by M. D. Cooper
“Benefits of wearing clothes—I can wear armor underneath,” Tanis replied and dumped the rest of her uniform in Sera’s arms. “Be back in a few minutes.”
She signaled the armor to flow up over her head, and triggered its stealth mode, rendering her invisible to the rest of the team. The soldiers would be able to see a marker for her, though, sent out on a preset pattern of frequencies that would appear random to an observer.
“Don’t you need a gun?” Krissy yelled after her.
“No,” Tanis called back.
She ran down the hall toward the two TSF soldiers who had taken cover in a small alcove.
The enemy wore armor Tanis had not seen before, though it bore a resemblance to what the TSF soldiers used. It was black and entirely without markings. She gauged it to be medium weight. Not fully powered, and light enough for moving through tight spaces in station corridors.
She slipped past the first two enemy soldiers, who had taken a position behind a conduit stack, and then another six who were firing from behind a mobile ablation shield. The final three were at an intersection. Keeping an eye out for station security, Tanis surmised.
She crept around behind the final three, wondering if her nano could breach their security systems, or if she’d have to do things the old-fashioned way.
Tanis crept behind an enemy and held her hand behind the soldier’s neck. Her hand tingled as a stream of nano flowed from it onto the enemy’s armor.
Tanis gave a mental shrug.
Tanis repeated the procedure on the other two soldiers, and then moved back down the corridor toward the six—now five—enemies taking cover behind the ablative shield.
Tanis said.
Tanis drew the two slim blades sheathed in her forearms, and stepped up behind two of the soldiers. She took careful aim and slid the left blade into the helmet seal at the back of one soldier’s head, pushing hard, while driving the other blade up under the other soldier’s pauldron and into his armpit.
The first soldier twitched and fell, while the second one jerked aside when he felt the blade tip bite into him.
Tanis leapt back as he checked himself, her intended target thinking he’d been shot. He looked behind, and saw the three unmoving figures at the end of the corridor, and Tanis knew the jig was up.
Two of the other soldiers turned and realized that one of their number had been killed from behind. One of the two still standing raised his weapon to blanket the area with pulse blasts, but a teammate pushed his gun down.
Tanis stepped between two of the soldiers, who were now moving backward down the hall, and approached the two still firing through the slot in the shield.
She slid one of her blades back into its sheath, and then flicked her left wrist. The motion opened a port in her palm, and the hilt of her lightwand dropped out of her hand.
The man was quick; he brought his weapon to bear, and Tanis dove to the side as focused pulse blasts tore through the air where she’d been standing a moment earlier.
Tanis slashed at his gun with her CF-blade and at his hand with the lightwand. The wand cut through his armor and into his hand, causing him to drop his rifle.
Tanis kicked it aside and grabbed his injured hand, flushing a stream of nano into his body.
A glance over her shoulder told her that the soldiers who had gone to check on their three frozen comrades were rushing back down the passageway. They fired at the area around their fallen teammates, and Tanis flattened herself against the wall, waiting to strike again.
Then a soldier turned right toward Tanis and pointed right at her.
The soldier who had spotted her swung his rifle to fire at her, and she dove to the ground, rolling to a new position when a thunderclap sounded in the corridor.
When she looked back at her attackers, they were toppling to the ground, headless.
“Stand down!” a voice thundered, and Tanis grinned, relief flooding through her.
There, standing amidst the three locked down enemies, stood Flaherty, hefting a crew-served railgun.
The two remaining enemy soldiers who were further down the hall paused for a moment, and then the telltale whine of the railgun filled the air. An instant later, both had tossed their weapons aside and were lying prone on the deck.
“Didn’t know you were on station,” Tanis said as she rose and set her armor to its matte-black state.
“I know,” Flaherty replied, then gestured to her armor. “Nice camo. Need to wipe it down.”
Tanis sighed. “So Angela tells me. Go help Sera; she’s ahead.”
“Gladly,” Flaherty replied.
He moved past her, kicking one of the enemy soldiers as he did, and then the two TSF soldiers she had passed earlier approached—Yves bending down to secure the two enemies who had surrendered.
Corporal Yves replied.
A minute later, the sound of the railgun came again; then again, and again. When the report of pulse rifle blasts fell silent, Sera, Krissy, and Finaeus approached with Valerie and two of the High Guard preceding them.
“You have fun down here?” Sera asked. “Still have your hands and heart?”
