by M. D. Cooper
Tori snorted. “I’ll bet. Is that why you’re going down to New Amsterdam? For a performance?”
“Yup.” Tanis nodded vigorously, then glanced away. “Well, I hope. I have some auditions to do. There’s a lot of art and culture on New Amsterdam, though. I’m sure I’ll find something.”
“I’d like to see you perform, if you land somewhere,” Tori said, an uncertain smile forming on his lips.
Tanis felt the urge to make a rude gesture at Darla’s avatar—and then she proceeded to indulge that urge.
“You know…” Tori ventured cautiously. “Maybe once you get settled, we could meet for drinks.”
“I get that,” Tori nodded emphatically. “I’m like that when I start a new job, too. I work crazy hours just to learn everything I need to know—no matter how long it takes. This one time…”
Tori began to tell Tanis a story of how he’d once worked one hundred hours straight at a plant where they made graphene that was often used for appliques like the ones she’d likely wear for Horde dancing.
Despite the fact there was only so much excitement to be had in the wild world of graphene, Tori spun a tale that was more entertaining than Tanis had expected.
They continued chatting as the shuttle approached Saturn, but as they drew close, he broke off from a story about Tyche’s wildlife to point out the window at the planet below.
“You know…that’s the closest I’ve ever been to anything bigger than Nibiru. It’s freaking huge.”
“I always find it amazing how visible the rings are. You can see them clear across OuterSol with even moderate visual augmentations, but they’re only ten meters thick.
“Except at those,” Tori said, pointing out the window at a kilometer-high berm that had formed in the rings.
Tanis had never seen a buildup like that in person. They were caused when harmonic orbits created standing waves in the rings, or when electron beams from lightning storms on the planet below passed through the ring and charged micro-particles in it.
“That looks amazing,” Tanis said as she leant over Tori to look at the buildup of dark particles above the ring. “They always say that there’s no place like Saturn.”
“Easily as complex as the rest of the Sol System,” Tori said in agreement.
“All passengers, we’re beginning our final descent to New Amsterdam,” the attendant announced. “Things are a bit windy down there, so they have the dome-top closed. We’ll be docking at one of the perimeter bays. That means we’re coming down into the upper cloud deck. Things’ll get a bit bumpy, but once we get on the city’s leeward side, it’ll smooth out. We’ll have you in Bay A1219 in under fifteen minutes.”
“I wonder how bad that really is?” Tanis asked as the ship began to slow, dropping further toward the planet, now past the A ring.
Gravity began to pull down on them as Tori shrugged. “I mean, people do this all the time, right?”
Tanis couldn’t help that her laugh sounded a bit nervous as the first of the planet’s winds buffeted the shuttle.
The shuttle shook and shuddered, a disconcerting rattling noise getting stronger, until Tanis began to wonder how much of an inspection the shuttles received between each flight.
Then the vibrations lessened, and through the window, she saw a dark structure looming nearby in the thick clouds.
Suddenly the vibrations were gone entirely, and the view outside Tori’s window was of a docking bay with a half dozen other shuttles in cradles, people either getting on, or getting off each of them.
“Whew.” Tori’s word was followed by a low whistle. “Feels perfectly stable in here. “
“I guess they’ll really have the know-how you need for your work,” Tanis replied. “To have the city feel entirely unperturbed by those winds….”
As the shuttle slid along its docking rails and onto the cradle, Tanis grabbed her bag and began to undo her harness.
“Eager to go?” Tori asked.
“I’m ready to see what we just risked the storm for,” Tanis replied with a grin. “It’s surreal, right? We’re ‘on’ Saturn. I mean…I know that this city is hundreds of years old, but it’s new to me.”
“I get where you’re coming from,” Tori replied as he retrieved his bag. “Remember, it’s my first time seeing anything this big. Well, not New Amsterdam, the planet.”
They walked off the shuttle and across the bay onto the concourse beyond. On the far side were wide windows that looked out over the city, and the pair jogged toward them.
In a word, the view was breathtaking.
The floating city was a disk over ninety kilometers in diameter, filled with what appeared to be old-Earth buildings, all divided by an extensive canal system.
The city was ringed by holowalls that looked like an Earth sky, though a thousand meters up, those gave way to the clear dome that stretched overhead.
