Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart

by Niall Teasdale

  Nayland raised his pistol, pointing it at Corazon. ‘Shut up! Shut up or so help me I’ll…’

  Both Kottigan and Ella raised their weapons, levelling them at Nayland, but it was Corazon who spoke. ‘Go ahead. At least it’ll be quick.’

  ‘The shuttle,’ Ella said. ‘Everyone into the shuttle.’

  ‘We can’t fly it,’ Corazon reminded her.

  ‘No, but we can seal it and on the ground the air won’t run out. There’s heat in there too.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Kottigan agreed. ‘We can hole up in there, get food in. It’s our best chance of surviving until the next supply ship comes.’

  With everyone aboard and the hatches sealed, people drifted into seats, largely attempting to avoid sitting too near anyone else. That was not difficult; the shuttle was a Concordia-class transport with two cabins and a small lounge. They were used for moving passengers up and down between New Earth and its orbital stations, and on those the lounge had vending machines for drinks. Here there were far more comfortable chairs in the lounge, but no drinks. Still, it was a good place to drag Nayland and Corazon to talk to them.

  ‘Okay,’ Ella said, ‘what do we actually know about this bug?’

  ‘We didn’t actually lie about anything we told you,’ Corazon said.

  ‘You didn’t tell me much, and I’ve never seen the written reports you said you had.’

  ‘Commercial secret,’ Nayland stated flatly.

  ‘Are you fucking nuts?! This virus wiped out the researchers who originally created it. They couldn’t control it. It killed all of them.’

  Corazon looked resigned as she spoke. ‘The written reports went into a lot of detail about their initial studies, their attempts to re-engineer the virus, and their tests, of course. We have full specs on the eventual machines they constructed, but no reports on the final stages of the last tests.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ella said, ‘because there was no one alive to write them up. Wait, it’s not actually a virus?’

  ‘Viral nanomachines. Organic, yes, and structured like a virus superficially. They have far more complex mechanisms for altering replication in living cells. You were right; the complexity is beyond anything we’ve ever encountered before. They never said they salvaged it from some Xinti site, but there’s no way that they could have created the basic system themselves.’

  ‘And you thought it was a great idea to experiment on these things?’

  ‘Have you any idea what advances we could make in medical science studying these machines?’ Nayland asked. He was covering up insecurity with anger. ‘Genetic defects can be altered after conception, on fully grown adults. Limbs can be regrown. You have cybernetic eyes. With this technology your eyes could have been entirely regrown!’

  ‘Uh-huh… and that’s why you drugged me and spent days analysing my blood.’ Ella had to admit, he was good; his passionate defence of his noble ideals stalled on his face for barely a tenth of a second. ‘The only thing I can think of that makes me any different from anyone else is the stuff the AIs on Negral put in me. They didn’t want us catching anything, so they gave us some sort of nanomachine antibiotic…’

  ‘Oh, it’s much more than that,’ Corazon interjected, her eyes lighting up. ‘Your machines attack just about any microbial or viral agent that gets into your blood. We introduced mutated blood cells to some of them and they were shut down quickly and efficiently. You’re probably immune to cancer. We found evidence that they’ve been cleaning out deposits in your blood vessels. Gopi, they’re cleaning plaque off your teeth!’

  ‘Okay,’ Ella conceded, ‘they’re engineered, perfect little body cops and you’d like to study them. Why the subterfuge? This is exactly the kind of technology we were planning to disseminate through the Galactic University programme.’ She paused for a second as both Corazon and Nayland looked away. ‘It’s not just competitive advantage, is it? If these things can destroy a bacterium, they can destroy a cell. You’re creating bio-weapons. The rumours are true.’

