Killswitch: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel (v1.1)

by Joel Shepherd

  She was walking across the rooftop pad with Vanessa and Rhian when she received a call.

  "Hello, Commander," came a youthful, enthusiastic voice in her inner ear. "I've been arranging your itinerary for the day and prioritising departmental requests. Would you like an immediate rundown or would you prefer to wait until the office?"

  "I think that can wait, Private Zhang." Truthfully, she had her own automatic programs in place that sorted much of the scheduling and priorities for her. And she could access all of that remotely without any help. Her new secretary, however, was young, bright eyed and eager to be useful.

  "Yes, Commander. I've taken the liberty of redirecting your incoming calls and mail away from staff, which takes some load off them. I've also identified and return-contacted seventy per cent of those incoming calls and given them alternative channels to go through-most of them are interdepartmental, they've got no real business bothering you at all with their problems. "

  Sandy blinked in surprise, walking to the door of the rooftop foyer, flashing ID from her uniform pocket to the invisible scanners. She hadn't been aware she could tell half of her callers not to bother her. No doubt they hadn't wanted her to know, least it remove their access to her office. Maybe young Private Zhang would have his uses after all.

  "Thank you, Private, I appreciate that. " The decorative foyer beyond the glass doors was a mass of interlocking security systems, mostly invisible to the unaugmented eye. She, Vanessa and Rhian headed for the stairs. Two suited men engaged in conversation turned to starepartly in recognition of herself and Vanessa, Sandy reckoned, but also partly at the sight of three very attractive women, one of them wearing most un-martial attire, her stomach bare and slim curves exposed. Rhian flashed the two men a smile as they descended the stairs. Sandy repressed a smile of her own at the two men's expressions, wondering if anyone, on first acquaintance, would guess correctly which of the three was not a GI. "Was there anything else?"

  "Ah, yes, Commander, five minutes ago you received an urgent request from Sergeant Rajan for assistance with the new slash four weapon pods in maintenance bay five. Apparently there's a problem only you can solve. "

  That didn't surprise her-until she'd placed the order for them, no one else in the CDF had even heard of the new slash-fours.

  "Tell him I'll be down immediately, put my paperwork on hold. First thing to know if you're going to be my assistant, Mr Zhang fieldwork comes first."

  "Yes, Commander." There was no mistaking the worship in the young man's voice. She disconnected the link, with a faint sigh of disbelief.

  "Ricey," she said as they reached the bottom of the second flight of stairs, "could you take Rhi to medical and make sure she's introduced properly?"

  Vanessa frowned at her, walking fast and tense. "You're not coming?"

  "Raj wants some help in bay five, I'll be back before the scans are finished."

  Vanessa looked less than impressed. "Sandy, you're going to get this checked out properly. I'm not going to let you just ignore it ... they put a fucking kill mechanism in your head, Sandy, and you're acting like it's not a big problem."

  "Vanessa, I'm not going to put my life and my job on hold every time some new panic arises."

  "This isn't just any fucking panic, Sandy!"

  "I said I'll be there." Very firmly. Vanessa looked exasperated. Rhian watched on, curiously. "I'm a GI, this kind of crap just goes with the territory."

  "I'm warning you, Sandy, you're not half as invulnerable as you think you are."

  Sandy held up her hands. "Not now, Vanessa. Take care of Rhi, I'll be there soon."

  She took the next right-hand turn, striding fast. Telling herself that she really didn't need Vanessa's kind of well-meaning hysteria right now. Vanessa worried far too much. The last time she'd caught a cold, Vanessa had called around frantically to various biomedical specialists and branches, asking after various expert opinions on synthetic immunology until finally convinced that it wouldn't be fatal. Vanessa treated her artificial nature as if it was some kind of condition, one that needed to be fought and overcome at every opportunity. Sandy didn't want to be treated like a sick child every time some inevitable complication arose. And it troubled her that Vanessa didn't seem to understand that yet.

  Bay five was dark and full of shadows. Sandy walked along a ferrocrete aisle, past tall, stacked crates and idle lifters, headed for the patch of bright fluorescence ahead. The din of activity faded behind her. To one side loomed the hulking shapes of combat landmates, humanoid arms hanging limply.

