Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield

by Joel Shepherd

  “Was always the plan, sir,” said Amirah. Watching GIs under fire was a learning experience, even if he wasn't truly watching her. Incoming fire provoked not fear or flinching but thought process, he could see her looking at the rounds blasting holes within hands’ reach of her head and immediately calculating return trajectories. “Sir, if they decide to simply wipe out this entire section of building, I can't stop them.”

  “These things work by procedure, Ms Togales,” said Ibrahim, as heavy rounds hit the wall separating Ballan's office. “Taking out a section of the building will require high-up clearance, even in these circumstances. That will take time, and with any luck, Cassandra and company will be here by then.”

  And if not, they wouldn't. He didn't need to say it, Amirah understood.

  “Yes, sir. Excuse me a moment.”

  She rolled, then leaped into the hall, firing both ways simultaneously. Then disappeared. More firing, crashing, and then screaming, that stomach-turning moment when a soldier's mind went from tactical professionalism to the realisation that he had a split-second of life remaining. Relative silence in the hall, then grenade fire whistling past the doorway, detonations farther away…a thunder of fire as Amirah returned, crashing in so fast she impacted and spun off the doorway. And sat, back to a wall, head cocked as though listening for indications of the damage she'd done.

  “You're hit,” Ibrahim observed.

  Amirah made a face, as though wondering how anything else was possible. There was a clear hole in her clothes to the front of her hip, though no visible blood. The other blood on her fist, Ibrahim reckoned, was not hers. “That'll keep that side clear for a few minutes,” she said. “They had too little defensive gunnery; they won't make that mistake again.”

  Danya sat watching the wide windows of the presidential suite and wishing he could stand with Svetlana and Kiril for a better view. They were not especially high up, perhaps twenty storeys, but their view north of central Tianyang District showed them zigzagging missile trails, darting magfire rounds and rapid tracer sprays. Explosions lit the dark towers in silhouette like some approaching lightning storm.

  “Ragi,” Danya tried again, “you have to help them!”

  “I'm not intervening in a civil war,” Ragi said quietly. He stood farther from the windows, a drink in hand, surveying the deadly view with somber resignation. “I have sympathy for what Cassandra and her friends have had done to them. But her side wishes to pursue the option of war against the League. For the moment, I'm unable to choose between them.”

  “You stayed out of it because you didn't want to risk starting a war between the FSA and Operation Shield!” Danya retorted. “But look! War came anyway! And it'll come again against the League no matter what you do, if that's what's going to come.”

  “Odd sentiment for a street kid who's spent his life staying out of the way to stay alive,” Ragi suggested.

  “Yeah, well, this is the first time I actually could make a difference.”

  “Seductive, isn't it?” said Ragi. “To be so powerful? I do not trust it.”

  The underworld doctor who had put the cast on Danya's leg and his arm in the sling had departed. Danya did not question how Ragi had contacted her, any more than he questioned how Ragi could get this massive hotel suite. He suspected that with Ragi's network skills so advanced, the more sophisticated an entity's network, the more vulnerable they were to takeover. Big hotels like this didn't even require you to turn up in person—if you had sufficient network ID and security, they just presumed you were real. And most of the time, unless the guest was Ragi, they were right.

  The doctor had done the cast well though, and the sling—it only hurt now when he moved. Or breathed. She'd been a Jain and served the underground types who'd rather suffer than go to hospital.

  “Danya!” Kiril exclaimed, peering through his AR glasses. “I can see missiles!”

  “Can you see what's going on, Ragi?” Svetlana asked.

  “The FSA are advancing quickly,” said Ragi. “But they're going to struggle to get past the final defences. Every minute they take, those defences get stronger.”

  “That's Sandy leading that attack, isn't it?” Svetlana demanded. “Ragi, if the attack fails, she's going to be killed! Operation Shield would rather kill her than anyone else!”

  “I'm sorry,” said Ragi, spreading his hands helplessly. “I'm not going to take sides in this war. Cassandra understands what it means to have principles; I'm sure she'll understand this one.”

