There were seven more, nine in total, most similarly hopeless. Down in Malina, twenty-six others could probably be classified as “damaged” to varying degrees but not in need of hospitalisation. All of those preferred to sit in the sun anyhow, and many were able to help in daily things even if not in construction, like making food. A few had taken to meditation with the Krishna priests, and one of those had shown remarkable improvement since he'd started doing so. FSA doctors were keeping tabs on them, too.
The last patient was Pongsit, similarly restrained and immobile like the others. But unlike the others, Dr Singh was smiling when they entered his ward.
“I've something to show you with Pongsit,” he said. “I think it would be better to wait until we go downstairs.”
Downstairs was a private lounge, glass windows fronting onto the broader FSA compound, gardens, and glass buildings, Tanusha's towers rising beyond. Here in comfortable chairs sat Cassandra Kresnov and little Kiril, who had his AR glasses on once more.
“Rishi!” he shouted, jumped off the chair and ran to her. Rishi was accustomed enough to Kiril that it didn't surprise her, and she bent for the hug. More surprising was that Cassandra followed and gave her a hug of her own. She looked a lot better than when Rishi had last seen her upon returning from the Droze spaceport, face cut up and one arm dangling. Also interesting was that Cassandra seemed quite pleased to see her. Which was quite different from Kiet's talk of how she'd abandoned them and didn't care to be involved anymore.
“Rishi,” she said, “this is Ragi.” Indicating the other person in the lounge, a slender black man who'd been sitting directly opposite Kiril. “Ragi's a non-combat GI from the League.”
“Really?” Rishi went to shake Ragi's hand, having learned how those manners worked. “Did you defect?”
“Not so much defect as abandon, I think,” said Ragi. Immediately, from the way that he spoke, Rishi could tell he was very high designation. “I was wondering for a while what side I should be on, but then League tried to kill me, so that seems to have solved that problem, yes?”
“League do that a lot,” Rishi agreed.
“Ragi's helping me to use my uplinks,” said Kiril, returning to his chair and his glasses, which he was controlling in turn with a hand slate. Rishi supposed that children needed that extra control function. “They're not supposed to be working yet, but Ragi makes them work.”
“No, they're still not working, Kiril,” Cassandra said sternly, returning to his side. Ragi smiled patiently, also resuming his seat. “It's just a preemptive activation, they won't be working properly for a long time yet.”
“I don't care,” said Kiril defiantly, readjusting manual settings on his slate. “I can get a basic colour pattern now, I can actually see it.”
Rishi noted Cassandra looking at Ragi, not looking very pleased. “It's entirely harmless at this point,” he said. “Or rather, it won't make anything worse.”
“Shouldn't mess with this stuff,” Cassandra said shortly. Rishi thought it was an argument they'd had before. “You activate it, you stimulate it, it grows more.”
“It's already activated, at a very low level,” Ragi said calmly. “Your doctors have it crawling with nanos that repress further propagation and keep it at a very low rate. By testing function I can get a better picture of what's working and what isn't.
“But Rishi, I imagine you'd like to see Pongsit?”
Rishi frowned. “See him? I just saw him lying upstairs.”
“Oh, we can do better than that. Take a seat.”
Rishi looked at Cassandra and Kiril, who was preoccupied again with his slate. Cassandra nodded encouragingly toward a vacant seat. She sat and…
…was suddenly somewhere else. A large outdoor balcony beneath a blue sky. It was a restaurant, high up on a valley side. The valley was green with thick forest, mountain peaks soaring high above. At tables across the balcony, people sat, ate, drank, talked, and laughed. They wore clothes and had bags by their tables that looked like they might be good for walking long distances. A little way down the valley, an old village, made of grey stone, with little bridges across a sparkling stream.
“Hello! Is your name Rishi?” Rishi looked and saw a girl, no more than fourteen, sitting at a table with a jaw-dropping view of the valley below. She had a book in front of her, a real paper thing with white pages that glared in the sun, and was now pushing sunglasses up onto her head. “Please have a seat, Ragi told me you might be coming.”
