Sister Time-ARC Read online

  "Sorry." The boss obviously wasn't. "All the snacks in ours are geared to the tastes of the Indowy-raised. As an Earther, I doubt you would like them. You are, however, welcome to try. If you walk to that end of the hall, turn the corner, and walk through the second door on the left, you will find what you are looking for," he said.

  His employee thanked him and walked towards the elevator bank, instead. The mentat dismissed the unimportant incident from his mind, continuing on his own intended course to speak with his assistant. He could have called her to him, but he wanted to stretch his legs. It had been a productive morning. The walk to the opposite corner office and back would combine a scheduled break with a useful task. Efficient.

  As he walked in her door, Felini put down her AID. That she expected him was no surprise. A competent aide, she knew his daily schedule as well as he did.

  "Prida, I need you to check with the travel office and verify that all the arrangements are as they should be for the Caribbean convention. Everything from the flight out on the afternoon of the eighth to the moment I arrive back at my apartment Sunday night. Last time, those cretins booked me in a hotel that had no pool, with a restaurant that was a carnivore's delight but did nothing for me. I informed them of my dissatisfaction, but I have learned not to expect stupidity and incompetence to abate merely because of a complaint and a couple of terminations. It is, of course, a ridiculous waste of your time, but I need it," he said.

  "I'll take care of everything." His assistant was an absolute paragon of control, despite her minor idiosyncracies. She was an Earther. He expected no better in moral development, contenting himself with prodigious competence.

  "Thank you. You have no idea how much I am looking forward to this convention. The keynote speaker, Alexandra Patel, will be presenting her paper on motivational strategies in postwar subsistence economies. I have read a small preview of her findings and they are fascinating. The implications for our work could be very significant. Oh, and note that I am not staying at the convention hotel. The Pearlbrook has self-contained chalets right on the beach. I am supposed to have one reserved, but please do verify it." He turned and began the other half of his restful walk, knowing that he could trust his accommodations and amenities to be perfect.

  Thursday, 12/2/54

  The Personnel Department at The Institute for Advancement of Human Welfare wasn't aware of the details of new employee orientation as practiced by Prida Felini. Not that they could have done anything about it if they were. Personnel weenies worked away from the most sensitive company operations and management carefully shielded them from those realities. Personnel weenies had way too much opportunity to damage the company through the passive-aggressive retaliations that were so hard to detail and therefore compel against. Insufficiently specific compulsions tended to wear off unless reinforced regularly—another technical problem to solve before they could release a production model of the Aerfon Djigahr. One, teensy compulsion was unpleasant, but hardly something to make a federal case out of. It was, however, just the kind of thing to get their panties in a twist. Personnel weenies bored Prida to tears. Consequently, she tried to make her interactions with them as rare and brief as she could get away with.

  The little man at her door now was one of the most boring people in that department. Granted, it was his job to see that suitable candidates were presented, and interviews scheduled, until positions were filled. And every minute she spent with the little bastard she couldn't help thinking about all the fun she could be having if she wasn't occupied dealing with him.

  "What is it?" she said, not bothering to waste courtesy on such a nonentity.

  "Excuse me, Ms. Felini. Sorry to interrupt you but in-processing is screaming for that reception clerk again. I've got a list of all the qualified applicants I can forward to you." The underling didn't meet her eyes, just stared at the ground looking stupid.

  Screaming. She'd be screaming with boredom until she ditched the man. "Pick the most qualified candidate, schedule it. Hal," she addressed her PDA, "send Personnel my schedule for the next month. The first or second week in December would be preferable, as I'm quite busy. It seems one is always busiest in the holiday season." She stared out her virtual window, which was much more interesting than the weenie, and dismissed him. "That should be all you need. I need to get back to work. Shut the door on your way out."

  Samuel resisted the urge to hum as he trotted back down to the third floor and his own desk. Some favors were a joy to return, regardless of the risks. Besides, while he hadn't taken to all that much that was Indowy, the Path ought to mean something to a mentat. The Human Mentat O'Neal would now have her second friend hired into the company. He couldn't have cared less why Ms. O'Neal wanted these people hired, though he couldn't help guessing a lot. Whatever it was would be nothing but bad for Ms. Felini and Mr. Winchon, the corrupt son of a bitch, and that was plenty good enough for him.

  There was a big smile on his face as he placed the voice mail call to the planted candidate requesting an interview. He was having a very good day—so good a day that his coworkers had to tap him on the shoulder several times to ask that he stop whistling.

  Cally O'Neal sat down on the winter-brown grass in front of the tractor Grandpa was winterizing for one of her cousins. She stuffed her hands in the pockets of her new, secondhand coat. "I've got an interview. December tenth. One of the clerk covers. Guess I'm the next one in," she said.

  "So the girlfriend draw did the trick, did it? Told you so." He spat tobacco juice over his shoulder, simultaneously attempting to wipe the black grease off his hands with a shop towel. He only succeeded in moving it around, of course.

