Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘We’ll want to be very sure of our potential hosts first.’

  Gillian gave Bashford a nod. ‘Of course, but I don’t believe they’ll be a substantial threat. If they aren’t even using radio their technology could well be limited. We can always retreat to the shuttle and leave.’

  ‘All right. Let’s get ourselves ready for a surface mission.’

  Old Earth, 10.9.526 FSC.

  Aggy had managed to locate a tourist map she had downloaded centuries ago which seemed to indicate that the area they were heading for had once been known as Matlock. The town itself was settled in a three-pronged river valley and surrounded by quite high cliffs. Aneka had piloted the shuttle in as the light was just starting to show in the sky, keeping low over the hills and hoping there were no shepherds along their path. They had managed to ascertain from high up that the cliff to the north-west of the town was unpopulated, so that was where they were going in.

  Bashford’s eyes scanned the sensor display in front of him as Aneka guided the ship forward on anti-gravity and thrusters. He was looking for a suitable landing site, though Aneka spotted the one he was going to go for half a second or so before he said anything.

  ‘Thirty metres over on the right?’ he said. His fingers flicked over his console and a marker indicator appeared on Aneka’s HUD. ‘Some tall, old trees there and the ground seems smooth enough.’

  Aneka drifted the shuttle into position over the clearing, images from the underside cameras sliding into position once again around her vision field. ‘Some scrub down there, but nothing too bad. We voting for here?’

  ‘I’m registering a couple of anomalies which look like fallen masonry,’ Ella said from the back. ‘Nothing too tall though. I’ll mark them for you.’ A few rough clumps which Aneka had assumed were just bushes were highlighted. The shuttle slewed three degrees to the right and then dropped towards the ground below.

  Bashford was on his feet as soon as the engines started winding down. ‘All right, I want a perimeter ring of sensors up before it gets light, so let’s get moving. Ella, is there anything we should be worried about in the atmosphere?’

  ‘Nothing detected so far. If you want to be safe wear filter masks until we have a full analysis.’

  Bashford paused halfway to the rear door, then turned around. ‘Monkey, pull four masks from the back there. This place was nuked. We’re not reading anything, but still…’

  Aneka took the deeper forest to the north of the landing site because it was closer to the town, and the dim light made no difference to her. The plan was to place passive sensor units out at about one hundred metres all the way around the ship. Aneka was to push out to two hundred metres as well, placing sensors on what she considered strategic points. She walked with Bashford out to the north-east corner of their planned surveillance area, mainly so that Aneka could ensure he did not fall down the cliff.

  ‘That’s… unexpected,’ Bashford said as the ground seemed to decide to drop away from under them without warning. The light was still a little dim as the sun hauled itself up to the horizon, which meant surmounting the hills on the other side of the gorge.

  ‘I think I vaguely remember this place,’ Aneka said, her voice low. ‘I’ve got a memory of driving through that valley in my Dad’s car. I think I was six or something.’

  ‘How far down is that?’ He was peering out over the edge of the chalky cliffs, frowning. ‘I wonder if we even need to worry about instrumenting this side…’

  ‘It’s about one-thirty-seven metres, but it’s scalable. The biggest mistake anyone ever makes when setting security is to assume a route is impossible. That’s how I got into Harriamon spaceport.’

  Bashford grunted. ‘You have a point. Besides, if I run the sensors along the edge here Gillian and Ella can monitor that track down there.’

  Grinning, Aneka reached up and placed a sensor on a tree that was trying its best to join the rocks at the foot of the cliff. ‘See you in thirty minutes.’ She headed off to the north-west in a shallow arc, placing sensors every ten to fifteen metres and it did not take too long before she made it to the opposite side of the band of trees. She was settling down in the brush to wait for Delta to meet up with her when she heard the voices.

  There were three of them, two men and a woman. Aneka backed up a little, making sure she was out of sight, and listened. At first she could not understand a word they were saying, but gradually, as her universal translation software began to work, she began to recognise English with a very thick northern accent. Whoever they were, they were in good humour. It sounded as though the two men were making a few ribald comments at the expense of the woman. When they came into view the reasons became more obvious: all three were young, barely out of their teens. It sounded like the kind of banter she would expect from youthful Humans.

