Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  “No one can help that,” Ibrahim replied. “Callay is what it is, and the moment we start regretting that is the moment we fail in our responsibilities.”

  Sandy nodded. “This means Chandi will still actually be working for you, after you so cruelly granted him his freedom?”

  “No,” Ibrahim said mildly. “Parallel means parallel, who is in charge will depend on whose jurisdiction it naturally falls into. Federal matters, I’m in command. Local, Chandi will be.”

  “And of course every case you have will be easy to divide like that,” said Sandy.

  “Yes.” With dry amusement. “I’m sure of it. The next matter—the war crimes prosecution are planning an appeal.”

  Her Honour had rejected the possibility of trial at the hearing, citing the dubious source of the evidence.

  Sandy nodded again. “Yes, I heard.”

  Ibrahim looked at her cautiously. “It could go on a long time. The appeal will be to a full bench this time, which has fewer time restrictions. It could take months.”

  “I know,” said Sandy. Ibrahim was worried for her emotional state. He needn’t have been; she was dealing with it quite well. Accusations of being a killer didn’t bother her as much as they once had. She was a killer. As were all soldiers, at least in potential. It was just a question of who, how and why. Here, on all three counts, she was comfortable she was in the right.

  “The political implications of this are quite severe,” Ibrahim continued. “We are under pressure on many fronts, and we’ve lost what little cooperation we once had with the League government.”

  “Killing their operatives will do that,” Sandy remarked. It had been Ibrahim’s order. The press knew nothing. They’d never known Paola Ortiz even existed. FSA and CSA had collaborated to make a cover story about a foreign temporary visa holder who had crashed into the river in a freak user-error accident—it happened occasionally, when smart people tried to override traffic net, usually for fun or a dare. In the FTL era, such personal details from other worlds would take months to check, and most news organisations hadn’t bothered. Those few that had would meet screw-ups at the other end from friendly security agencies doing the CSA some favours, and that would be the end of it. As far as Callay knew, neither Ortiz nor her assassination had ever existed.

  “Yes it will,” Ibrahim agreed. “But the Federation does actually have many ongoing arrangements with the League, including many ceasefire monitoring deals, humanitarian assistance arrangements, a small amount of trade, various joint research programs, exchange programs and the like.”

  “I know,” said Sandy, now a little frustrated Ibrahim was treating her like a kid. Everyone knew this stuff, why was he . . . ?

  “And those arrangements are now in jeopardy.” He folded his hands, and leaned on the table. “As such, I’m afraid we shall be forced to end all cooperative arrangements with the ISO on New Torah. The mission’s off, Cassandra. I’m sorry, but we have no choice.”

  “The fuck we don’t.” Her own language surprised her. So did her volume. “We’re just going to let them win? This is why they did it, why they gave Padma fucking Chaury and the SIB all that information on Tropez Station. They knew Mustafa was up to something with me and they wanted to stop it. And it’s why they sent Eternity before that, to put an end to Operation Patchup. So now you’re telling me that it worked? And we’re going to reward them for their cleverness?”

  “Yes,” said Ibrahim, gaze level and unblinking. “I realise the sensation must be quite foreign to you, Cassandra, but sometimes the other side wins. And sometimes, our side loses.”

  “We didn’t lose!” Sandy shouted. “You fucking quit!”

  Her vision was tracking now, all the way into infra-red. She hated it when this happened, when she got so angry she slid all the way into combat-reflex with no immediate threat of combat. This reflex confirmed every fear of every prejudiced anti-GI campaigner who insisted that she and her kind were not to be trusted. And the worst of it was that when she was like this, she didn’t completely trust herself.

  Ibrahim never blinked. Sometimes Sandy thought he had a combat reflex too, of sorts. “Cassandra, I realise that this is of some considerable personal importance to you. But understand that however much I sympathise, and share your concerns about New Torah . . .”

  “Stop giving speeches,” Sandy told him. “Just stop. I know you make impartial decisions. I know you as well as anyone.”

  “Not quite,” Ibrahim said quietly.

