Chapter One
From the time she was a little girl, Vivienne had wanted to be a spy. Not in the way of a child just wishing to do something absurd, but in the way of someone who had discovered what they wanted to do with the rest of her life. She wanted to protect her country. She wanted to be part of those things no one else ever knew about. From the first time she tried on her grandfather’s oversized army cap and watched her father don his uniform, Vivienne wanted to be important .
After all of her time in the army, after everything she did to prepare herself, she really wasn’t surprised when she finally became a spy. Despite that, she had never imagined the actual mission she was assigned.
“What is this thing even supposed to be ?” she asked through her communicator, as she ran her hands over the various monitors, buttons, switches, and the primary terminal of the cramped space pod.
“I mean, I get that it’s a space craft, obviously,” she added, considering she was in the process of rising through the troposphere and into the stratosphere. The pod’s thermostat dipped harshly as the craft passed into the tropopause and then leveled off once more as the pod entered the stratosphere. The pod’s auxiliary thrusters kicked in with a jolt to keep the pod going straight, rather than simply falling into orbit.
“But why so tiny?” It seemed a valid question, as Vivienne was not a particularly large woman, and yet she felt like she was being squeezed like a can of sardines.
She was an attractive woman, albeit in a somewhat unconventional manner. At 5’5”, Vivienne wasn’t amazingly tall, but she never looked tiny. Broad shouldered, broad hipped, and brimming with more confidence than a bull moose, she always seemed to fill up every room she entered. She had skin the color of coffee with cream, and amber eyes that could be as meltingly warm as a cup of cocoa or as harshly frigid as ice chips, and curly black hair that she kept cropped close to her head. She had high, prominent cheekbones, a straight nose, and a mouth that could smile or scold with equal dignity.
Once upon a time, on a few occasions, she had wished that her chest was not quite as large as it was, so that people would be more likely to look at her face as she spoke with them (nothing said ‘disrespect’ like being unable to meet her superior officer’s eyes because he was too busy eye-fucking her chest).
And then she decided that wishing to change herself was idiotic, and she switched to threatening to punch people if they didn’t look at her face. Considering her arms were corded with muscle, it was a threat that most people took seriously.
At that moment, though, she mostly felt like a foil wrapped TV dinner.
The pod was already cruising into the mesosphere when mission control deigned to answer Vivienne’s question, her voice crackling over the speaker.
“ It’s an emergency pod, ” mission control answered.
“ It’s for getting help up to the space station or anything else that might get launched into orbit in a hurry, without needing to worry about any extra baggage. This is just a test run to make sure it runs properly. ”
“Don’t I feel safe,” Vivienne drawled flatly.
“ I assure you, everything has been tested to the fullest extent ,” mission control replied dispassionately. “ Barring some sort of catastrophic malfunction, you are reasonably safe. ”
“Yep,” Vivienne continued. “Feeling safe.”
For a few minutes, all was quiet. In a surprisingly short amount of time, though, the pod was in the thermosphere.
Vivienne could understand the need for haste in an emergency, but the speed was only increasing, to the point that it was beginning to seem ludicrous.
On top of that, she was beginning to feel dizzy.
“I think something’s wrong,” she said, her voice slightly distant.
“ Report ,” mission
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