Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  “Go!” the Peaceforce sergeant bellowed, and his troopers charged forward once more, over the bodies of the seccy defenders and their own engineers, alike.

  * * *

  “They’re punching through at Atwater and Chester.”

  Thandi Palane’s voice was almost maddeningly calm in Triêu Chuanli’s earbud as he stood at the intersection of Chester and Agostino. They were using standard civilian coms, tied into Neue Rostock’s hardwired internal com system, and even though the surveillance systems had taken heavy damage, Chuanli knew they still gave Thandi a far better picture of what was happening than anyone else had.

  “What do we have between there and here?” Chuanli asked.

  “Nothing,” Thandi replied flatly, and he swallowed a curse.

  “More battle armor?” he asked.

  “Some. Looks like they’re down to about seven or eight suits, though. Our people have been costing them all the way in.”

  Once upon a time, Triêu Chuanli might have sneered at Thandi’s use of the words “our people,” but not anymore. Yana Tretiakovna was in Doc Nimbakar’s infirmary, minus her left arm and unconscious while Nimbakar and Steph Turner worked on a sucking chest wound, but the Amazon’s counter attack had retaken the critical strongpoint she’d gone in to restore, pulser in one hand and vibro blade in the other, and she’d littered the corridor with Peaceforcer dead before she went down herself. Andrew Artlett’s right eye was covered by a thick dressing—it was going to take regeneration to restore his sight—but he was still on his feet, toolkit still slung over his shoulder, moving through the chaos and the confusion to somehow keep the tower’s internal systems running. And Victor Cachat had led more forlorn hopes—and somehow gotten back alive each time—than anyone else in Neue Rostock. By now, the tough, cynical seccies of Jurgen Dusek’s gang would have followed him in an attack on Lucifer’s own palace, and every man and woman in Neue Rostock knew how much they owed to Thandi’s icewater control of their desperate defense.

  “Okay,” he said, vaguely surprised that his own voice sounded almost as calm as Thandi’s. “We’ve got it. How soon can you get someone else to back us up here?”

  “Eight minutes. Diasall’s on his way with a heavy tribarrel and a couple of grenade launchers, but they’re still on the fifteenth floor,” she replied, and he nodded.

  That much firepower should—should—let this position hold, assuming it got here first. Unfortunately, one thing he’d learned was that when Thandi Palane gave a time estimate, it was accurate, and if the Peacies were punching through at the Atwater and Chester strongpoint, he didn’t have eight minutes. He had to slow them up somehow, stall them long enough for the promised support to get there.

  He looked at the dirty-faced teenager equipped with one of their few, precious remaining Auger launchers.

  “Sammy, you and Luca hold here.” He jabbed his index finger at the barricade behind which they stood. It was only half finished, neither as thick nor as tall as many of the others had been. But it would offer good fighting positions for Diasall and the others when they arrived, and it could be improved quickly, if they managed to hold it against the initial attack. “Jenney and I will try to buy you some time. If we can’t, hold your fire till you’re sure you can take out at least one of the heavies on point.”

  Sammy nodded tautly, and Chuanli glanced at Jenney the Hand. The young woman’s face was pale and frightened, but she met his gaze steadily as the scooped up the knapsack.

  “Come on,” he said.

  * * *

  Corporal Thomas Crunn moved forward down the corridor his HUD labeled “CHESTER AV,” wishing fervently that these damned corridors were wider. Not that he would even have considered trading his battle armor for the smaller, more maneuverable utility armor. On the other hand, his power cells were getting low, and the seccies had done a better job of slowing 1st Platoon’s advance than the ops plan had allowed for. Of course, the bastards always did.

  Crunn had never really thought too much about what seccies might think or feel. He hadn’t known any of them personally growing up, and the only ones he’d had contact with since joining the Peaceforce had been problems to solve, not people to know. Hell, they hadn’t really been people at all, as far as he’d been concerned. Over the last several weeks, though, he’d been forced to think about them quite a lot. No one would ever confuse him with a philosopher, but combat had a way of sharpening a man’s concentration, and he’d come to several unpleasant conclusions.

