Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel (v1.1)

by Joel Shepherd

  The elevator arrived at parking bay level, where the cruiser was already waiting on the main apron, in a space only a high-level government vehicle could reserve ... The door whined open as she ran to it and clambered in. Vanessa waited for the door to close, and gunned them immediately out the exit. The retail strip appeared below, an endlessly long, gleaming wet profusion of light and people. Then gone as the exit lane steered them over the smaller building ahead, and into a long, accelerating climb to the right, engines thrumming comfortably through the seat leather. Vanessa clicked on the autopilot and Sandy handed her a container.

  "Autopilot activated," said a gracious female voice from the console.

  "Blow it out your ear," Vanessa told it, cracking the lid and digging about with the fork provided. Sandy did likewise, and the cruiser interior filled with the fragrance of steaming hot curry and rice. "You know, I've had this ship for three years and I haven't yet figured out how to shut up that annoying voice."

  "Easily done," Sandy told her, taking a hot, delicious mouthful. Wiped wet hair from her face with a free hand, gazing out at the sprawling, wet spectacle of night-time Tanusha. A blurring mass of light through the water streaked windows. Above, the scudding grey cloud glowed palely luminescent, trapping the mass of light below. Everything glistened and shone for as far as the eye could see. "Anything happen?"

  "The river party at Tianyang consumed another hundred litres of chardonnay," Vanessa said around a mouthful. That was the Andaman Corporation delegation and associates, one of the Federation's biggest shipping and construction companies. All one hundred and twelve of them, cruising happily down the Pesh, a central-southern branch of the meandering Shoban River Delta. "Three smaller parties broke up and went home, the Tsang meeting is now two hours over time and counting, Swami Ananda Ghosh has rejected CSA cover, claiming that his supporters and "metric karma" will provide him with all the protection that he needs ..." She swallowed a portion. "... and the new lemmings are still delayed at Gordon Spaceport."

  "Lemmings" were what bureaucracy and media alike were now calling the innumerable delegates from the multitude of interested parties who were descending from the heavens to participate in the Federation-shaking debate over Article 42. A mass migration of mindless herd animals into a potentially calamitous circumstance. Lemmings indeed.

  It was of course impossible for Federation-wide governments, companies and other organisations not to come-communications between Federation member worlds only travelled as fast as the next intersystem freighter, and negotiations could only take place in person. Governments and corporations alike sent out senior delegates with the power to negotiate in the name of the organisation in question. But people who could make up their minds could also change them. Or have their heads blown off by desperate people who didn't like their conclusions.

  Lots of security out tonight.

  Especially given that half the major delegations from Earth itself were just crawling with Federal Intelligence Agency personnel, armed with "official" Federal passports that CSA Intel had become increasingly good at spotting. No proof, no means of challenging a visa, just clear and all-but-proven suspicion. What they were doing here was anyone's guess. Intel had some ideas. Mostly, Sandy suspected, there were big moves afoot in Tanusha, and the FIA were loath to miss a chance to influence it, or at least to keep very close tabs for their political masters back on Earth. Exactly what they'd do, and under what circumstances, the brightest brains in the CSA could only guess at. But the FIA had not been reticent about interfering in Callayan affairs before. All Earth-based delegations were under particularly close watch tonight-and all nights-especially those multi-national institutions such as the United Nations, the Pan-African Union and Earth Gov itself, where joint security was less solid.

  The CSA made no attempt to be discreet in their surveillance of such groups. Rumours of rumblings within CSA elements of revenge hits upon suspected FIA personnel had been spread within those delegations, with Ibrahim's blessing. It kept the FIA off the streets, and discouraged them from wandering. Ibrahim apparently liked it better that way. And could not, in all seriousness, give any guarantee that the rumours in question were not in fact true. Sandy had heard some genuine rumours in circulation that indicated otherwise.

  She shook her head in disbelief, and washed down a mouthful of curry with her makani juice. "This isn't a diplomatic gathering," she said. "This is a zoo."

  "It's a fucking circus," said Vanessa.

