PrincessColumbia

  Diane had rather abruptly realized why so many sci-fi movies and shows had women with shorter hair, usually only down to their jawline at the longest. Doing one’s hair up to be able to go into a helmet was a singurity frustrating exercise when said helmet had to form a vacuum tight seal for any potential exposure to space.

  Thanks, once again, to Norma’s ridiculously overprepared ‘mom-friend’ nature, she discovered that the other woman had her cabin stocked with some hair ties and pins. Russe was actually the one to have pointed this out when Diane was fussing with her hair and compining about forgetting this rather important element to being someone who lived in space.

  “Oh, you didn’t see on the trip to Mortan? Norma stocked you up with hair care products.”

  Diane blinked, “Norma stocked me up on hair care products?”

  Russe chuckled, “Oh, yeah, she always hated how she couldn’t actually properly care for her looks before you arrived and unlocked the full station and let us all stay. She may not act like it, but she’s really very fastidious about looking her best. Ever since she’s been on a tear about making sure people have proper hygiene and watching videos on the ‘net about taking care of appearances.”

  Her eyebrows went up and she investigated her cabin and realized that she’d never questioned the presence of the shampoo and conditioner in her shower or the (apparently) moisturizing body wash, she’s simply used them as though using her personal bathing facilities on the station.

  Just having the appropriate tools didn’t mean she knew how to use them, however, and it took an embarrassingly long time on her pyer HUD to track down the videos she needed to learn how to do her hair up into a helmet-ready bun.

  Once she’d done that, she put on her suit, which she’d only had a chance to try on the individual components at the station to make sure they fit, and then fit together. Once fully assembled, she looked in the mirror with the helmet ‘down’ and, for the first time since creating her character, looked at her appearance and felt something besides confusion, yearning, and fascination.

  The space-suit base that she’d brought to the station with her was already an environmental-hardened carbon-nanotube and kevr mesh that was designed to keep her alive and well in even the most extreme conditions a person might be found in while in space. The armor pting, a polymer shell around some yers of impact resistant weave, yers of non-newtonian gel, energy dispersing faraday mesh, and ‘spider-silk’ (a material that was 100% synthetic but earned the name from te-20th century experiments in harvesting silk from spiders that, when woven, was several times better than even worm silk at preventing penetration by sharp objects), was a gorgeous, slightly off-white color leaning toward slightly blue. It was almost like wearing armor made of ice (were she to wax slightly poetic just based on the color). The undersuit moved and flexed with her body, resulting in a freedom of motion that she didn’t even have in her regur office-style suit.

  Speaking of her usual clothes, she’d had to remove them to fit properly into the surprisingly form-fitting combat suit. Even her underwear, the Morvuck-progenitor fitting design managing to nicely match the utilitarian bra, were removed and safely tucked into the dirty clothes packet connected to her rack. There was nothing between her skin and the suit, which felt awfully revealing even if there was nothing actually revealing about it whatsoever.

  When she looked in the mirror with the armor on, it was like she was seeing an honest to goodness Valkyrie, an armored warrior woman that was more than ready to deliver the fury of Heaven upon all who would invoke the righteous wrath of justice and deny mercy to the meek. She began to feel the now familiar rush of emotions that raged in her whenever she looked at herself in the mirror in this game, but this time the tsunami was accompanied by a new feeling. Like a kaiju hidden in the depths of the ocean of her subconscious, a feeling of rightness and decency and the memory of wanting to be a hero in an uncomplicated way and somehow being a Morvuck woman in combat armor was scratching that itch from her childhood. Moreover, she felt like she could be proud of her appearance. For the first time since she’d lost her mother to cancer, she wished her mom could see her now.

  Remembering Russe’s admonishment that sometimes you needed to confront things and sometimes you needed to hide and that both responses were okay, she buried the feelings of shame that were threatening to overtake the pleasure and enjoyment from looking like a woman and the feeling of power and agency it seemed to give her. Right now, she thought as she snagged a tissue with her armored glove-encased fingers and wiped the tears from her smiling face, I need to be in the moment and present and fighting the good fight against some actual unproblematic evil people. I can feel sorry for my fallen, sinful nature ter. For now, there’s women and girls to save.

