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  “Junk food? It is better food! Um — doesn’t she have two, very large, excess fat deposits?”

  “Oh, those. Those she has little choice about — an evolutionary adaptation to attract males. I gather she is unusually well adapted,” he said. “Remember, she does not know the bean squares will keep her healthy. By the time I have the human Nathan O’Reilly tell her the truth about the food — with me at a safe distance, far away, of course — she will be angry for a few seconds to a few days before laughing and asking for more brownies. By then, she will have accepted that she likes the taste of the improved, clean foods and will not imagine bad tastes into them.”

  “You told her she was a test subject. Why would she be angry?”

  “She thought I was joking.”

  “Why? No, never mind, sir. I have a different question. Human males are the more aggressive. You mentioned that human males are less fond of the beans in the brownies?”

  “Quite true. However, I have not yet explained the human male fondness for another metabolically challenging, high food-value, ethically clean broth made from fermented seeds. Let me tell you about ‘beer.’ ” The head of Clan Aelool led his young protege to a convenient, civilized bounce tube, carefully securing the rest of the experimental food for the journey.

  Chapter Ten

  Four men and one woman gathered around a hologram in a stale-smelling Galplas room. Six enhanced information manipulation units sat ranked on ancient folding tables along the walls, hard-wired out through secure data cables that ran through ductwork in each wall. Each machine’s buckley port was uncharacteristically empty. Each unit showed signs of recent and regular cleaning, each showed signs of age in black lines of dirt ingrained in the casing’s few small seams. Each was still a cutting edge application of Tchpth technology, being between seven and twenty years old. More accurately, cutting edge of what the Crabs had been willing to release to any Galactic anywhere. Human cyberpunks being less hidebound than Galactics, each was still more innovative in small ways than anything Indowy or Darhel had. They made up in creativity anything they lacked in Darhel institutional infotech experience. The cybers presumed, of course, that the Himmit had perfect working copies. The Frogs’ espionage capabilities on all fronts were so good that the cyber division of the O’Neal Bane Sidhe had the private opinion that even the Tchpth had no idea how much of their tech the Himmit had quietly stolen. After all, why would the Himmit risk provoking the Tchpth to increase security? One of the cybers’ primary and highly covert projects was to find and keep secure a good enough story to buy whatever information the Himmit had acquired on the slab.

  They had enjoyed a remarkable lack of success, though not through lack of stories. It was practically impossible to protect a good enough story against penetration by the Frogs — nicknamed for the terrestrial amphibians they resembled. Purplish and bulbous when in the open having a conversation, the Himmit were racial cowards, a trait moderated only by their cheerfully insatiable curiosity. They had an extraordinary ability to reshape their bodies and repattern them to match their surroundings, and to move silently. Their natural camouflage ability was to a chameleon’s what a Formula 500 race car was to a little red wagon. They were also so harmlessly amiable that it was impossible to stay angry with one.

  The cyber operations security director described the continuing attempt to protect information from the devilishly effective little bastards as “good training.”

  The walls in the room were a nasty putty color. One corner was glaringly different, the bright purple walls covered with acid green spirals. It hurt Tommy’s eyes, but he had to admit that Cassandra was one hell of a cracker. Despite her penchant for collecting desk toys that, together, moved like a set of demented clocks, he’d never seen a system she hadn’t been able to poke half a dozen different security holes in. The purple stuff was obviously painted on, since it was already flaking at the uneven edges. Galplas had never been designed to take paint. What would’ve been the point? It could be tuned to any color you wanted — at least, it could at installation. Galactics weren’t much for anticipating change. Sometimes it seemed like they barely tolerated it at all.

  Tommy Sunday shook himself and got his attention back on track. Cally was going over the layout of Fleet Strike Operations Training Headquarters. “They put the archival library on this section of the flats. It’s not just a machine room tightcasting to the troops’ AIDs. Fleet Strike learned a few lessons from the war. All of its more interesting material is secured within the system and accessible only by physically cabled-in terminals. In practice, that means you sit down in a study couch, scan in your fingerprint or swipe your temporary ID, and plug in the buckley you checked out from the front desk on your way into the building. The building is, unofficially but strictly, a no-AID area. The in-house buckleys all carry a bright-blue stripe up the back, just as a reminder not to cross-connect the two. There’s a manned desk at the door to tactfully ensure the protocol is followed. Questions?” She paused, clearly knowing the question wouldn’t be rhetorical.

