Originator

by Joel Shepherd

  Sandy established a new tacnet frame and let it propagate. It would automatically integrate every spec ops agent in direct FSA contact. And these days, the League weren’t the only ones with GIs.

  A new connection, heavily encrypted. “Commander, Chief Shin.”

  “Chief, this is Kresnov, go ahead.”

  “I have assets moving to acquire a target in Santiello. I believe you have eyes-on; request you leave this one to us.”

  “Can you handle the League infiltration team we estimate is on route to eliminate your target as soon as you move?”

  Pause. Surely he knew about it? Little got by Shin. “Estimates?”

  “Front six, four sweepers, mid-to-high designation.”

  “Sitrep?”

  She couldn’t very well deny him; they were all on the same team. Theoretically. “We have them netfixed, eyes-on is too dangerous with high-des GIs. Our estimate could be off.”

  “So you don’t have a firm fix?”

  “By the sound of it, more than you.”

  “Request we go joint. FedInt acquires target, spec ops covers against League infiltrators.”

  “Our respective units do not possess that degree of interoperability. As you well know.” He certainly did. Lately FedInt and spec ops hadn’t agreed on much. Sandy tried to keep it civil, without compromising a damn thing.

  “Surely you can improvise?”

  “We certainly can. Unfortunately, I’m fairly sure FedInt can’t, as we’ve seen demonstrated. I’m calling jurisdiction.”

  “That is a mistake, Commander. A grave mistake.”

  “Lodge a protest. Tell your people that getting in our way could be fatal. I’ve made the official call, spec ops jurisdiction is clear, League GIs makes this ours, it can’t be clearer.”

  “FedInt will lodge official protest with Ranaprasana.”

  “You do that.” Click.

  Ranaprasana’s Grand Commission was far more concerned with actual governance than security; the FSA had rewritten most of the security protocols for Callay concerning Federal actions and local-federal overlaps, and there wasn’t actually a committee or statutory body anywhere in the Federation with the authority to override them. Sometimes Sandy wondered if Ibrahim had been counting on the events of last year to grant him the power to do that. The FSA Chief played chess across a span of months and years, moving pawns while opponents were distracted or asleep. Most opponents did not even realise they were in the game. Sadly, Shin was one who did.

  “Ari, fix me.” He gave her the fix; his own setup had massive local complexity very few regular humans could handle. He was seated high at the far end of the huge Santiello Stadium, capacity a hundred thousand plus. A quarter of the way around the ground, on the lower tier, sat two men, one African, the other Indian. The African, Sandy would have bet was ex-special-something; his arms were ripped with lean muscle, he just had the look. The Indian was more nondescript, wide face, smiling eyes, and sort of . . . bland. Average Tanushan height, average Tanushan skin tone, average Tanushan everything. That raised suspicions too. “You got interface feeds?”

  Those came through, and Ari didn’t bother giving her a briefing—at the speeds her brain worked, his words were superfluous. It flashed over her, a construct the size of a stadium, one hundred thousand mostly uplinked people, plus all the newsfeeds from the game, the live coverage options blinking on and off, automated bots scrambling to coordinate feeds and match profitable advertising lines. . . . And here were her two men, watching the game, hooked into the system. Sandy broke through ID codings; the African was plugged into game stats and commentary, the Indian was more coded . . . she broke it down further, automated tracers racing in a hundred directions to trace the relays his protective systems were bouncing it off. . . .

  “This guy’s a player,” she said, highlighting the man. “Real netpro.” Above, she was seeing Vanessa’s tacnet structure fitting into place, like some manic spider spinning webs of light. “Vanessa, you watch the League and FedInt, I’m on Subject A and his friend.”

  “Gotcha,” said Vanessa. “More worried about FedInt than League GIs, myself.”

  “Yep.” She locked the cruiser into a wide circle around Santiello, not wanting to go in personally unless she was sure this was the place to commit. “Ari, I can’t get a fix on this guy. Clearly a GI, you think?”

  “Oh yeah,” Ari agreed. “I have a couple of folks here, we could go and say hello.”

