Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (7 page)

Callay’s president now was Vikram Singh, having disposed of Neiland in a political coup nearly two years ago. Establishing the Grand Council on Callay had chewed through Callay’s budget, disrupted long held financial goals, and of course, cost far more than Neiland or anyone had promised. Then loopholes had begun appearing in Callay’s laws, special deals for foreign worlds, for Fleet troops, for new embassies, all the things that needed to happen for Callay to become the central Federation world, but smacked of an erosion of sovereignty to Callayans unaccustomed to such things.

Portions of the Fleet had practically declared war on Callay five years ago, and were only defeated in what historians now called either the first, second or third Federation civil war, depending on which writing of history you preferred. Now the Fleet had control of spaceplanes, and Fleet Marines wandered Tanushan bars, occasionally causing trouble as hard-drinking Marines sometimes could. And then the GIs had begun turning up. One GI was an interesting curiosity. Two, when Rhian had joined Sandy, was tolerable. But now it was fifty and climbing. The religious radicals who hated GIs had faded but not disappeared, and now raised their voices once more. The Federation loyalists, who’d fervently hated the League precisely because of GIs, were also unhappy, as were all the biotech conservatives. And a lot of ordinary Callayans, who may or may not have come to accept the presence of Cassandra Kresnov, now worried that while one or two GIs might be an acceptable risk, fifty could be stretching their luck. And where would it end? Even Sandy didn’t know the answer to that.

Vikram Singh had been Neiland’s Education Minister, until Neiland’s numbers had begun to slip badly on accumulated concerns. He’d taken power in a typically craven fit of backstabbing, and now promised a hard line against the overreach of new Federal agencies, promising to defend Callayan independence against all comers, be they Federation or League. To Sandy’s astonishment, she now found herself associated by many with both. Well, the first was true, at least.

“Let’s launch a coup!” a soldier shouted, flat on his back and chafing to see his family again. “Fuck it, we just knocked off one planetary government, let’s make it two!” Loud cheers from the troops.

“Hey!” Vanessa yelled. “None of that! Not even in jest, I’m serious!” They quietened. “If someone heard that, God forbid in the media, we’d be fucked!”

Silence settled. Vanessa checked her internal visual for the time.

“Half an hour,” she muttered. “How long do you think they’ll keep us?”

“Vikram’s just trying to show who’s in charge,” Sandy said calmly, arm behind her head, using the rucksack for a pillow. “Could be another half an hour, could be five hours. Either way, he made us wait, we only moved when he wanted. He makes his point, he wins.”

There was an election coming up, too, due in three months. President Singh had to justify his faction’s betrayal and removal of Neiland, who though unpopular at the time, had still won two previous elections and led Callay through some truly tumultuous times.

“I don’t like him winning.” Vanessa got up. “Let’s go.”

“Balaji won’t let us leave,” Sandy reminded her from the ground.

“Balaji won’t let us leave by air,” Vanessa corrected. “If we take the highway from here, we’ll be home in ninety minutes.”

Sandy smiled, and also got up. “We’ll catch shit for skipping his customs inspection.”

“Do you give a shit?” Sandy shook her head. “I don’t give a shit. Better that than him winning. Now, transport for two hundred. Any ideas?”

A network scan showed them a number of charter companies in the area, running bus tours for tourists, as the countryside was quite beautiful. Vanessa called a human operator, and managed to wrangle up four busses over the next couple of hours, at a reasonable fee on Federal credit. Various suits scrambled to stop the troops as they walked to a gate, and were cheerfully ignored. Vanessa was right. Balaji airport could only stop them from leaving by air, and Vanessa herself had security access to get through the gate.

The busses arrived shortly, capacity of sixty each, and everyone piled in. Once on the regional highway, speed accelerated to 150 kph, through valleys and across wild, sloping hillsides and thick, green forests. Spirits were high, and there was singing, and joking around. Sandy kept an eye on the network, and sure enough, there was soon an unmarked flyer following them overhead, transmitting on heavily encrypted frequencies. She pointed it out to Vanessa, who grinned, and pointed it out to the rest of the bus, to much hilarity. Every soldier liked to win. Against the president of Callay, who was an asshole, winning was especially sweet.

