Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart

by Niall Teasdale

  The shuttle settled onto the bottom of the pit and Aneka shut down the propulsion systems. The gravity shifted from a normal one-G to the much lower pull of the small world. Aneka pushed her chair back and almost bounced out of it. ‘Okay then… Get your helmet on, Delta, time to go to work.’

  ~~~

  The thick air swirled around them as they worked, like a slow tornado that tried vainly to push them over as Delta finished wiring a small computer unit into the external control panel of the airlock. Thunder roared through the air, sounding distant, but still threatening.

  ‘I think… Yeah, that should do it,’ Delta said. ‘This thing is kind of primitive.’

  ‘Hopefully that makes this easier,’ Aneka replied. ‘Al?’

  ‘I am connected to the slave unit and attempting to determine the control system’s protocols. Between me and Aggy’s database of security measures from your time, I believe this should go smoothly. Give me a moment… Done.’

  ‘That was a very short moment.’

  ‘I’m very good.’

  Aneka drew Bridget, flicking the safety off. A little startled, Delta aimed her carbine at the doorway. ‘Okay, Al, open it.’

  The heavy door levered itself open, swinging to the left. The airlock was about five metres long and lit only by a dim, red light over the door at the far end, but there was nothing in it which suggested trouble.

  ‘Aneka to shuttle, door’s open, we’re clear to proceed.’

  Bashford’s voice replied over the radio. ‘We’re on our way out.’

  ‘Is there any sign of life?’ Ella asked.

  ‘Only electrical,’ Aneka replied ‘There’s what looks like an emergency light on, and the door was obviously under power. All we’ve got open is the airlock, so there’s not much to see.’ She gave Delta a nod. ‘You want to disconnect that and close up the panel while they’re coming over?’

  Delta re-slung her carbine and got to work on the wires. ‘Do you, uh, think there’ll be bodies?’

  ‘No idea, but a good point. Ella? You’ll check for biohazards in there, right?’

  ‘Of course,’ Ella replied.

  ‘I think we won’t find any,’ Gillian said. ‘Bodies that is. The sensors saw nothing in the way of ships. I believe that, if anyone was actually here when the Xinti came, they left at some point after the attack.’

  ‘Good,’ Delta said. ‘I realise I’m going to have to see dead bodies on this job sooner or later. I’d just prefer it if it wasn’t on some abandoned, isolated station.’

  Aneka grinned. ‘Yeah, that would be the stuff of horror movies.’ The rest of the team was emerging from the nearest airlock on the shuttle. Aneka watched them, just in case anyone had trouble in the swirling wind.

  ‘And you used to watch that kind of thing for fun?’ Delta asked.

  ‘It’s not like it was real. No such thing as ghosts, or zombies, or vampires.’

  ‘Vampires?’

  ‘Dead people who rise from the grave to suck the blood of the living.’

  ‘There are chucks,’ Ella commented. ‘You called them zombies.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Hopefully I’m not going to find out I was wrong about ghosts and vampires too.’

  ‘Right, now let’s worry about current and present danger,’ Bashford said. ‘Delta, Monkey, take the rear.’ He indicated that Aneka should lead in and then followed her.

  There was a panel beside the door which looked like it was the airlock controls, and since the buttons were glowing dimly Aneka figured they would work. She glanced at Bashford, got a nod, and hit what looked like the button to cycle the air. Behind them the door swung closed with a clang.

  ‘The air is cycling,’ Ella said after a couple of seconds. ‘The pressure is approaching normal…’ Her eyes widened. ‘I’m actually getting oxygen showing up.’

  ‘Can we breathe it?’ Delta asked.

  ‘Hang on…’ The light above the door went from red to green and the door started to open. Aneka and Bashford immediately shifted to cover it. ‘We’d suffocate,’ Ella continued. ‘Oxygen is too low, carbon dioxide is too high. I think the air-processing system is offline and this is what’s left after a thousand years. I’m showing trace ammonia, methane… No organics. I think Gillian’s theory is right.’

  Aneka and Bashford moved into the corridor on the other side of the door. It burrowed straight to the south, at least a hundred metres. Aneka could see another door at the end, this time secured with a locking wheel. The walls were metal, probably steel, and they looked pretty rough and ready, but solid.

