A bit later, she flicked the unsmoked half of her third down onto the pavement, as Kieran climbed into the plane to do whatever pilots did. She shrugged, greeting Tommy, his son, and a guy named Maise whose vaguely haunted, zombie look spoke volumes.
She waived Maise and Arthur onto the plane before pulling Sunday aside out beyond a wing. She didn’t know if Maise had enhanced hearing or not, and wasn’t chancing it.
“Brief me,” she said quietly.
“Dependents murdered. His family. Pretty gruesome. One of his sons survived.”
Cally’s knuckles whitened in clenched-fist fury. “We know,” she said in a tone that was more statement than question.
“We know,” Tommy confirmed. “They weren’t subtle about who, and the why is obvious. For all practical purposes, the balloon has gone up.”
“Roger that. Do we have any word on scope and ROE?” she asked. “Are our troops on alert?”
“You know as much as I do. As for DAG, we’ve kept a lid on it. They’re on alert. They’ll notice Maise is gone, but I think we kept it pretty secure. The courier was the big risk; Wendy and Shari have him nailed down tight. Mueller and the other NCOs will be on search and destroy for rumors.”
He held his hand out under the increasingly insistent drops. “By the way, you may not have the sense to go in out of the rain, but I do,” he said.
Cally was suddenly conscious of her hair plastered to her head. She was soaked to the skin.
“Fuck it,” Cally said. “Getting wet and miserable’s just going to make me happier to kill somebody.”
When the plane was in the air and she found herself staring out the window at nothing, she finally shook loose of the black nowhere she’d been inhabiting.
“Buckley, play me something. Anything. I don’t care, as long as the music is violent.”
“Oh, dear. Some disaster has happened. Are we in the air?” it squeaked. “Don’t you know how dangerous it is to be in the fucking air, those rail guns—”
“Shut up, buckley. Just play it.”
“Right,” it said, its habitual pessimism tinged with an actual note of fright. The base buckley personalities all loathed flying. Nevertheless, the order for violent music was one it understood, and it called up the historical record of the ACS playlist from the Posleen war, and ran a search of similar material.
Metallica was just what the doctor ordered, the buckley concluded, and it started with “No Remorse.”
Chapter Eleven
Pinky understood the next morning when Father O’Reilly turned him over to another one of the moms — he sniffled at the word before controlling himself. Besides, Mrs. Mueller was much nicer than Miss Veldtman. Miss Veldtman tried to be nice, but Mrs. Mueller just was nice. With the other lady he could tell it was her job to try to be nice to him, and help him not hurt over his mom and Joey, or even Jenny. Pinky thought that was the stupidest idea any adults had ever had. It was gonna hurt anyway and he didn’t damn well want to talk about it. He felt better for thinking about that with the “damn” in it. It was more emphatic that way.
Mrs. Mueller had him playing in the kids’ gym with her kids Davey and Pat. They were older than Joey, but they were all right. Father O’Reilly had told him it really was okay to let his real self show around the Muellers. Pinky had been doubtful, but he tried it a little, and a little more when it worked out okay.
The Mueller kids were nothing like Joey, or even Jenny, or the other neighborhood kids. After about five minutes they had looked at each other, then looked at him, and Pat said, “It’s like you’re a juv, only a kid version. Cool.”
“Our dad’s a juv,” Davey informed him, watching him as if he wasn’t sure of the reaction the disclosure was going to get.
“Cool,” Pinky echoed. Then the three of them had grinned at each other, and since then the other two boys had been patiently initiating him into the rudiments of handling the combination of a baseball and a glove. The guy at the gym counter even had one close to his size, which was cool because Mom could never aff — Pinky suppressed another sniffle.
The kids’ gym, as far as he could see, was about the same size as an adult basketball court at the Y, doubled. He noticed pretty quick that the playground equipment looked a lot more like a kid-sized Q-course than the kind of stuff you got in preschools or public parks. He approved. The park stuff was boring, like the grown-ups that built it would have a heart attack if you so much as stubbed your toe. The five-year-old eyed the monkey bars with a mix of lust and glee.
The floor underneath all the stuff was padded, at least a little, but it didn’t look too heavy. Besides, Pinky didn’t want to actually get hurt if he fell; it just made him indignant to feel like they were so afraid he’d break just from a little damn play. Grown-ups could be damn stupid sometimes.
The boys took the hint and he got to play on them a little before Mrs. Mueller came over and told them they had to go.
Davey and Pat looked at her like she was crazy. “Mooommm! It’s not even lunchtime!”
“Hush.” She looked at him. “Pinky, your daddy’s here. We’re going up to the cafeteria where you can meet him and grab a snack.” Her eyes were real sad, and he could tell she felt sorry for him. He wished she wouldn’t, because it made him have to fight that much harder not to cry in front of Davey and Pat.
It was the first time Pinky had been in the base cafeteria. It looked like a grown-up version of the cafeteria at Joey’s school, except the adults got to tell the people behind the counter what they wanted to eat.
They were already at a table when three people walked in, and Pinky was surprised to find himself getting out of his chair so fast he knocked it down, and spilled the milk all over himself, but he didn’t care and just ran for the big man in the middle. “Daddy!”
And then it didn’t matter that he was crying in front of people because Daddy was crying, too. He was wrapped up in a big hug, and he didn’t care that it was too tight, not even a little.
Pinky saw that the part of his mind that noticed things was still clicking along like a clock, as he heard the really huge man, who had walked behind him, telling Mrs. Mueller he had a cube from her husband. He noticed that the blond woman with real big breasts standing beside his dad wasn’t reacting to the crying at all except for maybe being a little impatient. She was just mad. Madder than he’d ever seen anybody. Ever.
He could tell it wasn’t at them, so it was probably at the people who killed Mom and Joey. And Jenny, he added. He squirmed in his dad’s arms, wiping the snot from his nose on his sleeve.
“Who are you?” he asked the woman. Somehow “lady” didn’t seem to fit her at all.
“My name’s Cally. Hi, Pinky.”
She didn’t squat down on her haunches, which he always found kind of patronizing from adults. She was another one who just plain talked to him like a human being. He liked her, instantly, mostly because he could tell that she’d just love to kill the people who murdered his family, very violently. It was a sentiment he could appreciate, but it was another one he didn’t really think would fit the role of five-year-old, which he couldn’t quite discard in front of his dad.