Callie’s brow creased just a touch, eyes passing between the two remaining hostile Arms Masters as she slid towards Nil’s
other shoulder. At her side, her hand barely twitched over her leather micro-bag and the pistol crammed within.
Once again, a subset of thoughts flickered to the fact that, tactically speaking, she should be outside on the same roof that she’d stashed her (new) rifle, watching proceedings through a window with Charter. She was critical to any evacuation; putting her in the diplomatic party, and thereby at ground zero of any attack, represented a similarly critical risk. But, of course, Spindle wanted her in the room to listen in on proceedings – and in the side rooms during the breaks, to subtly press the US’ agenda if the opportunity to chat with any of the diplomats arose.
Another part of her echoed the other element of Spindel’s briefing – a piece of knowledge that
gnawed at her mind and urged her towards that same position of relative security and circumspection, one that she had mentioned to nobody else not least because she had no good excuse for knowing it…
Thus, here she was: fatigues exchanged for an off-white sleeveless dress (chosen to blend into the building’s internal and external surfaces) that hugged her svelte torso before flowing outward into a mid-length skirt, heavily pleated to maximise mobility, and her hair held up in elaborate yet compact waves rather than by its usual utilitarian tie.
The rest of her mind pushed those thoughts away (barring one stream hoping that the gauzy capelet over her shoulder was doing its job and had disguised her muscles tensing from the hand twitch) as Callie studied the Zodiac’s exemplar and his aide.
Casual arrogance from someone who’s known power without inhibition for near his whole life – his hanger-on’s body language and expression, though… Couldn’t be less confident if they tried. Rule through fear isn’t rare but it doesn’t inspire loyalty or security. The prospect was intriguing – a clear objective, if a conditional and secondary one. If things were to go awry here and Callie was able to – well, ‘capture’ or ‘free’, the distinction would only become clear later – this person, they might have useful information for the fighting that would come after.
Low, steely voices behind her; Callie’s attention multiplied. One of them she
absolutely recognised, burned into her mind from just a few days ago. The other… One ‘Koichi’, she thought – a rookie but one apparently committed enough to the Force to intervene on behalf of its objectives. For now, against her instinct to act, she would let him; Cristina was more likely to respond constructively to critique from one of her peers than to a ‘veteran’ throwing her seniority around. If she didn’t… Well, at that point she
would jump in.
Not that she could entirely blame Cristina for being distracted by a familial connection. Spindel’s knowledge still burned at her, threatening to spread to the parts of her brain that she had partitioned it away from and consume it with possibilities.
Kenrick – her
father, who she remembered only through the fog of two decades of forgetting – was here. And for all her mental powers, despite the hundreds upon hundreds of scenarios and approaches she had touched on in her imagination of the moment, Callie had no idea what she might do if she were to encounter him – or, worse, if he were to encounter her.
