Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  “Oh fuck!” said someone, with real fear. Like they’d strolled into the wrong patch of Callayan jungle, and found themselves staring down a hungry sabre cat. Only worse, because people had actually been known to survive sabre cats. The look in Radni’s eyes was all guilt.

  “What’sa matter, Radni?” she asked him. “Live in Nirvana but scared of dying?”

  Too much augmentation had a way of giving men false confidence—they pulled guns on her. Sandy went through them in a blur, scattering bodies and smashing bones. One went through a side window, another crashed off a wall, she cracked a knee ninety degrees the wrong way, made a new elbow for an arm where there hadn’t been one before, and shattered a shoulder with a careless twist.

  Several more had stun batons, and twirled them with adrenaline charged expertise as Radni and a few others ran away. The network exploded with alarms, meaning everyone would come running. Sandy hardly minded. The baton wielders were seriously fast, even by her standards of measurement. She couldn’t take augments like this lightly, not in these numbers. It would test her. Kind of like GI racquetball. Tests were fun.

  She jabbed repeatedly for the non-stunning grips, broke a finger, blocked the baton’s spin then broke its wielder’s ribs, used his body for leverage to come up and over on his partner to smash his arm with a kick before he could even swing. They collapsed to join the others on the ground, some of those still conscious screaming in pain, but nothing life threatening. She wasn’t here to kill, just to scare. Badly. She walked, hips still swinging even now, and entirely too amused with herself.

  Another man was backing off before her, hands held up, palms empty, eyes wide. “Hey, it wasn’t my idea. It was Radni’s. I told him it was stupid to threaten you. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  “Fair enough,” she told him. “Run away.” He did, past her and back down the way she’d come.

  The schematic showed the room beyond was big and filling with activity, her hearing catching lots of panicked yells. Radni hadn’t expected she’d be here, hadn’t expected she’d do this. No one ever predicted her, only Vanessa and Ibrahim. Truthfully, she kind of liked that. Now, with resistance awaiting her beyond the door, she hacked the building’s lights, flicked them off, and uploaded her own happy music to the big backroom speakers. Nirvana, the real deal, first a twirl of bass intro. Then, as someone overrode her hack to put the lights back on, the drums and heavy guitar kicked in.

  Sandy went through the door before anyone’s eyes could adjust to the on-and-off lighting, their hearing suddenly blasted by rock and roll. A few with guns tried foolishly to shoot her, and were felled immediately by the pistol she’d taken from one of the men she’d dropped in the corridor. She took legs, arms and shoulders, then put bullets through where her schematic showed the power mains would be. Half the lights went out again, sparks exploded and small fires started.

  A couple actually came at her, either drugged insensible or so hyper on adrenaline augments they couldn’t stay away from a fight once started. Cage fighters, she reckoned as she spun past one and into his buddy, whose middle she crushed with a flying knee, then caught his arm and twisted, popping the shoulder. Underground fights, big augmentation, big money, frequent fatalities. Another leaped at her and she took him from the air with a spin kick that sent him cartwheeling over tables.

  “Radni!” she yelled, as someone behind to her left risked raising a pistol in what he thought was her blind spot. Sandy put a bullet through his shoulder without looking, then saw Radni trying to ascend a loft staircase up one wall. She grabbed a big table, spun and hurled it, two hundred kilos flying through the air like a Frisbee to destroy the stairs just before Radni, sending him tumbling back down.

  Several of his men tried to block her path to him, bravely, with knives and clubs rather than guns. Nirvana hit her favorite, thrashing chorus, and she took them gleefully apart, nothing spectacular, just short, brutal and close, blocks turning into grabs and twists, blending into spins and jabs, then a drop-and-scythe that took another’s legs. She took limbs only—limbs would mend—and avoided the head shots that might not. Bones broke in time with the rhythm, and then she was at Radni, who was picking himself up from the base of the stairs. She grabbed him by the collar, lifted him, then carried him to the bar and slammed him down.

