by M. D. Cooper
They passed several Golists and Tanis passed tokens to them, their avatars nodding serenely to one another on the general net.
Angela asked.
Tanis spent a few hours working her way through the commercial district, identifying several routes from the bar where she was to meet the contact to the vessel she would be leaving on. She also checked calendars on the local nets to ensure that no maintenance or large shipments of cargo would get in her way.
Eventually the time for the meeting drew near and Tanis made her way to The Human Condition. She was not entirely certain she wanted to see the reason the venue went by that name.
Tanis entered the bar and crossed to where the servitor, a human in this case, was busy pouring drinks. The place was clean, the walls a gleaming white, the décor mostly steel and plas. All in all it was pretty stark, meant to draw the eye to the fact that the tables and chairs were made of humans. Not dead humans by any means, but live humans, mostly with little modification, and a lot of clamps and rods holding them in place.
The scene brought back memories of Toro—images of people turned into things, artwork and worse, flashed through her mind.
Tanis considered what had been required for her current cover.
There were several dancers at various stages between human and things decidedly not human slithering up and down poles, and in one case, mostly embedded in the pole. Tanis observed with Golist serenity, admiring the dancers’ wholesale devotion to their expression by merging their human physicality with an expression of inner self. Privately, Tanis reaffirmed her position that some people’s inner selves were just weird.
Tanis closed her eye—the other was currently covered over by her flowmetal—and calmed herself, exuding a zen-like peace as she waited for her contact to arrive. That didn’t mean that she wasn’t paying attention to what was around her. One of the advantages of the fluid metallic covering was that she had optical sensors all around her head, giving her a 360-degree view of the bar. She wondered if it would be possible to retain the ability after this mission, depending on whether the TSF let her keep the flowmetal—something she considered unlikely.
As Tanis surveyed the scene, one of the dancers caught her eye and she watched the person move around a series of poles near the center of the establishment. She wasn’t entirely certain if it was male or female, or if such designations even applied. It appeared to have no bones, or if it did, none were evident. The dancer’s general shape was that of a lithe woman, but it was totally asexual, and while it often bent at what would normally be the locations of joints, at other times entire limbs became fluid and snakelike.
As its dance progressed, Tanis saw that it was also able to change the overall dimensions of its body, almost as though its skin were no more than a stretchy membrane. Its stomach distended at one point, and then it grew breasts, moments later to lose them and become smooth and featureless again. Its head would swell and become conical and narrow and wrap around a pole before thickening and resuming the shape of a normal human skull.
Tanis had to admit she was impressed; whoever this dancer was, it had some of the most extreme modifications she had ever seen. If it wasn’t for the abstract beauty of the dance, Tanis would have thought the creature wasn’t human at all. Dance was something that could always betray a lack of humanity. Any machine or AI would inevitably have some evidence of math or an artificial lack of math in its dance. It was something that was hard to spot, but Tanis had watched enough dancing to know there was a certain element to organic dance and expression was not something a machine could replicate.
Tanis countered.
Tanis laughed; not outwardly, her face currently having no mouth, but she found Angela’s ever-prosaic attitude amusing.
They continued their silent observation of their surroundings until a message came over the establishment’s local net informing Tanis that their contact was waiting for them in the rear of the bar. The message contained directions to a dressing room. She hovered past the other patrons to a hall in the rear and through a door with the label “Adrienne” on it.
The inside of the room was plush and opulent, a distinct difference from the austere look of the common area outside. There were several holo mirrors, showing a 360-degree view as Tanis stood in the center of the space waiting for her contact to show up.
The lack of a second exit unnerved her and she assessed the structure of the walls to see if she could break through them if needed. They were little more than a thin plas and she determined that with a few blasts of a pulse rifle she could create an additional exit should the need arise. The moments ticked by and then the door opened, revealing the identity of Adrienne.
It was the fluid dancer. She—“Adrienne” seemed to imply gender—slinked into the room, passed Tanis and sprawled onto a mound of cushions, her form melting over them.
