Aneka Jansen 7: Hope Read online

  ‘Don’t mind the tail,’ Trin said, apparently reading Ella’s thoughts, ‘it has a mind of its own. More or less literally. There’s a nerve cluster at the base of my spine that was put in specifically to control it and they say it’s just an auxiliary brain, but I think it does what it pleases.’

  Ella giggled. ‘I don’t mind. It’s kind of nice. You’re a Felix, yes?’

  ‘Oh, you’ve heard of us? Ana said you weren’t from these parts.’

  ‘I met… Actually, I didn’t meet one a few years ago. She was in oestrus and locked in her cabin with a man.’

  Trin gave a grunt of displeasure. ‘Not that I mind the sex, but it’s a pain going through that every quarter.’

  ‘Anyway, you more or less match the description we were given of her. She’d escaped the Pinnacle and ended up in our end of the galaxy. She ran a long way.’

  ‘To get away from them? I don’t blame her. I decided to stay and fight.’

  ‘What is it you do on the ship? Aside from measuring people for clothes, obviously.’

  ‘Most of us do a bit of everything. First mate is basically second in command, so I stand a watch, run things while Ana is resting.’

  ‘You’re the XO, executive officer.’

  ‘If this was a military ship, yes. Ana likes to stick with the old terms from seafaring days.’

  Ella grinned. ‘She seems to play the “dashing pirate” card pretty heavily.’ Trin’s tail had not given up on the stroking, even though Trin had stopped taking measurements and was flicking through some sort of menu on the tablet.

  ‘It’s all part of the plan, so to speak. We’re pirates, no two ways about it, and we’d probably get our guts served to us for breakfast if we didn’t have the hearts and minds of the non-Pinnacle Humans out there. Someone would give us up. Haven’s location is a secret, but it’s not exactly a brilliantly hidden secret.’

  Haven again. Ella was about to ask more about it when Trin’s tail managed to squirm between her legs and she let out a squeak instead.

  Frowning, Trin grabbed her own tail, pulled it away from Ella and glared at the end of it. ‘Stop that. You’ve only just been introduced to the woman and you don’t even know if she likes tails.’

  ‘I, uh, I’m not really sure. I’ve never had a tail–’

  ‘Oh don’t say that! It’ll be all over you now. It’s convinced that you’ll never go back once you’ve had tail. Seriously. If it gets out of hand, just give it a slap.’ Her attention returned to the, apparently sulking, tail. ‘Yes, you heard me. She can slap you whenever she wants. That’ll teach you to get fresh. Ha!’

  Ella giggled. ‘Are all the Felix like you?’

  ‘Oh no, most of them are moderately sane.’

  ‘Right… Is there somewhere I can get some food? I need a shower, and then food.’

  ‘Sure. We use what was the officer’s mess, mostly. It’s down the hall. Ask anyone if you get lost. Oh, and put some clothes on. You don’t want to enflame anyone’s passions.’

  ‘But… you’re naked.’

