Read Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart for Free Online

for Sapphira Three. Prepare the ship for reception.’
    It had been an ‘all hands’ broadcast, but Aneka had nothing to do. She lay back on her bed and relaxed. Beside her, Grant was looking restless. ‘You’re still on official sick leave,’ Aneka pointed out. ‘The others can handle it.’
    ‘Huh. Hopefully I can get some bone regeneration done while the ship’s being repaired.’
    ‘If you do, you’ll have to go back to sleeping in the bunkrooms.’
    Grant laughed. ‘No one’s going to believe I was in here this long and we never fucked.’
    ‘Alison would throw me out an airlock if I hurt your wrist. How long d’you think the repairs will take?’
    He shrugged. ‘Five days? Give or take. I’m a gunnery tech, not an engineer. It’ll take a proper dry dock to repair that forward turret so we won’t be handling that here. You’re pretty keen to get back to that redhead of yours.’
    ‘Yeah. Ella… She liked me as soon as she saw me. Knowing what I was didn’t bother her at all. She’s believed in me even when I doubted myself and she’s got this smile… It’s like someone lets the sun into the room when she smiles.’
    ‘Sounds like a really beautiful woman.’
    ‘Oh yes. She certainly is beautiful, inside and out.’
    Hayward Alpha Research Facility.
    ‘Fourth of June, Twenty-one-oh-three. Subject Twelve was infected with culture Two-One-Nine-B at oh-nine-twenty-six. Immediate signs of discomfort. Skin ulcers appeared after fifteen minutes, thirty-two seconds accompanied by extreme pain. Convulsions followed at seventeen minutes. Death occurred thirty-six seconds later.’
    There was no sign of a smile on Ella’s face as she listened to the recording. She had been going through them for four hours and so far she had discovered a litany of horrifying deaths. It had started with rodents, moved on to monkeys of some description, and now it was people. Whatever this mysterious ‘Tilton’ facility was that the Hayward team had found, it was apparently conducting bio-weapon research. Subject Twelve was only identified as a number; she knew nothing more about him or her, but whoever it had been they had died what sounded like a horrible, painful death so that more death could be inflicted on others.
    Finishing the transcription, Ella got up from her seat in the sterile, white lab she had been given to work in. She needed to eat. She was not hungry, exactly, but she knew her blood sugar was getting low. Her bio-monitor was telling her that, the readout projected into her vision field.
    There was one of Kottigan’s people outside the lab door ready to escort her back up to ground level. Her clearance allowed her in and out of the lab, but they still insisted on keeping tabs on her when she moved around down there. It was starting to make her feel paranoid, and they were all lousy conversationalists.
    Nayland found her as she was sitting down in the canteen with some fruit and black coffee into which she had put too much sugar. He smiled at her, an expression she did not feel like returning. ‘How’s the transcription going?’
    ‘I’ve done maybe half the audio notes,’ Ella replied. ‘Honestly I’m dreading what I’m going to find in the later ones.’
    ‘How so?’
    ‘They were doing bio-weapon research, Alec. They were infecting Jenlay, well they were Humans back then, but living people. They were infecting them with incredibly virulent diseases and watching them die.’
    Nayland nodded. ‘We got that from the written reports. That’s why it’s so important that we get this researched and vaccines made. Some of the viral material we found is still viable. Can you imagine what terrorists could do with this?’
    Ella winced and forced herself to eat. The fruit tasted of bile. ‘I guess. When you put it like that.’
    ‘Exactly. Beyond that, studying the epidemiology of these diseases could help us improve future genetic treatments. Jenlay are resistant to a lot of diseases, true, but