Originator (2 page)

“I suppose we'll find out.”

She had ideas. Ideas like revolution, like uprising. Like PRIDE, like the revivalists, like all sorts of crazy stuff going on in the League right now. Given what they knew of the neuroscience behind the sociological breakdown, the best estimates for major blowups had still given them another year or two. Sandy hadn't been so optimistic.

She would have expected a message from Ari by now, so she dropped him a line, just to see if he was available. Click. “
Sandy?
”

“You need some help bringing this one in?”

“
Not yet. You going to HQ?
”

“Yeah.”

“
Sandy, Rumplestiltskin is going to try and lock you down. You might want to go autistic for a little while
.”

Sandy frowned, processing multiple tacnets and net sweeps on internal vision, her real eyes watching the dash screen as a new Cresta Station feed came in from HQ. “Why will Ranaprasana lock me down?”

“Just will. Watch the blind side, girl.” Click, disconnected. The blind side was the bureaucracy, Sandy's worst weak spot in Tanusha. Ranaprasana was the former Chief Justice of old India itself, loaned by far away Earth to the Grand Commission, as they were calling it, trying to sort out the governance mess the Federation had gotten itself into over the last year.

Vanessa connected. “
You think we'll get deployed?
”

“Hell,” said Sandy, “if League's about to fall apart, the smartest thing might be to pick the biggest bit remaining and join with them to crush everyone else. At least then we have a fast winner; the worst option is to let this shit drag on.”

“
Yeah
.” Worriedly. “
Dammit, I was supposed to get another two years
.”

“Wouldn't worry about it, Ricey,” Sandy said with considerable satisfaction. “If we get deployed, you're not going.” Silence. “I am
not
deploying a mother with three-month-old twins. So save yourself the trouble and get used to it now.”

“
Yeah. Yeah, I know
. . . .”

Vision on the screen showed a bright flash. Station feed, the crescent horizon of a big moon in space. Cresta, light methane atmosphere, lifeless save for the pressurised colonies. The flash looked like a new sun being born. Then shock-waves, Cresta's atmosphere literally peeling away, rippling concussion blasts like waves across a pond, as the station feed darkened dramatically against the impossible glare. Behind it, waves of fractured molten rock, liquefied at those pressures. Then the shockwave hit the station, and the feed went blank.

Sandy had seen a lot of horrible things in her life. This was a scale beyond imagination. V-strike, only theorised until now. Everyone knew how to do it, but despite several wars in the age of ultimate annihilation, it had never been used. Until now. Probably a rock, little more than the size of a house, propelled by FTL jump engines to a speed perhaps three, perhaps four percent the speed of light. The energy involved was on the scale of stars. Against a larger world, it would devastate the atmosphere and kill all life in a few hours. A smaller moon like Cresta would be permanently reshaped, cratered on the near side, bulged on the far, and stripped of all atmosphere forever. Beneath such a force, the entire moon would temporarily liquefy, cities and people included. Against a bigger world, it wouldn't just kill people; it would kill everything, down to the microbes.

“I'm glad I just hugged my kids,” Sandy said quietly.

“
Well, give them a hug from me when you see them too
,” said Vanessa, similarly quiet.

“Vanessa,” said Sandy, instinctively knowing her friend's mind. “It wasn't a mistake to have kids. You picked the perfect time. If you'd waited longer you might never have done it.”

“
Yeah, let's hope
that
wasn't the better option
.”

“
Sandy
,” Amirah cut in on a narrow link, “
FedInt special transmission, we've got it straight from Chief Shin
.” Sandy scanned the com display graphic that came with Amirah's link, saw FedInt command structures, barriers that should not
be so easily penetrated . . . only Ami was running what spec ops called the “weather forecast,” which involved spying on the Federation's leading spy agency from the inside, using their own codes against them.

“Yeah, that looks like he's moving,” Sandy agreed, as the cruiser's nav comp locked into FSA airspace controls ahead. FSA airspace was a part of Grand Council airspace; failure to sync would these days result in immediate destruction. “Call Ari.”

