“I’d rather keep Granpa out of this.”
“Grandfather does not know of your marriage?” Michelle looked shocked. “I had thought you were more mature than to keep that kind of secret for our clan head. I am sorry I do not have the time to have that conversation. If you do not know his plans, I need you to discover them, quickly. Starting with whatever he is plotting on Dulain, and proceeding from there.”
“Dulain? What the—” Cally shook her head, interrupting herself, “Never mind. Just because I didn’t mean to leak anything and I’m pissed off at him over it doesn’t mean I’m going to help screw him over without damned good reason. You promise you’re only going to help him?”
“I cannot believe you think I would lie about something like that.” The mentat looked genuinely shocked.
“Fine, but I hope you don’t need it soon, because arranging meetings with him isn’t easy or quick.”
“I know he is on the moon. Tell your employers you are making a courier run for me. All you have to do is get him to tell you the information I need. The broad plan, and all the details you can get me. You and I won’t need to meet afterwards, I will simply listen in.”
“You will not!” Cally blushed. “We’re going to be busy. You just keep your mentat mind out of there.”
“Fine. I do not have time to argue, I am very busy working the prototype in around my other work commitments. Please be on the next courier flight.”
“Delivering what? What am I supposed to be taking you and why?”
“Invent something. I’m sure that will not be a problem for you, as your dramatic skills far exceed mine.” There might have been something vaguely disapproving in the way she said it. She was so closed that it was impossible to tell. Cally couldn’t even say anything back. Her sister was gone.
The hotel room was clean enough. Maybe. Stewart might have said the place had seen better days except that, sadly, it probably hadn’t. The walls were cheap white stucco, probably slapped right over the lunar equivalent of cinder block. One wall was simply the decorative brick of the corridor outside painted a glossy white — barren cheapness trying to masquerade as decorating panache. The blue patterned carpets were dingy, tinged brown with dirt up next to the walls. The paint on everything was fresh and clean, like someone had been desperately trying to pretend the place was not a dump. It had been the best anonymous privacy he could arrange in the base’s dusty underbelly on short notice. It also featured two double beds instead of one king. They’d just have to get very close.
“Okay, what the hell was so important?” He addressed his wife, a pin-up perfect picture even in old jeans, who had arrived before him and now sat on the edge of the bed nearest the door, legs crossed. Anyone else would have been leaning back. Cally sat, spine straight, weight balanced forward, elbows in, hands in her lap. It was body language Stewart associated with the real Cally, Cally without masks. No masks, just defensive as all hell. A muscle jumped in his cheek as his jaw clenched as he took in her disconcertingly neutral expression. She was really pissed off about something. Unfortunately, being called out of business meetings on practically no notice for a dangerous face-to-face rendezvous didn’t have him in a receptive mood.
“My sister Michelle sends her belated congratulations on our happiness.” Her voice had that cheery lilt that southern women got when you were really in the shit.
“Oh fuck.” He turned and walked a few steps away, his forehead clasped in a hand.
“She also sends congratulations on your debut into high level Galactic politics and asks what in the hell you thought you were doing,” Cally said coldly.
“Excuse me?” He tried, and apparently failed, to look innocent. He felt like a husband caught with five sealed decks of cards after promising to give up poker.
“What did you do, or are you doing, to the Epetar Group?” She was giving him the deep freeze for sure.
After a long pause, he said, “I don’t know if I can get into that, Cally.”
“I see,” she said shortly. “Fine. I’ll go first. You started with what I told you about my windfall and extrapolated that, correctly, to my having stolen a set of nanogenerator code keys from the Darhel Pardal. You proceeded to plan and act on that information for the sake of your organization. Fine, my mistake for indiscretion. Now I’m going to compound that by providing more information. Whatever you planned is about to go all to shit and, your good luck, Michelle finds it in her own interests for it to succeed instead. No, that’s not right. She finds it in Clan O’Neal’s interests. That Indowy upbringing really took. She wants to smooth the way for it, but she needs to know what the hell you have planned.”
She held up a hand to forestall his interruption. “Lest you think this is a setup, I know her situation. You’re trying to screw Epetar, she wants them thoroughly screwed but can’t have her fingerprints on it. For our part, let’s just say that this ties in, in an acceptable way, to things we’re working on, as well. Fortunately.” She shrugged. “You’ve got two choices. You can take the gamble that she’s telling the truth and talk to me, or you can tell me to go to hell and take your chances.” She looked at her watch. “It’s late. I’m tired. Think about it all you want. I’m grabbing a shower and going to bed.” She snatched up a small bag and left him to his thoughts.
Even if he had a good poker face, a guy’s wife could tell a lot about his thoughts from watching him think. It was a decent gesture to leave him alone to do his thinking. Or would be if she didn’t have the place bugged to the gills. It was what he would have done. He pulled a small device out of his case and began a sweep.
“You don’t need to bother sweeping the place. I didn’t bug it. Just applied some creative static.”
“If it’s not bugged, how come you knew when I started looking?”
“I’m your wife, genius. Go ahead if it makes you feel better.”
Damn but she was good. He sometimes forgot how good. Now, did he bring her in or pass? Obviously, bring her in. First, she was good. Good enough maybe even to read her mentat sister right for motivation. Second, said mentat sister, like all the Indowy-raised, would put her loyalty to her clan — as she saw it — above everything else. However much he disapproved of Michael O’Neal, Senior, for letting his son continue to think he was dead, Michelle had to know her grandfather was alive, which would make him the O’Neal clan head. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Michelle could have sunk Stewart himself any time she wanted, and still could, just by pointing a finger. She didn’t need proof. Darhel paranoia would kick in and that would be that. Helping it succeed was the only possible reason she could have for wanting the full plan.
It still messed with his sense of reality to call people with the highest levels of the Indowy’s production voodoo “mentats.” He kept having flashbacks to a fucking long science fiction movie he’d seen years ago with freaky looking human calculators. He knew how it had all happened. When they translated Indowy labor ranks into English, or coined words for them, they had classified all the levels at the top of the list as different grades of “adept.” Well, that had been great until they found out that there was another voodoo level above the adept grades that was so qualitatively beyond them as to be a whole different ballgame.
There was apparently a very sudden, massive jump in ability from the top grades of adept to this new thing. It hadn’t been on the lists of Indowy labor ranks because it wasn’t one. All the other grades had a set wage rate for assigned work. These folks had variable pay based on negotiated contracts, and were the direct employers of the various Indowy work teams. As much as you could translate something as individualistic as “employment” to Indowy, anyway. So they needed another word for someone super-skilled, something so way up there as to be almost unimaginable. Some wit had borrowed the term “mentat” from the same book that inspired the old movie. Stewart still couldn’t hear someone spoken of as a mentat without picturing a fat guy with toothbrushes for eyebrows.