by M. D. Cooper
“Oh, I’m not sure. I checked over the ship’s ready status, and since our requests for a new tank are rejected, that has flagged our ship as cleared for refueling. I can see it right here on the station boards.”
“Uh…well that’s an error.”
“Ho, whoa, whoa, Sergeant Hanja. I know that in real life, two wrongs don’t make a right, but if our tanks are no good, and we can’t get new ones. I see two negatives adding up to a positive.”
“That makes no logical sense whatsoever,” Connie whispered.
Marion winked and continued, “I’ve submitted the request for refueling. Looks like the NSAI’s approved it! Wow, that’s efficient. We’re going to get in queue for the…oh, look, it placed us at the G9A fueling station. That’s only a few hundred meters from where your offices are inside the station, isn’t it?”
“What? How is this—”
“You should come to the windows so we can wave to you while we’re topping off—”
“Kirby Jones! You cannot refuel! Your tank will explode! The cap housings are fractured, it’ll—”
“Are you acknowledging, on the official record, that you are denying us a refuel because our tank is damaged and needs to be replaced?” Marion prompted.
“Uh…I suppose so.”
“OK…we’re passing official acknowledgement from the Portmaster’s office on to procurement. Can you hold for just a second?”
Marion muted the pickups and then began to whistle a tune. Surprisingly, the woman on the other end remained silent until the procurement board changed the state of the request to approved—which took only a minute.
Marion enabled the pickups again and proclaimed, “Oh! Look at that, they just approved our new tank! Stars, you’re helpful, Sergeant Hanja. I’m certainly going to put in a recommendation for you after this.”
“Um…thank you, Kirby Jones.” The woman sounded both relieved and confused. “I…uh…PMO, signing off.”
“Stars,” Connie gave Marion a look of awe-filled adoration. “How the hell did you do that? And can I pay you under the table to handle all my procurement requests?”
“Thanks, Lovell. And you’re right. I just…I’m just a bit of a go-it-alone kinda gal.”
“Jones first.” Marion raised her fist, and Connie reached out and clasped it.
“Damn skippy. Jones first.”
SEEKING TANIS
STELLAR DATE: 03.02.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Interplanetary pinnace, orbiting Titan
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Normally, Leona respected an officer who was good at their job. She believed that efficiency and effectiveness were some of the best traits anyone could possess.
She recognized that not everyone could operate at her level, but she liked to know that the people around her were at least pulling their weight as best they could.
She did not, however, appreciate a high level of efficiency in officers of foreign militaries.
The fact that the Terran Space Force was able to simply traipse around the Sol System as though they owned the whole place, while the militaries of the Federation’s other member states faced restrictions, even in their own territories, bothered her enough as it was.
The least they could do was suck at their jobs.
Thinking of the TSF as a group of bungling idiots assuaged Leona’s simmering resentment of them, and then people like Tanis would appear and mess that up.
Of course, Leona knew that applying a blanket judgement to all TSF personnel was dangerous in her line of work, and she endeavored not to let herself slip into a false sense of complacency. As such, the effort to manually track Tanis Richards aided greatly in staving off any such complacency in herself.
Made all the more effective because she couldn’t find the woman’s trail at all.
The AI’s tone did little to hide her own annoyance—which Leona hoped had more to do with her own inability to find the Mickie operative than disgust with Leona’s frustration.
Initially, Leona thought it would be a fun exercise to pit her abilities against both her own AI’s and Tanis Richards’s, making a game out of who could find Tanis the fastest. But as the hours ticked on, and they were unable to locate and positively identify Tanis, both of their frustration levels had risen.
Leona shrugged and leant back in her chair, looking around her private quarters on the pinnace that Alden had secured for her. The cabin was nice. A bit too nice. She didn’t like to surround herself with much in the way of comfort. It made it too easy to forget what reality was for a woman like her.
This time, Leona did let out an audible sigh.
Leona groaned as she pushed off from her chair and drifted to her bunk, eyeing its soft blankets warily before pulling herself down onto it.
“Still a needle in
a haystack,” Leona muttered aloud.
Leona pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and shook her head. “No, we’re operating on the QT here. Alden needs to be distanced from any connection with what’s going to happen at Terra. You know that once the shit hits the fan, the TSF is going to tear apart everything Tanis has done since Europa. If they even catch a whiff of a connection to Alden….”
“It’s tempting, it really is, but even if it doesn’t make it back to Alden, it still puts you and I in the crosshairs of an investigation.”
“Alden will make sure we’re taken care of.”
Leona knew who Chelsea was referring to: Gage.
“Right, well, all of that is ample reason to keep this to ourselves. It’s not like we need to take risks. We have eyes on Kameron; Tanis is going to approach him at some point, and when she does, she’ll out her cover.”
Leona stared at the overhead, tracing the vent bulge that was covered by a decorative panel, willing it to give her some sort of insight.
Then it hit her. “Chelsea. What if our timeframes are wrong?”
“Exactly. What if Tanis or her mystery AI fudged with that somehow?”
Leona nodded absently while she settled in to wait. With the light lag and delays introduced by the myriad comm networks that encircled Saturnian space, it took almost five minutes for Chelsea to get her answer.
“You found her?”
“She is an L2, Chelsea.”
“So if that shuttle came in early…how early?”
“Crap! That gives her the chance to take a whole raft of flights that we hadn’t factored in.”
