Aneka Jansen 7: Hope (3 page)

Gwy.

‘I love her too,’ Cassandra stated firmly, ‘and you will need all the help you can get to find her.’ She was looking calm, but determined, and Aneka had already figured out that there would be no dissuading her, but she had to try…

‘But–’

‘
And
I have been apart from my own love for quite long enough. Not wishing to make this sound like a hopeless task, it could require months of searching to find Ella and I am unwilling to be separated from Al for that long when there is no need. I am coming too.’

To emphasise the point, the android settled her head on Al’s shoulder. She was perched on his lap on the bed in Gwy’s cabin. It had the advantage of privacy, if you discounted the fact that Gwy would tell Aggy what had transpired. Since everyone seemed to consider what
was
going to happen a foregone conclusion, that did not seem like an issue.

‘I have already made the necessary arrangements,’ Cassandra went on. ‘Everything is covered. My students have been allocated new tutors. Other lecturers can handle my timetable. I started arranging everything as soon as I heard she was missing.’ She shifted slightly, her brow wrinkling a little. ‘There is something… I debated whether I should say anything, but keeping it secret seems… wrong.’

Aneka raised an eyebrow. ‘Cassandra?’

‘Ella was having an affair.’

‘Oh.’

Cassandra’s frown deepened. ‘You do not seem particularly shocked.’

‘I… Maybe later. There were signs. When she came back from the planning trip to Lacora she was behaving… There was something not right. Hindsight suggests guilt. Please tell me it wasn’t Devor.’

‘Uh…’

‘No wonder she was going behind my back! Damn, I thought she had taste! Cheating on me is one thing, but Devor… Jesus.’

‘Does this change–’

‘Of course not!’ Aneka shook her head. ‘We’ve been together, what? Thirty years, give or take. We were both getting complacent. I should have done something when I noticed she hadn’t complained about me wearing clothes she couldn’t see my boobs through.’

‘Aneka, it’s not like you overdress…’

‘Huh. Maybe not, but… Anyway, no, we’re still going to go find her, and then I can ask her when her standards dropped to rock bottom.’

Part Two: Standards

Lacora, 21.10.559 FSC.

Ella looked at the morose face in front of her. The green eyes looked sad and she was convinced there were worry lines showing on the brow. It was not good.

‘Your standards have dropped alarmingly, girl,’ she said. ‘The stress is getting to you as well. You’re distracted. Your work is slipping. Pull yourself together or you’re going home. Clear?’

There was no answer, of course, and she turned from the little mirror hung over her sink and headed back into her bedroom to get dressed. She
was
going to pull herself together and get on with her job. Breaking up with Ian had been the right thing to do, even if he was still trying to persuade her otherwise. Now she just needed to stick by her decision, get the job done and hope she got back to Shadataga before Aneka did. Because if Aneka got there first, she would come straight out to Lacora to do two things: see how Ella was doing and rip Ian a new one for his project plan. And if
that
happened it would all come out in… She decided to describe it as ‘an uncontrolled manner’ even if that sounded far too clinical. Sometimes being a psychologist was a pain.

Dressed in a light environment suit, she let herself out through the airlock and started across the camp’s square to the main laboratory. The camp was set up on four sides of an open central area which they used for parking vehicles and storing non-essential equipment. The prefabricated buildings were not linked, you had to exit one to enter another, and the airlocks were there to keep the world’s atmosphere out, originally. They had discovered that the viral agent which seemed endemic to the world was carried in water, so now the airlocks were only required because Lacora’s atmosphere was thin, breathable, but thin enough that it left you breathless if you had to exert yourself. At least a full helmet was not required for short-term exposure.

Ian appeared at her side as she walked and her spirits sank. It was stupid, and annoying. A few weeks earlier she had felt exhilarated whenever she saw him, attracted. He was easily fifty years her junior, handsome, with a full head of blue-black hair and piercing, blue eyes. His body was firmly muscled and he was tall, and lying in his arms had been a thrill. He had been so… enthusiastic. He had been something fresh and new, and…

‘I was wondering whether we could have a drink tonight and talk–’

‘No,’ Ella interrupted him.

