Steel Beneath the Skin

Steel Beneath the Skin

An Aneka Jansen Novel

By Niall Teasdale

Copyright 2012 Niall Teasdale

Amazon Kindle Edition

Contents

Part One: Aneka

Part Two: Where Men Once Walked

Part Three: On the Edge

Part Four: Terra Nova

Part Five: Plus ça Change

Part Six: Humanity

Part Seven: Facilitating Change

Part One: Aneka

FScV Garnet Hyde, 12.6.523 FSC.

Spotlights worked their way along the hull of the wreck searching out a method of ingress. The hulk looked like it was in surprisingly good condition, given that it was floating in deep space. Far enough away from any system that the space really was empty, it had avoided collision with asteroids and comets which might have damaged it badly, but there was a lot of pitting from minor dust impacts and cosmic rays. In fact, the only major damage seemed to be at one edge of the disc-shaped craft where something had torn through the hull.

‘Radiation readings negative,’ Patton said. ‘No residual gasses.’

Drake, his hands shifting delicately over the controls for the manoeuvring jets, nodded and skated the Garnet Hyde to a stationary position near the hole in the hull. ‘Drake to boarding team. Clear for EVA.’

‘Boarding team proceeding to breach,’ Bashford’s voice said from the console speakers and three figures in skin-tight vacuum suits appeared from the airlock under the bridge.

Bashford was leading; he had the experience and skill. Ella was following him a little too closely, but she did have all the sensor gear and it was important that she had that in range of anything dangerous before he got to it. Monkey brought up the rear. His name was actually David Gibbons, but he was the youngest person on the crew, even younger than Patton, and with a name like Gibbons he had naturally been dubbed “Monkey.”

As they reached the ship’s hull and the gap in it, Ella Narrow’s voice sounded over the ship’s comm system. ‘Confirming radiation readings within normal parameters. The carbonisation around the breach suggests a plasma containment failure. I suggest we set up the temporary airlock in case the interior atmosphere is intact.’

Down in the main lab, Doctor Gillian Gilroy’s eyes scanned over the readouts from Ella’s instruments and the view through three helmet cameras. ‘That would be a wise precaution. If this ship is as intact as it seems we don’t want to risk further damage.’

‘Deploying portable lock unit,’ Monkey said.

‘I’m seeing no floating debris inside the ship,’ Ella said as Bashford and Monkey began manoeuvring the heavy plastic disc into place. ‘This section at least must have explosively decompressed.’

‘Fast enough that nothing was left in orbit around the ship,’ Drake agreed. A ship as big as this one had enough gravity to overcome low speed expulsions.

Ella’s view of the interior was blocked as the airlock was placed over the gap. It took little more than a minute to seal the edge of the disk to the hull, and then they moved through it, closing the outer flap over the hole and locking it down. Now if they let atmosphere into the destroyed engine room it would not be leaving the ship.

Ella sighed though the sound did not transmit outside her helmet. ‘No EM readings,’ she said for the benefit of the rest of the crew. ‘There’s a breach in the outer shell of the main reactor. Can you see that, Doc?’

‘Yes,’ Gilroy’s voice said. ‘Secondary power systems would be long dead by now. I doubt any of the systems are live. Please take some samples. We’ll run dating analysis and see just how old this thing is.’

‘We’re going to have to cut through the hatch to gain access to the rest of the ship,’ Bashford said. ‘You’ve got time to collect samples.’

Ella began floating around the dead terminals and damaged panels, breaking off pieces where there was already plenty of damage and slipping them into stowage bags hung from her belt. Monkey went to work on the hatch’s locking bars with a fusion torch. Despite Bashford’s comment, it was relatively quick work; nothing much could stand up to the temperature of the plasma coming from the torch. After a few minutes the two men were pulling the hatch open.