  “I know you’re the guy who’ll order ten people killed so you can save a hundred. I know you’ll let friends suffer to save other people you don’t like. I get it. You’re the impartial one, everyone’s equal before the eyes of Allah. But this time, you’re wrong.”

  “Right and wrong in this matter are not for us to decide,” said Ibrahim. “There are constraints. I recognise them. Apparently you do not.”

  “GIs are the center of this!” Sandy insisted. “Out there in the Torah Systems, some bunch of murderous lunatics are taking GI technology in directions that could restart a major war, or . . . or lead to Gods know what!”

  “At which point we must suppose that the League will be finally forced to deal with it themselves. We cannot police every crime, Cassandra. Not if it means the significant risk of destabilising the very peace with the League.”

  “What peace? The Federation fought to win! The League surrendered! Now they get to set the terms of peace?” Ibrahim said nothing. “Your problem is that you don’t know what my people are capable of . . .”

  “Your people?” Ibrahim interrupted, frowning.

  “Yes, my people! Artificial people, like me. There are directions in which that technology can be taken that could spell very bad news for all humanity, and I fear that that’s exactly what’s going on out in New Torah right now.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “No, but I work for a fucking intelligence agency, so you’d think I wouldn’t be the only person with an interest in finding out!”

  “We have assets we can access without having to get directly involved.” Ibrahim leaned forward further, very firmly. “Cassandra, I won’t allow it. That is the end of the matter.”

  “It’s not the end of the matter,” said Sandy. She took out her badge and guns, and put them on Ibrahim’s desk. “I quit. Now try and stop me.”

  Sandy went home. She knew she was furious, and that it was affecting her judgment. But that was not necessarily a bad thing. Emotions were not intrinsically bad or illogical. Someone who ran into a burning building to save people from the flames was acting under the influence of strong emotion, when it would be far more logical to stand outside and watch them burn.

  At home she did not bother gathering her things; she could not take so much as a backpack where she was going. She merely grabbed a few electronic essentials, raided her secret stash of storage chips, sunglasses and some hair dye, and left. She walked out of Canas District, feet being the form of transport the CSA would find hardest to trace without eyes-on surveillance. She’d already changed all her personal constructs to her third alternates, and would change them again soon. Her CSA personal contact links were still working. Ibrahim had made no immediate move to shut her out. She was not concerned either way.

  She got a taxi to a tube station, paid cash, then caught the maglev to Kochin District, for no other reason than there was a big shopping mall there, and she could lose herself in the crowd, uplinks working overtime on CSA surveillance frequencies in case she was being traced. Those also remained open, but if they were trailing her they’d use something completely unfamiliar to throw her off. She went into a cosmetics store, bought a makeup box, used the bathroom and snuck out the back way into a service corridor. Down back way stairs into the subway system, which ran shorter distances than the maglev, caught it for several stations to a park where she’d signalled a cruiser taxi to pick her up at a transition zone.

  That took her airbourne, as she finally managed
to propagate one of her best reserve IDs, paid for the taxi ride with it on a separate and equally fake credit line, then did the same at the high-rise hotel the taxi dropped her off at. That checked her into a room with a cool view, which was nice. She liked to have a place to sleep, and safe houses were overrated. She wasn’t wealthy enough to afford one, anyway. But this false ID should hold for tonight; she’d polish up another for tomorrow night somewhere else. She didn’t need some secret stash of stuff hidden somewhere—being what she was, and having the network skills she had, there was nothing she couldn’t acquire on short notice. Including weapons.

  First she showered, and dyed her hair black in the bathroom basin. Then she accessed another storage chip and entered a mental VR space with a huge, complex construct that glowed and pulsed now as she activated functions on the test grid. After half an hour of final checks, she contacted Anita on one of those very covert frequencies that private citizens weren’t even supposed to possess, given that it parasited off secure government networks.

  “Hi, ’Nita. You heard?”

  “’Course I heard. Vanessa has us all on alert in case you contact us. She’s worried about you, Sandy!”

