Fleet Strike was different from the old United States armed services in many respects. The fondness of the organization's senior officers for the game of golf was not one of those differences. During the design phase of Titan Base, a bright and ambitious young life support engineer had noticed a way to fulfill a design requirement for hardy, nonfood perennials while simultaneously scoring a vast number of brownie points with senior staff. Hence, the entire lowermost deck of the Fleet Strike and Spares and Fabrications quadrants was very high-ceilinged and devoted to a lush lawn of specially bred grasses and turf. Getting the Indowy to sign off on the absolute necessity of the ceiling configuration had required the importation of a small herd of miniature horses from Kentucky. For some reason, getting all the signatures for the transport of the livestock had gone amazingly easily. The fans for computer randomized wind patterns had been more difficult, but still possible. After all, what was the use of generating so much oxygen if you didn't have the ability to mix it with the rest of the station air?
Cally watched with carefully disguised amusement this morning as Beed cursed the headwind as he approached the tee for the third hole. Golf was a challenging game for her, especially in this environment. Upgraded muscle density, still there under the surface mods for Sinda, and her own inherent spatial awareness and finely honed martial training combined to make her easily one of the top three golfers on Titan Base.
Sinda Makepeace had nothing in her record to indicate that she'd ever even visited a golf course, much less played the game.
Beed needed flattering, convincing him that he was teaching her to golf.
The upshot was that on the golf course her acting challenge was more exacting than usual as she had to constantly evaluate precisely how lousy she needed to be.
The odd part was that a couple of times this morning she'd gotten the bizarre impression that Pryce was also holding back to avoid beating the general. She smiled fondly. Get a really great lay or two from the guy and all of a sudden I'm imagining all sorts of new virtues for him.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw him trip over the strap of the golf bag and barely catch himself by the edge of the cart. Next she'd be envisioning him as the world's next great orator. Geez.
"All right, Sinda, dear, your turn." Beed leered at her as she smiled back brightly, wondering how even a cover role had allowed her to see him even temporarily as less than the worm he obviously was. "Did you notice how I was still for a moment after making my swing? That's called 'follow through,' and it's important in this game."
She nodded, hands clasped in front of herself, listening carefully, eyes bright, cheerful, earnest, and empty. She watched Beed smile indulgently without a spark of recognition on her own part, reaching out and blithely selecting a putter, smiling gratefully at Beed when he traded her for a better club.
"Pay attention, dear. Club selection is very important," he said.
With her upgraded hearing, she could hear Pryce gritting his teeth as Beed wrapped his arms around her to guide her swing. She hoped Beed couldn't hear it, even though it sounded loud to her against the background of the golf course, unusually empty this morning and silent except for the distant whir of the fans. The freshly cut grass was sweet in her nostrils and she could feel Beed's erection against her buttocks as he adjusted her grip on the club. Hell, there goes my afternoon. Not that I didn't expect as much. Unfortunately, the general has an average juv libido. Horny as hell all the damned time. Too bad the BS would be pissed if I killed the bastard. Okay, so he's a human life and I wouldn't kill him for no damned reason, but I swear if he keeps getting on my nerves I might succumb to the temptation to . . . bruise him a bit . . . on my way out. Slimy paper-obsessed son of a bitch. Against some personality traits, looks just aren't enough. Well, hell, I knew it was part of the job when I took it. I have to admit I have done worse. The poor bastard can't help it that he suffers by comparison.
She sighted carefully down the course and made the very slight adjustments that would send the ball straight into a sand trap.
"Look how hard I hit it! Wow!" She jumped up and down in excitement, generating a range of mesmerizing jiggles for the two men. Out of the corner of one eye she saw Pryce swallow, hard, and suppressed a grin.
"Is that good?" She cocked her head to one side and beamed at the hapless general.
"An intercepted signal has come in that meets your specified criteria for your attention, your Tir." The voice of the AID was melodious, like all Darhel voices, but had an indefinable extra intensity to it. The hair on the Tir's back lifted slightly as his ears relaxed outward, just a bit, in unconscious response.
