Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield (21 page)

“No, I agree completely. But everyone was a child once…or everyone who's not a GI, anyway…” She looked Svetlana very closely in the eyes. “And those men you killed were all children once, like you are now. Like Danya and Kiril.” Svetlana looked uncomfortable, trying to look away. Sandy drew her attention back. “And maybe…who knows, if things had turned out differently, maybe they'd be nice. But Droze was really nasty the last five years, and people had to do all kinds of things to survive…I mean, you saw it, right? You saw people you thought were good, who ended up doing bad things? Working for bad people?”

Svetlana was getting upset now and not knowing what to do about it. Obviously she did know plenty of people who were basically good but had done bad things. She herself had stolen plenty of times. And she knew none of them deserved to die for it. Half-hating herself, Sandy pressed on, knowing it had to be done.

“And people can change, right? Maybe some of those men were just doing what they were doing to Danya for money? Maybe they'd change their minds later, if they had a chance. Maybe if they weren't working for Janu, you'd
have liked them, and they'd have been kind.” She squeezed her arm tight. “It doesn't mean you did the wrong thing, Svet. Wars have been fought that desperately needed to be won, and it's good that they were won, but that doesn't mean that all the people on the other side were bad and deserved to die, it just means that their
cause
was bad. Sometimes there's no choice in killing, but the really sad part, the thing that keeps even me awake at night, is that even when you really have to, and when it's absolutely right, sometimes the person you kill is really pretty good. Or could be good, if things were different. Maybe they'd even be your friend. And maybe they have brothers and sisters who'll be as sad to lose them as you'd be sad to lose Danya or Kiril. And maybe they're crying right now, because of what you did.”

Svetlana stood there, blinking back furious tears. She looked so helpless, having this awful thing inside of her and not knowing where to put it. Having this conviction that she'd done everything right and not knowing why it still hurt so much. And already beginning down that dangerous path of covering the pain by getting angry, defiantly, to try and convince herself that she could do the same thing over and over again, and it didn't bother her.

Only it did. It broke Sandy's heart to look at her. She'd lived with this most of her life. She knew exactly how it felt, and she wouldn't wish it on anyone, least of all a confused and frightened little girl.

Svetlana collapsed into Sandy's arms. “I didn't want to!” she sobbed. “I didn't want to shoot anyone, I was just so scared and I didn't want them to take away Danya and I didn't want to be alone…!”

Her words trailed off into incoherent sobs against Sandy's shoulder. Sandy held her close, her own cheeks wet with tears.

Vanessa walked into the FSA medbay with a customary cup of coffee in hand, finding Sandy on the central table, sitting topless save the receptor vest, with various other electrics strapped over that and big sensor paddles surrounding the table. Several doctors with VR eyewear assisted or gave instructions, sometimes just presenting Sandy with an open hand to press her fist into and push against.

“Jeez,” said Vanessa, “how long does a lube job take?”

“You leave my personal life out of this.”

“Eww,” said Svetlana as Vanessa gave Danya a one-armed hug and kiss on the cheek. Danya was surprised by it, but Vanessa remembered when Sandy had been surprised by it too. Vanessa had forced it upon her then and was even more determined to do so with the kids, who needed it more.

“You guys all think we don't know what it means, gross.”

“You know,” said Vanessa, not at all apologetic, “I was so looking forward to corrupting them.” And hugged Svetlana too.

“Too late,” said Danya. He was reading again, AR glasses on, sitting on a bunk in the rough denim and plain shirt he preferred to the more trendy stuff Tanushan kids typically wore.

Vanessa hugged Kiril last, he was sitting on a chair right next to Sandy so he could watch the doctors’ displays. She recalled he'd helped a lot in the Chancelry med ward on Droze and found all this stuff interesting.

“How's your head, Kiri?”

“It's okay. I don't see colours and lights and stuff now.” Vanessa saw Sandy's displeased glance and decided to leave that alone.

The scars on Sandy's arm were nearly gone, nanos repaired scar tissue as well as underlying tears and separations. The blast that had done it had been a big one, probably a DX grenade. In some reflexive modes Sandy could nearly shoot those from the air. Certainly she'd have seen the muzzle flash and known the firepower was there in the first place—DX mounts weren't fast to operate, GIs moved fast; whoever'd been wielding the DX would have been in support fire position quite deep in defensive formation so it didn't get taken out in the
opening exchange…it was how you slowed a GI advance: soak up the initial pressure with mines, then grenade and fixed fire, slow them down, then hit them with the heavy stuff from farther back.

With few “go around” options, even Sandy would have typically backed off faced with that, used some tricks, taken some time. But this time, she'd gone straight in and gotten hammered. Not as bad as the defenders, of course, but it was something rare indeed. And no prizes for guessing why she'd done it.

