Authors: Joel Shepherd
It was a full five seconds later when he realised that not only did he not have that time, he had never had that time to begin with.
Code Red was issued, effectively activating every security measure in Tanusha, right down to the lowliest police officer on his downtown beat. The President was grabbed, and rushed inside at a sprint. The grounded aircars, Alphas One through Three, began to lift to draw attention and possible fire. Alpha Four had aborted landing, accelerating and evading. Alphas Five and Six changed to intercept. The ground security grid went up, armed and active. It should have meant death to anything airborne and unidentified crossing the perimeter.
Everything went wrong. The security grids failed to recognise the attacking flyers as Threat ID Positive, and did not fire. The first incoming rounds destroyed Alphas Two and Three on the pads. Alpha One was riddled by door-cannon fire ten metres off the edge of the building, exploding in the utility personnel car park below. Alpha Four was struck by a homing projectile which blew the front end apart and sent it skidding into a tumbling collision with the wreckage of Alpha Three. With no fire support from the grids, Alpha Team's small arms had little effect on the armoured flyers, and the mounted weapons had cut them to pieces. Mishima was inside before that happened, sticking with the President while his men were slaughtered outside, fulfilling their oaths as they'd sworn they would.
Additional pad security was armed only for escort and watch duty, not for an armoured frontal assault with air support. Two landers grounded on each of the two main pads, disgorging heavily armed and armoured troopers who moved in precise, military patterns. As Mishima ran with the President and her remaining personal guard through the inner corridors, listening to the helpless, panicked shouts and screams of the outgunned, outprepared Parliament internal security staff, he knew very well who was after him. It could only be Dark Star. Only Dark Star could have got this far in the first place. And his estimations of what they might be after altered yet another notch.
Inside was chaos. Frightened staffers ran every which way, bulldozed and flung aside by the running wedge Alpha team had formed around the President, half carrying her as they rushed down the corridors while the forward and rearguard support yelled at staffers to evacuate to the ground floor. Behind them was shooting, and things exploding. The whole building shook, bits and pieces fell from ceilings, screaming, panicked staff colliding in doorways, blocking the exits.
Alpha Team found a deserted office three levels down, bundled the President in and began securing their perimeter. Her senior advisor, Aw Sian Thiaw, had been accompanying her in the convoy car — he crouched near the corner in which she sat, hovering protectively, face drawn and frightened.
"Thiaw," Neiland gasped, watching the frantic activity of Alpha Teamers running out of corridors, weapons ready, covering approach points and shouting in an unintelligible code that sounded like tactical geometry. The hastily fitted vest was very tight, restricting her breathing. "Thiaw," she grabbed his arm hard, "what are we doing here, why don't we go to ground level and get out?"
"They've got transports, they can cover ground level." Swallowed hard, eyes darting about, a crash of overturning desks and cabinets. "They'll come up and meet us in the middle. We need to buy enough time for Central Security to reach us, or SWAT — they're only down the road." He grabbed her hand, tightly. "Don't worry, we'll nail these fuckers. We just need a few more minutes."
"Thiaw, for Christ's sake, what about the staff?" Neiland was panicked, red hair sprawled in disarray, eyes wide and wild. "They're heading downstairs, they'll get run over ...!"
"It'll buy us some time. We just need a few minutes...!"
"
No!!!
" Leaping to her feet, starting forward as Thiaw grabbed her, bodily restraining her as she screamed, "
No fucking way
do we leave them to die!" Fighting him desperately. "Mishima! You fucking get them back here! Don't you fucking dare ..."
Umph!
Another body hit them, knocked them to the ground, pinning her.
"Ms President!" the man shouted in her face, pinning her from above. It was Johnson, Mishima's second. "We don't have time for this bullshit! We're going to keep you alive, and that's
it
! Do you hear me! I'll break your damn legs if I have to, but you're going to do what we say! That's final!" Neiland stared up at him, stunned.