"Play it," he said, shifting a bit towards the Indowy body servant who was scratching a troublesome itch behind his right ear, but not enough to disengage from the other servant who was currently working out some tension cramps in his shoulder muscles. There were, of course, no true windows in these quarters, although they were quite spacious, with simulated windows displaying vistas from any of several dozen worlds. The gravity and lighting, being artificial anyway, were pleasantly adjusted to homeworld's conditions. He pressed the pads of his bare feet into the deep pile appreciatively. For temporary quarters, the suite maintained in the human-free sector of Titan Base was quite adequate.
"Memo to Lieutenant General Peter Vanderberg, OFSI, Chicago, from First Lieutenant Joshua Pryce, assigned as aide de camp to Brigadier General Bernard Beed, 3rd MP Brigade, commanding. Subject: Hartford. Message: Have the opportunity to accelerate acquisition of essential project supplies. Supply source is code named Hector by the supply depot. Contact information follows. As these particular supplies are in your area of operation, suggest your people pursue local acquisition. Have taken the liberty of paying a deposit on the supplies to Mr. Jones, balance pending on acquisition. Negotiated price is well within assigned budget for this project. Memo ends. There is a file attached that appears to be a list of four names, several aliases, DNA code samples, and several locations and times per name."
The Tir was now sitting bolt upright, whiskers trembling. He took a moment to breathe carefully before speaking.
"Forward the information to Mr. Stuart. Tell him we would prefer as much information regarding these . . . supplies . . . as possible, but in no case should Fleet Strike have them. Having the supplies disclose information in uncontrolled circumstances would be . . . adverse to our interests," he said.
"Yes, your Tir. It is done," it replied.
The Indowy body servants continued their ministrations uninterrupted. One disappeared briefly into the kitchen, reappearing with an ornate tray set with fresh vegetables from three different worlds. As always, the personal service made the food marginally less distasteful.
Nathan O'Reilly looked up as his office door slid open with no announcement, surprised to see the Indowy Aelool in his doorway. The muscles around the eyes were crinkled and the ears turned slightly inward in an expression that was either grave, worried, or both.
"My goodness, what's wrong?" He got a bottled water from a small cooler and poured it into a fresh glass, setting it on the end table and backing away. His friend usually affected unconcern around human carnivores out of politeness, but the priest felt it might be a bit much to expect of him in his clearly distressed state.
"Team Hector is compromised. Our leak, as you call it, has sprung again." He sat in a human-sized chair absentmindedly, perched on the edge, legs swinging nervously, plucking absently at the green tendrils of his left leg.
"When and what can we do about it?" O'Reilly pulled up the team's schedule with an aside to his AID.
"Identities and itineraries over the next few days are in Fleet Strike and Darhel hands. Names, aliases, DNA patterns. The whole team," he tutted lightly. "Unfortunately, as large a loss as an entire team will be, it pales next to the value of our sources of information close to the Tir. We can do little. Nothing, without a plausible cover story for how we know."
"We can put an extraction team in place on hold status. Activate them if we get any kind of cover we can use, leave them if not. Who knows, the other side might get sloppy." The priest didn't sound very confident.
"Is there anything new from Team Isaac?" the Indowy asked.
"Since we last talked? No, unfortunately not. Harris in traffic analysis is bright. I'll set her to work looking for anything we can leak back to point in a plausible wrong direction for how we knew. I think that's all we can do." He walked over and stared out of his virtual window.
"As long as you are absolutely confident that if they do not get direct authorization the extraction team will remain inactive. I do not need to remind you that the stakes here are very high," Aelool was just a bit shrill.
"So—do we risk a message to Papa O'Neal that now would be a good time for results?" He tapped his fingertips on the glass.
"I would suggest no. They know the stakes and the risks. I would be correct in thinking they are already as motivated as it is possible to be? Then there is no gain and some risk. Don't you have a phrase? Jostling the elbow? I think better not." He walked over beside his friend and looked up at the fake window. Like all the Indowy, he probably found it difficult to understand why humans needed to pretend to be close to the outside and empty spaces, even when they were cozily packed together with their own clans and very best friends.
"Agreed," the priest said.
"You still pray, do you not? Perhaps it would be a good time." Looking a bit bewildered, most likely at the virtual window, Aelool left.
"Peter, you have an urgent memo coming in from General Stewart, covered as Lieutenant Pryce on Titan Base," his AID chimed.
"He got a live one?" Vanderberg sat bolt upright in his chair.
"Not exactly, Peter. What he got was four names and identifying information including DNA, itineraries, aliases, and current physical descriptions of agents in the Chicago area," it said.
