Aneka Jansen 7: Hope (4 page)

The door hissed again and he was gone. Ella was thankful when the door closed behind him, cutting off the screaming, but the idea that she might be doing the same soon had not yet entered into her head. They were all dead. All of them. And she was alone, in the hands of the Pinnacle.

~~~

It felt as though she had been lying there for days wondering when the pain would start, and Ella knew that was an unproductive line of thought so she turned her attention to what she knew of the Pinnacle.

They were, as far as she knew, a line of Humans who had set themselves up as the supreme strain of Humanity. They were, according to them, pure. Genetic alterations which had been made to many of the subspecies had been eschewed, though there had been some improvement. They were, essentially, a eugenics exercise which had become something like a religion. Her interrogator’s comment regarding heresy had confirmed that. It appeared that they were convinced that
they
were what Humans were meant to be like and anything else was wrong.

Centuries ago they had mounted an assault on Old Earth, their original home world, but Yrimtan had been running things then. Aneka’s more-or-less twin had reacted badly to a war fleet appearing in her system and the Pinnacle ships had been pushed back, many of them in pieces. Ella had read accounts of the battle, which was why she recognised the insignia, but they were more or less ancient history. Despite worries that the Pinnacle would return to try again after Old Earth re-joined the galactic community, no one had seen anything of them.

There had been rumours and mutterings. People spoke of a vast empire run off the backs of slaves taken from every Human subspecies. Given that the metalwork around Ella’s neck had been described as a slave collar, she was having to give more credence to the stories than she had previously allowed.

Some of them seemed extreme, maybe a little inflated to make the menace in the dark seem worse than it was. There were several stories of huge raids where entire settlements were attacked, rounded up and transported away into slavery. Some said the Pinnacle would destroy an entire planet where the population defied them. A couple of history students had attempted to verify a few of the stories, but they always hit the same wall: everything happened in some far-off place which made it difficult, if not impossible, to check the facts.

Almost as if the interrogator knew she was distracting herself from the tedium, the door opened and he walked in. Ella heard the screaming again; whoever the gunner was who had messed up, he was certainly paying for it.

‘I wish to establish the stakes in our game,’ he said without preamble. ‘This way you will know why it is important to you to tell me what I want to know.’

‘What? I don’t–’ And then she began screaming.

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Ella sat on her bed, curled into a ball in the corner, as far from the door as she could get. It was a small gesture, and useless, but it made her feel a tiny bit safer.

The man had released her from the restraints when he had finished asking her useless questions, being unsatisfied with her answers, and activating the collar. It meant she could move, though there was nowhere to go. It meant she could also take in the fairly basic, short, grey tank dress she had been put in. There was no footwear. She could feel, but not see, the collar. It was made of curved strips of metal which seemed to have been moulded around her neck, and it felt as though it was quite ornate. There were even smooth areas which might have been jewels of some sort. She got the impression that the Pinnacle did not want their slaves spoiling the view with ugly indications of their status.

She had been given food. Not bad food, actually. A stew of some sort and likely rehydrated before heating through, but it had filled her stomach. She had thought herself incapable of eating until the stuff had been in her mouth and she had realised how hungry she was. And the food had been delivered by a different man who had not said a word to her. He had been younger, but his uniform was identical to the older one. The Pinnacle, it seemed, were not big on rank insignia so there was no obvious way of determining relative seniority.

The door opened and Ella pulled herself into a tighter ball. It was her interrogator again.

‘Our medical technician remarked upon your durability,’ he said. He was really not fond of introductory statements. ‘How did you survive the explosion? You should have died. There should have been broken bones, internal damage…’

‘Over-protective girlfriend,’ Ella replied. She watched as he took his hand from his pocket, the control for the collar in it. ‘Seriously! She’s spent thirty years worrying over me getting killed in one of the stupid situations we keep finding ourselves in. My bones have been reinforced with carbon nanofibres. There’s a lattice of nanotubes around my heart that contract with the muscles and keep it pumping. I’ve got nanomachines floating around in just about every cell doing one thing or another. My lungs filter gasses and particulates from the atmosphere. Huh, I used to be able to get drunk on one glass of wine and now I can drink like a fish and I never get a hangover.’

‘We detected extensive cybernetics. Your eyes are entirely artificial.’

‘Oh,
those
went much earlier. I contracted a type of disease when I was young. It ate away half my face and both eyes. The facial tissue they could rebuild, but it was easier to just replace the eyes. Now we’d just regenerate the lot, but back then some things were hard to get right, like nerves, and my optic nerves were half gone.’

He gave a nod, apparently satisfied for once. ‘Are you ready to tell me about the virus now?’

‘Look, I’ve told you
everything
I know. I do archaeology, history, psychology.
Social
sciences. I know enough biology to understand some of what that virus did, but the woman who could have answered your questions was sitting beside me when you blew up the lab.’

He turned the control unit over in his hand, obviously contemplating her answer. ‘Unfortunately I believe you are telling the truth. We have what we managed to salvage from your computers. It will have to suffice.’ He took another box from a pocket, thumbed over it and spoke. ‘Have Crowthorn executed. His stupidity cost us more than we thought.’ Pushing the boxes back into his pockets, he turned to leave.

‘So what happens now?’ Ella asked quickly. ‘To me. What happens to me now?’

‘You will be taken to our Border Enforcement Station to await orders from High Command. I expect you will be tried and executed, but they may show leniency and commute that to slavery. You’d make an acceptable house slave.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, but he was already walking out the door.

Just before it closed, she heard the screams cut off suddenly. The Pinnacle did not waste time when it came to executions.

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Aside from the deliveries of food and drink, Ella was left entirely alone in her cell. That was fine by her. She had attempted, once, to engage one of her guards in conversation. Well, she had asked how long they would be travelling and he had activated her collar for a few seconds before walking out. She was a fast learner and there was no point in demonstrations of resistance, though she had no doubt that Aneka would have handled the situation differently. Of course, Aneka probably would not have been captured, and if she had, the collar would have done nothing to her, and she would have probably killed everyone on the ship within the first day…

Ella had come to the conclusion that her best chance was getting sentenced to slavery. There was some chance that she could escape at that point. With a gun in her hand, preferably two, she could do some damage. The Pinnacle people seemed strong, but she knew enough about unarmed combat that she could probably take one out before they could activate the collar, and then she would need to find weapons and a ship, and… Well, it was not exactly a
great
chance of escape, but it was a chance.

Her only other option was waiting to be rescued and, while Aneka and Winter could do some pretty amazing things, they would be looking for one woman in a vast expanse of space. No, Ella had to do something to help herself, even if her chances were slim.

Sealed away in her cell, she only became aware of their arrival at the Pinnacle station when her guard appeared at the door. ‘On your feet. We’re transferring you to a cell on the base.’ They were the first actual words he had said to her.

The ship outside the cell was almost as functional and grey as the cell itself. She was led down corridors to an airlock and then through into a similarly functional structure, which was presumably the interior of a space station, via some sort of docking gantry. The gantry served a secondary purpose: there was a gravity gradient as they moved down it and it allowed some adjustment. Ella felt the slight disorientation which suggested spin gravity was being used on the station, and she felt about half her normal weight by the time she was inside.

Her guard carried no weapons on him, but then he did not really need to. Ella had nowhere to go and she could be reduced to a screaming blob on the floor at a moment’s notice. They passed several other grey-clad men as she was walked through the corridors. None of them paid her any attention, which was possibly a good thing if the attitude continued into normal society. If the natives largely ignored slaves, then she would be largely ignored if she escaped and acted like she was just out on an errand or something.

The new cell looked a lot like the old cell, but it belonged to a larger collection of them and there was no screaming to be heard in the corridor outside. The locks, Ella noticed, were electronic but required manual entry of a six-digit code, and each had a screen beside it which was presumably there to allow someone outside to see what was happening inside. She assumed that there was a security officer or AI watching the feeds as well. Her best bet still seemed to be slavery.

As she sank onto the rock-hard bunk, Ella considered that: when slavery was your most favoured outcome, things had got really bad.

