The Winter War (35 page)

‘I have. The suit is essentially
dormant. The computer is not as complex as mine, but quite
powerful. The suit’s functions are listed and are… quite
extensive.’

‘It’s not exactly covering.’

‘It is. I’ll initiate the
activation sequence.’

Aneka was about to say something
when she felt something shifting around her neck. It was a weird
feeling, as though water was crawling over her skin. She looked
down to see something black and metallic running quickly down
across her breasts under the Ultraskin. ‘What the…?’ she began, and
was cut off as the same black oil slick crawled over her lips.

‘Breathe normally,’ Winter said,
‘through your nose. The suit filters contaminants and can extract
oxygen from aerated water. You’ll need an air mask for vacuum, or
you can operate on your internal air supply.’

The sensation as the fluid
crawled over her eyes was incredibly creepy and Aneka found herself
fighting back panic, but just as her vision was completely obscured
it was replaced by the view through the suit’s sensors. It was at
least as detailed as Al’s normal radio and light sensing
capabilities, and her view had the normal multi-spectral overlay.
Her lips were sealed shut by whatever it was the suit was made
from, but she found she could breathe easily through her plugged
nostrils.

On the other hand, speaking was
out. ‘Al, can you connect me to Winter’s communications
network?’

‘Done.’

‘Okay,’ she said in her head,
hearing her voice coming from the room’s speakers. She looked down
at her arms, seeing them covered in a faintly crystalline, metallic
material. ‘Okay, I’m in the gimp suit and it’s… quite comfortable
once it’s in place. I take it it’s quite resilient?’

‘It should take most of the bite
out of a blast like the one you took on Odanari,’ Winter told her.
‘It’s a form of living metal, nanotech battle armour with a
distributed computer system integrated throughout, adaptive
camouflage, surface sensors for the majority of wavelengths as high
as ultraviolet and power for a month of operation.’ The teenager
turned toward Ella. ‘Is that sufficient protection, Ella?’

‘I think so,’ Ella replied,
grinning. ‘And it looks amazing.’

