Violet takes her leave of the ThunderParrot while the crew are in the Motherlode asteroid belt selling off their cargo of water, salt and seafood. Her target this time is a powerful private citizen named Warren Macdonnell on the asteroid Neris. He has been bankrolling pirates. Someone has contacted the Tong, and is willing to pay 75,000 credits for him to have a fatal accident.
When the crew was still on Newhall and decided to go to the Motherlode, Violet researched Mister Macdonnell to be sure he truly deserved to be removed from the gene pool. Yep, he's been financing some real baddies. Using Tong contacts, she aquired a specialized electronic device, and a pint of blood from the local bloodbank. She set up an account that if traced would show as belonging to her victim, then used it to rent an apartment just under the surface of Neris. (Fairly inexpensive due to increased risk of meteorites.)
Violet sets down at the local starport in her Longbow class shuttle.
She puts back on her "Ingrid Tanaka" disguise she wore on Beaumonde, the one with a bright white bob hairstyle with little feathers in her eyelashes. Dressed to the nines, she goes to a nearby five star hotel where she has reservations and checks in. She tells the agent at the front desk she will be there for two weeks, prepays, and says she plans to relax and sleep a lot, so to please not disturb her. If she needs anything she'll call the front desk. She lavishly tips the bellhop then once he's gone she locks the door and surveys the suite.
She unpacks what appears to be a featureless mannequin head, takes off her white wig and places it on the stand. She punches some buttons on the base and the wig starts to grow to shoulder length and fade through black to a medium brown.
While that is happening, she draws a bath in the sybaritic bathroom. Although water is scarce here, it's unrestricted for patrons of the hotel. She removes the feathered eyelashes, and careful not to mess with the makeup job Gina did to her face, she bathes. After a four hour nap that brings her to around local midnight, she dresses in much less fancy clothes and repacks. Her suitcase is a convertible model, so she pulls out the straps, and it converts to a backpack. Violet slips out the service entrance and goes to find the tubeway to the town of Dry Hole.
There are cameras in all the tube stations, but Violet is now in her new persona going by the name of Ling Vandermeer. It's about a hundred kilometer ride to Dry hole, and takes about forty five minutes. The Tube coasts to a stop at Dry Hole station, and Violet slings her pack and heads out.Following the map she downloaded to her computer watch, she finds her way up to the apartment she rented. It opens to the code she specified, and she inspects it. It will do.
She unpacks and takes another nap. She awakes at approximately eight a.m. local time. The apartment came furnished, but she needs dishes, bedsheets and so on.
She's going shopping, but first she pulls out the specialized electronic device she brought with her from Newhall and plugs it into the apartment's atmospheric controls. She spends a good portion of the day shopping, outfitting the apartment in a manner suitable for a respectable middle class citizen. She finds a store specializing in Vacc suits. She selects a good medium-duty suit in her size. They also sell all sorts of accessories, from polarized visors to jetpack maneuvering units to heavily insulated slipover boots. Violet decides she doesn't need anything fancy. The suit folds into a suitcase sized package, and she takes it home.
The apartment, being just subsurface has an emergency airlock. Violet spends several hours familiarizing herself with all of the features of her new suit, then suits up and tries the airlock. Opening the overhead hatch, she climbs out on the surface of Neris. She stands on a concrete apron, with forty nine other hatches, each leading to another apartment. She finds it takes her apartment access code to open the hatch from the outside. She climbs back into the airlock and cycles it. She hangs up her suit on a rack built into the airlock and makes sure the tanks and water supply are topped up. She puts away the dishes, Makes the bed, then sits down at the cortex terminal. She uploads the entirely fictitious resume of Ling Vandermeer to the local job boards, looking for a job as a holographics technician.
That evening (evening by clock only, Neris has a day of over two months) Violet goes to a nightclub/restaurant owned by Warren Macdonnell named The Olivine Cavern. According to her reports, he comes here every few evenings and plays the piano. She brings her datapad and camps out after dinner, waiting to see if he shows. Unfortunately, this is not her night.
This forms a pattern. Each evening she comes back to the Olivine Cavern (so named because this section was a natural cavern where olivine crystals were found, according to the story on the back of the menu) and has supper there. She is a good tipper, and consistently gets the booth opposite the piano. The first night that Warren is there, she is careful to make solid eye contact, then turn away as if embarrassed.
After a week he's been there playing the piano three times, she decides it's time to make her move. Later in the evening Warren starts playing a song Violet is familiar with. She takes a deep breath and begins singing along. Violet had voice lessons back when she was fourteen, and is still quite good. The room goes silent except for her voice and the piano. As the song ends, she seems to realize what she's done and acts totally embarrassed as the other patrons applaud.