  Svetlana stared at Danya. Demanding of him. Pleading. Do something! She had the pistol with her still; Ragi had not attempted to take it from her. Perhaps Ragi was naive in his own way, not understanding how far even a child might go. Danya took a deep breath. Every instinct he possessed told him Ragi was right, in tactics if not in strategy—look out for yourself first, minimise your risks, don't bring trouble down on those you love. But one of those he loved was already in trouble, and here it was, the great dilemma he'd faced upon first meeting Sandy—that by increasing the number of people in your close little family, you increased the amount of risk you'd have to take to keep all of them safe.

  But it was too late now, because if he didn't try everything to try to help Sandy, when he had the means at his disposal, and Sandy died…well, that was just unacceptable. The same way it would be unacceptable with Svetlana or Kiril.

  He pulled his AR glasses over his eyes, saw the local network connect to his portable, and Svetlana's and Kiril's, which boosted the local network to something sizeable. “Well,” he said, “even with Operation Shield's control of the city net reduced, it's still going to be impossible to make contact with the FSA or Director Ibrahim. But I reckon if his network works the way I think it works, we can reach Rami Rahim.”

  “Danya?” said Ragi, frowning with alarm. “Danya, you shouldn't do that; you boost the local signal size any bigger, Operation Shield will see it.”

  “Well, then why don't you help and make sure they don't?” Danya suggested. He was in the network now, he could see the constructs displayed before his eyes, appearing to float in mid-air. Ari had shown him basic techniques, the kind of thing any Tanushan kid knew real young but were still a novelty to a kid from Droze—how to match a net construct with a physical location. A simple search showed him where Rami Rahim's studio office was…of course he wouldn't be there, Operation Shield would put a warhead in it anytime. Private houses? Well, he was rich, he'd have a lot. So where was this signal coming from?

  “Kiril,” he said, “can you see where Rami Rahim's network is operating from?”

  “You won't be able to trace his immediate location,” Ragi said with mild frustration, “he's got a lot of very smart people working with him; all of Operation Shield won't know his location.”

  “But he gets outside calls all the time,” Danya retorted. “It's a talkback show; he talks to people all over Tanusha. I'm betting he'll still have talkback function enabled. We don't need to find where he is, we just need to be able to talk to him.”

  “Danya, you can't do that.” Ragi was properly alarmed now. “You can't upload Kiril's information to him anyway. Kiril's wireless uplinks aren't advanced enough to upload to a civilian network…”

  “No, but we can just tell him what we've got,” Danya retorted. The glasses put rows of icons in the air before him, but it was hard to manipulate them fast enough with only one hand. The viewpoint flashed and rotated, then darted to a different part of the network, then ran multiple search functions on different strands of data…it was frustrating to see just how much data there was. He felt he was moving very fast, but in reality he was barely scratching the surface.

  “Danya, if you tell him what you've got,” Ragi replied, “everyone will hear. Including Operation Shield. They'll trace back to here, and they'll probably put a missile into this room, do you understand that, Danya? Or anywhere else you move to, they can trace the transmission.”

  “Not if you stop them,” said Danya,
still working.

  “I told you I won't. Now stop this immediately.”

  “Or you'll do what?” Danya asked. “Stop me yourself?” Ragi was staring at him. Standing against the wall, looking increasingly cornered, eyes wide with alarm. Danya didn't know exactly what he was doing, except that it was instinct, and it seemed to be right. Ragi didn't know how to handle confrontation. Sitting on the sidelines was one thing. Having a gun put to your head and being forced to make instant decisions, that was something else. Danya had experience of it. Ragi didn't. Speaking of guns…

  “Svetlana,” he added, “make sure he doesn't try to stop us.”

  Svetlana pulled her pistol and aimed it at Ragi, quite calmly. “You're not a combat model,” said Svetlana. “And we don't have uplinks you can hack. I wouldn't try it.”

  A promising lead turned into a dead end. Danya swore beneath his breath. “I'm not going to help you,” Ragi repeated.

  “You don't have to,” said Danya. “There's the door.”

  “No way!” Svetlana protested. “Danya, he can really help, we can make him!”

