Shadow of Freedom-eARC (31 page)

* * *

“If this brainstorm of yours is actually working, My Lady, we’re probably getting close,” Gutierrez said over his private link to Abigail. “If I were in charge on the other side, this is where I’d be stacking my fire. Nice extended sightlines, and plenty of opportunity for converging fire on the only door the other guys could come through.”

“It does look like the best opportunity for them, doesn’t it?” Abigail agreed, studying the detailed imagery from the damage control guide. “I guess the only question’s whether or not this Major Pole’s going to pull enough strength from his reserve.”

“Only one way to find out about that,” Gutierrez said philosophically.

“I know.” Abigail smiled fleetingly. “That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though. I really don’t want to be wrong about this one, Mateo.”

“Course you don’t,” he replied in a gentler tone. “But when you come down to it, you’ve got to drop the penny. I don’t know if it’ll work, either, but I think it’s our best shot.”

Abigail nodded. Her greatest fear, really, had been that the gendarmes would drag one of their Manticoran prisoners into the middle of the firefight and threaten to kill him if she and her boarders refused to back off. Given the gendarmerie’s normal disregard for civilian life—if it belonged to “neobarbs,” at least—she’d anticipated from the beginning that the Sollies would eventually call her bluff, find out if she truly was willing to continue attacking in the face of a direct threat to the prisoners. What she hadn’t been able to estimate with any confidence was how
soon
they might do that. It seemed unlikely they’d risk that sort of escalation until they were convinced they wouldn’t be able to stop her any other way, however, which was the entire basis of the strategy she’d adopted.

Hopefully, Major Pole was bright enough to recognize the defensive possibilities Gutierrez had just described. If he was, and if he’d committed enough of his reserve…

“All right, everybody,” she announced over the tactical net. “It’s just about time to dance. Report readiness.”

A chorus of responses came back to her, and she nodded.

“Mateo, start the music. Nicasio, let’s be about it.”

* * *

“Get ready!” Captain Ascher snapped as “Denny” blew another set of blast doors into wreckage.

* * *

“Now!” Lieutenant Nicasio Xamar said crisply, and the Royal Manticoran Navy personnel standing on the surface of habitat module Victor Seven moved forward.

Just finding the emergency personnel locks should have been a nontrivial challenge, and even after the Manties had found them, they should have had to burn or blast their way inside. They certainly shouldn’t have been able to override the entry codes and cycle their personnel through them without anyone noticing! But that, of course, assumed they didn’t have access to Shona Station’s classified damage control files.

* * *

“They’re behind us!
They’re behind us!
”

“What the hell?!”

John Pole’s head flew up as his tactical display changed abruptly. Half a dozen of his single reserve platoon’s icons went crimson in the same instant, and three more blinked from green to amber—or red—even as he watched. That
couldn’t
be right! The Manties couldn’t—!

“Central, they’re hitting us from—!”

The voice chopped off in mid-sentence, and Pole’s face went white as even more icons went down. Others were falling back desperately, abandoning their positions, and he heard heavy firing and explosions over the open circuit. But that wasn’t possible. There was no
way
the Manties could have—

“Sir, the Manties want to talk to you,” a pale-faced communications tech said. Pole stared at him, and the tech pointed at a display. Somehow the Manties had patched into the station’s “secure” communications net.

Pole stood for a moment, frozen while his brain tried to process the information coming at him.
None
of this could be happening, but—

“Sir?” the com tech said almost plaintively, and the major shook himself viciously back to life and turned to the indicated display.

“
What?
” he got out. His voice sounded strangled, even to himself, and the young woman on the display smiled coldly.

“I’m in contact with my people who have just taken control of your brig, Major,” she said flatly. “I understand at least twenty-five of your gendarmes have surrendered to them. At the moment, your people are being locked into the cells and
my
people are evacuating the way they came. I very much doubt you have anyone in a position to intervene…and if you do, I’d strongly recommend you don’t try it. So far, whether you believe it or not, I’ve been trying to
avoid
killing any more of your people than I have to. I’m perfectly prepared to abandon that approach if you insist, however.”

