Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘There’s some data in these files about the location of the Tilton star system, and it’s relative to Earth, Old Earth. It’s all kind of vague though. It’s supply routes via a couple of other systems I don’t know and it’s just about how long it takes to get stuff to Tilton.’

  ‘The location of Earth was deleted from the uplift sites,’ Aneka replied. ‘The Xinti Scientists didn’t want to remember how badly they’d screwed up.’ She barked a laugh. ‘And if that doesn’t prove they weren’t AIs I don’t know what does.’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s an approximate location, right?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Well, with the approximate location in our old records, and that one, and this data, maybe I can narrow it down using the navigation data from the Pegasus.’

  ‘Al?’ Aneka said, aloud so that Ella knew she was doing it.

  ‘Connecting with Ella’s implant…’ the AI responded. ‘And good morning Ella. I have the data and I am streaming it through to your storage. I have taken the liberty of sending the subsection containing the Old Earth assumed region.’

  Ella giggled. ‘So thoughtful. I wish I had an Al. My implant has a non-volitional embedded to handle the user interface, but it’s just there to do what I tell it. It can’t be helpful. Okay, let’s see. If I overlay the nav data with the two regions we get… Uh-huh, they intersect, so that narrows it down. Now if I can map these routes in…’ After a few seconds she was frowning.

  ‘Problem?’ Aneka asked.

  ‘There’s a lot of potential paths to check. It’s going to take ages.’

  ‘Perhaps I may be of assistance,’ Al suggested. ‘Obtaining the data… That’s very well presented, Ella. Running pattern matching…’

  ‘How long’s it going to take?’ Ella asked.

  ‘A little less than the time it takes for me to relay this reply using speech as a medium,’ Al replied, and Aneka thought she detected a hint of smugness in the AI’s voice. ‘Transferring the solution to your implant now.’

  ‘Wow,’ Ella said. ‘Quantum computing is really fast.’

  Aneka smiled. ‘So, how many possible sites do you have now?’

  ‘Twelve,’ Ella replied.

  ‘Searching twelve star systems could take a while.’

  ‘Uh-huh, they’re spread across a pretty big volume of space, but… one of the routes ends in a G-two main sequence star with a trinary system one-point-three seven parsecs from it. That’s the first leg. “Earth to Alpha Station.” That… that has to be it.’

  Aneka’s eyes snapped open and she pushed herself up onto her elbows. Ella was staring at her. ‘Ella… Are you saying you have a definite location for Earth? Old Earth? My Earth?’

  Ella nodded, very slowly. ‘Yeah… Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.’

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  Aneka and Ella were slow-dancing, naked, around the open space between the cabin door and the bed. The room’s speakers were playing ‘Black Velvet’ because Ella had found it while searching for material about Elvis Pressley in the Wikipedia dump the Xinti had taken, and she had decided that it was really moody and she wanted to slow-dance to it.

  ‘You think this is really about Pressley?’ Ella whispered. Her mouth was quite close to Aneka’s ear, a fact she was exploiting periodically.

  ‘Never thought about it, but it makes sense. That line about “Love Me Tender”? That was the name of one of his songs, and he did die before his time, so to speak.’

  ‘Mmm… I love this song. It’s so moody, and she’s got a great voice. Kind of throaty and raw and sexy…’ Aneka chuckled and Ella added, ‘Yours is kind of like that too. When you laugh like that it hits me right between the legs.’

  A message appeared in Aneka’s vision field and she sighed, not stopping the slow movement of their bodies to the music. ‘Thirty minutes to warp exit,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ Ella replied, her arms tightening a little around Aneka’s waist. ‘I guess we’d better put some clothes on then.’

  New Earth Transit Station Two.

  ‘Remind me why we put clothes on,’ Ella said as they walked into the blank, white-walled quarantine room.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Aneka replied. Once, a thousand years ago, she had been treated to a course on how to act during a biological threat situation. When it came down to it, nothing much had changed. They had been stripped, soaped, hosed down, dusted with powder, blasted with various wavelengths of light, hosed down again, this time with the application of scrubbing brushes, and finally ushered into the quarantine room in the station’s medical section.