“Har, har,” Tanis replied. “You’re very droll, you know that?”
“I’ve heard talk.” Sera half-smiled.
Though Flaherty’s railgun had driven the bulk of the attackers back, Tanis decided their best bet was to hold
steady until the station security and TSF garrison moved into the area.
“The garrison will have a company here in seven minutes,” Krissy reported as she grabbed a pulse rifle from one of the fallen soldiers.
Valerie handed Tanis a spare cloth, and she wiped the blood off her flow armor before taking her uniform from Sera.
“You make a good coat rack,” Tanis said with a grin.
One of Krissy’s soldiers, a sergeant named Loren, gasped at Tanis’s impertinence.
“Sorry,” Tanis shrugged as she stepped into her pants. “When you’ve saved the president’s ass a dozen times, you can make comments like that, too.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever actually saved my ass,” Sera replied with a furrowed brow.
“I beefed up Sabrina, and rescued you from that pirate ship in Gedri,” Tanis said.
“If you recall, I was already on the bridge and in control when you arrived.”
Tanis laughed. “Well, I provided a useful distraction. I also saved you from your sister, back at Ascella.”
“OK, that counts for a dozen all by itself,” Sera relented with a smirk as she reached out and touched Tanis’s shoulder, feeling the flow armor. “You know, now that I’m your boss, I could order you to give me one of these.
“It’ll probably itch you,” Tanis replied.
Sera stroked the side of her chin with her index finger. “Bob has that fancy armor skin he made for his avatars, and you have your pour-on armor; I wonder if he could work out some way to incorporate that into my skin…”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“Armor is the only time we can count on you to get dressed anymore. If your skin is armor, that’ll be the end of your decency.”
Sera frowned. “I’d call you a luddite, but you’re even less human than I am. You of all people should understand the finer points of self-enhancement.”
Tanis laughed. “Oh, I do…I just like to blend in.”
Sera straightened her back. “Well, I’m the eccentric ruler. It’s my job to be strange and unusual.”
Finaeus laughed. “That’s my kind of girl. Krissy, you should follow Sera’s example; you’re too rigid.”
Krissy had been talking to one of the soldiers, and now she looked back to give her father an eyeroll.
“There you have it, folks,” Finaeus said with a laugh. “The trademarked Krissy eyeroll. I’ve been inoculated through repeated use, but you two should look out; it can be deadly.”
“Dad…”
Finaeus held up his hands defensively. “Sorry, dear, sometimes I’m not good at the personal/professional line. Spending nine years on Sabrina wasn’t helpful. They have no line—not a lot of professionalism, either.”
Sera laughed and clasped Finaeus’s shoulder. “Damn, I wish I could have been there for all that.”
“Don’t worry, there are plenty more stories to share. By the way, when we get back to the I2, come to Earnest’s lab with me; he may already be working on just what you’re referring to. I think we could actually incorporate the armor directly into your skin.”
“Will it itch?”
“Of course not,” Finaeus looked offended at the suggestion.
“Then you’re on.”
AGENT
STELLAR DATE: 08.07.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Intrepid Space Force Academy
REGION: The Palisades, Orbiting Troy, New Canaan System
Nance closed out the replay of the I2’s departure, a feeling of sadness tugging at her heart.
Nothing had turned out like she had hoped it would. They had made it to New Canaan, delivered Finaeus, secured General Garza and his ship, and witnessed the destruction of all the enemy fleets attacking the colony.
It should have been the happy ending…but it wasn’t.
Sabrina was gone, along with her new crew, off on a new mission. Their goal to gain some measure of control over the AI revolution that had begun at Virginis. Erin had taken a position as the ship’s AI aboard the Undaunted, where she now patrolled the edges of the New Canaan system. Cargo was still close-by, but he had all but gone off the grid, working on his homestead down on Carthage.
Nance shook her head and lay back on her bunk, wondering for the thousandth time what she was doing here.
Wondering’s the wrong word. Nance knew why she was at the ISFA; the Caretaker required it of her.
It made her ill to think that she was just an agent of whatever that thing was, unable to set her own course in life. True, it allowed her some level of autonomy most of the time, but it also ensured that she moved in the direction it desired.
Currently, that direction was to expunge—the Caretaker’s word—the remainder of the Myrrdan shells from New Canaan.
