Sister Time-ARC Page 5

  She'd thanked God that Grandpa had decided that speed was more important than profit and had put off taking the heads and hauling them on the truck to the first bounty outpost at Spartanburg. They were repulsive enough lying dead on the pavement leaking yellow ichor into the ground. Having that stinking mess in the truck right next to her would really have been too much, wrapped in a tarp or not. He'd sprung for the rental fee for a really big truck for that one, bringing down most of the parts of the house. Most of parts of Grandpa and Shari's house were, of course, galactic materials. Extruded and formed to spec, they could laugh off a direct hit by a hurricane. And over the next couple of centuries, they probably would.

  Sensors and scanners for civilians hadn't even been a dream in some bright boy's head that soon after the war. Making do with the Mark I Eyeball when a postie just might have picked up a railgun from somewhere wasn't quite as terrifying as being in a bunker too damned near ground zero of a nuclear explosion, but it had been close. The worst part of the ride had been whenever they crossed a postie bridge. She'd known they were structurally sound, of course, but the reminder of organized and technological Posleen had rubbed salt in memories that were all too fresh.

  The first month on the island had been a hot and muggy hell, especially to a girl who'd recently acclimated to the Idaho mountain air. Sister Gabriella had really believed in PT, so at least she hadn't been out of shape. Standing her watch at night, stalking posties from one end of the island to the other, bit by bit, in the day had been tiring and tedious as hell. It wasn't that there were a whole lot of ferals. There weren't. Fleet and Fleet Strike and all the rest had done their job, and, once the God-Kings were gone, the ravenous hunger of the feral Posleen normals had done even more. It was just that posties, even a single isolated feral normal, were so terribly nasty. At least she'd gotten to vent her frustration at the heat and the mosquitos and the sand in everything whenever they'd actually found a Posleen. Grandpa didn't care, he'd just let her vent, as long as she didn't give him cause to scold her for wasting ammo. She didn't. Well, not more than once. And she'd had a really bad morning that day.

  Shari's kids had stayed at a Bane Sidhe safehouse back in Knoxville that summer. Cally hadn't blamed her one bit for keeping them out of it. They hadn't been trained for any of this. She had. Well, she'd lived with Grandpa during the war, which had amounted to the same thing. By the time they'd finished clearing the island, putting up the cinderblock and earth-berm-reinforced guardshack had been nothing. Guarding the bridge for the three days it had taken Grandpa and Shari to bring back the big truck of building materials from Knoxville had been interesting. Before they left, she had helped Grandpa and Shari load up the rotting but still identifiable postie heads in the back of the pickup. Another nasty job.

  Grandpa had helped her run the line of tripwires connected to alarms back and forth across the bridge. It was still a day and a half before she could convince herself to take the time to sleep. In the end, only one of the moronic, leaderless feral normals had happened along and actually tried to cross the bridge. Then had come the icky task of chopping it into pieces she could carry and dropping them over the side of the bridge and down into the water. She pitied the aquatic scavengers that had to dine on the thing, but she could hardly leave it on the bridge to rot and attract more. And then she'd had to wrap the head and keep it so they could take it in for the bounty later. She'd made sure it was downwind.

  After Shari and Grandpa got back, having brought Billy to ride high sentry and help out, they'd reviewed the island looking for the best place to build. On a plot on the landward side, next to a big bay, Shari had found an old bit of street sign that had somehow survived the scavenging. It had said "Jungl" on the only bit that was left. Grandpa had laughed and said that was home for him. The name had stuck, and even all these years later everybody still called it Papa's Jungle House. When they didn't call it Mama's house. Cally still couldn't figure out quite how it had happened, but over the decades Shari had somehow become honorary mother or grandmother to the whole island, whether the kids or grandkids or—hell, the relationships were all too confusing—were hers, or not.

