Cauldron of Ghosts (51 page)

And from a philosophical perspective, he was firmly convinced that MGC’s public proselytization in favor of genetic uplift (and the Alignment’s covert enhancement of Mesan citizens) had been held back for T-centuries by Mesa’s association with genetic slavery. For that matter, much of the continuing galactic prejudice against the entire concept of planned genetic uplift was fueled by the existence of genetic slavery—and the public’s attitude towards it—in Jackson Chicherin’s opinion.

And now it had brought them
this
. It made him want to weep. He had no burning sympathy for the Audubon Ballroom—genetic slavery’s moral corruption couldn’t simply grant carte blanche to its opponents where the commission of equally ugly atrocities was concerned—but he found it difficult to
blame
the Ballroom for its hatred and the tactics that hatred spawned. At the moment, it was easier to blame the terrorists than usual, given the number of personal friends and colleagues he’d lost in the nuclear attacks like the one on Saracen Tower, yet how could shedding even deeper rivers of blood make the situation
better
? It was hardly likely to deter any future attacks which had already been planned, and it
was
likely to produce even more terrorist recruits among the seccies McGillicuddy and Snyder wanted to terrify.

None of which even considered Pearson’s point about the propaganda advantages Mesa’s enemies would wring out of any
government-sponsored
atrocities!

Despite all of which, he could already see which way this was going to end. Snyder was far and away the single most powerful member of the General Board. Manpower had spent too many T-years cementing its alliances with the other megacorporations who named the Board’s members, and its thirty percent interest in Noroguchi Nanotech and Cybercom of Mesa (not to mention its never officially acknowledged outright ownership of the Jessyk Combine) gave it plenty of raw political power of its own. With McGillicuddy backing her play, she was going to carry the day eventually.

Unfortunately, he was right.

* * *

“All right.” François McGillicuddy’s eyes were hard as he sat behind his desk, facing the holographic images of Commissioner Bentley Howell and Commissioner Fran Selig. “The Board’s greenlighted Rat Catcher. What do we need to make it work and how soon can we implement?”

“That depends on how hard we intend to hit them, Sir,” Howell replied.

The handsome, dark-haired, dark-complexioned Howell was the commanding officer of the Mesan Internal Security Directorate. MISD—its critics normally pronounced the acronym “missed,” especially since its . . . overly enthusiastic reaction to Green Pines—was technically a mere division of the Office of Public Safety. Of course, OPS had a lot of divisions, and more total manpower than any other agency of the Mesa System government. It needed the warm bodies because, despite its relatively innocuous name, it was the primary suppressive arm of the Mesan government and it answered only to the Procurator of Public Safety and, beyond the Procurator’s Office, to the Director of Security. The Procurator, unfortunately, had been attending a soccer match at a stadium in Dobzhansky when a nuclear device exploded directly above it. For the present, McGillicuddy had taken over the Procurator’s duties in addition to his own, which was how he came to be speaking directly to Howell and Selig, who—as CO of the Office of Public Safety—was Howell’s superior. Nominally, at least; MISD had a reputation for creatively misconstruing directives with which it disagreed.

Selig was a small woman, barely a hundred and fifty-seven centimeters in her bare feet, with dark blue hair and intense green eyes. There were other, more subtle genetic mods in her family background, however, and she was far stronger and tougher than she looked. She was also a savvy, skilled bureaucratic infighter, although that hadn’t helped her rein in Howell. MISD was a separate fiefdom within OPS, and the gauntleted fist gripping the drawn dagger of Public Safety on the MISD shoulder patch reflected that status only too accurately. When push came to shove, when it was time to put away the neural whips and the water cannon and the tear gas dispensers and send in Public Safety’s true hard men and women, that was when MISD came into its own.

“How hard to do you think I
want
you to hit them, Bentley?” McGillicuddy replied to Howell’s question. “I want those seccy bastards
hammered
. I went them hammered so flat they won’t even
think
about getting back up.”

“So you’re not talking about just breaking a few more heads, Sir?” Selig asked, and McGillicuddy snorted.

“I’m talking about putting pulser darts through a few heads,” he said flatly, and Selig nodded. If she was surprised, it didn’t show. And, in fact, she’d been anticipating that decision for some time. Her uniformed OPS troopers had already broken quite a few heads over the past day or so, and she was entirely in favor of taking things to the next level.