Johnson pulled himself off her, ripped a pistol from his belt, grabbed Thiaw's hand and stuffed it in. "Last resort," he told him, eyes blazing with controlled fear and adrenalin. "If you use it, make sure it's them you're hitting." Thiaw nodded wordlessly, eyes wide, and Johnson darted off.
"Oh my God." Neiland was sitting up again, huddled, shaking and terrified, her voice quavering. "This can't be happening, this just can't be happening..."
Gunfire snarled nearby, answering pops, then an explosion that made everything rattle. More commands from Alpha Team members down the corridor, suited and crouched, guns levelled and searching with muscle-trembling intensity. Mishima was nearby, crouched, talking fast into his throat mike. More gunfire, and screams. Shots intensified, a two-way firefight, rattling explosions and more shooting. Still the screaming.
Neiland whimpered, still shaking. Five steps up the corridor the ceiling exploded, and everything vanished under flying debris and smoke. Then gunfire exploding all about, shattering the senses. Someone grabbed her arm and hauled, half carrying her through the chaos and screams. Blue lightning ripped through the side wall, turning all to exploding flame.
Running then through the next doorway, Johnson dragging her like a sack of grain as she tried to find her feet to assist, vaguely aware that people were following, fighting a retreat. Into another, bigger room with scattered desks across an open floor and windows that let in the sunlight, running hard as Johnson dragged her nearly to the far wall, then shouts of warning and throwing her flat and sprawling, bullets striking about with impossible force, splintering desks and kicking over chairs, return fire answering and then it was on, and hell broke loose for the second time.
Neiland scrambled on hands and knees to the wall beside a filing cabinet and stayed down, Johnson crouched behind a splintered desk and returning fire with the remainder of Alpha Team, a deafening roar of small arms fire. One man fell into a wall painting and collapsed over the pot plant below, leaving a bloody smear down the white wall behind. The glass partition to the adjoining executive office disintegrated beside Neiland's hiding place, the conifer-timber door kicked open by multiple strikes. Johnson lurched backwards in a spray of blood as a terminal screen exploded. Neiland screamed, and lunged forward to where he'd fallen as a grenade went off and blew everything to hell, knocking her flat.
Johnson was up and shooting again left-handed, right arm dangling as dark shapes leapt through the smoke, guns blazing. An Alpha Team woman made a defiant dive for new cover amid a tracking hail of fire, popped up to return fire and was blown back two metres into a bookshelf that collapsed on her. Another stood his ground, refusing to cover, dropping one attacker and wounding a second before a third blew his guts out. Neiland scrambled backward over shattered glass, into the exposed executive office, watching in a mesmerised, unnatural calm as Johnson covered long enough to reload with his damaged right hand, then up again to keep firing. He was still shooting when the shots found him again, and what remained of his bloody corpse thudded limply to the ground.
Suddenly silence. Neiland huddled backward, beneath the big desk of the executive office, staring through the wall-to-ceiling frame where the window had once been and across the shattered main office, desks and chairs askew, obscured by drifting smoke. Johnson's body barely three metres away in a thickening pool of blood. Time slowed. Each heartbeat, each passing moment, lingered to eternity.
A human figure appeared, cradling a heavy rifle. Looked at Johnson. Looked at her. And raised his weapon.
And vanished as the ceiling exploded for the second time, debris collapsing in a confusion of smoke and dust. Too stunned to cover herself, Neiland stared straight into the confusion, and saw something dark and human-sized fall straight down through the opening. Gunfire roared in rapid, staccato bursts, a fast, dark shape that moved like a ghost in the wind.
A brief moment of chaos, and the room was suddenly empty. A burst of fire from down a corridor, moving away. And another, and a thud like a body falling.
Moving suddenly of her own accord, Neiland was scrambling out from under the desk and into the main office, feet crunching over broken glass. Looked wildly about at the destruction, the sprawled, bloody corpses ... saw several new ones with large weapons. One's head was mostly missing. Another had a fist-sized impact hole through the chest.
