23 Years on Fire Read online

  “It’s sad she’s still a soldier,” Vanessa had observed. “She’s got far more to offer childhood studies and education than she does here. But she’s got to make that call for herself, I can’t do it.”

  “I said I was coming,” Sandy had sighed, “and she was pretty much unstoppable from then.”

  Last of these final, elite six, was Cassandra Kresnov. GIs had been coming in from the League for four years now, experimental ones with the self-­awareness to realise the injustices done to them. Though two had emerged as challengers, and one of those was certainly her equal in intellect, there were still none who came close in combat. Weller had quoted Hindu scripture after seeing her fight—Vishnu from the Baghavad-Gita: “for I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Sandy was one of a tiny handful of 50 series GIs ever made. Certainly she was the only one serving the Federation. It was hypothetically conceivable that further advances could make a more effective soldier, but Vanessa, for one, doubted it.

  “Babe,” she’d said, “if it’s Pyeongwha versus you, I pick you.”

  “Well that’s sweet,” Sandy had replied, “but you know better than anyone it doesn’t work like that.”

  “Bullshit it doesn’t,” Vanessa had said with a smile. “I’ve got an entire assault plan that counts on it.”

  Under the DA building was a cavern. It led to a maze of caves beneath Anjula, well known by the first settlers over two hundred years ago . . . in fact, it was one of the reasons why the city had been placed where it was. Into the caves had gone power plants, waste management systems, and various emergency facilities—a whole underground infrastructure. Then, from eighty years back, access had been increasingly restricted.

  It had begun by accident. A local biotech firm had made some genome alterations to counter a strain of nasty Pyeongwha native neural diseases. It worked, and the genome adjustments had created an interesting additional benefit—an enhanced ability to assimilate what had then been a new and innovative neural-cluster uplink technology. Those were synthetic-organic themselves, the kind of thing the League had been playing with at the time, later largely banned in the Federation. But on Pyeongwha, they’d led to a noticeable increase in productivity, ingenuity, and—its proponents claimed—social harmony. So popular they’d proven, that governments had been elected to promote, and later mandate, certain functions. A new phase of human evolution, they’d called it. Theories had abounded on how the natural mechanisms of organic evolution were now adapting themselves to NCT, as Neural Cluster Tech was called, leading to a virtuous circle of technological and biological improvement.

  NCT proponents built the technology into a vision of prosperity, and hadn’t taken criticism well. Soon NCT on Pyeongwha was cultish, non-NCT subscribers didn’t get into good schools, or get good jobs, and were accused of pushing down “national competitiveness.” Others were told they promoted “social disharmony.” Twenty years ago, they’d begun disappearing. Escaping “subversives” had told horror stories of covert “social reorganisation” programs occurring beneath the ground, and pleaded with the Federation Grand Council to do something. But that Federation Grand Council had been locked away on Earth, and only interested in keeping the trading lanes open. Pyeongwha was wealthy and productive, and action would be expensive.

  Then the Grand Council had shifted to Callay, where the fate of Federation colonies meant far more than just economics. Finally, five years after the relocation, a decision had been made. Fleet had wanted to do it the old fashioned way, strangling and pounding from orbit, but Callay’s former CDF, now refashioned into the new Federal Security Agency, had had other ideas. Callayan and Tanushan technology, long a driving revolutionary force in Federation civilian tech, now moved into military affairs. With a new cadre of side-switching GIs leading the push, FSA commanders were adamant that now, things would happen differently.

  Differently hadn’t included getting pinned down straight out of the elevators. There were caverns here all right, heavily engineered with gantry walls, great pipes and electrical assemblies running everywhere. Not some kind of military base, just a big city’s underground infrastructure, but Anjula was certainly protecting it.

  Sandy covered on one side of a big cargo doorway, arranging her various magazines and grenades where she reckoned she’d need them. Her squad were spread across the industrial space, exchanging fire with intense resistance in the cavern beyond. Sandy saved her ammo; anything she eliminated here would just be replaced. She had an objective, and any firepower she expended that didn’t directly help her get there was wasted.