  “Yeah, I’ll bite. How are we getting into their system?” Schmidt Two looked over at Tommy, raising an eyebrow. The male assassin was on the opposite side of the table from Cally, as far away as he could get without being rude. Tommy hoped they could shelve their tension before the run. He didn’t like complications within the team.

  “Go on.” Cally nodded at the big man.

  “Fine. When I left Fleet Strike in 2031, I hadn’t been approached by the Bane Sidhe yet, but I’d gotten used to having extensive access and didn’t want to lose it. It was a big chance and could have gotten me shot if they’d caught me at it, but I fooled Fleet Strike’s systems into thinking I was on a long-term deep cover investigations mission. That I was a sleeper.” He held up a hand when Papa would have spoken.

  “I know, I know, Fleet Strike’s mission was and is human versus Posleen, not human versus human. They have almost no cloak and dagger operations, of course. The key word there is almost. They have, rarely, had some internal high drama — investigating misappropriation of funds, diversion of resources, corporate bidding scandals, things like that. There was a billing category for it, a protocol for the systems to deal with such an agent, and that was all I needed. Especially since I told it I was too secret for it to pay me, which let me, after the fact, disable the linkage to the payroll and accounting systems. When I got through tinkering, the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. I cross referenced against the standard reports… uh… your eyes are glazing over. I covered my tracks, okay?” When he talked about computer geeking, it was possible to see the skinny, dark-haired kid from Fredericksburg inside the linebacker’s son.

  “If they hadn’t broken out their own data storage from the Darhel’s main AID network in 2019, I never would have been able to manage it. I’m sure it’s duplicated in the Darhel’s databases somewhere, but there’s never been anything to bring one insignificant sleeper agent to their attention. Not that I know of, anyway. I had dumped large chunks of AID code into some harmless-looking duplicate files on a first generation preproduction system right after the Rabun Gap incidents. I was pissed, Iron Mike was pissed, we were all pissed. The plan was to analyze it later and I had cooperation from the rest of the 555th ACS. We did some sleight of hand with partial files I don’t need to get into. Anyway, I used the back door I built to dump my files so I could use them in my private sector work. That’s the only time I ever accessed it, but I never shut it down. The system should, and I stress ‘should,’ still think I’m in Fleet Strike if we tickle it right,” Sunday said.

  He took a chance and stole one of the really yummy smelling brownies Cally had sitting on a napkin in front of her, ignoring the dirty look she shot him. He’d have to ask where she’d found them, since chocolate was one of those luxury goods at one hell of a premium on base since the split. It was far more available on the island, given the proximity for smuggling. Maybe he could get her source to part with t
he recipe for Wendy. These were good.

  “Unless they caught you last time, in which case it will bring all hell down on our asses.” The red-haired fireplug of a man spat neatly into a chipped stoneware mug that was missing its handle.

  “Papa’s got it in one,” Cally said. “Our peerless leaders’ willingness to play this card should give you some idea of the importance of the mission. You all know we’ve been skating on the edge of disaster, as an organization, since the split. The take from this mission won’t come anywhere near putting us where we were, but it’ll make that thin ledge we’re on just a tad wider. If the device’s existence and location is confirmed, if this isn’t some elaborate ruse to give the Darhel a plausible excuse to eliminate Michelle as one more O’Neal, we can’t let them get it developed and in production. If they get something like this, we aren’t just on the edge anymore, we’re out of business. We don’t have a defense that would keep a captured agent from spilling his guts under this thing, and all of our agents know way too much. We aren’t nearly as compartmentalized as we should be. There won’t be anything to stop the enemy from running routine interrogations on all their people, potentially compromising every agent we’ve got inside.” She sighed. “We’ve been complacent, and it’s come back to bite us in the ass.”