  ‘Roddy thinks you’re cute,’ one of the men said.

  ‘He doesn’t?!’ the girl responded.

  ‘He does,’ the second male affirmed. ‘He thinks your arse is really tight.’

  ‘No!’ It was almost a squeak. The girl was wearing fairly tight breeches in a material which could have been denim. Roddy’s opinion seemed quite accurate.

  Aneka checked Delta’s position and the direction the three locals were going, and then connected through her internal radio. ‘Delta, don’t say anything, just drop out of sight. There are three locals heading your way. I think they’ll stay outside the wooded area, but be careful.’ She heard a pair of clicks over the radio; Delta responding to her suggestion.

  ‘Aneka, this is Gillian. What are you seeing?’

  ‘Three Humans,’ Aneka replied. ‘Young ones. Early twenties, maybe even late teens. I’ll patch video and audio through.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ the girl said. ‘Isn’t Roddy seeing Lisa?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ the first boy replied, ‘but he still thinks you have breasts like twin moons.’

  ‘I thought you said he said he liked my arse.’

  ‘Yeah, well…’

  ‘What language are they speaking?’ Ella asked.

  ‘It’s English,’ Aneka replied. ‘They’re just speaking with a very thick accent.’

  ‘You don’t talk like that. Have you ever heard an accent that thick?’

  ‘Geordies, Brummies, Liverpudlians… To be honest, this is pretty indecipherable, but there’s been a thousand years of drift.’

  The voices were getting distant now. ‘You guys are having me on…’

  ‘They sound no different from teenagers back in my time though,’ Aneka added. ‘The boys are teasing the girl. Probably because one of them fancies her. Or both.’

  ‘Well,’ Gillian said, ‘we can both speak English. Do you think they could understand us?’

  ‘Oh yeah. It’s going to be you understanding them that’s the problem. They’ve moved on. I’m going to finish up this sensor net and come back to the ship.’

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  ‘You know,’ Aneka said, ‘I kind of figured that Gillian would want to be up here. Taking point, as it were.’

  Ella’s eyes were glued to a large pair of binoculars even as she unwrapped a snack bar of some description. ‘I’m the anthropologist so I get to observe the townspeople.’

  Aneka lay back on the foam mat she had set up and relaxed. ‘I guess that makes sense.’ They were in what amounted to a high-tech hide. From the inside the tent was essentially transparent. From the outside it blended into the landscape perfectly, at least from a distance. Aneka figured you could get within about five metres of it before you had a chance of spotting it and given the fact that it was in trees on the edge of a cliff it was unlikely that anyone was going to get that close.

  ‘You know, this is fascinating,’ Ella said for perhaps the tenth time. They had been watching now since dawn and it was after midday. ‘Do you want to take a look?’

  ‘I’m looking. I’ve got all the passive sensors and your viewer slaved in-vision. I can see everything you see, and everythi
ng around us.’

  ‘Oh. It’s fascinating, right?’

  Aneka chuckled. ‘I wouldn’t have put it that way myself, but it is… kind of weird.’

  ‘Why weird?’

  ‘Well… We’ve seen ground transport, right? But only trucks and tractors, nothing personal. They walk everywhere. The trucks we’ve seen are roughly equivalent to something I could have driven a thousand years ago. They have internal combustion engines. They don’t seem to have personal communications equipment.’

  ‘It does seem a little anachronistic.’

  ‘Uh-huh. It’s almost like a medieval farming community that’s got its hands on some modern equipment they don’t know much about.’

  ‘Gillian’s doing her best to examine some of the vehicles on the track near the shuttle. Maybe she can figure some of it out.’

  ‘Maybe. Then there’s the clothes. I’d swear that girl I saw yesterday was wearing denim jeans. Tight ones, which takes relatively modern manufacturing techniques, but denim.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Denim is a cotton fabric. You can’t grow cotton in this country.’

