Cauldron of Ghosts (53 page)

“What the fuck do we do now?” she asked, watching the UA-clad figures step into the open and begin moving methodically across the park.

“Damned if I know,” Nine-Finger replied, rubbing his depilated scalp with the maimed left hand which had earned him his nickname. “I was hoping it’d be more Safeties, but these pop guns—” a twitch of his head indicated the civilian pulse rifles he and Jenney had been issued “—aren’t going to do much against UA suits.”

“What’re those bastards in front carrying?” Jenney asked nervously. “Don’t look like pulse rifles or flechette guns to me!”

“That’s because they aren’t,” Nine-Finger said grimly. “Those’re neural disruptors, girl.”

Jenney shuddered. She’d never actually seen a disruptor used, not in person, but she’d seen them on HD, and one of her cousins had lost the use of her right arm after a Safety casually lashed out with a neural whip in a “crowd clearing” operation. Disruptors used exactly the same tech, but they were a lot more powerful than any neural whip, and a whip was no more than a meter or so in length. That was all the range it had, whereas disruptors could kill someone at as much as a hundred and fifty meters. They were shorter ranged than pulse rifles and far less efficient at simply killing people than flechette guns, but the Misties didn’t use them because they were
efficient
; they used them because they were terror weapons. Even someone who might face a pulser dart with a snarl of defiance might think twice—or even three times—about facing a disruptor.

“What—” She stopped and swallowed hard. “What do we—?”

She swallowed again, and Nine-Finger turned his head to give her a grim, humorless smile. Then he handed her the com he’d looted from the Safeties’ bodies.

“What
you
do is shag ass back to Eaker Boulevard,” he told her. “Take this with you. Dusek’ll have some of his people out trying to manage traffic. Find one of them and give it to him. Then head for Neue Rostock yourself. They’re going to need every shooter they can find before this is over.”

“
Me?
What about
you?
”

“Me, I’m thinking I’ve let the fucking Safeties and Misties hammer enough people I cared about.” Nine-Finger’s eyes were back on the approaching MISD troops. “Time I did a little hammering of my own.”

“Are you fucking
crazy?
They’ll
kill
you, Nine-Finger!”

“A man’s got to die doing something,” he replied. “Might’s well be something I
enjoy
doing and not just sleepin’ in bed. ’Sides, I’ve got a surprise’r two for those bastards. Now
get
, girl!”

Jenney darted one more agonized look at his face, torn by terror, fear, hope, and shame at the thought of leaving him behind, but he only quirked one corner of his mouth and jerked his head towards Eaker Boulevard.

She gave his shoulder one quick, fierce squeeze, then disappeared down the culvert at a run.

* * *

Trooper 1/c Jubair Azocar watched his HUD with one eye but kept the other peeled for things the HUD might overlook. He’d found out the hard way that his UA’s sensors were biased in favor of threats its onboard computer recognized and tended to ignore things that didn’t fall neatly into its threat hierarchies. It looked for power sources, infrared signatures associated with vehicles or opponents in powered armor, and large numbers of individual IR signatures that its analysis indicated were moving—or positioned—to act cooperatively. Within those parameters, it was very, very good.
Outside
those parameters, it was dumb as a rock. Of course, anything it missed spotting was unlikely to be dangerous enough to actually get through Azocar’s armor, but he and the rest of Bravo Company had passed at least twenty or thirty dead Safeties already. He had no desire to suffer the same fate they had.

He paused suddenly, raising his right hand in the ancient visual command to stop for the benefit of the riflemen covering his flanks.

“Central, Bravo-Two-Niner,” he said. “Patch Bravo-Zero-Three.” He waited a single heartbeat as the communications net’s AI connected him to Sergeant Barrett. Then—

“Bravo-Two-Niner, Zero-Three,” Kayla Barrett’s voice said in his ear bud. “Go.”

“I’ve got what looks like one Tango about six hundred meters west of my present position,” he said, highlighting the icon on his HUD, which simultaneously displayed it on Barrett’s. It was on the far side of a quartet of picnic shelters, in exactly the right place for someone to be hunkered down in the mouth of the drainage culvert showing on the terrain overlay on Azocar’s HUD.

“What’s he doing?” Barrett asked.

“Just sitting there, near’s I can tell. Doesn’t seem real likely he’d be hanging around if he wasn’t up to
something
, though.”

