The Winter War (18 page)

‘In that case,
Xenia
,’
Aneka said, trying to ignore the ominous sound of the words, ‘I
wish you the best of luck, and I recommend Kat and Dillon as
playmates.’

‘Dillon is the big man with the
huge… muscles?’

‘Uh-huh.’

A positively impish grin
appeared on Winter’s face. ‘I think I might just take your
advice.’

~~~

Aneka slipped into the guest bedroom,
closing the door and locking it, just in case. Then she turned to
find Ella waiting for her. The redhead was standing a metre or so
from the bed, looking for all the world like a nervous
teenager.

Stepping up to stand in front of
her, Aneka smiled. ‘What’s got into you? It’s not like we haven’t
done this before.’

‘I know, but…’ She stood there,
kind of folded in on herself, fingers twisting the ring on her left
hand. ‘It’s different. Tonight it’s got to be perfect.’

Her eyes dipped away and Aneka
reached out to lift her chin. Beautiful, wide, green eyes looked up
at her timidly. ‘Tonight it doesn’t matter, love. Tonight I’d be
happy if we got into bed, cuddled up, and went to sleep. Believe it
or not, I’m not just with you because you make me feel like I could
die happy whenever you touch me.’

‘I… I know. Sort of. I mean, I
know, I do. I just… I look at you and… and I want you. All the
time. So much it hurts. Like… like I could drown in you…’

Reaching down, Aneka took the
hem of Ella’s little midriff shirt and pulled it up over her head.
Ella’s arms fell down, crossing over her breasts bashfully. ‘You
had those fixed for me,’ Aneka said softly. ‘Don’t hide them.’ She
dropped to her knees, taking Ella’s arms and pushing them down to
her sides, holding them there as she leaned forward. Her tongue
grazed Ella’s right nipple and the redhead let out a little
whimpering moan. She sucked the engorged flesh in between her lips
and now Ella was just moaning.

‘If… if you keep d-doing that I
won’t be able t-to stand…’

Aneka steered her around and
pushed her back onto the bed, sitting her down with her feet still
on the floor. Casting her own top aside she slid up Ella’s body,
pushing her down onto the sheets, her arms up over her head. Their
lips met, Aneka’s tongue sliding inward, parting Ella’s lips, and
the kiss became hungrier as they lay there, breast to breast.

Shifting a little, Aneka slid an
arm down, pulling Ella’s skirt out of the way. Ella gasped against
Aneka’s mouth as a pair of fingers slid into the now slippery
opening Aneka found waiting for her. And then Aneka was moving
those fingers, pressing up and in against the spot within Ella that
always brought her quickly to a peak of pleasure.

‘Oh…’ Ella moaned, fighting it
as the tension within her grew. Aneka could feel her body starting
to vibrate against hers. ‘No… going to… too quick… going to…’

‘Oh my love,’ Aneka breathed
against her ear, ‘you come for me. We’re just getting started.
We’ve got all night. Come…’

Ella’s back arched at the word,
her body shaking in the throes of the orgasm she had been holding
back. Aneka kissed her face and neck, and let her lover twist and
thrash and moan beneath her. They really did have all night, and as
many nights as they wished after that…

Yorkbridge
Mid-town, 7.6.527 FSC.

Even if they really wanted to stay in
bed engaging in every form of mutual pleasure they could think of
until they had to go back to work, the practicalities of the matter
were that Ella had to go to the toilet aside from anything else.
Once they were up there was the urge for food, and Ella started
pottering around the kitchen while Aneka slumped into one of the
couches in the lounge and flicked through channels on the wall
screen.

‘Anything interesting on?’ Ella
asked, not looking at the screen. Aneka had piped the sound through
her internal system to avoid disturbing her.

‘Uh… sex comedy, sex comedy,
sitcom with some sex in it, sex comedy, sex…’

‘A lot of the usual then?’

‘Uh-huh. I figure you can eat
and then we can fuck on the lounge carpet.’

Ella giggled. ‘Sounds good to
me. I’ll go for a high carb intake. Added stamina.’

Aneka found a news channel and
stopped flicking. ‘You’ll need it.’ Her attention was drawn to the
screen as she saw a familiar figure getting out of a car and
heading toward a building. The commentary, however, made her
frown.

‘Following the recent bombing of
an Administration building,’ the announcer was saying, ‘a
conference was held yesterday morning on the growing problem of
terrorist activity on the core worlds. Winter, head of the Federal
Security Agency, gave a briefing on the situation to key members of
the Administration, including…’

‘Isn’t that Winter?’ Ella
asked.

Aneka cut the sound and looked
around. ‘Yeah. Some anti-terrorist briefing she attended yesterday
morning.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Except that yesterday morning
she was wearing a bright red wig and one of your mother’s stripper
friends was between her legs.’

Ella paused her food
preparation, staring at Aneka with wide eyes. ‘That was Winter? I
mean, she looked kind of familiar, but I couldn’t place… Gopi! I
think she had me at one point!’

‘Yeah. She seemed to enjoy
herself. I know she turns up in places unexpectedly, but being in
two places at once is good, even for her. She must have
doubles.’

Ella frowned. ‘And she sends one
to a conference so she can attend a friend’s party?’

‘She was acting a little funny.
Like she was half-expecting one of these assassination attempts to
succeed.’ Aneka shrugged. ‘Anyway, if you had the option, which
would you have gone to?’

Walking over with a plate of
sandwiches, the naked redhead sat down on Aneka’s lap, grinning.
‘The party, without any qualms at all. I’m not the top Federal spy
though.’

‘She does seem to like getting
out from under her bodyguards.’

‘And under Dillon instead, if
memory serves.’ There was mutual giggling. Aneka flicked the
channel over to one of their library files; up on the wall screen
Dillon could be seen employing his talents on Ella. She glanced up,
grinned, and snuggled closer to Aneka. ‘There’s something I want to
ask you, and you’re going to argue.’

‘And that brings it to
mind?’

‘Uh-huh. I want you to use the
neurostim on me. Tomorrow at the latest.’

‘Ella… You just got over Yrimtan
addicting you to that sort of device…’

‘And that’s why I need you to
use it on me. I need to know whether the addiction kicks back in,
and I’d rather do it now, while I’ve got some time to recover and
the only person I need to worry about seducing is you.’

Annoyingly, she was making a
certain amount of sense. ‘Are you
really
sure you want to
try it again?’

‘Yes. Look, I admit I’m a
pleasure junkie at the best of times and that thing is
amazing.
I mean, I wish it worked on you so you could feel
what I feel, but whatever, I don’t want to miss out on it unless it
really is a danger to our relationship. Plus… Well, if I can be
easily hooked on it again because I have been before I think I
should know.’

‘Okay. We’ll do it once your
lunch has settled. If you’re going to be a horny little minx for
the rest of the week, we might as well start sooner rather than
later.’

Ella giggled. ‘Bit late to worry
about that.’

Aneka laughed. ‘You know, there
is one way I could feel what it’s like to use that thing…’

