Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel

by Joel Shepherd

  "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 ... An, 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, An, 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 right up to the Federation Grand Council ... if Neiland's amendment goes through, we can just k
eep 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 ...

  "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 An, 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 An, "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, An, they're not much more than private sector s
quibs, 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, An, 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."