‘She’s telling the truth,’ Shannon said softly. ‘They said they’d do more than kill her.’
Aneka nodded; being a telepath really had to suck sometimes, but it was useful. ‘You didn’t know they were there. They followed you in and the first you knew about them was when they pushed you into the room.’ She glanced at Shannon. ‘Let her up, but keep her with us. She’s not leaving when the cops do.’
Lena sat up, rubbing her wrists. ‘W-what are you going to do with me?’
Aneka leaned in close and whispered, ‘Violence always makes me wet.’ It was a lie, but it sounded really badass.
~~~
Lena lay on the bed, her large breasts heaving and covered in sweat. She was fit and very flexible, but she had had three women on her for over an hour. ‘Please,’ she panted. ‘A short break…’ She had been very eager to please after the Peacekeepers had left; Aneka figured she deserved a rest.
‘Okay, I think we could all do with one. We don’t have to be up early do we, Shannon?’
Shannon gave a smirk and shook her head. ‘We have to pick up the Torem at fifteen hundred. Other than that the day’s ours.’
Lena swallowed hard. She could probably see them keeping her there until then. Aneka gave her as evil a grin as she could manage; it seemed to make the misapprehension stronger. ‘Why did those two goons pick on you?’ Aneka asked.
‘I don’t know. They grabbed me at the club. They must’ve seen me dancing for you. They said I should try to get you back to my place, but when you invited me here they said that would do. I was to get you to open the door and then… How did you get the Peacekeepers to let you go without questioning you?’
‘Friends in high places.’ Aneka had sent a message through to Winter, head of the Federation’s security organisation, with a video of the two men attached. Ten minutes after the Peacekeepers had arrived they had received a call from their superiors saying they should take the men into custody and ‘let Miss Jansen get on with whatever she was doing.’ A minute after they had left, Aneka had received a message from Winter which said only, Looking into it. When people came after Aneka with weapons designed to capture, Winter tended to get interested.
‘You… you’re important?’
Ella giggled. Aneka said, ‘Not really. You just made my day though.’
‘Uh, how?’
‘You don’t know who I am.’
11.8.524 FSC.
Aneka’s first look at a female Torem left her wondering how they could tell the difference. Adjaxis, the Torem Ambassador to New Earth, had been ludicrously tall the way Wallace was: slim, with long fingers, and a fairly featureless face aside from the large, entirely black eyes. Tosimna, senior lecturer in warp theory at the Floating University, looked almost identical to him, including the fact that she was wearing a sparkly, blue and white, figure-hugging suit designed to help her operate in normal gravity. On Corax she did not really need it, but once they were on the shuttle she would have found it hard to function much as Wallace did.
‘The only visible difference,’ Al informed her as she waited to shake hands with only the third alien she had ever met, ‘is the crotch bulge which males have. It’s literally a bulge in the groin. They don’t have external sexual organs like Humans do.’
Now that he mentioned it, Aneka noted the variation in shape. ‘How do they…? No, forget I asked. I probably don’t want to know.’
Tosimna’s long fingers wrapped almost entirely around Aneka’s hand and her thin lips curled into something like a smile. ‘Aneka Jansen, the woman from Old Earth. It is a great pleasure to meet you.’
Aneka smiled back. ‘Hello, Doctor.’
‘Just Tosimna. We don’t use titles like that among my people.’
‘Okay. So long as you call me Aneka.’ Her smile turned quizzical. ‘Don’t Torem have some form of family name?’
There was a brief head-shake, more like a twitch. ‘If it comes to requiring a distinction, we list our parents. I would be Tosimna of Garla and Uneria. Now, I am anxious to see this wonderful engine Doctor Wallace has waiting for me.’
‘The shuttle’s loaded with the supplies we need,’ Shannon said. ‘We can get moving as soon as we’re aboard and I have flight clearance.’
‘Then let us proceed. By all accounts I have a considerable treat ahead of me.’
