Cauldron of Ghosts (58 page)

The passageway behind her was blocked by the ceiling which had crushed the rest of the platoon. From the confusion on the com net, it sounded as if at least some of Delta Company, which had been following 2nd Platoon’s advance, was still fighting, but the information was useless. She couldn’t retreat that way, and even if she’d tried, a torrent of seccies was pouring down across the rubble. Besides, it didn’t sound like Delta was going to last much longer than her own section. The members of Malden’s fire team flung themselves around, hammering disruptor and pulser fire back the way they’d come, and Ludvigsen, Timmons, and Sanchez sprayed more fire in all directions as the baying seccies closed in.

Some of the attackers were going down—Barrett could tell that much—but not enough of them, and a sudden sense of something almost like calm flowed through her, despite the terror and adrenaline lashing her system. She settled herself into the prone firing position she’d learned on the MISD’s rifle range so long ago, looked for a target, found it, and squeezed the trigger. The seccy went down, and she swung her electronic sight to the right, looking for another target, knowing it wasn’t going to make one bit of difference in the end.

“Follow me!” she heard Captain Shultz shouting over the com, and wondered vaguely where he was headed. Forward, probably, knowing him. It didn’t matter anyway.

“
Follow me!
Fol—”

The captain’s voice died abruptly, and it didn’t matter. She heard someone else screaming endlessly over the com, and that didn’t matter either.

Nothing mattered, and as Kayla Barrett squeezed her trigger again and again, a small, distant corner of her mind realized she wasn’t going to have to worry about a court-martial after all.

Chapter 63

“—understand that, Sir,” Gillian Drescher tried to keep her voice as calmly reasonable as possible, “but what happened to Commissioner Howell’s troops is an indication that if we don’t—”

“And I understand your position, General,” General Caspar Alpina interrupted from the com display of her Minotaur command vehicle. It was bigger and more heavily armored than OPS’ Cyclops, and both its computer support and it communications facilities were better. Not that Drescher was especially thankful for the latter, just at the moment. “I’m afraid the decision’s been made—made at the highest level—and there’s no point in our continuing this discussion at this time.”

Alpina was a trim, muscular, quick-moving man with a depilated scalp, a thin mustache, and dark eyes. Under normal circumstances, he radiated an aura of decisiveness, and Drescher had always found him a reasonable man to work for. Unfortunately, she was coming to the conclusion that however excellent he might be as a peacetime administrative, even as a trainer of combat troops, that decisiveness of his was sadly lacking once he came up against the hard edges of reality.

You’re probably being too hard on him
, she told herself.
He’s standing between you and the General Board, and you know perfectly
well what kind of shit has to be coming down all around him after
Howell’s
fucking stroke of genius. You should be damned grateful he’s there to weather the shit storm instead of you! But if the Board really insists on this
. . .

“I understand my orders, Sir,” she said, locking eyes with him on the com. “And I will, of course, carry them out to the very best of my ability. For the record, however, if my requests for supporting fires are . . . disallowed, both the cost in lives and in lost time will go up, possibly dramatically.”

“I’ll take your comments under advisement, General Drescher,” Alpina replied. “I’ll go further and say I fully understand your reservations and that I’ll pass them on to CEO Ward with my own endorsement. But we’re both soldiers. We don’t always have to like our orders. We don’t even always have to agree with our orders. We do have to
follow
them, however.”

“Understood, Sir.” Drescher smiled grimly. “One way or the other, we’ll get it done.”

“Good, Gillian,” Alpina said in a markedly less formal tone. “I know you will. Now I’ll get out of your way and let you get to it.”

“Thank you, Sir,” Drescher said, and then snorted as the display went blank. Both she and Alpina knew “thank you” was the last thing she’d wanted to say. Unhappily for a serving officer, there were times when what one
wanted
to say was . . . unacceptable. And, she acknowledged sourly, when saying it damned well wouldn’t do any good, anyway.

She climbed out of the comfortable crash chair and crossed the Minotaur’s cramped compartment to the open rear hatch. She stood at the top of the ramp formed by the lowered hatch door, feeling the night wind ruffle her short-cropped black hair, and looked out into the wreckage Bentley Howell had left her.

It was remotely possible that Howell’s patrons on the General Board would manage to save his hide in the end. Whether or not they could save his
career
was a much more doubtful matter, and if there was any justice in the world, he’d end up stripped of his rank and spending at least a decade or two behind bars. It was even remotely possible the Board would offer him up as the sacrificial victim—and deservedly so, in this case—when they had to face the rest of the galaxy and explain just what the
fuck
they thought they’d been doing.