“Do you want to put my people in immediately, Sir?” Howell asked.

“Not immediately.” McGillicuddy shook his head and pointed at Selig. “First, I want
your
people to push the rabble back into its kennels, Commissioner Selig. I want them holed up so Commissioner Howell’s people will know right where to find them in large enough numbers to make sure the survivors hear our message loud and clear. Understood?”

“Understood, Sir.” Selig smiled coldly. “We’ll get right on that.”

* * *

“What’s going on?” asked Lajos Irvine. “I heard—well, more like felt—what seemed like explosions nearby.”

Victor Cachat shook his head. “They weren’t nearby. The reason you felt them is because they were nuclear detonations. Half a dozen of them, all told. The news media are reporting casualties—most of them fatalities—in the tens of thousands.”

He paused for a moment and gave Lajos that frightening level stare. “They’re saying the detonations are being done by Ballroom terrorists. But that’s ridiculous—and you know it as well as I do. What I think is happening is that your Alignment is pulling everyone off the planet and covering their tracks. And if that requires mass murder, so be it.”

Lajos felt an urge to protest against the accusation, but he said nothing. He was pretty sure Cachat was right. And if he was . . .

Then why hadn’t anyone told Lajos himself about an evacuation? The only answer he could think of that made any sense—

And it
did
make sense. He rose to his feet. “It’s an onion,” he said. “It’s always an onion. And it seems I’m not—”

The sensation was a curious one. Disorienting more than frightening. But he wouldn’t have had more than a few seconds to be frightened anyway.

* * *

Cachat caught him as he slumped, and was able to keep his head from being injured. But it didn’t matter. The man was unconscious within seconds and died not long thereafter. A massive stroke; perhaps; but it was more likely to have been a pulmonary embolism—or something that mimicked it, anyway. The prisoner’s mouth was coated in foam and he’d suffered massive and complete incontinence. If Victor remembered correctly, those were often symptoms of the condition.

Even if a medical regeneration unit had been immediately available he probably couldn’t have saved the prisoner. But the few such units in their possession had already been moved to more secure locations underground. He could never have gotten the man into one in time.

Callie Patwary and her former gang partner Teddy came into the cell. They must have heard something.

Victor straightened up from his examination of the corpse lying on the floor. “When was the last time you saw him alive?”

Callie nodded her head in the direction of her former gang partner. “Teddy checked in on him about two hours ago.”

“He seemed fine,” Teddy insisted. “We didn’t speak to each other when I brought him breakfast, but he looked at me and didn’t seem sick or anything.” He sounded nervous, as if he were worried that Victor would blame him for the prisoner’s death and . . .

Do . . . something.

Victor found the reaction irritating, but he was used to it. He didn’t quite understand why, but he knew from experience that a lot of people found him frightening. As if he might kill or injure someone for no reason. A notion which he found ridiculous, but . . . there it was.

“Not your fault, Teddy,” he said. “If it’s anyone’s, it’s mine. I was being circumspect in my questioning of him because I was pretty sure he had a built-in suicide program that would be triggered off by anything too overt. Apparently, I wasn’t circumspect enough. Or he just got too excited and triggered it himself.”

“Could you have done anything to prevent it?” asked Callie.

“Not if it was well-designed—which I’m sure it was. The people he worked for are ruthless.”

He spotted the expressions on both Callie and Teddy’s faces and had to fight down a smile. They were looking at him the way people might look at a shark who accused a crocodile of being excessively carnivorous.

“Have we got an easy way to freeze him?”

Teddy pointed over his shoulder with a thumb. “Dusek’s people have a bunch of military-grade bodybags. Must have bought ’em from somebody they knew in the Peaceforce.”

“All right. Put him in one and find a secure place to store his corpse somewhere underground—not too close to here, either. Hopefully, the corpse will survive what’s coming. An examination by a really good medtech pathology unit might tell us something. It’s not likely, but it’s worth taking the chance.”

He didn’t bother to add the hope that they might survive what was coming also. Callie and Teddy were hardly what you’d call intellectual heavyweights, but they weren’t dimwitted. They knew perfectly well they were all in for a desperate struggle.