“Well, we’re under the Omega rules.” Azocar could almost hear her shrug in her voice. “Waste his ass.”

“Gotcha, Sarge,” he replied, and started moving cautiously towards the motionless icon.

Normally, Azocar would have been carrying one of his section’s heavy tribarrels. Or he might have been carrying the plasma rifle which was his standard alternate armament. But today, he’d been issued one of the neural disruptors, and after the thousands of civilians these terrorist bastards had killed—and all the dead Safeties he’d passed on the way here—he was ready to use it. In fact, he was looking
forward
to using it . . . a lot.

He wasn’t stupid, however, and he made sure his flanking teammates were covering his ass with their pulse rifles. The only real drawback of the disruptor, aside from its weight, which was a bitch, was its relatively short range. On the other hand, his sensors had pretty clearly identified the Tango’s weapon as a light civilian-model pulse rifle. That had been plenty to slaughter the Safeties, in their lighter, unpowered body armor, but it wasn’t going to do squat against utility armor. And that meant the short range of Azocar’s weapon didn’t matter at all.

He stepped into the shadows of the picnic shelters. They were deliberately rustic looking, the tough plastics of their construction disguised—imperfectly—to look like logs with the bark still on them, and his lip curled as he saw the heart shape and interlocking initials some stupid seccy had laboriously carved into the rocklike material. It had clearly been done with an old-fashioned blade, not a lasergraver, and doing it that way must have taken hours.

What a fucking stupid way to spend your time
, he thought contemptuously, but his eyes never stopped sweeping his surroundings, alert for any threat. There wasn’t one. The shelters were empty, with a solid ceramacrete floor that offered no place to leave booby traps or hide ambushers, and there wasn’t anywhere anyone could have hidden under the picnic tables, either.

* * *

Nine-Finger Jake watched the trio of Misties heading directly towards his position in the culvert. He’d been afraid they’d come his way—the culvert was the shortest, best protected route from this side of Trondheim Park to Eaker Boulevard, and unlike certain other aspects of the area around Neue Rostock, it was probably on the city maps they’d uploaded for the operation. On the other hand, the probability that they’d come this way was the entire reason he’d chosen this particular position.

He smiled at the thought. It was the sort of smile a wolverine might smile, or perhaps a wounded tiger as it watched the hunting party come within its reach. There were a few things he knew about Trondheim Park that the Misties didn’t, and he waited patiently, his eyes on the one with the disruptor. Another three meters, he thought, and then—

* * *

Jubair Azocar’s computer’s estimate of the threat potential of Nine-Finger Jake’s pulse rifle had been completely accurate. However, it had failed to notice a few other minor items. Probably because they were so primitive that they didn’t register as threats at all. After all, what could be particularly dangerous about a couple of abandoned, old-fashioned gas grills?

As Azocar stepped between them, his computer and he found out.

* * *

Nine-Finger pressed the button.

Gas grills for recreational cooking had been around for more than two thousand years, and they hadn’t changed a great deal over that long, long period. Most of them still used butane, and most of their storage bottles stored the gas at about the same fourteen bars of pressure which had been the norm since well before humankind ever left the Sol System. These grills, however, were no longer quite standard. Nine-Finger had been an off-the-books employee in Sukharov for almost thirty years, and he’d made a few selections from Sukharov Tower after the initial OPS advance had been driven back. Among other things, he’d helped himself to, a pair of air car hydrogen tanks. They were only about twenty percent bigger than the gas grills’ normal bottles, which meant they could just be squeezed into the same space under the burners, but the gas inside them was stored in liquid form . . . at
eight hundred
bars of pressure.

When Nine-Finger pressed the button, the catalyst cutting heads he’d installed around each hydrogen tank’s feed valves activated. It was like closing the blades of a hedge trimmer on a green branch; the cutting heads sliced through the tanks’ tough synthetics without fuss or bother . . . and without striking a single spark.

Fortunately, Nine-Finger had thoughtfully positioned the tanks valve-up. Instead of heading for the sky like rockets, the sudden twin hurricanes of erupting hydrogen shrieked up through the grills like cryogenic cyclones, blasting their covers several meters into the air with a sound like dying banshees.

