The Cold Steel Mind Read Online Free PDF

chem-sniffer. ‘Or it was. It’s dead now. There’s no evidence of biological activity.’
    ‘We should get a sample of it,’ Gillian replied. ‘It can be checked in the materials science lab, though I doubt it’s any different from the plastics they normally used.’ She glanced around at Aneka, who was busy removing a cutting tool from her belt. ‘Do you remember this room?’
    ‘No, they held me in the one nearer the bow.’ Rather than use a plasma torch on plastic, Aneka took a sonic knife to the screen. There was nothing actually sonic about it, but the blade’s extremely rapid vibration produced a high-pitched whine which had given it the name. It made short work of the degraded material. ‘Well,’ she added as the blade went to work, ‘if they did put me in here at any time I don’t remember it.’
    ‘You were their star subject,’ Ella pointed out. ‘Maybe they treated you to special accommodation.’
    ‘Huh, right.’ A section of the screen came free and she looked at it, turning it in her hand so that she could record a full-spectrum view of the material. It had an odd, semi-crystalline quality to it; the light falling on the cut edge refracted to give a shimmer of multiple colours. ‘There’s some sample bags in my backpack. Could you get one, Ella?’ She was wearing a short, Plastex jacket which had a hard-shell pack mounted on the back. Ella popped it open and retrieved one of the bags, and placed the bagged sample back in the pack.
    ‘There’s nothing much to see here,’ Gillian said. ‘We may as well move on.’
    The next room along that side was, apparently, a cabin. The Xinti had given up on their original bodies, but they still had need of a physical form, and this was where they had spent their off-hours. From the look of the room they had not really had much in the way of time off. There were two double bunks, roughly Human sized though they would have been a little short for Aneka, and very little else. There seemed to be no entertainment systems, or even computers. There was one chair set in front of a small, bare table. No photographs, nothing personal. To Aneka it looked as though the race had given up on the physical world as an expression of their personality.
    ‘It’s so… impersonal,’ she commented as she allowed her eyes to take in the environment.
    ‘We believe that they spent much of their time in what amounts to computer servers,’ Gillian said. ‘They employed bodies when they needed to, but when they didn’t need them they would live in a virtual environment.’
    ‘It’s probable that their rather amoral experiments were the result,’ Ella went on. ‘They didn’t see physical bodies as important, so experimenting on living things was just something they did to further their research.’
    As one of their experimental subjects Aneka had a few choice words concerning that, but she chose to say nothing. Instead she said, ‘No computers or entertainment systems because they could connect to the ship’s network any time they wished.’
    Gillian gave a nod. ‘Even their organic bodies had an electronic brain similar to the one you reside in. The ones we’ve examined had networking systems with the bandwidth for full-sensorium transmission.’
    ‘As do we,’ Al put in.
    ‘Huh,’ Aneka responded silently. ‘You’ve been quiet.’
    ‘I had nothing to say. However, I have not, as a matter of fact. I have been employing our high-bandwidth networking to talk to Cassandra.’
    ‘We believe,’ Gillian went on, unaware of Aneka’s internal conversation, ‘that they used physical connections in situations where higher bandwidths were required, such as on the flight deck.’
    ‘Because wireless networks suffer from frequency conflicts more than a hard connection,’ Aneka said. She was still a little surprised at the speed her new brain could process information. Having two conversations at once was easy now.
    ‘Doctor Wallace is drooling over the warp