Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  “—security forces have regained control of most of the districts where Office of Public Safety personnel were ambushed in yesterday’s fighting,” the commentator was saying in the background. “Faced with an organized, resolute response, the rioters who instigated the violence are retreating everywhere. Director of Security McGillicuddy’s office issued a statement just a few hours ago in which the Director said, I quote, ‘The perpetrators of these cowardly, vile attacks on OPS personnel attempting to apprehend several suspects believed to have been complicit in the Dobzhansky and Blue Lagoon Park attacks will be brought to account. It is regrettable that the decision of the terrorists and their sympathizers to seek concealment in the seccy districts has already led to so much loss of life, and will, unfortunately, lead to still more. In the face of the atrocities which have been committed by the Audubon Ballroom terrorists operating from those districts, however, the Office of Public Safety has no option but to continue its operations until such time as those responsible for the terrorist incidents and those seeking to aid and abet them after the fact have been taken into custody to face the full legal penalty assigned to their actions.’

  “In light of the Director’s statement, and the ongoing operations we’ve seen today, it seems likely that—”

  “It seems likely that a lot of people are going to get killed,” Thandi finished harshly, killing the sound.

  “They don’t mind that at all, as long as it’s the right people,” Dusek told her. “And what they think they’re doing right now is driving every seccy they can into their killing zones. Of course, that might not be exactly the way things are going to work out for them.”

  He smiled thinly. The evacuation of Neue Rostock’s inhabitants had begun days before, within twenty-four hours of Victor’s presenting Anton’s analysis of where the mounting tide of “terrorist attacks” was going to lead. It helped that he’d organized an evacuation plan for the entire tower years before, more as an exercise in “what if” than because he’d ever really expected to need it. Now he was glad he had, and he’d been getting his people out from under that looming hammer well before the string of nuclear strikes drove the security forces mad. The tunnels and passages under Neue Rostock Tower were hardly broad thoroughfares, and distributing the evacuees discreetly enough elsewhere to prevent OPS from noticing a sudden influx of seccies had been a nontrivial challenge. Fortunately, they’d begun early enough that virtually all of Neue Rostock’s residents—aside from a surprisingly high percentage of bloody-minded individuals who’d chosen to stand and fight along with the members of Dusek’s organization—had already filtered to safety before OPS and MISD had even started casting their net about it. Now, as refugees fled in front of the MISD hunter-killer teams, his people were guiding them down and out through the tunnels as soon as they reached the tower.

  From the messages still getting through to Neue Rostock—and from the news broadcasts—it sounded as if Bachue the Nose’s preparations had been less effective, though. She’d never been as tightly organized as Dusek, never tried to integrate all of the inhabitants of Hancock Tower into a single evacuation plan, and her people were less familiar with the tunnels and service ways spiderwebbing away from Hancock.

  “They’re frigging idiots.” Thandi’s voice was harsher than ever. “Look at them! They can’t have more than a couple of regiments out there. That’s a lot of manpower for hunting down and killing people in the open—especially people that can’t fight back. It’s not nearly enough to crack a tower like Neue Rostock.”

  “Unless they’ve decided to go with what your friend Captain Zilwicki so charmingly dubbed the ‘Damocles Option,’ ” Dusek pointed out. “If they just go ahead and drop a big enough KEW on us, they won’t need to use up manpower taking us out!”

  “That’s true,” Thandi acknowledged. “The problem they’ve got is that the kind of KEW they’d need to really crack open a tower like this one is going to inflict a lot of collateral damage. Like I told you in the beginning, they can do it, but it’s going to be even tougher than I’d estimated then. Whoever designed this place wasn’t concerned with the sort of minimal amenities that go into full citizens’ housing. They just wanted something they could pack people into, and atriums and air shafts use valuable space. They didn’t feel like wasting any of that on you people, and that means your tower here is really one solid gridwork of ceramacrete walls and floors. Taking it down with a single KEW would require them to write off a lot of other real estate in the process. I don’t think they’re going to want to do that. Of course, I doubt they’re going to like what happens when they try to storm a tower like this one, either. And I can guarantee that the bastards at the sharp end aren’t going to like it one little bit.”

  Dusek nodded. She wasn’t certain he really believed her, although neither Victor nor Anton had been at all hesitant in passing her off as the greatest military commander since Achilles. Given the already legendary status Torch had achieved among the seccy and slave populations of Mesa, despite all the authorities could do to suppress any news reports about the kingdom, they hadn’t even had to work very hard at it. She still wasn’t remotely comfortable at having her true identity known, but Victor had a point. If Neue Rostock ultimately fell, she and all the other off-worlders were as good as dead, anyway, so maintaining their secret identities would no longer be real high on their list of priorities.

  “Besides,” he’d said with typical, rather appalling Victor matter-of-factness, “think about what a major shot in the arm it would be for Torch when all those seccies we got out spread the word about Palane’s Last Stand. I mean, I’d much rather live through it, and I think we’ve got at least a fair chance of making it. But if we don’t, you’ll give Torch its own combination of the Alamo and Horatius at the Bridge in one, single package. A good looking one, too, now that I think about it. The statue’ll make even that thing of Duchess Harrington’s on Grayson look positively bland.”

