‘I see. Obviously, we need to ask him, but if you think the cyborg operation would cause problems…’
‘No. That man is everything to me. If he thinks he couldn’t stand the operation then he’ll have to learn to live with not lifting weights. I’d love him if you had to replace his entire body. You offer him both options.’ She laughed. ‘I’ve spent enough time around Aneka to know it’s not what you are that counts, it’s who you are.’
‘A commendable attitude,’ the doctor said, ‘and one I hope your fellow Jenlay will embrace. I’m afraid your partner is far from the only victim of that battle where replacing body parts is the best course of action.’
Tristar Township.
‘You know,’ Sharissa said, her voice soft, ‘Janine is not to blame for this.’
Janna glowered at her for a second and then relented with a sigh. ‘I know. It’s just…’
‘She’s an aspect of Winter and you’re angry. Yes, but it’s not really Winter’s fault either. Ella volunteered. From what Janine said, she insisted.’
‘Yes, but…’
‘And you know why too. She wouldn’t allow Aneka to go alone.’
‘I know that, but…’
‘And you know that Aneka couldn’t say no, because that’s the way she’s wired, if you’ll pardon the expression. And Aneka will do everything in her power to keep Ella safe as well.’
‘I’m not going to apologise for not liking the fact that my daughter is in danger!’ Janna snapped.
‘No one’s asking you to, love. However, this constant fuming about it is just raising your blood pressure, making Janine uncomfortable, and not helping anyone else’s stress.’
They were in Gillian’s back yard, standing beside the low wall at the edge of the property. Janna’s gaze fixed on the horizon and she drew in a deep lungful of air, letting it out slowly. When she spoke, her voice was quiet, and very flat, as though she were forcing the emotion from it.
‘When Ella was taken ill… When it became clear they couldn’t really help her on Harriamon anyway, I knew the only way I could help her was to bring her here.’
‘I know you had to work hard…’
‘I did whatever I needed to to get the money. I’ve never told her. She knows it was hard, of course, and she suspects… I did overtime at the club, slept with anyone who would pay me, did whatever they asked. I made films. Not the kind you see in the core, the specialist ones. There were times I was glad she couldn’t see the state I was in, but even she could tell I was hurt on occasion.’
Sharissa swallowed. She knew the kind of thing Janna was talking about. Jenlay did not classify films with sex in as porn, but the word did have a meaning, generally qualified by type. The urge to find the distributers and producers and murder them in messy ways surfaced and was pushed aside.
‘I would literally do anything for Ella,’ Janna went on. ‘I’ve done everything except die for her. Now…’ the brunette turned, blinking back tears. ‘There’s nothing I can do. I feel so helpless.’
Sharissa nodded, reached out, and pulled Janna to her. ‘Ella’s got two people she would do anything for, love. She’s with one to keep her safe, and she’s doing it to keep you safe.’
Janna gave a little nod. ‘I’ll apologise to Janine. And Winter.’
‘I don’t think either of them wants an apology. Just go back to being Janna. They’ll know they’re forgiven.’
‘You don’t mind if I worry though, I hope?’
Sharissa gave a soft laugh. ‘Everyone else is. It’d be hypocritical to ask you not to.’
Gwy, 28.1.530 FSC.
‘Two fighters,’ Gwy stated in Ella’s ear. ‘Port side rear. Closing at one thousand and sixty-two metres per second.’
Ella twisted the ship to starboard, rolling at the same time. ‘Weapons?’
‘My electronic warfare suite is reducing the effectiveness of their targeting systems. Their armament is unlikely to penetrate my force shielding. However, I am detecting an incoming cruiser-sized vessel and over thirty more fighters.’
‘Gopi,’ Ella muttered. A thought directed the lateral turrets to engage the two smaller craft and she twisted the ship around more weapons fire in an attempt to save the shields for anything else which might come their way.
