Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield Read Free

captured six. The other corporations between them had about fifty. If it came to an artillery contest, most of Chancelry's rounds would not survive the opposing missile defences, and would then be destroyed by counter battery fire, along with most of the Chancelry complex.
    Sandy smashed a couple of final defensive barriers, hard enough to give tacnet a wobble…visual portions crashed, then rebooted from 3D static, confused and struggling.
    “ Sandy! ” Kiet shouted at her. “ Leave it alone, I have it under control! ”
    “Are you deploying?” She could see it now, portions of tacnet the barriers had hidden. GIs, Kiet's troops, moving fast toward the crash site. And sideways, toward the Dhamsel Corporation border.
    The secure network had once gained some connectivity with surrounding corporate systems, not a big presence, mostly through the overarching intranet that linked the neutral spaces between corporate entities. Now it was all shut down, the surrounding corporations must have physically cut the intranet, and with it, nearly a week's work.
    “Rishi, talk to me,” Sandy demanded, holding Kiril close to her side as vehicles crashed and hummed into life around her. “Rishi, if you've entrusted a major operation to Kiet then you're about to get into trouble, he's not up to it.”
    “ Sandy, we got a response from some Heldig GIs ,” came Rishi's voice, terse, preoccupied. “ They wanted out, they attempted escape, but someone just shot them down, we don't know who .”
    If she weren't sliding into combat mode, Sandy might have sworn. They weren't supposed to make a move without her, she'd thought they were agreed on that. But with this rabble of recently freed GIs, it wasn't always clear who was in charge. Logic said her, as the highest designation and unchallenged, most experienced and lethal combatant. But Kiet hadn't agreed with hermethodology on freeing the other corporations’ GIs, and on his side were the majority. Rishi's GIs, the former Chancelry experimentals, were split between the high designations, who wanted to help but had no sense of how, and the lower designations, whom no one trusted.
    “That's wonderful,” she said. “Would you like my help, or do you want to wait until everyone starts dying?”
    “ You're not the only one with combat command experience ,” Kiet retorted.
    “In case you've forgotten,” she said, “I'm the only one who Captain Reichardt will listen to. And without the threat of an orbital strike, and mutually assured destruction, we'd have all been dead a week ago.”
    “ We are not going to allow some Feddie squish to veto our freedom! ” Kiet snapped. “ Now leave us alone, we're busy! ”
    The link disconnected—a block, because tacnet never truly disconnected. He'd fucking blocked her.
    “Kiril, let's go,” she said, and grabbed the boy up.
    “But I wanna stay!”
    “Tough.”
    She took off running, rifle in one hand so it didn't bounce, Kiril in the other. The latter burden made her somewhat slower than she'd have liked, but as the ferrocrete stretched toward the underground tunnel, she adjusted her steps to short leaps, skipping out to five normal steps, then eight, then ten at a time. It made her fast, but she had to watch Kiril's head on the ceiling, and keep the trajectory low so he wouldn't bounce painfully with each impact.
    The huge steel elevator doors were already opening on her uplink signal, and she got inside and signalled the lift up. It went, slowly, as Sandy scanned tacnet for the nearest unoccupied armour suit.
    “That was fun,” Kiril announced of his ride, rubbing a bruised backside. “Where are we going?”
    “To synthetic assembly,” said Sandy, checking her rifle and wishing she were already armoured…but walking around in armour for a week wasn't practical, any armour needed downtime maintenance, they had it on a roster system that left most of them unarmoured much of the time.
    “Where?”
    “The GI factory,” Sandy