Pre-Jing: Fioda

[Foxen]

Fioda had become used to being picked up in unmarked vehicles, but this one gave her pause.

Though the back windows were tinted, the front windows weren't. She could see that the driver was another Aos'si. The choice struck her as odd; usually the sort of men who hired aos'si escorts weren't inclined to have anything else to do with Fia's near-doomed species.

The passenger door slid open, and Fia started to step in - then stopped. There weren't any humans here at all. The guy in the back was Aos'si, too.

"Please. Sit down."

Survival instinct kicked on, but Fia did as she had been instructed. The door slid shut, which left her sitting beside a man in a dark suit. He wasn't dressed all that differently from the driver.

Usually Fia would turn on the charm, but this felt weird. Too weird for the usual dumb slut routine. Humans got off on that sort of thing, so Fia put on the performance and pretended to like it. This, though, would be pushing it.

"You aren't my usual sort of client."

"I'm not, actually." He took off a pair of sunglasses, folding them up and putting them inside his suit coat, near a holstered pistol. "I'm hiring you, but not as an escort. At least, not directly. I've got a different sort of proposition for you. A side hustle, maybe. But I get the feeling you hate where you are right now. Am I right?"

Fia pulled her little jacket tighter - the shirt beneath it was more bra than shirt - and folded her arms around her bare middle. The car sped up, merging onto a highway, picking up speed. They weren't just driving around aimlessly. "Go on."

"Ever heard of Lao Fan?" When she shook her head, the suit went on. "Minister of the Interior? A little while ago he contacted another escort service. We have been watching him for a little while, traced the calls, figured out just where - and intercepted."

"And this has something to do with me because…?"

"We intervened. He's going to get two girls, but one of them - if you agree - is going to be you."

"Alright, I follow. But why?"

"He's married."

Fia snorted. "So are half of these apes and it doesn't matter to them. They will still jack off to anything or put it in nearly anyone."

"Ah, yes," the suit conceded, "but this time it's going to be potentially very public."

The suit offered her a small metallic stick. Automatically, without thinking, Fia accepted it - then mentally kicked herself. Holding it up to the dim street light, though, showed her a small hole no bigger than a pinprick in one of the sides near the end.

Fioda wasn't an idiot, despite the usual helpless Aos'si routine people paid her for. It clicked into place and she understood immediately what was being asked of her - just not why.

"You're going to record it and blackmail him?"

"Yes. If you'll agree, we will pay you whatever you think is reasonable."

Fia toyed with the stick, some of her concerns forgotten as her mind sped along. Suddenly this wasn't an unmarked car meant to dump an unfortunate hooker - her, in this case - in some dumpster somewhere. This was the mob. Or at least, it was a mob. Organized crime existed, she knew, but it was usually the sleezy, human-oriented stuff. Drugs, sex, guns and murder were common enough and especially when they targeted the underbelly of the new human society that had, over the last hundred or so years, totally supplanted and nearly destroyed her own.

This, though.

This was different.

"Are you going to take him down?"

The suit shrugged. "Manipulate, would be the goal."

"Is he going to die afterwards?"

The other Aos'si gave her a strange look - more amused than baffled.

"I'm not sure exactly."

Fia stopped twiddling the camera, stuffing it in the little jacket pocket. She took a deep breath, wondering if this was the act of some sort of god of vengeance cracking a window for her to crawl through.

"I'll do it, but I have some requests."

 

[Foxen]

The ink wasn't dry on her new tattoo before she found herself being led up a high-rise in the best part of the capital. They had passed through open country, a trip that took them almost to morning, and Fioda had been Briefed.

She had also given them her list.

The list, in essence, contained several things she thought were important - the first bit was that they let her in. Fia knew a chance when she saw it. She had been surviving, alone, on the edge of this new society for nearly half a century, and when a good thing came knocking she knew not to lock the door.

There had been some discussion. More suits. A few of them seemed familiar to her but she couldn't quite place them until passing a sort of wall-of-fame in the back room of a nondescript office. Some of them were part of the local police blotters - sub-human rebels. Old holdouts. Kill on sight sort of people.

She had given up, a long time ago, along with the little cell of refugees who had taken the eventual offer of amnesty and integration.

But, in the end, they had sat her down and she had taken off what little she wore over herself to receive a small black circle over her heart. It hurt less than she thought it would.

As she had been shooting gin to recover, they had explained the rest of it to her.

Anyway - second; no more escorting.

