Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  The man was now climbing onto the sofa, on top of Sandy. There came the sound of mutterings, of dirty talk. Svetlana had heard that a few times, and had no idea why people did it. The other thing, she was coming to have some idea. But not like this.

  Something went pop! The dirty talk ended. Then a thud, as the man’s body hit the floor. Svetlana ran into the room in alarm, rounded the sofa, and stared.

  Sandy was sitting up, pulling severed ropes off her arms. The man lay on his side, eyes wide, tongue out. Unmoving.

  “Is he dead?” Svetlana whispered.

  “What do you think?” said Sandy, now pulling at the knots that bound her ankles. She was naked from the waist down. Svetlana hadn’t seen before, beneath Sandy’s long coat. The man had been trying to roll her onto her stomach. Her fingers didn’t seem to be working properly, and she gave up the knots and resumed cutting instead.

  Treska’s voice came from the other room. “Amdo? Are you okay?”

  Svetlana knew she should have hidden once more, but she was tired of hiding. The door opened, and there was Treska, in singlet and pants, his gut bulging, a cup of coffee held to his moustachioed mouth. Staring at the GI sawing through her last restraints, and the little girl who’d set her free.

  “You little BITCH!” he roared, and charged at her.

  “Dodge,” Sandy instructed, still sawing determinedly.

  Svetlana dodged one way around the sofa, then the other, as Treska thundered after her, sliding on the floor on socked feet. He could have barged straight over the sofa, but on it sat Sandy, still sawing. She snatched at him as he came close, one-handed, and missed.

  Svetlana was further surprised at how little frightened she was. Treska would kill her, she knew. But Sandy had her arms free, and even with the drugs, those arms were nothing Treska could survive if they got hold of him. She just needed to stay close to Sandy, and Treska couldn’t touch her. And Sandy’s ropes were being cut, one by one.

  Treska seemed to realise the situation as she did, and ran cursing for the next room. The last of Sandy’s ropes came off and she stood . . . and nearly fell. Svetlana dashed to her side and held her up. Sandy accepted that balance, and lurched awkwardly toward the door that Treska had gone through.

  “Stay back,” she warned Svetlana, and pushed through the door. But again she nearly fell, and Svetlana went with her, holding her up. The kitchen was empty, and beyond was the bedroom. Sandy went for it, Svetlana with her.

  There on the bed was a crossbow—a favoured weapon of establishment owners. Corporation spies sometimes reported firearms, but crossbows were not illegal. Treska was loading it.

  “Back!” Sandy warned Svetlana, who ducked behind the doorframe, but peered about to see Treska pick up the weapon and fire. Sandy snatched at the bolt, her hand a blur . . . and missed. It struck her in the throat, and she staggered back a step. Frowned, and pulled the bolt out. A single droplet of blood followed. No jugular vein on GIs, Svetlana recalled hearing. The veins went through the spinal column instead.

  Sandy ran at Treska, who fled through the adjoining door. Svetlana followed, as Sandy collided with the doorframe, and Treska tripped in the room beyond, scrambling back to his feet. Sandy came after him, like something from a zombie vid, and Treska swung at her with a big right fist, and connected with a loud crack that would have laid most men out cold. Sandy’s head jolted back, but only a little. Treska, however, screamed with pain and clutched his hand.

  He’d probably broken it, Svetlana realised. Smarter to punch a steel wall than a GI. Sandy stumbled forward, grabbed him by the neck, and drove him against a wall. And pinned him there, as Svetlana scrambled around to watch. Sandy’s fist tightened, and Treska’s eyes bulged.

  “Fast or slow?” Sandy snarled. Only it wasn’t quite a snarl. It was too cold, too simple and straightforward for that. It was hatred, but controlled, almost calm. Svetlana stared, utterly mesmerised.

  Treska wailed obscenities and whacked at her with his one good hand. His pants darkened in colour, and the air suddenly smelt bad.

  Sandy looked at Svetlana. “Turn around,” she said. Svetlana shook her head, eyes wide. Sandy snorted. “Fine. Fast, then.”

  Her arm jerked, and there was another loud pop! Treska’s head flopped like something no longer connected to his body. Sandy dropped him, and his limbs bounced. Then nothing.

