Steel Beneath the Skin

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ Aneka replied, reaching for the buckle of her equipment belt. ‘I’m going to switch off for a few hours before night shift. Al will keep a connection up to the alert system. Prod me if anything happens.’

  ‘I still can’t believe you named your on-board computer,’ Ella said.

  Aneka shrugged and turned toward the bunks tucked away behind the cockpit. ‘I didn’t want to keep calling him “computer.” Al’s shorter. Worry when I decide to name my pistol.’

  2.10.523 FSC.

  Despite being called “soft defoliation units,” the gadgets they were using looked and worked exactly like the heavy duty strimmers that Aneka had seen used by park officials and the like on Earth… Old Earth, really have to get used to that… A long shaft mounted on a chest harness had a semi-circular shield on the end with a rapidly rotating length of plastic wire in it. The wire chopped through vegetation easily, but did little damage to solid objects under it. Effective, relatively subtle, but it still took three of them almost an hour to cut away enough of the plant material to reveal the two heavy, metal doors hidden behind the vines enough that they could be opened.

  When they were finished, Bashford and Monkey were sweating and breathing heavily, and did not look pleased at the prospect of having to pry open the shutters. Aneka unstrapped her SDU and took her visor off, thankful that her new body did not appear to sweat unless she let it.

  Bashford pulled a couple of metal disks with handles attached from a bag and held them up. ‘Want to see if those artificial muscles of yours can shift those doors? You’ll make two normal jenlay really happy if you can.’ Aneka shrugged. She had no idea what she was capable of so it would be an interesting exercise. She took the plates. ‘Just press them to the doors and push the buttons on top of the handles.’

  The plates seemed to contain some form of electromagnet in them which locked to the steel plates very firmly. Aneka was impressed; something like that would have been useful for breaching hatches. She gripped the handles, set her booted feet, closed her eyes, and applied pressure. There was a horrendously ugly sound of metal under stress and a window popped up behind Aneka’s eyelids showing stress levels in her shoulder actuators. The numbers were green; she applied more force. The stress noises changed to scraping noises and the numbers turned yellow. She wondered absently what happened if they went red, and kept up the pressure. Her body did not tire. There were no toxins to build up in the muscles she no longer possessed, her motors had no need for oxygen. She kept pulling.

  As her hands passed the width of her shoulders the angle became inefficient and she let go of the handles, turning around to back into the space between the doors so that she could push rather than pull. Monkey was standing there with his jaw hanging open and she grinned at him before placing her palms against the grapple handles and pushing. Ella wandered up beside Monkey to watch as Aneka’s synthetic muscles bunched and strained to shift the doors, her chest pushing outward as she did so. The cyborg woman almost stopped to burst out laughing as the two younger members of the team licked their lips, unconsciously, and in unison.

  The doors suddenly gave, sliding open as far as she could push them. She lowered her arms and grinned. ‘Perverts,’ she commented.

  ‘To be fair to the younger perverts,’ Bashford replied, ‘there’s just something about a girl using her muscles…’

  ‘Even if they aren’t entirely organic muscles,’ Gilroy agreed. She had located a pry-bar in Bashford’s bag and stepped forward to hand it over. ‘Since you don’t have to breathe, it might be an idea for you to open the inner doors while we stand back. These structures occasionally manage to maintain enough integrity to be hermetic. You never know what might out-gas.’

  ‘Saves us getting into protective gear,’ Bashford agreed.

  Aneka took the bar and turned to the closed inner doors. ‘If I wasn’t here you’d have had to bring a bulldozer, right?’ These doors were supposed to be transparent plastic mounted in an aluminium frame, but the plastic was thickly coated in dust now and quite opaque.

  ‘Maybe,’ Bashford replied. ‘What’s a bulldozer?’

  Jamming the head of the pry-bar into the join between the two doors Aneka said, ‘Never mind,’ and put her weight into forcing the doors. This time the stress numbers in-vision never went over the green before there were a couple of metallic twangs and the locking pins gave way. Then there was a rush of dust and stale air through the gap. Inside, something fell over with a damp thud, and when Aneka dropped the bar and pulled the doors apart they spotted the corpse which had been sitting against them. Aneka’s nose wrinkled.

