The Cold Steel Mind (5 page)

Delta looked distinctly uncomfortable, but she nodded. ‘Uh, Aneka?’

‘Yes, Delta.’

‘What’s a chicken?’

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‘I assume the reason my son is looking blithely happy and making doe eyes at Delta has something to do with you missing dinner last night, Aneka?’ Gillian said as they worked over the flight deck of the Agroa Gar.

‘She needed a push, so did he,’ Aneka replied. ‘I fabricated her some thigh-high boots and a corset.’

‘A corset?’ Ella asked.

‘Uh, yeah… Like that basque you persuaded me to buy on Harriamon, but with more uplift and a far tighter waist. She needed the extra confidence. In case you hadn’t noticed, her breasts sag a little. Probably spending nearly thirty years in high gravity. Anyway, it seems like it did the trick. Monkey looked the type who’d go for the dominatrix look.’

Ella frowned. ‘No panties?’

‘A black thong. She’d have freaked if I’d suggested that degree of nudity.’

‘Sounds kind of… covering for seduction-wear.’

‘I can queue up the same outfit in your size if you wish?’ Al suggested. The AI was very good at predicting Aneka’s needs and wants; far too good at times.

‘See if they’ve got a pattern for a riding crop too,’ Aneka silently replied. Aloud she said, ‘These cable jacks on the consoles, they’re what they used to connect into the ship?’ The black cables were probably useless now; like all the other bio-plastic on the ship they had degraded, died, and were quite brittle.

‘Multi-core fibre-optic,’ Gillian replied by way of confirmation. ‘You don’t have a port for connecting one somewhere?’

‘Where would she imagine it was hidden?’ Al asked. Gillian raised an eyebrow at Aneka’s smirk.

‘Al wants to know where you think they hid one. I think I’ve just got the wireless networking.’

‘Technically,’ Al said, ‘there is a hard-link port near the base of your skull. It’s covered and left over from when the original frame was being programmed. Your mind and my software were uploaded through it. You’d need surgery to get to it now. It was never meant to be used after your skin was put on.’

‘I think we’ll stick with just the wireless idea.’

Gillian was looking upward. ‘Aneka, do you think you could open that panel up there?’

The panel in question was big, taking up a two-metre-diameter portion of the ceiling. Aneka doubted she could have managed it alone under normal conditions, but with the zero gravity… ‘I’ll give it a go,’ she said, pushing upward. Locking her boots to the ceiling, she examined one of the locking bolts and then pulled a universal driver from her belt. The head of the little motorised device locked into the slot in the bolt, an odd, eight-pointed star design, and soon the bolt was being twisted out of its hole. She glanced around the circular hatchway. ‘This is going to take a short while. They really didn’t want this opened that easily.’

It took about thirty minutes to go around the entire hatch and then to prise the plate free and move it away from the hole it left in the ceiling. Thankfully there was no sign of any form of bug-eyed monster, or even a dead Xinti, in the space above. Instead there were large racks of computer equipment, silent and inactive, arranged in a circle around the access port.

‘That’s the primary computer system,’ Gillian said. ‘That’s what we need to get powered up so that we can access its memory. You see that large, sort of crystalline section?’ Aneka turned and saw what she meant; taking up about a quarter of the space was a block of semi-transparent material which refracted light oddly. ‘Holographic memory of some sort. We should get Abraham down here to look at it, and we need a full lidar map and any other sensor analysis we can before the power comes on.’

‘Well,’ Aneka said, ‘I can tell you what I see, and it looks like the whole thing is dead. There are no emissions beyond normal thermal. That memory block does some really odd things to the light moving through it, but it’s basically inert.’

Gillian gave a nod. ‘Gilroy to Drake. Could you get us a lidar drone up to the flight deck, Drake? We want the computer core scanned.’

‘Shannon’s on it,’ Drake’s voice replied over the comm units.

‘I’ll be right down,’ Wallace added.

