Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  “All right, all right,” the captain said testily. “If the fucking bastards want to surrender—and if they get their goddamn hands up quick enough—let ’em. And if you can tell it’s a kid, and if it’s not carrying a grenade around with it, you can secure it and hand it over to the consolidation teams. Is that clear enough?”

  “Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”

  Connor saluted, closed his UA’s visor, and headed back to his platoon with Gavin Shultz’s glare boring holes in his back the entire way.

  * * *

  Section Sergeant Kayla Barrett watched Lieutenant Ferguson from behind the protective concealment of her visor with smoldering eyes as he walked back toward her. Most of the time, Barrett found Ferguson tolerable enough. Too much of a goody-goody two-shoes for a MISD combat officer, maybe, but fair-minded and firm about discipline and training without descending into martinet territory. But today wasn’t “most of the time,” and today Kayla Barrett had very little patience for anyone who wasn’t as eager to get it stuck in as she was.

  She stood very still, hazel eyes hard, and felt herself quivering with rage. Before the Blue Lagoon Park atrocity, she’d had a brother, a sister, a sister-in-law, two nieces, and a nephew. Today, she had none of them, and nothing in heaven or hell was going to stop her from avenging those deaths. She didn’t know if anyone in front of her had personally had anything at all to do with that attack, and it didn’t matter. If they hadn’t done it themselves, they’d still produced whoever had. Those murderers had come out of the seccies, they were hiding among the seccies, and that meant they were being hidden by the seccies. The evidence was clear enough on that . . . and that was all she had to know.

  Barrett had never joined the Champions of Safety and Order like Captain Shultz, but she knew he had, and she’d been tempted a time or two herself. Today, she wished she had. In fact, that was something she intended to look into when they pulled back to barracks.

  But for now—

  “Get them saddled up, Section Sergeant,” Lieutenant Ferguson said. “We move in in five minutes.”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  * * *

  “Shit—those’re Misties!” Nine-Finger Jake exclaimed.

  He and Jenney the Hand crouched in the mouth of a drainage culvert on the edge of Trondheim Park. Trondheim wasn’t that much of a park compared to the facilities available to the children of full citizens, but it was normally kept neat and clean and it offered a wide green space, dotted with only moderately run-down playground equipment, around a small pond suitable for toy boats or wading, and it was usually well populated by kids.

  Today it was deserted, aside from the dozen or so bodies scattered across it. Most of those bodies belonged to seccies, but two of them had been OPS troopers. The Safeties had been stripped of their equipment, and Nine-Finger had liberated their secure coms in the process. He’d sent one of them farther up the line to Jurgen Dusek, but he’d kept the other, and he’d been listening to it for the last couple of hours. He’d rather enjoyed the panic he’d heard in the voices of the Safeties once they realized they weren’t going to have things their own way for a change, and he’d taken a savage delight in the steadily mounting casualty totals they’d been announcing. But Nine-Finger had been around for almost seventy years. He’d known how Security was going to respond to the Safeties’ heavy losses. Still, he hadn’t expected to see MISD troopers this soon.

  “Shit,” Jenney muttered beside him.

  Technically, neither she nor the considerably older Nine-Finger were formally associated with the Dusek Organization. They were independents, but any independent knew enough to stay on good terms with the local boss, and Dusek was more reasonable than most. As long as they paid the turf fees he charged—and they weren’t exorbitant—independents were welcome to fill any of the niches between his organization’s main areas of operation. In fact, he often had odds and ends of jobs he was willing to farm out to the independents who kept their noses clean and followed the rules . . . the very first one of which was that they never, ever made any grief for the “civilians” living in his district. Nobody got robbed, beaten up, or raped in the Neu Rostock District unless they’d crossed the line themselves first. Dusek took that sort of thing seriously—violence and casual thievery weren’t just bad for business; they were also things the people in his district expected him to hold to a minimum—and it looked like he felt even more strongly about it than Jenney had realized.

