“Anyway, we have Winchon’s conference schedule. Michelle tells me our only chance is to do the op when he is at least a few hundred kilometers away from the site. As far as possible, really.” When she mentioned talking to Michelle, Granpa’s face got grumpier, like it always did. She hated being in the middle of family squabbles. “Work like this tends to have small but significant turnover. People may not be able to walk out, but they do leave feet first. We have the profiles of the jobs most likely to turn over, and the ones that are vacant. Multiple resumes are in the pipeline for each of us. Our inside man has our list. We have staffers down in GN32 manning our phones. Interview calls will be routed to voice mail for obvious reasons, along with a tag telling you who the caller thinks you are. If you can’t have your buckley tell you when a call comes in, you need to check it at least every two hours. If you’re doing a short assignment and can’t do that, you need to notify me in advance and let me know how long you’ll be out of pocket.”
George started to say something, but Cally had evidently anticipated. She placed a soft hand over George’s lips and smiled as she continued, “Granpa, you and George take what we know of the layout of the place, develop plans for physical surveillance of the facility, and start working on secondary plans of entry and execution.”
Papa O’Neal nearly choked on his tobacco trying not to laugh at the expression on the young man’s — well, he looked young, anyway — face. As if his granddaughter was going to let him steamroller one of her meetings for the second time in a row. He caught a whiff of her perfume from across the room. Dangerous stuff. The kid’s eyes glazed over as she turned in her seat, deliberately moving the lethal cleavage nearer. At least, Papa knew damned well it was deliberate.
“Anyone gets a call, it will automatically route to me, too. Whole team, meet back here, same time, in one week to touch base unless I tell you sooner. Dismissed.” Unusually for Cally, she didn’t give time for questions, and she didn’t relax the format, just took her hand off George and swept out of the room. Whew, but her nose was out of joint. He might just have to have a talk with her. Or better yet, with Schmidt Two, who was still looking a bit poleaxed. Maybe even each of them. He might indeed.
Pardal cordially loathed the smell of Titan Base. The overpressure on the domed city drove in mixed hydrocarbons that made the entire facility reek of a combination of a ship with a faulty life support system and a dirty waste-room. The pathetic suite set aside for his use, which would have looked luxurious only to human savages who knew no better, had a shoddy Earthtech air filter in one corner. It reduced the reek in his own rooms, but produced a whining that abused his sensitive ears. The air movement and hiss had, more than once, awakened him from a sound sleep, diving for his pressure suit. The times it had happened, it had taken a few seconds before he’d realized he was not aboard a ship with a hull breach but was, instead, on the Aldenata-bedamned Titan Base. By then his stress hormones, mingled with a tingling hint of Tal, were in such an uproar that it took a seventh-level meditation to relax him enough to get back to sleep.
Demanding complete and immediate repair would have revealed weakness. He certainly didn’t want the humans to know that the panicked awakening was almost as dangerous, to him, as a real hull breach somewhere on board one of his ships would have been. Much less reveal weakness to others of his kind. He had ordered proper air cleaning equipment from a reputable supplier and would simply have to wait for its arrival. He hated humans, as much for their cheap and shoddy devices as for anything else.
The Indowy produced voluminous excesses of Indowy, the Tchpth produced overwhelming technological inventions, the Darhel produced money and power, the Himmit produced — well, consumed, then — an excess of stories, the Posleen produced a voluminous amount of both Posleen and ships. The humans’ particular excess was millions of tons of ephemeral, garbage goods — some in use, the vast majority already broken and discarded. They were ridiculously self-congratulatory over insignificant increases in useful life of what they produced, and the ability to remanufacture their garbage instead of just piling up and burying their millions of shipweights of discards.
Human females were the worst. They incessantly wore and replaced robes in an absurd variety of colors, textures and shapes, like some maniacally molting, diseased insects. Human men apparently found this profligate trait attractive. They did price their shoddy goods like the worthless things they were, but that was almost as bad. By treating them with extreme care, it was possible to extend the life of such goods to the point that they became economical. The volume and variety of garbage goods, that did work for very brief periods, made the humans frighteningly adaptable — an unpleasant truth that he would never admit to anyone else and barely admitted to himself. He really loathed the little barbarian carnivores.
He watched a live holo of the main dividing way of the savage city, the one the humans called the Corridor. How original. He sat watching and listed to himself the various reasons he hated humans. He was aware that most of his kind felt merely a more distant contempt for the species. He would probably return to that attitude, himself, as soon as he could get out of the gods-forsaken Sol System and back to civilization. For now, they were just too close. He was finally in a state of mind to get the most appreciation out of the latest cube of research he had received from the human Erick Winchon.
After the first hour, he decided he was very disappointed. This cube wasn’t nearly as good as the last one. The first half, an aversive eating sequence with fresh subjects, would have been completely boring if he hadn’t learned to read human facial expressions. The second half, aversive mating behaviors, should have been boring, but wasn’t. Somewhere in the sequence, it crossed over from mere unaesthetic mates to pointless and counterproductive destruction of the females. Odd, that. The accompanying notes said the obvious aversiveness resulted from the peculiar human emotion called empathy, rather than the loss of a potential mating opportunity before viable offspring could result. The other feature that rescued the cube from tedium was the proof of aversiveness tests performed on random subjects after a significant act, which left the subject in the situation while removing all controls on his or her emotional responses. Humans in distress were capable of an extraordinary variety of vocalizations.
He was leaning back in a reclining couch, watching the show a second time through, when his AID interrupted him, stopping the holo.
“Sir, you have an incoming message from a special courier vessel,” it said.
“Display it,” he said coldly.
A still holo of another Darhel appeared. The yellowish tinge to his silver and black fur, along with the yellow stains on his teeth, showed his less-than-stellar grooming habits. It was also a telltale mark of a certain age, as teeth didn’t get that neglected overnight. The gilded patterns on the columns behind him had Epetar’s traditional triangular motifs worked into the designs. From the moderately low quality and the obvious lack of sufficient Indowy body servants to attend his personal needs, Pardal knew the sender was of low rank.