"Oh good lord," Vanessa muttered. Someone had undoubtedly hacked a surveillance camera by now-illegal, of course. News media would have this footage. "Oh Jesus."
More people were jumping, more frightened of the foam now than the fire. Vanessa stared through the windscreen, jaw open, hands fastened unthinkingly to the control grips. Aircars were landing, foam blowing every which way from the flyer's downdraft, struggling civilians in the water now whipped with flying spray and rippling chemical fires still alight. Personnel sprinted from landed aircars, leaping headfirst into the water after the swimmers. Nearby pleasure craft were manoeuvring closer in to help. Someone was nearly run over. Another slipped and fell from an assisting hand, awkwardly. The flyer lifted away, perhaps warned of the havoc it was creating, and huge billows of greasy smoke blasted all and sundry with lung-choking mouthfuls.
"Oh no." Vanessa's hand had gone to her mouth, her voice weak. Tanushan emergency services. With no real idea of how to handle an emergency. It did, Sandy thought with tired irony, sum the place up rather well. And then she found what she was looking for.
"Vanessa, Lagosso, right now."
Vanessa raised no word of protest, merely set in the coordinates and let the emergency navprogram assign them the fastest course. The cruiser banked steeply as it accelerated once more, up and away from the carnage of entangled, converging police, CSA and emergency units. Still the smoke billowed from riverside fires. Sandy hoped someone would attend to the wrecked car on the bridge.
She cast a sideways glance at Vanessa. Vanessa looked in shock. Her hands were tight on the moulded control grips, turning instinctively to stay within the low-level lane navcomp had prescribed. Their velocity hit six hundred, legal maximum for any trans-Tanushan air traffic, even emergency services. At fifty metres altitude, the tree-cov ered suburbs were flashing past below at an impressive rate, blurring glimpses of brief, lighted neighbourhoods and traffic.
"I don't think we'll call any backup for this one," Sandy remarked after a moment, over the unaccustomedly powerful multi-toned whine of the engines. A slight bank pressed her forcibly into the seat, towers and speeding horizon leaning sideways. "Do you?"
"Shit no," Vanessa muttered. "They'll crash into each other and level a suburban block." She looked pale, in the wash of speeding, swinging light from beyond the windows, a tower rushing by. Levelled out of the slight turn, and the downward pressure eased.
"Hey," Sandy offered, "if it makes you feel any better, I'm not very surprised. They don't exactly get a lot of business here."
"Oh God, I don't want to talk about it." She sounded decidedly shaken. "I was under the impression that I was working within a system that was actually capable of responding to emergencies without turning them into catastrophes. I'm suddenly terrified that this entire city is just one more stupid mistake away from wiping itself out."
Sandy shrugged, observing their high-velocity perspective with interest. Air traffic was about them again, mostly above. Some were heading in the same direction they were, quickly overtaken and left behind at speed, a brief flash of motion to their sides and above.
"It's a big city," she replied finally.
"All the more reason for terror," Vanessa muttered. Glancing at the navscreen. Lagosso was approaching. Fifty seconds. Towers fled past the windows. Faint patches of rain came and went, lit yellow by streetlight. The cruiser's com-link beeped, and Vanessa hit receive.
"Snowcat," she snapped.
"Snowcat, what are you doing?" asked Ruben's curious voice.
Vanessa looked at Sandy. And Sandy realised that she couldn't exactly lie to a direct inquiry.
"I think I might have found a trace of that sleeper code over in Lagosso," she said reluctantly. "It might be nothing."
"Um ... well that's funny," Ruben replied, "because I think I might have found something similar. We'll compare notes later ... would you like some backup?"
"That depends."
To her surprise, Ruben gave a snort of nervous, tense laughter. "Oh God," he sighed, "it's a bloody nightmare, isn't it? Um ... well, fair warning, Sandy, I've already got some people onto it, but there's no CSA available unfortunately. They're all at the bombing or off elsewhere ... who knows. " He sounded, Sandy thought, as if the whole thing would be quite darkly entertaining if it weren't so serious. She knew how he felt. She wasn't certain Vanessa did.
