The Cold Steel Mind (11 page)

Aneka’s eyes scanned the room. ‘Al says that whoever did this connected straight into the terminal through a data port. He says it wasn’t Cassandra so we have…’ She stopped as she noticed sparks of blue light, markers from her ultraviolet overlay, from the floor under one of the air-conditioning vents. Walking over, she bent down and swiped at them with her fingers.’

‘What’s that?’ Shannon asked, walking over.

Aneka looked at the specks of metal on her fingertips. ‘Looks like metal shavings…’ She looked up at the vent, seeing the scratch marks around the screws highlighted by her edge-recognition software. ‘Al thinks we have an intruder. And given that something came through that vent, and that vent is too small for a Human, I’d have to say we have a really small intruder.’ She looked around at the others. ‘A hyper-intelligent glickle?’

~~~

It had taken the combined efforts of Wallace and Shannon doing the recalibrations and adjustments, and Delta and Monkey realigning array heads, but they had got the station sensors which had been tuned to scan the Agroa Gar to work over the Garnet Hyde instead. That had taken almost an hour, and then it had taken another ten minutes for the anomaly to show up: a small signal, unnoticeable without the enhanced science array, but definitely there. Now Aneka was down in the ship’s hold with Monkey’s blaster pistol.

There were two reasons why she was doing it. First, she could operate in the unpressurised section where the blip was without a suit. Second, they were unsure of exactly what they were facing, and her body was better suited to taking damage than anyone else’s. And she was using Monkey’s pistol, as she had told Delta, because her own blaster might blow a hole in the hull, and would certainly obliterate whatever was down there before they figured out what it was. Thankfully, as far as she was concerned, the weapon came with sights designed to operate with a HUD, so she could patch it through her normal targeting system. Currently she had it set to stun, essentially making it a ranged Taser.

‘Anything?’ Ella’s voice sounded worried even over the radio channel.

‘Not yet,’ Aneka replied. ‘All I see are the cargo containers we brought up last time.’

‘The signal is still there,’ Shannon said. ‘Around five metres ahead of you.’

Aneka moved around the crates that were blocking her path. Turning back towards where her in-vision display from the ship’s sensors was indicating the blip was, she immediately saw the dark hole in the side of one of the boxes. ‘There’s a panel missing from the exterior of one crate. Looks like someone arranged for us to bring our intruder aboard last shore leave.’

‘That sounds exceptionally well organised,’ Wallace commented. ‘Someone after information on the Xinti-tech?’

‘Seems logic-’ Aneka cut off as something shifted in the opening in the crate. As her high-speed mind slowed the action down, she had time to see a metallic object, roughly disc-shaped, with at least two limbs. Then there were other messages flashing across her vision as a laser beam hit her right cheek.
Laser weapon impact. Dermal layer damaged.
She smelled burning and lifted her gun, pulling the trigger as she registered the disk in the sighting window. Sparks danced across the metal skin of the small robot and its limbs twitched violently before going still.

‘Aneka?!’ Ella sounded slightly frantic.

‘I’m okay. I found our intruder and it was armed. I’ve got a laser burn for my efforts, but nothing bad.’ Stepping forwards, she lifted the robot out of the hole. ‘It’s a robot, a small one. Six limbs and some sort of ducted fan propulsion, for zero G I guess. I think I shorted it out or something with the blaster.’

‘Its electronics were probably not shielded,’ Al commented. ‘There isn’t much mass there to put shielding into.’

‘Bring it back,’ Wallace said. ‘Cassandra, Delta, and I can dissect it. Perhaps we can recover something, or find a clue to its origin.’

Aneka nodded, and dropped to one knee to look into the hole in the crate. ‘On my way, but we may have more problems. There’s room for several of these things in this crate.’

‘Nothing else is showing up on the sensors,’ Shannon replied.

‘That may be because we’re looking in the wrong place.’

‘I’ll get started realigning the arrays,’ Monkey said as Aneka started back towards the airlock.

~~~

Delta was trying hard not to stare at Aneka’s cheek. The beam had cut over her cheekbone, revealing some of the mesh beneath the artificial, semi-organic skin. Normally Aneka looked and acted entirely Human, and she was fairly sure that Delta had stopped thinking of her as anything else. Now she was faced with the reality that Aneka was basically a robot, albeit one significantly more sophisticated than the one being disassembled in one of the Hyde’s labs. Thankfully, the looks Delta was giving her suggested curiosity rather than abhorrence.

