Crossover (3 page)

Her eyes followed as one of the airborne transports whined mournfully by, a shimmering reflection slipping across its gleaming shell like mercury, running lights blinking. Voices played at the back of her consciousness, a building pressure, then receding with tangible, physical sensation. Machine traffic, people traffic, sharemarkets, transport guidance, personal calls ... all blended smoothly into one clear presence. Thus the city spoke to itself, and thus to the other cities about the globe, and to the station above, and the planets and the people beyond even that. The net was huge. Vast. And many, many things beyond ...

She turned to look at Joachim, who lay naked amid the comfortable tangle of sheets, limbs splayed amid the fall of night light from outside. Sighed, softly, and began to pull on her clothes from where they'd fallen 107 minutes before. Joachim did not stir, having had perhaps one glass too many in the evening past. And she had worn him out — 107 minutes was apparently much longer than he was accustomed to.

Well, she thought, as she fastened her belt about the waist of her jacket, she had no complaints. It had been a while, that was all. A week, at least. She checked that her wallet was still in her pocket and that her various cash and identification cards were still where they ought to be, and then finger combed her hair back into some kind of order in the gleam of window light before Joachim's bedroom mirror. Her hair was slightly strewn, but she liked the effect and she smiled at herself in the mirror. The mirror smiled back.

And then, because she harboured a secret ambition to one day become a hopeless romantic, she walked to Joachim's bedside and kissed him gently on the lips. Joachim's breathing may have altered slightly, but his eyelids never so much as fluttered. April Cassidy moved softly to the door, opened and closed it silently and walked off down the empty corridor, the soft remnants of a saxophone melody running gentle circles through her mind.

That night, alone in her hotel bed, she dreamed.

She was surrounded by cold, dark metal. Loud, mechanical noises echoed and crashed, and heavy forces crushed her into her seat, then tossed forward against the restraint bar. Her thickly gloved right hand clasped the grip of a rifle, locked into a heavy brace. Her body was encased in armour, lightweight but hard, and a helmet strap pulled tight beneath her chin, visorplate open, systems temporarily offline in the pre-drop.

Other soldiers sat on the benches around her, similarly armed and armoured, secured by their restraints as the forces slammed them this way and that and the engine noise whined in their ears. She knew their names, these soldiers. There was Tran, child-faced and slight. Rachmin, cold-eyed and narrow-jawed. Chu, tongue protruding from a corner of her mouth in nervous habit. Dobrov, dour and grim. Mahud, with barely restrained eagerness. The man sitting opposite regarded her darkly. Sergei. Or Stark, as he was more often called.

"Not long now, Sandy." She could see the target image on the forward scan uplink, drawing closer. She looked about her. Another sudden lift slammed her hard down into the seat, blurring her vision. Her discomfort grew.

"My name's not Sandy. I'm April Cassidy now."

"Wha's tha', Cap'n?" asked Chu.

"My name," she repeated. "I'm not Sandy any more. My name is April Cassidy." The return stares were blank, uncomprehending. Tran yawned.

"Approaching the target, Captain," said Stark. His stare was ominous, as always.

"I can't lead you," she told him. "I'm not supposed to be here. This is a mistake." The discomfort grew worse. There wasn't much time, and she was unprepared, so unprepared.
How
could she lead them without her plans? Where were her intelligence reports? She always had intelligence briefings before an operation, but she couldn't remember receiving one.

"Thirty klicks," said the pilot. She didn't know the pilot's name. Or was it Marsh? No, it couldn't be. Marsh had been killed in the Riemus op. She felt a surge of panic. She had to know the pilot's name. How could she let her people be flown into a firezone by a pilot she wasn't checked out on? No, this was a bad op, she couldn't let this continue ...

"Abort," she snapped into her mike, "abort mission. This is Captain Cassandra Kresnov ordering an abort of ..." Good God, she'd forgotten the mission codename. That was impossible. She stared helplessly at Stark, who stared back, offering little comfort.

"What's the matter, Cap'n?" Mahud asked her from further along, grinning. "Cold feet?"

"Twenty klicks," said the pilot, and another thrust of G slammed her helmet against the headrest. Fire ripped past, targeting acquired and Cover replied with violence, tracking and tagging ...

