by M. D. Cooper
VA and sensor readings from the probes lined her vision as they surveyed the room. It read clear and Tanis ducked into it and crouched behind a row of backup oxygen tanks.
Two men entered the room at the far end and Tanis flattened herself against a tank to avoid detection. Her probes circled, giving her a clear view of their positions. She waited until both men were facing away from her and then leaned out, shooting each in the lower back with the pulse beam. They crumpled and Tanis crept over to them, keeping an eye on the hatch they had come through. Angela deployed several nano to disable the fallen rifles.
The opening flashed in Tanis’s sight and a map of the ship appeared over her vision. A short corridor lay beyond the exit and beyond that another hatch opened into the main engineering bay. The bay was long and narrow; two of the intruders were at the far end and another two were positioned at either side of the entrance she had to go through.
“Let’s do this,” Tanis said to herself. She picked up a second rifle, opened the hatch soundlessly and crept down the corridor to the bay’s entrance. It wasn’t sealed tightly and her probes slipped through the cracks. As the readout had shown, there was a man on either side of the hatch, weapons charged and positioned to nail anything that came through.
Tanis pulled the hatch inward and stood behind it. Who knew, maybe they’d fall for something simple. Visual input from her probes showed one man stepping through the entrance, his eyes darting suspiciously.
Tanis raised a boot and kicked hard, slamming the hatch into the man’s head. He fell backwards, clutching his nose as blood poured down his face. The second man was distracted by his falling comrade and Tanis used the opportunity to step into the clear and let loose with both pulse rifles. The man crumpled to the deck as she delivered another blast to his bleeding partner.
With both of them taken care of, she sent her nano over the various machines dedicated to moving and powering the ship. Luckily, the engineering bay was far from silent and the two figures at the other end hadn’t noticed the commotion. Either that or they were simply concentrating on their little pet nuke.
Tanis darted down the length of the bay, leaping over equipment and ducking under conduit. Her movements were silent and she went unnoticed. Ten meters from the pair she swung around a set of cooling conduits and stepped into view.
“I strongly recommend you step away from the device.” A twinge of panic was in the back of her mind, shouting run away from the nuke! She schooled her face not to show it—dozens of enemies were one thing; a nuke was something else.
The two figures straightened; a man and a woman. The man had long hair that fell well past his shoulders, held away from his face by a thin band around his head. A scowl creased his angular features. The rest of his form was hidden by a long dark coat. The woman moved into view and Tanis cursed softly under her breath; she was wearing a shimmersuit. As Tanis approached it shifted from a glossy black color to completely translucent, rendering the woman’s body invisible.
“I think you made a wrong turn.” The man scowled. “If you run now, you can get off the ship before it blows.”
“I don’t think I can allow that to happen,” Tanis replied.
The woman didn’t say a word; with her body invisible she was just a disconcerting floating head, which disappeared too as the shimmersuit’s material flowed up over her face.
“Think you can do that faster than I can twitch my trigger finger?” Tanis asked. “I’m MICI; we don’t arrest—we just shoot.” After a moment’s pause, the material flowed back down the woman’s face.
“Military Intelligence and Counterinsurgency?” the man asked.
Usually having MICI show up meant you had a leak; he had to be considering that possibility, a doubt Tanis was more than happy to plant.
“Then this will really hurt,” he continued.
Tanis’s vision turned white and pain erupted behind her eyes.
She felt a throb behind her eyelids and, as Angela predicted, in one second she could see again. The woman had vanished and the man was standing with the nuclear bomb between them.
He hadn’t pulled out a weapon, and simply wore a wicked smile. “Thanks for the treat. There’s little I enjoy more than watching Kris work.”
Tanis scanned the room for the woman while keeping her weapons trained on the man.
A fist impacted Tanis’s face and she staggered backwards, kicking out at where the attacker should have been. Nothing.
Tanis took a deep breath and brought her fists up in a defensive position. The room was loud and she set her hearing to filter out the ambient sounds, trying to listen for the whistle of the woman’s limbs.
