Shadow of Freedom-eARC (53 page)

“Lombroso couldn’t hand you candy from a baby! He’s hiding in the damn basement—him and Hadley both! He deputized me to ‘negotiate’ with you, and I’m all done, friend. Now. Are you going to accept
my
terms? Or do I need to pass the order to shoot the first hundred or so prisoners to make my point?”

“Why is it,” Terekhov asked conversationally, “that people like you always think you’re more ruthless than people like me?”

Something about his tone rang warning bells in the back of Yucel’s brain, but she refused to look away. She held her glare locked on him, refusing to back down, and he shrugged.

“Stilt?” he said without glancing away from Yucel.

“Yes, Sir?” a voice replied from outside his com pickup’s field of view.

“Pass the word to Colonel Simak. Then set Condition Zeus.”

“Condition Zeus, aye, aye, Sir.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Yucel snapped.

“I can’t say it’s been a pleasure speaking to you, Brigadier,” Terekhov replied. “Educational, yes, in a disgusting sort of way, but not a pleasure. In fact, I’m just as happy we won’t be speaking again.”

“Good,” she said. “Now get the fuck out of here before I change my mind and decide to shoot a couple of dozen of them to hurry you on your way!”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of that,” he assured her. “In fact,” he raised his wrist and glanced at his personal chrono, “you should be receiving my response to your terms”—those ice-blue eyes flicked back to her face—“just about now.”

She frowned, wondering what the hell he was talking about.

She was still wondering two and a half seconds later when the kinetic projectile struck Lombroso Arms Tower at approximately thirty kilometers per second.

* * *

The Mark 87 “Damocles” Kinetic Strike Package was a containerized weapon system designed to fit into any standard shipboard magazine and sized to dep0loy through a counter-missile launch tube. The KSP could be configured with several different types of payloads, but the most common variant—like the one which had been deployed from
Quentin Saint-James
number three CM tube shortly after she’d entered orbit—carried a rack of six of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps’ M412 kinetic penetrators. Each penetrator was a six hundred and fifty kilogram dart fitted with its own small, short-lived but powerful impeller drive, a capacitor ring for onboard power, and a guidance package. By controlling acceleration rates and times, the M412 could produce an effective yield of up to one megaton…but this particular application called for a slightly smaller sledgehammer than that.

The projectile impacted at barely one tenth of a percent of light speed. The tower was enormous, the projectile wasn’t all that huge, and its velocity might seem positively snail-like compared to the eighty percent of light speed a Mark 23 could attain, but it was sufficient. In fact, its produced an effective yield of just over sixty-seven kilotons as it struck dead center on the tower’s roof at an angle of exactly ninety degrees and punched straight down, pithing it with a spike of plasma that vaporized everything in its path.

Admittedly, the results were positively anemic compared to those of the far heavier strikes Yucel had used to obliterate “rebellious towns” as object lessons, but that suited Aivars Terekhov just fine. The structure’s massive ceramacrete walls confined and channeled the blast, and the towers around the impact point acted as cofferdams, further confining the blast and restricting the damage. Yet the explosion still reached out to obliterate the Presidential Palace and everything else (including the residential towers in which the System Unity and Progress Party’s leadership and the majority of the transtellars’ off-world personnel had been quartered) in a three-block radius. Within the primary zone of destruction virtually nothing survived; outside it, except for shock damage, there was remarkably little devastation.

Even as the shockwave rolled outward from what had been the Lombroso Arms Tower, two dozen assault shuttles plummeted out of Landing’s sky. Eight of them swooped down on the soccer stadium, heavy with wing-mounted precision guided munitions that launched and screamed in on the tri-barrels Yucel’s gendarmes had mounted on the stadium’s uppermost row of bleachers to cover the prisoners below. Precisely calculated fireballs crushed them like some giant’s brimstone boots, and the shuttles reefed back around, going into hover, dropping their noses to bring their bow-mounted heavy cannon to bear.

The rest of the shuttles streaked by overhead, and three companies of battle-armored Manticoran Marines plummeted from them on counter-grav drop harnesses.

