"I'm pleased to hear that. Generally." The car paused at a traffic light. It seemed a pointless inconvenience, in the circumstances. She wished Ari had an aircar.
"So what do you make of this GI?" A little tentatively, Sandy thought.
"The prick shot me." She was not, she felt, in the right mood to discuss it presently. "I'm not happy about it."
An blinked. "Well, logically, I'd imagine that might follow. What'd he look like?"
"Black. Where are we going?"
"Oh, um, I figured we didn't want a hospital since the SIB might track that ... and they probably couldn't help much, anyway ... so I thought a friend's place, just to patch you up. So ... African-black? Or Indian-black?"
"African ... Fucking Norwegian-black, I don't know. Which friend's place?"
"You wouldn't recognise the name."
Jesus. She was losing her temper now. That rarely happened. Being shot with her own weapon infuriated her. The way it had happened doubly infuriated her. The fools with their guns who hadn't believed she was CSA infuriated her. The fact that there were GIs in Tanusha again, breaking into places and stealing their databases ... oh, that was it, she could feel the anger surging, at that single thought.
"Fucking GIs," she muttered into An's continuing silence, as the lights went green and the car accelerated once more. "I hate fucking GIs."
An gave her another, tentative sideways look. "Surely you don't mean that?"
Sandy stared out the windows, and fumed. Silence was her only answer.
he awoke. Lay for a moment, in the darkened room, listening. Distant air traffic. Bustling city sound, faint and dreamy. Omnipresent. Like the sigh of a gentle breeze through forest leaves. A lazy, reflex hearing-shift, to finer detail. The whine of a maglev line. An aircar, a gentle throbbing pulse on some nearby skylane. Nearer sound ... music, and drums. From somewhere outside, neither close nor distant. The suggestion of laughter, and cheering voices, rising in faint waves above the city's gentle murmur.
She blinked her eyes open more fully. She was lying on her back in a darkened room, gazing at the ceiling. That was distinctly strange. How did she get here?
Faint snatches of memory swam to her recall. Ari. Ari had brought her here. Remembered being assisted up some steps. Remembered pain. Some people, strangers, in their house. Nothing more.
House. She was in a house. She blinked lazy, uncoop erative vision into some kind of focus, shading into UV in the dim glow of street light that fell through broad, nearby windows. Turned her head, over toward the windows. It was a broad, open floor, of tiles or ... slate, she guessed dreamily. Plastered walls. An arched brickwork doorway. The broad windows led out onto a balcony, with many plants and decorative railings.
Aestheticisms. One could not go anywhere, in Tanusha, without running into aestheticisms. This one was European, perhaps Mediterranean. Stone, brick, plaster, glazed patterns and trimming, plants and paintings ... God, she shut her eyes tightly, feeling her head spinning, a slow and unpleasant disorientation. She was not sure where she was. It seemed a fitting predicament, here in Tanusha, among old cultures and old things that should not have held meaning for her, but somehow evoked ... whatever they evoked, she was not sure. Music, drifting faintly through the room. She listened for a long moment, with dazed curiosity.
A door opened across the room, artificial light spilling briefly through the doorway. Sandy glanced, and saw a man. Instinctively, she knew he was no threat, and she lay still, naked beneath the bed covers, as the man approached across the hard slate floor with light, careful steps. Listening to the music drifting from down the street.
"Hello, Cassandra." A tall man, lightly wringing his hands. A blue turban and a handsome, trimmed beard. "The machine told me you were awake." She blinked at him for a moment. Then looked left, at the portable monitoring equipment there, on top of a wooden bedside table. And realised the connector plug was attached to the insert socket at the back of her head.
"How are you feeling?"
"Where am I?" Her voice was clear and strong, if a little dazed. That relieved her. Another time, she vaguely remembered, she'd awoken much the same as this to find it hardly working at all.
"You're at my house in Nagpur, Cassandra." A mild, congenial voice. Comfortingly so. "I'm a friend of Ari's, my name is Amitraj Singh, I'm a doctor. He brought you here for my assistance. You were shot."
