The Winter War (14 page)

‘Aggy? The next message here is
after you grabbed my team, isn’t it?’ There were actually quite a
lot of emails she thought were after that date.

‘We did not leave the system
when you were taken,’ Aggy said. ‘Chief Scientist Aktana wanted to
be quite sure that you were the subject he wanted before returning
to Negral. We were in system for almost eight solar days before
leaving and I continued to monitor communications during that
time.’

‘Oh. So these messages… a lot of
them are going to be about me and my team going missing.’

‘Yes, Aneka. There are mundane
emails such as that one to your accountant, but there are several
regarding your disappearance.’

‘Oh.’ Aneka looked at the
screen. There was no indication of the contents of the messages
until she opened them. They were marked with a serial number and a
timestamp, and Aggy had explained that she had compiled specific
search routines to hunt through the texts for information she was
interested in.

‘I could understand if you might
find reading these uncomfortable,’ Aggy said. The sound quality had
changed a little and, sure enough, Aggy had decided that projecting
her image into the room would be preferable.

Aneka sat back in her chair and
regarded the golden figure. ‘You’ve been through them?’

‘Given that you were on the
Agroa Gar, I paid more attention to traffic regarding you, but I
was not analysing the data extensively.’

‘My family…?’

‘Your parents were not extensive
email users. There is one email from your brother to a friend in
which he indicates he will not be attending a party due to your
disappearance. I believe your parents were notified five days after
your capture from some of the other traffic, presumably by
telephone or personal visit.’

‘Huh. I could actually see
Anderson going out to tell them himself.’ She paused for a second
before adding. ‘I think I need to psych myself up for those ones.
I’ll leave them for tomorrow.’

‘As you wish, Aneka. Have a
pleasant evening.’

Aneka grinned at the air where
Aggy’s image had been. It was not like either of them were actually
going anywhere, but Aggy was big on the formal pleasantries.
Looking to her left, she saw the list of emails again. Then she
reached out and flicked the monitor into standby.

23.3.527 FSC.

Aneka frowned at the email she was
reading. It was from her old boss to an address she did not
recognise and the contents were disturbing. At first she had not
been sure why the email had been put in the list until she had
found her name in one line.
Aneka is one of my best. You assured
me you had this covered.
Everywhere else there were no names,
just references to a ‘stolen package.’

‘Aggy? Do you have any other
messages between Anderson and this email address?’ Aneka asked.

The golden-skinned woman
appeared between Aneka and the bed. ‘Checking…’ She was gazing off
toward a corner of the ceiling as though trying to recall something
and, despite her feelings about the email, Aneka grinned at the
Human-like pose. Aggy looked down. ‘I have found… Why are you
grinning at me, Aneka?’

‘You look so Human doing that.
Do you do it to make us feel comfortable?’

‘I find Humans, and Jenlay,
react better to my presence if I enact Human mannerisms where I am
able to mimic them. I can stop if it makes you uncomfortable.’

‘No, I find it endearing. Thank
you for taking the trouble to make us at ease. What did you
find?’

‘The email address used there
appears twice in Mister Anderson’s private mailbox. I have no other
emails originating from it or with it as a recipient.’

‘Let me see the other one then.’
A new window opened on the console screen and Aneka turned to look.
There was not much to the mail, just a date and a set of
coordinates. The date was a very familiar one: May the sixteenth,
twenty-eleven. ‘Aggy… Aren’t those coordinates…?’

‘The latitude and longitude
given are where you were captured, within a one-kilometre radius,
Aneka.’

Aneka checked the send date. It
was the fifteenth, the day before they had gone in. Aneka had sent
the extraction coordinates out through encrypted radio. ‘Why would
Anderson be sending our extraction point to some mysterious email
address?’ It was obviously a rhetorical question and Aggy gave no
answer. ‘Could someone have known you were on Earth? That you were
looking for candidates for the project?’

‘While not impossible, it would
be highly unlikely. The only people who knew about the programme
were Xinti. My cloaking system was more than sufficient to keep us
hidden from the technology available on Earth then. The
infiltrations I conducted of secure servers was never discovered,
to my knowledge, and if it were it would likely have been
attributed to a more mundane source.’

