The Cold Steel Mind (13 page)

‘Doc?’ Drake’s voice, so the radios were still working.

‘There’s a massive gravitational force out there,’ Wallace was obviously concentrating hard on something. ‘Tight, but strong. I can only think… It looks like a string.’

Aneka lost interest in what he was saying as she made it up onto the main deck and found Gillian and Ella. The Doctor was clearly leading a trembling Ella towards the labs where Wallace was and Aneka had been heading. ‘Ella? What’s wrong?’

‘She can’t see,’ Gillian replied. Ella was already turning at the sound of Aneka’s voice, rushing forwards off course. Aneka grabbed her and the redhead clung to her fiercely until Aneka picked her up with no apparent effort and started walking towards the lab.

‘The pulse,’ Ella whispered. ‘My eyes are cybernetic and the pulse wiped them out just like it knocked Cassandra out.’

‘We’ll fix it,’ Aneka said. ‘Delta can probably fix it in her sleep. We’ll…’

The ship gave a sudden, massive lurch. Gillian hit the wall of the corridor and then fell. Only Aneka’s enhanced balance kept her upright. ‘What the Hell?! Are you all right, Gillian?’

‘I’ll live,’ Gillian replied. ‘We’re accelerating.’

‘What was that?’ Drake sounded angry, and worried. ‘This station isn’t in a fit state to handle that sort of acceleration.’

Aneka walked into the lab in time to hear Wallace’s response first-hand. ‘We’re being dragged towards the string, or…’ She saw the man’s eyes widening. ‘That’s impossible!’

‘Doc?’ Aneka asked as she set Ella down beside a dazed looking Cassandra.

‘These readings suggest a circular, high-gravitation singularity effect. It’s not possible, but it looks like a wormhole.’

‘My understanding was that those were unstable at best,’ Gillian commented.

‘Theoretically, wrapping one in a cosmic string with negative energy density could stabilise one, but…’

‘The technology is far beyond what you have?’ Aneka suggested. Wallace nodded dumbly at her. ‘Aggy sent a distress call when she first woke up. I’m thinking that was the weird electromagnetic effect you had us looking for when we came back from Corax… and I think she may have got an answer.’

‘The Xinti did not have wormhole technology,’ Gillian stated flatly.

‘A thousand years ago,’ Aneka countered. ‘We need to…’ She stopped speaking, her eyes widening as her voice simply cut out and her vision dimmed. She heard shouting, Gillian and Wallace she thought, but the voices seemed distant. She had a brief sensation of falling before her mind switched off entirely.

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Aneka watched her diagnostic displays as they scrolled across her closed eyelids and tried to take stock of her situation before looking. She was naked, she thought; she could feel something like a blanket under her back. The air was warm and she thought she could feel sunlight on her skin. Her diagnostics were all in the green, but she had been offline for close to four days.

‘Al?’ She half-expected there to be no response.

‘I am here Aneka.’ Well that was a relief. ‘I am relieved to see that you appear functional too.’

‘What happened?’

‘We were hacked. Very quickly and efficiently. The attack was overwhelming. I could do nothing to stop it.’

‘Okay.’ Aneka opened her eyes and saw trees. Through the canopy of alien leaves she could see what looked like a blue, cloudless sky, though there was something wrong with it she could not immediately place. Lifting her head revealed a clearing among the heavy trunks of what could have been pine trees if they were on Earth. It also revealed the rest of the crew. Everyone was there, lying naked on their own, individual blankets.
What the fuck is going on?

‘Cassandra’s networking systems just came online,’ Al told her. Around the clearing there were other signs that people were waking up, but it was the android who opened her eyes and sat up first. She spotted Aneka sitting up and, surprisingly, looked down quickly and covered her chest with her arms.

‘Oh… crap,’ Drake groaned from off to Aneka’s right. ‘I feel like I spent the last year in cold sleep.’

There were boxes on one side of the clearing and Aneka went to inspect them without saying anything. Sure enough, the first one she came across contained bottles of water. Picking up the box she started back to the group of slowly rising Jenlay.

‘There’s water here,’ she said, pulling out a bottle and tossing it to Drake, ‘and I think there’s food there too. I’ve no idea what planet we’re on, we’ve got no clothes or equipment, but we seem to have been provided with rations.’

