"Erica Grayson. E..rick... ahhh... Grayson." She focused on herself in the mirror of her hotel room; it was pre-paid for the next month, giving her plenty of time to relax and decide just what to do. She didn't know if she was going to be staying on Tybalt, so looking for an apartment seemed a bit counter-productive.
On the plus side, her hand was a bit smaller, stronger, and differently shaped than it used to be; so her signature would've been a bit different even if she didn't try to change it. Her vocal chords were different, too; no need to change the voice.
She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath, and then glanced at the comm stuck to her wrist. Someone from the ASU was going to be calling sometime. She'd double-checked with the embassy; she should be looking for the code phrase 'Chain Fire' fit into a conversation. She had yet to leave the dome, and go see the planet proper; so of course, she'd suggested meeting on such an excursion today; this world had been terraformed a century ago at this point, and was apparently proud of its work, offering all sorts of tours, hang-gliding, ski trips, so forth, to tourists.
She wasn't set on riding through the sky on a mass of fabric and poles, so.... a trip through a century-old redwood forest would be the next best thing. She opted for a nice blue suit; not actually a vacuum suit, for the first time in a while, just normal bright blue fabric with a lightning pattern running through it; over the usual heavy undersuit she would likely be wearing for months to come.
As she stepped out of the hotel into the street; looking at the busy lines of pedestrians going every which way, tourists, business-people, local military... she watched the sign mounted on the pole; she was looking for the next bus to B-17; buses traveled out along 18 lines in varying paths from the city center, and the hotel was on line 'B'; with the redwood park about two hundred miles away. She'd either need another bus or some other transit from B-17 to the park; but wasn't too worried.
This whole world had been planned from the beginning; small, picturesque villages scattered through the wilderness, vast stretches of land seeded with a mix of terran and compatible alien flora and fauna; the cities, as they were built, expanding upwards and down rather than out, all connected to the mass transit lines to the one central spaceport it had all started from.
She couldn't help but feel small as she worked her way through the crowd, climbing onto the smooth cylinder of one of the trains; she knew the Alliance had worlds this big, this populated, with their masses of billions... but she'd never been among them, and the crowds had always been... normal. Just the common variations of skin-tone, not the vast differences in height, in ears, eyes, the blues, the reds...
As she stepped into the bus, waving her comm at the scanner before settling into a seat, it started on its smooth outward path. The bus was even strange; the seats wider than they should be, with a handy lever to adjust the level, clearly made for people of a variety of heights and widths that was well outside human normal. The smooth, gliding motion of a magnetic hovering engine was familiar, at least; some things the same everywhere.
She could feel a faint buzz as the bus reached the outskirts of the city... passing into a tunnel that would lead from the heights of the dome, outside the planet's atmosphere; down through the darkness a dozen miles... until it reached... sunlight.
Her first view of the proper sky of Tybalt was amazing; a vivid teal, with whispy clouds, a vibrant yellow-orange sun, and vast fields of tall grass and wandering animals before her. She got only momentary visions of them before the bus stopped at 'B-15', a few passengers getting off, a few getting on....
One of them; a man who was completely bald, and had a set of odd eyes which were clearly engineered for surviving and still being able to see in extreme heat conditions; tiny, squinting, oddly-shaped masses; settled in beside her, and nodded. "G'day there, miss. First time on Tybalt?"
She glanced at him, then around the bus. He looked decent enough; physically fit, in fair condition, wearing a utility skinsuit; not a uniform, but clearly something built for work in space, all done up in patterns of blues and gold. He had also walked right by a dozen empty seats to sit next to her.
She thought for a moment. He might be the ASU contact. Or he might just be a random guy looking to chat with a pretty girl. "First time anywhere with big trees, actually. From the Sirius sector... spent most of my life on stations you could walk from one side of to the other.... and, well. Born on Adamant. Biggest tree there was a meter."
He nodded, smiling. "Ahh, a Dub, then. I'm a frontier man, myself... born to the crew of a BSE ship, though I did visit the United Worlds for a while, ended up taking a trip out to Ash, becoming a mercenary... I'd say the folks were disappointed, but they didn't really care."
