Aneka Jansen 7: Hope (22 page)

‘Uh…’

‘Are you going to undress, or do I have to knock you out and cut those britches off you?’

He had been acting a little oddly all the way to the hangar bay. It was as if he had had a shock to his self-esteem and was treating Aneka as the new alpha female. Now he regained a little of his former composure, crossing both sets of arms and lifting his chin. ‘Think you can? Without whatever it was you hit me with? Felt like a Pinnacle force pistol, but stronger.’

‘Same basic technology, different source.’ She stepped forward, placed her hands on his hips and lifted. There seemed to be no effort to it; she just lifted him off the deck and stood there, holding him. ‘Yes, I think I can knock you flat on your tight little arse.’ His eyes widened and she lowered him down again. ‘Now show me your tight little arse or I will.’

He was reaching for his belt before she had finished the sentence.

‘I did some research on his subspecies,’ Cassandra’s voice said into Aneka’s head. ‘There is quite a lot of data in the Pinnacle databases we took. Polymelians are strong, physical creatures and respond to strength. Demonstrating that you are physically superior will tend to make him more easily influenced.’

‘Huh. Well, he seemed the type, and he has gone rather submissive on me all of a sudden. I feel like I just got a new puppy.’

‘Let’s hope he’s housebroken.’

Aneka turned as Lanyon began pulling his boots off and glanced at the medical pod. It swung around from horizontal to a more vertical position and opened up. It was a bit over two metres in height, a metre across, which was going to be just about big enough to contain its patient. The interior was padded and the lid transparent.

‘Okay,’ Aneka said, ignoring the slight erection Lanyon was trying to cover up, ‘in you get. It’ll close and you’ll go to sleep. Shouldn’t be more than about ten minutes and it’ll fix up whatever damage I did to you.’

He looked down at the livid bruise which was starting to form across his lower rib cage and all across his stomach. ‘I don’t feel… particularly good,’ he admitted. Settling into the box, he rested his head back as the lid closed over him. A second later, his eyelids fluttered and then closed and the box began to fill with a bluish fluid.

‘Okay, fix him and run a full bioscan. I want to know if he’s using anything stronger than painkillers, and anything else you can find.’

‘Initiating cellular repairs now,’ Gwy responded.

‘Great. Cassandra? Would you mind vacating the cabin for a while? I think that Mister Lanyon might be an interesting source of information.’

‘Of course, but it’s unlikely he’ll trust you with anything we don’t already have.’

Aneka grinned and looked at the body now submerged in nanotech medical agent. ‘Oh, I think I know how to get him to talk to me.’

~~~

Ella straightened her top and waited for the inner door on the airlock to open. She had thought about wearing the grey dress but had decided that the pirate gear was better. She looked sexy in the pirate outfit and she was going to need all the help she could get to persuade Aneka not to be so angry anymore. A bit angry was pretty much to be expected, but… Anyway, at worst she was turning up and saying, ‘Look, I brought eye candy,’ which was something.

The door opened and Ella saw Gwy’s avatar standing on the other side. ‘Gwy! Uh… I’m happy to see you, but I wanted–’

‘I’m afraid Aneka is busy at the moment, Ella,’ Gwy said, smiling.

‘It won’t take long I just–’

‘She asked not to be disturbed.’

‘Yes, but–’

‘She is entertaining Mister Lanyon.’

‘O-oh. I… I guess I can come back… later.’

Gwy’s smile broadened as the door began to close. ‘I look forward to seeing you again, Ella.’

~~~

Aneka was smiling as she walked into the office space which Cassandra was currently occupying. ‘Anything interesting?’ the android asked. ‘Aside from multiple orgasms, obviously.’

‘What did the medical scans turn up?’

‘He’s suffered multiple bone breaks over his lifetime, some of them at a young age. The system corrected several faults in the bone structure while they were taking care of the bruising. You hadn’t done anything life-threatening to him, but he would have spent days recovering.’

‘There was no indication of drug use at all,’ Gwy put in. ‘I doubt he even takes much in the way of pain medication.’

Aneka nodded. ‘He basically thinks the sun shines out of Kade’s arse. He handles buying equipment more than the sales, but he’s been at several meetings where she’s been negotiating sales. I wouldn’t say she looks too hard at her buyers, but she does seem concerned about where the weapons are going. To be honest, he’s sort of a nice guy with a lousy history and he’s loyal. I get the feeling Kade inspired that in him rather than it being some sort of hero worship.’