Wallace, deprived of his exoskeleton, remained lying down, but rolled onto his side and propped himself up on an elbow. ‘I don’t think this is a planet. The light is wrong. Too white.’

Al popped up a frequency spectrum analysis in Aneka’s vision. ‘Okay,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m not great on this stuff, but a star wouldn’t be putting out equal amounts of all frequencies of visible light, would it?’

‘Highly unlikely,’ Wallace replied. ‘You can see ultraviolet light too. I believe you’ll find the shorter wavelengths are entirely missing?’

‘It cuts off at three hundred nanometres.’

The physicist nodded. ‘The shorter wavelengths tend to cause melanomas and some other even less pleasant issues. We’re under artificial light.’ He nodded his thanks to Gillian as she handed him a water bottle. ‘The question, of course, is where?’

‘All right,’ Bashford said, ‘we’d better find out.’ He had wandered over to the supplies they had and appeared to be taking stock. ‘We have some basic tents here. Monkey, Delta, Shannon, you’re in charge of getting these up and taking stock of what we have here. Drake, Aneka, you’re with me. We’ll check the area, see what we can find.’

‘I’m coming too,’ Ella stated, moving quickly to stand beside Aneka.

Bashford appeared to consider arguing for a second, but then said, ‘We may need some science support. Cassandra? Would you come with us?’

Steeling herself, the attractive android, who should have had no body image issues that Aneka could imagine, climbed to her feet, straightened her back, and stepped forwards. ‘Of course. Doctor Wallace will be in some discomfort in this gravity without his frame.’

‘I’m afraid I’m going to be of little help with the tents too,’ Wallace added, his voice forlorn.

‘Why did they take our clothes?’ Ella whined.

‘Nothing they didn’t supply,’ Aneka replied. Raising her hand she pointed it at Ella’s discarded water bottle and blasted it across the clearing. ‘I appear to be the only weapon we have, and that was on purpose since they
must
have known about that force generator. They had four days to examine us before leaving us here.’

‘Four days?’ Gillian said, frowning. ‘What were they doing?’

Aneka shrugged. ‘What happened after I blacked out?’

‘I’m… not sure,’ Gillian replied, her frown deepening.

‘Cassandra collapsed a second after you,’ Wallace put in.

‘Probably hacked the way I was,’ Aneka told them. ‘Al said it was too fast and efficient for him to stop it.’

‘Then…’ Gillian was obviously concentrating on remembering. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t remember any pain. I don’t remember much.’

‘I remember hearing the ship groaning under the acceleration stress,’ Drake said. ‘Then… I woke up here.’

‘May I?’ Shannon asked, raising a hand towards his head. He nodded and she laid her palm on his forehead before closing her eyes. A second or two later she opened them. ‘I think our memories have been tampered with. There’s a whole lot of blank that just starts too suddenly for it to be natural.’

‘Whoever took us didn’t want us remembering anything we might have seen,’ Gillian said.

‘But it’s got to be some Xinti group, hasn’t it?’ Ella asked. ‘We were studying a Xinti ship, and the technology…’

‘I concur,’ Wallace said. ‘The only race capable of reaching that level of technology, which we know about, is the Xinti.’

‘I dunno,’ Monkey replied. ‘If it was them, why are we still breathing?’

‘No point in speculating,’ Bashford interjected. ‘Not until we’ve checked out the area and set up camp anyway. Then you can muse about our captors to your heart’s content. Let’s get moving. Aneka, you’ve got the built-in nav system. Lead on.’

The clearing had three natural openings out of it. Aneka picked one which she decided to call the North Exit, there was no natural magnetic field, and started off. The plant life appeared to be arranged in beds which added to the impression that the forest was artificial. Each bed seemed to contain flora which belonged together, but the morphology was entirely different from one bed to another.

‘Is anyone else getting the impression that this place is an arboretum?’ Aneka asked after the first hundred metres or so.

‘The plant life appears to have been taken from a number of different worlds,’ Cassandra agreed. ‘It is a collection, possibly from planets all across the galaxy.’

‘I’m guessing, but wouldn’t these all require different nutrients, even atmospheres?’

‘And I am guessing, but they have either been altered to fit the new environment, or they were selected for their ability to thrive in these conditions.’

They continued another hundred metres before they came in sight of what was clearly a wall about fifty metres ahead of them. Aneka scanned the area and a second later Al was starting to build a very basic map for her in-vision.

