Janna came hurrying down the corridor that connected the front door with the lounge. She was a near copy of her daughter, especially now that Ella had had the breast enhancements and was working out more. Her face was a little older, harder really, her eyes were brown, and her short hair was black, but Ella had inherited almost all her looks from her mother. Janna was topless as well, which suggested the blonde was more than just a passing acquaintance.
‘Let them in,’ Janna said, grinning. ‘Come on, you two, don’t be bashful. This is Sharissa. I told you about her, right?’
‘Yes,’ Ella replied, a little nonplussed, ‘but I didn’t know you two were still together.’
Sharissa was closing the door behind them. ‘It’s nothing official,’ she said. ‘We’re not together together, but I come visit whenever I get the chance.’
‘Which is not as often as I’d like,’ Janna added.
‘But when Janna told me you were coming here for an extended stay,’ Sharissa went on, ‘I thought I’d come down too. I got in late last night.’
Aneka looked at her, making sure that Janna could not see the narrowing of her eyes. Sharissa smiled back, twitching her eyebrows in a manner that suggested that further explanation would come. Sharissa was one of Winter’s people and had been assigned to protect Janna from Ardus Quint. She had, basically, picked Janna up and gone home with her; Janna was not supposed to know anything about it.
‘You’re a flight attendant, right Sharissa?’ Aneka asked.
‘I was when I met Janna. I work for the Federal Security Agency now. Just an office job, nothing special.’ Good idea; keep the lies to a minimum.
‘I’ve met your boss a few times.’
‘Uh-huh. The whole agency knows she likes to keep an eye on you.’
‘Winter?’ Janna said. ‘Winter likes to keep an eye on you? That doesn’t sound good.’
‘She’s nice,’ Ella replied, ‘in a weird kind of way.’
‘You’ve met her?!’
‘Uh-huh.’
Janna shook her head and headed off into the lounge. ‘My daughter is keeping company with the most mysterious woman in the Federation. Now that’s not something I ever thought I’d say.’
Ella giggled, following on behind. ‘That’s nothing. Aneka fucked Stephen Teldarian for coffee beans.’
Aneka let herself blush, but Janna just looked over her shoulder and said, ‘I want details. Including full measurements.’
~~~
The only person still fully dressed was Aneka. With a thorough description of Teldarian and his island given, Janna had moved on to her daughter. Aneka had never seen such a professional, almost technical, examination of a pair of breasts before. Ella had not consulted her mother about the operation and Janna had not seen the results up close yet. She went over every square centimetre of flesh checking for abnormalities of any kind. Ella had endured the scrutiny, eyes cast upward as her mother checked for scarring, bruising, stiffening, or anything else which might have indicated a problem.
‘You can never be too careful,’ Janna said as she settled back onto one of the two lounge couches beside Sharissa. ‘Honestly, I’ve seen my share of mistakes made in cosmetic surgery. I don’t want anything happening to you.’
‘I guess you would see quite a few enhanced body parts in your line of work,’ Aneka said.
‘You’ve no idea!’ She cupped her own breasts illustratively. ‘I had these pushed up a cup size and reinforced, of course. They’d be around my knees otherwise and the customers expect a girl with bounce, not swing.’
‘Yours are fairly tasteful,’ Sharissa said, ‘and you said you weren’t small before. Ella’s just matched up to you, so it’s not disproportionate. That friend of yours, Marilyn?’
‘Case in point,’ Janna agreed. ‘Four operations over seventy years, getting larger each time. She’s a miracle of science.’
‘Looks like a woman attached to two weather balloons,’ Sharissa interjected. Aneka and Ella giggled at the image.
Janna patted Sharissa on the thigh. ‘Not quite that bad, but… yes. You should see the men I’ve seen having operations though. They’re the worst.’
‘Uh… what kind of operations?’ Aneka asked. ‘I don’t really want to know, do I?’
‘Oh, not what you’re thinking,’ Janna said. Then she frowned and added, ‘Not just what you’re thinking. I have seen extensions, thickening, general enlargement…’ She ticked them off on her fingers, looking thoughtfully upward. ‘…scrotal padding, scrotal stretching, anal reinforcement, buttock padding…’
‘Wait up… anal reinforcement?’
