Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart (42 page)

‘We’re both just as heavily armoured,’ Yrimtan said as she forced the blade downwards against Aneka’s arms. ‘That skull of yours could take a hit from a steam-hammer, but there’s one weak spot.’ She leaned forward, pushing harder. Aneka slammed a knee into her back, but it seemed to make no difference. ‘I push this through your eye and it’s straight through into that computer you call a brain.’

‘You don’t have to do this,’ Aneka grunted. The other Aneka was right, and she had the advantage. Aneka could feel her grip slipping. It was just a matter of time.

‘I’m sorry, but I really do.’

Aneka swallowed and let go of Yrimtan’s wrists with her right hand. The blade slipped down six inches, piercing into Aneka’s right eye, before it was stopped as Aneka’s palm braced against Yrimtan’s forehead. ‘No, I’m sorry.’

‘What for, dying?’

‘No, for this.’ Aneka fired off her pulse weapon and a burst of random gravitons appeared briefly within Yrimtan’s brain. The knife jerked away from Aneka’s face, and then down again. Aneka fired again, and again, and kept firing until the charge indicator in her vision field said that the weapon’s capacitors were entirely depleted. She pushed sideways and Yrimtan’s body tumbled off her, sprawling onto the floor of the chamber and lying still.

Part Five: The New World

Prime City, 22.9.526 FSC; 8
^th
August 3186.

The door slid open and Ella looked up half-expecting to see Yrimtan walk back in. Instead she saw Aneka and her expression shifted from worry to horror.

Aneka swallowed. ‘Do I look that bad?’

Ella gave a slow nod and then hopped off the bed to see whether there was anything she could actually do. Fake blood dripped from the hand Aneka was cradling, and from the cut in her cheek which started at her jawline and ended near the corner of her eye. That eye was currently a milky white colour, and had a puncture wound which almost split it in two. Ella could see armour mesh through the flesh of Aneka’s chin, bare metal poked out of a burned nose. Ella hung back, her arms rising as she looked for some method of helping. Then she gave up and rushed forward, hoping for a hug. She got one.

‘Yes, you look that bad,’ Ella whispered. ‘You also look absolutely fabulous. The most beautiful sight I’ve seen in decades.’

Aneka giggled. ‘You’re just saying that because I’m rescuing you.’

‘Again,’ Ella agreed.

‘Yeah, well we still need to get out of here. There are a lot of people in this city and I’m not sure how happy they’re going to be that I’ve killed their boss.’

‘Actually,’ Al said, patching himself through Ella’s implant so that they could both hear him, ‘I think that we may have an entirely different problem with the people here.’

