Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield Read online

  Missile fire, her eyes flicked to it, zigzagging madly across the dark sky. Then dove, and a bright flash, in a target zone far away from the current fighting. Another, then one more flash. Two intranet nodes disappeared from her schematic.

  “Kiet!” she shouted. “They're taking out the intranet! We're out of time, get all your people out of wireless range!”

  “I can't do that, we have more GIs breaking into Central Zone from Dhamsel! You can't see them on tacnet because they're keeping silent, they don't want to draw fire!” Gunfire in the background, heavy explosions—big weapons, she reckoned. Not attacking, just hemming them in. It matched with what she could see on the streets.

  Another explosion took out one more intranet node. They had to buy more time.

  Her subconscious saw the cannon fire coming her way before her conscious mind could process it, and she leaped for empty air on reflex as the balcony and chunks of the building wall disintegrated around her. Fell, hit a rooftop, and slid, then leaped for the road as concrete crashed behind her.

  “Cai, get me a full intranet diagnostic,” she called as she thudded to the road. “What are they going to hit next?”

  She ran up the road as Cai processed—that had been tank fire, someone was evidently scanning the horizon and looking for anyone high up, possibly they'd figured it might be her. Not that worried about civvie casualties then.

  “Cassandra, right here,” said Cai, and several points formed on tacnet in Neutral Zone, forming a network. “Their analysis will tell them if they take out these five points, intranet will collapse.”

  “Kiet, I need a team!” Sandy was already running, past several more GIs in heavy suits, missile launchers on their backs awaiting tacnet's next targeting assignment. “Infranet protection in Central Zone, if it goes down they'll reestablish killswitch channels and we'll lose all of them!”

  No reply from Kiet, tacnet showed him engaged in heavy fighting, probably he couldn't fight and command like she could. Fuck him—she enabled her own command structure on tacnet, a little trick Kiet wouldn't know she had, overrode Kiet's protocols and established her own secure coms.

  The security wall was breached, but she jumped an intact section, saw missiles streaking overhead to intercept flying targets farther up that might have been engaging Kiet's forces. GIs from the rear line were leaping the wall after her, pulling off Kiet's reserve line to do so.

  “What if Dhamsel outflanks us?” one asked.

  “You wanna save the other GIs or not?” Sandy snapped.

  Here in Central Zone the roads were more built up, multi-level apartments and lower four-storeys. The roads were grid pattern, and Sandy paused at a building wall to peer around a tacnet-blind corner…and rolled back as heavy fire blew brickwork thirty meters back down the road. Tacnet tagged the shooter as some kind of armoured vehicle and tried to lock a missile onto it, but already it was moving and they had no visual fix, the anti-armour missiles on the heavy suits moved too fast to acquire mid-flight and would probably get jammed anyway.

  “D-5, D-7, pincer left, blockers hold here, E-4 get ready to flank right.” She ran fast left across the road, GIs with her, fire pursuing—Kiet's forces were too far into Central Zone to be of any help here, and these corporate units (Chancelry, she thought) were threatening to cut Kiet's retreat.

  She jumped for rooftops, leaping across sloping tiles, springing long and low across intervening yards, then slamming down flat for cover as heavy fire intercepted from five hundred meters left. Tile fragments and chunks of roof went spinning, Sandy locked and returned fire, not a challenging shot even at half a K, but the target was armoured. The corporations had prepared well for this, her killing options were limited.

  She kept moving, more GIs running with her, several in heavy suits loosing missiles at whatever tried to shoot at them, big explosions from that side and a notable reduction of incoming fire. But their move was noted now, and the response ahead would be concentrated.

  Two buildings from the end of the block, a rooftop AMAPS opened up on them from a hundred meters with rotary machine guns…or tried to as Sandy shot it first, sliding on a rooftop, then dropping to a back yard as rapid-fire grenades came in from somewhere, big explosions sprayed fragments everywhere as she ducked behind a wall. That brought all the other GIs down off the rooftops as well, one of them injured. More grenades came in, then rapid-fire mortar, Sandy already scrambling down a narrow lane between building and wall to the road, and the cross street beyond, but still no direct line of sight.