  ‘Which would imply overseas trade, but we’ve detected no aircraft or surface ships.’

  ‘That’s my point. I think we’re missing something.’

  ‘Drake and Shannon are running the high-def scans now. Maybe they’ll be able to pick up something we couldn’t detect on the mapping run.’

  ‘Uh-huh. But sooner or later we’re going to have to go talk to them.’

  ‘Yes. I can’t wait. We’ll be doing it.’

  ‘The anthropologist and the robot girl with the magic linguistic software?’

  Ella giggled. ‘Basically, yeah.’

  ‘It’s a good thing we have that little nanofac then.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we are not going in there in plastic spacesuits.’

  ‘Oh, true.’ Ella was silent for a minute or so, watching the people in the town below. ‘I think I’ll look pretty good in those breeches.’

  ‘I thought you were allergic to opaque clothing.’

  ‘I’m prepared to compromise my semi-nudist principles in the furtherance of science.’

  ~~~

  A lot of the town’s life seemed to revolve around the central square. It was not a square, but that was what they were referring to it as. In practice it was an irregular area framed by the meeting of the three roads that fed into town from, very roughly, north-east, north-north-west, and south. A river followed the course of the north-westerly to southerly road, more or less, and there were a couple of bridges across that linking the neighbourhoods.

  The majority of the town’s housing seemed to be on the north side. The buildings were stone with slate roofs, some of them larger than others, but all within what Aneka would have considered a middle-income size. There were a few larger residences out on the eastern side of town, and the flat area to the south of the square looked like it was set up as a livestock market. There were pens there, with aluminium poles set into the ground to hold up temporary shelters.

  Today, it seemed, was something of a day off and the square had got quite busy as the day went on. Older people, and that meant people too old to be working, along with the town’s children, appeared first, finding places to sit in the summer sun. As that sun began heading towards the western horizon, the age spread got more even as teens and adults came out of houses or in from fields. As the sun started to go down and large lights set around the square came on, Aneka figured just about the entire town had gathered.

  ‘Analysis says four hundred and sixteen, plus or minus five,’ Ella said. ‘I think over a third of those have come in from out of town.’

  ‘It looks like a party,’ Aneka commented. ‘The clothing is a lot more… Well, “Sunday Best” is the first thing that springs to mind.’

  ‘Sunday was some sort of holiday, right? Religious thing?’

  ‘For Christians and atheists.’

  Ella actually took her eyes away from the binoculars to look at Aneka. ‘How can it be religious for atheists?’

  ‘Believe me, some people were pretty religious about their Sundays off.’

  Ella put her eyes back against the eyepieces of the binoculars. ‘I see what you mean about the clothes though. Pressed shirts, very white whites, and vibrant colours. All the clothes are new or kept for best.’

  ‘Bash to Aneka.’ The voice intruded through Aneka’s internal radio.

  ‘Go ahead, Bash.’ Aneka replied aloud, mostly so that Ella would know she was talking on the radio.

  ‘Looks like they’re all gathering in the square. We’ve seen nothing on the roads for almost an hour. We’re heading back to the shuttle. Gillian wants to watch the proceedings on a decent monitor.’

  ‘Understood,’ Aneka replied, switching to a silent reply. ‘I doubt I could move Ella if I wanted and she has food packs. I’ll get her back to the ship later if she doesn’t fall asleep with her eyes glued to the binoculars.’

  ‘Don’t forget you need to sleep sometime.’

  ‘I know, but I’m kind of interested myself. This is a bit of a strange society. It’s like I stepped into some sort of weirdass utopia version of rural England, with early twenty-first-century technology.’

  ‘Fair enough. We’ll be here if you need us. Bashford out.’

  ‘They’re heading back to the shuttle?’ Ella asked.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘It has gone very quiet on the roads. Nothing much for them to watch. Hey, I think there’s a band starting up. This really is a party.’

