Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel

by Joel Shepherd

  "That's true."

  Sandy felt the weight increasing against the back of her chair, as if Vanessa was slowly falling asleep. She reached and put a hand to the back of Vanessa's head, a gentle, improvised embrace.

  "I wouldn't leave you," she murmured. "I've never had a friend like you."

  "I've never had a friend like me either." Dazedly tired.

  Sandy ruffled her hair, and planted a long kiss on her cheek. "Go to bed."

  "Bed. That's a good idea." Rested her forehead against Sandy's for a long moment first. A simple gesture. It made Sandy feel warm all over. This was what love felt like. She'd felt it before, with GIs of her old team. But somehow it'd never been quite like this. They'd loved her as a reflex, their squad leader being the central figure in their universe, holding them all in awe with her capabilities. It'd been impossible for them to feel otherwise. She'd loved them back, affection for affection.

  Vanessa, though, had a choice. Vanessa was her own person, and was under no obligations over where to place her affections. And Vanessa was amazing. She'd studied business, but ended up hating the corporate world for its moral sterility. She was smart enough to be very rich if she'd wanted. Pretty enough to have spent a life accumulating adoring menfolk (and the occasional woman) in a salivating pile at her feet. Personable enough to have hobnobbed and brown-nosed her way up the corporate and social ladders to the very top.

  And instead, she'd gone against all the social norms for pretty, intelligent, sophisticated young women who preferred books to VR-sims and knew the French Revolution for an historical event beyond the famous Parisian nightclub on Ramprakash Road. She'd joined the CSA, become a SWAT grunt and gone on to become SWAT's most celebrated team leader, for which she received a moderate government salary, public anonymity and, lately, a reasonable chance at violent death or injury. She saw the universe in big-picture, and wanted what she did in life to matter. Lately, it had mattered-a great, great deal, in fact. It was the kind of imaginative, morally centred, dedicated passion Sandy had always suspected of existing in the civilian world, and particularly in the Federation, free from dogma, military discipline and a narrow-focused view of the universe. Not everyone had it. But Vanessa did. Vanessa, to Sandy's eyes, was amazingly, incredibly special.

  And of all the people Vanessa had chosen to love as a close friend, she'd chosen her. It blew her away.

  Vanessa got up on weary legs and swaggered slowly over occupied bedrolls in the dark to her empty bedroll beside where Hiraki was still stretching, bent low and grasping one extended ankle, forehead to shin.

  "You sure you'll be able to sleep without your bed of nails?" someone nearby teased him in a low voice. Hiraki fancied himself as something of a modern day samurai, and led a very disciplined, frugal lifestyle by any standards, let alone Tanushan standards.

  "Sleep, vile scum," was Hiraki's reply. Everyone liked Hiraki. But they were glad Vanessa was squad CO.

  Vanessa pulled off her tracksuit and stretched, a sinuous rippling of slim, wiry, muscular limbs. Someone wolf-whistled while she was bent to touch her toes, clad only in underpants and small, cut-off undershirt that left her flat stomach bare.

  "Children," came Zago's deep, murmured reprimand from across the room. "I'm surrounded by immature children, one sleep-out and everyone thinks they're back in school camp." Zago was in his fifties, married with five children, and enjoyed his role as squad "senior." Someone farted. All those still awake collapsed with laughter. An enhanced vision-shift through the dark showed Sandy that even Hiraki was smiling. Vanessa just sat on the floor, head in hand, shaking uncontrollably. It was a release of tension. Sandy had seen it even among supposedly tension-resistant GIs. Straights required far more, she'd discovered.

  "Do GIs fart?" someone thought to ask.

  "I refuse to answer," Sandy replied, "on the grounds that any statement may be self-incriminating."

  "Children," repeated Zago. Vanessa resumed stretching upon her bedroll.

  "Do that bending-over stretch again, LT," came Singh's voice. "I was enjoying that."

  "You won't enjoy me breaking your kneecaps," retorted Rupa Sharma, SWAT Four's only other woman besides Sandy and their beloved CO.