‘The device itself appears to be custom-built,’ Cassandra commented. She had been going through the ship’s databases by remote. ‘It corresponds to no commercially available model of robot. Unfortunately all the components are off-the-shelf. You could find them in practically any hobby electronics catalogue. They are highly compact, expensive, but not uncommon.’

‘It’s been designed for spying,’ Wallace added. ‘Infiltration even. I’d estimate the cells are good for a month. It has a short-range, burst radio transceiver and a lot of data storage. I’m fairly positive that it cannot have reported anything it has found to its owner.’

Aneka gave a grunt and tapped the attention button on the console beside her. ‘Jansen to Patton. Shannon, lock down the long-range communications system. Shut it down if you have to.’

‘On it. I’ll need to leave a channel open for the shuttle. They’re due back in the next hour.’

‘Okay, but put a monitor on it. If it’s used by anyone, we want to know.’ She frowned at the bits of robot. ‘When we’ve got them all we’ll send the specs to Winter. Maybe she’s heard of something like this before.’

‘You seem to be on very good terms with the head of Federation Security,’ Wallace commented. Delta was wide-eyed.

‘For whatever reason, she seems to be very interested in me. When it comes to things like this, that’s useful.’

Wallace nodded. ‘I’m going to see what I can salvage from this thing’s memory. I suggest you start looking for its friends.’

