The Winter War (20 page)

Winter looked back at her, and
actually blushed.

FScV Pegasus, 23.6.527 FSC.

‘Federal Science Vessel Pegasus to New
Earth Control, requesting clearance for warp.’ Aneka’s hands were
on the twin joysticks that controlled the sub-light flight as they
headed out from the station where they had embarked onto the
streamlined beauty that was the Pegasus. It was an experimental
design using a second-generation warp engine. The idea had been to
produce a faster frigate, but the power requirements were currently
too great. There was nowhere to put weapons systems. It was still a
thing of beauty.

‘New Earth Control here, Pegasus
you are cleared through to Harriamon. Have a good flight.’

Aneka tapped a switch to close
the connection, and then another to activate the internal comms.
‘Ella, warp in ten seconds.’

‘Good. I want to be out of the
system so we can cut this secret mission gopi.’

Grinning, Aneka checked the
flight parameters appearing on one of the displays on her right and
hit the button on her joystick, which transitioned the ship into
warp. The ultrasonic howl of the twin antimatter torch engines died
away as the stars blurred and then vanished in front of her. A
second later the computer compensated, projecting a virtual version
of the star field to replace the one that had now blue-shifted into
gamma rays.

She checked the navigation
computer again. Flight parameters were locked in, everything was
looking good. ‘Al, keep an eye on her for me.’

‘Of course, Aneka,’ the computer
replied.

Aneka slid back the flight chair
and climbed out, heading back through the ship to its only other
room, a fairly well-appointed cabin, where Ella was going over the
equipment Winter had supplied.

‘Well, we’ve got enough kit here
to do basic field work in style,’ Ella said. ‘There’s a
lab-in-a-box, a couple of hand analysers, various multi-mode
sensors, a chemsniffer, and a lidar unit, which looks military
grade. There’s a bag there with climbing equipment, a box of those
light-emitting microbots, and another one which seems to be an
explorer system. I’m on survival rations. You’ll probably want to
skip those.’

‘I think I might, yeah.’
Sometimes not having to eat was a godsend.

‘Uh, that gadget over there
that’s taking up way too much space is a fusion torch. Nothing much
is going to get in our way with that handy. Oh…’ She reached out
and picked up a silver suitcase. ‘…and this little beauty is an
Automed. Basically it’s a robot doctor. If I’m hurt, you just put
this over me, activate it, and it should do everything aside from
raising me from the dead.’

‘Yes, well let’s try to avoid
needing it. Winter didn’t think there’d be anything to worry about
where we’re going.’

‘Yeah, but it’s nice to know
we’ve got it. What’s our flight time?’

‘Sixteen days, give or
take.’

Ella giggled. ‘Sixteen days with
nothing to do. It’s a second… What did you call it? Honeymoon?’

Aneka shrugged. With equipment
taking up half the floor of the cabin they were going to be
spending a lot of time on the bed anyway. ‘Just for propriety,
let’s wait until we’re a few light minutes out of the system before
we take our clothes off.’

25.6.527 FSC.

‘You know, there is something a little
odd about the data on Idridia,’ Aneka said.

Ella’s voice was a little
muffled by her mouth’s current position pressed to the side of
Aneka’s right breast. ‘Odd? Wha’ kin’ of odd?’ It was not that they
were up to anything, it was just that they could both work lying
down and that was where Ella had ended up. She was currently going
over the data from the uplift database on Idridia, as was
Aneka.

‘Well, there’s no follow-up
data. The other failed sites have data collected after they fucked
the planet up one way or another. The ones where they succeeded,
the data collection continues until the war. Idridia there’s a
report of the natives launching missiles, and then it stops.’

‘So, wha’re you finkin’?’

Aneka giggled. ‘For God’s sake
get your nose out of my boob. You sound like a boxer. I’m thinking
that Negral sent a ship out to survey the planet and something
happened to it. It wouldn’t be the first time a science ship ended
up broken on a planet’s surface.’

Ella rolled onto her back. ‘So
you’re thinking that this bunch of mercs were after that Xinti
ship?’

‘Or parts of it.’

‘Either way it gives us some
search parameters. There’s common use of collapsed matter and
various hyper-dense plastics in their spaceship hulls which are
unlikely to be found normally on a planetary surface. And if it
crashed there’s bound to be some debris, even if these mercs took
the bulk of it away.’

