Cauldron of Ghosts (48 page)

Thandi nodded.

“No problem. And we need to think about simple corridor denial, too. Even with the arsenal you’ve got, trying to hold every meter of something this big with that few shooters would be a losing proposition. But if you chop up the access routes—completely block some of them, turn others into cul-de-sacs, pre-plan fields of fire with loopholes and covered positions, lay a few minefields that
your
people know how to navigate at a run and then suck the bad guys into following them—and then use the tower’s environmental and service systems against them, as long as they last, anyway . . .”

Her own smile was to Dusek’s and Chuanli’s grins what a sabretooth was to an ocelot.

“In that kind of fighting the advantage is entirely with the defenders. The imbalance in heavy weaponry isn’t completely neutralized, of course, but forward progress is slow—and bloody as hell, for the attackers. But—”

She held up a finger. “Remember what I told you about KEW strikes. Sooner or later—and if they have a smart commander it’ll be sooner, unless she gets overruled by her superiors—they’ll realize they’ve walked into a meat grinder. At that point they’ll pull back their troops and hammer us with KEWs before they resume the attack.”

“And that’ll be the end.”

Thandi shook her head. “Not necessarily. If they settle for tactical-yield KEWs, the building will still be there. It’ll be badly damaged, but if we weren’t caught in the strike itself, we can keep fighting. In some ways, the terrain will be even worse for the attackers. But we
have
to evacuate the building first or the casualties will be . . . really, really horrible.”

“Yes, I understand that.” Dusek looked at Chuanli. “Triêu, I’m putting you in charge of the evacuation. We need to get everybody out of the building and into the underground passages within . . .”

He turned back to Thandi. “What’s the time frame?”

“You’ve got a few days. I figure you’ve got at least a week, in fact. Even if the balloon goes up tomorrow, it’ll take the OPS a couple of days to react—and the Peaceforce will take longer than that. I’m guessing the regular OPS troopers will come in first, and they’ll come in overconfident, figuring that they can just storm their way into the districts the way they always have before. By the time they realize what a mess they’ve gotten themselves into, a day or two will have gone by. It’ll take them another day or two before they’re willing to admit it and call in the MISD to save their asses, and the Misties aren’t going to have a lot better notion of what they’re walking into than the Safeties. They’ll get educated real quick when they hit one of the towers, though. It’s hard to estimate how many people they’ll be willing to lose before they admit a bunch of raggedy
seccies
kicked their asses, but they will eventually. Call it another day or two, and then . . .”

She made a face.

“Hard to tell with these vicious bastards, but most civilian authorities would shy away from ordering kinetic strikes on their own capital city. Even with tactical KEWs, there’s going to be a lot of collateral damage, including damage to citizen districts. You’re unleashing a lot of kinetic energy on a small amount of land. The debris alone will start fires all over Mendel. So . . .”

After pondering the matter for a few seconds, she shrugged. “Like I said, it’s hard to tell what people like this might be willing to do. But I can’t imagine them making the decision without spending at least a day arguing about it.”

Dusek nodded. “An absolute minimum of four days—more likely six or so—is what you’re saying, and maybe longer. That gives us enough time, although . . .”

It was his turn to grimace. “It’s going to be rough as hell, that many people trying to survive underground. For a few days, sure. But after that . . .”

“Can you get some of the other districts to take them in. Some of them, at least?” asked Yana.

“Oh, yeah,” Dusek replied. “Bachue the Nose won’t agree, the damn witch. But McLeod would. So would three or four other gang bosses I’m on good terms with. But what good would that do in the long run? They’re going to be attacking all the seccy districts.”

Thandi exchanged glances with Victor.

“Maybe not,” he said. “Look, from a strategic point of view there’s no way we can win this anyway. Speaking in the long run.”

“But we can drag it out in the short run—a lot—if we deliberately draw the MISD’s attention to Neue Rostock as soon as the fighting starts,” added Thandi.

Dusek frowned at her. “Why in God’s name would we do that?”

“Because that allows you to send your people into the other districts for safekeeping,” she said. “All that’s left behind is a fighting force.”

“Ah.” He took a deep breath and slowly blew it out. “But it also means losing Neue Rostock, which in the long run . . .”

“There
is
no long run, Jurgen,” said Victor forcefully. “Unless . . .”

He nodded at Anton. “Anton and Yana take the yacht back to Manticore and get help.” A thin, savage grin came onto his own face. “Since the Mesans want to play ‘let’s get a bigger club,’ we’ll go get us a really, really
big
club.”

