Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield (47 page)

“Oh, well,” Tado made a face. “Now you're opening a whole can of worms.”

“I'll rephrase it,” said Kresnov. “If you drop the politically correct bullshit from various peoples who are offended by the implication, modern civilisation pretty much began with the Romans.”

Tado smiled. She'd known Kresnov was smart, but she'd expected most of that intelligence to be focused on practical matters, security, intel, bureaucracy. And killing people, of course. This was unexpected.

“Commander, security law and regulation are not my forte, but I'm willing to bet that what you've just done in bringing me here is illegal. Why?”

“Because someone's trying to hack your brain.”

Tado smiled benignly. “That's not even possible.”

Kresnov indicated the baths, end to end. Waters sparkled in the sun. “This is about the length of your pool, wouldn't you say?”

“The Supreme Court pool, sure.”

“And how many strokes does that normally take you?”

“Eighteen.”

“And how many did it take you just now?”

Tado frowned. “Seventeen. I think. But that was just you pulling me into VR, wasn't it?”

“This pool in VR is of identical length to the one in the Supreme Court. I made it so.”

“So what does that mean?”

“There is a technique,” said Kresnov. “Some call it value adjustment. And
the Justices of most courts are almost continually uplinked with all your case files and readings, so you barely notice it's happening.”

“The networks we're linked to are some of the most secure anywhere.”

“Made secure by the Federal government, yes, I know.” Sardonically. The same Federal government that had just tried to kill her, Tado recalled. “Tell me this, how do you know that something is big?”

“Excuse me?”

“Big,” Kresnov pressed. The pretty blue eyes at this range were disconcerting. Never threatening, not like in some B-grade action movie where the eyes glowed with fearsome intensity. They just never lost focus, never wandered, never darted or did any of the multitude of random things a normal person's would. “How do we define big? In a world where there is only one object, how do we know if it's a big object or a small object when there's nothing to compare it to?”

“Yes,” Tado said slowly, “most linguistic or psychological concepts are relative, and thus meaningless in isolation. Very basic psychology, so what?”

“So something is only big because it's relatively larger than everything else. If everything else was larger, it wouldn't be big anymore, just average. The size of surrounding objects changes the meaning of ‘big.’”

“I understand,” Tado said impatiently. Kresnov was smart, but if she thought she was smarter than
her
, Justice Tado would give her a lesson in humility. “What does this…”

“Try a more difficult one. Try ‘bad.’ I kick an innocent puppy, for no reason. That's bad, and I deserve to be punished. I walk into a room full of innocent people and shoot them dead. That's bad. How do we know which is worse?”

“Learned experience that the life of a person is worth more than the life of a puppy.”

“Scale has nothing to do with it?” Kresnov pressed.

Tado blinked at her. Then back at the pool. Eighteen strokes. Seventeen. Was Kresnov getting at what she thought she was getting at? “I suppose,” Tado said carefully. “We judge the value of life on a hierarchical scale. Humans are at the top. Puppies further down. And the degree of violence inflicted, bullets to the head are at the top, kicks further down.”

“I was just in a place where bullets in the head were a common punishment,”
said Kresnov. “You could get a bullet in the head just for being in someone's way. Value scales can be adjusted.”

“Look,” Tado said warily. “If you're suggesting that someone is using the court networks to change my value judgements…well, that's just crazy.”

“Your Honour,” said Kresnov quite calmly, “I work for the Federal Security Agency. I've seen it done.”

“You, dear girl, have just been accused of planning a coup to overthrow the Grand Council.”

“Yes.” A small smile. “I heard.”

“And if you could do that, why wouldn't you lie to a judge?”

“You don't have to believe me,” said Kresnov. “Just remember your figures. Eighteen strokes to swim the pool. Six steps to cross your office. The length of ten hands to cross your desk. Write them down. They start with spatial perception, and that gives them a way in, size affects value judgements, the brain automatically attaches size to facts as a function of memory and internalises them. Used cleverly it can appear to give more weight to some facts than others, affecting judgement. Recall you're not being asked to pass sentence on questions of obvious morality, just constitutional technicality. Should one clause for some unnamable reason appear to all judges together as holding greater weight than the others, in a relative comparison, your conclusions can be arranged without you being aware of it.”

Sandy was in the Courts Building bathroom, sitting in a toilet stall. Now she flushed, exited, and washed her hands like any other person. The bathroom was empty, as was much of the building—the Supreme Court Building was hardly a hive of activity, cases were limited, and staff few. Security was primarily remote, and in here, enough of the old Tanushan government security systems still ran that Sandy could access most of the building.

