Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  Suddenly someone was beside him, wet blonde hair and lean, bare arms.

  “Hang on,” Sandy told him, with undisguised amusement. “Just get on board and kick, watch out for my feet.” She grabbed his board’s nose one-handed, and kicked and paddled hard. There shouldn’t have been enough leverage, but her feet were truly thrashing now, with power that Ari was pretty sure would break his arm if he stuck it in. Watch out for the feet indeed. Soon they were really moving. He only got dumped three more times, and was rewarded each time by her laughing at him.

  Finally they were out past the break, him gasping for air as he sat up. “Well I guess I deserve that,” he wheezed, and coughed.

  “And far more.” But she was smiling. Makeup and fancy clothes looked great on some girls, but Sandy looked best like this—natural, hair wet, eyes alive. It was summer, the ocean currents too warm for wetsuits, so she wore boardshorts and surfer’s top—a rashie, he remembered some called them, Australian slang like a lot of sporting terms. Ari thought she looked pretty damn good in more traditional swimwear too, but in this kind of surf, they’d get torn off.

  “You’re a dill,” she told him. That was Australian for idiot. “It’s a fairly big day today, and you’ve never even sat on a board.”

  “Yeah, well, I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Looks good on you though,” she added, as he wobbled a little on his board. He rode far higher in the water than her, his longboard buoyant, her short board submerged.

  “Why aren’t you working?” he asked.

  “Who says I’m not?” She nodded toward the shore. Ari looked, and saw a strong black man powering toward them on a short board. Every undergrounder who was anyone knew Mustafa Ramoja on sight. For a lot of them, he was an even bigger hero than Sandy, whom some considered a sellout for having abandoned the League.

  “Ah,” said Ari. “Hello Mustafa!”

  “Hello Ari,” said Mustafa, smiling. “How was Pyeongwha?”

  “Wonderful. Real garden spot.” He caught Mustafa’s glance at Sandy. “Oh, did I intrude on something? Excellent.” He waited, all ears.

  “Your news first,” said Mustafa.

  “You wouldn’t find my news interesting.”

  “I am an intelligence agent. I assure you I would.”

  “Ari,” said Sandy, “Mustafa’s currently at odds with the League government. The whole ISO is.” Ari raised his eyebrows at her. Then at Mustafa. Mustafa sighed, as though not particularly happy she’d said that. “If you wanted to talk to me about NCT, Mustafa might actually be able to help.”

  She gave the other GI a long, hard look. Ari frowned, looking from one to the other. What was going on?

  He decided to take a chance. “Well, look, this is not the place to go into detail, with my head full of salt water. It’s just that . . . well, I think Pyeongwha NCT is based upon one of the previously unused GI development methods. Brain development. Which means that if New Torah is reactivating some of that tech like we think, it could be real trouble.”

  Neither GI replied. They bobbed in the swell, and the cool breeze felt a nice contrast to the warm sun. Houses perched on a nearby rocky bluff. Flickwings circled, reptilian birds, searching for fish. It was really nice out here, Ari decided. This part of surfing he liked. It was just the paddling, the waves and the . . . well, the surfing, that he loathed.

  “He’s useful,” Sandy insisted to Mustafa. Mustafa looked dubious.

  “Useful for what?” Ari ventured. Between these two, the insecurity was back—they were both so beautiful, effortless and smart. Why would Sandy want to be saddled with a regular human like him anyway, when she could have men like this?

  “Mustafa has a plan,” said Sandy. Mustafa did not silence her. “Or rather, the ISO has a plan. For intervening in New Torah.”

  Ari blinked at her. “Against the wishes of the League government?”

  Sandy nodded. “Yes.”

  “And involving Federation Intelligence assets? The FSA?”

  “And CSA, yes.”

  “Why? Why not do it themselves?”

  Sandy smiled at Mustafa. Mustafa scowled. “Because the Federation currently has more high-designation GIs trained for this sort of irregular operation than the League does,” she said cheerfully. It was pretty funny, Ari had to concede. “And if this is going to work, they’re going to need us.”

  “A blind drop?” Ari said dubiously.

