Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  “Not the regs. Regs don’t have friends.”

  “And most of them are working for the companies. The companies don’t like GIs with loyalties.” He wasn’t working as hard as he should be, he was too distracted. But they weren’t paid by the hour, only by the value of the junk that they salvaged.

  Svetlana dug out some wiring, disconnected a chip, and tossed both in a salvage tray. “I’m going to talk to Pedro.”

  “Why?”

  “He works in stores,” she reasoned. “He’ll know if the Tings have bipofalzin. I bet they do, Gunter’s the most valuable thing they have.”

  “The Tings don’t own Gunter, Svet, he works here ’cause he chooses to.”

  “Same thing.”

  “And how would the Tings have bipofalzin if Gunter doesn’t know himself?”

  Svetlana rolled her eyes. “Danya,” she complained, “how will we ever know if we don’t ask? Pedro will know, he likes me. And seriously, if you were the Tings, and you employed Gunter, would you tell him everything? I mean, what if they’ve got drugs that kill GIs as well as drugs that fix them? Would you want Gunter to know that too?”

  Danya thought about it. Sometimes, he reflected, Svetlana made a lot of sense. But only sometimes. “You be careful with Pedro, Svet. He may like you, but he likes his job more.”

  Svetlana made a face. “You worry about getting the D-chips out of that vacuum bot, I’ll worry about Pedro.”

  Sandy awoke. She felt horrible. Well, she supposed, that made sense, given that she was dying.

  She tried to recall where she was. Droze, on Pantala; her memory wasn’t that far gone. But the details were hazy. Time, place, the sequence of events, all overlapped in her head. Breathing was hard, and her limbs ached. She should open her eyes, she supposed. Not yet. Try to remember, where were her friends?

  Dead, she was fairly sure. Han, Khan, Weller, Ogun, Poole. Aristide’s had been a safe location, supposedly. An ISO plant in Mid-East. The ISO had others, isolated, not knowing each other’s names or locations. But Aristide was an ISO agent, fully trained and bred, horrified by what had happened to Droze since the crash. Surely he hadn’t turned for money or threats, not to the corporations he despised. So, how?

  It had come in through the air conditioning, a strange mist. Sandy had secured that, three times over . . . someone had to have betrayed them to get synthetic nerve toxin into the aircon while they slept. Even then, she’d woken fast, alerted the others . . . but then the attack, and it had all been so fast, the perimeter already breached, the alarms silent, their reflexes slowed just a little by inhaling the pervasive mist. GIs. She remembered targets flashing, explosions, professional assault tactics, deadly fast and high-designation. Hard to fight with your head swimming, the attackers all wore breathers. Still she’d killed a bunch, she couldn’t remember how many, but she’d been hit too, a few bullets, a few tranq rounds. They hadn’t been trying to kill her, only capture. But Khan she’d seen dead, a horrid, messy memory . . . Weller, too. They’d known who she was. They’d known where she slept. They’d been non-lethal against her, even knowing how hard she was to take down with any method. Why?

  Too many thoughts. Bad ones. She opened her eyes, and her vision was a blur. Tranq relaxed the muscles, even in her eyes. Vision focus became difficult. But her hearing remained.

  Men were talking. How was that possible? She was in the kids’ hidey on the top floor, and there had been no one else there. Only, the light here was different, dimmer, artificial. The kids’ hidey had holes in the walls that let in natural sunlight. Had she been moved while unconscious?

  Footsteps across the floor. Moving past, not toward. Then a new voice to the conversation—someone else had arrived. Exclamations of amusement, incredulity.

  “ . . . so they don’t know I have the ground floor monitored, right?” a male voice was explaining. “So I’m listening in, and the boy comes up to knock on my door, but I pretend I’m still asleep or not here or something, I want to listen. And the girl says she’s a GI. Federation, can you believe that?”

  “Oh, perfect,” said another. “I mean, no one will miss her.”

  “Exactly!” said the first man. “If she were some corporate skinjob, they’d send folks to look for her—I mean, those things are valuable. But the fucking Federation’s got sand in their heads if they think they can do covert ops on Pantala. They wouldn’t survive a week.”

