by M. D. Cooper
Darla watched the boat depart, now following both it and Tori.
She could think of dozens of logical reasons for his behavior, ones that belied nefarious intent. But for some reason, she didn’t want to accept any of them. She wanted to know what Tori was up to—not to mention who he’d met with on the boat.
Tori finally took a lift down into the undercity—not having gone back to the maglev platform at the passenger terminal to retrieve his bag.
Eventually he came to a low-cost hotel—fifty levels below the surface, close to the maintenance sectors—and checked in.
Darla’s feeds didn’t give her visuals inside the hotel, but after thirty minutes, no one had exited, and she assumed that was actually where he was staying.
Tasking a monitoring routine to watch that hotel, she turned her full focus to the boat—which had spent its time travelling through the city, now only a kilometer from The Barony Hotel where she and Tanis were staying.
All the while, Darla had not spotted any sign that another person was on the boat—though with the cover, it was hard to tell. The vessel could have been automated, or there could have been a servitor driving it—which she supposed was the same thing.
As it had traversed the canals, Darla looked up the boat’s ownership, finding that it was a private craft, registered to the NA Boaters Club, a group that owned a variety of boats, which members could use whenever they wished with no booking mechanism.
Finally the boat entered a covered dockhouse only a block from the hotel, and several minutes later, a man emerged, striding along the street that lay next to the canal.
Hoooooly shit. That’s Kameron!
The TSF officer walked up to The Barony and calmly entered the hotel. Darla switched to her internal taps and saw a servitor waiting for Kameron with a large case. The man nodded to the bot, and it followed him through the lobby to the lifts.
I wonder, Darla thought as she switched back to feeds of the maglev platform.
Sure enough, a servitor eventually showed up at the storage lockers with a large case. It opened the locker and placed Tori’s luggage inside.
Seems convoluted, Darla mused. Unless….
She checked over the events and saw that the servitor had not arrived at the terminal until five minutes after Tori had boarded what she now knew to have been Kameron’s boat.
She considered waking Tanis, but decided that whatever was happening next, it would require ‘bumping into’ Kameron, and since he’d just entered his room, bringing the servitor and the case inside, she determined they may as well wait until he made his next move.
Besides, Tanis needs rest. She gets so cranky on little sleep.
BREAKFAST
STELLAR DATE: 03.02.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: The Barony Hotel, New Amsterdam
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
“Stars, Darla. You should have woken me. What if Kameron left in a hurry with some sort of dangerous device he’d made from the contents of Tori’s luggage?”
“Sure, I can do that. Doesn’t mean I like to.”
Tanis considered a number of replies for her AI, but in the end she abandoned them all. “So what do you think?”
“Yeah, that surprises me as well. So here’s the worst-case scenario: Tori just gave Kameron the final components for a bomb, and he’s going to use it to blow a pontoon strut and drop the city into Saturn. Everyone dies.”
Darla chuckled as she replied.
Tanis rose and stretched her arms above her head, yawning as she did so. “Keep an eye on Tori. If he leaves New Amsterdam without his big case of badness, that’ll be one clue.”
Tanis shrugged as she pulled on a pair of white leggings and a loose dress that stopped a bit higher up the thigh than her personal preference. The dress matched her hair in both color and pattern-shifting ability. The look was a bit disorienting to Tanis—it made her feel like her face was lost in a sea of blues and pinks. “You know how I like to work. Assume the worst-case scenario, rule it out, and then work my way up from there.”
“If the worst-case is illogical, then it will rule itself out pretty quickly.” Tanis pulled her lightwand out of her bag and tucked it into a concealed pouch at her waist before pulling her hair up into a ponytail.
“Why not hack a cleaning drone and send it in?”
Tanis snorted. “If I had a credit for every time I’ve had a cleaning bot—or a human, for that matter—come into a room I’d set that flag on, I could probably buy a starship.”
“I though you liked hyperbole.”
Tanis walked to the room’s door. “So this means I get to go for breakfast, while you have a bot perform a B&E?”
She had the door half-open, and Darla’s statement caused her to stumble into it before she got her feet back underneath her.
Tanis could hear the humor in Darla’s voice and found herself wishing there was some way to give the AI the equivalent of a pinch on the arm.
The hotel had a small restaurant on the fourth floor, with a terrace that overlooked the canals. Tanis had eyed the buffet breakfast, but it looked a bit picked over, so she decided to order off the menu.
She’d gone for something simple, eggs, bacon, and sausage, silently thanking Darla for not making another vegetarian cover. Her coffee was first to arrive, and Tanis took a breath of the beverage, noting that the beans had been a little over roasted. She added a liberal amount of cream to compensate.
Passable, she thought as she took her first sip. A lot better than the tar Connie always makes. That stuff probably takes a day off my life with each cup.
In the canal below, boats plied the waters as the sun marched steadily to its zenith. Tanis wondered what it would be like to be in a place like this on a true vacation—or to live here. Just the idea of living in a city where you were hovering overtop of such a hostile environment made her feel uneasy.
