John Ringo - Cally's War

The next morning at work she passed Pryce at the coffee machine early on, but after he walked back over towards CID she didn’t see him again that morning. General Beed, however, was very much in evidence. Her first duty of the morning was, he told her, to use her PDA to access his e-mail account and print out his correspondence, sorting it into categories for his review. She had to bite her lip to keep from pointing out that if he had an AID or a PDA he could have it sorted, ranked by importance, and in routine cases, answered — all just for the asking. Then, after he had sorted through the correspondence and noted what he wanted done with it all, she retrieved the stack from his out box and took it over to CID to run it through an only slightly improved version of a prewar photocopier, with one copy going to his incoming correspondence file before any of it could be answered or otherwise acted upon.

The man was positively a dinosaur, and several times when he spoke to her she had to avoid gritting her teeth as she smiled.

She did brace him about one issue, though. Whoever was making the coffee ought to be shot.

“Sir, have you noticed anything… er… strange about the coffee?” she began.

“It’s grown locally in hydroponics, Makepeace. Something about the air — you’ll get used to it.” He shrugged, humming slightly as he plowed through some reports from the Fleet Strike Detention Center.

The prison was on base, but its dome was entirely separate. Escape was possible, of course. It had even been done. Several times. Apparently the biggest inconvenience to Fleet Strike was sending a crew out in suits to retrieve the bodies. Cally wasn’t sure she could blame the prisoners. Freezing in unbreathable smog was probably a more comfortable death than an accident doing zero gee work in orbit, which was the usual ultimate fate of any prisoners who didn’t have very limited sentences. And prisoners with minor problems didn’t usually get shipped all the way to Titan Base.

After dealing with his correspondence, which was a matter of dictating what she thought the answers should be based on notes scribbled in the margins, printing the responses out, running them by Beed for changes, and then yet another printed version by him for approval before sending them out, there was yet another mound of paper in his outbox. She noticed he made a couple of excuses to come to her office, ostensibly to check on some bit of work she was doing. From the way he stood too close behind her, resting a hand on her shoulder as he bent over behind her to deliver comments that were always plausible but never strictly necessary, it was clear the general had more than work on his mind. His profile had said he was married, a fact he had neglected to mention and which was conveniently unobvious since he didn’t wear a ring. However, it also mentioned that his wife was an unrejuved forty-seven. The wife had accompanied him out to Titan Base, but Cally could well believe that the poor woman was slowing down.

A bit after eleven-thirty he came in and made a great show of opening file drawers and browsing through the files.

“Good work getting things organized, Sinda. Now that you’ve got a system set up, it should be a lot easier to find things when I need them.” He looked at the watch on his wrist and back at her. “It’s about lunch time. Why don’t we go grab a sandwich and you can brief me on the new filing system over lunch?”

“Certainly, sir. When would you like to leave?”

“I was thinking now, Captain.” He smiled disarmingly at her. “I don’t know about you, but my stomach is starting to growl.”

“Bless your heart, sir, we can’t have that. Give me just a moment to print out a list of files and I’ll be ready to go.” She offered him a smile that was open, friendly, and oblivious, turning back to her PDA and speaking to it softly. “There. We can pick it up from the printer in CID on our way out.”

He stood back from the door a bit, clearly waiting for her to precede him out the door, gently — and unnecessarily — guiding her through with a hand on the small of her back. A hand he was careful to remove before they came around the corner and into the general reception area.

He waited while she got the printout from down the hall. As they left, Anders seemed to be very absorbed in the holographic display of whatever form she was working on.

The lunch rush had barely started, so they had a short wait for a car to the Corridor.

“Isn’t there a cafeteria or anywhere to eat in Fleet Strike’s quadrant, sir?” Cally tilted her head at him curiously.

“There’s the mess hall, the officers’ club, and a snack bar in the rec room for the enlisted men. Food at the officers’ club is pretty decent, but it’s a little… crowded. Not the best place for a working lunch,” he said.

The grill where he took her was on one of the upper levels. The booths were constructed with high Galplas walls that had been adjusted to reflect in shades and patterns of a rosy brown that resembled cherry wood. From the relative hush and the slightly hollow sound when the waiter introduced himself and dropped off their menus, she could tell the place used electronic sound damping. Low level. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the edge of a small disk adhered behind the napkin holder.

He ordered a Reuben, she ordered an almond chicken salad on pita bread.

“So, you were going to give me an overview of the filing system,” he invited, beckoning with a hand.

“Yes, sir. It’s separated first into the headquarters material, CID, and the various units by unit. Within all that, it’s alphabetical by subject.”

“Can I see the list?” He didn’t wait, but reached out for the paper, brushing her hand with his not quite accidentally along the way. His eyes were fixed on hers, watching for her reaction. She allowed a mischievous twinkle into her eye.

He didn’t actually turn her on, but he didn’t much turn her off, either. Ah well, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d needed to use sex on a mission, and it wouldn’t be the last. And he was more likely to be a mediocre lay than an actually bad one. Most men were.

The weekly State of the War briefing was late in the afternoon. It was always scheduled close to the change between first and second shifts so that the senior brass of both services, no matter what shift, could arrange to attend.

This got the general out of the office and Cally managed to stack up enough work for herself to justify staying late. She had a good chance of getting enough unobserved access to some of the areas over in CID to do a physical search. CID worked normally. The general’s bizarre obsession with paper apparently didn’t apply to things that didn’t have to go through his hands, so she had been able to do a fair bit of her searching through the computers her first night. As the general’s secretary, she had enough access to get her in the door, and then it was only a matter of expanding on it and covering her tracks. She hadn’t found anything of interest, and was hoping that a physical search might turn up data cubes of material not stored directly in the systems.

After first shift, headquarters did have a pair of MPs posted out at the base car terminus to monitor comings and goings and keep out the unauthorized, but Anders and the CID agents generally left at or soon after seventeen hundred. She waited until seventeen-forty-five before deliberately misfiling a file the general had mentioned at lunch and heading for the water cooler, which was conveniently over in CID.

CID was a hallway of six offices flanking a conference room. The walls between the doors were bare except for the name plates and lock panels. The office beside the conference room had the water cooler and Beed’s paper equipment. As she walked past the closed doors, she was able to observe the door panels of each office, and listen for voices inside. From the closed doors and the silence, it was pretty likely that the agents had gone for the day.