The Winter War (8 page)

Well, it was kind of true, Aneka
thought, in a very simplistic manner.

‘In that time a great gift fell
from Heaven. It was the means to travel among the stars, and even
though the western lands wanted to keep it for themselves, the
People were given the gift too. It became a time of great peace on
Earth because no man needed to fight his neighbour for land or… um,
resources. The People and the inhabitants of greatest of the
western lands sent many ships out among the stars. Grandfather says
that there were several of our ancestors among those who left to go
to colonies on other worlds. Some returned, much richer than when
they left. Others stayed and prospered there.’

‘That explains a lot,’ Aneka
said. ‘If China and America were the biggest exporters of people,
then the Chinese ended up creating Rimmic and the Hani script, and
I’ve always thought Federal sounds more like American English.’

Chan Mei translated what she had
said and the old man laughed and continued his story.

‘Grandfather says that he heard
the word “America” used once for the western land. Like “China” it
is a name that has been lost in time. He says the prosperity of the
new age ended when the Demons were discovered. They had attacked
some of our… trading partners and much wealth was put into building
warships. But the Demons were powerful, with terrible weapons. It
is said they were twenty feet tall and men turned to dust just from
looking at them. The war went on for decades, but the Demons
finally came here. They threw fire and huge rocks down from the
heavens. Of those who survived that… torrent, many became sick. The
sky was black as night for a whole year. The crops failed and there
was snow in the summer. Animals and people gave birth to monsters
that lived for only a few minutes before dying, or were stillborn.
The Demons had brought Hell to the Earth… Then, after ten years,
Manu Dei came and made the world well again.’ The old man looked at
Aneka, his eyes narrowing. He said something which Chan Mei
translated as, ‘He says that he saw Manu Dei once, many years ago,
and you look very much like her.’

‘She was… a distant relative,’
Aneka replied. ‘I only met her the once.’

The old man let out a cackling
laugh after hearing the translation and his reply came back as,
‘Now that she is gone he says that he can say that you are better
looking.’

Aneka laughed. ‘Thank you.’

‘And you have a better sense of
humour. He says that Miss Narrows is very beautiful too. She
reminds him of his wife.’ Chan Mei blushed a little and combed a
hand through her hair. ‘I get my hair and a little of my looks from
her.’ The blush deepened as he continued speaking. She looked like
she did not really want to translate, but felt it was her duty. ‘He
says he has always had a thing for the red hair.’