  “I know. Tell her I’m fine and I’ll contact her soon, I promise.” That was another helpful fact—having so many friends within the CSA, including a few who could probably bring the entire Callayan security network down from the inside if they were angry enough, would limit anything Ibrahim or Chandi might do against her. But it also put her friends under considerable pressure, and their careers in some jeopardy, at least in the short term. Well, she’d deal with that, too. “Firstly I’d like you to look at this. It’s a VR linkup so it’ll take a few seconds to propagate.”

  “Of course, send away.” Sandy sent. “So you really quit the CSA and FSA? And Ibrahim accepted?”

  “He didn’t accept, but my passcodes are inactive and it looks like I’m temporarily suspended, at least. I walked out before we could discuss it further.”

  “Why wouldn’t he cut you off immediately? Doesn’t he know how dangerous you can be to CSA systems from the inside?”

  “No, he’s very clever,” Sandy replied, “and he knows me too well. He knows I’m more dangerous on the outside because then I’ll have nothing to lose. He knows I’ll never sabotage the CSA or FSA from the inside while I’m still technically a member.”

  “Wow, what happened?”

  “And he’ll know I won’t talk about that.”

  Anita’s VR function would be activating now. There was a pause as Anita accessed. Then . . . “Oh my God. Sandy? Did you make this? It’s beautiful!”

  “It’s a secure communications function for a TS-series net seeker. You know how you send them out but their com systems are vulnerable to infiltration and traceback, and then those new 21-8000s turn them into zombies and feed you bogus data . . .”

  “You solved the seeker suckers?” With amazement.

  “Well, not solved, but pretty much improved I think, for a TS-series anyway.” Anita had designed the TS-series seekers, in Sandy’s opinion easily the best available. She’d tinkered with them often. “Make a few tweaks if you like, but I think it should be profitable.”

  “Oh, hell yes!” Anita enthused. “Sandy, this could make you quite a bit of money.”

  “That is the idea, yes. I’m going to need it.”

  “And about time, too. Look, I’ll work up a licensing agreement to a false ID. That’s usually what we do with designers who want to stay outside the system. And I’m prepared to give you ninety percent revenue after Raj-Bhaj Systems takes care of testing and publicity . . .”

  “Oh, come on, Anita, the usual seventy percent will be fine, you’re not a charity . . .”

  “Ninety percent and that’s my final offer.”

  “And you did design the TS-series, I just built onto it.”

  “Ninety percent it is, then. We can pull an all-nighter for tests, make some calls . . . oh, man, the market’s just dying for something like this. People have come up with bits and pieces, but an integrated solution’s just eluded everyone so far, assuming it works like you say . . .”

  “It does. I’ve used it myself for a few months, done my own troubleshooting. They used to crash whenever they ran into any sort of multi-barrier matrix, but I solved that.”

  “Planning ahead?” Anita wondered slyly.

  “It occurred to me something like this might happen,” Sandy admitted.

  “Well, if it works like you say, we can release it in three days. You should have money within a week. Blank account, you can do with it what you want. Oh, and Ari’s looking for you, too.”

  Sandy smiled. “Tell him I’ll give him a thousand bucks if he can find me.”

  “Ari never really did it for the money.”

  “Tell him a blowjob, then. For old time’s sake.”

  Anita laughed. “Now, that he might be more interested in.”

  Weapons were easy. The irony was that though firearm ownership was strictly controlled, alloy-microprinter ownership was not, so there were plenty of workshops scattered through Tanusha that could knock up a good custom automatic in half an hour. Ditto, bullets. A basement chem lab could make good powder in no time, and micro-manufacturing had brought the construction of anything up to and including guided missiles and beyond into the realm of a teenager’s after school hobby. No one had yet managed to make a functioning H-bomb, but not for want of trying. Sandy had personally sat in on a briefing given to some civil liberties folks who’d complained about all the radiation sensors built into the Tanushan streetscape, saying that there were plenty of legitimate medical uses of low intensity radiation devices that the CSA had no business snooping into. They’d been shown several very close shaves the CSA had intercepted yet told no one about, and the civil liberties folks had left the room ashen-faced and silent. No more complaints about carpeting radiation scanners had been received.

