Aneka Jansen 7: Hope Read online

  Ella was silent for a second, considering her response. ‘Have you made any notes about that?’

  ‘No, just a passing thought really.’

  ‘Don’t. Keep it quiet until we can present it to the AIs. The Xinti are gone… I’m just not sure suggesting that some of them may have engineered their transition to digital minds without consulting the rest would be a great idea.’

  Lena gave a slow nod. ‘You may be right, but it was a long time ago and–’

  And then the world exploded.

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  Ella became aware that she was conscious, but she kept her eyes closed while she assessed her situation in case it was particularly bad.

  The last thing she remembered was a lot of noise and the wall of the lab rushing at her. She was fairly sure it had been part of the wall which had been moving. According to her implant, that had been over two days ago. She had been out for two days and the injuries from the impact would have been severe… And there was something which felt a bit like a medical brace around her neck and she could not move.

  No… She could move, but not much. She was in restraints of some sort. Cold. Metal. She was fixed to a hard mattress at the waist, wrists, and ankles. The brace was cold against her skin, probably more metal, and it seemed to curve around her neck at the back leaving her throat exposed. More like jewellery than a neck brace.

  Wondering whether she was going to regret it, she opened her eyes. It was not an especially illuminating experience. The room was well lit and very grey. At a guess, she was looking at a room on a spaceship, but it did not exactly look like a cabin. In fact, it looked more like a cell and turning her head just confirmed that perception. The door was very solid with no obvious means of opening it, and there was a toilet and sink in one corner. Checking the ceiling again, she located a small, black dome in the opposite corner which had to be some form of visual sensor.

  All right, so the camp had been attacked. There was nothing on site with the explosive power to rip the lab building open, so it had to have been something from outside. They had been attacked, she had been hurt, possibly badly, but she had been healed if her biological readouts were telling the truth, and now she was clamped to a bed in a cell. And it was going to be several days before anyone on Shadataga even knew she was gone. She really should have insisted on a five-day check-in cycle; Aneka was going to be so sarcastic about this…

  The door opened with a hiss of heavy-duty hydraulics. Ella noted the arrival of a man in a grey uniform, but she was distracted from a thorough analysis by the muffled screams she could hear before the door closed. It had sounded like a man, and it had been a man in a lot of pain.

  ‘Can you understand what I am saying?’ the new arrival asked, speaking slowly.

  ‘You’re speaking a dialect of English,’ Ella replied. ‘I understand English.’

  He sniffed. He was well equipped for it, having a fairly strong, Roman nose mounted on the front of a moderately handsome face which had once been more handsome. Guessing ages was generally a pointless exercise just based on looks, but he was not in the flush of youth. The physique was powerful: he was tall and strong, and the muscle looked natural on him rather than bulked up. His voice was good too, resonant. The uniform was cut to fit well, though the dark grey colour did nothing for him. There was a symbol on the breast pocket of his jacket: three overlapped triangles in gold, with the middle one taller than the others.

  ‘I am speaking English, as it has been spoken for over three thousand years,’ he stated.

  Ella grinned at him. ‘No… I’ve met someone who speaks it as it was spoken a thousand years ago, and your vowels have drifted a bit. And historically that version of English came into use around–’

  ‘You would be advised to keep your observations to yourself, girl. Heresy is punishable by death and we already have you on bioterrorism charges.’

  ‘Now wait a min–’

  ‘You will cooperate. You will tell us who you are working for and how this weapon you were developing is used and countered.’

  ‘We weren’t developing a weapon! We were studying a nanovirus which already existed!’

  ‘So that you could use it on us.’

  ‘I don’t even know who you–’ She stopped, peering at him. ‘Wait… that symbol. I’ve seen that symbol before… Old Earth historical databases… Pinnacle. You’re Pinnacle.’

  ‘And you wish me to believe you did not know that?’ He put the kind of disbelief into the phrase which could only stem from total disdain for his target. Well that fitted with what she knew of the Pinnacle.

  ‘We know you attacked Old Earth centuries ago and were beaten back. I know of someone who ran away from you people a lot more recently. Aside from that, we had no idea where you were. No one I know of has seen anything of you in decades. Longer. I’m an archaeologist. Lacora was a mystery I was trying to solve. My microbiology specialist had got some way to working out how that virus came into existence, but… What happened to her? She was in the same building as me when you attacked. What happened to my team?’

  ‘We required one prisoner,’ he stated flatly.

  ‘Bastard.’ It was barely a whisper. They were all dead? He could be lying… Somehow she doubted that.

  ‘The slave collar you are wearing has a neural induction circuit. On command, or if you attempt to remove it, it will cause pain.’ He paused, maybe for effect. ‘You heard the screams as I entered? That was the gunner whose misdirected strike damaged your laboratory and our evidence. He is wearing one of those collars.’ He paused again, but this time it was likely to allow that thought to sink in. ‘I will return in a few hours to begin your interrogation. I will be bringing the control for your collar with me.’

