Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield

by Joel Shepherd

  “What kind of systems?”

  “Anything with wireless access. Of course you need uplinks, internal or external…in your case external of course, since you're kids. You have an external unit?” Danya nodded. Anku looked a little jealous. “Well-equipped little buggers. Use that to acquire a wireless gateway, and this booster should break you in. Lots of uses for conniving little trolls up to no good.”

  “Valuable?”

  Anku's face turned suddenly thoughtful. He tried to shrug offhandedly, fingers interlaced in his long, greasy ponytail. But Danya caught the glint of greed in his eyes, the suppressed eagerness. “Could be. You want me to look for some buyers?”

  Danya kept his bored expression in place with far more convincing ease. “No. Not a good time for us to go around advertising ourselves. Someone would dob us in just for our stuff.”

  “People will do that anyway,” said Anku. “If you did it through me, I'd make sure no one knew who the seller was.”

  Danya shook his head. Put a hand into his backpack and pulled out a heavy black pistol. Anku's eyes widened. Suitable equipment for children indeed. “We can defend what we've got. And I'd rather defend a useful tool than a shitload of cash we can't spend without showing our faces in public.”

  “I'd be careful who I showed that to,” Anku warned him. Everyone knew the corporate bounty on guns and their owners. It was an easy way to make money, and for the corporations to keep their threat levels down beyond the walls. No one collected on Home Guard, because Home Guard killed informers. But a street kid with a gun was just a bounty awaiting collection.

  “I am,” said Danya. Something buzzed on his earbud. Frequency chatter, probably Home Guard. Svetlana pulled AR glasses and activated; they fed off the receiver in her backpack.

  “Flasher drone,” she said, observing what it showed her. “Home Guard are watching it.”

  “The feeder drone still there?” Danya asked. That was the high-altitude one, a feeder because it sent a constant feed back to the corporations. Who were putting so much countermeasures up lately, Home Guard had stopped bothering to shoot missiles at them. Missiles were expensive, and limited.

  Svetlana nodded. “Yep. And another one up over West Side.”

  “Wow,” said Anku, watching them. “You two did hit a treasure trove. Nice gear, kids.”

  “Friends,” said Danya, putting the gun away. “Svet, we better go.”

  He felt nervous being in one place for too long. And more nervous being outside and moving. Anku had several ways out of his basement, then along some dark corridors, past some people sleeping in the central corridor, dirty limbs amongst tangled blankets—it was safest, protected from further artillery by layers of concrete. Power was out once more, which probably had something to do with all the shooting in the corporate zone. But now when he stopped at the rear exit to peer out the glass doors, the sky in that direction was silent once more. A few hours ago it had been like a Pantalan static storm but with streaking missiles and scattering tracer. Now nothing, save a few long-burning fires aglow against the night horizon.

  “Parking,” he said, leading them to the adjoining parking exit instead. Nervous habits, born of life on the streets of Droze. The parking exit led into a covered section protecting a few vehicles and an armed security guard with a mechanical cybernetic arm who stared at them. The kids pulled down hats and hoods against the cold and made for the road. They paused at the sidewalk. Once beyond the covered area, aerial surveillance would spot them. Them and thousands of others in this region of Droze; the streets were quiet but not that quiet. If the people Danya feared were looking for them really were, they'd have no way of sorting their heat signature from those other thousands. But children made a smaller signature, surely. And they'd know there were two of them.

  He pulled out his own AR glasses. The booster Anku had been lovingly examining was hacked nicely into the Home Guard feed, which gave them visuals on the feeder drone. It was approaching a position where it could look down this street with no cover. Luckily the corporations had poor satellite surveillance, something about a hyperactive sun and poor planetary magnetics…

  “Wait a moment,” he said, waiting for the drone to pass.

  “You don't really think the corporations are after us?” Svetlana wondered.

  “They know who we are, Svet,” said Danya. “CEO Patana himself threatened us when I was with Sandy before the attack, I saw it. Or he threatened Kiril. They think they can get to Sandy through us.”

