Cauldron of Ghosts (57 page)

The arcade was Bravo Company’s designated objective point. When the company’s troopers reached it, they would have secured a roughly pie-shaped section sixty meters wide at its base and eighty meters deep. Adding the arcade’s grav shafts to the banks the MISD had already secured and bypassed, they’d have at least a dozen potential points of access to the floors above, and Howell’s other two regiments each had a pair of battalions driving in on separate axes. Their joint objective was a sports complex—a large gymnasium with adjoining tennis courts and a large swimming pool. They had less distance to cover, but they were also moving a lot more slowly. When they took the sport complex, however, they would have secured almost half of the rest of the ground floor and all of the grav shafts and stairs which served it. Even with the shafts powered down—and there was no question in Barrett’s mind now that they
had
been powered down, deliberately—counter-grav equipped troopers would be able to ascend them, and the defenders were going to find it difficult to cover all of those points of vulnerability.

“Sarge, I’ve got eyes on the objective,” Ludvigsen reported.

Most of the anger had faded from his voice as they moved steadily deeper, and Barrett was glad to hear it. It was still going to be there between them afterward, and she had no idea how that was going to work out, but for right now they all depended on one another to survive long enough for there to be an “afterward” to worry about.

“Don’t get carried away,” she replied. “I don’t want anyone rushing out into the open just because we haven’t run into anybody yet.”

“Don’t worry about
me
getting carried away!” Ludvigsen snorted, and continued cautiously forward.

* * *

“The bastards coming up Gladstone are almost in the zone, Bachue,” Fred Trujillo said tautly.

“What about Merriwell and Patterson?” the tall, rawboned woman with the beaky nose asked harshly.

“Not yet. They’re still about two cross corridors out,” Trujillo replied.

“Shit.”

Bachue the Nose rested her right palm on the butt of the pulser at her hip, fingers drumming on the holster’s plastic. Her gang was less tightly organized—less
disciplined
, much as she hated to admit that—than Jurgen Dusek’s, and she hadn’t spent as much time as he had worrying about planning for a possible situation like this. Why the hell should she have? The notion of
seccies
actually being able to defend a residential tower against a frontal assault was ludicrous.

Yet, as the warning signs had accumulated, she’d realized Dusek was right about what was coming down this time. Personally, if she’d been able to get her hands on the Ballroom bastards behind the nuclear strikes, she’d
gladly
have handed them over to the Safeties. It wasn’t like the lunatics were actually going to
change
anything here on Mesa, and the security agencies’ reaction had been as predictable as sunrise. For that matter, she was none too fond of anyone prepared to kill that many people just to make a point herself.

But she
couldn’t
get her hands on them, because she had no idea where to find them—not that she expected the Misties to believe that for a moment—which had left her with only one option. Even a cornered rat would fight savagely when it had no option, and Bachue the Nose was a hell of a lot more dangerous than any
rat
.

“Any sign the Gladstone bunch is planning on pushing past Brookner?”

“Not yet.” Trujillo shook his head. “Looks like you called it, boss. They’re planning to link up at Brookner.”

Bachue grunted. The Brookner Plaza—although she’d always thought calling it a “plaza” was pretty damned high-flown and fancy for a down-at-the-heels, threadbare shopping arcade—at the intersection of the Gladstone, Merriwell, and Patterson trunk corridors had been an obvious weak spot in Hancock’s defenses. Of course, as Dusek’s advisor Palane had pointed out,
obvious
weak spots could be very useful things from a defender’s perspective. But to make it work, she wanted as many of the Misties in her sights as possible.

“What about the ones coming in from the west, Levi?” she asked.

“They’re still about ten minutes out from Crawford, maybe fifteen at the rate they’re moving,” Levi Andrade, Hancock Tower’s building supervisor, replied from his central console.

Bachue nodded. There were twice as many Misties in the four-pronged advance moving in from the west, and they were more widely separated. It looked like they were heading for the Crawford Sports Complex, located right off the tower’s central air shaft opening, but their approach routes made it difficult to be certain. Even if they were, though, they’d never reach it by the time the first bunch reached Brookner. Still, she’d made preparations on that front, as well.

