Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield

by Joel Shepherd

  “Everywhere,” Sandy agreed. “But lots of people too, not like this. This spaceport is out in the wilds because it has to be a long way away from people, with all these military shuttles landing. Tanusha's got lots of trees, but…well, you'll see.”

  “Are we very far away?” Danya asked.

  “A few hundred kilometers. Not far. Maybe forty minutes flying.”

  They flew for a while, not saying very much. Sandy supposed it was very strange, to actually be here, on another world, in the kind of flyer that had always meant trouble, viewed from below on Droze. Little of the wilderness below was visible in the dark, unless one had vision like Sandy's. A small cluster of lights here and there, a little town. A car moving on a rare outback road.

  And then ahead there came an enormous glow that lit the horizon from side to far side. Closer, and the glow resolved into many colours and blinking lights. Thousands of lights. Then millions of lights. Then billions.

  “Kiri!” Svetlana shook her brother's shoulder; he'd fallen asleep to the vibration of thrumming engines. “Kiri, look! It's Tanusha, Kiri!”

  Approaching the outer perimeter, the air traffic became intense. Sandy flew mostly above it, as navcomp assigned her a lane, but not too far above. Svetlana and Kiril made awestruck sounds, staring down at huge towers surrounded by clusters of smaller but still huge towers, centering on gracefully tangling ribbons of light ground traffic in endless gleaming streams. And more towers, and more towers, in endless repeating but unpredictable patterns. Air traffic passing in trails, ahead and behind, predictable lines, following highways in the sky. Layers upon layers of it, dividing up the sky like a giant layered cake.

  Sandy glanced at Danya as she flew one-handed. He stared in utter amazement, head turning this way and that, not saying a thing. All the cabin lights were off, yet still his face was lit with the glow from the ground. It shone through the cabin like white fire, turning everything silver and pale.

  “Danya,” she asked him, and he looked her way. “What do you think?”

  For a brief moment, through the usual shield of wary concern, she glimpsed something else. Excitement. It was not the dominant emotion, not by a long shot. But it was there, real as the city that sprawled around them. Sandy thought it a good start.

  “Amazing,” he breathed, and went back to staring around him. “Amazing.”

  “I told you it was big,” she said to them all cheerfully. “But you have to really see it, don't you?”

  Kiril wanted to know how all the cruisers didn't bang into each other, so she explained the traffic control to them, and how she was steering along a centrally mandated skylane, a higher-altitude one for flyers. Svetlana wanted to know what all the towers were, and if they were going to live in a tower like one of these. Sandy laughed and said towers weren't that great because you couldn't have a garden. In Tanusha, short houses cost more than high apartments much of the time.

  And then they were descending, to Svetlana's displeasure and despite her request to fly around for a while longer. Sandy told her she'd have lots more chance to go flying, but for now everyone was tired, not just Kiril, and it was time to go home.

  The flyer landed at Canas District's third secure transition zone, actually a spot beside sports fields outside the Canas security wall. A groundcar was waiting, and they all piled into the third transport vehicle of the day (actually the fourth, Sandy reminded them after Svetlana said it, because the station was technically moving in orbit, and thus also transportation) and rolled the short distance to Canas security gate number three.

  Automatic units scanned the vehicle inside and out, laser projectors peering through all windows, then the gate opened and they rolled inside. Up narrow winding streets, wheels bouncing on cobbles (why was it so rough? Danya asked) between decorative stone walls, across a little bridge with wrought iron light fittings, past the neighbourhood eatery packed with high-security residents seated along the streamside eating some very good Spanish food, then left around a bend and under some lovely tall trees. Then left again into a little driveway, the carport opening on automatic, sharply downslope, and into a very familiar parking space.

  They got out, and Sandy couldn't quite believe she was home, it felt so surreal. Almost as surreal as the company she'd brought back with her. Through the little jungle of garden, up steps to the rear door, automatic locks came open, and a full system scan on uplinks gave her a return feed from the house, months of reports, all pouring in—most of them empty and unoccupied save for a few GI visitors come to check on the place. Almost as though the house had been lonely and was welcoming her back.

