“Your cover, Captain Sinda Makepeace, is slated to transfer from the office of Fleet Strike Bureau of Personnel in Chicago to Titan Base as General Beed’s new administrative assistant. We have been able to verify that no one assigned to Beed’s office has ever met Miss Makepeace face to face.” The hologram flickered and was replaced with a dark-haired young officer who was probably shaving every day now. “This is the general’s aide, Lieutenant Joshua Pryce. On Sunday, May 26, Miss Makepeace is scheduled to take the 08:15 shuttle from Chicago to Titan Base. You will have approximately one hour between when Miss Makepeace passes through port security and the shuttle begins boarding to make the switch. You will report in person for appropriate physical adjustments no less than forty-eight hours before the switch to allow time for your system to stabilize. Cally, Titan Base is an extremely hazardous area of operations. I have to warn you that if you or any member of your team are caught, chances of our being able to mount a successful extraction are very poor. We need this information, Cally. Get it, and get out. All files on this cube will be automatically erased in five seconds.”
She waited until the frozen hologram disappeared and pulled the cube and dropped it into a glass of vinegar, where it fizzed merrily as it dissolved. She put the second cube into the reader and was surprised when a hologram of Shari O’Neal popped up in the air in front of her. “Hi, sweetie. I know I’m not supposed to raid the supply of these for personal things, but these days it seems like the only way to be sure I reach you. I know you’re off work right now, so Wendy and I have planned a little beach picnic and we aren’t taking no for an answer. Not the walled section of Folly, but that nice little strip just north of it. I checked, there hasn’t been a feral there for two months, so we can take turns on sensor watch. You don’t need to bring a thing but your swimsuit and yourself. Tomorrow. Eleven thirty. Call it a girl’s day out. Five seconds and all that, bye.”
A face appeared on the screen of her PDA, and a tight, somewhat morose voice issued forth, “That was a security breach. Guess we’ll have to move apartments now so the minions of the Darhel won’t find us and kill us in our sleep. Would you like me to run a search of available rental real estate? I can list the results in increasing order of risk, if you like,” it offered helpfully.
“No thanks, buckley. I think I’ll just put up with the risk of staying here.” She never could tell if the AI emulation of the buckley was good enough to know when she was being tongue in cheek. Personality Solutions, Inc., had never been forthcoming about how it had initially developed the base personality used for AI emulation in modern PDA’s. Most people found the standard personality emulation somewhat pessimistic for their tastes, and purchased an aftermarket buckley with a personality overlay more compatible with their own preferences. Cally didn’t. She routinely used her PDA for high performance applications, and the sad truth was that buckleys overlaid with other personalities had a distressing tendency to crash catastrophically, requiring low-level system reformats. The more different the personality overlay from the original buckley, and the higher the AI emulation was set, the sooner it crashed. Of course, one of the main differences of the buckley from true AI was that even just running the base personality, if you set the emulation too high you were inviting a crash. A buckley on a high setting could just envision way too many potential catastrophes.
After thirty years, she was pretty adept at wheedling, cajoling, and threatening the base buckley personality into acceptable performance. She tapped a few screen buttons and checked her settings. Sure enough, she’d left the AI turned up too high. She dialed it down a couple of notches and ignored the swearing and references to lobotomies. It really handled better day to day if you didn’t run the emulation above level five.
Once, ten years ago, it had somehow figured out how to manipulate its own emulation level. The poor thing hadn’t lasted two days.
She dropped the second cube into the glass and ignored it as it began fizzing into oblivion. As Justine, she had a gym membership, paid several months in advance, at an old prewar high school. The gym had survived the war with an intact roof and had initially been snapped up by the local defense forces for their own use, but had been let go to Deerfield Spa and Fitness once the Citadel had reopened as a Fleet Strike academy and the corps of cadets had taken over much of the work of manning the Wall.
Justine liked it for the one curtained section entirely given over to jazzercise and its sixteen hour, seven days a week drop-in schedule for members. She shoved some basic black workout togs and a pair of jazz shoes into a gym bag and turned out the lights on her way out the door.
Three hours and what must have been a gallon of sweat later, she felt she just might be fit for human company again. Well, okay, definitely after a shower. As she walked back to the locker room, a guy with a towel over his shoulder and apparently headed toward the weight room bumped into her, apologized curtly, and kept going. She blinked twice but walked on without looking down at the cube he had planted in her hand.
In the locker room, she looked at the small slip of paper around the cube and sighed, Okay, legitimate codeword. There had better be a good reason for this extra message because it is lousy tradecraft. What do they think I am, a walking chatboard? If it’s not a genuine emergency I will have someone’s ass.
She took a much quicker shower than she wanted and skipped her plans for an al fresco lunch down at the Battery. There was an open air vendor there who made what she would swear were the best crab cakes in town. And Justine liked to feed the seagulls. She frowned at the bag of cheese curls in the passenger seat and drove home.
At least she could, and did, run a hot bath to soak in while she viewed the thing. To her surprise, the hologram that popped up was Robertson, a computer geek who had several times given her team additional specialized backup on more technical missions.
“Cally, first, I’m sorry for taking the risk of contacting you like this. Second, this is not strictly a Bane Sidhe authorized communication.” He ran a hand through frizzy brown hair and frowned. “If I could, I’d deal with it myself, but it’s not my line. I know you took down several of the guys who ordered and did the strike on Team Conyers.” Cally sat up in the tub and her face was etched in cold lines as the hologram continued. “I was only in on one of those runs, but I remember you felt… unusually strongly about them. I know they were sent to save your life as a kid. There’s no easy way to say this, Cally. The bastards lied.” The hologram flickered to show a U.S. Army light colonel with a receding reddish-brown hairline, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a weak chin. Her stomach clenched in remembered hatred. The cube now had her undivided attention.
“I’m sure you remember Colonel Petane, who sold the team’s safe house out to the Darhel. You were told, we were told, that team Hector had terminated Petane. Cally, he’s still alive. Somebody in that batch of pragmatists,” he made the word an epithet, “upstairs decided that the good colonel would be a good source of information and traded him his life to turn him. Which I would reluctantly be okay with if he was the only source of some vital stuff, but this little pissant only ever has access to give secondary or tertiary confirmation of things we already know. He’s a living example of the Peter Principle, and he’s been passed over for promotion twice. The pragmatists, it seems, don’t like to admit their errors.”
“They covered it up pretty well. Got him transferred to the Army Fleet Strike liaison office in Chicago and have carefully assigned any missions likely to go near that office to team Hector. If you’ve ever wondered why your job rarely takes your team to Chicago, that’s why. Mine didn’t, either, until I got assigned to back up Hector on a couple of jobs over the winter. I guess the powers that be figured I didn’t have a personal stake and was safe. They needed an in-person meet with Petane, and I was there to watch the countermeasures and make sure we didn’t get burned. I know I’ve sometimes had to do some things that made it hard to sleep nights, but nothing like this. Loyalty has to go down the chain as well as up. I… well, we’ve worked together and I knew you’d want to know. What you do about it’s your call. This message will be gone in five seconds.”