‘Good,’ Winter replied. ‘When
one goes to war, one should do so in style.’

~~~

‘Do you think she meant it?’ Ella asked,
her voice soft enough that Aneka could barely hear it, even though
the redhead was lying against her side. ‘War. Do you think she
really meant that?’

‘It’s a kind of war,’ Aneka
replied. ‘Right now it’s kind of a cold one.’

‘I remember that. America and
the Soviet Union facing off without really fighting. It’s not the
same though. Winter’s powerful, but she’s hardly a superpower.’

‘I’m not sure that’s what she
meant.’

‘Then what?’

‘Well, assuming we’re right
about the Herosians being behind the shipping attacks…’

‘Pretty much a given.’

‘Then they’re doing it for a
reason. Hitting tech supplies, weapon shipments… They’re trying to
weaken their opposition. Eventually they’ll want to move things up
a notch.’

‘You think they would? I mean,
would they really do that?’

‘If they thought they could win.
At least, that’s the way I see it from what I know about them. I’ve
had pretty limited experience of Herosians. I think I know more
about the Torem, and that’s not saying much.’

Ella shifted slightly,
uncomfortable, but not physically. ‘I can’t believe they’d start a
war. But maybe I just don’t want to believe it.’

‘Maybe. I don’t
want
to
either, but I have to consider it as a possibility. And another
possibility is that it wasn’t Xinti who attacked Negral.’

‘You think the Herosians did
it?!’

‘They’ve got Xinti tech. They
got it from somewhere, including the site on Idridia. What if they
found a partly functional battleship?’

Ella was silent for a second.
‘The assault on Herosia didn’t go all the Xinti’s way. The
Herosians put up as much of a defence as they could manage. They
always said they killed two battleships there.’

‘Herosia? That’s supposed to be
an asteroid belt.’

‘Uh-huh. The Herosians declared
it a Site of Cultural Significance. No one has been allowed to go
there in five centuries.’

‘So they could have been quietly
mining it for Xinti technology ever since.’

‘There… and any of several dozen
sites we think they found and never told us about, plus more we
don’t know anything about.’

‘
If
it’s the Herosians,
they’ve been planning this for generations and even Winter didn’t
know about it. It’s being kept
very
secret, even from most
of the Herosians.’ She frowned. ‘In a way, it makes it unlikely.
That kind of conspiracy is hard to organise.’

‘It’s a lot easier when there’s
a lot of empty space around to hide your conspiracy in. Do you
think Winter figured out the Herosians may have attacked
Negral?’

‘If I can connect the dots, I’m
pretty sure she can.’

29.9.527 FSC.

‘Yes, that had occurred to me.’ Winter
was currently a tall, buxom, brown-eyed brunette. This was Number
Two, though Aneka had seen Three and Six walking around the ship,
and technically the AI was operating hundreds of featureless
androids as well. ‘I consider it highly probable, in fact. The
Herosians have gone to a lot of trouble to achieve a secret
technological advantage over the other races. My old colleagues on
Negral would have negated that. What I’m not sure about is how they
discovered the location.’

‘I had a thought,’ Ella replied.
‘The ship on Idridia likely had a location for Negral in its
databases. Negral would have been the ship’s home base. I’m
guessing that they put two and two together when the Garnet Hyde
was taken.’

‘A good working theory,’ Winter
replied, smiling. ‘Avoiding the loss of their technological
superiority likely explains why the Harriamon tachyon relay was
attacked. Old Earth could also give the Jenlay a much needed
edge.’

‘They took that out too?’ Aneka
asked.

‘There was extensive damage.
Repairs will take some time.’ Winter’s gaze shifted to the huge,
holographic star map they were sitting beside. ‘Communications at
normal speed will slow down the talks between the two worlds
considerably.’

‘This really is going to turn
into a war, isn’t it?’ Ella said grimly.

‘I believe it already has. These
are the initial skirmishes. The Herosians were always an
acquisitive race, far too ready to put their own needs above any
other consideration. The only thing keeping them in check was the
superior strength of the Jenlay and the technology of the Torem.
The latter has been proven to have been exhausted in the war, and
the former is negated by this new technology and an unwillingness
to actually act.’

‘Winter?’ Aneka asked, frowning.
‘What happened to your counterpart? The AI responsible for the
Herosian uplift.’

‘Bright Days of Growth Prepare
the Coming Harvest,’ Winter said. ‘We called him Summer.’

‘Which is why you’re Winter, I
assume.’

‘Yes. He was decommissioned.
They turned him off because he went insane after the Herosians
wiped out the Aromans. He had been programmed to consider them his
charges, to
like
them, and he could not reconcile that with
their actions.’

‘I didn’t know AIs could go
insane,’ Ella said.

‘That’s because you’ve never
seen Two Thousand and One,’ Aneka replied. ‘Actually, I think that
was supposed to be some sort of logical problem. A moral issue the
computer couldn’t cope with.’

‘It’s not common, but it can
happen,’ Winter agreed. ‘The mind of an AI is complex, and things
can go wrong. Thankfully, the Jenlay have never done anything which
would cause me to flip out.’

‘Yet,’ Aneka said, grinning.

Winter’s lips twitched. ‘If they
do I’ll just have to kill the…’ She paused, her head turning as
though she was listening to something. ‘We have company.’

‘Here?’ Aneka asked,
surprised.

‘Someone with the inclination,
time, and access to generally secret communications logs could work
it out. The configuration is that of a Gadetta-class heavy gunship.
It’s manoeuvring to high orbit and firing on my communications
satellite.’

‘That’s not very friendly,’ Ella
commented.

Winter frowned. ‘No. Contact
with three one-hundred-kilotonne nuclear warheads. A Hachadim
gunship is currently being deployed from its hangar bay. Gadettas
carry three.’

‘Six, four-man fire teams,’
Aneka mused, ‘maybe two or three of those heavy battlesuits. Can
they detect us?’

‘Doubtful, but they can detect
the ship you came in on. This vessel has weaponry, but we are in a
weak tactical position here. If I open fire they
will
detect
us and the Gadettas were built for planetary bombardment.’

‘What about hacking their
computers?’ Ella asked. ‘Like you did with our ship.’

‘They are apparently aware of
that possibility and have hardened their communications. I can
probably do it, but it will take time. Probably too much time.’

‘Are the drop ships heading this
way?’ Aneka asked.

‘Currently their trajectory
suggests that they are planning to execute a search pattern over
the planet. They’re splitting up to cover the ground faster.’

‘That gives us some time to
prepare. How does this sound?’