  Well he was nearly right about that, Sandy thought tiredly. They’d been just short of three weeks downworld, after a month in-system but offworld, preparing.

  “Anyhow,” the first man resumed, “she said she needed bipofalzin or she’d die. So I called around, found a batch and injected her.” Sandy took a moment to process that. She was going to live? “Had to get a special industrial needle, fucking impossible to get the thing in otherwise. Gave her a shot of some alfadox too . . . Gomez gave me the formula, right here. You get the proportions right, keep the bipofalzin to minimum while countering with the alfadox, you can keep her in a zombie state for weeks. Months maybe.”

  Sandy exhaled with difficulty. She could have guessed it wasn’t going to be that easy. She tried to move, and her muscles just wouldn’t cooperate. Alfadox was another form of tranquilizer, close to what the CSA had dosed her with upon her first arrival on Callay seven years ago. It kept her muscles from consolidating beyond the critical mass required to break out of basic restraints. Alfadox was a slightly more aggressive version, dangerous if misused by even a small margin. If she’d been injected with that, plus the remnants of the original lethal tranq, then bipofalzin or not, it was no wonder she felt like shit.

  “So come and look, come and look,” the man continued, all enthusiasm. Footsteps approached. “I mean, think what you like about skinjobs, there’s some damn fine engineering that goes into making the girls hot. And this one’s pretty damn nice, if you like the athletic look.”

  Footsteps came right over. Then someone was grabbing her face, turning her head, like a farmer examining some livestock. She couldn’t see much more than a blur, but she could smell his breath, and it was stale.

  “Nice,” he said. One of the other two men . . . or she thought there were two, three in total. “Real fucking nice.” His hands moved down, pulling up her shirt. And doing other things. Sandy was half-relieved she couldn’t feel very much, the tranq doing strange things to the sensation of contact on skin. It felt like it was someone else’s body, that she was only borrowing it for a while. “Yeah, she’s not real skinny, is she?”

  “I like curves on a woman, myself.”

  “Hard as a rock. Don’t like athletic girls myself. Soft and squishy’s my thing.”

  “Sure, and how many sluts do you have in that whorehouse who look better than her?” That was the first man again.

  The whole thing was surreal. Sandy had wondered a few times if, being what she was, she would be less psychologically damaged by rape than most women. For one thing, the very concept was mostly unthinkable. Most men weren’t suicidal, and GIs never did it to each other, as far as she knew. She’d never thought she’d have to find out for real. Still it didn’t seem right to get too upset about it. Largely that was the drugs, she knew, screwing with her head. But also, she was responsible for hundreds of deaths in her life, and regardless of how many of them had deserved it, it didn’t seem that she was in any moral position to complain when bad things happened to her. She would deal with it, like she always did, and hope that karma sorted itself out in the end.

  “I think about thirty chits,” said one of the other men.

  “Forty,” said the first man. “The ropes only make it more kinky, I know some of your regulars are real perverts. They’ll like that.”

  She was tied up? Sandy could barely move enough to feel the tug of restraint. But maybe it was just that her reduced sense of touch wasn’t allowing her to feel the ropes. Maybe what felt like a lack of mobility was actually ropes tying her up? In that case, maybe the drugs weren’t affe
cting her as badly as she thought, and she’d move okay if untied.

  She strained her vision. The blur shifted, overlapping outlines coming together, resolving into two men. They were still fuzzy, but she could make out basic features. One was black, grey streaked, weathered. Another was big, Caucasian, moustachioed. The third man she couldn’t see.

  “Thirty-five,” said the black man. “It’s a trek for my customers to come across here, unless you want to move her, and she can’t come to the brothel. My girls won’t like it.”

  “Hard to do without being seen,” said the third, invisible man.

  “Thirty-five,” the big, moustachioed man agreed, reluctantly.

  “Fifteen for me,” said the black man—a brothel owner, it seemed. “Twenty for you. Deal?”

  “Deal.” They shook hands. Perhaps the moustachioed man saw her looking, unfocused though her drug-addled stare was. He leaned down close to her, and beamed. “You should be flattered. Whorehouse girls don’t go for more than ten, usually.”

