Cally glanced at her watch, Damn. Time’s gonna be tight. She crept the rest of the way up the stairs, pausing to slip her shoes back on before opening the door and stepping out into the hallway. This part of the building was immaculately maintained. The carpet was new, and the walls smelled of fresh paint. She passed a picture of a lighthouse, in a gilt frame, as she counted three doors down and retrieved the gas grenade from inside her dress.
The Posleen had reduced Earth from a thriving civilization of five billion down to about one billion refugees, barbarians, and Galactics’ lackeys. The six-legged carnosauroid aliens were immune to every hostile chemical agent the humans or Galactics had been able to envision. Likely, they were immune to quite a few things nobody but the half-legendary Aldenata had envisioned. Fortunately, the Indowy were more vulnerable. Particularly, they were vulnerable to the general anesthesia agent in the grenade. She opened the door just long enough to toss it in, pulling it closed and waiting outside.
Nonlethal and scentless except for a vanishingly faint chemical-lavender smell, the gas was harmless to humans and persistent enough to be readily detected later. The thing she liked best about it was that one of the breakdown products was a common Darhel allergen and tended to give them a very nasty rash — about three days later. She watched the second hand on her watch tick off thirty seconds before going in.
Inside, one of the first things she noticed was a holographic display that sat on an antique mahogany table. In a display of vanity excessive even for his own species, this Darhel apparently traveled with his own portrait. The silver-black fur would have been salt and pepper except for its characteristic metallic luster. His fox ears, cocked forward aggressively, had been embellished with the lynx-tufts that were the current fad in Darhel grooming. His cat-pupilled irises were a vivid, glowing green — she would be willing to bet they had been digitally retouched. They glinted in the middle of the purple-veined whites of his eyes. The most prominent feature, however, was row of sharp teeth, displayed in a near snarl. Again, they had obviously been retouched to make the light appear to sparkle off their razor edges. He was draped in some kind of cloth that was, no doubt, hideously expensive. His angular face combined with the other features to make him look like a fatally charismatic cross between a fox and some sort of malignant elf. Half a dozen Indowy body servants were portrayed clustered in subservient postures around his feet.
Other than the gratuitous display of self-adoration, it was a stereotypical Darhel suite. A thin layer of gold covered practically everything that could be gilded, worked in intricate patterns. Piles and piles of cushions were covered in muted colors of an expensive Galactic fabric ten times softer than silk. Some of those cushions were now graced with the small, green, furry forms of sleeping Indowy. One of them had been unlucky enough to fall on the floor. It had curled up into a ball and she stepped over it as she searched for the all-important, hideously expensive code keys that were the goal of her raid.
The drawer was one of several hidden in one of the false columns ornamenting the room. She assumed it was the one with the expensive bio-lock worked into the hatch. Her buckley might have been able to convince it she was the Darhel owner. Or it might not. Fortunately, this Darhel had neglected to consider the hinges, which were delicate, of a Galactic material far too strong for most brute force, and exposed. The screw holding one end of each pin took the normal Indowy hourglass head. She unscrewed the top of her pen, selected the right size bit and—
“Cally O’Neal, I see you.” The soft voice behind her was soprano, but not nearly high enough to be Indowy. The blonde cat burglar whirled and froze in mid strike, staring at a thin girl in Indowy mentat’s robes, her brown hair pulled back in a tight bun…
“Michelle?” Cally asked, her eyes blinking rapidly in surprise.
Since Cally had been officially dead for over forty years, including as far as she had been aware to the knowledge of her only sister, seeing the mentat was, to say the least, a bit of a shock. Especially in the middle of an op.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Cally hissed. “And that Indowy greeting was in very poor taste, you know. ‘I see you’ sounds like we’re playing hide and seek.”
“Is this a bad time?” Michelle could have been slightly miffed. In all that serenity, it was hard to tell.
“Hell yes, this is a bad time!” Cally hissed. “I’m kind of in the middle of an op here. And could you please keep your voice down!” Despite feeling totally surreal from the interruption, the underdressed cat burglar couldn’t help drinking in the sight of her long-estranged sister. “Waitaminute — you knew I was alive? How the hell did you get in here, anyway?” she asked.
“The physics is… complicated. You know, Pardal is going to be very displeased when he finds those missing.”
“Fuck Pardal. Personally, I wouldn’t mind if it sent the bastard into lintatai.” The thief fitted the screwdriver into the tiny hinge.
“Fine, don’t listen to me,” Michelle sighed, “but don’t do it that way. You’ll break it. Someone put a lot of time into that drawer. Why don’t you just use the manufacturer’s override code?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because it’s a hundred random characters of Galactic Standard? What do you mean I’ll break it?”
“Those aren’t hinges. They’re purely decorative. And breakable. Also alarmed. If you attempt to remove them the real door will lock somewhat permanently. Besides, the code’s not quite random.” She rattled off a string of Galactic syllables with a glibness that made Cally’s tongue ache in sympathy.
“How? Nevermind. Could you repeat that again, only slower?” She fiddled with her PDA for a moment, “Buckley. Give me a Galactic keyboard and pretend to the drawer you’re an AID.”
“It wanted to tell me. It likes me.” Michelle gestured faintly towards the drawer, then began repeating syllables, pausing briefly after every group of five.
“The keyboard’s rather pointless, you know.” The buckley’s conversational tone made Cally twitch a bit, as did the fact that it was talking again. “I understand Galactic perfectly,” it said.
“I told you not to talk.”
“Yes, but when you spoke to me directly I presumed you wanted that to override the earlier instruction.”
“Buckley, is your emulation up too high again?”
“Of course not,” it answered indignantly, “and don’t reset it until after the mission. You know it’ll all go wrong without me. Not that it won’t anyway.” It sounded smug. She hated it when the buckley got smug. Whenever it was too happy, sure as hell she’d screwed something up somewhere. Michelle reached the end of the long code, and the door slid open soundlessly as the buckley finished feeding it the correct characters. Damned if the hinges weren’t ornamental, after all. And the inner door was solid plasteel with very expensive subspace traction locks. If she’d triggered those the thing would have become more or less a single piece of material.
“Okay, thank you for helping me get into this thing,” Cally said, checking to make sure the code keys were actually in the compartment. “Now go away. I have an egress to effect and I don’t need the distraction. Nice chat. Catch me some other time.”
“I did not just come to nag you. It is business. I wish to engage your team’s services for a mission. Are you available three weeks and two days from now?”
“If the money’s right and it doesn’t go against our core objectives, we are,” Cally said. “But I did mention I’m on short time here, right?”