"Thanks, Candy," Michael O'Neal, Senior, said grumpily.
Papa reflected that it was damned embarrassing to have a machine remind you of something you really shouldn't have forgotten.
"Aw, Boss. I can't rub those shoulders for you, but what the hell? Why not let me dance for you again. You know you like it," she husked. Candy's AI emulation was set high enough that he did have to worry about occasional crashes. She had a lower crash rate than some other overlays, even though the holographic dance algorithms took up a fair bit of her space. He'd renamed her, of course. The thing about Candy was she knew better than to misbehave when Shari was around—or any of the gaggle of hens in his very large family. Shari knew all about her, but they had a tacit don't ask, don't tell agreement on internet porn, which covered Candy. Covered more of her than her get-up of beads and feathers tied together with minuscule scraps of suede.
Candy was modeled on a stripper he'd known when he was stationed in Florida. Her coal-black hair fell to mid-thigh, the perfect prop to her schtick as an Indian princess. She had all the right curves in all the right places, face raised above mere prettiness by great big doe eyes. Tan was in, nobody thought twice about skin cancer. Never a tan line on her.
His PDA's animations didn't even remotely approach a stripper's natural jiggles, but it did tend to break up the boredom.
"Maybe later, sweetheart. That message is important."
He'd forgotten to tell anybody what to do with Snake Mosovich and his people before he left. Hell, he hadn't told anybody but Shari that they had Snake and his people for keeps. Oops.
It was plain obvious that sixty troops could not stay on Edisto Island. Even if they'd been one hundred percent certain it was safe to expand the facilities, they couldn't feed 'em. They had enough trouble keeping family supplied, and the Bane Sidhe transients were always in need of a certain amount of charity, damn the skinflints. Papa silently admitted that the O'Neals had a lot to do with the organization's financial fortunes over the past seven years, good and bad. The money from the last mission hadn't so much fixed things as kept them limping along.
Before the Galactics returned, the Bane Sidhe on Earth had been a core of adherents with fragments of knowledge in their brains. Many had been monks bound to silence, the organization itself being one of the reasons such vows were so encouraged over the centuries. Operating costs had been zilch.
After the return, the Indowy Bane Sidhe had largely funded human operations. Not completely, but mostly. Although Indowy lived in debt from childhood to grave, tiny bits of cash from a lot of people added up fast. With the split, the O'Neal Bane Sidhe had had two choices: shut down active operations, or find funding. Shutting down was surrender to the Darhel vision of humanity as scarce, and enslaved—so the O'Neals' funds were stretched by the transients. If the O'Neals hadn't had a good tax-free trade going by moonlight, they wouldn't be making it.
They sure as hell couldn't keep DAG secret in the U.S. and they didn't have the resources to maintain them. But sometimes when you had two problems they solved themselves.
"Okay, Candy. Send this back through all that encryption and signal hiding crap we do, and double encrypt," he said.
John Earl Bill Stuart, otherwise known as "Johnny," had learned to find his Darhel boss's office intimidating. When he first got promoted, started dealing directly with the Tir and all, he had felt a certain smartass superiority to some furry guy who looked like an overgrown fox, working in the middle of a a big city with no idea what the real world was like out there where average folks shot and killed any stray Posleen that happened to show up. The furry alien engendered a certain contempt, despite the over-dramatic hooded cloak and the rows of sharp teeth. Hell, Johnny had seen sharp teeth before. What had mattered to him was that this fox couldn't kill a rabbit to save its life—well, without losing its life by going into some kind of permanent, fatal, biological drug trip. Johnny didn't think much of people who did drugs, either, and these guys had their drugs built right in.
That was what he'd thought.
Then he'd really gotten his head around the Darhels' total absence of conscience when it came to manipulating someone else to pull the triggers, or arranging billions of deaths by mischance. He was fully aware that the Darhel in question was capable of taking off from Earth and obliquely ordering some underling to push the button that slagged the whole planet, and doing it with the same amount of emotion he'd feel putting on his clothes in the morning. It couldn't directly kill without effectively killing itself. It couldn't even think about it real hard. But for positive feelings, it fully matched the coldest psychopath he'd ever met in his life. Positive emotions? Conscience? Nobody home.
