"I'm not meant to be here!" she shouted at them desperately. "I'm not your captain any more, I'm April Cassidy. I'm a cognitive software technician ..."
Mahud broke into sneezing laughter.
"You're a what?" Dobrov asked her, mildly interested.
"Target approaching, Sandy," Stark intoned warningly. Oh hell, they were all going to die, in a firezone that she hadn't prepared for, in an op without a proper intelligence briefing, because she didn't have her counterpoints locked in and she hadn't a clue what the primary objective was, let alone the withdrawal procedures, and she was going to have to wing it, which meant that they were all going to die. Just like the last time, they were all going to die ...
... And she awoke in fright, bolt upright in bed, dripping with sweat and gasping for air ...
* * * *
For a long, long moment, Cassandra Kresnov sat upright in bed, sweat cooling in the mild room temperature, the sheet fallen to her hips.
Sandy. Her name was Sandy. She'd thought that to change it would be simple, and that would be that. Her official records swore blind that her name was and always had been April Cassidy, but the official records were fake. Captain Cassandra Kresnov, Dark Star special ops. As if she could ever have escaped it.
Outside the window the sun was rising. It was 6:24, and she'd had slightly less than six hours' sleep, but anything over four hours was an indulgence really. Sleepiness was not a common affliction for April Cassidy. For Sandy.
She screwed her eyes shut in frustration. Cassandra Kresnov. Sandy, to her friends. If friends they really were. Hard to tell with that bunch of two-dimensional personalities for whom 'kill or be killed' was not just a survival strategy but an entire moral philosophy. Perhaps she'd been a bit like that herself, once. Perhaps. But they were all dead now. And she got up, not wanting to think about it any more.
Emerging from the shower, dry and somewhat recovered, she sat on the floor, and stretched. Muscles that had not been seriously exercised in over a week creaked and groaned their displeasure. Stretching helped, but she knew she would be well advised to do some more serious exercise soon. Which would be difficult, considering that most exercise in a place like Tanusha was done in public. But she thought she could probably find something that would do her some good while not frightening the locals too much. Or alerting the authorities.
Breakfast was still 17 minutes away when she finished, so she sat cross-legged on the bed and jacked herself into the net. Her files were still very much in order within the hotel's protective confines, although they had been accessed several times, as she'd thought they would be. All four accessors were the companies she'd had interviews with yesterday. She sorted through their various data trails in thoughtless reflex, following leads in about twenty directions at once, seeing where they'd been, and what they'd done with the information. Company names, address numbers, access codes formal and not so formal, encryption, bypass pathways ... it all went flashing past at high velocity, sorted, scanned and abandoned, each with equal thoroughness. There were a couple of mental question marks, but otherwise, nothing. And her security tripwires, in case anyone started searching down other, telltale avenues, were still in place.
But there was nothing like that. Just a bunch of interested companies running the standard legal background checks on a prospective employee, like any good company should. They'd find nothing but glowing recommendations too, not least from Boushun Information, for whom she'd done a genuinely excellent job, adding nearly thirty percent to their annual profit figures while she'd been there. But Boushun were upstarts, willing to take a risk on a relative unknown who could possibly have been a security breach for all they'd known, and from what little they could glean from her education files.
She could have been, too, if money had been her motivation—Boushun would have been none the wiser. But she wasn't, and had left Boushun with her bank balance looking very healthy and her much-needed glowing recommendations on file, without which she wouldn't have much chance of getting into one of these Tanushan tech majors. She'd turned down a big pay rise offer on leaving, too, but Boushun couldn't have been too unhappy—she'd left them with a couple of basic design patents that would be raking in at least fifteen percent profit growth per year for the next six or seven years. At least. She felt good about that, too. Boushun had done her a good turn, and she'd done them one in return. It was such a simple thing, this friendly, civilised business of being nice to people. A simple pleasure. She liked it a lot. And besides, there was plenty more where those software patents had come from.
