Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart (16 page)

‘It’s the taste that counts, the textures, the experience.’ Halton’s eyes sparkled. His smile was so broad Aneka wondered whether he might strain something.

‘Okay… Well Doctor Gilroy said you could help with the substitution.’

‘Indeed. Specifically I’m getting some of my best students together for a seminar tomorrow. We’ll brainstorm the entire thing. You bring your knowledge of what we’re looking for, I’ll bring the textures and flavours of dozens of worlds. Together we’ll create art!’

Aneka smiled at him, hoping it did not look too bemused. ‘Okay. If you send me the details I’ll be there with a long list.’

‘Excellent! Now, if you’ll excuse me. They’re first years and if I don’t keep an eye on them they’ll burn the water.’

‘Thanks,’ Aneka replied, turning and heading out.

‘Oh, Ella,’ Halton called after them. ‘Let’s get together and do lunch sometime.’

‘Sure, Gary. If we get the time,’ Ella called back.

‘Is he always so enthusiastic?’ Aneka asked as they walked out of the smooth-walled, white building which housed the cookery school along with a few other departments Aneka associated with home economics.

‘Oh yes. If it’s food-related anyway. He’s got an absolute passion for anything food. I mean, he’s
really
passionate about food. This project is something he can really get his teeth into.’

‘Uh-huh. I kind of got that impression.’ Her brow creased a little. ‘So, when he was saying you could do lunch…’

‘He likes making food and eating it off your body.’

They walked on in silence for a second before Aneka said, ‘I’m glad to learn the future still manages a few kinks I hadn’t thought of.’

Downtown Yorkbridge, 5.2.526 FSC.

Aneka and Ella were taking a day off from shopping around for spices, fruit, and vegetables at Rollins’ Market in Mid-town to go shopping for clothes in the biggest mall Aneka had ever seen. Aneka was not sure this counted as a day off. They had taken the subway to Downtown, several kilometres south of their apartment, and Ella seemed to be determined to check every clothing store which sold suitable evening wear. There were a lot of those.

Aneka emerged from a changing room in a Nusilk tube which hugged her body from chest to ankle and did a slow twirl for Ella. Ella appraised the red, slightly translucent garment with the eye of one looking for exactly the right look. Aneka was learning to hate that.

‘It’s gorgeous,’ Ella said, ‘but it hides your legs too much. Your legs are too good to conceal. Next.’

Turning and walking back to the cubicle, Aneka was quite glad. Frankly, she was not entirely sure the strapless dress was going to stay up without glue. Not that anyone would have minded a wardrobe malfunction, except for Aneka herself.

‘You do know that I could kill you in about a dozen ways that no one would be able to detect right?’ Aneka pointed out through the curtain.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I’m just saying.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Stressful situations could unleash my latent psychotic tendencies.’

‘You don’t have latent psychotic tendencies.’

‘Bloody psychologists,’ Aneka muttered as she stripped off the tube. Louder, she added, ‘I could wear my swarm dress, or the one I got for the last shindig. That long silver one.’

Ella giggled. ‘Shindig? Never mind. You need something different, and I’m going to wear
my
swarm dress.’

Aneka picked up the next dress, also in red, short, strapless, and made of a lace Bi-weave. ‘You bought a swarm dress?’

‘Uh-huh. I can control it with my implant. It’s so fridgy.’

Dressed, Aneka stepped out of the cubicle. The skirt was low mid-thigh, so she was not sure Ella would go with it. At least the fitted bodice felt like it would stay attached.

‘I like it…’ Aneka’s heart soared at the words. ‘…for a summer drinks and dancing party.’ And her hopes were dashed. ‘We’ll take the tube…’

‘But you don’t like the tube!’

‘For this. You looked gorgeous in it. We’ll take it.
And
I know just what we need. I saw it in Hadfield’s.’

‘But we were in Hadfield’s an hour ago. Why didn’t you get me to try it on then?’

‘I wasn’t sure about it then. Come on, we don’t have all day. You’ll need shoes too.’

Sagging visibly, Aneka trudged back into the cubicle. ‘I know some things about torture too,’ she muttered.

University of New Earth, 9.2.526 FSC.

