Free The Cold Steel Mind by Niall Teasdale

met one. First time for everything.’
    ‘Huh. I’ll tell Shannon as soon as she gets back up here. It is okay she left me watching the cockpit, right?’
    ‘On orbital ascent? Yeah. Those things can do that on half an engine with their eyes closed. I’d chew her out if it was during docking.’
    Aneka laughed. ‘She’d probably enjoy that.’
    ‘Not that kind of chewing out. See you soon. Drake out.’
    Aneka shut off the channel at her end and looked back out at the star-sprinkled blackness. Odd electromagnetic effects; what did that mean?
    ‘Something we won’t know until we return to the station,’ Al commented.
    ‘Unless this sensor sweep shows something up?’
    ‘If they believe the anomalies have stopped, I suspect not.’
    ~~~
    Shannon’s hands moved over sliders and pads as she manipulated the shuttle’s attitude thrusters, bringing the small vessel past the Agroa Gar in a loop which kept the nose and primary sensor array pointed at the Xinti vessel at all times. Aneka was impressed with the coordination involved; there seemed to be little connecting the woman’s actions with the ship’s movements, and skilled operation of a non-intuitive system was always impressive.
    Behind Aneka’s right shoulder, Ella was sat at the control station for the sensor suite and she was pretty busy as well, though it was mostly to do with reading and interpreting incoming baseline data, and then setting the sensors to perform more detailed scans where she spotted anything odd. She was not spotting anything odd.
    ‘And that is where you spent much of the last thousand years?’ Tosimna’s voice behind them made everyone jump except for Aneka; superior hearing was a significant benefit of the whole robot body package.
    ‘More like twelve hundred,’ Aneka corrected, ‘but who’s counting. It wasn’t like I was aware of the time passing.’
    ‘Yes… Nanostasis, I believe. A lost technology. There have been experiments conducted in recreating it, but none of them… ended well.’
    Aneka gave the Torem a glance. ‘I don’t actually understand the difference between that and the cold sleep they use on the Hyde.’
    ‘Not my speciality,’ Tosimna replied, ‘but my understanding is that synthetic nanomachines invade the body’s cells constructing… um, I suppose the best term would be scaffolding which locks the entirety of the system into metastasis. Nothing changes, you don’t age or decay. In some ways, you stop being a biological object. Or perhaps you become a snapshot of a biological entity. Without the proper coding to reverse the state…’
    ‘It doesn’t end well?’ Aneka suggested.
    ‘No. That said, while freezer deaths are rare, when they happen they are generally very unpleasant. With nanostasis you just don’t return to life.’
    ‘Huh. Getting anything, Ella?’
    ‘No, not really. The electronics aboard the Agroa Gar seem to be more active than they were a day or so ago…’
    ‘The data correction algorithms are likely to become more active as they work through greater numbers of index sectors and find large chunks of file,’ Al commented inside Aneka’s head.
    ‘…but there’s nothing particularly anomalous showing up,’ Ella finished. ‘I’ll send the data through to the station anyway. You may as well take us in, Shannon.’
    Giving a curt nod, Shannon shifted her hands over the controls and the shuttle reoriented itself towards the underside of the Garnet Hyde. ‘Shuttle to station, we’re coming in. Nothing to report.’
    Drake’s voice sounded over the speakers. ‘Probably just some transient interference. Maybe the military were running some test or other.’
    ‘Or someone on a training course screwed up,’ Shannon agreed.
    Aneka frowned. ‘I thought they did hostile environment training here.’
    ‘They do,’ Drake replied.
    ‘Should a trainee have access to something that causes weird effects in orbit on a survival course?’
    ‘Well, if we have no joy