Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  “Shut up, Xavier!” That came from Alex, who’d stopped abruptly. “Something’s wrong. Lighting doesn’t just—”

  Two figures emerged out of the gloom, coming from behind a nearby air car. A moment later, Vittoria spotted two more coming from different directions.

  All of them were armed.

  “ ‘Shut up’ is excellent advice,” said one of the figures. “All of you would do well to follow it.”

  She couldn’t tell the genders of any of the people, since they were all face- and voice-shielded. But the one who’d spoken was either a large man or a very large woman. Shielding couldn’t disguise sheer size.

  She was terrified already, and the next words the person spoke didn’t help at all.

  “We’re from the Audubon Ballroom, and if you give us any shit, you’re all dead.”

  The faint sound of an approaching vehicle came from behind them. A moment later, a bulky personnel van drew up alongside. As was standard for such vehicles, the windows were all shaded.

  “Get in. Now.”

  * * *

  At the same moment, the limousine carrying Harriet Caldwell and Tony Lindstrom was approaching the exit of their own garage. It had taken them a while to get there because the offices of the DIB were buried deep within one of the huge towers at the center of the city. Government accountants weren’t perhaps as frugal as viewcast producers, but they’d seen no reason to provide mere fellow civil servants with private parking facilities—claims of security risks be damned. The last recorded instance of a DIB agent murdered in a public garage had been a hundred and thirteen years earlier, and the killer had been his own wife, irate over the very public affair he’d been conducting with a fellow agent.

  Whom the wife had also shot, but only wounded before she was taken out herself by the accused adulteress.

  That long and uneventful streak of unnecessary security precautions now came to an abrupt end. The side hatch of a cargo van parked near the garage exit slid open as the limousine approached. The 10 mm heavy tribarrel pulser positioned within the cargo compartment began firing as soon as the limousine came in sight. The weapon was firing super-dense 65 gram explosive rounds with a maximum rate of fire of up to 3,000 RPM (1,000 per barrel).

  The limousine’s armor was designed to deflect or absorb light pulser rounds, not this sort of military-grade fire. The vehicle more or less just came apart. As did, needless to say, its three occupants.

  It was all over in five seconds. The two shooters hurried out of the cargo van and disappeared around a corner of the garage. By the time the nearest witness—who’d only overheard the slaughter, not seen it—approached warily, they’d already gone up sixty floors on one elevator, crossed a short corridor to another, gone down seventeen floors, and were now on a slidewalk which would eventually take them through an aerial passageway to one of the adjoining commercial towers.

  They’d been able to move quickly because they were quite unencumbered. They’d left the tribarrel behind in the van.

  It didn’t take the police long to identify the weapon. It was a M247 Heavy Tribarrel manufactured under license by Rensselaer Industries, whose facility had—until very recently—been located in one of the industrial modules of a space station named HMSS Vulcan which had once orbited a planet named Sphynx.

  How the weapon had been obtained, on the other hand, remained a complete mystery. It was not available to the public even in the Star Empire of Manticore, because it was designed and made strictly for the Manticoran infantry and Marines.

  * * *

  “—now been warned. Any and all agents of oppression, be they from the OPS or the MOI or any of Mesa’s instruments of tyranny can expect the same justice at the hands—”

  * * *

  “I don’t want any more fucking excuses!” raged François McGillicuddy, Mesa’s Director of Security. “I want some answers! How in hell is the Audubon Ballroom dropping their manifestos into our planetary data net?”

  “They can’t possibly be doing this with just their own on-planet resources,” said one of his assistants, Grace Summers. “They have to be getting help from the Manties or the Havenites.”

  “Or both,” added her colleague, Aidan Crowder. “Or Beowulf.”

  “Or—or—or! Just listen to yourselves, Goddamit.” McGillicuddy slammed an open palm on his desk. “I don’t want fucking possibilities—I can get those from my granddaughter. I want answers.”

  He glared at them for a moment longer, then reached out and stabbed at his desk com. “Zeno, tell those assholes running Customs they’re doing a pisspoor job. From now on, I want full searches of any and all cargo being brought into Mesa. They’re letting weapons through.”

