Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield

by Joel Shepherd

  “Like I said, that's a damn smart kid.”

  “Fuck,” said Sandy, laying in a new course and turning. “If it gets at all hairy, Detective Sinta will have to find someone else. And get me some fucking backup.”

  “I've got you three units, CSA plainclothes.”

  “That's no good, get me a GI.”

  “There's no one available. One of the plainclothes is Kazuma.”

  “Okay,” Sandy muttered, “I guess that'll do.” She disconnected. And announced to the others, “Double belt, please, I'm putting us into performance mode.”

  “You mean we can go even faster?” Kiril asked with excitement.

  “Yes, Kiril. Much faster. But not right now because we don't want to alarm anyone.” They were holding to a standard skylane, traffic ahead and behind, holding the pattern like any other vehicle. Dalhousie was twelve kilometers away, getting there wouldn't take longer than three minutes.

  “Who's Detective Sinta?” Svetlana asked.

  “Homicide Detective,” said Sandy, flashing an overview file onto the cruiser's screens. “Friend of Ari's, I've never met her.”

  “This is her?” asked Svetlana, looking at the photograph on file. “She's hot.”

  Danya looked too. “Wow,” he said.

  “I bet you knew she looked this good,” Svetlana accused him. “That's why you wanted to help her.”

  “How could I have known that?” Danya replied.

  “I bet Ari showed you a photo. Boys are like that with each other.”

  “Nice theory,” said Danya. “But no.”

  Sandy wondered what would happen when Danya got his first Tanushan girlfriend. That Danya could get such a girlfriend, Sandy had no doubt. That Svetlana would let her live was the bigger question.

  Sandy established personal tacnet off independent FSA servers and quietly established a backup on local servers. Sinta's investigations were into the Grand Council, which in turn controlled the FSA. It wasn't inconceivable that if Sinta really was being tailed, that person had GC connections and could use GC codes to get into FSA networks, perhaps even knock down tacnet once she'd established it. That was what Ari meant about needing someone who could handle network problems—someone like Vanessa, or a dozen Vanessas, couldn't run tacnet on local servers without FSA backup. But Sandy could, plus other tricks besides.

  Once in tacnet, she used the com functions to establish new links to Sinta, via Ari's links. “Detective, this is Sandy Kresnov, if you talk to me for a few moments FSA tacnet will integrate your construct and we can coordinate from there. What's your situation?”

  “Wow, they weren't kidding when they said Ari knew people, were they?” Making light of it, but the tone was strained. “I was running down a lead. I called my car to come get me halfway, only some traffic emergency function intercepted it and parked it on a corner a block from me. I walked there and it just looked wrong, you know? A blind corner, few people around, perfect ambush spot.

  “So I pretended like I'd forgotten something and walked away, but I don't think I'm fooling anyone, I've spotted three solid tails, there's some creepy network interference that's static delaying my calls, even Ari can't pinpoint it, and if I can't trust traffic net because these are Feds and they can access everything and I can't…”

  Damn right she sounded a little panicked. Sandy's heart thumped a little harder, vision swimming into combat mode as she listened. A good cop would be right to be scared getting into stuff like this.

  “I mean, I'd ask my guys in my precinct to come get me, or some random cops on the street for a lift, but an emergency call to the precinct will mean telling my captain everything I've been investigating, and I can't ask anyone out here without an emergency call because if I'm right about this they could be walking into some real shit—same with local cops, plus some Feds might just drop in and tell them to hand me over, no questions.”

  What the hell did she think she was into, Sandy wondered?

  “Detective, where are you currently?” Sandy had her on speaker so the kids could hear, it was policy for her that no matter who you were, if you were in a situation, you got to hear all of it, or as much as possible. And these kids were not to be patronised with ignorance.

  “I'm in a little gift shop off Manfred, I'm pretending like I've forgotten to buy presents. Then I was going to go and get my first manicure in about a year, there's a place across the road with a good view and lots of people, should be safe enough there.”

  “Okay, hold the manicure, I'm going to bring it down on the street, they won't risk anything with so many people around.”

