Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel (v1.1)

by Joel Shepherd

  She rushdialed Ari's implant, came up negative as per usual. And discovered she was now quite mad and just a little bit frightened. Overrode the local codings with her best infiltration package, managed to acquire a partial lock on the local network's com functions, mutated a seeker function to Ari's mode of receptor software and sent it out ... Parliament alarms flared, somewhere deep in the system, but she didn't care. Came up positive on a location a millisecond later, hacked that room with even less subtlety, which started even more alarms, got a reading on the receptor location, seized control of that room's transmission systems, hacked, opened and sent. No reply, receiver resisting ... she locked the sender signal into a blank channel and sent him a blast of raw static on maximum bandwidth, and got an immediate sense of startled, hurried replies shooting out, trying to patch the various local and system-wide alarms she'd triggered in the securityintensive system. She nailed one of his patches with her most lethal League attack function and watched it disintegrate ........ fucking hell, Sandy, WHAT!!! What do you WANT!!!"

  "You're in the damn building," she formulated coldly, "I thought so."

  "Well, clever you, what are you trying to do, get arrested?!"

  "I'm trying to get the truth, Ari. What did Sai Va steal? What was it that you didn't want me to find out, and what's it got to do with what Neiland's announcing now?"

  "Sandy," warningly, "I don't have time for this right now, I'm trying to monitor something important here ... "

  "You'll tell me or I'll fry your damn circuitry so it melts into your eardrum. What did Lexi know that Sai Va stole. Ari?"

  "Sandy," very firmly, and without a trace of the usual irreverence, "don't be a spoilt child. I don't have time. This is more important than your petty concerns, I'm trying to monitor something of crucial importance and if you don't get out of my frequency right now I'll get security to your location and have you tranqued and arrested in that order. "

  He cut off. Agent Odano was suddenly at her side.

  "Cassandra," with an urgent whisper, leaning close, "someone just breached transmission frequency! Was that you?"

  "Yes." And to his baffled, alarmed look, "Watch the damn monitor."

  "... announce here today," Neiland was saying, "a new public amendment to the Article 42 process, an amendment I sincerely hope will assist in moving the entire process forward, and resolve many of the great obstacles facing not only Callay, but the entire Federation, and all of its members."

  Sandy realised she was holding her breath. The entire room was utterly still, only the alarm frequency blinking in the lower corner of her overlaid net-vision.

  "I announce here before you today Amendment number 15. The proposal put forward in Amendment 15 is not merely to address the nature of the present Federation system of governance, but rather to change it. And by change, I mean really change it." Staring out into the gleam of lights and half-visible spectrum-flash strobes of the cameras, green eyes piercing beneath sternly arranged red hair. "Amendment 15 is a proposal to change the location of Federation governance. To move the centre of power of the Federation from the planet Earth, and to relocate it out into the vast and growing colonies, from where it can better represent the increasingly diverse and ever-changing needs and interests of this great experiment in collective, representative human governance we call the Federation."

  From somewhere amid the crowd around the monitor, someone dropped a glass. No one seemed to notice. Sandy knew how they felt. Speech failed her. Thought did. She was stunned.

  "Amendment 15 does not merely shift the location of the Federation Grand Council, however. Amendment 15 is a proposal to relocate the entire bureaucratic apparatus of central Federation governancethe bureaucracy, the Federal Bank, Fleet Command and the associated military apparatus, everything. All such branches need to communicate in realtime, with no time delays for inter-stellar travel, and as such all must be located upon the same world-if one moves, all must move.

  "It is the collective opinion of the vast majority of Federation worlds that the present debacle of Federal Intelligence Agency powers running rampant over the rights of individual member worlds is a direct result of the corrupting influence of certain Earth-based powers that continue to run the affairs of the Federation according to their own unrepresentative agendas. Such agendas were formed during the war against the League, which is now ended, thus ending the legitimacy and relevance of many of those groups and their interests. It is time to return those powers to the people of the Federation, and to return them to the people directly, not have them wielded from a distance by committee and via request, but have them within the direct grasp of our hands.

  "Furthermore, it is also the proposal of Amendment 15, a proposal arrived at once again after exhaustive consultation with the senior delegates from all Federation member worlds, that the Federation world whose infrastructure and star-lanes most suit it to becoming the recipient of all Federation bureaucracy is ... Callay."

  Another glass dropped. That didn't surprise her either. Neither, given the rest of it, did the last part of the announcement. Callay was the most logical choice, not only was it the best located, the best equipped and the most powerful, but also the most recently and seriously wronged. The political message was clear. As to who would buy it ... God, she needed to sit down. That didn't happen to her often. Grand moments in history were things she'd read about. She'd never thought to be caught up in one so personally.

