Free The Shadow of Cincinnatus by Christopher Nuttall Page B

performance, but they would be too distracted to look for anything else. Or so she hoped. Sex had been used to hide misdeeds – other misdeeds – for countless years. And besides, the governor had played a large role in dulling the security forces on Athena. He’d certainly had more than enough reason to make sure they were harmless, as well as incompetent.
    Clicking a switch, she sent the message to the upload node, then headed for the shower. It wouldn’t be long before someone worked out that she was supposed to be working at the palace, then called to ask her some pointed questions. She didn’t want to be discovered naked, not after the rumors about the Grand Senate’s latest set of enforcers. The last thing anyone wanted was to draw their attention to Athena.
    But she had a feeling, she knew as she stepped into the shower, that it was already too late.
    * * *
    Mike Higgins had wanted to be an engineer from a very early age. He had been mocked by his extended family, which had served in the Federation Navy since there had been a Federation Navy, but he’d always been more fascinated with machines than people. Machines were predicable and understandable, even the ones built by aliens. Indeed, he’d always considered it a shame that there were so few examples of genuine alien technology in the Federation. It was often more interesting than purely human tech.
    The alien ship was remarkable, he decided, as his team followed him through the airlock and into the craft. And yet, judging from some of the opened panels, she had been abandoned in a hurry. He peered into one of the panels, then frowned, recognizing some of the circuits. Reaching for his handheld sensor, he swept the panel and felt his frown grow deeper as he examined the results. It was impossible to be sure, but it looked like aliens had captured some Federation technology, then reverse-engineered the systems and put it into production. There were enough oddities about the alien craft to confirm that human minds hadn’t built it.
    “Curious,” he mused. It was a shame he couldn’t spend hours exploring the craft, but he wouldn’t have the time. The entire craft would have to be disassembled, piece by piece, and for that it would need to be moved to a shipyard. He seriously considered putting in a request for a transfer, even though he knew it might reflect badly on his career. But alien technology was more interesting than even the latest FTL drives from Earth. “Very curious.”
    He paused, then looked around the cabin. It was clear to his gaze that the aliens were humanoid – and, perhaps, not that different from humans. The consoles were in the right positions for humans, rather than one of the child-sized races humanity had effectively enslaved, while the lighting was quite close to human-norm. Indeed, the whole ship smacked of human-alien collaboration . What the hell was it doing here?
    “I’m going to try to get a live feed from the ship’s data recorders,” he said, keying his radio. The Federation insisted on working recorders into every hull, but the aliens might have different ideas. “I want to see where this ship has been.”
    It only took a few minutes to connect the ship to one of his datacores, not entirely to his surprise. Whoever had designed the ship had wanted it to interact with human technology. It suggested that they weren’t dealing with a self-spacefaring race, but one that had managed to get a leg-up from human renegades. Might the Outsiders have given the aliens human technology? And what else might they have built?
    The datacore bleeped an alert, then deactivated itself. Mike scowled, and then checked the readings. It was clear, now, that the ship’s databases had been completely wiped. Even the most thorough sweep of the datacores would reveal nothing. The ship had been abandoned because it was useless, without its computers. But why hadn’t they sought to replace the datacores or simply scuttle her? It was a