The Cold Steel Mind (3 page)

‘If she was being rebellious, I’d be surprised if she hasn’t dabbled,’ Aneka commented.

‘Assuming she could find someone to dabble her.’

Aneka giggled at the turn of phrase. ‘There’s always someone around who’ll dabble a willing young woman.’

‘Yeah, but they can be hard to find. I had to hide in a dark cupboard to get someone to dabble me.’

Not particularly wanting to be reminded of Ella’s first experience of sex, Aneka set her fingers to work again. Ella let out a moan and Aneka said, ‘Not any more you don’t.’

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The facilitators were busy laying cables and placing lights. The cables passed through the old reactor room and then through the hull patch, just as the conduits pumping air into the ship did. The bio-plastic sheet they had used to seal the hull was quite amazing stuff; bio-plastic was the kind of stuff Aneka considered science-fiction-made-real in fact. It did everything these days, including providing the material for their suits, in different forms. Tough, flexible where needed and hard where needed, self-repairing, it was the universal material of the future. The only thing which was as much use was setae strip, which could bond just about anything to just about anything in a reversible way. Setae strip was what was fixing the cables and lights to the walls and ceilings. The cables were super-conductive bio-plastic, Transdux, sheathed in insulating Plastex.

Aneka and Delta were working their way down one side of the ship, the port side, while Monkey and Bashford did the other side. That arrangement kept Aneka away from the room she had spent her thousand-year sleep in, and the lab she had been dissected in. Ella was working with the two women. That side of the ship had not been part of the minimal survey the Garnet Hyde’s crew had done after finding Aneka. Delta had been happy to go along with the plan since it meant she was not working with either of the men. She was not entirely comfortable around half-naked women, but even less so around similarly dressed men.

‘This must have been the medical bay,’ Ella said from one of the doorways at the side of the broad, orbital corridor. They had put a light in there about ten minutes earlier and Ella had started doing a quick inventory of the contents soon after. ‘There are drug bottles, various devices which look like they had a medical function. They might have done some biological research in there…’

‘No, I think they kept that to the lab on the other side,’ Aneka stated. ‘I’ve no memory of being in there. I can remember the cell block about two doors ahead, but not that room.’

Ella moved past the two facilitators and shone a torch into the room with the restraints. ‘You’ve never really said much about what you remember from the ship.’ Her voice sounded distant. She could obviously imagine Aneka fixed in the manacles, terrified and helpless.

‘Enough,’ Aneka replied. ‘It’s not much. Fragments. I think they kept us drugged most of the time. I woke up in that room once and they tried to feed me some sort of paste. I screamed a lot of obscenities at them. After that I just remember the lab and the cutting.’

Delta shuddered. ‘It must have been…’

‘The most terrifying experience of my life. That’s another reason a slightly spooky old ship doesn’t really bother me. I’ve been through Hell. This is a cake walk.’ She looked around at the still shadowed portions of the corridor. ‘Maybe if there were more creaking, some shuffling sounds from the corners, strange clicking noises… An ominous soundtrack would be good.’

‘Why would you want an ominous soundtrack?’ Ella asked.

‘It’s very horror movie. You can always tell when the monster is about to leap out and eat someone because the soundtrack goes ominous.’

‘Oh. I don’t really watch that kind of movie much.’

‘I know. Inane sex comedies are your thing.’

‘They’re not inane!’ Ella squeaked, thoughts of monsters crawling out of the air vents instantly replaced. ‘They’re…’

‘Puerile?’ Delta suggested.

‘You don’t like them either?’ Aneka asked, brightening a little.

‘They’re okay, once in a while, when there’s nothing better on and I’m feeling, uh, well… you know.’

Aneka gave a slight shrug. ‘I don’t get to feel like that long enough to watch a film. Ella’s a redhead.’

‘What’s her hair colour got to do with anything?’ There was a hint of embarrassment about the question; well Delta’s hair was, perhaps, more red than brown.

Aneka smiled. ‘You can sleep with a brunette, you might get to sleep with a blonde, but a redhead’ll keep you up all night.’ Both Delta and Ella went red, Delta went almost scarlet.

‘I don’t think I’m a proper redhead then.’