  “Of all the fucking stupid things,” Sandy muttered, looking about with distaste. “I want my pants.”

  Her pants were ripped and unwearable, so she took some of Treska’s instead, and tied them with some of the kids’ rope since the tailoring fit her so badly. The kids, enterprising as always, ransacked the apartment for all sorts of useful things before leaving.

  Danya knew a back way that didn’t involve passing through the tavern downstairs. They went into a back alley, then through several zigzags, Danya and Svetlana scoping their surroundings with all the professional poise of special forces recon. They seemed to think someone else might be after them, people called Tings, but Sandy’s head wasn’t working well enough to process it further. Svetlana walked at her side, providing support in case she needed it, which she occasionally did. Her balance came and went. One minute she could be fine, the next flailing up against some wall.

  A sandstorm was kicking up dust, and the kids fastened on their goggles. Everyone on Droze had them, save Sandy. Sandy squinted; even GIs could get sand in their eyes. Danya rummaged in his pack and found a pair of old shades, not proper goggles. They were scratched, but better than nothing.

  “Where to?” Sandy asked. Sand darkened the yellow sky to brown, and even now the temperature was plunging. Static lightning crackled, an electric blue flash, almost industrial. The thunder that followed was high pitched and short, not deep and booming like she was used to. It was sandstorm weather, one of Pantala’s more interesting atmospheric features. But the novelty soon wore off.

  “How about Cheung?” Svetlana asked, voice raised above the wind.

  “We owe him money,” Danya reminded her. “Maybe Turner?”

  Svetlana made a face, pulling her collar up higher to keep stinging sand off her neck. “She doesn’t like us.”

  “I think she’s okay.”

  “She accused me of stealing last week. I called her a lying bitch.”

  “Were you stealing?” Danya wondered.

  “It was just an apple!”

  “Okay, not Turner. Svet, you’ve got to stop making enemies of our friends.”

  Svetlana scowled. Visibility on the road was down to dark shadows against yellow gloom. Sand showered against metal shop fronts, their roller doors descending even now. Vehicles roared by with their lights on. Sandy reckoned it would have been painful against exposed skin, for a regular human, but the kids were well covered up, save for their faces.

  They turned a corner. This street was narrower, giving more protection. People darted into shop fronts and lobbies through side doors . . . business was still open, Sandy saw, the shutters were just down to keep the weather out. She yawned to keep her ears equalised—the drop in temperature was actually a drop in air pressure as well, one of the stranger local meteorological phenomenons. Pantala’s air pressure was only eighty percent the preferred human standard, and in some bad storms, people caught outside had been known to suffocate.

  “We’re being followed,” said Danya. “Vehicle behind us, lights off.”

  Svetlana swore, but didn’t look back.

  “What kind of vehicle?” Sandy asked.

  “Belcher,” said Danya. A combustion engine, in local slang. “Old thing, not like your enemies would drive.”

  “Tings,” said Svetlana. “Can you run?”

  “Not really. No balance, weak legs.”

  “Well, if we just keep walking, they’ll coordinate some ambush,” said Danya, scanning the road ahead. With the drugs affecting her vision, and now the sandstorm, Sandy wasn’t confident she could see any better than him.

  “What did you do
to these Tings?” asked Sandy.

  “Stole some bipofalzin from them,” said Danya. “Or Svetlana did.”

  “Oh gee, thanks,” said Svetlana. “Blame it all on me.”

  Sandy gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Thanks. Let me deal with it. They likely to be armed?”

  “Yes, but not heavily,” said Danya, uncertain if this was a good idea. “Better not to kill them if you can help it.”

  Svetlana made a face. “I wouldn’t care.”

  Sandy couldn’t quite believe she’d just received those two remarks from a couple of kids. “Keep walking,” she said, and turned around.

  The vehicle was indeed an old combustion engine design, with a pickup tray on the back and a four-person cabin. Very tough and easy to operate in a low tech environment where electricity was often more expensive than basement ethanol, high tech tended to grind in the fine sand, and hydrogen was just plain dangerous in an atmosphere with this much natural static charge.

