Sister Time lota-9 Read online

  When Ming had received the message from Earth that Dulain’s humans needed to assemble an alternate cargo for an incoming freighter, production had gone into round-the-clock shifts. They could count on some lower-margin Indowy goods being available to fill out the ship’s hold — especially as the message came with suggestions of which Indowy ears for the Tong lieutenant for Dulain to drop a word in. Clan Beilil was not plentiful nor powerful on Dulain, but they did appear more open, for no reason that was readily apparent. Ming had quietly filed the name in her memory as a useful contact for the future.

  Meanwhile, several human towns that were capable of turning out glass beads had gone into high gear, as well. The plus was that there was less of a bottleneck in the immediate machine production of colored glass beads, the downside that they had to be strung by hand. A cube containing a series of books on the construction of machine tools from scrap metal had been, and was still, very popular on Dulain. The necessary parts for generation of strings of the beads were being put together by every small machine shop on the planet. In the two weeks since they had had word from Earth, her people had accomplished a great deal. In the two weeks they still had before they had to ship the product off Dulain, they would do much more.

  Wednesday 11/10/54

  The more time Michael O’Neal, Senior, spent in secure rooms, the more alike they all looked. The Galplas walls were a light mud color, except for the purplish glow of the ceiling surface. It made his eyes hurt, if he didn’t wear sunglasses. Which was, of course, the only reason he was wearing them.

  “Nice shades, Papa,” George said as he walked past and moved a couple of the rolling office chairs around, trying to pick one that was less broken down than the others. The chairs all sported gray Galactic silk slipcovers over the seats and backs. Silk was expensive — unless it was from the first efforts of children and typically very off-spec. Color, texture, and quality were variable. The slipcovers were marginally better than nothing, maybe. They didn’t stop the feel of the torn tweed and disintegrating fifty-year-old foam padding beneath them.

  He grunted and set his mug down on the table, shaking a couple of chairs to pick one that wasn’t going to dump him into the floor. A caster came off of one of them and he slid that chair over against the wall, putting the offending piece in the seat. The other chair seemed to only have loose handles, so he parked himself in it and kicked his feet up onto the badly chipped pine table.

  “So, the miracle kiddies down below get to make another part.” George jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the chair.

  “Gotta hand it to them. Theirs don’t break. At least, not so far.” Papa spat neatly into his mug.

  “Bitching about the crappy fucking chairs again?” Tommy Sunday walked in wearing a grimace and carrying a steel camp stool. He pushed a couple of the inadequate chairs out of the way and unfolded his stool. “At least you can sit in the damn things.”

  “You aren’t missing much, son,” O’Neal said.

  The door opened again, admitting Cally and Harrison together. Cally’s hair was a shining silver bell around her face. It hadn’t looked that good in years.

  “Wow,” Tommy said. “What the hell did you do to your hair?”

  “Why thank you, Tommy. Good afternoon to you, too,” she said, smiling a little too sweetly.

  “Uh… I mean it looks really good,” he said.

  Papa suppressed a grin. “Your hair looks very nice, sweetheart.”

  “Thank you, Granpa.”

  “Who would have thought that Darhel conditioner would work so well on human hair?” Harrison asked the room at large.

  “Not me,” said George. “Cally, you’re a brave woman.”

  “We tried it on a sample of hair from her brush first. I’m not a total novice at hair care, I’ll have you know. I figured since Darhel depilatory foam works on humans, the protein structure might be similar enough that their conditioner would work as well.” Their fixer looked insufferably proud of himself.

  “I didn’t think Darhel medicines were safe in humans.”

  “They’re not. The conditioner has a binder and emollient effect to reduce split ends and increase shine. It’s not a medicine.”

  Cally crossed the room and sat down next to George. “Okay, let’s get started. Has everyone had time to review the latest intelligence on our target?”

  “Is it supposed to smell like cabbage?” George asked.

