Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire Read Online Free PDF

now was booby traps, always the biggest threat to GIs. She sprinted down corridors, literally bouncing off walls to make corners at speed, leaped down stairwells, and crossed open spaces so fast guarding soldiers barely had time to aim before she was gone. If they were lucky, she didn’t bother killing them on the way through. In combat mode, even she wasn’t entirely certain what her subconscious would process as a threat, and simply didn’t have time to think it through at length.
    Her mental schematic helped, too, it wasn’t always perfect, but it gave her a general idea of what lay ahead. It told her a door blocking the corridor was thin enough to grenade and dive through the hole, while another one would be faster for her to go around. Automatic gun emplacements guarded a junction, so hair-trigger that she didn’t dare try and shoot them even with her reflexes. She hacked a ventilation system instead, blasting one with cold air, causing others to shoot the vent, which blew out the region’s power and caused a defensive grid flux. That was all she needed to hack one’s control system and blow the other emplacements to pieces. She was twenty-two years old now, positively ancient in GI terms, and she knew a lot of tricks.
    The corridors opened onto proper caverns, metal giving way to rock, and here there was a full squad with multiple AMAPS, heavy weapons, the works. First thing, from the shelter of an engineering approach, Sandy hacked and shut down half the lights. The other half came down with a couple of well-placed grenades, heavy supports crashing to the cavern floor, sending soldiers running in the engulfing dark. Then, dark as the night that had suddenly descended, she simply jumped in amongst them.
    It was a horror, the only light came from misused AMAPS floodlights that glared and blinded as much as they illuminated, and muzzle flashes and explosions, everyone firing and only one target, which was never where or what its opponents thought it was. Sandy barely had to shoot more than a third of them, mostly they shot each other as she skipped, rolled and wove amongst them, a bullet here, a punch there. Most commanders did not realise how numerical superiority could be a curse until they ran into high-designation GIs. They were still dying once she’d gone, racing into the complex they’d been defending—a hive of steel and glass emerging from the rock. She shot a window, leaped three stories and crashed through office glass, confounding anyone who’d expected her to take the door.
    Civvies screamed and ran, and Sandy ignored them, save for one woman, dressed like a manager, whom she abruptly headlocked against a steel corridor wall. “Where’s the containment facility, I want the people. Where do you keep them?”
    And followed the woman’s trembling finger, down the corridor in a flash. This place was medical. That immediately creeped her out. NCT was medical, certainly, and required a lot of ongoing research. Anjula insisted that it was all above-board biotech, but refused Federal inspectors who wanted to probe further for illegal tech. This place looked like a giant steel-framed hospital, built into a natural cavern like a beehive might fill up a spider’s hole with honeycomb. Everywhere were secure doors requiring keycards or iris scans, though Sandy found that network hacks or hammer blows did the trick as well.
    She skipped through rooms to cut between corridors, and found vast labs, high tech analysers, rows of test tubes and refrigerated containers. Partly, she was dimly aware past the combat reflex, it creeped her out because many of her own worst nightmares came from places like this—too many bad memories of combat patches, upgrade surgeries or the ubiquitous “checkups.” She’d been conceived in a place like this, no doubt. It wasn’t something she liked to think about, and even Tanushan psychs were accustomed to her changing the subject.
    A couple of guards surprised her at a