The Winter War (12 page)

‘That him?’ Aneka asked.

‘Gopi, he’s really let himself
go,’ Ella replied.

‘Take the seat opposite. I’ll
sit directly across from him.’

‘I don’t think he’s dangerous,
Aneka.’

‘He might not be, but the rest
of this place is setting off all my alarms.’

Ella slipped into the booth,
scooting over so that Aneka could sit beside her. The blonde took
one look at them and then walked off. The man, Ella’s father,
looked surprised for a second, and paid far too much attention to
Aneka for her liking, then he looked at Ella, frowned, and said,
‘You know, the picture on the news didn’t do you justice,
Ella.’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ Ella said, not
exactly with sincerity. ‘What do you want?’

‘Well, to see you, of course.
Who’s your friend…? Uh, no, Aneka Jansen, right? The woman from Old
Earth.’

‘Yes, this is Aneka, my partner.
You could have seen me any of the dozen times I’ve been back here.
You could have sent me a message on my birthday once. You didn’t,
so why now?’

Aneka sat silently,
contemplating the man opposite her. She had known that Ella was
estranged from him, but not to that extent. Ella rarely mentioned
him aside from when she had explained what had happened to her. She
had gone with him one day when he went to work, part of a school
assignment, but while she was in the mining cavern where he worked
she had been infected with a local life form; an extremophile
lichen which had eaten away at her flesh leaving her blind and
disfigured. It had been her mother who had scraped together the
money to go to New Earth, and then got Ella’s face reconstructed
and her eyes replaced with cybernetic ones. Her father, it seemed,
had not been in the picture then, but it was hard to believe the
man could care that little for his daughter.

‘Like I said,’ he said,
switching to Rimmic as though it were just natural to do so, ‘I saw
you on the news. I saw you were in the system and I figured… Well,
maybe it was time we got reacquainted, y’know?’

‘You marked the message as
urgent, Dad,’ Ella replied, keeping to Federal.

His eyes flicked to Aneka, then
back. ‘Okay, yeah, I did… Look, I need some money. There are some
very bad guys who are going to hurt me if I don’t get it to them…’
He seemed to figure out that Aneka could understand what he was
saying perfectly well when she frowned at him, and he switched back
to Federal. ‘They’re going to kill me, honey.’

‘Don’t call me that!’ Ella
snapped. ‘You don’t have the right. You’ve been gambling again,
right? I don’t suppose you ever stopped. What happened? Mom decide
to cut you off?’

Aneka could see Techman’s eyes
and jaw tightening as he tried to control a flare of anger. ‘She’s
got some new bimbo she’s moving in with. Says she’s got expenses
and can’t help me.’

‘Sharissa is not a bimbo,’ Ella
replied. ‘She does, however, love Mom and she probably persuaded
her that you’ve been leeching off her for long enough. Well you’re
not going to start on me. We’re going, you can sort yourself out.’
Aneka slipped out of the booth and Ella started to follow.

‘No,’ Techman said, desperation
in his eyes. ‘Ella, you can’t still be blaming me for what happened
to you? It wasn’t my fault you got a faulty mask…’

Aneka’s eyes swept over the
room. The raised voices were attracting little attention except for
one woman sitting at the bar who was looking their way. She had
purple eye shadow on, and dark red lipstick. She was dressed in a
very sheer tank top and pair of Ultraskin shorts, which left almost
nothing to the imagination. But Aneka recognised Leeforth
immediately.

‘I’ve never blamed you for that,
Dad,’ Ella told him. ‘Not once. What I did blame you for was taking
the compensation money the company paid you and gambling it away
rather than using it to help me.’

The door of the club opened and
two men walked in. Both were in casual gear, but they walked with a
purpose rather than like patrons. Aneka was pretty sure the smaller
of the two was armed from the way his jacket hung. The bigger one
probably just needed to glare at someone to make them fall
over.

‘It wasn’t enough!’ Techman
wailed. ‘We needed more and all I had to do was…’

The two men noted the argument
and the smaller one grinned far too maliciously for Aneka’s taste.
They started toward the booth. Out of the corner of her eye Aneka
noted that Leeforth had seen them too. She was reaching for her
bag.

‘Brinna,’ Ella said, ‘you’re an
asshole. You’ve got a gambling problem and you need to do something
about it.’

