by M. D. Cooper
She pulled on a pair of silver boots, realizing too late that not only were they heel-less, but they didn’t flex at all in the ankle.
“All passengers, please settle into your beds and strap in for a hard burn. We’re looking at nine gs to match Insi’s rotation. Burn in three minutes.”
Every holodisplay in the cabin switched to show the countdown, and Tanis quickly pushed all the clothing she’d strewn about back into their crates before pulling on the uncomfortable boots and laying on the bed.
“You know…when you saw me pulling these boots out of the container, you could have mentioned the lack of heels.”
“I guess on the plus side, if I kick someone, they’re going to feel it in the morning. And I only have to wear this to the hotel that you’ve booked for Claire, and then I can be Bella again.”
* * * * *
Once the ship had docked with Ceres’ Insi Ring, Tanis placed Bella’s clothing in a follow-bot, and instructed the ship’s NSAI to have the rest of her belongings delivered to the hotel.
Her cabin and the corridors of the Fleetwing 17 were carpeted, but once she arrived in the debarkation area, Tanis found that the boots had an added feature she’d been unaware of.
Every time they hit the hard deck, they rang like a bell.
Heads turned, and dozens of annoyed glares were sent her way, while she had to walk with her head held high, as though she fully intended to sound like an ancient church tower while striding through the customs arch.
Tanis growled at Darla at one point.
Tanis maintained a serene expression as she reached her waiting stationcar outside the terminal and sank into the seat as it took off. The relatively new Insi Ring—named after the ancient ring the Andersonians built around Ceres only to be destroyed by the AIs at the outset of the Sentience Wars—did not have a terraformed inner surface. Instead, a clear overhead covered the ring, leaving Ceres visible, hanging above.
The dwarf planet was the largest object in the Main Asteroid Belt—almost twice the diameter of Vesta, which still only gave it a circumference of just under three thousand kilometers, and roughly the same surface area as the Indian subcontinent on Earth.
Naturally, Ceres had just three percent of Earth’s gravity, but that was no longer the case, courtesy of the GE miniature black hole in its center.
Installed in the twenty-eighth century, Ceres’ GE MBH brought the planet’s surface gravity up to a hair more than Luna’s, close to 0.2gs.
Or, in Tanis’s opinion, ‘comfortable’.
Unlike Mars 1, the Insi Ring was geostationary in relation to Ceres’ surface, anchored to the planet by myriad cables that stretched to both the equator and the poles.
Before humans began to alter it, Ceres had a nine-hour day. However, to give the Insi Ring sufficient angular momentum for artificial gravity—while still keeping it anchored to the planet—that day had been shortened to just four hours.
The end result was that Insi had nearly identical gravity to that of Ceres’ surface.
Though many of her memories of Ceres were not fond, as she gazed up through the clear ring-dome at the planet above, she couldn’t help but admit how beautiful it was, given the initial failed terraforming attempts, and the near total-destruction when the original Insi Ring had collapsed onto the planet.
A large section of that ancient ring was still visible where it had fallen near the equator, maintained as a memorial to the war and the lives that had been lost when Psion had attacked the Andersonian Collective over a thousand years ago.
Sometimes Tanis had trouble connecting to the ancient history of the Sol System, but seeing a four-hundred kilometer length of once-orbital ring standing out of the forests and plains of a planet’s surface was a stark reminder that the price humans and AIs paid to learn how to live together had been a high one.
Darla said, as Tanis continued to gaze at the planet.
Tanis gave a soft laugh.
The rest of the ride was made in silence, and when Tanis finally reached her suite in The Prima Plaza Hotel, her assorted luggage was waiting for her there.
“Huh.” she glanced back at the follow-bot. “Guess I didn’t need you after all.”
The bot turned to leave her room, and Tanis called out. “Wait! Stupid thing. I need to get my clothes out of you.”
The bot returned, and Tanis collected her belongings from it, surprised to hear the machine make a rude sound as it trundled out of her room.
Darla muttered.
“Why’s that?” Tanis asked as she released the clasps on the silver boots and threw the cursed things halfway across the room.
Tanis had never considered it in that light before. She had noticed that most automatons and servitors were very impersonal, but hadn’t realized it was done on purpose as a differentiator.
“I can see how that would be an issue,” Tanis said, unsure of how much the subject bothered Darla.
