by M. D. Cooper
“Either way, you think I have the quantum core—which, by the way, I don’t—and you need that bit of tech to get your little projects out in the Scattered Disk running.”
Tanis stopped talking and aimed her pulse pistol at Tora-Unger’s crotch.
“I need some sort of feedback on how I’m doing, here,” she said. “Either you give it to me, or I elicit it.”
“You wouldn’t,” Unger hissed through clenched teeth. “You’re a TSF officer, you don’t torture.”
“You forget,” Tanis said with a wink to cover up how much his words stung. “I’m on the run, suspected of all sorts of horrible things. Which has to cause you to wonder, how did I escape? What sort of means do I have at my disposal? How far am I willing to go to get to the bottom of this? I could just dump enough nano into your head to wipe out your protections, and strip what I want to know from your mind. Want to find out if I’ll go that far?”
“You can’t do that,” Tora-Unger sneered. “You’d need an AI.”
“I have a friend that would help,” Tanis intoned. “She’s been listening in.”
Tora-Unger visibly paled, and Tanis let a predatory grin slip onto her lips. “Start talking.”
“You already seem to know everything…” Tora’s voice wavered. “What else—”
“I want evidence,” she interrupted. “Something that ties Deering to all of this and exonerates me. Your hide will be a start, but alone it’s not enough.”
Tora-Unger’s eyes narrowed, and the muscles along his jaw tensed.
“Don’t think you can give me all that and hold out now,” Tanis waved her pulse pistol. “I wonder…at this point, would a pulse shot at your junk hurt more, or be a blessed bit of numbing? Either way, your testicles are gonna be salsa.”
“Admiral Kiaan,” Tora-Unger said after a moment of indecision. “He has all the information. I’m just flying the ship; I don’t know much more than you do.”
“And where is Kiaan right now?” Tanis asked.
“His quarters, I suspect. Here in the Éire, suite 724-142.” Tora-Unger flashed a grin. “Not that you can stop us, anyway. We’re going to get those ships working, one way or another.”
“Now tell me, what is it that all my unexpected visitors have been after? The quantum core…we never saw anything like that on your ship.”
Unger pursed his lips, but then shook his head. “Damn…you really didn’t know about it. It was inside a Marsian cruiser model in my cabin…one of your crew must have taken it. So much for you running a tight ship.”
Tanis glared at the man, resisting the urge to hit him. After a half-minute—and a few deep breaths—she bent down and tapped the muzzle of her pistol against his forehead.
“OK, Unger. You stay put while I go have a chat with your Admiral Kiaan.”
To his credit, Tora-Unger tried to make a grab for Tanis. She’d been ready for it, though, and kneeled on his arm before slamming the butt of her pistol into his temple.
LEADS AND MORE LEADS
STELLAR DATE: 01.22.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Suite 1301-01, Grand Éire Resort
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Tanis tied Tora-Unger up in the same room that had held the captured mercenary from the prior night. His body wasn’t there anymore—which was some comfort, though Tanis still felt a little bad that all of the attackers had died.
She pushed the worry out of her mind, triggering her nano to burn out Tora-Unger’s Link antenna, rendering him unable to reach out, should he wake before she returned.
Then she stripped off the bumblebee-vomit dress, and pulled the shimmersuit back on, this time putting both a pulse pistol and a kinetic handgun into pouches on the suit’s waist.
She wished there was a way to take the last rifle Harm had brought, but there was nowhere to hide it—other than in the suit itself, and that would be far from comfortable.
The ride up to the 724th floor took just a few minutes. When Tanis arrived, she very nearly collided with a group that was rushing toward the lift, laughing about someone they were going to meet at one of the lake bars, and bragging about how wasted they were going to get.
Rather, they nearly collided with her, given that she was invisible.
Pressing herself against the bulkhead, Tanis winced as one of the men in the group brushed against her. He didn’t slow, and she let out a long, cautious breath before turning and walking down the corridor to Admiral Kiaan’s room.
When she arrived, Darla set to work on the access panel—once again utilizing one of Harm’s Infil Kits—and forty seconds later, the door slid open.
Tanis was inside with the portal closed again in seconds, only to see a rather non-descript room that showed no signs of occupancy.
Tanis walked to the barrel and grabbed it, dumping its contents on the bed. There were some food wrappers, and a half-eaten apple. Then she saw a piece of plas with the resort’s logo on top.