  “I bet that was Sandy,” said Svetlana, eyes alive, nodding toward the corporate zone. The fireworks, she meant. “I bet that was her blasting them all to bits!”

  “She's not a superhero, Svet. GIs die just like anyone.”

  “She got Chancelry, didn't she?” Svetlana had been so impressed. Chancelry Corporation were the all-powerful overlords of Droze, Pantala, and all the immediate universe. Even the gang bosses and Home Guard commanders of Rimtown and the other, outer districts of Droze lived in terror of earning Chancelry's displeasure, for all Home Guard's tough talk of warfare. Now, their friend Sandy had torn through their heaviest outer defences and occupied Chancelry HQ. It was like Abraham's tales in his little Rimtown mosque of a man named David who had once killed a giant. Although Danya didn't think David had been a GI, and Sandy had been using better weapons than slingshots.

  “She had a lot of help getting Chancelry. For all we know most of her GIs died taking Chancelry; we've no idea how many of them survived.”

  “I bet lots!” Svetlana said hotly. “They wouldn't have captured Chancelry if they'd lost too many! And I bet she rescued Kiril too!”

  It was a total non-sequitur, but Kiril was the dominant recurring thought for both of them. And she had no proof of it either. Danya would have argued the point, but it was too hard. Svetlana wanted to believe. Being younger, she had that luxury. As the oldest, he never had. And now that logic forced him into possible conclusions he couldn't bear to face. Kiril was over there, in the direction of all that shooting an hour ago. Had been over there, out of sight and unreachable, for more than a week. He could have died in the initial attack on Chancelry and been dead over a week, there was no way to tell.

  He and Svetlana had taken two days to reunite after the attack at one of their emergency rendezvous spots. Since then they'd been hiding from various drones, spies, and people out to get them. As scary as that was, Danya didn't find it nearly as scary as wondering what had happened to Kiril. It was a fear so great he was almost tempted to let the corporations grab them, so long as he could know Kiril's fate. But that was stupid—Kiril had been in Chancelry, and the other corporations now knew as little of what went on in Chancelry as he did.

  As they waited, Svetlana pulled some flatbread from her pack, tore some, and offered half to him, eating hers. He ate. It was dry now, three days old, and Danya dreaded buying more for fear that shopkeepers might be alerted to them. Corporations did that sometimes, to get the people they wanted. They had cash, Svetlana had salvaged a pair of boots and a knife the GIs had also left, which Danya had since sold. Svetlana could always steal some more, but he hated it when she did that; she was so good at stealing that he wasn't sure she always saw the point of money. And they could get a lot more cash if they sold some of their newer acquisitions…but as he'd told Anku, where could he spend it? When the bounty on you got high, you trusted no one.

  The drone was passing. “Svet,” said Danya as she prepared to move from their wall. “I have an idea.” Svetlana waited patiently. So trusting. Sometimes he wished she wasn't. She had more confidence in him most of the time than he did. “Do you remember Janu?”

  “Of course. The Wilkie job.” Wilkie were a rival family out in Al Khartoum. Danya and Svetlana had been offered good money to spy on one of their establishments from an opposing attic for a week. They'd taken it with trepidation, but far from getting screwed, or killed, they'd been paid well, and even thanked. “That was good money.”

  “Svet,
if you're sure you heard micro drones the other night…”

  “I did! I heard them buzzing, you were asleep so you didn't…”

  “I know, I believe you.” Svetlana was placated. “But if they're using micros, we're not going to be able to stay hidden very long. I mean, we don't even know whose micros they are, and I was thinking…if Home Guard and the Tings and whoever else knows the corporations are looking for us too, that only gives them more reason to find us, so they can get a big bounty.”

  Svetlana nodded impatiently. “So what about Janu?”

  “I was thinking maybe he'd help us.”

  Svetlana blinked. “But he's a mobster. Danya, he has people killed, he could just hand us over to the corporations, or the Tings, and…”

  “No.” Danya shook his head firmly. “He's never taken corporate money, and he deals in all the stuff the corporations ban, so they'd rather him dead. Home Guard don't like him either because he shows them up on their turf. He's got a lot of people and technology, so if he helped us, we wouldn't have to worry about these fucking drones. And best of all, he's got contacts in the corporations with all his blackmarket stuff. I reckon if anyone could get in contact with Chancelry, find out if Kiril's okay, it would be him.”