Shot. Yes, she definitely remembered that. Strangely, the memories did not impact on her in a rush. She felt calm in the agreeably cool, mild atmosphere of this darkened, pleasant room.
"I remember." The memories helped. They triggered others. Events slipped back into place and she felt her waking rationality smoothly returning. "You'll be a biotech surgeon, then?"
"Yes." With a smile in the darkness. "I'm an old friend of Ari's." An, it was increasingly apparent, had a lot of old friends. She did not bring it up.
"How badly was I hurt?" More badly than she'd thought, evidently.
"You were suffering from the effects of what I've heard referred to as "impact concussion." Of course I've only read about it second-hand from League information, and I've never experienced it directly ... you're familiar with the condition yourself, I imagine?"
"Sure." She felt with a hand over her stomach beneath the sheets. Felt bandaging, applying pressure. Large bandages, with cold, lumpy objects beneath. Coldpacks, for muscular reconsolidation. The doctor had read the right reports.
"Impact concussion" referred to the shockwave that ripped through a GI's body following projectile strikes. Synth-alloy myomer tensed from human-density tissue to armour-density in micro-seconds under compression, the rate of compression determined by the force of the strike. Which triggered sympathetic reactions in adjoining muscle groups, which in turn conducted the force of the strike right through the GI's body at far greater power than for a regular human's, where the kinetic energy would dissipate amid the soft tissue. A leg shot could do more damage to a GI's spinal cord than to the leg itself, as impact force was transmitted up the ferrous-enamel bone of the skeletal structure.
"I didn't think it'd hurt that bad," she murmured, rubbing her cold bulges beneath the bandages. Cold temperatures allowed myomer muscle to contract, tighten and reconsolidate. The coldpacks would help her badly bruised, compacted and wrenched stomach muscles recover their normal state.
"Ari said you'd been shot before, within the last month." Ah, she realised. Of course. "GI muscles take time to recover, Cassandra, just like human muscles. Your stomach muscles, and probably your entire torso region, does not appear to have fully reconsolidated from that incident, and so was not able to withstand the concussion as normal. And you've been very busy lately ... have you been managing to stretch regularly?"
Sandy put aside any lingering concerns of the "doctor's" legitimacy-obviously he was a real doctor ... not a GI himself yet already he was lecturing her, the genuine article, on the proper care and good health of her artificial body.
"Half hour a day," she replied, stretching slightly beneath the covers. She felt stiff. Achingly, immobilisingly stiff. But surprisingly free of pain, and increasingly clear-headed as whatever drugs he'd given her to relax the muscles and take the slugs out began to wear off. "My best friend gives good massages, too."
"Hmm. I had heard it can take three months or more for a full recovery ... it's a question of structural engineering more than actual health. Your previous, um, clean incisions, were a relatively simple matter, damage inflicted at predictable, healable locations. This is far more widespread and invasive, if less immediately traumatic. You've been ... um, rather active, I take it, since you arrived here?"
Sandy smiled faintly. "Could say."
"And how are you feeling now?"
"Better. Stiff, but no real pain." A brief, diverted scan showed her the time-6:50. Just after sunset. "Where's Ari?"
"I'm afraid he didn't say." With mild amusement. "That being rather the way with An. You might have noticed."
"Yeah." She sighed. "No message for me?"
"No." Regretfully. "I'm afraid not."
It was very predictable. It meant something. She needed some space, just for a moment. Or more than a moment. She needed space to figure out what was going on, and what she was going to do.
"Okay. Thanks for your help. If you could just wait outside, I'll be out in a minute." A rapid blink.
"Um ... Cassandra ... I don't think I would advise you getting out of bed right now, much less going out once again into that ... that chaos out there." Things had been happening, evidently, while she slept. "I really think you should have at least one night's quiet rest ... I'm not entirely clear on the effects of repeated impact concussion such as this, but I do think the risks that you'll reinjure yourself, or somehow make the damage worse, are rather high."
