The Cold Steel Mind (7 page)

Ella was giggling. ‘Serioushly, Donnal, you’ve no idea how tough.’

‘I think,’ Brin said, ‘we’d best get Donnal back to base and sobered up before the Reps see him. He only speaks Rimmic when he’s hammered.’

Aneka sank her last shot because it was there. ‘Nice meeting you. We should get Ella to bed as well.’

‘You’re calling Lena though, right?’ Ella said as they walked to the door.

‘Sending a message now,’ Al said when Aneka had not said ‘no’ after a second.

‘What did he actually call Aneka?’ Shannon asked.

‘One tough bitch,’ Ella supplied.

Shannon chuckled. ‘Got that right.’

~~~

Shannon lifted her head from between Ella’s legs long enough to say, ‘Feels like Lena’s arrived.’

Aneka, watching them from the desk chair, rose smoothly to her feet. ‘Good, I could do with someone to entertain me.’ The buzzer on the door went a second later.

‘More than just her, you might have your hands full. And various orifices probably.’

‘Odd, she didn’t say she was bringing anyone when she replied.’ Rooms at the hotel did not have a spy hole in the door, they had cameras outside the room, and it took just a thought for the view from it to appear in Aneka’s vision field. Lena was there, wearing a dress which carried the name only because there was no other name for a garment that shape; it largely seemed to consist of string holding cloth panels in strategic positions. And she appeared to be alone. Aneka stopped. ‘You’re
sure
there are people with her?’ Lena’s face was invisible from this angle, but her body language was tense.

‘Two or three, the noise in my head is that much louder.’ Both Shannon and Ella had stopped what they were doing now, picking up on Aneka’s tone.

‘In the bathroom, both of you. Something’s not right.’ They scurried to obey and Aneka stepped forward, mustering an excuse for why answering the door had taken so long. She had concluded that being naked was going to be excuse enough in the second or so it took to reach the door and press the panel that opened it. The excuse was not needed anyway.

Lena was pushed towards Aneka as soon as the door opened, a move designed to be distracting in all probability. It failed because Aneka could see the two men in optical-adaptive camouflage suits behind her; the suits masked heat signature well enough, as well as mimicking the local visual spectrum, but Aneka’s eyes covered more wavelengths than that. She stepped aside, leaving Lena to fall, half on the bed, and raised her right hand towards the first of the men coming through after the dancer. The force generator in her hand was not especially powerful, but it was pretty much like being smacked in the face with a baseball bat. He fell backwards into his teammate, and Aneka now had the advantage.

The impact must have disturbed the optical system in the suits because the two of them became visible in a disturbing flicker of digital noise. Aneka found herself looking at two male figures with muscular, heavy bodies, both of them encased from head to foot in smooth, white Plastex. There had to be some sort of video relay between the outside of the suit and the inside or neither would have been able to see, but Aneka was more concerned about the gun the second man was pulling. She dived out into the corridor, landing full length on top of the thug. Her left hand grabbed his right wrist and held it, her left clamped over the man’s throat and squeezed. He struggled, still trying to pull the gun, but his organic muscles were no match for Aneka’s cybernetic ones and he was rapidly losing oxygen flow to the brain. He struggled, tried hitting at her, and none of it did much to change his situation. After about fifteen seconds his struggles weakened and, to Aneka’s amazement, he actually started getting aroused. Then the struggling stopped entirely.

Aneka pulled the two pistols the men were carrying, both stun guns from the looks of them, and turned around. Shannon had dragged Lena onto the bed and was holding her there, wrists trapped at the small of her back. Ella was standing close by holding a vase by the neck and looking ready to hit someone with it. ‘You two were supposed to stay out of the way,’ Aneka commented.

‘I can handle myself in a fight,’ Shannon replied. ‘Not like you, maybe, but Drake taught me a few things.’

‘I’m quite sure he has,’ Aneka replied, stepping back into the room. She did not bother closing the door being sure that it would be opening again soon. ‘Wrestling moves, no doubt.’ She grabbed Lena’s long, blonde hair and pulled her head back. ‘Security will be here in a few seconds. You’ve that long to tell me why I won’t be sending you along with the two unconscious thugs.’

‘They… they said they’d kill me if…’

‘She’s telling the truth,’ Shannon said softly. ‘They said they’d do more than kill her.’

Aneka nodded; being a telepath really had to suck sometimes, but it was useful. ‘You didn’t know they were there. They followed you in and the first you knew about them was when they pushed you into the room.’ She glanced at Shannon. ‘Let her up, but keep her with us. She’s not leaving when the cops do.’

Lena sat up, rubbing her wrists. ‘W-what are you going to do with me?’

Aneka leaned in close and whispered, ‘Violence always makes me wet.’ It was a lie, but it sounded really badass.

