Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  “Sandy? Have some coffee. You’ll feel better. It always makes me feel better.”

  Sandy took a deep breath and forced the deadly focus down. Normal vision restored, slowly, and there was Svetlana before her, offering her the mug. Trying to help the only way she knew how, because small luxuries like coffee were heaven in Svetlana’s world, and one learned to be happy with what one had, however fleetingly.

  Sandy sighed. Accepted the coffee with one hand, and ruffled Svetlana’s hair with the other. On the portable screen, the flyer lifted off the rooftop and climbed quickly for altitude.

  “So what’s your mission now?” Duage asked. “Now that one of your main guys has betrayed you?”

  “That depends,” said Sandy. “You’re the one who came here with this portable, looking for information. It seems to me that you’re the one who’s planning something.”

  The basement was under a standard block of dusty apartments, guarded by a guy in a plain coat that covered an assault rifle. Duage led the way downstairs beneath flickering fluoro lights, to another secure door with big locks, guarded by two more armed men, playing cards.

  The door was opened, and down some more stairs, then into the building basement, a big concrete space with generators and overhead pipes. Everything looked almost pre-technological to Sandy; this part of Droze had sprung up around the corporations without planning permission in the early days of colonisation. League law couldn’t prevent the excess people from coming, so the corporations had to accept them and let them do their thing. Rimtown and districts like it were like the old shanty towns she’d read about in books, slums of poor workers springing up in the hope of profit from proximity to the wealthy. They’d built cheaply, and it showed.

  Tied and chained securely to steel pipes against the wall was a woman. A GI, female, brown skinned. She sat in a chair, hands locked behind her with cuffs, aside from all the other restraints. Two armed men got to their feet at the party’s arrival.

  “They missed one in the evac,” said Duage to Sandy, indicating the GI. “She’s drugged. Someone shot out a piece of her skull, but she survived. Could have been you.”

  “Could have been me,” Sandy agreed. She’d been so cross-eyed at the time she might certainly have missed a clean shot.

  She walked to the GI. Behind her, Danya, Svetlana and Gunter stood with Duage and watched. The GI had no gag in her mouth. Her head had been roughly bandaged, a small bloody patch on the cloth, bound over very short hair. Her eyes were closed.

  Sandy squatted in front of her. The GI’s eyes opened. Pretty, as were they all. Her gaze seemed well focused, so the drugs weren’t too serious. Targetted drugs repressed muscles, not brain function, but some did both, just to be safe.

  “What’s your name?” Sandy asked. No reply. Not even the flicker of a response in those eyes. “Do you have a name? Are you Chancelry Corporation? What’s your designation?”

  No reply to any question. And no prospect of getting one.

  Sandy looked at Duage. “Got a cord?”

  “Hey now,” said Duage, “she’s our prisoner, I’d rather you didn’t do anything with her I can’t see.”

  “Well you can torture her all you like, she won’t talk. We suppress pain, and we heal more easily. If you want to find out what she knows, you’ll need another GI to do it, one who’s a higher designation than she is.”

  Duage thought about it. Sandy wasn’t sure what to make of him yet. He had no military background, that was clear. But he seemed pretty smart. Whether that assessment would change once she figured what he was up to, time would tell.

  Duage pulled a cord and booster unit from a pocket, and tossed them to her. One of the guards brought her a chair. Sandy sat alongside the prisoner, inserted the cord into the booster, then the back of her own head. The prisoner saw what she was doing and moved her head evasively, but Sandy smacked it back against the pipe she was secured to, and plugged in.

  Big barrier elements. A huge, complex structure in the empty 3-D neutral space created by the booster. Better to use the neutral space than hack a GI directly. She established her entry point, made sure she was back-secured, then began. The GI’s construct resisted, but Sandy knew these League patterns too well, and soon the feedback responses were allowing her automatics to construct new offensive codes, which she tried in turn to create new feedback . . . the loop accelerated until outer elements began collapsing, and from there it all fell pretty fast. A hard job for her by GI standards, but in real-time outside, it probably only took five seconds.

