Aneka Jansen 6: The Lowest Depths of Shame

by Niall Teasdale

  Apparently doing so, Janna straightened her back and walked over. ‘Am I interrupting anything?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing which cannot run in the background,’ Cassandra replied, smiling.

  ‘Right…’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

  ‘Yes… good idea.’ Janna settled onto a chair, sitting far too upright for normal.

  ‘What’s on your mind, Janna?’ Cassandra asked.

  ‘I… need some advice and, maybe, a favour.’

  ‘Advice?’

  ‘Yes…’ The ex-stripper took a deep breath, which made her large, barely covered breasts shift almost alarmingly under her halter top. ‘You know I prefer sex with women? In fact, I’m exclusive.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, yes.’

  ‘Well, it’s not entirely from inclination. I mean, I’m not exactly a lesbian, I just find sex with men… uncomfortable. I needed money, you see? To bring Ella here and get her eyes and face fixed. I did… I met some men who…’

  ‘I understand,’ Cassandra said. ‘The man who created me chose to educate me in what he wanted from me by streaming days’ worth of sex-related media into my system. I have seen things done to and by women which… Aneka wondered once why I was sane.’

  ‘Well, it put me off men for almost seventy years, but it’s not the same now that I have Sharissa.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, she still likes men, but she’s avoiding them because we like to share and with a man we couldn’t. And I do have some good memories of that aspect of my sex life. I feel like I’m…’ She paused, casting around for the right words. ‘I feel like I’m stopping the woman I love from doing something she enjoys, and that simply won’t do if I can do something about it. Seventy years. I think I should be able to overcome it after that long. You’re a psychologist. I was wondering…’

  ‘You know I specialise in machine psychology?’

  Janna managed a smile. ‘Yes, but I also know you like observing us strange organics.’

  ‘Very well. I think if you want to overcome this, then that is a first step. A good one. However, it won’t be easy. You’ll need an understanding male partner and I think I see where this is going.’

  ‘Your Al,’ Janna said, nodding. ‘He’s a psychologist, sort of, and he can talk to you electronically, as I understand it. So the two of you should be able to tell if I’m in distress. And he’s not, exactly, a man… If you see what I mean.’

  ‘He is an AI. His body is cybernetic. You would not be having sex with a man for your first time in a long time, but with… an extremely realistic sex toy.’

  ‘Oh I’d never call him that!’

  ‘Why not? That’s what we call each other. I am, at the base, a robot sex doll, and he has certain features which are really there only for that purpose. Obviously giving him a little autonomy from Aneka has improved our relationship on far more levels than the merely physical. But even there… He can pick me up and carry me. Have you any idea what that feels like when your initial relationship with someone assumed that we would never physically meet?’

  Janna nodded. ‘Simple things you thought you’d never do, and suddenly they become possible. I can grasp the concept. What do you think?’

  ‘I think that, in theory, it is a workable plan. I think that you should discuss it with Sharissa. Aneka and Ella are away, they went to Odanari after seeing Stephen Teldarian. We can’t proceed until they return, so talk it over with your partner. Feel free to invite me to join the conversation. We should, obviously, discuss it with Al and Aneka. They have some reservations about certain aspects of this body thing which I find amusing. Given that Al is in Aneka and Aneka won’t sleep with you, they might have an objection, though I doubt it.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Sharissa tonight,’ Janna said. ‘Do you think we should do the first session as a foursome?’

  Cassandra laughed her throaty laugh. ‘Give me a few hours and I’ll have everything planned with a coloured flowchart.’

  Odanari.

  Gwy’s sensors had been unable to detect any sign of life on the island where Steven Teldarian made his home, but Ella was still armed with a laser pistol when she walked down from the landing pad with Aneka.

  ‘It’s beautiful here,’ Ella commented as they rounded the corner to see the low, white house and the blue lagoon stretching out in front of it.