“You must be Yora,” the woman said. I am Adrienne, as you may have guessed.”
A connection presented itself over a secure Link; Tanis opened it and responded.
“So, to the point and without pleasantries. Normal, I suppose, for one of your type. You sculpt yourselves into paragons of beauty and power and then abstain from pleasure entirely. I, personally, would not be able to resist.”
“I never understood why someone seeking enlightenment would also want to control corporate interests,” Adrienne said. “The notions seem to be in conflict. I, on the other hand, have no such desires. I only wish to surround myself in comfort and pleasure.”
“There are actually a number of groups that use me to help them acquire work. You could consider me something of a broker. What sort of venture are you planning?”
“So you’re looking for some muscle, are you then? Any particular needs?”
Adrienne sat still for a moment, only pulsing the odd limb as she considered the requirements. “I think I can hook you up with a group that has done such things in the past. They could most likely field a team of twenty or thirty for a job like this.”
Data was delivered to Tanis and she looked it over, examining specs and the oblique descriptions of jobs performed. It matched the data on the group that had attacked the Intrepid and she determined that the time for her disguise was over.
Tanis’s tone brooked no discussion.
“Their what? Why would you need to know that?” Adrienne asked. Shock rippling—literally—across her face.
“You’re TSF?” Adrienne asked. “I have to admit, that’s a pretty extreme cover.”
“Thank you.” Tanis allowed the flowmetal to form a mouth since her cover was no longer necessary. Besides, her voice could be very menacing. “You’re going to tell me everything you know about their job to attack the Intrepid and you’re going to do it with a song in your heart.”
“You don’t think I haven’t…” Adrienne’s smug expression drooped into surprise. “You’ve got a suppression field!”
“Well, it wouldn’t do for you to call in whatever thugs you have on hand to stop our little conversation. I don’t think we need for this to get unpleasant, but I won’t really mind if it does.”
Adrienne sat silently for a moment, then in a flash her entire body moved toward the far wall. Tanis realized there must be some sort of open vent that the woman could fit through. Reacting on instinct, Tanis pulsed her hover system and leapt into the air, coming down into Adrienne, the needle points at the ends of her legs piercing what would be a normal person’s calves.
Adrienne shrieked, twisting in pain, and Tanis spat a glob of flowmetal over her face where it flowed into Adrienne’s mouth, swelling to block out further noise.
“Easy now.” Tanis’s tone carried no small amount of menace. “This can get a lot worse if you don’t cooperate.”
The look Adrienne shot at Tanis said it all; she wasn’t willingly going to give up the person who had hired the merc crew. Whoever it was, Tanis was certain it must be a big player. Most of the time an agent like this wouldn’t hold back after being skewered.
Tanis re-established a direct Link to Adrienne. “I’m not afraid to slice and dice you, you know. All I want is a name. Who did the hiring for the crew that hit the Intrepid?”
“No problem.” Tanis exuded calm. “We’ll just go the standard route, making you more scared of me. You see, I’m currently a little outside the scope of my assigned duties, if you get my meaning. Not a lot of people know where I am, and even if anyone does link my whereabouts to the remains of your mutilated—but not dead—body, they’ll not get upset. Not only am I going to hurt you until you give me a name, but I’ll leave you alive for whoever you’re so afraid of as well.”
Tanis altered the state of the plas on her arms to allow motion at the joints and reached up to her head. There, she extruded a thin rod of metal. She took it into her hand where it formed a gleaming blade which she lowered to Adrienne’s left leg.
Adrienne’s face slipped into an expression of fear. “Who…who are you?”
“Oh, I forgot to mention. You may have heard of me. The media called me ‘The Butcher of Toro’.”
Angela replied.
She began slicing into Adrienne’s leg, though the skin, which appeared to be almost like neoprene in composition. Adrienne’s eyes bulged in pain and her arms flailed, pounding the deck on either side of her. Tanis felt resistance as the blade met the cartilage that served as bone. She grimaced inwardly at the feel of it.
A rush of numbers and data memory blocks flowed into Tanis’s mind, where she passed them off to Angela.
