The Cold Steel Mind (4 page)

‘It’s a bio-plastic,’ Ella said, her eyes on a scanner she was holding, a chem-sniffer. ‘Or it was. It’s dead now. There’s no evidence of biological activity.’

‘We should get a sample of it,’ Gillian replied. ‘It can be checked in the materials science lab, though I doubt it’s any different from the plastics they normally used.’ She glanced around at Aneka, who was busy removing a cutting tool from her belt. ‘Do you remember this room?’

‘No, they held me in the one nearer the bow.’ Rather than use a plasma torch on plastic, Aneka took a sonic knife to the screen. There was nothing actually sonic about it, but the blade’s extremely rapid vibration produced a high-pitched whine which had given it the name. It made short work of the degraded material. ‘Well,’ she added as the blade went to work, ‘if they did put me in here at any time I don’t remember it.’

‘You
were
their star subject,’ Ella pointed out. ‘Maybe they treated you to special accommodation.’

‘Huh, right.’ A section of the screen came free and she looked at it, turning it in her hand so that she could record a full-spectrum view of the material. It had an odd, semi-crystalline quality to it; the light falling on the cut edge refracted to give a shimmer of multiple colours. ‘There’s some sample bags in my backpack. Could you get one, Ella?’ She was wearing a short, Plastex jacket which had a hard-shell pack mounted on the back. Ella popped it open and retrieved one of the bags, and placed the bagged sample back in the pack.

‘There’s nothing much to see here,’ Gillian said. ‘We may as well move on.’

The next room along that side was, apparently, a cabin. The Xinti had given up on their original bodies, but they still had need of a physical form, and this was where they had spent their off-hours. From the look of the room they had not really had much in the way of time off. There were two double bunks, roughly Human sized though they would have been a little short for Aneka, and very little else. There seemed to be no entertainment systems, or even computers. There was one chair set in front of a small, bare table. No photographs, nothing personal. To Aneka it looked as though the race had given up on the physical world as an expression of their personality.

‘It’s so… impersonal,’ she commented as she allowed her eyes to take in the environment.

‘We believe that they spent much of their time in what amounts to computer servers,’ Gillian said. ‘They employed bodies when they needed to, but when they didn’t need them they would live in a virtual environment.’

‘It’s probable that their rather amoral experiments were the result,’ Ella went on. ‘They didn’t see physical bodies as important, so experimenting on living things was just something they did to further their research.’

As one of their experimental subjects Aneka had a few choice words concerning that, but she chose to say nothing. Instead she said, ‘No computers or entertainment systems because they could connect to the ship’s network any time they wished.’

Gillian gave a nod. ‘Even their organic bodies had an electronic brain similar to the one you reside in. The ones we’ve examined had networking systems with the bandwidth for full-sensorium transmission.’

‘As do we,’ Al put in.

‘Huh,’ Aneka responded silently. ‘You’ve been quiet.’

‘I had nothing to say. However, I have not, as a matter of fact. I have been employing our high-bandwidth networking to talk to Cassandra.’

‘We believe,’ Gillian went on, unaware of Aneka’s internal conversation, ‘that they used physical connections in situations where higher bandwidths were required, such as on the flight deck.’

‘Because wireless networks suffer from frequency conflicts more than a hard connection,’ Aneka said. She was still a little surprised at the speed her new brain could process information. Having two conversations at once was easy now.

‘Doctor Wallace is drooling over the warp core,’ Al said. ‘It seems to be entirely intact and of a far more advanced design than anything any of the current races have.’

‘That’s right, Aneka,’ Gillian said, sounding a little surprised. ‘You’ve grasped the concepts of our networking technologies?’

‘Basic computer networking infrastructure was part of my facilitator training.’ Something about what Al had said was nagging at Aneka and she could not quite put her finger on it. ‘Well,’ she said to Al, ‘don’t distract Cassandra, if that’s possible. Otherwise, enjoy your chat.’

‘Cassandra is as capable of multi-tasking as you are.’

‘Of course she is.’ Aloud she added, ‘Anything you want for the labs, or shall we go on?’

