Chronicles of a Space Mercenary 0: Tanya (5 page)

Tanya escaped the room and the laser’s beam she had been expecting in her back the entire time, but heard no sounds of pursuit as she raced to get down through the building and into the sewers. Tanya had not even taken the time to look at his face, but whoever he had been, he had chosen not to follow Tanya’s escape route.

Tanya knew that this building had a connection to the warrens below, and she had only to get to it. She found herself rubbing the ring on her thumb with her pointer finger even as she ran, as if she had to assure herself that it was still there. It was a beautiful fit. It
was
probably the pinky ring of the one who had detected her. Had been his ring, but was no longer so.

She made it to the makeshift entrance before any pursuit, just a crater decayed into the floor and revealing the sewers beneath. Tanya jumped, hit and rolled, losing more skin in the process, but then she was up and running through the warrens she knew better than anyone alive.
Chapter 8
The tiny ship silently fell toward the planet. It was heavily shielded, but against radar and scanning only, with absolutely no
defensive
shielding. There was no power active aboard the ship nor had there been over the last seventy-two hours
after insertion a
s
she
approached Mordalin on inertia alone. Remaining silent and invisible was a necessity. It was touch and go several times as random ships crossed Tanya’s path, but
she continued on each time, undetected. If she
was
noticed running silently with no identification b
eacon broadcasting her identity
the mission would
be
immediately scrubbed. This was the
point upon which everything
hinged. Without complete stealth, the mission was over. She almost wished it would occur that someone would notice her so that she could light her engines and get the hell out of there.

Yet Tanya was not the type to give her word lightly, and once having given it, she thoroughly meant to follow through
with
it. And anyway, the insertion was Handler's plan, not h
ers. If it
was
botched
, it would be h
is failure
. She’d be out with a clear conscience.

But she wasn't detected and the small ship slipped into the atmosphere unnoticed. If the little ship was caught on radar it would be seen as little more than a large species of bird, regardless of what type of radar they were using. With no power signature they would have no reason to suspect more, and no time to get someone there anyway. Handler's technicians were better than the best. Everything always worked. Getting in without being visually noticed had been the task. Tanya didn't want to think about getting out just yet. That could be worried about later, everything in its order.

Plan well, and then follow the plan one step at a time. Concentrate only on the step you are currently executing so as not to burden yourself thinking about the entirety of the plan, and avoid being overwhelmed with what a monstrous task it really was. That kind of distraction caused great plans to end in disaster, and Tanya was too much the professional to let that happen.

As the atmosphere began to thicken, Tanya cranked the manual lever which spun the ship on its axis so that the rear half of the ship turned a
full quarter rotation, at odds to the front wings, thus eliminating the aerodynamics and creating the wind resistance necessary to flutter the small light ship slowly into the atmosphere. She had to use the utmost caution, because this ship, which was little more than fusion and jump engines mounted on a light-weight carbon lattice frame, was her ticket out of here when this was over. The ship could neither be damaged on insertion nor discovered in her absence. And it could be a long absence.

The flutter fall wasn't enjoyable. It was a tricky piloting maneuver and the dizzying spin involved was no help. At four hundred meters she was low enough to avoid detection as a power source, so Tanya hit a switch and the tail slid back into place. There was no way to judge with any accuracy where you would come out of these flutters when you activated the tail section servo-motors; there were simply too many variables.

The little ship tried to dive, having been caught nose downward and inverted when the tail section righted. Tanya pushed hard on the stick as the deep ailerons and wide wings grabbed the thick atmosphere, leveling it out but still upside down.

In control now Tanya flipped over even as she looked for a place to make a landing. A brief use of her engines as she brought up ship's power, and
. . . there it was. She pulled the rudder over and within moments was braking with her attitudinal jets and heading toward a little clearing in the thick interwoven forest canopy, where a behemoth of a tree had recently fallen and the surrounding jungle hadn’t quite filled it in yet. With the ease of expertise she settled it into the opening and carefully maneuvered down through the branches to a clear spot on the ground. Then she shut down all power.

Chapter 9

The dream woke her immediately this time. She could actually feel her pointer finger caressing the ring on her thumb as she sat like a ghost in an abandoned building watching the one directly next to it. The buildings here in the ghetto were built nearly one on top of the next, just a sidewalk between, and Tanya now had a new avenue of access. The fe
eling of exhilaration as she
floated across that span, not remembered until later when she was safe and her terror
gone
, was an intoxicant too powerful for Tanya to deny. Then had she had the time to marvel.

The success through physical activity s
ent strange signals through her. G
iving her the beginning o
f a new self-confidence she
never
before
felt
. That was when Tanya
recognized t
he correlation between physical
prowess and self-confidence;
that
they were one and the same. The self-confidence she was lacking could be claimed through physical accomplishment
!
This memory had been forgotten, but it had still assure
dly shaped who she would become. A
s if that forgotten part of her was still in control of her in some invisible
subconscious
way.

Only a few of the gangsters who were running the building next to this one ever came and went in the room she now surveyed. Only th
e most important ones, Tanya noted over two nights
study. It wasn't a kitchen. The lights were off and the interior door closed as Tanya made ready to make her running jump, but
then
suddenly the door
opened and the
light was
on. A hugely muscular man entered the room and moved over to the safe.

