Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (20 page)

Eternity
must have brought evidence of some sort. Sandy was pretty sure she knew what. There were only a few institutions that could enforce such matters; war crimes were on a high Federal level that went over the Callayan police force’s heads, and given that the accused was CSA herself, the CSA couldn’t do it. That left the SIB, everyone’s favorite law enforcement bureaucracy, who never saw a moralising, semantical piece of nonsense they wouldn’t try their damnedest to enforce. Especially if it involved putting Kresnov and the CSA in a bad spot. One of the SIB’s favorite judges must have signed the warrant, and rather than doing it quietly and in consultation, the SIB had chosen to barge into her convention talk and do it in public.

Clearly it was a diversion. The League wanted her out of the way. There was only one big thing she was involved in that might provoke a League starship to come all this way with trumped up charges of something that, if Sandy was right about its nature, the League would usually prefer to keep quiet. Sandy wondered what else
Eternity
’s envoys were up to in Tanusha, at this very moment, when everyone’s attention was elsewhere. Frustration set in. Ibrahim had better send someone fast.

Her seekers brought back further net hits, and she scrolled through them—no details about the charges yet. That didn’t surprise her; she hadn’t been told, either. Some commentators were calling for her resignation anyway. Some were vigorously defending her. Most of those were independent media. The establishment, Sandy had long known, was a lost cause where she was concerned. Thankfully, the establishment had been proven wrong so many times on security issues, most Callayans didn’t take them seriously.

Another hit caught her eye—a video link, and she opened it.

Super cool vision!
, it said.
Sandy Kresnov, Callay’s hottest soldier babe, spotted dancing at Kotam Road party!

The vision was clear enough, and it was indeed her—hard to recognise directly in the crowds and flashing lights with her shades on, but if you paid attention . . . Sandy smiled. As with most things physical she was a very good dancer, and looked good doing it. Here on the vision, someone was spraying the dancing crowds with water, everyone dripping and having a blast. The vision lasted thirty seconds, then cut. There could have been more, close-ups of her face, or tits, but there weren’t. Someone had taken the trouble to make her look good without being too intrusive, and released it just when her public image could most use the support.

Her smile grew to a grin. She could almost get emotional at how her strongest supporters here, most of them anonymous civvies she’d never met, consistently came to her defence. No, dammit, now she
was
getting emotional. She wiped her eyes.

Ibrahim did better than send someone. Barely thirty minutes later, he came himself. She was led from the interrogation room back into the main offices, where Ibrahim very pointedly returned to her her ID and her guns, in full view of all the SIBs who’d watched her come in.

“I invoked emergency privilege,” he answered her unasked question, in the backseat of his cruiser as they flew into a cloudy midday sky. “You’re essential personnel and they’ve no business arresting you. The charges won’t be so easy to dismiss, however. It’s going to cause a stink for quite a while I’m afraid.”

He looked at her, questioningly. “I’ll tell you later,” she promised.

“A lot of very awful things happened on all sides of that war,” said Ibrahim. “Many of them are far too readily politicised by those seeking to make a political point against the other side.”

“Don’t,” said Sandy, shaking her head. “Don’t abandon your objectivity just for my sake. I value it too much. I’ll tell you, and you can judge. You all can. Just not right now, because it was intended as a distraction, and it will be.”

Ibrahim pursed his lips, and nodded. “Very well. When the current noise has faded, you can speak when you wish.”

“They’re after Operation Patchup, aren’t they?” said Sandy. “
Eternity
’s envoys?”

Ibrahim nodded. “Somehow they found out, or suspected. They’re from League Interplanetary Affairs, so they’re government.”

“What else are they doing, aside from discrediting me?”

“Making threats. Resumption of war seems the main thing.”

“They can’t afford it,” Sandy scoffed. “They had riots on five worlds in the past three months, law and order problems everywhere. The only business sector booming over there right now is domestic security.”

“Of course. But the foreign ministers are all here, and foreign ministers, like chickens, are best frightened in groups. Safe to say that the resumption of a war everyone in the Federation thought we’d won is not a popular proposition, not even to risk it.”

