‘It’s similar to the reaction to the Negral negotiations,’ Gillian put in.
‘Not bad, I guess. I feel sorry for Aneka and Ella. I mean, wherever they are, they probably don’t even know this is happening! They’re going to come home to… Well, it’s going to be quite a change.’
‘Yes, but at least Aneka won’t have to keep the secret anymore. She hated it. If only one good thing comes out of this, it’s that.’
Yorkbridge Mid-town, 25.8.527 FSC.
Sharissa knew, more or less, what to expect when she walked into the flat, but was not quite prepared for the sheer elemental force of a worried Janna dashing forward to hug her in the doorway. It was almost rib-crushing, and it certainly demonstrated how worried the woman had been.
Still Janna was not sufficiently wrapped up in her own relief at seeing her partner again to not notice the blonde girl waiting patiently behind her blonde girl. ‘Who’s your friend?’ she whispered.
‘Give me my lungs back,’ Sharissa replied, ‘and I’ll introduce you.’
Janna let go enough that she could pull Sharissa in through the door. ‘Janna, this is Elaine Truelove. She’s… She was Winter’s assistant so they’ve been pretty hard on her, and she doesn’t have anyone at home…’
Janna’s features melted into a look of sympathetic concern. ‘Oh Vashma, yes, of course. Come in, dear, make yourself at home. You don’t want to be out there at the moment.’
‘Uh, no,’ Truelove agreed. ‘The press are everywhere.’
‘Gillian Gilroy invited me over to her place,’ Janna said. ‘If it gets bad I’ll call her and see whether we can all hide there. It might mean sleeping on the couch, but…’
Truelove nodded. ‘She’s in Tristar, where the press can’t get to her. Isn’t that a bit of an imposition?’
‘As I said, I’ll ask, but she’s already got her boyfriend, her son, and her son’s girlfriend there. I think she rather likes having a full house. She was very accommodating at Christmas.’
‘Christmas?’ Sharissa asked.
‘Some Old Earth festival just before First Day. Ella decided we should all celebrate it after they came back from Negral. Now, are you all cleared?’
‘They brought in telepaths, after the conventional interrogation,’ Sharissa told her. ‘When they said we knew nothing about Winter’s background, or why she might have been killed aside from the obvious, Dowler couldn’t hold us.’
‘And it’s on record that Winter was going to tell the Administration’s Security Committee who was behind the shipping attacks,’ Truelove added.
‘Well, yes,’ Janna said. ‘What else would she have been there for?’
‘I think Dowler wanted people to believe she was going to reveal that she had been working for the Xinti for years.’
Janna rolled her eyes. ‘Is the man insane? Winter was no more a Xinti spy than Aneka is.’ She paused. ‘Um, you don’t know where she and Ella are, do you?’
‘I’m sorry. As far as I know, the only person who knew where she hid them was Winter. I’m sure they’re safe, but I don’t know when they’ll be back.’
Janna sighed. ‘As long as they’re safe. Come on, let’s get you settled in. Do you want to stay in the guest room? There’s plenty of room in our bed…’
Sharissa rolled her eyes. She knew it was partially displacing her worry over her daughter, but she was quite sure that Truelove would end up in their bed. Janna was being Janna. Which was a good thing, under the circumstances.
Herosian Gunship, System G3069, 22.9.527 FSC.
System G3069 had ten worlds circling around an M5 main sequence star, a red dwarf. Ella examined the data on it on the co-pilot’s console while Aneka busied herself with piloting the ship.
‘Winter’s here?’ Ella asked, sounding perplexed. ‘I mean, why here?’
‘There’s one habitable planet,’ Aneka remarked.
‘Barely. Low gravity, barely a third of an atmosphere, and the surface temperature rarely gets above freezing. No one lives here.’
‘She’s here,’ Justine said. ‘Second planet, the habitable one. She’s here because no one lives on it.’
Aneka’s hands shifted over the controls. ‘ETA is… sixteen minutes. What do you want to do once we get there?’
