Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘It’s like they’ve all been affected by the same thing that hit the medics,’ Gillian commented as they passed yet another fallen Enforcer lying in a corridor, sprawled as though he had collapsed on the spot without warning.

  ‘I think,’ Al said, ‘that this is the result of a virus passed through the city’s wireless network to their implants. There is a core computer facility at the bottom level, in the centre. I believe that if we are to resolve this we must go there.’

  Ella and Gillian had stopped beside the fallen Enforcer, taken off his helmet, and were examining him. ‘Alive,’ Gillian commented, ‘apparently responsive at the reflex level, but there’s no awareness of outside stimuli…’

  ‘Al thinks they’ve got a computer virus,’ Aneka commented. ‘Maybe some sort of booby-trap Yrimtan set up.’

  Ella stood up and dusted off her knee. ‘That doesn’t seem likely. If it was caused by her death, I think it was accidental.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘She was kind of insane,’ Ella replied, ‘but she believed that what she was doing was for the best. She was following the programme, making better Humans. She wouldn’t have wanted them dead.’

  ‘Well, Al thinks that we need to go to the main computer room if we want to fix it.’ Aneka pointed towards some lifts at the end of the corridor. ‘Down all the way and then north, roughly.’ Her in-vision schematic zoomed in towards the computer core as she spoke. ‘Wow… This place has a pretty big computer centre.’

  ‘Big and bulky, or big and sophisticated?’ Bashford asked. Aneka had been watching him since they had collected him and Gillian from the medical wing; he seemed tense, wound up, and so far she was not sure why.

  ‘I couldn’t really say from the data I have here. Why?’

  ‘Big and sophisticated may indicate an AI, which might be annoyed at us for killing Yrimtan.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Ella said, ‘for the same reason I don’t think they’re all unconscious on purpose. She wouldn’t want something out there that was smarter and more in control than she was.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Aneka agreed. The lift doors opened for them, closed behind them, and started down.

  ‘How does it know where we’re going?’ Ella asked.

  ‘Al’s in contact with the city network. Actually, that’s another reason to think this isn’t on purpose. Al says the security here is just about non-existent.’

  ‘You think she figured she’d never die, so why have fail-safes in place?’

  ‘Again, it makes sense.’

  The lift doors opened and they were faced with another corridor with black-painted walls. Yrimtan seemed to have liked that look for her more private areas. The short corridor led to doors which opened for them as they approached.

  ‘I did not do that,’ Al commented as they passed through.

  Aneka frowned, but kept walking. The corridor fanned out into a circular room with five huge monitors mounted on the walls and no obvious signs of controls. Only two of the screens were actually active. The one opposite the entrance was displaying scrolling text messages, operational notes, and diagnostics for the city around them. The second active screen was displaying rapidly shifting waveforms of some description.

  ‘Those are neuro-cognitive induction systems,’ Ella said. ‘Thousands of them… If I had to guess, I’d say that someone’s running teaching programmes for the entire implanted population.’

  ‘Teaching what?’ Aneka asked. A third screen came to life, text flickering past at a rate too fast for normal comprehension. Aneka watched it move, her overclocked perception slowing it to a near standstill. ‘I was wrong. She did have a back-up plan in case she died.’

  ‘And?’ Bashford asked. ‘Do we need to worry about a city trying to kill us on the way out?’

  ‘No. Apparently it’s removing the controls she had on them. It’s preparing them for a life without Manu Dei watching over them. There’s even some stuff in there about setting up a proper democratic system.’ Aneka looked away. ‘Maybe she wasn’t quite as bad as I thought. Maybe she really did have what’s best for them in mind. Maybe…’

  ‘She couldn’t give it up,’ Ella interrupted. ‘She was so wrapped up in making sure that Humanity became what she thought they should be that she couldn’t let them do anything without her. She probably knew she was stunting their development, but she couldn’t stop.’

  ‘Are you saying that she wanted to die?’ Aneka asked, frowning.

  Ella shrugged. ‘She was alone. She hadn’t taken a new partner since that man on Titan. I don’t know if she wanted to die, but I think she was ready.’

