They came through the Home Guard without really paying them much attention, and the Home Guard seemed to shrink from their path. And then, weaving through their midst, came a skinny girl sprinting toward her.
Sandy knelt as Svetlana ran into her and hugged her. She was crying. Sandy frowned, pulling back enough to see, and brush the tears away.
“Hey, come on, tough street girl,” she said. “I’m about the hardest thing to kill that’s ever lived.”
“I can see that,” said Svetlana, with glee. She let her go, and stared up at the flyer. “Whoa! You just jumped up and caught it?”
“Thought it might be useful,” Sandy agreed. “Oh, and there’s someone still alive in the front seat. Best send someone to get him out.” That last more loudly. “Who are these people?”
“They’re GIs!” Svetlana said excitedly. “They’re Gunter’s friends! I mean, can you believe it? We always thought Gunter was just Gunter, but it turns out he’s got all these important friends living out in the sands! This is Kiet, I think he’s in charge.”
Kiet was a GI, Vietnamese looking, in League Fleet Marine armour. He wore a headset, had a teller 9 rifle, and various other weapons besides, including a back-mounted launcher. For a moment, Sandy had such a strong flashback, it gave her a chill. She really was back in the League now.
“Kiet,” said Kiet. “Former groundie, Tac Sergeant, 13th Colonial. Designation 4186.”
“Kresnov,” said Sandy. “Captain, Dark Star, retired.” Kiet’s eyes widened slightly. “Designation 5074.” The eyes widened a little more. “Currently FSA, special ops commander.”
Kiet exhaled. “Wow.”
“You guys got left here?”
Kiet nodded. “In the crash. League stationed a security force here, a bit over six thousand GIs. Of course when they started evacuating, naturally we got first preference.” The sarcasm was strong. Coming from a GI, Sandy loved it.
“Naturally,” she agreed, smiling.
“We kept strong chain of command right up until the shooting started. Then some took the companies’ side, some took the civvies’, and the rest of us packed up and moved elsewhere.”
“Where elsewhere?”
“Somewhere safe,” said Kiet. And smiled. “Somewhere amazing.”
“So you’ve been living on your own out in the desert for five years?” Sandy asked in amazement. She’d never heard this in any briefing, never even hinted at. “Six thousand GIs and no one thinks to figure where all the originals ended up?”
Kiet shrugged. “Four fifths of us were regs, and you know regs. Most of them died in the fighting. Too brave to stop, too dumb to run away. The other thousand, well, there’s guys like Gunter, decided to stay here, make money. It’s probably more comfortable here. Because we’re GIs, you know, no one ever bothered to do a proper headcount.”
“How many of you?”
“Can’t say,” said Kiet, faintly apologetic. “Sorry. Been a secret for a while.”
“And why come in from the cold right now?”
“Because of you,” said Kiet, completely matter-of-fact. “Gunter told us. He’s kept our secret for a while, he’s one of our eyes and ears in town. He said what you’re trying to do. Not all of us agreed, but some of us thought we should help. We’ve got some Chancelry runaways amongst us, too. We know what Chancelry’s doing.”
“Make you mad?” Sandy suggested.
Kiet’s face hardened, and his grip shifted on his rifle. “Damn right. We’ve been free for five years. Some of us still aren’t completely free, if you know what I mean.” He tapped the side of his head. “But a few of us have figured out what freedom actually means. And we know it sure as hell doesn’t include Chancelry Corporation.”
“Hey,” said Hector, pushing unwanted into their conversation. “Sorry to break up the happy skinjob reunion, but it’s not safe here and we’ve got things to talk about.”
Kiet was going to let it pass. Sandy gave Hector a look that might have turned men to stone. “If you use that word on me again,” she said icily, “I’ll skin you.”
Hector snorted, and left, waving his men to follow. Kiet just looked at her, faintly puzzled. “It’s just a word,” he offered. “Everyone uses it.”
“I used to think that,” said Sandy. She thought of what she’d just seen, in Chancelry HQ. Of Anya, lying in that bunk, all a mess. “But then, I used to think the League were the good guys. Svet, where’s Danya?”
