“Yup. But I don’t have to fight him. I just have to stay ahead of him for fifty-eight seconds and then make it down the stairs. If I die, I’m just a crazy Darhel-conspiracist bitch who got lucky. And unlucky. That’s the other reason I need you, Harrison. You’re going to have to patch me up and pretty me up enough to make it through the interview, if it can be done. If something goes wrong, George gets a call from his girlfriend saying she’s got car trouble and has to reschedule.”
“I hate to say this, Papa, but it could work,” Tommy said, breaking his silence for the first time.
“I know. That’s what pisses me off the most.” His teammate looked more like a short, muscular, red-headed fireplug than he did like Cally, especially since her whole external appearance had been worked over seven years ago, but he was reacting more like her grandfather than her teammate. “We don’t have the slab anymore. Dead’s dead. And I notice the Crabs aren’t busting their humps bringing it back, either,” Papa said.
“And wouldn’t we all love to have it back? You’ve just brought up one more reason for doing this. The Crabs operate on favors, part of a whole ’nother chunk of Galactic economy nobody bothered to tell us about. It would be nice to have them owe us one. This mission is worth the added risks all the way around.” She never missed a chance to push a point home.
“Even if it fucks up the primary operation and your sister dies?”
“The message included something that had to come from her; this particular Crab is one of her buddies. She’s in it up to her ears, and we’re just going to have to trust her, too.”
“Michelle, too?” O’Neal groused. “But I still don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” Cally said, but Harrison knew she was lying. Correcting the Darhel Pardal’s respiratory problem would appeal perfectly to her unslaked need for revenge, for the death of a mother, the loss of a father, and more other things than he could count. Now that he thought about it that way, he wouldn’t trade his own spot on this mission for the world. He could think of a few things his family owed to the Darhel, too.
“Yeah, but what if Pardal doesn’t take the bait?” his brother spoke up.
Cally shrugged, “George, you’re one of the people who’s always insisting I piss off too many people, and without trying. We O’Neals have certainly never tried to piss off the Darhel, as a race. Seem to have done it, though.”
Harrison thought she was taking liberties with the truth there. The O’Neal family had never exactly tried not to piss off the Darhel, either. Not that they should.
“Can I get the bastard to lose it when I am trying?” she continued. “Not a problem.”
“We’re done except for me and you, Tommy.” The team lead placed a small hand on their star geek’s arm as the others left. “I’m gonna need a lot of that research information George mentioned. You don’t have time to do it; you’ve got to get out of here. I need you to pick me the best cyber guy to assemble my on-the-fly field guide to Darhel behavior for tonight. There’s no time for techie versus nontechie misunderstandings. I need you to sit in while I explain what I need and translate whatever needs translating, then you need to get moving.”
“A whole species’ behavior in one night. Is that all?” The big man’s mouth had an ironic twist.
“Oh, you,” she said, punching him in the shoulder. “I’ve got my wish list down to reasonable proportions. For the researcher and me, both. I know exactly what I need.”
The “computer guy,” as it turned out, was a tiny, fifteen-year-old girl with tangled brown hair and a splash of freckles across her nose, who asked precise questions, jotted notes, and — from the way she repeated back the details of what Cally wanted — hadn’t needed anybody to translate for her in the first place. Mendy Wimms went on the assassin’s list of people to expect big things from.
She herself went on Mendy’s list of people to expect unbalanced things from, about the time she started skipping away down the hall singing like some manic, killer child, “I get to kill a Darhel, I get to kill a Darhel!”
Wimms overheard Harrison mumble something to his little brother as their team leader vanished around a corner. “We’re never going to live this down, you know,” he said.
The Indowy Aelool would have preferred almost anything to the situation he now had to face. It was one in the morning, local time, and he was dreading the coming interview with the human O’Neal. Aelool had not become the head of his own clan without having the strictest and most exquisite niceties of courtesy and propriety drilled into his head. The action he was now contemplating trampled all over the social rules with an almost human degree of obliviousness. No, to be fair, the human O’Reilly would never have done what Aelool was about to do. He had, after all, not spoken a word of the matter to Aelool himself in seven years. Surely he must have known. Humans were not often so discreet about private clan matters, and his human counterpart’s tact had rather impressed him. It had been so tempting to interfere. In any case, he now waited in the special room for sitting that humans needed to share personal meetings with him. Nervous, he did not sit.
The O’Neal’s eyes displayed an uncharacteristic vividness of the blood vessels in the whiter areas of his eyes. It looked strange. He also must have been weary, because he was being less careful about concealing his teeth with his lips. Aelool repressed a shudder.
“What was so important at this hour of the morning, Aelool? Sorry to be grumpy, but I’d just gotten to sleep,” the orange-topped omnivore said.
“First, I most deeply regret the breach of protocol involved in approaching you on so private a clan matter. Please be assured that I have made every effort to respect your privacy in this, and to confine the distribution of any reports as much as possible. I am aware, from your own reticence, that you regard this as an extremely private clan matter, and I wouldn’t have spoken of this matter with you or any other if I did not believe you needed this information. Please, forgive me in advance if I am mistaken. It is most certainly not my desire to be discourteous or disrespectful to the O’Neal or to the Clan O’Neal.” He stopped speaking and waited for the response from the other clan head, to indicate if Aelool should continue, or should politely terminate the discussion.
“Aelool, I’m sorry if I’m not answering right, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. Could you please try to explain in plain English? Sorry if I’m slow on the uptake, but I’m still half asleep.”
The human was looking more wakeful by the second, but presumably this was part of their protocol for such situations.
“It involves your household granddaughter’s breeding partner. Forgive me so much for intruding. Normally, when we intercept such a message, we file it flagged to your eyes only and leave it in the personal storage system for you to access or not, as you choose. In this case, the courier that was supposed to deliver the message to your granddaughter has suffered a misfortune — none of our doing, I assure you! If I did not broach the matter with you, the message might never reach Miss O’Neal, and the contents are so sensitive I judged I must personally bring it to your attention. Again, I am so sorry to intrude into Clan O’Neal’s privacy.”
If he had not known better, Aelool would have interpreted the human O’Neal’s facial expression as bewilderment. Since that was clearly impossible, the Indowy was at a loss. Unsure of whether he had irretrievably blundered or not, he simply placed a data cube in the human O’Neal’s hand and bowed, withdrawing to his and his roommates’ sleeping quarters and closing the door behind him.