Steel Beneath the Skin (31 page)

Aneka nodded. ‘Now I know about it I can control it, so I won’t be using it. So I guess I’m okay with people not knowing.’ Her eyes flicked to Ella, who was grinning. ‘What?’

‘I don’t mind you using the sex one. That could be great at parties.’

Gillian laughed. ‘I don’t think many people will mind you using that one.’

Yorkbridge Mid-town, 15.6.524 FSC.

It had been quite a long day. A pretty long night too. They had woken up mid-morning after spending half the night pleasuring each other in various ways, and Gillian had come into town with them to do some shopping. Aneka had managed to escape with just a new mini-dress that Ella had forced on her. She had to admit it was a nice dress; long-sleeved, tight-fitting, and composed of lace.

With the purchase-fest concluded, Gillian came back to Ella’s apartment with them for coffee. Aneka was lugging several of the bags, because she had artificial muscles which did not mind the weight and did not tire as quickly. She did, however, make sure that her own bag with its hidden gun was ready on top. She was constantly looking around for signs of her stalkers, and she knew Ella had picked up on it. Her friend seemed to be a little worried, but not nervous. Aneka was a professional and she knew what she was doing, and that had been transmitted as well.

It happened as Ella was reaching for the door entry panel to the apartment building. Part of the brickwork just above the panel exploded into dust, followed a fraction of a second later by a loud crack. ‘Inside!’ Aneka snapped as she dropped to one knee, pulling her gun from her bag. She was aware of Al activating the door control by remote and her two friends stumbling inside, but she was more concerned with the shooter. Al threw up a display indicating the target area the sound had come from and Aneka used the high-magnification display from her pistol to scan it.

Then she saw it. On a balcony attached to the side of another tower block a man was dismantling a long-barrelled sniper rifle of some sort.
Weapon identification: electromagnetic acceleration rifle. Range: 500 metres. Warning: range exceeds maximum for full effect.
It meant that there was some chance the anti-matter pulse from her gun would degrade to ineffectiveness before it hit its target. She took her time, focussing on her target, letting her body relax into the shot, aiming for centre mass above the railing, and then squeezed off three rounds. Through the viewfinder of her gun she watched as the man’s chest was ripped open. He looked shocked for a fraction of a second as the first bolt hit him, and his rifle slipped from his fingers. Then the light went out of his eyes and he staggered back against the wall of the building, slipping down to the floor and leaving a bloody smear in his wake.

‘Al, call the Peacekeepers and get a message through to that address Winter gave us,’ Aneka said.

‘The Peacekeepers aren’t going to be pleased.’

‘I know. Just do it before someone else calls them.’ Aneka pushed her pistol back into her bag, grabbed everything else, and hurried inside.

‘Are you okay?!’ Ella squeaked from the staircase.

