Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel Read online

  "Oh no." An gazed down at the young terrorist's calm, sleeping face. "I can always make new friends. Plenty more where these came from."

  The swell was large today.

  Sandy sat on her board, part submerged in the heaving sea, and watched the churning curl of the last wave pass, thundering on toward the beach. Breaking, a muffled roar of collapsing water, headed for the distant shore. A surfer emerged from the churning wash, nose first, and resumed paddling. Lost, momentarily, as the swell took her down again, and moving dunes of water rolled between, glittering in the pale light of an overcast sky.

  The wind was changing. Sandy turned to face into it, brisk and salt-smelling from the south-east, blowing leftwards along the north-south coastline. And tending now to onshore, she thought, as it whipped at careless strands of salt-wet hair, narrowing her eyes as it chopped the heaving seas to a broken mess. Soon it would be completely onshore, and the scudding patches of low cloud would turn to thick, blackening thunderheads, dark with the lateness of autumn.

  Another swell lifted her, and suddenly, she could see a long way. The long, thin line of coast, stretching away to the southern distance. Nearby to the right, Lindolin Heads, a flaring mass of dark rock and sprawling reef, the surrounding sea flat with white, broken wash. Further out, the breakers pounded, exploding white spray along the outer reef. Beyond, a pleasure boat was cruising a rolling, bounding course through the roughening seas. Back on the near beach, the small figures of people, watching from the shore.

  The other surfer continued out on a different angle, briefly hidden by the rolling swell. It was no one she recognised.

  Weather for serious surfers, she thought idly, scanning the surrounding sea for other dark, wetsuited figures upon the broken surface. There were several, widely spaced across the broad stretch of beach front.

  A faint smile played at her lips. So she was a serious surfer now. Vanessa thought so. Vanessa had wanted her company at lunch, with friends and family. Vanessa hadn't understood how a weather report could make that impossible. A serious surfer was surely someone who, given several hours' respite from the worst security crisis the planet had ever seen, would grab her board and wetsuit from her CSA locker, hire a flyer from a regional hire company and head out to the coast. Most agents spent such precious time-outs sleeping, or, like Vanessa, catching up with friends and family, mostly unseen for the last few weeks. Lacking family, not needing much sleep, and her attention consumed with the surf report, Sandy's priorities were different.

  The swell loomed up in front, not quite the correct angle of face. She let it go, a giant heave and rise over the lip, then sliding down the back. Roar and crash as it broke behind her, churning on toward the beach. A wonderful sound. The last opportunity she'd had, on a precious rotating weekend off, she'd camped overnight on a beach near this. Vanessa had been with her that time. Lying in the dark, wind rippling the canvas tent walls, they'd talked about many things, and looked out the window mesh at the stars, while the waves had pounded and roared out in the dark.

  Meteors that night, she remembered, reseating herself upon the board, facing the wind. Shooting stars, Vanessa had called them. Another of those strange civilian terms, unconnected with reality. Yet all the more charming for it. Sandy gazed out into the freshening wind, beyond the lumpish horizon of sea in motion, and remembered the most spectacular meteor storm she'd ever witnessed. Nothing natural could rival the aftermath of a trans-orbital battle. Wreckage that burned in brilliant flares, flaming pieces that lit the sky in their multitudes and turned a moonless night to noon-day glare. Yet another difference between her perceptions and those of the people around her. She had stopped counting long ago.

  Further out, another dark swell was looming ... and another behind it, she saw, as another rise took her higher ... even larger than the first. She thought it looked very nice, very promising. And felt a flare of excitement, watching that first, looming wall of water grow. Rode it all the way up, a fast ascent, then plunging over the lip as she saw, to great delight, that the second had indeed been worth waiting for. Roar as the first broke, rushing away. She lay flat and turned the nose of her board back toward the shore. Behind her, the mountain rose, dark and glistening.

