by M. D. Cooper
<…you don’t understand,> Abby was saying.
Tanis could spot gross exaggeration when she heard it. A lot of servitors and bots had been destroyed, but the damage she and Joe had done to the machine shops was minimal at worst.
Abby sighed.
The meeting ended and Tanis opened her eyes again to see Ouri standing in her doorway.
“That looked like a fun conversation, boss,” she grimaced. “You were making some choice expressions.”
“Just talking progress with the brass,” Tanis replied. “What can I do for you?”
“I wanted to talk about Collins.”
Tanis gestured to a chair. “Sit, but before you get started, no recriminations.”
Ouri’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “What gave it away?”
“Nothing, but I’m wracking my brain trying to see how I didn’t catch on to any of this. I figured you must be doing the same.”
Ouri laughed. “Good to know I’m not the only one.”
“Not by a long shot. If we hadn’t saved the ship on a dozen occasions, we’d be in pretty deep hock right now,” Tanis said.
“I guess that does paint things in our favor a bit.” Ouri paused for a moment before continuing. “I’ve instructed Terry to look at what people have done since joining the crew or colony as much as what they did before coming onboard. Perhaps we can find some patterns that will point us in the right direction. I also have a team dissecting every move Collins made since he came on board. Hopefully we’ll identify any co-conspirators.”
“Pay extra attention to those last minute fill-ins we had on Callisto. It always seemed a bit odd to me that the GSS let people transfer in so late—even if their reasoning did pass muster at the time.”
“Already on it, Colonel,” Ouri said.
“Now you’re just kissing up,” Tanis laughed.
“Pretty transparent I guess.” Ouri shifted to stand up, but Tanis stopped her.
“I looked at the reports; the cylinders took a bit of a beating. How’s your little stand of trees doing?”
Ouri smiled. “Thanks for asking. Not too bad, the maintenance bots are cleaning things up. Most of the damage happened further aft where the engine released some radiation bursts during the flare. The majority of the damage in my neck of the woods was due to flooding.”
“We should have a gathering down there once it’s cleaned up. I think folks could really use that.”
“I know I could. I’ll see if I can put something on the schedule.”
“No schedule, make it spontaneous when things are ready. I’ll be a pleasant surprise.”
“Will do, sir.”
Tanis knew that even though the captain had given his ruling, Abby would start to pester Terrance and he would go to Andrews. The captain was good at not reacting to pressure, but it wore on him and eventually he would come to Tanis to see what compromises could be made.
Tanis brought up her lists of colonists with investigatory experience. Engineers all but filled the roster, but people with investigatory experience were lacking. With the levels of terrorism and insurrection in the Sol system, she expected more folks from counter-terrorist or counter-insurgency agencies.
Angela would have been a help, but with the SOC short staffed, she was doing interviews of the crew as well. Tanis could hear her in the back of her mind asking a plasma transfer specialist about his hometown.
Tanis knew it was unusual for her to be able to hear Angela so well. She had always had a very close rapport with her AI, but after the merge with the fighters in the Sol system she had been able to hear Angela’s thoughts more readily.
She knew her AI could see more deeply into her mind, as well—it showed in some of the observances Angela made.
Neither had spoken of it. It wasn’t entirely unheard of and neither felt any pain or discomfort when it happened. They had enough to do and worry about without making up new problems.
A name appeared on the holo after Tanis ran a new search focusing on Terran federal agencies: Jessica Keller. The woman’s record showed that she was a decorated, if somewhat unorthodox, agent from the Terran Bureau of Investigations.
There was no reason why she had left the TBI; in fact, upon closer investigation Tanis was surprised to see that she didn’t seem to have the right clearances to be in the colony roster to begin with. Far from being a help, this woman looked like a new problem.
