Crossover

by Joel Shepherd

  "Ms President?" someone spoke very clearly from nearby as everything else faded away.

  It was the last thing Neiland heard before she passed out.

  Chapter 7

  "Ms President, the doctor said that you ought to rest."

  "I don't want to rest, Ms Rafasan, I'm perfectly capable of holding a meeting."

  Mahudmita Rafasan gave Benjamin Grey a despairing look. Half seated on the hospital bed that the President ought to have been occupying, the Callayan State Security Chief shook his head, lips pressed to a grim line. His shirt and tie were uncharacteristically askew, and a suggestion of stubble darkened his jaw.

  Seemingly oblivious to them both, President Katia Neiland sat between the far wall and the large desk, facing them both. Chi Haotian hospital reserved exclusive sections for important, busy people. This room was one such, and the hospital bed was accompanied by the inevitable working desk. If either of the President's aides found the irony of this pairing amusing, they kept it to themselves.

  Neiland was fully and properly dressed, refusing the white bed robe that the nervous attending nurse had offered. How anyone could possibly expect her to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling when the entire city, indeed the planet, had just been turned on its head was completely beyond her. She could only assume that certain of her advisors did not take her responsibilities as seriously as she did.

  She flicked from one shielded channel to another, checking on her latest advisory reports, reading most and internalising some through the direct link. With a practised eye, she noted the signs of frantic haste—the contextual ambiguities, the grammatical errors, the incomplete analyses. The bureaucracy was going nuts. Reports were being churned out, instructions overlapping from a dozen different departments, queries misplaced, security restrictions imposed ... it was chaos of a sort that modern, infotech administrations were supposed to have been cured of long, long ago.

  Good Lord, Neiland thought glumly as she scanned quickly through the mess, have we let things get this far out of hand? She remembered reports, warning documents urging caution in the face of unbridled expansion and administrative indulgence ... You never notice the problem until the crisis hits. She shook her head tiredly. It all seemed so predictable in hindsight. But at the time there had never been enough reason, and the administrative demands had been so enormous, the pace of change so much faster than any comparable administration had ever had to handle ... She'd thought she'd been doing a good job on this kind of thing. It dismayed her to discover otherwise.

  The door to the private ward opened, and Neiland looked up.

  "Ms President?" It was Ulu N'Darie, the deputy chief of the CSA. Small, black and compact, she was a ball of seamless efficiency. "Everyone is here except for Mr Ramos and Mr Ibrahim ... should I have them wait?"

  "No," Neiland sharply cut off the two advisors present, who stared at her with consternation. "I'll see them now, thank you. I don't have time to wait for the unpunctual." It was a harsh assessment of both absent men, who were no doubt entangled in their own procedural nightmares on this most singular of Tanushan evenings. N'Darie merely nodded and vanished from the doorway.

  "Ms President," Grey tried again, "don't you think it would be better to wait...?"

  "No." The word was sharp and tactless, with little regard for feelings. Grey had no response. Doubtless, she thought, he believed her unreasonable. That suited her fine. She was in no mood for reasonable. She wanted answers.

  The main door opened once more and stayed open, as a file of important, anxious-looking, people entered the room. Neiland absently disconnected the shielded plug-in from the back of her skull and leaned back in the deep leather chair. Unlike her office chair, it was not moulded to her body, and the cushions felt all wrong. Another incongruous wrongness on a day of wrongnesses. It gave her a strange feeling, and she had to blink herself back to attention as the greetings flooded in on her.

  "Ms President," Governor Dali was saying, "I cannot express my relief at your survival, I was truly terrified for you, truly terrified." He loomed over the desk, his face a picture of dark-skinned, long-nosed concern. With his deep, sallow eyes and languid wrists, he reminded Neiland of a long brown goldfish. He talked on for a time, but she missed what he was saying. Which was frequently her habit with Dali.

