John Ringo - Cally's War

She wanted to scream with cheated frustration when he stopped in the middle and grabbed his silks to make a run for the men’s room.

“I’ll wait for you,” she called as he left.

The only furniture in the room was a desk and chair, and there was a laptop computer in the drawer. More of Beed’s paranoid dislike of AID’s, probably. Not that she blamed him.

It only took a second to plug her PDA into the port.

“Crack it, buckley.”

“Did you know there’s a ninety-eight point two percent probability that we’ll be captured and die here?”

“Shut up and crack the damned thing. The routines are on the cube.”

“Right.”

The other thing that had been on the cube, of course, was enough of its old data to get the buckley to be cooperative. Well, as cooperative as it ever was, anyway. Waking up the buckley was a risk, but Cally worked marginally faster with one, knowing just when to wheedle or cajole, and when to bulldoze right over its paranoia.

Time always slowed down in this part of an op. Still, she fidgeted nervously as the buckley worked. There was always the chance that the protections were more up to date than the routines chasing the security holes.

But Tommy and Jay were two of the best. She was in pretty quick. Then it was up to her human intelligence to search through the files and find the files she needed.

Oh, my god. Jay, the sonofabitch! And he burned Hector. Holy fuck.

“Send the data, buckley, send it now!”

“There’s transmission protection on this room for sure. We’ll be caught.”

“Send, damn you! Send it now!”

“Right. It’s sent. How fast can you run?” it asked.

“Fine.” She punched the cube out and fished the bottle of vinegar out, dropping the incriminating material in to fizz and dissolve merrily.

“Buckley, execute full and complete shutdown. Now.”

“Oh, sure, I’m expendable! What the hell, it’s probably less painful this way. Bye,” it finished glumly. The screen went dark.

Cally barely noticed it out of the corner of her eye, as she was busily yanking her silks back on.

The door slid open before she got the front seal half fastened. It was Pryce, and somehow she didn’t think his pallor had anything to do with the drugs. She was staring down the business end of his nine mil sidearm, held very steadily.

“It was you?! Oh my God… You’re under arrest,” he said.

“Pryce—” She extended a hand.

“Actually it’s Stewart. Major General James Stewart.”

Her shoulders slumped. “A setup.”

A splash of blood and bits of gore exploded forward from his stomach as the door slid open again, and he slid to the floor, hands clamped across the wound, staring down at it.

“That serves you, you poaching insolent pipsqueak. She was mine!” General Beed stepped over Stewart and to the side, kicking the other man’s dropped gun away. He looked up at Cally. “And you get it straight — you may be a whore, but you’re my wh—”

He was cut off in the middle of the word as the gray blur that was Cally rolled and came up with Pryce’s gun, firing into Beed two to the chest and then into the head, firing until the slide locked back on an empty chamber.

“I think he’s dead,” Stewart choked wryly, “and I won’t be long after. Hurry, now. As good as you are, you’ve got to have a way out planned.” His voice was ragged but gentle.

“No.” She slid across the floor to him and looked at his wound just a moment before ripping off the top half of her silks, tearing the tough Galtech fabric like paper. She folded it quickly and expertly into a field bandage and moved his hands, pressing it over the wound, hard, before it could gush.

“Never any damned Hiberzine when you need it, eh?” She smiled mistily at him, clamping the other hand over the entrance wound in his back.

“You’re not going to die on me.” She was firm, as if that was not allowed.

“I think I love you, whoever you are.” He coughed, leaving flecks of blood on his lips.

She was actually thankful when the squad of MP’s burst through the door, bare seconds later.

“He needs Hiberzine. Now!” she ordered.

One of them was already pulling a syringe from the kit at his belt.

“Captain Makepeace, or Jane Doe, you are under arrest.” The Brigade XO, Colonel Tartaglia, had elected to lead the squad himself. Clearly, they had come in response to a call placed by Pry — General Stewart rather than in response to shots fired.

“I know.” Free from the need to stop his blood loss by another MP taking her place, Cally let one bloody hand caress his jaw, before his eyes closed and a pair of MP’s pulled her to her feet.

“You get General Stewart to the hospital.” The colonel gestured to three of the MP’s. “The rest of you, bring her. And pay attention!” He waved at Beed’s corpse. “She’s dangerous as hell.”

On the shuttle, Jay’s PDA and his AID beeped at the same moment. Since the message was urgent, and their game was not, the game autopaused and opened the incoming file.

Jay was the first to react, not being surprised by the news. Unfortunately for him, reactions honed in the brutally Darwinian environment of battle do not fade as long as the body is fit. Tommy Sunday was very fit.

The desperate flying tackle knocked Sunday out of his seat, but the blow that would have shattered his trachea never landed, skidding harmlessly aside off of a raised forearm.

In the enclosed confines of the freight shuttle’s cockpit, Tommy’s size was not an asset. Still, in the wrestling match that followed, Jay’s hand-to-hand training in the gym, while excellent for what it was, couldn’t match a combat veteran’s front-line down and dirty fighting experience, kept honed by regular training. Humans didn’t fight like Posleen, true. But Tommy knew to within a hair what his own body would do, and had ingrained a few dirty tricks the other man had never heard of.

Later, Tommy could never precisely describe the sequence of moves in that cramped, desperate fight. At least, he never told it the same way twice. All he was really sure of was that by the time Papa O’Neal came through the door to find him sitting beside Jay’s body, catching his breath, his groin was on fire with pain and Jay was missing an eye, had two broken fingers, a broken neck, and was suffering from a severe and permanent case of dead.

“Did you send it through to Earth yet?” the older man asked matter-of-factly, stepping over the corpse to get to the communications equipment.

“No, not yet.” Tommy shook his head, getting up and easing gingerly into a chair.

O’Neal harrumphed and tapped at the keys for a few moments, encrypting the data and sending it through a roundabout system of radio relays that sent it out to Earth as a three times repeated squeal of noise embedded in a routinely intercepted voice signal.

“What do we do with him?” Tommy nodded at the body.

“Put him in the cargo hold. It’s nice and cold in there. He’ll keep.” He rummaged through a shirt pocket for his tobacco pouch. “Never waste a perfectly good corpse if you can avoid it. You never know when you might need one.”

“What about Cally?”

“You obviously didn’t see the end of the message. Warm up the engines just in case, but…” His face was bleak as he inserted a plug in his cheek and repocketed the pouch.

Tommy picked his AID back up and had it display the file so he could read it, this time thoroughly, down to the codes at the bottom that meant, in the judgment of her PDA, that capture of the agent was imminent, rescue or escape unlikely, presume any future transmissions compromised.