She took a deep breath and stepped side-on about the edge of the elevator shaft, aiming across the atrium in the sure knowledge that a high-designation GI over there had just seen her and was reacquiring. She glimpsed a figure, fifth floor like her, crouched…she fired and ducked back, but drew no fire. Surely that must have been a hit, or she'd have at least been grazed or most likely killed.
And ducked back as shots did take the corner of the shaft but from a lower angle, and now a man in a suit was sailing up over the exposed railing from the floor below, weapon tracking onto a point-blank shot…and was hit from behind even before he landed, multiple times, body lurching as he spun and tried to return fire, only to take five rounds in the back of the head from Vanessa, flat on her back.
He fell, revealing Rhian, standing propped against a corridor wall, small pistol in hand. “Told you it works!” she yelled at Vanessa, evidently much stronger. “Go, that's all three of them, I'll follow when my legs are working!”
Vanessa's links had stopped another elevator, and she scrambled in. Doors closed and the car hummed upward, leaving the atrium behind in a gathering rush. Then a long, quiet ride, only not so quiet because her heart was hammering in her ears, and now that she noticed, her hands were flexing in time with her pulse. In fact, she was buzzing, her ears were buzzing, her hair tingling and prickling, colours and sensations surreal. The elevator car seemed impossibly large, as though the distance from one side to the other was a yawning canyon. Her augments felt a little like this in training, but in the real deal they made her a completely different creature. It was awe inspiring. And it was disorienting. Even her emotional responses felt odd, whereas normally this degree of awareness in a deadly fight would evoke some degree of fear, of concern, of desperately pumping herself up, urging herself on…here, it was absent. Not that the danger was obscured, she knew it only too well, could see it staring her in the face, teeth bared. But past the buzzing in her ears and the pounding of her heart, she felt she could almost step aside and consider it objectively. Consider her own death, if necessary, and watch calmly as it happened. These were not her thoughts, surely? Her brain didn't work like this. She barely recognised herself.
Seventieth floor. There was elevator music playing. Four Seasons, Vivaldi, but played just horribly, by someone who sounded bored. Phillippe hated what these “limp-wristed tarts” did to poor Vivaldi, it was music to be played “like you wanted to punch or kiss or fuck someone.” She wondered if she could still make the concert. Probably not with this synthetic blood all over her.
This elevator wouldn't go beyond the 85th floor, and she reckoned the attack had originated from the 89th, so she got off at 84 and went for the stairs. She couldn't reach Ari, hadn't heard anything from this level the whole ride up. Objectively she knew what that probably meant, but she was CSA, and there were other Agents up here, a good friend of hers among them. She moved fast up the stairs to level 89, paused at the staircase opening, no stairwell doors here; god, how she and every other spec ops agent hated stairwell doors.
This level was offices, all abandoned at this hour. In the ceiling here was a gaping hole, debris blasted down over desks and partitions, all ruined. Shaped charges, Vanessa knew this entry technique well, had done it herself…only the CSA secure level would have extra-reinforced floors. An attacker would have to know the weak spots, CSA didn't have architectural permission to just armour plate an entire floor; it could upset structural characteristics. Detailed analysis would show the weak spots. Planning again.
She moved fast, weapon ready. Saw a weapon abandoned in a corridor, then some civvie jackets tossed over some desks. Then some equipment webbing. GIs moving fast through this level, she and Rhian must have rushed them with their unexpected arrival. They'd cast off things they hadn't needed. But they might have had time to booby trap their approach, so she kept a careful eye out.
And reached a big ceiling hole, above the central corridor. And jumped straight up through it, having the augments to do that now, and not daring to announce herself first. The charge had blown through a big room, scorching the ceiling. Adjoining it was a security/surveillance room, its door was busted open; she caught a glimpse of bodies inside, blood spatter and broken glass screens, all limp. CSA Agents, but she couldn't check on them, not until she knew it was secure.
