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through the same sort of “interface” as sound usually did. Thinking about it, the in-vision displays she had been seeing were the same. It was as if the xinti engineers had gone out of their way to let her perceive her body as normal, with added extras.
    ‘Got that,’ Aneka replied. Her mouth sounded the words, but she supposed her computer relayed them through the radio direct. She decided to try not to think about it; it would probably give her a headache. Then she found herself thinking that she was probably not capable of having headaches anymore. Of course, if she could have orgasms, why not headaches? Give up while you’re ahead, Aneka. You’ll go all Blue Screen of Death again…
    The inside of her first alien ship was a little disappointing. Smooth walls, blackened in places by the plasma discharge which had doomed her to float in space for a millennium. The corridor on the inside, now without its floating body, was not a whole lot better. A tall, wide, curving corridor which seemed to encircle the whole ship. ‘Where they really this big, or did they just have inadequacy issues?’ she asked as they moved around toward the room she had been found in.
    ‘They built bodies for their needs, remember,’ Ella replied. ‘Some of them were pretty big.’
    ‘Their combat chassis were big,’ Monkey said. ‘Huge things, heavily armoured. They used weapons that would be tripod mounted if a human was using them, huge knives. Not something you’d want to meet.’
    Yes I would. Aneka glanced back toward the younger man. Except that she had to stop thinking of him like that. He was almost forty, which was still young for the lifespan of the average human… the average jenlay now, but ten years older than Aneka had been. She had been horrified to discover that Ella was seventy-two; she looked far less than thirty.
    She turned back to discover that they had arrived at the storage room. ‘We thought you could start by telling us what all of this stuff is,’ Ella said. ‘It seems to be yours.’
    Aneka floated into the room. The first thing she saw were the racks, and the equipment on them. It did, indeed, seem to be the stuff her team and the hostages had had with them when they were taken. She was about to start going through it when she noticed the machine at one end of the room. A huge, tank-like mechanism, the transparent doorway now open to vacuum since they had had to cut her free of it. She could see restraints of some sort within, designed to hold a humanoid body upright within the tube.
    ‘That’s where we found you,’ Ella confirmed. ‘It’s a nano-stasis rig. They’re more stable than cryogenic systems, use less power.’
    ‘Strung up like a pervert’s slab of meat in a freezer,’ Aneka replied.
    ‘We’ve no evidence that xinti showed any interest in cross-species sex. Or in sex.’
    ‘Huh.’ Aneka returned her attention to the shelves. ‘For someone uninterested in sex, they sure went to a lot of trouble to make sure I could have it.’ Her hands drifted over clothing. All of it had been carefully folded, but it had been cut off the bodies it had belonged to. ‘Combat fatigues, body armour, a pair of jeans. One of the hostages must’ve been wearing those.’ She turned to another rack. ‘Weapons.’ She glanced around at Bashford. ‘After a thousand years in space I doubt the propellant works, so you’ve no need to worry. There should be three MP-fives, two rifles, a grenade launcher. Might be wise to be careful with that and the ammo. The explosives could be unstable. It’s basically a nitrocellulose powder.’
    Bashford could be seen blanching, even through his helmet faceplate. ‘Get a couple of the armoured containers over, Monkey,’ he said. The younger facilitator nodded, the action almost lost in his helmet.
    ‘Field radios,’ Aneka went on. ‘These…’ She paused over a tray containing a couple of wallets, a few bits of jewellery, some ID badges. ‘Personal effects.’