Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘And that’s unlikely?’

  ‘The planet was bombed into the Stone Age. How would they have mustered the resources, let alone the science?’

  ‘Fair point.’ Aneka checked their flight path. ‘Well we may know more in forty-six minutes.’

  ~~~

  It took a little longer before they dropped down to ground level in the area Aneka had once known as St Albans just outside an irregular ring of shattered roadway which had once been the M25, the orbital motorway around London.

  ‘They built out further after I was taken,’ Aneka commented as she glided the shuttle in to settle on one of the embankments overlooking the dead motorway. ‘Those buildings on the other side? That was green fields in my time. Those look like big buildings.’ Or they had been once. Now they were broken concrete teeth just over the rise across the road.

  ‘Between fifty and sixty stories from the structural analysis,’ Ella said. ‘Composition suggests an early form of Plascrete.’

  ‘How’s the radiation?’

  ‘Here it’s fine,’ Bashford replied. ‘We’ve got increasing emissions about a hundred metres beyond that rise. We’ll dose up on the anti-rad drugs and take readings, but from here it’s not looking too bad.’

  ‘Not that I’d want to spend extended periods in there,’ Gillian added. ‘I suggest we wait until morning. Drake and Shannon’s mapping scans showed some life signs and thermal markers in the ruins.’

  ‘Things are living in there?’ Aneka asked. ‘In the radioactive ruins, on the planet where things have been genetically altered to survive the effects of radiation?’

  ‘Yes. And that is why I think we should wait until there’s light.’

  ‘Sounds great,’ Monkey said from the back. ‘I’ll break out the carbines.’

  London Ruins, 17.9.526 FSC.

  ‘I get the feeling no one has lived here in a long time,’ Aneka said. The flat they were in had long ago lost all but scraps of paint and most of the plaster from the walls. It was five stories up, in one of the buildings right on the edge of the ruins. There were two stories above them, but the building was even less secure up there than it was here and neither she nor Bashford had been willing to allow anyone higher. Only Delta and Ella were with her; the others had stayed at ground level.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Ella replied, ‘but I think people were in here after the bombing.’

  Aneka walked through from what had probably been a lounge to the single bedroom where Ella was. The redhead was poking at some scraps of what looked like blankets which occupied a corner of the room. There were a few empty and very rusted tins in another corner.

  ‘This does look a little like someone’s campsite,’ Aneka agreed. She focussed on the column of indicators on the left side of her vision field. ‘Radiation is a little lower up here than ground level. I guess it was back then too. Maybe someone came up here for that. Or they felt more secure up here and survived a little longer due to the lowered exposure.’

  ‘There’s definitely something living here,’ Bashford said. ‘I’ve got some form of animal droppings here. Nothing I recognise, though I’m no tracker anyway.’

  ‘Nothing much up here aside from cockroaches,’ Delta commented.

  ‘You recognise cockroaches?’ Aneka asked.

  ‘Huh. There are cockroaches on just about every Jenlay world. Tough little bastards.’

  ‘About the only places they haven’t managed to get a foothold on are the worlds where something considered them a light snack,’ Gillian supplied. ‘They’re mostly harmless, and most of the ecosystems don’t suffer because of them. There have been a couple of cases where they’ve become dangerously overabundant, but a biological control generally works when that happens.’

  ‘We can go down,’ Ella said, straightening up. She, like everyone, was wearing her suit. It provided additional protection against the radiation in the area as well as any pathogens they might find, though nothing like that had come up in the scans.

  Aneka turned, heading back to the stairwell they had climbed up. Maybe ‘ascended’ would be a better word since they had come up a rope on motorised ascenders. Trusting the staircase itself had not seemed like a great idea. She looked down to where Monkey was waiting for them. ‘Ella, you go first. Ready down there?’

  ‘All clear below,’ Monkey replied.

  Ella clipped onto one of the three boxes attached to the thin, high-tensile line, and let herself slip out over the edge of the balcony. The wall had given way long ago so at least they did not have to climb over it. Holding the box, she pressed the down button, and glided smoothly to the ground.

  With all three of them down, they went outside to find Bashford looking down at several elongated pellets lying against a wall. They were around ten centimetres in length and tapered, and Aneka frowned at them thoughtfully.

  ‘You know, if I didn’t think they’d come from a large dog, I’d say those were rat droppings.’

  Ella came up beside her. ‘They are way too big for a rat, but they also do look rat-like.’ She grimaced. ‘Seen a few rat pellets in my time. Psychologists love the little buggers.’

  ‘If those are from a rat,’ Delta said, ‘I do not want to meet it.’

  ‘Let’s hope we don’t have to,’ Gillian replied, ‘but I’d like to go a little deeper. See if we can find any more recent habitation. Or even signs of people moving through the ruins on the way to somewhere else.’

  ‘We can go look,’ Bashford said. ‘I’m betting we won’t find anything in this area. The radiation and the animals…’ He looked up at the buildings around them. Aneka followed his gaze; it was a perfect sort of place to set up an ambush. ‘This is a bad place to travel through, day or night.’

  ‘About a klick west of here,’ Aneka said, ‘there’s a road… Well, there was a road anyway. The M-One, it was one of the main routes into London. If the Twenty-Five is still more or less here, then the One might be there too and it would be a pretty wide, open space to move into town on.’

  Gillian looked around at the decaying concrete structures around them. ‘I believe that I’m going to go with that assessment. If there is something to see here I doubt it’s worth the risk.’ She shivered. ‘Besides, something about this place gives me the creeps.’

  ‘There were about fifteen million people in the Greater London area in my time,’ Aneka said. ‘There must have been even more when the bombs fell. Millions dead or dying of radiation poisoning in half-crushed buildings… That’s a lot of ghosts.’

  Gillian started back towards the shuttle. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, Aneka.’

  ‘Neither do I, but I can feel them. All around us.’

  No one said anything for a while as they trudged through the dead streets. ‘Yes,’ Gillian said eventually. ‘So can I.’