Her stomach churned and she was suddenly on her knees, vomiting helplessly. Her head spun. Nothing seemed real. None of this could possibly be happening, and in her mind it refused to register. Another painful, stomach-cramping retch. And gasped, desperate for clean, clear air. A deep breath, gasping, her ears ringing, nausea passed for the moment. Eyes unfocused, seeing only a blur.
And began to come clear again. On a pair of bare feet and grey track suit leggings. Stared, not having heard the arrival. The owner of the feet crouched alongside, and Neiland looked up, hardly daring to breathe. Untidy blonde hair, burning blue eyes. Cassandra Kresnov. The GI. The one whom all of her closest advisors were telling her to sentence to bureaucratic hell.
"You okay?" Kresnov asked her. It was unthinkable that anyone should sound so calm in the midst of this nightmare. Everything was insane. She managed a faint nod, unable to speak. "Are you going to be all right here? There are some people I'd like to kill on the lower floors — they were shooting running civilians, last I saw."
Utterly serious. There was no malice in her voice, only a statement of fact.
"Be my guest, please," Neiland rasped. "Kill them all."
The GI nodded. "Thank you, I will."
More shooting from downstairs, then, before she could get up. An explosion shook the floor. The GI listened, expressionless but for a slightly raised eyebrow, as if hearing something of mild but not enthralling interest.
"Hmm. Reinforcements just got here. No point now, they'd just shoot me into the bargain. And they'll be down on the roof in another minute."
"Who will?" The Presidential mind was refusing to function. The Presidential mind was registering a wetness between her thighs, and a warmth that just had to be urine. The Presidential mind didn't care.
"SWAT, if I recognise the signature. They started taking out the flyers two minutes ago — you were probably too busy to hear. I'll stay here and make sure no stragglers get flushed this way."
Explaining herself calmly as she knelt in firing position on the floor, covering the ruined, bullet-ripped corridor entrances. Sitting helplessly on her knees, Neiland stared at her. The right forearm and hand, now gripping the trigger handle, were red with blood. Her white T-shirt was torn and bloodstained. And she was utterly, utterly calm.
Neiland got to her feet, swaying slightly. Staggered through the strewn wreckage to the first of her Alpha Team men, finding him messily, unpleasantly dead.
"Don't bother," Kresnov said from behind her. "There's no one alive in this room but us. I can tell." Neiland stared down at the dead man. Lim, she remembered his name was. His face was intact, young, Asian and handsome. So young. Oh God. Tears blurred her eyes.
"I'm sorry," Kresnov added.
Neiland fell to her knees by the body of the young man named Lim, whose first name she had never learned, never thought worth bothering to learn, although she saw him nearly every day, every time she travelled certainly... She cried without restraint, while the GI who by all rights should want her dead guarded the corridors to her back, and waited for the fighting downstairs to stop and help to arrive. She was still crying when the confused thud of heavy boots sounded in the outside corridors, and Kresnov called out. Laid her weapon down on a desktop in full view, and stood, hands on her head.
Armed figures burst in, weapons levelled. Took in the scene.
"Down on the ground!" one of them yelled at Kresnov. "Now!" Kresnov complied, as calmly as before.
"It's the President!" shouted another one, rushing forward and shouldering his weapon while the others covered him. "We've found her, we've found her!" Crouching alongside, then, in awed concern ... "Ms President, are you hurt?"
"It's the fucking GI!" another shouted as Kresnov's hands were bound behind her back. Planted a boot on her shoulders, pressing the gun barrel to her head ... "I should blow your fucking brains out right now, you fucking bitch!"
Neiland staggered to her feet fast, rounding on the troopers who were suddenly gathering around where Kresnov lay face down on the floor, weapons held ready. Too fast. Everything faded, and noises dimmed.
"Bind her feet man, she's fucking dangerous!"
"Don't move, bitch!" The thud of a boot landing, hard. And again.
"Ms President?" someone spoke very clearly from nearby as everything else faded away.
It was the last thing Neiland heard before she passed out.
CHAPTER 7
"Ms President, the doctor said that you ought to rest."