It was VR; Rishi had done VR before, but the only other time it had been this intense was with Cassandra. Cassandra had required a direct cord link to do that, and she'd been her prisoner at the time; Cassandra had had to forcibly break defensive barriers to access her construct. Ragi did it now with no cord at all, and no warning. She hadn't even realised her barriers had been bypassed.
She took a seat opposite the girl and noticed the man sitting beside her. Brown, Asian features, sitting serenely in the sun, and looking over the valley. “Pongsit?”
Pongsit looked at her. He seemed to recognise her, because he smiled at her. Then he resumed looking at the view. Rishi stared at him, amazed. She'd never seen Pongsit actually look at anything. Had never known him capable, until now.
“He loves it here,” said the girl. “I'm Allison, by the way. I'm a friend of Ragi's and Cassandra's. I have a medical condition; in the real world I can't move or speak at all. But here I can sit in the sun and read my book. Ragi's been expanding on the VR for me, it's actually a tourist simulation provided by the government of France, back on Earth. These are the Pyrenees mountains, aren't they beautiful? But Pongsit and I can't access a public VR, so Ragi's cloned it into his own format, no one still knows how he does it, but he's got a special construct worked up that allows me to be here, and now he's done the same for Pongsit, even though we've got completely different conditions.”
“Does he speak at all?” Rishi asked, gazing curiously at Pongsit. He had no book in front of him, nor anything else. But he looked perfectly content.
“No,” said Allison. “But I've been spending some time with him here for about a week, and he's been more animated each time. At first he was just dull and lifeless, but look at him now. I'm hoping he'll join me for a walk up the valley soon. I think the more he experiences, the more animated he'll become.”
The VR was very good, Rishi thought. Besides the view, the contrasting sensations of warm sun and cool mountain breeze were quite amazing.
“Well, thank you for spending time with him,” said Rishi. “I'm a friend of his; we're about the same age. I always thought that if he was awake and alert in there, it must be so depressing for him not to be able to move and enjoy things. It's nice to see he can enjoy a place like this.”
“Oh, we go other places too,” Allison said cheerfully. “We've got a beach simulation…oh, and Ragi's even got me a flight simulator; I'm leaning to fly, can you believe that? I wanted to bring Pongsit too, but Ragi says motion sickness might not be the best introduction to real-world sensations! I'm not that good yet.”
Rishi talked to Allison for a while, marvelling at the girl's good humour. For all the beauty of this place, it was still VR, a limited world with limiting choices. And if she moved too fast, or her hand brushed the wooden tabletop, the sensation wasn't quite the same, or a sound could crackle rather than flow, or a lovely outline of tree-lined ridge would pixelate momentarily or freeze before evening out once more. But it was a lot better than what she'd had, and besides, she hadn't given up hope that new technologies would get her walking soon.
They were interrupted by a circular portal that appeared in mid-air before Allison, who gasped with excitement reading it, and said that her brother was going to uplink to go walking up the valley with her. Rishi wasn't supposed to meet anyone non-FSA approved, but Allison understood, and they said good-bye, which, as Rishi was only now coming to anticipate, included a hug and a kiss on the cheek with people you liked, especially if you were a woman.
“You're the same tech, aren't you?” she said. “Talee tech. Like what they were working on at Chancelry.”
Ragi gave her a sideways glance, away from whatever he was doing with Kiril. “It seems so. Though I've no idea what they were working on in Chancelry.”
Rishi made a face. “Some stuff just experimental. That's the stuff that made Melvin a vegetable. They'd just throw stuff at a wall and see what stuck, some of us did, some of us didn't. I was lucky. But there was other stuff they didn't have the facilities to do themselves. We figured that after you left,” and she looked at Cassandra, “we found piles of new data, experimental biosynth models, new brain structure, stuff we haven't seen before.”
Cassandra blinked at her. “Where did you find that?”