  "Raj!" she called as she walked, looking for the sergeant's usual spot, wedged in between crates, up to his elbows in hi-tech innards beneath the sole ceiling light. There was no reply. She reflexively uplinked to the building network, and found nothing, just static. The network seemed to be down. Not surprising; all of these lower maintenance bays had until recently served other purposes, and the hardware had only been recently rewired to the secure, interactive standards required for military-scale weapons. There had been glitches galore. She kept walking ... and saw the laser tripwire activate a split second before her shin passed through it.

  She leaped as the explosion hit her, blasting her into the crates on her left in a spray of metal debris, the blurring crash of heavy impact, the rush of heat on skin. Through the swirl of flames, she sensed movement, and sprang into an explosive roll as high-velocity fire shredded the spot where she'd been, scrambling into an accelerating sprint as the fire tracked her from point-blank range. And saw, in that time-dilated rush of motion, a squat, menacing shape upon a pair of birdlike legs, twin rotary cannon for wings, each spinning with a roar of flames and fury. An AMAPS-12.

  Sandy leaped to her right as fire clipped at the tail of her uniform, sailing upward over the row of crates and equipment ... and felt/saw the second targeting system acquire her from the bay's far wall. She twisted in midair, a desperate contortion as a second burst of fire snarled, echoes yammering off ceiling and walls, fire ripping past ... she reached and caught the trailing edge of a cargo crate as it sailed past below, snap-tumbling her trajectory downward just as the second burst thundered, and fire ripped the space where she would have been. Something hit her shin hard and she tumbled to the ferrocrete floor with a barely controlled crash. Flattened herself against the crate, pulling the automatic pistol from her thigh holster, for what little good it would do, and considered her options.

  She was now crouched in the next aisle along the maintenance bay floor, between stacked rows of crates and equipment. From the aisle she'd just left, low-toned and dull in the lingering time-stretch of combat-sense, she could hear the first AMAPS stepping from its hiding place within an empty crate, with heavy, rhythmic thuds of metal-shod feet. From against the far wall to her left, similar sounds, as the second AMAPS stalked along the wall to a firing position down this aisle. Her pistol would cause little damage against an Auxiliary Mobile Anti-Personnel System-that armour did not come with weak spots that a mere handweapon could exploit. Barehanded she was far more confident ... but clearly the entire bay was rigged, even now she could hear the main entry doors grinding closed. Clearly the plan was to trap her in here, with these two mobile killing machines. Assuming there were only two. Likely there would be more smart-triggered explosives planted at strategic locations. Probably the maintenance bay's entire sensor grid was now tracking her ... all of the receptors were down, and she received no feedback on her own uplinks. The implants in her skull were not powerful enough to penetrate the thick ferrocrete without a booster. It was a good plan all right. She was alone in here.

  The footsteps to her far left came suddenly louder. The second AMAPS appeared with an elegant brace of weight-bearing leg-joints, and swivelled its smooth-nosed torso with alarming speed to point down the aisle. Sandy dashed through a gap between crates opposite as fire shrieked and clanged down the aisle, ripping a four-wheeled cargo loader to pieces, forklift, tires and leather driver's seat pinwheeling down the aisle like pebbl
es. At the end of the gap between the stacked crates, Sandy realised that there was no way out, and that whatever was in the crate stacked above, it was heavy enough that it didn't move when she pushed full-force.

  Jump-jets roared over the advancing clang of the second AMAPS's footsteps, then a heavy thud-the first metal monster had landed on top of the row of crates over which she herself had jumped. Sandy sensed tightbeam communication, and knew the second machine was telling the first where she was.

  Machine-gun fire tore into the crate above her head with an unholy racket, Sandy scrambling backward as the occasional round tore through the crate, and hit the underside above her head. She put both hands against the crate blocking the far end and pushed, artificial muscles straining at maximum intensity, her feet scrabbling for grip. The crate remained unmoved. Something exploded and crashed inside the crate above-if its contents were high explosive and detonated at this range, Sandy knew she was dead, GI or not.

