Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield (57 page)

And found herself clearing the top of the building, fire chasing her toward the apex, and she dove, spinning even now to pump fire from her white-hot rifle into emplacements, hitting all but silencing only one…and now the bottom of the big circular building, right in the bull's-eye, a central floor of glass surrounded by walkways and gardens. Sandy hurtled at it like a missile, upending at the last moment as she passed roof level, battery fire ceasing so it wouldn't hit the building, and crashed feet first through the glass at 300 kph.

Luckily the Grand Council's main chamber had a high ceiling. But she was still travelling at 200 kph when she hit the central floor right on top of the Chairman's table. And smashed, blacked out, and came to her senses even
as she hit the floor face-first. Struggled, aware that others had hit the ground around her, chairs in the grand circular chamber, the most famous in all the Federation, now burning and smashed from thruster-blasting crash landings.

And now they were under fire, as armoured troops rushed the chamber's perimeter doors. Sandy levered her broken suit into a roll, fire pinging and cracking off her armour, then a concussion of grenades, levered herself up on an awkward knee, and discovered her big magfire rifle was still working when it had no right to be, and thank god for Tanushan arms tech. And began unloading her remaining ammo at infantry troops with armour to withstand medium-caliber small arms, but nothing like this two-meter-long tank killer. Two exposed soldiers disappeared in pieces, others diving for cover or sheltering behind door frames, which Sandy summarily blew apart, pivoting in a continuing circle, shell feed clanking and humming, leaning into the recoil like a sailor in a gale. Her comrades joined in, five besides her, several with street-clearing grenade launchers put fragmentation rounds into walls, ripping a thousand holes in representatives’ seats across swathes of chamber.

Incoming fire ceased, and Sandy cracked her broken armour, rolling onto her back to free her legs from the suit's unresponsive limbs. Wriggled out amidst smoking-hot steel and the stench of scorched thrusters, found her personal weapons mangled on her armour rack, and so scrambled up an aisle between chairs, willing her hypertense leg muscles to work properly, found a dead Shield soldier with serviceable weapons. And found the GC network relatively open to transmission.

“This is Kresnov,” she snarled to all defenders. “I'm in the building with friends. Good luck, assholes.”

Ibrahim gazed up from his chair in the war room at the end of a long table with all kinds of high-tech displays and implants. Mostly dysfunctional for now, but he'd been following as much as he could and issuing commands where possible. He
had
been. Now he gazed dazedly at the blurred figure before him and recalled that he'd left the short rifle on the table before him…but he could not see it clearly, not quite recall how it operated on short notice. He'd known such things as a younger man. But it had been so long ago. And if the figure before him now was hostile, there was little he could do about it.

The figure crouched and put a hand on his shoulder. Blonde hair, messed
askew. Blue eyes, calm intensity. Not especially beat up this time. “Director,” said Cassandra. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.” He blinked, eyes resolving blurs into clear shapes. “I don't know what happened. I was here, on the displays, and then…”

“Augment stress,” said Amirah on his left. Ibrahim stared, not having seen her there. She was seated, far more bedraggled than Cassandra. Unaccustomedly, for a GI, she looked exhausted. “It happens when you push an organic body harder than it could normally take. You're not a young man any longer, sir.”

“No.” He rubbed his face. “Evidently not. Cassandra, what…?

“They surrendered,” she said. “Once we got inside. I did write a paper on that a while ago, on the flaws in the GC architecture, let us get directly into the main chamber. They were finished once that happened, they can't match us in the corridors. Had a hard enough time with Amirah by the looks of it.”

“Indeed,” said Ibrahim. And looked at the other GI with admiration. “Extraordinary, Amirah.” Given her first real taste of combat had been only a month ago, had nearly killed her, and caused her considerable trauma. “Quite extraordinary.”

Amirah nodded, face strained. Took a deep breath, elbows on knees, attempting composure. Sandy said nothing.

“Amirah?” Ibrahim pressed.

“I don't like fighting,” she managed, voice strangled. “I don't care how I'm built, or how good I am at it. I don't like it.”