"Thank you for your advice-I take it on board-and I appreciate everything you've done to help. But could you please wait outside?" Another blink. Not about to argue, she guessed, when she put it like that. She held his attention with an effortless, unblinking gaze.
"Well ... if you insist. But I'll tell Ari I warned you against it ... I have to go out, I'm needed at work, but my friends outside will take care of you. Your ... um, clothes are on the chair over there."
"Thank you," she repeated, as he reluctantly left the room, closing the door behind him. She flopped back onto the pillows, gazing at the ceiling. Damn. Damn that bloody GI. She doubted he'd meant his shots to be this debilitating. Which did her little good now. Of all the stupid inconveniences. Ari hadn't dragged her away from effective house arrest in the expectation that she'd fall at the first hurdle. Some help she'd proved to be. And now he'd left her, gone off on his own wild chase. With An, she thought, the trail could lead him anywhere ... Out there, somewhere in the dark, dangerous night. So beautiful, in the glow of light through the windows, and the gentle murmur of sound. And so deceptive.
An. Speaking of deceptive. Bringing her along to track down this mysterious Sai Va, yet as soon as the trail led to League GIs on League business, he'd sent her off in the wrong direction while he set off in solitary pursuit ... an irony that it'd meant she was closer than he was to the source of that transmission signal when she heard it, and thus faster to respond. But Ari hadn't been shocked to hear that the GI in question was higher designation, nor at her assessment that he'd most likely done the whole raid on Sai Va's friends solo. And Ari himself had volunteered the information about the newly arrived League delegation, and their accompanying party of GIs.
Maybe ... maybe Ari hadn't wanted her to catch up with that particular GI. Maybe he'd known who he was, and what he was. Smart. High-designation. She herself was the only truly human-level GI yet created, mentally speaking. All high-designation GIs had resided in Dark Star, the League's most lethal special operations combat unit. She'd had the run of Dark Star most of her life, she knew all the ins and outs. She knew all the high-des GIs personally, many of them had been in her own combat team, the one her superiors had ordered eliminated when they became politically inconvenient. Keeping high-des GIs in Dark Star was a matter of covert policy ... not technically allowed. To this day most League politicians remained unaware of the existence of quite so many unauthorised high-des GIs-her own existence in particular-especially since the embarrassment of her escape and abandonment of Dark Star and the League entirely.
But those high-des GIs that Parliament were aware of, and did authorise, were all assigned to Dark Star as a matter of top-level policy. This GI was smart. Very smart, very capable, and she'd never seen nor heard of him before in her life. So where was he from? And was that what Ari hadn't wanted her to know? How would Ari have known? How on Earth could his intelligence on such things be superior to hers? She'd been passing on a great deal of classified information about League operational matters to CSA Intel for the last month since the emergency legislation and Article 42 ... they simply didn't know that much, not even An. No, that couldn't be it. Could it?
Damn civilians. She closed her eyes, breathing deeply to stop her head from spinning. The Senate banned her, An appropriated her on his business and then lied to her, and now she'd run headlong into something she was certain many people in officialdom had much rather she hadn't-a smart League GI who knew her name, and possessed an inexplicable quantity of charm, a rare quality among combat GIs, to say the least. Doubtless they would worry about her loyalties. Even after the bastard had shot her.
It was enough to make her claustrophobic. Too many restrictions did that to her. Too many commands. The world of possibilities was vast, and she needed to find her own way, and her own answers to these and others of her most pressing problems. Like she always had.
She'd been blinkered, she realised now. Hemmed in. Tanusha was civilian, and foreign, and Federation ... and she was military, and League, and a GI, most of all. And she had been feeling overwhelmed by recent events, the trauma of her first arrival here, the discovery and loss of her old friend Mahud, and the feelings of guilt, loss and personal responsibility that went with it all. And having Vanessa for a friend had been such a big change, as had everyday operations with the CSA, and she had allowed herself the unaccustomed comfort of being led, and sometimes pampered, and having other people thinking for herbecause it was all so different, and she was taking a long time to recover her personal confidence in matters operational.