‘Well,
someone
seems to
have known something was going to happen.’ Aneka frowned. ‘Anderson
pushed me to do that op. We were just off a two-month assignment
guarding some arsehole businessman in Afghanistan and I’d said we
needed the break, but he pushed… Someone made sure I was there, in
the middle of nowhere, so you could grab me, and Anderson told them
where it was going to happen.’

‘I was following you from the
moment you left Baghdad. The message was not for my benefit.’

‘No, I didn’t think it was.
Could you please go through your records looking for anything else
related to this email address? I’m not expecting anything, but it’s
worth a try.’ Reaching out, she closed down the console and then
turned away from it.

‘Of course, Aneka. Are you all
right?’

Aneka’s frown deepened.
‘Confused. And I hate mysteries.’

24.3.527 FSC.

Aneka finished watching her diagnostics
cycle but kept her eyes closed. She was lying on her back, not on
her side curled up against Ella. Still another sixteen days until
the redhead was up and pestering her for sex at every opportunity.
At times it was annoying. Lately it had been getting to the level
where it was almost a problem. Right now, Aneka would have given
quite a lot for Ella to be lying there begging for ‘just one more
come before we get up.’

Sighing, she opened her eyes,
swung her legs out of bed, and found herself looking at a pair of
golden thighs. She looked up. ‘Morning Aggy. You know, if you had a
physical body you could really take advantage of my current frame
of mind.’

‘The batteries on your favourite
vibrator are fully charged, Aneka,’ Aggy replied happily.

‘It’s Ella’s favourite, that’s
why I’m using it. I don’t have a favourite vibrator since I usually
have Ella. She may not vibrate, but she hums quite well. Is there a
reason for your early appearance?’

‘I have done as you asked. As I
indicated, there are no other emails from or to that account. I was
unable to find any references to any component of it. I tried
tracking the mail server for the account only to discover that its
internet address was changed frequently. In every copy of the DNS
database I took a snapshot of, in fact. I have concluded that the
address was a throwaway one designed to obscure the recipient.’

Aneka nodded. ‘I guess that
makes sense. So it’s a dead end?’

‘I did not give up so easily,’
Aggy replied. ‘I did a full heuristic search for other captured
emails around that time period using similar phraseology, as well
as scanning for messages utilising the same email server. Having
discarded all the ones related to postal or courier services, I was
able to narrow the list to nine thousand, six hundred, and
twenty-seven messages.’ Aneka blinked at her. ‘Unfortunately I had
to work through these manually to avoid false negatives, which is
why it has taken me until now to find this.’ Lifting her hands, she
put her palms together, and then spread them to produce a window in
the air. She held it out to Aneka. Taking the window in hand, Aneka
held it up and looked at it. She knew it was not actually real; it
was something Aggy was projecting for her. But she could actually
feel
the thing in her fingers! Focussing on the contents of
the projection instead of the projection itself, Aneka examined the
message.

It seemed to be from a company
executive to someone else in the same company.
The Major is
complaining about his lost package,
sprang out at her. Anderson
had been a major before leaving the Marines.
The operation went
exactly as our Principal said it would. His information was right
on the money.
So whoever it was seemed to have been aware of
what was going to happen. Someone, their ‘Principal,’ had told
them.
The advancement in technology we expect from this event
will make every last one of us richer than God.

‘Who the Hell is Deltram
Technologies Ltd?’ Aneka asked.

‘They were a small investment
corporation,’ Aggy replied, ‘based out of Baltimore, Maryland. They
specialised in cutting-edge technology investment, according to
their SEC filing.’

‘There is also a Deltram
Technologies FRC in the Federal Register,’ Al added. ‘Their filing
lists the same sort of activity, which may be coincidence given the
considerable span of time involved.’

‘I don’t believe in that kind of
coincidence,’ Aneka stated flatly. ‘There’s nothing else you can
find, Aggy?’

‘Nothing, Aneka. My capture of
emails was not complete except in areas of specific interest, such
as you and the other potential subjects. I can only data mine what
I have, unfortunately.’

‘Not your fault. Okay, I guess
we’ve hit the end of this road for now. Thank you for your help,
Aggy.’

