Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  Ideally, they’d have detonated the bomb at a greater altitude, but they’d waited because the flyer’s course took it almost directly over a large playing field where two local schools were having a sports match. The stands were full of teenage students and their families.

  The hypocenter was not quite above the playing field. It was a hundred meters to the north of what would have been the outer wall of the stadium except that the stadium was just two long rows of tiered seats on either side of the field. But the practical effect was about the same. The framework of the seats was ceramacrete but the seats themselves and the awning that shielded spectators from the sun were not. Except for twenty-six people who were inside the ceramacrete shells—nine girls, seven boys and two teachers using the toilets; three janitors playing a card game while they waited for the game to end; and five students making purchases from bots at the concession stand—everyone attending the match was killed instantly. First, incinerated by the radiant heat from the fireball. Many of the victims left only shadows on the seats behind. Then, the remains were pulverized and dispersed like so much dust by the blast wave.

  The concession stand under the southern tier of seats was open at either end. The blast wave came through and battered the five students there into literal pulp. A few of the people in the toilets and two of the janitors in their small supply room survived the blast, although all of them were badly injured. All of them would soon suffer the effects of severe radiation poisoning as well. In the end, only two would survive—and one of those would never come out of a coma.

  Dobzhansky had no seccy district at all. The population was made up entirely of citizens. That population also produced, per capita, more members of Mesa’s police, security forces and military than any other town or city on the planet.

  Marinescu, Haas and their team, assembled and overseen by Collin Detweiler, had crunched the numbers carefully. Every battalion-sized police, security or military force in Mesa had just lost one or more family members of anywhere between five and seventeen percent of its troops.

  There was not a single other measure they’d been able to devise that was more certain of enraging those forces. Those who had not personally lost family members in the Dobzhansky terrorist attack would almost certainly have friends who had.

  Investigation would determine that the two seccies who’d loaded the baggage onto that flyer had both disappeared. When their apartments were searched, propaganda literature from the Audubon Ballroom would be found on the personal computers of both of them.

  The culprits would never be found, however. Within two hours of their disappearance, they’d been consumed in a commercial garbage disintegrator whose security program had been bypassed by one of the Alignment’s top software specialists.

  The software specialist would be one of the very last evacuees. The two Alignment agents who’d kidnapped the baggage handlers were not slated for Houdini. They’d both die soon when their med implants failed to receive the ping that would abort the suicide program.

  One of them would die from a heart attack, the other from a stroke. The Alignment had been careful to vary the cause of death so that there would be no unusual statistical “clumps.” Each program was also tailored to the individual’s medical history. Or medical records, at least. Those sometimes needed to be tweaked to give a healthy person a plausible cause of death.

  * * *

  “Ready on Target Beta,” said Haas.

  Marinescu monitored the input from the camera perched inside the auditorium on one of the lower floors of Saracen Tower. Today’s keynote speaker had been introduced and was beginning his speech.

  “Go,” she said. Haas keyed in the command.

  The device planted in the auditorium’s utility closet was a tactical nuke, much smaller than the one used at Dobzhansky, and the tower’s loadbearing walls channeled the blast. Like most towers (or, at least, those built for full citizens), Saracen was actually a honeycomb of ceramacrete tubes arranged in cells which ringed a central core. They were very large tubes—those in Saracen were fifty meters across—and very, very tough, deliberately designed to contain disasters like fires or the sorts of “natural” explosions humans were capable of accidentally producing under almost any circumstances. The tower’s central cell consisted of six fifty-meter tubes arranged in a ring around a central fifty meter-wide air shaft which also gave access to small air cars. Outside that central cell was what amounted to an enormous atrium, thirty meters across, with pedestrian ways and traffic lanes for the small, electric vehicles which scurried about the tower’s interior facing the kilometer and a half-tall atrium walls. Suspended pedestrian and vehicle ways crossed the atrium at regular intervals, providing a sense of airiness and space even at the heart of the vast, kilometer-wide structure. A second ring of cells, each identical to the central core, threaded around the atrium like the beads of a necklace, surrounded by yet another atrium and yet another ring of cells.

  In all, there was a total of four rings of cells wrapped around the central core, which made the entire tower just under nine hundred meters in diameter and one and a half kilometers tall. The solid ceramacrete loadbearing walls of the tubes were incredibly strong, and the floor plates of each of its five hundred floors were also fused ceramacrete, substantially stronger and more resistant than thrice their own thickness of solid granite.

  Still, the cells—and floor plates—were cross-connected at almost every level by doors, archways, grav shafts, emergency stairwells, and all the thousand-and-one elements of a modern building’s circulatory and respiratory systems. The auditorium was in the tower’s second ring, roughly six hundred meters from the tower’s outer face, and the blast front was enough to blow any closed opening in its path wide open, but the overall effect was rather like setting off a small nuclear device (a very small one, in fact, barely ten percent as large as the ancient atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima) inside a mountain cave. It hollowed out a vast chamber directly above and below itself and sent blast, heat, and fragments scything through the two adjacent loadbearing tubes on either side, and vented to both the central air shaft of its cell and the adjacent atrium, but the auditorium was on only the fortieth floor The blast front never even reached the tower’s outermost cells, never so much as blew out a single exterior window.

