Cauldron of Ghosts (50 page)

Who was also missing.

* * *

The driver’s manifest listed the contents of the container in the cargo compartment as an aquarium being delivered to a law firm, presumably for display in their waiting room.

The driver—a seccy, like most such—had no reason to question the legitimacy of the manifest. He was not permitted to examine sealed containers anyway.

Nor did he question the legitimacy of the route he was given. The law firm was located on the 468th floor of Rasmussen Tower, one of Mendel’s most luxurious and expensive residential/commercial buildings. Deliveries made to such an address allowed a commercial van to use airspace normally reserved for passenger vehicles.

He was still required to use special commercial lanes, of course.

The first sign that anything was amiss was when he suddenly found his hands, as if of their own volition, overriding the traffic program and taking direct control of the vehicle. An alarm immediately started blaring.

You are not authorized for manual operation in this area. Immediately restore the automatic program. Warning. You will be heavily fined if you—

But he was paying no attention. To his horror, his hands—
his own hands!
—were steering the van right up into the most heavily trafficked lanes. The only thing that was now preventing collisions were the van’s own emergency programs. But in this sort of dense traffic they could not possibly—

* * *

“Zeta ready.”

“Triggering . . . now.”

The final blast was another tactical nuke, but a big one—about three kilotons. All vehicles in the vicinity of the van were obliterated. Those in the fireball itself ceased to exist above a molecular level; those beyond it survived only in pieces—and the passengers in still smaller pieces.

Vehicles farther away survived the radiant heat relatively intact—although the passagers usually didn’t—but the blast wave hurled them in all directions, smashing into other vehicles or into the surrounding buildings. Or, often enough, both. The space between the city center’s kilometer-high towers was narrower than the spacing became farther out, and the one between Rasmussen Tower and the neighboring Jarrett Tower was a narrow and very deep artificial canyon. Vehicles caught in that explosion were like small pebbles in a can. They caromed off everything until they finally just came apart altogether.

The death toll wasn’t as high as in the Dobzhansky and amusement park blasts. But an astonishingly high percentage of the casualties were movers and shakers in Mesan society, and because of the nature of the disaster itself, many of the bodies would never be identified.

Indeed, many of those who died there would never be known at all. Thousands of people vanished in Mendel that day. How many of them were incinerated in the shopping mall? Turned into shadows on the walls and floors of the amusement park? Simply . . . vanished in that canyon of death?

No one would ever know. No one would ever be able to prove anything about those disappearances, one way or the other.

The delivery company’s records would be searched and the identity of the driver determined. A search of his apartment would also uncover ties to the Audubon Ballroom.

* * *

“Okay, Janice, we’re out of here.”

“Just a . . . second. There, it’s set. Let’s go.”

* * *

Six minutes later, the small personal flyer in the garage half a kilometer away took to the air. On the horizon, Marinescu and Haas could see the blast cloud above the amusement park.

They headed north to the rendezvous.

Nine minutes later, Eta detonated. Their control center vanished. So did the small town surrounding it.

Haldane was a resort town in the hills east of Mendel, a place of small houses and cottages—some of them, admittedly, not all
that
small—laid out as a deliberate escape from the urban towers in which the vast majority of Mesa’s population lived. The permanent population was only two and a half thousand, but on any given day there was a transient population of at least twice that many people. And, like the population that used the traffic lanes where the van had detonated, the resort’s clientele included a large number of the planet’s most prominent and important people.

A large part of the reason for Haldane’s popularity with the upper crust was that one of the town’s specialties was anonymity. It was the sort of resort that even a celebrity could visit without much informal notice being taken—and no formal notice of any kind. The electronic ledgers of all hotels were wiped every morning, and even while they lasted a good third of the registrants had names like Smith, Johnson, Williams and Brown.

The Eta bomb was the biggest of all. Forty-five kilotons, detonated at ground level.

Grotesque overkill, for a town that size. There was literally nothing left at all.