They moved on to the medical bay. Aneka slipped her jacket off, popped open her backpack, and the mundane, but important, process of recording and packing dozens of bottles and other containers began. None of them looked like the contents had survived the long wait in the vacuum, but there was possibly residue to analyse and Gillian was determined that they should miss absolutely nothing.

There were a number of instruments to be catalogued as well: injectors, scanners, various things which appeared to be for parting something to allow someone to look inside, as well as more mundane devices like tweezers. The clever, high-tech, bit of mundaneness was the tube-shaped device that Ella stated was a laser scalpel. Aside from that there was a medical bench with an array of manipulator arms around it. It all looked incredibly complex.

‘If the Xinti didn’t think much about bodies, why all the medical paraphernalia?’ Aneka asked.

‘I doubt they could replace them outside one of their stations or worlds,’ Gillian replied. ‘If they died out here, they were dead.’

‘Couldn’t they just… restore a backup?’

Gillian had obviously considered this. ‘Unless they had some form of moral qualm about that, yes. However, all the experience they had gained on the mission would be lost. Hence good medical facilities.’

‘I think Doctor Wallace is going to want to see this table,’ Ella said. ‘I think this is like the scrapped field medic robots we’ve found on old battlefields, but this is intact.’ She glanced back at Aneka. ‘They could perform even very delicate operations in battlefield conditions. They used nanofibre probes to get into the body without causing excessive tissue damage.’

‘They really had technology far in advance of what you have even now, didn’t they?’

‘Some of what they could do was… magic to us.’

‘None of this is magic,’ Aneka said, ‘just really, really advanced.’