* * *

Azocar froze, stunned by the sudden eruption, as the world around him disappeared into a cryogenic fog. For an instant, until his UA’s sensors adjusted and dialed the volume back, the scream of escaping gas was like being hit in the head. There was a moment of heart-stopping panic, but a huge tide of relief followed almost instantly. The sight of the grill covers lifting into the heavens on the columns of vaporizing hydrogen had been startling, but it would take more than that to damage utility armor, and—

* * *

Nine-Finger pressed another button, and Jubair Azocar discovered—briefly—that he’d been wrong as the cloud of hydrogen gas erupted in an improvised fuel-air bomb that was fully capable of shredding, and incinerating, even utility armor.

Chapter 59

“
Down!
Get the fuck down right fucking
now!
”

“All right!
All right!
” The young seccy woman went to her knees on the parking garage’s ceramacrete, hands already clasped behind her head, her face tight with fear as she looked into the emitter of Kimmo Ludvigsen’s neural disruptor. “I’m down,” she said. “See? I’m down!”

“Shut the fuck up!” the MISD trooper’s UA’s external speakers turned what was already a shout into a deafening bellow. “How many others are back there?!” he demanded. “And don’t fuck around with me, seccy!”

“A dozen, maybe.” The seccy tried to keep her voice as level and submissive as she possibly could, but the words came out cracked and shaky, as frightened as her face. “They’re just kids, Sir. Only kids and a couple of teachers. We’re . . . we’re just trying to get them somewhere safe.”

“I told you to shut the fuck up!” Ludvigsen screamed, and the seccy clamped her mouth shut, her eyes—more terrified than ever in the face of his contradictory commands—cutting to where Section Sergeant Barrett stood watching.

Barrett saw the fear in those eyes, and a part of her almost sympathized with the seccy. Almost. Maybe she really would have sympathized a few T-centuries ago—when she’d still had siblings and nieces and a nephew . . . and before Bravo Company had taken so many losses.

Jubair Azocar and Trooper Irena Gnoughy had been 2nd Platoon’s first deaths, and Márton Neveu, the second of the two riflemen who’d been supporting Azocar, was going to be a long time regenerating. Nor had they been the platoon’s only casualties. Despite their armor and the limitations of the seccy’s improvised weapons, the seccy had cost 2nd Platoon three more troopers when they went after him, and 2nd Platoon’s casualties were actually light compared to some of the other units. Colonel Dothan Perelló’s 19th Regiment had been hit even harder as it headed towards Hancock, but at least the combat chatter suggested the 19th had gotten more of its own back. The bastard who’d killed Azocar and Gnoughy—and who’d also killed Matheson, van Noort, and Sugase—had gotten away clean in the confusion.

Barrett felt her jaw muscles clenching as she remembered that. The incredible thermobaric explosion which had taken out Azocar’s entire fire team had stunned her just as completely as anyone else in her section. She still didn’t know exactly how the goddamned seccy had pulled it off, or how he could’ve gotten something that powerful close enough without Azocar’s armor sensors picking it up. She’d been back over the sensor data herself three times, and there was nothing—
nothing
—aside from the standard igniter power cell in either of the booby-trapped grills. Nothing else, not even trace emissions from old-fashioned chemical explosives!

They’d gotten a firm position fix on the seccy who had to have detonated the trap, though. Her own section had halted in place, prepared to cover Brad Kempthorne’s 2nd Section as it leapfrogged towards the seccy’s position. That was standard operating procedure, and this time around SOP had been a real lifesaver . . . for
1st Section
, anyway.

The seccy might not have had utility armor or its sensors, but he obviously hadn’t been blind. He’d seen what was coming and hightailed it down the drainage culvert before Kempthorne’s section could nail him, and 2nd Section had gone in pursuit. That was how they’d discovered the
next
booby trap. Whatever he’d used the first time around had worked even better underground. The thermal pulse had virtually vaporized Kirsten van Noort. There hadn’t been a lot more left of Matheson or Sugase, and the pressure front erupting from either end of the culvert had sent two more of Kempthorne’s section to the hospital. If not for their utility armor’s protection and their helmets’ self-contained air supply, the casualties would have been still worse.

Even
with
the armor, 2nd Section was down five of its twelve troopers, and the survivors’ morale was badly shaken. The deaths had hit all the rest of 2nd Platoon almost equally hard, for that matter. They hadn’t been Barrett’s troopers. For that matter, she and van Noort had cordially hated one another. But they’d still been part of the same platoon, part of the same unit, and all the death and injuries had only intensified 2nd Platoon’s hatred and fury. The platoon wanted revenge, and the fear of similar booby traps, of similar attacks from the hated and despised seccies who were supposed to be fleeing from them in panic, only fanned that hunger’s ferocity.