~~~
Despite wanting to spend more time around the Torem, Aneka sat in the co-pilot’s seat as they lifted off from the spaceport. Torem were naturally telepathic, all of them, and Tosimna might have noticed that Aneka had a very quiet mind. The plan was to have plenty of people around whenever they met, and failing that Ella was to make sure she was on hand. Ella’s thoughts were practically audible to non-telepaths; it was the one thing Shannon did not like about her.
Besides, Aneka still got a thrill from seeing the view through the cockpit windows as they climbed out of the moon’s thin atmosphere. The internal gravity field compensated for the acceleration from the engines so it was hard to tell they were even moving without looking out of a window. As the haziness of the air faded and the stars appeared around them, Aneka let out a sigh and sank back in her seat to watch.
‘Still digging space?’ Shannon asked, humour in her voice.
‘It’s still new to me. Especially like this. Aboard the Hyde there aren’t many windows to look out of.’ The shuttle was fitted out as a mobile laboratory, designed to house an expedition team at a dig site. Because of this it had fairly large windows along its length to allow the crew to observe the outside world even where the outside conditions were less than ideal.
Shannon’s fingers shifted over her control panel. ‘Well, we’ll have orbital insertion in ten minutes and docking in twenty-two, so you have that long to look.’ She pushed her chair back and climbed to her feet. ‘I’m just going to check on our passenger and cargo. Keep an eye on things and yell if anything looks odd.’
Aneka gave a slight grimace, but figured the ship would probably make something odd pretty obvious. ‘I guess I can do that, sure.’
Shannon grinned and patted her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, these things fly themselves.’
The external communications system chimed for attention barely three minutes after Shannon had gone aft. Leaning forwards, Aneka tapped a glowing panel on the display in front of her. ‘Shuttle Alpha-Nine-Sixteen responding. Jansen here.’
‘Aneka, it’s Drake.’ The Captain’s voice sounded over the cockpit speakers, sounding a little surprised. ‘Is Shannon there?’
‘She’s in the back checking the cargo. I can get her…’
‘No need. Just pass the message along, would you? We’ve been registering some odd electromagnetic effects. They began yesterday and seem to have stopped, but we’d like you guys to run a fly-past and use the shuttle’s array for an external sweep.’
‘Tosimna won’t be pleased. She’s kind of impatient to see the warp core, but I guess she’ll appreciate the view of the ship.’
‘An impatient Torem? Don’t think I’ve ever met one. First time for everything.’
‘Huh. I’ll tell Shannon as soon as she gets back up here. It is okay she left me watching the cockpit, right?’
‘On orbital ascent? Yeah. Those things can do that on half an engine with their eyes closed. I’d chew her out if it was during docking.’
Aneka laughed. ‘She’d probably enjoy that.’
‘Not that kind of chewing out. See you soon. Drake out.’
Aneka shut off the channel at her end and looked back out at the star-sprinkled blackness. Odd electromagnetic effects; what did that mean?
‘Something we won’t know until we return to the station,’ Al commented.
‘Unless this sensor sweep shows something up?’
‘If they believe the anomalies have stopped, I suspect not.’
~~~
Shannon’s hands moved over sliders and pads as she manipulated the shuttle’s attitude thrusters, bringing the small vessel past the Agroa Gar in a loop whi
ch kept the nose and primary sensor array pointed at the Xinti vessel at all times. Aneka was impressed with the coordination involved; there seemed to be little connecting the woman’s actions with the ship’s movements, and skilled operation of a non-intuitive system was always impressive.
Behind Aneka’s right shoulder, Ella was sat at the control station for the sensor suite and she was pretty busy as well, though it was mostly to do with reading and interpreting incoming baseline data, and then setting the sensors to perform more detailed scans where she spotted anything odd. She was not spotting anything odd.
‘And that is where you spent much of the last thousand years?’ Tosimna’s voice behind them made everyone jump except for Aneka; superior hearing was a significant benefit of the whole robot body package.
‘More like twelve hundred,’ Aneka corrected, ‘but who’s counting. It wasn’t like I was aware of the time passing.’
