by David Weber
Fontein nodded. That would also make her the one who'd saved the Committee . . . if, that was, she intended to save the Committee and not complete its execution, possibly as a "mistake" in the strike that took out the Levelers. He knew her people would follow her whatever decision she made.
"Speed down to Mach Seven and dropping," the pilot reported. "Nothing so—acquisition! We're being painted!"
McQueen nodded to herself as the shock cages clamped around them and the world outside spun with crazed, chaotic viciousness. Something whined past, dark and solid for a fleeting instant. Close enough to see it, by God, she thought. That meant really inspired piloting. The pinnace juddered in its path as a warhead blew up behind them, and static hashed an electromagnetic pickup.
"Maniacs," she said softly. They were using nuke warheads within the atmosphere. Not total fools, though. They hadn't put all their faith in the logic bomb to keep the Navy from intervening while their coup went on.
Rob S. Pierre kept his eyes on the wall display, hands kneading at the gray streaks over his temples. Everyone else was looking now too, and the fighting was close enough that the building shuddered continuously with the outrages being done to its structural members. Anguish shouted from the speakers: "Don't, George, don't!"
The pickup showed a wounded man slumped back against a ceramacrete-armored door. He looked up, his face knotted into a rictus, and worked doggedly at the hose connector that lay across his lap. A fumbling grip undid it at last, and the man's head slumped back in exhaustion against the metal. His tongue licked lips gone paper-dry with the thirst that blood-loss brings, but his eyes opened again as cautious steps sounded in the corridor outside. The battered, scorched furniture had been luxurious once, and the floor was covered in a pile of deep sea-green carpet. It sopped up the rather thick liquid that gouted out of the armored cable, leaving it an inconspicuous spreading stain rather than the slippery mass it would have been on bare pavement or metal.
Body-armored figures swarmed forward down the corridor, groups forming fire-parties and then leapfrogging forward. Pulser rifles whined as they "checked" the rooms to either side with fire, and an occasional grenade blasted fragments and dust out into the corridor itself. The view narrowed as the man leaning against the door let his head droop; all they could see then was the circle of sopping carpet, and the dead bodies scattered across it, insurrectionist and Chairman's Guard.
"We need the access code, traitor," a voice said, cold with hate.
The man looked up again, seeing his own bloody face reflected in the visor-shield of the enemy standing over him. Boots kicked away weapons.
"Don't, George! Don't do it!" Evidently the attackers could hear that clearly too, and they looked up and around. The one with the visored helmet laughed.
"Don't be brave, George—be smart." He ground his foot down on the prone man's shattered leg, bringing a convulsive moan of agony. "The access code! Give it to us, now!"
"I'll . . . give . . ." the man wheezed.
The visored face nodded, bent to hear. At that range Pierre could see through the visor, see the flicker of horror as the wounded man's fingers dropped the lighter to the carpet and he realized what was about to happen.
"Don't George, don't—it's useless, don't—"
An instant's searing flame showed through the pickup, and then the rippling bubble of melted plastic. A long hollow boooomm sounded through the fabric of the building, echoing up through ventilators and elevator shafts. Two dozen pairs of eyes swivelled to the exterior view, and halfway up the tower they saw windows punched out in an echoing bellow of flame.
Saint-Just was busy at his console. "That was part of the automated defenses," he said, in his colorless bureaucrat's voice. "Inoperable. George Henderson led a party back down through the shafts to enemy-held floors to try and activate it manually." The pale, passionless eyes rose for a second. "He succeeded."
"How long until we have the systems back?"
"One hour forty-five minutes," the head of Security said. "Captain Henderson has bought us some time; besides their casualties, they'll have to wait for that level to cool, or bring in firefighting equipment. On the other hand, we've also suffered very severe losses. It's going to be a tossup."
Not for the first or last time that day, Rob S. Pierre wished that he could pray.