  She gave up trying to move the container, and instead holstered her pistol and sledgehammered a fist straight through the metal. She got her hands into the hole, and pulled with everything she had. Metal bent and tore with a rupturing shriek, as the skin of her hands also tore, painlessly ... she kicked and made a lower foot-hole as well, which gave her more leverage. The hole became wide enough for her shoulders, and she got her arms through and pulled the rest of her body after with more brute power than acrobatic grace, and found herself wedged into a narrow space between the container wall and stacked boxes of ammunition. Heavy footsteps thudded closer. If the AMAPS fired into this crate, the explosion could take out half the bay.

  She scrambled up, over the ammo boxes, wriggling through the cramped, blind space beneath the top of the storage crate, sending boxes crashing and clanging aside in her haste. Reached the far end of the container, slithered down into the narrow gap between ammo boxes and the crate side, and braced her feet and back as best she could. She pushed, maximum exertion, straining tension ... the piled ammo boxes at her back could move no further, and the crate side was as hard and solid as one would expect of an interstellar shipping container.

  Sandy's entire body contorted, legs forcing inexorably outward, muscles condensing to a consistency far beyond that of most combat alloys. The container side shrieked, then clanged loudly, as the entire top and left side welding burst free, and light poured in. She leaped for that gap, grabbed the jagged edge and threw herself out, falling to half-roll on the ferrocrete floor.

  Heavy cannon fire tore into the container from the end she'd entered, a shrill roar of disintegrating metal. Sandy was up and running at full speed along the aisle, finding that it ended abruptly to the right where that row of CDF shipping containers suddenly ceased, and there were instead a number of newly acquired light armour vehicles awaiting integration into CDF ranks, and, oh holy shit, she hoped whoever was behind this mess hadn't rigged one of the tanks as they'd rigged the AMAPS ...

  A massive explosion shook the bay, Sandy riding the impact into a forward dive and roll as debris ricocheted at deadly velocity, followed by secondary explosions cracking like firecrackers at Chinese New Year ... Sandy raised her head beside the last of the right-side storage crates, her brain in overdrive, and surveyed the row of light tanks on the open square of floor in the maintenance bay's far corner. The damn AMAPS were powerful enough for limited operations, but they weren't incredibly bright-Federation legislation prevented the installation of any sentient Al in a military unit's CPU, even the League hadn't been keen on the idea of city-levelling hovertanks with sentient free will. Like any non-sentient computer, the AMAPS were very bad at guessing. After all, the cargo crate probably contained ammunition, that would possibly explode if fired upon at close range ... but then if there was also the very high possibility that the crate also contained the AMAPS' target, and the AMAPS' entire existence revolved around the elimination of that target, then surely the risk of an explosion was justified? League software programmers Sandy knew had been very impressed with their risk-analysis and awareness simulations, the usual set of amorphous calculations that she entirely failed to trust ... how could one mathematically calculate "risk" as an objective concept, after all, in a mostly random universe? Her own brain, or that of any sentient, was vastly superior to any nonsentient computer at calculating such vague, abstract concepts, but still she struggled. The AMAPS, now no doubt flat on its back and badly singed in the continuing explosions, was now possibly reflecting (if AMAPS could reflect) that the bright-eyed little techno-geek who'd programmed its CPU hadn't known half as much about the universe as he'd thought he had.

  All of this and more passed through Sandy's mind in the fraction of a second following her recovery from the explosion, which was fading now as the secondary explosions trailed away, and the crates stacked on top of the exploding one smothered the blasts. And in that continuing, drawn out time-dilation, Sandy found further time to be impressed with the design standards of that particular batch of ammunition, that only perhaps five percent had detonated, and a critical mass of explosive detonations had not led to a total chain reaction ... which would not have taken out the entire bay, because any fool knew to disperse ammunition crates at even distances throughout any storage facility, but even so, she could well have been dodging large pieces of falling ceiling right about then. Ahead of her, her various sensory receptors registered one of the armoured vehicles activating full systems-engines, weapons and all. Please God, she thought, don't let it be one of the Ge-Vo hovertanks.

  But of course it was.

