by M. D. Cooper
“At least on any Enfield-enhanced L2s,” Harm added.
“We achieved greater axon conductivity with a slightly lower neural density—has to do with the myelin sheath thickness on your axons. The end result is that there’s a bit more room in your skull, and your thinking is faster, without being burdened with higher energy consumption.” Harm spoke the words as though he were talking about a starship engine.
“Well, have I passed?” Tanis asked. “Good to go and all that?”
“Yes,” Colonel Green nodded. “We’ll see you tomorrow. Once we get past the first few days, we can change these reviews to just once every three days.”
“OK,” Tanis replied, turning toward the room’s door. Then she paused and glanced back at Harm. “If you want to test how I do under physical stress tomorrow, be sure to bring someone more qualified.”
Harm worked his jaw for a moment before replying. “Believe me, I will. Not going to make the same mistake twice.”
INTERRUPTION
STELLAR DATE: 01.21.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: EBE Labs, Gen. Steven Kristof Hospital
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The next few days passed uneventfully.
Each day, Tanis left her suites at a different time, choosing her routes to GSK Hospital at random, but never using the same one twice.
Some days, she stopped at a restaurant or park before her appointment with Green and Harm, and some days she went straight there, though via a circuitous route.
At the end of the fourth consecutive visit, Colonel Green told Tanis that everything was going well, her mods’ upgrades were all performing to spec, and even under the influence of stressors—real ones, not just Harm trying to hit her—Tanis’s biological and augmented systems all performed perfectly.
“We’ll see you in three days, then,” Green said, flashing one of her rare smiles. “Honestly, I didn’t expect it to go this well, but barring a few small adjustments to your neurological linkages, you’re the perfect specimen.”
“ ‘Specimen’, Colonel?” Tanis asked.
“Forgive me, Tanis,” Green said, her smile still in place. “It’s hard to switch out of the profession’s parlance.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m not really bothered.”
Darla made a sound that Tanis chose to interpret as a groan.
“She’s a tough woman,” Green said, her eyes locked on Tanis’s. “Which is good. The universe doesn’t pull punches. Before long, you’ll be back in the black, and we’re coming up on a grand alignment.”
Tanis wondered at the colonel’s use of ‘we’. For most people—ones who didn’t have to patrol the federation’s internal borders—a grand alignment was exciting, a way to see a dozen major planets and stations in just a few months if you had a fast ship.
“Well, see you in a few days, Colonel,” Tanis said and saluted the doctor, then gave a nod to Harm, who was bent over his console. “Harm.”
“Enjoy your days off, Tanis,” he said in parting, glancing up, and she waved back on her way out.
Tanis snorted as she walked out of Lab 3J.
<’Boring’. I believe the word you were looking for was ‘boring’.>
Tanis reached the lift and pushed the call button.
Ignoring her AI, Tanis navigated the warrens of GSK Hospital to its main entrance, which led out into a broad atrium housing a park and a maglev station she’d not yet used. As she walked down the hospital’s steps, enjoying the artificial sunlight streaming down from high above, she decided to change things up, and hailed a stationcar.
Less than thirty seconds later, a car pulled up on the vehicular traffic section of the concourse, and Tanis climbed into the open-air seating section on the back. As she settled in place, two other passengers climbed aboard, and she nodded to them before turning her gaze to the scenery in the atrium.
Tanis replied.
Tanis considered dismissing Darla’s suggestion, but decided that she had nothing else planned for the day, and if she wasn’t happy with the AI’s selection, she could simply go to Atlier.
Tanis leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes, though she was still all-too aware of her surroundings, thanks to her enhanced hearing and olfactory systems. And though her eyes were shut, Darla’s optical pickups weren’t, and Tanis could tap those if she so chose.
It had occurred to her a few times over the past week that, with this recent batch of upgrades, she was as much machine as human. Even the organic parts of her body were not stock. Genetic modifications and bio-enhancements were the norm across her physiology.
Mostly, she was glad for the mods. Many in the military worked hard to bulk up, but Tanis had grown up on Mars; tall and thin were normal for humans on the low-gravity planet. The idea of working out until she looked like a stocky Terran wasn’t one that appealed in the least. Her mods allowed her to keep the lithe appearance she was used to.
