The Winter War (28 page)

‘You have authority from…?’

Dowler held out a memory card.
‘My authorisation.’

Taking the card, Truelove slid
it into her console. There was a slight pause and then the screen
lit up with a Federal Certificate of Authority. The marker at the
bottom declared it genuine. ‘This checks out, Sir.’ Truelove looked
up at him as she handed him back the card. How in Vashma’s name had
this man been assigned to run the Agency? He was a pencil-pusher, a
politician.

Dowler nodded. ‘Until further
notice, Miss Truelove, you will be on administrative leave.’

‘Sir?’

‘You will be escorted from the
building immediately.’

‘I don’t understand, Sir…’

‘That’s an order, Agent.’

Truelove’s eyes narrowed
slightly. ‘Am I under arrest, Sir?’

‘Not at this time…’

‘Then I am required under
Federal Law to secure my terminal prior to leaving. I assume that
you will not be requiring me to shirk my responsibilities?’

For a second she thought he was
going to stop her, but he nodded. ‘Be quick about it.’

She palmed the chip Winter had
given her and, under the guise of closing any files she might have
open, slipped it into one of the slots. Then she locked her
terminal and got up from her chair. She did not know what was going
on, but she had a very bad feeling about it.

Yorkbridge Mid-town.

Janna frowned as the apartment door
opened and Sharissa stepped through, a metaphorical black cloud
hanging over her head. The blonde did not look in the least bit
happy. Janna decided that putting a smile on and making light of
things would be a good start, though she did not expect it to
work.

‘You’re home early, love,’ she
said. ‘Must be my lucky day.’

Somewhat to Janna’s surprise,
the reply was, ‘It is. I’m going to have a couple of drinks and
then we’re going to fuck until I can’t remember my name.’

Worried now, Janna got up and
went to the bar. Pouring two healthy glasses of shinishee, she
passed one across to Sharissa. ‘Can you talk about it?’

‘I have no idea.’ Sharissa sank
the glass in one pull and held it out for seconds. ‘Some of it is
going to be all over the news, so I guess I can tell you that.
They’ve appointed some pencil neck from the Administration as
temporary head of the Agency. The first thing he did was kick
Elaine Truelove out of the building. Then he apparently locked
himself in Winter’s office. And then about an hour later various
other orders came out. Anyone close to Winter has been sent home on
garden leave.’

‘Are you under investigation or
something? The woman was assassinated! What are they
investigating?’

‘No official investigation has
been started that anyone’s aware of, but this
feels
wrong.’

Janna frowned. ‘What about Ella,
and Aneka? Are they safe?’

‘Well, I can’t warn them if they
aren’t. Winter put them somewhere no one directly associated with
the Agency knows about. Her own, private, safe house. I don’t even
know which world they’re on. Hopefully that means they won’t be
tracked down.’ She smiled, though it looked forced. ‘I don’t even
know whether there’s any danger to them.’

‘What if this new man revokes
the gag order on Aneka?’

Sharissa grimaced. ‘There were
good reasons for that. It wasn’t just Winter’s whim.’

‘But…’

‘No buts. Get
your
butt
into the bedroom and change into one of your costumes. I want a
dance, then a lap dance, and then you’ll do whatever I damn well
tell you to do until I’m not thinking about this anymore.’

Janna threw back her own drink
and then started for the bedroom door. She had learned a long time
ago that sometimes actions were more important than words.

Elsewhere, 11.8.527 FSC.

Tachyons exist in a superluminal state
their entire lives. They are particles which naturally travel
faster than the speed of light, thus violating a lot of cherished
laws of physics, and therefore considered impossible until the
discovery of gravity-control technology. The ability to manipulate
gravitons, and the Higgs field, to manipulate the apparent mass of
objects brought with it the ability to slow down and detect
tachyons, but the equipment to do so was originally large and very
clumsy, and it managed to detect one particle in several thousand
passing through it. Improved technology made for more accurate
detection of higher-velocity particles using progressively smaller
equipment.

