John Ringo - Cally's War

“ I’m young, Pryce? Hello?”

He turned back, stumbling a little, and flushed.

“Okay, yeah, that sounds s-stupid coming from me, but… you’re nice, Captain, and I just hope you’re… careful,” he said.

“Pryce, I’m okay. And I’m not looking for favors. Look, working late sometimes isn’t that bad, and with, you know… Well, mixed marriages of juv and nonjuv are notorious in the service, aren’t they? Gosh, just look at this mountain of work. But it’s all right. The general, bless his heart, is happy today, and all this,” she waved her hand at the paper and filing cabinets, “is much easier when he’s happy, isn’t it, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, ma’am, Captain.” He picked up the file he’d come in for, and paused on his way out the door. “Probably the best attitude you could take, ma’am.”

“Pryce?” she ventured.

“It’s okay, Makepeace. Really.” His eyes were softer, and she had to be content with that.

It was six in the evening, and, at the moment, while collating presentation packets, she was currently considering the entertaining possibility of watching Bernhard Beed nibbled to death by giant carnivorous ants. Giant carnivorous poisonous ants. While staked out on ice. No, ice numbed pain too much. Hot sand? Nails. Nails was good. The insensitive, possessive, obnoxious bastard. He had actually let her sit around doing make-work most of the afternoon, only to call her in at twenty minutes till five and load the copying for this stupid presentation package that mysteriously required very elaborate collating and had to be ready for his review by seven the next morning. Just because he had to go to his wife’s birthday party and couldn’t make time to get a little tonight, the bastard was obviously making sure she was entirely otherwise occupied.

Acid. Concentrated hydrochloric acid on a slow burn, from the toes up. Son of a bitch. She hadn’t realized she had spoken out loud until she heard the familiar voice behind her.

“Now, it can’t be that bad,” he said.

“Aren’t you supposed to be passing canapés?” She didn’t turn around. She really wasn’t in the mood to be cheered up.

“Well, yeah, but the general sent me over here with three pages to be included in between the pie chart and the bar graph, and he wants me to report back.”

“Obnoxious possessive sonofabitch is checking up, is he? It’s not enough that I fuck him, the bastard has to have control over my private time, too. Ooohhh!”

“Gee, Makepeace, I don’t think you should bottle your feelings up like this,” he said.

She turned and froze in the act as she was about to throw the pile of papers in his face, and something about his deadpan face and single quirked eyebrow broke her up and she lost it, laughing.

“Okay, okay. I was a little overboard.” She shook her head, holding her side and catching her breath. “No, I wasn’t, but that wasn’t helping.”

“Hey, you’re allowed to let off steam. In private. But might want to make sure you’re in private, ma’am.”

“Good point, Pryce.”

“You know, ma’am, the general obviously sent me because he felt I was ‘safe.’ I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“Why, bless your heart, Pryce, did you want to stop being safe?”

“Not tonight. Gotta get back to passing canapés. J-just didn’t like the assumption.”

“It’s okay, Pryce,” she pouted at him as he walked out the door, “I don’t think you’re safe.”

The convenient thing about this evening, for Beed, was that she was kept both busy and out of the sight of his wife. The convenient thing for her, once she got the copying and collating done, was that, with Pryce gone, she was the only person in the office and she had a perfect excuse for being there. It provided complete and uninterrupted privacy to search the entirety of CID, turning up three cubes of miscellaneous data that might or might not relate to her mission. Cally was beginning to get nervous about that. Okay, sure, she hadn’t expected a big neon sign flashing, “This Way To The Secret Files,” but other than that tiny bit of pillow talk by the general, they were keeping this operation pretty tight. The three agents they had considered most likely to be helping run the operation all seemed to have full-time workloads of regular CID investigations.

The only really interesting thing she’d found so far was a map in Corporal Anders’ data storage of the areas on this floor assigned to the headquarters of the 3 rd. Most of them were areas she had override access for. Some were not. Of course, with the tactic of hiding in plain sight always being a possibility, everything had to be searched. Tedious, but there it was. The collating provided an excuse to go into an area marked storage down the hall. She could always be claiming to look for boxes of an obscure contrivance called “binder clips.”

By the time she finished getting herself dusty looking through boxes of backup cubes, an old coffee machine, stacks of uniforms and uniform parts, three blank new-in-box PDA’s, a half a box of night-sticks, fairly new-looking full and partial boxes of paper supplies, and, inexplicably, an ancient-looking half-box of blue and silver children’s party hats, her stomach was growling fiercely. The backup cubes, except for the most recent, looked as though they had sat exactly where they were, undisturbed, for quite a long time. She would only waste her time searching them if absolutely nothing else panned out.

In a way, it was getting annoying going out for every meal. After getting a fried chicken salad and a bowl of gazpacho from a café just off one of the transit car docks on the Corridor, she found an Oriental Market and bought a sackful of sealed self-heating dinners. Lemon chicken, mu shu pork, General Tsu’s, hot and sour soup, sizzling rice soup, egg rolls, spring rolls, duck with plum sauce, California roll with sashimi… Yum.

These packages were great. The heater was in the bottom of the package; you just pulled the tab and the chemicals mixed in the heater pack and the heat rose through the food. Well, okay, for some specialty foods, like the egg rolls, the food was spiked on metal conductive toothpicks hooked to the bottom of the package. Still, yum, yum, yum. And no having to go out for it. Things being what they were, she’d still probably be taking most meals out. But at least now she would at least sometimes have another option. Microwaveable was quicker, but the self-heaters tasted better. Okay, it was a matter of personal taste. And whether you’d rather throw packages away or scrub out the microwave once a week. Cally wasn’t real big on housework.

Stewart told his AID to shut off the hologram and leaned back, rubbing his eyes. The problem with an investigation like this was that until you caught someone you really couldn’t eliminate anyone. Some were just more likely than others.

He twirled a ballpoint pen as he thought, a habit revived from his first staff position, way back before the general demise of paper as the medium of military bureaucracy. He stared unseeingly at the matted and framed poster he’d had printed out to break up the unrelieved light green of the office walls. The agents had eyed the print knowingly when he’d hung it, figuring he was opting for paper instead of a window-simulating view screen as a way of brown-nosing the boss.

In fact, it was a reprint of a poster that had been tacked to the wall of his Aunt Rosita’s apartment in his childhood gang days. With the exception of Beed, everyone else was too young to recognize pre-war Malibu Beach. And Beed was from the wrong part of the country. One of the things he appreciated about Sinda was that no matter what else went over her head, he had several times caught her looking wistfully at his poster and had gotten the ineffable impression that somehow, on some level, she actually got it. Even though there were so many things that he just couldn’t talk to her about, she somehow managed to make him feel… understood.