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Reaching in she lifted out a gold ring. ‘Quinn’s wedding ring. I went to the wedding. He’d been married for six months when… Nice girl. He met her on leave in New York and married her three months later. Kind of fast, but in our line of work you didn’t get to meet people that much. People you’d give the time of day to anyway.’ She placed the ring back in the tray where it wobbled in the zero gravity, and then pulled out a wallet, unfolding it and taking out a desiccated dollar bill. It crumbled in her fingers. ‘I guess dollars aren’t exactly legal currency anymore anyway.’ It was all kind of depressing.
    ‘You still used physical money?’ Ella asked.
    ‘A lot of transactions were electronic, but folding money was more useful in a place like Iraq. Or for buying a hot dog on a street corner for that matter.’ She spotted another tray and carefully lifted something out of it. ‘The bra I was wearing when they grabbed me. Oh, and my knickers. There doesn’t seem much call for underwear now either.’
    ‘Of course there is,’ Ella replied, giggling though it came over a little funny over the radio. ‘On planets anyway.’
    ‘People still have a taste for flimsy undergarments under the right circumstances,’ Bashford commented.
    Aneka looked at the sports bra she was holding. ‘Well, this was for support, which I don’t appear to need anymore. You could just about bounce bullets off it.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Monkey said, ‘you really don’t need it now.’ He appeared to consider the comment and then blushed. Aneka was rather pleased; maybe being viewed as a sex object was not how she wished to be perceived, but it was better than being viewed as a threat.
    ‘Thank you,’ Aneka said to him, and then floated across to the last of the racks and frowned. ‘This wasn’t ours…’ She opened a case and found herself looking at a bulky pistol. Without really thinking about it, she lifted the weapon out of its padded container. ‘I don’t recognise this at all, but… I seem to know how to use it.’ She looked around to see Bashford and Monkey with their hands on their pistols. She turned the gun around to show them the rear where there was an empty slot over the handgrip. ‘No power cell. It’s useless.’
    ‘That’s a blaster pistol of some sort,’ Bashford said. ‘It fires high energy electrons, probably. Like ours. It looks like it was designed for a human hand. Yours, perhaps.’
    ‘Why would they be providing weapons for me?’ She flipped open another case and found what looked like a dozen power cells for the gun in some sort of charger rig. The charge indicators on the cells suggested they were dead. A third case revealed a combat knife which she lifted out and twirled in her hand. ‘This feels heavier than it looks. Some sort of high-density material? Why?’
    ‘Maybe they wanted you to assassinate someone,’ Monkey suggested.
    ‘Then why not give me a laser rifle or something? Dalton was our sniper. He could put a bullet through a man’s eye at a thousand yards. I was good, but he’d have been the choice for assassination.’
    ‘We don’t know much about what the Xinti were doing on Earth before the war started,’ Ella said. ‘I doubt there was anyone there worth assassinating. Considering that they did such a good job building a natural looking body, Gillian and I think you were supposed to be an information gatherer. The weapons were probably just asset protection.’
    Aneka frowned; it made some sense. She packed the weapons away in their cases. ‘They taught me how to use that pistol. I must have been conscious at least some of the time.’
    ‘No, there are techniques for implanting skills.’ Ella was suddenly behind her, placing a hand on her shoulder. ‘I don’t think you were going back to Earth to kill people. I think, with the body you have, you’d have done something to us by now.’
    ‘Emotive as Ella is,’ Bashford said dryly, ‘she has a point. If you