Cauldron of Ghosts (56 page)

“Audrey, I don’t think—”

“I think we’re through here, Kyle,” she said, not unkindly, and shook her head. “I know I’ve got a temper, and I also know you’re doing your job the way you understand what has to be done. I understand that. But you’d better understand that
I
have a job to do, too, and that I’m
going
to do it. So before you say anything else, and before we start screaming at each other again, I suggest you go and pass my message along to your bosses. Tell them that either they grant me access starting tomorrow morning, or I’m on the first ship out of here to tell the Solarian League at large that you and they are obviously covering up
something
—something so big and so ugly that you didn’t dare risk my getting even a whiff of the truth.”

Chapter 62

“Well, I suppose it’s about time . . . not that I’m looking forward to this,” Gillian Drescher said sourly. She shook her head. “This is going to be a cluster fuck, however we go about it, you know.”

“Be a worse one if we left it all up to Howell and his idiots,” Colonel Bartel pointed out even more sourly. “They’ve managed to lose almost five hundred people, and they aren’t even up to the damned towers yet!”

“Fair’s fair, Byrum.” Drescher shook her head, her expression worried. “The truth is, our people didn’t project this kind of seccy resistance, either. And so far, it’s been mainly small arms and improvised booby traps. You think it isn’t going to get worse—for our people, not just theirs—before it’s over?”

“I’m damned sure it is, Ma’am. That’s
one reason I’m so pissed at Howell—and McGillicuddy, for that matter—for handing this shit sandwich off to us.”

“Well, it’s not ours yet.” Drescher looked at the orders on her terminal again, then shrugged. “At least we’ve already stood up our people. How long till we have them on the ground?”

“It’ll still take at least another six hours, Ma’am.” Bartel shrugged irritably. “Just moving them’s going to be a problem, since the Misties ‘borrowed’ so much of Fifth Brigade’s transport.”

Drescher grunted unhappily. Howell’s troop movements had been on a much larger scale than he’d ever anticipated, and, just to make things worse, he’d managed to lose something on the order of three dozen air lorries and a dozen APCs in a single seccy raid. Fortunately, he’d lost them parked on the ground, without anyone aboard them to be killed when their hydrogen tanks exploded, but what kind of idiot established a major vehicle park without at least securing the access points to the utility tunnels
underneath
it?

Actually, I know
exactly what kind of idiot does something like that, don’t I?
she reflected.

“In that case, we’d better get started,” she said out loud.

* * *

“Yes, Sir. Of course. I understand, Sir.”

Bentley Howell managed somehow to keep his searing anger out of his voice and expression as he gazed at François McGillicuddy’s com image. To McGillicuddy’s credit, the Director of Security didn’t look a lot happier than Howell felt, and he damned well shouldn’t have.

“Until General Drescher arrives on-site, you’re still in command, Commissioner,” McGillicuddy said. “I expect you to exercise good judgment in the interim.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Good. In that case, I’ll speak with you later. Good luck, Bentley.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

The com image disappeared, and Howell allowed himself a snarl. So, they were going to take Rat Catcher away from him and hand it over to that oh-so-superior sanctimonious bitch Drescher to take the credit after
his
people had bled to get to this point? It was probably Pearson’s doing. Or Alpina’s. The Peaceforce’s CO was always on the lookout for ways to improve the MPP’s position at the Office of Public Safety’s expense!

He glowered down at the map display.

Fourth Regiment’s 1st Battalion had a cordon around the Neue Rostock approaches. Howell was positive no more seccies were getting into the tower at ground level, and Major Brockmann would keep it that way. In the meantime, he’d moved MacKane’s 2nd Battalion, and all of Perelló’s 19th Regiment and Sergio Metz’s 17th Regiment up to invest the approaches to Hancock Tower. They were perfectly positioned to assault the place, and now he was expected to stand here with his thumb up his ass while Drescher’s Peaceforce strolled through his lines, took
his
prize, and walked off with all the fucking credit, was he?

McGillicuddy said you’re still in command until Drescher drags her sorry ass to the front
, he reminded himself. He caught his lower lip between his teeth, his mind racing as he considered the possibilities. Then he drew a deep breath, nodded once, hard, and looked up at the man on the other side of the Cyclops’ map display.

“Colonel MacKane.”

“Yes, Commissioner?”

“The assault elements are in position?”

“Yes, Sir.”