Tanis knew that it wasn’t really much more dangerous than most stations or ships, but out in space, there wasn’t—at least not immediately, anyway—a massive gravity well underneath, eager to suck you down into the darkness below.
Tanis nodded her response, and returned to gazing at the canals and the leisurely traffic upon the waters.
Her attention was drawn away by a servi
tor bringing her food, and she’d just taken her first bite of the bacon—unable to hold back a slight moan of pleasure—when Darla made a sound of alarm.
ESCALATION
STELLAR DATE: 03.02.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Interplanetary pinnace, orbiting Titan
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Leona pulled herself into the pinnace’s galley to see her team settled around the table, playing what appeared to be gin-rummy.
“Seriously, Stefan,” Pearl said with a derisive snort. “Do you really think that what you have can beat me and Forrest? You and Alexi are screwed.”
“Hmmm,” Leona said as she walked around the table, looking at each person’s hands. “Hmmmmmmmmm.”
“Shut up, boss,” Alexi rumbled. “You’re not messing with my head.”
Leona raised her hands defensively and continued on to the counter. “Just taking a peek, that’s all. I’m only here for a top-off on the java.”
“Think those beans really come from Earth?” Forrest asked without looking up from his hand.
“I think a person can still call it ‘java’ even if the beans aren’t from the island of Java.” Pearl gave Forrest a judging look. “Besides, even if they’re from the Cho, who wants to say ‘I’ll have a cup of your best Cho’?”
“Sounds like the sort of thing that would put you in the autodoc for a day,” Stefan added.
“Stars…you four are just a buncha deep thinkers, aren’t you,” Leona said as she refilled her cup and sealed the lid.
“You give us some action, and we’ll shoot the shit outta things,” Pearl said, glancing up from her cards. “You give us milk runs, and we start thinking too much.”
“Gawd,” Leona drawled. “I can’t let that happen. You four thinking could spell the end of humanity.”
“Only if they’re lucky,” Alexi snorted.
Leona pulled herself back into the pinnace’s central passage and was nearing the bridge when Chelsea spoke up.
“What is it?” the colonel asked as she reached the bridge and slid into her seat.
“I do indeed. It was just yesterday. I may be organic, but my memory’s not that bad.
“So it looked through all the drone traffic?” Leona asked. “Doesn’t seem like the end of the world. Or is it that it failed to terminate a task your concern?”
“Oh? Related to Tanis?”
“Figures. It’s becoming obvious that Tanis is the queen of amateur hour. I’m starting to think that her help in protecting the oligarch was just fluke.”
“OK….?”
Leona had been taking a sip of her coffee, and nearly choked on it. She glanced out the pinnace’s front viewscreen at the implacable world of Saturn, half expecting to see an explosion where New Amsterdam drifted in the clouds.
“Rerouted to where?” she managed to ask a moment later.
“And now it’s gone missing,” Leona whispered. “Shit, Chelsea…if we hadn’t tried to track Tanis’s route to the city, we’d never have found it.”
“No,” Leona shook her head. “That’s no good. It would take hours to evac the city, and that may just drive whoever we’re dealing with to blow their bomb right away. Dammit. This is a hell of a step up for the Diskers. Assassinating someone like the oligarch is one thing…but dropping a whole city into Saturn? There are millions of people living there.”
“I know,” Leona said as she set the pinnace’s engines to begin their warm-up phase. “We’ve got an operative on the ground, though. Time to find out if Tanis Richards is as good as everyone else thinks she is.”
COLLUSION
STELLAR DATE: 03.02.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: The Barony Hotel, New Amsterdam
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
“Leona,” Tanis muttered aloud as she raced down the hotel’s stairs to the ground floor.
Granted, I think just about any tone of voice she uses would make me want to do that. She rolled her eyes.
She burst out of the hotel’s rear doors and raced toward a quay with several boats set aside for renters. Darla had already paid for a craft, and Tanis paused only long enough to free its moorings before jumping in and firing up the engine.
While she did so, Leona told her about the missing antimatter shipment, and a feeling of deepening dread settled over Tanis.
Darla said privately.
“Thank the stars for redundancy,” Tanis muttered aloud before relaying the information to Leona.
“Surprised she cares,” Tanis muttered as she banked around a corner, sending out a wave of spray that soaked a group standing on a quay.
Leona didn’t reply right away, then,
Tanis came around a corner and finally caught a glimpse of Kameron’s boat before it turned down another canal and passed out of sight again.
She slowed her vessel down to take the sharp corner and checked the city maps. His last turn had narrowed down the possible destinations to just one.
Tanis eased her boat around the final bend and came into a wide lagoon at the lock’s entrance. There were two other boats in front of her, and beyond them, she saw Kameron’s boat slip into the water lock, the gates closing swiftly afterward.
She looked up the transit time and saw that the lock would take four minutes to bring the boat down to the lower levels, and then another seven to refill.
“Dammit,” she muttered, wondering if it would be possible to alter the water lock to make it run faster. She was about to consider the breach, when a message flashed on a holodisplay above the structure at the end of the canal.