Steel Beneath the Skin (15 page)

‘You let an entire squad of them live though,’ Ape said.

Aneka looked across the room at him, her eyes narrowing. ‘I gave some xinti slave-soldiers the choice of surrendering and they chose to destroy themselves instead. Have you ever killed anyone, Captain Gibbons? Close up? Face-to-face, not ship-to-ship?’

‘There has been no conflict in the Federation much larger than actions against pirate ships for far longer than Captain Gibbons has been alive,’ the woman said.

‘No,’ Gibbons added flatly, ‘I haven’t.’

‘Back home, Old Earth in my time, we had plenty of wars, but a lot of them were being fought like you’d be used to. Men sat in rooms miles from the front line and piloted remote drones. They tracked down their target and blew them up with missiles. Don’t get me wrong, these were generally bad people who deserved to die, but you don’t get the same feeling for the people you’re fighting that way.

‘I was in Kandahar, summer of oh-seven, hot as Hell and I was on this shit bodyguard detail for the CEO of a mining company. They were hosting a cocktail party for some local dignitaries. Most of them were Muslim so there was no alcohol. Stupid idea. Anyway, there I was in this swanky hotel surrounded by men who thought my evening dress looked really amazing on me, and that I was a Western whore, and this girl comes out of one of the back rooms. She’s running at one of the visiting politicians with a knife and I stepped in front of her and put
my
knife in under her ribs and pushed up. She never said anything. She just looked at me like she was saying “I failed,” until the light went out in her eyes.’

‘So, you killed a terrorist,’ Gibbons said.

‘No, I killed a girl who wanted to kill the man who had sent her brother to his death. The guy she’d been after had ordered some troops to fight to the death while he was sneaking out the back of the camp. She’d been going to kill a corrupt, morally repugnant man, but not for politics, for her family, and all she’d done was die in my arms. I had to watch her dying, right there, while I held her.’ She swallowed. ‘So, I paid to have the girl’s body given a proper funeral, and a couple of months later, when the negotiations were over and our clients didn’t need him, the man she had been going to kill was found in a back alley with his throat slit. When you kill someone, it’s personal, you know them, empathise with them, know it’s going to be your turn eventually. I killed those robots. I knew they wouldn’t give themselves up when I offered them surrender.’ Her attention shifted from Gibbons to the woman. ‘Can you honestly say that they’d have been treated fairly if they had given themselves up?’

The woman seemed to come to a decision, pushing back her chair and getting to her feet. ‘Someone will be in shortly to get you out of those restraints. You’ll be taken to a rather irate Miss Narrows. You are not under arrest, but you should stay in your room until we can send a technician down to get your identification system configured. The base’s systems won’t let you go very far before then anyway.’

‘Thank you,’ Aneka said.

‘It’s not quite over, I’m afraid. You’ll continue on to New Earth. The University there has excellent scanning equipment and they will be running a number of deep scan tests to ensure that the Xinti have not planted any hidden surprises in you. Their psychologists will perform some more extensive interviews to evaluate your mental state.’ She smiled, and this time it did touch her eyes. ‘I’d imagine they will be rather keen to gather as much information as they can on you anyway.’

Aneka gave her a half-grin in return. ‘Yeah, I’d imagine they will. I didn’t get your name.’

‘No, I didn’t give one. You can call me Winter.’ With that she started for the door and soon Aneka was alone once again.

~~~

As expected, Ella was pleased to see Aneka as she walked into the cabin they were going to share. She was even more pleased when the two guards nodded to her and then left, the door closing behind them. The room was more spacious than the little cabin aboard the Garnet Hyde with a similar sort of shower cubicle, but a double bed instead of bunks and a desk with a computer system on it.

‘You’re out,’ she said, somewhat redundantly, her words muffled because her face was pressed against Aneka’s neck. If Aneka had had to breathe she might have been in trouble.

‘And confined to this cabin until some tech turns up to sort out this transponder business.’

Ella’s head lifted, her expression eager. ‘Confined to the cabin?’

Aneka reached down, fingers pressing against Ella’s sex through the thin plastic of her suit. ‘Confined.’

‘I’ve got a roll of setaestrip tape,’ Ella moaned.

~~~

‘You wanted to see me, Dad?’ Monkey had not been especially happy that one of his father’s aides had sent a message asking for a meeting. He had agreed, however; you did not say no to Captain Tor Gibbons. So he had come down to the office his father was using on the station.

