Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield Read online

  “Commander, I can't do anything,” said Cai helplessly. “I'm not a magician, the intranet is the only thing preventing the reestablishment of killswitch channels.”

  Save shooting her own AMLORAs at them. Which would most likely not do enough damage and would invite counterstrike that would surely level Chancelry HQ, and would not be responded to by Reichardt because she'd have shot first. Time moved at a crawl. She stared at the tacnet picture, stared at it so hard her brain nearly bled, like staring at a chessboard so hard you could force some new, miraculous move to appear from the harsh reality of squares and pieces. But no matter which new angle she considered it from, the reality was the same—checkmate.

  “Those AMLORAs were not fired at Chancelry HQ, Commander,” came a new voice. CEO Huang, Kressler Corporation. It was an integrated com, patched into multiple receivers, Reichardt included. “The Federation is just over a minute away from a strike killing several thousand League citizens for no commensurate reason. When League Fleet arrives, this will be presented to them as an act of war.”

  “No way, Commander!” Kiet interjected. “The minute you terminate that round, they'll use the killswitch!”

  “They'll use it anyway.” Sandy got to her feet. Past the combat reflex, she could feel very little but dawning horror. GIs sheltering in the basement loading bay were also standing, staring at her. Hers was a command channel, not usually accessible to regular troops, but now it was open. She didn't remember changing those settings, but she must have.

  Reichardt cut in. “Commander, you are a Federation operative. You cannot single-handedly commit an act of war and expect to retain the Federation's support in whatever you choose to do next.”

  Think about the long game, he meant. Think about the larger things at stake. That was easy for someone sitting in orbit thousands of clicks away to say. Someone who did not have to look into the wide eyes of fellow synthetics who had only just managed to break free, hoping for freedom and a long life, now to realise they were all about to die.

  Forty seconds. High above, the round was entering atmosphere. Tacnet showed the intranet gone, all remaining nodes removed. Corporate GIs had no autistic mode, no defence against the killswitch signals; even if they could turn their uplinks off, the codes would reactivate them, anywhere within range. Her own had been shut off, barriered behind so many layers that even Cai couldn't get in there without direct cable access and several hours with serious barrier breakers. But this was what it was built for. A big red button, labelled “press in case of revolution.”

  “Don't do it,” she whispered. “Please.”

  “We won't do anything,” came the response. “We haven't done anything. Terminate the round now, and we'll talk.”

  Lies. She ought to let the round land, for preemptive revenge. But whether it landed or not, they'd still use the killswitch. The only question was whether she'd betray the trust the Federation had placed in her by granting her a commission in the process.

  “Don't you do it, Commander!” Kiet shouted. “You can't back down now!”

  A girl walked to her, a GI, unarmed in a torn and bloody tracksuit. She looked scared. “Don't forget about us,” she begged. She grasped Sandy's hands. “Don't let this happen to any more of us. Promise you won't.”

  Fifteen seconds.

  “I promise,” said Sandy. Escapees hugged each other. Her own troops looked at her disbelievingly, then back again, with mounting desperation. Surely they hadn't gone through all of that for nothing?

  Ten seconds. Any closer and the round would do damage. Sandy triggered termination and saw the signal on firecontrol abruptly vanish. Time passed, a frozen stillness. Then a great, rolling boom, like some unworldly thunder. If she'd been outside, she would have seen a great light high above, a brief and secondary sun.

  “Very good,” said Huang with satisfaction. “Now we can complete our transaction.”

  Some GIs fell immediately. Others screamed and thrashed. The implants in their brainstems turned white-hot and exploded. Straight human brains had no nerve receptors, but in GIs it wasn't that simple. Sandy forced herself to watch, as others cried, or embraced the dying, or turned away to stare at the walls. This she was going to remember. This would not be for nothing.

