She traipsed across the fields to the house, feeling like she was eight again and just learning to run demo. Carefree days, if you didn’t count the Posties. Well, she’d lost count of her own Posties in the first engagement, anyway. Now she had her own girls to pick up from Jenny and Carrie’s house this afternoon. Time sure did fly.
“We’re all here, so let’s get started,” his granddaughter said.
Michael O’Neal, Senior, spat into the paper cup he’d filched from the mess hall. Being on an operational team with his own grandchild was a special kind of purgatory for O’Neal. He didn’t grumble to himself over it, because he figured he had a lot of time stored up for one penance or another, anyway. Okay, so he didn’t grumble much. The oldest living O’Neal never forgot that he was an old man in a young man’s body. He had gone the whole route, from looking death in the face as a young man, himself, in the jungles of Vietnam — where death was a hunter you could avoid if you were both good and lucky — to looking death in the face as an old man, where it rolled up on you, a slow juggernaut that killed by inches as more and more of your parts and systems just didn’t work like they’d used to. He hadn’t made his peace with it. To his mind, anyone who said they had was lying — unless maybe it was less than a few hours off. Anyhow, those things in the heart and mind that turn a young man into an old one, he’d already traversed forty or fifty years ago.
His granddaughter, in her perpetually twenty-year-old body, had never felt what it was to age. Much as she thought she had the maturity of a full life to the same degree as a prewar woman of sixty, she had no idea. It wasn’t time that made you old. It was your experiences. She’d had plenty of horrifying ones, but not the right ones, or not the same ones, anyhow, to give that perspective that came from getting old. A non-juved man or woman of her age could tell her a thing or ten about life.
She was going over the building floor plan, and working ingress and egress strategies. He knew she had various theories about why he had long since ceded command of the team to her. None of them were right. He needed a fresh plug of chaw. It was off-brand stuff that didn’t taste quite right. He cleared his mouth and seated the fresh dose of nicotine, anyway.
His real reason for putting her in charge and leaving her there was that it made it far easier to watch her back. That meant more, now that the slab was gone. She’d died once in her career so far, and not just piddling little technical death-on-the-table of the prewar kind. She’d had a major organ-system blown away damned near real death. Without the slab, another one of those and she’d be gone for real. Half the time, his contributions to mission planning put him in place to cover her ass. If he had been in command, she would never have tolerated his shuffling her off to nice, safe spots. For one thing, there weren’t any, for another, it would put the whole team at risk, and for a third, he’d just wake up one morning to find she’d transferred to another team.
This was the next best thing. He did his job, she did her job, he trusted her skill and competence and all that shit. There were proper mission slots devoted to covering a teammate’s ass. He made sure that, as often as possible, when the right job was there, he was the one watching her back. When it wasn’t, he put it out of his mind, completely, and did whatever job the mission dictated, knowing that a fuckup from him could kill her as surely as any enemy could.
So he didn’t command. Planning, though, involved the whole team. Everybody’s head had to be in the game one hundred percent to catch flaws in the plan, like now.
“Did I just hear you say you want me to go in through the ventilation shafts? Hello? Clang, clang, clang? Don’t go all Hollywood on me, people,” he said.
Everybody was looking at him as if he’d jumped in from Mars. He smiled sheepishly. “Okay, I obviously missed something. You caught me woolgathering.”
Cally gave him a mom look, like he was a kid found climbing on the cabinets. “Granpa, the ducts are Galplas. Great for some architectural reason, I’m sure, but lousy for security. You also don’t have to make as many of those weird turns. Apparently, Galplas can go farther in straight lines than steel or aluminum — something about heat expansion. You’ll be carrying the decoy device behind you, but we’ve got a padded pouch for it with strap attachments and wheels on the bottom. You should have no problems pulling it along behind you.”
He radiated skepticism.
“Sorry, but you’re the only one who can get the device in. There’s no way in hell Tommy will fit, George and I have other routes inside, and no offense, Harrison, but you don’t have the right set of skills to take down any nasties, fast and quiet. Besides, you’re stronger than Harrison, Granpa. The device is pretty heavy — about a hundred kilos. We all have upgraded muscles, so any of us could carry it, but you started off with the same lifter’s strength as Daddy. You’re going to be the best getting it through that ductwork, especially this vertical climb,” she said, sticking a pointer into the ducting hologram her buckley had flashed up.
“So how do I get in? And do I really want to know?” Tommy said.
“We know their likely sweep pattern and their sweeps are always Thursday nights. We know they need more subjects. We position you to get swept up. The next afternoon, you’re already in the building, we break you out.”
“I don’t like this plan,” Tommy said. The other faces at the table had varying expressions of alarm, except for George, who looked thoughtful.
“Tommy, when you analyzed their internal security systems, you said they were a piece of crap designed to contain the technically ignorant, and could be defeated with canned scripts. That wrong?” George asked.
“Hell, no. They are a piece of crap. But do we know if all the people caught in the sweep go to the company or get split off for involuntary colonization? I don’t want to end up with a one-way ticket to Dulain. Besides, predicted sweep patterns can change. Not to mention the hazards of joining Doctor Mengele’s fun and games. If they’re that low on victims, who’s to say they aren’t going to start in on people the first day? I read George’s report of how fast their compulsions can work.”
“On the sweep patterns, if we can go through and take our intelligence data to analyze where sweeps have happened before, and population traffic patterns, so can they.” She pulled up a map. “There’s a nice, juicy fat community right here that hasn’t been plucked yet. It’s the most likely target. Hey, they don’t pick you up, we go to plan B.”
“I like the sound of plan B better already. What is plan B?” he asked.
“That Harrison goes in through the vents with Papa and an AID to run canned scripts, and you drive the car. You can see all the potential that has to go wrong. We have no backup cyber. If we can’t get into the room with the Aerfon Djigahr, the whole mission’s a bust. I had hoped you’d be the first one we got in as an employee, but it just didn’t turn out that way.”
“The cracking equipment goes in on me either way,” the O’Neal said.
“George, you’re inside. What do you rate the chances of Sunday being a casualty between when he gets in there and when we break him out? I’ve got my own guesstimate, but I want yours.”
“I think there’s a decent chance they’ll do something with him. How high, I don’t know. But what she put on me had to be an easy task for Felini. As Mark Thomason, as far as they knew, I had already agreed to keep my mouth shut, so they expected it to be easy. As me, I keep secrets far more than I run off at the mouth about them, so it worked — until the doc broke it. The really awful stuff they do they still have to build up to. Anyway, the biggest thing is that only Winchon and Felini can work the device so far, and Winchon’s gonna be out of town.” He looked at the huge man. “The chances Felini alone can do anything permanently harmful in one day are real low,” he said.