by M. D. Cooper
He gestured to the tunnel, and Tanis swam in, passing quickly through the shaft to emerge over a shadowy grotto.
The space was over a hundred meters across, and filled with poker tables nestled amongst stone outcroppings, coral reefs and carefully manicured kelp gardens. The floor of the room wasn’t flat, instead rising and falling, with some of the tables near the roof, and others down in dark crevasses.
It was early in the day, and only a few dozen people were playing at the tables, each run by a merman or merwoman. A few merguards with gleaming tridents—not the exterior shark security, Tanis was glad to see—drifted over the area.
The waitstaff consisted of people who looked far more like seahorses than humans, but the patrons were a mix of individuals with very little in the way of mods—though their divesuits were quite garish—all the way to a person who made a very convincing hermit crab.
A dozen ‘card up your shell’ jokes ran through Tanis’s mind as she began to swim through the transparent tubes that ran around the upper half of the grotto.
There were a few others in the tubes, one of the pufferfish people—gender entirely indeterminate—and a woman who was the long, eel version of a merwoman.
They gave her nods and smiles when they passed by, but none of them spoke, keeping to their characters.
She was glad for both Bella’s meditation and Claire’s penchant for remaining perfectly still, as they helped Tanis deal with what she found to be an utterly boring series of loops over the room.
Three hours later, she was wondering what would happen if she were to just float back down the tunnel and go searching for the Infiltrator Chameleon, when Saniyah reached out to her.
The pufferfish person was the first one out, moving to the center of the room, where a crowd of patrons quickly gathered, running their hands along its spines.
Tanis caught a reflection of herself in a polished quartz pillar—sinuous, silver, many-tentacled—and then looked down at the Infiltrator Chameleon. Anger flared up in her that the IC had been ‘Tanis’ for weeks now, while she had been forced to go through a variety of covers until she’d become a thing all because of the machine below her.
She picked up speed, reaching the table where the IC and two other players sat with cards in hand. Letting out a low orca moan in greeting, Tanis began to swim around the table, brushing her tentacles across all the players, and depositing breach nano on the Infiltrator Chameleon.
Tanis moved behind her doppelganger, who turned to look up at her with mildly curious eyes—Tanis’s eyes. Then the IC twitched and blinked rapidly.
Tanis sank down, wrapping her tentacles around…herself.
She pushed the utter strangeness of what she was doing out of her mind and lifted the IC from her seat, pulling her back up to the tubes overhead.
The merman running the table looked up in surprise, but the Tanis-doppelganger only waved happily at the man, who shrugged and turned back to the remaining two players—one of which looked as though he wished he’d been chosen by the gleaming, many-tentacled creature now pulling ‘Tanis’ away.
Tanis almost laughed aloud as she turned the corner into the rear hall, glad to see that the always talkative Arnold was not in sight.
The map showed a storage room nearby, and she headed for it, praying that no one would look too closely and see that there was a person concealed within her appendages.
At the door, she passed another passel of nano into the locking mechanism and breached it quickly, darting into the interior while the passage behind was empty.
Tanis nodded absently as she looked around the room, which was filled with everything from chairs to chunks of grotto wall. Spotting a stack of wall pieces piled haphazardly, Tanis swam over and tucked the IC inside.
Tanis set down a piece of grotto wall over where the IC lay, pleased with herself for managing to move the cumbersome object with her tentacles.
Darla seemed to notice, too.
She attempted to use the nano she’d left in the corridor to check for any passersby, but the currents in the hall had swept them away.
Tanis sent an affirmative and then opened the door only to find Arnold staring at her.
Tanis couldn’t tell if the man was coming on to her, or if he was genuinely concerned for her well-being. While she wanted to believe he was sincere, the idea of someone behaving altruistically in a place like the Blue Lagoon was an incongruous one.
Takes all kinds, she thought, deciding to take him at face value—with a side-helping of skepticism—and accepted his access codes.
Tanis half-expected him to slap her on her rear—such as it was—but he didn’t, only giving her a smile and a nod bef
ore he firmly closed the door to the storage room.