Another series of blows struck Tanis and she stumbled, tripping over some equipment.
Tanis tried to move unpredictably while Angela hunted down the devices. Her arm tingled as thousands of nano left her body and filled the air in the bay. In moments the microscopic machines located the sources of the dampening waves and converged. The unseen robotic war was short, and punctuated by flashes of light as the enemy nano was destroyed.
Tanis’s sensors were suddenly able to detect air turbulence again and fed an image to her visual overlay.
The woman’s shimmersuit was slick; Tanis was unable to maintain her grip and her opponent slipped away. She blocked a punch and then they were apart, Tanis circling slowly, moving as quietly as she could.
The man swore, having realized while he watched the fight Angela’s nanocloud was disarming the nuke. He bent over the console, trying to undo Angela’s work.
“Just kill her already, Kris. We’re running out of time. She must have AI that’s hacking the nuke.”
Kris didn’t respond, but Tanis heard the telltale sound of a foot pivoting on the deck. With a quick flick of her wrist, Tanis let fly her lightwand, satisfied when her opponent screamed.
In front of Tanis, part of the shimmersu
it flickered, turning black, and then red around the area the wand had struck. From the height, and bits of exposed teeth, it was safe to say it was Kris’s jaw.
“Bet you wish you’d surrendered now.” Tanis reached out and ripped the lightwand free.
The woman staggered back, but didn’t make a sound. She must have pain suppressors.
Wordlessly, Kris pulled two thin blades from what Tanis guessed were her forearms. With most of the shimmersuit still functional, they appeared to float in midair.
The blades began a deadly dance and Tanis blocked with her pulse rifle, narrowly avoiding losing an arm in the first flurry of blows. The man was still cursing as he bent over the nuke, trying to do battle with Angela’s nano—though it was likely his AI was doing most of the fighting.
Tanis blocked an overhand blow from Kris and followed up by driving the butt of her weapon into the woman’s chest. Kris fell back and the shimmersuit failed, reverting to a glossy black.
“So much for your unfair advantage.” Tanis pointed the pulse rifle at the woman’s head. “Now drop the blades and put your hands behind your head.”
The woman snorted, a sound that didn’t work well with part of her face sliced open, and raised her right hand. As a static shield sprung out of her forearm Angela fed an intercepted Link communication to Tanis:
Tanis dashed over to the man and held one rifle on him, while firing several shots in Kris’s direction with the other.
“I’m going to have to ask you to step away from the nuke, Mister.”
He didn’t even look up, frantically working the manual interface, using every possible edge to stay ahead of Angela.
“Fine, have it your way,” Tanis muttered before smashing a fist into his face. The blow forced him to his knees and Angela signaled approval.
At the far end of the engineering bay, two men stepped through the hatch and leveled large caliber slug throwers at Tanis.
Kris helped Trent to his feet and they backed out of the engineering bay as the hail of bullets pinned Tanis down.
“It was nice meeting you.” The man called out. “You may have disrupted our little event today, but I’ll make sure you get a front row seat for the encore.”
The pair slipped past the two heavy weaponers, who turned and followed them out. Overwhelming silence filled the bay.
Tanis stood and looked at the damage caused to the Steel Dawn III’s engine bay. “Why do I get the feeling this was the easy part?”
THE NEW BOSS
STELLAR DATE: 3227162 / 07.28.4123 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Mars Outer Shipyards (MOS)
REGION: Mars Protectorate, Sol Space Federation
“Well, I can see you get right to work.”
Tanis looked up from her cup of coffee to see two men entering the sector chief’s office where she was finishing up her report with Chief Ian. She spotted four stars on the collar of the man who had spoken and rose before snapping off a salute. “Thank you, sir.”
He returned the salute. “I’m Admiral Sanderson and this is Captain Andrews of the Intrepid.”
“Impressive work, Major Richards,” the captain said.
“Thank you, sir,” Tanis replied. “It was a pretty easy decision. Stop them or get blown up.”
