Steel Beneath the Skin (8 page)

‘Holy shit!’ Aneka exclaimed. ‘Sorry. It says it’s on pacification mode.’

‘Oh, I think it is. It’s just damn powerful. I think that’s a pulsar pistol. They fire anti-matter pulses in lethal mode. The acceleration field is usually more powerful than a typical blaster. The Xinti used them extensively, we’ve never quite figured out the physics.’

Aneka looked down at the weapon she was holding. ‘I don’t know about the physics, but I can build and repair this thing.’ She moved the pistol up and snapped off a shot from her hip, watching as the target disintegrated.

‘Perhaps on your off time you could draw up some schematics,’ Bashford said. ‘Might be another little money-spinner for you if they can be manufactured.’ He pulled two rolls of paper out of a box. ‘And don’t worry, I have more targets.’

Aneka grinned at him. This was certainly more fun than reading textbooks.

Part Two: Where Men Once Walked

FScV Garnet Hyde. 25.9.523 FSC.

One of the things Aneka had had to learn was the standard calendar. The federal authorities had set about defining a standard time system early in the life of the Federation. Jenlay, apparently, were more anal about that kind of thing than the other races, so jenlay standards had been used for a lot of things. A second was a second, defined using some aspect of a caesium-133 atom, a minute was sixty of them. A day was the same length as she was used to, but divided into twenty hours of four thousand three hundred and twenty seconds each. The year was three hundred and sixty days long, divided into twelve, thirty day months. Of course, each world had its own local calendar as well, and it all sounded very confusing. Her computer, however, did not consider it a problem. It popped up an application which let her keep track of multiple simultaneous clocks and calendars.

Her computer was becoming more “helpful” as time went on. It did not seem to be sentient, as such, but there was certainly some degree of intelligence in there and it was showing itself more as she got more confident with her new body and the world she had found herself in.

And she
was
becoming more confident. Her nights were spent in a personalised, virtual dream world where she could interact with characters who taught her how society functioned. She had learned how to operate the common computer interfaces, been to parties and listened to the things people chatted about, attended lectures on the history of the Federation, and had more wet dreams than she thought was entirely proper.

She had been through the various training courses, initially with Bashford, then Monkey, and then on her own, though she was currently sharing the ship with Patton and Ella. Ella had got up four days ago to sit around looking nervous while Aneka did the exams. She had said someone had to since Aneka looked sublimely confident about it. Which was quite true. Monkey had told her that the questions were basically information recall and some problem solving. Well her computer-augmented memory was beyond perfect, she had discovered, and the kind of problem solving she was being asked for was little different than planning the kind of military ops she had done a hundred times before.

The official report on her test scores was now waiting on confirmation by Drake and Bashford, and today was the day they would be emerging from the sleep pods along with Monkey and Gilroy. And assuming she had done as well as she thought, Aneka would become a resource for the preparations for planet-fall.

Aside from providing stress relief during the exams, though considering she seemed to be stressing more than Aneka was, perhaps it was the other way around, Ella had given her a bit of a briefing on their destination. Alpha Mensae IV was a relatively warm planet on the edge of known space; known space for now, but actually quite close to Old Earth, or where they thought Old Earth was. Heavy, but small, it had a high mineral content in its crust which seemed to be why some early human colony had been sited there and rediscovered by a deep survey mission three years earlier. Now they were going out to look at it since it might shed considerable light on early human activity in space.

‘So we’re going to go look at some ancient human miners?’ Aneka had asked.

‘After a thousand years in a warm environment, I doubt there’ll be much left of the miners,’ Ella had replied.

‘I’d have thought there wouldn’t be much left of anything.’

‘There are ruins. The building materials we’re talking about don’t decay. Pretty much ever.’

The three women walked down to the hibernation room together to wake everyone else up. With Aneka’s exams finished, they had gravitated into a threesome which Aneka had actually enjoyed; maybe Patton had been right about it needing the right people. Whatever, they had felt a little more like companions who should go together to see the others through the revival process. Aneka had seen three people come out of cold sleep now and she knew it was not exactly a pleasant process. You woke up cold and usually a bit nauseous, generally hungry and very thirsty.