  Aneka sat up and turned a parabolic microphone towards the square. Music filled their heads as the microphone transmitted it to their internal radios. Aneka identified a fiddle, some sort of drum, and probably a bass cello or something similar. The tune was folky dance music and Ella’s foot started tapping in time to it almost immediately.

  She glanced at Aneka. ‘Not your kind of music?’

  ‘You’ve heard my taste in music, I…’ She stopped as a voice joined in the melody, strong and female, and clearly trained. ‘Now that… That’s a bit better. Reminds me a bit of Nightwish.’

  ‘Oh that… Nemo wasn’t it?’

  ‘One of my favourites, yes.’

  ‘I can… sort of hear the similarity. She does have a beautiful singing voice.’

  Aneka lay back down and closed her eyes, though she could still see several sensors and the view of the town square. ‘Yes, she does.’

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  ‘I agree that the technology is unusual,’ Gillian said as they sat around the shuttle over breakfast. ‘Not unusual in its form, but more its distribution. The society appears largely agrarian. Very simple for the most part. As you observed last night, the entertainment seems to be in the form of performance, dancing…’

  ‘And a couple of the younger ones were making their own entertainment,’ Ella added. ‘Out of sight of their elders.’

  ‘To be expected I’d imagine,’ Gillian continued. ‘Their farming methods are relatively simplistic.’

  ‘The livestock are native Earth species,’ Delta put in. ‘Unmodified as far as we can tell. I think you said they were called sheep and cows, Aneka?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Aneka agreed. ‘The pictures you took look like the same animals I’m used to. Sheep can give wool for fabric and then meat. Cows give milk or meat. You can take the hide off both species for tanning. There are cattle pens down in the town that look like they could be a market area.’

  Gillian nodded. ‘But then they have vehicles using internal combustion engines.’

  ‘The exhaust fumes suggest a biodiesel fuel,’ Bashford told them. ‘That suggests a production facility somewhere, but we’ve seen no sign of it.’

  ‘It also indicates that they are not drilling for oil,’ Gillian added. ‘We have still not picked up radio communications, but David tells me there are wind turbines in the hills.’

  ‘We saw them when we went out to take
a look at the livestock,’ Monkey said.

  ‘And some of the buildings appear to have solar panels on the roofs,’ Bashford said. His gaze shifted to the window. ‘Not that those are going to be much use today.’

  The rain had started just before dawn; big, heavy drops of water were still falling. ‘Don’t count on it,’ Aneka told them. ‘This is England in the summer. Give it an hour and we could be in blazing sunlight with high humidity. English weather is the definition of changeable.’

  ‘I’d like to continue my observations anyway,’ Ella said.

  ‘Of course,’ Gillian said. ‘As do I.’

  ‘If yesterday was a Sunday,’ Aneka said, ‘then today you should see a lot more work being done. I’m not exactly big on farming, but summer is a busy time as far as I know.’

  Gillian nodded. ‘David, Delta, we could use soil samples from as large an area as possible, but be sure you aren’t seen.’

  ‘It’s not too hard to avoid people,’ Monkey replied. ‘There’s a lot of empty space out there and not too many people in it. I got the impression Old Earth was pretty densely populated.’

  ‘It was,’ Aneka told him. ‘There were billions of people on this world when I was taken. I think the UK was somewhere around sixty million.’

  ‘That’s more than the entire population of New Earth!’

  ‘Uh-huh. There’s not a lot of people left here. After a thousand years I’d expect more.’ Her eyes moved to the window and the rain streaking down it. ‘The Xinti must’ve come damn close to wiping out everyone.’

  ~~~

  ‘You were right about there being more activity,’ Ella commented.

  ‘Uh-huh. Monday morning, always the worst day of the week.’ Aneka was back on her foam mat, eyes closed, watching the world around them from a dozen points of view.

  ‘I’ve seen a dozen or so trucks passing through the town in the last couple of hours. And a lot more people going out on foot.’

  ‘When are you going to want to go in there?’

  ‘What? Oh, uh… Well, now. But we need to observe more. We need a better idea of the society. I mean, how will they react to people coming in from outside? I don’t want to go in and then have to shoot our way out.’