  The door hissed again and he was gone. Ella was thankful when the door closed behind him, cutting off the screaming, but the idea that she might be doing the same soon had not yet entered into her head. They were all dead. All of them. And she was alone, in the hands of the Pinnacle.

  ~~~

  It felt as though she had been lying there for days wondering when the pain would start, and Ella knew that was an unproductive line of thought so she turned her attention to what she knew of the Pinnacle.

  They were, as far as she knew, a line of Humans who had set themselves up as the supreme strain of Humanity. They were, according to them, pure. Genetic alterations which had been made to many of the subspecies had been eschewed, though there had been some improvement. They were, essentially, a eugenics exercise which had become something like a religion. Her interrogator’s comment regarding heresy had confirmed that. It appeared that they were convinced that they were what Humans were meant to be like and anything else was wrong.

  Centuries ago they had mounted an assault on Old Earth, their original home world, but Yrimtan had been running things then. Aneka’s more-or-less twin had reacted badly to a war fleet appearing in her system and the Pinnacle ships had been pushed back, many of them in pieces. Ella had read accounts of the battle, which was why she recognised the insignia, but they were more or less ancient history. Despite worries that the Pinnacle would return to try again after Old Earth re-joined the galactic community, no one had seen anything of them.

  There had been rumours and mutterings. People spoke of a vast empire run off the backs of slaves taken from every Human subspecies. Given that the metalwork around Ella’s neck had been described as a slave collar, she was having to give more credence to the stories than she had previously allowed.

  Some of them seemed extreme, maybe a little inflated to make the menace in the dark seem worse than it was. There were several stories of huge raids where entire settlements were attacked, rounded up and transported away into slavery. Some said the Pinnacle would destroy an entire planet where the population defied them. A couple of history students had attempted to verify a few of the stories, but they always hit the same wall: everything happened in some far-off place which made it difficult, if not imposs
ible, to check the facts.

  Almost as if the interrogator knew she was distracting herself from the tedium, the door opened and he walked in. Ella heard the screaming again; whoever the gunner was who had messed up, he was certainly paying for it.

  ‘I wish to establish the stakes in our game,’ he said without preamble. ‘This way you will know why it is important to you to tell me what I want to know.’

  ‘What? I don’t–’ And then she began screaming.

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  Ella sat on her bed, curled into a ball in the corner, as far from the door as she could get. It was a small gesture, and useless, but it made her feel a tiny bit safer.

  The man had released her from the restraints when he had finished asking her useless questions, being unsatisfied with her answers, and activating the collar. It meant she could move, though there was nowhere to go. It meant she could also take in the fairly basic, short, grey tank dress she had been put in. There was no footwear. She could feel, but not see, the collar. It was made of curved strips of metal which seemed to have been moulded around her neck, and it felt as though it was quite ornate. There were even smooth areas which might have been jewels of some sort. She got the impression that the Pinnacle did not want their slaves spoiling the view with ugly indications of their status.

  She had been given food. Not bad food, actually. A stew of some sort and likely rehydrated before heating through, but it had filled her stomach. She had thought herself incapable of eating until the stuff had been in her mouth and she had realised how hungry she was. And the food had been delivered by a different man who had not said a word to her. He had been younger, but his uniform was identical to the older one. The Pinnacle, it seemed, were not big on rank insignia so there was no obvious way of determining relative seniority.

  The door opened and Ella pulled herself into a tighter ball. It was her interrogator again.

  ‘Our medical technician remarked upon your durability,’ he said. He was really not fond of introductory statements. ‘How did you survive the explosion? You should have died. There should have been broken bones, internal damage…’

  ‘Over-protective girlfriend,’ Ella replied. She watched as he took his hand from his pocket, the control for the collar in it. ‘Seriously! She’s spent thirty years worrying over me getting killed in one of the stupid situations we keep finding ourselves in. My bones have been reinforced with carbon nanofibres. There’s a lattice of nanotubes around my heart that contract with the muscles and keep it pumping. I’ve got nanomachines floating around in just about every cell doing one thing or another. My lungs filter gasses and particulates from the atmosphere. Huh, I used to be able to get drunk on one glass of wine and now I can drink like a fish and I never get a hangover.’

  ‘We detected extensive cybernetics. Your eyes are entirely artificial.’

  ‘Oh, those went much earlier. I contracted a type of disease when I was young. It ate away half my face and both eyes. The facial tissue they could rebuild, but it was easier to just replace the eyes. Now we’d just regenerate the lot, but back then some things were hard to get right, like nerves, and my optic nerves were half gone.’

  He gave a nod, apparently satisfied for once. ‘Are you ready to tell me about the virus now?’

  ‘Look, I’ve told you everything I know. I do archaeology, history, psychology. Social sciences. I know enough biology to understand some of what that virus did, but the woman who could have answered your questions was sitting beside me when you blew up the lab.’

  He turned the control unit over in his hand, obviously contemplating her answer. ‘Unfortunately I believe you are telling the truth. We have what we managed to salvage from your computers. It will have to suffice.’ He took another box from a pocket, thumbed over it and spoke. ‘Have Crowthorn executed. His stupidity cost us more than we thought.’ Pushing the boxes back into his pockets, he turned to leave.

  ‘So what happens now?’ Ella asked quickly. ‘To me. What happens to me now?’

  ‘You will be taken to our Border Enforcement Station to await orders from High Command. I expect you will be tried and executed, but they may show leniency and commute that to slavery. You’d make an acceptable house slave.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, but he was already walking out the door.

  Just before it closed, she heard the screams cut off suddenly. The Pinnacle did not waste time when it came to executions.

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  Aside from the deliveries of food and drink, Ella was left entirely alone in her cell. That was fine by her. She had attempted, once, to engage one of her guards in conversation. Well, she had asked how long they would be travelling and he had activated her collar for a few seconds before walking out. She was a fast learner and there was no point in demonstrations of resistance, though she had no doubt that Aneka would have handled the situation differently. Of course, Aneka probably would not have been captured, and if she had, the collar would have done nothing to her, and she would have probably killed everyone on the ship within the first day…

  Ella had come to the conclusion that her best chance was getting sentenced to slavery. There was some chance that she could escape at that point. With a gun in her hand, preferably two, she could do some damage. The Pinnacle people seemed strong, but she knew enough about unarmed combat that she could probably take one out before they could activate the collar, and then she would need to find weapons and a ship, and… Well, it was not exactly a great chance of escape, but it was a chance.

  Her only other option was waiting to be rescued and, while Aneka and Winter could do some pretty amazing things, they would be looking for one woman in a vast expanse of space. No, Ella had to do something to help herself, even if her chances were slim.

  Sealed away in her cell, she only became aware of their arrival at the Pinnacle station when her guard appeared at the door. ‘On your feet. We’re transferring you to a cell on the base.’ They were the first actual words he had said to her.

  The ship outside the cell was almost as functional and grey as the cell itself. She was led down corridors to an airlock and then through into a similarly functional structure, which was presumably the interior of a space station, via some sort of docking gantry. The gantry served a secondary purpose: there was a gravity gradient as they moved down it and it allowed some adjustment. Ella felt the slight disorientation which suggested spin gravity was being used on the station, and she felt about half her normal weight by the time she was inside.

  Her guard carried no weapons on him, but then he did not really need to. Ella had nowhere to go and she could be reduced to a screaming blob on the floor at a moment’s notice. They passed several other grey-clad men as she was walked through the corridors. None of them paid her any attention, which was possibly a good thing if the attitude continued into normal society. If the natives largely ignored slaves, then she would be largely ignored if she escaped and acted like she was just out on an errand or something.

  The new cell looked a lot like the old cell, but it belonged to a larger collection of them and there was no screaming to be heard in the corridor outside. The locks, Ella noticed, were electronic but required manual entry of a six-digit code, and each had a screen beside it which was presumably there to allow someone outside to see what was happening inside. She assumed that there was a security officer or AI watching the feeds as well. Her best bet still seemed to be slavery.

  As she sank onto the rock-hard bunk, Ella considered that: when slavery was your most favoured outcome, things had got really bad.

