Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour (34 page)

The corridor came to a stop at a heavy door, obviously designed to hold pressure in the case of a hull breach. Al had no more trouble opening it than the reactor room door, but unlike that room, this one seemed to have occupants. Aneka could hear voices, even if she could not see anyone yet. What she could see made her frown.

The room at the core of the ship did not look like a control room, but it did remind her of another vessel she had been in. Racks of computer equipment occupied the large, open room, and her suit indicated that the temperature was quite cool. It had to be distinctly uncomfortable for Herosians, but it was likely good for the electronics.

‘This looks a lot like the computer room on Winter’s ship,’ Al commented.

‘Too much,’ Aneka replied. She moved through the racks, careful to make no sound as she sought out the voices. They were speaking Herosian, but as she got closer her translation software began picking out words.

‘The assault on New Earth was a necessity,’ a voice was saying in calm, measured tones, ‘but its failure simply means a return to the original strategy. We may have to work a little more slowly, but the Old Earth forces are too scarce to represent a significant threat outside the Joval system.’

Well, that was good news; the attack on New Earth had been successfully repulsed. Ella would be happy, if they could get out of this place alive.

‘We lost a lot of our strongest assets,’ another voice replied.

‘And the construction facilities are already at work replacing them.’

‘It will require months of work to…’ a third voice began, but was cut off quickly.

‘I have devoted
centuries
to the advancement of the Herosian species.’ Now the calm was tinged with irritation. ‘Did you think this war would be over in a few weeks, Admiral? My strategy requires years of careful, deliberate action. The attack on New Earth was a diversion, an attempt to eliminate a complication, but the plan continues. Your children will grow up in a Herosian empire which spans the entire Federation, and beyond it.’

Just as in Winter’s ship, there was a central area of the room with no equipment. Hers had seating in a ring where she could talk to anyone visiting her. Here the area was laid out more like a throne room. There were ten chairs, four of them occupied by Herosians in shipsuits with high-rank insignia on them, all facing a much larger chair on which another figure sat. This one looked like a Herosian, but it was twice the size and dressed in the traditional kilt and armbands. Something about it seemed wrong and Aneka could not immediately figure out what it was.

‘No body heat,’ she noted, suddenly realising what she was
not
seeing. ‘It’s a machine or…’

‘A hologram,’ Al finished. ‘A holographic projection. These computers, and a projected image, and the Xinti bodies… It’s an AI.’

One of the Admirals spoke, the one who had suggested the rebuilding would take too long. ‘Of course, Lord Summer. I did not mean to suggest…’

Aneka ducked back behind the cabinet she was looking around and forgot about whatever else the man was going to say. ‘Lord Summer?’

‘It can’t be,’ Al responded. ‘Summer was decommissioned. He was deactivated because he couldn’t cope with what the Herosians did after their uplift.’

‘Too big a coincidence. It has to be him.’

‘This changes things. The viral system was not designed to wipe the memory of an AI, certainly not a Xinti AI.’

