Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  “Why the Jain Market?”

  Sandy indicated to the left as a big gap between buildings opened up. Nestled within soared a great, white marble temple, with winding spires and a facade carved with dazzling, detailed patterns. More crowds ascended and descended from its wide stairs, carrying the garlands and incense from the market, plus offerings of food.

  “The Bhubaneswa Jain Temple,” she said. “Do you know about the Jains?” Rishi shook her head, mouth open. The temple was stunning. She’d never seen anything quite like it. “They’re pacifists who don’t believe in harming any living thing. Ironic location, in this market with all this meat around. See those funny looking crosses on the walls? Those are called swastikas. That’s a Jain symbol. Over three thousand years old now.”

  Rishi didn’t know what to think. She’d never even imagined a place like this. It was amazing.

  “You say your executives never hurt you,” said Sandy. “Why won’t they let you see a place like this?”

  The place vanished. They were back in the play room. Rishi felt a sense of loss. Tanusha was fascinating. She wanted it back, and didn’t know what to do with this sensation. Dissatisfaction.

  “I’ll tell you why they don’t,” said Sandy. “Because GIs process information. High-designation GIs especially. We like complexity. Confusion appeals to us. We’re like kittens, dangle a shiny ball in front of us and we’ll chase it round and round in circles, we can’t take our eyes off it. You know how many League GIs have defected to the Federation?”

  Rishi blinked. “No.”

  “Seventy-six so far, last I heard. All high-designation. You didn’t tell me your designation.”

  “4505,” said Rishi, dazed.

  Sandy whistled. “High. Very high.”

  “Not as high as some,” Rishi murmured. “The girl you found. Her image, in my memory implant. She’s higher.”

  A pause from Sandy. Her stare was very intense. “You know her?”

  Rishi nodded. “She was very high. And her friend, Eduardo. They were always together. Executives tried to find things for them to do, separately, but they preferred to be together. Everyone talked about them, because they were strange. I suppose that’s what happens, when you’re strange.”

  “Are you strange, Rishi?”

  “I don’t know.” Helplessly. “Maybe.”

  “Eduardo came to me, in Tanusha.” Rishi stared at her. “He was very strange, but I liked him. The executives killed him.”

  “No!” Incredulously. Defiantly. “You’re lying.”

  A new image replaced the lush green rainforest on the display wall. An autopsy table. Gruesome images. Eduardo’s face, lifeless in the cold light. No images that belonged in a colourful play room.

  “My own memory implants,” Sandy said quietly. Rishi stared. “See how the implants melted, in the back of the head? You know what does that?” No reply. “They put killswitches in all of our heads, Rishi. Me too. All the high-designation GIs. In case we start doing things they don’t want. Then they melt our brains.”

  A VR control panel opened in empty space in front of her.

  “On here are the schematics and images I recorded of Chancelry HQ when I hacked in just now,” said Sandy. “You know the medical research building, floors 12 to 17? The ones you’re not allowed into? Here’s what’s in them. Anya’s in there. You take your time, and look them over yourself. Then you tell me what you think. I promise if you want to go back to Chancelry after you look at them, I’ll let you. You won’t be a prisoner here anymore. It’s your choice. Life without choices is no life at all. Remember that.”

  Sandy unplugged from the back of Rishi’s head. She lolled, unconscious against the chains that bound her to the cellar’s rusting pipes. Monitoring the portable processor, Kiet gave Sandy a questioning look.

  “VR works amazingly,” said Sandy. “I showed her Tanusha, and a full schematic of Chancelry HQ. She’s processing that now.”

  Home Guard had given her drugs that knocked her out, but that wouldn’t stop the VR construct from working, a little bubble of consciousness within the enfolding dark of sleep.

  “Not waking up,” Kiet observed. “Try slapping her?”

  Sandy shook her head. “I don’t want to interrupt. Sometimes they wake up, sometimes they don’t. What I showed her was traumatic. She’ll wake when she wants to.”

  “Can she process the schematic without this?” Kiet tucked the cords away into the processor in its carry pack.

