Read Online Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart by Niall Teasdale - Free Book Online Page A

we’ll need some test subjects.’
    Nayland nodded. ‘I’ll contact our usual supplier. It may take a few weeks, but we’ll get them.’
    ‘It’s easier in the stations outside the Rim, closer to the source.’
    Nayland laughed. ‘I know you’re impatient, Lisa, but science takes time.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Corazon said, ‘unfortunately.’
    FNf Delta Brigantia, 14.12.525 FSC.
    Aneka slipped into the gunnery chair on the flight deck with a grin. Technically any of the three operations positions could perform any role, but the one she was seated in was generally used by the gunnery officer and the displays were set up for that purpose.
    Prentice, seated in the pilot’s chair, glanced over at her. ‘You look like a woman on a mission.’
    ‘We’re heading back to New Earth,’ Aneka replied.
    ‘Uh-huh. Course is set, we went into warp…’
    ‘About an hour ago. I heard the drives kick in. I figured now that we’re up to spec, more or less, we could pick up the lessons again.’
    ‘What does Anderson say?’
    ‘She said it was okay if you were okay with it.’
    Prentice chuckled, leaned forward, and tapped some keys on her console. The displays in front of Aneka reconfigured themselves into a copy of the ones in front of Prentice. ‘Okay, what’s our current speed?’
    Aneka’s eyes flicked over the screens. ‘Point-four-nine light years per hour.’
    ‘Okay, so you remember the basics.’
    ‘Side effect of being basically a supercomputer. I remember everything.’
    ‘Huh.’ The pilot’s fingers flicked over her controls. ‘All right, switching over to simulation. I want you to drop us out of warp and then give me a two-G acceleration for nineteen seconds followed by a course correction of two degrees upward pitch, five degrees right yaw.’
    Aneka made a point of checking that a flashing ‘Simulation’ indicator was blinking away on one of her displays before reaching out and taking hold of the joysticks on the arms of her chair. ‘Leaving warp in five,’ she said.
    ~~~
    ‘How are the pilot lessons going?’ Anderson asked. ‘Prentice seems to be enjoying them.’
    Aneka smiled. ‘Yeah, I think she’s got kind of a sadistic streak. I’m enjoying it and I think I’m learning something. At least the basics. I doubt I could get a pilot’s licence…’
    ‘Don’t count on it. Our best pilot thinks she’ll have you up to qualification grade for the Navy by the time we get home.’ The captain shrugged. ‘Yeah, you’d need to do a load of procedural training, but I hear you’re good at that kind of thing.’
    ‘I’ll be happy if I can fly one of these things in an emergency. I’m all about being able to handle emergencies.’
    Anderson laughed. ‘I got the report through about those supposed Knights of the Void on Sapphira. You handled that pretty well. Five dead.’
    ‘Four, I let one of them go.’
    ‘I was counting the taxi.’
    ‘I didn’t kill the taxi.’
    ‘The taxi was pretty dead when you were finished.’
    ‘Well… yeah… but I didn’t kill the taxi.’
    ‘Touchy subject?’
    ‘No,’ Aneka said, waving away the argument, ‘of course not.’ After a second she added, ‘But I didn’t kill the taxi.’
    Anderson nodded. ‘Touchy subject.’
    Hayward Beta Research Facility, 15.12.525 FSC.
    Lisa Corazon watched the glickle as it gnawed on a large lump of Plastex. The things had to be kept in wire cages because they chewed their way out of the adanymax ones used for more or less everything else. The frown on Corazon’s face spoke volumes and the reason for it was that the glickle was still chewing on its brick.
    ‘It should be dead,’ she commented.
    The lab technician sitting beside her looked in at the glickle. ‘Yes, ma’am. This bug was engineered, right? Maybe they engineered it to work on a specific genome. Glickles aren’t even vaguely related to anything from Old Earth. Neither are the other things we’ve tried it on.’
    Corazon nodded. As far as their