Ella giggled and Aneka said,
‘Yeah, you just can’t beat a redhead.’

~~~

By the time they got back to their rooms
in the tower, Aneka was getting moderately proficient in Mandarin
and Ella had an extensive collection of oral history stored in her
computer implant’s memory for Gillian to listen to later. Most of
it was fairly uninteresting as far as Aneka was concerned; Chan
Nianzu had been the highlight of the day for her. Ella was rather
more enthusiastic since she was the anthropologist and this kind of
thing was her bread and butter.

Chan Mei escorted them up to the
top floor. It was mid-afternoon and Gillian and Bashford were not
back yet. Ella stretched as she walked in through the door and
Aneka detected a subtle hint about what her own redhead wanted to
do with the rest of the afternoon. The evening was to be taken up
with a dinner to which a lot of important administrators and
scientists had been invited. Aneka would have rather stayed in
bed.

‘If you will need my services
tomorrow,’ Chan Mei said, ‘you need only tell Councillor Wei and I
will be available.’ Something about the way she said it made Aneka
turn to look at her properly. She saw a slight reddening along the
girl’s cheekbones, a tight quality around her eyes. ‘And… if you
need me for
any
other service before then I am available.’
There was more blush and her lip rose as her nose wrinkled for a
fraction of a second. Tiny expressions which would be missed by
most, but not by Aneka’s overclocked brain.

Ella turned and looked at their
guide as though she was trying to work out whether she was actually
saying what she appeared to be saying.

Aneka spoke before Ella could.
‘We’re pretty much covered for anything we could need right now,
thank you Mei.’ Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Ella
pouting. The real problem was the look of disappointment that
flickered over Chan Mei’s face.
One minute disgusted with what
she’s offering and then next unhappy that we declined?

‘You were wondering earlier what
she was being paid for this job,’ Al said. ‘Might I suggest that it
was extra if the optional package was made use of?’

‘I hope to see you tomorrow
then,’ Chan Mei said, oblivious to Al’s comment. She started to
turn toward the door, stopping when Aneka spoke.

‘Mei, wait. We’ve dragged you
over half the city. I think we should at least offer you a drink
before you go.’

‘Thank you. That would be most
kind.’

A message popped up indicating
that Ella had initiated a voice connection through her implant.
‘First you stop me from taking her up on the offer and now you’re
asking her to stay. Are you being mean, or testing me, or…’

‘I want to know why she offered
in the first place. She was really not happy doing it…’

‘Oh… fuck. I really need to get
myself looked at.’

‘She was not happy doing it and
then she wasn’t happy when I said no.’

‘Well that doesn’t make
sense.’

‘Quite. Go put something less
covering on. I want to see her reaction.’

‘Be right back,’ Ella said out
loud, and strutted off toward the bedroom they were using.

Aneka headed for the small
kitchenette which occupied a side of the room. ‘What would you
like? We have tea, coffee, various fruit juices… or something
stronger if you’d prefer?’

‘Uh… orange juice?’

‘Sure.’ Aneka made sure that the
Chinese girl could see her pouring whiskey into a couple of glasses
before she went to the fridge for the juice.

‘Coming out now,’ Ella said
inside Aneka’s head.

Aneka watched Chan Mei as Ella
emerged from the bedroom in a sheer white shirt with exactly one
button closed. The nervousness came back instantly. ‘Much better,’
Ella said, flouncing into the room and dropping onto a couch with
absolutely no decorum at all.

‘So, what do you do when you’re
not escorting visitors around, Mei?’ Aneka asked.

Flustered, Mei looked quickly
away from Ella and walked over to collect her drink. ‘I work in the
family shop. We sell fruit and vegetables grown outside the city by
some of our relatives.’

‘Uh-huh, so you’re not actually
a prostitute then?’

Chan Mei’s eyes widened about as
far as they would go and her cheeks went scarlet… And then she
sagged visibly, looking down at her hands holding her glass. ‘Not
normally, no.’

‘So how much more were they
going to give you for this job if we’d taken you to bed?’

The girl swallowed. ‘Double.
More if I was here until morning.’

‘Right. I take it that’s going
to work out as a lot of money?’ There was a timid sort of nod.
‘You’ll get it.
Without
the extra work. I don’t suppose they
explained
why
they were asking you to do this?’

‘Councillor Wei said that you
had a female companion who you were… very intimate with and that
you came from somewhere which had a more… uh, open view of…
intimacy, and that we should make sure you saw our city in the best
possible light so if you wished for, um, entertainment of that kind
it should be available.’

Aneka closed her eyes and then
threw back her whiskey in one swallow. It was going to do
absolutely nothing to her, but the burning sensation at least gave
her the glimmer of hope that it would. ‘Oh, this kind of thing is
going to have to stop,’ she growled.

Prime City, 12
^th
September.

Aneka had had a set of chairs brought
into the audience chamber in Yrimtan’s rooms, setting them in a
vague circle. Rather than sitting behind the desk, which she
figured was what her twin would have done, she sat
on
the
desk, her hands holding the edge and her feet swinging rhythmically