He looked back down at the corpse. Victor had never asked the man his name, out of worry that might also trigger a suicide program. Now that it was all a moot point, he found himself regretting the fact. There was something indecent about a man dying nameless in the hands of enemies. Just one more thing to chalk up against the Alignment in his black book. A very small entry, admittedly, in what was by now a massive tome.

Still, he wouldn’t forget. When it came to remembering the misdeeds of his enemies, Victor Cachat’s memory was flawless.

Chapter 57

“That’s right—kick the bastards in the balls and stomp on their throats when they go down!” Sergeant Amos Barkley shouted. “Show this shit what happens when they start throwing nukes
our
way!”

The troopers of his OPS section had their neural whips dialed to their highest setting. Technically, that was against regulations, just as it was against their official orders. But any Office of Public Safety noncom was well accustomed to reading between the official lines to what the orders really were, and in Amos Barkley’s opinion, it was long past time the seccies were put firmly in their place. He didn’t care what the official story was; he knew damned well those Ballroom bastards couldn’t have gotten the Green Pines bomb into place without active seccy support. He’d known that from the beginning, even before he’d seen the bootleg copies of the classified transcripts of post-Green Pines seccy interrogations, and now, with this latest series of explosions . . .

The drably dressed seccies in front of him had just suddenly appeared out of an alley mouth. There were a half-dozen adults, most of them women, and closer to two dozen children, all of them obviously running from someone else. Sergeant Surekha’s section was supposed to be clearing out the rats nest of apartments in the cellars of Sukharov Tower, and Barkley wasn’t a bit surprised Surekha had flushed these seccies into his lap. Sukharov wasn’t supposed to be a residential tower, at all. In fact, it wasn’t even a tower, really—barely more than fifty stories tall and crammed full of mostly automated light manufacturing equipment. The owners had winked at the seccy squatters in their cellars for years, in no small part because many of those seccies were off-the-books maintenance techs, fully capable of overseeing Sukharov’s maintenance remotes and even making repairs themselves in return for a roof over their heads. OPS had known about it all along, of course, but they, too, had turned a blind eye . . . in return for a suitable subsidy from Sukharov’s owners. And, of course, a suitable “residence tax” extorted from the seccies themselves.

Barkley always accepted his own share of the rake-offs, but it had griped him. Once you started making accommodations with scum like the seccies, it could only get worse in his opinion. Respect and fear started to erode under those circumstances, and it was damned well time to put that fear back into Mendel’s seccies.

Those of them who survived, at least.

The high, shrill whine of the neural whips sang suddenly louder, only to be buried an instant later under the even shriller sound of human screams. Very
young
human screams. At their present settings, a neural whip would have been lethal to four out of five fully adult humans in good physical condition. Even the one in five who might have survived would have suffered massive damage to his nervous system. He would almost certainly have been paralyzed for life below the point at which the whip contacted his body, and it was entirely probable that he would have suffered catastrophic brain damage, as well.

A child under fifteen T-years old stood no chance at all against that agonizing form of death.

Some deeply buried core of decency, even in an Amos Barkley, cringed as the first three kids went down. But it was very deeply buried, that ragged, shopworn decency—deeply enough he had no difficulty ignoring it. Besides, plenty of his fellow troopers’ kids had been incinerated in the Dobzhansky explosion and the Blue Lagoon Park attack. And in the words of an old, old cliché of which Barkley had always been fond, nits made lice. Besides, there’d always be more where they’d come from. The damned seccies bred like flies!

Another fleeing child stumbled, almost falling. Her mother snatched at her arm, yanking her up, but the two of them had been delayed just long enough. Toby Qorolas, Barkley’s section corporal, brought his neural whip around and almost casually clubbed both of them to the pavement. The little girl didn’t even scream, but her mother certainly did.

* * *

Shasta McGuire had never thought of himself as a particularly good man, which was reasonable—he wasn’t one. What he was, was just over two meters in height, with an ugly, scarred face, knuckles that were even more heavily scarred, and a twenty-T-year history as one of Maysayuki Franconi’s enforcers. Franconi probably wouldn’t have qualified for sainthood in most people’s eyes, either, but she’d always done her best to run her territory with a minimum of unnecessary bloodshed. By and large, she’d succeeded in doing just that. And when bloodshed
had
been necessary, there’d always been McGuire.