Unlike human psychopaths, Darhel did follow rules. They'd cheerfully write the worst screw-you contracts in the world if you weren't real careful with the fine print, but they followed rules. If they hadn't had a practical morality of various rules, he doubted they'd be able to manage at all. But they were pure hell on breach of contract. Instead of looking at them as overgrown foxes, he had grown to respect them the way he'd respect a saber-tooth tiger with the appetite of a shrew, tethered by a very thin leash. He'd seen a mother bear savage a Great Dane once—just rip it right up. He'd been five, and on a camping trip in the Rockies. The memory was burned into his brain.
If a Darhel lost its temper, it meant not only the death of the Darhel, but everyone and everything moving that it could reach, until that internal drug kicked in. The hair on his neck stood up every time he went in the room with one, and his clothes always carried a stink of fear by the time he left. Worse, he was sure it knew.
He shuddered and pushed open the door, entering the office.
The room was all changed again. Everything was in shades of blue, with some white and a really depressing, mottled gray. Carpet, walls, ceiling—everything. That is, everything that didn't have little designs of gold or, like the desk, gold edgings—inlays. He couldn't help shaking his head just a little.
He could guess the reason for all the trappings. Tir Dol Ron was showing off his new acquisition. On one wall he had a painting of a kid of maybe eleven or twelve, dressed like the pictures of America's Founding Fathers he'd seen in elementary school. Only his clothes were all light blue and made of silk or satin or something. The area behind him was dark mountains, but you couldn't really make it out. The kid's face looked feverish. He looked like the biggest pansy Johnny had ever seen.
After making him wait until a normal guy would start getting fidgety—Johnny was used to it—the Darhel entered the office through the side door that led in from the next room in his suite. It waved a hand carelessly to dismiss the Indowy servant that tried to follow it into the room.
"Mr. Stuart. Hurry your report. I have some very urgent matters requiring my personal attention and have little time to catch up on your . . . provision of services," it said.
He. Always think of it as a "he." Stuart reminded himself of what his alien employer preferred to be called. They understood the bad impressions that went along with calling someone an "it" and got pissed off if humans didn't call them "he."
"Anything I can help with?" Stuart asked.
"No, no," Dol Ron snapped impatiently. Then he seemed to think the better of it. Even the fox-faced aliens occasionally needed someone to talk to. They weren't very social. Human listeners were something between a convenience for thinking out loud and an audience for subtle boasting. Subtle as a sledge hammer.
"A minor functionary of another group had the bad taste to lose his temper on my planet and his superiors are bothering me about it. He botched a number of serious business dealings and his group is looking for someone to blame. It won't be me, but it doesn't stop them from trying," the Tir said.
"That's pretty rare. Any idea what set him off?"
"Botched business dealings sometimes do that," the Darhel admitted. "Badly botched ones, anyway." That was information it wouldn't have confided seven years ago, but his boss was clearly having a bad day.
"So your forensics don't show any more than that? Just business stress?" he asked.
"My what?"
"Forensics," Johnny said slowly. "It's something human authorities, or people like me, always do after a suspicious death in our area of responsibility, to make sure whatever caused the guy's death is really what it appears to be," he explained.
"With us, deaths of this type are always straightforward," the Darhel snapped. "Our people place sharp limits on the—on whatever you're implying."
"I can see that, sir. But with respect, you and your dead guy are on a planet full of humans who aren't all that good about staying within limits," the security man said.
"Impossible. Ridiculous. If a human were involved, we would have found its corpse." The Darhel paused. "However, your kind of investigation could give me an extra tool to shake off the inconvenience of Pardal's lintatai with less input of my valuable time. Unless there's something special, I don't really need your report. Get right on this, get back to me. Make an appointment a week from now. You won't find anything unusual, of course, but that's a good time for me to use your report as further evidence that I've tried everything to meet my obligations. You're dismissed." It waved him away with the same negligent gesture it had used on the Indowy servant, having forgotten him already as it returned to its own thoughts.
Johnny didn't take offense at the self-important, high-handed dismissal. Much. He was used to it. As long as he stayed on the Tir's good side, he didn't much care what the alien fuck did. He did his job, he got paid. When he was away from the Darhel, he even enjoyed the work. He hadn't worked around Darhel for seven years without learning a bit about procedure. The late—or nearly late—Pardal's AID would have been turned off until it could be reassigned. What he would normally have done was send his business to that AID and let it handle the matter, only involving its master if absolutely necessary. As it was, there would be a reception AID for the building, held by the building manager. Since he didn't know anybody over there, it was his only route he knew of to get a message in right this minute.
