Killswitch (34 page)

She broke off, tears flowing, barely able to speak. Sandy hugged her, and held her close, feeling that surely her arms had never held anything so precious in all her life. She buried her cheek against Vanessa's hair, and tried to blink back her own tears.

"I'm so flattered," she whispered hoarsely. "Honestly, I've never been so complimented in my life."

"Don't be," Vanessa replied, a familiar edge of humour in her voice, struggling for daylight. "It's just a biochemical reaction."

"At the end of the day, we're all just biochemical reactions," Sandy murmured into her hair. "It doesn't make us any less real."

CHAPTER TWELVE

rom about when, did she say?" asked Ari. The cruiser descended in a slow hover toward the yellow-striped transit zone beside the Columbo Park, past streetlights and lush foliage. Below, zone markers flashed warning lights, warding pedestrians along the parkside, strolling or jogging along the puddled path in the busy, early evening.

"I don't know," Sandy replied in mild frustration. "We didn't talk about that." Mentally aligning the cruiser's CPU com-systems with her own uplinks, a sernivisual scrawl of flashing numerics and graphics across her innersight. She was having trouble finding a transmission package she liked, one that was compatible with her encryption and Ari's carrier boosters. With a bump of wheels, the cruiser touched down. Navcomp displays on the dash switched to road-navigation, the lights on the zone markers stopped flashing, and the cruiser eased forward on automatic, along the one-lane departure road that cut into the park's perimeter. Behind, the next cruiser was descending, and the zone markers began blinking once more as the local air-traffic grid guided them in.

"Then what did you talk about?" Ari persisted, implacably curious.

"We just talked! About ... stuff."

"Stuff."

"Girl stuff," she said pointedly. She almost never invoked that particular piece of gender-territorialism. Take a hint, Ari.

"`I'm in love with my best friend but she doesn't want to sleep with me because she's straight and artificial' girl stuff?"

Sandy restrained exasperation with difficulty. "Look, just because you have this puerile, masculine fascination for lesbian sexuality ..."

"Gee, Sandy," Ari deadpanned, "what are you saying? That I'm heterosexual?"

"This is very serious to me, Ari! It's not a game."

"I ..." Ari blinked in consternation. "I never said it was a game, when did I say it was a ... ?" He broke off as navcomp abruptly slammed on the brakes-a careless jogger running across the road, Sandy saw immediately, registered at once by the cruiser's ranger and road sensors. "Fucking pedestrians," said Ari matter-of-factly as the cruiser re-commenced, "some people in this city should be required to get a licence just for stepping out the fucking door."

The Fast Curry outlet was jammed with traffic, of course-aircars packed nose-to-tail along the left lane where the one-way road became two lanes, and ten more queued behind. Canvas awnings were stretched across half the road, the far right lane left clear to rejoin the main, parkside highway up ahead. On the opposite side of the low, one-storey restaurant buildings, many diners sat at tables beneath similar awnings, eating before a view of beautiful, rain-wet gardens and lawns, and passing pedestrians. Several cars departed ahead, and the lane edged slowly forward. Sandy glanced over her shoulder as the next cruiser behind boxed them in.

"Wonderful ambush spot," she remarked.

"Yeah, well I'm hungry enough to risk it. I just wish the takeaway joints could put themselves up the top of tall buildings or something, so we don't even have to land to pick up dinner. We'd just fly through."

"And get our curry splattered all over the windshield?"

"Yeah, I wasn't thinking at three hundred kilometres per hour, genius. We'd hover."

"I don't think a curry house could pay the rent eighty storeys up," Sandy remarked, happy that the conversation had moved along. "Unless they charged about sixty Feds per meal."

"Hmm." Ari considered that. Drummed briefly on the steering grips with his fingers. "So d'you think she's jealous of me? Or of us, I mean?" Sandy scowled at him. "What?" Ari protested. "It's important, right? I'm asking!"

The queue bumped up another space, then another. "I don't know, Ari, I honestly just don't know."

"I mean, I guess that must have hurt, huh?" Ari appeared quite intrigued at the prospect. "Although we don't ... you know ... we don't carry on together like some couples I could name ..."

"She's not the jealous type," Sandy said firmly.

"You're certain? I mean, how would you know?"