  ‘Oh.’ Aneka started back towards the doors. ‘I think maybe we should dispose of the body before they wake up.’ She stopped and looked around. ‘I think I should dispose of the body.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to do that alone?’ Gillian asked, her tone uncertain.

  ‘No… But I think it’s something I should do.’

  ~~~

  There was an incinerator in one of the various laboratories around the city which, according to what Al had found, used fusion torches to reach an interior temperature of around seven thousand kelvin. It was meant for burning dangerous chemicals and biological samples, and it seemed like enormous overkill for anything, but Aneka was pretty sure that it would do a proper job of destroying Yrimtan’s body.

  Placing the body on the induction platform, Aneka stood back, her thumb resting on the start button. Her twin looked like she was asleep, lying there on the pristine, ceramic surface.

  ‘We’re sure she’s dead?’

  ‘There is no electromagnetic activity from the body,’ Al replied. ‘Her mind is silent. I think if she were alive she would be trying to avoid this.’

  Aneka sighed. ‘Goodbye, Aneka Jansen,’ she said aloud. ‘I never really got to know you, but you seem to have done well by your children. I hope you’re at rest now.’ She pressed the button.

  The platform slid into the hole in the wall behind it and a heavy hatch made of gleaming metal closed over it. A few seconds later a roaring noise began. Aneka blinked away a tear from her good eye and started for the door.

  ~~~

  The shuttle came in for a slightly shaky landing on the field Aneka had put her microlight down on. The engines had barely been shut off before the large rear hatch opened up and Monkey and Delta emerged, the former making a beeline for his mother to wrap her in a hug.

  Delta grinned at them for a few seconds before turning to look at Aneka. ‘You look like someone went over you with a sandblaster.’

  ‘You should see the other me,’ Aneka replied.

  Delta looked perplexed. ‘The other… Yrimtan? She’s alive?!’

  ‘Not anymore. Let’s get inside. I want to get out of this stupid suit and into something more comfortable. Then we can figure out what to do next.’ She started up the ramp, undoing the seals on her suit as she went.

  ‘Well we contact the Hyde, don’t we?’ Monkey suggested.

  ‘That could be a problem,’ Bashford said, swallowing hard as he finished and almost choking off the last word.

  ‘Yrimtan said she’d blown it up,’ Aneka explained.

  ‘I gave her the transponder frequencies,’ Bashford added. ‘I…’

  ‘I went through what you did,’ Ella interrupted sharply. ‘There’s no way you could have resisted her.’

  Aneka began to peel her suit off and looked back at him as he walked up the ramp. He glanced up at her and then quickly averted his eyes. ‘No one resists torture, Bash. Except in the kind of vids you people don’t make anymore. No one does, and she had every trick in the book to work with.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ Ella went on, ‘she said Aneka, Monkey, and Delta were dead, and that’s clearly not the case.’ She frowned at Delta’s arm in its cast. ‘Battered and a little broken, maybe, but not dead. I say we can’t call it either way until we can’t contact them.’

  Aneka found her leotard and beg
an to pull it on. It felt really good to be slipping on a garment she had once considered far too risqué for her tastes. ‘I agree. Shuttle to Garnet Hyde, please respond.’ There was silence for a few seconds and everyone looked at each other. ‘Shuttle to Garnet Hyde. This is Aneka. Is anyone receiving this?’

  ‘Garnet Hyde here, Aneka,’ Aggy’s voice came from the speakers around the cabin. ‘Captain Drake and Shannon are asleep. We were attacked from the surface, but Shannon’s quick thinking avoided the majority of the explosions. We have sustained minor damage to the ship’s sensor arrays, but we managed to attain a stable orbit. We have been observing radio silence in the hope that you might contact us.’

  Monkey let out a whoop of joy. Aneka grinned brightly. There was a lot of smiling. ‘You have no idea how happy we are to hear your voice, Aggy,’ Aneka said.

  ‘I think,’ Bashford said, starting towards the cockpit, ‘that we’ll lift off and come up to join you.’

