Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield (3 page)

“
Mate, just shoot when I say shoot, okay
?
This was a very broad interpretation of the Federal Interest from the very beginning, you know the stakes as well as I, don't go pulling all this semantical crap now
.”

“
This reply is not adequate
.” Reichardt didn't seem very amused. She was asking him to commit to firing orbital warheads on her say-so that would kill tens of thousands of people here on Droze. He'd wear the responsibility without any of the control, and he hated it. But she didn't have a choice.

“
This situation is not adequate
.” She sealed the armour up with a whine and click of interlocking joins and powering micro hydraulics. She left the helmet off for her preferred headset, additional sensors, and processing. “
But it's all I've got
.”

She took off running.

The main entrance to Chancelry HQ was not defended by a wall of any kind, just a pedestrian space, a few gardens, then civvie roads, light rail, and shopping. Everyone in Chancelry worked for the corporation; inside the zone there were no outsiders to defend headquarters from. But they had parked a big fuck-off tank out front, so described because its multiple rapid-fire autocannon, street sweeper anti-personnel systems, and missile launchers gave nearby residents an unmistakable message.

She took off running up the main street. Up ahead, she didn't need tacnet to tell her the shooting had started. The night sky was lit up with rapid flashes and random tracer. Now an explosion, a lingering flash. Then another.

A new connection lit up her internal visual. CEO Patana, Dhamsel Corporation. “
Commander! You end this provocation at once!
”

With the intranet cut, she had no way of telling what was going on in the other HQs. The idea had been to create a new uprising, like they'd accidently caused with Rishi here in Chancelry, but with alternate routes created to ensure they could see what was happening. Now they were blind and had nothing like the force to attack the other corporations directly as they'd done initially here. Damn Kiet for moving too soon.

“
The true provocation is the continued utilisation of any synthetic person in armed bondage
,” Sandy replied, bounding now at over 60 kph down the suburban road. Now eighty. Admitting she wasn't in control would be dangerous. “
Release them all now and this stops immediately
.”

Tacnet showed Kiet's troops crossing the border into neutral land ahead, under heavy fire. Civilian areas, joint administered between the corporations, and they wouldn't risk excessive civvie casualties. But they could zero on the roads, avoiding buildings.

It didn't take her long to get close—she could see the deployment clearly, support lines with heavy weapons ahead, scattered across apartments and street corners, others deployed ahead, across neutral territory. In there, tacnet updated periodically, new hostiles where identified, fire positions, trajectories. It looked relatively restrained, too many civvies around for the heavy stuff. And here ahead there were more civvies, running in the streets, a few carrying kids and terrified. Fucking Kiet, she was going to wring his neck.

“Get indoors!” she yelled at them, pointing. “Stay indoors, armscomp will shoot at the roads, not the buildings!” A few complied, the others kept running. A support line GI on the corner saw her and connected on direct talk.

“
Commander, we're holding the support line in case Dhamsel tries to cut off the retreat…
”

Sandy leapt, ignoring that soldier, onto a neighbouring rooftop, then up to an apartment balcony—she didn't need some greenhorn explaining to her a fraction of what she already knew. She could see Dhamsel Zone from up here, then across the built-up neutral zone, the other corporate zones beyond. Dhamsel was the problem, they shared a long flank with Chancelry, now crawling with what tacnet identified as military vehicles.

Chatter indicated the advance party had reached the crash site, visuals
showed a military flyer demolishing half a house amidst a sprawl of debris. Big apartment building nearby, civvies now running for cover, probably the reason the companies hadn't just blown the wreck. The flyer couldn't have held more than twelve people, Sandy thought Kiet might have lost more than that already. She uplinked to Reichardt again and got his Com officer instead.

“Get me Cai, please,” she asked.

“
Cai
,” came the reply, remarkably fast considering relay distances.

“We have the corporates’ killswitch channels locked down, but they'll be trying to unlock it.”

“
I know, find me a point of access and I'll try and stop them
.”

