Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  Sandy shrugged, shovelling pasta. “That’s life.”

  “You can’t just step up recruitment?”

  “Oh, we are. But the technology we’re using these days for augmentation is getting very advanced. Previously, maybe three percent of the population had the right genes and physiology to handle the upgrades, but with the most recent stuff it’s down to less than one percent. We’ll expand that as genetic mods improve, but that’ll take time. Plus, if we’re recruiting from all member worlds directly into the FSA, that’s a huge leap for a rookie. We’d rather recruit from experienced pools like the CSA. We’re working with a number of them to fast track interested personnel, but again, it takes time.”

  “And you’re adamant we can’t let Fleet carry out operations like Pyeongwha on their own?”

  Sandy made a face, shaking her head. “It’s not just me that says so. Look, Fleet Marines are good, but they don’t do what we do. Marines are an arm of the Fleet, and Fleet’s strategic—they go after big installations, stations, ports, command centers. They hit and hold, and their units are kind of inflexible because they have to be, to concentrate firepower on specific objectives.

  “FSA are more tactical. On Pyeongwha we worked in small units, we coordinated with civilian groups on the ground, we had a whole range of targets and objectives, and we really took tacnet coordination to a whole new level . . . like I said, our augmentation’s getting very high tech. Fleet haven’t caught up yet, and I don’t know if they’re interested. Marines see tacnet as a coordination tool; FSA uses it like an offensive weapon.”

  “Interesting,” said Ballan. A staffer hurried into the room, bringing a tablet, which Ballan read, signed and sent. “I’m also a little concerned at how for all the FSA’s supposed intelligence expertise, they keep being trumped by the CSA. Take this latest news on New Torah.”

  “Well, the sources are on Callay,” Sandy said. “And the CSA knows Callay better than anyone, obviously. But also, Ibrahim is just the best.”

  “I know.”

  “And Director Diez . . .”

  “I know.” Ballan put down his fork and picked up his glass. He sipped, and looked at her for a long, considering moment. “What would you say to replacing one with the other?”

  Sandy sighed. “If it weren’t for the fact that his wife is dying and he wants to retire to look after her, I’d say hurray.”

  Ambassador Ballan wanted her to meet some Fleet Intelligence officers whom he respected, to talk about New Torah from Fleet’s perspective. Sandy went, despite having ten other things that needed attending, more because one did not say no to Ambassador Ballan than for any great enthusiasm for Fleet Intelligence. The Grand Council Assembly Director was Li Shufu, who was the closest thing that the Federation had to an overall president. Second to him was Ouchi. Ballan was number three, and as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and highly respected in Fleet, arguably more important in security matters than the other two combined.

  Walking the hall with him certainly reinforced that impression, as several staff accompanied him, including one young, pretty female staffer who was newly promoted, and staring about in wide eyed glee at all the big architecture and important people. Security walked with them, and Ballan excused himself from Sandy’s company to talk with a senior staffer about something unrelated.

  Then ahead, Sandy saw the journalist, Sushma Sen, waiting for them. She refrained from groaning, and was pleased at least that the cameraman was not also present. One did not interrupt Ambassador Ballan in mid-conversation with senior staff, so Ms Sen intercepted one of the other staffers, with whom she seemed friendly, and walked with them, talking.

  She wasn’t sure what happened next, but at one moment her ears caught one of those odd sounds her subconscious was specifically programmed to isolate, and the next she was tackling Ambassador Ballan to the ground. Just a millisecond before the explosion detonated, she recognised the sound as a cybernetic charge.

  It blew its wearer to pieces, chaos and smoke in the hallway, then she was up with both pistols drawn as several people came out of hallway doors front and rear, armed. Sandy dropped them, guns blazing both ways at once. Then the secondary charge went off and sent her flying into the far wall.

  She rebounded immediately, shaking her head clear, hair smoking and clothes in tatters. One gun was gone, the other no longer working, and several more armed people were rushing her and firing.

