by M. D. Cooper
Few diners were in evidence as yet, but Tanis was relieved to see that Darla had not led her astray. Men and women alike were dressed in bright colors, glowing even more with the black lights that shone down on each occupied table.
If it wasn’t for the fact that she didn’t want to admit defeat to Darla, she would have commented that the style did look good on most of the guests.
Except for one man in particular, who seemed to have made his skin glow a rather unsettling shade of neon green. Coupled with the loose shirt he was wearing and his upswept hair, he looked like a bag of radioactive vomit.
Stars, there’s something I need to get out of my mind if I’m to enjoy my meal here.
Luckily, the seat Tanis was shown to faced away from green-skinned-fiasco-man. She activated the table’s holomenu while the man who had seated her wished her a pleasant meal and left.
As Tanis scanned the menu, she found an assortment of esoteric dishes that she had never heard of, and a few simple options—such as the Jerhattan Strip, which was served with a baked potato. That was high on her list, but when she saw that there was an option for an ‘Interstellar Bake’ version with bacon on top, she looked no further.
The AI gave an airy sniff in Tanis’s mind.
Tanis did see the option to add bacon to the Grecian Salad. She gave brief consideration to whether or not having bacon on two of her items was excessive, but dismissed it.
No such thing as too much bacon.
Moments later, a waiter appeared, pouring Tanis a glass of water that sparkled so much she thought it must be filled with diamonds. As she placed her order, Darla informed her that the water was infused with crystals that would dissolve on contact with her saliva, though nothing that would cause any intestinal harm.
With the waiter gone, Tanis took a tentative sip, and sloshed the water around in her mouth.
Tanis knew she was right, but she also knew there were ways to get around mednano’s protection. She didn’t know any personally, but there were always stories. Better safe than sorry.
She casually observed the other patrons’ comings and goings, and before long, her wine arrived, followed shortly thereafter by the salad.
Tanis munched contentedly on the leafy greens, bacon, and cheese, continuing to watch the other patrons while reveling in how good fresh food tasted after the Jones’s overlong tour.
Darla was right in that there was a marked difference at the roughly hundred-years-of-age point. Younger patrons were dressed as she was, though few had colored their skin like vomit-man—luckily, those who did had picked better colors—whereas the people over a hundred years old seemed to prefer pastels and spring colors.
One woman especially stood out in a long, green gown that somehow gave the appearance of tall grass waving in a meadow. Her breasts looked like inverted tulips, and her blue-skinned face was surrounded by billowing white clouds of hair.
Tanis asked, suddenly very grateful that the styles Darla selected were only garish in color and not design.
Tanis ran facial recognition on the woman, and when it came back with the ID, she nearly spit her wine across the table.
Tanis watched as the admiral was seated at a table set for four. None of the other place settings were removed, which meant the woman would have company.
The fact that the brass got all dressed up in outrageous styles was something that Tanis had never considered before. She was used to seeing Deering’s scowling visage as she addressed her command, not looking like she was a character out of some children’s vid.
While Admiral Deering was not in command of Vesta, she was responsible for this sector of border security between the Terran Hegemony and the Jovian Combine.
Technically, Tanis reported to Colonel Higgs, and Higgs up to Admiral Kocsis. In reality, Higgs’s 475th Patrol Division had been on loan to Deering’s 814th fleet for just over ninety years. Which meant, for all intents and purposes, Deering considered the 475th PD to be hers.
In true TSF fashion, the confusion turned pretty much everything into a pain in the ass. Procurement never knew how to allocate supplies, and Tanis had to fight her way up two chains of command for every special request, and even half of her standard requests…like restocking ammunition.
The Vesta supply chiefs always joked that maybe once the 475th had been on loan to Deering’s fleet for one hundred years, things would finally get sorted out.
Not that anyone actually expected that to happen.
The idea that Tanis was sitting in an upscale restaurant, twenty paces from the woman who had arbitrarily vetoed dozens of Higgs’s—and, by extension, Tanis’s—requests over the past few years was both surreal, and a little aggravating.
The salad soured in her mouth, and Tanis had half a mind to go speak to the admiral, when two of her guests arrived.
The man and woman were dressed in darker colors, rendering them almost invisible in Chez Maison’s dimly lit interior. But their austere clothing stood out in stark contrast to Deering’s.
Tanis didn’t recognize the newcomers, and ran facial recognition on them, surprised to see both come back as members of the Scattered Worlds Space Force.
While the Terran Space Force was the de-facto military of the Sol Space Federation, disparate nation states within the federation also fielded their own militaries.
Most notable were those of the Marsians, Jovians, and the Scattered Worlds.
Though the TSF was the largest and most powerful space force in the Sol System—with over a million ships spread across the half a cubic light year they patrolled—the Scattered Worlds military was nearly as large in number of ships, though not in firepower and tonnage.
The nominal border of the Scattered Worlds was the outer fringes of the Kuiper Belt, though the SWSF also claimed some of the objects that passed within Neptune’s orbit, such as Pluto—or at least, they had until the Jovians bought Pluto a few years back.
Rumor had it that the dwarf planet was to be relocated to an inner orbit around Jupiter and mashed together with some other JC acquisitions to form a new moon around the gas giant.