Maglev service to the cylinders had been restored and Tanis took a track that arched outside the ship. The starboard side of the ship was dark. Estrella de la Muerte, dim even up close, was barely visible anymore, providing no illumination. As the train arched over the dorsal hump and Sirius A, the Dog Star, came into view, its bluish-white light providing a bow-to-stern view of the ship.
There were a few repair crews working on external damage. Further aft, secured by a multitude of tethers and nets, was the Fuel Dump asteroid. Crews would likely be working on it, extracting lithium for a burn of the Intrepid’s starboard engine, which would correct their vector and bring the ship back on course to New Eden.
Tanis’s attention was brought back to the task at hand as the maglev train slowed and changed tracks to one mounted directly on the port cylinder.
Because the track ran around Old Sam, the centrifugal force caused Tanis’s stomach to lurch as the feeling of “down” shifted from below to above her head a moment before the interior of the train pivoted to match. Half a kilometer later, it slipped through an ES airlock and slid to a stop at a station.
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She looked around at the small, dark station; even the emergency lighting was off. She wondered if coming with no armor and only a light-wand was wise.
Tanis enabled her IR and UV visual overlays, in addition to sending out a wave of nano to sonar-map the route to the stasis pods.
Tanis left the station and followed the map she had pulled from the Intrepid before boarding the maglev. Colonist stasis pods sheathed the sixteen-kilometer-long habitation cylinders, the area providing ample room for the 1.5 million colonists on the ship, as well as over a hundred thousand backup stasis pods.
With the power out, she again had to find creative ways to move three decks up and one kilometer along the cylinder. As she struggled with an emergency hatch, it struck her that roughly a hundred meters above her was Old Sam’s interior; a world filled with hills, trees, and lakes, kept in place by the centripetal force of the rotating cylinder.
Tanis said.
Tanis laughed aloud. It was good to know she could still keep Angela on her toes.
Before too much longer, she entered a chamber containing stasis pods. Tanis had never been in this portion of the ship and had never seen a stasis chamber this large. It stretched for hundreds of meters and must have housed tens of thousands of colonists.
Unlike the corridors up to this point, this chamber had power, though only emergency lighting was on. The illumination cast long shadows across the pods.
Tanis suppressed the feeling that she was surrounded by the dead. It was too easy to imagine the pods containing some sort of inhuman horror waiting to rise up and claim her.
Tanis turned and walked up an aisle, sending a command to the local systems to provide some additional lighting. The pods all looked much less sinister in the standard lighting. A command to the systems gave her the precise location of Jessica’s pod and Tanis passed the protocols to unseal it and awaken its occupant as she approached.
Stasis suits hugged the body perfectly and the former TBI agent’s figure was clearly visible as the pod began cycling through its wakeup process. The woman was quite obviously modified from human norm and her blue hair was just the beginning.
While she appeared of normal height—around one hundred eighty centimeters tall—her legs were disproportionately long and her waist was quite small. Her breasts were also rather large for her frame. This was obviously a woman who had rebuilt herself for a purpose, though it was not something one often saw in a TBI agent.
As Tanis watched, the pod’s lid lifted and the woman’s eyes fluttered open. True to form, they were purple.
The woman lay still for a moment, staring up at the chamber’s ceiling. Tanis assumed she was trying to Link to the nets. The local ones were up, but connections to the rest of the ship were unavailable. She must have learned something that alarmed her because the color drained from her face and she looked at Tanis.
“Is the local net’s timestamp correct?”
* * * * *
The amount time it took the woman standing over Jessica to respond seemed like an eternity. There didn’t seem to be a connection to the broader shipnet, but the localnet had an identifier and a date. She was on the Intrepid, likely many light years from Sol.
“Yes it is.” The woman’s expression appeared compassionate; she seemed to expect confusion.
Jessica’s subconscious took in the fact that the woman standing over her wore a TSF uniform and the insignia of a lieutenant colonel, but where there should be a TSF badge, there was an icon that represented the Intrepid. She looked young, but had an air of command about her that said she had earned that rank the hard way.
