“Let’s hope that’s overstating it.”
“What do you think we’re looking for on Droze? Some kind of base?”
“Some kind of very old base, or bases. Chancelry discovered Talee outposts here. My own GIs, Kiet’s bunch from Pantala, were living in caves the Talee had used a long time ago . . . but there was no technology there, we’ve gone over all of that before. What we don’t know is if this was a base of synthetic Talee or organic. This system is a long way from Talee main space, so it seems it survived their catastrophe, or mostly. This is where the seeds remain that weren’t burned in the fire. Seeds that are thousands of years old and hold the key to knowledge that was lost millennia ago. That’s what I think the organics are here to find, something that the synths were keeping from them. What and why, I’ve no idea.”
Reichardt pursed his lips, thinking about that. The delay lasted longer than light-speed suggested it should. “Wow,” he said finally. “You know, Kresnov, I think I’ve done pretty well following you around all this time, saving your ass. I mean, I’ve got to see some pretty far-out stuff.”
“Find that damn base,” Sandy said wryly. “We might not have seen anything yet.”
An hour later, Home Guard began lobbing makeshift mortars over the walls. Encouraged by the lack of a more typical devastating response, they started lobbing more and hammering heavy machine gun fire at the visible corporate zone buildings. Doing so under corporate rule would have seen them, and several hundred innocents, immediately incinerated. But now it was playtime for fools.
“Shouldn’t we do something to stop that?” Poole asked as they climbed into their hoppers to go attend to the Dhamsel perimeter guard’s latest problem. Another explosion echoed, somewhere distant. Then another, nearer.
“Can’t shoot them without killing the civvies they’re hiding behind,” said Sandy. “Let them shoot, it’s not like they’ll hit anything.”
“Dunno about that,” said Poole, firing up his power core. “Idiots always get lucky. You think they even know that the last bunch in here were Talee?”
“If all the corporate zone civvies ran into the outer zones to hide, they’ll know.” She tested feedback, a flex of the arms. “Thing is, they hate Federation nearly as bad as League. They’re probably fine with Talee.” Outside the building lobby, they fired up thrusters and leaped for the Dhamsel wall.
Below the ten-meter-tall reinforced wall were a series of bunkers and concrete trenches. Sandy and Poole descended by a trench where Lieutenant Duana awaited in his hopper suit, while an unoccupied suit stood nearby.
“Private Tulloch’s in the bunker,” Duana said with faceplate raised. “The defensive systems are working; they’re just not patching into central systems, so we can’t control it yet. Tulloch thinks he can do it.”
“But you had something?” Sandy asked.
“Yeah.” A shell whistled over nearby. “Got a visual myself, didn’t tacnet it, it’s not tactical. But I thought you’d like to see.”
A flicker as Duana’s systems patched into hers and an image appeared on her visor display. Zoomed, first-person visual, a bit shaky. It was the far side of the wall, taken from this side, looking down and out. The first several blocks of what had used to be Droze buildings were gone, torn away after the Crash when the corporations had bulldozed a clear space for defence. A hundred meters of kill-zone into which previously anything that wandered unauthorised was dead. Beyond that, deserted buildings, not bulldozed but crawling with killer droids. Those buildings blocked any line-of-sight from the buildings that were occupied and provided cover for swarms of easily re-tasked robots that could just as easily fan out as hold the line, if required.
But now, Duana’s visual zoomed on the base of one of those buildings by the corner of a main road . . . and she saw them, behind the burned-out wreck of a car. Kids, peering at the walls. Looking both scared and hopeful, and now debating with each other. Even now another one ran over, no more than seven, in dirty old pants and sneakers. Droze street kids, the city had plenty. These ones seemed to have figured out that something had changed, and there might be something on the other side of the wall worth risking everything for.
“Fuck,” said Sandy with feeling. “We’re sure all the defensive grids are down?”
Duana nodded. “They’re safe, but they don’t know that. They’re taking a hell of a risk.”
