Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  Sandy nodded. “That’s exactly what they call it. An interactive defence grid.” She’d known adults who’d had trouble understanding it when explained to them. Danya explained it perfectly, just from observation.

  “Anyway,” Danya continued, “Svetlana thought Haral’s idea was great, she was only seven then but all she heard was ‘more food, more good stuff,’ you know? I said no. I tried to tell Haral and some of the other kids he talked to that you don’t fuck around with the security wall. They didn’t listen. Svetlana was so upset we didn’t go with them. She cried. And then, when none of them came back . . .” He looked at Sandy, with eyes that had nothing of “child” in them. “That was the last time she ever really argued with me when I decided something. On big things, anyway.”

  “Haral didn’t mean to be a trap,” Sandy said somberly. “But he was one without knowing it.” Danya nodded. “But we all might be. Danya, I can’t promise anything. But you want Kiril back. You’re usually the most cautious, conservative guy there is, but if you were ever going to do something stupid, it would be for Kiril. Or Svetlana.”

  Danya didn’t reply. But his silence said volumes.

  “But you have options now, besides doing something stupid. I’m doing recon. That’s what I came here to do, and it’s what I’ll keep doing now. I want to find out what happened to all of my team. I want to find out who did it. And I have to follow up on our information on Chancelry. If I’m doing recon on that, I can do recon on Kiril, too.

  “But there’s another option. Chancelry might try to contact you, and promise you Kiril’s life in exchange for betraying me.” He’d thought about it. She could see immediately that he had. “And I think you’d probably do it.” She put a hand on his arm. “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t even be upset. Kiril’s your brother, you’d do anything for him, and I respect that.

  “But think. Chancelry don’t like loose ends. Kiril’s seen the insides of Chancelry by now. They won’t like giving him back to you, wandering on the outside, with that knowledge in his head. They won’t like anyone out here getting the idea in their heads that once Chancelry grabs you, they might let you go.

  “So maybe they’d offer to take you and Svetlana as well. Give you a new life in the corporation. It’s real fancy in there, trust me. Much more comfortable than out here. But you know they like to grab their kids young. Kiril’s the perfect age, he’ll miss you for a while, but young kids are adaptable. He’ll adapt to his new situation, and in a few years he’ll be a corporation kid—that’s no offence to him and how much he loves you, it’s just how kids his age are. But you and Svet . . . you’ll always be street kids. You’ll always be suspicious of them, always remembering your friends out here. Always questioning Chancelry policy when it comes to exterminating troublemakers.”

  Danya just absorbed, unblinking and unshockable. He gave away very little.

  “What do you think the easiest option would be?” Sandy asked. “For a big corporation like Chancelry, with so much at stake? Take a risk on you guys? Or use three bullets and be done with it?”

  Danya thought about it, looking at Svetlana, settling to sleep beneath the covers. Whether she heard any of their low conversation, she gave no sign.

  Then he looked back. “You really are a high designation, aren’t you?” With a faint trace of humour.

  “I’m smart enough to be stupid and sentimental with kids like you,” said Sandy. “I know you don’t trust easily. You’re right not to. And in any other circumstance, I’d tell you to go back to your lives here, and forget about me. But I’m not going to watch you get killed doing something stupid for Kiril. I got you into this, I’ll do what I can to get you out. But you don’t need me to give you any odds on success, because you’re too smart to believe me anyway.”

  Danya nodded. Then looked like he wanted to ask her something, but didn’t know if he should. Sandy waited. “What’s Callay like?”

  “Callay’s very beautiful,” said Sandy. “There’s lots of wilderness, the population isn’t very big and nearly half of them live in Tanusha, so you can go from one of the biggest and most amazing cities in the history of human civilisation, to beautiful wilderness, in just an hour. I like to surf.”

  Danya blinked. “On ocean waves?” Sandy nodded. “I can’t imagine an ocean. How do children live in Tanusha?”