  ‘I will wake Captain Drake and Shannon for your approach, Mister Bashford,’ Aggy replied. ‘I am sending rendezvous vectors to your navigation system and stabilising our orbital tumble now. I assume that I can stop pretending to be orbital debris?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Aneka told her. ‘There shouldn’t be any more missiles.’

  ‘We’ll be docking in… thirty-five minutes,’ Bashford said from the bow. ‘Everyone hold onto something, I want off this rock as fast as possible.’

  Aneka heard the ultrasonic hum of the anti-gravity system and the main engines starting up. He really did mean to get away as fast as he could. Of course, they felt barely anything of the acceleration as the shuttle climbed into the sky.

  FScV Garnet Hyde, 23.9.526 FSC.

  Aneka sipped her coffee, sighed, and relaxed back into her seat. Her right eye was still non-functional, but her skin had mostly healed over or returned to the colour it was supposed to be. She had put a synthetic skin patch over her damaged eye, mostly because Delta had been grimacing every time she looked at it.

  They had taken a fair bit of damage between them. Delta had her broken arm, but it was the less visible hurt afflicting Ella and Bashford which had Aneka worried. Ella was fidgeting, and had been since the shuttle had made it out of the atmosphere. Bashford was showing less outward signs of discomfort, but he would not look at any of the women and was particularly avoiding Gillian’s eyes. Yrimtan had worked a number on both of them and the exact outcome of that was yet to be seen.

  They had finished bringing Drake and Shannon up to speed on what had happened on the surface. Now it was Drake’s turn. ‘All right, here’s the situation. Currently the main navigation sensors are offline. Shannon is pretty sure she can repair them, but until she does we can’t risk warp speed. The bigger problem is fuel. Dodging death by nuclear missile used up a lot of our reserves. We’ve likely got enough to get us out of orbit and heading back towards Harriamon, and we don’t burn fuel in warp, but it’s tight.’

  ‘We will not have sufficient fuel to reach Harriamon after warp exit,’ Aggy supplied.

  Shannon winced. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’d rather be low on fuel than be scattered wreckage,’ Drake replied firmly. ‘You got us out of real trouble. Quit kicking yourself for it.’

  Shannon gave him a smile. ‘I’m not promising anything, but I’ll try.’

  ‘Captain,’ Aggy interrupted, ‘I am detecting surface radar pulses.’ The room fell into silence as they waited, half-expecting to hear the announcement of another attack. ‘Pulse modulation and frequency indicate an imaging radar system, not a targeting one.’

  ‘If we need to run,’ Bashford said, ‘can we?’

  ‘Aggy,’ Drake said, obviously keeping his voice steady on purpose, ‘let’s get the main engine online and…’

  ‘I am receiving a radio broadcast,’ Aggy interrupted again. ‘Putting it on speaker.’

  ‘…unknown space vessel, please respond. I repeat, this is Prime City to unknown space vessel, please respond.’ The voice was male and none of them recognised it. Everyone looked at Drake; he was the captain after all.

  ‘Prime City,’ Drake said, ‘this is the Federal Science Vessel Garnet Hyde, Captain Mallory Drake speaking. We are an unarmed exploratory mission from the Lorenti Federation.’

  There was a short pause and then the voice replied. ‘Captain Drake, this is Councillor Jerome Harper. I am informed that your vessel is damaged. We… are unaware of your Federation, but would like the opportunity to learn more. Perhaps we can be of assistance with your repairs?’

  Drake looked around the room. ‘Councillor, could you hold for a second while I confer with my colleagues?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I have muted communications, Captain,’ Aggy informed them.

  ‘Some help would be useful,’ Shannon stated.

  ‘They have pretty advanced technology in the cities,’ Aneka said. ‘We wouldn’t be revealing anything they don’t already know.’

  ‘But can we trust them?’ Drake asked. ‘You were down there.’

  ‘I think, yes,’ Ella replied. ‘If Yrimtan was still running things… Well, she’d have blown us out of orbit. The fact that they haven’t says a lot.’

