Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart (37 page)

~~~

Bashford watched Delta as she removed the tape they had used to seal the museum door and then moved inside. He was not expecting trouble from that direction, but it was safest to check. Looking to his right he could see Monkey and Aneka. They seemed to have found a way into the tower block and, sure enough, a second later they were gone.

‘I wonder what the ogres were doing in there,’ Ella mused.

‘Probably just looking for a place to sleep,’ Bashford replied. It made a degree of sense, but he did not like the way they had behaved according to Aneka’s description. There was something not quite right going on and he had half a mind to call it a day and leave the area. On the other hand the Garnet Hyde was not due back in orbit for a few days, so if they did leave they would be stuck in cramped quarters for that long. The shuttle only had four bunks and he was not sleeping that well in one of the chairs…

Something made him turn his head towards the other side of the plaza. It was a sound, a soft roar that seemed to be growing in volume. He frowned. There was something there, two somethings. Two objects moving towards them…

‘Get down!’

The warning came too late as two small missiles impacted the ground near their feet. For the briefest instant Bashford thought he was dead, but the warheads exploded into a cloud of vapour which enveloped them quickly and almost immediately began to solidify into strands of clinging plastic. He tried to struggle, but the fibres just tightened until he was completely immobile.

‘Aneka!’ he yelled into the microphone in his helmet. ‘Monkey, Delta? Do you read? We’re under attack!’ There was no reply, and he realised that he should probably be able to hear Gillian and Ella yelling over the radio too, but all he could actually hear was static. Someone was jamming their signals.

~~~

Delta scanned the interior of the museum, visually and with a sensor tuned to detect the electrical impulses living organisms tended to produce. As far as she could tell there was no one there. It had not exactly been likely.

‘Delta to Bashford. Nothing here, Boss. You can bring them in.’ She waited for a reply, starting back towards the doors. ‘Bash? Are you receiving?’ Her pace quickened when there was still no reply. What she did hear was what sounded like an explosion muffled by distance and the museum doors. She started running.

Bursting through the doors she saw four men in black armour standing over what looked like three cocoons of spider webbing lying beside the shuttle’s airlock. Whoever they were, they were up to no good. Raising her carbine, she sighted carefully, and fired. It was as if the incandescent beam of light had hit nothing. All four of the men turned, two raising rifles, the others raising short tubes which they placed on their shoulders. She felt twin impacts on her chest which slammed her backwards into and then through the door, and then the world exploded around her.

~~~

Diagnostic messages danced in front of Aneka’s eyes. Her right leg had lost motor function, she had extensive bruising of her dermal tissue and some internal systems damage, but she was mostly functional. For a second her systems had been sufficiently upset that she had, effectively, blacked out. She was lying against the wall, beside the bed, and her pistols were nowhere to be seen. Monkey…

She started to try to stand, and then let out a gasp as her head was slammed back against the rotten plaster and concrete. One of the men in black armour was standing in the doorway, his rifle levelled at her. He fired again and she felt the shock of the force beam slamming into her face through the suit’s visor. She felt fake blood running down from her nose over her lip.

‘Tough bitch, I’ll give you that,’ the black figure said, his voice made more menacing by some form of electronic modulation. He raised his rifle once more.

Aneka raised her right hand as though warding off the next blast. Various stress alarms were going off to tell her that she was going to take significant damage if this kept up. She set the pulse weapon in her hand to lethal mode and fired it. For a brief instant a tiny maelstrom of conflicting gravity fields came into existence inside the man’s head. His face went blank and he fell, collapsing to his knees, his mouth working. She fired again and this time the light went out in his eyes entirely.

Struggling to keep herself moving, Aneka tried to stand and failed. Giving up on that, at least until her repair systems had done their work, she started crawling towards the door. She made it halfway across the lounge before she collapsed.

~~~

Monkey let out a groan. His head felt as though a dozen men were beating on it with big hammers and he was not entirely sure why. Something had happened. He had been in a building, scouting it with Aneka and then… He remembered falling.

‘Monkey to Aneka,’ he said, wincing slightly at the pain this invoked.

‘David?’ It was Delta’s voice that replied. She sounded close to tears. ‘Thank Vashma. I’ve been trying to raise you for thirty minutes. No one else is answering.’