~~~

Lena lay on the bed, her large breasts heaving and covered in sweat. She was fit and
very
flexible, but she had had three women on her for over an hour. ‘Please,’ she panted. ‘A short break…’ She had been very eager to please after the Peacekeepers had left; Aneka figured she deserved a rest.

‘Okay, I think we could all do with one. We don’t have to be up early do we, Shannon?’

Shannon gave a smirk and shook her head. ‘We have to pick up the Torem at fifteen hundred. Other than that the day’s ours.’

Lena swallowed hard. She could probably see them keeping her there until then. Aneka gave her as evil a grin as she could manage; it seemed to make the misapprehension stronger. ‘Why did those two goons pick on you?’ Aneka asked.

‘I don’t know. They grabbed me at the club. They must’ve seen me dancing for you. They said I should try to get you back to my place, but when you invited me here they said that would do. I was to get you to open the door and then… How did you get the Peacekeepers to let you go without questioning you?’

‘Friends in high places.’ Aneka had sent a message through to Winter, head of the Federation’s security organisation, with a video of the two men attached. Ten minutes after the Peacekeepers had arrived they had received a call from their superiors saying they should take the men into custody and ‘let Miss Jansen get on with whatever she was doing.’ A minute after they had left, Aneka had received a message from Winter which said only,
Looking into it.
When people came after Aneka with weapons designed to capture, Winter tended to get interested.

‘You… you’re important?’

Ella giggled. Aneka said, ‘Not really. You just made my day though.’

‘Uh, how?’

‘You don’t know who I am.’

11.8.524 FSC.

Aneka’s first look at a female Torem left her wondering how they could tell the difference. Adjaxis, the Torem Ambassador to New Earth, had been ludicrously tall the way Wallace was: slim, with long fingers, and a fairly featureless face aside from the large, entirely black eyes. Tosimna, senior lecturer in warp theory at the Floating University, looked almost identical to him, including the fact that she was wearing a sparkly, blue and white, figure-hugging suit designed to help her operate in normal gravity. On Corax she did not really need it, but once they were on the shuttle she would have found it hard to function much as Wallace did.

‘The only visible difference,’ Al informed her as she waited to shake hands with only the third alien she had ever met, ‘is the crotch bulge which males have. It’s literally a bulge in the groin. They don’t have external sexual organs like Humans do.’

Now that he mentioned it, Aneka noted the variation in shape. ‘How do they…? No, forget I asked. I probably don’t want to know.’

Tosimna’s long fingers wrapped almost entirely around Aneka’s hand and her thin lips curled into something like a smile. ‘Aneka Jansen, the woman from Old Earth. It is a great pleasure to meet you.’

Aneka smiled back. ‘Hello, Doctor.’

‘Just Tosimna. We don’t use titles like that among my people.’

‘Okay. So long as you call me Aneka.’ Her smile turned quizzical. ‘Don’t Torem have some form of family name?’

There was a brief head-shake, more like a twitch. ‘If it comes to requiring a distinction, we list our parents. I would be Tosimna of Garla and Uneria. Now, I am anxious to see this wonderful engine Doctor Wallace has waiting for me.’

‘The shuttle’s loaded with the supplies we need,’ Shannon said. ‘We can get moving as soon as we’re aboard and I have flight clearance.’

