Steel Beneath the Skin Read online

  Steel Beneath the Skin

  An Aneka Jansen Novel

  By Niall Teasdale

  Copyright 2012 Niall Teasdale

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  Contents

  Part One: Aneka

  Part Two: Where Men Once Walked

  Part Three: On the Edge

  Part Four: Terra Nova

  Part Five: Plus ça Change

  Part Six: Humanity

  Part Seven: Facilitating Change

  Part One: Aneka

  FScV Garnet Hyde, 12.6.523 FSC.

  Spotlights worked their way along the hull of the wreck searching out a method of ingress. The hulk looked like it was in surprisingly good condition, given that it was floating in deep space. Far enough away from any system that the space really was empty, it had avoided collision with asteroids and comets which might have damaged it badly, but there was a lot of pitting from minor dust impacts and cosmic rays. In fact, the only major damage seemed to be at one edge of the disc-shaped craft where something had torn through the hull.

  ‘Radiation readings negative,’ Patton said. ‘No residual gasses.’

  Drake, his hands shifting delicately over the controls for the manoeuvring jets, nodded and skated the Garnet Hyde to a stationary position near the hole in the hull. ‘Drake to boarding team. Clear for EVA.’

  ‘Boarding team proceeding to breach,’ Bashford’s voice said from the console speakers and three figures in skin-tight vacuum suits appeared from the airlock under the bridge.

  Bashford was leading; he had the experience and skill. Ella was following him a little too closely, but she did have all the sensor gear and it was important that she had that in range of anything dangerous before he got to it. Monkey brought up the rear. His name was actually David Gibbons, but he was the youngest person on the crew, even younger than Patton, and with a name like Gibbons he had naturally been dubbed “Monkey.”

  As they reached the ship’s hull and the gap in it, Ella Narrow’s voice sounded over the ship’s comm system. ‘Confirming radiation readings within normal parameters. The carbonisation around the breach suggests a plasma containment failure. I suggest we set up the temporary airlock in case the interior atmosphere is intact.’

  Down in the main lab, Doctor Gillian Gilroy’s eyes scanned over the readouts from Ella’s instruments and the view through three helmet cameras. ‘That would be a wise precaution. If this ship is as intact as it seems we don’t want to risk further damage.’

  ‘Deploying portable lock unit,’ Monkey said.

  ‘I’m seeing no floating debris inside the ship,’ Ella said as Bashford and Monkey began manoeuvring the heavy plastic disc into place. ‘This section at least must have explosively decompressed.’

  ‘Fast enough that nothing was left in orbit around the ship,’ Drake agreed. A ship as big as this one had enough gravity to overcome low speed expulsions.

  Ella’s view of the interior was blocked as the airlock was placed over the gap. It took little more than a minute to seal the edge of the disk to the hull, and then they moved through it, closing the outer flap over the hole and locking it down. Now if they let atmosphere into the destroyed engine room it would not be leaving the ship.

  Ella sighed though the sound did not transmit outside her helmet. ‘No EM readings,’ she said for the benefit of the rest of the crew. ‘There’s a breach in the outer shell of the main reactor. Can you see that, Doc?’

  ‘Yes,’ Gilroy’s voice said. ‘Secondary power systems would be long dead by now. I doubt any of the systems are live. Please take some samples. We’ll run dating analysis and see just how old this thing is.’

  ‘We’re going to have to cut through the hatch to gain access to the rest of the ship,’ Bashford said. ‘You’ve got time to collect samples.’

  Ella began floating around the dead terminals and damaged panels, breaking off pieces where there was already plenty of damage and slipping them into stowage bags hung from her belt. Monkey went to work on the hatch’s locking bars with a fusion torch. Despite Bashford’s comment, it was relatively quick work; nothing much could stand up to the temperature of the plasma coming from the torch. After a few minutes the two men were pulling the hatch open.

