Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (52 page)

“Because Chancelry don’t like these two kids,” said Sandy. “Only they couldn’t get them, so they took their brother instead.”

“Why don’t Chancelry like those kids?”

“Because they were helping me. I’m from the outside, Anya. I’m from where Eduardo was sent. That’s how I met him.”

Anya looked up. Now she understood. Eduardo had been sent on a mission. She didn’t know what, and she hadn’t been able to talk to him before he’d been sent away. She knew he hadn’t wanted to go. But he’d made friends once he got there. That amused her. GIs were made for fighting, but Eduardo had said once that if he ever had to fight the Federation, he’d rather make friends with them instead, since that was where Rinni and Pasha came from. Maybe that was why the monitors hadn’t wanted them watching it.

“Your GI friend Poole is from the Federation too?” she asked.

Sandy nodded. “He plays the piano. It’s my fault he’s here. He should still be at home, playing music. But he decided he wanted to help, and he’s very stubborn and I couldn’t say no. Do you think you could help me to find him, and little Kiril?”

Anya smiled. “Yes. But only if you bring Eduardo back to me. Or take me to him.”

“Would you like to leave here?” Sandy asked. “If I can get you out?”

“If that’s the only way I can be with Eduardo, yes.” And she frowned. “But Sandy, I don’t know where I am right now. I mean, physically. I suppose I must be asleep, or in some procedure. When you’re looking for Poole and Kiril, can you look for me, too?”

Anya had code keys to parts of the security network it would have taken Sandy dangerous ages to find. Even now there were random network sweeps pulsing through HQ’s various sectors, searching for anomalous activity. She was quite good at blindsiding them, but if she stayed in here long enough, at some point they were going to get lucky.

But now, with Anya’s codes, she could micro-burst glimpses of the main security net, cameras and all, avoiding the random surveillance patterns that would normally trap anyone simply leeching on the feed.

HQ was at least ten buildings that she could see, all in a complex, all connected below ground and above. Those were in turn surrounded by Chancelry Quarter City, home to at least fifty thousand Chancelry employees, a proper city-within-a-city. That she hadn’t seen, but was told it looked not unlike modern cities anywhere, and completely unlike the parts of Droze that lay beyond the corporate barriers.

HQ’s network was completely separate. Its various parts corresponded on the network to its physical geography, so she looked first roughly where she knew medical to be. Camera feeds showed her various wards and beds, and various patients and doctors. It all looked very normal, like hospitals anywhere. In the League, military hospitals hadn’t segregated GIs and straights very much; a lot of biotech overlapped between them, unlike in Tanusha where she had to go to a separate facility to get treatment. But here, she couldn’t see GIs or GI-related treatment anywhere.

Anya had been very vague, she pondered, searching further while scanning for potential intercepts in a hundred different directions. Partly it was that Anya was young, and the irony of high-designation GIs was that at four years of age, you could probably expect more rationality from a lower des. High designations just took longer to fully form—she herself had taken at least five years, another big drawback for any military power wanting to make lots of GIs as short term circumstances changed. Wars could be won or lost, and new ones started, in less than five years. Regs took a fraction of that time.

Sandy suspected Anya was indeed unconscious, either sleeping or in some “procedure,” as she’d called it—common enough for an experimental GI in development. She’d had quite a few of them herself. GIs were never made perfect. In their early years development wasn’t just about allowing the brain to mature—it was about ironing out the kinks, entailing various medical procedures, most of them small scale involving micro treatments to adjust implants, or immune system balances, or to enhance motor skill pathways, or some such. Anya had not been able to help Sandy any more than give her these key codes. And her memory access had been poor, suggesting temporary limited function.

She broke off her ponderings, noticing some active monitoring where it didn’t seem to belong. It looked like . . . residential? Dormitories? She took feeds from several cameras, and saw corridors and classrooms. Children’s drawings on the walls, and rooms filled with toys. A class for science experiments, big displays of galactic charts, the composition of a binary star system. A cool holographic display system. It was far too late for school; regular city kids wouldn’t come to school in HQ, so these would be special kids kept separate . . .