  He’d already put out the word that Neue Rostock Tower was buckling down for heavy action, and she knew she and Nine-Finger could find a place there. But the western boundary of Trondheim was Eaker Boulevard, one of the underground pedestrian ways—a seccy pedestrian way, of course, which meant its powered slidewalks worked no more than half the time—and an awful lot of seccies were fleeing towards whatever refuge they could find on foot, now that public transportation outside the towers themselves had been shut down by the Mendel authorities. Working slidewalks or not, Eaker Boulevard was one of the primary accesses to Neue Rostock; if it was blocked, a lot of people trying to find safety for themselves and their families would be caught in the open or trapped in its underground portions. As independents, she and Nine-Finger had no formally assigned role in the Dusek Organization’s defensive plans, so they’d appointed themselves as lookouts for the crowds of civilians following the boulevard towards the hoped-for safety of the boss’s tower.

  “What the fuck do we do now?” she asked, watching the UA-clad figures step into the open and begin moving methodically across the park.

  “Damned if I know,” Nine-Finger replied, rubbing his depilated scalp with the maimed left hand which had earned him his nickname. “I was hoping it’d be more Safeties, but these pop guns—” a twitch of his head indicated the civilian pulse rifles he and Jenney had been issued “—aren’t going to do much against UA suits.”

  “What’re those bastards in front carrying?” Jenney asked nervously. “Don’t look like pulse rifles or flechette guns to me!”

  “That’s because they aren’t,” Nine-Finger said grimly. “Those’re neural disruptors, girl.”

  Jenney shuddered. She’d never actually seen a disruptor used, not in person, but she’d seen them on HD, and one of her cousins had lost the use of her right arm after a Safety casually lashed out with a neural whip in a “crowd clearing” operation. Disruptors used exactly the same tech, but they were a lot more powerful than any neural whip, and a whip was no more than a meter or so in length. That was all the range it had, whereas disruptors could kill someone at as much as a hundred and fifty meters. They were shorter ranged than pulse rifles and far less efficient at simply killing people than flechette guns, but the Misties didn’t use them because they were efficient; they used them because they were terror weapons. Even someone who might face a pulser dart with a snarl of defiance might think twice—or even three times—about facing a disruptor.

  “What—” She stopped and swallowed hard. “What do we—?”

  She swallowed again, and Nine-Finger turned his head to give her a grim, humorless smile. Then he handed her the com he’d looted from the Safeties’ bodies.

  “What you do is shag ass back to Eaker Boulevard,” he told her. “Take this with you. Dusek’ll have some of his people out trying to manage traffic. Find one of them and give it to him. Then head for Neue Rostock yourself. They’re going to need every shooter they can find before this is over.”

  “Me? What about you?”

  “Me, I’m thinking I’ve let the fucking Safeties and Misties hammer enough people I cared about.” Nine-Finger’s eyes were back on the approaching MISD troops. “Time I did a little hammering of my own.”

  “Are you fucking crazy? They’ll kill you, Nine-Finger!”

  “A man’s got to die doing something,” he replied. “Might’s well be something I enjoy doing and not just sleepin’ in bed. ’Sides, I’ve got a surprise’r two for those bastards. Now get, girl!”

  Jenney darted o
ne more agonized look at his face, torn by terror, fear, hope, and shame at the thought of leaving him behind, but he only quirked one corner of his mouth and jerked his head towards Eaker Boulevard.

  She gave his shoulder one quick, fierce squeeze, then disappeared down the culvert at a run.

  * * *

  Trooper 1/c Jubair Azocar watched his HUD with one eye but kept the other peeled for things the HUD might overlook. He’d found out the hard way that his UA’s sensors were biased in favor of threats its onboard computer recognized and tended to ignore things that didn’t fall neatly into its threat hierarchies. It looked for power sources, infrared signatures associated with vehicles or opponents in powered armor, and large numbers of individual IR signatures that its analysis indicated were moving—or positioned—to act cooperatively. Within those parameters, it was very, very good. Outside those parameters, it was dumb as a rock. Of course, anything it missed spotting was unlikely to be dangerous enough to actually get through Azocar’s armor, but he and the rest of Bravo Company had passed at least twenty or thirty dead Safeties already. He had no desire to suffer the same fate they had.