‘Yes… Nanostasis, I believe. A lost technology. There have been experiments conducted in recreating it, but none of them… ended well.’
Aneka gave the Torem a glance. ‘I don’t actually understand the difference between that and the cold sleep they use on the Hyde.’
‘Not my speciality,’ Tosimna replied, ‘but my understanding is that synthetic nanomachines invade the body’s cells constructing… um, I suppose the best term would be scaffolding which locks the entirety of the system into metastasis. Nothing changes, you don’t age or decay. In some ways, you stop being a biological object. Or perhaps you become a snapshot of a biological entity. Without the proper coding to reverse the state…’
‘It doesn’t end well?’ Aneka suggested.
‘No. That said, while freezer deaths are rare, when they happen they are generally very unpleasant. With nanostasis you just don’t return to life.’
‘Huh. Getting anything, Ella?’
‘No, not really. The electronics aboard the Agroa Gar seem to be more active than they were a day or so ago…’
‘The data correction algorithms are likely to become more active as they work through greater numbers of index sectors and find large chunks of file,’ Al commented inside Aneka’s head.
‘…but there’s nothing particularly anomalous showing up,’ Ella finished. ‘I’ll send the data through to the station anyway. You may as well take us in, Shannon.’
Giving a curt nod, Shannon shifted her hands over the controls and the shuttle reoriented itself towards the underside of the Garnet Hyde. ‘Shuttle to station, we’re coming in. Nothing to report.’
Drake’s voice sounded over the speakers. ‘Probably just some transient interference. Maybe the military were running some test or other.’
‘Or someone on a training course screwed up,’ Shannon agreed.
Aneka frowned. ‘I thought they did hostile environment training here.’
‘They do,’ Drake replied.
‘Should a trainee have access to something that causes weird effects in orbit on a survival course?’
‘Well, if we have no joy explaining it internally, we’ll ask them. Cleared for docking. Bay doors are open.’
‘Bringing her around,’ Shannon said. ‘Everyone get a seat and strap in.’
12.8.524 FSC.
A yellow message in Aneka’s morning diagnostics caught her attention. ‘Al, what does “Full storage defragmentation and categorisation not completed” mean?’
There was a tiny pause. ‘I’ll shelve the sarcastic answer. The algorithms which optimise your long-term memory did not run to completion, which is odd, but not a serious problem unless it starts happening on a regular basis.’
‘Why wouldn’t it? Run all the way through, I mean.’
‘Well, it should always be able to run to completion. We should keep an eye on it. I’ll schedule a more extensive diagnostic run on your hard storage for tonight in case there are failing sectors. You were offline for over a millennium. Some of the data losses you incurred, the holes in your memory, could be due to physical faults which were not detected.’
‘Can they be fixed?’
‘Perhaps, but even if they can’t they can be marked as faulty and the system will avoid putting things there.’
‘Just so long as I don’t lose more.’
‘The memory integrity check came back clean. Nothing else is being lost.’
‘Good. I don’t want to discover I can’t remember my name again.’
~~~
There was music playing on the Agroa Gar’s flight deck when Aneka walked in. She looked between Gillian and Ella, and grimaced. ‘Where the Hell… No, why the Hell are you playing Justin Bieber?’ She noticed Monkey perched on a seat at the sensor console nodding; he obviously was not impressed either.
Gillian turned, frowning. ‘I rather liked it. We discovered a huge archive of material apparently taken from whatever the Internet was called back then.’
‘The Internet,’ Aneka supplied. ‘Sometimes the “World Wide Web,” or just the Web.’
‘Oh, well, it seems that they gathered vast amounts of material from it and stored it for research purposes.’
‘Well, I know they looked at it. That’s why I got a boob job done when they constructed this body. The idea that my body was reconfigured to suit the ideals on the Internet was not one of Al’s finer comments.’
‘How were they to know?’ Al asked.
It was a good point, but not one she wanted to hear. Instead she walked over to the console. The interface was in Xinti, but there were both basic and complex search functions. Aneka typed, grinned, and then selected one of the returned tracks. Elvis Presley erupted into the opening bars of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. ‘There you go, your favourite royal singer.’
