Shadow of Freedom-eARC

by David Weber

  Now he knew better. They’d had the damned Uppies on the run for the first couple of weeks, and maybe as many as a third of the smaller cities and towns had come in on the LLLP’s side, or at least declared their neutrality. But that had been before they found out the frigging OFS had called in the Solly navy.

  His eyes went bleak and hard as he recalled the first kinetic strikes. MacCrimmon and MacQuarie hadn’t seemed interested in taking prisoners. Maybe they’d just wanted to avoid the expense of building bigger reeducation camps on Westray, or maybe they’d been scared enough they struck out in panic. Or maybe they were just such bloody-minded bastards they’d decided to eliminate as many of the opposition as they could while the eliminating was good. MacLay figured he’d never find out for sure which it had been, and it didn’t much matter, anyway. There’d been no warning, no call to surrender, no threats of orbital strikes at all. There’d been only the terrible white lines streaming down through the skies of Halkirk to pock the planetary surface with brimstone.

  That was what had broken the Resistance’s back. The first wave of strikes had taken out a dozen towns and the regional city of Conerock, whose city council had been the first to go over to the Liberation League when the Provos seized the local UPS stations and the hub airport. No one knew how many had been killed, but Conerock’s population had been over eighty-five thousand all by itself, and there’d been precious few survivors.

  So now they were left with this, he thought grimly. There was no surrender—not for the Provos, not for the hard-core, like Innis MacLay. They wouldn’t last long in the camps, anyway, even assuming they’d live long enough to get there, and he was damned if he’d give MacQuarie and General Boyle the satisfaction. Besides, his wife and kids had been in Conerock, so they could just drag him out of his last burrow when the time came, and his teeth and claws would savage them the whole way. When he got to Hell, he’d walk through the gates over the souls of all the Uppies he’d sent ahead to wait for him.

  It wasn’t much for a man to look forward to, but he’d settle for what he could get, and—

  He stiffened, eyes narrowing. Then his jaw clenched and he reached for the old-fashioned landline handset. The sound quality wasn’t good, but it was a lot more secure than any of the regular coms, and not even Solly sensors could localize and identify it against the background of the city’s power systems.

  “Yes?” a voice at the other end answered.

  “MacLay, on the roof,” he said tersely. “They’re coming. I’ve got eyes on at least a dozen tanks and twice that many APCs headed down Brownhill towards Castlegreen.” He paused for a moment. “I think they’ve figured out where we are.”

  Silence hovered at the far end of the line for seconds that felt like hours. Then—

  “Understood, Innis. I expect you’ll see a couple of missile teams up there in a minute or two.”

  “I’ll be here,” MacLay replied, and put down the phone.

  He moved from his observation post to the French doors that gave access to the apartment’s small balcony. The protective sandbags piled just inside them weren’t visible from ground level…and neither was the heavy, tripod-mounted tribarrel behind them. The field of fire wasn’t perfect, and MacLay was under no illusions about what the Uppies heavy weapons teams would do to his improvised perch once they located his position. But a man couldn’t have everything, and he expected he’d probably get to add at least a round dozen of them to his family’s vengeance first.

  * * *

  “It’s time for you to go Megan,” MacFadzean said flatly as she hung up the phone. “They’re headed straight for us, and we don’t have a prayer of stopping them.”

  “And where do you expect me to go, Erin?” MacLean asked almost whimsically. “You want me to go hide in the logging camps? Put other people at risk for helping hide me?” She shook her head and reached for the pulse rifle leaning in the corner behind her. “I think not.”

  “Don’t be stupid!” MacFadzean’s voice was sharper and she glared at the other woman. “You’re the League chairwoman—the one who can speak for us! Get the hell out of here, lie low, and then find a way to get off-world.”

  “And do what?” MacLean demanded. “We’re done, Erin—we’ve lost, and nobody else in the entire galaxy gives one single solitary damn what happens here on Halkirk!”