  Svetlana's eyes widened at that. He knew he had her. “You think?”

  “Maybe. This standoff with Chancelry could go on for weeks. Svet, I don't know if we can dodge these drones for weeks.” And he didn't want to spend more weeks not knowing about Kiril. He didn't need to say it, she felt the same.

  “But what can we give to Janu? All we've got is weapons, and he's got plenty already.”

  “I know.” He stared past the wall at the cold, empty street and boarded shopfronts. “I'll think of something.”

  Sandy knelt in the shower stall and sobbed. It wasn't her accustomed reaction after a fight. But that fight had sucked. Her brain kept replaying that trapped, horrid sensation of the advance across Central Zone rooftops, unable to move fast on the streets thanks to defensive fire, cross-fired from all sides, and pinpointed by enemy arty. Tacnet was usually her friend, the puzzle that presented solutions. This time it had shown her nothing but a giant cage, slowly contracting on her.

  The numerical certainty of losing friends with every few passing seconds as the rounds came in, and knowing there was nothing she could do to stop it save to keep advancing, condemning even more of her troops to die…she could see the blips on tacnet disappearing even now, accompanied by that rapid, pounding concussion. The memory brought on panic. She never panicked. Deep in combat reflex, the sensations of combat did not usually register on that emotional side of the brain in the same way they did with regular humans. But she was changing, older now. Her brain had new pathways, had exercised new emotional connections that hadn't been there a few years ago. And this felt just awful.

  And she'd failed. Nearly all of the attempted escapees were dead, save for a few that Kiet's troops had moved away from the initial crash site in time to be clear of the killswitch frequencies. Possibly as many as several thousand GIs, spread across the four remaining mega corporations. Mostly not experimentals like in Chancelry, just combatants, of whom the corporations had become suddenly terrified, following events here. Of course she'd known she would fail; Kiet's plans were crazed wishful thinking based on idealistic rage. But his incompetence had forced her to try, and had put her into an unwinnable trap. Never again.

  “Sandy?” The stall door opened, and there was Kiril, worried. “Sandy, are you crying?”

  “Yeah.” She raised her face to the hot water, so that there could be no telling between water and tears. “Yeah, kid, I'm crying.”

  Kiril came into the stall with her and hugged her. Sandy was baffled. It was a dumb thing to do; he was getting all wet. It was also awkward, because she-of-no-parenting-skills-whatever now had to worry about female adult nudity and young boys, which wasn't something she'd ever been concerned with before. What would Rhian say that could make sense of such behaviour?

  She'd say that Kiril was actually the smarter, because getting wet and being nude were stupid and irrelevant, and Kiril ignored them both by trying to make her feel better. Because kids were like that; while adults tried to navigate between grown-up obstacles, kids ploughed straight through them with utter unconcern to go for what mattered to them. And she recalled Danya and Svetlana telling her what a sweet boy Kiril was, how he liked to hug and liked to make friends. Too sweet for a street kid, and Danya had worried about it, fearing he'd make friends of the wrong kind.

  Sandy hugged him back. To her surprise, it did make her feel better. She held him for quite a long time. It made him very wet, which was completely selfish of her, but neither of them cared.

  “Come on,” she said, and kissed him roughly. “You need to get dry.”

  “Hey, Sandy,” he said cheerfully. “I'm having a shower in my clothes!” Like it was the most amusing thing ever.

  Sandy smiled. “Well, that's no good. Do you have some dry clothes?”

  “Yeah, Ratnika helped me wash some earlier.”

  “Well, let's go and get them, and let's thank Ratnika.”

  “I already did, she's really nice.”

