Cauldron of Ghosts (60 page)

“Well, there aren’t as many Misties left as there used to be,” Chuanli put in grimly. “Not after the way Bachue cut them to pieces in Hancock.”

Thandi looked at him and nodded. She’d distrusted Bachue’s gleefully triumphant estimate of how many MISD troopers the initial Hancock ambush had killed, but only until she’d had an opportunity to talk to Barrett. Until the section sergeant had confirmed it, Thandi wouldn’t have believed anyone would be stupid enough to send three battalions of the MISD into that kind of opposition without
any
intelligence on what the other side had or how it was deployed.

Unfortunately, by the time Barrett arrived in Neue Rostock to do any confirming, Bachue and all of her people—including all of the “civilians” still trapped in Hancock—had been dead, which had deprived Thandi of any opportunity to apologize for her original skepticism.

“No, there aren’t,” she agreed out loud. “And I think our Peaceforce prisoners are probably right about who called in the tower buster on Hancock. They’re probably even right about why Drescher didn’t use
any
KEWs on us for so long.”

She smiled thinly, and despite their grim situation, Dusek and Chuanli actually laughed. It was part of the bizarre nature of the fighting that here in Neue Rostock’s central control room the air was still cool and dust free and they still had access to the Mesan information net. But the same could not be said for certain other places, both inside the tower and out. And it would have been just a bit pointless for even Culture and Information to try to hide the nature of what had happened to Hancock, since three quarters of Mendel had been blanketed in a snowlike covering of dust and ash. Thandi doubted very much that anybody actually believed a single word about the “nuclear suicide bombers” story Bryce Lackland and his minions were spouting to explain that ash fall, but it had suggested one reason for Drescher’s restraint where kinetic weapons were concerned. Probably not
Drescher’s,
really; it had the stink of a political decision to Thandi’s nostrils. Either way, she was grateful for it. Once the KEWs had started falling again, she’d known their time was growing short.

“I think it’s time we started thinking about withdrawing as many of your people as we can,” she said, looking back at Dusek.

The gangster frowned, and she grimaced.

“Look,” she said, “you and Triêu are right, Jurgen. They
are
going to take Neue Rostock away from us, probably in less than a week. The one thing that’s actually worked out better than I’d projected, though, is that we still hold the grav shafts and
they
still haven’t managed to seal off the tunnels. That means we can still get your people—or a lot of them, anyway—out, and it’s time we started thinking in those terms.”

Dusek continued frowning, and she glanced at Victor.

“Thandi’s right, Jurgen,” Victor said. “I know I’m the one who got you into this, so you might not think I’m the best person to be giving advice now, but she’s right. You need to get as many of your people out as you can . . . and
you
need to go with them.”

Dusek looked up sharply, his frown deeper than ever, and Victor smiled wolfishly at him.

“Culture and Information’s mouthpieces wouldn’t be spending so much time trying to blame this all on you—specifically on
you
—if they weren’t scared as hell of you,” the Havenite said. “The last thing a genuinely repressive regime wants is a folk hero on the other side, and that’s exactly what you’ve become.”

“I’m not going.” Dusek’s voice was flat, and Thandi felt one eyebrow quirk. “Maybe it is time to start getting some of our people out, but I’m not going to be one of them.”

“This isn’t the best time to start turning all noble,” Victor said mildly.

“Fuck noble,” Dusek replied even more flatly. “I’m not going.”

Thandi started to argue, then stopped herself and glanced at Victor and shook her head ever so slightly, instead. He regarded her quizzically for a moment, then gave a patented, minimal Victor shrug.

“Have it your own way,” he said, and Dusek grunted in obvious satisfaction.

Thandi was positive the gangster would never put it into words, but she knew exactly what was going through his head. Before she’d met him—and before he’d allied himself with her and Victor—she might not have believed it was possible. Now she knew better, and she felt a deep and abiding sense of warmth as she looked at him.

Victor had been right from the beginning; Dusek always had been more than “just” a gangster, whether he would ever have admitted it or not. But he’d still been
mostly
a gangster, and now he’d become something else. The crime lord was still in there, and not very far from the surface, yet it wasn’t the crime lord who’d announced that he wasn’t leaving Neue Rostock. No, the Jurgen Dusek who’d announced that had made the transition from gangster to patriot.

She glanced at Chuanli and saw the same hardness in his eyes. Both of them knew the equation on Mesa had been changed forever, whether or not the Grand Alliance ever responded to their desperate call for help. The seccies would never again simply lie down and die for the Office of Public Safety. They’d seen where that led . . . and they’d discovered that they could fight back. That they could
hurt
their oppressors, punish them in return . . . even
defeat
them. What had happened to the Security Directorate in Hancock, what was happening even now to the Peaceforce in Neue Rostock, proved that, and all of the Culture and Information propaganda in the universe couldn’t hide that truth.