  There were times she wondered about Victor, she really did. Not that he didn’t have a point, she supposed. Whether she liked it or not, she was no longer a Solarian Marine junior officer, and she’d changed even more than she’d thought she had along the way, because a part of her actually understood what he was saying. She had absolutely no desire to become a legend, but sometimes you got caught in what one pre-space history she’d read had called the Birkenhead Drill. If this was her Birkenhead Drill, she intended to take as many of these Mesan bastards with her as she could, and if the Kingdom of Torch needed a legend, she wouldn’t be around to object, anyway.

  “The thing is,” she continued, turning from the HD and crossing the spacious room to the bank of consoles at its center, “a tower like this is just full of nasty accidents waiting to happen. With a little help, you can arrange for them to happen to the right people.”

  Dusek nodded again, more enthusiastically, as she seated herself in one of the comfortable chairs. He took the chair beside hers, and she looked around.

  The room in which she sat was buried in the Neue Rostock cellars, five floors below ground level. Up until a very few days ago, it had been the control center for the incredible, complex entity that was Neue Rostock. Tenement tower or no, a structure eight hundred meters tall and a hundred meters on a side was an enormous edifice, and the environmental systems needed to keep it functioning were as complex as anything one might find in an orbital habitat or a starship. The technicians who’d overseen those systems had done so from this room, just as they’d monitored the tower’s lift shafts, sewerage systems, water supply, security systems, and the fusion plant which provided the tower’s stand-alone power supply.

  The truth was that Neue Rostock was a small city, home to over thirty thousand seccies, with all of the support services a city that size needed. And because it was standard practice to make such towers as self-sufficient as possible, it was not simply a city but a citadel well suited to withstand both assaults and sieges. Oh, they couldn’t hold out indefinitely. Feed
ing the defenders would become a problem after the first few weeks, although she’d been pleasantly surprised by just how much food was actually available. Power couldn’t be cut off from outside the tower, however; the fusion plant’s deeply buried storage tanks held almost a full T-year of reactor mass. Nor could their water supply be cut, since the builders had even driven wells down into the aquifer under Mendel—why not? it had been cheap enough with modern technology—to provide a standalone water supply, as well.

  Sloppy thinking on someone’s part, she reflected. Obviously whoever authorized the plans wasn’t thinking about what a copperplated bitch it would be to assault something like this. I’d’ve thought a bunch of paranoid slave masters would have given something like that some thought. Guess not even genetic supermen can think of everything. Pity about that.

  What was even sloppier was that they hadn’t already taken steps to seal off Neue Rostock’s subsurface accessways. In their defense, they’d probably anticipated taking the seccies by surprise, and realistically speaking, the possibility of evacuating that many people through the tunnels and cellars with little or no warning while actually under attack wouldn’t have existed. For that matter, they might even have wanted a few of them to get out, spreading their tales of the terror of Neue Rostock’s fall among the rest of the seccy population. Then again, it was equally possible they hadn’t been stupid enough—initially—to contemplate actually attacking the towers. It was at least remotely possible that the original Office of Public Safety sweeps hadn’t been intended as the first step in a major bloodletting. The initial reports certainly seemed to indicate the Safeties had never anticipated what had happened to them, never expected the seccies to fight back. Which was only going to make it even uglier in the end, she thought grimly. The hatred and thirst for vengeance which had animated the OPS troopers in the beginning could only have been reinforced and strengthened by the casualties they’d taken.

  “Do you really think we can hold out until your friends can get someone in here to help us?” Dusek asked very quietly, his voice low enough none of the other technicians in what had become Thandi’s command post could hear him.

  “Realistically?” Thandi regarded him levelly, then twitched her head back in the direction of the HD they’d been watching. “If what we’ve seen so far is typical, I’d say the odds are probably at least eighty-twenty in our favor, always assuming they don’t just haul off and drop one of those big assed KEWs on us after all. If they find somebody who doesn’t have her head thoroughly up her ass to take over from that idiot Howell, the odds go down. In fact, depending on how good Howell’s replacement is, they could go down a lot.”

  “I see.”

  Dusek took it well, she thought. On the other hand, she was none too sure he’d ever really believed the entire Grand Alliance would drop everything and send a rescue fleet just because Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki asked it to. As she’d gotten to know him better, she’d come to the conclusion that he probably would have done exactly what he was doing even if he’d known there would be no rescue in the offing. There was an unexpected streak of the berserker in Jurgen Dusek. If the Mesan government had finally decided to slaughter the seccy population down to a manageable size, then he was going to kill as many Safeties and Misties as he possibly could first. And if it turned out that there really was a fleet coming to save him, that was only icing on the cake.