  Gillian had her own scanner out. ‘Steel plating over a polymerised ceramic. This place predates bioplastic construction. No Plascrete, none of the adanymax variants.’

  ‘Huh,’ Aneka grunted. ‘Good, solid, old-fashioned construction.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Gillian replied. ‘I’m amazed it’s lasted so well.’

  ‘Let’s see how well,’ Bashford suggested. ‘Close the airlock, but stay by it. Aneka, I’ll take your advice and let you lead once we’re through that door at the end.’

  Aneka nodded and headed down the corridor. There was a small porthole in the door which showed clear air and a staircase on the other side. She slipped Bridget back into her holster and turned the wheel. A millennium of lack of maintenance made the big door stiff, but it gave way to Aneka’s artificial muscles. Pulling both pistols, the displays from them appearing at the sides of her vision field, Aneka moved on up the open, steel steps.

  She emerged into what looked for all the world like the reception area of an airport. The room was moderately large and had seats in rows. She could imagine people waiting here to embark a shuttle on their way back to Earth. The lighting was dim; maybe half the ceiling lights were still working and a couple of those were flickering. It looked like there were actual fluorescent tubes behind the panels, and the overall effect was spooky.

  With only one obvious way out, Aneka took it, finding a short corridor leading to a crossroads. Signs on the walls pointed to ‘Central Control’ straight ahead and a couple of habitation blocks to the north and south. ‘Straight on?’ Aneka suggested.

  ‘If there’s anything here, I think that’s going to be the first place we’ll find it.’

  Aneka went on down the corridor. There were doors on either side which remained closed as they passed. All of them were labelled and seemed to be administrative offices. Aneka realised as they went on that she was getting tenser and forced herself to relax. The chances of anyone or anything being here were too small to calculate. The corridor ended in a double door. Aneka nudged the button beside it with a pistol muzzle and the doors scraped open, one of them jamming two-thirds open.

  Central Control was a hexagonal room on two levels. A walkway ran around the edge at the level they were on; ladders dropped down to the floor below at the four compass points. On this level there seemed to be various instrument panels and Aneka spotted one close by with an active display.

  ‘I think I know why it’s still powered, Doc,’ she said. ‘There’s a panel here that’s showing readouts for a geothermal plant. Looks like there’s a reactor as back-up, but that’s been shut down.’

  Bashford was looking at some of the panels on the other side of the doorway. ‘All these systems seem to have been closed down. I mean really closed down. Someone did an orderly shutdown of the entire facility. Only the very basics were left running, like they were thinking someone might be back to bring it up again.’

  ‘Well,’ Gillian replied over the intercom, ‘we’re here.’

  ‘We’ll see about that in a bit.’

  Rather than going down the ladder, Aneka relied on her enhanced body and the low gravity and dropped from the walkway to the floor below. Her guns swung up and around as she landed, spreading her visual field, but there was nothing to see aside from computer consoles and chairs. There were two offices behind glass walls at north and south, one labelled ‘Security’ and the other containing a bigger chair, probably the comma
nding officer’s office.

  Aneka lowered her guns. ‘We can sweep the habitation areas, Bash, but I think we’re being excessively paranoid.’

  Bashford looked down at her from the walkway and nodded. ‘Okay, you four get up here to the control room. It’s straight through from the air lock, no deviations. That means you, Doctor Gillian Gilroy.’

  ‘As if I would,’ Gillian replied. ‘I want to see this control room.’

  Bashford’s laugh was throttled some by the intercom. ‘You can see if any of these systems can be brought back from the dead. If we can get a breathable atmosphere in here it’ll make working easier. Aneka, you check the northern habitat. I’ll go south. We might as well be sure there are no breaches at least.’

  Nodding, Aneka stepped up to the ladder, bent her knees, and jumped. She had to grab the railing at the top to stop herself flying into the ceiling. ‘Okay… So I’m not quite adjusted to low gravity yet.’

  ‘That’ll teach you to have super-muscles,’ Bashford commented as he turned for the door.

  29.8.526 FSC.