Chapter 56

The best adjective for the atmosphere in the sumptuous conference room was probably “brittle,” although “frightened” would have run a very close second. The men and women seated around the conference table understood the terror, consternation, and fury filling the hearts and minds of the Mesa System’s citizens. Indeed, they understood it far better than most of those millions upon millions of citizens understood, because unlike them, they knew how much damage the string of nuclear explosions had actually done . . . and threatened to do yet.

Bryce Lackland, the Director of Culture and Information, had managed to keep a lid on the actual casualty figures from the Saracen Tower bomb and the air van bomb which had detonated equidistantly between Masten Tower and Rasmussen Tower, but the
number
of people who’d been killed was far from the worst damage they’d inflicted. The
nature
of the people who died made the appalling loss of life still worse. A painful percentage of Mesa’s top-tier scientists had perished, yet even that was less ominous than the casualties which had been suffered among the families of the planetary security forces.

“I’m telling you,” Brianna Pearson said emphatically into the tension-curdled atmosphere, “we do
not
want to turn OPS—or, even worse, MISD—loose. Not without bringing in people from outside the Capital District, anyway!”

“There’s no time to bring in anyone else!” Regan Snyder snapped, and Pearson glared at her. “We have to act
now
, and we have to act
decisively
,” the tall, raven-haired Snyder continued harshly. “We’ve let the damned seccies have too much free rein for too long, and this is what we get for it! It’s time we
explained
reality to them in terms even they can understand!”

Pearson never took her glare off Snyder, but the corner of one eye was watching Brandon Ward, the General Board of Mesa’s CEO. What she saw there wasn’t encouraging.

Ward was a tall, fair-haired man with gray eyes and a strong chin. He carried himself with the grace of an athlete, maintained by the hours he put in on handball courts, and he projected the image and attitude of a decisive person with genuine power. Unfortunately, any decisiveness he might once have cherished had been leached out of him long ago, and the truth was that his actual power was an amorphous proposition, at best. Chief Executive Officer or no, he’d long since learned the true limits the General Board imposed upon him. His ability to
administer
Mesa was almost as great as someone looking in from the outside might have supposed it to be. His ability to formulate and control Mesa’s
policies
was quite another matter, and Snyder—although officially “only” the Director of Commerce—was Manpower Incorporated’s representative on the Board.

And Ward knew it.

Snyder stood a hundred seventy-three centimeters tall and was almost as athletic as Ward (although her chosen sports had more to do with bedrooms than handball courts), with strikingly good looks which owed very little to biosculpt and quite a lot to the same genetic modification which had given her that midnight hair and incredibly blue eyes. Those portions of her appearance were due to her parents’ choices before she’d ever been born, but the stylish tattoos and body piercings were her own addition. At the age of fifty-one, she was forty years younger than Ward, although both of them were third-generation prolong recipients. Unlike him, however, Snyder was a member of the New Lodges, the members of the Mesan social elite who chose to flaunt their status and revel in their power. In Pearson’s opinion, that was stupid. The Audubon Ballroom had made a special point of picking off members of the New Lodges whenever possible, especially any of them with direct links to Manpower, and Snyder’s link to Manpower was very exalted indeed. She was VP of Operations in the Mesa System, which would have put her at the very apex of any Ballroom hit list even without her arrogant, sneering lifestyle.

On the other hand
, Pearson acknowledged to herself,
she
is
VP of Operations, so maybe she’s not quite as stupid as I thought. Given her job, she couldn’t paste
a bigger target on her back however she chose to dress, now could she? So why not live whatever way she chooses?

On more mature consideration, however, she
was
just as stupid as Pearson had ever thought.

“I think Brianna has a point,” Jackson Chicherin put in, his courteous, academic tone contrasting sharply with Snyder’s grating anger. The Commerce Director looked away from Pearson to glare at him, instead, and he shrugged. “The situation’s bad enough now without our making it even worse,” he pointed out. “If we turn Public Safety loose on the seccy districts and
don’t
bring in units from outside the Capital District, it’s going to be a bloodbath. Too many of their people have lost family or friends. All some of them will be interested in is getting payback, and if they can’t get it from whoever actually set off those bombs, they’ll take it from anyone they can catch.”

