Steel Beneath the Skin (17 page)

‘That was… anti-climactic,’ Aneka commented. Taking two quick steps forward, she caught the boy’s wrist and wrenched it sideways. The stunner bounced off the alley wall and the kid let out a cry of pain. Then she followed through, her knee slamming up into his groin, and he let out a squeak before his eyes rolled back and he collapsed onto the dirt. Aneka heard Monkey wincing in sympathy behind her. ‘What do we do with him now?’

‘Call the local cops, I guess,’ Monkey said.

Ella walked over and looked down at their would-be mugger, now curled into a foetal position on the dusty concrete. ‘Just leave him. If he’s lucky, no one will find him and steal
his
clothes before he wakes up. If we call the cops we’ll spend the rest of the day filling out forms and he’ll end up on a prison station learning to be a better criminal.’

‘That’s kind of cynical,’ Aneka commented as they walked away. ‘I’d have thought the future had better ways of dealing with criminals.’

‘In the Core there’s almost no criminality,’ Ella replied. ‘The kind of thing which creates it has largely been engineered out and most people have what they want. Out here the medical facilities aren’t as good and there are more people desperate enough to try stuff like this. Since there aren’t that many criminals in the Core, the Federation doesn’t know what to do with the ones it has. They get locked up, off-world.’

‘Huh. Some things don’t change. Okay, what’s a “necro”?’

‘Someone from the Core Worlds,’ Monkey supplied. ‘I’ve no idea why.’

‘It used to be “corpsers,”’ Ella explained. ‘Then someone read a book and heard about “necromancy” and stuff like that. It dates back to last century.’

‘Huh. I’m not one anyway.’

‘People like him tend to think anyone dressed nicely are necros. Ah, here we are.’ She reached for the door of a shop and Aneka looked up to read the sign.
Adele’s Adult Fun Shop.

Monkey let out a groan and Aneka laughed. ‘Hopefully she won’t want me trying anything on in here.’

‘Don’t count on it,’ he replied.

~~~

‘I don’t know why you wouldn’t wear the other outfit back to the station,’ Ella said as they walked back toward the spaceport.

‘Because I draw the line at turning up at the security station dressed in a few faux-leather straps,’ Aneka replied. She was now carrying three bags, mostly because her body did not care much about the extra load.

Ella giggled and Monkey said, ‘I told you she’d have you trying things on.’

‘You did. She tried things on too.’

‘I don’t know why you wouldn’t, Monkey. You’d have looked gorgeous in…’

‘I didn’t think so,’ he interrupted, and then came to a stop at the sight of the two policemen standing beside the tunnel to the port. ‘That doesn’t look good.’

Ella continued walking, a frown on her face. ‘Is there a problem, officer?’ she asked of the nearest of the two men in dark blue slacks, boots, and something like a flak jacket, all over the top of what looked like a blue ship-suit.

‘There’s been a cave-in in the tunnel,’ the man replied. ‘They’re clearing it, but the port is closed until morning. I can provide you with the location of a hotel if you require one, ma’am.’

‘No,’ Ella replied. ‘I can manage.’ She was frowning when she turned around and led her friends back across the cavern. ‘These tunnels don’t cave in. Not since they were first constructed anyway.’

Monkey grunted his agreement. ‘Does seem unlikely. Reinforced Plascrete walls like that don’t fail on their own.’

‘You’re talking sabotage?’ Aneka asked.

‘Could be. Not our problem, though, unless it becomes a problem for everyone.’

‘No,’ Ella agreed. ‘We’ll get a hotel room and fly up in the morning. We’d better contact the Doc and let her know.’

Aneka asked Al to put a call through and a video contact window appeared to show he was trying to reach her. ‘I’m on it.’

‘
A
room?’ Monkey asked.

Ella shrugged and gave him a grin. ‘We’ve all seen each other naked, why waste money. It’s not like I’m asking you to sleep with Aneka.’

Monkey groaned. ‘Why did you have to say that?’