  “And start a fight in a crowd, with GIs. No thanks, let’s just watch.”

  “Odd thing,” said Ari. “Some in the crowd are hearing about Cresta. I’m sifting general traffic and they’re talking about it. But this guy, nothing. You’d think he’d be more interested.”

  Because Subject A, the African guy, was a League splinter and probably involved with the people who’d done it. The Indian guy, they had no idea about but didn’t want to bust in and end this meeting until they knew his background, who he was uplinked with, who else might be listening in on this conversation and anything else about him. Who would a League militant leader be meeting with in Tanusha, at a football game, at the time news came through of Cresta’s demise?

  “Subianto security is too good to allow GIs in here with weapons,” came Kriplani’s voice from a temporary stop atop a stadium carpark roof. “They’re not reading anything. If the League team are here, they’re hanging back and waiting.”

  Like us, thought Sandy.

  “Bet they have eyes-on too,” said Vanessa as she thought it. “Bet they’re wondering who the guy with Subject A is, just like we are.”

  “And if they do, FedInt does,” Sandy added. “This is no way to bake a cake. If shit goes down, it could get very messy.” She opened priority back to HQ. “I want everything we’ve got on standby, in the air. CSA support would be nice too, if they can spare some.”

  “Copy, Snowcat,” HQ replied. Sandy completed another circuit of the stadium, blazing in the night with white electricity. “Snowcat, the Director wishes you to know that the Provisional Grand Council has taken an interest in proceedings. Be careful.”

  Great. Ibrahim wouldn’t tell her unless it was important. The apparatus that selected Grand Council reps for the various Federation worlds had launched what was effectively a coup last year, when the prospect of a new war against the League had them sufficiently spooked. Now she was hunting the representative of an organisation that might have just sparked a civil war in the League . . . if one hadn’t already existed.

  Yet still the target and his friend just sat here, in plain view. That didn’t make sense. Unless . . .

  She called up Tanusha Central, which was what the FSA had taken to calling her newest creation. It was a multigrid, linking some of the FSA’s most powerful processors and supplementing them with outside boosters to make a grid matrix several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything else in the city could string together. Experimental institutions had made grids more powerful but hadn’t been able to apply them to anything before the inherent instabilities brought them crashing down.

  Ari saw what she was doing. “Whoa. You think . . . ?”

  “Just hold a moment,” she said, as tacnet informed her of known FedInt cruisers heading on suspicious courses near Subianto. “Hello, Cody, could you and a few friends stabilise this for me? It’s very important.”

  “Of course, Cassandra,” replied the AI. Cody was an old friend—not an FSA employee, but willing to help and possibly the only entity on Callay who could stabilise a grid this big. And it violated several standing regulations, the FSA not liking AIs in security matters because their loyalty was impossible to psych-profile. “Do you think this might be related to the Talee?”

  “I think that’s quite possible, Cody,” she said. He was fascinated by Talee. Who wasn’t? “Let’s have a look.”

  She set the parameters and activated the trace-and-map . . . it was insane, far too much information even for her, but the processing power was there at least. Pro
bably the Tanushan power grid would register a slight uptick on consumption, just from this matrix alone. She hoped they didn’t blow a fuse. To cross-reference every real-time visual feed onto Subianto Stadium with facial recognition on the two men sitting in section M, seats 81 and 82, and loop it through FSA tacnet’s interface while juggling multiple simultaneous encryptions. . . .

  It had taken her nearly a year to design the thing, little tinkerings in her few quiet moments. A year ago, her own uplinks couldn’t have processed even this much monitoring capability. But for now, she saw a simplified grid unfolding, three-dimensional, sprawling, and moving in every direction at once . . . and that was nearly too much to handle.

  Finally an answer. And when she matched timelines . . . they were off. Time was the hardest thing to simulate, and according to multiple cross-referenced constructs, these two had been sitting in the stadium for .0002 of a second longer than real-time cameras recorded. Net time moving more slowly than real time, as it would with ultra-large constructs. But it took crazy large processing capability to find the mismatch.

  “Ari,” she said, “send in your guys.” Shutting down the program to patient mode.

