Cauldron of Ghosts (52 page)

“He’s planning to
assault
residential towers?”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Bartel’s expression showed his opinion of that particular notion. “The idea, as I understand it, is to pen the seccies up in one convenient spot, then kick in the doors and clean them out once and for all.”

“Wonderful. Just frigging wonderful!”

Drescher suppressed a sudden urge to break something, but she wasn’t really surprised. Bentley Howell was good-looking and projected an aura of command—to the easily impressed, at least—but she sometimes wondered if he had two brain cells to rub together. Oh, he was reasonably intelligent in a lot of ways, but his contempt for seccies was bottomless, and it had led him into seriously underestimating them on several occasions she could think of right offhand. Once his prejudices engaged, his brain
dis
engaged, and she had a sinking sensation it was going to be up to her to clean up one of his more spectacular messes.

The idiot probably thinks it’s going to be a routine corridor-clearing exercise
, she thought disgustedly.
From
what Byrum’s saying, he and his people are going to be in for one hell of a painful surprise if that
is
what he thinks, though. It’s one thing to break up riots, or to sweep a single neighborhood in one of the towers
to pick up a specific suspect, but
this
is going to be an entirely different animal
.

She thought about that for another moment or two. She really didn’t like Howell, and he didn’t like her very much, either. But the Peaceforce was specifically tasked to stand behind OPS and MISD operations in case heavier support was needed. For that matter, the Mesan Planetary Peaceforce’s entire reason for being, really, was to respond to threats of seccy or slave unrest before they turned into genuine rebellion.

And, of course, to watch MISD like a hawk . . . and vice versa
, she reminded herself.

The system government deliberately encouraged a certain degree of mutual antagonism between the Internal Security Directorate and the Peaceforce. OPS and MISD had significantly more combined manpower than the MPP, but the MPP had one hell of a lot more
firepower
than either—or both—of François McGillicuddy’s agencies, and it answered to General Caspar Alpina. Alpina was the Planetary Peaceforce’s senior uniformed officer, and under the Mesan constitution,
he
answered directly to CEO Ward, not McGillicuddy. The regular police forces, the ones that dealt with criminal investigations and peacekeeping among Mesa’s full citizens, stood completely outside the organizations specifically tasked with suppressing any seccy or slave unrest, of course. As such, even their SWAT teams had precious little in the way of heavy weapons. But the various security agencies had
lots
of weapons, ranging upward from OPS’ neural whips and flechette guns through MISD’s armored air cars, tribarrels, and plasma rifles to the MPP’s armored fighting vehicles, plasma
cannon
, and assault shuttles. Modern armies tended to be quite small, since there was no real point trying to defend a planetary surface if someone else controlled that planet’s orbital space, and technically—
technically
—not even the Planetary Peaceforce was actually an “army,” at all. But when roughly a third of the planetary population had to worry about mass uprisings from the other
two
thirds, the people responsible for preventing those uprisings needed plenty of firepower.

And their civilian masters needed to be confident that the people who commanded all that firepower weren’t going to be tempted to get together and use it to get rid of the aforesaid civilian masters. Actively fostering the tension between MISD and the MPP was one way to help prevent that from happening.

Unfortunately, that tension could also produce unhappy consequences when McGillicuddy’s security agencies and Alpina’s Peaceforce needed to cooperate.

Crap
, Drescher thought.
I don’t have a choice. I
have
to com the bastard
.

She punched a dedicated button on her desk com and sat back. A few seconds later, a young man in MISD uniform appeared on her display.

“Internal Security Directorate, office of Commissioner Howell,” he said crisply. It was like Howell to use a live human to run his switchboard rather than letting the automated systems get on with it, the general thought disgustedly.

“This is Lieutenant General Drescher,” she told him. “I need to speak to the Commissioner. Immediately.”

“Hold, please,” the lieutenant replied. His image disappeared, replaced by MISD’s wallpaper, but the mailed fist and dagger of the Security Directorate’s insignia disappeared quickly.

“General Drescher.” Bentley Howell nodded his head in acknowledgment as his image replaced the wallpaper’s. “What can I do for you?”