One such high-tech detector,
massing around thirty tonnes, hung in orbit around a world
smothered in icy oceans, covered by a thin, if technically
breathable, atmosphere. It sat waiting for particles carrying the
kind of phase modulation it had been created to detect, and when
such a particle stream impinged upon its detection field it
interpreted the signal, applied the complex error correction codes
used in such lossy communication, and then retransmitted the result
toward the surface of the planet using more conventional means.

The message was received by
complex computer systems which had already noticed that traffic
coming into the tachyon relay had been becoming sparser for days.
The message resulted in a flurry of activity and the transmission
of a number of messages back up to the satellite for transmission
out of the system.

There was a lot to be done.
There were decisions to be made and there were people to protect.
Someone had declared war and this was no time for delay, but Sleep
Brings Renewal to All Things was an AI and she needed information
before she could determine the best course of action.

FSA Headquarters.

Dowler had been working on the
encryption surrounding Winter’s private data files for a day. Not
personally, of course; he was not a cryptographer. He had brought a
dedicated code-cracking computer with him for the job, one which
was not connected to the network. If anyone asked, it was an
isolated laptop because the data he was reading was for his eyes
only, but the real reason was that he had not been given keys to
the files and he needed what was in them.

He had been assured that any
encryption system could be broken, given time. The computer he was
using was something special. He had never seen anything quite so
responsive to commands and there was no doubt it was working far
faster than any general purpose device would have, but it was still
not coming up with anything.

The problem was time. He was not
entirely sure how much he had. He knew that there were already
people at work trying to replace the old Winter with a new,
permanent assignment to the role, and he very much needed to get
the information he was looking for before that happened. Elroy, in
particular, had been unhappy about the appointment of a civilian to
the FSA leadership. Dowler had suggested that Elroy be removed from
the equation, but his masters had not wanted any additional
attention. One assassination was enough.

The computer bleeped to draw his
attention to the screen. One file had been cracked and was being
displayed for him. He frowned and then took a phone from his
pocket, dialling from memory and then waiting for the signal from
the other end stating that the connection was secure.

‘Odanari. There’s a safe house
there. It may be nothing, but… Yes, I’ll forward the coordinates.’
He listened for a second, nodded, and closed the connection. Then
he went back to waiting for the computer to decrypt more files.

Yorkbridge Mid-town.

‘Request for access,’ the apartment’s
computer announced. ‘The individual has identified herself as an
FSA agent.’

Truelove frowned. ‘Mute sound,’
she said, and the news channel she had been watching went silent.
‘Approve the request and open the door when they get here.’ She got
to her feet and headed for her small bedroom. She had not bothered
getting dressed that morning for the simple reason that she had no
plans to leave her home.

Emerging from the room in a
short, Nusilk wrap she found a tall woman with short, black hair
and narrow features set in a rounded face standing just inside the
door of the apartment. She was wearing a grey business suit with a
sheer blouse, which reminded Truelove of Winter. The clear, blue
eyes held the same kind of ageless quality her old boss had had
too.

‘Hello,’ Truelove said, ‘can I
help you?’

‘Yes, Elaine, you can,’ the
woman said, ‘but what I’m going to ask you for is unofficial, and
potentially dangerous. I want you to know that you can decline.
Just say the word at any time and I’ll leave.’

‘I… don’t understand. Who are
you? The computer said you had Agency identification.’

‘Yes… I am, how to put this… I
am Winter’s backup plan. I am here to gather information in order
to decide the best course of action. Someone is doing something
which is a threat to the Federation. They have, essentially,
declared war on us, the people who protect that Federation. I need
to know who they are.’

Truelove’s frown grew deeper.
‘You’d better sit down.’ She pointed to the couches in front of the
silent screen and the woman crossed to one, sitting so that she
could face the one directly opposite the video wall.

‘I’m not sure what I can do to
help you,’ Truelove said once she was seated. ‘I’m on
administrative leave. I’ve no access…’

‘Who’s running the Agency?’

‘A stiff-neck named Dowler.’

‘Marcus Dowler?’