  “Ah . . . Chief.” Crowder took a little breath. “I really don’t think it’s likely that—”

  “Shut. The. Fuck. Up. I said answers, not prattle.”

  Which was exactly why Grace had kept her own mouth shut.

  Chapter 52

  “My current estimate—my very rough estimate—is somewhere between five and twenty thousand people,” said Anton. “I’m certain that it’s at least three thousand, and I doubt very much if it’s more than thirty.”

  Yana whistled softly. “That many?”

  “Actually, the comment you should be making is: that few? Think about it, everyone.”

  He looked around at the people sitting at the table in a small conference room in Neue Rostock. They consisted of himself, Thandi, Victor, Yana, Jurgen Dusek and Triêu Chuanli. “If I’m right,” he continued, “what’s happening is that Mesa’s innermost circle—what we’re calling the Alignment—is pulling up its stakes and leaving the planet. Every single one of them. This is from a world that has a total population of close to six billion people. Do the math.”

  Yana did, and it didn’t take her but a moment. Abstruse statistical theory might be beyond her, but she could do straightforward arithmetic in her head much faster than most people.

  She whistled again, more loudly this time. “I see what you mean. Even at the high end—thirty thousand, you said—we’re talking about no more than one-half of one-thousandth of one percent of the population.”

  Anton nodded. “And it could conceivably be smaller than that by an order of magnitude. Either way, relative to the entire population, that’s probably the smallest ruling class in the history of the human race. And they’ve been doing it, don’t forget, for six hundred years.”

  Thandi shook her head. “I don’t see how that small a group could manage it.”

  “They could if they have what you might call the right mechanism in place and they’re prepared to be patient. A very small gear can run a very big machine, if it’s designed properly. Each gear turns one bigger, and then bigger, and then bigger. It takes a lot of time, of course.”

  “Everybody looks at the big bad wolf and misses the much badder but itsy-bitsy teeny-tiny monster hiding in its ruff.” Yana ran fingers through her long, glossy black hair. That mannerism she rather enjoyed. “You’d set up a huge front operation. Call it . . . Manpower, Inc.”

  “Those fuckers.” That came from Dusek.

  Victor looked at him. “I take it you’re not skeptical any longer?”

  “I’m not sure I ever was, the minute I first heard you lay out your theory.” He and Chuanli exchanged glances. “It explains a lot of things.”

  “That’s putting it too strongly, I think,” said Chuanli. “Boss,” he added, almost as an afterthought. Dusek didn’t seem to need having his ego stroked. His subordinates felt free to disagree with him, although they were respectful about it.

  Chuanli made a waving motion with his hand. “It doesn’t actually explain much of anything. But it sure fits, doesn’t it?”

  “Explain that, please,” said Victor.

  Chuanli gnawed on his lower lip. “I’ve always had this weird sense—so has Jurgen—that a lot of times when you’re dealing with Mesan bigshots, you keep feeling . . .”

  He looked to D
usek for help. “How would you put it?”

  “Gears slipping. It’s like you’re dealing with people who just aren’t bright enough for the positions they hold—and then suddenly everything’s in gear again. Looking back on it, as if someone with real brains just issued everybody’s marching orders.”

  Anton grunted softly. “That . . . makes sense. If you’re running a conspiracy you need to make sure that your puppets aren’t too capable—or if they are, either get rid of them or absorb them into the conspiracy or, at the very least, keep them at a distance. Any way you do it, though, you’re always working through layers that are a little more sluggish than they ought to be.”

  “Especially when there aren’t that many of you to begin with,” added Victor. He shook his head. “But this is all speculation. What is not speculation is that we know—know for sure and certain—that the Ballroom is not behind this string of so-called terrorist incidents.”

  “How are you so sure?” asked Chuanli.

  “From the best sources possible—Jeremy X and Saburo X.”

  Even Dusek, who had a world-class poker face, looked impressed. “Never heard of the second guy,” he said.