‘The muscle’s not used to the kind of abuse some people put it through. The worst cases are the artificial muscle enhancements though. You get men with layers of extra muscle grown in regeneration tanks and then grafted in under their skin. It looks…’ She shuddered, which gave Aneka quite enough of an impression of what she was talking about.
‘High-tech steroid abusers,’ Aneka suggested.
‘Tends to look worse than that,’ Sharissa commented. ‘Steroids pump you up, but at least the muscle growth is your own. The bad cases of this look like walking slabs of beef.’
‘You see it a lot in Rim World erotic film actors,’ Janna added. ‘They actually seem to think it’s sexy. Then again some of the stuff being made out there is for a rather… restricted market.’ Aneka noticed Sharissa’s arm tighten slightly around Janna’s shoulders, but the dancer smiled brightly, maybe a little too brightly, and went on quickly. ‘Enough of that, however, I have some news myself.’
‘Oh?’ Ella asked.
‘I am retiring. My contract is up for renewal in a couple of months and I’ve decided not to.’
Ella blinked rapidly. ‘But you love dancing.’
‘And I’m not going to stop; I’m just changing my venue and switching careers.’
‘Mom, you’re being obtuse.’
Janna smirked across the small, Polyglass coffee table between the couches. ‘I start teaching at the University of New Earth at the start of month nine. Assistant to Doctor Zebrenev. I’ll be teaching several classes. General fitness and flexibility, pole work, erotic.’
‘The university teaches “erotic dancing?”’ Aneka asked. Then she shook her head. ‘Never mind. Of course it does.’
‘Are you going to need somewhere to stay?’ Ella asked.
‘No,’ Janna said, one hand squeezing Sharissa’s thigh. ‘Issa has an apartment in Yorkbridge…’
‘Which I’m not in enough as it is,’ Sharissa stated. ‘I have to travel a lot, though I’m hoping that’ll settle down soon, but Janna would really be doing me a favour moving in there. I mean, there’s someone to look after the place while I’m away…’
‘And a free sex toy when you get home,’ Janna finished. ‘Plus, I’ll get to see you more. When you’re not gallivanting across the galaxy.’
Ella beamed at her mother. ‘That’s so fridgy, Mom! Just so you remember, Aneka’s mine. No borrowing.’
Janna smirked. ‘I’ve got my own beautiful blonde. What do I need yours for?’
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Janna was up on stage, currently still mostly dressed and upside down on the chromed pole. It was her second set and Aneka, Ella, and Sharissa were watching from a booth nearby. Janna was exceptionally talented; she was going to make a good teacher. On the other hand, this was her second set so they had had one chance to be awed already.
‘Okay,’ Aneka said, her eyes still on Janna, ‘why are you still here? Winter can’t be worried about her.’
‘Vashma no,’ Sharissa replied. ‘No I’m really here because I want to be. Sure I picked her up the first time because I was supposed to be guarding her, but… Well, neither Winter nor I thought I’d actually fall for her. It, err, wasn’t in the mission briefing.’
‘So she’s not in any danger?’ Ella asked.
‘If she is, I don’t know about it. And when I find out about it I’ll break its legs and fe
ed it its fucking windpipe.’
Ella blinked at the vehemence of the statement and then giggled. ‘Okay, Mom seems to have lucked out almost as much as I did. Welcome to the family.’
‘Ha! Thank you.’
‘Isn’t she going to figure out what you really do for a living eventually?’ Aneka asked.
‘No. Well, not exactly. The story is that I’m training in security planning. It’s just bending the truth a little. I’m not as young as I was and personal security is… getting tougher. I am actually going into more of a supervisory position. Another year and I should be working primarily out of the Yorkbridge office which works for us, obviously.’
‘It sounds great,’ Ella said. ‘Mom hasn’t really had a steady partner since… Well, since we left Harriamon.’
‘She doesn’t talk about Harriamon much. I know enough to know she really loves her daughter.’