GOING UNDER
STELLAR DATE: 03.03.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Kirby Jones, orbiting Europa
REGION: Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Two days earlier…
“Smythe,” Connie said as she walked onto the Kirby Jones’s bridge. “I need to get down to Europa. The H3 cap is leaking again. I’ve shunted the fuel off to a secondary tank, but we can’t top off until it’s fixed.”
The lieutenant turned to look at her. “You heard what the commander said; no one is to leave the ship ‘til she gets back.”
Connie held in a frustrated sigh. So far, only she and Cassie knew that the ‘Tanis’ who had been aboard the Kirby Jones for the last week was not the genuine article.
While the faux commander had behaved well enough through the trip, she’d gotten a bit odd at the end, insisting that the Jones remain in a parking orbit around Europa—not docked with a station—and then ordering everyone to stay aboard.
It wasn’t that the any of them were likely to run off, anyway, which made the order sit strangely with the rest of the crew.
“Can’t you just order a new cap and have it couriered up?” Smythe asked.
“Already did that.” Connie shook her head. “The new one leaks too; turns out the whole housing is a bit torqued. Fixing it will require changing the whole tank.”
“Shit,” Smythe muttered. “The commander’ll be pissed. That’ll put us in refit for a day.”
Connie nodded. “Yeah, but I checked the housing. It’s solid—just a few microfractures that I can repair with nanowelds. I took detailed scans of the cap-mount, and if I go down to the local manufacturer, I can get them to make a custom one.”
“Why not just send them the specs?”
“No can do,” Connie replied. “Since it’s a custom order, they want me down there to verify that it meets my requirements. They said otherwise they’re not going to make a ‘broken part’.”
“Dammit,” Smythe rubbed his hands against his face. “How long will it take?”
“Day, tops. I’m going to take Cassie, too. We can grab a few other things and fix up some of the stuff Tanis was pestering me about on the way over here.”
Smythe sighed. “She’s been in a hell of a mood, hasn’t she?”
“Yeah, I think she’s just pissed that she barely got to see Peter.”
Smythe ran his hands through his hair. “These orders have been weird. First we go to Ceres for no real reason, and now Tanis is down on Europa doing stars know what.”
“Yeah, but she’s not due up for three days. Let me do this, and then we’ll be fueled up and ready for the patrol before she gets back.”
“I—” Smythe said, then stopped himself.
“Remember what I said about you and Jeannie?”
“Yeah, that you’d make sure Tanis didn’t find out.”
Connie nodded. “Right, well, the amount of effort I put into that is dependent on you scratching my back a bit, too.”
Smythe groaned. “Fine.”
“Excellent!” Connie said brightly as she turned and walked off the bridge.
* * * * *
A day later, the pair were in one of Chora Station’s underwater departure bays checking over their private, two-person submarine.
Connie looked down at herself as she waited for Cassie to get into the small craft, casually brushing a hand against the divesuit she wore. It was covered in coral, textured in such a way that it looked as though her entire body was constructed of the calcium carbonate, but that was just a clever illusion.
Luckily, unlike natural coral, it was soft to the touch.
“So let me get this straight,” Connie said. “Our fake Tanis has gone to this Blue Lagoon casino, where you believe Oligarch Alden is, with the intent of finishing the job?”
“Hole in one,” Cassie said as she settled into the small submarine. “We have to head in there and get the lay of the land. Then we’ll ferret out whoever is behind this.”
“Shouldn’t we just stop the bad Tanis before she kills Alden?”
Cassie glanced at Connie. “I went over this already. Stopping one attack doesn’t keep Alden safe. We need to find out who is pulling the strings.”
“Well, if we keep someone from killing him, that seems to be the sort of thing that ups his safety quotient.”
“Only temporarily. Besides, that’s what his security is for.”
Connie could tell that there would be no convincing Cassie to change her mind. “Well, then why did you bring me along?”
The spy shot Connie a dark look. “So that I can feed you to the sharks they use for security down there during my getaway.”
“Jeez, no need to get pissy about it,” Connie muttered.