Her conscious mind, on the other hand, was roiling with the knowledge that she was on a one way trip to a colony she never wanted to see—her career, her life, everything she had worked so hard for was gone.
All because of one man.
She realized the woman had started speaking.
“I’m Lieutenant Colonel Richards, we’re not yet at the colony as we’ve had some problems. We were looking for people with specific skill-sets and your name came up. However, there are some issues with the data regarding how you got approved for the colony roster—so finding you raised questions, not answers. Can you help shed any light on this?”
“Myrrdan,” Jessica muttered softly.
The woman raised a hand to her chin, looking thoughtful. “I recall hearing something about a terrorist on High Terra by that name.”
Jessica sighed. “That’s the one. I was on the team attempting to apprehend him. I followed him to the MOS, but he got the drop on me while I was hunting him down. Next thing I know I’m staring at you.”
The colonel seemed nonplussed, but she did lean back and give Jessica an appraising look. Jessica took the time to slow her breathing and force her mind to calm.
“You don’t think you guys could just pull over and let me out do you?” Jessica asked.
The other woman laughed. “I don’t know if that would make my day simpler or a heck of a lot more difficult. The question on my mind, however, is before you were stashed on this ship in a stasis-pod, were you any good at your job?”
“Before I got stashed in this pod I would have said yes. My record is damn good, though you’ll have to take my word for it—unless you brought along a lot of databases a colony ship would never need.”
“I still have data about all personnel on the MOS while we were docked there, so I have a summary of your record. It says you were good, but there are a few annotations here and there.”
Jessica chuckled, “I imagine there are, most of them are probably even true.”
“I’m going to take you to the hospital get you all checked out—give you the opportunity to talk to someone about what happened to you and then we’ll see what shakes out.”
“Need to make sure I’m not booby trapped?” Jessica asked with a wink.
The colonel glanced at Jessica’s ample bosom. “Something like that.”
SUBVERSION
STELLAR DATE: 3241794 / 08.19.4163 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: GSS Intrepid, Deck 42 officer’s lounge
REGION: LHS 1565, 171 AU from stellar primary
“Do you think it’s wise for us to meet like this?” Hilda asked while cas
ting furtive looks around the empty room.
“Of course,” her companion replied. “There is nothing strange about the two of us meeting in the open. We should behave as though we’ve formed a friendship. Officers of our rank meeting for drinks is nothing strange.”
Hilda nodded and forced herself to relax. “What did you want to discuss?”
Her companion leaned back and took a sip of whiskey. “It’s time for us to move beyond talking about stopping the Intrepid. We need to begin to take action.”
Hilda shook her head. “I don’t know how that is going to be possible. Colonel Richards has everything locked down tight. You should know that better than I.”
“I know how to get around her security—that should be obvious,” the other responded.
“I suppose you would,” Hilda smiled slowly. “I assume you have a plan?”
“I do. We’re going to need to get the first mate out of stasis for it to work. I’m going to need your help with that.”
“I can’t believe the colonel just shot him like that.” Hilda’s voice took on a bitter tone. “I’ve known Mick for a long time, the captain hand-picked the two of us for this trip. She could have reasoned with him.”
The other nodded. “Yes, but you know how she works. Shoot first, second, and third. Maybe ask questions later.”
Hilda snorted. “You can say that again. She’s like a cold machine—maybe that’s what happens when you have been altered as much as she has.”
“Who’s to say?” her companion shrugged. “Either way, we get Mick and then we’ll stop the ship, take it to civilized space and stop this research.”
The pair spoke softly for several minutes of the plan and how it would play out. A nano cloud shrouded their conversation, altering the sound-waves beyond to that of an innocuous conversation should anyone happen to listen in.
After Hilda left, the other sat for several minutes, considering their next moves. Tanis was proving to be a larger complication than anticipated—though in retrospect that should not be a surprise. Removing Tanis was out of the question, she made the game much more interesting.