“I was not able to develop the technology sufficiently to create a working model,” Takewashi said quietly. “But Chancelry succeeded, with Karavitis’s help.”
“Were there others? Or was Kiril the only one?”
“There are others,” Takewashi confirmed. “Still in Chancelry custody. All in good health.”
Sandy looked at Kiril. He was quiet in that way he got when adults were having interesting conversations, listening intently. A smart boy, but not so genius-smart that he could join in. Just a regular smart kid, who didn’t deserve this. Sandy took a deep breath.
“Why are the Talee trying to kill you?” she asked.
“The technology that I was warned against is feared by the Talee,” Takewashi said sombrely. “They think it responsible for their dual catastrophes. They do not allow anyone to possess it. Amongst their own kind, the punishment for possession or development is death. I was warned that that exclusion would extend to humans too.”
“Oh dear fucking god,” said Shin, and got to his feet to stare out the window, hands on his head. And muttered something else, in Chinese. Otherwise, stunned silence from the spies, if only to see their implacable boss so upset.
“Sandy?” said Kiril, gazing up at her with dawning concern. “Sandy, what does that mean?” Sandy couldn’t move. Her heart was thumping, her vision dropped into full multi-spectrum. Ready to fight and move, but with no one to kill.
“But our real problem,” Takewashi continued sombrely, “is that the technology may be the only way of stopping the League’s condition. If it works, we can adapt and upgrade the population. But at present, even if we were sure it does work, which we are not, such a policy would bring us into a full-scale war against the Talee, which we would surely lose.”
Shin stood, hands on hips, and looked at Kiril. Kiril now looked a little scared. And not before time either, Sandy thought. She grasped his hand.
“Sir,” said one of the FedInt agents, “if this one boy brings down Talee assassins on our heads . . .” And left the sentence incomplete. Considering the gun in Sandy’s hand.
“This one boy,” Ragi said coolly, “could be the best hope of preventing humanity from destroying itself. Why such fear of aliens, when the real monster is ourselves?”
“Yes, Ragi,” Takewashi agreed. “And so I came here, to warn you. League got wind of my departure and wanted it stopped at any cost, given my knowledge, and the blow to League prestige. But what I share with you here is paramount. The Federation must assist the survival of this technology, even should it mean resisting Talee agents. The League insists it does not need Federation help, and fears that Federation help would mean the end of League as a political, independent entity. They may be right. But that has always been secondary to me, against the advancement, and survival, of the human race.”
“There’s not another way?” Shin asked. “We have advanced labs, in Tanusha. And funding beyond anything the League could offer, should we offer it. With your help, you could achieve in months what in the League would take years.”
“The advantage of this technology is that its success is already established, amongst the Talee themselves,” said Takewashi. “It is known to work on them but to have deleterious side effects. To develop entire new technologies from scratch is an operation of guesswork and trial that takes unavoidably enormous periods of time. Time that we do not have.”
“What side effects?” Shin pressed. “On the Talee?”
A keening wail filled the room, rising up, then falling down, with full, alien vibrato. The FedInt agents looked at each other. One went to the other room, but the asura were already coming into the main room, loping and circling on sinewy legs. Another let out a wail, like the first, body taut, muzzle searching the ceiling. The agents looked alarmed. Sandy stood, gesturing for Kiril to stay on the sofa.
Shin pulled out a small handheld radio, the simplest of old-tech, and unhackable. “The asura’s upset,” he said shortly. “Anything?”
Another wail from an asura, its diaphragm throbbing. “Everyone’s autistic?” Sandy asked in a low voice. Combat mode seemed strange without uplinks, no cross-referencing of data on her sub-visual.
“All uplinks are off,” one of the agents confirmed, weapon out, backing slowly toward a wall. He plucked at the elastic band around his wrist and winced as it snapped his skin. Clever, Sandy thought—Talee-GIs fought by VR, but most straight-human VR failed to accurately replicate pain.
“Kiril’s uplinks aren’t full emersion-capable,” she said, crouching by the boy. “Kiril, if you see anything, you tell me, yes? Anything that shouldn’t be here.”