Aneka nodded. ‘Wasn’t there
something about exotic matter being used in the reactionless
drive?’

‘Uh… yes. We should have the
sensor data from the Agroa Gar. If there was a release then we
might be able to pick up the residual radiation. If the drive’s
intact then… I’m not sure, actually, but we can see what we can
find out.’

‘Huh,’ Aneka said, grinning and
turning on her side, one arm draping across Ella’s stomach, ‘we
actually have a plan. The start of a plan anyway. I honestly
thought we’d roll up to this place with no clue what to look
for.’

‘Instead of which we
may
have some vague idea of what to look for.’

‘You’re usually the optimist in
this relationship.’

‘Well, you’re being optimistic
and someone’s got to inject a note of realism.’

Aneka laughed. ‘I wasn’t exactly
being optimistic. It was more like our chances have gone from nil
to some and I was celebrating the fact.’

‘Oh. In that case, we’re going
to sweep in there, spot the ship on the first fly-by, swoop in,
find vital information that Winter can’t do without, and be heroes
of the galaxy.’ Aneka looked at her. ‘Too much?’

‘Maybe a little.’

11.7.527 FSC.

‘Okay, so locating the ship on the
first pass was maybe a little over-optimistic,’ Ella said. She was
sitting in the pilot’s seat with the displays configured almost
purely for sensor operation.

‘Maybe a little,’ Aneka agreed.
She was leaning on the back of the chair monitoring the window on
the right which gave orbital trajectory and other flight
parameters. She could have done it remotely from the cabin, but
where was the fun in that.

They had arrived at Idridia two
days earlier, put the ship into a trans-polar orbit, and started
mapping. The first day had been spent doing topographical scans, at
high resolution since they already had the low-resolution survey
data from the previous scouting mission. Now they were going back
over the planet with everything they could muster.

‘What do we do if we can’t find
anything significant?’ Ella asked.

‘We check out those areas of
refined metal we discovered.’

‘There are several hundred of
those, Aneka.’

‘Yeah, but we can probably
discount some of them.’

‘Such as?’

Aneka leaned forward, tapping a
map display and spinning the virtual globe on it around, then
zooming in on one area. ‘Such as that one. See how there are
discrete chunks? And there are several mounted up high on this
curved ridge with a clump below in the valley?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘That’s what they call a kill
zone. Classical tank battle tactics. The ones in the valley were
stupid to walk into it.’ She zoomed out, turned the map again, and
narrowed the focus once more. ‘This one is more promising.
Radiation signature with a conical scatter pattern…’

‘High-speed, low-angle impact,’
Ella continued. ‘But it’s all light alloys, barely spacecraft
grade. That’s probably a nuclear bomber that crashed.’

Aneka grinned and kissed Ella on
the cheek. ‘Fair enough, but we can narrow it down like that.’

‘Okay, no need to get despondent
yet then. We could still…’ She stopped, her hands reaching forward
to tap at a display. ‘Now that’s interesting.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That is a gravimetric
distortion. Could be the result of unusually dense rock strata
under the sight…’

‘But it could be from a hull
with a collapsed-matter outer layer?’

‘Uh-huh… I say we finish this
sweep and then go back for a closer look if we don’t find anything
better.’