Her smile was icy, but her eyes were colder still, and something inside Major John Pole shriveled under their weight.

“So tell me, Major,” she invited, “which way would
you
like me to handle it?”

Chapter Seventeen

“
Look out!
”

The screamed warning came a lifetime too late as the first obsolescent but still deadly Solarian-built Scorpion light armored fighting vehicle rounded the corner of the pastel-colored ceramacrete tower. It moved down the center of the broad boulevard, and two more AFVs followed it. Still others were visible beyond the initial trio, all wearing the presidential seal and crossed thunderbolts of the Presidential Guard.

Any doubt as to the Scorpions’ purpose was dispelled quickly, clearly, and not with anything so potentially ambiguous as words.

The Scorpion’s main weapon—a 35-millimeter grav gun—didn’t fire, but its secondary, turret-mounted tribarrel spewed out thousands of rounds of solid five-millimeter darts per minute. They struck like some terrible, solid tornado of destruction, and the front of the crowd of demonstrators disintegrated in a hideous spray of crimson and shredded flesh. Pieces of bodies flew or flopped to the pavement, and shrieks of terror replaced the furious, chanted slogans of moments before.

The stink of blood and riven human bodies buried the warm summer scent of flowers from the capital’s green belts, and the huge demonstration began to shed a torrent of panicked fugitives.

None of those fleeing people were armed. They’d come to express their opposition to President Lombroso’s régime, not to engage in pitched warfare with the black-uniformed Presidential Guard, the most feared of the Mobius System’s many security services. The current demonstration had been a long time brewing, and over half of its members belonged to Lombroso’s own System Unity and Progress Party. That didn’t mean as much as it might have, since the SUPP was the only legal political party in the entire Mobius System and party membership was a requirement for anybody who ever hoped for anything better than purely menial employment, but it probably said something that so many of System Unity’s rank and file had been willing to come out in protest of their own founder’s policies. Yet while there’d been no lack of anger in their chants’ furious denunciations of Lombroso’s tyranny and corruption, very few of those running for their lives had ever imagined a response like this one!

Not all the demonstrators were fleeing, however. Nor had all of them come unarmed. Less idealistic (or naïve, perhaps) than their fellows, those others had anticipated the Guard’s appearance and come prepared. Or they’d thought they had, anyway; the appearance of AFVs in the heart of the planetary capital when there’d been zero violence from the demonstrators surprised even them.

Despite that, weapons began to fire back from here and there in the screaming crowd. Pulsers were few and far between, since (as Lombroso and his OFS-trained Presidential Guard had explained when confiscating all modern weapons over twenty T-years earlier) the security of Mobius’ citizens was the responsibility of their government. There’s no room for vigilantism on Mobius, Citizens, thank you very much! Now move along. Nothing to see here!

Less sophisticated firearms had tended to evade the government ban on personal weapons, however, and if they were less “advanced” than pulsers, they were no less deadly if they managed to hit their targets.

The Guard infantry following the Scorpions with their body armor, shields, and high-voltage stun batons found that out the hard way. Their riot gear had served them well in confrontations with outraged college students, fired more by intellectual outrage than organized hatred. It had served well enough breaking heads to discourage the occasional general strike, or moving “squatters” out of housing they happened to own but which had been condemned under eminent domain for transfer to Lombroso’s corporate patrons. And the swaggering, self-proclaimed “elite” troopers who wore it were backed by heavier infantry and armored vehicles, even sting ships. They’d been confident no one could possibly be stupid enough to offer them actual
armed
resistance with all that firepower on tap to support them.

Unfortunately, this time they were wrong, and the riot gear which had always stopped improvised truncheons or thrown rocks turned out to be far less effective against bullets.

The Guard’s ranks shuddered as the return fire slammed into it. For a second or two, the troopers simply froze, unable to believe such a thing could possibly happen to
them
, and over forty were killed or wounded in that handful of moments. For the first time in its history, the Guard heard its own members screaming in agony as
their
bodies were broken and rent, as
their
blood soaked the pavement. Then, as if it were a single organism, the “elite” infantry turned and fled in howling panic.