As the bus slowed down at stop 'B-16'; a small village had formed around the bus-stop, named 'Adironi', the man looked her over for a moment. "Spent a few years as a merc, until the ship I was on had an incident where we were fighting some pirates. Bit of chain-fire, where one of the missile bays erupted; whole thing went off at once, half the crew ended up being frozen, a few killed entirely. This was before implants were as widespread as they are now, so some of them were never recovered."
Oof. Before implants were that widespread? Was this an actual story, because implants had become cheap enough that most people had them in her grandfather's day... close to a century before. Nowadays, almost everyone got one, especially folks with dangerous jobs. They'd even started putting them into slaves with useful skills a few decades ago. "You know, sometimes its strange to look at someone and hear a story like that. You have no idea how old they are just by looking at them... just see a decent-looking guy with a story, and wonder... is that really his story? Is he over a hundred, and chatting about his youth... or is he four hundred, and chatting about something from after he retired from his original career for the excitement of mercenary work?"
He studied her for a moment. He wasn't sure whether she'd gotten the code-phrase, it seemed. "Only if you're from a place with tons of baseline folks. Most people are used to it. Becomes a sort of fun game, you sit down at a table at a party... no idea which of the girls is your date's mom, which is her grandma, which is her sister... you make guesses. Sometimes you're wrong. Sometimes, you can even get yourself slapped by confusing a girl and her great-grandma, and kissing the wrong person because the resemblance is just that strong."
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
She chuckled, smiled at him.... and extended a hand. "Erica Grayson. Heading out to see the redwoods?"
He smiled back. "Adrian Proxima. Yes, in fact, I am. Spend so much time in space, good to take a break, now and again."
She froze for a moment. "... Ahh. Well then. I suppose we're going at least that far together." Her voice was suddenly strained. Proxima. How common was that last name?
At the next stop, B-17, she rose from her seat... as did Adrian... and when they stepped out into another small, quaint village... they could see them. Enormous, hundreds of feet tall, towering in the distance... a redwood forest. The forests around them were real, dense with smaller varieties of pine and oak; but after centuries of exploring space, they'd found few things to compare to the redwoods.
Granted... they brought at least some of those things with them, here. As she stepped way from the bus, looking out at the surrounding forest, so difficult to make out from the speeding train, she could see the faint light of glowflies; a particularly pretty quasi-insectoid which had bioluminescent traits, and had been dragged all over the galaxy by humans who kept them as pets. They liked to form intricate patterns in the night sky, or beneath the canopies of trees; and people just loved them.
A nearby sign offered redwood tours; at did a dozen other signs scattered down the street.. and she sighed, picking one at random. Hopefully this guy wasn't as bad as the other Proxima; or, even worse, a relative holding a grudge.
***
If he hadn't been referred to her by the embassy, she'd have refused to come out here. Being asked to leave her comm behind, and walk out amongst the redwoods with a stranger... especially one with the last name of the man who'd shot her... it was outside her comfort zone. Still. If she wanted the job....
She inhaled deeply, and followed. She'd wanted to come here, regardless. The massive trees.. dozens of feet across, the size of whole buildings... the sound of birds in the distance, the squirrel watching her with interest from the bushes... it was all so... strange. It touched something, deep inside.
She glanced over at him, as he planted a small cylinder in the dirt, twisting the top... and then there was an audible pop. She blinked. She was suddenly a bit... confused. Her memories of the walk out here... weren't quite as clear.
"Sorry, miss. Just an EMP. I scanned us both for any listening devices once we dropped our comms, then left the scanner behind... and one more check. Anyways! First of all, thanks for saving my uncle. He's an asshole, but he's family, and from what I hear, you'd have been fully justified in leaving him behind. In fact..."