Tanya knew what a safe was, and she also knew the combination of this one, having watched it being opened numerous times over the past forty eight hours. It was a busy safe. Things went in and things came out, but whatever had to be kept inside a carbon cube and behind a combination was now of extreme interest to Tanya. Her finger caressed the ring.

She knew she was breaking her own rule, but a power greater than common sense had gripped her; the power of shiny baubles. It was a power greater than anything she had ever experienced, and far too strong to resist. She wasn't aware of it, but she was hardly the first to have been gripped by the power of wealth.

What Tanya saw represented by the ring she now wore on her finger was the way out of here. These drug dealers and gangsters were all tax-payers and they could come and go from the tax-free zone as they wished. She was stuck here. She could neither go anywhere nor do anything to change her lot. Or at least until now she had not been able to.

The muscular man finished at the safe, closed the door, cranked the handle and spun the dial, then departed the room, turning off the light and shutting the door as he went. Tanya landed on the sill only a moment later, nearly as quietly as a bird alighting and fully confident of her ability to make this jump. No one heard her alight, in any case, and she was quickly at the safe.

With a clear night sky above and the bright expanse of the universe casting it’s approval down upon her endeavors, Tanya had just enough light trickling through the window to illuminate the silvery dial of the safe. With the help of her excellent low-light vision, she quickly had the safe open and the contents scooped into her ratty old shoulder tote. She shut the safe, pulled the handle down and spun the dial, ran across the room and vaulted off the sill, landing in the next building. Her roll was more controlled this time and she made her way quickly down through the building and into the safety of the warrens below.
Tanya sat up abruptly and threw off her groundsheet. Her pointer finger caressed the place where the ring had been and she looked down at her own hand like it wasn't even a part of her. Like it was someone else’s hand she had just mysteriously found attached to her own wrist.

Where had that ring gone? Her hand suddenly felt strange and odd without the ring there, as if bereft. She certainly possessed no such ring as that now, and Tanya wasn't the type to sell off old jewelry. She collected jewelry, and the kind she collected didn’t get old. She had so much in the way of gold and diamonds already (and every other manner of rare gem and precious metal) that she could hardly keep track of it all herself! But that piece had been particularly beautiful, and knowing what she knew now, had been extremely valuable. She would not have gotten rid of it willingly. She would have killed to keep it. So where had it gone? Who had taken it from her? How had they taken it from her and why couldn't she remember?

She quickly broke her cold camp, just a groundsheet and other basics, and after a quick look at her GPS device set out in the direction it indicated. She
had
studied Mordalin astronomy and geography, in case
of a loss or failure of her instruments, though they’d never failed her before. Tanya never did anything without research. She knew exactly where she was in relation to her target with her first GPS reading, and could
now turn it off if she needed
and go on without it.

She wasn't far from her projected landing place. The fall of the flutter ship couldn’t be guided, and you simply hoped for the best as you fell into the atmosphere, and further hoped you could pull it out at the last moment if it came out of the flutter in a dangerous position. She wasn't far from where she had intended, however. She had landed less than fifty kilometers from the Senator's mansion. It would be little more than a short hike. She set out.

Chapter 10

The only intelligence that Handler's Organization had been able to acquire about the security system around the Senator's mansion was the limits to which it was effective. That information was acquired through direct scanning
while
docked at the Palomino, not any internal leak in the Senator’s Security.

Senator Geble had no internal leaks, at least none that had been uncovered. Tanya was an expert in every type of electronic surveillance, however, and would have no problem defeating and then disabling whatever sy
stems the Senator had in place.
She had learned a great many things in her years of service to the Organization, but most of the things she had learned she had learned on her own. Tanya never did anything halfway. She came prepared or she didn't come at all.

To say that Tanya could have gotten to the Senator's mansion without her devices didn't mean she'd be able to get onto the Estate's grounds or into the Senator's mansion itself, if such became necessary. Modern electronic surveillance could not be defeated by force of will alone. Having covered almost twenty-five kilometers a day for the prior two days she now neared the perimeter of the Senator's surveillance grid, and slowed down to access the challenge ahead.

The landscape here was thinner woodl
and than where she had set down. P
erhaps harvested as firewood for the mansion's fireplaces or kept clearer than the forest beyond for security, but the cover was still thick enough to cover her from prying satellite
eyes. She knew this
because even her own very sophisticated cameras had not been able to penetrate the canopy.

She was pouring sweat inside the heat-sig suppression suit she had donned several hours earlier, but until she had ascertained all of the mansion's security systems, she could take no chances. She wouldn't take chances. Tanya never took chances.

The counter-surveillance puck she held in her hand, known on the streets as a field-nullifier, would bring her an immediate death sentence were she to be caught with it. There was only one use for such a device, and that was breaking and entering. In her case, it would be breaking, entering, and assassination.

The additional designation of assassination in her case, assassinating a Senator, no less, would certainly seal her fate, if they could catch her. She would never be taken alive if she could help it. Not out of loyalty to Handler or his secrets, but simply because it was better to die
immediately than to die a thousand times later. Senator Geble was as rich and ruthless as they came, so the rumors went.