Loose Cannon

Chapter 1-2

Barb turned up at the spaceport the next day with a duffle bag and the number of the berth where she could find Borovsky in the area reserved for small commercial ships. She stepped off the tiny, automated electric tram that ran up and down the long lines of ships on the ground, without bothering with the door or with slowing the thing down. It crawled along like it had treacle in its wheels, anyway. She hopped over the guard rail and barely wobbled on the landing, though she did jar her bag from her shoulder.

The sound of someone slow-clapping as she picked up the bag made her look up. The ship she’d come to find—an unimpressive hunk of junk—stood in front of her, and, sitting beside it in a lawn chair, apparently enjoying the sunshine sat…a person who must be Borovsky. Height, age, and weight all matched the file Barb had read. But the picture in it had been quite innocuous: a late-twenties woman with mid-length brown hair, wearing a white shirt.

This person was not innocuous. She wore a tight shirt and pants, which did nothing to hide her figure. A good figure, too. She looked taller than the height recorded in her file because she wore quite enormous boots. Her hair was in one of those fashionable just-got-out-of-bed styles, and streaks of blonde and dark red enhanced the brown. Least innocuous of all, she carried a gun on her hip. It pushed the limits of the term “handgun.”

“Corolus?” Borovsky said. “Hell, why am I asking? You stink of military.”

Barb resented the idea of her stinking. And she didn’t have on her uniform. Borovsky was probably points-scoring.

“Let me check your ID,” Barb said.

“By the book, huh? Sure.”

Barb held out her pocket terminal. Borovsky swiped her fingers across it too fast. The terminal said the fingerprints were unreadable, but a second later, it showed Positive DNA match. Taisiya Borovsky.

“Yes, I’m Lieutenant Corolus.” Barb offered her hand. “Good to meet you, Agent.”

“Let’s nip the ‘lieutenant’ and ‘agent’ s**t in the bud right away, before you say it accidentally in front of the wrong people,” Borovsky said as she shook Barb’s hand.

“Would you prefer me to call you Borovsky or Taisiya?”

“It’s Taya to my friends. But you can use it, too. What about you? Barbara? Barbie?” Borovsky smirked.

“Barb.”

“Pointy. Okay, Barb.” Borovsky—Taya—led the way up a steep ramp, which extended from the side of the ship, and through a hatchway. “Welcome to my ship. It isn’t big enough for two people to share comfortably, so we’re s**t out of luck there. Come aboard and find someplace to dump your gear.”

Finding someplace didn’t take long, since the ship was too cramped to have many places.

“Living quarters and control room up here, cargo hold and engineering section underneath,” Taya said. “Engineering section is really just the far end of the cargo hold.” She opened a hatch in the floor for Barb to check out the lower section.

Barb dropped down the ladder to it and looked around. Taya didn’t accompany her, apparently having better things to do than give her the grand tour. By the time Barb climbed back up, she found Taya in the cockpit, starting the engines. Barb slipped into the co-pilot’s seat and brought up the preflight checklist, which had nothing marked off.

“What?” Taya said, catching the look Barb flashed her. “Please, I’ve got the whole thing in my head.”

“Completion of the checklist is a legal requirement.” Barb worked her way through it, to Taya’s obvious amusement.

“Auxiliary power unit operational?”

“Auxiliary power unit happy as Larry.”

“Communications board status.”

“Green as your eyes, Babe.”

“That’s Barb.” She marked the item off the list. Ignoring any of Taya’s nonsense, Barb finished the list by the time they had takeoff clearance. The ship rose. The orange sky faded to indigo at the horizon.

“Course set and laid in for Pritchitt Orbital.” Once they reached orbit, Taya steered away from the planet. “You want coffee? I’d kill my grandmother for a cup right now.”

“Do you have decaf?”

Taya looked at her as if she’d asked for a cup of blood. “God, no. Are you mad?”

“Tea then?” Barb needed a night’s rest before they hit Pritchitt. She needed to be fresh and ready for action when they reached the rendezvous.

“Keep an eye on the instruments.” Taya headed out to the tiny nook referred to as a galley and returned a few minutes later with two glass mugs full of hot black tea. “Sugar?” She pulled some paper sachets from her pocket.