  The vehicle stopped. Doors opened, and two men got out. One sheltered behind the door and pulled a pistol on her, realising they were identified. “Stop right there!” he shouted.

  Bad as she felt, Sandy didn’t feel completely helpless. She pre-tensed her arm and shoulder muscles, dove and rolled for the cover of the car bonnet, then grabbed the front fender. She reckoned she had barely five percent of her usual power, so flipping it end over end was beyond her—she settled for going sideways, and the man on that side ran desperately as his car nearly rolled on top of him, and crashed on its roof.

  In that confusion his friend recovered to try to shoot her, but she kept low, zigzagged, and came up under the gun, turned and threw him at the wall. He crashed off the roller door and slumped to the ground. Which left Sandy holding his pistol, and she checked the ammo. The first man was sheltering behind the overturned car, peering fearfully past a wheel, not stupid enough to engage now he saw what she was.

  “Fuck off,” Sandy told him, pointing back down the road. He ran. She slid in beneath the car, recalling what Danya had said about ambushes and somewhat worried about snipers. There was another man in the car, who panicked as she came in a window, and scrambled out the other side. Footsteps receded fast, and Sandy searched the interior.

  Inside was a Teller 9, bullpup assault rifle, compact and very recent tech. League special forces model; to say she was familiar with its utility was a severe understatement. There was also military webbing with extra ammo and kit.

  “Outstanding,” said Sandy, collecting all. She was due a few lucky breaks.

  Through the cracked windscreen, she saw the street mysteriously deserted. Residents in Droze knew when to disappear. Then, into the middle of the street, dropped a man. A ten meter drop, and he didn’t even bother to roll.

  Sandy had him bull’s-eyed through the windscreen with her new weapon before his boots had even hit, for he was clearly a GI . . . but dropping from a good vantage into an exposed street was a strange move for a guy doing an ambush. And then, stranger still, she saw him take his eyes off the overturned car, toward Danya . . . who was running from cover to talk to him. Svetlana, too. It had to be safe, then; the kids’ instincts were far too good for them to do that if it weren’t.

  Sandy slid out, her rifle still targetting the GI’s chest. She was half in combat mode, and it seemed to steady her hands and stop the world from spinning. The kids and the GI walked over. He carried a DV-6, longer than her Teller. Not strictly a sniper rifle, but as good as one in the hands of any GI better than a reg.

  “Sandy!” said Svetlana, quite relieved and excited. “This is Gunter! He’s our friend.”

  Gunter’s apartment was in the attic of a big warehouse and workshop. Sandy barely made it up the stairs—combat reflex was fading, and her strength went with it—and Gunter had to half-carry her through the heavy steel door. He had big locks on it, too, and a good security setup, multi-level ID processing.

  Within was a big, wide floor broken by ceiling supports, and small windows on the far wall. Furnishings were sparse and sensible, yet everything was clean and neat. By what she’d seen in this part of Droze so far, Sandy thought it luxurious.

  Gunter helped her to lie on his bed . . .

  . . . and then she woke up, feeling dazed. The window above her head was dark, occasionally rattling with some gust of wind. She rolled her head, and saw Danya and Svetlana sitting on the neighbouring bed, going through the various possessions from their backpacks. There was only dim light from various fittings, soft and blue.

  “Is the power out?” she wondered.

  Danya nodded. “The corporations do it to show us who’s boss. They run fusion power plants. There’s no shortage of power; they cut it on purpose.”

  “Kind of,” said Gunter. He was cooking over in the kitchen, against the side wall. “They do have distribution problems. No one maintains the lines, and lots of people steal. Lots of lines were damaged in the crash, too, and no one actually pays for power, they just demand it. The problem with Droze is that everyone takes but no one gives back, so the lines don’t get repaired.”

  “And whenever someone shoots at a corporation flyer,” Danya said determinedly, “or lobs a mortar over the security walls, we lose power for days. If it’s a big incident, we won’t get it for a week.”

  “Yes,” Gunter agreed. “That too.”

  Sandy couldn’t see what he was cooking, but it smelt nice. She struggled to sit up on the bed, and get a pillow behind her. She felt weak, but her head was clearer. She couldn’t have been out for more than a few hours.