“
He's patched in. . . . Ari, you sure you don't need a hand?
”

“While we're still asking nicely,” Sandy added.

“
Um
. . .” said Ari. “
Actually yeah, League won't miss that many agents coming our way. Help could be nice
.”

“I'm on it,” said Sandy, locking a new course into the nav comp and swerving out of FSA airspace to a new heading. Someone would see that, but Grand Council airspace was a mess, ambassadors, reps, admirals, everyone inbound, and traffic control doing somersaults to try to squeeze them all in without forcing an extra circuit.

Ari was in Santiello, where she'd first lived in Tanusha upon arrival, with Vanessa. God, so many years ago now. Ari was tailing the mysterious figure who'd been detected in various covert communications around Tanusha, and watched from that point on. Subject A, in typically imaginative intel speak. Everyone was pretty sure that Subject A was an operative with one of the League splinters, those anti-League separatists that League didn't like to admit to. Which one, no one quite knew. There was no point in arresting him until more had been discovered through observation, but problematically, FedInt were watching Subject A as well. It now seemed Chief Shin of FedInt had given the order to take Subject A in. Spec ops, Sandy and Vanessa's unit, were not on good terms with FedInt and now saw fit to intervene.

FedInt were one complication. The League infiltration team which had also been shadowing Subject A, and various other “subjects” these past weeks, were another. Ari was right, they wouldn't miss Shin's move, and now this game of sneak and observe was over. If it was League security, it would certainly be GIs, and they'd be under instruction to not allow Subject A to fall into Federation hands, not FedInt and especially not Spec Ops.

Sandy established a new tacnet frame and let it propagate. It would
automatically integrate every spec ops agent in direct FSA contact. And these days, the League weren't the only ones with GIs.

A new connection, heavily encrypted. “
Commander, Chief Shin
.”

“Chief, this is Kresnov, go ahead.”

“
I have assets moving to acquire a target in Santiello. I believe you have eyes-on; request you leave this one to us
.”

“Can you handle the League infiltration team we estimate is on route to eliminate your target as soon as you move?”

Pause. Surely he knew about it? Little got by Shin. “
Estimates?
”

“Front six, four sweepers, mid-to-high designation.”

“
Sitrep?
”

She couldn't very well deny him; they were all on the same team. Theoretically. “We have them netfixed, eyes-on is too dangerous with high-des GIs. Our estimate could be off.”

“
So you don't have a firm fix?
”

“By the sound of it, more than you.”

“
Request we go joint. FedInt acquires target, spec ops covers against League infiltrators
.”

“Our respective units do not possess that degree of interoperability. As you well know.” He certainly did. Lately FedInt and spec ops hadn't agreed on much. Sandy tried to keep it civil, without compromising a damn thing.

“
Surely you can improvise?
”

“We certainly can. Unfortunately, I'm fairly sure FedInt can't, as we've seen demonstrated. I'm calling jurisdiction.”

“
That is a mistake, Commander. A grave mistake
.”

“Lodge a protest. Tell your people that getting in our way could be fatal. I've made the official call, spec ops jurisdiction is clear, League GIs makes this ours, it can't be clearer.”

“
FedInt will lodge official protest with Ranaprasana
.”

“You do that.” Click.

Ranaprasana's Grand Commission was far more concerned with actual governance than security; the FSA had rewritten most of the security protocols for Callay concerning Federal actions and local-federal overlaps, and there wasn't actually a committee or statutory body anywhere in the Federation with the authority to override them. Sometimes Sandy wondered if Ibrahim
had been counting on the events of last year to grant him the power to do that. The FSA Chief played chess across a span of months and years, moving pawns while opponents were distracted or asleep. Most opponents did not even realise they were in the game. Sadly, Shin was one who did.