  ‘Your clothing and belongings are being run through scanners now,’ said a voice from speakers mounted over the observation window which occupied one wall. ‘We can provide disposable clothing if you feel the need to wear something?’ Aneka turned to see a man in a white, Ultraskin bodysuit and a Plastex lab coat standing behind the window. He was tall, handsome, blah, blah… He actually looked like he should be starring in a hospital soap opera as the heartthrob young surgeon all the nurses were in love with, complete with the short, blue-black hair and blue eyes you could drown in. She expected his teeth to sparkle when he smiled. ‘I’m Doctor Alex Lindeman,’ he said. ‘It’s my job to make sure you haven’t suffered any ill effects from your exposure to this nanovirus you found.’ He smiled. There was no sparkle.

  ‘We didn’t exactly find it,’ Aneka said.

  ‘A turn of phrase. We’ll be scanning to make sure none of it managed to hitch a lift before we allow you out. Don’t worry, Miss Jansen, I’ve had my briefing on your… unique condition. I’m quite aware of the horrible fate which will befall me if I breathe a word of it.’ He smiled again and there was still no sparkle. ‘I’ll let you get settled in. If there are any problems, there are call buttons beside the beds.’

  ‘Thanks, Doctor,’ Ella said, smiling back. She waited for him to leave the observation room before adding, ‘I wouldn’t mind checking out his bedside manner.’

  Aneka winced. ‘Please don’t make me think I’m featuring in one of those terrible sex comedies you make me watch.’

  ‘He’s cute,’ Ella replied, pouting.

  ‘Yeah.’ Aneka wandered over to one of the beds, lying down and stretching out, resting her head on her arms. ‘And I have a feeling that he’s going to be the most entertaining thing we’ll see for a few days, unless there are cute nurses to go with him.’

  Ella wandered over to the second bed and lay down in more or less the same pose. ‘Cute nurses would be good. Not that any will be coming in here.’

  ‘Nope. We’re on our own for now.’

  ‘Aside from the cameras and the observation window.’

  ‘Not that that would stop you.’

  Ella gave a shrug. ‘I’ve just had better than five days of unrestricted Aneka-time. I can wait until we’re alone.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I do have some restraint, you know. I managed without the whole time you were away.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘It’s not like I’m a nymphomaniac, you know.’

  ‘Not clinically anyway.’

  Ella pouted harder.

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  ‘We’ve been over the data the Brigantia collected,’ Winter told them. She was sitting on a stool in the observation room with Gillian alongside her. ‘The best match we can find is the collapse of a strange star into an electroweak star. A nova, but the explosion of something more dense than a neutron star. Frankly, you’re lucky you survived hitting the wavefront from it.’

  ‘You build tough frigates,’ Aneka replied.

  Winter smiled, it even reached her eyes. ‘Either way, it looks like you were right. They exploded their own star to destroy the Xinti attacking them. The data was relayed to the Herosians with a statement that we would not be needing reinforcements on our border.’

  ‘Are they going to accept that?’ Ella asked.

  ‘Not initially. They’ll suggest there might be more Xinti out the
re…’

  ‘There might be,’ Aneka interjected.

  ‘True, but we aren’t going to allow Herosian battleships in our region of space on a “might be.”’

  ‘So, they’re gone,’ Gillian said.

  Aneka nodded. ‘It seems that way. At least these ones died doing something useful. They took out a threat to the peace of the galaxy.’

  There was silence for a while and then Ella said, ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘Abraham is working with what we have,’ Gillian said. ‘He’s planning to write up everything he learned while we were there. Of course, it’s a fraction of what we could have learned, but it’s a step up. Combining that with what he’s learned from Aneka’s body he believes that several advances can be made which might have required decades, even centuries, to come up with on our own.’

  ‘I’ve ordered Eshebbon to be incinerated,’ Winter said. ‘An investigation is starting into Hayward’s involvement in the production of biological weapons, but they’re not stupid. I suspect they’ll wriggle out of this somehow. The best I think we can hope for is that they have to shut down their apparatus for a while. If I can keep the pressure up, the loss of income might finish them.’

