Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield

by Joel Shepherd

  “Then I want to know exactly what it is.”

  “Those files they erased,” Poole reminded her. “They'll have copies, but we're not exactly in a position of leverage…”

  “We've got an expert in orbit,” said Sandy. “Let's use him.”

  The mall had been nice once, some old-timers said. In the crash, Home Guard had used it for staging and supplies, and the corporations had hit it, leaving half of it a collapsed ruin. Danya and Svetlana sat in what had once been a kitchen of some mallside restaurant, huddled in long sleeves and hats against the cold. Svetlana had her AR glasses on, looking for drones. Somewhere farther down the mall, stray dogs barked.

  Danya examined the booster unit. His own glasses gave him a graphical display of receptive targets and sources he could potentially lock into besides the Home Guard feeds. Quietly monitoring local and supposedly “secure” networks, they could move around like this for quite some time and have real eyes and ears. Would have been damn useful the past five years. But it made them a target too, and they couldn't live like ghosts forever.

  “Danya, what did Mama do before she came to Pantala?” Svetlana asked suddenly.

  Danya thought about it for a moment. It took a mental adjustment. That was another world, the world with Mama. “She worked in insurance,” he said, remembering.

  “What's insurance?”

  “Insurance is where you pay a company some money each year, and if something bad happens to you, they pay you even more money back. So you're covered, in case something bad happens.”

  “Who'd pay a company money?” Svetlana asked incredulously. “What if the company was the one that made something bad happen to you?”

  “Companies elsewhere aren't like they are on Droze. You can trust them.”

  “And what good's money if something bad happens to you anyway?” Svetlana adjusted her glasses settings. “Why not pay money to make sure something bad doesn't happen?”

  “I guess even offworld sometimes they can't stop bad things happening,” Danya reasoned.

  Silence for a moment. Down the mall, dogs were still barking. Sometimes the strays found scraps, left by other street kids or wanderers. The mall was a common place to look for a sleeping spot. You wouldn't do it more than one night at a time, because it could be dangerous sometimes, thieves or worse targeting the helpless to steal their stuff. But tonight, Danya feared thieves less than he had, and preferred some place farther away from regular folk.

  “Why did Mama come to Pantala if she worked in insurance?” Svetlana asked then.

  “Pantala was rich,” said Danya. “She thought she could make more money.” She had been making money too. Danya remembered a big apartment. He'd been younger then, maybe Kiril's age. Before Kiril, then. Svetlana just a baby, he remembered her as a baby, a little thing all squished up in her bedclothes. Remembered being shown her, straight from the tank, all pink and wailing.

  Confident Mama. Single woman, big apartment, new city. Bit of a wasteland, but you could build anything if you had enough money, he remembered her saying so. They'd all called Droze the sandbox, even before the crash. But the companies kept the money pouring in from big military contracts, and no one thought about it. Until the war stopped, and the money with it.

  Confident Mama. Three kids, no father, just a donor bank and gene labs. They were all three of them pretty well set, gene wise, Mama had wanted for them all the best in life. He remembered her saying so, tears on her face as she held him in the crowds of the transit camp with the cops yelling and the sirens and roadblocks blaring and flashing, and everyone pushing and screaming for a seat on some departing transport. She'd only wanted the best, please forgive her.

  But they hadn't gotten a transport. There'd followed a smaller apartment, then troubles, then a lack of food. Kiril, in the tank even as the trouble started, but Mama hadn't terminated, no, she didn't believe in that kind of thing. A new baby, Danya remembered holding him in the water queues, remembered Mama getting milk from company officials, company people were all about town back then, still trying to help, you could ask them for stuff and not get shot. Thank you, she'd said, as Danya had held the baby, and Svetlana had cried and clutched her teddy.

  Then the queues had been less orderly, lots of people yelling, and Mama didn't like the kids in line anymore, even though it had helped to get them more stuff. Then locked doors and crouched with other neighbourhood parents and kids as the riots ran up and down the streets outside, and then the shooting started…and then it was concrete and basements, watching the walls shake and dust rain down as explosions crashed and boomed above. Running from one place to another, terrified of shooting but desperate for water and food. Bodies in the street, things burning. Lots of shooting.

