Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel (v1.1)

by Joel Shepherd

  "To the spaceport?" Odano guessed. Sandy nodded. "Then what are we waiting here for?"

  "Ari has to find us some transport. We don't know what pad it'll use, we don't want to waste time going in the wrong direction. Stay calm, Agent. Use your head."

  Odano blinked several times. Then straightened, adjusting his lapels with a deep, measured breath.

  "Agent, my weapon and badge, if you please."

  He didn't even hesitate, reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew both. Sandy checked the weapon over, and settled it comfortably into her empty holster, and the badge in her inside pocket. The room security saw, but did nothing. She guessed it didn't seem the time. They walked across the empty meeting room floor and stopped in the outer hallway.

  "Cassandra," Rafasan said breathlessly, "I really must get back to the President-well done today, and please take care of yourself." And leaned forward for a brief, farewell kiss on the cheek ... Sandy gave it, after an initial delay of surprise, and gently berated herself, as Rafasan scurried off, for always forgetting to anticipate those trivial yet significant civilian rituals. A brief moment of relative silence, the hallway strangely empty after the initial rush of commotion-everyone retreated to their uplinks and vidcoms in times of crisis, and physical movement generally stopped.

  "What'll happen if they've gotten him to the spaceport?" Odano asked her. Doing a good job of appearing calm. A faint shift of visual spectrum showed her the pulse in his throat, and the faint sweat upon his brow.

  "We'll have to stop them from taking off." Waiting patiently for Ari's word on which way to go, faced with two equally attractive lengths of empty corridor up which to sprint. "There's at least six or seven ships in orbit or docked to station that belong to Earth factions. Tough to stop them once they're in space-we don't have any military assets-and we couldn't exactly blast them, anyway, if they refused to stop, that'd be an act of war."

  "Are they likely to ... um ... shoot at us?"

  Sandy gave a mild shrug. "Almost certainly. Probably with military-grade weapons, the FIA don't do things by halves."

  Another brief silence. Electronic flurries raced across her various uplink channels, a mass of interconnecting electronic information. Nothing she could monitor effectively without breaking even more security protocols. A brief switch to a news channel ... visual flash of people talking, heated arguments, shouting. Others of people cheering. Excited faces. Angry faces. Some dancing in the streets, others overturning cars. Oh, what a city, she thought sourly, the excitement never ended.

  "I don't suppose you're very frightened," Odano half laughed, very nervous and trying to cover it. As if the very concept of a frightened GI was unthinkable. Sandy smiled.

  "This is my life," she said simply. Then Ari's signal showed them a flyer descending toward a rooftop pad on the left wing, and they ran like hell.

  lie flyer coming down was an FT-25, a smaller version of the FT-750 transports that made up the larger portion of the SWAT fleet. Sandy half-crouched against the backwash, jacket and hair blasted back as the mobile fourposter came in fast, wobbling in the swirling uplift of ground effect off the pad, then hovered as the lower-rear access ramp descended ... Odano ran, followed by the other two security agents who'd been assigned to Parliament that day but were now following her to the latest flashpoint-they'd been assigned to her, she was realising, and not having received any new orders were going to stay with her indefinitely. Her responsibility, it seemed, for the moment.

  She ran last, her habit in groups, not liking to be hemmed in, ducking fast beneath the thrashing blast from the smaller, directional rear nacelles to the ramp that hovered just above the landing pad ... and paused to see another pair of dark figures leaping up the short ramp-side ladder, then running toward her against the backdrop of broad, grassy Parliament grounds. Dark jackets blew out behind in the gale of engine-wash, exposing heavy, side-holstered weapons. She waited, reluctantly, giving them a long, dark look as they stopped. One look at Ari's dark expression and she knew Dali was gone-and that this mad scramble was no longer just an inconvenient precaution.

  "Don't you have your own transport?" she yelled at them. "It's going to be crowded in there, there's three already on board plus me and these three, 25s are only rated for eight, and we've got equipment on board!"