  "You could do it instead, Rupa, I don't mind either way." Some laughter and poking went on across where Sharma was lying. A smacking sound of Sharma swatting someone away.

  "I knew it had to be a mistake trying to sleep in a room full of this many men," she muttered.

  "Where's your sense of adventure, Rupa? This is your chance to be a sexual legend! A shot at the record books!"

  "I'd rather sleep in a farm yard."

  "Whatever gets you going, I guess."

  "Well," said Vanessa, finishing her stretching and climbing tiredly into her sleeping bag, "you guys can do what you want over there, but I warn you, any attempt to penetrate the CO will be met with stern disapproval and extra duty."

  "Arvid," Sandy added over the muffled giggles from around the room, "I'll have you know I own those record books."

  "I'll believe that," Singh said agreeably. "Good night everybody, sleep well, and try not to think of the LT's tight little arse and shapely thighs ..."

  "There's nothing further from my mind, I assure you," said Kuntoro, who was gay.

  "Seriously," Sharma complained, "someone take him out in the cor-

  ridor and shoot him."

  "Can't," said the usually laconic Tsing, "Requisition Order 32b, non-operations-related ammunition requested for the purposes of disposing of irritating squadmates must first be signed for against the authorisation of ..."

  And was cut off by exhausted, uncontrolled laughter-even Sandy found herself grinning. And reflected that most of her old Dark Star team would probably have been asleep by now ... except maybe Tran and Mahud, who alone of her team might have stayed awake talking while the others followed procedure and went to sleep. Again, civilians did things differently. Perhaps, she thought, whatever the situation's difficulties, a few minutes' extra sleep were not as important as the emotional comfort of knowing one was not alone. In Dark Star, they had fought because fighting was the act that defined their existence. In SWAT Four, they fought for their homeworld against those who wished to harm it. It was a cause they all shared, even the macho types like Johnson, whose primary reason for joining was "tough-guy" self image. Even through their casual banter, they reminded each other of the togetherness, and sense of community, that drove them in their task. The togetherness was what they were fighting for. A place, a people and a cause.

  Sandy smiled to herself in the dark, feet up on the table and reading from her screen as the conversation continued in hushed, laughing tones ... feeling that something very significant had slipped profoundly into place. This was what it felt like to belong to something. To be willing to fight, and even to die for it. And for the first time in her life, she knew what she was fighting for-it was messy, it was complicated, it was often exasperating and downright infuriating. But it was something worth protecting, and something that was in evident need of her protection. And after so many years of uncertainty, regret and doubt, this sudden, delightful onset of clarity felt like ... liberation.

  he Grand Congressional Hearings Chamber was as impressive to sit in as the name suggested it ought. Located on the fifth floor of the massive nine-storey Parliament complex, the ceiling extended all the way up to the roof in a grand, arching dome, patterned with tiles and inlays of Islamic inspiration. The lighting setup reminded Sandy of mosques she had ventured into, a circular arrangement of long, suspended lamps that formed a clear circle above the middle of the huge room between ceiling and floor. The lamps themselves were more in the style of European chandeliers, though, as were the wall panelling, and the enormous, wooden altar-like benches at the front of the room.

  Sandy sat at the centre of the long table before the elevated, arching semi-circle of benches with their carved panelling and plush chairs, her laptop set before her as she waited for the huge, nois
y crowd in the chamber seats behind to arrange itself into some kind of orderliness. She estimated seating for perhaps six hundred. Some, she'd been informed by Rani Bannerjee, the President's new senior advisor, were being filled by congressors or senators not presently occupied with other matters. Most were taken by yet more lemmings, members of one or another off-world delegation, along with the many interested Callayan onlookers. Visitors' passes to the Parliament were rare these days, and most journalists had been banned from the room for this occasion, but still, milling behind her this jostling, unsettled crowd ... she caught snatches of conversation, some of it technical, but much of it, as she'd feared, specifically about her.

