Originator (53 page)

Surprise in the man's eyes. Then perhaps . . . admiration? Cer tainly pleasure that she'd reached such a conclusion. “Cai told you?”

“We figured it out.” An explosion nearby, a mortar hitting a tower and the crash of falling glass. “Our theory is that organics died in your last catastrophe, and you synthetics brought them back.”

A silence as the man regarded her, broken by a rattle of gunfire. Sprawled in the dirt, Patana appeared to wake a little, blinking and coughing, then abruptly slumped into unconsciousness once more. No one felt inclined to check on him. Sandy felt as though the galaxy were holding its breath. This theory had not yet been confirmed. So much hung on the answer.

The Talee-GI exhaled, finally, with a heave of broad shoulders. “And have been regretting it ever since,” he admitted.

Sandy and Poole jogged alongside the armoured car carrying Patana and their guest. A mortar hit twenty meters away as they ran, no real threat to armour, but if buildings began to catch fire it would be destruction of evidence, and she had no manpower to spare fighting fires.

“Arvid, let's stop them shooting.”

“
Sure
,” came Singh's reply from observation atop a tower roof. “
How? We use magfire against them it'll go straight through them, and five walls behind them, possibly ten. The areas they're shooting from look inhabited
.”

“
Which suggests they know we're Federation
,” Vanessa cut in, “
and they'll use our moral standards against us. Real brave
.”

“Yeah, maybe the next generation of mag rifles we'll have a power reducer, cut the muzzle velocity in half.” But she hated too many systems in one weapon—the key to weapon reliability was simplicity, something modern designers forgot too easily. “How about airbursting missiles?”

“
Can't do it with shuttles
,” Singh replied, “
they don't have anything small enough. Backracks might work, but we've never tried it. Could be fatalities, they're not designed for nonlethal purposes
.”

“So long as those fatalities are Home Guard, I'll risk it,” said Sandy. “Pick a guinea pig, and if it works do a whole bunch simultaneously. Should shut them up for a while.”

She was just arriving back at HQ when Singh, deciding the test shot had worked, launched a full spread of sixteen backrack missiles, zigzagging off toward the perimeter. Soldiers unloaded Patana from the car and carried him inside, while Sandy noted that incoming fire appeared to have stopped.

Inside the main building lobby, Vanessa was in light armour with some others, attending to the rows of opened hopper suits, directing maintenance and rearming. With shuttles down on various HQ pads, spare ammo had been unloaded already, carried by hoppers and placed here for rearming, all without Sandy having to spare it a thought. With senior and junior officers and noncoms like she had, she knew such things would just get done, without her getting in their way.

“Wanna talk to Home Guard?” Vanessa called across the lobby, tapping her headset. Secondary coms were Vanessa's responsibility, and she wouldn't bother Sandy with it if Sandy were otherwise occupied.

Sandy thumped across in full armour. “How long they been calling?”

“Just now.” As she watched privates examining the new ammo, checking security tags and serial numbers before loading. “Something about how unfair it is that they can't shoot at us with impunity.”

“You do it,” said Sandy, lining her armour up with the others, cracking the shell and shutting down. “Then come with us, our new friend's got something to tell us.”

“New friend got a name?” asked Vanessa, looking dubiously at the new GI.

“Dara,” he said.

“Cute,” said Vanessa, flipping channels to talk to whichever indignant Home Guard person was shouting at her.

“Commander,” said Dara, meeting Sandy as she stepped from her hopper, “might it not be best to talk without the organics present?” With a look back at Vanessa. “We synthetics have matters to discuss. They require a certain perspective.”

Sandy looked at him for a moment, then at Patana, held between two GIs, head lolling. A man who'd commanded the commissioning of thousands of synthetic test subjects, then terminated their short lives for experiments. And then killed upwards of a thousand more via the killswitches built into their
brainstems, rather than let them escape to freedom. She couldn't look at him and not see the terrified faces, escapees realising that the vaunted Cassandra Kresnov had no solution and that their great hope of freedom was about to implode and take their lives with it.

