Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire Read Free

be snuck past when no one was looking, but were impossible to simply tear down by hacking alone, now disappeared. It was cheating, of course—hackers were supposed to hack barriers, not simply destroy their mainframes. But he’d ceased to be a simple hacker a long time ago, and now played by different rules.
    “Good work,” he said. “I’ve got barriers down all over the place . . . team, let’s get inside before they transfer functions and reestablish.”
    Now it was a genuine fight. Sandy’s target was beyond the CBD, by the northern edge of the most northerly park. She’d not wanted to land closer—confusion was a part of the assault plan, and that region was heavily guarded. But now, she had a trek ahead of her.
    She leaped across several blocks, keeping low, scanning for anything that moved. There were quite a few civilians and ground cars. When she’d first heard “jetpacks,” she’d nearly resigned on the spot. Those contraptions just put you on a slow, fixed trajectory that the dumbest armscomp could blow from the sky. But these were jumpjets, it had been insisted, for short, varied bursts of flight like the grasshoppers for which they were named. Still she didn’t trust them, and stayed as close to the rooftops as possible.
    Tacnet showed airbourne security vehicles trying to make their way from suburban bases to downtown, and getting blown from the sky. That would limit defensive deployment options. Others were trying to move out by ground, and that was more effective, if far slower. She headed for one now, grounding in a small city park between buildings to break up her flight path, then leaping again through the trees.
    She landed on a rooftop seven stories up, looking onto a street afire with ruined vehicles and collapsed building fronts. Tacnet showed her a couple of likely culprits ahead, and she leaped after them, zooming vision on their newest targets—a couple of personnel carriers. It wasn’t always easy to tell where they’d come from; some of the police and security stations through the inner city had armoured depots that micro-munitions wouldn’t touch.
    They were under fire when she landed, two FSA suits on neighbouring rooftops pouring fire onto the street below. They hadn’t seen the UAV zooming around behind them for a shot, Sandy armscomped it in midflight, pulled the trigger, then landed by a skylight as the UAV screamed tumbling into a building a block away and exploded.
    One of the APCs was afire, men scrambling from the back, Sandy locked a grenade on the other and blew its top turret, then ducked back as fire came at her from across the street. Suddenly a viewfeed from one of her friendlies showed AMAPS on the road, running through halted civvie traffic with that ugly, birdlike gait. Sandy’s friend blew one of them to hell with a rifle shot, but suddenly there were missiles in the air and everyone jumped.
    Sandy’s rooftop blew up just after she’d left it, and she took the flying vantage to put multiple rifle rounds into another running AMAPS on the street below, but one of those missiles was still going, streaking about in a circle as it tried to reacquire. It picked her, and Sandy turned, shot it from the sky, and crashed onto a rooftop ventilation system with less grace than she’d have liked. Snipers snapped at her from across the road somewhere, two of them, armscomp calced and showed her where in a split second as she came up on her feet and fired twice, then dropped a free fall grenade over the edge.
    “Blinder!” she advised her wingmen as the phosphorus detonated, and any sensitive lenses focused that way abruptly burned out. She went over the edge a second later, blew another AMAPS’s CPU apart with a headshot, hit the jumpjets in mid-fall to land sideways and rolling as another AMAPS tore the street apart with its twin cannon, firing blind. Sandy and a wingman hit it with grenades simultaneously and it disappeared in three directions at once.
    Sandy