‘Me, I’m fine. The sniper is a bloody smear on a wall.’ She started for the stairs. ‘I’ll dump this stuff and then come back to wait for the cops. Put the coffee on. I’ve never met a policeman who didn’t appreciate a cup of coffee.’

~~~

Peace Officer Attica Barlow did, indeed, appreciate the coffee. She did not seem to be appreciating having to sit around Ella’s apartment making sure that Aneka went nowhere while they waited for an investigator to arrive. Her presence did give Aneka a chance to examine a Peacekeeper up close. She did not expect to have to go up against one of them, but the information was always worth having.

Barlow was not especially tall, but her body was all lean muscle. She was quite happy to talk about her training, which included armed and unarmed combat. Not that she was usually unarmed; she carried an electro-shock stun baton on her left thigh, and an electro-laser beam pistol on her right hip, and she was trained with both. Her training did not include investigating crimes, and also did not seem to cover much more than handling drunks, traffic accidents, fires, and similar minor emergencies. Barlow was actually unusual in that she had done a terrorism awareness course a couple of years earlier, but it was not much use since they just did not get terrorists on New Earth. Still, she was interested as well as a little frustrated at not being able to look into it further.

‘Someone shot at you with a hypervelocity railgun, tried to kill you, and you don’t know who or why?’

‘That’s a sniper weapon, right?’ Aneka replied with a question.

‘Old style, yes. Modern military snipers use lasers.’

‘So, he didn’t try to kill me.’

Ella looked up at that. ‘He didn’t?’

‘If he was trying to kill me, he’d have shot me in the back, or the head. He wasn’t trying to kill any of us, he was trying to scare us. Scare me.’

‘It doesn’t appear to have worked,’ Barlow commented.

‘I sent them a message back.’

‘Thank you, Officer Barlow, that will be all.’ The voice came from the apartment’s doorway. Aneka had heard the slight hiss from the actuators and knew it was coming. Everyone else jumped. Winter was dressed in a Peacekeeper uniform again. She walked into the room every bit the confident detective. Ella and Gillian glanced at Aneka and she narrowed her brow in a signal to say nothing.

‘You’re taking this, Investigator…
Special
Investigator Drew?’ Barlow asked.

Winter nodded. ‘Special circumstances. Miss Jansen is considered politically important.’

‘Right, the whole “girl from Old Earth” thing. Okay. Good luck with the case.’ Barlow made her way out and Winter waited for her to be out of the room and the door closed behind her before saying anything else.

‘It might have been a little easier if you’d left him alive.’

‘You run the security services,’ Gillian commented. ‘They do whatever you tell them. Would you like some coffee?’

‘No thank you, it makes me hyper.’ She did move over to one of the couches beside Gillian and sit down. ‘Now, we identified the man who shot at you and you have done the galaxy a favour. He’s not exactly a first rate assassin, but he has been identified as the person responsible for various killings on the Rim Worlds. Someone hired him in to send you a warning shot.’

‘Nice of them to send a professional,’ Aneka commented. ‘It doesn’t make sense though. The Knights of the Void try to kidnap me, and then an assassin is sent to scare me. Fanatics and professional killers don’t go well together. And what’s the point in trying to scare me if I don’t know why?’

‘I don’t know why, but I can theorise about the connection.’ She looked around at Gillian, and then Ella. ‘This does not leave this room. We have had a suspicion for a while that the Knights of the Void are operated by another group. As yet, we don’t know who, but there are a number of candidates. Certain commercial interests would benefit from a reduction in legal regulation. Of course, there’s Humanity First. Charles Hunter has decried the Knights’ activities, but his goals are a subset of theirs.’

‘A subset?’

‘Humanity First wants the human worlds to secede from the Federation,’ Gillian said. ‘The stated view of the Knights is more of an anarchist agenda, but dissolving the Federation is certainly among their goals.’

‘Hunter is rich enough, but the probability favours one of the trans-stellar corporations,’ Winter said. ‘I have people going over our gunman’s data to see whether we can find anything. The only other option is to wait and see whether they make themselves and their wishes known to you.’

Aneka gave a shrug. ‘I’m a soldier, I’m used to waiting.’

Yorkbridge, Leighbridge Airport, 26.6.254 FSC.

‘That’s what we’re flying on?’ Aneka asked. Outside the windows was an incredibly sleek, ultra-streamlined aircraft with stubby, back-swept wings. It looked like one of the lifting-body designs NASA had come up with.

‘Uh-huh,’ Ella replied. ‘Hypersonic transport. It uses a multi-mode scramjet engine to get it off the ground and land, and a fusion torch to accelerate it into a ballistic trajectory for high-speed flight. A little expensive to use, because they don’t carry many passengers, but it’s the fastest way to get to Antipose.’

‘Antipose because it’s on the bottom of the globe?’

‘Something like that.’

‘You know, I expected to spend your birthday in bed.’

Ella giggled. ‘Tempting, but I haven’t seen my mother in over a year and I’d like you to meet her.’

Aneka grimaced. ‘Back in my time “meeting the parents” was one of those horrific things you had to go through when things got serious.’

‘Mom’s really great. She’ll love you.’

‘Yeah, but I’m the big, bad woman from the past who’s fucking her daughter.’

‘Aneka, she’s a stripper. Seriously, where do you think I get