  One day Mama had gone out and not come back. Danya remembered crying and being terrified, but also being so preoccupied taking care of Svetlana and Kiril that he hadn't had time to cry and be terrified for very long at all. He'd put it off, crying for Mama, and by the time he remembered again, it was too late, and he'd almost forgotten her face.

  “I think she was right,” Svetlana decided. Danya looked at her in surprise. “I'd like to have money.”

  Ah. Of course she did. “I think you're quite a lot like Mama, Svetochka,” said Danya. Svetlana looked pleased at that. Danya put an arm around her. Svetlana would never blame Mama for dumping them in this mess. Kiril neither. They were too young to know anything else and could not recall that there was an alternative. Mama was a mythical figure, of distant memory to Svetlana, and of only tales for Kiril. And their older brother had no business tarnishing that figure with doubts and crude, blunt observations born of a lifetime staying alive on the streets of Droze, like what kind of fool moved to a government-run munitions town in the last throes of an ending war and brought three kids into a world that, suddenly without all its money, and her money, she had no chance of supporting…

  It was the scariest truth that he knew. Adults were stupid too, and there was nothing to look forward to in growing up, except that you might be a bit stronger and wiser, and people wouldn't treat you quite so much like shit all the time. Or if they did, you could do more about it.

  Truth was he didn't much like it when Svetlana asked questions about Mama. He always tried to tell her the truth, but with Mama, he couldn't. And he didn't like to think about it, because unlike Svetlana and Kiril, he was old enough to remember things that they'd happily forgotten or never really known.

  Outside the kitchen, on the floor where the restaurant had been, a dog started barking. Danya got up and looked. Sure enough, it was barking at them; it could smell them. Most of the mutts weren't dangerous, just suspicious and territorial. A few he'd even been friendly with, the ones that licked and wagged their tails. Not so much different from street kids, they just got by how they could.

  “He'll go away in a minute,” said Danya. He looked around for something he could throw…but that could be awkward, he didn't want to make any more noise.

  “He'll give us away,” Svetlana warned.

  “I'll chase him.”

  “Don't,” said Svetlana. “There's a pack out there, packs are dangerous.”

  “I don't think it's a pack, it's just some mutts in the same place…” He finally noticed what Svetlana was doing. The pistol came with a silencer, and she was screwing it quickly into place. “Svet, what the hell…”

  Svetlana rolled quickly to the edge of the bench, got up, and sighted the pistol on the benchtop. Danya could have stopped her, but he wasn't about to wrestle a loaded gun off his sister over a dog. Besides, he couldn't quite believe she'd do it.

  The gun thumped, just a small thud of compressed air. The dog stopped barking. It looked puzzled, wobbled slightly, then sat down, panting heavily. With a jet of arterial blood shooting out of it at least a meter, like water from a punctured pressure pipe. Both kids stared in horrified fascination. Or Danya did. Svetlana calmly unscrewed the silencer, all business.

  Still panting
, the dog lay down, with a glassy, slightly desperate look. Not knowing what was wrong with it, but wanting it to stop. The jet of blood reduced to a trickle, and the dog lay still.

  Danya crouched back down and stared at his sister. Silencer back in a pocket, she had the safety back on the pistol like Sandy had shown her.

  “What?” she said stubbornly. “That dog was going to get us killed.”

  “It wasn't; it was just barking.”

  “And attracting attention! There's people looking to kill us!”

  “Dogs bark all the time, you think the people after us have sensors looking for barking dogs? They'd get a thousand readings all over Droze.”

  “We can't take risks anymore, Danya,” Svetlana retorted, jaw set stubbornly. “I'm not getting killed over some stupid dog.”

  “So that's going to be how you solve every problem from now on, huh?” This new turn scared Danya in ways he couldn't put words to. Svetlana could be ruthless. “Selfish” was a hard word to use about someone you loved more than your own life…but there it was. Only her definition of selfish included her brothers and anyone else who happened to be important to her. Most of her life, it'd just been them three. Lately, it had come to include Sandy. Who Danya was starting to think had been a very bad influence in this one respect. “Someone annoys you, shoot him?”

