Shadow of Victory

by David Weber

  Assuming, of course, there’d been any truth to such libelous rumors.

  Fortunately, that was none of Ira Valverde’s business, and he concentrated on his flying.

  Sakue Yampolski, the head of Grazioli’s protective detail, didn’t have that luxury. Unlike Valverde, she had to know everything there was to know about the man she was responsible for protecting. She wished she didn’t. For that matter, she wished Grazioli had the common decency to at least try to conceal his appetites from her. Unfortunately, he seemed to have no clue why he ought to. Indeed, she sometimes suspected that in his own mind, her own diminutive stature and slender build put her into the category of his preferred sex toys, despite the fact that she was very nearly eighty T-years old. It was a good thing that, whatever his other failings, he was smart enough not to try to play games with his own security chief.

  Especially since I would gleefully cut off his balls and tie them around his neck for a bowtie, she thought, and smiled at him from the facing seat as she allowed her imagination to dwell lovingly upon the possibility.

  As a general rule, it was a bad idea for the head of someone’s protective detail to think he’d look so much better dead. But it was better to be honest with herself. And however Yampolski might feel about him, it was her job to keep the sick bastard alive, so she’d do it and take a certain professional pride in the doing. Besides, it wasn’t as if he was the first waste of good DNA she’d been assigned to protect over the sixty T-years of her career.

  At the moment, however, she wished he was at least a little bit brighter than he was. Sakue Yampolski had seen a lot of neobarb unrest in her time, and she didn’t like what she was seeing on Halkirk. She remembered a line from a really, really bad holo-drama. Things were “quiet, too quiet,” especially after the MacRory fiasco and the violent demonstrations it had provoked, and she didn’t buy into the theory that the UPS had crushed that unrest once and for all. In fact, she thought Ottomar Touchette’s analysis was on the money, which made this no time for someone like Johannes Grazioli to prance around out in the open.

  And I don’t really care whether or not he thinks anyone knows about the frigging apartment, she thought behind that concealing smile. I know for damned sure a whole lot of anyones do, and a bunch of them would be just delighted to kill his sorry ass.

  That was why she’d had the entire apartment building swept for surprises. Fortunately, it was a small building, not one of the residential towers seldom seen outside Elgin, so sweeping it wasn’t all that hard. And she had six members of her team on the floor directly beneath Grazioli’s penthouse. Nobody was getting to him that way, and she’d arranged for a rapid bugout if that seemed indicated.

  * * *

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come down and at least have some supper, Sakue?” Grazioli asked, and smiled. “I’m likely to be several hours, you know.”

  “I’m aware of that, Mr. Grazioli,” she said, wondering if he realized just how…scummy that smile of his looked. “But I’ve got plenty of paperwork I can catch up on while you’re occupied.” She smiled back and gestured at the limo’s data terminal.

  “If you’re sure,” he said, and headed for the lift from the rooftop landing pad to his penthouse.

  Yampolski watched him go, then keyed her com.

  “He’s headed down, Rick.”

  “Copy,” Rick Fernandez, the senior member of the detail keeping an eye on the apartment building, replied. “Did he invite you down for a drink?”

  “If that was the only thing he’d had in mind, I might’ve accepted,” she said caustically, and grimaced when he chuckled. “Listen, you’d better just be grateful he’s as hetero as he is. Otherwise, he’d be looking at your ass, boy-oh!”

  “He may be, anyway,” Fernandez replied. “His girlfriends are late.”

  “Oh?” An eyebrow arched. “Do we know why?”

  “Their ‘uncle’ screened about thirty minutes ago.” Yampolski could hear the shrug in Fernandez’s voice. “Said they’d be delayed. Something about their air taxi’s routing getting screwed up.”

  Yampolski’s other eyebrow joined the first, and she frowned. The pimps who provided Grazioli’s playthings knew he didn’t like to wait. In fact, they’d move heaven and earth to avoid keeping him waiting. And that…

  “I don’t like this, Rick,” she said as every instinct in her body started to jangle. “Turn him around as soon as he gets there.”

  “He won’t like that, Sakue,” Fernandez said with pronounced trepidation.