  “Yeah, there's no transition zones where I am, you'll have to go…”

  “Don't need them, I can override without declaring emergency.”

  “Okay, good, I'll be here.”

  “Two minutes. Buy yourself a nice bottle of something, you might need it afterward.” Soft disconnect, tacnet still registering the active connection.

  “What does that mean about transition zones?” Danya asked.

  “TZs are where you can land a cruiser and merge with ground traffic,” Sandy replied. “Security or emergency services can override that and land anywhere, but it has to be an emergency. Except for FSA and CSA, we can land anywhere if we have to, without declaring emergency.”

  “So you don't let anyone hooked into the network know that you're coming,” Danya surmised.

  “Exactly. But if we misuse it we'll be in the shit afterward…guys, be a bit careful with me the next few minutes. I'm half in combat mode, just don't grab me unless you have to, okay?”

  In the rear seat Svetlana was checking Kiril's straps, all business. She saw Sandy looking in the mirror. “You got another weapon in here?”

  “Under your seat. Too cramped to use it in here.”

  “But would save time if I had it out and ready, just in case.” She loosened straps to find the seat controls, a panel popped and she reached in past her legs.

  “Svet…” Sandy started, but the girl was already pulling out the gun, a compact, snub-nosed thing not too big for a kid to handle. “Yeah, just…careful with that, don't forget the…” As Svetlana quickly popped the mag in and out, checked the rounds, chambered one, set the safety and held it correctly, across her body with both hands.

  “I got it,” she said innocently. “Just in case.”

  “Hold it real tight in case we have to manoeuver,” Danya added, then squinted up ahead to where their flightplan ended. Ahead, a business hub of many buildings, a few of them enormous, on a delta between two gleaming rivers. “That's Dalhousie?”

  “Yeah, Sinta's on the other side, let's come around.”

  Finally she broke lanes on FSA privilege, projecting a decelerating curl around central Dalhousie to come in low over Sinta's position on the far side. Sandy was now watching traffic central carefully, also an FSA function, for anyone else breaking lanes or acting suspiciously. If the people tailing Sinta were what Sinta thought they were, they were now seeing her, and though her flightplan was not registered with central, they'd now be certain where she was headed.

  “Detective, ETA forty-five seconds.” As they passed between towers, unbothered by the passing buzz of air traffic, safe in their lanes. “Detective?”

  Silence.

  “Crap, Ari, I lost her, do you have anything?” Abruptly overriding the previous flightplan and accelerating, cutting corners, and dodging beneath a pair of intersecting lanes as traffic central bleeped red warnings at her.

  “Negative, what happened?”

  “I don't know, she's not replying, she's not linked on tacnet. I'm going to try for a visual.” Braking hard now as the road appeared ahead and below, a moderately busy urban road on the edge of the business hub, a large park nearby, beside which tacnet was identifying Sinta's vehicle. The cruiser had scanners, now sweeping the road as she mentally configured parameters to look for at least two people moving close together, though if they'd bundled her into a waiting vehicle she wasn't g
oing to see much.

  “Guys, look for her,” Danya told Svetlana and Kiril, craning to look down out the window. “There'll be at least one guy with her, probably with a gun in her ribs, walking with an arm around her.”

  “Unless there was a back way out of the gift store,” said Svetlana, also looking, rifle pressed against the door as Sandy refrained from warning her.

  “I can't see!” Kiril complained, too short for the straps to let him reach.

  Sandy crabbed them sideways above the street, only ten meters high and a few folks now stopping to look up. That narrowed it further, Sinta's captors would be amongst those not looking.

  “Sandy, this is Kazuma, we'll set up a search perimeter and watch for escaping vehicles.” Sandy saw the three other cruisers on tacnet, coming in close to help.

  “Good,” she said, “keep your spacing, don't get bunched up down here. If something happens we could run out of space.”

  Traffic central abruptly blew out, a cascade of disintegrating code. “Fuck, watch it!” someone yelled.

