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

doorway, she took both by breaking bones without killing, and used one’s keycard to open a secure door as he shrieked. This room had refrigeration units. Big ones, from floor to ceiling, with fancy screens that displayed the vitals of the people within. Because . . . they were people , it registered now as she slowed her pace a little. Rows of them, men and women, old and young. The network in this region was proving stubborn, so she accessed at a local data point, downloaded rapid codes, then fed them up to Ari, confident he’d find a delicate way through where she’d just break things and make a mess. This information, they needed intact.
    Into a neighbouring room, past more refrigeration units, dimly aware that Ari was swearing in her inner ear. She really wasn’t processing on that emotional level yet; she’d cut that out of her world, unable to handle that and the job she was here to do at the same time. He was seeing the same thing she was—armscomp had cameras on her headset, and he was reading and no doubt recording those images. Someone in the room with Ari, in the background, sounded like he was crying.
    Through another door, and here were surgical tables, with great automated surgical units hovering like mechanical spiders above the slabs, arms affixed with every cutting and scanning and stabbing tool known to medicine, plus tubes for the blood and grilles on the floor to flush away the mess . . .
    At that moment all the doors slammed shut and armed soldiers sprang up beyond the adjoining control room windows, no doubt thinking it a fine trap they’d led her into. Sandy shot them all in slightly less than half a second, and leaped into the control room through shattered glass. She accessed physically with a cord and socket, and accumulated codes got her into memory files and recent activities, and now she could see bodies on the slabs, machine tools whirring, skulls sliced open to probe the mysteries of NCT within, and why it didn’t seem to work on some defective people as well as Anjula’s leaders thought it ought. Everyone had thought the situation on Pyeongwha was bad, but no one had quite expected this.
    “ Oh, you got ’em Sandy, ” Ari was saying, choked with furious emotion. “ I’m getting all this and we’re putting it out to broadcast in a few seconds. You fucking got ’em. ”
    “These memory files are too big,” she heard herself saying. “There’s got to be years of files in here. Surely this whole facility can’t be for this.”
    “ I think it might be, ” said Ari. “ It would explain a lot, these last fifteen years or so . . . ” And he broke off, to calm the sudden clamor for names from the crying man in the room with him. There would be plenty of time to search the database for names later, he assured that man. They’d find everyone, every last man and woman, no one would be forgotten.
    Sandy didn’t know how she felt. It was more than just combat reflex, which made it hard to access emotion. She just felt . . . numb. She’d wanted to be on board precisely because of this, and the prospect of a very worthy cause. But now that she was here, she couldn’t figure if she was glad to be here, or if she’d regret it forever. Perhaps, like so many things in the lives of soldiers, it was both.
    “ Sandy, ” came Rhian’s voice, “ you’ve still got several hundred security personnel in there with you, and maybe a thousand civvies. Do you need some help mopping up? ”
    “Help?” Sandy disconnected and moved through a side door. A security man on the far side tried to shoot her, but between his finger tightening on the trigger and the gun going off, Sandy was no longer where she had been. She punched him in the head, not an especially hard punch as such things went, but the wall three meters back was sprayed with skull, blood and brains. “No,” she said, continuing down the corridor. “I think I can handle it.”
    Admiral Alemsegad’s shuttle arrived in