Cauldron of Ghosts (54 page)

She looked up from the body, saw Ludvigsen and the others in a half-circle on the other side of the corpse, standing among the seccy bodies. She couldn’t see their faces any more than they could see hers, but if she could have, she knew exactly what expressions she would have seen. It was odd. Her life hung in the balance, depended on the next words she said, and all she felt was . . . empty.

She never really knew how long they stood there, each looking at the others’ blank visors. It couldn’t possibly have been as long as it felt. But then, finally, Sanchez and Timmons reappeared, joining the others, and she drew a deep breath.

“Any sign of the shooter?” she heard her own voice ask, never looking away from Ludvigsen.

“Not a trace, Sarge.” Sanchez sounded a lot calmer than Ludvigsen had, she noted, and Timmons carried his pulse rifle like a hunter, its forestock resting on his left forearm and the muzzle not—quite—aimed in her direction.

“Too bad,” she said. Then shook herself. “Central, Bravo-Zero-Three,” she said. “Patch Bravo-Zero-One.”

“Bravo-Zero-One,” Loretta Frasch’s voice said in her earbug. “Talk to me, Barrett. What the
hell
is going on in there?!”

“Sorry, Sarge,” her voice said. She didn’t seem to be consciously choosing the words; they just came, as if she were listening to a stranger. “Been a little confusion here. We flushed a nest of seccies, and while the lieutenant was starting to interrogate them, somebody sniped him through a break in the back wall. He’s dead.”

The silence on the command circuit was absolute. It lingered for what seemed like a very, very long time. Then Frasch cleared her throat.

“And the seccies?”

“Killed in the crossfire when we returned fire,” that voice which sounded so much like her own replied steadily while she looked at Ludvigsen and the others.

“The sniper?” Frasch sounded resigned, and Barrett shook her head inside her helmet.

“Got away. The hole he fired through’s no more than half a meter. By the time we sorted out what the hell had happened and Sanchez and Timmons managed to squirm through it after him, he’d disappeared down some damned rathole or another.”

“Understood. There’s likely to be some hell to pay over this,” Frasch continued. “Regiment’s going to want to talk to all of you later. Near as I can tell, the LT’d dropped out of the tac net when he headed into the garage, so I’ve got damn all
I
can give them. Maybe you and the others can put together some kind of accurate picture of what happened for them.”

“We’ll certainly try to,” Barrett said, hearing the buried message in the platoon sergeant’s words and sensing the relaxation of the troopers around her.

“You’d better,” Frasch said flatly. “Trigger the LT’s retrieval beacon, then get your asses back out here. We’re falling behind the other platoons.”

Chapter 60

“I can’t believe these idiots,” Thandi Palane muttered, looking up from the HD and the imagery of MISD troops sweeping the green belts, industrial spokes, and the parking and support facilities that serve them. “What the hell do they think they’re
doing?
”

“They think they’ve got a free hunting license,” Jurgen Dusek said coldly. He stood beside her, watching the same imagery, and his expression was even grimmer than hers. “I don’t know who really set those nukes off, and I’m still not convinced Captain Zilwicki and Mr. Cachat are right about who was behind it, but they were damned well right about the consequences. Whoever it was
gave
people like that bitch Snyder the excuse they’ve been looking for. This—” his chin jutted at the HD “—is the early stages of Snyder’s ‘final solution to the seccy problem.’ Besides, after what happened to the Safeties, they don’t have any real choice. They’ve
got
to take out at least a couple of seccy towers—and do it pretty damned spectacularly—if they don’t want what’s happening here in Mendel to spread. And, trust me, Snyder and McGillicuddy
definitely
don’t want that!”

Thandi glanced at him thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. She was no longer surprised by Dusek’s obvious familiarity with the innermost workings of the Mesa System government. He was a seccy, which automatically precluded him from participation in that government, but he watched it the way any predator watched its environment. He had to know what was going on inside it, because whether seccies were permitted a voice in it or not, it controlled everything about their lives. Indeed, the fact that they had no voice made it even more vital for him to know what its objectives were, who the major players within it were, and how all of that was going to impact his own district and his own organization.

And after the weeks she’d spent on Mesa, she’d come to regard Dusek himself in rather a different light. Victor had been right about the role the various crime bosses played in the seccy community. No one would ever confuse Jurgen Dusek with a white knight, and he certainly typified the old cliché about doing well by doing good. In terms of both personal wealth and personal power, he was quite probably one of the most powerful individuals in the entire city of Mendel, not simply in the seccy communities. Since he and Victor had become . . . associates, she’d realized Dusek’s contacts went far beyond the seccy districts. The “gray economy” of Mesa was grayer than most, even among the system’s full citizens, and Dusek had formed alliances in some very peculiar places where no seccy would ever have dared to go openly.