Ibrahim leaned and extended a hand. Amirah took it. “I'm so sorry,” he said quietly. “But I had no choice. You were an asset I desperately needed.”

Amirah nodded. Tried to reply but couldn't. Gasped again for air, and composure, tears streaming.

“Sir,” said Cassandra. “Someone needs to talk to the media. Now. Not some broadcast message, I mean face to face. The people need to know what's happening, the population's roused now, and if they think it's just another coup, they could be storming the walls.”

Ibrahim nodded. “It should be me. Let's give them enough time to assemble…are the grounds secure enough? It should be here.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, I've already taken the liberty of summoning them. You've been unconscious for fifteen minutes at least?” She looked askance at Amirah. Amirah nodded. “I'm not sure you're in any condition.”

“Sir,” Amirah added, “your pulse rate is very elevated.” They could see that, Ibrahim realised. Infra-red vision, watching pulses of heat, blood, and tissue. “With respect, I'm not sure the first thing people see of the new authority is a man who can barely stand.”

“Well, then I can get a shot to keep me on my feet.”

“Absolutely not,” Amirah retorted sternly. “That's against all medical regulations for a man your age with augment stress. Need I remind you what happened to Commander Rice? And she's young and fit.”

Ibrahim repressed a tired smile. Amused at this new condition in his life—female GIs who could kill with the flick of a wrist, now scolding him like his wife and daughter.

“And Commander Rice is well?” he asked. And looking at Cassandra, knew the answer immediately. “Of course she is, good.” Because Cassandra would be considerably more distraught than Amirah if it were otherwise. “Well then. If it must be immediately, and it cannot be me, it must be you.” With as firm a stare as he could muster. “Cassandra.”

A year ago, she might have protested. Six months ago, even. Now, she just gazed at him with that familiar, calm blue stare. “I know,” she said. “There's a few things I want to say.”

She strode the back hall to the media room off the lower main entrance, adjusting the armour suit she'd borrowed for the occasion. A GI was guarding the doorway ahead, watching the newly arrived and arriving media outside, weapon at cautious cross-arms. Kiet now pressed past him, coming to see her. From his face, she sensed bad news.

“They found Rishi,” he said quietly. She'd disappeared off tacnet, one of four from Sandy's final assault to do so. Marco had been found alive, his suit winged, he was hurt but would live. They'd been hoping a similar story for Rishi. Kiet's expression said otherwise.

Sandy hugged him. They clung to each other for a long moment, repressing the occasional tension tremor from the armour.

“There wasn't much left,” Kiet said quietly. “So at least it was fast.”

“She was the first to rebel,” said Sandy. “Others fought back, and some like me escaped, but she led the first true rebellion. I'll see that that's remembered. That they're all remembered.”

Kiet pulled back to look her in the face. “How?”

Sandy managed a faint smile. “Watch,” she said.

She moved past and strode into the media room. And here they were, rows of some of her least favourite people in the world, journalists. Net casters, source collectors, independent traffic aggregators. With modern tech anyone could be a journalist, could gather news themselves, but still most people went through the aggregators for convenience. And the aggregators packaged and spun, this way or that, because a firmly stated opinion gathered more viewers than bland objectivity. They pretended to be independent, but most of them were sheep, the groupthink elite, who interacted mostly with each other and thus viewed the universe from within that cage, peering through their narrow bars.

Sandy walked to the podium behind which one or another Grand Council importance would normally stand, the GC logo behind, and Federation flags. And placed her assault rifle deliberately upon the podium where all could see it. Rows of nervous faces confronted her. Rows of cameras, large 3D spectra-lenses, small portables, active-pulse laser scanners that her combat vision disliked, a distracting flicker on hypersensitive synthetic retinas. They hadn't liked being called in like this, Dahisu had done it, had said there'd been exclamations and disbelief. She was putting their lives in danger, they'd said. She was going to make threats. Surely they should wait another hour or two to confirm all was safe?

Fine, she'd relayed through Dahisu. There will be an announcement in thirty minutes. If you don't want to cover it, don't come. Your competitors will get the live feed, it's not my problem. She could see the fear and excitement battling on faces, the instinct for self-preservation against the desire for the story. About two hundred of them, all told, crushed to standing room only at the back.