And being led was dangerous. She was not regular CSA, she was far more sensitive politically. Her place within the institution was tenuous at best, whatever badge she held in the familiar leather binder. She could not afford the luxury of believing that she was safe in letting others do her thinking for her. She had always been independent, even within Dark Star command, back in the League. Different from all her comrades. Separated from most of her straight human command and support. Free to formulate operational tactics as she saw fit, and to include or ignore advice on such matters however she wished. She had been without that independence for too long now. She needed it back.
All this she thought while lying alone in the comfortable, darkened silence, listening to the gentle sounds of the city. And to the rhythmic drumming and melody that reminded her of everything she had left her military life in hope of discovering-which she had discovered, and more besides. Now it was time to stop being frightened of it.
She got up, carefully, unwrapped the outer bandages, and dressed. The stiffness hurt, and she was careful not to strain her midriff, but the inconvenience was manageable. Her shoulder holster was also upon the chair, slung across the back, pistol and all. She gave the weapon a brief check, and the magazines in her jacket pocket, and called Vanessa's uplink. Got back an engaged signal ... which meant she was operational, and not available to casual callers.
Stretched her hamstrings for a moment, dialling through the needed links to CSA Central. The display gave the usual chaotic mess of meetings, functions and sensitive security spots ... and a disturbing number of active-security "reds," designating currently running hotspots. A deeper scan revealed that one was a hostage drama, which had been running in Junshi for some time ... just several kilometres away from her and Vanessa's apartments. Several were post-active shootings, sweepers collecting data and corpses. Most appeared to be gang-related. Fighting over the black market spoils, no doubt, in a fluid environment of rapidly changing power structures-determined by who held what information, and who had been talking to which visiting delegation, and which way the rumour winds were blowing ... God. She wasn't even going to get into that. It gave her a headache just thinking about it.
At least the politicians were safely at home for the day, the debating over. Officially, anyway ... doubtless it all continued, after hours, in private, de-bugged, security-perimetered rooms with various delegates and interest groups. She hoped Parliamentary security wasn't being stretched too thin in the confusion. With the stockmarket crashed more than twenty per cent (an unheard-of calamity in Tanusha), some of the would-be assassins could easily be bank and fund mana
gers in three-piece suits. Tanusha, the happy city, was today no longer quite so happy.
Dinner was basic Indian, a tandoori chicken with rice, and she shovelled it down with relish. Something about getting shot at that made her famished. Company sat about on the lounge chairs, and tried not to stare as she ate. Five of them, excluding the recently departed Doctor Singh. Ari's friends. Hackers, jackets, netsters, technogeeks, link-jockeys ... the "underground," by any multitude of names. Monitoring equipment trailed cables and hookups across the floor like a crazed North Synian climbing vine, devouring furniture, rugs and open floorboards. Racks of control boxes piled against one wall by the stereo system. Custom-rigged tech, all of it, and mostly cutting edge despite the haphazard appearance. "Watching the furball," the man named Carlo had called it. Transmission tracking on the network. The underground were busy all right. There was a lot to watch.
"Do you need to eat very much?"
Sandy glanced up at the questioner-Anita, a small Indian woman with a shaved head and butterfly tattoos on her eyelids that fluttered when she blinked. Holographic Job. Weird, Sandy thought as she chewed, savouring the delicious flavour. But then, they wouldn't be underground if they weren't weird. It came with the territory.
"Three times a day," she managed around that mouthful, ignoring the awe-struck stares focused on her from all sides. Watching her eat. She hoped the fascination did not extend to other bodily functions. "Balanced metabolism, it's not so different."
Grins and giggles from the group. Evidently they found that amusing.
"You know," called Carlo from the kitchen as he came strolling over, beer bottles in hand, "I ... I really thought you'd be taller." Tossed a beer to Tariq, who caught and opened. "I mean, you're ... you're what, one-sixty-seven/sixty-eight? I heard this guy Stommel saying you were, like, seven foot tall or something ..." Half-crazedgrin. "... so I'm like ..
Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel Page 23