Outsystem (Aeon 14) Read Free Page B

backwards clutching his nose as blood poured down his face. The second man was distracted by his falling comrade and Tanis used the opportunity to step into the clear and let loose with both pulse rifles. The man crumpled to the deck as she delivered another blast to his bleeding partner.
    With both of them taken care of she sent her nano over the various machines dedicated to moving and powering the ship. Luckily, the engineering bay was far from silent and the two figures at the other end hadn’t noticed the commotion. Either that or they were simply concentrating on their little pet nuke.
    
    
    
    
    Tanis darted down the length of the bay, leaping over equipment and ducking under conduit. Her movements were silent and she went unnoticed. Ten meters from the pair she swung around a set of cooling conduits and stepped into view.
    “I strongly recommend you step away from the device.” A twinge of panic was in the back of her mind, shouting run away from the nuke! She schooled her face not to show it—dozens of enemies were one thing; a nuke was something else.
    The two figures straightened; a man and a woman. The man had long hair that fell well past his shoulders, held away from his face by a thin band around his head. A scowl creased his angular features. The rest of his form was hidden by a long dark coat. The woman moved into view and Tanis cursed softly under her breath: she was wearing a shimmersuit. As Tanis approached it shifted from a glossy black color to completely translucent, rendering the woman’s body invisible.
    “I think you made a wrong turn.” The man scowled. “If you run now, you can get off the ship before it blows.”
    “I don’t think I can allow that to happen,” Tanis replied.
    The woman didn’t say a word; with her body invisible she was just a disconcerting floating head which disappeared too as the shimmersuit’s material flowed up over her face.
    “Think you can do that faster than I can twitch my trigger finger?” Tanis asked. “I’m MICI; we don’t arrest—we just shoot.” After a moment’s pause the materiel flowed back down the woman’s face.
    “Military Intelligence and Counterinsurgency?” The man asked
    Usually having MICI show up meant you had a leak; he had to be considering that possibility, a doubt Tanis was more than happy to plant.
    “Then this will really hurt,” he continued.
    Tanis’s vision turned white and pain erupted behind her eyes.
    
     Angela replied. She felt a throb behind her eyelids and, as Angela predicted, in one second she could see again. The woman had vanished and the man was standing with the nuclear bomb between them.
    He hadn’t pulled out a weapon, and simply wore a wicked smile. “Thanks for the treat. There’s little I enjoy more than watching Kris work.”
    Tanis scanned the room for the woman while keeping her weapons trained on the man. she asked Angela.
     Tanis asked.
    
     Tanis asked as she flipped through various vision modes. There was nothing on infrared, UV, or even air disturbance detection.
    A fist impacted Tanis’s face and she staggered backwards, kicking out at where the attacker should have been. Nothing.
    Tanis took a deep breath and brought her fists up in a defensive position. The room was loud and she set her hearing to filter out the ambient sounds, trying