<Wow, Silversquid, they weren’t lying when they said you move through the water like a dream. I bet you’re the most beautiful thing under the ice.>
<Thank you,> Tanis replied tonelessly, wondering if the man’s casual manner was a test to see if she’d break character.
<Oh yeah, that’s right, Damon said you want to always be in your ‘persona’. I guess that’s cool, but if you need to be regular for a bit, I won’t tell. There’s one mermaid who I let sneak into my room in the dry section every now and then. She just drinks coffee and stuffs her face with popcorn for an hour or two. Says it helps ground her.>
Tanis hadn’t considered what life must be like for some of the people who worked in the casino because they had no other choice. They all seemed calm and serene in the hallways, but she supposed, with an overlord like Damon, they probably watched their behavior even in the staff areas.
<What is required of me?> she asked, trying to move the conversation along—still not certain it wasn’t a test.
Arnold only shook his head before gesturing at the long, dark tube. <Tank 11 sits overtop the main poker hall. Most of the time, you’ll stay in the tubes, but every now and then, they open up, and you’ll need to go swim around the patrons for a while. I’ll warn you, though, they like to touch, and if you flinch…well, it makes Damon behave like even more of an ass than normal.>
Tanis decided that if Arnold was playing her, he was doing an amazing job. The disdain with which he said Damon’s name was almost palpable.
She nodded, floating serenely in front of the long tunnel.
<You’re a funny one, Silversquid. OK, go on in. At some point, Saniyah will call you out to get ready for your show, but for now, just enjoy yourself.>
He gestured to the tunnel, and Tanis swam in, passing quickly through the shaft to emerge over a shadowy grotto.
The space was over a hundred meters across, and filled with poker tables nestled amongst stone outcroppings, coral reefs and carefully manicured kelp gardens. The floor of the room wasn’t flat, instead rising and falling, with some of the tables positioned near the roof, and others down in dark crevasses.
It was early in the day, and only a few dozen people were playing at the tables, each run by a merman or merwoman. A few merguards with gleaming tridents—not the exterior shark security, Tanis was glad to see—drifted over the area.
The waitstaff consisted of people who looked far more like seahorses than humans, but the patrons were a mix of individuals with very little in the way of mods—though their divesuits were quite garish—all the way to a person who made a very convincing hermit crab.
A dozen ‘card up your shell’ jokes ran through Tanis’s mind as she began to swim through the transparent tubes that ran around the upper half of the grotto.
There were a few others in the tubes, one of the pufferfish people—gender entirely indeterminate—and a woman who was the long, eel version of a merwoman. They gave her nods and smiles when they passed by, but none of them spoke, keeping to their characters.
She was glad for both Bella’s meditation and Claire’s penchant for remaining perfectly still, as they helped Tanis deal with what she found to be an utterly boring series of loops over the room.
Three hours later, she was wondering what would happen if she were to just float back down the tunnel and go searching for the Infiltrator Chameleon, when Saniyah reached out to her.
<Shoot, I forgot to send you your song, Silversquid! I’m passing it now. I need you to get to Tank 3 and rehearse before the amphitheater opens up in thirty minutes!>
<On my way,> Tanis replied dutifully, and picked up the pace, swimming through the tubes to the exit. She was nearly there, when a glance below revealed her doppelganger entering the room beneath her. At the same time, sections of the tubes slid open—the signal that the few performers drifting overhead were to swim down and mingle with the crowd.
The pufferfish person was the first one out, moving to the center of the room, where a crowd of patrons quickly gathered, running their hands along its spines.
<Well look at that, he’s pumping out psychotropic drugs,> Tanis commented to Darla. <I can smell them from here.>
<Quite the crowd pleaser,> Darla replied. <As is Miss Eel. She’s already half-wrapped around that guy over there.>
<I’m making my move,> Tanis announced suddenly, veering off and out of the tunnels, angling toward the table where the Infiltrator Chameleon sat.