Warren walks over and without asking sits across from her. "That was really impressive," he says. Violet, still acting embarrassed says she doesn't know what came over her, she just got carried away. He asks her name, she gives him her current alias. He draws her out in conversation, she tells him how she was born on Beaumonde, but her parents moved to Persephone when she was just a baby. Her parents worked for a local nobleman, she went to trade school and got quite good with holographic displays. She found that on Persephone you were either noble or a nobody, so she took her savings and moved out here to the asteroids. She's put her resume out on the local job boards and has already had a few nibbles. He says "I have a few connections. I can put the word out and get you a job if you would like." She replies "That's probably not a good idea. It would look suspicious if I got a job through someone I've slept with." Warren is startled "But we haven't…" he says. She touches her tongue to her upper lip and with a smile says "We can fix that. I have an apartment near here. What time do you get off?" "My dear Ling," he replies, once again in control, "I own this club. My shift is over when I say it's over." Violet bursts into a big smile. He tells her not to go anywhere, he'll be ready in ten minutes. She realizes full well that what he's doing during those ten minutes is doing a background check on Ling Vandermeer, but she's not worried. Her alias is airtight.
She takes him to her apartment, puts on some pleasant music, and mixes drinks. Using her skill with body language she learned during her abortive stint at the companion academy, she makes it plain she's ready for him, but lets him control the pace. They soon wind up in bed.
Later, once he's finally fallen asleep, Violet presses a button on her computer watch, triggering the device she attached to the environmental controls. This activates a "glitch" whereby the the oxygen level in the room drops toward zero. She lays there looking at Warren, thinking it's a shame he has to die. "A good man who does evil things is not a good man" she consoles herself. After a bit a red light starts blinking on the computer watch, and she reaches under the bed for an oxygen mask. Eventually the light on the watch goes solid red. Effectively zero oxygen. She waits five minutes before disentangling herself to be sure he's not going to wake up, then gets up and removes the device from the environmental controls. When the police investigate it will look like a fatal computer glitch.
Now to muddy the waters. Violet takes the pint of blood she brought from Newhall from the refrigerator.
She opens it and pours some of it in the bathtub. She rinses most of it out, but there will still be detectable traces for the police to find. Likewise the sink and the toilet. Lastly one drop from the now empty bag on the toe of Warren's shoe. If they do a DNA test it will show a mostly chinese female of mixed ancestry who's not on any records and matching the description of Ling Vandermeer. The apartment and everything in it will show as having been paid for by Warren Macdonnell. Let the police figure that out.
Violet puts the wig base back in her suitcase, puts on her vacc suit, breathes deeply several times from the oxygen mask then closes the suit and goes on internal air. She drops the mask and the empy blood bag in the suitcase, slings it as a backpack, and cycles out the airlock. There's no way she could tube back to the starport without being seen on the cameras, but she can easily hike a hundred kilometers across the surface. She sets a waypoint on her inertial navigator to guide her to her ship. As she leaves the concrete apron she nearly falls as she leaves the artificial gravity envelope. She had figured twelve hours at a fast walk, but now finds it will take less, bounding along in the reduced gravity.
She makes good time, but her feet are COLD! Now she realizes why they sold those insulated slipovers at the vacc suit shop. Her whole journey will be in shadow. Her feet are so cold they feel like they're burning by the time she reaches the starport. Her shuttle is docked to the port by it's starboard door, but it has a small airlock at the back end. She enters her shuttle and removes her helmet. She sends a text to the hotel she originally checked into, saying that she's leaving a few days early. She then calls for clearance to lift. Clearance is granted. She lifts off, gets clear of the controlled area around Neris, then sets course for Boros.
She sets the autopilot, then starts taking off the vacc suit. When she tries to take off the feet, the pain is excruciating. She now realizes she has frostbite. She gets a vibroknife and carefully cuts the suit from around her feet. They look grey, and now she's worried. She's heard of people losing toes and even whole feet to frostbite. She puts on a pair of shorts and a tank top then gets the first aid kit and puts antiseptic cream all over her feet. She tries not to scream while putting it between her toes. She wraps her feet in tee shirts and tapes them up. She checks the first aid kit. Fortunately she has an ample supply of codeine. She takes one. She thinks about the fact that she's a lot closer to Jiang-Yin than Boros but the doctors there probably couldn't do a lot for her. Her only hope at this point is Gina and that marvelous Autodoc. She pushes her shuttle to hard burn. Even so it's going to be a long eleven days…