Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (2 page)

Tacnet was slotting them in to secondary targeting now, armscomp found her one and she fired a missile as she landed, with no real interest in where it went. She ducked amidst garden trees and took a knee with a view.

Tacnet was incorporating the local network now, and she could hear/see/feel the local traffic going crazy. Perhaps a million calls to emergency services, media networks abruptly going live, police, hospitals, fire departments . . . and no doubt security services too, but those weren’t on any accessible network. Or, not yet.

“
Okay, I’m getting a CNS response, very active, all units standby.
”

That was Ari, tracking Central Network Security as it tried to lock its own tactical networks into place. There was no way of knowing exactly where they propagated from until they went active.

“
I have police on the streets at A-35 by H-16,
” came another, as tacnet immediately located that grid reference and highlighted it. “
Multiple vehicles, looks like a convoy.
”

“
Don’t hit it unless it’s para,
” came Vanessa’s reply. She was only coming online now, her tacnet functions took longer to propagate, leaving the first “fire” command to Sandy. But now, she was in charge. “
Police just cause confusion.
”

If they’re not equipped for this sort of fighting. Most weren’t. They’d run the simulations many times, and Sandy concurred—they were actually more use alive. Emergency services, too. Sandy would have vetoed shooting at them, anyhow. Yet, happily, fire trucks blocking the roads served every purpose except the defence of Anjula.

“
Airborne at C-9 and V-3. Unspecified security vehicle.
”

“
Kill it.
”

And so it went. Pyeongwha security would go red now, but they weren’t equipped for this kind of assault; it would take them time to get assets in the right positions to be effective. In the meantime, Sandy had a facility building to reach. She couldn’t head straight in because Ari thought the network defences were too advanced, and could be degraded through phase one of the assault. Give it a half hour, he insisted, and he’d have her a path inside.

Ari sat in Moon’s residence and observed the chaos. Moon sat alongside, working multiple display screens and VR uplinks at once, Hideger beside him. Across Anjula, they had a network of perhaps a hundred—rebels, activists, hackers, local Anjulans and other Pyeongwhanians pissed at the system. They’d planned this for months, some of them years, and a few, decades. Now it was finally on.

Beyond the windows were flashes of light, and shockwaves that shook the glass. Power flickered and restored, and air traffic shrieked overhead as flight control sent vehicles low on emergency lanes to escape the field of fire. A pointless measure; civvie aircars were hardly the target.

Conversations clamoured in Ari’s ears, network operators locked into their various infiltrations, attacking security barriers, police communications, primary information channels. Two minutes ago an old fashioned TV network had attempted to go live from a building top, only to lose uplink feed a moment later, from hacking or explosions. VTS, the government network, had crossed to live broadcast a minute later, only to receive a warhead through their studio window, then static. Who had authorised that strike, Ari didn’t know. Things were happening too fast, target assignments flashing new onto tacnet by the second.

He let the team do their job. There would be plenty of time for recriminations later. He was after bigger fish.

“Okay, here they come,” he declared, watching the network defences spiral out from hardpoints along the com grid. The major institutions knew they were under attack. They’d have a defence plan to seek out the infiltrators, erase their networks and if possible, discern a physical location so their SWAT teams could take them out. That could mean a warhead landing in his lap, or anyone’s lap, at any time. “I’m running counter, let’s see if this works.”

His counter measures were packages inserted covertly into various supposedly high security com nodes. Those com nodes now relayed attacks from Anjula’s security institutions, unaware they were feeding data on their composition straight back to Ari. Within seconds he had an array of network points highlighted for tacnet. A simple publish sent them through.

“Hello Jailbait, I’d like these dead, yesterday if possible.”

Vanessa wouldn’t bother replying, and didn’t, but after a pause of a few seconds he saw a new cascade of orange and white flashes across the urban horizon, and a whole series of network lines abruptly died. Then the sound reached him, a thunder like stampeding elephants, shaking the windows and walls.

“Dude, those are some fireworks!” Moon announced, wide eyed, as fingers flew across his interface.