‘So she may not be as bad as she seems?’ Cassandra asked.

‘Maybe. I hope not. I’m going to talk to the Felix. You said she was the XO, Al?’

Al’s avatar was sitting in the office’s second chair, quietly admiring his paramour in her simple, white tank dress. He stirred as Aneka spoke. ‘That seems to be the case, though she is referred to as the first mate.’

‘Very nautical. I’ll talk to her. Lanyon was going to relieve her on the bridge.’

‘I should mention that Ella was here earlier,’ Gwy said. ‘While you were “talking” with Mister Lanyon.’

‘Oh? How did she take it?’

‘She seemed… unsettled. She said she would return later.’

‘Right. With a bit of luck it’ll be while I’m talking to Trin.’

Hope of Sanctuary.

Trin raised an eyebrow at the tall, white-haired woman standing in her cabin doorway, but she stepped aside and waved Aneka in before heading for her drinks cabinet.

‘So you’re this Aneka that Ella was talking about? Want a drink? I need one.’

‘Is that rum?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘No thanks. It tastes like paint thinner and the alcohol does nothing to me.’

Trin poured a glass, raised it to Aneka, emptied it and poured another. ‘Nothing at all?’

Aneka watched as the girl sprawled out on some cushions on the floor. ‘This body is synthetic. I’m pretty much a robot. My mind is an emulation running on a computer in here. I can eat and drink, but I only bother for the taste.’

‘That is some very fine craftsmanship,’ Trin replied, grinning. ‘You didn’t come here to discuss rum, or feminine aesthetics.’

Aneka settled onto the cushions near the cat-girl. ‘No, I came to discuss your captain.’

‘Direct, forthright, I like it, but do you really think I’m going to spill my guts just because you walk in and ask?’

‘I think that you’re the first mate and Kade trusts you, so you’re aware that she’s hoping Ella can be a vehicle to get Shadataga in on this fight of yours.’

‘She… may have mentioned–’

‘Well, now I’m here and you’re going to have to convince me. Speaker is going to view this as outside their remit. War might be able to persuade him that striking at the Pinnacle now will prevent greater loss of life later. He’s the social scientist, and she’s the strategist.’

Trin sipped her rum and stared at Aneka with unblinking, amber eyes. ‘So you simply want me to justify what we do to you so you’ll decide we’re worthy of your assistance.’

‘Something like that.’

‘You’re not worth it.’

Aneka laughed. ‘Good answer. Explain it to me.’

‘That’s the point, I can’t. If you can’t see that the Pinnacle are a threat to your very existence, given time–’

‘But that’s just it, they aren’t. Even if they manage to push their technology to the next generation, we could still wipe them out with no difficulty at all. We can blow up suns. On my own I wiped out eight cruisers and a heavy battleship, and then I killed every man on one of their stations. Imagine what our warships are like.’

‘But you won’t use them. You’ll hang back and wait. You want peace, am I correct? People who want peace do not make war.’

‘That’s pretty much what the last man who decided to take over the galaxy said. The AIs are logical. They’re emotionally invested in ensuring peace, and they’re quite willing to take drastic measures to make sure they get it. The Collective isn’t perfect. It has people in it for one thing, and people can be arseholes. But they know that if they start a war, Shadataga will pull their tech out from under them, and if they try anything big, they won’t live long enough to know they fucked up.’

Trin’s eyes narrowed and she sipped more rum. Her tail curled, finding Aneka’s thigh and sliding over it. Aneka ignored it because it seemed like the tail’s owner was concentrating and the tail was doing its own thing.

‘I grew up on Taeonvrie,’ Trin said eventually. ‘It’s a neighbour of Iyonvrie, a nice place, but complacent. It has good tech, better than this ship, and that includes a device which they created to end the threat of nuclear war.’

‘Damper technology. I know the kind of thing. It’s useless against antimatter warheads, or antimatter-catalysed fusion bombs.’

‘Yes. I am here because I want to keep my home world safe. No one has ever thanked me for it, but there you are. I don’t think we can sit there behind our defence ships and the damper screens while the Pinnacle work out how to defeat us. I can’t speak for everyone. Ana is out for revenge as much as anything and Lanyon would follow her into Hell. No one on this ship is in it for the money, though that helps. My tail thinks that your skin feels too real to be synthetic. If I were to take one of my knives–’

‘You’d find the layer of monocrystal armour under the skin, and then I’d break your arm.’

