by M. D. Cooper
Marion shook her head. “You got a grievance with this woman? You should take it up legally. Do you really want to do this?”
“Yeah, I do!” The Raven growled and launched herself at Marion.
Her accomplices looked less sure of themselves, but after a moment’s hesitation, joined in the fight.
Unlike Tanis, the four soldiers of her breach team weren’t trying to blend in. They wore kinetic base layers underneath their semi-dress casuals, but more importantly, they all carried pulse pistols.
Seconds later, a series of concussive shots sent a pressure wave through the air, and three of the attackers fell. The Raven’s armor protected her enough that she kept coming, but Marion casually raised her weapon and fired at the tall woman’s face.
Ten minutes later, Tanis was back where she had first swapped her identity to that of Monica. She changed back into her uniform and altered her face and hair back to their natural shapes and colors.
She tucked Monica’s shipsuit into a pack she’d brought with her from the Kirby Jones earlier in the day, and then began to retrace her steps back to the docks.
Tanis couldn’t help but chuckle.
Tanis chuckled.
DEFERRED
STELLAR DATE: 02.20.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Kirby Jones, Crantor
REGION: 0.5AU beyond Ouranos’s orbit, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
“I’m really sorry about that mess, Commander,” Marion said as she stood at attention on the other side of Tanis’s desk. “We were just looking for a good watering hole, then that woman just plowed right into us.”
“At ease, Corporal,” Tanis said. “So far as I can tell, you did the right thing—nothing different than I would have done.”
Marion lifted an eyebrow. “No disrespect meant, ma’am, but I’d hope you’d’ve hightailed it out of there. If we hadn’t been armed, armored, and ready, the four of us would have been in for a good fight. Just you on your own—well.…”
“Don’t worry, Marion. I promise. I would have hightailed it out of there.”
Darla let out a long laugh in Tanis’s mind.
“Why is it you had pulse pistols with you?” Tanis asked.
“Darla suggested it. She said Crantor was known for having some issues lately, and we’d be smart to stay armed just in case. You know how sometimes the locals like to mess with TSF out here.”
Tanis sighed. “That I do. Speaking of the locals, everything’s squared away with them. That ‘The Raven’ woman is going to get some time.”
“That’s good. She seemed like the sort that liked to just pick fights for the fun of it.”
“Had the record to back that up, too,” Tanis added. “We’re shipping out for Saturn as soon as Connie reports that fuel’s topped off. We need to courier some datacrystals to the TSF base on Hyperion.”
“Sure thing, Commander,” Marion said with a crisp nod. She appeared to consider saying something further, then stopped herself.
“Nothing else you wanted to add?” Tanis prompted.
“I…well…. When are you are you going tell us what is really going on. Or are you? Before that mess with Admiral Deering, we’d never crossed Jupiter’s orbit. In the last ten months, we’ve flown to more places than the Jones has since its keel was laid a hundred years ago.”
Tanis sat back and ran a hand through her hair. “We’re sure putting our girl through her paces, aren’t we? After the stuff that went down on Vesta and with Deering, Admiral Kocsis told me that he wanted to use us for some special missions.”
“Special missions that have to do with figuring out why a Terran admiral was carrying water for the Scattered Worlds?” Marion asked, one eyebrow raised questioningly.
“I didn’t tell you any of that,” Tanis said. “And I can’t confirm or deny it, either. Do you trust me to always put this crew and the Jones first?”
“Ma’am, you’ve never shown anything else to be the case.”
“I promise you that won’t change.”
Marion pursed her lips and gave a small nod before meeting Tanis’s eyes, her voice carrying a note of compassion. “I’ve been around long enough to know that the brass doesn’t always give people like you and me a lot of choice in how to honor our loyalty….”
Tanis knew exactly what Marion was getting at.
“If I find myself in questionable territory, I’ll make sure everyone on the Jones has options, Corporal.”
Marion didn’t look entirely at ease, but she nodded nonetheless. “I suppose that’s the best we can all hope for.”
Tanis snorted. “Alternatively, we could all just opt out of this woman’s space force and go grow oats on some station in the backend of nowhere.”
“Think I’ll get to shoot people on said station?” Marion asked with a wolfish grin.
“Unlikely, Corporal.”
“Well, then I’ll stick around. Not like I signed up for crumpets and tea, anyway.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a ‘crumpet’,” Tanis replied with a tired smile. “Is that all, Corporal?”