  He paused suddenly, raising his right hand in the ancient visual command to stop for the benefit of the riflemen covering his flanks.

  “Central, Bravo-Two-Niner,” he said. “Patch Bravo-Zero-Three.” He waited a single heartbeat as the communications net’s AI connected him to Sergeant Barrett. Then—

  “Bravo-Two-Niner, Zero-Three,” Kayla Barrett’s voice said in his ear bud. “Go.”

  “I’ve got what looks like one Tango about six hundred meters west of my present position,” he said, highlighting the icon on his HUD, which simultaneously displayed it on Barrett’s. It was on the far side of a quartet of picnic shelters, in exactly the right place for someone to be hunkered down in the mouth of the drainage culvert showing on the terrain overlay on Azocar’s HUD.

  “What’s he doing?” Barrett asked.

  “Just sitting there, near’s I can tell. Doesn’t seem real likely he’d be hanging around if he wasn’t up to something, though.”

  “Well, we’re under the Omega rules.” Azocar could almost hear her shrug in her voice. “Waste his ass.”

  “Gotcha, Sarge,” he replied, and started moving cautiously towards the motionless icon.

  Normally, Azocar would have been carrying one of his section’s heavy tribarrels. Or he might have been carrying the plasma rifle which was his standard alternate armament. But today, he’d been issued one of the neural disruptors, and after the thousands of civilians these terrorist bastards had killed—and all the dead Safeties he’d passed on the way here—he was ready to use it. In fact, he was looking forward to using it . . . a lot.

  He wasn’t stupid, however, and he made sure his flanking teammates were covering his ass with their pulse rifles. The only real drawback of the disruptor, aside from its weight, which was a bitch, was its relatively short range. On the other hand, his sensors had pretty clearly identified the Tango’s weapon as a light civilian-model pulse rifle. That had been plenty to slaughter the Safeties, in their lighter, unpowered body armor, but it wasn’t going to do squat against utility armor. And that meant the short range of Azocar’s weapon didn’t matter at all.

  He stepped into the shadows of the picnic shelters. They were deliberately rustic looking, the tough plastics of their construction disguised—imperfectly—to look like logs with the bark still on them, and his lip curled as he saw the heart shape and interlocking initials some stupid seccy had laboriously carved into the rocklike material. It had clearly been done with an old-fashioned blade, not a lasergraver, and doing it that way must have taken hours.

  What a fucking stupid way to spend your time, he thought contemptuously, but his eyes never stopped sweeping his surroundings, alert for any threat. There wasn’t one. The shelters were empty, with a solid ceramacrete floor that offered no place to leave booby traps or hide ambushers, and there wasn’t anywhere anyone could have hidden under the picnic tables, either.

  * * *

  Nine-Finger Jake watched the trio of Misties heading directly towards his position in the culvert. He’d been afraid they’d come his way—the culvert was the shortest, best protected route from this side of Trondheim Park to Eaker Boulevard, and unlike certain other aspects of the area around Neue Rostock, it was probably on the city maps they’d uploaded for the operation. On the other hand, the probability that they’d come this way was the entire reason he’d chosen this particular position.

  He smiled at the thought. It was the sort of smile a wolverine might smile, or perhaps a wounded tiger as it watched the hunting party come within its reach. There were a few things he knew about Trondheim Park that the Misties didn’t, and he waited patiently, his eyes on the one with the disruptor. Another three meters, he thought, and then—

  * * *

  Jubair Azocar’s computer’s estimate of the threat potential of Nine-Finger Jake’s pulse rifle had been completely accurate. However, it had failed to notice a few other minor items. Probably because they were so primitive that they didn’t register as threats at all. After all, what could be particularly dangerous about a couple of abandoned, old-fashioned gas grills?

  As Azocar stepped between them, his computer and he found out.

  * * *

  Nine-Finger pressed the button.