‘I expect we’ll get instructions before then.’
‘I’m not digging this, Justine.’
‘Don’t worry. Everything will be fine once we get there.’
About ten minutes later, Ella noticed something on the sensors. ‘There’s something in orbit. A satellite of some sort… Passive sensors aren’t making out much more than mass and orbital configuration. It’s in geostationary orbit over the largest ocean.’
The planet was about seventy per cent water on the surface, and it was liquid, barely, so it had to be saltwater. The land surface seemed to be divided between two fairly circular continents. There did not look like there was much life on the planet, if any; there was no sign of green on the continents.
‘It’s a communications relay,’ Justine supplied. ‘Secure tachyon beam comms between here and New Earth.’
The ship shifted on its vertical axis, realigning its trajectory slightly, and Aneka frowned. ‘I didn’t do that…’ She reached for the controls, but her fingers elicited no response from the console. ‘We’re locked out, Justine.’
‘Well, it’s one way of giving instructions.’
‘How does she know we’re on this thing? She could assume we’re a Herosian attack ship.’
‘I think that, were that the case, we would be taking fire. One ship? One, small, planetary assault ship?’
‘If she crashes us into the planet, it’s on your head.’
‘She won’t. We’ll be down in ten minutes. I think Ella and I should get into environment suits. As you said, Ella, it’s rather cold down there and the air is thin.’
‘Fine,’ Aneka said sourly, ‘I’ll stay here and pray we don’t meet a horrible end.’
~~~
According to the sensors the outside temperature was about five below freezing point in the weak, orange light of the day. There was life on the planet; Aneka could see patterns on the rocks which suggested some form of lichen grew there, likely surviving on photosynthesis and melt water from the brief periods when it got above freezing. Life, it seemed, would always find a way, no matter what the conditions. They had landed on an open, fairly flat area beside a hill of some sort.
‘We’re down,’ she said, ‘but I don’t see why we’re here.’
‘We need to go out,’ Justine said. ‘It’ll be obvious once we get where we’re going.’
Aneka glanced at Ella, shrugged, and then hit the console control to open up the rear gate. Ella put her helmet on and shrugged back before starting for the cockpit door.
The cold nipped at Aneka’s bare skin as she walked down the ramp, but it was nothing her body could not cope with. She drew in a lungful of air and her systems indicated that the pressure was too low to be breathable and she was operating on her internal oxygen supply. That lichen had to be damn hardy stuff.
Justine started toward the hill, which looked like a rock up-thrust of some sort. The entire place was rock, grey boring rock, with little to differentiate it aside from the different patterns the lichen had formed. Oddly, there seemed to be little of the darker stippling on the hill itself, as though the symbiotic life form had avoided colonising it.
As they got closer, the hill got stranger. ‘Is it just me,’ Ella said after a few metres, ‘or is that hill just… wrong?’
‘The signature is unusual for a mineral,’ Al commented. ‘There could be some odd elements in it, or…’
Aneka frowned, looking down the length of the hill and then back again. The lump of rock was maybe three hundred and fifty metres long and twenty high, and it looked almost like someone had dropped a torpedo of granite into the landscape to half bury itself. ‘That isn’t natural,’ she said. ‘The shape isn’t right.’
‘No,’ Justine agreed, ‘but there are limits to what can be done with camouflage.’ She walked straight at the rock wall in front of her, passing through the surface as though it was not there and vanishing. Her voice came through over the radio. ‘Come on. It’ll be more obvious once you’re through.’
Aneka’s skin tingled as she walked through the field. ‘Some form of static, electromagnetic wave,’ Al commented. ‘I’d imagine it’s the same sort of cloaking field as the one used on the Agroa Gar.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Aneka replied, stopping in her tracks, ‘but this is a lot bigger than Aggy used to be.’
Perhaps ten metres behind the field was a spaceship half-buried in the surface of the planet. Roughly cylindrical, the exact shape was difficult to determine this close up, but there was an airlock door about ten metres away to the left and Justine was heading for it with a confident stride. Aneka knew there was probably no point, but she wished she had brought her pistols.