  ‘Oh no. I’m wearing a knife.’

  ~~~

  The food was handmade. At the back of the mess a small kitchen had been organised where a man named Patches worked via protein fabricators and old-fashioned ovens and stoves to produce, today anyway, a thick soup with vegetables and meat in it, and fresh bread.

  As far as Ella could make out, Patches was Human, but his skin was oddly pigmented. There were patches of colour all over it. His face was white to the point of albino; his right hand was almost black while his left was a more normal pink. His eyes were almost white as well. He seemed like a happy enough cook, and the food was good, and served with a measure of rum. Ella began to wonder whether the entire crew spent much of their voyages drunk.

  She was working her way through the broth when a man walked in, and she tried not to stare as he collected a large bowl of soup. But then he came and sat down at her table, grinning at her. ‘Hi, I’m Lanyon,’ he said, offering her a hand across the table.

  He had four hands to offer. He was big, tall, and thickly muscled, though the lower set of arms, which had somehow been engineered to extend from his ribcage, was less heavily developed than the ones coming from his shoulders. He was wearing thick leather trousers and boots, and a wide belt. No shirt, but Ella figured he had trouble getting shirts to fit. Or maybe he just liked walking around half-naked: it seemed like a lot of the crew dressed to fit an image as much as for any practical purpose. He was not the most attractive man Ella had ever met, with a squashed nose and heavy brow with no hair to mask it, but he did have the kind of skull which suited bald.

  ‘Ella,’ Ella finally said, taking his hand. ‘Ella Narrows.’

  ‘I know. Word gets around pretty fast on a ship like this.’ His grin broadened. ‘You’ve got no idea what I am, have you? Trin said you knew about her kind, but I’m a mystery.’

  ‘Uh, pretty much.’

  ‘Polymelian. The Pinnacle made us as a slave race. Big, strong, four arms, no brains. They got it a bit wrong though. Most of us aren’t good at making decisions, but we can think for ourselves. I am pretty stupid though.’ He said it with such humour that Ella giggled.

  ‘I kind of doubt that.’

  He shrugged, a particularly expressive gesture on a man his size and with four arms. ‘I’m not as bright as most people. I’m brighter than most Polymelians. I’m the Quartermaster.’ He spooned soup into his mouth, chewing on a meatball happily.

  ‘Oh, right. Trin said something about you searching the transport.’

  ‘Uh-huh. We have to loot what we can and a transport like that might have had something useful. We have suppliers, but we steal as much as we can. We even got six nukes off a transport like that a couple of weeks ago. Not much use when we want to board something, but if it gets serious, a nuke’ll do serious damage.’

  ‘Yeah…’ Ella said bleakly. ‘I’ve seen nuclear weapons used before.’

  ‘Really? Not many people have. Even the Pinnacle don’t use ’em much.’

  ‘We had to destroy a virus production facility. I flew us out ahead of the blast from four ten-kilotonne warheads.’

  Lanyon’s two lower hands slapped the table. ‘Oh man! That must have been something to see. And you really don’t look like the kind of person who does stuff like that. I heard you were a scientist.’

  ‘I am a scientist. I just… picked up some additional skills due to being dropped into a number of peculiar situations.’

  ‘Like outrunning nuclear explosions.’

  ‘And a few other things. I had a pretty quiet life, and then we found this woman on a dead Xinti starship and… Well, it’s not like she caused it all, but after that my life got a lot more complicated. It seemed like it had calmed down again. I’ve spent the last… almost thirty years running a department at a university. It’s only been normal dangers to worry about, not nuclear bombs, viral nanoweapons, interstellar wars, infiltrating highly secret, heavily fortified military bases to kill a rogue AI…’ She trailed off, looking up at the ceiling. Lanyon was staring at her. ‘You know, it’s kind of weird, but I almost miss all that.’ She grinned. ‘You see, that’s what thirty years of normal does to you.’

  ‘Uh, wouldn’t know.’

  Climbing from her seat, Ella took her bowl back to the kitchen counter and started for the door. ‘Nice meeting you, Lanyon. Would it be okay if I took a walk around, see the ship?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be a problem, no.’

  ‘Fridgy. Oh!’ She darted back to the table and picked up her glass, knocking back the rum in one go. ‘Nearly forgot. See you around.’

  Lanyon watched her walk out of the room, eyes a little wide. ‘What a woman!’

  ~~~

  Ella’s gaze ran around the engineering section, taking in the systems she could see around her. She was not exactly an engineer, except when she had an engineering chip plugged in, but she had seen quite a few engines in her time and assisted in disman
tling one or two. And none of them had been quite like this.

  The warp coils, wrapped around the hull along maybe a sixth of its length, looked to be fairly standard, definitely part of the original design. From the basic configuration, Ella took it for a second-generation drive. From the looks of it, it had been derived from the original, Xinti-based, drives, but was an independent evolution. The Pinnacle had developed their own high-end technologies.

  The fusion reactor was also fairly standard and an uprated model using gravity-field compression to increase the yield. It was probably a Pinnacle design, but there were only so many ways you could build a fusion reactor.

