The Cold Steel Mind

The Cold Steel Mind

An Aneka Jansen Novel

By Niall Teasdale

Copyright 2013 Niall Teasdale

Amazon Kindle Edition

Contents

Part One: Ghost Ship

Part Two: Down The Rabbit Hole

Part Three: Wonderland

Part Four: The Art Of Diplomacy

Part Five: Quint

Part Six: The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be

Part One: Ghost Ship

FScV Garnet Hyde, in Orbit of Corax, Joval System, 3.8.524 FSC.

Aneka stood on the flight deck of the Garnet Hyde, looking out on the place where she had died. She was a little ambivalent about seeing the Agroa Gar again, her resting place for over a thousand years while the galaxy continued apace and she slept in nanostasis. The vessel was dead, a silent wreck, and no threat to anyone, but just looking at it brought memories to mind she would rather have stayed buried.

In a lab on the saucer-shaped vessel she had been, for want of a better term, dissected. Injected with drugs which inhibited shock and stopped her feeling pain, she had been fully aware as circular saws and other implements had opened her up for analysis by an alien race called the Xinti. Ultimately the Xinti scientists had somehow taken an image of her brain, her mind, and recreated it as software executing on a specialised, highly advanced computer system encapsulated within a robotic, near-perfect copy for her original body. Aneka Jansen had died and her ghost lived on in a robotic shell. The Xinti had done the same thing to themselves; they had probably thought they were doing her a favour.

‘Are you all right, Aneka?’ The voice was male and only she could hear it. Al was an artificial intelligence who resided on a second computer in her chest. He had been designed as her support system, an observer of her as she observed the Human race and reported back to her Xinti masters. As it turned out, she had been more in need of a support system than expected, and Al had done his level best to fulfil his role.

‘This isn’t going to be the easiest job,’ Aneka replied inside her head. Al could read her thoughts, in effect. He was connected directly into her mind, though she lacked the ability to perceive what he was thinking, only what he chose to project to her. ‘A lot of the procedure I went through over there is blanked out of my memory. What I do remember is… unpleasant. I’d rather it stayed as fragments, I think.’

‘While your long-term memory appears to act in the same way as Human memory, it is not quite the same. In particular, the actual storage medium is quite different. The holes which persist are the result of storage degradation, bit loss which my data recovery algorithms were unable to repair. It is highly unlikely that an external stimulus will manage to recover anything further.’

Well that was both good and bad. ‘So anything I still can’t remember I probably never will?’

‘For good or ill,’ Al agreed.

‘You okay, Aneka?’ This time the voice was outside her head. Shannon Patton was sitting at one of the two flight consoles, but had turned the chair to look at the robot girl standing just behind her. Shannon looked like some sort of space bimbo; not too tall with a cute face framed by bobbed, honey-blonde hair, her slim body was fit and came equipped with wide hips and an expansive bust. Pretty much all of her was on display since she was dressed in what was referred to as a shipsuit, a thin, semi-transparent, white bodysuit which clung to every curve. It looked like fetish-wear, but combine it with a helmet and gloves and it made a perfectly serviceable vacuum suit. Regulations stated that everyone wear one, except for Aneka.

‘I’m… basically fine.’

Shannon was not going to fall for that, and Aneka knew it. The pilot was a telepath, which was of little use on Aneka, who did not have an organic mind to read, but being able to tell what people were thinking, even when she did not want to know, had turned Shannon into a reasonably good psychologist. There were, frankly, far too many shrinks on the ship. Shannon’s eyes narrowed a little, but she clearly decided that pressing the matter was not her job. ‘Hard links are all in place. They’ll be ready to go aboard soon. You should get down to the airlock.’

Giving a nod and a grimace, mostly to indicate that she
did
recognise that she was not quite fine with it, Aneka turned to the door of the flight deck, hearing the latches disengage before it slid open. Even when manned, the room was sealed, secured against anyone trying to break in. Aneka considered that good practice. Outside she turned left and descended a ladder to the deck below and the forward airlock.