  And then it was on her, several sharp thrusts from her arms to accelerate as the board tilted forward, and the massive wave lifted her clear of the flat surface ... then plunging forward, upward shove from tightly gripped hands, and a smooth swivel got her feet under her. Firm grip of bare skin on the roughened board as she plunged and bounced down the huge, racing wave face. Decelerated at the bottom and cut hard left, back up the face, shooting upward and slicing back ...

  ... and for an exhilarating, flying moment, she hung upon the vertical face, high above the flat sea below ...

  ... and plummeted down, a rush of wind and racing water, a mad vibration of board on water that jolted through her legs. Sudden explosion of foam everywhere, half the lip collapsing behind as the wave broke, and she cut left again, aiming to keep ahead of the surging mess. Up and racing at double velocity across the face. Flat sea below, balanced midway up a rushing, vertical wall that roared with howling, salty wind and spray.

  She laughed out loud, soundless against the roar. Trailed the fingertips of her left hand along the racing wall-face, and at that hurtling, shuddering velocity, it felt solid as concrete. Spray erupted along her path as she zigzagged madly up and down the vertical face. And then, with heavenly grace, the lip curled over to fall like a giant curtain on her right, and she was in a tube.

  Time slowed. Encircled by rushing, shimmering water, everything echoed. The curl of arcing sea above her head was possibly the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. The world turned green and shimmering blue, refraction of moving light and water. It was eerie, and heavenly, and utterly exhilarating.

  And suddenly ending, as she shot into open sky amid erupting spray from the blowhole effect, the wave collapsing further ahead. She cut back hard right, falling downslope, and sensed the rest of it falling in behind her, like a cliff-face collapsing. Everything exploded, with massive force, blasting her forward ... within which she held her balance, inhumanly, and came back down on her feet ... except that the board was no longer under her.

  Wham. Roaring silence, everything churning over. Muffled thunder. A few exploratory strokes, to test resistance. Direction. Up from down. Felt herself rising, as the foam passed, and stroked in that direction.

  She broke the surface, a rush of light and sound. Hauled her board in by the leg strap, grinning uncontrollably, and looked around for the next set. There was another one out there, rising nicely and coming her way. What a day. She threw herself jubilantly back onto the board and began paddling back out to sea.

  Frequency alarm-a sharp register in her inner ear. She frowned, still paddling, and accessed. Click and response, a merging tune into frequency ... a shielded line with priority code, but no message. A specific recall, just for her. Someone wanted her back at work. She swore, loudly. Several more strokes and she decided that she had to stop paddling. Dammit. Ahead, the next wave exploded into towering whitewash, and she was nearly too annoyed to bother rolling under.

  She emerged from the water several minutes later, board under one arm, bare feet trudging over rough, shell-strewn sand. Wiped dripping hair from across her face. Refused to hurry, the recall would have told her if it were urgent. More damn procedural rescheduling. Some politician had probably slipped in the shower and twisted her pinky. To hell with politics, didn't they know the surf was up?

  She walked along the shore, sand plastering her wet feet, and headed for the ranger's bungalow on stilts that overlooked the beach from the height of a neighbouring dune. Surfers gathered about. Boards, clothes and towels, and carry bags for a day trip or longer. She walked among them, dripping, getting looks from many of the men as she went. Broad shouldered and somewhat less than tall, she was hardly the long, leggy, wand-like surfie-girl ideal. But broad shoulders came with broad hips,
and compact, lithely muscular curves, pronounced enough, as Vanessa said, to take your eye out.

  Sandy knew very well what she looked like in a wetsuit. She'd been told often enough lately. And in a city where the predominant skin colour was brown, and the predominant natural hair colour was black, attractive blonde Europeans got more than their fair share of attention.

  She reached her bag where she'd left it on the sand, shouldering it without bothering to check the possessions-here among the surfer community, no one worried about rare urban concepts like common theft. Besides, no one stole stuff in Tanusha. The very idea was beneath majority criminal contempt. There were so many infinitely more valuable things to steal in Tanusha than the contents of surfers' carry bags.