  When she was out and about, she could still see what Cally regarded as the O'Neal touch in the layout of the island. Everything was downplayed to any potential observer on land, sea or overhead. Trees and brush and dunes broke up vertical outlines and while planted fields were impossible to hide, a whole lot could be done with roofs and netting. Between irregular overhangs and creative use of vegetation, most roofs couldn't be distinguished from the air. Hiding, of course, wasn't the point. Obfuscation was enough. With so many people moving into the Lost Zones, the purpose was to make the O'Neal compound seem just one more group of poor but independent bounty-hunters.

  The houses of O'Neals and Sundays were not showplace houses, designed to be artistic, designed to be seen. Rather, they were designed to fade into the background. Shrubbery and vegetation around the houses wasn't planted to artistically enhance, but to blur straight lines and obscure. A pre-war Green would have loved it. All so artistic. All so earthy. All so . . . deadly.

  Cally savored the smell of the salt on the brisk fall air as she walked across the road from the parking lot to pick up the kids. The olive drab pack on her back, brought along for the groceries, helped block the wind. She'd worn her shooting glasses to keep the fine, blowing sand out of her eyes. The school was only about a klick from the house, and right across from the small building that served as a local barter market and grocery store. She wouldn't even have driven if there hadn't been the trash to haul. Ashley Privett, Wendy and Tommy's oldest, had made a good business out of selling baked goods when she'd first arrived on the island some years ago, and over time had evolved into a sort of barter grocer, keeping track of what came in from who and selling on consignment.

  After the BS split, Cally had figured out a way to stretch her shrunken salary by using half her personal baggage allowance on each trip between home and base carrying something abundant one place and scarce in the other. Consequently, her pack was about half full with jars of soy sauce, corn syrup, four quart jars of moonshine, and some bagged popcorn. Bringing corn to the lowcountry would have been like bringing sand to the beach except for the relative difference in price, and that the Indiana popcorn popped a lot better. She'd gone out with two pounds each of roasted coffee beans, baking chocolate, cane sugar, home-made cigars, a pack of vanilla beans, three bottles of rum, and a bolt's worth each of indigo denim and unbleached shirt-weight oxford cloth. Her market for stone-ground hominy grits had gone out in the first year, after one of the women on the cleaning crew on Base had figured out how to make it herself. It had been a niche market, anyway. Besides, cloth was better. There was always a market for blue jeans. She supposed she was technically a smuggler, among other things. Not like it mattered. Assassin, smuggler, thief, but not a drunk—it's kind of hard to become an alcoholic when your blood nannites break it down before you ever feel the effects. Not a brawler—well, mostly. Not a rapist—she'd heard it was technically possible, but it wasn't to her tastes or her needs, even if she had been celibate for months now. Dammit.

  That was the worst thing about getting back on the team. Her six monthly regular courier slot to the moon would be given to someone else on light duty, and she'd have to find some other way to arrange time with James. Okay, Stewart. And of course she couldn't explain why she wanted to keep the courier route. She couldn't even ask to keep it. She'd been lucky to get it in the first place. James had been on Earth for conferences twice since Morgan was born. Unfortunately for her love life, she was probably going to have to wait until he could get down here again. Anything less wasn't an option. In forty or so years work for the Bane Sidhe, she'd had enough casual sex to last multiple lifetimes. She'd denied it often enough, even to herself, but she'd been looking for "the real thing." Having found it, she was hardly going to settle for less. Oh, if the fate of humankind was at stake, she wasn't going to be a prude, but
she'd also determined to say no to plans that involved her as a honey trap if it was just a matter of getting information faster or cheaper. Sure, sometime faster or cheaper might mean life was on the line. But more frequently than not, it wasn't. Motherhood was an excuse for saying no. It sometimes meant they weren't happy with her, but under the circumstances, she could live with that.