  One thing he’d learned was that whatever anyone else might say, seccies were tough bastards when they decided to dig in and fight. He hadn’t observed a whole lot of cowardice on their part, either. And for people who weren’t trained soldiers—who would’ve been subject to lengthy prison sentences, or even execution, if they’d ever tried to become trained soldiers—they were entirely too damned good at killing people who were trained soldiers. They were also far too proficient at booby-trapping the damned hallways, and they were obviously using the tower’s surveillance systems to keep track of the attackers. The Peaceforce had discovered the hard way that absence of resistance usually meant something extra nasty was waiting up ahead and that the fools who rushed to meet it seldom survived. Those who’d lived through one such experience had learned that caution and a certain methodical, deliberate rate of advance was the best way to go right on living, and that meant—

  * * *

  “Talk to me, Palane!” Triêu Chuanli whispered over the com.

  “Forty-five meters and closing,” Thandi replied. Her voice was level, almost conversational, but her eyes were dark, because she realized exactly what Chuanli intended to do.

  “Get back,” he said to Jenney the Hand, and jerked his head at the cross corridor they’d passed ten meters before. Their eyes met, and he smiled tautly. “You should have an opening any time now.”

  “Yeah.” She swallowed hard. “Triêu—”

  “No time, kid.” He clapped at her on the shoulder. “Tell Jurgen I said he should sign you on permanent.”

  “I will,” she whispered, although both of them realized how little chance she’d ever have to do anything of the sort.

  “One minute,” Thandi said over his earbug.

  “Go!” he snapped to Jenney, and she dashed towards the position he’d indicated.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “Got it.”

  Triêu Chuanli watched Jenney go, then squared his shoulders under the straps of the knapsack suspended across his chest. He really wished they’d gotten the roof of this section booby trapped, but the speed of this advance had taken them by surprise, and the Peacies had broken through to areas where they hadn’t been expected yet.

  Wish we had more of these handy, too, he thought harshly, stroking the knapsack with the fingers of his left hand. Not that anybody ever expected to be able to use the ones we do have.

  Even more than he wished they had more of them, he wished there’d been time to use this one some other way, but there wasn’t. Not if he was going to slow down the fucking battle armor.

  “Fifteen seconds.”

  “Been a pleasure, Thandi,” he said softly. “Look after yourself.”

  “Not so shabby yourself,” she replied. “Five seconds.”

  Chuanli drew a deep breath, rested the ball of his thumb on the detonator in his right hand, and stepped out of the recessed doorway in which he’d been waiting into the center of the corridor.

  * * *

  A warning ping sounded in Thomas Crunn’s earbug and an icon flashed sudden crimson on his HUD. His eyes flicked in the indicated direction, his tribarrel started to swing, but there wasn’t enough time.

  Jurgen Dusek had acquired less than a dozen of the Black Widows, otherwise known as the Mark 3, Mod 2 EEP Antitank Mine (Heavy). First, because he really hadn’t been able to imagine any circumstances under which a mine capable of destroying a hundred and thirty-ton main battle tank would be of much use to a gangster. Second, because Bl
ack Widows were the sort of ordnance the Peaceforce got antsy about when it disappeared from one of its warehouses. In fact, they’d ended up in his possession more or less accidentally when the ordnance clerk who’d been supposed to send him three crates of pulse rifles bobbled the paperwork. Under the circumstances, however, it had seemed . . . unwise to try to return them to sender, so he’d kept them.

  So far, Neue Rostock’s defenders had used six of them.

  Now they used a seventh.

  Triêu Chuanli pressed the button, the Black Widow strapped to his chest detonated, and three self-forging penetrators, each more than capable of penetrating the belly armor of a Mandrake-class heavy tank, screamed down the corridor. One of them struck Corporal Crunn just above waist level, punched through his battle armor, through his body, through the armor’s back plate, and then seared its way equally effortlessly through Trooper 1/c Claire Shwang, immediately behind him.