“I understand you’re preparing to launch a sweep of Neue Rostock and Hancock,” Drescher said, coming straight to the point, although calling what he intended to do a “sweep” was clearly an enormous understatement.

“That’s right.” Howell nodded again. “I’m sending in two regiments—the Fourth and the Nineteenth.”

“I see.” Drescher looked at him for a moment, then cocked her head. “Under the circumstances, don’t you think it would be a good idea for us to liaise with each other? Make sure we’re all on the same screen if things turn ugly.”

Turn ugly
again,
you ass
, she added mentally.

“Liaise?” Howell looked at her as if she were speaking an unknown tongue. “I’m sending my people in loaded for bear, General. Things are going to turn ‘ugly,’ all right, but not for them!”

“Commissioner, you’re talking about regiment-sized attacks on residential towers,” she pointed out as calmly as she could. “We’ve never done anything like that before, even after Green Pines. And the seccies have already demonstrated they’re in possession of heavier weapons than anything they’ve ever shown us before. This is
not
going to be a cakewalk.”

“Nobody thinks it is, General.” Howell’s tone was much cooler than it had been, and his eyes were even colder. “They’re still seccies, though. They’ll break quickly enough if they see us coming in hard and fast.”

“These aren’t ‘just’ seccies, Commissioner,” Drescher said. “They’re organized groups with weapons heavier than anything we’ve ever faced before, and they’re going to be fighting on their own ground inside those damned towers.”

“Your ‘organized groups’ are packs of common criminals and seccy street scum, General. Are you suggesting that their discipline’s going to be able to match
my
people’s?” His upper lip curled. “They’ll run for their kennels as soon as they figure out what’s happening!”

“I wouldn’t count too heavily on that, if I were you,” Drescher said. “And tower assaults—especially on towers like Neue Rostock and Hancock—are one of the nightmare scenarios we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over here. Those aren’t like Rasmussen or Tyler Tower, Commissioner. You can’t envelop them vertically using the atriums and air shafts, and the way their interiors lay out, they’re even more damage resistant than one of the citizen towers. Trust me, if it turns into a serious firefight inside one of those towers, you’re going to lose a
lot
of people. Frankly, the best way to take one of them would be to seal it off and wait it out. Sooner or later the people inside it are going to run out of food, at which point they either come out and surrender or starve. Unfortunately, that takes time, and I’m fully aware that the General Board wants this concluded as quickly as possible. But if we want to do it quickly, and if everybody’s committed to assaulting them, then you need to open them up with kinetic weapons before you go poking your head into the dragon’s mouth.”

“You want to use
KEWs
inside Mendel?” Howell shook his head incredulously. “You really think you’re going to get authorization for that?”

“I’m aware that the General Board’s already discussed the option,” Drescher replied in a much cooler tone of her own. “I believe, however, that at that point the discussion centered around using KEWs to completely take out the towers. There are smaller sledgehammers available, Commissioner, and enough blows from a
little
hammer will do the job of a great
big
one.”

“I’ve got all the hammers I’m going to need,” Howell said flatly.

Drescher gazed at his com image for a moment. He probably really believed that, she thought. And it was even remotely possible—
remotely
possible—he could be right . . . assuming Jurgen Dusek and Bachue Emmett and their people broke a hell of a lot faster than Maysayuki Franconi’s had.

She wasn’t very fond of the MISD, and she didn’t really much like Howell, but this time she found herself hoping he was right and she was wrong. Because she obviously wasn’t going to change his mind, and if he wasn’t right—and if she was—he was going to discover that a seccy slum’s residential tower was one of the toughest, most intricately subdivided fortresses the human race had ever built.

Chapter 58

“—and sweep northeast, towards Hancock,” Colonel Teodosio MacKane, CO, 4th Regiment, Mesan Internal Security Directorate said, jabbing his index finger at the holographic display in his lightly armored Cyclops command vehicle. “And while the Nineteenth’s doing that, we’re going to sweep north
west
, towards Neue Rostock. Randy,” he looked up to dart a ferocious look at Major Randall Myers, commanding officer of his 2nd Battalion, “your people are going to take point. Brockie”—those angry eyes moved to Major Camelia Brockmann, 1st Battalion’s CO—“you’ll be watching Randy’s back, and I want you to peel off two companies as our reserve.”