  Sandy frowned, remembering something. "`Metric karma'?" she said curiously. "What's that?"

  "Our certified whacko swami has apparently devised a foolproof method of measuring karma via electronic database. Thus "metric karma." I think he's got copyright on it."

  Sandy shrugged. "Pretty tame, by Tanushan standards."

  Vanessa snorted. "`Foolproof' is a technical impossibility in this city," she replied. "Nothing can be "proof' from this many fools."

  Navcomp skipped them onto an adjoining lane, curving back one hundred and eighty degrees. The main Baidu strip passed below once more, flanked by mid-level office towers. A residential suburb lay beyond, then a bend of river, flanked by taller apartments. Light blazed on the water as they cruised overhead. Small craft made widening trails of wash, and light rain made the air glow yellow with ground light.

  Security, she noted while shovelling her way through her meal, was exceptionally tight about Gordon Spaceport, many kilometres out past Tanusha's westernmost edge. The new lemmings that Naidu had told them about at the briefing had not left the terminal. That made them nearly three hours overdue. Whatever the hold-up was, no one had thought to inform a couple of roaming SWAT operatives. No one even knew who the new lemmings were, nor where they came from. No one with her security clearance, anyway.

  They cruised for another hour, letting CSA Central plot the cruiser's course with an uplink to the central traffic network. Everything was integrated. Their course, Sandy noted, wound conveniently past a number of ongoing "security concerns" in their particular region between Porcetti and Vanos, from Southern-Central to CentralSouthern Tanusha. About one hundred square kilometres of urbanity, alive with remnants of late-weekend nightlife. Of the sixteen "security concerns" within their designated region, only three broke up and dispersed back toward their various hotels, their private security and bodyguards in tow. Still the lemmings had not left Gordon. But then, considering Gordon was a city unto itself, with some of the best duty free shopping within light-years ... not surprising. The whole thing sometimes seemed more like a giant business junket than an interstellar, political, constitutional crisis.

  Another ten minutes, and it was 10 p.m. Vanessa got bored with listening to mundane radio traffic, and put on some music-Lattino rhumba, a favourite of hers, and infectiously rhythmic, even on low volume. Several sectors away, Parliament traffic picked up, and transmission traffic increased forthwith. The Senate had packed up for the night, from another of their after-hours sessions. No one really knew what went on in most of them-much was security sensitive, and sessions were closed to media. Sandy recalled her meeting with the President, and the alarm in the Senate over her own role within the CSA ... among other things. In all likelihood they'd been talking about her over there. Well, at least a little.

  "You want to go shopping with me tomorrow if we get a spare half hour?" Vanessa suggested. "I need a new outfit. Or two."

  Sandy frowned, fingers tapping absently on the dash to the rhythms. "A new outfit for what?"

  Vanessa shrugged. "I've got a date."

  "Oh," said Sandy. Blinked in surprise.

  Vanessa flashed her a sideways look. And grinned. "What, you thought I was going into a prolonged period of post-relationship celibacy?"

  "Hey," Sandy replied with a faint smile, glancing back out at the hypnotic view as the cruiser performed a slow bank, "I'm the slut here, remember? Who's the guy?" For a moment, the ground rose up on the cruiser's side, and she could look straight down onto the maze of st
reets, lights, trees, buildings and parks. A beautiful, relaxing spectacle of colour and detail.

  "Girl," Vanessa corrected. "Sylvia Lopez, troubleshooter tech in maintenance. She helps with the suit calibration sometimes, you've met her."

  "Yeah." Sandy recalled a tall, attractive, tanned woman with long brown hair. "You ever thought of going out with someone more your own size?"

  "No way, I like tall, tall's nice. No offence."

  "I'm taller than you," Sandy replied with a smile.

  "Who isn't?" The cruiser levelled out, a gentle bump and wobble past the blazing side of a tower. "Anyway, I asked her today just before training, I've always liked her."

  "How are you going to find time for a date?"

