Cauldron of Ghosts (61 page)

A second penetrator killed Trooper 1/c Andries Benkô, casually ripped off Corporal Aldokim de Castilho’s right arm, and then obliterated three of the combat engineers who’d been following behind them.

The third penetrator went straight down the center of the corridor, killing two more engineers and four utility-armored troopers coming on behind the battle-armored point team.

Chuanli was dead well before any of his victims, of course. The detonation hurled his shredded body all the way back beyond the cross passage where Jenney the Hand had taken shelter. Even aimed away from her, the directional blast half-stunned her in the corridor’s confines, but unlike the Peaceforcers she’d been expecting it, and she threw herself back out into the main passage on her belly.

The military-grade pulse rifle she’d been issued was a far cry from the light civilian-grade weapons she’d had when she and Nine-Finger Jake first saw the Misties advancing across Trondheim Park towards Eaker Boulevard. The sophisticated electronic sighting system penetrated the billowing smoke and dust easily, and she squeezed the stud, hosing explosive darts into her enemies.

There was no one left in battle armor to get in her way, and her fire slammed into the more lightly armed troopers who’d survived Chuanli’s blast. Three of them went down. Then two more. A sixth.

Jenney the Hand killed a total of twelve more Peaceforcers before the launcher-fired grenade exploded sixty-four centimeters from her head.

It took the attackers almost fifteen minutes to get themselves reorganized and resume the advance.

Twelve minutes later, that advance ran into Athanasios Diasall’s tribarrel and missile team, well dug in behind the barricade at Chester and Agostino, and disintegrated in bodies and blood.

* * *

“So, do you think the rumors are accurate, Byrum?” Gillian Drescher asked.

“Which ones, Ma’am?” Colonel Bartel asked wryly. “I’ve heard so damned many of them over the last couple of weeks it’s kind of hard to keep track.”

“I suppose it is.” Drescher twitched a smile, then looked back down at the holograph on the map table. “In this instance, though, I meant the ones about Thandi Palane.”

“Oh,
those
rumors.” Bartel grimaced. “I don’t know. I’m inclined to think they could well be, though, Ma’am.” He shrugged. “Before this whole disaster started, I’d’ve argued that it would have taken someone like a Palane to get seccies to stand up and fight this way. Now, though.” He shook his head. “I’ve had to . . . reexamine certain of my fundamental core beliefs were seccies are concerned, you might say.”

“There’s been a lot of that going around,” Drescher agreed in a desert-dry tone.

Actually, she was two-thirds convinced—maybe even three-quarters convinced—that it truly was the infamous Thandi Palane who’d planned and commanded Neue Rostock’s defense. On the face of it, it was preposterous. Only it was no more “preposterous” than everything else which had been happening since the Dobzhansky strike. And the rumor that the commander in chief of the Royal Torch military was here—right
here
, on Mesa—personally leading the seccy defiance of the planetary security forces had raced through the seccy communities at light speed. There was no stopping it now, and as the assault on Neue Rostock had dragged on and on and on, that rumor had become ever more credible in the seccies’ eyes.

It was a name being whispered whenever three or four seccies gathered to discuss the battle. That name and the name of Jurgen Dusek, and of Bachue the Nose. It was hard to imagine a more unlikely triumvirate of legendary heroes, yet that was precisely what Palane, Dusek, and Bachue had become, and Gillian Drescher was too much of a realist to pretend that that legend could ever be killed. Easy enough to kill a woman named Thandi Palane, a man named Jurgen Dusek, but the
legend?
There weren’t enough silver pulser darts in the galaxy to slay that.

But it’s my job to kill the people behind it
, she reminded herself,
and it’s a job I swore an oath to do. Maybe I wish now that I hadn’t. Maybe I wish I’d found something else to do with my life. But I didn’t
,
and if I break faith with that oath, what else do I have?

It was a question she’d asked herself more and more often of late, and one she couldn’t answer. But she knew exactly what was going to happen sometime in the next forty-eight hours.

And that however great a success it might be tactically,
strategically
it would be a disaster.

She understood now why Dusek and Palane—if that really was Palane in there—hadn’t evacuated. Despite her own earlier estimates, she was now certain that they’d managed to get virtually all of Neue Rostock’s regular residents out through the tunnels well before the tower had come under actual attack. Everything she’d seen, everything her people had discovered—and fought their way through—only confirmed that they’d started fortifying the tower days, maybe even weeks, before the first OPS sweeps had run into disaster, and they must have evacuated everyone but their fighters along the way. Yet her people had finally cut those tunnels. No one else was getting out of Neue Rostock now, and her assault elements were poised for the final attack.