~~~

Aneka lay back on the bed feeling
unaccountably nervous. They had done things like this before and it
had been interesting to say the least, but something about this
time made it feel like she was taking a risk.

Ella’s computer implant, like
Aneka’s brain, allowed her to record her sensory input and replay
it. The main difference was that Ella had to want to record the
data; Aneka’s brain did it all the time. Once that data was in her
memory she could save it to an external store, or transmit it to a
suitable receiver for playback. Aneka was a suitable receiver. They
had transferred over the data from Ella’s latest experience with
the neurostim to Aneka’s memory, the touch components anyway, and
now she was going to replay that through her own synthetic nervous
system. It was the reverse of what she had done to Ella on the
flight back to New Earth.

As far as either of them could
tell, Ella was fine following the experience. She was cuddled up at
Aneka’s side, being very affectionate, but she often got that way
after an intense sexual experience. An hour after the device had
been removed from her skin, she was not craving it the way she had
during her addiction. So what did Aneka have to worry about?

‘Okay,’ Aneka said, ‘here we
go…’ She started the playback.

It started as a warm sensation
over her stomach, as though someone was breathing warm air over her
skin, and that quickly grew into a tingling sensation. The tingling
spread until it was encompassing the skin at the base of her
breasts and her lower stomach.

‘That’s… kind of nice.’

‘Wait until it moves up,’ Ella
said. ‘You went up toward my boobs next.’

