Killswitch (32 page)

"He'd do it just to spite them," Sandy muttered. "And he'd tell them the evidence is destroyed. And Jane gets sent to the FIA. Who operate in such a total information blackout that they can do all kinds of illegal stuff with her that they can make her into whatever they want."

"So the question is," Vanessa continued, "why the big deal about Jane? Takawashi's a neurol ... a neurologist." Managing to bite out the word through uncooperative lips. "I mean, what makes her special? She's gotta be different from you, or he'd have just dumped her. Maybe he'd been working on something special with her, something he didn't want to see destroyed."

Sandy gave no response. Vanessa waited for a moment. Then lifted the supporting hand from her face, and poked Sandy in the arm. Sandy's distant gaze shifted onto her friend.

"I was a failure," she murmured. "I was a great success while I lasted, but a long-term failure. Loyalty was a part of the test parameter. I failed."

"And a wonderful, glorious failure it was too."

"Jane won't fail. She might die, but she won't fail. She won't defect. That's why she's so smart at such an early age. That's what Takawashi was working on."

"What was?" said Vanessa, struggling for focus.

"A loyal GI. One whose personality could be predetermined. One who wouldn't slowly evolve over seventeen years. Who wouldn't change her mind. All the combat effectiveness of a Cassandra Kresnov, without the downside risk." She stared away at a far wall, beyond the booths and patrons' heads. "I didn't want to believe that was possible."

"It might not be," Vanessa replied. "Jane's still young."

"If I get my way, she's not going to get much older."

Vanessa half shrugged. "Them's the breaks, I guess."

Within the office behind the glass opposite their booth, Sandy saw that Neiland was staring at the pair of them, darkly. There was an indication to an aide, then, and the aide opened the door. Pointed two fingers at Sandy and Vanessa, then pointed "inside." Sandy sighed.

"Now the fun starts," she murmured, sliding out of the booth seat, and waiting to give Vanessa a hand in case her head started spinning again. "Where's Ari?" she thought to ask as Vanessa carefully stood up.

"I sent him away," Vanessa said drily. "Before he started a fight he wasn't going to win." With Neiland, Vanessa meant. The President, and Commander-in-Chief of CDF and CSA. Ari's ultimate boss. Not that that would stop Ari, once paranoid certainty had set in.

"Good move," Sandy murmured, and they walked together to the door.

The President sat on the far side of the room's table, gazing at the inbuilt display screen and chewing at the inside of her lip. To one side sat Agent Chandaram, to the other, All Sudasarno. The aide who'd opened the door, Sandy didn't recognise. Sandy and Vanessa took old fashioned, leather seats with their backs to the glass ... Sudasarno pressed a button on his table console, and the glass polarised to deep black. Neiland gazed at them both, and then at Sandy in particular, with hard green eyes. She wore her red hair loose today, in counterpoint to a pink blouse beneath the dark, formal suit. Somehow, it didn't soften her expression much at all.

"Your timing stinks," she said flatly, looking straight at Sandy. "I need the State Department, Commander. I need credibility. I need Callay to look like a world that can handle the task of hosting the Grand Council in a year's time. Right now, we're a laughing stock. If all our newfound allies among friendly Federation worlds pack up and go home, and strike their own separate deals with Earth and the Fleet, no one will be less surprised than I."

"It's not us, Ms. President," said Sandy. "We've been interfered with again-as long as Earth remains the central power in the Federation, they'll retain the means to infiltrate our security and organisations, and screw us any time they like. If anything, it strengthens your arguments, and it gives Federation worlds even more reason to be scared of Earth-centralised power and the Fleet."

"Commander." Neiland leaned forward, elbows on the table. Her green eyes flashed. "Perhaps you didn't notice, but we're under blockade. When news reaches Earth of the reasons why, they'll think it's justified. Their admiral was assassinated, on an official visit, with us providing the security-apparently by a pro-Callayan extremist group. You tell me a rogue GI did it, but there's no proof ... except for Major Rice's combat records from the scene, which provide far too much sensitive material about CDF operations to unfriendly interests than we can afford, and that are so complicated no major news organisation would understand it even if we did release it.