She traced the active monitoring to the floor below, and wasn’t surprised to see a boy at a table, drawing. A woman sat alongside, talking to him, though Sandy didn’t have audio. Praising his work, which did indeed look good—it was an interactive screen, and the boy drew shapes that he could then manipulate and animate with controls. He seemed to be drawing animals, then animating them with the holographic display, which brought them to life before his eyes. He laughed with delight now as a giant lizard-like creature he’d just finished drawing appeared upon his table top, then half-galloped, half-slithered across the table. The woman clapped and praised him.

The boy looked about six, sandy-brown haired, and now as the camera caught his face, Sandy recognised Kiril from their brief meeting. So, thought Sandy. Not mistreated at all. A few more years of this, and he’d be a Chancelry kid. She understood his siblings’ distress to lose him, but wondered again if Kiril hadn’t gotten the best deal of the three.

She returned to where she’d found Anya’s uplink. This one wasn’t geographically contiguous. She’d only registered the uplink because she had special functions searching for them, and recognised the signature as being similar to Eduardo’s. But it could be coming from anywhere. There was nothing for it but to search geographically, floor by floor.

Things looked familiar in the sixth building she scanned through, on the seventeenth floor. Here the barrier elements about the security nodes changed—a whole new level of security. Even Anya’s codes couldn’t crack these. She tried a whole bunch of tricks, ran into a bunch of dead ends, then finally found a com relay that repeated origin codes it shouldn’t have when queried. That gave her bits of a puzzle to assemble, which combined with other bits gave her the foundation for a blind key . . .

. . . which worked when she tried it. For how long, she neither knew nor trusted. She scanned quickly, one room then the next. Heavy duty biotech medical, rooms rigged like something set up to monitor sub-atomic experiments. Sensors everywhere, wiring, reinforced doors and walls, bed restraints. Heating, coolling, cryo-tubing, triple redundant systems . . . she scanned through it rapidly, looking for active systems, rooms that might be occupied.

Found one, and locked into the security camera. A bed, and a GI, locked down in restraints, heavily monitored and sedated. A zoom upon the face, and it was no one she knew. Probably a local.

Further along, she found another, and repeated. This one was Poole, upper body swathed in bandages, tubes in his mouth and nose, heavily restrained, and no doubt sedated. Sandy took note of the room layout, its position in the corridor and the rest of the building, the full schematic. She didn’t think they’d move him soon; he looked hurt. But alive, and possibly recovering.

One to go. Past more barriers, teeth on edge now, expecting to be discovered at every turn . . . smashing barriers was more her style than sneaking through them; this was more Ari’s game than hers. And then two floors above Poole, as she accessed the level, a whole new construct appeared that had been hidden from a distance. This was big. Almost industrial, like they had a small factory running up here; lots of small generators, pumps and conduits. The layout made her blood run cold, just to look at it. She’d seen this layout before.

She camera-scanned on a room, now dark and empty, workers gone home for the night. Here was a giant cradle rig, with 3-D x-ray and multiple electrode attachments. A GI would lie on that slab, and be studied. Alive, she saw, given the life support built in by the wall. The electrodes would do things. The tubes would siphon off blood. The laser scalpels would cut.

Here in the next room was refrigerated storage. She could make out limbs behind transparent glass. Organs. From live subjects. GIs only gave decent life readings while alive, obviously. She’d found stuff like this on Tropez Station. She’d had it done to herself, upon first arrival in Tanusha. But with far less professional and industrial sophistication than this.

Another room had bodies in storage. These were deceased, in floating rows, preserved until recycled. Men and women, GIs in their usual physical dimensions. There was no telling if they’d lived and died, or ever lived at all. Nor how Chancelry had decided they would end up here. Chancelry GIs saw very little combat, and lived mostly secure lives. There might be one or two fatalities a year. In here was provision for hundreds. Chancelry production capacity was estimated at similar hundreds per year. They didn’t have that many in active duty, really. It had always been a mystery, where those hundreds of new ones ended up, and why they always needed more.

