Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart Read online

  ‘Sure. If I scream, you can drag my smoking corpse out of the tube.’

  Aneka laughed. ‘Chance?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Don’t have a need to scream.’

  University of New Earth.

  The Dean appearing in Gillian’s office was generally not a great sign. That he had another man with him, a man in a suit so expensive it made Ella blanch, was odd. Then again, the history and archaeology departments at the university had become pretty famous recently. Maybe the guy was some benefactor and Dean Ajax was giving him the tour.

  Ajax gave Ella one of his beneficent smiles. ‘Miss Narrows, this is Mister Hayward of Hayward Pharmaceuticals. Is Doctor Gilroy busy? We would very much like to discuss something with her.’

  She was just supposed to say, ‘Of course, go right in,’ but Ella knew how much Gillian hated office politics. She tapped a key on her desk. ‘Doctor, the Dean is here to see you with a Mister Hayward.’

  There was a slight pause, during which Ella imagined Gillian was sighing. ‘Send them in, Ella.’ Gillian had almost completely managed to get the weariness out of her voice.

  The two men walked past, Hayward giving Ella a smile that managed to make her feel slightly dirty, and Ella went back to studying a document from the Xinti archives they had about early spaceflight. It was written, of course, in Xinti, a relatively complex language with various nuances, which made translation occasionally quite difficult, and she had managed to work her way through another hundred lines when Gillian’s voice came from her desk again.

  ‘Ella, could you come in here, please?’

  Frowning, Ella locked her screen and walked through into the second office. ‘Yes, Doctor?’

  Gillian was looking annoyed. ‘Never mind being formal for our guest, he wants something and I’m going to have to beg you to handle it.’

  The Dean was looking annoyed, but also embarrassed. Hayward was continuing to smile his slightly lascivious smile. Ella frowned. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Short version,’ Gillian said, ‘one of Mister Hayward’s research teams has got its hands on some Old Earth tech which appears to be oddly advanced. They have a load of documentation, but it’s in… English, Aneka calls it. Written documents, videos, and audio recordings.’

  ‘And they need someone to go over it and see what they actually have.’

  ‘And they won’t send it here, and I’m stuck here in case Negral contacts us again.’

  ‘We have a courier vessel leaving for Eshebbon on the first,’ Hayward supplied. ‘It will take very little time to get there and we can have you back just as quickly once you’ve done the work, and, in addition to our donation to the university, we would be able to compensate you quite handsomely, Miss Narrows.’

  She had run up some fairly large expenses recently. ‘I’d need to be back before the end of the year. My girlfriend should be back by then and I want to be sure to be here when she arrives.’

  ‘I am sure that, with your expertise, you will be done long before then.’

  ‘Okay,’ Ella said, smiling. Aside from anything else, it would probably take her mind off missing Aneka.

  FNf Delta Brigantia.

  Aneka walked onto the bridge to find Anderson leaning over the sensor console with Baron. Prentice and Hughes were in their seats, but neither had much to do with the ship, still basically a dead lump of high-tech scrap. Anderson turned her head and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I’ve put Scotts in my room for now,’ Aneka said. ‘He needs the rest while the Regelin works. No signs of concussion. The burn should heal fine. He’s awake, but I told him to stay put or I’d break his legs. Cole’s sitting on him.’

  ‘We’re going to need him, unfortunately,’ Anderson replied.

  Aneka nodded. ‘I heard Chance’s report. Some blown out power conduits?’

  ‘Repairable. We have spares. Currently the main problem is the long-range sensors, which seem to be out. Without those we can’t go anywhere without maybe hitting something.’

  ‘And it looks like the FTL comms are out too,’ Baron added. ‘Probably damage to the external array. Only way to be sure is for someone to go out and look.’

  ‘So…’ Aneka said.

  ‘The problem is that there’s a lot of gamma radiation out there. That was that light flare we saw before the lights went out. We seem to have passed through the worst of it, but it’s still pretty bad. Someone goes out there, they fry.’

  ‘So I go.’

  ‘Did you hear what he said?!’ Anderson asked, her voice rising.