  Still, it was good that Grandpa owned the island free and clear. Before the split, her pay had been enough to keep a footloose single girl in beer and skittles, but hadn't been anything to write home about. Since the split, if she hadn't moved back home, she'd be struggling to make ends meet for herself, let alone the girls. It frustrated James that he couldn't help, of course. But in her business, having more money than you ought was dangerous. Bosses were understandably paranoid about who else might be paying their covert operatives, and for what. Fortunately, since the smuggling was almost a public service to the organization, it was honest income. Enough for a bit extra for Christmas and birthdays, anyway. Saving the world was great for warm and fuzzy feelings, but the pay sucked.

  She kicked at the sand and a bit of some scrubby creeping plant with one foot, frowning as the sand in her sneaker reminded her of the hole she had worn through the sole. Still, living in the next thing to paradise was a nice compensation on its own, thanks to Grandpa. And if paradise was gritty and placid and boring, those were what made a good place to raise kids. Even if the Bane Sidhe had made her into a thief. At least every mission she went out on to steal something was one mission where she probably could manage not to kill anybody. That was something, wasn't it?

  She shoved her hands in the pockets of the olive drab windbreaker she'd pulled on over a faded red t-shirt and jeans. The fall wind was starting to cut right through the holes at her knees and back pocket. Time to patch this pair. She stepped over a dried palmetto frond that had gotten blown together with spanish moss and downed leaves.

  The external walls of the little schoolhouse were plastered with tabby and screened with vegetation, the thin sheet of galplas that surfaced the roof had been tuned to a camouflage pattern Shari had done up on her PDA. The windows, while clear, had been coated with a thin film that kept the sunlight from glaring off of them, although they still admitted daylight and allowed the children to see out. On the side closest to Grandpa's and Shari's was one of the small concessions to color that the teacher and some of the mothers had insisted on—the children's flower garden. Currently, there was a small carpet of pansies peeking mischievously out at the afternoon sunlight. It was another reason Cally picked up the kids herself in the afternoons whenever she could—the flowers were nice.

  Most of the kids were out on the obstacle course by now. Well, okay, there was a seesaw and a rope swing, when somebody wasn't climbing it. The monkey-bars and tower and such were all kid-sized, and the kids tended to attack everything from the cargo nets to the tower in no particular order, substituting random, chaotic enthusiasm for the single-mindedness of adult PT. Still, the O'Neals and Sundays and various children of Bane Sidhe families were the only children she'd ever seen play hide and go seek in ghillie suits. At four, Sinda hadn't quite gotten the idea yet. She was sitting under the tree happily weaving flowers and bits of brightly colored construction paper into the new section of loose, unbleached cotton netting Grandpa had given her last week.

  "Mommy!" Morgan yelled, dropping off the rope swing and running across the packed sand. Sinda, whose head had jerked up as soon as she heard her sister cry out, wasn't far behind her, having left her netting behind her on the ground. Cally crouched down and spread her arms, catching one girl in each, and enjoyed the best moment of her day.

  "Did you two have a good day?" she asked, looking into one set of green eyes and one set of brown ones. Sinda's honey-blond hair hung around her shoulders in curls. Morgan's straighter and shorter brown hair looked like she'd been rolling around in the sand.

  She braced herself for impact as a little red-haired girl, liberally daubed with fingerpaint, crashed into the three of them. "Aunt Cally! Aunt Cally!" she squealed.

  Cally picked up three-year-old Carrie, who was actually technically her aunt, weird as that was, and planted her on one hip. "Hiya, squirt!" she said.

  "Come look at my Billy suit, Mommy!" Sinda started dragging her over to the now brightly decorated piece of netting, while Morgan said something about her books and ran inside.

  Cally looked down at the netting as her four year old pulled it over her head like a scarf and preened at her. "It's a very colorful ghillie suit. The most colorful one I've ever seen," she said.

  "Do you just love it?" Sinda asked.

  "It's very pretty. But isn't it going to stand out when you play hide and go seek with the other kids?"

  Sinda's forehead wrinkled a bit. "I could hide in the flowers!"

  "Every time?" Cally said.

  Sinda nodded cheerfully. "I like flowers. They're my favorite."

