Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  “That’s great, Ari,” said Vanessa, staring at her display.

  Suddenly it appeared, jump entry, a massive wave of energy dangerously close to the planet. Alarms wailed, automated bridge systems putting the station into emergency modes. Ships weren’t supposed to come in this fast, this close to planet. Normally an arrival would jump into the outer system and coast in over several days.

  “He’s carrying . . .” Ari did some fast calculations, “. . . point zero six L, God damn that’s fast.” Trajectory lines calculated, adjusting for the curve of planetary gravity . . . missing the planet’s atmosphere, but not by much.

  “Can he make it?” Vanessa asked, heart hammering as she tried to read the frantic scroll of data across the feed. “Is he short?”

  The data wave hit them now, just behind the initial light wave . . . “This is Captain Reichardt of Federation warship Mekong. This is an emergency manoeuver! All vessels stay clear, this is an emergency manoeuver, all vessels stay clear . . . !” And repeated, over and over.

  From navcomp’s seat, Ari’s eyes were wide, calculating furiously. “I think he’s short! Fuck it, I think he’s short!”

  “What about weapons V?” Rhian pressed.

  “No he’s six percent of light speed, weapons V won’t make a damn bit of difference . . .”

  “Oh, God,” said Vanessa, hands to her face. “Oh, God, what can we do?” Ari’s intercept line was showing Mekong definitely short, one minute and thirteen seconds so. As soon as the ghostie had launched, it would manoeuver and jump, and possibly kill itself doing it so close to the planet, but that was no comfort for anyone on Droze. The mathematics of trajectories in space were pure and simple: Reichardt had carried as much velocity from the energy of jump as physically possible, but still it was not enough. Jump speeds were a function of jump engines; burning the regular mains at full power would make no observable difference now. “Get me that damn channel to the ship again!”

  “He won’t answer,” Rhian said quietly.

  “I don’t care, we have to try!”

  “New arrival!” Ari shouted, as something else flashed on the nav screen. A big surge of energy, a unique signature. “He’s close, real fucking close!”

  Navcomp didn’t recognise the signature, nor the data wave that followed. Because there was no data wave.

  “He’s heading straight for the ghostie, shallow approach, projected V . . . seventeen percent!”

  “Fuck me,” Rhian breathed. Rhian had spent a lot of time on ships. “We can’t do that. That’s Talee.”

  Vanessa turned to stare at Cai. Cai sat at the auxillary post, staring intently, unspeaking. Navcomp was giving them strange readings, trying to make sense of an alien ship jumping into close planetary proximity at a fraction of light speed that should have turned them all to mush.

  “What the hell?” Ari muttered. “I think . . . I think he’s fired? I can’t tell, but it looks like the signal’s fracturing, he’s on intercept and . . .”

  “Antibe Station, Antibe Station, this is Mekong!” came Reichardt’s voice on coms. “What the fuck is that?”

  “Mekong, this is Antibe Station!” Vanessa called back. “New contact not hostile, not hostile!”

  She had no idea if it was true, but it was the only chance they had.

  “Intercept in ten!” Ari called. “Five! Mark!” The alien trajectory skimmed the atmosphere, tangentially. Dear God, if he actually hit the atmosphere at that speed . . .

  “What happened?” Vanessa asked. “Where’s the target?”

  “Navcomp’s not sure,” said Ari, sifting furiously through incoming data from multiple satellites. “Hang on just a minute, he might have manoeuvered.”

  There was a long, deathly silent pause.

  Then, “Antibe Station this is Mekong. We read that ship as dead, there’s a big reentry cloud just short of projected line. No other reading available—he’s gone.”

  There followed a huge surge of energy, a ship jumping. No one had to ask whose. For a moment, they all just sat and stared at the screens, dumbly.

  Vanessa’s com crackled. “Uh . . . Antibe Station, this is Mekong.” Captain Reichardt’s voice, an understated Texan drawl, warped by massive velocity shift in the light wave. “Was that thing what I think it was?”