Sandy got home mid-afternoon, grabbed her board and wetsuit and went straight to the beach. A sea breeze made the surf a bit messy, but it was wonderful to just be out on the water again, bobbing in the swell, with nothing about but sun and breeze and the roar of breaking waves. This was Kuvalam Beach, well north up the coast from the suburban encroachments that had made the main Tanushan beaches unpleasant for serious surfers. Tanusha grew so fast, and she could hardly begrudge its sixty-two million inhabitants their share of her favorite part of Callay—its coastline. The developments weren’t even objectionable, no gaudy high-rises or marinas, just pleasant suburban neighbourhoods and protected parks by the beaches.

But there were literally thousands of people in the water even on workdays like this one, which was to a surfer what Tanusha’s crowded sidewalks were to a jogger. Even out here at Kuvalam where the landscape was almost completely wild there were lots of people in the water, but most were surfers, and so long as they didn’t cut in on her waves, she didn’t mind. To live in a big city was to learn to tolerate others, even out on the water.

Returning to her spot beyond the break after her sixth decent ride, she sat up on her board and saw a surfer paddling toward her. Something about his stroke was familiar. Powerful, she saw, as he effortlessly burst over the top of a breaker and kept coming. An African man with strong shoulders. She vision-zoomed, and was not particularly surprised to see who it was.

“Mustafa!” she called, not as displeased to see him as she’d have thought. “I didn’t know you surfed?”

“I don’t!” he replied. “But you learned rather quickly, so how hard can it be?”

He sat up beside her, with only a slight wobble on the unfamiliar board. It was a short board too, and only an idiot or a GI would come out in surf like this on a short board if he wasn’t experienced. Mustafa Ramoja, of course, was the latter.

Mustafa was still League. He was ISO, League Intelligence, a senior attachment to the League’s Tanushan embassy. Callayan and Federal Intelligence knew he’d gotten up to things he really wasn’t supposed to, but hadn’t expelled him, partly on Sandy’s assessment that he was actually quite helpful at times, and partly because everyone felt safer when they knew where he was. As GIs went, he was exceptionally rare—technically a higher designation even than Sandy. Not quite the combatant that she was, though not by much, he was the only GI Sandy had ever met that she had to concede was a match for her in intellect. And on her less self-important days, grudgingly, probably somewhat more than that.

Mustafa gazed at the shoreline, the long stretch of sand, and the nearby rocky bluffs that broke up the coastline and gave each beach its separate identity. “It is very pretty,” he conceded. “I can see why you come here so often.”

Sandy smiled, amused at the small talk. “So, why did you follow me today?”

“Oh, come now,” he said. “Can’t old friends just catch up and talk? I’d have invited you for a coffee, but I knew I’d be keeping you from your surfing, and you wouldn’t thank me.”

“You want to know about Anjula?” Sandy tried her second option.

Mustafa was amused. “Well, yes. If you wished to discuss it, that would be nice.”

“As League Intel, you probably know more about what was happening on Pyeongwha than I do.” Mustafa shrugged. “What would you like to know?”

“Oh, a whole bunch of things you’re not allowed to tell me.” A big swell rode them up, then down the far side. “I hear the assault went well?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“And your president still doesn’t like Federal Security Agency treading on his toes.”

“He should have thought of that before supporting the relocation.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Excuse me, this wave looks excellent, back in a minute.”

She lay flat and took off paddling. The wave was a nice six-footer, standard for Kuvalam, and she put on a few moves, nothing fancy. As with most things physical, it wasn’t the technical challenge that drew her to the activity. Plus, she’d been told she could sometimes be identified from a distance when she showed off—there were things she could do on a board that even augmented humans couldn’t. The price of anonymity was mediocrity.

Paddling back out, she saw Mustafa trying a wave. He judged the drop nicely, stood up fine, then put too much weight on the back leg and the board took off, dumping him behind it.

“Not so easy after all,” Sandy suggested as she paddled in beside him.

“How many tries did it take you before you could stand up?” Mustafa wondered.

“First time. Bigger surf than this, too.”

“Show-off.”

“I’m not a show-off. You asked me a question, I answered it truthfully.” They rolled under another big breaker that swamped them. “Don’t be troubled,” she added as they emerged and resumed paddling, “you’re doing quite well for a non-combat model.”

