In retrospect, impersonating a guest rather than a security guard had been a Very Bad Idea, the sort of idea that was capitalized to emphasize how Very Bad it was.
It just goes to show that the Service isn’t omniscient at the best of times. One would think we would take the Special Security part of the acronym more seriously, instead of using it as a cover for our more spicy affairs. Alas, the mission briefing is the mission briefing, and it wasn’t my time to go horribly off script yet.
The reason it was a Very Bad Idea, as I told my dear contact, was that a guest is expected to stay in certain areas. A security guard would be naturally avoided by any competent evildoer, yes, but they could show up in any random place they wanted, and the rather bourgeois crowds attending tonight’s gala would overlook them with a passion.
Despite my objections, the boutonnière was forced upon me, and I was deployed with strict orders to enjoy myself.
That is, of course, until I notice suspicious activity, and it turns out to be a shapeshifting Vurellyan radical instead of an intoxicated Martian starship captain.
In the meantime, partaking in refined activity, or intelligence work, as I call it, was the name of the game.
That was how I found myself in the rather inexperienced hands of a young federal delegate from Venus. Why someone of actual importance would associate themselves with this “diplomatic gathering”, I was unsure, but I’m sure it related to either the rare good-faith diplomatic politics or simple desire to attend another party.
Some of the software I downloaded earlier informed me that his rather stiff-looking robe was the height of fashion on Venus Orbital. I, personally, thought he looked like someone dressing up as a clergyman for a laugh. However, recently updated archives don’t lie, and thus I looked it up and down and made the appropriately impressed noises expected from the dashing Exploratory Corps representative I was pretending to be.
We made idle conversation as we did a short dance for a song or two. Vurellyan architecture, the hospitality of our hosts, etcetera. He seemed to be amazed at how kind and generous the aliens were.
Of course, we had just applied heavy amounts of pressure to their ancestral foe, a bunch of raiding bastards that despite their tech disadvantage had still managed to be a lethal nuisance. Nuclear blastwave levels of pressure, actually. Thus, no more organized raiders in the Vurellyan League.
Naturally, this whole state of affairs had them invite our equivalent to the assembled noble houses. After patiently explaining that we didn’t have noble houses, unless Scandinavia was getting uppity again, we sent half the federal assembly and a mass of Navy brass.
To a planet with a known surplus of violent sectarian rebels, who were very angry about their Satan-equivalents being blown up. From the normal Vurellyan perspective, Humanity hit the Wrath of the Gods with a plutonium rod until they stopped moving. From those fine fellows’ perspective, however, we had unbalanced the cosmic scale between Virtue and Sin.
Oh, and those fine fellows also had stolen augmentative nanotech that allowed them to change their appearances. Because terrorists with undetectable-with-current-tech stealth capabilities were precisely what this very important gathering needed.
And so, in swept the Commonwealth Special Security Service to save the day. Ready to provide the sort of security nobody else can be bothered to.
Eventually, we broke apart, and I took a moment to sit down at an isolated table and pretend to eat while patched into the building’s security cameras. I didn’t see much suspicious activity. The party would be the Holy Grail for political blackmail, however. Thus, the more self-conscious Vurellyans were slightly more restrained than their Human guests.
As I scrolled through cameras, I took notes on standard activity patterns for both species. If our unwanted guests were smart, they’d vary their disguises and actions. If I were infiltrating a party with intention to shoot some politicians (a common fantasy, I’m assured), I would have half my infiltrators disguise as Humans, and the other half disguise as Vurellyans of different phenotypes. Naturally, they wouldn’t associate with each other, except for when they did to throw off suspicion. They certainly wouldn’t move around in a big clump, like the rather shady group in Grand Hall B was.
I zoomed in on them. I couldn’t say for sure that they were my target, but I had a certain feeling about them.
However, unless they had a pocket nuke on them, they weren’t going to do much from two kilometers away. Even if they did, that sort of range would be pushing it. I certainly didn’t see anything that could be a pocket nuke, and the radiation scanners weren’t going ballistic, so I was reasonably certain that they hadn’t swallowed it.
Of course that’s happened before. Because if something is possible, someone is going to try to kill another person with it.
