Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  Barrett felt her jaw muscles clenching as she remembered that. The incredible thermobaric explosion which had taken out Azocar’s entire fire team had stunned her just as completely as anyone else in her section. She still didn’t know exactly how the goddamned seccy had pulled it off, or how he could’ve gotten something that powerful close enough without Azocar’s armor sensors picking it up. She’d been back over the sensor data herself three times, and there was nothing—nothing—aside from the standard igniter power cell in either of the booby-trapped grills. Nothing else, not even trace emissions from old-fashioned chemical explosives!

  They’d gotten a firm position fix on the seccy who had to have detonated the trap, though. Her own section had halted in place, prepared to cover Brad Kempthorne’s 2nd Section as it leapfrogged towards the seccy’s position. That was standard operating procedure, and this time around SOP had been a real lifesaver . . . for 1st Section, anyway.

  The seccy might not have had utility armor or its sensors, but he obviously hadn’t been blind. He’d seen what was coming and hightailed it down the drainage culvert before Kempthorne’s section could nail him, and 2nd Section had gone in pursuit. That was how they’d discovered the next booby trap. Whatever he’d used the first time around had worked even better underground. The thermal pulse had virtually vaporized Kirsten van Noort. There hadn’t been a lot more left of Matheson or Sugase, and the pressure front erupting from either end of the culvert had sent two more of Kempthorne’s section to the hospital. If not for their utility armor’s protection and their helmets’ self-contained air supply, the casualties would have been still worse.

  Even with the armor, 2nd Section was down five of its twelve troopers, and the survivors’ morale was badly shaken. The deaths had hit all the rest of 2nd Platoon almost equally hard, for that matter. They hadn’t been Barrett’s troopers. For that matter, she and van Noort had cordially hated one another. But they’d still been part of the same platoon, part of the same unit, and all the death and injuries had only intensified 2nd Platoon’s hatred and fury. The platoon wanted revenge, and the fear of similar booby traps, of similar attacks from the hated and despised seccies who were supposed to be fleeing from them in panic, only fanned that hunger’s ferocity.

  Just as it fanned Barrett’s own ferocity.

  “Get the rest of them out here, seccy!” the section sergeant snapped. The kneeling woman stared at her, then collapsed with a wailing cry of pain as the butt of Ludvigsen’s disruptor smashed into the pit of her stomach.

  “That’s enough, Kimmo!” Barrett snapped as the trooper raised the disruptor high, obviously preparing to bring the buttplate down on the seccy’s skull. His mirrored visor—featureless, but for the MISD emblem—turned to look at the section sergeant for a heartbeat before he stepped back slowly, obviously unwillingly, in obedience to her command.

  The seccy writhed, fighting to get her breath back, and Barrett stepped closer to her. She prodded the prostrate woman with the toe of an armored boot.

  “I said, get the rest of them out here,” she said in a cold, flat tone.

  The seccy managed to struggle back to her knees, staring up at her imploringly, and the section sergeant let the muzzle of her own pulse rifle line up with the other woman’s forehead.

  “If we have to go in there after them, it’ll be even worse,” she said. “And you won’t be here to see it.”

  The seccy swallowed hard, then nodded.

  “Please don’t hurt them,” she half whispered. “They’re kids—only kids!”

  “Now, seccy,” Barrett replied.

  The seccy stared at her for a moment longer, then licked her lips and raised her voice.

  “Come on out, kids!” she called, her eyes locked with Barrett’s. “It’ll be okay. Promise.”

  Nothing happened for a few seconds, then, slowly—one by one—another young woman and eleven children, all of them probably between ten and eleven T-years old, crept out of the shadows where they’d hidden behind the derelict, obviously abandoned air lorry. Twelve more faces, each as terrified as the first seccy Ludvigsen had caught, stared imploringly in the section sergeant’s direction as they, too, went to their knees.

  “All right,” Barrett said. “Now we’re all going back to—”

  The sudden, evil whine of a neural disruptor cut her off, and her head snapped around as Ludvigsen and Brock Sanchez fired into the kneeling prisoners.