  Danya was washing his hands in the bathroom, splashing some water on his face, when Svetlana came in. She looked anxious, hands thrust deep in jacket pockets, hat pulled down low over her head like she didn’t want to be recognised.

  “So, what did Pedro say?” She’d been gone a while, he’d been starting to worry. She grabbed his arm and pulled at him. “What’s the matter?”

  “Pedro said yes,” she said, hushed and agitated. “I got this.” She pulled a vial from her pocket. Within was a small quantity of clear liquid. Danya stared at it. “Bipofalzin. Danya, let’s go!”

  “Wait.” He grabbed her wrist. “Svet, where did you get that?”

  “It doesn’t matter, let’s go!”

  “Go where? Svet, where did you get bipofalzin?”

  “I took it from the Tings’ private storeroom, okay?” she hissed. “Now let’s go back home and help Kresnov!”

  “You stole from them?” Danya was horrified. “Svet, you know what they do to thieves?”

  “Let’s go!” she urged him. Danya followed to the bathroom doorway and peered out . . . sure enough, there were yard bosses walking the floor like they were searching for something, with lots of finger pointing and shouts. One of them was coming toward the bathroom.

  Danya ducked back and swore. “They’re coming. Out the window.” He pulled her over and boosted her up. She got a boot on the pipe to the urinal and scrambled up to the window sill, then slid out. Danya followed, more athletic than his sister but not quite as nimble, and the window was a tighter squeeze. Below was a long drop to the top of a storage tank, Svetlana already clambering down to the ground with all the dexterity of a Droze street kid. The window wasn’t wide enough to allow Danya to get his feet under him, so he went out headfirst, caught the rim to swing around as he fell, overcooked it and hit hard on his chest. Then up and after Svetlana, shimmying down a pipe, then running along the alley at the back of the yard.

  Svetlana took a right, rather than join the main road directly, and disappeared like a juno up a drain. The wind knocked out of him, Danya struggled to keep up. This alley was narrower, filled with junk and dust, and bad smells from the workshops in dilapidated neighbouring buildings. Svetlana paused to look up one alley, but passed as it was too narrow even for her. Then another, which she took, then a quick turn back to the left. Here the alley was a little wider and clearer, enabling Danya to start running properly and catch up. Until a dark shape dropped from the sky and landed with an athletic thud before Svetlana, and she skidded to a halt.

  It was Gunter, broad and blond, and doubtless armed in one of his many pockets. Svetlana tried to back up, but Danya caught her and held her steady. You couldn’t run from GIs, not when they were this close.

  Gunter walked forward. “Did you steal from the Tings?” he asked Svetlana. She shook her head, fearfully.

  “Svet, tell the truth,” said Danya. He didn’t see any other choice. “Gunter, she took bipofalzin,” he tried, desperately. “It’s that drug we asked you about. It’s for GIs. We met a GI, she was nearly dead, we were trying to get her bipofalzin so she would live. If you don’t let us go, she will die.”

  “Are you telling the truth?” His jaw was square, blue eyes hard and impossibly handsome. Like some beautiful god, out of place amidst the squalor of Steel Town.

  “Why would I lie?” Danya retorted. “And why would she steal just one vial of bipofalzin, when there are so many more valuable things she could have stolen? Show him, Svet.”

  Svetlana reached into her pocket and produced the vial. Her hand, Danya noted, was not shaking. He wanted to spank her, but damn she was tough. Gunter looked at the vial. GIs could zoom in with their vision, Danya knew.

  “Where is this GI from?” Gunter asked.

  Danya decided to take a big chance. “She’s an offworlder. Like you.”

  Gunter gazed at him. Not very smart, Svetlana had said. Danya didn’t know about that, they’d never talked for long enough. But he’d never been mean, and had often shown small kindnesses to yard workers—a gift of food here, and kind word on one’s behalf to a supervisor there. Mostly his job at the yard was as deterrent, to stop major theft or attack through the simple fear of his presence.

  “A League GI,” said Gunter.