Aneka and Ella separated enough that they could frown at each other. ‘What problem?’ Aneka asked.

~~~

An eerie silence seemed to have sucked all the sound out of the entire city as the small group of visitors left the medical block where Gillian and Bashford had been hiding. Out beyond the kill-zone the Enforcers had set up it was more obvious that something was wrong. Everyone, Citizen and Enforcer, was lying around on the floor or seating, wherever they had happened to be when it had started, and they were doing nothing at all.

‘It’s like they’ve all been affected by the same thing that hit the medics,’ Gillian commented as they passed yet another fallen Enforcer lying in a corridor, sprawled as though he had collapsed on the spot without warning.

‘I think,’ Al said, ‘that this is the result of a virus passed through the city’s wireless network to their implants. There is a core computer facility at the bottom level, in the centre. I believe that if we are to resolve this we must go there.’

Ella and Gillian had stopped beside the fallen Enforcer, taken off his helmet, and were examining him. ‘Alive,’ Gillian commented, ‘apparently responsive at the reflex level, but there’s no awareness of outside stimuli…’

‘Al thinks they’ve got a computer virus,’ Aneka commented. ‘Maybe some sort of booby-trap Yrimtan set up.’

Ella stood up and dusted off her knee. ‘That doesn’t seem likely. If it was caused by her death, I think it was accidental.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘She was kind of insane,’ Ella replied, ‘but she believed that what she was doing was for the best. She was following the programme, making better Humans. She wouldn’t have wanted them dead.’

‘Well, Al thinks that we need to go to the main computer room if we want to fix it.’ Aneka pointed towards some lifts at the end of the corridor. ‘Down all the way and then north, roughly.’ Her in-vision schematic zoomed in towards the computer core as she spoke. ‘Wow… This place has a pretty big computer centre.’

‘Big and bulky, or big and sophisticated?’ Bashford asked. Aneka had been watching him since they had collected him and Gillian from the medical wing; he seemed tense, wound up, and so far she was not sure why.

‘I couldn’t really say from the data I have here. Why?’

‘Big and sophisticated may indicate an AI, which might be annoyed at us for killing Yrimtan.’

‘I doubt that,’ Ella said, ‘for the same reason I don’t think they’re all unconscious on purpose. She wouldn’t want something out there that was smarter and more in control than she was.’

‘Makes sense,’ Aneka agreed. The lift doors opened for them, closed behind them, and started down.

‘How does it know where we’re going?’ Ella asked.

‘Al’s in contact with the city network. Actually, that’s another reason to think this isn’t on purpose. Al says the security here is just about non-existent.’

‘You think she figured she’d never die, so why have fail-safes in place?’

‘Again, it makes sense.’

The lift doors opened and they were faced with another corridor with black-painted walls. Yrimtan seemed to have liked that look for her more private areas. The short corridor led to doors which opened for them as they approached.

‘I did not do that,’ Al commented as they passed through.

Aneka frowned, but kept walking. The corridor fanned out into a circular room with five huge monitors mounted on the walls and no obvious signs of controls. Only two of the screens were actually active. The one opposite the entrance was displaying scrolling text messages, operational notes, and diagnostics for the city around them. The second active screen was displaying rapidly shifting waveforms of some description.

‘Those are neuro-cognitive induction systems,’ Ella said. ‘Thousands of them… If I had to guess, I’d say that someone’s running teaching programmes for the entire implanted population.’

‘Teaching what?’ Aneka asked. A third screen came to life, text flickering past at a rate too fast for normal comprehension. Aneka watched it move, her overclocked perception slowing it to a near standstill. ‘I was wrong. She did have a back-up plan in case she died.’

‘And?’ Bashford asked. ‘Do we need to worry about a city trying to kill us on the way out?’

‘No. Apparently it’s removing the controls she had on them. It’s preparing them for a life without Manu Dei watching over them. There’s even some stuff in there about setting up a proper democratic system.’ Aneka looked away. ‘Maybe she wasn’t quite as bad as I thought. Maybe she really did have what’s best for them in mind. Maybe…’

‘She couldn’t give it up,’ Ella interrupted. ‘She was so wrapped up in making sure that Humanity became what she thought they should be that she couldn’t let them do anything without her. She probably knew she was stunting their development, but she couldn’t stop.’

‘Are you saying that she wanted to die?’ Aneka asked, frowning.

Ella shrugged. ‘She was alone. She hadn’t taken a new partner since that man on Titan. I don’t know if she wanted to die, but I think she was ready.’

‘Oh.’ Aneka started back towards the doors. ‘I think maybe we should dispose of the body before they wake up.’ She stopped and looked around. ‘I think
I
should dispose of the body.’

‘Are you sure you want to do that alone?’ Gillian asked, her tone uncertain.

‘No… But I think it’s something I should do.’

~~~

There was an incinerator in one of the various laboratories around the city which, according to what Al had found, used fusion torches to reach an interior temperature of around seven thousand kelvin. It was meant for burning dangerous chemicals and biological samples, and it seemed like enormous overkill for anything, but Aneka was pretty sure that it would do a proper job of destroying Yrimtan’s body.

Placing the body on the induction platform, Aneka stood back, her thumb resting on the start button. Her twin looked like she was asleep, lying there on the pristine, ceramic surface.

‘We’re sure she’s dead?’

‘There is no electromagnetic activity from the body,’ Al replied. ‘Her mind is silent. I think if she were alive she would be trying to avoid this.’

Aneka sighed. ‘Goodbye, Aneka Jansen,’ she said aloud. ‘I never really got to know you, but you seem to have done well by your children. I hope you’re at rest now.’ She pressed the button.