"Holy shit! DNA, too?" Somebody up there likes me.
"That's what he says, and the file attached has all of that." The AID even sounded pleased.
"Wow. Show me the file." He shook his head as he scanned the details. "Shit, Stewart hit the jackpot. Get me Morrison." He stood and walked over to the window, tapping his lips with one finger.
"I'm sorry, Peter. Morrison is out of pocket. He has a dental appointment," it said.
"Dental appointment?" He turned, looking at the AID on his desk as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing.
"He broke a tooth. He's in for a replacement."
"Geez, did something happen? Is he all right?" he asked.
"No accident. I believe it was a statistical certainty sooner or later. He chews ice." The AID's voice had that prim note they took on when they disapproved of something. The AID personalities had odd notions of propriety sometimes. In this case, he suspected the cause of disapproval was that anyone would do anything so inconsiderate as to engage in a habit that would eventually necessitate taking time off from work. Every once in a while, AIDs were really strange.
"Okay, have him come in first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, I don't think this can wait. Send in Lewis, I guess. No, cancel that. I'd rather lose a day than bring in an extra person on something like this. Shit. Tell Morrison I want him in here tomorrow at seven thirty. We can at least get an early start." He locked his hands behind his head and began to pace, already turning possible scenarios over in his head.
"You are aware that tomorrow is Sunday, right?" it said.
"Yeah. I hate it, but this can't wait." He waved one hand impatiently and kept on pacing.
"That's fine, Peter. I'm just following your standing order to remind you."
"Yeah, that. Thanks, Jenny." Wow. What a break.
There were so few public access terminals these days. Everybody and his sister had a PDA, well, except for the lucky bastards with AIDs. Well, clean ones, anyway. But PDAs sometimes broke, or people lost them—anyway, thank god for public access terminals.
This one was in the middle of the busiest section of the Corridor he could find. There was so much visual noise here with all the other people passing that no particular pedestrian would ever remember him. Not that anybody but the Bane Sidhe would be looking, and by the time they were, he'd be long gone.
He had really wanted to spend his retirement on Earth—the amenities were so much better, even when one was perforce keeping a low profile. Oh, well, things were how they were.
Dulain was a good planet. One of the first colonized by humans, and it had some hazards, but it also had a good belt of very pleasant islands. Not too great a place to work as a penniless colonist. But just fine for someone with a nice nest egg. And a ship was leaving at nineteen-thirty on Tuesday. Perfect. It only took him a few moments to transfer the funds from his numbered accounts to numbered accounts on Dulain. He'd opened an account on Titan with some of the cash from his payoff. The rest he had, unfortunately, had to deposit in a public locker, taking his chances. Still, the important part about the cash was the ability to buy his outbound ticket under an uncompromised ID.
And he'd never have to eat another soybean corn dog again. Ever.
The newsstand on the corner of level eight and hallway Romeo on the Corridor had a good solid range of over the counter medications, including several popular diet mixes that were mostly diuretics. Cally picked the distinctive orange and yellow package because this particular diuretic combination was not just fast acting, it was also mostly tasteless and the effective dose was small. A beer would be enough to hide the very mild taste, even from someone like her.
I hate drugging him at all. The least I can do is set it up so what I give him is as harmless as possible. Well, embarrassing, maybe, if he doesn't run fast enough. Still, that's as harmless I can make it. At least I don't have to use it for a few days.
She was wearing her least conspicuous bra under the silks as she made the buy. Less out of real need than out of the normal tradecraft of reducing conspicuous factors. Obviously it was not enough. She was sure the Asian cashier's eyes never even flickered above her collarbone.
James Stewart stood in front of the glass of his beach picture, trying to get enough of a reflection to make sure his hair was all right. He sure hadn't been this excited about coming in to work on a Saturday night in a long time. But then, he wasn't here to work.
In the silence of the empty headquarters office, he could hear the swish of the front door. The bag in her arms puzzled him briefly, until he remembered that she was supposed to bring dinner. He should have been hungry, but he'd never felt less like eating in his life. Well, not food, anyway. He grinned broadly as she came in and put the bag down on the front desk.
He reached for her and pulled her against him, one hand pressed into the small of her back, and the other buried in her hair. Her belly was pressed tight against his, her breasts squashed but still soft against his chest. He wanted to screw her now. Right now.
