by M. D. Cooper
Dropping the coat—and her lightwand—Tanis grabbed both ends of the towel and pulled it taut. In one fluid move, she pushed down off the ceiling and wrapped the towel around the face of the guard who had been standing behind her.
The move caught him off balance and he fell backward—Tanis’s ‘jump’ off the ceiling pushing him down with far more force than the planet’s gravity applied. As he toppled, she pivoted, slamming her knees into his face right as his head hit the floor.
Not convinced that he was out for the count, she whipped the towel away and simultaneously slammed a fist into each side of his head, feeling a crunch as her blows crushed the cartilage in his ears.
Her left hand shot out and caught her still-falling coat and pulled the lightwand free. She stood and triggered the blade just as Demetri was also struggling to his feet.
“You’re lucky I’m really not out to get your Oligarch,” she muttered. “He’d be as good as dead.”
“Not a TBI agent, then,” Demetri grunted. “Didn’t think you were, anyway. You’re low-g. They like to pick their people from Earth and High Terra.”
“I could be from Luna and just tired of snot-nosed Jovians,” she shot back. “This is still the Terran Hegemony we’re in, you know.”
Demetri had a pulse pistol in his hand, and he fired it at Tanis without further dialogue, but she was also on the move, leaping in the air, pushing off one wall, and already running along the edge of the ceiling on Demetri’s right by the time he squeezed the trigger.
“Too slow,” Tanis taunted as she kicked off the corner, pinwheeling through the air. Her thighs clamped around Demetri’s neck, and she swung her lightwand down, cutting off the end of his pulse pistol.
She deactivated the blade as he reached up to grab her, the huge man’s arms wrapping around her waist and pulling her down, giving her the opportunity to drive her elbows into his solar plexus.
The resistance in his skin told her that he had augmented muscles, but she did as well, so the blow was still enough to drive the air from his lungs.
The Jovian doubled over, and Tanis’s back hit the floor. Her legs were still wrapped around Demetri’s neck, and the look in his eyes told her that he knew—now that her augmented strength was revealed—that she could break his neck with one twist.
She didn’t want to kill the man, but one thing Tanis had learned about big meat-heads like the one between her thighs was that they liked to be a man’s man, swinging free and unencumbered.
Her hand shot up between his legs, met soft flesh, clenched—and twisted.
The shriek Demetri let out was at least two octaves higher than his normal speaking voice, and Tanis was glad that his stealth suit wasn’t permeable as she felt both his testicles pop.
Tanis flipped Demetri over and gave him a half-strength kick in the ear before rushing to the crate and wrenching the pulse rifle from the hole it had blasted in the container. She scooped up her lightwand and checked the Infiltrator Chameleon’s whereabouts.
Without a second thought, Tanis took a step back, fired her pulse rifle at the window, and screamed all the air out of her lungs as she raced toward it.
DIVE AND A FALL
STELLAR DATE: 02.23.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: The Golden Gazelle, Hunting Lodge
REGION: Ceres, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
As Tanis fell the sixty-seven stories toward the pool, two things popped into her head. The first was: At least I’m still wearing my swimsuit; the second: This is going to hurt.
Even at 0.2gs, Tanis’s quick math gauged her final velocity to be just over thirty meters per second. Better than if it had been a jump on a high-g world, but it was still the same as jumping forty-five meters on Earth.
Darla inserted a third thought into her mind.
As the pool rushed up toward her, Tanis realized that the AI was correct—she was going to land in the shallow end of the pool, which was only a meter and a half deep.
Twisting midair, she drew her knees up and tossed the lightwand and rifle away before raising her hands above her head and swinging them down with all her might.
Her knees hit the water at the same time as her arms, and the wider impact slowed her enough that her knees only scraped the bottom.
She peered around the illuminated pool, found her lightwand, and grabbed it as she splashed toward the edge, where her pulse rifle lay, bent and sparking.
Pain lanced up her arm, and she looked down to see the skin split open along her forearm, blood seeping out even as her internal med systems worked to staunch the flow.
People were gathered around, gasping and pointing as she heaved herself out of the water, blood also running down from her knees.
Then a shot hit the deck next to her, and she realized that the Jovians were playing for keeps.
The crowd scattered, screaming in fright. As Tanis took off toward the cover of the surrounding forest, she brought up her doppelganger’s location only to get no signal from the IC’s Link.