  "This puts the whole show on for the tenth, if Michelle can get us the decoy device in time. Winchon's scheduled for a conference in the Caribbean." His granddaughter ignored the I-told-you-so and tried, in vain, to tuck the short, black strands of hair behind her ears. It blew into her eyes, and the dark hair was so much more distracting than her "natural" silver blond. After so many hair changes she should have been used to it. She sighed. On the job, yes. At home, no.

  He nodded approvingly. "A Friday. Quitting time on a weekend is the fastest way to clear an office building I know of."

  "Want me to go fetch you some hot coffee?" she asked.

  "I knew I raised you right. You know how I take it."

  "You sure you want a double shot of that rotgut you drink in it when you're messing with tools?"

  "I am not 'messing with tools' as you put it. I am conducting the precision operation of winterizing a valuable agricultural machine. You're the one who volunteered to get me coffee, young'un, now git!"

  She traipsed across the fields to the house, feeling like she was eight again and just learning to run demo. Carefree days, if you didn't count the Posties. Well, she'd lost count of her own Posties in the first engagement, anyway. Now she had her own girls to pick up from Jenny and Carrie's house this afternoon. Time sure did fly.

  Monday 12/6/54

  "We're all here, so let's get started," his granddaughter said.

  Michael O'Neal, Senior, spat into the paper cup he'd filched from the mess hall. Being on an operational team with his own grandchild was a special kind of purgatory for O'Neal. He didn't grumble to himself over it, because he figured he had a lot of time stored up for one penance or another, anyway. Okay, so he didn't grumble much. The oldest living O'Neal never forgot that he was an old man in a young man's body. He had gone the whole route, from looking death in the face as a young man, himself, in the jungles of Vietnam—where death was a hunter you could avoid if you were both good and lucky—to looking death in the face as an old man, where it rolled up on you, a slow juggernaut that killed by inches as more and more of your parts and systems just didn't work like they'd used to. He hadn't made his peace with it. To his mind, anyone who said they had was lying—unless maybe it was less than a few hours off. Anyhow, those things in the heart and mind that turn a young man into an old one, he'd alr
eady traversed forty or fifty years ago.

  His granddaughter, in her perpetually twenty-year-old body, had never felt what it was to age. Much as she thought she had the maturity of a full life to the same degree as a pre-war woman of sixty, she had no idea. It wasn't time that made you old. It was your experiences. She'd had plenty of horrifying ones, but not the right ones, or not the same ones, anyhow, to give that perspective that came from getting old. A non-juved man or woman of her age could tell her a thing or ten about life.

  She was going over the building floor plan, and working ingress and egress strategies. He knew she had various theories about why he had long since ceded command of the team to her. None of them were right. He needed a fresh plug of chaw. It was off brand stuff that didn't taste quite right. He cleared his mouth and seated the fresh dose of nicotine, anyway.

  His real reason for putting her in charge and leaving her there was that it made it far easier to watch her back. That meant more, now that the slab was gone. She'd died three times in her career so far, and not just piddling little technical death-on-the-table of the pre-war kind. She'd had major organ-systems blown away damned near real deaths. Without the slab, another one of those and she'd be gone for real. Half the time, his contributions to mission planning put him in place to cover her ass. If he had been in command, she would never have tolerated his shuffling her off to nice, safe spots. For one thing, there weren't any, for another, it would put the whole team at risk, and for a third, he'd just wake up one morning to find she'd transferred to another team.

  This was the next best thing. He did his job, she did her job, he trusted her skill and competence and all that shit. There were proper mission slots devoted to covering a teammate's ass. He made sure that, as often as possible, when the right job was there, he was the one watching her back. When it wasn't, he put it out of his mind, completely, and did whatever job the mission dictated, knowing that a fuckup from him could kill her as surely as any enemy.

  So he didn't command. Planning, though, involved the whole team. Everybody's head had to be in the game one hundred percent to catch flaws in the plan, like now.

  "Did I just hear you say you want me to go in through the ventilation shafts? Hello? Clang, clang, clang? Don't go all Hollywood on me, people," he said

  Everybody was looking at him as if he'd jumped in from Mars. He smiled sheepishly. "Okay, I obviously missed something. You caught me woolgathering."

  Cally gave him a mom look, like he was a kid found climbing on the cabinets. "Grandpa, the ducts are galplas. Great for some architectural reason, I'm sure, but lousy for security. You also don't have to make as many of those weird turns. Apparently, galplas can go farther in straight lines than steel or aluminum—something about heat expansion. You'll be carrying the decoy device behind you, but we've got a padded pouch for it with strap attachments and wheels on the bottom. You should have no problems pulling it along behind you."

  He radiated skepticism.