A welcome letter for Admiral Kiaan.
Darla let out a frustrated groan.
Tanis gritted her teeth and closed her eyes.
Tanis opened her eyes, staring across the room in shock.
Harm sighed, and Tanis realized she was taking her ire out on the wrong person. anis. Vesta’s a great place to pull off this sort of thing. Everyone thinks everyone else has things under control. But I do have good news.>
<’Your’ suite, or the one you’re squatting in?>
Tanis couldn’t help a laugh as she thought about how strange her life had been these past few days.
That sounded like good news, but not the kind that got her onto the Jones. “I thought your ‘good news’ would be that you have a ship.”
* * * * *
Tanis had made it as far into Section 12 as she could without being detected. Though the shimmersuit could fool passive optics and IR sensors, the security arch ahead would use active scanning systems with higher-energy particles that the shimmersuit wouldn’t be able to convincingly bend around her.
Which meant this next part of the mission was on Darla.
Tanis said.
Darla made a humming sound, but didn’t speak further for a few minutes. Tanis hoped that meant she was working her magic. The AI hadn’t said whether she was going to hack the security arch ahead, or call in a favor, but either way, she wasn’t happy about doing it.
Just as Tanis was about to ask if Darla had made any progress, the AI spoke up once more.
Darla made a groaning sound.
Tanis walked forward gingerly, careful to avoid the two guards standing on either side of the arch—one human, and one AI in a mobile combat frame.
Tanis had to hold back a snort as she passed under the arch, half-certain the AI guard heard her anyway, by a slight twitch it gave.
Tanis nodded as she turned right at an intersection, following the path Darla had laid on her HUD. It would take them to an Ensconcing Chamber, a place where AI cores were mounted and cared for if they had no reason to occupy a mobile frame.
In Tanis’s mind, Darla’s avatar gave a protracted shrug.
Tanis surmised that the guard AI was Fred, and was a touch surprised that Darla’s friend on the inside was letting her take this much risk with the life of an AI.
A few minutes later, Tanis came to the door of the Ensconcing Chamber, and sure enough, there was a heavy mech standing in front of it.
Darla highlighted a section of the mech’s chestplate.
<’Should’?>
Darla’s avatar shrugged.
Tanis observed the three-meter mech for half a minute, considering his dual pulse cannons, chain gun, and scattershot slung from his hip. The thing meant business, and her shimmersuit—while great for stealth—offered almost no protection when it came to direct weapons fire.
She formulated a plan and crept down the corridor toward Fred, praying there would be enough room to execute her attack, and that it would work to begin with.
At one point, her foot dragged on the deck, and she froze, terrified that he’d detected her, but after fifteen seconds of no response, she continued forward.
Sidling around the AI’s mech frame, Tanis drew her lightwand’s hilt out of the pocket on her forearm, and held it close, knowing that the mech would have eyes on the back of its head as well—hopefully just not as many, or not ones it was paying as much attention to, given that they were staring at a door.
She activated it, and a stream of relativistic electrons shot out of the wand’s hilt, pushing out the tiny reflective mirror that was connected to the base of the wand by a nanofilament.
For all intents and purposes, the wand was a controlled bolt of lightning that could cut through almost anything, the white gleam of electrons tinted blue by the cherenkov radiation that the beam gave off.
The lightwand cut into Fred’s body, which jerked once and then fell still.
Darla didn’t reply, but the door slid open to reveal a hundred-meter-long chamber, filled with titanium AI columns.
An indicator appeared over a pillar a dozen meters in.
Tanis nodded silently as she approached the titanium cylinder. Once there, she grabbed the hard-Link cable hanging from it, and loosened the shimmersuit’s hood, exposing the small port behind her ear, and sliding the cable in.
owed the word with a soft chuckle.
Darla said, piggybacking over Tanis’s hard-Link.
Lovell made a sound of amazement.
Tanis stifled a laugh at the ire in Lovell’s voice. I suppose I know why he sounded so angry when he first responded, she thought.
Tanis suddenly wondered how often AIs wandered around in stealthed frames. The idea was a bit disconcerting.
The cover on Lovell’s cylinder slid open, and Tanis waited for the ‘safe to pull’ indicator to turn green as she disconnected the hard-Link cable from behind her ear.