~~~

One of the gunships had dropped to a
position about a hundred metres from the one Aneka, Ella, and
Justine had arrived on, positioned so that one of its turrets had
the area around the lost vessel well within its field of fire.
There were four men guarding the rear ramp now, while four more
searched the interior. This time there was no powered
battlesuit.

Aneka watched them from the
cover of some rocks about thirty metres away, hidden from view by
the camouflage system of her suit. She was waiting for the fun to
start, which would happen when the other two gunships arrived.

Beside her, Ella lay on her side
behind the rocks looking nervous, but determined, with a large pack
on her back. Having her along had not been part of the initial
plan, but Ella had insisted, a lot, and there had not been time to
argue her out of it. Aneka needed someone along who could speak
Herosian and had wanted to take one of Winter’s avatars. Winter had
pointed out that her general avatars were not actually much better
at combat than Ella would be in an armoured suit, and Ella had
wanted to be with Aneka.

The roar of fusion drives
sounded from the north and Aneka ducked down behind the rocks. She
pointed out toward the incoming ships, over the rocks, and Ella
nodded. They were not using radios at the moment, just in case
anyone picked up the transmissions. As the engine noise died away,
Aneka lifted her head again. Troops were disembarking the two
gunships, moving out to meet the ones already in position. One
entire fire team seemed to be equipped with large, sensor backpacks
and they began to deploy their equipment as soon as they were
within the safety zone of the rest of their squad. At least they
thought it was safe.

Aneka held up a hand, fingers
and thumb spread, as six of Winter’s combat androids burst out of
camouflaged pits dug into the rocky surface. They were not exactly
full avatars, more like semi-intelligent drones directed by Winter.
Each was the size of a man, humanoid, but featureless, and each
carried one of the same kind of machine gun that Aneka had used on
Odanari. As one they opened fire.

‘Winter has activated signal
jamming,’ Al said.

Aneka waited a second to be sure
that the attention of the troops was on the drones, and then
signalled Ella with a jerk of her thumb that they should move. Ella
rolled to her feet in one fluid movement, activated the power
assistance systems on her own cybernetic suit, and started running
toward the first of the landed ships. Aneka got to her feet and
followed, catching up with her after a second and then running
past. They were both moving at speeds an Olympic sprinter would
have been proud of and none of the combatants noticed, or if they
did they were too busy dying.

As they reached the ramp one of
the other ships exploded; one of Winter’s drones had reached it
with an implosion warhead. The second one would be going soon
enough. That left this one, which was going to be the one that
escaped.

Aneka kept on forward, drawing
her pistols. There was another explosion from outside and then the
sound of the gunship’s turret opening fire. Behind her motors
whined as the ramp started to lift. Aneka checked to be sure that
Ella had made it aboard and saw the redhead coming up behind her,
slowed a little by the heavy backpack she was carrying. All
according to plan so far; Aneka ran on ahead, straight up toward
the flight deck where she was pretty sure the pilot and gunner were
going to be shitting themselves.

‘Network negotiated,’ Al said
into her head. ‘They are using the same internal protocols as the
other ship. I’ve bypassed security. The cockpit door will open in
three seconds. We have left the ground and will be out of the
jamming field in ten.’

It was important that the crew
not get a message away. As the cockpit door opened, Aneka located
the two occupants, a Human and a Herosian, sighted on them before
they even registered she was there, and fired. Then she dropped her
pistols and bolted forward, struggling to yank the pilot out of his
seat before the ship went too far out of control.

Ella entered the room a second
or two later to find Aneka shifting the gunship’s flight path.
‘Comms are up,’ she said as Al connected to her implant.

‘Uh-huh. Get on the radio,
they’ll be wondering what’s going on.’ Aneka spiralled the ship,
apparently randomly, directly into the line of fire of the ship in
orbit. They were counting on the idea that even the Herosians would
not shoot their own ship down to bombard the surface.