by TylerRose.
“Because you can,” he said, coming the rest of the way in. “The panel here beside the door will turn your walls into anything you want to see that it is programmed with. A forest. A windswept meadow. It can surround you with an ocean. It can simulate sunrise to sunset to help your body maintain its regulated night and day.”
“Is that a thing?”
“It is. The blind often have trouble with it and so do people who live on space stations without the benefit of a setting and rising sun.”
A series of buttons pressed, he hit the green one and the walls became an open meadow in mid-afternoon.
“The sunlight is simulated. It cannot burn you but you will create necessary vitamins made with sunlight. I’ve named the simulation Daylight Hours so you can find it again. I must go. I am late leaving as it is. I will see you in a few days.”
“Thank you, Shestna. You’re the only one who has shown much interest in me so far.”
“You can seek out Councilman Baener. You met him already. He would be your ally, I have no doubt.”
He left her there. She spent a minute thinking about things he’d said, and realized she needed to sing. She hadn’t sung in too long. Far too long.
Compact discs out, she discovered the panel in the wall would give her a player and put speakers wherever she wanted them. Half a pipe smoked, she spent the next three hours jamming hard and belting out Journey, Motley Crue, Benatar, Billy Squier, Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Styx, Judas Priest, the Eurythmics, Stevie Nicks, George Michael. Feeling better for having released so much energy, she changed clothes and went back to Julian’s office.
“I was just about to call you,” he said, looking up from the vidpad in his hand. “I have an assignment for you to get ready for.”
“Doing what? Evaluating some planet?”
“Not yet. This one is actually a time travel gig but you are uniquely talented for infiltrating the operation. We need to learn exactly how this guy Speenar is acquiring women for his brothel of a space station. We know some of them are coming from planets around Gamma quadrant, but some of them claim to be from a different time. That means he must have someone who has access to time travel. We have someone there already but, being a guy, he can’t get any of the women to talk to him. At least, that’s what he says.”
Speenar, of a reptilian sort of humanoid species. Green and somewhat iridescent. Reptilian features like Shestna had feline features – subtle, more human than not.
“Brothel. You expect me to go there as a whore?”
“No. You could be a waitress instead,” Julian said. “Or a card dealer. It’s a gambling house, brothel, drug den. Our agents and operatives have never dealt with people like this or a place like this.”
“Like this? You think that because I was a call girl for a time and a courtesan for a time that I must have dealt with this kind of skeevy underbelly?” she questioned, and got her point across.
“Or maybe not.”
“In fact, I do know how a good brothel is run. I do know how a drug operation is run. I do know how to deal with this kind of people. Not because I was a call girl. Because I lived in Toledo, Ohio and the people I knew made and sold drugs and bought and sold and traded women on a regular basis within their own groups. But I’m not about to be a waitress or a card dealer. And I won’t prostitute myself ever again. Unless I want to,” she ended with a sly smile. “Get me in as the entertainment.”
“Entertainment?” Julian asked. “Like what? They don’t like jugglers or magic shows.”
“Singer. They’ll have a place where people get on a stage to perform for patrons, won’t they?”
“Yes, but, you don’t know the Language of the Landers. Or any songs they’d know.”
“They don’t have to know them and I don’t have to know their language. Song isn’t always about the words but about the emotions. It’s about capturing the attention of the crowd for three to five minutes. Do that a few times a day and the rest of my time would be my own to make friends and investigate.”
“How could you possibly expect to capture the attention of an entire room who can’t understand a word you’re saying?”
She smiled at him. “Bet me. One thousand Ruds.”
“That’s a lot.”
“If you don’t think I can do it, you’re not the one who will be paying.”
“Okay, bet.”
They shook on it.
“Come with me. Right now,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
She did the teleporting, arriving in the bathroom corridor of a place she knew. In Tokyo. Out they went into the loud, boisterous restaurant and she got a small table without fuss. The host seemed to know her. Julian was brought saki and she a glass of ice water. She smoked a few hits off her pipe and no one noticed or cared.
On the stage was a couple singing a horrendous rendition of Louie Louie.
[This is called Karaoke] she said telepathically. [People sing for the crowd. It’s hugely popular.]
[So I see] he replied. [Are they all this terrible?]
[Some are very good. Few of them know much English.]
That song ended and another began. A man sang Great Balls of Fire and wasn’t terrible. Then a man sang Respect. The crowd was loud and excited and cheered more enthusiastically the worse someone sang.
The host took the microphone and spoke for a moment ending with “our friend Tyler.” A hand extended out to her, the crowd applauded politely. A slow, mournful song filled the room. She didn’t jump around. She didn’t dance. Didn’t even sway her hips. Eyes closed, she sang about evening coming to take her into its power, minutes like hours. A saxophone solo and back to the repeated lyrics. The whisperers had stopped. The drunken laughter had stopped. The audience was dead silent, held in her thrall. Julian looked around to see them all mesmerized.
