Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel (v1.1) (9 page)

"The biggest ideological death toll lately came from the League insistence on self-determination away from old-fashioned Federation ideology. Self-perpetuating ideologies are all the same, Ari, the intolerant, self-righteous ones all end up getting people hurt-atheism's just as bad as religious zealotry in that. Look at the League, or twentieth century communism for that matter. It's only those societies that embrace diversity and alternative points of view that have a good chance of long-lasting peace and stability. I think the old cultural antiques in cities like this one play a damn important role, they make diversity an unavoidable part of the cultural and political landscape so that people just accept diversity as second nature.

"After the League, I can't tell you what a goddamn relief that is ... they've gotten so impressed with their scientific capabilities and logical thought processes that they've almost managed to take all the fun out of life. And they're so fucking convinced that their way is best that they're unable to spot their own failures, even when they're right under their noses ... they're nowhere near as self-critical as the Federation is, Ari. That's why they lost the damn war. They just assumed that the use of GIs would give them such an extensive personnel advantage, and they completely failed to realise the shortcomings of GIs, with their limited imaginations. Not to mention the enormous economic cost of having to make soldiers instead of just recruiting them ..."

"Wait wait wait a second ..." Ari waved both hands, shaking his head. Sandy stopped. He looked at her incredulously. "You agree with Federation biotech restrictions? Bans on artificial humanity in all forms?"

"Would that surprise you?"

He blinked rapidly, still looking amazed. "As civilisation's most advanced artificial human yourself, yes, that would surprise me."

Sandy sighed. "Ari, don't get me wrong, I like you and your kind of people." With a nod at the silently watching Kazuma. "I've found most of you smart, funny and interesting-and Tanusha needs people like you to even out the balance. But please, don't classify me into some kind of political or ideological group just because of what I am. I get enough of that from the radicals without having to contend with it from the people who actually like me."

Ari outright grinned at her. Ran both hands through his thick dark hair, the med-cast showing transparently within his left coat sleeve. Sandy stood with her arms firmly folded, hoping he'd got the message. He needed to, for everyone's sake. A sideways glance at Kazuma showed the small Japanese woman watching with silent intrigue.

Ari exhaled sharply. "Jeez," he said, with wry, flat humour, "you make it sound like I'm trying to recruit you for something."

"Aren't you?" Ari looked offended. "N'Darie doesn't like you. I've found her very consistent where League-ists are concerned, she doesn't like any of them. And your kind of Intel work is all about contacts, isn't it? I bet you could use a contact like me. With what I know about League-side, I mean."

"You know, you are very suspicious." Fixing her with a mock-hard stare and jabbing a finger at her chest. "I'd heard you were an idealist."

"I am, I'd ideally like not to get mistaken for something I'm not. Everyone in this city seems to, one way or another."

"We do important work, Cassandra." Kazuma interrupted for the first time in the argument. Sandy looked across at her. She looked very sincere, and totally unbothered by the whole thing. "Not just me and Ari, but our friends too. There are things that go on in this city that the CSA has no jurisdiction over. Officially. That's where we come in. If you ever need our help ... and I have a feeling that you probably will at some point ... you only need to ask. No favours, no return promises, just ask. We'll help."

Sandy targeted the other woman with her most penetrating, merciless stare. Kazuma never flinched. "Trusting," it occurred to her. She wasn't sure she liked that. Unconditional trust. It didn't seem any more safe or reliable than unconditional hate. And she didn't understand either very well at all, as far as this city and its politics went. Neither group knew who she was. They only knew what she was, and based their tenuous understanding upon that.

"Look," Ari sighed, "Cassandra." And to her disbelief he stepped forward and placed a hand upon each shoulder, looking down at her face. She wasn't sure she liked that, either. The "military spec ops officer" part of her brain objected quite strongly. "You're operating in a civilian environment now. I know you must find that disconcerting."

"You're a shrink too?"

"I can understand why you're so suspicious," he continued, ignoring her. Which she definitely didn't like. "I respect that you don't like to be categorised, and that your opinions and politics are yours alone and none of anyone else's business ... but like Ayako says, we're your friends. We do share a lot of common concerns. I just wanted to let you know that no matter how badly things gang up against you, you do have some friends in this city. That's all."