  “FSA priority,” Sandy sent direct on full emergency, “Detective abducted in Dalhousie District. Perpetrators just blew traffic central in this district. Their capture is priority.” As her backup called warnings about vehicles straying from lanes as central attempted to reestablish and emergency protocols kicked in.

  “Whoa, Sandy!” Kiril exclaimed, seeing something on AR glasses, and Sandy shoved them hard at the ground, yelps from the back as the restraints stopped them from hitting the ceiling. A cruiser zoomed straight through where they'd been, innocent occupants no doubt astonished at where the auto-control was sending them.

  “That one was aimed at us,” Sandy muttered, pulling them out barely three meters over the road, which was now filling with jammed traffic, crossroad lights on red as automatic precaution in case of central failure, pedestrians staring about in bewilderment. “That does it—central, I'm gonna nuke them.”

  She broke into all Federal frequencies at once, a rush of data that nearly overloaded her vision, but her data backups jumped to life and she caught a familiar jolt of shapes, repeating patterns, Federal codes in predictable repetitions and construct shapes immediately protesting her intrusion. Normally she'd have worked her way through it and tried not to break anything, but as a combat GI the main design function of her net access was to smash and grab, and in her time in Tanusha she'd improved the effectiveness of those functions too.

  Pattern seekers ID'd likely anomalous structures. She flashed through them, shredded several friendly structures in the process for data, matched codes, and sorted…and here was a primary encoded function, looked like some version of Fed-level tacnet. She hit it with everything she had, and its local supports, a massive service attack with barrier breakers and nearby servers flooding giga-tonnes of data into processors that couldn't handle it.

  Pandemonium on the net turned to panic as portions of local Federal network well beyond traffic functions began to melt down. Now in some buildings, the power was going out and basic communications dissolving to static. And on a nearby TZ several blocks away, a rising cruiser let out a squawk of alarm on a completely different coms function entirely.

  “Got you, you fucker.” Her own tacnet was flickering, but she put it onto main servers further out, howling sideways around intervening buildings to acquire a visual. Got one, locked the cruiser scanners on a low-altitude cruiser, and put a target lock on it. “Kazuma, get this fucker for me.”

  However they'd been aiming innocent civvies to crash into her, that function was now gone too, but there were lots of vehicles hovering aimlessly, meandering, climbing on independent initiative to rejoin some higher lane and get out of the mess in Dalhousie District…she wove between them, headed back to the street where Sinta had disappeared.

  “If they've lost control of traffic central then they've lost their escape route,” said Danya, gripping handholds tightly against the unexpected Gs. “They're stuck down there.”

  “Not if they get a cruiser,” said Sandy, seeing Kazuma's cruiser on tacnet coming about to intercept the one she'd targeted. “Dammit, Sinta, give me a sign.”

  Suddenly she was taking fire, rounds cracking into the rear gens as she spun the cruiser about and up.

  “Everyone down!” she yelled, crabbing up the street to get an angle on the location it was coming from, dropping the window and firing one-handed, a cluster of shots into the lip and railing about a short building's rooftop, behind which the shooter was covering.

  “Sandy, gun?” Svetlana offered.

  A new shooter opened up below, but Sandy was ready and hauling sideways, nose missing a glass building front by a meter, spinning about to get a good angle down on that first rooftop, the first gunman running even now…and diving for cover just as she got a shot out the window, putting a dozen holes into a parked cruiser, determined to frighten if she couldn't hit him.

  “Gun!” she said to Svetlana, holstering the pistol and reaching back for the rifle—it smacked precisely in her hand, G-forces and all. There were buildings all about, the next gunman with a good vantage could get a shot down at them, where the cruiser had more glass and less protection…but surely all this shooting was to make a distraction for an escape?

  Something bleeped on tacnet—her seekers picked up Sinta's com function, just a single pulse, and tracked it to…cruiser! On another shorter tower rooftop, ten floors, now lifting as it built power.

  “Everyone hold on!”