Monkey turned over, blinking and trying to regain some semblance of vision. ‘Delta? Where are you?’

‘The entrance to the museum. I’m trapped. A beam fell on my arm, I think it’s broken. There were men in armour. I shot one and my carbine did nothing. They… I couldn’t stop them.’

‘I’m coming.’ Struggling to his feet, Monkey started running towards the museum’s entrance which looked as though it had been remodelled with explosives. All the doors were gone and part of the portico had collapsed. He tried running faster, but that just made his head throb more and he had to slow down before he threw up.

He found Delta half-buried in rubble with an I-beam lying on her right arm. ‘What happened?’ he asked as he cleared the Plascrete away from her.

‘I lost radio contact with Bash so I started out the door and there were four men in armour beside the shuttle. They must have used some sort of riot control weapon on the others. They were wrapped up in these weird cocoons. I fired at one, and I know I hit him, even if I’m not really great with a carbine, but it did
nothing
to him. Then they fired back and…’ She looked up at the new skylight. ‘What happened to you?’

‘I’m not sure. I think I got blasted through a window. My helmet took most of the impact, but it knocked me cold.’

‘Aneka?’

He did not look at her, concentrating on the I-beam instead. ‘I’m not sure. You can’t raise her?’ Delta shook her head. ‘I’ll get you out of here and into the shuttle, then I’ll go look for her. She’s stupid tough. Either she’s okay, or… Or waiting a few minutes won’t matter. You’re going to have to help me with this.’

Leaning towards him, she braced her left hand against the beam and started to try to lift it. ‘David… I think they took your mother, and Bash and Ella. They sure as Hell weren’t ogres.’