Barb did usually enjoy sugar in her tea—it had been such a rare treat back home—but the sachets looked as if they’d been in Taya’s pocket for a month. “Thank you, no.”

Taya shrugged, tore open about four of the packs, spilling sugar on her lap. She dumped what she hadn’t spilled into her tea and brushed the rest off her knees to the floor. She lounged back in her chair, looking as if she was preparing for a nap.

“We should discuss our plans,” Barb said. “Explain to me how you intend to get Locke to the meet.”

Taya gave her a narrow look. “Listen, Barbie, let’s be clear. This is my mission. I’ve been working on the contact for a month. You’re not going to swan in here and take over.”

“That’s Barb. And there’s no need to be hostile.”

“There is if some deskbound intel analyst on a glory-hunting exercise is trying to come along and ruin all my carefully laid plans.”

“Plans like the one that got you sent to jail on your last job?”

“Oh, why the hell does everyone keep going on about that? Like I explained in my report, I urgently needed some information from a contact, and she’d gone and got herself tossed in jail. What else was I supposed to do?”

“Abort the mission?” Barb suggested in a tone implying this was what a sane person would do.

“You mean quit?”

“I mean make a realistic judgment. The mission was no longer viable.”

“You mean quit. And of course it was viable. I got the information. If my boss hadn’t panicked and bailed me out, everything else would have gone to plan.” Taya scowled and sipped her tea. “I don’t quit.”

That sounded almost…reasonable. Ridiculous to any normal person, maybe. But undercover operatives weren’t exactly normal people. Going by the outfit, Taya was on the more eccentric end of the scale. Barb scowled at the plunging neckline. It revealed a lot of admittedly quite enticing cleavage. Was it all part of the game? To distract the men Taya dealt with and make them lower their guard?

“Doesn’t that outfit you wear draw attention?” Barb asked.

“I hope so. But it doesn’t make me look like an agent, does it?”

“It makes you look like a pirate.”

Taya laughed. “That’s the gun. I can barely lift it with only one hand. I never use it. I think the power ran down.”

“You walk around with a useless weapon?” Barb said, looking at the huge pistol in its holster.

“For show. Then when they’re busy looking at it and wondering if I’m going to draw it…”

Taya suddenly held a sleek, matt-black pistol in her left hand. Barb had not seen her draw it and had no idea where it might have been concealed. Taya grinned at her stare. Surprisingly, she displayed good firearms discipline and kept it carefully pointed away from Barb and the instruments panel. The pistol vanished again, and Taya went on drinking her tea. Barb watched her for a while, then spoke up.

“I’m not a desk jockey, and I’m not glory hunting. But I acknowledge I don’t have the deep cover experience in the field you have. I’m not trying to take over the mission. I apologize if I gave that impression.”

Taya stared at her. “I should have got that on tape. An officer apologizing to me. There’s a first.”

“Don’t milk it,” Barb warned.

“Okay, Peaches. Apology accepted.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Excuse me. Lieutenant Peaches.”

Barb gave up because it would only encourage Taya.

“Do you want to discuss the mission?” Rather more diplomatic than before.

“Okay. When we get to Pritchitt, I’ve got an appointment set up with a man who claims he can arrange a meeting with the person he calls ‘the vendor’ of the weapons.”

“Locke.”

“That’s the assumption. He thinks I’m in the market for two of the guns to up the firepower on this baby.” Taya patted the console.

“But will Locke come to a sale? Especially a small one. Doesn’t he have people doing his dirty work for him?”

“Usually. But he always shows up for a cash transaction. I guess he doesn’t trust his minions not to cream a few bills off the top.”

“Cash? Where do we get so much cash?” Barb asked.

“Ah, now we get to why I agreed to have you tag along. Milintel can arrange the cash for us. You put the request through to your boss for it. Reassure him we’ll bring it back—”

“She,” Barb corrected. “My commanding officer is a she.”

“Good. She might have the brains to see the sense in the plan and not worry about the stupid money.”

“How do I reassure her we’ll bring the money back? What’s your plan there?”

“I’m sure I’ll think of something on the way.”