Chronicles of a Space Mercenary 0: Tanya (11 page)

The Kievors got a cut of everything. It was either agree to the price or spend a week negotiating the price, and then probably not getting it reduced very much. It was said that the Kievors could smell a credit’s profit from a Parsec’s span, and would negotiate endlessly to make a minuscule extra profit on each deal. Negotiating was the Kievor’s job and they did it tirelessly when the need arose. They always got the better deal.

The ship wasn’t much. Small! Just a very small bridge, more a cockpit than a bridge, two cabins, a head, kitchenette, fusion reactor and overlarge main fusion thrust
er- it would be extremely fast- o
ne puny plasma cannon, and the warp jump engine. It was enough. She hadn’t bothered asking the Kievors for any of their technology; it was common knowledge that they wouldn’t share it. Apparently they were well satisfied with their technological advantage and wanted to keep it. She could hardly blame them, considering their state. Their climb to technology could not have been an easy one.

An orange glow enveloped her ship and lifted it free of the deck. No feeling of motion to this. Not when the Kievors could accelerate you to what must have been near light-speed in their lift tubes, then decelerate you just as rapidly as they transported you across dozens of kilometers in bare milliseconds. If she hadn't felt the slight inertia while in their lift tubes, she might've thought it was some kind of spatial
transference rather than motion, but she had felt it just the slightest bit.

She felt no inertia now as the orange glow enveloping her ship slid them out through the transparent gravity field, the shimmering translucence the only thing between the dock and the vacuum of space beyond. There were hundreds of thousands of these docks of varying sizes
throughout
the entire exterior
-level
of the Station, every one of them wide open to the vacuum of space except for the shimmering gravity fields intervening and holding that vacuum at bay. It gave Tanya pause as she contemplated the unbelievable computing power required to run such an installation. The field enveloping her ship swiftly carried her out and beyond the shiny exterior of the Station.

When the orange glowing field disappeared, and while they were yet within the Kievor’s Protected Zone and guarded by the Kievor’s weapons, Tanya ran through the checklist of the little ship's systems for a second time, all green and go. She hadn't expected less from the Kievors, and she lit the fusion engine and pushed the throttle all the way forward. It slammed her back in her seat, gluing her into her crash seat, the only piece of equipment Tanya had changed. There was no doubt in Tanya's mind that she might need every ounce of thrust this ship could give her before she and Handler had their last words, and a good crash seat could make all the difference.

In a good seat, Tanya could withstand nineteen gravities lateral force. More than any other human that Tanya had ever heard about, other than the Simians. This little ship would give her those nineteen gravities of lateral force with no problem. In a space battle her opponent had better hope he got her before she came in too close, because once she
had, with the little ship’s massive thrust and maneuverability it would quickly be over.

She hit jump a long time before she came to the edge of the Kievor's protected zone.

Chapter 25

Her identity beacon was flashing an alias that Tanya
could only hope
was unknown to the Organization. She could not create a new alias on her own and needed to make contacts, and here was such a place where that might be handled. She brought her little ship down on clearance and settled it into the space port’s small ship section. There were thousands of other small ships. Places like this often drew such crowds, as Tanya now remembered well. The Corporate owned frontier planet
Hailey’s Outpost
was named for the daughter of the Corporation’s majority stockholder, but since that time little else had been invested in it. It was as safe
a place as Tanya could think
; she could not use any cont
act she
ever u
sed in the past. Even if she
thought they were unknown to the Organization.

Tanya had to disappear completely from the Organization’s network. She could trust no one from her past. Here she might possibly be invisible to the Organization, which usually didn’t do business in such places and thus were unlikely to have contacts here. She knew that there were no guarantees and Organization or not,
it
would not be a safe place. There were few more dangerous.

Hailey’s Outpost was rich in mineral deposits, and those were being shipped off-planet as fast as they could be loaded into cargo ships. The slapped together city of Dunnom, population somewhere around eight million, or its space port
,
would be a good place to get what she needed. Dunnom would be a good place to get dead too, if she wasn’t careful. She powered down her little ship and set the automated defenses.

Tanya seldom removed her jewelry but this was a special occasion. If she walked into Dunnom with millions of credits worth of diamonds strewn so carelessly around her neck, one of two things would happen; either she’d walk back out without her diamonds, or she wouldn’t walk back out at all. In a dark and desperate city like Dunnom, she’d be mobbed en-mass the instant she stepped foot inside the city proper. In any case, Tanya needed to make a different kind of impression, and drawing attention to herself wasn’t going to help her cause.

Camouflage skin tone, plain tan battle-dress, a pair of shit-kicking steel toed combat boots with retractable pointed cleats, and the Kievor blaster in a holster on her right hip and she was ready to depart. She wouldn’t have trusted the Kievor weapon on the Kievor Trade Station itself, but she trusted it here. Her laser went into a holster on her left hip. S
he could draw with her left
as quickly as her right, thousands of hours of practice had made it so, but if she needed to use a weapon here, she would use the Kievor blaster first. It was devastating.

There were no Custom's Offices or long lines and longer forms to fill out, in triplicate, to go through on Hailey’s Outpost, and there were land-cabs waiting on the curb when she had finally worked her way out of the parked ships. No kind of fence or security around the parking
area at all. If your ship could not defend
itself
, then Dunnom was not the place to leave it unattended.

