Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  “Buying time, I’d guess,” said Vanessa, as the armour’s leg seals hissed and clicked into place. “Assimilating that kind of data takes a little while. They had to package and encrypt it before they could shoot it off to where ever it went. So whatever it was, they valued it a lot.”

  “The clear pattern is anyone who knew anything about our activities on New Torah, even those peripherally connected.”

  Something occurred to Vanessa. “Shit, so they got Justice Rosa.”

  “We’re pretty sure. We’re reviewing him now, but it looks like he was in their web before he went to you. And had no idea what had happened to him, he thought he’d just been at a party, no memory at all.”

  “So they’ll know everything he knows about Sandy and New Torah.”

  “We’re not certain how good their technology’s recall is. We’ll have to study it now we’ve captured some, though they destroyed a lot before we could grab it. They might not have that much, and Justice didn’t know very much anyway.”

  “He knew that Sandy was ‘going away’ for a while, so they couldn’t continue their interviews. He’s not dumb, he knows what that means.” She wriggled into the torso harness, felt it tighten around her with a familiar, gripping embrace. “So we’re taking their Callayan access away from them?”

  “No choice; this is very nearly an act of war. We can’t set foot on the embassy grounds, but we can sure as hell cut it off. All of their personnel or League-associated people we’re collecting now. At least a few of them might try and escape, maybe shoot back. I’m not taking any chances.” Chandi spoke quickly off-mike—he’d be doing about five things at once at the moment, and briefing his SWAT Commander was just one of them. “Intel tells me you took out a GI.”

  “Yeah. She must have been one of the ones making that VR matrix work. Sandy’s only just discovered how good she is at that. It figures that the League would have known about it for a while longer.”

  “Intel found two more GIs at the hotel, both non-combat designations. They tell me the one you shot was very much a combat designation. A 39.”

  Vanessa blinked. She really shouldn’t be alive. Thirty nine was Rhian’s designation, and Rhian was deadly. Not as deadly as Sandy, but that was an unfair measure. “It’s the way they walk,” she explained. “Combat pre-tension. Their muscles tense up as combat reflex kicks in, I’ve seen it in Sandy and others. It changes their stride just a little, I got the jump on her.”

  “Yeah, well ‘getting the jump’ on a GI of that designation should only give you point zero five of a second head start, which for most people will not be enough. Given you’re still here and she’s not, I think you did a bit more than just ‘get the jump’ on her. I think you may have just made human augmentation history.”

  He disconnected. Crap, thought Vanessa. That made her sound like a lab rat. Which was always going to happen, she supposed further, as soon as she’d made the decision to get the latest upgrades done. And it sure beat being dead.

  She got her arms in, then mated the two armour halves together with a hard seal, and suddenly the deadweight suit sprang to life. Power cells hummed and artificial muscles flexed and sprung. She left the helmet on its hook at the back of her collar, and strode up the narrow aisle between armoured soldiers to her command chair at the front.

  There she took command from Arvid, and set the various airbourne units into wide holding patterns over various parts of the city, heavily armed backup for ongoing operations on the ground. Calls came in quickly enough. Cops chased one running suspect into a tall building and given that the target was suspected spec-ops and high value, asked for support. Vanessa put SWAT Eleven down on the building rooftop to trap him.

  Some more high-risk targets made rendezvous in a park. She sent in one of the combat flyers to get a heavy weapons lock on them. They surrendered to local police, with expressions that suggested they thought such tactics were a little unfair. Barely an hour into the operation, three quarters of all targets were accounted for. Vanessa thought back to seven years ago, when Sandy had first arrived on Callay and all this mess had started, and tried to imagine any security task this complicated being done in so little time with no casualties so far. It was unimaginable.