  Because she’d never used it as part of the full suit, she wanted to try out the helmet. With her left hand she reached up to a touch-interface visible on the right shoulder and pressed her thumb, index, and middle fingers against it. The biometric sensors built into the glove sensed the correct fingers pressed at the correct angles combined with the input from the touch surface and activated the rapid deployment mechanism of the helmet harness. In a sequence so fast she could swear it happened all at once, what looked like extra cosmetic bits of armor around her neck and shoulders and extending down her back snapped up and around her head, forming a visored helmet that (she’d been reassured) was just as resistant to penetration and breakage as a more traditional piece of head gear.

  She looked, she decided, like an amazingly badass woman.

  Frustratingly, she had to disengage the helmet so she could wipe the tears off her face again from the unexpectedly empowering thought.

  Sadly, the Morvuck hunting vest didn’t fit either over or under the armor, so had to be kept on a hanger in her quarters. Hopefully the gifter would understand her wearing it on the way to and from the location of the ‘hunt’ instead of during, should they ever have the opportunity to encounter the woman.

  “Alright, let’s try this again,” she said while standing in front of the captain’s chair of the Ad Astra. She reached over to the swing-arm that held the comms console and tapped the broadcast button. “Sver station, this is Commander Diane Somni’els aboard the Ad Astra SHRA-Five-Niner-Eight-Two, callsign ‘Dragon’s Daughter,’” the name was Russe’s idea, and Diane found she rather liked it and was pnning on having Cynthy dispatch a registry update to the Terran Federation when they got back, “Under my authority as station commander of the seed station Matron’s Aerie,” another name from Russe, he’d apparently done some deep-digging into the dragon fiction and mythology forums on the gactic ‘net and had been giving the question of the station’s and ship’s names some thought, “I am here to pce you under arrest pending transport to the nearest bounty transit station. Compliance will be noted on the official record of arrest and reported to the bounty authority. Resistance will be met with lethal force. Lower your weapons readiness status to offline and prepare an airlock for boarding.”

  The wording had been worked out mostly by Russe when Diane said she wanted to at least give the svers a chance to y down their arms. There were, apparently, ways to do it right already baked into the game. If an Independent wanted to earn some extra cash, fast, they merely had to hunt down known criminals and dirtbags in Independent space, provide evidence of executing on the bounty (lethally, should the bounty require it), and rake in the credits. There were limits to how many bounties one could tag; the system required the Independent provide evidence that they, specifically, executed the bounty. This meant that the station commander (in her case) couldn’t simply set up a bounty-hunting crew and send them out to collect bounties in her name, but in cases like dealing with the svers, just the station’s logs (and, since Katrina had hacked the ship’s computers) the ship’s manifests were enough to earn her a substantial amount of credits from just the combat action aboard the sver’s ship. It had been over 24 hours since the sver’s ship booked it out of the system Matron’s Aerie was in orbit of, and they could see the clearly damaged ship docked along one of the shipyard arms jutting out from the starbase. They knew who she was, they knew what she was capable of, and they knew what would happen if she got aboard their station.

  Several minutes went by without a response and Diane sighed, “Well, looks like they’re choosing the hard way.”

  “They might just be thinking that we’re not worth responding to. We’re just one Ad Astra, after all. It’s technically a combat ship, but only barely qualifies in terms of gactic conflict, and if they stay hunkered in their starbase there’s pretty much nothing we can do about it.”

  Diane smiled somewhat smugly at him, “See, that’s where I like to think I’m right and they’re wrong.”

  For all Russe had been rather gung-ho about testing Diane’s Commander status, it was clear the reality of what it would mean, of his friend dying (however temporarily) was a distinctly unpleasant thought. “I...are you sure you want to do this? It seems like a few forms of crazy.”

  “Psh!” she objected, “It’s not even an orbital drop. I’ll be fine!”

  “Just,” he took a deep breath, “You’re going to let your suit’s computer handle the ignition and guidance, right?”

  She rolled her eyes, “I’m crazy, not stupid,” any cut her words may have delivered was muted by her smile, “But...thanks for worrying. You’re a good friend, Russe.”

  He shot her a bright smile, “I try.”

