Reflections

"Oh, I'm Helmi. I'm a friend of Pilot Roth's."

No.

Helmi Alpassi closed her eyes for a second, blew out a short breath.

"Oh, I'm Helmi. I'm a friend of Cia's."

She smiled, studied the smile in the mirror. Too cold. Fake.

There was a picture tucked into the frame of the mirror and she studied it for a moment.

A family group, all with the same fair hair, all grinning at the camera. Mother, father, brother and me.

Helmi looked from the picture to the mirror, pulled the corners of her mouth a little higher, squinted her eyes a little. Better.

"Hi, I'm Helmi. I'm a friend of Cia's."

Good.  The smile looked natural. Her voice sounded normal, casual, to her own ears. To be sure, she flicked a button on her comm and listened as the recording played back. Yes. Normal.

Looking down at herself, she smoothed her hands over her shirt. She'd chosen it carefully, taking so long with the catalogue that the XO had said dryly No-one needs you to be a fashionplate, Helmi.

Looking in the mirror again, Helmi thought it had been worth the time. The light blue made her look younger, and gave an innocent tint to her grey eyes. The cut was long and loose, covering the sidearm nestled in the small of her back. The fabric was heavy, its stiffness disguising the light body-armor beneath.

"Hi, I'm Helmi, a friend of Cia's?"

Perfect.

She'd practiced with the shirt and the holster a hundred times, but she made sure again now. Her fingers flicked the hem of the shirt up and away with the beginning of the movement that brought her hand to the butt of her sidearm. Yank and drag, barrel to the ground.  The gun came around her body angled so she wouldn't shoot herself with a misfire and snapped up to level on the mirror.

Over the fat black muzzle of the gun, her eyes held no innocence at all.

It was hard to tell just how fast she was, subjectively. Sarge said fast enough.

Fisk Hurun wouldn't have said it if he hadn't believed it.  No way he'd let anything slide on Pilot's security.

He didn't draw that detail himself, anymore. Helmi could guess why. She wasn't the only one who'd seen him, when Pilot was out in Rens Bazaar or on the Interbus or where-ever, muscle jumping in his cheek, looking at little old ladies like they were about to jump Pilot and beat her to death with their string bags full of oranges.

It was understandable, she supposed. More than.

But it was a liability, too. A weakness. In a man she hadn't been used to seeing weakness in, not when she'd been a raw cadet in Peace and Order's junior team at the Haadoken Summit and he'd been the last man down in Home Guard's final match against Ishukone, not when he'd been the first through the door into the disabled transport full of Peace and Order marines expecting Blood Raiders rather than rescue, not when ...

But she didn't know if she'd seen weakness in him, that time.

He remembered.

She didn't.

Helmi holstered her gun and ran her fingers down the edge of the mirror.  The edge of firmcopy was barely detectable, even knowing it was there. She scraped at it with a nail until she could prise it loose.

Not that I don't know it by heart.

A letter she would never have seen, not in this body, if her mother hadn't been concerned enough to write back.

A letter she couldn't remember writing, but that she had no doubt she had.

About plots and treachery, about danger to Pilot, about no-one to trust.

Sent from her account in that blank space between the land-car accident and waking up in the cloning vat to hear that she and everyone else on her team had been killed in action when Pilot was abducted.

They'd known it had to be an inside job, but no-one had known who, or how. Rumors of TCMCS, but who had fired, how it had happened ...

Helmi still didn't know how.  The letter in her hand, with its insane conviction that Pilot was in danger from someone, maybe everyone, on her crew, and its veiled references to someone who can help...

The letter didn't tell her how. But the woman who'd written that letter, the woman completely certain that the only way to keep Pilot safe was to get her away from her crew and her guards and her friends ... the letter told her who had pulled the trigger.

Me.


She folded the letter back up and slid it back into its hiding place, met her own cool grey gaze in the mirror and tested that thought.

Not the sharp edges of it, the fruitless speculation, the what-how-when.  That was there, yes, but it was irrelevant.

As irrelevant as understanding why Sarge had become a liability to knowing that he was.

No. She tested all the places the knowledge of that letter ran to, checking to make sure that what if it happens again and why didn't I know and did Sarge see me shoot him stopped where they should.

Stopped short of the job.

Yes.

The woman who had done that hadn't been her, in any way that she could tell. Had looked and sounded and walked and talked like Helmi Alpassi, no doubt, but the TCMCs had made her someone else.  If it was me, Sarge would never have let them tap me for this job. He knows it wasn't me. Knows it was someone else.


And now she's dead. And I'm here.  

She knew who she was, who she wasn't. What she had and hadn't done.

She wouldn't hesitate. Wouldn't overcompensate. Wouldn't think, when the time came.

Whatever the letter said.

Helmi looked at herself in the mirror again.

Smiled.

"Hi, I'm Helmi. I'm a friend, of Cia's?"

Perfect.