  "I'm not taking an aircar against the FIA!" Ari yelled back. "I'd rather go with you!"

  "What if I don't want you?"

  "That's not your decision!" Kazuma shouted with a pleasant smile.

  "Great." She sprang up the ramp, the flyer's rear shifting about, compensating for the new load. Uplinked to the pilot's frequency ... "Nine on board, you're free to go." Balancing herself past the heavy storage lockers as the wind from the rear decreased and the engines thrummed like swarming insects. Ducked under a suspended armour brace, then into the main passenger hold, a cramped enclosure of heavy-braced seats and built-in tactical displays and linkups. Some small portholes in the sides for a view, and an open space through to the cockpit beyond, a glimpse of green gardens and buildings falling away as they climbed.

  "Tactical please," she announced, and one of the security agents clambered quickly enough from the seat, grasping a support brace as the flyer banked, picking up speed. Sandy climbed in, did the straps, activated screen and assistant functions, secured the light headset over one eye and ear and jacked it into the socket at the back of her head ... all with the ease of long, effortless familiarity with many different kinds of equipment. Except that her hair was now much thicker and she had to clear a path with one hand before insertion. The data-wall hit her with a familiar rush, an abrupt interface with headset vision and sound, multiple data screens arranged before the chair ... "So who found Sal Va?" she asked Ari, who was hanging over her shoulder from behind.

  "I did," came Kazuma's voice from the other side. "Got real close. The FIA got closer. Silly fool didn't realise how many people he'd upset."

  "Well," said Ari, "since anarchism itself is based upon ... um, a flawed perception of society, the one thing you can always count on anarchists for is mistakes."

  "Yeah, well, I'll deal with the socio-graphic analysis later," Sandy replied, scrolling rapidly through the data-feed of happenings, locations, involved units and their operating codeworks. "Sec-Gov was guarding Dali?" That was Government Security, they did all major government or other public sector buildings or installations.

  "Yes." Sounding more than a little angry, Sandy reckoned. She wasn't in a mood to be charitable.

  "Dammit, Ari, they're not much more than private sector squibs, what were you thinking?"

  "I put in a priority request for maximum lockdown a week ago. Non-rescindable. Only some bureaucrat redirected a third of those personnel just yesterday to guard some bureaucrats in the Foreign Office, and didn't consult me. It didn't occur to me to check they were all still there, I only just found out about it." A glance from Sandy's peripheral vision showed Kazuma lounging in a seat across the aisle, looking faintly amazed at the screw-up, but only a little.

  "I'd have an investigation done into who did that reassignment and why," Sandy told him, flipping up full schematics on Gordon Spaceport, a racing scan across multiple levels of groundplans and security infrastructure. "FIA still have resources through the bureaucracy, it could have been more than a bureaucratic stuff up."

  "Already done it. I've got three department seniors under interro gation."

  "My my," Kazuma mused, "don't we get embarrassed easily, Ari?"

  "If nothing else," Ari continued, unperturbed, "it'll get the message out that priority assignments from the CSA are not to be messed with."

  Sandy took it all in past the racing flood of data, analytical reflexes processing in about five different directions at once. Ari's measures were draconian, by Tanushan standards. They were also necessary, at a bare minimum. There'd been talk of a complete sweep of Tanushan civil services for some time now, no one thought for a minute they'd gotten all the FIA plants in
these places ...

  "They didn't kill anyone," Ari added, dark frustration tempered with relief. "All non-lethal weaponry. I'm guessing Dali might have refused to go with them if he'd seen his guards splattered all over the walls-he's an arsehole, but he's no killer."

  "No," said Sandy, "he gets other people to do it for him."

  "Still don't know what happened, there's some kind of strange lockdown virus in the local network I've never even seen before, it got control, let them in and got Dali out. No clue where they went ... you're sure it's Gordon?"

  "PINS is useless in Tanusha, Ari, I just spent several hours in the hearing explaining that, and now Dali's escape proves it." PINSPublic Infrastructure Network Security. "Everyone in this city is so network dependent, they're blind without it. Effective security needs to operate independently from central command-decentralisation always comes with a force multiplier effect, whether it's in military systems, bureaucracy, economics or whatever. Centralisation is a weakness in any system. I'm amazed everyone's forgotten that here."

