The Man between my crosshairs (girl X assassin)

Chapter 11/Landing

A/N Warning contains references to hevey Sci-Fi stuff like orbital periods. No this isn't about planets menstruating. Who says we can't do shocking?

Two weeks later Zoe was sitting in business class on a stargate shuttle. She was pretending to be in interstellar investment executive. She had decided that the person she was pretending to be would be looking at numbers on a spreadsheet projected by her augmented reality glasses. Normally an assassin travelled pretending to be a psychoanalyst for Artificial Intelligences. Artificial Intelligence had an unpleasant habit of becoming deeply neurotic. All you have to do was asked an AI to keep a secret for a bit and a month later they end up killing the crew for no reason. These days artificial intelligences were so important you didn't do brain surgery with out a serious permission slip. When you have schizoid AI was running a Space colony you couldn't just switch them off and back on again. Reprogramming live code wasn't an option. A programmer wouldn't know what aspect of the deep neural network needed fixing. Instead, you would call for a digital psychotherapist, a human being trained in talking to computers. The therapist would then talk the computer back to mental-health. It wasn't difficult but if you got the right reputation people will still pay big money to fly a digital therapist across known space.

 For assassins, there was no way to check the credentials of a digital psychotherapist.What is the suspicious border guard going to say? 'My terminal has been feeling depressed recently, can you chat with it for minutes?' So digital psychotherapist was high on the list of assassins cover identities. Zoe even had a few back paper copies of Humans & Artificial-Intelligences and HAL the trade magazine for digital psychotherapists. She even knew enough of the technical terms to pass for one, even when she had been accidentally introduced to a real one at a party.

Today she was an investment executive and was still settling into the part. Styles's company was desperate for investors and the prospect of money meant they would not look at here fake investment bank. Styles was keen to get things moving so after 'a sudden last minute opening in her calendar' one of the bank's junior investigators was being sent to look at the prospect and do what was known as 'due diligence'.

Despite the glasses and business suit Zoe had drawn furtive looks from the men in first class. Zoe looked around. She had come to the realisation that the reason she like motorbikes was that all other forms of transport involved going into a room, sitting down, The room vibrating, waiting, leaving the room, and being somewhere else. Air planes, self driving cars, star-gate transports spaceships all came under this category.

Zoe had taken a complex route to Zarimina. She had made sure no one could follow her and gone to Mercury. The planet had its own star-gate which dropped the star-gate transport on the edge of the Zarimina system. She and the ship around her were now in low orbit around Zarimina. The ship twisted in zero gravity. For some reason someone had let a child into first class. The boy was sitting at the window beside Zoe. The boy was about eight and annoying as hell with it. Zoe would admit she had a maternal instinct of a wet brick but use this to explain that 'she was clearly destined to be an assassin'. The boy looked out on the planet below. He had been playing with the on screen entertainment through all the trip. Zoe had to sit while the boy listened to a presentation showing that the planet Zarimina was now 42 light years from Earth in the constellation Pictor.

"WOW that's so interesting," said the kid next to Zoe. 

Zoe mentally rolled her eyes. She then ran a mental picture of punching him, it helped calm her down but not much. They would be landing soon.

'While this trip has only lasted three hours back on earth a whole month has gone by due to the laws of exo-solar start gate use.' said the screen which the kid was too dumb enough to put off silent. He let go of some glue he had been using to put things into a paper sticker book. It floated in the air near him. He was clearly regular enough traveller to understand zero gravity.