  Sandy simply called a friend of Ari’s, a techie guy with a serious crush on her, and lots of potential convictions she’d known about for ages yet never charged him for because he was too useful. Two hours later he delivered her a pair of nine millimeter automatic pistols direct to her doorstep, as though she were ordering pizza. All it cost her was a few hundred bucks, and a kiss. Being single, and the guy kind of cute, she made it a good one.

  These even had basic interface, she noted as she sat on the bed and checked them out properly, and the six mags he’d brought her. She tried it out, then received an encrypted transmission from elsewhere. She opened, and found a VR link. Wrong format, too—this full-immersion stuff never worked on her. Whoever this was (and she thought she knew) wanted to meet her in a neutral net venue rather than talking directly, which was more traceable. But if it was who she thought it was, surely he’d know her limitations with VR, and share them?

  Curious, she pulled her booster from a jacket pocket, plugged in and inserted that socket into the back of her head. Fully reinforced, she lay back on the bed, closed her eyes and accessed.

  Full immersion; she could do that in code-space, but here it was attempting to resolve into shapes and colours. Her brain resisted, as it always did, breaking down the constructs into their component parts and codes.

  “Just relax,” came Mustafa’s voice. “Don’t fight it. I found it hard at first, too. But if you take a deep breath, and just focus on the far horizon . . .”

  She did that. Colours resolved more sharply, then textures. It was a big room. An amazing room, with huge columns. Very familiar architecture . . . except that beyond the columns was open air, and a city. She looked around as things resolved further. Almost lifelike. Almost like she was standing there for real. This looked like some kind of palace. Everything was ornamental, a polished, patterned floor, huge vases, gold trimmed furniture . . . and everything was old. Or old-styled; it actually looked quite new, like it had been made yesterday.

  From the city outside arose a constant hubbub, unfamiliar, odd. Voices,
and clanking noises. Hammers. Wheels on cobbles. Animals. Old noises. No modern machinery. In the palace there was nothing that looked like it ran on electricity. No panels, displays, controls, automated units. This was utterly pre-technological. And yet, wow! she thought, looking up at the huge columns. Look at this building. Amazing to think people had been able to build these extraordinary things in an age when electricity was still two thousand years away.

  She walked to a column and looked out at the city. She’d read enough history, and done enough basic sims, that she knew roughly where she was.

  “Ancient Rome,” she pronounced. “We’re somewhere downtown. Oh, wow, look at the detail. This is amazing.” The cityscape was cluttered, spectacular, unpredictable. Columns, pillars, temples. Distant neighbourhoods, fine houses, crowded hovels. “Oh, look, the coliseum is under construction. Maybe 75AD?”

  “Vespasian’s time,” said Mustafa behind her. “He gives bread and circuses to the masses.”

  Sandy looked at him. He appeared to her vision the same as always, leather jacket, jeans, comfortable shoes. Most GIs dressed similarly. “What,” she asked, “no toga?”

  “Have you ever seen a black man in a toga?”

  “I’m sure there must have been. Half the empire was African.”

  “North African,” Mustafa corrected, standing alongside, taking in the view. “But yes, I suppose there must have been senior black Romans. That colour-based racism actually got worse before it got better. Just like sexism probably got worse after Rome before it got better. I remember being astonished when I first learned that. I’d always assumed that history moved in straight lines . . . you know, things were bad, then they improved. But it doesn’t actually work that way.”

  “History moves in waves,” Sandy agreed. The sun was low, yellow behind clouds. It looked like summer, though she had no sensation of warmth. She could hear animals below, yet a deep sniff brought no smell. This VR, too, had its limits, though it was far better than anything she’d previously tried. “Callay’s actually got more strict gender rules than much of Earth a few hundred years ago. A lot of women just like these more traditional roles. They’re orderly, they give comfort.”