I set a process to track them, and actually took a bite of the cake I had picked out, thoughts of atomic annihilation briefly contained.
A bit rich, but that’s not a bad thing. Chocolate base, chocolate filling, chocolate frosting… the hardened chocolate swirls on top tasted expensive.
Eighteen out of twenty, needed some vanilla to offset the chocolate. That, or replace the rather dense dark filling with lighter mousse.
I finished it. Eighteen out of twenty is still top-of-the-line.
The alert I had set pinged me, and I watched the suspicious group walking down a more obscure hallway. There were multiple reasons why that may be. If they were intelligent, they would have stashed their weaponry away weeks before the event, shielded it from scanners, and installed something to prevent the shielding from showing up as a suspicious blank spot. I had run into that before - people thinking they were smart, before realizing that of course the target would be in the one spot in the city that top-of-the-line sensors can’t see.
Accounting for time… I had a good twelve minutes before they entered active threat range. Excellent.
I put my plate in the exact center of the designated spot of the dish carousel, and turned away just as it was starting to foam up with nanocleaners.
If anything was going to destroy the world, they were. It was never good to trust nanobots that were allowed to dissolve organic material.
I rotated my neck slowly, and looked for interesting people. Attractive was easy, in our society of easy-to-access gene therapy and cosmetic advice, but interesting was another thing entirely. I’d say there was a lot of the first and not enough of the second.
The first fruitful response my scan received was sitting on the edge of the grand staircase, looking rather obviously distraught. There was potential there, and perhaps a ten-minute mystery to occupy myself with.
Thus, I crossed the floor with haste, gradually altering the fluid balance on the surface of my eyes as I approached her. Best to make a good impression with biological-looking features, and save the obviously augmetic look for the next time I needed to unnerve or impress somebody. Uncanny valley is a lovely rhetorical device, when viewed from a certain perspective.
I made my way up the stairs and sat down in the most convenient possible place. Not too close, but in a spot that made me plainly available for conversation.
“Good evening,” I said.
She stirred slightly, looking at me with a slightly dissociated expression.
“Have you seen the show?” I pointed at the nude Vurellyan telekine on stage, veils floating around her. I had been ignoring it for most of the evening - once you know how the trick works, it starts to get boring.
She shook her head.
“Mmm. Not really into it?”
“S’pose.”
“Ah, the sleeper awakes. Exhausted? I know how it feels.”
I put a timer for necessary interception of the target group in the corner of my vision. Eleven minutes, give or take a few seconds.
She shook her head.
“Just lonely. Expected something different.”
“Oh? Do tell. Is something upsetting you?”
She nodded in the direction of a clump of people.
“I’m sorry?”
I looked closer, cheating with my implants a bit to track the direction of her eyes. I saw a cheerful-looking middle-aged man chatting up a tall blonde woman in a tight blue dress.
“Oh, dear. I’m sorry. You were his plus one, I assume?”
She nodded.
“Came in, showed me off, fucked off to talk to the next woman that caught his fancy.”
I nodded understandingly. It happened, sometimes. You’d expect people, especially politicians and officers, to be more considerate.
“I understand. It happens sometimes, unfortunately. At least he showed his true colors now instead of later.”
A small nod.
“I just wasn’t good enough, wasn’t I?”
I shook my head and tried to look reassuring. It was hard experiencing the feeling of learning what a bastard someone you respected was for the first time.
“There is no ‘good enough’ for someone like him, madame. It’s just jumping from person to person on a whim, and then realizing you left the worthy ones behind a long time ago.”
I read her expression. Slightly less upset than she had been a few seconds ago. She was young, maybe ten years younger than the man on the floor. Such a bastard thing to do.
“I’m just…”
I knew what was most likely about to happen. I was guessing a laundry list of her perceived personal flaws, and pent-up bitterness. Instead of letting her speak, I cut in.
“You’re not ‘inferior’, madame. Yes, he was a bastard, and shallow. But that doesn’t mean you’re not worth anything. Tell me, when you look at him and her, what do you see?”
She looked at them in silence for a few seconds. She answered with a bitter tone.
“Just a guy trying to get as many eyefuls as he can, faking a conversation.”
I nodded slightly, that was good. As long as I could prevent her from fixating on the bitterness. A distraction was in order, I believed.
