Shadow of Freedom-eARC

by David Weber

  “There someone on the com asking for you, Ma’am,” the Presidential Guard tech said nervously, sweat beading his forehead. “He says he’s somebody named Terekhov. Commodore Terekhov.”

  “Oh, he does, does he?”

  Yucel felt her lips twist in anger. Terekhov. The same son-of-a-bitch who’d shot up the Monica System and started this whole frigging nightmare. She should’ve guessed.

  The Mobian only stood there, looking at her, obviously uncertain whether he was supposed to answer or not and terrified to make the wrong choice. Her fingers flexed with the urge to rip his head off, but she made herself draw a deep breath, instead.

  “All right. Put him on my desk display.”

  “Yes, Ma’am!”

  The tech disappeared like smoke, and Yucel turned towards the office’s enormous desk just as the display lit with the face of a blond, blue-eyed officer in the black and gold of the Royal Manticoran Navy.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “I assume I have the dubious privilege of addressing Brigadier Yucel?” The contempt in Terekhov’s tone flicked Yucel like a whip.

  “I’m Yucel,” she confirmed in a harsh, hard-edged voice. “What the fuck d’you want?”

  “I thought, much as the idea disgusts me, that I might offer you a chance to get off this planet alive.” Terekhov’s voice was like ice, his expression one of indifference. “Personally, I’d prefer to kill you where you stand. I’ve had the opportunity to observe your handiwork in some detail. However, since we’re all civilized people here, I decided to give you my terms, first.”

  “Your terms?” she sneered. “Who the hell do you think you are? You come waltzing into this star system, you attack Navy starships, and now you have the sheer, unmitigated gall to tell me you’re going to offer me terms? Well fuck you! One of us is here at the invitation of the legally constituted government of this star system, Commodore Terekhov, and it sure as hell isn’t you!”

  “A legally constituted government that’s massacred—or allowed you to massacre—a half million or so of its citizens with kinetic strikes? That legally constituted government?”

  “What a sovereign star nation does to suppress criminal insurrection is none of your goddammed business,” she said harshly. “And what the Solarian Gendarmerie does at the request of that sovereign star nation is none of your business, either! So get your ships the hell out of this system.”

  “Not going to happen.” Terekhov’s calm, cold precision was a sharp contrast to the seething fury of her own tone. “To put this in terms even you may be able to understand, Brigadier, you’re screwed. I don’t care if we have to kill every single gendarme down there, and I certainly don’t care if we have to kill you. But I’d just as soon avoid any additional damage to the Mobians’ planet if I can. So here are those terms. You lay down your weapons, you march all your personnel out of Landing to a point to be designated by me, and you wait there until my Marines take you into custody.”

  “And then what happens in this fantasy of yours?” she demanded. “You shoot us all on the spot?”

  “I’ll admit the thought has a certain appeal,” he said. “But, no. We take you into custody and we keep you there until a proper court can be convened to consider the actions of your personnel on this planet. All of you will receive a fair trial, and the guilty will receive the sentence commensurate with their crimes.”

  “You’re out of your fucking mind.” Yucel’s voice was almost conversational. “You really think you’re going to get away with trying and shooting Solarian gendarmes?”

  “I was thinking more in terms of hanging, actually, since that seems to be your own favored form of execution, but we’ll probably leave that up to the Mobians,” he told her, and she barked a scornful laugh.

  “And just what the hell do you think is going to happen to your pissant little Star Empire when the League finds out about that?” she demanded.

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” he told her flatly. “Not that I’m particularly worried about it in the short term.”

  “You may have kicked Crandall’s ass at Spindle, but it’s going to be different when the Navy knows what you’ve got and comes after you!” she spat.

