Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield (4 page)

Then pressed on, fast, knowing they were leaving a lot of enemies hiding in buildings to ambush them on the way back, but GIs survived in high-intensity battlespace by moving fast and not allowing the enemy to concentrate firepower. They'd nearly gotten stuck against that roadblock, and Sandy hated it. Direct thrusts into intensely hostile battlespace were not what GIs were made for, she had little firesupport here; the enemy had all the advantages of well-prepared terrain and tactics, and she'd already lost four of the roughly fifty GIs who were accompanying her now on this thrust into Central Zone against Kiet's previous orders, plus several more wounded who'd fallen back or were holding the lines of retreat open. The farther she pushed in, the more surrounded she'd become.

Advancing over rooftops was a pain, leaping and running from one to the next, under fire from surrounding buildings, some of which they could silence with return missile fire, but anti-missile systems were taking out more and more of those. Worse, they were under observation here, and enemy tacnet was dropping light arty and missiles on them that only fast evasive action could save them from. But they had to stay off the roads because one tank or AMAPS could turn those narrow canyons into deathtraps.

By now the surrounding circumstance was chaos; Cai and now Ari announcing in her ear that various corporate networks were showing signs of instability. Internal trouble they said, sign enough that there were GIs breaking loose in there, though exactly on what scale these particular revolutions were, there was no way to tell.

Ahead the first intranet nodes were only a few hundred meters away. Sandy put a grenade through a nearby apartment window, leapt for cover behind a rooftop eave, fire snapping past, then dropped to ground level as a missile
blew a neighbouring rooftop to hell. Ran at ground level until space ran out, then sprang back up, bouncing off a high wall to make a new rooftop, other GIs bounding forward amidst sporadic incoming…a crash as AP grenades blew one of them flying into a wall, more indirect fire hurtling in as Sandy slid once more and fell to the ground, cover from more explosions.

Pressed against a wall as concussions blasted masonry around her, she discovered that she wasn't enjoying this at all. She couldn't do anything about all this incoming; they were exposed here, the enemy were using indirect fire, always the best policy against GIs, and no amount of synthetic physical toughness would save them from accurate high explosives. But if they didn't capture the intranet nodes and stop the corporations from reactivating the killswitch…

A burst of cannon fire ended a GI's run across the rooves ahead, and Sandy sprinted across a yard, over an adjoining wall, and found the fallen GI on a carport rooftop, arm and part of the chest gone, blood everywhere, dying amidst convulsions. It was Angela, nice girl, low 40s designation; a few days ago Sandy had chatted with her about music, clothes, and the strangeness of civvie fashions. She'd never see any of that now. Before she could think another thought, another huge airburst had her rolling for cover and blew another of her team off a rooftop onto the road.

“Cai!” she yelled. “I need to make contact with all the corporate GIs if you can swing it! I can't protect all these intranet nodes, just this one closest will be a struggle, I'm getting shot to hell out here and if we keep going we're all dead!”

Then she saw the AMLORAs rising. Not heading for her, she realised a second later, watching those trajectories unfold. Heading for…Chancelry HQ.

“Reichardt!” Crawling into a narrow space between buildings for better cover as more arty came in. “Kressler and Heldig just launched AMLORAs, target Heldig and fire now, one orbital round to my fire control.”

A pause that felt like a lifetime. “
I see only three AMLORA rounds fired
,” came Reichardt's reply. “
You're asking me to kill thousands of people on that?
”

“One round to my fire control,” Sandy repeated, leaping back up to rooftop level, where tacnet identified a target. “It will take four minutes to arrive, if AMLORA firing has ceased by then I'll detonate it short of the target.” Landed and lay flat on the rooftop, scanning apartment windows nearly a kilometer
away. A human face appeared, with laser ranger, a tacnet-filler. Sandy fired, a slight pause then the head blew off. She moved before they could counter-track her.

Detonations back at Chancelry HQ, but she had no time to observe what they hit. If Reichardt refused her, they were all screwed, the corporations were testing them, a failure to respond would encourage more of the same.

“
One round to your fire control
,” said Reichardt. “
On its way, good luck
.”