“No offence,” Sandy told Dara, “but I trust her more than you.”

The office had a view, but window slats were three-quarters drawn in case of a very lucky Home Guard shot. Sandy poured a cup from the water dispenser, and one for Dara, Vanessa, and Jane, whom she'd summoned. Jane had found a baseball cap from somewhere, worn and faded, and wore it under her headset, sitting now with her feet up along the long table.

“What's with the hat?” Sandy asked her quizzically, skimming the cup along the smooth table top toward her.

Jane took it. “Got used to wearing it. Suits me.” She sipped. “I'm not as pretty as you lot.”

“No,” said Sandy, handing Dara his cup. “You're not.”

Vanessa entered, carrying fruit she'd found somewhere, one piece for each of them. She tossed with confidence that GIs would catch and took her own seat at the head of the long table. “No idea what they're called,” she said around a mouthful of fruit. “Something exotic. Taste good though, and they're on the database for edible foods.”

“Thanks, babe,” said Sandy, eating. “Thoughtful.”

Shrug. “You know me.” She glanced at Jane. “This is a fashion statement, huh?”

“Does this look like a fashion to you?” Jane asked drily.

“Don't be embarrassed,” Vanessa deadpanned. “When Sandy first arrived on Callay, she might have thought so too.”

“Thanks,” said Sandy. “What did Home Guard say?”

“Apparently we're not allowed to shoot at them. Only they're allowed to shoot at us. It's some kind of rule.” Another bite. “We killed three of them, but jury's out. I think we might have just knocked over a mortar tube while firing and they blew themselves up.”

“Any civvies hurt?”

“By us? No way. By them, probably, but they'll blame it on us.”

“Of course.”

“They said about twenty are dead from our assault, more than that wounded.”

Sandy exhaled hard. “Yeah, well, they're probably not kidding on that. There's just no other way to do it. That's their justification for shooting at us?”

Vanessa nodded. “Most of that wasn't us either, it was Talee shooting at us, only they didn't use airbursts at range, only magfire and AMLORA.” She glanced at Dara.

“The organics are not sophisticated,” he explained. “They've little practise at this.”

“We noticed,” said Jane.

“They borrowed our weapons tech?” Sandy asked. “From spies amongst us? People like you?”

“You must understand,” said Dara, looking down at his cup, “organic Talee are a new civilisation. They've been thriving, but they are isolated. We synthetics brought them into the world, but there remains concern over organic susceptibility to uplink technology. There is a mental condition, it . . .”

“Cai explained it to us,” Sandy interrupted. “A drug effect, it creates a narrow-focus mindset, improves linear thinking and processing, maths and data, but at the expense of rationality and context.”

“At the expense of self,” said Dara. “We call it tokot. Tokot on our home-world are a species of insect. Their workers feed themselves willingly to their young at a certain age for nourishment. It is an effective life-cycle for the hive, at the expense of the individual. Tokot creates such thinking in Talee. It is frightening, yet also seductive.”

“And synthetics don't get it,” Vanessa finished.

“No. We—synthetic Talee—suspect that synthetic humans will also prove less susceptible to such group thinking among humans. Such as the disorders that we see growing in the region of human space you call the League.”

“We've noticed as much,” Sandy agreed. Vanessa looked at her warily. “Dara, what were they doing here? What were they searching for? And if you synths are in control of Talee foreign policy, why are the organics suddenly rebelling?”

Her coms blinked before Dara could reply. She put it on speaker. “Kresnov.”

Pause for several seconds, then, “
Commander, it's Captain Reichardt
.” She could see that, but Dara didn't have that uplink . . . and with their recent upgrades, might not be able to get it without permission. Maybe. “
Just got a message from Bursteimer, putting it through now
.” Captain Bursteimer had gone off in pursuit of retreating Talee ships, following as they jumped from the system. Now he was another twenty-minutes-light farther out, and this message had been travelling that long.