  There was no rush of air into the room, but there was a bitten off cry of shock from Monkey as he saw the body floating in the interior corridor. Ella was both less surprised and more excited. ‘Doctor? We’ve got axXinti corpse here. It looks like the air must have drained out of the interior more slowly. Preservation is excellent.’ She pushed herself into the corridor to get a better view of the body. It was humanoid, not especially tall, with longer fingers than a human and a ridged, back-swept look to its face. The mottled grey skin was natural colouring, not due to vacuum exposure.

  ‘So I see,’ Gilroy replied. Her hands began to move over a nearby virtual keyboard. ‘I’m prepping containment facilities now. Check your scanner.’

  Ella looked down at the handheld unit. ‘EM reading. It’s weak, but constant.’ She moved the scanner head from side to side a couple of times. ‘To the right,’ she said, and began to propel herself in that direction.

  Slightly exasperated, Bashford pushed ahead of her, pulling a pistol from its holster on his thigh. It looked a lot like everything on the ship had died a long time ago, but if that was not the case it was best to be ready.

  The signal led them about a third of the way around the ship before Ella narrowed it down to a door on the outer side. ‘In here,’ she said. ‘It’s a light door. Maybe a storage room. Pry bars?’

  Bashford nodded to Monkey, moving to where he could cover the door with his blaster. It took two firm tugs before the lock gave way and the door broke open. There was no immediate weapons fire; Monkey wedged his crowbar against the door and pushed. Ella started forward, then realised Bashford would yell at her and held back while he pushed into the room, sweeping his gun around. He stopped moving and was silent for about a second before his voice cut in over the comm link.

  ‘You have got to be fucking kidding me!’

  ~~~

  She dreamed of computers scrolling text in front of her eyes. When she opened them she was not sure the dream had ended. There were screens around her, hanging over the plastic shell which kept her on some sort of examination bench. The displays looked like something out of a science fiction TV show, one with a fairly large budget. She would have been impressed if she could move anything below her neck.

  ‘You’re safe,’ a male voice said from somewhere nearby, almost in her ear. She tried to look, but her body was having none of it. ‘The best thing for now would be to rest. You’ve been through a lot. You’re not fully recovered.’

  ‘Rested enough,’ she said, her voice sounding thick in her own ears. Her body was also having none of that. She closed her eyes and whatever the voice said next was lost in the haze of gathering unconsciousness.

  ~~~

  Ella stood at the observation window of the medical bay’s containment room. It had very good security as well as the best diagnostic scanners. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ she said, though it was not necessarily aimed at Doctor Gilroy who was examining the readouts from the sensors in the room. Gilroy looked around anyway, to where their patient was laid out, naked, on the bed in the room.

  The woman they had found on the xinti ship was, indeed, good looking even by the standards set by modern humans. She had the physique of a dancer, or perhaps a martial artist; Gilroy was not familiar enough with military personnel to be sure of the latter. There was a lot of long, lean muscle, barely any fat. Her waist was slim, her hips wide enough to give a pleasing shape, very solid thighs, and large breasts which stood out firmly and were rather more pert than nature shoul
d have provided her with. Then again, nature had little to do with body-form these days. Her face was narrow, her cheeks hollow with high cheekbones, and she had full lips with quite a pronounced bow. Her hair was short, a cap of white, a straight fringe swept down to points in front of her exposed ears and a tight trim at the back of the neck. She did look like a perfect specimen of humanity, which made the truth all the stranger.

  ‘Attractive, certainly,’ Gilroy said. ‘The issue, however, is not that she looks good, but that she exists at all. We’ll need to be careful. We have no idea how she’ll react when she wakes up.’

  ‘You want me to handle that?’

  ‘You’re the psychologist. I’ll observe, of course.’

  Ella nodded, her eyes never leaving the body of the woman in the isolation chamber.

  13.2.523 FSC.

  She could move now, that was something. Blinking in the light, she pulled herself up into a sitting position. The plastic bubble had become a room with very solid looking walls, a door which looked like it was airtight, and a double-glazed window which looked equally solid. Beyond the window she could see the backs of displays and a woman who appeared to be around thirty, with wavy, brown hair and a Hispanic complexion, who was working on something away from the window. Attracting this woman’s attention seemed a good idea. She swung her legs off the edge of the bed, noting that her clothes were missing for the first time. That was when the second woman appeared at the window.