“Excellent.” Tanis slid the blade out of Adrienne’s leg. A panel on her torso slid open and she pulled out a med-patch, which she slapped on the wound none too gently. “The nano in here will hold you together long enough to get to a medic.” Tanis was about to extrude more flowmetal to bind her captive when the door crashed open and a terrifying figure stood in the entrance.
True to the strangeness of the locale, the muscle was unconventional. It was a woman, though that was evidenced only by the stylized breasts on the gleaming black torso. All of the woman’s limbs were gleaming black as well. They were also all very thin, nearly emaciated—a look that was offset by the woman’s head, which was a large ovoid devoid of any features.
“Hurting Adrienne was a mistake.” The voice emanating from the woman’s featureless head was soft and sultry, a rather odd combination considering the delivery.
“Possibly,” Tanis agreed. “But it was a calculated mistake; does that make it any better?”
The figure raised its hands and Tanis realized they weren’t hands at all, but merely the ends of the gun barrels. Handy…and disturbing.
Tanis dove to the side, or more accurately, cantered to the side as the guard fired flechette rounds at her. The initial shots missed, but then a few hit Tanis, some ricocheting off her chest, a few striking solidly enough to crack the plas covering her body.
Tanis angled forward, pulsed her hover system to its maximum and balled her hands into hard plas fists. She smashed into her bizarre adversary, and they flew through the opening into the bulkhead beyond with enough energy to lodge the woman’s head in the wall. Not waiting to see how long it took the freakish enforcer to extricate herself, Tanis sped down the hall at top speed. She burst into the bar area and wove past the sinuous dancers and the human furniture.
Outside the bar, she made a quick course adjustment to avoid colliding with several hovers that floated by. She raced behind one and angled herself to float horizontally alongside it. The man driving the hover cast her a strange look, but didn’t say anything. No point in getting involved in other people’s issues on Cruithne.
Angela deployed nanoprobes and they watched the black-skinned woman emerge from the bar and scan the traffic outside. She moved into the throng and started making her way in the direction Tanis had gone. Most likely she had access to external cameras that had let her know which way to go. Tan
is slipped ahead of her cover and raced through the crowd, still horizontal, and hopefully out of sight. Her earlier wanderings proved beneficial as she made use of several establishments and predictable throngs to mask her escape. Moving through a maze of levels and across the main hub of the station she worked her way toward her departure craft.
The original exit plan for leaving Cruithne wasn’t so precipitous as reality dictated, however, the times on the departure clearance requests displayed submission times only minutes after their arrival on the station. It was almost as though Angela knew her. Less than an hour after the confrontation in Adrienne’s dressing room, Tanis was pulling away from Cruithne and heading back toward Mars.
Trent. Not surprising; it just added fuel to the reaction when it came to hunting him down. The real key now was to see if the information would help her trace who was paying Trent’s salary.
DRAW THE NET
STELLAR DATE: 3227189 / 08.24.4123 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: GSS Intrepid, Mars Outer Shipyards (MOS)
REGION: Mars Protectorate, Sol Space Federation
Tanis eased into the chair at the head of the SOC’s conference table. Her leg muscles were still sore after being pulled out and replaced; high heels adorned her feet to ease her down after having her feet en pointe for days. The flowmetal still covered her head, but she had gotten an additive to change it to her skin’s color and texture. In a few days she would have it removed, but first she needed to debrief her people and be brought up to speed.
“That was some crazy jaunt you went on.” Evans’ voice held a hint of reproachfulness. “And that getup you went in. I don’t know how you stood it, barely being able to move for days.”
“It really wasn’t that hard.” Tanis shrugged. “Once I was on my way I was pretty much committed to seeing it through.”
Everyone else filed in as they spoke. Once they found their seats, Tanis called up the data she had retrieved on the table’s holo.
“So all roads lead to Trent right now. He’s the guy who did the nuke job and the guy who hired the mercs. We haven’t worked out who he’s taking orders from, but it has to be someone with deep pockets.”