MacKane’s tone was difficult to parse. On the one hand, he’d heard Director McGillicuddy’s conversation with Howell, and it was obvious to the commissioner that the colonel was less than fully confident in his own plan of attack. On the other hand, MacKane was MISD, and it was his people who’d already paid cash to get this far.

“In that case, Colonel, let’s get to it,” Commissioner Bentley Howell said flatly.

* * *

“Oh, shit,” Kayla Barrett said with quiet, intense sincerity as the order came over the com net.

She and her understrength section were on Hancock Tower’s eastern side, hunkered down along the bank of what had been intended—once upon a time—as a scenic canal or river (she wasn’t sure exactly which; the dry bed was studded with too many artistically spaced rocks for a canal, but it seemed awfully damned straight for a river) flanked by a scenic hiking trail. Since this was a seccy district, the canal (or river) had never been properly finished and the hiking trail’s landscaping was less than scenic. Worse, there’d been some fighting before the MISD secured control of the canal cut. The seccies had used it as a fighting trench—there were still a half dozen of their bodies in it—which was exactly what Barrett’s section and the rest of 2nd Platoon was using it for at the moment.

And what she really, really didn’t want to do was to climb out of that trench’s protection and advance into that hulking, mountainous tower. Unfortunately, no one seemed especially interested in what
she
wanted just at the moment.

“Saddle up,” Lieutenant Marilyn Kalanadhabhatla said sharply over the net. Kalanadhabhatla had transferred in from 17th Regiment to replace Connor Ferguson as 2nd Platoon’s CO, and that was another thing Barrett didn’t like. Kalanadhabhatla was a complete unknown. The one good thing about that from Barrett’s perspective was that she’d apparently come in cold, without any prior knowledge of what had happened to Ferguson . . . or how. The really, really bad thing about it was that no one in the platoon had ever worked with her before, and that was not a good state of affairs for one of the units picked to lead the assault into a seccy-held tower.

“You heard the LT!” Platoon Sergeant Frasch said sharply. “Off your asses and on your feet, people!”

At least the seccies who’d been sniping from Hancock’s outer windows had been driven mostly to ground, Barrett reflected, and the hissing, whickering crack-crack-crack-crack of the tribarrels’ covering fire was one of the most welcome sounds she’d ever heard. Every twelfth dart was a tracer round; at the tribarrels’ incredible rate of fire, those tracers looked like a death ray, reaching out to the tower and lacing its surface with a hurricane of explosions. Dust, splinters, and chunks of debris blew back—not even ceramacrete could take that kind of punishment without its surface shattering—and five battalions of MISD troopers moved forward under the protection of those thunderbolts.

Despite the covering fire, here and there a seccy popped up in one of the windows not currently under fire—there were far too many windows in the tower’s outer walls for
all
of them to be taken under fire continuously—and ripped off a burst from the military-grade pulsers Bachue the Nose’s people seemed to have in unpleasant numbers. Every time one of them did, the covering tribarrels immediately turned their attention to the window in question, ripping it apart and undoubtedly filling the room behind it with explosions and lethal shrapnel.

Barrett felt confident that many of those seccies were dead shortly after squeezing their own triggers, but she had a nagging suspicion the death toll was a lot lower than she could have liked. The long-standing contempt she’d cherished where seccies—and especially seccies’ toughness and willingness to fight—were concerned had taken a beating right along with the rest of 2nd Platoon. Whatever else they might be,
these
seccies had learned a lot of lessons the hard way since Rat Catcher had kicked off. The stupid ones were probably already dead. Certainly the ones that were left didn’t appear especially afflicted by stupidity, and that meant that most of the seccies popping up to fire knew what was going to happen to their firing positions as soon as they did. And that, in turn, meant they’d almost certainly planned on being somewhere else by the time the tribarrel gunners spotted them and shifted aim.

And the bastards are probably doing just fine at it
, Barrett reflected.

The advancing troopers went forward at a run, each unit directed at a specific entry point—freight delivery doors, for the most part, because they were larger, but a handful of pedestrian entrances for Hancock’s residents, as well. Those entry points had been subjected to special attention from the MISD heavy weapons teams to demolish any barricades the seccies had attempted to erect. Dust and chunks of debris, cascading down the tower’s outer face in stony avalanches from the covering tribarrels’ fire, bombarded 2nd Platoon as Barrett’s section closed with its own entry point. Something large and heavy—or falling from far enough up to
feel
large and heavy—rebounded from her utility armor’s helmet with force enough to half-stagger her, but she stayed on her feet and followed Ludvigsen’s fire team through the shattered pedestrian entrance and into the tower interior.