  A Talee ship had just killed a human ship. Even in the relief that she felt, and her utter disdain for the lives just lost, Vanessa could feel the enormity of what they’d just witnessed. And furthermore . . . what the hell was so important down in Droze that the Talee would violate all established norms of their interaction with humanity to protect it?

  She took a deep breath. “Antibe Station to Mekong. Good shot, Captain. Congratulations on a first class piece of manoeuvering.”

  A pause from Reichardt. “Yeah, copy that, Antibe Station.” Reichardt was not a politically stupid man. He’d understand why this should not be talked about. “Now pardon us while we slow down before we hit something tiny and die.”

  “Well, shit,” Ari remarked. “Talk about first contact.”

  Inside Chancelry Quarter, it was a rout. Sandy kept to the inside of buildings, then running on rooftops, then crashing through windows to run through hallways and open plan offices. It was early morning now, all streets deserted of civilians in the pale yellow glow. There were security vehicles and domestic police, and some AMAPS and tanks, but without the coordination and overlapping capabilities of the outer defences. Tacnet identified targets and eliminated them, mini-missiles whizzing along streets and turning corners, setting streets aflame as tank ammunition detonated, shattering every window within a hundred meters.

  Police and domestic security had position on rooftops, but wasn’t prepared for GIs running through the center of buildings, then leaping across roads to neighbouring buildings, without needing the roof or the ground floor. From within buildings, GIs paused to shoot anyone on a rooftop with a head raised high enough, and vehicle reinforcements rushing along streets ahead were missile-struck with terrible results, bodies strewn across the road. Sandy had barely progressed three blocks into Chancelry Quarter and already she could see the defensive coordination breaking down.

  She paused at the edge of another office building, shot down a UAV trying to move along the street beyond, fast scanned the skyline for defences and saw three soldiers two hundred meters away and a bit below, trying to set up a defensive position on a rooftop. Three quick shots dropped all of them, and with a mental signal to her armour, she amped leg myomer to maximum and leaped across the thirty-meter space to the opposing glass office wall, and smashed through. Tim followed, moving fast down the next hallway, bashing through doors that got in the way, not taking any fire from adjoining buildings. Tacnet showed their strength at ninety. They’d lost about forty on the way through, though some wounded remained behind with a few others to care for them. Chancelry Quarter had maybe fifty thousand inhabitants, but by appearances, they’d become very reliant on bots and heavy weapons around the external perimeter. Bots were strictly not allowed inside the safe zone; no one trusted dumb AI with that much firepower around civvies. Opposition here was all human, and simply not trained for the task, whatever their weapons.

  At the far side of this building she paused again. There were civvies running on the streets below, some with weapons, others just panicked. The street was all shops, cafes and foyers to apartment buildings, like any middle class urban neighbourhood. Directly ahead, just a block away, was Chancelry main HQ, a series of fifteen twenty-story glass buildings, like modern office complexes anywhere.

  A scan of the skyline showed several more rooftop positions, some new UAVs, some vehicles on roads below, the beginnings of roadblocks. They didn’t realise they couldn’t defend in the open against GIs. Sandy took a knee, Tim taking position beside her, and opened fire until everything hittable within weapons range was either dead, destroyed or behind cover. A human sniper could take ten seconds or longer to acquire a new target at over a kilometer—she t
ook barely one, Tim about three. Other GIs were moving through neighbouring buildings, also firing, forcing everyone Sandy had no line of sight on to take cover also. Grenades hit nearby armoured vehicles on the roads; missiles destroyed more distant ones. Return fire was sporadic, perhaps reluctant to use heavy weapons in civvie zones, and shell shocked, because everything exposed was getting killed before they could use it.

  Sandy thought she might need some cover approaching the HQ, so she leaped onto the opposing apartment rooftop, a twenty-meter drop, then jumped the remaining twenty meters to the road itself. A few civilians were cowering behind benches, public transport stops, behind plant holders. Sandy ignored them and took off running up the road. She paused at an intersection, but it was already occupied by several GIs who waved her through, and she raced on.