  A second penetrator killed Trooper 1/c Andries Benkô, casually ripped off Corporal Aldokim de Castilho’s right arm, and then obliterated three of the combat engineers who’d been following behind them.

  The third penetrator went straight down the center of the corridor, killing two more engineers and four utility-armored troopers coming on behind the battle-armored point team.

  Chuanli was dead well before any of his victims, of course. The detonation hurled his shredded body all the way back beyond the cross passage where Jenney the Hand had taken shelter. Even aimed away from her, the directional blast half-stunned her in the corridor’s confines, but unlike the Peaceforcers she’d been expecting it, and she threw herself back out into the main passage on her belly.

  The military-grade pulse rifle she’d been issued was a far cry from the light civilian-grade weapons she’d had when she and Nine-Finger Jake first saw the Misties advancing across Trondheim Park towards Eaker Boulevard. The sophisticated electronic sighting system penetrated the billowing smoke and dust easily, and she squeezed the stud, hosing explosive darts into her enemies.

  There was no one left in battle armor to get in her way, and her fire slammed into the more lightly armed troopers who’d survived Chuanli’s blast. Three of them went down. Then two more. A sixth.

  Jenney the Hand killed a total of twelve more Peaceforcers before the launcher-fired grenade exploded sixty-four centimeters from her head.

  It took the attackers almost fifteen minutes to get themselves reorganized and resume the advance.

  Twelve minutes later, that advance ran into Athanasios Diasall’s tribarrel and missile team, well dug in behind the barricade at Chester and Agostino, and disintegrated in bodies and blood.

  * * *

  “So, do you think the rumors are accurate, Byrum?” Gillian Drescher asked.

  “Which ones, Ma’am?” Colonel Bartel asked wryly. “I’ve heard so damned many of them over the last couple of weeks it’s kind of hard to keep track.”

  “I suppose it is.” Drescher twitched a smile, then looked back down at the holograph on the map table. “In this instance, though, I meant the ones about Thandi Palane.”

  “Oh, those rumors.” Bartel grimaced. “I don’t know. I’m inclined to think they could well be, though, Ma’am.” He shrugged. “Before this whole disaster started, I’d’ve argued that it would have taken someone like a Palane to get seccies to stand up and fight this way. Now, though.” He shook his head. “I’ve had to . . . reexamine certain of my fundamental core beliefs were seccies are concerned, you might say.”

  “There’s been a lot of that going around,” Drescher agreed in a desert-dry tone.

  Actually, she was two-thirds convinced—maybe even three-quarters convinced—that it truly was the infamous Thandi Palane who’d planned and commanded Neue Rostock’s defense. On the face of it, it was preposterous. Only it was no more “preposterous” than everything else which had been happening since the Dobzhansky strike. And the rumor that the commander in chief of the Royal Torch military was here—right here, on Mesa—personally leading the seccy defiance of the planetary security forces had raced through the seccy communities at light speed. There was no stopping it now, and as the assault on Neue Rostock had dragged on and on and on, that rumor had become ever more credible in the seccies’ eyes.

  It was a name being whispered whenever three or four seccies gathered to discuss the battle. That name and the name of Jurgen Dusek, and of Bachue the Nose. It was hard to imagine a more unlikely triumvirate of legendary heroes, yet that was precisely what Palane, Dusek, and Bachue had become, and Gillian Drescher was too much of a realist to pretend that that legend could ever be killed. Easy enough to kill a woman named Thandi Palane, a man named Jurgen Dusek, but the legend? There weren’t enough silver pulser darts in the galaxy to slay that.

  But it’s my job to kill the people behind it, she reminded herself, and it’s a job I swore an oath to do. Maybe I wish now that I hadn’t. Maybe I wish I’d found something else to do with my life. But I didn’t, and if I break faith with that oath, what else do I have?

  It was a question she’d asked herself more and more often of late, and one she couldn’t answer. But she knew exactly what was going to happen sometime in the next forty-eight hours.

  And that however great a success it might be tactically, strategically it would be a disaster.