“How's your mobility?” Vanessa asked. Sandy showed her—she couldn't lift the arm much over her head and couldn't extend the elbow from any position save straight by her side. “That'll extend though, right?”

“Another two weeks,” said one of the doctors. “The muscles were completely severed, beyond their capacity to independently regenerate. It's only once she got back here to proper facilities she's been able to heal fully.”

“You'd think they'd have made me modular,” Sandy complained, gesturing for some of Vanessa's coffee. Vanessa lent it, and she sipped and gave it back.

“At least your face is okay. Eyes and ears don't heal fast like muscles and tendons.”

“I dunno. Maybe an eyepatch, Svet?”

“That would look wicked on you!” Svetlana agreed. “You'd be like a blonde pirate.”

“What's a pirate?” Kiril asked.

“You haven't given him any pirate stories?” Vanessa was very disappointed.

“Huh,” said Sandy. “Another of those things not nearly as glamorous in real life. In the war we used to shoot them on sight, good thing too.”

“
Must
you always be so literal?”

“What's a pirate?” Kiril complained.

“Pirates used to sail around on the oceans on old Earth in big sailing ships!” Vanessa told the wide-eyed little boy. “And they had big swords, or old pistols called blunderbusses, and they had big hats, and they were always looking for treasure!”

“What's treasure?” asked Kiril.

“Gold and jewels and stuff, Kiri!” said Svetlana, joining the enthusiasm. She was wearing denim overalls, but with girly pink and blue stitching patterns and colourful socks. And could that be the tiniest smudge of eyeliner? “Stuff that makes you rich!”

“And pirate captains had peg legs,” said Vanessa, “and talking parrots, and they were always drinking lots of rum, and they laughed like this! Har har har har, Ar Ar! Can you laugh like that?”

And there followed a lot of pirate laughing with Vanessa, Kiril, and Svetlana. The doctors worked on, getting more readings as Sandy rotated her shoulder in a new direction, and pushed for gentle pressure. Probably thinking that if they had a private practise, they wouldn't have to put up with this shit…but working for the FSA or CSA, you didn't just tell their combat spec ops to shut up, nor their kids. And you got to work with bio-synthetic wonders like Sandy, which for most of the payroll doctors made up for a hell of a lot.

“I'll get you some pirate stories,” said Vanessa, “my nieces and nephews have some great ones, pirates are cool.”

“’Cept when they board innocent traders, murder the crew, and rape the female passengers before stealing all their stuff,” said Danya, still reading. “Guess the stories forgot that bit.”

“Thank you, Danya,” Sandy deadpanned with an approving look. Danya might have smiled a little.

“Yeah, well, that was a long time ago,” Vanessa said brightly. “Sandy, now that you're duty rostered again, got some people you should meet soon as you're finished here.”

“Five more minutes,” said one of the doctors. “Almost done.”

The kids went home with an FSA driver, which would doubtless include a stop somewhere exciting to look around and buy a few things, usually food and clothes. Tanusha was very safe, the kids weren't uplinked and so couldn't be traced, and Danya was smarter and more cautious than most adult childminders. But still Sandy didn't like it much, even as she knew she couldn't and shouldn't stop it. Now she knew why parents worried.

“It's just that they're mine now,” she explained to Vanessa, still rotating the shoulder in her jacket as they walked FSA HQ corridors. “Anyone who doesn't like me might go after them.”

“And they're network protected so openly publishing images or names is illegal and violations get scrubbed, plus you've got the underground on side with them just like with you, so the people most likely to break the protection barrier are actually helping it. And there's sixty-two million people in Tanusha, what are the odds?”

“Get your own damn kids,” said Sandy, “then start talking to me about odds.”

Vanessa laughed, determinedly upbeat as usual. “So you brought them to see a medical procedure, huh?”

“They were worried. Well,” she corrected, “Danya and Svet were worried, Kiril just likes it, all that medical tech. You'd think with all the injuries he saw he'd be put off hospitals for life.”

“That boy knows what he's interested in; he won't get put off easily.”

“Besides,” Sandy added, “it's good for them to see it. I mean, they know what I am, they're the least naive kids ever. But it's still good for them to be reminded now and then.”

“I guess,” said Vanessa. “Any luck on next of kin?” That search had gone nowhere. League records were incomplete; they knew who the kids’ mother was, Lidya Seravitch, but that name had no matches on existing records. Of course, League was currently expelled from Callay in what some were calling a post-war trough in relations, and others were calling a new cold war…whatever it was, it made requests for further access to League citizen and migration records impossible. They just had to go with what the intel agencies had access to. Or had stolen.

“Lots of Pantala migrants had dodgy pasts,” said Sandy, “Seravitch might have changed her name, might have changed her face too, even gene switches aren't illegal in the League.”