"Ari!" Sandy stared at him, her eyes hard. "I don't want to talk about it! Understand?"

Ari sighed. Sandy resumed fiddling with the com-systems until the cruiser reached its spot in the queue beneath the awning, then lowered the window as an Indian girl on skater-blades zoomed from a building door with a tray stacked with containers. Sandy paid with her civvie card, and Ari followed the cruiser ahead out and down the road. Sandy unpacked the meal onto the plastic holders always given to airborne customers, and finally lined up a com-sequence that worked for her.

"I got it," she said, "patch me in."

Ari touched a few markers on a display screen, aligning his own carrier boosters ... on internal visual, Sandy could see the cruiser's CPU com-matrix reconfiguring for long-range transmissions. Ari dialed up the destination and in a flash, the signal sorted and multitranslated through a dozen encryption and security walls to connect with CSA HQ's own central com network, with an ease and precision that even Sandy had to respect. An's codework was as eclectic and individual as Ari himself impenetrably so, she'd heard many fellow codeworkers complain. On some subconscious level that very few straights or GIs could access or analyse, An's conceptual brain simply worked differently to everyone else's. As a GI, she possessed far greater raw processing capability than Ari ever could. But as a straight, if impressively augmented, human, Ari's consistently baffling mental processes gave him an edge that very few GIs could hope to match-in individuality, and uniqueness.

"It'll take a few seconds for the relay-satellite to acquire Mekong's receptor dish," he warned, brow furrowed with concentration as his intent eyes studied the display screen. The cruiser took a left turn on automatic, away from the main highway junction, and on toward the next transition zone. "The Third Fleet's been a little jumpy lately, I hope they haven't been fiddling with basic access codes or we might not get in ...

Sandy handed Ari his tray, opening her own and cracking the lids. The smell of steaming curry filled the interior. She broke off a piece of pappadum and munched, waiting. The signal connected.

"This is Mekong com-three, please identify?"

"Hello, Mekong," said Ari, "this is CSA special operative Googly. I believe Captain Reichardt is expecting my call."

There was a few seconds' pause for transmission and encryptionprocessing delay. Then, "Hello Googly, please hold."

The cruiser pulled up behind the one in front, which was in turn behind three more aircars waiting at the transition zone-on weekday evenings, takeaway fly-ins were always crowded.

"Hey," said Ari in dismay, gazing down at his meal, "I ordered lamb kashmiri, not rogan josh. The most sophisticated goddamn infotech city in the history of humanity, and still they can't get a fucking takeaway order right."

"Would you prefer butter chicken? I like rogan josh."

They swapped, as Sandy knew they would-Ari loved butter chicken. The cruiser bumped up a space as ahead an aircar rose into the air and past the parkside treetops. Wheels retracting into the underside before accelerating off toward a busy overhead skylane, soaring black dots against a brilliant sunset of towering, orange and pink cumulous cloud. Sandy's uplink clicked back to life.

"Hello, Googly, this is Captain Reichardt."

"Oh, um ..." Ari swallowed his mouthful of butter chicken fast, "... hello Captain, I have Snowcat here to speak to you."

"Commander Kresnov?"

"I'm here, Captain," said Sandy, "you'll have to excuse the poor speech clarity, we just stopped to get some dinner and we're starved."

"I was under the impression that you were keeping clear of uplink networks, Commander?"

"Yes, sir, I was, but that problem seems to have been solved for the moment. Besides, I've got some help in making this a particularly secure line." With a glance at Ari, who was eating again-quickly, in case he was once more required to speak. "Captain, I understand that Director Ibrahim has been in contact with you regarding certain contingency plans of mine."

There was a pause from the other end that lasted too long to be just transmission delay. She took the chance to shovel another mouthful, and chewed quickly.

"Yeah," said the Captain. His Texan drawl seemed suddenly stronger to her ear, and she could almost hear the pained wince in his voice. "Well ... I gotta say, Commander, you've got a pretty interesting notion of what `contingency' means. "

"The Fifth Fleet has committed an illegal, hostile act, Captain. We only seek to protect what is ours."

Reichardt's reluctant sigh was clearly audible over the link. "Ifol- lowed you down this road once before Commander, you might recall. Didn't work out all so beautifully now, did it?"