"And now you're trying to find proof, and you've shut down the State Department to do it ... damn it, Cassandra, what kind of victory will it be for Callayan competence if our own State Department turns out to be the source of our problems? I mean, this ..." and she waved a hand at the display screen, ". . . all this stuff Agent Chandaram's been showing me, all these infiltration codes and suspicious mail transfers, this isn't evidence! This is a pile of naughts and zeros! Earth factions believe Callay is spiralling into out-of-control sedition and rebellion, and are determined to retain control over the Fleet to protect themselves from the chaotic horror that the Federation will surely become with us at the centre of it, and this bunch of technical rubbish is your only answer? I need clear, unassailable evidence! Nothing else is going to get it done!"

The President, Sandy noted, was fairly angry. About as angry, in fact, as she'd ever seen her. Sandy took a deep breath.

"Have you been talking with Captain Reichardt?" she asked. Neiland stared at her, incredulously.

"That's your answer? I'm talking about losing the one thing we've been fighting for these last years-losing the new Grand Council's sovereign and total control of the Fleet-and you want to start a fucking war?! "

"Ma'am," said Sandy, with great deliberation, "I can get you those stations back." Neiland's green eyes locked with her own, pale blue ones. For a moment, no one in the room appeared to breathe. "But I'll need Reichardt. It can't be done without him."

Neiland broke eye contact first, looking aside at the flat, smooth wood of the table. Closed her eyes, briefly, and massaged her head with one hand. "So you get the stations," she said. "What then? What's to stop Captain Rusdihardjo from backing off and blasting the whole facility?"

"War crimes," Sandy said simply. "It didn't even happen in the war, much. Combatants are supposed to take and hold civilian stations, not destroy them. To do it in peacetime, against an ally, would destroy their credibility."

"That's a hell of a gamble," Neiland said sombrely. "You say it didn't happen much ... I recall that about half of the war's casualties were civilians living or working on orbital or deep space facilities. So it happened a lot, didn't it?"

"Depends how you measure it," Sandy said calmly. "Lots of desperate situations in the war."

"Damn it, Cassandra, you think this isn't desperate?"

Sandy waited until she was sure the President was calm enough to offer her full attention. Then, "It's your choice, Ms. President. I can get you the stations. If it happens with Reichardt's help, it can't be called sedition, and they can't just blame it all on us. Then it's up to them how hard they want to push back. Either way, we've only acted in selfdefence. And we'll look strong in doing so. Strength with which to reassure our nervous friends."

Neiland stared at her for a moment longer. Then the stare flicked to Vanessa. "You've seen Cassandra's plans, Major?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Vanessa.

"What do you think?"

"It'll work," said Vanessa.

The President scowled. "You've never done off-world ops before."

"Then why ask me?" Vanessa replied with a smile. Another world leader, full of power and not knowing Vanessa, might have exploded at the scandalous informality. Neiland only looked exasperated.

"You're no help," she said.

"Thank you, ma'am."

They'd barely stepped outside the office when Sandy and Vanessa were confronted by a young man in an awkwardly ill-fitting suit. He seemed barely able to contain his excitement.

"Sandy, I've found ... oh, I mean Commander Kresnov, I've ... I've found it! I've found the parallel subsystem matrix that ... that ..."

"Agent Yoong," Sandy said patiently, "why don't you take a deep breath, and come with me out into the hall."

Yoong looked a little flustered. "Yes, ma'am ... I mean, Commander." Sandy put an unhurried hand on his back, guiding him toward the doors and away from curious eyes. And studiously ignored Vanessa's silent mirth as they went. Vanessa found the breathless young men of Intel just hysterical where Sandy was concerned, and teased her about it often.

"Now," said Sandy as they reached a relatively deserted stretch of hallway, "what have you found?"

"Ma'am ... I mean Commander ..." Yoong paused, and took a deep breath. "I think it'd just be simpler if you uplinked to the network and let me show you."

"I can't uplink to anything right now," Sandy said patiently, "there's bad people with mysterious access to my whereabouts who have a certain code that could kill me."

"Yes, I know, ma ... Commander, that's what I'm saying! I've found it, I've found the sleeper system someone put on the State Department network that locked into CSA and CDF systems and let them trace your location!"

"Show me," Sandy demanded.

