Steel Beneath the Skin (5 page)

She turned back to discover that they had arrived at the storage room. ‘We thought you could start by telling us what all of this stuff is,’ Ella said. ‘It seems to be yours.’

Aneka floated into the room. The first thing she saw were the racks, and the equipment on them. It did, indeed, seem to be the stuff her team and the hostages had had with them when they were taken. She was about to start going through it when she noticed the machine at one end of the room. A huge, tank-like mechanism, the transparent doorway now open to vacuum since they had had to cut her free of it. She could see restraints of some sort within, designed to hold a humanoid body upright within the tube.

‘That’s where we found you,’ Ella confirmed. ‘It’s a nano-stasis rig. They’re more stable than cryogenic systems, use less power.’

‘Strung up like a pervert’s slab of meat in a freezer,’ Aneka replied.

‘We’ve no evidence that xinti showed any interest in cross-species sex. Or in sex.’

‘Huh.’ Aneka returned her attention to the shelves. ‘For someone uninterested in sex, they sure went to a lot of trouble to make sure I could have it.’ Her hands drifted over clothing. All of it had been carefully folded, but it had been cut off the bodies it had belonged to. ‘Combat fatigues, body armour, a pair of jeans. One of the hostages must’ve been wearing those.’ She turned to another rack. ‘Weapons.’ She glanced around at Bashford. ‘After a thousand years in space I doubt the propellant works, so you’ve no need to worry. There should be three MP-fives, two rifles, a grenade launcher. Might be wise to be careful with that and the ammo. The explosives could be unstable. It’s basically a nitrocellulose powder.’

Bashford could be seen blanching, even through his helmet faceplate. ‘Get a couple of the armoured containers over, Monkey,’ he said. The younger facilitator nodded, the action almost lost in his helmet.

‘Field radios,’ Aneka went on. ‘These…’ She paused over a tray containing a couple of wallets, a few bits of jewellery, some ID badges. ‘Personal effects.’ Reaching in she lifted out a gold ring. ‘Quinn’s wedding ring. I went to the wedding. He’d been married for six months when… Nice girl. He met her on leave in New York and married her three months later. Kind of fast, but in our line of work you didn’t get to meet people that much. People you’d give the time of day to anyway.’ She placed the ring back in the tray where it wobbled in the zero gravity, and then pulled out a wallet, unfolding it and taking out a desiccated dollar bill. It crumbled in her fingers. ‘I guess dollars aren’t exactly legal currency anymore anyway.’ It was all kind of depressing.

‘You still used physical money?’ Ella asked.

‘A lot of transactions were electronic, but folding money was more useful in a place like Iraq. Or for buying a hot dog on a street corner for that matter.’ She spotted another tray and carefully lifted something out of it. ‘The bra I was wearing when they grabbed me. Oh, and my knickers. There doesn’t seem much call for underwear now either.’

‘Of course there is,’ Ella replied, giggling though it came over a little funny over the radio. ‘On planets anyway.’

‘People still have a taste for flimsy undergarments under the right circumstances,’ Bashford commented.

Aneka looked at the sports bra she was holding. ‘Well, this was for support, which I don’t appear to need anymore. You could just about bounce bullets off it.’

‘Yeah,’ Monkey said, ‘you
really
don’t need it now.’ He appeared to consider the comment and then blushed. Aneka was rather pleased; maybe being viewed as a sex object was not how she wished to be perceived, but it was better than being viewed as a threat.

‘Thank you,’ Aneka said to him, and then floated across to the last of the racks and frowned. ‘This wasn’t ours…’ She opened a case and found herself looking at a bulky pistol. Without really thinking about it, she lifted the weapon out of its padded container. ‘I don’t recognise this at all, but… I seem to know how to use it.’ She looked around to see Bashford and Monkey with their hands on their pistols. She turned the gun around to show them the rear where there was an empty slot over the handgrip. ‘No power cell. It’s useless.’

‘That’s a blaster pistol of some sort,’ Bashford said. ‘It fires high energy electrons, probably. Like ours. It looks like it was designed for a human hand. Yours, perhaps.’

