Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  Teodosio MacKane’s tone was perhaps a bit more pointed than it should have been for a mere colonel addressing a commissioner who carried the equivalent of lieutenant general’s rank. There wasn’t much give in his eyes, though, and Howell reminded himself not to rip out the man’s lungs.

  “I am aware of that, Colonel,” he said instead. “What I want to know is why we haven’t done something about that.”

  “Commissioner, we’ve cleared this area here, and this one, this one, and this one,” McCain said, jabbing his finger at the indicated points on the map as he spoke. “That’s basically all the ground level approaches to Neue Rostock from the east. We haven’t been able to get around the far side of the tower yet, but we’re making progress. And, Sir, I have to point out that I’ve taken over two hundred casualties so far, twenty-three of them fatal.”

  Those hard eyes met Howell’s, and the commissioner grimaced. That was a casualty rate of over ten percent. How the hell could a mob of seccies be inflicting that kind of loss rate on armored MISD troopers?

  He scowled down at the map, thinking about all the other reports he’d received during the day. Much as he hated to admit it, MacKane had a point about the intensity of the resistance. His original plan to sweep the areas around each of the seccy towers, driving them into neatly confined centers that could be dealt with one at a time was working, but it was costing more than he’d anticipated. The two regiments he’d committed to the Neue Rostock and Hancock areas were spread over too great an area, and the losses they’d taken were undercutting their fighting spirit. On the other hand, it was obvious that the seccies in and around Neue Rostock and Hancock were putting up the toughest resistance. Or inflicting the most casualties, at least. The question was whether that was because the seccies were better organized and better equipped or because 4th Regiment and 19th Regiment were more ineptly led?

  “All right,” he said finally. “I want you to leave one battalion to secure the approaches to Neue Rostock. But I want your and your other battalion to support Colonel Perelló. Colonel Metz and the Seventeenth Regiment will be joining you and Colonel Perelló. We’re going to knock Hancock out first, and then we’re going to take Neue Rostock down, understood?”

  “Understood, Sir.” MacKane didn’t sound as if he were filled with enthusiasm, and Howell smiled thinly.

  “I know it sounds like a tough assignment, Colonel. And I know you’ve been out here all day already. But they’re only seccies, and now that we’ve driven them to ground, they have to stand and fight—they can’t fade away the way they’ve been doing out here in the open. It may seem that I’m asking a lot of you and your people after everything you’ve already been through, but I’m not going to ask any of you to do anything I’m not willing to do myself.”

  “Sir?” MacKane’s eyebrows rose, and Howell’s smile grew still thinner.

  “I’ve got my UA in the air car, Colonel MacKane. I’ll personally be leading this attack.”

  * * *

  “Captain Shultz?”

  Gavin Shultz turned and found himself facing Section Sergeant Kayla Barrett. She had her helmet under her left arm, and her dirty face looked drawn and anxious.

  “Yes, Section Sergeant?” he acknowledged a bit impatiently.

  He couldn’t believe Commissioner Howell planned to lead the assault on Hancock in person, and he wasn’t at all sure it sounded like a good idea. Howell was a great man, someone who obviously understood the nature of the seccy problem, but he hadn’t held a field command in at least fifteen or twenty T-years. On the other hand, it sounded as if he was going to be going in with Colonel MacKane at his elbow. That should preclude any serious mistakes . . . Shultz hoped. And in the meantime, he had things to do that were a hell of a lot more important than taking some kind of report from a section sergeant.

  “Sir, it’s about Lieutenant Ferguson,” Barrett said, and Shultz’s jaw tightened.

  “What about him?”

  “Sir, I’m not sure exactly how it was reported, but—”

  “Section Sergeant Barrett, we’re about to kick off an assault on an entire tower full of seccies,” Shultz said. “I’m sure there will be plenty of time to sort out exactly what happened to Lieutenant Ferguson—and any of the other people we’ve lost today—after it’s over. Just this minute, though, I’ve got about a dozen other things I need to be doing. Can this wait?”

