The Cold Steel Mind (9 page)

Aneka frowned. ‘I don’t dream? I mean, I
do
dream. I remember having had dreams since I woke up like this.’

‘I’m not entirely sure what a Human dream is, but I don’t think what you experience is the same. Essentially your mind is interpreting random sensory snapshots left over from the night’s garbage collection. The nightmare you had on Alpha Mensae Four was generated as a response to our radio systems picking up chatter from the robots and your memories of the lab on the Agroa Gar. The dream you had last week with Ella and the cucumber… Well, I’d rather not contemplate where that came from, but we’re getting sidetracked.’

‘Sorry. So there’s a two-hour period last night where nothing was recorded. Like I was really shut down. I guess you must have been too, or you’d have noticed I wasn’t waking up.’

‘That disturbing fact had not escaped me.’

‘Well… What the Hell could do that?’

~~~

‘The Xinti?’ Ella was looking very serious, and that was no mean feat for her face. ‘There isn’t a live Xinti anywhere in the galaxy.’

‘That we know of,’ Gillian corrected. ‘However, the coincidence would seem… extreme. Xinti, some random survivors, happen to turn up here when we are investigating a Xinti wreck and start messing with you? Unlikely.’

‘What about the ship?’ Aneka countered. ‘This is the ship that was running the programme I was on. The computer had to know about these… data-gathering protocols.’

‘We’ve been monitoring everything,’ Wallace replied. ‘There is no evidence that the AI is even barely functional. I doubt it could be affecting you.’ They had managed to drag him away from his work with Tosimna to discuss Aneka’s problem. It had not been easy, but he had come to Aneka and Ella’s cabin after the third reminder. ‘These protocols were designed to allow them to download your data in bulk?’

‘That’s what Al says. They could access my long-term storage and just grab everything, but I’d have to be offline or it’d take too long. He thinks they could take him offline by invoking a data backup routine which would offline his runtime so all his memory could be downloaded.’

‘And there’s no control functionality involved?’ Drake asked. He was there because Aneka considered the entire thing to be a safety concern and she wanted no one left out of the discussion.

‘Al says no. They can’t even initiate a connection unless I’m already offline. However, I’d like someone to go over the ship’s access records and check whether my authentication codes have been used for anything odd.’

Drake nodded, a slight smile playing over the corners of his mouth. ‘You know, the only people I know of who distrust you as much as you do is the Navy.’

Aneka shrugged. ‘Ex-military security consultant. I can recognise a security nightmare when I see one.’

‘I’ll do the security checks personally,’ the Captain said. She could tell by the way he said it that he expected to find nothing.

~~~

Drake, and Bashford, whom Aneka had briefed an hour after the meeting when he had gone on a break, were sufficiently unconcerned about her potential risk that she was given the task of checking on a data conduit which had developed a fault at the back of one of the workshops in the station. It was partially because, in a zero G environment, her augmented balance mechanisms gave her an advantage, and her augmented target tracking meant she rarely lost loose bolts.

In this case another factor came into play after she had removed the last of the securing bolts. The panel was distinctly reluctant to come free and Aneka had to brace herself against the inner wall and apply her augmented muscles to the task of getting it free. Aneka briefly wondered whether she should have her name changed to Aneka ‘Augmented’ Jansen. There was a softly audible ‘ting!’ as the panel gave, as though she had broken something, but she was sure she had removed all eight bolts. She frowned, unsure of what else she had heard as the plate freed itself.

‘Al, replay the audio for the five-second period starting one second before the plate came free.’ There was definitely something there; a distant rattle just after the plate lifted. ‘Enhance from the break. Give me a frequency analysis and all that good stuff.’

‘Really? “All that good stuff?”’

‘I’m an ex-soldier, Al. Give me a break.’

‘Of course. Enhancing the sound you appear to be interested in.’ Sure enough, the sound, something like sharp nails tapping glass as something ran, was clearer in Al’s cleaned up replay.

‘Do you have any idea what that was?’ Aneka asked. ‘Because I know what it sounds like and it’s crazy.’ She peered into the space behind the panel, and her suspicions just got worse. Several of the fibre-optic cables passing through the junction had had notches taken out of the Plastex coating them, as though something had been gnawing at them. ‘These are all going to need replacing,’ she commented.

