Tanis Richards: Blackest Night - A Military Hard Science Fiction Space Opera Epic (Aeon 14: Origins of Destiny Book 3)
Page 4
“This crew spends months and months in the black, Tanis,” Connie replied equably as she poured in a liberal amount of the liquor. “You won’t let ‘em fuck, so you sure as hell better let them have booze.”
She walked to the galley table and handed Tanis her cup, then returned to the counter to make a fresh pot of coffee.
“I just say that so if it ever comes up, I have plausible deniability. Not like I’m going to confiscate it.”
“Plus, you drink most of it,” Connie said with a soft laugh, then set down the canister of coffee and turned to her friend. “Seriously, though, Tanis. What are we going to do?”
Tanis stared into her cup, swirling the liquid around as she thought through their options. “Too bad we don’t have one of those Infiltrator Chameleons handy. I’d let it have another go at Alden.”
“Commander!”
“I’m kidding, Connie…mostly.” Tanis upended the cup and poured the contents down her throat before continuing. “OK, no matter what, we have to let Harm and Admiral Kocsis know what’s going on. Otherwise our best-case scenario is me in front of a tribunal for treason.”
“Hey, whoa!” the chief said. “Does that mean you’ll really go through with it? Abduct Admiral Mikayla?”
“Well, if Alden’s right and she’s behind the hit on him—and I have two hundred million credits that says he’s pretty convinced of that—then I’d like to have a chat with the dear admiral as well. That shit with Deering never really came to much of a resolution. We know that the Scattered Worlds Space Force wants to rebuild—or at least some of them do—and we know they have their hooks in the TSF, and in Alden’s people too. Lastly, we know that they’re more than willing to hang me from a noose to achieve their ends.”
“That’s the dumbest name for a station ever,” Tanis muttered.
“Really?” Connie raised an eyebrow. “I always thought it was cool.”
“You would,” Tanis laughed, then cleared her throat. “OK, so even though we got ambushed by his extreme wretchedness, we still have a pickup to make at Crantor, plus we actually do need to get fuel there. I’ll send Harm an update when we get there and add in the ‘we need to meet’ signal.”
“You think he’ll be able to get to Earth? His cover with Enfield took a beating, with him running off with us to Europa.”
“That’s if he approves us going to Earth,” Tanis qualified.
Darla chuckled in their minds.
“I still think he was born a girl,” Connie said as she crossed her arms and leant against the counter. “He really seemed to like pink and sashaying his tush all over.”
“That’s how covers work,” Tanis replied as she rose from her chair and carried her cup to the sink. “You have to give yourself over to it completely. Otherwise it doesn’t work.”
Darla snorted.
“Hey, I picked the Golist outfit and spent a whole day in it—even after my legs had cramped so bad I was wondering how I’d ever walk again.”
“Stars, I wish there was video of all this,” Connie muttered.
“Darla,” Tanis growled.
“Pardon?” Connie asked, standing up straight. “ ‘Hot’ as in temperature, or ‘haute’ as in fashion?”
“Tanis!” Connie laughed, taking her hand. “We simply must go shopping! I bet you know where all the most exquisite boutiques are!” She added in an over-the-top giggle for good measure.
“You know…” Tanis muttered, “I’m starting to look forward to my impending tribunal.”
CRANTOR
STELLAR DATE: 02.20.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Crantor Station
REGION: 0.5AU beyond Ouranos, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Tanis nodded as she triggered her facial modifications to match Monica’s.
Ignoring Darla’s comment, Tanis walked out of the darkened corridor where she’d changed from Commander Richards of the Kirby Jones to Monica of E-Dock.
As she walked down a passageway that would lead her to a lift bank, Tanis worked on deliberately shifting her perception of the station.
Instead of Crantor being just another station she was visiting and just passing through, she tried to see the dark and somewhat dingy corridors as her home. That rather strange brown and green fungus growing in the rock all around? Perfectly normal. Probably not toxic at all.
She nodded to people whose eyes met hers, and made sure to have her walk match what she saw in the vid of Monica that Darla had found earlier.
Tanis replied and took a right turn into a store.
Once inside, she saw that they sold ‘Unique and Fascinating’ ice crystals that had begun to surface in Ouranos’s clouds as a result of the planet-stripping project.
She moved to the back of the small shop, studying the crystals floating in their cooling cylinders, finding herself rather impressed by their structure, but not letting that distract her from keeping an eye on the entrance.
With her head lowered and Monica’s dark blue hair obscuring her eyes, Tanis watched her cover’s spiky-haired friend walk by, not even glancing into the shop.
Tanis nodded absently as she exited the shop, glancing at the retreating form of Monica’s friend before turning and striding purposefully down the corridor to the lift bank.
Despite Darla’s warnings, she knew her JSF contact would wait if she wasn’t there exactly on time. Half the time when she met with agents for these handoffs, they were late.
She supposed that was in their nature. They’d likely case the joint, wait to see if the target got antsy, see who came and went, then make an approach. Her approach was still too military: show up on time, ready to go.
Maybe I should be the one who strolls in an hour afterward this time.
As she waited for the lift, Tanis couldn’t help but be annoyed that the Jovians had made her make this pickup. Chances were that whatever intel she was about to be given was already known by the nameless man who’d been in her galley three days prior.
The lift arrived, and she got on, considering that if she hadn’t threatened to kill them, they may have actually delivered it at the time.