  And the others—Sanjay Golpanath, the Vice President, some of the senior cabinet members, the head of Tanusha's IT network (a bureaucrat), Ulu N'Darie in her boss's absence and the head of the Secret Service, among others. Neiland did not perform a head count—she knew these people, and worked with them constantly. She was pleased to see her Treasurer, Claudio Rossini. Not that this was a matter concerning treasurers, but she considered Rossini a friend. For Katia Neiland, real friends were rare indeed.

  "Right," she said when all of the condolences and expressions of relief had been dispensed with. And took a deep, hard breath, sitting back in the unfamiliar chair and looking about at the serious, worried faces that ringed the desk. "First off, as you all no doubt know, my senior advisor is dead."

  There was a long, silent pause. Neiland remembered Thiaw's face, drawn and frightened, trying to protect her. Grasping the pistol that he did not properly know how to use, the ceiling collapsing, and the chaos that followed. It had been explained to her, in her moments of recovery, that it was a fairly common tactic among special forces these days to come in through the ceiling—modern sensory technology did not require a direct line of sight to track an opponent. They'd dropped in at several points using grenades to clear space, and then killed everyone in sight. Including Thiaw. How they'd got him, without hitting her in the process, Neiland had no idea. He'd been right beside her. Right alongside ...

  And she blinked, dragging herself back to here and now.

  "Thiaw's loss is a tough one for all of us," she continued, "both personally and professionally. I hope sometime soon we will have the opportunity to properly grieve his loss. But as Thiaw himself would be the first to tell me, were he here, we don't have that time right now."

  She paused, brushing strands of long red hair back into order. She did not understand what it meant, Thiaw being dead. It would make a difference to her job, surely—she had always valued his advice and his candour. She would miss his forthright appraisals and his occasionally unflattering assessments. Beyond that she could not say. Could not think that far, at this moment. Just seeing beyond the enormity of this moment, of this entire day, was too much to handle. She took another deep breath and straightened her jacket. It did not feel right, like the chair. Nothing felt right.

  "First and foremost," she said, gazing about the room with as much meaningful authority as she could muster, "what I require of you, and of all my department heads, is common-sense. The shit has just hit the fan in this city in a way that has never happened in its entire history. The media is going crazy. There are conspiracy theories by the thousand, business is being disrupted and ordinary people who have never given a damn about politics before in their lives now feel themselves personally involved.

  "Tanusha has never been considered a political city, neither have we considered ourselves as such. Possibly that was naïve, considering our central importance in the scheme of so many different things. I feel we are about to find out." From about her, there were sombre, silent looks—powerful, intelligent men and women lost in their own thoughts.

  "And so," she considered after that brief pause, "I require all of you to be independent, and to manage your affairs within your own department with as much restraint and simple common-sense as possible. Pull your heads in. Break channels if needs be. Do whatever is necessary and nothing that is not. And the first person," a jab of a warning finger, "to resort to bickering or infighting of any kind, over any matter, will lose their job, I guarantee it."

  Another considering silence. Some looked alarmed. Several looked approving. She looked at N'Darie.

  "The investigation is progressing?"

  A short nod. "It is. There ar
e many leads. All of the attackers' bodies have been recovered and are being examined. They're all lower-model GIs, less advanced than our Captain Kresnov, but advanced enough. We think that they're almost certainly Dark Star. You'll have a full private briefing when Mr Ibrahim arrives—the investigations are distracting him, as you'll appreciate." That much support for her boss. N'Darie was loyal, Neiland had no doubt of that.

  "Any final casualty figures?" Neiland asked.

  "Sixty of the attacking GIs," N'Darie replied. "That appears to be all of them. All that were involved in the attack, anyway—it does not appear that they expected to survive the assault. Parliament security plus Alpha Team plus several of the responding SWAT units lost seventy-three dead and twelve injured. Parliamentary staff, seventeen dead and twenty-five injured. That's a total of ninety dead and thirty-seven injured, although that number could change over the coming forty-six hours."

  Murmurs of disbelief from those assembled, some mutterings of consternation and sad headshaking. Neiland repressed a swallow, trying to keep her expression even. It was a lot of people dead for an operation that ideally should have resulted in only one death.

