Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘I am detecting wireless network activity,’ Al said. ‘Attempting to negotiate connection.’

  ‘I got the primary networks up,’ Delta said triumphantly from up on the walkway. ‘We should have data access to the refinery, security cameras… We could get the external sensors up if you’d like.’

  ‘What about that pipe sticking out the bottom of the station,’ Aneka asked. ‘Anything on that?’

  ‘Uh… There’s a panel over on the south side says something about an observation lab hoist.’

  ‘Network link established,’ Al said into Aneka’s head. ‘I have managed to replicate your double’s login details so we have extensive access.’

  ‘Download all the personnel records for the station and start going through them for details on Andrea Johnson,’ Aneka instructed. Aloud she said, ‘Think we should take a look at that hole?’

  ‘I think that’s not on the plans,’ Bashford replied. ‘That I can find anyway. Only way we’re finding out what it is is to go look.’

  ~~~

  The chamber under the base had all the signs of something put together on short notice, but it did have a feature which was interesting.

  ‘The sensors suggest that this is later construction,’ Gillian said. ‘There’s something much more like modern Plascrete behind the metalwork.’

  ‘They built this far later,’ Bashford said. ‘Makes sense. It would explain why the full structure isn’t on the plans.’

  The room had various monitoring stations which suggested that this was the primary control suite for the geothermal system, and one very heavy looking metal door. Aneka looked over some of the displays and then wandered over to the curved pressure door.

  ‘It said “hoist,” right? So they must have drilled down to make the geothermal system and… this is a way to get down to the machinery at the bottom?’

  ‘It also said that it was the hoist for an observation lab,’ Ella replied. ‘The geological sensors suggested a decoupled crust. I suspect this leads down to a lab that sits under that, in whatever is underneath.’

  Aneka looked around at Bashford who was standing at a console in the middle of the room. He pressed something and the huge door levered outward and then to the side. Behind it, set into a metal-lined tube, was a lift car which looked like it could withstand the pressure at the bottom of an ocean. Another button opened the car’s heavy door. There was room inside for three people if they stood very close together.

  Bashford grunted. ‘I suppose we want to send someone down there?’

  ‘I’d like it checked for anything interesting,’ Gillian said, ‘but only if it’s safe.’

  ‘Everything up here seems to suggest the systems are intact,’ Monkey said.

  The lead facilitator stroked his bald head, looking thoughtful and worried. ‘Aneka, Ella, are you up for this?’

  ‘Of course,’ Ella replied.

  Aneka shook her head, grinning. ‘If she’s going, then so am I. Put your helmet on, love, we don’t know what the air will be like down there.’

  With helmets set firmly in place and Ella interfacing three different sensor units to her implant computer, they climbed into the pressure vessel that was the lift. Aneka looked out at Bashford and gave him a nod.

  ‘The two of you keep in radio contact,’ Bashford said, then he punched a couple of buttons.

  The two doors slid into place, sounding very solid as they locked. That was reassuring. There was a shudder, Aneka caught Ella as she stumbled, and then they were moving down. Ella looked up at Aneka; she was not smiling.

  ‘Al, link me through to Ella’s implant. Just voice.’

  ‘We’re going to be good, right?’ Ella’s voice sounded in her head immediately.

  ‘We’re going to be fine. They wouldn’t have built this thing without taking into account every contingency.’

  ‘That was a thousand years ago.’

  Aneka’s navigation system was telling her that they were dropping at around thirty metres per second now. ‘I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Even if I have to climb the cables with you on my back.’

  Ella grinned at her. ‘I don’t think it’s got cables.’

  ‘So I’ll crawl up the sheer wall. It won’t come to that anyway.’

  Bashford’s voice intruded through their helmet speakers. ‘How’s it going down there?’

  ‘So far so good,’ Aneka replied. ‘This thing’s moving pretty fast.’

  ‘Yeah. We’re monitoring that here. By our calculations, you’ll drop out of range for the suit radios in about ten seconds.’

  Aneka looked around, spotting a speaker box on the wall with a button under it. She pressed the button. ‘Are you hearing this?’

  There was a pause and then Gillian’s voice came from the speaker. ‘We are. Are the sensors picking anything up, Ella?’

  ‘Nothing much. The walls on this car are too thick. I am getting some readings of electromagnetic activity. I think this thing’s running on some sort of maglev system.’

  ‘That seems likely. I’m not sure there’s much we can do except wait. Let us know if anything changes, and…’

  ‘Check in every five minutes,’ Bashford cut in.

  ‘Will do, Boss,’ Aneka replied, and let go of the switch.

  ‘I wonder how long we’ll be going down,’ Ella said, her voice sounding in Aneka’s head.

  ‘No idea. How thick is the crust?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  Aneka gave her a grin. ‘Then we’ll be at the bottom sometime.’

