“Helping street kids?” Kiril asked. With a faint incredulity that seemed too subtle for his age.
“Yes,” Sandy said solemnly. “Helping street kids.”
“That’s stupid,” said Kiril.
“It’s very stupid,” Sandy agreed sadly. “But a lot of things are stupid like that.” In the backseat, Svetlana took Kiril’s hand. And gazed at Danya silently. Danya turned back around in his chair, head back, knee up. With that thousand-yard stare thing he did sometimes, more typically seen on combat veterans.
Sandy was about to ask further, but something interrupted—a general alarm, this one CSA-coded but forwarded through FSA. The encryption-grade was Fleet.
“. . . we have an alert signal on inner perimeter,” came Reichardt’s voice. She checked logs . . . Reichardt was still in Tanusha, wasn’t due to return to Mekong in orbit for another three days. “New arrival, signature indicates hard jump, he came from a fair way off. Well off the main entry lanes, FOG recommends preliminary emergency status.”
That would give everyone shivers, given what happened to Cresta. Svetlana started to say something else.
“Hang on, Svet,” said Sandy, putting the feed to the cruiser’s screens. “Something’s happening.”
“FOG, this is Ibrahim. Who’s up?”
“Bursteimer’s in best position.” Sandy checked the feed on Fleet positions and found it was true—Caribbean was on station out that way. As usual from Fleet, no explanation of why. “Preliminary trajectory calc is coming through now. Looks like 182 by 23. League-wards. Could be a long jump.”
“That’s a new ship, right?” Svetlana asked, frowning. “Could it jump all the way from the League?”
“Way too far,” said Danya, listening carefully. “But there are mass points through the Federation that are hard to guard, someone could three-or-four-jump it.”
“That would take a long time though,” said Svetlana, no doubt remembering their own trek from Pantala, weeks locked within narrow metal walls.
They landed at Canas and drove in, watching the situation unfold. The media were still not reporting it, plenty of amateur astronomers would have seen that entry pulse, but it took longer for amateurs to tell the difference between scheduled and unscheduled activity without access to Fleet feeds. No doubt a few of the more advanced amateurs would be guessing by now, but the credible ones didn’t just blab everything to the media at first notice. But as Sandy and the kids settled for a late hot chocolate and snack before bed, still there had been no ID signal received from the ship. That was odd, because most ships newly arrived in a system automatically sent an ID package. In an important, populated system like the Callayan System, failure to do so would get you intercepted, or worse.
“Maybe they’re damaged?” Svetlana wondered. Sandy’s kitchen display showed the arrival’s position, a holographic glow above the stove and fruit bowl. Coming in fast, less than two days from Callay at that velocity. Usually new ships took a week.
“Can we stay up and watch it?” Kiril asked.
“Sure,” said Sandy, sipping her chocolate. Danya and Svetlana repressed smiles—Kiril always wanted to stay up late but always fell asleep anyway. Usually he got to sleep faster if he was allowed to stay up than if he was sent to bed complaining. Sandy was not above taking devious advantage. “But I warn you, watching ships arrive from the outer system is deadly boring.”
“But the world might end!” Kiril insisted.
“The world’s not going to end,” Danya said calmly, checking some database on his AR glasses. Probably something about ships, trajectories, and physics—Danya always felt compelled to know. “That ship will be intercepted by a whole bunch of defensive systems before it gets anywhere near Callay.”
“But League ships get to Callay all the time! That’s how League agents end up in Tanusha all the time!”
“Those are stealth ships,” Sandy told him. “They’re small things that only hold thirty or forty people, they don’t have FTL drives so they piggyback on bigger ships that arrive in the outer system. Then they coast in, usually from zenith or nadir, so we can’t see them against black space. They’re not fast or big enough to be a threat to the planet.”
“Have you been on one?” Svetlana asked. Sandy nodded, sipping her drink. “In the League? Did you do insertion missions for the League?” Another nod. “Oh, come on, tell us! What did you do?”
And Svetlana glanced at Danya, as though by some telepathy, to find Danya giving a small shake of his head. No. Svetlana looked at the floor.