She looked to the east, where the thick column of smoke still rose above the shattered ruins of Hancock Tower, black and silver in the light of Mesa’s larger moon, like the plume streaming from a volcano’s caldera after the eruption.

There was plenty of other smoke to join it, and more than enough fine ash and dust for any self-respecting eruption. Only this was no volcano.

“Did the general change his mind, Ma’am?” Colonel Bartel asked, and she turned her head to where he stood beside the Minotaur.

“I’m afraid it’s not General Alpina’s mind we have to change,” she said. “You were right about how the Board was going to respond.”

“
We
were right, Ma’am,” he corrected, and she shrugged. He was right, of course, although she’d been at least a little more optimistic about getting the civilians to understand simple, self-evident military truths. Probably, she conceded, because as the commander upon whom this disaster had been dumped, she’d
had
to be more optimistic about that. On the other hand, optimism was something in increasingly short supply.

She had no idea what might have been going through Bentley Howell’s mind. In fact, she rather doubted that
he
did at this point, either. Whatever might have passed for thought on his part, however, had probably been about equally compounded of fury, panic, and—most important ingredient of all—sheer fucking stupidity. And all of it had undoubtedly been made worse by his sudden discovery that his lifelong contempt for seccies had been . . . misplaced.

The defenders of Hancock Tower had butchered three of his battalions. Barely eight percent of the men and women he’d sent into the tower had stumbled back out again, and a third of those had been wounded. Officially, the remaining eighteen hundred-plus MISD personnel were currently listed as “missing in action.” Since their bodies hadn’t been recovered, there was no official confirmation of the armor telemetry reporting their deaths. That was a mighty thin fig leaf for the Culture and Information people to be waving about, however, and Drescher—and anyone else with an IQ above five—knew perfectly well that every single one of those people was dead.

The
lucky
ones got killed in the fighting
, she reflected grimly.
Given the way seccies feel about all nonseccies, but especially about the Safeties and the
Misties, whoever
didn’t die fighting died
hard.
I wonder if that was a factor in Howell’s thinking?
After the way he screwed the pooch by the numbers, did he think he could at least give them quick deaths?

Well, whether that was what he’d been thinking or not, he’d certainly succeeded in providing them. Along the way, he’d killed at least another twenty or thirty thousand people by Drescher’s most conservative estimate, and not all of that other twenty or thirty thousand people had been seccies or slaves.

The KEW he’d called down on Hancock hadn’t been any of the low-kiloton range strikes Drescher had had in mind. Oh, no. He’d wanted something more
decisive
than that. Something of
Jovian
dimensions. And he’d gotten it, too. No one was giving Drescher any hard yield numbers on the strike, probably because the people who had those numbers were pissing themselves trying to figure out how to convincingly understate them to the media and no one wanted the real ones leaking.

Culture and Information was already beginning to suggest that the devastation had been solely the result of cornered Ballroom terrorists detonating yet another of their nuclear devices in order to avoid capture, interrogation, and trial. According to that imaginative exercise in creative writing, Howell’s attack had actually been
succeeding
, when the heinous terrorists—whose presence in Hancock, incidentally, proved the attack had been totally justified in the first place—chose to end their lives in spectacular fashion. And, of course, in their fanatic determination, they’d used the biggest device they had in order to inflict whatever damage they could on the rest of Mendel’s infrastructure. That was, equally of course, yet more evidence of just how ruthless and bloodthirsty their mindless fanaticism truly was, since in the process they had slaughtered every inhabitant of Hancock Tower, as well. Those thousands upon thousands of
seccy
deaths were ample proof of the Ballroom’s fundamental insanity.

It was possible—
remotely
possible—that a particularly credulous ten-year-old might actually believe that, Drescher thought. No military analyst or trained physicist who examined the site was going to buy it for a moment. And neither were the non-Mesan newsies who were either already on-planet or undoubtedly swarming towards it by way of the Visigoth Wormhole at this very moment.

And that was the very reason—
one
of the very reasons—the General Board wanted her to wrap up the fighting in Mendel before that incoming tsunami of journalist outrage crashed ashore.

The idiots.

If this goes as badly as I expect it to go, newsies are going to be the
least
of our problems
, she reflected grimly.
No way in hell am I going to “wrap this up” quickly if they won’t release the tactical KEWs to me, and what happens when the seccy districts of our
other
cities figure out how long it’s taking—and how big a percentage of the Peaceforce’s total firepower it’s tying down—while I try to “wrap it up” here in Mendel? Especially with what happened to Hancock as an indication of how far we’re prepared to go?