  ‘I’m more resilient to radiation than a Jenlay, and you don’t just repair the damage like I do.’

  ‘I should point out that sufficient damage from radiation will kill off the nanomachines that do the repairs,’ Al said.

  ‘Well does it look bad enough out there to kill us?’

  ‘Currently, no. I was just making a point. There is sufficient radiation to endanger your dermal layer.’

  ‘From the looks of this,’ Baron said, unaware of Aneka’s internal conversation, ‘the level is dropping away. If we can wait a day it could be a lot safer.’

  ‘Then we wait,’ Anderson said firmly. ‘I’m happy to send you out there, but we aren’t going anywhere for a while. Twenty hours is not going to make much of a difference.’

  Aneka nodded. ‘Are we safe in here?’

  ‘The hull has to stand up to constant gamma-ray bombardment in warp, not to mention we’d all be sterile and bald if it didn’t stop cosmic rays.’

  ‘Oh… Space really sucks, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Outside a ship,’ Anderson said, nodding, ‘it’s a really nasty place to be.’

  Yorkbridge Mid-town, 13.11.525 FSC.

  Ella sat in the lounge of her apartment, sprawled on one of the cream-coloured sofas, looking at a woman who was not there. Aggy, technically Agroa Gar though no one used her full name anymore, was an artificial intelligence and she resided aboard the Garnet Hyde, one of the university’s research vessels. Right now, however, she appeared to be an attractive woman with golden skin, silver eyes, and honey-blonde hair sitting on the sofa beside Ella.

  ‘I must say, Ella,’ Aggy said, ‘that this method of communication is far more efficient.’

  Ella giggled. ‘Glad you like it.’ At the suggestion of Delta Ling, one of the university’s facilitators, Ella had had her cybernetic eyes upgraded. She had always been a little ashamed of having them. Most Jenlay viewed cybernetics in a negative light and, while Ella would be blind without them, she had always considered them a nuisance. Then she had met Aneka and Aneka had Al. It had given her a new appreciation of what cybernetics could do for her. Along with the eye swap she had had a tiny computer put into her skull, complete with a short range communication unit to allow wireless networking and ‘in head’ calls. That meant Aggy could project her image directly into Ella’s vision field rather than using a wall screen or Ella wearing special glasses. Then there was the other thing…

  ‘I’m not sure why you…’ Aggy began.

  Ella waved a hand. ‘It’s a surprise for Aneka. Now, you spent a lot of time analysing Old Earth writing and language, right?’

  ‘Obviously. My mission there was to assess candidates for the uplift programme. It would have been very hard if I didn’t understand the languages.’

  ‘Languages? We pretty much only know a couple. Aneka speaks English and, uh, Swedish, and she says Rimmic sounds like Chinese.’

  The golden woman nodded. ‘Federal is very close to English. There appear to be words in it from other languages and the vowels have shifted. As is often the case, there has been simplification. Rimmic does appear to owe a great deal of its structure to Mandarin. But Old Earth had hundreds of languages, thousands.’

  ‘Well, I just need to be sure I’m brushed up on English. For a job. I want to just speak it some. I did practise with Aneka. She helped us understand the vowel shifts and stuff a lot better than we did, but she’s not here.’


  ‘No,’ Aggy said, her voice sad. ‘I miss her.’

  ‘Yeah, so do I, which is another reason you’re going to distract me.’

  Aggy laughed. ‘Very well, a distraction I will be.’

  FNf Delta Brigantia.

  Aneka awoke from a dream where her skin was being stripped off, one flake at a time, by a searing wind. She found herself watching her morning diagnostics for any signs of radiation damage. Everything was, however, ‘optimal,’ and she slid off the bunk she had borrowed since Scotts was still in her bed.

  The Brigantia had a crew of fifteen, but there were always five of them on duty. Technically there were enough beds and bunks on the ship that everyone could sleep at once, so long as two of them did not mind sharing a double. In practice, the twelve bunks in the bunkrooms were never all occupied and there was always space to stretch out on one if needed.