Liberty and Equality massed fourteen million tons each, more than twice the weight of a superdreadnaught like the Rousseau, and they were armored and armed to match. Ordinarily a close-range engagement would crush the ship like a food pack under a power-armor boot. Their problem was that they couldn't approach the planetary surface as closely as a mobile ship. Everything they could throw towards Rousseau would also be thrown towards the planetary surface where their families lived. Even fanatics would hesitate at that prospect.
"Hesitate, but not forever," Captain Robert Norton muttered to himself, leaning back in the command chair. Aloud: "Hold station."
"Citizen Captain." His Tac officer spoke, and Norton glanced at the appropriate repeater.
Goddammit, Citizen ThisandthatRank not only sounds ridiculous, it's cumbersome when you're in a hurry, some distant part of his mind fumed. Probably the irritation was comforting because it was so familiar. Few of the officers who'd served before the Revolution were comfortable with the new titles.
"They're launching their LACs," he said, watching the display's schematics indicate small vessels swarming out of the fortresses' holds. "Logical."
Light Attack Craft were designed for close-in point defense. They had no armor to speak of, no sidewalls, and only a single light energy gun and strap-on pods of single-shot missiles. Putting them up against a superdreadnaught was like sending ants against an elephant. But ants could sting, and enough of them . . . and he was a stationary target, too.
"Launch," he said. "Let's try and close up the net."
The huge ship shuddered as her broadside batteries went to salvo, and scores of heavy missiles streaked across the screens. Engagement ranges were insanely close; the forts would have cut him into drifting wreckage if they'd dared use their laser and graser batteries, but Rousseau was shooting up. They might still blast him, if they were desperate enough. He glanced around. Point defense was active, treating the LACs as if they were missiles themselves. Insane. Nobody was going to have time to react to anything.
"Closing," the Tac officer said. "Ten point two seconds to launch. Mark."
Spots of brilliant light began to flare silently against the blackness and unwinking stars of space; the tank listed them as nuke warheads, the stabbing flicker of bomb-pumped X-ray swords, the fuzzier explosions of fusion bottles rupturing under the massive fists of Rousseau's energy batteries. Machines were dueling with machines, and men and women died.
And here I am a sitting duck, he thought bitterly. Nothing for a captain to do; the ship couldn't maneuver.
He looked to another screen, this one showing his assigned targets for bombardment. That made him lick dry lips. Insane, he thought again. Kinetic energy bombardment, warheadless missiles fired straight down at—literally—astronomical velocities. When they met the surface, mass in motion would be converted into heat. They didn't need warheads. The thought of that type of strike on a populated area, on Nouveau Paris, for Christ's sake, made his testicles try to crawl up back inside his abdomen.
"We didn't start it," he reminded himself. The gang of madmen who did start it had used nukes in a populated zone, and that showed you the sort of thing they'd do and order him to do if they got their hands on the levers of power.
He still tasted vomit at the thought of what he had to do, and what the Admiral was going to order herself. McQueen, when I'm fighting the Manties, I'd trust you to the limit. She was a hard CO, but she got the job done and she didn't flinch herself. Can I trust you here?
Rousseau's eight million tons leaped and shuddered as an energy lance went through her sidewalls and blasted into her armor.
"Damage control," he said
in a metronome-steady voice.
"Compartments twenty-six through eight open to vacuum. Graser one down."
"Reconfigure—"
There was no need to look at the display screens anymore, though some still did. Rob S. Pierre sat with his hands on the table, looking ahead, ignoring the worried glances and whispers where Oscar Saint-Just and Cordelia Ransom had their heads together.
Everyone looked up as a couple of Security noncoms came through the door, their arms full of pulse rifles.
"Citizens," one of them said. "It's time."
They began handing the weapons out.
"Hit them," McQueen said.
They were coming in over the city of Nouveau Paris at twenty-five thousand meters, and even from here the pillars of smoke were obvious. One or two of the huge towers must have fallen to create the gaps she saw. There was an ominous-looking crater, and her skin crawled as she watched the readout. Oh, it wasn't really a very large weapon—subcrit squeeze job—and it was designed to be relatively clean, but "relatively" was the operative word there. She remembered an old, old grisly joke: A tactical nuclear weapon is one that explodes a thousand kilometers downwind of you.