  This one appeared to be in her early twenties. Tall, slim, attractive, with pale skin, blue eyes, and shoulder-length hair, red-orange with more vibrant red streaks radiating from the crown. She was dressed the same as the one outside, in a white, one-piece, skin-tight, and translucent bodysuit which left nothing to the imagination. She was smiling.

  ‘Hi, I’m Ella. What’s your name?’ Aneka saw the redhead’s lips move, but the voice came from overhead speakers. The room seemed to be air-tight.

  ‘Aneka. Aneka…’ She trailed off. ‘I don’t remember my surname. Or much of anything else.’ Aneka looked at the strange woman, taking in details. The clothes, the equipment. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You’re aboard the Garnet Hyde. It’s a research ship. We found you on a derelict. Do you remember anything about that?’

  Aneka could feel the hum of engines through the vessel’s floor, but they were very, very smooth, and there was no movement, no sense of swell from water underneath them. The skin-suit the woman was wearing looked like something out of a sci-fi porno. ‘When you say “ship” you aren’t talking about something that floats in water, are you?’

  The older woman had turned from whatever she was doing and was looking in through the window as well, her eyes flicking to the monitors every so often. ‘That’s Doctor Gilroy,’ Ella said.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘No… Well, you didn’t answer mine… The Garnet Hyde is a spaceship. We found you on another spaceship, an old one.’ She gave Gilroy a quick look. ‘A very old one.’

  ‘Right.’ Aneka’s eyes scanned the room, one arm absently rising to hang over her breasts. ‘Is this some sort of adult reality TV show? Where are the cameras?’

  ‘You’ve been floating in deep space for… a long time. It was pure luck that we came across the ship you were on. The crew were all dead… But we found you.’

  ‘I don’t remember much, but I know we don’t have deep space ships. Manned ones anyway.’

  ‘We don’t?’

  ‘Humans. Earthmen. You look like a human so I’m assuming you are. I never believed aliens would look exactly like us and have a perfect grasp of English, even if that’s what happens in the movies.’

  ‘I’m… human, yes. Jenlay anyway. “Human” is an old sort of name for the species.’ The smile shifted up a notch; she was amused. ‘The ship you were on wasn’t a jenlay ship though.’

  ‘So what was I doing on it? Are you saying I was kidnapped by aliens? Close Encounters? Anal probes? Have I got an implant up my nose?’

  The smile became confused. ‘What? No… I mean… I don’t… Could you excuse me for a second?’

  Outside the window, Ella and Gilroy were talking, but the sound was cut off. Aneka was beginning to get a real feeling of dread, the kind of falling sensation in her stomach that came when… When what? When she lost something, someone… Damn! Why can’t I remember?!

  ‘Aneka?’ She looked up at the sound of Ella’s voice. ‘Uh, we need to go and discuss some things with the rest of the crew. Just… well, relax.’

  ‘Sure,’ Aneka said. ‘Take your time. I don’t appear to be going anywhere.’

  ~~~

  ‘She doesn’t know,’ Ella said.

  ‘She doesn’t know now,’ Patton said. Monkey nodded firmly in agreement. ‘You said yourself, she doesn’t remember anything aside from her first name.’

  ‘She thinks she’s a jenlay’ Ella insisted and then corrected herself. ‘She thinks she’s a “human” from back when that ship was working. Did we get a date back?’

  ‘Over a millennium,’ Gilroy said. ‘The analysis is still working on narrowing it.’

  ‘All right,’ Drake said, his voice firm. They had been arguing this around for half an hour now and it was getting them nowhere. ‘Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that she doesn’t know, it’s not an act.’ He held up his hand as both Monkey and Patton opened their mouths. ‘Ella, what do you want to do about it?’

  ‘I think we tell her. I’d like to do it face to face. The containment room has an air lock, there’s no danger of her getting out.’

  ‘And no way for us to help if she decides to pull your limbs off,’ Bashford pointed out.

  ‘Yes,’ Ella replied, ‘but I think it’s a risk worth taking. I don’t think she’s hostile. And anyway, if she is, do you think you can keep her contained.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Monkey said.

  ‘Gillian?’ Drake asked.

  ‘It’s a risk, but I’m not sure there’s an alternative. As Ella pointed out, we aren’t equipped to deal with this. If she’s hostile we’ll have to divert to a naval base, and that will likely end this expedition.’

  ‘Okay,’ Drake said. ‘Ella, you’ve got the go ahead.’

