The Coward's Option Read online

  The Coward's Option

  Copyright © 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

  All rights reserved.

  “Tasha's Fail-Safe” originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 2015.

  “The Coward's Option” originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 2016.

  Published together as an ebook in 2017 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

  Cover design by Jack Fisk

  ISBN: 978-1-625672-88-9

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Tasha's Fail-Safe

  The Coward's Option

  Appendix: Andrea Cort Chronology

  Also by Adam-Troy Castro

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Welcome to the second volume in the collected adventures of Andrea Cort which, for various reasons that seemed to make sense to the author, contain two separate stories. Both appeared in ANALOG and continue to present Andrea at the start of her career, prior to the extreme changes that begin to affect her life in the trilogy that begins with Emissaries From The Dead. These stories take place not long after the upsetting events of the Nebula-nominated story, “With Unclean Hands,” and indeed begin with Andrea still suffering the fallout of the decisions she made then, but you don’t need to have read that story to follow these.

  There is a strange consequence to publishing these together, in that certain points of similarity are brought to the forefront. To wit: it turns out that these stories both hinge on Andrea being partnered with other smart, resourceful women – black women, as it coincidentally happens – who each in their own way try to offer our misanthropic protagonist a lift out of her self-imposed social isolation. You will observe the results in the text.

  The novelette, “Tasha’s Fail-Safe,” offers some interesting firsts. Although Andrea’s superior Artis Bringen is an important character in the novels, he’s never more than a powerful off-screen presence, sending feedback from home; here, he appears for the first time interacting with Andrea in the same room. I trust I did a good job in portraying him as a not-entirely unsympathetic guy trying to wrangle a difficult employee incapable of trusting him. This is also the only Andrea story (so far) that takes place entirely at her home base, the wheelworld known as New London.

  As for our main attraction, the novella, “The Coward’s Option,” it offers us Andrea’s coldest line, ever. You will know it when you get to it. But you may think that of several of the lines she utters first.

  You will notice, too, that one of these stories is in first person and one is in third; this is just something I do to amuse myself, as I move from one Andrea Cort story, to the other. The entire trilogy of novels is in first-person, for what it’s worth. But there are uncollected tales in third. This is authorial fidgeting.

  Enjoy these dispatches from the life of a very formidable lady.

  Tasha's Fail-Safe

  Tasha Coombs

  As Tasha fled for her life, clutching the seeping wound in her side, she knew it was her own fault that she was probably going to die tonight.

  Heading home that evening had, it turned out, been a serious tactical error. Strictly speaking, she should have stayed within the Intelligence complex and sought what sleep she needed in one of the several perfectly acceptable apartments the Corps maintained in the heart of its own complex, for people who had worked so late that it made no sense to go all the way home.

  Besides, her assignment was about to go critical and the hub-based sun had dimmed to provide New London with the equivalent of night and that meant that there were fewer people on the streets, more opportunities for an ambush if she had not covered herself as conscientiously as she believed.

  Really, going home to her own bed and to her virtual husband made much a lot less sense than sticking around the job in case the flares went up.

  She was too good to make that kind of mistake. She’d walked in and out of war zones. She’d taken lives in order to preserve her own. She knew better.

  But that was also the way she’d been living for almost three weeks now, as her investigation entered its final stages. None of her prior precautions had turned out to be necessary and the operation hadn’t quite passed the necessary tipping point and so she made a decision that she now knew she never should have made: comfort over safety, stubbornness over self-preservation, the hunger for some kind of life over the imperative to preserve what life she had.

  This was a mistake.

  With her likely murderer’s footsteps not far behind, she knew that it had been a mistake.

  Earlier

  She had spent the last few weeks at the Dip Corps headquarters at the heart of the cylinder world known as New London, doing two jobs: the one she was supposed to look like she was doing, and the one she was actually doing.

  The one she was supposed to look like she was doing involved collating economic analyses of the latest major transactions of exo-Confederate corporate states, Bettelhine and Dejahcorp and Trawleny and the like. They were rival powers not quite enemies of the Hom. Sap Confederacy, with the potential to become enemies whenever the winds of fortune dictated. Even working a 5-D model with the latest known transactions of all principals, the job was intensely dull and, of course, not the one that she really cared about.

  Late that afternoon her superior Veronica Cheung came over and watched her work for a while, looming in the way that she did, tsking after several long minutes of examination. “That can’t be right.”

  Tasha thought she saw what Cheung did, but feigned ignorance. “What?”

  “You have some color overlap between the Bettelhine cloud and the Dejahcorp cloud. That’s unlikely in the extreme. The two corporations are not just rivals but bitter enemies; they’ve had what amounts to a shooting war for years.”

  “And they’d never engage in open trade,” Tasha agreed.

