Read Cauldron of Ghosts Online
Authors: David Weber,Eric Flint
Cauldron of Ghosts (49 page)
Chapter 54
“Janice, we’ve got a problem,” said George Vickers. “Three of my agents have gone missing. Lajos Irvine, Borisav Stanković and Fred Martinez. They haven’t reported back in days.”
Janice Marinescu bit off a snarled
who gives a fuck?
They were right on the cusp of the whole campaign and this—jackass—insisted on pestering her with a problem like this?
“Why the hell haven’t you—oh. Never mind.” She’d just remembered that the three agents were engaged in undercover work. The trackers that were embedded in Alignment personnel on Mesa sometimes didn’t work if they were taken behind shielding—or just too many meters of soil, if someone went underground. Given the nature of their duties, that wasn’t unlikely to happen.
“Hold on a minute.” She brought up her own records and gave them a quick examination. She was almost sure she already knew the answer to her question, but for something like this she felt obligated to make sure.
“Okay, what I thought. None of them were slated for Houdini. I assume their meds have been kept up to date?”
She gave the figure on the screen a sharp look. “Yes?”
“Yeah, sure. All my people had the refresher within the last two months.”
The special med implants in the trackers were good for at least a year. More to the point, if they weren’t pinged periodically the suicide program would automatically be initiated.
“At this stage of the game, I think we should just forget about them,” she said.
“What if they’ve been captured? Get interrogated?”
“By
who
? The reason we’ve been using long-shot schemes to catch more terrorists is because there are so few of them left. At least, in any position to do anything. But even if they are being interrogated by some unknown and mysterious parties, so what? Stanković and Martinez are in the very outer peel and don’t know anything our enemies—the smartest of them, that is, which excludes any seccy I’ve ever heard of—can’t already figure out. Irvine knows a little more, but . . .”
She shrugged. “That’s exactly why his med implant includes the truth serum safety.”
They’d never seen any reason to notify Lajos of that feature of his implants, either. To what purpose? If he got captured and interrogated with truth drugs, better for him as well as everybody else if he just dropped dead.
“What about torture?”
This was a waste of her time—time which was now extremely precious. “George, drop it. That’s an order. And why are
you
fussing about it? You’re slated for evacuation soon yourself.”
She didn’t need to double-check her records to make sure she remembered the details for
that
evacuation. By now, she knew them by heart.
“Yes, I know. I just . . .” He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Fine. If you don’t care, I don’t care. Signing off.”
A moment later, the screen reverted to standby.
She rose from her console and went over to another. Normally, that would have been staffed by one of her team members, but there were now only two of them left in the Houdini control room.
She brought up the status of her own evacuation. That one would be much more roundabout than most, because by the time
she
left the whole planet would be descending into chaos.
Good. She saw that the flyer had been brought to the underground garage. It would be fueled and ready to go.
Kevin Haas came into the room. “Get some sleep, Janice. There’s nothing left to do but wait, and we won’t have much chance for sleep for at least thirty-six hours after we leave.”
She knew her partner was right, but . . .
Firmly, she told herself she was just suffering from a case of jitters. She got up and headed for the control center’s small bunkroom.
* * *
“I’ll make it easier for you the first time around,” said the man. “Just answer one question and I’ll leave for another stretch. Fair warning, though. I am extremely good at detecting lies. It’s part of the reason I don’t use truth drugs. So if the answer is ‘no,’ don’t try to say ‘yes’ in order to drag everything out. And if it’s ‘yes,’ you’d better say so. The minute—the second—I think you’re lying to me, I will kill you.”
As was true of everything about the monster, what made him so frightening was his invariant understatement. The threats were simple, straightforward, as matter-of-fact as a man might say the sky was overcast. He never scowled, never snarled, never glared. Right now, he hadn’t even bothered to take out his gun in order to emphasize Lajos’ imminent peril.
He didn’t need to. He knew that Lajos knew he’d do exactly what he said he would, when he would, and how he would.
Still, Lajos struggled to retain some personal dignity. “You’ve never even told me your name. Not last time either.”
There was no longer any point in trying to claim he’d never been in that café. He also didn’t doubt the man’s claim that he was good at ferreting out lies.
“My apologies. I didn’t mean to be rude. My name is Victor Cachat. I’m currently a Special Officer in the Republic of Haven’s Federal Intelligence Service. Prior to that—”
But Lajos didn’t listen to any of the rest. His worst fears had been confirmed. It had been foolish to even ask that question.