  Cally glared at him and switched on the holoprojector, pointedly ignoring the young man’s comment as a holo of a video screen appeared at the far end of the tank. With holo the default viewing medium on the planet, using three-dimensional projection to simulate a two-dimensional screen no longer struck anyone as ironic. “As you can see from the timetable, we have at least a month to get inside. If Michelle is more than three days late, we’ll have to hold on for another three weeks past that before we get another shot. We’re just lucky that winter is convention season — all those researchers flying down to the Caribbean for their conferences.”

  They laughed. Of course, it wouldn’t have been half as funny if half of them didn’t already live along the coast. Even if it was colder than a witch’s titty in a brass bra this time of year. Maybe after this mission he ought to talk Shari into doing a run down to Cuba. Havana was nice now that the governmental policies had changed.

  “…thing we know Erick Winchon does is go to conferences and give speeches. Usually long on mouthings about peace and altruism, short on science. There’s a front group that does some puff research. For their cover research, our best guess is that they do small studies off site, then fabricate large sample data consistent with their small study results. Dr. Vitapetroni tells me they design their work to generate meaningless truisms that sound good. Grants are so light on the ground that convention standards aren’t so high these days — anybody who’s got a paper published fills up the convention program. So giving a lot of pretty speeches maintains their cover and appearance of respectability.” Cally tapped the forward arrow on the buckley, advancing the slide.

  “Anyway, we have Winchon’s conference schedule. Michelle tells me our only chance is to do the op when he is at least a few hundred kilometers away from the site. As far as possible, really.” When she mentioned talking to Michelle, Granpa’s face got grumpier, like it always did. She hated being in the middle of family squabbles. “Work like this tends to have small but significant turnover. People may not be able to walk out, but they do leave feet first. We have the profiles of the jobs most likely to turn over, and the ones that are vacant. Multiple resumes are in the pipeline for each of us. Our inside man has our list. We have staffers down in GN32 manning our phones. Interview calls will be routed to voice mail for obvious reasons, along with a tag telling you who the caller thinks you are. If you can’t have your buckley tell you when a call comes in, you need to check it at least every two hours. If you’re doing a short assignment and can’t do that, you need to notify me in advance and let me know how long you’ll be out of pocket.”

  George started to say something, but Cally had evidently anticipated. She placed a soft hand over George’s lips and smiled as she continued, “Granpa, you and George take what we know of the layout of the place, develop plans for physical surveillance of the facility, and start working on secondary plans of entry and execution.”

  Papa O’Neal nearly choked on his tobacco trying not to laugh at the expression on the young man’s — well, he looked young, anyway — face. As if his granddaughter was going to let him steamroller one of her meetings for the second time in a row. He caught a whiff of her perfume from across the room. Dangerous stuff. The kid’s eyes glazed over as she turned in her seat, deliberately moving the lethal cleavage nearer. At least, Papa knew damned well it was deliberate.

  “Anyone gets a call, it will automatically route to me, too. Whole team, meet back here, same time, in one week to touch base unless I tell you sooner. Dismissed.” Unusually for Cally, she didn’t give time for que
stions, and she didn’t relax the format, just took her hand off George and swept out of the room. Whew, but her nose was out of joint. He might just have to have a talk with her. Or better yet, with Schmidt Two, who was still looking a bit poleaxed. Maybe even each of them. He might indeed.

  Sunday 11/14/54

  Pardal cordially loathed the smell of Titan Base. The overpressure on the domed city drove in mixed hydrocarbons that made the entire facility reek of a combination of a ship with a faulty life support system and a dirty waste-room. The pathetic suite set aside for his use, which would have looked luxurious only to human savages who knew no better, had a shoddy Earthtech air filter in one corner. It reduced the reek in his own rooms, but produced a whining that abused his sensitive ears. The air movement and hiss had, more than once, awakened him from a sound sleep, diving for his pressure suit. The times it had happened, it had taken a few seconds before he’d realized he was not aboard a ship with a hull breach but was, instead, on the Aldenata-bedamned Titan Base. By then his stress hormones, mingled with a tingling hint of Tal, were in such an uproar that it took a seventh-level meditation to relax him enough to get back to sleep.