  She nodded to him and turned back to the displays. Yana and Victor were both occupied preparing fighting positions under Andrew Artlett’s guidance. Andrew and Nolan Olsen, the man who’d been Neue Rostock Tower’s Building Supervisor, were in the process of doing some profoundly unnatural things to the tower’s internal systems. Olsen’s family had already departed through the escape tunnels, but no one else knew Neue Rostock the way he did. On the other hand, Andrew had grown to adulthood surviving on a steadily disintegrating orbital habitat, and he’d learned to do some . . . highly inventive things with environmental systems along the way. Between them, they’d come up with several surprises for anyone foolish enough to walk into their parlor, and Andrew had the tower’s schematic—the real schematic, the one that showed Dusek’s alterations, not the one any invaders would have—on his display. At the moment, he was directing Yana in the placement of shaped charges in some of the corridor walls.

  Victor had his own copy of the schematic, and he and Triêu Chuanli had their people building firing positions, cutting loopholes, and laying out routes to move from one position to another under cover. They didn’t have anything like the MISD’s utility armor, but the weapons Dusek had stockpiled over the years were almost as good as anything the security forces had—especially given the short range at which any combat would occur—and their knowledge of the building’s layout would be a huge advantage.

  Thandi would really have preferred to be out there herself. At heart, when she came down to it, she was still really a company grade Marine officer, whatever other hats she’d had to take on since meeting Berry Zilwicki and Victor Cachat. But if they were going to have a chance of winning this thing, it was going to depend on her ability to exercise tight tactical control over fighters who’d never received the training and experience she had. Yana and Victor had plenty of combat experience, although most of it had tended to be . . . idiosyncratic, to say the least. Many of the others had been in gunfights, knife fights, brawls in plenty, but that was a far cry from the sort of concentrated mayhem they were about to encounter. When the time came, they were going to need a voice—a calm voice—telling them what to do, when to do it, and where. And for her to be that voice, she needed to be exactly where she was at this moment, tapped into all of the tower’s internal surveillance equipment.

  She smiled thinly, fingers moving briskly as she scrolled through view after view of corridors, apartments, shopping malls, cafeterias, gymnasiums, freight passages, grav shafts, stairs, ventilation ducts. The entire tower was there at her fingertips, which meant she was going to have a degree of situational awareness better than anything even the finest utility armor’s sensors could provide to the other side.

  You just come right on in, you bastards, she thought, glancing sideways again after the exterior views of the approaching MISD troops. We’ll be sure you get a warm reception.

  Chapter 61

  Gavin Shultz scowled as he raised his helmet’s visor. The stink of smoke was everywhere—he wouldn’t have thought there were enough flammable materials even in a seccy district to produce that much of it—but it still smelled better than the inside of his utility armor after an entire day of combat.

  He didn’t like the losses Bravo Company had taken, especially in 2nd Platoon, and there wasn’t much of an excuse for them, in his opinion. They were only fucking seccies, after all, and he’d gotten enough hands-on experience of his own during the day to confirm his opinion of them. He’d tried conscientiously to bear in mind that his own experiences might not be representative of what had happened elsewhere, but still . . .

  He lowered his visor again—not all the way; he still wanted the fresh air, smoky though it was—far enough to bring up the map display on his HUD as an armored air car settled on the far side of the jury rigged command post. The swaths of green indicating pacified areas in the approaches to Neue Rostock and Hancock were smaller than they ought to have been, and Colonel MacKane wasn’t delighted about it. Well, neither was Gavin Shultz, but—

  “Where’s Colonel MacKane, Trooper?” a voice demanded, and Shultz turned towards it in amazement.

  “Commissioner Howell!” he blurted, then snapped to attention as Bentley Howell turned from the corporal who’d been unfortunate enough to be standing there when he climbed out of the air car. The commissioner wasn’t in armor, but he wore a vehicle crewman’s helmet with the visor down. Unlike the utility armor’s visors, it was only lightly tinted from the outside. It was enough to project the necessary HUD for its wearer, but Shultz could see through it more than clearly enough to recognize the MISD’s
commanding officer.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here, Sir!” the captain added as Howell scowled.

  “Well, Captain . . . Shultz, isn’t it?” Shultz nodded, impressed by the commissioner’s memory for faces, without even thinking about the possibility that Howell’s helmet systems had pinged his UA transponder’s ID code. “I didn’t expect to be here,” Howell continued. “I expected to hear that my advanced elements had already closed up to Neue Rostock and Hancock.”

  Schultz swallowed. The commissioner’s tone was not happy, and it seemed prudent to keep his own mouth shut.

  Howell regarded him for a moment, then smiled unpleasantly.

  “Don’t worry, Captain. I’m not going to rip you a new asshole. But I do need Colonel MacKane, so where is he?”

  “Sir, I’m not really certain, but Major Myers is about two hundred meters in that direction.” He raised his hand, pointing in the proper direction. “Can I escort you to him?”

  “No. I’ve got his icon now,” Howell said, manipulating the data pad on the side of his helmet. “And it looks like Colonel MacKane’s with him. Good. Thank you, Captain.”

  He nodded curtly to Shultz, then jerked his head at the two utility armored troopers who’d unloaded from the air car behind him, and headed off in the indicated direction.

  Shultz watched him go, bodyguards at his heels, then turned his attention back to the map display.

  * * *

  “Well, Colonel,” Howell said. “Would you care to explain why you’re no further forward than this?”

  “Resistance is being a lot stiffer than our intelligence estimates predicted it would be, Sir.”