Chronicles of a Space Mercenary 0: Tanya (15 page)

Her odds no longer seemed all that great, but it was a fight she had fought here before, many times, and it was a fight that had to be fought or she would spend the entire remaining length of her short life running from Jason
Cormach and the Organization’s O
peratives. They would never give up.

This was the ground of her choosing. It was her home-ground and certainly she knew it better than Jason Cormach or any of his Simians. She was also the Tanya of her remem
brances, the little girl who
decided she was no longer going to run. She ate a double ration of protein concentrate and then forced down some fiber, and went back to bed. She wondered, with a small smile of satisfaction, how much rest the Simians were getting? She didn’t think it could be much, not with Jason Cormach breathing down their necks. She immediately fell back asleep, that small smile still curling her lip.

Chapter 36

It was as good a place as any and fitting, Tanya
decided. The same place she
used when she was a child. The blast-rifle would be no good for close-in work down in the tunnels because if she fired it in close quarters the concussion channeled back down those narrow passages could very well rip her apart as well.

The blast-rifle, her backpack and a few other things would go into her old hiding place. The hand-blaster she would keep with her for a last ditch offensive, should that become necessary, and hopefully to take a few of them along for the ride. Being taken alive was not an option. Her hand-laser would be her weapon of choice. She placed that in a well-worn holster, and then sheathed her short swords. They were loose in their sheaths, which went on her back in place of the backpack. The backpack she stuffed up into her hiding spot with the blast-rifle and the rest of her things.

Tanya knew exactly what a one-atom edged carbon blade could do to a human body. Re
membering the bare scrap she
used as a
child, it felt like she was being given the chance to rewrite her history, going into it
knowing everything she had done wrong the first time. The odds were about the same, Tanya decided, but she had changed. Would it be enough?

If the Simians hadn't initially come equipped with infrared contacts or goggles, they'd certainly have them now. Adding to the discomfort of the thermal retardant clothing she was already wearing, she would now have to pull down the thermal facemask as well. It would be stifling when fully sealed, and in the rare case, if worn too long, was known to cause pneumonia. But it would be little more than a discomfort for Tanya. And it was completely worthwhile, because with it in place she would be invisible to their infrared contacts.

Invisible in the warrens in which she could run full speed through the pitch dark
without
her infrared contacts. She’d done so thousands of times, often just for the joy of it, sometimes fleeing for her life. But for the Simians, and Jason and Felone after them, there would be no joy. Tanya knew every twist and every turn, and with her suit now sealed she would be invisible to anything but a spotlight.

Tanya wouldn’t allow herself to underestimate her enemies, though. There was every chance they would all come wearing thermal retardant clothing, which would complicate an already difficult situation, but Tanya suspected that if they had been wearing thermal retardant suits when they
began
searching the warrens for her, then they had long since been forced to give them up by now.

It was difficult just to wear the suits at all, but if the wearer was active as well, and they would have to be to hunt for her, then she doubted they would have been able to stand more than several days inside those suits. She had rested for over a week, secure in her sealed
hideaway. A week of rest for her had meant a week of further frustrations for her enemies, and it was a reasonable hope that they had given up their thermal retardant suits.

The more she frustrated her enemies the less rationally they would act. They were already straining at the bonds of their conditioning and training, having spent weeks searching through this ghetto-city for her and so far finding only death. The reason Tanya had been the best of Jason’s Operatives was her patience. A patience she had learned as a child in these very warrens, hidden in a nook in the dark while searchers hunted for her nearby, often coming within meters of he
r in the darkness
, their crank-lamps unequal to the task of finding her i
n her nook or crack in the wall.
W
hen to move even a muscle, to twitch, to cough or sneeze, even just to breathe heavily, would have meant instant discovery and death or wo
rse. The week of torment she
just inflicted on the
Simians
had not been a test of her patience at all, she reflected with some amusement, and neither would the next.

Chapter 37

“She’s there!” Jason snapped. “Her ship is still docked!”

“We’ve searched the entire city.” The Simian said with some exasperation
, some part of him at conflict
with wanting to get angry with Handler, but that made very little sense to him in his limited fashion. He was very happy with his employment and his life, and he would not wish to anger Handler.

“Search it again.” Jason snapped and hung up.

“Not going well, dear?” Felone asked, not bothering to look up from her computer screen. They were sleeping together out of boredom, as they had upon occasion, and Felone had gotten started calling him
dear
, though not as an endearment.

“You’ll try my patience one too many times.” Jason snapped before he could hold it in, really angry this time, but all this did was
bring
Felone’s head up and a laugh to her lips.

“You wish you had the balls.” Felone said scathingly, for a moment showing her true nature, that of the emotionless cold-blooded killer.

Jason didn’t comment, his anger instantly melting away in the face of the possibility that he might really push Felone too far one day. Normally, Jason didn’t give two shits what he said to Felone, but it wasn’t
just
a matter of fearing her or not. He feared her, but she needed him as much as he needed her. The Organization was far too complex for one person to run alone, and so no matter how badly they had gott
en along over the years they
both recognized the need to work as a team.

