by M. D. Cooper
“My, you are every bit as cocky as I’d been led to believe.” He waved an arm around him. “There is nothing you can do; you are fully under our control.”
“It’s something we’re trained for. I got an A in smugness and cocky back in OCS.”
“That doesn’t surprise me in the least. Though I imagine seeing the Intrepid destroyed in a rather spectacular fashion will do something to modify your attitude.”
Tanis couldn’t read Strang at all. She couldn’t tell if he was excited that he was finally going to get his victory, or if he was considering this purely from a profit and loss perspective. She decided to go on the offensive against his pride.
“I’ll give you points for boldness and a grand vision, but not so much for the execution. You haven’t really garnered a great track record—I don’t expect you to be able to pull something like that off.”
Strang’s look betrayed no emotion. “I don’t know what you thought was going to happen here, but I’ll tell you what’s not likely. You’re not going to goad me into telling you my plans—sorry to burst your bubble.”
Tanis changed approaches and grinned. “Don’t worry, I’m pretty unburstable. So what’s your reason for this gracious invitation?”
“I have reason to believe you know a few very interesting secrets about something on the Intrepid. I know about that trip down to Mars you and Captain Andrews took, and have strong suspicions about what you brought back up. I’d very much like to gain access to the Intrepid’s net so I can pull the specs for that little secret before we destroy it.”
“And you think I’ll give access to you?”
“I think you can be convinced.”
“I really don’t think you want to go that route.” Tanis gave her captors a benign look.
“Why not?” Herris asked. “I find myself rather looking forward to it, then I get that extra pay I mentioned.”
“Because I’m not restrained by the suppression net anymore.”
“You what?” Herris’s smug superiority cracked and a look of concern showed beneath it.
While she was being transported, Angela had configured some nano to extract bits of the armor and configured it to solidify. The effect was several thousand nano with very sharp knives. They just finished cutting through the threads on the back of the net and with a grand gesture, Tanis stood up and raised her arms in the air.
A look of shock passed across every face and Tanis couldn’t help but smile. A moment later every gun in the room was aimed at her.
“What? Not what you were expecting?” Tanis asked.
“Oh for fuck’s sake! Just kill her!” Strang yelled before he turned and stormed out of the conference room.
No one else moved. The six security types and Herris all eyed her for several moments. Tanis took the opportunity to deploy probes to create a detection field for the armor—the more warning it had about incoming fire the better.
She was not surprised when Herris shot first. Tanis accelerated her perception and felt her surroundings effectively slow down. She held herself steady as the bounty hunter’s finger squeezed and a bullet left the chamber, heading for her forehead. Here she would find out if the armor was worth its exorbitant cost
Milliseconds before impact the armor became rock hard from the top of her head down her neck and across her shoulders. This time Tanis didn’t try to move or compensate, but rather tensed her legs to absorb the shock. Just as advertised, the armor deflected the bullet.
The slug ricocheted off her face and into the wall. All eyes looked at Tanis’s forehead, to the wall, and back to Tanis.
“I sort of have that effect on all of you, don’t I?” Tanis smiled confidently. “What can I say, I’m truly amazing.”
Tanis used the last moments of surprise to launch herself at Herris. They crashed to the floor and Tanis proceeded to deliver blows to the woman’s neck and solar plexus, her hands locked into solid fists by her armor. Her opponent gasped for air and with an augmented thrust, lifted Tanis bodily and slammed her into the edge of the table. Her armor locked up and while the effect was somewhat disconcerting, it did cause the bounty hunter’s attack to not hurt at all.
The lack of pain allowed Tanis to recover quickly, and before Herris had a chance to get back on her feet, Tanis pointed her fingers, signaled the armor to lock and slammed her now solid hand into Herris’s eye.
Screaming a string of curses that Tanis couldn’t even understand, the woman covered her face and tried to slide away. Tanis delivered several more blows to Herris’s thorax and stood, ignoring the thrashing of the body at her feet.
A moment after Tanis looked up, her vision tinted and the nano probe’s video feed in her HUD showed that all six of the security guards had fired their laser pistols at her. The armor absorbed the energy from the beams, focused and released the light in one blinding pulse. She heard startled shouts of shock and when her vision cleared the guards were all covering their eyes.
“You guys can’t hurt me with those, but I can hurt you.” Tanis snatched up Herris’ handgun and panned it between the guards while stepping back against the wall. “Drop your guns and spread ‘em on the table.”
Five of the men complied, but one decided to try another shot. Tanis fired several slugs into his chest. He grunted and fell over, his life saved by body armor under his suit.
“Get up, and get spread.” She took careful aim at his head.
He stood slowly, but Tanis’s nano video feed showed her one of the other guards edging away from the table, reaching for something inside his jacket. Without moving her arm, Tanis rotated her prosthetic wrist at a biologically impossible angle. Her handgun was pointed directly at his head.
She didn’t even look at him. “Keep moving. I promise you a very short, sharp pain in your head, but everything will be all right after that. If push comes to shove I only need one of you alive to talk.”
They got the message; she could shoot them all as fast as the weapon could chamber the next round—in less than a second based on the specs of the pistol.
“So, now that the ground rules are established, is there any chance any of you know what it is Strang’s planning to do?”
No one said a word.
“Oh come on; you guys hear things, follow him places. You must know something.” Her comments continued to be met with silence and Tanis considered her options. “OK, I know it sounds crazy, but I’m actually tired of torturing people. It’s really not that pleasant for me—makes for some really unpleasant dreams.”