  "How many more GIs might be out there?" she asked quietly.

  "That is what we are attempting to determine," N'Darie replied evenly. "It depends how they got here, and how they're managing to stay hidden. And it depends on the nature of any possible connection between the attack on yourself and the presence of Captain Kresnov in government custody. I don't say that such a connection exists, but it is a possibility we are investigating."

  "Are we certain," one of the gathered officials asked, "that our space lanes are secure?"

  N'Darie took a deep breath. "No," she said reluctantly. There were more murmurs of consternation.

  "You mean that the greatest human civilisation outside of Old Earth itself can't even guard itself from infiltration?" asked the Vice President, Golpanath. His voice was incredulous.

  "Sir," N'Darie said, "even Old Earth can't completely guarantee space lanes. The solar system is a big place. Most spacecraft have stealth designs that are undetectable by active scanning, except at close range, and nothing in space is close. We see them only when they manoeuvre, scan or fire. Standard covert military tactics is to enter a system at far nadir or zenith jump points, run silent through the equatorial plane, dump velocity with jump engines, which produces no actively detectable pulse unless you happen to be focused directly on that region of space when it happens, and release a landing shuttle. The shuttle needs no directional adjustment and uses the atmosphere for deceleration alone. And once inside the atmosphere, well, ninety-eight percent of Callay is uninhabited.

  "Furthermore, we have clear evidence that the Plexus grid sensory system has been compromised from within. We do not know how, and we have no guarantee that it will not happen again. Until we uncover the means of this infiltration we must consider ourselves vulnerable to outside infiltration of this nature. Be assured that we have assigned this matter top priority."

  The expressions on the many assembled faces reflected general dismay. We complacent city-folk, Neiland thought sourly, thinking ourselves so secure. Of course everyone knew the basics of solar-system physics, but no one ever bothered to think about what it actually meant from a security standpoint.

  "If you wanted more information on how it's done," she said to N'Darie, "I'd suggest Kresnov. I doubt you'll find anyone more experienced in the matter." N'Darie nodded shortly.

  "I have done that personally. She has been most helpful."

  "We're certain that Kresnov did save the President's life?" asked Benjamin Grey, from off by the foot of the hospital bed.

  N'Darie gave him a short, appraising glance.

  "Very certain. Present investigations show that Kresnov accounted for at least twenty of those GIs. Which also serves to demonstrate just how dangerous she actually is, but nevertheless it does perhaps give some indication as to her loyalties, such as they are."

  Grey nodded, appearing to give that some serious thought. He did not look entirely pleased. Neiland turned back to the gathered faces before her.

  "All right," she said, "I want a status report from each of you. This is the last time we'll do this face to face—I merely wanted this one occasion just to make certain that everyone understands everyone else. After this, I'm certain we'll all be far too busy. Begin."

  * * * *

  When President Neiland pushed her way through the door of the isolation hospital ward, the two guards on duty there snapped to rigid attention.

  Neiland ignored them and walked down the long, open room, beds lining the wall upon her right and broad, open windows to her left.

  Many-coloured lights strobed and gleamed in the outside dark. Media cruisers were hovering at the required distance, searching for a camera angle. Trucks and trailers with big antennae had surrounded the hospital, and cameras blocked every exit. Police, SWAT and Secret Service made up the security, preventing intrusions. Somewhere amid the mess, regular hospital staff tried desperately to go about their job of treating sick people. It couldn't have been easy. Outside the room the hospital corridors were jammed so full of stern, armed security staff that it was difficult to move.

  On the very end of the last bed a woman sat in a white bed robe, fully upright as if contemplating the view. As she drew nearer, Neiland noted that her ankles and wrists were bound separately, the ankles in turn connected to the bed end with unbreakable cord. Cassandra Kresnov sat with her arms over drawn-up knees, and gazed out at the play of moving light beyond the one-way windows.