It was going to be ugly, and it was going to be brutal, but it was also going to be
over
. She’d gutted four brigades getting to this point, and she was about to reduce a fifth to wreckage. Altogether, she’d lost in excess of nine thousand men and women since she’d taken over from Howell. By her most optimistic estimate, that total would rise to at least eleven thousand—close to a third of the Peaceforce’s total peacetime strength—before it was done, but she wasn’t foolish enough to think anyone inside that tower would surrender before she’d paid every bloody gram of the price.

And ultimately, her people would pay that price in vain.

Snyder and McGillicuddy and their allies on the General Board might see Thandi Palane’s presence here as a godsend—as “proof” Torch and, by extension, Manticore truly were in bed with the Audubon Ballroom. That they’d facilitated and enabled—probably even planned—the present wave of terrorist attacks, just as they had the strike on Green Pines. In Drescher’s opinion, based on prisoner interrogation and every intelligence source available to her, that was nonsense. In fact, despite all the evidence, she was no longer fully convinced the Ballroom truly had been responsible for all of the atrocities credited to it. It was probably insane of her, possibly a symptom of combat fatigue, yet she couldn’t quite shake the suspicion. And even if it was true, even if Torch had been complicit in every single one of those attacks, it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t change what Palane and Dusek had already set in motion.

It was too late for any clever propaganda tricks to change what was going to happen. It was no longer a matter of
if
the regime was doomed, but of
when
the regime would fall. In the end, the ship of state was going down, as surely as ever the
Magellan
had, with its keel ripped apart on the reef of Neue Rostock and the general seccy resistance which was bound to arise from the tower’s ashes.

Yet she had no choice but to burn that tower to the ground. To turn it into the lifeless wreckage from which a dozen—a hundred—other Neue Rostocks would spring up like dragon’s teeth.

It was her job.

“I think we’re about ready, then, Byrum,” she heard her voice say. “Pass the word. I want all brigade and regimental commanders in the com briefing at nineteen hundred hours.”

* * *

“Well, I certainly hope we have some
good
news for a change,” Regan Snyder said sourly as the General Board gathered around the conference table.

Brianna Pearson didn’t bother even to glare at her. There was no point anymore. Instead, she looked at Brandon Ward as the CEO settled into his chair at the head of the table.

“Actually, there is,” Ward said. “According to General Alpina, General Drescher will be launching her final assault in approximately twelve hours. He tells me that she’s confident this
will
be the final assault, and that she estimates the core of resistance in Neue Rostock will be broken within thirty or forty hours from the time she attacks. Mopping up may take some days longer, but she should be able to hand that back over to MISD and pull the Peaceforce brigades back to refit and reequip within two days.”

“Well, it’s certainly
taken
her long enough!” Snyder snapped pettishly. “After all the money we’ve plowed into the Peaceforce, you’d think they’d have been able to take a single tower away from a pack of ragged-assed seccies in less than a T-month!”

“It hasn’t been a T-month,” Pearson said coldly. “It’s been about three T-weeks from the moment the first shot was fired. And considering the opposition and the nature of the mission—
and
the fact that she was denied the fire support she needed for
two
of those T-weeks—General Drescher’s done one hell of a job with very little support from this Board.”

“Oh, bullshit!” Snyder snarled. “It’s all her fault—well, the
Peaceforce’s
fault—we’re in the mess we are right now. You’ve heard about the incidents happening all over the other seccy districts by now. You think that would’ve happened if she’d done her damned job in the first place and nipped this whole thing in the bud?!”

“So now you’re going to blame the Peaceforce for
your
mess, is that it?” Pearson snapped back, too furious to worry about how dangerous an enemy Regan Snyder had proven herself countless times in the past. “You know, Regan, there comes a point at which self-delusion becomes genuinely dangerous, and you’re so far past that point that I doubt you could even see it in your rearview camera!”

“Is that so?” Snyder asked in suddenly silky tones. “Well, we’ll just have to see about that, won’t we? And now that Drescher’s
finally
going to take Neue Rostock down, it’s time for us to decide which seccy district Public Safety is going to clean up next.”

“Are you really
that
far out of your frigging mind?” Pearson demanded. “You want to kick off
another
Neue Rostock, is that it?!”

