The Professional
The SIREN Project
Twelve hours. That’s all she had.
The shuttle hissed as it locked into the docking ring, the silence of space broken by the metallic clank of mechanical engagement. Captain Leona Rhys unstrapped herself with a well-practiced maneuver, adjusted her suit, and floated into the waiting airlock.
With four low-Earth orbital deployments, three commendations from Allied Aerospace Command, and two successful disruptions of adversarial satellite intel relays, Captain Rhys was more than qualified for most roles.
But this mission was different.
It was one she had been in training for all her life, both professionally and personally, and although the program–Specialized Interpersonal Response & Engagement Network–was never officially acknowledged, that mattered little. It had all started as a whisper in the Pentagon; a whisper that turned into a joke and grew into a desire for hard empirical data.
Now, a decade later, Leona was going to give them that data.
She had to have special training, of course. Deep-structure psychological modeling. Speculative Zero-G mechanics. Fluid displacement modelling. But even with all of that, she had her work cut out.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen. I’m Captain Rhys. You’ve all been briefed, I’m sure.” She met them in the main atrium. They’d been here for months already. Four men, all veterans of space and science. She floated in, anchored with a magnetic clasp, and smiled at them like they were old friends.
No one said a word, and she enjoyed the idea that these men, the greatest and brightest of her nation, were looking at her like a group of scared boys. No one spoke about what prolonged Zero-G isolation does to the male psyche, and she was here to help.
“Lieutenant Carr,” she said, zeroing in on her first target. “You’re with me.”
Lieutenant Carr looked momentarily fearful and then steeled himself, looking at the other men and giving a tight nod. They watched him go as Leona tugged herself along the corridor rail with ease, Carr trailing behind her. She brought him to the small cabin on the Environmental Control Access Bay; a low-traffic section of the station usually reserved for HVAC diagnostics and coolant line checks. It wasn’t originally designed for her work, but had been selected retrospectively for the most appropriate area for her mission to take place. Quiet. Undisturbed. Private. Carr hovered near the wall, one hand against a stabilizer rail, his breathing faster already.
“I read your file,” she said calmly, tucking her tablet into the cabin’s recessed console. “Engineering lead. Flight systems specialist. High responsiveness to eye contact and verbal praise.”
He blinked. “That’s...in the file?”
“I extrapolated.” She drifted closer to him, her finger playing with the zip of her flightsuit. “And I’m rarely wrong.”
She unzipped the upper layer of her uniform and peeled it back slowly, exposing the deep line of her cleavage. His pupils dilated.
“Do you want to sit back against the wall for me?” she asked.