  Demanding complete and immediate repair would have revealed weakness. He certainly didn’t want the humans to know that the panicked awakening was almost as dangerous, to him, as a real hull breach somewhere on board one of his ships would have been. Much less reveal weakness to others of his kind. He had ordered proper air cleaning equipment from a reputable supplier and would simply have to wait for its arrival. He hated humans, as much for their cheap and shoddy devices as for anything else.

  The Indowy produced voluminous excesses of Indowy, the Tchpth produced overwhelming technological inventions, the Darhel produced money and power, the Himmit produced — well, consumed, then — an excess of stories, the Posleen produced a voluminous amount of both Posleen and ships. The humans’ particular excess was millions of tons of ephemeral, garbage goods — some in use, the vast majority already broken and discarded. They were ridiculously self-congratulatory over insignificant increases in useful life of what they produced, and the ability to remanufacture their garbage instead of just piling up and burying their millions of shipweights of discards.

  Human females were the worst. They incessantly wore and replaced robes in an absurd variety of colors, textures and shapes, like some maniacally molting, diseased insects. Human men apparently found this profligate trait attractive. They did price their shoddy goods like the worthless things they were, but that was almost as bad. By treating them with extreme care, it was possible to extend the life of such goods to the point that they became economical. The volume and variety of garbage goods, that did work for very brief periods, made the humans frighteningly adaptable — an unpleasant truth that he would never admit to anyone else and barely admitted to himself. He really loathed the little barbarian carnivores.

  He watched a live holo of the main dividing way of the savage city, the one the humans called the Corridor. How original. He sat watching and listed to himself the various reasons he hated humans. He was aware that most of his kind felt merely a more distant contempt for the species. He would probably return to that attitude, himself, as soon as he could get out of the gods-forsaken Sol System and back to civilization. For now, they were just too close. He was finally in a state of mind to get the most appreciation out of the latest cube of research he had received from the human Erick Winchon.

  After the first hour, he decided he was very disappointed. This cube wasn’t nearly as good as the last one. The first half, an aversive eating sequence with fresh subjects, would have been completely boring if he hadn’t learned to read human facial expressions. The second half, aversive mating behaviors, should have been boring, but wasn’t. Somewhere in the sequence, it crossed over from mere unaesthetic mates to pointless and counterproductive destruction of the females. Odd, that. The accompanying notes said the obvious aversiveness resulted from the peculiar human emotion called empathy, rather than the loss of a potential mating opportunity before viable offspring could result. The other feature that rescued the cube from tedium was the proof of aversiveness tests performed on random subjects after a significant act, which left the subject in the situation while removing all controls on his or her emotional responses. Humans in distress were capable of an extraordinary variety of vocalizations.

  He was leaning back in a reclining couch, watching the show a second time through, when his AID interrupted him, stopping the holo.

  “Sir, you have an incoming message from a special courier vessel,” it said.

  “Display it,” he said coldly.

  A still holo of another Darhel appeared. The yellowish tinge to his silver and black fur, along with the yellow stains on his teeth, showed his less-than-stellar grooming habits. It was also a telltale mark of a certain age, as teeth didn’t get that neglected overnight. The gilded patterns on the columns behind him had Epetar’s traditional triangular motifs worked into the designs. From the moderately low quality and the obvious lack of sufficient Indowy body servants to attend his personal needs, Pardal knew the sender was of low rank.

  The AID from the courier ship had a beautiful voice. “Message from Epetar Factor Raddin of Dulain to Commerce Manager Pardal, currently traveling in the Sol System. Message begins.”

