“It’s been fun playing with y’all, but I’m going to have to finish up now and get home,” she said, the slight natural southern drawl at odds with the persona she’d worn coming into the alley.
Whether it was the stillness itself giving them a chance to think, or the recognition that three of their friends were on the ground, two corpses and one crippled, or the deadness that entered her blood-spattered face as if someone had flipped a switch and turned off all humanity inside her, Cally would never know. What she did know was that all three suddenly turned and made tracks down the alley faster than she would have figured they’d still be able to move, especially the one with the cracked ribs. She had somehow ended up facing a pile of soggy cardboard boxes, partway between the live kid and the girl.
She looked over at the crippled survivor, a kid, maybe in his early twenties, with dirty blond hair and a ratty bandanna around his neck. Blood soaked his jeans where she’d kicked him, but to her practiced eye it looked like he was in no danger of bleeding out. A foil packet flipped out of her hand, landing on the thug’s stomach.
“Have a morphine. Hold you till the ambulance arrives.” She fixed him with an icy stare, “Dude. You may not believe this, but I just did you a favor.” He was too busy gritting his teeth to reply. Or too scared. “You’re alive. File for disability, learn a trade, find another line of work. You were really lousy at this one, anyway.” The cripple might have been swearing under his breath as she turned away.
Cally looked over at the girl, who had to be about fourteen, and blinked. “What the hell are you waiting for? Scram!” The idiot tried to run out the alley the same way the remaining thugs had gone. “Pfweet!” she whistled, jerking a thumb over her shoulder as the girl turned back around. “That way.”
The assassin shook her head as the girl edged past her, skittering down the alley, obviously trying not to look at the bodies or the last guy. Cally rubbed her jaw. Definitely gonna bruise. Ick. She wiped the blood off her hands on her blouse, and off her face once she found a clean spot, picking her way past the cripple and the corpses, which were beginning to smell strongly of recent deadness.
“Oh.” She turned back to the guy on the ground, coldly. “You never saw me. None of you. You’re really sure you never saw me.”
“Right. We’re going to say a girl did this to us. I don’t think so,” he said, bitterly, muttering “bitch” under his breath.
She nodded once and picked up her purse and the stuff that had spilled from it, retrieved her jacket, and zipped it up to the neck. She got about a block away before pulling out her PDA. “Buckley, wait fifteen minutes and route a call to emergency services from the nearest pay phone.” Uncharacteristically, the buckley was silent, merely acknowledging the command on the screen. Muttering, “I hate rapists,” she walked the rest of the way to the parking lot and her bike without incident.
Home, on the other hand, wasn’t so great. She was in her bathrobe in the laundry room, rinsing the blood out of her clothes, when she heard someone clear his throat.
“Good morning, Granpa,” she said.
“Yeah, I suppose it is morning. Technically. Any of that yours?” His voice had a certain long-suffering quality to it.
“Like you really need to ask,” she said, shaking meat tenderizer on the stains before adding the white blouse to a load of wash.
“How many times am I going to have to tell you that you can’t depopulate the criminal element of Charleston single-handed? People would notice,” he griped. “How many bodies?”
“Only two. Gang types. You and I both know the police are too overworked to investigate it. Besides, I really hate rapists.”
“I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, just that if you keep running in there like some comic book Valkyrie avenger, people are going to talk.”
“Gampa, what’s a ape-ist?” They both turned to see Sinda in the doorway clutching a bedraggled plush penguin. She dropped her fist from the eye she’d been rubbing when she saw Cally’s face, “Mommy? You gots ouchies.”
“I was in a little accident on the way home, sweetie. It looks worse than it is,” she said.
“Were you wearing your helmet?” the four-year-old asked suspiciously.
“Yep. Just a few bruises and scrapes. Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I skinned my knee when I fell offa my bike. You musta falled on your hands.”
“Bed, Sinda,” her mother ordered, glancing down at her raw knuckles. “Not one word,” she said to Papa O’Neal, in response to his quirked eyebrow and the quivering corner of his lip as the little girl disappeared down the hall.
“Didn’t say a thing.” He walked off, whistling softly.
Chapter Five
It was a large office, for the moon. It had the standard black enamel desk with laptop and PDA, the ergonomic chair, and a pair of squashy armchairs upholstered in superior-quality leathex. Those were standard features for any managing analyst’s office. Then there were the small touches that indicated that the office’s occupant had the approval of the Grandfather, and his trusted aides, as a promising candidate for promotion — no small thing in an organization whose upper leadership tended to have the resources to avail themselves of the rejuvenation process. Discreetly, of course.
On one side of the room a carved, decorative screen kept unlikely company with an old-fashioned, framed, photo-quality print of a prewar surfer catching a wave at a place few remembered as Malibu Beach. Underneath the picture, a small fountain sat on a low table, gurgling peacefully. On another wall, a conventional work of a blossoming branch painted on parchment rested in a frame that matched the carved screen. A braided ficus, a species renowned for its tolerance of low gravity, sat in a large pot in one corner. A small potted plant sat on one end of the desk, partially screening a holocube of a spectacular blonde and two little girls from direct view through the open doorway. Of all the decor in the room, only the wall color had not been the occupant’s choice. A shade the office manager called pale peach and the occupant called pink had been hard-coded throughout the suite of offices. Well, he hadn’t chosen the carpet, either, but as it was an inoffensive light brownish color, he seldom noticed it.
Named Manuel Guerrera by his mother, and, later, James Stewart by himself, Yan Kato was an extraordinarily ordinary looking man. He was neither too tall nor too short. His hair was spiked enough to be proper, but not enough to draw attention. His features, while clearly Asian, did not lend themselves to identification with any known ethnic group. As his name suggested a mixed ancestry, that was unremarkable, too. In the aftermath of the war’s turmoil, there were millions like him. As he was, in fact, Latino, the surgeons had considered his skin tone and texture too difficult to match to any specific pure ancestry.
At the moment, Yan — who still thought of himself privately as simply “Stewart” — was not looking at his office decor, but was instead facing the personal holotank behind his desk on which he had called up a display of star systems, travel times, and trade routes. He had been in the office, doped on provigil-C, for the entire nine hours he’d been back on station. He had been awake and running analyses on his buckley, with occasional carefully camouflaged data downloads, since leaving his hotel in Charleston some fifty-three hours before. He checked his results five times to make absolutely sure he’d accounted for as much as possible and provided for maximum local flexibility to accommodate unforeseen contingencies. Finally, he sent the orders to dispatch the Tong’s single fast courier ship, which he technically had no authority to commandeer, along the prescribed route and sent an explanatory memorandum, eyes only, to the Grandfather. The courier was moderately expensive to maintain near a major jump point out from Earth. It was prohibitively expensive to dispatch anywhere, because of the fuel expenditures involved in making a warp jump and the resultant servicing of a vessel that was nearly scrap — all the Tong could afford. Mostly it sat, its bored crew collecting dust, ignored by the Darhel as a worthless, unreliable wreck unloaded on gullible humans as a vanity ship. Stewart would be answering some hard questions for his temerity in using it. Not just for one hyper jump, but for four. Dulain, to Prall, to Diess, resupply at Diess base, and then back to the Sol System. The first three systems with Epetar cargos would get a courier visit — just long enough to pop out of hyperspace, tight beam the heavily coded instructions to a communications satellite under cover of a general communications packet, and receive acknowledgment of receipt. The nice thing about the Galactic Communications System, or lack thereof, was that so many Darhel groups would have encrypted traffic of so many redundant messages going somewhere that everybody who received routine communications would assume that someone else’s message had been important enough to charter a courier. This would spur much spying, but only against each other.