But as Jason looked at Felone’s angry face he decided that this
might be
one of those times when it was best not to push her any further than he already had. He was well aware that this entire mess was his fault, even if he wouldn’t admit it openly. And things were not going as planned.

Jason could n
ever forget how he and Felone
built the Organization in the first place. It was their success as a hit team, and that success
largely Felone’s doing, that
necessitated the recruiting of their own
Operatives to handle all the new work that was coming in as a result of their growing reputation. They were now known far and wide in the kinds of circles where such services were required, but there could be no forgetting how they
began
, nor how very dangerous Felone really was.

Felone had also later received the same enhancement as Tanya, the success with her enhancement paving the way for more testing and research until finally they had both undergone the actual procedure. There
was
no rejection with Felone like with Tanya, and the transition had been the smoothest Jason had seen of any type of enhancement even with the much more volatile and unpredictable Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal augmentation.

Jason
almost died during
his
conv
ersion. He
wanted to and was sure he was going
to,
his screams every bit as loud as Tanya’s as his body fought ferociously to reject it. But something had finally given way within him and he eventually accepted the enhancement. His recovery
took
a long time though, much longer than either Tanya or Felone, and so even though he was as fully enhanced as they he didn’t want to have to put those abilities to the test against either of them. Both Tanya and Felone were naturals.

“It may just be the two of us in the end.” Felone said, having calmed down and apparently also having read his mind. “Tanya will get them all, there’s no doubt of that, and we’ll have to finish it ourselves. Just like the old days, right Jason?” It wasn’t really a question. She was telling him how things were going to be. She went back to her computer screen and left Jason to his own troubled thoughts.

Chapter 38

Tanya
was
waiting immobile in the total darkness of the warrens for more than forty-eight hours. Not moving, barely breathing, waiting. The patient hunter is always rewarded. Tanya was almost rewarded too well this time. There were three of them and they weren't taking chances.

Tanya caught sight of their thermal glow long before she heard a sound. They were far too good for that, but they weren't good enough to have forced themselves to keep wearing their thermal retardant suits. They carried no lights, counting on the
assumption that Tanya would
have given up her thermal retardant suit as well. They
were
mistaken. Lying prone inside a rotted crumbling place in the wall, and reducing her heart beat through rhythmic slow breathing, she wasn't even uncomfortable. A little warm at most, and impatient, but she didn’t let that impatience transfer to her body. It was in her mind alone.

The Simians began slowly to draw nearer. They were moving with the utmost caution. A limited intellect did not mean a limited cunning. Their simian enhancements reduced intellect but raised
their reliance on their
instincts. They were as wary as any animal, but they weren’t in their own forest and that was all that Tanya needed to even the odds. There were still three of them and only the one her, and who knew how many more were near enough to intercede if Tanya couldn’t silence them before they could react?

They were spread out. The first in line was meters ahead of the second, and the second meters ahead of the last. Tanya didn’t like the weapon
the first in the group was carrying. It was an old style scatter-gun, although its manufacture would have been recent, and it was probably loaded with something much nastier than lead pellets. Tanya didn’t want to find out the hard way what it was packing. In all likelihood, some form of micro-flechette load. She should have thought of it herse
lf, as it was ideally suited
to the tight enclosed tunnels of the warrens;
just swing it in your opponent’
s general direction and pull the trigger. The Simian with the scatter-gun would have to be taken out first, negating her desire to let the last in the line pass before making her attack.

It seemed an eternity before the first of the three was alongside her crack in the wall, and for a moment, as it paused to sniff the air, Tanya thought for sure it had or would detect her, but the overpowering stench of the warrens con
fused whatever it thought it
smelled and it slow
ly continued to move on past, it
s every sense on alert as some inner warning tried to make itself known, moving gracefully now as it stalked. Tanya shot it through the back, through the corrupted heart, closing her eyes as she depressed the actuator, to avoid the flash that would also momentarily blind the second two. Or so she hoped.

Tanya rolled free of the crevice and yanked the scatter-gun from the Simian’s now nerveless fingers before it
could
even
begin to
fall to the ground. She spun and discharged the weapon down the tunnel and into the two others, who were struggling through the haze of their momentary blindness to pick her out of the gloom, and since their vision was blurred from the flash of the laser and Tanya was emitting no thermal signature, the flash of the scatter-gun was the last thing either of them saw.

Chapter 39

The scatter-gun had blown them apart, Tanya noted
with detachment
as she quickly removed the first Simian’s bandoleer of scatter-gun shells. There was no time to waste. The thundering reverberation of the scatter-gun would have been heard for a great distance, and there could be no question as to the cause. They would be coming from every direction. They would be coming now, and Tanya had no idea how close they might already be. Throwing the bandoleers around her own shoulders and releasing the face mask of her thermal retardant suit, she began to run.

The location had not been a random one. There was only one place near here where a person, or Simian, could quickly gain the city above, a small crack in the ceiling just down from where she had laid in wait, and once she had climbed up through it, she pushed the huge bulk of an old wooden bureau over the opening and then continued to move upward through the building.

When she
made it to the fourth floor she quickly took her place at a rotted windowsill and began to wait. There was beginning to wait, there was waiting, and then there was waiting for the waiting to end. That was her new existence, and it was a comfortable one.