The Winter War

by Niall Teasdale

  Still lying back on the bed, Aneka chuckled. ‘You best take a look. Maybe it’s from your mother.’

  ‘Huh, yeah, true.’ Ella slipped out of the bed and stepped over to the console. ‘Though I don’t think she’d disturb me during sex.’

  ‘She sent it days ago. I don’t think she could’ve known…’

  ‘This is my mother we’re talking about. She’d…’ Ella stopped suddenly and Aneka pushed herself up onto her elbows, frowning.

  ‘Ella?’

  ‘It’s, uh, from my father.’

  ‘Brinna? How did he know we were here?’

  ‘Saw it on the local news channel. “Ship returns from Old Earth.” “Crew responsible for discovering Negral uncover life on Earth.” That kind of thing. He saw my picture…’

  ‘Oh. Well, what does he want?’

  ‘He wants to see me, tomorrow. Says he’ll meet me in one of the clubs, Yashi’s, in Cavern One.’

  ‘You’re not exactly sounding positive about this.’

  ‘I’ve barely spoken to him since we left Harriamon. I wasn’t even sure he was still here. I think he talks to Mom sometimes, but she tends to avoid telling me.’

  ‘Why?’

  Ella deleted the message on the screen and turned around. ‘Because whenever he gets in contact it’s because he wants something.’

  Harriamon, 25.1.527 FSC.

  Yashi’s was a fairly typical sort of structure for the kind of building you found in Cavern One. The whole place was what could best be described as the social hub of Harriamon’s one and only town, if it could be said to have one at all. The atmosphere of the planet was a delightful mix of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and various sulphur compounds, all at one-point-two atmospheres and nearly a thousand Kelvin. As a result of that the town was constructed in caverns under the surface with a couple of domed habitation areas on top. It was a mining town, out on the Rim, and it looked it.

  In this case, the building seemed to have been constructed half in the wall of the cavern. What was visible was a single storey sprayed over in dirt-brown Plascrete which made it look stuccoed. There was a single door and no windows, and a glowing sign that read ‘Live Dancers!’ Aneka assumed that meant that some of the other clubs hidden away at the back of the cavern used robots.

  ‘This is the place?’ Aneka asked as they walked toward it. She was not entirely sure why Ella had insisted that they wear ‘suitable clubbing outfits’ since Yashi’s did not look like somewhere she would want to be seen dead in and they were meeting her father, but she had, so they were. Aneka was dressed up in a basque, short skirt, and heels; Ella was in a shorter skirt, halter top, and higher heels.

  ‘Yeah. It figures the bastard would want to meet here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This is where Mom used to work.’

  The inside was not much better than the outside. The lighting was dim, which probably helped to avoid questions about the stains on the Plascrete floor. It was basically one, big open room, as far as Aneka could see, with circular tables scattered about it, a couple of booths at the back, and a long bar on the right side. About midway down the bar was a pole with an extremely bored-looking blonde with breasts large enough for it to look entirely unnatural swinging around it. There were three waitresses Aneka could see working the floor, all of them naked aside from thongs, which barely deserved the term, or maybe exemplified it, and high-heeled, platform pumps.

  ‘Just avoid the dressed ones working the tables,’ Ella said. ‘There are private dance rooms at the back, except that they do their best to persuade you to pay for extra.’

  Aneka spotted three women and a man moving between the tables. At least it was relatively equal opportunity prostitution. They were dressed, more or less. There was a lot of sheer material and very tight Ultraskin. ‘Can you see your Dad?’

  ‘He’s probably at the back. There’s a little more privacy there.’

  There was a man sitting in one of the back booths alone. Alone aside from the blonde in the strappy, semi-transparent top and micro-skirt who was standing at his table anyway. He looked the part of a man with a daughter in her late twenties, slightly balding, a little overweight, starting to wrinkle around the eyes. Of course Ella was actually in her seventies and there was no real reason for him to look his age. The only thing Ella seemed to have inherited from the man was her hair; her mother was a brunette, her father’s hair was ginger. Otherwise he looked like a good-looking man who had let himself go; not a common sight in Federal culture. Brinna Techman, Ella’s father. Aneka really could not see the resemblance.