  “It’s just a schematic, it’s not full VR. Tacnet will handle it easily. Every GI has tacnet built in.”

  “Amazing you can keep a VR construct that size stable,” Kiet observed. “There’s so many unstable parameters.”

  “There’s a formula. I’ve got a new system worked out. It’s self-adjusting, monitors the construct and keeps it stable.”

  “Automated systems find it nearly impossible to stablise a construct that big,” Kiet said cautiously. “Especially with a subject who doesn’t want to be there.”

  Sandy shrugged. “But run automated systems with conscious oversight, and the capabilities exponentially increase. That’s always been a GI advantage. Augmented straights have it too, but they just don’t process the volumes that we do.”

  They left the basement, past Home Guard with weapons at the door who looked displeased with their presence. Outside the door was a blaze of cold morning sun, and Sandy wrapped her scarf beneath her raised collar, eyes adjusting to block the glare. It was only a short walk to the nearby garage where their vehicle and its guard were parked, but there were people in the street. Too many people, looking their way.

  Sandy didn’t need to tell Kiet. He immediately walked wide, hand in pocket for a weapon. On the right, immediately past a battery recharge store, Home Guard emerged from a coffee shop where they’d been waiting, smoking hookah pipes. Their weapons were not particularly well concealed within their heavy coats, berets askew, hoods raised against the chill. Sandy had never been much on dress discipline, but this was unprofessional. Raised hoods blocked the ears, restricted peripheral vision. Heavy duty boots were good for soft-footed straights, but slowed running. Weapons access was blocked by clothing, or otherwise poorly positioned.

  One of the men was Sylvan Hector. “Who gave you permission to talk to the skinjob?” he asked. Ordinary folks were gathering around, and it didn’t take a GI’s vision to spot more poorly concealed weapons.

  “I did,” said Sandy, not wanting to get Duage into trouble. She had asked, she wasn’t impolite.

  “From now on,” said Hector, “consider that permission revoked.”

  Sandy would have kept walking, but their path was completely blocked. Ordinary folks looked angry. Which made this a setup, because it could be no coincidence that all these people would gather in this place by chance. But a setup by whom, and for what?

  “Listen,” said Hector, “you don’t control anything around here. This is Home Guard territory. We’ve shed blood for five years to keep Outer Droze free from the corporations. You want to do anything, you talk to us first. Otherwise, we end up with Chancelry artillery attacks and a bunch of dead and wounded.”

  Angry growls from the crowd.

  “Noted,” said Sandy. “Move aside.”

  “What did she tell you? In there?” Hector jerked his head toward the doorway they’d emerged from.

  “Nothing,” said Sandy. “Your people gave her drugs to knock her unconscious.”

  “So what did you tell her?”

  “You’ve got a strange conception of the term ‘unconscious.’”

  “Listen Feddie,” said Hector, “I know you GIs have tricks. You didn’t just go in there to play visitors. What’s in the bag?” Looking at Kiet’s backpack, where the processor was stored.

  “It’s not safe for so many people to gather like this,” said Sandy. “Chancelry’s not the only corporation with UAVs. Kiet’s people can’t shoot them all down, it’ll just invite counterstrike. And now, lik
e a bunch of geniuses, you’re not concealing your weapons.”

  “And now she gives us lectures on not inviting a counterstrike!” snarled another onlooker.

  Now Sandy was truly concerned, but not for herself. She raised both hands, palms out. “Look, I don’t know who told you that confronting high-designation GIs physically could intimidate them, but they’re idiots. I’m going this way,” she pointed through them, “and trust me, you can’t stop me.”

  She indicated with a brief flick of the finger to the surrounding windows up and down the street. Kiet turned to look, scanning in full combat mode as the red shift descended upon Sandy’s own vision.

  “Twenty-six people are dead because of you!” another person shouted. “Fucking skinjob, who’s going to answer for all our dead?” More shouts. It was becoming hard to be heard.

  “Listen!” Sandy shouted. “Someone sold us out! I was doing recon in the neutral zone about the barrier and we triggered no alarm, just suddenly the Chancelry bots knew where we were! If you want someone to blame for that artillery strike, blame whoever told Chancelry we were there!”