  “I’m more worried about you, really,” she said as she headed to the rear of the bridge, “I will be a small, thermally challenging target. You will be a big ol’ bullseye on their screens.

  Russe waved dismissively, “Nah, this will be cake! I’ve had to run a blockade across the Crotixian border in a smuggler’s ship.”

  Diane paused in the doorway to the crew quarters, “...and what were you doing running the Crotixian border?”

  “Nothing!” he chirped, suddenly very focused on his console.

  She rolled her eyes and made her way to the crew cabin that had been converted into an armory.

  “Last chance to change your mind, this is still a really crazy idea.”

  Diane grinned, feeling honestly too eted to do much else as she said, “Crazy like a dragon!”

  Russe chuckled, “That’s not a thing.”

  “We’re gonna make it a thing!”

  “Alright, firing impulse for three seconds in three...two...”

  It turned out that all Diane had needed to feel the thrill she’d been expecting at travelling through space was to remove a yer. Except for her armor, nothing was between her and the crushing void of space. It is possible, she had the passing thought, That I may be an adrenaline junky. Just as the countdown hit one, she tightened her grip on the access dder rung and hunched down deeper into a runner’s starting block stance. It was rgely superfluous; the suit’s inertial compensation routines would automatically lock her grip around the rung and trigger the gravity lock of her boots whether she issued the command or not. As it was, she’d already firmly pnted her boots and they wouldn’t release until the preset speed and distance already programmed into her suit’s computer.

  This didn’t stop her from feeling several G’s yank back on her, the inertial dampening field of the ship not designed to keep up with someone on the outside of the hull. She wasn’t terribly worried, they’d looked it up and run the numbers on the trip out to the starbase, the amount of stress on her system was about three times the human maximum, but it was just barely inside the maximum capability of a Morvuck woman in peak physical condition. Diane wouldn’t swear to being in ‘peak’ physical condition for a Morvuck, but she was certainly above average based on the examples she’d encountered on Mortan.

  Which, honestly, said something significant about the physical training discipline she’d developed for herself outside the pod and how she had either a genetic predisposition to not being particurly fit or conditions in post-war America were so poor on the dietary front that she’d been just deprived enough of the appropriate nutrients to develop her form the way she wanted but had never achieved. A simir regimen to what she’d practiced outside the pod (scaled up for Morvuck physiology) was apparently a step above even the requirements of professions that required physical strength on Mortan. Until they had looked up what Diane would be capable of for this trip, she hadn’t thought anything of being a few inches and several dozen pounds of muscle more physically imposing than even the police that were part of the mayor’s security detail.

  Her crazy levels of fitness and strength training were serving her well now as the ship rocketed from what felt like a standing start to .01 of its maximum impulse speed.

  “Alright, sver station’s weapons are going for a lock, initiating evasive maneuvers,” came Russe’s voice over the comms in her helmet. The ship juked hard to starboard, her suit’s servos cmping the glove firmly on the rung to keep her from being rocketed off the hull from sheer inertia.

  Diane’s eyes weren’t good enough to see the station across the distance that still remained between the ship and the sver’s stronghold, no organic being’s eyes were. It was several orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude further than any pnetary-evolved life form would ever even hope to be able to see. She did, however, have a HUD in her helmet that was showing her where the starbase was with a small targeting reticule and a callout belling it. The unremarkable nothing suddenly fred bright blue-white and before she could really register what she was seeing a bolt of psma several times as wide as her car in Houston and half as long as a football field ripped past the ship what felt like just inches from her helmet.

  Which wasn’t accurate, she had to acknowledge, the HUD alerted her that it had been several feet from her head.

  “Whoah, Russe! Cutting it close there!” she barked into her comms, “I may be a Commander and might respawn back at the station, but you’re not! I’m not eager to tell Norma you weren’t coming home ‘cause you got cocky!”

  “Hey, it’s been a few years, they must have newer targeting systems than the Crotixian border stations!” came Russe’s distracted reply.

  “Just be careful, please! I’ve kinda gotten fond of you.” Her reply was punctuated with another shot of weapon fire from the station whipping past the ship, this time on the other side of the ship from where she was clinging to the hull.