Just as it fanned Barrett’s own ferocity.

“Get the rest of them out here, seccy!” the section sergeant snapped. The kneeling woman stared at her, then collapsed with a wailing cry of pain as the butt of Ludvigsen’s disruptor smashed into the pit of her stomach.

“That’s enough, Kimmo!” Barrett snapped as the trooper raised the disruptor high, obviously preparing to bring the buttplate down on the seccy’s skull. His mirrored visor—featureless, but for the MISD emblem—turned to look at the section sergeant for a heartbeat before he stepped back slowly, obviously unwillingly, in obedience to her command.

The seccy writhed, fighting to get her breath back, and Barrett stepped closer to her. She prodded the prostrate woman with the toe of an armored boot.

“I
said
, get the rest of them out here,” she said in a cold, flat tone.

The seccy managed to struggle back to her knees, staring up at her imploringly, and the section sergeant let the muzzle of her own pulse rifle line up with the other woman’s forehead.

“If we have to go in there after them, it’ll be even worse,” she said. “And you won’t be here to see it.”

The seccy swallowed hard, then nodded.

“Please don’t hurt them,” she half whispered. “They’re kids—only
kids!
”

“
Now
, seccy,” Barrett replied.

The seccy stared at her for a moment longer, then licked her lips and raised her voice.

“Come on out, kids!” she called, her eyes locked with Barrett’s. “It’ll be okay. Promise.”

Nothing happened for a few seconds, then, slowly—one by one—another young woman and eleven children, all of them probably between ten and eleven T-years old, crept out of the shadows where they’d hidden behind the derelict, obviously abandoned air lorry. Twelve more faces, each as terrified as the first seccy Ludvigsen had caught, stared imploringly in the section sergeant’s direction as they, too, went to their knees.

“All right,” Barrett said. “Now we’re all going back to—”

The sudden, evil whine of a neural disruptor cut her off, and her head snapped around as Ludvigsen and Brock Sanchez fired into the kneeling prisoners.

Very few ways to die were more agonizing than a bolt from a neural disruptor. It literally tore the central nervous system of its victim apart, and unless the brain itself was hit directly, the victim was denied even the threadbare mercy of unconsciousness.

Ludvigsen and Sanchez swept their fire over the children and the other seccy woman, and the convulsing, shrieking reflections of their victims danced across their mirrored visors like demons. Despite her own fury, her own hatred, Barrett’s felt her gorge rising, tasted the acrid bite of vomit at the back of her throat, but there was nothing she could do about it. From the instant those firing studs were depressed, all the seccies—all the
children
—were dead. All that remained were the long, horrifying seconds it took for every organ in their bodies to stop functioning and their brains to gutter down into the merciful dark.

Barrett stared at the twisted, still twitching bodies. Then, against her own will, her eyes returned to the young woman still kneeling in front of her. A young woman whose expression was absolutely blank, blank with something that went beyond horror and shock into the pure, unadulterated inability to believe what she’d just seen. And then, slowly, like images appearing on an antique negative in the developing bath, understanding, knowledge—and
hate
—seeped back into her face. She looked up the length of Barrett’s pulse rifle, her eyes filled with soul-searing hatred and the knowledge of what had to happen next, and for an instant, Barrett saw what she saw. Saw the hulking, black-armored shape, picked out with scarlet, blazoned with MISD’s gauntlet and dagger, faceless behind its mirrored visor. And in that instant, the section sergeant realized exactly how Mendel’s seccies must see her and her troopers.

Her finger squeezed without any conscious thought on her part, the seccy’s head exploded under the pulser dart’s hypersonic impact, and as the body pitched backward, spraying brain tissue and finely divided fragments of skull across the ceramacrete, Kayla Barrett didn’t know whether she’d pulled the trigger out of hatred, to silence a possible witness . . . or simply to escape the bottomless hate radiating from those eyes like a curse.

* * *

“What the
hell
do you people think you’re
doing?!
”

Barrett’s head snapped around and her face paled as Lieutenant Connor Ferguson appeared. Second Platoon’s commander had been moving with its third section, where he and his platoon sergeant could keep an eye on his reserve force. For a moment, Barrett had no idea how he could suddenly be
here
, instead of there, but only for a moment. He must have been monitoring the take from her own armor’s sensors—as the platoon commander, he could plug into any of his noncoms’ sensor feeds at will. And, knowing the lieutenant, he’d been headed her way at a run to try to get a handle on the situation.