“There won’t be any more ‘Neue Rostocks,’ ” Snyder sneered. “The only reason—aside from Drescher’s incompetence—that this entire disaster’s stretched out this way is this bitch Palane!
Thandi Palane!
” Her lip curled in contempt. “A mongrel from Ndebele who
deserted
from the Solly Marines to throw her lot in with a passel of escaped slaves! Just the sort of scum who’d come here, to Mesa, trying to foment rebellion. Hell, she probably brought the Ballroom bombs in
with
her, and you know it, Brianna! Well, she won’t be around to command any more ‘gallant defenses,’ now will she? And without
her
, the seccies will go back to being exactly what they’ve always been!”

My God
, Pearson thought.
I think she actually
believes
that. But she
can’t
really be that stupid, can she? Or is it that she’s that
desperate?
That she
has
to believe this line of bullshit she’s handing out, because the only alternative would be to face the truth? God knows that’s the last thing anyone associated with Manpower wants to do right now, but if we let her go on this way, drag all the rest of us down with her, then what happens to
us?
For that matter, what happens to
Mesa?
What’s going to stop the seccies and the slaves from taking exactly the kind of revenge anyone else would take in their place and turning this entire planet into one huge graveyard?

Brianna Pearson had never thought of herself as a religious woman, but in that moment, she found herself wishing she did believe in God. Or did she? Because if there truly had been a God, the people whose prayers he’d be listening to were probably the ones inside Neue Rostock Tower, not the ones sitting around this conference table.

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” she began. “As a matter of fact—”

The conference room door flew open, and heads snapped around at the unceremonious, unexpected, and unacceptable interruption.

“What’s the mean—” Brandon Ward began thunderously.

“I’m sorry, Sir!” his senior aide cut him off. “I’m sorry, but . . . but this is—”

She slithered to a stop, as if groping for words, and Ward’s frown turned even darker.

“What the hell are you talking about, Andrea?!” he snapped.

“Sir, Perimeter Tracking just reported a hyper footprint. A
big
hyper footprint—at least a dozen ships-of-the-wall!”

Chapter 66

Thandi Palane checked the pulse rifle magazine, then locked it in place, cycled a round into the chamber, and set the safety. She’d already checked the vibro blade at her left hip and the pulser at her right.

She looked up and saw Victor gazing at her.

“I hate legends,” she said, with an off-center smile.

“I admit they can be unpleasant things,” he acknowledged. “Messy, even. Useful, though. And you have to keep your eye on the final prize.”

“Have I ever mentioned to you that you’re a very strange person, Victor Cachat?”

“Yes, you have.” The handsome face and blue eyes met hers levelly, and he shook his head. “And for what it matters,” he said, his voice unaccustomedly soft, “I’m sorry. I’d really rather not have turned
you
into a legend, Thandi.”

“Don’t be,” she replied. “Sometimes you just draw the short straw, and I can think of a lot worse things to be fighting for—or against, for that matter.”

“At least we gave the bastards a hell of a hard time,” Dusek said from where he sat in one corner, counting hand grenades. He looked up with a crooked smile of his own. “You really think the rest of them will finish it up for us?”

“One way or the other,” Victor said. “We may not have kept them busy long enough for Duchess Harrington to get here from Manticore, but we sure as hell kept them busy long enough for the other seccies to get organized.”

Thandi nodded. They could still pull in Culture and Information’s so-called newscasts, and it didn’t take a huge amount of skill at reading between the lines to know the Mesan government was sweating bullets over the pressure building in the other seccy districts. None of those other districts were as well organized—or armed—as Neue Rostock had been, but she had no doubt at all that they were a lot better organized—and armed—than they’d been three T-weeks ago, and there were a lot of them. She remembered a certain Old Earth legend, and snorted.

“Something funny?” Dusek asked.

“Just that I never realized I should have been named Pandora Palane, not Thandi.”

“Pandora?” Dusek raised both eyebrows.

“A Solly legend,” Victor said, “and she’s mixing it up.” Thandi stuck out her tongue at him, and he smiled. “You’re not inflicting all the world’s evils on your
own
people like that silly twit, Thandi. You’re inflicting them on the
bad
people.” He paused for a moment, scratching the lobe of one ear, then shrugged. “Um. Now that I think about it, you might have more of a point than I thought, though. What was the last thing to come out of the box?”

“Hope, I think.” She shrugged. “It was in the version of it I heard, anyway.”