Lajos had been part of the extensive debriefing conducted by Collin Detweiler after the McBryde/Green Pines fiasco. He was the only surviving eyewitness who’d had contact with the two men suspected of being the foreign agents behind the whole affair. He’d been dismissed after his testimony was taken and examined, but not before he’d learned the basic facts as established by Detweiler and his team.
Cachat.
Again.
He and his Manticoran partner were supposed to be
dead.
How had the man managed to—?
But what difference did it make? Lajos didn’t doubt him, any more than he doubted any of the man’s threats.
Cachat finished. Then paused for a moment. Then:
“Here’s the question. All I need for now is a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We know you’re a member of the Alignment. More specifically, that you’re working for their security forces. Don’t bother trying to deny that because it’s pointless.”
“So what’s your question?”
“Are you ready and willing to die for the Alignment? Not in the abstract, but here and now.”
Cachet glanced at his timepiece. “I’ll make it even easier for you. I’ll give you five minutes to think about it. If the answer is ‘yes,’ say so at any point you choose, I’ll shoot you dead and we’re both done. If the answer’s ‘no,’ you don’t have to say anything. If you’re still silent when the time’s up, I’ll just leave. When I come back, though, I’ll have more questions.”
He looked at the timepiece again. “Starting the count . . . now.”
Lajos’ brain spent the next few minutes scurrying around in his skull like a mouse trapped in a cage.
There was no way out. And . . .
He realized, finally, just how badly his faith in the Alignment—its purpose, its mission, and for sure and certain its methods—had been eroded over the past year.
How much? He didn’t know yet. But he was no longer willing to die for it.
He didn’t say anything, though. He just waited.
“Time’s up,” Cachat said. “I’ll see you in a few hours, then.” He glanced around the cell. “Do you need more water? Food?”
“No, I’m fine.” The moment he said it, he realized what an absurd statement that was. He was anything
but
fine. Given the parameters of his situation, though . . .
Again, he struggled to retain some dignity. “I don’t suppose you could do anything about the
quality
of the food, could you?”
“No, sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I’m eating the same stuff you are. The kitchens—”
He shook his head, as if he were irritated with himself. And with that he left.
* * *
As was true of modern residential towers everywhere, most people in Neue Rostock ate food that they prepared themselves in their own kitchens. Still, with this many people concentrated in a single building, there was always a large number who wanted to eat at one of the cafeterias or restaurants scattered throughout Neue Rostock.
But now, the tower’s public kitchens were closing. The cooks had spent the last period making foods that could be carried easily and would keep for days without refrigeration. The foods weren’t noxious, but probably the best that could be said for most of them was that they were bland.
For thousands of people undergoing an evacuation, however, it made for the most practical diet. Chuanli was finding refuge for them in other towers, but it was a slow process and priority was being given to children, the elderly and the ill. Some of Neue Rostock’s people would be living underground for days, maybe weeks.
* * *
The evacuation was proceeding a lot more smoothly than Thandi had expected. She’d underestimated—quite badly, in fact—the extent to which Dusek and his people wielded authority in Neue Rostock.
The problem, she now realized, was with the very term “criminal gang.” Both words in that term were . . . off.
To begin with, while many of the activities Dusek oversaw were against Mesan law, most
seccies
had little if any problem with them. For the most part, those activities which Dusek and his people operated directly themselves involved entertainment—defining the term a bit broadly to include liquor, drugs, gambling, sex, bot fighting, all sorts of racing and sports matches. He even owned and operated a third of the district’s public libraries.
Seccy social mores were perhaps coarse, by the standards of many worlds—certainly the Core worlds—but that just reflected the reality of their lives. The more unsavory of those businesses, like prostitution, were ameliorated by seccy attitudes. Many young women and men did a stint working that trade and left it after a few years with usually little in the way of permanent consequences. Very often, the way they quit was by being matched up with someone by one of the mating services—some of which were also run by Dusek.
Many of whatever social services existed in Neue Rostock were maintained by the gang. If someone needed medical treatment and couldn’t afford it, their first (and usually only, and always last) recourse was to ask the gang for help. As long as you hadn’t done something to put you in Dusek’s bad graces, a loan would always be forthcoming. And while outright grants were never given, Dusek was willing to forgive a loan in cases of real hardship. A lot of families over the years had seen their old folks die in reasonable comfort and grace thanks to a loan from the gang—which, if they really couldn’t afford to pay it back, would usually be cancelled.