Why the
fuck
didn’t you get here thirty seconds sooner?
a bitter voice demanded in the back of her brain. The memory of her brother’s face floated before her, but it was no longer an icon demanding vengeance. He’d been a good man, her brother—a
gentle
man—and all she saw in his eyes now was horror.

“I’m—” she began, with absolutely no idea of what she was going to say, but Ferguson cut her off.

“I don’t want to hear it.” The words were carved out of frozen helium, but they came over the dedicated command channel, excluding the rest of her section. “I expected better out of you, Section Sergeant,” he continued in that same ice-crusted tone. “I
depended
on better out of you. You’re relieved. Report to Platoon Sergeant Frasch. Tell her I want her out here to take personal charge of this cluster fuck you’ve created.”

“I—” she began again, then swallowed. “Yes, Sir,” she said.

Her voice sounded dead in her own ears, but she saluted—out of ingrained habit and muscle memory more than volition—slung her pulser, and started towards the rear.

Ferguson watched her for a moment, then turned to the rest of the section.

“I know all of you—all of
us
—are keyed up, pissed off, and confused as hell,” he said over the section-wide circuit. “But there’s no excuse for this kind of thing. The Omega rules don’t mean we can just slaughter
children
out of hand, for God’s sake! How do you think Command’s going to react when they review the tac recordings from your armor? Or were you
thinking
at all?!”

Barrett stepped out of the parking garage and trudged towards Platoon Sergeant Loretta Frasch’s icon on her HUD. Her utility armor’s exoskeletal muscles didn’t seem to be working very well. Each of her feet weighed at least a ton, and the slung pulse rifle on her shoulder weighed at least ten times that much. The memory of those screams, the bone-breaking contortions as the disruptors hit, and the
look
—the hatred and knowledge—in the kneeling seccy’s eyes . . . all of that went with her, curses from beyond the grave which she knew she would never—
could
never—be free of that dragged at her soul like an anchor. It was just—

“Sarge! Sergeant Barrett!”

She froze, then whirled. It was Ludvigsen, waving frantically for her to come back. She didn’t want to. More than she’d ever not wanted to do something in her entire life, she wanted never to enter that parking garage again. But Ludvigsen only waved harder, and she drew a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and went back the way she’d come.

Every step seemed even harder than the ones she’d taken away from the garage, and as she turned the corner back into it, she saw what she’d somehow known she was going to see.

“The bastard must’ve been hiding over there in the back corner, Sarge.” Ludvigsen was talking fast, so quickly the words blurred into one another, as he jabbed an index finger at the patch of sunlight admitted by the break in the garage’s back wall. “We were all listening to the lieutenant, and nobody even noticed the son of a bitch until he’d fired! Took us all by surprise. By the time we realized, he’d ducked back through that opening. Sanchez and Timmons are after him now, but I don’t think they’re going to catch him.”

Barrett gazed down at the armored corpse lying half across one of the dead seccies. A seccy sniper—
that
was what they wanted her to believe? And a seccy sniper who’d somehow magically squeezed himself—and his weapon—through a half-meter hole to escape pursuit before anyone could even open fire on him?

The entry point was only a tiny hole in almost the center of Ferguson’s visor. She was confident that if she’d measured it, it would have been precisely five millimeters in diameter . . . exactly the same as the Mark 9 pulse rifle’s darts. Judging by the wreckage and the blood spatter, it had been a Mark 3 explosive round, not the solid Mark 1. There was just . . . nothing left of the back of the lieutenant’s helmet.

Or of his skull.

Someone wanted to make damned sure, didn’t they?
The thought flowed through her brain as she looked down at the body.
Idiots. Do you think he turned off his tac recorder while he reamed you a new one? The court-martial’ll never buy that shit about seccy snipers! Where the hell would they get—

And then it hit her. Ferguson probably
had
killed the “record” function on his armor systems. He’d probably done it even before he chewed
her
out. It was the sort of thing he
would
have done, trying to nip the situation in the bud before it got even worse. Trying to get his people back under control before someone farther up the military food chain had to take cognizance of it and hammered them, made an example out of them. And that meant . . .