‘It’s mutual,’ Ella said, almost inaudible over the throbbing beat Janna was dancing to. ‘She deserves someone good after all this time.’
‘I’ll try to make sure I live up to that thought. Oh, I have a message from Winter. I was briefed on your… unique physiology, Aneka. And Winter asked me to decide whether we should tell Janna. I recommended that it be left up to you, but if Janna’s made aware of the situation, she’ll keep the secret.’
Beaming, Aneka leaned over, grabbed Sharissa’s head in both hands and kissed her. It was a chaste sort of kiss, but it still left the blonde blinking in surprise. ‘You’ve just made my week,’ Aneka said. ‘I hate keeping this a secret. Absolutely hate it.’
‘Well, I have to go back to Yorkbridge tomorrow, so save it until then. If she figures out I already know then it’ll bring up questions. She’s got a good head for people.’
‘I can do that.’ Aneka looked back at the stage. Janna had shed her clothes and was swooping around the pole like a gymnast. The audience was enraptured. ‘She is bloody amazing at that. I mean, I wish I was even a fraction as good at moving my body.’
‘She is,’ Sharissa agreed. ‘Mind you, you should see her table dancing. I mean… erotic doesn’t quite describe it.’
Ella was wearing an evil grin; Aneka really did not like the look of it. ‘She’s expensive isn’t she? For a private dance, I mean.’
‘Fifty credits, plus tip. Costs more if it’s really private, in one of the back rooms.’
‘So worth it…’
‘Ella,’ Aneka said, ‘there is no way you are going to get your mother to dance for you.’
‘Oh no. I’m going to get her to dance for you.’
Sharissa stifled a laugh. Aneka looked pained and whined, ‘Ella…’
‘It’ll be fun, and besides, she’ll wind you up so much you’ll be begging me to take you somewhere quiet.’
Aneka sagged back onto the couch. Why could she never say no to the girl?
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There was not really a whole lot to do around Barnard City, but Ella had decided that they should do something rather than hanging around in a strip club watching her mother dancing. So they had dropped Sharissa off at the airport, and then Janna off at the club, and then they had driven out of the city and into the countryside.
Aneka had been living in Yorkbridge for over a year, but they had never done the same there. It made sense to her; you never went sightseeing near your home. She had been to the edge of the city, for one thing Gillian lived there, but never really outside it. Yorkbridge seemed to be surrounded by grassland to the south, and forest further north. Barnard City was surrounded by what could best be described as scrub.
‘It’s not particularly attractive,’ Aneka commented as she drove them out of town. She had decided to drive. It had to happen sometime and Ella was not complaining.
‘Technically it’s a desert,’ Ella replied. ‘It gets about twenty centimetres of rain a year, but they brought in plants that could do well under those conditions so it’s not just sand. They even grow some crops a little further south where it’s a touch cooler.’
‘Okay, so what’s to see out here?’
‘A unique feature of the landscape,’ Ella replied, grinning. ‘Also, when we’ve seen that I’m going to take you somewhere off the road where we can have sex.’
Aneka laughed. ‘Redheads…’
They drove for about thirty kilometres to the south-west of the city, and then turned off the main roadway which, according to Ella, went on for another three hundred kilometres before it came to the nearest town. New Earth had a fair amount of space, and not that many inhabitants. The smaller road went on for another kilometre and then came to a stop in a car park which seemed to have no signs or other markings.
‘We have to walk from here,’ Ella said, opening her door, ‘but it’s not far.’
Not far, but uphill. Aneka was a little surprised at the sudden rise which started just beyond the car park. The rest of the land was pretty flat, but here there was a very broad, quite sharp incline and, after a hundred or so metres, a sign which said, ‘Sudden Drop. Caution.’ It was not joking.
Aneka came to a stop as the incline suddenly turned into a cliff dropping away from them into a huge bowl carved into the ground. Her navigation system did its work, calculating approximate dimensions based on shadows and the time of day. She was looking at a crater over a kilometre in diameter and perhaps two hundred metres in depth.
