Underground — far underground — she parked it in her reserved space. One benefit of the split was plenty of parking. She waved Harrison off to whatever his evening plans were and went to turn in the night’s take.
The Base had none of the graffiti and vandalism which so dated the various Sub-Urbs. Still, whether it was the smell of the air or dark lines in the little places that dirt gathered no matter how carefully you cleaned, there was an atmosphere of age about the place. After seven years it still seemed so empty she almost expected it to echo. Her black tennis shoes, of course, did nothing of the sort. As she walked from the south elevator to the workroom administration corridor she noticed someone had gotten creative with the Galplas again. The design wasn’t bad at all. It appeared to be a rather interesting cross between Celtic knotwork and early circuit board. And the murals, probably done by the children, of Indowy engaged in daily tasks were pretty well done. She just wished they’d chosen a background color other than puce.
The Indowy she passed on the way were all people she recognized by name. Even after so long, they still traveled the corridors in pairs or triads where possible. She had been told it helped to cut the risk of agoraphobia.There had been initial talk about establishing breeding groups in the Base, but for some Indowy reason no one had explained to her it hadn’t happened. Maybe it still would. She didn’t know and for some reason had always felt it would be rude to ask. Instead, once or twice a year when a Himmit scout ship came through another one of Aelool’s people would come inside, or two or three from Clan Beilil.
The other operatives had, in a way, had more time to adjust to the change. Since she had been home with the girls, not on base, for most of the past seven years, it always hit her as a shock to see the emptiness of Earth’s central Bane Sidhe base since the split. It was very hard not to take that split personally, as centrally located in the whole mess as she had been.
First, her decision to kill the traitorous Colonel Petane, who had been partly responsible for the death of a Bane Sidhe team that had saved her life. The assassination had not only been without orders, but she’d done it after the leadership of the Bane Sidhe, the entire Bane Sidhe, had gone to considerable lengths to make her and Granpa think he was already dead. They had considered him an intelligence asset, and never revisited that decision after he turned out to be basically worthless. In retrospect, she agreed he was not only a fucking traitor, but a harmless schmuck. It wouldn’t really have hurt anything to leave him alive. At the time, however, she had been truly livid at the deception that had deprived her, and Granpa, of giving their input to the decision.
That was the moment when the building tensions in the Indowy about how to relate to humanity, or whether they even wanted to relate to a species of carnivores that could and did kill other sophonts, finally started to come to a head. Clan Aelool and Clan Beilil had had deep and recent experience with extreme clan-wide blood debts. Debts of honor, and debts of vengeance both. While Clan Roolnai and the rest of the clans had seen the assassination of Petane as a dangerous repeat of Granpa’s assassination of someone on his own personal “better dead” list in Vietnam, and a sign of the fundamental homicidal instability of humanity, Aelool and Beilil had taken the view that Team Conyers had saved the clan head of Clan O’Neal, the O’Neal himself, in saving Michael O’Neal, Senior. This had made the blood debt to Team Conyers a much graver matter, and the concealment of Petane’s continued existence an offense against Clan O’Neal as a whole. Aelool and Beilil, victims of the worst of the massacres on Diess, apparently felt the guilt of this offense the most keenly, feeling the strongest debt to Clan O’Neal because of the actions of her father on Diess. They had, after much internal discussion, taken the mostly private position that Cally had been acting on behalf of Clan O’Neal to discharge a debt the clan owed to Team Conyers.
The Indowy concept of loyalty, called loolnieth, did not translate very well into English or any other human language. The loyalty was all up chain to the clan. The mere idea of down-chain loyalty to individuals was, by Indowy standards, perniciously insane. It made perfect sense, applied to their species. Individuals were overwhelmingly plentiful, and clans were few. The only protection the vast majority of individuals had for their safety and the safety of their offspring was the security of the clan as a whole. Additionally, the Indowy breeding groups precluded anything like the human nuclear family.
Another facet in the split had been that the Indowy Aelool had, by far, the greatest understanding among his people of humanity as a species. He understood, in some small sense, why human reproductive patterns dictated that loyalty that did not go at least partly down chain as well as up was disastrous to any tribe that adopted it. He understood why a social convention that was insane for his own species was not only sane but necessary for humanity, especially its predominant surviving variants. In his understanding, he was as rare as humans who truly understood why Indowy loolnieth worked — for Indowy. It was not, as some in the cyberpunk faction supposed, a corrupt and dishonorable reaction to oppression by the Darhel. It was not some Indowy feeding others to the tiger in the hopes that the tiger would eat them last. Instead, it was just another example of the truism that aliens are alien.
In retrospect, she’d had to admit that lack of human understanding of the Indowy had been as much a cause of the Bane Sidhe split into the Traditional Bane Sidhe and the O’Neal Bane Sidhe as the reverse. Perversely, it made her feel better to acknowledge that. She certainly hadn’t been responsible for human misunderstanding of the Indowy, whatever else she might have done.
The final break, the break that had resulted in the other clans packing up their delegations and leaving Earth, also cutting themselves off from any human agents the Bane Sidhe had managed to cultivate off Earth, had also revolved around her. According to the majority faction of the Bane Sidhe, her capture on Titan Base had presented a neat solution to the problem of a renegade agent and was best left alone without risk of further exposure for the organization or expenditure of organization assets. Loolnieth owed no allegiance to an individual operative, however occasionally useful.
The Indowy Aelool, Father O’Reilly, Granpa, and the entire leadership of what would become the O’Neal Bane Sidhe realized that if Cally had been abandoned to torture and death without even an attempt to determine if rescue was feasible, especially if a component of the decision was her personal inconvenience, the ability to retain and recruit human operatives would have been compromised to the point of destruction. The operatives that could have been recruited would have been mercenaries with little loyalty to the organization and would, every one, have represented horrendous risks of exposure. The cyberpunk faction would have bolted outright, drastically reducing the ability of the Bane Sidhe to operate on Earth. The cyberpunks had signed on with the Bane Sidhe back during the war, but they had always harbored extreme reservations about the Indowy and had never truly integrated with the noncyber operatives. Cally had been admired and respected in the cyber community largely because she was admired and respected by Tommy Sunday. The O’Neals and Sundays had forged strong ties over the decades, including the development of Edisto Island as a unique refuge for the human resistance. When it was impolitic to ask for a close friend or family member, a completely trustworthy one, to be taken in by the Bane Sidhe itself, the Edisto operation had smuggled many to new lives.