  “Radni,” she said to him, quite calmly. An uplink command turned the music down. “You don’t seem to understand. I am, without challenge, the baddest, meanest thing in this city. Sometimes I don’t think you comprehend that, because I’m such a nice girl and I usually play by the rules. Sometimes you think I’m so constrained by those rules, you can do anything, and I won’t touch you.

  “Now, you can threaten me all you like. And I’ll laugh at you, because actually trying to hurt me is fatal, and you know that. So you think you can go around me, and go after the people close to me instead.”

  She tightened her grip on his throat, to give him a taste of her power. His eyes bulged.

  “So let me make this clear. You. Don’t. Threaten. My. Friends.” Double pause. “Ever. I will bury you. I will smear you and your comrades all over these walls. I will destroy everything you have, then burn the ashes. And if you tell the media I was here, or if you come after me in some other way, I have lots of CSA friends who hate you, who’d love to investigate a whole bunch of activities in your organisation we haven’t bothered to investigate so far.”

  She hacked his uplink with a powerful override. It was painful when she did it, unlike the more subtle artists, and he winced, gasped and writhed. She downloaded files, pictures, linkages. Stuff the CSA had compiled. The Tanushan black market was so extensive that going after the likes of Radni on everything was a legal maze. Usually the CSA just drew lines in the sand, and went after them only when those were crossed.

  “Do you understand me?” she asked him. He nodded weakly. “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.”

  “I understand you,” he whispered hoarsely, files opening before his eyes that he had no control of. Images of things he’d done, or that his organisation had. Faces, names he’d rather not see discussed in public. No doubt it was frightening enough just to have one’s uplinks hacked so comprehensively. Like someone else taking over your brain. In a combat GI, it was just as much a military function as straight shooting. “I apologise. It was a mistake.”

  “I’m glad you think so. I’m going to let you live this time. Don’t try me again. There is no defence against me, in this city. Be very, very certain of that.”

  She left him splayed on the bar, and walked away. “I apologise to everyone else I hurt,” she called to the room of groaning, broken bodies, tossing the borrowed pistol aside. “Your boss made a bad call, you were just collateral. Please be certain he makes better calls in the future.”

  She tensed leg muscles, then sprang for a high window. She flew across the room, smashed the glass whilst grabbing the ledge, then leaping upward as the schematic showed her she could for the roof. That gave her a platform to leap to the neighbouring roof, and from there down to a rear lane.

  Then she walked, zipping up her jacket, back out onto the street. Night-time pedestrian crowds, talking, laughing, searching for entertainment along the glaring light and displays of Tianjin strip. No one paid her any mind.

  An hour ago, she’d been feeling . . . not unhappy, no, but melancholy. Now, she felt good. She buzzed, limbs loose and mind alive, like in the aftermath of really good exercise, or really good entertainment. Or really good sex, perhaps . . . but no, that was a more laid back, lazy feeling. This was jumping, vital. She felt like dancing. Maybe she would. There were at least forty or fifty really good concerts in Tanusha on any given night, and she was out now, and dressed for it.

  This wasn’t normal, she knew. Plenty of regular humans enjoyed a fight, but not like this. Cage fighters after a winning bout found ecstasy in relief and triumph. Her brain didn’t do triumph. Triumph implied the possibility of losing, and the exultation of not losing. It
was certainly possible that the fight wouldn’t have gone as well for her; there were plenty of opponents, and underworld augmentations were becoming truly military-class. But it never really occurred to her either way. She just didn’t do all that subconscious Freudian stuff—not the fear, not the yearning, not the desperate desire to prove herself. She’d never had a childhood, had never developed all of those complexes. She just was.

  And what she was, was this. In the moment. One pace, one mood, all the time, no wild swings. Her desires were basic, fundamental. Food, love, sensation. Violence. There were times when it haunted her. There’d been a time she’d cried to the heavens in denial, and sought a life built on anything, anything at all, but that.

  And then there were times when she knew it to be the most fundamental core of who she was. Like now. Know thyself, the holymen advised. She’d been on that journey all her life. Well, this, she knew. And tonight, at least, so much of the confusion was gone.