  Her fingers flitted over the projection, magnifying the area under dispute.

  “But they each have resources the other needs, and it’s never been unknown for lesser administrators far from the central power structure to engage in barter of one kind of another as long as they can keep the bosses out of the loop.”

  She enlarged the area of greatest overlap. “This represents a flurry of back-and-forth over in the Lesothic Cluster; one of the administrators of Dejahcorp’s wheelworlds there has been exchanging a little more than ten percent of his annual production to subsidiary powers doing direct business with Bettelhine. It’s wildly against the policies of both corporations, but I don’t think he’s letting his bosses know.”

  Cheung seemed to admire that. “Cheeky bastard.”

  “Not quite. His attempts to cover himself have been clumsy in the extreme, and he’s been operating at such a loss because of it that he’s going to have to either turn himself in to the law or defect to Bettelhine in order to avoid imprisonment.”

  “Can we make him an asset?”

  “It would mean getting the Corps to cover his losses.”

  Cheung didn’t smile; it just wasn’t in her to flash teeth, ever. But she had to appreciate the opportunity to establish that rarest of all birds, a triple agent. “I like the way
you think, Tash. You should get me a report on that by the end of the workday tomorrow. But as for now, you look like you’re about to fall asleep standing up. How long has it been since you closed your eyes?”

  Tasha had feigned a lot of things since joining the task force, but her answering yawn was not one of them.

  “I thought so. You stay much longer, you’re going to start making mistakes. Get yourself some rest and return when you can hold your head up.”

  “One more hour,” said Tasha. “I have to wrap up.”

  “Ten more minutes,” said Cheung. “Then save your work, and get yourself a goddamned drink or something.” She pivoted on her heels and strode away, her spikes making clack-clack noises on the office’s alloy floor.

  Tasha had no intention of listening to this advice.

  She gave her current task a full hour, moving data about, not uncovering a potential Dejahcorp traitor, but instead creating one, as the cheating bureaucrat she’d just described was wholly fictional. By the time she was done the numbers painted a portrait of the wholly imaginary personality as detailed as any oil painting. Tasha could almost smell the man’s fear-sweat when he tallied up his figures every day, his forlorn hesitation whenever he passed high places and contemplated ending himself before his perfidy could be discovered. Her personal image of him was that of a round-faced, jowly man with a bad comb over and a permanent sheen of sweat, returning home to a wife who had barely two words to say to him and a son who had only half as much to say as the wife. She sprinkled in a few personal transactions to indicate that the poor guy lived beyond his means, in order to support a double-life, and stopped only when she realized that her numbers were in danger of transforming into a soap opera.

  So she deleted the digital scaffolding that identified her fiction as a work in progress, backed up her work, and stopped off at the office where her other target, one Beau D’Eauffier, was taking a break himself. He had draped his oversized bulk over the lounge and seemed to be dreaming, eyes hidden under a hairy forearm, when she poked her head into his office but just before she left him alone he murmured: “You’re going to die, Coombs.”

  She laughed. “That’s what Cheung said.”

  “You should listen to her. Nobody ever saved the kingdom by making themselves a shell. You’re going to drain off what life force you have just trying to impress everybody.”

  She shrugged. “What do you want. I’m compulsive.”

  “Cheung’s compulsive. I’m compulsive. We all have to compulsive to do this work. But if you’re like this when there isn’t even an diplomatic crisis sending us to the bunkers, I hate to see what you’re like when everybody’s called in for a clock-burner. Have you even eaten today?”

  Tasha was uncomfortably aware that this was the second time somebody had expressed concerns for her health. “This morning. I think.”

  “The day will come,” he intoned, “when you realize you’ve missed the best parts of life. Come on. You only see this old carcass still hanging around because I need a nap just to gather up enough energy to go home and sleep properly.”

  She smiled. “I just have a few things to wrap up.”

  “For Juje’s sake wrap them up then. This is not a conversation I want to have with you again, tonight.”

  “Not much longer,” she promised.

  She left the division, did a speed-walk to the other side of the Dip Corps complex, spent a little time sipping coffee in a break room where nobody knew her, took her time in the rest room sending a coded update to her handlers, then returned to the division prepared to tell her superiors that she’d almost made it home before having to return to the office for something she’d forgotten. By then D’Eauffier was also long gone. The sound of her footsteps echoed wherever she went. She consulted the building’s security records to confirm that this entire wing of the building had been as good as abandoned for more than an hour, spent about ten minutes waffling debating her options, and then made what probably qualified as the most careless professional decision of her life.

  She decided that going home would not be a problem.

  The commute

  Tasha signed out and left the antiseptic halls of the Intelligence Division for the somewhat more antiseptic environment of the surrounding Dip Corps campus, well-manicured and lovingly landscaped but always in her mind impossible to see as anything but a tableau built on deceit and lies.