  ~~~

  The car shuddered and Ella grabbed onto a rail which ran around one side. They were slowing down after fifty-five minutes of dropping through the crust of the little planet.

  Aneka reached over and hit the intercom button. ‘We’re slowing. There are no horrible grinding noises, so I figure the slowing down is on purpose.’

  ‘It seems like a steady drop,’ Bashford’s voice replied. ‘Looks like you’re getting to the bottom.’

  ‘Vashma I hope so,’ Ella said. ‘I’m not looking forward to going back up.’

  There was a loud clang and the car jolted to a stop. Then there was silence.

  ‘Are you reading anything?’ Aneka asked.

  ‘I’m not reading anything troubling. The electromagnetic effects have shut off.’

  There was a dull noise from outside the car, and then the door swung out. Aneka turned on her helmet lights; wherever they had arrived at, it was pitch dark, the light from the lift only revealing the dim outline of a short corridor. The torch beams did not reveal much more. Out of habit more than anything, Aneka pulled one of her pistols, and then stepped forward into the corridor.

  ‘There’s a corridor ahead,’ Ella said for the benefit of those above. ‘We’re going to go in. Hopefully there’ll be an intercom in here somewhere.’

  ‘If not, check back here in five minutes,’ Bashford instructed.

  The corridor was no more than five metres long, and it ended in a pressure door with a window in it. The room inside was dark, but there was no sign of water, or any other fluid, on the other side. Aneka located the controls and hit the open button, and the door levered away from them into the room.

  It was circular, perhaps four metres across, and if it was a laboratory it was an odd one. A bed occupied one side, a metre from the curving wall. On the opposite side of the room a couch of some description sat facing outwards. There was a console in the middle, and they moved towards that. Aneka found a switch on some tubes mounted above it and fluorescent lights flickered into life. Almost immediately Ella spotted the intercom.

  ‘Uh… Hello from the dark room at the bottom.’

  Gillian sounded relieved, even over the intercom. ‘You found something?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s kind of weird. It’s like someone had a bedroom down here. Bed, console, a sofa…’ She looked up at the blank, metal ceiling. ‘There are no overhead lights, just some lamps over the console.’

  ‘T
here’s a reading light beside the bed,’ Aneka said. She returned her attention to the console. ‘It said it was an observation lab…’ She hit a button. Behind them the door closed.

  ‘What was that?’ Gillian asked, alarmed.

  ‘The door on the room closed,’ Aneka replied. There was another sound, a faint but audible squeaking. In the dim light from the console lamps, they could just about see the walls moving. That was when they realised that the walls were actually some sort of glass with metal shielding over it. ‘There are windows. The shields over them are moving down, and… Oh wow…’

  ‘Aneka?’

  Lights illuminated another world outside the structure. Visibility was not great, but they could see water, or maybe some other fluid, kilometres of it stretching out until the slight haze obscured everything. Metal rods blocked the view in a few places, extending down from the ice above them into the depths below, and there were pillars of ice too, reaching down from the underside of the crust like massive, glittering stalactites.

  ‘Aneka?!’

  ‘Sorry. We’re okay. The view is… quite something.’