‘You haven’t even heard what I want to talk about.’ And there was the thing which had convinced her she was right to break off their relationship. He sounded like a sulking child. There was a whining quality, a hint of recrimination; he was a teenager given the codes to a fast grav-speeder who considers it unfair when they are taken away again. He had been so attentive on the planning mission, but when she had started up with him again after Aneka had left… It was a lot like he had decided he had got the prize and did not need to put in the effort any more.

‘I know exactly what you want to talk about, and you already know what my answer will be. Now pull yourself together or I’ll be requesting a new lead facilitator on the next check-in call.’

He stopped and she kept on walking, trying not to hunch her shoulders or show too much tension. She was still not sure she could do that to him. This was his first big operation as leader and sending him back early would break him, but she had a feeling Bash’s evaluation of his work would not exactly include glowing praise… Then again, she had been the one pushing for him to run the mission. She had seen him and wanted him to be there, and she had ignored his lack of experience for the opportunity of a fling. Stupid, stupid… Aneka had never liked the man, and Ella had the horrible feeling that part of the reason he had been so keen on the affair was a desire to hurt Aneka.

The lab’s airlock finished its cycle and Ella stepped through into the room. Lena Freemont was there, peering through a binocular microscope and chewing on the end of a stylus. She liked writing notes by hand for some reason rather than using a neural transcriber or dictation. Ella allowed her the eccentricity since her work was excellent and the computers still managed to decipher the scratchings Lena made.

‘Anything new and exciting?’ Ella asked.

Lena lifted her head, blinked and then smiled. ‘Nothing really… Oh! Well, there was one thing. A bit strange and not exactly new, more like ancient.’

‘You’re being more than usually opaque, Lena.’

‘I’ve been running the protein sequences through the databases, yes?’

Ella nodded. ‘You sequenced the proteins used to construct the viral machines and you were having the computer see if it could find anything similar in the biological databases.’

‘Uh-huh. You
were
paying attention. I wondered as you looked distracted when I told you.’

‘Yes, well, that’s in the past, and I assume you’ve got a result.’

‘Several, but most of them I discounted.’

‘Because?’

‘Fragmentary elements of much larger structures. Only one protein matched when the virus has several structures. But two of the matches came back with wider similarities. One is the nanovirus you encountered on Eshebbon. As I indicated earlier. I now have a more thorough analysis. The two share about sixty per cent of their functional proteins.’

Ella’s face straightened and she pushed back an urge to evacuate the planet immediately. ‘The other one?’

‘That’s the
really
weird one. It’s a seventy-two per cent match… to the virus which the Xinti fell victim to. I need to run more tests, but I’d put money on this place being the original home of the virus that forced the Xinti into artificial bodies.’

‘Gopi! Are we safe? That virus was supposed to be–’

‘Some of the differences would make the Xinti virus more virulent and harder to isolate, and we have a few generations of advancement on the Xinti. The countermeasures we have are
way
better. We’re safe. Though…’

‘Lena?’

‘Well, even with the mutations… I took a good look at the Xinti virus when the match came up. I don’t get how they failed to stop it. I don’t get how these machines mutated into that form either. It’s almost like someone did it on purpose and then decided not to put their best efforts into countering it.’

Ella was silent for a second, considering her response. ‘Have you made any notes about that?’

‘No, just a passing thought really.’

‘Don’t. Keep it quiet until we can present it to the AIs. The Xinti are gone… I’m just not sure suggesting that some of them may have engineered their transition to digital minds without consulting the rest would be a great idea.’

Lena gave a slow nod. ‘You may be right, but it was a long time ago and–’

And then the world exploded.

PLC-3472, 23.10.559 FSC.

Ella became aware that she was conscious, but she kept her eyes closed while she assessed her situation in case it was particularly bad.

The last thing she remembered was a lot of noise and the wall of the lab rushing at her. She was fairly sure it had been part of the wall which had been moving. According to her implant, that had been over two days ago. She had been out for two days and the injuries from the impact would have been severe… And there was something which felt a bit like a medical brace around her neck and she could not move.