“
We've been analysing their jump signatures
,” came Bursteimer's voice, crackling with solar static. “
We've seen this pattern before, I don't think they were full charged for jump. I'm ninety percent sure they cut it short, in which case they're just out of the system, possibly regathering. We've seen that before too, and if they've got reinforcements out there, assuming these guys picked up a few smarts from Kresnov's synthetic Talee friends, they'll be back in a few hours, maybe less. We surprised the heck out of them coming in here like that, but Talee ships on inbound assault trajectories aren't anything we can really handle. I'd recommend that Kresnov finds whatever the hell she's looking for down there, and gets the hell out before we cop it in the neck
.”

That transmission cut and was replaced by Reichardt. “
Sandy?
”

“I'm working on it,” she said, looking Dara calmly in the eyes. “If you're going to get smashed, retreat, and pull the same stunt on them, don't get shot up on our account. We can take care of ourselves down here, and if the Talee want to come back down and start that ground fight again, let's just say my concern will be limited.”

A transmission pause as that went out. Vanessa sipped her water, looking scarcely more bothered than Jane, who was typically unreadable. No one giving anything away in front of their guest.

“
Copy that
,” said Reichardt. “
However, if they've finished with Droze, and have no further use for it, they might just make a large smoking crater out of the corporate zone, which we won't be able to stop if we're not here. Recommend you make plans to head for the hills. Reichardt out
.”

“Doing that too, Kresnov out.” She raised eyebrows at Dara.

“Come with me,” said Dara, “and I'll show you.”

“Show me what?”

“What you're looking for. What
they
are looking for. The thing that
defines the struggle of the Talee race, and that might lay clear the future path of yours.”

Twenty minutes later, Sandy stood out on the big Dhamsel landing pads alongside one of their assault shuttles, heavy pumps roaring as they struggled to refuel. Loading vehicles rumbled past, taking more ammo to the HQ, and guide lights blinked against the oncoming dark. Jane stood with her in light armour, while Vanessa loomed above them in hopper armour, as were ten others spaced around the pad perimeter, awaiting the vehicle Dara said was incoming. Bereft of sunlight, the air was cooling fast, and the sharpening wind stung with flying sand.

“You realise we don't have any atmospheric radar coverage?” Vanessa shouted at Sandy above the noise. “The network wasn't very good to begin with, but now it's out almost completely, and Fleet say they can't track fast-moving atmospheric vehicles from orbit!”

“I don't think it's an accident that the grid's out,” Jane remarked, checking her rifle, wary of the blowing sand. “No way Dara's alone here. And Droze tech isn't upgraded like ours.”

“Yeah, well, don't get cocky about those upgrades either,” Vanessa retorted. “I doubt they've shown us everything they can do, and we know Cai kept secrets.”

Sandy nodded. “We'll be careful.”

Tacnet showed something on the edge of visual range, moving very fast. They waited, pleased at least that Home Guard weren't about to drop a shell on their heads, and watched the blip decelerate as it approached.

“Keep Patana alive,” said Sandy to Vanessa grimly. “He knows a lot of pieces in the GI research program puzzle I'd like filled in. But that won't matter to some of our GIs if they suspect our debrief and legal process could take years, which it will. He might be useful enough we never get around to executing him. Some of us won't like that.”

“Hell, I don't like it,” said Vanessa. “But I'll do what I can.” Meaning that if one of their own GIs was angry and determined enough, Vanessa wasn't about to stop them with force. Sandy nodded.

“You don't want him dead?” Jane asked Sandy. With that impenetrable stare beneath the brim of her cap.

“Personally? Sure. But ‘personally' doesn't come into this. We need to know what the hell League are doing with their GIs and where their medical research program is at. Against that, my desire to blow his head off is insignificant.” Jane nodded, looking off beyond the pad, through blowing sand. Sandy frowned at her. “What?”

“I tried rage once. After you nearly killed me, then let me go. I don't think I understood it, at the time. But it felt right, and as I read things, it seemed that rage was appropriate, for a warrior.”

“Lots of ‘an eye for an eye' in the Koran,” Sandy suggested.

Jane shrugged. “Bible too. Most religions. But that's not it. Rage just didn't take, with me. I didn't kill the people I've killed from rage. It was something else.”