Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield

by Joel Shepherd

  On the Armoured Mobile LOng RAnge system's back was a huge launcher and enough missiles to level city blocks. The legs would let it operate in places wheels couldn't go—not fast, but better for concealment and camouflage. Here in Chancelry they'd captured six. The other corporations between them had about fifty. If it came to an artillery contest, most of Chancelry's rounds would not survive the opposing missile defences, and would then be destroyed by counter battery fire, along with most of the Chancelry complex.

  Sandy smashed a couple of final defensive barriers, hard enough to give tacnet a wobble…visual portions crashed, then rebooted from 3D static, confused and struggling.

  “Sandy!” Kiet shouted at her. “Leave it alone, I have it under control!”

  “Are you deploying?” She could see it now, portions of tacnet the barriers had hidden. GIs, Kiet's troops, moving fast toward the crash site. And sideways, toward the Dhamsel Corporation border.

  The secure network had once gained some connectivity with surrounding corporate systems, not a big presence, mostly through the overarching intranet that linked the neutral spaces between corporate entities. Now it was all shut down, the surrounding corporations must have physically cut the intranet, and with it, nearly a week's work.

  “Rishi, talk to me,” Sandy demanded, holding Kiril close to her side as vehicles crashed and hummed into life around her. “Rishi, if you've entrusted a major operation to Kiet then you're about to get into trouble, he's not up to it.”

  “Sandy, we got a response from some Heldig GIs,” came Rishi's voice, terse, preoccupied. “They wanted out, they attempted escape, but someone just shot them down, we don't know who.”

  If she weren't sliding into combat mode, Sandy might have sworn. They weren't supposed to make a move without her, she'd thought they were agreed on that. But with this rabble of recently freed GIs, it wasn't always clear who was in charge. Logic said her, as the highest designation and unchallenged, most experienced and lethal combatant. But Kiet hadn't agreed with her methodology on freeing the other corporations’ GIs, and on his side were the majority. Rishi's GIs, the former Chancelry experimentals, were split between the high designations, who wanted to help but had no sense of how, and the lower designations, whom no one trusted.

  “That's wonderful,” she said. “Would you like my help, or do you want to wait until everyone starts dying?”

  “You're not the only one with combat command experience,” Kiet retorted.

  “In case you've forgotten,” she said, “I'm the only one who Captain Reichardt will listen to. And without the threat of an orbital strike, and mutually assured destruction, we'd have all been dead a week ago.”

  “We are not going to allow some Feddie squish to veto our freedom!” Kiet snapped. “Now leave us alone, we're busy!”

  The link disconnected—a block, because tacnet never truly disconnected. He'd fucking blocked her.

  “Kiril, let's go,” she said, and grabbed the boy up.

  “But I wanna stay!”

  “Tough.”

  She took off running, rifle in one hand so it didn't bounce, Kiril in the other. The latter burden made her somewhat slower than she'd have liked, but as the ferrocrete stretched toward the underground tunnel, she adjusted her steps to short leaps, skipping out to five normal steps, then eight, then ten at a time. It made her fast, but she had to watch Kiril's head on the ceiling, and keep the trajectory low so he wouldn't bounce painfully with each impact.

  The huge steel elevator doors were already opening on her uplink signal, and she got inside and signalled the lift up. It went, slowly, as Sandy scanned tacnet for the nearest unoccupied armour suit.

  “That was fun,” Kiril announced of his ride, rubbing a bruised backside. “Where are we going?”

  “To synthetic assembly,” said Sandy, checking her rifle and wishing she were already armoured…but walking around in armour for a week wasn't practical, any armour needed downtime maintenance, they had it on a roster system that left most of them unarmoured much of the time.

  “Where?”

  “The GI factory,” Sandy explained, slotting the grenade mag, chambering a round.

  “Why are we going there?”

  “Because if someone drops artillery on us, that will be the safest place.”

  “But it's not deeper underground than the other basements,” Kiril said doubtfully. “I looked at it on my glasses, and I think the other basements are safer.”