  "You think Gordon's PINS is vulnerable?" Kazuma asked.

  "Public infrastructure is government systems. With the amount of infiltration the FIA have done on Tanushan government systems, I'd be surprised if they hadn't written software precisely for case-by-case sce narios to infiltrate every major piece of public infrastructure in the city if they needed to ..."

  "They can't take control of the whole damn spaceport, surely?"

  "No, that'd be a waste of effort. Just the bits they need ... Ari, I'd like to establish a tactical command network, we need a com-frame in place, we can't afford overlapping operations here ..."

  "I've already got you an Ops team from HQ," Ari replied, "they're setting up your com-net basics now, we've got net-ops tracking flightpaths and all available systems between here and Gordon. If they went that way they had good cover, we can't find anything yet ..."

  "I don't think they will." Finishing her detailed sweep of Gordon's systems, and switching to broad overview ... Stared for several long moments at the massive span of spaceport, three major runways in a triangular configuration and a web of interconnecting taxi-ways, a big five-runway complex to the south of the spaceport for atmospheric flights ... that was a different system, thank God. The spaceport had a full forty operational shuttlebays, six more under construction in the new east wing. There were broad passenger halls, interconnecting transportation services with separate freight processing junctures on the lower levels, a traffic control wing, multi-level high security comnet-everything highly automated but still a twelve-thousand-strong workforce-fully operational at the moment, it seemed, traffic was normal, no alarms raised, flights coming and going.

  She'd hooked into the flight-data systems before she'd even realised it, checking flights and schedules. Immediately found a shuttle registered as Federation-licensed on the old north wing thoroughfare, scheduled for departure at 4:50, in half an hour's time, headed up to Grenada Station ... where, it so happened, the Federation vessel Capetown was docked. Capetown, she knew from previous checks of the registry, was a charter vessel, under current lease of the combined delegations of numerous Earth East-Asian nations, most notably Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines, in that order of economic signif icance. The laws of jurisdiction in combined leases, she knew furtherfrom a CSA Intel briefing paper-were tricky, and had room for loopholes as to exactly who was allowed on the vessel and in what capacity. CSA Intel had had Capetown under close surveillance by operatives on Grenada since it had made dock, but hadn't spotted anything particularly suspicious ... although the FIA were nothing if not sneaky, and well experienced in dodging such surveillance measures.

  "Berth 15," she said, "north wing, one of Capetown's own attached shuttles, I think. Departure at 4:50."

  "Plenty of time," said Kazuma.

  "If they're hooked into flight control they could go early," Ari warned.

  "So land a flyer in front of them," said Kazuma, "they're not going anywhere."

  "Not yet," said Sandy. "Ari, I want you to put the best person HQ have available on a network scan. Focus on the PINS fire-grid. I don't want to do it myself, these guys will know my patterns too well."

  A brief pause as Ari sent that out. Then ... "They're on it."

  Kazuma was staring at her from across the aisle. "You don't think that ..." and was interrupted by an incoming frequency whose accesspattern Sandy recognised immediately.

  "Hey, Ricey, I hope you've had enough sleep."

  "Hey, gorgeous. What have you got for me, and do I finally get a chance to shoot at that silly bastard Dali?" Her tac-display showed the signal source, a SWAT FT-750 headed out from CSA HQ, still some thirty Ks away but converging toward Gordon on an intercept that would get them there perhaps three minutes behind Sandy.

  "I think that's entirely possible, though if it comes to shooting him, his own FIA people might just beat you to it if we get them surrounded."

  "Yeah, I got that much already, genius ... who has the spaceport?"

  "Good question, all appears basically functional now, I'm sus pecting a localised infiltration for effective cover." With full fire-grid defensive systems schematics unfolding across her forward screen, familiar specifications indeed. "My bet would be the fire-grid, I don't want anyone unauthorised flying into spaceport airspace until we know for sure."