  The svers manning the weapons on the station were pretty good, she had to admit. Russe’s cims of being a ‘solid helmsman’ were put paid as gross underrepresentation’s of his skill as he maintained the speed required to keep Diane from turning into jelly inside her suit while dodging shot after shot from the weapon’s empcements.

  Diane’s attention was grabbed by a notification on her helmet’s HUD with a countdown starting at 45 seconds, the milliseconds tracking down as they approached their first major waypoint. “Okay, Russe. About to separate in 30 seconds as of...mark!”

  Her friend juked the ship hard on the z-axis, almost enough to sm her bodily into the hull, but she trusted him to know what he was doing. Sure enough, before the timer hit the 15 second mark, he began an arc that would point the ship and its vector back in a straight line toward the sver starbase.

  This was quite possibly the most dangerous point in their pn. If the svers had even just a little bit better timing or luck on their side, her suit’s thrusters wouldn’t have enough power to get her out of the way of one of those truck sized energy bolts, and that wasn’t even mentioning that her suit’s onboard computer and limited sensor suite weren’t capable of detecting said weapon’s fire even if she was strapped to a maneuvering harness that might have been capable of it.

  “Detaching in 3...2...1...away!” not even willing to trust her limited organic reactions, she left the release of her glove from the service dder and the deactivation of her gravity boots to the pre-programmed routine they’d set up. From her perspective, it looked like the Dragon’s Daughter dove down as she sailed in a straight line through space. Hopefully the svers targeting the ship would assume the arc was just another maneuver of a crazy pilot and would aim for either further down the track ‘above’ Diane or along the parabo the ship would be following if someone not yanking around a flight stick like a crazy person were at the helm.

  She heard Russe breathe a sigh of relief along with hers as two shots did exactly that. One going ‘above’ Diane by probably 75 yards and another going ‘low’ and off to port of where he’d actually piloted it. They’d been guessing that the sver’s sensor array wouldn’t be looking for something the size of a human person since the collision shields would be able to neutralize anything smaller than an Earth standard automobile that wasn’t also packing warhead of some variety. Plus the time she’d spend attached to the hull in deep space meant her thermal profile was minimized and the suit’s power usage was too low to ping on a space station’s sensor array.

  “Alright,” he breathed as he kept maneuvering the ship away from her. “I’ll keep ‘em distracted and looking at me, I’m tracking your path on my screen and will do my best to keep the cone of fire away from you. If anything goes wrong...”

  “Hit the abort sequence and blow past the station instead of nding on it, understood,” she interrupted, “You keep focused on the helm, you are more important as far as getting through this safely goes.”

  Russe just offered an abbreviated, “Aye,” as he juked the ship into more evasive moves.

  Eventually the Dragon’s Daughter’s path took it outside of Diane’s visibility, Russe ramping up the speed now that he didn’t have to worry about an organic being clinging to the outside of the hull anymore, and for several minutes all she had to keep her company was the sound of his breathing and occasional grunts and curses of frustrated concentration as he continued to masquerade at trying to force the ship close enough to target the weapons empcements. She could track his movements on her HUD, watching the little arrow dart through space at a speed that would be impossible in an atmosphere. He really is a damn good pilot... she thought as she watched energy bolts slice through the vacuum of space seemingly just barely missing the ship.

  Another timer blipped into existence, counting down from five minutes. “ETA to turn-and-burn waypoint T-minus 4:45...mark,” she stated into the comms.

  “Roger,” was Russe’s reply as she turned her attention to the starbase, still just a tiny dot in her field of vision from which needles of death were being fired at her friend.

  She felt her lip curl up and allowed herself a sense of satisfaction that she counted someone as friend enough to feel indignant that they were being shot at.

  In a space of time that felt eternal but also far too short, the countdown timer flickered red, letting her know she was nearly to the pre-programmed waypoint for the maneuvers that needed to happen using her suit’s built-in thrusters. “Five seconds to turn-and-burn...mark.”

  A quick five-count and the script Russe helped her code into her suit’s computer fired off her thrusters flipping her orientation so her feet were pointed at the station instead of her head, then it felt like she hit a mile-high pile of jello at terminal velocity and for the first time since entering the game felt like her body wasn’t quite up to the task. She felt her muscles strain and had to concentrate to keep from doing anything that would ruin her trajectory. There was no such thing as wind resistance, but filing her arms would alter her momentum and send her off course.