  “What you mean is he’ll kick, scream, holler, and bitch the whole way,” Yampolski corrected. “And, frankly, I don’t give a good goddamn if he does. He can take it up with Frazier. And if Frazier wants, he can damned well pull me from Grazioli’s detail. Hell, I wish he would! But in the meantime, we’re getting his ass out of here and back under cover until I find out why the girls are late.”

  She’d opened the sliding panel to the pilot’s compartment while she spoke, and her raised right forefinger made an urgent “wind it up” motion at Valverde as the chauffeur looked up from his book reader. He gawked at her for a moment, then tossed the reader aside, and she heard the whine as the turbines spooled up.

  “I don’t like unexplained schedule changes, especially now,” she continued to Fernandez, “and I’m damned—”

  The shoulder-fired Hydra III was old, outmoded, and obsolete, but its warheads still packed one hell of a punch. The blast-incendiary warhead’s performance against any armored target was fairly anemic, but the penthouse wasn’t armored. And neither was the air limo.

  The four warheads didn’t impact exactly simultaneously, and Sakue Yampolski had one fleeting moment to realize that at least Johannes Grazioli had died before she did.

  * * *

  It was raining in Conerock as Lieutenant Ranald Ross’ personal vehicle screeched to a halt. He was out of the air car and halfway to the station house entry before the hatch cycled closed behind him.

  He hit the front door like an earthquake, barely pausing for the security computer to recognize his biometrically linked personal transponder and open it, and Kenneth Bevan, the duty sergeant, looked up from his solitaire deck with a startled expression, then leapt to his feet.

  “Lieutenant! What’re you doing here?! Sir,” he added belatedly.

  “Get your ass in gear, Sergeant!” Ross snapped so sharply Bevan blanched. Ross was normally an easy-going boss. He didn’t tolerate any slackness, but neither was he the type to collect scalps for minor infractions like a little solitaire game at three o’clock in the morning.

  “Yes, Sir!” Bevan barked, coming to attention. “I’m sorry, Sir, I didn’t—”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Bevan?” Ross demanded.

  “I—that is…” Bevan looked at him helplessly, and the lieutenant glanced at the cards scattered across the duty desk in front of the noncom.

  “Oh Christ, Bevan!” Ross rolled his eyes. “I could care less about the damned cards! Haven’t you been listening to Freiceadan at all?!”

  “Freiceadan, Sir?”

  Bevan’s confusion was complete, Ross saw. The sergeant was a good man, solid and reliable, but he wasn’t exactly the most mentally agile person Ross had ever known. And clearly he hadn’t been listening to the United Public Safety Force’s internal news channel.

  “According to Freiceadan, somebody just shot Colonel MacChrystal in Hendry Park.” Bevan gawked at him. “Sounds like they took out her entire detail at the same time. In fact, it sounds like her damned dog was the only survivor—the bastards just stun-gunned it! And they took out Major Kiley, his air car, and his entire detail at what sounds like exactly the same time.”

  Bevan went even paler. It didn’t take a mental giant to see the connection between MacChrystal and Jordan Kiley, the man who’d officiated over the MacRorys’ murders. But Ross wasn’t done yet.

  “On top of that, Zack MacLennan just screened from Rotherwal. Somebody blew hell out
of that sick bastard Grazioli’s little playpen about nine minutes ago. And on top of that, I can’t get Major Farquhar to answer her com. So, if it’s all the same to you, Sergeant, I think we’d better get ourselves organized, don’t you?”

  “Uh, Yessir! Right away, Sir!”

  Bevan stabbed a button on his panel and the general alarm wailed from every speaker in the station house…and, at only slightly lower volume, from the personal com of every UPS trooper assigned to it, wherever they might be. Startled voices answered from the squad room where the ready response force had probably been playing poker, rather than solitaire, and Ross headed for his own office at a half-run. He’d been unable to reach Amanda Farquhar, the commander of UPS’ Conerock Division, over his personal com, but his office com should be able to nail down her current location from her personal transponder. He hoped so, anyway, because he sure as hell wanted to talk to her!