"Who'd you get?" she asked, with trepidation.
"SIB," Ruben replied shortly. Sandy swore, lightly, surprising herself. It was a very civilian thing to do. "Please don't hurt me, they were all that's available. "
"What are you doing on Ops, anyway, Ari?" she asked him, somewhat testily. "Don't you have something boring and meaningless you should be attending to?"
"Look, don't pick on me, Sandy, I'm just on work experience ... hey, I gotta go and mop some floors. Be careful ... "
Sandy outright grinned, as the connection clicked off. And gave a snort of laughter, shaking her head.
"Since when did he start calling you Sandy?" Vanessa asked tersely.
"I don't care," Sandy sighed. "He's a pain, but he's cute. And he might just be my only chance to get laid, now everyone knows what I am."
"Maybe he's gay," Vanessa muttered unhelpfully.
The cruiser was slowing, bleeding velocity amid a brief, buffeting turbulence.
"I'll convert him."
"That'll be a task."
"I can do it. I'm a sex goddess, didn't I tell you? Turn a gay man straight ... long and hard in five quick, easy steps ... Fifty bucks, full refund if unsatisfied."
"Oh God," Vanessa murmured, scanning the way ahead, "you're in a mood again. Bad things happen when you're in this mood."
Sandy turned an appraising blue gaze upon her friend and blinked in mild affront. "I beg your pardon, my dear?"
"That's exactly what I mean. Behave yourself, we're in a civilised place."
"My behaviour has been impeccable of late."
"Tell that to the SIB."
"I did."
Vanessa swore to choke off a treacherous smile, and held her grim demeanour in place with effort.
"Where you wanna go?" she drawled, as the cruiser climbed slightly into a regular skylane, banking low across the Lagosso skyline. The major river bend that was the central Shoban itself, broad and mirrored with gleaming reflections. Another few automatic sorts came clear, and the options narrowed further. And again. "Sandy?"
"Just a second." Eyes unsighted as the cruiser swung above the river bend, violating regular skylanes on emergency privilege as Sandy let her functions run down, flashing through electronic mountains of digital data, recent transmissions. Seeking patterns or variations on that sleeper code ...
"Sandy," Vanessa warned, eyeing the navscreen, trajectories headed out from Lagosso as the Shoban swung away beneath them. "Sandy, I'm running out of airspace here, even emergency privilege doesn't like me below fifty metres anywhere up here. There's too much highrise ..." as mid-level towers loomed ahead, around a bend where the Shoban curved back upon itself, luxury apartments overlooking the gleaming waters ...
"Got it," Sandy said as it came clear, and Vanessa blinked, her navscreen abruptly reconfiguring to a new trajectory, sending instructions to central control, clearing them for a new course.
"Jesus, Sandy," she muttered, swinging them about. "That's spooky, you've got an interface like a damn Al."
"Get used to it. See the building?"
"Yeah, I've got it," Vanessa said, with a narrow-eyed glance through the windscreen, past the faint green lines of holographic HUD. The cruiser levelled out once more, humming at barely forty metres as it headed back along the riverside. Bridges spanned the width, glistening stretches of light across the mirror surface. Sandy fixed her eyes on the building, two blocks in from the riverside up ahead. Lower mid-level residential, just twelve storeys, balconies and broad glass. Inexpensive, relatively ... for Tanusha. Her mind found the barriers-basic security that gave with barely a nudge-and she
was in. Found the room in question, clear traces of code, coming back to a single operational terminal on the left wall by the sliding window to the balcony, ten storeys up ...
Vanessa banked them in over the riverside, losing velocity as they drew near.
"Tenth floor," Sandy told her, "this one here, overlooking the river ... Pointing at the apartment.
"This one?" Bringing them gliding close, and dropping level, engines throbbing on hover pulse, a deep, shifting vibration.
Sandy flash-zoomed beyond the window reflection ... The room looked empty, unlit, untidy, with plants that hadn't been watered on the balcony and an empty deckchair.
"Got anything?"
"Nothing, looks like they're gone ..." Scanning further down the links, but beside the single terminal, nothing else registered. "Door please."
