Chronicles of a Space Mercenary 0: Tanya (2 page)

“Rice!”

“A whole bag.”
They chorused in their astonishment and surprise. A whole bag of rice would feed the twelve of them for a long time. None had large stomachs.

“How did you get a whole bag of rice?” The second oldest asked.
Malcomb.
His name was Malcomb. She suddenly remembered the only true friend she had ever had, he asking vocally even though he knew she wouldn't answer, because he knew she couldn't. He always spoke vocally to her anyway, never giving up on her and hoping that one day she would respond.
Tanya couldn't utter a word no matter how hard she tried. She could make sounds, the calls they used to communicate, but she couldn’t speak a word. It was as if he
r throat would just seize
when she tried, a terror she could not understand seemed to grip her
throat and nothing would come out. She didn't know why, what trauma
she had suffered that
so devastated her sense of self-confidence, but she just couldn't. Not since her mother had gone. Not a single syllable.

The Tanya of now swallowed the memory and forced herself to concentrate on the business at hand. The strange memories had come again. Brief flashes of her very own life if she could believe what she was remembering, these the first such hints Tanya had ever received of even having a life prior to what she now knew. Not until now and so far only the two brief flashes. The first glimpses of her
forgotten
past. She put those thoughts aside for the moment and looked through the scope of the laser rifle.

The target would be visible through the dia-glass bay window of his high-rise condo as he opened the curtains in the morning. It was the only routine Tanya had been able to find in his schedule, this fifty-four
th day of her surveillance, which also
forced her to extremes of action she would rather have avoided. But he was a careful man and Tanya had to make necessary allowances.

Six days in a row she
watched through video surveillance feeds as he opened his curtains every day at roughly the same time, and now she waited. The couple who owned the condo where Tanya was now lying prone on the carpeting of the living room, her laser-rifle propped with a monopod and steady in her hands, were at that moment lying dead in their beds. Tanya did not leave witnesses.

The memories rose again suddenly from nowhere and flooded her mind, trying to wash away her concentration, but she could not allow that to happen and forcibly changed what she was thinking, subduing the memory from repeating itself, at least for the moment. She had
replayed the first remembrance over and over again, attempting to dredge up more memories, but nothing ha
d come,
until now. Possibly the stressful situation, Tanya thought, though it wasn't all that stressful. This was her job and she was more than just an expert. She was the best in the business. Cool, calm and collected, she waited.

The curtains began to open, the mark now coming into plain view. He was walking across his living room when Tanya took her shot. With the cross-hairs centered on the back of his head Tanya depressed the trigger
. The laser-rifle was held rock-
steady in sure hands, and the shot took him in the back of his head. He was
dead
before
he was falling to his floor. Still, Tanya was thorough and put in four more shots as he went down. It would be a closed coffin funeral.

She left the rifle where it lay as she got up and went into the bathroom to check her appearance in the mirror. Her disguise was still in perfect order as she had known it would be, but she liked to check it anyway. It was a good one with tight black curls, olive skin set off by even darker brown contacts, puffed out cheeks to ruin computer recognition and a few more kilos than she norm
ally wore around her midsection.
Al
together making it entirely impossible to recognize her once the disguise was gone. She couldn't escape the security cameras of this building, but this had been one of those jobs where extenuating circumstances drove her to do things she wouldn’t ordinarily do. Walking past a security camera after a h
it was a bad deal, but there were
no
other options
in this case and they would never find the person they thought they were looking for.

In her business suit and briefcase in hand, carrying all manner of weapons, Tanya walked out of the building and disappeared into the crowds. No one gave her a second glance.

Chapter 3

Tanya couldn't tell
Malcomb
where she had gotten a whole bag of rice, because she couldn't speak. She wouldn't have told him if she could. She was now sole provider for the group and the responsibility was hers alone. She was the oldest. Those older than her when she had been taken in by this group were now long gone, perhaps dead or to even worse fates. The ghetto was a dangerous place in so many ways that the providers seldom lasted long.

Then it
fell to the oldest to be the
next
provider. For over a year
Tanya
had been the sole provider for this group, and it had not been easy. She knew what he was asking her; he thought she was selling her body. This wasn’t the first bounty she had brought in recently, and how else could she get a whole bag of rice! She had been doing very well for the group lately, in fact. She had also now lasted longer as the provider than any who had come be
fore her, at least in her time
here. She also knew how important her role was for the children. There were none old enough to take over for her. They would all die without her.

The ghetto was also getting meaner by the month. A provider could eke out a living scavenging, or at least Tanya had been able to when she took over as provider, but the pickings had been getting slimmer and farther in-between lately. Tanya had watched helplessly as the children
began
to bloat from starvation, and she had decided to do the unthinkable.

The unthinkable was
how she had been providing and
also
why she wouldn't have answered his question even if she could. Selling her body would have been by far the slighter of the two evils, and much less dangerous.
Tanya sat up in bed, the dream as vivid in her mind as reality, the dream remain
ing in her mind even after she
woke, and then she realized it hadn't been a dream. It had been another remembrance, another brief flash of memory from her past. She had been a thief! Stealing for her group of children
! B
ut how she had been stealing was still a mystery Tanya couldn't remember. What she had seen in the brief flashbacks was all she knew.

