Steel Beneath the Skin

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Putting humanity first, of course.’

  ‘Very sound-bite, but what does that mean?’

  Hunter turned, sweeping an arm out to indicate the men training on the beach. ‘I’ve been searching, Miss Jansen. Searching for the finest specimens the human race has to offer and bringing them here. Here the men learn to use their bodies to the best of their abilities so that, when the time comes, my army can sweep out and destroy the fools in the New Earth Administration who keep us tied to this failing federation. Doctor Rush here makes sure that everyone who comes here is in peek physical condition and is genetically sound.’

  ‘And the women?’ Ella asked. Aneka thought she knew the answer to that one. The fact that Ella did not spoke for the level of equality most of the Federation’s population enjoyed.

  ‘Women have a greater purpose, Miss Narrows. They represent the means of creating the next generation of humans. Despite your background, Doctor Rush tells me that you have a very respectable genetic heritage. You’ll make an excellent mother.’ Ella’s eyes widened; she really had not met this kind of misogyny before.

  ‘I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, Hunter,’ Aneka said, ‘but women don’t get pregnant these days unless they want to.’

  ‘Not an issue in your case, Miss Jansen. You were born before this travesty of evolution was engineered in. As for Miss Narrows, she was given a shot of Ovanimax during her treatment earlier.’ He turned, his eyes hardening as he looked at them. ‘Here are the rules of my island. You can go anywhere you wish, unless the area is marked as off-limits. Those areas have defences. It would be unwise to ignore the signs. It is twelve-hundred kilometres to the nearest island. Odanari has no dangerous indigenous life, but you would not survive the swim. You will accept every demand for sex you receive. Failure to do so will result in punishment. I won’t kill you for it, but you’ll wish you were dead. Are we clear?’

  ‘Crystal,’ Aneka replied. Ella just nodded.

  ‘Good. Try to enjoy yourselves.’ He turned on his heel and walked away, trailed by the silent doctor and the two guards.

  Aneka looked around at Ella. She was paler than usual. ‘Ovanimax?’

  ‘The reproduction controls we have are hormonal,’ Ella replied, her voice a dull monotone. ‘They go wrong in some people and they can’t have children naturally. Ovanimax was developed to activate the ovulation process in women like that.’

  ‘So…’

  ‘If I have sex, I could get pregnant. I-it’s unlikely for a few days, but still possible. After that…’