  “Stay with me, Diane, tell me about...your first pet.” The directive felt like it came from a distance and it took her a moment to connect it with the concept of Russe in her mind.

  She forced herself to think, “...no...no pets. Not allowed...” she managed to gasp out, each word pushing the tunnel of bck away a little bit more.

  Russe chuckled, Diane dimly wondered if the station was still shooting at him if he had enough attention to spare for her, “From what you told me your caretaker probably thought you’d eat whatever pet you got.”

  Caretaker...? Right...game, Tiffany wasn’t my stepmother here, she would have been my caretaker...still a bitch, as her consciousness cwed its way out of the well it seemed to have fallen into, she started putting together more of her awareness of who and where she was that she hadn’t even realized she had lost mental hold of. Still thinking of myself as a girl...weird...

  She apparently hadn’t responded the way Russe had expected, “Diane, you still there? You’re thrusters are almost expended, you’re going to hit the station’s collision shield soon...”

  “Yeah, sorry. Keep talking, it’s helping.”

  “Okay, not much time, but I could tell you the story of how I met Norma.”

  “Nah, I want to be sharing a drink with you when you tell me that.” She recognized more of her HUD, noticing the countdown timer and connected it to the concept of her pn to board the station. She gnced at the bottom corner to note her velocity and was satisfied when it flipped from red to green, indicating her thrusters had bled off enough speed that the collision shields wouldn’t bounce her momentum back onto her.

  “Heh, okay, fair enough. How about...my first virtual pet!” she saw a fsh of light and realized that she was close enough to the station that she was seeing the psma bolts moving away from her instead of at some angle from her course. She looked ‘down’ from her perspective and saw the station was filling about a quarter of her field of view and growing fast.

  “Beg pardon?! First virtual pet? And shouldn’t you be focusing on dodging?” She felt a sudden resistance in her flight that just as suddenly disappeared, Must have passed through the collision shield just now.

  “No point in hanging around dodging their weapons if you’re sptted against their hull because you bcked out.”

  “Point, now shush, I’m back to full consciousness. T-minus 20 seconds...mark!”

  Bracing herself mentally while she forced her body to stay loose and ready, she counted the seconds until her boots automatically engaged their grav-lock and half a breath ter her feet impacted against the exterior of the sver starbase. She allowed her knees to bend and her torso to flex, absorbing as much of the shock left from her software-controlled burn as possible, smming her knuckles against the hull and finally halting her momentum. Gasping a little, she forced herself to take deep breaths as her body released endorphins to counter the overall ache she was now experiencing from the extreme gravities she just put herself through.

  She realized that she was feeling a regur thrumming sensation through the hull exterior pting suddenly stopped. “Disengaging and moving to a safe distance. How’re you doing over there?”

  Vibrations must have been the weapons, which if they’re no longer shooting at Russe would have stopped, “Pardon the nguage, but HELL yeah!” she stood and straightened her spine, stretching some of the compression from her joints, “Zero training, zero practice, just two crazy idiots in a tin can about to ruin some sver’s whole careers!”

  Russe’s ughter was bright and victorious, “We need to get you more comfortable with cursing if that’s the best you can do.”

  Diane sniffed haughtily, “It wouldn’t be proper for a dy to engage in inappropriate nguage!” She wound up giggling along with Russe’s renewed ughter. “Okay, let me take a look here, if we aimed me right, I should be...” she scanned the surface she stood against, her HUD highlighting the features of the hull, “Ah, there it is! Approaching the airlock now.”

  They had spotted the airlock once they got close enough to do more detailed exterior scans using the Dragon’s Daughter’s long range sensor array. It wasn’t one of the usual airlocks a ship would dock at, being sized more for a shuttle-sized craft than even one as small as the Dragon’s Daughter. The markings on the hull indicated it was likely primarily used for maintenance and emergencies and thus would be unlikely to be heavily guarded even if they were alerted to her presence, which was unlikely given the construction of the outer hull would have several yers of reinforcement and vacuum chamber gapping that would prevent a catastrophic blow in the event of an atmosphere leak. She probably could have impacted at twice the velocity and even if a sver had been pressing his ear to the wall directly opposite her impact point he wouldn’t have heard anything.