  "Oh, I can wrangle a coincidental night off for two people. You've just gotta know who in admin you have to ask to make the schedules match."

  "How'd you know she was gay?"

  "I just did, I dunno ..." Vanessa shrugged, theatrically. "Just her helping me get a few suit adjustments ..." A sly, creeping smile. "... I could just tell. It's a subtle thing."

  Sandy raised an eyebrow, faintly, eyes not leaving the view. "Nothing to do with the bite marks she left on your arse?"

  The alarm bleeper combined with Vanessa's hard, backhanded whack on her arm to cut off the sentence. Sandy touched the reception before Vanessa could stop looking annoyed.

  "This is Snowcat," she announced.

  "Hi, Snowcat ... is that Cassandra?" It was hardly proper protocol.

  "Yeah, this is Cassandra." With a curious, sidelong glance at Vanessa, who sent a similar one back. The voice was familiar, but the reception quality was not sufficient for identification. A quick mental probe of the link made her suspect that it might have been intentional. "Snowcat is my personal callsign, but tonight it covers a two-man unit. Who is this?"

  "Um, it's Ari Ruben, Cassandra ... do you need a direct interface to receive code?"

  "No." Even more puzzled, though increasingly less surprised. "Why?"

  "Well, then ... I just wanted to see what you made of this. Stand by to receive ... "

  Sandy hooked reflexively into her linkups, and felt the interface kick in as a transmission code arrived ... and recognised it immediately.

  "That's a sleeper, Ari ... I don't know if you know that coding, but that's a Blue Sigma, triple lock ..."

  "... with intercompatible C-grade interface, yeah," Ruben cut her off, and it can sing, dance, and cook you an omelette in the morning. What I don't know is how old it is, and I had this idea League software was better at cyclelapse deterioration than what I've got ..."

  "This one's been active three hours, twenty-three minutes and fiftysomething seconds," Sandy said immediately. "Why's that important?"

  "I think we might have some bats in the belfry ... hang on, I'll get back to you ... " Click, and he was gone. Sandy looked at Vanessa. Vanessa looked at Sandy.

  "Bats in the belfry?" said Vanessa, incredulously.

  "What's a belfry?" Sandy asked.

  "And what's he doing on direct ops, anyway?" Vanessa said. "I didn't think they'd let him in, he doesn't hang around Central much."

  "He never said he was in Central." And Vanessa gave her another hard look. Sandy scanned further along her links, breaking down the signal. The further she got, the more complicated it became. "In fact, I can't tell where the hell this is coming from."

  "Which, considering that you can track pretty much anything, makes him one slippery little Jewish boy, right?"

  "Logical conclusion." She scanned further. They were over Nagpur now, the other side of the winding, gleaming Pesh from Baidu. But if Ruben had contacted her because of her League software, there was no guarantee that his security concerns were located in her region. There was transmission traffic everywhere. Electronic data-mountains of it. More than a year spent living in a civilian environment, and she was still getting used to it.

  "Got anything?" Vanessa asked after a moment of high-speed information deluge.

  "Not yet." Then, "There's something."

  "What?"

  "Don't know. Sounds like shielded traffic." She scanned further. Someone's transmissions were running hot. "Private security, it looks like."

  "Where?"

  "Uh ... Derry. That's pretty near." It was two districts over, back beyond Baidu.

  "It's outside our region," Vanessa replied. Tapped manually through the cruiser's frequencies, frowning as she tried to find what Sandy was monitoring. "We also don't have any official call-in ... private security don't qualify."

  On the horizon, something bright caught Sandy's eye. She looked ... and her eyes widened. She pointed, and Vanessa looked too. And swore, breathlessly.

  "You think that looks serious enough?" Sandy asked mildly, as the fireball climbed into the middle-distant sky. At two hundred metres, it began dissipating. On the frequencies, all hell broke loose.

  "Jesus," said Vanessa as the auto-control reverted to manual and she fed in the destination ... directly at the thick plume of black smoke and raining fragments of small debris, eight kilometres away. The cruiser leapt forward with impressive acceleration, sliding into a new lane with emergency beacons flashing on the navscreen, and traffic ahead sliding out of the way. "Oh fuck, that looks like a couple of kilos worth, oh shit ..."