“Yes, ma’am, it is.”
Marion saluted, and Tanis returned the gesture before the breach team leader turned and left her office.
“Well, Harm and Kocsis want results, and I think they also want the SWSF to see us out here, maybe take a shot. Either way, we’ve been playing it a bit fast and loose. I think we should take our time getting to Saturn.”
Tanis leant back in her chair and folded her hands behind her head. “You know, I don’t think it would hurt to make Alden sweat a bit.”
THE MISSIVE
STELLAR DATE: 02.20.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Enfield Corporation Offices, Vesta
REGION: Main Aster
oid Belt, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Harm reviewed the update from Tanis Richards three separate times. The first time, he read the message for what it was: she’d gone to the meet location, gathered the intel, and had two new leads to check.
One lead was at Hyperion, a possible leak in the TSF base there, and the other was on Earth. She’d put in a request to check the lead back at Terra herself—which was unusual, since Tanis’s work was in OuterSol. The Division had plenty of other agents who could follow up on InnerSol intel.
There was also a note about the JSF boarding that didn’t quite make sense. If the JSF had boarded the Jones at Ouranos, how did she pick up intel at Crantor? Unless there were two groups within the JSF that were running independent investigations.
For a moment, Harm felt bad for using Tanis as a honeypot. Anyone looking too deeply into the attempted assassinations of Oligarch Alden would flag her as a person of interest. Add to that the fact that trans-Jupiter space was far beyond her ship’s typical patrol zone, and she stuck out even more.
Of course, that was the point.
Once Harm was satisfied that he’d successfully gleaned all surface meaning from the message, he reread it, paying attention to the things that Tanis didn’t put into the text.
She made no mention of her crew or of the Scattered Worlds Alliance. She did mention an issue with crime on Crantor, and he made a note to check with the field office there for any cleanup work that might need to be done.
Then something caught his eye. Her report mentioned how impressed she was by seeing the largest Jovian fleet in the Sol System massed at Ouranos.
A quick crosscheck informed him that the fleet at Ouranos was not the most numerous massing of Jovian ships in the Sol System; there were far more JSF vessels stationed at The Cho and Saturn.
“Shit, what is she getting at?” Harm muttered as he pulled up listings of JSF military leaders at Ouranos. No one stood out—no more than usual, at least, and so he began to look for any notable civilians at the Ouranos Project.
Little stood out there, barring a GE board meeting and tour of the work. Harm dug deeper into that, wondering if there was anyone meeting with GE’s board that would have piqued Tanis’s interest.
Nothing stood out.
Can’t be right. Tanis wouldn’t make a deliberate error like that if it didn’t mean anything.
He knew there was still a coded message within her missive, but he wanted to solve the information she’d put in plain text first. An operative may not always have the opportunity to set up a datadrop. He had to learn how she thought and follow her nuance.
Harm dug into the GE board members’ itineraries and flipped through all their meetings and infrastructure tours. There was one meeting listed as ‘board policy review’, but he couldn’t find any minutes logged for it.
It was entirely possible that those logs had not yet been transmitted back to the GE headquarters on Ceres, or that they hadn’t been logged at all.
He had allotted an hour to solving this riddle, and the time was coming to an end when he saw a name on a shuttle flight manifest that caught his attention.
Colonel Leona.
The import of that name initially eluded him, but Harm knew it belonged to a person he’d noted recently. He constructed a search query to correlate Colonel Leona with recent events, and a match came up almost immediately.
She had been dispatched with a team to Europa when word got out that the Sargasso Mountain orcas had detained Oligarch Alden. From that point on, there was no record of her unit returning to the station they operated out of.
A quick review of the woman’s history showed an officer who was known for getting results. Her methods were not always the most graceful, but she rarely missed her mark. If she was connected to Oligarch Alden, and she hadn’t resurfaced since the incident at Europa….
Oligarch Alden was at Ouranos—and he met with Tanis!
“Idiot,” he muttered. “ ‘Biggest JSF fleet’. What’s bigger than Alden?”
Sure enough, Alden was still listed as ‘recovering at an undisclosed location’. Which was bullshit, since the man had made a number of public appearances.
Harm supposed it made sense. With someone trying to kill Alden, his security was doing the right thing in keeping his itinerary a secret.
He’s probably operating from aboard a JSF ship…. Harm mused.
With a note made to later run a search for ships that Oligarch Alden could be using, he set to ferreting out Tanis’s datadrop code.