  “That’s not true,” MacFadzean said. MacLean stared at her in disbelief, and she shook her head. “I…didn’t tell you everything,” she said after a moment, looking away rather than meeting her friend’s eyes. “Our supplier for the weapons…he offered more than just guns, when the time came.”

  “What are you talking about?” MacLean’s eyes had narrowed.

  “He told me he could get us naval support.” MacFadzean turned back to face her fully. “When we were ready, if I got word to him, he was going to arrange things so we’d be the ones with starships in orbit.”

  “That’s crazy! How was he supposed to do that? And why didn’t you tell me about it?!”

  “I didn’t tell you about it because you already didn’t trust him,” MacFadzean’s voice was flatter than ever. “You may even have been right. Probably he and his friends were only helping us for their own ends, but he told me he wasn’t really a freelance arms dealer after all. That that was just his cover, a way to provide deniability if the wheels came off. He told me he was actually speaking for his own government, that his queen was ready to come into the open to support us if it looked like we might pull off our end of it, and I believed him. Hell, maybe I just needed to believe him! But if you can get off-world, find a way to contact him, maybe—”

  She broke off, tears spangling her eyes, then shook herself savagely.

  “Goddamn it, Megan! It’s all we’ve got left! You’re our chairwoman, if anyone can speak for us, you can! At least get out there and see to it that someone hears our side of what happened here. Don’t let the bastards just sweep us and Conerock and all the rest of this shit under the rug like it never even happened!”

  MacLean stared at her for a moment, shaken to the marrow of her soul by the raw appeal in MacFadzean’s last sentence.

  “I wouldn’t even know how to contact him,” she said finally. Something exploded in the near distance, the sound muffled but clear through the apartment building’s walls. “And that’s assuming I could get off-world in the first place.”

  “Here.” MacFadzean tossed her a data chip. “The contact information’s on there.” She smiled crookedly. “It’s in my personal cipher, but you’ve got the key.”

  MacLean caught the chip. She looked down at it for a moment, then clenched her fist around it.

  “I’m not running out and leaving you and everyone else behind, Erin. I’m just not doing it.”

  “Yes, you are,” MacFadzean told her as more explosions began to shake the command post. “You owe it to us.”

  She locked eyes with the other woman, and it was MacLean’s gaze that fell.

  “Jamie will get you out through one of the tunnels,” MacFadzean said then. “If the two of you can get out of Elgin, head for Haimer. I think our cell’s still secure there. Lie low for a few weeks, and Tobias MacGill—he’s the cell leader in Haimer—will fix you up with new papers. Then he and Jamie will get you onto one of the timber shuttles. From there…from there you’ll have to play it by ear, but you can do it, Megan. You have to.”

  “I—”

  MacLean tried to find one last argument, but she couldn’t, and there wasn’t much time. She looked at her friend, the friend she knew was about to die with all those other friends, and she could hardly see through the blur of her tears.

  “All right,” she whispered. “I’ll try.”

  “Good.” MacFadzean stepped around the table and enveloped her in a brief, crushing hug. “Good. Now go!”

  MacLean hugged her back for an instant longer, then nodded, grabbed her pulse rifle, and headed for the door. MacFadzean watched her go, then picked up the handset again and p
ressed the button that connected her to every other handset simultaneously.

  “Blàr Chùil Lodair,” she said simply. “Let’s by some time for the tunnel rats.”

  * * *

  “No fucking around this time!” Colonel Nathan Mundy snarled over the battalion communications net. “And no excuses, either! Get in there, kick their asses, and bring me their fucking heads!”