Clack-whine, and the door heaved open, panel lights blinking a red indication of safety restraints overridden ... A breeze blew in, and the abrupt, loud throbbing of the engines, echoing off the building side here at the tenth-storey level, buzzing the balcony glass. The cruiser performed a gentle sideways slide as Vanessa's hands moved on the controls. Sandy unfastened her belt, checked her pistol, grabbed the door rim with both hands and performed a careful, controlled leap. Landed smoothly on the balcony between deckchair and potplants, a controlled impact with the glass door to stop her. The door was locked-mechanical lock, nothing electronic that could be hacked. She grabbed with both hands, and gave it a sharp yank. Crack! as the mechanism broke, and the door leapt back on its runners.
The apartment room beyond was indeed empty. Her vision tracked through multiple spectrums about the bare walls, a made bed in the right corner, a dresser alongside with a small interface terminal in the wall ... She walked over, and stared at it. Strained her eyes to the most sensitive extreme, squinting slightly. There was a faint rectangular mark on the dresser bench, near the terminal. Like someone had used a portable here. Nothing special in that ... under other circumstances.
She turned around. A cool breeze billowed the curtains, alight with the blinking flare of running lights from the cruiser, a great angular shape hovering just beyond the balcony ledge. The engine whine was nearly deafening, and she tuned her hearing into differing frequencies, taking the edge off it. And saw a clear mark on a wall. A handprint, quite recent, red with residual heat. But there was nothing to indicate the apartment had been lived in. It was small, empty, and mostly undisturbed.
She checked the bathroom, and found it empty. Opened the front door and went out into the corridor. Someone was standing out there, ten metres down.
"Hey!" A man, dressed only in a towel. A big man, Asian, with bulging muscles and tattoos. "That you cruiser? I hope serious, you big trouble, you wake me up, damn noise, huh?" The noise was indeed loud, the man's voice, raised.
"Sorry, CSA." She flashed him her badge as she walked over. He squinted, frowning. "You hear or see anyone using this room just now?"
"That room?" The noise was less loud down the corridor, away from the open door. "Nah. I sleep. You wake. What you do, huh?" He didn't seem particularly helpful, Sandy thought. Loud, big and frowning obnoxiously. And his English seemed almost deliberately bad.
"Do you know if anyone lives there?" she persisted, looking calmly at the broad, frowning face as she refolded her badge and tucked it into her jacket.
Hard shake of the head. His second chin wobbled. "No. No idea." Walked up close and jabbed a finger at her chest. "You get damn car away from building, hey? You make big noise. I call cops!"
"I outrank the cops," she told him mildly. There was a lot of him for just one towel to cover. All that skin smelt funny, at this range. "Are you certain you don't know if anyone lives here? Or are you just being difficult?"
"Difficult? I give you difficult, girlie, you know what I am?" A hand grabbed her shoulder, hard, as he prepared to explain something to her. Sandy took his wrist and gave a twist ... thud, the big man went down on one knee, face straining in sudden pain as she applied a simple armlock with hands on wrist and elbow.
"No," she told him. "You see, I'm in rather a hurry, I don't really care who you are, and I don't know if you recognised the badge or not, but to you that means "don't touch," okay?" Applied a gentle pressure, and the man yelled, protestingly. His once stubborn face was now contorted. And the towel was slipping.
"Sandy?" said a voice in her inner ear. "What's going on?"
"In a minute," she said, not bothering to formulate an internal reply. And cut off the link. "Now, let's try again ... Who lives in that room?"
"Not know," the man gasped, shifting about to try and take the pressure off his arm. "You ... big augment, huh? No do, I sorry. Very sorry. No problem, huh?"
"Sure, no problem." She let him go and he collapsed back onto his knees, grasping his arm. Sandy gave him a disgusted look. "Thanks, friend, you've just wasted my time." And took off running down the corridor, toward the stairs.
"Hey," came the shout from behind, "you know me? I Chai Chong Li! I big fight promote! You want good money, you call, huh? You big augment, I make you good money ... !"