  “E-4 flank right,” she called to the units she'd sent over that way, “we'll try to pin these guys here!”

  “If we don't get cut to pieces first,” someone muttered.

  A huge airburst overhead, and the air was full of shrieking shrapnel, roadside trees above Sandy lost limbs and windows shattered. Sandy hurdled the side wall to the next property, not wanting to expose herself on the street with artillery coming in, and tried to duck up the narrow front garden of this apartment building. Immediately she was under fire from the crossroad ahead, one of the facing buildings, rounds shredding the wall between her and the road as she plastered herself against the next wall, gained a tacnet visual from someone behind her, and popped up to fire. She hit the window the rounds had come from, but the shooter was gone, displacing as well-trained soldiers learned to do against GIs—shoot once, move like hell, cover, and shoot again.

  “Dammit, these guys are well trained,” she announced. She couldn't stay under this arty, but moving across that road was going to cost her. “Someone get me a visual on that road.” If she had a visual she could use missiles and dig the fuckers out.

  Tacnet showed her someone smashing into a building, running down a corridor, and peering out a window…a brief glimpse of the road ahead, buildings on either side, vehicles down below, a few civvies and one big one…it flashed, something boomed nearby, and the feed went dead. Sandy locked a missile request into tacnet for that location, pointed her grenade launcher across the road, and fired. Raced and dove through the hole it made in the wall, smashed across a room, up a corridor, then kicked and punched a ragged hole in an adjoining wall—civvies were all in the basements, thank god.

  BOOM! as her missile request hit the place opposite her new position where the tank had been, only she doubted it was still there. Grabbed a scanner off her belt, found a window and tossed it to the road—if she'd done it from her previous position it would have been seen and grenaded. This one bounced, little cameras recording all directions, tacnet recording positions dutifully, now fixing the tank, an AMAPS just across the street…

  Already the missiles came in, blew the tank to hell and most of Sandy's apartment building with it. The next thing she knew, she was under rubble and would certainly be dead if she'd been a straight, and with several tonnes on her, her armour might break, but she wouldn't. She heaved it off her, smashed some uncooperative bits, and crawled out amidst the debris to the sound of massive fire coming up and down the road, her GIs now rounding that previously lethal corner and shredding anything that didn't run away.

  Then pressed on, fast, knowing they were leaving a lot of enemies hiding in buildings to ambush them on the way back, but GIs survived in high-intensity battlespace by moving fast and not allowing the enemy to concentrate firepower. They'd nearly gotten stuck against that roadblock, and Sandy hated it. Direct thrusts into intensely hostile battlespace were not what GIs were made for, she had little firesupport here; the enemy had all the advantages of well-prepared terrain and tactics, and she'd already lost four of the roughly fifty GIs who were accompanying her now on this thrust into Central Zone against Kiet's previous orders, plus several more wounded who'd fallen back or were holding the lines of retreat open. The farther she pushed in, the more surrounded she'd become.

  Advancing over rooftops was a pain, leaping and running from one to the next, under fire from surrounding buildings, some of which they could silence with return missile fire, but anti-missile
systems were taking out more and more of those. Worse, they were under observation here, and enemy tacnet was dropping light arty and missiles on them that only fast evasive action could save them from. But they had to stay off the roads because one tank or AMAPS could turn those narrow canyons into deathtraps.

  By now the surrounding circumstance was chaos; Cai and now Ari announcing in her ear that various corporate networks were showing signs of instability. Internal trouble they said, sign enough that there were GIs breaking loose in there, though exactly on what scale these particular revolutions were, there was no way to tell.

  Ahead the first intranet nodes were only a few hundred meters away. Sandy put a grenade through a nearby apartment window, leapt for cover behind a rooftop eave, fire snapping past, then dropped to ground level as a missile blew a neighbouring rooftop to hell. Ran at ground level until space ran out, then sprang back up, bouncing off a high wall to make a new rooftop, other GIs bounding forward amidst sporadic incoming…a crash as AP grenades blew one of them flying into a wall, more indirect fire hurtling in as Sandy slid once more and fell to the ground, cover from more explosions.