There was no time to wonder how the IC had given them the slip as angry bellows mixed with the crowd’s fearful wails, and Tanis picked up the pace, pushing deeper into the forest’s dubious cover.
“Well,” she muttered as she raced toward the first rise. “I guess I probably thwarted the assassination attempt. There’s no way Oligarch Alden is going to come here after all this.”
“Oh ye of little faith,” Tanis whispered as she darted to the right and gently pushed aside a matted group of vines. “Check it out.”
Before Tanis lay a dark opening wreathed in dirt and roots, but a few meters further stood a half-open airlock door. Dried dirt filled the bottom third, and it took some work to wriggle through, but Tanis breathed a sigh of relief to see that the inner airlock door was still open.
The passageway beyond was tilted at a fifteen degree angle to the right. The sounds of dripping water came from that direction, and she turned left, moving at a good clip through the dark passage.
The light began to fade almost immediately, and Tanis switched her vision to use her sound-based overlay, letting out a high-pitched whistle as she ran.
She considered using her lightwand for illumination, but the device wasn’t military grade. It didn’t have a long-usage battery and, even with her augmented vision, it would partially blind her in the pitch-black cavern.
Tanis came to a section where roots blocked her forward passage and she looked around for another route. She spotted a door a few meters back on the right that appeared to have
seen some usage. She prised it open and continued on her way.
“There’s a larger concourse down here,” she said while squeezing around a section of bulkhead that had collapsed. “If I can get to it, we’ll be spoilt for exit locations.”
“The maps I have don’t show this passage as connecting to it, but from what I can tell, it has to.”
Thirty minutes later, Tanis still hadn’t found any route that would take her to the concourse, and the trail of nanoprobes Darla had left behind showed that the Jovians had found the gully—though they’d not yet located the entrance to the ruins.
She didn’t expect things to stay that way for long.
Tanis was pulling herself over a conduit run that had fallen from the overhead when Darla called out,
“What is it?”
“Huh.” Tanis consulted the maps and saw the adjustment Darla had made to their direction. “I think you’re right. That means if I cut a hole in the deck…and maybe a few meters of dirt, we’ll hit it.”
A panel lit up on the bulkhead just behind Tanis, highlighted on her vision by Darla.
“Now you’re just taking the challenge right out of this.”
Tanis pulled the panel free and looked up to see a twisted mass of roots and vines hanging above. She was tempted to climb out that way, but given that they were still only a few kilometers from the hotel, they’d be well within the initial search radius.
She turned her head and looked down into utter darkness. A whistle and a few finger snaps later, she discerned that the tunnel sank over three kilometers into the ground.
One look at the ladder told her that trusting her life to it would be a serious risk.
“Right, easy,” Tanis muttered as she pulled herself into the shaft, carefully bracing her back against one side, with her feet on the other. She carefully slid down, centimeter by centimeter, until she’d made it just over three meters.
Wiggling her back side to side, she dropped a bit further when the other side of the shaft gave way under the pressure from her feet, and her back slipped free.
Her head hit the side of the shaft, and then her knee scraped against something as she frantically clawed at the walls.
Then, in a sudden bone-jarring lurch, her downward momentum halted in a burst of pain from both her back and groin.
“Oooowwww…” Tanis moaned as the realization hit her that her swimsuit—and a noteworthy amount of skin on her back—had snagged on something jagged sticking out of the shaft wall.
While her skin had torn, the suit had held, driving all her weight into the fabric between her legs.
“Sure. Yeah. Thanks,” Tanis said between ragged gasps as she surveyed her surroundings, trying to at least be glad for Ceres’ low gravity.
She wasn’t sure if it was luck, or fate cruelly mocking her, but an opening loomed a meter just above her head, to the right. She looked for any remnants of the ladder and realized that the only part of it still present in this section of the shaft was stuck into her back.
With more courage than certainty, Tanis drew in a deep breath as she carefully lifted her legs and brought her arms out in front of herself.
A cry of anguish tore free from her lips as she slammed her hands and feet back into the wall, pushing herself off the jagged protrusion that had caught on her swimsuit and across the narrow space. She hit the far side and kicked off, twisting around, desperately reaching for the opening.
Only the fact that Bella preferred the grippy coating on her feet saved Tanis. That coating gave her enough purchase to propel a meter upward, and she sailed through the air.
Both her hands grasped the opening’s lower lip, and she pulled herself up slowly. Her head had just drawn level with the hole, when the ancient plas under her left hand bent and twisted.