  “Safely. They go to school, they play sports, they learn arts. There’s a lot of community programs. Kids are encouraged to get involved through their schools, not just sit in classrooms. Schools aren’t just used as places to do dull lessons, they’re places where children learn about their society and their place in it. They’re never hungry. I recall one murder a few years ago, an adult killed a child. The whole city was horrified. It was all over the media. Thousands came to the funeral. That’s how rare it is.”

  “There’s no crime in Tanusha?”

  “Oh there’s lots of crime. Crime’s a constant in human societies. But it rarely touches children. Children are protected. Some say they’re too protected, that they’re getting soft.”

  Danya smirked. “Hell of a problem to have.”

  Sandy smiled sadly. “Yeah. Hell of a problem.”

  Danya sat for a moment on her bed, thinking. Wondering if he dared to dream. Sandy felt a lump in her throat, watching him. She wanted to hug him, but respected him too much. He’d resent it, she was sure.

  Finally he nodded. Took a deep breath. “Interesting,” he said. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Danya.”

  Vanessa awoke with a start, a sensation like she was falling. To find that her body was trying to elevate off the bed didn’t help. A strap pulled tight, and she recalled the approach plan went weightless an hour out from station, the habitation cylinder no longer rotating in preparation for dock. Crap, she’d slept longer than she’d meant to.

  She unclipped the straps and swung from the bed, pulling the webbing across behind her to stop the covers floating away. Then she grabbed her prepacked bag and gear, secured to the bunk’s underside, and pushed off for the door. She spent so much time in 3-D tacnet spaces these days, the abrupt loss of 2-D orientation didn’t bother her much. The door whined open and she squeezed through, along the corridor to the neighbouring chambers.

  Here was a tiny galley, as everything was tiny on the Farseeker, an independent, League-registered freighter bound for Antibe Station via several smaller jump points that wouldn’t have been profitable to a larger vessel, and were barely profitable for this one. The galley was larger than she recalled, her brain struggling to comprehend how the room had looked before, only now the wash basin was upside down and her brain kept trying to insist that the ceiling was the floor.

  Rhian was already here, floating comfortably, strapping on a thigh holster, a similar one for a knife already on her forearm. She had her pants down to do it, but Ari wasn’t noticing, holding his own gear bag, looking pale and unhappy.

  “I told you an upload wouldn’t cure space sickness,” Vanessa told him, floating in and flipping to wedge herself between fixed tabletop and floor, so she could stay in one spot while preparing.

  “Your prediction is noted,” Ari grumbled. “Yay you.”

  “How far out are we?”

  “Twenty minutes,” said Rhian, testing the release on her holster, all business. About her floated various other weapons she’d not yet secured. “We’ll have an hour after we dock, no rush.”

  “Fucking dead system even this far out,” said Ari. “You get this close to Callay you get all kinds of transmission traffic, but there’s nothing here.”

  “Enough weapons, Rhi?” Vanessa asked, eyeing her assortment.

  “Barely,” said Rhian. Vanessa hadn’t wanted her to come. Had been privately relieved when she’d come anyway, overruling Vanessa’s protestations, but even so, she was a mum now. Rhian had thought Pyeongwha would be a simple thing, you go and do the job, then you come back, but even that had been harder than she’d thought. Kids grew when you were
n’t there, and missed you, and asked where you were. This time, at the prospect of her going away again, this time for longer, they’d been upset. Rhian had been upset, too. Vanessa had never actually seen Rhian cry before, or look generally miserable, but so far on this journey she’d been both. But under it all was steely determination, because if Sandy was ever in trouble, Rhian would be there, and that was that. One day, she insisted, her kids would understand that, too.

  Sandy wouldn’t, Vanessa was pretty damn sure. Sandy was going to be mad as hell she’d let Rhian come, had been very determined that Rhian wouldn’t come in the initial mission with Han, Weller, Khan and Ogun. Rhian was Sandy’s big success, the one GI who’d transitioned from combat vet to happy motherhood, and Vanessa knew it was more than just love for an old friend that caused Sandy to be protective. Rhian was proof that it could work, that the fate of synthetic humanity wasn’t always bound to be tragic, and Sandy would happily wrap Rhian in cotton wool and forbid her from ever facing danger again, if she could. But that wasn’t up to her, and neither was it up to Vanessa, because ultimately, what Sandy had fought for herself and Rhian to have was freedom. And Rhian, being free, chose to come.