  "... wish she'd turn around ..." was the gist of many conversations, as eager, curious, wary civilians strained for a look at this most significant of curiosities to descend upon their world of late. She had no intention of turning around. She'd gotten here early, straight from the small VIP flyer pad at the side of the complex, and sat in her required seat specifically in order to get here ahead of the gallery crowd and sit like this with her back to them as they entered. Not that she cared if they saw her face or not-the closed-circuit TV would, and would transmit these proceedings all through the corridors of power. Closed-circuit transmissions ran on fancy embedded encryption that erased themselves at any attempt to copy and disseminate, and did so in ways that could also melt the utilised equipment. She'd studied the software herself, briefly, and had been satisfied. This broadcast would only be seen once, and that only in select offices of power.

  "Nervous?" asked Mahudmita Rafasan from alongside. The President's senior legal advisor was dressed rather conservatively today, in a dark outfit that looked almost as much dress as sari, with silvery trimmings and only a patterned orange shoulder-sash for the obligatory flash of colour. Earrings, bangles and other jewellery were untypically sparse and modest, and her gleaming black hair was bound conveniently short at the back.

  "Wishing I'd sat in on the security checks," was Sandy's only com ment, uplinked to the room's security systems, for what little she could access past the impenetrable barriers that enclosed all the Parliament complex's systems.

  "The, um, detectors and searches in the corridors are quite thorough," Rafasan reassured her, with a familiar nervous fidget at the bangles upon her left wrist. There was a ring there too, on the fourth finger, where a wedding ring might be upon a European. This ring, Rafasan had told her some time before, was a mark of graduation from her law school, some fifty years before ... Rafasan was seventy-five years old, though it was impossible to tell to look at her. She could have been a young thirty, and a very attractive one at that. Not all biotech advances, Sandy reflected, were disdained in Tanusha. It was the kind of hypocrisy in the Federation's anti-biotech stance that the League never failed to point out at every opportunity.

  "Even so," Sandy replied, running her eyes across the lower front bench before her, "I'm never comfortable with so many people at my back." The congressors were all in place and seated, some examining notes, some taking in the scene before them. The second, upper bench held fifteen, the lower one eleven. Elected representatives, seated here in numbers reflecting the numbers of the lower house-seventeen for Union Party, and nine for Progress Party. A two-party system in the lower house, with their preference system and elimination ballots. Only in the proportional representation of the Senate, housed in the second point of the Callayan governmental triangle but a kilometre from here, did the minor parties run amok.

  Security stood at various strategic points about the room, armed and alert. Most were facing the crowd ... white-shirted uniforms with gold badges upon their chests. All members of the gallery were VIPs of a sort, security cleared, sifted, and further checked in the outside hall before entry ... standard procedure these days with or without the presence of controversial, ex-Dark Star GIs. In truth, Sandy reflected, she was less concerned at the possibility of rogue terrorists in the gallery than at the presence of several leading Tanushan journalists of whose presence Rani Bannerjee had also informed her. There might be no legal means to broadcast her image or voice, but there was nothing to stop print or broadcast media from transmitting her words secondhand when she spoke in a public setting.

  Do not, Bannerjee had further counselled her just minutes before, under any circumstances, say anything controversial. Be dull, boring and listless if necessary.

  Exactly what constituted a controversy, Sandy remained unsure. She suspected it rather depended upon who was listening. And on a world like Callay, surely the only way to avoid offending anyone was to say nothing at all. It was all Neiland's problem now. She was surprised at exactly how cool she was about it. She only wished there'd been some way of keeping her gun ... but, of course, she remained technically suspended due to the SIB's investigation, and it would not do to be seen wielding a weapon in direct defiance of that suspension in the Parliament complex itself. Her weapon remained with an Agent Odano, a junior recruit from Investigations who'd been assigned to run this errand, and was presently seated in the gallery some short distance behind. He also had her badge. "Don't throw them to me if there's trouble," Sandy had told him on the flyer ride in. "I'll get to you first, believe me." He'd believed her.

