Free Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart by Niall Teasdale Page B

Ella had to admit, he was good; his passionate defence of his noble ideals stalled on his face for barely a tenth of a second. ‘The only thing I can think of that makes me any different from anyone else is the stuff the AIs on Negral put in me. They didn’t want us catching anything, so they gave us some sort of nanomachine antibiotic…’
    ‘Oh, it’s much more than that,’ Corazon interjected, her eyes lighting up. ‘Your machines attack just about any microbial or viral agent that gets into your blood. We introduced mutated blood cells to some of them and they were shut down quickly and efficiently. You’re probably immune to cancer. We found evidence that they’ve been cleaning out deposits in your blood vessels. Gopi, they’re cleaning plaque off your teeth!’
    ‘Okay,’ Ella conceded, ‘they’re engineered, perfect little body cops and you’d like to study them. Why the subterfuge? This is exactly the kind of technology we were planning to disseminate through the Galactic University programme.’ She paused for a second as both Corazon and Nayland looked away. ‘It’s not just competitive advantage, is it? If these things can destroy a bacterium, they can destroy a cell. You’re creating bio-weapons. The rumours are true.’
    ‘Doesn’t really matter, does it?’ Corazon replied. ‘We’re all going to die.’
    ~~~
    Ella slipped onto the flight deck of the shuttle and settled into the co-pilot’s seat, leaning back into the slightly reclining position with a sigh. It was getting dark outside and she was hoping to get some sleep, but the last people she wanted to be near were the men and women who had drugged her into oblivion. Kottigan, sitting in the pilot’s seat, was not exactly on her favourite people list, but he had done nothing to harm her and had actually returned to the labs to pull her out.
    ‘Hope you don’t mind the company,’ she said, her voice low mainly because it felt like a good idea.
    ‘Huh,’ the grunt was half-laugh, about as much humour as he could manage. ‘I’ve had worse-looking people keep me company on guard duty.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    ‘Okay, a lot worse.’
    Ella chuckled. ‘It’s okay, I wasn’t fishing. Have you got a partner? Family?’
    ‘Not really. One of the reasons I took this job was to get away from my last partner.’ He glanced across at her. ‘It wasn’t an entirely amicable break-up. I swore off anything committed for a while. Haven’t done without, y’know? But there’s no one to miss me and no one I’ll miss. You’re with that woman they found, right? The one from Old Earth?’
    ‘I found her. Aneka.’ The thought that she might not see Aneka again surfaced and was immediately suppressed. ‘What do we know about the things that come out of the cocoons?’ she asked to change the subject.
    ‘Not a lot. Uh… They’re stronger than average. The lasers burn them, but they don’t seem to care. I saw one lose a hand and it just kept coming. I hit one in the chest, should’ve killed it, but it didn’t. The cold doesn’t seem to bother them. Several of them walked over from the Beta site in indoor clothes. They act more like animals than Humans, and they go crazy when they’re wounded. Their skin looks… old, kind of dull and slack, and they stink. You can smell them before you see them. Oh, they, uh, they eat…’
    ‘Us?’ That just sounded like it rounded out the whole package.
    ‘Yeah, but they’ll eat their own kind too. We nailed one of them, laser right in the face and it went down. Several of them stopped coming at us and just started tearing into the corpse.’
    ‘Okay. Lovely.’ Ella frowned, looking out at the gathering gloom. Her eyes automatically adjusted, brightening the darkness. There was no sign of anything moving out there. ‘So they need to eat. Do they sleep?’
    ‘No idea.’
    ‘So we don’t know whether we can go out at night… It’s a neat solution. Objectively, it’s a clever design for a