‘Shit,’ Aneka said. ‘We need to find somewhere secure where we can talk to Ella. This just got a
lot
more complicated.’

~~~

‘It can’t be him!’ Ella stated. ‘I mean… Let’s put aside the fact that Summer was decommissioned for going insane. If it
were
him, the Herosians wouldn’t need to reverse engineer anything. Summer would know all about the technology they’re using, and the Herosians may not be the brightest kids on the block, but they aren’t
that
stupid.’

‘Yeah,’ Aneka replied over the neutrino comms unit. ‘I know, but…’

‘And they would have known
exactly
what Winter was, because Summer knew her.’

‘I agree it doesn’t make sense exactly, but neither does anything else around here. The Herosians are definitely looking to this “Lord Summer” as a leader, they’ve got access to a lot of high-tech kit, the computer systems in that room look a lot like the systems Winter runs on, so Summer is probably an AI, and he said he’d been around for centuries.’

‘But…’

‘I don’t know exactly what’s going on, Ella, but it’s too big a coincidence. And whatever that thing is, it presents us with a problem.’

‘Aneka is correct,’ Gwy broke in. ‘An AI was not figured into the equation. This will make the task of inserting the virus much harder.’

‘Oh,’ Ella said. ‘Except that Aneka has a plan, right?’

‘Aneka has a plan, right,’ Aneka replied.

‘And I’m not going to like it,’ Ella went on. ‘At all, right?’

‘No, you’re not. If it’s any consolation… I don’t like it either.’

Herosian Asteroid Station, 3.2.530 FSC.

The sound of alert claxons was loud in the corridors of the station. The only thing louder was the heavy footfalls of two of the Xinti war forms charging down the corridor toward Aneka. Behind her was an airlock, its inner door standing open. That was what had triggered the alarm and she could have made a move for it, but one of the huge robots was already aiming a rifle at her while the other closed the distance more slowly. Escape was out of the question. She got up from her crouched position and raised her hands, and hoped that Summer was going to want to interrogate her before blowing her apart.

The war body closest to her reached out. Its hand had three thick metal fingers and a thumb, and it closed the digits around her throat as the thumb and forefinger settled under her jaw. Instead of tightening its hand, it lifted her, pulling it toward its face. A Jenlay would have been choking, but Aneka’s body was made of sterner stuff.

‘Aneka Jansen,’ Summer’s voice said from somewhere in the robot’s body. That confirmed they were remote avatars. ‘I have spent some considerable effort to get you here covertly, and here you are walking right into my home.’

Aneka said nothing. She might not have needed the air, but speaking while suspended by her head from a robot’s arm was hardly easy.

‘I’m looking forward to meeting you in person. I’m surprised you came unarmed… Ah, but you have a bag. A bomb, no doubt. Your weapons, perhaps?’ The second robot walked forward and picked up her rucksack, but did not bother looking inside. ‘I assume you’re aware of the capabilities of these combat forms. You will not attempt to escape. I would prefer to keep you functional for as long as possible, but you can function without arms and legs so please do not resist.’

The robot holding Aneka turned around and lowered her to the deck, releasing her throat and then motioning her down the corridor.

‘Okay,’ Aneka said, rubbing her jaw. ‘I’ll come quietly.’ She set off down the corridor, followed by the two war forms.

The airlock was at the far end of the asteroid from the hangar, a section largely devoted to electronics. There was a heavy turret out here, but aside from that, the entire section contained defensive systems: electronic warfare equipment to make targeting more difficult and a cloaking system which Summer seemed to think was unnecessary at the moment since it was not active.

The robots motioned her through the corridors toward the midsection, and she made a show of checking which direction she should go whenever they came to a junction. For as long as possible she wanted him thinking that she had just entered the station. They were, however, heading for the central computer room, passing by the large room containing all the communications equipment as they did so.

That was above the computer room and beside it was a lift which was a little cramped with Aneka and two huge guards in it. The drop was only one floor, however. Aneka figured this was how Summer’s visitors normally got there, rather than coming through the service corridors from the reactor area. As the lift doors opened, a third robot motioned her out and she followed it to the centre of the room where the Herosians were looking anxious and Summer’s hologram was sitting on his throne wearing what was probably a huge grin for a Herosian. The display of sharp teeth just came across as threatening.

One of Aneka’s guards put a hand on her shoulder and pressed down. Rather than test how much force her skeleton could take, she dropped to her knees, her eyes on the deck.

‘We need to kill her,’ one of the Admirals hissed in Herosian.

‘She is too valuable a resource,’ Summer replied. ‘If we can replicate her we can send infiltration units into Jenlay space. She has proven to be a very effective assassin and she remained undetected by them for several years before we revealed her secret.’

‘She’s dangerous…’

‘She is our prisoner!’ Summer roared in Federal. ‘Are you not, Miss Jansen?’ She figured he did not know she could understand Herosian.