  “Okay, to make the explanation as simple as possible, the plan is a lame duck jenny with a charlie chatter and a right angle fake. Harrison, you’re charlie. Granpa, you do the fake out. Tommy steals the ball. George, you drive and babysit the Humvee. Jenny, obviously, me.” She pointed to her own chest.

  “If nobody’s got any questions so far, let’s get to the positions and timing.” Cally picked up a fiberglass pointer. “The plane comes in nap of the Earth at oh-five-hundred and sets down on the flat behind this hill. I’ve allowed a generous twenty minutes for us to unload and get into the vehicle. I expect it to take half that. Buckley, start the hummer and the clock.”

  “Hold that thought, buckley,” George said. “I do have a couple of questions.” If Isaac’s team lead objected to being interrupted, she didn’t show it. Not to casual inspection. Tommy knew enough to recognize the slight tightening of her hands after she folded them in front of herself and turned a deceptively open face towards the other man. There was nothing significant to anyone about her closed body language. Cally always kept her arms close in, defensively, when she wasn’t in character for a job. He didn’t know if George could read her closely enough to catch the Cally-specific facial tells.

  “Yes?” Her tone of voice was pleasantly even. If Tommy hadn’t worked closely with her most of her life, he wouldn’t have been able to tell she was getting torqued. He was starting to wonder how tactful George had been, or hadn’t been, in their prior meeting.

  “The jenny is fine, but in my experience it’s almost impossible to run an obvious diversion on a military base without the senior NCOs, at least, smelling a rat. Not to mention a security lockdown of the base. And Harrison sucks at field work,” he said, nodding to his brother. “Sorry, bro, but you do. Tommy’s conspicuously huge, and a fucking war hero. What if he gets made? Why not switch Tommy and Papa and send Papa in with a swipe card, since the system takes them. Or a grafted fingerprint. And why do you really need me if I’m just going to be sitting on my ass in the truck? No offense, it just looks like I’m extraneous.”

  Cally’s expression got friendlier. Not a good sign. “Okay, first off, the diversion is anything but obvious. Operations training has a computer randomized Posleen attack drill approximately once a month. It’s separate from security lockdown drills because with Posleen that’s a waste of manpower that Fleet Strike may need. Don’t sell Harrison short. He’s charming, and can be made up to look inconspicuous, particularly in uniform. And he’s not going to make a fuss about changing his appearance. Right, Harrison?” It wasn’t really a question. “Everyone still alive who ever served with Tommy has either been riffed out or deployed off planet. He’s huge, no disguising that. His hair, eyes, and facial structure will look nothing like his original identity. Fleet Strike has helped us out, there, by liberalizing the length and grooming standards for hair in the past ten years. Papa can’t go in his place. A swipe card triggers a security review automatically, a graft is a dead giveaway under the most casual review, and the access end is the place most likely to need a sophisticated on-site hack. You, obviously, are our go to hell guy.”

  It was impressive how she could say something like that without overselling or underselling it. It’d be interesting to know if she was fooling George or not with the Miss Friendly face. “You’ve just demonstrated why. You’re better than anyone I know at finding potential weak points in a plan, on short notice — even though we have those specific ones covered. You improvise fast and well even for a field agent. If anything goes wrong, you get to pull our cherries out of the fire.”

  “Okay, fine. Why is Papa doing the hack for the diversion, and what if that’s not smooth?” he asked. “No offense.” He nodded to the older redhead.

  “Tommy does the hack on the way. He’s got half a dozen canned routines set up in Papa’s buckley to cover contingencies. The only reason the hack isn’t already done is to reduce the chance that it will be noticed beforehand. We hope it won’t be noticed at all, but nobody wants a blown op, do we?” She smiled. “That it? Okay, buckley, start the Humvee moving.”

  “Are you sure? There are at least sixteen more things that could go wrong, you know. Would you like me to list them?” the buckley offered cheerfully.

  “Shut up, buckley,” she said mechanically.

  “Right.”

  Tommy and Harrison coughed, unconvincingly, as the miniature truck started moving through the hologram. The base buckley’s eccentric reaction to Cally O’Neal was a running joke between them. As was Cally’s ill-concealed suspicion that Tommy was hacking her system. He hadn’t, which just made it funnier every time she accused him. The briefing went on, more quickly now that George had said his piece.