Sandy shook her head. “No, street kids here are smart. They’ll have noticed the defender bots’ behaviour changing under the Talee, I don’t know if the Talee were still tasking them to shoot at people, but they’ll have been different. And now the attack’s come through and all the bots are silent, they know the zone’s changed hands.”
“You think they know it’s Federation?” asked Poole. Machine gun fire, from somewhere farther away. Tacnet showed heavy rounds, well out of accurate range, streaking over the perimeter. Accuracy wasn’t their goal, just noise. A single missile from her backrack could have silenced them. “You’re kind of famous here, you beat Chancelry, took over their HQ. And they’ll know Danya, Svet, and Kiril went with you.”
Sandy stared at him with dawning desperation.
“Might get a kid dreaming,” Poole finished. “And you know kids can dream.”
“Fuck,” Sandy repeated. She didn’t like this at all. “Our protocol is to always inform the civvie population what’s happening to them, when possible. I have to tell them the Federal Security Agency has taken the corporate zone for now. But if I tell them that, we’ll have street kids and other desperates running for our gates, asking for a ticket to Callay.”
“I would,” said Duana.
“Yeah, me too. And fucking Home Guard will call them traitors and start shooting them, you watch.”
“You think?” With the wide-eyed disbelief that a lot of younger GIs showed for cynical predictions of human behaviour.
“Yeah, I think. Look, we stay quiet for now. Lieutenant, get those kids in here. Don’t go looking for more, but if they do show up, get them all in, get them sent back to Dhamsel HQ, find some armoured runabout for transport in case one of these mortars gets lucky. And if Home Guard even look like they’re gonna shoot at them, you fucking toast them first, got it?”
“Yes, Commander.”
“Tickets to Callay are pretty expensive,” Poole suggested, looking dubious.
“Federation’s rich,” Sandy muttered. “If we can afford to carry troops and ammo all the way here, we can afford to carry a few kids back.”
“Commander?” Tacnet showed it was Williams, farther along the wall. “Take a look at this.”
An image appeared: Williams’s visual feed. It showed a man, in plain civilian clothes, walking across the bulldozed kill-zone toward the next entry gate along. Behind him, dragged by one hand, was another man, hauled by his collar through the dust. The ease with which the weight was pulled, for so little sacrifice in posture, indicated the walking man was a GI. And his cargo, so unceremoniously hauled, was . . .
“Well,” said Poole, viewing the same feed. “Looks like we found Chairman Patana.”
Sandy and Poole sealed up and ran, nearly a kilometre along the inner wall, saving their thrusters and not drawing extra attention to that gate. At the gate, more soldiers in hopper armour stood back, while the personnel gate alongside the big vehicle gate was opened. Through it walked the man, dragging the Dhamsel CEO behind him. He dumped Patana and stood calmly before them.
Sandy lifted her faceplate once more and knelt, rifle butt down on the dirt for stability. The GI was African-looking, broad-faced, and handsome. His hair was worn in that series of spikey studs that African hair could attain. She didn’t know if that hairstyle had a name. Svetlana would know, being a student of such things. But thinking of Svetlana was a mistake, because suddenly she missed her so badly her eyes watered.
“Who are you?” she asked him.
“Commander Kresnov,” the man greeted her, in that very calm, intelligent way only a high-des GI coul
d. Any GI that high-des, and in the Federation, she’d know. That left two options, and if this was a League GI, he’d be ISO, and ISO weren’t about to just hand her an asset like Patana. That left one. “I’ve brought you a gift.”
Sandy looked at Patana. A slim, dusky man, half-conscious in a dirty suit, shirt ripped and tie long gone. “I’ve been given better,” she said darkly. “What’s the trade?”
The man smiled. It was a wry smile, edged with darkness. “Perhaps I misunderstand the human custom. Is there always a trade with a gift?”
“Among friends and family, no. Among people like us, always. I’m sure Talee are the same.”