  ‘Doesn’t really matter, does it?’ Corazon replied. ‘We’re all going to die.’

  ~~~

  Ella slipped onto the flight deck of the shuttle and settled into the co-pilot’s seat, leaning back into the slightly reclining position with a sigh. It was getting dark outside and she was hoping to get some sleep, but the last people she wanted to be near were the men and women who had drugged her into oblivion. Kottigan, sitting in the pilot’s seat, was not exactly on her favourite people list, but he had done nothing to harm her and had actually returned to the labs to pull her out.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind the company,’ she said, her voice low mainly because it felt like a good idea.

  ‘Huh,’ the grunt was half-laugh, about as much humour as he could manage. ‘I’ve had worse-looking people keep me company on guard duty.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Okay, a lot worse.’

  Ella chuckled. ‘It’s okay, I wasn’t fishing. Have you got a partner? Family?’

  ‘Not really. One of the reasons I took this job was to get away from my last partner.’ He glanced across at her. ‘It wasn’t an entirely amicable break-up. I swore off anything committed for a while. Haven’t done without, y’know? But there’s no one to miss me and no one I’ll miss. You’re with that woman they found, right? The one from Old Earth?’

  ‘I found her. Aneka.’ The thought that she might not see Aneka again surfaced and was immediately suppressed. ‘What do we know about the things that come out of the cocoons?’ she asked to change the subject.

  ‘Not a lot. Uh… They’re stronger than average. The lasers burn them, but they don’t seem to care. I saw one lose a hand and it just kept coming. I hit one in the chest, should’ve killed it, but it didn’t. The cold doesn’t seem to bother them. Several of them walked over from the Beta site in indoor clothes. They act more like animals than Humans, and they go crazy when they’re wounded. Their skin looks… old, kind of dull and slack, and they stink. You can smell them before you see them. Oh, they, uh, they eat…’

  ‘Us?’ That just sounded like it rounded out the whole package.

  ‘Yeah, but they’ll eat their own kind too. We nailed one of them, laser right in the face and it went down. Several of them stopped coming at us and just started tearing into the corpse.’

  ‘Okay. Lovely.’ Ella frowned, looking out at the gathering gloom. Her eyes automatically adjusted, brightening the darkness. There was no sign of anything moving out there. ‘So they need to eat. Do they sleep?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘So we don’t know whether we can go out at night… It’s a neat solution. Objectively, it’s a clever design for a weapon. The disease converts people into a vector for the disease. The vectors spread the disease, but they also kill people uninfected, and then they’ll eventually kill each other for food… You said they stopped attacking to feed?’

  Kottigan swallowed. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So they aren’t inherently hostile. They kill for food. If they’re not hungry they won’t attack unless attacked. That could be useful to know. I don’t suppose we know how many there are?’

  ‘We had a complement of four hundred and change. How many were infected and how many were just killed I’m not sure.’

  ‘Over a hundred of them then, maybe a couple of hundred. Gopi.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kottigan said. ‘Gopi’s right.’

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  Ella blinked, not sure why she had woken up until she heard her name called again. She turned and looked at Kottigan. The man’s skin looked reddened in the dim overhead light and bore a sheen of sweat. Ella gasped.

  ‘Yeah…’ His voice was weak, barely audible in fact. He pointed at his carbine, leaning up against the flight console. ‘Think you can use one of those?’

  ‘Not well, but…’

  ‘It’s more powerful than the pistol, holds a bigger charge.’ Reaching to his waist, he plucked a short, thick cylinder from his belt, and then unbuckled t
he belt and handed it across to Ella. ‘Spare mags… two grenades. Careful with those. Directions on the case.’

  Ella looked at the cylinders on the belt, and then the one Kottigan was holding. ‘What… what are you going to do with that one?’

  ‘I’m not going to become one of those things, kid. If I get lucky, maybe I can take a few of them with me.’

  ‘Right…’

  ‘Good luck.’ He climbed to his feet, wobbling slightly and catching himself on the chair back, and then started for the hatch behind the flight deck.

  ‘Goodbye, Kottigan,’ Ella said.

  She waited in silence, listening for any sound, for seven minutes, according to her internal chronometer. When it came it was little more than a dull thud in the distance. She wondered whether he had managed to take any of the creatures with him.

