Free Steel Beneath the Skin by Niall Teasdale Page A

problem. It popped up an application which let her keep track of multiple simultaneous clocks and calendars.
    Her computer was becoming more “helpful” as time went on. It did not seem to be sentient, as such, but there was certainly some degree of intelligence in there and it was showing itself more as she got more confident with her new body and the world she had found herself in.
    And she was becoming more confident. Her nights were spent in a personalised, virtual dream world where she could interact with characters who taught her how society functioned. She had learned how to operate the common computer interfaces, been to parties and listened to the things people chatted about, attended lectures on the history of the Federation, and had more wet dreams than she thought was entirely proper.
    She had been through the various training courses, initially with Bashford, then Monkey, and then on her own, though she was currently sharing the ship with Patton and Ella. Ella had got up four days ago to sit around looking nervous while Aneka did the exams. She had said someone had to since Aneka looked sublimely confident about it. Which was quite true. Monkey had told her that the questions were basically information recall and some problem solving. Well her computer-augmented memory was beyond perfect, she had discovered, and the kind of problem solving she was being asked for was little different than planning the kind of military ops she had done a hundred times before.
    The official report on her test scores was now waiting on confirmation by Drake and Bashford, and today was the day they would be emerging from the sleep pods along with Monkey and Gilroy. And assuming she had done as well as she thought, Aneka would become a resource for the preparations for planet-fall.
    Aside from providing stress relief during the exams, though considering she seemed to be stressing more than Aneka was, perhaps it was the other way around, Ella had given her a bit of a briefing on their destination. Alpha Mensae IV was a relatively warm planet on the edge of known space; known space for now, but actually quite close to Old Earth, or where they thought Old Earth was. Heavy, but small, it had a high mineral content in its crust which seemed to be why some early human colony had been sited there and rediscovered by a deep survey mission three years earlier. Now they were going out to look at it since it might shed considerable light on early human activity in space.
    ‘So we’re going to go look at some ancient human miners?’ Aneka had asked.
    ‘After a thousand years in a warm environment, I doubt there’ll be much left of the miners,’ Ella had replied.
    ‘I’d have thought there wouldn’t be much left of anything.’
    ‘There are ruins. The building materials we’re talking about don’t decay. Pretty much ever.’
    The three women walked down to the hibernation room together to wake everyone else up. With Aneka’s exams finished, they had gravitated into a threesome which Aneka had actually enjoyed; maybe Patton had been right about it needing the right people. Whatever, they had felt a little more like companions who should go together to see the others through the revival process. Aneka had seen three people come out of cold sleep now and she knew it was not exactly a pleasant process. You woke up cold and usually a bit nauseous, generally hungry and very thirsty.
    ‘I’m too old to be doing this,’ Gilroy groaned as she sat up and looked around at the others. She was the last one conscious and the others were all waiting for her to come around so that they could go find something to eat. Each was holding a plastic bottle of isotonic fluid, most of them had gone through half of it already. Patton handed Gilroy a bottle and she yanked off the sealed top and drained it in one go.
    ‘No you aren’t,’ Bashford replied. ‘You’ve been saying that for thirty years that I know of. Come on, we’ll get some food in us