“And boy, are they going to regret that when the shit hits the fan in a few years,” said Vanessa. “I wouldn't worry about it, the odds that someone of the Seravitch clan in the League is going to pop up and claim parental custody seems pretty slim, and Federation adoption law supports existing relations more than past heritage.”

“I know,” said Sandy. “That doesn't worry me. League dirty tricks do. I showed them they shouldn't come after me or the kids with force, but their legal crap is another matter. Like with the war crimes stuff.”

The war crimes stuff was still pending. It was all bullshit too, but it had never been the moral currency of such cases that gave them life, when aimed at Sandy.

She never even bothered to query where Vanessa was taking her. They just arrived in a very secure room in the heart of headquarters. Sandy half-expected
to see a senior Fleet officer or maybe even a politician with a famous face. Instead, there were two men and a woman in suits whom she did not recognise.

She glanced at Vanessa. Vanessa nodded to the suits and then the full security suite activated, jammers, net barriers, sonic white noise. Several of the walls transformed into pleasant green grass and trees, a fake view from fake upper-level windows. A university campus, perhaps, buildings with nice old brickwork, students wandering the pretty grounds.

“Sandy,” said Vanessa, “these are some cool folks I know. I'd tell you who they work for, but they don't actually have a name.”

“No name?” said Sandy drily. This game of “our organisation is more secret than yours” was becoming a little silly. Usually it was just silly acronyms and pseudonyms. “Good heavens, you must be important.”

The young man who extended his hand to her grinned. “No, actually. We're only as important as people think we are. I'm Steven. These are Reggi and Abraham.” At the woman and man with him. “Please, I understand you've been injured, have a seat.”

There were tea and biscuits waiting for them on the table. Neatly arranged. Sandy sat, increasingly suspicious. But if Vanessa had pointed her into a room containing the devil, she'd still have gone inside.

“Now, Commander,” said Steven, as they all took seats, “we basically run some interesting software programs. Social sciences, predictive routines, I'm sure you know the stuff.”

Again, if it had been for anyone other than Vanessa, she'd have politely, or less politely, excused herself. “Poli-sci cubed,” she said. So called because it was, as some wag had described, political science in a box. “And what's your success rate running at lately?”

Steven's face fell. He was very young, no more than early twenties, blond and small and earnest.

“Sandy,” said Vanessa with an assertive smile. “Be nice.”

“That's not the nature of our software,” said Abraham, a tall man with a goatee, skullcap, and a gentle Bengali accent. “We've no interest in predicting the future of broad events. As your scepticism suggests, there is little productive sense in such a path. We only try to analyse trends along specific axies.”

“Pyeongwha,” Reggi added, a little impatiently, as though she thought
the boys weren't getting to the point Sandy needed to hear. She was African, round-faced, with long, girly dreadlocks. “Our research comes from the data on Pyeongwha.”

It did get Sandy's attention.

“What about Pyeongwha?” she asked.

“Pyeongwha has been classified as a mass isolated outbreak of Compulsive Narrative Syndrome exacerbated by Neural Cluster Technology, a branch of uplink tech that was supposed to be banned in the Federation for precisely this reason,” said Abraham. “The theory has always been that NCT causes this because NCT is a defective technology, leading to defective outcomes.”

“Well, I've never bought that,” Sandy said cautiously. “NCT isn't defective, it does precisely what it's supposed to do—allow data-sharing across multiple neural levels to create a multi-dimensional neural environment for all members of a society to enjoy a collective emersion experience. Which is safe if the human brain were constant, but it's not, it adapts and develops pathways depending on usage, so if you make it behave like a hive mind, it will eventually grow into one. That's what we see on Pyeongwha. Not defective, just deadly efficient.”

The three suits exchanged looks with each other, and with Vanessa. As though just now reassured that they hadn't made a mistake in coming to Sandy.

“Good,” said Abraham. “Not defective technology, no, it's an entirely reasonable outcome, if you understand the psychology and wiring. On the larger scale, it creates nightmares.”

In Pyeongwha's case, a totalitarian state addicted to NCT and its advantages, creating a collective sense of “we” that labelled anyone not similarly addicted as an enemy, even its own citizens. Six hundred thousand dead over several decades, most of those in the last five years as the terror escalated, before the FSA raid led by Sandy and Vanessa had smashed it. News was still coming out; only now were the more gruesome details becoming public, though not having the impact it should have thanks to a media more obsessed with the “scandal” of the Grand Council's decision to attack in the first place.

“We've come to you because we think a similar phenomenon may be occurring here on Callay,” said Reggi. Sandy just looked at her. People who didn't know her often found it intimidating when she did that. And a few who did know her. “At first Intel Chief Naidu found our reports interesting, and
they were circulated amongst some CSA people, mostly…a few FSA, but it's not really a Federal thing yet. That's how Commander Rice encountered our work, and she recommended you.”