At present, of course, that view was obscured by thin ammonia clouds that shrouded the city as it weathered what the announcements called a ‘mild’ storm.
At the very top of the dome, Tanis could still make out the shape of the ring overhead, appearing almost like a giant knife that was going to come down and cut the city in half.
“Can you imagine living here?” Tanis asked breathlessly.
Tori laughed. “Isn’t that your plan?”
“Oh, yeah,” she tittered. “I guess. I mean to grow up here…with those rings overhead all the time…and seeing the lightning and Enceladus ice geysers….”
She trailed off and gave Tori an apologetic look.
“Don’t worry,” he gave her an encouraging shrug. “I fully endorse being awestruck by this place.”
“I’d better go,” she said, gesturing to the maglev that would take her down to a hotel near one of the canals. “You staying surface-side?”
“Nope, looks like your dancing gigs pay better than my company does. I’m a few levels down. Don’t mind that much, though. I want to be close to the engineers’ watering holes.”
“Still always working extra hard, aren’t you?” Tanis asked with a warm smile.
“Guess so.”
The pair parted, and as Tanis stood waiting for the next maglev, Darla spoke up.
Tanis nodded a
bsently.
Tanis mused as she stepped aboard, feeling sluggish in the near-Earth gravity at Saturn’s cloudtops.
Tanis smiled and shook her head as she looked out the maglev’s window as they sped out of the terminal and out across the city.
Boats were moving through the canals, some with people pushing them along with long poles, others under their own power, motors making small wakes behind.
Tanis replied.
Darla replied, and Tanis turned her gaze from the city below to the clear overhead and the skies above.
The storm had begun to abate, and the top of New Amsterdam’s high dome once again rose above the cloudtops, creating a breathtaking view as night settled over the city.
New Amsterdam was twenty degrees north of the equator, and it was currently ‘summer’ in Saturn’s northern hemisphere—which gave them just shy of four and a half hours of daylight before night would settle in for a slightly shorter period, as it was doing now.
All of that was lost on Tanis as she stared up, mouth agape at the view overhead. At this time of year, the planet cast no shadow on the rings, and they were fully illuminated by the sun, casting their ruddy yellow glow down on the planet below.
Tanis snorted.
Their conversation ceased as they continued to gaze up at the view—though when Titan hove into view, Tanis pointed it out, marveling at how they could see its atmosphere even from tens of thousands of kilometers away.
She was still staring up as the maglev stopped at a platform down on the city’s surface, and Darla prodded her to get off.
“I’m gonna get a kink in my neck,” she muttered absently as she stepped off onto the stone walkway.
A few chuckles came from other passengers getting on and off the train, and Tanis pulled her gaze back down from the heavens above to the street she now stood on.
The maglev line ran perpendicularly across a canal—down which a long wooden boat filled with passengers and a few musicians floated. Alongside it ran a narrow street paved with round stones that made Tanis glad for Kiora’s preference for flat footwear. She smiled at the relaxed atmosphere while threading her way through the light crowds, most of which were walking slowly and taking in the views while holding glasses of their favorite beverage.
Her destination was a hotel named ‘The Barony’, and it was just a few blocks away…or across two canals, by the local reckoning.
Their target had checked in there the day before, the TSF officer named Kameron, who the Jovians suspected to be colluding with subversive elements within the Disker military.
Their evidence was slim, mostly a number of after-hours meetings with Disker representatives, and now this unscheduled vacation down to New Amsterdam.
She really didn’t expect to find much. The Jovians were being paranoid, and most of their leads didn’t pan out.
I suppose I should take it a bit more seriously, Tanis thought as she approached her hotel.
Despite the possible import of this detour, her real concern was that she wouldn’t hear back from Harm before she had to depart for Terra; that she’d end up off-book once more—heading to humanity’s homeworld on her own to hunt down Admiral Mikayla.
Of course, that put her in dangerous territory, because she would end up looking like a traitor herself. What Tanis really wanted to do was go off-book to find Oligarch Alden and beat him about the head for a good while.
How did it come to this? she wondered.
A year ago, she was the commander of a patrol ship that had a good reputation with a solid crew. Then she got an AI which no one was allowed to know about, and shortly thereafter she became a spy. Add in some additional shenanigans, and now she was a double agent.