"On the contrary, Captain, it worked marvellously. There were of course personal consequences for yourself, and your career ... and doubtless what I ask of you this time will have similar ramifications. If that matters to you."

"Don't even go there, Commander. The fact is, it's not just me up here. I have other captains, and I'll need to consult. This is one call I simply don't have the authority to make alone. And I'll need proof. "

"What kind of proof, sir?"

"Proof that Duong's murder was all a setup, as your people claim. Proof that the Fifth is clearly in league with the setup, and deserves what's coming to them. They might be arseholes, Commander, but they're our arseholes. We're not going to call down bad things upon their heads on the sayso of some bunch of downworld foreigners, beggin' your pardon, ma'am. "

"I understand entirely," Sandy said calmly. Fleet loyalty, he meant. She was asking the Third to be complicit in a military action against their brethren. Reichardt's people and the third Fleet might be as politically opposed as two groups of people were likely to get, but still, she had no illusions of the scale of what she was asking for upon any Fleet man or woman's conscience. "We're in the process of acquiring that proof now."

"Better make it real good, Commander. I'm a clever man, but I ain't no miracle worker, you understand?"

CSA operatives found Enrico Kalaji shortly after midnight, shot through the head in what appeared to be his safehouse apartment in downtown Mananakorn District. The shot had awoken neighbouring residents-the bullet had passed through the corridor beyond and sev eral adjoining rooms, just missing a man asleep in bed. Ari wasn't happy.

"Damn it," he muttered as they climbed from the cruiser atop its rooftop pad, "we nearly had it. Just another thirty fucking minutes and we'd have had it."

Sandy nodded tiredly, gazing about at the view from a mere eight storeys up, atop the Mananakorn residential building. Since dinner that evening, they'd been constantly on the move, acting on pieces of information, codes, suspicions and guesswork that had taken them right across Tanusha and back several times over. They'd paid visits to two of Ari's friendly underground code breakers to analyse bits of Kalaji's gear taken from the State Department network that neither Ari nor Sandy were familiar with. Then there'd been a blackmarket weapons expert (in a noisy bar down a dark alley, of course), then a suburban family man they'd dragged from dinner with promises to tell his new fiancee about the previous conviction and probation for smuggling if he didn't explain certain key details about the loopholes in Callayan customs it seemed Kalaji had dealt with in order get the rocket launchers through shipping inspections.

And so on, constantly cross-referencing their latest discoveries with the hundred-plus CSA operatives also searching, hoping for new clues and directing regional police to search those locations they didn't have the manpower to cover. Ari, as Sandy had already seen, knew Tanusha inside and out, and had avenues to so many irregular sources of information, she couldn't help but wonder how he found the time to maintain contact with them all. Or maybe, she'd found herself figuring at about 10 PM, all these shady figures deferred to him on reputation alone. Some of them clearly expected favours ... which as far as she knew the CSA operating manual, were illegal to grant to anyone, least of all convicted or suspected felons, as the majority of his contacts appeared to be. Which cast new light entirely upon An's unpopularity among certain more formal, starch-collared segments of the CSA hierarchy ...

The building they'd now arrived on reminded Sandy somewhat of her and Vanessa's old home in Santiello-a modest eight-storey residential building, with a skyport on the roof with awnings to keep off the worst of the Tanushan rain and hail, and garden boxes aligned decoratively about the railings. About them, the suburbs slept, streetlights smothered beneath the profusion of semitropical trees. The air smelled heavy with recent rain, their boots splashing on rooftop puddles as they walked. Distant lightning lit the horizon with discontented rumbling, a sharp, dark outline of towers against brilliant flashes of blue.

The crime scene was a square of space by the edge of the rooftop, where a narrow gap between a decorative bush and a rising wall afforded a clear view toward the Mananakorn central business district, slightly less than one and a half kilometres away. About that small square, scanner wands had been erected, sweeping near walls, bushes and puddles with searching lines of light. Elsewhere on the rooftop, CSA agents swept with handheld devices, or entered data into compslates, or stood about and watched, or talked with colleagues. One man stood at another gap between bushes, and gazed out at the rising cluster of Mananakorn towers, alive with light.