Ella, apparently, decided that Delta was not to be allowed off the hook. ‘I bet you are. You just need the right guy to get you going. Or maybe the right girls…’ Delta’s blush extended down her throat and Ella giggled. ‘She’s awfully easy to tease. This could be fun. We need to go down to Corax sometime, just the girls. We can go to Feathers, and get drunk and inappropriate.’

Corax was the moon they were in orbit around, though ‘moon’ was doing it a disservice. Aneka was unsure what ‘Feathers’ was, but guessed it was some sort of club. ‘If we’re going out for a drink,’ Aneka countered, ‘I’d rather we did something that lasts longer than the time it takes for you to get drunk and start stripping, love.’

Ella pouted; she had terrible alcohol tolerance, and she knew it, but that did not mean Aneka had to point it out. ‘I’m not that bad. And there would be men there and I’m not going to get naked around men right now. They’d get the right idea.’

‘You mean the wrong idea,’ Delta said.

‘No, the right one, usually. There was a bit of an… incident a few months ago and I’m kind of off men. I’ve got this plan to get over it, but then this project came up and there was all the planning…’ The incident had been their kidnapping by a slightly deranged terrorist and Ella’s rape in the name of progressing the Human race. The story had made the news networks pretty heavily. The Humanity First organisation running a breeding farm and terrorist training camp was big news. However, the names of the women involved had been kept secret and the official story was that a team of marines had stormed the private island. No mention had been made of the fact that, by the time the marines had arrived, Aneka had killed almost every male on the island.

Aneka activated the light she had just attached to the ceiling and there was a little less darkness. ‘We’re getting there. Another… ten lights? And the last couple of rooms.’

Delta looked down the corridor towards the bow of the ship. ‘Sounds right. Then there’s the flight deck to rig. Bash and Monkey got it worst; they got most of the engineering section.’

‘Huh, good point. There’s the sensor suite down that side, and the stealth and electronic warfare sections. Doc Wallace is going to want all that well lit.’

‘We’re going to be at this for the rest of the day.’

‘At least we’re busy,’ Ella pointed out. ‘And when we’re finished we’ll be in the mood to relax and get busy.’

‘Redheads,’ Aneka said, shaking her head.