  “Cap,” said Rhian on uplinks, “they’ve got an AMAPS up high somewhere, another low to the left, there’s no angle on this doorway.”

  “Doesn’t matter, go around it,” she replied. “Take the squad, Rhi, you’re in charge. Get their damn power plants offline, we can shut down half the city from here.”

  “You’re going alone?” She didn’t sound that surprised.

  “You know the sims in tight spaces, once they realise they can’t get me, they’ll flank me, everything will come down on my wingman, any way they can. I’m really better at this alone.”

  “I know.”

  It was one of the stupid ironies about being the galaxy’s most effective 50 series GI—she was a very talented commander, yet even better in a shooting fight. In situations like this, where the objective was imperative, support only slowed her down, and all her command skills were for nothing.

  They moved, Sandy down a side corridor, then up some stairs to a gantry overlooking the cavern. It was guarded, she shot two soldiers defending it, crushed the skull of a third with a casual passing elbow, then proceeded, while running, to put bullets through the exposed faces, throats and armour weak spots of another five troops at various points about the cavern. The AMAPS Rhian had spotted was on her level now, turning with twin cannon spinning. Sandy leaped and spun, switching the rifle to her left hand to nail its sensors with a grenade while the right angled upward with a pistol to shoot two men on a gantry above her. She skidded on her back, put another grenade in the AMAPS, leaped for the overhead gantry, silenced two more shooters in mid air, then ducked into a side tunnel before the second AMAPS tore that gantry to pieces with its cannon.

  Anyone who got in her way, and was armed, died. If Rhian had come with her, she’d have lost her by now anyhow; coordination at these speeds was nearly impossible. The biggest worry now was booby traps, always the biggest threat to GIs. She sprinted down corridors, literally bouncing off walls to make corners at speed, leaped down stairwells, and crossed open spaces so fast guarding soldiers barely had time to aim before she was gone. If they were lucky, she didn’t bother killing them on the way through. In combat mode, even she wasn’t entirely certain what her subconscious would process as a threat, and simply didn’t have time to think it through at length.

  Her mental schematic helped, too, it wasn’t always perfect, but it gave her a general idea of what lay ahead. It told her a door blocking the corridor was thin enough to grenade and dive through the hole, while another one would be faster for her to go around. Automatic gun emplacements guarded a junction, so hair-trigger that she didn’t dare try and shoot them even with her reflexes. She hacked a ventilation system instead, blasting one with cold air, causing others to shoot the vent, which blew out the region’s power and caused a defensive grid flux. That was all she needed to hack one’s control system and blow the other emplacements to pieces. She was twenty-two years old now, positively ancient in GI terms, and she knew a lot of tricks.

  The corridors opened onto proper caverns, metal giving way to rock, and here there was a full squad with multiple AMAPS, heavy weapons, the works. First thing, from the shelter of an engineering approach, Sandy hacked and shut down half the lights. The other half came down with a couple of well-placed grenades, heavy supports crashing to the cavern floor, sending soldiers running in the engulfing dark. Then, dark as the night that had suddenly descended, she simply jumped in amo
ngst them.

  It was a horror, the only light came from misused AMAPS floodlights that glared and blinded as much as they illuminated, and muzzle flashes and explosions, everyone firing and only one target, which was never where or what its opponents thought it was. Sandy barely had to shoot more than a third of them, mostly they shot each other as she skipped, rolled and wove amongst them, a bullet here, a punch there. Most commanders did not realise how numerical superiority could be a curse until they ran into high-designation GIs. They were still dying once she’d gone, racing into the complex they’d been defending—a hive of steel and glass emerging from the rock. She shot a window, leaped three stories and crashed through office glass, confounding anyone who’d expected her to take the door.

  Civvies screamed and ran, and Sandy ignored them, save for one woman, dressed like a manager, whom she abruptly headlocked against a steel corridor wall. “Where’s the containment facility, I want the people. Where do you keep them?”