  ‘Biohazard gear,’ Gilroy said. The body had not entirely desiccated though the skin was drawn tight across the skeleton. There was no obvious indication of how the man, it looked male, had died either. No wounds, no sign of energy weapon impact.

  ‘I’ll have decontamination gear ready when you come out,’ Bashford said. ‘Come on, Monkey. Let’s go clear the other sites.’

  ‘Gladly,’ the younger man replied.

  Gilroy, now wearing a helmet over her headgear, appeared at Aneka’s side and handed her a face mask. ‘No sign of how he died. You’d better wear this. It’s hard to decontaminate the inside of your lungs.’

  ‘Asphyxiation or starvation,’ Aneka guessed. ‘Too scared to leave the building, ran out of food or water.’ She poked a toe at an empty, plastic bottle lying near the body. ‘But why didn’t they come in here to clean out the rest of the miners?’ She raised her head and looked around, augmented vision picking out the interior of the room in the dim light. ‘Looks like it was a reception area. Desk at the back there. Still has a computer monitor on it.’ There were two doors leading out of the room; one to the right, one to the left from behind the semi-circular desk. Public and private rooms, probably.

  ‘Step back, Aneka,’ Gilroy instructed. ‘We’ll lidar-map the room before proceeding. It gives us a full three-D mapping of the space before it’s disturbed.’

  Aneka nodded and moved back, slipping her mask on before starting to breathe normally. What the lidar did and how it did it had been part of her coursework. How long it would take had also been in there; they were going to be waiting a while before they could proceed further into the building.

  ~~~

  Aneka slammed her pry-bar into the edge of the inner door behind the desk and pushed. There was the sound of straining metal for a brief second, and then the door flew open as if on springs. This time there was no rush of air, but dust fell from some of the overhead panels.

  ‘I won’t need decontaminating after this,’ Aneka growled, ‘I’ll need to be washed down with a fire hose.’

  ‘You did say your hair was dirty blonde before,’ Ella said. ‘Now it’s just dirty.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Aneka’s eyes scanned ahead, taking in the fairly narrow corridor with its suspended ceiling and tiled floor, and she frowned. ‘There’s a heat source. Probably in the far corner of the building. Not very bright, but it’s there.’

  ‘It’s probably the building’s power system,’ Gilroy commented. ‘Is it moving?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Keep an eye on it while we run the lidar down this corridor. Assuming that your heat source doesn’t move, we’ll let you check that first, and we can work back toward this room.’

  ‘And if it does move?’

  ‘You shoot it and we worry over being systematic afterwards.’

  Aneka gave a shrug and backed up a pace, freeing the strap on her pistol, just in case. ‘I can live with that plan.’ Ella was already busy pointing the lidar sensor head down the corridor. The red beam flicked out and began its rapid scanning.

  They had found another body behind the reception desk when they had got to it, and that discovery had just deepened the mystery of the place. This body’s clothing suggested a woman, but it was hard to tell from just the body since the corpse was badly desiccated. She had also been shot by something big; her skull was more or less go
ne, but what was left showed charring. Most interesting to Aneka was her left arm, which was cybernetic.

  ‘If she was shot, and a while ago,’ Aneka said, nodding toward the corpse, ‘would that seem to indicate that we have two assaults here?’

  ‘We probably won’t know for sure until we’ve run the dating sequences,’ Gilroy replied. ‘I admit the differences in the two corpses are perplexing.’

  ‘Artificial arm too.’

  ‘The prejudice regarding cybernetics comes from the war. This place predates that and replacement of body parts, even voluntarily, was far more common back then.’ Gilroy gave a shrug. ‘Even now it’s used where needed. Look at Ella.’

  ‘Scan’s complete,’ Ella told them, picking up the instrument and moving to one side. Aneka pulled her pistol and edged past. The picture-in-picture sighting display appeared along with a charge count and a “lethal” indicator. Not knowing what she was dealing with, she left the weapon at full power. ‘Be careful,’ Ella said, sounding a little worried.

  ‘You people seem to keep forgetting what I am.’

  The door had a pull handle on it which undid the latch and let it be slid sideways. Gripping it, she pulled, opening the door far enough to allow the nose of her pistol to be slipped through. ‘Machine room,’ she said. ‘Looks like… computer racks. A big cylindrical device. Could be a power unit of some sort. That’s where the heat source is. I’ll patch the video through to your helmets…’

  There was a pause and then, ‘That’s a fusion plant,’ Gilroy said, sounding a little surprised. ‘If it’s still operating, it must have been dropped to minimal output or have a large auxiliary fuel tank under the building.’

  ‘The terahertz survey didn’t indicate anything below this building,’ Ella supplied.

  Satisfied that the heat source was not an immediate danger, Aneka pulled the door fully open. Standing in the doorway she could see an indicator panel on the side of the power unit and her gun sights had pretty good magnification. ‘See that? Fuel level is practically zero, but something’s drawing about five-hundred watts.’ She scanned her camera around the room and stopped. There was a dim, but active, LED glowing on one of the racks. ‘It looks like there’s still some active electronics.’

  ‘Oh, let it be the colony log unit,’ Gilroy almost prayed. ‘We may even get video and reports on the xinti attack.’ She started down the corridor along with Ella. ‘Get a scan of the room and then we’ll see what we can salvage. Aneka, could you open up the other rooms?’

  Slipping her gun into her holster, Aneka nodded and turned to the door behind her. For some reason it was all a little depressing. She was used to dropping into places like this in order to mount rescue operations. Here she was with a body which could have stood up to anti-tank weaponry back at home, but here there was no one to rescue. Everyone had died a thousand years ago.

  Gripping the handle, Aneka yanked open the door and did not even bother looking before moving on to the next.