‘That’s him. You know him?’

‘Of him.’

‘Well, as best as I can tell,
he’s running some sort of investigation into Winter. I know he sent
a lot of people home on the day he started. All the people Winter
trusted, starting with me.’

‘I see. Elaine, I think it’s
best if I stay away from you for a few days. There may be news
regarding Winter in the next few days and it may well look very
bad. I need to know… Did you trust her?’

‘Yes,’ Truelove replied without
a thought.

‘Very well. Remember that and I
may come to ask for your help again.’

‘Again? I didn’t really tell you
anything.’

‘Yes, you did.’ The woman rose
to her feet and started for the door.

‘I don’t even know what to call
you.’

The woman paused in the doorway.
‘I’m Justine,’ she said, and then she was gone.

Odanari.

Justine walked out of the front door of
the house, heading for the object that had fallen onto the landing
strip a few minutes earlier. The dead drops were done from courier
ships that made regular runs between New Earth and Odanari. They
launched re-entry vehicles from high orbit on the way in, and those
small missiles did their level best to avoid giving away their
eventual landing site as they wound their way to the island. Thus
far no one had ever tracked one; she knew since they were equipped
with sensors to detect tracking of various forms.

Picking up the small metal
sphere, which was all that was left of the missile, she started
back toward the house. Her ident unlocked the access panel as she
walked and she flipped it open, surprised to see only a single data
card inside. Generally there was more, even the odd handwritten
note; getting a single object in one of the pods was unusual.

Taking the card to her private
office, Justine plugged it into her terminal and watched in silence
as the data unspooled onto her screen. She watched footage of
Winter being assassinated from the viewpoint of three different
news channel cameras, her face impassive. She watched the text
which followed and frowned. Not telling Aneka and Ella, especially
Aneka, seemed wrong. They were not going to do anything stupid.
What
could
they do? Just like Justine, they were stuck on
this island until someone came to get them.

It was, however, the last
message on the card which lifted Justine’s eyebrows and made her
jaw drop. It was just one line, but she had never thought she would
ever see anything like it.

If your location is
compromised, bring them here.

Harriamon, High Orbit, 13.8.527
FSC.

Another tachyon relay sat in high orbit
above another world. Harriamon had a thicker, and more toxic,
atmosphere, and the relay was newer, having been built earlier that
year, but it did the same sort of job. Tachyons streamed in from
distant worlds, impinged upon the detection field, and so became a
stream of data to be processed and redirected.

In the case of this relay,
however, more or less all the data was simply retransmitted. The
entire machine had been built to relay messages from New Earth to
Old Earth, and vice versa. It rarely relayed anything to a local
destination, or even a remote one which was not one of the two
Earths.

The crew, two technicians and
one scientist, were expecting nothing more than tachyon beams
transiting through their station, so the barrage of gamma-ray beams
came as something of a surprise. It ripped open the central section
of the hull like a tin can leaving the missiles which followed to
wipe out the main sensor arrays.

By the time the Admiral Banfry
had swung around from the far side of Harriamon and got within
sensor range, the source of the attack was gone and all they could
do was begin mounting a rescue operation.

FSA Headquarters, 14.8.527 FSC.

‘I don’t understand,’ Dowler said into
his phone. ‘You won’t take Elroy out, but you attack the relay
station at Harriamon?’

The voice at the other end was
apparently quite angry since Dowler’s face paled. ‘No, of course I…
Yes… It’s still working on the files. I’ve found a few leads, but
nothing solid yet. There’s evidence that she was definitely hiding
something serious, and I have the full details on Jansen.’

He listened again, nodding a few
times. ‘I’ll forward the files to you immediately, and of course
I’ll tell you when I have more on Winter.’ He closed the connection
and reached for his terminal. He would need to be careful about
sending out the data on Jansen. It was a level-seven secret and he
was sending it to an unauthorised location. If someone found out
about it… But they would not, he was sure of that at least. As long
as he used the encryption software he had been supplied with, no
one would be able to crack it or trace the connection.