The Winter War (29 page)

Yorkbridge Mid-town.

Justine watched the data streams going
into and out of the FSA’s communications hub. It was mainly routine
data: email, file transfers, video calls. Little was drawing her
attention, but her computer was checking over everything, just in
case.

When one file transfer was
flagged for her attention, she moved, her fingers sliding over her
tablet to bring that stream to the forefront. The encryption being
used was strong, and of an unknown type. Frowning, she ordered the
computer to copy the data for decryption and locate the source and
destination.

It had been sent from the
terminal in Winter’s office, and the only person with access to
that was Dowler. The destination was harder, but the computer was
running very advanced software. After passing through a dozen
routers, the stream terminated at the firewall of the Herosian
embassy.

Justine flagged the decryption
as urgent, to be prioritised over other work. She needed to know
what the interim head of the FSA was sending to the Herosians.
Especially since he was taking such pains to ensure no one found
out about it.

Odanari, 15.8.527 FSC.

Ella let out a small whimper as Aneka’s
fingers traced over her stomach, moving upward at a slow crawl.
Aneka had her arms pinned above her head, not firmly enough to
really hold them, but Ella was not really trying to get free and
the whimpering was as much play as anything.

‘You’re beautiful, you know?’
Aneka whispered.

‘So is just about everyone,’
Ella replied.

‘It’s not your looks that make
you beautiful, love.’ Aneka reached up and tapped Ella between the
eyes. ‘This is what makes you beautiful.’ She lowered her hand and
pinched Ella’s right nipple, eliciting a sharp cry of pain followed
by a moan. ‘That and the cute little noises you make.’

‘That’s mean… if you stop.’

Aneka grinned. ‘I don’t plan to
stop.’

The bedroom door opened and
Justine walked in. Both girls looked up since their caretaker had
said she had a few things to do around the house and that they
should have some couple’s time. The fact that she seemed to be
wearing combat armour of some form was the second surprise.

‘Sorry, but you need to get up
and dressed,’ Justine said, her voice carrying urgency. ‘We’ve got
company.’

‘What kind of company?’ Aneka
asked, releasing Ella’s arms and rolling across the bed to sit
up.

‘That I’m not sure of. Sensors
detected a ship dropping out of orbit about an hour ago.
Ninety-eight tonnes, probably a fusion torch engine, no
identification echo. It dropped out of sight ten minutes later, but
the course suggested it was heading this way.’

‘Are we expecting someone?’
Aneka was pulling on her suit and she glanced around at Ella, who
had not moved. ‘She’s going to need some armour.’

Justine nodded. ‘When you’re
dressed, we’ll go to the armoury. I have some weapons you might be
interested in too.’

Ella blinked. ‘There’s an
armoury?’

~~~

The armoury was hidden behind a wall on
a corridor next to the solarium, and it was quite an armoury. Ella
busied herself putting on an armoured combat suit, which looked a
little too much like the suits the Negral AIs had given them for
Aneka’s total comfort, while Aneka examined the weapons mounted on
the walls.

‘This stuff,’ Aneka said, ‘it’s
Xinti weaponry.’

‘Not… exactly,’ Justine replied,
taking a rifle down from the wall.

‘Then…?’

‘The Xinti used some similar
weapons. These are developments on some of those, and some unique
developments.’

‘Developed by Winter?’

‘Yes. She’s older than she
looks.’

‘I… know that. Something about
her eyes. You have the same look.’

Justine pointed at a large,
bulky-looking weapon near where Aneka was standing, and changed the
subject. ‘I think you’ll like that. It’s basically the same as your
sniper rifle, but it’s fully automatic. Most people use it from a
mount, but with your strength…’

Aneka took the weapon down. It
was connected to a backpack via a flexible ammo feed and it weighed
easily twice what her sniper rifle did. As her hand closed around
the grip an in-vision display indicated that it was loaded, with a
four thousand round magazine.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘now
we’re talking. Ella’s pretty useful with a beam-based pistol…’

Justine pulled down a pistol and
handed it to Ella. ‘Graser pistol. The range is reduced in
atmosphere, but if you’re shooting at something more than fifty
metres away in this situation I’ll be surprised.’ She looked up
suddenly. ‘Sensors have picked up a low-flying ship, five
kilometres to the south. It’s armed. Forward-mounted beam weapons
and ground assault cannon on turrets.’ She looked down at Aneka.
‘The configuration matches a Herosian light gunship, Hachadim
class.’

‘Ashad Hithor,’ Ella said. She
took the pistol from Justine, saw the heads-up display appear in
the vision field, and nodded.

‘If they’ve got any of those
armoured suits…’ Aneka said.

Justine walked across to a box
and pulled out a pair of thick cylinders. She handed them to Aneka.
‘Don’t use them inside. They’re graviton pulse implosion grenades.
They have
significant
range and…’

‘War, the Negral weapons
designer, told me about these. I’ll be careful.’ She clipped them
to her belt. ‘Let’s hope we don’t need to use them.’

‘We’ll know soon enough. The
ship has landed at one end of the strip. The shield door is
dropping and I’m arming the exterior defences.’

‘We have exterior defences?’
Ella squeaked.

‘Yes, and those and the door
should hold them for a while, but if it’s the same group who
attacked the facility on New Earth we have to assume they’ll get
in.’

‘We need a defensible position,’
Aneka said.

Justine smiled. ‘You hadn’t
noticed the chokepoint out of the lounge?’

‘That corridor doesn’t provide
much cover.’

‘That is because it doesn’t
normally need to.’