Down a short hall into another room, surveillance glass looking onto a secure apartment with a big, heavy, locked door. The door was open. It looked like the kind of apartment they'd kept Sandy in when she'd first arrived in Tanusha and no one knew if they could trust her or not. Or rather, most were certain they couldn't. There'd been rumours of high-des GIs kept in secret facilities, and it figured that Ari would be in on that…had that been what he was doing here? Evidently it wasn't that big a secret if he'd been about to let her and Rhian in on it…but where was the GI now? Was he in on this? Was that how things had gone down so smoothly? An inside job? What the hell was this new GI anyway?
There were no signs of shooting in the secure apartment. She checked it quickly, saw food in the kitchen for more than one person. Ari had said he'd feed her and Rhian when they got here.
Vanessa left the secure door, down the adjoining hall, and immediately here were bodies, GI bodies, two felled by precise gunfire, two more by powerful blows that could only have been from another GI. And here were more rooms, an office torn apart, bullets and blood everywhere, three human agents down and all far too messy to still be alive. Here a living room, for more agents to pass time while guarding whoever-it-was, two more dead, one decapitated. And now she could hear talking, someone talking fast, and someone crying. A voice sounded like Ari's.
“CSA!” she yelled, pretty sure she'd covered the whole floor; the building wasn't very wide this high up. “I'm clear out here! Is that you Ari?”
“Vanessa!” He sounded relieved, and genuine. “Good god, get in here.”
It could have been duress, but Ari would never, not that earnestly, not even with a gun to his head. She entered carefully and found their last stand—the other big penthouse lounge at this level, one semi-circular wall all glass and spectacular view, fractured in places by bullet holes. Ari was holding a girl, slender, long dark hair, who was on her back and covered in blood. She was crying.
“I don't want to die, I don't want to die,” she was repeating.
“You're not going to die, Ami,” Ari soothed her. “I've seen GIs take much worse than this, this is nothing, you'll be fine.”
“I only just got here,” said Amirah, blood mixing with tears on her cheeks. “And I like it here so much, I was gonna do so much, I don't wanna die now…” She coughed, and blood came up.
There were another two CSA Agents, one wounded, tending to an unconscious girl, a frail teenager, lying on a sofa.
And there was a slender black man, sitting opposite another three individuals and staring at them. Those individuals looked like…and Vanessa raised her gun again in a rush.
“What the fuck?” They were GIs, and from their battered civvie clothes and bloodstains, they could only be League GIs. The ones who'd attacked. They appeared mostly unharmed and just sat there, looking vacantly into space. Vanessa stared.
“Ricey!” called Ari. “That's Ragi. We were holding him here, he saved us. He's got them locked.”
“Locked? What the fuck is ‘locked’?”
“Here, let me show you,” said Ragi.
And suddenly she wasn't standing there anymore.
It was cyberspace, pale and indistinct. Her gun was missing. There were a lot of glowing constructs surrounding her, massively intricate. And nearby, some smaller ones, combinations of familiar pieces all joined together in neat, barriered little bundles. Those were people.
“This is them,” said Ragi, and she spun to find him standing before her. A pleasant-looking man, round-faced, calm, with intelligent little eyes. “League GIs, ISO, I imagine. They tried to kill me.”
“They succeeded with a lot of others.”
Vanessa stared at the three constructs he was pointing to. Massively barriered, GIs always were. They needed to be, as entirely synthetic they were so much more vulnerable to network infiltration. Normally to immobilise a GI you needed a direct connection, a cable, GIs like anyone had hardware that filtered wireless, made it harmless.
And he'd just barrier hacked her as well, transported her instantly to a VR network. It wasn't technologically possible, of course, though she had recently met one man who could do it. But he'd been the representative of a massively advanced alien species.
“You're Talee?” she asked him.
“It's possible,” said Ragi. “I don't recall. That's been rather the problem, I don't know who or what I am, and your CSA can't let me out until they're sure. Meantime the League wanted me dead, unless you can think of some other target in this tower they were after.”
