Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield

by Joel Shepherd

  It was quite bewildering to be confronted with something impossible. The mind took several turns to figure it out. Either some old fairy tale from her childhood had suddenly come to life, and she'd travelled far back in space and time, or…she'd somehow entered a virtual reality space.

  She looked about. The water still felt completely real, swirling between her fingers. And here, sitting by the poolside in a simple dress, bare feet in the water, was a familiar face…familiar from news reports at least; Tado had never actually met her in person. She took a deep breath, and the feeling of safety she'd recovered upon realising she was in VR receded once more.

  “Cassandra Kresnov,” she demanded, over-arming her way to the GI's feet. “What the hell are you playing at? Did you put me in VR?”

  It was impossible, of course. Only there'd been rumours that it wasn't, that Kresnov had scared the crap out of some very senior people with the extent to which it wasn't. But a Supreme Court Judge wasn't really supposed to know stuff like that, being senior in the scheme of things didn't mean she was anything more than just another judge, completely independent from all the mechanisms that surrounded for her to occasionally pass judgement on.

  “It's a better scenario than the alternative,” said Kresnov.

  “And what, please tell me, is the alternative?” Tado put arms on the poolside and glared up at her.

  “I was killed by Operation Shield,” said Kresnov innocently. “Because that would make this the afterlife.”

  “Or you a ghost.” She poked at Kresnov's bare foot. It felt quite real, but that was just VR. “Girl, I am one hundred and seven years old. You should show more respect to your elders.”

  “If I didn't respect you, I wouldn't be here.” Tado was certain Kresnov had learned to use this first impression to her advantage among people who'd never met her before. She was very pretty, calm yet animated. The period dress was a nice touch, the VR giving her a chance to dress as she would normally never choose, feminine and just a little revealing. There was a subtlety to her expression, a depth that must surely astonish anyone prejudiced against her kind. Charisma of a very certain type. “I brought you here to warn you.”

  Tado was too old and wise for that. To let this stripling dictate the conversation, and thus the situation, quite so easily. She heaved herself from the pool and sat beside Kresnov in her swimsuit. The sun felt warm. These baths were half open, one side a wall, the other opening to olive groves. Someone led a donkey by, bags of olives on its saddle.

  “You know I'm pretty sure the Romans didn't build them like this,” said Tado. “Bathing was a more formal experience. This is more informal. Like someone from our age might reinterpret an ancient scene.”

  “Probably,” Kresnov agreed. “But we put people into ‘types’ so often, don't we? I get told all the time I don't behave like a normal GI, or like a normal person from the League, as though who we are means we've only one way to do things. I'm sure plenty of Romans built things however they chose, it was a big empire.”

  “And why do you like the Romans so much?”

  Kresnov smiled slightly. “A clever use of the word ‘like.’ Implying personal bias on my part, yourself apart in wise judgement.” Tado only smiled, wondering again how the hell Kresnov had penetrated security to get this far. But she was only an expert in law, not security. “I'm interested in modernity, and how it happens. What we call ‘modern’ civilisation pretty much started with the Romans.”

  “Oh, well,” Tado made a face. “Now you're opening a whole can of worms.”

  “I'll rephrase it,” said Kresnov. “If you drop the politically correct bullshit from various peoples who are offended by the implication, modern civilisation pretty much began with the Romans.”

  Tado smiled. She'd known Kresnov was smart, but she'd expected most of that intelligence to be focused on practical matters, security, intel, bureaucracy. And killing people, of course. This was unexpected.

  “Commander, security law and regulation are not my forte, but I'm willing to bet that what you've just done in bringing me here is illegal. Why?”

  “Because someone's trying to hack your brain.”

  Tado smiled benignly. “That's not even possible.”

  Kresnov indicated the baths, end to end. Waters sparkled in the sun. “This is about the length of your pool, wouldn't you say?”

  “The Supreme Court pool, sure.”