  ‘Uh-huh. I think, if I’m honest, I knew I was going to end up in bed with Stephen when I saw the view the first morning. But I’d have put up more of a fight if he’d actually tried to seduce me.’

  ‘Yeah… I can see your point. I still can’t see any heat signatures. You said he had two maids and a butler?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I’ve negotiated the public network,’ Al informed them. ‘I think this is one time where Mister Teldarian would not mind me hacking the other ones. That is under way. The public network is signalling that external communications are offline, however.’

  ‘That’s not a great sign,’ Aneka replied. ‘The fact that the front door is open is probably a worse one.’ She pulled one of her pistols from its holster on her right thigh and moved forward, sweeping the room as she entered. The hallway looked as it had when she had last been there with its not-carp in the ponds lined with not-ferns. Sand had blown in through the open door and never cleaned up. It was otherwise empty.

  ‘Aneka,’ Ella said, drawing her attention to the wall beside the door. There was a blackened mark at about chest height. Not really a burn, more like someone had rubbed graphite over it. ‘Blaster,’ Ella said, ‘set on stun. Someone was trying to take prisoners.’

  ‘It fits Stephen’s story.’

  They checked the guest rooms at the front of the house, finding nothing of interest, and then moved back down the central corridor. The office door was locked, but by then Al had cracked the service network and opening it was just a matter of telling the door to open. The room was as Aneka had last seen it, except that all the screens were dark. It seemed dead, too quiet, just as the rest of the house seemed far too silent for them to find anything good there.

  It was not until they got to the pool area with its bridge that they discovered their first sign of life or, more particularly, of death. Butler, Teldarian’s man-servant, was lying on the bridge where he had fallen. The air conditioning had kept the decomposition to a minimum, but Ella’s nose still wrinkled. Aneka thought it was a sign of what she had been through the past couple of years that that was her only reaction to finding a dead body.

  ‘Blaster wound to the chest,’ Ella said, her voice hushed. ‘They wanted prisoners, but they weren’t unwilling to kill.’

  Aneka nodded, pointing at the pool below where a dark shadow could be seen at the bottom. ‘He armed himself and tried to defend the place.’

  ‘I think,’ Ella said, looking down the bridge toward the lounge and dining area, ‘that he did a little better than try.’

  There was a dark stain on the Plascrete and another on the railing which looked like a badly smudged handprint. Producing a device from her belt, Ella pointed it at the mark on the floor and pressed a button on the top.

  ‘You remember Abraham saying his super-amazing scanner, the one the size of a room, would be a while before it could be handheld?’ Ella asked.

  ‘I recall, yes.’

  ‘This is the handheld version. He was surprisingly sanguine about it, considering one of his best pieces of engineering was trivial to the AIs.’

  ‘I think getting to study wormholes from the inside has him happy enough not to worry.’

  ‘True. It is blood, and it’s Jenlay.’

  ‘Anything else? There were other people here besides Butler.’

  ‘Male…’

  ‘And they would all have been female. Butler hit one.’

  ‘So it wasn’t the Herosians. Big surprise, but who was it?’

  ‘Al,’ Aneka asked, ‘anything on the internal video?’

  ‘No,’
the AI replied. ‘Someone introduced a virus into the system and it has done a very precise job of erasing any records from the last week or two.’

  ‘Huh. We’d better check the rest of the place, and Daniella’s house, but I’m not hopeful. You don’t leave bodies lying around if you’re staying with them.’

  ‘Do you think we should bury him?’ Ella asked.

  Aneka looked down at the body of a man she barely knew. He had been nice enough, and obviously very loyal. ‘We’ll bury him. There should be something in Gwy we can use. We’ll check the back rooms first.’

  The servants’ quarters were almost as sumptuous as the guest rooms. Two of the beds showed signs of having been vacated in a hurry. One of those, belonging to one of the maids judging from the contents, had a burn mark in the wall over the headboard. The third room was neat and tidy. The owner had obviously been up and about when their visitors had arrived.