  ‘That him?’ Aneka asked.

  ‘Gopi, he’s really let himself go,’ Ella replied.

  ‘Take the seat opposite. I’ll sit directly across from him.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s dangerous, Aneka.’

  ‘He might not be, but the rest of this place is setting off all my alarms.’

  Ella slipped into the booth, scooting over so that Aneka could sit beside her. The blonde took one look at them and then walked off. The man, Ella’s father, looked surprised for a second, and paid far too much attention to Aneka for her liking, then he looked at Ella, frowned, and said, ‘You know, the picture on the news didn’t do you justice, Ella.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ Ella said, not exactly with sincerity. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Well, to see you, of course. Who’s your friend…? Uh, no, Aneka Jansen, right? The woman from Old Earth.’

  ‘Yes, this is Aneka, my partner. You could have seen me any of the dozen times I’ve been back here. You could have sent me a message on my birthday once. You didn’t, so why now?’

  Aneka sat silently, contemplating the man opposite her. She had known that Ella was estranged from him, but not to that extent. Ella rarely mentioned him aside from when she had explained what had happened to her. She had gone with him one day when he went to work, part of a school assignment, but while she was in the mining cavern where he worked she had been infected with a local life form; an extremophile lichen which had eaten away at her flesh leaving her blind and disfigured. It had been her mother who had scraped together the money to go to New Earth, and then got Ella’s face reconstructed and her eyes replaced with cybernetic ones. Her father, it seemed, had not been in the picture then, but it was hard to believe the man could care that little for his daughter.

  ‘Like I said,’ he said, switching to Rimmic as though it were just natural to do so, ‘I saw you on the news. I saw you were in the system and I figured… Well, maybe it was time we got reacquainted, y’know?’

  ‘You marked the message as urgent, Dad,’ Ella replied, keeping to Federal.

  His eyes flicked to Aneka, then back. ‘Okay, yeah, I did… Look, I need some money. There are some very bad guys who are going to hurt me if I don’t get it to them…’ He seemed to figure out that Aneka could understand what he was saying perfectly well when she frowned at him, and he switched back to Federal. ‘They’re going to kill me, honey.’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’ Ella snapped. ‘You don’t have the right. You’ve been gambling again, right? I don’t suppose you ever stopped. What happened? Mom decide to cut you off?’

  Aneka could see Techman’s eyes and jaw tightening as he tried to control a flare of anger. ‘She’s got some new bimbo she’s moving in with. Says she’s got expenses and can’t help me.’

  ‘Sharissa is not a bimbo,’ Ella replied. ‘She does, however, love Mom and she probably persuaded her that you’ve been leeching off her for long enough. Well you’re not going to start on me. We’re going, you can sort yourself out.’ Aneka slipped out of the booth and Ella started to follow.

  ‘No,’ Techman said, desperation in his eyes. ‘Ella, you can’t still be blaming me for what happened to you? It wasn’t my fault you got a faulty mask…’

  Aneka’s eyes swept over the room. The raised voices were attracting little attention except for one woman sitting at the bar who was looking their way. She had purple eye shado
w on, and dark red lipstick. She was dressed in a very sheer tank top and pair of Ultraskin shorts, which left almost nothing to the imagination. But Aneka recognised Leeforth immediately.

  ‘I’ve never blamed you for that, Dad,’ Ella told him. ‘Not once. What I did blame you for was taking the compensation money the company paid you and gambling it away rather than using it to help me.’

  The door of the club opened and two men walked in. Both were in casual gear, but they walked with a purpose rather than like patrons. Aneka was pretty sure the smaller of the two was armed from the way his jacket hung. The bigger one probably just needed to glare at someone to make them fall over.

  ‘It wasn’t enough!’ Techman wailed. ‘We needed more and all I had to do was…’

  The two men noted the argument and the smaller one grinned far too maliciously for Aneka’s taste. They started toward the booth. Out of the corner of her eye Aneka noted that Leeforth had seen them too. She was reaching for her bag.

  ‘Brinna,’ Ella said, ‘you’re an asshole. You’ve got a gambling problem and you need to do something about it.’