  It had damned well better wait, he thought grimly. He had a pretty good idea of what had happened to Ferguson. There wasn’t any evidence to support his theory, but the fact that there wasn’t any evidence, of any sort, of what had actually happened strongly suggested that he was correct. And if I am, this isn’t a can of worms I need to be opening right now, especially with Commissioner Howell himself right here on top of us. Besides, Ferguson was a whining, holier-than-thou pain in the ass when he was alive; I’ll be damned if he screws up my career now that he’s dead. The son of a bitch probably had it coming, anyway.

  He held the section sergeant’s eye, his expression less than encouraging, and silence hovered for a half-dozen heartbeats. Then—

  “Yes, Sir,” Kayla Barrett said softly. “Yes, Sir. I guess it can wait.”

  * * *

  “How stupid do you think I am, Kyle?” Audrey O’Hanrahan demanded.

  Kyle Fraenzl clamped his teeth tightly on what he wanted to say in response to that acid question. The problem was that the one thing O’Hanrahan most definitely wasn’t was stupid. It would’ve been so much simpler if she was as clueless as the journalists covering the Magellan sinking, he reflected.

  “No one thinks you’re ‘stupid,’ Audrey,” he said in his most soothing tones. “It’s just that you seem to have gotten hold of some garbled information, and you’re really too well known for any of us in Culture and Information to feel . . . comfortable letting you get too close to the shooting.” He shook his head, expression grave. “The truth is, we can’t afford the bad PR if we let you get killed on our planet, and it’s really, really bad out there, Audrey. The seccies are shooting at anything that moves.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” O’Hanrahan glared at him in searing, disgusted contempt. “The seccies are shooting at anything that moves? That has to be the biggest piece of bullshit anyone’s ever tried to hand me, even here on Mesa!”

  Fraenzl’s lips thinned and his face darkened, and she shook her head.

  “I have not gotten hold of any ‘garbled information,’ Kyle.” There was less searing disdain in her voice this time, but the slow, patient tone she’d adopted—as if she were speaking to a five-year-old—wasn’t much of an improvement. “I’ve gotten hold of perfectly accurate information, quite a bit of it from your own security forces’ electronic chatter.” She smiled sweetly, holding up a Solarian made security band scanner which should have been confiscated from her coming through Customs, and Fraenzl felt his teeth grate on one another. “And I do have other sources, even here. That’s why I know it’s not the seccies shooting people out there. Or, at least, if they are shooting anyone at the moment, it’s almost certainly in self-defense!”

  “Now you wait one damned minute!” Fraenzl snapped, abandoning his effort to stay focused and professional as fury flashed through him. “Whatever’s happening out there ‘at the moment,’ as you put it, don’t you forget for one instant who was setting off nuclear explosions here on my planet! It’s not Public Safety or the Security Directorate running amok out there in the streets—it’s the fucking seccies and their Ballroom friends!”

  “The hell it is,” O’Hanrahan shot back, and this time her voice was lower, almost soft. “I don’t know for sure who was responsible for those terrorist attacks, Kyle. I’m inclined to take them at face value, as genuine Ballroom attacks, even if it isn’t really their usual style, but I don’t know that, and before you get all fired up again, don’t you pretend to me that the Mesa System government is a staunch champion of freedom of the press. We both know differently, Kyle. And we both know it’s
your job to tell me exactly what your superiors tell you to tell me, no matter how little resemblance to the truth it may bear. So why don’t you save yourself a lot of trouble and effort and simply admit what we both know is true. Your security personnel took casualties when they set out on a general punitive sweep of the seccy districts, and they got out of hand as a result. They’re the ones committing atrocities out there. You know it, I know it, and your superiors know it.”

  Fraenzl drew a deep, deep breath, held it for a ten-count, then exhaled hard.