  They got to the large bedroom which, presumably anyway, belonged to Teldarian himself without finding any more bodies. The room was painted a deep red, and in the centre of it was a huge, round bed.

  ‘He liked to have plenty of room,’ Ella commented.

  ‘Apparently. I was never in here. It does come across as very…’

  ‘High-end brothel?’ Ella suggested.

  ‘Well… yeah. I don’t think I’d want to sleep in it.’

  ‘You did fine in that room on the Serai. That was a bit like this.’

  ‘This is more bachelor brothel. That one was kind of comfortable in a deviant sort of way.’ Aneka walked over to a small door which was discreetly situated at the back of the room and pushed through. ‘Uh-huh… He doesn’t like sleeping in there alone.’

  Ella peered over her shoulder and found herself looking at a far smaller room with off-white walls. There was a single bed in it. It was a large single bed, but it was clearly meant for one person. There was a little cabinet near the head of it upon which was resting a tablet computer and a half-empty glass of water.

  ‘Almost makes me feel sorry for him,’ Ella said, frowning.

  ‘He’s had his butler murdered, and his sister and two maids kidnapped. You’re allowed to feel sorry for him.’

  Tristar Township, New Earth, 28.10.530 FSC.

  ‘We couldn’t find any real evidence of the attackers,’ Ella said as they sat in the lounge for debriefing. ‘Not at Teldarian’s place and not at the hotel complex. The DNA from the blood is the best chance we have.’

  ‘I’m running it through records now,’ Winter replied. She was a teenager again, a serious look on her face. ‘While you were away the news channels have been burning with this. They’re painting it as a Herosian attack. Everyone at the hotel killed.’

  ‘Well that doesn’t tally,’ Aneka said. ‘We got records from the hotel systems indicating thirty-eight staff on duty and sixty-nine guests. Gwy pulled the Peacekeeper reports. They found nineteen bodies. There was a lot of damage to the building structures, but not enough to bury or destroy eighty-eight people.’

  ‘They took more than just Teldarian’s sister.’ Winter nodded thoughtfully and then straightened. ‘The DNA matches a Special Operations Marine, Nathan Tulvy. According to his service records, he is currently stationed at Dokar.’

  ‘Well, that makes sense as far as it goes. The Navy wants Teldarian working on the Gathor, so they coerce him by grabbing Daniella, but they could have done that without all this fuss.’

  ‘And if they wanted to keep the tension up,’ Ella added, ‘why not just kill a lot of people? Why the abductions?’

  ‘Agreed,’ Gillian put in. ‘If they were saying that people were taken then I could understand it, but they are hiding the kidnappings.’

  ‘A mystery which will have to wait,’ Winter stated flatly. ‘We cannot find Teldarian’s sister, so he will be unwilling to be extracted, and they have other people working on the Gathor anyway. We can’t have them building working technology from it. Aneka, I need you to go back in there.’

  Aneka gave a shrug. ‘Well, it keeps me from getting bored.’

  Corax, 1.11.530 FSC.

  There were fewer people around the frigate when Aneka entered the bay for the second time. There had been more around Feathers and a few of the other public areas, so someone believed in rest days. They still had people working on the ship, however, which was going to make what she had to do more difficult.

  Checking that no one was actually watching her, she walked behind a pile of storage crates and activated her shield. A counter appeared in-vision with an estimate of the time she had available, given the current drain on her reserves. She had had to use the cloaking system for the last hundred metres to the entrance, but the power from that had been recovered already. She had fifty minutes to do what she had to.

  Slipping out of cover, she headed for the ship. She still had to be careful of noise, and if anyone bumped into her she was in trouble, but she was pretty sure no one was going to see her. Even lidar and radar, if there had been any operating in the bay, were not going to see anything.

  The dangerous part was going to be planting the devices Winter had given her. Five canisters, not large, but they would be visible as soon as they left her hand. She needed them all in place, and out of sight, before she triggered them and got out. And the first was going to be the most difficult. It was to go in the lower warp drive coil, which was opened up and sitting there near the ground. If someone saw that one, the alarm might be raised.