  They sat on temple steps as the waves crashed upon the shoreline, and ate fish and chips from a nearby vendor. Flickwings swooped and squealed across the sand as the sun set behind them, and the sky faded to a dark turquoise. A few people strolled or jogged, or came up the stairs to attend evening prayers within the temple. Within, between rowed pillars, priests led a sonorous drone of song and chiming bells, and flame torches flickered.

  “We need reconnaissance,” said Mustafa. Several women coming up the steps gave him long looks. Ari was comfortable enough without a shirt, but reckoned that if he were built like Mustafa, he’d find excuses to take it off more often. “We can’t do anything without it.”

  “You’re telling me that after . . . what is it, a hundred and twenty years of settlement, the ISO has no intelligence assets left in the Torah systems?”

  “On the outer systems, yes,” said Mustafa, about a mouthful of fish. “On Pantala, not really. Nothing useful.”

  “And how is that?”

  Pantala was the Torah Systems’ only heavily inhabited world, though even that population was sparse. It was the central base of Torahn economics and government, where all the major corporations were based. Its capital city was Droze.

  “The corporations control the Pantalan infrastructure,” said Mustafa. “That’s what we need intel on. Corporate loyalties are strong. If you’re not in a corporation, you’re just a settler. Their lives are cheap, and they’ve no access to anything. Those assets we did have amongst them were few, and mostly eliminated.”

  “But you can’t just infiltrate a corporation with outsiders,” said Ari.

  “No.”

  “So you’ll have to infiltrate the settlers, and infiltrate them with someone capable of bridging that gap between settler and corporation. Someone with expertise in infiltrating hard targets.”

  They both looked at Sandy. Sandy half-shrugged, enjoying the fish. It was charcoal-grilled and delicious. Sandy loved a good meal. Or a good concert, or a nice sunset. Anything sensory and stimulating. Her brain processed enormous volumes of sensory information. It had been a combat design function, surely none of her designers had imagined it would be the making of a hedonist.

  “How many others?” Ari asked, feeling worried.

  “Undecided,” said Mustafa. “Quite a few. Myself, obviously.”

  “Obviously. What objective?”

  “To see if there’s some way of bringing it down from the inside,” said Mustafa. “To see exactly what they’re up to, and what the threat is. Autocratic institutions are inherently unstable, as you found on Pyeongwha. Often it is just a question of leverage.”

  “I’ll go,” said Ari.

  “No,” Sandy said firmly.

  “I’m a good sneak,” Ari insisted, “you saw what I did on Pyeongwha, and network capabilities don’t get much better than mine . . .”

  “I know, but no,” said Sandy. “This isn’t a free information environment Ari, there aren’t these masses of civilian traffic you can hide in. This is a spartan, authoritarian system, most of the sneaking will be physical, and anyone doing the sneaking must absolutely be combat specialist enough to survive any encounters.”

  “This is a very harsh environment,” Mustafa agreed. “The corporations use everything from UAVs, AMAPS and GIs to suppress dissent. At present we think it’ll be a GI-only operation, ISO and FSA.”

  “Well then, I want to help in the setup,” said Ari. “I have background in this stuff.”

  “Excellent,” said Mustafa. “Welcome aboard.”

  “And Ibrahim’
s on board?”

  “Cautiously, yes,” Sandy affirmed.

  Ari looked at her more closely. “Wait, you mean it’ll be deniable?”

  “No other choice.”

  “Oh, damn.” Ari felt really unsettled now.

  “I’d have thought that an obvious reality,” said Mustafa, “things being as they are, politically speaking.”

  “Ari doesn’t like governments sneaking around,” Sandy explained. “It makes him paranoid.”

  “It’s a little known fact,” Ari offered, “but a guard with a spear was manning a wall in ancient Greece, and someone asked him, ‘how do you feel,’ and he said ‘paranoid,’ just before a black-clad commando sent by a nearby island’s government snuck up behind and stuck a knife in his throat, and that’s where the word paranoid comes from.”

  “You’re right,” said Sandy. “That is a little known fact, especially from a man who doesn’t know ancient Greece from modern New Zealand.”