  Vanessa pushed into the debrief office, and found it already full. Most of the CSA’s seniors sat on chairs, while Sandy sat on a bench by the holo display. The chairs were all full, but Chandrasekar stood for her. Vanessa waved him off, and leaned against the wall instead. Chandrasekar rolled his eyes, took her by the shoulders, and put her physically in the chair. Vanessa could have resisted, but just grinned, as did the room. She’d been on alert standby half the afternoon on a bit of random suburban crime with uncivilised weapons. The cops had settled it peacefully, and now she was just back from her shower, and rather tired.

  “Okay,” said Sandy. “Now that your shower has finally finished . . .”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Vanessa, stretching her legs in her comfortable tracksuit.

  Sandy smiled. She wore her usual civvie off-duty wear, jeans and jacket. There had been a time, attending lots of Grand Council committees, when she’d gone for girl-suits, but she’d never liked them. Light cloth felt as fragile as silk, to a GI. She liked tough clothes that wouldn’t easily tear, and felt uncomfortable in anything less.

  “I’ve never told the whole story about how I left the League,” she said. “I’m not sorry about it, and I’m not apologising. Every veteran has something they don’t want to talk about, not with anyone. But since the League have decided to call it a war crime so that our enemies here will prosecute me on their behalf, that’s a luxury I no longer have.

  “Combat GIs had rehabilitation facilities. We’re pretty tough; a lot of battle damage is just patched on the spot and we’re ready to go again, even if it sometimes takes a few weeks. But some damage can’t be fixed within weeks. It takes months, a full rehabilitation job. So there was a station, back in Tropez System, well back from the contested front. It circled one of the outer worlds. It’s mostly mining colonies there, not much traffic; a good place because it meant Federation raiders weren’t likely to hit it.

  “Everyone in Dark Star knew, if you got hurt bad, they sent you to Tropez. I had a few troops who went, then came back. They said it was great . . . a bit of a production line with GIs coming in and going out, but it was a war; everything had to be cost effective. The tech was good, everyone got fixed, and on the rare occasion someone couldn’t be completely fixed, they were assigned a desk somewhere.”

  She sipped on her makani juice. Someone brought Vanessa tea—white, sugar, a touch of cardamom, as she liked it. Ibrahim preferred coffee, black, and was seated at the rear wall with his ankles crossed. “I had this one guy in particular, Jonti,” Sandy continued. “He took a fragmentation mine on a boarding mission. I wasn’t sure he’d make it, but they sent him off to Tropez and soon I got a vid message from him, lying in his bed and quite cheerful, saying he’d take a few months to mend but the doctors assured him he’d be back soon enough. So I sent a message back, and we kept in touch . . . nearly a year, it was. He seemed to be doing better with each message.

  “By this time, of course, we were losing the war; everyone knew it. Recruitment had taken over GI divisions in League Command, Command didn’t like it, there were some good military people there who didn’t want some bunch of tight-ass bureaucrats telling them what to do with their personnel. But GI production was expensive, Recruitment had been told to cut back, so they were streamlining everything, making sure Command were doing their bit to save resources. EEMs, they were called. Efficient Employment Methodologies.”

  She snorted, and sipped her drink again. Vanessa felt for her. She knew Sandy didn’t like replaying this part of her life. She did it occasionally, when it suited her, when she needed something off her chest. Otherwise Vanessa left it alone. She didn’t have anything like the scale of nasty experiences Sandy had had, but she’d had a few. She was too much the cheerful person to dwell on them, and was always grateful when people declined to prod her too much. Being able to talk about it when you wanted to was good, but being allowed to not talk about it when you didn’t was better.

  “I was having my terminal falling out with Dark Star at this point. I never actually turned on them until they had my team terminated, but we were engaged in low intensity conflict for maybe a couple of years before Recruitment arrived. I was questioning orders, talking to people I shouldn’t, asking inconvenient questions. Then Recruitment took over and we got hard-ass commanders who didn’t like GIs much. That was when I began reinterpreting orders and missions as I saw fit, and lying about it afterwards. They were a bunch of stupid fucks. I was having problems with everything by then, not just the conduct of the war but the entire rationale behind it. And everything about GIs; my own reasons for existing.