‘Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,’ Dean Ajax said, his voice ringing out across the huge, vaulted chamber which was the Great Hall of the university. ‘Welcome to the University of New Earth and welcome to what we’re calling the Old Earth Schmooze.’

Aneka, standing just behind the tall, dark-skinned man, focussed on not blushing. The name was… Well, yeah. But she also felt as though she was naked in front of a few hundred people. Ella’s idea of the perfect dress was a diamond of Nusilk covering her breasts, and a triangular skirt that fell from her left hip to her right ankle, just about managing to maintain her dignity. It was, at least, opaque. Well, unless you shone a strong light on it, and she was now standing on a spotlit podium.

Beside her, Ella was smiling brightly clad in a cloud of sparkling beads that hovered around her body. The tiny, buoyancy-neutral robots which composed her outfit had been programmed to hover within about half a centimetre of her body from her bust down to her ankles. Between the light the microbots were emitting and their constant movement she was more or less covered.

On the other side of Ajax, Gillian was wearing a white tube dress not unlike the one Aneka had tried on. She looked supremely confident. Aneka knew she had been practising her short speech for the last three days almost solidly.

‘We want to get to the main event as quickly as possible,’ Ajax continued, ‘so I’ll step aside and introduce our very own Head of Archaeology, Doctor Gillian Gilroy.’

Ajax stepped back, slipping behind Aneka and Ella, as Gillian stepped forward into a blaze of light from camera flashes. Aneka suspected that the bright light and Gillian’s dark skin were going to make for some very interesting pictures, and wondered whether Gillian had planned that. She was aiming to get as much attention as possible…

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the last time I was with many of you in this room we were announcing the discovery of a woman who had survived from the time of Old Earth.’ She looked back at Aneka, smiling, and there was another blaze of flashes. ‘Aneka Jansen has been one of the greatest sources of historical information about Old Earth we have ever discovered. The vessel she was found on, a Xinti science vessel which was studying our original home world, has yielded a lot of facts, but without Aneka we would still be getting things wrong, or interpreting them incorrectly. So I’m going to take the opportunity of having you all here to thank Aneka for everything she has done for my career over the last couple of years.’

There was laughter and more camera flashes. Aneka let herself blush, but she was paying attention to the crowd. Her eyes cut the glare, scanning primarily in the infrared so that she could see skin temperature variations and movements despite the darkened room and the bright lights. Everyone out there was Jenlay: no Torem, no Herosians. This was a Jenlay event, not one for the other two races of the Federation. One man near the front of the crowd was not press. His posture suggested he was holding a glass, not a camera, and his attention was firmly focussed on Aneka, even when Gillian began speaking again.

‘Now, we have learned a lot about Old Earth since rescuing Aneka from her deep space tomb, but my assistant, Ella Narrows…’ She gave Ella a nod and that was the cue for more camera flashes. ‘…recently made a discovery in some historical records which has the possibility to expand our knowledge of where we came from beyond anything we could have imagined.’ She paused for dramatic effect. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we now have a positive, confirmed location for Old Earth.’

Quite what the latest blaze of flashes was going to achieve, Aneka was not sure, but her vision whited out and she switched to infrared again. The man at the front was still watching her, with some interest if the heat flow around his groin area was anything to go by. ‘Sometimes I don’t want to know what my senses can tell me,’ she commented silently.

‘You can never have too much information,’ Al replied.

Aneka’s eyes flicked over the man again as the flashes died away, amplified, visible spectrum light adding in to the infrared, which dropped back into an overlay. He was tall, fit; the heat overlay showing through his immaculate, black suit suggested a firm muscle structure. Nothing new in any of that. His face was handsome, but relatively individual with a low brow, a ridged nose, and very sharp, blue eyes. His mouth was slightly feminine, quite wide and full. He had black hair, long at the back with a wisp trailing around his left brow. Aneka would have bet the look cost him a lot of money even though it looked as though it was done in five minutes with a comb after a shower. And he really was paying her a lot of attention.

‘Our plan,’ Gillian continued once the uproar had died away, ‘is to mount an expedition to that location this year, as soon as we can arrange funding and logistics. So that is the other reason you are all here. This is going to be a long mission. We’re going to need resources, both in the form of credits and help in preparing for what we might find there. Me and my team will be around this evening; we’d like to talk to anyone who thinks they can help. To move things along we have some food prepared by the university’s culinary department, and Chef Gary Halton, based on recipes worked out from Aneka’s memory and their knowledge of modern supplies. As Aneka says, it’s not quite authentic Old Earth food, but it’s as close as you’re going to get. Be warned, some of it is quite spicy. Please enjoy yourselves. Thank you.’

