Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  Gunter, she was fairly sure, would have led the kids directly back through the buildings, none of this sideways sneaking around, not with the sizeable distraction she was providing. She flew low about those buildings anyway, keeping out of any line of sight from Chancelry Sector, and shredding several ground bots with the cannon turret, a simple enough task to operate with tacnet, despite the weapons officer’s incapacity. She wondered if Gunter had figured out yet what had happened, but didn’t dare contact him lest something still in and around these buildings managed to trace those transmissions—she didn’t control this battlespace, she’d only acquired the capacity to shape it a little.

  With plenty of bots in the secure zone, she ought to have been receiving more ground fire by now, except that the bots were not in constant communication with Chancelry, and would have to receive an override priority target to allow them to fire on a friendly flyer. She’d just taken down a bunch of com relays, so perhaps that was stopping a lot of them . . . except for the big tank bots, but she wasn’t so concerned of them.

  Scan registered big missile fire from Chancelry Sector, streaking straight up into the sky. Sandy was pretty sure she knew what that was, and didn’t want it coming down anywhere near where Gunter and the kids were. She roared up a street, then pulled into a tight hover next to a building. Overhead, the seeker missiles ceased their climb, one circling, the other pulling into a dive as it acquired. It wouldn’t have as good a lock without the UAV airbourne, but on the vertical trajectory, these buildings ceased to be a problem.

  It dove in, and she put a missile into the upper floors of the building before her, diving under the exploding debris and releasing full countermeasures—electrostatic charged particle mist to add to the confusion. The flyer was only prop powered instead of jet powered, and barely got clear in time. The seeker’s explosion sent her lurching forward, struggling to control the swinging aircraft. She barely made the next right corner, nearly standing the thing on its side to avoid hitting buildings ahead, then losing altitude abruptly and skimming the road to recover. She could nearly hear one of her SWAT pilot friends snorting derisively at her piloting skills—having crazy battlespace capabilities, and actually using them on unfamiliar equipment, were two very different things.

  The second seeker fell on her, and she thought about pulling up into it with a steep climb, but that would expose her to line-of-sight weapons from Chancelry Sector. Hanging dead in space, they’d nail her even if the seeker didn’t. There was no choice but to go full countermeasures and turn sharply down another road, and hope. The seeker blew a huge hole in the road behind her, and this time she didn’t nearly crash on the corner. Great, she thought. She was improving as a pilot fast enough that at this rate, she might live another sixty seconds, tops. There’d be another UAV up shortly, and then the seekers wouldn’t miss by so much. She had to either ditch this flyer, or put it somewhere they couldn’t hit it.

  Even now, scan showed her more flyers coming airbourne, first two, then four, then . . . they multiplied, someone had obviously shouted scramble, and they scrambled. They’d know there was one hostile pilot in the air . . . maybe she could get in amongst them and fool their IFF for long enough so they wouldn’t know which was the hostile? But she was kidding herself, and she knew it. She had okay piloting skills, but it was hardly her specialty, whatever her innate natural talents. Twelve to one and climbing was pushing it, and so much of this form of warfare was technology; she couldn’t make a flyer defy physics and if one homing missile got a good lock on her, that was it. Only worse, because built as she was, she’d possibly survive with damage, only to be salvaged by Chancelry operatives in some extremely unpleasant way . . .

  Sandy’s inner ear crackled as someone made a direct microwave com connection. “Sandy, stay low and pull back to Home Guard airspace, we have aerial cover.”

  It was Gunter’s voice. Aerial cover? Not air support, surely. Perhaps Home Guard had moved up all their air to ground launchers; surely they’d have them prepped by now?

  She didn’t know how to reply on that channel—the flyer wasn’t similarly equipped; she just turned away from Chancelry Sector and hoped the Home Guard knew friend from foe. To make it more obvious she spun around between buildings, moving in a backwards hover, weapons trained in the Chancelry direction, her rear completely exposed to Home Guard. An AQ bot stepped around a corner below and aimed at her, but on auto targeting she was faster, and cannons tore it into bouncing pieces. More fire zipped by below, coming from behind her. That was Home Guard, shooting at . . . something. Her scans showed nothing. Well, they were enthusiastic, and most importantly, shooting past her, not at her.

