Cauldron of Ghosts (59 page)

“We don’t know that Drescher is going to need all of them,” Ward said pacifically before Snyder could bark back at Pearson. He watched the Director of Commerce from the corner of one eye, and Pearson suddenly understood. “We simply felt—that is,
General Alpina
simply felt—that it would be prudent to ensure that any combat power she might find herself needing was already deployed and ready to respond.”

“I see.” Pearson sat back in her chair, gazing at Snyder and Ward, and wondered how many of her other colleagues had been involved in the decision. McGillicuddy, for certain, she thought. And probably Gannon at Industry and Suchein at Foreign Affairs. Maybe Anson Cenáculo at Treasury? It didn’t really matter. The fix was in, and the same idiots who’d let Howell get away with using the massive kinetic weapon which had wreaked so much havoc weren’t about to let Drescher use
any
KEWs.

And Pearson knew why, too. It was suddenly blindingly obvious to her, and she didn’t know which she wanted more, to laugh hysterically or to curse.

The frigging idiots
, she thought.
The
idiots!
They really think they’re going to be able to sell that Ballroom nuclear suicide to the rest of the galaxy
.
Surely even
they
aren’t that stupid! Or maybe they are
.
Or maybe they figure
they can sell it right here on Mesa, at least, after this whole wave of bombings, and they’re not even worrying about selling it to anyone else, since “anyone else” is going to be skeptical as hell whatever we say
.
Either way, they aren’t going to let any more KEWs come
zooming down from the heavens
.
Why, that might give credence to the vicious, traitorous, groundless rumors that it was our own fearless and dedicated security forces who blew the hell out of Hancock Tower and the rest of the capital!

She might, she forced herself to concede, be doing them at least a little bit of a disservice. Some of it was quite possibly the result of genuine shock and dismay on the part of people who’d never really visualized what a kinetic strike was actually like. Maybe some of them—Barbara Suchein came to mind—were operating in that special sort of panic mode which rejected even the tiniest possibility of a second Hancock-level strike. Maybe they were even sufficiently panicked they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—differentiate between the massive overkill Howell had inflicted and the smaller, lighter tactical strikes someone with a working brain, like Gillian Drescher, might call in. But however much of the decision was rooted in that sort of shock and apprehension, the real string-pullers behind it were undoubtedly Snyder and McGillicuddy, and those were the two who were most likely to think they really could convince at least
someone
that all the devastation was the doing of suicidal Ballroom terrorists.

No way
, she thought now.
No way in hell
.
And just what the hell do they plan to do when the seccies in Detweiler City or New Athens decide
they
don’t have anything to lose, either?
Or, worse, that the fight Neue Rostock’s putting up proves
they
could fight—and
win—
as well?

She had no idea how to answer her own questions, but as she looked at the fortress of Regan Snyder’s face, she had the sinking suspicion they might all be going to discover those answers.

* * *

“And I say we just go ahead and cut her fucking throat right fucking now!”

Kayla Barrett didn’t know who the hate-thickened voice belonged to, but she knew exactly whose throat it was talking about. And as she sat on the cold, damp floor, leaning back against an equally damp wall with her arms tied behind her, she wished they’d all just get themselves together and take the voice’s advice.

She couldn’t see anything, thanks to the bag tied over her head. It smelled like onions, and it was made of some sort of fabric—
textile
fabric, not plastics; she felt it fluttering as she breathed. A faint smear of light penetrated its weave, but that was about it. It was a simple expedient, yet an effective one, although she wasn’t any too sure she’d really be able to
see
anything even without it. She was pretty sure she had a concussion, at the very least, and she doubted her eyes would have focused very well in her present state.

Then there was the damage to her right leg. She was just as happy she
couldn’t
see that. The pain was bad enough, and even if they’d had them, seccies were . . . unlikely to waste painkillers on a Misty. Fair enough. In their place, she wouldn’t have either. In fact, in their place she would’ve already cut the Misty’s throat.

“No,” another voice replied, firm and flat. “Bachue said take her to Dusek, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, Bachue’s frigging
dead
, Alvin. And so’s everybody else in the organization, and everybody
else
in the goddammed tower, and this bitch’s friends’re the ones who did that!”