  “I'm not going to make him do anything,” Danya said firmly, and distant explosions shook the windows. “He insists on being allowed to do what he wants. That's fine. He can't stop us doing what we want either. But he can leave.”

  “It is my hotel room,” Ragi pointed out.

  “We're street kids,” said Danya. “We steal. Sorry.”

  Rami was aware that Liz was having an increasingly agitated, wide-eyed conversation with someone while seated before her production bank arrayed before the sofa. Her hands flew through multiple icons at once, as on the display screens, their crude imitations of tacnet software tried to translate multiple incoming data sources into some kind of tactical picture. That feed was running on multiple self-randomizing net feeds throughout Tanusha, which in turn was getting them millions of ongoing links throughout the city from frightened citizens desperate to know what was going on. Those citizens were now in turn adding their own data into the feed, vid images out windows, audio recordings of nearby shootings that software was triangulating into location points…Tania and Anjul, his two main net geeks, were running furious interventions over by the indoor garden, trying to keep the whole system synched as feed-ins kept multiplying.

  “Remember,” Rami was saying now, watching the feeds unfold, “don't contact us directly even if you know how. Operation Shield has murdered before to keep their shit intact; we figure there's a good chance they'll just lob a missile onto your location. We are not the CSA or FSA, we can't guarantee anonymity, and if any of you netsters listening out there can help run interference for us, that'd be bilkool awesome, capish?”

  Liz was gesturing to him frantically now. “Kirpal, tell us what's happening?” Kirpal Singh took over, former CSA SWAT and friend of Rami's, he'd come knocking on the door of this Rami's “other” house ten minutes ago, figuring Rami might be here, and was now offering strategic insight, but only into what Operation Shield were doing. FSA analysis he left alone in case he gave the bad guys ideas.

  “Got a kid on the line says he's Danya Kresnov!” Liz hissed at him. “It's encrypted, but it's, like, only grade 3 at best…”

  Danya Kresnov? “Oh fuck!” said Rami, and linked fast. “Danya, what's up, buddy? Are you safe?”

  “Rami, you know how Special Agent Ariel Ruben was nearly killed a few days ago?” A boy's voice, but not a young boy. A teenager, cool and serious.

  Rami blinked. “I…hang on, who?”

  “Special Agent Ariel Ruben, good friend of Sandy's, Police Inspector Sinta was nearly killed with him, Operation Shield blew up their car on the freeway…”

  “Oh wait, shit, I remember that on the news…”

  “Yeah,” the boy interrupted, “well, Sinta was investigating Idi Aba, the lawyer who was killed by the League. Only he wasn't killed by the League, he was killed by Operation Shield because he'd been in contact with an activist in the League who'd given him a vision of a secret new League facility for mass-producing GIs.” Rami tried to process that for a moment. “It's against all the treaties that ended the war, probably it would restart the war, and Operation Shield is trying to force these anti-war amendments through the Grand Council, you get it? This would kill the amendments dead.”

  “Well…well, shit, Danya, that's…that's a great story, but I don't know if…”

  “Rami, we have the damn vision. Ari Ruben sent it to us just before his car crashed. The League GI production facility, we've got it. You show it, Operation Shield's finished.”

  Rami's jaw dropped. “Danya…Danya, hang on, I'm going to put you onto our technical people…wait, what's your format?”

  “Well, that's where it gets tricky.”

  Sandy flanked hard left across the defensive grid assembling on Santiello District, herself and five others streaking low over suburban neighbourhoods, coming down on apartment towers, moving rather than shooting, and making it quite obvious to the defenders. UAV presence directly opposing her had tripled since she'd made her identity known, and tacnet showed defensive depth boosting dramatically—it was taking tips now from Rami Rahim's independent network, which was now getting open-source feeds from all kinds of places, including some crazy fools out in their cars filming out the window and daring Operation Shield to shoot them. If they kept piling up resources here they'd leave a flank exposed.