In truth, she wanted to put her foot down hard and run for it, but she had to hold her position until Aneka could leave the nearby asteroid and get back to Gwy. Her orders were to hold for another sixteen minutes and then assume Aneka was dead. Well, she was simply not considering the possibility, but she was certainly going to hold on for another sixteen minutes.
‘Fighter’s disabled,’ Gwy announced, her tone calm.
Ella slammed the ship into a tight turn, swinging it under the asteroid. ‘Stealth systems?’
‘Repairs complete.’
‘Engage them…’ She pulled the ship up, putting the huge rock between her and the oncoming ships. ‘Now!’
‘Stealth field engaged,’ Gwy replied. ‘Multiple missile launches detected from the asteroid.’
Ella saw the flares of engines. It looked like the entire surface of the thing was coming out to meet her. They could not see her, but they had to know where she was. They would detonate in a wide spread and hope it was close enough. If she could just…
But she was too close. The explosions jerked Gwy hard to starboard, rippling across the space under her belly. Indicators floating in front of Ella showed systems going offline as the force field and hull were breached. There was no way she was getting out of this one…
And the flight environment dissolved around her to reveal Aneka standing at the front of the small room, grinning broadly.
‘You got me,’ Ella growled, ‘you don’t have to look so happy about it.’
‘Actually,’ Aneka said, still beaming, ‘I’m happy because it took a missile broadside to take you out. What was that? Two frigates, seven fighters, and that was after I cheated and had your cloaking shield malfunction.’
‘You performed admirably, Ella,’ Gwy said, appearing beside Aneka, ‘and I have a better feel for the interaction between your implant and my systems. I believe we make an effective team.’
Sitting up, Ella reached behind her neck and disengaged the cable that was connecting her to the ship. ‘If I’d given the asteroid a wider berth…’
‘You could have probably dodged the explosions,’ Aneka finished, nodding. ‘I doubt our target has that kind of firepower anyway. It’s a command station in a system they don’t expect to see anyone entering.’
‘Then why hit me with it?’
‘Because it’s a simulation and you might as well train for the worst while it isn’t going to kill you.’
‘It sure feels real enough,’ Ella replied. ‘I think I could feel the heat from the detonations.’
‘That is just your imagination,’ Aneka told her, grinning. ‘You did good, love, and if we do this right, you won’t even need to have done the training.’
Ella gave a sigh and got to her feet and started for the gravity lift. ‘Two more days.’
‘Until we get there,’ Aneka agreed, following. ‘Maybe another one or two for planning. Nervous?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I’d be worried if you weren’t.’
29.1.530 FSC.
Aneka was listening to Herosian. It was an odd language, full of guttural noises and sibilants. The latter was kind of expected in the race that looked reptilian. She had always been a little disappointed that it did not really show up when they spoke Federal, but then the future refused to meet up with her expectations at times; the Delta Brigantia had an engineer named Scotts who did not have a Scottish accent.
‘Do you think you’ve got the hang of that?’ Ella asked from the bed.
A display of recognition data from her universal translation software appeared in-vision and Aneka flicked through it. ‘I’m not quite up to native comprehension.’
‘Do you need to be? Hours of self-teach H
erosian language lessons is less fun than hours of actual language lessons.’
Aneka grinned. She had been listening to the recordings for most of the trip, on and off. She checked the readout again; she was going to be able to understand everything but the most complex or scientific conversations she heard. Good enough.
‘Okay, get your pads on and I’ll beat you up some more.’
Ella grinned and scrabbled to comply. ‘Massage after, right?’
‘I’ll even use the scented oil.’
Shadataga, 30.1.530 FSC.
‘Second thoughts, sister?’
Winter turned from the galaxy display to see War and Evolution standing behind her. It was the former who had spoken and Winter took it as a sign of their own disquiet that the AIs were expressing themselves vocally rather than simply exchanging messages. She doubted they had grown as used to physical form as she had over the last thousand years.
Turning back to the display she said, ‘No. I have no second thoughts on the matter. That does not stop me allocating runtime to the possibility that I have sent two women I consider friends to their deaths.’