“Would the Manties agree?”

“If Anton’s the one bringing the news, yes. He has . . . credentials.”

Thandi smiled. “It doesn’t hurt that his girlfriend’s the leader of the Liberal Party and a close childhood friend of Empress Elizabeth.” She could have added
although they’ve been politically estranged as adults
but saw no point to that. Besides, Cathy Montaigne and Elizabeth had been getting along pretty well lately. “Besides, he’s met the Empress herself—done her a couple of really
big
favors, in fact—and he and Victor here have actually rubbed shoulders with Duchess Harrington.”

“The
Salamander?
” Dusek looked impressed, and Thandi smothered a chuckle. Some reputations obviously leaked through just about
any
filters.

“I agree about sending Anton,” said Yana. “But there’s no reason for me to go. My only credentials are that I used to be a Scrag, and those take you exactly nowhere.”

Zilwicki started to say something but Yana waved him down. “Shut up, Anton. What’s even more important is that these Mesans are the same people who murdered my best friend Lara and”—her own thin grin somehow managed to be even more savage than Victor’s—“the way I look at it, being a super-soldier extra-magnum genetic specimen and all, is that these
shitheads
have been taking my name in vain. So I’m staying. Don’t anybody bother arguing the point.”

After a moment, Chuanli smiled. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Victor had been frowning, though. “But how’s Anton going to get permission to take the ship out of orbit? For that matter, how does he get away with taking the shuttle up if Yana isn’t seen returning with him? They’ll think he’s trying to steal it or something.”

That . . . was a problem.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Dusek. “We’ve been smuggling stuff—including people—off this planet for a long time. What we do is, Anton and Yana return to the ship bringing a small cargo container. When the port guards investigate the contents, they’ll find it’s full of Mesan gourmet foods—yeah, we have some, every planet does—”

“The vassu liver pâté’s to die for,” said Chuanli.

“—which you’re planning to take home with you seeing as how you’ve decided to leave because of all the trouble. Then after you get on board, Anton—good servant that he is—takes the container back to where he leased it.”

“Which happens to be one of our firms,” interjected Chuanli.

“We’re silent partners,” said Dusek. “The face of the company’s a citizen, but we actually run it. He just gets a cut.”

Victor leaned back, his frown clearing away. “I see. The container is designed—and shielded, I assume—to hide a person, and the port guards probably won’t give it more than a perfunctory examination anyway because they’re expecting it to be coming back out. So Yana leaves that way.”

“That’s it. We’ve done it dozens of times. I might mention that the port guards are more or less on our payroll, anyhow. Informally speaking.”

Anton chuckled. “And the humble bribe strikes again. Okay, that works. We’d better move as soon as possible, though.”

“We can have the container full and ready to go in three hours,” said Chuanli.

“Three hours it is, then.”

Chapter 53

After they’d been bundled into the van, Vittoria and her two companions had been manacled by some sort of device she hadn’t seen—and she hadn’t seen them because the first thing they’d done was slap something on her forehead that immediately blinded her behind a sheet of translucent . . . something.

The one thing she had seen before that happened, though, had given her a little ray of hope. One of their abductors had taken the time to pick up Dennis’s vid gear and bring it into the van. Why would they bother to do that if they were just going to murder them? The gear was valuable, but not so valuable that she could imagine terrorists running the risk of trying to sell it on the black market.

It was a pretty dim ray of hope, granted, but it was all she had.

Xavier Conde tried to say something about five minutes after they were abducted. But before he got more than half a sentence out one of their captors said: “One more word and we’ll gag you. Electronic gags work by paralyzing your vocal cords, if you didn’t know—and there’s sometimes permanent damage.”

That shut him up. Without his mellifluent voice, Xavier Conde was barely a cut above an unskilled laborer.

She couldn’t tell how long the ensuing trip took. Between her blindness and fear, it seemed to last for hours.

Eventually, the van came to a stop. “Out,” was the command. She had to move carefully because they still kept the blinders on and she couldn’t see more than a little sliver of space just in front of her feet.

After she got out of the van, she found herself on some kind of hard, rough flooring. Like the pavement in a garage, maybe, that hadn’t been maintained in years. She had a vague sense of emptiness around her, too, as if they were in some sort of large abandoned building.

“Where are—?” She broke off, since it would be idiotic to expect an answer to that question. “What are you going to do to us?”

