Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  The Gaul went down, both hands clutching at his throat. The impact knocked Zachariah off his feet, as well, and he rolled frantically as he heard Zhilov’s hacking, coughing fight to breathe. He doubted very much that he could have done enough damage to crush the other man’s larynx, and if he hadn’t, if the far better trained Gaul regained his breath, got back to his feet . . .

  Zachariah’s hand came down on something angular. It closed instinctively, and as he slammed into a bulkhead and rolled back up onto one knee, three meters from his opponent, he discovered the angular something was Zhilov’s pulser.

  His hand rose as the Gaul shook himself and started to shove back upright—still hacking, still coughing—only to freeze. His gory face was expressionless, but his good eye widened in sudden awareness.

  And then Zachariah McBryde’s trigger finger tightened and a four-dart burst of fire blew Anthony Zhilov’s chest into a steaming red mist.

  Chapter 46

  Csilla Ferenc had never been so terrified in her life. She thought she’d reached the limit of fear in those horrible moments when armored soldiers had come into the station’s traffic control center and taken her prisoner along with the others. But their captors then had been no worse than vigilant. One of them had even been rather good-humored, in a rough sort of way.

  Now, their captors were in a rage. Stalking up and down the line of prisoners standing still—no; rigid as ceramacrete—with their pulse rifles no longer held carefully pointed away but leveled.

  Except for a few bigshots like Somogyi, they’d all been herded into the station’s largest hold. Hundreds of them. At first, she’d taken some comfort in being just one person half-buried in those numbers. But then something happened. She didn’t know what it was but apparently, from what their captors were saying to each other, someone had destroyed one of their ships.

  She was sure they were all about to be slaughtered. Then a short woman she didn’t know—some sort of officer, from her uniform—came into the hold, almost running.

  “Stand down!” she shouted. “God damn you—stand down!” She slowed her pace and lowered her voice—a bit. “You’re supposed to be soldiers, not a fucking mob. Stand down, I said!”

  She pointed to one of the soldiers. “Sergeant Supakrit, are you in command of your unit?”

  The big soldier looked meaner than just about any of them, but his expression was . . . well, not calm, exactly. But he seemed to have himself under control.

  “Yes, Colonel Kabweza, I have them . . . They’ll obey me.”

  “Good. You just got a field promotion to lieutenant. Junk the stupid ‘X’ and get a last name. Now bring your unit forward and stand guard over the prisoners. I want you prepared to shoot dead”—she turned and glared at the rest of the soldiers—“any worthless goddam so-called Marine who does not do fucking exactly what I tell them to do. Am I clear, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. Up front, people.” A small group of soldiers came toward him. They had their rifles pointed upward, but it was obvious even to a civilian like Ferenc that they were ready to use them—and not against her.

  A little shudder seemed to go through the mob of soldiers. One of them, a short stocky woman who looked to be about Csilla’s own age, was standing a couple of meters away. She now looked at Csilla. Glared at her, rather.

  “I didn’t do it,” Csilla said, in a small, tremulous voice. “Whatever happened, I didn’t do it.”

  Her knees buckled. A moment later, she was sprawled on the floor, half-erect, supported on one hand. She started to cry. “I just work here. It’s the only job on the planet for people like me that doesn’t pay shit. My husband can’t work because he was crippled in an accident and we have three kids. My dad’s sick, too.”

  She took a slow, shaky breath. “I just work here.”

  The female soldier took a slow breath herself, which also seemed a little shaky. Then, looked at the rifle in her hands and brought it up so that it was pointed at the ceiling of the hold.

  “Ah, hell,” she said.

  * * *

  Breathing heavily and trying to regain his composure, Zachariah turned and saw Gail Weiss on her knees a few meters away. The blow she’d taken from Zhilov’s forearm didn’t seem to have done any major damage, so far as he could tell.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She raised her head and looked up at him. He was relieved to see that her eyes seem to be able to focus. She might have a concussion, but he didn’t think it would be a major one.