‘Welcome to the Great Crater,’ Ella said. ‘It’s not a very imaginative name, but it’s great and it’s a crater. Some people call it Havishaw’s Crater, after the man who discovered it, but the maps say “Great Crater.”’
‘A meteor impact?’
‘Uh-huh. Dating says it’s about thirty thousand years old. It’s the largest surviving impact crater on the planet.’
‘There’s one a bit like it on Old Earth. That’s called Meteor Crater, so I guess people tend to run out of ideas for naming these things. I think that one’s about this size. So this world gets impacts like the old one.’
‘Probably more of them, or it would do if we weren’t here. There’s supposed to be evidence of a really big one that hit the ocean north of here about two thousand years ago. Old Earth had a great big moon that probably kept a fair number of big rocks from hitting the planet. We have an agency that specialises in making sure nothing dangerous gets onto a collision course.’
‘They were talking about doing that back in my time. The last big impact killed the dinosaurs so we didn’t want to find out if we could survive the same.’
Ella nodded. ‘There’s evidence that this place was starting to develop land animals when that last rock hit the ocean. We’ve found some bones. The indigenous plant life never fully recovered. The animals were wiped out entirely. Given long enough, things might have picked up again, but then we turned up and took over.’
‘So, basically, this is proof that life is a crap-shoot. Uh, craps was a dice game.’
Ella giggled. ‘Yeah, you could put it that way. It’s like we said when you woke up. Life is just about a certainty. It appears anywhere it’s even vaguely possible. Getting it to last long enough to get complex, that’s harder. Really simple stuff usually survives events like this better too. I mean, if the Torem hadn’t figured out warp physics when they did, they’d be gone. The Xinti seem to have gone digital because something happened to force them to. It takes millions of years, maybe billions, to turn basic life into something intelligent, and most species just don’t get that long.’
‘We got lucky.’
‘Really lucky.’
~~~
Ella was giggling a lot, which made Janna giggle too. After the outdoor sex, which Aneka had enjoyed as much because Ella had found a shady spot to do it as because it was outdoors and therefore a little illicit, they had returned to town and gone shopping. The results of the shopping had been used to make a meal, which had come with a bottle of wine. Now they were sprawled in the lounge with a second bottle of wine, and Ella was reacting in her usual manner to the intak
e of that much alcohol.
Still, Aneka had prepared the meal, and got the wine, for a reason. ‘How drunk are you, Janna?’ she asked.
‘Tipsy,’ Janna replied, grinning. ‘Just tipsy enough to start making suggestions I don’t expect you to agree to, and to find my daughter hilarious.’
Ella pouted. ‘I’m not that dru-hic!’
‘Of course, not, dear.’
‘Okay,’ Aneka said, ‘I need to tell you something, but I need you to understand that it’s a secret, a really serious one.’
Janna’s grin stayed in place, but her eyes narrowed a little. ‘Alcohol and a serious secret. You’re a little worried about how I’ll take this.’
‘A little, but it’s… It’s important that you know. Important to me anyway.’
‘Me too,’ Ella said. ‘But you can’t tell anyone else, Mom. Really. I mean… really.’ She giggled. ‘I’m drunkerer than I thought.’
Janna’s face had straightened now. ‘Is this just personal, or something Winter and her people would be involved in?’
‘It’s personal,’ Aneka replied, ‘but the reason I couldn’t tell you before is that Winter wouldn’t let me. It’s a “we will kill you if you tell” secret. If you don’t think you can cope with that…’
‘I’ll probably die of curiosity now if you don’t tell me, but I also think you’d be very disappointed if you couldn’t.’
Aneka nodded. ‘The people I care about, I hate not being able to tell them. The people I work with all know, but Kat and Dillon don’t. I really wish I could tell them. Winter said I could tell you if I wanted. She thinks you can be trusted to say nothing.’
‘All right, hit me with it.’
Aneka took a deep breath. ‘Okay, you know that Ella found me on a derelict ship that the Xinti had been using to spy on Old Earth.’ Janna nodded. ‘The story was that they had put me in stasis, the ship’s reactor failed, and that left me as the only survivor, frozen in deep space for a thousand years and change.’
Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart Page 18