“Now, tell me. Look away from him, he’s not worth it. Who are you?”
“Why’s it matter?”
“Identity matters, madame. I’m Saniel DeMille, Exploratory Corps.”
That was my current identity, at least. On some level, it still hurt to not have one that was truly permanent.
“Katarine. Katarine Guillou.”
I nodded again.
“Now, Katarine, would you like a slice of cake? I hear it does wonders for your energy.”
She appeared to consider it for a moment, but in the end nodded. I stood up and offered her a hand. After hesitating, she took it and stood up.
Looking at her more closely now, I could tell that she was quite lovely. Features from either the south of France or Italy, dark hair combed to an impressive gloss, proper sense in fashion. I was tempted to make a comment about her abandoned suitor, but decided that distraction was more important than a fifty-fifty shot at reminding her of what had happened.
The timer ticked down to seven minutes. I was hoping I could scare the threat off and then return to what I was doing. Despite the fact that I had been sure to not express any interest, having a second person abruptly vanish would not exactly do wonders for miss Guillou’s mood.
I invited her over to another dark, isolated table, close to the wall. When she was situated, I summoned a drone and pulled more dessert off of its serving tray.
Interesting, she picked something with nearly lethal concentrations of lemon in it. Learning new things about people was always nice, I always needed some basic information to act upon. Normally, it was a personnel file, but personal interactions worked fine.
“So, tell me. I know your name, but who are you?”
“Political historian, attached as a consultant to SNSE Danubia. I was invited here as… his… plus one.”
“Now, do forgive me for asking, but who is he?”
“Who?”
She smiled innocently. An interesting method of defense. I decided to just abandon the subject.
“Hm. As a political historian, may I assume you would be addressed as Doctor Katarine Guillou, in some cases?”
“Indeed. I graduated with my doctorate several years ago. My thesis was about sectarianism within the Internationals and historical basis for such, with an emphasis on the vanguardist-popular split.”
“Ah, Bill Bailey,” I said. Now that would be esoteric.
“What?”
I hummed a tune, an old satirical song.
“You may be a comrade to all of those folks, but you ain’t no comrade of mine.”
“Oh, I understand. I must have missed that.”
“Regardless, that’s interesting. An area of personal interest for myself. May I ask which time periods and Internationals?”
“Twenty-sixty to twenty-one-ten, covering the Fifth and Sixth primarily, but with notes on the Third and Fourth.”
I nodded. A fairly famous time in history, then.
“I would know about that. I’m from Mars. Still live there, as a matter of fact. To give you an idea of the time frame, I was colonizing Mars back before the surface settlements existed.”
She raised a neatly trimmed eyebrow at that. I knew that I certainly didn’t look the part.
The timer hit three minutes. I sighed.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to attend to some business in three minutes. I’m unsure whether I’ll be able to return when it’s concluded.”
She made a displeased noise.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Well, it was interesting…”
I smiled, to put her at ease.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got a solution.”
I handed her a small card, inscribed with a sequence of numbers. It held my current identity’s contact information.
“My personal contact information. May I have yours? I shall contact you when my task concludes.”
She looked it over before fishing a piece of paper out of a mystery compartment. I assumed it to be a hidden purse or other object. A thousand years of development, and still nobody could be bothered to make a dress with pockets. For shame.
I looked at it enough to memorize, and stowed it in my coat pocket. Despite having the information memorized, if something damaged it, I would be very displeased.
“Oh, before you go, I have to say, I like the hat. It suits you.”
I nodded and tipped it slightly, acknowledging the compliment.
“Thank you. I’ve been told before that it looks fedorable.”
She groaned, and I made a sensible chuckle. Puns were an unappreciated art.
“I’ll be seeing you. Hopefully soon.”
With that, I made my exit. There was no point in making a production of goodbye, especially with twelve seconds left on the timer. I was at the bottom stair, ascending towards the interception point, when it hit zero.
As I ascended, I reverted my eyes to their default state. Intimidation would be useful tactic, if they weren’t suicidally fanatical. Even if they were, there was no downside.
Just as I hit the top of the stairs, I heard a suspicious noise. Namely, the sound of a metal object hitting a far-away wall.