Kiril nodded fast, looking frightened.
“They can’t be here so fast!” Takewashi muttered, still in his chair, having nowhere safer to be. “I had more time!”
“Sandy?” Kiril volunteered nervously. “Cai called me last night.”
Sandy, Shin, and the FedInt agents all stared. “What did he say?” Sandy asked.
Another wail from the asura, circling now by the windows but with eyes still directed to the ceiling. “Just hi,” said Kiril. “I couldn’t sleep, and he couldn’t sleep either, and he said that maybe I should have a glass of warm milk. But I don’t like warm milk very much.”
“Cai?” said Takewashi, frowning. Then with dawning comprehension, “You have Talee agents here already?”
Sandy thought furiously. A Talee attack would establish a VR framework around the target, simultaneously fooling it and every system in it that nothing was wrong. Everyone here was autistic, systems allowing no external communication. So the Talee should find nothing they could hack into. . . .
Shin’s radio crackled. “We have a cruiser breaking lanes. Hold on . . .” A whine from beyond the front windows. Sandy looked and saw a flat angle of concrete arising from the front garden wall amidst the sand . . . a defensive mount, on this FedInt property, searching the incoming cruiser. Beneath was a mag-launcher, targeting on an articulated mount.
“Is the defence grid autistic too?” she snapped.
“Yes,” said Shin, “but it’s . . .” and looked to the rotating mount out the front windows. “MOVE!”
Sandy grabbed Kiril and threw herself toward the rear wall. All hell exploded about her, high-velocity rounds shredding walls, furniture, people, eardrums. She rolled behind the supporting wall at the rear of the living room, covering Kiril as best she could, then grasping him beneath her as she scrambled on hands and knees for the hall as rounds smashed fist-sized holes in the walls above her.
She glimpsed fast around the corner, saw devastation, white walls sprayed red, Ragi low against one wall with his hand gone, Takewashi still in his chair but missing head and arm. She ducked back as rounds from the emplacement tore across the near wall, just missing Ragi, then swivelled back to some new motion. . . . She leaped up the hall, rolling to collide and slide back-first with a wall, cradling Kiril from the impact, then scrambling again on hand and knees. Grabbed a doorframe one-handed and shoved hard, shooting herself in a power slide up the hall, figuring that if the design of this place was like she suspected, the other hidden entry tunnel would be up this end by the second bathroom. . . .
And here before the bathroom doorway she found a FedInt man crouched, waving frantically to her . . . and just as abruptly his eyes glazed, and his pistol raised straight at her. But he was too close, and Sandy smacked the pistol from his hand with force enough that he gasped and clutched his hand.
“Autistic!” she yelled at him. “Autistic or they’ll hack you!”
“I wasn’t . . . I mean I didn’t . . .”
And she dove into the bathroom, aware that someone else was following—a wall in the shower stall was false, and she ducked through and down stairs three then five at a time, then a corner at the bottom and running in the dark. A sprint, clutching Kiril, reminding herself not to do that too hard, usually even her subconscious combat-mode brain could still recall to do that.
Then up stairs
and into a basement garage, empty of vehicles, just utility pipes and the ongoing echo of hammering gunfire nearby. And a FedInt agent atop the stairs, who gestured frantically for her to come, and then as she got close, abruptly swung a gun to her head. Sandy slammed the woman back against the doorframe with a forearm.
“Fight it!” she yelled. “Stay autistic, dammit! Don’t let them in!” The woman’s stare was confused, no telling what mental state she was in, half in and out of VR . . . but if she could see her . . .
The shriek informed her of an incoming round and she hit the floor, covering Kiril once more as the explosion tore through a far wall and peppered the halls with debris. These were beachfront houses, lightly built holiday homes . . . her fine-tuned hearing caught the howl of the cruiser. . . . She smacked the woman’s head back against the wall, and she slumped unconscious, but at least the Talee would no longer be targeting through her eyes. Then the hacked air defence emplacement next door began to blast through the walls, and she ran at a big window and jumped, turning her back to take out the glass and sailing to hit a dune on the far, downward slope. She slid, shielding Kiril all the while, as staccato shots shredded the house behind them like paper.