  The construct still resisted, a mass of branching pathways that glowed and pulsed, looking much like a real brain in full complexity. Sandy knew from nasty personal experience that entire constructs could take long hours in real world time to break down entirely. That was okay, her needs were more limited.

  A blur of visuals as she shot down various paths and junctions, it ought to be right about . . . here. Minor barriers resisted and were killed, then she found multiple matching keys to get visual functions unlocked, and . . .

  Visual memory. You couldn’t actually hack a GI’s memory any more than you could a regular person’s. Brains worked in mysterious and complicated ways; memories weren’t stored as data files to be pulled out and reinserted, they were meshed into a million other things that all overlapped and interconnected in ways that made it impossible to unravel even if you could access it, which usually you couldn’t. But GIs, and an increasing number of augmented regular humans in Tanusha, had memory attachments—cybernetic memory, it was often called, though the latest advances made that clunky old terminology sound quaint.

  Memory attachments lightened the processing load by duplicating fuzzy “real” memory in data files, like making a copy and storing the backup. It made recall more precise, whether of people’s names, faces, passcodes, or anything else a person might want or need to remember as a matter of urgency. Soldiers used them to recall procedures, regulations, technical skills learned once but rarely practised since. Instant and precise recall. And, in some very popular Tanushan thriller vids based on true stories, occasionally subject to outside manipulation and hacking, with all kinds of hair-raising results.

  Sandy was only looking for images. Lower designation GIs stored them as a matter of automated function, like a camera set to record automatically whenever something walked in front of it. Here she found images, and flashed through them rapidly—corridors, rooms, meals. Bathrooms, showers, sex. Beds. Combat sims, more corridors, people. People.

  Sandy reset the search function and went after faces. Lots of them flashed by. Her own memory implants had all of Chancelry’s most senior known faces, and these matched with none of them. This GI didn’t mix with the rich and powerful, no surprises there. But there were lists of technicians Mustafa had provided them with, ISO lists of minor functionaries in various corporations. If she could find a few of them, maybe there were some elements of her old plan that could be resurrected . . .

  She paused on an image of a mess hall. The image played, a few seconds, erratic time lapse, but the purpose of cybernetic memory images was to store visual information in 3-D, not to accurately recall events in sequences. Here was a girl, seated amongst the others at chairs and benches. Dark straight hair cut short, blue eyes. A GI amongst GIs, yet all alone as GIs rarely chose to be. And then she recognised her.

  Wow.

  She copied the data and withdrew fast . . . and found herself blinking in the dull fluorescent of the basement. Disconnected the cord and double checked images on internal visual from her own memory implants . . . definitely her. Definitely. So what to do about it?

  The prisoner was staring at her. “Why her?” she asked, voice hoarse. As though she were having difficulty speaking.

  Sandy frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “That one. Why her?”

  “The girl alone in the mess hall. She’s a Chancelry Corporation GI, isn’t she?” There was no reply, but this time, a flicker of response. “Do you know
her?”

  The GI’s mouth worked. Nothing came out. In her eyes was something new. Confusion. Sandy felt as though the room temperature had abruptly dropped ten degrees.

  “Oh dear God,” she muttered.

  “What’s going on?” Duage wondered. Then, “Hey kid, best you stay back from there.”

  But Danya came to Sandy’s side anyway, peering at the prisoner. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong with her,” Sandy said quietly. “She’s exactly how they made her. Her neural construct patterns are strange. I’d have to spend hours looking at them and I’m not a neurologist, but they just look odd.”

  “What did she mean ‘why her’?”

  “She knows another GI in Chancelry, I pulled an image of her off the memory implants. I don’t know her name, but she had a good friend who was sent to Tanusha on a mission some months back. His name was Eduardo.”

  The GI was staring at her.

  Sandy leaned close. “You knew him, didn’t you? He said this girl was his best friend. He loved her. I think he only went to Tanusha because his bosses said they’d hurt her if he didn’t. He’s dead now, you know that? His killswitch activated. They killed him, your bosses. I tried to save him.”