  “You obviously haven’t paid any attention to reality in some time,” Terekhov said. “And you’re just a bit behind the news, too. For example, on the basis of what you’ve just said, I don’t suppose you’ve heard about what happened to Vice Admiral Dubroskaya at Saltash, when five of our destroyers destroyed all four of her battlecruisers. Or about the fact that the Star Empire is now allied to the Republic of Haven. Or that between us, we now have somewhere around five hundred ships of the wall, any two of which could have controlled every missile we fired at Crandall in Spindle. Let’s do some math here, Brigadier. If two of our ships can kill seventy of yours, and we’ve got five hundred of them, that means we can kill every superdreadnought in Battle Fleet, including the Reserve, about three times each.”

  He paused, smiling coldly at her, letting her see the total confidence in his eyes, then continued.

  “According to the latest dispatches before I headed out for Mobius, your Admiral Filareta was on his way to Manticore with somewhere around four hundred of the wall. By this time, I’m sure he’s arrived…and if he was foolish enough to actually fight when he got there, I doubt any of his ships lasted long enough to surrender. I’m certainly not worried about the outcome, anyway. Now, do you accept my terms or not?”

  Yucel stared at him, her face momentarily slack with shock. Manticore and Haven allied? Allied against the Solarian League? He was lying. He had to be lying! But even as she thought that, something with thousands of icy little feet started crawling up and down her spine. If he wasn’t lying, if he was telling the truth, that would explain why he’d been willing to take out Watson’s ships. And if he really was ready to do what he’d just said he’d do to her personnel, to her…

  The ice moving up and down her back seemed to settle in her belly. It was odd. She’d never realized her stomach could be simultaneously nauseated and frozen into a solid lump.

  Panic surged suddenly, rising into her throat like vomit, and she swallowed hard. For a moment, she knew exactly what it had felt like for countless malcontents and troublemakers when her gendarmes’ pulser butts hammered on their doors. But then she forced herself to push the panic aside and glared at Terekhov’s image.

  “All right,” she said. “Those are your terms. Well, here are mine. You stay the hell off this planet. You put one shuttle down here, one frigging Marine, and I start shooting prisoners. I’ve got over thirty thousand of them in the stadium. You’re welcome to take a look for yourself. And I’ve got two companies of gendarmes over there. I can kill every fucking person in that stadium in five minutes flat, and if you try any shit like landing on this planet, I swear to God I will!”

  “Courageous and determined to ‘serve and protect’ to the last, I see,” Terekhov observed contemptuously, and Yucel flushed as he tossed the Solarian Gendarmerie’s official motto into her teeth.

  “Just try me and see,” she snarled through gritted teeth.

  “One more time, Brigadier, and my patience isn’t unlimited. If you choose not to accept the terms offered, the consequences will be on your own head.”

  “What? You think I believe you’d come down here after me? Wreck the rest of this podunk city coming after my people and get everybody in the frigging stadium killed?” She sneered at him. “Not you. You’ve got to be the goddammed white knight in shining armor. Well, you come down here and screw around with us, and you’ll get plenty of blood on that armor. I guarantee it!”

  “I see. Perhaps I should be having this conversation with President Lombroso. He might be perfectly willing to hand you and your gendarmes over to me if he thought it would save his own skin.”

  “Lombroso couldn’t hand you candy from a baby! He’s hiding in the damn basement—him and Hadley both! He deputized me to ‘negotiate’ with
you, and I’m all done, friend. Now. Are you going to accept my terms? Or do I need to pass the order to shoot the first hundred or so prisoners to make my point?”

  “Why is it,” Terekhov asked conversationally, “that people like you always think you’re more ruthless than people like me?”

  Something about his tone rang warning bells in the back of Yucel’s brain, but she refused to look away. She held her glare locked on him, refusing to back down, and he shrugged.

  “Stilt?” he said without glancing away from Yucel.

  “Yes, Sir?” a voice replied from outside his com pickup’s field of view.

  “Pass the word to Colonel Simak. Then set Condition Zeus.”

  “Condition Zeus, aye, aye, Sir.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Yucel snapped.

  “I can’t say it’s been a pleasure speaking to you, Brigadier,” Terekhov replied. “Educational, yes, in a disgusting sort of way, but not a pleasure. In fact, I’m just as happy we won’t be speaking again.”

