by M. D. Cooper
Tanis opened the door to her room and edged around the containers in the short hall, eyeing the bed and thinking of a good night’s sleep.
Darla snorted.
She’d just turned toward the door when Darla chuckled.
Tanis groaned. “Were you really going to let me go down there and search it?”
“Sheesh! That’s it. I am hacking the food service systems to get a BLT, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
Tanis attempted to slip a malformed packet through what should have been an open port in the food service system, but where she should have received a response that she could exploit, the system did nothing.
HIKING AND DIVERSION
STELLAR DATE: 02.22.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: The Golden Gazelle, Hunting Lodge
REGION: Ceres, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The following day, Tanis continued to scout around the hotel for any signs of Simon, but came up empty. Her doppelganger , on the other hand, didn’t do anything interesting, either. Just a run, a swim, and meals at the various restaurants.
“Two more days of this, and I’ll go nuts,” Tanis groaned as she walked down one of the forested paths near the hotel.
“This isn’t a vacation,” she complained. “On one of those, I’d do something interesting, like visit a historic site, or climb a mountain, or swim with dolphins again.”
“Yes, Darla, I’d ‘do’ Peter. You know, you’re probably the least mature AI in existence.”
Tanis rested against a rock, pulling out a bottle of water and taking a long draught. “It’s weird, too. On the Kirby Jones, there are days—weeks, sometimes—where we do nothing at all. Just routine.”
“Are you suggesting I build a routine here?”
Tanis capped off the bottle and resumed her walk.
Tanis nodded, unwilling to verbally admit that she just didn’t like being on the sidelines, waiting for whatever was going to happen to happen.
Tanis waved amicably to a trio of men who jogged by.
Tanis replied as she turned onto a side trail that wound up to the top of one of the nearby hills. The climb was easy in the low gravity, and just a few minutes later, she was at the summit, gazing out at the small city of Hunter’s Lodge and the lowlands beyond.
As she’d told Kaebel the prior night, before humans came, Ahuna Mons had been a lonely mountain rising above a smooth plain—other than a nearby crater, which was now the location of Lake Tres.
But when the ring had fallen, and Ceres was covered in fire and ash, the crust had rippled across this region, creating the low mountains and pushing Ahuna Mons up another five hundred meters.
There were even rumors that the mountains were half made of old ring debris, piled up and slagged before getting covered with dirt during Ceres’ second terraforming.
It amazed Tanis that the GE miniature black hole at the planet’s core had survived the destruction of the original ring—though she imagined that the AIs who had attacked the planet had worked out how not to destabilize the MBH.
In an effort to relax, Tanis slipped into her katas in a clearing on the hilltop, performing them as slowly as possible, forcing herself to maintain her form perfectly while barely moving.
A passerby would think at first that she was standing still, but then her slow breaths and even slower movements would clue them in.
By the time she had done all eight katas, her arms were shaking. She quaffed the rest of her water, considering climbing another hill before returning to the hotel.
As she turned toward the path to the next rise, a glint of light to her right caught her attention, and she ducked as a pulse rifle fired.
The edge of the concussive wave brushed against her head, causing a moment of disorientation before she leapt across the clearing, landing behind a boulder.
A pulse blast hit her cover, causing the rock to shudder while she deployed her nanoprobes, seeking out the attacker.
“I don’t know what you’re doing!” she called out. “But I don’t think it’s illegal to practice karate up here.”
The probes swept toward the origin of the weapons fire, only to be caught by two more shots, the blast destroying some of the nanocloud while more was blown off-course.
Tanis eyed the other nearby cover—a half-rotten log from a tree that fell long ago, and a smaller boulder.
The pulse rifle fired again, and the trio of shots sounded strange to Tanis until she realized why: their tone and intensity were identical to the prior shots.
“Shit,” she muttered, releasing another passel of drones and sending them into the surrounding underbrush. “Thing’s firing on auto.”
She gave a frustrated sigh and sat back just in time to feel something poking against
her back.
“Freeze,” a male voice said. “Don’t move, whoever you are.”
Tanis said as she looked the man over through her nanoprobe feeds.
He was middling height, brown eyes, unremarkable features under a mop of black hair.
“Totally frozen,” she replied. “I was just practicing a bit in the clearing. Didn’t realize it’s private property, I can go—”
“What were you really doing up here?” the man asked, pushing the barrel of his ‘gun’ deeper into Tanis’s back.
How much of this would Bella take? she wondered. Maybe a bit more.
“That’s not a really nice thing to do,” Tanis replied.
“What’s not?”
She spun, grabbing the stick and smacking it against the man’s hand holding the pistol. Her aim was true, and her ambusher’s hand spasmed, dropping the weapon.
She swung the stick up, jabbing it in his throat and then whacking him on the side of the head. The man fell back, and Tanis scooped up the pistol, holding it on her would-be attacker.
“I don’t really like guns,” she said. “But I like assholes even less. What are you playing at?”
“I’m not the one playing,” the man said, holding a hand to his head. “You’re clearly not who you say you are.”
Tanis drew herself up. “I am Bella, acclaimed Wado Ryu practitioner and more than capable of disarming you.” Inwardly, she asked,
“You cased the hotel last night, and today you cased the grounds,” Inspector Sawyer accused. “I didn’t spot it at first, but when I had an NSAI run through all the hotel’s footage for the last day, it picked you up.”
“You shot at me because I walked the grounds?” Tanis asked. “Is that illegal here?”
“Some fishy shit has been going on here, and you’re the first solid lead I have,” Sawyer retorted, his eyes narrowing.