In the end, it turned out to be based on her references to the Sol System’s seventh planet. Sometimes she called it Uranus, sometimes Ouranos. That gave him the key to unlock the datadrop’s location.
Once he had it, Harm swapped his Link ident to that of a civilian cover he used on Vesta, and accessed the location of the drop. Its contents were a vid that a woman had posted on one of the station’s hook-up groups. She was interested in a ‘friends with benefits relationship’, but she wanted to have several in-person meetings first. At one point, she mentioned that it wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted to hide from the officers, either.
Harm sat back in his chair and interlaced his fingers behind his neck.
She wants an in-person meeting, and she wants me to tell Kocsis.
Then something else in Tanis’s update jumped out at him. She’d made mention of how they’d picked up a load of sweet potatoes at Ouranos. Not Crantor, Ouranos.
A few months back, he and Tanis had been chatting about the usefulness of double agents. He’s said that they had their place, but that he’d rather have people whose loyalty was unquestioned and that one could never be too sure about a double agent.
Tanis had laughed and said that they sounded like sweet potatoes. OK if that’s all that was available, but she’d rather have regular potatoes any day.
In an instant everything clicked. Holy shit. Alden met with Tanis and has turned her into a double agent. He has her doing something she’s not at all comfortable with, and she wants an in-person meeting with me or Kocsis.
Now her strong desire to work the lead on Earth made ample sense.
Well, Harm, time to get used to full gravity again; looks like we’re going to Terra.
He rose from his desk and stretched languidly.
Right after I brief Admiral Kocsis.
REPERCUSSIONS
STELLAR DATE: 02.20.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: JSS Hawk’s Flight, Crantor
REGION: 0.5AU beyond Ouranos’s orbit, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Leona met Gage’s glare with one of her own.
She wasn’t going to flinch no matter how much ire he poured into his steely gaze. The man was far too used to getting his way, just because he had the oligarch’s ear. What he’d soon come to realize is that Leona had more than just Alden’s ear. She had his trust.
She was certain that no one trusted Gage.
“Are you going to make a point eventually?” she asked, refusing to break eye contact first.
“I’m fairly certain I’ve already made it. You’re Tanis Richards’s contact on paper only. You go where I tell you, when I tell you. You don’t pop in to see her when she’s in the middle of a pickup to get ‘eyes on’ her, as you put it.”
She gave the odious man a dismissive wave. “So far as anyone watching would know, Tanis Richards and I have never met. I just wanted to see how she handles things, how solid her covers are.”
“You’re absolutely right.” Gage’s tone was laced with condescension. “No one had ever seen the two of you in one place. ‘Had’ being the operative term.”
Leona leant back on the couch in the ship’s officer’s lounge where they were meeting.
“I really thought you were smarter than this, Gage. No one but us and her agency—and maybe not even them—knows that Tanis Richards was in that bar. It was just some dockworker named Monica who had a drink—only to get chased out by some local toughs. Seems like Tanis didn’t pick th
e best cover.”
“Or she hired them to give her an excuse to beat a hasty retreat,” Gage added. “Either that, or she knew they were after the woman she was using as cover, and let them find her. This woman is clever and conniving. You should do well to remember that.”
Leona had to admit to herself that she hadn’t considered that angle. To Gage, she only said, “Maybe. She does seem especially adept at network breaching. Nothing in her record shows an indication of that level of skill.”
Gage shrugged. “Perhaps she has an AI.”
Leona shook her head at the spook. “She’s an L2. No L2s have AIs.”
“Are you so sure about that?” he asked her with raised brows. “Did you check them all over? Or were you told that no L2s have AIs, and you’ve blindly accepted it?”
Leona was ready to deliver a harsh retort, but she paused and considered that she never really had given it any thought beyond accepting what she’d been told.
Gage saw the hesitation in her eyes and pressed forward. “And don’t forget. She doesn’t need the AI to be in her head and fully paired. We’ve seen how accepting she is of extreme body mods; her AI could be tucked in next to her heart, for all we know.”
She knew Chelsea’s thoughts on that subject all too well. The AI often questioned her own sanity for pairing with a soldier who saw so much combat.
Leona didn’t blame her. Any soldier who had been shot at as much as she had—and still re-upped—likely had a screw loose.
Most colonels did their damnedest to get a seat on a cruiser’s bridge, or behind a desk running a specialized battalion or regiment. Leona ran a platoon.
The best damn platoon in the JSF.