Crossover (40 page)

"So what the fuck am I doing here? Helping them cut you up? Trying to kill the damn President ... I mean, why? You like her, right?"

Sandy nodded mutely. Frightened to speak, lest this strange, take-charge Mahud suddenly evaporate, like some holographic trick of the dancefloor lights. His hands were warm and strong.

"This is service to the League?" he continued, eyes burning with sudden conviction. "I mean ... sure, it's service, I'm sure they need it, but... but fuck it, what about me? I've fought for them for four years ... and that's gnatshit next to your time, I know ... but it's about damn time they gave something back ... and this isn't what I had in mind. They can't seriously ask me to choose between you and them, I mean ... hell, there's no contest. There never was."

"You're going to do this for me?" Sandy asked quietly. Mahud shook his head warily.

"You're going to turn this around," he said in a faintly accusatory tone, "I know you Cap, you'll turn it around so you'll make it look like I'm not thinking for myself again ... it's not like that." Passionately, his hands tightening upon her own. "I want to do it because I'm figuring where my priorities are. And that's wherever I goddamn say they are. You're my priority. You see? It's not just you ... it's just that I've suddenly figured out where the damn League's priorities end and mine begin. I'm figuring what
I
want to do. You get that?"

"Yeah." Sandy nodded, eyes gleaming with sad, quiet pride. "I get you. It's one of the biggest things they never took into account when they made us, Mahud. Developing sentiences rarely hold to the same perspectives for long in their formative years. Among straights, kids change perspectives and opinions far faster than adults. If we live long enough, we start questioning things. Straights were changed by the war, their personalities altered by the experience. But we're still building personality at that stage. And small readjustments can reorient our value systems one-eighty degrees in those early stages. We're kids, Mahud. Really. For kids, rebelling is natural. It's part of growing up."

"I'd like to grow up, Cap," Mahud murmured, squeezing her hands. "With you." Sandy smiled weakly, her eyes moist. Took a hand and pressed it to her lips.

"I'd like that too."

Half an hour before sunrise Shan Ibrahim strode across the rooftop landing pad of the doghouse. The wind blew cold, engines howled in the floodlit night. SWAT teams crouched, intent on last-minute consultation. Four special-purpose SWAT flyers squatted diagonally on the pads, dark, angular and brooding. Ground crews hurried purposefully about the massive engine nacelles on preflight duties, or stood with headset and complist, running through final checks with the flight crews.

Captain Hayland saw the Director approach and walked across to meet him.

"Morning sir. Four airframes prepped and ready. Takeoff in ten mikes." Ibrahim acknowledged with a nod, listening to the operational chatter on his headset.

"Weather looks bad today, Philip," he said over the keening engines, "I want Eagles Five and Six on five-minute standby for the duration, recovery turnaround asap."

"I'm already on it. You've got the frequencies?"

"I have." He gave Hayland a pat on the arm as he walked past, headed for the nearest SWAT unit. Lieutenant Vanessa Rice sat on the deck, talking to one of her troops — Agent Devakul, Ibrahim saw — rifle propped butt down at her side, and nearly as tall as she was, seated. Saw him coming and rose smoothly to her feet, mirrored by the others, a whining clatter of armour and heavy weapons.

"How much sleep did you get?" was his first question, glancing about to include them all in his query.

"They got six hours, average," Rice replied. Her attractive, fine features looked incongruously delicate above the solid bulk of her armoured shoulders. "I had about three, but hey, that's my lot in life."

"Poor baby," said Agent Sharma from nearby. Rice smiled. She looked subdued, Ibrahim thought, eyeing her critically. Subdued, but relaxed. The other teams looked tense, businesslike. SWAT Four looked quite calm by comparison. Ibrahim knew very well that Rice could take much of the credit for that — her team adored her and followed her positive example with relentless dedication. Today, he needed them. He needed people whose loyalty he could rely on. He trusted Rice. Her priorities were moral more than technical. Today he needed that of his closest people more than he ever had before.

"You're good for it?" he pressed.

"Wouldn't be here if I wasn't," Rice replied. Ibrahim gave her a smack on one armoured arm.

