Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  She landed on a rooftop seven stories up, looking onto a street afire with ruined vehicles and collapsed building fronts. Tacnet showed her a couple of likely culprits ahead, and she leaped after them, zooming vision on their newest targets—a couple of personnel carriers. It wasn’t always easy to tell where they’d come from; some of the police and security stations through the inner city had armoured depots that micro-munitions wouldn’t touch.

  They were under fire when she landed, two FSA suits on neighbouring rooftops pouring fire onto the street below. They hadn’t seen the UAV zooming around behind them for a shot, Sandy armscomped it in midflight, pulled the trigger, then landed by a skylight as the UAV screamed tumbling into a building a block away and exploded.

  One of the APCs was afire, men scrambling from the back, Sandy locked a grenade on the other and blew its top turret, then ducked back as fire came at her from across the street. Suddenly a viewfeed from one of her friendlies showed AMAPS on the road, running through halted civvie traffic with that ugly, birdlike gait. Sandy’s friend blew one of them to hell with a rifle shot, but suddenly there were missiles in the air and everyone jumped.

  Sandy’s rooftop blew up just after she’d left it, and she took the flying vantage to put multiple rifle rounds into another running AMAPS on the street below, but one of those missiles was still going, streaking about in a circle as it tried to reacquire. It picked her, and Sandy turned, shot it from the sky, and crashed onto a rooftop ventilation system with less grace than she’d have liked. Snipers snapped at her from across the road somewhere, two of them, armscomp calced and showed her where in a split second as she came up on her feet and fired twice, then dropped a free fall grenade over the edge.

  “Blinder!” she advised her wingmen as the phosphorus detonated, and any sensitive lenses focused that way abruptly burned out. She went over the edge a second later, blew another AMAPS’s CPU apart with a headshot, hit the jumpjets in mid-fall to land sideways and rolling as another AMAPS tore the street apart with its twin cannon, firing blind. Sandy and a wingman hit it with grenades simultaneously and it disappeared in three directions at once.

  Sandy left, disconcerted that she’d dented a thruster, but otherwise unscathed. Happily, no one else tried to shoot at her as she sailed with her two companions toward a new landing. Watching snipers’ heads explode was not pleasant, and if the only enemies that shot at her from now on were mechanicals like those Armoured Mobile Anti-Personnel Systems, she’d be happy.

  UAVs were now proving a pain in the ass. Pyeongwha’s military was restricted, like all Federation worlds, so they had few assets that qualified as full-blown military. But that left “para military,” which Sandy knew from experience could include pretty much anything if you classified it cunningly. On her leaping trek around Anjula downtown, she counted five types in the air, two of them supersonic, one of them high altitude recon, and two others slow and hovering and hiding behind buildings. She disliked those most of all. She could track and hit high-motion at anything up to Mach one with barely any assistance from armscomp, but while Mach one was very visible, even she couldn’t hit what she couldn’t see.

  She covered her teammates’ blind spots as they moved, as they covered hers, and they leapfrogged forward in the most old-fashioned of infantry manoeuvers, covering about half a K with each jump. Police and para-military were getting more snipers into high buildings now, and some with missile launchers, but those were going to have trouble tracking FSA suits in opti-cam. Even so, armscomp started registering regular near misses, mostly in the air. True to Sandy’s infantry prejudice, grounded meant cover, and cover meant “safe.” In the old days, there’d been something called the “air force.” These days, modern weapons and armscomp turned most aircraft into flying bull’s-eyes.

  They were closing on North Park when Anjula began closing down the advertising frequencies, having realised how the attackers were using it against them. Ari simply transitioned them to one of the emergency services sub-frequencies, and tacnet propagated all over again. They could keep frequency jumping all night until Anjula shut the whole lot down, but then the city would be as blind as the attackers, who could then just switch to their own coms and battle through whatever jamming was thrown at them. Defending took a lot more coordination, and if Anjula’s assets couldn’t talk to each other, they were screwed.