I diverted a portion of my consciousness into the mind-impulse transmitter, and summoned my trusty briefcase. It floated from its home in a cracked-open closet, and made its way across the high ceilings. True to their nature as savannah-dwellers, nobody in the ballroom ever looked up.
Twenty seconds after summoning it, it fell into my hand, opening itself and presenting its cargo. Harbinger II rested under a velvet false bottom, along with extra ammunition. In the worst-case scenario, I would only need a single bullet for each target. Despite this, I picked up three spare magazines and hid them around my person.
I picked up the pistol and felt the hum as it linked to my implanted mind impulse unit. I ran a quick set of diagnostics before clicking the safety off - preparedness is important, after all. Finally, I mag-locked it to my side, at an angle that wouldn't be visible from the front.
A group of mixed Humans and Vurellyans appeared around the hall corner. True to my suspicions, their networked nanotech-based disguises played hell with my short-ranged electromagnetic scanners.
They each carried an impressively lethal-looking weapon. I counted a rare, out-of-production plasma caster amongst their number, as well as what looked suspiciously like a grenade launcher. Where they managed to get their hands on cutting-edge Human military equipment, I couldn’t begin to guess. I would have read the signatures of the guns, but the nanotech was jamming my capabilities on that front.
They stopped about twenty meters in front of me, pointing their weapons forward threateningly. I must have made quite a sight. One man, wearing a suit and hat. Even my body wasn’t particularly threatening, “Saniel” was slightly shorter than I preferred to be, and lacked obvious muscle. Without being close enough to glimpse my more obvious tells, they would have assumed I was just a random dignitary out for a stroll.
Yes, I was just a harmless politician to them, the opposite of a worthy opponent.
So, of course, one of them made a noise that sounded like laughter and fired a grenade right at me.
When it landed, I simply wasn’t there anymore. The trajectory was clear to me, as plain as day. Projected blast radius and shrapnel hazards were overlaid in my field of vision, as clear as if they were happening in real time.
I dove behind a pillar, drawing my weapon. I had expected peaceful negotiation slash death threats to work. Evidently not. Just another Very Bad Idea.
If I had it drawn, I could have shot it out of the air, and triggered a premature detonation.
“Yes, and if the horse had a nail, the war would have been won,” I thought
It blew up about a meter above where I had been three seconds ago. A blast of plasma from the caster followed the detonation, setting the carpet on fire. Flames licked at the walls and wall decorations.
That certainly said something about the level of collateral damage they were willing to output.
I accessed the hallway’s security camera, and looked at the progress the group was making. They were apparently clad in heatproof suits, stepping right through the shreds of melted carpet and still-burning flames. Their nanotech disguises flickered as the heat killed the nanites.
I kicked the combat analysis program into maximum, auto-generating a list of threats and conditions.
Threat: Burning carpet will reach position within thirty seconds.
Threat: Within active plasma caster range.
Threat: Evacuating current position will result in exposing self to unacceptable levels of fire
It looked bad, lethally inescapable for anyone without nigh-supernatural capabilities.
I, personally, rated it a six out of twenty.
I gave myself over to the combat analysis program. The feed from the now-damaged security camera overlaid my vision, and blue lasers representing the trajectories of each weapon filled the space. A circle representing the grenade launcher’s area of effect swept back and forth as its bearer lazily walked towards the ballroom.
I swept Harbinger II to the side, seeing my own green laser appear on the overlay. The possible ricochet showed up in violet, representing diminished power. It would be plenty for this case, ten millimeters was an enormous round by Vurellyan standards.
I fired four shots at the pillar across the burning hallway. Sparks appeared at the impact point.
The first three bullets passed through the heads of the heavy weapon specialists. The last hit a very specific place directly behind the injection chamber of the plasma caster.
The depleted impact of the bullet would normally not be enough to breach the hard polymer casing of the plasma caster. However, penetration was not necessary in this case.
The safety valve isolating the hydrogen feed from the ionization chamber was dislocated, cracking in half from the anomalous force. Gas flooded into the ionization chamber, charging and turning into a large quantity of energized plasma.
Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. This would normally only occur when the trigger was pulled, which would open both the barrel and gas feed valves. However, the barrel valve was shut, in absence of a living user to open it by pulling the trigger.