“You've seen our evidence against Operation Shield,” she told them without preamble. “I'm not going to rehash it. I'm not a spokesperson, I'm a soldier. If you still need one of us to convince you of what Operation Shield really was, with everything we've shown you, then you're probably beyond our ability to convince anyway.”

“Why was this necessary then?” called out some vaguely familiar face, who was probably famous or something, Sandy wasn't sure and didn't care. “It's one thing to accuse Operation Shield of wrongdoing, and maybe you're
right. But a full-scale war in Tanusha? There are at least a hundred civilians dead so far, hundreds more injured…”

“You,” said Sandy, pointing a finger at the maybe-famous journalist. “Shut up and wait your turn.”

“You can't just threaten a journalist!” shouted another.

“I can,” said Sandy. “And I'll tell you why. None of you raised your very opinionated voices against Operation Shield. Not one. It took independent media operators like Rami Rahim, and traffic shunters like Splinter Group and Kalita Constructs, to get subversive and ask questions. There will be investigations. Not done by us, we're just soldiers, but by independent judges, probably not even Callayans, since a Callayan could be considered compromised given the emotion of what's just happened. But investigations will happen, into Operation Shield, and into the role of everyone who backed it, or supported it, or was otherwise suspiciously silent with the questions, when it's supposed to be your job to ask them. Now a lot of you are probably just spineless and compliant rather than guilty, but we've evidence against some who were definitely Shield mouthpieces, bought and paid for, possibly even some in this room. So am I threatening you? You better believe it. With justice, independently administered. We're dealing with treason here. That's about the only thing people are still put to death for. Think about it.”

They thought about it. There was fear on a lot of faces. Good. Sometimes these jokers forgot that theirs was not merely a power but a responsibility to at least attempt objectivity and not take sides. And responsibilities forgotten, or abandoned in the name of personal preference, Sandy was learning, were only truly recalled beneath the blade of an axe, metaphorical or otherwise.

“Second thing. The same people who will determine your fates will now certainly determine ours. Ours, of course, meaning we who have just forcefully removed the current leaderships of Federation Grand Council and Callayan Parliament from office. Again, there will be investigations. Should we be convinced that those investigations are fair, we will submit to them, as humble servants of the Federation should. Should the same people who implemented Operation Shield be running those investigations, however, they'll find us resisting them with every weapon at hand. And once they hear the weight of our evidence, I'll hope that the majority of the people of Callay, and indeed the people of the Federation, will join us in doing so.

“Next thing. People will accuse us of launching a coup. A real one this time, not the utter fabrication of the one we were previously accused of. And they're right. This
is
a coup.”

She ran her gaze over them. The assembled faces stared back. Sandy supposed she was going out live, certainly she couldn't take anything back. But she hadn't thought to check.

“There's no denying it. A group of unelected soldiers took it upon themselves to overthrow the acting Federation and Callayan governments by force of arms. If you consult a dictionary, it'll tell you that defines a coup. But this was a
counter
-coup.” She raised a combat-gloved finger. “Important distinction. The first coup destroyed the democratic legitimacy of both governments, attempting to ram through massively important amendments without due democratic process.
That
was why we acted. Not, and I'll repeat this so that everyone understands,
not
because we didn't like the amendments. That's none of our business; we're not elected, we don't get to choose what either government chooses to do through due democratic process.

“It was the
lack
of such process that made us act. The forceful suppression of alternative views, the assassination and attempted assassination of several such figures. A coup by stealth, disguised as a security action. Innocent people have died in Tanusha today, and we all regret that. But this was not our choice. We were doing what we all swore an oath to do—defend the Federation constitution at all costs. If people want to change the constitution by legal means, wonderful. But if you have to threaten, suppress, and murder to do it, we, and others like us, will kill you. I apologise if that seems blunt to some people. This seems the time for blunt talk. We'll kill you. We're good at it. If you try it again with ten times the forces, we'll kill them too. And then we'll trace it back to the people who ordered it. You know who you are, and you should be frightened.