  ‘Well we should be okay then,’ Aneka said, trying to sound as confident as possible. ‘I don’t plan to stick around here any longer than I have to.’

  ~~~

  Odanari had about a sixteen and a half hour rotation period, give or take a couple of minutes, which meant a relatively short day. Aneka had wanted to use as much of that time as possible to get a look around the island, but the practicality of the situation was that she and Ella were the new girls on the island. They were a novelty. One the male breeding stock felt should be tried out. Mostly, however, they turned up one at a time and Aneka had no trouble diverting their attention to her. Even men who appeared to have been indoctrinated to believe that they were supposed to impregnate as many women as they could to further the race noticed Ella’s unwillingness and went for the easier option, and Aneka’s liberal use of her sex pheromone helped.

  Still, as the sun began to go down and food was brought into the hut, Aneka found herself cradling Ella’s head in her lap while a man with muscles like a steroid abuser banged into the little redhead, and Ella sobbed. For once fear had been more of an aphrodisiac than Aneka’s chemicals, and mewls and sobs were punctuated by his grunts as he thrust far harder than was necessary. None of them had been particularly interested in the pleasure of their partner; “sew your seed and leave” had been the order of the day. This one, however, was getting his rocks off on seeing Ella in pain. Yeah, he was a wonderful specimen of humanity.

  Finished, he pulled out, leering at Aneka. ‘Give me a minute, I can do you too,’ he suggested.

  Aneka did what she said she would never do and pumped dominance pheromones into the air. ‘Not that I’m saying I won’t,’ she told him, ‘but if you don’t piss off and let me see to my friend, your body will wash up sometime next week when the gasses make you bloat and your corpse is such a mess they won’t be able to tell how badly you were beaten.’

  For a second his stupid, leering, macho grin stayed in place, but then he started to realise that she was quite serious, and quite sure she could do what she was suggesting. The grin went stale. ‘I’ll catch you in the morning,’ he said, backing out past the curtains.

  Aneka picked the still sobbing Ella off the bed and carried her through into the small-but-functional bathroom. Turning on the shower and waiting for it to run hot, she pulled Ella under the water and held her there, bodies pressed together while the shower washed tears and other things away.

  ‘I’m going to take great pleasure in killing that one,’ Aneka whispered.

  ‘Not for me,’ Ella whispered back. ‘This shouldn’t matter. I can get through this. It’s not like I’ve not had a lot of sex. And I’m a psychologist. I can work through this.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt you can, but I’m still killing that bastard and everyone else who comes to this hut.’ She was silent for a second, though she could feel Ella’s body tensing, asking silently for an explanation. ‘Twenty-oh-six I got asked to go into the Congo after a naturalist and a film crew that had gone into the jungle with her. Fucking idiots the lot of them. The Congo had been one big war zone for a decade or more. It was pretty well known that some of the combatants had been using rape as a weapon. Against men and women, actually. We found the naturalist and her cameraman four days in. He’d been shot, she’d been raped and shot. Then we found the village they’d been heading for, and that’s where we found the director they’d sent along on their little field trip. It wasn’t like she was the only one. The guerrillas had been through the whole village, killing, beating, raping, but she was a black girl from America wearing western clothes… They’d raped her, ten of them, more, and then they’d raped her with the barrel of twelve-gauge and told her they’d pull the trigger if she didn’t come. And then they’d pegged her out on the edge of the jungle, naked, with a live hand grenade pushed into her…’ She cut off, swallowing back bile at the memory of finding that one woman, even though there had been so many others.

  ‘You saved her?’

  ‘We got her out. I heard that she recovered almost fully, after a couple of years of reconstructive surgery. Physically anyway. The other women in that village though, they just had to live with what had happened to them. It wasn’t actually what happened there that got to me though, it was the fact that I couldn’t do anything about it. By the time we got there, the soldiers who’d done it were gone, long gone. I wanted to rip them apart. So this isn’t entirely for you, and it certainly isn’t for me, but it is for those women I couldn’t avenge back then. Okay?’

  Ella nodded against Aneka’s shoulder. She was trembling, despite the hot water, and Aneka was not sure whether it was the story or her recent treatment. ‘What are you going to do? If they’re in here fucking us all the time…’

  ‘It’ll be dark soon. This world has no moon so it should be really dark. I doubt we’ll have visitors, so I’ll go scout. Once I know what’s here I can work up a plan to get us out.’

  Ella’s arms tightened behind Aneka’s shoulders. ‘What if someone comes while you’re away?’

  ‘You steel yourself and do as they say, but I think they’ll stay away once the lights are out.’ She grabbed soap from the rack beside the showerhead. ‘Let’s get you clean, and then I’ll go hunt us a way off this rock.’

  ~~~

  The island was roughly circular, about a kilometre in diameter, with a promontory sticking out to the north-west. The spaceship landing area was on the end of that pr
omontory; little more than a concrete platform flat enough to put a ship down on and coloured to look like the local rock.

  There were fifteen huts including the one Aneka and Ella were in, all set along the beach. Each had two women in them and, from the heat signatures Aneka could see through the curtains a good two-thirds of those were pregnant. The men were housed in barracks in the interior of the island next to what appeared to be a parade ground.

  There was also a lot of heavy brush as soon as you got off the beach, which was good because there were still guards even with the light coming from stars and little else. They were wearing some form of night vision goggles, though it was a guess what type. Aneka was guessing they were not to the same spec as her eyes because no one had seen her moving naked through the undergrowth. A white dress was not a useful thing to wear when sneaking around, even if Ella had looked a little perplexed when she had stripped before going out. Aneka had considered the possibility that the dresses were there specifically for visibility and rejected it; too easy to remove, which was probably the real reason they were being worn.