Some of those security networks had used servers that weren’t in reinforced locations. Some were in office buildings, where micro-munitions could surgically remove single or multiple offices, and all hardware within. Network barriers that could be snuck past when no one was looking, but were impossible to simply tear down by hacking alone, now disappeared. It was cheating, of course—hackers were supposed to hack barriers, not simply destroy their mainframes. But he’d ceased to be a simple hacker a long time ago, and now played by different rules.

“Good work,” he said. “I’ve got barriers down all over the place . . . team, let’s get inside before they transfer functions and reestablish.”

Now it was a genuine fight. Sandy’s target was beyond the CBD, by the northern edge of the most northerly park. She’d not wanted to land closer—confusion was a part of the assault plan, and that region was heavily guarded. But now, she had a trek ahead of her.

She leaped across several blocks, keeping low, scanning for anything that moved. There were quite a few civilians and ground cars. When she’d first heard “jetpacks,” she’d nearly resigned on the spot. Those contraptions just put you on a slow, fixed trajectory that the dumbest armscomp could blow from the sky. But these were jumpjets, it had been insisted, for short, varied bursts of flight like the grasshoppers for which they were named. Still she didn’t trust them, and stayed as close to the rooftops as possible.

Tacnet showed airbourne security vehicles trying to make their way from suburban bases to downtown, and getting blown from the sky. That would limit defensive deployment options. Others were trying to move out by ground, and that was more effective, if far slower. She headed for one now, grounding in a small city park between buildings to break up her flight path, then leaping again through the trees.

She landed on a rooftop seven stories up, looking onto a street afire with ruined vehicles and collapsed building fronts. Tacnet showed her a couple of likely culprits ahead, and she leaped after them, zooming vision on their newest targets—a couple of personnel carriers. It wasn’t always easy to tell where they’d come from; some of the police and security stations through the inner city had armoured depots that micro-munitions wouldn’t touch.

They were under fire when she landed, two FSA suits on neighbouring rooftops pouring fire onto the street below. They hadn’t seen the UAV zooming around behind them for a shot, Sandy armscomped it in midflight, pulled the trigger, then landed by a skylight as the UAV screamed tumbling into a building a block away and exploded.

One of the APCs was afire, men scrambling from the back, Sandy locked a grenade on the other and blew its top turret, then ducked back as fire came at her from across the street. Suddenly a viewfeed from one of her friendlies showed AMAPS on the road, running through halted civvie traffic with that ugly, birdlike gait. Sandy’s friend blew one of them to hell with a rifle shot, but suddenly there were missiles in the air and everyone jumped.

Sandy’s rooftop blew up just after she’d left it, and she took the flying vantage to put multiple rifle rounds into another running AMAPS on the street below, but one of those missiles was still going, streaking about in a circle as it tried to reacquire. It picked her, and Sandy turned, shot it from the sky, and crashed onto a rooftop ventilation system with less grace than she’d have liked. Snipers snapped at her from across the road somewhere, two of them, armscomp calced and showed her where in a split second as she came up on her feet and fired twice, then dropped a free fall grenade over the edge.

“Blinder!” she advised her wingmen as the phosphorus detonated, and any sensitive lenses focused that way abruptly burned out. She went over the edge a second later, blew another AMAPS’s CPU apart with a headshot, hit the jumpjets in mid-fall to land sideways and rolling as another AMAPS tore the street apart with its twin cannon, firing blind. Sandy and a wingman hit it with grenades simultaneously and it disappeared in three directions at once.

Sandy left, disconcerted that she’d dented a thruster, but otherwise unscathed. Happily, no one else tried to shoot at her as she sailed with her two companions toward a new landing. Watching snipers’ heads explode was not pleasant, and if the only enemies that shot at her from now on were mechanicals like those Armoured Mobile Anti-Personnel Systems, she’d be happy.

