Dropping the aircraft low, she set it on course toward the nearby mountains, carefully sprinkling the skin flakes from Tarranavi in the cockpit. “I already planted some other evidence of Tarranavi’s involvement in the sabotage I did to this aircraft’s safety systems,” she told Jonis. “That sabotage is what set off the alarm that distracted you for the second I needed. What? Aren’t you pleased at how well I learned your lessons? Oh, that’s right, you’re dead. But it will look like you died when this aircraft hits those mountains and the collision-protection equipment fails to deploy. Poor little snake, his neck broken in the impact! And all the evidence will point to another snake’s being responsible.”
Hauling out the low-altitude parachute she had brought along, Roh Morgan cast a regretful eye on the stealth gear she had returned to Jonis, the jewelry having fallen from his limp hand to lie sparkling on the floor of the cockpit. “Thanks for warning me how your fellow snakes can trace that stuff,” she told Jonis cheerfully. “Otherwise, I probably would have tried to take it. Hey, did you notice that I’m wearing skin gloves so none of my skin flakes or prints will show up on that gear or in this aircraft? No? Too bad. Good-bye, snake.”
She popped the side door, slid out of the cockpit, felt the chute deploy in the moments before reaching the ground, then rolled into a landing.
A powder sprinkled onto the chute caused it to shrivel into fragments. The snakes would find those fragments, of course, but the only evidence they would have as to who had used the chute would be the footprints from Sub-CEO Tarranavi’s boots, which were on Morgan’s feet.
Morgan disposed of the boots at her first stop, changing into other boots. Over the next twenty kilometers, she changed footwear several more times, using a dozen different methods to throw off any possible tracking or pursuit through open country, then the city. By the time she reached the military barracks where she was stuck, waiting for someone to accept her into a unit, she had thoroughly muddled her trail.
The sub-CEO running the barracks had made no secret of her own eagerness to see Morgan shunted off to some cannon-fodder unit where the combat life expectation of an Executive Fifth Class would be measured in minutes. But Morgan had managed to throw up a series of obstacles that had so far prevented her assignment to that kind of unit. Increasingly, Morgan realized her delaying tactics were only postponing the inevitable. No other kind of unit wanted her. No one else wanted her for any other purpose. No one had ever wanted her. So such a suicidal assignment would probably be her fate despite the medical assessment that had cleared her for duty. Morgan smiled at the sub-CEO’s office as she passed it, thinking that she had already survived one suicide mission and wondering if she could eliminate any more snakes or equally poisonous executives and CEOs before being shipped out.
Not that she would die even then, despite every attempt to kill her. Morgan somehow knew that she was destined for something big, some greatness, even though everyone was against her. She hadn’t died on that suicide mission into enigma space. She knew that the person who had come back wasn’t the Roh Morgan who had been sent on the mission. She had changed, become much more than before. She felt that. And the proof of her belief was that no one had ever come back from enigma-occupied space. Except her. That meant there must be a reason, a big reason, why she hadn’t died. She was learning more every day, gaining the knowledge of her victims before sending them to the fates they deserved, preparing herself for whatever came next.
Her comm pad buzzed urgently. Morgan checked it, read the message, then had to pause to read it again.
Someone had agreed to take her as a junior executive in their combat unit. Someone had believed in her, despite her youth and her brief, checkered past. CEO Artur Drakon. “This officer deserves a chance,” Drakon had written.
Morgan didn’t know who Drakon was. But as she looked at the message, a totally unexpected event, she knew he must be the one person in this dark, vicious universe who was on Morgan’s side, who might not only deserve her loyalty but be the one worthy of helping her fulfill her own still-dimly-seen destiny.
Colonel Roh Morgan, part of the crowd of rumpled and weary travelers leaving the tramp freighter which had brought them to Ulindi Star System, approached the security checkpoint at the docking facility orbiting Ulindi’s primary world.
The checkpoint was an impressive one, with at least twenty snakes scrutinizing every person going through the checkpoint and ten ground forces soldiers in full battle armor backing them up. Clearly visible automated sensors and weaponry tracked the movements of those approaching the checkpoint, and it was a given that more sensors and weaponry were concealed in the walls and ceiling. Not just a security checkpoint, it was a strongpoint, well defended enough to hold off a serious attack.
A young man next to Morgan in the crowd muttered to himself as he stared aghast at the menacing snakes. “I wish I had one of those gadgets that make you invisible.”
Idiot, she thought. Idiot to say that out loud, where snake sensors would pick it up, pinpoint the source, and ensure that the young worker received extra attention during the security screening. And idiot to think any piece of equipment could make you invisible in this kind of setting, where the snakes were searching with all of their equipment and skill for enemy agents and threats.
Searching for someone pretty much like Roh Morgan, when you got right down to it.
Morgan walked with the crowd toward the checkpoint.
Chapter Five
Morgan had no equipment with her to help evade detection or attention by the snakes running the checkpoint and everything else in this star system. No one would be able to spot stealth equipment on her which no innocent civilian traveler should be carrying. Knowing how the snakes operated, what they looked for and what they didn’t think of, made it a lot easier to know what not to do. Thanks to experience and study of the enemy’s methods and tactics, Morgan also knew what she should do.
She wore slightly baggy, shapeless worker clothes in neutral colors, the clothes neither old nor new, neither fashionable nor unfashionable. Morgan had tinted her hair into a shade so bland that it was hard to find a descriptive word for it, and had cut it into a style matching that of countless other workers. Her skin had been similarly tinted, neither light nor dark nor shiny nor flat, but just there. Contacts shaded her eyes to an unremarkable color. She walked with a loose, slightly slouching posture, shoulders rounded a bit, matching the speed of the others around her. On her face, Morgan kept an expression of vague concentration, as if even routine actions required a little extra mental effort. She did not look scared or nervous or confident or any other emotion that might attract any attention. It wasn’t easy to project a blank presence without its becoming apparent that you were being blank, but it could be done, like a magic trick in which the observers did not even realize their attention had been distracted.
The gazes of her fellow travelers and those of the snakes at the security checkpoint slid over Morgan, finding nothing to hold their attention or attract interest or rest in their memory. Even when Morgan handed her forged documents to the snake at the screening station, his attention barely rested on her for a moment before looking beyond in search of something worth seeing. “Purpose of travel to Ulindi?” the snake asked her in a bored monotone, his gaze wandering over the other passengers.
“Looking for work,” Morgan said, her voice pitched so it could be easily heard but not any louder, her accent as generic to this region of space as possible.