Tapped into building security, she could see other people in the corridors and judge when it was safe to move. She watched herself leave the bathroom, not bothering to fool the system into thinking she was someone else but simply blocking that portion of the security nervous system that processed faces. That in turn required a fairly complex VR overlay that duplicated system functions and fooled it into seeing what she wanted it to see, at least in portions—that thing that Cai and lately Ragi had proven so good at, doing
to automated intelligent systems what VR did to the human brain. She wasn't nearly as good at it as they were, but good enough for limited needs like this. But she needed help.

“
Rhian, are you there?
” Rhian was maintaining the command structure, like a control center for VR function, seeded within the court building's own central matrix. Sandy had infiltrated and put it there, but did not have enough processing power to keep both it running and personal functions at the infiltration level. Once Sandy was inside, Rhian had come in through the front door, the system fooled into thinking she was someone else, and taken a seat in the waiting gallery, shades on, busy on multiple uplinks, all dark suit and no nonsense. Security types often looked the part, and no one bothered her. After all, she'd penetrated building security with no difficulty.

But now, Rhian did not reply. Sandy looked for her on building systems…and found her seated in the waiting gallery with various others, mostly press awaiting some announcement by a court clerk scheduled for some time in the next thirty minutes. The connection was working, why wouldn't Rhian reply? She slowed her pace in the corridor. Either she was getting incorrect information as to system function, or Rhian was ignoring her. That wasn't possible. The system function must be down, but she wasn't seeing it. Given that these systems didn't particularly trouble her, that wasn't possible either.

The only option it left was a crazy one. But she didn't see that logical deduction left anything else.

Am I out? Or still in?

She punched the wall, hard. It bounced without breaking. Shit. And began winding back through network functions as fast as she could; this shouldn't be possible, not to her, her brain usually rejected VR, and it was only with recent software adaptations that she'd begun to damp down that reflex…so disable the adaptations. She did, and…

…abruptly found herself atop an impossibly tall mountain. All about was empty space. Below, stretching away into the infinite distance, smaller, lower peaks, themselves snow covered and incredibly high. Clouds formed beneath them, filling valleys. The air was crisp and clear in the way it became at very high altitude. She should have been freezing to death. Suffocating. It happened more slowly with GIs, but it still happened. Instead there was
numbness and absence of sensation. This was VR, and the program, unable to give her accurate-to-life sensation, gave her nothing instead.

It could have been Everest, she supposed. The Himalayas on old Earth. Old Earth simulations were most common in the Federation, the most famous of human worlds; the colonists all wanted to see it for themselves. The sun was small and low on the horizon, a bronze coin. The small platform of rock beneath her feet was barely a meter wide. To either side was space to step, trails. Forward or back would send her plunging into empty space.

She had no net access here. Could sense nothing on her uplinks, the kind of total absence you'd have on top of a huge mountain in the middle of nowhere. Hell of a capture program. It was a trap, of course, specifically designed to catch VR hackers. It shouldn't have worked on a GI, let alone a high-designation one like her. A regular human might be stuck up here indefinitely, lacking the skills to climb down or the courage to jump. But she wasn't scared of falling.

She leaped…and the VR refused to translate her synthetic power into momentum. She fell rather than flew, saw the rocky cliff face racing up below and flatly refused to brace for it, trusting a lifetime's experience of synthetic strength…and hit, the VR attempting to turn impact into pain, which a GI's brain could never accept as real…

And snap! she was back in the toilet stall, uplinks down and hearing that others were entering the bathroom. With her unarmed, unable to fool building security into thinking that a gun was anything other than a gun.

She fell and rolled under two neighbouring stalls as gunfire erupted and the partitions above her disintegrated in a hail of exploding panels. Planted a foot on a bowl and shoved just as the gunfire dropped to floor level, shot out through a riddled door with a blow that sent it off its hinges, collided with the armoured soldier on the far side with an elbow smash that caved in his lungs, kicked his neighbour into a third, jumped high, and rebounded off the ceiling at an angle to drop down on a fourth. Used him as a pivot to kick a fifth, removed his weapon to shoot a sixth and seventh, then an armlock on the fourth's retaliation, flipped him, ripped off the helmet and levelled the newly acquired weapon at his nose.

“Who?” she said, standing there covered in dust and debris from shattered stalls but barely a scratch besides, amidst the ruins of armoured bodies.

“Go to hell,” said the man. An accent program ran without prompting…Nova Esperenza. Ambassador Ballan's homeworld. Big local security agency, locally known as K13, more heavily armed and, some claimed, more kick ass than the CSA.