"That used to be Regional Intervention Battalions HQ, didn't it?" she said.
"Yes." Fontein's voice was flat.
Fourteen thousand people, she thought. More than a good-sized fleet engagement usually killed.
"Status on the crowds," she said.
"They've thinned out. Everyone must have gotten the idea that something serious is going on, and the fun-seekers have gone home," one of her staffers said. "We estimate that only two hundred thousand are still out."
Still a fairly substantial number, even in a city with a population of thirty-two million.
"These must be the real Leveler militants. They're all in or near Committee HQ and adjacent parts of the Government district. No particular organization, but plenty of arms."
"Citizen Brigadier Conflans."
"Citizen Admiral, I can't proceed until the . . . mob . . . is cleared out of my way. Dropping ground troops into that would be like throwing a handful of buckshot into a barrel of snot."
"And I can't do that until the airspace over the Avenue of the People is safe," she said thoughtfully. Then on another channel: "Citizen Captain Norton, execute."
"Ma'am—" there was an edge of desperation in his voice. "Ma'am, those are government units."
McQueen throttled an impulse to shout. She couldn't force Norton to obey her; all bets were off, and everyone was proceeding on personal convictions and loyalties. Norton had been with her all through the fighting around Trevor's Star; he'd stayed calm when the Rousseau's bridge was blown open to space and they were slugging it out with Manty superdreadnoughts at energy-weapon range and a main fusion bottle started to go critical. . . .
"Bob," she said quietly, "we can't spare the time to convince them of our bona fides, and they'll fire on us. There's no time. Clear our way, but whatever you do, we're going in."
The voice that answered might as well have been a robot's. "Affirmative, Citizen Admiral. Initiating."
Someone gasped as a solid bar of white light stretched down from heaven; air riven to ionized gas, and fragments of ablative shielding. The bar touched earth, and a pattern of shocked-white fury reached out from that point. The shock wave moved after it, and buildings rippled and blew away like straw around it.
"God have mercy on anyone within half a klick of any of those."
"Civilians," she said to nobody in particular, "call this sort of thing a surgical strike. Sort of like surgery with a chain-saw."
"Two," someone murmured. Another bar of light; she looked away, blinking at the after-images behind her eyelids. "Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven." A pause. "Eight."
"Citizen Admiral," Norton's voice said. "Liberty and Equality have opened fire with their energy armaments." Another pause, and surprise in his tone: "Fraternity is opening fire on them."
"Get out of there, Bob. You've done all you can." She switched channels. "Prepare to execute, Citizen Brigadier Conflans." To her own tiny flotilla of pinnaces: "Let's convince the Leveler militants they're in the wrong line of work. Execute Grapeshot."
Many of the crowd that filled the Avenue of the People for two kilometers were in a holiday mood; the police officers hanging from the street-lamps on either side, or twitching on the points of the decorative wrought-iron fences around gardens added to the festive air. There was still fighting going on towards the three-hundredth floor of the Committee's tower, but they didn't have to do anything in particular. A few of the more energetic were amusing themselves by dragging out civil servants from the lower floors of the towers on either side, and giving them impromptu People's Justice. Others passed bottles around, sang the war-chants of the Conspiracy of Equals, or simply stood or sat and waited. It wouldn't be long now.
Many of them looked up at the turbine wail. Police vehicles had tried overflights an hour ago, and a few of them had even gotten away, but the falling debris from the others had been dangerous. Leveler cell-leaders at the fringes of the street barked into their communicators.
Some of the mob might have had time to realize the nature of the pepper-flake tiny loads the pinnaces were dropping. None of them had time to run before the tens of thousands of fragmentation loads from the cluster munitions reached their preprogrammed height and exploded in a long surf-wall of white fire. Each of them threw thousands of pieces of jagged ceramic shrapnel into the air, cutting across the crowd at chest-height at thousands of meters per second. Where they struck blood and flesh and bone splashed, divided into a spray of damp matter as liquid as the blood alone.