‘Yeah,’ Aneka said pushing away from the desk she was leaning against, ‘but this time I’m going to get a bigger gun.’

~~~

Aneka actually stood guard over Monkey and Delta while they realigned the arrays again, Bessie in her hands. The huge blaster was set to its non-lethal setting, but that was significantly more powerful than the one Monkey’s blaster had. Monkey’s weapon fired highly accelerated electrons, simply reducing the power to produce the Taser effect. Bessie normally fired anti-protons, requiring a larger acceleration field to do it; switching that over to accelerating an electron stream produced quite a charge.

The result of all that hard work had, however, been a complete lack of any sign of anything out of the ordinary and a ‘War Council’ had been set up in the mess as soon as the shuttle was back aboard the Hyde.

‘I believe,’ Wallace was saying, ‘that any remaining robots have gone into a low-power, stealth mode. This assumes that there are other robots, but it does seem likely. A solitary unit would not need the communications package.’

‘So we won’t be able to spot them unless they power up?’ Aneka asked.

‘Unless we do it visually,’ Drake replied, ‘and they could be in places we would find very hard to get to.’

‘What about the inspection drones?’ Delta said. Everyone looked at her. ‘We have those two inspection units to do studies of the conduits on the Xinti ship, yeah? They’re remote-piloted, but we could fly them down through the air ducts and cable conduits. They have cameras and lidar…’

Aneka smirked at her. ‘And you said you weren’t cut out for this job.’

‘She did?’ Monkey sounded a little surprised.

‘So that was two things I was wrong about, I guess,’ Delta admitted. ‘I can have the drones ready in an hour. Monkey can fly the second one.’

‘Aneka and I will do a search through the station,’ Bashford added. ‘We won’t have time to do the Agroa Gar…’

‘We can keep going tonight,’ Delta interrupted.

‘Flying those drones in tight confines is tiring,’ Bashford told her. ‘I agree that there’s some urgency in this, but if you keep going at it without rest you’ll miss things.’

‘Bash is right,’ Aneka stated flatly. She looked at Drake. ‘Can we set the sensor systems to keep scanning and alert us if these things show their faces?’

‘Of course.’

Bashford nodded. ‘That’s the plan then. We work while we can and set the sensors up to watch while we sleep.’

‘Wouldn’t it be faster if we all searched?’ Ella asked.

‘Those things are armed, Ella,’ Aneka said. ‘I don’t want Bash going in there, but I know I can’t stop him. My face will be back to normal in an hour. You’d need surgery, if it didn’t kill you.’

‘Yeah… I guess.’ Aneka could tell she was not pleased, but that was how it was going to be. The risk was unquantifiable, but it applied to all of them, and putting someone else in the direct line of fire was not an option.

17.8.524 FSC.

Aneka’s eyes flicked open, the dark room not so dark to her eyes, but the usual display of diagnostics was not there. Instead there was a flashing message which said,
System interrupt. Diagnostic cycle incomplete.

‘I am receiving a communication request,’ Al said into the silence.

‘So? Hang on, the comm system is still shut down.’

‘This is coming in through a short-range signal.’ There was an odd sort of strain in his voice. ‘Aneka, it’s using Xinti protocols and a Xinti civilian-grade encryption standard.’

Aneka’s mind ran over the possibilities, but it came down to only one. ‘The ship’s awake. Put it through. I want to know what’s going on.’

‘Initiating connection…’

Nothing seemed to change, but then the voice spoke. ‘I realise that you may not trust me, but the situation has moved to the point where we need each other’s help.’ It was female and speaking English with no accent, and it seemed to be coming from inside the room rather than inside Aneka’s head. She opened her eyes and found herself looking at a pair of golden legs.

Bolting upright was probably not a smart move. Ella groaned, her eyes flickering open. ‘Aneka? What’s wrong? Did the sensors detect something?’

Aneka was staring at the figure in the room with them. She was a trim, naked woman with fairly large breasts and honey-blonde hair which fell to her neck. The one ‘imperfection’ was a lack of defined genitalia. That and that she was gold. Her skin was metallic gold, her featureless eyeballs were silver. ‘I elected to take a Human form to make you more comfortable,’ the woman said. Aneka looked at her. ‘We do not have time for this.’

‘Aneka?’ Ella looked between Aneka and where Aneka was looking. ‘What’s going on?’

‘You don’t see that?’ Aneka asked, pointing at the figure. ‘Hear it?’

‘I’m an image projected onto your vision field,’ the woman told her. ‘My voice appears to come from the image, but it is patched through your senses. It might be unwise to…’

‘I’m seeing a woman with gold skin and silver eyes standing beside the table,’ Aneka said, ignoring the projection. ‘I think it’s the computer from the Agroa Gar.’

‘That is correct,’ the golden woman said. ‘A situation has arisen which…’

‘It’s talking to you?!’ Ella butted in, unable to hear that she was interrupting. She sounded excited rather than alarmed.

Aneka sighed. ‘Ella, the computer which we thought was entirely inactive has made contact with me, was probably the one messing with my head a couple of days ago, and has obviously been hiding the fact that it’s fully functional. Get Bashford and Drake down here. I want guns pointed at my head.’

‘There is no need for that,’ the computer said, ‘and no time. We have to…’

‘Ella…’ Aneka growled.

The golden woman’s face creased into a frown. ‘Your internal communications system is down. You can’t contact them, even if you wanted to. Now will you listen to me?’

‘Internal comms is down,’ Ella said, her voice now carrying a hint of anxiety. ‘Did she…?’

Aneka shook her head, eyes on the computer. ‘No… No, I don’t think she did it. All right, what’s going on?’

‘You are aware of the robots that have been infiltrating this facility. I thought that they were yours at first, but they went out of their way to avoid any of you. When you almost found one of them they provided that animal corpse to distract you. Then you destroyed one and the others were alerted. They reactivated thirty minutes ago…’

‘Our sensors should have picked them up,’ Aneka interrupted.

‘One of them was in position to disable your internal communications at a moment’s notice. With that down, your computer was unable to signal the one you call Drake. I have disabled two of the devices that were attempting to access my core. There are three more. One is attempting to access my systems through a different route, one is hacking the computers on the bridging station, and one is in your engineering section. I believe the last one’s intent is not benign.’

‘Fuck!’

‘Aneka?’ Ella asked. She was looking confused and scared.

‘Ella, get your suit and helmet on and go wake the others. The spy robots are attempting to sabotage the ship. I’m going down to the drive room to try to stop that, but they need to get into the station and the Agroa Gar to stop the other two.’ She stabbed an index finger at the golden woman. ‘You. You’re talking to me via a radio connection, so you can at least audio link to the others. You have to guide them to where the robots are.’

‘I connected to you because you were designed as an observation platform for the Xinti. I don’t trust…’

‘Well I do and I can’t do everything alone. Now do it!’

‘Of course, Yrimlos.’

Aneka paused with her hand halfway to her leotard. ‘What did you call me?’

‘Yrimlos. It means…’

‘God’s eyes?’

‘Yes. It was the name given to you when you were uplifted.’ There was a tiny pause during which Aneka gritted her teeth and thought of a response. ‘I am sorry that I had to covertly access your memory to discover what had happened to me. Perhaps I should have been more open.’