He tried to pull her back towards his office, or hers, but she wouldn't go, laughing teasingly.
"Why not right here?" She patted the top of the desk, a glint of mischief in her eyes. "Or here . . ." She slid off the edge of the desk and fell back into the chair, spinning in it and laughing.
He quirked an eyebrow skeptically, imagining how far he'd have to bend his knees for that to work. But she was ahead of him. That, or she'd read his mind, pressing the button that activated the chair's hydraulics, raising it to its limit.
As she unsealed the front seam of her silks and shrugged them off her shoulders, he reconsidered. Perhaps it was workable after all. Especially once she lifted her knees and gripped, taking a lot of the weight off his knees. As the rhythm of sex took him over, the brush of her nipples against his chest making him fight for every bit of the control needed to make it last, he promised himself that he'd never question her assessment of what was physically possible again.
After they fixed Anders' philodendron, which had somehow gotten dislodged from its terra cotta pot, they ate dinner in Sinda's office. He didn't know where she'd come up with an old-fashioned picnic of cold fried chicken, potato salad, deviled eggs, and chocolate chip cookies, but it sure was good. Especially the ice-cold genuine Milwaukee beer, which must have cost her a small fortune.
Afterward, she seduced him—not that he resisted, of course—on the slimy sonofabitch's desk. He had to admit he appreciated the irony.
The smell of her hair was thick in his nostrils as her kisses—interspersed with a few bites to make sure he was paying attention—trailed down his chest. More kiss than bite the farther she went. Finally, she was wrapped around one of his legs, her breasts rubbing against his thigh, nails and body clenched and shuddering against him in ways that showed him that she was having just as much fun as he was.
The ethereal opening strains of the next song on her cube pierced him with an oddly sweet sadness for a few moments before the hot, driving rhythm kicked in to add to the intensity of what she was doing to him. He didn't try to remember the name of the band or the song, but it came to him anyway. It was a war-time band called Evanescence, the song, "Bring Me to Life," and it couldn't possibly fit their situation, but somehow he knew the music was deeply important to her.
The vibrance of the music bled onto every sensation, making it more alive—the scent of her, her hands and mouth on him. Her beautiful, pale skin, flushed with sex and luminous with a light sheen of sweat. Even the drab gray of the office walls seemed more intensely real. The music was singing in their bones, and he wondered what in the hell was happening to him. Sex had never been like this.
The thought wandered through the back of his mind that there was something a little perverse about doing it in a coworker's office, but it was a small thought, and easily banished. Besides, Li had gotten a couch for his office. Not leather, but a reasonably good substitute.
Oh, my God. . . .
Afterward, over a lunch of grinders, his ham and hers roast beef, they talked. He tended to avoid walks down memory lane when talking to her. Well, when talking to anybody, really. No matter how well you knew and believed your cover, there was always the chance of tripping yourself up. One of the things that made Sinda so easy to talk to was that she didn't try to push their conversations into the past. She was happy to talk about music, or old movies. Okay, so she might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she had this amazing depth to her—and she hadn't exclusively focused on chick flicks. The really incredible thing was she actually got the best parts. He'd never met another woman who watched the Three Stooges and laughed—really laughed. They'd both liked the scene at the end of one of the old spaghetti westerns where the hero "had a problem with his arithmetic." Hell, she was the first girl he'd met in twenty years who'd ever watched them.
The toughest part of this situation was that he couldn't let himself get involved, no matter how much he might like to. He was living a lie, and there was no telling how her reaction to him would change when she found out the truth. Would she see him as just another opportunist? Would she see him as being like the asshole? Just another predatory juv general? Or could she possibly understand why he'd had to do this?
Bobby Mitchell was good at surveillance, and his skills had only improved since leaving law enforcement. A throwback to a touch of Sioux on his daddy's side and a hint of Mex on his momma's, he was a small, slightly nervous man with dark hair, dark eyes, skin that tanned easily, and a talent for blending in with his surroundings, whether people or environmental.
Bobby maintained his tan very carefully, having noticed early on how disinclined people were to notice a swarthy, average to short man engaged in manual labor.
Today, he was sweeping a sidewalk across from a park. Bobby's natural vision hadn't been all that good, but the damned aliens had some doctors that weren't too shabby. As he progressed along the sidewalk, he was from twenty to eighty yards from the park bench that allegedly was the enemy dead drop, yet he could clearly make out the features of anyone on or approaching the bench.