Those alliances had been shattered by the wave of “terrorist” attacks, however. It wasn’t so much that any of his allies thought he’d had anything to do with them. It was simply that the hammer which was about to come down on Mesa’s seccies—especially here in Mendel, where so much of the total seccy population was concentrated—was big enough no one wanted to get caught under it with him.

He knew it, too. Yet that was purely secondary to him at the moment. Well, maybe not
purely
secondary; if there was a tomorrow for Mendel’s seccies, Dusek clearly intended to stay right at the top of the pile. But at the moment, he was operating not as a crime lord skimming profit from troubled seas but as exactly what Victor had said he was—the closest thing to a government the thousands of seccies living in Neue Rostock Tower had ever known.

“—security forces have regained control of most of the districts where Office of Public Safety personnel were ambushed in yesterday’s fighting,” the commentator was saying in the background. “Faced with an organized, resolute response, the rioters who instigated the violence are retreating everywhere. Director of Security McGillicuddy’s office issued a statement just a few hours ago in which the Director said, I quote, ‘The perpetrators of these cowardly, vile attacks on OPS personnel attempting to apprehend several suspects believed to have been complicit in the Dobzhansky and Blue Lagoon Park attacks will be brought to account. It is regrettable that the decision of the terrorists and their sympathizers to seek concealment in the seccy districts has already led to so much loss of life, and will, unfortunately, lead to still more. In the face of the atrocities which have been committed by the Audubon Ballroom terrorists operating from those districts, however, the Office of Public Safety has no option but to continue its operations until such time as those responsible for the terrorist incidents
and
those seeking to aid and abet them after the fact have been taken into custody to face the full legal penalty assigned to their actions.’

“In light of the Director’s statement, and the ongoing operations we’ve seen today, it seems likely that—”

“It seems likely that a lot of people are going to get killed,” Thandi finished harshly, killing the sound.

“They don’t mind that at all, as long as it’s the right people,” Dusek told her. “And what they think they’re doing right now is driving every seccy they can into their killing zones. Of course, that might not be
exactly
the way things are going to work out for them.”

He smiled thinly. The evacuation of Neue Rostock’s inhabitants had begun days before, within twenty-four hours of Victor’s presenting Anton’s analysis of where the mounting tide of “terrorist attacks” was going to lead. It helped that he’d organized an evacuation plan for the entire tower years before, more as an exercise in “what if” than because he’d ever really expected to need it. Now he was glad he had, and he’d been getting his people out from under that looming hammer well before the string of nuclear strikes drove the security forces mad. The tunnels and passages under Neue Rostock Tower were hardly broad thoroughfares, and distributing the evacuees discreetly enough elsewhere to prevent OPS from noticing a sudden influx of seccies had been a nontrivial challenge. Fortunately, they’d begun early enough that virtually all of Neue Rostock’s residents—aside from a surprisingly high percentage of bloody-minded individuals who’d chosen to stand and fight along with the members of Dusek’s organization—had already filtered to safety before OPS and MISD had even started casting their net about it. Now, as refugees fled in front of the MISD hunter-killer teams, his people were guiding them down and out through the tunnels as soon as they reached the tower.

From the messages still getting through to Neue Rostock—and from the news broadcasts—it sounded as if Bachue the Nose’s preparations had been less effective, though. She’d never been as tightly organized as Dusek, never tried to integrate all of the inhabitants of Hancock Tower into a single evacuation plan, and her people were less familiar with the tunnels and service ways spiderwebbing away from Hancock.

“They’re frigging idiots.” Thandi’s voice was harsher than ever. “Look at them! They can’t have more than a couple of regiments out there. That’s a lot of manpower for hunting down and killing people in the open—especially people that can’t fight back. It’s not nearly enough to crack a tower like Neue Rostock.”

“Unless they’ve decided to go with what your friend Captain Zilwicki so charmingly dubbed the ‘Damocles Option,’ ” Dusek pointed out. “If they just go ahead and drop a big enough KEW on us, they won’t need to use up manpower taking us out!”

“That’s true,” Thandi acknowledged. “The problem they’ve got is that the kind of KEW they’d need to really crack open a tower like this one is going to inflict a
lot
of collateral damage. Like I told you in the beginning, they can
do
it, but it’s going to be even tougher than I’d estimated then. Whoever designed this place wasn’t concerned with the sort of minimal amenities that go into full citizens’ housing. They just wanted something they could pack people into, and atriums and air shafts use valuable space. They didn’t feel like wasting any of that on you people, and that means your tower here is really one solid gridwork of ceramacrete walls and floors. Taking it down with a single KEW would require them to write off a lot of other real estate in the process. I don’t think they’re going to want to do that. Of course, I doubt they’re going to like what happens when they try to
storm
a tower like this one, either. And I can
guarantee
that the bastards at the sharp end aren’t going to like it one little bit.”