  “Good,” she said. “Now get the fuck out of here before I change my mind and decide to shoot a couple of dozen of them to hurry you on your way!”

  “Oh, I’m not afraid of that,” he assured her. “In fact,” he raised his wrist and glanced at his personal chrono, “you should be receiving my response to your terms”—those ice-blue eyes flicked back to her face—“just about now.”

  She frowned, wondering what the hell he was talking about.

  She was still wondering two and a half seconds later when the kinetic projectile struck Lombroso Arms Tower at approximately thirty kilometers per second.

  * * *

  The Mark 87 “Damocles” Kinetic Strike Package was a containerized weapon system designed to fit into any standard shipboard magazine and sized to dep0loy through a counter-missile launch tube. The KSP could be configured with several different types of payloads, but the most common variant—like the one which had been deployed from Quentin Saint-James number three CM tube shortly after she’d entered orbit—carried a rack of six of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps’ M412 kinetic penetrators. Each penetrator was a six hundred and fifty kilogram dart fitted with its own small, short-lived but powerful impeller drive, a capacitor ring for onboard power, and a guidance package. By controlling acceleration rates and times, the M412 could produce an effective yield of up to one megaton…but this particular application called for a slightly smaller sledgehammer than that.

  The projectile impacted at barely one tenth of a percent of light speed. The tower was enormous, the projectile wasn’t all that huge, and its velocity might seem positively snail-like compared to the eighty percent of light speed a Mark 23 could attain, but it was sufficient. In fact, its produced an effective yield of just over sixty-seven kilotons as it struck dead center on the tower’s roof at an angle of exactly ninety degrees and punched straight down, pithing it with a spike of plasma that vaporized everything in its path.

  Admittedly, the results were positively anemic compared to those of the far heavier strikes Yucel had used to obliterate “rebellious towns” as object lessons, but that suited Aivars Terekhov just fine. The structure’s massive ceramacrete walls confined and channeled the blast, and the towers around the impact point acted as cofferdams, further confining the blast and restricting the damage. Yet the explosion still reached out to obliterate the Presidential Palace and everything else (including the residential towers in which the System Unity and Progress Party’s leadership and the majority of the transtellars’ off-world personnel had been quartered) in a three-block radius. Within the primary zone of destruction virtually nothing survived; outside it, except for shock damage, there was remarkably little devastation.

  Even as the shockwave rolled outward from what had been the Lombroso Arms Tower, two dozen assault shuttles plummeted out of Landing’s sky. Eight of them swooped down on the soccer stadium, heavy with wing-mounted precision guided munitions that launched and screamed in on the tri-barrels Yucel’s gendarmes had mounted on the stadium’s uppermost row of bleachers to cover the prisoners below. Precisely calculated fireballs crushed them like some giant’s brimstone boots, and the shuttles reefed back around, going into hover, dropping their noses to bring their bow-mounted heavy cannon to bear.

  The rest of the shuttles streaked by overhead, and three companies of battle-armored Manticoran Marines plummeted from them on counter-grav drop harnesses.

  Here and there an isolated gendarme or two had survived the PGM strike with enough courage—or stupidity—to fire on the hovering shuttles or try to nail one of the plummeting Marines. They didn’t have much luck. The Marines came in far too hard and fast to be easily targeted by men and women terrified of what was happening, and the gendarmes had no antiair weapons. The Mobius Liberation Front hadn’t had any aircraft for them to worry about, so none had been issued to the stadium guards, and the shuttles were too well armored for their surviving light weapons to pose any threat.

  Those far enough away from any prisoner discovered that their body armor was worth precisely nothing when a thirty-millimeter round from a shuttle pulse cannon hit them at several thousand meters per second. The others lasted a little longer—until the Marines grounded and they discovered that their pulse rifles were as useless against battle armor as they’d been against the shuttles.

  A handful threw their weapons to the ground and got their hands clasped behind their heads quickly enough to survive.