Here and there an isolated gendarme or two had survived the PGM strike with enough courage—or stupidity—to fire on the hovering shuttles or try to nail one of the plummeting Marines. They didn’t have much luck. The Marines came in far too hard and fast to be easily targeted by men and women terrified of what was happening, and the gendarmes had no antiair weapons. The Mobius Liberation Front hadn’t had any aircraft for them to worry about, so none had been issued to the stadium guards, and the shuttles were too well armored for their surviving light weapons to pose any threat.

Those far enough away from any prisoner discovered that their body armor was worth precisely nothing when a thirty-millimeter round from a shuttle pulse cannon hit them at several thousand meters per second. The others lasted a little longer—until the Marines grounded and they discovered that their pulse rifles were as useless against battle armor as they’d been against the shuttles.

A handful threw their weapons to the ground and got their hands clasped behind their heads quickly enough to survive.

* * *

Helen Zilwicki stood behind Commodore Terekhov, watching the recon platforms’ imagery in the main visual display. The kinetic strike’s towering, ugly, anvil-headed cloud of dust and smoke was still climbing when the first Marine landed. The prevailing wind had barely begun to bend it before the entire stadium had been secured.

The sheer, stunning speed of it left her feeling vaguely dazed. She’d been at Terekhov’s elbow as he, Commander Lewis, and Colonel Simak planned and organized Zeus. Yet she’d been convinced, somehow, that Yucel was at least smart enough to realize how hopeless her position was.

I guess Daddy was right when he told me to never underestimate the power of human stupidity
, she thought.
God, I hope the word gets around and finally starts penetrating even Solly skulls! If we have to keep on killing every damn one of them
…

“Well,” Terekhov said after a moment, blue eyes still on the visual display, “I suppose we should see if whoever’s still alive in their chain of command is more willing to listen to reason.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

“I wish we knew what he wants to talk about,” Mackenzie Graham groused as she locked the door behind them. Then she and Indiana headed down the rickety stairs—their apartment building’s elevator was on the fritz again—from the sixth floor. “I’m not crazy about unexpected emergency meetings.”

“We’ll find out why he’s here soon enough,” Indiana pointed out, keeping a cautious eye peeled.

The landings were none too well lit, and muggings weren’t unheard of even inside apartment complexes. Especially not here, on the older side of town, where so many “historical” buildings from Seraphim’s early days remained in use. Most of those older buildings had been constructed using natural materials and without counter-grav capability. They were smaller, built closer to the ground than the later towers, and easier to break into, and they’d never boasted the security systems that were part of the city’s newer structures. They were also firetraps, but on the limited plus side, there were fewer public security cameras on this side of town, and the rundown tenements offered their inhabitants a much higher degree of anonymity. And given what had happened to Indiana and Mackenzie’s father, and the complete destruction of the family’s financial fortunes, not even the scags were likely to find it remarkable that they’d been reduced to such miserable quarters.

The light was out again on the second-floor landing, Indiana noticed when they reached the third floor, and he slid his right hand casually into his pants pocket as the made the turn and started on down. If anyone was going to try anything, it should happen just…about…
now
.

The two men lurking in the landing’s shadows had obviously done this before. They came out of the darkness in a concerted attack, rushing the brother and sister from both sides, and he saw the dull gleam of a knife.

His right hand came out of his pocket in a practiced move. His thumb pressed a button, the collapsible baton extended instantly to its full seventy centimeters even as his left arm swept Mackenzie behind him.

“Gimme your wal—” the one with the knife snarled, only to break off with a scream as Indiana brought the weighted baton down.

It was a whipcrack strike, a quick, powerful flick of the wrist rather than a full-armed blow, and he recovered from it instantly. He stepped towards the knife-wielder, not away
from
him, as the injured mugger clutched his own shattered wrist and hunched forward. The second man had targeted Mackenzie, but she wasn’t where he’d expected her to be thanks to her brother’s shove, and Indiana’s move took
him
just out of the mugger’s reach, as well. The second attacker shouted an obscenity and turned towards Indiana, one hand going back over his shoulder. Indiana saw the blackjack against the third-floor landing light, but he had plans of his own, and the other man collapsed with a hoarse, whistling scream as the rigid baton’s rounded tip slammed into his solar plexus like a rapier.