Breakfast was three minutes late again, delivered by the same hotel employee with the bow tie, who again apologised for the slight delay. He seemed friendly even beyond the usual hotel-politeness, and delayed for a few more words, no doubt making the next breakfast even later. Possibly he'd noticed the casually drawn bathrobe and deduced from appearances that she was in the habit of walking naked about her apartment. Probably he wanted to nail her too.
She smiled wryly to herself, shucking off the bathrobe to eat her breakfast sitting naked on the bed, watching the magnificence of the rising sun among the towers. Screwing room service would certainly not do—he was late enough already. Although he had to get off work sometime. And then there was that man who'd spared a second and a third glance at her in the elevator yesterday morning. He hadn't been bad looking either. She wondered if she'd see him again this morning. Life in Tanusha for a single woman with decidedly pronounced sexual tastes seemed like a pleasant prospect.
"Anything that moves," they'd said in the military, and they hadn't been talking about shooting things.
Sandy, or April Cassidy, or whatever your name is—you are definitely not a one-man woman.
The thought thus composed, she smiled broadly to herself and attacked her breakfast with renewed vigour. All in all, she was feeling much better.
* * * *
The Tanushan Heritage Gallery was an experience. She wandered slowly across the polished wood floors, interested as much in the setting as the art itself. The walls were long, white and smooth. Small lights illuminated each exhibit from calculated angles, and the ceiling light was soft and muted. People strolled, and stood, and talked in low, considered voices, studying one canvas or another with serious intensity.
Sandy paused before one such, a tall, rectangular frame that covered much of one wall. It was a mess. Paint everywhere. Red paint, blue paint, green paint, splotted and splashed in thin, seemingly random lines. But not random. She looked closer, eyes narrowed in concentration. Looking for the calculation that must surely exist behind a work like this. It was exhibited in one of the major galleries on the planet, after all. But it was difficult to tell.
But maybe, she thought to herself as she pondered, that was the artist's intent. To make you look. And think. Which struck her as very strange—that an artist could be considered such by challenging the notion of art itself. Possibly even devaluing it. She wasn't sure that she liked the idea.
And straightened before the painting, looking around her at the other people, all considering other pieces of equally abstract work, and taking it all very seriously. What were they seeing? she wondered. Something she could not see? Merely the differences between individuals, perhaps? Or was it something specifically to do with her?
She looked back to the painting and altered the visual signature upon her retinas. It only looked cold and flat. A piece of dead canvas with some paint on it. Changed spectrums, and the colour mix only became even more chaotic. Back to standard light. Same old painting. And still a mess.
She remained in the gallery for some time, enjoying the hushed, thoughtful atmosphere. People moved slowly, and no one rushed. Her comfortable walking shoes squeaked pleasantly on the polished floorboards, and if she tried, she could almost ignore the gathering, grating stiffness that was accumulating in her muscles from lack of recent exercise or massage.
Four hours later, following a pleasant lunch in one of the gallery'
s restaurants, Sandy moved on. The morning sun above the city streets had given way to thick cloud and rain, steady and persistent. She walked briskly along the footpath from the five-storey, anciently styled gallery building, an umbrella in hand, her overcoat wrapped firmly around her legs to keep the moisture from her casual jeans. Wind gusted through the roadside trees and traffic hissed by on road-wet tires. But it was hardly unpleasant and she walked happily enough, shoes splashing in the puddles as the rain continued to fall.
Lightning flashed nearby through a gap between the massive towers. Then boomed, a deep, guttural rumbling that echoed strangely off the buildings. Huddled under their umbrellas, people looked up. A couple of teenage girls laughed and chattered, hurrying on to where the pedestrian cover made a sheltered walk, safe from the rain save for the occasional driving gust.
