Crossover

by Joel Shepherd

  "Am not."

  "... and is the only person in SWAT Four who actually makes more sense when she's drunk." Vanessa fought back a smile. "Just don't call her 'Midge', or she'll hurt you."

  "Hi," Sandy said, and held out her hand. Vanessa took it. Glanced at her sideways for a moment, as if suddenly realising exactly whose hand she was shaking. "I'm Cassandra Kresnov. When I'm not eating human flesh and decapitating small furry animals, I like listening to music, reading books and fucking." A cheer from Singh. Vanessa's eyebrows went up.

  "Don't get any ideas, LT," said Singh.

  Sandy blinked, and looked at Vanessa, Vanessa looked annoyed, removing her hand to grasp the controls.

  "Yes, I am," she replied to Sandy's unspoken question shortly. "My husband's a man, though." Which struck Sandy as interesting. Interesting that Vanessa hadn't told her, and interesting that she hadn't guessed anyway. Which was biased thinking, she realised even as she thought it. There was no guarantee that Vanessa's sexuality made any observable difference to her behaviour. As if a Dark Star GI was going to be any good at picking up such things among straights anyway, whatever her intellect.

  "Wish I was like that too sometimes," she replied with amusement. "Half the population gone to waste." Vanessa grinned somewhat self-consciously.

  "Got that right."

  "Why do GIs even have sexual preferences?" Singh asked, incurably curious. He was starting to remind Sandy of Tran.

  "She's an imprint, you moron," Vanessa replied testily before Sandy could speak. "Her neural structure is copied directly from a human subject. Everything we've got, she's got."

  A hard shudder as the cruiser hit a rough patch where the wind reflected off a nearby tower. Navcomp flickered and beeped, warning of more ahead, displaying topography sections in 3D, their projected course weaving in and out. It was much smoother down here at mid-level than up among the towertops, though. Another flash of lightning. The veil of rain was much closer, blotting out all visibility several towers to their left.

  "Some I knew were gay," Sandy affirmed. "Mostly bi, for some reason, rarely single preference. About the same as the usual average though, all told." Sudden communication signal, blinking urgently at the edge of her consciousness. She accessed cautiously. Read the heading code in a flash ... Tetsu Consolidated, full encryption. Curious, she hooked it up.

  "Cassandra Kresnov?" asked a recently familiar voice, linked impressively to her inner ear. Clear signal, very clean. Focus and isolate, she concentrated her reply.

  "This is Cody, am I right?"

  "That is correct, yes. I hope I'm not disturbing you?"

  "No. Please go ahead."

  "Very well ...I have a message for you." Sandy frowned. Aware that from the back of the cruiser, someone had asked her a question. Vanessa was looking at her. Told Singh that she was accessing, looking curious.

  "Who is the message from, Cody?"

  "I don't know." The frown grew deeper. "Shall I tell you the message? I'm sure it is meant for you, and I'd like to know what it means."

  "Yes, please tell me the message."

  "Very well. Message reads, 'Tell Sandy I miss her'. End message." Suddenly Sandy felt strangely, inexplicably cold. Several interminably long seconds crawled by. Hair prickled on the back of her neck.

  "Where did this message come from, Cody?"

  "I don't know." A cold, tense feeling tightened her stomach. "Do you know what this message means? I am very puzzled about its location, since I can usually detect such things. It has aroused my curiosity."

  "No. No Cody, I'm not certain what it means." A brief pause.

  "Was I correct in assuming that the message was intended for you?"

  "Yes." The cold feeling grew worse. A shudder as the cruiser gently turned, and then rain was hammering over the windshield, obliterating all visibility, turning the entire world to wet, sheeting grey. "Yes, I think this message probably was intended for me. If I come to understand what it means, I'll be sure to inform you." A shudder on the transmission as lightning flickered and leapt, illuminating the dark shadow of a nearby tower through the pouring rain. "Thank you for passing this on to me."

  "You're welcome. I'll be very interested. Goodbye." The connection cut out. Sandy stared into the blinding grey, her head suddenly empty of sound.