It was a bold statement, but the Talee-GI inclined his head, not arguing. Biologists had discovered that different life-forms evolving in similar environments ended up following very similar evolutionary paths. Sandy was certain that just as evolution was evolution anywhere in the galaxy, so were politics and power.
“I come to you as a friend. I have no alliance to those who previously occupied the corporate zone. But I think you already know that.”
“A friend of ours explained some things to us,” Sandy agreed. “He went by the name of Cai. Perhaps amongst his own people he went by a different name.”
“Cai is known to us. How does he fare?”
“He died. Defending us and his investment in us.” The man’s face fell. “He was brave, and we owe him a debt. I owe him personally.”
“‘Debt’ is our custom too. I’m sad to hear he’s gone, though he knew it was a dangerous task when he took it. ‘Duty,’ I believe, is another common concept between us.”
“It is,” Sandy agreed. She hiked one armoured thumb back toward the Dhamsel HQ. “Your organics are becoming unruly. Can’t you control them anymore?”
Surprise in the man’s eyes. Then perhaps . . . admiration? Cer tainly pleasure that she’d reached such a conclusion. “Cai told you?”
“We figured it out.” An explosion nearby, a mortar hitting a tower and the crash of falling glass. “Our theory is that organics died in your last catastrophe, and you synthetics brought them back.”
A silence as the man regarded her, broken by a rattle of gunfire. Sprawled in the dirt, Patana appeared to wake a little, blinking and coughing, then abruptly slumped into unconsciousness once more. No one felt inclined to check on him. Sandy felt as though the galaxy were holding its breath. This theory had not yet been confirmed. So much hung on the answer.
The Talee-GI exhaled, finally, with a heave of broad shoulders. “And have been regretting it ever since,” he admitted.
Sandy and Poole jogged alongside the armoured car carrying Patana and their guest. A mortar hit twenty meters away as they ran, no real threat to armour, but if buildings began to catch fire it would be destruction of evidence, and she had no manpower to spare fighting fires.
“Arvid, let’s stop them shooting.”
“Sure,” came Singh’s reply from observation atop a tower roof. “How? We use magfire against them it’ll go straight through them, and five walls behind them, possibly ten. The areas they’re shooting from look inhabited.”
“Which suggests they know we’re Federation,” Vanessa cut in, “and they’ll use our moral standards against us. Real brave.”
“Yeah, maybe the next generation of mag rifles we’ll have a power reducer, cut the muzzle velocity in half.” But she hated too many systems in one weapon—the key to weapon reliability was simplicity, something modern designers forgot too easily. “How about airbursting missiles?”
“Can’t do it with shuttles,” Singh replied, “they don’t have anything small enough. Backracks might work, but we’ve never tried it. Could be fatalities, they’re not designed for nonlethal purposes.”
“So long as those fatalities are Home Guard, I’ll risk it,” said Sandy. “Pick a guinea pig, and if it works do a whole bunch simultaneously. Should shut them up for a while.”
She was just arriving back at HQ when Singh, deciding the test shot had worked, launched a full spread of sixteen backrack missiles, zigzagging off toward the perimeter. Soldiers unloaded Patana from the car and carried him inside, while Sandy noted that incoming fire appeared to have stopped.
Inside the main building lobby, Vanessa was in light armour with some others, attending to the rows of opened hopper suits, directing maintenance and rearming. With shuttles down on various HQ pads, spare ammo had been unloaded already, carried by hoppers and placed here for rearming, all without Sandy having to spare it a thought. With senior and junior officers and noncoms like she had, she knew such things would just get done, without her getting in their way.
“Wanna talk to Home Guard?” Vanessa called across the lobby, tapping her headset. Secondary coms were Vanessa’s responsibility, and she wouldn’t bother Sandy with it if Sandy were otherwise occupied.
Sandy thumped across in full armour. “How long they been calling?”
“Just now.” As she watched privates examining the new ammo, checking security tags and serial numbers before loading. “Something about how unfair it is that they can’t shoot at us with impunity.”
