by M. D. Cooper
“I am indeed serious. Things are quiet at the moment and I intend to take advantage of that. I’ll never be more than a few light minutes away. I’ll be certain to keep a laser comm trained on the Intrepid.”
“The admiral will never clear you for it.”
Tanis smiled and Ouri knew she wasn’t going to like the response.
“The admiral never has to know.”
CHAPTER 9
STELLAR DATE: 3227185 / 08.20.4123 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Cruithine Station
REGION: InnerSol, Sol Space Federation
Tanis looked out the porthole at Cruithne Station as the transport matched velocities with the asteroid habitat. There really wasn’t much asteroid visible anymore, though here and there a bit of raw rock did show between spurs and domes. Originally merely an aggregation of ice and iron no more than five kilometers across, the station had expanded far beyond those bounds into a sprawling structure over one hundred kilometers long. Her access to the structural design showed that none of the original asteroid remained.
Normally once the resources from such a stellar body were exhausted there would be no further reason for mankind to remain, but Cruithne orbited the sun in resonance with Earth, always on the same side of Sol. Depending on where it was in its year it was either accelerating away from earth, or Earth was accelerating toward it. The result was a very useful location for transporting shipments in and out of InnerSol. In addition Cruithne also crossed the orbit of Venus and Mars from time to time, further adding to its list of useful locations.
This was one of those times when Cruithne would come very close to Mars and the trip only took two days, something Tanis was grateful for as the transport she was on wasn’t at all passenger-friendly. The crew was even less so. They were either ignoring her, or coming on to her. Tanis had gained a great familiarity with the walls of her berth.
When the shipnet announced a seal and equalization Tanis was moving down the corridor before the station rules finished posting. She wasn’t terribly worried about them, other than the fact she was certain to break some.
Cruithne fell under the jurisdiction of the InnerSol portion of the stellar federation, but only nominally. It was owned and run by an old family of traders, and had been for as long as anyone could remember. They were wealthy and not overly concerned about scruples. The combination made for a station that looked like it was out of the vids from the early third millennium. It was readily apparent that one of the reasons the family was so wealthy was that they didn’t bother with preventative maintenance…or cleaning.
Tanis moved out onto the dock and immediately had to navigate around an argument between the ship’s supercargo and a repair crew. It seemed that the crew was repairing part of the life-support system at the transport’s berth. The main cargo hatch was completely blocked off by conduit hanging from the ceiling like vines in a jungle, and more than a dozen pulled-up deck plates.
After circumventing the mess, Tanis logged on to the station net while Angela chatted up the traffic and mass balancing AI for information. She checked the public areas to see if there were any alerts or warnings that would affect her plans before beginning a slow circuit of the station.
Even though she didn’t expect any—or much—trouble, knowing the lay of the docks and where clever hiding places or distractions could be found was never a bad thing. More than one vendor hauling carts filled with random trinkets and knickknacks trundled along the dock. A larger than average population of greasy food carts was also in evidence. She suspected that some of them must be doing double duty both keeping a lookout and smuggling items onto various ships.
Tanis was undercover, her net presence and ID switched to a new record that Angela and Ouri had set up. She was certain that they had picked this particular disguise as a joke or some sort of punishment for overworking them.
She was masquerading as a Golist, a religious sect of quasi-cyborgs who believed in reaching enlightenment by minimizing motion and being at peace with oneself. They also were fierce traders. The religion’s roots were an odd combination of capitalism and Taoism.
Because she wasn’t a cyborg, the sect’s regular attire was not comfortable at all. Ironically the part of her that was the most comfortable was her head where nearly all of her skin had been removed.
Covered in a silver metal, with only a sliver of skin around her right eye still in place, her head had a slightly ovoid shape. The liquid steel that covered it could take any form, but the standard pose was a totally expressionless mask with no mouth, nose, or ears.
Angela said.
Her body was covered in a polymer that coated her like a second skin, which was somewhat uncomfortable as it really wasn’t meant to wear over skin, but typically in place of it. She had opted for the temporary discomfort as re-growing the skin on her face was going to itch enough as it was; she could suffer a few days to save the weeks of itching and scratching across her entire body. The glossy white covering was largely inflexible; not that strange since the Golists deplored excess motion. Tanis had allowed for more movement in the arms than was typical, but her legs were essentially straight as a beam and ended in fine points that hovered several inches off the deck. It took a good bit of power to achieve that effect, which meant that most of her thigh muscle was waiting for her back on the Intrepid, the area it usually occupied now filled with SC batteries.
An itch began to twinge way behind Tanis’s right knee.
They passed several Golists and Tanis passed tokens to them, their avatars nodding serenely to one another on the general net.
Angela asked.
Tanis spent a few hours working her way through the commercial district, identifying several routes from the bar where she was to meet the contact to the vessel she would be leaving on. She also checked calendars on the local nets to ensure that no maintenance or large shipments of cargo would get in her way.
Eventually the time for the meeting drew near and Tanis made her way to The Human Condition. She was not entirely certain she wanted to see the reason the venue went by that name.
Tanis entered the bar and crossed to where the servitor, a human in this case, was busy pouring drinks. The place was clean, the walls a gleaming white, the décor mostly steel and plas. All in all it was pretty stark, meant to draw the eye to the fact that the tables and chairs were made of humans. Not dead humans by any means, but live humans, mostly with little modification, and a lot of clamps and rods holding them in place.
The scene brought back memories of Toro—images of people turned into things, artwork and worse, flashed through her mind.
ela’s avatar shuddered.