  “And how many strokes does that normally take you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “And how many did it take you just now?”

  Tado frowned. “Seventeen. I think. But that was just you pulling me into VR, wasn't it?”

  “This pool in VR is of identical length to the one in the Supreme Court. I made it so.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “There is a technique,” said Kresnov. “Some call it value adjustment. And the Justices of most courts are almost continually uplinked with all your case files and readings, so you barely notice it's happening.”

  “The networks we're linked to are some of the most secure anywhere.”

  “Made secure by the Federal government, yes, I know.” Sardonically. The same Federal government that had just tried to kill her, Tado recalled. “Tell me this, how do you know that something is big?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Big,” Kresnov pressed. The pretty blue eyes at this range were disconcerting. Never threatening, not like in some B-grade action movie where the eyes glowed with fearsome intensity. They just never lost focus, never wandered, never darted or did any of the multitude of random things a normal person's would. “How do we define big? In a world where there is only one object, how do we know if it's a big object or a small object when there's nothing to compare it to?”

  “Yes,” Tado said slowly, “most linguistic or psychological concepts are relative, and thus meaningless in isolation. Very basic psychology, so what?”

  “So something is only big because it's relatively larger than everything else. If everything else was larger, it wouldn't be big anymore, just average. The size of surrounding objects changes the meaning of ‘big.’”

  “I understand,” Tado said impatiently. Kresnov was smart, but if she thought she was smarter than her, Justice Tado would give her a lesson in humility. “What does this…”

  “Try a more difficult one. Try ‘bad.’ I kick an innocent puppy, for no reason. That's bad, and I deserve to be punished. I walk into a room full of innocent people and shoot them dead. That's bad. How do we know which is worse?”

  “Learned experience that the life of a person is worth more than the life of a puppy.”

  “Scale has nothing to do with it?” Kresnov pressed.

  Tado blinked at her. Then back at the pool. Eighteen strokes. Seventeen. Was Kresnov getting at what she thought she was getting at? “I suppose,” Tado said carefully. “We judge the value of life on a hierarchical scale. Humans are at the top. Puppies further down. And the degree of violence inflicted, bullets to the head are at the top, kicks further down.”

  “I was just in a place where bullets in the head were a common punishment,” said Kresnov. “You could get a bullet in the head just for being in someone's way. Value scales can be adjusted.”

  “Look,” Tado said warily. “If you're suggesting that someone is using the court networks to change my value judgements…well, that's just crazy.”

  “Your Honour,” said Kresnov quite calmly, “I work for the Federal Security Agency. I've seen it done.”

  “You, dear girl, have just been accused of planning a coup to overthrow the Grand Council.”

  “Yes.” A small smile. “I heard.”

  “And if you could do that, why wouldn't you lie to a judge?”

  “You don't have to believe me,” said Kresnov. “Just remember your figures. Eighteen strokes to swim the pool. Six steps to cross your office. The length of ten hands to cross your desk. Write them down. They start with spatial perception, and that gives th
em a way in, size affects value judgements, the brain automatically attaches size to facts as a function of memory and internalises them. Used cleverly it can appear to give more weight to some facts than others, affecting judgement. Recall you're not being asked to pass sentence on questions of obvious morality, just constitutional technicality. Should one clause for some unnamable reason appear to all judges together as holding greater weight than the others, in a relative comparison, your conclusions can be arranged without you being aware of it.”

  Sandy was in the Courts Building bathroom, sitting in a toilet stall. Now she flushed, exited, and washed her hands like any other person. The bathroom was empty, as was much of the building—the Supreme Court Building was hardly a hive of activity, cases were limited, and staff few. Security was primarily remote, and in here, enough of the old Tanushan government security systems still ran that Sandy could access most of the building.