  Despite what Hunter had said when he had first met them, Aneka was a little surprised to come across a sign which read “Keep Out. Minefield. Lethal Force.” There was a building about twenty metres away, which was probably the reason for the minefield, and any building protected by mines had to be worth investigating. She was even more surprised when her enhanced vision highlighted the minute differences in thermal signature and ground displacement which marked where the mines were buried.

  ‘If they have proximity sensors,’ Al said, ‘picking your way through them could still be dangerous. There must be a clear path for people to visit the building through.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s more likely to have guards near it. The mines are buried, I doubt they’ve got anything so clever attached to them.’ She tried to make herself sound confident, but she was figuratively sweating as she moved slowly across the ground, stepping where the earth was undisturbed.

  The building was low, a sort of blockhouse built of solid Plascrete as best she could tell, but there was a large ventilation duct on the back wall which she was able to prize off with the application of some android strength. And I’m crawling through ducts again. She slipped inside on hands and knees, and made her way in as far as the first vent which happened to be just inside a fan which was doing the air circulation.

  It appeared that the little bunker was low because it was partially sunk into the ground. She found herself looking into a room from about two-thirds of the way up the wall. There was one man sat at a huge console which appeared to be a combination of traffic control, radar, security suite, and communications stations. Typical of guards the universe over doing the graveyard shift, this one was lying in his chair with his feet up and appeared to be asleep.

  ‘Too good to be true?’ she asked silently.

  ‘Would you prefer cynicism or a psychological breakdown?’

  The vent pushed upward on hinges, apparently secured only by a couple of pins which made almost no sound as they broke. She slipped silently to the floor and moved over to the man in the chair. ‘Can you access the communications system?’

  ‘There is a wireless interface. Hacking… What do I do when I get in?’

  Aneka permitted herself a small smile; when he got in, not if. ‘See if there’s an FTL communicator. If there is, send a message to Winter with our location and tell her to bring Hell.’

  ‘There is. Transmission time to New Earth is around eight and a half hours. If they send a fast ship you’ll still be looking at around forty-eight hours before it gets here.’

