Authors: Joel Shepherd
"Hi Sav," she said as the call came through and a man's face appeared on the screen. Brown skinned and handsome, Sandy noted.
"Vanessa," he said. A note to his voice that reflected neither surprise nor joy. And Sandy turned away, an offer of privacy. Hiraki, she noted, made no such gesture.
"Just called to say I'm fine, everything went great, no dramas."
"Good." He nodded unenthusiastically. "That's good. Those your squad-mates with you?"
"Yeah, they're just having a coffee. How's work?"
"Fine. Everything's great, no dramas." It sounded somewhat tense. Sandy glanced at Hiraki, lounged comfortably in the sofa, looking uncharitably amused. On him, the expression looked like a knife slowly drawn from its sheath.
A few minutes later Vanessa disconnected. Slumped backwards with a deep sigh, gazing reluctantly at the blank screen. Still standing, Sandy decided it safest to remain silent. Many civilian relationships remained beyond her understanding.
"You're only going with him because he's hung like a donkey," Hiraki commented mildly, "you said it yourself." Vanessa shot him a dark look.
"I was drunk, you moron."
Hiraki's smile grew broader, and sharper.
"The LT's boyfriend doesn't like her work," he explained lazily to Sandy. "He's old-fashioned. Doesn't find armour very sexy. I think Rupa would say, 'sexist fucker'." Sandy recalled Rupa Sharma from the raid ... tall, lean and pragmatically unadorned, usual for an Indian civilian woman. Very unlike the glamorous, decorative-types she'd seen. You couldn't generalise about anyone in civilian society, she was realising.
"I thought they were selectively drowned at birth these days," she murmured, sipping her coffee.
Vanessa turned the dark look on her. "Jesus," she muttered, "no fucking privacy around here."
Sandy shook her head faintly. "Ignore me. I'm not in a good mood."
"Two of us," Vanessa replied, staring back at the blank phone-screen.
"You could always divorce him again," Hiraki offered.
"Just shut up."
Rain lashed down. Sandy stood outside on the balcony, partly sheltered by the building as the wind howled and blew. Gusted, cold and hard at her face, tossing hair. Nothing of the view was visible, totally hidden behind impenetrable walls of rain. Lightning flashed the greyness to blue, vivid and sharp. Howling gusts blew everything sideways in sheets.
She felt both lost and found. Numb to anything but the roaring wind, cold and ferocious, and the sudden crackle and boom of thunder, a buzzing rattle on the windows behind her. Such awesome power. She closed her eyes and lost herself in the storm, neither rejoicing nor dreading, merely ... there. Accepting. Like a welcome long-lost companion.
Vanessa and Hiraki were inside, warm and dry. But she ... she belonged out here somehow. On the outside, in the cold, where the storm thrashed and howled with a fury that was not rage but identity. The storm held no anger, no intent, no purpose — it merely did what it did because that was what it was. A storm. And Sandy understood exactly what that meant. She'd been there.
She knew that one of her people was here, just felt it for a fact, bone deep. Here in Tanusha, on the other side of events. One of her squad-mates. The number of possibilities was not large. Out there somewhere in the storm. She wondered what he, or she, was doing. Why he was here. How he had survived. And, most troubling of all, if she had abandoned him, leaving as she had.
She remembered being told. Remembered it as vividly as the attempt on the President's life yesterday ... had it only been yesterday? Events and traumas, one on top of another, the images mixed and recurred in her brain with no regard for chronology. But the deaths of her team held a special place amid her memories of horror.
It had taken a great effort to keep her from killing Colonel Dravid when he told her, simply smashing his head to pulp against the nearest bulkhead. That had passed, replaced by grief and loss and the most helpless, soul-destroying loneliness she had ever imagined. If not for her books, and her music, and her passionate interest in things non-martial, she was certain she would have suicided. In a world where even her own side had never entirely trusted her, there had been nothing and no one else to care about. They had been her life. In the physical, tangible environment in which she spent her days, they had been all there was.
She had known it was no accident. Had even suspected something of the sort, thus her earlier warnings to them, trying to prepare them for something that they would not believe if she came straight out and told them. Old things that she had been gathering over the last few years, on and off, but in that last year in earnest — Intel reports, interdepartmental communiques, briefings, news feeds, technical and political analyses and various other intelligence sources that stretched well beyond the immediate concerns of her profession.
It had created a picture, piece by piece, that meshed with much of what she knew from her own tactical analyses of the unfolding war and the nature of many of her targets. The League's use of GIs, and the reasoning behind it all. The juggling of factional interests by the League Parliament. The salves to various interest groups. The concerns of an administration only one year from new elections, for whom the war had not gone well, and who were facing the ignominious prospect of a treaty and a permanent ceasefire with none of their stated goals achieved.
The cessation of hostilities would mean that the security legislation, which had kept so much of the military's activities from public scrutiny, would be null and void. Already there had been debates about reintegration, soldiers coming home, the creation of new jobs and new lives for the veterans. And for the GIs ... obviously the GI regs were good for no other life and had no desire to leave the military, which was their home. With the veterans returned to civilian life, lower-model, mainstream GIs would continue to account for a significant portion of the armed forces, maintaining a vigilant watch for the day when the League needed to mobilise again.
Of the higher models there had been very little mention. There were very few of them, after all. Just her own team of sixteen, and five others like them. Casualties had gone unreplaced for six months by that point — replacements had simply stopped arriving. Her squad had been down to eleven, including herself, when everything ended. Several others had been less fortunate. And two ... two had mysteriously vanished — departed on raids and never returned. Sandy had never received what she considered a credible explanation for the disappearances. They had made her suspicious, to say the least.