‘My pleasure, Aneka. Frankly, if
someone was aware of our activities back then, I would like to know
who and how as well. I am not greatly fond of mysteries
myself.’

20.4.527 FSC.

Ella hauled herself upright and
groaned. Aneka handed her an open bottle of isotonic water and
waited for the little redhead to consume half of it before saying,
‘Morning, love. Good sleep?’

Ella growled at her. ‘I had this
really weird dream.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. I was taking a walk in
the hills above Matlock, I think. The wind was blowing in my hair,
the sun was shining, and I was feeling all light and breezy. And
then I’m suddenly getting pounded by this beefy shepherd.’

‘Hmmm…’

‘And after that he had friends.
Finishing up with his sister. I’m horny as fuck! You wouldn’t know
anything about any of this, would you?’

Aneka put her hand up to her
chest, fingers spread, and affected a hurt look. ‘Moi?’

‘Yes, you! You didn’t think I’d
want you enough when I got up?’

Aneka grinned. ‘Let’s get some
food in you. You’ll need the energy.’ Reaching into the pod she
lifted Ella out and set her down on the deck. ‘Believe me, you’ll
need the energy.’

~~~

‘I can’t move,’ Ella said.

‘You don’t need to,’ Aneka
replied, grinning.

‘We can’t spend the night lying
on the mess room table.’

‘Well if it comes to that, I’ll
carry you back to the cabin.’

Ella giggled. ‘It might. Vashma
that was good. What’ve you been up to while I was asleep?’

‘Reading. Books, and there were
some files Aggy kept from when she was researching me for uplift.
Oh, and I fucked Drake when he got up for the mid-flight check so
I’d have something to play to you and start that dream off.’

‘How long have you been planning
that?’

‘Couple of months. I missed you.
I don’t like it when you’re not in bed when I wake up. It feels
like… like there’s a hole in my world.’

‘You say the nicest things.’

‘It’s true. Sue me.’

‘I’d much rather fuck you.’

‘I thought you couldn’t
move?’

‘I lied.’

29.4.527 FSC.

Ella was pacing. It was sort of comical
aside from the fact that Aneka was not sure why. There was not much
space in the cabin for walking back and forth, so it was a couple
of steps, turn, a couple of steps…

‘You should really stop that,’
Aneka told her from her position propped up on one elbow on the
bed. ‘You’ll get dizzy.’

Ella stopped and turned, and
looked at Aneka with a weird sort of concentrating-confused
expression. ‘Okay, here’s the thing. I was thinking about what you
said when I woke up. Like there was this hole, you remember?’

Aneka looked at her with a
quizzical half-grin.

‘There was a hole. In your life.
When I wasn’t in bed. Or not in bed, exactly, but there. When I
wasn’t there. And I started thinking. And the others will be up
tomorrow and I thought I’d better say something before then because
if you want to then we can start planning and if you don’t I’ll
have some time to sort that out. See?’

The half-grin remained. ‘Uh…
no.’

‘You don’t?!’ Ella’s eyes
widened.

‘I don’t understand what you’re
talking about.’

‘Oh. Oh! I wasn’t really very
clear, was I? Look, we’ve been together for nearly four years now
and it’s been really great. I mean, it’s been
really
great.
I’ve never felt so good in my life and that’s the important thing,
you see? That we feel great, because we
should
feel great.
We have a right to feel great. That’s what life should be about.
You do your best to find someone you like, and maybe love, and you
try to be as good together as possible, but then maybe you need
more and I think that maybe we should do that, because I know you’d
think of it as more than it was, because I read up on it in our
notes and I know it was more important back then and now it’s
really just a legal thing…’ She turned slightly red and stopped to
drag in a lungful of air.

‘But that’s important too!’ It
was kind of like watching a train wreck; Aneka thought she should
step in and stop her, but it was just too fascinating. ‘I mean if
something happened to me you’d be out on the street! So that’s
important, but I’d understand if you felt it was too much because
nothing would change, probably, so it wouldn’t be like it was back
then, but it does still have some meaning, you see?’ She gave Aneka
a quick look as though she expected an answer, and then went on
anyway.