Flagship flight-wing crewman Ensign Bella Penrose sat near the viewport in the starboard galley picking at her food and staring out at the large QMT facility. The facility hung in a non-Keplerian orbit hovering over the capital city of the U.S. colony of Arcadia. The Ross 128 colony was as beautiful as Tau Ceti and was far more developed. Tau Ceti had over fifty million people and had been established for a few decades. Ross 128, on the other hand, was nearly a hundred years old and had over one hundred million colonists. The colony was old enough to have several generations of native-born Arcadians.
Penrose looked at the large octagonal structure and towers of the small moon-sized facility just beneath the warship. The facility reminded her of the ones she had seen at the Oort Cloud in the Sol System, and the one above New Tharsis in the Tau Ceti system. The times she had seen those facilities her name had been either Kira Shavi or Nancy Penzington.
Since her return to the Tau Ceti system it had taken the CIA agent almost six years to create a cover that would allow her to get aboard the flagship of the U.S.R., Once before she had infiltrated one of the Seppy ships, but she was discovered and barely managed to escape with her life and some very useful intelligence data. She had managed to get that data back to the Sol System mainly by happenstance. But she did get it back.
Unfortunately, the byproduct of her successful espionage had been that the Seppies had stepped up their efforts to prevent a spy from infiltrating their military infrastructure ever again. Things had become even more difficult for spies, and that was mainly because of her. Twelve years before, she had managed to infiltrate the Seppies, and after that no other agents who had attempted to do so had ever reported back to the CIA. Bella, at the time she was Nancy, had managed to infiltrate the Separatists most likely due to the mass confusion involved in the Seppy attack on Mons City on Mars followed by the exodus of the Separatists.
Allison, any idea what this package is that is of such importance? she thought to her AIC. Her flight group's orders were to be on standby to support the delivery of a highly important package to the capital city and directly to Ahmi herself. Bella knew that meant trouble. But just how much trouble, she wasn't certain.
Your guess is as good as mine, the AIC responded. We'll just have to be patient. It isn't scheduled to arrive for a couple hours.
It had taken Nancy Penzington six months to completely cover her tracks after her return to the Tau Ceti QMT facility six years prior. Once she had managed to get away from the facility by stowing away aboard a troop carrier dirtside to Ares, Nancy spent several weeks considering going native and giving up the spy business. She had made plenty of personal sacrifices for the United States of America. She should have died on the Seppy battle cruiser Phlegra when it had tried to make a kamikaze run on Luna City. But, luckily, she hadn't. She still had several covers she could use if she needed them. So she did. Like any good undercover agent who is in country and cut off from home, she had multiple bank accounts, money and weapons caches, and a couple of safe houses under various names throughout New Tharsis and the Madira Valley. She cashed in on some of them and spent several months on the beach outside the spaceport working on her full-body tan.
After the second month of mental recovery, a.k.a. lounging on the nude beaches of Madira Valley, it dawned on her that with the Phlegra destroyed near Luna, Elle Ahmi would want a new favorite mode of space transportation. Nancy began formulating a hypothesis that the new supercarrier-sized battleships under construction at the base at the beach might fit that need. After a few fun and not-so-fun nights, with off-duty sailors and contractors, she managed to get enough word-of-mouth information to back up her hypothesis. Elle Ahmi actually spent a significant amount of time visiting one particular ship that was under construction. There had to be something special about that ship, because according to rumor that was the only one Ahmi visited regularly.
Nancy didn't necessarily have a specific mission she needed to do; her general mission orders were to gather intel on the Seppies. Gathering intel on the Seppy military capabilities seemed as good a plan as any to her. But she had other plans, too. After Ahmi had tortured her and the way that she had tortured her, Nancy had decided one thing. Someday, she would make Ahmi pay, dearly.
Then one night at the nightspot for the military types just outside the base adjacent to the beach spaceport she met a young naval cadet in her last year of college. The young cadet had hopes and dreams of being a mecha jock. The cadet was in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) and had a good chance of making it into the flight-training program upon graduation. Nancy had the beginnings of a plan at that point. She befriended the young cadet and gathered as much information about the young woman as possible. She learned everything she could about becoming a cadet and getting into the NROTC. Then Nancy cashed in some assets and paid for a new rejuvenation that left her appearing as young as or maybe a bit younger than the cadet. She never spoke with that particular cadet again.
The next three months took patience. Nancy laid low on the beach and stayed away from any recent friends she had made—her appearance had been changed pretty dramatically, but she didn't want to take any chances. She simply lived the life of a beach bunny and gave herself the time to rest, relax, and enjoy life for a while. She stayed in shape by running ten to twenty kilometers a day up and down Madira Beach and by taking some yoga and martial arts classes at a local gym.
Slowly and carefully, she gathered emotional and cultural information about getting into the U.S.R. Navy flight line. She researched all the pertinent logistics, admissions, and paperwork information she needed. Three months passed before she finally got the break she was looking for. An earthquake occurred in the middle of the ocean, causing a tidal wave. The tidal wave struck an archipelago called Campbell's Islands on the southern region of the Amazonia continent. Amazonia was a large landmass about the size of China, and the archipelago region was analogous to the Philippines on Earth. There were casualties numbering in the thousands. Nancy immediately gathered herself up off the beach, hopped aboard a plane stored at one of her caches, and was in southern Amazonia only a few hours after the news broke. She managed to board a rescue boat as a volunteer a few hours after that. Soon after, she had managed to get herself lost in the aftermath of the tidal wave impact zone of East Plantation Island.
East Plantation Island, according to public data records, had thirteen hundred inhabitants and more than three times as many tourists at any given time. Needless to say, Nancy found plenty of casualties to work with. Allison scanned for other AICs broadcasting casualty locations. The CIA super-AIC hacked those AICs for personal bio information, looking for just the right profile. After a couple of hours of this she found one that fit her needs on the far side of the island. The casualty had lived on Tau Ceti since before the Martian Exodus and was about sixty years old. The lady had no known relatives on Tau Ceti, although she reportedly had family still alive on Earth. And, to top it off, she had recently been rejuved to a very young appearance. Nancy and Allison found her drowned and broken body trapped inside what was left of her home. Allison had no problem copying the data files from the commercial AIC that poor Bella Penrose had in her skull, even in its nonfunctional, damaged state. Then Nancy removed the AIC from the lady's brain and crushed it. The unlucky artificial intelligence was just a casualty of war, and Nancy had little remorse about it. Allison had long since given up such emotional hang-ups about killing other AICs as well. They had a job to do—for the betterment of the United States of America. They disposed of the body and AIC remains with a couple of incendiary chemicals that Nancy had brought along with her, and then she went about addressing her appearance and plan for being rescued. She scratched herself up with some broken glass and changed into the clothes that the real Bella had been wearing. She climbed atop the roof of Bella's small beach house and waited for help as Allison mimicked the AIC help broadcast. Eventually, she was rescued by a group of volunteers and was flown to a makeshift hospital for treatment.