Tanis considered what had been required for her current cover. There were several dancers at various stages between human and things decidedly not human slithering up and down poles, and in one case, mostly embedded in the pole. Tanis observed with Golist serenity, admiring the dancers’ wholesale devotion to their expression by merging their human physicality with an expression of inner self. Privately Tanis reaffirmed her position that some people’s inner selves were just weird.
Tanis closed her eye—the other was currently covered over by her flowmetal—and calmed herself, exuding a zen-like peace as she waited for her contact to arrive. That didn’t mean that she wasn’t paying attention to what was around her. One of the advantages of the fluid metallic covering was that she had optical sensors all around her head, giving her a 360-degree view of the bar. She wondered if it would be possible to retain the ability after this mission, depending on whether the TSF let her keep the flowmetal—something she considered unlikely.
As Tanis surveyed the scene, one of the dancers caught her eye and she watched the person move around a series of poles near the center of the establishment. She wasn’t entirely certain if it was male or female, or if such designations even applied. It appeared to have no bones, or if it did, none were evident. The dancer’s general shape was that of a lithe woman, but it was totally asexual, and while it often bent at what would normally be the locations of joints, at other times entire limbs became fluid and snakelike.
As its dance progressed, Tanis saw that it was also able to change the overall dimensions of its body, almost as though its skin were no more than a stretchy membrane. Its stomach distended at one point, and then it grew breasts, moments later to lose them and become smooth and featureless again. Its head would swell and become conical and narrow and wrap around a pole before thickening and resuming the shape of a normal human skull.
Tanis had to admit she was impressed; whoever this dancer was, it had some of the most extreme modifications she had ever seen. If it wasn’t for the abstract beauty of the dance, Tanis would have thought the creature wasn’t human at all. Dance was something that could always betray a lack of humanity. Any machine or AI would inevitably have some evidence of math or an artificial lack of math in its dance. It was something that was hard to spot, but Tanis had watched enough dancing to know there was a certain element to organic dance and expression was not something a machine could replicate.
Tanis laughed; not outwardly, her face currently having no mouth, but she found Angela’s ever-prosaic attitude amusing.
They continued their silent observation of their surroundings until a message came over the establishment’s local net informing Tanis that their contact was waiting for them in the rear of the bar. The message contained directions to a dressing room. She hovered past the other patrons to a hall in the rear and through a door with the label “Adrienne” on it.
The inside of the room was plush and opulent, a distinct difference from the austere look of the common area outside. There were several holo mirrors, showing a 360-degree view as Tanis stood in the center of the space waiting for her contact to show up.
The lack of a second exit unnerved her and she assessed the structure of the walls to see if she could break through them if needed. They were little more than a thin plas and she determined that with a few blasts of a pulse rifle she could create an additional exit should the need arise. The moments ticked by and then the door opened, revealing the identity of Adrienne.
It was the fluid dancer. She—“Adrienne” seemed to imply gender—slinked into the room, passed Tanis and sprawled onto a mound of cushions, her form melting over them.
“You must be Yora,” the woman said. I am Adrienne, as you may have guessed.”
A connection presented itself over a secure Link; Tanis opened it and responded.
“So, to the point and without pleasantries. Normal, I suppose, for one of your type. You sculpt yourselves into paragons of beauty and power and then abstain from pleasure entirely. I, personally, would not be able to resist.”
Data was delivered to Tanis and she looked it over, examining specs and the oblique descriptions of jobs performed. It matched the data on the group that had attacked the Intrepid and she determined that the time for her disguise was over.
Tanis’s tone brooked no discussion.
“Their what? Why would you need to know that?” Adrienne asked. Shock rippling—literally—across her face.
“Thank you.” Tanis allowed the flowmetal to form a mouth since her cover was no longer necessary. Besides, her voice could be very menacing. “You’re going to tell me everything you know about their job to attack the Intrepid and you’re going to do it with a song in your heart.”
“You don’t think I haven’t…” Adrienne’s smug expression drooped into surprise. “You’ve got a suppre
ssion field!”
“Well, it wouldn’t do for you to call in whatever thugs you have on hand to stop our little conversation. I don’t think we need for this to get unpleasant, but I won’t really mind if it does.”
Adrienne sat silently for a moment, then in a flash her entire body moved toward the far wall. Tanis realized there must be some sort of open vent that the woman could fit through. Reacting on instinct, Tanis pulsed her hover system and leapt into the air, coming down into Adrienne, the needle points at the ends of her legs piercing what would be a normal person’s calves.
Adrienne shrieked, twisting in pain, and Tanis spat a glob of flowmetal over her face where it flowed into Adrienne’s mouth, swelling to block out further noise.
“Easy now.” Tanis’s tone carried no small amount of menace. “This can get a lot worse if you don’t cooperate.”
The look Adrienne shot at Tanis said it all; she wasn’t willingly going to give up the person who had hired the merc crew. Whoever it was, Tanis was certain it must be a big player. Most of the time an agent like this wouldn’t hold back after being skewered.
“No problem.” Tanis exuded calm. “We’ll just go the standard route, making you more scared of me. You see, I’m currently a little outside the scope of my assigned duties, if you get my meaning. Not a lot of people know where I am, and even if anyone does link my whereabouts to the remains of your mutilated—but not dead—body, they’ll not get upset. Not only am I going to hurt you until you give me a name, but I’ll leave you alive for whoever you’re so afraid of as well.”