Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (19 page)

“The last foreign ministers are due in tomorrow,” said Justice. “They’re here to vote on it, aren’t they? The new trade bill’s just a cover.”

Sandy said nothing.

“Tell me this, then,” he said instead. “Do you want to help mostly because of these poor people we see suffering here? Or because of that GI hiding behind the water cooler? It seems to me you have a lot of unfinished business with the League. First they made you, then they betrayed you, and now they’re doing the same to others. Or, New Torah is while the League does nothing and denies it. And here you sit, helpless, wondering if other GIs are out there going through far worse than even you did, and wondering further if there isn’t some kind of closure to be had. Confronting the system that made you? Perhaps destroying it? Bringing justice to those that deserve it? Saving those like yourself who need to be saved?”

Sandy smiled faintly. “Make a good book, wouldn’t it?”

“It might.”

“If you hold off on publishing what you’ve got, I’ll give you the fully authorised story. My story. Or this part of it, at least. That’s the best I can offer you.”

Private astronomers noticed the new arrival first of all, out past Vamana, the sixth and smallest planet of the Callayan system, an unexpected jump point for any Federation vessel. It broadcast no ID, closing very fast, and generated enough trans-radiation that they thought it might be quite large. The media picked it up, and soon all the channels were issuing live coverage, filling the airwaves with unfounded speculation. The system defense grids were activated, and Fleet placed on high alert. Anything that big, travelling that fast from jump, could kill a planet.

In reality there was nothing to worry about—it would still take several days to arrive, and Callay’s defensive stations were well positioned to turn the arrival to radioactive dust well before that, along with any ordinance it fired. Fleet itself was an extra safety net. But determined not to miss a dramatic opportunity, Callayans responded with “end of days” parties, spontaneous prayer services, and groups of robed crazies roaming the streets, yelling at everyone to harmonise their chakras before it was too late. Zoroastrians slaughtered goats in public parks, and were promptly arrested for animal cruelty. Hari Krishnas danced in shopping malls. Buddhist monks drew huge mandalas with coloured sand in public squares. Sufis gathered at shrines to sing praise of Allah. And Hindu holymen did whatever the hell they felt like, as had been their way for thousands of years.

Sandy thought it all wonderful. With a day off, she took several of her GIs to a street dance party, to show them how much fun their adopted home could be. A full kilometer of road in Kotam District had been shut down, filled with live dance and music acts, some traditional, some techno or fusion, and all incredibly rhythmic as one would expect from a society obsessed with parties and celebrations, nearly two-thirds of whose population traced ancestry to South Asia or Africa. Word had gone out on the net, and soon all of Tanusha’s amateur drummers were gathering on the dance road—there were thousands. Nearly every school kid learned tabla or bongo at some point. Soon professional acts and amateur but talented enthusiasts were mingling, and the noise was incredible.

Different sections of road gathered about different acts, which grew and swelled as new drummers joined or left. The rhythms were not only loud, they were intricate and would shift organically, as appointed leaders led to a new change, and the rest followed by osmosis. Thousands of people danced as the sound shook their bones, half naked and sweaty. The sheer adrenaline of the sound and movement was intoxicating, and Sandy danced with the rest of them in her surfer-chick short top and board shorts—her most comfortable civilian identity, the one that let her be sexy without having to indulge impractical feminine fashions that would never be her style. To her delight, her GIs all joined in—they were that kind of group anyway, that being why she’d brought them. Several looked utterly astonished, like virgins having great sex for the first time, or children having their first taste of chocolate. Incredulous delight.

They stayed, as some people left, but even more arrived, and the drumming continued well past midnight and only got louder. They split up, and went from group to group up the road, each with a different character. Some Tanushans were now arriving dressed up, some even in Mardi Gras costumes, others in various festival extravaganzas that Sandy did not recognise: sequins and feathers and crazy, sexy things that left breasts bare and backsides shaking. Amongst the cool crowd there were even mostly-naked, ash-smeared Sadhus, stoned off their heads and dancing crazily toward alignment with nirvana, dreadlocks flying. Sandy flirted with total strangers, her big sunglasses on and confident she wouldn’t be recognised in the night’s confusion. There were now sparklers and miniature pyrotechnics going off, plus the flashing lights of professional rigs, and besides, most Tanushans knew her serious in uniform, not sweaty with her hair flying. In addition to which, there was quite a lot of mind-altering substance being consumed, some eaten, drunk or smoked, others uploaded in uplink connections, much of it illegal and as at least nominal law enforcement she should probably have said something, but what the fuck, the world was ending.

At dawn came word that the unidentified vessel had revealed itself to be the
Eternity
, a League ship bearing government envoys, their communications damaged in jump, with sincere apologies for any nervous moments their unannounced arrival may have caused.

“Who are they kidding?” said Rami Rahim on his crazy live show, still Sandy’s favorite Tanushan entertainment personality. Dancers had been linking to him on and off all night as he jumped coverage from one Tanushan party to another. “Callay hasn’t had this much fun since the last ice age.” And had then sent roving reporters to go and find various crackpot religious figures to see if he couldn’t arrange some kind of calendar of impending global catastrophies, so all Callayans would know when the next cool party was on.

Some among the tired, departing crowd were unhappy because
Eternity
’s identification meant the dancing stopped. Sandy was unhappy for different reasons.

“Fucking League envoys,” she told her group of departing GIs, as they headed for the maglev in pale, morning light. “Pity they fixed their coms, better if we nuked them.”

“Hear, hear,” said Khan, shirtless, with lipstick smears on his cheek and a happy smile on his face.