  “Oh right!” Hector laughed, angrily. “Because it’s our fault! And all you skinjob freaks turning up on Chancelry’s doorstep with your heavy weapons had nothing to do with it!”

  “Go back to where you came from!” someone shouted, and others joined in the chorus. It was a crescendo of yells, pointing fingers and angry faces. Even in Tanusha, with its multiple extremist elements, Sandy had never experienced anything like this.

  But despite the noise, her hearing was sensitive enough to detect Kiet’s muttered reply, intended for no one but himself. “Go back to where I came from? You fucking made me, I came from you.”

  Shots. Someone fell, then another. Screams, yells, people running, ducking for cover as Sandy pulled two pistols and targetted on both sources, but they were gone as fast as they’d come.

  “Go!” she yelled at Kiet, and he sprinted for the vehicle. Sandy walked slowly, in full combat vision and watching the windows she was certain the snipers had been in, but knowing better than to expect those windows alone to yield more snipers.

  No more shots came, and now the truck was roaring toward them, doors opening, and Sandy jumped on the rear tray, weapons out, still scanning. The truck dodged more running people, and now some of those were aiming weapons. Sandy put a shot through an arm, a leg, then another arm, as again people ducked or ran for cover. Then the truck skidded about a dusty corner, and Sandy clambered around the cabin to crawl into a door that a GI inside held open for her.

  “You see them?” Sandy asked Kiet.

  “No,” said Kiet, weapons out at the opposite window, as were the other three GIs, including the one driving, a pistol on the wheel. “Two guns, that’s all.”

  “Why didn’t you shoot them?”

  “Dammit,” said Kiet, “not all of us are as fast as you. I only had a second, they were well covered and didn’t expose themselves.”

  Crap, thought Sandy, lateral thinking returning as combat reflex dimmed a bit. She hadn’t meant it as an accusation, just an honest question.

  “Fucking setup,” she muttered. “Whole thing.”

  “Whose?” asked the driver, roaring about another corner.

  “Home Guard. I had to wound a couple just now who tried to shoot at us. Now we’ll get blamed for the whole thing, all of Droze will turn against us.”

  “Hey!” said Kiet, as something occurred to him. “Rishi, the girl! They’ll kill her. We have to go back.”

  “For a Chancelry drone?” the driver asked sceptically.

  “She’s not a drone, she’s high-des. We were trying to bring her around!”

  “Keep going,” Sandy told the driver.

  “We’re not abandoning another one!” Kiet turned on her, angrily. “I’ve had enough of these fuckers, I’ve had enough of being treated like shit, and if they’re stupid enough to pick a fight with me, that’s their problem. We went to all that trouble to try and bring her around, and . . .”

  Sandy held up a hand. “I know,” she said, with a calm, knowing look. “She’ll be fine.”

  Kiet blinked, as the truck bounced on some rough road. “You slipped her something?”

  “Drug neutraliser. When you weren’t looking. Home Guard won’t let the mob have her, she’s an asset. But when she gets free of those chains, there’s plenty of ways out of that place without her having to kill any Home Guard. You see those high sidewalls? Led straight to the alleys.”

  “Wouldn’t care if she had to kill a bunch of them,” Kiet growled.

  “We might have to kill a bunch of them,” the driver agreed. “If they come after us.”

  “Then what?” asked another.

  “Maybe she comes to find us,” said Sandy. “Maybe she won’t. We’ll see.”

  “Well that settles it,” said Ari, sliding in beside the others. “They’re definitely following Cai.”

  They were huddled in a cold, abandoned storage compartment, behind the cover of steel air ducts and empty cargo rails. Nearly four hours ago, they’d been forced to abandon their reconnaissance, based from Cai’s empty apartment, when both Ari and Cai’s tripwires had been triggered, warning them of an approaching ambush. Since then they’d been moving continuously, deeper and deeper into Antibe Station’s cold, empty bowels, cautious pursuit never more than a few hundred meters behind.

