John Ringo - Cally's War

Which could maybe explain why he was so hung up over some fluff-headed ditz that he was sitting here woolgathering instead of getting his work done.

“Diana, turn my monitor back on and give me a keyboard and track spot.” Instantly, a keyboard appeared on his desktop. The red circle projected to the right of the keyboard and the two buttons below it served the function of an old-fashioned mouse. Having learned to type before the war, he could work much faster this way. Fortunately, everything but true AI was well within the reach of a modern PDA, so he didn’t have to worry about Beed twigging to the presence of a real AID and how very much of his daily work activity was being recorded. An aide de camp, naturally, was often at his general’s elbow.

As part of the mission, they had approved attempts to transfer in or out of the office a bit more freely than normally would have been the case. The cover was that a new CO would of course want to pick as many of his own headquarters people as possible. They had managed to replace eleven of the seventeen headquarters and CID office staffers. Out of the now thirteen staffers with a documented humanist connection, nine had both the connection and were new to their position.

Makepeace was on the list, of course, but so was over half the office after you subtracted himself and Beed. Franks was the obvious prime suspect. Sixty plus years of living had taught Stewart that, unlike in holovids or movies, the obvious suspect very frequently was the guilty party. Still, the enemy organization had already proven you couldn’t count on it to obligingly do the stupid or obvious thing.

What it amounted to was that he had fifteen people to watch for patterns, eleven to watch closely, and nine to watch very closely.

Franks had several Earthside communications from his quarters, one to a known humanist activist who was also his wife’s brother-in-law, another to a friend of the family who had not been noted to express humanist sympathies but who, on examination, turned out to have a large number of humanist friends and associates. The calls had been encrypted with a relatively strong public cryptography system that had been released to the public by some anonymous wiseass. The authorities had been chagrinned, and Stewart supposed he ought to be, too, but he couldn’t help being secretly just a bit happy about it. He chalked it up to his misspent youth. Which had actually been rather fun, come to think of it.

Anders had called a boyfriend back home every night the first week and had tapered off since. The hometown honey appeared to be on his way out.

Makepeace had sent e-mail replies to two long letters from her mother, but had kept the discussion to inconsequentials such as descriptions of coworkers and the restaurants and shops in the Corridor.

Sanchez had sent an order to a freight company to ship up a private supply of cigars, bourbon, and Tabasco sauce. Otherwise, he seemed to be fairly typical in that Fleet Strike was becoming his family as age and anti-juv prejudice separated him from his previous connections.

Keally kept contact with his wife and daughter who had not accompanied him up to the Base, but had had no apparent contact with his high school best friend, who taught Sunday school at North Topeka First Methodist, which had taken a notable stance against differential rejuvenation of one member of a married couple.

The rest was more of the same. It was looking more and more like Franks was his man. Only problem was that so far all he had was circumstantial. There had been no overt act. Which meant he could be wrong. Which meant he had to keep digging into the private lives of fourteen innocent people, any way you sliced it.

“Turn it all off, Diana. Time to blow this taco stand.” Tacos. Hmm. It seemed, and was, a lifetime ago that he’d anglicized so painstakingly in his efforts to move beyond the privations of his childhood. At the time, he’d thought it was necessary. In retrospect, he now knew that it hadn’t been. Oh, it had kept him out of the way of some people’s prejudices now and again, but what had really turned him around had been the good influence and example of Gunny Pappas and Mike O’Neal. They’d given him a dream bigger than just himself and his friends, a dream a man could hitch his star to. They’d sold him on America and the dreams of democracy and liberty, sometimes without even saying a word. Good men at the tail end of a good age. Too bad the dream had died. He didn’t know how it had happened. Maybe it had been when the President moved the Capitol to Chicago by decree. The excuse for not changing the Constitution had been the national emergency and the number of states that were overrun by the enemy. Maybe it had been when the candidates for office and the remains of the political parties started accepting anonymous donations in FedCreds and nobody had done anything about it. Maybe it had been when they made the residents of the Sub-Urbs sign waivers of certain rights as a condition of residency. Maybe it had been when the offices of the Toledo Blade were firebombed. No, the damage had already been done well before then. That was just the most obvious nail in the coffin of the dream. Instead of a real investigation, there had been a very thin whitewash, and the rest of the papers had fallen into line. Not that he could blame them, really. He had seen the post mortem pics of the editorial staff.

He walked around the edge of his desk and laid a hand, gently, on the cold glass covering the paper beach. It had been a great dream while it lasted. He sighed. Combination plate from La Colima it is.

A week later, after having had three liaisons with the general and no more meaningful information, and having thoroughly searched everywhere near the general’s headquarters that she had access to with no luck, Cally had come to the conclusion that it was time to try plan B. The areas she did not have access to had some serious security on the door locks. Not even a custom crafted tools package from Tommy had been enough to let her crack it safely, the one time she’d gotten a solid chance at one of them without an MP in visual range of the door.

She had, however, been able to copy the security permissions file to cube and the report back from Tommy had turned up the interesting information that while she didn’t have access to those areas, as the general’s aide de camp, Pryce did. Which left her organizing the morning e-mail printouts for Beed contemplating the not at all unhappy prospect of plan B. Not at all unhappy.

Of course, stalking Pryce was going to be complicated by Beed’s infernal, possessive, controlling habits, which had gotten worse if anything. Still, she had a few things on her side. Foremost that the general seemed willing to trust his aide around her, while being annoyingly paranoid about other males. Whether it was Pryce’s low rank or that his terrible clumsiness and slight stutter tending to worsen in the general’s presence, the general’s paranoia had a blind spot where the lieutenant was concerned.

And, of course, she intended to make sure that her public behavior continued to foster that blind spot.

“Good morning, sir,” she said cheerily as she bounced into his office and put the stack of printouts in his in tray, scooping up an inch and a half of assorted paper from his out tray.

“Come here a second, Sinda, I need to go over this with you.” He waved her around to his side of the desk, using explaining his proofreading markups to her as a transparent attempt to get her close enough to grope her left breast. She affected excitement, gasping slightly, but honestly! Beed wasn’t bad looking, and he was at least decent in bed, but sometimes he got on her nerves so bad she had to physically restrain herself from throttling the man.