He could have used electronics, of course. And he did have them, as a backup. Still, after seeing just a few of the things his damned alien bosses could do with recorded data, Bobby was a firm believer in the personal touch. He'd never been one to assume the enemy was incompetent or stupid.
Besides, the mission here was purely confirmation of a tip in advance of a raid.
He was halfway down the sidewalk sweeping, the second time, when the very average black man with conservative scalp patterns, dressed in a dirty sky blue windbreaker and jeans, sat down on the bench. The face was a dead ringer for one of the four in the tip file, and he admired the smoothness of the man brushing a hand under the edge of the bench under cover of tossing crumbs to the pigeons. You had to admire the artistry. He didn't even see him read it, and only knew it was probably a note on flashpaper from the slight excess flare as the man lit a cigarette, standing and strolling casually back the way he had come.
Tip confirmed, mission accomplished. Bobby continued his sweeping all around the square, palming his back-up cameras as he passed them.
The Fleet Strike puke who picked up their cameras from within the park itself half an hour later was clumsy, wearing civilian clothes that were too carefully sloppy and too new and overacting his casualness, although his sleight of hand was acceptable. Still, it was obvious Fleet Strike hadn't faced a serious threat from an opposing intelligence force in a long time.
Too bad he couldn't count on all their people being that inexperienced. It was probably overkill, but he'd still plan the raid as if they were going to be competent competitors for the prizes.
After cleaning up the last camera, he disappeared down an alley to his ten-year-old gray sedan, throwing the broom in his back seat. His AID looked like a cheap discount-store brand PDA. He took a moment to call his cousin, "Hey, Johnny. Yeah, it's me. We're on for beer and pizza Tuesday. My place."
Tip confirmed, raid on schedule, set the wheels in motion. And may we all get nice bonuses out of this.
As he got off the bus, Levon Martin took out the baggy where he'd saved a bit of bread from his sandwich. He tore the bread into crumbs as he walked from the stop to the park.
It was a beautiful day but a trifle windy. His clothes had the well worn look of the comfortable clothes that a man might wear for a walk on his day off. The air today smelled fresh and green, and he couldn't help but be cheered a bit by the profusion of dandelions that pushed up between the cracks of the crumbling sidewalks, giving way suddenly to solid concrete and well-tended flower boxes as he turned onto the square.
In the park in the middle of the square, he found a spot on the left end of the bench that was mostly clear of pigeon droppings and sat, playing out the crumbs to the fat, iridescent birds as they waddled and pecked at the bits of bread and sometimes at each other.
Somewhere in the middle he managed to palm the flash paper sticky-note stuck to the bottom of the bench. Under cover of crumbling a bit more bread, he tore off the corner of the paper that held a few tiny dots of film that would yield up their data later, under magnification. The rest of the note simply said, "Plus one hour for Joe."
He kept it palmed while he finished feeding the birds and disposed of it before he left by the simple expedient of burning it as he lit a cigarette, covered by the flare of his lighter. The baggy with the data dots went into his pocket. Wonder what in the hell Barry has going on that necessitates pushing back the mid-cycle meeting? Not that it matters.
There were various people in the square or on the walkways this Sunday afternoon, but none of them stood out. There was nothing to distinguish the sidewalk sweeper from any of a couple of dozen other people going about their business in plain sight.
Martin walked back out to his bus stop, arriving five minutes before the next scheduled pickup at that stop. After a short wait, he boarded his bus and was gone.
Peter Vanderberg contemplated the young major in front of him, from the slightly long for regulation hair to the precise fit of his silks and liked what he saw. What he primarily liked about David Morrison couldn't be seen on the surface. Alert, competent, smart. Attentive to detail without getting bogged down and overcome by trivialities. Good delegating authority. All these were reasons for the man to have obtained the exalted rank of major at the unusually young age of thirty-six.
His 201 file was virtually perfect, as was true of almost all of the new breed of young Fleet Strike officers.
"So. Now that our intel is confirmed, I expect a finalized operational plan for capture of the targets ready to brief in the participants by eleven hundred tomorrow. You can use my briefing room, since I'll want to be there. Look at me, David." He caught the major's eyes as they dropped slightly to meet his own. "I can't emphasize enough how important this mission is. Use whatever you need to get it done."
