Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel (v1.1)

by Joel Shepherd

  "What'd he do?" Washing down the chicken with a bite of salad and a sip of drink.

  "He broke into Lexi Incorporated, stole a big chunk of mainframe data. Itineraries included, travel plans, meetings, that kind of thing."

  Sandy blinked, considering that. Lexi Incorporated? They'd been on the boat last night when Jurgen Chavinski and the Human Reclamation Project had tried to blow them out of the water. And she made the next obvious connection.

  "You think Sai Va gave the HRP the schedule for Lexi's boating cruise?"

  "It definitely looks that way."

  "Why?"

  "I'm not sure. Word is Sai Va's latest employer was the Hornsvaag Four-they're GGs, goodtime gangs, mafia by any other namethere's six leaders, don't know where they got the "Four" from. Good thing about Tanusha, you can make the most money by doing things legally, so the cream of the genius tends to avoid the mafia." He shrugged theatrically. "Anyhow, as you know, GGs are a big part of the League infiltration network in Tanusha, they'll take anyone's business for enough money. You heard about the new lemmings at Gordon Airport last night? The ones who took so long to get through?"

  "Sure." Frowning as she swallowed her next mouthful. "They were still stuck out there just before the bomb went off, after that I wasn't watching. Who were they?"

  "League delegation." The cup froze halfway to Sandy's lips, her eyes locked hard onto Ari's. Ari's return gaze was calmly thoughtful, even curious. The cup continued to her lips, and she took a long, considered sip. "Big one," Ari added. "Word is there were GIs in the group arriving. Officially registered, full documentation." Sandy nearly swore. "Apparently it's not illegal, there's nothing in the regulations prohibiting the League from appointing GIs as official security under the relevant diplomatic articles that govern these things. So long as they stay at the Embassy, it's all covered by diplomatic immunity. That's what the hold-up was about, some immigration officials made a fuss but got overruled."

  And just now Neiland wanted to talk to her about likely positions the League would take regarding Dali's impending testimony? She took a deep breath to cover the surge of frustration. Neiland was under no obligation to share such information with her. Neiland would have been breaching protocols to tell her precisely why now, of all times, she needed a League-side opinion of League-side attitudes toward the present crisis. What would the new League Administration think? What would they want? Damn sure it mattered now, the new Administration just sent a delegation to Tanusha, doubtless to partake in ... whatever they thought worth partaking in. She was no expert on what the new Administration would want. It all seemed like chaos over there right now.

  It certainly made more sense of the timing of Ambassador Yao's message to her-he had just received the information himself, because it had just arrived on those League ships with the new delegation. So were the League here to talk, or to listen? Or worse, to make "constructive headway"? And then she thought back, with an unpleasantly cold feeling in her gut, to Ari's initial point.

  "So what does this have to do with Sal Va and hacking into Lexi Incorporated? And why would any mafia group want to help get Lexi blown up, anyway?"

  "Exactly-they don't. It's bad for business. They get quite a lot of work from minor biotech people, tracking down various black market tech for study. Everyone knows the corporations are the biggest buyers on the black market, why attack your own best client?" Ari stabbed a piece of salad with his fork, and pointed it at her with emphasis. "The thing is that Sai Va's a dedicated anarchist in the truest of underground traditions, he'd only take the Lexi job to cause trouble. The GGs were stupid to hire him, but then that's GGs-too many stim implants, too few functioning brain cells left in the cerebral cortex. And, of course, it's not the GGs' idea, it's just that some fool comes along from their old League contacts and offers them a huge pile of credit to arrange it, and their beady little eyes light up like Holi decorations and they go searching for the most qualified person they can find with that money, without giving a second thought to whether he's reliable or not ..

  "The League paid this mafia gang to employ Sai Va to hack Lexi?" With some incredulity, realising how silly it sounded all compressed into one sentence. Ari nodded, eyebrows raised somewhat glumly. Ate the salad piece off his fork, and went to work on the lasagna again. "What did the League want with Lexi?"