  ‘Frankly,’ Gillian said, ‘the scientific value of re-examining their culture would be considerable. We did not have the opportunity to see the cities anyway, and now we may be able to.’ Bashford looked about to say something, but bit his lip instead.

  ‘All right,’ Drake said, heaving a sigh, ‘it looks like we’re staying for a while. Aggy, reopen the link.’

  ‘Done, Captain.’

  ‘Councillor, we would welcome your assistance. We’ll send a party down to you tomorrow so we can talk.’

  ‘We look forward to it, Captain. Harper out.’

  Aneka closed her good eye and sagged back against her seat. They would be going back down to Earth, this time as envoys for the Federation. She was not sure how the citizens would react to her, considering that she looked like their recently vanished ex-dictator, and she was not entirely sure she wanted to find out. Somehow, though, she felt she had to go back to find out what state her twin had left the people of Earth in. She was supposed to be the observer; maybe her Xinti programming was rearing its head. Finally Yrimlos was going to be doing what she had been designed for. The world she was supposed to do that in was gone, and she had finally accepted that. There was a new world, with new Humans, for her to discover a few hundred kilometres below her, and she could accept that too.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Ella asked, her voice low and a little concerned.

  Aneka opened her eye and gave Ella a small smile. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I am. I really think I am.’

  ###

  This is the end of the Steel Beneath the Skin Trilogy.

  Aneka Jansen will return in The Winter War.

  About the Author

  I was born in the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall so perhaps a bit of history rubbed off. Ancient history obviously, and border history, right on the edge of the Empire. I always preferred the Dark Ages anyway; there’s so much more room for imagination when people aren’t writing down every last detail. So my idea of a good fantasy novel involved dirt and leather, not shining plate armour and Hollywood-medieval manners. The same applies to my sci-fi, really; I prefer gritty over shiny.

  Oddly, then, one of the first fantasy novels I remember reading was The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper (later made into a terrible juvenile movie). These days we would call Cooper’s series Young Adult Contemporary Fantasy and looking back on it, it influenced me a lot. It has that mix of modern day life, hidden history, and magic which failed to hit popular culture until the early days of Buffy and Anne Rice. Of course, Cooper’s characters spend their time around places I could actually visit in Cornwall, and South East England, and mid-Wales. In fact, when I went to university in Aberystwyth, it was partially because some of Cooper’s books were set a few miles to the north around Tywyn.

  I got into writing through ro
leplaying, however, so my early work was related to the kind of roleplaying game I was interested in. I wrote “high fantasy” when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. I wrote a lot of superhero fiction when I was playing City of Heroes. I still loved the idea of a modern world with magic in it and I’ve been trying to write a novel based on this for a long time. As with any form of expression, practice is the key and I can look back on all the aborted attempts at books, and the more successful short stories, as steps along the path to the Thaumatology Series.

  Writing, sadly, is not my main source of income. By day, I’m a computer programmer. I work for a telecommunications company in Manchester, England. My favourite authors are Terry Pratchett, Susan Cooper, and (recently) Kim Harrison. Kim’s Hollows books were what finally spurred me to publish something, even if the trail to here came by way of Susan, back in school, several decades ago.

  For More Information

  The Thaumatology Blog: http://steelbeneaththeskin.wordpress.com

  Other Books by this Author

  Steel Beneath the Skin (ASIN: B00FJIQ85O)

  The Cold Steel Mind (ASIN: B00D4MN40O)

  The Thaumatology Series

  Thaumatology 101 (ASIN: B006IYIESW)

  Demon’s Moon (ASIN: B006JPN7A0)

  Legacy (ASIN: B006OKR8PK)

  Dragon’s Blood (ASIN: B0072S1DOU)

  Disturbia (ASIN: B007GNICZO)

  Hammer of Witches (ASIN: B007YG2I44)

  Eagle’s Shadow (ASIN: B008E17TYW)

  Ancient (ASIN: B00923F8AS)

  Dragonfall (ASIN: B00AKV95XW)