Monkey swallowed and tried to sound as confident as he could. ‘Well, considering what ogres kidnap women for, that’s probably a good thing. Now shut up and lift.’

~~~

‘Is she dead?’ Delta looked down at Aneka, lying on one of the bunks. Her own arm was now in a Plastex cast, but when they had got Aneka out of her suit she had felt like a broken arm was nothing. Aneka’s body was more or less one livid bruise, and she lay on the bunk unmoving, unconscious.

‘Sensors say there’s electrical activity in her body, so I’m going to say no,’ Monkey replied. He was feeling a lot happier, but that was mostly because he had recently pumped himself full of the most powerful analgesic on the ship and his endorphin levels were spiking like crazy. He gave a small shrug. ‘It’s difficult to tell. I mean, technically she isn’t alive in the same sense as we are. As far as I know, if she isn’t atomised she can come back from it, but if something damaged her brain enough… All we can really do is wait.’

‘What about the others?’

He walked back to one of the consoles and tapped at it, frowning at the results. ‘We’re not picking up their suit transmissions. No bio-readouts, no location… no radio at all. Either they’re out of range or they’re still being jammed.’

‘Gopi, David! What do we do?’ There were tears in her green eyes again. He turned to her and pulled her into his arms.

‘There’s not much we can do. Not the way we are right now. We’ll wait until Aneka comes around. Maybe then we can try searching from higher altitude. That might work.’ He felt tears on his neck. She was crying, silently, but still crying. ‘It’ll be okay. Somehow. Maybe it’s the painkillers talking, but we’ll be okay.’

Maybe it
was
the painkillers, or maybe he just had to keep thinking that. Otherwise he would start crying too.

Prime City, 6
^th
August 3186.

Ella opened her eyes and looked up at a ceiling of soft, artificial lights behind plastic panels. Her head felt fuzzy, unfocussed, and she was having some trouble focussing on where she was and what had happened to her.
Drugs. I was drugged.
She pushed herself up on one elbow.

Gillian was lying on a bench similar to the one Ella was on; the room had four of the slim bunks, two on either side. Bashford was on a third, sitting up, looking dazed, and being examined by a woman in an outfit Ella recognised. There was a short, long-sleeved, white plastic dress, this one with red lines down her arms, black leggings, and white boots. The woman was a citizen. Aside from the benches and the ceiling lights, the room was pretty featureless.

‘Good, you’re awake.’ Ella turned her head at the sound of the voice to see a man walking up to her dressed in basically the same outfit as the woman. He lifted a scanning unit of some sort, aiming it at her. The device had no display so she figured that it connected directly with the man’s implant. ‘Vital signs are strong,’ he said. ‘Your brain activity is coming back to normal. I’d imagine you’re still feeling groggy?’

‘Uh… yeah. Where am I?’

‘The Prime City, of course. Please lie still. The drug they gave you will wear off soon, then you can move around.’

‘Why are we here? Why did those men kidnap us?’

The man smiled. ‘The Enforcers
detained
you for questioning. We weren’t informed why. We’ve no need to know.’ Ella looked at him. The smile was far too happy, almost brainwashed. ‘We attempted to access your implants,’ he went on, ‘but the protocols are different.’

‘Uh, yeah, I guess they would be. Are my friends okay?’

The smile became slightly confused. ‘Friends? We assumed they were guides or servants.’

Ella blinked, perplexed for a second herself. Then it hit her. ‘They don’t have implants so you assumed… Not everyone where I come from has them. I’m a rarity, in fact.’

The smile was replaced entirely by confusion. ‘How do you run your society?’

‘We talk to each other, I guess. People haven’t been very keen on cybernetics since the Xinti War.’ His confusion continued. ‘You don’t know about the Xinti? The war? Why this world is in the state it’s in?’

He frowned. ‘There’s something wrong with our world?’

‘I suppose that depends upon who you ask. Look, what’s going to happen to us?’

As if on cue, the only door in the room opened and two of the black-clad Enforcers entered. Each was carrying a rifle with two wide barrels. They stopped beside Ella’s bunk.

‘Is this one the leader?’ The voice was filtered through some sort of electronics to sound slightly mechanical, and more menacing.

‘No.’ Everyone turned to look towards Bashford. ‘No, I’m the leader here, hard as that might be for you people to believe.’

The Enforcers looked at the medi-tech. He shrugged. ‘She said they were friends, not servants.’

The Enforcer who had spoken looked towards Bashford. ‘On your feet. Manu Dei is handling this personally.’ Bashford stood up and started towards them.

‘Bash,’ Ella said, her tone urgent, ‘don’t go with them.’

Bashford gave her a smile which did not reach his eyes. ‘I don’t think we have much choice in the matter. Don’t worry. I’m sure this… Manu Dei, whoever he is, just wants to talk.’ The Enforcers moved out behind him and the door closed.

Ella looked at the medi-tech again as the female one moved towards Gillian to check on her. ‘What about the others? There were six of us. Where are the other three?’

‘Sadly,’ the man said, ‘you were the only survivors.’

‘No,’ Ella said, her stomach sinking. ‘I… don’t believe that.’

‘Well, if there is one fault the Enforcers have… Once they go after someone they tend not to leave them alive. And they have no reason to lie.’

‘No…’

London, 20.9.526 FSC.

The diagnostics were telling something of a different tale than their usual ‘optimal.’
Right leg: motor systems, inoperable – repairing. External communications: inoperable – repairing. Auditory systems: right sensor partially damaged – repairing; left sensor inoperable – repairing. Right arm: 70% functional – repairing. Dermal layer: damaged – repairs delayed.
She opened her eyes.

She was lying on one of the four bunks situated behind the cockpit. The bottom two bunks were more or less at floor level. Turning her head she saw Monkey and Delta lying opposite her. She smiled; Delta was a big woman and looked incredibly cute curled up in his arms. One of Delta’s arms was in a cast…

Memory returned. The cast she was unsure about, but Monkey had been blasted through a window. He had to have dropped three stories onto the plaza outside, but he looked fairly undamaged. The suits the Negral AIs had given them were really pretty amazing. She wondered how much more damage she would have taken if she had not been wearing hers.

‘David?’ she said, keeping her voice soft. Both of them opened their eyes anyway.

‘You’re awake finally,’ Delta said.

Aneka checked her last downtime period: over eighteen hours. ‘Yeah, but I’m not fixed yet. Another… twenty hours for full repair. My leg’s fucked. I can barely hear.’

‘And your skin is
definitely
not supposed to be that colour,’ Monkey added. ‘Hey, you called me David.’

‘Yeah, well you must’ve got me out of that room, and Delta looks like she needed some help. Monkey sounds like a nickname for a kid, and you’re not one. Where are the others?’