More than that, Neue Rostock’s stand had already bought time for other seccy communities to begin organizing, begin stockpiling weapons and preparing their own defenses. The forces Mesa had been forced to commit to reducing Neue Rostock alone had prevented the Office of Public Safety from breaking up those defenses, and the longer Neue Rostock
continued
to stand, the higher the blood price the Safeties and Misties would pay if they attempted to break them up afterward. None of the other seccy communities by themselves could hope to stand off the massed might of OPS and the Peaceforce, but neither could` the security establishment possibly hope to suppress
all
of them. The only way they could do that would be to call in the KEWs from the very beginning . . . and the seccy communities were inside their own cities. To rain kinetic weapons on them would be to devastate their own communities, their own infrastructure . . . their own
families
.

My God
, she thought.
Victor was right again—probably more right than even he realized
.
We’ve started a genuine
revolution,
and if the
seccies
go up in flames, the slaves aren’t going to be far behind
.

She remembered the comment Victor had made about providing Torch with the equivalent of its own Alamo if they all died here in Neue Rostock. Jurgen Dusek had probably never thought in terms of a glorious last stand in his entire life, but now he’d grasped the reality—the larger-than-life reality, but still reality—that draped itself around those sorts of stands. The reality of Thermopylae and Masada, of Fort Saint Elmo and Khartoum. Of the Alamo, Verdun, and Stalingrad. Of the Battle of Carson and the Second Battle of Yeltsin and a thousand other places where men and women had stood their ground. Stood to die. “They shall not pass!” All too often the defenders who’d shouted that warcry had failed. They’d fallen, and the enemy had marched forward across their bodies. But for every Thermopylae there was a Battle of Salamis, and for every Alamo there was a Battle of San Jacinto. For every Stalingrad there was a Battle of Kursk . . . and ultimately, there was a Battle of Berlin, as well.

That was what Jurgen Dusek and Triêu Chuanli had decided to give the seccies of Mesa—give their
people
, with an awareness that they
were
their people—their own Leonidas, their own Travis . . . their own Spartacus. And if they died in the giving, so be it.

“I think we should at least start evacuating the wounded,” she said.

Chapter 65

“—and then,” Gillian Drescher said using her pointer to drop an icon into the holographic terrain display, “Brigadier Hanratty’s people will attack
here
. Essentially, First Brigade and Third Brigade are diversions. If either of them has an opportunity to convert a diversionary attack into an actual attack with a chance of success, I expect the opportunity to be taken, but there’s no prize here for running unnecessary risks and getting your people chopped up.”

She looked up from the display to meet her regained commanders’ eyes levelly.

“We’re grinding them away, but they’ve proven repeatedly how badly they can hurt us if we get ahead of ourselves. So we’re doing this methodically, carefully, by The Book.” She forbore to mention that the
old
Book had proven itself woefully inadequate. All of them understood that she was talking about the
new
Book.
Her
book, rewritten and annotated on the fly. “Sixth Brigade is the key here. If they can reach this objective, we’ll be positioned to squeeze out this entire portion of the tower—” her pointer’s icon shifted, circling a crimson-coded portion of Neue Rostock’s interior “—and
that
will flank their position on the gamma group of grav shafts.”

She stood for a moment, gazing at them, then deactivated her pointer and shrugged.

“This operation isn’t going to give us Neue Rostock,” she told them. “But what it is going to do is to make it even harder for them to get in and out of the damned tunnels. And it’s going to put us in a better position to drive for the central residential sections. If we cut off the tunnels, we cut off the flow of reinforcements, and once we do that, we can finally start rolling them up one section at a time. Is that understood?”

Her subordinates nodded, their expressions grim, but confidence glittered in the backs of their eyes, and she nodded back. None of them expected it to be easy, and all of them expected to lose a lot more people, but like her, they realized the end was in sight for the seccies.

“All right. Let’s look at some of the details. Byrum?”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Colonel Bartel stepped forward and activated his own pointer. “Brigadier Edson, to make this work, your Second Regiment will have to advance to at least
this
point. Once you’ve reached it, we’ll be able to—”

* * *

“
Shit!
”

The shouted expletive was all the warning the seccy strong point had. The Peaceforce didn’t have a great deal of all-up battle armor, and battle armor wasn’t really that well suited to fighting in the close confines of a seccy residential tower. That was the main reason Gillian Drescher had been holding it in reserve. The other reason was that she’d been waiting for the proper moment to commit it.

That moment had come.

The Mesan Planetary Peaceforce’s assault companies weren’t as well trained as Solarian League Marines or the Royal Manticoran Marines. Very few military organizations matched the capabilities of those elite forces. But they were well trained enough and there was nothing at all wrong with their courage, and they bulled forward, heavy tribarrels blasting. None of them carried plasma rifles—there were limits to the amount of destruction they could inflict without effectively blocking their own advance—but the hurricane of heavy tribarrel darts was almost as bad.

