always had to work, and once she had to abort to jogging down to the end of the row of buildings and back, before she got two good camera angles on the door and one on the apartment windows.

Her gray clothes would pass for an early morning jog, and of course were ideal for not being seen in dark and twilight, but as the day warmed they’d become more conspicuous as clothing too drab for any self-respecting coed. Fortunately, with the setup work done, now she had a couple of hours to go back to the hotel and sleep. No point running her reserves down when she didn’t have to.

After a late breakfast, she drove out to the East Chicago Sub-Urb, under a deep blue sky that seemed to stretch forever and was dotted with fleecy clouds. Weeds and trees grew up through the occasional crumbling, abandoned building along the roadside. Many buildings that had been abandoned during the war as young men went into the army and old men, boys, and women fled to the Sub-Urbs had never been reclaimed. For every family of the next generation brave enough to reclaim the surface, another chose the stars and the promise of rejuv, instead. As she neared the Sub-Urb itself, cheap, pre-fab Galplas houses with carefully tended yards and the occasional small vegetable patch clustered in neighborhoods around a couple of large manufacturing plants, where plant employees who had seen the surface in their twice daily bus rides to and from the Urb were gradually recolonizing the surface in search of sunshine and fresh air.

Every Sub-Urb had its “street” corridors, if you knew how to find them. The maintenance database was a dead giveaway. Just look for the run-down area the maintenance workers were reluctant to enter alone. Spray painted graffiti covered the walls, with the lights ripped out except for the smallest amount needed to avoid tripping over the trash pushed into the corners. Public com stations had been vandalized to keep unwary strays from calling for help. Had Marilyn Grant truly come down here alone, she would certainly have been considered one of those unwary strays. As it was, a single look at Cally O’Neal’s game face was enough to ward off other predators in an environment where Darwin had refined the gift of telling predator from prey to a high art. She knew she had found what she needed when she came to a small patch of corridor whose perfect lighting shone like a beacon in the gloom, where a lone boy of perhaps twelve was raptly absorbed in the mural he was painting over the primed Galplas. Cally looked at the image of a benevolent mother, in a red beanbag chair, nursing her baby and her eyes softened in spite of herself.

“Is she someone you know?” she asked softly.

“My momma and baby sister, before the flu came through last year.” He didn’t startle when she spoke, as if he’d sensed she was there, but felt no need to turn away from his work. “I don’t know you.”

“No, you don’t. I’m from… outside. I’m… shopping.”

“Strange place to shop.”

“I was hoping that since you live here you might be able to tell me who to talk to if I wanted to buy some things.”

He turned to look at her and she could see the crucifix and a Saint Christopher medal hanging on the outside of his paint-splattered T-shirt, and it may have been her imagination that he seemed just a bit disappointed as he asked, “You sure you want to buy those things? Might be some better places to do some shopping, some better things to buy.”

“There probably are,” she agreed, “but I’ve got a list to take care of.”

“I’ll take care of it, Tony.” A neatly dressed young man stepped out of the shadows and Cally half-smiled at him.

“I get the feeling you might know somebody who can help me take care of my list.”

“I might. Depends on what you want and what kind of money you got.”

She pulled out a well-used wad of mixed FedCred and medium-bill dollars and let him see it before wordlessly shoving it back in her left front pocket.

“Yeah, we can talk.” He motioned for her to follow him farther down into the half-light of the corridor beyond the mural. “Surprised you made it down this far without trouble, that kind of cash.”

“Trouble doesn’t usually come looking for me.” She shrugged, letting her eyes go back into thousand-yard-stare mode. “I have that kind of face.”

“Fine. Whatcha buyin’?”

She left with significantly less cash, the necessary drugs and needles, a small bottle of ether, and the most expensive thing, a good quality fan-intake air scrubber — fortunately a more or less common consumer item with anyone who smoked anything… sensitive… in an Urb. The legitimate shopping section yielded a cheap hot plate, a set of permanent markers, a small mortar and pestle, a pair of glass screw-cap salt and pepper shakers, a set of glass tumblers, a bottle of Everclear, a box of long wooden party toothpicks and she was ready to go back to the hotel and do some cooking.