She caught flak for it sometimes, but usually it just took the casual toss of a fifty kilo weight for any detractors to realize they shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
Even so, the idea that she was hardly organic hung in the back of her mind, something that created a special kind of self-doubt that she didn’t know how to deal with.
Am I good at what I do on my own, or is it just because of my mods?
Logic told her that the military invested in her because she was a worthwhile candidate, but they also tanked up grunts with just as much hardware—albeit with less finesse.
Tanis pushed the concerns from her mind, which was somewhat more difficult than it used to be.
When she first awoke from Darla’s implantation, nothing had seemed much different—other than the presence of another mind always a thought away over the Link.
But as the days had progressed, her thought patterns had periodically become difficult to control. Green and Harm had warned her this would happen as her body worked through the physiological changes. Temporary chemical imbalances were common when mods were added and mental alterations were made.
By and large, her cognitive abilities seemed unaffected, and Green had indicated that Tanis’s neurotransmission speed rated a small percentage higher than before the pairing.
Tanis understood that to mean that she thought faster, and that she could trip herself up or fall into loops of perseveration if she wasn’t careful. That had happened a lot after her L2 upgrades. She’d often lost hours, just thinking about things.
The doctors then had told her it was a normal part o
f the upgrade process. One had to reframe one’s worldview constantly, as new revelations abounded and deeper meanings altered fundamentals.
What it had really felt like was aging a hundred years in a week. Not physically, but mentally. Few people really understood that being an L2 was as much a wisdom upgrade as a raw thinking power upgrade.
The act of spotting, and considering, more variables engendered no other outcome. Unless a person was determined to be willfully ignorant.
And that was not in Tanis’s nature.
The stationcar drove down the sweep to a lower level on the next ring sector, which brought them to the Fornax district. The other two passengers got off at a restaurant, and then the car took Tanis to a tree-lined boulevard bearing the name ‘Corner Street’.
Not that it was overtly fancy, but the sidewalks weren’t lined with half-drunken soldiers in varying states of revelry, so that was a step up from half the ‘off-base’ districts on Vesta.
* * * * *
Half an hour later, she exited the shop, somehow having pleased both herself and Darla with her purchases. There was even a splash of red in some of the clothing—though that came mostly because Darla had been bemoaning that Tanis was entirely monochromatic.
With her bags slung over her shoulder, Tanis walked down the boulevard, heading to a maglev station a half-kilometer away. It would take her clear around Vesta’s ring before returning her to the Grand Éire, but that didn’t bother her.
She considered stopping at the Refit and Repair drydocks and checking in on the Kirby Jones. Connie had made Tanis promise she’d do so before she left—the engineer usually swung by every day during a refit, and was antsy about being away from ‘her girl’.
Tanis dropped a missive in the long-range transmission queue for Connie—who would be arriving at Cune in a few hours—and continued on her way to the maglev.
When she arrived, the very first train to pull in was one that would take her to the drydocks. Tanis boarded with a smile, and settled down in her seat, closing her eyes for a brief rest.
Tanis cracked an eyelid, surveying the maglev.
A chuckle escaped Tanis’s lips, and the left side of her mouth quirked up.
Tanis had already reviewed the repair crew, but a second set of eyes was never a bad thing.
Despite what she’d told Darla, she had an ulterior motive for going to the ship: she wanted weapons. The MPs still hadn’t returned her lightwand, and their continued stalling had Tanis more worried than any other event since the initial attack.
Technically, she wasn’t supposed to wander around armed on Vesta, which meant that she couldn’t hit up any of the quartermasters she knew for a favor—not without putting them at risk. Just like she was already studiously avoiding the rest of her crew, all of which—other than Connie—were still on Vesta.
Surreptitious checkups had shown them all to be well, and she’d satisfied herself with watching from afar. But when it came to gear, the Jones was Tanis’s domain, and it had a fully-stocked armory.
