Originator (40 page)

“Now go find one of
your
doctors, and get some treatment on those wounds, and get cleaned up so Svetlana doesn't freak out when she wakes up and sees you looking like a corpse.”

Sandy nearly smiled against his shoulder. She drew a long, shaky breath. “Okay. I'm going.”

“Love you,” he said, and kissed her. It was the first time Danya had ever volunteered that first, without her starting it. Sandy kissed him back, not trusting herself to speak without crying. Then she leaned and kissed Svetlana, very gently. And finally dragged herself away and out the door of the ward.
FSA medical was now a GI repair yard, wounded GIs in various rooms, getting patched up. In intensive care, there were eight, at least half of whom might not make it. In the morgue, thirteen more, including Cai. Nearly all of them were wounded to varying degrees, and regular medicos who rarely worked on GIs were helping out with the biotech specialists, doing basic triage and applying micro-solutions where possible, and stabilising injuries for later treatment where it wasn't.

Sandy's injuries were more a matter of electro-stimulation for the beat-up muscles, micro-environment bandages for the wounds themselves, and a small plasma transfusion for blood loss. Finally allowed off the table, she went to Rhian's ward where she was having her head wrapped to protect the damaged ear and eye where a grenade had gone off near her head. The ear would heal, but the doctors weren't sure about the eye. Replacement parts in the League would be done and largely healed in five days, but in the Federation, laws prevented the creation of GI parts, even as they no longer prohibited the citizenship of GIs themselves. Everything was available on the black market for a price, but the FSA wasn't allowed to go that way, and these days League channels were tenuous. It looked like Rhian might be one-eyed for a while yet.

Sandy sat in clean underwear as a young doctor prepared the bandage micro-solutions and wrapped them around her worst scars. Rhian talked with a senior doctor about her eye and ear, head turned to help her hear. Sandy remained uplinked to Svetlana's ward, where Danya sat with her, and the room where Kiril sat with Ragi, who pulled the dual duty of scanning Kiril's uplinks for possible damage while having his arm treated and fitted for a robotic hand in the immediate absence of a proper replacement. Kiril seemed okay but subdued and upset. It made Sandy want to rush to him, but she remembered what Danya had said, and how all her hovering and worrying wasn't always helping. Being upset only made them more upset. She had to be strong for them, to show them everything was okay. If only she felt it.

Rhian's doctor left. Sandy's doctor had only some wrapping to do on the legs, which Sandy insisted on doing herself. When they were alone, Rhian smiled crookedly. “You know,” she said, “there was a celeb magazine offering a lot of money for photos of us two without clothes. We should take a photo and make some cash.”

Rhian wore only a hospital gown. They both looked like wrecks. It was
almost funny, but only because it was Rhian saying it. Sandy found that she still had nothing to say. Rhian patted the bed beside her. Sandy came over and continued to wrap the bandage around her calf. In her life, she'd had plenty of practise.

“Sandy, you saved them,” she said gently. “They're safe now.”

“No,” said Sandy. “Talee still want them dead. And now with Cai dead, we can only guess what's actually going on.”

“Well, then, we'll just have to deal with them first,” said Rhian, ever practical. “We've proven we can beat them now. Or you did.”

“They're not much better than you or most high-des combat GIs in a straight fight. With Cai's assistance they no longer had the tech edge.”

“Proving that you really
are
the most dangerous soldier in the known galaxy,” Rhian added. “Given that our known galaxy just expanded a lot.”

“Yeah,” Sandy murmured. “Though Jane's nearly at my level now.” She cut and stuck the calf bandage. “I'd have been screwed without her. Two high-des GIs don't increase capability by addition, it's multiplication—combat effectiveness squared. And we coordinate like . . .” She searched for the word.

“Like siblings,” Rhian suggested. Yeah, Sandy thought. That was the word she'd been avoiding. “We'd have been screwed too, without our cavalry. They'd breached the final defences right when Cai got killed trying to stop them.”