  "Sorry, but you're the only one who can get the device in. There's no way in hell Tommy will fit, George and I have other routes inside, and no offense, Harrison, but you don't have the right set of skills to take down any nasties, fast and quiet. Besides, you're stronger than Harrison, Grandpa. The device is pretty heavy—about a hundred kilos. We all have upgraded muscles, so any of us could carry it, but you started off with the same lifter's strength as Daddy. You're going to be the best getting it through that ductwork, especially this vertical climb," she said, sticking a pointer into the ducting hologram her buckley had flashed up.

  "So how do I get in? And do I really want to know?" Tommy said.

  "We know their likely sweep pattern and their sweeps are always Thursday nights. We know they need more subjects. We position you to get swept up. The next afternoon, you're already in the building, we break you out."

  "I don't like this plan," Tommy said. The other faces at the table had varying expressions of alarm, except for George, who looked thoughtful.

  "Tommy, when you analyzed their internal security systems, you said they were a piece of crap designed to contain the technically ignorant, and could be defeated with canned scripts. That wrong?" George asked.

  "Hell, no. They are a piece of crap. But do we know if all the people caught in the sweep go to the company or get split off for involuntary colonization? I don't want to end up with a one-way ticket to Dulain. Besides, predicted sweep patterns can change. Not to mention the hazards of joining Doctor Mengele's fun and games. If they're that low on victims, who's to say they aren't going to start in on people the first day? I read George's report of how fast their compulsions can work."

  "On the sweep patterns, if we can go through and take our intelligence data to analyze where sweeps have happened before, and population traffic patterns, so can they." She pulled up a map. "There's a nice, juicy fat community right here that hasn't been plucked yet. It's the most likely target. Hey, they don't pick you up, we go to plan B."

  "I like the sound of plan B better already. What is plan B?" he asked.

  "That Harrison goes in through the vents with Papa and an AID to run canned scripts, and you drive the car. You can see all the potential that has to go wrong. We have no backup cyber. If we can't get into the room with the Aerfon Djigahr, the whole mission's a bust. I had hoped you'd be the first one we got in as an employee, but it just didn't turn out that way."

  "The cracking equipment goes in on me either way," the O'Neal said.

  "George, you're inside. What do you rate the chances of Sunday being a casualty between when he gets in there and when we break him out? I've got my own guesstimate, but I want yours."

  "I think there's a decent chance they'll do something with him. How high, I don't know. But what she put on me had to be an easy task for Felini. As Mark Thomason, as far as they knew, I had already agreed to keep my mouth shut, so they expected it to be easy. As me, I keep secrets far more than I run off at the mouth about them, so it worked—until the doc broke it. The really awful stuff they do they still have to build up to. Anyway, the biggest thing is that only Winchon and Felini can work the device so far, and Winchon's gonna be out of town." He looked at the huge man. "The chances Felini alone can do anything permanently harmful in one day are real low," he said.

  "The old Company motto: we bet your life." He shrugged. "Sorry, being helpless goes against the grain. There's no other way to get me inside?"

  "None that I could find. I looked at security, supplies in, trash out—all the first choice routes I could think of. Look over it yourself. We've got some time. See if you can find anything I missed. We might get lucky."

  "If I wanted a nice, safe, desk job, I wouldn't be here. Okay, I'll see if you missed anything. I hope so, because thinking about it I like plan B even less than plan A."

  She grimaced sympathetically. "Sorry."

  "Okay, so everybody knows the timing, the routes in for our gear, the routes in for us, the switch, and our route out. Have we missed anything?" she said.

  "What's the go to hell plan?" Papa asked

  "We have secondary routes out here and here." When she mentioned them, her buckley obediently highlighted the paths through the building in red and blue. "As you can see, the red route is shorter but last choice, because it has one more actively patrolled hallway intersection, more chance of after hours workers, and two more cameras to gimmick. That's the most active stairway in the building, being closest to the front entrance. Buckley, give me the green route," she said. "This stairway is farthest from the secure room, but least used and closest to the west loading bay. The guys bringing in supplies don't take the stairs, they take the freight elevator. The trash goes into the burn bin there, so we also have the least likelihood of questions."

  "Don't tell me we're hauling that cart down the stairs?"

  "Either that or just the device."

  "What's the problem with the freight elevator?"

  "More chance of traffic and requires a real badge. Tommy could prob
ably crack it, but it's more time spent and more risk of hostile encounter. The stair exit is around a corner from the elevator. Papa carries the prototype, Tommy carries the cart, George and I are available for reaction."

  "If that's it, then mull it over, look for flaws, and get me any comments by the end of the day. Take off, people."

  Thursday morning, 11/9/54

  "Your office door is jammed," on of her work crew informed Michelle, as she walked up the side of the construction bay on her way in. It lacked only a final check of her work before she made delivery of the Aerfon Djigahr decoy to her sister. Then the endeavor would be out of her hands. She had not allowed this situation to ruffle her emotional equilibrium, so far, but with the grade II Sohon technician's announcement, she found she actually had to devote a moment's thought to restabilizing her heart beat and halting release of stress hormones.