  Sandy ducked, half-spun as bullets whipped where she’d been, then kicked off the wall to shoot herself at the opposing wall like a projectile. She bounced off to take one runner down with an elbow through the chest. The next swung at her and she grabbed the arm and threw—too hard, the arm came off in her hand, so she went low for the third’s legs, upended him and put a fist through his skull before it hit the ground.

  That gave her his weapon, which she took, and put bullets through the heads of two more down the hall’s other end. The armless man was still alive, and would remain so for a little while despite jets of arterial blood, so she put six rounds through his chest to be sure.

  Then Assembly security came running, too late for what had obviously been a suicide mission, even if there had only been one human bomb. She yelled at them, in case they didn’t notice the network telling them who she was. That was when she registered she wasn’t wearing much any longer. The second charge had removed her jacket completely, and most of her shirt beneath. Her jeans were now shorts, legs shredded. She still had hair—GI hair being, like most things, somewhat tougher than the organic equivalent—but still she was smouldering.

  Only now was she noticing how dark it was, smoke everywhere, walls blasted, the fire retardant still not activated because nothing was on fire after the initial explosion. She ran back to check on her group. All of them were down. Ballan was alive but unconscious; she’d saved him from the first blast, and he’d then been lying flat for the second one, which she’d caught full in the face. Two others looked like they might make it—a security guard and the young staffer. Probably he’d tackled her and saved them both, but still it looked nasty, flesh shredded and amputations necessary. The others were all gone, two of them literally, just bits and pieces blasted about the hall.

  More security were rushing in, a few of them checking on the bodies of the attackers.

  “Leave them!” Sandy snapped, and strode over. Security backed off in awe at this apparition that strode from the smoke, half naked, scorched and blackened. Sandy knelt by a body, and remembered her interlink cord had been in her jacket. “Someone get me a cord!”

  A cord was produced, and she snapped it into an insert socket—her head, then the corpse. That was always creepy, accessing a dead network construct, but she was hardly in a mood to be squeamish. It didn’t take long to find what she was looking for.

  “Everyone from Pyeongwha in the building gets arrested!” she yelled. “Right now! Everyone who’s been there on holiday gets arrested! Everyone who has family there gets arrested! Everyone who has NCT installed in any form, gets arrested!”

  “But we’d already done that,” one security man protested.

  “Yeah,” she muttered, “that’s what I thought, too.”

  She sat in FSA medical. The scanners circled the table where she sat in her underwear, while several FSA meds checked her over. Sandy watched news reports on uplink. She saw lots of emergency vehicles parked around the Assembly Building, and flyers in the air. Reporters talking to camera; God knew why they did that.

  Then the footage again. No one knew how the media had received it, only that the now-late Sushma Sen had had some kind of fancy cybernetic upgrade done that allowed her to record vision, like a GI might. It had activated during the attack, and the footage now had found its way to the media, who found little squeamish in displaying the last sights of a dead woman. The footage had been cleaned up a lot, yet it showed enough—walking in the corridor, then a blast and everything going sideways. An attempt to rise, then a second blast, and down ag
ain, this time for good. She’d been lying there, probably dead, with the implant still recording. Through the smoke, the final image was clear—Sandy, an indistinct yet clearly female figure, unloading six rounds into a wounded attacker on the ground.

  They were now asking if the execution of a wounded prisoner was justified. God knew how they came to the word “prisoner”—she hadn’t arrested anyone, and with cybernetic explosives even corpses were threats until disposed of. She’d just killed him so he couldn’t self-terminate, if he’d been loaded, which it turned out he hadn’t. Just that first one, a passing female staffer with several false ribs, loaded as a human bomb: one blast for effect, then a second to scythe down anyone resisting the firearm attack.

  A few commentators made the sensible point, but a few more condemned that killing as excessive. Over and over, they played that footage—a female GI, standing over a wounded man, impassive and fearsome, putting six rounds through him without blinking. Could a GI have caused this attack, other commentators wondered? Possibly one of those seeking asylum?

  Great, thought Sandy. Barely an hour later, and the media were already spinning to try to make this her fault.