  Ella pulled herself together and moved over to the window in front of them. Taking one of her sensor units in hand, she directed it out through the glass. ‘Okay, this is a diamond-like crystal lattice structure, about twenty centimetres thick. The scanner is getting readings from outside… Water, ammonia, various hydrocarbons. That explains why the water is a liquid. Temperature is just over one-sixty kelvin… I’m getting organic signals.’

  Aneka blinked. ‘There’s something alive out there?’

  ‘No. Well, unlikely. Amino acids though, some other precursors. Warm this place up and you might start getting life.’

  ‘Any safety concerns?’ Bashford asked.

  ‘Structural analysis is coming back sound on radar and ultrasound. I think we’re safe enough. Air is… breathable.’

  ‘All right. Scan whatever you need to, take pictures, and call us when you’re coming back up.’

  ‘I’d like to take an hour or so down here,’ Ella replied. ‘Aside from anything else, I want a break before I have to ride that car back up.’

  Bashford gave a snort of a laugh. ‘First sign of anything worrying, you get out of there.’

  ‘Oh, we will,’ Aneka told him. ‘Talk to you soon.’ She turned off the intercom and looked at Ella. ‘This isn’t going to take an hour. Not even close.’

  ‘Nuh-huh. But there’s a bed. How many times do you think I’ll get the chance to have sex under a planet?’