~~~

The first man to leave the rear access
door of the gunship was hit in the chest by a stream of hydrogen
pulses heated to several thousand degrees by a laser. The plasma
burned through his combat suit as though it was barely there and, a
second later, there was almost nothing left to identify him as
Jenlay.

The mercenaries had not been
expecting that kind of resistance, but they still had their ace in
the hole; the heavy suit went out next. The sealed, hardened armour
with a neutronium outer layer, powered by an antimatter reactor
just to give it the power it needed to move, seemed to ignore the
bursts of super-hot plasma as they exploded uselessly against it.
Wearing a stupid shit-eating grin, the man inside lifted his arms,
the suit’s motors responded to the action by lifting the, much
heavier, arms of the small mech he was riding in, and with them the
two heavy antimatter blasters they were holding. A normal man would
have had trouble lifting one of them; the suit could handle one in
each hand. He began firing back.

~~~

Heavy, laminated metal and plastic
shields had risen from the floor of the corridor. They were
staggered, the first about five metres from the door into the
lounge, and about a metre high. They looked very solid, but Aneka
had no illusions about their ability to stop antimatter explosions.
Ella had been positioned behind the last of the five with orders to
stay put and only use her pistol if someone got too close. Aneka
was behind the first, Justine taking the next.

They were speaking via their
implant communicators, and Justine had patched the feeds from the
exterior cameras through to them as well. The second of the two
turrets had engaged the suit, but it was having no more luck
breaching the dense armour than the first had.

‘They’ll either hit the door
with those cannons,’ Ella said, ‘or use breaching charges.’

‘Agreed,’ Justine replied.
‘We’ll know soon; the second gun is down.’

Sure enough, the view from the
second Gatling’s sighting system had gone to snow. Another camera
showed six men in combat suits running down the ramp at the back of
the ship. One of them appeared to be carrying a large satchel.

‘Looks like it’s going to be
explosives,’ Aneka commented. ‘As long as they can’t get that
bloody tank in here we should be fine. Only eight men?’

‘I count six,’ Ella put in.

‘They lost one to the cannon,
one’s in that battlesuit.’

‘Oh, yeah.’

‘The Hachadim carries two crew
and eight marines,’ Al supplied. ‘They were built to drop fire team
pairs into combat situations. The stealth hull provides superior
incursion capability.’

‘If possible,’ Justine said, ‘we
want to take it intact.’

‘Why?’ Ella asked, sounding
perplexed.

‘Our position is compromised. My
orders are to take you to a secondary location, and that is
currently the only safe way I have of doing so.’

There was a loud explosion from
the front of the house. Dust billowed down the corridor as far as
Aneka’s shield. She lifted her gun, balancing it on the shield top
and then ducking back out of view. The weapon’s integral sight
would do fine for aiming.

‘They’re through the door,’
Justine said. ‘The hole is large, but nowhere near big enough to
allow the heavy suit through.’

Aneka was watching the camera in
the lounge. Three men swept into the room, rifles raised high, and
immediately covered the three main directions. She smiled, standard
room clearance tactics not much different from what she would have
done. She could imagine the point where they announced the room
clear, estimated when the second trio would move in, and smiled
again when they did. Now they would move up…

‘Get ready. Here they come.’

The first of them rushed through
the door, his gun darting left and right as he went. Aneka had time
to analyse his motions as he spotted the shields along the
corridor, took in the heavy weapon poking out from over one of
them, and realised he had made a mistake. She pulled the trigger.
It was almost unfair; the man was shredded, almost literally by the
stream of heavy needles, as were the two men following him. The
problem was that the three remaining men were going to be far more
cautious.

She held the trigger down,
watching as the ammo counter clicked down. She could not keep that
kind of suppression fire up for long, but it stopped them getting
in line with the door. It did not stop them firing back, however.
An antimatter pulse impacted the wall inside the corridor, blasting
fragments of Plascrete over a wide area. Aneka felt the backwash
hit her, but there were no damage indicators in-vision so she
ignored it.

The view from the lounge camera
showed one of the men pulling something from his belt. ‘Shit,’ she
muttered, releasing the trigger of her gun and moving out from
behind the barricade.

‘Aneka!’ Justine snapped out.
‘What are you doing?’

‘They’ve got a grenade.’

Another explosion blasted dust
and debris from the wall nearby. The grenadier was moving toward
the door, taking a more direct line since the shooting had
apparently stopped. Maybe he thought she was reloading. She could
hope so. She bolted forward into the doorway, bringing her gun
around, clamping down on the trigger, and sweeping the stream in an
arc. Just inside the door, one man fell backward as his body was
riddled with plasma darts, then the stream of bullets blasted holes
in the wall before slicing the grenade thrower almost cleanly in
two.

But there was a third and he was
on her left, almost behind her. She dodged randomly, swinging to
her left and rolling, but she felt the impact on her back, the
searing pain as the pulse exploded tearing away fake flesh and
exposing the mesh armour beneath. Briefly she saw damage indicators
flashing past her vision, and then she saw nothing.