Wisely, Delta said nothing at all.

~~~

‘As your initial survey suggested,’ Wallace began, ‘the breach made a near total mess of the reactor itself.’ He was sitting in the motorised wheelchair he was using a lot aboard the Hyde, his eyes on the wall at the back of the mess hall-cum-conference room where the lidar-mapped schematic of the reactor room was being displayed. ‘The failure was catastrophic. In fact, it was almost
too
catastrophic. I need to do further analysis, but it appears that there were multiple plasma releases from the core.’

‘That shouldn’t happen,’ Drake commented. ‘I’m no engineer, but no breach of that type I’ve ever heard of had multiple points of failure.’

Wallace nodded. ‘Technically it’s possible, but practically a point of weakness in the containment field develops, a hotspot is formed, the plasma burns out through that weak point, and the pressure is let off in other areas. One entire side of this reactor has been split open.’

Aneka was seeing what Wallace was seeing now as she got used to viewing the rotating, line-art image. ‘That looks less like a breach and more like an explosion.’

‘Yes,’ Wallace agreed, ‘though I did say more analysis was needed. I’d like some ultra-high-def scans made of the reactor itself when we’re done checking over the room.’

‘That shouldn’t take long,’ Gillian commented. ‘The room itself was trashed and then exposed to hard vacuum for over a millennium. There’s little there to examine.’

‘Quite. Computer, display the sub-light drive room.’ The image changed to show another room containing another, vaguely spherical machine which, again, looked badly damaged. ‘Unfortunately, this drive was hit by the plasma backwash fairly badly. I doubt there’s much salvageable, and there may be very little we can learn from it.’

‘That looks like it exploded as well,’ Aneka commented.

‘It possibly did. You may have noticed that the vessel has no obvious exhaust port exterior to the hull? Xinti vessels frequently used some form of reactionless drive technology. We’ve never got to the bottom of how they worked, but we suspect some form of exotic matter. It’s possible that containment of that matter failed when the reactor exploded. We don’t know. A chemical analysis of the materials in the room may give us more information. Can we have the warp drive chamber, please?’

The next display looked like it was going to be more promising. The warp drive itself, a cylindrical device occupying much of the room, seemed intact. Wallace sounded a lot more enthusiastic when he spoke. ‘This is more like it. The warp drive is intact, the room itself undamaged. We’ve never had what could be a functional Xinti warp drive to study, at least not since the one which came down on Old Earth all those years ago. In Aneka’s time, in fact.’

‘A little after my time,’ Aneka replied.

Wallace acknowledged the correction with a slight shrug. ‘So, the plan is for Bash to assist Cassandra and myself in going over the damaged rooms and then move on to the undamaged drive. While that is happening, Monkey and Delta will be rigging additional power lines into the ship so that we can get power to the sensor systems and computer.’

‘I’m quite keen to get the computer’s storage systems online,’ Gillian put in. ‘There could be a lot of very interesting information in there.’

‘Powering up the computer?’ Aneka said. ‘Isn’t that… risky?’

‘It probably won’t be functional,’ Wallace replied. ‘It may take a lot of effort to reconstruct its memory once we have it powered up and I doubt the actual operating software is complete enough to function. Even if it is, there’s little it can do. The ship has no weapons. Its sub-light drive is destroyed and while the warp drive is largely intact, there is significant damage to the power conduits leading into it.’

‘Okay,’ Aneka said, though she could not help thinking it was still a bad idea. ‘What am I doing?’

‘You’ll be shadowing me and Ella,’ Gillian replied. ‘We’ll be going through the other rooms checking for anything useful. That medical bay you found is a priority. We want to gather up any chemicals, drugs, whatever, for analysis back at the university.’

‘And we’ll be keeping an eye on you all from the station,’ Drake said. ‘Not as interesting as our usual tasks, but more relaxing.’

‘Hopefully more relaxing than Alpha Mensae,’ Shannon said. ‘We’re quite sure there aren’t any hidden Xinti robots aboard that thing?’

‘No,’ Gillian said, ‘which is why Aneka is going to be packing her… Bessie is it?’

Aneka grinned. She had named the handgun the Xinti had provided her with ‘Bessie.’ ‘Yeah, Bessie will be along to introduce herself if something nasty crawls out of a corner. Let’s hope not because she’s about as subtle as an anti-tank rocket.’

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‘That’s Bessie?’ Delta asked, nodding at the pistol strapped to Aneka’s right thigh. It was big, chunky, with an over-sized barrel wrapped in a very solid shell.

‘That’s her,’ Aneka replied, patting the gun’s butt where the power cell was. ‘A Xinti anti-matter blaster. Basically she launches a few anti-protons down a channel evacuated by a laser. It causes a small nuclear explosion at the point it hits. Like I said, not subtle.’

‘Uh, no.’ Delta came to a stop beside the hatch leading to the machine shop in the station. ‘Well, wish me luck. A day of working with Monkey laying power cables.’

Aneka smiled and pushed off towards the bridge to the Agroa Gar. ‘You’ll be fine. Monkey’s a great guy once you get to know him.’ She got only a grunt and the sound of the hatch being opened in reply.

Gillian and Ella were waiting outside the engineering rooms. Beyond them, Aneka could see Wallace and Bashford hard at work removing the outer shielding of the warp drive while Cassandra apparently just watched. In practice she was recording the process, her eyes being a perfectly good, stereoscopic video camera. Aneka would be doing the same thing for Gillian and Ella with the added benefit that she could record in a far wider frequency range.

‘Delta all ready to spend the day with Monkey?’ Ella asked as Aneka approached.

‘What possessed you to put our two shy people in a room together, Gillian?’ Aneka asked in reply.

‘There was only one cabin left.’ Gillian gave a slight shrug. ‘He likes her. He’s gone all quiet around her.’

Aneka grinned. ‘I recognise the symptoms. Shall we proceed?’

‘By all means. Lead the way, Facilitator First Rank Jansen.’

Aneka pushed back the way she had come, towards the port side rooms which had not been surveyed when the ship had been initially discovered. ‘I love it when you go all formal, Doctor Gilroy. Next thing you know we’ll be spanking Ella.’

‘Work first, play later.’

There were two of the cells, or containment rooms, or whatever you called a chamber designed to hold experimental subjects between examinations. The one towards the rear of the ship appeared to have been designed more for animals. Rather than the robot arms, half the room was sealed behind a transparent, but extremely tough, shield wall which looked like it had been designed to slide apart.