‘You have a synchronisation fault between the two image receptors,’ Delta said. ‘Hence the blurring.’
‘You can correct that?’ Aneka asked.
‘Fairly trivial,’ Delta replied. ‘It’s just a matter of applying a re-sync pulse… Applying a remote command… How’s that, Ella? Is the grid clear?’
‘It looks sharp… Yes, I think that’s perfect.’
‘Well, these old Frenoffs will probably do you another decade, but you should really consider some new ones. Clarion May make some compatible models with far better specs.’ Delta lifted the visor from Ella’s eyes revealing a thoughtful expression.
‘I’ve heard of them. They created some really amazing nanodrugs. I think they believe cybernetics is going to be the way for Jenlay to push forwards into the future.’
‘That’s them. Idealists. Probably wrong. They do make good products though.’
‘I’ll keep them in mind.’ Her gaze turned to Aneka. ‘I’ve come to have a new appreciation of cybernetics recently.’
Delta looked at Aneka too. ‘Yeah… I can understand that.’
Aneka decided that blushing was allowed under the circumstances.
~~~
Cassandra was avoiding Aneka’s eyes again and it took maybe ten minutes of it before she snapped, pulled the android aside and asked what was going on.
‘It’s stupid,’ Cassandra replied. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll control myself better.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Aneka drawled. ‘Why is it that psychologists are so bad at applying their skills to themselves?’
The platinum blonde was good at timid smiles despite the fact that her body was so precise most of the time. ‘Doctors make the worst patients?’ she suggested.
‘So?’
‘You saw me with my back opened up,’ Cassandra explained in a resigned tone. ‘It’s not exactly me at my best.’
‘I know you’re a robot, Cassandra. I’m basically a robot. I’m not going to think any differently about you than I did. More to the point, I doubt Al gives a flying fuck.’
‘I don’t,’ Al agreed.
‘Every sentient being has insecurities, Aneka,’ Cassandra replied. ‘You worry, needlessly, about your… humanity. Al worries about his purpose. Ella worries that she’ll lose you…’
‘Also needlessly.’
‘…and I worry that people think less of me because of the body I have. Some do.’
‘Not the ones who actually know you. Ella and Delta saw you too. Neither of them thinks any differently because of it.’
Cassandra’s smile was a little indulgent. ‘A cyborg and a cybernetics technician. Not exactly typical.’
‘Huh.’ Aneka turned. Monkey was unlucky enough to have not left the office they were using fast enough. ‘Monkey, come over here a minute, would you?’
He did, but you could tell he was wary about it; something embarrassing was just waiting for him, he could tell. ‘Aneka?’
‘Cassandra’s a robot, right?’
‘Well… Uh, yeah, I suppose so.’
‘And you’re not really too fond of robots?’
‘Well, no. As a rule.’
‘And I assume you’ve seen others of her model?’
‘A couple. Uh, in vids. I’ve never, uh, you know? With one.’ As expected, his cheeks were turning redder by the minute.
‘I wasn’t implying you have or would. But, does the fact that Cassandra is basically housed in the body of a sex robot make you think any less of her?’
‘Of course not!’ He actually seemed affronted by the suggestion. ‘She’s… I don’t know. It’s like you. Once you get to know either of you what you are isn’t the point. You’re not a Xinti robot and she’s not some dumb, non-volitional sex doll.’
Aneka turned to Cassandra. ‘I rest my case.’
‘Far more valid, I agree,’ Cassandra replied, ‘and thank you David. However, as you well know, insecurities, phobias, and bigotry are not rational. We’re stuck with them until we somehow work through them.’
There was no point in arguing; she was, of course, right. ‘Damn,’ Aneka said. ‘There I was hoping you’d invented a drug to get rid of them.’
Cassandra laughed; at least the current issue was resolved. ‘If we had it wouldn’t work on either of us anyway.’
~~~
The other amazing thing Aggy could do with the glasses everyone was wearing was to provide augmented reality training. Shannon was busy using that feature to bring her up to speed on the warp engine the AIs were fitting into the Garnet Hyde. She was working in the Forum, on one of the big stone islands, interacting with a model of the engine which Aggy projected for her through the glasses.