  At the next corner, she peered around and found an odd-angled intersection, public transport rail across the road, and a hulking great hovertank guarding the main doors to the HQ building. She stepped back, tacnet fixing the tank’s location now that she had a fix, and locked on her last missile. Fired, the missile shooting out and turning abruptly left around the corner. The tank blew up. God knew what use they thought it could be against modern missile tech.

  The blast knocked over a nearby AMAPS, another shredded the corner cafe beside her with chain guns. Sandy waited until it paused, then fired a grenade through shattered windows that struck the AMAPS’s nose and blew it through a wall. More longer range fire engaged targets further along the HQ perimeter, and Sandy dashed toward the HQ entrance, accelerating into long, flying bounds like a triple jumper. She crossed fifty meters in five progressively lengthening strides, and crashed through the front doors at eighty kph, sliding across the lobby amidst a tangle of metal door frames, prepared to shoot any defenders. But there were none.

  Others followed her in at similar speed and she was off, sprinting along wide, polished hallways. The building looked deserted. Sprinting down shiny, empty hallways in dusty, explosive-scorched armour was surreal. Tacnet abruptly illuminated a central courtyard between HQ buildings as one GI acquired a visual on it—there were armoured vehicles there, and soldiers, frantically redeploying weapons that had been trained on the other several buildings ahead. Sandy didn’t need to say anything—she just illuminated those buildings as “friendly,” and the forces around them as “enemy,” and watched the shooting start.

  She crashed out through a window and found cover along the side of the big garden courtyard where a sunken path went around the landscaping, as soldiers ahead scattered, fire pouring in from newly arrived GIs. Vehicles and weapons exploded; several soldiers were running for cover ahead of Sandy, who shot them as she came. Now she had a crossfire going, ran out of ammunition and pulled her pistol rather than waste time reloading, shooting left-handed as soldiers who weren’t dead fell flat and pretended they were.

  The building ahead was a mess, windows smashed from incoming fire, smoke billowing from many floors, countered by a spray of automated fire retardant. Sandy reloaded, dashed in a window, shot someone point blank who tried to shoot her from a corridor, then slid out into that corridor with rifle and pistol blazing in both directions simultaneously, felling the assault team waiting there and putting a grenade into a wall for good measure, spraying others with shrapnel. More shooting, as some of them had armour to survive the initial shots, and then others were falling to her teammates crashing in from the courtyard behind, a flurry of point blank shooting and then just bodies, sprawled on the ground as GIs rushed over them like a wave and kept going.

  “GIs!” Sandy yelled ahead, moving at a fast, ready crouch. This corridor too was already shot to hell, bodies on the floor that had been there a while now, blast marks from grenades. “GIs, we’re friendly!”

  “GIs!” came a reply around the corner, and a hand waved. Sandy rounded the corner, and found three, crouched in little more than tracksuits, two of them bloody, armed with rifles. Clearly GIs, and somewhat amazed to see them.

  “You came!” said one of them, with a lower-des appreciation of obvious things.

  “How many of you?” Sandy asked as others rushed past, heading around the perimeter to clear the other Chancelry soldiers attempting to retake their HQ from the rebels.

  “Isn’t it easier if we just integrate tacnets?” one replied.

  Sandy blinked. “Of course! Where’s your link?”

  She found it quickly on the local network, and it let her in without query . . . codes matched and suddenly her tacnet and theirs began to merge. Abruptly the space in her head expanded, and she could see dozens of new markers. Friendlies, rebels who had fought for their freedom, and now occupied this central cluster of main HQ buildings, holding them off against concerted Chancelry efforts to take them back.

  “They transferred command functions,” said one of the GIs, apologetically. “We tried to shut it down so you wouldn’t have to fight through that perimeter, but you can’t shut it down by just destroying one post. It transferred to somewhere remote and we can’t find it.”

  “Never mind,” said Sandy. “All their main corporate functions are still routed from here, and we’ve got them now. They can’t shift their mainframes. Chancelry belongs to us now.”