Ella was waiting for her. Ella Narrows was a pretty young woman. Pretty meant less now given that just about everyone was attractive and young-looking unless they chose to be ugly or old. Ella was in her seventies and looked no more than twenty, maybe a young thirty. She could expect to live for two or three centuries. She had moderately sized breasts on a slim frame, not overtly muscled, and while her body was largely on display thanks to her shipsuit, Ella rarely wore anything which was not at least partially transparent anyway. She was a redhead, a mass of red-orange hair hung to her shoulders, and possibly a closet nymphomaniac. She was also Aneka’s partner, a trained psychologist, and worried. When Ella smiled, it could light up the room, but she had a sad sort of face when she was being serious, and right now she looked serious.

‘You’re sure you’re all right about this?’ Ella asked. Ella, unlike Shannon, was speaking English. Her accent was a little odd, somewhere between the English accent Aneka spoke in and the Americanised sound that Ella spoke Federal in. Federal had derived from English by way of Mandarin and a couple of alien languages, and a lot of shifts in vowels and simplification of structure. Ella was trying to learn English mostly as an exercise and she was getting pretty good at it.

‘Everyone’s so concerned I’ll crack up as soon as I go over there,’ Aneka replied, walking past Ella into the airlock chamber.

Ella followed her in and hit a panel beside the hatch to cycle through the opening and closing of doors. There was no vacuum on the other side; using the lock was a safety precaution. ‘You’re forgetting, I’ve seen you crash from shock.’ It was true; when Ella had told her what she was she had been unable to handle it all and her executable had dropped into a diagnostic cycle to recover her mental state.

‘Al doesn’t think I’ll be able to recover any more memories, and I’ve been through some worse trials than this. What I don’t get is why I have to be first aboard.’ The outer door opened and Aneka stepped forward into the docking tube which led to the Agroa Gar Science Station.

The station had been custom-built to allow the Agroa Gar to be studied. The university had spared every expense they could in setting up the project, which was why the ‘custom-built science facility’ was basically a docking system between the Garnet Hyde and the Xinti ship. It was actually a pretty clever idea: the Garnet Hyde already had many of the facilities they needed, as well as being a familiar base of operations to the team working on the ship. The ‘station’ had been built to fill in the gaps with a couple of laboratories and a workshop, a power plant able to supply power to the Xinti ship if needed, and two docking limbs to connect the larger vessels. It also had a sufficiently powerful atmospheric processor that it could actually handle giving the derelict ship a breathable atmosphere.

Gravity was another matter, however, and Aneka and Ella were floating as soon as they stepped clear of the airlock. Rails down the side of the short, metal-walled tunnel allowed them to pull themselves into one of the three modules comprising the station. There was just a simple hatch at the far side of the tunnel, airtight but locked only by latches driven home via a vertical bar which Aneka worked to allow them through. That let them into an access tunnel with branches off it in various directions leading to the engineering room and the storage area. Outside this module there was also a zero-atmosphere cargo area, currently occupied by the four semi-autonomous drones the project had been supplied with.

‘It’s a formality really,’ Ella said as she pulled herself through into the station and dogged the hatch behind her. ‘It’s your ship, you should invite the team aboard. It would have been nice last time, but you were, y’know, in stasis.’

Aneka pulled herself down the access corridor to the next doorway. This one was far heavier, powered, and clearly more like an airlock hatch. The core section of the station, which held the labs and control room, had more than a basic alloy hull. There was a short delay after Aneka hit the button beside the hatch before they could hear various seals unlocking. ‘It’s not like I own the thing,’ Aneka said as she waited. ‘It’s not actually mine…’

The door unsealed and opened to reveal Doctor Gillian Gilroy floating on the other side.

‘Actually, it is and you do,’ she said, also in English. Gillian always looked a little like that aunt you had who looked really fantastic well into her middle age. She had let herself age a little so she looked older than Ella did, but she certainly did not look her age, which was over a century. She had a classical look to her, though, with short, brown hair she kept in ringlets, brown eyes, and features that would not have looked out of place on a Greek statue.

