Aneka Jansen 7: Hope by Niall Teasdale Page B

parthenogenesis? You’d all be clones of your mothers.’
    ‘Minor genetic mods to the gametes and you get variations. It was never a problem. It worked, and we had a great society. There were problems. No such thing as a perfect society, of course, so there were bound to be problems. And then the Pinnacle turned up. It was about forty years ago, they had started expanding in a pretty measured manner and no one had really noticed. They arrived, declared Arcadia to be part of the Pinnacle and the Amazons to be horrific aberrations of nature… It was a slaughter. They had superior weapons and numbers. They enslaved about ten per cent of the population and killed the rest. My mother got me out on a ship which was running the blockade. Never saw her again. I’m probably one of the last few hundred Amazon’s alive in the galaxy. So, yes, I hate the Pinnacle. What’s your story?’ Kade sank half her glass without showing any signs of it impinging on her senses.
    Ella was about to answer the question when the door opened. The man who walked in was short and a little on the plump side, balding and with a flattened nose and a wide mouth. His eyes could have been more or less any colour because they were obscured by a pair of goggles with ridiculously thick lenses in them. He was carrying a valise which looked to have been made from recycled carpet.
    ‘Ah, Cubby,’ Kade said. ‘Thanks for coming down. Get that collar off her, would you?’
    Cubby peered at Ella for a second through his thick glasses and then leered. ‘My pleasure, Captain.’ He walked over and knelt down beside Ella, opening his bag and extracting various tools. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, grinning.
    ‘Keep still,’ Kade suggested. ‘If he gets this wrong… Well, you’ll die in agony, but he’s very good. Kind of a genius is our Cubby.’
    ‘Have to be to keep this crate flying,’ Cubby commented.
    ‘You can talk, just keep still.’
    ‘Uh… Sorry, I totally forgot.’ Reaching up to her neck, she caught the collar as her implant sent the unlock code. ‘I figured out how to control the collar. Otherwise they’d have been able to track me as soon as they noticed I was gone.’ Cubby was looking a little disappointed. ‘Sorry.’
    ‘You worked out how to control the collar?’ the little man said. ‘With what?’
    ‘Implanted radio and computer.’
    Kade frowned. ‘Perhaps you should start with who, and what, you are?’
    ‘Well, I’m a scientist. Archaeology, psychology, anthropology, palaeoanthropology, history…’
    ‘You know all that stuff? How old are you? Thirty? Sixty, maybe?’
    ‘A hundred and eight last birthday. I’m a Jenlay. I guess that’s another Human subspecies. We’re very long-lived.’
    ‘Damn, girl, I thought I was doing good and I’m not seventy yet.’
    Ella smiled. ‘You are doing pretty well as far as I can see. Anyway, we’d found a planet in Old Earth records–’
    ‘Wait… Old Earth? You’ve been to Earth?’
    ‘Yes. We stopped off there on the way to Lacora to update them on the plans for the survey. I dropped in on a friend. She’s the Ambassador to the Collective–’
    ‘The Collective?’
    ‘It’s what we call the collection of states who work with the Shadataga. This is getting really off-track. We found Lacora in some Old Earth records. A lost colony where they had discovered ancient ruins and then been wiped out by some disease. I wanted to study the place, so I got an expedition together and we went out there.’
    ‘I know that world,’ Cubby said. ‘They tried to colonise it years back and everyone died within a week.’
    ‘There’s a nanovirus endemic in the water. We have the technology to make sure it didn’t affect us, so we went in and studied it, examined the ruins, did planetary surveys. We were getting somewhere with the virus too. Then the Pinnacle came and killed everyone, except me. They said we were terrorists manufacturing a bioweapon. They told me that we had