Both majors nodded their understanding. Brockmann seemed a little less enthusiastic than Myers did, MacKane thought. It wasn’t that she looked hesitant, or afraid. She just didn’t seem as fired up and ready to go as Myers obviously was. That was the main reason he picked 2nd Battalion to lead and 1st Battalion as its supporting element. Myers and his company commanders were clearly eager to get to grips with the seccies who’d mauled the Public Safety troopers so badly, and MacKane wanted someone who was ready to kick ass leading the way. It wasn’t that anyone in the MISD felt all warm and fuzzy where OPS was concerned, but it was a really bad idea to let seccies get the mistaken notion that they could kill
any
security troops without paying the sort of price that would give any survivors, their children, their grandchildren, and their
great-
grandchildren
nightmares.

“All right, then. Get back to your units. We kick off in twenty minutes.”

* * *

“What now, Ferguson?”

Captain Gavin Shultz sounded more than a little exasperated as he glared at Bravo Company’s problem child. Schultz had commanded Bravo for almost three T-years, and Lieutenant Connor Ferguson had commanded Bravo’s 2nd Platoon—and been a pain in Shultz’s ass—for just over one of those years. To be honest, Shultz had never been able to figure out why Ferguson had joined the Security Directorate in the first place. The man’s mind—or heart, at least—simply wasn’t in the job, and he was a stickler for following rules and procedures, the sort who didn’t seem to grasp that sometimes you just had to ignore The Book and get the fucking job
done
. Schultz had known a few others like Ferguson, people who prided themselves on their “professionalism” but didn’t have the guts when the dirty work came along. Who thought they could keep the fucking seccies in their place without breaking a lot of heads and an occasional neck in the process.

Schultz hadn’t heard Regan Snyder talking about the “seccy problem” at the Directors’ conference, but if he had, he would have endorsed her sentiments strongly. He knew exactly why
he’d
joined the MISD eighteen years ago. Whatever people like Ferguson might think,
he
knew—like Snyder—that the mere existence of the seccies owed itself to a centuries-old blunder which had gifted later generations of Mesans with a problem that could only get worse. And it had. Anyone with eyes to see had known that even before Green Pines. Seccies were scum, genetically indistinguishable from the slaves who’d spawned them, and they bred like flies. Everyone knew they routinely evaded the birth licenses citizens abode by, and they packed into their filthy warrens like rats, scurrying around in their own filth. And they were always
there
, always turning up on the news, reminding people that the galaxy wasn’t perfect. There was always some stupid damn intellectual to whine about how
terribly
the seccies were treated, how restricting them to second-class citizenship was a blight on the honor of Mesa’s full citizens. But worse—worst of all—their mere existence was a constant, standing threat to Mesa’s fundamental security. They’d come from slaves, been manumitted, granted their freedom, and if it could happen to
their
ancestors, then why shouldn’t the
current
generation of slaves aspire to the same thing? And it was that kind of aspiration that led to things like Green Pines or Dobzhansky.

That was what people like Ferguson never seemed to grasp, and it was why Gavin Shultz had joined the Champions of Safety and Order when he was only twenty-three years old. The CoSO wasn’t quite legal, but it wasn’t really
ill
egal, either. Its members understood that seccies had to be kept in their place, and Shultz, who’d risen to the rank of Champion First, had done his bit—after hours and purely on his own time, of course—to teach quite a few seccies their places over the years. Of course, he also used his official contacts to figure out which of the seccies needed tutoring, as well. That was one reason he
loved
his job.

And the stupidity of people who couldn’t see the truth when it stared them straight in the face was one of the reasons he had very little patience with people like Connor Ferguson.

“I just wanted to be clear on the rules of engagement, Sir,” Ferguson said now.