“Well, I think you could probably make a case that
hope
is exactly what we’re delivering to the seccies and slaves here on Mesa. And even though I rather doubt
Duchess Harrington’s
ever been called ‘hope’ before, that’s damned well what the seccies are going to call her when she rolls into the Mesa System with blood in her eye in another few T-weeks. Of course,” he smiled unpleasantly, “I tend to doubt that’s how the system government and the Mesan Alignment’re going to see her.”

“Probably not,” Thandi agreed, and looked down at her handful of still live monitors.

It wouldn’t be long now. Two days before, Drescher’s troops had finally driven a twin pronged assault entirely through the tower on the twenty-third floor. They’d taken the central grav shafts at that level, and they were working their way methodically both up and down from that point. It was still costing them people, but the defenders were critically low on ammunition for the heavy tribarrels, and they were essentially out of missiles. They still had sizable stocks of satchel charges manufactured out of commercial blasting compound—several tons of which had been smuggled into the tower before the underground accessways were cut—and plenty of ammunition for pulsers, but those were of limited effect even against utility armor, far less against the battle-armored troopers Drescher was increasingly using as her point elements.

In addition to the stranglehold Drescher had locked on the twenty-third floor, her troops were working their way up from the sub cellars, and the Peaceforcers advancing from that direction were going to reach the control room well before the ones fighting their way down from the twenty-third. There weren’t as many booby traps and strong points between them and their objective, and it was pretty clear they’d figured out where Thandi’s command post was, despite any false information their maps of Neue Rostock Tower might contain. It didn’t really matter, though, because they’d taken the fusion plant nine hours ago. The tower was operating on battery power now, and that would last little more than another eleven or twelve hours, at which point the remaining environmental systems would shut down. Most of her surveillance systems were gone by now, anyway; judging by the methodical way the Peaceforcers had been taking them out, Drescher had clearly realized how valuable they’d been to her.

At least Yana, Steph, and Andrew should be okay until Admiral Harrington gets here
, she thought.

They’d gotten Doctor Nimbakar’s infirmary out before the Peaceforcers finally cut the last escape tunnel, and Thandi had ordered Steph and Andrew to go with them. She’d tried ordering Nimbakar to go, as well, but she might as well have saved her effort on that one. Stupid, really. Anybody Nimbakar patched up was going to die anyway, in the end. But that was the way human beings were, she supposed. Sometimes it was really hard to judge where stupid ended and gallant began, and one thing Nimbakar had plenty of was guts. Who was Thandi Palane to tell her she couldn’t die caring for the wounded?

She looked back up at Victor, and for just a moment, he wavered through a sudden prickle of tears. There weren’t many of them, those tears—certainly not enough for anyone else to notice—but in that trembling heartbeat of time, she found herself wishing passionately that she could see his face—his
real
face—one last time.

Don’t be any stupider than you have to be
, she told herself.
You can see his “real” face anytime you want to
.

She closed her eyes for a moment, summoning the memory, treasuring the remembered smile in those dark brown eyes. Not many people had ever seen that smile, she reflected. A lot of people would have flatly denied it could exist. But
she’d
seen it, and she knew exactly who it was for. And that was enough, even here at the end.

She reopened her eyes, looking once again at the outward stranger disguising the inward man, and her lips twitched in an unwilling smile.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just a passing thought.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, but she only shook her head. It wasn’t really all that funny, she supposed, but it
was
inevitable. The vote had been unanimous, in fact, and her gaze rested for just an instant on the detonator hanging against his chest like a necklace pendant. They didn’t have anywhere near the mountain of blasting compound they would have required to bring Neue Rostock down, even placing the charges internally, but they had enough to implode a
lot
of the tower. They ought to be able to take at least another thousand—more likely two thousand—Peaceforcers with them when they went. And no one had doubted whose hand they wanted on that trigger . . . or whose brain they wanted calculating the exact moment to press it home.

Spiteful of us, I guess,
she thought with another of those half-imagined smiles.
But if I’m going to wind up becoming a damned legend, I want it to be a practical, bloody-minded, stubborn, vindictive
bitch
of a legend, by God!

“Thandi?”

She looked up as Nolan Olsen called her name. The Neue Rostock building superintendent’s refusal to leave had been just as adamant as Rudrani Nimbakar’s, and Thandi had wasted less effort arguing with him. Partly that was because she’d gotten to know him better and realized more quickly how futile it would have been, but mostly it was because he’d been much more useful for the grim grinding out of the defense. He’d done wonders keeping the internal systems online—or limping along, anyway—and he was at least as exhausted as anyone else in the control room. Yet there was something peculiar about his tone.