“Don’t know I’d call them such great ‘friends’ of hers, Geerard,” Alvin—whoever he was—replied sardonically. “If Bachue hadn’t ordered us to drag her ass over to Neue Rostock, they’d’ve dropped the damned thing right on
her
head, too! Not exactly a friendly thing to do.”

“
Bullshit!
” Geerard snapped, his voice even uglier with raw, burning hatred. “Don’t you try’n kid me along, goddamn it! Molly and the kids’re gone, too!”

“I know,” Alvin said more gently. “I know they are. And so’s everybody else. And if killing her slow and painful’d bring a single one of them back, I’d hand you my knife an’ step back and cheer.” There was, Barrett thought from the dizzy darkness which enfolded her, nothing but total sincerity in that last sentence. “But it won’t bring any of them back, an’ getting her to Neue Rostock, someplace where someone like Palane can get information out of her, might just keep someone else alive. Might even make the difference in what happens to all of us who’re still left.”

“
Difference
,” Geerard half-sneered. “You saw what they did to Hancock. What kind of fucking ‘difference’ is anything she may know gonna make if they’re ready t’ do
that
kind of shit?! We’re screwed, Alvin. Bachue should never’ve listened to Dusek and Palane—if it’s
really
Palane, at all!—in the first damned place.”

Someone else muttered what sounded like agreement.

“Wasn’t going to make any difference whether we fought or not,” Alvin said heavily. “Not this time. They were moving in to kill everybody in sight, and you guys all know it. Sure, if we’d all hunted hidey holes, some of our friends—hell, some of our families!—might still be alive. But they probably wouldn’t be, and how many other people’s friends and families’d be dead instead?”

“And what exactly’s gonna be different in the end doing it
this
way?” Geerard demanded. “They busted Hancock wide open with one frigging KEW, and those damned things’re
cheap
, Alvin. They can send ’em down all day, and sooner or later, that’s exactly what they’re gonna do to Neue Rostock. And then they’re gonna send the Misties in, prob’ly this time with Peacie tanks backing them, and they’re gonna sweep right through all the other districts just like they did to Hancock and just like they’re gonna do to Neue Rostock.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Alvin conceded. “Maybe we’re all going to die, and maybe Dusek and Palane were frigging lunatics to think fighting back could make any difference. But I’ll tell you one thing, Geerard. If I’m going to die, and if all my friends’re going to die, then before I do, I’m going to kill every fucking Misty and Peacie I can! And if we get her to Dusek, it may help us kill a few more of the bastards.”

There was silence for a moment, and Barrett wondered almost idly what the rest of her captors were thinking. Then another voice—this one female—spoke.

“Alvin’s got a point, Geerard. Course, odds are we’re all gonna get killed trying to take her to Dusek. But if we
don’t
, it might actually let him and Palane kill another stack of Misties, maybe this time with a few Peacies thrown in. And if we don’t make it, we can always cut her throat then. Or maybe the Peacies’ll do it
for
us when they take us out!”

Several people chuckled wolfishly at the woman’s last sentence. Then there was another lengthy silence until, finally—

“All right,” Geerard agreed at last, his tone sullen. “All right, I’m in. But if it looks like we aren’t gonna make it, then I’m personally cutting her throat.”

“Not a problem,” Alvin said mildly. Then he went on, “Milla, you and Scott get to carry her for the first leg. Geerard, I want you and Luke scouting ahead for us. I got so turned around when the big one hit that I’m not sure where the hell we are, so if any of you think you see anything that looks familiar, sing out.”

Chapter 64

“
Down!
Down, Jackie!”

The warning shout came a lifetime too late. The Peaceforcer at the point of the three-man fire team feeling its way along the rubble strewn corridor went down in an explosion of blood and rupturing power packs. His utility armor was—or had been, anyway—considerably stronger and more capable than the equipment issued to the MISD, but it had never been designed to stop an Auger anti-armor missile.