  “Well the scans don’t show anything,” said Hueng, one of the meds. “I’m sure you must have some kind of blast concussion, but our equipment can’t find it. I suppose we have to let you go.”

  “Good,” said Sandy, and moved to get off the table.

  “Uh!” Rhian said loudly, from where she’d been waiting by one wall. She shook her head at Sandy, sternly, and indicated she lie down. Sandy snorted, and did so. “Here’s an old trick, doc. Sometimes, you have to use your hands.”

  Rhian dug her fingers and thumbs into various pressure points and gauged Sandy’s response by voluntary and involuntary means. It wasn’t hard to do. A hiss of pain usually meant something tight.

  “They’re pretty much the same pressure points a chiropractor or physiotherapist knows,” Rhian explained to the curious meds. “Synth-alloy myomer will contract hard after a blast, just like any impact, but strains won’t show on scans. You have to feel for it.”

  Hueng took over. And probably enjoyed it somewhat more than Rhian, as Hueng had a pretty obvious crush on her, and she wasn’t wearing much. Another time, she would have teased him, or flirted. Now, she just watched the uplink images repeating before her eyes.

  Someone found her some spare clothes, and she dressed, then left to find Rhian in the adjoining analysis room. Salman was there, sitting on a stool as a med lady showed him how the microscopes worked. Rhian had been with him, Rakesh working, the twins with Rakesh’s parents, when news of the attack came through. Another mother might have panicked at the thought of letting a six-year-old wander into this world, but Rhian knew better than most what was safe, and was adamant that experiences were important for kids, even unsettling ones. With all the security around the FSA compound, which was brand new and alongside the Grand Council Assembly, Salman was certainly having an experience. And sure as hell there were no Pyeongwha-born or connected people here.

  “Aunty Sandy!” Salman said upon seeing her. He looked anxious. “Did you get hurt?”

  “No,” said Sandy, dismissively. “I’m fine. I have a few bruises, that’s all.”

  “Rhian said someone tried to hurt a Grand Council Ambassador.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “It happens sometimes.”

  “If you got hurt,” Salman said sagely, “you should go to a hospital. But this isn’t a real hospital.” With a look around at the lab equipment.

  “He was at the hospital when the twins had some checks,” Rhian explained. “He knows what a real hospital looks like.”

  Sandy squatted opposite the young boy. He looked a lot like his dad, which was to say that one day he’d be a big guy, and handsome.

  “Well,” she said, “you know what I am, right?”

  “You’re in the CSA!” With considerable awe. It was nice to know that someone still thought the CSA was cool. Still much cooler than the FSA, which might upset a few people in this building.

  “Yes I am. But what else am I?”

  Salman thought about it. Then realised what she was getting at. “You’re a GI. Like Mum.”

  At that word, Rhian beamed. He didn’t use it all the time, but lately more and more.

  “Yeah. I’m a GI. And do you know what that means?”

  “That means you’re strong and you protect people from the bad guys.”

  Sandy nearly burst into tears. It astonished her, but suddenly her eyes hurt badly, and she had to wipe them to keep her vision clear.

  “That’s right,” she agreed, her voice tight. “Your mum and I keep people safe. We’re synthetic. That means we’re made of different stuff from you and your dad, but we’re real people just like you. If we get hurt, we have to go to a place that has equipment that can make us better. Ordinary hospitals don’t usually have it, so I come here.”

  Salman nodded enthusiastically. “I know,” he said. “Dad told me about it before.”

  Just like that. Sandy recalled all the hand-wringing angst when some Callayan media outfit had discovered that one of Callay’s new GIs was adopting children. That one had gone on for weeks. Luckily no one had spilled Rhian’s name, a fact helped by all of Rhian’s underground friends helping to sweep the networks of details the media shouldn’t know, and the promise of a lengthy jail term to anyone publically naming a CSA operative without authorisation. But the debate had been typically stupid, and Rhian had obviously been hurt, however she denied it.