  She looked pale, Sandy noted with interest.

  Incoming traffic was a garbled mess, saying something about boats and water traffic, and fires on a bridge ... a direct location fix, and she could see it all-a large river boat with its stern section ablaze, and what looked like a large section of river foreshore blackened and scorched, but with very little actually blown away ...

  "Jesus, what'd they do?" Vanessa breathed, staring wide-eyed at her display screen. "It wasn't on the boat, right? Just on the foreshore? That was one fucking huge explosion ..."

  "Amateurs," Sandy told her. Vanessa stared at her. Sandy continued to scan calmly through her links, observing the new vid-feeds coming in from the explosion site, and racing through the surrounding infrastructure for telltales.

  "Oh Christ," Vanessa said, breathlessly, "don't tell me that's not serious! "

  "No, they were serious. They were just stupid ... that was basic plastique, backyard stuff, big fireball and no real shockwave, it's mostly flammable chemicals and doesn't generate much punch. You see any crater? No heavy debris in the explosion cloud either." As she spoke, calmly reasoning, shouts and cries for assistance and support were howling over the frequencies, and about fifty media outlets were simultaneously screaming for information on the broader net. "Looks like they took out some of the boat's windows, but those fires are mostly chemical, they won't catch."

  The boat was big, perhaps a one hundred capacity. On one vidfeed, there were people in the water, amid patches of flame. A splash, as another jumped, and another. Panicking, thinking the boat would sink. She shook her head in disbelief, scanning further, seeing a bridge overpass with a wrecked car, and more flames. That looked more serious. By the riverside, some trees were blazing like matches. A nearby building was missing some windows, and the gardens were smouldering. She hoped no one had been walking along the riverside when it went off. But the people in the boat should be fine. If the fools didn't drown.

  But where did a couple of amateur pyrotechnicians hide when setting off a device that size? Where would they be if, as it seemed, they had been reading the instructions from the side of a box?

  In the driver's seat, Vanessa was engaged in a desperate conversation with someone on a frequency. Sandy recalled Ruben's sleeper code, wove it into her most advanced scanner function, and went hunting.

  She found a trace almost immediately, in a nearby com relay. She followed it, noting the mutations as it went, allowing her software to adjust for it, tracing the patterns ... racing through massive, multitudinous relays and network branches, a staggering, sprawling complexity that baffled any visual scan and tried to split the brain into a million different directions at once.
She unfocused slightly, allowing the programs to do their job, monitoring on automatic as Vanessa continued shouting something into her voicelink ... They banked about another towerside, the drifting plume of smoke now clear ahead, flames burning at a broad bend in the river, aircars coming to hover in close proximity-a confusion of multi-coloured, flashing emergency lights, flaring off building windows already alive with chemical fires.

  "Back off," Sandy said, eyes half-focused on the chaos in front. "Keep us out of the mess. I think I've got something in Lagosso."

  A pause as Vanessa broke off her conversation ... "You think? Lagosso's fifteen klicks in the other direction."

  "Just hold off a second ..." Internally focused as the patterns converged, racing through the mass of network chaos, chasing the thin, repetitive strain of data-trails. A throb of engines declining as Vanessa bled off their velocity, and the navcomp blinked a query ... Civilian traffic being quickly rerouted, emergency programs overriding to keep the onlookers away, and their airspace was rapidly clearing of company. Another query from navcomp.

  "Dammit, Sandy," Vanessa exclaimed, "what d'you want? If we go in now we might get something on the ground."

  "There's nothing on the ground," Sandy murmured. "It'll be crawling with suits in a few minutes, anyway ..." Ahead, an emergency flyer had arrived in a howling downdraft of multiple engines, the fire scene erupted with foaming spray. It smothered crowding civil ians on the boat's foredeck, a sea of fending arms submerged by carpeting foam ...