  “Not surprising,” said Anton. “He was the person in charge of the Ballroom’s activities on Mesa. About as black an op as there exists anywhere.”

  “That’s not quite accurate,” said Victor. “Nobody can really be ‘in charge’ of something at that great a distance. But there is no one off Mesa who knows more than Saburo does—and he certainly would have known if the Ballroom here had the capability to be pulling off these sorts of exploits.”

  “Maybe his information is out of date,” suggested Chuanli. “When did you last hear from him? Or them?”

  Victor had a thin smile on his face. “We—‘we’ being all four of us here—spent a total of six, maybe seven hours, being briefed by the two of them. That happened about three months ago. So, no, their information wasn’t very far out of date.”

  “Oh.” Dusek suddenly chuckled. “I’m curious, since I’ve heard about the guy for so long. What’s Jeremy X like? In person, I mean?”

  “Quite charming, actually,” said Anton. “And maybe the best pistol shot in the galaxy.” He hooked a thumb at Victor. “He owes his life to that, in fact.”

  Dusek and Chuanli both looked keenly interested. But Victor made a firm gesture with his hand, the gist of which was not now.

  “It’s a long story,” he said. “For the moment, what matters is that if Anton’s right—and I am quite sure he is—we’re going to start seeing ‘terrorist incidents’ a lot worse than anything we’ve seen so far. Including the use of nukes. That’ll be the magic cloak the Alignment spreads over everything to hide their own disappearance.”

  Dusek’s expression was grim. “And if that happens—when it happens—Mesan security forces will run wild, especially the MISD.”

  Chuanli started to explain the acronym. “That stands for—”

  “Mesan Internal Security Directorate,” Victor finished. “We know. And you can be sure of this—at least one of the ‘terrorist incidents’ will strike hard at MISD personnel. Probably not even at them directly but at their families.”

  Dusek sighed. “Christ. I hadn’t thought of that. They’re bad enough under any conditions, but if they think they’re on a personal mission of vengeance . . .”

  The retaliatory pogroms carried out against the seccy districts following Green Pines had been largely the work of the OPS and—especially—MISD teams which targeted specific neighborhoods within specific residential towers. The MISD was ruthless about snatching seccies off the street, interrogating them however brutally they liked, and making potential troublemakers disappear without a trace. They were accustomed to the protection of their reputation and aura of terror, and their contempt for the seccies was (in some ways) even greater than their contempt for the slaves. That contempt expressed itself in a total disregard for any possible personal rights on the part of the seccies whose paths they crossed, but it also expressed itself in a sort of institutional overconfidence.

  Any seccy who might think about offering the MISD resistance knew there was literally no limit to what would happen to him or those he cared about as part of the MISD policy that “we can always make it worse.” The seccies as a group realized that the nail which stands highest gets hammered first and hardest. Individual seccies, faced with being dragged off by the MISD, or seeing someone they loved being dragged off, might resist (in a fatalistic, hopeless sort of way) because this was the worst thing they could visualize happening to themselves or those loved ones. However, seccies as a group fully realized that if they attempted to impede or resist OPS or MISD arrests, sweeps, etc., they would only succeed in marking themselves and their families for “special attention.” However bitterly they might hate the security goons, and however bitterly they might regret what was happening to a fellow seccy and/or his family, their own families were also hostages to fortune. They dared not draw the MISD’s fury down upon them, especially when centuries of experience had demonstrated to them that resistance was ultimately hopeless and futile, anyway.

  Because of this, MISD troopers and the majority of the analysts working for MISD and OPS—even those who at least attempted to avoid this particular trap—tended to regard all seccies as feckless, cowardly, and subservient. They were a technically free but contemptible and easily cowed layer of society without any more rights (but allowed a few more “privileges”) than the slaves who constituted the even larger layer beneath them and for whom MISD and OPS had even more contempt.

