Read Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart for Free Online Page B

woman with shoulder-length, blonde hair and a trim figure. She wore a lab coat like Nayland’s, but complemented it with a sheer blouse and a narrow, fairly short skirt. ‘The bio-scans indicate the presence of some form of foreign material in her system. Nanoscale foreign material. Inorganic.’
    Nayland nodded. ‘Find a reason to get a blood sample. Fake a minor outbreak or something.’
    ‘I’ll arrange something,’ Corazon said, turning on her heel. ‘How much of a hurry are we in?’
    ‘She’s working through the audio files fast. I think she’ll slow down when she hits the videos. We have a couple of days.’
    Arlyn, Sapphira, 9.12.525 FSC.
    Aneka watched her diagnostics scroll past on the inside of her eyelids. Everything was, as usual, optimal. Then she opened her eyes and looked out at the bright skies of Sapphira through the huge picture window of the room she had been given in the resort city of Arlyn.
    Sapphira was a world of two sides. On one there was Arbonatura, a fairly large continent full of farmers. They did not have a particularly stunning lifestyle; they lived out on a world in the Federal Rim and made a living by making food that no one in the core really wanted. On the other side of the world was Sapphira Vista, and it might have been on a different planet. No one from Arbonatura wanted to work there so all the staff at the numerous resorts were imported from other worlds on fixed-term contracts. Almost all of the tourists were from the core: rich, spoiled, and hedonistic. The Rim Worlders who went there were generally richer and even more spoiled. Aneka had arrived in Arlyn the night before and already she wanted to leave.
    Whatever, she had an appointment to see Representative Andrea Vaughn in an hour. She slipped out of bed and headed for the, extremely sumptuous, shower. Meeting Vaughn was, undoubtedly, going to be as much fun as a root canal and she wanted to be feeling fresh and happy before she started. It was unlikely she would be feeling the same way afterwards.
    ‘I’m picking up a range of radio wavelength and high frequency light signals,’ Al said as she stepped into the bathroom. ‘They correspond to patterns used in medical scanning equipment.’
    Turning on her heel as though she had forgotten something, Aneka went back into the bedroom, found a small device in her bag, activated it, and carried it through into the bathroom with her before starting the shower.
    ‘Think they got anything?’ she asked silently.
    ‘I doubt it. The jammer is operating quite well; they won’t get anything now either.’
    ‘So the question would be, who bugged my bathroom with a med-scanner?’
    ‘I could make a list?’
    ‘I figure we’ll just wait for someone else to try something and narrow it down that way.’ She paused. ‘Didn’t Vaughn have something to do with Hayward Pharmaceuticals here?’
    ‘That was supposition. She is, however, a regional Representative and her position holds a responsibility to the businesses here.’
    ‘And the pay is probably better if she does nice things for the big medical corporation.’
    ‘Also true.’
    ~~~
    Andrea Vaughn was a true citizen of the Federation. Her idea of a meeting dress was short enough and tight enough that Aneka would have found herself pulling the hem down every two minutes. It was also very low cut which showed off her expansive cleavage. Her long, dark-blonde hair hung around her shoulders in a manner designed to look casual while she had spent an hour getting it just right. The thing that told you most that she was from the core worlds was that she did not adjust her skirt at all. Not even when she sat down opposite Aneka and casually crossed her legs.
    ‘There has been a lot of confusion in the system recently,’ Vaughn said. The pleasantries had been shortened since they had met before. ‘There are a number of rumours, increased military activity. Of course, we heard the news from New Earth about this… Negral is