Sandy skidded over rooftops like a crazed pebble bouncing along the surface of choppy water. Hurdled an intervening street and paused at a good vantage over a minor industrial complex ahead. The infranet node was under that somewhere.

“Hello, all corporate CEOs,” she announced on general frequency. “This is Kresnov. If you all look skyward, you'll find your defence screen radars showing you an incoming orbital round from where
Mekong
parked them in geostationary over your heads. That's what happens when you launch AMLORAs at Chancelry HQ. One of you is about to die, I haven't decided which yet. Keep firing AMLORAs and the rest will follow.”

It would come in several thousand Ks too fast for anti-missile defences to stop. Not quite a nuclear-scale blast, but enough to make a permanent geological feature where a corporate HQ had once been.

GIs smashed into buildings for cover overlooking the industrial complex and used that to gain line of sight. Missiles took out a tank, several AMAPS, but their ammo was now getting short. Fast, close engagement silenced more targets, then GIs were blowing holes in factory walls and dashing inside, Sandy joining them.

A fast run through one warehouse complex, someone uncovered tunnels beneath buildings that hadn't shown up on the schematics. Sandy jumped down a ladder, into a dark space filled with pipes and cables, and followed several junction signs until she reached a wide open space with big fuel cell generators in industrial steel containers, a lot of power routings, and a bunch of ceiling wiring along the aircon that looked like it was probably coms.

“This is why they can't blast it from the air,” she announced, transmitting visual feed from her headset. “It would take out power for half of Central Zone.” Power in Droze was serious, with no native water and air that got lethal in poor weather; power could be life and death.

“If their security situation gets bad enough,” said Rishi at her shoulder, “they might blast it anyway.” Rishi wore a heavy suit, new shrapnel holes in the armour, the back-mounted launcher smoking from a recent shot. She'd no sooner spoken than two of the five remaining nodes disappeared. On a nearby rooftop, tacnet prioritised a visual feed showing two fireballs rising.

“
Just because they're underground
,” came Poole's voice, “
doesn't mean they can't blow them by hand
.”

Looking at this, she could make a few schematic guesses about the intranet nodes—they relayed the signal above ground via a mass of antenae scattered over these buildings. Above ground, that could be jammed, but jamming would sever corporate forces’ own communications. Besides which, nodes like this ran networks underground, and you had to cut those lines of transmission as well as block the wireless frequencies if you wanted to jam the network, because the network would adjust information flows and leapfrog severed sections by alternate means. Thus Cai's instruction that these five primary nodes all had to go down simultaneously to block the signal. Three left.

And three minutes left on the orbital round. Sandy gave orders, deploying a defensive perimeter about the industrial complex. She was above ground between buildings when a call came in. It was Patana, CEO of Dhamsel Corporation.

“
You're about to commit a warcrime by the Federation's own statutes
,” he told her.

“Don't care,” said Sandy. “Let your GIs go, peacefully, and cease all offensive actions, or those incoming rounds will multiply.”

“
If your Captain agreed with that rationale he'd have fired more than one round already. Furthermore, not all of our GIs want to leave
.”

“Good,” said Sandy, walking to a corner near the complex perimeter. “Then you won't mind dropping your internal emergency alerts and allowing full observation privileges to our Captain in orbit.”

“
Commander!
” one of her soldiers cut in. “
I've got GIs, escapees!
”

Sandy looked, saw broken visuals, running men and women, a few armed, none armoured, some wounded. Looking desperate and bloodied, like they'd just run through heavy fire without the means to fight back.

“
…lots dead!
” one of them was shouting, as Sandy's troops laid fire back up the road they'd come down. “
We heard about your uprising, we heard what they were doing…corporates locked us up, a few of us they just killed…
”

“
We had to get out!
” a girl shouted over the top of her friend, eyes wild. “
We had to get out, they were gonna kill us all, I heard them talking!
”

“
…we can level Chancelry HQ well before any orbital warhead gets here, and we will if you do not terminate that round immediately!
” Patana was yelling at her. “
You have twenty seconds to terminate or we open fire!
”

“Most of my people aren't even in Chancelry HQ,” Sandy said coldly, crouched on the complex perimeter and watching escapee GIs rushing across the street ahead, pursued by tracer fire. “Better yet, you just selected yourself for targeting. Everyone in Dhamsel Zone now has two minutes to live, unless you comply.”