A glance at Kiril showed him in shock, clutching her frantically, all sandy but not obviously hurt, but she couldn’t ask if he was okay, as the cruiser circled in, one gull door lifted in flight, a weapon scanning ominously out the window. She’d barely scratch it with a pistol, she knew, before that door gunner took her out. He’d be a GI, perhaps as unlikely to miss as she was. She had to jump, from an angle the gunner couldn’t hit, and take them hand-to-hand . . . but the pilot was being smart and careful, not getting too close. If he kept circling, he’d see her, and with this soft sand beneath her she wouldn’t have the leverage to jump that far. . . .
A shot hit the cruiser. She could barely see it, but from somewhere behind came fast, accurate rifle fire. Five shots a second, slower than weapon-auto, but faster than unaugmented human fire—a GI then. The cruiser veered, wobbling as its rear gens took all the damage, and fleeing before it took more.
“Come on, Kiri, just a bit farther.” She struggled along the dune, horrified by how slow the burden of a child could make her, now she couldn’t just leap and crash through and over things. She did leap the next house’s low wall, an easy enough thing to calculate without a great impact, then up the side of the property to the rear, then paused at the carport exit to peer out. Running up the road was Ragi, clutching his damaged forearm. A little inland, and up the hill overlooking the beach, came a crackle of fully automatic rifle fire—her guardian angel again. Was one of the FSA’s GIs out here, looking out for her on Ibrahim’s orders? She couldn’t use uplinks to find out.
She pointed uphill for Ragi’s benefit, then ran that way, along the road, then the first left, heading sharply upslope. Return fire was coming in from the cruiser now, but only rifle fire, hitting a house near the crest. Again the sniper fired, from a different window, changing positions before new fire came back. Aside from a few dogs barking, there were no people to be seen or heard—the beachside suburbs were sparsely populated on weekdays, thank all the Hindu gods.
And here, parked by the side of the uphill road, was a groundcar. Sandy put Kiril down beside it, fished in her pocket for the cord that was always there, and plugged it direct into the insert socket at the back of her head. Connected the other end to her belt unit, unhooking it to press it on the door lock . . . flash, it felt as though her head had been grasped in a giant vice, with pressure about to split her skull.
She tore the unit away from the door, gasping . . . the short wireless distance between unit and door lock had been all it took for Talee GIs to access and reverse-hack the most sophisticated combat GI yet commissioned by humans. Dear god.
“Sandy,” Kiril protested, “we need an aircar, not a groundcar.” If she’d had time to feel anything, such lucid thinking from her little boy under pressure would have made her the proudest ever.
But, “Cruisers use air traffic command,” she said, and smashed the window with her fist. “It’ll get hacked and flown into something. Groundcars don’t.” She got in, plugged herself directly into the console, and got an override two seconds later. “Get in.”
She dragged him over her lap and into the passenger seat, as downslope Ragi came running, with one of the asura loping panicked circles about his heels. Kiril scrambled to try and open the rear door for him but couldn’t reach. Ragi did it himself, tumbling in as the asura followed, and Sandy gunned the car into fast reverse and a skidding one-eighty. If the sniper was as smart as he seemed, he’d have seen this and would know exactly what was going on.
Sandy roared uphill and screeched to a halt by the house. And the front gate opened, thank you very much, and a middle-sized female figure with a baseball cap and a large rifle exited and closed it neatly behind her. Kiril scrambled between the seats into the rear with Ragi and the asura, as the sniper got in, and looked at her . . .
Sandy’s pistol snapped up and levelled at the woman’s face. Unremarkable features, though strong, and calm. Shortish brown hair beneath the cap. A combat GI, unseen by Sandy for the past six years. At the time, the very worst of enemies.
“Hi there, sis,” said Jane. “We gonna go, or you want to sit here until they find a new cruiser and kill us all?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
It wasn’t much of a signal that Poole received. Just a blip, a heavily encrypted and rerouted nothing, an accidental static transmission from some random function of the network. But it was enough. He clipped the little autistic plug to the back of his head, linked it to his earpiece, and stood up. Walked six paces to Svetlana’s desk in the classroom, where she sat with other kids considering the best way to solve a maths problem.