“Damn…yeah. Just like that one.”
Chelsea passed Leona a visual of a woman matching Tanis’s build, but with long multicolored hair and a face bearing slightly more delicate features.
“Crap, Chelsea! That means she’s already down on New Amsterdam!”
Leona pulled up the information and nodded. “Well, Kiora Adams, seems you’re not as clever as you thought you were.”
BOAT RIDE
STELLAR DATE: 03.02.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: The Barony Hotel, New Amsterdam
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
While Tanis slept, Darla worked at establishing a secondary cover. If there was one thing she’d learned, it was that her human partner was more than willing to burn a cover if it was even moderately convenient.
It mildly annoyed Darla, considering the effort she put into each cover. It was also the reason that she’d taken to simply using locals if they were temporarily indisposed.
Although, based on what had happened with Monica on Crantor, that may not have been the best plan.
I’ll just have to do a bit more checking into people that I ‘borrow’ to make sure the reason they’re not around isn’t because they’re hiding from someone who wants to hurt them.
Darla suddenly imagined a vigilante that would show up in people’s lives, appropriate their bodies for a bit, and solve their problems in the process.
Probably already a vid series with that premise—or a dozen.
She made a note to go find them later…. There might be some interesting ideas to be had—and if there wasn’t such a show, she knew some producers who might buy the idea from her.
She looked through the feeds of locals in New Amsterdam, searching for someone that might be useful to appropriate, but none jumped out. The biggest issue was timing. It was impossible to know when Tanis might need to swap covers.
Nothing for it. I need to create a fresh cover…someone who is travelling here, or lives here, I wonder?
Not for the first time, Darla wished that Tanis had a bit of a thicker build. With her slender features, it was almost impossible to make her appear as a man, which would open up a lot of other possibilities when it came to backgrounds, fashions, and behavior patterns.
The easiest alternate personas for Tanis were ones that involved someone who was into sports or other physical activities. She had considered convincing Tanis to add mods that would allow them to adjust her hip and breast size with ease, but was relatively certain that it would be too much for her partner.
Harm sure seems to have them, though, Darla thought with a laugh.
Ultimately, she crafted a woman named Evelyn, a free-spirited, nomadic bard. She traveled around the Sol System, doing small gigs in bars and busking in public areas for credit.
New Amsterdam, with its canals, was perfect for that. Half the boats drifting through the city had itinerant musicians at their bows, singing a tune while strumming some sort of instrument.
Maybe if we have a lull in this op, I can get her to wander around performing on the canals…something to help establish the cover.
Darla realized that meant she would have to order Tanis an instrument—something she could learn to play fast and stash somewhere.
OK…let’s just go with singing only.
That work done, she flipped through vid feeds from across the city—access granted courtesy of a friend of a friend who she ran an expanse for—when she spotted Tori wandering through a park on the surface.
While she didn’t begrudge the man a stroll under the ringlight, she was surprised to see him out there. On the flight down, he’d mentioned several times about how tired he was from his journey and the transfers around Saturn. Not only that, but his boarding location was deep within the city, and it would have taken him at least twenty minutes to get up to that park.
Maybe he just can’t sleep. He’s very lightly modded, so he probably can’t force himself into a sleep cycle.
Darla knew it was a weak argument; even if a person didn’t have mods, the drugs to manage sleep were commonplace. She did know that some humans preferred not to use drugs or mods to manage their biochemistry, counting on a good diet and natural rhythms to keep them healthy.
It was utter nonsense, so far as she was concerned. If the human body were a perfect machine that could take a limited variety of nutritional inputs and create every chemical cocktail it needed, that would be one thing. But thousands of years of science showed that organisms like humans were very good at adapting to their food sources and environments, but that those adaptations were often compromises. Compromis
es that wore down the body and made it less efficient over time.
Modern medicine and science understood human biology well enough to know that, while the body could manage on its own, human biosystems were all reactionary, and many of them were isolated. The solution that one part of the body would employ might be detrimental to another.
Mednano, along with a half-decent micro-NSAI to manage them, could operate with agency and keep a person healthy for hundreds of years—so long as said person got moderate levels of activity.
All of that flitted through Darla’s consciousness as she watched Tori continue his walk. She grew curious as to how long he’d been out, and if he’d slept at all. Tracing the feeds he’d appeared in, she became puzzled by his actions.
As she went further and further back, she realized that he’d never checked into a hotel. After leaving the passenger terminal, he’d collected a large bag from the luggage pickup area, and then carried it to a set of short-term storage lockers at the maglev station.
Once he’d stowed the bag, Tori had done nothing other than aimlessly wander the city.
I suppose maybe he made a booking mistake and his room wasn’t ready?
He’d never given an actual destination, so to check, Darla pulled up a list of hotels near where the man had said he’d be staying. As carefully as possible, she tapped what information she could on each hotel, finding no signs that Tori had booked a stay at any of them.
She’d been keeping a part of her focus on Tori as he strolled through the park, so she saw when he reached a canal that ran along one side of the greenspace, and a small, covered boat pulled up.
He slipped down into the boat and disappeared beneath the covered section in the center.
The boat continued along its way—barely having slowed for Tori—for several kilometers, taking a circuitous route through the city and then back toward the same park. When it arrived at a stone quay, Tori reemerged and walked at a leisurely pace back up onto the green lawns.
