Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  “The League make a habit of that,” Sandy agreed. She sipped some juice from a chipped mug. It was quite good. Gunter’s money gave him access to good stuff.

  “I know the other corporations don’t like Chancelry much,” Gunter continued. “GIs are a good weapon. They can do damage without destroying infrastructure, like heavier weapons do. Corporations can afford to kill people, but they can’t afford to destroy infrastructure that keeps everyone alive.”

  “That was why we were so useful in space warfare,” Sandy agreed.

  Gunter looked troubled, and frowned as he cut his sausages. Sandy waited for whatever was on his mind to surface, still eating. Danya and Svetlana watched this exchange between GIs with intrigue.

  “We find them sometimes,” Gunter said finally. “Projects. That’s what we call them. GIs from Chancelry. Not many of them get away, but you know, GIs sometimes are hard to stop.”

  Sandy nodded. She’d heard this before, but still she felt cold. “Go on.”

  Gunter looked up at her, with bothered blue eyes. “One I found was insane. I mean really. His mouth foamed, and he spat, and made sounds like he was trying to talk, but couldn’t. We looked after him for a few days, but he died. His heart just stopped.”

  Sandy wanted to ask who “we” were, but didn’t want to change the subject. “Go on,” she repeated.

  “There was another. She lasted a week. She wasn’t so bad, but she shot herself. Twice, because she messed it up the first time.”

  There it was. Sandy felt it, like a hard core in her soul. She’d been too dazed, befuddled and desperate, the last crazy day, to wonder where it had gone. But it was back now, and she welcomed it like an old friend. It was rage. Murderous rage.

  “Chancelry’s working on new GI technology,” she affirmed. “It doesn’t always work. Sometimes they get out.”

  “You were going to hit them, weren’t you.” It was a statement, not a question. Sandy just gazed at him. Wondering if she dared to trust. “The Federation never liked GIs.”

  “I’m a GI,” said Sandy. “I’m Federation. The Federation doesn’t like the idea of people made and used as slaves. I went to the Federation to be free. Now I’m back. I’d like to spread that freedom. What about you?”

  Gunter considered her for a moment. All eating at the table had stopped. With appetites like Danya’s and Svetlana’s, Sandy hadn’t thought that possible. “You’re Dark Star, aren’t you?” said Gunter.

  Sandy nodded. “Former. I left.”

  “Designation?”

  “The highest. Ever.”

  Gunter nodded slowly. “I’ve heard of you. You’re the one who defected, and made the League upset.”

  Sandy nodded again. “I rose high and I have lots of friends there. A lot of them don’t like GIs, but a lot of them do like me. That’s the difference. In the Federation, they accept that I can be just me. That GIs are people, like any other people. Here, in the League, we’ll always be GIs first and foremost, however much they claim to love us.”

  “But we’re never really just us, are we?” Gunter replied. “We’re different. We might want to hide it, but we can’t. I mean, look at me, in this place. If I weren’t a GI, I’d have nothing. We change things, just by being what we are.”

  Sandy nodded thoughtfully. Far from some mindless drone, this one. “What designation are you?” she asked.

  “3801-S1.” Less advanced than most of her high-des friends, then; the gap even between 38s and 39s was steep. But if he’d been here since the crash, he might be quite old, by GI standards. Age made a big difference. She was proof of that. “You?”

  “5074J-HK.”

  Gunter blinked. “A lot of people would say that’s not possible. That the technology’s not able to go up that high.”

  “There’s a number of different strands of neural growth tech. I’m an unusual branch. They didn’t make many; apparently we’re unstable. And when fully grown, prone to think for ourselves.”

  Gunter smiled a little at the humour. You had to be a GI to find that funny.

  Svetlana leaned forward in amazement. “You mean they made you in experimental labs like in Chancelry?”

  “No,” said Sandy. “League space, a long way from here. But yes, highly experimental.”

  “Recruitment Department,” Gunter added. “The government agency in the League responsible for making GIs. They had experimental divisions.”