"Tina," he said, walking back down the fluorescent-lit hall to catch the elevator. Its brass doors, typical of Darhel excess, had been engraved with odd alien patterns that were apparently artistic. Or maybe writing or something. "Get the reception AID for Epetar Group's Chicago headquarters."
"Shall I put you on with its carrier, or Lila herself?"
"Put me on with Lila." The AID was impersonal.
"Epetar Group, how may I direct your call?"
"In the absence of the Darhel Pardal, the Tir Dol Ron's office requests that you notify his attendants and the building staff to vacate the floor of the building that contains his office, put anything removed from his office in an empty, secure room for holding and allow no access to that floor or that room. Absolutely do not repair anything taken from his office, absolutely do not clean anything in his office."
"I'll need to know the purpose of this unusual request," it said frostily.
"The Epetar Group has requested assistance from the Tir." In a manner of speaking it had. "Because of Earth's highly unusual nature, there are extra steps and protocols that must be observed for the Tir to render that assistance in a proper and timely manner. Oh, and under no circumstances is anyone to physically approach the Darhel Pardal's . . . uh . . ." What did he call it? Was it a corpse? A body? It might or might not be dead yet. "Nobody is to approach his person. By the way, where is it?"
"It was apparently placed on the roof. I have no record of its retrieval and incineration, indicating the Darhel Pardal had not finished dying as of the most recent observation by his servants."
"Thank you for cooperating with the Tir's efforts to assist the Epetar Group. As his employee, I will be there shortly to carry out my assignment. Once I complete it, you should be able to resume whatever operations are standard for places other than Earth."
"Thank you so much," the device replied. It had certainly mastered sarcasm.
A quicker and more pleasant call to his cousin ensured he'd be met at the crime scene sometime today, however long it took to get there. Bobby wasn't exactly prompt even in good weather. As far as Johnny was concerned, lintatai was "suicide," and the place it happened was a crime scene. You didn't just assume a suicide, you verified it. He had ordered enough "suicides" himself to be skeptical of all of them until proven otherwise.
Johnny took a cab rather than trying to drive. No way was he going to walk. A recent storm had left any shovel paths a risk of broken bones, not to mention the biting wind accompanying today's Chicago Special of the Day—freezing rain. It was unpleasant enough just picking his way from the curb to the front doors. Some days a ton and a half of rock salt just wasn't enough. He figured the wind chill was only about a gazillion below, and missed the hell out of Texas.
Ten minutes later he was busy trying to invent new curses, having run out of his ample supply of old ones. Indowy were damned thorough cleaners, and didn't wait around to get started, either. He was left with minimal bits of luck. Thank god their voodoo tanks took awhile to fix stuff. They'd already fully repaired the drapes, but hadn't gotten to the desk yet. The deceased's—um, almost deceased's—AID had not been tampered with, other than to turn the poor thing off. Lacking anywhere else to put it until competent authority reclaimed Epetar operations on Earth, it had been turned off and shoved back in the envelope where the Indowy had found it. Johnny filed that information away for future use. He hadn't known it was possible to turn an AID off. He was darned sure the Darhel weren't eager to have humans know that bit of information. Considering who he worked for, he didn't plan to share. Besides, the Darhel wouldn't use hush envelopes themselves if there weren't a catch to this whole "turn it off" business. He'd love to know, but it wouldn't be a good idea to ask.
Bobby arrived while he was going over the office and making notes. The first thing Stuart had him do was replace the packing tape on the floor with conventional yellow tape, where an Indowy had told him the Darhel was found.
"Good that they didn't rip out the carpet yet," the ex-cop grunted.
Robert "Bobby" Mitchell was medium-height, heavyset and dark with the look of a weight-lifter who had given it up for other pursuits. He'd been a Sheriff's deputy in Silverton for ten years, eventually rising to detective sergeant, before one of the many, many IA complaints managed to stick. Picking up and then brutalizing a "hooker" who turned out to be an undercover police officer would do that.
"No, just trampled their little green feet all over it moving stuff out and around."
"Yeah. Let me block off the desk. I know the leg marks are still there in the carpet, but it makes it easier to visualize the scene. I'll also need a black light. I don't think they cleaned the carpet. Look at the tear here. They probably meant to repair it. And get me one of those doohickeys to show window repairs. It looks like there might have been a struggle, but I've seen a Two-D of one of them going bughouse years ago in Panama. He could have easily done all this himself before going catatonic. Believe me you don't want to see one of those bastards get pissed. Remind me the next time you're over. I've got it on a cube somewhere. Let's just say I don't want your job, cuz."