  “That’s what we pedants call missing the point.”

  “I’m unsocialised,” said Sandy, selecting a chip. “You know I never get the point.”

  “And once you heroic types have done the reconnaissance,” Ari pressed. “What then?”

  “There are internal forces within New Torah that can be manipulated,” said Mustafa. “It’s not a monolithic regime, it’s fragmented.”

  “You say that like it’s a weakness,” Ari warned. “Fragmentation has been the core organising philosophy of all human civilisation since the beginning of infotech. There are mathematicians and biologists who’ll tell you it’s at the heart of evolutionary progression itself.”

  “I’ve read all the sociological convergence theories, yes,” said Mustafa. “But the fact remains that a fragmentary system gives us a way in, in the way that a monolithic system does not. You had to break down Pyeongwha from the outside. In New Torah we’re looking for ways to break it down from the inside.”

  “And if you can’t?”

  “We’ll find evidence of the threat they possess, assuming they do, and convince my government of the need for action.” He gazed at the ocean horizon, and the gathering dark. “We still possess that much capability, at least, to deal with a few rogue systems.”

  His words were sour. No doubt it hurt, to see the grand ideals of League science, reason and progress fall so low. The League had always possessed a technological edge, but it had not been sufficient to win the war. Technology hadn’t made as much impact on space warfare as League scientists had theorised; those physics were hard to bend, and when the Federation put its mind to it, it caught up fast. From there, sheer industrial scale had told a predictable tale in the end.

  “I still don’t understand why the League can’t do it themselves,” said Ari.

  “It’s shame,” Mustafa replied. “Our leaders said they’d win the war, and failed. They said synthetic humanity was a wonderful evolution of the human species and no ill would come of it, only to be embarrassed by Cassandra here, and others like her, defecting to the Federation. She’s very big news in the League, you know. There’s quite a backlash in the general public against those who led the war.”

  “The loyalists don’t like me,” Sandy murmured.

  “But the loyalists lost their credibility when they lost the war,” said Mustafa. “The last thing the League public wants now is another war. And the new leaders don’t want to reveal just how horrible things got on New Torah after they pulled out. They’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Sounds like they’ve got enough violence under their noses without worrying about Torah,” said Sandy. “What’s happening on Calico right now? That sounds like major civil disturbance, not just a few poor social indicators.”

  Mustafa sighed, and scratched his head.

  “To be expected in the aftermath of any major social dislocation,” said Ari. “The war qualifies. Same through all human history.”

  “Can’t talk about it?” Sandy pressed Mustafa further.

  Mustafa shrugged. “Don’t want to. Too depressing.”

  “What did happen on Pantala?” Ari asked, with a very level stare. “Most of what we hear is bullshit. I’ve heard twenty different versions of the same things. But the ISO knows, don’t they? They just don’t want to talk about it, either.”

  “Aren’t allowed to talk about it,” Mustafa corrected grimly. Several priests came up the sand from the water, carrying surfboards. They wore boardshorts, only identifiable as priests due to their dreadlocks or shaved heads, and a few tattoos. There wasn’t supposed to be development right on the beach, but no one had protested a few temples, and this order of Shiva had claimed surfing as a necessary part of worship, a sacred union with the elements. Now that it was built, no one complained. It was low-key and beautiful, made of old stone that looked like it had been growing out of the dunes for centuries, and the priests led all the local efforts to keep the beaches clean.

  “The main part of the narrative the commentators get wrong is that the corporations probably aren’t to blame,” Mustafa continued. He tossed a nearby flickwing a last chip. It snarled and leaped, and attracted thirty others, a flurry of leathery wings. “They controlled all the infrastructure on Pantala. The whole world is a company town, there was nothing else there until big industry moved in. Pantala has the most perfect combination of about thirty main elements used in high tech weaponry. They were pulling it out of the ground cheaply and moving all the weapons industries there—the profits were bigger. The rest of the population came later, and set up cities around the main industrial sites. But there’s almost no water on Pantala, and the corporations were the only ones with the capability to ship it down from the poles, so they did that, and it was expensive, but profits were large and no one minded. Then every citizen who lives there needs constant micro-upgrades to deal with the atmosphere, radiation, some nasty local viruses, so the corporations paid for those, too. Living on Pantala was expensive, but no one noticed until the war ended and everything collapsed.