‘Then let us proceed. By all accounts I have a considerable treat ahead of me.’

~~~

Despite wanting to spend more time around the Torem, Aneka sat in the co-pilot’s seat as they lifted off from the spaceport. Torem were naturally telepathic, all of them, and Tosimna might have noticed that Aneka had a
very
quiet mind. The plan was to have plenty of people around whenever they met, and failing that Ella was to make sure she was on hand. Ella’s thoughts were practically audible to non-telepaths; it was the one thing Shannon did not like about her.

Besides, Aneka still got a thrill from seeing the view through the cockpit windows as they climbed out of the moon’s thin atmosphere. The internal gravity field compensated for the acceleration from the engines so it was hard to tell they were even moving without looking out of a window. As the haziness of the air faded and the stars appeared around them, Aneka let out a sigh and sank back in her seat to watch.

‘Still digging space?’ Shannon asked, humour in her voice.

‘It’s still new to me. Especially like this. Aboard the Hyde there aren’t many windows to look out of.’ The shuttle was fitted out as a mobile laboratory, designed to house an expedition team at a dig site. Because of this it had fairly large windows along its length to allow the crew to observe the outside world even where the outside conditions were less than ideal.

Shannon’s fingers shifted over her control panel. ‘Well, we’ll have orbital insertion in ten minutes and docking in twenty-two, so you have that long to look.’ She pushed her chair back and climbed to her feet. ‘I’m just going to check on our passenger and cargo. Keep an eye on things and yell if anything looks odd.’

Aneka gave a slight grimace, but figured the ship would probably make something odd pretty obvious. ‘I guess I can do that, sure.’

Shannon grinned and patted her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, these things fly themselves.’

The external communications system chimed for attention barely three minutes after Shannon had gone aft. Leaning forwards, Aneka tapped a glowing panel on the display in front of her. ‘Shuttle Alpha-Nine-Sixteen responding. Jansen here.’

‘Aneka, it’s Drake.’ The Captain’s voice sounded over the cockpit speakers, sounding a little surprised. ‘Is Shannon there?’

‘She’s in the back checking the cargo. I can get her…’

‘No need. Just pass the message along, would you? We’ve been registering some odd electromagnetic effects. They began yesterday and seem to have stopped, but we’d like you guys to run a fly-past and use the shuttle’s array for an external sweep.’

‘Tosimna won’t be pleased. She’s kind of impatient to see the warp core, but I guess she’ll appreciate the view of the ship.’

‘An impatient Torem? Don’t think I’ve ever met one. First time for everything.’

‘Huh. I’ll tell Shannon as soon as she gets back up here. It is okay she left me watching the cockpit, right?’

‘On orbital ascent? Yeah. Those things can do that on half an engine with their eyes closed. I’d chew her out if it was during docking.’

Aneka laughed. ‘She’d probably enjoy that.’

‘Not that kind of chewing out. See you soon. Drake out.’

Aneka shut off the channel at her end and looked back out at the star-sprinkled blackness. Odd electromagnetic effects; what did that mean?

‘Something we won’t know until we return to the station,’ Al commented.

‘Unless this sensor sweep shows something up?’

‘If they believe the anomalies have stopped, I suspect not.’

~~~

Shannon’s hands moved over sliders and pads as she manipulated the shuttle’s attitude thrusters, bringing the small vessel past the Agroa Gar in a loop which kept the nose and primary sensor array pointed at the Xinti vessel at all times. Aneka was impressed with the coordination involved; there seemed to be little connecting the woman’s actions with the ship’s movements, and skilled operation of a non-intuitive system was always impressive.

Behind Aneka’s right shoulder, Ella was sat at the control station for the sensor suite and she was pretty busy as well, though it was mostly to do with reading and interpreting incoming baseline data, and then setting the sensors to perform more detailed scans where she spotted anything odd. She was not spotting anything odd.

‘And that is where you spent much of the last thousand years?’ Tosimna’s voice behind them made everyone jump except for Aneka; superior hearing was a significant benefit of the whole robot body package.

‘More like twelve hundred,’ Aneka corrected, ‘but who’s counting. It wasn’t like I was aware of the time passing.’

‘Yes… Nanostasis, I believe. A lost technology. There have been experiments conducted in recreating it, but none of them… ended well.’

Aneka gave the Torem a glance. ‘I don’t actually understand the difference between that and the cold sleep they use on the Hyde.’

‘Not my speciality,’ Tosimna replied, ‘but my understanding is that synthetic nanomachines invade the body’s cells constructing… um, I suppose the best term would be scaffolding which locks the entirety of the system into metastasis. Nothing changes, you don’t age or decay. In some ways, you stop being a biological object. Or perhaps you become a snapshot of a biological entity. Without the proper coding to reverse the state…’