  ~~~

  ‘Kottigan’s gone,’ Ella said as she walked into the lounge.

  Corazon looked up at her from where she was sitting on one of the couches. ‘We lost two more last night. Maybe… maybe they went before they could infect anyone else.’

  ‘Have you any idea when it starts to get communicable? The sweating…’

  ‘The conversion process generates a lot of heat, hence the fever. That might also be a means of spreading it, but none of the notes gave a definite answer and I wasn’t able to determine one for sure.’

  Ella looked at her for a second and then said, ‘But you think you know.’

  ‘I think we’re fucked,’ Corazon replied, her voice barely above a whisper. Then she raised her voice a little. ‘I won’t end up like them. See to it I don’t end up like them. Please.’

  Ella looked at her, horrified. ‘I’ve never killed anyone…’

  ‘You won’t be. You’ll be shooting a corpse.’

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  Ella slipped out of the forward hatch of the shuttle just as the sun was starting to rise, turning and pressing the close button. Kottigan’s carbine was slung over one shoulder, his belt with one grenade on it was over the other. When the hatch locked shut, she started walking towards the facility, watching for any sign of movement.

  About halfway back she stopped and looked at the small disc-shaped device in her left palm. It was the cap of the second grenade. She had read the instructions carefully before she had handed the grenade body to Corazon. The woman was lying on one of the couches in the lounge now, her face red and covered in sweat. Waiting.

  Ella placed her thumb over a red button on the inside of the cap, closed her eyes, and pressed down. The explosion was little more than a thud; all that fire and compression contained within the pressure hull of the shuttle. She remembered the look of gratitude on Corazon’s face. She remembered what Corazon had told her in the darkest hour of the night. The bitch had not deserved that much compassion.

  She pressed forward towards the station. She needed to find food, which meant going to the canteen area before heading to her room. It would be dangerous, maybe, but without food and water she was going to starve before there was any chance of being rescued. Maybe she would run into Nayland on the way. Then she could shoot him in the face and do something good with the day.

  The head creep of research had slipped out through one of the rear hatches after three more people had come down with the nanofever. Ella was not sure that he was infected, but given the incubation period Corazon had suggested it was pretty likely. He might still be on his feet, or he might already be a pupae somewhere. Really she did not care, but shooting him would have been nice.

  So far Ella was showing no symptoms. She had had a sudden moment of panic mid-morning when it had felt as though her temperature was spiking, but that had subsided quickly. The only viable explanation was the nanobots in her blood. She vaguely recalled a programme she had watched on the potential horrors of nanotechnology and some expert claiming that if terrorists deployed nanotech weapons, nanotech defences could be made to destroy the invaders before they could do harm. If Ella’s ‘blood cops’ were doing rather more for her than had been initially suggested, maybe that included destroying attacking nanomachines.

  She saw nothing all the way to the facility, but the doors were sitting open when she got there. She closed them behind her. If there was anything inside then sealing it in with her was not going to matter, and if there was not then maybe they were not intelligent enough to open the locking wheels. Besides, it kept the heat in.

  The corridors were deserted, so was the canteen, for which she thanked any deity who might be listening, and the universe if they were not. She had decided that her room was the safest bet because it was high up, out of the way, and she thought she could secure the door. Theoretically the labs were safer, but she figured that there could be several of the creatures down there, and the emergency stairs would have been opened up for evacuation, which circumvented the facility’s security. Being underground had not seemed like a good idea either.

  Finding a trolley in the store room at the back of the canteen, she loaded it up with whatever sealed food and water containers she could manage, and two brooms which were set against the wall in a corner, and headed for the central lift. The creatures had to be somewhere, but where she was not sure. Maybe they just did not know she was there yet. Maybe they were off somewhere killing each other for the meat. ‘Vashma, I hope so,’ she muttered as she waited for the lift to reach the top level where her room was.