Rhian's “cavalry” had been Tanusha's usual complement of League GIs. Uninvited, covert, and hostile insofar as they were implementing League policy at the Federation's expense, they'd been untouched by the Talee-GIs' infiltration matrix and had maintained enough network insight to see what was going on. A quick debate had brought them to realise that the success of Talee assassination squads was in no one's interests, and perhaps the League's interests least of all. And upon deducing that a final defence was being mounted at the Sadar Institute of Technology, they'd acted as reserve, held back until the enemy was fully committed and hit them from an unexpected flank. Without it, the whole thing would have failed, and Rhian, Ragi, Ari, Raylee, and most other defenders would be dead.

“Damn,” Sandy muttered, thinking about it. “We're all going to have to have a talk. All us GIs, before the Grand Council and FSA take over once more.”

“They're not in charge now?”

“That's what we're going to have to have a talk about.”

Rhian thought about it, nodding slowly. “You know it doesn't make sense? Talee attacking us? I mean, Cai says they're terrified of the tech in Kiril's head, and that makes sense—I mean, Takewashi confirmed it, and the Talee chased Takewashi here because he's the guy who gave it life in human form. But it was a desperate, stupid thing to do.”

“I know,” said Sandy, tightening the wrapping about a forearm.

“I mean, if it didn't work, and they took casualties, we'd basically have their tech. And we can reverse engineer, and suddenly humans are catching up with Talee, and they've lost their edge on us . . . just after having pretty much declared war on us.”

“There's only one way that it makes sense,” said Sandy. Rhian looked questioning. “If they thought Cai was already giving us all that tech anyway. Whether they attacked us or not. Then they'd have nothing to lose.”

“But . . .” Rhian frowned, puzzled. “But that would mean Cai was their enemy from the start. Not their representative like we thought.”

“Yeah,” Sandy agreed. “But he's not one of ours, he's clearly Talee-made. Makes you wonder what actually happened in their second catastrophe. How they actually wiped themselves out, and who actually survived it.”

“You think . . .” Rhian's one good eye registered shock as it came to her. Damn, she'd gotten so much smarter in the past five years, Sandy thought. It made her happy for all synthetic-kind that it was possible, given a long enough, and full enough, life. “Oh shit! What if the Talee
didn't
survive their extinction event? What if only their synthetics did?”

Sandy nodded. “Like if organic humanity wiped themselves out, and GIs were the only ones left.” Rhian stared at a wall, trying to take that in. “In which case, think about it. Would we bring them back? If we had enough tech and enough DNA to do it?”

“You think . . . you think organic Talee are the creation of synthetics? That synthetic Talee brought back their organic creators from extinction?”

“And are now wondering if it was such a good idea,” Sandy said grimly. “We can't be sure, but it's worth considering. Certainly there's a big division between synthetic and non-synthetic Talee, and the synths seem to have been running a lot of their foreign policy until now. This would sure explain how
that ended up happening. I bet you anything that was what Cai was—the representative of synthetic Talee, not the organics. Only in this case, the synths aren't the copies, they're the original. And what if they laid down some laws to the straights when they brought them back, like ‘you guys will always be more numerous than us because you reproduce so much more quickly, but synthetic rights will always be determined by synthetics alone.'”

“Damn right,” Rhian murmured. “That's what I'd do.”

“Which is why Cai was so offended by these fucking drones sent after us. Organic Talee wouldn't have been
allowed
to make synthetics, synths would have reproduced themselves. Like we were doing briefly on Pantala, at Chancelry.”

“And now they're having a falling-out,” Rhian finished, “synths against organics. And the organics thought Cai was trying to get humanity onto
his
side, the synth side, and panicked.”

Sandy skimmed the net briefly on her way to FSA HQ's interrogation rooms. Tanusha was in chaos, and everyone had been told to take the day off. There was too much speculation flying around to follow without a concerted search, but some of it seemed alarmingly accurate. “Talee net attack” would have been laughed at not long ago, but now it seemed quite prominent, discussed with seriousness by leading experts on various media. The Tanushan tech sector knew what was possible and impossible with today's technology, Federation and League, and what they'd just seen was the latter. Impossible for humans, anyway. It didn't leave many options.

