Aneka Jansen 6: The Lowest Depths of Shame (22 page)

There was the sound of a door opening behind him. Footsteps. Two sets, one heavier than the other and those ones continued longer. The person making them walked into sight. He was dressed in the uniform of a Marine and looked as though he could bench-press a car.

‘There’s no point in trying to get free.’ The voice came from behind him. Part recognised it.

‘Pierce? What in Vashma’s name are you doing?’

‘I’m actually here to ask you the same question. You gave information to Agent Truelove. I want to know what information you gave her. This, very large, Ensign is going to hit you until you have told me everything you know. Some people would use drugs, machines, all sorts of clever electronic devices, but I believe in the tried and true methods. So, violence it is.’

The Ensign flexed his hands, drew back a fist, and swung. It felt a lot like being hit in the jaw with a sledgehammer.

Gwy, 20.2.531 FSC.

‘This is Gwy to Sapphira Control, come in please.’ Aneka had tried a couple of times to get a response, but there was no point in giving up until Ella was finished using Gwy’s sensors to scan the surface.

‘Sapphira Control, we are responding to the medical emergency you reported. We have vaccines aboard to assist you. Please respond.’

‘This is bad,’ Ella said. Technically, Ella’s projection into the flight deck environment said it; Ella was upstairs in the cabin with a cable plugged into her neck. ‘I’m getting almost nothing in the way of life signs from the surface. The orbital facilities are running on minimal power for some reason.’

Aneka looked out at the planet they were speeding toward. ‘That’s Sapphira Vista, right?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘We’ll swing around and do a sweep over Arbonatura. Larger population, quite spread out. We may have more luck there. Gwy, give me a low-orbit insertion path, please.’ Ahead of her, a series of rectangles appeared, projected into space for her to follow into orbit. Their course adjusted immediately to thread through the first of them.

‘You know,’ Ella said, ‘she could just do that for you.’

The obsidian avatar appeared between them, smiling brightly. ‘But I like being directed by Aneka. Or you, Ella. Something about being at the command of another… It makes me feel… tingly.’

‘We’ve got a submissive warship,’ Ella said, grinning.

‘You know, that would worry me under pretty much every other circumstance I can think of,’ Aneka replied. ‘Orbital insertion… now. We should be coming up on Arbonatura in… thirty-eight seconds.’

Ella turned back to the screens she had arranged in front of her to handle the sensor readouts, her thoughts translating into changes in the scanning parameters.

‘This is Gwy…’ Aneka began, and then changed tack. ‘This is Aneka Jansen to anyone on Sapphira. We are responding to your medical emergency. We have vaccines against the disease. Please respond.’

Static. Or…

‘I am detecting a radio transmission,’ Gwy announced. ‘It is weak and operating in a very high-frequency band which would require line of sight. Yes, it is in a three-millimetre wavelength range which would also suffer from atmospheric absorption. Turn left three degrees, Aneka.’

‘I’m getting more heat sources below us,’ Ella said. ‘There are
some
living people down there. It looks like the more spread out population did help.’

‘I have managed to get a better lock on the signal,’ Gwy said.

‘Represent… survivors in secure… university. Please… Shaw we have… secure location… help.’

‘Anthony Shaw?’ Ella asked as fragments of message repeated.

‘Sounds like it, and we’re headed for Chance, but that’s a repeating loop, not a live broadcast. They could be…’

‘Don’t say it. If it turns out they are then we’ll find someone else, but until we do there are survivors there and we need to go help them.’