  Right at the back, the large, spherical drive was another matter. She had seen Xinti reactionless drives before, one or two several times as big, but this one looked as though it had been bolted in using spit and setaestrip, and then wired to the rest of the ship with whatever cable there was lying around. Cubby had to be a genius, because only a genius could have created a mess like that and then got it to function.

  ‘I bet you’ve never seen anything like that, kid.’ Ella turned to see Cubby standing behind her.

  ‘Actually, I have, quite a few. Just never one that’s been wired up quite so… creatively.’

  ‘You have?’ he sounded genuinely surprised. ‘There’s not that many people who know Xinti technology when they see it, never mind having seen it working.’

  Ella looked at the strange little man for a second and then said, ‘Well, technically, if you discount a few generations of development, I’m Xinti technology. I work within a university that was created by Xinti AIs. I’ve got a computer in my head designed by them, cybernetic eyes, reinforced bones, enhanced organs… You’ve done amazing work given that you’ve been doing it from scratch.’

  She saw an eyebrow rise above his goggles. ‘Well… Now that’s a turn up for the logs. You come with me.’

  He led her off to starboard, down a ladder onto the lower deck of engineering and into a space which she had a feeling was his own, private little heaven. The place was strewn with junk of all sorts. Everything seemed to be of a different design, some of them quite old. Off against one wall there was a thin mattress set up. Cubby slept with his engines at least some of the time.

  ‘Now what do you make of this?’ the small man asked, holding out a metallic object. It was about ten centimetres across and curved into a half-moon shape.

  ‘Oh, I haven’t seen one of those in ages.’

  ‘You know what it is? I managed to rig a cell to power it, but it just sits there giving out weak radio pulses.’

  Ella took the device from him and balanced it on her palm. ‘Yeah, it’s… Let me see if I can get it to… There.’ The air between the horns of the gadget shimmered briefly and then patterns of light began to form within it, and dancing flashes of blues and reds drifted across the field it had created, sometimes mixing to give different shades. ‘It’s basically a child’s toy. Educational. They were supposed to learn to control the light emitters to give various patterns. Even the young ones had implants and they needed to learn clarity of thought to use them properly.’

  ‘Implants? Girl, the Xinti were robots.’

  ‘Not exactly, and not when this was made. They were organic once. Cubby, this thing is thousands of years old. There’s one in the museum on Shadataga that they managed to get working. The Herosians had been hoarding various things they had no idea about for years and they handed it over with the rest of their collection. They’ve actually started making them on some Jenlay worlds where implants are becoming popular. More for amusement than education though.’

  ‘Herosians? Never mind. It’s a toy?’ He sounded a little disappointed.

  ‘On the bright side, it’s got a weak force field emitter built into it. Just enough to let the light project onto it. Study that and you might be able to build something bigger. At the very least you could get projection holograms out of it.’

  Cubby gave her a grin. ‘Now that’s an interesting notion. You know those are supposed to be impossible, right?’

  ‘Tell that to my research ship. She uses them all the time.’

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  Security on the Hope seemed a little lax. Ella opened a door off one of the forward corridors and found herself looking onto the bridge. Even on the Amethyst Hyde, the flight deck was secured against random people walking onto it. She was about to leave when she saw Kade looking back at her from around an acceleration couch.

  ‘Come in, Ella,’ the captain said, so Ella walked in, the door closing behind her.

  The room was large, with consoles for six people on each side wall, the captain’s chair in the middle, and two helm positions forward of it. The front wall was one huge screen, currently showing a star field. They were in warp and the projection was artificial, generated from the rush of sensor data the vessel was receiving. Currently only the captain and one pilot were in the room. There was not really much need for anyone else while they were under warp drive.

  ‘Sleep well?’ Kade asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you. Better than I have in quite a while, actually.’

  ‘Good. Think you could fly her?’

  Ella frowned, surprised at the question. She walked over to the empty helm chair and looked at the controls. It was a twin stick design, not the same as the one she had learned on, but similar.

  ‘I’d need some familiarisation, and it’s been a while since I flew anything with manual controls, but probably.’

  ‘What controls do you usually use?’