  The League Ambassador tried to go on local news nets to protest this action by the heavy handed CSA and FSA, but the feed mysteriously cut out before he could get to the good bit where he’d start threatening League-Federation relations with “instability.” News nets protested to Chandrasekar directly, asking if the CSA had cut the League Ambassador off, and if so, what had happened to free speech? Chandrasekar issued a statement through a spokesperson replying that the League Embassy was implicated in large scale security violation in Ahimsa Hotel, which had been broken up by CSA Agents with a number of casualties (which the media already knew), and that CSA policy was to disallow any figures actively involved in the violation of Callayan security from making public statements that would do no more than further their cause.

  Vanessa thought it was quite well played, and listened a little to the media back and forth as they circled into the Tanushan evening. They monitored the apprehension of the remaining League citizens and subjects of interest across the city. Some media commentators wondered if this meant the war was back on. More sensible folks said that was stupid, and wondered what the hell the League had been doing at the Ahimsa Hotel that had led to a shootout. Thankfully, they had little evident clue of the answer.

  In the early evening they landed at a public flyer port atop a mid-level tower for refueling. She let her troops out to stretch their legs—it got deadly boring after a while, sitting in the rear in full armour, watching visor displays and not actually doing anything. Such was the lot of a SWAT grunt. Sometimes you got to go in, and sometimes you didn’t.

  Rhian called. “They’re after Sandy, aren’t they? They’re trying to find out where she is.”

  Vanessa stood on the landing platform beside the flyer’s rear ramp, as engines whined and refueling pumps hummed. Before her, the lights of Tanusha glowed in their millions against the gathering dark, as the flyer’s landing lights strobed the pad orange. “Oh, I think they know where she is. They want to know what she’s doing, and probably what Mustafa’s doing to help her.”

  “I notice none of our targets are ISO.”

  “Yeah. That ought to make relations between League government and ISO even worse.”

  “Vanessa, what if the League intervene in New Torah themselves? I mean, not to stop the New Torah administration, just to stop the ISO and Sandy?”

  Vanessa gazed across the cityscape horizon. Techs manning the fuel pumps gesticulated to each other above the noise. “Let’s find out what they know first. Then we’ll start worrying.”

  “What if they know a lot?” Rhian sounded worried already. Rhian was usually so optimistic, it wasn’t like her. “I mean, if Sandy’s about to get trapped out there . . . what do we do?”

  “I don’t know, Rhi.” Vanessa forced herself to calm. “Like I said, let’s wait and find out what we can find out first, okay?”

  She knew damn well what she’d do. But doing so was going to make a real mess.

  “Okay,” Rhian said quietly. As far as she’d come as a person, Rhian would never be a commander. In some things, she’d always need to be told what to do. Thankfully, her judgment in who she’d listen to was pretty good. “I heard you got a high-designation GI just now.”

  “Yeah. Your designation, actually.”

  “Now yours, too,” said Rhian, with a faint smile in her voice, and disconnected. And left Vanessa, slightly stunned, to ponder that.

  Danya awoke, and peered through the hole in the wall. Dim sunlight, a yellow glow. Still, it was very cold. He took a breath from his puffer.

  “Svet.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Svetochka. Wake up, it’s morning.” She complained, as she always did, and burrowed more deeply into the coat she used as a pillow.

  On Danya’s other side, little
Kiril was already awake, sitting up without complaint and taking his puffer in both gloved hands. Danya stretched, and adjusted his woolen cap. It had slipped up on one side during the night, and his ear was numb with cold. There was no heating in their little hidey, just room on the floor for three, with holes in walls that let in the chill. He’d tried to plug them, but any material good for plugging was good for bedding and blankets too, and better used for that. Within their little nest, three bodies lying close could keep warm enough, even on Droze nights.

  Danya reached into his side of the nest, pulling out his coat and struggling into it. That movement upset the big cover over smaller blankets, and Svetlana complained as the cold got in. Danya slipped out of the covers entirely and pulled on his heavy pants over the light leggings. A fresh pair of socks, because the old ones were becoming truly ripe. He could get their stuff cleaned, but it cost coin he’d rather spend on food. Sometimes Henrietta who worked at the laundromat would smuggle a bag of their bad clothes in and wash them for a trade. Trade got you more than coin did, lately. Danya was good at trade. He’d had to be.