As Aneka approached, Aggy filled in the bulky piece of equipment for her too. She was looking at about fifteen tons of complex machinery, a tube about four metres long and two across with a number of heavy cables connected in via a ridge at the top. Right now Shannon had one of the side panels off and was peering in at the two donuts of metal and plastic which occupied the interior of the machine.
Aneka knew it was her own cultural heritage speaking, but she still found it a little odd that Shannon was the mechanically inclined of the two pilots. Drake knew his ship, and was good with various control systems, especially the comms suite, but if the reactor decided to break on them in deep space it was Shannon who was the one who would get them out of it. Engines were not a speciality, but someone needed to be at least familiar with the new hardware and Shannon had been given the job.
Out of a perverse sense of duty to her time period, Aneka wolf-whistled at the site of Shannon’s behind clad in high-cut running shorts sticking out towards her. Shannon peered around at the source of the sound, frowning a little.
‘Did that signify something? It seemed a little complex for just getting my attention.’
‘Seriously? The world is devoid of wolf whistles? I’m almost disappointed.’
‘I don’t recognise it.’
‘Originally from the navy. It was called General Call and was supposed to draw the attention of all crew members to something.’
‘Alert Code Three,’ Shannon said. It was one of three alert tones used aboard the Hyde, and other vessels, to draw increasingly urgent attention to some situation.
‘Uh-huh. Sailors used to whistle it to draw their friends’ attention to an attractive woman. It caught on outside the navy and then got simplified into that.’
Shannon grinned and, rather expertly, mimicked the two-tone whistle. Then she added, ‘You didn’t come down here to teach me a new method of complimenting you.’
‘Drake asked me to come check on you,’ Aneka replied. ‘Again. I think he’s a little worried about you getting bad headaches without your pills.’ Shannon opened her mouth, looking a little annoyed, but Aneka got in before the blonde could say anything. ‘You have been spending more time than usual alone.’
‘This is better for my concentration. No one’s shouting in my head.’
‘They’re still worried.’
‘Gopi no! They’re all so enthusiastic.’ The grimace was expressive to say the least. ‘The only ones who seem to be being realistic about all of this are you and Cassandra.’
Aneka’s eyebrows rose. ‘How can you tell? You can’t read our minds.’
‘I can read your body language. You’re… relieved. I’m not sure about Cassandra. She almost seems like a teenager with a new boyfriend. Can’t figure out who if she is.’ Shannon’s eyes widened as Aneka avoided her gaze. ‘You know!’
‘Not for me to say,’ Aneka replied.
Shannon was far too smart sometimes. ‘Al. She’s fallen for Al. That’s so… ’ Her face fell. ‘…frustrating.’
‘She does have a remarkably empathic mind,’ Al commented.
‘We have to figure something out,’ Shannon continued. ‘I mean, there has to be some way of getting them together.’
‘How? She’s an android and he has no body. Except mine and he can’t control it.
’
‘Even if I wanted to,’ Al added.
‘Even if he wanted to,’ Aneka repeated.
‘What about some sort of virtual interaction?’ Shannon suggested.
‘I don’t think that’d be the same. I think if it was that easy they’d have done something about it.’
‘You’re quite perceptive yourself,’ Al told her. ‘We’re currently avoiding the issue.’
‘Better to just leave it,’ Aneka said to Shannon. ‘It’s their problem and I think we should let them deal with it.’
Shannon nodded, and then reached down and peeled off her T-shirt. Aneka looked at her. ‘What?’ Shannon said. ‘I need a break and you’re here. Get your suit off.’
Aneka laughed, but she unsealed her suit. ‘Yes, ma’am!’
20.9.524 FSC.
‘All systems check out, Captain,’ Aggy’s voice said through the speakers on the Garnet Hyde’s flight deck. ‘I am quite ready for the proving run.’
Drake nodded to Shannon and she hit a button on the console in front of her. ‘Garnet Hyde to Negral Control, requesting permission to leave dock.’