Snyder’s blue eyes hardened with disdain as they bored into the short, wiry Chicherin. Part of that was the contempt of someone who considered herself a predator among predators, cutting her way up the corporate ladder with ruthlessness and determination, for someone who was basically an academic. A highly skilled, very wealthy academic, and Vice President of Research and Development for the Mesan Genetic Consultancy, but still an academic with an academic’s squeamishness for the way things worked in the real world.

“Maybe a little bloodletting’s what we need,” she said now, her eyes as coldly reptilian as her voice. “As far as I’m concerned, we should simply call in kinetic strikes on the bastards! Level their damned towers and be done with it once and for all!” she went on, amply confirming Pearson’s estimate of her intellectual capacity. Or of her ability to pour piss out of a boot, for that matter.

“You’re out of your mind,” Pearson said flatly. Snyder’s blue eyes flashed fire, and Pearson sneered. “If you want to destroy the entire city of Mendel, you go right ahead,” she said. “
I’m
going to be moving to the country first, though! Do you have
any
idea what kind of KEW you’d need to take out a modern residential tower? Or even one of those seccy deathtraps? You can’t use that kind of weapon without plenty of collateral damage, Regan! And that wouldn’t be the only ‘collateral damage’ you’d be doing, either!”

“We’ve let the whole frigging seccy question fester for way too long,” Snyder grated. “It was a mistake to ever allow manumission, and we’ve been paying for it ever since. I say it’s time we finally put an end to the problem once and for all, because if we don’t, I’ll guarantee you we’ll see more of this kind of crap! And don’t think for a minute that it won’t spread from the seccies to the slaves if we don’t stamp on it fast and hard. Whether we use KEWs or not, I stand by my original argument. We need to spill enough blood to drive those bastards back into their holes and keep them hiding there for the next T-century!”

“What you’re going to get if you turn OPS loose the way its troopers are feeling right this minute will be one hell of a lot more than ‘enough blood’—whatever that is!” Pearson said sharply. “And what we don’t
need
right now is a bloodbath!”

“Why not?” François McGillicuddy demanded, and Pearson managed—somehow—not to roll her eyes.

McGillicuddy was a senior board member of Atkinson, McGillicuddy, & Shivaprakash, a major transstellar investment firm with branches in many of the Solarian League’s major star systems. He was also Director of Security, a plum post which had fallen to AMS as the result of intricate negotiations with Manpower and the Jessyk Combine. Negotiations which would never have succeeded if he hadn’t demonstrated his willingness to work hand-in-glove with Snyder. That meant his attitude was hardly surprising, but the post he held made that attitude even more . . . unfortunate.

Pearson herself was Vice President of Operations (Mesa) for Technodyne Industries, which was how she found herself on the General Board. Technodyne had suffered major losses—both financially and in terms of prestige—after the disaster of the Battle of Monica, although it had recovered much of the lost ground by providing its newly developed Cataphract long-range missile to the Solarian League Navy. Overall, its position on the General Board was still weaker than it had been, as Pearson was only too well aware. She’d gotten her start in Technodyne’s public relations division, however. That gave her a somewhat different perspective from many of her colleagues, who seemed blissfully unaware of—or, even worse, dismissive of—the public relations implications of what they were discussing, and all of her instincts were ringing loud, insistent alarm bells as she listened to Snyder and McGillicuddy.

“Regan’s right,” McGillicuddy continued now, as if to prove how justified her fears were. “We need to send a message to the seccies. Even more important, maybe, we need to send one to the
slaves
. And we need to send it right now, before those Ballroom ‘manifestoes’ have time to sink in. God only knows how they’re likely to react after that!”