  "Sandy?" Vanessa asked. The navcomp feed now displayed a lighted space across Vanessa's side of the windshield, a comprehensive head-up display. The course curved away in front, and Vanessa followed it with a gentle shift of her hands. Numbers flickered and changed—speed, altitude and associateds. "What did the AI want?"

  Vanessa, Sandy realised, must have some very fancy enhancements to know who was calling her.

  "Gave me a message," she said, staring vacantly into space. Tell Sandy I miss her. Sandy. The only people who might miss her, and who had once called her Sandy, were dead. She'd thought. Until just yesterday.

  "What kind of message?"

  Cody hadn't known where the message had come from. Tracing and analysing data was Cody's specialty. Until that moment she hadn't been certain if it was possible to send messages to an AI of Cody's sophistication and not have the location pinpointed. Damn right Cody was curious. It was a ghost.

  The word gave her a shiver. 'Trick' occurred to her abruptly ... but Cody had been very principled, very thoughtful, and was simply not allowed to behave in such a manner. Not likely, no. The message was very real, her instincts told her. Her mind raced.

  "Cassandra?"

  Of course they were watching the CSA's movements. Somehow they'd found out she was working with them. Or someone had. Well. She took a deep breath. She'd suspected. Now she knew. And the abrupt certainty hit her with an unexpected, jarring force.

  She stared across at Vanessa, snapping abruptly back to reality. Vanessa looked concerned, watching but glancing back at the display. What could she tell her? Suddenly her mouth was reluctant and her throat was tight. It was alarming. She was on the right side, she knew she was. There was the promise of a new life held out before her. Citizenship and equal rights. And her beliefs ... she thought back to her conversation with Ibrahim, and found it suddenly difficult to recall what she'd told him.

  She'd believed in ... peace? That the war had all been pointless and the League had been wrong to start it? What had any of that mattered, when she was with her team? Happiness had been a few days of uneventful transit, a few bottles and a game of poker down in the ship's bowels. Maybe a vid, maybe a VR sim, and afterwards she and one of the guys could have some fun in her bunk or his ...

  All gone then, when League command had decided her group had outlived its usefulness and, with the war winding down, had in fact become a liability ... What had she been thinking, before that time? That they would come with her? Oh God, she'd been so stupid ... they didn't share her politics, didn't share her drive, her passionate intellect. They simply didn't care—League was good, Federation was bad, and that was the end of it. The war had created them, given them a home and a life, and a meaning to it all. They had a purpose, however little they'd understood it, and it had been enough. Strangely, so strangely, they'd been happy.

  She'd wanted to save them, wanted it so badly. But they didn't want to be saved, and it had nearly torn her apart. Please God, let one of them still be alive. Tell Sandy I miss her. She felt cold all over, hair on end and stomach in knots ... they were going to break her heart all over again. Vanessa was still waiting for an answer.

  "l think," she said hoarsely, in a voice that was suddenly reluctant to work, "I think ... it might be someone I knew." Pause. "A GI."

  "A GI?" Vanessa stared at her. The cruiser shuddered, buffeting through a new patch of turbulence. "What was the message?"

  Chapter 11

  "Tell Sandy I miss her."

  She stood before Director Ibrahim's desk in his personal office, fully armoured but for weapons and helmet left outside. Under the harness and compression feedback, she knew she was beginning to stink, but
there hadn't yet been an opportunity to change. Vanessa stood at ease beside her, watching with curiosity.

  "Sandy being yourself," Ibrahim said with a gesture. His eyes were narrowed but otherwise expressionless. If he was irritated at the interruption to his massively overloaded schedule, it did not show.

  "Yessir." A deep breath. "My team called me Sandy, for short." And Vanessa had at some point or other adopted the same name. When had that happened?

  "And you have no reason to suspect the Tetsu AI—Cody?"

  She blinked herself back to the present moment.

  "Nossir. In the brief exchanges we had, Cody seemed all above board."

  "He's got no record," Vanessa added. "His design schematics are first rate, his psyche evaluations give him a continuous record of triple-clearance—his last evaluation was thirteen weeks ago. And he used a regional direct channel to contact her, so I was able to register the linkup myself from the driver's seat. He seems textbook, by all indications."