"Yes, sir." He nodded. "My preliminary plan is for a solid team in civilian clothes backed up by a substantial number of uniformed MPs who can be thoroughly concealed and held under radio silence until and unless needed."
"Reasonable. Get on it. I'll see you tomorrow. Dismissed."
"Yes, sir." The about face was clean, but relaxed, confident. Good man. As soon as Stewart was out in the open, he was definitely sending him a mixed case of Havanas and good scotch, and damn the cost.
"So he didn't notice that you had your buckley do all those time-wasting reports he wanted?" Stewart had doubled back to the office, since Sinda didn't have to be at the asshole's quarters until his wife left at nineteen hundred.
"Well, he did comment that they were a bit pessimistic." She trailed a finger down his chest, grinning conspiratorially. "I blamed it on PMS.
"So," she took a finger and tapped him on the chest, "we've just about exhausted the possibilities of the regular office but you," she tapped him again, "have access to the locked room off of Beed's office. Is there any . . . interesting furniture or anything in there?"
Her breasts were just barely brushing against his chest, and he could feel her nipples hardening through the thin fabric. Her breath was warm against his jaw line and smelled of cinnamon.
"Well, there is a recliner back there. And a large vidscreen. I don't think he wants the rest of the office to know he uses them." He ran a hand through that silky, bright hair. She had great hair.
"A recliner? Lead on, Macduff," she said.
If she thought she was going to be in the driver's seat like last night, she was in for a surprise. Not that it hadn't been fantastic, just, well, they didn't have a lot of time and he didn't like why. Oh, it wasn't her fault at all. Which was why he was in the mood to wring every last bit of sensation from her and leave her sated and limp as a rag doll. The asshole might get her acting ability, but he had her real passion, and he knew it. It was his aim to make her unable to forget it for a second of her sad pantomime with that unfit, corrupt flake who he was more and more looking forward to relieving of command and career.
The promised recliner was upholstered in a rather hideous green and black plaid. A faded leopard-print pillow scavenged from who knew where was squashed into one corner of it. A couple of other pillows and a red and white blanket with a soft drink logo were piled neatly to the side of the chair. A box of holocubes with the logos of commercial entertainment companies sat by itself on a small end table. The color scheme was the same institutional green and battleship gray of the rest of the office.
As the door slid shut behind her he pulled her hard against him, kissing her deeply. He didn't know what it was about this woman, but a kiss or a touch and he was just gone.
Now her legs were up around his waist and the drive came boiling up in him. It turned out that the pillows and blanket combined to provide just the right height boost to support her when he bent her over the arm of the chair. He had both hands free, and he could reach everything, and did, as he felt the convulsions begin to take her. Yesterday had been pretty great, but all in all, Stewart preferred to drive.
He had worked his way through two and was recovered and starting on three, gotta love that juv stamina, when he thought he heard a noise in the outer office. He clapped one hand over Sinda's mouth, "Shhh!" and they both dived for their PDA's. She made it first.
"Buckley, who's out there?" she hissed.
"It's Sergeant Franks! He'll tell the general and we're all gonna die!" it whispered back.
Only Franks. Wonder what he's up to? Stewart breathed a sigh of relief and put a finger over his lips.
Sinda nodded.
He quietly murmured to his AID-in-drag to listen for Franks until he left the headquarters complex. He and Sinda sat very quietly, staring at each other, until it announced softly that Franks was gone and, other than themselves and the MP standing guard in the outer corridor, the headquarters area was now empty.
"You get damn good performance out of your buckley," he said.
"Yeah, so do you," she observed absently. "Boy that took the mood right away, didn't it?"
"Yeah, but I bet we could get it back pretty quick." He looked down and shrugged, running a finger up her thigh.
"We already damn near got caught once tonight. Let's not make that a certainty, okay?" She stopped his hand with one of her own and grabbed her silks, smiling regretfully.
"Yeah," he agreed reluctantly, grabbing his own clothes. It really wasn't her fault. If it was anybody's fault it was his for having the power to relieve the bastard and failing to do so. Okay, so his own orders didn't allow it yet, but if he wanted to get her out of the asshole's bed all he had to do was hurry up and catch Franks or whoever the sonofabitch plant was. As soon as that was done, he could relieve Beed and ship his scumbag butt back to Earth and away from her.
