by M. D. Cooper
“Yeah…hence the ‘dammit’.”
“ ‘Well’ what?” Tanis asked, wishing Darla would just spit it out.
ASSIGNMENT
STELLAR DATE: 01.18.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Suite 1300-2, Grand Éire Resort
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
“OK…the fact that you’re actually here at the Grand Éire is enough to have me flabbergasted,” Connie said after silently listening to Tanis talk through the last few days’ events.
“Oh, trust me,” Tanis gave a soft laugh. “I’m still flabbergasted that I’m here too. Feel free to carry on in that regard.”
“Noted.” Connie took a sip of the wine the servitor had brought her. After, she eyed the glass, and then downed the rest before tossing it over her shoulder to be caught by one of the servitors.
“Tempting fate?” Tanis asked, shaking her head.
“That model of servitor is advertised with ‘lightning reflexes’. I was just curious if that was really the case.”
“I’d’ve spotted you a wine glass, Darla,” Connie countered.
“Holy shit, are you serious?” Connie exclaimed, and Tanis paled. She’d not been exceptionally careful with the goblet she held, either.
“Sorry,” Connie muttered. “Not like I’m normally careless…I just needed to act irrationally for a moment—you know, to fit in with how fucked up this all is.”
“It’s a giant pile of what the hell, that’s for sure,” Tanis said, carefully handing her glass to a servitor for a refill. “Certainly the most interesting shore leave I’ve ever had.”
“Well, yeah…you’re an L2 with an AI, Tanis. That makes you a full on freak of nature—” Connie stopped, chuckling at Tanis’s shocked expression. “In the best way imaginable, though I guess you’re really not ‘of nature’ much anymore.”
A grimace formed on Tanis’s face. “Not sure how I feel about that.”
“Your logic makes my brain hurt,” Connie said with a snort. “And I’m already barely able to parse what’s gone on here.”
“Well, I need you to dive a bit deeper into this quagmire.” Tanis met Connie’s wide-eyed gaze with her own. “I want to know who Unger really was and what else he might have picked up at Cune.”
“A bit hard to find that out from—” Connie’s voice cut off and she shook her head. “Seriously, Tanis? I came here for a little spa treatment, some of the extra fancy pillow mints, and mojitos down on the Éire’s lake. Now you want to send me off to Cune?”
Tanis pursed her lips, knowing that she was asking a lot of her ship’s engineer. “You always tell me you know people in every port. I assume you know folks at Cune?”
“Well, yeah, but…can’t I just reach out to them? That place is two AU away right now, it would take almost a week to get there.”
“What am I, your personal PI?” Connie said with a groan, but Tanis could tell from the tone in her voice that the sergeant would do it. It was the same way she sounded when she reminded Tanis that it was time for Kirby Jones’s bi-annual hull scrub. She hated it, but she knew it had to be done.
“So you’re in.” Tanis said it as a statement, not a question.
“Yeah, but one of you is footing the bill. The service doesn’t pay me enough for jaunts like this.”
“First class!” Connie demanded, gesturing for one of the servitors to bring her another glass of wine.
“And a group of male strippers to entertain me each night.”
“She’s kidding,” Tanis said.
“Actually—”
“Connie.”
The sergeant rolled her eyes and sagged back into the sofa. “Fine. But I want some credit for expenses.”
“I have to ask,” the engineer began after a brief pause. “Why are you doing this, Darla?” She waved her hands at their surroundings. “All this. The Grand Éire, paying for me to go to Cune?”
Tanis had to admit that she’d wondered about Darla’s motivations herself. It was possible that the AI just had so much credit that all of this was a pittance, or that she really was trying to impress Tanis and put her at ease.
In a way, it felt like Darla was manipulating her, but at the same time, it could also be that the AI was generally nice and generous.
Downside of essentially marrying a person you’ve just met, she thought, as Connie called one of the servitors over for a massage.
“If I’m going to spend a couple weeks round-trip getting to Cune and back, I’m going to need to limber up,” Connie said, and the couch firmed up, lifting her higher to give the servitor more leverage when working on her.
“OK.” Tanis rose and walked to the edge of the pool, staring out into the sunlit space surrounding Vesta. “Looks like your flight doesn’t leave for another five hours, anyway.”
REVIEW
STELLAR DATE: 01.18.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Suite 1300-2, Grand Éire Resort
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
“I don’t know how to behave,” Tanis muttered aloud as she looked herself over in the holomirror. “I’m dressed like a civilian, going into a military hospital. Plus someone out there wants to kill me, and my CO has bought the ‘random attack’ narrative.”
Tanis gave one last look at her image in the holomirror. She had found more muted clothing in the wardrobe Darla had stocked, and now wore a pair of snug black pants, a camisole, and a fitted jacket.
It would have been perfectly respectable, except that the jacket only fastened right below her breasts, then swept away to the sides, the camisole was cropped high, and the pants slung low. All of which combined to expose her navel—something that Tanis felt was more than a little improper.
“Maybe I can find a longer shirt,” Tanis suggested, turning back to the wardrobe.
“Tell that to the space force,” Tanis replied, then she sighed and slid a carbon-nanoblade into a shoulder sheath.
The MPs still had her lightwand, but she wasn’t about to wander Vesta completely unarmed. Not when someone out there wanted her dead for reasons she still hadn’t discerned.