The outer doors of the airlock closed as soon as they were inside, and the air pressure climbed to one atmosphere quickly enough that Aneka found herself swallowing as her ears adjusted. The heat did not come so quickly, but the temperature had risen above freezing by the time they were at normal pressure.
Grinning, Justine took her helmet off just as the inner door opened. The corridor beyond was empty, but it was warm.
Ella took her own helmet off more uncertainly. ‘There’s no one here,’ she said.
‘There is,’ Justine replied. ‘Come on. It’s not far now.’ She set off down the corridor, leaving the couple behind in her haste.
‘This better be good,’ Aneka muttered. She looked around at the corridor with its wide, curved walls. ‘This looks like a Xinti design.’
‘I’d noticed that,’ Ella replied, hurrying to catch up as Justine turned a corner to the right.
As they rounded the same corner they saw large, heavy doors sliding back to either side. Beyond it was a broad, open room filled with what looked like banks of computers. The air was cooler in there; they could feel that even before they walked into the room. Air conditioning for the electronics, and there was a lot of electronics.
The room, Aneka figured, was at the very core of the ship, and it reminded her of the computer core on the Negral station in that respect. There the centre of it had been a floating, super-cooled sphere which had once held all the Xinti minds resident there. As they moved through the maze of servers to the centre of this room they discovered an entirely different centre.
Here the middle of the room contained two semi-circular benches of white metal, as though they were placed there for discussions, but there was only one person sitting on them.
Winter stood up as they approached, smiling. She was wearing a simple, silver-grey robe, a quoka, which was standard dress for Xinti. ‘Welcome,’ she said, raising her arms, palms upward. ‘It’s nice to finally meet you face to face, as it were.’
Aneka smiled quizzically at her. ‘We’ve met face to face many times, Winter.’
‘Not exactly.’ The voice did not come from the figure in front of them, but from the room around them. ‘I should apologise for the melodramatic introduction, but I found myself unable to resist the little touch of mystery. Let me introduce myself properly. I am Sleep Brings Renewal to All Things, but you can carry on calling me Winter, if you wish.’
Part Six: The Sleep of Renewal
G3069, Second Planet, 22.9.527 FSC.
Aneka stared at the blonde woman in the Xinti robe, her mouth hanging slightly open. Her gaze shifted to the computer racks around her, and then back to the woman. ‘Do I talk to you, or the room?’ she asked for want of something better to say.
‘You prefer a more personal form of communication,’ the room said.
‘So we’ll talk like this,’ the figure concluded.
‘You’re an android?’ Ella asked. ‘A remote like the ones the AIs on Negral used?’
‘Yes, and no,’ Winter replied.
‘An android would be detected fairly quickly,’ Justine said. ‘We’re entirely organic. Though it does mean that the processing power is a little more limited, an instance of her mind is quite capable of running in a body like this.’ She indicated Winter. ‘Though that particular avatar is being directly run by the real mind.’
Aneka frowned. ‘Wait… Are you saying that you, Justine, are also Winter?’
‘That particular Justine is something of a special case,’ Winter said. Aneka turned to look at her; the double-teaming was getting a little annoying. ‘She began as an instance of my mind, but she has been distinct for so long that her personality is quite unique. The other avatars are synchronised with me on a frequent basis to ensure that everyone tells the same story.’
‘Which is why you can get killed and then turn up the next day on a beach,’ Aneka said. ‘It’s not doubles, or clones. Every Winter is an avatar of the main mind here.’ She went on quickly as it all started to play out in her head. ‘And you must change the form of your avatars every so often. Winter, the head of the FSA, has been you since the beginning. Each time one apparently dies, you just replace her with a new model.’
‘Exactly. My purpose was to see that the Human race progressed, and this was the best way I could find to see that it did.’
‘All this time,’ Ella said. ‘Since before the Federation began, you’ve been pushing things to keep us moving in the way you wanted.’