Sandy sighed. “Svet, it makes you more of a target if you know these things. League don’t like lots of people knowing this stuff.”
“That’s not why, though,” said Svetlana reproachfully. “You don’t trust us.”
Danya’s faint roll of the eyes told Sandy what she already suspected—it was one of Svetlana’s little manipulations. Sandy didn’t fall for it as often as she’d used to.
“Sandy trusts us with all kinds of things,” Danya said firmly. “Don’t be unfair.” Svetlana looked exasperated.
“Svet,” said Sandy. “You want to know the truth?” Svetlana nodded earnestly and came to stand closer. “The truth is that I don’t really like talking about it with you. I was a different person back then. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. Back then, the only use I had to anyone was to the League, as a killer. A lethal weapon. I’m much more than that now. Or I like to think I am. And I don’t like you to think of me that way, or have nightmares about what I’ve done.”
“I wouldn’t have nightmares,” Kiril said earnestly.
“I do,” Sandy said quietly.
“But that’s not fair, is it?” Svetlana insisted. “You get to watch us grow up, and you get to see how we change as we get older. And probably when we’re all adults you’ll say all kinds of embarrassing things about what we did when we were kids. But you won’t share your growing up stories with us?”
Sandy watched her sombrely. Svetlana gazed back, with those pretty blue eyes. Delicate, at first glance, within that pale, fine-boned face.
“Wow,” Sandy finally deadpanned. “You’re good.”
Svetlana struggled against a treacherous smile. “I know.”
“I especially like the big orphan-waif eyes. ‘Please, Sandy. It’ll mean ever so much to me.’”
Svetlana lost control of her grin. “She’s always done that,” Danya observed.
“Security stuff,” Sandy told her, “and fighting, I’m excellent at. None better. This other stuff, I’m not so good at. Like you, like everyone. So I’ll tell you eventually. But I’ll do it when I’m ready. Deal?”
“Deal,” said Svetlana. “Can I use my orphan-waif eyes to get you to break out the marshmallows?”
“Yeah!” said Kiril.
“Can’t really have hot chocolate without marshmallows,” Danya offered in support.
Nothing made Sandy more skeptical than when they started teaming up like that. “Is that some kind of law, is it?” she said drily.
“It is,” Danya agreed. “It’s an immutable law.”
Vanessa was helping Phillippe feed the twins when the alert sounded. She dashed for the cruiser, with baby food and drool still on her shirt, and in eight minutes on emergency lane privilege was halfway across town to rendezvous on a rooftop pad at Surat. She jumped from the cruiser the moment it was down, and it flew away on auto to park itself somewhere secured.
The spec ops flyer was down on the pad, hulking black and heavily armed, engines keening but no running lights. Even as she ran up the rear ramp, her other team members were jumping from other cruisers and running to join her. Up the rear aisle between armour racks, and people quickly wriggling into armour, powering up, testing feedback.
“Where we at?” she yelled as she stripped outer clothes before her suit and stuffed them into the foot locker.
“Tacnet up!” Munde shouted back above the engine shrill, checking weapons and helmet interace alongside. “Target’
s in Bhubaneswar CBD, Lotus Tower!”
Dammit, Vanessa thought, ducking to slither into her upper-half armour. Anywhere in central Bhubaneswar was crowded; the market there was one of Tanusha’s biggest. Central planners had added extra subway lines just to compensate for the numbers and had expanded the residential zones for more and taller towers around them. Operations in densely populated zones were a nightmare.
The last team member arrived three minutes later and the flyer lifted. By then Vanessa had the armour on, and completed the final adjustments automatically, full attention on tacnet as it showed her the scene.