Tanis didn’t reply as she walked out of the suite, Darla’s hacked feeds hovering on the periphery of her vision. A part of her knew she should be worried that Darla had walked through the Grand Éire’s security to access their feed, but given their lack of concern over her
attack, she was more than willing to look the other way.
My life’s on the line, after all. And I still don’t have a clue what for.
According to the feeds, her level of the Éire’s spire was still unoccupied—save for herself—and she saw no one in the corridor during her walk to the lift.
When she arrived, a lift car was waiting, and Tanis took it up to the resort’s ring level, and strode across the lobby, eyes locked forward, though her attention roved across every person and automaton in the space.
She knew it was silly—no one would attack her here, in a highly secured area of the resort with dozens of people around. But just like the security feeds, she wasn’t willing to stake her life on trusting others.
As she walked through the resort’s portal and across the gardens that separated it from the maglev platform, she wondered at how readily she’d accepted Darla’s side-stepping of the law.
Maybe it’s because being in the space force has trained me to tackle all problems head-on with maximum force. Things get loose out in the black.
The AI’s adamant response surprised Tanis.
Tanis shook her head as the maglev pulled up.
Darla snorted.
Tanis groaned inwardly.
Tanis walked toward the glowing yellow line that marked off the safe edge of the platform as the maglev train approached, shaking her head in disbelief.
The AI chuckled in Tanis’s mind.
Darla’s laugh started up again, softer this time, and she sent Tanis an image of her avatar winking.
Darla didn’t respond immediately, and Tanis wondered if she’d offended the AI.
Tanis had tangential knowledge of how AIs bred new minds. Usually, multiple AI minds came together and created new offspring. Frequently they drew humans into the mix, building young AIs that maintained a close connection with the parent species.
It was Tanis’s turn to chuckle as she stared out the maglev’s window, watching the broad stretch of open station sweep pass by before the train pulled up through the overhead and out into vacuum.
Tanis nodded absently, aware that many humans had feared that in the past—many still did, though they were the minority.
Growing up on Mars, Tanis had always been proud to live in a more progressive society than those in the Terran Hegemony. While places like Luna and the High Terra ring were more than accepting of AIs and their place in the grand scheme of things, other places like Earth and Venus still treated AIs like second class citizens in many ways—even after a thousand years of co-existence.
Mars was in many ways the opposite. Tanis had been altered before birth to ensure her mental capacity was that of an L1—a person whose brain contained more neurons, dendrites, and axons than a standard L0 human.
At age eighteen, her father had pressured her to undergo the procedure to be upgraded to an L2—what he’d hoped her pre-natal alterations would have produced in the first place.
Tanis had been hesitant at the time, knowing that it would preclude the option of ever being paired with an AI…at least with the technology at the time. But her father had insisted, and Tanis had bowed to his will.
Looking back, she didn’t regret becoming an L2—though her decisions afterward had upset her father greatly. He’d had a grand plan for her: his own little puppet that he’d see become a business mogul like himself.
But while in the recovery room, Tanis had explored her mind, testing the bounds of her new cognitive abilities, and had come to a conclusion: she felt stifled.
Exploring the Sol System, perhaps even the stars someday…that was what she craved. Adventure, excitement, and travel. Anything was possible.
When she had expressed her desires to her father, he’d frozen all her accounts and funds, telling her she could travel once she’d committed to the course of action he’d planned for her life.
Such an irony that the procedure he insisted on in order to make me into his perfect pawn was the catalyst for all his plans ending.
That very day, a TSF recruiter had messaged her. They were offering significant signing bonuses to L2s who joined the space force’s Officer Candidate School. A week later, Tanis had enrolled in OCS, and the rest was history.
Now
here she was, captain of a starship, and paired with an AI as an L2.
If someone wasn’t trying to kill me, I’d be living the ultimate dream.
A small voice in the back of her mind suggested that perhaps someone wanting to kill her was just the sort of thing that made living the dream even better. She loved combat, the thrill of the chase; finding out what was up with Unger and the Norse Wind, learning who was really behind it and the attempt on her life…it was just another type of chase.
Her thoughts wandered, considering what Admiral Deering could be doing with the SWSF. Whatever it was, the woman wasn’t worried about being seen with the Scattered Worlds’ delegation.
Tanis knew there was unrest in the Scattered Worlds. Granted, that was par for the course. The region of space out beyond Sol’s Kuiper Belt was vast, and filled with small planetoids, asteroids, comets, and dust fields that were months, or even years’ travel apart from one another.
While the Terran Hegemony, Marsian Protectorate, and Jovian Combine were strong, nationalistic groups, the Scattered Worlds were loosely affiliated at best. Their common thread was they were not a part of InnerSol or OuterSol. Too often, she’d heard their slogan, ‘Diskers are for the Disk’.
There was talk on the feeds of them rallying for another vote to secede from the Sol Space Federation, but no one took it seriously. Without the resources of the federation, the Scattered Worlds would be nothing more than a backwater, people scratching out a living from whatever rock they managed to cling to at the edge of the deep dark that surrounded Sol.
Except for Nibiru, of course. The denizens of that planet didn’t need the federation; they had enough resources to survive without help. But they had their own problems with the rest of the Scattered Worlds.
The thought spurred Tanis to consider where the officers Admiral Deering had met with hailed from. Not their assigned sectors and fleets, but where they’d grown up.
What she saw raised more questions than it answered. All three SWSF officers who had met with the admiral in Chez Maison were Nibirun natives, and were currently stationed there.