  Head offices for mega corporations were usually found on the highest floor, but Chancelry’s central office was deep underground, beneath the basement complex. To get to it, Sandy descended stairs as the lift was not working, past multiple security barriers that GIs had blasted open with high explosive, and finally down a ferrocrete reinforced corridor that provided the chamber’s only entrance or exit.

  Within, it was like the Intel briefing room at the Grand Council building, completely shielded. There was no accessing the mainframe here from outside—not by wire, nor by wireless. Lethal defences at each guardpost should have killed the attackers, but Rishi had hacked enough internal systems to alert them. Slow progress had finally forced a way inside.

  When Sandy arrived, Rishi and several others were seated by the long table, working at the exposed mainframe behind a removed wall panel. Rishi was sweaty and dusty, as were they all, barely fitting in the leather seat in her armour. Sandy wanted to hug her, or pat her shoulder, or exchange something meaningful, but Rishi only acknowledged her with a nod. She seemed entranced at something, her eyes vacant.

  Sandy noticed the booster on the table and uplinked to the local network . . . in a flash she was in, and it was a monster. Cyberspace on a grand scale, harbouring perhaps the biggest set of barriers she’d ever seen in her life. This construct was completely isolated, an autistic entity. It talked to nothing and no one, and could only be accessed by the highest clearance. Even then, Sandy didn’t doubt that for all the microsecond computing power in the galaxy these days, it would take many minutes to process entry.

  Within the network, she could hear the GIs talking to each other, quite calmly, trying to find a way in. Several of them seemed quite expert. No doubt these were their best, brought downstairs for the purpose.

  “Why didn’t they fry the mainframe?” Sandy wondered.

  “Maybe they can’t,” said a GI, distractedly. “Who would they trust to carry whatever’s behind these barriers on a portable?”

  And if there had been a contingency plan, Sandy thought, against most threats they would have had hours. Mostly they were scared of other corporations, and spies. Chancelry was heavily armed enough to resist those threats, and corporations had no interest in attacking each other so vigorously as to capture each other’s HQs. No, the level of inter-corporate warfare on Pantala had never reached anything like that intensity; they all ultimately relied upon each other to maintain the infrastructure that allowed them to survive on this barren world.

  And if the League or Federation had attacked, they’d have had lots of warning. Days of ships arriving in orbit, then big attack formations that took many hours to assemble. They’d never expected their own GIs to attack them. They weren’t set up for it. It hadn’t bee
n thinkable. Because . . .

  “Rishi,” Sandy said. Rishi looked at her. “Why didn’t they use the killswitches?”

  “There’s a channel,” said Rishi. “We were never supposed to turn it off. We weren’t able to, most of the time. They said we’d be in trouble if we tried. But Eduardo found out a way to turn it off, him and Anya, but make it look like it was still on. A few of us knew how to do it. I showed the others when I showed them what you showed me, the medical research building. We agreed that must be how they’d use the killswitch, so we used Eduardo’s trick before we started shooting.”

  “They didn’t have an active response frequency?” Those would be built into a GI’s com uplinks, and would answer an active signal whether the GI wanted it to or not.

  “Maybe,” said Rishi. “We killed them so fast they didn’t get a chance to use it. Com centers first, Beta building, fourth floor. Blew it to bits.”

  On her way upstairs, the pushback started.

  “Ms Kresnov,” said Ms Kaif of Heldig Corporation, very coldly. “The New Torah Council Board has been in emergency session. You have ten minutes to vacate Chancelry HQ and leave Droze completely, or we will use full firepower upon those Headquarters.”

  “And I will reply in kind,” said Sandy, climbing stairs. “We’ve captured several artillery units within grounds perimeters, we are targeting your own Headquarters as I speak.”

  “And we have the anti-missile defences to neutralise the few offensive weapons you have present,” Kaif replied. “You have nothing like the defences to withstand ours.”

  “Ms Kaif,” said Sandy, emerging into the lower floor office, and then to the hallway beyond, “if you’ll look skyward, you’ll notice that there is currently a Federation carrier positioning to orbit about this planet. Federation forces also control Antibe Station. Be assured that any act of aggression upon me will bring down the full weight of Federation firepower upon your heads.”