Lotus Tower was two blocks from Bhubaneswar Market, above bustling streets lined with expensive shops and restaurants. Worse, it was Friday, just after 9 p.m., with rush hour faded and nightlife well begun. The market would be crammed with tens of thousands; there had once been entire roads of traffic there, but planners had blocked it all off for pedestrians about twenty years ago when it had emerged how popular the shopping had become. She called up traffic central, where monitors gave her rough estimates of people-density, and sonofabitch, even the lead-in streets were crammed, just below crush densities on the underground, and just as bad on the huge interdistrict maglevs. People came from the other side of Tanusha for a night out in Bhubaneswar. A high camera shot showed her crowds pouring down the steps of the maglev station from the latest train arrival. At 9 p.m. the maglevs arrived every four minutes, the underground every two. Add to that the rapidly filling parking lots. . . .
“Hello, Vanessa, how’s it looking?” came Amirah’s voice in her ear.
“Hello, Ami. Crowded as fuck. Where are they?”
“We’ve units in position now, our intel says forty-ninth floor.” Tacnet updated even as she spoke, showing the blue dots of friendly units on various floors of Lotus Tower and several floors shaded red. No eyes-on yet . . . which raised the question . . .
“Our Intel here is pretty weak, what’s the rush?”
“Our tip says they’re about to move. Could be a big one.”
“Who’s the tip from?”
“We don’t know. But seems accurate so far.”
Which could mean anything. Vanessa knew better than to start wondering about that now. It was the Pyeongwha terrorists, of course, and Lotus Tower would supposedly mean they’d been staying there, for a few days at least. Again, how they’d managed that, there was no way of telling.
“Okay, they’ll be on this feed,” one of their techies in HQ said, and Lotus Tower feed came through, all the data security services were usually not allowed to look at, people in rooms, security setups, elevator and stairwell activity.
“Yeah . . .” Vanessa fiddled with the inputs, not as good at juggling all these feeds simultaneously like Sandy, “damp that down a bit, the fucking targets will be on the building net, they’ll see we’re linked in. . . .”
“Vanessa, I’ve got it,” came Sandy’s voice, calm as ever, and Vanessa felt that particular tension flee her. Like a cool drink on a stinking hot day, everything felt right again. The incoming building feed modulated, just a trickle of incoming data, nothing they’d notice . . . only somehow multiplying here on tacnet, cross-referencing data adding up to more than was escaping. God knew how she did that, some trick of multiple sources adding up to more than the sum of their parts. . . . “Can we get eyes-on, give us an ETA.”
“Snowcat, ETA is . . . can we get a . . . ?”
“Ten seconds,” came someone else’s voice, from inside the building. “Keep your panties on.”
“Not wearing any,” said Sandy. A few years back that would have broken tension amongst nervous troops in the back, gotten a few giggles. Now it provoked only lazy or minor smiles among cool, professional troops who’d seen this all before and were visualising exactly where they were and what was about to happen. GIs, nearly half of them, in separate squads but mixed teams.
SO1, Vanessa’s flyer, now orbited Bhubaneswar a kilometre out, low amidst the teeming air traffic so as not to draw attention. Sandy was in transit too, SO4, now entering a similar orbit. SO2 had hoppers aboard, armoured troops with jumpjets, useful at altitude, but they wouldn’t fit comfortably in those tower corridors. Standoff firepower only. On the ground, cops were gathering, Vanessa could hear multiple shouts and terse calls for direction in the background noise—someone had that under control, she couldn’t worry about that now. A move too soon, and whoever was in Lotus Tower would see, and they’d be blown.
Then a new vision feed, fast and darting outside a window. Fly-cam, the troops called it, not easily spotted, but the feed was clean enough. Here a living room, tables and chairs, some odd-looking equipment . . . two people, in conversation with a third, unseen off-screen. Tacnet added those two to the schematic, its first hostile red dots. Then a third, as the camera bobbed and panned. The third person was working on something at a table, invisible at this angle.
“That’s good,” said Vanessa, looking at all the rear rooms in this apartment suite that tacnet still painted a blank, static grey. “We need more, back-rooms if you can.”
“Looks like they’re going somewhere,” someone else remarked. It did, as one shouldered a bag. A fourth, a woman, entered from another room, pulling on a jacket. Tacnet added another red dot by the bathroom doorway, tracking across the carpet to the balcony window. Fly-cam gained altitude, and the red dots froze, blinking, indicating last-seen position. “That’s four. No weapons yet.”