The Auger was the Mesan Planetary Peaceforce’s standard light anti-armor weapon, capable of knocking out any armored personnel carrier. Of course, no one was trying to use any APCs inside Neue Rostock tower, but the Auger was capable of killing utility armor, or even the full battle armor of the Peaceforce heavy assault companies, all day long.

Or as long as the defenders’ supply of them held out, anyway.

The Peaceforcer behind the point man went down as well, screaming, the right leg of her utility armor shattered by blast and shrapnel. The last member of the fire team grabbed her by her equipment harness, dragging her frantically towards safety, but a heavy tribarrel fired a short, deadly burst down the passage.

His armor’s backplate was thinner than its breastplate. It was unlikely that it made a lot of difference, however. The tribarrel would have had a better than even chance of taking out
battle armor
, even with a frontal hit. Hit from behind, the UA never had a chance.

The rest of the squad poured answering fire up the passage. Their armor’s sensors could pick up the energy signature of the tribarrel, now that it had been brought online, and their fire was deadly accurate. But the seccies behind that tribarrel had been instructed by Thandi Palane, Victor Cachat, and Yana Tretiakovna. The barricade of piled sandbags and slabs of ceramacrete—provided by demolishing some of the tower’s internal loadbearing walls—was impervious to pulser fire and shrugged off even heavy tribarrel darts, at least for a while. And the Peaceforcers were far more exposed than the seccy gunners.

A grenade bounced off of the corridor roof, spinning crazily to land on the far side of the strong point. It armed when it hit the roof, but one of the seccies pounced on it, snatched it up, and spun to drop it into the grenade sump they’d built behind the barricade.

He didn’t make it. The grenade exploded in his right hand, killing him instantly, but his body absorbed most of the blast. One of the tribarrel gunner’s assistants was badly wounded; no one else was even scratched, and the Peaceforcer who’d fired the grenade went down an instant later, shredded by the tribarrel’s fire.

“Back to the cross passage!” the Peaceforce section sergeant who’d tried to warn Jackie ordered, and the survivors retreated hastily. They dove into the cross passage on either side of the main corridor, scuttling out of the tribarrel’s field of fire, and the section sergeant counted the icons on his HUD and swore with silent venom. Then he gave himself a shake.

“Central, Delta-Zero-Six,” he said. “Patch Delta-Zero-Two.”

“Delta-Zero-Six, Delta-Zero-Two,” the platoon sergeant’s voice came back.

“Sarge, we’re stuck at—” the section sergeant consulted his HUD “—Fox-Seven-One. The seccies have a tribarrel dug in at Fox-Seven-Three. We’re not gonna budge it without a hell of a lot of support. I’m down four—three dead, and one wounded I can’t recover. We need some help in here.”

“Delta-Zero-Six, hold on,” the platoon sergeant replied. The link went silent for perhaps two minutes, then, “Zero-Six, hold what you’ve got. Delta-Zero-Eight’s going to punch across to Fox from Golf-One-Niner. I say again, from Golf-One-Niner. That should let him come in behind your tribarrel. He’ll contact you direct when he’s ready to move. Be ready to put some covering and distraction fire down. Understood?”

“Roger, Zero-Two. Zero-Eight will be coming in behind the tribarrel. Standing by to provide cover fire.”

“Confirm,” the platoon sergeant said. “Estimate fifteen minutes.”

“Delta-Zero-Six copies fifteen minutes,” the section sergeant said, then looked around at his troopers in their filthy, battle stained armor.

“Fifteen minutes, Sergeant Carla says. Then it’s our turn.”

* * *

“I know there’s no justice in the world, Byrum,” Gillian Drescher said mildly. “If there were, though—if there
were
, I say—then after this is all over the Board would give me about a half hour—no, forty-five minutes—alone with Bentley Howell and a very, very dull knife.”

“Never going to happen, Ma’am,” Colonel Bartel replied. “But if it did, I could get rich selling tickets.”

Drescher snorted. It was a harsh sound, made harsher by the two solid weeks that had passed as her Peaceforcers clawed their way one bloody centimeter at a time into the bowels of Neue Rostock Tower. The body count was atrocious, and she strongly suspected that she’d lost more people than the seccies had, so far at least. Of course, ultimately, once the seccy defense finally broke—and it had to break soon, one way or the other, if only because they must be running out of ammo—it would be a bloodbath. That was what happened when one side decided to fight to the bitter end, and that certainly appeared to be what the seccies had decided to do.

