Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire by Joel Shepherd Page B

Dazed. “You’re not as pretty as Pasha.”
    “No,” Sandy said quietly. “I don’t suppose I am.”
    “Will you go and get her? If I help you?”
    Sandy felt helpless. This, she’d been dreading. For years and years. “I’d like to,” she said earnestly. “I’d like to very much.”
    Eduardo smiled. And began convulsing.
    “Eduardo?” The convulsions grew worse. Sandy grabbed him. If she hadn’t been a GI herself, the convulsions would have smashed her bones. A flailing arm crushed the chair back of the bench, and Sandy threw herself on top of him to pin him. “I want an ambulance!” she yelled, not bothering with internal formulation. “Whatever leading biotech surgeon you can get, he’s in trouble!”
    Immediately she could hear a cruiser coming in; they’d had one on standby for rapid transport in case something happened. Eduardo’s eyes were rolled back in his head, his mouth foaming. And then he stopped. GIs had no jugular pulse, so Sandy put her ear to his chest. The pulse was still there, but galloping.
    She tried a violent network access, but the barriers were hard, unresponsive. She reached instead for a pocket, withdrew an ever-present access line, clicked it into the back of her own head, then rolled Eduardo to get at his own inserts . . . and her fingertips felt hot, melted metal. It was smoking, the inserts entirely melted through the skin.
    Oh, God. She slumped back and sat on the path as the CSA cruiser howled in to a landing on nearby grass, landing lights flashing. Gull doors opened and medicos rushed to her, and the lifeless body of her newest friend.
    Sandy sat in the observation chamber, elbows on knees, and watched the coroners work. They had tools set up especially for this—laser cutters that could saw through even a GI’s synthetic tissue and bone. Scanners showed a clear picture, and visual diagnostics programs tried to make sense of what they saw. The CSA knew a lot more about GI physiology now than it had a few years back, and one of the coroners was actually a leading biotech surgeon, a civvie but security cleared. They cut efficiently, removing a piece of skull.
    Some years ago, no one would have dared sit near her and offer comfort when she was in this mood. Now, Singh came by, recently showered post-armour, and sat beside her and asked how she was. Not great. He put an arm around her shoulders and just sat with her for a while, watching the monitors. Naidu likewise came and asked, and Chandrasekar. Ibrahim was elsewhere, probably briefing politicians. These days he had to do more of that than he liked.
    Then Vanessa arrived, and took Singh’s place as he left. “It’s the killswitch,” said Sandy.
    “I know.”
    “I don’t know who triggered it, there was no transmission. It just melted his brain.”
    “Yeah.” Vanessa clasped her hand.
    “I think he was sent here to kill someone. I think he was being blackmailed, and now he refused, and they killed him.” Vanessa’s gaze was very worried. “I swear I’m going to find who did this.” Her tone, like her mood, was utterly black. “I’m going to kill them. I don’t care if there are hundreds, I’ll kill them all.”
    The biotech surgeon’s name was Sasa. She sat at the end of the briefing table, with the intense, slightly exhausted look of someone trying to process a lot of information in a short space of time. About the table, CSA command sat and listened.
    “Well,” said Sasa, “it’s hard to tell exactly what they did to him. But it looks like one of his memory implants was converted into some kind of a control matrix. There are two kinds of memory implants—real memory and cybernetic. What the real memory implants do is compile a copy, like a facsimile, of memory triggers—for a smell, a sensation, there’s a pattern firing of neurons that the brain instantly recognises and uses like a key to unlock particular memories. Real memory implants don’t actually store the memory itself, they store