  ‘Yes he does.’ The speaker was the smaller of the two men, and he was speaking in Rimmic. ‘He has a bad gambling habit, but don’t worry, little lady, we’re going to fix it for him.’

  ‘Charlie,’ Techman said, trying really hard to be jovial, ‘you said I had a week…’

  ‘And that was eleven days ago, Techman. It’s a thousand credits, or Hector breaks one of your limbs and we make it two thousand.’

  ‘I don’t have it, Charlie, but this is my daughter and she’s going to…’

  Aneka saw Charlie’s eyes flick toward Ella, saw the bigger man, who was presumably Hector, shift his position and stance. She relaxed, her eyes shifting downward where she could watch their hands and look non-threatening. She knew where this was going even if Techman did not.

  ‘She is going to do nothing!’ Ella snapped, cutting her father off.

  ‘Your daughter?’ Charlie said, suddenly interested. ‘Now this changes everything. Maybe we can cut a deal. She can pay it off in instalments back at my place. Hector, bring her.’

  Hector reached out, his hand landing on Aneka’s arm to push her aside. He was taller and far bulkier to look at, but he was trying to shift almost one hundred kilos of robot. She went nowhere. Then she looked up at him, smiled, and stepped forward. His stance, meant to brace himself, gave her an easy opening as her knee drove into his groin. Letting out a howl of pain, Hector crumpled onto the floor, hugging his wounded genitals.

  Charlie, stupidly, went for his gun. Aneka’s fist slammed into his right bicep and it was his turn to scream as the bone broke. Her right fist hit him in the stomach and he doubled over her arm.

  Hector started to unwrap himself from his foetal position, only to have Leeforth’s block heel come down on his ear. ‘Stay down,’ she growled at him. Aneka was impressed, it sounded damn menacing considering she had wondered whether the woman had it in her.

  The other amazing thing was that Charlie was still trying. He backed up and swung at Aneka with his only good arm. It was not good enough. She caught the swinging arm and twisted, driving him down to one knee and keeping him there. ‘Fucking stay put!’ Aneka told him.

  Leeforth was turning to the bouncers who had suddenly decided to take an interest, and ignoring the screech from Hector as her heel turned on his ear. ‘Naval officer. Someone get the Peacekeepers in here. Now!’ The bouncers stopped in their tracks, one of them fumbling a phone from his pocket and turning to make the call.

  Aneka nodded to Leeforth. ‘Commander. You scrub up well.’ She noticed a pair of animal footprint tattoos on the upper slopes of the woman’s breasts. Maybe Judy Leeforth had a wild side. ‘Don’t tell me you frequent topless bars when you’re on shore leave.’

  ‘Uh… no. Doctor Gilroy was a little worried when she heard you were coming here. She spoke to Ape. He thought I’d be less obtrusive.’

  ‘In that outfit?’

  ‘You’re one to talk. Are you all right, Miss Narrows?’

  Ella slipped out of the booth, giving her father a glare. ‘I’m fine aside from a desire to break someone’s nose.’

  ‘I wouldn’t, Ella,’ Aneka replied, ‘you’ll probably regret it.’

  ‘I don’t think I would.’

  Techman looked up at his daughter beseechingly. ‘Ella… Honey…’

