The beat-up desks weren’t much better than the chairs. Instead of artificial windows, two sides of the room had improvised posters — they’d taped together six sheets of eight and a half by eleven printer plastic to form improvised scenes of a beach and a sidewalk cafe. Beside the posters, each had two more sheets of plastic thumbtacked to cork board. The printed calendar pages each had the same pair of weekends blocked out in lime green highlighter pen.
The first week, the three had done the final proofing of resumes and mailed them out. The backgrounds of the accounts closely resembled the backgrounds and identities of the applicants in just one respect. All were convincingly fictional. All went out through very sincere accounts which would match up with each identity.
After that, work had gotten dull, with nothing to do but wait for exactly what happened next. The old blue police light fastened to the ceiling started flashing at the same moment as the old woman’s buckley started ringing, displaying a name and pertinent facts on a screen it projected in front of her. Three other things happened immediately after. The younger woman and the man’s buckleys shut off what they were doing and started playing suitable office background noises, and the old woman dropped her knitting, eyes rapidly taking in the review that told her who she was supposed to be and which identity had gotten a bite on the line.
“Actuarial Solutions, Ashley speaking, how may I help you?”
The other side of the conversation played only through the woman’s earbug. The girl listened absently, nibbling on a rough corner of her thumbnail.
“Yes, Mr. Thomason is employed here. Shall I transfer you to him? Thank you.”
The three waited for two or three minutes to make sure the caller was not going to ask to be transferred back to the receptionist. When it appeared the caller had found holomail satisfactory, the light stopped flashing, the two time-killing displays for the young people flashed back to life, and old Miss Mallory picked up her knitting.
“Damn. I died,” the young man said.
George was a good six meters up the sheer cliff face when one of the hand holds crumbled away in his grasp. Never daydream when you’re climbing, he berated himself as he slid loose, with nothing to grab onto, and the ground coming fast. He was only halfway through the thought when the bungee cord kicked in, grabbing his harness and bouncing him around in the air. He lowered himself to the ground, swearing silently. Whoever decided to add the combination of plaster and holos to climbing walls was a sadist of the first order. At the moment, the diminutive assassin wanted very much to meet that man, or woman, in a dark alley.
“Those decoys are a bitch,” a soft female voice drawled behind him.
He jumped. “Hello, Cally.” The other assassin was the only person he knew who was a good enough sneak to come up behind him unnoticed. He really wished she’d quit. At least she didn’t laugh out loud. This time. Payback was hell. He grinned, unhooking himself and reaching for a gym towel.
“You have mail,” his buckley blinked at him.
He held a hand up to Cally. “Hang on, I’ve gotta get this.”
“I know,” she said.
He quirked an eyebrow at her before picking up the PDA. “Kira, play message.”
“Message is confidential, honey,” it said.
“It’s okay. Play it anyway,” he told it.
A ten-inch-tall hologram of a woman, seated with a background that suggested an office appeared in the air in front of him. “Mr. Thomason, this is Clare from the Institute for the Advancement of Human Welfare. We received your resume for a research support statistician.” She smiled a polite, office smile. “We’d like to set up a time for an interview. If you could please call us back at your earliest convenience, we can set up that time. Thank you.”
“You got a bite,” Cally said, as the woman disappeared. She held out a small handful of cubes to him. “I brought you a handful of hypno cubes to sleep to. I know you’ve got the equivalent of a bachelors in stats, but that cover was a long time ago. Sorry about the headaches.”
He sighed, taking the cubes. Effective hypnosleep required a drug and headgear apparatus to stimulate the right kinds of brainwaves to synchronize sleep levels with the program on the cube. Invariably, the sleep induced was not particularly restful, and the rig induced a nagging headache throughout the next day. The drug contained nannite-based components both to bypass some of the Bane Sidhe drug immunities and to ensure that the operative would sleep despite a discomfort allegedly similar to a twentieth-century woman sleeping in curlers. It gave George a wholly unwanted sympathy for what women went through to look good for their men. It was knowledge he could have done without.
“Okay, so I win the prize.” He pocketed the small lumps. “So I get the cover job. Do we know how big the gizmo is? How awkward is it going to be for the guy who gets to take it in?”
“It’s heavy enough. Not big, but dense. Michelle says it’s about a hundred kilos. I’d assume the Indowy use a grav platform to move it.”
“We can’t screw with gravity without sending most of the instrumentation in the place haywire. Not with the organization’s equipment in the shape it’s in — not to mention the added bulk. So even for the enhanced, it’s going to be awkward. Okay,” he said.
“Fine. Book it. Let me know when your interview is.” She turned and walked across the gym to the door at the far end, dodging a pickup basketball game on the way.
He watched her butt as she went. He had no complaints with the rest of her figure, it was just that cute buns were his thing. Having a lot of basis for comparison, he could say with authority that Cally O’Neal’s ass was one of the finer ones he’d seen. Definitely worth watching. When she turned to look back, just short of the door, he pretended great interest in the game on the court.
The Darhel Tir Dol Ron was having a quiet day. A day, in fact, so quiet that his only occupation was playing one of a number of human games he’d been given as a gift from the human Johnny Stuart, and loaded onto his AID. Darhel did not have this practice of gifts. Nor did they participate in the elaborate economy of favors practiced among the other Galactic races, holding that any exchange that didn’t specify contractual terms and store them in an impeccably reliable third party database to be primitive and uncivilized — not to mention being far too short of maneuvering room about the “spirit” of the deal. He neither knew, nor cared, if the human expected a return favor or not. If he did, his stupidity was not the Tir’s problem.
This game was simplistic to the point of mindlessness, but there was something compelling about the turning and falling shapes, and the click of virtual buttons necessary to cause them to lock into place cleanly. Watching the blocky, multicolored shapes fall was almost a meditative experience, until the fall rate got too fast and the falling distance too short for even Darhel reaction times.
“Your Tir, I have a page incoming from the Gistar Group’s planetary factor, on Titan Base.” The mellifluous voice which could so daze other species had no effect on him, other than being a pleasant choice for his AID. It would have been pleasant, that is, if it hadn’t startled him, causing him to miss a shape and lose his game. He uttered a muffled curse and heaved his well-fleshed bulk up from the cushions. The sedentary years on Earth had taken a certain toll and he resolved, for the umpteenth time, to visit the gym more often. And to spend more time off this damned backwater of a planet.