  The Dip Corps was the face the Hom.Sap Confederacy showed to the other great powers of known space, but it was a rickety construct, based less on preserving the peace than in preserving the illusion that humanity’s dominant power spoke with one voice. Some of what was involved in making the illusion work involved the dirtiest of all possible tactics; and Tasha had seen enough of it to be cured of any illusions she might have had about the Confederacy’s claims of being the shining light for humanity’s future. It was, as far as she was concerned, just the best of a very bad lot. Somebody she didn’t like very much, one Andrea Cort, had told her once that when she started thinking that way, it would be time to start working off what remained of her Dip Corps contract at some less psychically-damaging assignment, like Embassy work. And she’d been thinking that way for a long time.

  From the quad she moved on to the slidewalk and from there to an express tube that should have delivered her to a bed and to a simulated lover who because he made no demands on her limited time was right now a fine substitute for the real thing. She didn’t even want sex from the damn thing tonight; never mind that it had been longer than she wanted to think about since she’d been able to fit such an extravagance into her schedule. But the warmth of another body, however false; the soft reassurance of a loved one’s breath against her back, however artificial; there came a point when that was necessary just to maintain sanity.

  When this business is done, she told herself; when I nail the piece of shit to the wall—then I’m going to step back, get a transfer to something less time-consuming, and have a life for myself.

  The habitat engineers had decided that it would be a warm night with a starry sky, and so Tasha she took her time during the two extended periods when she was on foot, stopping at one point for a meal of protein buzz and slowing down to slurp it through a straw as she gazed up at the false starscapes shifting and dancing across the surface of New London’s central hub: not quite the sky of the rural world where she’d been raised, nor a persuasive illusion, but better than the sense she always got of a great metal club, poised to smash the jumped-up country girl flat.

  She was almost wistful when she turned the corner of the corridor that accessed the neighborhood containing the cubicle complex she called home; thinking of anything but the tactical dangers of her surroundings.

  Her attacker jumped her then.

  Tasha’s first impression, even as the blade sliced through her suit and drew a line across her ribs, was that this was just street crime.

  Muggings as such largely didn’t happen on New London. Currency was not totally unheard of in the Confederacy, because member worlds encompassed such a wide spread of human civilizations, but here all commerce was direct transfer from one account to another. There was no particular need for anybody to carry valuables. But random assaults, rapes, crimes of passion: these happened, because people were people. When the burning pain hit her side Tasha even had enough time to feel the irony of possibly falling to a mundane threat so close to home, after surviving far greater dangers on assignment to distant worlds.

  She reached for her side-arm. Her attacker seized her by the wrist before she could clear it and tossed it aside, before ramming her against the wall a second time.

  Tasha thought to hell with this and got serious.

  Getting serious would have normally meant the death of any amateur who took her on in close quarters.

  But her attacker blocked what would have been a deadly counter-blow had it been wielded against any moronic street thug.

  She was treated to her first close-up look at the
angry, but fear-driven face behind the knife.

  She recognized her enemy and along with the rush of surprise—because she’d been leaning toward the belief that the attack would come from the other one —came the awareness that this had been the worst possible night to succumb to a craving for the pleasures of home.

  The words shouted in her face were hoarse, driven, tremulous: the tones that can enter even the most civilized human being’s voice that the veneer of that civilized is ripped away by the prerogatives of self-preservation. “WHAT DO THEY KNOW?”

  The average person wounded as badly as Tara was would have succumbed to the deadly illusion that providing answers offered a possible path to survival.

  Tasha knew better. This little act of desperation had just incriminated her attacker in far more than a simple assault. There was no chance of this encounter ending with Tasha being allowed to live; compliance was, like surrender, a direct path to extinction.

  She screamed, leveraged the piece of shit to the ground, enforced her opinion with a savage kick to the belly, only barely evaded an attempt to grab her ankle, discerned that none of this had put her enemy down for good, looked for her side-arm, saw that it had slid somewhere out of sight and judged that any attempt to retrieve it now would only succeed in keeping her within the killer’s reach.

  She fled.

  Her side bled, and running made it bleed more, but it was a shallow wound; not the great big gaping gash of the sort that spills organs or fluids in quantities that leave a corpse after a few agonized steps, but a shallow cut meant to terrorize that could only kill her if she let the pain stop her from attempting an escape.

  She had a chance: if not to outrun her assailant or put a door between them, then at least enough to get into position for a counter-attack, or to make it to a place where other human beings could be found.

  She hated that the sounds coming out of her mouth were those of a panicking helpless girl. But she didn’t try to stop them or the tears that had sprung, unbidden, to her eyes. Those, she knew, were involuntary physical responses. Fighting them took more energy that it was worth.