‘This,’ Ella said, ‘was what “The King” sounded like?’
‘One of his rockier numbers. He did ballads, things with more blues to them.’ She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t a big fan.’
‘I can see why. Is there anything in here you did like?’
Aneka typed and then tapped, and Disturbed’s ‘Down with the Sickness’ began blasting out. ‘This is more my style.’
Monkey was now standing behind them. ‘Wow, that’s… good. It’s more… I don’t know, it’s more raw than modern music.’
Aneka chuckled. ‘Yeah, somehow I could see you at a Disturbed concert.’ Her fingers moved over the keys again. ‘Maybe they’ve stored some movies. I may be saved from those interminable sex comedies you lot like so much.’ The screen changed and Aneka found herself looking at a list of films.
‘Looks like they did,’ Gillian commented.
Aneka nodded, her hands lifting away from the screen. It was displaying what she wanted, but she was almost sure she had not finished typing in the query.
~~~
The chatter at lunchtime was almost exclusively about warp engines. Aneka ate what passed for ham sandwiches, though the meat had very little to do with ham, and let the voices pass over her. She had almost no clue what they were talking about. The basic concept of a warp drive she had mastered: the engines compressed space ahead of the ship and expanded it behind. This allowed the vessel to travel at faster-than-light velocities as far as the wider universe was concerned, but at no time was the ship itself actually exceeding light speed within its frame of reference. Her brother had been very much into science fiction and she remembered him mentioning the idea that warp speed, just like in Star Trek, was possible. She seemed to recall that the problem was the amount of energy required.
That problem, it seemed, had been solved, but the Agroa Gar’s drive apparently presented a different issue. ‘The synchronisation hardware between the two cores,’ Tosimna was saying, ‘must somehow be able to pass data from one core to the next at faster-than-light speeds.’
‘It wouldn’t have to be much faster,’ Wallace countered, ‘but I do agree. Some form of short-range tachyon system?’
‘I would suspect a coupled quantum entanglement mechanism. More reliable over such a short distance. The pa
rticles could be generated just prior to engaging the drive. I have a simulation program that could be adapted to this configuration. Perhaps we could work on that this afternoon?’
Wallace grinned wolfishly. ‘Sounds fascinating. We’ll use the station labs, more comfortable for both of us.’
Ella leaned over towards Aneka. ‘I think Doc Wallace is in love,’ she whispered.
Aneka glanced at Cassandra who was looking on with an indulgent smile. ‘She’s rather enjoying his infatuation,’ Al commented.
‘More people watching?’ Aneka asked silently.
‘Everyone needs a hobby.’
‘Did you manage to look at that data we uncovered regarding the reactor failure, Abraham?’ Gillian asked. They had managed to find the computer’s logs and data recorders from the period leading up to the accident. There was nothing after it.
‘Cassandra has been analysing the data leading up to the explosion,’ Wallace said.
‘It appears that there were disruptions in the ship’s power systems for almost an hour prior to the eventual failure,’ Cassandra informed them.
‘I remember them saying something about that,’ Aneka said. ‘It’s why they paused my “conditioning” and stuck me in stasis.’
‘Yes. There were disruptions in control systems; the communications system went offline preventing them from calling for help. If I were to theorise, I would suggest that some of the damage Monkey and Delta attributed to a power surge actually happened prior to the reactor failure.’
Wallace grunted. ‘That fits with the data from the actual explosion then. The data recorders suggest some form of violent heat burst immediately before the reactor blows and, obviously, nothing more was recorded.’
Aneka frowned. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’
‘I’m proposing that the accident which trapped you in space was not an accident. Someone sabotaged the power systems on the Agroa Gar.’
13.8.524 FSC.
This morning the diagnostics showed no yellow lines; everything was, once again, optimal. Optimal aside from the time. Aneka frowned at the sequence of time displays as they appeared in the list, double-checking that she was reading them right before asking Al about them.
The Cold Steel Mind Page 6