"Might not want to talk so frankly about our employer. It's not a great idea."
"Meaning no disrespect." His eyes flicked uncomfortably to Johnny's AID. "I don't guess our boss minds if we're a bit scared of him, you think?" He said it more for the benefit of the AID than his cousin.
"Nope." Johnny kept his response as short as possible. Safer that way.
"We absolutely have to have an autopsy of the Darhel."
"That might be a problem. Pardal isn't actually dead yet."
"If you really want to find out what happened, we probably need to fix that."
"Um . . . Is a coroner going to know enough about Darhel physiology to determine much? They're damned secretive."
"That's a problem, all right." Bobby rubbed his forehead, looking for a solution to that very big problem. "Use an AID. It knows enough about Darhel physiology to know what to look for and answer specific questions. A good forensic pathologist will be able to tell us stuff we've got to know—maybe make the difference between cracking the case and not. Can't investigate a suspicious death very well without an autopsy. Figure any information we get from the thing is more than we'd have if we didn't even look. Besides, they're just letting the prick starve." He shrugged at the warning glance from Johnny.
"It's a VIP death, screw it up and our asses would be in a crack for sure. That means I'm doing everything by the book. If the Tir denies permission for an autopsy it's no skin off my nose as long as I can document that I asked. If something goes wrong, I don't plan to take the fall for it."
"Gonna be hell to get him to agree to this."
"We've at least got to have proof that we tried. CYA, buddy."
"I hear that. Okay, gimme a minute." Johnny stepped outside and pulled the black box off his belt. Not that he needed to talk into it, it just felt wrong to talk to empty air like a head case. "Tina, get me Tir Dol Ron."
"He's a very busy person. I'll try," it said. "You're in luck. Here he is."
"Why are you interrupting me, Mr. Stuart?"
"I'm sorry, your Tir. I need special permission for something."
"And that is?"
"Whenever we investigate a suspicious death on Earth, we can't get enough information to tell what happened without an autopsy." He made sure to put the why ahead of the what to try to head off a knee-jerk reaction.
"What's an autopsy?"
"It's where a specialist examines the body to get clues about what happened in the person's last moments. Those clues are always a big part of reconstructing the circumstances of the death."
"This is unacceptable. We already know what happened in the Darhel Pardal's last moments. He failed to control himself and went into lintatai," The Tir bit the words out, as if loath to admit the species' weakness to a mere human. "However, if it makes your report more thorough to personally go look at the remains, do so."
Johnny grimaced. The Tir wasn't for a minute going to admit that the Darhel didn't want humans to know any more about them than they had to. And he clearly didn't understand the nature of the procedure. This was going to be delicate. "Sir, I know the security situation is delicate, and I do have ideas about how to protect your interests. The examination would be primarily conducted by an AID, with the specialist only present to tell the AID what kinds of things to examine, then your security employee, Bobby, would instruct the AID in how to analyze the results for the final report."
"The degree of observational opportunity to the human physician is unacceptable. It would be a human physician, correct?"
"Sir, while a human physician specializing in deaths would be necessary, steps could be taken to ensure anything sensitive he learned about Darhel in general was . . . contained. Completely contained."
He could hear the Darhel breathing hard before it asked, more collectedly, "You have several days before this must happen, for your death expert to do his work?"
"Uh . . . sir, to get the information we need, waiting would . . . Sir, do you really want to know?"
"No! No I don't. You may do your . . . work, provided you guarantee information security in . . . some way that preserves our interests. I cannot emphasize enough how displeased I would be at a security breach of this nature."
"I understand, sir. I understand completely."
"This did need my personal attention. Try to avoid other incidents of this kind. I find the interruptions distasteful." The Darhel's breathing exercises were still audible in the AID network's transmission. He hated getting the boss upset—for the sake of his own skin rather than any liking of his employer. Bobby was right, though. When two risks to his safety conflicted, he just had to guess which one was smaller and go with it. He grimaced and walked back into the office.
"So do we have a go, or not?"
"We've got a go. But we need a pathologist who's good enough, but expendable."