  ‘You’re nuts.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m adorable too.’

  ~~~

  Aneka sat on the couch, Ella’s head in her lap, watching the light play on the currents and eddies that swirled in the water outside the crystal window. It was pretty, but a little dull. Still, she could see the attraction of spending time down here. There was no sound, nothing to disturb you. It seemed kind of odd to have an observation area down here since there seemed to be very little to actually observe. The instruments on the console registered water temperature, cold, water pressure, very high, and the various chemical constituents, which sounded pretty inimical to life, but Ella assured her that things lived in much worse conditions.

  Maybe the main use for the room was what they had just done. The sex had been carried out in near silence since every tiny moan seemed to be very loud. It was surreal, exciting, and carried that thrill of danger knowing that they were making love somewhere surrounded by tonnes of freezing, watery death.

  ‘I have managed to determine some information about Andrea Johnson,’ Al said. His voice sounded hushed; even he was infected by the silence of the room. ‘She was contracted to the station on secondment from a United Nations security organisation. There is no indication that this was unusual, perhaps it was common practice for an international organisation to provide policing.’

  ‘Anything on her background?’

  ‘Yes, but certainly faked. Born in London in twenty-one-hundred, no family, parents dead. She entered the UN Interstellar Security Organisation in twenty-one-twenty-three and was posted to Titan in twenty-one-twenty-six. There is a registration of cohabitation record for her and a Captain Andrew Innsbruck.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘In the personnel files. I believe, given that the station’s computer thinks you are her, that we could access her personal files.’

  ‘We should be getting back up,’ Aneka said aloud. It was true; they had been down there for almost an hour.

  Ella sighed. ‘Yeah. It’s so peaceful down here. Shannon would love it.’

  ‘A hundred klicks of ice between her and the nearest mind? Yeah, she would. Come on, get your suit on.’

  With their suits back on and their helmets in place, just in case, Aneka hit the close button on the shutters. Metal rose up to cover the view outside, the lights staying on until the last moment, and then the room was plunged into near darkness. Ella flicked off the desk lamps and they headed back towards the lift for the long journey back to the surface.

  30.8.526 FSC.

  ‘Video diary, fourth of June, twenty-six.’ The voice was Aneka’s, the face on the screen was Aneka’s, but the woman who had recorded this centuries ago was not the Aneka watching it. The Xinti had changed the design a little: this one had golden-blonde hair, neither the white she now sported nor the dirtier colour she had originally had. It looked like they had dispensed with the exaggerated boobs too.

  ‘Today is my first day on the job here at Titan Station. What a shithole. Three hundred assorted refinery workers who are out here for the danger pay, sixty-two administrative personnel who couldn’t care less what happens as long as the liquid methane gets shipped, twenty-six scientists studying the organics and trying to work out the methane cycle in the atmosphere, twelve prostitutes, both sexes, five command staff, and me. I get to field the security for the entire station. Not that I can’t do it, it’s just that it’s dumb. Still, I wanted to get off Earth. Be careful what you wish for.

  ‘On the plus side, the pilot of the ship I came over on is still here. I’m pretty sure he likes me, and he’s cute. He ships out in two days so I’d better move fast. Signing off.’

  The screen went dark and then displayed the list of entries again. They were not made every day, but there seemed to be a reasonable record of what ‘Andrea’ had been up to while she was on Titan.

  ‘She sounds like me,’ Aneka commented silently.

  ‘Unsurprising,’ Al replied.

  Aneka selected another entry, not quite at random. Andrea looked tired, which was quite a feat considering.

  ‘Video diary, twenty-sixth of December, twenty-six. Boxing Day. The plant’s been running on a skeleton crew for the last two days. They’ll resume full operation tomorrow. Everyone’s been celebrating. So that’s eighteen drunks sleeping it off in the cells, three fights I had to break up resulting in two men in the infirmary, and one assault on a prostitute. That resulted in a man in the infirmary, but that’s because I bounced the arsehole’s head off the deck. I need to offline for a few hours, my head’s swimming. At least Andrew comes in day after tomorrow. I swear he’s the only good thing within a light-minute of this hole. Signing off.’

  ‘Huh. Seems like she liked her dashing space captain.’

  Al popped up a portrait, likely an ID image, of a handsome man of around thirty-five with blue eyes and stylish, black hair. ‘He appears to be quite a handsome man.’

  Aneka hit the next entry in sequence, which was eight days later. Andrea was now grinning: quite an improvement. ‘Video diary, third of January, twenty-seven. Yeah… Can’t get the stupid grin off my face. Andrew left this morning and we’ve been fucking just about non-stop since he arrived. I actually feel Human again. Well, you know what I mean. Once the morons at the refinery were back at work and not nursing hangovers, things calmed down a lot and I could take a rest, but instead of that I’ve been fucking like a bunny. It’s a good thing I’m not Hu
man or I’d be walking funny. God he’s good. And let’s face it, in this gravity you can get up to some pretty amazing gymnastics. We…’

  The video cut off as Aneka stabbed a button. ‘I really don’t think I need to hear the details of what she got up to with her boyfriend.’

  ‘What are you up to?’ Aneka looked up to see Ella standing in the doorway of the security office, which was where Aneka had decided to sit to review the diary.

  ‘I’m sitting in Andrea’s chair, reading Andrea’s diary.’

  Ella walked around and stood behind her. ‘Let’s see her then?’

  Aneka selected another entry. ‘Video diary, sixteenth of February, twenty-seven.’ The mildly depressed look was back.

  ‘I think I prefer your hair,’ Ella commented absently.

  ‘It takes so long to get news out here,’ the recording went on. ‘We just got word that there was a battle between Xinti and Herosian forces at the Grand Market. There was a lot of damage and the Herosian fleet was just about wiped out. The war isn’t going well. I still don’t understand why this is happening. I haven’t had any contact with Negral since it started, but I don’t believe they would start a war like this. I don’t believe they’d just destroy what they sent me to build. I feel… betrayed. All that hard work for this. Fuck it. Signing off.’

  ‘She doesn’t seem happy,’ Ella commented.

  ‘About the war, no. Of course she wouldn’t have known the Herosians started it. To her it seems like the Xinti just turned around and started attacking the results of their uplift projects. She’s in love with a pilot though. He cheers her up.’

  Ella giggled. ‘Is he handsome?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, keep watching. Those diaries are probably really valuable as a historic record aside from anything else. Especially considering what she was sent to do.’ Grinning, she headed for the door. ‘Your breasts are way better too.’

  Shaking her head, Aneka started another recording.

  2.9.526 FSC.

  Aneka stood in front of the main screen in the control room with the rest of the team on chairs at the consoles. ‘Okay, well it took a while, but I’ve gone through my double’s diary. When I get the time I’ll write up my thoughts on it, and given she’s almost certainly long gone, I don’t think she’d mind you going over it. It’s personal in places. I think I know her better now.’