  How could a child accept a synthetic person as a parent, they’d asked? What damage would it cause to do so? Hell, Sandy had once asked those questions of Rhian, herself. But Salman just called her Mum, and that was that. Rhian always said she preferred the logic of children to adults, not because it was escapist, but because it often stated truths that adults were blind to. Now, Sandy was seeing what she meant.

  “Come on,” she said, and scooped Salman up. “I’ll walk you and Mum to your cruiser, then I have some things I have to do. Are you going to have a party this Holi?”

  “Yes,” Salman said happily. “We’re going to have water pistols, and we’re going to make everyone wet!”

  “Oh that sounds like fun. Can I come?”

  “Yes!” said Salman, even more happily. “And Auntie Vanessa too, can she come, too?”

  “You know,” said Rhian as they left the med room, “I sometimes think he’s getting an unrealistic view of women. His three main examples are all grunts.”

  “At least he thinks we’re fun,” Sandy said firmly.

  “What does unrealistic mean?” asked Salman.

  The interviewee was a young woman, no more than twenty-five. She was an Anjulan facility employee, European, moderately pretty. She had a small nose stud, standard fashion accessory on many worlds, and wore a light, peach-gloss eye shadow. She had the blood of thousands on her hands.

  “Can you describe your job in the facility?” asked an interviewer, off screen. Her voice was measured. Sandy had heard that tone many times, in professional psychs, constructing an angle of attack.

  “I was in prep,” said the girl.

  “And what were your responsibilities, in prep?”

  “I would prepare the subjects.”

  “Prepare them how?”

  “I’d put them in a sedated state. Then I’d prepare them for the procedure.”

  “The surgical procedure?”

  “Yes,” said the girl.

  Sandy sat in a comfortable reclining chair, with a grand view of night-time Tanusha. This was one of Anita and Pushpa’s apartments. They had numerous, which formed a valuable support network for all the curious causes the two very-wealthy businesswomen found it necessary to support. Sandy herself was one of those causes, as were most of the GI asylum seekers.

  “Where did you get this from?” Vanessa asked Pushpa. She’d excused herself from Phillippe’s company, citing an evening with the girls—any e
xcuse to get away from one of Phillippe’s functions with the various music-supporting VIPs that she found so awful. Sandy doubted Phillippe had any problem with Vanessa’s absence—when Vanessa was unhappy, she had a way of spreading it around.

  “Ask me no questions,” said Pushpa around a mouthful of ice cream, “and I’ll tell you no scurrilous half-truths.”

  “Ah,” said Vanessa. Ari was still on Pyeongwha, leading the FSA’s investigations. These interviews were strictly not for public release, but mysteriously, a bunch of them were now making the rounds on a string of pirate network sites, the kind that propagated themselves in a dozen new locations every time the authorities shut one down. This was a new interview that wasn’t even on the networks. Yet.

  “Did it concern you at all that these were ordinary people?” asked the interviewer. “Pyeongwha citizens, like you?”

  The girl shook her head. “They weren’t like me.”

  “Disassociation,” said Anita, watching the screen with wide, transfixed eyes. She had a mohawk now, dyed various colours, and unorthodox jewellery. Among her many unofficial qualifications was psychology, which she’d acquired by being one of Callay’s best uplink software constructors.

  “How were they not like you?”

  “They were rejectors.”

  “What is a rejector?”

  “A rejector is a traitor,” the girl insisted, with a flash of anger. “NCT is Pyeongwha’s greatest achievement. It makes us strong against our enemies. Rejectors are traitors who try to destroy everything good in Pyeongwha. They serve our enemies, and they must be fought.”

  “Notice the language,” said Anita. “The overuse of the first person plural, we, our, us. Collectivists always do that.”

  “Nothing you don’t hear from radicals here,” Pushpa said skeptically.

  “Some of our research suggests that many of these rejectors, as you call them, were not actually opposed to Neural Cluster Technology at all, nor to Pyeongwha society,” the interviewer continued. “Instead, it’s more that their brains were not structured to best adapt to NCT. So they weren’t making a conscious choice to reject NCT, it was just an accident of biology.”