He stuffed the expended device into a pocket. "If you hadn't brought any of our people out, your risk to reach Tybalt would've approached zero. The Bonaventure told us that they got suspicious on hearing you talk about maybe moving out, but didn't decide to act until they realized you had someone else's brain-chip, and not that of their marine, in the carrier. You had to know that bringing our people out was a risk, and you did it anyway. You've already been rewarded financially... but I just want to be clear. We appreciate it. It was a good, noble thing, and you're our kind of people."
He extended a hand... and Erica looked at it a moment.. and accepted, giving him a firm shake. "I wish I'd done it earlier. Honestly, your... uncle.. might have been an asshole, and he did kill my cat, but he gave me the kick in the ass I needed to leave a government I always knew was in the wrong. Doing my job, where people didn't even have genes anymore, just made it even more ludicrously obvious."
"This actually brings us to what we're really out here for." He chuckled. "The job offer. Right now, you're about eighty percent trusted; which is more than most of the folks we hire. We've heard from Cricket what you're offering in terms of skills. The equipment you'd need, we can get right here in Tybalt. We'll need to provided new equipment and training to our people, and divert those brain-chips we collect here, rather than to the UW....or, ideally, to a different world... if you're willing."
She nodded. "I like this world... but I haven't grown attached. Mind if I ask why? It only took a couple of days to get here, so it wouldn't be a bad spot, and its not that friendly to the Alliance..."
Proxima shrugged. "Any brain-chips brought here have to be brought in under the table, hidden. If discovered, they get interrogated, and... for Alliance people... we'd be charged with kidnapping, and the chips would be sent home. They're unlikely to actually check; they like us much more than the Alliance; but the risk goes to zero if we relocate to the Sunrise Coalition. Any willing participants in the Alliance military or slavery operations are considered criminals there and arrested immediately if found. Amusingly enough, the law only applies to un-augmented humans; by default, anyone augmented is assumed to have worked under duress. Which means, not only will they absolutely not stop us from having an office there interrogating Alliance brain-chips, they'll also arrest any Alliance operatives that come sneaking around, and maybe even help us with more prisoners... they have regular conflicts with mercenary groups paid by the Alliance."
Sunrise coalition. She'd... never heard of them. "...Who, exactly, are the Sunrise Coalition?"
"..... Its a bit complicated. Do you know how ownership law works, of new star systems?"
"Of course! Lets see. Any colony with at least a thousand people, and either self-sustaining or producing a regular export that more than funds their existence, can pay a fee and apply to the International Survey Corps for recognition. Once they get it, any part of their star system not already settled by someone else becomes theirs, legally, and they can make agreements with the other nations. The Alliance Colonial Core always has a few of those requests in."
He studied her for a moment, and nodded. "Surprisingly concise and accurate. So. We don't want the Alliance to grow. So we and our friends setup colonies in surrounding systems... which then make mutual defense pacts with the United Worlds as soon as they get legally recognized. The Sunrise Coalition is a group of like... thirty of those worlds, plus a few that the Alliance tried to setup with slave labor... that we instigated slave revolts on, so when the Survey Corps showed up, they registered a new colony... under the control of the former slaves."
"...Isn't it... risky to move there? Won't the Alliance be trying to take them over?"
"Not... officially. They send pirates to raid and cause problems... but if any actual Alliance military shows up, thats it. End of the whole shebang; the dubs and the Empire show up and wipe the slate clean, and nobody shows up to help the Alliance, cause they started it."
She nodded. "So... a bit dangerous, but not too bad."
"Exactly. On the dangerous part, however... it'll be a few months to get setup. We'll want a good, secure base, somewhere the Alliance doesn't know about, the whole nine yards. If you'd like, you can take a vacation. You've got the money, you could stay here and relax, or you could head out to the Coalition and figure out where you might want to settle down. Or.... it wouldn't be a bad idea for you to get some combat training. Learn to fly a ship, defend yourself. No matter where you end up... if you're working against the Alliance, there might come a day you need to fight your way out in a hurry, and aren't able to get a pilot. We can definitely get you on the next flight out to Ash... and you'll be even more anonymous when you come back out to the frontier, just another random merc from Ash out to make her way in the wider galaxy."