The platform slid into the hole in the wall behind it and a heavy hatch made of gleaming metal closed over it. A few seconds later a roaring noise began. Aneka blinked away a tear from her good eye and started for the door.

~~~

The shuttle came in for a slightly shaky landing on the field Aneka had put her microlight down on. The engines had barely been shut off before the large rear hatch opened up and Monkey and Delta emerged, the former making a beeline for his mother to wrap her in a hug.

Delta grinned at them for a few seconds before turning to look at Aneka. ‘You look like someone went over you with a sandblaster.’

‘You should see the other me,’ Aneka replied.

Delta looked perplexed. ‘The other… Yrimtan? She’s alive?!’

‘Not anymore. Let’s get inside. I want to get out of this stupid suit and into something more comfortable. Then we can figure out what to do next.’ She started up the ramp, undoing the seals on her suit as she went.

‘Well we contact the Hyde, don’t we?’ Monkey suggested.

‘That could be a problem,’ Bashford said, swallowing hard as he finished and almost choking off the last word.

‘Yrimtan said she’d blown it up,’ Aneka explained.

‘I gave her the transponder frequencies,’ Bashford added. ‘I…’

‘I went through what you did,’ Ella interrupted sharply. ‘There’s no way you could have resisted her.’

Aneka began to peel her suit off and looked back at him as he walked up the ramp. He glanced up at her and then quickly averted his eyes. ‘No one resists torture, Bash. Except in the kind of vids you people don’t make anymore. No one does, and she had every trick in the book to work with.’

‘On the other hand,’ Ella went on, ‘she said Aneka, Monkey, and Delta were dead, and that’s clearly not the case.’ She frowned at Delta’s arm in its cast. ‘Battered and a little broken, maybe, but not dead. I say we can’t call it either way until we can’t contact them.’

Aneka found her leotard and began to pull it on. It felt really good to be slipping on a garment she had once considered far too risqué for her tastes. ‘I agree. Shuttle to Garnet Hyde, please respond.’ There was silence for a few seconds and everyone looked at each other. ‘Shuttle to Garnet Hyde. This is Aneka. Is anyone receiving this?’

‘Garnet Hyde here, Aneka,’ Aggy’s voice came from the speakers around the cabin. ‘Captain Drake and Shannon are asleep. We were attacked from the surface, but Shannon’s quick thinking avoided the majority of the explosions. We have sustained minor damage to the ship’s sensor arrays, but we managed to attain a stable orbit. We have been observing radio silence in the hope that you might contact us.’

Monkey let out a whoop of joy. Aneka grinned brightly. There was a lot of smiling. ‘You have no idea how happy we are to hear your voice, Aggy,’ Aneka said.

‘I think,’ Bashford said, starting towards the cockpit, ‘that we’ll lift off and come up to join you.’

‘I will wake Captain Drake and Shannon for your approach, Mister Bashford,’ Aggy replied. ‘I am sending rendezvous vectors to your navigation system and stabilising our orbital tumble now. I assume that I can stop pretending to be orbital debris?’

‘Yeah,’ Aneka told her. ‘There shouldn’t be any more missiles.’

‘We’ll be docking in… thirty-five minutes,’ Bashford said from the bow. ‘Everyone hold onto something, I want off this rock as fast as possible.’

Aneka heard the ultrasonic hum of the anti-gravity system and the main engines starting up. He really did mean to get away as fast as he could. Of course, they felt barely anything of the acceleration as the shuttle climbed into the sky.

FScV Garnet Hyde, 23.9.526 FSC.

Aneka sipped her coffee, sighed, and relaxed back into her seat. Her right eye was still non-functional, but her skin had mostly healed over or returned to the colour it was supposed to be. She had put a synthetic skin patch over her damaged eye, mostly because Delta had been grimacing every time she looked at it.

They had taken a fair bit of damage between them. Delta had her broken arm, but it was the less visible hurt afflicting Ella and Bashford which had Aneka worried. Ella was fidgeting, and had been since the shuttle had made it out of the atmosphere. Bashford was showing less outward signs of discomfort, but he would not look at any of the women and was particularly avoiding Gillian’s eyes. Yrimtan had worked a number on both of them and the exact outcome of that was yet to be seen.

They had finished bringing Drake and Shannon up to speed on what had happened on the surface. Now it was Drake’s turn. ‘All right, here’s the situation. Currently the main navigation sensors are offline. Shannon is pretty sure she can repair them, but until she does we can’t risk warp speed. The bigger problem is fuel. Dodging death by nuclear missile used up a lot of our reserves. We’ve likely got enough to get us out of orbit and heading back towards Harriamon, and we don’t burn fuel in warp, but it’s tight.’

‘We will not have sufficient fuel to reach Harriamon after warp exit,’ Aggy supplied.