  “But, I mean, what about the Projects?” Svetlana pressed. “These GIs Gunter found who had things wrong with their heads? What if they had to do that to make you? Go through hundreds and hundreds of failures until they got it right?”

  Sandy swallowed, and looked at the tabletop.

  “Svetlana,” Danya muttered, and put a hand on her shoulder. “Enough.”

  Sandy took a deep breath and looked at the kids. Danya looked cautious as ever. And Svetlana now a little anxious, as though wondering if she’d really stepped in it.

  Sandy managed a weak smile. “Don’t ever be scared of me,” she told them. “I’ll never hurt you. Svetlana asked a good question. The answer is that I don’t know. I don’t think there were that many failures, at least not that went to full commission. We have good enough intelligence on how Recruitment’s high-designation programs went to know that. But not precise intelligence. There probably were a few commissioned failures, at least, before me. I can only hope it wasn’t very many.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Svetlana, and reached for her hand. Sandy took it. The hand was half the size of her own. Children grew. It was hard to get her head around that fact, sometimes. It made the gulf between herself and regular humans just seem enormous. “You don’t like Chancelry very much, do you?”

  “It’s not a matter of not liking them,” Sandy replied, gently clasping the girl’s hand with some intrigue. “That kind of GI development left unchecked is against the Federation’s interests. It’s my job to safeguard those interests.”

  “Sure,” Svetlana said drily, with wisdom beyond her years. “But you really don’t like them, do you?”

  “No,” Sandy admitted. And released her hand, reluctantly.

  “What were you planning, before you got hit?” Danya asked, resuming his meal.

  It was all highly classified, of course. But now, there wasn’t much left to classify. The only reason not to tell them was to keep them out of danger, but Danya and Svetlana were already in danger, to say nothing of Kiril. She was really lost in the woods here, and these two children, and this one rogue GI, were all she had for support.

  “Our contact was a local tech,” she said, resuming her meal as well. “He’d done some probing of Chancelry’s systems. He had contacts in other corporations who fed him details, codes, possible ways in. He thought he’d found a central command node in Chancelry’s secure network.”

  Danya looked a little blank. “What secure network?”

  “Every corporation has a secure communication network. You have to understand, in modern cities, the networks are enormous. Droze is a long way behind. There are very few uplinks or even working computer systems outside of the corporations themselves, and everything’s shielded.

  “Now, all the GIs are plugged into that network.” She looked about at them. Without knowing what she knew about neural cluster technology, they’d probably not understand why that was significant. “All the Chancelry new GIs included. These new GIs, these Projects, their brains are different. They use a different kind of neural growth technology. We thought this central command node might be the key to controlling the GIs brains.”

  “You think it’s a hive mind?” Gunter asked.

  “I’m not sure. We were trying to hit a building on the edge of the Chancelry secure zone; we thought it could get us some information on the command node.”

  “But they’d have known it was some outside operation,” Gunter countered. “No one else in Droze has the ability to do a precision military hit like that, except for another corporation. And they’r
e all trying to make peace at the moment.”

  Sandy nodded, and swallowed a mouthful. “We’re not here to destroy the whole system, Gunter. We were just a few operatives on a recce mission. The idea was to gather intelligence and take it back. We’d figure out what to do about it after that.”

  Gunter paused to think about that.

  Danya saw his chance. “How do we get Kiril back? You said you’d help.”

  “I’ll think of something,” Sandy promised. Exactly what she was promising, she didn’t know. “I need information first. Any contact any of you have that could help, I want. If you want to help, that is?”

  She gazed at Gunter.

  Gunter still thought about it. “Going up against Chancelry’s a good way to get dead,” he said. “They have an army. All the corporations do. It’s quite advanced, even by Federation standards. They’ll be looking for you right now.”

  “Probably,” Sandy agreed. “But this is hostile land for them. I know what they do to corporation spies around here.”

  “That’s just the Home Guard,” Danya warned. “Lots of people would sell you to Chancelry for money. Home Guard are the only ones who hate the corporations enough to kill traitors. Everyone else is just trying to get by.”

