Killswitch (11 page)

The tech extended a hand. Jean-Pierre grasped cautiously at a finger, and sniffed. The man smiled, looking slightly puzzled, and surprised, from the bunbun and back to Sandy. Sandy sipped her drink, and pretended not to notice. Nearly everyone who met her for the first time in a nonmilitary setting gave her that look. Particularly when she was holding and talking to a cute, furry household pet.

The security team departed and Sandy let Jean-Pierre out into the garden, where a number of tall trees soared from the lush undergrowth, and gave him plenty of exercise and freedom. She watched for a moment on the front decking as the nimble, furry shape clambered quickly up a tall trunk with precise holds and bounds. He could run away any time, certainly there were plenty of wild bunbuns of various species throughout Tanusha ... no doubt Jean-Pierre met and associated with them often, particularly the lady bunbuns. But bunbuns were highly territorial creatures, and grew very attached to their place of birth and home. Like most well-treated, domesticated bunbuns, he came home every time.

Ironic, she reflected as she climbed the stairs to her room with her drink and a slice of fruitcake from the fridge, that it was easier to domesticate smarter animals as pets than stupid ones. Unless you counted livestock or fish as pets, which she didn't, personally. Livestock only licked your face if they found something edible on it. Real pets did it because they liked you. Poor bunbuns, though. Just smart enough to stay, but not smart enough to leave. Like GIs, she'd said to Rhian, once. But Rhian, of course, hadn't gotten the joke.

Consciousness was elusive. She drifted beneath the surface of lucidity, gazing at the ripples and roaring foam ... like waves, viewed from below. Perhaps she was at the beach. At Rajadesh, or one of her other favourite surf spots. And if she reached with one foot, and found the sandy bottom firm against her toes, she could push off and break the surface into the sunlight and clean, fresh breeze above. And one of the regulars would be cruising past ... maybe Peytr Lipinski, or maybe Tabo with his round, cheerful black face, and compliment her on a nice ride, and wonder if perhaps she'd come to drinks at the beach party they were having that weekend ...

A high, cruising whine above the crashing surf. The sand felt unstable ... a bump of turbulence. Memories triggered, reflexes ... damn, she was dreaming. She wasn't on a beach at all. The realisation came as a mighty disappointment. Above her swam the lucid surface, a refraction of sunlight through a watery depth. The cruising whine remained steady. Then voices, and the noise of someone moving equipment. A rattle and bump of turbulence, disorienting. She knew that feeling well enough. She was airborne.

Finally her eyes flicked open. She was staring at a low ceiling. Her vision was clear enough, thankfully, and when she moved her eyes, she could see medical equipment to her side. There was someone over there, someone wearing a medico's white coat, adjusting equipment. Gravity tilted once more, g-forces pressing faintly against her back. So she was lying down. In an airborne vehicle. Surrounded by medical equipment. Aerial ambulance. Someone must have tried to kill her again. But the most disturbing part was that she couldn't remember a thing.

"What happened?" Her voice was small, yet clear enough. That was good, she knew from past experience that when the meds shot her too full of drugs, her voice was usually the first thing to go.

"Commander?" There was a woman leaning over her, in the whitecoated uniform of a Tanushan ambulance officer. "Commander Kresnov, how do you feel?"

"I don't know yet. Tell me what happened." Jean-Pierre. Abruptly she felt worried for him, and was relieved to remember letting him run up the tree in the backyard-twenty metres over the house, he should be fine.

"We're not sure what happened, Commander. Canas security alerted us after they responded to a personal alarm from your room. We got there within five minutes of their call, Canas security said they'd found you passed out on the floor. They said you'd been subjected to some kind of network attack, some foreign assault virus had penetrated your barrier networks and immobilised you. They physically disabled the house's network to disconnect it."

There had been Canas security personnel in her house, Sandy remembered. One had let Jean-Pierre sniff his fingers. She'd checked out the house's network herself many times, as had some of the brightest brains in the Tanushan techno underground, who knew where all the hidden pitfalls and shortcuts were located. So it stood to reason that whoever had tried to kill her had done so through the agency of Canas security ... who guarded all the most important people in Tanusha, and were invulnerable to infiltration. Sandy moved her arm, and found that it was restrained.