“Fishy shit?” Tanis asked, leaning against the rock, trying to put Sawyer at ease. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
Sawyer gave her a disbelieving stare. “Is that the sort of thing that Bella, practitioner of Wado Ryu, would ask?”
“You attacked me first, and I have the gun now. Far as I can see, that means I get to ask the questions.”
Sawyer pursed his lips and didn’t speak, but Tanis gestured with the pistol. “There are two ways to do this.”
“Fine,” he spat. “I guess if you’re behind all this, then you know it all already.”
“Which I don’t. Now talk.”
“I was doing a C&S—Check and Secure—of the hotel when I found signs of a struggle in one of the stairwells. There were some ripped drapes on a window, and stains on the carpet that I’m certain were blood. I didn’t have a kit to take samples—wasn’t supposed to be anything but a walkthrough. I cordoned off the area and set a pair of the hotel’s bots to make sure no one walked over the scene while I went back to the station to get a kit.”
“You were ‘certain’ it was blood?” Tanis pressed.
“Well, I didn’t want to mess with any evidence, but optics and olfactory said blood. Whether or not it was human would have taken a real sample to be sure.”
“I imagine fights happen,” she said. “I got in one just the other day, up on Insi.”
“Saw that,” Sawyer replied.
“Then, if you’d checked, you would have realized that I just arrived on Insi yesterday, and then I came down here. When would I have attacked someone?”
“Well that’s not the weird part.” Sawyer widened his stance, and Tanis could tell he was close to making an attempt on the gun. “The weird part was that when I came back, the place was cleaned up, and the bots were nowhere to be seen. I checked the logs, and there was nothing to indicate I had set them to keep people away, or that they had cleaned it themselves. The hotel management was a little worried, but with no evidence, they just wrote it all off.”
“I still don’t see how this gets to the point of attacking innocent people on hilltops,” Tanis retorted.
“Well that’s just the start of it—” Sawyer’s words cut off, as he lunged for the gun.
Tanis was ready and, with her left hand, casually tossed the weapon over her shoulder and into the clearing, while jabbing her knuckles into his sternum with her right.
Sawyer made a strangled ‘gnnuughhh’ sound before stumbling backward.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Tanis asked. “Surprisingly easy to crack the sternum if you hit it just right. That was a love tap. Want to feel it crack open, or are you going to tell me what you’re really up to?”
“Link’s slow up here, but by now, you should have been able to confirm that I’m HLPD,” Sawyer grunted once his breathing stabilized. “You’ve just assaulted an officer of the law.”
“Do cops just ambush people?” Tanis asked with a scowl. “I’m a Hegemony citizen. You can’t just shoot at me without first trying to get me to submit verbally.”
She saw Sawyer’s face redden and knew she had him. The guy was an honest cop, just acting desperately—for reasons she still had to discern.
“I saw you break that guy’s leg like it was nothing,” Sawyer muttered. “He out-massed you three to one, and when you did that, it was obvious you’d been toying with him the whole time. I don’t have any illusions that I could take you down if you resisted.”
“Not only that, you have real evidence,” Tanis smirked, even though she doubted it fit with Bella’s persona. “I’m no trained police officer, but last I checked, that’s why folks like you use teams to take out dangerous people. The fact you’re up here solo is what has me feeling mighty suspicious.”
Sawyer reddened further. “It started with that weird crime scene disappearing. Then one of the hotel staff got hit by a hovercar…thing landed right on her. Squished. A few other ‘accidents’ around the hotel have stacked up, but no one wants to take them seriously. Too worried about messing up ‘the visit’. It wouldn’t have hurt you much, by the way.”
“ ‘It’?”
“The pulse rifle. I had it firing at low power. It was just enough so I could stun you and get the binders on.”
“Oh, yay,” Tanis muttered sardonically. “So you were only going to rough me up just a little before illegally detaining me.”
The man’s jaw snapped shut, and his lips drew into a thin line. “If you don’t know, I’m not going to be the person to leak it.”
“So…someone big is coming, they let the HLPD in on it—probably SOP for the hotel—and you were sent to do some early checks to make sure their internal security was tight. That’s when you discovered a number of suspicious activities that ether got
cleaned up mighty fast, or that no one seemed to care about.”
Tanis drew out the words to give Darla more time, but tossed in the right words to make Sawyer lead her in the correct direction.
“Yeah,” his tone had become suspicious again. “That’s about right. As you can imagine, with lots of unsubstantiated worry and disappearing evidence, you can see how I’m getting a bit desperate to find out what’s going on. My captain has me on his shit-list now, and if I don’t find a smoking gun or drop the whole thing, he’s gonna put me on spaceport cargo inspections. Now tell me, who are you, really?”
“Well?” Sawyer pressed, as Tanis deliberately paused.
“Fine, but this doesn’t leave your lips, mind, or Link. I’m TBI. Special Agent Sasha. I was sent to make sure things go smoothly for the visit. There’s someone I have my eye on, but he’s not doing much yet. I’m up here to keep my cover with him intact.” Tanis felt a bit bad about throwing Kaebel under the bus, but she didn’t want to give away her Infiltrator Chameleon doppelganger to the likes of Sawyer and have him bungle everything up.
“The kid at the bar?” the police inspector asked, and Tanis raised an eyebrow.
She didn’t recall seeing him there last night, which meant he was better than she thought, or he had taps into the hotel’s security. Or both.
Probably not both. Guy can’t shoot for shit. Aloud, she said, “Yeah. Either he’s totally innocent, or he’s so good he’s playing me.”
“Saw you getting pretty friendly with him,” Sawyer couldn’t stop a smirk from forming on his lips.
Her eyes narrowed, shooting daggers. “Part of the job. Don’t think that means you have a chance with me.”
