Unless this new kid is Net Force business somehow—Which made it, as far as Maj was concerned, her business as well…especially when it turned up in her own household.
The kettle started to shriek. Maj pulled it hurriedly off the burner and poured the boiling water onto her teabag, then killed the burner and took the cup over to the table, sat down with it. A moment later her mother came scuffing in, also wearing that slightly beat-up “work bathrobe” she favored for these early morning work sessions, a garish multicolored thing she had brought back from Covent Garden in London after a consulting trip. “These people,” she muttered, making for the same cupboard Maj had opened, and taking out a one-shot coffee dripper from it. “I build them a system that works like a dream, but can they leave it alone? Noooo. They have to tinker with it, and attach new programs to it, and they don’t debug the programs, and then they wonder why the whole thing crashes….”
“Morning, Mom,” Maj said.
“Morning, honey,” her mother said. “Thank you for not saying ‘good.’”
Maj was itching to ask her mother why her dad would be on the phone to James Winters…but that would reveal that she had been eavesdropping.
“Daddy up yet?” her mother said.
“I think so. Sounded like he was on the link or something.”
“The man just won’t rest.”
“Neither will you.”
“And what are you doing up this hour?” her mother said. “Before you accuse us of being incorrigible workaholics.”
“Oh, our big space battle’s tonight. Prebriefing.”
“That serious?” her mother said, pouring water into the prepacked coffee filter.
“Well, we’ve spent a lot of time on development,” Maj said. “We don’t want to get immediately dead because we didn’t discuss what we were going to do with what we developed.”
“Mmm,” her mother said then. “No argument there…”
They sat in companionable silence for a while and drank their tea and coffee respectively. After a few moments, there came a faint tick! from one side of the kitchen. Maj’s mom cocked her head. “Aha,” she said, for the tick! had come from the water heater. “He’s in the shower, then.”
Maj’s father would have lived in the shower if he was allowed to. He claimed he got his best ideas there. Maj’s thought was that it was probably best that he had a day job which kept him out of the shower occasionally. Otherwise he would now quite likely rule the world. “I’m in no rush,” she said. “I was going to go to this meeting first.”
“Good.” Her mother had another slurp of coffee. “Honey, about our little guest…”
“Mmmh?”
“You do realize that he’s—”
“Mommy, Mommy, look what I found!”
The Muffin, horribly awake for this hour of the day, came charging into the kitchen, waving a tattered picture book. Maj sighed. Whatever the manufacturers said about these books being “childproof,” they had not yet run them past the Muffin.
“—thirteen,” her mother said after a moment, looking slightly bemused.
“Oh, yeah, Mom, it’s no problem,” Maj said. “I’ll manage.”
“It was lost,” the Muffin said, “and I found it under my bed.” She waved the book under her mother’s nose. It had an earnest-looking dinosaur on the cover.
“That’s where most things go,” said Maj, who had previous experience in this regard with her little sister. The Muffin regarded “under the bed” as a storage area of infinite flexibility.
“Will you read it to me, Mommy?”
“But you can read it yourself, sweetie,” her mother said, wearily taking another swig of coffee.
“It’s good to read to people,” the Muffin insisted. “I read to my dinosaurs. It makes them smarter.”
Maj and her mother gave each other an amused look. “Well, honey,” her mother started to say, and then the phone rang.
“Now, who can it be at this hour?” her mother said, looking up. “They’d better not be expecting imagery, because they’re not going to get it. Hello?” she said.
The Muffin looked annoyed and wandered over to the other side of the table with the book, where she climbed up on a chair, slapped the book down on the table and began to read aloud to herself.
“No,” Maj’s mother said to the air over the recitation of dinosaur names, “he’s not available at the moment; may I take a message for him? — Yes, this is Mrs. Green. — Oh.—Oh. And it’s landing where?”
There was a pause. “Seven-fifteen? There wasn’t any problem with the plane, was there?”
Maj’s eyebrows went up. “—Oh, well that’s good,” her mother said. “No problem. Yes, we’ll be there. Thank you! Bye now!”
She blinked, “hanging up,” and turned to Maj. “So much for the virtues of getting up early and having half an hour to relax,” she muttered, and glanced at the Muffin. “They’ve diverted our young cousin’s flight to Dulles.”
“Isn’t that good for us, though? We don’t have to go all the way down to BWI.”
“It would be good if he wasn’t landing in three-quarters of an hour,” her mother said, getting up and swigging down the rest of her coffee at a rate that made Maj wonder one more time if her mother had an ablative-tile throat. “Better get dressed, honey, we’ve got a plane to meet.”
“Ohmigosh,” Maj said. “My meeting with the Group—!”
“You’re going to have to abort it,” her mother said. “This is family stuff, hon, sorry…I think you’re needed. Tell them you’ll talk to them later.”
“It wasn’t just a talk, it was—!”
But her mother was already on her way down the hall, and a second later she was banging on the bathroom door, shouting, “Sweetie, the sky is falling, better come out of there!”
Maj heard a strangled noise come through the faint sound of rushing water. Reluctantly she got up and went off to get dressed, after which she would have to rush to commandeer enough time on the computer to tell the Group she was going to have to miss out on the briefing. They’re going to be furious. Come to think of it, I think I’m furious.
So much for this little Niko not interfering with anything, Maj thought as she stalked off down the hallway. What a wonderful time we’re going to have together….
Fortunately, it being the awful hour of the morning it was, the traffic into Dulles wasn’t too bad. Maj could almost have wished it was a little worse, in that there would have been more time for her to lose her bad mood completely. The reaction of the Group, when she had stuck her head into Chel’s work space and announced that she couldn’t stay for the meeting, was all too predictable, especially from those who had stayed up late. “Look, I’ll meet you all early here tonight,” Maj had said as she turned to go, and Shih Chin, usually so good-tempered, had actually growled, “Miss Madeline, if you’re late tonight…we’re going without you. The battle starts at six central—”
“I know, I know, I won’t be….” Maj had said, unnerved by the mutter of annoyance coming from the others. She had fled, then, intent on getting into the bathroom for at least a few minutes before she would have to get dressed and pile into the car with the rest of the crowd. Now here she sat, feeling rather hot and bothered, insufficiently showered, and altogether not caring whether she made any kind of good first impression on anybody.
Yet she was still distracted by the one connection she couldn’t put together. James Winters…and Dad. Talking about him. Maj sighed. I’m going to have to cut him some kind of slack, I guess, no matter how annoyed I am.