  A bell rang, a clear, rapid chiming. How anachronistic, Sandy thought, watching with interest as the sound emanated from a small, silver bell in front of the chairman. He was seated in the centre of the front row, a man of Arabic appearance, clad in the white robe permissible in Tanushan politics for those politicians who liked to display their cultural heritage instead of settling for the universal blandness of suits and ties. He wore a thick, black beard, which gave Sandy some indication as to his political leanings. Although, she'd been learning in Tanusha not to take anything for granted.

  "The records shall note that the time is ten thirty-five on Central

  Time Monday the fifteenth of March, 2543."

  League time, it occurred to Sandy in idle thought, was tri-monthand-twelve when converted to the universal League calendar-decimals and averages-the general average of League-world years made convenient for the time-dilation of travelling starships and peoples a long, long way from Earth's rotational schedules. It made more sense than Callay's system of cramming a 325-day year into the same twelve Earth months, with months running to twenty-six or twenty-seven days to compensate. But none of the League's months were named after great Roman emperors who had lived more than two thousand years before, and were thus, in Sandy's estimation, rendered quite dull by comparison. Long live inefficiency and pointless complexity. She was certain that the reminder of past eras and histories was far more valuable than any gain in basic numerical efficiency.

  "I," the chairman continued, "Khaled Hassan, declare this special Congressional Hearing open, and the speaker today is one ... Ms. April Cassidy." With emphasis that Sandy thought might be wry sarcasm. A murmur echoed from the clustered gallery behind. Some muted laughter. Tittering, nervous excitement. Rafasan spared her a nervous glance. Sandy sighed. "Ms. Cassidy ... just a procedural thing, could you please make sure you speak directly into the microphone so everyone can hear?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Another tittering murmur from the gallery. She wondered if maybe she'd said the wrong thing, reminding people of her military past ... well, she couldn't help that, calling people in positions of authority "sir" was as unshakeable a habit as breathing. She determined to keep her tone polite and deferential, free from the drill instructor formality that would surely intimidate a crowd such as this, however formal the occasion. She'd never been keen on drill anyhow.

  "Now, Ms. Cassidy ... I understand you have a presentation for us, on behest of the President herself ... in order to demonstrate to us all, I gather, the nature and ... well, importance of your more recent work here on Callay ..." in the slow, pausing, long-winded manner of a professional bureaucrat, "... but first, if you would allow, of course, I would like to ask the freedom as chairman to ask you a few questions ... o
n behalf of my colleagues here, who will of course have their turn, as per the standing orders of this hearing chamber, to ask of you their own questions upon your completion of this ... presentation of yours. Is this sequence of events ... acceptable to you?"

  "Yes, sir, perfectly acceptable."

  More murmuring. And it occurred to her in a flash ... it was her voice. A good voice, to be sure, firm and strong. But high, clear, and unmistakably female. Wow. It amazed her that they were amazed. Just her luck to end up on one of the few worlds left in all human space where the idea of women as fighters still raised some eyebrows. They damn well knew the rest of human space had largely moved on, they simply didn't care, and women themselves were among the loudest objectors. And now this ... not only a GI, but a female one. And blonde. In Tanusha, when a teenage Indian, Arabic or Chinese girl wanted to upset her father, she dyed her hair blonde and wore European-style skirts several sizes too short. Blonde women were the sexually exotic, or, as Vanessa would say with a snort, the archetypal decadent, cultureless European morality vacuum. Not that anyone had noticed any shortage of libidinous activity among the Tanushan population in general of late, but some ethnic stereotypes died harder than others. It didn't seem something that most European Tanushans were trying very hard to fling off. Sandy empathised.

  "Very well, then, Ms. Cassidy ..." Hassan paused for a moment, reading from the screen before him, stroking absently at his ample beard. "... first of all, could I perhaps inquire if "April Cassidy" is in fact your real name? There was some conjecture earlier, among my colleagues ... some said it was only a CSA-given pseudonym."

  Sandy smiled. "April Cassidy is a pseudonym, Mr. Hassan." Her voice echoed clearly through the chamber, projected from invisible speakers with great clarity. "My real name remains protected for now, as do my other personal details."