‘A positive outlook, Ella,’ Gwy commented. ‘It is important in a situation like this. I will activate the shields and turret guns.’

~~~

Chance was one of the oldest developments on Sapphira and it had always looked to Aneka like something out of one of those movies set in Everytown America. The buildings were Plascrete, not wood or brick, but it had that Middle America feel to it. She had liked the place. It felt like home.

Now it looked like someone had recast it in a horror movie. The streets were largely deserted, aside from a few people who shambled rather than moving with a purpose. The chucks, though now Aneka definitely thought they should be called zombies, had taken up residence. How anyone had survived in the town was a miracle. Assuming, of course, that anyone had survived in the town.

She swung Gwy in over the university campus, hovering over the grassy area in front of the main building, half her mind on the view through the turret cameras. So far it was fairly quiet; the chucks, it seemed, did not associate a spaceship with food.

‘I’m reading… somewhere around thirty heat signatures inside the building,’ Ella said. ‘Too warm to be chucks.’

‘That’s a good sign.’ A thought opened a channel to the speakers in the cabin. ‘Cassandra, you’re on medical case duty. We’re going down.’ She did not, of course, need to tell Al what his drone would be doing.

They went out from the airlock with Aneka in the lead, both hands holding pistols which she swept out in search of targets as soon as she was on the ground. She had her sniper rifle slung across her back, but it was not needed at the moment. Al followed her with a huge rifle. He was not exactly skilled in using it, but his frame could handle the weight and the thing spewed out a hundred rounds of hyperdense darts a second: there was no need to be accurate when you were firing that much ammunition. Cassandra came next with a pack on her back containing medical supplies, and Ella brought up the rear with a smaller rifle, one of the antimatter blaster designs the Xinti had favoured for open warfare.

‘On the right,’ Aneka said.

Al was already turning. His rifle began to shred the group of chucks coming their way before they were within a hundred metres, and then Ella let off a shot from her gun which blew one chuck apart and used his remains to lacerate three more. Aneka fired off a burst from her right-hand pistol without even looking around and the only chuck still standing lost his head.

The door of the picturesque building they had landed beside opened and Anthony Shaw was standing there waving them inside. He looked much the same as he had the last time Aneka had seen him. He was a little slimmer and he was looking tired. The bright, blue eyes which had been there were looking duller, like they had seen things he would rather forget, and there were worry lines showing across his brow.

‘Miss Jansen, Miss Narrows,’ he said as soon as they were inside and the door had been re-barred, ‘I
really
didn’t expect to see you here.’

‘That’s the fastest ship in the Federation,’ Aneka said, ‘and your communications are down.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘It’s a long, long story and we’re here to help. This is Cassandra, that’s Al, and Cassandra has a backpack full of medical supplies and enough inoculations to keep you safe from this disease.’

‘Will it keep us safe from the… things?’

‘Chucks,’ Ella supplied. ‘I named them chucks, because you can’t be scared of something called chuck.’

‘You’ve encountered this before then?’

‘Oh yes. I spent a few weeks holed up like you are. Except I was alone until Aneka came to rescue me. This is caused by an engineered nanovirus. Someone did this to you, Representative, and it wasn’t the Herosians.’

‘Yes,’ Shaw said, ‘well, we’d figured that out for ourselves.’

Sapphira.

David Reman was a gangly sort of figure. Tall and thin, a bit shy around attractive women, and all brain. He was the pride and joy of the Sapphira academic community, considered one of the best minds on astrophysics in the Federation. Aneka knew that Abraham Wallace wanted him on Shadataga, but she thought it was likely to be a tough sell: Reman seemed like the kind of man who preferred a comfortable, quiet life at home.

Unfortunately for him, he was having to deal with being the best mind they had available among the surviving people of Chance.

‘It seemed a bit odd to me,’ he was explaining, ‘that this plague kicked off not long after a new vaccine gets sent to us from New Earth. I’m not saying I don’t trust people from the core worlds, but the coincidence seemed a bit strong.’

‘A directive went around that we should have everyone inoculated,’ Shaw added. ‘It was just a precaution, they said. Sapphira was probably not of interest to the Herosians. But they were producing enough for everyone, just in case. “High value assets” would be protected first. It actually said that. So we’re pretty sure they’d done most of Sapphira Vista and the orbital stations before the symptoms started showing. Of course, we stopped any injections as soon as we realised there might be a connection, and not many got done because the supply was short, but…’

‘I managed to get my hands on one dose,’ Reman went on. ‘Swarming with these little organic nanomachines. We don’t have that kind of technology. And we found the same thing in samples taken from some of these… chucks was it?’

‘Uh-huh,’ Ella replied. She seemed determined that the name should stick.

Reman grinned a little. ‘It does make them seem a little less threatening. Anyway, the stuff in the “vaccine” is also in the chucks, but far more active. Unfortunately, this kind of science is a little out of my field. I wouldn’t know where to start manufacturing a cure…’

‘There’s no cure,’ Aneka said flatly. ‘They’re dead. They die and then they get… reanimated as those things. Walking, groaning, disease vectors. They even clean up their own mess. They’ll cannibalise their own kind if they can’t get fresh meat.’

‘We do have inoculations against it,’ Ella said, ‘but… I’m sorry, there’s nothing you can do for these people. I did see evidence of survivors outside the town…’

‘So…’ Shaw began. ‘We need to kill them. All of them.’

Aneka nodded, putting a hand on the big man’s shoulder. ‘Al and I will go out in the morning and clean up the town as best we can. We’ll go out after that and take vaccines out to the nearby settlements. We can’t stay forever, but we can help as best we can…’

‘With the town clear, we can handle the vaccinations,’ Shaw said. ‘I think, if you’re willing, we could use someone taking a look at Sapphira Vista and seeing what state the orbital stations are in.’

‘Okay. Sounds like a plan. For now, we need to give everyone their shots and then get through the night.’

‘Oh,’ Reman said, ‘we’ve got very good at getting through the night.’