  “Copy,” said Ari. “What do you see?”

  “They’re not there,” said Sandy, with more thinking curiosity than frustration. “It’s a mass illusion. I think the security systems might be the only ones not to see the empty seats. We’re being hacked.”

  “Fuck,” said Ari succinctly. “Cai’s back.”

  “Or his friends.”

  On the visual feed, she could see Ari’s agents moving down the aisles between seats in the crowd, approaching Subject A and his friend. Stopping alongside, then placing a hand on the African man’s shoulder . . . the hand went straight through. Then both men flickered and disappeared. None of the surrounding crowd reacted. So this was an FSA-specific hack. And whoever else was watching, no doubt.

  Almost immediately, Director Ibrahim was in her ear. “Cassandra, I take it this means Subject A was meeting with a representative of the Talee?”

  “Certainly looks that way.” Hell of a time, Cai, she thought to herself. Better hope the media didn’t get a lead on this. “Sir, if that’s the case, he just helped our person-of-interest to escape surveillance. I know we all agree the Talee are self-interested and not hostile, but we can’t just let it go because we’re scared of pissing them off. There has to be a price to pissing us off, even for the Talee.”

  “Agreed,” said Ibrahim. “I want Subject A brought in, however necessary.” And disconnected. If you have to break rules to do it, that meant, I don’t want to know about it.

  “Well, they were real when they came in,” said Ari. “We followed Subject A here, he met the other guy—who we’re presuming is Cai until proven otherwise—then they must have gotten up and left at some point, which we couldn’t see. Subianto security shows . . . hang on . . . Cai bought that ticket three hours ago, that was just before the game began.”

  “Be nice to backtrack their communications,” Sandy added.

  “Yeah,” said Ari through gritted teeth. “Wouldn’t it.” Don’t hold your breath, that meant. If that V-strike on Cresta was not a lone event, if it was just the prelude to many, and now the representative-of-some-sort of the people who’d done it was here . . . she put the thought away. It would not help her here.

  The shot hit her cruiser without warning, then more, cracking off the rear gens. Sandy cut thrust and fell, got it back with a wobbly recovery, her panels red with alarms and aware she had a fresh breeze on her face that shouldn’t be there.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied to the warning shouts, zooming and triangulating fast on tacnet’s auto sniper-track for the source . . . three possible cruisers, and dear god, fifteen possible rooftops, so much for narrowing it down. “Anyone get that? Tacnet won’t give me a fix.”

  “Sandy, you’re listing,” Vanessa observed. “Better ditch that thing.”

  Sure enough, the cruiser was dropping its left side, generators struggling to match output, nothing a few corrections could fix. “Copy, just get beneath me.”

  She was on the farther side from the stadium now, away from the point of attack—if it came from a tower, she was now out of range, and none of the three possible cruisers were following. Of course it could be a coordinated hit, but that had to involve cruisers, setting up a sniper crossfire around the stadium was crazy difficult on such short notice. FSA vehicles were now streaking in pursuit of the three cruisers, and checking out those towertops . . . but they didn’t have the numbers. Where was the CSA help?

  She stopped tracking the situation long enough to pop the door as Vanessa steered her cruiser underneath and to one side. Wind blew in, not much, she was nearly hovering . . . she leaned to recover her bigger weapon from under the rear seat, locked the cruiser’s course on auto, then stepped out. She fell five meters onto Vanessa’s rooftop, then swung over the edge through the window Vanessa had opened for her.

  “Hey babe,” said Vanessa, closing the window and powering the cruiser in the direction of those redlit towers on tacnet, quite used to such unorthodox means of entry by now. “Just dropping in?” She was chewing gum, her habit when the tension came up.

  “That was League,” said Sandy, quickly loading and prepping her rifle in the passenger seat. On tacnet, her own cruiser was making an emergency landing at a nearby transition zone. “That shot cluster was from over a K, GIs for sure.”

  “Disable or kill?” Vanessa asked grimly.

  “Probably kill,” Sandy admitted. “Too far out for that against a moving target, even with GIs. But they try any closer than that, good chance tacnet will pinpoint them even if they’re accurate.”