  "Who knows?" Shovelling another forkful into his mouth. "Lexi's big, they're one of the most influential corporates on Callay, biotech or otherwise. Their opinion gets listened to in the corridors of power, they lobby like a six hundred kilo krais dragon with a toothache, and they know everyone ... and their bank account details. So if the League could get their info, find out who they're talking to, find out all kinds of things about where the whole corporate scene's at regarding Article 42, and therefore where the League's best plays lie ... And where the vulnerable angles are. Who knows, maybe there's still some unfinished business there from the whole thing you were involved in. Maybe the League still has contacts there."

  "Old League, you mean? Not the new Administration?"

  Ari gazed at her. "There's a difference?"

  "Isn't there?"

  Ari shrugged. "New bottle, old wine. Or maybe not. We just don't know yet what their foreign policy will be."

  "Self-interested self interest," Sandy muttered.

  "Sure. But implemented how? The old regime did things the nasty, sneaky way, tying up with their worst enemies in the FIA when it suited them. These new guys might look at a breakaway Callay as a potential new ally. Wouldn't surprise me if they start acting real nice and cooperative all of a sudden."

  "That'd put them at odds with their old FIA contacts," Sandy pointed out. "With the whole old League Intel network here, like the people who instructed Sai Va to hack Lexi. If it's really changed, we could be looking at a local League civil war between old regime and new regime operatives here."

  Ari smiled at her, pleasantly surprised. "That's amazing, you're a natural at this stuff."

  "I'm a natural cynic, if that's a compliment. I always count on League dark ops trying to screw everything up."

  "They've certainly been trying," Ari agreed.

  "Only Sai Va's an anarchist lunatic who doesn't care which big organisation he screws," she ventured, "and so a few buddies in the fellow lunatic scene ask him if he knows anyone big they could try and blow up, and he offers them Lexi."

  Ari nodded, chewing contentedly. As if further pleased she was doing so well.

  "It's certainly the only way that bunch of amateurs could draw a bead on Lexi," he agreed. "So now the GGs have put two and two together ... and made five, incidentally ... and they're after Sai Va." Sandy raised her eyebrows. "His main hideout's been ransacked, I was just there this morning, and the GGs might just have enough favours to call in from enough people to put him in real hot water, because, of course, they don't want to get the blame for blowing up Lexi ... So Sai Va's gone to ground before they can extract revenge one toe at a time."

  "And now the League's here," Sandy added. Ari nodded, speechless for a moment with a mouthful. "And you just know they're going to want to clean up their mess ..." She didn't feel at all happy about it. Ari nodded again, reluctantly conceding. ". . . with GIs."

  He smiled, finally swallowing. "And that's why I invited you along. Even up the odds a bit."

  Sandy gave him a very flat, dark look.

  "Gee, Ari, you really know how to make an invitation to lunch into such a romantic occasion."

  Art shrugged. "What can I say? I'm just a romantic, dashing, handsome kind of guy."

  ri hadn't chosen Zaiko just for the view. Clustered, busy urbanity crowded thick and close to the river bend. Ari led Sandy along a roadway busy with midday traffic holding to centrally governed speeds. The pedestrian traffic was mostly office workers, clustered into cafes and restaurants along the stretch, crowding streetside tables beneath rows of towering neon signage. And beneath gleaming towers soaring higher still against the clear blue sk
y.

  They crossed at a ped-crossing, into the mouth of a huge, open mall flanked by holographic displays, the awning-style ceiling stretching over them many storeys overhead. Everything in this place, Sandy noted as they walked, was tech. Other regions of Tanusha had many stores with traditional clothes, ethnic restaurants, chic fashion, books, ornaments, traditional medicines and others. Downtown Zaiko, it seemed, was all rad-tech fashion. Clothes stores sported displays of wild hair, neon colours and body piercings. Tech stores abounded-display sets, interlink modules, vehicular upgrades, net intel appliances, plus all manner and range of gizmos and generally useless yet trendy junk ... which accounted for a good half of the Federation consumer tech market, she recalled hearing one economist saying on TV. A particularly plushlooking shopfront advertised an upstairs surgery with "the latest advances in sensory enhancement technology." And another announced a special package deal to "get a visual and audio upgrade, we'll upgrade your net interface to a VX-1800 for free!"