  The prisoner closed her eyes.

  Sandy stood up. “Well, we’ve got something to go on, now. That is, if the Home Guard actually want to do something big for a change?”

  Duage drove them through the night time streets, bouncing on rough roads, a careful eye out for activity. Their path took them through two other Home Guard sectors, some of which might not take kindly to Rimtown Home Guard passing through their patch unannounced. But if they were going to do this quietly, there was no other choice.

  They pulled down a side street several blocks from the neutral zone, this was a wealthier area, streets buzzing with light and people, and quite a bit of traffic. Duage drove the van to an underground car park, queuing behind several others at the entrance, all checked by heavily armed guards at the entrance. Being Home Guard, they were waved through. Then spiralling down into the parking space below, until Duage found an empty level and pulled the van into a park.

  The passengers clambered out—Duage, Modeg and a Home Guard man named Zhao, plus Gunter, Sandy, and their two scouts, Danya and Svetlana. When Danya had first insisted they go, Sandy had refused. Then Danya told her about the salvage riches in the neutral zone near the barrier, the wreckage of technology that still lay unattended in or beneath many of the buildings. Most folks left it alone, rightfully fearful of the perimeter bots that prowled the zone, but a few times, when they’d been desperate, Danya and Svetlana had come here for a fast but dangerous score, as had other street kids. Street kids networked, and it hadn’t taken Sandy many questions of the Home Guard to discover that the kids knew the neutral zone far better than they did, either first hand or from others. Sandy still didn’t like it, but if this was going to work, it had to be done.

  They rattled up a service stairwell until they reached a corridor along the ground floor of the apartment building above. Danya and Svetlana led the way, their usual drab, dark clothes serving the purpose of a night recce well enough, plus the dark woolen caps pulled over their heads. Sandy followed, rifle slung under her coat, a borrowed pistol in her pocket, a black cap hiding blonde hair. She’d have been happier with a second pistol, not to mention sensible webbing to secure the rifle to her back, hold grenades, and a headset for sensor enhancement plus rear vision, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Several passersby gave them odd looks in passing, four bad-news adults led by two kids.

  The corridor emerged at the building’s rear, then along a narrow walk against the property wall. Someone had knocked a hole in that wall, for access Sandy supposed, and they moved into a rear garden, past a long disused swimming pool that hadn’t seen water in years, then up stairs to the next building through-corridor.

  “It’s all apartment buildings all along here,” Danya explained as they walked. “It used to be real expensive before the crash. It used to be right next to Chancelry’s main zone.”

  “Still is,” said Duage from behind Sandy. “Just now there’s a wall in the way.”

  “The apartments up close to the wall are still really nice,” Svetlana added. “Some folks still try to live in them from time to time. But the bots get them. The corporations don’t like anyone living too close.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” said Modeg. His coat was longest, concealing what would be a high caliber sniper rifle, once the barrel was attached.

  They exited through the building’s front lobby, occupied by several homeless folks heating some food on a cooker. One of them extended a hand at the passing group, dirty and bearded beneath an old blanket.

  “So many apartments,” Sandy observed as they trotted down stairs onto the next cross street, “but there’s still homeless people.”

  “This here is Decision Street,” Danya explained, pointing up and down. Further up were lights and people gathered around a night market. Several street vendors did a brisk trade despite the deepening cold. At the far corner, loud music thumped. “They call it that ’cause if you live here, you’ve got a decision to make. Live here, and pay high prices, and be safe. Or try your luck a bit further down and live for free, and risk the bots.”

  Danya led them along a few buildings, then up a side lane. They had to clear the gate first, and Sandy would have given the kids a boost, but they scrambled over with the dexterity of urban bunbuns. The lane got dark very quickly, though, away from the street lights.

  “Broken glass on the right,” Sandy alerted them, vision fading to ultra-v. The kids walked left, peering to see.

  Svetlana turned to give her a grin. “I wish I could see that!”