‘Sorry?’ Aneka asked, frowning at her.

‘The Agroa Gar is, technically, your ship,’ Gillian replied, smiling slightly. ‘You were the only living, sentient being aboard when she was found. Under Federal salvage statutes, that means that she belongs to you. The Administration enacted clauses allowing them to take temporary possession for study purposes, but when we’ve finished ownership reverts to you.’

Closing her eyes and squeezing the bridge of her nose, Aneka found herself not quite believing what she was hearing. ‘Wonderful. I own a Xinti wreck.’

‘You own the most important archaeological find of the century,’ Gillian corrected. ‘The most important one related to the Xinti anyway.’

‘There’s another kind?’

‘Of course.’ Aneka could hear the humour in Gillian’s voice. ‘
You
are the most important archaeological find related to Old Earth.’

By now they had reached the second bulkhead door on the opposite side of the control module. ‘Thanks for that, Doc,’ Aneka said as they waited for the doors to open. ‘That makes me feel really old.’

‘Only chronologically.’

‘Chronologically is all I have. It’s not like this body ages.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Ella agreed. ‘You’ll always be young, gorgeous, incredibly sexy…’

‘Down girl,’ Aneka replied, grinning at her. ‘We’re working, remember?’

Ella pouted for about a second before giving one of her bright smiles. She was right, of course; Aneka’s body had been a good one even before the Xinti had replaced it. She had been a soldier; her body had been the result of good genetics and better exercise. She was tall, tanned, and beautiful, with lots of long, firm muscle and a model’s face. Her eyes were a clear blue, her nose moderately long and straight, her lips were full and slightly pouting, her cheekbones high and wide, her cheeks hollow. She had previously had a cap of dirty-blonde hair, but that had been replaced with a white that was almost silver, and the remodelling had included a more expansive, firmer bust, perky, and slightly pointed. The Xinti had designed her to be an observer of Humans, and had got the idea of what Humanity’s ideal woman was from the Internet. That was likely why they had neglected to include pubic or underarm hair in the model. She had, at one point, decided she was lucky; her nipples stood out like thimbles when aroused and the lucky part was that this was not a permanent feature given the source material.

The doors opened onto another tube-like corridor. Branching off from this one were the atmospheric processor system, the workshop, and a sensor facility which was directed specifically at analysing whatever emissions came from the Agroa Gar. At the far end of the corridor were the remainder of the team who would be taking part in the initial survey.

Leo Bashford was a facilitator, which was the job title Aneka had. He was the senior facilitator on the team, an experienced naval technician who had left the Federal Navy to go private. He had a robust, muscled body and a handsome face with slightly slanted eyes. Humans tended to have an odd mix of features after a thousand years of intermixing races and modifying their genetics until they no longer called themselves ‘Human.’ They were the Jenlay, a name that had come into use after the war with the Xinti and before the foundation of the Lorenti Federation. Bashford was a fine example of a Jenlay male, including what Aneka considered an above average bulge in his shipsuit: above average for a Human, not a Jenlay. He was also bald, with the kind of skull that suited it; he had gorgeous bone structure.

Floating beside him, and apparently more comfortable doing so than he was in normal gravity, was Doctor Abraham Wallace. Around eight feet in height and thin to the point of absurdity, Wallace had been born on a low-gravity world and wore an exoskeleton suit to help him cope with the stress of moving under normal conditions. Always good humoured, he was an expert in more or less all of the physical sciences, and had an anachronistic love of physical media. His office at the University of New Earth was full of printouts and books where most people used tablets and larger computers. Aneka would have liked him just for that, but he had also had absolutely no qualms about her from before they had met. Jenlay, many of them anyway, had developed something of a prejudice against cybernetic organisms and robots as a result of the war with the Xinti and Aneka’s nature had been made a state secret because of that. Wallace could not have cared less; as far as he was concerned she was a woman stuck in a robotic body and he dealt with her as another sentient being rather than as a machine.