Gillian smirked at Aneka and Ella. ‘What a surprise,’ she said.

~~~

‘It looks like there was a power surge when the reactor failed,’ Monkey told the rest of the team at the evening food and discussion gathering. ‘We’ve laid cables through to the main power converters and spliced them in, but we’re having to go through and check the conduits out of the reactor room one by one. Then we’re having to rig bypasses for the damaged sections with modern components.’

‘It’s taking longer than we thought,’ Delta added to emphasise the point.

‘Well,’ Gillian said, ‘we’re about done with our survey. Aneka can help you two tomorrow while Ella and I start working on the samples and such in the labs.’ She looked around. ‘Aneka missing her meal again?’

‘She said she had something to take care of,’ Ella replied. ‘I’ll let her know the change of assignment when I see her later.’

‘Hmm, I wonder what she’s up to this time. She’s already fixed my son’s love life.’

Both Monkey and Delta went scarlet, but neither said a word.

~~~

The door to the cabin opened and Ella walked in, coming to a sudden stop, her mouth dropping open. Aneka was standing in the space between the bunks and the table, dressed in a black, mock-leather corset which narrowed her waist and pushed her substantial breasts upward, a tiny black G-string, and thigh-high, black, stiletto-heeled boots. She was slowly tapping a riding crop against her right thigh and trying to keep a straight face while all she wanted to do was grin.

‘Now then,’ Aneka said, ‘tell me again how this is not good seduction-wear.’

‘I… take it all back,’ Ella replied, her voice barely making it over a whisper.

Aneka slapped her leather-clad thigh sharply with the crop. ‘Not good enough! Get that suit off and you can tell me in much greater detail while you’re licking my boots.’

‘Oh Vashma,’ Ella breathed as her hands started undoing her suit seal before her mind had caught up with what she was doing.

Aneka allowed herself a smirk.

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‘Doesn’t that thing restrict your breathing?’ Ella asked. The thong had been dispensed with, but Aneka was still encased in corset and boots, and they were lying, happy and satiated on the bottom bunk.

‘Yes, but thankfully I don’t need to breathe that much.’

‘And people wore those in your time?’ Ella sounded slightly disbelieving.

‘Not routinely. A century earlier there was a fashion for hourglass figures and women would wear ridiculously tight corsets all the time. There were cases of fainting and even broken ribs. People will do stupid things for fashion.’

‘Tighter than that one?!’

‘Much tighter. At least I didn’t need a maid to lever me into this. Modern materials make it a lot easier. This one just contracts to the desired fitting like those jeans I have.’

‘I don’t think it’ll catch on.’

Aneka grunted a laugh. ‘No, sexy to you people is basically nude. It’s like you’ve lost the idea that a bit of mystery helps. You’re so used to everyone being pretty, and everyone being happy with their bodies, that you just display the goods to anyone who wants to look.’ She frowned. ‘And yet you still have bikinis.’

Ella gave a shrug. ‘I guess a little covering up
does
make it more exciting when you get to see what’s beneath. It’s different now though. Pretty much everyone is attractive so you have to look at more than the surface to find someone you want to be with. Seeing everything up front doesn’t make that much difference.’

Aneka gave a soft grunt. ‘Except that’s so much gopi, right? You said yourself that no one wanted to be with you when you were disfigured. If everyone’s beautiful, then no one has to settle for an ugly partner. If they’d got to know you they’d have seen what a gorgeous girl there was under that messed up face, but they just looked at the outside and went off to find a cheerleader.’

Ella was silent for a while. The Jenlay seemed to dislike having the hypocrisies of their society pointed out, but generally Ella was better about it than most. Finally she said, ‘What’s a cheerleader?’

