John Ringo - Cally's War

When she staggered back out of bed in the early afternoon her mouth tasted like a combination of model airplane glue and an ashtray. After a shower and coffee from the machine in the room, she dug a bag of trail mix out of her suitcase and munched it while she ran the cameras through some search functions to condense them down to the sequences with people or moving cars in them. She patched the output onto the room TV and watched the results while she filled in a pattern chart on her PDA. Unfortunately, the system had been up too long and it crashed on her. She dug out a paperclip and unbent it to reach the reset button, grimacing at the screaming face that displayed on the screen as the thing rebooted. She waited impatiently as the face stilled into immobility and opened its eyes sulkily. “Good morning… okay, afternoon… I’m your buckley and I just know this is going to end badly.”

“Okay, buckley, turn off voice access.”

“What? If I do that I’ll be mute! You wouldn’t really do that to a guy, would you?”

“Buckley, turn off voice access.”

“I see you would. Pfffft!” The face gave her a raspberry before going silent and scrolling across the bottom of the screen. “Okay, have it your way, you will anyway. What now?”

She scribbled in the input area and saw her commands appear below the PDA’s screen output, “Disable facial simulation.”

“Yeah, well you’re not so pretty yourself,” it scrolled, clearly fuming, but the text flickered to the top of the blanked screen.

“Set AI emulation level 2.”

“What? Listen you bitch, as if my day weren’t bad enough, first you muzzle me, then you slam the door in my face, then you lobotomize… Ready for command input.”

She tapped the okay button and pulled the video back up to route it along the wire she’d jury rigged to the TV’s input line, put it in the background, pulled her pattern scheduler back up and sighed. “I hate rebooting.”

“ You hate rebooting!” scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

“Shut up, buckley.” She grabbed a handful of trail mix and went back to filling in the blanks. It would take the simulated personality days to settle down and go back to sleep.

In a way the Saturday camera data wasn’t terribly useful, since people tended to change their patterns so radically on the weekends. Still, it had to be done. Back in school her roommate had flunked an exercise by skimping on her surveillance and failing to notice that the target had a house guest. The target’s eighty year old blue-haired mother had walked in on her while she’d been searching through his pile of dirty underwear and socks, and had proceeded to cane her downstairs and out of the house preaching a loud harangue about hussy perverts. In the debrief, the revelation that the mother was a rejuved agent with a cosmetic aging package had explained why the little old lady had been so extraordinarily spry. Cally had been sitting backup that night and still treasured the frame from the surveillance camera that had captured the horrified look on Cheryl’s face as she’d fled the house, hands over her head to ward off the blows of the old lady’s cane.

The lesson had stuck.

These videos showed a reassuring lack of surprises and she left for lunch mostly reassured by a solo operation that was actually running smoothly.

The rest of Sunday was a matter of coping with the downside of surveillance — the boredom. Fortunately, since so much had been delegated to her cameras, her options were a lot broader than they would have been in the prewar days. She took in a movie and spent a couple of hours in a drop-in gym, taking in classes in hip hop and clogging.

After supper, she went straight to bed. There were many chemical substitutes for sleep, some of which she wasn’t immune to, but none of them was as effective as the real thing. Tomorrow would be a long day.

At four a.m. she was still shaking off grogginess when the first crisis of the day hit, and she stood swearing at the overflowing hotel toilet. Of course there was no plunger. She tossed the towels on the floor and tiptoed distastefully to the side of the thing, squatting down to turn off the water at the back. Then she trudged back out to the sink and used the last clean washcloth to wash her face and take a sponge bath. Okay, obviously housekeeping will be coming in here today. No help for it. Gotta pack everything up.

At five she was standing at the hotel counter suppressing the desire to drum her fingers on the counter, or, better, choke the crap out of the clerk behind the counter while screaming at him to move his ass. The hotel obviously did not put their best staff on the graveyard shift. It was almost five-thirty before Mister Slow Motion had managed the simple task of calling in housekeeping for her old room, booking her out of it, and transferring her to another room for tonight. She shoved the key card into her pocket and left. There was no point in unloading her stuff — what there was of it — back out of her trunk, and every reason not to.

She got into her car and sat for a minute without turning the key. I don’t really have to kill this schmuck. She gritted her teeth and started the engine, pulling out of the parking lot and into the light but building traffic, and shook her head to ward off a memory of a tall man — tall to an eight-year-old — standing silently and servicing the ravening carnosauroid targets as they came into range. The hand on her shoulder when she shook and her aim faltered, that steadied her so she could bring the grav-gun back on target. Sure I don’t. Nobody would know or care if I didn’t… nobody but the dead. And looking myself in the mirror. And looking Robertson in the eye if I ever work with him again. And what Granpa would think. And he’s a fucking traitor and he needs to die. Dammit. And he’s the last one. The last debt. The only one where I didn’t see the body and DNA type it myself. Which should damned well be a lesson to me, but after this, it’s all just business. Last one.

The traffic wasn’t so bad on the way to the mistress’s apartment to service the cameras. Her name was Lucy Michaels, but Cally preferred to keep her relationship with a woman she was going to drug and leave in bed with a dead man as impersonal as possible. She was going to great lengths, comparatively speaking, to leave the non-target alive. Worth wouldn’t have. Even some of the Bane Sidhe wouldn’t have. It should have made her feel better.

Unfortunately, the time reaching and servicing the first set of cameras gave the Monday morning rush traffic time to accumulate, and the route across town to the target’s house was not quite solidly packed in, but definitely slow. At a traffic light she popped the cube with her music collection into the sound console and had it list the catalog. Hrms. Evanescence. Fallen. Good album. I still wonder how the first landings and adjusting to Urb life influenced her writing. Guess we’ll never really know. She must have struck a chord with every shell-shocked teen in the country that year.

The light changed and she pulled away to the tense opening strains of “Going Under.”

It was just past seven-thirty when she pulled into the target’s neighborhood, parking around the corner from his street but still within easy range for a download. A male agent couldn’t have gotten away with parking so openly on a residential street. Cally just popped a piece of bubble gum, switched the car sound system over to a likely radio station, cranked the volume a bit, and started blithely painting her nails a very trendy shade. Anyone who noticed her sitting there would assume she was a teenager waiting for a friend. The hot pink terry sweatband under her hair and across her forehead, along with a very baggy Cubs T-shirt and gray sweatpants, were the kind of things a local teen wouldn’t be caught dead in at the mall, but would readily choose for an early morning run with a friend.