  “If that someone's trying to get us killed, yes!” Svetlana settled back against the counter, knees drawn up, arms about her legs.

  “Svet, any number of people might nearly get us killed. It's not always on purpose, sometimes things are just dangerous! You can't just shoot everyone who worries you!”

  “They were going to take you away!” There was panic in her tone, the calm cracked. “They were going to take you like they took Kiril, and I was going to be left all alone!”

  “Svet, this isn't about that.” He held her arm firmly, knowing that he lied—it was about that, of course it was. How could it not be? “That wasn't a bad thing that you did.” Dead eyes staring at the ceiling. Screams and blood. He'd had nightmares of seeing her or Kiril like that. He'd wanted them free of all of that kind of thing. But now they were in it neck deep, and there was no getting out, and Janu's people were after them with revenge on their mind, and there was just no getting out of this that he could see, nothing that would stop the two of them ending up the same way…

  “But if this is how you start dealing with everything,” he continued, forcing himself, “well…people shoot back, Svet. And they've got much bigger guns than that one, and there's more of them, and…”

  Something hit the counter with a thud, then a bang! and acrid smoke everywhere. Stunned from the noise he tried to scramble for his own bag and gun, then realised that Svetlana's was in her pocket, and she was pulling it out. He grabbed her, holding her arm, and something heavy came over the counter and fell on them, gloved hands pulling him off with effortless power.

  He was being dragged then, something pressed over his mouth regardless how he struggled, but he didn't pass out like he assumed; they weren't trying to smother him. A mask to keep gas from his lungs. He heard voices instead, muffled from inside helmets.

  “Rear's clear.”

  “Two bags, some field kit. Two pistols.”

  “We got them,” said the man holding him. “Objective secured, returning to rendezvous.”

  “This is Ramoja,” came the reply on an audible speaker. “Good job.”

  Sandy moved quickly in the lower hallway of 9-R building, fine-tuning systems on her armour, quickly selecting weapons and ammo, an extra harness for grenade rounds, more lateral rotation through the torso; mobility was going to be important here. On local tacnet she had Droze primary spaceport, out beyond the northern periphery, visible defensive grids downlinked to her from Mekong.

  “If this was my sitrep, Sandy, I couldn't confirm what they're up to,” Vanessa warned her.

  “They grabbed the kids,” said Sandy, running through armour systems on linkup. A right arm flex, and the armour flexed in response, harnessed to a wall of the hallway with a couple of underarm straps. “There's nothing else it could be, you don't drop a combat shuttle from orbit onto Droze outskirts with a sudden tacnet linkup with corporation defences for any other reason.”

  “That you can think of,” Vanessa cautioned.

  “That I can think of's been all I've had for the last twenty-two years, Vanessa.” Amp down feedback, lateral flex up two, rebalance the power ratio to the shoulder mount, recalibrate, pump up the feedback once more…“Corporation defences were set to shoot down League orbital descents just an hour ago, now they're locked down, they've done their deal and now they both want me out of the picture. Grabbing the kids is the best way to do it.”

  Poole came stomping down the hall in heavy gear, loaded with extras and not yet calibrated. Rishi followed, unarmoured. Dahisu, Kiet's best friend, likewise.

  “They're at the spaceport,” said Rishi, frowning. She leaned against a wall, arms folded. “You going to attack it?”

  “No, I'm going to go and ask nicely if they'll let me have my kids back.” Poole handed her some loaded webbing. “You don't have to come. Someone should look after Kiril.”

  “Kiril wants his brother and sister back,” said Poole, starting his own calibrations, unshouldering a massive rifle. “I think in poker it's called ‘all or nothing.’”

  “This isn't your fight.”

  “You think I don't like Kiril? I spend nearly as much time with him as you do.”