She wasn’t certain exactly what she’d expected. At the very least, she’d counted on running into a lookout or a sentry. But there was nothing.

The corridor leading away from them was typical of the passageways in a seccy residential tower—much narrower than in the full citizens’ towers, dingy, and poorly lit at the best of times, which this wasn’t. The main lights were out, but the emergency lighting was still up, dimly illuminating the layers of dust drifting in from outside through their entry point like fog. The dust floated around Barrett’s knees as she consulted the schematic on her HUD.

This was far from the first time she and her section had invaded one of the seccy towers, but it was the first time she’d ever seen the corridors completely deserted, and something with lots of tiny feet scuttled up and down her spine as she gazed down that long, poorly lit bore. The passageway ran arrow-straight towards the bank of grav shafts serving this quadrant of the tower, but there was none of the openness, the airiness, she would have seen somewhere else—like her own tower, for example. The quarters were tight, the walls lined with closed doors on either side, interrupted every ten or fifteen meters by a cross corridor, and her heart sank. It was one thing to advance confidently and arrogantly up a narrow gut like that as part of a routine sweep, or on her way towards a specific apartment number to drag out a specific seccy while all his friends and neighbors froze in their burrows like mice when the cat was a-prowl. It was quite another to contemplate it in the dusty darkness, with a quarter of her section already dead behind her, knowing an ambush might lurk at any point.

“By the numbers, people,” she said flatly. “Ludvigsen, you’ve got point.”

“Right, Sarge.”

There was a lot of anger in Ludvigsen’s acknowledgment, Barrett observed. Maybe the SOB thought she was trying to get him killed to eliminate him as a witness to what had happened to Lieutenant Ferguson . . . and to those massacred seccy children. Which, now that she thought about it, might not be that bad an idea.

“Malden, stay on your toes,” she continued.

“Gotcha, Sarge,” Corporal Denise Malden, the leader of Barrett’s second fire team, acknowledged. The rest of 2nd Platoon was flowing into the tower behind them, and Barrett waved into the dimness.

“Let’s go,” she said.

* * *

Kayla Barrett’s mouth was unpleasantly dry. It didn’t matter how much water she sucked from her helmet’s nipple, either. She supposed that what she ought to have been feeling was relief, but what she was actually feeling was something very different.

Second Platoon had advanced to and beyond the first bank of grav shafts. Not surprisingly—this
was
a seccy tower, after all—the shafts were down. That was scarcely unusual, although she couldn’t help wondering if this time around it was genuinely lack of maintenance or if some overly clever seccy hadn’t simply switched them off. If they had been turned off, however, whoever’d done it had also managed to block the Emergency Services override codes to turn them back on, and that suggested some things she really didn’t want to contemplate about what
else
might have been done to the tower’s internal systems.

The advance had gone well, though. The rest of 4th Regiment’s 2nd Battalion had made entrance behind Bravo Company successfully, as well. Like 2nd Platoon, Bravo’s other platoons had moved inward, providing point teams for the rest of the battalion. Those point teams swept the dimness before them with their sensor systems, weapons ready to engage anything they encountered, while the covering teams following on their heels systematically kicked in doors and sensor-swept the apartments behind them. So far, 2nd Platoon had encountered no resistance, although 1st Platoon and Bravo’s HQ section had walked into a nasty little firefight. First Platoon had lost three people, but Captain Shultz and the HQ section had come in on the flank of the seccy firing position through a cross corridor.

The fighting had been brutal, if brief, and none of the eight seccies in the position had survived.

That had been about it, though, and Barrett sensed a growing confidence in the men and women of her section. A
dangerous
confidence.

“Stay
sharp
, damn it!” she snapped over the section net. “There’re thousands of the bastards in here somewhere! You think they’re going to let us waltz all the way through and out the other side just like
that
?”

No one answered her, but Malden’s covering team moved a little more briskly, a little more alertly, as they kicked open more doors and scanned cross passages.

Even a miserable rats nest like Hancock had to have some open spaces in it. The squat, eight hundred-meter high cube did have a single central access well, but it was only about twenty meters across. Aside from that, it was a squared off, monotonously repetitive grid. The sort of maze laboratory rats had been sent to negotiate for millennia . . . and which had dominated the design of government housing warehouses for almost as long. But according to her HUD schematic, they were coming up on one of the tower’s commercial sections. It wouldn’t be anything like the spacious malls in the citizens’ towers, but it offered a fairly broad central arcade, surrounded by shops, stores, and restaurants.