‘Why would they be providing weapons for me?’ She flipped open another case and found what looked like a dozen power cells for the gun in some sort of charger rig. The charge indicators on the cells suggested they were dead. A third case revealed a combat knife which she lifted out and twirled in her hand. ‘This feels heavier than it looks. Some sort of high-density material? Why?’

‘Maybe they wanted you to assassinate someone,’ Monkey suggested.

‘Then why not give me a laser rifle or something? Dalton was our sniper. He could put a bullet through a man’s eye at a thousand yards. I was good, but he’d have been the choice for assassination.’

‘We don’t know much about what the Xinti were doing on Earth before the war started,’ Ella said. ‘I doubt there was anyone there worth assassinating. Considering that they did such a good job building a natural looking body, Gillian and I think you were supposed to be an information gatherer. The weapons were probably just asset protection.’

Aneka frowned; it made some sense. She packed the weapons away in their cases. ‘They taught me how to use that pistol. I must have been conscious at least some of the time.’

‘No, there are techniques for implanting skills.’ Ella was suddenly behind her, placing a hand on her shoulder. ‘I don’t think you were going back to Earth to kill people. I think, with the body you have, you’d have done something to us by now.’

‘Emotive as Ella is,’ Bashford said dryly, ‘she has a point. If you know what that pistol can do, you know what these ones can do. Your computer should know, even if you don’t, that we would have a real problem stopping you if you went wild on us.’

Aneka raised an eyebrow. Unbidden, a tactical display appeared in her field of view indicating optimal attack strategies and the probability that she would sustain unacceptable damage initiating that attack. The probability was very low. ‘Thanks for trusting me with that. You’re right. You don’t stand a chance.’ She dismissed the display. ‘None of this makes sense. It’s like… like I wasn’t finished.’ She turned her head toward the door. ‘I think we should look in one of the central rooms.’

Ella frowned at her through her visor. ‘A memory?’

‘A feeling.’ She pushed off toward the door, using the walls to move around toward the front of the ship a few metres before she stopped, looking at a large, heavy door on the inner wall. ‘Here. Can we open this?’

It took three of them. Bashford and Monkey wedged pry-bars into the seam until Aneka could get her fingers into the gap and pull. The resistance was purely age, corrosion in the mechanism. The power holding the doors shut had failed long ago, but they still had a lot of mass and no lubrication. On the other hand, Aneka’s arms were like a couple of cranes shifting the weight and she discovered that her muscles did not tire, did not give up; they just kept applying pressure. After a half-minute of hard effort, the resistance gave and the doors jolted open leaving her spinning slowly head over heels as her momentum carried her into the room.

It appeared to be a laboratory of some sort, or an operating theatre. The centrepiece was an X-shaped table with clamps designed to hold a victim down on it. Machines which looked like torture equipment more than scientific instruments surrounded the table. Floating above it, obviously dead, was a body. Humanoid, badly desiccated, with long fingers, digitigrade, three-toed legs, and a bony skull, the eyes sunken to pits by years of dehydration.

Aneka drifted slowly toward the ceiling, her gaze on the table. She had seen this before. She knew what had happened there. She remembered…

Deep Space, May 30
^th
, 2011.

Awareness slowly permeated Aneka’s mind, followed rapidly by discomfort. She blinked and pulled her head up from where it was hanging on her neck, and found herself in Hell.

Small robots, about the size of a basketball, floated in the air around her. The room itself looked like something out of one of the science fiction films her brother was so fond of. And like a bad ‘50s B-Movie, she was strapped to an X-shaped frame in the middle of the room, stark naked. Maybe not a ‘50s movie, maybe a more recent spoof porn version of a B-Movie. Four long, mechanical, tentacle-like arms were arranged around the table, two ending in what Aneka thought were cameras; they were certainly looking down at her, examining her. The other two arms were considerably more worrying, despite the fact the cameras had sharp looking pincers arranged around them. One arm had a syringe on the end, the other a circular saw.

Light came from a couple of spotlights and a large, blue, glowing dome in the ceiling, but the robots seemed to have no trouble with the relatively dim lighting. They buzzed around her making noises which sounded like static every so often. It almost sounded like they were speaking to each other. Some sort of compressed vocal system, like the burst radio transmissions the military used to make detection harder.