  Only now her net sensors were warning her of new tacnet alerts, but these weren't strategic, they were audible, meaning tacnet had overheard something and was feeding it to her…and her eyes widened with a shock that nearly caused her to miss her next landing on a roadway and crash through a streetlight. Danya's voice. Tacnet said he was talking to Rami Rahim, something about Ari and Sinta, and…and if she could overhear this, Operation Shield could too.

  She gridsearched frantically, that confusion of emotion trying to override the deadening weight of combat reflex…who was closest? It was Tianyang District, almost squarely in central Tanusha, ahead of their line of advance for now but about to get pulled onto the friendly side, and if Operation Shield wanted to do something about a target there, they'd have to do it soon or risk losing the capability. Vanessa! Vanessa was closest, taking 9th Company in a typically aggressive hard push through the guts of the defences…but she couldn't tell Vanessa to abandon her command priorities just to save her kids.

  “Sandy, I got it!” Vanessa yelled, and kicked off the pavement behind apartment buildings, blasting low over the adjoining park and watching hard for the source of autocannon fire hovering behind buildings in Tianyang just over a K ahead. “Sandy, get back in fucking command, I got it, your kids are a strategic fucking asset, now get your head together and go!”

  Because she already knew how Sandy would react, the ruthlessly logical tactical side hitting the powerfully emotional side and freezing. But her own tacnet sensors were showing her the same thing, the link coming from somewhere within a hundred-meter radius, maybe five possible buildings over two kilometers ahead…and crap, if Operation Shield decided to put a round in there, she was in no current position to stop it.

  “Blue 3, push hard on grid-31, draw some counter-fire and light ’em up!” Because the usual catch of infantry combat still applied here—in order to see the enemy, you usually had to get them to shoot at you first. The smart ones would hold their fire until they wanted to shoot, not when you wanted them to.

  She grounded hard behind another building and didn't like doing that because these were residential and occupied, but if people were clustering in central stairwells and basements as advised…tacnet showed her Blue 3 drawing fire ahead, grounding now and returning fire, several of the enemy displacing under cover from farther back…and suddenly there was magfire hitting the ground directly in front of her, huge eruptions of dirt and grass from gardens showering her armour as she pressed herself to the wall and tried to ignore it—it was a warning that enemy tacnet knew where she was, knew it couldn't hit her but wan
ted to delay her. She couldn't delay, not here.

  “Go go!” she shouted. “Two by two, next cover!” And half of her squad displaced, running and leaping, Vanessa jumping straight over the line of fire from incoming mag rounds, they were taking two seconds to reach this location, if she didn't fly in a straight line for longer than two seconds they couldn't hit her. Theoretically.

  Here a rooftop raced up, she made as though to land on it, then as it raced up she kicked again, a mid-air burst of thrusters as a mag round tore pieces from the rooftop where she would have landed. And here it was, two Ks off, airbourne and moving as it fired, and Vanessa put her own magfire onto it, then kicked sideways in mid-flight behind a taller resi tower, saw fire skipping and racing at other targets ahead…a flash as Blue 5 went down, no telling what did it, Gs crushing her as she kicked again and thrusters red-lit across her vision as temps reached critical, land or burnout.

  An out-positioned enemy hopper tried to run, was blown spinning into a towerside by one of Vanessa's squad, as Vanessa hit, stumbled, and slid on knees to slow, then up and running for building cover, realising only as she reached it that she was in a school yard, and her cover was a classroom building. One K to target, and tacnet showed her fire passing Blue 7 that could only have come from behind a particular tower…she fast-programmed a missile, fired, saw it loop high, and said to her man with the best angle, “Blue 4, watch for fast target behind tower grid H-98.” As tacnet highlighted that point. The missile searched, found, and dove, the enemy hopper dodged, firing frantic countermeasures, and was blasted into a backward spin by Blue 4.

  “Good call, Skip,” said Blue 4, and Vanessa jumped as incoming magfire began to shred the school building. Damn, there was going to be a damage bill. And now she could see an A-12 at long range, seven Ks ahead, firing a whole spread of missiles that did not appear to be directed at specific mobile targets, but the bigger warheads for taking out building floors…and her heart nearly stopped. Oh, no.