PrincessColumbia

  Diane strode onto the bridge feeling rather positive about how things had gone down so far.

  Of course, she knew the situation wasn’t even close to resolved. “Alright, give me the sitrep,” she ordered as she stepped into her Commander’s station.

  Jace swung around in his chair and gestured vaguely at the main viewscreen. “We’ve successfully disabled The Roadrunner. From what we’ve been able to gather from their comms chatter, they’ve sustained casualties but nothing fatal. When we offered assistance we received some rather...anatomical threats and suggestions about auto-fornication.”

  Diane couldn’t help but snicker at the captain’s clever wordpy, “And the distress signal?”

  “We’re on our way back to the pnet the signal came from. Comms, you want to take over?”

  The lieutenant on the Communications station momentarily had a deer-in-the-headlights look before composing herself, “We’ve been using the encryption the captain provided to broadcast a ‘message received, assistance on the way’ message, but we haven’t received a response. I can confirm that no additional messages have been sent and there doesn’t seem to be any messages coming in response. It looks like whoever the ‘family’ was he was communicating with is following his instructions to not respond.”

  Diane nodded, “Alright, I guess that means it’s up to us to at least follow-up to see if assistance is needed.”

  Jace nodded, “I’ll have a couple of my people meet you at the shuttle bay, your loadout locker is ready for you.”

  Katrina, it was quite obvious by now, learned from history, even if it was just the ‘recent’ history of the st few months. Since every other ship Diane took out at some point had one of the bunks completely converted temporarily to a weapons bay, Katrina had modified the blueprints for The Joan of Arc to include an Executive Armory, complete with racks for Diane’s armor suits.

  Yes, plural. Since the mission to eliminate Coxand, she and Katrina had taken to creating new suits and modifying them to specific tasks with a passion. The amount of testing and modelling was expectedly high, especially given that there simply wasn’t any in-game infrastructure for space and combat suit research.

  Diane hadn’t been expecting any specific circumstances for this trip, though since Katrina had been wanting to apply some of the upgrades they’d come up with to the suit they’d decided to refer to as the ‘standard’ combat and survival suit she’d had to leave that one at the station. Going forward, it would be the ‘test stable’ build of any advancements they made in the tech. They’d use the other suits to specialize, using them to test the test and most cutting edge of their developments.

  One such was the suit she’d opted to rack-up for this trip, the stealth suit. Lighter and with a lower profile than her standard suit, it was less about intimidation and more about being, in Russe’s words, “a sneaky badass.” The software built into the onboard computers would be a suite of active hacking and monitoring tools, using the most up-to-date computing tech avaible to the station to connect wirelessly and automatically to any avaible networks nearby and to be so completely discrete with the connection it would be undetected even with the most aggressive network audit.

  The outer yers of the suit were not just made with sound absorbing materials that were beyond whisper quiet when she moved, they were light absorbing. The suit wasn’t, strictly speaking, bck. It was simply that the outer yers were made with a light absorbing material that simply soaked up the visible light spectrum. While only 80% effective, meaning one could see the matte mesh that the fibrous material made against the panels of the armor, it was still amazingly dark bck that was intimidating as hell.

  Adding to the stealth capabilities was a prototype active camoufge that had a very limited battery life but was quite good at making her basically invisible. Although Russe had compined that if she moved it looked like a mirror was walking around, which was a bug that they hadn’t worked out yet.

  It wasn’t nearly as strong as her standard armor. The shot she’d taken to the torso in the engine room of Coxand’s ship would punch right through the stealth armor, but it was sufficient to protect against anything in the “stabbing” category of weapons, would resist any cuts short of a weapons-grade ser, and would do a passable job of absorbing a grenade bst. As in, she’d walk away...but it would be a walk, she’d be in too much pain to run.

  The loadout would also be lighter, there simply weren’t as many mount points on the stealth armor as the standard. She carried a single P390 on one hip and one psma pistol on the other. Her extra ammo for the carbine was stored in the base of the custom holster they had built for the gun.

  Once she was changed and loaded up, she headed to the shuttle bay where the ship’s single shuttle was waiting, two crew members already in their much more limited armor, consisting of just torso covering and a pair of bracers and shin-guards.

  “Ma’am, I’m Lt. Duturi and this is Ensign Watanabi,” the young man in the co-pilot’s seat stood as he indicated the pilot, who was completing her pre-flight checks.

  “As you were, lieutenant. Good to meet you both and thanks for coming along for this. I’m afraid I still haven’t logged any time in the simutor to fly one of these things.” Diane gred down at the passenger seat she would be occupying for the flight. At least this time they weren’t going to get shot at.

  She hoped.

  Damnit, I just jinxed it, didn’t I?