That was probably just as idiotic a question, as one of her captors immediately made clear by slapping her on the back of the head. “Shut up.”

But the voice of the head captor said: “Just relax. Soon you’ll be starring in a public service message. Do exactly as we tell you and nobody gets hurt.”

Public service message.
That meant some sort of terrorist propaganda skit. It’d be humiliating, certainly, but . . .

Fuck it. If her employers expected Vittoria to maintain heroic silence on behalf of Mesa, which wasn’t even her own star nation, they could damn well think again. She’d say—hell, she’d babble and add hosannas and hallelujahs—anything these frightening people wanted her to say.

* * *

Victor accompanied Anton and Yana all the way to the entrance of Neue Rostock they’d be using to return to the port. That entrance didn’t lead directly to the outside, of course. It passed through several underground passageways before a hidden door—more like a ship’s hatch—would let them out in the subbasement of an adjoining commercial tower where they’d parked their expensive air car. By the time any surveillance cameras could pick up Anton and Yana again, they’d already be halfway to their destination.

There were advantages to working with long-standing and successful crime bosses. Another one was that they wouldn’t have to fumble around getting Andrew and Steph and the three seccy women they’d been hiding from the boutique to Neue Rostock. Chuanli had a team taking care of that for them. They’d even bring the regeneration unit—with Karen still in it—back to Neue Rostock.

How? Victor hadn’t asked. Partly as a matter of politesse, but mostly because he was preoccupied.

Victor Cachat had known Anton Zilwicki almost his whole adult life. And while the times they’d been together were only a small portion of that adult life, they were among the most . . .

Memorable? That seemed an absurdly spartan way of putting it.

Anton was looking at him with an odd expression on his face—one that Victor suspected was mirroring his own. What did you say to a friend and colleague like that at a time like this?

Fortunately, Anton was better with words than he was. Perhaps that came from his long association with the Countess of the Tor, who gave speeches like nobody’s business.

“If we never see each other again, Victor, I want you know that I have cherished you since the day I first laid eyes on you in Chicago and will continue to do so until the day I die. You’ve been the guardian dragon in my life, watching over those I love as well as your own. I am eternally in your debt.”

Victor looked away, embarrassed. Then, forced himself to look back. He wasn’t good at this—never had been and never would be—but some things had to be said.

“I think the debt runs more the other way, Anton. It’s easy for—for a dragon—to lose himself in his fury. Lose himself forever, if he’s not careful. You’ve been one of my lifelines. In some ways, I think, the most important one.”

They stared at each other for a few seconds. Then Yana made an exasperated noise and said: “Since the two of you are too hung up to kiss each other,
I’ll
do it for him.”

She matched deed to word, sweeping Victor into an embrace and kissing him . . .
not
the way a proper woman kisses her uncle.

Then she released him and turned away. “Come on, Anton, you’ve got a fleet to catch.”

He and Victor exchanged one last smile and he followed her. After a moment, Victor turned back into Neue Rostock.

* * *

“Hey, what about me?” Anton asked plaintively a short while later. “Don’t I get a kiss too?”

“Forget it. Dwarf lords don’t ring my bell. Borderline sociopaths ring my bell. Besides, your squeeze scares me more than Victor’s does.”

“Huh? Thandi can take a gorilla three falls out of three.”

“Yeah, so? Your old lady gives speeches—and what’s worse, people
listen
to them. We’re into lynch mob territory now. Way scarier than gorillas.”

* * *

Their captors had led them into a small room somewhere in the building and sat them down on chairs. Vittoria thought
it was a small room, anyway. Being blinded by that horrid translucent sheet—which was only “translucent” by the faintest margin, in these surroundings; she might as well have been wearing an old-fashioned blindfold—seemed to heighten her other senses. In some manner she couldn’t exactly pin down, the place they were now located in just
seemed
small, where the place they’d first been unloaded from the van had seemed cavernous.

How long they waited there, she had no idea. She heard at least one of their captors walk away, but others stayed with them, and when Xavier—the fucking idiot!—tried to say something again, someone struck him. Pretty hard, too, from the sound of it.

“Which word in ‘shut up’ are you having trouble with, moron?” the terrorist demanded.

Eventually, one or more of their captors returned. “Okay, we’re ready. Get up.”

By that point, Vittoria was relieved to be doing anything. One of her captors lifted her out of the chair by an arm and guided her away. She sensed that she’d passed through a door, but thereafter all she could determine was that they were being moved down some sort of corridor. Then, through what she thought was another doorway. Then, she was forced down onto a chair again—not because she put up a fight, but simply because her sightless clumsiness made her captor handle her roughly.