‘I’m too old to be doing this,’ Gilroy groaned as she sat up and looked around at the others. She was the last one conscious and the others were all waiting for her to come around so that they could go find something to eat. Each was holding a plastic bottle of isotonic fluid, most of them had gone through half of it already. Patton handed Gilroy a bottle and she yanked off the sealed top and drained it in one go.

‘No you aren’t,’ Bashford replied. ‘You’ve been saying that for thirty years that I know of. Come on, we’ll get some food in us and take a look at Aneka’s test results. I’m keen to see what a xinti-built synthetic body can do for us.’

Apparently the answer was, “quite a lot.” Bashford’s eyes widened as he sat in the mess with a fork in one hand and a data tablet in the other, the former apparently briefly forgotten before his stomach growled and he started on the food. Then he spent twenty minutes peering at the display and scrolling backward and forward through the results. Drake, whose signing off on the exams was more of a formality, looked a little surprised and dug into his food to await Bashford’s analysis. Gilroy was also gazing intently at a tablet, though that could not be Aneka’s test results.

‘Ninety-six per cent,’ Bashford finally said. ‘
I
didn’t score that highly.’

‘I only scored eighty!’ Monkey squeaked.

‘Well, a lot of it was just recall of procedures,’ Aneka said, feeling embarrassed, ‘and I seem to be able to remember
everything
now. I always used to hate that kind of exam.’

‘You were supposed to be a data collection operative,’ Gilroy pointed out. ‘I would imagine the Xinti wanted accurate information.’

Bashford grunted. ‘Yes, your scores on procedure and documentation are perfect. The practical analysis scores are lower, but those are always a little subjective.’

‘I’m ex-military. I’m used to tactical analysis, insertion and extraction methods, site security… personal protection.’

‘Well, get some experience under your belt and you’ll be an absolutely first rate facilitator.’ He tapped the screen a couple of times, and went through the sign-off process. Drake nodded, apparently happy, and did the same.

‘Aneka Jansen,’ the captain said, ‘Facilitator First Rank, welcome to the crew.’

Aneka gave him a smile. Ella positively beamed at them both. Then Aneka turned to Gilroy. ‘What are you staring at so intently, Doctor?’

‘Test results. The dream programme you went through took note of your reactions as well as providing education. The first part of your consultancy, if you will. I’m quite sure that your memory will fill in blanks in our knowledge, but your reaction to our world also tells us a lot about the differences. Of course, it will take some time to analyse the data. Ella’s the psychologist, she’ll be doing most of that.’

Trying not to think about the amount of dream sex she had had, Aneka said, ‘About that… You know, I was a grunt soldier. I mean, history was never my strong point and I hated politics. I don’t know how much blank space I can fill in.’

‘My dear girl,’ Gilroy said, smiling warmly, ‘if you’d seen how much information we have on your time you’d realise that
anything
you could tell us would be valuable. We’re not even sure about half of the information we do have.’

‘Like,’ Ella said, pausing to think of an example, ‘we’ve never understood how the world developed the way it did under a monarchy.’

Aneka frowned. ‘A monarchy?’

Ella nodded, enthusiastically as always. ‘We have records of one of the kings so we know it was a monarchy, and it just doesn’t seem like the right environment for a largely commercial inter-stellar society to develop from.’

‘Uh… which king? There was a queen on the throne when I… left.’

‘King Elvis. Apparently he was famous for singing.’

Aneka’s jaw worked for a few seconds before she managed to come out with, ‘Okay… Yes, maybe I’ll be more use to you than I thought.’

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Aneka was busy checking perimeter security sensors in the pressurised hold when the announcement came over the ship’s intercom. It was Patton’s voice, sounding very matter of fact, ‘All hands. We will be dropping out of warp in five minutes. Orbital insertion in fifteen.’ A slight thrill went through Aneka; they were arriving at her first ever alien world. Apparently someone else had thought of that. ‘Aneka, please come up to the bridge,’ Patton added, her voice sounding as though she was grinning.