"Why am I restrained?"

"I'm sorry, Commander, Canas security said you were thrashing around some when they found you. I didn't particularly want to share the back of an ambulance with a thrashing GI."

"Fair enough. I'm okay now, let me out."

"I'm really sorry but regulations won't let me. I've been instructed from the top, they say not to risk it."

Sandy wasn't sure of her own reaction. The calm felt decidedly like combat-reflex. The surreal dislocation was probably drugs. God knew what they'd shot her full of. All she knew for sure was that she didn't want to ask anything more that might alarm anyone. She had a mental checklist in her head, now, and she needed to check off some items. And she realised, in that slow, unaccustomed state, that she wasn't receiving any data through her uplinks. That was another question she didn't want to ask. Maybe they'd think she was getting upset.

"We're going to CDF compound, aren't we?" As calmly as she knew how to ask.

"Um, no ..." the ambulance officer was now reaching for something, adjusting it out of her field of vision, ". . . we're headed to the Lloyd Hospital. They have the best biotech surgeons there, they'll know best how to make sure you're okay."

"I think it's a better idea to get back to Doctor Obago at the CDF. He's my regular physician. He's gotten to know my medical situation better than anyone else in the last two years."

"We'll definitely consult with Doctor Obago," the ambulance officer reassured her. And lifted into sight the implement she'd been adjusting-a hypospray, filled with fluid.

"I'm fine," Sandy said, her voice hardening. "I don't need another damn shot."

"No offence, Commander, but I'll be the judge of that."

"You're very self-assured for a simple ambulance tech." She tensed her arm, seeking critical muscle function, and felt only the faint twinge of reaction. The arm remained loose, the restraints hard and firm about her forearms, synthetic straps, far harder than steel. The ambulance officer smiled.

"Trust me, Commander, I'm uplinked to some very knowledgeable experts in the field of GI physiology. The shot is prescription."

Sandy focused inward, as hard as she could. Remembering what muscular tension felt like. The secret was not tension. It was to relax ... relax ... She breathed deeply, closing her eyes. The officer's hypospray was a small, low-powered pocket size. It gave her a little extra time.

The ambulance officer touched the hypospray to Sandy's bare arm, and Sandy felt the faint sting of pressure. Then a puzzled pause from the officer.

"Hmm, that's funny. It's not going in." Another faint pop against her skin. "It's leaving a mark on your skin, so the hypo's not broken. Very funny."

"Hysterical," Sandy agreed. Tension erupted in her right arm, and she unleashed it with a bang! that shook the stretcher as the arm restraint tore clear away. And caught the startled ambulance officer by the front of the white coat. "Stick me with that again and I'll impale you with it."

Bang! as she ripped her left arm free, releasing the stunned medico to reach for the cord at the back of her head and rip it clear ... barrier restrictions evaporated, and suddenly the rush of network data flooded her mind in graphic, three-dimensional relief. A picture of their present location-they were almost precisely over central Tanusha, where Shi- nobu district blended into the broad Balikpapan Nature Park. Lloyd Hospital was in central-southern Tanusha, still five minutes' flight time away. Sandy sat up to undo the straps about her ankles.

"Commander, what the hell are you doing?" The medico had flattened herself warily to the side of the ambulance, eyes wide with alarm. Sandy ignored her, finished with the ankle straps and moved to the reinforced window at the front of the cabin, where the ambulance driver was staring back at them with some alarm, speaking rapidly into a headset microphone. Sandy hit the window with an open palm to disperse the impact of the strike, and it crashed explosively inwards as the driver ducked to his side. The resulting gap was large enough to crawl through, which she did, headfirst, and climbed into the empty passenger seat alongside the driver.

"Commander!" The driver was clearly alarmed. "We're just on our way to hospital, what do you think you're doing?" As Sandy stuffed the fractured dividing window back through the rear frame where it wouldn't get in the way. "There's no need for any alarm, Commander ... I think that latest attack might have disoriented you in some way. Please try to think on what you're doing."