The second man went down, writhing in agony, trying desperately to breathe. It didn’t look like he was going to have much luck with that, given the serious internal injuries he’d probably just suffered, a corner of Indiana’s mind reflected. At the moment, he had other things to worry about, however, and he turned back to the first mugger. He stood like a swordsman, baton poised, and the broken-wristed attacker gawked at him in disbelief.

“My sister and I were just leaving.” Indiana was amazed at how level his own voice sounded…and the fact that he could actually hear it through the thunder of his pulse. “I think your friend needs a doctor, and as far as we’re concerned, you can find him one. But I wouldn’t advise choosing this building again in the future.”

The still-standing mugger’s mouth dropped open, and Indiana extended his free hand to Mackenzie without ever taking his eyes from the other man. She took it and stepped across the still spasming, gagging body on the landing.

“I’ll give you five minutes before I call the cops,” Indiana continued, although God knew he had no intention of doing anything of the sort. “I think you should both be gone by then, don’t you?”

He nodded to the other man, then followed Mackenzie down the remaining stairs without ever turning his back on the mugger until they reached the vestibule. Then he glanced at his sister and shook his head as he saw the compact automatic pistol sliding back into her
pocket.

“Idiot,” she said, shaking her own head. “There were
two
of them, Indy! You did notice that, didn’t you? What did you think you were doing taking both of them on by yourself?!”

“It seemed like the thing to do at the time,” he told her mildly, collapsing the baton and opening the apartment building’s front door for her with his left hand.

“Only because you suddenly decided to go on a testosterone jag! I’m not exactly a little girl anymore, you know!”

“No, you’re not. And you’re a better shot than I am, too,” Indiana acknowledged. “On the other hand, it occurred to me that shooting someone full of holes in our own building might not be the best way to keep a low profile. The Cherubim PD hates filling out the paperwork on dead bodies, but they do investigate them, you know, even on our side of town. When firearms are involved, at least.”

Mackenzie had opened her mouth. Now she closed it again. After a moment, she even nodded in agreement.

“Point taken,” she said after a moment, because Indiana was right.

The Cherubim Police didn’t give a damn how many muggers managed to get themselves killed, and if the one Indiana had dropped was found dead on the landing from blunt force trauma, there probably wouldn’t be any investigation at all. Those cops who weren’t on the take were too overwhelmed trying to look out for law-abiding citizens to worry about what happened to the capital city’s predators, and the ones who
were
on the take had more profitable things to worry about. But they stood up and took notice when firearms were used, and any case involving them was automatically flagged to Tillman O’Sullivan’s Seraphim System Security Police. Not because the scags cared how many proles slaughtered each other, but because the possession of firearms by private citizens was illegal. That hadn’t always been the case, but one of President McCready’s first acts in office had been to amend the System Constitution to delete its guarantee of a citizen’s right to be armed.

After all, they couldn’t have all those weapons floating around contributing to the unacceptably high crime rate, now could they?

“I’m glad you agree,” Indiana said with a grin as the two of them stepped out onto the slushy sidewalk. More snow was drifting down, and the east wind felt raw and cutting. “Mind you, I’m a little concerned. It’s not like you to give up so easily, especially when I’m right.”

“Don’t push it, Indy,” she said severely, and he chuckled.

They walked down the sidewalk to the tram station in the middle of the next block. The public transit system looked as worn out as anything else in Cherubim, and the often-vandalized tram cars’ broken windows made gaping punctuation marks in the colorful, usually obscene graffiti that caparisoned their sides. Despite that, the trams were mechanically reliable and, unlike a great many other things in the Seraphim System, they actually ran on a reliable schedule. Primarily, Indiana and Mackenzie knew, because they were the only means of transportation available to most of the capital’s population, and the system’s transstellar masters wanted their serfs to get to work on time.