The Winter War (33 page)

‘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.’

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.’