The Winter War (24 page)

‘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
Aneka, 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.

The figures waiting there did
not get much clearer as they got closer. As the underside of the
ship grounded about five metres from the edge of the water, Aneka
popped open the hatch and poked one of her pistols out. She zoomed
the image in and got two surprises.

The first person she narrowed in
on was Sharissa, dressed in a combat bodysuit of some kind and
carrying a laser rifle. Poking over her shoulder was something
which looked like a man-portable, anti-tank missile launcher of
some sort. Clearly she had been briefed on the attack on the
diplomatic facility.

The other figure resolved into a
pretty blonde with an unforgettable, forgettable face dressed in a
typical, grey business suit. Winter. It was not possible, but there
she was, standing on the beach as though Aneka had imagined seeing
her killed two days earlier.

‘That is surprising, even for
her,’ Al commented.

‘She died,’ Aneka replied. ‘I
saw
her die. I heard her blow herself up, for Christ’s sake!
A double doesn’t explain this.’

‘A clone? Forced growth. It’s
theoretically possible to overwrite neurons with data taken from a
scanned brain…’

‘I have a feeling that this is
one of those questions that she won’t want to answer right now.’
Aneka climbed up onto the deck of the submarine. There was a narrow
section around the hatch you could stand on and a sort of walkway
marked across the hull to the edge of the disc, presumably hardened
to allow people to walk on it without breaking through. She stood
on that and then kneeled down to call into the craft. ‘Come on up.
If these two are going to kill us we’re royally screwed.’

They had to wade up onto the
beach. Aneka was thankful that her Ultraskin leggings, while
air-permeable, were moderately waterproof. She could feel water
squishing in her boots, and Truelove looked distinctly
uncomfortable. Then again, she was grinning, though Aneka was not
sure if it was the sight of her boss, alive despite the odds, or a
residue of the recent sex. Maybe both. Sharissa’s smile was more
obviously because she was seeing Aneka and Ella.

‘At least I can tell your mother
you’re safe,’ she said to Ella as they approached up the sand.

‘Safe is a matter of degrees,
under the circumstances,’ Winter countered. ‘Let’s get into the
plane. We have fresh clothes for you all. Elaine, you’re piloting
once you’ve changed.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Truelove replied,
heading straight for the open door of the VTOL.

‘Keep it low, off the radar, and
fly a wide loop out over the ocean. Our final destination is the
spaceport, but I need time to talk to Aneka and Ella before we get
there.’

‘Sure,’ Aneka said, starting
after Truelove. ‘It’ll be nice to get out of these boots. I must
say I’m more than a little surprised to see you here, Winter.’