  Ibrahim thought about it, deep brown eyes burning with intelligence. The office was surprisingly spartan—simple, efficient and functional. Any view from the window was obliterated by grey sheets of rain. There were the predictable flags on the walls and photographs on the desk, but the rest was bookshelves, a terminal with interface equipment and some framed photos on the walls. A tall, leafy plant by the door looked shamefully extravagant. Sandy wondered if it felt guilty.

  "Who," Ibrahim said then, "do you think it could be? Specifically." Some question that was.

  "I don't know, sir." She felt slightly dizzy, standing there, in a way that had nothing to do with recent exertions. It was a wild, crazy possibility. One she'd been more than half expecting, logically. As had Ibrahim, having seen the reconstruction sim of the Parliament attack, and drawing the same conclusions about its origin that she had. She was good at that. Being logical. There was a natural disconnect, in her brain, between logic and emotion. Something she'd learned, she was sure, rather than been designed with. But to have it actually happen, to be confronted head on by the terrible, wonderful, earth-shaking possibility... her head spun and her knees felt weak. "I still don't understand how it's possible that one of them might be alive. I saw the Intel reports. Secret ones that I wasn't supposed to see—I hacked into them. It was very comprehensive. The entire target was detonated with all of them aboard. The whole thing was one big GI trap, and they were all on board when it blew. That's what the reports said, and I can't conceive of how they could be wrong."

  "I understand that, Cassandra," Ibrahim replied patiently, "but the question remains—who do you think it could be? Assuming that at least one of them did survive?" The question shook her. Assuming ... good Lord, did he realise what he was asking her to do? It was no simple hypothetical, not for her. It was too painful.

  "I'm not sure, sir." Her throat was unaccountably tight. It made her voice waver just a little. She didn't think either Ibrahim or Vanessa would miss it. "It could have been any of them."

  "But only from your team?"

  "Yessir. No one else called me Sandy." No one else would have dared.

  "You don't have to 'sir' me in this room, Cassandra. This isn't the military."

  Deep breath. Strange that now, after the raid and dressed head to toe in battle armour, the old reflexes should start returning to her. She gave an affirmative nod. Ibrahim frowned, considering her closely. For a moment she suspected he might offer her a seat, and maybe a glass of water.

  "The message suggests someone particularly close to you," he said instead. Unable to pass up a position of advantage, Sandy reckoned. Her estimation of the man rose another notch, however she might have wished things otherwise. "Particularly considering the potential jeopardy in which his or her mission may have been placed by contacting you. Which of them particularly might have left such a message for you?"

  "There were several." She really, really didn't want to talk about it now. Helping Ibrahim to find them ... he had the resources to help her do it, and thus she'd agreed to the deal. Now the debt was due. He wanted answers, about them, about whoever it might be, out there on the run. And she was no longer certain that his priorities and hers coincided. "Chu. Mahud. Tran. Raju. Dobrov ... maybe." Not really the affectionate type, Dobrov. Certainly Sergei wasn't. She doubted 'Stark' had ever had a thought that sentimental in his entire short life.

  "So you were close with quite a few of them, then?"

  "A few of them, yes." Ibrahim paused, considering that.

  "Sexual relations?" he asked then. Sandy thought she could see where that was going.

  "Sir, I wouldn't want you to be misled—sexual relations among Dark Star GIs indicate very little, emotionally speaking. We fucked pretty much everyone." Ibrahim's lips pursed slightly, as if restraining a smile. And he nodded his understanding.

  "But even so," he persisted, "some sexual relations are more significant than others, yes?"

  Sandy nodded. "Definitely ... but I'd be very reluctant to characterise any of my relationships with my troops in the manner you're suggesting. Sex was recreation. It was affectionate, definitely—maybe even more than that on occasions—but then sharing a game of cards can be affectionate too. I was never 'in love' with any of my troops, if that is your meaning. And they were simply not capable of reciprocating, however much they liked me. The concept was largely beyond their comprehension."

  "Are you sure about that?"

  There was something about the way the question was phrased, so mildly put, that gave her another cold chill. But...