There was no rush of air into the room, but there was a bitten off cry of shock from Monkey as he saw the body floating in the interior corridor. Ella was both less surprised and more excited. ‘Doctor? We’ve got axXinti corpse here. It looks like the air must have drained out of the interior more slowly. Preservation is excellent.’ She pushed herself into the corridor to get a better view of the body. It was humanoid, not especially tall, with longer fingers than a human and a ridged, back-swept look to its face. The mottled grey skin was natural colouring, not due to vacuum exposure.

‘So I see,’ Gilroy replied. Her hands began to move over a nearby virtual keyboard. ‘I’m prepping containment facilities now. Check your scanner.’

Ella looked down at the handheld unit. ‘EM reading. It’s weak, but constant.’ She moved the scanner head from side to side a couple of times. ‘To the right,’ she said, and began to propel herself in that direction.

Slightly exasperated, Bashford pushed ahead of her, pulling a pistol from its holster on his thigh. It looked a lot like everything on the ship had died a long time ago, but if that was not the case it was best to be ready.

The signal led them about a third of the way around the ship before Ella narrowed it down to a door on the outer side. ‘In here,’ she said. ‘It’s a light door. Maybe a storage room. Pry bars?’

Bashford nodded to Monkey, moving to where he could cover the door with his blaster. It took two firm tugs before the lock gave way and the door broke open. There was no immediate weapons fire; Monkey wedged his crowbar against the door and pushed. Ella started forward, then realised Bashford would yell at her and held back while he pushed into the room, sweeping his gun around. He stopped moving and was silent for about a second before his voice cut in over the comm link.

‘You have got to be fucking kidding me!’

~~~

She dreamed of computers scrolling text in front of her eyes. When she opened them she was not sure the dream had ended. There were screens around her, hanging over the plastic shell which kept her on some sort of examination bench. The displays looked like something out of a science fiction TV show, one with a fairly large budget. She would have been impressed if she could move anything below her neck.

‘You’re safe,’ a male voice said from somewhere nearby, almost in her ear. She tried to look, but her body was having none of it. ‘The best thing for now would be to rest. You’ve been through a lot. You’re not fully recovered.’

‘Rested enough,’ she said, her voice sounding thick in her own ears. Her body was also having none of that. She closed her eyes and whatever the voice said next was lost in the haze of gathering unconsciousness.

~~~

Ella stood at the observation window of the medical bay’s containment room. It had very good security as well as the best diagnostic scanners. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ she said, though it was not necessarily aimed at Doctor Gilroy who was examining the readouts from the sensors in the room. Gilroy looked around anyway, to where their patient was laid out, naked, on the bed in the room.

The woman they had found on the xinti ship was, indeed, good looking even by the standards set by modern humans. She had the physique of a dancer, or perhaps a martial artist; Gilroy was not familiar enough with military personnel to be sure of the latter. There was a lot of long, lean muscle, barely any fat. Her waist was slim, her hips wide enough to give a pleasing shape, very solid thighs, and large breasts which stood out firmly and were rather more pert than nature should have provided her with. Then again, nature had little to do with body-form these days. Her face was narrow, her cheeks hollow with high cheekbones, and she had full lips with quite a pronounced bow. Her hair was short, a cap of white, a straight fringe swept down to points in front of her exposed ears and a tight trim at the back of the neck. She did look like a perfect specimen of humanity, which made the truth all the stranger.

‘Attractive, certainly,’ Gilroy said. ‘The issue, however, is not that she looks good, but that she exists at all. We’ll need to be careful. We have no idea how she’ll react when she wakes up.’

‘You want me to handle that?’

‘You’re the psychologist. I’ll observe, of course.’

Ella nodded, her eyes never leaving the body of the woman in the isolation chamber.

13.2.523 FSC.

She could move now, that was something. Blinking in the light, she pulled herself up into a sitting position. The plastic bubble had become a room with very solid looking walls, a door which looked like it was airtight, and a double-glazed window which looked equally solid. Beyond the window she could see the backs of displays and a woman who appeared to be around thirty, with wavy, brown hair and a Hispanic complexion, who was working on something away from the window. Attracting this woman’s attention seemed a good idea. She swung her legs off the edge of the bed, noting that her clothes were missing for the first time. That was when the second woman appeared at the window.

