Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart (23 page)

‘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 intake 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.’

‘Just about everyone knows that.’

‘And it’s almost the truth, except that they were on their way back from Negral with me when the reactor blew, and… I didn’t exactly survive.’

Janna’s brow furrowed. ‘You don’t look dead, dear.’

‘Aneka Jansen died on the way to Negral. They dissected her, me. They cut me up into bits to see how I worked. I was the last. They’d already done the same to the rest of my team. They killed us in about as horrible a way as I can think of. I remember the saw cutting…’ She stopped, swallowing.

‘They kept her brain alive,’ Ella said. She was sounding less drunk. ‘You know the Xinti were digital minds in computers. I’ve told you that. They took Aneka back to Negral and they did the same thing to her as they did to themselves. They mapped her brain, her mind, into software and they put that into a new body which they built for her.’

‘This body,’ Aneka said. ‘I’m basically a robot with the ghost of Aneka Jansen inside it. It’s a very good simulation.
I
couldn’t tell until Ella told me. But I’m fusion powered, my muscles are artificial, my brain is one computer and I’ve got a second one in my chest that provides advice and handles some of my functions. I don’t sleep; I go offline for four hours so that my memory can be archived into long-term storage. I never forget
anything.
’

‘But even if she’s a simulation,’ Ella put in, ‘she’s a perfect simulation of a real woman who lived on Old Earth all those years ago.’

Janna was staring at Aneka, a frown on her face, and she remained that way for what felt like hours, but was actually about ten seconds. Then she leaned forward, lifting her hand. Aneka locked her muscles to avoid flinching. Janna’s fingers trailed over Aneka’s cheek and then a single tear rolled out of the corner of her eye.

‘You poor child. What you’ve been through… I’d have gone quite mad.’

‘The Xinti started doing some… conditioning, they called it. They broadened my perspective to make me accept the change better.’

‘They never finished it though,’ Ella said. ‘The reactor accident interrupted it.’

‘I really don’t care,’ Janna said. ‘If they hadn’t done all that to you I’d have never met you, and neither would Ella. What they did to you was horrific, but the result is something beautiful.’

Aneka smiled. ‘You’re okay with this?’

‘Okay? Aneka, if you were not here my daughter would be dead! Instead she’s happier than I’ve seen her since she was a child. Okay really does not say enough. I don’t care
what
you are. I just care
who
you are.’ She frowned. ‘I can, however, see why this needs to be kept quiet. You needn’t worry, I’ll say nothing. Does Issa know?’

‘She will do. She’s FSA. I’ll make sure she’s briefed on it.’

‘Good. She’s the one person outside this room I don’t want to keep secrets from.’

Aneka poured more wine. ‘I think we need more alcohol. Everything’s got really serious.’

Janna lifted her glass and grinned. ‘I’ll drink to that.’

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Aneka dropped her case by the door of the apartment and started pulling off her clothes. It was not that difficult given that she was in a mini-skirt and T-shirt. ‘I’m going to have a shower, and then I’m going to offline for a while,’ she told Ella.

‘I’ll come with you. I can never sleep on night flights.’

‘And that’s why I need to offline for a while.’

Ella giggled. ‘I have no idea what you mean.’

‘Well,
someone
told me to wear a skirt on the plane and used the fact to molest me all night whenever she thought the attendants weren’t watching. If it wasn’t you then I need to file assault charges against someone.’

More giggling; tired giggling, but still giggling. ‘I just can’t sleep on night flights, and it takes ages to fly that route. And anyway, that attendant, David, he knew exactly what we were doing.’

Aneka laughed. ‘So did the other two. It wasn’t like we were the only ones from the noises I heard. I’m not bothered about it, but now I need some sleep.’

‘Uh-huh, so do I. We’ve got tomorrow to do something with before we have to start work. Maybe when we wake up we could go out to a club…’

Aneka turned the shower on and pulled Ella into the streams with her. ‘Haven’t you had enough of clubs?’

‘I thought we could go to Shin You. Maybe see if Kat and Dillon want to go.’

‘That place with Kat and Dillon… All right, but you’ll be sleeping it off most of tomorrow.’ She plucked a tube of wash gel from a rack, squeezed some out and began soaping Ella’s back.

‘I know, but we’re going to be working our asses off the next few weeks. I think we should play hard before that.’ She sighed and moved a little closer to Aneka. ‘That feels so good.’

Aneka smiled. ‘All right, Shin You it is.’

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Aneka sat in the lounge, reading. It was gone midday and Ella was, as predicted, still asleep. Aneka had lain beside her for a couple of hours after waking, but had eventually given up and left the exhausted redhead to sleep.

Shin You, the Rimmic for libido, was basically a swingers’ club, even if the term was no longer used. Patrons went there for sex, and the club supplied alcohol and various inhibition-reducing, legal drugs to help that along. Kat and Dillon were big fans, Aneka less so. It always seemed a little forced to her. It seemed a bit like it was there just to enforce the idea that the Jenlay had such a free, wonderful society that you could have a place where it was perfectly safe to go and bang total strangers for fun. It was, kind of, fun, and Aneka turned her sex pheromones on whenever they went there because if you were going to go to a place like that you might as well get into the swing of things. But Shin You represented the most decadent aspects of Jenlay culture, and Aneka really only enjoyed it because Ella did.

‘I have a communication request coming in from Aggy,’ Al told her.

Closing the book she was reading, Aneka said, ‘Put her through,’ and the golden-skinned woman appeared, standing a few metres away. Aneka pulled her legs up from where they were propped on the couch. ‘Hey, Aggy. Have a seat.’

‘Thank you.’ Aggy grinned. ‘Not that I’m really sitting, but the thought is nice.’