by M. D. Cooper
Seamus’s eyes grew wide, as he realized he’d pushed Connie too far and his life was in mortal danger. He fired up the powered lifter and had the crate up the ramp and into the Jones’s hold before she could say ‘get moving, shithead’.
Connie glanced up at the crew that was setting the ship’s hull plates back in place.
Connie bit back a curse and instead drew a long, slow breath.
“Pile on, pile up,” Connie muttered as she turned away from the Jones, looking to see if dockmaster Kieran was present. He was the only one who could get them on schedule, and she was more than certain he was behind half the delays.
She chewed at the inside of her cheek as she considered a half-dozen replies to Smythe’s question. In the end, she settled on,
She almost laughed at the sound of indignation that came to her over the Link.
Connie closed her eyes, pausing next to a rack of hull plating.
A choked laugh came across the Link.
Connie queried the sector NSAI for Kieran’s location and then pushed off the hull plates she’d leant on. It was time to beard the lion in his den.
Dockmaster Kieran was in charge of bays 8120 through 8130 in Sector 33, but acted like he ran the whole sector. Which was partially true, since he bowled his way over everyone around him. Even though he was only a master sergeant, she’d seen majors find somewhere else to be when he came through in a foul mood.
Connie suspected that the holdups they were constantly facing were related to the lockdown that had occurred when Admiral Deering had secreted the Jones and the Norse Wind in bay 8129 and denied anyone—including Kieran—access to the bay.
Connie walked out of the dock and followed the corridors to the sector’s admin offices. When she arrived, Kieran’s door was wide open, and she strode past the front desk—where the corporal stationed there protested her interruption—and into the master sergeant’s office.
“Technical Sergeant.” He grunted out the word without looking up from the plas sheets arrayed before him, knowing all too well how the rank irked her.
She drew a calming breath and then shut the door before responding. “You’re messing with my shit, Kieran. The Jones should be spaceworthy by now, but you just have one crew on it. What gives?”
Kieran shuffled his plas sheets together before looking up at her. “What gives is that you messed with my shit, so now it’s coming back around.”
Connie leant forward and planted her fists on the dockmaster’s desk. “You know full well that we didn’t do any of that. You want someone to get pissy at, go shit on Admiral Deering.”
The burly man eased back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. “Well, they shipped her off to someplace cold and unpleasant, so the only people I have to take my ire out on are you lot. Sorry, that’s just the way it is.”
Connie decided to make one final plea to his sense of decency—should he actually possess such a thing. “I have orders to get the Jones in the black in fourteen hours. They’re not the sort of directives that have a lot of flexibility.”
“Damn,” he shook his head, a cruel smile forming on his lips. “I don’t see how that can happen. You know half the hull plates are off your ship right now, right?”
“OK, shithead,” she growled at the master sergeant. “You wanna fuck with me? Think you can piss on me just because things didn’t go your way a few weeks back? I’m going to bring your entire world crashing down around your ears.”
Master Sergeant Kieran rose from his desk to tower over Connie, his face reddening. “Who the hell do you think you are, Sergeant? I’ll—”
“Be in a world of hurt when I tell your wife about the women you’ve been seeing on the side,” Connie shouted over him. “Who is it now, Rochel, Rayna, and Rory? That’s just the Rs, too.”
Kieran slashed his hand through the air as he hissed at her. “You open your bitch mouth about that shit, and I’ll—”
“You’re not going to do a damn thing, Kieran. Because I also know that you banged Samantha Higgs in the mess hall’s supply closet three weeks ago.”
A cruel grin formed on Connie’s lips as she watched the color drain from the big man’s face.
“Yeah, that’s right. You and Colonel Higgs aren’t on the best of terms to begin with…. I wonder what will happen when he finds out that you smashed his little sister up against the cleaning bots? Granted, it won’t be nearly as bad as what he does to you when I tell him you fucked his wi—”
“I’ll get it done,” Kieran growled.
“Get what done?” Connie asked innocently. “I want to hear you say it.”
“Your ship. It’ll be ready to fly in fourteen hours.”
She locked eyes with the master sergeant. “Make it ten, and you have a deal.”
“Ten!”
“Too big a number? Then let’s go for eight.”
Kieran’s jaw clamped shut, and he ground his teeth so loudly that Connie wondered if they would shatter.
“I can do ten.” He bit off each word.
“Excellent. I’ll get back down to the Jones and make sure the pace picks up.”
Connie turned and walked toward the door. Her hand was almost over the access panel when Kieran spoke up.
“How?”
“How what?” she asked without turning.
“You know what. How do you know all that?”
Connie turned just enough to take in the brutish man. “You’re sloppy. You hide what you do from people, but you forget about automatons and servitors. AIs monitor those. AIs see everything. Normally they don’t care who bangs who, but I have some very good friends who happen to be AIs, and they thought I might find that information useful. I didn’t want to use it, but…” she gave an exaggerated shrug. “You kinda forced my hand.”
Kieran sputtered, and Connie nodded to his desk. “Chop-chop. I expect to see big changes by the time I get back to the bay.”
She opened the door and walked out of his office, not bothering to close the door, certain that the corporal at the front desk was staring at his fuming boss, wondering how
a technical sergeant had just schooled the terror of Sector 33.
Halfway to the bay, Lovell, the Jones’s AI, reached out.
Connie chuckled.
CHASING SIMON
STELLAR DATE: 02.20.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TMS Fleetwings 17, Approaching Ceres
REGION: Main Asteroid Belt, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
In addition to maintaining her cover as the wealthy and mysterious Claire, Tanis spent much of her time aboard the Fleetwings 17 studying the datapacket Harm had provided on Simon after she’d accepted the mission.