The voice which answered belonged to the AI handling the hangar bay and flights in and out of the system. Apparently she had been doing it since long before the war. ‘Negral Control here, opening bay doors and removing docking clamps. Begin at your leisure.’
‘Gillian?’ Drake asked.
‘Sensors are all fully operation. We’re ready.’ Gillian was sat at the science console, ready to check their flight data when they had some.
‘Abraham,’ Drake said, ‘everything ready down there?’
Wallace’s voice came back a second later from the engineering room. ‘All ready here. Looking forward to it, actually.’
‘Shannon, take us out.’
Aneka watched as the blonde pilot’s hands shifted over the controls. There was the gentle hiss of manoeuvring thrusters, inaudible to everyone else, and the ship turned smoothly towards the huge doors in the outer hull. There was no actual need for Aneka, or the rest of the facilitators, to be aboard, but no one was going to miss the inaugural flight of their upgraded ship.
‘Controls are smoother,’ Shannon commented, sounding pleased.
‘Thank you, Shannon,’ Aggy replied.
Drake chuckled. ‘I’ll take her back in. I want to get a feel for her if her handling’s changed.’
‘You won’t be disappointed,’ Shannon commented. ‘Fifteen seconds to main engine ignition.’
The fusion torch engines had not been upgraded by the AIs, but they had had some work due to minor damage. Just about everything had had some minor damage and the science team were taking careful measurements of everything they could measure, just in case.
‘Hull integrity and atmosphere are solid,’ Ella said from one of the labs where she was monitoring her own set of data feeds.
‘Engine start-up is proceeding as normal,’ Cassandra added. She was down in engineering with Wallace. ‘Reactor optimal.’
‘And the gas tank’s full,’ Shannon said, grinning. ‘Clear of the bay. Engine burn in five… Main engine burn.’
The subsonic whine Aneka had been hearing as the engines powered up developed ultrasonic overtones and the Hyde powered away from the station. The Hyde was only capable of about half a G’s acceleration, but the difference compared to the thrusters was quite noticeable even if the artificial gravity compensated almost perfectly for the sudden change.
‘That,’ Drake said, ‘was incredibly smooth. Aggy, you’re very good at this.’
‘Compared to the sub-light drives on my old ship, Captain, this is easy.’ Aggy nevertheless managed to sound proud. ‘I am measuring no abnormalities in the engines.’
‘Confirmed,’ Cassandra said. ‘Engine output is nominal. Acceleration is within normal parameters.’
Drake gave a nod. ‘Abraham, you ready for the warp test?’
‘Need you ask? I suggest giving the station several hundred kilometres’ clearance before engaging, however.’
‘Ready here too,’ Gillian added.
Shannon’s hands were moving again. She glanced at Drake, receiving a nod. ‘Garnet Hyde to Negral Control. Initiating warp drives in thirty-five seconds.’
‘Noted, Garnet Hyde,’ Control replied with no apparent hesitation. ‘Good luck and a good flight.’
‘Let’s give it a thirty-minute time limit,’ Drake said. ‘If anyone sees anything out of the ordinary we drop out immediately.’
Aneka was watching through the window as the drive engaged. Space seemed to pull in towards them for a fraction of a second, stars became streaks of white and then were shifted through blue and into the ultraviolet, and then vanished as the light was compressed into frequencies even she could not see. Then Aggy compensated for the movement and the dots reappeared.
‘Velocity is stable,’ Shannon said. ‘Point-oh-eight-three parsecs per hour.’
‘No radiation effects,’ Gillian stated. ‘The warp envelope looks stable and we’re getting no electromagnetic effects beyond the usual gamma-ray impacts.’
‘Everything here is in the green,’ Wallace said. ‘It looks very much like the operation was a success.’
‘It’s silent,’ Aneka said. ‘If it’s making a sound it must be above my frequency range.’
Drake settled back in his seat and relaxed. ‘Thirty minutes,’ he said, ‘then we’ll drop out, recheck everything, and head back.’ Aneka noticed him pat the arm of his flight chair; Drake was happy, his ship was going twice as fast as usual and performing perfectly.