  Sergeant Bevan looked up as the front door opened again, and his tense, worried expression eased as Alexina Morrison and Lachlan MacLaurin burst through it. They weren’t supposed to be on duty tonight, but unlike the sergeant, they obviously had been listening to Freiceadan. Both of them were only privates, but Bevan knew Ross had earmarked them for promotion after the next proficiency exam, and both of them were geared up in full tactical rig.

  “Good to see you,” he said as they jogged across the lobby towards him. “The Lieutenant’s in his office, and—”

  The burst from Morrison’s flechette gun hit him at the base of the throat and decapitated him.

  The body flipped backward, and MacLaurin went by the brand new corpse at a run. He disappeared down the short hallway to the squadron, and the hard, sharp discharges of his flechette gun vanished into a terrible scream of agony.

  Lieutenant Ross’ reflexes betrayed him. He charged straight out of his office, pulser in his hand…which was exactly what Private Morrison had expected. She was waiting, half-concealed behind the duty desk, and the shrieking flechette darts hit Ross squarely in the face before he ever saw her.

  She reached across the desk and hit the button that overrode the security computer. The station house’s doors all opened at the same instant, and forty more armed members of the Loomis Liberation League charged through them.

  * * *

  “Stop squealing about it and fix the damned problem!” Nyatui Zagorski snapped from the com display. “We’ve goddamned well paid you people enough, so get your thumbs out of your asses and get a handle on this!”

  Tyler MacCrimmon gripped his hands tightly together behind him and managed not to snarl back at the SEIU exec. It wasn’t easy.

  “We’re trying to get a handle on it, Nyatui.” His voice was less even than he could have wished. “At the moment, we’re having just a little bit of difficulty down here, though.”

  “‘Difficulty’?” Zagorski repeated. “What you’ve got down there, Mister Vice President, is a frigging disaster! Do you have any idea how much SEIU equipment those bastards have already torched?!”

  “Yes, I do,” MacCrimmon replied. “I’m a bit more concerned about all the people they’ve killed, though. Including Johannes Grazioli and Jock MacRathin.”

  Zagorski had opened his mouth. Now he closed it again and sat back in the chair behind his enormous desk.

  “I knew about Grazioli.” His volume had dropped by at least fifty percent. “This is the first I’ve heard about MacRathin, though. Is that confirmed?”

  “Yes,” MacCrimmon said tightly. “And while Johannes’ murder could have had something to do with his…tastes in entertainment, Jock’s sure as hell didn’t. I’ve got confirmation of the assassination of at least twenty-five senior government and UPS officials so far.” He emphasized the last two words harshly, his eyes locked to Zagorski’s. “But that’s not the only people these lunatics are killing, and they hit the Cooperative’s Elgin office about twenty minutes ago. MacRathin was in his office with three other board members when someone tossed in a hand grenade to keep them company. And another bunch of the bastards got into Admin and set off some kind of bomb right in the middle of the Cooperative’s main data storage. The Uppies have retaken the two lower floors, but they’re in one hell of a firefight with the sons of bitches upstairs!”

  “Shit,” Zagorski muttered. The Silver Oak Cooperative played an important role in SEIU’s “management” of Halkirk. The front organization, completely staffed and administered by native Loomisians, functioned as the primary conduit for silver oak without getting SEIU directly involved in hammering any effort by the producers to raise prices. Jock MacRathin, its CEO, had managed the majority of Grazioli’s contacts and contracts with the local growers and loggers…and had been, if possible, even more despised than Grazioli.

  “Look,” MacCrimmon pushed into the temporary break in Zagorski’s tantrum, “everyone down here’s doing his best to ‘get a handle on it,’ but this is no local disturbance. It’s going on in Elgin, Conerock, Rotherwal, and at least ten other cities and major towns. That means it’s planned and orchestrated. MacQuarie’s in her HQ, coordinating operations, and I really need to be over there helping her do that. So that’s where I’m going. My staff will keep you updated, but right now I need to be concentrating on that. So if you’ll excuse me.”

  He reached out, cut the connection, and headed for his office door.

  * * *

  “—don’t care where the frigging guns came from,” Nathalan Mundy snarled. “What I care about is what the bastards are doing with them right now!”

