John Ringo - Cally's War

She didn’t show it, but it jolted her sense of cover slightly to notice the dress shop next door had a red scarf around the neck of the mannequin in the window. However late she got away from the general tonight, she’d have to make time for a meet with Granpa. Not that she had a lot to tell him other than what hadn’t worked. And that she had confirmed that Beed had an extra project, probably their leak. Maybe he has something on the tong angle.

A latte and a bag of cherries later, she was back in the transit car up to the office. For some reason the cherries and plums on Titan Base were considerably better than most of its other hydroponic produce — possibly because hydroponics were in the bottom level of Fleet’s quadrant. After her first encounter with base-grown coffee, she had avoided the office coffee in all but her direst needs for caffeine. She had asked Carlucci about it once. Apparently, as Beed said, you got used to it. The old hands didn’t seem to taste the difference anymore. She was going to have to start drinking the awful stuff. Sinda Makepeace would be getting the process of acclimation over and done with, and her own persistence in drinking the imported Terran coffee was a potential break in cover. Unprofessional.

At the office, she poured herself a cup from the coffee maker in the copy room, suppressing a grin as she passed the collating table. She grimaced at the foul liquid in the cup and proceeded to drown it in sugar and creamer powder, reminding herself that she had in fact done worse things for the cause.

Pryce did better than she thought he would at acting normally when he said good morning. One of the worries that had gnawed at her brain as she settled into sleep last night had been that he might turn out to be a really rotten liar. He was okay. Maybe she could find some opportunity to get together with him this weekend. She had been tentatively turning over a plan in her head for a couple of days now, and the chemistry between the two of them was good enough that it just might work. If she could play to his desire for variety by using different places throughout the office as props for sex, it was just possible that she could either get him to take her into the areas she couldn’t otherwise reach or that she could somehow swipe his ID card and spoof the biometrics.

She flipped through the morning traffic on her PDA while trying to mull the relative advantage of forcing the coffee down a sip at a time, or waiting and chugging it when nobody was looking. Hell, nobody was looking now, and it was probably marginally less awful hot. A moment later she regarded the empty cup with satisfaction, trying not to wince at the slightly sour aftertaste.

The awards report had come through from first battalion on Dar Ent. Dammit, whose Cheerios did Simkowicz piss in? Lost records my ass.

“Buckley, send a full and complete copy of the Simkowicz 201 file to Personnel, copied to Payroll, with a full and complete copy of his career pay records. Code it as coming from General Beed. State that the general urgently desires that this matter be cleared up by no later than sixteen hundred today, and that if this is not possible, to please reply immediately indicating the specific reasons for the delay and the specific individuals responsible. Copy the entire mess to General Franklin’s AID. Shoot the AID, Lisa, a private memo explaining that she can use her judgment about whether to show it to her boss if the name doesn’t finally light a fire under those assholes. Four months behind my ass.”

A few minutes later, as she walked back down the hall to get Beed’s morning printouts, Pryce was coming the other way, headed back to his office from somewhere. She didn’t stop, but passed him just a little too close, turning so that her breast brushed his arm as he walked past. There was a spring in her step as she bounced down the hall for the stupid paper. Suddenly, she felt like whistling.

Stewart ducked into his office, squashing the simultaneous desires to curse and grin. He also needed to think about something else for a minute to return his silks to a presentable state. Unfortunately, it looked like Sinda might not turn out to be a very good liar. That was careless. Not surprising, really. She was a bit of a ditz. Not that she didn’t make up for it in her own way. She was warm, and had a great work ethic, and he shook his head as he realized he’d been staring at the same spot on his office wall for who knew how long. The point was that she was a ditz. But a fun one. And he really needed to think of, say, the steps in the process of fitting a new ACS suit to a troop. It had been long enough ago that it required just the right amount of concentration to remember the steps — that is, a lot.

Finally, he was ready to go talk to that slimy sonofabitch excuse for a general officer. Think lieutenant. Fresh-faced, eager, klutzy Lieutenant Pryce, first lieutenant as proof that God really does have a sense of humor. He tripped over the threshold on his way out the door, just for practice, and noticed that Sinda not only could see his door from her desk, but was actually watching him, with a rather dazed expression on her face. Boy, why you are getting hung up on a complete, incredible, total ditz, I do not know. This simple lieutenant role must be going to your brain. Okay, so it’s not my brain I’m thinking with. Whup! ”… after the boot area is fitted, the suit nannites must be induced to begin the undergelling process…”

He walked into the general’s office, stumbling slightly over his feet and grinning internally at Beed’s slight flush of frustrated anger. He came to attention in front of the desk as the door slid shut behind him.

“Our source has been in contact again. He’s offering more information for sale,” the general said.

“Who are they sending to meet him?” As if I didn’t know.

“He’s here. I can’t meet him tonight. You’ll have to make the meet. Here’s the address. Memorize it.” He extended a sheet of paper and waited while Stewart stared at the paper for a few moments, taking it back and tucking it into his desk.

“Do not fuck this up, Lieutenant,” Beed said grimly.

Yeah, like you have a real excuse for slacking, asshole. If Mister Jones is on Titan, I wonder who else is on Titan? This is the first indication we’ve gotten that our strategy might actually be working. God, I look forward to relieving this bastard. For Sinda’s sake if nothing else.

“Yes, sir. Will that be all, sir?”

“Make sure you come back with something good, Pryce. I don’t need to tell you that right now we’ve got jack squat on this mission, and that does not look good. A good OER on a mission like this could be a great asset to the career of a young officer. Dismissed.”

You prick. “Yes, sir.” Pryce saluted, executing a wobbly about face and leaving before his façade cracked. Maintaining cover was getting to be harder than he had expected.

The sake bar served a certain class of Fleet junior officers. While the establishment was on the no-go list for Fleet Strike personnel, other than MPs in the line of duty, Stewart’s task tonight fully justified the civilian clothing he was wearing, and his military haircut was common among freighter weenies, anyway. While walking in two or three hours later would pretty much have guaranteed a brawl, it was still early enough that Fleet’s finest were firmly absorbed with drinking and trying their luck at some of the multiplayer game consoles scattered around the place.

Stewart generally avoided the lousy beer, made worse by being microbrewed on the premises from local hydroponically grown hops. The anime, at least, was first class. While the large… eyes… on cartoon women were not nearly as much fun as the real thing — he quashed the strong impulse to fantasize painful and violent ends for Beed — anyway, the art was nice to look at.