"I'm not meant to be here!" she shouted at them desperately. "I'm not your captain any more, I'm April Cassidy. I'm a cognitive software technician ..."

Mahud broke into sneezing laughter.

"You're a what?" Dobrov asked her, mildly interested.

"Target approaching, Sandy," Stark intoned warningly. Oh hell, they were all going to die, in a firezone that she hadn't prepared for, in an op without a proper intelligence briefing, because she didn't have her counterpoints locked in and she hadn't a clue what the primary objective was, let alone the withdrawal procedures, and she was going to have to wing it, which meant that they were all going to die. Just like the last time, they were all going to die ...

... And she awoke in fright, bolt upright in bed, dripping with sweat and gasping for air ...

For a long, long moment, Cassandra Kresnov sat upright in bed, sweat cooling in the mild room temperature, the sheet fallen to her hips.

Sandy. Her name was Sandy. She'd thought that to change it would be simple, and that would be that. Her official records swore blind that her name was and always had been April Cassidy, but the official records were fake. Captain Cassandra Kresnov, Dark Star special ops. As if she could ever have escaped it.

Outside the window the sun was rising. It was 6:24, and she'd had slightly less than six hours' sleep, but anything over four hours was an indulgence really. Sleepiness was not a common affliction for April Cassidy. For Sandy.

She screwed her eyes shut in frustration. Cassandra Kresnov. Sandy, to her friends. If friends they really were. Hard to tell with that bunch of two-dimensional personalities for whom 'kill or be killed' was not just a survival strategy but an entire moral philosophy. Perhaps she'd been a bit like that herself, once. Perhaps. But they were all dead now. And she got up, not wanting to think about it any more.

Emerging from the shower, dry and somewhat recovered, she sat on the floor, and stretched. Muscles that had not been seriously exercised in over a week creaked and groaned their displeasure. Stretching helped, but she knew she would be well advised to do some more serious exercise soon. Which would be difficult, considering that most exercise in a place like Tanusha was done in public. But she thought she could probably find something that would do her some good while not frightening the locals too much. Or alerting the authorities.

Breakfast was still 17 minutes away when she finished, so she sat cross-legged on the bed and jacked herself into the net. Her files were still very much in order within the hotel's protective confines, although they had been accessed several times, as she'd thought they would be. All four accessors were the companies she'd had interviews with yesterday. She sorted through their various data trails in thoughtless reflex, following leads in about twenty directions at once, seeing where they'd been, and what they'd done with the information. Company names, address numbers, access codes formal and not so formal, encryption, bypass pathways ... it all went flashing past at high velocity, sorted, scanned and abandoned, each with equal thoroughness. There were a couple of mental question marks, but otherwise, nothing. And her security tripwires, in case anyone started searching down other, telltale avenues, were still in place.

But there was nothing like that. Just a bunch of interested companies running the standard legal background checks on a prospective employee, like any good company should. They'd find nothing but glowing recommendations too, not least from Boushun Information, for whom she'd done a genuinely excellent job, adding nearly thirty percent to their annual profit figures while she'd been there. But Boushun were upstarts, willing to take a risk on a relative unknown who could possibly have been a security breach for all they'd known, and from what little they could glean from her education files.

She could have been, too, if money had been her motivation — Boushun would have been none the wiser. But she wasn't, and had left Boushun with her bank balance looking very healthy and her much-needed glowing recommendations on file, without which she wouldn't have much chance of getting into one of these Tanushan tech majors. She'd turned down a big pay rise offer on leaving, too, but Boushun couldn't have been too unhappy — she'd left them with a couple of basic design patents that would be raking in at least fifteen percent profit growth per year for the next six or seven years. At least. She felt good about that, too. Boushun had done her a good turn, and she'd done them one in return. It was such a simple thing, this friendly, civilised business of being nice to people. A simple pleasure. She liked it a lot. And besides, there was plenty more where those software patents had come from.