Sandy stared up into his handsome, sincere dark eyes, and found it was all she could do to keep herself from grabbing his other arm and twisting until it hurt, and warning him never to forget what she was. And that she wasn't half as pretty on the inside as she was on the outside. She didn't trust the sincerity for a moment ... he believed it, obviouslythe prospect of a natural, self-evident alliance between like minds in service of like causes. But "just friends"? No return commitment?

No way. Whatever else he was, Ari Ruben was too smart for that, and far too dedicated. Dedicated to what, she hadn't figured out yet. But she reckoned she would, sometime soon. And she was damned if she was going to get caught up in his agendas without knowing exactly what they were in advance.

"I'm a soldier, Ari," she told him, "not a politician."

"Oh sure, and soldiers aren't political in the League either." He jabbed her casually in the chest with a forefinger. "You need a support base. We're it." Clapped her on both shoulders, and smiled at her cheerfully. "Think about it." And he turned and left, his smaller, similarly black-clad partner swaggering jauntily in tow, sparing her a sly, parting smile as she left.

"I'm not his damn cuddle-bunny," she muttered to Vanessa a half hour later in armament prep, deep in the bowels of Doghouse Testing and Training-T&T, in SWAT lingo. Doing a fast reassemble on a KT6 multi-function close-assault weapon, hands sure and rapid as barrel, stock, sighter, comp and magazine slotted quickly and efficiently back into place. B Range echoed with the hard-alloy clack-ker-chack! of weapons coming apart and going back together ... SWAT Seven had C Range, SWAT Four's usual haunt, but schedules were tight and messy these days, and no one complained.

"Should have flattened him," Vanessa said helpfully, peering down the sight of her own heavy pistol. Aligning armscomp electronics between targets on the far range wall, the pistol in her uplinked right glove, and the headset eyepiece strapped across her brow and uplinked to the insert socket in the back of her skull. "Usually works for me, people have this idea that because I look like a cross between a stuffed baby animal and a teenage bikini slut, everyone can line up and have a pat. I find a short, bone crushing left jab to the solar plexus usually does the trick."

"Look, sorry, LT," said Johnson from Sandy's left, reading armscomp diagnostics off his booth screen, "you need tits to be a teenage bikini slut."

"You'll need a windpipe to keep breathing," Vanessa replied, sighting calmly. "You think he's just hot for you?"

"Damn, I wish," Sandy muttered. "Thinks I'm a fellow techiegeek-long live the march of rational scientific progress. I don't need it." Finished the reassembly, activated armscomp and shoved her right hand into the sighting-glove. Pulled the headset off the hook on the wall of her booth, slid it on, inserted the connection beneath her increasingly unruly hair (she'd never had it so long), flipped down the eyepiece and raised the gun.

She didn't need all the gear, she had enough direct interface crammed into her unadorned skull to make a far cleaner shot than the armscomp link could possibly calculate. But it was weapons check, and so she was checking weapons, gear included, the basic SWAT rule being that everyone checked everyone else's gear too, not just their own. Sighting down the open, eighty metre, low-ceilinged space, the targets showed bright and clear on comp-vision, a range of holographic spheres and highlighted trajectories across the range's virtual imagination. Lowered the short, snub-nosed rifle, a mental deactivation of comp-viz, and the long, empty underground range turned blank and dull once more, lit only by the reinforced inset glow-lights for depth perception down the length.

Warning call down the row of booths, and then someone fired, four short, staccato bursts that assaulted the eardrums with a familiar rhythm. Clusters of vicious dark holes erupted in quick succession across four solid target outlines on the far wall, like swarming black insects. Echoes racketed, then silence. The riddled targets replaced themselves.

"Not bad," called Hiraki's voice, a softer echo after the gunfire. "Uneven rhythm, third out at point two, fourth scattered, adjust recoil, target acquisition down and left point four. Sandy?"

"Trigger tension down five," she yelled down the line of booths, "RPS up one. Comp it and watch the recoil on your transition, that Panchi-3 kicks like a horse. Use a bigger mag if you like, keeps the nose down."