In short, using the term
criminal
to describe Dusek and his people . . . wasn’t inaccurate, exactly. But it was also much too limited. If he was Neue Rostock’s robber baron, the
baron
part of the description was preeminent.
The term “gang” was even more misleading. To begin with, it was closer to a small army than anything usually implied by the term “gang.” Dusek had hundreds of people on his own payroll, and thousands more whose income derived from him indirectly.
The reason none of the major crime lords in the seccy districts had tried to take over Lower Radomsko wasn’t because they
couldn’t
have done so. Dusek, for instance, could have flattened any of the Lower Radomsko gangs—or all of them put together. The real deterrent was that if any one of them tried, the other major bosses would come in also to prevent them from gaining another large territory.
The term “organization” was a lot more accurate than “gang.” The seccies themselves usually called Dusek’s organization “the outfit.”
So, the evacuation was going quite well. The outfit had even managed to keep most signs of it from becoming evident outside of Neue Rostock. People whose jobs were such that an absence would have become quickly noticed by the authorities were allowed to keep going to work for the time being.
The situation couldn’t last for very long, of course, especially with people being filtered into neighboring towers. But unless Victor and Anton’s assessment was badly off, it wasn’t going to anyway.
Thandi had no opinion on that subject herself. But by now, she did have a firm opinion on the subject of Cachat & Zilwicki Espionage, Ltd.
It was the best outfit of its kind in the galaxy.
October 1922 Post Diaspora
“We have, to put it as mildly as I possibly can, got a grudge against the Alignment.”
—Victor Cachat, Haven agent
Chapter 55
“They’re almost in the zone,” said Kevin Haas.
Janice Marinescu was watching the progress of the commercial flyer on her own screen. On board were George Vickers and two other alpha-line high-ranking members of the Alignment.
The flyer was now coming in for a landing at the airfield just outside the city of Dobzhansky, three hundred kilometers to the southwest of Mendel. From there, Vickers and his companions were supposed to take a shuttle to one of the orbital stations, where they would board the Jessyk Combine vessel that would take them outsystem. They were starting their Houdini evacuation.
Starting . . . and ending. All of them had been carefully evaluated and found wanting in one important respect or another. In the case of Vickers—the only one of the three Janice knew personally—the problem was excessive narcissism and egotism, an unfortunate side effect that tended to crop up in his genetic line.
There was a tried and tested method—tested for at least ten millennia, since humans first began domesticating animals—for dealing with that problem. Cull the unwanted variants in the genetic line.
The final decision had been made by Collin Detweiler two days ago, just before he left himself.
“Okay . . .
now,
” said Haas.
Marinescu keyed in the command. The nuclear device that had been secreted in the flyer’s cargo bay detonated.
The yield of the explosion was eight kilotons, roughly half the size of the “Little Boy” bomb used on Hiroshima over two millennia earlier. The height at which the detonation occurred was a little over five hundred meters, which was just about the same height as that of the Hiroshima detonation.
Ideally, they’d have detonated the bomb at a greater altitude, but they’d waited because the flyer’s course took it almost directly over a large playing field where two local schools were having a sports match. The stands were full of teenage students and their families.
The hypocenter was not quite above the playing field. It was a hundred meters to the north of what would have been the outer wall of the stadium except that the stadium was just two long rows of tiered seats on either side of the field. But the practical effect was about the same. The framework of the seats was ceramacrete but the seats themselves and the awning that shielded spectators from the sun were not. Except for twenty-six people who were inside the ceramacrete shells—nine girls, seven boys and two teachers using the toilets; three janitors playing a card game while they waited for the game to end; and five students making purchases from bots at the concession stand—everyone attending the match was killed instantly. First, incinerated by the radiant heat from the fireball. Many of the victims left only shadows on the seats behind. Then, the remains were pulverized and dispersed like so much dust by the blast wave.
The concession stand under the southern tier of seats was open at either end. The blast wave came through and battered the five students there into literal pulp. A few of the people in the toilets and two of the janitors in their small supply room survived the blast, although all of them were badly injured. All of them would soon suffer the effects of severe radiation poisoning as well. In the end, only two would survive—and one of those would never come out of a coma.