  Six years old or not, there was no coddling Kiril about nasty possibilities. Which was something of a relief, because she wasn't good at it anyway and had no idea how to take care of children beyond what she'd seen third-hand from others.

  “I don't think they'll want to damage the GI factory if they can avoid it,” she said. “The people who ran Chancelry are hiding over with the other corporations, and they want their headquarters back. The GI factory is one of the most valuable bits.”

  “Wow, did you know there are big power cables running down the wall here?” He was pointing at things only he could see with his glasses.

  On tacnet, Sandy could see the other corporations firing up to full mobilisation. Exactly how tacnet knew, given their limited resources here, she wasn't sure. Had Kiet deployed new intel assets?

  “Why won't Kiet listen to you?” The elevator was nearly at the top now, above the ferrocrete ceiling that would perhaps stop a couple of armour-piercing AMLORA rounds, but no more than that.

  “Kiet thinks all the other corporations’ GIs should be freed right now,” said Sandy. “I was trying to be patient.”

  “You mean he was being impatient,” said Kiril with wise emphasis. “Danya tells me all the time, me and Svetlana, don't be impatient. He says we can get hurt if we're impatient. Is Kiet going to get hurt?”

  “Worse,” Sandy said grimly. “Everyone else will.”

  “Sandy, when are we going to rescue Danya and Svetlana?” Looking up at her with those big, serious eyes.

  Sandy looked at him for a moment. There was probably some kind of adult-to-child moment to be had here, that she'd know how to do if she'd had some practise. But with her head full of tacnet and combat reflex, it wasn't her thing.

  “I don't think they need rescuing, Kiril. They're in Rimtown and they've lived in Rimtown all their lives, like you. I'm sure they're much safer there than here.”

  Probably shouldn't have said that either, but it was true.

  “But I want them here!”

  “I know.” There was a dull, unpleasant feeling as she said it. Something twisting deep in her gut. “But the corporations have us surrounded and outgunned, and I couldn't bring them here if I wanted to.”

  “We have flyers in the bay,” Kiril retorted, pointing back that way. “We could fly to them.”

  “We'd be shot down.” The elevator reached ground level, A-5 building of Chancelry HQ, wide aprons and heavy, triple-layer security doors leading to the outside. “Besides, we don't know where they are and if we tried to contact them, that contact could be traced and lead the corporations straight to them. Come on.”

  She bent for him, but he went on his own. “I don't need to be carried,” he muttered, walking fast.

  “Well, then you need to run,” said Sandy. “Can you run?”

  “I can get there on my own.” Kiril walked across the apron to new secure doors that Sandy was already opening with a mental uplink. Within lay a long internal corridor. Out on the courtyard space between buildings, another AMLORA was positioning, missile launcher angling skyward.

  Sandy kept up. “I promised Danya and Svetlana I'd look after you. You don't want me to break my promise to Danya, do you?”

  Kiril said nothing for a moment. Then held out his arms. Sandy picked him up and resumed running, slower this time, as the low ceiling would not allow bounding. She opened doors in their path with uplinks, patched directly into the local network. Building 5-A became the much larger 7-A, which remained a mess after the uprising, externals shot to hell
, all windows gone and much of the outer facing walls and offices. One part of the internal corridor sagged where the wall had caved, ceiling threatening to collapse, but once she squeezed through the gap the floor was relatively clear, shielded from external bombardment.

  Rishi had led her Chancelry GIs in an uprising that had sheltered here and in a few other buildings, trying to gather enough firepower together to survive against what Chancelry unloaded on them, trying to recapture these buildings. Then Sandy's force had arrived, with Kiet and his older desert dwellers, come in from five years in the sands to right this one, horrid injustice. The Chancelry uprising would have been put down if they hadn't arrived when they had.

  7-A adjoined to 2-A, a detour around ruined adjoining passages, through a cold and dusty night and air that smelled of sulphur. It wasn't breathable to humans save with lung and bloodstream micros that filtered the toxins; even Sandy had had them added, being synthetic didn't make her immune to bad air. Then through more heavy, secure doors, into a waiting atrium that this time demanded realtime ID, then to the top of some stairs.

