[AgentZero]

Bring Us More Pie!



“Frak,” murmured Alice some time later. “What the hell's that?”
Kagan glanced up at the view screen, while making a mental note to mind his mouth around the girl. She seemed to be picking up his bad habits with gleeful aplomb. “That would be Perth 9. Not the friendliest place in the galaxy, but it's where we need to be.”
Allowing Alice to busy herself with the docking maneuvers, Kagan opened up a communications link to the station. He keyed in a series of codes, then waited. Within a few seconds, a long stream of seemingly random numbers and letters filled the screen, and Kagan sat back with a sigh of satisfaction. She was here.

“Who was that?” Alice asked after the Daedalus had latched securely to the station.
“Just checking up on an old friend,” Kagan replied.
“Odd,” she muttered as she went about shutting the ship down.
“What's that?” he inquired.
“Well, the proper communications protocol for contacting someone on board the station would be seven-six-two-eight, or two-nine if they were on a ship docked with the station, but yours was nine-seven-four-six. Which like I said is odd, especially since civilian protocols stop at seven.”
“How-” Kagan stopped to allow a good frown to form. “How did you see that from there?” he asked slowly.
“Didn't see,” she informed him. “Heard. The little beeps it makes when you press a key.”
“But those beeps all sound exactly the same,” he pointed out.
“Nope,” she disagreed cheerfully. “Slight frequency difference depending on which row and what position the key is in. A one sounds like 'beep' and a nine sounds like 'beep'.”
“I couldn't tell any difference between your beeps,” said Kagan.
“No, me neither,” she agreed. “But the human vocal apparatus simply isn't designed to create such slight variations in frequency.”
“But the human ear is?”
“No, not most of them.”
Kagan's frown deepened to the point where it was in serious danger of becoming a scowl, and he turned back to the communications console and began alternating between pressing the one and the nine. After a few minutes, he resigned himself to the fact that there was no difference between the two, and that he was in love with a raving lunatic. A raving lunatic who'd also been completely right, he reminded himself. Deciding that was a conversation for another time, he tucked his sidearm into its shoulder holster and headed on to Perth 9 with Alice in tow.

The smell was the first thing one noticed upon arriving on Perth 9, and it wasn't a pleasant experience. The air was thick with the smell of unwashed bodies, vomit, excrement and other bodily products best not thought about. Greasy, filthy bodies squeezed past each other in the tight confines of the corridors, though Kagan and Alice were given some measure of space, thanks partly to Kagan's sleeveless shirt which showed off both his firearm and the long line of dates and places tattooed down his right bicep that identified him as military, and partly to the disproportionately massive sidearm Alice wore slung low off her hip.
"Why do we have to be here?" Alice inquired, trying to ignore the leers that no weapon in the galaxy would protect her from; women weren't a common sight on the station.
"Because a friend is here," Kagan replied. "Probably the only person who might know what the frack's been going on the last few days."
"What's he look like?" wondered Alice.
"She," Kagan emphasized. "Looks.... Terrifying."
"Oh. Dear," she muttered, casting her gaze around to see if anyone matched that description. Many adjectives came to mind to describe the crowd around her: Disgusting, revolting, vile, mildly disturbing, but none that could be considered terrifying, and definitely none that could be considered female.
"There," said Kagan, looking ahead.
Alice, being somewhat shorter, had to wait a moment longer for her first glimpse of Kagan's friend. The crowd suddenly parted, the slovenly workers suddenly trying to put as much distance between themselves and the woman striding purposefully down the corridor. She was tall, almost the same height as Kagan, and slender but she moved with a noticeable aura of barely restrained power, a sort of quiet lethality that Alice had to agree, was terrifying. Almost as much as her face, which was completely white except for her black lips and blacker eyes. As they drew closer, Alice realized with a sense of growing trepidation that the woman approaching them was not wearing any make up, that the disturbing mask was no mask at all, but bare skin. The woman swept her gaze across the corridor, and the filthy men filling it seemed to wither under her gaze. Alice felt a cold chill run through her as the woman's eyes fell upon her. A fearful knot tightened in her stomach, though she could think of no rational reason for it, Alice was stuck with the unshakable feeling that the eyes of Death itself were upon her.
She stopped in front of Kagan and extended her hand expressionlessly. He gripped it firmly, and the two of them pulled each other towards themselves, wrapping their free arm around the other's shoulders in a tight embrace.
"Alice, I'd like you to meet Saraea Azen," Kagan said.
Saraea nodded politely towards Alice. "A pleasure," she said.
"Eek," Alice said.