~~~
‘Any problems?’ Aneka asked as she entered the lab.
Ella looked up from her console and smiled. ‘Nothing I can see and Aggy seems happy with the data.’
The golden woman appeared near them. ‘I have made some small adjustments to the warp field in conjunction with Doctor Wallace. The Garnet Hyde is a different shape to my old body. I cannot detect any issues with my structure either, and there is no detectable atmospheric loss or impurities.’
Ella grinned and, when Aggy’s image vanished again, took off her glasses. ‘All good.’ She nodded towards one of the larger screens showing the starscape outside. ‘And the view is awesome.’
‘Where are we?’ Aneka asked, her own eyes on the stars.
‘Fifty-ish light days out from Negral going up from the galactic plane.’
‘So it’d take light nearly fifty days to get here from Negral, and we did that in thirty minutes?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Aneka blinked. ‘Kind of brings it home. How fast we travel, I mean. It always seems to take months to get from star to star and I’ve never really had a concrete idea of the distances…’
‘It’s normally about a day to travel a parsec. We can do double that now. A parsec is about three-and-a-quarter light years, so we can travel six-and-a-half light years in twenty hours.’
‘That’s Earth, Old Earth, to its nearest neighbouring star in under a day. I remember Alan telling me that was about four light years away once.’
Ella grinned again and her fingers flicked over her console. The room lights dimmed to black leaving only the light from the screen of stars to illuminate them. Aneka stepped closer and slipped an arm around Ella’s shoulders.
‘Still think it’s beautiful?’ the redhead asked softly.
‘I’m not sure I’m ever going to stop.’
‘Good,’ Ella whispered.
24.9.524 FSC.
There had been something of a melancholy atmosphere about the station since the proving flight had gone off without a fault. Everyone knew what it meant and everyone, even the AIs, found themselves looking for excuses to delay the inevitable.
For Aneka, who had been ready to give the order straight off the bat, the realisation that she did not entirely want to leave was something of a shock. In some ways, these were the last entities to know her before she was trapped in space for a thousand years. They had never met her in Huma
n form, her body had been dismantled aboard the Agroa Gar, but they had known her before the memory loss, had studied her mind as it was all those years ago. And they liked her. Evolution in particular seemed to think of Aneka as the greatest accomplishment of the Human Evolution project, but all of them viewed her as the last living Xinti individual, even if she was not quite the same as the entities that had once created them.
The fact was that this place was as much a home as New Earth, maybe more so. This was where Aneka had become the Aneka she now was. She was still not sure whether that was the same as the one stolen from Earth, but it was who she was now. Negral was her home world, the place where she had been reborn. Leaving it was not going to be as easy as she had thought.
‘It isn’t like we’re your family,’ Evolution said from the doorway to her project lab.
Aneka looked around from the galaxy map she had been staring at. ‘I think you probably qualify as a distant aunt.’
‘How so? I’m software. I don’t even usually have a body.’
‘Well, you were “related” to the AI who built this body. If that makes her my surrogate mother then you’re a surrogate aunt.’
Evolution laughed, walking over to stand beside Aneka, her gaze falling on the star map. ‘Considering that we kidnapped you, twice, and uplifted you against your will, I’d consider that a compliment.’
‘You did as you were told,’ Aneka replied.
‘Hmm. I believe that “we were just following orders” is a poor excuse. Of course, I also believe in what we did.’
Aneka looked at her, head tilted slightly in thought. ‘You’ve no choice though, have you? You were created with a purpose, like Al. He’s more bound by his, perhaps, but you can no more go against it than he can.’
‘I can question the validity of my purpose where he does not, perhaps, have the capacity to do so. Of course, his purpose was your safety and the observation of your behaviour. Neither causes harm while my purpose has caused so much.’
‘You said yourself that there are species around that would not be so advanced without you.’
‘And others gone forever because of me. The Xinti among them.’ The synthetic body frowned. ‘Are we doing the right thing, Aneka? Should we put ourselves in a position where we are artificially advancing civilisations again?’
The Cold Steel Mind Page 18