“Ari, fix me.” He gave her the fix; his own setup had massive local complexity very few regular humans could handle. He was seated high at the far end of the huge Santiello Stadium, capacity a hundred thousand plus. A quarter of the way around the ground, on the lower tier, sat two men, one African, the other Indian. The African, Sandy would have bet was ex-special-something; his arms were ripped with lean muscle, he just had the look. The Indian was more nondescript, wide face, smiling eyes, and sort of . . . bland. Average Tanushan height, average Tanushan skin tone, average Tanushan everything. That raised suspicions too. “You got interface feeds?”

Those came through, and Ari didn't bother giving her a briefing—at the speeds her brain worked, his words were superfluous. It flashed over her, a construct the size of a stadium, one hundred thousand mostly uplinked people, plus all the newsfeeds from the game, the live coverage options blinking on and off, automated bots scrambling to coordinate feeds and match profitable advertising lines. . . . And here were her two men, watching the game, hooked into the system. Sandy broke through ID codings; the African was plugged into game stats and commentary, the Indian was more coded . . . she broke it down further, automated tracers racing in a hundred directions to trace the relays his protective systems were bouncing it off. . . .

“This guy's a player,” she said, highlighting the man. “Real netpro.” Above, she was seeing Vanessa's tacnet structure fitting into place, like some manic spider spinning webs of light. “Vanessa, you watch the League and FedInt, I'm on Subject A and his friend.”

“
Gotcha
,” said Vanessa. “
More worried about FedInt than League GIs, myself
.”

“Yep.” She locked the cruiser into a wide circle around Santiello, not wanting to go in personally unless she was sure this was the place to commit. “Ari, I can't get a fix on this guy. Clearly a GI, you think?”

“
Oh yeah
,” Ari agreed. “
I have a couple of folks here, we could go and say hello
.”

“And start a fight in a crowd, with GIs. No thanks, let's just watch.”

“
Odd thing
,” said Ari. “
Some in the crowd are hearing about Cresta. I'm sifting
general traffic and they're talking about it. But this guy, nothing. You'd think he'd be more interested
.”

Because Subject A, the African guy, was a League splinter and probably involved with the people who'd done it. The Indian guy, they had no idea about but didn't want to bust in and end this meeting until they knew his background, who he was uplinked with, who else might be listening in on this conversation and anything else about him. Who would a League militant leader be meeting with in Tanusha, at a football game, at the time news came through of Cresta's demise?

“
Subianto security is too good to allow GIs in here with weapons
,” came Kriplani's voice from a temporary stop atop a stadium carpark roof. “
They're not reading anything. If the League team are here, they're hanging back and waiting
.”

Like us, thought Sandy.

“
Bet they have eyes-on too
,” said Vanessa as she thought it. “
Bet they're wondering who the guy with Subject A is, just like we are
.”

“And if they do, FedInt does,” Sandy added. “This is no way to bake a cake. If shit goes down, it could get very messy.” She opened priority back to HQ. “I want everything we've got on standby, in the air. CSA support would be nice too, if they can spare some.”

“
Copy, Snowcat
,” HQ replied. Sandy completed another circuit of the stadium, blazing in the night with white electricity. “
Snowcat, the Director wishes you to know that the Provisional Grand Council has taken an interest in proceedings. Be careful
.”

Great. Ibrahim wouldn't tell her unless it was important. The apparatus that selected Grand Council reps for the various Federation worlds had launched what was effectively a coup last year, when the prospect of a new war against the League had them sufficiently spooked. Now she was hunting the representative of an organisation that might have just sparked a civil war in the League . . . if one hadn't already existed.

Yet still the target and his friend just sat here, in plain view. That didn't make sense. Unless . . .

She called up Tanusha Central, which was what the FSA had taken to calling her newest creation. It was a multigrid, linking some of the FSA's most powerful processors and supplementing them with outside boosters to make a grid matrix several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything
else in the city could string together. Experimental institutions had made grids more powerful but hadn't been able to apply them to anything before the inherent instabilities brought them crashing down.

Ari saw what she was doing. “
Whoa. You think . . . ?
”