The first thing she found to be noteworthy was that Simon was not military—at least there was nothing in the data provided to suggest that he was. As best she could tell, he was a civilian contractor who had worked his way up from corporate espionage to wet work, which had garnered MICI’s attention.
None of that was explicitly stated in the dossier, but the clues were there. A referenced connection to a corporation here, a date that coincided with an unsolved murder there.
Tanis wasn’t surprised to see that people like Simon got scooped up by Division 99, but it was a bit dismaying to see that a man who was clearly a criminal had gotten a free pass because of his skills.
While there was little information in the data packet about Simon’s past, there was almost nothing about his current assignment. In fact, it was so light on details, that she wondered if part of the packet was missing, or if there was supposed to have been a second transmission.
Though she and Darla had discussed not reaching out to Harm—lest he or his channels be compromised—she worried it was the wrong move. Still, the Infiltrator Chameleon was their only lead at present, and reaching out to Harm may let its puppetmaster know she had survived its attempted assassination in the boutique’s dressing room.
Tanis just hoped that when they arrived at Ceres, the IC’s actions would open up new avenues of investigation.
However, that didn’t keep her from her primary mission. She dug up what she could on where Simon had been on Ceres before he disappeared. A few surreptitious inquiries to AIs who Darla trusted turned up a trail on the planet’s ring, which then led to the planet’s surface.
But the end of the trail was seven days old. That was when Simon had simply disappeared. He’d checked into a hotel at the base of the Ahuna Mountains, and hadn’t been seen since.
The cover he’d been using at the time was that of a man named Kyran, and none of the alias’s credit accounts had been used since check-in. Tanis scoured every feed she could get her hands on, but nothing showed anyone remotely close to resembling Simon’s division-registered covers entering or exiting the hotel in the days following.
That didn’t mean it was impossible for the man to have snuck out. Plenty of service vehicles came and went, any one of them providing more than enough room for Simon to hide.
Darla’s avatar appeared in Tanis’s mind, shaking her head.
Tanis groaned.
A few choice responses flashed through Tanis’s mind, but she decided to ignore the AI. Moments later, an alert flashed on her HUD, and she smiled at the news.
CASSIE HAWK
STELLAR DATE: 02.17.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Kirby Jones, Bay 8129, Sector 33
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Harm Ellis pushed a power-truck onto the Kirby Jones, keeping an eye out for the woman he wanted to have a chat with. Something very strange was going on, and he wanted to get to the bottom of it.
“Hold 2,” Spaceman Liam directed Harm, and he nodded before turning down the side corridor.
Looks like my quick and dirty disguise is working, Harm thought with a laugh as he glanced at himself in a reflective door. He looked close to his normal appearance, but with just a few changes to hair, brow, and jaw, no one would confuse him for the Enfield scientist known as Harm Ellis.
Today, he was Randy Drush. Which was to say that it was a day like any other—one when he lied about who he was.
Sometimes Harm had to remind himself of what his real name was; it had been so long since he’d used it. Even in the Division, he went by Harm Ellis. Of course, that was because he was undercover as an Enfield employee with access to Division 99, working in concert with them to place AIs with L2 humans.
Oh the tangled web we weave, he thought to himself before depositing his cargo in Hold 2.
He tapped into the ship’s internal surveillance systems while traversing its corridors, and queried them for Connie’s whereabouts. As luck would have it, she was just two holds down. He made his way to her location like he had every right to be walking about the ship.
He entered the hold to see Connie bent over, looking through a crate that bore the label ‘Conway Hot Tub and Spa’. He frowned, wondering why something like that was on the ship as he closed the door and activated a privacy field.
“Connie,” he began, only to find the engineer facing him with a gun in her hand.
“That’s my name,” she grunted. “Kieran send you? Tell him he can’t muscle his way out of this or shut me up. The AIs know to drop everything onto the public nets if anything happens to me.”
“You blackmailed Kieran?” Harm asked with a laugh. “I guess that explains the four hull repair crews out there.”
“If you�
��re not with Kieran, then what’s your game?”
“No games,” Harm replied. “It’s me, Harm Ellis.”
Though the rest of Tanis’s crew didn’t know of Harm, he had worked with Connie to gather the Kirby Jones’s crew several weeks ago while Tanis was being held under suspicion of murder.
Connie’s eyes widened. “Harm? Nice disguise. What are you doing skulking onto my ship?”
“Trying to figure out where you’re going in such a hurry.”
“What do you mean?” A look of concern came over Connie. “I was certain it was you sending us out! Everything is coming down through Colonel Higgs, but I can tell he’s just relaying orders. A few plas sheets have had your initials hidden on them.”
“My initials? I’d never do something so crude, Connie. Where are you bound?” Harm asked as he considered the implications of someone masquerading—poorly—as him.
“We’re to meet with Tanis on Ceres. She’ll beat us there, but we won’t be too far behind.”
“Ceres?” Harm asked in surprise. “She’s supposed to be hanging out with her boy toy down on Mars! Have you spoken to her?”
Connie shook her head. “Like I said, I figured this was all your doing and that you wouldn’t want us blathering about it.”
“Can you forward me some of the orders?”
“Sure.”
Connie pulled the lading plas off the crate she had opened and handed it to him. “This one has your initials in a microdot. Forwarding the orders.”
Harm shook his head at the ‘HE’; it was obviously something put there just for Connie to find. As he reviewed the orders, he spotted a data pattern that he watermarked documents with—one that he didn’t think anyone else knew about.
“Ahhh crap!” he exclaimed. “I did send these orders.”
“Glad you agree with me,” Connie replied. “But either you’ve got amnesia, or shit’s just gotten weird.”
Harm handed the plas back to her. “Weird with a side of WTF. OK, I have to go. I need to find out who has set this in motion.”
“Uhhh…what about us?” she asked.