"Sandy," came Vanessa's voice again ...
"Nothing," Sandy told her, crashing the stairwell door and leaping down, four at a time at half-falling velocity. `Just I nearly got recruited to the local underground fight scene." She was, in fact, rather amused. And even more so at the thought of the man's expression if he ever figured out who she really was.
"I won't even ask," Vanessa said dryly. "I read you going downstairs ... you want airborne cover?"
`Just you, Ricey," Sandy said, hammering down the fourth flight, rebounding hard off the wall and taking the next just as fast. "Better keep it away from the windows, you're upsetting the populace."
"Any decent Tanushan would be out getting drunk and laid at this hour," Vanessa retorted. "Underground hours," Sandy knew that meant ... maybe three drug-accelerated hours' sleep per cycle, to be grabbed at all kinds of unusual hours before racing off to work, party, or generally make trouble. The spreading popularity of such irregular hours had doctors and sociologists worried for a multitude of medical and social reasons, but, as of yet, no one had arrived at a totally convincing argument as to why regular, natural rest was superior, when the drugs and enhancements evidently did such a good job. Tanushans were frequently accused of decadence, but rarely laziness, and most Tanushans would evidently rather party than sleep.
Sandy sensed the cruiser's ID beacon shifting further away, out beyond the side of the building. She finished the last flights in a freefall plunge, accessing the front door security system with her links. Hit the bottom flight and bashed out the door ... into the lobby, as her links connected on the security camera, overrode the lockouts and raced backward through the last few minutes of footage ... there.
A young man in a heavy coat, goatee-bearded under a baseball cap. He held a portable case cover under one arm, and walked with a brisk, nervous stride. She chopped that five seconds of footage, looped it, parcelled it, and shot it up to the cruiser, all while running out the main door and into the street outside. Some people were at the point of entering, and stood aside in surprise. She ignored them, scanning on full-spectrum.
"Ricey," she formulated, "get this image out on the net, I reckon that's our guy." It was a small street, no traffic, just a few wandering pedestrians. Streetlight shone wetly along the roadway.
"This guy?" came Vane
ssa's voice. "Looks a bit like Ruben."
Sandy nearly smiled. "Yeah, that'd be a turn-up, huh?" Exhaled hard, staring vainly up and down the street. From nearby above, an aircar's engines were throbbing in steady hover. "So where d'you reckon he went? Public transport?"
"Could be private ... you're not getting any more traces?"
"Of what? He's not transmitting anything. "
"Wait ... there's a pair of aircars on emergency privilege another kilometre up the river, they're hovering. I read them as SIB. Looks like they might be on
to something. "
"Well, for now, that's as good as anything." She set off running down the street, boots pounding on the wet pavement.
"You don't want a lift?"
"No, you go ahead and ask them. Don't let on that I'm even here, they won't like it." The whine of hovering aircar engines shifted in pitch, cruising somewhere overhead and then away. "One thing's for sure, with all this activity our boy will now know we're after him. "
"No doubt. "
Sandy kept running, holding her speed within respectable parameters. A fast run, by unaugmented standards. Flying at sixty down the road would attract too much attention. She kept to the wet roadside under the dripping trees, ignoring the curious looks she got from people out walking. The district was mostly mid-level residential, with several-storey buildings, low apartments, a casual concentration of mid-sized living spaces amid the trees and taller apartment buildings. She glanced to her left as she ran, toward the river and the taller lines of buildings that were clustered there. The lights were brighter from the ground, and colourful displays flowed down the sides of buildings. Nightlife always clustered around the river, she'd noticed. Any river. The Shoban Delta had hundreds.
At that moment, her links found something strange. Surprising, because she hadn't been consciously aware she was uplinking ... but that was typical enough. A single call along the basic cable net, voice audio and scrambled ... nothing unusual about that, but this felt familiar. She locked onto it and began breaking it down. A split second's analysis showed that it would be difficult to decipher without further work ... but the shielding was clearly familiar. She switched directions, crossing the street and heading down a side road, toward the riverfront and the gleaming light displays amid the apartment buildings.
Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel (v1.1) Page 12