  Her eyes moved to look at Zhilov’s corpse. It was as if she was watching a cobra, to see if there might still be any life in the serpent. But she didn’t seem to be in a panic, or confused.

  “Jesus, that was close,” she said, her voice husky. “I can live with being killed for a good reason—”

  Abruptly, she broke off and choked down a laugh. “Talk about a phrase that makes no sense!” She took a breath, then another, calming herself. “But I’m damned if I want to get killed because two maniacs went at each other.”

  She rose to her feet, went over to the table and sat down. Then she drank what was left from her coffee cup and carefully placed it back on the table.

  “I knew—we both knew—he was here to execute us in case of capture. But I should have realized there was more to it. You know how the Alignment’s security people think. You heard Marinescu. Anybody who knows anything about Houdini either vanishes or dies. They were steel-hard on the subject.”

  He nodded wearily. “So they had a second string to their bow. That’s what happened to the Luigi Pirandello. Arpino killed Charteris and van Vleet. Then he waited for the best available opportunity target and blew the ship. Thereby covering his own tracks. Now, nobody who’s not in the Alignment will have any idea what happened to Charteris and van Vleet. They’re not missing persons who get discovered as corpses—murdered for mysterious reasons. They’re just vapor now, indistinguishable from any other interstellar gasses.”

  Zachariah looked around the chamber, which bore a lot more resemblance now to a slaughterhouse than an officers’ lounge. There was blood everywhere.

  He was surprised no one had come to see what was happening. But the hatch was closed—and it was as solid as any ship’s hatch. And now that he thought back on it, the only really loud noises had been people shouting. The exact words wouldn’t have been distinguishable on the command deck, if they’d been heard at all. It was certainly not something they’d come to investigate, given their wariness around Zhilov.

  “So now what do we do?”

  “For starters, we need a cover story that’ll satisfy Captain Bogunov. I don’t think she’ll press too hard if we give her anything that’s reasonably coherent.”

  She looked back and forth between the two corpses. “What do you think? Should we put the gun in Stefka’s hand and claim she—no, that won’t work. How did she shoot him four times in the chest and he was still able to take the gun back and kill her?”

  “I think we should just stick to the truth,” said Zachariah. “She panicked, attacked him, he killed her—but then ran wild. You knocked the gun out of his hand and I picked it up and killed him. I think that’ll be enough to satisfy Bogunov, at least until she can get us off her hands.”

  “And then what?”

  He shrugged. “We tell the same story all the way through to the end. What the hell, it’s true—that is what happened. I don’t think the Alignment will punish us for it. There’s no reason to, once we’ve completed Houdini.”

  Weiss thought about it, for a moment. “Well . . . That’s true enough.” Her mouth twisted into a little smile. “You’ve got to say this much for our security people—they’re as cold-blooded and ruthless as a spider, but they’re just as practical, too. They don’t kill people out of spite.”

  * * *

  “What the hell happened?” Colonel Donald Toussaint demanded. He knew no one aboard Hali Sowle had any more information than he did, but he half-glared around the
freighter’s bridge anyway.

  Denmark Vesey was almost six light-minutes from Balcescu Station, and both she and Luigi Pirandello had disappeared from the FTL gravitic sensors the moment their velocities equalized and they shut down their impeller wedges. The sensor drone Hali Sowle had deployed had tracked the passenger shuttles’ wedges after they separated from the ship, then tracked the pinnace’s wedge until it was shut down. Then nothing. Nothing at all . . . until, three hundred and eighty-three seconds later, light-speed scanners had detected the nuclear explosion which had destroyed the freighter in a blinding bubble of light.

  Followed, thirty seconds after that by the missile detonations which had killed Luigi Pirandello’s shuttles.

  Lieutenant Commander Bayano’s report had come in one minute after that. The frigate CO’s summation of the events themselves had been clear and professional, but at the end, it had become almost plaintive.

  “None of it makes any sense, Sir,” his recorded message said from Toussaint’s com screen as he played it back the second time. He’d viewed it the first time by himself. Now he wanted all the different perspectives on it he could get.

