Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (28 page)

Ari kept profile networks, and cultivated them on private processors he wouldn’t even let Ibrahim see. He had formulas: capabilities plus contacts plus ideology mixed together with a good dose of psychology and some good old fashioned hunches. He wasn’t always right, but he could usually narrow down a huge range of possible suspects to a small sample with an accuracy that baffled most investigators, to the point that there were a few police departments to this day who were convinced that he had something to do with the crimes he’d helped solve, so spookily fast had been his work in finding the culprits. Infotech societies had everyone on record somewhere. Finding them was just the old proverbial needle in a haystack thing. Everyone was data. Ari was good at data. But most of all, he knew how the data corresponded with the real world, and how to recognise the recurring patterns when he saw them.

“Hmm,” said Ari, scratching his jaw. “Speaking of traitors, what would you call someone who collaborated with League operatives to do their dirty work?” Pino frowned. “Who’s your controller, Pino? You know they have this way of lying about who they are? They turn up in chat rooms, usually they have some avatar tailored to what they know you’ll like, like, I don’t know, hot girls who race motorcycles? They might select some guy who’s a big fan of . . . maybe Sarita Muhkerjee, you’re in her fan club yes? With half a million other guys, sure, but narrow that down to ex-Fleet, weapons training, martial arts clubs . . . and she ends up with, well, a guy like you. So she makes an avatar in motorcycle leathers, helmet on one arm . . . sound familiar?”

Pino said nothing. Ari’s senses weren’t as good as a GI’s, but he could detect elevated breathing, increased heart rate. Increased pupil dilation.

“And so you talk motorcycles for a while, and she really knows her stuff, because hey, League operatives really train up. They have these last-gen memory enhancements, so they just soak up information like a sponge, great for spies. She could become a motorcycle expert in just a few hours reading, pass herself off to the real deal like you. And then she asks you about your Fleet time, and you get to impress her with your war stories, and she says how much she hates GIs for what they did to your buddies, and you agree, and she says she can introduce you to others who feel the same way, and who hate it how there’s suddenly GIs pouring into Tanusha, and some who might even want to do something about it . . .”

Pino took off running. “And you decide to gather on what you think is a secure VR facility on an underground server that just happens to have been designed by a friend of mine,” Ari continued as Pino ran away, then stopped in frustration. “Hey! I haven’t finished my story yet, dammit!”

Ari jogged after him.

Pino didn’t get far. Down a row of walkers, Ayako stepped in front of him with a pistol levelled. Pino stopped.

“CSA,” she told him. “Get on the ground.”

“Fuck you, bitch.”

“No, fuck you,” Ayako disagreed, and pointed her pistol at his groin. Pino got on the ground.

Following, Ari saw the previously dancing walker now advancing on them. “Hey!” he yelled, pointing his own pistol at the walker driver. This was a civvie model, recreational and open fronted as the laws stipulated, so they couldn’t be used as weapons. Or, not without exposing the driver to casual marksmanship. The driver stopped. “Back off!” Signals flashed on the workshop net, encrypted and directional. Ari didn’t like it. Elsewhere about the workshop, some workers were standing and staring, but they seemed abruptly less visible than Ari remembered. “Ayako, quickly!”

Ayako knelt alongside Pino, pistol at his head, handcuffs in the other hand. With a howl, a big walker engine fired up. Pino lashed at Ayako, and she refrained from simply shooting him as she should have, and took the blow on a forearm, skidding backward. Ari swore, pistol still trained on the first walker as his eyes searched for the second. It broke clear of the wall behind him, and he spun. It was over three meters tall, its driver fully enclosed—a police model, small arms fire at the operator was useless. Ari shot at its knees instead, where exposed mechanisms were more vulnerable.

It charged him. He dove sideways, always the best option with walkers, they were fast in a line but didn’t change direction quickly. This one skidded on the flat concrete, then Ayako was darting past on its other side, abandoning her fight with Pino to get behind it.