  ~~~

  ‘Well,’ Gilroy said as they sat in the shuttle for lunch, ‘this may partially explain our mysterious corpses.’ Everyone turned to glance at her, except for Aneka who was sat at the security station, a little out of the way, having no need to eat. ‘Five of our seven bodies date, as I suggested, to the end of the Xinti War. Approximately nine-hundred and fifteen years, plus or minus fifty. Two of them, however, came back at three-hundred and twenty-two years.’

  ‘Isn’t that within what you classify as recorded history?’ Aneka asked.

  ‘Yes, but this region is still classified as outside the Federal Rim. Back then it was “here be dragons” country.’

  Aneka laughed. ‘I can’t believe you still use that phrase.’

  ‘You’d prefer “here be space dragons” perhaps?’

  ‘Better. So some bunch of deep space scroungers go out looking for old sites to loot, come here, and get themselves shot up by xinti energy weapons? I thought they were supposed to have been wiped out by then.’

  ‘The Herosians claim there are still pockets of them out there,’ Monkey said. ‘No one has actually claimed to see a live one in over two centuries, but back then there were possibly still one or two enclaves still operating.’ He shrugged. ‘Though if they were here when these looters arrived, I’d expect them to still be here.’

  ‘Initial planetary survey is complete.’ Drake’s voice came from the speakers around the room. The ship crew were there in spirit if not physically. ‘The only evidence we’ve found of structures is the town you’re at and what looks like a mine entrance about a mile to the north.’

  ‘Any indication of indigenous life?’ Aneka asked.

  ‘Not on land, but we haven’t run the high-def scans yet,’ Patton replied. ‘We have found some evidence of life in the oceans. Nothing bigger than about a metre though. Several large algal blooms in the open ocean and I saw fish of some sort feeding on them.’

  ‘Nothing to explain those track ways you found,’ Drake added. ‘Maybe the next sweeps will find something. We’ll run the continent you’re on as a priority.’ There was a pause and then, ‘Oh, Bash, could you run diagnostics on the shuttle’s systems?’ Bashford immediately started for the cockpit. ‘We’ve picked up some random EM bursts. Just noise, no longer than a second at a time, but I don’t want to find out we’ve ignored a possible comm-system failure we could prevent.’