  “Maybe we should tell Duage?” Svetlana wondered. “He hates the corporations, he’d help.”

  “Duage?” Sandy asked.

  “He’s leader of the local Home Guard division,” Danya explained. “And he doesn’t like the Federation either—I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Capabilities?” Sandy asked. She’d been briefed, but you could never have too much local intel.

  “Very little,” said Gunter, shaking his head. “Most of the real fighters died in the crash. They’re very outgunned.”

  “I sometimes wonder why the corporations let any of us live at all,” said Danya. “None of us like them, they get nothing but trouble from us.”

  “They have dreams of building New Torah up to be a power one day,” said Sandy. “They’ll need a local population for that. An economy, to buy and sell things, and to make things. Besides which, I hear they take talent when they need it, to fill manpower shortages.”

  There was a silence. It was the wrong thing to say, because now they were all thinking of Kiril again. Svetlana started to cry. It wasn’t a little girl’s crying, all weak and helpless. It was just pain. Real pain, in Sandy’s experience, looked much the same on anyone, no matter the age, gender or physiological makeup.

  Danya pulled her close and kissed her head. Svetlana clung to him. In Tanusha, Sandy had seen siblings who were close, but nothing like this. Closeness amongst siblings in civilised places was a luxury. Here, it was survival, and these two kids were permanently grafted to each other’s souls. As was the third, and losing him hurt like losing an arm.

  But not quite like losing an arm, because Kiril was still alive and almost certainly well looked after, the corporations needing manpower, as Sandy had said . . . plus, if they wanted him for leverage, that only worked if he lived. And so Danya and Svetlana took turns using the shower, as Gunter monitored local net traffic with the help of some shades to block out the light, and Sandy sat on Gunter’s bed and refamiliarised herself with the Teller 9.

  Gunter had shampoo, and mouthwash, and other amazing things that Svetlana was desperate to try. Gunter let them. Then Svetlana discovered the hair drier, and much amusement followed. Sandy could even hear Danya laughing, as his sister tried to dry his wet hair into a new style, and lots of protests and arguing. It was a nice sound. Kids were amazing, Sandy decided. So resilient, tormented one moment, laughing the next.

  They came out in their clothes, and Sandy reflected that she’d never heard tell of any brother and sister who’d comfortably get changed together at that age. But then, as she knew from personal experience, when you’d seen the big horrors the world had to offer, the little ones just stopped mattering as much.

  Svetlana came to Sandy and sat on the bed opposite, looking at the rifle. “Wow,” she said, wide eyed. “That looks dangerous.”

  Sandy recalled what Rhian had told Salman one day, when Salman had spotted her pistol. “Do you want to see the most important thing on this rifle?” she asked. Svetlana nodded vigorously. “This switch here.” She pointed. “This is the safety. If you see this weapon unsecured, put this switch on, like this. Don’t touch anything else, just this.”

  “What else does it do?” Svetlana asked eagerly. “Aside from fire bullets I mean.”

  Sandy glanced at Danya. He gave them a wary look from the second bed, looking through his things again. Normally Sandy would have stopped the lesson with the safety. Kids shouldn’t need to know about guns like this one. But then, kids shouldn’t have needed to be hungry, scared and in danger either, and wishing it otherwise changed nothing.

  “Interface,” she said, tapping the small CPU in the stock. “I’m running an interface on my uplinks, connecting me into the weapon. Once I’m in I’ll feel its balance from the internal gyros, I can measure the speed of its movement from its accelerometers, it’ll be like it’s an extension of my arm. I’ll feel that feedback directly into my brain. And of course it has armscomp, so I see from its targeting here,” and she tapped the pinhole camera/laser on the muzzle, “and it also sees what I see, and it shares calculation with my own armscomp.”

  Svetlana stared. “You have armscomp built directly into your brain?”

  “All GIs do. Ever wonder how all humans can recognise faces? I mean, faces are all so similar, you’d never recognise a hundred arms or legs and know whose were whose. But a hundred faces, most people can do that easy, with people we know. A thousand even.”