  “They’d already surrendered and left the ship in their personnel shuttles,” Bayano continued. “They had to have known—dammit, I warned them twice, and I was blunt about it—that we’d take out all of them if so much as one slave was killed. So why blow their ship at that point? What the fuck did they think they were doing?” He’d been visibly shaken himself, then grimaced. “Sorry, Sir. I know you don’t know either, but losing Lieutenant Xiorro and all his people when we had the situation under control . . . that hurts. That hurts a lot.”

  “Maybe they just wanted to get revenge by killing some of our people at the same time,” Lieutenant Commander Lansiquot said now. The Havenite adviser was standing next to Major Sydorenko, close enough to the screen to view the report along with her and the colonel. Toussaint had invited him to do just that, and now he paused the recorded message’s playback and raised both eyebrows at Lansiquot.

  Sydorenko’s expression was tight, hard, coldly furious. “Like Commander Bayano says, damn it. Bastards killed Lieutenant Xiorro and all his Marines. That’s got to be why they did it.”

  Donald waved his hand, trying not to be impatient with people either. “Meaning no offense, but neither one of you was ever a slave. I was—so was Tunni—and what they did makes no sense. It just doesn’t. These people were slavers, for Christ’s sake, not religious or political fanatics. Any slaver crew is likely to have one or two loose screws rattling around who might be crazy enough to do something like this, but all of them?”

  He glared back down at Bayano’s frozen image in his display. Lansiquot started to say something but stopped abruptly, and Sydorenko inhaled sharply.

  “Can we hear the rest of Commander Bayano’s report, Sir?” she asked. Before I shoot my mouth off again was left unspoken.

  “Of course.” Toussaint gave her a humorless smile which strongly suggested that he’d heard what she’d left unspoken, and touched the screen again.

  Bayano’s frozen image sprang back to life, and he shook his head like a traveler pondering the Sphinx’s riddles.

  “I had fairly extensive contact with the ship’s captain, Colonel, and he sure didn’t seem like he was in a suicidal mood to me. That’s the main reason I’m so frigging lost for any explanation of what he did! He actually sounded reasonable, like someone who wanted to at least get his own people out of it alive, and he said all the right things. He even did all the right things . . . right up to the last moment.”

  They could see him pause for a moment, and his expression become . . . not chagrinned, exactly. Rueful, perhaps.

  “The truth is, Colonel, I think now I may have jumped the gun when I opened fire. Looking back on it, I don’t think the people in the shuttles had any idea what was going to happen.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Toussaint told Bayano’s image bluntly, then glanced back up at Sydorenko and Lansiquot. “That’s pretty much what I told Tunni when I receipted his report, and I stand by it. I think he was probably right about how much Brandt and the other people in those shuttles had to do with it, but the fact remains that they were a bunch of stinking slavers. And assuming he was right, they wouldn’t have known anything so there’d have been no point in keeping them alive to be interrogated.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “I look on the bright side. We just proved to any slaver who needs it that we mean what we say. We warned them, they didn’t heed us—regardless of who ‘they’ are, exactly—and we exacted the penalty we said we would. Let the rest of them learn from that.” He swiveled to look up at Sydorenko. “Make sure we collect every scrap of recording that exists on the incident, Anichka. Our records, the Denmark Vesey’s—the station’s, if they have any. When we get back to Torch, I’ll tell our intelligence people they need to squeeze that data for all it’s worth so we can hopefully figure out what really happened and why. There’s a mystery here somewhere, I can smell it.”

  * * *

  It was perfectly obvious to Zachariah that Captain Bogunov didn’t believe much of their story. But it was just as obvious that she had no intention of trying to ferret out the truth herself.

  Let the authorities—whoever the hell they might be—sort this out for themselves. The same authorities who had stressed to her that she should ask no questions of the passengers and let Zhilov do pretty much whatever he had a mind to do.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to put you in confinement for the rest of the trip, though,” she said apologetically. “Pick whichever of your cabins you want. It’ll be a little crowded but . . . that’s the way it is. I haven’t got the personnel to keep a guard on more than one cabin.”

