by M. D. Cooper
Helen gave the AI’s equivalent of a laugh.
Sera shifted from foot to foot. She had to be wearing at least twenty kilograms of weaponry. She slipped back into the wardrobe and found a long black jacket that fell nearly to her ankles. She slipped it on, ensuring that she could leave it open while not revealing the full extent of her armament.
The four tiny probes flew out of Sera’s mouth, one settling on an access port for the room’s terminal.
The probe disappeared as it slipped into the access port and linked with the station’s general computer net.
The room’s main holo activated, showing the layout of the station. Helen searched through access points, then made a noise of surprise.
Sera stopped her investigation of the station’s public net.
Helen indicated the location on the holo she was displaying. Sera zoomed in and traced a path from Rebecca’s quarters. It was two decks down and across a good quarter of the station.
“This’ll be fun,” Sera said with a smile.
Sera slipped out into the hall, heels snapping and long coat rustling.
Sera smirked.
Sera obliged her AI and a moment later all sound from her movements ceased.
Sera slipped silently down the corridor and into the stairwell. The four probes ranged ahead and behind, keeping an eye on all surveillance equipment, sending signals to them, providing normal visual and audio feeds.
The stairs were narrow and Sera moved down them gracefully, peering over the rail to ensure the next landing was clear.
At the second landing, Sera cracked the hatch ever so slightly, allowing a probe to slip past the seal. Both she and Helen watched the visual feed, Sera accessing the infrared and ultraviolet ranges she normally excluded from her vision.
Sera strode down the center of the corridor. No point in looking suspicious to anyone leaving the dining area. As she neared the opening to the hall, two men stepped out.
“Whoyah,” one exclaimed. “I know you’re new, ‘cause I’d remember a sweet looking thing like you!” His friend elbowed him, but the man continued, taking a step toward Sera. “That’s one sexy getup. You’re a randy little bitch, aren’t you?”
She didn’t want conflict, but no woman dressed as she was on a Mark station would take talk like this without a fight, or a tumble between the sheets.
Sera stepped toward him, exuding sexual energy. “I am a bit new here, care to show me around?”
The man laughed and moved closer. “Hell yeah, we can start with my cabin.”
When he moved into range, Sera reached out with her right hand and grabbed his hair. In the same fluid motion, she reached down with her left hand, and pulled a blade from the top of her right boot. She pushed him back against the wall, wrenching his head back and pressed the blade in her left hand against his neck.
She sneered and ground her hips into him. “I like it rough, and I’ve got six more of these little blades, I don’t like to stop until each one has gotten a taste of blood. Where’s your cabin?”
The man’s friend was laughing so hard that he had a hand against the wall to steady himself.
“I…uhh…can’t right now…I’m on shift soon,” the first man stammered.
Smoothly Sera stepped back and let go of him, a sultry pout on her lips. “Always work with you types, oh well.” She put the blade back into her boot and blew him a kiss. “I’ll keep an eye out for you.”
He reddened, and all but ran down the hall. His friend followed, clutching his gut as he laughed.
They slipped into the service corridor without seeing anyone else. It was little more than a shaft and ended at a hatch leading to a larger thoroughfare. The hatch stood open and Helen sent two probes through. There was mild foot traffic, but no troops or guards of any sort.
Sera stepped through and took a left. Some of the men and women eyed her with appreciation, some with wariness, but most just ignored her. There was no shortage of men and women wearing racier clothing than Sera. She began to suspect that The Mark had a brothel on the station.
She took a right at the next intersection and then another left further down. The terminal she was looking for was in a vertical maintenance shaft off this corridor. The probes spied the shaft’s access eight meters away and Sera approached it nonchalantly. The coast was clear, but as she neared the hatch, two guards rounded a corner and began walking toward her.
Sera muttered a curse to herself and kept walking past the hatch. She passed the guards and winked at them. They both smiled at her in response. When she neared the end of the corridor, the probes behind her showed the two guards turn down a side passage. She doubled back and opened the shaft access panel, slipping in with a bit of trouble when her jacket bunched up beneath her. Once in, she h
ooked a foot on the access panel and pulled it shut.
Sera slithered down to the location indicated on her HUD, and took a deep breath. She held her index finger against the port and silver metal flowed out through her finger and formed a probe. It seated itself into the port.
Sera studied the station’s layout as Helen accessed the secure net. Even without knowing exactly where the artifact they were searching for was, there were only so many places it could be hidden. The station’s own power grid should show its location—even if they hadn’t decided to use it. If they had then it should be even easier.