Bobby winced. "Gotcha," he said. "I'll try to find one who doesn't have too many people to scream when he's gone. And keep the assignment itself confidential. We might need to do this again someday, and I'd hate to have trouble finding help next time."
"Good point. So we pick somebody who likes money enough to get stupid."
Johnny Stuart ignored the muffled pop sound from the morgue and looked at the report projected by his AID. He sat in the ground floor breakroom customarily used by the former pathologist and his staff, also ignoring the flunkies going past to help Bobby clean up the mess. The Darhel corpse, of course, had to be removed completely.
Interesting results. The Tir was going to be extremely pissed. His chief of trouble prevention was torn between having an extreme plum of information to show for his efforts, and vindicating his call for an examination, versus nervousness about delivering the news. He had had to have a less intimidating staffer interview the Indowy who had cleaned the room. That report told him more about Darhel and lintatai than he'd ever wanted to know—specifically that he never wanted to be in the room when it happened, and that whoever had been was some kind of superman or something. A superman with a taste for blue silk shirts, judging by the scraps of fabric the departed doctor had pulled from Pardal's gut. It never for a moment occurred to him that the killer might have been a woman. The sheer athleticism it had taken to get out alive ruled that out.
His cousin had emerged from the autopsy room, leaving the scutwork to the less well-paid help. It was amazing how fast you got used to money and power. Despite appearances, Bobby wasn't on the payroll because he was Johnny's cousin. Bobby was on the payroll because he combined a solid background in law enforcement with one very special, crucial talent. Bobby was what you'd call a well-socialized sociopath. He could follow the rules of his employer without deviation when he wanted—because getting caught was a certainty, and he knew it. Someone without his talent would be tempted by all kinds of feelings, from love, to family ties, to friendship, to guilt.
Johnny could do the job, even enjoyed the job, but the nightmares were a stone bitch. He probably kept three researchers employed at Smith-Kline-Reynolds all by himself keeping him in sleeping pills. It was rare for the job to bug him, but the times it did he was torn between wondering whether he never should have taken the Darhel's dollar at any price, or whether he just plain liked it too much. The dead doctor in the other room didn't bug him, but he was just as glad that Bobby was the one to cap the prick.
Johnny's talent was management, especially of useful personalities. He kept Bobby unbored and made sure he had no hassles about getting laid. Easy arrangement. Bobby screwed whoever he wanted, Johnny had the girls checked out, before or after, and dealt with if they were a risk. Worked out for everybody.
Just now, Bobby was cursing at the coffee machine. In the present economy, it was unsurprising to find a pre-war junker of a machine, technically an antique, still in noisy, clunking service in the basement of a modern hospital. The offending machine had taken his money, and was straining noisily, but had failed to deposit the requisite paper cup in the appropriate slot. Johnny obliged by going over to the machine to exercise one of his own special talents—a mostly useless one, but still a talent. He could hear exactly where the problem was and somehow just sense where the problem was likely to be. He obligingly thwacked the machine on just the right spot to make it disgorge the cup and fill it with the doubtless crappy coffee.
"Thanks," his cousin said.
"No problem. Everything all right?" Johnny jerked his head towards the morgue.
"No problems. Where do we ditch the Darhel and the other dude?"
"Back where we found him, on top of the building. Nobody's allowed up there, and if we stick him in the right place, my understanding is that the Indowy will neatly haul them to the in-building trash incinerator. As easy as inserting tab A into slot B."
"Reminds me, I need the name of a new pimp. Freddie's girls are getting a bit long in the tooth." His cousin's tone was bland. The brief adrenaline rush had obviously worn off already.
"Sure. Tina, send him the next three on the list." He had warned his cousin about the circumstances of his predecessor's demise, but it went in one ear and out the other. He was almost clean in his operational habits.
His cousin didn't need conversation; in fact would prefer not to be distracted from his computer game, so the room was silent. He himself was preoccupied deciding exactly how he was going to present his findings to the Tir.
He had ample time, as the cleanup took several hours. Thank God for federal agents, who had the entire area tightly locked down. The former forensic examiner would be "involved in a sensitive murder investigation" permanently. The agents, believing it themselves, would handle inquiries down the road with the excuse of witness relocation. In a way, that was even true. His ashes, along with those of Pardal and whatever trash was in the building that day, had to end up somewhere. He supposed being murdered counted as involved in a murder investigation. Minus the investigation part. Whatever.