2950-12-20 – Tales from the Service: The Assassin Influencer
Captain Sandra Ibsen scowled down at herself as Toloni’s lumbering ground-car lurched back into motion. She looked up only in time to see the two crisply uniformed security men in the rear canopy gawk at her as the vehicle rounded a corner and vanished up the street. Their surprise told her that they didn’t know about the plan which required Holy Tabernacle’s skipper to dress like a desperate socialite. They had very little time to learn, if things went according to the Hierophant’s schedule.
Gritting her teeth, Sandra held one hand in front of her face, cuing holo-displays in the smart-fabric of her detached sleeves to wake and show her the controls. With one final cringe, Sandra switched everything on. The already gaudy blue and green evening dress lit up with shimmering holographic fire, and dancing accents spun around her body and above the tapered hat into which she’d bundled her hair.
Several pedestrians along the street who’d stopped and stared when Toloni’s huge groundcar had rumbled to a halt now stopped and stared again. Sandra hated being stared at, but for the moment, it was part of the plan; feeling the reassuring lines of her sidearm tucked into the ruffled pouch below one arm, she adopted the most vapid, impatient expression she could conjure up and flounced down the street.
Toloni had had his drivers drop Sandra off around the corner from the headquarters of Bertolini & Thatcher Group, a small Maribel datasphere media company which seemed mainly to work as production contractors for the Frontier’s motley array of independent media personalities. According to Toloni, their person of interest was inside, recording live on a studio set for her fashion-obsessed audience.
Delilah Brahms-Walton was, by the standards of the broader Reach, a niche personality with a modest datasphere footprint, but with nearly ten million fans, mostly young women from relatively well-to-do-families, she was probably BTG’s most prominent client. Sandra had surveyed Brahms-Walton’s datasphere hub a few months ago, when they’d first linked her to Toloni’s several would-be assassins, and had been far from impressed. Brahms-Walton seemed mainly to reach her audience through live broadcasts to Maribel followers, which were then transmitted as recordings outside the system. Vapid, tittering, excitable, and shallow, she was pretty in that vague, elfin way that didn’t threaten other women or make them feel jealous. Evidently, her manner and looks did little to attract a male audience; almost nineteen out of every twenty of her followers were women.
As to content, Sandra had detected almost none. Though branding herself as a fashionista, Brahms-Walton seemed to spend almost no time designing, trying, modeling, or critiquing fashion products. Most of her broadcasts were of her chattering amiably about nothing for the camera lenses, interrupting herself excitedly so many times that no bit of gossip ever seemed to be described in full. She occasionally brought on someone to chat with, or broadcast from exotic vacation destinations all over Maribel. This last sort of show usually featured Brahms-Walton baring all in a skimpy swimsuit, surrounded by equally vapid, pretty, scantily clad young people, and it was stills from this sort of recording that had first linked her to the attempted killers.
The front doors to the BTG studio were smaller than Delilah expected, but once inside, the broad lobby with its tastefully abstract furnishings, tastefully-dressed, blank-faced receptionist, and tastefully unobtrusive security guard were far more in line with expectations. Sandra pretended not to see the receptionist for several seconds, until the woman waved slightly, and then pretended to be surprised, as if the woman had jumped up out of the floor.
“Love the look. Trying to book a studio, Miss?” The receptionist smiled.
“No, no, no. Delilah said to meet her here.” Sandra deliberately raised her voice’s pitch and lowered it’s volume. “She’s here, isn’t she?”
The receptionist brightened. “Oh, you’re going on with Miss Brahms-Walton? I love her so much. She’s going to love that outfit. Studio number three.”
Sandra looked around, staring down the two hallways disappearing into the building. “Three…” She easily spotted signage that would guide her there, but pretended not to. “Where’s that?”
“That way.” The woman pointed to the hallway on the left of her desk. “Take a left at the big arrow, then it’s on your right.”
“Thanks!” Sandra immediately turned to the hallway, then hesitated at its threshold. “Right at what?”
“Rob, can you show her?” Sandra could almost hear defeat in the receptionist’s voice.
The security guard peeled away from his spot in an out of the way corner and hurried up to Sandra’s elbow. “Follow me, Miss.”
Sandra followed the man, and as she did, she pretended to fidget with the cuff of one of her sleeves. In reality, she was transmitting a double-click signal to the head of Toloni’s security detachment. The groundcar, and Toloni, would arrive outside in a moment, but first Sandra had to pin down their quarry. Brahms-Walton couldn’t know she was about to meet Grand Hierophant Uberto Toloni until the last possible instant.