  The treasury secretary glared around the conference table in the basement of the United Public Safety Force’s main building in Elgin.

  “And the reason I care about that is that they seem to be kicking our asses!” Mundy added.

  Senga MacQuarie flushed angrily. She opened her mouth, but someone else spoke before she could flay Mundy.

  “I agree the situation is…messy,” the voice said. It belonged to Frinkelo Osborne, the Solarian “trade attaché” who was actually the Office of Frontier Security’s senior man on the planet. “And I know you’ve suffered heavy casualties and a lot of property damage. Believe me, Mr. Zagorski’s called that to my attention in no uncertain terms! But I think it’s important that no one panic here.”

  “Panic?” Vice President MacCrimmon looked at him as if he had two heads. “This isn’t ‘panic,’ Mr. Osborne. Nathalan might not be the most tactful person in the universe, but he does have a point. In the last two T-weeks, we’ve lost control of Conerock, Harlach, MacQuinnville, and Ohlarhn. That’s four of our regional administrative centers, and I’d like to point out to you that there were only twelve of them to begin with. As nearly as we can tell, they’ve acquired every Safety Force armory in all of those cities, too, and at this moment, Secretary MacQuarie’s probably lost close to half of her people.”

  “I understand that, Mister Vice President,” Osborne said. “But however serious the situation may be, it’s still a long way from hopeless.”

  He gave the Prosperity Party’s leadership the most confident expression he could summon up. The truth was, however, that he wasn’t quite as confident as he sounded—by a margin of no more than, oh, three or four hundred percent. And the truth was also that for a centicredit and a cup of cold coffee he’d let every damned person in this room go straight to hell. If anyone had ever deserved to have his planet burned down around his ears, it was MacCrimmon and his cronies, and he didn’t even want to think about what might be necessary to save their skins. One thing he did know, given how far things had already gone: it was going to be ugly. In fact, he was sinkingly certain that it would be even uglier than he could imagine.

  Unfortunately, Nyatui Zagorski had already dispatched his own report to the home office in Lucastra. Osborne doubted his version of events was going to even mention the not so minor role SEIU’s policies, arrogance, and security force’s brutality had played in creating them, but that report was the one SEIU’s patrons would be sure got read in Ol
d Chicago. That meant it would be the one upon which the Office of Security ultimately acted, whatever Osborne did.

  It’s not going to matter, Frinkelo, he told himself bitterly. Whatever you want, HQ’s made it clear enough you’re here to support Zagorski’s operations. The last thing any of your esteemed superiors need is a glitch in their personal cash flow from SEIU. So however much you’d love to watch him and all his local stooges hang—however much you may hate what it’ll take to save their worthless asses, instead—that’s not on the program this month.

  “I’d be inclined to agree that it isn’t hopeless yet,” MacCrimmon said after a moment. “I hope you’ll pardon my pointing out that it seems to be headed that way, though.”

  “Of course I understand your concerns, Sir,” Osborne said. And he did.

  In the wake of the precisely coordinated, carefully targeted strikes in half a dozen cities, popular support had rallied to the “Loomis Liberation League” like a hurricane. The simmering unrest over SEIU’s logging policies had never been far from the surface. The fury spawned by the murder of ninety percent of Mánas MacRory’s family had brought it to a roaring boil, and the LLL’s initial successes had reached deep into that unrest with the proof that UPS and SEIU’s own security forces could be hurt. Not simply hurt—defeated. Destroyed.

  Ottomar Touchette had warned Osborne it was coming, and Osborne had dutifully passed the Gendarmerie lieutenant’s analysis on to his own superiors. Not even Touchette had expected things to boil over this quickly, however. And the UPS’ increasingly vicious tactics, the product of its own fear and desperation, were only pumping more hydrogen into the furnace. On the other hand…

  “Mister Vice President, I’ve already sent my dispatch boat to McIntosh. There’s a permanent Frontier Fleet detachment there. I sent the boat off five days ago, so it ought to reach McIntosh in another five or six days. When it does, I’m sure naval support at the very least—possibly even a company of Marines or an OFS intervention battalion—will be on its way here absolutely ASAP.”