  She checked the time and then reached for her ship-suit. Normally she wore an Ultraskin leotard, high-hipped, figure-hugging, and semi-transparent, mostly because she had grown to like it. Today she was going outside the ship and she wanted the added protection afforded by Xinti-manufactured super-materials. The suit was black and textured something like splint-mail, but it could easily stop a laser rifle beam. Add gloves, boots, and a helmet, and it was an exceptionally serviceable vacuum suit. Dressed and carrying her helmet, she headed for the mess.

  ‘External sensors indicate that the radiation level outside has dropped significantly,’ Al said as she walked. ‘However, I would recommend no more than twenty minutes outside before returning to allow our systems to repair the accumulated damage.’

  ‘Should be enough time for an inspection.’

  ‘I would imagine so, yes.’

  Aneka turned through the open door to the mess hall and immediately spotted Anderson and Scotts talking to Chance at one of the tables. The room was not large, but you could pack the whole crew in if you really had to. Generally you did not have to since someone was always on duty. Right now it was fuller than usual because most of the crew were waiting to find out what they were going to do rather than doing it.

  ‘How are you feeling, Scotts?’ Aneka asked as she approached them. She had been amused to discover the Brigantia’s chief engineer was named Scotts, though explaining why would have been a waste of time. Sadly he had an accent more like something out of New England than Scotland.

  ‘I’m fine. Skin’s healed over well.’ He grinned. ‘You can have your bed back.’

  Aneka gave a slight shrug. The cabin she was in was unassigned, one of two set off to the sides of the habitation block. Anderson had a cabin on the port side, Aneka’s was on the starboard, and she was mostly in it because it kept her out of the way of the crew while they were doing their jobs. ‘You can stay in there if you like.’

  ‘That’s an offer you shouldn’t refuse, Chief,’ Chance said, smirking.

  ‘And we all know you couldn’t, Chance,’ Scotts replied smoothly, ‘but I’ve actually got a sense of decency. I’ll be fine in a bunk…’ He looked around at Aneka thoughtfully. ‘If you’re feeling generous, Ensign Grant broke his wrist falling off that bunk and he’d probably be better off with more space to rest in.’

  Aneka looked across the room to where Gunnery Technician Philip Grant was trying to eat with his right wrist encased in a Plastex cast. ‘Hey, Grant, want to sleep in the starboard cabin for a while?’

  Caught by surprise, the young man who was probably older than Aneka looked at his captain. ‘She’s offering you more space in bed, Grant,’ Anderson told him, ‘not nights of untold pleasure.’

  ‘Oh, uh, I guess it’d be more comfortable with this damn thing on. Sure, thanks.’

  ‘I take it from your attire,’ Anderson went on, redirecting her attention to Aneka, ‘that you’re ready to go out and take a look at the sensor array?’

  ‘Al tells me I can spend twenty minutes out there without worrying. That should be enough for an inspection.’

  ‘All right, you’ll go out the forward airlock in ten minutes. Gives us time to set up monitoring.’