  What these people failed to appreciate, however, was that once someone realizes they are extremely likely to be killed anyway, “we can always make it worse” becomes an ineffective tool. If seccies and their families—their children—were going to be subjected to mass murder, the equation changed. What Anton and Victor were calculating on—counting on—was that under those circumstance the seccies damned well would fight back. And they’d do so with all the ferocity of centuries worth of hatred and bitterness backing up the desperation of any cornered animal.

  Judging from the expressions on their faces, Jurgen Dusek and Triêu Chuanli had already come to that conclusion themselves.

  “This isn’t going to be like it was after Green Pines, boss,” said Chuanli. “And that was pretty horrible.”

  Dusek was staring at a blank spot on the wall, his expression bleak. “No, it’ll be ten times worse. Hell, a hundred times worse.” The boss of Neue Rostock transferred his gaze from the wall to Anton and Victor—and then, to Thandi.

  They’d revealed Thandi’s true identity to Dusek and Chuanli at the start of the meeting. They’d urged the two of them to keep it to themselves, at least for the time being, and were pretty confident they’d actually do so. The old quip three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead had some truth to it, but there were exceptions. Experienced and successful gangsters were likely to be one of them.

  “What are our chances, if we put up a real fight?” he asked her.

  “How many people do you have?”

  “I’ve got about two hundred shooters ready to go—right this minute if I need them—and another five hundred who could back them up within a day. Beyond that . . .” He looked at his chief subordinate. “What do you think, Triêu?”

  Chuanli shrugged. “The problem will be the number of weapons we’ve got available, not the number of people. There are about thirty-five thousand people living in Neue Rostock and plenty of them—men, women, children, old folks—will fight if their backs are against the wall.”

  “What weapons do you have?” asked Thandi.

  “Lots of civilian grade pulsers,” replied Chuanli. “All told . . . pistols, rifles, everything . . . somewhere around three thousand. That’s not counting the odd pistol here and there that someone’s got tucked away.”

  Dusek chuckled, his expression becoming almost cheerful for a moment. “There’s got to be at least another thre
e thousand of those. One of the few advantages of being a seccy is that the powers-that-be don’t give a fuck what we do as long as we keep it to our own districts.”

  Then his face hardened again. “But there’s a lot less in the way of military hardware. There, we’ve got maybe a hundred and fifty, hundred and seventy-five mil-spec pulse rifles—don’t have a huge amount of ammo for them, I’m afraid—and eleven tribarrels. Two of those’re heavy enough to give at least some anti-armor capability. And we’ve got half a dozen plasma rifles, although I don’t know how much good they’ll be inside a tower. For that matter, some of my people’ve read the manuals, but no one’s ever actually used one of ’em. And we’ve got a couple of dozen light SAMs—the Banshee; it’s the standard Peaceforce portable SAM—and a couple of crates of Lancer anti-armor rockets.”

  “Don’t forget the grenade launchers, boss,” Chuanli put in. Victor raised an eyebrow at him, and the gangster chuckled. “We’ve heard about your escapade in Lower Radomsko. We don’t actually use them very often, you understand, but there’s damned few things more impressive to someone looking into its business end than a grenade launcher. We’ve got a couple of dozen of them. And we’ve got forty or fifty flechette guns, too.” He shrugged. “Doubt they’ll be much use against MSID goons in armor, but what the hell? Couldn’t hurt to add ’em to the mix!”

  Thandi’s eyes widened. “That much? That’s way better than I expected. I figured you’d just have a few light tribarrels.”

  Again, Dusek chuckled. “One of the other charming characteristics of the OPS—hell, every security force on the planet except the Mesan Office of Investigation—is that they’re corrupt as well as vicious. That’s usually another burden on us, of course. But it also means it’s not hard to find a goon who’s greedy enough to sell us heavy weaponry.”

  Thandi nodded. That was a common phenomenon on Verge worlds too, but not on this scale. The difference went back to Mesa’s peculiar and unique social structure. The level of oppression visited on seccies was not much different from that leveled on Verge populations, but because Mesa was a highly advanced society the seccies were simply a lot wealthier. Or, at least, weren’t dirt-poor. Some of them could afford tribarrels and plasma guns.