Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (3 page)

“
Active countermeasures nearly got it,
” Han observed. Sandy watched a replay of what he’d seen, a storm of micro-flares about the gardens, settling now amidst the trees and bushes. Enough to distract most missiles, but not Tanushan tech, evidenced by the new smoking crater beneath one wall where the emplacement had been.

“If countermeasures are still active, they’ll have just about everything up, save the big emplacements,” Sandy observed. “Anyone running or flying in there is dead. Ari, either you get that defensive grid down or find us another way in.”

“
Um, okay, hang on a moment . . .
” Between familiarly gritted teeth.

The front of the DA building exploded. Even though Sandy was not in direct line of sight, the intensity of the flash, and then the boom, made her duck. Then, amid the rain of debris onto neighbouring blocks, she looked up, and saw an especially large missile contrail.

Sandy suppressed a smile. “That you, darling?”

“
I told you,
” said Vanessa, “
never go anywhere without clean underwear and artillery.
”

“
Yeah, well my underwear is now less clean than it was,
” said Han.

It was the Trebuchet system. Vanessa had insisted on bringing it along, descending on UAV mounts and sparing several troops to spend ten minutes of phase one setting it up somewhere hidden. God knew how long they could now keep it hidden, but for the moment it had proven a far-sighted insistence. Vanessa’s operational policy had always been that obstacles were not obstacles once you’d blown them up. Facing the collapsed front facade of the DA building, Sandy found the logic hard to argue with.

“Let’s go,” said Sandy, targeting her three remaining missiles at surrounding department gardens, then leaping. At max power the jets pulled nearly nine Gs, and she did a fast loop over buildings, screamed low across a road and into the debris cloud of multiple explosions. Still something hit her, and she nearly crashed on deceleration and landing, digging a knee-down furrow in the turf, laying rifle and grenade shots down at everything that might be an emplacement. She continued putting down fire as Han and Weller tore in to more dignified landings, and then, just a little late, Rhian and her pair.

“
Sorry we’re late,
” said Rhian, as they crashed through debris into the DA building. “
Got into a tangle.
”

“I know,” said Sandy, ducking beneath collapsed steel beams, the ground an unstable mess of crushed concrete. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

What they had was smoke and dust filled corridors, nothing working, and only the fuzziest network reception. Sandy recalled her pre-stored schematic, which was hardly precise, but it said the basement ought to be accessible from elevator shafts ahead. If that blast hadn’t crippled or collapsed everything.

“
Sandy,
” said Ari in her ear, “
network.
” The connection clicked, and suddenly she was in, a vast expanse of complicated electronic schematics overlaying her vision. This was central grid, the command foundation that Anjula always pretended didn’t exist. Pyeongwha was a free world, they said. Democratic, free trading, law abiding, a self-evolving society that no outside force had the right to dictate terms to. So why did it need a central network regulator, and hidden ministry compounds—the public discussion of which would get a government worker disappeared? To defend freedoms, Anjula replied, on the rare occasion they spoke of it at all. But the freedom to do what?

At a central point there were indeed elevator banks, two of them large, for cargo. Nothing worked. Han smashed the doors open and peered down the shaft, while Sandy accessed some interesting functions on her schematic.

“The shaft’s booby-trapped,” she observed, as they began unsealing from their suits. “Gas won’t bother us, but there’s a microwave projector that will clear your airways real good.”

“Microwaves,” said Khan. “That’s so evil supervillain.”

All six of them were GIs. There had been about fifty arriving on Callay over the past few years, mostly high-designation, escapees from the League who were following Sandy and Rhian’s example and claiming asylum. Rights activists had taken up their cause, and each year more turned up at Gordon Spaceport. A few with network capabilities, advanced like hers, appeared almost right on Sandy’s doorstep. Most volunteered for military or paramilitary, that being the only work they knew. A few non-combatant designations had found high level civvie jobs, most in data processing or technology of some description. And a few, more concerningly, had become loners, and struggled.