She’d already found two. The first had been simple to locate: it was Terry—the same shell that had infected her with…whatever Myrrdan was, back when she first came to the Intrepid. Infect her with his evil—no, not evil, more like opportunism embodied. Or not embodied as the case may be.
The second shell had been a man named Cordell. While things with Terry had gone smoothly, Cordell had been ready for her. The confrontation had taken place here on The Palisades. Cordell had been one of the construction workers and, after a long hunt, Nance had finally found him and cornered him on Ring Ten, back when it wasn’t yet complete.
He’d put up a fight. In the end, she’d had to kill him and set up the scene to look like an accident.
The voice—the remnant of the Caretaker that was left within her—had helped then, just as it had so many times during the journey through the Perseus Arm and beyond.
Afterward, Nance had kept an eye on the investigation and was quite relieved when it had been ruled an accident.
A part of her felt guilty; like she was working against Sera and Tanis. But at the same time, the Caretaker’s remnant had been a great help over the years.
It was through the remnant that Nance had orchestrated many of the events at the Grey Wolf Star—ensuring that the ship docked, privately suggesting to Finaeus that he look for broken mirror pieces, getting the mirror to work on Sabrina.
If it hadn’t been for…whatever had moved the jump gate, Sabrina would have made it back to New Canaan years ago.
Stars, without the remnant, we wouldn’t have made it all.
Half a dozen times on the journey through the Perseus Arm, the remnant had aided her in saving the ship and crew.
And now she was back where it had wanted her to be in the first place, serving its purpose—blending in, hunting Myrrdan shells.
Her ultimate goal was to find the original, the ancient murderer himself. Her careful inquisitions had left Nance feeling certain there was another shell on The Palisades. Most of her clues were small and tenuous, but there was a preponderance of them that lent to her surety.
Right now, all she had managed to locate was a discrepancy in the counts of pico assembler units used to build The Palisades. There was an assembler unit that had been listed as damaged on arrival and sent back. But when it had arrived back at Gamma III, it had been missing its pico payload.
It had gone months without being flagged, and the message requesting the location of the pico payload had only come back to The Palisades two days ago.
Of course, by now, most of the people who built the station were long gone—some to other projects, a few on the I2, destined for Khardine, and some on the ships that had headed off to the Aleutian facility several months ago.
Still, Nance had a hunch—and so did the remnant within her—that the shell was still on The Palisades. And if it were, she would track it down and liberate it. Or kill it trying.
Freeing the shells was Nance’s goal. She wanted to help those people—just like she hoped that someday, someone would help her….
The remnant didn’t really care about the people Myrrdan used. Now that the remnant was rising up in her consciousness more often, Nance was starting to understand it better. It valued hu
manity—to a degree. It seemed to only place value on humans as a whole. Individuals held no special importance to it.
Most individuals, that was.
The remnant had been especially interested in Tanis. Whenever Tanis had been near—and Sera, to a lesser extent—it had watched closely, as though recording everything about her. But Nance had also sensed fear in it; or at least something akin to hesitation. The remnant had seemed torn between its desire to watch Tanis and the worry that it might be found out.
Feeling worry from the entity within her was rare; in fact, the only time she’d felt it before was when the jump gate at the Grey Wolf Star had realigned itself.
Now that she knew what lay at the heart of the Transcend, the thing called Airtha, Nance was all but certain that Airtha herself had realigned the gate in an attempt to send Sabrina—and most importantly, Finaeus—out of the galaxy, and out of the picture.
As though her perseveration had summoned the thing within her, the remnant rose in her mind and issued a command.
Go.
She had long-since given up arguing with the thing when it gave orders. It was perfectly well able to take control of her body—but it seemed to wish her to commit the actions.
That had caused her to wonder if the remnant had some sort of limitation that prevented it from controlling her for long periods of time. It was a theory that she had not yet put to the test, but hoped to soon.
Nance had been given the provisional rank of lieutenant, as recognition of her efforts on the Finaeus mission. She still had a lot of remedial classes to take and was with the first-year cadets as often as not, but she did get a private billet—which was worth her weight in gold, especially with the thing in her head telling her what to do and when.
She had always been amazed that Erin had never noticed the remnant’s presence in Nance’s mind. Even when it had made her do things that she should not have done, Erin had seemed to be asleep, or somehow unaware of what Nance’s body was doing, or where she was.
Nance had hoped that when Erin had been removed from her mind, New Canaan’s AI technicians would notice that there was something wrong with her brain—but they had pronounced her hale and whole.