“Damn…I don’t like the idea of the IC getting that far ahead of me.”
Darla inserted a few blind spots into the hotel’s surveillance that allowed for ‘Bella’ to leave the room unnoticed. An hour later, the organizers of the ‘Talents of Ancient History’ show were effusively thanking the martial arts expert for attending and demonstrating the art of karate to them.
Tanis had to hold back a laugh as she considered that, a few weeks ago, Bella hadn’t even existed, and now people were falling over themselves to have her perform a demonstration at their event.
Harm certainly does good work—except for when it comes to checking in on me.
Tanis began her presentation with the Pinan NiDan kata, explaining to the crowd as she moved through the forms how karate originated with the peasants of Okinawa, an island south of Japan. The people of Okinawa had been forbidden to own weapons by the Japanese emperor, so they combined their knowledge of fighting with Chinese martial arts to create karate.
It was an abbreviated version of history—a subject that Tanis found fascinating—but she knew that the crowd had come to see her fight, not talk, so once she completed two more katas, she summoned her first opponent onto the low, ten-by-ten-meter stage.
It was a
simple combat automaton that the show organizers had provided, and she defeated it in moments, smashing the machine’s damage sensors and dropping it to the deck.
Following that, two more automatons joined it, and then eventually she was simultaneously fighting seven of the machines.
The crowd was cheering, and Tanis wondered if they’d be as impressed should they learn she was an L2. Though people with enhancements like hers were respected for what they could do, most people still felt wary around them, jealous of what they felt to be an unfair advantage granted by greater neuron density, interconnectivity, and signal transfer speed.
Finally, after she had bested ten automatons, a large man shouldered his way through the crowd.
As he got closer, he called out, “I see you can beat a bunch of bots—probably all programmed to fail—but can you beat a human?”
Tanis ground her teeth. If she were ‘Tanis’, she’d just walk away…maybe after shooting the bastard with a pulse pistol, but it wasn’t in Bella’s nature to turn down a fight like this.
“I’m going to turn you into a smear,” he grunted, while Darla fed Tanis visuals of the brute’s fighting skill. His real name was Tom, but in the ring, he fought as the ‘Skull Crusher’.
She stepped back to her side of the ring and settled into masuba dachi, slowly rolling her neck to work out a small kink that had developed while fighting the automatons.
Skull Crusher took the time for a few quick stretches, and then began to growl. Tanis cocked an eyebrow, and then gave a slight bow before settling back into shomen neko ashi dachi, her weight on her left rear foot, toes of her right resting lightly on the ground.
She waited patiently for his assault, which was—predictably—a forward lunge of sorts. His arms were spread wide, as if he was expecting to easily encompass her. Almost languidly, she stepped in and delivered a mae geri kick to his jaw.
She took care not to kick him hard enough to shatter the bone, but the blow clearly dislocated his jaw. She hoped it would end the fight quickly, while the crowd collectively gasped, and then cheered with delight.
A wild howl tore from Skull Crusher’s throat, as he reeled back and reassessed the woman before him while shoving his jaw back into place—much to the horror of the throng.
“Gonna take a lot more than that to take me down, little girl,” he grunted.
Tanis didn’t respond, only settled back into her waiting stance while he worked his jaw.
Then, without warning, he launched another frontal assault, only to dart left at the last moment, swinging his right fist—which was nearly the size of Tanis’s head—toward her torso.
Tapping into her L2 reflexes, Tanis twisted around his strike, delivering a hammer fist to his neck with her right hand, and a blow to his solar plexus with her left.
Though she delivered the attack with all her strength, it barely affected the behemoth, and he grabbed for her with his left hand, nearly getting it around her right arm, before Tanis twisted away, dashing to safety.
The pair began to circle one another. Skull Crusher attempted to grab and punch Tanis a few more times, but each time, she evaded his blows, delivering a few mae geri kicks to his wrist when he overextended his reach.
It had become readily apparent that Skull Crusher liked to grapple more than hit. It made sense, given that he would normally fight within his own weight class, and his opponents likely moved as slowly as he did. Tanis’s ability to evade his attacks was making the man frustrated, but no more than she was with not being able to hit him hard enough to do more than annoy him.
After five minutes of dancing around the brute, she decided that the time for caution was over. She drew up her right knee, twisting ever so slightly to hint at a roundhouse kick, which caused Skull Crusher to draw his left leg back and turn his torso away.