  "Yes, very sure," she said, as firmly as she could manage. "I spoke with them about similar things on many occasions, feeling them out, seeing how much they understood or were able to learn." She took a deep breath, wondering how to make him understand. And decided she was up to her neck at this point anyway and should take the plunge.

  "My guys enjoyed having sex with me, certainly—they'd damn well queue up for it, actually. It was my reputation, you see—they respected me so damn much, because I was their ideal of soldierhood and selfless service to the League. Sex was an opportunity for them to express that respect... they equated it with affection, you see, it's all the same thing among GIs. They don't discriminate much between different kinds of emotions—there's just good, bad and indifferent. But that's as far as it went."

  "Damn hard life, girl," Vanessa commented from her side. Sandy nearly smiled. Threw a grateful glance Vanessa's way, and saw her faint amusement.

  "Irritating as hell, sometimes," she replied. "They all wanted so damn much to please me that I wasn't allowed to do anything in return ... nothing more annoying than a guy who doesn't know what he wants."

  Vanessa shook her head. "Jesus, some people will complain about anything."

  Sandy bit her lip to keep the smile in check. It didn't seem the right time for levity. But she couldn't help but be thankful to Vanessa for trying.

  Ibrahim just looked at her. Possibly a little annoyed, Sandy thought, by Vanessa's intervention, mild though it was. A show of support when he was trying to be firm.

  "Cassandra," he said then, leaning his full weight back into the chair as he considered her. "You've been very honest with me in all our direct dealings thus far, and I appreciate that, I truly do. I know this is difficult for you." Sandy couldn't help but tense, sensing what was coming.

  "But I want you to answer just one more thing for me, as honestly as you can." Pause, deep brown eyes gazing directly into hers. "If this were in fact one of your old squad-mates, would you feel a conflict of interests?"

  "In what sense do you mean sir?"

  "In the sense that you continue to feel greater loyalty towards your old comrades than you do towards Callay and the CSA."

  Sandy locked stares with him. His brown eyes hawk-like. Her jaw nearly trembled, but she tightened it with a hard clench, refusing weakness. Not now. Not before a man of such obvious capability, who would assuredly put all personal interests well behind the necessities of duty. And
who homed in on the core of every issue with the accuracy of a tac-suit armscomp.

  "Sir, I can't lie to you, and you wouldn't believe me anyway. Obviously, if any of my old team are here in Tanusha, I feel obligated by emotion and duty to help them. I believe that I can best do this by helping them to escape their present circumstance and join me here in Tanusha."

  "To defect."

  "Yes sir." The wrong reflex, she remembered again. Right now, she didn't care. She was what she was, and it came naturally.

  "Do you think this likely?" In a calm, even tone that suggested neither disbelief nor hope.

  "I do, sir." With a calm nod. The armour held her posture firm and kept her body language invisible. She was grateful for it. "I've told you that my comrades respected me enormously, especially my opinions. And that the League murdered ... at least some of them." God, she just wasn't sure, she no longer knew for certain, and for a brief moment the confusion threatened to throw her head into a spin. "If there were any survivors, it could only be one or two." With as much certainty as she could muster. Hoping she was wrong. But in hope, too, lay danger.

  "And you believe you can convince them?"

  "Yessir. I can't go back to the League. I've passed on too much information to you now, for one thing. That makes me a traitor. I've no loyalty to the League anyway. I never did have. I don't believe in their cause, or their ideals, least of all their war. That's why I'm here now and not there. And that being my situation, my only chance in helping my comrades ... would be to find them and convince them to change sides.

  "Sir ..." she cut in before Ibrahim could reply, "... they weren't bad people at all. My guys." With creeping desperation. Wanting to lean forward on his desk, shove it into his face ... but that did not seem wise, under the circumstances. "I actually liked them, if that recommendation means anything to you. Not all of them, maybe, but some of them ... They'd never do anything indecent or uncivilised, I swear it. And their loyalty was never so much to the League ... they served the League because it was all they'd ever known. They understood very little of the actual reasons behind the war, and cared even less. Their loyalty was far more to me than to the League, it always was. I believe it still is now."