His gray eyes were as fiery as Snyder’s, but there was more fear under that anger. Snyder, Pearson suspected, didn’t yet actually feel personally threatened. She was too fundamentally arrogant—and had too much faith in her own security measures—to consider that there might be another nuclear device out there somewhere with
her
name on it. McGillicuddy, on the other hand, had been growing increasingly anxious about the potential for seccy or even slave violence—or perhaps it would have been more accurate to say
additional
seccy or slave violence—ever since Green Pines. Recent events would suggest his anxiety had been entirely justified, and he was clearly terrified of where the next round of terrorist attacks might go. There might be one person on Mesa—Regan Snyder, for example—the seccies hated more than the system’s Director of Security, but it was unlikely there were two of them. And blowing up the head of the forces responsible for preventing acts of terror would have to sound very attractive to the terrorists bent on committing them.

“Look,” Pearson said, making herself sit back and pitch her voice as reasonably as possible, “I’m not saying measures don’t have to be taken. I’m not even saying that ‘sending a message’ to the seccies is necessarily a terrible idea. I’m simply saying there’s enough trouble already headed our way without adding this kind of interstellar public relations black eye to the mix.”

“Oh, give me a
break
, Brianna!” Snyder sneered. “We’re
Mesa
, remember? Every do-gooder and moral crusader in the explored galaxy’s spent the last four or five T-centuries telling everyone what moral lepers we are. You really think that breaking a few heads—hell, breaking a few
necks!
—is going to make us even more leprous?”

“What I’m saying,” Pearson’s tone was just a bit over controlled, “is that the Manties and the Havenites are screaming nonsense about our being behind the attacks on Manticore. They’re telling everyone who’ll listen that we’ve been manipulating the League into attacking Manticore, as well. It’s ridiculous, and only a fool would believe we would—or
could
—do something like that! But if we respond to these attacks with wholesale bloodshed, we’ll hand them a golden opportunity to hammer us for it. It’s going to be bad enough whatever we do, but if we pile up some sort of massive body count, you can be damned sure their propagandists’ll use it for all it’s worth! Give them enough opportunities to paint us as the galaxy’s bogeyman, and their claims will start gaining traction. If nothing else, it would make it a hell of a lot harder for our friends in the League to scare up any support for us if they decided to come after Mesa directly! With them already blowing away Solly battle fleets right and left, do you really want to hand them that sort of hammer in addition? And don’t forget, that muckraking bitch O’Hanrahan is right here in-system at this very moment. She’d be right on top of any ‘excesses’ our security forces might commit, and don’t think for an instant that she wouldn’t be shouting about them at the top of her lungs to all her League audience! You have no
idea
how much influence that woman has, and she’ll pull out all the stops on this one.”

Chicherin leaned back in his chair, watching the other members of the General Board, and tried to keep his dismay from showing. He was an alpha-line whose family had been part of the Alignment for generations, and like the vast majority of the Alignment’s membership he’d always hated Manpower and the institution of genetic slavery.

From a cold-blooded business perspective, Mesa’s position as the galaxy’s foremost genetic slaver was a continual stumbling block for Mesan Genetic Consultancy. MGC was what some people mockingly described as “the kinder, gentler face of Mesa,” a firm which provided many of the same services as those provided by Beowulfan geneticists. It was known to push the limits of the Beowulf Biosciences Code hard—even to ignore them, upon occasion—but partly because of that, it had produced some of the most successful genetic modifications for colonists whose planets demanded that sort of alteration. Unfortunately, quite a lot of people who would have dealt with MGC under other circumstances had been scared off by a combination of moral repugnance for the slave trade and fear that the genetic mods
they
wanted would be “contaminated” by Manpower’s. And however much Chicherin hated to admit it, quite a lot of the basic R&D which underlay MGC’s accomplishments really had originated in Manpower’s labs. There were times he felt dirtied by that knowledge, but research was research. Even though he would never have condoned the programs which had produced that data, he could hardly justify not making use of it.

From a personal moral perspective, he loathed the institutionalization of an entire subset of the human race which was automatically considered inferior—indeed,
sub
human—and denied the dignity and the rights of other human beings. From a professional viewpoint, he knew how completely unjustified the prejudice which produced that situation actually was. Genetic slaves might have been tailored—designed—for specific ends, but they were just as human as anyone else, and the bigotry which denied that simple fact was not simply morally wrong but based entirely on ignorance and stupidity.