“Sorry.” Cassie pursed her lips in frustration as the submarine dropped into the water, and they began to drift down the dive tube that led to the city of Chora’s Height. “I’m just annoyed that this whole business is still so opaque. I brought you along because you’re quick on your feet. We have no AI with us, so I need backup.”
“OK, then as backup, what plan am I backing up?”
“Well, I’d like to see if we can find the real Tanis when we get down there—stars, I wish I’d set her up with emergency data dead drops before she went off to see Peter. She and Darla are ridiculously good at hiding. Granted, it would be easier if they were using a cover I made.”
“Why would they not be using one of your covers, anyway?” Connie wondered.
Cassie shook her head. “Pretty sure it’s due to Darla’s penchant for playing dress-up. She kept pressuring me to make a rich heiress type of cover for Tanis, but those aren’t as effective as one would think. Plus they’re expensive, and the Division does not like paying for the sorts of places those people like to stay.”
“Places like this casino?”
“Yes. Places exactly like this casino.”
Connie pulled up the public information on the Blue Lagoon to review a second time, once again impressed by its amenities. Not to mention awed by how much staying at the place cost.
“I can see why the Division doesn’t want to foot this bill. Plus side, if Tanis is masquerading as a wealthy woman, her cover should be able to get into a place like this.”
“Maybe. I had to pull some serious strings for us to get in. Even with Darla, I’m not sure how Tanis will manage.”
“Well, Evil-Tanis obviously got in.”
Cassie laughed. “Evil-Tanis, eh?”
“Seemed to fit.”
“Yeah, well, it’s us versus Evil-Tanis in one of the most secure casinos in the Sol System.”
“Good thing you brought me along.”
TORFIN AND AMEONIA
STELLAR DATE: 03.05.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Blue Lagoon Casino, Sargasso Mountains, Europa
REGION: Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Tanis nodded silently as she reached the entrance to Tank 3. She swam up through a long tube and found herself entering an amphitheater-like space through an opening in the stage.
The room was shaped like a large conch shell, and the rows of seats all had holodisplays in front of them. She guessed it was so that the viewers could gamble in a variety of ways while watching the show.
A seashell-encrusted woman drifted nearby, glaring at Tanis as she emerged.
&nbs
p; “About time,” she said, vocalizing the same way Damon had. “This parlor opens up in fifteen minutes, so we need to get you singing! Did you get the song?”
Tanis nodded. “I received it.”
“Good. Let’s hear it.”
The expression on Saniyah’s face led Tanis to believe that the woman did not have high hopes, so she decided that she’d knock the glittery woman off her high horse.
Pushing herself off the amphitheater’s stage, she splayed her arm and tail-tentacles wide, calmed her mind, and brought up the song’s lyrics over her vision.
When she had told Damon that she’d taken singing lessons as a child, she wasn’t lying. Her father had constantly pushed her to do something that would lead her to greatness—specifically, his idea of greatness.
One of the avenues he’d pushed her down was performance arts. Though she’d had some skill, standing on a stage had never been something she enjoyed, and she’d fought against her father until he finally acquiesced.
By that time, she’d been singing for several years, so her instructor was rather displeased when one of her star pupils completely dropped out.
Summoning all her memories of the skill she’d once had, Tanis began the song with a single, sonorous, orca-like moan. The sound filled the amphitheater, reverberating along the ridged, conch-shell-like walls.
She paused, letting the note fall away to silence, and then launched into the song.
It was a tale of two orcas named Torfin and Ameonia. They lived long ago in the seas of Earth, near a place called Aleutia. It was a beautiful sea, and fish were plentiful. The pair met one night under the starlight and fell deeply in love, forming a life-bond. When they announced it, their pod celebrated their union with days of frolicking in the waves and hunting the largest tuna the ocean provided.
On the fifth day, after a particularly long hunt, Torfin realized that Ameonia was nowhere to be found. He searched for her until he found one of the other bulls in the pod, bloodied and bruised. The injured dolphin told of a great monster that had risen up out of a dark crevasse and taken Ameonia.