“Get Pablo and his people over to the west side,” she said. She turned her head, looking at the crimson lines advancing across the building manager’s schematic. “Tell him they’ll be coming up Whitman, Severesky, Ibanez, and Chasnikov. They’re not going to be far enough in for the Crawford charges, so tell him to make for the secondary trunk positions.”

“On it, boss,” Andrade told her, and she turned back to Trujillo, moving closer and resting her left hand on his right shoulder as she looked over his head at his display.

“We wait a bit longer,” she told him. “I want Pablo in position, and I’d really rather have as many of these other bastards as deep as as we can get them before we pull the plug. Keep a close eye on the Gladstone bunch, though. Let me know if they get antsy.”

“Gotcha.”

* * *

“Malden, secure the entrance,” Barrett directed. “Ludvigsen, I want you and your team about as far out there as that first kiosk. Don’t think about wandering any farther until Captain Shultz and the rest of the Company gets here!”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Sarge,” Kimmo Ludvigsen said fervently.

* * *

Captain Gavin Shultz smacked his left hand on his armored leg in satisfaction. His HUD showed 2nd Platoon already on the objective. He still didn’t like to think about how . . . messy accounting for Ferguson’s death might turn out to be, and he hadn’t been delighted to get a brand-new replacement for the dead lieutenant on such short notice. But damned if Kalanadhabhatla hadn’t turned his frigging problem platoon around!

His other platoons were making good progress, as well, and aside from that little firefight where he’d managed to get his HQ people stuck in, there’d been no resistance at all to speak of. He always known seccies were cowards, and they were damned well proving it now.

“All right, people,” he said, striding along just behind 1st Platoon’s point team, “let’s close it up and get a move on. We’ve got us some seccies to kill!”

* * *

“They’re all into the zone now.” Trujillo’s voice was tighter and a little higher-pitched than it had been, and Bachue looked over his shoulder at the display.

The Misties were so self-confident that they hadn’t even tried to knock out her corridor surveillance cameras. Or perhaps they simply hadn’t realized they were there. They were completely separate from the
official
surveillance system even seccy towers were required by law to provide, and their pickups were far better maintained—and concealed—than the official ones.

“How’s Pablo doing, Levi?” Bachue asked over her shoulder, never turning away from Trujillo’s display.

“About there, boss. He says two minutes.”

“Are the Misties into the secondary zone?”

“Just about. My cameras aren’t as good as Fred’s on this side. Looks like we’ve got maybe . . . seventy-five, eighty percent into the zone. Probably got a few already past it, though.”

Bachue frowned thoughtfully, then nodded.

“Let those bastards moving up on Brookner get a little deeper into the zone, Fred,” she said, squeezing Trujillo’s shoulder. “Another fifteen or twenty meters.”

“You got it, boss.”

* * *

Bentley Howell gazed down at the Cyclops’ map in satisfaction as his battalions penetrated deeper and deeper into Hancock Tower. The green lines indicating their progress crawled across the display steadily, and he smiled triumphantly. He’d told that idiot Drescher the seccies would break and run when they realized the situation was hopeless. He had them bottled up in their holes now, and they were probably pissing themselves just thinking about what was headed towards them. He’d have all of the first five floors of that damned tower secured by the time Drescher ever even got here! He wouldn’t be able to keep her from claiming credit for the occupation of the
rest
of Hancock, but the record would clearly show who’d executed the initial breaching operation and damned well
handed
her the tower! In fact, he was looking forward to—

* * *

“Now,” Bachue the Nose said softly.

* * *

Hancock Tower lacked the spaciously laid out cellular structure of a tower like Saracen or Rasmussen, but the loadbearing walls and floor plates of its relentlessly square grid work were just as tough, just as strong, as those other towers’ structures. Ceramacrete was ceramacrete. There was no point in anyone’s trying to provide substandard materials, because the basic materials were so cheap to begin with. And there was no point skimping on the fusing, because either it fused completely or—for all intents and purposes—not at all.