Then came the observations that FSA and CSA had been targeted hard, that there were riverfront homes on a wilderness stretch of northern river ablaze where the infiltration matrix had acquired FSA military assets, presumably chasing someone to kill them. Others were connecting Takewashi's ship's arrival in-system, and rumours it might have been carrying someone the Talee were chasing. The breadcrumbs were everywhere, and Tanusha's techs aboveground and below were too smart not to follow them. This genie was well and truly out of the bottle, and humanity would never be the same.

She ID'd past heavy security doors, then into a corridor where fully armoured FSA troopers stood guard. Beyond a window, several armed agents were interviewing a man shackled to his chair, tubes in his arm. Sandy entered
without asking if it was okay, pulled up a chair and sat on it backward, arms crossed on the backrest. The interviewing agents stared at the breach of protocol. The interview subject gazed back at her, unsurprised. Brown-skinned, handsome, broad. A combat GI, currently drugged and restrained to safe levels. And matching exactly the description that Raylee had given, of the GI who had shown up in her apartment, and fed her tall tales about FedInt.

“Name?” she asked him.

“Hafeez.”

“Designation?”

“Forty-four and change.”

“Commander,” said the interviewing agent, “if you don't mind, we're in the middle of . . .”

“This is more important,” said Sandy.

“I don't think it's that . . .”

“Get out,” Sandy told him and his companion. Flicked her eyes to the door and back, a stare that would take no argument. “Now.”

They got up and left. This was not technically her field, nor was this her accustomed part of headquarters to be giving orders in, but still she outranked them.

“You being treated okay?” Sandy asked.

Hafeez looked down at his cuffs and the tubes in his arm. Sedative, that kept a GI's synth-alloy muscles from contracting to critical mass. He shrugged. “Sure. Nothing unexpected.”

“I've been right where you are now,” she said. “I always ask.”

“You've never been right where I am now,” Hafeez corrected. “A prisoner of the Federation, while still loyal to the League.”

Sandy nodded, conceding. Smart, this one. It wasn't surprising. “You're ISO?” No reply. “Of course you are. Why not run when you had the chance? Before FSA arrived and took you and your people prisoner?”

“We're not all prisoners,” Hafeez corrected. They had five of them.
Which
five, and how many more were still loose in Tanusha, they didn't know.

“You're the leader?” Sandy asked. No reply. “Okay. I think you got caught because someone needs to see how the FSA reacts from the inside. And in case someone like me wants to talk about things League would like to talk about. Like Pantala. Takewashi said there were others on Pantala like my boy Kiril.
With that same new-gen tech in his head that the Talee are so scared of. That they warned Takewashi years ago they'd kill him and everyone around him if he started playing with. Know anything about that, Hafeez?”

His stare told her he did. “Go on.”

“His uplinks work,” said Sandy. “My boy's. He's seven years old, and they were automatically decoding Talee active transmissions and nullifying them.” His stare widened, just a little. This was why GIs should always interrogate other GIs—a straight might miss it. “They're not supposed to work this well in kids. I haven't noticed any bad side effects yet; they might happen, but so far nothing. Takewashi thought they could overwrite League's uplink problem. New tech, replacing all the existing tech that's causing League straights to go crazy and kill each other.”

A hammering on the window. Sandy looked and saw Hando on the other side, in the observation room, lights switched on so she could see him. He beckoned to her; the interview was over. They didn't want her discussing this stuff with a League GI. Sandy ignored him.

“I have the key,” she said as calmly as she could. “The key to saving the League's ass. Possibly the Federation's too, if we end up in a V-strike war with the League. Unfortunately this key is lethal to the Talee, or they think it is. They'll do anything to eliminate it. Only
they
is a little bit more complicated than we knew, isn't it, Hafeez? What do you know about it?”

Hando burst through the door. “Commander!” he said angrily. “This interview is over!”

Sandy barely looked at him. “Either you go outside,” she told the FSA's second-in-command, “or I will put you outside.”