"I don't want to rest, Ms Rafasan, I'm perfectly capable of holding a meeting."
Mahudmita Rafasan gave Benjamin Grey a despairing look. Half seated on the hospital bed that the President ought to have been occupying, the Callayan State Security Chief shook his head, lips pressed to a grim line. His shirt and tie were uncharacteristically askew, and a suggestion of stubble darkened his jaw.
Seemingly oblivious to them both, President Katia Neiland sat between the far wall and the large desk, facing them both. Chi Haotian hospital reserved exclusive sections for important, busy people. This room was one such, and the hospital bed was accompanied by the inevitable working desk. If either of the President's aides found the irony of this pairing amusing, they kept it to themselves.
Neiland was fully and properly dressed, refusing the white bed robe that the nervous attending nurse had offered. How anyone could possibly expect her to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling when the entire city, indeed the planet, had just been turned on its head was completely beyond her. She could only assume that certain of her advisors did not take her responsibilities as seriously as she did.
She flicked from one shielded channel to another, checking on her latest advisory reports, reading most and internalising some through the direct link. With a practised eye, she noted the signs of frantic haste — the contextual ambiguities, the grammatical errors, the incomplete analyses. The bureaucracy was going nuts. Reports were being churned out, instructions overlapping from a dozen different departments, queries misplaced, security restrictions imposed ... it was chaos of a sort that modern, infotech administrations were supposed to have been cured of long, long ago.
Good Lord, Neiland thought glumly as she scanned quickly through the mess, have we let things get this far out of hand? She remembered reports, warning documents urging caution in the face of unbridled expansion and administrative indulgence ... You never notice the problem until the crisis hits. She shook her head tiredly. It all seemed so predictable in hindsight. But at the time there had never been enough reason, and the administrative demands had been so enormous, the pace of change so much faster than any comparable administration had ever had to handle ... She'd thought she'd been doing a good job on this kind of thing. It dismayed her to discover otherwise.
The door to the private ward opened, and Neiland looked up.
"Ms President?" It was Ulu N'Darie, the deputy chief of the CSA. Small, black and compact, she was a ball of seamless efficiency. "Everyone is here except for Mr Ramos and Mr Ibrahim ... should I have them wait?"
"No," Neiland sharply cut off the two advisors present, who stared at her with consternation. "I'll see them now, thank you. I don't have time to wait for the unpunctual." It was a harsh assessment of both absent men, who were no doubt entangled in their own procedural nightmares on this most singular of Tanushan evenings. N'Darie merely nodded and vanished from the doorway.
"Ms President," Grey tried again, "don't you think it would be better to wait...?"
"No." The word was sharp and tactless, with little regard for feelings. Grey had no response. Doubtless, she thought, he believed her unreasonable. That suited her fine. She was in no mood for reasonable. She wanted answers.
The main door opened once more and stayed open, as a file of important, anxious-looking, people entered the room. Neiland absently disconnected the shielded plug-in from the back of her skull and leaned back in the deep leather chair. Unlike her office chair, it was not moulded to her body, and the cushions felt all wrong. Another incongruous wrongness on a day of wrongnesses. It gave her a strange feeling, and she had to blink herself back to attention as the greetings flooded in on her.
"Ms President," Governor Dali was saying, "I cannot express my relief at your survival, I was truly terrified for you, truly terrified." He loomed over the desk, his face a picture of dark-skinned, long-nosed concern. With his deep, sallow eyes and languid wrists, he reminded Neiland of a long brown goldfish. He talked on for a time, but she missed what he was saying. Which was frequently her habit with Dali.
And the others — Sanjay Golpanath, the Vice President, some of the senior cabinet members, the head of Tanusha's IT network (a bureaucrat), Ulu N'Darie in her boss's absence and the head of the Secret Service, among others. Neiland did not perform a head count — she knew these people, and worked with them constantly. She was pleased to see her Treasurer, Claudio Rossini. Not that this was a matter concerning treasurers, but she considered Rossini a friend. For Katia Neiland, real friends were rare indeed.