After the last word ended, they erupted into the noise of a crowd ten times its size. Smiling, thanking them in Japanese, Tyler bowed and returned to the table. Hands reached for hers along the way, smiles of congratulations, shaking hands and nodding heads.
She sat down, the cat that ate the canary. “Well?”
He took her hand, lifted it as he bent over, and kissed it.
“Your money will be in your account within half an hour of our return. I will never bet against you ever again. It’s expensive.”
She only smiled and teleported them back to his office.
“You work out who will be my agent and handler and I’ll take care of the rest,” she told him.
“I will. Your vidpad will shortly have as much information on the station as is publicly available.”
“I don’t want it.”
“What?”
“A person going to a new venue usually knows nothing about the venue. I’m a newly discovered talent building an audience by performing live. That way no one needs to have heard of me before and my ignorance of the station and how things work won’t be a big deal. I can’t be expected to know what I never could have known in the first place. Knowing what I shouldn’t can be equally dangerous.”
Julian chuckled. “You are too smart sometimes.”
“I’ve heard that before. What I really need is a way to get my music onto a single disc or memory card with the lead vocals removed. Can you do that?”
“Just tell the computer that’s what you want to do.”
“Okay. I have to go shopping for suitable clothing. How much will that thousand Ruds buy me?”
“Fifty items or one, depending on how you shop.”
“My pay here is going to be almost nothing, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Unfortunately, we’re paid every twenty days. You’ll get your first next week.”
“Can I convert American dollars into Ruds?”
“No. It must be real and tangible property. Gold, silver, gemstones. You can convert jewelry into currency readily enough at the bank but you won’t like the exchange rate for most thin
gs.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said by way of leaving.
In the market, she browsed in several stores and stalls before going into the larger store. Finally she found dresses that might be more suitable but not quite what she wanted. She returned to her room, deciding to go to Earth in the morning.
“You didn’t keep your appointment with the language learner,” Julian said when she accepted his call in her room.
“I did not see the point,” she said in the Language of the Landers. “I learned it while walking through the market this evening.”
Her answer was most unexpected. He couldn’t hide it.
“Have a good night then,” he said.
“Good night.”
She went back to Earth and did some shopping in SM leather shops in Los Angeles, where she could spend her cash. Returning with ten outfits, she hung them up for now and went back to the market to find appropriate luggage.
She took Shestna’s advice and attended every demonstration of fighting she could get into over the next few days. She took every self-defense class that had a spot open, focusing on absorbing the knowledge of the instructors. She practiced alone in her room against a holographic opponent projected into the middle. Solid enough to fight but stopping short of trying to kill her, made of light, she could not read its mind to determine what it might do next. She had to rely on improvisation, mixing up the different techniques and moves to react and strike back. She took it street dirty as Nails and Dicer had taught her.
“That is a violation of the rules of engagement,” Nimrod said time and again until she turned off the rules of engagement. People on a space station brothel and gambling house were not going to fight by any rules of engagement and neither would she.
Thinking on the matter of money, she picked a day and returned to Earth to get some cash and teleported to the bathroom in Thomas’ office. He was finishing up a meeting, and came in to use the toilet afterward.
“Tyler! What in the world are you doing here?” he blurted, and took her in for a strong hug. “I’ve missed you.”
“I need to buy some gold. Say one pound in total.”
“What for?”
“Because I do,” she said. “Don’t ask me why.”
“Okay. I can send an order. It’ll be delivered in a couple hours. Wait in my office a minute.
She left him to do his business.
“How much is gold right now?” she asked, reaching into her pocket when he came out.
“Put that away. You don’t have to pay me for a piddling pound of gold,” he said, reaching for the phone to call his secretary. “Call the gold exchange and buy sixteen one ounce bars of gold, to be brought here immediately.”
He hung up to look at her where she sat in the chair.
“You look good. If I pick you up and carry you to my sofa to have my way with you, will you fight me off?” he asked.
She laughed. “You have not asked if I am free.”
“Okay, are you free?”
“No. I cost the same as a pound of gold today.”
He grinned, pressing the intercom button to tell his secretary no interruptions until the gold arrived. He pulled the sofa down into the bed. Covered with a sheet from the cupboard, he took her by the hand to the bed, and quickly discovered the short dress she wore was all she wore. She was naked against him while he was still dressed, kissing him back as eagerly as she ever had.
“I’ve missed you, love,” he grumbled, hand sliding down to grasp her small, round buttock. “You’ve been away too long.”
She said nothing, disengaging from him to lie back on the bed while he undressed. He wasted no time with foreplay, getting between those pale thighs of hers and striking deep in a single thrust to ride her long and hard.
“You fuck like you’ve not had sex in half a year,” he said while they rested.
“A good month or so, yes,” she admitted. “Forever ago it seems.”