Up ahead, a man and woman hurried from cover to a waiting aircab, clambering quickly inside as the doors swung closed—then a building whine, clear and loud above the rush and hiss of the road traffic, and the lights along the pedestrian walk flashed red. People stopped behind the yellow lines, watching as the aircab lifted smoothly away from the cross-striped landing zone and into the air. Sandy stopped too, feeling the familiar static charge prickling at her hair, like pins and needles, then fading as the engine note changed and the aircab accelerated up and away, and the pedestrians walked on again. The next cab in line rolled forward, and the next behind it, rain spilling and beading on slanted windscreens.
In the air above, through the water-stained glass of the ped-cover, Sandy could see the next one coming in to land, taking up the final place in the queue, and the lights at that end began to flash yellow. She had a clear sense of the descending aircab's landing frequency, talking simple, directional binary, up and down the scale as she stepped back quickly to clear the next yellow line. An interesting binary, though, she thought as she walked. A different basic notation from most machine languages. It stood out very clearly.
Thunder crackled, high pitched and racing haphazardly across the sky, then plummeting to a deep, booming rumble that shook the air for several long, ponderous seconds. She fancied she could smell it in the air, that warm ozone-smell of a thunderstorm, alive with energy. Behind her, the aircab settled to the ground with a whining thrum of engines.
Again she sensed the binary tone. Reflexively she broke the signal down as she walked, segmenting it into parts. Visualised the odd branches off the third-phase interactive modulators, and the compressed storage segments that they serviced ... She sidestepped through the oncoming traffic beneath the long ped-cover, seeing her way without really looking, eyes distant and unfocused. Yes, that was a high band, big meg carrier. It had levels that she could not penetrate, as brief as her reception had been. Probably it was the lightning. Interesting.
She sensed it twice more on the lightrail train, a faintly ghosting presence against the background traffic. The carriages hummed smoothly past rain-wet streets and the occasional flashing light of an intersection. From her seat by the window, she saw several more lightning flashes, gleaming brightly off the tower windows. Above the train's electric whine could be heard the faint, suggestive rumblings of thunder.
It failed to stop the air traffic though, she noted with an upward glance out of the window. Aircars moved in smooth, curving lines among the towers, obscured briefly by a passing flurry of wet greenery, then visible again. Tower glass reflected an overcast grey, grim and silent beneath the darkening sky.
"Not much of a day, is it?" the woman sitting beside her said, peering past into the bleak, grey light. Sandy mentally disconnected herself from the net connections she hadn't even realised she'd been using, and smiled.
"I like the lightning," she said. "It makes a day interesting."
The woman gave her a thoughtful look. "That's one way of putting it." And was silent.
Content that there would be no further conversation for the time being, Sandy re-established her connections. Frequency input involved necessarily less interactivity than a direct linkup, but it served the purposes of a basic search. As before, she went straight to her records. All was in order. No new visitors. She wondered idly how long it would be before one of her interviews resulted in a job offer. And wandered down one of those pathways while the train pulled into its next stop and people began to get up. Found herself at the Wardell Systematics site, which was very solid and professionally intricate, as she expected. The train stopped, doors opened and those disembarking squeezed past those getting on. Umbrellas were folded, and the new, mildly wet passengers moved to empty seats.
Again that binary signal, and Sandy lost her connection to a momentary rush of static, regaining it almost immediately. For a long, long moment, she stared blankly out of the window, watching as the trees and the roadway and pedestrians began to slide past the windows at an accelerating pace. Her attention was focused instead on the reflection of a man sitting four rows behind her, in a seat by the aisle. He was carrying some kind of communication gear. Its transmissions were somehow linked to that binary signal. That was what had blanked her connections. It was possible, she knew, that it meant nothing. It was even possible, she thought very, very calmly, that it was a total coincidence.
April Cassidy might have had the luxury of believing in coincidences. Cassandra Kresnov did not.
Her eyes roamed the carriage interior, across the broad rows of comfortable seats and the spacious central aisle. A man sat facing her across the space around the carriage doors. He wore a transparent plastic raincoat over his clothes, beaded with moisture. In its distorted reflections of light it held an image of the entire carriage behind her where she could not see without turning her head.