Here goes.
Utilizing every ounce of speed she possessed, she slammed her right foot down and spun her back to the man—something that would have horrified Sensei Guthrie. In the midst of that move, she whipped her left leg around and slammed it into the inside of the brute’s right knee. At the same time, she brought her left elbow into his throat, giving her kick additional leverage.
For a moment, Tanis met with more resistance than she expected, but as “Kiai!” tore free from her throat, a surge of energy burst through her, and her enemy’s knee broke with a resounding crack.
The room fell silent as Skull Crusher screamed and fell to the floor. Tanis returned to her side of the raised stage and bowed once more before stepping off the platform and walking away.
The stunned crowd parted to let her through, and she was almost out of the room when the cheering began.
An hour later, she’d finally finished giving out her last holosig to her new fans, and boarded her ring-to-surface shuttle.
Tanis wanted to give Darla a hard time, but with the endorphins from the fight still flowing through her, she couldn’t bring herself to feel upset about the delay.
Neither spoke further on the flight—other than for Darla to inform Tanis that Skull Crusher’s manager was threatening to sue her—and twenty minutes later, they were settling onto a cradle at Hunter’s Lodge Spaceport.
Tanis did her best to ignore the incongruity of a small city being named a ‘lodge’ as she gathered her things and caught a hovercar to the Golden Gazelle Hotel, which sat at the edge of the city, at the base of the rugged Ahuna Mountains.
A few minutes later, the hovercar set down in front of the hotel, and Tanis grabbed her pack and stepped out into the warm air and cloudy-day sunlight of Ceres. A flight of stairs led from the street to the hotel, and in the low gravity, she leapt over them in a single bound.
A voice called out from behind her, and Tanis turned to see a young man struggling to climb the steps.
“Damn! How’d you do that?” he asked.
Tanis shook her head in dismay as she watched him put his foot down and push off too hard, going more sideways than straight.
With practiced ease, she darted backward and caught him before he fell on his side, twisting in the air and landing halfway up the steps, the wobbly man secure in her arms.
She couldn’t help but notice—as they were face-to-face—that he was rather attractive and had a pleasing musk.
“Um, you have to be careful to push off in the center of your mass,” she said, setting him down carefully. “You have five times the strength here that you’re used to, so if you push to the side, you’re five times more likely to go the opposite direction.”
“I, uh…I get that in principle,” the man said. “Practice is turning out to be a bit more difficult.”
“Ea
rther, right?” Tanis asked as she helped him walk up the steps.
“Yeah, grew up dirtside, near Mexico City. You?”
Tanis almost said Mars, but corrected herself to give Bella’s birthplace. “Luna, so Ceres feels just like home.”
“I don’t know how you folks manage here. Even most space stations spin up to point seven gees.”
“Well, we’re born to it. Plus side, learning to walk hurts a lot less, and we do it sooner.”
They reached the top of the steps, and the man smoothed his hair back and gave Tanis a sheepish grin. “Thanks for that, I guess it would be easier to learn when you’re that small. Being full-sized, it still hurts a bit when you fall on a staircase, even in low-g. I’m Kaebel, by the way.”
“Bella,” Tanis replied as they began to walk toward the hotel’s glass doors. “So what brings you here to Ceres?”
“Business,” Kaebel replied. “My firm makes superconductor batteries, and we have a new version that we’re trying to market here.”
“Oh? Personal?”
“Yeah, only three centimeters in diameter, but twice the charge with no overheating issues.”
“Sounds impressive,” Tanis replied with an accepting, but slightly patronizing smile. “I prefer a different type of energy.”
Kaebel glanced over at her, then his eyes widened. “Oh! Hey! You’re getting some play in the feeds right now—daaaamn! Did you break that guy’s leg?”
She chuckled. “Yeah, he had it coming. Was a little publicity stunt the organizers set up—but didn’t tell me about. He was playing for keeps, so I did too.”
Kaebel chuckled as the hotel doors slid aside, and the pair walked in. “Glad you got that out of your system before you encountered me.”
“I would never strike out at a stranger like that,” Tanis said in a serious tone. “Unless they were striking me first.”
The man gave her a worried look, but she winked, and he let out a relieved sigh. “Don’t say things like that. I saw how fast you moved in those recordings. You could kill me before I even knew it.”