That meant that despite its smaller size, the much more tightly divided Hancock was actually structurally stronger than Saracen or Rasmussen. And, of course, “smaller” was a purely relative term. Bachue the Nose’s organization had been unable to evacuate as many of Hancock’s residents as Dusek had managed to get out of Neue Rostock. They hadn’t planned for it, and—as Thandi Palane had suspected—they hadn’t explored the subsurface passages and networks as diligently as Dusek had. Bachue had managed to get five or six thousand of Hancock’s people evacuated through Neue Rostock, using the tunnels Dusek had mapped, before the Safeties and Misties cut the two towers off from one another, but she still had well over twenty thousand “civilians” to look out for.

A surprising—or perhaps not so surprising, under the circumstances—number of those people had volunteered to assist the gang members in preparing Hancock for what was to come. Again, Bachue had started later, with less warning from Victor Cachat, but her people had pitched in enthusiastically once she did start. And, strong as ceramacrete was, it wasn’t battle steel. A little judicious work with rock drills and the odd kilo of blasting compound—civilian, construction-grade compound would do just fine—tucked into the drilled holes could accomplish wonders.

Fred Trujillo pressed a button, and the distributed charges—
some
of the distributed charges—exploded thunderously.

* * *

“Shit!
Shit!
They’ve—!”

Lieutenant Meryl Rodman’s voice cut off with a knifelike sharpness as a twenty-meter stretch of the Patterson trunk corridor descended like a vengeful giant’s boot. A cubic meter of ceramacrete weighed roughly three thousand kilograms, and Patterson’s roof—which was also the floor of the corridor above it—was a ceramacrete slab thirty-five centimeters thick. There were seventy-five cubic meters in that plunging juggernaut, and the two hundred and twenty-five-ton sledgehammer turned Lieutenant Rodman, her platoon sergeant, and twenty-one of 3rd Platoon’s thirty-eight troopers into bloody gruel.

Behind her, two more twenty-meter piledrivers came down on most of Alpha Company, as well.

* * *

Kayla Barrett was far enough forward to escape the avalanche that descended on Lieutenant Kalanadhabhatla and a quarter of 2nd Platoon’s remaining troopers. A dusty hurricane howled past her, but before she could really react to that, a ten-meter square of Brookner Plaza’s ceiling blasted loose in
front
of her, as well. It crashed down in ruin, but there was no one under it. So why had the seccies—?

“
They’re coming through the fucking roof!
” someone screamed.

It sounded like Ludvigsen, and Barrett flung herself prone as dozens of unarmored seccies on counter-grav belts plummeted through the sudden, gaping holes, weapons blazing.

* * *

“
Motherf—!
”

Lieutenant Leandro Wallace’s voice broke off in mid-word, and his icon disappeared from Gavin Shultz’s HUD with sickening suddenness as the Gladstone roof plummeted down onto 1st Platoon’s heads. More of Wallace’s people survived than 2nd Platoon or 3rd Platoon could claim, but more than half of them still died, and 4th Platoon, Shultz’s reserve, was on the far side of the plunging ceramacrete. Only six of its people were killed, but Charlie Company, following behind it, was less fortunate when the roof above
it
came plunging down, as well.

Schultz stood frozen, stunned by the sudden, massive carnage. A flood of loss-of-signal codes exploded over the 4th Regiment’s com net as the transponders in crushed and flattened utility armor went abruptly off the air. And, as he stood there, his HUD suddenly flashed and flared as dozens—hundreds—of other LOS codes came roaring in when still more tons of ceramacrete hammered down on 1st Battalion, 19th Regiment, and 2nd Battalion, 17th Regiment.

Eighty-three percent of the troopers in the three battalions Bentley Howell had ordered into Hancock Tower—just under seventeen hundred men and women—were killed or incapacitated in less than two minutes. The survivors, like Gavin Shultz and Kayla Barrett, were stunned by the sudden, catastrophic carnage, and two hundred and thirty seccies—most members of Bachue’s organization, but with a sizable reinforcement of volunteers—swarmed down through the newly blasted breaches upon them.

* * *

The attackers were armed with pulse rifles and grenade launchers, and Section Sergeant Barrett heard her own voice cursing in a flat, staccato monotone as they opened fire. Her armor’s sensors were a huge advantage in the sudden darkness and swirling dust produced by the explosions. Or they should have been, anyway. But there was too much confusion for them to sort out, and there were too damned many
bodies
coming at her.