Dobzhansky had no seccy district at all. The population was made up entirely of citizens. That population also produced, per capita, more members of Mesa’s police, security forces and military than any other town or city on the planet.
Marinescu, Haas and their team, assembled and overseen by Collin Detweiler, had crunched the numbers carefully. Every battalion-sized police, security or military force in Mesa had just lost one or more family members of anywhere between five and seventeen percent of its troops.
There was not a single other measure they’d been able to devise that was more certain of enraging those forces. Those who had not personally lost family members in the Dobzhansky terrorist attack would almost certainly have friends who had.
Investigation would determine that the two seccies who’d loaded the baggage onto that flyer had both disappeared. When their apartments were searched, propaganda literature from the Audubon Ballroom would be found on the personal computers of both of them.
The culprits would never be found, however. Within two hours of their disappearance, they’d been consumed in a commercial garbage disintegrator whose security program had been bypassed by one of the Alignment’s top software specialists.
The software specialist would be one of the very last evacuees. The two Alignment agents who’d kidnapped the baggage handlers were not slated for Houdini. They’d both die soon when their med implants failed to receive the ping that would abort the suicide program.
One of them would die from a heart attack, the other from a stroke. The Alignment had been careful to vary the cause of death so that there would be no unusual statistical “clumps.” Each program was also tailored to the individual’s medical history. Or medical records, at least. Those sometimes needed to be tweaked to give a healthy person a plausible cause of death.
* * *
“Ready on Target Beta,” said Haas.
Marinescu monitored the input from the camera perched inside the auditorium on one of the lower floors of Saracen Tower. Today’s keynote speaker had been introduced and was beginning his speech.
“Go,” she said. Haas keyed in the command.
The device planted in the auditorium’s utility closet was a tactical nuke, much smaller than the one used at Dobzhansky, and the tower’s loadbearing walls channeled the blast. Like most towers (or, at least, those built for full citizens), Saracen was actually a honeycomb of ceramacrete tubes arranged in cells which ringed a central core. They were very
large
tubes—those in Saracen were fifty meters across—and very,
very
tough, deliberately designed to contain disasters like fires or the sorts of “natural” explosions humans were capable of accidentally producing under almost any circumstances. The tower’s central cell consisted of six fifty-meter tubes arranged in a ring around a central fifty meter-wide air shaft which also gave access to small air cars. Outside that central cell was what amounted to an enormous atrium, thirty meters across, with pedestrian ways and traffic lanes for the small, electric vehicles which scurried about the tower’s interior facing the kilometer and a half-tall atrium walls. Suspended pedestrian and vehicle ways crossed the atrium at regular intervals, providing a sense of airiness and space even at the heart of the vast, kilometer-wide structure. A second ring of cells, each identical to the central core, threaded around the atrium like the beads of a necklace, surrounded by yet another atrium and yet another ring of cells.
In all, there was a total of four rings of cells wrapped around the central core, which made the entire tower just under nine hundred meters in diameter and one and a half kilometers tall. The solid ceramacrete loadbearing walls of the tubes were incredibly strong, and the floor plates of each of its five hundred floors were also fused ceramacrete, substantially stronger and more resistant than thrice their own thickness of solid granite.
Still, the cells—and floor plates—were cross-connected at almost every level by doors, archways, grav shafts, emergency stairwells, and all the thousand-and-one elements of a modern building’s circulatory and respiratory systems. The auditorium was in the tower’s second ring, roughly six hundred meters from the tower’s outer face, and the blast front was enough to blow any closed opening in its path wide open, but the overall effect was rather like setting off a small nuclear device (a very small one, in fact, barely ten percent as large as the ancient atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima) inside a mountain cave. It hollowed out a vast chamber directly above and below itself and sent blast, heat, and fragments scything through the two adjacent loadbearing tubes on either side, and vented to both the central air shaft of its cell and the adjacent atrium, but the auditorium was on only the fortieth floor The blast front never even reached the tower’s outermost cells, never so much as blew out a single exterior window.
Inside
the tower was quite another matter, of course. The explosion was more than enough to kill the 1,463 people in the auditorium and every living soul on the seventy-one floors above it in the same loadbearing tube. The blast vented into the atrium directly beyond the auditorium, inflicting very heavy casualties on those hapless souls strolling along the pedestrian ways or dawdling over a cup of coffee in one of the sidewalk cafés. Rather amazingly—and in testimony to both the freakishness of blast waves and the confining effect of those ceramacrete floor plates—six people on the auditorium tube’s ninth floor actually survived, as did a hundred and twelve on the eighth floor, and over two hundred on the seventh. Below the seventh, there were only non-life-threatening injuries, but there were no survivors at all between the fortieth and the hundred and eleventh floors, and casualties in the adjoining tubes and those facing the blast site across the atrium space were very heavy.