  Sandy fell once more, got beneath rooftop level as she built speed down the road and across a block, then slowed quickly and flared, rising above rooftop level at the last moment, hurtling sideways and slowing, straight at the cruiser. They hit side-on-side, hard, alloy crunching and shrieking, their target spinning once as it lost attitude atop its lift axis and fell off it sideways…straight into the neighbouring building front. It was glass, and the cruiser smashed through and lodged there.

  Leaving Sandy's cruiser hovering just off their side, Sandy with the rifle out the window, now flicking coms to external speaker, volume high. “THIS IS SANDY KRESNOV. RELEASE THE DETECTIVE NOW OR I'LL FUCKING KILL ALL OF YOU!”

  It had the desired effect; she could see them bailing fast, out of the windows into the office building…and just as well, because firing into a cruiser was imprecise with ricochets and tumblers. And she had no desire to mow down a car full of people in front of the kids.

  The rear window smashed from the inside, fracturing white, then boots kicking it out—in an impact the glass went from aeroplane tough to children's-safety-glass-tough. Then Sinta was crawling out atop the rear gens.

  “Guys, right door open—Kiril! Scoot across, Svet, help him!”

  The right gull door clanked open on emergency overrides, red lights flashing until Sandy killed them, wind and noise howling in as she brought them right up against the rear of the wall-embedded cruiser. Sinta looked okay, crouched, hair blown…and now jumped a simple two meters with a cop's respectable augments, grabbing the rear gen supports. And astonished to be assisted inside by a ten-year-old girl swapping places with her little brother.

  “We're going!” Sandy was off even now, door closing, full acceleration and keeping low to deter shooters, weaving between towers over streets filled with crazy traffic jams. She put the safety back on the rifle and handed it back to Svetlana, with a quick glance back to Sinta. “Detective, you okay?”

  “Yeah, what the…” distractedly, holding onto things rather than strapping in. “You've got kids in here!”

  “She's observant!” Svetlana said brightly, getting her own straps on, clutching the rifle. “She must be a detective!”

  “I bit my lip,” said Kiril.

  Sinta blinked. “Why do you have kids in here?”

  “Ask Ari,” Sandy muttered, setting course to FSA HQ and not slowing down for anything. Not game to even send word that she had Sinta safe, in case someone with access to FSA coms intercepted it. The combat vision was fadin
g now, normal colours reasserting. Damn, she'd insisted she'd be out of there as soon as shooting started…but as always with combat reflex once she was in it she couldn't pull out. All her combat instincts were dangerous, and attack wasn't her best defence, it was her raison d’être.

  “I think ‘thank you’ would work,” said Danya, looking around his chair at Sinta. Sinta stared at him, still gasping.

  Unexpectedly, Sandy found herself grinning. “That's okay, Danya, she's a bit rattled. This kind of thing's new to her.”

  Even more unexpectedly, Danya grinned back. “Well, I don't know about you guys,” he said loudly, “but I heard a lot of interesting words just now.” Svetlana shrieked with laughter. “Around children, Sandy, how could you?”

  She blinked at him. “What did I say?”

  “Sandy's favourite word is fuck!” Svetlana sang. “Sandy's favourite word is fuck!”

  “Oh, you poor precious things,” she retorted. “Damaged for life.”

  Danya laughed so hard he nearly hurt himself.

  Sandy offered to help the kids get their dinner at the FSA cafeteria, but Kiril said quite loudly that they ate there all the time, they knew where everything was. It was the closest Sandy had felt in her life to being embarrassed.

  In the Director's office were Ibrahim, Hando, and Shin, along with Sandy and Sinta. They all sat in various chairs, as they did in an informal meeting, save for Ibrahim, who half-sat on the edge of his desk as usual. Sinta looked dazed, hair disorganised, hands gripping a cup of strong coffee, one wrist bandaged where she'd had it twisted when the anonymous Feds had grabbed her in the gift store. When she sipped from the cup, her hands trembled, just a little.

  “You didn't get any?” she asked now, as Hando brought them that news.

  “They disappeared,” said Hando, settling long limbs into his seat with a displeased frown. Rubbed his chin with a gold-ringed finger. “We'll get DNA from their cruiser, but if they are who we think they might be, we're not going to get any matches.”