Ari unloaded his clip into the walker’s hip, then ran out of ammo and reloaded, retreating between the legs of other, idle walkers as Ayako propagated a tacnet on their common frequency. He barely ducked in time as a worker swung something big and metal at him from the side, lost his pistol as he spun from the second swing, then sidestepped through the third to take the man’s arm and rip it back over his head whilst taking his knee out. A second came at him with a big wrench before he could finish the move, Ari stepped inside the swing, caught an arm, broke the grip, kicked to the groin, then drove the head down onto his raised knee. The first man was getting up, Ari spun kicked him flying into a walker’s leg.

Before he could reclaim his pistol, the police walker, now with Ayako somehow perched atop its shoulders and pulling exposed hydraulics with her bare hands, came rushing head first into the parked walkers where Ari covered. Ari ran like hell as tonnes of metal crashed and walkers fell in a tangle, and Ayako came diving and rolling clear across the floor.

Then the first walker was rushing him, fast, and he leaped straight at it instead of sideways. He grabbed the driver’s cage, grabbing the man’s arm and pulling hard. The machine’s arm flailed in unison, as the driver flailed with his other arm, trying to fight Ari off, only making the machine flail instead. Ari punched the man in the head for good measure, and the machine toppled backward, Ari riding it down.

Tacnet propagated fully, and Ayako’s registered targets were suddenly visible to him as well. The police walker was extricating itself from the tangle of fallen walkers, and a glance across to find Pino showed him getting into yet another walker, and at least two more activating about the walls.

“Well, great!” Ayako said cheerfully. “You know how to drive one of these things?” She ran and leaped with ridiculous agility onto the back of the rising police walker, to resume pulling out cables—it was only police, not military, and hardly invulnerable.

Ari was already in the workshop’s network, accessing fast by reflex. There were override codes for places like this, ways to get into the emergency remote control systems, mandatory in Tanusha to stop people doing dumb things in walkers . . . but here the construct was all modified, without the proper access points. No matter, he hit it with a few basic attacks, caused one barrier collapse, forced it to reassert system dominance to several backups, which in turn opened a new vulnerability which he hit, causing a full-on subsystem meltdown.

And then he was in, full override control, and one of his multitudes of stored programs fit neatly into the void and ran. Control panels emerged and he shut all the walkers down, full immobility. Ayako’s ride collapsed beneath her, and she jumped off, a little puzzled.

“Is that you?” she asked, as the other walkers powering up, now began powering down.

“Damn right, it’s me,” said Ari, walking to Pino’s walker. Fully immobilised, he was now trapped in the driver’s cage as it stood against the wall. He struggled against the straps and the locked cage, helplessly. “You know,” said Ari, “you’re an idiot.” Pino stopped struggling, and fumed. “Net monkeys always win. You don’t play with technology around me. I own you.”

Already there were police cruisers landing on the roof, summonsed automatically by the emergency tacnet propagation. Ari finally answered the urgent query blinking on his inner vision. “Seems to be the group that attacked Yvette White, maybe others,” he told incoming law enforcement. “Lock down the whole complex, don’t let anyone leave.”

“I thought you said there’d only be one guy here,” Ayako accused him, coming over. A few shop workers were running out the exits, but two CSA Agents couldn’t chase everyone. Law enforcement were locked in now and the runners wouldn’t get far.

Ari shrugged. “Well, you find one guy, you find many guys.”

“Sloppy.”

Ari considered her. “That’s a hell of a leap you’ve acquired. ALKs?”

Ayako nodded smugly. She’d always loved her toys, especially the augments. “Wonderful things. I can jump six meters vertical now. Before, I struggled to do four.”

“Sprint?”

“A hundred meters in seven point two.”

Ari whistled. “Gotta love that new gen biotech.”

“Not so bad, yourself.”

Ari smiled. He’d kind of forgotten how good she looked, with her Japanese eyes and kick-ass smile. Now he remembered. “Well, you know how I like to keep on top of the latest tech. You still top of your class at the agency?”

“Not quite,” she admitted. “Commander Rice soaks up the tech like no one else. We all joke she must have borrowed some good genes from Commander Kresnov.”