  They were still in their suits, but their helmets were now just being kept close. It had taken most of the night for the atmospheric processing system to bring the oxygen level up and scrub the excess carbon dioxide, but they were effectively in a shirt-sleeve environment. It was just that no one entirely trusted it.

  Aneka wandered through the northern habitation block with Ella, carrying two helmets and being there just because the regulations said so, though it did get her out of trying to get the station’s computers to reboot. Monkey and Delta were on that duty while Bashford and Gillian went through the southern wing. Ella was having a veritable field day, and Aneka suspected that Gillian would have been bouncing in glee if Gillian did things like that.

  ‘This is fantastic,’ Ella said for the… Well, Aneka had stopped counting really. ‘They left in an orderly fashion, but they obviously decided to take minimal effects with them. Photographs, books, mementos… We could probably spend months here cataloguing this stuff.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Aneka replied.

  ‘You’re not very excited.’

  ‘All this stuff you’re amazed and excited by? Half of it I could have bought on Tottenham Court Road in my time.’ She picked up a thin tablet device from the lower of the two bunks in the room and pointed at the logo. ‘This is a bloody Kindle! They were like the in thing if you were into reading. It’s not one I recognise, but my brother had one of the earliest ones.’ She dropped the reader back onto the bed and shrugged. ‘This is… ordinary.’

  ‘Oh… I guess. But this is what archaeologists live for. I mean, it doesn’t matter what period you’re studying, it’s the personal artefacts that really tell you a lot about the people.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Aneka conceded, ‘that’s true. I just doubt the people here were much different from the ones I knew. A bit different, I guess. I mean, the ones here before they closed down would be… a century more advanced. Interstellar travel would be relatively common. They’d met aliens…’

  ‘Some of them. We don’t think there was much intermixing. Maybe some ambassadors visiting. Most of the general populace would have never actually seen a Herosian or a Torem, except maybe on vid.’

  ‘They’d know they existed though. A lot of people thought there would be mass panic if we ever had solid proof that aliens were out there. You’d have to be nuts to think that Earth was the only world with intelligent life, but most people just didn’t think about it. No proof, no worry.’

  ‘There could have been. We don’t know. Maybe we’ll find out when we get to Earth.’

  Aneka grinned. ‘Have you noticed? Everyone’s just calling it “Earth” now, not “Old Earth.”’

  Ella giggled. ‘I hadn’t, but you’re right. I guess…’

  She was cut off by Monkey’s voice coming over the radio. ‘Mom, Ella, you might want to get back up to Control. My glorious and very skilled Amazon has managed to get this heap of silicon junk to talk to us.’

  ‘On my way,’ Gillian’s voice replied immediately.

  ‘Come on,’ Ella said, bolting for the door.

  Running was not a good idea in the low gravity, but they made their way as fast as they could to the main junction and then down to the control room. Monkey and Delta were sitting in front of one of the consoles, apparently trying to get it to respond to them. All Aneka heard as she dropped to the bottom level was a female voice saying, ‘Unauthorised access,’ and grunts of annoyance from Delta.

  ‘Trouble getting in?’ she asked.

  ‘Please tell me we don’t have a working computer we can’t get into,’ Gillian said as she arrived at the top of the ladder.

  ‘It’s being… stubborn,’ Delta replied.

  Aneka leaned over her shoulder and looked at the console. Fairly standard design. It was not running some sort of Windows. There was a button showing ‘Login’ and nothing else. Reaching out she slid the mouse pointer over it and tapped the pad. The screen said ‘Verifying…’

  ‘Security Officer Andrea Johnson verified,’ the voice said. ‘Your last login was… unknown.’ Aneka blinked. The screen was changing to show a plain, blue background, which the system began to decorate with icons.

  ‘It… seems to know you,’ Delta said.

  ‘As someone called Andrea…’ Aneka trailed off. ‘Can’t be,’ she said, her voice soft. She stumbled backwards, the effect softened by the low gravity, and Ella caught her.

  ‘Aneka?’ Ella asked.

  ‘The other me. Yrimtan. She was here. She was here when… She wasn’t on Earth when the Xinti attacked.’