Fia had been sick of it almost the moment she had started, but what else was there? She had tried to get other jobs, but her Chinese had been horrific and she couldn't just pick it up in five minutes. Some Aos'si got to go to some human colleges, but the thought had made her sick. Grocery stores - tea shops - then, modeling. Then, modeling, but with less clothing. Lingerie had led to pornography which had led to her current formed employment.

The slide had been gradual. But she was done with it.

Fia wanted to be able to kill people. Fia wanted vengeance. That had been the last bit of the list - Fia wanted to be able to do the stuff her ancestors had, only better and more modern. She wanted guns, and knives, and human tech, and she wanted to be able to use it against them in the worst possible ways.

All Aos'si, somewhere she supposed, wanted to see human civilization with it's notions of ownership and near-slavery employment crash and burn, but not all Aos'si had been literally fucked over. Some had starved, some had died to disease, most had been obliterated by superior firepower and xenophobia, and some more had been tamed like pets.

But - some people were still fighting, and Fia had enough pride that she wanted to fight, too.

The elevator opened and Fia stepped into it. She glanced at her partner, a beautiful human brunette who claimed her name was Tabby. Fia went by Crystal.

"There really going to be tiger?" Fia asked, slowly.

"Seems like it. It's supposed to be tame, though."

"This guy; fucked up."

"Yeah. But wow, the money, huh?"

Fia pressed the button for the penthouse, and the doors slowly slid closed.

"Yes," she agreed in her broken Chinese. "Wow the money."

 

[Foxen]

Fioda didn't think of herself as bloody minded, but she also didn't really view humans as people in the strictest sense.

They could be nice or they could be assholes. So could anyone. But they didn't live long enough to really figure out which they were and Fia just didn't enjoy giving them those sort of chances.

It had been a pretty good couple of decades.

Lao Fan had fallen into their pockets as expected, but he was already looking at being shifted out of the cabinet position. For what it was worth, it had bought them enough breathing room to expand a little, breaking further into the bar rackets. The boss of Fia's family was one of the old guard and he had figured out how the human finance system worked. His name was Darethon, and while Fia did not know how old he was specifically, gray hair had begun to creep it's way into his short brown curls.

It turned out, rich people owned stuff. Money was just consolidated debt. So the Black House owned things and each member owned a certain number of shares, or stock, in any number of things.

Put all together - it translated to power. Tel'cerlyn Kor owned several construction companies full of perfectly legitimate business, two security firms, a whole bank of servers, and at least one big tech company. They weren't the only underground criminal organization to do so, but Darethon had bought sparingly over time and avoided detection, letting the full wealth be lost to a casual observer who would only be looking at the growth of a few years.

Eventually it cycled back to the Minister of the Interior, who was now comfortably retiring.

Fia lit up a cigarette and cracked the window in the black Dojing-fei cruiser, letting the highway wind take the smoke away.

"Old friend of yours?"

"Something like that." Fia's Chinese had become near perfect. She still had an accent, she knew, but the inflection of the words had finally dug it's way into her hindbrain and fluency had followed.

Today was the day she fulfilled the fourth, final bit of her deal.

Lao Fan's driver kept glancing at her in the rear view. She didn't blame him. Today, she was visiting as a shareholder in a company the man had stock in, but she had simply worn a dark suit, skirt, heels and a white jacket. The short tie was cute, she thought, but not unprofessional. Not the way a nerdy rich girl might look.

"I don't usually get to go in there myself."

"Just shut up."

 

[Foxen]

Lao Fan lived in a villa overlooking a valley that, a hundred years ago, had been a crater. Nature had reclaimed its own, washing away the blood and viscera of war with a pure and unblemished expanse of greenery that Fia appreciated from a second story balcony. The trip had taken her into the evening and the sunset lit all of it up as good as any landscape portrait.

Interestingly, the House owned the security company that had installed the cameras on this property, along with the security systems. Fia just logged in with her phone, shut them off, and walked on unopposed.

His wife, whose name Fia didn't remember, had been horrified.

But there hadn't really been anything she could do about it.

Fia debated shooting her, too, just to get her to shut up, but had decided against it. Yes, it would be leaving witnesses - but after the video came out, and security footage showed the woman shooting her own husband, people would put two and two together and that would be the end of it.

The gun had already gone over the side of the balcony into the forest, and now Fia contemplated life after revenge.

