“Tell me you’re not hard-core enough to be here for the fucking fishing,” Tommy opened, when it looked as though the slight, blond-haired man was going to be silent all day long if Tommy himself didn’t say something.
“Got a touchy subject to bring up. Cally contacted me yesterday about coming along as an auxiliary on a run Team Isaac has coming up.” He pushed the horn-rimmed glasses up on his nose with one finger.
“And?”
“First off, I try not to pay attention to gossip. I’ve heard enough gossip about me that wasn’t true to know ninety percent of what I hear about other people is crap. And I don’t go out on missions with partners I haven’t done my homework on. So. Cally. I’ll be going straight to her to get to know her, but first I want general impressions from you. I’ve heard more talk about loose cannons than I like.”
“Cally has pretty much earned her reputation for giving the rules types the finger when it suits her. But so have the rest of us, and you. There’s always that dynamic between the operators and the desk jockeys. Mostly, she’s done what’s necessary to accomplish the mission and get us all home.”
“I’ve seen her resume. What I’m really interested in—”
“ — is that mess back on Titan in ’47, right? And the Petane hit.”
“I’m more concerned about her stability, and reliability. Everyone I’ve heard agrees that she’s… erratic. But I haven’t heard from the rest of the team. You guys never really talked about her while I was tasked to Isaac, and asking didn’t seem like a good idea.”
“Papa pretty much nailed it when he called her ‘creatively violent.’ And he’s her grandfather. But just because she looks erratic from the outside, don’t let that fool you. That woman never does anything without a plan. It just looks like she goes one way and then zips off in another operational direction. It’s really because she doesn’t telegraph. She doesn’t tip her hand, and unless you’re on the inside of the team’s plan, you never see it coming. If the phrase ‘need to know’ hadn’t already been around when she was born, Cally would have invented it.”
“You’re making it sound like she walks on water. I need to know. Talk.”
“She definitely has her faults. She damned near had a nervous breakdown before and after that Titan mess. It’s not wise or safe to seriously piss her off. But it’s not real easy to do, either. Since they put her back together after Titan, she’s a lot less detached than she used to be. She and I have spotted for each other on a couple of straight sniper ops when she needed the cash. She’s been more concerned than she used to be about picking times and places to minimize trauma to bystanders. She does things like look for opportunities to take the target during school hours, when kids are off the street. Once she called an abort because a school field trip was in view. We got him the next day, but our controls grumbled. O’Reilly stepped in for us on that and validated her call.” He shrugged, “She’s not the machine she was early in her career, but she’s not verging on psychopathic anymore, either. Usually. Lemme see, what else? Oh, the couple of times they’ve wanted her specifically to screw information out of a source, she’s told them to go fuck themselves.”
“That could be a problem.”
“It hasn’t been, yet. Not as far as I’m concerned. She says she turned them down because they were, quote, ‘Using her as a whore out of convenience, not necessity,’ ” Tommy said. “I asked,” he added.
“Yeah, maybe she has a point there. Still,” Schmidt grimaced, “I hate to say it, but resources matter. This isn’t a job for those kinds of scruples.”
“Fine, but I can’t blame her for asking if they’re paying her enough for that.” The huge man held up one hand. “Sure, she’s dedicated to the cause. We’re all dedicated to the cause — but if you’d watched her go through half of what we have… I’d say she’s earned herself the right to a couple of scruples. If you can’t agree, I doubt anybody’s going to force you to take the mission. Even though, as you say, resources matter.”
“I don’t know. I still have to wonder if we’re going to be in the shit and hit a wall because of those new-found scruples. I do it if necessary, and so have you, once or twice. Face it, it’s part of the job.”
“George, you’re either thinking like a guy, or thinking like an Indowy. She was right, they were using her as a fucking convenience — to the point of not even considering any other kind of operational plans if good ol’ Cally could get them what they wanted on her back. And while she was fine with it, it was nobody’s business to say anything.” He looked the boyish assassin directly in the eye. “You grew up in the Bane Sidhe. We may be on the side of good and right, but you know the Organization sure as hell isn’t perfect. You know the Indowy — how could anything be anything but honorable and joyful if it furthers the interests of your clan. Especially if it doesn’t maim or kill you. Or not permanently, anyway. Man, if you had just been there when one of the little furballs who’s been trying to learn accounting came in all excited, ‘Cally, with your present form, do you realize how much FedCreds we could bring in if you just—’ George, she was three months fucking pregnant. And then he ran out of the room before Papa could deck him. Caught the first Himmit express off planet and hasn’t come back. And the rest of the little green fuckers had not a clue what the big deal was. We were ‘overreacting.’ ‘Anachronistic, irrational, residual fear of mating with inferior genes,’ they said. You wonder that O’Reilly backed her? Vitapetroni finally got through to them, barely, with an analogy about damage to their psyches from fighting, even for survival of their clan. You may not have known about it, being a guy and not having worked with her enough to be close, but if she hadn’t won that argument, I don’t think we’d have a female operator left. Don’t even talk about the O’Neal wives — I thought Wendy was gonna hop a plane up there and start lopping off heads. So yeah, just about all the female operators are telling them to fuck off on the honey trap jobs right now unless there’s a damned good reason. It’s not just Cally. Call it a pink flu.”
“Roger that — but you talk like she’s your little sister.” He grinned. “You’ve given me what I needed to know. After lunch tomorrow, I’ll know whether I’m going to volunteer or suggest she look at her next choice. Yeah, I’ll probably take it, but you know as well as I do how quickly it can fuck up an op if the team doesn’t fit together. If I don’t think I can work with her, I’ll say so.”
“George, how many people have you ever met that you couldn’t work with?”
“I’ve met a few. Not many, but a few. Enough to make asking the question one of my cardinal rules. Oh, dude. Pink Flu indeed. Good old Bane Sidhe 101. ‘Alien minds are alien.’ Too bad the Indowy seem to have such a tough time getting their heads around that. They get it with the other Galactics, but when you get right down to it, none of the Galactics are any good at adapting to new ideas or new situations. Including just about everything about human nature. That’s dense even for them, though. That must have been right after I lost Sherry. And everything. That’s the only way I could’ve missed something that big.”
Tommy was silent for a minute, uncomfortable at the reminder of his friend’s dead wife. And the rest of Team Hector. What could you say to that?
“Oh, one other thing,” the big man said. “You do not want to be in the same state — no, on the same continent — when that woman is seriously pissed off. But that could describe Papa, or — what can I say? She’s an O’Neal. They’re all like that. But whether it’s something to do with growing up right in the middle of the Posleen war, or having her dad blow up a nuke on her head when she was thirteen, or having to kill her first assassin at age eight, Cally’s just — more so. O’Neal, but more so.”