Her network was back and showed gunfire in the waiting gallery. “
Rhian, we're blown, it's K13!
”

“
Yeah, got that!
” came Rhian's reply amidst heavy gunfire. Sandy's central feed was no longer working, she couldn't see Rhian's situation. “
Thanks for the head's up!
” Which could have been sarcasm. From Rhian?

Sandy abandoned all caution and hit the building network with everything…and found the command setup more easily than she'd hoped. Head Justice's chambers. Dropped her man, hit the door, then out the corridor at a sprint.

“
Rhi, you good for three minutes?
”

“
Take ten
,” said Rhian. Return fire suggested she too had a weapon of her own now. “
Why should I mind?
” Definitely sarcasm.

Sandy took a corner so fast she ran up the wall to do it, skidded into a controlled collision with another corner, then fell down some stairs, taking the entire flight in a jump. Stopped with another collision in a wide, polished hallway. Ten strides away were the big panelled doors to the Head Justice's chambers. One usually approached them with reverence.

Sandy went through them in a combat dive, bits of wood and mechanism splintering as she did, weapon out and searching…and came up on one knee to find the chambers empty of all but two, both Judges. One was Malima Yadav, the Head Justice herself. The other was Sarah Tado.

“So it's true,” said Yadav quite sternly. No robes, she wore a simple suit, hair in a braid. A much younger woman than Tado, only in her sixties, a high flier from Romero System. The Federation's senior legal authority. “You won't even respect the sanctity of the Supreme Court.”

“Where is he?” Sandy demanded, looking about the room. K13’s operational commander had been here, she was sure of it. With court approval. “K13, where is he?”

“So you can do what? Kill him too?”

Sandy did not waste time with disbelief. Yadav was supposed to be neutral. This wasn't neutrality. “You?” she said to Tado instead. “You were
playing along?” Tado said nothing. “Using the entire Supreme Court as a trap to help Operation Shield get its most wanted fugitive?”

“When the security agencies that protect us start fighting amongst themselves, and we get caught in the crossfire,” Tado explained, “there's not a lot we can do.”

“You can do what's right,” Sandy suggested. “Shouldn't be a novel thought in this building.” No replies. “Last mistake in your legal careers.”

Fear, on both their faces. They thought she was going to shoot them. As though they'd learned nothing from her last eight years of service. But these people, she recalled, were Federation, not Callayan. Callayans had become accustomed to her. The Federation, less so.

“
Rhi
,” she formulated as she turned and left the chambers. “
I'll be there in thirty seconds.
”

Svetlana wandered easily across Russell Square, picking her way between milling groups of people. “I think there's about three thousand here,” she said.

“
One of the news nets is saying six thousand
,” said Danya in her AR setup's earbud. “
They've got an overhead camera, they can see more than you.
”

That was true enough, Svetlana conceded. And, being from Droze, she'd rarely seen more than a few hundred people together in any one place at a time and wasn't much good at estimating crowds. Russell Square was pretty, like all Tanushan public places. It had grass, trees, and paths, was surrounded on all sides by buildings that were modest by Tanushan standards, and enormous by Droze standards. Over in the northeastern corner, the land dropped to a natural amphitheatre, where public performances were sometimes held. Over that way it was very noisy, with lots of shouting and amplified voices. Here in the middle of the square, it was less crowded.

“If Justice Rosa's going to start some sort of rebellion,” she said, “doesn't he need more than six thousand people?”

“
A lot more
,” said Danya. “
I guess most people don't believe him, they think Sandy was plotting a coup.
”

“If they believe that after all she's done for them, maybe she
should
have plotted a stupid coup,” Svetlana muttered. “Would serve them all right.”

She wasn't wearing much of a disguise; they were all counting on any automated surveillance programs searching for all three of them—surveillance programs were limited, they all knew from experience, especially in crowds. And presumably Cassandra Kresnov's kids wouldn't be a very high priority if Ari was right and the Feds didn't know about the uplink message he'd sent to Kiril. Surveillance programs would narrow the odds by searching for all three of them together in a limited space—three kids of 13, 10, and 6, two boys and a girl, etc. Her alone, wearing the cute beret that her and Sandy's trip to the dress-up party had inspired her to buy, along with her own AR glasses, ought to hide her well enough amongst these people.

And here before her, as she emerged from the cover of a big fig tree to the
grassy rim about the amphitheatre…“Oh, look,” she said cheerfully, not breaking stride. “Surveillance.”