  And followed the woman’s trembling finger, down the corridor in a flash. This place was medical. That immediately creeped her out. NCT was medical, certainly, and required a lot of ongoing research. Anjula insisted that it was all above-board biotech, but refused Federal inspectors who wanted to probe further for illegal tech. This place looked like a giant steel-framed hospital, built into a natural cavern like a beehive might fill up a spider’s hole with honeycomb. Everywhere were secure doors requiring keycards or iris scans, though Sandy found that network hacks or hammer blows did the trick as well.

  She skipped through rooms to cut between corridors, and found vast labs, high tech analysers, rows of test tubes and refrigerated containers. Partly, she was dimly aware past the combat reflex, it creeped her out because many of her own worst nightmares came from places like this—too many bad memories of combat patches, upgrade surgeries or the ubiquitous “checkups.” She’d been conceived in a place like this, no doubt. It wasn’t something she liked to think about, and even Tanushan psychs were accustomed to her changing the subject.

  A couple of guards surprised her at a doorway, she took both by breaking bones without killing, and used one’s keycard to open a secure door as he shrieked. This room had refrigeration units. Big ones, from floor to ceiling, with fancy screens that displayed the vitals of the people within. Because . . . they were people, it registered now as she slowed her pace a little. Rows of them, men and women, old and young. The network in this region was proving stubborn, so she accessed at a local data point, downloaded rapid codes, then fed them up to Ari, confident he’d find a delicate way through where she’d just break things and make a mess. This information, they needed intact.

  Into a neighbouring room, past more refrigeration units, dimly aware that Ari was swearing in her inner ear. She really wasn’t processing on that emotional level yet; she’d cut that out of her world, unable to handle that and the job she was here to do at the same time. He was seeing the same thing she was—armscomp had cameras on her headset, and he was reading and no doubt recording those images. Someone in the room with Ari, in the background, sounded like he was crying.

  Through another door, and here were surgical tables, with great automated surgical units hovering like mechanical spiders above the slabs, arms affixed with every cutting and scanning and stabbing tool known to medicine, plus tubes for the blood and grilles on the floor to flush away the mess . . .

  At that moment all the doors slammed shut and armed soldiers sprang up beyond the adjoining control room windows, no doubt thinking it a fine trap they’d led her into. Sandy shot them all in slightly less than half a second, and leaped into the control room through shattered glass. She accessed physically with a cord and socket, and accumulated codes got her into memory files and recent activities, and now she could see bodies on the slabs, machine tools whirring, skulls sliced open to probe the mysteries of NCT within, and why it didn’t seem to work on some defective people as well as Anjula’s leaders thought it ought. Everyone had thought the situation on Pyeongwha was bad, but no one had quite expected this.

  “Oh, you got ’em Sandy,” Ari was saying, choked with furious emotion. “I’m getting all this and we’re putting it out to broadcast in a few seconds. You fucking got ’em.”

  “These memory files are too big,” she heard herself saying. “There’s got to be years of files in here. Surely this whole facility can’t be for this.”

  “I think it might be,” said Ari. “It would explain a lot, these last fifteen years or so . . .” And he broke off, to calm the sudden clamor for names from the crying man in the room with him. There would be plenty of time to search the database for names later, he assured that man. They’d find everyone, every last man and woman, no one would be forgotten.

  Sandy didn’t know how she felt. It was more than just combat reflex, which made it hard to access emotion. She just felt . . . numb. She’d wanted to be on board precisely because of this, and the prospect of a very worthy cause. But now that she was here, she couldn’t figure if she was glad to be here, or if she’d regret it forever. Perhaps, like so many things in the lives of soldiers, it was both.

  “Sandy,” came Rhian’s voice, “you’ve still got several hundred security personnel in there with you, and maybe a thousand civvies. Do you need some help mopping up?”