"You're in Eagle One with me. Load up." SWAT Four moved out with barely a comment, and Ibrahim walked on to the next team, doing the circuit. A minute later N'Darie intercepted him as he strode toward his flyer.

"Chief, I've just had a message straight from Dali. He wants direct uplink access, says he needs to be kept abreast of any new developments." Another man might have cursed. Ibrahim thought about it for a moment as they walked, readjusting the com-interface at his belt then rezipping his navy-blue CSA jacket.

"Tell him we are concerned about the integrity of all outsourced links," he said then, half shouting over the engines. "Tell him we have evidence that throws that integrity into doubt and we're concerned about leaks. Give him secondhand reports by the minute, as he requires. No direct access." N'Darie frowned, walking fast to keep up.

"And when he protests?"

"Quote him regulations," Ibrahim said blandly as they passed the port nacelle. "Any regulations. And for Allah's own good sake, say
nothing
of Kresnov or her information source. Imply nothing, suggest nothing." N'Darie nodded her complete understanding.

"I'll keep everything as tight as I can. This won't be easy."

"No," Ibrahim agreed as they reached the rear doors, "it won't be at all easy. We shall do the best we can." N'Darie left, and Ibrahim climbed the rear ramp into the main hold where SWAT Four were already hooked in and waiting.

It was, Ibrahim was well aware, a most delicate set of circumstances. By far the most delicate of his professional career, and probably of the CSA's entire history. He knew that the quarry was about to act. It was both a problem to be solved and an opportunity to be exploited. But the present commander-in-chief was most likely a part of the problem, and his aides were almost certainly directing the quarry personally, whether Dali knew of it or not. How to conduct an operation against the interests of the Acting President and not let the Acting President know about it? It would not, as his second had stated, be easy.

He sank into the command chair with a sharply exhaled breath. Did his restraints, ran his bank of display graphics through a systems check, as about him the rest of the command crew did similar, announcing various systems' status and safeing their connections.

The FT-750 was a bigger flyer than those used on SWAT's standard operations, with extended range and payload plus impressive multi-role capabilities. SWAT Four had room enough for weapons-drill amid the harness straps and storage lockers toward the rear. The front half was pure Command and Control, multiple observation posts, systems interface, communications, surveillance, all run by their regular people, familiar faces beneath headsets and eye-wear, bathed in screen light. CSA flyers had been on standard patrol above the Tanushan skylanes every hour since the attack on the President. No one on the ground would notice the change. This was just another standard rotation ... only the payload was somewhat altered.

Surrounded by the familiar competent preparations, Ibrahim allowed himself to reflect upon the circumstances that had brought him to this moment. It was so very easy to forget the convoluted history that lay behind the recent turbulent events. Of the two great powers of humanity, and their differing perceptions of what it meant to be human. The League, believing in science as the saviour, charting a new direction for the species. They were the self-appointed trailblazers. The visionaries. The ones who had attained a new enlightenment, out among the new worlds, the new frontiers of human civilisation. They had escaped the shackles of Earth-bound conservatism to pursue their vision far from the intellectual censorship of the Federation. For the great minds behind the League, a ban on scientific research and development was akin to a ban on subversive political ideologies. It was censorship, plain and simple, and they steadfastly believed in intellectual freedom in all its varied dimensions. For its preservation, no cost was too great.

And then there was the Federation. The League accused Federation worlds of being mere puppets of Old Earth, children clutching to the apron strings. But that, Ibrahim knew, was a massive oversimplification. In the Federation, cultural roots remained critical. One only need spend a few days in Tanusha, walking among the historical recreations of its many districts, to see the importance Tanushans placed upon remembering the old, preserving it, living it. The future was not complete without a past. And without a clear understanding of one's past, there could be no clear perception of one's future.

Ibrahim could recall with great clarity the various lines and verse from the Koran, and even the Afghani and Iranian folk tales, that his parents had read to him when he was a boy. The tales of morality, of purpose and human dignity. He did not believe such things were insignificant. He did not believe it was right or good for any human society to erase such things from its collective memory and start anew. The path had been walked upon for thousands and thousands of years. There was no 'new beginning' There was only the next stretch of path, winding ever onward, building the future upon the foundations of the past.