The Scorpion crews were just as astonished by the ferocity of the response. Like their infantry compatriots, they’d grown accustomed to being the ones who did the killing and maiming. The notion that someone could offer them organized violence in return had never crossed their minds, and they snarled in fury as their anticipated afternoon’s amusement of slaughtering enemies of the state turned into something else.

Yet there were still plenty of those “enemies of the state” out there, and the Scorpions still had their weapons…and their armor. They swept forward on their counter-grav, tribarrels raving. Dozens of demonstrators—most of whom hadn’t had a thing to do with the fire coming back at the Guard—were killed for every security trooper who’d gone down. Bodies (or parts of them, at least) piled in rows as hyper-velocity darts tore them apart, and scores of other people were trampled, many to death, in frantic efforts to escape the Scorpions’ wrath.

Unfortunately for the Guard, however, President Lombroso’s security forces hadn’t managed to confiscate
all
of his citizens’ modern weapons after all, and the antitank launcher on the thirtieth floor of the O’Sullivan Tower was a very modern weapon, indeed. Its kinetic projectile weighed over five kilos, despite its slender dimensions. Accelerated to thirty KPS by the man-portable gravitic launcher, it was effectively an energy weapon. The super-dense projectile struck with the equivalent energy of well over half a ton of pre-space high explosive, concentrated into a penetrator barely one and a half centimeters in diameter, and the lead Scorpion erupted in a blue-white blaze of burning hydrogen as its fuel tanks ruptured.

A second launcher took out another light tank in equally spectacular fashion, and the Scorpion crews turned their attention from the diversion of butchering demonstrators to the desperate business of self-preservation. Their weapons tracked around, trailing swaths of destruction, hammering the faces of the towers from which the fire was coming. Display windows and businesses exploded. Flames gushed through shattered ceramacrete walls. Fire alarms wailed, smoke streamed up in dense, choking columns, and another Scorpion exploded.

The others redoubled their efforts, and main gun fire joined the tornado of tribarrel darts. The 35-millimeter projectiles were substantially heavier than, and at least as fast as, the antitank penetrators, and explosions pocked the towers, blasting deep into their internal structure.

* * *

“Intolerable!
Unacceptable!
” President Svein Lombroso shouted, pounding on his desk blotter. “Did you
see
that?
Do
you see that?”

He stopped pounding long enough to jab one hand at his office windows, which overlooked the columns of inky-black smoke rising from the heart of the of the city of Landing’s financial district. The firing had finally stopped an hour ago, but the lower stories of three major towers were roaring infernos, and God only knew how much damage those fires were going to do before they were extinguished. And not just to locally owned property, either. Two satellite offices of Lombroso’s major transstellar sponsor were part of the bonfire, as well.

“I’ve been telling you for
months
something like this was coming!” the President continued. “For months! I’ve been warning you about the rumors, the malcontents my security people have found! But did you
believe
me? Hell, no, you didn’t!”

“Mister President, please, calm yourself,” Angelika Xydis said in her most soothing tones. Her raised hands made stroking motions in midair. “I agree this is terrible, Sir. But the situation’s a long way from out of control!”

“A long way from out of control?!” Lombroso stared at her incredulously. “I lost over a hundred men.
A hundred men!
That’s more Guard troopers killed in one afternoon than in the last fifty
T-years
. D’you think those malcontent anarchists don’t
realize
that? Aren’t going to be emboldened by their success?”

Xydis bit her tongue.

Officially, she was a State Department employee, the Solarian League’s trade attaché on Mobius. Actually, as everyone realized perfectly well, the trade mission was where the local Office of Frontier Security’s representative (one Angelika Xydis, as it happened) hung her hat. As a mid-level OFS bureaucrat, Xydis had seen more strongmen like Lombroso than she cared to recall. More than one had gotten his ass in a crack through sheer, stupid incompetence, too. And it was amazing how many of them would have fixated—just like Lombroso—on the losses their security troops had taken as something likely to embolden their local opposition instead of reflecting on the fury the two or three thousand
civilian
casualties were going to engender!