  "Sounds real quality," Sandy suggested dryly, nodding at the frontage as they passed.

  "Oh no," Ari said unconcerned, "they're not too bad. Everyone here's registered, licensed and legal. They're just low-class establishments for people who can't afford better. You wouldn't catch a professional there, legal or otherwise."

  "Where do the pros go?"

  "Well, of course, legal pros get it paid for by their employer ... in my case, now, the CSA. That's a full hospital job ... though, of course, if you're rich enough you can afford that too, so long as it's legal. Of course, CSA has access to a whole range of stuff that's not available to the general public."

  She knew that well enough, Vanessa had capabilities that would have gotten a public citizen arrested. But she also knew that not all public citizens abided by those restrictions. She had no doubt that the man walking beside her had numbered among them, before his CSA days. Maybe that was part of the attraction of joining? For his comrade Kazuma, in particular, she could well guess.

  "And where do the illegals go?" she asked him.

  "I'll show you."

  He led her into a nondescript corridor off the main mall between two Chinese restaurants, and past a few small shops beyond. The corridor turned left at a decorated Chinese-style gateway, and an even more nondescript flight of stairs headed underground on the right. Ari led her down with the confident stride of someone who knew precisely where he was going, dark boots rattling a quick descent. A passageway opened to the right of the stairs, past the stairway's faded wooden railings. Sandy stared about in astonishment as they reached the passage and kept walking.

  The passageway was gloomy, the lighting a poor industrial fluorescent, shadowy in patches. The floor was a worn and untended ferrocrete, the walls little more than the ferrocrete base of the buildings above. Torn posters adorned the walls, new plastered over old, pictures advertising what might have been music, parties or other gatherings ... it was hard to tell, the writing was mostly a combination of Chinese characters, Hindi, and something that she vaguely recognised as stylised Sanskrit. Her memory implants allowed her to read just about any language ever written, although slowly, but this stylised, jargondense, colloquial stuff was difficult. There were no doors along the immediate stretch ahead, just posters, the occasional graffiti and some exposed plumbing that looked suspiciously ferry-rigged through rough holes drilled in the ceiling and floor.

  "Wow," she said, keeping a brisk pace at Ari's shoulder, "this is the first genuine dump I've seen since I've been in Tanusha."

  "You haven't seen anything yet, this is just the first level." Ari's long strides ate up the distance quickly-GI or not, her shorter legs had to hurry to keep up. "The planners weren't as omnipotent as they like to pretend. There were lots of sites like this underground, intended for storage, parking, underground manufacturing, whatever. As the city grew it became apparent that some of them weren't viable for their original designation. No one wanted them, the official real estate agencies wouldn't touch them with bio-sanitation gloves. They got bought up and renovated by whatever groups could find a use for them. And being underground, they're not made accountable to the style and culture police."

  "What's wrong with the style regulations?" Shifting to local network scan, and finding an immediate, god-awful mass of heavily shielded local systems. "They certainly keep the city beautiful."

  "They're mandatory," Ari said with emphatic humour. "Can't have it, you see. Some people don't like anything mandatory."

  Sandy gave him a sideways glance. "Friends of yours?"

  Ari shrugged. "Maybe. On my bad days." And he reached into his right pants pocket, withdrew the pistol Sandy had spotted long before, and handed it to her. She took it wordlessly, withdrew it briefly from the tight holder, and gave it the usual once-over. Once finished she tucked the holder into a thigh pocket, checked the safety a final time and pushed the pistol into her shoulder holster beneath the jacket.

  The passageway ended at an open doorway to the right, blocked only by a curtain of dangling beads. Ari brushed through it first, Sandy following to find herself on a walkway a level above the broad, open floor of what looked like a restaurant. More decorative than she'd have guessed from the passageway. Suspended lights and decorations along the ceiling above a floor filled with tables. A large, open bar along the far side, the wall behind stacked with a profusion of drinks.

