He groaned inwardly. She could be such a cold bitch on her bad days. “Dump it to my PDA, and no tricks with the file format!”
“Fine. You can call him back on that thing then!”
“Fine.”
She — it — cut the connection and he looked for the file for a couple of minutes before turning up the AI emulation level on his buckley. “Suzie, please pull up and display or play the most recently transmitted file.”
“Are you sure you want me to do that, boss? I have half a terabyte of files that were dumped to my system in the past two minutes. Well, dumped to my enhanced system storage through an index.”
“Great. Just great. I want you to find a particular file. It’s a warning order memo from General Pennington and it could be text, audio, audio-vid, or even full holo.”
“Found it. It’s a compressed holographic file.”
“Compressed? What’s the rest of all that data?”
“Um… It appears to be a complete set of maintenance manuals for the waste reclamation systems on an RZ-400 class freighter.”
“That figures.” He sighed. “Any idea how you get a divorce from an AID?”
“No… But I’d be happy to find that out for you. Would you like me to search the database of Galactic law and precedent?”
“No! Don’t start that search! Just play the memo.”
The white-haired young-old man appeared only from the shoulders up, automatically oriented to face him. “Colonel, I need you to call me back ASAP. We have received a mission for DAG, hooah?” Beside his head, a mostly flat map of the northeast rift zone of Africa appeared, obsolete political borders outlined on it for convenience, with a blinking red dot on it roughly halfway down Ethiopia.
“The Darhel Gistar Group has leased a mining concession to extract tantalum and niobium in the old Oromo area of the rift. The Awasa mine has been taken over by terrorist raiders, of unknown affiliations. The mine is being held by these hostiles, and is believed to be being looted at this time, hooah? DAG’s mission is to proceed to the former Ethiopia as expeditiously as tactically feasible and retake the mine, holding it until Gistar replacement personnel and their private security detachment have been reinstated and firmly reestablished. Rules of engagement for these hostiles will be optimized for maximum speed and efficiency, and for maximum protection of the security of DAG personnel and surviving Indowy labor forces. Prisoners for interrogation are not, say again, are not a desired objective. You will, of course, be authorized to take and secure surrendered prisoners, where practical, as colonization volunteers for off-planet, privatized security details. Seems it would be right up their alley, anyway, hooah. Get me some preliminary time on target options and call me back by ten hundred hours, Sierra time.”
Great. That left him about half an hour to get with Mueller and run some sims. He was also going to need his AID, if she would behave. He considered ways to butter her up before grabbing a dry towel and his gym bag from the locker room on his way out the door. No time to shower and change here. First thing was to get back and take her out of his drawer. If he picked her up as soon as possible and started carrying her around immediately, she’d want to take the opportunity to prove her usefulness. It had certainly worked before. Besides, he was good and warmed up and wouldn’t feel the cold on the short jog back to the HQ. Not much, anyway. He groaned as he stepped outdoors into the icy wind. Full sprint. Definitely go for the full sprint. Thank God it was dry.
Sergeant George Mauldin looked a lot like his dad. He was bit on the short side and the constant training at DAG kept him solidly muscled. Standing still, he tended to look awkward, with arms too long for his body. The grace with which he moved, a combination of his mother’s influence and lifelong martial arts training, belied his gawky appearance. His hair was a light, muddy-apricot color. He hadn’t entirely escaped Papa O’Neal’s red hair, but Shari’s blondness had muted the shade. He kept it cut in an old-fashioned high and tight style, so there wasn’t as much of it to see except in good light. What really gave him away was the fair, ruddy skin. Very red, when he’d been working out — which was most of the time, including now.
About an hour into the day’s weight program, he was outside the gym cooling off with a sports drink and an energy bar. Even in the cool of November on Lake Michigan, most of the members of DAG used the outdoors as a quick way to drop some of the excess heat built up during the day’s training.
He wasn’t surprised to see the colonel step outside in his workout shorts, despite the cold. After all, the colonel was a juv, more than capable of keeping up, and trained as hard as any of his officers or men. What surprised him was watching Colonel Mosovich take off at a hard sprint for the headquarters building, towel around his neck and gym bag in his hand. Colonels didn’t do that, not in George’s limited experience. Something was up.
George was something of a fan of gadgets. Around his neck with the dog tags he carried a miniature PDA that would take a low-emulation buckley with a minimal overlay. About the size of one of the dog tags, it naturally was voice access only. He picked it up and addressed it, “Carrie, call Major Kelly for me.”
Chapter Sixteen
The fountain plashed softly in one corner of Michelle’s office. The breeze today smelled of apple blossoms and rain. The ceiling gave the impression of clouds moving in an overcast sky. In another corner, a sohon tank stood, containing its mass of nannite jelly and some as yet ill-defined parts and bits, whose purpose and final assembly pattern were indecipherable to any of the few dozen Indowy who came and went in her private space. She knew what her apprentice must be thinking: that whatever it was, it must be very important and delicate indeed to merit the personal attentions of a Michon Mentat. The apprentice, like the dozens of others on her personal work crew outside, would ask no questions. If he needed to know something, she would tell him. Besides, they knew that there was every likelihood that anything a mentat took on personally was a matter for those whose wisdom exceeded their own. An apprentice’s teaching emphasized that if he did not involve himself in matters that did not concern him, he could make no embarrassing or damaging mistakes.
Michelle O’Neal’s Indowy apprentice was twitching with excitement, despite years of Sohon discipline, and despite having shown the self-discipline to earn the position of primary apprentice on her work crew. She ignored it as understandable in one just entering his sixth decade — not considering that she herself was close to the same age. For one thing, he had just been entrusted with the great secret of the existence of rapid transit this morning — a secret only a handful of masters held. For another, he was going to travel by that almost miraculous method himself, this very day. For a third, this important job, if he completed it with wisdom, was to be the final test of his ability to function in the journeyman post he would hold provisionally until the assignment was complete. It was a great honor, and the apprentice — journeyman, she corrected herself — was not presently operating a tank. She could allow him some high spirits on his big day.
“It’s important that you understand both your job and the reasons for it. The Darhel Epetar Group has done something very unwise. Unwise to the point that the appropriate people have decided upon the appropriate responses. The Darhel Gistar Group is neither particularly wise nor particularly unwise, but happens to have a ship conveniently positioned in the Dulain area — never mind how. A group of humans, also neither particularly wise nor particularly virtuous, happens to have been set in motion by others to assemble the rudiments of a cargo with no planned shipping. That is, if a ship suddenly becomes available to carry it, they can appear to have merely scraped a cargo together on short notice, without any prior plan. The Epetar ship will be late to drop off its cargo of humans and pick up a mixed cargo of uninitialized Sohon headsets and tools. The Epetar ship will have defaulted on its shipping contract — ordinarily a matter of simple fines. In this case the Rontogh factor will have rebooked the cargo onto the conveniently available, and timely, Gistar vessel. The Epetar ship will not want to depart with empty cargo holds. They will book the cargo ‘hastily assembled’ by the humans.” She faced the journeyman with quiet, serene eyes. If she had any personal feelings about this matter, they didn’t show.