In all, nine thousand, nine hundred and forty-one people were killed outright. Another seven hundred and two would later succumb to their injuries.
The meeting had been sponsored by Bateson University. The speaker had been Mesa’s Assistant Director of Scientific Research. His topic had been
Projections for research grants in 1923.
Mesa had just lost a significant portion of its scientific establishment.
One of those slated to speak later that day had been Lisa Charteris. According to the program, she was just returning from a weeks-long stay in a research institute on McClintock Island. Her husband Jules had just entered the auditorium when the blast went off. He’d been looking forward to seeing his wife again. She’d been incommunicado, as was normal procedure for seminars held at that institute.
Jules had been personally invited by Lisa’s boss, at Collin Detweiler’s instruction. As always, the Alignment worked in layers. The blast would not only explain Lisa Charteris’s disappearance. By killing her husband it would also eliminate the one person most likely to probe that disappearance.
Charteris herself had never been told of the plan, of course. There was no reason to upset her, especially since that would undermine her effectiveness. By the time she found out about her husband’s death, if she ever did, many years would have gone by. Time would have softened her memory and the precise events of that horrible day of carnage so long ago would have been blurred by that same passage of time.
A number of other scientists were supposed to have been there that day, who, in the event, never showed up. Those were the ones who’d already left Mesa as part of Houdini.
The surviving records would, indeed, show that they’d been there. But the blast would have destroyed their physical persons along with the persons of anyone who might have been able to say otherwise.
* * *
“Target Gamma . . . now.”
Marinescu keyed in yet another command and a huge shopping center in one of the towers inhabited by citizens was ground zero for another tactical nuke, this one with a yield of just over a kiloton.
The time was far from ideal, since the lunchtime crowd would have thinned and the evening crowd hadn’t started arriving. But this all needed to be done in a very short span of time. Even as it was, eleven thousand six hundred and three people were killed immediately. Almost as many would die within the next few days from the effects of radiation, burns and radiation poisoning.
Among the people whose lives were spared by the timing were Zachariah McBryde’s mother Christina and his younger sister Arianne. They’d been planning to shop together that evening, after dinner.
They both lived in the building, Dedrick Tower, but their apartments were far enough from the blast that they suffered no injuries. Christina’s apartment was barely even rattled. Arianne’s was closer, and she lost some fragile personal items tossed off their shelves by the concussion. But nothing worse.
* * *
“Delta ready.”
“Firing . . . now.”
Another large bomb, twelve kilotons. Set off in the middle of an outdoor amusement park located on Mendel’s outskirts.
Three and a half thousand dead immediately or within a few hours. Another eleven hundred would die from the effects. One hundred and two would never really recover.
Almost all of the employees of Blue Lagoon Park and the majority of its customers came from the surrounding suburbs. These were citizen areas which, albeit not to the same extent as Dobzhansky, also provided a considerable number of Mendel’s police and security forces and military personnel.
By the team’s calculations, the percentage of those forces who’d now been immediately impacted by the terrorist outrages had climbed to somewhere between seven and twenty-two percent, depending on the specific unit.
* * *
“Epsilon.”
“Let’s hope . . .
yes.
Misfire as planned.”
Epsilon was another big device: thirteen kilotons and, literally,
big.
It was three meters long, almost two meters across in its widest lateral dimension, two meters high, and weighed just short of five thousand kilograms.
Obviously jerry-built and poorly designed to begin with, it was not surprising the bomb failed to detonate. And thankfully so. The bomb would be found in a maintenance shop in another residential tower set aside for citizens. Had the perpetrators succeeded in their plans, the death toll could have been in the tens of thousands.
The five seccy repair workers who were the only ones who used that maintenance shop had all gone missing. They would also never be found. The Alignment had seen to that.
But, of course, they’d still get the blame for it. Investigation would determine that the seccy foreman of the crew, Sepp Richter, had been taking courses in applied physics at a small college catering to seccies. Ballroom propaganda would be found on his personal computer as well as that of two other repair workers—and on the school computer assigned to the physics instructor.