  A stairway led down to the floor. Sandy eyed the lights and holography rigging along the ceiling corners, rotating reflective panels ... the place would come alive at nights. Now it was empty and echoing, table surfaces bare but for standing menus and glasses. A man polished glasses and arranged drinks behind the bar, and a robot server stalked on backward, bird-like legs among the tables, polishing and preening.

  She kept an eye on the robot as they made the floor. It was not a common sight in Tanusha, most restaurateurs preferring human service to automated. And the rapidly accumulating security map on her uplinks showed her enough non-standard barriers and access points to make her suspicious of all kinds of unsuspected internal setups. Robots of any kind could integrate into that, there was no telling what a few technical wizards could implant into its CPU-integrated soft ware.

  "Ari!" called the broad, jovial man behind the bar. "What brings you down here at such an ungodly hour?"

  "Hi, Ahmed," said Ari, walking over to lean upon the bar. It was cut into a wave shape, stools along the bends. Sandy remained behind by one of the tables, fully uplinked and watching the long-toed, stalking gait of the server-bot that wound its way among the tables like a tame, headless heron. The aircon whirr was particularly loud ... they were under a tower/retail complex, two levels down, and a reflexive hack into the publicly available building schematics showed her the relevant blueprints. The air venting wasn't even connected to the main system above, it was all separate, as was the powergrid. And, of course, the comnet. Highly inefficient. Unless someone was paranoid enough to want to limit all points of access. Which explained the complicated barrier functions at limited access nodes in the comnet, restricting all unauthorised use.

  And there was a certain, unnatural sweet smell in the air that caught her attention ... purifier, from the aircon, self-recycling. She knew that smell very well, from space stations and other self-contained facilities, usually military. And now this limited entry, a single passageway leading down to a restaurant ... manned by a single sentry plus robot while all the others who lived and worked down this way would no doubt be fast asleep from a long night's activity. She was beginning to form an idea of exactly what kind of place this was.

  "I'm looking for Arnoud," Ari said to the broad, Arabic man behind the bar, "is he around?"

  "Oh, gee, I dunno," said Ahmed with theatrical ignorance. "Lotta people looking for Arnoud lately, you know? Lotta people ... but I could check ..." And got a better look at Sandy as she took slow steps out from behind Ari, keeping the stalking server-bot in view, and getting a better reception of room-mounted scanners. She'd de
tected four so far, all heavily shielded. "Oh baby! Ari, who's your new partner, huh? My faith in you is restored, my man, much better taste than that other little slanty eyed bitch ..." Leaned forward heavily on the bar, the open top buttons of his shirt revealing copious amounts of black, curly hair across his bulging, muscular chest. Grinning unpleasantly. "Hey, baby! What's your name, honey?"

  "You don't want to do that," Ari told him, smiling broadly.

  "Why not? She frigid or something?"

  "Just trust me. You don't want to do that."

  Sandy ignored them, having found a vulnerable gap through one of the remote security nodes that linked the monitors from this room to a central system ... she acquired the signal, probed and received a reply. Reconfigured that coding's barrier elements into her own mutation-basic League-configured military applications, it all ran pretty much automatically through the internal visuals in her head. The mutation confirmed itself complete a micro-second later and she sent it ... the security node accepted it as one of its own coding family, and then she was in, and the local network opened up before her. It wasn't very big, geographically, just this little underground area, one large city block coming within a hundred metres of the river. But it contained ... she did a fast count, and came to 296 separate, self-contained, heavily barricaded networks. A living warren of independent network identities. A hacker haven.

  "Arnoud's not in," said Ahmed, continuing to watch Sandy as she strolled, his eyes trailing up and down appreciatively. "He's moved, didn't say where ... guess he wanted a change of scene."

  "Okay, that's what he paid you to say," Ari said pleasantly enough. "Why don't you quit screwing me around and tell me before I get angry and hurt you?"