‘Okay, Al’s done some clever projections and it looks like our clearing is in the middle of the chamber. The whole thing is about five hundred metres in diameter.’

‘Over seven hundred and eighty-five thousand square metres,’ Cassandra supplied.

‘We’re looking at several million tonnes of station,’ Drake said. ‘Assuming we’re on a station or ship.’

‘What’s that?’ Ella was pointing through the trees to their right. ‘There’s something there that doesn’t look like a plant.’

The thing was definitely not a plant, thought it looked kind of like a metal tree. It was tall, hexagonal, and about two metres in diameter. Each vertex was a shiny, polished metal column, the faces were black and smooth, glassy though Aneka suspected the material was a plastic, and to add to the tree-like structure the column had branches extending out about ten metres up, though their purpose was not immediately clear. It was clearly a piece of technology, but it was Ella who found the telling clue.

‘It’s Xinti,’ she said, staring at one side of the structure. ‘Or at least there are Xinti glyphs scrolling over this screen.’

‘What do they say?’ Bashford asked.

‘No idea. They’re going way too fast.’

Aneka stepped up behind her, resting her hands on the girl’s shoulders and feeling the slight trembling stop. ‘It’s… some sort of sensor device. The text is displaying atmospheric data. Gas partial pressures, particulates… And it’s monitoring the plants and us. Well, you. It doesn’t seem interested in me or Cassandra. I can’t see a single thing about us. Possibly it’s only set up to analyse organic life forms.’

‘So, we’re in a laboratory, being watched,’ Drake growled. ‘Like lab rats.’

‘That seems unlikely,’ Cassandra said, her tone musing. ‘If you were, essentially, experimental subjects, there would be no point in Aneka or I being here.’

Ella swallowed. ‘I agree. I think this is… a holding cell, if you like. I think our captors don’t know what to do with us so they’ve locked us away where we can’t do any harm while they work out what to do.’ She waved her hand at the column. ‘This is just here to monitor the collection. We happen to be part of it currently.’

‘Let’s get moving,’ Aneka suggested. ‘Standing around here isn’t going to get us anywhere.’ She steered Ella away from the column and started out on a clockwise path through the strange forest.

~~~

They had discovered two more of the columns spaced fairly evenly through what Aneka had started calling the arboretum. No one could detect any difference between the three objects. All were displaying the same sort of environmental data, and each of them registered the presence of the Jenlay, but not the synthetics. Aneka noticed that one of them seemed to be registering the other group in the clearing; the display commented on a ‘kha’dag,’ the Xinti term for a Human who was suffering from reduced musculature which was causing some difficulties with oxygenation of the blood. Cassandra had wanted them to go back to the clearing pretty much immediately.

The only other thing they had discovered was what they were fairly sure was the way out. A low structure was built against the southern wall, roughly forming a quarter of a sphere with the dull metal and made of something similar. There were doors in the curved surface, so well made that the seams were almost invisible, but there was no obvious way to open them. It was obvious that some form of wireless key was required, and Al just confirmed that this was a common mechanism for Xinti security doors. They had found a door, but there was no way through it.

The others had been busy and the clearing contained eight lightweight, but very sturdy-looking tents suitable for dual occupancy by the time the search party had returned. One slightly larger tent had been set up to contain the provisions, though there seemed to be no sign of any animal life in the arboretum which really necessitated the safeguard.

Cassandra had gone straight to the tent where Shannon was attempting to make Wallace feel more comfortable. It was not easy. His body was partially acclimatised to one G, but not entirely. Normally his suit at least gave him the illusion of being able to operate normally, as well as taking some of the stress off his bones and muscles. Without it the normal stress the higher gravity put him under felt worse. His heart had to work harder to keep his brain supplied with oxygen. It was just hard work for his body.

Wallace was, however, having nothing to do with people worrying over him. ‘I’ll be fine as long as I don’t need to do much. The suit lets me move about normally, but I didn’t have that for almost a year when I first moved to New Earth. If I stay prone and avoid getting excited I won’t have any problems.’ He gave Aneka a bemused grin over Cassandra’s shoulder. ‘Frankly, I’m more embarrassed about having nothing to wear. I’m not the beautiful young thing I once was.’ Considering that the man was likely pushing two hundred, Aneka thought he was doing rather well for his age, but she just grinned back at him and let Cassandra fuss.