  Sandy paused on a rooftop long enough to track and fire a missile at a high-altitude UAV, then was startled by civvies on a neighbouring balcony peering out to take a look. She refrained from shooting, leaped instead, and scanning nearby air traffic on tacnet found one vehicle loitering suspiciously and warned her second wingman about it. There were no rooftops she liked the look of, ahead, so she grounded on the road instead and pressed herself to a wall. At fifteen thousand meters overhead, the UAV blew up. So did the cruiser she’d warned about, when a door opened to reveal security with a launcher.

  There were displays and advertising everywhere at street level. Sandy realised she was in one of the entertainment strips, wall to wall graphics and dancing images. All deserted now save for several cops huddled by their cruiser, staring fearfully. Sandy ignored them and leaped again, and was immediately shot at by someone down below . . . low caliber, she didn’t bother shooting back.

  Ahead was a big tower, and she crashed through a tenth story window, scattering chairs in an office. Ran out into the corridor in case someone sent a munition through the window after her, fast down a corridor then kicked in a door, activating building security alarms. That brought her to a window with a view. Ahead was North Park. To the right of that, the Domestic Affairs Building. It looked like it was built to withstand a nuke, which wasn’t far from the truth. Around it were gardens, all trip-wired and armed to hell, then high walls. Flames rose from several points around it, indicating it had been subject to some early strikes, but she’d studied the preliminary schematics that were all Ari’s folks had smuggled out, and wasn’t especially encouraged.

  “Ari, I want an active schematic on Primary Target, real time if you please. No guesses.” At another time it might have felt a little odd; she hadn’t spoken to him directly for half a year now. No, dammit, at any time it still felt a little odd. “Alpha formation, make a perimeter and hold,” she added to her wingmen. The other three would be joining them shortly, she hoped.

  “I’ve still got a few barriers remaining,” came Ari’s reply. “Just hold for a little.” A little what, Sandy nearly said, but didn’t. She was military, her brain didn’t process “a little.”

  She smashed the window and jumped out instead. She fell, and the side of the building behind her exploded. Smaller neighbouring buildings gave cover for her landing, and she hit the street hard, then moved quickly along a sidewalk as burning debris and shattering glass tumbled about her.

  “Someone missed an emplacement,” said Han, one of her wingmen.

  “You think?” Sandy muttered. Probably it’d seen her break the window and fired just late. That was a happier thought than it having been about to fire anyway, and it being just dumb luck that she’d jumped when she had. Han lit up the offending emplacement for tacnet, saving his own ammunition, as elsewhere about the city, missiles leapt skyward. Ten seconds later, as Sandy sheltered at a corner, another explosion tore the air by the DA building.

  “Active countermeasures nearly got it,” Han observed. Sandy watched a replay of what he’d seen, a storm of micro-flares about the gardens, settling now amidst the trees and bushes. Enough to distract most missiles, but not Tanushan tech, evidenced by the new smoking crater beneath one wall where the emplacement had been.

  “If countermeasures are still active, they’ll have just about everything up, save the big emplacements,” Sandy observed. “Anyone running or flying in there is dead. Ari, either you get that defensive grid down or find us another way in.”

  “Um, okay, hang on a moment . . .” Between familiarly gritted teeth.

  The front of the DA building exploded
. Even though Sandy was not in direct line of sight, the intensity of the flash, and then the boom, made her duck. Then, amid the rain of debris onto neighbouring blocks, she looked up, and saw an especially large missile contrail.

  Sandy suppressed a smile. “That you, darling?”

  “I told you,” said Vanessa, “never go anywhere without clean underwear and artillery.”

  “Yeah, well my underwear is now less clean than it was,” said Han.

  It was the Trebuchet system. Vanessa had insisted on bringing it along, descending on UAV mounts and sparing several troops to spend ten minutes of phase one setting it up somewhere hidden. God knew how long they could now keep it hidden, but for the moment it had proven a far-sighted insistence. Vanessa’s operational policy had always been that obstacles were not obstacles once you’d blown them up. Facing the collapsed front facade of the DA building, Sandy found the logic hard to argue with.