He kissed her and waved her on out to go do what she had to do as soon as she had her hair and clothes straightened while he finished cleaning up.
It wasn't actually impossible. It wasn't as if working in CID or an MP Brigade was her life's ambition. He could get her a transfer somewhere on base. Once they were no longer in the same chain of command, and she was in a job less outright crazy than this one, there wouldn't really be anything to keep them apart, would there?
On the shuttle for the freighter, Jay and the others generally wore liners of the same material as military silks under their heavy cotton jumpsuits. They had to. Landing control wouldn't have tolerated the heat leakage that would have resulted if they'd kept the inside at a comfortable temperature.
Besides, they weren't supposed to be sleeping on it in the first place. Covering that had meant renting a transient's room and having someone in it enough of the time to make it look well used. Jay liked this arrangement because it gave him excellent cover for his independent ventures when it was his time to use the room.
And his turn was supposed to be today, but Papa O'Neal had asked to swap, and he hadn't had a graceful excuse to say no.
So here he was stuck on the shuttle freezing his buns off with Sunday. Well, okay, the silk longjohns helped a lot. He'd still rather be alone and warm and ready to go. Not that Sunday was a bad guy, it was just that he had so much money he couldn't possibly understand what it was like to grow up in the lousy BS. Oh, most of the kids had just accepted it. They never knew any better. But him being a doctor's kid, he'd seen the difference between himself and the other doctors' kids. He knew full well what his life would have been like with a lot less fucking BS. Sunday could have never understood, but he was just getting back the life that always should have been his in the first place. And if the BS suffered, well, it just balanced the scales, didn't it?
He surreptitiously checked the outbound passenger shuttle schedules. Fuck! Two hour mechanical launch delay. This totally sucks. Okay, not a real problem. It was still well within the effective span of his diversion, it was just that the other launch time was so sweet.
His change of clothes and ID was in a locker with the money and minimal luggage, all ready to go. He had another couple of hours to kill, that's all.
"Hey, Sunday, wanna play me a battle or two of Warlord?" He wiggled his PDA.
Cally sat on the closed seat in the lone stall of the office women's room. The only problem with this diuretic was it tended to lose potency and acquire an aftertaste if you mixed the water-soluble combination too far ahead of time. She was pretty sure she could make an opportunity to get into that last, guarded room tonight. Which meant she'd need this within a couple of hours. One eyedropper full in his beer would guarantee sending him running out.
She stowed the bottle in her purse, pulling out a data cube for her PDA. No telling what cracking programs she'd need. Best to have them all on tap. Still, she checked the seal on the small, wide-mouthed jar of vinegar, just in case.
Back in the office, she puttered around her office waiting for Pryce to get back with dinner. She had asked him to get beer and hot wings. Everybody drank beer with wings.
Tonight they had no preset time limit. Beed's wife had apparently finally insisted on at least one quiet evening together at home. It was a damned shame to waste it by drugging Pryce, but she couldn't let her hormones get in the way of her job. Besides, when she found the identity of the leak, and sooner or later she would, it would be all over without a goodbye, anyway.
But maybe she wouldn't find it tonight. It could be wherever Beed went on those long inspection walks of his. Maybe even over at the detention center. It was certainly secure enough.
Persuading Beed to take her along would be easy enough. All she'd have to do was provide him with even a thin excuse. The horny bastard would jump at the offer of more time to get his hand in the cookie jar.
She smiled sadly as she heard the outer office door. It really was too bad she had to do this, but it was the best way she knew to cover her search time while leaving him totally unharmed. Well, other than his dignity. She pulled her game face firmly on, grinning wickedly at him as he came in her open door.
"Mmmm. Something smells good." She inhaled appreciatively. "Dinner smells pretty good, too."
"Cute." He gave her a sidelong glance as he took the beer bottles and to-go boxes out of the bag. "Did you want to get to the food at all? I mean, if you're not hungry . . ." He trailed off with a slow, predatory grin.
"Um, actually I am hungry. For food, I mean. First." She let her eyelids droop a bit, letting how much she wanted him show on her face. There was a tight pain in her chest. Sometimes she hated her job.
"Okay." He opened the beer bottles and went to get his desk chair. She didn't need the ruse she'd planned, after all.
It only took a second to reach into her desk drawer and put a dropper-full of the drug into his beer.