The Cold Steel Mind by Niall Teasdale Read Free Book Online Page A

she had backed down. He was probably right, of course, but if he got himself killed she was going to murder him.
    ‘We’re ready,’ Monkey said over the radio.
    ‘All our sensor systems are active and recording,’ Ella added. She was in the station control room with Gillian. Wallace and Cassandra, along with Drake and Shannon, were back on the Hyde. If they had to disconnect quickly and pull away, Drake had wanted the majority of people already aboard.
    ‘Aneka?’ Bashford’s voice asked her status.
    ‘My sensors are active and recording too.’
    ‘Close the connection,’ Bashford ordered. There was a pause and then…
    Aneka’s gyroscopic balance landed her smoothly on her feet, but she heard a chorus of expletives from the other people aboard the ship. ‘Gravity still works,’ she commented. Her eyes scanned the consoles which now had flickering patterns of characters moving over them. ‘Nothing much else seems to.’
    ‘I am detecting an internal wireless network,’ Al informed her. ‘However, no data is being transferred across it. Basic access point identification broadcasts and nothing else.’
    ‘We’re showing some radio transmissions from within the ship,’ Ella said, confirming Al’s findings, more or less. ‘Short bursts. Is something talking?’
    Xinti speech used a highly compressed, near-digital form which had been mistaken for radio static until Aneka had identified it. This was not Xinti however. ‘Just wireless base station transmissions,’ Aneka said. ‘According to Al anyway. Nothing else is saying anything and the display panels in here are showing random glyphs. I don’t recognise anything you’d call a proper word.’
    ‘All right,’ Bashford cut in. ‘We run a full sweep of the ship, establish there’s nothing here that’s going to murder us all, and then we can let our no doubt eager research team back aboard.’
    Aneka nodded and started for the door. A brief pulse of sound, not a word, just a signal, drew her attention to one of the consoles where something was pulsing slowly. Computer Online, firmware active, diagnostic systems offline, core intelligence offline. ‘It looks like the computer is up, but its mind isn’t working,’ she reported to the others.
    ‘Possibly for the best,’ Gillian replied. ‘We don’t want this one committing suicide on us.’
    Aneka nodded, even if they could not see her. ‘I’ll take the port side, Bash. You guys cover the starboard. Good for you?’
    ‘Given that you’re the combat android, yes.’
    ~~~
    ‘The computer system seems to be largely unresponsive,’ Gillian said as she stood in front of one of the consoles, prodding at the virtual keyboard it was displaying with no effect. ‘The memory core must be severely degraded.’
    ‘Maybe,’ Ella began and then stopped.
    ‘What, Ella?’ the Doctor prompted.
    ‘Aneka and Bash would think it was a bad idea.’
    ‘We might as well hear it,’ Aneka told her, wondering how bad an idea it was.
    ‘Well, maybe Al could connect through the wireless system and start some data recovery on the memory. Like he did with Aneka’s memory.’
    ‘I could,’ Al said to Aneka.
    ‘He could,’ Aneka said aloud, ‘but you’re right, that doesn’t sound amazingly safe.’
    Gillian looked at Bashford, standing beside the door with his carbine still cradled in his arms. ‘It’s up to Aneka and Al,’ he replied. ‘I don’t see how anything is going to progress unless you can recover the thing’s storage, but it’s Al that’s risking his, uh, life to do this. That said, if the system is that badly damaged, I doubt there are active security systems which would present a threat.’
    ‘I concur with Mister Bashford’s analysis,’ Al commented.
    Aneka considered the matter for what seemed like several minutes to her, but was likely a second to everyone else. ‘All right, but we take precautions. There’s that examination table in the lab. We strap me down to that first. If