Breakfast was three minutes late again, delivered by the same hotel employee with the bow tie, who again apologised for the slight delay. He seemed friendly even beyond the usual hotel-politeness, and delayed for a few more words, no doubt making the next breakfast even later. Possibly he'd noticed the casually drawn bathrobe and deduced from appearances that she was in the habit of walking naked about her apartment. Probably he wanted to nail her too.

She smiled wryly to herself, shucking off the bathrobe to eat her breakfast sitting naked on the bed, watching the magnificence of the rising sun among the towers. Screwing room service would certainly not do — he was late enough already. Although he had to get off work sometime. And then there was that man who'd spared a second and a third glance at her in the elevator yesterday morning. He hadn't been bad looking either. She wondered if she'd see him again this morning. Life in Tanusha for a single woman with decidedly pronounced sexual tastes seemed like a pleasant prospect.

"Anything that moves," they'd said in the military, and they hadn't been talking about shooting things.

Sandy, or April Cassidy, or whatever your name is — you are definitely not a one-man woman.

The thought thus composed, she smiled broadly to herself and attacked her breakfast with renewed vigour. All in all, she was feeling much better.

The Tanushan Heritage Gallery was an experience. She wandered slowly across the polished wood floors, interested as much in the setting as the art itself. The walls were long, white and smooth. Small lights illuminated each exhibit from calculated angles, and the ceiling light was soft and muted. People strolled, and stood, and talked in low, considered voices, studying one canvas or another with serious intensity.

Sandy paused before one such, a tall, rectangular frame that covered much of one wall. It was a mess. Paint everywhere. Red paint, blue paint, green paint, splotted and splashed in thin, seemingly random lines. But not random. She looked closer, eyes narrowed in concentration. Looking for the calculation that must surely exist behind a work like this. It was exhibited in one of the major galleries on the planet, after all. But it was difficult to tell.

But maybe, she thought to herself as she pondered, that was the artist's intent. To make you look. And think. Which struck her as very strange — that an artist could be considered such by challenging the notion of art itself. Possibly even devaluing it. She wasn't sure that she liked the idea.

And straightened before the painting, looking around her at the other people, all considering other pieces of equally abstract work, and taking it all very seriously. What were they seeing? she wondered. Something she could not see? Merely the differences between individuals, perhaps? Or was it something specifically to do with her?

She looked back to the painting and altered the visual signature upon her retinas. It only looked cold and flat. A piece of dead canvas with some paint on it. Changed spectrums, and the colour mix only became even more chaotic. Back to standard light. Same old painting. And still a mess.

She remained in the gallery for some time, enjoying the hushed, thoughtful atmosphere. People moved slowly, and no one rushed. Her comfortable walking shoes squeaked pleasantly on the polished floorboards, and if she tried, she could almost ignore the gathering, grating stiffness that was accumulating in her muscles from lack of recent exercise or massage.

Four hours later, following a pleasant lunch in one of the gallery's restaurants, Sandy moved on. The morning sun above the city streets had given way to thick cloud and rain, steady and persistent. She walked briskly along the footpath from the five-storey, anciently styled gallery building, an umbrella in hand, her overcoat wrapped firmly around her legs to keep the moisture from her casual jeans. Wind gusted through the roadside trees and traffic hissed by on road-wet tires. But it was hardly unpleasant and she walked happily enough, shoes splashing in the puddles as the rain continued to fall.

Lightning flashed nearby through a gap between the massive towers. Then boomed, a deep, guttural rumbling that echoed strangely off the buildings. Huddled under their umbrellas, people looked up. A couple of teenage girls laughed and chattered, hurrying on to where the pedestrian cover made a sheltered walk, safe from the rain save for the occasional driving gust.

Up ahead, a man and woman hurried from cover to a waiting aircab, clambering quickly inside as the doors swung closed — then a building whine, clear and loud above the rush and hiss of the road traffic, and the lights along the pedestrian walk flashed red. People stopped behind the yellow lines, watching as the aircab lifted smoothly away from the cross-striped landing zone and into the air. Sandy stopped too, feeling the familiar static charge prickling at her hair, like pins and needles, then fading as the engine note changed and the aircab accelerated up and away, and the pedestrians walked on again. The next cab in line rolled forward, and the next behind it, rain spilling and beading on slanted windscreens.