Vanessa thought about it. “Who's the girl?” And recalled even as she said it the reason Ari had invited her and Rhian there in the first place—a girl, he'd insisted, emotion in his voice. Her life restored.
Ragi smiled. “I can show you that too.”
The scene changed with an effortless fade of colours and textures. Suddenly she was in an old bedroom with wooden floorboards in a creaking old house. In the four-poster bed lay a girl, who sat up bright-eyed and smiled at her.
“Hello!” she said with delight. “Ragi, have you brought me a friend? Who are you?”
“I haven't told her what just happened,” came Ragi's voice in her inner ear. “Please don't tell her, the poor girl deserves more joy.”
“Allison, this is Commander Vanessa Rice,” Ragi said audibly. “She's a good friend of Ari's. Vanessa, this is Allison.”
“Hello, Vanessa!” said Allison. “Isn't this amazing? I can sit up now, and I can talk properly!”
The pale girl in the room. Vanessa recalled Ari talking a few times over the years, of a girl with a rare disease who couldn't move and couldn't uplink properly to VR either. He hadn't been able to make VR work for her, the usual “cure” for incurable vegetables, and so she was unable to have a life in either world. Until now, evidently Ragi had fixed it so she could.
And then the League had come with advanced GIs to kill him, and once he'd been released from his network restraints, Ragi had brain-hacked them fast as you like and held them in their own externally-imposed vegetative state. If he could do that to the best the League had to offer…no wonder he'd been kept in isolation.
“Hello, Allison,” said Vanessa. Her voice sounded far away to her own ears. Coming down off the combat high, the brain did funny things. “How long have you known Ari?”
“I think about four years,” said Allison. “Are you really a friend of his? He's been absolutely wonderful, I mean, he's introduced me to so many others? You know, hackers and network experts, and they've all been so amazing, I've made so many friends and they've all tried to help me. And they helped a lot, I've been able to access libraries and live shows, I've even made friends with AIs who've helped me to see all across the city, attend concerts and parades, everything's covered somewhere on the net! But I couldn't, you know, actually move. In a VR construct, not like this!”
She swung her legs carefully off the bed.
“I think you'd better wait, Allison,” Ragi said gently. “You still need to know how to stand, even in here.”
“I know!” she beamed. “But it's wonderful just to sit up.”
Even in post-combat shaky wind-down, Vanessa could still see why Ari had invited her here. This was truly something.
“Allison,” said Vanessa, “we'll have lots of people here to visit you soon. I have to go right now, but now that you're moving, I'm sure your family can come.”
“Can I hug them?” Allison asked, tearing up at the prospect.
“Of course you can.”
“I've never hugged my family before.” Crying for joy. “Thank you, thank everyone in the CSA for me.”
The VR disappeared, and Vanessa stood in the lounge. A CSA flyer roared outside the tall glass windows, lights flashing, while other cruisers hovered nearby. The one healthy CSA Agent was telling them on another channel to break the glass, they had to get Amirah out immediately. That was a new thing, everyone so concerned about the dying GI. She'd saved their necks, it was obvious from the dead attackers Vanessa had seen on the way in.
“Don't kill them,” Vanessa said to Ragi, as Ragi sat and watched his captive GIs. God knew where they were now, mentally. Frozen in some VR world they couldn't escape? Unconscious? Writhing in Ragi-induced agony? “I'm sure you can kill them. But we need their information…and for God's sakes don't let them or anyone else access their killswitches.”
“Believe me,” said Ragi, “I want to know what they know even more than you do.” And looked at her oddly. “Commander Rice, are you okay?”
Okay? Why shouldn't she be okay? It was her last thought before her legs folded and she hit the ground.
Danya was quite pleased at how good he was getting at moving around. He'd been worried Tanusha would become like a golden cage, especially with Sandy as a guardian. They'd end up stuck in Canas, surrounded by high security and unable to move, but increasingly as he was learning the basic protocols, and when and who to contact in CSA just to let them know they were moving, he was discovering they could go pretty much anywhere—so long as he cleared it with Sandy first, of course.