  "Yeah, I kinda already thought that when you said Gordon ... I'm looking at the schematic now. That's a five point fire system, overlapping fields of fire, the only blindspots are in among the terminal buildings themselves but you'd never get in that close without neutralising at least one firepoint, preferably two."

  A feed from HQ abruptly surfaced on the B-screen ... a realtime overhead visual, presumably someone at high altitude. A shuttle was landing, transport vehicles moving, aircraft on the adjoining airport taxiing, everything looked as usual. Massive flow of civilian traffic on the main road plus the maglev line ... no aircars, thank God. Spaceport regulations prohibited civilian airborne transport near the flightpaths. Gordon was busy at the quietest of times, which this was not. Damn, this was going to be tricky ...

  "I'm thinking a ground assault on two adjoining firepoints, they won't hit ground targets ... "

  "I want a look at the protocols close up first, Ricey. They might override the safeties and mow you down as you go running toward them ... that's a two kilometre run from minimum safe distance, we can't use missiles because of the micro-defensive units about the macro-emplacements, and the CSA doesn't have any airborne projectile weapons with that kind of range."

  Damn, what she'd give for a single Viper assault flyer with dual AP gauss cannon mounts ... those defensive systems were good, but they couldn't shoot down supersonic, finger-sized projectiles. But what need would Tanushan SWAT ever have for such weapons? The fire-grid itself was a fifteen-year-old system, installed in a fit of rare political awareness, she'd gathered, when FIA reports had circulated through the media explaining just how vulnerable key Callayan infrastructure was to armed atmospheric attack from League assault teams ...

  "Security reports a high-level delegation team just went through the north wing, " came an HQ report on the net, "carrying plenty of gear, bypassed customs. Another report shows several vehicles commandeered, the local officer responsible was upset about a protocol breach but wasn't sure if he'd get in trouble for reporting it ... "

  "Oh great," Ari muttered, and on reply frequency ordered, "Tell them, "Do nothing, act as if everything's normal. Quietly put a withdrawal procedure in place for all personnel, to be activated on direct command from CSA or in an emergency." This is a CSA job and we don't want overlapping jurisdictions here."

  "Hello, HQ, this is Snowcat," Sandy added, "that's the last communication I want put out on secure-net, I want tac-net set up ASAP. This will be a SWAT-red operation if it does go down, command will be local. We'll need all command infrastructure prepped and ready."

  "HQ copies, Snowcat, Ibrahim has been alerted.
We are establishing secure communications between relevant units, the link to Gordon Central could take a bit longer. As of this moment SWAT Four has command. Lieutenant Rice, prepare for tac-net establishment, matrix in thirty seconds."

  "Cancel that, HQ," came Vanessa's voice back immediately. "This is a military operation, military-grade weapons and tactics are in evidence, strongly recommend that command is issued to Snowcat, over. "

  Sandy barely felt herself react, having half expected it. It was the most sensible option, and she was most qualified. Especially if those fire-grids were operational. The brief pause for consultation ended.

  "HQ copies, SWAT Four-Snowcat has command. Snowcat, tac-net matrix in twenty seconds, standby to receive. "

  "Snowcat copies. All units, remain on standard flightpaths, we don't want to let them see us coming." Disconnected audio briefly to shout over her shoulder, "Everyone suit up! Gear's in the back, full kit please, make it fast!" Fast visual switchback to their present position, now over mid-western Tanusha, headed due west toward where Gordon's sprawling complex lay twenty Ks beyond the megatropolis's westernmost perimeter. Low overhead skylane, a straight line above the heights of scattered mega-rise, cruising at a touch over five hundred kph ... ETA just over fifteen minutes. Plenty of time. She realised abruptly she was suddenly back in the old mode-Dark Star mode, Captain Cassandra Kresnov, on yet another assault mission. Reflexes so familiar she'd barely even noticed she was doing it. It fit like an old glove. And she found the time to be faintly amazed that she'd actually missed them.