“I’m sure there was more to it than that.” Captain Andrews gave her a warm smile. The admiral was smiling too, but it was more of a grim, got-a-job-to-do sort of smile. He cast an unreadable look at Captain Andrews as they both sat.
Tanis took a moment to examine the two men as they all got comfortable. Each was older than her; a quick records check showed Admiral Sanderson as having just passed his three-hundred and fiftieth birthday. She already knew of Captain Andrews; he was an old spacer, born over a thousand years earlier. Much of his life had been spent in stasis making the run between Sol and Alpha Centauri. Because he was recently returned from an interstellar journey, none of the images of him were recent, and she was surprised to see visible aging.
Angela commented.
“I didn’t expect you two to come down here.” Chief Ian of MSF pulled Tanis out of her private conversation as he addressed the captain and admiral. “Though I can’t say I’m surprised either.”
“Someone tries to detonate a nuke three klicks from where my girl’s tied up, you’d better expect I’d come down here.” Captain Andrews’ expression brooked no argument.
“Will Stevens be joining us?” Admiral Sanderson asked.
Tanis looked up the reference and found that Stevens was the MOS stationmaster. Her TSF security clearances brought up additional data pertaining to several complaints the stationmaster had filed against the Intrepid for incoming shipments causing disruptions on the station.
Tanis suddenly realized she hadn’t checked on Patty or Eric. Emergency Response Status would have ID’d the dead, so Tanis accessed their net. The list scrolled over her HUD and she felt her heart drop as their names slid past. She made a note. There should be a memorial for the dead, and she would contact their relatives.
She returned her attention to the conversation around her to hear Chief Ian explaining the stationmaster’s whereabouts. Apparently he was down on Mars for a meeting with the Marsian government.
“And getting a strip torn off him, no doubt.” Captain Andrews glowered. “It’s what he gets for letting a goddamn nuke get smuggled onto his station.”
“Now, Captain, we don’t know that nuke didn’t come in on the Steel Dawn III,” Chief Ian countered.
&nbs
p; “If I may...” Tanis waited for a nod from Admiral Sanderson before continuing. “There were no abnormal emissions on our trip from Earth to indicate the nuke was with us during transit. It could have been stowed behind some sort of shielding on the ship, but frankly I don’t know where that could be. Every shielded location is heavily monitored. Also, on my way out I saw scuff marks on the bulkheads that indicated the nuke came from the dock.”
“Still, you can’t be sure.” The chief’s jaw was set at a stubborn angle.
“She’s right.” A man with commander’s bars stood in the doorway. “Sir.” He addressed Admiral Sanderson. “You asked me to keep you advised of what we found. It turns out the device was brought on board MOS a week ago on a small transport. It was stored in a nearby holding facility until today when it was moved to this sector as it was marked for the Dawn’s return trip to Earth.”
“Thank you, Commander,” Sanderson said. “Will you join us? This is Major Richards; she will be heading up your security unit going forward.”
“Yes, sir.” Commander Evans nodded to the admiral, and gave Tanis a long look as he sat down. It was either a look of guarded relief or territorial disgruntlement.
Tanis kept surprise from showing on her face. She looked the commander up and saw he was Joseph Evans, a TSF pilot added to the colony roster several months ago. Initially his duties consisted of piloting assembly craft, but according to the records several acts of sabotage resulted in his transfer to ship’s security. As the ranking TSF officer, the admiral placed him in command. Knowing that a flyboy ran security gave Tanis new insight into why her interview had seemed so perfunctory. These folks were desperate and apparently needed someone with her skills.
The knowledge raised more questions. Why didn’t an operation like this have the cream of the crop available to run security, and why hadn’t she heard of sabotage on a GSS ship?
“We’re damn lucky you were on that ship, Major,” Captain Andrews said. “My report indicates that the blast would have taken out over ten percent of the shipyard, and while it wouldn’t have completely destroyed the Intrepid, it certainly would have set the launch date back. Way back.”