In her mind, Tanis had imagined that working for Division 99 would be a short-term thing. Maybe something she’d do for a few years before getting promoted to major and getting command of a larger ship.
But now, with Alden holding her hostage, the Division was either going to make her continue to work as a double agent, or they were going to force her to permanently change her identity—and probably continue working as a spy. That is, if they didn’t disavow her and hang her out to dry.
She tried not to give that line of thought much credit, but the notion that her time as ‘Tanis Richards’ was coming to an end kept flitting about at the edge of her consciousness, souring her mood more than a little.
One step at a time, Tanis, she said to herself with a resolute calm that she hoped would somehow permeate herself. Right now, we sort out this Kameron guy. Harm’s not going to leave us in the wind. He’ll give us some sort of direction. Maybe he’ll even figure out a way out of this mess.
When Tanis reached the hotel, she saw that it was well appointed, but not opulent by any means. Just the sort of place Kiora Adams could afford to stay, given the fact that she was a dancer with enough money for interplanetary travel.
When Tanis finally reached her room, she realized that it had been over thirty hours since she last caught a few hours of shut-eye in her cabin aboard the Kirby Jones.
It was well past midnight local time, and the day would commence with the next sunrise in four hours.
Tanis nodded, uncertain if she even muttered ‘thanks’ before falling asleep.
TANK
STELLAR DATE: 03.01.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Kirby Jones, Hyperion Service Yard 17-32
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Connie bit her tongue and counted to ten before responding to the woman from the Portmaster’s office who had reached out over audible comms.
“So you’re telling me that I can’t get a new helium tank for the Jones why, exactly? I’m trying not to be dense, but I’m totally flummoxed here.”
“Well, you see,” the woman began in a nasal tone that made Connie wish they were face to face…so she could test a theory about breaking her nose. “Your ship commander failed to file a JR-182A. She filed a JR-182B. That’s for a new H3 tank on your class of ship when the old one is past its service date. Yours still has four years on its service date, so we can’t replace it with a JR-182B.”
Connie muted the audio pickups and placed her hands over her temples, doing her best not to scream. Marion was with her in the engineering bay—they’d been chatting about a new card game they
’d heard of called Snark, debating whether or not they should buy official cards or just fab some, when the woman from the Portmaster’s office had called in.
“You know,” Marion whispered, watching Connie trying not to lose it, “I like my job a lot more. I still have a lot of shitty paperwork, like dozens of forms for ammo and charge cylinders, but at the end of the day, I get to use my gear to shoot shit.”
“Wanna stage a raid on this woman’s console?” Connie asked with a hungry grin, before unmuting her pickups. “Sergeant Hanja, I cross-checked those forms myself. The B version is for a new tank because of a structural issue. The A form is for it going past its service date. You have them mixed up.”
“No…no, I’m pretty sure you have them wrong.”
“Pretty sure?” Connie fumed. “Pretty sure? I’m curious, if I were to file an A as well, would that get us the tank? Just for funsies?”
Sergeant Hanja cleared her throat. “Oh no, that won’t work at all. You see, we pushed the B you filed into procurement. They have a pending rejection on it, but they won’t accept an A form until the B clears. The system’s just not set up to have two tanks requested for a ship that only takes one.”
Connie pursed her lips and muted the pickups again and pounded her fist against the edge of the console, causing Marion’s eyes to widen in alarm.
“Connie…this isn’t healthy. You can’t get so worked up about stuff.”
“You’re right,” she replied, trying to regulate her breathing. “I’m just…just.…”
“Something to do with the commander’s secret orders?” Marion prompted with a wink.
“Yeah,” Connie nodded. “We can’t sit here for weeks while they get their heads out of their asses, and I’ve seen shit like this take that long to clear up.”
“I’ve got this,” Marion said as she leant over and toggled the pickups, doing her best impersonation of Connie’s accent. “Uhhh…Sergeant Hanja, we’ve checked over everything, and we see that you’re right. So from what we can see—because we have to ship out in four days—we’d like to request a refueling of our H3.”
“Pardon?” the woman on the other end of the comm asked. “You can’t do that, your tank is leaking.”