  They were not, surprisingly, shot at on their way down to the pnet’s surface.

  A shuttle is, of course, no transporter. It took a good amount of time for them to get from the stable orbit The Joan of Arc was in down to the small continent the signal had been trianguted to. Time that gave Diane the chance to think.

  Her musings nded on her interaction with J’Jesi. It wasn’t that it was a bad interaction, it was, in fact, quite enjoyable. The problem was it was yet another indicator that she was getting a bit too invested in her character. During the discussion of the loss of the engineer’s parents, Diane had almost said ‘the war that cost us our parents.’ As in, Diane telling the NPC that she was commiserating with that she had lost her parents in the war. As a cover for her identity in-game as a Lost, it was perfect. No family, no real connection to ‘her’ native culture, appropriately tragic so people would stop asking questions beyond the surface level, and perfect for giving her a reason to be completely clueless about certain aspects of life in the 27th century in the middle of a very poputed gaxy.

  The problem she kept coming back to in her musings was that...she would have meant it.

  She’d heard of this kind of thing, of course. She was a spook, a spy, and she was presently in the middle of some of the deepest cover ever created. Any agent that had to go undercover at all was given training for it, and some of that training included cautionary tales of agents who’d slipped a bit too deep into their cover, who’d have to be reminded of their true allegiance and purpose.

  Agents who let themselves slip too far into the fantasy.

  It made sense that she’d be in danger of it here, in this game that felt so real she had to have gynecological checkups for anatomy that was so biologically accurate that it gave her cramps and extra undry to do once a month. For all intents and purposes, she was in The Future? and well out of touch with her superiors. Yes, they were just a tap of the ‘log out’ button away, but until the auto-logout, she could simply...be Diane “First Found” Somni’els. If she just let herself really sink into it, she could forget about being Dyn Samuels entirely and embrace being...well, everything she’d ever wanted, even the parts she never knew she wanted.

  She could be a legend, the start of a legacy for the homeworld of her people, a race that was strong and powerful from birth and yet had such compassion built into their culture that unquestioning acceptance was simply a thing they did. She was the First Found Daughter. No other Morvuck had ever held that title, and no other would again. She was already able to wield enough political might to redirect an entire trade route through the gaxy from her homeworld to her station. Her retionships were headline making, her decisions affected hundreds of people, soon to be thousands, and the feeling like she’d become Sani’s older sister would be as natural as the sun rising.

  Or she could be an agent in the American Republic’s intelligence apparatus. Operating in the shadows, hiding in the ‘net, and never, ever making connections. She had no friends who weren’t people she worked with, and the number of those she trusted with more than a surface-level connection she could count on one hand.

  She could be Caitlynn’s girlfriend, exploring the retionship between them in ways she’d never dreamed possible for someone like her. The emotional connection, the feeling of affection that almost hurt when she and Caitlynn would spend the evenings after dinner discussing whatever struck their fancy before retiring to the bed and connecting in other ways. The sex was incredible and she had no doubt that she’d miss it in ways she didn’t have the words to express.

  Or she could go back to her apartment in Houston, make a meal for one, and go to bed alone.

  She could be a woman, a Morvuck woman, capable of both impregnating someone or becoming pregnant herself. She could, in theory, go with Caitlynn to a fertility clinic and work with a specialist to make their genetics compatible with each other and freeze an egg or three for both of them and have children together.

  Or she could be a man in the American Republic. Maybe she...he would find someone to marry, eventually, but having children? That simply wasn’t something that an agent could do. There was too much leverage an enemy could use if an agent had children. Too much opportunity for an agent to be too embroiled with challenges on the homefront.

  She could be the Syer of Svers, the woman who ended Coxand’s reign of terror, business woman extraordinaire, and commander of one of the thousands of seed stations that dotted the gaxy.

  Or she could be The Reaper.

  And that was the crux of the matter, really. She had made choices in her life that led her to be known as someone so lethal that her online identity had become synonymous with Death itself. The problem was, of course, the anthropomorphized manifestation of the End of Life was a divine entity, an Angel of God with perfect insight and heavenly mandate. That mythical entity didn’t make mistakes.

  And Dyn had. ‘The Reaper’ had taken the life of a child and snuffed it out. Possibly more than one, she hadn’t had the emotional strength to restart the holo-environment of the mission logs to confirm how many were juveniles (and to figure that out she’d have to dig into what the difference was between a ‘child’ S.A.I. and an ‘adult’ S.A.I., something else she hadn’t had the fortitude to investigate), because even just the sure knowledge of the one was enough to send her spiraling into depression.

  Was it any wonder, really, that she’d begun to lose herself in her cover?