  Months. Good lord, what months.

  Before them the living space, polished floorboards and a high ceiling, a wall of windows opening onto the jungle/garden, open kitchen on the left, stairs climbing past it up to the second floor, all very mellow and light and spacious as suited her taste.

  “This is your home?” Svetlana gasped, staring around in unrestrained excitement.

  “No,” said Sandy. “This is our home.”

  They couldn't believe it. Just couldn't. It wasn't the biggest house by any means, though quite nice by middle class Tanushan standards. But Sandy had seen where the kids had come from, and to them, this was a castle in the clouds. And everywhere else they'd been since leaving Pantala had been cramped and simple—the ship quarters, then the station quarters for a night. They'd never really seen how middle-class Tanushans lived, to say nothing of important residents of Canas high-security district. Sandy thought she'd take them to see one of Anita and Pushpa's genuine mansions one day.

  Living rooms all downstairs, the bedrooms were all upstairs and unoccupied save her own, since Vanessa and Rhian, who'd once shared the place with her, had acquired separate lives and moved out.

  Svetlana wanted her own room—demanded it, in fact—and ran excitedly around it and jumped on the bed when she got it: Vanessa's old room with the windows opening onto the big trees outside, where her pet bunbun had gone climbing each night. But Kiril wanted to be with Danya, so they got Rhian's old room across the hall, with the windows looking the other way toward the perimeter and the big flowering bushy tree that separated this house from the neighbours that way.

  Then there were showers, and toilet stops, and pajamas the Intels had given them…and Sandy taking Danya aside to show him the house security systems, all of which were directly uplinked in her head, as were the broader systems of the entire district surrounding. That, to help him sleep. Some kids needed a glass of warm milk; Danya, a security briefing.

  Then bed. Which lasted until Sandy sensed movement in the hall (she had hall sensors on directly, so she'd know) and got up to stick her head in Svetlana's room and found the bed empty. Smiling, she looked in the other room to find all three children wrapped together in the one big bed. Svetlana probably hadn't slept alone in her life. Sandy was half tempted to drag a mattress in there and join them, but this was their new normalcy now, and they needed it established as quickly as possible. Starting now, this was their home. Whether the kids would find that Tanushan normalcy actually agreed with them, or they with it, only time would tell.

  She was awoken by running footsteps on the hallway floorboards. Children's voices, excited. Thumping down the stairs. She smiled. She hadn't expected they'd be up before her, though Rhian had warned her.

  She got up, carefully, and checked all her bandages. Three weeks of healing, and it would be a few more before she'd get them off. The arm was partially functional now but still needed rest, healing itself at high speed as GIs with merely structural damage tended to do. She showered in the ensuite, dressed awkwardly, and checked herself in the mirror. Something of a mess, she looked. The hair now had three weeks of fuzzy growth, giving her an allover blonde buzz cut. Vanessa had said she still looked great, save for the bandage across the left side of her head. That short hair suited her, as it often did women with wider features.

  Sandy had always liked it short, partly from habit
, partly from agreeing that it suited her…but hair this short made her look like android model B from central casting. Longer hair could be mussed, lending that too-perfect face some unpredictability. Could be worn to one side, distracting attention from the effortless symmetricality of that central line. Some days Sandy was just happy to be going through life with the blessings of good looks, however she'd arrived at them. But other days, the big blue eyes gazed back at her with accusation.

  Svetlana burst into the room. “Sandy, Sandy, there's a robot at the door!”

  Sandy blinked at her. “There is?” She checked her uplinks. “Oh, yeah, it's just a delivery bot. The house knows when people are home and what's in the fridge and cupboards, and we don't have anything. So it ordered some groceries for breakfast.”

  “What should we do with the robot?” Svetlana asked, all breathless and earnest.

  “Just take the bag and it'll go back to its vehicle,” said Sandy. And she thought of Danya, downstairs facing an inoffensively humanoid delivery bot, his only experience of humanoid bots being things that carried rotary cannon and were programmed to kill. “It's not the slightest bit dangerous, please don't let Danya trash it.”