  From the beach it was a fifteen minute walk through scrubby dunes and along a pressed-earth road to the small park designated for flyers. Groundcars parked haphazardly along a roadside that was definitely not equipped for auto-control, wearing ruts off the road shoulder. Sandy recalled one of the locals saying recently that the council had wanted to build carparks to accommodate all the traffic, but the locals wouldn't stand for it. Scrub turned from low bushes to trees as she walked along the roadside, board under one arm, and the most hi-tech thing she could see was the solar panel atop the public toilet, near the mouth of the path that led to the camping ground. Sandy had long decided she liked it better this way, all natural bush and sand, a fresh breeze blowing and the roar of surf upon the air. But she kept a careful eye upon the occasional groundcar that rolled past on its way to or from the major western freeway ten kilometres off-out here, all cars drove on manual, a skill Tanushan drivers rarely practised. Despite the onboard computer assist, away from the urban central network several still managed to end up nose first into trees.

  The flyer sat upon a rectangular, grassy clearing off the roadside behind a line of tall trees, one of an angled line of other flyers. It was already humming in the pre-flight mode she'd initiated with a mental uplink. She stowed the board and climbed to the driver's seat without bothering to remove the wetsuit from her lower body. Engines thrummed within the nacelles, and the ground fell away below ... the field with its row of parked flyers, the road to the beach, then the white, rippling dunes, a pale line before the turquoise ocean, broken in white, frothing lines ... all laid out below, the short distance she had walked, map like.

  Sandy gazed regretfully at the ocean for several lingering seconds, at the churning white froth of a break, at a big swell looming further out, a glimpse of a surfer, plummeting joyfully along that advancing wall of ocean swell ... She re-angled the thrust and banked away from the ocean, heading inland and gaining altitude.

  Rajadesh passed below, a single main street, some basic buildings and side streets, holiday accommodation and not much else. Beyond, and all about, the trees grew thick, green and profuse. To the left, the glittering tangle of waterways that made the Shoban River Delta. At a further distance to the right, the looming peaks of the Tuez Range, a bare, rocky spread of tall, broken landscape. Above, the broken grey cloud seemed near enough to touch, scudding by at noticeable speed as she angled the nacelles to cruise. Spread before them, and seeming quite close at even this low altitude, was the forest of tall, reaching towers that was Tanusha. Like a forest of gleaming sticks beneath a dull and broken sky. It spread for many kilometres to either side, towers too numerous to count. One of the greatest, monolithic civilisations in all human history. Home.

  The skylane brought her into Tanushan airspace at .86 kilometres, four hundred metres above the uniform Tanushan height for mega-highrise. Towers sprawled in clusters in every direction, central regions fading to suburbia and back again, and the sky was alive with a profusion of air traffic. Sandy recovered her makani juice from the little refrigerated glovebox where she'd been saving it, and took a long sip. Offhandedly decided to interface through a local connection, high bandwidth receiver. A fast reception and in, zooming through a section of regional infrastructure network as her eyes and hands effortlessly followed the lane ahead.

  Scanned on a range of securitied levels, searching for telltales, anything with that certain scent about the codes ... sipped again at the makani juice, flying one-handed as she waited. Rush of data, freeform and tangible, network branches sprawling in an orderly, tangled mass ... click, right there. She zoom-scanned and focused, there was a feeder-monitor of some description attached to one of the central control relays, part of the air traffic grid. Put there to monitor something, obviously. Small system, to escape curious attention. A fast probe showed it as official. Illegal to hack, not to mention difficult. A quick push further, through linkages open only to her ... and caught the active trace ... there was something about the diversion flows, the way each key linkage was siphoned off through fancy accesses ...

  Which meant ... she did a further quick break-and-enter, using a series of coded combinations that would have frightened certain security types if they'd known she possessed them ... and found the connection, and the data trail, and the spot to which it all pointed.

  She turned about in her seat and looked. Could see, a brief glimpse through the rear-side window past the nacelle, a small spot among many such spots, cruising innocently on a parallel skylane. A fast flashzoom through the gap between nacelle and window-side-a Chandara Falcon, large cruiser, darkened windows. A type commonly used by government agencies. Three point one kilometres away, with a clear monitor-fix upon her flyer.

