by M. D. Cooper
Once Rich had her in the air, Tanis shut off the magfields, and he groaned under the full weight.
“Terry! Get that damn thing!” he called out while rushing toward the Auth & Auth, pushing another passenger out of the way in the process.
They passed through the security arch without trouble, and Rich puffed and wheezed while Terry took his time getting Tanis’s base.
When he finally brought it through and set it down, Rich hurriedly held Tanis over it, and she re-activated the magfields just as his grip was slipping.
“Thanks for not dropping me, Rich,” she said, trailing a tentacle along his cheek.
The guard reddened even more, and his counterpart burst out laughing as ‘Miss Claire’ wheeled away.
Rather than go right to her room—where she would have no reason to remain in the FGS—Tanis decided to venture to the ship’s VIP areas and see what pre-flight entertainment was to be had.
Despite the fact that the Whisky Tango was one word away from being a rather amusing curse, the moniker had more to do with the fact that the ship catered to people who liked expensive alcohol and dancing on their interplanetary cruises. To that end, it had not one, but two casinos.
Tanis mused as she drifted into the first casino and rolled amongst the unoccupied tables.
Darla suggested.
Tanis shrugged as she approached the bar at the back of the casino area.
Tanis shrugged.
“What’ll it be, ma’am?” the bartender asked as Tanis wheeled up to the bar.
For a moment, Tanis thought that he was an automaton, but then realized that he was wearing a mirrorsheath and mask like Claire’s. She understood how people did it for fashion and kicks, but to see a business dressing humans up as ubiquitous machines seemed odd, if from nothing other than a cost perspective. Machines could work day in and day out, but humans needed breaks, and worked in short shifts.
Maybe it’s a way to show how upper-crust the ship is, she mused. It’s not like I have a lot of experience hobnobbing with elites.
“Do you know how to make a Coronal Mass Ejection?”
“Sure do,” he winked and began to prepare the drink.
* * * * *
Over the week it took to reach Europa, Tanis played innumerable hands of poker, blackjack, and a number of other card games she’d never heard of before.
She also learned a few new dances and even became quite the sensation on the dance floors when she wore what she’d come to call her ‘haute-roller’ outfit—though dancing required wearing the corset a bit looser than Darla wanted.
All the while, she kept tabs on the Kirby Jones via a tap into the cruiseliner’s scan suite. The TSF patrol craft was ahead of them by nearly a day, still on a vector that could end up at any of Jupiter’s Galilean moons.
During her time as Claire, Tanis made many acquaintances, and had no small number of suitors approach her—both male and female. However, despite their wealth, none of them felt authentic to her. Not like Kaebel had.
His youth and drive to make the most out of life had been refreshing. She’d checked the feeds for mention of him, and eventually found that he’d been questioned about his time with ‘the would-be assassin, Bella’, but was ultimately deemed innocent and let go.
Inspector Sawyer had a harder time of it. While his suspicions were correct about there being something amiss at the hotel, the fact that it had been right under his nose—or so the investigators thought—didn’t bode well for him. He’d been busted down in rank, and Tanis was determined to do something for him when everything came to light.
As the days went on, and scan showed the Kirby Jones on course with no apparent issues, she began to wonder how the Infiltrator Chameleon had been able to fool her crew so well.
Darla suggested.
The AI snorted a laugh as Tanis reached the end of the pool. She was about to swim another lap when an announcement came that the burn was about to cease, and the pool was closing.
As Tanis drew herself up out of the water, Darla asked,
Tanis nodded as she stepped into an autodryer, standing still for the five seconds it took the machine to dry her mirrorsheath.
Darla snorted another laugh.
Tanis shrugged as she ambled into the passageway.
Tanis waved and nodded to a couple as they walked past. “Had a blast last night, Tara, Ford.”
“Us too! You hitting the floor when they boost again later?” Ford asked.
“Sure thing. I’ll be there with wheels on.”
“Love it!” Tara giggled. “I’m totally getting wheels when we get to Europa.”
“It’s an ocean moon,” Ford laughed. “I thought you wanted to get fins.”
Tara frowned then pursed her lips. “Hmm…good point. I wonder if there’s a way to combine them.”
Ford only laughed, and Tanis gave him a knowing wink before she turned and resumed her walk and conversation with Darla.
“All passengers, burn decreasing in fifteen seconds.”
The lift began to rise, and Tanis slipped a foot into a floor strap, just to be on the safe side, as she gave Darla’s clue a moment’s thought.
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Tanis laughed as the lift opened and she stepped out, keeping one hand on the passageway’s railing as she walked to her room.
“Burn decreasing in five, four, three, two, one.”
The feeling of gravity slowly dissipated, and before Tanis reached her cabin, she was pulling herself along the railing.
* * * * *
That night, Tanis hit the dance floor with wheels on her feet for one final show. She was still in her mirrorsheath, which she’d worn for the entire trip, once she divested herself of the FGS costume.
Today, she’d utilized the flowmetal from the FGS’s tentacles to cover her roller-shoes, pads, and helmet, turning herself into a gleaming silver dancing machine.
After Darla went on for ten minutes about how it would ‘complete the outfit’, she’d even used the last of the flowmetal to make a silver corset.
She danced for hours with Tara, Ford, and several of their friends. At one point, Tara began to place her drink orders through Tanis, and though Tanis’s first reaction was still to get one just to pour on Tara’s head, she acquiesced, and danced her way to the bar and back, even going so far as to leap in the air and roll across a few tables—much to their patron’s alarm and then delight.