~~~

Justine made it to the doorway in time
to see Aneka fall, and fired on the merc. The graser beam bit into
his chest, carving a line through his armour and the chest beneath.
He fell back and she kept firing, the beam cutting up over his
throat and then through the faceplate of his helmet, and he stopped
moving.

‘Aneka?’ Ella’s voice came over
the radio. ‘Is she…?’

‘She’s down, but I don’t think
one blast from one of those things could stop her permanently. We
have another problem. Stay there.’ There was little likelihood that
the redhead would obey, but the heavy suit had to be taken out.

Running over to Aneka’s prone
form, Justine found one of the grenades on her belt and moved to
the hole in the door. Hitting the priming stud, she leaned out long
enough to get a fix on the huge, armoured form, and tossed the
cylinder out. Then she turned back in time to see Ella arriving
beside Aneka.

‘I said to stay put,’ she
growled. ‘Help me get her out of the way.’ She grabbed one of
Aneka’s arms and, with Ella helping, pulled her to one side of the
room.

They had made it perhaps five
metres when the sound happened. It was not an explosion, exactly,
though there was a rumble, which could have been the aftershock of
one at the end. It was more like a loud crack followed instantly by
a sound like a tornado whipping past in an instant. The building
creaked audibly and the edges of the blasted metal shield door
began to glow a dull red.

‘Shit,’ Justine grumbled, ‘I
hope it didn’t damage the damn ship.’ She looked around at Ella.
‘Stay with her. I have to get the crew before they decide to bug
out.’ Ella nodded dumbly and Justine bolted for the gap in the
door.

The battlesuit looked like a car
wreck. It was tipped on one side and visibly crushed, the heavy
metal bent and crumpled where the sudden intense gravity field had
pulled it in toward the point of detonation. The man inside was
probably soup. Justine had never actually used one of the things on
a real target. She had seen what it could do in tests, but the
actual results on real people… Shuddering, she ran toward the
gunship still sitting on the deck twenty-five metres away.