  Very few ways to die were more agonizing than a bolt from a neural disruptor. It literally tore the central nervous system of its victim apart, and unless the brain itself was hit directly, the victim was denied even the threadbare mercy of unconsciousness.

  Ludvigsen and Sanchez swept their fire over the children and the other seccy woman, and the convulsing, shrieking reflections of their victims danced across their mirrored visors like demons. Despite her own fury, her own hatred, Barrett’s felt her gorge rising, tasted the acrid bite of vomit at the back of her throat, but there was nothing she could do about it. From the instant those firing studs were depressed, all the seccies—all the children—were dead. All that remained were the long, horrifying seconds it took for every organ in their bodies to stop functioning and their brains to gutter down into the merciful dark.

  Barrett stared at the twisted, still twitching bodies. Then, against her own will, her eyes returned to the young woman still kneeling in front of her. A young woman whose expression was absolutely blank, blank with something that went beyond horror and shock into the pure, unadulterated inability to believe what she’d just seen. And then, slowly, like images appearing on an antique negative in the developing bath, understanding, knowledge—and hate—seeped back into her face. She looked up the length of Barrett’s pulse rifle, her eyes filled with soul-searing hatred and the knowledge of what had to happen next, and for an instant, Barrett saw what she saw. Saw the hulking, black-armored shape, picked out with scarlet, blazoned with MISD’s gauntlet and dagger, faceless behind its mirrored visor. And in that instant, the section sergeant realized exactly how Mendel’s seccies must see her and her troopers.

  Her finger squeezed without any conscious thought on her part, the seccy’s head exploded under the pulser dart’s hypersonic impact, and as the body pitched backward, spraying brain tissue and finely divided fragments of skull across the ceramacrete, Kayla Barrett didn’t know whether she’d pulled the trigger out of hatred, to silence a possible witness . . . or simply to escape the bottomless hate radiating from those eyes like a curse.

  * * *

  “What the hell do you people think you’re doing?!”

  Barrett’s head snapped around and her face paled as Lieutenant Connor Ferguson appeared. Second Platoon’s commander had been moving with its third section, where he and his platoon sergeant could keep an eye on his reserve force. For a moment, Barrett had no idea how he could suddenly be here, instead of there, but only for a moment. He must have been monitoring the take from her own armor’s sensors—as the platoon commander, he could plug into any of his noncoms’ sensor feeds at will. And, knowing the lieutenant, he’d been headed her way at a run to try to get a handle on the situation.

  Why the fuck didn’t you get here thirty seconds sooner? a bitter voice demanded in the back of her brain. The memory of her brother’s face floated before her, but it was no longer an icon demanding vengeance. He’d been a good man, her brother—a gentle man—and all she saw in his eyes now was horror.

  “I’m—” she began, with absolutely no idea of what she was going to say, but Ferguson cut her off.

  “I don’t want to hear it.” The words were carved out of frozen helium, but they came over the dedicated command channel, excluding the rest of her section. “I expected better out of you, Section Sergeant,” he continued in that same ice-crusted tone. “I depended on better out of you. You’re relieved. Report to Platoon Sergeant Frasch. Tell her I want her out here to take personal charge of this cluster fuck you’ve created.”

  “I—”
she began again, then swallowed. “Yes, Sir,” she said.

  Her voice sounded dead in her own ears, but she saluted—out of ingrained habit and muscle memory more than volition—slung her pulser, and started towards the rear.

  Ferguson watched her for a moment, then turned to the rest of the section.

  “I know all of you—all of us—are keyed up, pissed off, and confused as hell,” he said over the section-wide circuit. “But there’s no excuse for this kind of thing. The Omega rules don’t mean we can just slaughter children out of hand, for God’s sake! How do you think Command’s going to react when they review the tac recordings from your armor? Or were you thinking at all?!”