At the studio door, the guard stopped Sandra, then peeked his head in. “She hasn’t started her show yet.” He smiled at Sandra, looking her up and down. Though her attire was far from revealing, Sandra didn’t like the feeling of being inspected like that; it was something unknown among spacers, partly because they almost never dressed to draw the eye. “Do you need anything else?”
“Oh, you’ve been so helpful.” Sandra grasped his hand and lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “This is going to be my big break.”
The guard chucked and extracted himself. “You’ll do great.”
Sandra sent her double-click signal again as the man ambled back toward the lobby, then turned and went into the studio. Beyond a semicircle of recording equipment, Delilah Brahms-Walton lounged at a desk in front of a pastel-patterned backdrop, inspecting her intricate makeup. Her attire was no less gaudy than Sandra’s, a riot of gold and violet with a constellation of starburst holograms chasing each other around her thin frame. A lone tech scuttled between the various fixtures, clutching a slate.
Brahms-Walton glanced over to the door the moment Sandra came in, though given the elaborate outfit Toloni had given Sandra, noticing her was hardly a feat of observation.
Sandra waggled her fingers in a wave. “Hi!”
Brahms-Walton stood, a confused look crossing her face. She was taller than Sandra had expected. “Do I know you?”
“You don’t recognize me?” Sandra blinked and pretended to look hurt for an instant. “I suppose there were a lot of people. It’s me, Sissy! Sissy Ibsen? From Sioda Sands!”
Brahms-Walton made an exaggerated show of thinking back. “You do look a little familiar. Did-”
Sandra clapped her hands. “I knew you’d remember. We only talked a little, but you and Conrad-”
“You know Conrad?” A look of alarm crossed Brahms-Walton’s face. No doubt she knew that Conrad Nyquist had been captured on Vorkuta attempting to assassinate the highest-ranking Penderite.
“Know him! I was in primary-ed with him! Oh I could tell you all kinds of-” Sandra stopped short, as if remembering something, mimicking Brahms-Walton’s own style of delivery. “Anyway, he told me, after we met at Sioda, he said: Sis, Delilah said, if you’re ever in the city, drop by her studio. I was going to a party, but then I thought-”
“Conrad told you I wanted you to stop in?” Brahms-Walton frowned. “I didn’t tell you myself?”
Sandra, improvising, looked away. “Er, I kinda… had too much. Those blue drinks with the paper umbrellas, what were they called?” Sandra knew it was a universal constant that any tropical resort built by humans always served some sort of blue alcoholic drink with a little paper umbrella.
Brahms-Walton nodded; she clearly didn’t remember the trip in question entirely clearly either. “I love to have friends on the show, Sissy dear, but you’ve come on a bad night for it. Are you still going to be in town the day after tomorrow?”
Sandra looked downcast, but nodded. “Until next Thursday.” She turned to go, then stopped. “Er, have you heard from Conrad? He sent me some messages after he left on his business trip, but they… It doesn’t sound like him. Something about a priest?”
“He sent you messages?” Brahms-Walton was between Sandra and the door in an instant, her vapid, over-exaggerated mannerisms gone in an instant. “When? What did they say?”
Sandra shrugged, smiling wistfully. “Silly stuff. He rambled on for so long. It was nice to hear his voice.”
“Ninety seconds, Miss Brahms-Walton.” The tech, adjusting the controls of one of the bigger cameras, called out.
Brahms-Walton put her hands on Sandra’s shoulders. “Stay and watch the show. After, let’s have drink and catch up, and talk about bringing you on for the next show, okay?”
“Really?” Sandra bounced on the balls of her feet as much as her ridiculous platform heels would allow.
Delilah Brahms-Walton smiled reassuringly, but there was steel behind that smile. Sandra, still fairly certain her cover was intact, nevertheless shivered at the idea of pretending to be duped. “Anyone so special to Conrad is a friend of mine.”
Before our words once again grace this feed, the Emmanuel Feast (Christmas for Roman Catholics) will have passed. From all of us here at Maribel, both within this embed team and in service to the Navy which guards this world, we pray that this occasion is a time of joy for all of you back home. For the two thousand nine hundred fiftieth year, and for the third time of this war, we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, though peace yet remains a rare commodity.
There are many more fitting accounts for the season in my inbox, and we may diverge from Captain Ibsen’s account next week to tell one of these, if time and Naval Intelligence censors permit.