  * * *

  They settled in Gail’s cabin, which she’d shared with Juarez, since it had two bunks.

  After Zachariah stowed away his few possessions, he sat across from Gail at the little extruding shelf that served the cabin as a pitiful excuse for a dining table.

  “Did you leave everyone behind?” she asked him.

  “Yes. Lisa was the only friend I had left, and . . .”

  She nodded. “I guess I was lucky. My husband and I divorced a year ago and we had no kids. And my parents are both dead. I have a brother but we’ve never been close. You?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Zach began talking about his family. He was still doing so two hours later, as the ship vanished into the universe. By then, they were holding hands.

  Chapter 47

  From long practice and experience, Triêu Chuanli had no trouble keeping his expression impassive as he moved through the havoc that had once been the headquarters—lair, it might be better to say—of Lower Radomsko’s most notorious gang. But in truth, he was a little shaken.

  It wasn’t so much the blood and gore, by itself. A man didn’t rise to the position of Jurgen Dusek’s top lieutenant if he was squeamish or faint-hearted. No, it was the . . .

  What was it exactly? Chuanli tried to pin down what was bothering him so much about the ruin and destruction. Everything seemed just a bit . . .

  “Too clean,” he said.

  He’d been speaking to himself, but two of the people who’d come with him were standing close enough to overhear.

  Tamara Hess made a face. “You call this clean? I’m sure glad you’re not my janitor bot.”

  The other person, Henry Copper, shook his head. “No, Tam, he’s right. Except ‘clean’ is off a little. I think ‘precise’ is the word you’re looking for, Triêu.”

  That finally brought the whole scene into focus for Chuanli. He looked around the room buried deep within one of Lower Radomsko’s residential towers. This time, noting the location of the splatter and other details as if he were a forensic medical examiner investigating a crime scene.

  Yes, Henry was right. Too precise. Too one-sided, also. It was a little hard to be certain because some of the bodies were badly damaged, even leaving aside the on
e that had been decapitated. But so far as Chuanli could tell not one of the five people in this room had had time to defend themselves—despite the plethora of weapons available. He was pretty sure that at least three of them had never even had time to get to their feet.

  “Check the magazines on all the weapons,” he said. “I want to know if any of them were fired. And see if any are missing, as best you can.”

  That last order would be largely guesswork, of course. Still, at least with sidearms, they could check the pistols against holsters. There might be some gun cases in one of the closets, too.

  Between Tamara and Henry and the other people Chuanli had brought with him, the work was done within a few minutes.

  “The only weapon fired in this room,” Henry reported, “was that guy’s.” He pointed to one of the corpses lying in a corner. “And from the look of the wound and the tear in the bottom of the holster, I think he shot himself in the foot without ever getting the gun clear.”

  “Missing weapons?”

  “No way to be sure, but none that I can see.”

  Tamara chimed in. “Every body has a weapon associated with it except that of the woman over there. She had two, one of them a backup in her boot. Neither was fired.”

  Chuanli nodded. “And the other rooms?” They’d found a total of nine corpses in the apartment complex.

  “Same story,” said Henry. “One guy killed in the corridor coming out of the bathroom. Two of them killed in bed while they were—” He waved his hand. “The one in the front room . . .”

  “We think he was on his feet and facing his killer,” said Tamara. “He’d drawn his pistol, too, looks like. But it was lying on the floor a couple of meters away, never fired.”

  By now, Triêu had a rough picture of what must have happened. “So . . . One shooter comes in the front door by blowing it in with an explosive charge. They could do that because their target was too careless to keep a guard on duty in the corridor. That made one hell of a racket, which would have momentarily stunned everybody. He or she shoots the guard on duty in the front room and then moves into this room—what I’d call a living room if it weren’t such a pigsty—and guns down all five people here. Meanwhile, another party or parties blows in the wall connecting the kitchen to the corridor on the other side and clears the bedrooms. He shoots the couple while they’re screwing and takes down the last guy coming out of the toilet.”