‘We have given them every advantage,’ Evolution replied, stepping closer and looking up toward the spot Winter was watching. Up there among the cloud of simulated stars, a trail showed the expected path of Gwy. It was very close to its destination now. ‘Aneka is very capable. A few Herosians will present her with little challenge.’
‘It’s not them I’m worried about. I suspect War understands.’
‘It’s what we don’t know about,’ War responded. ‘We have accounted for everything we can envisage happening, but Aneka has to deal with what we have not considered.’
Evolution nodded, but did not seem overly troubled. ‘Agreed, but is that not why we requested that Aneka do this? We could have sent an automated probe if we knew exactly what we were dealing with. I have every confidence in our team.’
‘I’ve spent too much time among the Jenlay,’ Winter replied, smiling bleakly. ‘I can’t discover a reason for my disquiet, but I can’t eliminate it either. They refer to the feeling as a “hunch.” Somehow I feel this is not going to be as easy as we currently think it will be.’
‘This kind of enterprise rarely is,’ War replied.
Gwy, 1.2.530 FSC.
‘So that’s Herosia,’ Aneka said.
‘What’s left of it,’ Ella replied. She was working at a desk which had formed itself in the second cabin for her to use as a console. Gwy was arranging for them to both see the sensor data they were getting as a three-dimensional projection in the air of the room. ‘There were seven planets and three asteroid belts here the last time anyone saw it. No gas giants.’
Now the system had ten asteroid belts. Some were denser than others, but Aneka could not tell which of them had once been spheres. The Xinti had blasted every world in the system into rubble. Not just the Herosian home world, all of them.
‘They were really pissed when they got here, weren’t they?’ Aneka commented.
‘Right at this moment, I can’t say I blame them.’ The redhead’s fingers moved over the keyboard, but she was frowning. ‘I think I’m getting some concentrations of refined materials which could be artificial satellites, but we need to get closer.’
Aneka nodded, her attention shifting to the flight data she was seeing in a separate display. They were ten light-minutes outside the system’s outer edge. She had dropped them out of warp there because even with the stealth field engaged exiting within the system was likely to get them noticed. She ran the calculations.
‘We’re about seven hours from that outer belt at full acceleration.’
Ella was busy with her own estimates. ‘We’ll let the sensors run on for four and then see what we have. That gives us three to make final plans for entry. If we had a science sensor package instead of tactical, we could probably know something sooner…’
‘I will mention that to War when we return to Shadataga,’ Gwy said from the room’s speakers. ‘A multi-function system could be installed.’
Ella gave the room a grin. ‘I’m hoping we won’t need to sneak into heavily defended solar systems again, personally.’
‘Indeed,’ the AI replied, ‘but it would be nice to feel useful for other purposes when we are done here.’
‘You will be,’ Aneka told her. ‘Let’s go lie down. That acceleration isn’t huge, but it’s going to be annoying after a few hours.’
Nodding, Ella got to her feet and then had to brace herself against the desk to keep steady. ‘Wow. I’ve never felt that much force through an inertial compensator. You have really powerful engines, Gwy.’
‘Thank you, Ella,’ the AI responded, sounding pleased. ‘For my size I do have quite some push. The apparent acceleration is around half of one standard gravity. I hope it does not cause too much discomfort.’
‘Discomfort, no,’ Aneka said, ‘but trying to do anything active while vertical is going to be difficult.’
‘Then we’d better find something active to do while we’re horizontal,’ Ella replied, smiling sweetly.
~~~
‘We have been monitoring the sensor readings,’ Al said as the model of the Herosia system appeared above the bed. ‘As Ella indicated, there is evidence of artificial objects in the system.’
Aneka and Ella watched as several clumps of one of the asteroid belts lit up to indicate the regions Al was referring to. There were three of them, one significantly larger than the others, situated in a belt about nine-and-a-half AUs from the system’s star.