The smile on Winter’s face faded a little. ‘I wouldn’t say that I’ve succeeded in making things go as I would have wished, exactly.’ She pulled herself together and started out of the ring of seats. ‘Come, let’s find you somewhere you can set up camp, as it were. I’ll have your things brought over from the pile of junk you came in on. I’m sure a shower and some refreshment would be useful, and then… Well, we have much to discuss.’
‘Yeah,’ Aneka said. ‘That would be something of an understatement.’
~~~
Aneka was unsure exactly what the purpose of the vessel Winter occupied was. It had a huge section devoted to storing the semi-autonomous, robotic crew, and that seemed fine, but then it had twenty luxury cabins, one of which was now assigned to Aneka and Ella. There was a small park, three labs which covered the primary sciences, a one-hundred-bed hospital, a gym, a firing range, a dance studio, a theatre, a club… and what Winter had described as a brothel! There were also several offices, a very big computer data centre, and an even bigger operations room, which had once been devoted to the Human Evolution project.
It was in the latter that Aneka, Ella, and Winter gathered once the couple had changed into fresh clothes, and had had something to eat and drink. The room was huge, and busy. Featureless, humanoid androids moved around it, checking consoles and avoiding the large, central area which was filled with a vast holographic projection of the local galaxy. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of sparkling dots filled the open air, each representing a star. White ones were uninhabited, red marked Herosian worlds, Torem systems were green, Jenlay ones blue, and Federal, shared systems such as Obati, were yellow. To Aneka it looked like a room planning for war.
‘What’s going on here?’ Ella asked, obviously thinking something similar.
‘What has been going on here for the last six centuries,’ Winter replied. ‘Data is collected from worlds throughout the Federation and processed here. Lately the data coming out of Herosian space in particular has begun to get thin.’
‘Deliberate?’ Aneka asked.
‘A number of agents in Herosian space have stopped making reports to the FSA. Reports which are coming in are very routine. Too routine. I’m trying to verify the status of some of the non-responsive personnel, but it’s difficult without the resources I’m used to.’
‘The FSA was set up as your personal information gathering system,’ Ella said. She did not sound entirely pleased at the idea.
‘Oh heavens no! The FSA is the Federation’s security service. It is responsible for making sure that internal
and external threats are detected, evaluated, and an appropriate response is made. It just so happens that my ability to analyse data and make projections based on it have helped the Agency to achieve its goals.’ There were three couches arranged around the central display and Winter moved to one, indicating that they should sit beside her.
‘But you said things hadn’t gone how you intended?’ Ella continued as she sat down.
‘I’d have thought the Jenlay have turned out as well as anyone could expect,’ Aneka added.
‘But we’ve had this discussion, Aneka,’ Winter replied, smiling. ‘Were the galaxy a perfect place, the Jenlay would be everything I could hope for, more or less. Perhaps a little overfond of physical intimacy, but I can’t fault them over much. I am quite fond of that form of recreation myself, even if it took me a couple of centuries of taking on an organic form to see the appeal. No, the problem is that they are ill-equipped to deal with the problems of the galaxy.’
‘But the Navy seems kind of over-aggressive to me,’ Ella said, grimacing to indicate what she thought of their attitude.
‘The Admiralty have no idea when to fight and when to run, or talk. Their answer to anything is to throw force at it. It isn’t that they know they can’t win and won’t back down, it’s that they truly believe nothing can stand against them. It’s something of an odd trait, given that their troops are well trained, but have almost no experience of combat. Worse, the majority of them would spend the next twenty minutes retching into a bucket if they killed someone.’
‘I don’t see pacifism as a negative characteristic,’ Aneka said.
‘Neither do I until it means they can’t defend themselves.’
‘Huh. You knew. When I first arrived at Harriamon station, you knew who I was, and what I was.’
‘Of course. I built that body for Aktana. I did a full analysis of your mind before it was implanted. I devised the implantation process, the “conditioning” Aktana was working on when the reactor failed.’
The Winter War Page 25