  ‘And Old Earth?’ Ella asked.

  ‘I’ve suggested an expedition,’ Gillian replied. ‘It’s going to take some organisation, and funding.’

  ‘There isn’t really a security aspect to that discovery,’ Winter said, ‘but if I can bring any political pressure to bear, I will. I think rediscovering the Jenlay home world is something we should do.’

  ‘Vashma, yes,’ Ella agreed.

  ‘It would be the culmination of my life’s work,’ Gillian said, nodding.

  Aneka said nothing and Ella glanced at her, seeing the conflicting emotions on her face.

  ~~~

  ‘Aneka?’ Ella was lying in Aneka’s arms. The room was dark and quiet, at least to her. She suspected that Aneka could hear things; sounds too quiet for Jenlay ears, or too high or low to hear.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I get the feeling you don’t want to find Old Earth.’

  There was silence. Ella waited; she was not going to push the question. She was very open about her feelings, but she was quite aware that others were not, especially Aneka. Her background was psychology and anthropology, and she knew when to talk and when to listen. Even if she really wanted Aneka to open up, she would wait for it to happen.

  ‘I woke up,’ Aneka said, ‘and you told me everything I knew was gone. Even I wasn’t what I knew anymore. My world was dead, everyone I knew was dead. I guess I have the Xinti to thank for not going insane on the spot. They made me more… accepting. I adjusted far too quickly to being in a new world, but I think that’s partially because it was a new world. Nothing was the same so there was nothing for me to compare it to except memories. I didn’t have to deal with my world changing because I wasn’t in my world.’

  She stopped speaking again and Ella waited. There was going to be more. Ella even thought she knew what was coming, but Aneka needed to say it.

  ‘If I go back, what am I going to find? You say it’s a cinder. Eve said there could have been survivors. I’m not sure I want to see my old home as a lifeless lump of rock. I’m not sure I want to find cavemen wandering over a bleak landscape either. Either way, I’m going to go home and it’s not going to be home.’

  ‘You haven’t really faced the fact that your home world is gone, and you’re not really sure you want to.’

  Aneka made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a laugh. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me I should face up to it.’

  ‘No. My professional opinion is that facing this would be good for you, but I can’t be entirely professional where you’re concerned. It’s going to hurt and I don’t want you to be hurt.’

  Aneka’s arms tightened around Ella’s waist. ‘You’re going though, aren’t you?’

  ‘Gillian needs her assistant, and I… I’ve studied this kind of history for a long time. I want to go, but I’d stay here with you…’

  ‘And hate me for missing out on the opportunity? Screw that. And if you’re going, then I’m going. You’d just get into trouble without me.’

  ‘I was managing fine on digs before you showed up, you know?’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But now I’m here and you’re not going to go hundreds of parsecs, out beyond the Rim, without me. Okay?’

  Ella smiled. ‘Okay.’ Whatever they found when they got there, she was going to be there to help Aneka through it. But the important thing was that she was going to be with Aneka.

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  Nurse Carter was as hunky as Doctor Lindeman, even wearing a huge, transparent Plastex bag over his head as a helmet. Nurse Bentall somehow did not look so good with her face slightly distorted by the disposable helmet, but she did have a body to die for. Both of them were wearing Plastex bodysuits; practical certainly, but it just made Aneka feel more like she was starring in Carry on Space Hospital. Ella was being all coy and suggestive as Carter took her temperature and blood pressure, which did not help.

  The manual checks were being done to ensure there were no calibration or detection errors with the remote equipment. Lindeman had told them that there was at least one virus he had encountered which caused aberrant readings in instruments due to an alteration of the reflectivity of the skin. What Aneka was not so sure of was why Bentall was checking her at all, though she suspected that the woman just fancied her.