A few seconds later, she felt a tap on her forehead and the translucent sheet vanished. She could see again!

Barely—there was a bright light shining at her, almost directly in her eyes. When she adjusted, though, she realized that there wasn’t much to see anyway. They were in a room that was not very big—perhaps ten by twelve meters, with a rather low ceiling—and completely bare. So far as she could see, there were no windows and only one door. The walls were colored a sort of greenish off-white and were otherwise completely undecorated.

She wasn’t sitting next to Xavier and Alex, but facing them at a distance of three meters or so. Her two companions were still standing.

The captor who’d brought the vid equipment from the garage—so she assumed, anyway; they were all face-shielded and wearing identical gray clothing, so it might have been a different one—placed it next to the recording tech. The big captor, the one who’d done most of the talking so far, pointed at it.

“Set the stuff up,” he commanded. “You have three minutes.”

“It takes at least five!” protested Alex.

“Fine. You have six minutes.” The big captor glanced at his wrist com. “If you’re not recording by then I’ll kill you.”

The man didn’t bother to draw the pistol at his waist, and the threat was made so matter-of-factly that it didn’t quite register on Vittoria for a moment. Then she couldn’t help but gasp.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked. Some part of her was furious at herself for being so craven, but that part was overwhelmed by the rest of her, which was purely and simply terrified.

“For the moment, nothing.” The captor pointed to Xavier. “You, get ready to read a little speech.”

Thankfully, Conde had enough sense to keep his mouth shut.

* * *

When Alex said he had everything ready to go, the captor glanced at his wrist com again. “Four minutes and forty seconds. You lied, but we’ll let it go.”

He nodded at one of the other captors, who stepped up to Xavier and moved him to stand just a meter from Vittoria, facing the vid recorder. Then he handed him three sheets of papic.

“All right. Start.”

Nervously, Xavier licked his lips. But he was accustomed to reading text written by someone else smoothly and easily, so he went right into it.

“Once again, we in the Audubon Ballroom find ourselves forced to impart another lesson to Mesa’s rulers.”

Some manic little sliver of Vittoria’s brain noted the use of the passive tense, which was particularly unfortunate in a manifesto of this nature. Her producer’s training almost led her to blurt out a protest.
Hey! That should read: ‘We in the Ballroom will now teach another lesson—’

She was so distracted that the next part of the speech didn’t register on her clearly.

“—all you understand are actions, we present you with another to demonstrate our resolve. Let all those who seek to undermine the faith the masses have in our cause take heed.”

Two of the captors who’d been standing just behind and a little to the side of Alex as he recorded Xavier stepped forward. Vittoria saw that they’d drawn their pistols.

They were pointing them at her! Why?

The fusillade took her down, spilling her off the chair as it splattered the wall behind her with blood, brains and shredded pieces of tissue. So she didn’t get to see Xavier vomit, or the beating he got from his captors that forced him to finish the manifesto.

She might have gotten a tiny bit of satisfaction out of that part, at least. It was a pretty savage beating.

* * *

“First the killing in our own garage and now this!” said François McGillicuddy, half-shouting. “What the fuck is going on?”

Grace Summers managed to refrain from responding with:
I’d think it was pretty obvious.
Instead she satisfied herself with a simple declarative sentence: “The Ballroom wants to publicly demonstrate they have the capability to strike at anyone. They killed our people to show they could penetrate our security and—”

“Conde’s just a fucking newscaster!” said McGillicuddy. “He had no more security than—than—my fucking grandmother.”

That was perhaps not an apt comparison, since Genevieve McGillicuddy was part of Mesa’s very upper crust and had quite a bit of security. But perhaps her grandson didn’t realize that since he’d spent his entire life in that wealthy cocoon.

Blessedly, Grace’s colleague picked up the slack. “True—but he’s also quite well known,” said Aidan Crowder. “And unlike the assassination of the DIB people, the murder of that poor woman and Conde’s beating was recorded and dumped into the data net.
Everybody and—and—their grandmother will be talking about it.”

“Fuck everybody’s grandmother.” McGillicuddy reached out and stabbed at his desk com. “Zeno, I want an immediate doubling of security details on—on—everybody who might need it,” he finished lamely.

And their grandmother,
thought Grace. But she didn’t say it, of course.