  Move the centre of governance from Earth to Callay? Might as well shift Earth itself, all of Sol System, relocate it a convenient few hundred extra light-years closer to the vaguely defined Federation "centre." Her eyes shifted to the group gathered about the monitor, mostly stunned and silent, but for the sombre, meaningful stares of the ministers who'd known what was coming, and had no doubt been in on the consultation. A big secret, those consultations. Lots of people consulted, but no leaks. Or almost. Lexi! the thought struck her. Was that what Sai Va had stolen from Lexi without knowing it? News of ongoing negotiations to take the seat of Federation power away from the motherworld? Well of course they'd had to keep it secret. The moment the various Earth delegations got wind of that, there'd have been pandemonium-claims and counter-claims, concerted attempts to try and scupper the emerging Federation-wide consensus Neiland was claiming to have achieved in this convenient gathering of Federation-wide decision makers in the one single spot ... The media uproar alone could have derailed the talks at that early stage of the negotiations.

  And she realised she owed Ari an apology. He had needed her to catch Sai Va, the bullet holes strewn through the Zaiko Warren and the Cloud Nine gangster-club were proof enough of that. But, of course, he wasn't allowed to tell her. She wasn't cleared for that kind of knowledge-she was a soldier, she knew what rank meant, she knew that some information was classified for a reason. Not to mention the precarious political situation that existed where she was concerned. He'd tried to keep her in the dark because those were the rules. She knew rules. She just hadn't learned much respect for Tanushan rules yet. Until today she hadn't been given much reason to.

  "What does that mean?" Odano was saying. Incredulity and puzzlement colliding upon his young face. "Callay's going to become the centre of the Federation? Where will they put the Grand Council? Tanusha's crowded enough as it is!"

  Sandy shrugged faintly. "There'll be room on the periphery."

  "City planners don't like surprises."

  "I think they'll come to terms with this one pretty quickly." Which struck her as a surreal conversation ... the trials and tribulations of Tanusha's various officious planning departments were the least of their problems right now. And she looked up as Rafasan came striding quickly over, heels muffled on the carpet. Sandy half expected her to be jubilant, her lawyer's soul seemed to rejoice at moral victories, however bureaucratic in nature. Instead, her elegant face was drawn and worried.

  "Cassandra," she whispered, leaning close, "you do realise what this means? For security implicatio
ns, I mean?" It was, Sandy recalled, her job. Or had been, until the SIB had put it on hold.

  "Earth aren't going to like it," she replied in similarly soft, sombre tones. "Not one bit. Most of the business and political factions probably never realised how important access to the Grand Council was to them until faced by the threat of it being taken away." There was, she knew, a strong historical precedent for that, involving the United States of America and the United Nations-the USA had nearly come to blows with the European Union in 2040 when a mass UN assembly had voted to remove the UN headquarters from New York City and relocate it to Tbilisi, Georgia, in the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas. Power-neutral territory, they'd said, midway between the Pan-Arabic Alliance, Europe and Russia, and mid-distant from China and the USA ... as well as being pretty. No one had wanted the UN left in the demographic "possession" of the then increasingly isolationist, xenophobic Americans, who they feared were already holding the whole UN hostage with threats of power cuts, traffic blockages and complications with the leasing arrangements on the property.

  In hindsight, one of the better things that had happened to the USA, Sandy knew. It had removed one of the last remaining veils from the truth that politicians in the USA had found so frightening at the time-that their nation was no longer the world's most powerful, and could no longer simply tell foreign cultures, in which they'd never invested any effort in trying to understand, how they had to act. That reality had only sunk in after a thirty year withdrawal from the United Nations following the Great Relocation of 2040, during which time they'd discovered just how much they'd never realised they needed it, and had finally begun to re-enter the world arena with some sense of respectful decorum.

  Maybe, she had to think, this would be a similar lesson for Earth. So many years of taking the colonies for granted. So much neglect and disregard. The assumptions of unchallenged supremacy, of Earth as humanity's so-called "indispensable world," a phrase its leaders never stopped using in their speeches. And in many ways it was true. Humanity would always need Earth. But Earth needed the rest of humanity just as much, something it appeared to have forgotten of late. This was the wake-up call.

  "The Federal Intelligence Agency will fight tooth and nail, Cassandra," Rafasan whispered intently. "That's the Old Earth backroom club, newer Federation powers like Callay just don't have access to that system. We're not represented, our desire to stay out of the war's more clandestine activities made it so ... our fault too, of course, and since then we've been paying for it. All Earth-centric businesses, lobbies and power groups will fight like crazy to stop this from happening, they profit too much from the system being structured the way it is now ...

  "What about the Fleet?" Sandy asked.

  Rafasan frowned. "The Fleet? Cassandra, I'm just the legal expert. Military matters are hardly my speciality ..."

  "Well shit, I hope someone's put some thought into it, Fleet admirals are all elected through an Earth-based appointment process. I read about it in League Intel reports, the FIA has its fingers stuck into that too."

  "I'm sure the relevant experts have taken all of that into account." But she continued to look somewhat alarmed. Behind them, the group clustered about the monitor had begun to depart, a gathering momentum that threatened to break into a stampede for the doors. Her network uplinks showed a surging rush of transmission traffic, in multiple encryptions and emergency priority codings ...

  "Maisie," Sandy said sharply, grabbing Rafasan's attention with the nickname, "why did the President want me in the Hearing Chamber now?" As the room rapidly cleared of people, and bewildered security stared about in confusion.