  “We hit a station once, in Eludi System. This Colonel Melak, he was a Recruitment appointee, he ordered us to shake down the station civvies.” She looked at Vanessa. Vanessa had heard this story, though no one else had. Vanessa nodded understanding. “We had to divide all the civvies into groups, they were searching for people they thought were intelligence assets, certain professions, engineers, doctors. Rough up any in those categories, make them talk. I said fuck it, you can all go, and put them onto shuttles. Colonel Melak came and threatened me with court martial . . . that was about the fifth time, I think . . . said he’d take my team away from me. I blew him out an airlock, made it look like an accident . . . happens a lot on damaged stations, post combat. My team swore blind he’d pushed the wrong button. They were awesome.”

  Silence in the room. They were now, perhaps, beginning to understand why League called her a traitor, and now a war criminal.

  “You blew him out an airlock for threatening you with court martial?” asked Obango.

  “No,” said Sandy. “For threatening to take my team away. I kept them alive. If I hadn’t done it, one of them would have, only messier, and gotten caught.”

  Obango nodded warily, not really understanding. Civvies never quite understood how cheap life got in war.

  “Anyway,” Sandy continued, “even if they suspected, I was too damn useful when they used me properly for them to ditch me. That and some of the research guys like Takawashi had too much invested in me. So the war kept getting worse, and finally Recruitment got so scared of the investigations that would happen in the peace, and the fact that the general public didn’t know that GIs as advanced as me even existed, their heads were going to be on the blocks. So they had my team eliminated, made it look like a Federation victory. But you know all that.

  “What I never told you was that in the process of going AWOL . . . well, I killed a few people. To get into the League systems, check out a bunch of data. Clear a way out for myself. In doing so, I found some reports on Tropez Station. Recruitment had shut it down a year earlier. It was too expensive, you see. They were winding back GI production and employment anyway, in preparation for the peace; there were too many of us. And now they had to save money, rehabilitating GIs is expensive, so they just shut it down. And all the patients there. It had become a recycling facility. Live, wounded GIs would come in one end, and spare parts would come out the other. So my buddy Jonti, a few others I k
new who’d gone there since . . .”

  She took a breath. Wiped her eye, and sipped her drink. Oh God, thought Vanessa, barely daring to breathe. She knew what came next. In some things, to her at least, her friend had become quite predictable.

  “Those recordings of Jonti were just sims, visual constructs. They’d studied his mannerisms, figures of speech, and the programs had put it together. Could have fooled his mother, if GIs had mothers. And I’d been sending messages to a guy who’d been dead a year.

  “I didn’t go straight to the Federation. I got out at a crazy station with twice the ship traffic it was designed to handle, whole waves of refugees coming through . . . I stole a limpet, hitched a jump on several big ships, then waited until I found one heading for one of the Tropez mining systems. I went to Tropez rehab station, of course. They let me in, thought I was something else—you know how good I do fake IDs. I got on board, and I cleaned the place out. Then I rigged their reactors to blow, and left. Fleet records here have a few mentions of a League facility lost at Tropez, cause unknown. That was me. I suppose we can update that intel now.”

  More silence. Vanessa could hear frogs croaking in the CSA compound gardens outside.

  “How many?” Ibrahim asked.

  “Oh they’d automated most of it by then,” Sandy said dismissively. “Just enough to keep up appearances in the lobby. Twenty-two, all Recruitment employees.” Another sip. “Plus about a hundred GI regs and a whole bunch of automated defences who were protecting the place. Put there in case a Federation raider tried to take them. Bad publicity that would be. But they weren’t expecting one little limpet ship with a four-crew capacity to be a threat.”

  “They used GIs to defend a GI slaughter house?” Chandrasekar asked incredulously.

  “Yeah, regs,” Sandy said drily. “They’re regs, they do what they’re told. They’ll shoot their own wounded if ordered, I’ve seen it. Sometimes they’ll shoot themselves.”