Mustafa was only partly amused.

“So you’re happy in the Federal Security Agency?” Mustafa asked as they resumed their seats beyond the break.

“It was only ever a secondment,” said Sandy. “I’m still CSA.”

The rearranging and disappearance of security agencies was a source of some discussion and exasperation on Callay. The Callayan Security Agency alone weathered the storm, Callay’s preeminent central institution for all high level security matters. Its SWAT teams had been temporarily folded into the short-lived Callayan Defence Force, which had been necessary when it looked like parts of the Federation Fleet were about to declare war on Callay. But with Fleet now supporting the new situation, the CDF’s position had become untenable, as a Federal-level military organisation effectively in competition with Fleet, and with overlapping jurisdictions.

And so the CDF had joined the fledgling Federal Security Agency, which in turn had replaced the old Federal Intelligence Agency that had caused Sandy so much grief upon her first arrival on Callay. The FIA had collapsed, largely due to events Sandy had been central to, and been replaced by the FSA. There were too many old FIA folks in the FSA for lots of Callayans to feel comfortable with, however, so sticking the CDF onto it had been a good way to boost colonial control of the old-Earth institution.

Sandy, Vanessa and Rhian had gone with the CDF to the FSA at first, then realised just how infrequently the military arm of the FSA was actually going to be used, and that most of their time would be training and paperwork. They could train better in CSA SWAT, by doing actual missions, and so the present arrangement had emerged—several FSA arms, one based on Callay, each of which would stay “current” with their skills by working most of their time in local SWAT teams. The CSA had certainly been glad to have them back; they’d been rebuilding their SWAT teams, but standards had slipped, and undesirable activity on Callay—in Tanusha, in particular—had increased. They’d been even happier that their returning troopers had brought a lot of their new toys with them, acquired in the FSA and earlier in the CDF, when Callay had been arming fast.

“And you’ve heard of the new lawsuit by the Rainbow Coalition?” Mustafa pressed.

“Which one?”

Mustafa smiled. “The one charging the CSA with becoming a planetary military force, and demanding it disarm.”

“That’s not my favorite,” said Sandy. “I like the more recent one charging the FSA with war crimes on Pyeongwha and Anjula.”

“That was fast. I had not heard that.” Mustafa wasn’t nearly as interested in Callayan pop culture and local affairs as she was. “Well, I suppose that’s the danger when you conduct any operation that kills civilians.”

“Oh they’d be charging us with war crimes if we’d only killed mass murderers,” said Sandy. “A lot of pacifists on Callay aren’t actually pacifists, they’re just cheering for whoever we’re against. We’ll answer in court with those tapes we got of the victims.”

“You really think they’ll care?”

“No,” Sandy admitted. “I’m sure most pacifists would prefer that mass slaughter continued, they only object when we try to stop it. It’s just another totalitarian ideology, they all cling together. But we can win most of the Callayan population these days. They’re far less pacifist than they were.”

“They just don’t vote for presidents who support you.”

“Actually, no one’s voted for Singh yet,” Sandy reminded him. “That’s three months away. The population’s leaning to Callayan nationalism, sure, which puts it at odds with the Grand Council and everything Federation. It was inevitable. But that doesn’t mean they’ll oppose what we did in Anjula.”

“This strikes me as a painfully ad-hoc situation,” said Mustafa. “The Callayan president takes a populist stance against the FSA, but most of the FSA troops on the Pyeongwha mission are actually his own CSA troops on temporary assignment. Can you keep wearing two hats like this?”

“Sure,” said Sandy. “It just proves what a dumb fuck the president is. We’re trying to narrow the gap between Federation member worlds at the Federation government level, and he’s trying to widen it. Even though his own world is now the central world of the Federation, and all his institutions are becoming integrated into it whether he likes it or not. He’s cutting off his nose to spite his face. Fingers crossed for the election.”

“Not that the alternative looks much better.”

Sandy smiled. It was too much to expect Mustafa to have anything positive to say about Callay’s present situation. “Maybe. But the way you dispose of idiot politicians is like how you eat an elephant—one bite at a time.” Another wave was coming, nicer than the last. “Excuse me, back in a minute.”