‘Yes he does.’ The speaker was
the smaller of the two men, and he was speaking in Rimmic. ‘He has
a bad gambling habit, but don’t worry, little lady, we’re going to
fix it for him.’

‘Charlie,’ Techman said, trying
really hard to be jovial, ‘you said I had a week…’

‘And that was eleven days ago,
Techman. It’s a thousand credits, or Hector breaks one of your
limbs and we make it two thousand.’

‘I don’t have it, Charlie, but
this is my daughter and she’s going to…’

Aneka saw Charlie’s eyes flick
toward Ella, saw the bigger man, who was presumably Hector, shift
his position and stance. She relaxed, her eyes shifting downward
where she could watch their hands and look non-threatening. She
knew where this was going even if Techman did not.

‘She is going to do nothing!’
Ella snapped, cutting her father off.

‘Your daughter?’ Charlie said,
suddenly interested. ‘Now this changes everything. Maybe we can cut
a deal. She can pay it off in instalments back at my place. Hector,
bring her.’

Hector reached out, his hand
landing on Aneka’s arm to push her aside. He was taller and far
bulkier to look at, but he was trying to shift almost one hundred
kilos of robot. She went nowhere. Then she looked up at him,
smiled, and stepped forward. His stance, meant to brace himself,
gave her an easy opening as her knee drove into his groin. Letting
out a howl of pain, Hector crumpled onto the floor, hugging his
wounded genitals.

Charlie, stupidly, went for his
gun. Aneka’s fist slammed into his right bicep and it was his turn
to scream as the bone broke. Her right fist hit him in the stomach
and he doubled over her arm.

Hector started to unwrap himself
from his foetal position, only to have Leeforth’s block heel come
down on his ear. ‘Stay down,’ she growled at him. Aneka was
impressed, it sounded damn menacing considering she had wondered
whether the woman had it in her.

The other amazing thing was that
Charlie was still trying. He backed up and swung at Aneka with his
only good arm. It was not good enough. She caught the swinging arm
and twisted, driving him down to one knee and keeping him there.
‘Fucking stay put!’ Aneka told him.

Leeforth was turning to the
bouncers who had suddenly decided to take an interest, and ignoring
the screech from Hector as her heel turned on his ear. ‘Naval
officer. Someone get the Peacekeepers in here. Now!’ The bouncers
stopped in their tracks, one of them fumbling a phone from his
pocket and turning to make the call.

Aneka nodded to Leeforth.
‘Commander. You scrub up well.’ She noticed a pair of animal
footprint tattoos on the upper slopes of the woman’s breasts. Maybe
Judy Leeforth had a wild side. ‘Don’t tell me you frequent topless
bars when you’re on shore leave.’

‘Uh… no. Doctor Gilroy was a
little worried when she heard you were coming here. She spoke to
Ape. He thought I’d be less obtrusive.’

‘In that outfit?’

‘You’re one to talk. Are you all
right, Miss Narrows?’

Ella slipped out of the booth,
giving her father a glare. ‘I’m fine aside from a desire to break
someone’s nose.’

‘I wouldn’t, Ella,’ Aneka
replied, ‘you’ll probably regret it.’

‘I don’t think I would.’

Techman looked up at his
daughter beseechingly. ‘Ella… Honey…’

