Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (14 page)

“And because of everyone’s reluctance,” Sandy added, “something like six hundred thousand people on Pyeongwha have died when it could have been stopped.”

“Is it up to six hundred thousand now?” Ballan murmured, aghast.

Sandy nodded. “It was industrial scale. We’ve found another six facilities so far. Their records indicate they were going at a solid forty thousand a year this year. It had been escalating upward for the last few decades. It started off as just a handful of murders a year, then grew exponentially. Kind of like NCT itself.”

“It doesn’t seem possible, does it?” Ballan gulped his wine.

“Oh, I think it does,” said Sandy.

“Perhaps you’re less naive than I.”

“Or perhaps when you’re the product of an industrial war machine like I am, and you’ve then seen the people who created you treat this wonderful creation like something they scraped off their shoe, you realise that with human civilisation, pretty much anything is possible.”

Ballan smiled faintly. “Having seen the abuses you’ve seen, it’s a wonder you’re not a pacifist.”

“Having seen the abuses I’ve seen,” Sandy replied with an edge, “it would be a wonder if anyone could
remain
a pacifist.”

Ballan nodded thoughtfully. “So tell me this,” he said. “The Federal Security Agency. You’re a member of both it, and the Callayan Security Agency. Can this continue?”

“Right now we don’t have a choice. The FSA is new, and while there’s plenty of intel analysts and desk jockeys, they’re short of serious muscle. We’re still recruiting, but there’s always been a shortage of good paramilitary people on Federation worlds, and from there the next step up is Fleet. And a lot of Fleet Marines don’t really like the FSA because of all the old CDF hands like myself and Vanessa who shot up a bunch of Fifth Fleet people five years ago.”

“To say nothing of all the former-League GIs now in the FSA as well,” Ballan added.

“Exactly. So if the FSA is to have an arm with muscle, that can carry out strikes independently of Fleet, we’re really stuck with ex-CDF and CSA people, because there’s not enough of the others yet to fill the numbers. And if we strip all those people out of the CSA at the same time, the CSA’s left with nothing, and with all the threats on Callay at the moment, that’s not feasible. Thus, we’re all working two jobs.”

“It’s just that when we moved the center of the Federation from Earth to Callay,” Ballan explained, “we swore this kind of blurring between the Federal government and the local would end.”

Sandy shrugged, shovelling pasta. “That’s life.”

“You can’t just step up recruitment?”

“Oh, we are. But the technology we’re using these days for augmentation is getting very advanced. Previously, maybe three percent of the population had the right genes and physiology to handle the upgrades, but with the most recent stuff it’s down to less than one percent. We’ll expand that as genetic mods improve, but that’ll take time. Plus, if we’re recruiting from all member worlds directly into the FSA, that’s a huge leap for a rookie. We’d rather recruit from experienced pools like the CSA. We’re working with a number of them to fast track interested personnel, but again, it takes time.”

“And you’re adamant we can’t let Fleet carry out operations like Pyeongwha on their own?”

Sandy made a face, shaking her head. “It’s not just me that says so. Look, Fleet Marines are good, but they don’t do what we do. Marines are an arm of the Fleet, and Fleet’s strategic—they go after big installations, stations, ports, command centers. They hit and hold, and their units are kind of inflexible because they have to be, to concentrate firepower on specific objectives.

“FSA are more tactical. On Pyeongwha we worked in small units, we coordinated with civilian groups on the ground, we had a whole range of targets and objectives, and we really took tacnet coordination to a whole new level . . . like I said, our augmentation’s getting very high tech. Fleet haven’t caught up yet, and I don’t know if they’re interested. Marines see tacnet as a coordination tool; FSA uses it like an offensive weapon.”

“Interesting,” said Ballan. A staffer hurried into the room, bringing a tablet, which Ballan read, signed and sent. “I’m also a little concerned at how for all the FSA’s supposed intelligence expertise, they keep being trumped by the CSA. Take this latest news on New Torah.”