  Neiland stopped by the neighbouring bed. Folded her arms. Kresnov did not spare her so much as a glance. She looked calm. Flares of blue and red light deepened the natural highlights in her fine blonde hair, gleamed in dim reflection in her eyes, played along the smooth curve of her jawline and over a cheek. Strong features, Neiland thought, watching her in that timeless moment, quiet but for the faint wailing of a distant siren, and the floating expanse of city sound beyond. Strong, broad and wide-browed ... and the most beautiful, wide, expressive blue eyes. Serene and calm, watching the lights.

  Neiland found herself unaccountably nervous, in a way that dealings with important politicians or bureaucrats never made her feel. She did not, at that moment, know what she was going to say. It was an unaccustomed feeling.

  "I'm sorry about the restraints," she said then. Her voice sounded strange in the quiet, subdued hush.

  "The restraints don't bother me so much as the drugs," Kresnov replied. She spoke in a soft, mild voice that somehow carried an authority far surpassing its volume. Neiland forced a soft, painful sigh.

  "I'm sorry about the drugs, too," she said.

  "The drugs don't bother me as much as the sensor plug in the back of my head," Kresnov added. There was a subtle note in her voice that might have been wry, sarcastic amusement. But it was difficult to tell.

  Neiland gazed at her for a long moment. And on a sudden, frustrated impulse strode forward to Kresnov's side, and felt for the insert socket beneath the tail of blonde hair. Kresnov frowned, but did not move. And let out a small, sharp gasp as the sensor plug came out, the shock sequence deactivated in the presence of hand restraints. Neiland pocketed it, and sat beside Kresnov's drawn-up knees on the edge of the mattress, looking back at her face. Kresnov gazed at her, eyes puzzled ... more than puzzled. Alive and aware, of a sudden, where they had been distant before. The change was remarkable. And always lurking, that subtle, indefinable gleam of intelligence, in the faint narrowing of eyes, the minuscule change of expression. It was several more moments before Neiland realised she was staring.

  Kresnov raised a mild eyebrow and cast a meaningful sideways glance back up the length of the room. Neiland looked. One of the guards was standing with his rifle levelled, a clear shot to the side of Kresnov's head. The other was speaking into a comlink, tense and worried.

  "Son," Neiland said loudly, "you've got three seconds to put that rifle away b
efore I personally walk over there and shove it up your ass." And on the next thought, "And tell your backup to stay where they are. This woman risked her life to save mine, dammit. If she was going to hurt me, she'd have done it already."

  She had no idea if it would work—arguing with Mishima on security matters had often seemed as useful as banging her skull against a bulkhead. But Mishima was dead now, like all the others. The thought abruptly hit her, like a hammerblow between the eyes. For a moment the room seemed to spin, and her heart accelerated to a racing panic. And eased, just as quickly, as her control restored itself—more an act of habit than an assertion of will. At the far end of the room the guard had lowered his weapon. No support arrived. Which surprised her. She had said that Kresnov would not hurt her. Maybe someone in security actually agreed with her.

  But they would be watching her. In this ward more than any other, the security cameras were very active.

  And she looked back to Kresnov. The GI was watching her, blue eyes narrowed with sombre consideration.

  "I take it," Kresnov said calmly, "that you've never been shot at before?" Neiland moved to shake her head, but thought the better of it. She felt weak, and the neighbouring bed looked very inviting.

  "No," she replied. And on an impulse, "I take it you have?" A faint shift of reaction in Kresnov's eyes. And her lips pursed lightly with faint, considered humour.

  "Perhaps," she said. "In my youth." Glanced down at the small space between them, seated together on the same mattress. And back up. "You do know that you're making the guards nervous? I could probably kill you where you are now, even drugged."

  Neiland blinked. "And why would you do that?"

  Kresnov frowned. "You really think I'm that harmless?"

  "Aren't you?" To which Kresnov gave a sharp tug at the restraints, achieving nothing.

  "Why these then?" she asked mildly. Neiland sighed, and glanced back towards the windows. Then back again, to find that Kresnov's gaze had not wavered a millimetre. It was disconcerting. But somehow, surprisingly, it was not threatening.