No… She
could
move, but not much. She was in restraints of some sort. Cold. Metal. She was fixed to a hard mattress at the waist, wrists, and ankles. The brace was cold against her skin, probably more metal, and it seemed to curve around her neck at the back leaving her throat exposed. More like jewellery than a neck brace.

Wondering whether she was going to regret it, she opened her eyes. It was not an especially illuminating experience. The room was well lit and very grey. At a guess, she was looking at a room on a spaceship, but it did not exactly look like a cabin. In fact, it looked more like a cell and turning her head just confirmed that perception. The door was very solid with no obvious means of opening it, and there was a toilet and sink in one corner. Checking the ceiling again, she located a small, black dome in the opposite corner which had to be some form of visual sensor.

All right, so the camp had been attacked. There was nothing on site with the explosive power to rip the lab building open, so it had to have been something from outside. They had been attacked, she had been hurt, possibly badly, but she had been healed if her biological readouts were telling the truth, and now she was clamped to a bed in a cell. And it was going to be several days before anyone on Shadataga even knew she was gone. She really should have insisted on a five-day check-in cycle; Aneka was going to be
so
sarcastic about this…

The door opened with a hiss of heavy-duty hydraulics. Ella noted the arrival of a man in a grey uniform, but she was distracted from a thorough analysis by the muffled screams she could hear before the door closed. It had sounded like a man, and it had been a man in a
lot
of pain.

‘Can you understand what I am saying?’ the new arrival asked, speaking slowly.

‘You’re speaking a dialect of English,’ Ella replied. ‘I understand English.’

He sniffed. He was well equipped for it, having a fairly strong, Roman nose mounted on the front of a moderately handsome face which had once been more handsome. Guessing ages was generally a pointless exercise just based on looks, but he was not in the flush of youth. The physique was powerful: he was tall and strong, and the muscle looked natural on him rather than bulked up. His voice was good too, resonant. The uniform was cut to fit well, though the dark grey colour did nothing for him. There was a symbol on the breast pocket of his jacket: three overlapped triangles in gold, with the middle one taller than the others.

‘I am speaking English, as it has been spoken for over three thousand years,’ he stated.

Ella grinned at him. ‘No… I’ve met someone who speaks it as it was spoken a thousand years ago, and your vowels have drifted a bit. And historically that version of English came into use around–’

‘You would be advised to keep your observations to yourself, girl. Heresy is punishable by death and we already have you on bioterrorism charges.’

‘Now wait a min–’

‘You
will
cooperate. You will tell us who you are working for and how this weapon you were developing is used and countered.’

‘We weren’t developing a weapon! We were studying a nanovirus which already existed!’

‘So that you could use it on us.’

‘I don’t even know who you–’ She stopped, peering at him. ‘Wait… that symbol. I’ve seen that symbol before… Old Earth historical databases… Pinnacle. You’re Pinnacle.’

‘And you wish me to believe you did not know that?’ He put the kind of disbelief into the phrase which could only stem from total disdain for his target. Well that fitted with what she knew of the Pinnacle.

‘We know you attacked Old Earth centuries ago and were beaten back. I know of someone who ran away from you people a lot more recently. Aside from that, we had no idea where you were. No one I know of has seen anything of you in decades. Longer. I’m an archaeologist. Lacora was a mystery I was trying to solve. My microbiology specialist had got some way to working out how that virus came into existence, but… What happened to her? She was in the same building as me when you attacked. What happened to my team?’

‘We required one prisoner,’ he stated flatly.

‘Bastard.’ It was barely a whisper. They were all dead? He could be lying… Somehow she doubted that.

‘The slave collar you are wearing has a neural induction circuit. On command, or if you attempt to remove it, it will cause pain.’ He paused, maybe for effect. ‘You heard the screams as I entered? That was the gunner whose misdirected strike damaged your laboratory and our evidence. He is wearing one of those collars.’ He paused again, but this time it was likely to allow that thought to sink in. ‘I will return in a few hours to begin your interrogation. I will be bringing the control for your collar with me.’