  “He's not going to trash it!” said Svetlana, scampering out of the room. “He just didn't know what to do with it, it looks kinda creepy!” And thundered back down the stairs.

  Sandy looked back to the mirror…and found her previous train of thought all in tatters. For a brief moment, it offended her. Then she smiled. Good. Stupid, morbid train of thought anyway. Rhian had warned her of this too—they'll take over your life, your brain, your thoughts, everything, she'd said. And probably, Sandy thought as she went down the stairs after Svetlana, not before time either.

  Everyone helped with breakfast. Sandy didn't even need to ask, nor Danya to direct, it just happened: Svetlana and Kiril setting the table, and Danya helping Sandy to see how the stove and frying pan worked, and then to cook, since she only had one hand. Bacon and eggs, they'd liked that when Gunter had made it for them in his apartment in Droze. Now they wolfed it down, with the appetites of kids who never knew when their next meal was coming. Sandy foresaw a problem, eating habits leading to massively increased calories, with massively decreased exercise. These kids were going to take up sports, or she'd have three little balloons in the house before long. Still, nice problem to have, she reflected as they ate, and Svetlana kept talking about the robot and teasing Danya for being scared of it, at which he laughed and tried to pinch her ear to make her shut up.

  Danya laughing was the best thing Sandy had seen in weeks.

  Then they all helped her clean up. Rhian would be jealous.

  “Okay!” she announced, as they sat to drink a final cup—tea for her and Danya, juice for Svetlana and Kiril. “Today, we have some things to do. First, we're all going to take Kiril to FSA Headquarters, so we can check out his uplinks.” It was the first thing she'd arranged, as soon as the freighter had entered transmission range of Callay on the way in. “And while we're there, you can see where I work.

  “Next thing, we're going to do some shopping. Because you guys have basically no clothes at all, and I've got hardly any…well, anything, in this house, like we're going to need.” And while she was at Headquarters, it occurred to her with halfway seriousness, she might ask for a raise as well.

  “And then,” she said brightly, “we'll have the rest of the day off, because I've been told quite pointedly by my various bosses that I'm not expected at work today” (they'd been even more direct than that) “so I figured I might show you some things in Tanusha. Where would you like to go?”

  A clamour of questions and suggestions followed, entirely from Svetlana and Kiril. Danya was happy to go wherever they wanted to go, though he listened with great interest to Sandy's descriptions of the various places they might visit. While they talked, two waiting message lights illuminated her uplink vision, nothing urgent, just “call me when you've time.”

  Schedule decided, Svetlana and Kiril rushed upstairs to get ready. Danya remained at the table, cup in hand, gazing thoughtfully out the windows at the lush tangle of plants outside. Sandy sat beside him.

  “I know you think I worry too much,” he said, surprising her. But not really surprising her, because only a fool would think of Danya as an imperceptive child. “And, I mean, I can see how easy it would be, to just, you know. Relax. I mean, it's nice here.”

  Sandy nodded. “It is nice.”

  “And…I don't know.” He sipped the remnants of his tea. “Maybe one day. But I just don't think like that, you know? You've seen where I'm from, you've seen…”

  “Danya.” She put her good hand on his arm. “You want the truth? I don't want you to change at all. Or if you change, I want you to decide for yourself how to do it. And I think you already know what maybe Svetlana and Kiril haven't worked out yet, that however nice this place is, it's not entirely safe either. Because I'm important, and I have lots of enemies, and a lot of the stuff that took me all the way to Droze? All that stuff started here. And it's still here, and it's found me many times before, and probably will again.”

  Danya nodded. Not looking at all surprised. “It's dangerous here?”

  Lying was the standard thing to say to children when they asked things like that. “Yes,” said Sandy. “Everyone's surprised I've become a guardian to children.” She didn't say “adopted.” It wasn't quite that, legally, though close. “I never thought I'd have children in my life before I met you guys. And the main reason why was because it's so dangerous. And look at me. You've seen what I am.” She gestured with her damaged arm. “It's not pretty, and it's not safe. I'm the last person with any business taking care of kids.”

