No good. Nissa’s whole operation was up to no good. Gaz despised Alaya’s need to work under Nissa as much as she despised her role in driving Alaya here. Security was boring, repetitive and dangerous. But it paid the bills and all three of those downsides were mitigated by Gaz’s… everything.
Right then she guarded a gambling den and brothel — places on Bahl-Mau diversified — and spent the whole time agonizing over Alaya and her fate. Communication risked both of their positions, so Gaz got to sit and spend her time worrying about and planning for possibilities which might never exist. Which would probably never exist.
“You on the menu, sugar?” A woman leaned into Gaz, ran her hand over her chest and down her midsection.
“Sorry ma’am. I am strictly security.” Gaz spoke with as much vigor as she could muster. Enough credits or trade and anyone on the station was for sale. The brothel just formalized the transactions.
Attire which would have looked right at home on one of the performers in this place clung to the woman, covered her breasts, back and groin enough she might not be ticketed for public indecency. Three huge, fuck off guys stood behind the woman fawning over Gaz and held their arms loose, by their sides. It was the correct tactical move: assume a ready position without provoking the potential or their principle. “Aww, just a few hours. I could make it worth your time.”
Nothing the woman offered could possibly make it worth Gaz’s time. Well, technically one thing would, but Gaz very much doubted this woman could somehow acquire Alaya’s willing participation. Gaz sighed. “I’ve already sold my time. I am very sorry.” There was nowhere for Gaz to retreat, the guards had to know that. So did the woman. “Oh, right. To Mau Security, right?”
Gaz mouth opened and shut. “Yes.”
“Then that’s easy!” The woman finally stepped back from Gaz. Scanners showed her packed with nothing more exotic than the standard wealth package: longevity devices, projection matrices, and a few dozen other little quality of life cybernetics. Honestly, she was a little under-augmented for those wealthy citizens Gaz had dealt with in the past. The woman looked away from Gaz, but spoke aloud. “Darling, I have one of your cute little employees right here in front of me. I want to play with her.” The woman glanced at Gaz. “What’s your employee ID, sweetie?”
This was a situation Gaz was perfectly incapable of handling on her own. She offered the woman her ID. How was Gaz supposed to talk her way out of a liaison with this woman? She was herself the person who was supposed to save others from this situation.
“Great. No, I don’t care about the contract terms. Yes. 200k.” Gaz froze at the figure. It sounded like the woman had just mentioned 200k credits. For a few hours of Gaz’s time. “Your boss wants to talk to you.”
At the same time, a secure communication bearing the digital signature of the CEO of Mau Security appeared on the header of the packets. Gaz opened the line. “Your name’s just Gaz? Do whatever Ms Feng asks of you. You get 50k credits. This is not a contractual arrangement, understand?”
“I…”
“Great. This discussion is over.” He hung up on Gaz before the video had finished loading. Ms Feng leaned her head side to side.
“What did he say?”
“He told me to go with you and do whatever you said.”
Ms Feng looked back at her guards. “You heard the lady. Clear the way for us please.” Then she took Gaz’s arm and pulled her into the brothel.”
Gaz had spent more than a little time here. Neither gambling nor sex appealed to her as pastimes. She experienced the urge like anyone else, and suppressed it chemically so she could save herself for Alaya. That wasn’t changing today.
They passed small, packed in little booths with people staring at dedicated terminals. Slots, poker, any game under the sun served on those terminals. A little money went a long way toward getting watered down drinks, magically preserved food, and even some entertainment if the spender wanted a private booth.
Color-wise the place was red and gold, ostentatious without quite reaching camp levels. Some of the gold was real; a status symbol and barter tool despite the metal’s abundance out in the rings. But most of it was just glittery faux metal paint. The carpet was the nicest thing about the place, impossible to stain, a claim backed up by nanotech materials, the carpet required no cleaning either. Best of all it was soft and pleasant to look at with a comforting recurring pattern which had the effect of sending Gaz’s attention sliding down the length.
As operations went, Gaz had to tip her hat to the place. High rollers and the lucky often blew their winnings at the brothel. And more than a few people left the brothel aimed directly for the gaming booths.
Back into the private rooms, that was where Ms Feng led Gaz. The woman’s body had a lovely silhouette and profile. Either she kept in shape or she had an excellent surgeon on staff. Maybe both. Neither old nor young, she had the ageless quality of the exceedingly wealthy. Only the ones who chose to looked elderly. And only the audaciously vain sought youth. Janice shared her opinions on her peers with Gaz and Alaya.
A guard, tied to the establishment, challenged them. Ms Feng led the way and produced a red metallic card Gaz has never seen before. The guard had. Or understood its significance right away. He stepped out of the way and bowed to the two of them, hand swept out to welcome them deeper into the rooms.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Gaz had been here before too. An unpleasant necessity of her job in station security: she had to investigate crime. Both the brothel and the casino attracted their own kinds of criminal element. In the case of the man who’d beaten his girl up after she’d performed for him, Gaz and several other officers — split between men and women — took a little bit of extra care in making sure he broke bones on his way to station lockup and eventual spacing. Beat your spouse, your kids, or pets, the station wouldn’t touch you. But lay a damaging fingernail on the merchandise and they would and did happily toss you into the void.
She hadn’t made the system, but certainly helped perpetuate it. Maybe she was exactly where she deserved, standing before a penthouse suite in the Bahl-Mau brothels. This section right here was a portion of the station Gaz had never ventured into. People who sprang for the penthouse suites knew to clean up their messes without getting security involved.
“After you, sugar.” Ms Feng motioned to Gaz, who nodded dutifully and opened the door. The woman patted Gaz’s ass as she stepped into a pit of opulence.