  Tapped into building security, she could see other people in the corridors and judge when it was safe to move. She watched herself leave the bathroom, not bothering to fool the system into thinking she was someone else but simply blocking that portion of the security nervous system that processed faces. That in turn required a fairly complex VR overlay that duplicated system functions and fooled it into seeing what she wanted it to see, at least in portions—that thing that Cai and lately Ragi had proven so good at, doing to automated intelligent systems what VR did to the human brain. She wasn't nearly as good at it as they were, but good enough for limited needs like this. But she needed help.

  “Rhian, are you there?” Rhian was maintaining the command structure, like a control center for VR function, seeded within the court building's own central matrix. Sandy had infiltrated and put it there, but did not have enough processing power to keep both it running and personal functions at the infiltration level. Once Sandy was inside, Rhian had come in through the front door, the system fooled into thinking she was someone else, and taken a seat in the waiting gallery, shades on, busy on multiple uplinks, all dark suit and no nonsense. Security types often looked the part, and no one bothered her. After all, she'd penetrated building security with no difficulty.

  But now, Rhian did not reply. Sandy looked for her on building systems…and found her seated in the waiting gallery with various others, mostly press awaiting some announcement by a court clerk scheduled for some time in the next thirty minutes. The connection was working, why wouldn't Rhian reply? She slowed her pace in the corridor. Either she was getting incorrect information as to system function, or Rhian was ignoring her. That wasn't possible. The system function must be down, but she wasn't seeing it. Given that these systems didn't particularly trouble her, that wasn't possible either.

  The only option it left was a crazy one. But she didn't see that logical deduction left anything else.

  Am I out? Or still in?

  She punched the wall, hard. It bounced without breaking. Shit. And began winding back through network functions as fast as she could; this shouldn't be possible, not to her, her brain usually rejected VR, and it was only with recent software adaptations that she'd begun to damp down that reflex…so disable the adaptations. She did, and…

  …abruptly found herself atop an impossibly tall mountain. All about was empty space. Below, stretching away into the infinite distance, smaller, lower peaks, themselves snow covered and incredibly high. Clouds formed beneath them, filling valleys. The air was crisp and clear in the way it became at very high altitude. She should have been freezing to death. Suffocating. It happened more slowly with GIs, but it still happened. Instead there was numbness and absence of sensation. This was VR, and the program, unable to give her accurate-to-life sensation, gave her nothing instead.

  It could have been Everest, she supposed. The Himalayas on old Earth. Old Earth simulations were most common in the Federation, the most famous of human worlds; the colonists all wanted to see it for themselves. The sun was small and low on the horizon, a bronze coin. The small platform of rock beneath her feet was barely a meter wide. To either side was space to step, trails. Forward or back would send her plunging into empty space.

  She had no net access here. Could sense nothing on her uplinks, the kind of total absence you'd have on top of a huge mountain in the middle of nowhere. Hell of a capture program. It was a trap, of course, specifically designed to catch VR hackers. It shouldn't have worked on a GI, let alone a high-designation one like her. A regular human might be stuck up here indefinitely, lacking the skills to climb down or the courage to jump. But she wasn't scared of falling.

  She leaped…and the VR refused to translate her synthetic power into momentum. She fell rather than flew, saw the rocky cliff face racing up below and flatly refused to brace for it, trusting a lifetime's experience of synthetic strength…and hit, the VR attempting to turn impact into pain, which a GI's brain could never accept as real…

  And snap! she was back in the toilet stall, uplinks down and hearing that others were entering the bathroom. With her unarmed, unable to fool building security into thinking that a gun was anything other than a gun.

  She fell and rolled under two neighbouring stalls as gunfire erupted and the partitions above her disintegrated in a hail of exploding panels. Planted a foot on a bowl and shoved just as the gunfire dropped to floor level, shot out through a riddled door with a blow that sent it off its hinges, collided with the armoured soldier on the far side with an elbow smash that caved in his lungs, kicked his neighbour into a third, jumped high, and rebounded off the ceiling at an angle to drop down on a fourth. Used him as a pivot to kick a fifth, removed his weapon to shoot a sixth and seventh, then an armlock on the fourth's retaliation, flipped him, ripped off the helmet and levelled the newly acquired weapon at his nose.