  Gas grills for recreational cooking had been around for more than two thousand years, and they hadn’t changed a great deal over that long, long period. Most of them still used butane, and most of their storage bottles stored the gas at about the same fourteen bars of pressure which had been the norm since well before humankind ever left the Sol System. These grills, however, were no longer quite standard. Nine-Finger had been an off-the-books employee in Sukharov for almost thirty years, and he’d made a few selections from Sukharov Tower after the initial OPS advance had been driven back. Among other things, he’d helped himself to, a pair of air car hydrogen tanks. They were only about twenty percent bigger than the gas grills’ normal bottles, which meant they could just be squeezed into the same space under the burners, but the gas inside them was stored in liquid form . . . at eight hundred bars of pressure.

  When Nine-Finger pressed the button, the catalyst cutting heads he’d installed around each hydrogen tank’s feed valves activated. It was like closing the blades of a hedge trimmer on a green branch; the cutting heads sliced through the tanks’ tough synthetics without fuss or bother . . . and without striking a single spark.

  Fortunately, Nine-Finger had thoughtfully positioned the tanks valve-up. Instead of heading for the sky like rockets, the sudden twin hurricanes of erupting hydrogen shrieked up through the grills like cryogenic cyclones, blasting their covers several meters into the air with a sound like dying banshees.

  * * *

  Azocar froze, stunned by the sudden eruption, as the world around him disappeared into a cryogenic fog. For an instant, until his UA’s sensors adjusted and dialed the volume back, the scream of escaping gas was like being hit in the head. There was a moment of heart-stopping panic, but a huge tide of relief followed almost instantly. The sight of the grill covers lifting into the heavens on the columns of vaporizing hydrogen had been startling, but it would take more than that to damage utility armor, and—

  * * *

  Nine-Finger pressed another button, and Jubair Azocar discovered—briefly—that he’d been wrong as the cloud of hydrogen gas erupted in an improvised fuel-air bomb that was fully capable of shredding, and incinerating, even utility armor.

  Chapter 59

  “Down! Get the fuck down right fucking now!”

  “All right! All right!” The young seccy woman went to her knees on the parking garage’s ceramacrete, hands already clasped behind her head, her face tight with fear as she looked into the emitter of Kimmo Ludvigsen’s neural disruptor. “I’m down,” she said. “See? I’m down!”

  “Shut the fuck up!” the MISD trooper’s UA’s external speakers
turned what was already a shout into a deafening bellow. “How many others are back there?!” he demanded. “And don’t fuck around with me, seccy!”

  “A dozen, maybe.” The seccy tried to keep her voice as level and submissive as she possibly could, but the words came out cracked and shaky, as frightened as her face. “They’re just kids, Sir. Only kids and a couple of teachers. We’re . . . we’re just trying to get them somewhere safe.”

  “I told you to shut the fuck up!” Ludvigsen screamed, and the seccy clamped her mouth shut, her eyes—more terrified than ever in the face of his contradictory commands—cutting to where Section Sergeant Barrett stood watching.

  Barrett saw the fear in those eyes, and a part of her almost sympathized with the seccy. Almost. Maybe she really would have sympathized a few T-centuries ago—when she’d still had siblings and nieces and a nephew . . . and before Bravo Company had taken so many losses.

  Jubair Azocar and Trooper Irena Gnoughy had been 2nd Platoon’s first deaths, and Márton Neveu, the second of the two riflemen who’d been supporting Azocar, was going to be a long time regenerating. Nor had they been the platoon’s only casualties. Despite their armor and the limitations of the seccy’s improvised weapons, the seccy had cost 2nd Platoon three more troopers when they went after him, and 2nd Platoon’s casualties were actually light compared to some of the other units. Colonel Dothan Perelló’s 19th Regiment had been hit even harder as it headed towards Hancock, but at least the combat chatter suggested the 19th had gotten more of its own back. The bastard who’d killed Azocar and Gnoughy—and who’d also killed Matheson, van Noort, and Sugase—had gotten away clean in the confusion.