  Barrett stepped out of the parking garage and trudged towards Platoon Sergeant Loretta Frasch’s icon on her HUD. Her utility armor’s exoskeletal muscles didn’t seem to be working very well. Each of her feet weighed at least a ton, and the slung pulse rifle on her shoulder weighed at least ten times that much. The memory of those screams, the bone-breaking contortions as the disruptors hit, and the look—the hatred and knowledge—in the kneeling seccy’s eyes . . . all of that went with her, curses from beyond the grave which she knew she would never—could never—be free of that dragged at her soul like an anchor. It was just—

  “Sarge! Sergeant Barrett!”

  She froze, then whirled. It was Ludvigsen, waving frantically for her to come back. She didn’t want to. More than she’d ever not wanted to do something in her entire life, she wanted never to enter that parking garage again. But Ludvigsen only waved harder, and she drew a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and went back the way she’d come.

  Every step seemed even harder than the ones she’d taken away from the garage, and as she turned the corner back into it, she saw what she’d somehow known she was going to see.

  “The bastard must’ve been hiding over there in the back corner, Sarge.” Ludvigsen was talking fast, so quickly the words blurred into one another, as he jabbed an index finger at the patch of sunlight admitted by the break in the garage’s back wall. “We were all listening to the lieutenant, and nobody even noticed the son of a bitch until he’d fired! Took us all by surprise. By the time we realized, he’d ducked back through that opening. Sanchez and Timmons are after him now, but I don’t think they’re going to catch him.”

  Barrett gazed down at the armored corpse lying half across one of the dead seccies. A seccy sniper—that was what they wanted her to believe? And a seccy sniper who’d somehow magically squeezed himself—and his weapon—through a half-meter hole to escape pursuit before anyone could even open fire on him?

  The entry point was only a tiny hole in almost the center of Ferguson’s visor. She was confident that if she’d measured it, it would have been precisely five millimeters in diameter . . . exactly the same as the Mark 9 pulse rifle’s darts. Judging by the wreckage and the blood spatter, it had been a Mark 3 explosive round, not the solid Mark 1. There was just . . . nothing left of the back of the lieutenant’s helmet.

  Or of his skull.

  Someone wanted to make damned sure, didn’t they? The thought flowed through her brain as she looked down at the body. Idiots. Do you think he turned off his tac recorder while he reamed you a new one? The court-martial’ll never buy that shit about seccy snipers! Where the hell would they get—

  And then it hit her. Ferguson probably had killed the “record” function on his armor systems. He’d probably done it even before he chewed her out. It was the sort of thing he would have done, trying to nip the situation in the bud before it got even worse. Trying to get his people back under control before someone farther up the military food chain had to take cognizance of it and hammered them, made an example out of them. And that meant . . .

  She looked up from the body, saw Ludvigsen and the others in a half-circle on the other side of the corpse, standing among the seccy bodies. She couldn’t see their faces any more than they could see hers, but if she could have, she knew exactly what expressions she would have seen. It was odd. Her life hung in the balance, depended on the next words she said, and all she felt was . . . empty.

  She never really knew how long they stood there, each looking at the others’ blank visors. It couldn’t possibly have been as long as it felt. But then, finally, Sanchez and Timmons reappeared, joining the others, and she drew a deep breath.

  “Any sign of the shooter?” she heard her own voice ask, never looking away from Ludvigsen.

  “Not a trace, Sarge.” Sanchez sounded a lot calmer than Ludvigsen had, she noted, and Timmons carried his pulse rifle like a hunter, its forestock resting on his left forearm and the muzzle not—quite—aimed in her direction.

  “Too bad,” she said. Then shook herself. “Central, Bravo-Zero-Three,” she said. “Patch Bravo-Zero-One.”

  “Bravo-Zero-One,” Loretta Frasch’s voice said in her earbug. “Talk to me, Barrett. What the hell is going on in there?!”

  “Sorry, Sarge,” her voice said. She didn’t seem to be consciously choosing the words; they just came, as if she were listening to a stranger. “Been a little confusion here. We flushed a nest of seccies, and while the lieutenant was starting to interrogate them, somebody sniped him through a break in the back wall. He’s dead.”