  "Okay. Are y'all ready to go to the store?" Cally asked as Morgan came back, a blue denim backpack slung over one small shoulder.

  They walked across a path that had bits of pavement, indicating it probably had once really been a street, to the store. Privett's Grocery was a weathered gray pine building, almost a shed, really, with a mud-brown roof of galplas tiles and a couple of windows with big, gray, storm shutters latched open against the walls. A bright splash of color came from the fresh fruits and vegetables displayed in wooden carts on the front porch. The carts were obviously new, the boards the golden white of fresh, unweathered pine.

  As soon as they got in the door, Carrie started struggling and Cally put her down. The girls drooled over the assortment of fudge behind the counter while she swapped her trade goods, incoming for outgoing, and picked out her own groceries. Shari's cabbages hadn't survived this year, so she grabbed a head of cabbage for coleslaw, and a bottle of lemon juice that must have been put up last year. A pitcher of lemonade would be a nice treat for everybody. She got each girl a small piece of fudge wrapped in rice paper, fighting the temptation to buy one for herself. Christmas was just around the corner, and it was going to be tight this year. Besides she was making brownies for dessert. Halfway down the steps she turned around and went back for the square of fudge. It was definitely getting to be time to do something about her salary.

  Chapter Three

  Grandpa was quiet as he fought with the tie-downs on the tent-roof thingy they were putting up over the picnic table. Cally knew it said gazebo on the box, but a she'd seen plenty of gazebos in Indiana—white, wooden, merry-go-round buildings without the ride. This was just a square tent roof with four poles and top to bottom mosquito netting. She got the zipper to work and zipped the mosquito netting from bottom to top outside her pole, moving on to the next one. Shari was grilling some hotdogs for the little kids, and had a shrimp boil going for the adults.

  Cally had really hated having to tell Grandpa that "our" meeting with Michelle was really her meeting with Michelle. She'd felt like she'd just taken away a kid's Christmas candy. He hadn't said much, then or since. She'd passed on Michelle's excuse, and cringed when he'd tried to wave it away as "no bother" to him as Clan Head. From the way Michelle had sounded, it hadn't seemed like she'd show unless Cally was alone. Grandpa didn't understand, of course. She didn't, either, but she wasn't the one being left out. Telling him had been just awful.

  Soon they'd gotten the netting down, which was more to stop the blowing sand than anything, all sensible mosquitos having decided to stay out of the cold, or whatever it was mosquitos did. She looked at her watch and threw a side-glance at Grandpa. Neither one met the other's eyes. She looked up at Shari, whose eyes plainly said she didn't want to be involved.

  "I guess it's about that time. I'll be back in a bit," Cally said. Grandpa just grunted in reply. Not gonna be a real relaxed dinner, is it.

  Cally picked her way through the tall grass to a set of ancient railroad-tie stairs and started down onto the beach. She looked out at the
waves hitting the shore and sighed, futilely trying to tuck her hair behind her ears. The wind insisted on blowing it right into her face. She dug an elastic band out of her jeans and pulled it back in a ponytail. It made her look about sixteen. Twelve, if it hadn't been for the boobs, which she still considered overwhelming. She sighed, but it wasn't like anyone but family was here to see her. The impression of adolescence was complete as she walked down the beach, scuffing her feet in the sand.

  "Where are you going?" The voice came from behind her and Cally jumped, spinning around in a crouch.

  "Ack! Don't do that!" Cally clutched a hand to her chest and looked up at the girls, letting a breath of relief out that they were still sitting at the table and maybe hadn't noticed anything unusual. "You didn't just appear out of nowhere, did you?"

  "Please give me credit for some sense. I came in behind that pile of rubble." Michelle gestured at the crumbling remains of some cinderblock structure or other. "I only walked down when I saw you. So it seems I am finally at a beach with you."

  "Yeah," Cally said. There was an uncomfortable silence. "Before we get into the mission, real quick, can I ask you a question about nanogenerator code keys?"