  Ella pulled back her fist. ‘I told you not to call me that…’

  ~~~

  Ella flexed her right hand and winced. She was sitting in the Cavern One Peacekeeper station with Aneka and Leeforth, waiting for the police officers to finish up the paperwork.

  ‘I said you’d probably regret it,’ Aneka told her. ‘Hitting someone in the face is never that good an idea. Too much bone.’

  ‘Well I thought you meant I’d feel bad about punching my father.’

  ‘Oh, I only knew the guy a few minutes and I wanted to punch him. When the bruising goes down you’ll be fine.’

  ‘Gloves help,’ Leeforth supplied, ‘especially if you’re hitting them in the mouth. Seriously never a good idea, but if you have to…’ She lifted her own right hand, flexing the fingers and showing a scar over her middle knuckle. ‘It got infected and the tissue regen didn’t work perfectly, but I kind of like it. Didn’t at the time. Some people’s mouths are sewers.’

  ‘You are a bit of a conundrum,’ Aneka commented.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Uh-huh. You don’t really look like a battleship’s executive officer, you definitely don’t look like someone who punches people in the mouth…’

  ‘And the tats are a surprise,’ Ella added, happy to have the conversation move away from her hand.

  Leeforth’s hand shifted up to stroke over the left hand paw print where it poked above her top. ‘Yeah… Legacy of my earlier career. I was a marine. The only girl in my unit. All the others had tattoos which went with their nickname and they called me “Wildcat” so…’

  ‘You were a marine?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Got posted to the Banfry, impressed Ape, and when his XO position opened up he said I should apply. I thought he was crazy, but I got the job. The interview board said they were impressed with my organisational skills and tactical ability.’

  ‘You and he aren’t…’

  ‘Vashma no! No, Ape’s in a solid partnership with his ship. No woman alive comes between him and her. I mean, we’ve had sex, but that’s just stress relief. Sometimes we spar, sometimes we fuck…’ She grinned. ‘…and occasionally the sparring ends up with us naked, but it’s nothing serious. Ever.’

  A message popped up in Aneka’s vision field indicating that Ella had made a connection. ‘I think the lady protests a little too much,’ Aneka commented.

  ‘She’s right though. Ape’s married to the Banfry. That’s what broke up his relationship with Gillian.’

  ‘True, she’s probably being pragmatic.’

  ‘Since when did pragmatism work on emotions?’

  A Peacekeeper in blue body armour walked over holding a tablet and further discussion of Leeforth’s love life was put on hold.

  FNb Admiral Banfry, 26.1.527 FSC.

  It probably said something about the progress Ape had made in the last few years that he was allowing Aggy to present her findings on the terrorist ships ‘in person.’ In person meant appearing on a wall screen, but the Captain had allowed an ex-Xinti AI to connect directly with his ship’s systems, which was a long step from the distrust Ape had had in anything Xinti when Aneka had first met him.

  Aggy stood in a virtual extension of the briefing room, hands clasped behind her back, next to a wireframe model of the ship she had been asked to analyse. Her audience was several of the senior officers of the Banfry, including Ape and Leeforth, along with Aneka, Drake, Gillian, and Ella. Her news was interesting.

  ‘Careful analysis of the vessel in question has identified some interesting anomalies,’ the golden woman said. ‘The hull shows
the outward appearance of a hyper-dense composite as used by the Xinti. However, the manufacturing is poor. The outer layer of material has been laid down without the precision I would expect to see in a vessel manufactured by Xinti engineers.’

  ‘Further evidence to suggest that this is someone with imperfect understanding of Xinti technology,’ Gillian suggested.

  ‘I would tend to agree, Doctor,’ Aggy said. ‘Their use of a sensor cloaking shield system along with a reaction drive is also flawed. The emissions from a reaction drive, especially an antimatter torch, make the shield essentially useless. This means that the ships must be waiting for their targets, setting an ambush. A Xinti vessel would be able to pursue its target while hidden, but these ones would give themselves away if they used their main drives while cloaked.’

  ‘Which means they’ve got intel on the ships they want to hit,’ Leeforth said.

  ‘Which is why we gave a false time of arrival,’ Drake said, nodding. ‘However, that does assume they are hitting specific targets. If their goal is merely to terrorise then they could just be positioning themselves and attacking any random ship that comes within range.’

  ‘I took the liberty of analysing the attacks as well as the data on the ship,’ Aggy said. ‘The attacks would appear to be random, but there is an underlying pattern. Weapons and supply shipments, particularly higher technology items, are being targeted along with enough other ships to provide obscurity. It is of particular note that these specific targets tend to be discovered later, and are more carefully reduced to unrecognisable wreckage.’

  ‘You’re saying that our terrorists may be pirates after all?’ Leeforth asked.

  ‘Actually I am saying that these terrorists are conducting a campaign to steal high-technology equipment and deprive the systems they are working in of those same supplies. I highly doubt they are pirates. This is a carefully constructed campaign spread across hundreds of parsecs of space. That is not the work of pirates, or terrorists.’

  FScV Garnet Hyde.