They should’ve cut and run
, she thought grimly, standing beside her Minotaur and glaring at the battered, crumbling ceramacrete cube that was her objective.
They should’ve cut and run at least a week ago. God knows
we
couldn’t’ve stopped them!

After she got done gelding Bentley Howell with a dull—a dull and
rusty—
knife, she intended to have a few constructive moments alone with the city engineer and his staff. It was sadly apparent that the maps of the underground service ways and access routes were badly out of date. Her troopers had run into ceramacrete walls where there weren’t supposed to be any, and discovered dozens of tunnels that weren’t supposed to be there but were. It was bad enough fighting a way through terrain like that when the bits and pieces of it were where you thought they were; it was infinitely worse when your maps lied to you.

Of course, the city plans of the
inside
of the frigging tower’re even
more
useless
, she reflected grimly.
But that still doesn’t explain why they didn’t pull out days ago. I know damned well they’ve still got underground access we’re not even close to finding yet, so why the hell haven’t they used it already?

The truth was that she was afraid she knew the answer to her own questions. The seccies hadn’t run because they didn’t
want
to. Or, perhaps more accurately, because they’d
chosen
not to, whatever any putatively sane person might have wanted to do.

They were making a
statement
, as well as a stand. They were telling the Peaceforce and all the rest of the Mesan government that they were willing to die where they stood, and that they could kill a hell of a lot of Peaceforcers first. But their true audience wasn’t the government; it was every other seccy on the planet.

There were already signs, she thought grimly. There’d been incidents in Detweiler City. Nothing like Hancock or Neue Rostock—not yet. But there’d been no OPS or MISD sweeps in Detweiler, either. That meant the incidents had all come from the
seccies’
side, and that was scary as hell. So far, the Safeties had managed to keep a lid on the situation, although Drescher wasn’t optimistic about how much longer they could continue to do that. It went against the Safeties’ training and inclinations to practice “crowd control” without corpses, but thank God McGillicuddy—or someone—had hammered them hard enough about the need to do just that. The last thing anyone needed was for Detweiler to go the way Mendel had.

Besides Neue Rostock, OPS and MISD troopers had four more towers—Stamford, Kovaleski, Hadar, and Lindbergh—surrounded in the capital’s seccy districts. So far, none of the seccies in any of those towers had attempted to test the security forces’ cordons, but the whole reason they’d been surrounded was the potential for additional violence from them which OPS’ surveillance systems were picking up. The situation was tense as hell, and with so much of the MPP committed to Neue Rostock or being held ready for instant deployment to Detweiler or any of the other cities, there was damned little available to support those cordons.

The wheels could come off of
this thing at any moment
, she thought grimly.
And if they do
. . .

At least her warnings seemed to have finally started getting through to the civilians, she reflected even more grimly. They hadn’t wanted to listen to her. In fact, they’d fought tooth and nail against it, but they’d finally released the use of tactical-level KEWs to her. Of course, they’d hedged it around with all sorts of asinine restrictions, but the truth was that even if they’d let her use heavier strikes, by now her own people were too deep into Neue Rostock for her to really hammer the tower. Still, she was steadily reducing its upper stories to rubble at the same time her people fought their way deeper and deeper into it along the two or three floors above ground level. Eventually, they were going to start losing enough of their noncombatants that they’d have to either pull out, counterattack, or try some sort of negotiations. Or they might be crazy enough to stand and fight until their families were slaughtered behind them, as well.

Please, God
, she thought.
I know you probably aren’t even on speaking terms with us at the moment
,
and we probably deserve it. But
please,
help me find a way to not kill every single person in that tower
.

* * *

“We lost Aaronson and his tribarrel when they punched out the Proctor and Sangamon junction hardpoint,” Triêu Chuanli said wearily. He scrubbed one hand across his face and shook himself. “We got Serengeti and his crew out first, though.”