Soon, everyone on and around the dance floor was ordering their drinks through Tanis, and she gave into the role, spending the rest of the night fetching drinks.
Only once did anyone attempt to proposition her. A man tried to grab Tanis, saying he wanted a go at the ‘roller-bot-bitch’. After he woke up with the distinct marks of four wheels on his face, he tried to have the ship’s security arrest Tanis, but everyone on the dance floor and at the surrounding tables swore that it had been a mistake, and that Claire had slipped when Ford dipped Tara too low in a dance, and bumped into her.
Even the two bartenders and the other staff swore that was what happened, and the belligerent man had ultimately stormed off.
By the time Tanis made it back to her room—just before the heavy burn cut out again—she was exhausted from having rolled for almost eight hours, but surprisingly happy.
“People are a lot more fun when I can just dance around them and serve them drinks rather than talk to them.”
“Well, you know how the saying goes, right?”
“That’s the nice version. I was thinking of something more like ‘You tell anyone about this and you’re dead’.”
“A death threat is fantastic?”
Tanis groaned as she pulled off the roller-shoes and slid her feet into footholds before the burn ended. Once secure, she divested herself of the flowmetal and took off the pads and helmet.
“So, did you learn anything?” she asked.
“Hey, covers are work—especially Claire. She’s not like Bella, who’s a loner. Claire likes to get out there and party.”
Tanis chuckled and repeated her question. “Did you find anything?”
Tanis laid back in her bed and pulled the blanket up, doing up the fastener along the side to hold her in as the ship’s burn began to decrease. “You were saying?”
“I thought that was a protected region down there,” Tanis said as she pulled up a map of the ocean moon.
Even at the dawn of spaceflight, humanity had suspected that an ocean lay beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s second Galilean moon, and once orbiters with radar and sonar penetrated the ice and confirmed the water’s existence, it was only a matter of time before rigs landed and began to drill through it.
The water wasn’t immediately hospitable to Terran organisms. It was also filled with protolife such as phages and viruses that were examined and catalogued. Most of the nanoscopic organisms that lived in Europa’s waters had ultimately been destroyed by Earth’s much more advanced life, though a few still persisted.
Many argued that life in Europa should be maintained as it was, but as the largest source of relatively clean water in the Sol System, no one was willing to let Europa remain entirely untouched.
Only when a joint treaty was signed between Terra, Mars, and the Jovian Combine, did the struggle to protect Europa end. However, by that time, many people had settled in cities on the moon’s ocean floor. Elevators stretched up to holes cut in the icy surface, and trade and commerce were well established.
Talks began to unseat the humans, but in the end, it was the dolphins who saved the cities. A part of the treaty to protect Europa was to give its management over to dolphinkind. The dolphins took that task seriously, but they argued that they needed human partners to effectively take care of the moon—and so a symbiotic relationship formed.
Over the centuries, the equality in that bond had ebbed and flowed. During the last century, the Jovian Combine had built more cities atop the moon’s icy shell, and the human population in the cities below had begun to balloon as well.
Though the vast majority of the humans who lived on and in Europa appreciated it for the natural wonder it was, some sought to exploit it.
People such as Oligarch Alden.
“How—nevermind. I know how. He’s the oligarch.”
“Great, now I feel all icky, knowing we have to go to his casino and save him. If it wasn’t that ‘Tanis Richards’ would be his assassin, I might be tempted to look the other way.”
“I said ‘might be tempted’. That’s a solid double-qualifier.”
“So, what’s our in?” Tanis asked.
“I’m sensing a ‘but’.”
“Dancing?”
Darla laughed.
“Oh, that doesn’t seem so bad. Just another cover.”
“Define, ‘heavily modded’?”
Darla broke into a tittering laugh once more.
“Pardon!? That’s disgusting, Darla.”
“How much modding we talking about?” she asked.
“Shiiiiit,” Tanis whispered. “Guess I’m going to find out what it’s like to be a JJ99 pilot.”
“Do they get to keep their legs at all?”
Tanis perked up at
the thought. “Scary how?”
“Kay, yup. You’re right. Octowoman gets to keep a normal head, right?”
“Well, set us up. I guess it’s time to upgrade from two tentacles to eight.”
A SIGNIFICANT CHANGE
STELLAR DATE: 03.03.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Europa Crown Station, Europa
REGION: Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Given the fact that the Kirby Jones had beaten them to Europa, and ‘Tanis Richards’ had already disembarked for the surface, Tanis and Darla decided that that there wasn’t time to establish a new cover.
That’s how it came to be that it was Claire, the fashionista debutant, who rolled into the recruiter’s office on Europa Crown Station, wearing her all-silver ‘Haute Roller’ outfit, automaton mask and all.
She’d decided that anyone hiring for the Blue Lagoon wasn’t going to want employees like Claire, since they likely had no idea how to function as servants. As a result, from the moment Tanis entered the recruiter’s small, but warmly decorated office, she adopted a subservient attitude, standing behind the chair with her head slightly lowered and hands clasped before her.
The recruiter didn’t immediately look up from her holodisplay, but when she did, her brown eyes widened in surprise, and she brushed a lock of blue-white hair back from her face.
“You’re…Claire?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tanis said in a voice that was not monotonous, but also carried no emotion.
The woman scowled at her display. “Ummm…may I be blunt?”
“Of course, ma’am.”
The woman’s look of consternation deepened. “Did something recently happen to your wealth? From what I can see here, you could spend money with wild abandon and still not have to work a day for the next hundred years.”
“No, ma’am, my wealth is intact.”