Ella pulled back her fist. ‘I
told you not to call me that…’

~~~

Ella flexed her right hand and winced.
She was sitting in the Cavern One Peacekeeper station with Aneka
and Leeforth, waiting for the police officers to finish up the
paperwork.

‘I said you’d probably regret
it,’ Aneka told her. ‘Hitting someone in the face is never that
good an idea. Too much bone.’

‘Well I
thought
you meant
I’d feel bad about punching my father.’

‘Oh, I only knew the guy a few
minutes and I wanted to punch him. When the bruising goes down
you’ll be fine.’

‘Gloves help,’ Leeforth
supplied, ‘especially if you’re hitting them in the mouth.
Seriously never a good idea, but if you have to…’ She lifted her
own right hand, flexing the fingers and showing a scar over her
middle knuckle. ‘It got infected and the tissue regen didn’t work
perfectly, but I kind of like it. Didn’t at the time. Some people’s
mouths are sewers.’

‘You are a bit of a conundrum,’
Aneka commented.

‘Me?’

‘Uh-huh. You don’t really look
like a battleship’s executive officer, you definitely don’t look
like someone who punches people in the mouth…’

‘And the tats are a surprise,’
Ella added, happy to have the conversation move away from her
hand.

Leeforth’s hand shifted up to
stroke over the left hand paw print where it poked above her top.
‘Yeah… Legacy of my earlier career. I was a marine. The only girl
in my unit. All the others had tattoos which went with their
nickname and they called me “Wildcat” so…’

‘You were a marine?’

‘Uh-huh. Got posted to the
Banfry, impressed Ape, and when his XO position opened up he said I
should apply. I thought he was crazy, but I got the job. The
interview board said they were impressed with my organisational
skills and tactical ability.’

‘You and he aren’t…’

‘Vashma no! No, Ape’s in a solid
partnership with his ship. No woman alive comes between him and
her. I mean, we’ve had sex, but that’s just stress relief.
Sometimes we spar, sometimes we fuck…’ She grinned. ‘…and
occasionally the sparring ends up with us naked, but it’s nothing
serious. Ever.’

A message popped up in Aneka’s
vision field indicating that Ella had made a connection. ‘I think
the lady protests a little too much,’ Aneka commented.

‘She’s right though. Ape’s
married to the Banfry. That’s what broke up his relationship with
Gillian.’

‘True, she’s probably being
pragmatic.’

‘Since when did pragmatism work
on emotions?’

A Peacekeeper in blue body
armour walked over holding a tablet and further discussion of
Leeforth’s love life was put on hold.

FNb Admiral Banfry, 26.1.527 FSC.

It probably said something about the
progress Ape had made in the last few years that he was allowing
Aggy to present her findings on the terrorist ships ‘in person.’ In
person meant appearing on a wall screen, but the Captain had
allowed an ex-Xinti AI to connect directly with his ship’s systems,
which was a long step from the distrust Ape had had in anything
Xinti when Aneka had first met him.

Aggy stood in a virtual
extension of the briefing room, hands clasped behind her back, next
to a wireframe model of the ship she had been asked to analyse. Her
audience was several of the senior officers of the Banfry,
including Ape and Leeforth, along with Aneka, Drake, Gillian, and
Ella. Her news was interesting.

‘Careful analysis of the vessel
in question has identified some interesting anomalies,’ the golden
woman said. ‘The hull shows the outward appearance of a hyper-dense
composite as used by the Xinti. However, the manufacturing is poor.
The outer layer of material has been laid down without the
precision I would expect to see in a vessel manufactured by Xinti
engineers.’

‘Further evidence to suggest
that this is someone with imperfect understanding of Xinti
technology,’ Gillian suggested.

‘I would tend to agree, Doctor,’
Aggy said. ‘Their use of a sensor cloaking shield system along with
a reaction drive is also flawed. The emissions from a reaction
drive, especially an antimatter torch, make the shield essentially
useless. This means that the ships must be waiting for their
targets, setting an ambush. A Xinti vessel would be able to pursue
its target while hidden, but these ones would give themselves away
if they used their main drives while cloaked.’

‘Which means they’ve got intel
on the ships they want to hit,’ Leeforth said.

‘Which is why we gave a false
time of arrival,’ Drake said, nodding. ‘However, that does assume
they are hitting specific targets. If their goal is merely to
terrorise then they could just be positioning themselves and
attacking any random ship that comes within range.’

‘I took the liberty of analysing
the attacks as well as the data on the ship,’ Aggy said. ‘The
attacks would appear to be random, but there is an underlying
pattern. Weapons and supply shipments, particularly higher
technology items, are being targeted along with enough other ships
to provide obscurity. It is of particular note that these specific
targets tend to be discovered later, and are more carefully reduced
to unrecognisable wreckage.’

‘You’re saying that our
terrorists may be pirates after all?’ Leeforth asked.

‘Actually I am saying that these
terrorists are conducting a campaign to steal high-technology
equipment and deprive the systems they are working in of those same
supplies. I highly doubt they are pirates. This is a carefully
constructed campaign spread across hundreds of parsecs of space.
That is not the work of pirates, or terrorists.’

FScV Garnet Hyde.

‘We just went into warp,’ Aneka said as
an in-vision monitor told her that fact.

‘Forty-odd days to home,’ Ella
replied. ‘Did Delta decide to sleep with everyone or is she taking
a nap for the rest of the trip?’