Sandy got her helmet off as the rest of the suit unsealed and disassembled. The big chest plate came off first, then the arm rigs that allowed her to hold up the enormous mag-rifle, then the heavy backpack/power source which she lowered to the ground. The leg-exo shed, like a crustacean losing its shell, and the whole rig, thrusters and all, slid to an untidy pile on the floor. Her light under-armour was her regular rig, plenty tough enough for infantry work. It now had a hole through the left side of the chest plate, where the building defences had hit her on the way in.

Khan saw it. “That go through?”

“Bit.” Sandy flexed an arm with a grimace. “Maybe a rib. I’m fine.” Disconnecting the assault rifle from the mag-rifle, a tiny thing by comparison, but just what she needed at close range. Without the helmet, she just had a headrig—like a headband with eyepiece, earpiece and insert plugs at the back—rigged in turn to signal boosters in her backpack. More grenades from storage, and twin pistols in her back holster, and she was right to go. “Ari, can you cut power on the shaft?”

“
No, but I have a schematic for that microwave.
” It flashed up. Sandy peered in the shaft and saw the relevant points on the wall, maybe twenty meters down. Scrolling through visual spectrums, she could also see the laser grid defences.

“Lasers,” she said. “First person down there will discover the correct use of the word ‘decimated.’” She strode to another shaft, and smashed through the doors with a single punch, then pulled them aside.

“There’s a correct use?” wondered Han.

“To divide into ten equal portions,” said Rhian, also armed up and covering a corridor. “She hates it when the reporters don’t know what it means.”

“It’s Latin,” said Weller. Someone up a corridor pointed a gun at them. Weller shot him in the head before he could fire. “Deci as in ten; decade, decimal, decahedron.”

Sandy put a grenade through where Ari’s schematic showed the microwave’s power source was. Her schematic flickered, shielding wobbled then failed, and she hacked the lasers, too. Unable to deactivate them, she fired them instead, and they tore the sides of the shaft, and each other, to sizzling pieces.

“Let’s go.” She jumped.

Han was a 43 series, Dark Star. Sandy had met him once, briefly, in operations now nine years back, when they were both on the wrong side. Chinese by cosmetics, he was a specialised point man, a clear thinker, and overwhelmingly right-handed. He’d survived the Dark Star culls that had sent Sandy running for the Federation, tranquilised in an isolation cell until some unknown League techie had woken him up and smuggled him onto a freighter. More good Samaritans, a Christian group, had brought him to Callay and alerted herself and various rights groups, who’d all watched as CSA and others debriefed him and argued over asylum.

“Nice guy,” Vanessa had told General Dal in their formal prep, in selecting the final assault squad. “Bit dopey. Does what he’s told, vague on details, but absolutely disciplined and very dependable. Just don’t let him make decisions on his own.”

“Not like we haven’t seen that before in GIs,” Sandy had added, wryly. Back on old Earth, American soldiers had once been called “GIs” because every piece of kit they’d been issued was stamped “GI,” for “General Issue.” When League’s industrial war machine had begun issuing front line units not just with kit, but with fully sentient synthetic soldiers, they’d been called “GIs” too, for the same reason. The acronym had stuck, its meaning forever changed.

Khan was a 47 series, and had never seen actual combat in the League. Too experimental, apparently, he was only about eight years old, which meant at his long-gestation designation, he’d only been active for about four. Three of those had now been on Callay. Again, a group of League defectors had brought him with them before he was evolved enough to think for himself, hoping to get a better asylum deal for themselves if they brought a high-des GI along. That made some security folks nervous—Khan had never actually defected, like Sandy, or even reached the conscious realisation that the League truly sucked for GIs and a lot of other people, like Han. And Khan had become truly smart, socialised and borderline devious when he chose. If anyone could fake it, then sell you out to his old League friends, Khan could.

“Showbiz Khan,” Vanessa called him, after his flashing smile. “He’d be command material if he had more experience. Wait and see how he responds to the real thing, then we’ll make a call.”