“We have to go,” he told her.
Svetlana stared up at him. “Now?” Poole nodded. “I’ll get my bag.”
“Leave it here, the school can look after it.”
Svetlana excused herself from the group, the other kids now also staring. The entire class turned to watch them go, and the teacher came uncertainly to intercept them by the door.
“Can’t talk,” Poole explained, not halting. “Have to go.” The teacher, being from Canas high-security school, nodded and asked no questions.
They walked into the empty school corridor. “What’s happened?” Svetlana asked.
“Prearranged signal,” said Poole. “I’d rather not say here.” Between these echoing walls, sound travelled. “Let’s get Danya.”
He’d memorised their schedules, as there was no way to check Danya’s location by uplinks. Danya was in chemistry class, also performing some exercise in a small group, with beakers, white coats, and protective eyewear. Poole got his attention from the doorway, a fast military signal of “leave now, this way.” Danya nodded, took off coat and glasses, and left. The class barely noticed.
“Trouble?” he asked, as they descended stairs to the ground floor.
“Precaution,” said Poole. Danya nodded and walked fast.
The day outside was warm and sunny, barely a cloud in the sky. It seemed impossible that something, somewhere was less than perfect. The school playing field gleamed green and humid from recent watering as they walked across it.
“We’re not going home?” Danya guessed.
“No. Rendezvous with Sandy. Prearranged spot.”
“She never told me.”
“Only came up with it this morning,” Poole explained. “We think it might be Talee.” Through the gate surrounding the playing field and onto the sidewalk beneath leafy trees.
“Talee?” Both kids stared at him. “You mean Cai?”
“Possibly Cai himself.”
“That’s why we’re not driving?” Danya guessed.
“Not for now. Sandy doesn’t trust Canas systems if Cai’s involved. The higher the network intensity, the more control Talee-GIs get over it.”
He half expected Svetlana to take his han
d for comfort. He’d seen other girls her age do that, when upset. But Svetlana left his hands free, in case he needed a weapon in a hurry. Thank god he was looking after these kids. The prospect of Talee-GIs as enemies was scary. He was a bit frightened, if he thought about it. Luckily, he didn’t make a habit of thinking.
Sandy drove fast along winding suburban roads, tires skidding on sand patches and slopes. The landscape remained wild out here, Tanushan central planners kept wanting to landscape like the main city, but locals resisted, preferring the rustic beach-side feel. She dodged light traffic and a couple of cyclists, heading back toward a trunk road that would in turn get them to the freeway.
“We should slow down,” said Ragi, pale and wincing with his bloody stump squeezed under his armpit. “Traffic central will register us as speeding, and a stolen vehicle. Talee will hack traffic central in no time.”
“Yes, but so will FedInt,” said Sandy. Driving with a direct cord from her head to the dash, she had full access to car systems without risking a wireless hack. But mostly she monitored the cabin rear-view camera, to watch Kiril in the backseat. He was crying, the great, gasping sobs of a child badly terrified. “FedInt know what just happened, they’ll be looking for an escaping vehicle. We might get help.”
“Do we want their help?” said Jane, patient in the passenger seat, rifle propped to the ceiling. “Given what we just saw?”
“Maybe.” She rounded a fast bend and guessed the best turn ahead. No net access meant no maps, so she didn’t even know the way. And no one in an infotech dreamworld ever thought to put up road signs. “They could at least run interference.”
The road looked less promising, turning into a house-lined cul-de-sac. She screeched the car sideways, then roared back the way they’d come, seeking the other turnoff.
“Look,” said Jane, “you can either watch the road or the kid.” Sandy shot her an evil look and screeched into the next turn. “We could use your shooting if they come at us again, you’re still a better shot than me.” Though with Jane, they both knew, the margins were so close it would be very hard to measure. But if Jane took the rear seat in another attack, would she use her body to shield Kiril with rounds incoming?
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