The crowd was huge, more than eighty thousand on this avenue alone. The laws of probability and various obstacles assured there were more than enough left alive to scream as the pinnaces began their second run.
One man managed to stagger back to his feet and fumble at the load across his back. Blood was running down into his eyes, and there was a wetness when he tried to breathe, but his hands still functioned.
"They're running, Ma'am," the pilot begged, forgetting himself and the presence of Citizen Commissioner Fontein. "They're running."
"And I want them to keep on running for a long, long time," McQueen said softly. "All their lives, in their heads. How do you think those bodies got to hanging from those lamp-posts, son? We'll make another pass, with the pulsers, slow and level. All pinnaces, one more pass. Citizen Brigadier Conflans, we've cleared your way for you. Now go in there and make it worth something."
The pinnace screamed up in a near-vertical turn, passing near the scarred, smoking side of the Committee tower, then looped over again and began another run down the Avenue of the People. This time she was working from the rear of the crowd forward, towards the building the mob had hoped to overrun. To either side of her nose heavy tri-barrel pulsers raved in long spears of white light, sending thousands of heavy explosive projectiles down into the street below. Bodies living and dead blew apart, and the ground-cars and pavement below them offered little more resistance as they erupted into volcanoes of shredded metal and stone. Lime in the concrete burned white under the howling lash of projectiles driven to thousands of meters a second by the impeller coils. Wrecks trailed the clean blue flame of burning hydrogen in the pinnace's wake.
"Target acquisition!" the pilot shouted as an alarm shrieked and blinked red from his control panel. He rammed his throttles home.
The pinnace leapt forward. Something slammed into its side, and one of the massive air-breathing turbines lurched free and pinwheeled away. Admiral Esther McQueen watched it slam into the side of a tower. Her last thought was an angry impatience. She wouldn't even get to see if her gamble had succeeded or failed.
"Citizen Chairman," the Marine said, saluting. "I am pleased to report that this building is under control. I must ask you all to remain here until we've—"
"Got it!" someone shouted. "Sir, the net's back up! We killed the
fucking ghost!"
"Excuse me," Rob S. Pierre said to the Marine brigadier. He turned and took two steps to the terminal, sat, and began giving orders. It was twenty minutes before he sat back.
"Citizen Committeeman Saint-Just," he said. "Perhaps you could tell me exactly what happened, at this point?"
Saint-Just swallowed; he'd just allowed the most massive Security breach in the new regime's history. Of course, Pierre thought behind the mask of his face. He knows I know everyone makes mistakes. But he can't really be certain of that. A wry smile tugged at one corner of his mouth; it would be an odd start to his New Look policy to have his second-in-command shot, anyway.
The head of State Security had the Marine officer in tow; the man was looking guarded, which any sensible officer would at being in this close contact with the Committee.
"Now, Citizen Brigadier . . . Conflans?" The officer nodded. There were scorchmarks and rusty-looking dried fluids across the arm and chest of his combat armor. "Perhaps you could explain exactly how your most timely assistance came about?"
The Chairman's brows rose until he felt his forehead ache. "Timely indeed," he murmured when the man was finished. "Esther McQueen, eh?" He looked at Saint-Just; the Security chief nodded. And I was supposed to interview her this afternoon. He looked at a screen; three hours almost to the minute since this began. He felt as if it had been that many decades . . . and where had he managed to get that bruise, or tear his jacket?
"Well, where is the lady?" he said. "I gather from you and Citizen Captain Norton that she isn't on Rousseau?"
"No, Citizen Chairman," the Marine said. The fierce, handsome face behind the sweeping mustaches suddenly looked pinched. "Her pinnace went down while it was directing the final operations. We haven't . . ."
Rob S. Pierre looked at his Security chief. "Find her for me, Oscar. I think the lady has gone from a possibility to a certainty, and it would be excessive irony if she were dead."