And so they went from a self-organised trip to Ranarid to get some school supplies, back home for dinner with Sandy's apologies for having to work late, then to CSA HQ thirty Ks away, after word that something bad had happened. They just took the maglev and light rail like any other Tanushan, on transit passes they'd bought. Sandy had of course wanted to send them a cruiser, but that would take a while as the CSA were busy, and Danya said they didn't need a chaperone anyway. And walked them to the HQ public entrance off the rail stop, prepared for all the security checks, but a man in a suit took them straight through with minimal fuss, just the obligatory body scans and visitors’ passes, then a hand-off to some junior staffer to escort across to medical.
Sandy was there in the hallway, in civvie off-duty clothes. She was talking to several others who looked like they might be SWAT. Danya was learning to recognise the type, tougher and leaner than most, all short-haired, some with the sides shaved for a better helmet fit. They rang alarm bells to look at, like seeing augmented toughs in the street outside a club on Droze…but these were Sandy's friends and turned to look as Sandy saw them, and beckoned them over.
Sandy introduced them, and the SWATs all seemed friendly enough, with smiles and handshakes for Danya and Svetlana and ruffled hair for Kiril. And departed, as Danya gazed through the window they were all standing before and saw Vanessa lying in that medical bed, hooked up to various machines and unmoving. There was a tube in her mouth. Danya knew Vanessa as fun and lively, always with a smile or a joke. It didn't look right for her to just be lying there, small and silent. Her husband Phillippe was in the room with her, seated beside the bed, holding her hand and just looking at her.
Sandy knelt and hugged Danya, which startled him because he didn't need the hug…then he realised that the hug wasn't for him. He held her back. She was shaking. That scared him. Svetlana joined the hug, seeing she was upset, then Kiril, and Danya broke away to gaze through the window. After a moment, Sandy joined him, hand on his shoulder.
“How is she hurt?” he asked.
“We don't know,” Sandy said quietly. “It's like before, at Antibe station, only much worse. It's like her body just shut down, if it weren't for the life support she'd be gone.”
“So she's not injured?”
“No. No, she got three fucking GIs in a row, low forties, barely a scratch on her.” She took a
deep breath. “The doctors think it might be a kind of augmentation overload. She's so fast these days, and so strong. They think when she really pushes herself, the augmentations are too much for her body and it just shuts down.”
“I'd thought…I mean, didn't they know that would happen before they did the augmentations?”
“It's all so new, Danya. Since the war ended and the restrictions got relaxed, the technology's just gone flying ahead. We're still learning what it does at this level, and SWAT gets the highest tech there is. We're guinea pigs. And I told her, I told her it was risky, that the meds didn't know half as much as they thought they did, but she was so excited at getting better, at getting closer to my level. And she just can't get to my level, none of them can, we're just made from different stuff and there are limits, and if you exceed those limits, things start breaking.”
“Sandy.” Danya put his hand on hers, on his shoulder. “Your hand's too tight, you're hurting me.”
“Oh, shit!” She removed her hand like she'd been shot, and bent, examining him with concern. “Did I hurt you? Where?”
“No no no!” Danya shook his head, smiling. “It was just a little tight, you could never hurt me properly. Look, there's not even a bruise.”
She looked unsteady in her relief. Like she might burst into tears. Danya took the opportunity of her proximity to put both hands on her shoulders, like he sometimes did to Svetlana or Kiril when they got overwhelmed by things.
“Look,” he said firmly, “Vanessa's going to be fine. She's incredibly tough, and you've got the best medical care in the galaxy here. It'll be just like last time; she'll wake up and be fine.”
Sandy smiled at him and put a hand to his face. The last time Danya had seen any adult look at him with such love in her eyes, they'd been Mama's eyes. So long ago. She hugged him again, and Danya was glad, because he didn't want anyone to see him cry.
Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield Page 23