They got away without fielding general questions because Gillian was about to spend the next hour giving interviews in one corner of the hall, and the press knew that they could grab Aneka and Ella during the evening to ask questions. That was going to be fun, but they also had their targets. Well, Gillian, Ella, Bashford, and Drake did; each had various commercial figures they were aiming to talk to as the evening went on. Aneka had been given a ‘floating remit,’ because she did not really know many of the people who might help.

She had decided that she wanted to know more about her mysterious watcher, however, and she was about to head in his direction when she heard the voice. ‘Miss Jansen, Iain Patrick with Consolidated Federal Media. Would you mind giving us your feelings on the rediscovery of Old Earth?’

Mystery Man would have to wait. Setting her face into a smile, Aneka turned towards the camera being pointed at her. ‘Of course, Mister Patrick…’

~~~

Mystery Man was talking animatedly to Abraham Wallace when Aneka spotted him again. Abraham was a very, very tall man, stick thin and starting to show his age, which was considerable. His physiology came from being born on a planet with about one-third normal gravity. During almost his entire, long career in charge of Physical Sciences at the university he had had to wear a cybernetic support structure to help him move about and keep some of the stress off his body. Tonight he was wearing a stylish tuxedo-style suit and there was no sign of the metallic web he normally wore under clothes. Instead he was in his own, personal low-gravity field thanks to the AIs they had met in Negral.

Cassandra was nearby, smiling indulgently at her boss. She acted as Wallace’s assistant and it was generally considered that without her he would likely have been unable to do half of what he did. Since Cassandra was there, and she and Al had something of a complex intimate relationship, they had been talking. ‘Your new friend’s name is Stephen Teldarian,’ Al said as Aneka walked closer. ‘He’s the CEO and majority shareholder of Superluminal Design and Construction FRC. Basically, he makes spaceships. Apparently he’s something of a genius.’

‘Must be,’ Aneka replied. ‘Abraham doesn’t get that enthusiastic unless he’s talking about physics.’ Cassandra looked in Aneka’s direction and grinned. ‘Yeah, they’re talking about physics.’

‘I still don’t understand the synchronisation mechanism between the dual cores,’ Teldarian was saying. ‘I’ve been over it a dozen times and it still doesn’t entirely make sense.’ His eyes shifted as Aneka approached, scanning over her body from the six-inch heels upwards and lingering over her breasts. Aneka turned off the infrared overlay on her vision. ‘Frankly, I don’t know how you managed to get your head around it.’ Still able to talk while the blood was running away from his brain; the man had to be a genius.

‘It’s complex,’ Abraham agreed, ‘and I’d love to spend a few hours explaining it properly, but this is not a time for that. Instead, let me introduce you to Aneka Jansen.’

Teldarian smiled warmly. ‘Of course I know who you are, Miss Jansen, but it’s a pleasure to meet you properly.’

‘Aneka, this is Stephen Teldarian,’ Wallace went on, ‘one of the most gifted non-academic students of warp physics I know.’

‘A pleasure to meet you, Mister Teldarian,’ Aneka said, returning the bow of his head with her own.

‘Stephen. Mister Teldarian was my grandfather and I remember him as a crotchety old man, all business, never any fun.’

Aneka grinned. ‘And yet you’re at a function like this discussing work.’

‘Ah, but I enjoy my work. He didn’t. Frankly, I wouldn’t miss this event for anything. I get the chance to talk to Abraham about warp engines, and to meet you.’

‘Me?’ Aneka’s grin became perplexed. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ve been interested in Old Earth history since I was a boy. I think I’ve read every book and paper Doctor Gilroy has published, as well as anything else I could get my hands on.’ He leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘I even bought that music collection the university put out. My sister is quite fond of the heavier material.’

Aneka was not actually sure which of the vast amount of music Aggy had had stored, ripped from the Internet, had been released by the university. She had made her own collection. ‘I like the heavier stuff myself. Your sister has taste.’