The Winter War

by Niall Teasdale

  Aneka was busy putting on her suit. ‘Ella, watch out the door, but stay behind the wall.’

  Ella rushed over to do just that and immediately said, ‘There’s someone coming down the corridor. Don’t recognise her. Short, wavy blonde hair, long legs, narrow face, a tan. Not much in the way of boobs, but she’s sure got nipples.’

  ‘Sounds like Truelove. She’s Winter’s assistant.’

  Sure enough, it was. ‘Miss Narrows,’ Truelove said as she entered the room, ‘I’m Elaine Truelove. Hello again, Miss Jansen.’

  Aneka nodded, pulling a boot on over one Ultraskin stocking. ‘Truelove. What’s going on?’

  ‘A strike force is attacking the facility.’ The woman’s voice was calm, but her dark eyes were shifting a little nervously and she looked tense. ‘They have very advanced weaponry, and some heavy artillery. This bunker should be secure, but I’m to take you to an escape craft.’

  Aneka stood up and strapped on her gun belt, then fixed the holster straps to the tops of her leggings. ‘What about Winter?’

  ‘My orders were very specific.’

  ‘Right.’ Silently she said, ‘Al, can you get me a layout for this bunker?’

  ‘I believe so. The local network appears to recognise our identification codes.’ Almost immediately a map appeared showing the complex of tunnels and rooms which formed the bunker. There was a tunnel to the east that looked like it headed out from the side of the island.

  There was the sound of another explosion, this one barely deadened by the Plascrete walls. ‘Get Ella to the ship. I’m faster on my own. I’ll check on Winter, and the situation…’

  ‘Those aren’t my orders, ma’am,’ Truelove interrupted. ‘I’ve lost contact with the surface forces entirely. We need to leave.’

  ‘And you really can’t stop me. Get Ella out of here. I’ll slow down anyone trying to follow. Move!’

  Obviously deciding that she was not going to be able to dissuade Aneka, Truelove grabbed Ella’s arm and pulled her out into the corridor. Aneka slid past them, her pistols in her hands, and ran ahead. ‘She really can move fast,’ Truelove commented.

  Ella was clearly resigned to Aneka playing hero again too. ‘Yeah. I just wish she’d run away from the trouble more often.’

  Aneka reached the T-junction at the end of the medical section and turned left toward the main entrance of the bunker. She could already hear gunfire; energy weapons were being discharged up ahead somewhere. She frowned. There was something odd about the sounds, but it was a familiar odd. Truelove had said that the attackers had very advanced weapons…

  She reached a door, ducked in to one side of it, and hit the open button. The sound of gunfire immediately grew louder. Slipping her pistol around the edge of the door, she used its sight-camera to scope out the room beyond. The far side of it was a heavy, armoured bulkhead with a door in it, standing open. Men in tight-fitting, but clearly very advanced, combat armour were occupying the door, firing into the room with bulky-looking rifles of a design Aneka recognised immediately. These were not Xinti-manufactured, but they were certainly antimatter blasters. Closer to her, behind a desk, which had obviously been designed for use as a shield since it was still there, Winter and two marines were firing back with laser rifles. From what Aneka could see there were four dead marines with them, and no dead men on the other side.

  ‘Aneka, get out of here!’ Winter yelled over her shoulder.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Aneka muttered. She squeezed the trigger, spraying the area of the doorway with needles which flashed into plasma knives as each projectile bit into its target. The result was immediate. Two of the gunmen went down, the other two staggered back, clearly wounded. ‘No, you get out of there,’ Aneka yelled back.

  Something moved in the haze of smoke beyond the bulkhead door, something large with a man-shaped heat signature that was otherwise invisible. There was the scream of ripping air and an explosion, and a section of the wall between the room and the corridor vanished in a blaze of light and heat. Messages flashed up indicating that her right hand had taken some dermal damage, but she was more concerned about what it had done inside the room. She risked looking in.

  Winter was down. One of the marines had been more or less decapitated, and the other was not moving. Her quick glance could detect no sign of breathing. Tucking her pistol under her left arm, Aneka grabbed the back of Winter’s combat suit ready to pull her out, and then she saw the thing advancing toward them.