  I wish you could too, Sandy thought, wishing once more she could have left them in safety. Or as close as Droze got to safety, for street kids.

  Ahead they had to climb a genuine wall, and this time Sandy demonstrated with hand signals that she had a better way for them than climbing a neighbouring drain pipe. With Danya’s foot in her hand, she just had to extend her arm for him to grab the top and clamber over. Svetlana followed, then Sandy jumped up herself and helped pull Duage, Zhao and Modeg over. Gunter jumped himself, bringing up the rear, and made his own sign to his mouth, warning her that it was no longer safe to talk.

  Sandy didn’t need to tell the kids that; they were reverting to their own system of hand signals, manoeuvering close to a wall, then pausing beneath a broken window. Danya gave Svetlana a boost up, and she wriggled in and disappeared. A moment later came two taps on a wall, and Danya followed. The window wasn’t big, and Sandy realised that there was a good chance kids were better at this than adults—fitting through small spaces and making less noise. But her desire for them to be elsewhere didn’t come from doubts about their ability.

  In fact, their hand signals as they crept through an abandoned downstairs laundromat were remarkably close to the military language she’d known forever, save for a few intriguing variations. Pausing to look back from a corridor, she made a few of her own signals to them, and was instantly understood.

  There were no lights in these buildings at all, and the central corridors were so dark the kids must have been nearly blind . . . but the way was straight and predictable, and they walked fast enough with fingertips trailing along the walls. And as they neared the front lobby, things brightened fast. There was a lot of city light outside, coming from somewhere ahead. That was Chancelry Quarter, on the other side of the barrier, where buildings loomed tall and life was good.

  The kids ducked left instead of moving through the lobby, and Sandy saw its windows were shattered and its walls peppered with shrapnel marks. Whether it was recent or crash-damage, she couldn’t tell.

  Danya led them up stairs to the third story, then indicated they should wait in the corridor outside an apartment. Sandy was having none of it and followed him in. Within was a regular apartment, stripped
of everything valuable. A rope was tied firmly to a kitchen fitting beneath the sink. Another slim line, like fishing line, made a connection from the apartment balcony to the neighbouring building. Two lines, Sandy saw, like a little pulley system. Danya set about securing the rope end to the pulley . . . it would take the rope across to the other side. Leaving the rope there permanently would show up on some bot’s scan, but fishing line would probably not. And where the hell did they get fishing line on Droze? With no nearby oceans or fish?

  Sandy indicated a negative to Danya. He frowned at her, and pointed across to the neighbouring building. Walking streets was too dangerous, obviously—they were easy to monitor, and even if you didn’t die immediately, the monitors would know you were there. Sandy nodded her understanding, then pointed to herself, pointed to him, and mimed a throw to the neighbouring building. Danya looked at her as though she was nuts.

  Svetlana came into the room with a questioning expression. Sandy repeated her throwing mime. Svetlana jumped up and down with enthusiasm, and pointed to herself. Sandy grinned. Danya stepped forward sternly to indicate that however nuts, he’d go first. Svetlana made a face at him.

  It wasn’t a long throw, just four meters, but further than a kid could jump with no run-up. Sandy lobbed Danya neatly over the opposing balcony rail, then did the same for Svetlana. Then she jumped herself and left Gunter to deal with the other straights.

  This time it was down to the basement, Sandy now insisting on leading the way, pistol in hand, checking back on Danya for instructions. In the basement there was no light at all. Danya pulled a flashlight and led past dead pumps and heaters to a service room. Inside, Sandy found a hole in the wall, leading to a service tunnel for power and com cables. Within was enough space for a kid to crawl comfortably, and an adult uncomfortably.

  Sandy definitely went first this time, beneath the opposing road. Surely Chancelry knew about these access tunnels, and would guard or booby-trap them. But then, the corporations had never been interested in the population beyond their walls, had ignored it and been disinterested in their doings. Did they even have detailed planning schematics of the non-corporate city beyond their walls? No one here had had to gain planning approval before building anything.