  Danya smiled. A very grown-up smile, slightly sad, and ironic. “You're perfect,” he said. “For us.”

  Sandy knew exactly what he meant. And smiled back. “Look,” she said. “I don't know what we are yet. All four of us together. I'd like to say ‘family,’ but ‘family’ is very contrived, isn't it? You guys are certainly family, but I'm not your flesh and blood, I'm not anyone's flesh and blood…”

  “Semantics,” said Danya.

  Sandy blinked. She hadn't suspected he'd know that word, nor use it so well. “Maybe. But the point is that none of us are used to this. I'm not. You're not.” Her smile grew broader. “None of us really knows what the hell we're doing. So here's what I think. We're a…”

  “…team,” Danya echoed with her, at almost the same moment. “We've always been a team, me, Svet, and Kiril. That's what I'd always tell them, what Svet always needs to hear when she's off in Svetlana land, chasing Svetlana rainbows. It's all of us together. The way I see it, the team just grew by one more, that's all.”

  Sandy sighed and squeezed his arm. Stupid to think that Danya would need to have any of this explained to him.

  “That's how I explain it to Svet and Kiril, anyhow,” Danya finished.

  “Okay, good,” said Sandy, getting his very full attention. “But any team, whether it's military or sports or whatever, has different people doing different roles. In military teams, the two who make everything work are officers and non-coms, meaning sergeants. Officers have to look at the big picture, watch the broader environment, make sure nothing surprises the team. And the sergeant's like an officer, he's in charge, but he pays attention not just to the big picture, but also to the small picture—where everyone's standing, what they're doing, how they're feeling. He really runs the team, because it's his job to translate what the officer says into real actions on the ground, you get that?”

  “You think you can be the officer, and me the sergeant?”

  Sandy nodded. “That way, we both kinda know what we're doing. But here's the thing. Good sergeants don't just blindly do whatever dumb thing their officers tell them. Good sergeants think for themselves. And I gotta tell you, Danya, the main reason I'm happy to have you three in my life where I'd be reluctant with any other kids, is because you three can think for yo
urselves.”

  “And you don't have to worry about ruining our lives, because our lives were already fucked up,” Danya quipped. Good lords, it was almost a joke. The truth, but spoken with humour, dry but real.

  “That too,” said Sandy. “In this culture, Danya, we think of kids as innocents. I couldn't inflict my life on anyone innocent. But you guys…”

  “Trust me,” said Danya, with a light in his eyes. “This is a big improvement.”

  Sandy grinned. “I'm so glad you think so. But keep your eyes open, because it'd be a damn shame to make it all the way through Droze, only to get knocked off in Tanusha.”

  It would be a horrid warning to give to most children. But Danya laughed and looked entirely more happy with things. Like suddenly he was on familiar ground.

  After he'd gone upstairs to check on his siblings, Sandy checked her message lights. One was Vanessa.

  “Everything okay?” Vanessa asked, with every expectation that it was.

  “Just fine,” said Sandy. “They're happy, Danya just made a joke, we're going to have a good day.”

  “Wonderful,” Vanessa said happily. “Today I'm having a lot of sex. That's on top of a lot of sex yesterday evening as well.”

  “Currently between bouts?” Sandy asked.

  “Ice-cream sundae refreshment break.”

  “Want me to come and towel you off?”

  “Ooh. Now you're making me really horny.”

  The other light was Rhian's, with just the same question. Sandy told her about breakfast. “That's not fair,” Rhian laughed. “I had to train my latest two from bodily functions on upward. Yours come combat drilled and field tested.”

  The doorbell rang. Sandy excused herself from Rhian's call and went to the door. It was Kushbu Iyengar, civil rights lawyer extraordinaire and friend of hers for the past five years.

  “Cassandra!” A slim, grey and mild-mannered Tamil, he would have merely kissed her cheek, but the delight on his face deserved a hug, so she gave him one, one armed. “So glad you're back. Not that I ever doubted it.” She released him. “Nor had the foggiest where you were, of course.”