The intercom beeped. The gold had arrived. The beeping stopped and Thomas started up again. Well-fucked and temporarily satisfied, she teleported to her mother’s house. No one was there, fortunately. Getting her mother’s long-forgotten jewelry making box out of the bedroom closet, she teleported to her room on the station.
Shegot to work turning gold bars into plain rings while the computer copied cd after cd onto a memory card and removed the lead vocals for her.
Making gold rings was simple enough to do. She melted two bars of gold in the small crucible while looking through the ring molds. She wanted a simple band, something she could make without markings, like a wide but plain wedding band in her own sizes for first and middle fingers.
The two molds found, she carefully wiped them with a clean cloth and set to making copies one at a time from the original. A very helpful ability she’d been using now and then since leaving Gramma Addie’s home. A pen, a pair of socks, an eyeliner, it was quickly becoming one of her favorite abilities.
When she had ten molds lined up, she used psychokinesis to take the small inner chamber out of the crucible, and carefully poured the molds just to the bottom of the pour spout. If she didn’t touch the crucible, she couldn’t be burned.
Realizing she should have copied the gold bars first, she made one copy of the remaining stacks. Originals locked into the wall safe, she went back to work. Another two bars in to melt, she took the molds to the tiny refrigerator. Vocally resetting it to 35 degrees to cool them quickly, she went back to check the progress of the bars.
Her door chimed. Shestna was there, having returned from his trip home, and she let him in.
“What are you doing? Julian says you have been hiding in your room.”
“I don’t hide. I’ve been to Earth to get something and am making rings out of gold bars so I can have ready currency on my assignment.”
“Visiting a lover?” he asked.
“Not that it’s any business of yours,” she replied, getting the molds out of the freezer.
At her table, she pried one apart to find the gold cool enough to handle. She got to work scraping off the rough edges from the pour spout and smoothing them over. Trimmings into the crucible and she wiped the molds out to ready them for the next set.
“These are Earth standard one ounce bars, are they not?” he asked, picking one up.
“They are.”
“This will not be much money.”
“No. But I can create copies from the bag of originals whenever I want.”
“You replicate matter also?” he asked.
“Why is it every time I tell you I can do something, you respond as if you cannot believe it?” she asked back with more than a little irritation.
“Because, Femina, the things you say you can do are things no one can do except the gods themselves.”
She picked up one of the finished rings and copied it, the second appearing in her other palm.
“Then I must be a goddess.”
“More than you realize,” he replied, ignoring her flippancy. “Keep the originals separate. Only ever replicate the originals.”
“Why?”
“Because if you replicate copies from copies, eventually the molecules will not be able to hold together. It is called replicative fading. I read an account, in the Doyen Confederacy, of the last person who could make copies of things.”
“Gotcha,” she said, realizing she would have to make rings out of the original bars and then make copies of the rings, so that she wouldn’t forever be making rings out of bars.
She brought a pair of socks to her hands and put the first ten rings into it. “There. Good enough?”
“A very good idea. If you can bring things to you, has Julian shown you how to create your own invisible vault?”
“No. What’s that?”
“Not a what so much as a where. You may be able to create a secret place in the fabric of space around you. A private place to store things like this gold, so they cannot be stolen.”
“Can yo
u do it?”
“No. Very few people can. You may not be able to. My abilities are limited to telepathy and the occasional burst of telekinesis,” he said. “Who is this lover you have come from?”
“Not your business. Don’t ask again.”
He eyed her, particularly annoyed, as she poured the molds full.
“You have not eaten today,” he said.
“What makes you say that?”
She carried the tray of molds to the refrigerator to place it inside.
“You generally get cranky and impatient when it has been too long since you have eaten. Leave this for now. Come eat.”
“I’m fine,” she said, easing two more bars into the crucible opening on top.
“No, you are not,” he said more firmly, and turned off the crucible. “You’re too stubborn to acknowledge it. Gold re-melts and no one will come in here to take it. You will come have food with me. We must talk on other important matters.”
She had no further choice except to fight with him as he picked her up bodily. He carried her outside the door before setting her down. Taking her by the hand to a restaurant that provided private tables, he would hear no protests.
The table was literally private, as each was surrounded by a force field. Items were ordered off a computer screen and arrived on a little teleportation platform below the screen. There was no wait staff.
“What is this assignment you are going on?” he asked after punching in an order.
“Finding out how some dude on some space station is stealing women and taking them back through time.”
“The Crecorday assignment? For someone who has never gone on an assignment at all? This is what they give you?”
“I am uniquely qualified to get in and not be out of place,” she said.
“The men who run Crecorday will expect you to whore yourself for them. They will make you if they can. That is what they do with females of every species.”
“They might try. Once. I do have other talents,” she sniped at him. “What’s got you in such a fantastic mood?”
He realized she was right. He was being unreasonably harsh with her. “My apologies, Femina. My father is wanting me to take a permanent wife and I am not wanting to.”