  The room was as she had left it, untouched. Her belongings, which she had not even given a thought to as she had escaped with Kottigan, were all still there. Pushing the door closed, she turned the wheel and then jammed the two adanymax broomsticks into it crosswise. When she tried the wheel again, it jammed against the sticks, which were jamming against the floor. Just to be sure, she took the desk chair and did her best to wedge that under the wheel too.

  Ella nodded. Even if the things were stronger than normal, she doubted they were going to get through that. She was safe. Pulling off her helmet, she dropped onto the bed.

  That was when she started crying.

  FNf Delta Brigantia, 1.1.526 FSC.

  ‘As this old year turns and the new one begins,’ Aneka said, ‘we give thanks for all that has been, and look forward to all that is to come. The Long Dark is gone and we look into the light. Let this First Day be the first of many where we strive to be the best we can be and fight to keep the darkness at bay.’ She took a drink from her glass, along with the rest of the Brigantia’s crew, and then she added, ‘I have to find someone older than me to do this with.’

  ‘I’d say,’ Anderson said, ‘that you’ll have a tough time doing that.’

  ‘I’m only the oldest on a technicality.’

  Anderson laughed. ‘Gets me out of doing it. On Navy ships it’s usually the responsibility of the most senior officer. Having you here gives me an excuse to shirk.’

  ‘Seems to be a common theme.’ Aneka looked down at the glass and sighed softly.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘I usually do this with Ella. I was hoping I’d be back in time…’ She shook herself. ‘I’m sure she’s gone over to Gillian Gilroy’s place. In twenty minutes she’ll be giggling and suggesting a threesome in the hot tub.’

  Anderson reached over and clinked her glass against Aneka’s. ‘Well then, I’m sorry you’re missing out. Chance and Shari would oblige if you gave them half a chance.’ She grimaced. ‘You know what I mean.’

  Aneka smiled at her and then looked across at the pretty blonde pilot and the handsome technician. ‘Yeah… yeah they probably would.’ She looked down at her drink again, wondering what Ella was really doing.

  Hayward Alpha Research Facility.

  Toasting the Renewal with water was not how Ella had wanted the year to start, but she knew her alcohol tolerance was lousy and the last thing she needed was a hangover. She had barely managed to struggle through the little speech as it was. The words had tasted sour in her mouth, she had been fighting back sobs most of the way through it, a
nd Aneka was not saying them.

  The last time she had had to recite the Renewal was when she was thirteen, over sixty years ago. She had been allowed to stay up for the first time, and she had been given a small glass of wine and a card with the words on. She had read it through three times before it got to midnight, determined that she would do a good job. The headache she had suffered through in the morning had almost been worth it. Ever since then she had been with someone older on First Day. She had never been alone before.

  The reason she was not taking a chance on drinking was that she had worked out why none of the creatures had been around when she left the shuttle. Their numbers had been growing over the past couple of days. Putting it simply, most of the ones at this site had not hatched, and now they were coming out.

  Still, she figured she had enough food to last her for a month before she had to try to find more. When she finished a bottle of water, she refilled it from the tap in her bathroom and put it aside. She was not sure that the facility’s environmental systems would keep functioning, but she was also not sure that drinking the water was safe. She was saving that for when the bottles ran out. Which just left her waiting.

  Saying the Renewal had made her realise what she was really waiting for. She was waiting for Aneka to come and rescue her.

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  ‘The report from the Delta Lantilla has come in, ma’am,’ Truelove said as she walked into Winter’s office. The room was not large, and while the deep, red paint on the walls made it feel warm, it also tended to make it feel smaller still. The furniture, made from actual, real wood, was also dark in colour and quite large, and that did not help either. On the other hand, Truelove felt, it did make speaking to Winter in her office feel more intimate somehow.

  ‘I know,’ Winter replied. ‘I’m read… I’ve read it.’ She looked up from the screen. ‘No radio contact at all, signs of activity on the surface, but those signs are “unusual.”’