  Inside the tower was quite another matter, of course. The explosion was more than enough to kill the 1,463 people in the auditorium and every living soul on the seventy-one floors above it in the same loadbearing tube. The blast vented into the atrium directly beyond the auditorium, inflicting very heavy casualties on those hapless souls strolling along the pedestrian ways or dawdling over a cup of coffee in one of the sidewalk cafés. Rather amazingly—and in testimony to both the freakishness of blast waves and the confining effect of those ceramacrete floor plates—six people on the auditorium tube’s ninth floor actually survived, as did a hundred and twelve on the eighth floor, and over two hundred on the seventh. Below the seventh, there were only non-life-threatening injuries, but there were no survivors at all between the fortieth and the hundred and eleventh floors, and casualties in the adjoining tubes and those facing the blast site across the atrium space were very heavy.

  In all, nine thousand, nine hundred and forty-one people were killed outright. Another seven hundred and two would later succumb to their injuries.

  The meeting had been sponsored by Bateson University. The speaker had been Mesa’s Assistant Director of Scientific Research. His topic had been Projections for research grants in 1923.

  Mesa had just lost a significant portion of its scientific establishment.

  One of those slated to speak later that day had been Lisa Charteris. According to the program, she was just returning from a weeks-long stay in a research institute on McClintock Island. Her husband Jules had just entered the auditorium when the blast went off. He’d been looking forward to seeing his wife again. She’d been incommunicado, as was normal procedure for seminars held at that institut
e.

  Jules had been personally invited by Lisa’s boss, at Collin Detweiler’s instruction. As always, the Alignment worked in layers. The blast would not only explain Lisa Charteris’s disappearance. By killing her husband it would also eliminate the one person most likely to probe that disappearance.

  Charteris herself had never been told of the plan, of course. There was no reason to upset her, especially since that would undermine her effectiveness. By the time she found out about her husband’s death, if she ever did, many years would have gone by. Time would have softened her memory and the precise events of that horrible day of carnage so long ago would have been blurred by that same passage of time.

  A number of other scientists were supposed to have been there that day, who, in the event, never showed up. Those were the ones who’d already left Mesa as part of Houdini.

  The surviving records would, indeed, show that they’d been there. But the blast would have destroyed their physical persons along with the persons of anyone who might have been able to say otherwise.

  * * *

  “Target Gamma . . . now.”

  Marinescu keyed in yet another command and a huge shopping center in one of the towers inhabited by citizens was ground zero for another tactical nuke, this one with a yield of just over a kiloton.

  The time was far from ideal, since the lunchtime crowd would have thinned and the evening crowd hadn’t started arriving. But this all needed to be done in a very short span of time. Even as it was, eleven thousand six hundred and three people were killed immediately. Almost as many would die within the next few days from the effects of radiation, burns and radiation poisoning.

  Among the people whose lives were spared by the timing were Zachariah McBryde’s mother Christina and his younger sister Arianne. They’d been planning to shop together that evening, after dinner.

  They both lived in the building, Dedrick Tower, but their apartments were far enough from the blast that they suffered no injuries. Christina’s apartment was barely even rattled. Arianne’s was closer, and she lost some fragile personal items tossed off their shelves by the concussion. But nothing worse.

  * * *

  “Delta ready.”

  “Firing . . . now.”

  Another large bomb, twelve kilotons. Set off in the middle of an outdoor amusement park located on Mendel’s outskirts.

  Three and a half thousand dead immediately or within a few hours. Another eleven hundred would die from the effects. One hundred and two would never really recover.

  Almost all of the employees of Blue Lagoon Park and the majority of its customers came from the surrounding suburbs. These were citizen areas which, albeit not to the same extent as Dobzhansky, also provided a considerable number of Mendel’s police and security forces and military personnel.

  By the team’s calculations, the percentage of those forces who’d now been immediately impacted by the terrorist outrages had climbed to somewhere between seven and twenty-two percent, depending on the specific unit.

  * * *

  “Epsilon.”

  “Let’s hope . . . yes. Misfire as planned.”

  Epsilon was another big device: thirteen kilotons and, literally, big. It was three meters long, almost two meters across in its widest lateral dimension, two meters high, and weighed just short of five thousand kilograms.

  Obviously jerry-built and poorly designed to begin with, it was not surprising the bomb failed to detonate. And thankfully so. The bomb would be found in a maintenance shop in another residential tower set aside for citizens. Had the perpetrators succeeded in their plans, the death toll could have been in the tens of thousands.

  The five seccy repair workers who were the only ones who used that maintenance shop had all gone missing. They would also never be found. The Alignment had seen to that.