  Aneka nodded and started for the door. ‘I’ll be ready.’

  ~~~

  The stars were bright sparks in the darkness around her as she walked over the Brigantia’s hull. The Delta-class frigates were built for speed, both sub-light and superluminal. That did not, however, mean a streamlined thing of beauty. The Brigantia was basically a cylinder with a pair of huge engines mounted at the back, and a bulbous nose. Aneka had to walk through the darkness from the rear of the forward section, around to the craft’s ‘chin,’ where the primary forward weapons and long-range sensors were.

  ‘Almost there,’ Aneka said, or rather thought. Her thoughts were relayed through her internal radio and sounded from the speakers on the flight deck. All very efficient and convenient. ‘Radiation level is within tolerances, but I’m not exactly feeling happy about it.’

  ‘We’d be feeling worse,’ Baron replied.

  ‘Yeah… I can see the panelling over the forward sensor array. It looks like something blew out.’ She frowned, moving carefully closer. Her boots adhered to the hull using a nanofibre bonding system similar to the ubiquitous setaestrip. She knew that stuff could hold just about anything; it was the future version of Duct Tape. The surface on her boots, however, she always felt a little less sure of since it was electronically controlled by her suit. ‘No… I think we got lucky. Looks like something blew out one of the forward turrets. There are metal fragments embedded in the hull all around it.’

  ‘It’s not metal.’ That was Scotts’ voice. ‘The outer hull layer on the bow is a synthetic monocrystal. If its structure is disrupted like that it could be interfering with long-range sensor operation.’

  ‘Great. It’s covering a good few metres around the turret. How do we clear it?’

  ‘Start back,’ Anderson said. ‘You’re not going to do it straight away.’

  Aneka turned and started for the airlock. There was no sensation from her artificial skin, but her sensors were telling her that her dermal layer had taken damage: minor radiation burns, even through the suit. It was nothing that could not be fixed, and quickly, but she was in no mood to test her healing capacity right now. ‘On my way. But how are we going to fix it?’

  ‘The good news is that we don’t have to fix all of it,’ Scotts replied. ‘The bad news is that someone’s going to have to go over the surface of the hull with a plasma torch. That should anneal the material, even out the refractive index across the surface. Right now we’re getting too much scattering.’

  ‘That’s going to take a long time at ten minutes every couple of hours.’

  ‘Yeah, but the warp drive isn’t going to be working much sooner. We’re going to have to scavenge parts from other systems, cut out some of the damaged conduits… This is not going to be easy.’

  ‘At least you’re not saying it’s impossible.’

  There was a pause, which was a fraction of a second too long for her liking. ‘Not impossible. No.’

  Aneka remained silent as she trooped back, one careful step at a time, to the airlock. Scotts was not entirely hopeful they could fix everything enough to get home. Aneka was not going to ask what the odds were. It was almost certainly better not to know.

  ~~~

  Aneka turned off the shower and took a towel from the rack beside it. The showers in the Brigantia were not great, but the one in her room was more spacious than the ones in the Garnet Hyde. It would have been a little restricting, but you could have got two people in the little cubicle here and there was just no way you could do that on the Hyde. Aneka still preferred the Hyde, though that might have been because Ella was generally sharing the room with her. As she padded out of the washroom here, it was Philip Grant who watched her from the bed.

  The man’s pale-blue eyes followed her around the room as she dried her hair, put the towel back, and walked over to the edge of the bed. In her own time she would have expected a man she was
about to share a bed with to be doing that, simply because she was a very attractive woman. She had been before the Xinti got their hands, and claws, and saws, on her. Her body was all tight muscle, long-legged, narrow in the waist. Her breasts had been too large in her estimation; too large for someone with such an active lifestyle anyway. Sports bras had been her friend. The Xinti had turned her short, dirty-blonde hair into something more like silver, and they had made her breasts larger, firmer, and a little more pointed in the belief that what they saw on the Internet was society’s ideal in womanhood. Her face could have graced a catwalk model: thin, high cheekbones, with startlingly bright blue eyes. So Grant had a right to look, even if sex was off the cards, but she had a feeling that his attention was born of something else.

  ‘Are you watching my body, or a finely made piece of machinery?’ she asked.

  He blushed and his eyes rose to meet hers. ‘Both, I guess. I mean, I know you’re a machine, but… damn they did an amazing job. There’s no way I could tell if I just met you.’

  Aneka smiled and lifted her right foot up onto the bed, examining the skin on her thigh. An hour or so after she had returned to the ship there had been reddening and a few blisters; radiation burns showing up. Now there was nothing.

  Grant waved a hand at her leg. ‘There’s that, of course. I’d still have the burn unless they dosed me with a load of radiation treatment and covered it in synthetic skin.’

  ‘And that’s why I went out and not one of you flimsy organics.’ She grinned at him. ‘I wasn’t exactly happy about getting stuck in a robot body, but there are times when it comes in handy.’ Lifting her leg down, she pulled the sheet aside and climbed into the bed. ‘Uh… this might seem a little weird. I don’t sleep, I go offline. I’m told I move and breathe, and generally act like I’m sleeping, but you won’t be able to wake me. Al’s under orders to monitor external sounds, so if you’re having trouble with that wrist I should come around. On the plus side, I don’t snore, and if you do I won’t notice.’