‘Indeed. According to the schematic, that blue one is the most important, and also the worst damaged.’

It was difficult to see, but Aneka thought the fibre beneath the coating looked damaged. ‘Jansen to Bashford. Bash, I’m going to need… seven fibre patch cables down here.’

‘Seven?’ Bashford’s voice sounded surprised even over the communication channel.

‘Yeah. Uh… Is there such a thing as space rats? It looks like something’s gnawed the Plastex coating and I’m sure I heard… well, skittering.’

Now Bashford sounded resigned. ‘Not rats, no, but there are glickles.’

‘Glickles?’

‘Like rats, but they operate fine in zero gravity. If we have a colony aboard we could be in real trouble. Vashma! I hope they haven’t got onto the Agroa Gar!’

‘Will the sensors pick them up?’

‘We should be able to register the heat signatures if we tune them. Fix those cables. I’ll get Monkey and Delta to help me with the glickle hunt.’

‘Yes, boss.’ Aneka turned from the hatch and started towards the door; there were spare patch cables in the other workshop.

‘It’s odd,’ Al commented as she floated towards the hatch, ‘but we registered no abnormal heat signature behind the hatch before opening it, and it was stuck rather fast, as though something did not want it opened.’

‘Well, if they’re small…’

‘Yes. The thermal signature might not have shown against the comms hub in there.’

‘That’s a comms hub?’

‘According to the schematic. The glickle could have taken down the main data and voice connections between the Agroa Gar and the Garnet Hyde if it had kept chewing.’

‘Huh. Good thing we caught it in time then.’

~~~

The three hunters, looking tired and dirty, slouched into the mess on the Hyde. Bashford put a small, plastic box on the table. Through one transparent side, Aneka could see an animal of some kind which looked a little like a cross between a rat and an armadillo, possibly their mutant offspring with a spider. It had eight limbs, each ending in an articulated ‘hand’ with sharp claws. Its skin was covered in dense-looking platelets and it had rodent-like, very large incisors jutting out past the end of a long muzzle. There was a large burn mark on its left side, probably fatal and the reason it looked dead.

‘That’s it?’ she asked. ‘That’s a glickle? Just the one glickle at that?’

‘Be thankful,’ Drake commented. ‘Where there are two glickles, there are dozens of the little buggers.’

‘We’re pretty sure that’s it,’ Bashford said. ‘We combed both ships and the station. All we could find was this corpse. Looks like it ran into a power conduit not long after you disturbed it, Aneka.’

Tosimna was glowering at the dead alien across the table. ‘I’m glad it’s dead. Those things are a menace. A plague on the survey team who found them.’

Gillian gave her a conciliatory smile and then looked across at Aneka. ‘When they were discovered, on Glick Six I believe, someone thought they would make interesting pets. There was a big merchandising campaign and such. Then it was discovered that they love eating bio-plastics and they breed like maniacs with enough food. Their native environment kept them in check with predators and limited food supply.’

‘That was too late for several Torem stations where they had become popular with children,’ Tosimna continued. Aneka looked at the corpse and wondered how
anyone
could have ever considered the things cute. ‘We lost one entire station, along with several dozen people, when the things destroyed the reactor control system. After that they were eradicated, and the transportation and sale of them was banned, but they still manage to find their way onto ships and stations from time to time.’

‘Well, I’m just glad we got this sorted out today,’ Bashford said.

‘Yes,’ Gillian said, nodding. ‘It would have interrupted our shore leave.’

‘Oh, yes…’ Tosimna’s voice carried a hint of melancholy. ‘Back down to Corax tomorrow.’ She frowned at the glickle. ‘Stupid creatures can’t even be disruptive when I’d like them to be.’

~~~

Aneka was about to leave with Ella, heading back to their cabin though it was unlikely they would be sleeping immediately, when Tosimna looked up at her. It was tough to read expression on a Torem’s face, but there was something like curiosity there. ‘Aneka, you have an amazingly quiet mind. I don’t think I’ve ever caught a stray thought from you.’

‘Vashma yes!’ Shannon got in before Aneka could even start considering a response. ‘She’s awesome. The Mental Sciences department thinks it’s something to do with the nanostasis, or something else that happened while she was on the Agroa Gar. Her brain doesn’t operate on the right frequencies or something. I never did understand that psi-science stuff. I’m just glad she’s not as noisy as Ella.’