  ‘Neural. Optical fibre into my data port and then it’s just a question of… willing the ship to fly how I want it.’ Ella grinned. ‘You’ve been talking to Lanyon.’

  The helmsman was looking at her, eyes a little wide. ‘Your data port?’

  ‘That’s Tebbot,’ Kade said. ‘He’s our pilot. Only pilot now. Tebbot, this is Ella Narrows, our visitor from far-off lands.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Ella said and then turned her back to him, pulling her hair aside to show him the plastic panel at the base of her skull with its two depressions. ‘One’s for a fibre cable, the other is for chips. Currently that’s loaded with survey data from Lacora, which is absolutely no use at all.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Kade said, ‘but you are.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m short a pilot. If even half of what you told Lanyon is true, you know how to handle pressure, and you know Xinti tech as well as the normal stuff. Yes, I talked to Cubby too.’

  Ella considered for a second and then said, ‘Is that why I’m dressed up in this outfit?’

  Trin had brought her new clothes to her the night before. The bodice was a heavy, black fabric with a pattern of purple embroidery down what there was of the front. It did not actually meet in the middle, leaving a fair expanse of cleavage on show. Belts around her waist and upper chest, and a collar, held it in place. The sleeves were short and puffed around the shoulders, which gave adequate freedom of movement. Then there were leather shorts, and tall, thigh-high boots with spike heels which added to her already long legs. It fitted in with the kind of outfit the crew wore more than the simpler, and more covering, clothes she had seen on the refugees Kade had picked up on her travels.

  ‘We may have discussed asking you to join us, at least temporarily. Look, you’re going to need money to persuade someone to take you back to Old Earth and I’m in need of a new pilot on short notice. We’ve got something big coming up and everyone on the crew gets a share when we make money. Come out with us, earn yourself the cash you need, and I can get a new pilot in time for the next run.’

  ‘Let me think about it,’ Ella replied, already thinking about it.

  ‘Sure. I don’t need an answer until we get to Haven. But when we do, we’ll be dropping off passengers and cargo and then heading out. This thing is time-sensitive, but it really is big.’

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  ‘You going to do it?’

  Ella looked up f
rom her food to see Lanyon sitting down across from her. His plate was piled high with vegetables and two of the slabs of artificially produced lean meat Patches had cooked up for lunch. They did not look especially appetising, but they tasted good.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Join the crew, of course. It’d be great if you did. No delay on the next mission, and we’re heavy on ugly men at the moment.’

  Ella giggled. ‘I’m not sure. I mean, I’m guessing your captain’s big score is some sort of hit on the Pinnacle, and I obviously have a bit of an axe to grind with them. And she’s right. I’m probably going to need some form of currency to get home…’

  ‘But?’

  ‘It just seems… This is going to sound like I don’t trust Captain Kade. She seems to have decided she can trust a total stranger after ten minutes of chatting.’

  The big man pushed an entire potato half into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. ‘Ten minutes of chatting with her. And more with me, and you helped Cubby with his gadget and told him about your cyber stuff and where you’ve come from. Didn’t need to be open about that, but you were. Trust begets trust.’

  Ella nodded and tucked into her food. She had not been absolutely open about everything Aneka and Winter had done to her over the last few years. Some of it had only been used in anger once, and that had been a real emergency on a dig. She really had had a fairly quiet life since the Collective had formed. Even the emergency, a huge attack by a horde of pack predators, had been a relatively mundane danger compared to wars, espionage, and terrorism. Did she really miss that kind of action? She knew Aneka did or Winter would never manage to persuade her to go off on missions for her.

  ‘I’m still thinking about it,’ Ella said.

  ‘If you’ve got worries, or questions, talk to Ana. Or Trin. Trin’s good to talk to and she knows Ana’s mind pretty well.’

  ‘Okay, thanks. I might just do that.’

  ~~~

  Trin’s cabin was set up a little like Kade’s, but more so. There were more cushions on the floor, the only breaks being a walkway past the hangers where her knife-belts were slung to the bedroom door, and a couple of short tables which formed little wooden islands in the padded sea. Trin liked her edged weapons: aside from the belts, there were knives and swords mounted on the wall as if on display.