“What, Nolan?”

“We’ve got a com call coming in.” He sounded almost bemused, although there was something else—something tauter, even darker—under the bemusement. “It’s for you.”

“What?” Thandi straightened. The Peaceforcers hadn’t been able to shut down their internal communications net, but they’d managed to cut any external links. “For me?” Olsen nodded. “From who?”

“She says she’s Lieutenant General Drescher,” Olsen replied.

Thandi blinked, then looked at Victor and Dusek.

“Little late for any surrender demands, don’t you think?” Dusek asked wryly.

“Won’t cost her anything to try,” Victor pointed out. “And she probably has at least a pretty good idea of how much it’s going to cost her to finish things up the hard way, too.” He shrugged. “Hard to blame her for giving it a shot.”

“I suppose you want me to say something deathless and noble to her?” Thandi said, looking at him sourly, and he chuckled.

“Deathless, maybe. Noble?” This time he actually laughed. “Neither of us is a Manty aristocrat, Thandi! I vote for something pungent and to the point.”

“Such as?”

“ ‘Go fuck yourself?’ ” Dusek suggested helpfully.

“Too many syllables,” Victor said, shaking his head. “She’s only a general, you know. She’d get confused.”

“And which one of the two generals involved were you referring to?” Thandi inquired.

“The other one, of course. Wouldn’t be safe to talk about
you
that way.”

Thandi snorted, but she also looked back at Olsen.

“Can you switch it to my station, Nolan?”

“Yeah, I can still manage that much.”

He punched in a command and one of Thandi’s dead monitors flickered to life with the image of a petite, dark-haired woman in the uniform of the Mesan Planetary Peaceforce with a lieutenant general’s insignia. She was a few centimeters taller than Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou, yet she strongly reminded Thandi of the Beowulfer. That was irritating, given how much she’d liked Benton-Ramirez y Chou.

“Yes?” she said, more than a bit brusquely.

“I’d asked to speak to Thandi Palane,” the woman on the monitor responded stiffly.

“I’m Palane,” Thandi said even more brusquely, and the other woman’s eyes narrowed.

“Not according to the imagery of Captain Palane from the Solarian Marines you aren’t,” she replied, and Thandi felt her eyebrows rise.

It certainly wouldn’t have been impossible for Mesan intelligence to get its hands on a copy of her official Marine file, but it wouldn’t have been easy, either. On the other hand, once Torch declared war on Mesa, it would have made a lot of sense for the Mesan intelligence agencies to look for all the information it could find on one Thandi Palane. Although, now that she thought about it, it was questionable just how much good that would do them, given the various unnatural things Admiral Rozsak had done to her
official
file when she went to work on his personal staff.

“Surely not even a Mesan would have expected me to come waltzing in wearing my own face, General Drescher?” she pointed out acidly.

“I guess not,” Drescher conceded after a moment, her eyes still intensely focused on Thandi’s face. “Good disguise, though. Beowulf?”

“Given the fact that your government—such as it is and what there is of it—is already trying to blame
Torch
for those ‘Ballroom terrorist attacks,’ do you really expect me to say anything you could cut and edit to accuse anyone else of the same sorts of things?”

“I guess not,” Drescher said again, this time with a snort that sounded like genuine amusement. Then she shook herself. “I’m going to take you at your word that you really are Thandi Palane, though.”

“You have no idea how deeply flattered I am by your concession. And would it happen that that means you’re about to get around to telling me why you commed?”

“It would.” Drescher’s expression sobered. “The reason I screened was to propose an immediate cease-fire in place, followed by the phased withdrawal of all of my personnel from Neue Rostock Tower.”

Despite herself, Thandi blinked, then shot a sudden, incredulous glance at Victor and Dusek. Dusek looked as stunned as she felt. Victor . . . not so much. He did look suddenly and intensely interested, however, which was about as close to “stunned and incredulous” as Victor Cachat ever came.

Thandi looked back down at Drescher’s image, trying to imagine what could be behind the other woman’s last, preposterous sentence. Surely she didn’t think she could dupe them into lowering their guard, letting her surprise them with a sudden attack in the midst of “negotiating” this cease-fire of hers! But if not that, then—?

“Why?” she asked bluntly, and Gillian Drescher smiled very strangely at her.

“Well, General Palane, it seems something new has been added to the balance of forces here in the Mesa System. Thirty-five minutes ago—”