  Vanessa dressed in her own civvies, functional and heavy duty, good for station wear with lots of pockets. Not so many weapons as Rhian, but Rhian had her own ideas of what worked, and was experienced enough at civvie security duty that Vanessa wasn’t about to tell her otherwise.

  Geared up, she returned to the corridor and made her way carefully toward the bridge. She wasn’t as graceful as Rhian up here; Rhian was an experienced spacer. Sometimes she forgot that most of Sandy and Rhian’s early life had been in places like this, ship corridors and cramped quarters, bulkheads, stations, snap-frozen rations. No wonder Sandy loved the outdoors so much.

  Procedures and security were pretty lax on a small freighter, and there was no one to stop her drifting onto the bridge. It had only five stations, chairs stuffed into small spaces amidst a crowd of automation, life support and wrap-around scans. A lot of it required a direct uplink to look at, but Helm’s primary scan was simple enough to read, and showed the station ahead as a small dot moving across Pantala’s wide surface on a fixed trajectory line, surrounded by a clutter of smaller dots. Some of those would be debris, some small vessels, some atmospheric shuttles on ascent or descent. Probably none were starships, not at Antibe Station; they couldn’t get many more than one a day, if that. Not only weren’t the routes economically viable to most, they weren’t safe either. And the corporations didn’t trust big League liners, and only traded with independents these days.

  “Not on a very high orbit, are they?” she volunteered. Scan read them at 320 kilometers altitude.

  “Magnetic field’s a bit weak, sun can get lively,” said Captain Ocha, eyes hidden behind his wrap-around visor. “Safer down lower. Plus less fuel from the surface—they do more up and down traffic these days than side to side.”

  Ocha had a good working relationship with the FSA, and it made him enough money that he could keep his head above water, not always easy for a privateer in these lean, post-war years. Mostly he just gathered intel, and told them what he saw. Sometimes he smuggled FSA operatives or equipment through League space. Privateers weren’t reliable, of course, but Ocha’s daughter had been press-ganged onto a League cruiser in the dying years of the war, forced into Fleet uniform at gunpoint, so desperately short of good spacers the League had been. That cruiser had died in one of the many small exchanges across the contested systems, a cold and lonely death at some forgotten mass point that barely made a dot on the official charts. FSA folks Ari trusted, and there weren’t many of those, said Ocha was no friend of anyone officially League, and New Torah even less.

  “Can we see who their guests are?”

  “Wait five minutes,” said Ocha. “We’re on the wrong side, we’ll make a burn in three to bring us around.”

  Helm brought up a forward image on one screen so Vanessa could see. Antibe Station was a big, round wheel, like stations everywhere. But unlike stations everywhere, this one was massive, a big export hub through which a large portion of the League’s grounded war machine had passed at one time. Now it sat lonely and bloated on Pantala’s horizon, with barely more than a skeleton crew to keep it operational.

  Com was talking to station. Vanessa overheard discussions of cargo and prices. They were transmitting manifests, checking the board as they called it, to see how the prices were moving. Lots of perishables, Vanessa guessed; Pantala didn’t grow much. Most of the population wasn’t rich enough to trade, but the corporations still had money. Luxury items for the suits, while the masses scavenged.

  “Look at this,” said Scan, and put a visual on a screen. It showed a ship, a big steel spine and modular tanks, small habitation circle, no jump engines visible to Vanessa’s less-than-expert eye. The engines were glowing.

  “System runner,” said Ocha. “She’s leaving?”

  “Yeah, heading 258, that’s Anak.”

  “The shipyards?” Vanessa asked. They were out in orbit around the Pantala system’s third planet, where the asteroid belts made good ore bodies for mining.

  “Nothing else out there,” said Ocha. “Big, isn’t she? Acceleration gradient?”

  “Um . . .” said Scan, analysing the runner’s track. “Yeah, she’s loaded. At that thrust she’s maybe forty percent slower than empty; those holds are full.”