  “I apologize for losing my temper with you.” His tone was utterly sincere; his eyes were not. “In my defense, I can plead only exhaustion, stress, and grief. I lost several close personal friends in the Dedrick Tower attack, and one of my wife’s cousins is—was—a Security Directorate lieutenant who was killed today. So, yes, I’m just a little personally invested in this story, and my professional detachment is a bit lacking. I’m even prepared to admit—off the record and not for attribution—that there have been some instances in which some of our troopers, reacting in the middle of a combat situation, probably have used excessive force. You’ve covered enough military actions in your career to know that sort of thing happens, even with the best troops, sometimes. But there is not a general pattern of ‘atrocities’ on the part of our troops, and there certainly is no truth to the rumors that any Public Safety or Security Directorate officer has ordered, authorized, or turned a blind eye to those excesses. I assure you that any provable instance of the use of excessive force will be thoroughly investigated and prosecuted in the fullness of time.”

  “You actually managed to make it sound like you believe that,” O’Hanrahan said in a tone of mocking admiration, then snorted harshly. “Kyle, I’ve covered Frontier Security operations. I’ve seen the Gendarmerie at its worst, and I know damned well what I’m seeing when I look at that HD or when I go out on my balcony and look at the smoke rising from the seccy districts. You can deny me access to the scene where all of this is happening if you want. If you do, however, please be sure that Director Lackland and the rest of your superiors understand that I’ll be reporting to all of my viewers that despite repeated requests on my part, the Mesa System government refused to allow me to cover this story. They might want to think about how that report from me is going to impact the amount of credence the public in general will extend to their account of what’s happened here.”

  “Audrey, I don’t think—”

  “I think we’re through here, Kyle,” she said, not unkindly, and shook her head. “I know I’ve got a temper, and I also know you’re doing your job the way you understand what has to be done. I understand that. But you’d better understand that I have a job to do, too, and that I’m going to do it. So before you say anything else, and before we start screaming at each other again, I suggest you go and pass my message along to your bosses. Tell them that either they grant me access starting tomorrow morning, or I’m on the first ship out of here to tell the Solarian League at large that you and they are obviously covering up something—something so big and so ugly that you didn’t dare risk my getting even a whiff of the truth.”

  Chapter 62

  “Well, I suppose it’s about time . . . not that I’m looking forward to this,” Gillian Drescher said sourly. She shook her head. “This is going to be a cluster fuck, however we go about it, you know.”

  “Be a worse one if we left it all up to Howell and his idiots,” Colonel Bartel pointed out even more sourly. “They’ve managed to lose almost five hundred people, and they aren’t even up to the damned towers yet!”

  “Fair’s fair, Byrum.” Drescher shook her head, her expression worried. “The truth is, our people didn’t project this kind of seccy resistance, either. And so far, it’s been mainly small arms and improvised booby traps. You think it isn’t going to get worse—for our people, not just theirs—before it’s over?”

  “I’m damned sure it is, Ma’am. That’s one reason I’m so pissed at Howell—and McGillicuddy, for that matter—for handing this shit sandwich off to us.”

  “Well, it’s not ours yet.” Drescher looked at the orders on her terminal again, then shrugged. “At least we’ve already stood up our people. How long till we have them on the ground?”

  “It’ll still take at least another six hours, Ma’am.” Bartel shrugged irritably. “Just moving them’s going to be a problem, since the Misties ‘borrowed’ so much of Fifth Brigade’s transport.”

  Drescher grunted unhappily. Howell’s troop movements had been on a much larger scale than he’d ever anticipated, and, just to make things worse, he’d managed to lose something on the order of three dozen air lorries and a dozen APCs in a single seccy raid. Fortunately, he’d lost them parked on the ground, without anyone aboard them to be killed when their hydrogen tanks exploded, but what kind of idiot established a major vehicle park without at least securing the access points to the utility tunnels underneath it?

  Actually, I know exactly what kind of idiot does something like that, don’t I? she reflected.

  “In that case, we’d better get started,” she said out loud.

  * * *

  “Yes, Sir. Of course. I understand, Sir.”

  Bentley Howell managed somehow to keep his searing anger out of his voice and expression as he gazed at François McGillicuddy’s com image. To McGillicuddy’s credit, the Director of Security didn’t look a lot happier than Howell felt, and he damned well shouldn’t have.

  “Until General Drescher arrives on-site, you’re still in command, Commissioner,” McGillicuddy said. “I expect you to exercise good judgment in the interim.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Good. In that case, I’ll speak with you later. Good luck, Bentley.”