This one appeared to be in her early twenties. Tall, slim, attractive, with pale skin, blue eyes, and shoulder-length hair, red-orange with more vibrant red streaks radiating from the crown. She was dressed the same as the one outside, in a white, one-piece, skin-tight, and translucent bodysuit which left nothing to the imagination. She was smiling.

‘Hi, I’m Ella. What’s your name?’ Aneka saw the redhead’s lips move, but the voice came from overhead speakers. The room seemed to be air-tight.

‘Aneka. Aneka…’ She trailed off. ‘I don’t remember my surname. Or much of anything else.’ Aneka looked at the strange woman, taking in details. The clothes, the equipment. ‘Where am I?’

‘You’re aboard the Garnet Hyde. It’s a research ship. We found you on a derelict. Do you remember anything about that?’

Aneka could feel the hum of engines through the vessel’s floor, but they were very, very smooth, and there was no movement, no sense of swell from water underneath them. The skin-suit the woman was wearing looked like something out of a sci-fi porno. ‘When you say “ship” you aren’t talking about something that floats in water, are you?’

The older woman had turned from whatever she was doing and was looking in through the window as well, her eyes flicking to the monitors every so often. ‘That’s Doctor Gilroy,’ Ella said.

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘No… Well, you didn’t answer mine… The Garnet Hyde is a spaceship. We found you on another spaceship, an old one.’ She gave Gilroy a quick look. ‘A very old one.’

‘Right.’ Aneka’s eyes scanned the room, one arm absently rising to hang over her breasts. ‘Is this some sort of adult reality TV show? Where are the cameras?’

‘You’ve been floating in deep space for… a long time. It was pure luck that we came across the ship you were on. The crew were all dead… But we found you.’

‘I don’t remember much, but I know we don’t have deep space ships. Manned ones anyway.’

‘
We
don’t?’

‘Humans. Earthmen. You look like a human so I’m assuming you are. I never believed aliens would look exactly like us and have a perfect grasp of English, even if that’s what happens in the movies.’

‘I’m… human, yes. Jenlay anyway. “Human” is an old sort of name for the species.’ The smile shifted up a notch; she was amused. ‘The ship you were on wasn’t a jenlay ship though.’

‘So what was I doing on it? Are you saying I was kidnapped by aliens? Close Encounters? Anal probes? Have I got an implant up my nose?’

The smile became confused. ‘What? No… I mean… I don’t… Could you excuse me for a second?’

Outside the window, Ella and Gilroy were talking, but the sound was cut off. Aneka was beginning to get a real feeling of dread, the kind of falling sensation in her stomach that came when… When what? When she lost something, someone…
Damn! Why can’t I remember?!

‘Aneka?’ She looked up at the sound of Ella’s voice. ‘Uh, we need to go and discuss some things with the rest of the crew. Just… well, relax.’

‘Sure,’ Aneka said. ‘Take your time. I don’t appear to be going anywhere.’

~~~

‘She doesn’t know,’ Ella said.

‘She doesn’t know
now,
’ Patton said. Monkey nodded firmly in agreement. ‘You said yourself, she doesn’t remember anything aside from her first name.’

‘She thinks she’s a jenlay’ Ella insisted and then corrected herself. ‘She thinks she’s a “human” from back when that ship was working. Did we get a date back?’

‘Over a millennium,’ Gilroy said. ‘The analysis is still working on narrowing it.’

‘All right,’ Drake said, his voice firm. They had been arguing this around for half an hour now and it was getting them nowhere. ‘Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that she doesn’t know, it’s not an act.’ He held up his hand as both Monkey and Patton opened their mouths. ‘Ella, what do you want to
do
about it?’