  Justice Rosa was a cyclist. Sandy hadn't thought the activity more than one of those odd, antiquated things that for some reason hadn't died yet, despite the many more hightech forms of transport available. But Justice needed to interview her for his book, and liked to cycle at least 250 kilometers a week, and so thought to combine the two. A lot of Tanushan roads had cycle-lanes, something she'd barely noticed before. They were just wide enough to ride two abreast, and since all traffic was automated, there was no danger from vehicles—just pedestrians, who Justice complained often thought the cycle-lanes belonged to them, despite being clearly marked otherwise.

  Sandy hadn't expected how nice it was. Tanusha was both awesomely huge, busy, and hightech, but also pretty on the small, intimate scale. Walking let you appreciate a neighbourhood, but it was too slow to see any more than a tiny sliver of the megacity. Cars and maglevs were faster but reduced the city's details to an air-conditioned blur. Cycling held a middle speed, about 40 kph, air on the face and sun on the skin, everything to look at with no glass between you and it, much the same freedom she loved about surfing. And cycling you could observe how neighbourhoods changed, from the crowds and soaring towers of city hubs, to sudden bridges over Tanusha's many river tributaries, to green parks and patches of urban jungle. A game of cricket on a roadside field, the whack of bat on ball. Roadside buskers, music, and singing. The whine and hum of a big VIP cruiser coming to land at a riverside transition zone. Children laughing and shouting in a school playground.

  “So where do GIs fit in with the nationalism debate?” Justice asked her, long brown legs pumping easily. Sandy could have managed a massively larger gear, of course, but she got a better exercise-heartrate kick from the smaller one. Much of a GI's musculature response was mechanical and wouldn't count as exercise in the short term, but if she pushed it long enough, constant use triggered nutrient flow, meaning blood, and a thumping heart to push it all around just like in regular humans.

  “GIs are born with nationalism built in,” said Sandy. “That's the joke of it; we're not allowed to choose.”

  “So when you were a soldier in the League, you loved the League unconditionally?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all foundational tape teach, do you think?”

  “No,” said Sandy. “It's just like a child and her parents. The bond is instinctual; you can't second-guess it. Children love their parents because they have to, that's their environment, they're stuck with it. It's a part of them and determines their welfare, so they'd better love it, because its survival is their survival.”

  “Hmm,” said Justice. They pedalled over a short bridge. Sandy recognised this stretch of Derry District, where a terrorist bomb had gone off a few months after her arrival in Tanusha. Nearly six years ago now. She and Vanessa had responded to that one, briefly, and had been relieved that no one had been killed. Cycling around the city, it struck her how much personal history she'd accumulated in this place. “Sociologists will tell you that minor nationalisms will spring up wherever a commonality of people share a unique bond that at the same time separates them from everyone else. Race, religion, etc.”

  “Gender,” said Sandy.

  “Gender nationalism,” Justice mused, as they left the bridge, between tall apartment towers. “Interesting concept.”

  “Gender's the one that struck me the most, arriving in civvie life. I mean, race, religion, and all that are interesting, but it's all blending together, and both Federation and League have done a pretty good job at making a single, bigger nationalism, or set of nationalisms, for everyone to belong to. So you live in Tanusha, and you're Indian, or African, or whatever, but you're Callayan first, and Federation too…”

  “No, most Tanushans are
Tanushan first,” Justice disagreed. “There's no snob like an urban snob.”

  “But gender's the thing that transcends everything else, the thing that no amount of modernisation can change. People cling to gender types the same way they yearn for sex, it's primal.”

  “Please don't tell me you're becoming a feminist,” said Justice. “All that trivial, girly fluff Tanusha's feminists want to destroy is the stuff about femininity I like.”

  “No, I've grown to quite like the fluff too,” Sandy admitted, smiling. “After a military upbringing, pointless decoration is lovely.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just not on me.”

  “Nobody's perfect,” said Justice.

  “And I'm alarmed at how many people define their gender identity by the fluff, without realising that it is fluff.”

  “Well, you'll get that in any prosperous, self-indulgent society,” said Justice. “And it's by no means just a female problem.”