Thandi Palane nodded. She sat tipped back in the central control chair, her expression calm, but the awareness of approaching defeat swept through her. Frankly, she was surprised they’d held this long, once the Peaceforce took over from OPS and its stooges.

She knew who was in command on the other side now. Despite the savagery and close quarters nature of the combat, they’d taken a handful of prisoners—and captured quite a lot of highly useful weapons—over the last terrible weeks, and most of those prisoners had a tendency to spill their guts once they realized they’d truly fallen into seccy hands. Others had been more defiant, even though she knew Dusek’s people had been less than gentle with them. She supposed they probably ought to be observing all the niceties of the Deneb Accords, since the Peaceforce was, after all, a uniformed, regular arm of a legally recognized government. On the other hand, Dusek’s people and the volunteers who joined them had never ratified the Accords, and they could all be fairly confident that the MPP wasn’t going to be observing them where
they
were concerned, either.

Actually, the most interesting of the prisoners was the MISD section sergeant who’d been delivered—eventually—to Dusek. The handful of survivors from Bachue the Nose’s organization had endured several narrow escapes evading security forces in the labyrinth of underground passages between what had once been Hancock Tower and Neue Rostock, but they’d made it in the end. Thandi was glad they had, although she was far from sure what to make of Kayla Barrett.

The woman’s right leg had been beyond salvage by the time her captors dragged her into Neue Rostock, and Rudrani Nimbakar, who’d received quite good bootleg medical training despite her seccy origins by way of some of Dusek’s “gray economy” contacts, had amputated it just below the hip. If the woman lived—which seemed unlikely—regenerating the lost limb wouldn’t be particularly difficult. Aside from that and a moderate concussion, she’d been in pretty good shape, all things considered, when she finally arrived in Nimbakar’s infirmary, but there was something about her . . .

Thandi supposed any Misty who found herself in seccy hands, especially after what had already happened, was bound to be at least a little off. But Barrett seemed remarkably calm. She did what she was told to do, she was actually courteous—courteous, not fawning or subservient, and there definitely was a difference—to her captors, and she readily answered any question put to her. She hadn’t had an enormous amount of information to offer about the Peaceforcers, but she’d readily provided all she did have. And yet there was that sense of something broken inside her. Something even worse than the sorts of sights and sounds so many others were enduring. It was as if she was merely waiting for something only she knew was coming, but whatever it was, it had stamped out any interest she might ever have had in her own future.

Thandi gave herself a mental shake. She doubted she’d ever find out what was actually going on inside Section Sergeant Barrett’s head, and that was probably just as well. She doubted she really
wanted
to know. But the way her mind kept wandering back to Barrett was probably a sign of her own growing mental fatigue.

“We’re not going to make it, are we?” Jurgen Dusek sounded as weary as Chuanli looked, and she glanced across to where the gang boss sat at another console. “They’re going to take Neue Rostock away from us way before your friends could possibly get here, aren’t they?”

“Probably,” Victor Cachat said. He’d arrived in the control room with Chuanli, and even his improbably handsome disguise looked worn and battered. He was as dirty as Chuanli, a bulky bandage swelled the bloodstained shirt covering his upper right arm, and a hand-sized bruise discolored the left side of his face. He had to be just as exhausted as the seccy, but no one would have guessed it to look at him. In fact, he looked as calm and collected as he’d been at the start of the siege. It took someone who knew him really well—someone like Thandi Palane—to realize just how desperate even he must be beginning to feel. Of course, Victor’s desperation wasn’t quite like anyone else’s, she reflected.

“Victor’s right,” she said. It didn’t occur to her to offer Dusek any comforting half-truths. Even if it might once have, it didn’t now; she and the gangster had been through too much by now. “I’ll be honest, this Drescher who’s calling the shots for the other side’s a lot better than I’d estimated she’d be. And the Peaceforce is better, too.” She shrugged. “Maybe I let myself be persuaded to underestimate them because of what miserable excuses for troops the Safeties and Misties are.” She snorted. “Hard to believe, but most of
them
were actually
worse
than I’d expected! Probably only fair that the Peacies turned out to be better.”