  “Yeah I know, humans have a part of their brain just for recognising faces,” Svetlana said with faint impatience at being thought dim. “I learned that, I’m not uneducated.”

  “Not entirely uneducated,” Danya corrected from the other bed. Svetlana made a face at him.

  Sandy smiled. “So that’s what GIs have, big parts of their brains just for calculating trajectories. Interconnect them with uplinks for external information feeds, and we’re actually faster than AIs. We have the same thing with coordination and movement, too. It’s not too different from regular humans, we just process more information, more efficiently.”

  “I bet you’re not so fast right now, though,” said Svetlana. “Here.” She put out her hands, palms pressed together, fingers pointing at Sandy. “Do you know this game? Hands like this, and try to slap mine.”

  They played for a while. Even light headed and with her muscles slowed, Sandy found it utterly unchallenging. And yet, she enjoyed it immensely. Aside from her few unsatisfying forays into sport, she couldn’t recall ever having played before, as children played. And Svetlana of course found it very challenging, though Sandy made it much easier by keeping her hands slow. Which Svetlana knew, and a few times accused her of not trying hard enough . . . but that was the point of play, Sandy supposed. It wasn’t supposed to be about fair contests or challenging matchups, it was just supposed to be fun.

  Though it wasn’t entirely true that she’d never played before, Sandy reconsidered. Combat training had been a substitute back in the League. And entertainments, of course, her never ending search through net libraries for books, music or films. And then of course there was sex. But all of those were selfish to varying degrees. Child’s play wasn’t, when shared. She began to see what Rhian saw in it.

  Soon Svetlana’s eyelids were drooping. Gunter insisted his visitors take the beds for tonight, he’d sleep on the couch. Danya came to escort his sister to her sleep, and she protested, but her heart wasn’t in it. Sandy gave her a kiss and a hug before she went.

  “Thank you for saving me,” she said, and meant it.

  “You’re welcome,” said Svetlana with a sleepy smile, and hugged her back, and went to bed.

  Danya sat in her place for a moment, and watched as Sandy finished with the rifle, slapped the mag
azine in and chambered a round. The interface felt good, a solid presence in her mind. It was good to have something to interface with, so long it had been since she’d used uplinks in a meaningful way on this network-barren world.

  “Won’t it give you away?” Danya asked, nodding at the rifle. “If you have to move stealthy, won’t sensors pick up the rifle transmissions when you interface?”

  Sandy nodded. “It’s a danger. These are real short range. I lose contact more than two meters out of reach; the transmissions don’t penetrate walls and such. When I’m fully armoured the interface goes through the glove to the handle sensor patches, so no transmission at all. But on a stealth mission I’ll turn it off. Don’t need it much, really. It’s just nice to have if I do.”

  “She likes you,” said Danya, nodding at his sister, crawling beneath the covers of the nearby bed. He spoke in a low voice, but Sandy suspected he didn’t really care if she overheard a little. These two had almost no secrets at all. “She thinks you’re going to save us, and bring us a better life.”

  “I’ll try Danya. I honestly will.”

  “Svetlana, you know.” Danya shrugged. “She hopes for things. I can’t hope for things. Things don’t happen because you hope for them. You know?”

  “I’ve been a commander in war,” Sandy agreed. “I know that better than anyone. You remind me of good commanders I’ve known.” Danya nodded, arms around drawn up knees, looking anxious but hiding it well. A slim nose, but the beginnings of a strong jaw. Intelligent, somber eyes. “But a good commander also knows when to take an opportunity.”

  “And when to avoid a trap,” said Danya.

  “Do you think I’m a trap?”

  “Not you personally. But I once knew this kid. Haral. I was only ten then, he was fourteen. Said he knew a way through the Caltier Pocket security wall, to a warehouse where there was food and tech and other stuff. I knew that part of the wall pretty well, I told him sometimes they move the auto patrols, sometimes they try to lure people in—it’s a learning grid, an interactive defence, it doesn’t just sit there and wait for people to figure out how to get around it, it makes mistakes on purpose as a lure. That way it learns how people will try to beat it.”