Cai had been instrumental in making that happen over the last week. Sandy didn't even know exactly what his technology was, except that it was a vastly superior version of what she had, an ability to manipulate huge volumes of network data in very short time frames. Over the last week he'd helped them to infiltrate corporate networks via the intranet and to isolate corporate security channels and codes that they would use to trigger the killswitch—the ultimate failsafe against their own GIs. Access to Chancelry's own codes had helped them know what to look for, but of course the other corporations had known that and had changed to backups.

“Look,” she said, having a reasonable view up here, and being somewhat confident opposing AMLORAs wouldn't take out this building with all the civvies around, “Kiet's trying to help the escapees, but if the corporations break your barriers and trigger the killswitch, every GI they have will be dead instantly.”

“
You're sure they'll do it?
”

“Very. Rishi's uprising scared the crap out of them, they've had all their GIs in lockdown for a week.”

“
Cassandra, the only reason we're able to maintain those blocks on the killswitch channels is because of the hardline infrastructure in Central Zone…
” There was a working pause, even Cai needed to stop talking when the info-overload hit him. “
With Kiet attacking Central Zone they now have an excuse…
”

“I know,” said Sandy. “But a lot of that stuff is built into civvie infrastructure, they can blast some of it but not all of it.” She called up her own schematics, searching for the intranet structures, the only infrastructure still connecting Chancelry networks to the other corporations. Nodes, junctions, and interfaces highlighted in Central Zone and Chancelry Zone.

How long until they figured it out? She did some fast calculation…assuming they'd tried to use the killswitch on those GIs who were escaping, and it hadn't worked…the blocks would show up in a few minutes of processing their systems. More minutes to hunt solutions, various departments consulting, arguing…how scared were they of their own GIs? Only the higher designations, not the regs, most of whom didn't even have killswitches. Which left her with….

Missile fire, her eyes flicked to it, zigzagging madly across the dark sky. Then dove, and a bright flash, in a target zone far away from the current fighting. Another, then one more flash. Two intranet nodes disappeared from her schematic.

“Kiet!” she shouted. “They're taking out the intranet! We're out of time, get all your people out of wireless range!”

“
I can't do that, we have more GIs breaking into Central Zone from Dhamsel! You can't see them on tacnet because they're keeping silent, they don't want to draw fire!
” Gunfire in the background, heavy explosions—big weapons, she reckoned. Not attacking, just hemming them in. It matched with what she could see on the streets.

Another explosion took out one more intranet node. They had to buy more time.

Her subconscious saw the cannon fire coming her way before her conscious mind could process it, and she leaped for empty air on reflex as the balcony and chunks of the building wall disintegrated around her. Fell, hit a rooftop, and slid, then leaped for the road as concrete crashed behind her.

“Cai, get me a full intranet diagnostic,” she called as she thudded to the road. “What are they going to hit next?”

She ran up the road as Cai processed—that had been tank fire, someone was evidently scanning the horizon and looking for anyone high up, possibly they'd figured it might be her. Not
that
worried about civvie casualties then.

“
Cassandra, right here
,” said Cai, and several points formed on tacnet in Neutral Zone, forming a network. “
Their analysis will tell them if they take out these five points, intranet will collapse
.”

“Kiet, I need a team!” Sandy was already running, past several more GIs in heavy suits, missile launchers on their backs awaiting tacnet's next targeting assignment. “Infranet protection in Central Zone, if it goes down they'll reestablish killswitch channels and we'll lose all of them!”

No reply from Kiet, tacnet showed him engaged in heavy fighting, probably he couldn't fight and command like she could. Fuck him—she enabled her own command structure on tacnet, a little trick Kiet wouldn't know she had, overrode Kiet's protocols and established her own secure coms.

The security wall was breached, but she jumped an intact section, saw missiles streaking overhead to intercept flying targets farther up that might have been engaging Kiet's forces. GIs from the rear line were leaping the wall after her, pulling off Kiet's reserve line to do so.

“
What if Dhamsel outflanks us?
” one asked.

“
You wanna save the other GIs or not?
” Sandy snapped.

