“Sweet hopping Christ.” Spare processors took over the task of saving the report and sending the acknowledgment receipts. Then other processors set about burning the trail which might lead from Janice Bachman to the open investigation of one “Princess Alaya of the Alayan Empire.” The current holder of the Red Charter.
The Red Charter. Three people knew the full details about it. On paper, Janice reported to the other two. One of whom called her on a secure line that very moment. “Chairman.”
“Our index is down .3 percent. .3 percent Bachman. What in the godforsaken void happened?”
Three people knew the full truth about Princess Alaya. Officially. The problem was too many people knew about a cherry fresh idiot with a Loop Charter who just exploded onto the scene by causing the destruction of an ancient relic of a station. “Our Red Charter holder is a loose canon. Obviously.”
“You said you had her under control.”
God this feels like a cliché. You know what happens next, he’s going to threaten our position, I’ll have to remind him I know what he knows and know that he knows. God. “Mr Singh. Let’s skip to the end here. Unless you have a perfect new candidate to take Alaya’s place and can manage to kill her, I will handle this. We’ve had what, four quiet generations? We should have taken a more active hand toward protecting the line if keeping them quiet was so important.” Chairman Singh took a breath for a protest. Janice was tired and too busy for a rant. “What happened is in the past. I’m sending a rep to intercept her. Either they’ll help or they’ll find a way to make her step aside.”
“Nelissan Arms spun up an interdiction fleet. Pirates out of five different Loops put a black body on her and anyone who helps her.”
Chairman Singh delivered his news with such gravity, as if Janice’s report hadn’t contained much worse news than that. Might as well deliver the full medicine now. “She’s headed toward a Boho cluster.”
“Shit.” His North American accent hardly ever came out, Chairman Singh had a finely honed politician’s bearing. “We should just bomb it before she gets there.”
“Can’t. Guess which one she’s headed to.”
“Not one of the testing clusters…”
“Worse.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“One of the rogues?”
Chairman Singh was far from foolish. Since taking office, his decisions had generally fallen in line with the best interests of the economy and of stability. These were values Janice held in high regard. She’d been in her own position long before the Rogue Bohemian Clusters had been created. Before Singh’s time, the events which produced the rogues had been the results a fool’s project, black and secret. As stupid and short-sighted as that old Etiolon evo-borg project they had to shut down centuries ago.
A fleet admiral and several bucket loads of highly trained, self-sufficient MilCas personnel slipped into one of the floating clusters of stations and cylinders populated by bohemians, hippies, and other outcasts who refused to abide by the ISE rules.
Eventually the dossier and a report on the project and its outcome landed in front of Janice. She’d been furious. They’d seeded a bunch of untraceable anarchists with top of line military equipment and training. Worst of all they’d given the bohemians the means to reproduce it. MilCas had few hard rules and that lone idiot jarhead had broken almost all of them. Everything but actual treason. Janice made sure the admiral who’d led the project was still screaming from his isolation jar. Despite her ministrations she hadn’t uncovered the full reason the asshole had done it.
Didn’t matter now, somewhere between two and seven different Boho clusters had splinter MilCas operatives running around executing an assignment whose details Janice hadn’t been able to tease out of the admiral.
She disconnected from the Chairman and rolled out of her creche. Automated arms pulled away from where they’d been massaging her body while she cast her mind away. Other arms descended from stark white painted walls and draped her for her day. Paintings older than the first cyberware stood before Janice in their original forms. This one of a woman in a rocking chair holding a horn to her ear.
Janice adored that painting. People often mistook the horn as the most significant piece there, but Janice loved to remind them of the rocking chair, the woman’s bonnet and dress, and even of the house in which the painting had been staged. Named “Whistler’s Mother,” Janice viewed it as the prototypical outline for the cyborg life.
A lesser person, one like Chairman Singh, who might have balked at Janice’s claims regarding her painting, might also have complained about Princess Alaya. Certainly what she’d been doing created extra work for Janice.
But it was exhilarating.
For the first time in fifty years, Janice felt her blood pump hot in her veins. As she reached the door to her chamber, she dialed up her suites on IO. Warmth rolled over her as she walked through the portal and into a false sunrise. Nectar and pollen sweetened the air, bees hummed and people giggled not twenty meters away through the curtain rising up from the floor.
This place invigorated her two centuries ago, but she hardly ever came back now. As she stepped out into the open and found participants bedecked in gaudy uniforms and frolicking in the most sybaritic fashion, she flushed and disrobed to join them. Not one of them knew her, not as the owner of the place. But they all took pleasure in their mutual explorations.
The problem of Princess Alaya of the Alayan Empire need not wait on Janice, who had dispatched her agent long before she had accepted Chairman Singh’s call.