  The holo shifted into motion as the Darhel in the display began speaking his recorded piece. “A freighter, a gods-be-damned garbage scow by the look of it, has entered the Dulain System. Dedicated Industry has a Gistar registry, she is not on the schedule, and however disreputable she looks, she has the capacity to carry a substantial cargo. There is no substantial cargo waiting to load out here that is anywhere near completion except for ours. Two of the three cargoes over fifty-percent assembled are Cnothgar cargoes that they’re not about to allow jumped from their own planet. Strange ships coming in on top of one of my high margin cargoes make me very nervous. This would be a very bad time for a ship to be late. If there is a circumstance of which I am unaware, I report the information so that you may plan accordingly. I take my leave of you.”

  “Message ends. The billing confirmation number for this service has been transmitted to your AID. This vessel will depart the Sol System for return to the Dulain System immediately. Any standard correspondence or return messages should be uploaded at once.”

  Pardal ran his claws through the fur on top of his head, scratching nervously behind his ears. He took a deep breath and dropped the hand back to his side. He had to look composed for official correspondence. “AID, record for transmission from Commerce Manager Pardal to Epetar Factor Raddin of Dulain, copy to Epetar Freighter Captain Efgin traveling in the Dulain System. I received your message. As the shipment is late, it is likely that the Gistar vessel has taken advantage of the situation to take the contract on our Dulain cargo. Empty holds leak profits. Acquire whatever salable cargo you can, for the best price, and quickly. Unload, reload, and get that ship on to Prall. The Gistar vessel will undoubtedly beat us to Diess as well. Skipping that leg is the only way to get back on schedule. Your information was critical. Your use of the courier in this instance is validated, despite the expense. Continue to exercise all care before incurring such expenses. I take my leave.”

  Gistar. Pardal smiled. It was the kind of smile that, thousands and thousands of years ago, would have scared any prey animal stiff. Or sent it running. Today, his Indowy body servants abruptly left the room. Gistar. The code keys were no doubt long gone from Sol. Probably went out on the very next shuttle off of Earth and didn’t stop until they hit the jump point. Still, some things had to be revenged. What did the humans say? One good turn deserves another. Amazing that they were sometimes capable of sarcasm. One good theft certainly deserved another. Gistar.

  It would take a call to the human who primarily handled those of Epetar’s interests that required the human touch. And, curse Gistar, require him to book passage right back to Earth. The only mitigating component would be ge
tting off Titan.

  “AID, what is the name of our human agent for special issues on Earth?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Monday 11/15/54

  The white-haired man was clearly not a juv. He looked like a late middle-aged stockbroker. He had sectioned his hair into precise squares pointed into precise spikes, exactly two point five four centimeters long. His pale blue suit jacket had the tails that had come back into style for morning clothes at the office. Robert Bateman even had an office. It was in the business district of Little Rock. When he was in town, he unfailingly went into the office at eight each morning, and left it between five and seven each evening. If he had to be elsewhere, which he frequently did, he reported in to the office first. He charged this expense to his employer as a necessary cover. Too many of the things they wanted done required a respectable business persona. His day trading of a picayune amount of Epetar’s money kept him abreast of the market, well enough to talk intelligently about its movements, scandals, and surprises. This was the cover he needed most often. It cost less to simply maintain it than to pay people to fabricate what was essentially the same identity, over and over. He did what he could to avoid getting the alias visibly dirty. You don’t shit where you eat.

  It surprised him to receive a direct call from the Darhel Pardal — or, rather, from his AID, which amounted to the same thing. He carried a buckley. An AID would have been an extravagance and a security risk. The trader he was counterfeiting would never have used one. He trusted Epetar to make sure his calls back and forth to them were secure. The hard-ass alien bastards were geniuses at programming. Privately, he thought of them as a weird blend of vampire, fox, and elf that sucked money as a poor substitute for blood — and resented it. Obviously, the Darhel had evolved as carnivores. Plant eaters did not have those rows of sharp teeth.