It was the middle of the night but Tanya got out of bed
anyway and stood looking out
on the garishly lit city below. She knew she shouldn't b
e standing in the open window. T
hat taking unnecessary chances was a rule she never broke, but
for the moment
she didn
't seem to care. A
ll she could think about
suddenly
were the old memories. They were like flashes of someone else’s life
. A
Tanya from another life which she could not remember, but must come to terms with if she truly wanted to understand herself.

Tanya contemplated q
uestioning her handler about it, h
er contact with the Organization, the man who had recruited her so long ago that her memory of it seemed hazy and incomplete. She’d been doing this
job
since her mid-twenties. She had been working a mundane job and somehow, she couldn’t remember exactly how, the Organization had taken her in and given her this
occupation
-
a career as a paid assassin. It
was really a very good living and her life had been easy and uncomplicated since.

Easy and uncomplicated?
Tanya pondered those thoughts for a moment and wondered; where had they come from, and why? Her life had been anything but easy and uncomplicated, if you looked at it from an outsider’s view or measured it against the lives of
other
tax-paying citizens.

Yet the thought had been strong, reassuring, and repetitive. This was not the first time she could remember having this thought. Suddenly she realized, as she opened this line of reasoning and began observing her stray memories objectively, that she was seeing an odd link in her own past. Why hadn’t she seen it before? She took a cold hard look at herself, now realizing clearly that she was always telling herself this story about how easy and uncomplicated her life
was
, and that somehow, somewhere along the way she had come to believe it.

Nothing seemed to make sense to her the way it always had.  She could only guess at the meaning of these intrusive thoughts and memories.
Bringing this up to her handler was out of the question. She did not know what this was all about and Tanya was reticent by nature, always careful. It wasn't just her occupation. It was her and why she
was
so good at what she did. She did not take chances.

She let the foolishness slip away and quickly moved away from the window. If there was one thing Tanya did not do, it was risk her life needlessly. Tanya was very fond of her life, even if she now realized she was no longer fond of her occupation. In fact she had never been fond of it. She’d never liked it in the least, but for some reason she could not now fathom she had kept telling herself that she did. The sensation that
passed through her then, an electric shiver that raced up her spine, completely set her on edge. Tanya was always alert to the warnings of her subconscious, and of little doubt this was one now. But what was it warning her of?

Chapter 4
The
sign in the front window reported that the martial arts academy was accepting students. Tanya stopped to study it as if this were the first time
seeing it. No one would recognize
it wasn't. No one would recognize her. She turned and opened the door and went in, looking like a young society girl who might like to learn how to kick her rich boyfriend in the balls the next time he cheated on her. The instructor looked at her a bit longer than was necessary before he spoke, some inner perception at odds with the image, but it was a polished one and he didn’t follow his intuition.

“May I help you?” He asked as he walked over to Tanya, halting just out of arm’s length, almost far enough to seem impolite. She could sense his inner confusion; it was apparent in his hesitant body language and the strange look on his face. His senses were telling him something his eyes were not and he should have paid attention. That was the exact reason Tanya always listened to her
’
s; things were not always as they seemed.
He could never comprehend
how quickly she could move. She shouldn't have been able to. No human should have been able to, and the short
distance
between them not enough.

“I saw your sign when I was passing,” Tanya said, stepping forward with her left foot a little as she
turned and pointed with her right hand
at the
sig
n in the window
. Her eyes followed her pointing finger and he naturally turned to follow the cue.

The stiletto fell into her left hand as she l
oosed it from her sleeve-sheath. It was
little more than an elongated carbon icepick really, and now within reach her left hand shot up and forward and buried it all the way to the hilt under his chin and up into his brain. She left it there while he figured out he was dead, and before he could even fall she was out the door. She was halfway down the block before the students and another instructor came pouring out of the building in pursuit.

The high-performance land-car came to a near halt in the street beside her as she ran, the passenger door rising as it screeched up beside her. Tanya jumped in on the run, and tires spinning it raced
away
down the street.

“Any problems?”
Her handler asked. It wasn't all that often that he showed up personally for these types of things, but he did so occasionally. Still, the timing now seemed odd to her. Now that she had begun to remember some of her past.

It also now occurred to her that he always asked her how she was progressing towards remembering her past. Looking at him now, she knew he would ask her agai
n, after some small talk. It
always seemed like mere courtesy, but now Tanya wasn't so sure. Suddenly Tanya wasn't sure of anything and she did not like the feeling.

“No problems.” Tanya answered. There never was. “I would have preferred being allowed to take them all though. You know I don't like leaving witnesses.”

Her handler looked at her and her Asian disguise, the eyes even pulled into slants with surgical stitches that would slowly disintegrate over the next forty-eight hours. It was the perfect disguise for the perfect Operative. He saw the entrance he was looking for and pulled the ground-car into t
he underground parking garage. J
ust as quickly found a parking spot, and flipping open a hidden control panel on the dash activated the alteration. Just a color, ID beacon and tag change, but the ground-car could
do much more. It could
even
go as far as a model change, but that wouldn't be necessary this day. The mark had not been politically important, the reasons for the hit had not been offered and he had not asked, but it had not been politically motivated. If this had been a political hit the str
eets would now be locked down
tight as a drum with security checkpoints going up everywhere. This wasn’t such a job and there was little to fear, once having escaped the area of the attack itself. He backed the car out of its parking spot and they pulled back out onto the street.