Not that there weren't a lot of people overlooking the amphitheatre, there were—office workers come out on their lunch break, some with food in hand, other perhaps tourists, a few genuine attendees…but most of those were in pairs or small groups. Only this one woman, in unremarkable civvies, was standing alone and watching not only the ongoing speeches but also the people around her.

“
Careful, Svet
,” said Danya. “
Don't get cocky.
”

“They're not looking at little girls after an ice cream,” Svetlana replied, breaking into a run toward the ice-cream stall farther around the rim. Her run took her straight past the surveillance agent, close enough to show the little bulge at the back of the belt and a weight in the left pants pocket…and probably a gun in that silly handbag too.

Danya and Kiril sat in the southern part of the square, a nice series of playgrounds, including an enormous and well-supervised jungle gym, a crazy water playground, and a go-cart track. They ate some lunch, roti rolls and samosa, and took their time because, as Danya had explained, it would look suspicious for kids to be sitting between all these play spaces and not joining in.

They now watched on AR glasses of their own as Svetlana's vision feed approached the ice-cream stall, peering around taller bodies as she waited impatiently in line.

“I want an ice cream too,” said Kiril.

“We've got more important things to worry about than ice cream,” Danya replied.

“But she's having one.”

“She's using it as cover,” his big brother explained. “So she can get close without anyone being suspicious, they'll think she's just another kid with nothing better on her mind than ice cream.”

“Like me,” said Kiril sullenly.

Danya grinned and ruffled his hair. “Yes, like you.”

“So what if she's using it as cover, it's still ice cream.”

“Kiril, pay attention and help your sister like you're supposed to, and I'll get you an ice cream later, promise.”

Ari had shown Danya how to blank the AR glasses setup so that it ran without ID—a very common thing in Tanusha, where people were techie smart and didn't like governments or advertisers tracing their every move. But most people, Ari said, then ruined it by using Augmented Reality in conjunction with uplinks, which weren't supposed to be easily traceable by communications law, but really were, to governments or security organisations with skills. Kids using ID-less AR, sans uplinks, wouldn't even register. The net monitored cyberspace constructs, but portable devices just bouncing signals off relays like antique phones used to do were anonymous, thanks to legal campaigns long ago by people who cared about stuff like this. People like Ari, Danya thought, whose concern of Feds abusing their power seemed pretty smart right now. And he hoped again that Ari was okay, wherever he was.

It meant that Danya and Kiril could receive Svetlana's live feed, with the standard AR overlay, and break that overlay down into parts. Not that Federal agents would make themselves visible to AR displays, but some others did—even now as Svetlana waited in line and looked around, a nearby person highlighted on the feed, and a close-up on that highlight said that she was a journalist and writer, working for something called Golden Pen Presentations.

“That's a journalist,” Kiril observed. “Maybe we could talk to her?”

“No, remember we're not after journalists,” said Danya. Svetlana's vision stayed trained on the woman, giving them time to consider her, but unable to speak now that she was in a line with other people. “The media's not on our side, we just want to see if we can talk to Justice Rosa.”

“But he's a journalist,” Kiril reasoned.

Sometimes Danya wished Kiril still wasn't smart enough to be able to follow this stuff at all. But then he wouldn't be reading, or setting up their AR links, or doing any other useful things either. “Yeah, but he's a different kind.”

Journalists, Danya guessed, would light themselves up on AR in places like this in case someone with information wanted to tell them something. Probably this woman would be very upset to know how close she stood to the biggest story of anyone's career. And then, maybe not so upset knowing how likely that knowledge was to kill her.

Svetlana ordered strawberry gelato, a double serve, and walked away
licking it all over. “
Oh, Kiri, look!
” she said loudly, examining the ice cream thoroughly on all sides with her glasses feed. “
It's really delicious!
”

Kiril grumbled, and Danya tried not to smile. “Don't be mean, Svet.”

Svetlana walked to the edge of the amphitheatre, overlooking the crowd. It was thickest here, several thousand at least. On the platform sat some people in cheap plastic chairs, while one talked into a mini-mike, eliciting the occasional roar from the crowd. Some others stood security, arguing with crowd members around the podium, waving hands in discussion, all concerned and serious. Some cops stood nearby, watching, their cars parked on the nearby road corner, lights flashing. The whole thing looked like a last-minute setup, Danya thought.

AR lit up the people on the stage. “Intel…” tried Kiril, reading the captions. “Intellech…Intellechal…”

“Intellectual,” said Danya. “Public Intellectual, they all are.”

“What's that?”

“People without a real job,” said Danya. “Kiri, can you zoom on the guy at the end there? That's Justice Rosa.”

“What's a PhD?” Kiril asked as he did that.