  It was big, big enough that it almost filled the doorway. Roughly the shape of a man, it had a heavy helmet with no visor, two enormous mechanical arms, and thick legs. The body was solid armour. In its hands was a rifle, which looked like it was really designed to be mounted on a vehicle: a massive antimatter cannon.

  ‘Dreadnought armour,’ Al said. ‘Nothing we are equipped with can penetrate that, though I have no idea where these people have got it from.’

  Aneka snap-fired at the monster battlesuit, more as a distraction than anything else. She pulled, dragging Winter out into the corridor and then away from the door before that gun could be brought to bear. It was close; there was another shriek of air being torn apart by a laser and then half the doorframe vanished. Aneka continued dragging. If she could get clear they had a chance; there was no way that thing could get through the doorway and move in the corridor if it did.

  ‘Stop.’ The word was almost a whisper.

  Aneka did not stop, but she looked down. ‘I’ll get you out of this.’

  ‘I’m… dead. Internal injuries… too much. Leave me… Aneka. Don’t tell… anyone. I’ll make sure… they don’t… follow.’ Winter had only one working arm, but she used it to reach for something on her belt: a grenade. ‘Go.’

  Aneka’s hand clenched around her pistol. ‘No. We can…’

  Winter pushed the cap off the grenade. ‘Go.’

  Aneka ran, letting go of Winter’s collar and sprinting for the corridor the escape ship was on. A couple of seconds later there was an explosion, a wash of heat at her back, and the sound of falling masonry. Aneka bit back a sob and kept running. Tell no one?

  She was still considering what to say when she rounded a corner and found Truelove waiting behind another bulkhead door, and next to what looked like a submarine hatch in the floor.

  ‘Winter?’ the blonde asked.

  And the lie just fell into place. ‘I couldn’t get to her. They’ve got some sort of heavy, armoured battlesuit. I couldn’t even dent it. I found a grenade and collapsed the corridor.’

  Truelove nodded as though that was just some fact to assimilate, but her throat flexed as she swallowed hard. ‘Get down there,’ she indicated the hatch, ‘and strap in. I’ll close the doors and follow.’

  There was a metal ladder down to another hatch, and below that there really was a submarine. Ella was already strapped into one of the six seats, looking relieved to see her partner, so Aneka took the seat beside hers and pulled the straps into place, locking herself into the seat. Truelove came down a couple of seconds later and headed up to one of the front seats.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ Aneka asked.

  ‘We’re going to take this down into one of the trenches just off the coast and hide,’ Truelove replied. ‘We’ve got food and water for about a week, but we shouldn’t be out that long. Winter will contact us when it’s safe to come up.’

  Tell no one. Winter was not going to be calling them up, but she had said to say nothing. What the Hell were they going to do?

  North Islands Trench, Under the Eastern Ocean, 5.8.527 FSC.

  There was over seven kilometres of water, at seven hundred atmospheres, sitting above their heads. There was no light outside the submarine since Truelove had positioned them on a ledge near the bottom of the trench and then shut down the external lights. Even with the huge pressure of water outside, the spherical pressure vessel they were sitting in made no sound. It was quiet and dark, and it reminded Aneka a little of the observation lab she had spent an
hour in on Titan. Except that they had been down here for almost a day.

  The Titan expedition had been deeper, and to an ocean buried deep under the crust of the planet, but Ella had been there with her, and there had been the sudden urge to make love down there. Aneka could tell that Ella had the same urge, but it was not being expressed. Ella was not sure why Aneka was so unsettled, but she could sense her partner’s discomfort and was staying away from suggesting an underwater threesome.

  ‘How long have you been Winter’s assistant?’ Aneka asked at one point.

  ‘Four years, two months,’ Truelove replied. ‘I started on the first day of month six in five-twenty-three.’

  ‘Fast recall.’

  ‘It’s a date I remember. Getting this job was a dream.’

  ‘It’s not long before Aneka was found,’ Ella commented. ‘I remember that day pretty exactly too.’

  ‘She was good to me from the start,’ Aneka said. ‘Like she trusted me, even if she had little reason to.’