  “Here they come,” said someone on that microwave frequency. “Six in the main wave, six behind. Fire when they breach the zone.”

  Which might have meant a fire zone. That was tacnet terminology. No damn way Home Guard used tacnet. Who were these guys?

  She couldn’t see any of the flyers approach, only that they were all closing in on her, six units angling around for a run. In a low hover between buildings, they couldn’t see or hit her, but were protected by the same. And now, as the first pair came zooming on the diagonal within two hundred meters, missiles leaped from all across the Home Guard front. Not crappy little mid-tech missiles either. These twisted and fizzed, acquiring and adjusting at startling speed.

  The Chancelry flyers were still low, and that saved them as missiles hit buildings, or darted after countermeasures and clipped rooftops instead, a cascade of explosions racing after the twin flyers between buildings . . . Sandy lost scan feed for a little, there was so much jamming and low level flying going on, it wasn’t showing her more than two or three targets at a time.

  “He’s gone,” someone said. “One down.” Smoke boiled up behind nearby rooftops.

  The other flyers were milling, unable to operate against that kind of ground to air tech in these concentrations. Chancelry HQ would not view this as a positive development. What would the button pushers do, confronted with a tactical disadvantage?

  Fuck. She quickly enabled a main frequency broadcast, and patched it onto external speakers as well, just to be sure. “All civilians get to shelters! Get to shelters NOW! Everyone take cover immediately!”

  She was only ten seconds early. Then, utterly predictably, a cluster of missiles leaped into the air from multiple locations within Chancelry Sector. Having acquired optimum targeting altitude, they fanned out, and dove. Sandy spun her flyer about and ran, full power, straight down the main street into Home Guard territory. Behind her, explosions swept the row of occupied buildings closest to Chancelry Sector in a wall of flame.

  Someone found a frequency she could access on a directional com, and directed her to a disused factory building three kilometers from the Chancelry barrier. She didn’t particularly like the look of the neighbourhood, as she came in low to hover—it was old industrial, most of which had survived the crash physically, but not the economic consequences. Factories were disused and stripped now, or had been converted to something other than their original purpose—weathered steel rooves that had never been high tech facilities to begin with, just opportunist investments from the free settlers who had followed the big corporations unasked to Droze.

  Sandy also wasn’t certain why she was being directed to stay here in the Chancelry control-neighbourhoods, those Droze neighbourhoods in a quarter-arc of the city out from Chancelry Sector. The six big corporations dominated the central section of the city, surrounding the Free Zone, which was not actually free, being reserved for corporate folks only . . . but it was not owned explicitly by any one company, which meant “free” in corporate language. Chancelry’s UAV system had been hammered thanks to her strike. They seemed to be having trouble talking to them, and her scans didn’t register anything airbourne in this part of the city, but still she reckoned Chancelry would have other means. And they’d be angry now, and possibly worried, now their bots had gotten a look at her. They’d know
who was after them, and more importantly, what she was after.

  A few Home Guard wrapped up against the cold night opened the factory’s big doors for her, and she hovered inside amidst great swirls of dust. Landed, killed the engines, but left weapons systems live as she began writing some very specific key codes to protect the flyer’s CPU. This might just be the most advanced weapon system in Home Guard territory, and if it was, she wanted the only person with the key to be her.

  Some vehicles roared into the deserted factory through a back way, lights off, armed men jumping from the back. Sandy recovered her rifle and got out through the place where the canopy should have been.

  Home Guard approached her, weapons ready. Several aimed them at her. Sandy activated the cannon mount beneath the flyer’s chin, and aimed straight back at them. With her uplink working, she could kill everyone in the factory without having to move a finger. Some others saw the turret target them, and pushed their companions’ weapons down.

  “Who are you?” a man shouted at her, approaching angrily. “Duage says you’re Federation?”

  “That’s right,” said Sandy.

  “And what gives you a right to start a fucking war against Chancelry?”

  “So the Home Guard signed a peace deal with the corporations?” she answered. “When did that happen?”