  “Su and Alice will be down there,” Sandy told Kiril. “They'll be monitoring all the GIs’ systems. Do you think you can stay with them until the emergency passes?”

  “Can I help them?” Kiril asked, brightening a bit. He loved technology. Down in the bowels of Chancelry's experimental synthetic-person assembly plant, there was plenty of that.

  “Sure, but only if they ask you to, okay?”

  Kiril nodded. “Sandy, is there going to be fighting?”

  Developments on tacnet did not look promising. A lie might have been parental. “Probably,” she said. “But I'll try to stop it from reaching here.”

  “Be careful,” said Kiril as she left.

  “I will,” she assured him…and uplinked to Su and Alice to tell them Kiril was on his way down. They'd have no problem, they liked Kiril and could always use someone to carry small things or bring coffee.

  She closed the entrance up behind him and ran, across courtyards, dodging debris no one had yet bothered to clean up, several burned-out vehicles, a destroyed AMAPS from before they'd gained control of Chancelry's defensive grid, a lot of broken glass. A link opened from orbital relay; that would be Mekong.

  “Reichardt. Commander, what's going on?”

  “A bunch of GIs launched an operation to free the neighbouring corporations’ GIs without me,” Sandy formulated silently, easier than speaking while she ran. “I'm assuming they've isolated the killswitch lockdown, but I've no idea how long that'll last, a group of Heldig GIs tried to escape by flier but they were shot down in neutral territory, we've various units converging on that spot now.”

  “Sounds like your revolution just met with a counter revolution. You have no control at all?”

  Sandy skidded to slow down, then dodged through the main door atrium of building 9-R. Here the last few armour suits were racked against the wall, several being occupied even now by late-arriving GIs, additional ammo, and weapons too.

  “I'll have control once it all starts to go wrong, Kiet's not much of a tactician. I did tell you we were at odds over tactics where the remaining corporate GIs were concerned.”

  She pulled off her jacket, emptied pockets, and slammed her back into the spread torso armour—this was only light stuff, League-issue urban armour, not the quality of her CSA gear. But in urban spaces with heavy firepower, a bit of extra protection, plus carrying capacity, never went astray.

  “Commander,” came Reichardt's reply, “you should know that I cannot provide direct support to any operation that is not under the direct command of a Federal officer or agent.”

  “Mate, just shoot when I say shoot, okay? This was a very broad interpretation of the Federal Interest from the very beginning, you know the stakes as well as I, don't go pulling all this semantical crap now.”

  “This reply is not adequate.” Reichardt didn't seem very amused. She was asking him to commit to firing orbital warheads on her say-so that would kill tens of thousands of people here on Droze. He'd wear the responsibility without any of the control, and he hated it. But she didn't have a choice.

  “This situation is not adequate.” She sealed the armour up with a whine and click of interlocking joins and powering micro hydraulics. She left the helmet off for her preferred headset, additional sensors, and processing. “But it's all I've got.”

  She took off running.

  The main entrance to Chancelry HQ was not defended by a wall of any kind, just a pedestrian space, a few gardens, then civvie roads, light rail, and shopping. Everyone in Chancelry worked for the corporation; inside the zone there were no outsiders to defend headquarters from. But they had parked a big fuck-off tank out front, so described because its multiple rapid-fire autocannon, street sweeper anti-personnel systems, and missile launchers gave nearby residents an unmistakable message.

  She took off running up the main street. Up ahead, she didn't need tacnet to tell her the shooting had started. The night sky was lit up with rapid flashes and random tracer. Now an explosion, a lingering flash. Then another.

  A new connection lit up her internal visual. CEO Patana, Dhamsel Corporation. “Commander! You end this provocation at once!”

  With the intranet cut, she had no way of telling what was going on in the other HQs. The idea had been to create a new uprising, like they'd accidently caused with Rishi here in Chancelry, but with alternate routes created to ensure they could see what was happening. Now they were blind and had nothing like the force to attack the other corporations directly as they'd done initially here. Damn Kiet for moving too soon.