  “Let’s go,” said Sandy, targeting her three remaining missiles at surrounding department gardens, then leaping. At max power the jets pulled nearly nine Gs, and she did a fast loop over buildings, screamed low across a road and into the debris cloud of multiple explosions. Still something hit her, and she nearly crashed on deceleration and landing, digging a knee-down furrow in the turf, laying rifle and grenade shots down at everything that might be an emplacement. She continued putting down fire as Han and Weller tore in to more dignified landings, and then, just a little late, Rhian and her pair.

  “Sorry we’re late,” said Rhian, as they crashed through debris into the DA building. “Got into a tangle.”

  “I know,” said Sandy, ducking beneath collapsed steel beams, the ground an unstable mess of crushed concrete. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  What they had was smoke and dust filled corridors, nothing working, and only the fuzziest network reception. Sandy recalled her pre-stored schematic, which was hardly precise, but it said the basement ought to be accessible from elevator shafts ahead. If that blast hadn’t crippled or collapsed everything.

  “Sandy,” said Ari in her ear, “network.” The connection clicked, and suddenly she was in, a vast expanse of complicated electronic schematics overlaying her vision. This was central grid, the command foundation that Anjula always pretended didn’t exist. Pyeongwha was a free world, they said. Democratic, free trading, law abiding, a self-evolving society that no outside force had the right to dictate terms to. So why did it need a central network regulator, and hidden ministry compounds—the public discussion of which would get a government worker disappeared? To defend freedoms, Anjula replied, on the rare occasion they spoke of it at all. But the freedom to do what?

  At a central point there were indeed elevator banks, two of them large, for cargo. Nothing worked. Han smashed the doors open and peered down the shaft, while Sandy accessed some interesting functions on her schematic.

  “The shaft’s booby-trapped,” she observed, as they began unsealing from their suits. “Gas won’t bother us, but there’s a microwave projector that will clear your airways real good.”

  “Microwaves,” said Khan. “That’s so evil supervillain.”

  All six of them were GIs. There had been about fifty arriving on Callay over the past few years, mostly high-designation, escapees from the League who were following Sandy and Rhian’s example and claiming asylum. Rights activists had taken up their cause, and each year more turned up at Gordon Spaceport. A few with network capabilities, advanced like hers, appeared almost right on Sandy’s doorstep. Most volunteered for military or paramilitary, that being the only work they knew. A few non-combatant designations had found high level civvie jobs, most in data processing or technology of some description. And a few, more concerningly, had become loners, and struggled.

  Sandy got her helmet off as the rest of the suit unsealed and disassembled. The big chest plate came off first, then the arm rigs that allowed her to hold up the enormous mag-rifle, then the heavy backpack/power source which she lowered to the ground. The leg-exo shed, like a crustacean losing its shell, and the whole rig, thrusters and all, slid to an untidy pile on the floor. Her light under-armour was her regular rig, plenty tough enough for infantry work. It now had a hole through the left side of the chest plate, where the building defences had hit her on the way in.

  Khan saw it. “That go through?”

  “Bit.” Sandy flexed an arm with a grimace. “Maybe a rib. I’m fine.” Disconnecting the assault rifle from the mag-rifle, a tiny thing by comparison, but just what she needed at close range. Without the helmet, she just had a headrig—like a headband with eyepiece, earpiece and insert plugs at the back—rigged in turn to signal boosters in her backpack. More grenades from storage, and twin pistols in her back holster, and she was right to go. “Ari, can you cut power on the shaft?”

  “No, but I have a schematic for that microwave.” It flashed up. Sandy peered in the shaft and saw the relevant points on the wall, maybe twenty meters down. Scrolling through visual spectrums, she could also see the laser grid defences.

  “Lasers,” she said. “First person down there will discover the correct use of the word ‘decimated.’” She strode to another shaft, and smashed through the doors with a single punch, then pulled them aside.

  “There’s a correct use?” wondered Han.