  “It wasn't a gender-specific observation.” She remembered something that made her grin. “Rami Rahim had a piece about men messing with the penis genome in the gene-screen labs. Apparently despite all laws against it, penis size in the general population is increasing so fast that soon sex will be impossible. Women will need larger vaginas to accommodate, and he went on to describe a world where there were no people left, just giant walking genitals.”

  Well, it was funny when Rami did it. Comedic delivery wasn't her strong point.

  “I think you're avoiding the question you know is coming by talking about sex.” Sandy frowned at him. Justice's expression was impenetrable behind his cycling glasses and the rim of his helmet. “You do that when you're uncomfortable with a line of questioning.”

  “I wasn't aware this was a ‘line of questioning,’” Sandy replied. “Unlike you, I cease hostilities with my dayjob; a conversation's just a conversation.”

  “This is my dayjob,” said Justice. “Now that all these GIs are arriving in Tanusha, it's inevitable they'll all acquire some kind of synthetic nationalism. What form will it take?”

  He was right; it wasn't a question she was particularly comfortable answering. “I guess that depends on how they're treated.”

  “What difference will that make?”

  “People who are well treated are less likely to form a defensive group nationalism in response.”

  “I'm not sure that explains the Chinese community,” said Justice. Traffic lights ahead, and they slowed, an intersection between apartments, a large shopping mall, and a university campus nestled in garden grounds. Students queuing at the lights to cross. “On most Federation worlds Chinese communities have stuck together irrespective of how well they've been treated—on most worlds very well.”

  “Not on worlds where they're the majority, which is plenty. They disperse like any dominant group.”

  “Yes, but we're talking about minorities.” They stopped alongside waiting cars and students. A student peered at her curiously, as though recognising her. “GIs in Tanusha will always be a minority. And they'll always be very different from the surrounding population, which is arguably why Chinese minorities tend to cluster, as do plenty of other ethnic minorities.”

  “Excuse me,” the student asked her. “Are you…?”

  “Get mistaken for her all the time,” Sandy explained with a smile. The student clicked a photo on her portable, not believing her. The lights changed, and they cycled off. “Look, you can't generalise about GIs. We don't have an ethnicity. We speak English because that's the League's dominant tongue, lucky for us it's the Federation's too. But we understand nothing of the cultural origins, and none of it holds any significance for us. Ethnic and religious nationalisms are formed by shared history, but GIs are relatively new, we've very little of that either.

  “Nearly all of my best friends are non-GIs. My only best friend who is a GI has probably gone even more that way than I have. She's married a non-GI, adopted kids, and is so fascinated by early childhood development that she's made it her other profession—a biological process that GIs are completely divorced from.”

  “Not completely,” Justice disagreed. “It has some bearing on early GI neurological development too.”

  “And our early neurological development has turned out to be far more unpredictable than the League initially thought. We're a big, wide bunch of different personality types, and the longer we're allowed to evolve in peaceful, civilian environments, the more diverse we'll become. I'm asking everyone who they're voting for in the next election, those who have citizenship and can vote. So far it's a completely even split. The kind of nationalism you're talking about comes from a homogeneity that I just don't think GIs have. We don't cluster.”

  “But you're tracking their voting intentions.”

  “Sure.”

  “So obviously you're concerned about how this new synthetic community will turn out, surrounded by strange non-synthetic civilians who are often distrustful. And you're keeping other tabs too, no doubt.”

  She was helping people she trusted to run full-scale psychological analyses on them. But she wasn't about to share that now. “It's interesting,” she said shortly. “We synthetics are all just as interested as you straights, trust me.”

  “There is one other factor that can lead to the creation of a group nationalism,” Justice continued, as they pedalled into pleasant, leafy suburbia. “A powerful, charismatic leader.”

  “Then you're lucky they've only got me, aren't you?” Sandy said drily. “Dull, practical, loyal servant of the Federation that I am.”