“You do it,” said Sandy, lining her armour up with the others, cracking the shell and shutting down. “Then come with us, our new friend’s got something to tell us.”
“New friend got a name?” asked Vanessa, looking dubiously at the new GI.
“Dara,” he said.
“Cute,” said Vanessa, flipping channels to talk to whichever indignant Home Guard person was shouting at her.
“Commander,” said Dara, meeting Sandy as she stepped from her hopper, “might it not be best to talk without the organics present?” With a look back at Vanessa. “We synthetics have matters to discuss. They require a certain perspective.”
Sandy looked at him for a moment, then at Patana, held between two GIs, head lolling. A man who’d commanded the commissioning of thousands of synthetic test subjects, then terminated their short lives for experiments. And then killed upwards of a thousand more via the killswitches built into their brainstems, rather than let them escape to freedom. She couldn’t look at him and not see the terrified faces, escapees realising that the vaunted Cassandra Kresnov had no solution and that their great hope of freedom was about to implode and take their lives with it.
“No offence,” Sandy told Dara, “but I trust her more than you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The office had a view, but window slats were three-quarters drawn in case of a very lucky Home Guard shot. Sandy poured a cup from the water dispenser, and one for Dara, Vanessa, and Jane, whom she’d summoned. Jane had found a baseball cap from somewhere, worn and faded, and wore it under her headset, sitting now with her feet up along the long table.
“What’s with the hat?” Sandy asked her quizzically, skimming the cup along the smooth table top toward her.
Jane took it. “Got used to wearing it. Suits me.” She sipped. “I’m not as pretty as you lot.”
“No,” said Sandy, handing Dara his cup. “You’re not.”
Vanessa entered, carrying fruit she’d found somewhere, one piece for each of them. She tossed with confidence that GIs would catch and took her own seat at the head of the long table. “No idea what they’re called,” she said around a mouthful of fruit. “Something exotic. Taste good though, and they’re on the database for edible foods.”
“Thanks, babe,” said Sandy, eating. “Thoughtful.”
Shrug. “You know me.” She glanced at Jane. “This is a fashion statement, huh?”
“Does this look like a fashion to you?” Jane asked drily.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” Vanessa deadpanned. “When Sandy first arrived on Callay, she might have thought so too.”
“Thanks,” said Sandy. “What did Home Guard say?”
“Apparently we’re not allowed to shoot at them. Only they’re allowed to shoot at us. It’s some kind of rule.” Another bite. “We killed three of them, but jury’s out. I think we might have ju
st knocked over a mortar tube while firing and they blew themselves up.”
“Any civvies hurt?”
“By us? No way. By them, probably, but they’ll blame it on us.”
“Of course.”
“They said about twenty are dead from our assault, more than that wounded.”
Sandy exhaled hard. “Yeah, well, they’re probably not kidding on that. There’s just no other way to do it. That’s their justification for shooting at us?”
Vanessa nodded. “Most of that wasn’t us either, it was Talee shooting at us, only they didn’t use airbursts at range, only magfire and AMLORA.” She glanced at Dara.
“The organics are not sophisticated,” he explained. “They’ve little practise at this.”
“We noticed,” said Jane.
“They borrowed our weapons tech?” Sandy asked. “From spies amongst us? People like you?”
“You must understand,” said Dara, looking down at his cup, “organic Talee are a new civilisation. They’ve been thriving, but they are isolated. We synthetics brought them into the world, but there remains concern over organic susceptibility to uplink technology. There is a mental condition, it . . .”
“Cai explained it to us,” Sandy interrupted. “A drug effect, it creates a narrow-focus mindset, improves linear thinking and processing, maths and data, but at the expense of rationality and context.”
“At the expense of self,” said Dara. “We call it tokot. Tokot on our home-world are a species of insect. Their workers feed themselves willingly to their young at a certain age for nourishment. It is an effective life-cycle for the hive, at the expense of the individual. Tokot creates such thinking in Talee. It is frightening, yet also seductive.”
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