With a cry, she fell, desperately kicking out her right foot and catching it on the jagged bar a meter down that had recently been stuck in her back.
Tanis grimaced as she pushed off the metal, slicing her foot open, but gaining enough momentum in the low gravity to pull herself up into the hole. Once safe, she rolled onto her side and pulled her swimsuit loose while cursing Harm for not giving her cover a penchant for full-body swimsheaths.
“Yeah. Good.” Tanis said between long, unsteady breaths.
After another twenty minutes of traversing twisting, half-crushed shafts, Tanis finally reached a panel that she and Darla both believed would open onto the main concourse.
“Here goes nothing,” Tanis said, drawing her unwounded foot back and giving the panel three good kicks before it fell free.
A long whistle told her that she’d indeed come upon a large space. She slid to the edge of the opening and flushed down some nanoprobes, glad to see she was only two meters up from clear and stable-looking deck plating.
She jumped out of the shaft and landed on her good foot. Once steady, she pulled her lightwand from the front of her bathing suit. When the beam’s glow slashed out over the cavernous expanse, she saw that it was indeed one of the main residential thoroughfares of the old Insi ring.
Garish banners and ribbons dangled limply from poles and beams overhead, hung for the ancient Sharm celebration. Beneath them, the remains of carts lined the edges of the concourse, their wares long since rotted way.
“Air’s better here, at least,” Tanis said as she limped toward one of the poles and grasped a long ribbon hanging off it. The plas material, though dusty, was still in good condition, and she yanked it free.
“Just trying to give my mednano a chance to heal this gash,” she said while wrapping the ribbon around her foot and tying it off.
Tanis gave a rueful laugh. “Umm…probably not. But if I’d taken out my doppelganger, it would have been. She must have placed her own monitoring equipment around the hotel…something that would only transmit if it picked up indication of combat.”
“The question,” Tanis continued as she began to gingerly walk down the concourse, headed toward one of the exits on her map, “is whether or not she’s going to abandon the job, or go to the Kirby Jones.”
“I guess she could do that…take my place on the ship ‘til the next opportunity strikes. I don’t really see that as a viable long-term plan, though. She won’t be real enough to fool the crew for long.”
“Mimicry only gets you so far.”
Tanis kept expecting to hear the sounds of pursuit from behind her, or of a search team coming in from the front, but over the next four hours, she didn’t hear anything other than water dripping and the occasional distant groan of something settling under the weight of the hills above.
“This is it,” she said as she reached a pool of water at the end of a narrow corridor. “Hopefully it’s not an exit they’re expecting us to use.”
“Easy,” Tanis said, then drew in a series of long breaths before jumping into the frigid water.
Despite the single word she’d uttered to Darla, the prospect of swimming through the
half-rotten passageway with zero visibility was not something that thrilled her. In fact, it was one of the scariest things she’d ever done.
The thought of running out of air halfway through warred with the fear of finding that the tunnel had collapsed. That fear brought to mind the millions of tons of mountain over her head, and she had to force herself to remain calm and keep her heartbeat slow.
Twice she had to squeeze through narrow gaps, and at one point, her foot caught on a twisted mass of half-rusted conduit. Four minutes later, she emerged in a pool of water with canyon walls rising sixty meters above her.
The sun was directly overhead, and she floated on her back, catching her breath and basking in its warm rays for a minute before swimming toward the rock walls to begin her ascent.
“Much,” Tanis grunted as she reached up and pulled herself out of the water, tired arms already shaking from the exertion.
When she finally reached the top of the canyon, she faced a forty-kilometer hike to the next town. She kept to the deeper forests as much as possible, but periodically moved into the sunlight to fight off the chill that was settling in as her power reserves ran low and her body’s available calorie count diminished.
When she finally reached the edge of town, Darla used a burner identity to rent a hovercar. When it finally arrived, Tanis slipped in, nearly singing with delight to see not only food, but a medkit and a clean, nondescript shipsuit waiting for her.
“What would I do without you, Darla?” she wondered while peeling off the nearly shredded swimsuit and opening up the medkit.
“I’ve been trying not to think of that,” Tanis said as she gave herself a mednano boost shot, and then set to cleaning the grime out of her wounds.
As she worked, Darla set the car to travel to the nearest elevator shaft, which was one hour away. By the time they arrived, Tanis was clean, clothed, and fed, and her internal batteries were at least partially charged.