Ogun was a 40, of African cosmetics, bald and dour-looking. By designation that made him kind of dumb, but Sandy wasn’t so sure. Certainly he didn’t say much, including about how he’d gotten out. But all the psychs agreed that he hated the League with a passion, and wasn’t smart enough, or devious enough, to fake it. The Federation opposed the League and that was good enough for him. His loyalty was beyond doubt.

“Great team player,” was Vanessa’s assessment. “He just knows where to be. Individually, not so much.”

“A lot of the lower designations are better team players that their supposed superiors,” Sandy had added. “Thus proving that selfishness is a higher intellectual function.”

“Ha,” spoke Vanessa. “Apply that theory to a five-year-old.”

Weller was an odd girl. A 44 by designation, European by cosmetics, she claimed to have been injured in a major battle eight years ago, left for dead in a ruined city, and nursed back to health by Sufi mystics who’d found her there. Both her injuries and her devotion to Sufism backed her story, but Sandy still found something about her strange.

“Her detachment is almost sociopathic,” Vanessa had observed. “But that’s unfair, because she’s quite a nice girl. She just, you know, doesn’t seem to make the distinction between people, events and emotions.”

“I think ‘autistic’ would be more fair than ‘sociopathic,’” Sandy had said. “Not uncommon amongst GIs either. But she’s a good soldier, I’ll take her.”

Rhian Chu, of course, was Sandy’s old buddy, and a quite intriguing individual. Upon first arrival in the Federation, Sandy wouldn’t have trusted her with a combat command any more than Ogun or Han, but she’d grown enormously since. A 39 by designation, she wasn’t technically supposed to be that smart, but these days Sandy would have backed her over a lot of higher designations. To prove the point, she’d recently completed an advanced postgrad on child psychology and early development, and aced it in a tough class.

“It’s sad she’s still a soldier,” Vanessa had observed. “She’s got far more to offer childhood studies and education than she does here. But she’s got to make that call for herself, I can’t do it.”

“I said I was coming,” Sandy had sighed, “and she was pretty much unstoppable from then.”

Last of these final, elite six, was Cassandra Kresnov. GIs had been coming in from the League for four years now, experimental ones with the self-awareness to realise the injustices done to them. Though two had emerged as challengers, and one of those was certainly her equal in intellect, there were still none who came close in combat. Weller had quoted Hindu scripture after seeing her fight—Vishnu from the Baghavad-Gita: “for I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Sandy was one of a tiny handful of 50 series GIs ever made. Certainly she was the only one serving the Federation. It was hypothetically conceivable that further advances could make a more effective soldier, but Vanessa, for one, doubted it.

“Babe,” she’d said, “if it’s Pyeongwha versus you, I pick you.”

“Well that’s sweet,” Sandy had replied, “but you know better than anyone it doesn’t work like that.”

“Bullshit it doesn’t,” Vanessa had said with a smile. “I’ve got an entire assault plan that counts on it.”

Under the DA building was a cavern. It led to a maze of caves beneath Anjula, well known by the first settlers over two hundred years ago . . . in fact, it was one of the reasons why the city had been placed where it was. Into the caves had gone power plants, waste management systems, and various emergency facilities—a whole underground infrastructure. Then, from eighty years back, access had been increasingly restricted.

It had begun by accident. A local biotech firm had made some genome alterations to counter a strain of nasty Pyeongwha native neural diseases. It worked, and the genome adjustments had created an interesting additional benefit—an enhanced ability to assimilate what had then been a new and innovative neural-cluster uplink technology. Those were synthetic-organic themselves, the kind of thing the League had been playing with at the time, later largely banned in the Federation. But on Pyeongwha, they’d led to a noticeable increase in productivity, ingenuity, and—its proponents claimed—social harmony. So popular they’d proven, that governments had been elected to promote, and later mandate, certain functions. A new phase of human evolution, they’d called it. Theories had abounded on how the natural mechanisms of organic evolution were now adapting themselves to NCT, as Neural Cluster Tech was called, leading to a virtuous circle of technological and biological improvement.