  Acknowledgments came back, and he smiled savagely as he settled deeper into his seat while his ground effect command vehicle slid around the final corner and his direct vision screens showed him the apartment building the rebels had taken over. It didn’t look any different from half a dozen other buildings they’d occupied across the capital, but this one was special. This was the one that was going to break the rebels once and for all, because this was their central command post. He’d thought for a while that MacPhee wasn’t going to break, but the UPS had a way of convincing even the most recalcitrant. Maybe MacPhee wouldn’t have broken if they’d had only him to work on, but when they brought in his daughter…

  I suppose he still might’ve lied, the colonel thought harshly. Of course, if he did, he’ll think what we already did to the bitch was nothing.

  “Get closer!” he barked at his driver.

  “Sir, I—”

  “Get me closer, goddamn it!”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  * * *

  The tanks were Solarian surplus, at least two generations out of date, but some tank was always better than no tank, and their armor shed pulser fire with contemptuous ease. They moved forward steadily, pounding the apartment building and the two structures to either side with fire from their main guns—fifty-millimeter hyper-velocity weapons with the firepower of a pre-space hundred and fifty millimeter cannon. Gouts of dust and smoke erupted, spewing showers of splintered ceramacrete, and coaxially mounted tribarrels spat thousands of explosive darts at their targets. It was impossible for anything to survive under that pounding, and the tank crews knew it.

  But the tank crews were wrong.

  The first antitank missile struck like hell’s own viper. The superdense penetrator impacted on its target’s frontal armor at just over ten thousand meters per second, and that armor might as well have been made of paper. The tank erupted in a thunderous fireball, and an instant later there was a second fireball. And a third.

  “Christ!” someone yelped over the command net. “Where the fuck did they get that?! Break right! Alfie, break ri—!”

  The voice cut off abruptly.

  * * *

  Innis MacLay bellowed in wordless triumph as the first UPS tanks exploded. Then a pair of APCs encountered one of the improvised explosive devices the Provos had buried in the sewers under Brownhill Road. It wasn’t powerful enough to destroy them outright, but the blast was more than enough to cripple them, and he watched their vehicle crews bail out, the Uppies scattering like blue-uniformed maggots.

  The grips of the tribarrel were comfortable in his hands as he peered through the holographic sight, and he squeezed the trigger stud.

  * * *

  Nathalan Mundy stared at his readouts in disbelief. That bastard MacPhee! He hadn’t said a single word about weapons that heavy! And the rebels hadn’t shown anything like that kind of firepower here in Elgin! How was he supposed to have realized—?

  * * *

  Another tank exploded, but this time one of its companions got a firm lock on the third-floor window from which it had come. A turret swiveled, a tank gun flashed, and half the floor behind that window disintegrated in a deafening explosion.

  * * *

  MacLay couldn’t feel the shock of the explosion from his lofty perch. Or, at least, he couldn’t feel it clearly enough to separate it from all the other shocks and vibrations whiplashing through the building. He saw the tank fire, though, and it wouldn’t have if it hadn’t had a target.

  He wondered who’d just died, but it didn’t matter. They could hurt the bastards, but they couldn’t win, and he’d already heard the reports from the other side of the building. The Uppies had to know exactly where they were; they were closing in from every direction, and MacFadzean was right. Only those closest to one of the escape tunnels had any chance at all of getting out alive.

  Assuming someone else kept the Uppies occupied, that was.

  He selected another target, slamming his heavy caliber darts through the thinner top armor of one of the APCs. The twenty-five-man personnel carrier staggered to a stop, then exploded, and his bloodshot eyes glittered with satisfaction. It was only a matter of time before someone spotted his firing position, but at the moment they were more preoccupied with the missile teams than mere tribarrels, and he swung his weapon’s muzzle towards fresh prey.

  * * *

  “Fall back!” Colonel Mundy snapped at his driver. “Get us further back—now, damn it!”

  The driver snarled something that could have been an acknowledgment, and the command vehicle curtsied on its ground effect cushion as he spun it around. The sensor cluster kept the apartment building centered in Mundy’s display even as the vehicle turned away, and a cursor flashed on the screen, highlighting a balcony on the sixtieth floor. An icon appeared beside it as the command vehicle’s computers identified the energy signature, Mundy’s eyes widened as he recognized the data code.