  Lindeman wandered in while the nurses were finishing up their various tests, his own face obscured by a less than perfectly inflated plastic bubble. ‘We’re seeing no indications that the virus has affected either of you in any way, or managed to hitch a lift,’ he said, standing at the foot of Ella’s bed. He looked over at Ella. ‘We did see some odd proteins in your urine, Miss Narrows. Those were minute amounts when you arrived and seemed to have entirely flushed from your system now. That immune system boost you were given seems to have done an exceptional job.’

  ‘So we can go?’ Aneka asked.

  ‘We’d like to keep you here overnight. If nothing comes up then you can go down on the oh-eight-hundred shuttle service.’ Aneka tried her best to ignore the innuendo-laden elements of the last sentence; Ella was bad enough as it was.

  ‘Thanks, Doc,’ she said.

  Just at that moment a window popped up in her vision field; Bentall had sent her contact details through using her ident-chip just as she started for the door.

  ‘I’ve located her staff photograph on the station’s internal network,’ Al said. The picture appeared beside Bentall’s contact details. ‘Her face is not actually that wobbly, and she’s a redhead.’

  ‘Figures,’ Aneka replied. ‘I wonder if Ella’s got Carter’s number.’

  ‘It seems likely. I detected a transmission tagged with her public key around the time Miss Bentall sent to you.’

  ‘Jenlay,’ Aneka said, inaudible to the Jenlay in the room, ‘at least you always know how horny they’ll be.’

  Yorkbridge Mid-town, New Earth, 25.1.526 FSC.

  ‘Do you think we should invite the nurses over?’ Ella asked as they walked out of the lift and onto the gantry which led to their apartment block. ‘You know, as a thank you for looking after us.’

  ‘Don’t you mean as a thank you for having a very substantial penis?’ Aneka replied.

  Ella’s lips twitched. ‘Nurse Bentall didn’t have a substantial penis.’

  ‘No, she had big boobs. I think we should wait at least a couple of days. We don’t want to sound desperate.’

  ‘No, you’ve got a point.’ They started across the bridge, the mist obscuring the streets far below. ‘What about them, your pilot friend, Kat and Dillon at the weekend?’

  ‘Too many women.’ The door ahead of them opened and they walked in, heading for the stairs. Katelyn and Dillon, their neighbours, lived on the lower level; their own little flat was above.

  ‘What about that guy y
ou mentioned? Chancer?’

  ‘Chance. Okay. Still a little girl-heavy, but better.’

  Ella opened the door at the top of the stairs and the lights in the flat came on to greet them. ‘I notice you’re not saying no.’ As they walked in the walls came to life; a beach scene appeared around them, Ella’s favourite landscape view.

  ‘Well… I’m not saying I couldn’t use the recreation, and if I did say no I’m pretty sure you’d have changed my mind before the weekend anyway.’

  Ella giggled. ‘You never say no to me.’

  ‘I had noticed that.’

  Ella looked at her, face suddenly serious. ‘I hope you never have to.’

  Sweeping Ella off the floor and draping her indecorously over her shoulder, Aneka started for the bedroom. ‘I don’t think it’s going to be needed any time soon.’

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  The decision to go out to Gillian’s home in the suburbs of Yorkbridge had been made late in the day and they had rushed around the following morning to get together the ingredients Aneka would need to make a curry. She had gone with the replacement recipe for Thai Green Curry she had used before, because finding substitutes for the spices in something else would have taken hours. It had been worth it. They had turned up, cooked, enjoyed their meal, and now they were sitting in the hot tub in Gillian’s back yard as the evening sun started to colour the sky.

  Gillian Gilroy was cuddled up to her partner, Leo Bashford, her dusky skin a stark contrast to his paler flesh. She was a good bit shorter than him too and of a more classical look. Aneka always thought she looked like a darker skinned version of a Greek statue, though her body had a more modern beauty. Her eyes were brown, as was her hair, which tended to hang in soft ringlets around her face, adding to the classical appearance. Bashford had the powerful body of a man used to manual labour, though his actual job title was ‘facilitator,’ like Aneka. He was bald, with upward pointing eyebrows and slightly oriental features; handsome in a relatively unique way for a Jenlay. When Aneka had first met them they were not, officially, together though she had got the feeling they occasionally indulged. There had been some sort of prior relationship, she thought, and they had drifted back together, though Bashford still maintained his own apartment and they were not together constantly.