Considering that the Scattered Worlds had massive planets such as Nibiru and Tyche at their disposal, she didn’t blame them for lifting some credit and concessions from the Jovians in exchange for the ice-ball that was Pluto and its assorted satellites.
One of Deering’s companions was a SWSF five-star named Kiaan, while the other was a first colonel named Urdon.
Tanis never understood why the SWSF didn’t use the normal colonel ranks. It always caused confusion in inter-force operations—which were already a mess, with the TSF’s reorg—but for all intents and purposes, a first colonel held the same rank as a lower rear a
dmiral in the TSF.
The AI chuckled before replying,
Tanis grimaced; the words had come out differently than she’d intended.
Tanis knew that Darla was right, but being rendered unconscious for neural surgery to have an AI implantedbetween her ears didn’t seem to register when she thought of the last ‘day’.
Tanis frowned, wondering what she meant. So far as she knew, everyone talked to AIs like they were regular people. Lovell, the AI on the Kirby Jones, had never said that she spoke to him any differently.
Darla said.
<’See’?>
Tanis’s frown deepened, and then she sighed, schooling her expression.
Darla replied, and Tanis couldn’t help but feel like the AI was contented.
She lifted the wine glass to her lips and took another sip, watching the fourth person being led to Admiral Deering’s table.
Her facial recognition listed the man as Captain Tora of the SWSF, but something about the way he walked looked familiar. His face did, as well, but she couldn’t place it.
As he strode toward the table, the man glanced at Tanis, and she was certain his eyes had widened. Her enhanced optics even registered that his skin temperature dropped.
He recognizes me…but who is he?
The man sat in the last chair with his back to Tanis, and she looked away, not wanting Admiral Deering to see her staring at her table.
Darla didn’t respond for a moment.
Tanis knew Darla to be correct. Even with all of the genetic and prosthetic alterations people made to themselves, there wasn’t enough variation to make everyone unique. Unless you were willing to add tentacles or wheels—which some people were.
Tanis remembered a gaggle of people she’d seen last time she was on Mars 1, half of which looked more like bikes than humans.
Maybe more than just ‘some’ people.
Her steak arrived shortly thereafter, and the waiter suggested a change in vintage to go along with the main course. Tanis lost herself in the delectable taste of the food, complimenting Darla on suggesting she dine there that night.
Even so, she kept half an eye on Admiral Deering and her table, a tickle in the back of her mind not allowing her to let go of the mystery man.
She left before the party at the admiral’s table, and didn’t get to watch Captain Tora any further. Pushing it from her mind, she decided to take the lift down to the lake at the bottom of the spire; perhaps walking its perimeter would jar a memory to the fore.
LAKESIDE
STELLAR DATE: 01.17.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Starside Lake, Grand Éire Resort
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The lift reached the bottom of its long shaft and disgorged Tanis onto a wide platform, a few meters above the placid surface of the lake.
Ringing the platform were several open-air bars, each with artfully arranged seating around them. On either end of the platform were two long walkways that led to the perimeter of the lake.
Tanis set off down one, enjoying the view of space around Vesta, but taking care to walk slowly as her short dress kept threatening to rise up over her hips—despite Darla’s assurances to the contrary.
Darla began, a note of curiosity in her voice.
Resisting the urge to groan at her AI, Tanis instead asked,
Tanis let her gaze drift up, watching a pair of tugs ease a TSF cruiser into its berth on Vesta’s ring high above. After a moment, she replied,
Tanis wondered why an AI would ask such a question. She didn’t have eyes; for the being in her head, watching ancient vids—or ones from the edge of the Sol System—was no different than staring at the sky in real time.
Darla snorted.
They walked in silence until Tanis got to the end of the walkway and turned left on the boardwalk that stretched around the lake.
Despite the fact that she knew it was an illusion, it really did look as though the lake was bottomless—if you dove in, you could swim all the way to Jupiter. If Tanis hadn’t been wearing a ridiculously expensive dress, she might have leapt in, just to try it.
A connection came into her mind, and Tanis saw that it was from Connie.
She accepted it, and a moment later, Connie said,
Tanis looked around, feeling a small amount of guilt that she didn’t regret missing that transport as much as she’d expected to. Sure, it would be nice to see Peter and her family, but a few more meals like she’d eaten at the Chez Maison, and it was possible she’d forget them altogether.
A groan came over the link.
Tanis pursed her lips, admitting that could happen.
Tanis considered her options. From the orders Higgs had given her, Darla’s presence was to remain a secret, but Tanis knew there was absolutely no way she could keep that hidden from her chief engineer for any extended period of time.
The fiction of ‘Darla is another AI that Lovell is training’ would last all of two seconds with Connie.
However, there was a clause in Tanis’s orders that provided for reading in her crew if there was a strong likelihood that they were about to discover the truth.
Tanis was certain that Connie would brow-beat her ‘til she found out what was up, which was close enough to ‘a strong likelihood’ in Tanis’s book.
Five minutes later, Connie had only uttered ‘Stars shitting in the deep’, giving Darla the opportunity to introduce herself.