“Hidden compartment. Not even on the main computer, just physically hidden, like they knew their mainframes might be compromised one day.”
“You wouldn't happen to have saved any of that?” Ragi wondered.
Rishi nodded. “We brought it with us. Wasn't allowed to say anything until now; we were waiting to see if you guys followed through on your side of the bargain.” Cassandra and Rishi exchanged glances. “Another thing, remember Margaritte Karavitis?”
Cassandra nodded. “The neural biosynth expert, yes?”
“Cai said she's League. Dalia System. It's well hidden, he says, but he overheard her talking while on uplink, said her accent is definitely Dalia…though how he knows what a Dalia accent sounds like, I don't know.”
“I'm sure a Talee agent would know a lot of things about humans from lying offworld and listening,” said Cassandra.
Rishi nodded. “Sure. Cai said she probably hadn't been on Pantala long. So she's League, she knows Takawashi, or so she said, and Chancelry are working on super-high-tech GIs with massive network capability using Talee neural biosynth techniques no one's seen before but don't have the capability to produce themselves. And now I find a GI with exactly those abilities who doesn't know who he is, appears to be very young, and was probably made by Takawashi and dropped off here for reasons that only Takawashi knows.”
Both Cassandra and Ragi were staring at her. “Karavitis was Takawashi's spy!” Cassandra exclaimed. “That's how Takawashi suddenly acquired the technology to make you!” Looking at Ragi.
Ragi was frowning intently. “And he gave me to the Federation to prevent a strategic imbalance. We think.”
“Shit, I bet she's behind Eduardo suddenly appearing here in Tanusha too. We never did discover why, we assumed he was sent to assassinate someone…but that just put us onto New Torah as a threat, so it's pretty dumb if they did it. Maybe Karavitis was trying to give Eduardo to us, only her superiors got onto it and killed him first. Maybe it was a warning of what was going on, but once the killswitch had been used, we just didn't have the technology here to sort through the mess that was left and make sense of it. Damn, I have to tell someone to exhume that body and take another look…excuse me a moment. Kiril, will you…?”
“Go!” Kiril sang, pointing to the door like it was some private joke. Sandy grinned and kissed him, then left.
A few hours later, Sandy and Kiril were in the cruiser flying home with Danya and Svetlana, who had gone to a nearby public swimming pool while Kiril was having his tests. Sandy was pleased Kiril's tests had become at least that routine for them, and now, following some instructional tape, both Danya and Svetlana were becoming reasonable swimmers. She was also quietly pleased, and not at all guilty, that her little manipulation had seemed to work so well—insisting to Danya that he couldn't truly keep everyone safe unless he and they were physically fit, not just tape-skilled. Since then they'd been exercising a lot, not only relieving her fears that they'd inflate like balloons from all this unaccustomed food and relative inactivity, but also encouraging them to act more like kids. But she couldn't say that to Danya, or she'd put him off.
“And we took the waterslide too!” Svetlana said now from the rear seat with Kiril, her hair still wet and spikey. “The waterslide's huge; it was like a hundred meters long!”
“Sixty,” said Danya.
“You went down it too?” Sandy asked hopefully.
Danya shrugged. “She insisted.” Sandy smothered a smile.
“We go so much faster together than on our own!” Svetlana insisted. “And then I bet Danya he wouldn't jump off the top diving platform!” Laughing at him. Danya looked a little annoyed. “And he told me I shouldn't because it was really high, but all these other kids were jumping…”
“Kids older and more experienced than you,” Danya added.
“Yes, but I'm awesome,” said Svetlana. Danya laughed. He and Kiril had found and bought her a “Little Miss Awesome” T-shirt on one of their shopping trips, and she loved it. “So I jumped off and it hurt a bit, but it was so cool and wasn't dangerous or anything, so I told Danya he had to go now, because he couldn't be shown up like that by his little sister…”
Danya rolled his eyes at Sandy. Sandy gave him a sympathetic look. Poor Danya. Svetlana loved him to death, but neither would she give him an even break. In her mind it was the greatest compliment.