  Pressed against a wall as concussions blasted masonry around her, she discovered that she wasn't enjoying this at all. She couldn't do anything about all this incoming; they were exposed here, the enemy were using indirect fire, always the best policy against GIs, and no amount of synthetic physical toughness would save them from accurate high explosives. But if they didn't capture the intranet nodes and stop the corporations from reactivating the killswitch…

  A burst of cannon fire ended a GI's run across the rooves ahead, and Sandy sprinted across a yard, over an adjoining wall, and found the fallen GI on a carport rooftop, arm and part of the chest gone, blood everywhere, dying amidst convulsions. It was Angela, nice girl, low 40s designation; a few days ago Sandy had chatted with her about music, clothes, and the strangeness of civvie fashions. She'd never see any of that now. Before she could think another thought, another huge airburst had her rolling for cover and blew another of her team off a rooftop onto the road.

  “Cai!” she yelled. “I need to make contact with all the corporate GIs if you can swing it! I can't protect all these intranet nodes, just this one closest will be a struggle, I'm getting shot to hell out here and if we keep going we're all dead!”

  Then she saw the AMLORAs rising. Not heading for her, she realised a second later, watching those trajectories unfold. Heading for…Chancelry HQ.

  “Reichardt!” Crawling into a narrow space between buildings for better cover as more arty came in. “Kressler and Heldig just launched AMLORAs, target Heldig and fire now, one orbital round to my fire control.”

  A pause that felt like a lifetime. “I see only three AMLORA rounds fired,” came Reichardt's reply. “You're asking me to kill thousands of people on that?”

  “One round to my fire control,” Sandy repeated, leaping back up to rooftop level, where tacnet identified a target. “It will take four minutes to arrive, if AMLORA firing has ceased by then I'll detonate it short of the target.” Landed and lay flat on the rooftop, scanning apartment windows nearly a kilometer away. A human face appeared, with laser ranger, a tacnet-filler. Sandy fired, a slight pause then the head blew off. She moved before they could counter-track her.

  Detonations back at Chancelry HQ, but she had no time to observe what they hit. If Reichardt refused her, they were all screwed, the corporations were testing them, a failure to respond would encourage more of the same.

  “One round to your fire control,” said Reichardt. “On its way, good luck.”

  Sandy skidded over rooftops like a crazed pebble bouncing along the surface of choppy water. Hurdled an intervening street and paused at a good vantage over a minor industrial complex ahead. The infranet node was under that somewhere.

  “Hello, all corporate CEOs,” she announced on general frequency. “This is Kresnov. If you all look skyward, you'll find your defence screen radars showing you an incoming orbital round from where Mekong parked them in geostationary over your heads. That's what happens when you launch AMLORAs at Chancelry HQ. One of you is about to die, I haven't decided which yet. Keep firing AMLORAs and the rest will follow.”

  It would come in several thousand Ks too fast for anti-missile defences to stop. Not quite a nuclear-scale blast, but enough to make a permanent geological feature where a corporate HQ had once been.

  GIs smashed into buildings for cover overlooking the industrial complex and used that to gain line of sight. Missiles took out a tank, several AMAPS, but their ammo was now getting short. Fast, close engagement silenced more targets, then GIs were blowing holes in factory walls and dashing inside, Sandy joining them.

  A fast run through one warehouse complex, someone uncovered tunnels beneath buildings that hadn't shown up on the schematics. Sandy jumped down a ladder, into a dark space filled with pipes and cables, and followed several junction signs until she reached a wide open space with big fuel cell generators in industrial steel containers, a lot of power routings, and a bunch of ceiling wiring along the aircon that looked like it was probably coms.

  “This is why they can't blast it from the air,” she announced, transmitting visual feed from her headset. “It would take out power for half of Central Zone.” Power in Droze was serious, with no native water and air that got lethal in poor weather; power could be life and death.