  “Who?” she said, standing there covered in dust and debris from shattered stalls but barely a scratch besides, amidst the ruins of armoured bodies.

  “Go to hell,” said the man. An accent program ran without prompting…Nova Esperenza. Ambassador Ballan's homeworld. Big local security agency, locally known as K13, more heavily armed and, some claimed, more kick ass than the CSA.

  Her network was back and showed gunfire in the waiting gallery. “Rhian, we're blown, it's K13!”

  “Yeah, got that!” came Rhian's reply amidst heavy gunfire. Sandy's central feed was no longer working, she couldn't see Rhian's situation. “Thanks for the head's up!” Which could have been sarcasm. From Rhian?

  Sandy abandoned all caution and hit the building network with everything…and found the command setup more easily than she'd hoped. Head Justice's chambers. Dropped her man, hit the door, then out the corridor at a sprint.

  “Rhi, you good for three minutes?”

  “Take ten,” said Rhian. Return fire suggested she too had a weapon of her own now. “Why should I mind?” Definitely sarcasm.

  Sandy took a corner so fast she ran up the wall to do it, skidded into a controlled collision with another corner, then fell down some stairs, taking the entire flight in a jump. Stopped with another collision in a wide, polished hallway. Ten strides away were the big panelled doors to the Head Justice's chambers. One usually approached them with reverence.

  Sandy went through them in a combat dive, bits of wood and mechanism splintering as she did, weapon out and searching…and came up on one knee to find the chambers empty of all but two, both Judges. One was Malima Yadav, the Head Justice herself. The other was Sarah Tado.

  “So it's true,” said Yadav quite sternly. No robes, she wore a simple suit, hair in a braid. A much younger woman than Tado, only in her sixties, a high flier from Romero System. The Federation's senior legal authority. “You won't even respect the sanctity of the Supreme Court.”

  “Where is he?” Sandy demanded, looking about the room. K13’s operational commander had been here, she was sure of it. With court approval. “K13, where is he?”

  “So you can do what? Kill him too?”

  Sandy did not waste time with disbelie
f. Yadav was supposed to be neutral. This wasn't neutrality. “You?” she said to Tado instead. “You were playing along?” Tado said nothing. “Using the entire Supreme Court as a trap to help Operation Shield get its most wanted fugitive?”

  “When the security agencies that protect us start fighting amongst themselves, and we get caught in the crossfire,” Tado explained, “there's not a lot we can do.”

  “You can do what's right,” Sandy suggested. “Shouldn't be a novel thought in this building.” No replies. “Last mistake in your legal careers.”

  Fear, on both their faces. They thought she was going to shoot them. As though they'd learned nothing from her last eight years of service. But these people, she recalled, were Federation, not Callayan. Callayans had become accustomed to her. The Federation, less so.

  “Rhi,” she formulated as she turned and left the chambers. “I'll be there in thirty seconds.”

  Svetlana wandered easily across Russell Square, picking her way between milling groups of people. “I think there's about three thousand here,” she said.

  “One of the news nets is saying six thousand,” said Danya in her AR setup's earbud. “They've got an overhead camera, they can see more than you.”

  That was true enough, Svetlana conceded. And, being from Droze, she'd rarely seen more than a few hundred people together in any one place at a time and wasn't much good at estimating crowds. Russell Square was pretty, like all Tanushan public places. It had grass, trees, and paths, was surrounded on all sides by buildings that were modest by Tanushan standards, and enormous by Droze standards. Over in the northeastern corner, the land dropped to a natural amphitheatre, where public performances were sometimes held. Over that way it was very noisy, with lots of shouting and amplified voices. Here in the middle of the square, it was less crowded.

  “If Justice Rosa's going to start some sort of rebellion,” she said, “doesn't he need more than six thousand people?”