  “We’re being herded,” said Vanessa, working her pistol mechanism to prevent jamming in the cold. “I hate that.”

  “Herded where?” Rhian wondered. They all had station schematics uploaded, but didn’t dare access the station network to monitor something real-time. Only Ari and Cai had the network kung fu to risk it, and they’d do it disguised as any number of other functions, and wouldn’t check something so obvious as a schematic. If it came to a fight, Ari had his booster they could run tacnet off, but they didn’t dare use it until the bullets were flying. Anything that generated a transmission range they could use, their pursuers could also monitor, even if they couldn’t interfere with it.

  “Somewhere they have a trap waiting,” said Vanessa, eyes fixed on doorways. They communicated only at a whisper, unable to use uplink formulation for the same reason they couldn’t use tacnet. Being in a communications unfriendly environment was getting old.

  “I’m not sure it follows they’re definitely chasing me,” Cai said with a faint frown.

  “You accessed docking matrix from gridpoint CF-92, like I said?” Ari asked. Cai nodded. “And immediately my mole reported a feedback spike on that grid, and two minutes later we hear footsteps coming down the best corridor access to CF-92. Somehow they know what to look for when you access the net.”

  “Best you stop for now,” Vanessa suggested. Her stomach grumbled. Being on a big, empty space station was like being stranded in a giant steel desert. Most services to these parts had been switched off, excluding air. No water ran through the pipes, and the nearest food was only available from retail outlets a kilometer away, or warehouses, both guarded and visible.

  “I’ve been on this station for several months,” Cai replied. He looked concerned, possibly even worried. That was a first. “They’ve never been able to trace my interface before.”

  “Yeah,” said Ari, staring intently at the surrounding walls. “I wonder. That League ship, the ghostie. Any other League ships visiting while you’ve been here?”

  “No,” said Cai. He and Ari looked at each other for a long moment.

  Vanessa got a chill that had nothing to do with the cold. Ari thought that super advanced League warship had been sent all this way to warn the station about Cai? That brought a thousand questions to mind.

  “Shit, Ari!” she whispered in frustration. “Who the hell is he? I can’t think my way out of a tactical situation if I don’t even know what we’re stuck in! And like it or not, I am ranking military here, however advanced he is!”

  “Perhaps we should tell her,” Cai suggested.
>
  “No.” Ari shook his head, adamant. “Ricey I’m sorry. You can kick my ass later.”

  “You better believe it,” she muttered.

  “But I think I’ve got some idea what’s going on out here,” he continued. “Why Chancelry’s making GIs out here, where GI technology came from. We’re getting chased right now. If they catch one of us . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she growled.

  “Tell me,” Cai interrupted. “You three seem too smart and too senior to just get yourselves trapped on this hostile station. Do you have support? Out there?” With a nod toward distant, empty space.

  “Now who’s asking for secrets,” Vanessa said drily. A thought occurred to her. “Do you?”

  Cai smiled a little, and shrugged. It was a subtle smile, with a hint of irony. The kind of expression only the most mentally developed GIs would offer. Like Sandy.

  “Well, whether you guys will talk to me or not,” she said, “I’ve only got one plan when people come after me.”

  “Ha,” said Rhian, checking weapons and ammo. “Thought so.”

  Ari blinked, looking from one to the other. “You’re going to attack them?”

  “Not all of them,” Vanessa replied. “Just the ones that matter.”

  The ambush was easier than she’d thought. With their pursuers tracking Cai’s network access points as they moved through the station, it was a simple enough matter for Ari to find a way to fool the network receptors to thinking Cai was somewhere he wasn’t. Almost immediately the pursuit deviated in that direction, with flankers to guard the main corridors to prevent any backtracking. A simple study of the schematic told Vanessa the logical spot for that, and she made sure she got there first.

  Rhian did it herself. There was no cover for any more than one person, and the others were needed to make sure they themselves weren’t flanked in the maze of corridors and empty rooms and service crawlways. Vanessa didn’t see exactly what she did, just heard a fast commotion, then peered down her corridor to see Rhian already dragging one body, boots disappearing around a corner.