  “Thank you, Sir.”

  The com image disappeared, and Howell allowed himself a snarl. So, they were going to take Rat Catcher away from him and hand it over to that oh-so-superior sanctimonious bitch Drescher to take the credit after his people had bled to get to this point? It was probably Pearson’s doing. Or Alpina’s. The Peaceforce’s CO was always on the lookout for ways to improve the MPP’s position at the Office of Public Safety’s expense!

  He glowered down at the map display.

  Fourth Regiment’s 1st Battalion had a cordon around the Neue Rostock approaches. Howell was positive no more seccies were getting into the tower at ground level, and Major Brockmann would keep it that way. In the meantime, he’d moved MacKane’s 2nd Battalion, and all of Perelló’s 19th Regiment and Sergio Metz’s 17th Regiment up to invest the approaches to Hancock Tower. They were perfectly positioned to assault the place, and now he was expected to stand here with his thumb up his ass while Drescher’s Peaceforce strolled through his lines, took his prize, and walked off with all the fucking credit, was he?

  McGillicuddy said you’re still in command until Drescher drags her sorry ass to the front, he reminded himself. He caught his lower lip between his teeth, his mind racing as he considered the possibilities. Then he drew a deep breath, nodded once, hard, and looked up at the man on the other side of the Cyclops’ map display.

  “Colonel MacKane.”

  “Yes, Commissioner?”

  “The assault elements are in position?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  MacKane’s tone was difficult to parse. On the one hand, he’d heard Director McGillicuddy’s conversation with Howell, and it was obvious to the commissioner that the colonel was less than fully confident in his own plan of attack. On the other hand, MacKane was MISD, and it was his people who’d already paid cash to get this far.

  “In that case, Colonel, let’s get to it,” Commissioner Bentley Howell said flatly.

  * * *

  “Oh, shit,” Kayla Barrett said with quiet, intense sincerity as the order came over the com net.

  She and her understrength section were on Hancock Tower’s eastern side, hunkered down along the bank of what had been intended—once upon a time—as a scenic canal or
river (she wasn’t sure exactly which; the dry bed was studded with too many artistically spaced rocks for a canal, but it seemed awfully damned straight for a river) flanked by a scenic hiking trail. Since this was a seccy district, the canal (or river) had never been properly finished and the hiking trail’s landscaping was less than scenic. Worse, there’d been some fighting before the MISD secured control of the canal cut. The seccies had used it as a fighting trench—there were still a half dozen of their bodies in it—which was exactly what Barrett’s section and the rest of 2nd Platoon was using it for at the moment.

  And what she really, really didn’t want to do was to climb out of that trench’s protection and advance into that hulking, mountainous tower. Unfortunately, no one seemed especially interested in what she wanted just at the moment.

  “Saddle up,” Lieutenant Marilyn Kalanadhabhatla said sharply over the net. Kalanadhabhatla had transferred in from 17th Regiment to replace Connor Ferguson as 2nd Platoon’s CO, and that was another thing Barrett didn’t like. Kalanadhabhatla was a complete unknown. The one good thing about that from Barrett’s perspective was that she’d apparently come in cold, without any prior knowledge of what had happened to Ferguson . . . or how. The really, really bad thing about it was that no one in the platoon had ever worked with her before, and that was not a good state of affairs for one of the units picked to lead the assault into a seccy-held tower.

  “You heard the LT!” Platoon Sergeant Frasch said sharply. “Off your asses and on your feet, people!”

  At least the seccies who’d been sniping from Hancock’s outer windows had been driven mostly to ground, Barrett reflected, and the hissing, whickering crack-crack-crack-crack of the tribarrels’ covering fire was one of the most welcome sounds she’d ever heard. Every twelfth dart was a tracer round; at the tribarrels’ incredible rate of fire, those tracers looked like a death ray, reaching out to the tower and lacing its surface with a hurricane of explosions. Dust, splinters, and chunks of debris blew back—not even ceramacrete could take that kind of punishment without its surface shattering—and five battalions of MISD troopers moved forward under the protection of those thunderbolts.