"Right," she said when all of the condolences and expressions of relief had been dispensed with. And took a deep, hard breath, sitting back in the unfamiliar chair and looking about at the serious, worried faces that ringed the desk. "First off, as you all no doubt know, my senior advisor is dead."
There was a long, silent pause. Neiland remembered Thiaw's face, drawn and frightened, trying to protect her. Grasping the pistol that he did not properly know how to use, the ceiling collapsing, and the chaos that followed. It had been explained to her, in her moments of recovery, that it was a fairly common tactic among special forces these days to come in through the ceiling — modern sensory technology did not require a direct line of sight to track an opponent. They'd dropped in at several points using grenades to clear space, and then killed everyone in sight. Including Thiaw. How they'd got him, without hitting her in the process, Neiland had no idea. He'd been right beside her. Right alongside ...
And she blinked, dragging herself back to here and now.
"Thiaw's loss is a tough one for all of us," she continued, "both personally and professionally. I hope sometime soon we will have the opportunity to properly grieve his loss. But as Thiaw himself would be the first to tell me, were he here, we don't have that time right now."
She paused, brushing strands of long red hair back into order. She did not understand what it meant, Thiaw being dead. It would make a difference to her job, surely — she had always valued his advice and his candour. She would miss his forthright appraisals and his occasionally unflattering assessments. Beyond that she could not say. Could not think that far, at this moment. Just seeing beyond the enormity of this moment, of this entire day, was too much to handle. She took another deep breath and straightened her jacket. It did not feel right, like the chair. Nothing felt right.
"First and foremost," she said, gazing about the room with as much meaningful authority as she could muster, "what I require of you, and of all my department heads, is common-sense. The shit has just hit the fan in this city in a way that has never happened in its entire history. The media is going crazy. There are conspiracy theories by the thousand, business is being disrupted and ordinary people who have never given a damn about politics before in their lives now feel themselves personally involved.
"Tanusha has never been considered a political city, neither have we considered ourselves as such. Possibly that was naïve, considering our central importance in the scheme of so many different things. I feel we are about to find out." From about her, there were sombre, silent looks — powerful, intelligent men and women lost in their own thoughts.
"And so," she considered after that brief pause, "I require all of you to be independent, and to manage your affairs within your own department with as much restraint and simple common-sense as possible. Pull your heads in. Break channels if needs be. Do whatever is necessary and nothing that is not. And the first person," a jab of a warning finger, "to resort to bickering or infighting of any kind, over any matter, will lose their job, I guarantee it."
Another considering silence. Some looked alarmed. Several looked approving. She looked at N'Darie.
"The investigation is progressing?"
A short nod. "It is. There are many leads. All of the attackers' bodies have been recovered and are being examined. They're all lower-model GIs, less advanced than our Captain Kresnov, but advanced enough. We think that they're almost certainly Dark Star. You'll have a full private briefing when Mr Ibrahim arrives — the investigations are distracting him, as you'll appreciate." That much support for her boss. N'Darie was loyal, Neiland had no doubt of that.
"Any final casualty figures?" Neiland asked.
"Sixty of the attacking GIs," N'Darie replied. "That appears to be all of them. All that were involved in the attack, anyway — it does not appear that they expected to survive the assault. Parliament security plus Alpha Team plus several of the responding SWAT units lost seventy-three dead and twelve injured. Parliamentary staff, seventeen dead and twenty-five injured. That's a total of ninety dead and thirty-seven injured, although that number could change over the coming forty-six hours."
Murmurs of disbelief from those assembled, some mutterings of consternation and sad headshaking. Neiland repressed a swallow, trying to keep her expression even. It was a lot of people dead for an operation that ideally should have resulted in only one death.
"How many more GIs might be out there?" she asked quietly.
"That is what we are attempting to determine," N'Darie replied evenly. "It depends how they got here, and how they're managing to stay hidden. And it depends on the nature of any possible connection between the attack on yourself and the presence of Captain Kresnov in government custody. I don't say that such a connection exists, but it is a possibility we are investigating."