For fifteen microseconds, more and more gas flooded into the ionization chamber, without an outlet. A quantity of plasma greater than ever anticipated by the weapon’s builders on Earth built up in the chamber, rapidly fusing and destroying the weapon’s magnetic containment field projector. It was a known safety flaw, and part of the reason why plasma weapons without emergency vents were extremely rare.
In layman’s terms, the weapon exploded. Violently. Two of the bearer’s compatriots were vaporized, and the rest of the group blinded by the painfully bright ball of plasma.
Of course, that gave me precisely the opening I needed.
I stepped out from behind the pillar, and unloaded a burst from my pistol. Each bullet was independently targeted towards a lethal point. Not stopping to see the results of my attack, I rushed backwards, away from the flames which were now dangerously close to consuming my former hiding place.
Where before there had been sixteen angry Vurellyans, there was now only one. Unfortunately, the ball of electromagnetic noise from the plasma detonation had somehow cloaked his or her movement.
A rifle shot slammed into my right shoulder, penetrating the skin and burying itself a centimeter deep in a reinforced bone. The impact threw off my aim, and I discharged the last bullet in the pistol’s magazine into the wall, a meter to his right.
Shit. That situation warranted expletives.
Threat: Right arm damaged - upper joint (biological) compromised.
Threat: Ammunition low.
Threat: Path to CQC blocked by environmental hazard.
Damnation. I lunged behind the next pillar down, trying to reload my pistol one-handed. My right shoulder joint was shot.
...Puns. Unappreciated art.
I heard gunshots as two security guards rushed out of the ballroom, rifles aimed. They were promptly cut down by the remaining Vurellyan radical, who was now running through the flames towards the door to the ballroom.
I would enter his field of view within ten seconds. Through the security camera, I saw dead nanites flaking off of him.
The magazine slid in just as he crossed into my line of sight. I saw the muzzle of the rifle swinging up towards my face.
Harbinger II fired, punching him off his feet. I could feel the Vurellyan’s bullet fly though my hat, taken off target by the shooter falling over.
I breathed a sigh of relief, and propelled myself to my feet with my functional arm. When I got back to SNSM Never Been Tried, I knew for a fact I would be losing another part of myself to the machine.
I was supposed to be better than that.
My arm hurt like hell. I switched the pain off, and walked back towards the ballroom.
I had to keep a look out, just in case. Security would be arriving within minutes, to deal with the fires and corpses.
One step after another, walking back towards the stairs. My right arm dangled next to me. It wasn’t often that I felt so useless. I was supposed to be good, untouchable, perfectly functional.
Yes, it would be a pound of flesh for a mistake. Just another sacrifice to make, another thing to replace.
As long as it made me more effective, I supposed, there wouldn’t be much harm in it.
I put the pistol back in the case, and let it fly back to its hiding place. I could easily remove it when I was extracted. I just needed to send a distress signal.
I took a moment to look at myself in the image from the security camera. My suit was torn and charred in places. The boutonnière had been lost at some point, and had most likely fallen into the flames. My beloved hat had a neat bullet hole through it, and was at an awkward angle due to the force of the shot
I sighed again. I was in no state to be seen in public.
It was directly back to Never Been Tried, then. Back to the operating room, and away from flesh.
I had discarded my habit of considering the nature of my humanity long ago. It was situations like this that almost revived it. There was always some deep-seated concern after a new part of myself was cut away and replaced.
This form was done with, I decided. It had failed, I had made a mistake. Best to abandon it, and make a new identity. I would be Illustrator again, until I was given the next mission, and next set of operational requirements.
I sent a message to Katarine, explaining my unfortunate situation. Of course, I whitewashed the bullet-in-shoulder issue. That would raise unfortunate questions. Best not to concern her, after all.
It would be five days before Never Been Tried broke orbit. Five days I could keep my identity, and have good conversation. I had never been one for romance, too… I couldn’t explain it. It just didn’t work.
I took one look down from the top of the stairs. The telekine was still changing her veils, casting light across their silk surfaces.
I looked back down the hall, where the flames still weakly flickered.
I walked away.
Submitted July 03, 2018 at 02:11AM by TheRealVerviedi https://ift.tt/2Nl59AP
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