Chronicles of a Space Mercenary 0: Tanya by Ronald Wintrick Page B

female lizards wore. Among humans, at least, there were few others who had as much love for their jewelry and signs of wealth as Tanya did.   The greed to possess the visible aspects of wealth and success she recognized readily enough as the direct result of the deprivations suffered in her childhood, but in the aspect of lizards loving their jewelry, at least, she and lizards had more in common than she and most of mankind.
    Lizards loved jewelry and wore it fearlessly. They did not wear imitations of the real thing while the genuine thing lay in its jewelry box at home. They wore only the real thing, brazenly and without fear. Tanya could not stop thinking about it because some of those lizard females, the wealthier among them, wore enough diamonds and gold and gems and everything else valuable to buy an entire planet.
    Granted, maybe only a frontier planet, but it made the paltry sums she was swindling at the card tables pale by comparison. A full-time job, a very dangerous job, and the proceeds of which were but scraps compared to what one job like that would bring. Not only that, she wanted to . . .
    ….................

Tanya screamed in agony, her back arching dangerous ly as it tore her apart. She thought it would just be more of his perversions, twisted into some new sickening avenue, but the mindless agon y made no sense to her. They strapped her to an examining table, hooked a medica l device to her, and then it injected something into her. The agony began almost immediately.
    Handler was there. He was now there in all of her remembrances, but there was another with him this time who seemed either to share an equal measure of authority or more, a woman Tanya had never seen before. She had the aspect of a shark.
    “She's rejecting it.” The woman said, obviously angry.
    “No she's not.” Handler said. “You'll see.”
    “All I see is a lot of credits going down the drain!” The woman snapped. “You should never have tried that experimental strain!”
    Even in Tanya's agony she could see the frantic look on the doctor's face as he did things to the control panel of the medical device attached to her. In her agony, as she screamed in irrepressible shrieks that were ripped bloodily from her lungs, spraying bloody droplets across the room, Tanya wasn’t able to scream loudly enough to compensate for the agony, the entire Universe now no more than the profound pain assaulting her, and suddenly she knew that it was over, that she was dying.
    But then some change began to occur within her. She could not explain how she knew it, but her body began to accept whatever it was they put in her, possibly as a result of her will alone. She could not say. All she knew was that suddenly the pain was lessening and wh atever it was they had put in her began to alter her. She could feel it mutating her, changing her, adapting her to some new form.
    “What are you doing to me?” Tanya croaked out, the first words she had spoken in her entire life that she was aware of, the horror of not knowing what was being done to her unlocking whatever had been holding back her voice. They only ignored her.
    “I told you so.” Handler said to the woman.
    “ Let it be on your head.” She told him. Then the woman turned and left.
     
    Chapter 23
     
    There were few humans aboard the Station in the first place, in relation to the multitudes of thousands or hundreds of thousands of the various races which both lived and congr egated aboard the Kievor S tation. Tanya had now abandoned the areas most frequented by humans, that being the reason she was here. So when she saw this human, there was no doubt in her mind that he was an Organization Operative.
    He didn't see her immediately when he walked in the bar. Tanya was in the back corner, at a table set into the juncture of two back corner walls, both at her back. The lights in this establishment were set low to accommodate the race which most frequented this watering hole, a race of