Perhaps this is their punishment.
The lift ride was quick, and it let out onto a wide passageway that was made of plas and steel—a section of station not hewn directly into Crantor Station itself. That also meant it had a touch more gra
vity, being outside the rotating asteroid itself.
The bounce in her step told Tanis that it was just under 0.3g at present.
Her route to the bar where the meet was to be had would take her half a kilometer down the concourse, and then another few hundred meters through a rather convoluted warren of passageways.
At the end of that, she’d come to The Boar’s Oars.
Tanis considered the AI’s response for a moment.
Darla groaned in Tanis’s mind.
“Hey, Monica!” a woman’s voice called out from behind Tanis, interrupting her conversation with Darla. Even before she turned, the probes Tanis had deployed around her singled out the speaker and fed her a visual.
The woman was tall, nearly two and a half meters. Long white hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her back. Her face was nearly as pale as her hair, and from the neck down, a black, floor-length cloak shrouded her figure.
Her Link ident came up as ‘The Raven’.
“Monica!” The Raven called out again, but Tanis picked up the pace, working to get away from the major corridors before the inevitable confrontation that was sure to follow.
When Tanis finally reached it, she turned to and squared her shoulders as The Raven rounded the corner.
“Why you running, Monica?”
“Umm…’cause you’re super tall and scary?” Tanis answered, doing her best to mimic what little of Monica’s speech patterns she’d observed.
The Raven snorted out a laugh. “Glad you noticed. I do my best to cultivate an imposing appearance.”
“Mission accomplished. What do you want?”
“Monica, Monica, Monica.” The tall woman took a series of languid steps toward Tanis. “What am I going to do with you. You don’t answer me on the Link, you hole up in your apartment when you’re not working…. You’ve made it very hard to collect.”
Tanis gave the tall woman a worried look, and said, “I…uh…have the money now.”
“Money?” The Raven burst out laughing. “Monica. You fucked my wives. Money can’t buy that off—I’m going to kill you for it.”
“Well…any chance you’re willing to take money?” Tanis asked. “I just came into some. I could give you ten thousand?”
The woman began to advance, red-gloved hands sliding out of her sleeves. “Ten thousand isn’t even worth getting out of bed for.”
“Fifty?”
“No way you have fifty, Monica. Say your prayers, you’re gonna meet your maker.”
Tanis slid her left foot back, widening her stance. She could feel the comfortable weight of her lightwand against her right thigh, but didn’t draw it.
That was the ‘pull in case of emergency’ option.
The AI barked a laugh in Tanis’s mind.
Tanis didn’t have time to reply as The Raven swung a fist, and she dodged to the side, avoiding the strike with ease, though trying to make it look as though it was a close miss.
Closer than I would have liked, actually. Looks like this woman has some skill.
Tanis jabbed the white-haired giant in the kidneys, only to have her hand hit unyielding steel.
“You think I’d wander around down here unarmored?” The Raven laughed as she took a step back. “Thought you had a chance? Stupid girl.”
“Wishful, I guess,” Tanis said with a half-smile.
Tanis was about to see if she could goad The Raven into showing her what lay under her cloak, when the woman did it on her own.
“I guess it’s not fair to hide how screwed you are,” she sneered while unfastening her dark cloak and tossing it to the side of the passageway.
Tanis nodded as she waited for The Raven to press the attack once more; she’d seen it, too.
“You seem a bit calmer than I expected, Monica. Usually at this point, people are begging, screaming, or trying to get away.”
Tanis shrugged, not bothering to put on much of the Monica persona. She wished that using nano to suppress the woman’s armor was an option, but that would be a dead giveaway that she was not a simple dockworker. That meant her best course of action was beating the woman about the head until she stopped moving.
Probably forever.
When no reply came to her goading statement, The Raven launched another attack. The fight progressed in earnest, and most of the woman in red’s strikes were made with her fists, blows directed at Tanis’s upper body—which made sense, given her attacker’s height.
Tanis continued to avoid most of the hits, though she took the few that gave her the opportunity to land a blow on the woman’s face.
The Raven was getting frustrated. She hadn’t taken any serious hits, but neither had she delivered any. Tanis suspected that most of the woman’s fights didn’t last more than a minute or two, and she didn’t seem to know how to break the stalemate.
“When’d you get so good at fighting?” she asked at one point. “You just watch loaders all day to make sure they don’t fuck up.”
“Everyone has to have a hobby,” Tanis replied with a grin. “If you weren’t armored, you’d be on the deck by now, you know.”
“Think so?” The Raven shot back as she swung a right hook at Ta
nis’s head.
“Want to take it all off and try?”
“You’re a funny woman.”
Suddenly, The Ravens’ fighting style shifted. While previously she’d only been using her arms and relying on her reach—back-corridor, thug type combat—she suddenly adopted a fighting stance close to Tanis’s own, loosening her fists and staying light on her feet.
Shoot, maybe she does know how to break this stalemate.
“If at first you don’t succeed?” Tanis asked.
“Well, it’s better for me if killings like this look like ones any tough would have delivered. But if you want to make it more challenging, I’m willing to play along.”
The combat intensified. The white-haired-woman used her legs now, and her kicks were fast. Tanis avoided several, but then one connected with her side, tossing her against the bulkhead.
She shook off the shock from the collision in time to avoid a blow to the head. She was beginning to suspect that The Raven may actually be a better fighter than her—at least while in armor with mild power boosts.