In all honesty, she wasn’t sure why she hadn’t gone before now. In the back of her mind, she’d believed that the threat to her life was being taken seriously by someone, somewhere.
But even Colonel Green had not brought up the incident after the first checkup—or even advised Tanis to exercise caution. Though her attacker hadn’t been caught—which in itself should have been a red flag, with Vesta being a wholly TSF installation—everyone had written the incident off as random violence.
If Tanis had been staying anywhere other than the Grand Éire, she would have done the same.
Twenty minutes later, she was passing under the security arch leading into Sector 33. Vesta’s ring was broken into three hundred and sixty sectors, with Sector 0 being where the ring intersected with what was originally Vesta’s north pole.
Sectors twenty-six through forty were all dedicated to drydocks servicing smaller patrol craft like the Kirby Jones. According to the general infonet, over seventeen hundred ships were currently undergoing repair in the drydocks, with one hundred twenty-three docked in Sector 33 alone.
Tanis hoped that her Kirby Jones was getting the attention it deserved, with all the ships under service. The level of activity seemed high, even for a Mars transit, but she supposed it may be in preparation for the grand alignment of the planets. Usually more ships were out on patrol. She wondered if the number of ships in R&R was the reason behind the Jones’s extended tour.
Once within the sector, Tanis hailed an automated dockcar that took her through the wide corridors to Bay 8129, where she hopped off and walked down the short corridor to the bay’s entrance.
She was surprised to see two MPs standing at the entrance to the bay with the door closed behind them. It was not a normal sight—not only were individual bays rarely guarded, but the doors of a bay in use were usually flung wide for the technicians and cargo drones coming and going at all times.
One of the MPs was standing in front of the access panel, and Tanis noted that the woman didn’t move aside as she approached.
“Corporal…Summers,” Tanis said as she came to a halt in front of the woman. “I’d like to access the bay and check on my ship.”
The corporal’s eyes had held steady as Tanis had approached, locked on a distant point down the corridor, but as Tanis spoke they shifted toward her.
“I’m sorry, sir, this bay is sealed. Our orders are not to allow access to any parties.”
A scowl formed on Tanis’s face. “I’m not ‘any parties’, I’m the captain of the Kirby Jones. What is going on in there that I can’t gain access?”
“Yes, Commander Richards, you are the captain of the ship, but you’re not on my list of authorized personnel. Regarding what is going on, I do not know. This door has been sealed for three days.”
Tanis took a step back and glanced at the other MP, who had not shifted her gaze during the conversation. A rage simmered inside of Tanis, and she fought back the urge to tear a strip off the corporal, but she knew it was not either of these women’s fault.
“On whose orders?” she asked instead.
“I’m not at liberty to say,” the MP replied, and Tanis saw a momentary flicker of compassion in Corporal Summers’ eyes.
“I understand.” Tanis blew out a long breath, then half-turned and put a hand to her forehead. “Shiiiiit.”
The MP’s posture softened, and she raised a questioning eyebrow. “Sir?”
“Well…see, the guy I’m seeing wasn’t supposed to come to Vesta for a few weeks, so I left it in my cabin on the ship, but now he’s going to be here in a day—his idea of a pleasant surprise—and I don’t have it!”
“ ‘It’?” Corporal Summers asked.
“I’m going to propose to him,” Tanis replied, adding a sheepish note to her voice. “We’ve been together for a bit, and he’s totally supportive of my crazy schedule, so I think it’s time to tie the knot. I know it’s old-fashioned to a lot of people, but I really want to make a commitment to him. The least I can do, with being away so much.”
Tanis spoke the words quickly, almost babbling them in an embarrassed rush.
The MP’s expression had softened further as Tanis spoke, but she shook her head. “I still can’t let you in, sir. It would be my ass.”
“Can you at least tell me who I need to see?” she pressed. “I don’t have much time to go up the chain…could take days.”
“Well…” Corporal Summers glanced at her counterpart, who gave a slight nod. “The orders had tokens from Admiral Deering’s staff. Master Chief Moore.”
“You’re welcome, and you never heard it from me.”
“Of course not,” Tanis said over her shoulder as she walked away.