~~~

The hotel room was in a reputable sort of place in the north dome, though the actual building was half above ground and half below. They had shared the bill and sprung for an aboveground room with two double beds. Right now Aneka and Ella were lying on one while Monkey lay on the other, his eyes on the video panel which occupied a substantial section of the opposite wall. Technically it occupied the entire wall; Ella had demonstrated selecting wall patterns and pictures as required by the patron when they walked in. However, one section was currently devoted to the local news channels, with Monkey listening to it on a wireless headset so he did not disturb the women.

Not that the women were doing anything much; just lying on the bed, Ella’s head on Aneka’s shoulder. Ella had stripped off her ship-suit once they were in the room, but then so had Monkey. The only one still dressed was Aneka.

‘You said you got those eyes after catching some disease,’ Aneka said, her voice low despite the fact that Monkey could not hear them. ‘You catch that here?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Aneka felt the redhead stiffen a little against her side.

‘You don’t have to…’

‘I was twelve. My father worked in the mines, mother was a dancer at one of the clubs in Cavern One. One day he took me on a visit to see the mining operations. I was doing a report for school and doing it on my mother’s job was not going to go down well. Anyway, there’s actually some life on this rock, a few extremophiles that actually like the atmosphere out there, and the heat. One of them mutated to handle an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and started colonising the mine areas underground. A type of lichen, actually. It would be fascinating if I hadn’t been exposed to some spores from the stuff while I was down there. My filter mask had a bust seam.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s difficult to treat, as you can imagine. Something that can live out there is immune to a lot of things, and a lot of the things it isn’t immune to would kill the patient. It started on my eyes because of the moisture, but by the time they had got it under control it had eaten away most of my nose and half of the left side of my face.’ Aneka winced, pulling Ella against her almost involuntarily. ‘It wasn’t so bad for me, really. I couldn’t see what I looked like.’

Aneka laughed half-heartedly. ‘That where you got your bubbly disposition from?’

‘Well, after that it did seem to be kind of stupid to be negative about… things like getting stuck here for a night. My mother decided the only way I was ever going to see again was to get me to one of the Core Worlds. She managed to scrape the money together to leave here and go to New Earth, and then get me the operations I needed. They reconstructed my face and put in the new eyes. It cost a lot of money. Mom never told me how she got it all, but I think she had to do some pretty distasteful things to make the extra credits.’

‘Where’s she now?’

‘New Earth. She still dances. The club she works at is nicer than the one here and she actually loves the work. She…’

‘Sound to room speakers,’ Monkey said, interrupting her, and the room piped the audio from the news channel through.

‘…are sketchy currently, but it is thought that around eighty people were in the port when the bomb was detonated. No demands made have been communicated to the press, but the terrorists appear to belong to the group known as “The Knights of the Void” an anarchist group thought to have been responsible for the destruction of the CSV Blue Auriga two years ago.

‘Once again, terrorists have assaulted the Harriamon Shuttle Landing Port and have taken hostages.’

‘Not a cave-in then,’ Aneka said. ‘We may be stuck here for more than one night.’

‘You think?’ Ella asked. It sounded like a genuine question.

‘Depends on the actual situation and the intelligence the police have. They won’t want to risk storming the place, assuming they can get to it, unless they’re sure of what they’re up against. They’ll risk losing hostages. And that’s assuming the terrorists don’t have explosives. I’d imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to bring the roof down and cut the planet off entirely.’

‘Not entirely,’ Ella said. ‘The commercial port, where the metals are shipped out of, is in a separate cavern. They’re only holding the passenger port. And there’s the military facility which has its own landing pads.’

Aneka frowned. ‘That makes relatively little sense. Unless that was the easiest to take.’ She shrugged. ‘Nothing we can do about it. Put a movie on or something, Monkey. Maybe I can get used to what passes for humour these days.’

8.11.523 FSC.

Aneka woke to an odd chirping sound and it took her a second to realise that it was not in the room. There was a message in her vision field indicating that there was an incoming call from a blocked source identifier. Assuming it was Gilroy checking up on them, she was surprised when the video feed showed the unassuming face of Winter.

‘Miss Jansen, I’m sorry for waking you. I need to discuss something with you, privately.’

‘You’re on my internal feed,’ Aneka replied.

‘Very well. You’re aware of the terrorist situation at the spaceport?’

‘I’ve seen the local news channel’s report.’