"Gotcha, Sandy." Zago's voice, deep and strong. No one ever questioned her fire analysis, she was quite literally the walking armscomp on such things. She had no idea how straights saw it, though even augmented straights seemed to struggle. How were these things difficult? Trajectories in a three-dimensional space ... it was only data. Data was easy. Visual, graphical data in particular. And of course if there was a firearm in League or Federation space she hadn't seen, tested, stripped and written field reports on ... she would have been surprised.

CSA SWAT weren't as good as her old Dark Star team at such basic things as shooting, and of course no GI ever had to worry about recoil all that much, but they made up for it in other areas. Like lateral thinking, forward planning, and the ability to avoid walking into traps because of things called "hunches" ... all very alien to the vast majority of the League GI soldiery. And so she adjusted, and tried to accept their weaknesses while playing to their strengths.

"So aside from the fashion sense," Vanessa continued, "what's the problem?"

"I don't like being used. Besides which, my resources aren't sufficient yet to do a proper threat analysis. Never walk into a firezone without one."

"You know," said Johnson, still reading from his screen, "for such a bigshot spec ops commander, you can be a real pussy sometimes."

"You seem to know all the cliches, Steve. Don't make me repeat the one about old soldiers and bold soldiers."

"How did that go again?" Vanessa asked.

"There ain't no old bold soldiers," Johnson announced.

"Ah, that's right, I could never remember how that one went."

"So you're an old soldier, are you, Sandy?"

"Fifteen," Sandy told him, allowing the armscomp to adjust itself on auto as she fed it corrections. "In GI years, that's ancient."

"I'm thirty-two," Johnson told her. "You're a baby."

"Compared to the crap I've seen in my life, Steve, you're a fetus."

"My, how competitive," said Vanessa. "I suffered the traumatic dismemberment of my pet bunbun at the age of ten when my cousin Pierre shoved a live wedding firecracker up its arse. Do I get points for that?"

"Cool!" said Singh from Vanessa's far side.

"What's your mental age?" Johnson challenged Sandy, taking his eyes from the screen for the first time. "There's gotta be a psyche profile for GIs, there's one for damn everything else."

"Hell, they gave you one," Vanessa agreed, "that's sure the thin edge of the wedge."

"Vanessa," Sandy stated with commendable pleasantness, "you're not being very helpful."

"I'm the unit CO, that's my job."

"Tell me about it," said Singh.

"You can't measure mental age on GIs," Sandy told Johnson, only too aware that Vanessa habitually ridiculed those conversations she thought were headed in unhelpful or even dangerous directions. "Mental age is a rough approximation of mental development, which is hugely accelerated with League advances in developmental and foundational tape-teach. GIs never really go through "infancy" as you'd understand it, anyway. The childlike emotional state is specific to straight humans, GIs skip it entirely. There's just developed and less developed, though GIs internalise information in their early years at a similar pace to a straight human child. It's a very rapid learning phase. Mine just continued six or seven years, most GIs only need about three ... and regs only about one and a half."

"But you don't remember any of it?"

"Almost nothing ... memory-wise, everything that happened to me before about nine years ago is very fuzzy."

"Weird life," Singh remarked.

"I was in combat much of that time ..." She shrugged. "... they're not memories I miss. And I don't think I would have liked myself much, back then. Mentally I'm a different person now ... which is why I don't remember much from then. My psychology's changed so much it's like a computer trying to access data stored in a different, out-of-date format. My brain today just doesn't recognise it. It surprised the hell out of my minders, they'd never had a GI mature over such a long period before."

"So are you going to remember stuff from today in ten years' time?" Vanessa asked. Giving her a concerned look from her booth, weapon temporarily lowered to safe-hold against the rim of the booth.

"Definitely," Sandy assured her with a faint smile. "I plateaued about seven years ago, the rest was just normal learning, like anyone learns ... my memories from about seven or eight years ago are crystal. It's just beyond that it gets progressively more fuzzy. But, I mean, age is a tenuous guide for anyone, it depends how you spend your time. Twenty formative years spent partying or on uplink VR won't create as much mental maturity as twenty years spent reading books and practising concertos."