And had started her wondering what would happen if they attempted to reintegrate higher-model GIs back into civil society. The civil rights groups would panic, would demand constant surveillance, psychiatric examinations, personal locators ... like a group of released criminals. The same watchdogs of the League citizenry who demanded the construction of GIs in the first place, to safeguard the great and noble dreams of the civilisation, and against all the earnest arguments of academics, moralists and freethinkers who argued that you couldn't realise ideals of freedom by creating an underclass of slaves, while the majority progressives had argued that you
could
, and that the overbearing, blind conservatism of the Federation monolith had forced such actions on them, and it was that or allow the League to go under ... some choice, for the breeding pit of idealist extremism that the League had become, in those heady, prewar days.
Had the war been won, perhaps things would have been different. League politicians, and the general populace, might have recognised their indebtedness to those beings that their technology, and their stubborn insistence on freedom of action, had created. But the war had been lost, or at least the Federation had achieved a stalemate, precisely as intended. And then ... what to do with the GIs?
The public assumption had been that there
were
no precisely human-level GIs ... the statutes governing GI creation dictated a less than fully developed nervous system. Many suggested this was a kindness, that a GI should genuinely enjoy his work and not be troubled by the enticements of possible alternatives. Sandy knew this to be hypocrisy. They only wanted to keep their creations under control. Which was why
she
was such a secret, and why knowledge of her model type was strictly limited, and why every straight who worked in close consultation with her had to pass a half dozen psych tests and be sworn to utter secrecy ... most of the people she passed in the corridors of a carrier had no idea exactly what she was. And she, of course, was not allowed to tell them.
She had often wondered why. A casual, musing thought, once upon a time, when her brain was not otherwise occupied by more important, military matters. But her misgivings had grown as her interests had grown, and her hobbies ... and, yes, her sexual appetite. Merely curious at first, then thoughtful, then sceptical. And finally, after what she now readily acknowledged had been far too long, downright suspicious.
GIs were a means to an end League citizens might feel proud of the technological achievement, and perhaps even grateful to their creations for the job they did, but no one wanted to live next door to one. GIs would help secure the League's golden future. That was the only goal that mattered. No one worried about what happened to the tools once the job was finished. But with the ceasefire looming, many of the legislative barriers that had shielded the League populace from knowledge of her existence would have come under threat. And her troops, although not designed to her creative standards, were still beyond the publicly admitted threshold. They themselves had not been aware of this, being conscious of little beyond their own narrow world — civilian life and politics had been mostly beyond their ready comprehension, and therefore beyond their interest.
What would a government do whose decisions had allowed GI creation to go beyond the prescribed limits? And why had there been only one of her type constructed in the first place?
Lightning flashed, bright and near, lighting up the sky. Sandy gazed unblinking, her retinas adjusting automatically to the flash. Probing with numb, self-destructive determination into this most sensitive problem of her own existence while the thunder crashed and boomed and the very building seemed to shake beneath her feet.
GI construction was difficult, yes. Particularly the brain. Imprint models were followed, but detail was a hugely technical matter. Lesser detail was achievable with reliable results. Greater detail was another matter. Truly human-scale detail ... extraordinarily difficult, particularly with all the required enhancements and linkages that would allow her to function effectively in her predesignated role. It must have taken them thousands of tries. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. Perhaps millions. But it was achievable, obviously, and she was the proof. And if they'd truly wished for more like her, in specialised roles, then they could have accomplished that. But they had not.
Sandy suspected dissention within upper-level League command. Had occasionally caught the faint whiff of displeasure in a regional commander's orders overturned, or sideways promotions, or rumours of strained relations between particular officers whose politics she had become astutely accurate at guessing.
She herself had been controversial. Her backers had wanted more like her, but settled for what they were given — compromise, the stuff of politics. And so she remained a unique test subject as much as a functional element. Probably they had expected she would not exceed the average GI lifespan by anywhere near as much as she had, thus saving them the embarrassment of ever having to admit her existence. But her talents for survival had exceeded even the highest expectations and 14 years from her inception, she remained stubbornly, inconveniently alive.
Even in peacetime, though, secrets remained — particularly in the years, even decades, directly following a conflict in which neither side had genuinely disarmed. She could have remained. One soldier alone was not much trouble to hide from the prying eyes of civilian watchdogs and regulators. But five fully rostered and fully operational experimental model GI teams?
Safer if they died in combat.
She felt cold now, standing on the balcony of Vanessa's apartment. Cold in a way that had nothing to do with the howling wind.
She could have done something. She'd seen it coming, after all. And yet here she was, alive, while they were not. Before that raid she'd known, but even then hadn't felt entirely certain, even knowing her own logical, tactical capabilities, and feeling every alarm bell ringing ... she remembered the feeling well, even now. She should have stopped it. But her own guys would never have believed her, and there was no order, no chain of command through which she could have worked that would have achieved the desired result. She had no say in selecting objectives, only in how to achieve them once selected.
She had known, and done nothing. And had never realised the consequences until she'd lost everything. Leaving the League, betraying all that her life had been up to that point, had seemed so easy then. So why not before? Dammit, she should have told them, pleaded with them in private, and once she'd convinced them, orchestrated a mutiny, or a rebellion...
Unthinkable, even now. She was fooling herself to think that it could ever have happened, tormenting herself unnecessarily. But it did nothing to change the fact that she was alive and they were dead, and she felt responsible. More than responsible. She felt guilty.
Please God let one of them still be alive. Just one. She wanted it so badly that it hurt.
Another rattle on the glass behind her, but this time it was the door opening and closing, then Vanessa was standing beside her. A good ten centimetres shorter, though she herself was barely 170. Dark hair tossed about in the wind, arms wrapped around herself for warmth.
"Either you're madly in love with chaos," Vanessa said loudly over the storm, "or you're having some very dark thoughts." Sandy searched but had no reply available. "Want to talk about it?"