Sure enough the tingling shifted
upward, the sensation receding from her stomach and shifting up to
encompass her nipples. They hardened almost immediately and she let
out a soft moan. What had she done next? It was getting a little
hard to think straight. Up over the chest…? Yes, it had been up the
valley of Ella’s cleavage, quickly so as not to overload anything
yet, and then hovering…

‘Oh… wow… That’s really… It
is
distracting isn’t it?’

Ella giggled. ‘You haven’t even
got to the best part yet.’

And there was the slide down to
cover her right nipple. At first it just seemed to be a more
intense version of the same tingling, warm, pleasurable sensation,
and then…

‘Oh… Oh shit… I can’t… Ah!’
Aneka thought she saw messages flickering through her vision field,
but they were lost almost instantly in the white heat of pleasure
rushing through her body. She was on fire. She was burning up in
the intensity of it. She was… She was vaguely aware of the centre
of the sensations shifting to between her legs, and then she was
aware of nothing.

And then she was looking at a
message that said
Sensory overload detected
in flashing red
letters. She opened her eyes to see a worried-looking Ella staring
down at her.

‘Are you okay?’ Ella asked ‘You
just… stopped.’

‘Uh… believe it or not some
safety system cut in. I think I went offline for a bit.’

‘Approximately ten seconds while
I halted the playback and your nervous system recovered,’ Al
supplied.

Ella giggled nervously. ‘Sorry.
I figured if I enjoyed it your body would soak it up no
problem.’

Aneka laughed. ‘You enjoy a form
of stimulation which makes a robot body run and take cover. Shows
there are some things an organic body is better for.’

Olderbarn Township, 9.6.527 FSC.

‘Okay… Famous psychologists from your
time. You must know some.’ Ella grinned across the table at Aneka,
who looked back dubiously.

They had decided to take a
couple of days to just go somewhere on New Earth that was not
Yorkbridge. Since Aneka had moved there they had never gone out of
the city except to visit the city where Janna had been living.
Having been all over Old Earth in her own time, Aneka felt like she
had barely seen any of the new one. Ella had found a town on the
west coast which had some pretty countryside around it, and they
had got there only to discover that it was very quiet and there was
little to do in the evening except eat, talk, and fuck. Currently
they were on the eating and talking stage.

‘Psychologists… Well, Sigmund
Freud and Carl Jung were probably the most famous names. Uh…’

‘We still use the Jungian
archetypes in some models of the mind,’ Ella said, nodding.

‘Oh, Philip Zimbardo. He did the
Stanford Prison Experiment, which basically proved that people are
shits and being a prisoner is depressing. And Mary Whiton Calkins I
remember because Harvard refused to give her a degree, despite
meeting all the requirements, because she was a woman. And Ivan
Pavlov. He taught dogs to salivate when a bell rang…’

Ella giggled. ‘I’m aware of
Pavlov’s work too. Behavioural conditioning. An advanced form of it
is used in the education system. What about famous
archaeologists?’

Aneka forked some of the pasta
from her plate into her mouth; it gave her a second to think.
Famous archaeologists?! ‘Uh… Howard Carter, though he was as much a
grave robber as an archaeologist. Gertrude Bell, Richard Leakey,
someone once told me Thomas Jefferson, who was one of the US
Presidents, was an archaeologist… Oh, Henry Jones Junior and Lady
Lara Croft…’

‘Hold up, wasn’t Lara Croft
fictional?’

Aneka giggled. ‘A video game
character, and there were a couple of movies. And Henry “Indiana”
Jones was a film character.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. You
can’t beat Nazis and biblical mythology. Maybe Aggy has a copy we
could watch. It’s a bit… Well, the hero shoots a lot of bad guys,
but it’s a lot of fun, honest.’

‘What about Lara Croft?’

‘From the
Tomb Raider
game series. She was an attempt to make a game with a feisty
heroine as the main character instead of some muscle-brained man,
but they had to appeal to a male audience so she charged around in
a tiny pair of shorts and a tank top, and she had huge boobs.
Angelina Jolie played her in the movies. I think you’d have liked
her.’

‘Big breasts?’

‘No, they had to pad her out to
look right, but she was a stunning woman.’