Eternity
arrived in orbit three days later. The day after that, Sandy was attending the conference Ibrahim had put her up to. It was held at the Colonial Institute, a Callayan policy think tank which occupied levels eighty-five to ninety of the Surat Tower in Surat District. The gathering numbered about three hundred, Callay having become a center for think tanks in the last five years, it being the one place besides Earth where Federal-level policy makers could be reliably found in numbers.

They had plenty of people there to tell the attendees how the current bunch of GIs were little threat, and plenty more to make the case that by granting GIs asylum, the Federation was potentially inoculating itself against the further, aggressive employment of GIs by the League, by making the League worry about the loyalty of every high-designation GI they produced. Already there were propaganda efforts going underground through League society, with slogans like “the League makes them, the Federation sets them free.” Sandy knew that she herself, had she heard something like that, would have been skeptical about her own side’s intentions a lot earlier than she had been.

What they didn’t have was someone to tell them about the League’s GI production facilities, something she’d been accumulating intelligence on over the last five years. Ibrahim thought it nice she had a hobby, and encouraged everyone in Intelligence to indulge her. Director Diez of the FSA was less enthusiastic, but as all the necessary intelligence sources were heading for Callay, the CSA had probably better information than the FSA anyhow.

After her talk, she took questions from a very crowded room, before a massive view of the skyline.

“The League’s official pronouncements on their GI production levels have denied retaining any research capability,” asked one person. “You’re saying they’re lying?”

“Yes,” said Sandy. “I’m not even sure they know where all of their production and research capacity is. It was all centralised under Recruitment in the final ten years of the war, but Recruitment then dismantled everything before the new government took over. They never found all the pieces again. And to this day I haven’t heard any reliable intelligence on the whereabouts of Renaldo Takawashi, to name just one prominent researcher.”

“What are your thoughts on the speculation he might be in New Torah?” asked another.

“It’s one of several sobering possibilities.” Should have killed the old bastard when I had the chance, she thought. “The problem is, like I said, they’re working on mind control. I proved to them that GIs are unreliable because we make up our own minds. But just now on Pyeongwha we’ve seen an entire civilisation of human beings go into a state of mass homicidal paranoia because of League-related uplink technology. If New Torah is working on this stuff again, it’s not just GIs who might get more dangerous, it’s everyone.”

The door at the room’s far end opened, and some people in suits walked in. Sandy knew immediately something was wrong. They looked official, and they strode up the aisle through the audience without looking for a seat.

“Commander Kresnov,” said one, “I’m Special Agent Gilberta Sullivan of the Special Investigation Bureau. I’m here to inform you that you are under arrest under the war crimes act of Five Junctions Treaty, for the suspicion of war crimes against League personnel in the year 2542.”

In the audience, people began getting to their feet in astonishment. Gilberta Sullivan—more than half the SIB’s agents were female—stopped by the speaker’s podium, holding a piece of paper.

“Will you please accompany us, Commander.”

Sandy sighed.

“Excuse me,” said a CSA agent in the audience front row, “what the hell is this about? War crimes?”

“Commander,” the special agent insisted. “Now, if you please.”

“It’s
Eternity
,” said Sandy, holding up her hands to placate those in the audience becoming increasingly angry. “They’ve concocted something to accuse me of through the war crimes act . . . Henry, could you contact the Director for me? I’m technically not supposed to once I’m under arrest.”

She stepped down from the podium. Sullivan was holding handcuffs. Sandy turned around to let her put them on, as the room erupted in conversation and protest. Some more CSA agents looked furious enough to jump on the SIBs, but Sandy shook her head at them as she walked up the aisle and out of the room. The SIBs were no doubt hoping she’d do something rash, and she’d then be charged with the real retaliation, rather than the insubstantial crime.

Once in the SIB cruiser, however, she snapped the handcuffs to scratch her nose. “Commander, you’re resisting arrest,” said Sullivan, seated opposite as the cruiser took to the air from the mid-level hangar.

“I’ve got an itchy nose,” Sandy retorted. “Want to scratch it for me?”

Sullivan didn’t bother trying to put more cuffs on her. The whole thing was for show—the timing in front of the audience, all of it. And pointing guns at her was, of course, not wise.

“You know,” said Sandy, “I’m surprised it took them so long.”

“To find a bunch of innocent people you killed and charge you with it?” Sullivan asked coldly.

“No. For a bunch of cold-blooded murderers to realise that in a contest between the devil and me, the SIB would side with the devil every time.”

At SIB HQ they put the cuffs back on. They led her through the main offices, SIB agents standing and watching her, like zoo employees watching some dangerous animal recently recaptured. Some looked very happy, as though her being here represented some great triumph. How the SIB had got to this point, even the CSA’s best behaviouralists weren’t entirely sure. It was like Pyeongwha, but without the murders, or the NCT.

They put her in an interrogation room, at a desk before one-way glass. Sandy snapped the cuffs once more, tore the manacles off her wrists, and rejected the chair to lie down on the table instead—interrogation room chairs were always uncomfortable, and she had a typical myomer-twinge in her lower back and hip.

The building network was surprisingly open to her, so she accessed the news nets. And there she was, without vision, but some talking heads were already deep in conversation about the SIB’s charging the CSA’s Commander Kresnov, an artificial person, with war crimes from year 2542 of the League-Federation War. It was one of the peace articles, controversially included in the League surrender—controversial in part because it had not been an unconditional surrender, because the Federation had no intention of occupying League space. That would be far too expensive. Conditional surrender entailed conditions, of course, and the League had demanded theirs in full. One of them was that if League officers were to be held accountable for war crimes, Federation officers must be also. Thus, an exchange process had been worked out, where evidence by either side would be considered in full view of both.