‘Hey!’ Ella huffed. ‘I try to be quiet, I’m just…’

‘Naturally very open?’ Tosimna suggested, her lips curling into a thin sort of smile. ‘I can’t understand your thoughts, but it is a little like being sat beside a fusion drive.’

‘A mistuned one,’ Shannon agreed.

‘Huh!’ Ella grunted, mock affronted. ‘Well I’m going to take my noisy mind and my quiet girlfriend, and go make noise in our cabin.’

Aneka grinned at Shannon and Tosimna, and followed Ella as she strutted out of the mess room. She said nothing until the door was closed behind them. ‘Shannon’s a genius.’

‘Shannon and I,’ Ella replied. ‘We came up with that distraction plan just in case.’

‘Clever girl. I knew there was more to you than a beautiful face and a great body.’

‘Of course there is! I have degrees in psychology and… And you were joking.’

Aneka gave her a slap on the seat of her shipsuit. ‘Yes, but not about your body. Now get moving so I can prove it.’

15.8.524 FSC.

Technically, with Drake, Gillian, and Bashford off the station, Shannon was in charge of shipboard safety and operation, and Monkey was in charge of any facilitator activities required. In practice, however, Monkey was a little unsure of himself and was deferring to Aneka a lot. Also, in practice it made little difference. Wallace was busy working on the simulation he had started with Tosimna; apparently they were very close to a working hypothesis on how the warp cores functioned and he was having to be supervised to make sure he slept. Cassandra was taking care of that, however. That left Ella doing research on the Agroa Gar, and Aneka was happy to cover her when she went over.

Thus far the Agroa Gar’s data archives had revealed more about Old Earth than it had about the Xinti. They had discovered huge amounts of data taken from the Internet. Pretty much the entirety of Wikipedia had been archived, which had given Aneka the opportunity to point Gillian at it and got her off the hook of providing insights into a lot of history and culture. She had had to point out that it was not always entirely accurate, but a good source of information. A highly detailed map had given Aneka the opportunity to show Ella where she had lived, when she had been home. She was a little surprised to discover that doing so did not hurt as much as she had expected. Finding her brother’s Facebook page was a different matter, but she had managed.

As lunchtime grew closer, Aneka heard some familiar sounds coming from a speaker and looked over Ella’s shoulder to see a couple engaged in a typical, vaguely unrealistic porn scene. ‘The stuff Kat and Dillon make is better,’ she commented.

‘You know, I got the impression from your reaction to our comedies that there just wasn’t this kind of porn around back then,’ Ella commented.

‘Oh there was plenty of porn on the Internet. Some of it was perverted and disgusting by any standard. Some of it was just enormously unrealistic, like this. People were starting to post homemade stuff which was better, I guess. At least it didn’t give people unrealistic expectations. Of course, when you do that now everyone looks like they could have been a porn star.’

‘It’s kind of hot.’

‘It’s supposed to be.’

‘Do you know how many rules we’d be breaking if we had sex in here?’

‘I probably don’t know all of them, but I can think of several.’

Ella giggled. ‘But I want you. Now.’ The redhead turned slightly. Her fingers traced over the exposed skin of Aneka’s butt.

‘We shouldn’t…’

‘No,’ the word was breathed in Aneka’s ear, ‘but we’re going to.’ The seal at the front of Aneka’s suit parted and Ella leaned down to kiss the skin revealed beneath.

Aneka felt the familiar flutter between her legs and knew that Ella was right.
Why can’t I ever say no to her?
But it was too late for that; Ella was peeling Aneka’s leotard back to reveal her breasts and her pointy tongue was circling a nipple. Aneka groaned and gave in, her fingers finding the closure at Ella’s throat and unsealing her suit. Ella moaned in turn as Aneka’s fingers slipped under the Plastex and found a nipple. Aneka had to admit there was something thrilling about impromptu, fumbling sex done somewhere where you should not be doing it.

Aneka was at a slight tactical advantage; Ella needed to negotiate the equipment belt Aneka was wearing to get where she wanted to go, but Ella’s suit split to the crotch immediately. The redhead’s eyes widened as Aneka found her target, and fingers filled Ella giving her no time to react before they found the spot within her that reacted so well to the right kind of pressure.