John Ringo: Cally's War

The gurney was tipped over on the floor, on the side of the room away from the observation lounge. He turned his head slightly toward it and winked one eye. Baker and Keally couldn’t have seen it. To those in the observation lounge, if they had seen it, it would have looked like a blink. Only Cally could see both eyes. If she had noticed, she gave him no sign.

“Sinda, please, honey, don’t make them do this to you. If you don’t talk, I can’t protect you. If you tell them everything, honey, I’m a major general — I can cut a deal and make your part of this all go away.” He took a step towards her.

One of her eyebrows quirked upward, skeptically, above a black eye. She stood her ground.

“Honey, they don’t want you, they just want the ringleaders. All these horrible things, they’re so unnecessary — but I can’t protect you if you won’t talk.” He closed the distance, brushing an unbruised section of cheek with one hand, and praying she didn’t blame him for what they’d already done to her. Well, she didn’t kill him outright. Good sign.

He leaned forward and kissed her, arms going around her ever so gently. None of the onlookers could see the pill he moved from his mouth to hers. She’d have to crunch it before swallowing, but Tommy had told him she’d guess that much.

“Please, sweetheart, what’s your real name?” he asked for the cameras.

She stiffened in his arms and he couldn’t tell if she’d just bitten down or not. Apparently. She swallowed hard.

“No,” she said.

He pushed her away, roughly, and strode back to the door, turning in the doorway.

“What, you thought you were a good enough lay that I’d get you out of this without you telling what you know? Sorry, sweetheart. Oh, you were enthusiastic enough, but I’ve had better.” He looked her naked and abused body up and down. “Oh, and no more fun and games with the men. When you get horny enough to talk, maybe we’ll let you have one back. But not me. I’m not a fan of damaged goods.”

Baker and Keally barely managed to yank him out and get the door shut before she bounced off the other side, swearing creatively enough to draw an appreciative whistle from the private.

If she hadn’t stood there with her mouth hanging open for a second, they never would have made it.

“I think you made her mad, sir.” The MP helped him back into the wheelchair.

“Yeah, Keally, it does sound like it. Back up to the lounge.” He wheeled off to the lift, hoping she’d understand why he’d had to say the worst things he could think of. He didn’t look back.

The delayed-effect pill kicked in between four and five hours later, just as Stewart had been promised. The Fleet bastard was doing unspeakable things to her fingernails when she started to go into shock. Her condition rapidly went downhill, despite everything the medic did trying to revive her. He wouldn’t have known, but Mike’s dad had told him that this particular pill pretty much exactly mimicked the torture cases where a previously unsuspected heart condition causes the victim to just shut down.

The medic was obviously desperate. And with good reason. His ass was almost certainly on the line for failing to detect the “heart condition.” Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

They tried transferring her to the infirmary which was a mass of hospital green Galplas and surgical steel. It had all the GalTech equipment a physician could want, but somehow still managed to smell of disinfectant. By the time they got her there, she had flatlined. Not even GalTech could bring somebody back from that.

The attending physician shook his head and waved over a couple of orderlies to take her down to the morgue. He wasn’t sure, but the red-haired guy might have been new. The big, dumb-looking one certainly wasn’t the type to find manual labor a hardship.

After they wheeled her around a corner, nobody noticed the needleful of Hiberzine antidote the redhead stuck in her leg.

The morgue was one corridor over from an emergency air lock. The flat, institutional beige of the Galplas walls contrasted with the blinding shine of the polished white tile floor. The astringent smell of the infirmary had faded to the faint but unavoidable burnt pork whiff of the morgue’s crematory.

They’d cremated Jay this morning. Not only were system records on the equipment poorly protected, they also revealed the morgue was rarely used — Tommy had checked. The first thing he did after getting her down there was to change the time on that cremation to the current time. The second thing was to retrieve the very sincerely labeled box of Jay’s ashes from behind the table and put them on the shelf where her ashes would have gone had she really been dead.

They had her stuffed into a black ship jumpsuit and heavily padded boots by the time she started coming around. Then Papa ran interference long enough for them to get to the lock, put on their pressure helmets and parkas, climb into the waiting power sled, send the preprogrammed command to make the lock forget they were ever there, and they were gone.

One of the few good things about the rabid fascism of the Darhel was the effect it had on the operating rules of most starports. The standard rule was that you filed for a departure time slot on a first-come first-served basis. Then those times were saleable on whatever terms the slot-holder wished. In practice, it meant that landing was free, but taking off cost money. It also meant that Darhel never had to wait for a takeoff slot, nor were they constrained by any hard and fast departure times.

Today, Darhel fascism suited Tommy fine. As per instructions, the real freighter crew had her hot and ready to launch as soon as they loaded, and there was another freight shuttle more than happy to make a quick buck off someone else’s impatience.

They were airborne an hour after leaving the prison air lock.

Two and a half hours later, they had Cally on the slab in the Indowy portion of the freighter, in a room that had housed six Indowy crew before the freighter was commissioned for this trip. The freighter’s human leaseholders had no awareness of the room. Nor did the holding company’s Darhel owners. After the freighter next docked, the equipment would be offloaded to disappear wherever it was needed next, six Indowy would be onloaded, and no one who did not already know of the room’s presence ever would know.

After two hours on the slab, Cally was up and around in her room. Unfortunately, she’d need to spend the rest of the trip in her cabin with himself or Papa bringing her her meals. There was no help for it. The freighter crew had gotten a look at her when she staggered onto the shuttle and there was no acceptable explanation for her rapid healing. He had explained it away as a bad mugging, but when they offloaded at Selene Base, on the Moon, he figured it was going to take splints, bandages, makeup, and careful planning to get her off the ship without raising crew eyebrows.

It was probably for the best. He’d noticed that Cally didn’t tend to have her very best interpersonal interactions with strangers in the first days after a rough mission.

Cally looked up brightly as Tommy came in with her supper, giving him a big smile. The contents of the big bag of cosmetics and toiletries and other girl stuff that he’d put together before the extraction, knowing in advance that she’d need those old-fashioned tools of feminine camouflage, but not which ones and how much, were strewn out across her bunk. She had a look of slightly guilty pleasure, like a kid caught opening the Christmas presents a day early. She swept them back into the bag as if they didn’t really mean a thing, but her eyes were bright and misty.