  “To divide into ten equal portions,” said Rhian, also armed up and covering a corridor. “She hates it when the reporters don’t know what it means.”

  “It’s Latin,” said Weller. Someone up a corridor pointed a gun at them. Weller shot him in the head before he could fire. “Deci as in ten; decade, decimal, decahedron.”

  Sandy put a grenade through where Ari’s schematic showed the microwave’s power source was. Her schematic flickered, shielding wobbled then failed, and she hacked the lasers, too. Unable to deactivate them, she fired them instead, and they tore the sides of the shaft, and each other, to sizzling pieces.

  “Let’s go.” She jumped.

  Han was a 43 series, Dark Star. Sandy had met him once, briefly, in operations now nine years back, when they were both on the wrong side. Chinese by cosmetics, he was a specialised point man, a clear thinker, and overwhelmingly right-handed. He’d survived the Dark Star culls that had sent Sandy running for the Federation, tranquilised in an isolation cell until some unknown League techie had woken him up and smuggled him onto a freighter. More good Samaritans, a Christian group, had brought him to Callay and alerted herself and various rights groups, who’d all watched as CSA and others debriefed him and argued over asylum.

  “Nice guy,” Vanessa had told General Dal in their formal prep, in selecting the final assault squad. “Bit dopey. Does what he’s told, vague on details, but absolutely disciplined and very dependable. Just don’t let him make decisions on his own.”

  “Not like we haven’t seen that before in GIs,” Sandy had added, wryly. Back on old Earth, American soldiers had once been called “GIs” because every piece of kit they’d been issued was stamped “GI,” for “General Issue.” When League’s industrial war machine had begun issuing front line units not just with kit, but with fully sentient synthetic soldiers, they’d been called “GIs” too, for the same reason. The acronym had stuck, its meaning forever changed.

  Khan was a 47 series, and had never seen actual combat in the League. Too experimental, apparently, he was only about eight years old, which meant at his long-gestation designation, he’d only been active for about four. Three of those had now been on Callay. Again, a group of League defectors had brought him with them before he was evolved enough to think for himself, hoping to get a better asylum deal for themselves if they brought a high-des GI along. That made some security folks nervous—Khan had never actually defected, like Sandy, or even reached the conscious realisation that the League truly sucked for GIs and a lot of other people, like Han. And Khan had become truly smart, socialised and borderline devious when he chose. If anyone could fake it, then sell you out to his old League friends, Khan could.<
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  “Showbiz Khan,” Vanessa called him, after his flashing smile. “He’d be command material if he had more experience. Wait and see how he responds to the real thing, then we’ll make a call.”

  Ogun was a 40, of African cosmetics, bald and dour-looking. By designation that made him kind of dumb, but Sandy wasn’t so sure. Certainly he didn’t say much, including about how he’d gotten out. But all the psychs agreed that he hated the League with a passion, and wasn’t smart enough, or devious enough, to fake it. The Federation opposed the League and that was good enough for him. His loyalty was beyond doubt.

  “Great team player,” was Vanessa’s assessment. “He just knows where to be. Individually, not so much.”

  “A lot of the lower designations are better team players that their supposed superiors,” Sandy had added. “Thus proving that selfishness is a higher intellectual function.”

  “Ha,” spoke Vanessa. “Apply that theory to a five-year-old.”

  Weller was an odd girl. A 44 by designation, European by cosmetics, she claimed to have been injured in a major battle eight years ago, left for dead in a ruined city, and nursed back to health by Sufi mystics who’d found her there. Both her injuries and her devotion to Sufism backed her story, but Sandy still found something about her strange.

  “Her detachment is almost sociopathic,” Vanessa had observed. “But that’s unfair, because she’s quite a nice girl. She just, you know, doesn’t seem to make the distinction between people, events and emotions.”

  “I think ‘autistic’ would be more fair than ‘sociopathic,’” Sandy had said. “Not uncommon amongst GIs either. But she’s a good soldier, I’ll take her.”