  It was contrary to all their propaganda. Home Guard insisted the war went on, preached eternal vigilance. It was on all the posters, and graffiti scrawled on the walls.

  “We have at least twenty dead civilians!” the man shouted, gesturing back toward Chancelry Sector with his rifle. “A hundred wounded! You provoked an artillery strike!”

  “That happens in a war,” said Sandy. “Corporations kill people all the time. If you were actually at war, and not a bunch of frauds posing as soldiers, you’d know that.”

  Someone else raised a gun at her. Sandy spun the flyer’s cannon barrels, prelude to mass slaughter. It made an unearthly, shrieking whine that echoed off the steel beamed ceiling. Many flinched, and ducked for cover.

  Sandy felt bad about the artillery strike. She might not have done it that way if she’d suspected Chancelry would use heavy weapons on a civilian area if it went wrong. But then, she’d had no idea that eruption of missiles would come from Home Guard territory, compelling Chancelry to target them. Home Guard weren’t supposed to have any weaponry like that, and she’d been planning to leave civilians out of it. But now, if Home Guard thought she could be intimidated by threats of force, they needed to have made very clear to them just what treacherous ground they were treading on. Force was her domain. She was well past doing favours for those who didn’t yet “get it.”

  When she was no longer being directly threatened, she let the barrels whine down to nothing. “What’s your name?” she asked the man who’d shouted at her.

  “Hector.” He hadn’t flinched all that much. He stood and looked like a tough guy, not especially big, but with a scarred face and attitude.

  Sandy recalled a name from a briefing. “Sylvan Hector? Droze Home Guard commander?” Hector nodded. So she’d found the head. “Was that you with the missiles?”

  “No,” he said, lips twisted with what might be contempt. “Not us.”

  “Who?”

  “People who should stay the fuck away from where they’re not wanted.” He pointed at the flyer. “You’ve landed on Home Guard territory. That flyer’s now our property.”

  Sandy smiled. “You all just came within one stupid move of dying. I’d quit while I’m ahead if I were you.”

  New vehicles roared into the factory, lights also off. Men and women climbed from these, an equal division of gender. Some wore full assault armour, League issue, even the stenciling visible on shoulder plate—Fleet, Company, Squad. There were modern weapons, full headset rigs, and the armour rigs even had back-mounted launchers, smaller versions of what she’d used on Pyeongwha. This was where the missiles had come from.

  They came through the Home Guard without really paying them much attention, and the Home Guard seemed to shrink from their path. And then, weaving through their midst, came a skinny girl sprinting toward her.

  Sandy knelt as Svetlana ran into her and hugged her. She was crying. Sandy frowned, pulling back enough to see, and brush the tears away.

  “Hey, come on, tough street girl,” she said. “I’m about the hardest thing to kill that’s ever lived.”

  “I can see that,” said Svetlana, with glee. She let her go, and stared up at the flyer. “Whoa! You just jumped up and caught it?”

  “Thought it might be useful,” Sandy agreed. “Oh, and there’s someone still alive in the front seat. Best send someone to get him out.” That last more loudly. “Who are these people?”

  “They’re GIs!” Svetlana said excitedly. “They’re Gunter’s friends! I mean, can you believe it? We always thought Gunter was just Gunter, but it turns out he’s got all these important friends living out in the sands! This is Kiet, I think he’s in charge.”

  Kiet was a GI, Vietnamese looking, in League Fleet Marine armour. He wore a headset, had a teller 9 rifle, and various other weapons besides, including a back-mounted launcher. For a moment, Sandy had such a strong flashback, it gave her a chill. She really was back in the League now.

  “Kiet,” said Kiet. “Former groundie, Tac Sergeant, 13th Colonial. Designation 4186.”

  “Kresnov,” said Sandy. “Captain, Dark Star, retired.” Kiet’s eyes widened slightly. “Designation 5074.” The eyes widened a little more. “Currently FSA, special ops commander.”

  Kiet exhaled. “Wow.”

  “You guys got left here?”