“But it’s not a risk,” Sandy retorted, “the League physically can’t do it. They’d lose in weeks. The economy’s collapsed and they’ve nothing left!”

“Well yes,” said Ibrahim, smiling at her naivety. “We rational security types know that. Foreign ministers consider their reelections and begin to cluck and lay eggs.”

“Fuck!” Sandy exclaimed. “God damn our fucking useless security. How did they find out just the moment to send their special envoys to Callay and make threats?”

“Probably the same way that your journalist friend found out here, only weeks ago. There are many worlds in the Federation. Keeping secrets on all of them simultaneously is hard, and beyond our control.”

“You don’t seem that surprised,” Sandy accused him.

Ibrahim shrugged. “It’s politics.”

Sandy frowned. “You don’t seem all too upset about it, either.”

Ibrahim smiled. “When have you seen me upset?” Then he waved a hand. “No, don’t answer that.” He seemed almost . . . cheerful. He saw her looking, and sighed. “Radha had her tests this morning. I just came from the hospital. The cancer is in remission.”

Sandy stared. “It worked?”

“It seems to have.”

Sandy didn’t know how Siddhartha had done it. The technology was far beyond what laymen could even begin to comprehend, save to say that Radha’s cancer had been caused by one of those new cellular mutations humanity had picked up in response to generations of uplink augmentation. As synthetic organisms, GIs were packed with various synthetic microdefenses that copied human biology while breaking all kinds of normal biological rules—natural/synthetic fusion, like so much League tech. Some of that stuff could be synthesised and recreated in new, custom-designed cells and proteins to do all kinds of other stuff in regular humans. Siddhartha’s massive VR computer systems had calculated which bits would work on what (as there was no chance of a human holding all that data in his head) and come up with some drugs. A week ago, he’d applied them himself. Today was Radha’s first checkup.

“How much reduction?” Sandy asked, holding her breath.

“Eighty percent.” Ibrahim was beaming. Sandy laughed, and did something she’d never done to her boss before, hugging him, and kissing him on the cheek. Normally she valued the solemnity of their relationship far too much, and did not wish to belittle him, nor the rock-like reassurance of his guidance. But today, it was obvious, he didn’t care a bit.

“Oh that’s wonderful,” she said. “Perhaps we should both break the law more often.”

“Allah does not like me to break the law, I am certain,” said Ibrahim. “But his first command to every husband is to care for his wife.”

“It’s a stupid law, anyway,” Sandy added. “I bet Allah thinks so, too.”

Ibrahim laughed, a very rare sound indeed. “I bet he does.”

Sandy was very pleased Ibrahim had chosen this day to find out Radha’s good news. It saved her from being quite so depressed when it became clear that the Operation Patchup vote was collapsing.

She sat in Grand Council offices with some leading aides, FSA and CSA agents, and several academics who had all been leading the way on Patchup the last month, and waited for the final meetings to conclude. Every ten minutes someone on their side would message one of the group with bad news—the debate was swaying the wrong way, foreign ministers were uncommitted, making excuses, going back on carefully worded arrangements that their permanent ambassadors had been writing the past month. There was a conversation going, here in the room, about how they might yet find some way to intervene, or do something with New Torah, once it became finally clear that Patchup was a non-starter.

Sandy didn’t contribute much, sitting and watching the usual summer mid-afternoon rain pouring down. She thought of Eduardo, and the picture of his female GI friend. She still had it in memory storage, and recalled it now to look at once more. The girl could have been Sandy herself, League-built and young, like Eduardo. Perhaps four or five years old. What had she known, at that age? Almost nothing, and her memories were very vague, almost non-existent. Like dreams.

She knew she should have been more concerned for the broader security issues. New Torah was a threat, in so many ways. And the Torahns themselves were suffering and dying. But if she was honest with herself, she knew that wasn’t the reason for her growing obsession. GIs were the key to this, she knew they were. The technology could go in directions that would give her no peace for the rest of her life, nor her GI friends. Eduardo had ended up here, and others would follow. She’d hoped to escape all this, but increasingly she knew she couldn’t.