The League, of course, saw this as a clear sign of flawed intellect. Culture, they reasoned, was so frequently the prison walls within which reason was trapped. And like missionaries of old, they spread their word, the word of reason, to where it was most needed. Knowledge, before which the old ignorance and superstitions would dissolve like ice beneath the summer sun. They were the enlightened. It was their mission and their purpose to bring their enlightenment to all of humanity. And once they saw the light, surely, surely reason and logic would follow.

Even now, as the rear doors closed, and the engine noise faded to a muted whine, Ibrahim had to suppress a shudder of disgust. He was by nature so very, very wary of a Great Cause. There had been people of his own religion, and from his own region of the Old World, who had once had a Great Cause of their own. They had not been so different from himself in many ways, had believed many of the same things and shared the same tastes and values, but with no sense of tolerance or moderation. Their Great Cause had brought much bloodshed and suffering, and all these hundreds of years later their legacy was not one of pride, but of shame.

The League also believed in a great many good, decent things. They were the progressives, the freethinkers, the radicals of their day. History favoured such people. They had brought great change, and great innovation, and the present was all the greater for their inspiration. But now, Ibrahim believed, the pendulum had swung too far. The Great Cause had become merely an ideology, and ideology, Ibrahim knew only too well, was the antithesis of reason. He was student enough of history, especially that of his own cultural roots, to know that for a very certain fact.

And it was Kresnov, he thought now, who had brought it all into focus for him in these recent, difficult days. Kresnov, who supposedly represented the pinnacle of the League's technological advancement. She was theirs, in body if not in spirit. And yet she had abandoned them, after they had abandoned
her
. They valued what Kresnov was, but they did not value her. Nor did they value the others of her kind, her friends among them.

It was the Cause. In the face of a Great Cause, the individual was always the first to suffer. The Great Cause consumed individuals as a Southern Plains tornado consumed trees. It did not matter that the Cause was in the name of humanity itself — any such mass ideology, even that conducted in the name of individual rights and freedoms, would sacrifice anyone and anything to further its own grand purpose.

The contradiction was, as always, quite stunning. Especially when this adventure was carried out in the name of logic and reason. But that was not the worst of it. Most ironic of all, to Ibrahim's mind, was that Kresnov was far more akin, in spirit and personality, to the Federation than ever she had been to the League. She questioned the questioners. She sought to understand the Cause. To dissect and examine the ideology, the reasoning that had given birth to her, the Cause that was her own very existence.

Seeking her roots, she had found them here, in a place that would never have seen fit to create her in the first place. Had found a welcome of sorts. People who acknowledged her individuality, however much it frightened them. Individual rights, after all, were the main grounds upon which the Federation opposed GIs in the first place — all sentient beings had inalienable individual rights, and so the creation of a being whose innate abilities extended beyond what society's rights were prepared to grant another individual ... would be an automatic breach. The Federation believed all people were equal. To create a person who was both more equal (with enhanced capabilities) and less equal (with predesignated social roles) threatened all the shared values upon which the Federation was based.

That any GI
was
an individual and
had
rights was something that most Callayans, and Federation people generally, would concede, however reluctantly. That was the greatest irony of all. The League championed Kresnov because she was 'good for humanity', but ignored her humanity in the process. The Federation opposed Kresnov because she was 'bad for humanity', but in doing so nonetheless recognised her as a real person.

This insight left Ibrahim in no doubt of which side he was committed to, heart and soul. And it made him realise, in a sudden flash of clarity, that he did not oppose the existence of those like Kresnov because it was 'bad for humanity' but because it was bad for Kresnov. He felt great pity for her. Hers was not an easy lot. She had never had any choice but to be what she was, and it quite simply was not fair. He did not hate her for the great destruction she had doubtless wrought upon members of the Federation in her past. He only wished that she could one day find some peace, and the happiness that she so obviously craved. She was in the right place for it, that was certain. And here, unlike in the League, she would never be asked to do anything that another human would not do herself.