  “She was from the League, yes,” Danya answered. Technically it wasn’t a lie. Gunter had been League before the League had left him behind, six years ago. Kresnov had been League, until she’d gone to the Federation. A lot of corporate GIs these days were locally made, and every year the number grew. Danya had often gained the impression that a lot of formerly-League GIs weren’t impressed with the local newcomers. “I can introduce you to her, if you’d like to meet her. Once she gets better.”

  “She arrived recently?” Gunter asked.

  “Yes. Gunter, we have to go!”

  Gunter nodded. “Tell her to come and say hello if she’d like. I’ll tell the Tings you went another way.”

  He leapt vertically, straight up, and onto the rim of a factory wall overhead. And disappeared.

  Danya headed not to Treska’s, but to Abraham’s Mosque. They took a back way, which took longer but would keep them away from anyone reporting to the Tings, through Buckethead Market with its crowds and commotion, under the wary eye of stall owners naturally suspicious of lurking street kids. But the merchants had little to do with Steel Town owners like the Tings, and street kids were common everywhere through Droze, for the most part they were invisible.

  “Great,” Danya muttered as they walked fast, “well, we’ve lost that job for good. And any other job in Steel Town, no one will take us now. Where are we going to get money, Svet?”

  He felt a rising sense of panic. They’d been doing quite well lately. Not like before. Svetlana had already forgotten a lot, in the years immediately after the crash. She’d been four, barely old enough to do more than sit in whichever derelict hideout he’d found for them, and look after baby Kiril, sometimes with the help of other street kids, sometimes not. She’d cried a lot, skinny, bedraggled urchin that she’d been then. And when they’d really begun starving, she’d stopped crying, from sheer exhaustion.

  Danya remembered long days and nights scavenging for scraps, coming home to share whatever he’d managed to find, and the horror at seeing his little sister and baby brother so thin and sickly, ribs showing, eyes hollow. He’d given them portions of his share too, until he’d been weak and stumbling from hunger. They’d joined a gang of other street kids then, which had probably saved their lives, because the scavenging became more coordinated, and food improved.

  But the gang had fought and split up, as gangs tended to do. For a while they’d run with Peng and Kumetz, but Kumetz had disappeared one night and never resurfaced, while Peng got caught on a security fence and bled to death before Danya could get him to help. Of the sixteen members of that original gang, Danya knew of only seven, excluding themselves, who were still accounted for. Some of the rest might still be alive, bu
t given the tales that were told about some kids who were taken, it was probably better if they weren’t.

  Those first two years had been the worst. Then Droze had begun to recover a little, businesses had emerged from the chaos, survivors began to organise and form some semblance of a livelihood. Suddenly there was a little money around, and clean water, food and meds. Scavenging had become easier, and a few little charities sprung up, mostly run by religious folk like Abraham, who frightened or guilt-tripped the faithful into contributions that they’d spend on providing for street kids.

  Also, Svetlana had turned six, at which age she’d proven a truly exceptional pickpocket and general thief. So exceptional that Danya had forbidden her from using her talent unless absolutely necessary, for fear she’d get cocky one time too many. Like this time.

  “Why aren’t we going back to Treska’s?” she asked him now, knowing better than to argue the point.

  “Because we have to go to Abraham’s and get Kiril,” said Danya, walking a little faster up the narrow, crowded street.

  “But why not let Abraham look after Kiril for a little bit longer?” Svetlana complained. “He’s just a baby, he’ll get in the way . . .”

  “Svet,” said Danya in frustration, “you don’t know what you’ve done. If you steal from someone in Droze, they know who you are. They know who we are, all of us.”

  “Oh, they won’t come after Kiril!” Svetlana said scornfully. But her voice was tinged with fear. “It’s just one vial, he’s got nothing to do with it!”

  “He’s got everything to do with it,” Danya retorted. “You don’t know how they think. And you don’t know how they think because you never fucking listen!”

  He wanted to run, but that would attract attention. Svetlana walked fast at his heels, head down, all pouting, rebellious and frightened at the same time.

  Danya could see something was wrong before they even got near Abraham’s Mosque. People were running, shouting alarm, others were emerging from shop fronts to see what was going on. Some shop fronts were closing, big rollers hauled down, windows shuttered and barred.