  ‘She told me once…’ Truelove began and then stopped as though she had thought better of it.

  ‘What? I don’t think she’s got many secrets from me. She tells me things I’d rather I didn’t know.’

  ‘Huh, yeah. She told me that you’d been kept out of the politics and bloodshed of a millennium of life before and during the lifetime of the Federation. You hadn’t been corrupted by anyone with an agenda. That made you easier to trust than anyone else she knew. But she does have her secrets, from you, and me for that matter.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Your nature is a level-seven secret, right? It’s technically the highest classification in Federal Law.’

  ‘Technically?’

  ‘There’s an eighth level, things only Winter knows. There’s a file on a memory card in a safe in her office. If she dies only the next Winter can access it, and I don’t think it has everything in it. Some things would die with her. One of them is who she is, or who she was before she was Winter.’

  ‘I asked her once how someone got the job. She said it was a conversation for another time, and it never came up again.’

  ‘There’s a list of candidates designated by her,’ Truelove said. ‘In theory the Federal Council could appoint anyone they wished to the role, but they always select a candidate from the list, in secret. All record of that person is removed from every database. They vanish, and they get “reborn” as Winter.’

  Aneka wondered whether that process was going on right now. Would they be contacted in a couple of days by a new woman calling herself Winter? Would she be as keen to keep Aneka’s secret?

  ‘Why “Winter?”’ Aneka asked rather than voice her concerns.

  ‘The original head of security for the Federation was called Xenia Winter,’ Truelove replied. Aneka glanced at Ella, who gave her a slight grin. ‘The title came from her.’

  ‘And Winter has always been a woman?’

  ‘Actually, yes. Supposedly it’s something to do with the different specialities of the male and female brain. I think there were a couple of male candidates last time. I wasn’t around to see it though.’

  ‘It has to be a bit of a lonely job,’ Ella said. ‘I mean, your entire history goes away. No family, no permanent relationships. Have you and she ever…?’

  ‘No!’ Truelove flushed pink. ‘I mean, if she’d ever asked I’d have said yes, but she’s very professional about that kind of thing. No sex with subordinates, even ones she might not have to send into dangerous situations.’

  ‘Right. Well, I hope she contacts us soon. This isn’t the best of conditions to be stuck in.’

  ‘She will,’ Truelove replied, all confidence.