‘I think Doctor Wallace might disagree when he works out what that warp core can do,’ Al said.

~~~

‘It’s not possible,’ Wallace said as they sat around eating their evening meal. ‘That drive is not possible.’

‘Told you so.’ Al sounded a little smug.

‘What’s the problem, Abraham?’ Gillian asked. She was grinning; her friend’s perplexity amused her.

‘It’s a binary core,’ Wallace explained. ‘All our warp engines have a single core.’ He glanced at Aneka and apparently felt that a more basic explanation was required; he was not entirely wrong. ‘The warp core produces a, well, a warping of space-time. Essentially it foreshortens space in front of the ship and extends it behind. This allows the vessel to exceed the speed of light while not actually breaking the rule that nothing can travel faster than light. Even our largest engines have a single core system, generating a single warp field, and this limits the efficiency of the drive.’

‘Okay,’ Aneka said, since he had directed most of the last part at her. ‘This one has two cores which somehow makes it more efficient.’

‘Exactly. One generator pulls, the other pushes, if you will. Actually, from the power feeds it’s not really more efficient, but the resulting drive is half the size of an equivalent one of ours. More bang for the tonnage. But the mathematics simply does not exist to handle synchronising the two fields. Get that wrong and you end up with the two halves of your ship a few parsecs apart.’

‘Something to be avoided then?’

Wallace looked at her, blinking, and then burst out laughing. ‘Thank you for putting my problems into perspective, Aneka. We have managed without such drives for the last thousand years or so, and the search for the principles behind this one could keep the next generation busy.’

Aneka frowned, the thought which had surfaced and then hid earlier finally sneaking out from wherever it had concealed itself. ‘Yeah, a thousand years… Stop me when I get something wrong. A few years after I was taken a Xinti ship crash lands on Old Earth. The Humans of that time were able to salvage enough of the warp drive to understand how it worked and build their own.’

‘The mathematics behind a normal warp engine are complex,’ Wallace said, ‘even what one might describe as “esoteric,” but there is nothing that could not have been understood in your time given what I know of the technology.’ He looked at Gillian for confirmation.

‘Agreed. We even have a few examples of scientific papers written back then, and we know of a couple of scientists during that period who worked in this kind of area. Laplace, Einstein, Chandrasekhar, Rosen, Hawking… Though the latter may have been an early android.’ Aneka giggled and Gillian winced. ‘That’s not right, I take it?’

‘Stephen Hawking had a degenerative nerve disease and a brilliant mind. When his speech decayed to the point where he was indecipherable, someone built a computer with a voice synthesiser in it. He was a genius, but he was also something of an icon, like Einstein was before him, I guess. Except Einstein never got to guest star on
Star Trek
or
The Simpsons
.’

‘I have a T-shirt with Einstein on it,’ Wallace commented.

‘As do I,’ Cassandra added. ‘Doctor Wallace bought it for me. It is considerably shorter than his, however.’

Wallace coughed. ‘Do go on, Aneka.’

‘Right… So this ship that crashed on Old Earth was, what? Would you say it was a first-generation warp ship?’

‘I suppose we’ll need to start calling them something like that, yes.’

‘And it crashed after I was taken off Earth by something with a second-generation engine?’

‘Apparently, yes.’

‘Oh,’ Gillian said, getting it a fraction of a second before the others.

‘Yeah,’ Aneka said, filling in the silence. ‘So if the Xinti had been using these second-generation drives to get to Earth, why did a first-generation one crash?’ No one seemed willing to answer so Aneka said it. ‘Because we would never have understood one of their current model engines.’

‘The Herosians got warp technology from a crashed ship,’ Ella commented. ‘Since the structure is almost identical to ours we’ve always assumed that was Xinti.’

‘Are we saying,’ Drake said into the next silence, ‘that the Xinti crashed those ships on purpose? They
gave
warp engines to the Herosians and the Jenlay, well, the Humans back then?’

‘There was nothing in the historical databases the Xinti robots gave us,’ Gillian said, but she was not sounding convinced.

‘Well, I’m saying it,’ Aneka stated flatly. ‘It makes sense of me. Part of an observation project leading to pushing the new race out into space.’

‘But you never arrived and they went ahead anyway.’

‘Yeah, that really worked out for them, didn’t it?’

7.8.524 FSC.

Aneka pushed her way through from the Agroa Gar side of the station into the central core and was a little surprised to see Delta hanging around in the corridor. Everyone else was back in the Hyde getting ready for the evening meal and there she was, holding back for some reason.

‘Hey, Delta, something up?’

The girl started, not an easy feat in zero gravity. ‘Oh, Aneka… No, nothing, I was just… I stayed back to check…’ Her face scrunched up into a grimace. ‘No, that was just an excuse. Look, I think I’m going to ask to be let out of my contract.’

Blinking, Aneka pulled herself closer and looked the auburn-haired girl in her green eyes. ‘Why?’

‘Well, I feel like kind of a fifth wheel here. Both Bash and Monkey have more experience than I do. You’re stronger. I was brought on for my muscles…’

‘And your robotics skills.’

‘Haven’t even used those. And… I don’t think Monkey likes me.’

Monkey liked her. Monkey thought she was so hot he would melt. Apparently everyone knew this except for Delta. ‘Why would you think that? Has he said something?’

‘No! Exactly the opposite. He hardly ever talks to me when we’re alone aside from, “Could you pass the wire cutters?” I see him looking at me sometimes and he always looks away quickly. My dad always got red around the face when he was angry and that’s the way Monkey looks when I catch him watching me…’

Aneka reached out and put a hand on Delta’s arm. ‘My God, girl, stop. Drahain really screwed your perceptions of males, didn’t it?’

‘I… What?’

‘Okay, first of all, Monkey gets really shy around women he finds attractive. He was the same with me when he first met me, and that was knowing I wasn’t even a Jenlay.’

‘He… does?’

‘And men who get caught looking at women tend to
blush.
It’s generally because they’re imagining one or more sexual positions, maybe something more exotic involving honey and a lot of licking.’

Delta was pretty when she blushed. ‘I’d imagine that
she
is now imagining something coated in honey,’ Al commented. Aneka tried not to laugh.

‘What I’d suggest,’ Aneka said, ‘is that you put some sexy clothes on after dinner and let him know you’re interested. You are interested, right? You’ve looked like you were interested since I met you.’

‘I… Well, yes, he’s nice and not pushy like a lot of the men…’ Her eyes widened in horror. ‘I don’t
have
anything sexy, Aneka. “Sexy” is not a word to describe typical fashion where I come from.’

Heaving a sigh, Aneka considered some options. Delta throwing herself at Monkey was probably out; she did not have the experience, obviously, and it would likely scare him more than arouse him. ‘Okay, you go get food. I’ll go to the fabricator and get something made for you. I’ll get it to your cabin. You just have to wear it and promise not to chicken out.’