  With a throbbing din of repulsorlift engines, the Ge-Vo lifted slowly into a low hover. The turret made its characteristic vis-field acquisition wobble, protruding quadruple cannon levering up and down ... Sandy had seen enough, rolled to her feet and ran back the way she'd come, through the choking smoke of the ammunition explosion. All her sending frequencies were tuned to full, but still she received nothing-the maintenance bay was too solid, and she was totally cut off from the outside network. The main doors had been secured. Doubtless those outside would break through in a few minutes, but those were minutes she did not have. The one saving grace, she reckoned, was that she was trapped in a warehouse stacked with weapons. Time to find one.

  Sandy accelerated down the aisle between five-metre-high stacks of crates, hearing the Ge-Vo manoeuvring for a clear shot through smoke that would not bother its sensors. She leaped high and to the right where a gap between shipping crates presented itself, and smacked into the metal wall and clung. The gap between crates was narrow, and if she extended both arms out to the sides, she could hold her own weight with ease as her feet sought toe-holds on the rim of the lower crates ... the slim gap descended four metres to the floor below and if she fell, she knew she could get wedged. She inched forward, awk wardly, hearing the Ge-Vo now accelerating cautiously down the aisle, sensors sweeping ... but she knew the tank's own engines would interfere with its sensors' reception enough to hide any small noises or signatures she might make.

  An automatic scan of her own memory files revealed that she did not possess an inventory list of the bay's current equipment. There could be anything in the crates around her, from armour suits to AP grenades to new uniforms. The odds of finding something useful by tearing crates open at random were not great, and the noise would draw fire.

  A burst of fire ripped through the metal walls behind her and she simply dropped, catching her weight again two metres down the crevice as elecro-mag fire tore through crates and their contents. She wondered as she accelerated her awkward, spread-eagled progress, if the Ge-Vo pilot was also automated ... or not. A rush of jump jets, and the second AMAPS landed with a heavy crash, legs straddling the divide, twin weapon pods angling downward at its trapped quarry. Sandy let go and fell to the floor, taking the impact, then exploding full-power off the floor. She shot five metres up and slammed into the AMAPS's underside just as the gun muzzles began to spin. The AMAPS staggered awkwardly, gyros readjusting for the new weight th
at clung to its belly. Sandy didn't waste time with a punch, but rather grabbed one weapon pod arm with both arms, got her feet against the AMAPS's leg, and twisted its torso sideways. The AMAPS's servos whined and cranked in protest, the machine's bird legs shuffling to retain balance as it lost its centre of gravity ... one more shuffle and Sandy timed a hard kick at its leg, that landed with a crunch that might have broken heavy-duty hip suspension, and the metal foot came down on the gap rather than solid metal.

  The AMAPS fell sideways, its right pod slamming into the lip of the gap as the right leg fought and kicked in empty air. Sandy maintained her steely grip despite the impact, and dangling from the AMAPS's shoulder joint, got one hand onto the lip of the gap, and thrust hard upward with the other. Alloy-myomer muscles and perfect technique propelled all three tons of AMAPS up and backwards, then off the edge of the row of crates entirely. It fell, gracelessly, and Sandy propelled herself after it, catching the rim of the crate overlooking the open aisle as the AMAPS completed a three-quarter somersault and landed face first with a booming crash. Down the aisle, a visual adjustment allowed her to see the first AMAPS picking itself up from within the smoke from the ammunition explosion. Surely its sensors and CPU function had been jarred by the blasts.

  Sandy swung from her perch and fell five metres to the ferrocrete floor, taking the impact with a comfortable jolt through her legs. The fallen AMAPS was kicking now, struggling to climb to its feet ... and seemed, in that extended fraction of a second, to be somewhat confused between which action had priority-getting up, or acquiring its target, which was now standing an infuriating two metres to its side. It then appeared to realise that its weapon pods were not articulated enough to acquire its target from a prone position. The legs folded almost flat, seeking to get its broad, padded feet beneath it and rise. Further down the aisle, within clouds of drifting smoke, the second AMAPS was already upright, and turning to face its target. Sandy watched, calmly unmoving, and wondering if all the machines were quite as target-fixated as these two appeared to be.