She had, originally, imagined that she would have taken a lot of satisfaction out of ending this guy. Sticking it to the humans after having been stuck so often by them. And, true, there had been a satisfying rush of emotion when she had shoved the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger - but afterwards as the blood pooled and her temper faded, Fia had just been left with an old, decrepit, sobbing human woman, a spotted bloody corpse, and a blood-speckled jacket.

Her phone rang. She fished it out of her jacket pocket.

"Hey, boss."

"Are you happy with your payment, little sister?"

"Mhm."

"Good. Do you want a break, or would you prefer coming back to work?"

Fia turned and leaned against the balcony, switching ears with her phone, to peer in at the corpse and it's hangar-on. The woman was watching the video Fia had given her on a small screen near the bed, and Fia wondered, vaguely, if these two had bothered to actually keep firearms on the premise.

She had the suspicion the answer was yes.

But what did she have to fear from some decrepit old human?

"Yeah. I can come back."

"Wonderful. Tell me, how comfortable are you in outer space?"

 

[Foxen]

"Cut my hair?"

Fia gave her boss a dubious look, but that didn't seem to change things very much.

"It's fine for the local work, Silk, just not for this." Darethon soothed, from the other end of a card table in the back of one of the cabarets the House used as a convenient bolthole - where Fia was currently holed up herself. It didn't change either of their styles. Fia was working door here, not flashing her tits for yuan, and she had got pretty used to nice clothes. Not that she couldn't slut it up when she felt like it and drop some jaws, but she very rarely felt like it.

Clothes changed the way people looked at a person. A lot.

Fia picked a fingerful of hair and pulled it taut, demonstrating it's length - over the last few years, she had cultivated it as long as her arm, and she gave Darethon a challenging look.

"Really?"

He sighed, itching at his eyebrow with the hand free of whiskey.

"It's not going to fit in a helmet, little sister. There is just no way, and so, yes. Yes, really."

"The fuck sort of job are you asking me for?"

"The humans found some of the ruins on our moon. The interplanetary corporations struck a deal with one of the Aos'si-led tech corporations we invest in, and service."

Fia took one last look at her long, long lock of hair, before letting it fall. She propped her fist on the couch arm and leaned, giving Darethon a blank look, and waiting.

He was an old, canny bastard. He didn't look a day over thirty in human years, but then, Fia had been alive over a century and in human terms, she passed as twenty or so. Maybe.

"Alright. So, what do you want me to do?"

"Make sure they don't get into an accident. There was an argument and a bidding war and they're caught in the middle of it. The executive officer is one of us."

Fia lofted her eyebrows. "Really? Part of the House?"

"No. Just the poster child that's making life a little easier for the rest of us in business."

Darethon dug his phone out of his suit pocket and slipped his sunglasses up, flipping through something on it before finally showing it to Fia. It was a picture of an Aos'si college graduate and an accompanying news article. Fia took it and scrolled through, reading the Chinese slowly, but with a lot more proficiency than she used to.

"Huh."

"Think you can do it?"

"Don't know. You want me to play bodyguard to her, or something else?"

"Half and half." She handed his phone back and he scrolled a little before turning the little device upside down on the coffee table and reclaiming his glass. "Ideally, I'd like you to keep the research out of the hands of the offworld corp that bid on it."

Fia sipped her own drink, giving this some thought. How? "I don't think that is going to be possible. If they have exclusive salvage rights or something, they'll just keep trying until it's theirs won't they?"

Her boss slowly tipped his glass until what was left of the whisky poured out on the floor. Fia watched as, one by one, the icecubes followed - and then he dropped it. It didn't break, but it did thump and roll.

She got the point.

"...keep her alive to claim the research, but break the toys if it fails?"

"I knew rescuing you from porn would be worthwhile. You're sharp. Yes. If she can't have it, keep them from getting ahold of it. They're paying a lot of money for exclusivity and I prefer that our interests remain ours."

Fia drank the rest of her glass and decided not to throw it at him. He caught her look, though, and shrugged.

"You do realize we have to leak that video, and you're going to be in the spotlight for a little in all your golden glory?"

Fia glared. But he had a point. She just hadn't wanted to think about it and resented being made to.

"You'll look completely different, I'm sure, just cut your hair."

"Fine."

 

[Foxen]

Fia sat in the back office, fiddling with the ends of her freshly cropped hair and watching the trial. The old woman, Lao's wife, was trying to defend herself against every bit of evidence provided by her husband's security firms. They were expensive and through - only, they didn't work for her.

Video evidence showed her shooting her husband. Fia would have shot the tiger, too, had it still been alive, but it hadn't been.