  ~~~

  Aneka looked up as she heard a door shutting. It was not the door to her cell, but through the small window in it she could see Ella. So the door was some sort of air lock. Well, that made some sense if she was actually in quarantine. High-end NBC system, maybe. Now, the fact that she knew what “NBC” meant suggested that maybe she was in the military. Maybe. She sat up to wait.

  The inner door slid open, sideways, and Ella stepped through. She was not wearing a hood or helmet, or even a paper mask, so bio-hazards were out of the equation. She smiled and walked over to sit down on the chair which was bolted to the floor near the middle of the bed. She had a pretty smile, but it was distorted by worry.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Ella asked.

  ‘Aside from the memory thing, I’m feeling fine. I don’t think I’ve ever felt better.’

  ‘Fridgy.’ Aneka wondered whether the girl ever looked anything other than happy.

  ‘Physically that is. I mean… I’ve been thinking and, if you’re a human, even if you don’t call yourself that, and we’re on a spaceship, then I guess I was stuck on that ship for quite a while.’ Ella nodded; she looked uncomfortable, which was a change. ‘How long?’

  ‘We aren’t entirely sure.’ At least the final dates had come back before she came in. She could do better than “about a thousand years.” ‘We ran dating analysis sequences on everything we could and we’re coming back with dates of eleven-hundred and seventy-three years, plus or minus forty.’ Ella watched as this figure sank in; she was expecting something, probably hysterics, but Aneka just sat there staring at her toes.

  ‘My hair’s white,’ Aneka said after a while. ‘It used to be blonde. Dirty blonde, but blonde. Now it’s white.’ She looked up at Ella. ‘And I think someone
gave me a boob job while I was out.’

  The statement made Ella look at Aneka’s breasts. ‘They, um… They did a really good job on them.’

  ‘They’re a little bigger, I think, definitely more… perky.’

  ‘They’re…’ Ella shook her head and made a desperate attempt to look professional. Aneka spoke first.

  ‘Why would aliens kidnap me, turn my hair white, and perform cosmetic surgery on me?’

  ‘Well… Do you notice any other differences? Small things, maybe.’

  ‘Got a mirror?’ Ella pointed to a sink near the door which had a small mirror over it, and Aneka headed over to it. She looked into it, frowning as she turned her head from side to side. Then she turned and started twisting around to peer at her body. ‘I used to have a filling in one of my molars. I think that’s gone. Nothing else I can see… There was a chicken pox scar on my neck that I can’t feel.’ She looked down, pressing at the skin of her right thigh with a thumb. ‘The bullet wound I had here... that scar’s gone too. Odd, but…’

  ‘And there’s just the memory loss? You don’t feel any different?’

  Aneka frowned. ‘You’re skirting around something. My memory’s fragged, but I’m pretty sure I’m the kind of person who prefers not to be bullshitted.’

  ‘I’m not actually sure what that means, but… maybe you should sit back down.’ She looked like she would be a lot more comfortable with Aneka sitting, so Aneka sat, perching on the bed and pulling her knees up to her chest. ‘I’m not really sure how to explain this…’

  ‘Just say it. I’ll ask questions if I don’t get it.’

  ‘Okay… The aliens who took you were called the Xinti. We think they were organic beings once, but that was thousands of years ago. They kind of… uploaded their minds into huge computers, used different bodies, robotic and engineered biological, according to their needs.’ She paused, her eyes fixed on Aneka. ‘And… that’s what they did to you.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You’re, basically… um, a robot. A synthetic organism anyway. There’s a cybernetic chassis with an organic body hung around it. Your mind is running as a program on the computer that controls it all. An emulation.’