  “With what?” Helm wondered. “Anak yards are pretty complete. There’s not much industry around there they’d need.”

  Ocha made a face. “Everything deteriorates, Anak’s a rough orbit, they get micro impacts all the time, they’ll need to replace things.”

  “Great,” Vanessa muttered. “They’re expanding.”

  “Too early to tell,” said Ocha, entering control adjustments for the upcoming burn. “Let’s get a look at this station.” He flipped the shipboard microphone. “Everyone take hold, burn in ten.”

  No one told her to strap in, so Vanessa guessed it wouldn’t be hard, and grabbed a support. Then a rumble, which grew to a gentle roar, and everything tilted. Suddenly “back” was “down,” and she was dangling from the support at a third of a G. She hooked a leg around the support and watched Helm’s screen as Scan’s station visual shifted perspective.

  A minute later the burn ended. The station was passing elliptical, its docking face becoming visible for the first time. A blaze of sunlight momentarily blinded the feed, then a darkening adjustment.

  “What the fuck is that?” said Scan.

  Vanessa could see five ships, locked in amidst the mass of docking supports and heavy duty frameworks about the station rim. Some of those were bigger than the ships at dock, having to support thousands of tonnes of weight at the station’s full one-G. But worth it, from station’s point of view, because there was space on the rim, and very little at the non-rotating hub.

  “That’s . . .” said Ocha, peering at the feed. “That’s a big fat ass on that thing.”

  “Which one?” asked Vanessa.

  “Berth 12. The big one, far side, just coming toward us down below.”

  Vanessa could see it now, and it was tail heavy, even to an untrained eye.

  “Computer says cruiser size, but that’s no cruiser,” said Scan. “I don’t see any cargo; that fucker’s all engines.”

  “Not a civvie,” said Ocha, and Helm muttered something under his breath.

  “It’s a warship?” Vanessa asked. “League Fleet?”

  “Yeah, but nothing line. I’d recognise it.” He was squinting at the picture, a weathered, bearded face, a man who had run this ship all through thirty years of League-Federation war and had seen most things. “That’s a ghostie.”

  “Yeah,” said Scan, reluctantly. “Yeah, the displacement’s all wrong for a cruiser. I mean, you can’t be all engines. You need some midships. That thing’s fast.”

  “Ghostie?” asked Vanessa.

  “Rim recon. Long jump
range, can come in way further out from an anchor mass than most of us, sits out on the rim all silent and watches.”

  “Don’t come into station very often,” Ocha added. “Or not the open traders. Dark facilities mostly, I’ve been doing this all my life, this is oh . . . the fourth I’ve ever seen?”

  “Cool,” said Helm, turning to grin at his fellow crew. “How many Talee you think this guy’s seen?” Skeptical looks came back. “Oh, come on. What else is he doing out this far?”

  “I’ve got a better question,” said Ocha. “Why the hell does New Torah allow a League warship to dock at Pantala? And why would League want to?”

  Outer collar dock was cold. Vanessa huddled in her heavy coat, arms folded as Rhian manned the inner airlock door. Ari looked better for the return of gravity here at dock, but worse again for the deep freeze, his face pale beneath his newly grown black beard.

  A crash from the outer airlock, grapples attaching. Rhian pressed some controls and exchanged words on the mike, watching a vid feed. She’d done this before, which made her the lead on this op. Vanessa was comfortable enough in command—she had led the attack to liberate Nehru Station from Fifth Fleet five years ago, so orbital operations weren’t completely strange to her—but her everyday experience in mundane things like how to operate a collar dock was well below that of Rhian’s. Which left Ari, with his dislike of all things offworld, but probably the most important of the three.

  After some minutes of securing, the outer lock opened, and someone in a station worker’s jumpsuit appeared. Rhian saw the pressures were equalised, and popped the inner doors as well.

  “Who won the Callayan football grand final?” asked the heavy set man in the airlock.

  “Subianto Dragons,” said Vanessa. “Eighty-nine to sixty, pretty disappointing match.”