  The silence on the command circuit was absolute. It lingered for what seemed like a very, very long time. Then Frasch cleared her throat.

  “And the seccies?”

  “Killed in the crossfire when we returned fire,” that voice which sounded so much like her own replied steadily while she looked at Ludvigsen and the others.

  “The sniper?” Frasch sounded resigned, and Barrett shook her head inside her helmet.

  “Got away. The hole he fired through’s no more than half a meter. By the time we sorted out what the hell had happened and Sanchez and Timmons managed to squirm through it after him, he’d disappeared down some damned rathole or another.”

  “Understood. There’s likely to be some hell to pay over this,” Frasch continued. “Regiment’s going to want to talk to all of you later. Near as I can tell, the LT’d dropped out of the tac net when he headed into the garage, so I’ve got damn all I can give them. Maybe you and the others can put together some kind of accurate picture of what happened for them.”

  “We’ll certainly try to,” Barrett said, hearing the buried message in the platoon sergeant’s words and sensing the relaxation of the troopers around her.

  “You’d better,” Frasch said flatly. “Trigger the LT’s retrieval beacon, then get your asses back out here. We’re falling behind the other platoons.”

  Chapter 60

  “I can’t believe these idiots,” Thandi Palane muttered, looking up from the HD and the imagery of MISD troops sweeping the green belts, industrial spokes, and the parking and support facilities that serve them. “What the hell do they think they’re doing?”

  “They think they’ve got a free hunting license,” Jurgen Dusek said coldly. He stood beside her, watching the same imagery, and his expression was even grimmer than hers. “I don’t know who really set those nukes off, and I’m still not convinced Captain Zilwicki and Mr. Cachat are right about who was behind it, but they were damned well right about the consequences. Whoever it was gave people like that bitch Snyder the excuse they’ve been looking for. This—” his chin jutted at the HD “—is the early stages of Snyder’s ‘final solution to the seccy problem.’ Besides, after what happened to the Safeties, they don’t have any real choice. They’ve got to take out at least a couple of seccy towers—and do it pretty damned spectacularly—if they don’t want what’s happening here in Mendel to spread. And, trust me, Snyder and McGillicuddy definitely don’t want that!”

  Thandi glanced at him thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. She was no longer surprised by Dusek’s obvious familiarity with the innermost workings of the Mesa System government. He was a seccy, which automatically precluded him from participation in that government, but he watched it the way any predator watched i
ts environment. He had to know what was going on inside it, because whether seccies were permitted a voice in it or not, it controlled everything about their lives. Indeed, the fact that they had no voice made it even more vital for him to know what its objectives were, who the major players within it were, and how all of that was going to impact his own district and his own organization.

  And after the weeks she’d spent on Mesa, she’d come to regard Dusek himself in rather a different light. Victor had been right about the role the various crime bosses played in the seccy community. No one would ever confuse Jurgen Dusek with a white knight, and he certainly typified the old cliché about doing well by doing good. In terms of both personal wealth and personal power, he was quite probably one of the most powerful individuals in the entire city of Mendel, not simply in the seccy communities. Since he and Victor had become . . . associates, she’d realized Dusek’s contacts went far beyond the seccy districts. The “gray economy” of Mesa was grayer than most, even among the system’s full citizens, and Dusek had formed alliances in some very peculiar places where no seccy would ever have dared to go openly.

  Those alliances had been shattered by the wave of “terrorist” attacks, however. It wasn’t so much that any of his allies thought he’d had anything to do with them. It was simply that the hammer which was about to come down on Mesa’s seccies—especially here in Mendel, where so much of the total seccy population was concentrated—was big enough no one wanted to get caught under it with him.

  He knew it, too. Yet that was purely secondary to him at the moment. Well, maybe not purely secondary; if there was a tomorrow for Mendel’s seccies, Dusek clearly intended to stay right at the top of the pile. But at the moment, he was operating not as a crime lord skimming profit from troubled seas but as exactly what Victor had said he was—the closest thing to a government the thousands of seccies living in Neue Rostock Tower had ever known.