  Aneka kept her mouth shut.

  ~~~

  ‘An android and two cyborgs climb into a submarine,’ Aneka said, mostly to break the silence that had settled over the ship. ‘It sounds like the start of a really bad joke.’

  Ella looked across at Truelove, her eyebrows going up. ‘You’re a cyborg too?’

  The blonde turned her head, pulling her hair away from her neck to show the ports with their plastic covers at the base of her skull. ‘Just a computer implant. It’s an enormous help with my work and the Agency paid for it.’

  ‘Not many people go for elective surgery like that. Don’t you get… comments?’

  ‘Yeah, from some. I lost a couple of friends over it, but the ones who count didn’t bat an eyelid. There was one guy actually got more interested after the op. Kind of weird. I mean, if it was an arm, or a leg… something obvious, I could sort of see it as a fetish thing. This is hardly noticeable. You had extra parts added recently, right?’

  ‘Computer implant,’ Ella replied, nodding. ‘I had my eyes upgraded too. I can magnify things and they have better night vision. Useful in my line of work too, but the fringe benefits have been interesting.’

  ‘Fringe benefits?’

  Aneka coughed, but Ella went on regardless. ‘We can link sensoria. I feel what Aneka feels and vice versa. It can be kind of overwhelming, but it’s worth it.’

  Truelove was blushing. ‘Oh. I, uh, hadn’t thought of something like that.’

  ‘Neither did we. You know about Cassandra, the android at the university? She taught us the trick. She’s kind of dating Aneka’s AI.’

  ‘That has to be… confusing?’

  ‘It has its complications,’ Aneka agreed. ‘Mostly they just like talking to each other. My sex life is a constant source of amusement.’

  ‘Fascination,’ Al said. ‘Occasional amusement.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I thought Cassandra was a robot psychologist?’ Truelove asked.

  ‘She still has a fascination for Jenlay psychology,’ Ella supplied, ‘especially what I guess you’d call “mating rituals.”’

  Aneka suppressed a smirk. ‘The two of them have a huge fascination with Ella, especially a drunk Ella.’

  Ella gave a small squeak.

  ‘Now a drunk Ella is amusing,’ Al commented dryly.

  ‘Well I’m glad neither of them is observing me,’ Truelove said.

  Ella looked out at the inky blackness beyond the mono-crystalline hull. ‘If we spend much more time down here, Al may be. There’s not much else to do.’ It said something about the situation that her heart was not really in it.

  6.8.527 FSC.

  Aneka opened her eyes and stretched. One of the benefits of her mode of ‘sleep’ was that she could do it anywhere and the conditions really did not affect her. Sitting up in one of the submarine’s chairs was as good as lying in a bed. Ella and Truelove had had something of a fitful night on rather thin sleeping pads on the floor, and Aneka had gone offline after they had finally given up. Both she and Truelove had decided that someone should be awake at all times, just in case.

  ‘Good sleep?’ Ella asked, her eyes on something at the back of the cabin.

  ‘As good as usual,’ Aneka replied. ‘I can’t really have good or bad sleep. I just turn off for four hours.’

  There was the sound of water splashing from aft and Truelove said, ‘That’s gotta be useful in circumstances like this.’

  Aneka turned, seeing as that seemed to be where Ella was focussed. Truelove was stripped to the waist, washing in a tiny sink. There was a curtain, which could be pulled around the ablutions area, but she had not bothered with it.

  ‘Yeah, it can be useful at times,’ Aneka agreed.

  Truelove picked up a cloth, which was hanging beside the basin, and began to dry herself as best as it would allow. She turned, giving Aneka a grin, and then caught sight of Ella. Aneka glanced back at her partner. Ella was licking her lips, her eyes slightly hooded. It looked like the redhead’s libido was cutting back in.

  ‘Elaine,’ Ella said, her voice soft, ‘either put your shirt back on, or take the rest off and come over here.’ She reached to her throat, unsealing her shipsuit and then parted it down to her navel.

  ‘I, uh…’ Truelove glanced at Ane
ka, receiving a tiny shrug in reply to the unasked question. ‘Uh…’ She started down the cabin, not undressing any further, nor getting dressed.

  Ella reached out as soon as she was close enough, her fingers deftly unclasping the front of Truelove’s Bi-weave jeans. The agent did nothing to stop her. Ella looked up into the girl’s dark eyes, her hands pushing down. Truelove gave a little shiver…

  And then the console in the bow chimed. ‘That’s the comms unit,’ Truelove said.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Ella replied, still sliding the jeans down her long legs.

  ‘I have to get it.’ She reached down, taking hold of the waistband of her pants.

  Ella sighed. ‘Okay, I guess you should.’

  Looking almost reluctant, Truelove pulled up her jeans and started to the console, though Aneka noticed that she did not do them up again. She tapped a couple of buttons. ‘We’ve rendezvous coordinates and a time. Should take about twenty minutes to get there.’ Ella got to her feet and started forward.

  ‘How long have we got until the meeting?’ Aneka asked.

  ‘A-about an hour.’

  ‘Plenty of time,’ Ella purred, her hands sliding around over Truelove’s breasts.

  The Islands.

  They surfaced about thirty metres off the beach where they were supposed to be meeting their contacts. The submersible had a saucer-like structure, which provided engineering space outside the pressure hull, an open structure, which sat around the upper side of the sphere with engines, lights, and power systems hung from it. That made looking out on the surface a question of climbing up the ladder to the hatch and peering out through a narrow band of transparent material. Even to Aneka’s eyes the world was a slightly distorted blur.

  ‘Looks like there’s a VTOL on the beach,’ she called down. ‘Two people, unless there’s more in the aircraft.’ There was some chance that the people on the beach had not spotted the craft in the water yet. It had a very low profile.

  ‘I’m taking her in,’ Truelove called up, and the twin primary motors at the sides pushed the ship toward the beach.