Tanis caught a reflection of herself in a polished quartz pillar—sinuous, silver, many-tentacled—and then looked down at the Infiltrator Chameleon. Anger flared up in her that the IC had been ‘Tanis’ for weeks now, while she had been forced to go through a variety of covers until she’d become a thing, all because of the machine below her.
She picked up speed, reaching the table where the IC and two other players sat with cards in hand. Letting out a low orca moan in greeting, Tanis began to swim around the table, brushing her tentacles across all the players, and depositing breach nano on the Infiltrator Chameleon.
<I’ll need fifteen—make that twenty-five seconds,> Darla announced.
<What’s the hold-up?> Tanis asked as she wrapped a limb around one of the player’s chests.
<I don’t think this is the same IC that attacked you on Mars 1. Yeah, different model. Aha! I have a way in, get ready to grab her.>
Tanis moved behind her doppelganger, who turned to look up at her with mildly curious eyes—Tanis’s eyes. Then the IC twitched and blinked rapidly.
<Do it.>
Tanis sank down, wrapping her tentacles around…herself.
She pushed the utter strangeness of what she was doing out of her mind and lifted the IC from her seat, pulling her back up to the tubes overhead.
The merman running the table looked up in surprise, but the Tanis-doppelganger only waved happily at the man, who shrugged and turned back to the remaining two players—one of which looked as though he wished he’d been chosen by the gleaming, many-tentacled creature now pulling ‘Tanis’ away.
<This feels icky,> Tanis muttered as she wrapped her tail-tentacles around the IC and pulled her through the tunnels and down the shaft leading to the back halls.
<Tell that to my brain.>
<I am.>
Tanis almost laughed aloud as she turned the corner into the rear hall, glad to see that the always talkative Arnold was not in sight.
The map showed a storage room nearby, and she headed for it, praying that no one would look too closely and see that there was a person concealed within her appendages.
At the door, she passed another passel of nano into the locking mechanism and breached it quickly, darting into the interior while the passage behind was empty.
<OK…> Darla muttered. <I have control of the IC’s exterior, but her core is locked down tight. It’s going to take me a bit to work around its defenses and dig through its logs for clues.>
Tanis nodded absently as she looked around the room, which was filled with everything from chairs to chunks of grotto wall. Spotting a stack of wall pieces piled haphazardly, she swam over and tucked the IC inside.
<Do you need a physical connection?>
<No, I’ve got her Link properly locked down. I can do this remotely, though I’m curious why it’s a different IC.>
<Hopefully that will be in the logs.>
Tanis set down a piece of grotto wall over where the IC lay, pleased with herself for managing to move the cumbersome object with her tentacles.
Darla seemed to notice, too. <You’re surprisingly good at managing twenty limbs already. Far better than I’d’ve expected.>
<Still can’t move the ones on my head for the life of me,> Tanis replied as she swam back to the door.
She attempted to use the nano she’d left in the corridor to check for any passersby, but the currents in the hall had swept them awa
y.
<Silversquid!> Saniyah’s voice thundered in her head before she’d opened the door. <Where are you? We need to get going!>
<Nearly there,> Tanis replied. <I was interacting with patrons.>
<Fine, fine, just get your tails in gear.>
Tanis sent an affirmative and then opened the door only to find Arnold staring at her.
<Silversquid?> he asked with a look of puzzlement on his face. <I got an alert that this door had malfunctioned.>
<I, uh…it wasn’t closed all the way,> Tanis said.
<Oh…the real woman in silver skin comes to the surface,> Arnold said with a conspiratorial smile. <I knew there was more to you than a cold automaton.>
<It’s harder than I thought it would be.> Tanis put all the emotion she could into her voice, unable as she was to make much in the way of facial expressions.