Trin’s lips curled into a grin. ‘You are quite amazing, and my tail likes you.’

Aneka glanced down at the tail which was now stroking over her hip. ‘I quite like your tail. Tell me about Kade.’

Gwy.

Ella licked her lips, straightened her shirt and waited for the inner door of the airlock to open. Lanyon was on duty on the bridge, so Aneka was not with him, so all she had to do was wait for the door to open and she could talk to Aneka and everything would be okay. When it did open, it revealed Gwy’s smiling face and Ella’s heart sank.

‘Hello again, Ella,’ Gwy said.

‘I’m here to see–’

‘Aneka is not aboard. She has gone to see the Felix, Miss Trin. She has been gone for over thirty minutes.’

‘She’s with Trin?’

‘Yes, Ella.’

‘And she was with Lanyon?’

‘Yes, Ella.’

‘O-oh…’ Ella’s lips tightened. ‘Right. I’ll be back in five minutes.’

‘I am not sure that Aneka will be back by then.’

‘I’m hoping she won’t be.’

~~~

The meeting with Trin had been interesting, and something to think about. Aneka was starting to conclude that Kade might be worth the effort, but there was one last thing she needed to know before deciding and that was going to be hard. Having Ella on-side would be good for that. The cute little redhead had been with the pirates for weeks now and she was bound to have useful insights if she could be trusted to get her face out from between Kade’s legs.

Walking into the cabin, Aneka concluded that Ella
had
,
in fact, returned to the ship during Aneka’s trip to Trin’s cabin. She also concluded that Ella was fairly willing to do anything to get back into Aneka’s good books, and that she was not too attached to the captain.

Ella was hanging on the wall from some sort of metal cuffs which had to use magnets to cling to the metal in the walls. The strain was showing in Ella’s arms, but she was coping. Her whole body weight was hanging from her wrists since she had also managed to cuff her ankles to the wall, a good metre and a half apart. She had been taking lessons from her mother for quite a while, but getting herself splayed out like that still had to have taken quite an effort. The stretching involved was making her back arch and pushing her chest out.

The sight of Ella’s naked, vulnerable body sent a little thrill through Aneka. On an intellectual level, she knew it was not real; her synthetic body reacted to the functions of her mind within its cybernetic shell, not to any physical stimuli. Another intellectual point was that Ella had cheated on her. That really did not matter: Ella was offering herself up to be used as Aneka wished, or ignored. Aneka ignored her, unstrapping her holster from her thigh and acting as though she had not even noticed Ella hanging there.

It was when she turned her back and walked over to a cabinet near the bed that Ella spoke. Her voice was timid, uncertain. ‘Aneka?’

Aneka said nothing, but she turned back after a few seconds and walked over to where Ella was suspended. She moved in close and Ella let out a gasp as a thin, metallic probe slid into her and she felt cool metal against her labia. A sensation she had not felt in a while, a slight tingling followed by a growing warmth, began. The last thing Ella heard before the neurostim turned her mind into a sea of incoherent pleasure was Aneka’s voice whispering, ‘I’m going to make you scream so hard you wake the neighbours in the next system.’

~~~

Aneka held Ella against her as hot water streamed down onto them. The little redhead,
her
little redhead, was still trembling and she hung limply in Aneka’s arms for several minutes letting the water soak into her hair.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ella whispered.

‘So am I.’

‘What… what’ve you got to be sorry for? Except maybe for breaking me.’

‘I should have said something about Devor. He wasn’t important and it never came up, and… I should have said something.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘He tried to get me into bed for about two months before he got to you. I knew exactly why he was doing it. He thought he could get a leg up on his career. As well as a leg over, of course.’

‘So when he came on to me… Damn, I gave him just what he wanted. Or was he trying to get back at you for rejecting him?’

‘Don’t know. But if I’d said something we probably wouldn’t have ended up like this, so it’s my fault as well.’

Ella managed a giggle. ‘Actually, I quite like how we’ve ended up, even if my legs still won’t work. Anyway, maybe we needed a bit of a kick. I had a lot of time to think about us when I was locked up in Pinnacle cells. We’ve been–’