  "You were the final obstacle, Sandy," said Rafasan. "Certain of her own party were demanding to see you personally before supporting this amendment ... she needed those last few votes to get a majority in the Union Party, Cassandra. A lot of them are still very opposed, she just needed those last, wavering few. They wanted to support this amendment, but claimed they could not be seen by their constituents to be siding with an administration harbouring a League GI unless they'd met the GI personally and allayed their fears, at least a little. They're covering their backsides for supporting this amendment, Sandy, it's just politics ... You must understand that this was all very rushed, the President wanted these negotiations to continue for another several weeks at least to finalise support. Instead circumstances have forced her to rush it through before our opponents got wind of it and released it unannounced to the press, and she had to improvise your appearance here on the spur of the moment, particularly following the incident with the SIB and your subsequent suspension. That matter needed to be cleared before certain of her own party would support her on the amendment ..."

  "The media didn't know before this?" She didn't know why it was important. She just suddenly felt that it was. Extremely so. Rafasan blinked.

  "Not that we are aware of."

  So Sai Va hadn't told the press ... who would he tell, once he'd realised how many people were after him for what he knew, or what they thought he knew? Once he'd broken that particular piece of most highly classified encryption and discovered this world-shaking piece of information?

  She dialled Ari again, and got a reply immediately.

  "I take it you have a mature, practical concern this time?" Sounding harried and distracted. Ari was the point man on tracking down the runaway leak, that being Sai Va. Doubtless he had resources watching numerous potential hotspots in the expectation that someone would try something immediately upon having heard this announcement.

  "Ari, what happened to Sai Va?" Not bothering silent formulation this time, wanting to share this conversation with Rafasan and the wide-eyed Agent Odano.

  "He's dead. " Shortly. "FIA. Somehow they tracked someone who tracked someone who found him, dragged him off the street in broad daylight at about nine this morning, hacked his implant in an alley and then shot him. Digital rape, very nasty." Only half serious, he sounded ragged with lack of sleep. "The amendment announcement was due for tomorrow, once the FIA had Sai Va's info we had to push it forward to today."

  So the FIA knew. What was the first thing they'd do? Protect themselves? Wasn't that always the FIA's first impulse? What was their greatest achilles heel right now? With all the legal jurisdictions threat ened with rearrangement?

  "Ari, where's Governor Dali?"

  "Um ... no, Sandy, we thought of that, he's under full guard in maximum security isolation ... "

  "Yeah, that's what I was scared of ... Ari, I know you didn't have time to listen to my presentation, but I did spend a good fifteen minutes just now talking about precisely why that's not adequate against the FIA, with the resources they've still got floating around in Tanusha, especially with the Earth delegations here. They've infiltrated every damn one of them ..."

  "Shit, you don't need to tell ME about that ... I had someone check on Dali just f i v e minutes ago ... "

  "Send a TEAM, Ari ... and get me transport right NOW. Alert security at Gordon Spaceport and put a SWAT team on standby, preferably SWAT Four ... he was in detention at the Leguna HQ, right? That's the priority site for maximum security isolations? Top floor?"

  "Sandy ... " A brief, exasperated pause. "... I'm rechecking that last message coding right now, it looks fine, all the protocols are there ...

  "If I had time for war stories, Ari, I'd tell you of FIA operations out of places that make Leguna HQ look like a kindergarten ... we didn't know the prisoner was missing until twelve hours after they'd left. We can't afford it, Ari!"

  Ari cut off, not wasting further time arguing ... "We," she'd said, she realised abruptly. Had she meant "we" as in Tanusha? As in Callay? Or even just "the CSA"? Well yes, she supposed she had. To any of those possibilities.

  "Sandy?" Odano asked. Rafasan was staring, wide-eyed and anxious.

  "Dali was the FIA's big appointment to overthrow Neiland's Administration last month," she explained. "He's got information to reveal complicity in FIA dark ops r
ight up to the Federation Grand Council ... if Neiland's amendment goes through, we can just keep him here and they can't extradite him back to Earth at all. We can try him here, this will be Federation jurisdiction, and we'll make damn sure we make him answer every question the FIA don't want answered, because we'll have our fair share of the judicial appointments and procedures ..."

  Rafasan's hand had gone to her mouth in shock.

  "You mean they'll try and kidnap him?" Odano exclaimed.

  "Or if that doesn't work, maybe just kill him. But the FIA knew Neiland was going to do this in advance. They've got inside knowledge on the encryption Lexi would have used to keep it secret ... they've got plants all the way through the biotech industry. They'll have decrypted it immediately. My bet is Dali's already gone."

  Dammit, she should have had security upgraded, she hadn't been exaggerating at all when she'd threatened him yesterday with what the FIA were capable of. But the FIA were keeping a low profile at the time, and she simply hadn't seen this coming so soon ... if only someone had told her, she could have prevented it. Instead, Ari had moved Dali directly to the highest security government enclosure available, which the FIA would have predicted in advance, with what they'd gotten from Sal Va ... and for all Ari's strongpoints in intelligence, he was not trained in military-grade dark ops, he just followed procedure and expected the apparatus to work. In a contest of FIA security apparatus against compromised Callayan Government apparatus, Sandy was going to bet on the FIA every time ...