But she’d broken out. She hadn’t obeyed her masters. Neither had Eduardo. What was going on out there? Who exactly in New Torah was making GIs, and for what reasons? She wanted to save them, but knew it wasn’t so simple. Some of them simply didn’t deserve to be saved—not their fault, they couldn’t help being what they were, but that didn’t make an emotionless killbot any more sympathetic. But the others, the high designations like her . . .

What if they could be turned against their masters, like she’d done for herself? What contribution would that make, towards solving the overall security problem that New Torah presented? She didn’t dare raise it here. People would look at her crazy. GIs were a problem, not a solution. They’d think she’d gone all Moses on them, “let my people free,” leading them to some promised land.

Well. Hadn’t she? Just a little bit?

Mustafa walked in. The security agents in the room grasped that significance, and stared at him. The others didn’t notice, and continued their glum discussion. Mustafa headed for Sandy, and beckoned her to a corner. Sandy knew it wasn’t even worth asking how he’d gotten into the Assembly Building. Mustafa had ways.

“Director Diez,” he said quietly.

Sandy frowned. “Director Diez what?”

“Told one of my agents. Who told League government. Who sent
Eternity
. Which scuttled Operation Patchup.”

Sandy stared. A thousand thoughts went through her mind. She found the most relevant. “Why tell me now?”

“I only just found out. I had suspicions, which I acted upon. And I was right, though the exact source was a surprise, I’ll admit.”

“And you’ll give me evidence? We can’t move on Diez without evidence.”

“I know. You can have it immediately.”

“Damn,” said Sandy, looking out the window to gather her thoughts. The room’s agents were still watching, wondering what was going on. Their hearing enhancements weren’t as good as hers, then. “We’ll have to do this quietly, can’t let the media know it came from you.”

“Surely the Director needs to spend some more time with his family,” Mustafa suggested.

“Yeah,” said Sandy, darkly. “Damn, I’d love to throw him in jail.” She considered him more closely. “You wanted Operation Patchup that badly?”

“ISO did, certainly,” said Mustafa. “Now there will be trouble.”

“League governments excel at trouble,” said Sandy, and walked to the agents, to set up a group call to Ibrahim.

It went down quickly. Sandy wasn’t even there; the FSA handled their Director internally, and sent him home on leave. Now they were stewing on Mustafa’s evidence, she knew. It was uncontestable—encrypted files only the FSA Director had access to, traced to the possession of one of League Embassy’s staff, who was, Mustafa shared with them, ISO and well connected with various League politicians. That last was a big breach by Mustafa. ISO never revealed information on the whos and whys of Embassy postings. Until now.

She landed her cruiser now near her own home—Canas high security district, not only where she lived, but where various high ranking Grand Council figures now lived as well. She found Ambassador Ballan in a reclining chair in his rear room by an indoor fish pond. A sunroom, with glass windows and rooftop, streaked with drumming rain.

“Cassandra!” said the Ambassador from Nova Esperanca, putting aside his reader. “Please have a seat, Ana come and say hello, Cassandra’s here!”

Ana was Ballan’s teenage daughter. She gave Sandy a tight hug, as she did every time she saw her, then rushed to get them some drinks and snacks. Ana knew her father was only alive because of Sandy. She’d been thinking of a career in environmental management, before. Now, she was seriously considering security.

“You’re looking well,” said Sandy, as they sipped fruit lassi Ana had brought them.

“Not so bad,” Ballan admitted. “I’m looking forward to leaving the house in a few weeks. Margarite has promised me a football match.”

He still wore a robe, with lots of bandages beneath it. The last time Sandy had seen him, he’d joked he had enough synthetic micros in his body to start their own evolutionary patterns.

“I hear we have an FSA problem,” said Ballan.

“We do,” Sandy affirmed. “It does present an opportunity.”

“It does indeed.” Ballan thought about it, sipping his drink. “Will the CSA agree?”

“They won’t like it,” said Sandy. “Hell, I won’t like it. Or not all of it. But in the time I’ve been working with the FSA, I’ve come to appreciate how important it actually is.”

“There’s nothing like a dysfunctional organisation to make you appreciate its importance,” Ballan agreed. “It’s only the ones that work well that get taken for granted.”

“And treated with contempt,” Sandy added, thinking of the protestors. And the SIB.