UAVs were now proving a pain in the ass. Pyeongwha’s military was restricted, like all Federation worlds, so they had few assets that qualified as full-blown military. But that left “para military,” which Sandy knew from experience could include pretty much anything if you classified it cunningly. On her leaping trek around Anjula downtown, she counted five types in the air, two of them supersonic, one of them high altitude recon, and two others slow and hovering and hiding behind buildings. She disliked those most of all. She could track and hit high-motion at anything up to Mach one with barely any assistance from armscomp, but while Mach one was very visible, even she couldn’t hit what she couldn’t see.

She covered her teammates’ blind spots as they moved, as they covered hers, and they leapfrogged forward in the most old-fashioned of infantry manoeuvers, covering about half a K with each jump. Police and para-military were getting more snipers into high buildings now, and some with missile launchers, but those were going to have trouble tracking FSA suits in opti-cam. Even so, armscomp started registering regular near misses, mostly in the air. True to Sandy’s infantry prejudice, grounded meant cover, and cover meant “safe.” In the old days, there’d been something called the “air force.” These days, modern weapons and armscomp turned most aircraft into flying bull’s-eyes.

They were closing on North Park when Anjula began closing down the advertising frequencies, having realised how the attackers were using it against them. Ari simply transitioned them to one of the emergency services sub-frequencies, and tacnet propagated all over again. They could keep frequency jumping all night until Anjula shut the whole lot down, but then the city would be as blind as the attackers, who could then just switch to their own coms and battle through whatever jamming was thrown at them. Defending took a lot more coordination, and if Anjula’s assets couldn’t talk to each other, they were screwed.

Sandy paused on a rooftop long enough to track and fire a missile at a high-altitude UAV, then was startled by civvies on a neighbouring balcony peering out to take a look. She refrained from shooting, leaped instead, and scanning nearby air traffic on tacnet found one vehicle loitering suspiciously and warned her second wingman about it. There were no rooftops she liked the look of, ahead, so she grounded on the road instead and pressed herself to a wall. At fifteen thousand meters overhead, the UAV blew up. So did the cruiser she’d warned about, when a door opened to reveal security with a launcher.

There were displays and advertising everywhere at street level. Sandy realised she was in one of the entertainment strips, wall to wall graphics and dancing images. All deserted now save for several cops huddled by their cruiser, staring fearfully. Sandy ignored them and leaped again, and was immediately shot at by someone down below . . . low caliber, she didn’t bother shooting back.

Ahead was a big tower, and she crashed through a tenth story window, scattering chairs in an office. Ran out into the corridor in case someone sent a munition through the window after her, fast down a corridor then kicked in a door, activating building security alarms. That brought her to a window with a view. Ahead was North Park. To the right of that, the Domestic Affairs Building. It looked like it was built to withstand a nuke, which wasn’t far from the truth. Around it were gardens, all trip-wired and armed to hell, then high walls. Flames rose from several points around it, indicating it had been subject to some early strikes, but she’d studied the preliminary schematics that were all Ari’s folks had smuggled out, and wasn’t especially encouraged.

“Ari, I want an active schematic on Primary Target, real time if you please. No guesses.” At another time it might have felt a little odd; she hadn’t spoken to him directly for half a year now. No, dammit, at any time it still felt a little odd. “Alpha formation, make a perimeter and hold,” she added to her wingmen. The other three would be joining them shortly, she hoped.

“
I’ve still got a few barriers remaining,
” came Ari’s reply. “
Just hold for a little.
” A little what, Sandy nearly said, but didn’t. She was military, her brain didn’t process “a little.”

She smashed the window and jumped out instead. She fell, and the side of the building behind her exploded. Smaller neighbouring buildings gave cover for her landing, and she hit the street hard, then moved quickly along a sidewalk as burning debris and shattering glass tumbled about her.

“
Someone missed an emplacement,
” said Han, one of her wingmen.

“You think?” Sandy muttered. Probably it’d seen her break the window and fired just late. That was a happier thought than it having been about to fire anyway, and it being just dumb luck that she’d jumped when she had. Han lit up the offending emplacement for tacnet, saving his own ammunition, as elsewhere about the city, missiles leapt skyward. Ten seconds later, as Sandy sheltered at a corner, another explosion tore the air by the DA building.