Dusek nodded. She wasn’t certain he really believed her, although neither Victor nor Anton had been at all hesitant in passing her off as the greatest military commander since Achilles. Given the already legendary status Torch had achieved among the seccy and slave populations of Mesa, despite all the authorities could do to suppress any news reports about the kingdom, they hadn’t even had to work very hard at it. She still wasn’t remotely comfortable at having her true identity known, but Victor had a point. If Neue Rostock ultimately fell, she and all the other off-worlders were as good as dead, anyway, so maintaining their secret identities would no longer be real high on their list of priorities.

“Besides,” he’d said with typical, rather appalling Victor matter-of-factness, “think about what a major shot in the arm it would be for Torch when all those seccies we got out spread the word about Palane’s Last Stand. I mean, I’d much rather live through it, and I think we’ve got at least a fair chance of making it. But if we don’t, you’ll give Torch its own combination of the Alamo and Horatius at the Bridge in one, single package. A good looking one, too, now that I think about it. The statue’ll make even that thing of Duchess Harrington’s on Grayson look positively bland.”

There were times she wondered about Victor, she really did. Not that he didn’t have a point, she supposed. Whether she liked it or not, she was no longer a Solarian Marine junior officer, and she’d changed even more than she’d thought she had along the way, because a part of her actually understood what he was saying. She had absolutely no desire to become a legend, but sometimes you got caught in what one pre-space history she’d read had called the Birkenhead Drill. If this was
her
Birkenhead Drill, she intended to take as many of these Mesan bastards with her as she could, and if the Kingdom of Torch needed a legend, she wouldn’t be around to object, anyway.

“The thing is,” she continued, turning from the HD and crossing the spacious room to the bank of consoles at its center, “a tower like this is just full of nasty accidents waiting to happen. With a little help, you can arrange for them to happen to the right people.”

Dusek nodded again, more enthusiastically, as she seated herself in one of the comfortable chairs. He took the chair beside hers, and she looked around.

The room in which she sat was buried in the Neue Rostock cellars, five floors below ground level. Up until a very few days ago, it had been the control center for the incredible, complex entity that was Neue Rostock. Tenement tower or no, a structure eight hundred meters tall and a hundred meters on a side was an enormous edifice, and the environmental systems needed to keep it functioning were as complex as anything one might find in an orbital habitat or a starship. The technicians who’d overseen those systems had done so from this room, just as they’d monitored the tower’s lift shafts, sewerage systems, water supply, security systems, and the fusion plant which provided the tower’s stand-alone power supply.

The truth was that Neue Rostock was a small city, home to over thirty thousand seccies, with all of the support services a city that size needed. And because it was standard practice to make such towers as self-sufficient as possible, it was not simply a city but a citadel well suited to withstand both assaults and sieges. Oh, they couldn’t hold out indefinitely. Feeding the defenders would become a problem after the first few weeks, although she’d been pleasantly surprised by just how much food was actually available. Power couldn’t be cut off from outside the tower, however; the fusion plant’s deeply buried storage tanks held almost a full T-year of reactor mass. Nor could their water supply be cut, since the builders had even driven wells down into the aquifer under Mendel—why not? it had been cheap enough with modern technology—to provide a standalone water supply, as well.

Sloppy thinking on someone’s part
, she reflected.
Obviously whoever authorized the plans wasn’t thinking about what a copperplated bitch it would be to assault something like this. I’d’ve thought a bunch of paranoid slave masters would have given something like that some thought. Guess not even genetic supermen can think of everything. Pity about that
.

What was even sloppier was that they hadn’t already taken steps to seal off Neue Rostock’s subsurface accessways. In their defense, they’d probably anticipated taking the seccies by surprise, and realistically speaking, the possibility of evacuating that many people through the tunnels and cellars with little or no warning while actually under attack wouldn’t have existed. For that matter, they might even have
wanted
a few of them to get out, spreading their tales of the terror of Neue Rostock’s fall among the rest of the seccy population. Then again, it was equally possible they hadn’t been stupid enough—initially—to contemplate actually attacking the towers. It was at least remotely possible that the original Office of Public Safety sweeps hadn’t been intended as the first step in a major bloodletting. The initial reports certainly seemed to indicate the Safeties had never anticipated what had happened to them, never expected the seccies to fight back. Which was only going to make it even uglier in the end, she thought grimly. The hatred and thirst for vengeance which had animated the OPS troopers in the beginning could only have been reinforced and strengthened by the casualties they’d taken.

“Do you really think we can hold out until your friends can get someone in here to help us?” Dusek asked very quietly, his voice low enough none of the other technicians in what had become Thandi’s command post could hear him.

“Realistically?” Thandi regarded him levelly, then twitched her head back in the direction of the HD they’d been watching. “If what we’ve seen so far is typical, I’d say the odds are probably at least eighty-twenty in our favor, always assuming they don’t just haul off and drop one of those big assed KEWs on us after all. If they find somebody who doesn’t have her head thoroughly up her ass to take over from that idiot Howell, the odds go down. In fact, depending on how good Howell’s replacement is, they could go down a lot.”