The Sukharov Territory had never been large—gangs which operated in the industrial “fire breaks” between the seccy residential towers had to be careful about emerging too far into the light—but it had been well organized. Franconi had headed that organization for the better part of forty T-years, and she’d reached a mutually profitable understanding with Sukharov Light Industries long ago. And with OPS, for that matter. Her territory had been largely spared after the Green Pines bombing, although enough people who lived in it had lost relatives—or had them beaten and crippled—for the lesson in terror to be fully absorbed. The instant they’d heard about the new, devastating chain of attacks, they’d known who’d be blamed and gone to ground.

Unfortunately, this time the Sukharov Territory’s immunity had shattered.

McGuire stood at Franconi’s shoulder, gazing down from her office window at the group of Public Safety troopers clubbing down women and children with their neural whips, and something deep inside him snarled. Franconi was scarcely half his height, a slender woman with silver-streaked dark hair, and he could see entirely too clearly over her head.

“
Bastards!
”

The single word rumbled up from his thick throat like the first pumice cloud from an active volcano, and his hand clenched around the butt of his holstered pulser. Neither he nor his boss could hear the shrieks through the sealed window, but they didn’t need to.

Franconi stood motionless, gazing down with basilisk eyes for a dozen slow breaths. Then she turned from the window, lifting those stony eyes to her chief enforcer’s face.

“Break out the heavy stuff, Shasta,” she said, her voice cold and even harder than her eyes.

He stared at her for a moment, stunned by the order. Like most of Mendel’s gangs, Franconi’s had assembled a potent arsenal over the years. Mostly small arms: pulsers, flechette guns, the occasional civilian-grade pulse rifle. But along with that was her small cache of military-grade weapons. Heavy pulse rifles, light tribarrels, even a handful of antitank weapons and man portable surface-to-air missiles. She’d never really expected to need them, but—again, like most of Mendel’s gangs—she’d believed in rainy days and making preparation against them. Yet McGuire knew she’d never been insane enough to even consider using them against any of the planetary security forces.

Until now, at least.

“You sure about that, boss?” he rumbled, yet there was surprisingly little surprise in his voice.

“Damned right I am,” Franconi said. “That’s how they’re
starting out
, Shasta—you think it’s not going to get one hell of a lot worse before they’re done?” Her lips worked as if she wanted to spit, but she only shook her head sharply. “There’s not going to be enough left of our territory to sweep up in an old-fashioned dustpan, and if those bastards think they can come in here and just slaughter
my
people and walk right back out again, they’re fucking wrong! Break out the heavy stuff,” she repeated, crossing to her desk and yanking open a drawer. She reached into it for the heavy military-grade pulser which had once been her father’s and checked the magazine and the power level expertly.

“
Now
, Shasta,” she said, turning to face him with the weapon in her hand. “I want every one of our people here in the tower armed and downstairs to meet me in five frigging minutes! Is that clear?”

“Yes, Ma’am!” McGuire said.

It was insane, of course. He knew that as well as she did. They weren’t even one of the middle-sized gangs, far less one of the big outfits like Dusek’s or Bachue the Nose’s. They’d be like spit on a griddle in one of the seccy greasy spoons when OPS or MISD came calling. It couldn’t end any other way; Shasta McGuire had seen too much of life in Mendel’s seccy district to have any illusions on that score.

And it didn’t matter.

“We’ll be there, boss,” he promised her, and headed for the office door, already reaching for his personal com.

* * *

Sergeant Barkley’s section turned the corner at the eastern edge of Sukharov Tower. A few of the seccies behind them were still twitching. One of them was even trying to crawl across the body-littered pavement, but he and his troopers couldn’t be bothered to go back and clean up. They were too many fresh prey waiting ahead of them, and the sweet, hot taste of blood was in their mouths. They’d find—

Barkley straightened suddenly, wheeling around as a crimson caret flashed at the corner of his helmet visor HUD. Someone was lasing him!

He just had time to see Shasta McGuire lying prone behind an overturned garbage can with the military tribarrel braced across it. The sighting dot was directly in the center of his chest, and his light, unpowered armor—fully adequate to resist knives, clubs, improvised weapons, possibly even light pulser fire, if he was lucky—was no use at all against the tribarrel’s hypersonic five-millimeter darts.

None of the rest of Amos Barkley’s section—or Gunther Surekha’s—survived him by more than twenty-seven seconds.

* * *

“You’re not serious!”