  “If their security situation gets bad enough,” said Rishi at her shoulder, “they might blast it anyway.” Rishi wore a heavy suit, new shrapnel holes in the armour, the back-mounted launcher smoking from a recent shot. She'd no sooner spoken than two of the five remaining nodes disappeared. On a nearby rooftop, tacnet prioritised a visual feed showing two fireballs rising.

  “Just because they're underground,” came Poole's voice, “doesn't mean they can't blow them by hand.”

  Looking at this, she could make a few schematic guesses about the intranet nodes—they relayed the signal above ground via a mass of antenae scattered over these buildings. Above ground, that could be jammed, but jamming would sever corporate forces’ own communications. Besides which, nodes like this ran networks underground, and you had to cut those lines of transmission as well as block the wireless frequencies if you wanted to jam the network, because the network would adjust information flows and leapfrog severed sections by alternate means. Thus Cai's instruction that these five primary nodes all had to go down simultaneously to block the signal. Three left.

  And three minutes left on the orbital round. Sandy gave orders, deploying a defensive perimeter about the industrial complex. She was above ground between buildings when a call came in. It was Patana, CEO of Dhamsel Corporation.

  “You're about to commit a warcrime by the Federation's own statutes,” he told her.

  “Don't care,” said Sandy. “Let your GIs go, peacefully, and cease all offensive actions, or those incoming rounds will multiply.”

  “If your Captain agreed with that rationale he'd have fired more than one round already. Furthermore, not all of our GIs want to leave.”

  “Good,” said Sandy, walking to a corner near the complex perimeter. “Then you won't mind dropping your internal emergency alerts and allowing full observation privileges to our Captain in orbit.”

  “Commander!” one of her soldiers cut in. “I've got GIs, escapees!”

  Sandy looked, saw broken visuals, running men and women, a few armed, none armoured, some wounded. Looking desperate and bloodied, like they'd just run through heavy fire without the means to fight back.

  “…lots dead!” one of them was shouting, as Sandy's troops laid fire back up the road they'd come down. “We heard about your uprising, we heard what they were doing…corporates locked us up, a few of us they just killed…”

  “We had to get out!” a girl shouted over the top of her friend, eyes wild. “We had to get out, they were gonna kill us all, I heard them talking!”

  “…we can level Chancelry HQ well before
any orbital warhead gets here, and we will if you do not terminate that round immediately!” Patana was yelling at her. “You have twenty seconds to terminate or we open fire!”

  “Most of my people aren't even in Chancelry HQ,” Sandy said coldly, crouched on the complex perimeter and watching escapee GIs rushing across the street ahead, pursued by tracer fire. “Better yet, you just selected yourself for targeting. Everyone in Dhamsel Zone now has two minutes to live, unless you comply.”

  “Ten seconds!” Patana shouted. Sandy didn't need audio analysers to hear the tremble in his voice. “Kresnov!”

  “See you in hell, motherfucker.”

  “Commander!” Reichardt overrode her. “You're not going to kill thousands of people just because you're pissed off…” Sandy cut him off. She had fire control, it was out of Reichardt's hands now. If Patana fired, everyone back at Chancelry HQ was dead, Kiril included. If she backed down, same thing. Only this way, she'd take that asshole with them.

  AMLORAs launched, lots of them. She could see them on tacnet, bright flares against a dark sky. But immediately, she didn't think they were heading for Chancelry.

  “Incoming!” Sandy yelled, as a dozen other voices echoed it, and GIs took off running to get clear of the industrial complex. “They're going to blast it!”

  Across from her was a market building with a truck drive-in at the rear. Sandy raced into it, down the slope, and tore through a roller door to basement parking.

  “Cai, we're about to lose the intranet!” She slid behind several large vehicles, other GIs rushing in around her. “Do something fast!”

  A series of huge thuds, and the ground rocked and shook. The concussion made her ears pop, shook light fittings from the ceiling.