  Justice smiled. “And there's one factor that makes some people wonder if GIs aren't especially vulnerable to a powerful, charismatic leader. You've got a caste system. It's your dirty little secret.”

  “Well, for one, your analogy stinks. Lower castes in old India didn't happily submit to rule by the upper castes, they all hated the upper castes, they only obeyed with a knife to their throat.”

  “Sure,” said Justice. “What you have is worse. It's the caste system the Indian upper castes would have loved to have, where their power and privilege were actually founded in something real. Lower-caste Indians proved it was all bullshit the first chance they got. But your lower-caste GIs, they really can't outdo you in anything, can they? And a lot of them worship you. As might be natural, given that you're the one who saw the light and led them to this promised land.”

  “I'm not Moses,” Sandy said testily. “And even if I were, you'd still have nothing to worry about, because leading the Israelites was like herding cats. And still is, if my Jewish Tanushan friends are any indication.”

  Justice smiled. “Agreed. But if you and your GIs are the Israelites, and the Federation is the Roman Empire, then one of us has cause for concern. Because the Israelites gave birth to something that turned Western civilisation on its head, and the Roman Empire inside out. And a lot of Romans, if they'd known it was coming, would have killed every last Jew long before the Nazis thought of it.”

  Danya sat on the stairs overlooking the dingy basement, as Anku scanned his booster on a cluttered table. Svetlana walked around the basement, peering at the junk piled onto shelves or tables. A lot of it was salvage, and some surely stolen. Anku was a collector of odds and ends, far enough away from their usual haunts in Rimtown that few there had any leverage on him. And he owed them a favour.

  “This better be worth it,” said Anku, reading data off a separate screen. He was hooked in, a cord to the back of his head, but not directly to the booster. Given where Danya got it from, that could be dangerous. “With the number of guys after you two, you must have done something serious.”

  “We didn't do anything,” Svetlana retorted, handling some interesting-looking tools.

  “Don't touch those,” said Anku, barely looking at her. She made a face and put them back. “Rimtown Home Guard wants you, Whalen Home Guard have the word out; they're looking for you too. And who's that junk shop family over in Steel Town? Ting?”
r />   “They say we stole from them,” said Danya, chin on arms, arms over raised knees. “But we were helping someone.”

  “So you did steal from them.”

  “For a good cause.”

  “The best cause I know is me,” said Anku. “Word is you stole the Ting's GI, joined the uprising.”

  “How can a couple of kids steal a GI?”

  “That uprising killed a lot of people. Artillery came down all over Droze, now we've got drones and flyers all over, Home Guard shooting them, them shooting Home Guard…”

  “Home Guard are stupid,” said Svetlana, checking out several useful-looking lengths of cord. “What's the point of shooting at drones, the corporations just make more, and people get killed.”

  “If Home Guard don't shoot at corporate drones,” Anku asked, “what's the point of Home Guard?”

  “Good question,” Svetlana replied.

  “Boss everyone else around,” said Danya. “Home Guard are about power here, fighting the corporations is just an excuse.”

  “Bingo,” said Anku with a smile, still peering at his screens. “Well done, young sir, the prize is yours.”

  “What prize?”

  Anku gestured to the room. “Pick something of absolutely no value. Anything at all.” All who knew Anku knew he placed value on every piece of junk he collected. He sat back in his chair and rubbed both his chins. “Well, the defensive barriers on this are amazing. Military grade, probably AI constructed. Who did you say gave it to you again?”

  “Friends,” said Danya. “I have the passcodes.”

  Anku looked dubious. “Well, it better be a gift, because if you stole it from someone, those people will want it back. This is League military, probably spec ops. With this you could gain control of some serious systems.”

  It had been a gift to Svetlana from their GI friends. Just before the attack, one of them had realised the advance meant leaving Svetlana all alone. She'd given her a bag of some stuff, with the carelessness of a middle-designation GI who didn't know much about civilian society, and what was and wasn't considered suitable equipment for the possession of children.