  “Right. We want to come as close to the base as we can without ever entering line of sight of the elevated areas of Fredericksburg Base itself. We’re landing out here. Technically, it’s civilian, privately-owned land. In fact, it’s abandoned but not yet reverted to Homestead and Reclamation. It’s as safe as it gets, but it means we need to proceed over the Rappahannock here, and do another crossing at the other side of this small island. There’s an old road that will have discouraged tree growth and such, but the route might as well be off-road. Harrison, planning for getting the truck across the river is your baby. Who knows what’s there now, but undergrowth analysis from the few aerial photos we have suggests that however much bridge there is, that’s the one that got the most rebuilding. Both sides of that old road have been used a fair bit, most likely by civilian-type vehicles, on both sides of the river. The bounty farmers had to have been crossing it somehow. Think about contingencies. Get with Tommy, go over whatever information we’ve got, and come up with a list of what you’ll need. Supply needs it by fifteen hundred tomorrow. Earlier if you need anything particularly exotic.

  “Obviously, there are security cams out in the area beyond the base. The difference between the cameras on base and the cameras off base is that the cameras on base are hard-wired to the data assessment center. The cameras off base are not. They broadcast or tightcast, using the same transmission protocols as the AIDs. For all that, they’re pure Earthtech, which means that we can fuzz them. Enough, anyway. So, our first point of approach is here,” she said, touching the pointer to the flashing red dot southeast of the base. “Harrison, Tommy and I un-ass the truck and proceed to the fence. We have fairly recent intelligence that the fence is chain link topped by razor wire. Naturally, we’ll take backup, but we should be able to get onto the base itself with nothing more exotic than heavy duty wire cutters. From the fence, we split up. Two hundred meters in from the fence line, there’s a guard patrol that covers the secure area containing the archive. I turn onto the road
here and start jogging up towards the archive building. Tommy and Harrison parallel me and wait for me to jenny the guard. They break across the line and make their way to the building. Harrison, you’re going to carry some package you need the clerk to sign for. Get together with Tommy and figure out something plausible.

  “Meanwhile, George and Granpa take the Humvee around to here.” She pointed to a second flashing red dot in the hologram. “As you can see, the truck can get closer in here, meaning Granpa will get up the hill before us, overlooking the muster point for the particular Posleen attack drill we’ve selected.”

  As she took them through the steps of the brief, Tommy tried to keep his mind on the details. This was a straightforward reconnaissance mission, despite the target, but that didn’t make it okay to get complacent.

  It was good flying weather, clear and mild, as Kieran Dougherty guided the Martin Safari hybrid jet over the Virginia hills. False dawn threw purple shadows over a landscape barely touched with color in the early light. The pilot grumbled to himself because the Schmidt sitting to his right in the copilot’s seat was not, in fact, his copilot — not that he needed one for this. Schmidt Two wasn’t any kind of pilot at all and as far as Dougherty knew, hadn’t a single hour of flight time to his name. The overgrown kid of an assassin was using the instrumentation of his plane, all right. Using it to control the surveillance cameras on the belly of the plane, taking countless pictures of the ground they were overflying, just as if it was anything more than godforsaken postwar wilderness laced with the occasional cluster of dirt-poor bounty farms.

  He came in low, dropping lower, using VTOL to land on a green flat, behind a hill, in a place that used to be called Falmouth. Mere tens of meters away, an abandoned bounty-farmer’s shack sat, weathering beneath an encroaching tangle of vines, dry and dormant in preparation for winter. His landing field was an irregular patch of knee-high grass and weeds, its sole virtue that it was relatively flat and not yet overgrown with the scraggly pines eating away its edges. There were, however, signs of abat. The only blessing about this mission to the middle of nowhere was the season. This late in the year, the grat, who, like the Posleen they came with, preferred warmer weather, were already hibernating deep in the ground awaiting spring. The alien insect, which preyed on the hapless, plentiful abat, hunted in swarms. The little bastards’ poison sting could kill a grown man with a speed and ease that would have struck a hive of killer bees dumb with envy.