Danya was with Gunter and a bunch of the new GIs who had taken up temporary residence in a warehouse. It was owned by some big local family, but Gunter was friends with the GI who worked security for them, so getting in was no issue. GIs sat about on bales and boxes, and checked their gear, or heated meals on small cookers, or stretched out synthetic muscles. Most of them took the time to look at Sandy as she arrived in Kiet’s truck and walked in amongst them.
Danya was helping to pull steel fragments from the back of a female GI who lay on a soft bale. It was slightly gruesome. He was having to stick his fingers into holes in the woman’s skin and feel around. But Sandy could see why he might be more suited to the task than a GI—a lot of GIs actually lacked the fingertip sensitivity of regular humans; it just wasn’t one of those things GIs needed very much. Plus, Danya’s fingers were smaller, so he could feel around and find fragments of splinter another GI might miss.
“Kresnov,” said Sandy to the woman on the bale. “Name?”
“Kuza. 3515.” Which meant she wasn’t likely to say much more—a 35 series was significantly smarter than a reg, but in Sandy’s experience they weren’t big on conversation.
“Hi,” said Danya, very pleased to see her, but unable to take blood smeared hands from Kuza’s back. Sandy kissed him anyway. “She got this in the artillery strike. She was on a rooftop with a launcher, so she might have saved your neck.”
Sandy wasn’t comfortable with the idea that all these people were suffering for her, civvies or GIs alike. But she was here to stop Chancelry and GI experimentation, the long term consequences of which could spell a terrible fate for billions. Compared to that, these few casualties were nothing. Her own life included, if it came to that.
“How close were you to the strike when it came in?” Sandy asked somberly.
“Right under it,” said Danya. “Gunter got us in the middle stairwell, lots of concrete. A lot of people in the outer rooms got hit, though.” He found a splinter, pulled it out and put it on a plate someone had provided.
“Serves them right,” Svetlana snorted, jumping up to sit on a bale alongside and watch. “Everyone up against the Chancelry wall are shit, running the smuggling routes, bribing all the poor folks and street kids to risk the bots for them.”
“Svetlana,” said Danya, in a very stern, older brother voice, with a firm stare. “Not all of them are like that. And they don’t deserve to get blown up.”
“Hmph,” said Svetlana. And changed the subject. “Does your skin work like that, Sandy? I mean, it looks a bit rubbery.” Looking at Kuza’s shrapnel-peppered back.
“It’s not quite as permanently attached to the muscle as yours, no,” Sandy agreed, looking around for Kiet. She found him, talking to several others whom Sandy took to be his senior command group, for this unit at least. “In an injury it comes away more easily for access. You two stay here and look after Kuza. Svet why don’t you look for something to use as disinfectant? Alcohol works well. GIs can get infected just like straights.”
“Straights?” Svetlana asked. “You call us straights?”
“You haven’t heard that before?”
“Maybe. Is it offensive?”
She’d threatened to skin Hector, Sandy recalled, for using a word she didn’t like. “I don’t know. Do you find it offensive?”
“I’ll think about it,” said Svetlana with a cocky smile, jumped off the bale and ran to look for some disinfectant.
Sandy gave Danya a puzzled look. “Is she okay?”
Danya nodded, attention divided as he worked. “She does this. We saw some nasty stuff from the artillery strike. Would have stayed to help, but we were with Gunter and these new GIs, and the locals didn’t want their help, so we left. Svet won’t admit when she’s upset, she says stupid stuff like ‘they had it coming,’ you know. She copes.”
Sandy did know. “Shit,” she muttered. “I’m sorry, Danya.”
“Why? It’s not your fault.”
Sandy sighed, put a hand on Danya’s shoulder, and left to talk to Kiet.
“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Kiet after Sandy had explained what she’d seen when she’d hacked Chancelry HQ. A number of other GIs sat and listened also, and in the warehouse, all speaking had ceased. Sandy sensed a low level network, powered off some small, portable equipment, obviously transmitting this conversation to all other GIs beneath this roof. “Our lives are cheap to them, but not that cheap. What you’re saying is that they’re making us just to kill us. To take us apart and see how we work. Why?”
“I’m not sure.” Mustafa had betrayed her. The ISO, at odds with the League government. They’d been puzzled too. Only . . . she took a deep breath. “I have an idea.”