  Kiet nodded. “In the crash. League stationed a security force here, a bit over six thousand GIs. Of course when they started evacuating, naturally we got first preference.” The sarcasm was strong. Coming from a GI, Sandy loved it.

  “Naturally,” she agreed, smiling.

  “We kept strong chain of command right up until the shooting started. Then some took the companies’ side, some took the civvies’, and the rest of us packed up and moved elsewhere.”

  “Where elsewhere?”

  “Somewhere safe,” said Kiet. And smiled. “Somewhere amazing.”

  “So you’ve been living on your own out in the desert for five years?” Sandy asked in amazement. She’d never heard this in any briefing, never even hinted at. “Six thousand GIs and no one thinks to figure where all the originals ended up?”

  Kiet shrugged. “Four fifths of us were regs, and you know regs. Most of them died in the fighting. Too brave to stop, too dumb to run away. The other thousand, well, there’s guys like Gunter, decided to stay here, make money. It’s probably more comfortable here. Because we’re GIs, you know, no one ever bothered to do a proper headcount.”

  “How many of you?”

  “Can’t say,” said Kiet, faintly apologetic. “Sorry. Been a secret for a while.”

  “And why come in from the cold right now?”

  “Because of you,” said Kiet, completely matter-of-fact. “Gunter told us. He’s kept our secret for a while, he’s one of our eyes and ears in town. He said what you’re trying to do. Not all of us agreed, but some of us thought we should help. We’ve got some Chancelry runaways amongst us, too. We know what Chancelry’s doing.”

  “Make you mad?” Sandy suggested.

  Kiet’s face hardened, and his grip shifted on his rifle. “Damn right. We’ve been free for five years. Some of us still aren’t completely free, if you know what I mean.” He tapped the side of his head. “But a few of us have figured out what freedom actually means. And we know it sure as hell doesn’t include Chancelry Corporation.”

  “Hey,” said Hector, pushing unwanted into their conversation. “Sorry to break up the happy skinjob reunion, but it’s not safe here and we’ve got things to talk about.”

  Kiet was going to let it pass. Sandy gave Hector a look that might have turned men to stone. “If you use that word on me again,” s
he said icily, “I’ll skin you.”

  Hector snorted, and left, waving his men to follow. Kiet just looked at her, faintly puzzled. “It’s just a word,” he offered. “Everyone uses it.”

  “I used to think that,” said Sandy. She thought of what she’d just seen, in Chancelry HQ. Of Anya, lying in that bunk, all a mess. “But then, I used to think the League were the good guys. Svet, where’s Danya?”

  Danya was with Gunter and a bunch of the new GIs who had taken up temporary residence in a warehouse. It was owned by some big local family, but Gunter was friends with the GI who worked security for them, so getting in was no issue. GIs sat about on bales and boxes, and checked their gear, or heated meals on small cookers, or stretched out synthetic muscles. Most of them took the time to look at Sandy as she arrived in Kiet’s truck and walked in amongst them.

  Danya was helping to pull steel fragments from the back of a female GI who lay on a soft bale. It was slightly gruesome. He was having to stick his fingers into holes in the woman’s skin and feel around. But Sandy could see why he might be more suited to the task than a GI—a lot of GIs actually lacked the fingertip sensitivity of regular humans; it just wasn’t one of those things GIs needed very much. Plus, Danya’s fingers were smaller, so he could feel around and find fragments of splinter another GI might miss.

  “Kresnov,” said Sandy to the woman on the bale. “Name?”

  “Kuza. 3515.” Which meant she wasn’t likely to say much more—a 35 series was significantly smarter than a reg, but in Sandy’s experience they weren’t big on conversation.

  “Hi,” said Danya, very pleased to see her, but unable to take blood smeared hands from Kuza’s back. Sandy kissed him anyway. “She got this in the artillery strike. She was on a rooftop with a launcher, so she might have saved your neck.”

  Sandy wasn’t comfortable with the idea that all these people were suffering for her, civvies or GIs alike. But she was here to stop Chancelry and GI experimentation, the long term consequences of which could spell a terrible fate for billions. Compared to that, these few casualties were nothing. Her own life included, if it came to that.