Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield Read Free Page B

and offices. One part of the internal corridor sagged where the wall had caved, ceiling threatening to collapse, but once she squeezed through the gap the floor was relatively clear, shielded from external bombardment.
    Rishi had led her Chancelry GIs in an uprising that had sheltered here and in a few other buildings, trying to gather enough firepower together to survive against what Chancelry unloaded on them, trying to recapture these buildings. Then Sandy's force had arrived, with Kiet and his older desert dwellers, come in from five years in the sands to right this one, horrid injustice.The Chancelry uprising would have been put down if they hadn't arrived when they had.
    7-A adjoined to 2-A, a detour around ruined adjoining passages, through a cold and dusty night and air that smelled of sulphur. It wasn't breathable to humans save with lung and bloodstream micros that filtered the toxins; even Sandy had had them added, being synthetic didn't make her immune to bad air. Then through more heavy, secure doors, into a waiting atrium that this time demanded realtime ID, then to the top of some stairs.
    “Su and Alice will be down there,” Sandy told Kiril. “They'll be monitoring all the GIs’ systems. Do you think you can stay with them until the emergency passes?”
    “Can I help them?” Kiril asked, brightening a bit. He loved technology. Down in the bowels of Chancelry's experimental synthetic-person assembly plant, there was plenty of that.
    “Sure, but only if they ask you to, okay?”
    Kiril nodded. “Sandy, is there going to be fighting?”
    Developments on tacnet did not look promising. A lie might have been parental. “Probably,” she said. “But I'll try to stop it from reaching here.”
    “Be careful,” said Kiril as she left.
    “I will,” she assured him…and uplinked to Su and Alice to tell them Kiril was on his way down. They'd have no problem, they liked Kiril and could always use someone to carry small things or bring coffee.
    She closed the entrance up behind him and ran, across courtyards, dodging debris no one had yet bothered to clean up, several burned-out vehicles, a destroyed AMAPS from before they'd gained control of Chancelry's defensive grid, a lot of broken glass. A link opened from orbital relay; that would be Mekong .
    “ Reichardt. Commander, what's going on? ”
    “ A bunch of GIs launched an operation to free the neighbouring corporations’ GIs without me ,” Sandy formulated silently, easier than speaking while she ran. “ I'm assuming they've isolated the killswitch lockdown, but I've no idea how long that'll last, a group of Heldig GIs tried to escape by flier but they were shot down in neutral territory, we've various units converging on that spot now .”
    “ Sounds like your revolution just met with a counter revolution. You have no control at all? ”
    Sandy skidded to slow down, then dodged through the main door atrium of building 9-R. Here the last few armour suits were racked against the wall, several being occupied even now by late-arriving GIs, additional ammo, and weapons too.
    “ I'll have control once it all starts to go wrong, Kiet's not much of a tactician. I did tell you we were at odds over tactics where the remaining corporate GIs were concerned .”
    She pulled off her jacket, emptied pockets, and slammed her back into the spread torso armour—this was only light stuff, League-issue urban armour, not the quality of her CSA gear. But in urban spaces with heavy firepower, a bit of extra protection, plus carrying capacity, never went astray.
    “ Commander ,” came Reichardt's reply, “ you should know that I cannot provide direct support to any operation that is not under the direct command of a Federal officer or agent .”
    “ Mate, just shoot when I say shoot, okay ? This was a very broad interpretation of the Federal Interest from the very beginning, you know the stakes as well as I, don't go pulling all this semantical crap now .”
    “ This