She stood looking at that rising smoke for another few moments, then shook herself and inhaled deeply.

“All right,” she said. “I suppose it’s time we got down to it. I want a face-to-face meeting with all the brigade commanders in thirty minutes.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Bartel’s tone suggested that he’d understood the reason she’d specified a
face-to-face
conference. A commander could say things to her subordinates in a conversation like that without putting anything out over the airwaves or recording it for posterity.

Or for use by the prosecution at any subsequent courts-martial.

“Thirty minutes,” she repeated, and turned back to the Minotaur’s map table.

* * *

“I told you this would be a disaster,” Brianna Pearson said flatly. Regan Snyder glared at her across the conference table, but François McGillicuddy seemed rather more shaken. “My God, this is even worse than I expected, and I didn’t think that was
possible
!”

“I don’t know that pointing fingers is going to do us any good, Brianna,” Brandon Ward said from his place at the head of the table. “For the record, I, for one, am perfectly prepared to stipulate that you warned us about the public relations aspect of something like this. I don’t think any of us really considered the other potential consequences, however.”

Pearson bit her tongue rather firmly against the burning temptation to point out that someone—like, oh, François McGillicuddy, for example—damned well
should
have given at least a smidgen of thought to what a megaton-range kinetic energy weapon was likely to do.

It had taken out Hancock Tower, all right. Of course, the blast wave had completely flattened and destroyed the industrial spokes on either side of the Hancock District, and the nearest towers beyond those spokes had been severely damaged, as well. That property damage alone was probably in the range of hundreds of millions of Solarian credits. Then there was the damage to the subsurface infrastructure serving the
entire
city, and not just the seccies. Damage there was going to be in the
billions
of credits, and so far the confirmed death toll among first-class citizens—mostly of people who’d been flying in the vicinity in personal air cars, taxis, or buses, or the ones who’d been unfortunate enough to find themselves in subway tubes when the shockwave raced outward through them from Hancock—was over eight thousand. Another four to six thousand were unaccounted for, although most of them would probably be found safe and sound—or relatively so, at least—once the disrupted city services were restored and rescue crews could start picking through the wreckage.

Probably.

There was going to be hell to pay. In fact, there was
already
hell to pay, and Pearson suspected that one reason for McGillicuddy’s subdued manner and shaken expression was that he was the one who’d cleared Howell’s request for a KEW powerful enough to take out the entire tower. This one was bad enough that they weren’t going to be able to settle for hanging responsibility on a disposable underling. This time somebody at the top of the tree, somebody at Director’s level, was going to the wall as well, and it would be fittingly ironic if the person who took the fall truly was the one who’d authorized the strike.

“So what are we doing now?” she asked, looking directly at Ward.

“General Alpina has ordered Lieutenant General Drescher to secure control of the Neue Rostock tower as quickly as possible,” the chief executive officer replied. “We’re moving five brigades into position to support the three she already has on the ground.”

Pearson’s eyes narrowed. That certainly sounded impressive, but it also sounded ominous. The Mesan Planetary Peaceforce wasn’t an enormous organization. In fact, its total strength was only about twelve brigades, little more than thirty-two thousand men and women plus support arms. Given the amount of firepower it deployed and the fire support it could call in from orbit, its combat footprint was far, far larger than most people might have thought just from the numbers, but it still had only so many warm bodies. If they were sending eight brigades, two thirds of the MPP’s total combat formations, to
Mendel
, what was going to be left for the
rest
of the planet’s seccy districts? And why in God’s name did anyone expect to need twenty thousand fully armed and armored soldiers to take a single tower? Oh, obviously the MISD’s initial attack on Hancock had been made in too little strength, with too little knowledge of the terrain it was going to confront and far too little forethought, but still . . .

“That sounds . . . like a lot of combat power,” she said, carefully skirting the word
excessive
. “Does General Drescher feel she’s going to need all eight of those brigades?”

“We have to get in and clean this up as quickly as we can,” Snyder snapped. “If that takes a bigger hammer, then a bigger hammer’s what we’re going to use.”

“I understand the time pressure, Regan,” Pearson said coolly. “Especially after what happened at Hancock.” Her thin smile could have frozen a nova’s heart and Snyder flushed angrily. “I’m just trying to understand how the Peaceforce intends to employ all those personnel.”