Ari’s little gang of anti-GI nasties revealed little in interrogation, but plenty more unwittingly. There were comnet functions and databases, old history trails through private VR forums that led to other people, and yet more contacts. Within hours there were new police and CSA raids across Tanusha, and a few on orbiting stations as well. Many of those would end up being released—they hadn’t done anything they could be prosecuted for, just fraternised with assholes. But it revealed more contacts, and led to some ghosts, the kinds of people even Ari struggled to find, the kind who couldn’t be sorted from the networked millions because they weren’t registered on any network, or not by anything real.

There were, of course, hundreds of thousands of those, most of them underground, some because they were genuinely involved in illegal stuff, but most because they simply didn’t like being registered on any network. Many in the underground provided the service to others, promised to clean up their constructs, limit how traceable they were, encode all their random traffic, enough to send any investigator or advertising AI running in twenty false directions at once. That was mostly legal, with limitations. The generation of completely false IDs, however, was not, and was also rampant in Tanusha. But with so many former-League operatives now living locally, the CSA had become quite adept in knowing what to look for, with them in particular.

Two they found by early evening. Genuine ghosts, faceless men with no believable IDs at all. Both were taken alive, and everyone knew they would reveal precisely nothing. The CSA didn’t torture, and besides, everyone knew the Federation had its own operatives out in League space, and didn’t want the favor returned to them. These would be held for a while, then swapped when the League caught a few Feddie spies. It happened all the time with no publicity at all.

But two more were untouchable. One worked for a big joint science program, funded by League and Federation alike, the kind of thing that was supposed to signal a thawing of relations and a common purpose in all this new technology flooding the Federation from the League since the war ended. Politically it would be incredibly awkward if this very high profile humanitarian program, featuring some very good visiting League scientists, were discovered to have been infiltrated by nefarious League agents who fed money and weapons to local extremist groups and encouraged them to murder Callayan nationals that the League would prefer dead. But neither could the present League government be allowed to think this kind of thing would just be overlooked.

The visiting scientist in question (more of a bureaucrat, in truth) was instead viciously attacked in the hallway of his apartment building, his wallet and personals taken, then his apartment ransacked. Many valuables were stolen, and some potentially useful security clearances. It had all the hallmarks of an underground gang hit—they did it sometimes to wealthy or well connected individuals with links to biotech, if there was something to gain. Possibly the cops would even catch who did it, and those people would certainly turn out to be gangsters, just doing an anonymous call-in job for very good money. Who the real client was, no one would ever know.

The scientist/bureaucrat had about fifteen broken bones and severe internal injuries. He’d take three months to heal in hospital at least, followed by a long trip home to the League. It wasn’t payback, it was just security. Anything less would simply encourage more attacks. That fact had been demonstrated over and over on Callay, and most Callayans were sick of it. And putting these kinds of operatives in what were fundamentally humanitarian programs, and then daring the CSA to disrupt that humanitarian goodness with a public arrest, was really beyond the pale. This was the CSA’s protest against foul play, and a warning that there were other ways to deal with such operatives besides a public arrest.

The second untouchable worked in the League embassy. Vanessa was not happy about that. Mustafa insisted he had not known. No one believed him.

“You want me to do it?” Sandy asked her friend as they sat in their cruiser atop a rooftop pad, twenty stories up in Ranarid District with a good view of a bend in the river.

“No,” said Vanessa. “You’ve done this enough. It’s my turn.”

They waited for the woman to emerge upon the roof of her apartment building across the river, windows wound down, the sounds of city traffic wafting up on a cool night breeze.

“Phillippe complained about me coming out tonight,” Vanessa volunteered. Sandy glanced at her. “That’s the first time that’s happened.”

“It was bound to sometime,” Sandy supposed. “He’s been very tolerant really. Especially for a guy with no background in security.”

“Yeah, but that’s the point. That’s why he likes it, it’s exciting to him because it’s unfamiliar. It’s one of the things I love about him, he’s interested in so many things beyond his own little world.”

“It’s what you’ve got in common,” said Sandy. “You’re the most unlikely SWAT grunt, you weren’t even much of a tomboy growing up, then you got into business, so you’ve had a foot in several worlds. And Phillippe’s a musician but he’s also a big philanthropist, an amateur botanist, amateur marine biologist . . .”