“Fine, fine. What have you been up to? Didn’t know you were in the field.”
“Target of opportunity. Wasn’t able to do a full set up. Sorry about that. I know these improv jobs are harder. How are Sue and Cary?”
“She graduated this spring. Didn’t pick my field or her mom’s. Don’t know what that girl sees in machines, but they tell me she’s an artist. And I got a letter from my junior reprobate this week. Seems he’s finding out that minding the nuns is more than just a good idea.”
Cally returned his wicked grin.
“That all?” he asked, and as she nodded, he patted her hand gently. “Got you covered, sweetheart. Go take a load off and try to forget about it.”
She logged herself in to one of the temporary suites and went down to grab that bath. By the time she got out, her trunk of personal effects would have been wheeled up and installed in the room. She left the “Do Not Unpack” sign on the dresser and went in to run her bath. The organization understood how transient and rootless field operatives could feel and believed firmly in reducing the disorientation by maintaining an assortment of personal effects on site. Maintaining entire apartments for operatives who might never return from a mission was cost prohibitive, and additionally tended to emphasize losses in peoples’ minds, so the personal gear was maintained in the modern equivalent of steamer trunks which were delivered to the operative’s room when he or she checked in on base, and wheeled back into storage when he or she left.
Cally appreciated having her own clothes and her own things when she was on base, but she preferred unpacking them herself or not at all rather than having them repeatedly handled by strangers, much less by friends or acquaintances.
She paid for lunch to be sent up. If she went to the cafeteria she would no doubt run into people she knew and would have to talk to. She would, in fact, have to be Cally O’Neal, and she wasn’t quite ready for that yet. Which just went to show she was coming down with something and ought to stop by the medic’s office just in case. Except that she didn’t really feel like doing that. She decided to see if a long, hot bath, a good workout, and an early night would put her right. No sense in bothering a doctor for something as trivial as a touch of stomach upset and, well, the night sweats must have been a touch of fever. And she was neither queasy nor feverish now, just a little draggy.
In the bathroom, she added some bath salts from a jar under the counter to her bath. Scentless, of course, since housekeeping never knew if the operative in the room would be male or female, but still good for a soak. Real decadence would have to wait for the arrival of her own things.
The brown contacts came out and her own cornflower blue eyes stared back at her as she pinned her hair on top of her head, looking at a curl ruefully. She wasn’t about to add a chemical relaxant, bleach, and dye on top of a perm and dye job. She’d be walking around for the next few days looking like she had a head full of broom straw. It would just have to wait until they did her new cover on the slab.
She grabbed the large white terry bathrobe from the rack outside the bathroom and hung it on the inside of the door, leaving her clothes where they fell as she stripped off and lowered herself into the hot water up to her chin.
Levon Martin looked into the mirror at his darkened skin tone and dark contacts, running his hands over the patterns shaved into his hair and shrugged. He licked his very thin lips and pulled out some lip balm. With the weather warmed up, that should quit being a problem soon. He’d be happy to get back into his own skin, but this afternoon’s urban reconnaissance had required a different social face. This was not going to be a fun interview. He straightened his golf shirt and ensured it was neatly tucked into his slacks before leaving his room, listening to the electronic lock click faintly behind him as he entered the halls of the Chicago base. The transit elevator at the end of the hall didn’t take long to route him to the administrative octant of the Urb, where he had a short walk down the hall to enter an outer office.
The human receptionist behind the desk was there not because he was necessary to keep track of appointments or forms, although he did both, but because his superior’s time was valuable and because he had displayed a talent for guarding that time from unnecessary interruptions.
“Martin, Team Hector. I’m early.”
“You are. Hang on just a second.” The man got up and poked his head around the door, murmuring softly for a moment to the person on the other side. It would have been audible to Martin’s upgraded hearing if he had chosen to pay close attention. Under the circumstances, he did not.
“You can go in,” he said. “You’re on the heels of another interruption, and we might as well combine them.”
Martin walked into the inner office and sat down, waiting for the young-looking man rather eccentrically still wearing a clerical collar to look up from whatever was being displayed by his AID. The hologram was blurred from this side of the desk.
Father Nathan O’Reilly had had the credibility of his improbable good health, given his officially unrejuvenated state, wear thin twenty years before and had come inside to exercise his considerable organizational talents in the Earthside bureaucracy that had inevitably developed after the Bane Sidhe had resumed contact with their human allies.
Taking him inside had required very special planning and no little risk. Catholic priests didn’t exactly have a high rate of violent death, and for various reasons at the time it had been necessary that he actually be seen by several people to be very sincerely dead. The drug used was a resource-intensive collaboration between the Indowy and Crabs, and was a timed-release variant of Hiberzine that showed none of that drug’s surface symptoms. The main problems with it was that the dosage was tricky, requiring rather exact knowledge of the patient’s physical stats, and the hibernatory effectiveness was degraded by the same changes that reduced the visible symptoms. If the dosage was off by even a tiny amount, or the antidote was not administered within twelve hours, the simulated death tended to become very real in ways even the slab couldn’t fix.
The drug was so secret it didn’t even have a name, customarily being packaged in a water-insoluble crunch capsule to be bitten and swallowed by the willing target of an extraction. The time delay served two purposes. One was allowing time for the patient’s stomach acid to fully dissolve the capsule material. The other was preventing any possibility that some sharp-eyed observer would see the patient take the pill and immediately fall over “dead.”
Still, the ten percent risk of not waking up at all had required a great deal of trust on his part, and it wasn’t exactly a comfortable drug. All things considered, he was rather glad he’d never have to take it again.
Decentralized as the Bane Sidhe inherently were, a functioning planetary cell system required some central organization. Chicago Base was it. The priest had taken command of it fresh after its commissioning, its very discreet construction having been a ten year project that had required… encouraging… the Himmit with a number of exceptionally good story opportunities.
“Display off,” he told his AID. “So, Levon, what’s on your mind?”
“One of my agents turned up dead of a heart attack this morning,” he began.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Was he known to be ill?”
“No, the reverse. He was found dead in his mistress’s bed. Consensus from preliminary investigation was that the heart attack was induced by a drug overdose, consistent with the agent’s drug problem.”
“Were we aware of such a problem?”