  * * *

  Helen Zilwicki stood behind Commodore Terekhov, watching the recon platforms’ imagery in the main visual display. The kinetic strike’s towering, ugly, anvil-headed cloud of dust and smoke was still climbing when the first Marine landed. The prevailing wind had barely begun to bend it before the entire stadium had been secured.

  The sheer, stunning speed of it left her feeling vaguely dazed. She’d been at Terekhov’s elbow as he, Commander Lewis, and Colonel Simak planned and organized Zeus. Yet she’d been convinced, somehow, that Yucel was at least smart enough to realize how hopeless her position was.

  I guess Daddy was right when he told me to never underestimate the power of human stupidity, she thought. God, I hope the word gets around and finally starts penetrating even Solly skulls! If we have to keep on killing every damn one of them…

  “Well,” Terekhov said after a moment, blue eyes still on the visual display, “I suppose we should see if whoever’s still alive in their chain of command is more willing to listen to reason.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “I wish we knew what he wants to talk about,” Mackenzie Graham groused as she locked the door behind them. Then she and Indiana headed down the rickety stairs—their apartment building’s elevator was on the fritz again—from the sixth floor. “I’m not crazy about unexpected emergency meetings.”

  “We’ll find out why he’s here soon enough,” Indiana pointed out, keeping a cautious eye peeled.

  The landings were none too well lit, and muggings weren’t unheard of even inside apartment complexes. Especially not here, on the older side of town, where so many “historical” buildings from Seraphim’s early days remained in use. Most of those older buildings had been constructed using natural materials and without counter-grav capability. They were smaller, built closer to the ground than the later towers, and easier to break into, and they’d never boasted the security systems that were part of the city’s newer structures. They were also firetraps, but on the limited plus side, there were fewer public security cameras on this side of town, and the rundown tenements offered their inhabitants a much higher degree of anonymity. And given what had happened to Indiana and Mackenzie’s father, and the complete destruction of the family’s financial fortunes, not even the scags were likely to find it remarkable that they’d been reduced to such miserable quarters.

  The light was out again on the second-floor landing, Indiana noticed when they reached the third floor, and he slid his right hand casually into his pants pocket as the made
the turn and started on down. If anyone was going to try anything, it should happen just…about…now.

  The two men lurking in the landing’s shadows had obviously done this before. They came out of the darkness in a concerted attack, rushing the brother and sister from both sides, and he saw the dull gleam of a knife.

  His right hand came out of his pocket in a practiced move. His thumb pressed a button, the collapsible baton extended instantly to its full seventy centimeters even as his left arm swept Mackenzie behind him.

  “Gimme your wal—” the one with the knife snarled, only to break off with a scream as Indiana brought the weighted baton down.

  It was a whipcrack strike, a quick, powerful flick of the wrist rather than a full-armed blow, and he recovered from it instantly. He stepped towards the knife-wielder, not away from him, as the injured mugger clutched his own shattered wrist and hunched forward. The second man had targeted Mackenzie, but she wasn’t where he’d expected her to be thanks to her brother’s shove, and Indiana’s move took him just out of the mugger’s reach, as well. The second attacker shouted an obscenity and turned towards Indiana, one hand going back over his shoulder. Indiana saw the blackjack against the third-floor landing light, but he had plans of his own, and the other man collapsed with a hoarse, whistling scream as the rigid baton’s rounded tip slammed into his solar plexus like a rapier.

  The second man went down, writhing in agony, trying desperately to breathe. It didn’t look like he was going to have much luck with that, given the serious internal injuries he’d probably just suffered, a corner of Indiana’s mind reflected. At the moment, he had other things to worry about, however, and he turned back to the first mugger. He stood like a swordsman, baton poised, and the broken-wristed attacker gawked at him in disbelief.

  “My sister and I were just leaving.” Indiana was amazed at how level his own voice sounded…and the fact that he could actually hear it through the thunder of his pulse. “I think your friend needs a doctor, and as far as we’re concerned, you can find him one. But I wouldn’t advise choosing this building again in the future.”