  “Gathering a lot of wool there, commander?” a feminine voice interjected her thoughts.

  Blinking herself back to the present, she gnced through the main viewport and saw they were still quite a ways away from their destination before turning to Ensign Watanabi, “Yeah, sorry, I’ve had a lot on my mind tely. Capital-C Commander stuff.”

  Duturi, a bck human with a serious face that almost brought to mind onyx statues with how serious and severe it seemed to be most of the time, huffed briefly, “You actually buy into that superstition?”

  The corner of Diane’s mouth turned up, What, am I a Jedi now? Out loud she responded, “It’s a lot less of a superstition when you see someone die in front of you and they’re walking around the next day. Besides, there’s other things that Commanders can do that kinda make it clear what we are. I didn’t know I was a Commander until I got to the station and found out there was an actual name for what we are, but yes. Commanders are real. I’m dating one, after all.”

  Watanabi turned from her controls, the craft not needing her full attention at that moment, “No kidding? I’m in a card game with her navigation crew. They talk about how she died, like, 30 or more times during that whole thing with the pirates.”

  The smile on Diane’s face faded slightly, “Yeah...I watched one of the times Coxand killed her, he broadcast it to the gaxy. She was...insanely brave to come back even when she knew that he was going to do that again and again.”

  The pilot turned back to her controls, “You ever die like that, commander?”

  Diane shook her head, “Nope, and I’d rather not try it for funzies. There’s a reason I come loaded for bear on away missions.”

  Duturi turned a skeptical eye to Diane, “You even know what that expression means?”

  Diane met the leutenant’s gaze with a challenging expression of her own, “I was raised on Earth and I know a lot about Earth history, specifically the 22nd century North-Western continent where that phrase originated.”

  Watanabi shoved at the lieutenant and said, “Don’t mind Jonas, he’s from a family that never left Earth. He even went to one of the old blue-blood schools, what was it again? Yale?”

  The lieutenant, apparently named Jonas, gave the ensign a gre that could peal paint, “Harvard!”

  At that moment, a chirp came from her console and she turned to focus strictly on the shuttle. “We’re on final approach to the nding sight. It was a fully functional nding pad, but that other ship bsted the hell out of it. I’ll set us down as stable as we can.”

  It took another twenty or so minutes and they were on the ground and disembarking. Lt. Duturi was efficient and no nonsense. Before they set out to track down the source of the signal, he acknowledged that Diane was his superior but made it clear he was in charge of the team while in the field, “But once we find this guy, whoever he is, you’re the one calling the shots. Dealing with this kind of thing is well above my pay grade.”

  Diane simply nodded, readied her pistol, and gestured at him to lead the way.

  The facility they had nded at had signs of being something with incredibly high security. Walls several feet thick were bsted apart, and what survived the orbital bombardment was baren, simple gravel and stone on top of packed dirt. There were several yers and the remnants of a checkpoint or two were still standing. There were a few corpses wearing a variation of the Terran naval uniform, though there was some badging that Diane didn’t recognize.

  Jonas flipped one of the corpses over and grunted in disgust, though not at the corpse itself, “Terran intelligence. Figures they’d be running a bck site in Indep space.”

  Diane frowned, instinctively sniffing the air even though she’d put her helmet up the moment the scent of ash and gore started choking her nasal passages, “So the question is, what was this instaltion for?”

  “It’s a detention facility,” said Ensign Watanabi, “I did a tour on a colony world right after boot, they had a pretty big penitentiary and half the reason they had Navy forces shuttled in was to keep the guard posts staffed. I recognize the yout,” she pointed at the walls, “These are...overkill, they could be fences and work just as well, but that’s why the ground between ‘em is just rocks and dirt.” She pointed at the checkpoints, “It looks like they’re using a double-pass, you have to clear opening the gate with both sides of it.”

  Lt. Duturi gestured up at what was now obviously what was left of a guard tower with his off hand, “That makes that make a lot more sense. It’s an electrical shielding array, designed specifically for blocking all inbound and outbound signals except what’s punched up directly through the array. I’d bet they had some energy shielding, too.”

  “So why was a Terran ship trying to pummel their own instaltion from orbit?” Diane pondered.

  As they made their way inside, Diane was noticing...something.

  It wasn’t anything she could put her finger on, but it was little things that felt...out of pce. A canister of some unknown liquid sitting upright on a part of a shattered wall, a section of debris that had been shifted from where it had nded after the destruction.

  As they passed the inner-most wall of the compound, Diane’s stealth suit pinged with a notification on the helmet’s HUD just as Ensign Watanabi’s tracker pad let out a chime, “I’ve got something on scanners! There must be a passive field where that wall ran through.”