as she waited for everyone to arrive.

On either side of her were
Abigail and Chan Mei, looking nervous. Ella, Gillian, Bashford, and
Drake sat on the next pairs of seats out. It meant that the
visitors rather outnumbered the people they were going to talk to.
Harper, Wei Lin, a man from the Western City named Grant Dillon,
and Marsden filed in looking almost as nervous as the two surface
girls.

Miss Jansen had been glowering
and looking purposeful since she had returned from the East with
Wei Lin and Chan Mei in tow. She had had the younger girl put up in
a room in her apartments and had said that she wanted Abigail
brought down from Matlock, and that she wanted a senior Councillor
from the West to travel over for a meeting. And she had known full
well that while she was being unreasonable, given that she had no
real authority, they would do it anyway. Worse, as far as Aneka was
concerned, she was right!

‘All right,’ Aneka said when the
Councillors were sitting down, ‘let’s get this started.
Councillors, Abigail, Mei, I’m going to tell you a story. When we
were in the East we visited Mei’s great-grandfather who told us a
legend of sorts about the time before the Xinti War, and this is a
little like that. The big difference is that
no one
outside
this room is going to hear it. Ever! Is everyone clear on
that?’

There were murmurs of assent
from the people in the room and she went on. ‘Okay. A long time ago
right above our heads, a woman called Aneka Jansen was born to Hugo
and Lauren Jansen. She was a bit of a tomboy from a very young age,
and when she was old enough she became a soldier. She loved her
parents and her brother, Alan, who was a clever young man who loved
science fiction. She sat through all sorts of films about alien
invasions, but the last thing she ever thought would happen was
that she would be kidnapped by aliens. The aliens were called
“Xinti,” and they stole Aneka out of a desert and killed her.’

‘But,’ Abigail said,
uncertainly, ‘aren’t you Aneka Jansen?’

‘Sort of, but how would you
imagine I survived for over a thousand years. How did Manu Dei
manage it?’

‘We never knew,’ Marsden
supplied. ‘She was never sick. It’s said she was almost
indestructible and she had incredible technology available to
her.’

‘Huh,’ Aneka grunted. ‘Well, the
Xinti had fallen victim to a disease a long time ago. Faced with
extinction they converted their minds into computer programs. They
could make bodies to occupy as they wished and for whatever purpose
they needed, and they worked the same process on Aneka Jansen.
Having taken her body apart, they built her a new one, a robot body
which could survive in space, in extreme cold, under water… It had
a living metal skeleton, and skin which repaired itself through
nanotechnology, and body armour under that skin which could easily
stop a bullet. But on the way to Earth the ship she was on had an
accident… and that’s how
I
survived for a thousand years. I
was stuck in a stasis chamber in a wreck in deep space until these
people found me.’

‘You do not appear to be a
robot,’ Mei said.

‘That was kind of the point. I
was supposed to observe Humanity and report back on their nature.
If I’d have been silver and metal, people might have acted
differently around me. Anyway, with me out of the picture the Xinti
changed tack. They’d built one Aneka, so they could build another,
but with a slightly different purpose. I was sent to watch, she was
sent to change, and she did just that. When she got back to Earth
she got Aneka’s brother to publish a paper on the kind of physics
which would be needed to make warp drives work, and when she was
ready the Xinti dropped a ship with a warp engine in it onto
London.’

The four councillors, especially
Dillon, were looking ashen. ‘These Xinti, who you say were the
beings who bombed the world, were also the ones who gave us warp
drives,’ Dillon said.

‘And Alan Jansen, the father of
warp physics, was your brother?!’ Marsden added, her voice rising
to a squeak.

‘Apparently. I didn’t realise he
was quite so famous until I saw his picture in the museum. Anyway,
as Councillor Dillon said, the Xinti eventually turned on their
creations. I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say it
wasn’t just a matter of the Xinti being evil, but the result was
the near destruction of Earth, and my twin, Manu Dei, simply could
not understand why they did it. She also couldn’t put aside the
task she had been given, so she began rebuilding the world, making
a superior Human race. And you lot are the result. Genetically
engineered into two sub-species, one to survive the surface before
it was cleaned up, and the other to create all the scientific
wonders you have in the city.’

There was silence. None of the
Earth people knew what to say.
Well what can you say to
that?
‘But I didn’t tell you that to shock you,’ Aneka went on.
‘That was the backstory. You see, I think… Actually,
we
think that Manu Dei realised too late that she had got it wrong.
She had taken too much control upon herself, factionalised the
population too much. By then she couldn’t stop herself, but she
prepared as best she could in case someone could stop her. I think
she hoped that you would work things out with a bit of a push, but
I think you need a bigger one. I’m not her, but…’ She stopped,
frowning, unsure of exactly what she wanted to say. ‘I… feel
responsible for making sure she gets what she was hoping for
instead of what she has.’