She leaned back and saw the thing standing there. Mottled, dark grey skin, digitigrade legs with three-toed feet, long fingers, and a skull that had back-swept spikes and ridges, a long, pointed chin, no obvious lips, and dark eyes. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Aneka yelled at it. ‘Let me out of this thing! Where are the rest of my team?’ The figure turned away making another burst of sound. ‘Answer me, damn it!’ The only answer she got came in the form of a sharp pain as the syringe sank into her left thigh and began pumping something into her bloodstream. ‘What are you doing? Let me out of this…’ Her voice trailed off as the numbness started to spread through her lower body. ‘Please, what do you want?’ Whatever the drug was, it was fast acting. Her entire body was numb within seconds, but she could still move to some extent.

Leaning her head back, she found the figure standing over her, bending down to look at her face. ‘Please?’ she said, her voice soft, pleading, but without hope.

Then she heard the circular saw starting up. She could feel nothing aside from a little vibration as it starting cutting into her flesh, but she started screaming anyway.

January 19
^th
, 2012

She was pretty sure she should be dead, but she was awake and aware… and immobile. And she could hear voices around her. They sounded artificial, a metallic twang sounded with each voice as though she were hearing the sound through a slightly dodgy speaker.

‘Systems check shows all functions active.’

‘Voluntary systems activation in ten seconds.’

‘Check its bonds. We don’t want it moving about until the conditioning is complete.’

‘All anchor points locked.’

Aneka opened her eyes. She recognised the blue dome above her, the room, the camera arms sweeping over her. The other two arms were nowhere to be seen for which she was thankful, but she remembered the saw cutting into her stomach and new she could not have survived it, so how was she alive.

One of the figures she had seen last time floated closer. There were others there this time. She heard the static noise, but this time it resolved itself into a voice. ‘Your voluntary functions will be activating… now. Move your fingers.’ She felt her hands flex. ‘Excellent. Further motive system checks will be made following conditioning.’

‘Conditioning?’ Her voice sounded odd; she put it down to the angle her head was at and the effects of whatever drugs she had been given.

‘Conditioning, training, acclimatisation to your status.’

It was not really an answer. ‘Where are the rest of my team?’

‘Team? The other subjects. We required only one survey unit. The others were analysed and the waste material disposed of.’ The alien turned away, moving to a console set against the wall. ‘Your species is remarkably lacking in resilience. Relatively minor changes in conditions proved fatal to your weak structures. We have given you a more suitable shell to complete your mission.’

She lifted her head, looking down at her naked body. She was spread-eagled on the table, as before, and there seemed to be no difference… except that her breasts seemed firmer and a little more pointed than before. Her fringe fell forward and she saw white. Her hair was white! What was that, shock?

‘Your mind has been transplanted into a synthetic shell,’ the voice said. ‘We have mimicked your original body, though we made certain changes which we believe will make you more appealing to the others of your species. Analysis of your global network and media sources has indicated that sex is an important aspect of your society.’

Great, they’ve given me a boob job because they’ve been reading porn on the Internet. Wait…
‘What do you mean, “synthetic shell”?’

Apparently it was tired of answering questions. ‘You will be implanted back into your primitive society. You will observe, record, and provide insight. Periodically, one of our ships will return to collect the data you have stored. Your shell is capable of operating for extended periods in any conditions you might find yourself in. It is fully armoured and self-repairing. We expect long and effective service from you.’

Aneka considered this for a fraction of a second before expressing her opinion. ‘Fuck off.’

‘Begin the conditioning process.’

~~~

She was not sure how long the weird sounds and lights had been working on her. There had been a voice constantly droning on behind the noise and she was sure that it was supposed to be training her to do whatever these “xinti” wanted. She had used every trick she knew from classes on resisting interrogation to keep her mind from sinking into whatever state they wanted and she thought she had succeeded, but she was not sure until it all stopped and she heard the voices again.

‘It is resisting to a greater degree than projected. Why has the system been shut down?’