The strong point was a solid wall across the corridor, built out of slabs of ceramacrete and sandbags. The only opening in it was the firing slit which had been left for the tripod-mounted tribarrel—in this case, one of the several Peaceforce tribarrels which had been captured by the defenders. It wasn’t a very large opening, but there were thousands of darts screaming towards it. Ceramacrete dust erupted, the incredible, deafening thunder of the exploding darts filled the corridor, and a few of those darts actually slashed through the firing slit and exploded against the tribarrel’s battle steel splinter shield.

The seccy gunner stood her ground, holding down the firing stud, hosing the Peaceforcers with her own explosive darts, and even battle armor had its limits. She killed five of them and wounded two more before their companions’ fire punched through the splinter shield and blew her apart. Her assistants dragged her body frantically aside, trying to get the tribarrel back into action, but the battle-armored Peaceforcers had gotten close enough to launch a fusillade of grenades through the slit. Fresh thunder rolled, punctuated by screams—
brief
screams—and then the Peaceforce combat engineers swarmed forward, setting the charges to blow the barricade.

They were almost done when Nolan Olsen pressed a button in the command center and the shaped charges on either side of the passage blew. Blast and fragments swept the engineers, whose utility armor was far less resistant than battle armor, and their screams disappeared abruptly as a massive chunk of ceramacrete smashed down onto them. But the blast did little harm to the battle-armored troopers who’d been waiting impatiently behind the engineers, and the explosions effectively breached the barricade the engineers had been trying to remove in the first place.

“
Go!
” the Peaceforce sergeant bellowed, and his troopers charged forward once more, over the bodies of the seccy defenders and their own engineers, alike.

* * *

“They’re punching through at Atwater and Chester.”

Thandi Palane’s voice was almost maddeningly calm in Triêu Chuanli’s earbud as he stood at the intersection of Chester and Agostino. They were using standard civilian coms, tied into Neue Rostock’s hardwired internal com system, and even though the surveillance systems had taken heavy damage, Chuanli knew they still gave Thandi a far better picture of what was happening than anyone else had.

“What do we have between there and here?” Chuanli asked.

“Nothing,” Thandi replied flatly, and he swallowed a curse.

“More battle armor?” he asked.

“Some. Looks like they’re down to about seven or eight suits, though. Our people have been costing them all the way in.”

Once upon a time, Triêu Chuanli might have sneered at Thandi’s use of the words “our people,” but not anymore. Yana Tretiakovna was in Doc Nimbakar’s infirmary, minus her left arm and unconscious while Nimbakar and Steph Turner worked on a sucking chest wound, but the Amazon’s counter attack had retaken the critical strongpoint she’d gone in to restore, pulser in one hand and vibro blade in the other, and she’d littered the corridor with Peaceforcer dead before she went down herself. Andrew Artlett’s right eye was covered by a thick dressing—it was going to take regeneration to restore his sight—but he was still on his feet, toolkit still slung over his shoulder, moving through the chaos and the confusion to somehow keep the tower’s internal systems running. And Victor Cachat had led more forlorn hopes—and somehow gotten back alive each time—than anyone else in Neue Rostock. By now, the tough, cynical seccies of Jurgen Dusek’s gang would have followed him in an attack on Lucifer’s own palace, and every man and woman in Neue Rostock knew how much they owed to Thandi’s icewater control of their desperate defense.

“Okay,” he said, vaguely surprised that his own voice sounded almost as calm as Thandi’s. “We’ve got it. How soon can you get someone else to back us up here?”

“Eight minutes. Diasall’s on his way with a heavy tribarrel and a couple of grenade launchers, but they’re still on the fifteenth floor,” she replied, and he nodded.

That much firepower should—
should
—let this position hold, assuming it got here first. Unfortunately, one thing he’d learned was that when Thandi Palane gave a time estimate, it was accurate, and if the Peacies were punching through at the Atwater and Chester strongpoint, he didn’t
have
eight minutes. He had to slow them up somehow, stall them long enough for the promised support to get there.

He looked at the dirty-faced teenager equipped with one of their few, precious remaining Auger launchers.

“Sammy, you and Luca hold here.” He jabbed his index finger at the barricade behind which they stood. It was only half finished, neither as thick nor as tall as many of the others had been. But it would offer good fighting positions for Diasall and the others when they arrived, and it could be improved quickly, if they managed to hold it against the initial attack. “Jenney and I will try to buy you some time. If we can’t, hold your fire till you’re sure you can take out at least one of the heavies on point.”

Sammy nodded tautly, and Chuanli glanced at Jenney the Hand. The young woman’s face was pale and frightened, but she met his gaze steadily as the scooped up the knapsack.