  It annoyed her no end. She accessed another, more familiar code, and awaited an answer. Got one, several seconds later.

  "Sandy?"

  "Hi, Ricey," she said, racing ahead on a separate link, checking out her assigned flightpath. "Are you on call?"

  "I just got out of my car I'm at the apartment, thought I'd better change. What's up?"

  "I'm in a flyer on the way back from Rajadesh Beach, and I'm being followed. Chandara Falcon, no identifying marks, just over three clicks away but they've got a jobby monitor somewhere in the local airgrid infrastructure. It's feeding to them direct."

  "Official?" Vanessa sounded concerned.

  "It looks that way, but I can turn orange if I decide I'm a pumpkin. I was wondering if I should run a trace."

  "Hell no. Run a fix and throw it priority over to Ops. They'll nab him and ask some questions. "

  "Even better." She smiled, doing that in a flash, full position and fix data, straight into CSA Ops, where the traffic rider ought to be receiving some very interesting information right about ...

  "Hello, Snowcat, this is Ops," spoke a formal, unrecognised voice in her inner ear. "Your queried vehicle is black flagged. Do you require further assistance?"

  A "black flag" meant government. More than government, it meant official, authorised, and not to be messed with. Sandy took in a deep breath through flared nostrils. The texture of golden light upon a gleaming tower shifted shade to pale-heat-light amid a darkening curtain of infrared. Independent movement highlighted, cruising aircars, a beckoning awareness, precursor to targeting-vision. The vibration of engines thrummed with enriched texture upon her eardrums, unveiling whole new shades and levels of sound and complexity.

  She thought about taking it higher. Thought of contacting Ibrahim and putting the question to him directly. He'd told her the SIB were watching her. She hadn't thought it meant a tail on her surfing trips. She hadn't thought it would include a tail this blatant at all.

  But there was a time and a place for such inquiries. Her instinct told her that this was neither.

  "No. Thank you, Ops." She changed frequency, upped her encryption, and reconnected the old hookup.

  "Sandy? Shit, is this another of your key-grade encryptions? This stuff gives me a headache. "

  "Tough. Ops says it's a black flag." Pause on the other end. Sandy's own readings showed the Falcon still with her, feeding off the air-grid fix. Her right index finger felt jumpy, the strain feeding through her hand, back up her arm. The redness had not left her vision.
/>   "Well, you did kind of expect it," Vanessa pointed out.

  Sandy made up her mind, reflexively slipped half-tranced into attack mode, and infiltrated the air-grid monitor through her connection.

  "That I did," she replied shortly, eyes unsighted as she found the trailing aircar's defensive barriers. Broke them with her best combina tion and released a killer-cell, military-level code destroyer, a selective virus that fed on complicated software. Many years of League military ingenuity did their job and the Falcon's civvie ID beacon gave a shrill, panicked screech, and died.

  "But," she continued, seeing a clear wobble show up on her nav- scan, "I've decided that I've had enough of being tailed. It's a clear security risk to me and my broader circumstances, don't you think?"

  "Obviously," Vanessa agreed. "Someone unofficial could imitate a black flag, or use their surveillance as a cover. You want me to talk to Ibrahim?"

  "Not necessary." The Falcon, Sandy registered through her own links, was being queried by central flight control as to their lack of ID beacon, and their erratic flightpath. The Falcon gave their flag ID. And announced a flight emergency. Flight systems failure, massive systems malfunction. Backups operational, they were headed ... somewhere. It didn't register on the flightpath. Sandy reckoned that with their systems down, she might be able to infiltrate far enough to find out that one, too. But she didn't want to push her luck. "I just nuked them."

  "Subtle," Vanessa said dryly. Then, "Shit. Oh well, makes things a bit exciting, I suppose."

  "That's the Dark Star concept of surveillance, Ricey. If you don't know where the bastards are, send them a mail bomb and watch where the smoke rises."

  "This is a flammable environment, Sandy. Everything burns. "