Helen said.
Sera looked over the portions of the station labeled as power generation. If they were using the CriEn, it would be around there. It didn’t have to be, but a smart engineer would place it near existing power distribution systems.
Helen said.
It was one of the difficulties of maintaining systems in the dark layer: heat dispersion. In regular space, the cold of vacuum was a great way to disperse heat, in the dark layer there was nothing to disperse heat to. The heat could be transformed into energy, but when it was permeating everything, that was hard to do. The CriEn module generated energy with no heat, which was the key to keeping a station in the dark layer.
Sera worked out the route to the station’s power plant while Helen used nano to build a bridge from the station’s secure net to the public net and placed the link into an encrypted stream. Unless they were looking, the station security systems wouldn’t stand a chance of locating it.
Sera pulled herself back up the access tube, and checked the two probes they’d left out in the hall. When the coast was clear, she flipped the latch and kicked the hatch open.
She eased out into the hall, but at the last minute, a bandolier caught on the hinge. She stumbled and fell to the floor before freeing herself and closing the panel.
She stood up and dusted herself off before looking up to see a guard walking toward her.
“Hey, what were you doing in there?” he asked.
“I’m tech; got a call that there was a down net coupling in there and I fixed it up.”
The guard was unconvinced. “You’re tech?”
“Yeah, I’m off duty.” Sera made sure to stand so that her coat hid the weapons, but not her shapely legs.
“Why don’t you spread your hands across that wall there while I check your ident?” The guard pulled out a scanner and stepped toward Sera as she placed her hands on the wall.”
“That’s odd,” the guard said as he ran the scanner over her hand. “I’m not getting any station ident off you.”
Sera smiled and turned, one hand sliding up her left leg and then behind her back. “I’m new; I’m just trying to do a good job.” Humanity had been civilized for twelve thousand years, but men still hadn’t outgrown their inability to think straight when a woman turned on her charm.
“Right, you can do a good job from detention while I check you out.”
Apparently, some men had evolved.
Sera said.
Sera slid the pistol she had reached for out from behind her back and jammed it under the guard’s chin. “Tight beam your access codes and tokens to me, or I spray your brains on the roof.”
The man nodded slowly, and Helen confirmed that he sent his codes. Sera gestured for him to turn and when he did, she fired a pulse at the small of his back. It was a simple, yet effective way to stun someone for a few hours. He slumped and she caught his weight with a grunt. A minute later, she had him stuffed into the maintenance shaft and Helen was faking his patrol signal on the net so he wouldn’t be missed.
Without any further incident, Sera made her way to the security station outside the power generation section.
Helen said without rancor.
Without another word, she stepped out from cover and strode directly up to the two guards. An automatic turret tracked her as she approached the two men.
“Hey guys. How’re you doing?” She asked with a friendly smile, attempting to walk right passed them.
“Hold it.” One of the guards said as they both reached forward to stop her progress. Sera halted half a step before they expected and grasped each guard’s outstretched wrists. Their expressions were priceless as she leapt backwards and pulled the guards toward her and into one another. The guards stumbled and crashed to the floor.
Sera kicked the man on the left in the face as he struggled to get up, the heel of her boot ripping open his cheek. The other guard kicked the back of her other leg, hitting her knee and knocking her backwards. Sera took advantage of the momentum, twisted and fell onto the guard—her elbow smashing into his chest. The sickening crack of his sternum reverberated up her arm.
Sera used her pistol to stun both men and dumped them in a small cleaning room a short distance back up the corridor.
A countdown appeared in the upper right of Sera’s vision as she ran down the corridors in the direction her map overlay indicated. There would be some techs monitoring the main reactor, but since the secondary one was ‘offline’, she doubted that anyone was watching it. She was wrong.
It appeared that The Mark techs were studying the CriEn module even as they were using it. Eight years later and they still didn’t know how it worked.
There were at least a dozen of them in a monitoring station and another group wearing hazsuits in the chamber where the CriEn module stood on a pedestal.
Helen showed Sera a readout of the main power throughput indicators. The CriEn module generated energy by accessing layers of space-time these techs didn’t even know about. It would be easy to generate anomalous readings from the device that wouldn’t put them in harm’s way, but would certainly cause them to vacate the premises.
Helen used her access to the station’s secure net to worm her way into the engineering network and from there to the CriEn chamber. As expected, grav fields were in place around the module to ensure safety. Helen altered the frequency of the fields and the module began to alter its output unpredictably. Its EM field swelled and pushed against the grav fields containing it.