“Something they give people without real jobs.” Justice had a long brown face, made longer by his tall, curly hair.

“
He looks like a pencil
,” said Svetlana through a mouthful of ice cream. “
He's writing Sandy's book?
”

“It's not Sandy's book, it's his, but it's about her.” If anyone could get a message to Director Ibrahim, Justice could. Or that had been his reasoning in taking the risk to come here. There were probably others, but he had no idea who they were, and without knowledge, couldn't risk it. But Justice, he knew from Sandy talking about it, had contacts everywhere, and had now declared himself firmly against Operation Shield. “Just be careful, Svet, see if he has any advisors or someone you could slip a message to.”

Svetlana walked down the slope and into the crowd. If it were a concert she'd have hated it, she only came up to most people's middles and couldn't see a thing on the stage. But today she liked it. Here she could move with complete freedom and slip through gaps no one else could. And do other things unnoticed.

“Hey, Kiril, see if you can get a feed on this.” She put her new acquisition
in her pocket with the AR regulator, saw the connection made on her vision, blinked on it, linked it to the main feed.

“
What's that, Svet?
” As the feed reached Danya.

“
That's really shielded
,” said Kiril.

“I bet we could find someone to break it,” said Svetlana, licking her ice cream into a more manageable size and shape. “One of Ari's friends.”

“
Svetlana, what is it?
” Warily.

“Just the spare belt unit I lifted from that surveillance lady back there.” Squeezing between gaps in the crowd. “I didn't look directly at it, you didn't see.”

“
Oh, for fuck's sake, Svet.
”

Kiril laughed. “
Cool
,” he said. And suddenly Svetlana could see new markers appearing on AR. Broadcasters, making a new signal pattern between them, like a grid of interlocking secure pathways.

“
What the hell is that?
” Danya asked. “
What's making that network?
”

“Don't look at me,” said Svetlana. She looked about, pausing for a moment. Each of the new nodes seemed to be located exactly where good surveillance would place a person, to watch the square. “It looks like…oh, wow, Kiril, did you just hack the shielding?”

“
Um…I'm not sure.
” A pause. “
Yeah, I think I did. It's, um…it's really weird, I can't see that network or anything, I mean I can't see a picture? A schematic?
” Which was one of those technical words he'd picked up that he loved to use, in or out of context. “
But I'm getting this different feed now? And I think…I think it's coming from them, from the Feds.
”

“And that's why we're all seeing it!” Svetlana barely remembered to keep her voice down in her excitement—there were people all about, but mostly the speakers from the stage and occasional cheering were too loud for them to overhear some kid beneath them. “You're processing the feed and sending it back to us! Kiri, your uplinks are really working!”

“
And working crazy well
,” Danya muttered. “
I don't like it, we should pull out, this is much more advanced than any uplinks should be at this level. It could be doing him damage.
”

“
I feel fine
,” Kiril protested.

“Danya, this is too awesome,” Svetlana said in a harsh murmur. “I can see everything, this is much safer for all of us, I know where they all are!”

A pause. Wild cheers following some announcement on stage.

“
Okay
,” said Danya finally. Reluctantly. “
Just stay low and do your own surveillance, Svet. No more stupid risks, okay?
”

“It wasn't a stupid risk,” Svetlana muttered, moving forward again. “I made us safer.”

She finally reached the front of the crowd and peered through a small gap between arms. From her low angle, the stage was too high, and she could barely see Justice's face as he sat near the present speaker. There were no barriers holding people back from the stage, though, and the volunteer security looked nervous. Shouldn't the cops be protecting the stage? Shouldn't there be barriers? Everywhere else in Tanusha the government seemed to stick its hand in, making everything safer…but not here.

She did a slow circle, edging into gaps. It was possible there was even a security person or two down here—they'd have a poor view, but sometimes you needed someone right up close. Funny the things you saw as a kid, down low, that no one else did. Litter on the once-perfect grass. Shoes people wore, from crazy boots to silly heels, to smart leather. She thought it would be funny to tie someone's laces together when they were watching the stage. A tough-shelled beetle, several times stepped on but still undamaged against the soft grass, struggling to find a safer place.

Around the back of the stage were a lot more officials…or maybe “unofficials,” as they wore no uniform and were scampering back and forth, talking, arguing, trying to organise things. Sometimes Svetlana wondered if adults knew what the hell they were doing, surely it couldn't be this complicated just to have a few people stand on a stage and talk? A few uniformed cops were talking to them, and as she got closer, she overheard something about permits, noise volumes. The “unofficials” wanted some cops around the front of the stage, between the speakers and the crowd.