Crystals hung from the ceiling, which itself rose into little peaks. At their heights, soft sun-like lamps sent their rays glittering through bits of cut glass and out into rainbows. White and gold dominated the furnishings. White leather upholstery, white wool, and even silk all made their appearances across the divan, a chair made for two, and a bed large enough for two McRory’s or at least six average sized people. Every door was open at the moment, so Gaz could see the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchenette from where she stood. Good way to sell the suite, she supposed.
“Rather gaudy, but I suppose it will do.” Ms Feng shut the door. “We’re out here in the border of real civilization. It’s not like Europa or Venus now is it?”
She spoke as if she expected Gaz to know. Alaya and Gaz had never reached Europa or Venus. They’d spent their lives out among the far ends of the Loops, where civilization was as dispersed as possible and they were unlikely to run into anyone else. The Mal-wares had the same anti-civlization attitude, exactly because they were pirates. “I guess not.”
Ms Feng shot Gaz a lopsided smile and raised her hand. Gaz braced herself as something puffed out of the woman’s hand where there should have been zero augmentations. A silver sphere floated out of her arm flashed once and expanded out to fill the room. It passed through Gaz and the Ms Feng and stuck to the walls, coating them in a thin silver foil. Tension still high, the silver faded into the surfaces as if it had been absorbed. “If you weren’t going to do it, obviously I had to.”
Rather than respond with “had to what?” Gaz shut her mouth. The way her arm opened looked eerily familiar to Gaz. As did the way it sealed back up. It wasn’t as smooth as Gaz’s, but the motion was clearly born of the same algorithms. Not exactly a digital signature, but almost as good. In Gaz’s case, almost certainly as good. “Etiolon?”
“Ha! So I was right.” Ms Feng’s body rippled and the woman’s skin and clothing turned to silver. Her carapace was similar to Gaz’s, but the precise cut of the lines was clearly different. “I would never rat you out, of course. Because I’m running their gamma chassis.”
A faint whisper of hope, already dying from lack of air winked out then. Gaz desperately wanted, needed information on her chassis. But MilCas had done its job wiping out the company, their subsidiaries, and virtually anyone they caught wearing an Etiolon body. Alaya’s little financial problem was only one of many reasons the two woman preferred life in the void.
“Well, I showed you mine, show me yours!” Ms Feng flicked Gaz’s in a way which might have hurt her if not for her cybernetics.
There was no way Gaz would do this. For all she knew this woman was recording this whole encounter as a way to dig up blackmail material on a station guard. “I’d rather not.”
The pout looked out of place on such an incredibly dangerous chassis. “Is this because of your stupid little legend?”
“Legend? What?”
Ms Feng stepped back, swept her hands up, and spun. “I mean all of this. A frontier station guard? That’s a practically a holovid staple. You’re playing space cowgirl, right? You can drop the act in here, I don’t want to get frisky with a space cowgirl, I want to get frisky with an elite Etiolon model cyborg. Space cowgirls are a credit for a score.”
For some reason those words set off a whole table of angry responses in Gaz’s brain. “How much did you pay for me?”
As if it were nothing, Ms Feng snorted. “Two hundred thousand shares in a little company I knew Bari would jump at.”
“How many credits?”
Ms Feng blinked and wrinkled her nose, as if Gaz had said or done something odious. “At sale close it was about 200 a share.”
Cyborgs, as a rule, had better mental control than baseline humans. Viruses — exceedingly rare — outside influence — a little more common — and system corruption — the most common cause — could make them shed their control. But in Gaz’s case it was simple shock. Billions of kilometers of digital lines, more switches than cells in a human body, all of it failed to multiply two simple numbers and get the result under the load of her shock.
When it finally landed, it only compounded her shock. Forty million credits wouldn’t have been enough to even make Alaya’s debt blip. But it would have been enough for Gaz to easily protect her. They could purchase a lifetime of freedom and security for what this woman had paid for a couple hours of Gaz’s time.
“You okay sugar?”
What Gaz did next was a Bad Idea™. She knew before she set the command sequence into motion. It had been one of those wild plans, out there and adapted on the fly. Part outrage, part anger, and part anxiety fueled her choices.
Her left arm formed into a spike, hard and sharp enough to drive through the other woman’s carapace. Not to hurt her, not exactly. But to infect her with the least common form of intrusion. Ms Feng didn’t even get a chance to gasp as Gaz drove the spike up under her rib, where a floating mobile controller tended to sit on her own body.
She struck true and released a nanite package she’d successfully used to hack target systems before. It was messy and left obvious signs of intrusion all over. But it was also very effective. Ms Feng’s systems did not even put up a real fight. Less than fifty microseconds later, Gaz owned Ms Feng’s chassis.
With the facilities at hand, Gaz couldn’t read the woman’s mind. Nor could she mess with her memories, outside of purging digital records and confirming Ms Feng didn’t have a failsafe alarm; she didn’t. That done, Gaz pulled the chassis schematics out of Ms Feng, something her own systems lacked, and put the woman into a chemically induced sleep for six hours. The rest of Gaz’s shift.
“Fuck.” Spike retracted, Gaz looked down at what she’d done. Plainly, she’d just pissed off one of the richest people she’d ever met in this sector of space. This was the kind of person who might buy and sell this station on a lark. “Fuck.”
She kept swearing at herself as she jumped up to a ventilation shaft and transformed into a drone. Two separate coprocessors scanned over the material from Ms Feng’s chassis, along with a few extra bits of useful information Gaz had pulled off of her.
Time to get off of this station. Debt or no debt.