“Well, the sources are on Callay,” Sandy said. “And the CSA knows Callay better than anyone, obviously. But also, Ibrahim is just the best.”

“I know.”

“And Director Diez . . .”

“I know.” Ballan put down his fork and picked up his glass. He sipped, and looked at her for a long, considering moment. “What would you say to replacing one with the other?”

Sandy sighed. “If it weren’t for the fact that his wife is dying and he wants to retire to look after her, I’d say hurray.”

Ambassador Ballan wanted her to meet some Fleet Intelligence officers whom he respected, to talk about New Torah from Fleet’s perspective. Sandy went, despite having ten other things that needed attending, more because one did not say no to Ambassador Ballan than for any great enthusiasm for Fleet Intelligence. The Grand Council Assembly Director was Li Shufu, who was the closest thing that the Federation had to an overall president. Second to him was Ouchi. Ballan was number three, and as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and highly respected in Fleet, arguably more important in security matters than the other two combined.

Walking the hall with him certainly reinforced that impression, as several staff accompanied him, including one young, pretty female staffer who was newly promoted, and staring about in wide eyed glee at all the big architecture and important people. Security walked with them, and Ballan excused himself from Sandy’s company to talk with a senior staffer about something unrelated.

Then ahead, Sandy saw the journalist, Sushma Sen, waiting for them. She refrained from groaning, and was pleased at least that the cameraman was not also present. One did not interrupt Ambassador Ballan in mid-conversation with senior staff, so Ms Sen intercepted one of the other staffers, with whom she seemed friendly, and walked with them, talking.

She wasn’t sure what happened next, but at one moment her ears caught one of those odd sounds her subconscious was specifically programmed to isolate, and the next she was tackling Ambassador Ballan to the ground. Just a millisecond before the explosion detonated, she recognised the sound as a cybernetic charge.

It blew its wearer to pieces, chaos and smoke in the hallway, then she was up with both pistols drawn as several people came out of hallway doors front and rear, armed. Sandy dropped them, guns blazing both ways at once. Then the secondary charge went off and sent her flying into the far wall.

She rebounded immediately, shaking her head clear, hair smoking and clothes in tatters. One gun was gone, the other no longer working, and several more armed people were rushing her and firing.

Sandy ducked, half-spun as bullets whipped where she’d been, then kicked off the wall to shoot herself at the opposing wall like a projectile. She bounced off to take one runner down with an elbow through the chest. The next swung at her and she grabbed the arm and threw—too hard, the arm came off in her hand, so she went low for the third’s legs, upended him and put a fist through his skull before it hit the ground.

That gave her his weapon, which she took, and put bullets through the heads of two more down the hall’s other end. The armless man was still alive, and would remain so for a little while despite jets of arterial blood, so she put six rounds through his chest to be sure.

Then Assembly security came running, too late for what had obviously been a suicide mission, even if there had only been one human bomb. She yelled at them, in case they didn’t notice the network telling them who she was. That was when she registered she wasn’t wearing much any longer. The second charge had removed her jacket completely, and most of her shirt beneath. Her jeans were now shorts, legs shredded. She still had hair—GI hair being, like most things, somewhat tougher than the organic equivalent—but still she was smouldering.

Only now was she noticing how dark it was, smoke everywhere, walls blasted, the fire retardant still not activated because nothing was on fire after the initial explosion. She ran back to check on her group. All of them were down. Ballan was alive but unconscious; she’d saved him from the first blast, and he’d then been lying flat for the second one, which she’d caught full in the face. Two others looked like they might make it—a security guard and the young staffer. Probably he’d tackled her and saved them both, but still it looked nasty, flesh shredded and amputations necessary. The others were all gone, two of them literally, just bits and pieces blasted about the hall.

More security were rushing in, a few of them checking on the bodies of the attackers.

“Leave them!” Sandy snapped, and strode over. Security backed off in awe at this apparition that strode from the smoke, half naked, scorched and blackened. Sandy knelt by a body, and remembered her interlink cord had been in her jacket. “Someone get me a cord!”