Dutifully finishing the diagnostics on the unit she was working on, Aneka arrived at the bridge just as the warp field was collapsing. With the field up the light ahead of them was squashed to the point where it was invisible, frequency-shifted to gamma rays by their speed. As they slowed, space ahead of them turned blue, then grew darker, and suddenly rippled into normality. And there was Alpha Mensae IV.

Whatever Aneka had been expecting, the planet did at least look alien. There was a reddish haze enveloping the globe, but she could just about make out large bodies of water and two land masses which looked very green, even through the red.

‘What do you think of your first planet?’ Ella asked. Gilroy was there too, both of them at the science station. Gilroy had the seat and was busy examining the early telemetry from the ship’s sensors.

‘Well, it’s alien,’ Aneka replied, ‘but I have seen a planet before. Just… not from space.’

Drake and Patton were sat back in their chairs watching the displays set before them, apparently quite happy to let the ship do the work. Aneka figured it was not too different from a passenger jet from her time; they were capable of taking the entire flight from take-off to landing, and the crew was there to handle emergencies. The computers on the Garnet Hyde had to be vastly more advanced than the flight computers on a jet.

‘What’s with the haze?’ Aneka asked. ‘That atmosphere doesn’t look especially breathable.’

‘Upper atmospheric dust,’ Gilroy replied. ‘There’s a fairly high amount of volcanism on the southern continent. It probably keeps the atmosphere in check. The surface averages over three-hundred Kelvin as it is. Without the dust to reflect solar radiation it could have gone greenhouse.’

Aneka watched as a data window appeared in her vision translating degrees Kelvin to Celsius; about thirty, quite warm enough. She leaned forward slightly to look out toward the world’s sun, looking dim through the automatically shaded viewing port. It still looked larger and more orange than the Sun did.

‘It’s a K-Two main sequence star,’ Ella supplied. ‘Larger than the star you’re used to, and a bit cooler, which makes the light more orange.’

‘So the light quality down there is going to be a bit weird.’

‘You’re unlikely to have any problems,’ Gilroy told her. ‘Generally a combat body like yours will come with multi-spectral visual sensors.’ As she suggested it, the computer which Aneka had begun calling Al popped up a fairly complex display showing a graph of frequency and the band her visual sensors were currently operating in. Aneka had no clue what half of it meant, but she knew a few radio frequencies and she could see those at one end of the scale.

‘Apparently I have. I guess I can see in infra-red. That could be useful down there.’

‘Orbital insertion velocity matched,’ Patton announced. ‘Course correction in five… four… three… two…’ There was no additional sound, but the ship’s orientation shifted slightly, perhaps a degree in yaw, two in pitch. ‘Course correction complete. Orbital insertion and retro burn in five minutes, twenty seconds.’

The globe of Alpha Mensae IV grew steadily in the window ahead of them. They were coming up on the night side, toward sunrise, and it made the atmosphere glow a brilliant crimson, but… ‘It looks kind of… small,’ Aneka commented.

‘About three quarters of the size of New Earth,’ Gilroy agreed. ‘Gravity is point-seven G. Atmospheric pressure is basically normal, oxygen-nitrogen composition. Quite breathable. Aside from the heat it should be quite comfortable for working down there.’

Aneka took a last look out at the red and orange globe. ‘Can’t wait. I’d better get back to checking the sensors so I can set foot on my first alien planet.’

Alpha Mensae IV, 1.10.523 FSC.

It was actually the following day by the time the Garnet Hyde’s shuttle settled onto an open area just to the south of the site of the “mining town” the first survey team had located. The slim, aerodynamic vessel was designed to function as a mobile science facility as well as providing bunk space and shelter. There were only four bunks, and no privacy, but there would always be one of the facilitators awake so that was not an issue. Given that Aneka appeared to be able to survive on about four hours sleep a day and could see in the dark, she had stated flatly that Bashford and Monkey should get a good night’s sleep and she would handle the night shifts.

Before Bashford would allow anyone to start doing close-up work, he wanted a perimeter set up. Aneka had expected the two scientists to balk at the delay, but they were disciplined about it, even Ella. Besides, while Bashford and Aneka went out to lay down perimeter sensors all the way around the town, Monkey was on the ship piloting a remote drone through the town. It was the first chance the two scientists would get to look at their site as well as an important security survey.