  Diane nodded, “Looks like I’m connecting to the base’s computers, or at least what’s surviving of them.” She holstered her pistol and began tapping away at the controls on her gauntlet until the visual controls popped up on her HUD. She then tapped at the controls that only she could see on the inside of her helmet but were non-existent to the two NPCs. It was somewhat uncannily reminiscent of when she used her pyer HUD.

  In moments, she brought up the comms logs and pinpointed the access terminal the signal they received had been sent from. “I’ve got a possible location,” she said, pointing toward the main building of the facility.

  Watanabi nodded as she lowered her pad back to her belt, “That’s where I show the single life sign at.”

  Duturi nodded and held his carbine at the ready, “Alright, let’s be careful. There could still be Terran agents with active camo or fun little traps left behind.”

  There were, thankfully, no traps. At least, none that had survived the bombardment. As they moved, Diane encountered more of the small, slightly out of pce signs that something was happening that she didn’t have all the pieces for. A panel that had power but a dead network connection. A case of field rations with a single pack missing. Signs that a door had been closed that looked like it had been open during the attack. It was tickling the back of her mind that all of the out of pce things meant something specific but she wasn’t quite putting the pieces together.

  They were in the hallway leading to the room that had the one life sign and the console that sent the message when it clicked in her head. “Stop,” she said quietly and abruptly.

  Confused, the two crew members turned to her. “Why? What are you seeing?” asked Lt. Duturi.

  “It’s what I’m not seeing,” she said. Pointing up at the corner near the door, there was what looked like a mount of some type next to some sort of plug socket.

  Duturi gnced between the corner and Diane, “What about it? Looks like a camera fell out during the attack.”

  Diane nodded, “It would...but where’s the camera?”

  The other two looked back to the corner and then at the floor beneath it and realized that there was no camera to be found. This prompted Ensign Watanabi to take a step back warily, “What does it mean?”

  “It means that we’re not making contact with the person who sent the distress call, they already made contact with us,” answered Diane as she handed the ensign her pistol. The other woman took it with a confused expression.

  “What do you mean? How did they make contact?” asked the lieutenant.

  “It’s a bit of spook drop-sign,” expined Diane, “If you’re operating deep in the heart of enemy territory but need to signal to your cohort that you’re in the area or send some other message, you set things out or alter your environment in such a way that someone who knows what they’re looking for can identify it. I’ve been seeing drop-sign almost since we got off the shuttle but didn’t put it together until now.”

  This finally got Duturi to take a step back as well, “When did you learn about this?”

  Diane pushed the touch pads to retract her helmet, smiling knowingly at the lieutenant as she unholstered her P390, “How about you tell me why you and half the crew of the Joan of Arc followed your captain out of the Terran navy?”

  Jonas frowned but said nothing as Diane handed him her P390.

  Diane stepped slowly up to the door frame leading to the room their target was in, tugging her gauntlet off as she made very obvious steps that could be heard in the other room. She paused before entering the field of view someone in the room would have of the hallway and said, “Hello...sorry if this sounds awkward, but we’re not from the government but we are here to help. Again, we’re not the Terrans.”

  She stopped and listened. Just barely on the edge of her hearing, probably only something she picked up because her ears in-game were from a species that had been created to be superhuman, a heartbeat. It was almost supernaturally slow, but it was the cssic two-beat pattern of a human.

  After a couple of breaths where their target said nothing and apparently didn’t move, she spoke again, “I’m not human, I’m Morvuck. If you know gactic politics, my people are not part of the Terran Federation. I’m about to show you my cws as proof, this is not a threat dispy. It’s the only evidence I can show you across a room like this, so please don’t shoot my hand off.”

  She waited a moment for a response before slowly extending her un-gauntletted hand into the door frame. Once it was fully extended with her fingers spread wide, she flexed slightly to extend her cws before retracting them. She slowly lowered her hand back and waited.

  A few breaths ter, the man spoke to them for the first time, “Very well, you may enter, but the two Terrans with you stay out there.”

  Diane took a deep breath and turned a victorious smile to the two crewmen. Watanabi frowned, “Are you sure you want to do this, ma’am?”

  Diane nodded and started tugging her gauntlet back on, “He’s had all the time in the world to take us out before now, and if he thought he could get off this rock without our help he’d have just taken our shuttle and booked it. He either wants or needs our help and clearly understands that you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.”

  Jonas frowned, “Just don’t forget that flies get swatted.”

  Diane nodded in acknowledgement of the lieutenant’s warning and raised her hands to a surrender position. “And don’t worry, I’m a Commander. If anything happens to me you two book it back to the shuttle and take off, I’ll see you when I respawn.” So saying, she stepped into the door frame.

  PrincessColumbia