  Tribarrel! a corner of his brain gobbled. That’s a tri—

  * * *

  The GEV erupted in a boiling cloud of red and black. It tore apart, incinerating its crew, and Innis MacLay howled in triumph. It was brief, that triumph, no more than seconds before one of the surviving UPS tanks put a round from its main armament right through the balcony’s French doors, but it was enough.

  * * *

  “This way, Megan!” Jamie Kirbishly said hoarsely. “We’re almost there.”

  Megan MacLean nodded, wading through the ankle-deep water at her guide’s heels, trying not to think about what was happening behind her. There were perhaps twenty more people in the tunnel with her, stretched out in a long, grim-faced queue, most of them people who still had—or might still have—family somewhere on the other side of holocaust. People who knew their friends—friends who no longer had anyone waiting for them—had chosen to stay behind and cover their escape.

  She put her hand into her pocket, feeling the hard edges of the chip folio, wondering who the man who had called himself “Partisan” really was. If he’d told MacFadzean the truth about his official status or if it had all been a lie. And if it hadn’t, what had he and the star nation who’d sent him really intended? Why had they offered to help the Liberation League? Whatever MacFadzean might have thought, it hadn’t been out of the bigness of their hearts. MacLean was certain of that, and God knew they had enough problems of their own at the moment. Had they simply been looking for a way to distract their enemies? That might well make sense, she supposed. But it was also possible it hadn’t all been cynical, pragmatic calculation on their part. They had a reputation for standing up for lost causes; maybe they even deserved it. And if they did, and if she really could get off-world and reach them somehow, maybe this nightmare slaughter wouldn’t have been entirely in vain after all. Maybe—

  “Down!” Kirbishly screamed.

  MacLean responded instantly, throwing herself down on her belly in the icy water even before she realized she’d moved. She landed with a splash, hearing shouts behind her, and raised her head just in time to see the heavily armored UPS troops plummeting down the ladder from the manhole above with their pulse rifles flaming in full automatic.

  It was the last thing she ever saw.

  * * *

  Frinkelo Osborne stood on the landing platform of SEIU Tower, his face hard and set as he watched fresh smoke billow up to join the dense, choking cloud hovering above the Loomis System’s capital. Over twenty percent of Elgin’s buildings had taken at least some damage, he thought disgustedly. MacQuarie insisted it wasn’t that bad, and it was possible his own estimate was high because of the r
evulsion and fury boiling through his brain, but he didn’t think so. She was a liar trying to cover her own arse, and she was going to have plenty of covering to do now that the shooting was over. Just what he could see from his present vantage point was going to cost billions to repair, and the damage her in Elgin was nothing compared to what Captain Venelli’s KEWs—not to mention the UPS’ kill teams—had done to the rest of the planet. He remembered his conversation with Venelli in Hoplite’s briefing room and his right hand rose, touching the hard angularity of the holstered pulser under his left armpit.

  Tempting, so tempting. He could walk into Zagorski’s penthouse office and no one would think twice about admitting him. And once he got there…

  He took his hand away from the pistol again and grimaced bleakly. The thought might be tempting, but he wasn’t about to act on it, and he knew it. Just as he knew the real reason he wanted to paint Nyatui Zagorski’s office walls with his brains.

  Osborne had served OFS well, for longer than he liked to remember, but this was the worst. Somehow he’d always managed to avoid the details like this one, but now he’d climbed down into the sewer with the worst of them, and he’d never be clean again.

  And the worst of it, he thought in the cold, cruel light of honesty, is that now that I’ve done it once, it’ll be easier the next time. And if I stay with it long enough, there will be a next time. There always is.

  He stood for another few minutes, gazing at the blazing apartment building, wondering how much longer it would stand before its skeleton collapsed into the inferno, wondering if there was anyone still alive inside that furnace, praying for death.

  Then he turned and walked silently away.