~~~

‘How did you survive?’ Ella asked.

They were sitting in one of the lecture theatres around heaters which apparently ran off some form of stabilised hydrogen. It was sufficiently far into the building that it isolated them from the chucks outside and it was sealed via the addition of some heavy furniture which they had dragged in to block the doors.

‘A lot of it is thanks to David and a few of the students,’ Shaw said. ‘He set up alarms around the building so that if something did get in we were ready. And he isolated the virus, of course, which helped us avoid catching it. We’re not big on food fabrication here, as you can imagine, but there were a couple of units around so that students knew how they worked and David managed to persuade one of these heaters to supply power.’

‘It’s a basic hydrogen fuel cell,’ Reman said, dismissing the matter.

Shaw smiled. ‘We have some guns, though we’re getting low on ammunition…’

‘We can help there,’ Aneka said. ‘I’ve got a few things you can use. Energy weapons. As long as you can charge the cells, they’ll run as long as you need them. I’ll train some of your people up on them before we go. They’re… special.’

Ella patted her rifle, sitting beside her on the floor. ‘Antimatter pulse rifle, for when you absolutely have to be sure it’s dead. And usually in pieces. Don’t be near what it hits.’

‘Isn’t that Xinti technology?’ Reman asked.

‘The Xinti used them,’ Aneka said, ‘but these are from a slightly different source. There’s a group of AIs who have created a university on a world called Shadataga. They
were
Xinti, sort of, but they’ve been alone for a long time and they want to teach what they know. Abraham Wallace is with them now.’ She looked at Reman. ‘I know he’d like to see you there. They were the ones who created that collapsed star he told you about when he was here.’

The scientist’s eyes lit up and then he looked down, frowning. ‘I don’t know… I’ve never been off Sapphira. I like it here…’

‘And maybe it’s time you broadened your horizons,’ Shaw said. ‘It would be prestigious for us to have someone attend something like that and you could learn so much.’

‘I hate long trips.’

‘Oh,’ Ella said, grinning, ‘by the time we’re ready to take on students they’ll have the wormhole system up and running. We can come pick you up in the Hyde. It’ll take us a day to get back.’

Reman blinked. ‘Wormhole… Where is this planet?’

‘It’s not far from Old Earth, actually. I mean, relatively not far.’

‘And it’ll take a day. By wormhole.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I think,’ Shaw said, ‘that if we get through this, he’s sold.’

21.2.531 FSC.

‘There are sixteen chucks gathered in front of the building,’ Gwy told Aneka. ‘They appear to be ignoring me. I assume this is because I am inedible.’

‘That’s probably the reason, yes.’ Aneka grinned and Shaw gave her a funny look.

‘I could use my turret on them, but there is danger of damage to the building,’ Gwy added.

‘Yeah. We’ll handle it.’ Aloud she said, ‘Can we get up on the roof?’

‘Yes,’ Shaw told her. ‘There are some of them outside?’

‘Not for long. Al, get ready here. When I’ve cleared the door, go out and take out anything still in the area and hold until I come down.’

Al executed a smart salute. ‘By your command,’ he said.

‘And stop doing Cylon impressions.’

‘I lack the flashing red eye slot,’ he replied as she followed Shaw out of the foyer.