Regarding the importation of contraband, the corporation had little to fear; the contraband was all being manufa
ctured here and leaving, by
cargo ship-load. These mining cities were always hotbeds of alcohol, drugs and violence and there would be drug labs running everywhere. It was always the same. It was the preferred lifestyle of
the
men and women who
toiled in these
places
,
and the corporations had long since given up trying to regulate the lifestyles of their workers. They lived short, furious lives, but they also had a very high reproductive rate. There were always ready workers to fill the ranks.

Tanya jumped into the first cab in the line. She hadn't expected an alien, but probably should have. She’d had no need to come to places like this before now. In a way it was like the Kievor Trade Station, a lawless pla
c
e which
would attract a certain daring type of colonist, not necessarily of the human race. Tanya would have to determine later if there was anything here in this city worth taking, but she highly doubted it. Her first order of business was acquiring new paperwork.

“Where you going?”
The cabbie asked. A mammal, face like a marmot and heavily furred. No doubt infested with all kinds of vermin.

“I need paperwork.” Tanya said. If its smell was any further indication, it had gone many months without bathing, and Tanya could not seriously imagine an officer of the law going to such lengths to catch a few drug dealers or paper pushers. In fact, she doubted there was any kind of law here whatsoever, other than the law of the strong, and a free colony had a right to regulate itself, so there wouldn't be
Federation Officials here attempting to make inconsequential busts. In any case, cabbies were usually the best place to start such inquiries.

“You come to right place.” I
t said cheerfully, as she had been sure it would, though Tanya still hadn't determined if it was male or female. “Find
everything
you need in Dunnom. I will be your guide.”
I
t
added,
the gleam of greed plainly visible in its alien eyes as it turned to look back at her over the seat as it spoke.

“I believe you.” Tanya said. She did.
“How much?”

Chapter 26

Without greed and avarice, Tanya decided, the entire human civilization would grind to a halt for lack of impetus. It would simply collapse for lack of motivation.
Starfire
, her both new and newly renamed ship, and Starfire’s newly changed identification beacon, now floated in orbit around
Sartoria
, a wealthy world and not one a being would want to try to enter without their paperwork in order. Tanya’s paperwork was in order. It hadn’t been cheap, but hardly on a level with the Kievors. All of mankind’s checks and balances within the system weren’t worth the code they were written with when
people
still input the data.

Handler had been unaware that Tanya knew where his and Felone’s base of operations was located, but she had deduced it over time. Tanya seriously doubted they would still be there. But she had to start somewhere, and this was as good a place as any. It was either take the
fight to them or never be able to sleep another restful night, knowing that sooner or later, and probably much sooner rather than later, they would be coming for her.

She had simply given up searching for an
y clues on the Ultra N
et. There was nothing there to find, no matter what search queries she tried. The simple fact of the matter was that Tanya knew absolutely nothing of Handler or the Organization other than what he had wanted her to know. In retrospect, she could hardly believe she had allowed such a one-sided relationship to go on for so long without knowing more about who she was working for.

The mental suppression and suggestions had been extremely powerful. Powerful enough to remain hidden for sixty years, and only the chance encounter with the pimp bringing them to the surface. Otherwise they may never have presented themselves. She might have gone on working for Handler for the next thousand years and would never have known the difference.

Now she realized, of course, that Handler had somehow heard of the pimp’s murder and realized she was remembering. And that if she hadn't remembe
red yet, she would soon. She
would have to be very careful that there weren't other suggestions still implanted within her mind, and carefully analyze every step she would take to be sure that the motivations were her own and not something steering her to her own destruction. Sixty years was a long time to forget something as traumatizing as what she had lived. Sixty years was a long time to smile in the face of someone you had done that to.

Tanya brought Starfire in for a landing under complete tower guidance. This was not Hailey’s Outpost and Tanya had to go through customs,
but her new identification chip brought only a smile and a return of the chip once it was passed under the scanning device.

“Welcome to Sartoria, will you be staying long?” The customs agent asked pleasantly.

“Depends on if I land my client.”
Tanya replied agreeably. It was the truth so she could tell it with a straight face, not that she couldn't lie just as well.

“You won’t need those here. You’ll find that we’re very modern.” He nodded to the weapons riding her hips in their holsters. “Not that they aren’t allowed, of course.”

“I think I’ll hang onto them.” Tanya said as she began to move off. “I’m so defenseless without them.”

“In that case, good luck.” He said as Tanya walked off. His look had said he would have liked to talk longer, possibly over dinner and then of course back to his place after. The idea was an intriguing one, though not with him and not now. The human predators she had met on the Kievor Trade Station were more overt than the predators of big commerce and politics, but behind it all they were still the same. The human predators on the Kievor Trade Station did their dirty work with their own hands. The only difference between the two groups was that the one did it with their own hands, while the other paid to have it done.

Thoughts of a new career would have to be put on hold for now, though if this went on much longer she would have to find some new means to replenish her bank account. Tanya wasn’t the type to sell her treasures; if she needed more funds she would simply have to acquire
more. The thought of accessing any of her other bank accounts never crossed her mind. It simply wasn’t an option. Tanya had deduced the location and planet of Handler's office over time without even meaning to, as she had never had a thought that she would need to, so if Handler had
tried
to keep track of her and her activities, including that of knowing where all of her bank accounts were, then he would've done so and that was the end of the story. Her banks accounts would remain inaccessible for the moment.