Lieutenant General Gillian Drescher gazed across her desk at Colonel Byrum Bartel, her chief of staff, her almond-shaped eyes narrowed in something that wasn’t so much disbelief as a desire to disbelieve. After Green Pines, she’d thought she’d seen just about anything that could happen during her three years as the commander of the Capital District of the Mesan Planetary Peaceforce.

Apparently, she’d been wrong.

“The Safeties got their asses kicked, Ma’am,” Bartel said flatly. The colonel was a tall, beefy man, half again his diminutive superior’s height and as fair-haired and complected as she was dark-haired. “They thought this was going to be just another Green Pines sweep, and they were wrong. According to the preliminary reports, they took something like five hundred casualties, most of them fatal.” He grimaced. “We’ve got surveillance video of most of the firefights, and what happened to any of the Safeties the mob got its hands on wasn’t pretty.”

Bartel had a gift for understatement, Drescher thought. She didn’t need to see the video he’d mentioned to be able to picture what must have happened to any OPS trooper who’d fallen into seccy hands. She wasn’t going to shed any tears for the bastards, either. While she had a certain grudging respect for the Security Directorate, the Safeties had never been anything remotely approaching soldiers. They hadn’t even been very effective policemen, for that matter. What they
had
been was a blunt instrument used to bloody the seccies’ heads whenever they seemed to be getting uppity. From the moment she’d been briefed on Operation Rat Catcher, she’d been unhappy about the notion of allowing Public Safety off its leash this way.

From the sound of it, she hadn’t been unhappy enough.

“How did even Selig’s idiots put their foot in it that badly?” she demanded.

“It looks like nobody counted on the seccy crime bosses.” Bartel shook his head with a disgusted expression. “When they realized the Safeties were deliberately running up the body count—that it wasn’t just a case of collateral damage this time around—some of the gang members started shooting back. Mostly with nothing heavier than pulsers, at first. Just whatever carry weapons they had with them when the ball dropped. But within the first half hour or so, they started breaking out heavier weapons. Military-grade tribarrels, grenade launchers—even a couple of plasma rifles.”

His eyes met Drescher’s, and the general nodded ever so slightly, acknowledging what he hadn’t said. Military-grade weapons, especially plasma weapons, had almost certainly come from the Peaceforce’s own stocks. It was common knowledge, if never discussed, that armory clerks and ordnance officers occasionally disposed of surplus weapons—and, in some cases,
non
surplus weapons—in black market transactions. A lot of those weapons went to various system-based and transstellar corporations’ covert operations units, but at least some of them had been falling into the hands of seccy criminal organizations for decades. In fact, Drescher and Bartel had been warning people for T-years, and especially since Green Pines, that the seccies had almost certainly gotten their hands on a lot more—and a lot more
potent
—weaponry than anyone had ever acknowledged.

They’d also cracked down on the Peaceforce. Several of those armory clerks and two field grade officers had been court-martialed and severely punished for selling arms under their control, but the crackdown had been all too much like locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. For that matter, far more weapons had certainly been quietly transferred to seccy ownership by corrupt members of the OPS and the Internal Security Directorate than by the Peaceforce. Which offered its own painful irony just at the moment, she supposed.

“It looks like the first organized seccy response was around the Sukharov manufacturing center,” Bartel continued. “That one took out two complete sections of Safeties before any of them even got out a mayday. It’s gotten worse since then, of course.”

“How much worse? And what’s happening now?” Drescher asked.

“A
lot
worse, Ma’am. And they’re sending in the Misties,” Bartel told her. “Howell’s got blood in his eye, too. They’ll be going in hot, with shoot on sight orders.”

“Wonderful.” Drescher pinched the bridge of her nose. “And just what are his objectives?”

“He’s planning to sweep the central arc of the northern seccy ring and drive as many of them as possible towards Neue Rostock and Hancock, then punch out both towers. Dusek’s got one of the biggest—and almost certainly the best trained and disciplined—gangs, and a lot of seccies have already refugeed towards Neue Rostock. Bachue the Nose has even more warm bodies in her organization in Hancock than he does in Neue Rostock. They’re not as cohesive and probably not as well armed, but they’ve got a reputation as tough, hardnosed bastards, and most of the seccies who didn’t make for Neue Rostock seem to have headed her way.”