  “You live here alone?” she asked Gunter.

  “Yes. I work for the Tings. Svetlana stole from them.”

  “But for a very good cause!” Svetlana retorted, not seeming particularly worried.

  Gunter smiled, still cooking. “Yes,” he agreed. He had that very straightforward manner of a mid-designation GI. Perhaps a high-30. Though, Rhian was a 39, and she’d been a bit like that once. No longer. “I think so, too. The Tings wanted me to help them ambush someone. They didn’t say it was you, though I suspected. I wouldn’t have let them. But then I saw you overturn that car, and I knew Danya and Svetlana had been telling me the truth about why they needed bipofalzin.”

  “Thanks for helping us,” said Sandy. “We really appreciate it.”

  Gunter nodded. “We GIs should stick together,” he said.

  Sandy blinked. She’d heard that sentiment a few times on Callay, among newly arrived escapees from the League. She’d never been aware it existed anywhere else.

  “Any chance they’ll suspect you and come here?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” said Gunter. “Though I don’t think anyone saw us. Visibility was bad.”

  “It’s Rimtown,” said Danya, checking and re-winding up his precious rope. “Someone always sees.”

  “If they did,” said Gunter, “they won’t come here. There’s only one way in, and they’re not GIs.” There was a gun on the bench beside him. And being a GI, he had other ways out, like the windows. “The Tings only set an example against people who steal. They don’t mind killing, but not if it means a few of them dying.”

  “Besides, you’re too important to them,” said Danya. “You make them a big deal in Steel Town. I don’t think they’re paying you enough.”

  Gunter seemed to like that. Clever Danya, Sandy thought with admiration. He seemed so relaxed here, where it was safe, but his brain never stopped working.

  Sandy got Svetlana to help finally take the slug that had been bothering her out of her thigh. That was a bit icky, because the wound had inflamed and pus came out, but the kids’ bag of tricks included tweezers, and Svetlana had the most nimble fingers. The bullet had hit her thigh on an angle, so it had only strained her quadricep a little, barely even causing a limp. Otherwise she had a scar on her elbow, and another on the hard muscle at the side of her neck, where bullets had just ricocheted away.

  Gunter offered them all the shower, and Sandy went first while
she was still clear headed. The shower was just one corner of the open floor, but Gunter had put up a big curtain for privacy, inside of which the floors and walls were tastefully tiled, with a fluffy rug on the floor to soak up extra water. There was even a little green plant, thriving in the humidity of many showers—a rare sight in Droze, with so little native vegetation. Gunter’s decoration would hardly win any interior design awards, but it was real, and heartfelt. Sandy had seen many astonishingly pretty places in Tanusha, yet somehow none had touched her the way that her soldiers’ bunks had been decorated in Dark Star—little photos of places they’d never seen, a favorite animal, a beautiful cityscape. The faces of friends who’d died. What else would GIs, with no family or pets waiting for them on some far distant home, decorate their personal spaces with? Gunter’s apartment reminded her of that. It made her unutterably sad. She thought of her own friends who’d just recently died, and felt sadder still.

  Dinner was sausages, and various cooked vegetables Sandy couldn’t identify. The sausages even tasted like real meat—probably vat-grown like most meat these days, but that was “real,” and tasty. Danya and Svetlana were impressed, and as ravenous as Sandy had expected.

  “If you’re from the Federation,” Gunter said as they ate, seated on low stools about the chest that doubled as a table, “why are you here?”

  “Why do you think?” Sandy asked.

  “It was Chancelry Corporation that took Kiril,” said Gunter. “If they’d found out Danya and Svetlana were helping you, that could be a warning. Or leverage.”

  Sandy had no way of knowing what he’d think, or where his loyalties would lie. In the worst case scenario . . . well, he was a lower designation than her. And she’d be back close to top shape by the morning. She hoped.

  “What do you know about Chancelry?” she asked.

  “They make GIs,” said Gunter. “Lots of experimental stuff. They’ve had the technology since the war. They didn’t make me, though, I was here before the crash. I was a League soldier, but the League left me behind.”