  ~~~

  ‘The radiation levels outside are getting significantly higher,’ Ella commented.

  ‘Dangerous?’ Aneka asked.

  ‘Not while we’re in the shuttle,’ Bashford replied. ‘Cosmic rays in space are worse. We’re well shielded in here. If we go out we’ll use the airlock and the dust scrubbers when we come back in.’

  Aneka continued gliding the shuttle down the broken roadway surrounded by once towering structures. ‘We’re coming up on Edgware. The city began there in my time. All this… This I don’t remember. It’s like they put up a large number of new buildings in the years after I left.’

  ‘Perhaps a migration towards the cities,’ Gillian suggested. ‘The increase in technology. The rise of off-world workers and the need to house their families while they were away. Perhaps the new technologies simply resulted in a greater carrying capacity.’

  ‘Carrying capacity?’

  ‘A world has a certain capacity for population, known as the carrying capacity. Generally higher technology results in greater efficiency in the use of resources, the capacity to produce food, recycling. Frequently, at lower tech levels, the population expands to fill the
carrying capacity.’

  ‘That makes a lot of sense.’

  ‘Hmm, yes. It’s almost common sense. At very high levels of technology, carrying capacity is effectively infinite. Generally population does not grow to that level, but before extensive interstellar flight develops a world can become very overcrowded.’

  ‘It certainly looks like that happened here,’ Aneka said, shifting in her seat.

  ‘It makes you uncomfortable?’ Bashford asked.

  ‘It seems like such a shift. The Xinti drop a ship onto the planet and the entire world changes in the space of a generation. I’m not sure I’d have wanted to be around to see that.’

  Bashford was about to reply when Gillian spoke up again. ‘Aneka, I’m getting some anomalous readings from something to starboard. Can you see anything?’

  Both Aneka and Bashford peered out through the windscreen, looking for anything ‘anomalous.’ The buildings in the area were still large and new to Aneka, but… ‘I’m not seeing anything weird,’ Aneka said. ‘More of the same new-build constructions, which means they must have demolished a chunk of Edgware to put…’ She stopped suddenly as something came into view.