‘Indeed. What they aren’t reporting is what the terrorists want and what they plan to do if their demands are not met. They’ve smuggled a micro-nuke into the port…’

‘What’s the yield?’

‘One kiloton. Not huge, but in the confined space of the Harriamon facilities quite enough to kill everyone in the town.’

‘And I assume you’ve some rule about not negotiating with terrorists?’

Winter smiled her humourless smile. ‘We prefer not to, but we will under the right circumstances. In this case it isn’t an option. They are demanding the dissolution of the federal government.’

‘I see your point, but why are you contacting me?’

‘There is one way of getting into the port which they will not be expecting, largely because it is technically impossible to use. There’s an electrical ducting system between the cargo port and the passenger port. It has little air and it’s very cramped, and it would take a hydraulic jack to lift the access panel at the far end. It’s useless to an assault team…’

‘But I could maybe crawl through it and I’m strong enough to lift the panel.’

The blonde woman nodded. ‘There’s no time to evacuate the population through the military port, and they’ll detonate the bomb if anything leaves the cargo port.’

‘You’re not actually leaving me much option. I’ll need schematics of the port and a weapon.’

‘Yes, I had considered that. I’m transmitting the plans now. You can collect your knife and pistol from me in the cargo port.’

‘You’re on the planet?!’

Winter smiled again. ‘I work very much in secret, Miss Jansen, but I’m quite a hands-on manager.’

‘All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’ A second window popped up to tell her that the schematics had been downloaded and processed into the navigation system. ‘One thing. I’d like you to get Ella and Monkey out of here once I’ve gone in.’

‘I’ll see to it personally.’ The link broke and Aneka pushed herself up onto one elbow.

‘Wake up, you two, we have to go.’

Monkey blinked at her from the other bed. ‘Huh? Is the port open again?’

‘No, but you two are leaving.’

‘We are?’ Ella said. ‘What about you?’

~~~

Ella had been, predictably, less than pleased, but the awe involved in meeting the mysterious Winter had been enough to make her accept that this was going to happen and that was that. Monkey had not been happy either, more because she was going in alone and there was nothing he could do,
and
he was not allowed to say anything about it. As Aneka crawled through the wiring duct toward the spaceport she was not exactly pleased herself.

It was a data conduit, thankfully. There were no thick power cables, but there were bundles of fibre optic cables, and they had not always been put in the best of places, or even properly fixed down. She was pushing a bag with her equipment ahead of her and she had left her boots behind with Ella because they were just too clumsy for this kind of activity. She was quite glad she had not inherited her mother’s classic English pear-shaped body, but on the other hand she was beginning to wish the Xinti had not “perked” her breasts up quite so much. She had to be almost a cup-size bigger and the added firmness was not helping.

On top of that, she was in pitch darkness. Her glorious enhanced vision was no use down here where there was no light at all aside from the heat her own body gave off, and she was not using a torch because there were holes in the plate at the other end and there was the small possibility that a light might be seen. At least she was crawling to the end of the tunnel so there was no chance of missing her exit.

When her bag finally bumped into something too solid to be another cable blockage her clock told her she had spent twenty minutes crawling five hundred metres. Shuffling onto her back, she got her hands under the metal plate an inch or two above her nose and pushed. Stress measurement indicators in-vision soared upward, turning yellow as she managed to shift the steel. Fifty kilos of metal levered upward, the task becoming easier as the angle on her arms changed and she could use her back. Finally, holding the cover up on its edge, she pulled her bag out, found the lifting holes by touch, and lowered the plate back into place.

It was still pitch black, but she had the schematic of the port and knew the stairs up were on her left orienting against the duct. Internal gyroscopes and magnetometers made sure she knew exactly where that orientation was and how she had moved since getting out of the duct. The door at the top of the stairs was locked, but she had the code to unlock it and it slid back without complaint. After almost half an hour of total darkness the dim light from the sparse emergency lights in the service corridor seemed incredibly bright.

Aneka used the opportunity of the unguarded corridor to open up her bag and get her equipment out. It was a classic piece of poor security design; assuming that an ingress point was “impossible” and so did not need guarding. There were no security sensors down here because “no one” could get to it without going through the port which did have cameras. The fact that you needed a respirator to breath in the unventilated space just added to that sense of false security.