  “Which means they think they know where Subject A is, and they’re warning us off.”

  “Or leading us astray.” They approached one tower fast, keeping below the soaring rooftop. Wind still blasted the interior, Vanessa keeping the window half-down in case Sandy needed to shoot out of it. Neither they, nor the cruiser’s scanners, saw anything preparing to shoot at them. Vanessa orbited, a fast circle about the tower. “Why hit us if we don’t have any leads?”

  “They didn’t hit us,” said Vanessa. “They hit you.”

  “Without a clear chance of getting me,” Sandy retorted. “It’s counterproductive.”

  “Unless . . .”

  “Shots,” said someone. “Main city grid, Petersham District.”

  Sandy looked and zoomed on the site . . . some street sensor had picked that up, software somehow translating random background noise into gunfire. Five Ks away.

  She didn’t need to tell Vanessa, Vanessa was already heading that way. “Watch the ambush,” Sandy warned all vehicles. “Firebird, get in there first and cover.” Firebird was an FSA flyer, a gunship with countermeasures enough to survive most portable missiles, and weapons enough to make red mist of whoever fired them. It would mean a thirty-second delay though, waiting for Firebird to get into position.

  “What?” Sandy asked Vanessa, catching that sideways look. “You want to be first over target with GI infiltration teams shooting at us?”

  “Cautious in your old age,” Vanessa remarked.

  “Thirty seconds won’t kill us,” said Sandy. “Impatience might.”

  The target area was suburban, low-rise two-storey houses hidden amidst a sea of trees, the occasional mid-rise apartment block breaking the regularity. Vanessa did a circuit rather than rushing in, as other FSA vehicles also held off, or spread on separate leads, or continued checking towers or the three possible flyers.

  “Hello, Sandy,” came Amirah’s voice. “This is your hourly weather forecast—stormclouds gathering. Lots of downdrafts.”

  “Thank you, Ami,” said Sandy, and disconnected.

  “Downdrafts?” Vanessa asked.

  “Chief Shin’s giving a lot of orders,” Sandy translated.

  “Damn,” said Vanessa. “Where the hell does Amirah have her forecasters an
yway?” Sandy only raised an eyebrow. Vanessa saw. “Oh. You bugged him. I should have guessed. You bugged the top spy in the Federation.”

  “‘Bugged’ is a little unsophisticated.” The gunship was roaring in now, underside weapon racks protruding all kinds of lethality, sensors sweeping the neighbourhood. “And it wasn’t just me. Let’s go.”

  “Does Shin know?” Vanessa asked, steering them in.

  “I’m sure he does, and I’m sure the bugging’s mutual.” Sandy highlighted a rooftop several houses away from the target house. “Right here, please.”

  Vanessa dropped altitude, coming in fast over trees and houses, then flaring as they approached the point . . . no less than a hundred kph, knowing Sandy’s capabilities better than most. The door cracked, and again Sandy stepped out. Fell, for several seconds, arm out to protect her rifle from impact, then crashed a knee through the rooftiles. Another bill for Federal Security.

  She drew no fire and saw no activity, so she came up from cover behind the roof apex, then leapt to the next rooftop, seeing Hong drop to a similar rooftop opposite her, and Kristi to her right. Operating with GIs in Tanusha felt odd but good, and transformed capabilities considerably. Rather than make the leap directly, she dropped to the rear yard beside a swimming pool and crashed through the brick wall with a kick that sent dust and fragments blasting.

  Rifle in one hand, she went fast up the side of the house, fishing her headset from a pocket and hooking it over one ear—not strictly necessary but a comfort she’d acquired since League days, particularly the rear-view camera behind her ear. She flashed a glance through a window as she ducked beneath it, then spun around a door corner and smacked it open with a flat hand that broke the lock.

  Fast up the hall beyond, as Hong and Kristi came in simultaneously through other entrances, without even a word spoken to coordinate. It took barely six seconds for the three of them to clear the ground floor; no one cleared interiors like GIs. Hong and Kristi flashed upstairs to repeat the process there, leaving Sandy to consider the mess in the kitchen.