  Aneka’s gaze swept the room and she spotted an interior door. Moving as silently as possible she crossed to it and looked inside. She smiled. ‘I think that we should be able to arrange for a nice, friendly welcome for the troops when they arrive. Hunter is not going to know what hit him.’

  ~~~

  The sound of voices alerted Aneka that someone was in the hut with Ella. ‘She’s not here. You wanted Aneka when you came back and she w-went swimming. Sh-she’ll be back soon I’m sh-sure.’

  The suspicion that the big guy from earlier was back was confirmed as she heard him speaking. ‘I shouldn’t be out of barracks now, bitch. I don’t have time to wait. So you’ll have to do. Now spread them for me or you’ll spend the next two days in the stocks getting fucked in public.’

  So that was the punishment for refusal. Aneka slipped through the curtains at the front of the building, making no sound. She knew where they both were from the heat signatures; Ella on the bed, the thug standing over her with a torch. In the darkness behind the man, Ella did not see Aneka moving closer until her assailant was suddenly pulled backwards by his hair, the torch flying sideways.

  ‘What the fu…?!’ The exclamation cut off as Aneka swept a knife across his throat, left to right. She felt the edge scrape his spine briefly, heard the gasp from Ella as blood sprayed out across the room from the severed arteries. Then she dumped the bleeding body onto the ground and watched it twitch, tossing a night vision visor to Ella as she did so.

  ‘Get that dress off and those on. We’re sneaking out of here to a more defensible position.’ Ella was staring at the body, at the blood pooling around his neck in the light from the fallen torch. She had not yet noticed that the same blood was soaking into the front of her dress and Aneka decided she should not. Stepping forward, Aneka pulled Ella to her feet and then yanked the hem of her dress up. That done, she jammed the visor over Ella’s eyes, bent over to turn the torch off, and then grabbed Ella’s wrist to pull her out of the building.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Ella hissed as her brain kicked back into action. From somewhere Aneka had found her leotard, boots, and leggings.

  ‘I found a bunker in the middle of the island,’ Aneka replied, her voice low. ‘It’s got the communications suite in it. I’ve sent a message to Winter, but we need to hole up for a while. Keep your voice low, volume and tone. High frequencies carry over other noise better than low frequencies.’

  ‘Oh,’ Ella said, not expecting a lesson in stealth while they were running for their life. ‘And this bunker is the best place to hide? Surely they’ll know where to look for us?’

  ‘Oh, they’ll know. I’m really not planning on hiding much.’

  ‘You’re not?’ Ella’s tone was low, but plaintive.

  ‘No. I found the armoury, which is where they’d put our stuff. Well, my stuff. I think your stuff is in bits.’

  ‘You can’t hold off this number of soldiers with a small arms’ Ella glanced at Aneka, seeing the malicious grin on her face.

  ‘Oh, I’ve got enough to hold them off. Trust me.’

  Ella trusted her friend, sure. She was just a little worried about how much of the island was going to be left afterward.

  30.6.524 FSC.

  The glow from Odanari’s orange sun was starting to light the parade ground as Aneka stepped onto the Plascrete surface. Ahead of her were the barracks huts, two of them, around fifty metres long and sufficiently dense that Aneka could not really see the heat signatures of the bodies within. Each building had a door at this end, and each door had a small window, and Aneka had a grenade launcher.

  She had picked up two of the largest weapons she could find before leaving the bunker, and the auto-loading electro-mag grenade launcher with its twenty rounds of explosive goodness was going to be her opening gambit. An alarm call which the multiple rapists in the hut where not going to forget in a hurry. Well, the ones who lived would remember anyway. Lining up on the left hand window, she fired, shifted her aim and then fired again. A second later she heard shouting and then the first explosion.

  The door of the left building burst open as the second grenade went off. Aneka pulled the trigger and the man coming through was hit in the chest with a forty-millimetre grenade. There were screams, more yelling. She emptied the launcher through the door and shattered window. Twenty seconds of chaos and she threw aw
ay the launcher and turned away from the barracks, heading back into the undergrowth to the spot where she had left her second heavy weapon.

  She could hear voices behind her, but she did not hurry. She wanted them running after her. Ahead of her she spotted the bush she was looking for, just as she heard the voices behind her.

  ‘There! She’s over there!’

  ‘All right, bitch, you’re unarmed and…’ Aneka yanked a heavy, cylindrical weapon out of the bush and swung it around. It had five barrels to ensure adequate cooling, a thousand rounds of three millimetre, needle-like ammunition, and a ludicrous rate of fire. She was really not that familiar with electromagnetic accelerator weapons, but it did not matter; the thing was a fire hose. ‘Gopi! She’s got a…’ The man was cut off, literally, as the mini-gun spoke, loudly.

  FNb Admiral Banfry, New Earth Orbit

  Captain Gibbons heard the chirp of his internal comm and frowned. Leaning across his desk he tapped the pad which would put the call through. ‘Gibbons.’

  ‘Captain, this is Winter. I need you to get your ship underway immediately. Destination and associated data are being sent through to you now.’

  Display windows opened on the Polyglass surface and Gibbons’ eyes flicked over them. ‘Odanari… And Jansen?’

  The hint of anger in his voice did not go unnoticed. ‘Miss Jansen has uncovered a terrorist training centre. Possibly something else as well. I need you to get there as fast as your engines will take you and deploy troops. Make sure they know that there are non-combatants there. That includes several pregnant women and Miss Narrows. Winter out.’

  The line went dead, a message flicking up to indicate that the connection had terminated. Gibbons growled under his breath, but orders were orders. He tapped the pad for internal comms. ‘Leeforth, I want us breaking orbit in forty minutes. Set a course for Odanari.’

  The First Officer’s voice sounded back almost instantly. ‘You going on holiday, Captain?’

  ‘I wish. As soon as we’re underway I want you and Commander Brod in my office.’