  Sandy stared at him for a moment. It was unexpected of Poole…and yet, somehow not. He was laconic, withdrawn. Some might say moody, for a GI. And also unorthodox and prone to confound. For him to forge a friendship with a six-year-old was surprising. Yet Poole often did things with the air of one raising a calculated middle finger to others’ expectations.

  “I don't get it,” Dahisu said flatly. “You claim to be our leader, to lead all us GIs to something better. Now you're going to go and get killed for a couple of kids. I get tired of asking whose side you're on.”

  “So stop,” said Sandy.

  “Dahisu's right,” said Rishi, still frowning. Her head still bore the scar where a bullet had nearly taken it off, when she'd attacked Sandy and her friends in service of Chancelry. Hers had been the biggest and most rapid turnaround in loyalties and worldview. “It doesn't make sense. How can you lead us if your loyalties are divided like this?”

  “And your inability to understand makes me wonder if you're worth leading,” said Sandy. She was processing on too many levels to get into the full emotive discussion now, gear calibrations, tacnet scan, comlink to Mekong, recalculating possible options now that it seemed they were two and not one. Rishi didn't get it, fine. She hadn't expected Rishi would.

  “Help me to understand,” said Rishi. “You helped me to understand before. I know I'm not like the rest of you, I'm young. But I know I can understand more, if you show me.”

  “Rishi,” said Sandy, removing clothes down to her undershirt for a better armour fit. “I really don't have time.”

  “You do,” said Rishi. “A League Fleet marine squad won't use corporate shuttles to get back to orbit, corporation vehicles all have embedded control systems and League don't trust them that much. The corporates would like those kids too, leverage over you and League. They'll have to refuel their own ship, take them another four hours at least.”

  Rishi was four years old, a 45 series. One iteration of synthetic neural tech below Sandy, though, making mere numbers misleading. Definitely far smarter at this age than Sandy had been, faster maturation with a lower plateau, like all GIs below her designation. Or all that she knew of.

  Sandy slipped into the armoured upper half from below, thrust her arms in with the reflex ease that she tied shoelaces. “I like these kids, Rishi. I can't explain it, but I like them a lot.”

  Rishi's frown grew deeper. “Like motherhood?”

  “I don't know.”

  “GIs don't get that,” sa
id Dahisu. “It's not written anywhere.”

  “Tell it to my friend Rhian on Mekong. She's a 39 series and she's the mother of three adopted.”

  “Liking kids and having maternal impulses aren't the same thing,” said Dahisu skeptically. “Maybe you're trying too hard.”

  “To be human?” Sandy said drily, testing the arm and shoulder resistance and liking it. “Maybe you could try some self-respect.”

  “To be a straight,” Dahisu retorted. “To be just like them.”

  Sandy might have shaken her head in disbelief, if she could be bothered. “There is no them. Nor us. That's what you're not getting.”

  Only she'd called them “my people” back on Callay, arguing with Director Ibrahim. And she'd felt that too, emotionally. Was this the curse of being high-designation, to be continually confronted with contrary impulses? Or was it rather the blessing, to ensure that no moral imperative was followed over a cliff?

  “So all this mass production, experimentation, and murder was just a figment of our imagination then?” Dahisu snorted. You had to be fairly high-des, and fairly old, to do sarcasm like that.

  “No,” said Sandy. “The persecution isn't your imagination. But your conception of the persecutors is. Everyone not a GI is not the enemy. If they are, we're finished, you may as well shoot yourself now.”

  Dahisu glowered at that reference to his friend Kiet. “And you think you can make them like us by forming attachments with their kids?”

  Sandy gave him her first dangerously contemptuous look. It had some effect. “This is like arguing with someone with the emotional range of a flea. I can't make them like us by doing anything, but my life experience tells me that many of them already like us or like some of us at least. But they probably won't like you, not because you're synthetic, but because you're showing every sign of being an asshole. I don't like assholes either. Give me an everyday straight or an asshole GI, I'll take the straight every day.

  “Now after not letting me lead you in preference to a guy who turned out to be strategically incompetent, you're now complaining that I won't lead you because I have higher priorities. You're damn right I do. You want my help? Be worthy of it. Right now I couldn't tell why you're worth leading.”