"Relinquish the controls," Sandy told him, uplinking to the ambulance's CPU and scanning its projected course ahead toward the hospital. The Tanushan central traffic network kept a careful eye on all emergency vehicles, had them priority-registered on the airborne net ...

"I'm sorry, Commander, but I just can't do that."

Sandy hit him, the heel of her palm to the thick part of the skull above the ear. The driver lurched sideways against his belt, then slumped in his seat. Sandy felt for pulse and breathing as the medico in the back made a startled exclamation of shock and fear.

"Check on him," Sandy told the woman. "I didn't hit him hard, make sure he's not hurt." Her uplinks accessed the navcomp, overriding the old course and setting in a new one. Traffic Central tried to query, and she overrode it with a CSA priority code. The medico leaned through the open rear window frame, feeling at the driver's throat and skull, stopping his head from rolling about.

"Commander," she said, trying to keep her voice steady, "I think you're panicking. You should stop and think for just a moment. Whatever you think is going on here, I assure you, there's nothing ..."

"Just shut up or I'll hit you too," Sandy told her. Truthfully she didn't like hitting straights if at all avoidable-the risk of a brainsplattered windshield was only theoretical, and in practice a hell of a lot less than that. But whatever the remote odds of a momentary loss of muscle control, she still didn't like doing it. The next fork in the new trajectory arrived, and Sandy steered the ambulance into a gentle left-hand bank with the passenger seat controls, following the string of aligned rectangles that projected up on the front windshield. The new course swung toward what the navcomp identified as Prasad Tower, a four hundred metre tall mega-high-rise that soared above the surrounding clutter of mid-sized towers in central Chattisgarh.

"Hello 875," came the ambulance controller's voice over the cockpit speakers, "we read that you have altered course, please explain. "

Sandy ignored it, uplinking instead to the Prasad Tower's presence on the network, studying its layout, its security features, its occupation demographics. The tower's top levels were occupied by a VIP parking bay, beneath the rooftop landing pads for flyers and other larger airborne vehicles. A query light blinked upon the ambulance's com system. Another pressed upon her inner consciousness, her uplink software immediately tracing its origin back to somewhere within the CSA. She ignored that too. Lights blinked upon Prasad Tower's landing pads, the occasional vehicle arriving or leaving from the parking bay beneath ... early evening traffic, late workers headed home. About half of the tower's massive glass sides were illuminated from within.

Her monitoring software informed her of nearby government vehicle trajectories altering toward her. She counted four. The nearest was less than a minute away. The tower's landing control had her slotted now, the windshield display rectangles stretching ahead to match up with the broad opening in the tower's side. Sandy began the landing cycle, automated systems deploying wheels, repulsor engines throbbing as their velocity slowed ... and then the ambulance passed into a floodlit cavern of ferrocrete, the landing systems directing the vehicle to a yellow-striped temporary park beside the main conveyer belt park, as was procedure for emergency vehicles. Wheels touched and she shut down the engines, ducked under the unfolding side door, and out into the echoing, gusty bay. She realised she was still wearing her CDF uniform, and hastily unbuttoned the jacket, tossing it onto the passenger seat.

She ran swiftly toward the through-passage ahead as another cruiser came in for a landing behind, its lights blazing her running shadow large upon the opposing wall. Then into the broad ferrocrete passage, hearing the clank and hum of the parking bay mechanism echoing through the walls above the throbbing whine of aircars. Her uplinks informed her that the next cruiser approaching the entrance bay was an official, black-flagged government vehicle, the exact identity of which remained ominously blank despite her probes.

The passage opened onto the exit apron on the other side of the building. A number of people were waiting on the raised footpath alongside the vehicle conveyer belt, finding their transport waiting in line, nose to tail. A pedestrian crossing light blinked red, advising her not to cross the apron ... Sandy ignored it, ducking and running past the departing end of a cruiser that lifted from the conveyer belt, hovering its way toward the exit. The repulsor field prickled her skin and made hair stand on end as she ran onto the pedestrian platform, and up the adjoining rampway that descended to the occupied, working floors below. It was a long platform, and she had barely started down it when a pair of dark-uniformed security guards appeared at the far end, stopped, and stared at her.