"Are we certain," one of the gathered officials asked, "that our space lanes are secure?"
N'Darie took a deep breath. "No," she said reluctantly. There were more murmurs of consternation.
"You mean that the greatest human civilisation outside of Old Earth itself can't even guard itself from infiltration?" asked the Vice President, Golpanath. His voice was incredulous.
"Sir," N'Darie said, "even Old Earth can't completely guarantee space lanes. The solar system is a big place. Most spacecraft have stealth designs that are undetectable by active scanning, except at close range, and nothing in space is close. We see them only when they manoeuvre, scan or fire. Standard covert military tactics is to enter a system at far nadir or zenith jump points, run silent through the equatorial plane, dump velocity with jump engines, which produces no actively detectable pulse unless you happen to be focused directly on that region of space when it happens, and release a landing shuttle. The shuttle needs no directional adjustment and uses the atmosphere for deceleration alone. And once inside the atmosphere, well, ninety-eight percent of Callay is uninhabited.
"Furthermore, we have clear evidence that the Plexus grid sensory system has been compromised from within. We do not know how, and we have no guarantee that it will not happen again. Until we uncover the means of this infiltration we must consider ourselves vulnerable to outside infiltration of this nature. Be assured that we have assigned this matter top priority."
The expressions on the many assembled faces reflected general dismay. We complacent city-folk, Neiland thought sourly, thinking ourselves so secure. Of course everyone knew the basics of solar-system physics, but no one ever bothered to think about what it actually meant from a security standpoint.
"If you wanted more information on how it's done," she said to N'Darie, "I'd suggest Kresnov. I doubt you'll find anyone more experienced in the matter." N'Darie nodded shortly.
"I have done that personally. She has been most helpful."
"We're certain that Kresnov did save the President's life?" asked Benjamin Grey, from off by the foot of the hospital bed.
N'Darie gave him a short, appraising glance.
"Very certain. Present investigations show that Kresnov accounted for at least twenty of those GIs. Which also serves to demonstrate just how dangerous she actually is, but nevertheless it does perhaps give some indication as to her loyalties, such as they are."
Grey nodded, appearing to give that some serious thought. He did not look entirely pleased. Neiland turned back to the gathered faces before her.
"All right," she said, "I want a status report from each of you. This is the last time we'll do this face to face — I merely wanted this one occasion just to make certain that everyone understands everyone else. After this, I'm certain we'll all be far too busy. Begin."
When President Neiland pushed her way through the door of the isolation hospital ward, the two guards on duty there snapped to rigid attention.
Neiland ignored them and walked down the long, open room, beds lining the wall upon her right and broad, open windows to her left.
Many-coloured lights strobed and gleamed in the outside dark. Media cruisers were hovering at the required distance, searching for a camera angle. Trucks and trailers with big antennae had surrounded the hospital, and cameras blocked every exit. Police, SWAT and Secret Service made up the security, preventing intrusions. Somewhere amid the mess, regular hospital staff tried desperately to go about their job of treating sick people. It couldn't have been easy. Outside the room the hospital corridors were jammed so full of stern, armed security staff that it was difficult to move.
On the very end of the last bed a woman sat in a white bed robe, fully upright as if contemplating the view. As she drew nearer, Neiland noted that her ankles and wrists were bound separately, the ankles in turn connected to the bed end with unbreakable cord. Cassandra Kresnov sat with her arms over drawn-up knees, and gazed out at the play of moving light beyond the one-way windows.
Neiland stopped by the neighbouring bed. Folded her arms. Kresnov did not spare her so much as a glance. She looked calm. Flares of blue and red light deepened the natural highlights in her fine blonde hair, gleamed in dim reflection in her eyes, played along the smooth curve of her jawline and over a cheek. Strong features, Neiland thought, watching her in that timeless moment, quiet but for the faint wailing of a distant siren, and the floating expanse of city sound beyond. Strong, broad and wide-browed ... and the most beautiful, wide, expressive blue eyes. Serene and calm, watching the lights.