Here in Central Zone the roads were more built up, multi-level apartments and lower four-storeys. The roads were grid pattern, and Sandy paused at a building wall to peer around a tacnet-blind corner…and rolled back as heavy fire blew brickwork thirty meters back down the road. Tacnet tagged the shooter as some kind of armoured vehicle and tried to lock a missile onto it, but already it was moving and they had no visual fix, the anti-armour missiles on the heavy suits moved too fast to acquire mid-flight and would probably get jammed anyway.

“D-5, D-7, pincer left, blockers hold here, E-4 get ready to flank right.” She ran fast left across the road, GIs with her, fire pursuing—Kiet's forces were too far into Central Zone to be of any help here, and these corporate units (Chancelry, she thought) were threatening to cut Kiet's retreat.

She jumped for rooftops, leaping across sloping tiles, springing long and low across intervening yards, then slamming down flat for cover as heavy fire intercepted from five hundred meters left. Tile fragments and chunks of roof went spinning, Sandy locked and returned fire, not a challenging shot even at half a K, but the target was armoured. The corporations had prepared well for this, her killing options were limited.

She kept moving, more GIs running with her, several in heavy suits loosing missiles at whatever tried to shoot at them, big explosions from that side and a notable reduction of incoming fire. But their move was noted now, and the response ahead would be concentrated.

Two buildings from the end of the block, a rooftop AMAPS opened up on them from a hundred meters with rotary machine guns…or tried to as Sandy shot it first, sliding on a rooftop, then dropping to a back yard as rapid-fire
grenades came in from somewhere, big explosions sprayed fragments everywhere as she ducked behind a wall. That brought all the other GIs down off the rooftops as well, one of them injured. More grenades came in, then rapid-fire mortar, Sandy already scrambling down a narrow lane between building and wall to the road, and the cross street beyond, but still no direct line of sight.

“E-4 flank right,” she called to the units she'd sent over that way, “we'll try to pin these guys here!”

“
If we don't get cut to pieces first
,” someone muttered.

A huge airburst overhead, and the air was full of shrieking shrapnel, roadside trees above Sandy lost limbs and windows shattered. Sandy hurdled the side wall to the next property, not wanting to expose herself on the street with artillery coming in, and tried to duck up the narrow front garden of this apartment building. Immediately she was under fire from the crossroad ahead, one of the facing buildings, rounds shredding the wall between her and the road as she plastered herself against the next wall, gained a tacnet visual from someone behind her, and popped up to fire. She hit the window the rounds had come from, but the shooter was gone, displacing as well-trained soldiers learned to do against GIs—shoot once, move like hell, cover, and shoot again.

“Dammit, these guys are well trained,” she announced. She couldn't stay under this arty, but moving across that road was going to cost her. “Someone get me a visual on that road.” If she had a visual she could use missiles and dig the fuckers out.

Tacnet showed her someone smashing into a building, running down a corridor, and peering out a window…a brief glimpse of the road ahead, buildings on either side, vehicles down below, a few civvies and one big one…it flashed, something boomed nearby, and the feed went dead. Sandy locked a missile request into tacnet for that location, pointed her grenade launcher across the road, and fired. Raced and dove through the hole it made in the wall, smashed across a room, up a corridor, then kicked and punched a ragged hole in an adjoining wall—civvies were all in the basements, thank god.

BOOM! as her missile request hit the place opposite her new position where the tank had been, only she doubted it was still there. Grabbed a scanner off her belt, found a window and tossed it to the road—if she'd done it from her previous position it would have been seen and grenaded. This one
bounced, little cameras recording all directions, tacnet recording positions dutifully, now fixing the tank, an AMAPS just across the street…

Already the missiles came in, blew the tank to hell and most of Sandy's apartment building with it. The next thing she knew, she was under rubble and would certainly be dead if she'd been a straight, and with several tonnes on her, her armour might break, but she wouldn't. She heaved it off her, smashed some uncooperative bits, and crawled out amidst the debris to the sound of massive fire coming up and down the road, her GIs now rounding that previously lethal corner and shredding anything that didn't run away.