my
attitude to sex?’ She turned her head and added, ‘Come on, we’re boarding,’ before Aneka could respond, and they trooped toward the gate.

With only sixteen passengers, there was not much boarding to do. Fifteen minutes later the aircraft was taxying out from the terminal. Aneka sat strapped into the, very comfortable, seat watching the small screen in the back of the chair in front of her. There were no windows, just the view screens, though Aneka was pleased to discover that there was a public wireless network on board which gave access to several applications for entertainment and communication, and allowed access to the ship’s navigation system. Most of the passengers would have to use portable devices for that; Aneka watched the craft’s progress in-vision while the outside view displayed on the screen in front of her.

‘Here we go,’ Aneka said quietly as the graphics she was watching showed them lining up with the runway.

Ella gripped her seat arms. ‘I hate this bit.’

‘You fly on spaceships.’

‘They’re huge, and go straight up and down, and have anti-grav. This thing is a held up by aerodynamics.’

‘Even in my day air travel was statistically the safest way to get about.’

Ella just grunted, but then they were being pushed back into their seats by the thrust of the engine and Aneka let it go. Fear of flying was not a rational issue and she was sure Ella would be fine when they got airborne.

The craft seemed to take a while to lift, but once it got its wheels off the runway it raised its nose steeply and started to climb. Where a normal aircraft would have throttled back and levelled out after a few minutes, this one powered up when it had reached three thousand metres, pressing them into their seats at around one gravity. That was just the start. The navigation display was now counting down to the ignition of the fusion engines.

‘Does this thing actually make orbit?’ Aneka asked.

‘Technically they can, but they aren’t really rated for it. It follows a parabolic arc, skims over the upper atmosphere and then drops back down. The acceleration will cut back once we’ve hit the required speed, but it gets a bit worse first.’

‘Uh-huh. Engines switching over… now.’ They had hit twenty thousand metres and the engine tone shifted from a sort of throb to a high-pitched roar as the fusion torch drives cut in. Somewhere behind them hydrogen was being fused into helium and the resulting energy was being focussed into an intense exhaust cone. In under five seconds they were being pressed into their seats at twice normal gravity. ‘Oh wow,’ Aneka breathed. Now this was what she sort of expected spaceflight to be like. Anti-gravity systems really took the discomfort out of it.

The screen in front of her showed the sky turning from blue to black as they rose into thinner and thinner layers of atmosphere. The pressure began to ease off not long after they had passed through into the lower bands of what Aneka thought of as space. She heard the engines drop to idle, and then she was floating against the seat straps.

‘Zero-G,’ Aneka commented.

‘Uh-huh, but it’s only for forty minutes or so. The whole point of this is that it’s fast.’ She still did not look particularly comfortable. Maybe it was being in what amounted to space without a ship-suit on.

Most of the other passengers seemed to be business people, the majority dressed in some form of suit. It was unlikely that you would see some of the outfits in the City in London, or on Wall Street, but what they were wearing was more formal than the casual outfits Aneka and Ella were in. Skirts were shorter, blouses and shirts were translucent, very sheer, or mesh, and the tailoring was more form-fitting. On the other hand, just like on any commuter flight, everyone spent the entire time working on computers. In contrast to flights Aneka was used to, there was a lot of chatter since everyone could, and did, use their personal phones relayed through the ship’s comm-system.

Ella had said that they were meeting her mother at the club where she worked and then going on from there, and they had some very basic hand luggage with them, so they had dressed for a club. Aneka suspected that Ella was wishing she had worn trousers as her micro-skirt floated languidly in her lap. Aneka was in her jeans and basque, though Ella had pointed out a feature of the SensiCloth she had failed to mention when they had bought the outfit and her nice, black jeans were now semi-transparent. There had been eye-rolling.

Aneka had expected to have problems taking her gun on the flight, but Winter had been rather more thorough in preparing the paperwork than she had expected. The pistol, in its case, was in the overhead locker. Airport security had passed her straight through without comment and Aneka had made a note to check exactly what Winter had authorised her to do. To be honest, she was carrying the gun out of paranoia; there had been no sign of the Knights for days and she hoped they would not be disturbed on this little trip.

Of course, assuming you would
not
be troubled was a sure-fire way of making sure you would.

Barnard City

The airport was around fifty kilometres from Barnard City and Ella had made sure they were covered for transport by arranging a hire car for the day. Aneka had been impressed with the efficiency of the system; Ella had arranged the hire in Yorkbridge the day before and been given a bay number to collect the vehicle from there and then, and it would respond to her transponder as soon as they arrived. There had also been some bemusement when they had arrived to discover a huge, plastic suitcase was in the bay they had been sent to. It had promptly unfolded itself into a car. Aneka had felt close to a huge geek-out.