Of course, they didn't show her tape in public. It wasn't really fit for public consumption. No doubt it would resurface somewhere on the holonet, the worst porn she had ever created being used as evidence in a murder trial.

it was pretty old news for Lieutenant Mao Fioda.

It had a certain ring to it.

Mao.

Fia was vaguely aware that it was the sound that cats made, but she liked cats and felt it suited her, so she didn't complain or argue when she had been handed the credentials. Rather than owning part share in the security company she now worked for it, at least on paper.

The uniform felt odd. She had become used to suits, dresses, or the latest human fashions in black, rather than militaristic bodysuits or tabards. It fit well and wasn't uncomfortable, but the woman she saw in the mirror did seem quite a bit different from the gangster she had been for the last few decades. It projected power, yes, but in an entirely different way than the usual.

Certainly different from Crystal. Fia hadn't ever cut her hair this short, for one thing. Her head felt a lot lighter and for some reason it also, in a very subtle way, changed the way she thought, too. Was this more professional? Should she, perhaps, have tried this earlier? It took such a long time to grow out that Fia hadn't ever dreamed of cutting it before, but now - here she was.

"Feeling better, Lieutenant?"

Fia took the offered coffee, opening the lid to check the color. She wasn't a black coffee girl. It seemed like they had drowned it in sugar and creamer and smelled like it, too, so she fixed the lid back on and sipped before she answered.

"Yes."

The other guard sat down with her with his own coffee. George Harves, an American who had repatriated - or maybe someone had imported him - had been assigned as her tour guide. Someone had to show her the way around the company's security systems. Fia had picked up a certain amount of technological literacy, but she was due for a crash course in actual network security and protocol. This guy was her tutor.

He was tolerable.

Fia was also pretty sure he wasn't interested in women, or at least not interested in her, which suited her just fine. The fewer puppy dog men in her life the better. She had discovered shortly after her liberation that as stupid and meek as she had once pretended to be in order to seem attractive, the opposite had the same affect reversed as well. Didn't matter what the fuck she did; people still sulked around her.

She wasn't above using that to her advantage. The profit was now more nebulous though. Fia sometimes felt manipulative, or something, but only temporarily.

"Can't believe she shot the guy," he was saying with his attention on the screen. "He probably deserved it, though."

"Yep."

 

[Foxen]

'Harvey' looked like a fish dragged out of a lake. This seedy game parlor wasn't his sort of place. He didn't like the atmosphere, it seemed, but Fia could hardly care less; the know-it-all human had pissed her off earlier, and Fia wanted vengeance.

She flipped the token to him.

"Go on."

"How do you play this?"

"There are a bunch of colored boxes." She plucked the controllers up from the stand, turning around to give them to the man, one for either hand. "You hit them, with these, as they come at you. To music. Most people dance or try while they do it, but nobody's going to care very much."

He looked awkward to her, but that was the point. She pocketed her hands and stepped a few paces back, well out of range of flung controllers or wild swinging. The two of them weren't the only people in the game parlor, but they had drawn a little attention by appearance alone. Fia, who always attracted attention, had worn black with the white jacket - just because she could. By contrast, Harves looked like a homeless person in blue jeans.

The rest of the troupe that commonly came here were the typical sweaty nerds, or e-sporty humans, who made their living, somehow, off of putting themselves online for lesser-talented humans to gawk at. Fia had come here, once or twice, to check up on the place; game parlors were excellent money-laundering rackets. Then, a mix of her pure lack of shame, coupled with a grudging curiosity, had seen her coming back a few times. Not to stream, of course, since people would naturally look her up if she did, but the complex physical agility most of the games required suited her well.

Additionally, nobody was going to bother her here. They wouldn't care what she subjected this American prick to.

It was the suit.

People gave them as wide a berth as possible while still glancing over occasionally. Fia put her head to the side regarding Harvey and didn't have to pretend very hard not to notice them.

Harvey put the token in and proceeded to embarrass himself. He started out alright, hitting the first few boxes, but before long the directions started to confuse him and he gave up, giving her a perplexed, flustered look. Fia shifted her eyes back to the holographic boxes, indicating where his own should be. He stumbled through the rest of 'Into the Night', by Urasi, then laughed and rubbed at his neck.

"This is a lot harder than it looks."

"Uhuh."

Fia shrugged out of her suit jacket and took the controllers from him, trading places.

"I didn't think you liked video games," Harvey said, finding a nearby stool while Fia limbered.

"I didn't realize you couldn't carry a tune in a bucket."

"Ouch."