Aneka laughed. ‘You’d have made a great one.’

~~~

Aneka floated near the main flight console of the Agroa Gar, her eyes scanning the room slowly and her pistol in her hand. In the engineering section, Bashford was doing something similar, except that he was holding a laser carbine. None of the academics were aboard the ship; they were considered non-combatants. If something went wrong at this stage all Hell could break loose and the last thing they needed was a group of easy targets for some automated defence system. Not that they had found evidence of one, but you never knew with alien technology.

Aneka had actually suggested that she be alone on the ship. Her hardened chassis could handle a lot more than Bashford, or the two people rigging the final stage of the power cabling, Delta and Monkey. Bashford had looked at her until she had backed down. He was probably right, of course, but if he got himself killed she was going to murder him.

‘We’re ready,’ Monkey said over the radio.

‘All our sensor systems are active and recording,’ Ella added. She was in the station control room with Gillian. Wallace and Cassandra, along with Drake and Shannon, were back on the Hyde. If they had to disconnect quickly and pull away, Drake had wanted the majority of people already aboard.

‘Aneka?’ Bashford’s voice asked her status.

‘My sensors are active and recording too.’

‘Close the connection,’ Bashford ordered. There was a pause and then…

Aneka’s gyroscopic balance landed her smoothly on her feet, but she heard a chorus of expletives from the other people aboard the ship. ‘Gravity still works,’ she commented. Her eyes scanned the consoles which now had flickering patterns of characters moving over them. ‘Nothing much else seems to.’

‘I am detecting an internal wireless network,’ Al informed her. ‘However, no data is being transferred across it. Basic access point identification broadcasts and nothing else.’

‘We’re showing some radio transmissions from within the ship,’ Ella said, confirming Al’s findings, more or less. ‘Short bursts. Is something talking?’

Xinti speech used a highly compressed, near-digital form which had been mistaken for radio static until Aneka had identified it. This was not Xinti however. ‘Just wireless base station transmissions,’ Aneka said. ‘According to Al anyway. Nothing else is saying anything and the display panels in here are showing random glyphs. I don’t recognise anything you’d call a proper word.’

‘All right,’ Bashford cut in. ‘We run a full sweep of the ship, establish there’s nothing here that’s going to murder us all, and
then
we can let our no doubt eager research team back aboard.’

Aneka nodded and started for the door. A brief pulse of sound, not a word, just a signal, drew her attention to one of the consoles where something was pulsing slowly.
Computer Online, firmware active, diagnostic systems offline, core intelligence offline.
‘It looks like the computer is up, but its mind isn’t working,’ she reported to the others.

‘Possibly for the best,’ Gillian replied. ‘We don’t want this one committing suicide on us.’

Aneka nodded, even if they could not see her. ‘I’ll take the port side, Bash. You guys cover the starboard. Good for you?’

‘Given that you’re the combat android, yes.’

~~~

‘The computer system seems to be largely unresponsive,’ Gillian said as she stood in front of one of the consoles, prodding at the virtual keyboard it was displaying with no effect. ‘The memory core must be severely degraded.’

‘Maybe,’ Ella began and then stopped.

‘What, Ella?’ the Doctor prompted.

‘Aneka and Bash would think it was a bad idea.’

‘We might as well hear it,’ Aneka told her, wondering how bad an idea it was.

‘Well, maybe Al could connect through the wireless system and start some data recovery on the memory. Like he did with Aneka’s memory.’

‘I could,’ Al said to Aneka.

‘He could,’ Aneka said aloud, ‘but you’re right, that doesn’t sound amazingly safe.’

Gillian looked at Bashford, standing beside the door with his carbine still cradled in his arms. ‘It’s up to Aneka and Al,’ he replied. ‘I don’t see how anything is going to progress unless you can recover the thing’s storage, but it’s Al that’s risking his, uh, life to do this. That said, if the system is that badly damaged, I doubt there are active security systems which would present a threat.’

‘I concur with Mister Bashford’s analysis,’ Al commented.

Aneka considered the matter for what seemed like several minutes to her, but was likely a second to everyone else. ‘All right, but we take precautions. There’s that examination table in the lab. We strap me down to that first. If something takes control of my body I won’t be able to go anywhere.’

Both Ella and Cassandra frowned at her. ‘The last time you were on that bench they were cutting you open,’ Ella stated, worried.

‘It’s a good thing the arms with the cutting gear aren’t there then, isn’t it?’

~~~

The ‘bench’ was roughly X-shaped, designed to stretch the occupant out for examination. Not trusting that the ship would not be able to control the metal bindings on it, Aneka had made them hold her down with the future version of duct tape; strips of high-strength, nanofibre reinforced setae strip were wrapped around her ankles, wrists, and waist. She felt very secure, and a little nervous. Despite her bravado, being back on the bench was not a thrilling experience.

Ella had not been entirely correct. The last time Aneka remembered being in the Agroa Gar’s lab was just before the reactor accident. The Xinti aboard the ship had been trying to ‘condition’ her, whatever that meant. While better than having a circular saw carving her stomach open, it had not been a great experience.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ Aneka said to Al. ‘I want out of here as soon as possible.’