<You’re not the first newbie to say that.> Arnold placed a hand on her shoulder. <Look, here are the tokens to get into the air-breathers’ living quarters and my room. You can hide in there later for a bit if you need to.>
Tanis couldn’t tell if the man was coming on to her, or if he was genuinely concerned for her well-being. While she wanted to believe he was sincere, the idea of someone behaving altruistically in a place like the Blue Lagoon was an incongruous one.
Takes all kinds, she thought, deciding to take him at face value—with a side-helping of skepticism—and accepted his access codes.
<Thanks,> she said softly. <I’d better go, Saniyah is going to string me up by my tentacles if I don’t get to Tank 3.>
<Off with you, then,> Arnold said, lifting his hand from her shoulder.
Tanis half-expected him to slap her on her rear—such as it was—but he didn’t, only giving her a smile and a nod before he firmly closed the door to the storage room.
GOING UNDER
STELLAR DATE: 03.03.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Kirby Jones, orbiting Europa
REGION: Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Two days earlier…
“Smythe,” Connie said as she walked onto the Kirby Jones’s bridge. “I need to get down to Europa. The H3 cap is leaking again. I’ve shunted the fuel off to a secondary tank, but we can’t top off until it’s fixed.”
The lieutenant turned to look at her. “You heard what the commander said; no one is to leave the ship ‘til she gets back.”
Connie held in a frustrated sigh. So far, only she and Cassie knew that the ‘Tanis’ who had been aboard the Kirby Jones for the last week was not the genuine article.
While the faux commander had behaved well enough through the trip, she’d gotten a bit odd at the end, insisting that the Jones remain in a parking orbit around Europa—not docked with a station—and then ordering everyone to stay aboard.
It wasn’t that the any of them were likely to run off, anyway, which made the order sit strangely with the rest of the crew.
“Can’t you just order a new cap and have it couriered up?” Smythe asked.
“Already did that.” Connie shook her head. “The new one leaks too; turns out the whole housing is a bit torqued. Fixing it will require changing the whole tank.”
“Shit,” Smythe muttered. “The commander’ll be pissed. That’ll put us in refit for a day.”
Connie nodded. “Yeah, but I checked the housing. It’s solid—just a few microfractures that I can repair with nanowelds. I took detailed scans of the cap-mount, and if I go down to the local manufacturer, I can get them to make a custom one.”
“Why not just send them the specs?”
“No can do,” Connie replied. “Since it’s a custom order, they want me down there to verify that it meets my requirements. They said otherwise they’re not going to make a ‘broken part’.”
“Dammit,” Smythe rubbed his hands against his face. “How long will it take?”
“Day, tops. I’m going to take Cassie, too. We can grab a few other things and fix up some of the stuff Tanis was pestering me about on the way over here.”
Smythe sighed. “She’s been in a hell of a mood, hasn’t she?”
“Yeah, I think she’s just pissed that she barely got to see Peter.”
Smythe ran his hands through his hair. “These orders have been weird. First we go to Ceres for no real reason, and now Tanis is down on Europa doing stars know what.”
“Yeah, but she’s not due up for three days. Let me do this, and then we’ll be fueled up and ready for the patrol before she gets back.”
“I—” Smythe said, then stopped himself.
“Remember what I said about you and Jeannie?”
“Yeah, that you’d make sure Tanis didn’t find out.”
Connie nodded. “Right, well, the amount of effort I put into that is dependent on you scratching my back a bit, too.”
Smythe groaned. “Fine.”
“Excellent!” Connie said brightly as she turned and walked off the bridge. <Cassie? We’re good to go.>
<I was going anyway. I’m already in the skiff. Get here on the double.>
* * * * *
A day later, the pair were in one of Chora Station’s underwater departure bays checking over their private, two-person submarine.
Connie looked down at herself as she waited for Cassie to get into the small craft, casually brushing a hand against the divesuit she wore. It was covered in coral, textured in such a way that it looked as though her entire body was constructed of the calcium carbonate, but that was just a clever illusion.