Sandy snap-froze a brief image and stored it. Focused inward on that internal copy, zooming and then scanning. Sections flashed by, faded and blurred. She began sorting, millisecond fast, finding and discarding. Settled on the clearest, and began enhancing it, clarifying the colour fades and reorienting the warped sections. It left her with a final, moderately clear image of a middle-sized Asian man in a dark overcoat, wet about the shoulders and hem. The wet hem caught her attention. It was darkened like puddle-splashes. Like the man had been walking a long way. Most Tanushan business commuters would catch transport. And this man was no tourist.
Sandy pursed her lips gently and exhaled a single, soft breath. Knowing she had no choice but to assume the worst. For now, at least. If she was wrong, well, she would find that out later. A single, panicked thought at the back of her mind wailed despairingly about her dreams of a peaceful life here in Tanusha—all shattered in this brief instant. Blackest despair threatened.
No. She was jumping the gun. Typical military paranoia. She had known that adapting to civilian life would be difficult. This was one of those difficulties—she could not go around assuming the worst at every slight alarm. This might be of little importance. In civilian life many things often were.
So. She resolved to find out.
She climbed to her feet as the train approached its next stop, grasping the overhead handle by the door. Spared the carriage a casual, disinterested glance. The Asian man was reading a magazine. But that meant little.
Out, then, and walked under the pedestrian cover of the small station, by a road intersection. A major tower stood on the street corner opposite. Adjoining that was a large shopping mall, perhaps nine storeys high and sporting external, glass escalators and walkways in a shameless display of architectural ostentation. Sandy jogged towards the mall, the weather giving her an excuse for speed. Leapt quickly up the stairs of the overpass, then walked the covered length above the roadway. A number of people were on the overpass with her, headed in both directions. Scan vision showed them as flowing, multifaceted displays of light, red fading to blue in many subtle shades. Nothing magnetic or electronic, save for the woman with the prosthetic right eye whose neural cordings curled back toward the interface. And the young boy with the headphones, but that signature was slight and inof
fensive. Traffic flowed by below. Huge lighted neon proclaimed the superstore chain's name in letters five storeys high. Thunder grumbled, rolling over the traffic and store-music sounds like a wave across a sandy shoreline, and fading gently away.
The mall was enormous. Shops fronted onto open walkways around the central atrium, the full nine storeys high. The transparent roof overhead let in the light. There were glass elevators and escalators by the dozen, all buzzing with people, voices echoing together in their hundreds and thousands, competing with the speaker music.
The red-to-blue flowing shapes now slid past Sandy on all sides. She moved purposefully, her strides even, processing data. The crowds were a distraction to her and a cover for her enemies, if they existed. But they offered protection too.
She stopped by a databoard and pressed some icons at random. Directories flashed up but she spared them little attention, scanning instead through her peripheral vision, searching for followers. Nothing but the crowds of shoppers, carrier bags swinging. Somewhere within the open atrium an amusement-ride was operating, an echoing clatter of machinery and the screams of excited children. Her finger found another icon and the floor display changed again.
And felt a faint flicker of recognition at the periphery of her consciousness. Her eyes flicked up, scanning the open atrium. She immediately registered the spectrum disturbance, a faint shading upon her retinas ... and found the source a moment later, a man standing at the opposite railing, wearing dark sunglasses. Indoors.
Sandy turned and walked on, her stride now a fraction brisker. Her throat was tight. She'd been found. Who or how was not important, she was certain that they intended no good. They never did. She pushed impatiently past a dawdling couple admiring the window displays. Shrieks from the amusement-riders echoing off the high atrium roof. She tucked her folded umbrella into her overcoat pocket, leaving her hands free, and turned right, stepping quickly across the path of oncoming pedestrians and into the adjoining corridor.
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