  “The true provocation is the continued utilisation of any synthetic person in armed bondage,” Sandy replied, bounding now at over 60 kph down the suburban road. Now eighty. Admitting she wasn't in control would be dangerous. “Release them all now and this stops immediately.”

  Tacnet showed Kiet's troops crossing the border into neutral land ahead, under heavy fire. Civilian areas, joint administered between the corporations, and they wouldn't risk excessive civvie casualties. But they could zero on the roads, avoiding buildings.

  It didn't take her long to get close—she could see the deployment clearly, support lines with heavy weapons ahead, scattered across apartments and street corners, others deployed ahead, across neutral territory. In there, tacnet updated periodically, new hostiles where identified, fire positions, trajectories. It looked relatively restrained, too many civvies around for the heavy stuff. And here ahead there were more civvies, running in the streets, a few carrying kids and terrified. Fucking Kiet, she was going to wring his neck.

  “Get indoors!” she yelled at them, pointing. “Stay indoors, armscomp will shoot at the roads, not the buildings!” A few complied, the others kept running. A support line GI on the corner saw her and connected on direct talk.

  “Commander, we're holding the support line in case Dhamsel tries to cut off the retreat…”

  Sandy leapt, ignoring that soldier, onto a neighbouring rooftop, then up to an apartment balcony—she didn't need some greenhorn explaining to her a fraction of what she already knew. She could see Dhamsel Zone from up here, then across the built-up neutral zone, the other corporate zones beyond. Dhamsel was the problem, they shared a long flank with Chancelry, now crawling with what tacnet identified as military vehicles.

  Chatter indicated the advance party had reached the crash site, visuals showed a military flyer demolishing half a house amidst a sprawl of debris. Big apartment building nearby, civvies now running for cover, probably the reason the companies hadn't just blown the wreck. The flyer couldn't have held more than twelve people, Sandy thought Kiet might have lost more than that already. She uplinked to Reichardt again and got his Com officer instead.

  “Get me Cai, please,” she asked.

  “Cai,” came the reply, remarkably fast considering relay distances.

  “We have the corporates’ killswitch channels locked down, but they'll be
trying to unlock it.”

  “I know, find me a point of access and I'll try and stop them.”

  Cai had been instrumental in making that happen over the last week. Sandy didn't even know exactly what his technology was, except that it was a vastly superior version of what she had, an ability to manipulate huge volumes of network data in very short time frames. Over the last week he'd helped them to infiltrate corporate networks via the intranet and to isolate corporate security channels and codes that they would use to trigger the killswitch—the ultimate failsafe against their own GIs. Access to Chancelry's own codes had helped them know what to look for, but of course the other corporations had known that and had changed to backups.

  “Look,” she said, having a reasonable view up here, and being somewhat confident opposing AMLORAs wouldn't take out this building with all the civvies around, “Kiet's trying to help the escapees, but if the corporations break your barriers and trigger the killswitch, every GI they have will be dead instantly.”

  “You're sure they'll do it?”

  “Very. Rishi's uprising scared the crap out of them, they've had all their GIs in lockdown for a week.”

  “Cassandra, the only reason we're able to maintain those blocks on the killswitch channels is because of the hardline infrastructure in Central Zone…” There was a working pause, even Cai needed to stop talking when the info-overload hit him. “With Kiet attacking Central Zone they now have an excuse…”

  “I know,” said Sandy. “But a lot of that stuff is built into civvie infrastructure, they can blast some of it but not all of it.” She called up her own schematics, searching for the intranet structures, the only infrastructure still connecting Chancelry networks to the other corporations. Nodes, junctions, and interfaces highlighted in Central Zone and Chancelry Zone.

  How long until they figured it out? She did some fast calculation…assuming they'd tried to use the killswitch on those GIs who were escaping, and it hadn't worked…the blocks would show up in a few minutes of processing their systems. More minutes to hunt solutions, various departments consulting, arguing…how scared were they of their own GIs? Only the higher designations, not the regs, most of whom didn't even have killswitches. Which left her with….