At only a hundred and seventy-seven centimeters, Ferguson looked like a teenager beside the taller, much more powerfully built Shultz, even in his utility armor. The MISD’s UA wasn’t quite the equal of battle armor, for a lot of reasons, starting with cost. Battle armor was expensive, and not even an affluent star system like Mesa had an unlimited budget. Worse, the corporate interests who managed Mesa had no desire to pay any more taxes than they absolutely had to, which meant that the Mesa System government’s budget got a substantially smaller slice of the Gross System Product than was the case for most other wealthy systems. Besides, MISD troopers didn’t really need all-up battle armor. They weren’t going to be fighting in a vacuum; a lot of their combat missions
were
going to be inside structures, where battle armor’s bulk could be a distinct disadvantage in close quarters combat; and they weren’t likely to need to carry full-scale plasma cannon around with them. Even more to the point, battle armor was an energy hog; utility armor got over three times the endurance off of little more than two thirds the power, which meant its wearer could remain on station and in action for five times as long off a single set of power packs. “Dwell time” was a major consideration in peacekeeping missions, and any MISD trooper would agree that more time out at the sharp edge was worth the sacrifice of a few bells and whistles. But if UA was more compact than battle armor, it was certainly bulky enough to project an aura of brute, threatening power, especially in the eyes of someone who had no armor at all, and MISD’s designers had deliberately enhanced that aspect of it. It was inky black, trimmed in scarlet, with exaggerated, spiky pauldrons, spike-knuckled gauntlets, and one-way mirrored visors marked with the MSID’s gauntlet and dagger insignia.

At the moment, Ferguson’s visor was raised, and Shultz saw the unhappiness in his brown eyes.

“I believe the colonel was perfectly clear about the rules of engagement,” the captain said coldly. “If you failed to understand him, however, I’ll clarify for you. We’re operating under Rules of Engagement Omega, Lieutenant Ferguson.”

“I understood that, Sir,” Ferguson said stubbornly. “I just want to be perfectly clear about taking prisoners and about minors.”

Shultz glared at him. ROE Omega called for the immediate application of lethal force; allowed the use of all available and necessary supports—including airstrikes, armor, and indirect fire up to but not including KEW strikes—all released to frontline commanders on an on-call basis; and authorized the engagement of any potential threat without regard to possible collateral damage. The keywords, as Shultz and Ferguson both understood perfectly well, were “
potential
threat.” Officially, that simply freed an officer’s hands to deal with enemies who hadn’t already clearly resolved whether or not they were “potential” dangers by direct hostile action. In fact, it could readily be construed to cover
any
situation, because in an operation like Rat Catcher—especially after it had already gone so spectacularly wrong earlier in the day—a unit commander could construe just about anything as a “potential threat.”

The universe was an imperfect place, however, and even MISD had been forced to cave to public opinion—and appearances—in some respects. The bleeding hearts could always be expected to whine about the rigor reality required, and there was always somebody to point to the “interstellar public relations” consequences of being
too
forthright in anything that was committed to writing and available as part of the public record. That was why even under ROE Omega, someone attempting to surrender was supposed to be allowed to do so and why MISD personnel were supposed to minimize casualties, especially among minor children. And unless Shultz was sadly mistaken, Ferguson had his armor’s tac systems online, which meant he was almost certainly recording this entire conversation. It would be just like the sanctimonious SOB, and there was no telling how a court of inquiry might . . . misconstrue anything that wasn’t by The Book.

“All right, all right,” the captain said testily. “If the fucking bastards want to surrender—and if they get their goddamn hands up quick enough—let ’em. And if you can tell it’s a kid, and if it’s not carrying a grenade around with it, you can secure it and hand it over to the consolidation teams. Is that clear enough?”

“Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”

Connor saluted, closed his UA’s visor, and headed back to his platoon with Gavin Shultz’s glare boring holes in his back the entire way.

* * *

Section Sergeant Kayla Barrett watched Lieutenant Ferguson from behind the protective concealment of her visor with smoldering eyes as he walked back toward her. Most of the time, Barrett found Ferguson tolerable enough. Too much of a goody-goody two-shoes for a MISD combat officer, maybe, but fair-minded and firm about discipline and training without descending into martinet territory. But today wasn’t “most of the time,” and
today
Kayla Barrett had very little patience for anyone who wasn’t as eager to get it stuck in as she was.

