Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire Read Free Page B

points around it, indicating it had been subject to some early strikes, but she’d studied the preliminary schematics that were all Ari’s folks had smuggled out, and wasn’t especially encouraged.
    “Ari, I want an active schematic on Primary Target, real time if you please. No guesses.” At another time it might have felt a little odd; she hadn’t spoken to him directly for half a year now. No, dammit, at any time it still felt a little odd. “Alpha formation, make a perimeter and hold,” she added to her wingmen. The other three would be joining them shortly, she hoped.
    “ I’ve still got a few barriers remaining, ” came Ari’s reply. “ Just hold for a little. ” A little what, Sandy nearly said, but didn’t. She was military, her brain didn’t process “a little.”
    She smashed the window and jumped out instead. She fell, and the side of the building behind her exploded. Smaller neighbouring buildings gave cover for her landing, and she hit the street hard, then moved quickly along a sidewalk as burning debris and shattering glass tumbled about her.
    “ Someone missed an emplacement, ” said Han, one of her wingmen.
    “You think?” Sandy muttered. Probably it’d seen her break the window and fired just late. That was a happier thought than it having been about to fire anyway, and it being just dumb luck that she’d jumped when she had. Han lit up the offending emplacement for tacnet, saving his own ammunition, as elsewhere about the city, missiles leapt skyward. Ten seconds later, as Sandy sheltered at a corner, another explosion tore the air by the DA building.
    “ Active countermeasures nearly got it, ” Han observed. Sandy watched a replay of what he’d seen, a storm of micro-flares about the gardens, settling now amidst the trees and bushes. Enough to distract most missiles, but not Tanushan tech, evidenced by the new smoking crater beneath one wall where the emplacement had been.
    “If countermeasures are still active, they’ll have just about everything up, save the big emplacements,” Sandy observed. “Anyone running or flying in there is dead. Ari, either you get that defensive grid down or find us another way in.”
    “ Um, okay, hang on a moment . . . ” Between familiarly gritted teeth.
    The front of the DA building exploded. Even though Sandy was not in direct line of sight, the intensity of the flash, and then the boom, made her duck. Then, amid the rain of debris onto neighbouring blocks, she looked up, and saw an especially large missile contrail.
    Sandy suppressed a smile. “That you, darling?”
    “ I told you, ” said Vanessa, “ never go anywhere without clean underwear and artillery. ”
    “ Yeah, well my underwear is now less clean than it was, ” said Han.
    It was the Trebuchet system. Vanessa had insisted on bringing it along, descending on UAV mounts and sparing several troops to spend ten minutes of phase one setting it up somewhere hidden. God knew how long they could now keep it hidden, but for the moment it had proven a far-sighted insistence. Vanessa’s operational policy had always been that obstacles were not obstacles once you’d blown them up. Facing the collapsed front facade of the DA building, Sandy found the logic hard to argue with.
    “Let’s go,” said Sandy, targeting her three remaining missiles at surrounding department gardens, then leaping. At max power the jets pulled nearly nine Gs, and she did a fast loop over buildings, screamed low across a road and into the debris cloud of multiple explosions. Still something hit her, and she nearly crashed on deceleration and landing, digging a knee-down furrow in the turf, laying rifle and grenade shots down at everything that might be an emplacement. She continued putting down fire as Han and Weller tore in to more dignified landings, and then, just a little late, Rhian and her pair.
    “ Sorry we’re late, ” said Rhian, as they crashed through debris into the DA building. “ Got into