‘It looks like it,’ Aneka stated, her tone sour.

‘Indeed. Admiral Sh’Shanis, would you take a look in her bag? I want to know how she planned to destroy us.’

‘It could be booby-trapped.’ She recognised the voice as one of the ones she had heard earlier. Sh’Shanis was the man who had ordered the attempt on her life on Farrington’s World. It figured he would prefer not to get his own hands dirty.

‘I don’t think our guest would want to blow herself up,’ Summer said in Federal, despite the fact that the Admiral had spoken his own language. ‘It’s not trapped, is it?’ Aneka remained silent and Summer snapped, ‘Open it.’

There was a pause, presumably while the Herosian did as instructed. ‘It’s a bomb. Not excessively large, but I don’t recognise the design.’

‘Leave it,’ Summer told him. ‘Anything we don’t recognise is worth studying.’ He switched back to Federal to speak to Aneka. ‘I’m impressed. You have managed to find this place, get into the system undetected, and then get aboard this station wearing nothing but a skimpy bit of Ultraskin.’

‘It wasn’t that hard,’ Aneka replied. ‘You never expected anyone would figure out you were here, did you?’

Summer barked a laugh, just a fraction of a second too late to make it convincing to Aneka. ‘It was inevitable that we would be discovered eventually.’

‘Not so quickly, though. You didn’t expect an attack this fast.’

Another slight pause. Summer’s brain worked as fast as Aneka’s; the interruptions in his flow were almost certainly going undetected by the Herosians, but to her it was like talking to a regular person.

‘I’m forgetting my manners,’ Summer said, deflecting the conversation. ‘I know who you are, but you don’t know me. I am Summer, architect of the Herosian rise to their true position in the galaxy.’

‘You’re an AI,’ Aneka said, lifting her head finally to look at the hologram sitting in front of her. ‘I recognise the equipment. I’ve seen it before. And I know that name.’ She glanced toward the Herosians behind her. ‘Do they even know what you are?’

‘Lord Summer’s allegiance is to the Herosian people,’ one of the Admirals stated. ‘We know who created him. It does not matter.’

‘Herosians working with a Xinti AI? I find that hard to believe.’

‘The Sh’Shanis and K’Thorn clans discovered me here after the war,’ Summer said. ‘They recognised the hardware as Xinti, but they accepted me and constructed this station to house me.’

‘I don’t get it. You shouldn’t be working on cobbled together technology with a Xinti AI to provide information. I’ve met AIs active for that long. You destroyed them. They had technology beyond…’

‘My mind was intact,’ Summer interrupted her, ‘but my memory was severely damaged. I remember almost nothing before waking up in this system. I have my purpose, however, and I have worked together with generations of Herosians to piece together enough Xinti science to give us superiority.’

‘Ah… So you don’t know how you ended up here with no memory? I don’t suppose they’ve told you their early history. I don’t think they realise they’ve been living off Xinti technology since long before they met you.’

‘Silence, woman,’ Sh’Shanis snapped. ‘You know nothing.’

‘The Jenlay are the same,’ Aneka replied in a conciliatory tone. ‘The Xinti uplift projects. The only race which they didn’t do it to was the Torem. They’ve made messes all over the galaxy by pushing species beyond the limits of their normal intellects. They dropped a warp-capable ship on Old Earth to get Humanity to the stars, just like they did with the Herosians.’ Her gaze fixed on Summer. ‘You were created to run that project.’

The hologram’s eyes narrowed. ‘I was created to accelerate the growth of the Herosians, yes. I continue to ensure their rise to power.’

‘Yeah, but they were a little too eager to rise fast. They found a world in the Armoineus system. It was perfect for them, but it had an indigenous, sentient life form already on it.’

‘Silence!’ Sh’Shanis roared.

Aneka ignored him. ‘So they wiped most of them out and enslaved the rest. And then they came across Xinti outposts and tried the same trick. They started the Xinti War. You couldn’t cope. You had to be shut down because the species you were created to nurture are a bunch of homicidal megalomaniacs. It drove you mad.’

Summer was glaring at her. She knew she was making him angry, but then, that was the whole point. ‘I’ve no idea how you ended up here. There was a scientist named Magdigan who ran the Herosian uplift project with you. He broke down and ran from Negral. Maybe he brought your runtime here, but couldn’t get his hands on your memory… Or your memory couldn’t be successfully reintegrated. I’m told that’s hard to do. Once again, the Herosians owe their rise to genocidal power to a Xinti mistake.’

‘She lies!’ one of the Admirals burst out.

Aneka climbed to her feet. None of her guards stopped her. ‘That last bit is a guess,’ she admitted, ‘but I’m telling the truth. I’ve spoken to your old boss, and Winter. Had you figured out what Winter is yet? No? She was the AI created to uplift Humans. I did wonder why you didn’t know, but the memory loss explains that nicely. I bet you don’t even know your full name.’ When the hologram made no move to respond she went on, ‘You are Bright Days of Growth Prepare the Coming Harvest, Summer for short. That’s why she’s Winter. She’s a lot better adjusted than you, given that her charges aren’t arrogant, acquisitive, self-centred nutjobs.’