Now she knew.

In the next room were the live cases. She knew she shouldn’t look, but like those dark nightmares from which there was no awakening, the pull was magnetic. Besides which, she wasn’t asleep, and this was all real. She couldn’t look, but she had to, because here lay her darkest fears.

These GIs were alive. They shouldn’t have been. They lay on suspended cots, restraints and tubes and wiring all feeding back and forth like some nightmarish high-tech jungle that had reached out and snared them. There were limbs missing, and ghoulish wounds temporarily covered with transparent bandage. You could do all kinds of things to GIs that would kill regular humans rather quickly, yet still GIs would live. Sandy had thought she’d seen her life’s share of this sort of thing. Now she learned otherwise.

A lot of them were rigged for tests. The neural systems could be accessed more easily this way, once the brain had matured, and you could manipulate the nerve endings in the limbs or spine with direct stimulation. The whole GI nervous feedback system remained a mystery; how it grew was a never-ending series of surprises. Accessing it all was difficult, in live subjects interested in remaining that way.

And here, in a next cot along, was a woman. Face up, torso pried open, feedback circuitry fed into the lower spine and at the base of the skull, alongside the uplink connections, to read a full schematic of all the brain activity. Life support cycled, keeping air in the lungs and the heart pumping. Giant pins kept the head in place, driven through the neck like a pair of huge knitting needles.

The face, tube in mouth, eyes closed, was Anya’s. The pretty dark hair was gone, just a shaven scalp, red across one side from recent incision . . .

. . . Sandy woke back to the apartment with a start, where she sat against the bedside with Danya and Svetlana, the uplink reality fracturing like a china plate thrown upon the floor.

Svetlana had crept to the doorway, and now looked back with concern. “Sandy?” she mouthed. “What’s wrong?”

Sandy was crying. She couldn’t stop shaking. Danya put a hand on her shoulder, and she looked at him through tear filled eyes. He looked frightened.

Sandy shook her head. “No,” she whispered, very low, as Danya and Svetlana put their heads close to hers to hear. “Not Kiril. I saw Kiril, he’s safe. They’re looking after him.”

They both looked unutterably relieved. “Thank you,” whispered Danya, and hugged her. Svetlana hugged her, too. Sandy hugged them back. It felt nice to have someone to hold on to, given what she knew she had to do now. Given the scale of Chancelry’s defences, she doubted she’d be alive much longer. But by God, she was going to take a lot of them with her.

They were barely out of the hotel room and into the corridor, when Sandy held up her fist for a stop. The kids stopped. A faint whine. A click. Beneath human hearing range, but within Sandy’s. Whine. Click. Coming down the adjoining corridor.

Sandy moved very quietly to the next hotel door and tried the handle. It opened, and made an unavoidable noise. She pointed Danya and Svetlana inside. Svetlana went in immediately, but Danya paused, questioning. Sandy pointed ahead, and around the corridor. Made a two-legged walking figure, then a single index finger.

One humanoid, around the corner. She pointed to herself, then around the corner, then a cutting motion across her throat. Danya nodded and retreated into the room, pulling the door in but not closed. Sandy pressed herself into the doorway of a room opposite. And waited.

There was no noise now. It would have heard the door open, and stopped to listen. Sandy could not sense any transmissions. An independent operator, as were all the bots in the secure zone. Sandy didn’t trust it. It was too convenient, this thing turning up right now as she was about to leave. It was possible she’d triggered some alarm in her net infiltration. She doubted it—when she fucked up on the net, usually everyone knew about it—but it wasn’t impossible. More likely was that one of their Home Guard friends had betrayed them. She’d known that was possible too, but there hadn’t been any choice. It also meant she couldn’t count on Modeg, Duage and Zhao being where she’d left them on the way out. Gunter though, she was prepared to bet on. He was downstairs. Maybe this unit had come up the rear way, away from Gunter.