  “And all the Torah Systems are just so far away from main League space. Space haulage is expensive, and those industries just didn’t make any other products that were still competitive when the freight costs were added. The whole place was only made profitable by war. In the free market they had nothing to sell, and the main industries lost all income all at once.”

  “That was a nasty decision,” said Ari, nodding. “Lots of weapons tech is transferable. Those industries could have made a transition to something else if the League hadn’t just cut off all funding.”

  Mustafa shrugged. “We were broke, and we’d just lost a war. Everything was smashed, we had to rebuild priority systems first, and Torah was never priority anything. We cut our losses. But you’re right, there should have been more warning. We’d become so good at ignoring reality, and New Torah was so far away, they just kept thinking wishfully until it hit them.

  “All the wealthy folk got out first. All the corporate connections. That created a lot of resentment. There weren’t anywhere near enough ships. People don’t really think about what it means to be isolated on some of these outer systems. They think they can just get a berth on the next ship back; it doesn’t occur to them that if everyone wants to leave at once, there’s capacity to move maybe one percent of them, if that. Those berths go to the best connected, that’s just how it works.

  “Suddenly the weapons contracts are cancelled and the industries have no money, everyone’s laid off. Economic collapse. No one panicks immediately, they’re not uncivilised. Right they say, let’s do this rationally. What do we need? We need water. Water comes from polar ice, shipped to lower latitudes at great expense. Who pays for it now that there’s no money? Well, the corporations are the only ones with the capacity to make shipments. Who pays them, now that they’re broke?”

  “Credit from the parent company,” said Ari.

  “Who’s just also gone broke,” Mustafa countered. “Torah employees counted for just a few percent
of their total workers, they’ve desperate people everywhere. Torah settlers knew the risks when they settled there, didn’t get out despite the warnings. Very expensive to keep them on permanent credit when there’s so little prospect they’ll ever get that money back. Only in a true crisis do all the folks who complain about corporate profits realise that corporate profits are actually life and death.”

  “Damn,” said Ari. “Can’t use the debt markets. Markets need buyers and sellers, who would buy Torah debt?”

  “It’s worthless,” Mustafa agreed. “League government aid was the only possibility. But again, we had desperate people everywhere, starvation on quite a few worlds, and each person in New Torah costs four times more money to keep alive than the average. How do you justify that to those dying under your nose?”

  “Could have taken Federation government aid,” Sandy said grimly. “They’d have done it.”

  Mustafa gave a humourless laugh. “If the war demonstrated anything, it was that League pride was worth at least a few million League lives.” It was possibly the least patriotic thing Ari could ever recall hearing Mustafa say. “Anyhow, on Pantala, the local administration tells the companies that capitalism doesn’t work any longer, we’ll have to centralise everything under government control.”

  “Bet that went down well,” said Ari.

  “But that’s the thing,” said Mustafa. “The corporations agreed. They couldn’t do anything else, they were all stuck in that mess together, and they wanted to survive, and for their families to survive, just like everyone else. Certainly, centralise the system, it’s an emergency situation, everyone has to pull together. But they’d still need to maintain all their own people in senior positions, because reasonably enough, their people were the ones who knew how everything worked—medical augments, water, power, everything. And a lot of scared and resentful non-corporates found that disagreeable.

  “So they rioted, to take control for the people. Some used big weapons—plenty of those around, the world’s an armament factory. Lots of corporates were murdered, families slaughtered, facilities not just taken over, but some of them even destroyed . . . which on a world like Pantala is like stationers destroying their own life support. So frightened corporates fought back, with even bigger weapons. That just turned into a full-on slaughter, we still don’t know the exact figures, but our best guess is that it lasted a month and that ten percent of the population died. Pantala was at nearly five million even after the evacuations, so that’s half a million people.”