~~~

A new guard, this one a blonde instead of a brunette, appeared at the door barely thirty minutes later, which was a little surprising after so much waiting on the ship.

‘On your feet, hold your hands out,’ he snapped.

Getting up from the bed, Ella held her arms in front of her and he snapped a pair of thick, metal bracelets around her wrists. Then he grabbed her forearms and pushed her back against one of the walls, lifting her arms up and stretching them over her head. There were two solid clunks as magnets in the bracelets locked onto the metal wall.

‘What–’ Ella began.

‘Keep your mouth shut unless you’re spoken to.’ He stepped away from her to the doorway where he assumed an attention posture and waited.

He was not kept waiting long. The new officer-type looked older than Ella’s interrogator, but he was, if anything, bigger and more muscular. His hair was grey but cut so short it was hard to tell, and he had a hard, almost shrunken face as though his skin had been sucked dry and was clinging to his skull. He nodded to the guard and then turned his attention to Ella, peering at her for a few seconds before speaking.

‘Captain Horton informs me that several formalities were skipped when you were arrested and in his zeal regarding your interrogation.’ So her interrogator had been the ship’s captain. ‘I am Lieutenant Colonel Detrow, the commanding officer of Border Enforcement Station three-nine-five. You have been identified as Narrows, Ella. Is that correct?’

‘Yes,’ Ella replied. She figured that saying the minimum was the best course of action at this point.

Detrow nodded. ‘Ella Narrows, you have been indicted for crimes against Pinnacle Law, namely unlawful incursion into Pinnacle space, unlawful production of biological weapons, and conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, treason, and heresy. Evidence of your actions has been transmitted to Olympus for evaluation and sentencing. Sentence will be carried out in four days. Do you have any mitigating circumstances you wish to have considered?’

Ella blinked. It was not exactly due process, but it was a process. ‘We didn’t know we were in Pinnacle space, we weren’t making a weapon, we were studying one, and we had no intention of using it. Ever.’

‘Duly noted.’ He turned back towards the door, speaking to the guard in passing. ‘Leave her on the wall for a few hours, Ensign. I can’t stand terrorists.’

‘Sir!’ the guard snapped, raising his hand to his brow in a very rigid salute.

And a few seconds later, Ella was alone again, clamped to a wall by her wrists. She looked up as best she could at the bracelets. ‘If Aneka ever decides to speak to me again, I’m going to have to see if I can get some of these fabricated.’

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Aside from the impending threat of death, it was a little like a holiday. With nothing else to do, she turned to all the books she had said she was going to read, had stored away on her implant’s memory, and had never actually got around to.

She was in the middle of a book called
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
It was one of the ones on her list which she was reading as a study of how people in the past had thought the world would turn out. She called it her ‘stuff they got wrong’ list, mostly because no one had really seen the Xinti intervention or the war coming. Not that she could blame them for that, and plenty of people had come up with plots which kind of matched. Aneka had told her that they had made a film of this one and the actor in it was pretty good, though Ella had not been sure whether she meant his acting or his looks. She made a mental note to see if they had the film in the libraries on Old Earth at almost the exact instant the door opened.

It was the guard, holding those metal bracelets again. Ella got up and held her arms out and did not resist as he pinned her to the wall. It had happened a couple of times in the last few days, always when an officer of some sort was coming in to visit her. This time it was Detrow returning.