Luckily, unlike natural coral, it was soft to the touch.
“So let me get this straight,” Connie said. “Our fake Tanis has gone to this Blue Lagoon casino, where you believe Oligarch Alden is, with the intent of finishing the job?”
“Hole in one,” Cassie said as she settled into the small submarine. “We have to head in there and get the lay of the land. Then we’ll ferret out whoever is behind this.”
“Shouldn’t we just stop the bad Tanis before she kills Alden?”
Cassie glanced at Connie. “I went over this already. Stopping one attack doesn’t keep Alden safe. We need to find out who is pulling the strings.”
“Well, if we keep someone from killing him, that seems to be the sort of thing that ups his safety quotient.”
“Only temporarily. Besides, that’s what his security is for.”
Connie could tell that there would be no convincing Cassie to change her mind. “Well, then why did you bring me along?”
The spy shot Connie a dark look. “So that I can feed you to the sharks they use for security down there during my getaway.”
“Jeez, no need to get pissy about it,” Connie muttered.
“Sorry.” Cassie pursed her lips in frustration as the submarine dropped into the water, and they began to drift down the dive tube that led to the city of Chora’s Height. “I’m just annoyed that this whole business is still so opaque. I brought you along because you’re quick on your feet. We have no AI with us, so I need backup.”
“OK, then as backup, what plan am I backing up?”
“Well, I’d like to see if we can find the real Tanis when we get down there—stars, I wish I’d set her up with emergency data dead drops before she went off to see Peter. She and Darla are ridiculously good at hiding. Granted, it would be easier if they were using a cover I made.”
“Why would they not be using one of your covers, anyway?” Connie wondered.
Cassie shook her head. “Pretty sure it’s due to Darla’s penchant for playing dress-up. She kept pressuring me to make a rich heiress type of cover for Tanis, but those aren’t as effective as one would think. Plus they’re expensive, and the Division does not like paying for the sorts of places those people like to stay.”
“Places like this casino?”
“Yes. Places exactly like this casino.”
Connie pulled up the public information on the Blue Lagoon to review a second ti
me, once again impressed by its amenities. Not to mention awed by how much staying at the place cost.
“I can see why the Division doesn’t want to foot this bill. Plus side, if Tanis is masquerading as a wealthy woman, her cover should be able to get into a place like this.”
“Maybe. I had to pull some serious strings for us to get in. Even with Darla, I’m not sure how Tanis will manage.”
“Well, Evil-Tanis obviously got in.”
Cassie laughed. “Evil-Tanis, eh?”
“Seemed to fit.”
“Yeah, well, it’s us versus Evil-Tanis in one of the most secure casinos in the Sol System.”
“Good thing you brought me along.”
TORFIN AND AMEONIA
STELLAR DATE: 03.05.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Blue Lagoon Casino, Sargasso Mountains, Europa
REGION: Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
<How long do you think it’s going to take you to breach the IC’s core?> Tanis asked Darla as she followed the directions to Tank 3.
<Umm…this thing has some pretty tight protocols. It will also wipe itself if I brute-force my way in.>
<So you’re saying I’m singing for my supper tonight, eh?>
<Yeah. I hate giving estimates on things like this, but I’d say that unless I stumble upon something, it’s going to take me a few hours.>
Tanis nodded silently as she reached the entrance to Tank 3. She swam up through a long tube and found herself entering an amphitheater-like space through an opening in the stage.
The room was shaped like a large conch shell, and the rows of seats all had holodisplays in front of them. She guessed it was so that the viewers could gamble in a variety of ways while watching the show.
A seashell-encrusted woman drifted nearby, glaring at Tanis as she emerged.
“About time,” she said, vocalizing the same way Damon had. “This parlor opens up in fifteen minutes, so we need to get you singing! Did you get the song?”
Tanis nodded. “I received it.”
“Good. Let’s hear it.”