  He crawled over his sister and cracked the door a little. Never a lot—with the UAVs around, it was never smart to make a lot of movement on the upper floors. He peered out. This was the fifth and top floor of what had been an office building. Beyond the hidey, the floor was scorched and blackened. That had happened during the crash. No one really knew why this building had been targetted, and anyone who’d witnessed it was likely dead in the witnessing. Anything of value was long ago taken, all that remained were bits of charred and melted furniture, even the walls stripped of wiring, surviving panes of glass and fittings. An outer wall and much of the ceiling were entirely missing, exposed to the yellow morning sky.

  Beyond that, Rimtown, a frontier sprawl of low-rise buildings along gridwork streets, smudged with ever-present dust. In the distance, the corporate zones, clusters of high-rise buildings, unreachable behind their defensive walls. From outside came morning noise, generators whining, a few vehicles. The water crier, trundling his barrow. The snorts of luozi, hauling loads.

  The need to use the bathroom finally got Svetlana up, as the only working facility was downstairs, and she hated to pee in a bucket. Danya made certain Kiril had his scarf, gloves and goggles, because the pirate frequency last night had said it would storm today. Svetlana double-checked him, because Kiril was forgetful, and they went down the short hall to the stairwell, where Danya took the big padlock off the door.

  They descended the echoing concrete stairwell together. Danya was always cautious doing that, and insisted Svetlana and Kiril should not do it without him. They were not the building’s only tenants, and some of those below them, who also used the stairwell, made him nervous. He had a big knife in his coat pocket and knew how to use it. Sometimes he thought of upgrading it to a gun, but the corporations’ penalty for NCPs carrying guns was death. That didn’t stop lots of folks from doing it, but then, lots of folks ended up dead, while he and his siblings were still alive. Danya’s sole mission in life was to keep things that way.

  Downstairs had once been a floor of offices like all the others. Now it was a tavern of sorts, all the partitions cleared out leaving only open space and ceiling supports, like an empty shell. Against one wall was a bar and behind that, the kitchen, adjoining Treska’s office. Opposite that was storage, boxes and trunks and spare junk, all Treska’s stuff. Generator engines and fuel, the place always smelled of fumes. Elsewhere about the floor were trestles and tables for patrons, a small stage that could be used for music, and some pool tables.

  Danya tried the switch and the lights came up. “Power’s on!” he told the other two. It was always good to start the day with good news. “Svet, you can make us some coffee, the machine will be working.”

  “I don’t like that coffee,” Svetlana complained, leading Kiril to the rear bathroom, behind Treska’s office. “It smells of juno piss.”

  “That’s probably because some juno pissed in it,” Danya explained.

  “Ew!” said Svetlana.

  “Yuck!” added Kiril, cheerfully.

  Danya set about making up the tables, pulling table cloths from their trunk by the wall, and cutlery from the box beside it. Treska kept their rent low and let them have breakfast if they set up every morning. Treska lived on the floor above, where it was rumoured he used banned communications to do business. Danya didn’t ask what, though he could guess.

  He was making up some tables near the front door when he noticed one of the locks securing the big steel shutter across a window was broken. He froze. The shutters were heavily secured; breaking one wasn’t easy. Had it been opened from the inside? But how could it have been, when anyone sleeping inside could have just left through the door?

  He heard the bathroom flush for a second time. Svetlana was already in the kitchen, clashing pots and pans. Danya examined the big, heavy window shutter. It was open, all right, the locks sheared right off. Had it been open like that all night? That was an unpleasant thought. There were some things out in the night you didn’t leave a window open for.

  “Danya!” It was Svetlana’s voice, shocked and frightened. His heart stopped, and he spun. Svetlana stood in the kitchen door, frozen, staring at something behind the bar. “Danya, there’s someone in here!”

  Danya ran, hands fumbling for the knife in his coat. Around the edge of the bar he saw her—a blonde woman, lying as though unconscious on the floor.

  “Is she dead?” asked Svetlana, hopefully. Dead people were a nuisance that could be disposed of. The live ones could be trouble.