“There’s more,” said Sandy. “I’m seeing a loose communication matrix, like a low-grade version of tacnet. They’re not all on this level, and they’re not all in this room.”
Fucking great, Vanessa thought, as her general level of optimism plunged several points. “Sandy, can you fool them? Pull the wool over their eyes? We gotta move these people. If we go in hot like this we’re gonna have some motherfucking collateral.”
“I’m geographically limited on that capability,” Sandy replied, slow and clear to be sure Vanessa would understand. “I can only get the targets in the room.”
“Great. Do it. I want . . .”
“This is infiltration. We’re reading explosive, mil-grade. Someone’s got bombs in there.”
New vision acquired from some nearby tower, blurred and looking through the windows . . . several people in the apartment were definitely preparing to go out, pulling on jackets, carrying bags. Once they got out of the apartment, into these crowds, the best chance of settling it relatively quietly disappeared. But one did not just walk out the door on the way to a terrorist operation; they’d be methodical. She still had some minutes.
“Sandy, if you can blind them, I’m going in hot. Everyone, spec ops is hot on my command. Let’s get those cops on the ground and clear the streets on my signal.”
She half expected to see the little light in the corner of her vision flash, indicating someone higher up wanted to talk to her. President Raza technically had a say on the maglev train, but that was because of the visibility. If she stopped this now, it would only be visible after the terrorists were all dead. Ibrahim, of course, would not call her at all. He trusted his people and would back her decisions whatever the outcome. And wear the blame if it all went wrong.
“Vanessa, they’re transmitting on NCT bandwidths, so no guarantees. But I think I’ve got them. Go now.”
“This is Jailbait, go go go.” As Gs pressed them flat, the flyer turning hard and shrieking at full power. On the feed she could see police cars rushing the streets, sirens blaring, speakers yelling at everyone to move, run, get the hell away from Lotus Tower. Somewhere in that apartment on the forty-ninth floor, their targets were now locked into Sandy’s VR matrix, the same trick Cai liked to pull on everyone, using uplink VR functions to activate in combination with actual surroundings, causing people to see whatever Sandy wanted them to see. Or not see. Like the view out the window, as the teeming streets around the tower suddenly cleared of traffic, and then of pedestrians, replaced instead by swarms of red-and-blue flas
hing lights and uniforms.
“Fifteen seconds,” said the pilot. “Stand by.”
“Squad One, fast rappel, main window,” said Vanessa. “Squad Two, side window. Get the corridor, come through fast. Squad Three, reserve rappel.” Illustrating with mental diagrams on tacnet as she did it, little dots and arrows as second nature as sentences. “Got it? Good.”
Pointless question that was. They practised this, one aspect or another, every single day.
Heavy Gs as the flyer howled and flared, rear door cracking to let in the gale. Tacnet showed her their position, and then the towertop landing pad was coming beneath them. . . . “Move! Move! Move!” And she was unstrapping, coming last down the aisle as those before her leaped from the rear, twisting and rolling on the pad . . . then she was out, a quick fall then impact and roll, the suit made it easy, taking all the force.
Then running to the edge of the pad, rappel hook over one shoulder as the mechanism activated. She paused at the rim, a four-hundred-meter drop sheer off the edge of the world and no time to think about it, fed the hook through the belt loop, crouched and placed it on the steel rim of the landing pad. Pressed the seal, and it flashed, smoke and fire, welding hard and immovable in a second. A hiss of steam as coolant released, then it was firm.
A quick glance about the pad showed the rest of her team in position, silhouettes against the urban blaze of a Tanushan night. Tacnet showed all good, no vocals required.
“All good! Go!” She jumped, head-first down the building side, the suit feed automatically orienting her as she came down on the whizzing windows, a hand squealing against high-speed glass to steady as the other grasped her rifle, strapped on the shoulder in case she lost it. Far below, like ants, police vehicles and a chaos of sweeping lights.
“Vanessa, I lost them,” came Sandy’s voice. “They’re out, they’ve seen us.” A brief visual showed her a glimpse of someone staring out the window at the cars below.
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