“Come on,” he said.

* * *

Corporal Thomas Crunn moved forward down the corridor his HUD labeled “CHESTER AV,” wishing fervently that these damned corridors were wider. Not that he would even have considered trading his battle armor for the smaller, more maneuverable utility armor. On the other hand, his power cells were getting low, and the seccies had done a better job of slowing 1st Platoon’s advance than the ops plan had allowed for. Of course, the bastards always did.

Crunn had never really thought too much about what seccies might think or feel. He hadn’t known any of them personally growing up, and the only ones he’d had contact with since joining the Peaceforce had been problems to solve, not people to know. Hell, they hadn’t really been
people
at all, as far as he’d been concerned. Over the last several weeks, though, he’d been forced to think about them quite a lot. No one would ever confuse him with a philosopher, but combat had a way of sharpening a man’s concentration, and he’d come to several unpleasant conclusions.

One thing he’d learned was that whatever anyone else might say, seccies were tough bastards when they decided to dig in and fight. He hadn’t observed a whole lot of cowardice on their part, either. And for people who weren’t trained soldiers—who would’ve been subject to lengthy prison sentences, or even execution, if they’d ever tried to
become
trained soldiers—they were entirely too damned good at killing people who
were
trained soldiers. They were also far too proficient at booby-trapping the damned hallways, and they were obviously using the tower’s surveillance systems to keep track of the attackers. The Peaceforce had discovered the hard way that absence of resistance usually meant something extra nasty was waiting up ahead and that the fools who rushed to meet it seldom survived. Those who’d lived through one such experience had learned that caution and a certain methodical, deliberate rate of advance was the best way to go right on living, and that meant—

* * *

“Talk to me, Palane!” Triêu Chuanli whispered over the com.

“Forty-five meters and closing,” Thandi replied. Her voice was level, almost conversational, but her eyes were dark, because she realized exactly what Chuanli intended to do.

“Get back,” he said to Jenney the Hand, and jerked his head at the cross corridor they’d passed ten meters before. Their eyes met, and he smiled tautly. “You should have an opening any time now.”

“Yeah.” She swallowed hard. “Triêu—”

“No time, kid.” He clapped at her on the shoulder. “Tell Jurgen I said he should sign you on permanent.”

“I will,” she whispered, although both of them realized how little chance she’d ever have to do anything of the sort.

“One minute,” Thandi said over his earbug.

“Go!” he snapped to Jenney, and she dashed towards the position he’d indicated.

“Thirty seconds.”

“Got it.”

Triêu Chuanli watched Jenney go, then squared his shoulders under the straps of the knapsack suspended across his chest. He really wished they’d gotten the roof of this section booby trapped, but the speed of this advance had taken them by surprise, and the Peacies had broken through to areas where they hadn’t been expected yet.

Wish we had more of these handy, too
, he thought harshly, stroking the knapsack with the fingers of his left hand.
Not that anybody ever expected to be able to use the ones we
do
have.

Even more than he wished they had more of them, he wished there’d been time to use
this
one some other way, but there wasn’t. Not if he was going to slow down the fucking battle armor.

“Fifteen seconds.”

“Been a pleasure, Thandi,” he said softly. “Look after yourself.”

“Not so shabby yourself,” she replied. “Five seconds.”

Chuanli drew a deep breath, rested the ball of his thumb on the detonator in his right hand, and stepped out of the recessed doorway in which he’d been waiting into the center of the corridor.

* * *

A warning ping sounded in Thomas Crunn’s earbug and an icon flashed sudden crimson on his HUD. His eyes flicked in the indicated direction, his tribarrel started to swing, but there wasn’t enough time.

Jurgen Dusek had acquired less than a dozen of the Black Widows, otherwise known as the Mark 3, Mod 2 EEP Antitank Mine (Heavy). First, because he really hadn’t been able to imagine any circumstances under which a mine capable of destroying a hundred and thirty-ton main battle tank would be of much use to a gangster. Second, because Black Widows were the sort of ordnance the Peaceforce got antsy about when it disappeared from one of its warehouses. In fact, they’d ended up in his possession more or less accidentally when the ordnance clerk who’d been supposed to send him three crates of pulse rifles bobbled the paperwork. Under the circumstances, however, it had seemed . . . unwise to try to return them to sender, so he’d kept them.

So far, Neue Rostock’s defenders had used six of them.

Now they used a seventh.

Triêu Chuanli pressed the button, the Black Widow strapped to his chest detonated, and three self-forging penetrators, each more than capable of penetrating the belly armor of a Mandrake-class heavy tank, screamed down the corridor. One of them struck Corporal Crunn just above waist level, punched through his battle armor, through his body, through the armor’s back plate, and then seared its way equally effortlessly through Trooper 1/c Claire Shwang, immediately behind him.