  “I don’t know,” said Danya, warily. “I don’t want to check, she might be a GI.”

  Svetlana’s eyes widened, and she backed up a step. “A GI, really? Why?”

  “The front shutter’s been broken. It looks like someone just forced it open.”

  “Is that a GI?” came Kiril’s voice from the kitchen. He peered past his sister in the doorway. “Is she alive, Danya?”

  “I don’t know, Kiri.” Danya crouched just short of her feet, peering to try and get a better look. She wore a heavy black coat, which made it hard to see if she was breathing. He thought hard. A GI could be trouble. There was no telling whose side she’d be on, or who she worked for. Though she could be a privateer. That would be even worse—the companies took a hard line with privateers. “I have to tell Treska.”

  “No, Danya, don’t leave us here with the GI!” Svetlana protested. “I’ll go and tell Treska!”

  Danya shook his head firmly. “I’ve told you, Svet, I don’t like you alone with him.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she retorted, “better Treska than a GI!”

  “I don’t even know if she is a GI. She might just be augmented, that could be enough to break the shutter.” There was blood on her clothes, he saw. Whether or not it was hers, there was no way to tell.

  “I’m not scared of GIs,” said Kiril.

  “Kiri,” Danya warned, “you listen to me. They’re not all friendly like Gunter, do you hear me? Some of them work for the companies, and they’re very dangerous. You stay well away from them, understand?” Kiril nodded, gazing at the unconscious woman. “Now, I’m going to go and get Treska. If she wakes up, be very polite and stay out of her way. She won’t hurt you if you don’t give her any reason to, okay? GIs don’t hurt people for no reason. But don’t you go near her, or you might give her a reason, understand?”

  Danya left for the stairs. He couldn’t check for a pulse, anyway, because GIs didn’t have a jugular vein, everyone knew that. He really didn’t want to leave Svetlana and Kiril alone with the maybe-GI. But also, he didn’t want to be slow to tell Treska, and make Treska upset. If Treska got upset with them, they’d have no place to sleep, and no breakfasts.

  He climbed the stairs back up to the first floor. Treska’s door was sealed with steel hinges, with an electronic peep hole in the middle. Danya hit the doorbell. That would make a noise inside the apartment
, though Danya couldn’t hear it. He waited. There was no telling if he’d been heard or not, and no way of hearing if someone was coming. He hit the doorbell again. Sometimes he thought Treska had set it up like this just to be disconcerting. It worked.

  After what he figured was a fair time waiting, he turned and went back down the stairs. Treska could hardly claim he hadn’t tried to tell him. Down in the tavern he could see Svetlana hustling over a stove, through windows in the kitchen’s prefab walls that closed it off from the rest of the floor. And behind the open bar . . . his heart nearly stopped for a second time. Little Kiril was helping the blonde woman to sit on several storage kegs behind the bar.

  He couldn’t yell—a sudden noise might scare her, and if she was a GI, he couldn’t scare her. He walked forward, hands balled to fists, willing himself to calm. The woman was awake, though moving very gingerly. She was having trouble standing on her own.

  “Kiri,” he said in measured tones, and leaned on the bar. “I think you should move away from there.”

  The woman slumped back against the wall, head lolled, and looked at him. Pale blue eyes, shortish hair, all messed up. Beautiful, if she didn’t look so awful.

  “She’s okay, Danya,” said Kiril, supporting her to make sure she didn’t slide over. “I think she’s sick.”

  The woman seemed to note Danya’s alarm. Her hand on Kiril’s shoulder lifted, a pronounced gesture. Almost an apology. She seemed to have difficulty breathing.

  Svetlana emerged from the kitchen with a glass of water. Danya glared at her—she should have been watching Kiril. Svetlana made a snotty mimicry of his glare and handed the woman the glass. Her hand shook. Kiril moved to try to help her drink it.

  “Kiril!” Danya commanded, and he stopped, looking confused. Kiril was such a nice boy, he thought everyone might be his friend. Danya worried about him constantly.