‘David,’ Ape acknowledged. ‘Have a seat.’ Monkey felt himself hunching as he sat down across the desk from his father and consciously straightened his back. ‘We’ve set the Jansen android free subject to testing at New Earth University.’

‘Good. She didn’t deserve that treatment.’

Ape grunted. ‘I want you to stay away from it. I can have you taken back to New Earth on the Marigo Benson. Your mother is too stubborn to…’

‘Her,’ Monkey said, his voice low, but the fact that he had spoken at all stopped Ape’s speech.

‘Pardon?’

‘Her. You want me to stay away from
her.
Aneka isn’t an “it.”’

Ape let out a sigh; it sounded long-suffering. ‘
It
charmed you too. You were awake with it during its facilitator training, right? Did you sleep with it?’

‘What? No. You saw to that.’ Monkey could not remember being angry with his father… well, ever. Thinking about it, that was probably because the man had never been around to be strict. ‘All your stories about the Xinti. If I didn’t get embarrassed about coming on to beautiful women I’d have been too scared to ask her.
She
knew I was nervous of her,
she
didn’t try anything.’

This time Ape laughed; a short, indulgent bark. ‘Son, I never understood why you felt insecure around women you like, but I think it’s stopped you learning a few valuable lessons. Of course it didn’t try to seduce you. Its job is infiltration, to lull you into…’

Monkey got to his feet, the abrupt movement once again interrupting his father. ‘You know, with all those tales you used to tell me about the Xinti, it never occurred to me that you’ve never actually met one. There hasn’t been a human contact with a xinti of any kind for… a couple of centuries until Alpha Mensae Four? You were just telling a kid horror stories about something passed down through the ranks. I’ll be going back to New Earth on the Hyde, and I’ll associate with the people I trust.’