  ~~~

  A new guard, this one a blonde instead of a brunette, appeared at the door barely thirty minutes later, which was a little surprising after so much waiting on the ship.

  ‘On your feet, hold your hands out,’ he snapped.

  Getting up from the bed, Ella held her arms in front of her and he snapped a pair of thick, metal bracelets around her wrists. Then he grabbed her forearms and pushed her back against one of
the walls, lifting her arms up and stretching them over her head. There were two solid clunks as magnets in the bracelets locked onto the metal wall.

  ‘What–’ Ella began.

  ‘Keep your mouth shut unless you’re spoken to.’ He stepped away from her to the doorway where he assumed an attention posture and waited.

  He was not kept waiting long. The new officer-type looked older than Ella’s interrogator, but he was, if anything, bigger and more muscular. His hair was grey but cut so short it was hard to tell, and he had a hard, almost shrunken face as though his skin had been sucked dry and was clinging to his skull. He nodded to the guard and then turned his attention to Ella, peering at her for a few seconds before speaking.

  ‘Captain Horton informs me that several formalities were skipped when you were arrested and in his zeal regarding your interrogation.’ So her interrogator had been the ship’s captain. ‘I am Lieutenant Colonel Detrow, the commanding officer of Border Enforcement Station three-nine-five. You have been identified as Narrows, Ella. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ella replied. She figured that saying the minimum was the best course of action at this point.

  Detrow nodded. ‘Ella Narrows, you have been indicted for crimes against Pinnacle Law, namely unlawful incursion into Pinnacle space, unlawful production of biological weapons, and conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, treason, and heresy. Evidence of your actions has been transmitted to Olympus for evaluation and sentencing. Sentence will be carried out in four days. Do you have any mitigating circumstances you wish to have considered?’

  Ella blinked. It was not exactly due process, but it was a process. ‘We didn’t know we were in Pinnacle space, we weren’t making a weapon, we were studying one, and we had no intention of using it. Ever.’