  Upon reaching the airlock, she had her first experience in having to reorient her entire body to accommodate a new ‘down’ as she stepped inside the airlock sleeve. The actual outside door was inset about a yard inside the colr, giving her plenty of space to stand as she located the control terminal and pried the maintenance access hatch off with a cw. Darn handy, that, she thought as she once again marveled at the design of her combat suit’s gloves. The tips that would normally just be either a seam or capped with a bit of armoring were instead a nano-weave structure that allowed her to extend her cws without puncturing the fabric, and the structure not only conformed to the shape of her cws, it perfectly mimicked their sharp edges and points. When she retracted her cws, the nano-weave structures retracted as well, leaving a standard glove fingertip.

  She used her left hand to pull a cord out from under her right gauntlet and plugged it into the access port on the panel. Hundreds of spaceborne species still had some basic requirements when building anything, and one of those requirements was something resembling a standard, even if that standard was just the male-female connection between a cord and a port on a console. Her HUD brought up the status of the automatic hacking tools that Russe had loaded into her suit. He’d made it absolutely clear that just owning some of the tools was a viotion of several ws and even a couple of interstelr treaties, so if she was going to take her combat suit anywhere that wasn’t Independent space he’d have to delete the tools.

  She watched as the HUD fshed up lines of text she presumed were the tools he’d installed and set to run as soon as she made a connection. In all, this was rather familiar ground for her, the teamwork operating nearly the same as when she was on a hunt using her old VR helmet setup with her support team of analysts. She even had her anti-A.I. weapon firmly strapped in with a back holster fitted over her armor in the small of her back.

  As though the presence of combat armor wasn’t enough to highlight the differences between her usual VR hunts and her current situation, she was going in armed with far more than hackers’ tools and a handgun. Over one shoulder she had strapped a shotgun. Yes, a good old, pump action, basic form and function unchanged since the days of the Great American West shotgun. The shells in the magazine and filling the ammo bag strapped to her right hip were double-ought buck, but the pellets were a fragmenting material that would shatter instead of penetrate if she missed a squishy target (a sver) and hit a hull pte instead. Strapped to the front of her right thigh was a pistol of the same make and model as the one she’d boarded the sver’s ship with the day prior. This matched the pistol strapped into a holster on her left hip. Strapped around her waist was a makeshift harness that held a P390 and it's ammo magazines firmly in pce.

  The P390 was an intriguing weapon to her. The agency had a small handful of the contemporary weapon the design was based on in the weapons locker at the range on the outskirts of Houston’s suburbs and she’d even gotten to handle it. Firing them was considered to be a serious no-no, however. The import of both the weapon and the ammo for it was firmly embargoed at the end of the war, and the company that made them cancelled the design. There was talk among the three weapons manufacturers in America of reviving the design for the AR’s military, but the price tag was just too high to seriously entertain the notion. The end result being that the tiny number of actual P90 and P190 weapons and ammunition were extremely closely monitored. This meant that Diane would be able to do yet another thing no other American agent had been able to do since the end of the war; fire a Px90 series carbine rifle in an actual combat scenario.

  Did Diane need the entire weapons locker offloaded to the Dragon’s Daughter for this trip? No. But then, she hadn’t known exactly what she would be needing when she left the station, so considered the extra weapons and ammo she hadn’t picked out to be positive redundancy.

  Russe’s tools eagerly and happily ran through their multitude of firewall cracking routines and rights unlocking algorithms, letting Diane simply stand there and watch.

  Until the st one.

  The scroll of lines on her HUD suddenly stopped, some nonsensical name being the st entry with a big red ‘X’ where all the other lines had a green check mark. She didn’t honestly know if it was ‘the st one’ on the list. If Russe’s script was coded to halt on a failure (which is how she would have coded it), then there could be another hundred of the tools to go.

  That said, she did not know the systems well enough to troubleshoot.

  “Russe, we have a problem.”

  PrincessColumbia