Tanis paused and her voice changed. It was deeper, slower, and dripped with venom.
“That doesn’t mean I won’t resort to it.”
She fired six shots into the wall, close enough to each man for them to feel the slugs pass by their hair. To a man they flinched and her augmented sense of smell picked up the acidic scent of urine.
“I don’t know where he went, but I know what he has planned,” one of the men said to sidelong glares from his comrades. “He’s going to set off an MDC and disintegrate the Intrepid.”
“Try again,” Tanis said. “There’s no evidence of an MDC on the ring.”
“That’s because you weren’t looking in the right place. The MDC is built into the network matrix for this portion of the ring. When the ship makes its hookups, the system will send the pulse through the network.”
Tanis waited until Angela mentally confirmed that it was technically possible to pull t
hat off.
“Thank you for the info,” Tanis said. “Now, I want you all to lie down on your stomachs with your hands behind your heads. Anyone tries something funny and I’ll put lead into you. I’ve got— Tanis felt the weight of the pistol—“seven shots left. Who thinks I’ll still have one left over if I decide to take you out?”
Tanis didn’t have to hold the men long. Angela had alerted the TSF and ChoSec the moment she had connectivity. Within minutes they had arrived. Tanis passed recordings of the event to each group and let them work out jurisdiction and custody while she slipped out of the room, querying the 701st engineering company for the location of the closest network node to the dock and requesting their best platoon on the double.
One hour and twenty-seven minutes.
A very large part of her wanted to go after Strang. She was tempted to tell Angela to start accessing visual feeds and track the man, but that wasn’t the priority. Nowhere he could run would be far enough. Tanis didn’t think he would hide at any rate. His type would get behind a wall of corporate lawyers as soon as possible.
No, Arlen Strang could wait.
A barrage of queries was coming in from TSF command on Callisto, as well as requests from ChoSec to return to the scene for more statements. Tanis shunted them all to her message queue, keeping an eye out for any message from the 701 engineers.
She was nearing the network node that Angela had marked off as the closest to the Intrepid’s berth when General Grissom, the Callisto TSF division commander, used an override to break past her queue.
Tanis bit her lip in frustration—stopping when she tasted blood.
Grissom broke the contact with Tanis and she kept moving toward the network node.
Angela’s astringent words didn’t hide the sentiment Tanis knew she felt.
Tanis decided that she wasn’t going to be drawn further into the discussion and focused on moving through the crowded corridors of the ring. Eventually they made it through the commercial district into a more sparsely populated systems control section. The sleek corridor walls gave way to rows of conduit containing both electronics and bio support liquids.
A few workers cast glances her way as she bolted past them. It probably wasn’t often that a TSF officer, more specifically, a TSF officer with a uniform full of burn holes, ran past them at top speed.
Tanis’s mental avatar stuck its tongue out at Angela.
Tanis rounded the final bend between her and the network node and saw that the engineers hadn’t arrived yet. The entrance looked like any other door off the service corridor, but behind it would be a marvel of man’s technological achievements. Angela exchanged tokens with the ring’s security AI and was denied access.
Trist’s mental chuckle was a welcome sound.
The doors slid open in front of Tanis and she stepped into the node.
One hour and nineteen minutes.
Tanis’s attention shifted to the view in front of her. She stood on a catwalk that ran around a large cubic space, roughly eighty meters along each side. The catwalk ran around the edge of the cube, roughly twenty meters from the floor. There were other walkways at the forty and sixty meter marks, each with a shimmering ES shield around it to shelter it from the three degrees kelvin temperatures that the node operated in. On each of the six sides of the cubic room, massive conduits breached the spaces between catwalks containing fiber-optic, plasma, and waveguide energy data transportation systems.
The conduit converged on an object that was difficult for the eye to perceive. It was essentially a massive structure housing several crystalline matrixes of super-dense silicon. The array contained some of the most impressive information-sorting and throughput technology in the Sol system.
The processing power of the Callisto nodes was well known to be immense. As humanity’s largest habitat, Callisto had more internal communication than every other habitation and planet in the Sol system put together. The hub in front of Tanis could conceivably handle all of the network traffic on Mars 1 and have bandwidth to spare.
Angela was deploying probes through the ES field and assembling a full picture of the node to determine if anything looked amiss. Tanis pulled a wad of formation material out of her pocket and set it on the railing, deploying nano to begin turning it into a multi-interface holo projector.
The holo projector was completed and Angela linked her nanoprobes to it before slaving their controls to the projector’s interface. The arrangement would allow the engineers control of the system once they arrived.
Angela fed several proposed component dimensions onto the holo.
Tanis pondered that, bringing up documentation on everything that was known about MDCs. They were initially conceived of in the twenty-first century, but at that point the technology to create one was only nebulously imagined. In the thirty-second century several scientists discovered that by altering the emitter from a ramscoop they could break apart certain bonds and make asteroid mining easier. At some later point several governments had begun weaponizing the technology, working out methods to have a single carrier wave contain other wavelengths specifically targeted at molecular structures. While an MDC couldn’t do something like take apart an entire planet, it could certainly break apart smaller bodies into their base elements.
Further perusal yielded formulas for how much energy it would take to generate either the targeted beam, general wave, or field effects that could break apart the Intrepid. The numbers were large, but well within the energy available to the network nodes.
Tanis loaded all of the information into the holo projector, which swelled to encapsulate the new data and the ever-enhancing view of the node that Angela’s nano were providing.