  It was well past midnight, and she left Kiril with Poole in medical, with instructions to let him fall asleep on a spare bed when he got too tired. Medical was a mess with injured GIs, tended to by other GIs like Poole with barely enough field medic skills to cope, and she had no business leaving a six-year-old boy in such an environment. But all three AMLORA rounds fired on Chancelry HQ had hit the 4-A building beside the main armoury, where small-arms reserves were stored, which were not the strategic weapons the companies were scared of, and led to speculation they'd been trying to stir a counter uprising amongst Chancelry's GI regs, and disabling local defences. Sandy was having all network traffic scoured for backdoors into local systems in case their local regs had been contacted, and all regs were under surreptitious watch. In the meantime, Kiril would never be more than a few meters away from her or Poole. Given what she was about to do, she knew that now, it had to be Poole.

  GIs had gathered on the ground floor to 9-R. Sandy walked through the main hall, past stacked ammunition boxes, lounges, and meeting rooms now converted into infantry-ready rooms, where GIs congregated between armour rosters. The past few days it had been a social space, this conditioned air filled with the smell of mess hall food and the sound of rock music. Now it was silent, save a few dutifully holding to their maintenance tasks on armour or weapons.

  The lobby was where they gathered, high glass walls and public sculpture, where Chancelry HQ presented its public face. A modernist human figure, towering up the sides of open-cut floors, balconies overlooking the space below. Sandy found something about its human distortions darkly ironic.

  The gathering of GIs was maybe forty strong, all armed, a few armoured but mostly not. Tired, some showered, a few injured, they wore whatever odd combinations of civvie or military clothes they could scrounge. Kiet's desert dwellers had their military fatigues, League issue and now a little old, cast-offs from the war that they were. Rishi's Chancelry experimentals had only company fatigues, black and navy blue, with the civvie stuff they'd “borrowed.” Some of the former had long hair, or braids, or other unorthodoxies. They were old by GI standards, some even older than her. League soldiers stationed on Pantala before the crash, they'd been abandoned by the retreating League with the rest of the population, their berths on escaping ships granted to Droze VIPs instead. Rather than participate in the civil war that followed, they'd withdrawn to the deserts, where they'd been surviving for the past five years.

  The Chancelry experimentals on the other hand were all green and new, neat haircuts and wide eyes. In Sandy's old Dark Star unit the veterans had said such GIs were so new they squeaked. Chancelry had bred them to die, entire batches living and dying in experimental surgeries, barely knowing each other existed, their environments so tightly controlled they'd not even questione
d the need to step outside. Until Sandy had arrived and exposed the truth to one of them: Rishi. Who had done the human thing and freaked out completely, and led an uprising that would have failed had not Sandy and Kiet led his desert dwellers on an explosive attack that had saved them in time, while also getting them trapped in this place, enemy corporate forces encircling all sides.

  Kiet and several others were talking loudly while most listened. There were looks of disbelief and despair. Confusion as to how it had all gone so wrong. The civvie world thought GIs emotionless, but Sandy knew that could not be further from the truth. GIs could control emotion when necessary. But when it came out, it was more pure and less restrained than in straights. Most GIs Sandy knew would make terrible poker players.

  Kiet saw her coming. Broad shouldered, he was Asian featured, squat and compact like a lot of male GIs. “You let them live!” he shouted at her furiously. “You traitor!”

  The crowd parted as Sandy approached. She walked to him, vision already tracking well into multi-spectrum, muscles tensing in the onset of combat reflex. Kiet saw, eyes widening, and took a ready stance. Sandy reached for his throat, quite slowly and deliberately. Kiet swatted her grip away, giving Sandy contact, which quickly reversed into a series of technical hand, arm, and wrist grips, basic Wing Chun, and ending with Sandy pulling his guard aside for a direct face punch that she declined to take.

  Kiet's eyes widened further—a 41 series, fairly advanced and with extensive experience of both life and combat, he wasn't accustomed to losing. Consciously of course he knew she was more advanced but had perhaps yet to understand what that really meant in practical terms. He tried again, another fast flurry, Sandy again refraining from a headshot, then another, then a fast reversal into a chest punch that she did take, which travelled ten centimeters and knocked him flying four meters backward.