  ‘Vashma,’ Bashford said. ‘Maybe you should come up here and look for yourself, Gillian.’

  Both Gillian and Ella appeared up in the cockpit a second or two later, staring silently out across the broken buildings to the thing beyond. It was large, metallic, and built on a smooth curve, but it was clearly not of Human design, and had probably not come to be there on purpose. The rear part of it was a slightly crumpled engine exhaust.

  ‘That looks Xinti,’ Aneka said. ‘You think they managed to shoot it down during the war?’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Gillian replied. ‘Look at the buildings. It looks more like they were put up around it. Can we take a closer look?’

  Aneka glanced over at Bashford. ‘Looks like there’s plenty of open space to set down in,’ he mused. ‘Take us in, put us down on one of the plazas, and we’ll see where we go from there.’

  ‘Okay,’ Aneka said, shifting the shuttle sideways and lifting it upward to clear the housing structures. Here the concrete was newer, the sensors suggesting something a lot more like Plascrete than the buildings further out. The buildings were a little taller too, with a more complex design. They also seemed to have survived the bombs and the millennium of decay afterwards better.

  ‘What’s that?’ Ella asked, pointing out towards the ground beneath where the huge exhaust stood above a plaza shadowed by its bulk. ‘Down at the base of the ship where it hits the ground. Are those doors? Glass doors?’

  Gillian leaned forward over Bashford, shifting the configuration of his console to display sensor data. ‘You don’t mind do you, Bash?’ she asked rather absently, and after the fact.

  ‘Having a nubile young woman in a skintight suit leaning over me? I don’t mind at all.’

  Gillian blushed. ‘We’ll discuss your terrible flattery in bed later. It’s Polyglass. Practically identical to the modern material. The hull material is a synthetic, monocrystalline structure similar to the high-end hulls made for the military today. Well beyond anything produced by Humans during the war, but equally not the laminate constructs used in Xinti craft.’

  ‘Well, it can’t have crashed after these buildings were built,’ Aneka said.

  ‘I think,’ Gillian said, ‘that this deserves closer inspection.’

  The shuttle glided into position beneath the cone of the exhaust, in front of the eight doors set into a portico which had been built into the hull. ‘You know,’ Aneka said, ‘that looks a lot like the entrance to a museum.’

  With helmets on they exited the ship through the port airlock. The four facilitators moved out with ready weapons, but there was no sign of anything moving among the buildings. Neither Aneka’s eyes nor any of the sensors could detect anything on the inside. Aneka tried one of the doors. It rattled.

  ‘Locked,’ she said. ‘Feels like a standard, physical locking mechanism.’

  ‘I got it,’ Delta said, stepping forward with something from her belt in her hand. Aneka moved back, away from the door, scanning the surrounding buildings for signs of movement. A few seconds later there was a click from behind her. ‘These old mechanical locks are easy when you’ve got a nanotech lock-pick,’ Delta commented absently.

  ‘Let Aneka go in first,’ Bashford said. ‘It’s dark in there and I think we’d best check it before we proceed.’

  ‘Thanks for thinking of me, Bash,’ Aneka said, drawing both of her pistols before pushing through the door. Her eyes picked up little in the way of infrared, some ultraviolet back-scatter through the doors, and almost no visible light. She scanned the room carefully, getting the sense of a large atrium with something in the middle of it, something large and, if the trace radiation was anything to go by, metallic.

  Reaching to a pouch on the back of her belt, she extracted a box and flicked it open. A swarm of glowing microbots floated free of the container and moved forward under Al’s direction. The radio bursts from the command signals outlined more edges and surfaces; the object in the middle of the atrium looked like it was some sort of monument. As the light swarm moved closer it became obvious that she was looking at a sculpture of the ship she was in, surrounded by a ring of people, each facing outward.

  ‘It’s clear,’ she called back, and then started towards the sculpture. There was a plaque mounted on the front of it and she had the lights hover closer above it. On this site on 23rd May 2023 the vessel you are standing in crashed killing 723 people and injuring 2145. They died that we might rise into the heavens. ‘Oh my God… This ship… This was the ship the Xinti crashed on Earth. They made a museum out of the hull.’