‘At this range,’ Gwy added, ‘the detail is light, but we have identified at least one battleship in the larger cluster. Matching our data to the data from the probe, we are confident that the situation here has not changed drastically since our last recorded mapping.’
‘And the asteroid we’re aiming for?’ Aneka asked.
‘Is, unfortunately, part of the larger cluster.’
‘Right.’ Aneka checked her flight data. They had turned to decelerate for the outer edge of the system, but that was going to put them over ten AUs from their eventual destination. ‘Change course. Take us above the plane of the system, aim for an AU above that cluster in a matched orbit.’
Almost immediately there was a shift in the acceleration as Gwy cut back her engines, turned the ship around, and began accelerating again.
Ella sighed. ‘More time on my back,’ she said.
Aneka giggled. ‘You’ve never complained about that before.’
‘Yeah… But I want to get this over with. We’re so close now…’
Aneka nodded. ‘This is when the tension starts getting to you.’ She glanced at her partner. ‘Surely that orbit can’t be where Herosia was?’
Ella looked up at the display. ‘No. It was the fourth of those belts, about one-point-one AUs out. They must actually be viewing it as a sort of war grave or memorial. I mean, they’d be in space anyway, but the closer orbit would let them use more solar power and they’d get some natural light. Maybe they aren’t quite as crass as we thought.’
‘Everyone has their limits. Didn’t Gillian want you to run scans if you had time?’
‘You’re trying to keep me busy.’
‘Uh-huh. Just for a bit. Then we’ll do something else to keep busy, and then we’ll have a shower, and then we’ll be in a position to make a tactical plan.’
Ella sighed. ‘Okay… Gwy, would you give me the data you’ve collected so far and keep it coming? Let’s see if there’s anything interesting out there.’
~~~
‘There’s definitely evidence of the final battle,’ Ella said as she highlighted various regions of the system via her implant. ‘These are debris fields. They’re what’s left of the ships destroyed in the fighting.’
‘They look pretty thin,’ Aneka commented.
‘They are. I think they’ve been farming them for materials for centuries. The thinnest patches are also the ones which contain the most exotic matt
er forms.’
‘The Herosians have been grabbing whatever materials they could from Xinti debris.’
‘Uh-huh. I’d say that explains the lousy quality of their frigate hulls.’
‘I concur,’ Al agreed.
‘Recycling the collapsed matter used in hulls like mine,’ Gwy put in, ‘requires very fine gravity manipulation technology. Even the Xinti found it difficult a thousand years ago. Where hull repairs were required, they would generally replace the section rather than attempting to seal it.’
‘It’s weird though,’ Ella went on. ‘I mean, this lot are trying to recycle it, which implies they have trouble making it at all. There’s a very large construction facility…’ She highlighted one of the areas they had identified earlier. ‘It’s got a lot of heavy equipment. Huge power systems. The sensors are registering anomalous gravity readings, big ones.’
‘Substituting brute force for fine control?’ Aneka suggested.
‘Possibly. But where did they even learn to do that? If they’d found a Xinti construction site surely they’d have better techniques. And there’s the lack of reactionless drives. It’s all… a bit weird.’
Aneka grinned. ‘Is that a technical term?’
Ella smirked. ‘The observed technology exhibits anomalous development patterns.’
‘You mean it’s a bit weird?’
‘Yeah. It’s like someone really clever has been reverse engineering Xinti tech for a millennium. They’ve got some of it right, but they aren’t entirely sure what they’re doing.’
‘Herosians aren’t exactly long-lived,’ Aneka said.
‘And they aren’t noted for their genius-level intelligence either,’ Ella agreed. ‘I think there’s something going on here we don’t know about.’
‘Huh… What about gaining entry to the asteroid?’
‘I have detected fairly regular shuttle traffic between it and the other stations in that area,’ Gwy said. ‘I believe your best course of action would be to hitch a ride on one of those. With Ella piloting, I believe we can move in undetected, drop you off on a shuttle, and you can ride it into the hangar bay.’
Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour Page 25