Yoong blinked at her. "Well, if you'd just uplink. . . "

"On your comp-slate." She pointed to the little unit in Yoong's suit pocket. Yoong blinked at that too, as if only just remembering he had it.

"Oh ... right, of course." He took it out, flipped it open and began rapidly downloading material from a personal database. "Here, you see, Commander, this is a triple slash version of the vega series of trace rerouters ...

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," said Sandy, snatching the slate from his hands. The 3-D graphical sequence on the screen looked familiar, she recog nised the shapes and formations with that portion of her brain that registered facial or speech recognition-reflexively and without quite knowing how-but that didn't mean she knew all the Feddie- Tanushan techie jargon they liked to throw around at Intel. Just because she knew what it was didn't mean she always knew what it was called ... and she scrawled rapidly through multiple facets and angleshifts upon the screen with a tracing forefinger, frowning as she tried to figure exactly what it did on a network the size and scale of the State Department's. "You found this where?"

"It was a subfile of a worker named, um ..." and he snapped his fingers, trying to remember. And Sandy's multitrack brain somehow found time to marvel at how such a genius with codes and numbers could still have difficulty recalling simple names. People's brains stored information in funny ways. "Damn it, I was just looking in his file ..

"Kalaji?" Vanessa suggested. Yoong stared at her, eyes brightening.

"Yes! Kalaji ... Enrico Kalaji!"

Sandy frowned at Vanessa. "One of Ari's geese?" she asked.

"One of Junior Assistant Director Samarang's," Vanessa agreed. "Or so he said."

"Oh yeah," said Yoong, "he's one of Samarang's closest ..." and he frowned at Sandy. "Ari's geese?"

"For his wild goose chases," Sandy explained, scrawling rapidly through the screen graphics. "Damn, I can't make this out, it's been too long since I actually looked at any code. Anyone have a cord?"

"Oh, yes," said Yoong, fumbling in a suit pocket. "Um ... just ... right here." He pulled out the connector lead. Sandy took it, slotted one end into the comp-slate and the other into the slim insert socket beneath the hair at the back of her skull. The data-wall didn't hit very hard, with just the little comp-slate. In no time she'd found the file and opened the program ... it unfurled before her in multilevel complexity, but nothing as advanced or complicated as the League-level tac-nets and security formulations she was familiar with. Here was the branch that connected to CDF central, and from there the links into main schedules and protocols, and over there the bypass subroutine that allowed what was supposed to be secure, encrypted information to be passed on to a third party along undesignated channels on the outside ...

Samarang worked for Secretary Grey. He'd been ordered to track her, including having her and An's vehicles bugged ... damn good work if you could bug anything Ari operated. But then, she recalled, the cruiser was on loan at short notice. Very sloppy, Ari. Kalaji was in direct control of the surveillance, and was apparently feeding it to friendly Ms. Jane. Why ... well, if she found him, she'd ask him. She only hoped she found him before Jane did ... as no doubt did CSA Investigations, who were becoming very sick of cleaning up Jane's mess after her.

But now, the monitoring software was secured, the leak in the State Department closed down, and no one was going to know with any degree of reliability where she was at any given moment. Jane still had codes that could trigger the killswitch, but wouldn't know where to search on the network at any given time to use them, making any remote attack attempt akin to the proverbial needle in the haystack, on a network the scale of Tanusha's. Caution was still required. But suddenly, she could use her uplinks again.

Sandy disconnected the cord from the insert, grabbed the startled Agent Yoong by the suit lapels, and planted a firm kiss on his lips.

"Thank you!" she told him delightedly, handed him back the compslate, grabbed Vanessa by the arm and hauled her briskly down the hallway. The astonished young agent stood in her wake, clutching his comp-slate, his light brown skin slowly turning a bright shade of pink.

"And you complained before Ari you couldn't find a man," Vanessa remarked scornfully as Sandy remembered the state of her head, and walked more slowly. "Intel's just teeming with all these nice, wellgroomed boys ..."

"Child abuse," Sandy retorted.

"He's at least thirty!"

"Still child abuse. I wanted a lover, not a pet. Vanessa, I need you to set things up. Can you do that?"

For a moment, there was no reply. "What's the time frame?" Vanessa said sombrely, after that moment had passed.