  There was a technician working three metres from the lowest run of the coil. She looked bored. Figuring all information was useful, Aneka looked over her shoulder at the tablet she was using and saw what appeared to be conductivity readings occupying the top of the screen, while the bottom showed a crossword.

  ‘Quantum,’ Al said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘She’s puzzling over eleven across. The answer is “quantum.”’

  ‘Do you want to tell her?’

  ‘I think that might arouse suspicion.’

  Moving around to the other side of the drive coil, Aneka found a spot between some cables where she could wedge the canister and pushed it in. It was mostly hidden and the small, flashing light on one edge was hidden. Satisfied, she climbed up the metal framework above and into the belly of the ship.

  You could tell that the thing had been cobbled together from technology only half-understood by the designers. The estimates Aneka had seen suggested a mass of around a thousand tonnes, and there should have been plenty of space, but the interior was bunged up with bulky, even over-sized equipment, and the destruction caused in studying the vessel had left even less space to work in.

  The cloaking system was not too bad. Hung, as it was, under the central hull, Aneka could crawl across the top, obscured from above and below. She placed two of the canisters amid the vaguely cylindrical machinery and then climbed up into the rear of the hull.

  Here she had to wait to allow people to walk past her, watch for projections as she slipped down the corridors, and generally spend more time than was necessary getting into the rear housing of the big gamma-ray laser which ran the length of the ship. One canister went at the front of the generator easily enough, but the second needed to go at the far end, and there was someone working on the control panel there.

  Picking up a loose bolt from the floor, she walked closer, taking it slowly to avoid making any sound. When she was right beside him, she got the canister ready, moved her other arm out until it was beyond his peripheral vision, and tossed the bolt into a corner. The man turned away from her to look, and she pushed the canister in behind the panel.

  ‘Nicely done,’ Al said as they started back the way they had come.

  ‘It’s not perfect. The light was showing against some of the metalwork. He might see it.’

  ‘Organics engaged in careful study are rarely so observant.’

  ‘Yeah, well… I hope we haven’t got one that is.’

  She waited until she was walking toward the
door to the access tunnel, quite visibly, before she told Al to activate the devices. There were a number of possible reactions to what was about to happen. She was hoping for panic.

  ~~~

  In the gamma-ray generation bay of the Gathor, Donald Mirian had just decided that something was not quite right. There had been a clattering noise, which was odd, but not entirely unheard of in the partially dismantled ship. When he had turned back from investigating that, something had changed. He was not sure what the something was, and he had been standing there, frowning at the console he had been examining, for five minutes, and it was not coming to him.

  Something seemed to move in the corner of his eye and he looked that way. There was nothing… And then he saw it, a faint, red glow reflecting off metal. Something in the dead ship was alive! The entire ship was basically scrap, as far as they could tell, but he had found something which seemed to be working.

  He turned to get a penlight from the bench set up behind him to hold his equipment. That would let him look into the dark space behind the console where the light had to be coming from.

  When he turned back, the control panel was dissolving in front of his eyes.

  High Yorkbridge, New Earth, 2.11.530 FSC.

  ‘It’s a total loss?’ Pierce asked. He was turning a tumbler of the best whiskey the Federation had to offer in his hand and did not seem especially annoyed.

  Part nodded. ‘Nanotechnology of some sort. Fairly basic I’m told, but very effective. It ate its way through pretty much everything aside from the hull plates. We’re currently unsure whether it was sabotage or someone triggered some sort of self-destruct mechanism.’

  ‘It was sabotage. There is someone with access to very efficient technology who does not want us to gain from our victories. I can guess who.’

  ‘Winter.’ Part spat the name out and then sank the contents of his own glass in one go.

  ‘Indeed. This needs to be countered. We need her fighting fires rather than looking carefully at our plans. We need… We need civilian casualties. I think that the Herosians will have to kill a few people on New Earth.’