A cord was produced, and she snapped it into an insert socket—her head, then the corpse. That was always creepy, accessing a dead network construct, but she was hardly in a mood to be squeamish. It didn’t take long to find what she was looking for.

“Everyone from Pyeongwha in the building gets arrested!” she yelled. “Right now! Everyone who’s been there on holiday gets arrested! Everyone who has family there gets arrested! Everyone who has NCT installed in any form, gets arrested!”

“But we’d already done that,” one security man protested.

“Yeah,” she muttered, “that’s what I thought, too.”

She sat in FSA medical. The scanners circled the table where she sat in her underwear, while several FSA meds checked her over. Sandy watched news reports on uplink. She saw lots of emergency vehicles parked around the Assembly Building, and flyers in the air. Reporters talking to camera; God knew why they did that.

Then the footage again. No one knew how the media had received it, only that the now-late Sushma Sen had had some kind of fancy cybernetic upgrade done that allowed her to record vision, like a GI might. It had activated during the attack, and the footage now had found its way to the media, who found little squeamish in displaying the last sights of a dead woman. The footage had been cleaned up a lot, yet it showed enough—walking in the corridor, then a blast and everything going sideways. An attempt to rise, then a second blast, and down again, this time for good. She’d been lying there, probably dead, with the implant still recording. Through the smoke, the final image was clear—Sandy, an indistinct yet clearly female figure, unloading six rounds into a wounded attacker on the ground.

They were now asking if the execution of a wounded prisoner was justified. God knew how they came to the word “prisoner”—she hadn’t arrested anyone, and with cybernetic explosives even corpses were threats until disposed of. She’d just killed him so he couldn’t self-terminate, if he’d been loaded, which it turned out he hadn’t. Just that first one, a passing female staffer with several false ribs, loaded as a human bomb: one blast for effect, then a second to scythe down anyone resisting the firearm attack.

A few commentators made the sensible point, but a few more condemned that killing as excessive. Over and over, they played that footage—a female GI, standing over a wounded man, impassive and fearsome, putting six rounds through him without blinking. Could a GI have caused this attack, other commentators wondered? Possibly one of those seeking asylum?

Great, thought Sandy. Barely an hour later, and the media were already spinning to try to make this her fault.

“Well the scans don’t show anything,” said Hueng, one of the meds. “I’m sure you must have some kind of blast concussion, but our equipment can’t find it. I suppose we have to let you go.”

“Good,” said Sandy, and moved to get off the table.

“Uh!” Rhian said loudly, from where she’d been waiting by one wall. She shook her head at Sandy, sternly, and indicated she lie down. Sandy snorted, and did so. “Here’s an old trick, doc. Sometimes, you have to use your hands.”

Rhian dug her fingers and thumbs into various pressure points and gauged Sandy’s response by voluntary and involuntary means. It wasn’t hard to do. A hiss of pain usually meant something tight.

“They’re pretty much the same pressure points a chiropractor or physiotherapist knows,” Rhian explained to the curious meds. “Synth-alloy myomer will contract hard after a blast, just like any impact, but strains won’t show on scans. You have to feel for it.”

Hueng took over. And probably enjoyed it somewhat more than Rhian, as Hueng had a pretty obvious crush on her, and she wasn’t wearing much. Another time, she would have teased him, or flirted. Now, she just watched the uplink images repeating before her eyes.

Someone found her some spare clothes, and she dressed, then left to find Rhian in the adjoining analysis room. Salman was there, sitting on a stool as a med lady showed him how the microscopes worked. Rhian had been with him, Rakesh working, the twins with Rakesh’s parents, when news of the attack came through. Another mother might have panicked at the thought of letting a six-year-old wander into this world, but Rhian knew better than most what was safe, and was adamant that experiences were important for kids, even unsettling ones. With all the security around the FSA compound, which was brand new and alongside the Grand Council Assembly, Salman was certainly having an experience. And sure as hell there were no Pyeongwha-born or connected people here.