  Gillian and Ella appeared on either side of her. Both of them let out gasps. ‘Twenty-third of May, twenty-twenty-three,’ Gillian said. ‘We’ve never known the exact date.’

  ‘Twelve years after I was taken,’ Aneka said. ‘This place could have a lot of information about the history of the crash and what happened afterwards.’

  The two scientists activated their helmet lights. ‘This is going to be fascinating,’ Gillian said. ‘Absolutely fascinating.’

  ~~~

  There was not really that much for Aneka to do so she wandered through the halls of the vast museum, playing at being a tourist, albeit a tourist in a spacesuit wandering around a dead tourist attraction. It seemed like the contents of the old Science Museum had been transferred over to the new site, and then they had added to the collection with huge displays concerning the theory and development of warp engines, the history of materials development, and the general progress Mankind had made in the century after the crash.

  It was not entirely a waste of time. Her eyes recorded everything she looked at as she wandered past the exhibits. Gillian and Ella could go over those records on the shuttle later and decide on areas they wanted to see personally, or the areas which could be skipped. She was walking through a hall containing large models of several of the early warp-capable spacecraft Mankind had built when she heard Ella’s voice in her head.

  ‘Aneka?’ The redhead sounded a little concerned, which immediately had Aneka worried. Al had a map and shortest route to Ella up in-vision before Ella could get the next word out. ‘We think there’s something here you should see. We’re in the famous scientists section.’

  The interior of the ship, the body of the museum, was vast, enormously spacious. It had to have been some sort of heavy transport vessel before the Xinti repurposed it as a means of educating lesser races, but whatever the case it took her almost ten minutes to get to the room they had named the ‘famous scientists room’ for obvious reasons. Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Hawking, Aneka walked past lots of stands with portraits and names she recognised until she reached the end where Ella and Gillian were standing.

  Aneka stopped, staring at the display ahead of her in the light from the cloud of microbots that were hovering over it. The picture that
took up the left side of the display was both familiar and not. It showed a man in his late middle-age, tall and slim, good-looking in a Nordic way with soft, blonde hair and blue eyes. The last time she had seen that face he had been an eighteen-year-old boy, but even aged thirty or more years she could recognise him.

  She looked around at the rest of the display. Alan Jansen, the Father of Warp Physics, born in nineteen-ninety-two, he had almost single-handedly discovered the secrets of the alien warp drive and gone on to pioneer research into gravity control which had resulted in inertial damping technology allowing far greater acceleration in spaceships. He had died in twenty-seventy-two leaving two children.

  ‘Seventy-nine,’ Aneka said, staring at the picture. ‘He made it to seventy-nine. He did so much with his life while I… floated around in space.’ Closing her eyes to block out the image, she turned away from the display. ‘I need to get out of here. I… I’ll go back to the sh-shuttle.’ She started away from them.

  ‘I’ll come with…’ Ella began.

  ‘No,’ Aneka replied, biting back tears. ‘I need… some time.’

  ~~~

  Ella found Aneka sitting in the pilot’s seat. It was tipped back and she was lying still, her eyes closed. The skin beneath them was red and puffy; she had been crying, but now she was asleep, or offline.

  She was, but Al was not. Ella saw the connection being made to her implant and then heard his voice. ‘She cried for over an hour before falling asleep. I think she’s actually started to come to terms with it.’

  ‘Thank you for watching over her, Al,’ Ella said in reply.

  ‘That is what I… what we do. I would have contacted you if you were needed. She will awaken in two hours, fifty-two minutes. I believe she would find it comforting if you were here when that happened.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting.’

  ~~~

  Aneka finished watching her diagnostics scroll past in-vision and then opened her eyes. She turned her head and saw Ella in the co-pilot’s seat. The console was displaying lidar maps of the museum and Ella’s attention remained focussed on them even though Aneka was moderately sure that she had noticed her companion awakening.