Ape got to his feet as his son turned and started for the door. ‘David…’ But Monkey ignored him.

~~~

The tech turned out to be a slightly nervous young man, typically attractive, blonde; the kind of person Aneka would have classified as a “surfer dude” if she thought surfing was still a sport and they were not on a space station. His name was Brad, which did not help. The nervousness, she was pretty sure, was down to the fact that his assignment required him to know what she was. It certainly was not bashfulness.

‘They, uh, really did a good job on that body,’ he said as he set up his equipment, which was basically a couple of computerised devices. Aneka recognised one as a signal analyser.

‘Thank you, it’s basically the same as my real one.’ She sat on the edge of the bed to wait for him to be ready. ‘They perked my breasts up a bit and turned my hair white, but this is how I remember looking, more or less.’

‘Huh, I guess there were pretty people back then too.’

‘A couple, yes.’

He turned to look at her, sitting on the bed with her hands hooked around one knee and no clothes on, and then he swallowed and said, ‘All right, I have no idea how we’re going to do this. I’ve got a software package that was developed for a volitional AI about ten years ago, but I’ve no idea whether your computer can run it…’

Messages flickered up from Al and Aneka read them before replying. ‘I don’t suppose you have the instruction set for the AI’s processor available?’

‘Uhhh…’ He turned to his other box and tapped rapidly at a keyboard. ‘Just give me a second… It was a Baltram-Mayes Quantum Bi-Matrix Two-Twenty… Yes! I can upload that and the software if you can negotiate a connection.’

A stream of text in-vision showed Aneka the negotiation progress. Al had already worked out how to interface with the systems on the Garnet Hyde, and the shuttle, and all of the wireless-enabled equipment she had had to use. The portable microframe Brad was using was easy, and the next display to pop up showed the file transfer progress of the two files.

‘So what’s it like?’ Brad asked, his eyes following the transfer progression on his own screen.

‘What’s what like?’

‘Being… well, a sort of robot, I guess.’

People asked the dumbest questions… ‘When I first woke up I couldn’t tell anything was different. Now… I never used to have computers displaying things inside my eyes before. Uh, mine is translating your program for his instruction set.’

‘Good, that sounds great.’

‘Really, the world has changed around me more than I’ve changed. There’s all this Big Brother bullcrap…’ She waved her hand at Brad’s computer. ‘My family, friends… planet are all a thousand years dead. On the plus side, I’m getting a lot more sex.’ He coughed, smirking at her, and she added, ‘Al’s ready to try out your software. He’s identified the data components and replaced them with my stuff.’

‘Al?’

‘My computer. I had to call him something. Hal was out.’

Brad’s fingers moved across keys, summoning up a test program. ‘Uh, why?’

‘You probably wouldn’t get the reference.’ A window popped up in her vision field, a request for her personal identifier, the public part of her ident-key. ‘Your program asked for my public ident?’

‘A voluntary request, yes,’ Brad replied, grinning. ‘Looks like it’s working. Could you accept it?’ He nodded at his screen. ‘Perfect. I’ll run the rest of the diagnostic sequence. These are the non-voluntary commands.’ His eyes flicked to his signal analyser as he hit the “go” button.

Aneka watched as Al displayed the stream of requests as she went through; name, ident-key, name
and
ident-key. Then the same set of requests went through with an annotation from Al stating that this was a covert request, not to be reported to the receiver. She kept the smile away from her mouth.

‘Three requests?’ Brad asked.

‘Uh-huh.’

Nodding, Brad began packing his equipment away. ‘That’s everything then. I was told to tell you that you could move around freely once that was up and running.’ He glanced around the room. ‘I was also told that you were sharing the room with someone.’

‘Ella got tied up.’

‘Ah, right. Well, it was, uh… nice meeting you.’

‘The same.’ She followed him to the door, allowing it to close behind him and then hitting the locking button to secure it. Then she went back to the bed and pulled the sheet back. Ella was lying there, pillows arranged to make her shape unrecognisable, ankles tethered to the bed frame with tape which would stick securely to anything and wrists taped to the hips. There was also a strip of tape over her mouth. ‘Now,’ Aneka said, ‘where were we?’

Ella just gave a little whimper in response.

Harriamon III, 7.11.523 FSC.

Walking from the shuttle landing port into the “town” really brought home Ella’s comment about this “not being civilisation.” The tunnel from the port opened onto what amounted to a large cave cut into the rock three-hundred metres under the surface. It had to be over five hundred metres across and a hundred metres high, the roof supported on thick pillars at strategic locations. Between them were concrete buildings, mostly low and scruffy, a few tall and just as badly maintained. There was a slightly unnatural, blue tinge to the light from the huge, overhead lamps.

‘There are five more caves like this one,’ Ella said, ‘three for habitation, two for mining operations.’ She sounded a little dejected. ‘There’s also the military facilities along the north tunnel, about a kilometre away. They tend to be better kept up. The mine administrators live up on the surface under the north dome. The south dome is for recreation.’

‘You were born here, right?’ Monkey asked. Aneka had been surprised when he had asked if they would mind if he came down to the planet with them. He had said that he did not want to be on the station. Ella had agreed very quickly and Aneka had gone along with it.

‘Yeah,’ Ella replied, and now she sounded more dejected, ‘don’t remind me.’

‘Come on,’ Aneka said, trying to sound cheerful, ‘I’m sightseeing. This is my first Federation world, there has to be something worth seeing.’

‘We should go up to the south dome,’ Ella replied, appearing to brighten a little. ‘Aside from anything else there’s a café up there. After a two hour shuttle trip I could use the coffee.’

Aneka winced. ‘Lead on. I must admit I wasn’t expecting it to take that long.’

Ella started off across the dusty, concrete floor, heading left toward what looked like the opening of a road tunnel at the side of the cavern.

‘When we did the drop from the Garnet Hyde to Alpha Mensae,’ Monkey said, falling into step beside Aneka, ‘we were in low orbit, about two-hundred kilometres up. The station is up around twenty-thousand kilometres. The deceleration time was way shorter and we didn’t have to worry about other traffic.’

‘Huh, yeah, I guess.’ As they entered the concrete-lined tunnel, Monkey moved to put himself between the wall and Aneka, and she could not figure out why until she saw the enormous, tracked vehicle rolling toward them. She frowned. ‘Is that a robot?’

‘Yeah,’ Monkey replied nervously. ‘A big one.’

‘Ore transporter,’ Ella supplied, turning left again about ten metres down the tunnel. The room she had entered was lined with six sets of lift doors, and she headed for the nearest pair and stabbed the button beside it. ‘The cavern structure isn’t exactly brilliantly designed. The transports have to go through there to get to the spaceport.’