  “Help?” Sandy disconnected and moved through a side door. A security man on the far side tried to shoot her, but between his finger tightening on the trigger and the gun going off, Sandy was no longer where she had been. She punched him in the head, not an especially hard punch as such things went, but the wall three meters back was sprayed with skull, blood and brains. “No,” she said, continuing down the corridor. “I think I can handle it.”

  Admiral Alemsegad’s shuttle arrived in the cold dawn, upon the landing pad within the bowl-shaped rooftop of Anjula’s Parliament, with engines screaming and thermal scales popping from reentry heat. Assault shuttles were always a menace to the eardrums. On polite official visits, VIPs would land at the spaceport and take an atmospheric shuttle to the Parliament, and not bring their direct-from-orbit beasts down on the roof to frighten local residents and damage their windows. But this was no polite visit, and Vanessa was there to meet him, thankful her helmet would save her senses from damage.

  The admiral wore a spacer’s jumpsuit, jacket and a uniform cloak, swirling out the back in a blast of frigid air amidst his armoured Marine escort. Vanessa popped her visor and saluted. The cold on her face was enough that she wished she hadn’t.

  “Commander Rice,” she identified herself. The admiral saluted, and she gestured him to walk with her.

  “Sitrep,” he requested.

  “We have Anjula for now,” she said, leading him through the blast doors into the holding area, signaling whoever was watching the monitor to cycle the doors. Probably it was one of their AIs. “Anjula rebels hold much of the Parliament network function, and now we physically hold most of the building . . .”

  “Most?” Alemsegad interrupted.

  Vanessa shrugged. “A few quarters holding out. We haven’t the manpower to mop up completely, they weren’t attacking us so we sealed them off. Now that you’re here, feel free to finish up.”

  The admiral nodded, and gave a signal to the Marine captain at this side. The captain relayed something, and four from the admiral’s ten-strong contingent hurried ahead as the inner doors squealed open.

  Vanessa led the admiral after. “Parliament wants to speak to you,” she continued. “They want to know by what right the Grand Council attacked their world.”

  “President Tao?”

  “Vice President Hakana,” Vanessa corrected. “Tao’s wounded.” The admiral looked at her. “We had to shoot our way in. They were trying to reestablish network control. Shit happened.”

  The admiral made a face. “Hakana then. Who’s in charge now?”

  Of the rebels, he meant. It was necessary protocol. The Fleet wasn’t allowed to intervene in any Federation world�
��s affairs except in exceptional circumstances. One of those circumstances was the event of civil uprising and loss of governmental control.

  “His name’s Moon,” said Vanessa, as they walked down a wide, gently bending corridor, office doors on the right, windows offering a view across the Anjulan skyline to the left. Smoke rose in columns, across a cityscape unusually clear of air traffic. “University professor and tech wizard. He’ll be acting president.”

  “Well,” said Alemsegad, “now I am. As the senior Federal representative, I’ll be acting president until a governor arrives, and you’ll be my security chief.”

  “Yes sir. You’d not rather use a Marine?”

  “You’ve been planning this for months, we just got here. I’ll need your knowledge.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Alemsegad smiled. “Don’t worry, Commander, I’ll not keep you long. Just until relief arrives, maybe a week.”

  “Damn,” said Vanessa. “I’m gonna miss Tanusha fashion week.”

  “Seriously?” asked the admiral.

  “No,” said Vanessa. Alemsegad actually grinned. Word was, he didn’t do that often.

  The planning/debriefing session in the ex-president’s office that evening was of informal attire, but as deadly focused, as one would expect from a bunch of war veterans who cared less about procedure than results.

  Sandy sat by the big, bomb-proof windows with her feet up, in a reclining chair with just a jacket over a bra-top, her side swathed in bandages. The DA building defences had indeed taken a rib, which had stopped them from taking a lung. The rib would heal, she was assured, but it needed to breathe, and have as little pressure on it as possible. A straight human, of course, would have lost most of her chest cavity. Also present were Vanessa, Ari, Admiral Alemsegad, Moon, Marine Captain Reddy, and Choi, a colleague of Moon’s, formerly an Anjulan police officer of considerable rank.