  But, of course, they’d still get the blame for it. Investigation would determine that the seccy foreman of the crew, Sepp Richter, had been taking courses in applied physics at a small college catering to seccies. Ballroom propaganda would be found on his personal computer as well as that of two other repair workers—and on the school computer assigned to the physics instructor.

  Who was also missing.

  * * *

  The driver’s manifest listed the contents of the container in the cargo compartment as an aquarium being delivered to a law firm, presumably for display in their waiting room.

  The driver—a seccy, like most such—had no reason to question the legitimacy of the manifest. He was not permitted to examine sealed containers anyway.

  Nor did he question the legitimacy of the route he was given. The law firm was located on the 468th floor of Rasmussen Tower, one of Mendel’s most luxurious and expensive residential/commercial buildings. Deliveries made to such an address allowed a commercial van to use airspace normally reserved for passenger vehicles.

  He was still required to use special commercial lanes, of course.

  The first sign that anything was amiss was when he suddenly found his hands, as if of their own volition, overriding the traffic program and taking direct control of the vehicle. An alarm immediately started blaring.

  You are not authorized for manual operation in this area. Immediately restore the automatic program. Warning. You will be heavily fined if you—

  But he was paying no attention. To his horror, his hands—his own hands!—were steering the van right up into the most heavily trafficked lanes. The only thing that was now preventing collisions were the van’s own emergency programs. But in this sort of dense traffic they could not possibly—

  * * *

  “Zeta ready.”

  “Triggering . . . now.”

  The final blast was another tactical nuke, but a big one—about three kilotons. All vehicles in the vicinity of the van were obliterated. Those in the fireball itself ceased to exist above a molecular level; those beyond it survived only in pieces—and the passengers in still smaller pieces.

  Vehicles farther away survived the radiant heat relatively intact—although the passagers usually didn’t—but the blast wave hurled them in all directions, smashing into other vehicles or into the surrounding buildings. Or, often enough, both. The space between the city center’s kilometer-high towers was narrower than the spacing became farther out, and the one between Rasmussen Tower and the neighboring Jarrett Tower was a narrow and very deep artificial canyon. Vehicles caught in that explosion were like small pebbles in a can. They caromed off everything until they finally just came apart altogether.

  The death toll wasn’t as high as in the Dobzhansky and amusement park blasts. But an astonishingly high percentage of the casualties were movers and shakers in Mesan society, and because of the nature of the disaster itself, many of the bodies would never be identified.

  Indeed, many of those who died there would never be known at all. Thousands of people vanished in Mendel that day. How many of them were incinerated in the shopping mall? Turned into shadows on the walls and floors of the amusement park? Simply . . . vanished in that canyon of death?

  No one would ever know. No one would ever be able to prove anything about those disappearances, one way or the other.

  The delivery company’s records would be searched and the identity of the driver determined. A search of his apartment would also uncover ties to the Audubon Ballroom.

  * * *

  “Okay, Janice, we’re out of here.”

  “Just a . . . second. There, it’s set. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Six minutes later, the small personal flyer in the garage half a kilometer away took to the air. On the horizon, Marinescu and Haas could see the blast cloud above the amusement park.

  They headed north to the rendezvous.

  Nine minutes later, Eta detonated. Their control center vanished. So did the small town surrounding it.

  Haldane was a resort town in the hills east of Mendel, a place of small houses and cottages—some of them, admittedly, not all that small—lai
d out as a deliberate escape from the urban towers in which the vast majority of Mesa’s population lived. The permanent population was only two and a half thousand, but on any given day there was a transient population of at least twice that many people. And, like the population that used the traffic lanes where the van had detonated, the resort’s clientele included a large number of the planet’s most prominent and important people.

  A large part of the reason for Haldane’s popularity with the upper crust was that one of the town’s specialties was anonymity. It was the sort of resort that even a celebrity could visit without much informal notice being taken—and no formal notice of any kind. The electronic ledgers of all hotels were wiped every morning, and even while they lasted a good third of the registrants had names like Smith, Johnson, Williams and Brown.

  The Eta bomb was the biggest of all. Forty-five kilotons, detonated at ground level.

  Grotesque overkill, for a town that size. There was literally nothing left at all.

  Chapter 56

  The best adjective for the atmosphere in the sumptuous conference room was probably “brittle,” although “frightened” would have run a very close second. The men and women seated around the conference table understood the terror, consternation, and fury filling the hearts and minds of the Mesa System’s citizens. Indeed, they understood it far better than most of those millions upon millions of citizens understood, because unlike them, they knew how much damage the string of nuclear explosions had actually done . . . and threatened to do yet.

  Bryce Lackland, the Director of Culture and Information, had managed to keep a lid on the actual casualty figures from the Saracen Tower bomb and the air van bomb which had detonated equidistantly between Masten Tower and Rasmussen Tower, but the number of people who’d been killed was far from the worst damage they’d inflicted. The nature of the people who died made the appalling loss of life still worse. A painful percentage of Mesa’s top-tier scientists had perished, yet even that was less ominous than the casualties which had been suffered among the families of the planetary security forces.