  ‘On it,’ Bashford said from the front of the shuttle. Aneka’s eyes flicked left as one of the security sensors fuzzed out for a fraction of a second. Maybe the diagnostic run was a good idea if they were getting dropouts on the cameras.

  ~~~

  When Aneka had said she wanted to fire off her pistol at something she had been expecting Bashford and Monkey to want to watch. What she got was everyone, along with five high-definition multi-spectral cameras trained on her, her make-shift firing range, and the target.

  ‘I just wanted to find out what firing it on full power was like,’ Aneka almost whined as she had to wait while various sensors were trained on her and the unfortunate tree which was going to get shot for science.

  ‘And how often do you think we’ve been able to apply modern sensor equipment to a xinti anti-particle beam weapon?’ Gilroy replied. She glanced across at Ella who was walking back from setting up the two target sensors. ‘When you’re ready.’

  Pulling her pistol, Aneka checked the setting was lethal and lined up on her target, bracing the pistol’s grip in her left palm. She took aim and Al indicated the target point she was about to hit, about four feet up the trunk, and the target’s range, fifty metres. She squeezed the trigger. A pulse of blue-white light left the barrel and hit the tree a fraction of a second later. There was a loud thud, which Aneka felt as a pressure pulse in her chest not unlike a hand grenade going off, and wood splinters flew in all directions. The bushes near the tree thrashed, dropping leaves. When the dust cleared they could see the huge hole which had ripped the side of the trunk out. They could see daylight through it.

  Aneka set the safety and slipped the pistol back into its holster, blinking at the damage. ‘Well fuck me sideways,’ she muttered.

  ‘Yeah,’ Monkey said. ‘That’s why people still worry about meeting up with a xinti.’

  ~~~

  Aneka watched her own diagnostics rippling past over the inside of her eyelids, happy to see that everything was in the green. Her time display suggested that she had barely had four hours sleep; enough, but meagre. However, she decided she was going to get up anyway since she had woken up from a dream of being strapped to a frame in the xinti ship they had found her in while strange aliens and robots hissed and crackled their peculiar communication.

  Slipping out of bed, she glanced toward the cockpit and saw the dark sky outside. Night had fallen on Alpha Mensae IV and the rest of the team would be back in the shuttle, maybe finishing up dinner, maybe going over the data they had collected or watching a film on one of the consoles. She could hear voices, and could have resolv
ed them if she wished, but she was not interested in eavesdropping. Reaching to the deck at her feet, she picked up her leotard to pull on.

  Monkey was at the security console, though half his attention was focussed on the screen across the aisle which Ella and Bashford were using to watch something Aneka took to be a comedy. They were laughing at it anyway, though there seemed to be more naked people on screen than Aneka expected from a sitcom. Monkey glanced up at her with a grin on his face as she walked past, and she returned the grin. Her face straightened as she caught something on his screen.

  ‘Bash? How did that diagnostic go?’

  ‘No faults found,’ Bashford replied. ‘Everything was optimal or better, actually. I ran a check on the transmission systems, sensors, and the power systems, just in case. Nothing to indicate a problem. Why?’

  ‘We keep getting random camera dropouts. Very short. Less than a second.’

  Monkeys hands moved to his keyboard. ‘She’s right. Twenty-six of them over the day. Number sixteen went out for nought-point-seven-five seconds ninety-six seconds ago.’

  A map of the camera placements flicked up in Aneka’s vision field. Sixteen was one of hers, just north of the eastbound track. ‘Can you bring up a plot of the outages with times on a map?’ Monkey nodded, fingers flicking over the keys. By now everyone was watching the display; Gilroy had moved up from her science station. ‘The side-track first, early this morning,’ Aneka said. ‘Then various places around the circle. I don’t see a pattern.’

  ‘Neither does the computer,’ Monkey supplied, ‘but fifteen, the one on the branch track, has dropped out more often than the others.’

  Aneka checked her pistol. ‘Are you guys going to be up for another thirty minutes or so?’

  ‘At least,’ Bashford replied.

  ‘I’m going to go out and check that area.’

  ‘I’ll come…’ he began.

  ‘Armoured synthetic body, remember.’ She started for the rear hatch. ‘Keep an eye on the cameras and I’ll have Al patch my visuals through as well.’