“
Ten seconds!
” Patana shouted. Sandy didn't need audio analysers to hear the tremble in his voice. “
Kresnov!
”

“See you in hell, motherfucker.”

“
Commander!
” Reichardt overrode her. “
You're not going to kill thousands of people just because you're pissed off…
” Sandy cut him off. She had fire control, it was out of Reichardt's hands now. If Patana fired, everyone back at Chancelry HQ was dead, Kiril included. If she backed down, same thing. Only this way, she'd take that asshole with them.

AMLORAs launched, lots of them. She could see them on tacnet, bright flares against a dark sky. But immediately, she didn't think they were heading for Chancelry.

“Incoming!” Sandy yelled, as a dozen other voices echoed it, and GIs took off running to get clear of the industrial complex. “They're going to blast it!”

Across from her was a market building with a truck drive-in at the rear. Sandy raced into it, down the slope, and tore through a roller door to basement parking.

“Cai, we're about to lose the intranet!” She slid behind several large vehicles, other GIs rushing in around her. “Do something fast!”

A series of huge thuds, and the ground rocked and shook. The concussion made her ears pop, shook light fittings from the ceiling.

“
Commander, I can't do anything
,” said Cai helplessly. “
I'm not a magician, the intranet is the only thing preventing the reestablishment of killswitch channels
.”

Save shooting her own AMLORAs at them. Which would most likely not do enough damage and would invite counterstrike that would surely level Chancelry HQ, and would not be responded to by Reichardt because she'd have shot first. Time moved at a crawl. She stared at the tacnet picture, stared
at it so hard her brain nearly bled, like staring at a chessboard so hard you could force some new, miraculous move to appear from the harsh reality of squares and pieces. But no matter which new angle she considered it from, the reality was the same—checkmate.

“
Those AMLORAs were not fired at Chancelry HQ, Commander
,” came a new voice. CEO Huang, Kressler Corporation. It was an integrated com, patched into multiple receivers, Reichardt included. “
The Federation is just over a minute away from a strike killing several thousand League citizens for no commensurate reason. When League Fleet arrives, this will be presented to them as an act of war
.”

“
No way, Commander!
” Kiet interjected. “
The minute you terminate that round, they'll use the killswitch!
”

“They'll use it anyway.” Sandy got to her feet. Past the combat reflex, she could feel very little but dawning horror. GIs sheltering in the basement loading bay were also standing, staring at her. Hers was a command channel, not usually accessible to regular troops, but now it was open. She didn't remember changing those settings, but she must have.

Reichardt cut in. “
Commander, you are a Federation operative. You cannot single-handedly commit an act of war and expect to retain the Federation's support in whatever you choose to do next
.”

Think about the long game, he meant. Think about the larger things at stake. That was easy for someone sitting in orbit thousands of clicks away to say. Someone who did not have to look into the wide eyes of fellow synthetics who had only just managed to break free, hoping for freedom and a long life, now to realise they were all about to die.

Forty seconds. High above, the round was entering atmosphere. Tacnet showed the intranet gone, all remaining nodes removed. Corporate GIs had no autistic mode, no defence against the killswitch signals; even if they could turn their uplinks off, the codes would reactivate them, anywhere within range. Her own had been shut off, barriered behind so many layers that even Cai couldn't get in there without direct cable access and several hours with serious barrier breakers. But this was what it was built for. A big red button, labelled “press in case of revolution.”

“Don't do it,” she whispered. “Please.”

“
We won't do anything
,” came the response. “
We haven't done anything
.
Terminate the round now, and we'll talk
.”

Lies. She ought to let the round land, for preemptive revenge. But whether it landed or not, they'd still use the killswitch. The only question was whether she'd betray the trust the Federation had placed in her by granting her a commission in the process.