  She understood now why Dusek and Palane—if that really was Palane in there—hadn’t evacuated. Despite her own earlier estimates, she was now certain that they’d managed to get virtually all of Neue Rostock’s regular residents out through the tunnels well before the tower had come under actual attack. Everything she’d seen, everything her people had discovered—and fought their way through—only confirmed that they’d started fortifying the tower days, maybe even weeks, before the first OPS sweeps had run into disaster, and they must have evacuated everyone but their fighters along the way. Yet her people had finally cut those tunnels. No one else was getting out of Neue Rostock now, and her assault elements were poised for the final attack.

  It was going to be ugly, and it was going to be brutal, but it was also going to be over. She’d gutted four brigades getting to this point, and she was about to reduce a fifth to wreckage. Altogether, she’d lost in excess of nine thousand men and women since she’d taken over from Howell. By her most optimistic estimate, that total would rise to at least eleven thousand—close to a third of the Peaceforce’s total peacetime strength—before it was done, but she wasn’t foolish enough to think anyone inside that tower would surrender before she’d paid every bloody gram of the price.

  And ultimately, her people would pay that price in vain.

  Snyder and McGillicuddy and their allies on the General Board might see Thandi Palane’s presence here as a godsend—as “proof” Torch and, by extension, Manticore truly were in bed with the Audubon Ballroom. That they’d facilitated and enabled—probably even planned—the present wave of terrorist attacks, just as they had the strike on Green Pines. In Drescher’s opinion, based on prisoner interrogation and every intelligence source available to her, that was nonsense. In fact, despite all the evidence, she was no longer fully convinced the Ballroom truly had been responsible for all of the atrocities credited to it. It was probably insane of her, possibly a symptom of combat fatigue, yet she couldn’t quite shake the suspicion. And even if it was true, even if Torch had been complicit in every single one of those attacks, it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t change what Palane and Dusek had already set in motion.

  It was too late for any clever propaganda tricks to change what was going to happen. It was no longer a matter of if the regime was doomed, but of when the regime would fall. In the end, the ship of state was going down, as surely as ever the Magellan had, with its keel ripped apart on the reef of Neue Rostock and the general seccy resistance which was bound to arise from the tower’s ashes.

  Yet she had no choice but to burn that tower to the ground. To turn it into the lifeless wreckage from which a dozen—a hundred—other Neue Rostock
s would spring up like dragon’s teeth.

  It was her job.

  “I think we’re about ready, then, Byrum,” she heard her voice say. “Pass the word. I want all brigade and regimental commanders in the com briefing at nineteen hundred hours.”

  * * *

  “Well, I certainly hope we have some good news for a change,” Regan Snyder said sourly as the General Board gathered around the conference table.

  Brianna Pearson didn’t bother even to glare at her. There was no point anymore. Instead, she looked at Brandon Ward as the CEO settled into his chair at the head of the table.

  “Actually, there is,” Ward said. “According to General Alpina, General Drescher will be launching her final assault in approximately twelve hours. He tells me that she’s confident this will be the final assault, and that she estimates the core of resistance in Neue Rostock will be broken within thirty or forty hours from the time she attacks. Mopping up may take some days longer, but she should be able to hand that back over to MISD and pull the Peaceforce brigades back to refit and reequip within two days.”

  “Well, it’s certainly taken her long enough!” Snyder snapped pettishly. “After all the money we’ve plowed into the Peaceforce, you’d think they’d have been able to take a single tower away from a pack of ragged-assed seccies in less than a T-month!”

  “It hasn’t been a T-month,” Pearson said coldly. “It’s been about three T-weeks from the moment the first shot was fired. And considering the opposition and the nature of the mission—and the fact that she was denied the fire support she needed for two of those T-weeks—General Drescher’s done one hell of a job with very little support from this Board.”

  “Oh, bullshit!” Snyder snarled. “It’s all her fault—well, the Peaceforce’s fault—we’re in the mess we are right now. You’ve heard about the incidents happening all over the other seccy districts by now. You think that would’ve happened if she’d done her damned job in the first place and nipped this whole thing in the bud?!”