  ~~~

  The room was stark, undecorated, and largely empty. It was one of the larger ones reserved for senior staff at the station, and it had a double bed as well as the more basic facilities of a desk and a couple of chairs. According to the staff roster, this was the room which had been assigned to Andrea Johnson.

  Aneka pulled open the drawers of the desk and then slammed them shut again. ‘Nothing. Not a single piece of paper. No pictures. Nothing.’

  Ella emerged from the small bathroom holding a glass. ‘Not nothing, exactly. She had a boyfriend.’

  Aneka frowned at her and then noticed the old-style, double-edged safety razor sitting in the glass along with a very dry-looking toothbrush. ‘It might have been hers…’

  ‘You don’t have to shave your legs; I really doubt she would have needed to.’

  Aneka nodded a little reluctantly. ‘I guess. Besides which I used to use a plastic disposable one, not one of those metal things. That’s really old-fashioned. Has more of a male feel to it.’ She looked around, still seeing nothing useful. ‘So we know she had a man, and he had a preference for old-style shaving implements, and that’s about it.’

  Ella took the razor out of the glass, turning it over and examining it. ‘And something happened to him before they left the station.’

  ‘Where do you get that from?’

  ‘Well, let’s say they had weight restrictions on the ships they used to leave and they could only take a few personal artefacts. The other rooms we’ve gone through have a lot of stuff in them which I’d have thought they would take, but nothing really personal. I’m not seeing pictures of couples. Only a few family pictures or pictures of kids. So they took everything they could.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Well, a man who shaves with something like this… This is about as personal an object as it gets and I bet he wouldn’t be able to replace it. He’d have taken it. Maybe the computer can tell us more. We can check through the personnel files…’

  Nodding, Aneka headed for the door. ‘What was she doing out here pretending to be a security officer anyway? According to Eve she was supposed to be this big influence on the space programme. You can’t do that if you’re on a gas station in the arse end of the system.’

  ‘We’re not sure, but we think the war was going for as much as fifty years before the Xinti came here. Maybe sh
e decided she wanted to be out of the way. Didn’t want to kill Xinti, couldn’t help Humanity in the war.’

  ‘Maybe. You know… this means she could be alive.’

  ‘It still seems pretty unlikely,’ Ella replied. ‘Even if she is, she could be almost anywhere.’

  ‘Yeah… Yeah, I know.’

  ~~~

  The activity up in Central Control was rather more animated than it had been. Gillian was actioning the ‘kid in a candy store’ plan for handling the sudden acquisition of a lot of useful data; she was flicking through file directories, reading the names of files, and randomly opening some to see what was in them. She would settle down after a while and start being systematic.

  Monkey looked up from the console he was sitting at when Aneka landed softly on the deck beside him. ‘Well, we got some useful information already,’ he said. ‘The earliest data file in the system was created in twenty-thirty-seven, so we figure that’s when the base was established. The last entry in the commander’s log is in twenty-one-thirty-seven. So it was running for almost exactly a century.’

  ‘The personnel records suggest a staff of around four hundred and fifty,’ Gillian went on. ‘Three hundred working the refinery in shifts, the rest handling administration and scientific work.’

  ‘So they were doing some sort of science here,’ Ella stated.

  ‘It seems to have been a largely commercial operation with government oversight,’ Bashford said. He was tapping at another console which he suddenly seemed to have some success with. ‘Yes! This thing has a file system like a trail of glickle droppings.’ They all looked up as the large screen which took up much of the southern wall changed to displaying a schematic of the station. The majority of it was on or close to the surface, as they had suspected, but there was what looked like a drilled tunnel leading down from the main structure beneath the link tunnel between Control and the refinery. The schematic just cut it off after a couple of hundred metres. It did similar things to the pipelines into the refinery.