All eyes fixed upon her. Kiet was the highest designation here, and he was a 41. That was about par for the course in her experience, in Dark Star. The majority here were high to mid thirty-series. They looked up to her immediately, not with trust, but with respect. Sandy wasn’t sure she liked that. It was the automatic respect that GIs paid to higher designations, like a caste system. She didn’t think she deserved more respect than anyone else by some accident of birth. It didn’t seem right. And yet it was the world that GIs were consigned to live in, because designation really did matter, and it was the reason she was immediately senior-most GI present, and all the others had to pay attention when she spoke. Unlike the old human caste systems, the synthetic human caste system was based on something real.
It was the reason she was always uncomfortable with well-intentioned folks in Tanusha attempting to equate her own situation in society with that of racism amongst straights. Racism was bullshit, a discrimination based on something so utterly insubstantial that even the most cursory knowledge of genetics should have been enough to allow its immediate dismissal. The things that separated her and other GIs from straight humans, however, were not bullshit. Those were real. And regular humans, she couldn’t help but conclude, had some very sensible reasons to think discriminatory thoughts about her.
“The corporations here don’t have much money,” she explained. They sat on bales and crates, arranged around a common center. “Their standard of living remains high enough thanks to all the infrastructure they built when they were rich, but the crash was an economic collapse more than anything else. Running that infrastructure is expensive, especially on this world. Now they’re burning more resources to make big numbers of GIs as little more than lab rats. Like Kiet says, it doesn’t make sense. Unless someone else is paying for it.”
Frowns from the group. A few looked at each other. “Who?” asked one.
“Well there aren’t many options,” said Sandy. “Sure as hell it’s not the Federation. It’s so hard for even independent Feddie agents to get into League space, let alone Torahn space, something like this would take so much organisation they’d get caught. Plus the only interest a Federation biotech company might have in research here would be in shipping it back to the Federation to make money . . . so why have it all wasted by killing subjects here? And why not just do it through the usual communication ratlines back into the main League worlds? FSA knows a lot about those; it’s so much simpler than coming here.”
“Are you saying the League government might be paying Chancelry to do experiments on GIs?” Kiet asked.
“It would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Sandy looked around at them. One thing with GIs, it was harder to read them, as a group. They didn’t react so much, and it hid their thoughts. “League society reacted badly to the news that Recruitment had gone much further in developing GIs during the war than they’d admitted. They’re being watched. There are still places they can do research without oversight, but nothing with a full industrial infrastructure. This is the only place where GIs are made large scale, where there’s no oversight at all. They can violate synthetic rights out here and no one will know or care. And if the League foots the bill, the corporations have a much needed source of revenue.”
Was that what the ISO really wanted to find out? Had Mustafa known all along that the League was funding GI research out here? Was the real cause of the conflict between League government and the ISO really that the government had tried to keep the ISO out of the loop? She recalled Duage’s footage—Mustafa walking unguarded to the waiting Chancelry flyer, amidst Chancelry GIs carrying the bodies of her dead friends. Was that all that had happened? Chancelry had agreed to let Mustafa and the ISO in on the deal, in exchange for calling off the attack, and sacrificing all her friends?
“Of course,” Sandy added, “no one in the Federation has any real idea why there’s any GI industry out here in the first place. Pantala’s a heavy industry world. There’s no real advantage to building synthetic biotech out here, and we’re pretty sure there was no GI industry here during the war.”
“There was research,” said Kiet, solemnly. “When I first arrived. Seven years ago. Big labs, very secret. They’ve been here a long time. Since Pantala was settled. I saw secret files I shouldn’t have, when I was League military. They confirmed it.”
Sandy gazed at him. She’d not heard that before either. Kiet was only a 41-series, fairly high as GIs went, but he wouldn’t have been privy to much high intel. But then, she knew how curious GIs sometimes ran into information they weren’t supposed to. “Really?” she asked. “Why build a research lab out here?” Pantala was settled 120 years ago. GIs themselves weren’t that old, though the technology had been approaching takeoff right about then. Chancelry had had GI research labs out here during technological inception?
The GIs looked at one another. There was no reply. Sandy recognised an uplinked conversation when she saw one, and remained silent until their discussion had ended.
“Can you process VR?” Kiet asked.
Sandy frowned. “As of very recently, yes. Only on my own matrix though, it takes a while to process a foreign system.”