‘You’re the scientist,
love.’

~~~

Nothing had come up as a better target,
at least for a possible Xinti crash site. The detailed
topographical scan suggested that there was some sort of structure
there: a fortress of some sort, or at least a defensible
outpost.

‘How did they not see that in
the original scans?’ Aneka asked as she switched places with
Ella.

‘There’s a lot of sand built up
around the buildings. Quite a lot of weathering too. In a low-res
scan it would look like small hills.’

‘Huh, well aside from those two
big mountains there’s not much in the way of
big
hills on
this sand trap.’

‘It’s got practically no seismic
activity. No tectonics, no volcanism. I doubt it’s been active in a
few hundred thousand years, maybe longer. Those mountains are old
volcanos. Everything else has been weathered down to hillocks. You
saw that sand storm in the southern hemisphere yesterday…’

‘Yeah. Not something I’d want to
get caught in. Okay, prepare for de-orbit.’ Taking the controls,
Aneka spun the ship on its vertical axis and fired the main
engines. As they began to drop she cut in the anti-gravity systems,
turned the nose down, and pushed the ship down into the atmosphere
as though the planet was not there. Two hundred metres above the
surface she pulled the nose up and began powering toward their
target. ‘I love anti-grav.’

Ella let out a little squeak in
response.

The towers of the outpost seemed
far more obvious at a low angle. The structure looked like it had
been built into the rock, which had probably been above the sand
before a few centuries of wind and no maintenance had smothered a
lot of it. Close up the sensors were registering a high wall,
probably a form of aggregate, under the sand.

‘I’ll put her down outside the
fort,’ Aneka said. ‘We’ll take the climbing gear in case we need to
drop down on the inside.’

Ella nodded. ‘You’re the
facilitator. I’ll go get ready.’

By the time Aneka had landed the
ship, powered down the flight systems, checked the sensors for any
life signs, and got back to the cabin, Ella was ready. Ready meant
that she was dressed in a spaghetti-strapped T-shirt, shorts, and
walking boots. Aneka looked at her.

‘What?’ Ella asked, trying to
keep the smirk off her face.

‘You should be in a suit.’

‘There’s nothing dangerous out
there, and I wanted to dress all Lara Croft for you. It’s even a
desert!’

Aneka sighed. ‘All right, but if
we wake up any Egyptian death gods it’s on your head.’

They went out with Aneka
carrying the bulk of the equipment. She had the lab case and the
climbing equipment, and her rebuilt, twin machine pistols strapped
to her thighs. Ella walked beside her with the box of mapping bots
and the smaller sensor units. Under other circumstances Ella might
have wished to shoulder more of the burden, but it was hot. Even in
the shade of the ship it was pushing fifty Celsius. In direct
sunlight it was like standing in an oven.

‘You did remember to put
sunblock on, right?’ Aneka asked.

‘Sprayed myself with the heavy
stuff before I put my clothes on. I don’t think it’s working.’

‘You could just about walk into
a fusion reactor with that stuff on, Ella. Don’t forget to drink,
but pace yourself.’

‘Yes, boss.’

‘Be careful. It’s really easy to
lose it in these conditions. My eyes have cut in light protection
against the glare.’

‘Huh, tell me about it. These
glasses are gaisu near opaque.’

There was no need for the
climbing gear. Inside the walls the sand had piled up against the
inner defences leaving a pit in the middle and some clear areas.
Off to their left was something like a gate or a bridge, though it
seemed to go only into darkness, blocked on the far side. On the
right they could see a doorway into one of the towers blocked up by
a door or some other obstruction.

‘Let’s set the microbots to
work,’ Ella suggested. ‘They can do a full detail search of the
area, and we can go take a look in that tower.’

Aneka nodded and started down
the slope to the floor of the pit. ‘Careful here, the sand’s
loose.’

It took a few minutes to set up
the lab unit, program the microbots from it, and set them on their
travels. A cloud of tiny robots floated free of the box and began
gliding out across the landscape, sampling and mapping as they
went. Then the two women turned and headed for the tower.

The door, which turned out to be
of heavy iron, was a crack open. Sand had worked its way in and it
took all of Aneka’s artificial muscle to shift it, but once opened
it swung easily; there was too little moisture in the air to rust
the metal. Inside the tower they got something of a surprise.

‘This was a camp,’ Aneka said.
‘Old, but not several centuries.’

‘Maybe seventy years?’ Ella
suggested. ‘She walked over to a crate and pulled out a metallic
bar. ‘Survival rations. A little less modern than the ones I’ll be
eating if we need to leave the ship, but not too much.’ She gave a
little grimace. ‘I wouldn’t want to open this.’ She turned it over
and then held it up to display some glyphs Aneka did not recognise.
‘That’s Herica, the script the Herosians use.’

‘We might be in the right place,
but why did they leave this stuff here?’

Ella shrugged and started for a
flight of stairs that led upward around the wall. Her voice came
from above a second or two later. ‘Doesn’t look like whoever it was
came up here much. There’s some old furniture. Metal. I guess they
wouldn’t have much wood to work with. Looks like an office. Maybe
some sort of planning room.’