She stood very still, hazel eyes hard, and felt herself quivering with rage. Before the Blue Lagoon Park atrocity, she’d had a brother, a sister, a sister-in-law, two nieces, and a nephew. Today, she had none of them, and nothing in heaven or hell was going to stop her from avenging those deaths. She didn’t know if anyone in front of her had personally had anything at all to do with that attack, and it didn’t matter. If they hadn’t done it themselves, they’d still produced whoever had. Those murderers had come out of the seccies, they were hiding
among
the seccies, and that meant they were being hidden
by
the seccies. The evidence was clear enough on that . . . and that was all she had to know.

Barrett had never joined the Champions of Safety and Order like Captain Shultz, but she knew
he
had, and she’d been tempted a time or two herself. Today, she wished she had. In fact, that was something she intended to look into when they pulled back to barracks.

But for now—

“Get them saddled up, Section Sergeant,” Lieutenant Ferguson said. “We move in in five minutes.”

“Yes,
Sir!
”

* * *

“Shit—those’re Misties!” Nine-Finger Jake exclaimed.

He and Jenney the Hand crouched in the mouth of a drainage culvert on the edge of Trondheim Park. Trondheim wasn’t that much of a park compared to the facilities available to the children of full citizens, but it was normally kept neat and clean and it offered a wide green space, dotted with only moderately run-down playground equipment, around a small pond suitable for toy boats or wading, and it was usually well populated by kids.

Today it was deserted, aside from the dozen or so bodies scattered across it. Most of those bodies belonged to seccies, but two of them had been OPS troopers. The Safeties had been stripped of their equipment, and Nine-Finger had liberated their secure coms in the process. He’d sent one of them farther up the line to Jurgen Dusek, but he’d kept the other, and he’d been listening to it for the last couple of hours. He’d rather enjoyed the panic he’d heard in the voices of the Safeties once they realized they weren’t going to have things their own way for a change, and he’d taken a savage delight in the steadily mounting casualty totals they’d been announcing. But Nine-Finger had been around for almost seventy years. He’d known how Security was going to respond to the Safeties’ heavy losses. Still, he hadn’t expected to see MISD troopers this soon.

“Shit,” Jenney muttered beside him.

Technically, neither she nor the considerably older Nine-Finger were formally associated with the Dusek Organization. They were independents, but any independent knew enough to stay on good terms with the local boss, and Dusek was more reasonable than most. As long as they paid the turf fees he charged—and they weren’t exorbitant—independents were welcome to fill any of the niches between his organization’s main areas of operation. In fact, he often had odds and ends of jobs he was willing to farm out to the independents who kept their noses clean and followed the rules . . . the very first one of which was that they never,
ever
made any grief for the “civilians” living in his district. Nobody got robbed, beaten up, or raped in the Neu Rostock District unless they’d crossed the line themselves first. Dusek took that sort of thing seriously—violence and casual thievery weren’t just bad for business; they were also things the people in his district expected him to hold to a minimum—and it looked like he felt even more strongly about it than Jenney had realized.

He’d already put out the word that Neue Rostock Tower was buckling down for heavy action, and she knew she and Nine-Finger could find a place there. But the western boundary of Trondheim was Eaker Boulevard, one of the underground pedestrian ways—a seccy pedestrian way, of course, which meant its powered slidewalks worked no more than half the time—and an awful lot of seccies were fleeing towards whatever refuge they could find on foot, now that public transportation outside the towers themselves had been shut down by the Mendel authorities. Working slidewalks or not, Eaker Boulevard was one of the primary accesses to Neue Rostock; if it was blocked, a lot of people trying to find safety for themselves and their families would be caught in the open or trapped in its underground portions. As independents, she and Nine-Finger had no formally assigned role in the Dusek Organization’s defensive plans, so they’d appointed themselves as lookouts for the crowds of civilians following the boulevard towards the hoped-for safety of the boss’s tower.