“So did you jump?” Kiril asked.
“Sure I did,” said Danya.
“But he didn't like it,” Svetlana teased. “I could see he was all wobbly up there.” And just when Sandy was about to tell her that maybe she should show her big brother a little more respect, given that she owed absolutely everything to him including her life, Svetlana removed her restraint and scrambled in the gap between front seats to give Danya a cheerful hug, cheek to cheek. Danya smiled and ruffled her wet hair, no hard feelings. As though they were telepathic, and Svetlana just instinctively knew she might have gone too far. Not that that would stop her doing it again in a moment.
“Besides,” said Danya, “she's so skinny she doesn't feel anything when she hits the water. Wait until you get a bit bigger, Svet.”
“Hey, Sandy!” said Kiril in the backseat, gazing out the window at passing towers and traffic with his AR glasses. “That building's called the Providence Tower, it's got a hundred and five storeys and it's…512 meters tall!”
Svetlana leaned over to look where he was pointing. “Wow, Kiri, how many people are in it?”
“Umm…” scanning on his glasses, “it doesn't say.”
“Well,” Svetlana reasoned, “let's say there are forty people on each floor. Now there are a hundred and five floors, so how many people are there?”
“Four thousand two hundred!” Kiril exclaimed almost immediately.
It was also impossible to get angry with Svetlana after seeing how good she was with Kiril, entertaining his enthusiasms no matter how non sequitur.
“Now I wish I'd gone swimming with you,” said Sandy. “That sounds like fun.”
“You can't disguise yourself with hat and sunglasses at the swimming pool,” said Danya.
“And you wearing a swimsuit in public isn't like the best way to not draw attention,” Svetlana added mischievously.
“Well, thank you,” said Sandy, “but I'm not really Tanusha-sexy; I've got shoulders and muscles. In Tanusha they go for lean and leggy—you'll be Tanusha-sexy in a few years, Svet, Danya will have to beat the boys off you with a stick.”
Another girl might have blushed. Svetlana just grinned.
“Why bother?” said Danya. “Just expose them to her charming personality.”
“Hey!” Svetlana unbuckled herself again to try and hit him, as Danya laughed and fended off.
“No fighting in the cruiser!” Sandy told them. “Svet, put your belt back on!”
A call light blinked, from Ari. Sandy put it on speaker. “What's up, Ari?”
“Hi, Sandy
, small favour, I see you're in the air near Turin? Could you just head across to Dalhousie and give Detective Sinta a ride?”
“Why does she need a ride?” Ari had told her about Detective Sinta, and her suspicion that the lawyer Idi Aba hadn't actually been murdered by the League.
“She thinks someone's following her. Actually she's certain. Given who that might be I don't want to send the whole cavalry or they'll get suspicious about just how important we think her case is, but if I send just one person I need that person to be, well, capable.”
“Ari, I have the kids with me.”
“Ah. Well, surely you can just pick her up?”
“Ari, you know damn well you're not just asking me to pick up some random friend. These are my kids.”
“Can you drop them off?”
“Now that you've called me, the folks who might be watching Sinta are now watching me, no matter what your fancy encryption. If I drop them off they're exposed.”
“Well, talk to us,” said Danya. “Who's Detective Sinta and what's her case?” Suddenly sounding calm and sober and twice his actual age.
“Very classified, Danya,” said Sandy. “Can't really say.”
“Sandy, this is a damn good cop,” Ari insisted. “She sounded scared. I asked around earlier, no one thinks she's the type to scare easily. Any trouble she's in is most likely network trouble, and you're perfect because you're immune…”
“Is it important?” Danya asked. “If it's important, we should do it.” Sandy gave him a distracted, surprised look. Danya was usually so cautious with Svetlana and Kiril's safety. “Sandy, the main reason we're safe with you is people are scared of you. But if you stop doing your job because of us, the bad guys will notice and then we're all in more danger. If they're watching us like you say, they'll notice if you don't help.”
Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield Page 32
