Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  Despite the covering fire, here and there a seccy popped up in one of the windows not currently under fire—there were far too many windows in the tower’s outer walls for all of them to be taken under fire continuously—and ripped off a burst from the military-grade pulsers Bachue the Nose’s people seemed to have in unpleasant numbers. Every time one of them did, the covering tribarrels immediately turned their attention to the window in question, ripping it apart and undoubtedly filling the room behind it with explosions and lethal shrapnel.

  Barrett felt confident that many of those seccies were dead shortly after squeezing their own triggers, but she had a nagging suspicion the death toll was a lot lower than she could have liked. The long-standing contempt she’d cherished where seccies—and especially seccies’ toughness and willingness to fight—were concerned had taken a beating right along with the rest of 2nd Platoon. Whatever else they might be, these seccies had learned a lot of lessons the hard way since Rat Catcher had kicked off. The stupid ones were probably already dead. Certainly the ones that were left didn’t appear especially afflicted by stupidity, and that meant that most of the seccies popping up to fire knew what was going to happen to their firing positions as soon as they did. And that, in turn, meant they’d almost certainly planned on being somewhere else by the time the tribarrel gunners spotted them and shifted aim.

  And the bastards are probably doing just fine at it, Barrett reflected.

  The advancing troopers went forward at a run, each unit directed at a specific entry point—freight delivery doors, for the most part, because they were larger, but a handful of pedestrian entrances for Hancock’s residents, as well. Those entry points had been subjected to special attention from the MISD heavy weapons teams to demolish any barricades the seccies had attempted to erect. Dust and chunks of debris, cascading down the tower’s outer face in stony avalanches from the covering tribarrels’ fire, bombarded 2nd Platoon as Barrett’s section closed with its own entry point. Something large and heavy—or falling from far enough up to feel large and heavy—rebounded from her utility armor’s helmet with force enough to half-stagger her, but she stayed on her feet and followed Ludvigsen’s fire team through the shattered pedestrian entrance and into the tower interior.

  She wasn’t certain exactly what she’d expected. At the very least, she’d counted on running into a lookout or a sentry. But there was nothing.

  The corridor leading away from them was typical of the passageways in a seccy residential tower—much narrower than in the full citizens’ towers, dingy, and poorly lit at the best of times, which this wasn’t. The main lights were out, but the emergency lighting was still up, dimly illuminating the layers of dust drifting in from outside through their entry point like fog. The dust floated around Barrett’s knees as she consulted the schematic on her HUD.

  This was far from the first time she and her section had invaded one of the seccy towers, but it was the first time she’d ever seen the corridors completely deserted, and something with lots of tiny feet scuttled up and down her spine as she gazed down that long, poorly lit bore. The passageway ran arrow-straight towards the bank of grav shafts serving this quadrant of the tower, but there was none of the openness, the airiness, she would have seen somewhere else—like her own tower, for example. The quarters were tight, the walls lined with closed doors on either side, interrupted every ten or fifteen meters by a cross corridor, and her heart sank. It was one thing to advance confidently and arrogantly up a narrow gut like that as part of a routine sweep, or on her way towards a specific apartment number to drag out a specific seccy while all his friends and neighbors froze in their burrows like mice when the cat was a-prowl. It was quite another to contemplate it in the dusty darkness, with a quarter of her section already dead behind her, knowing an ambush might lurk at any point.

  “By the numbers, people,” she said flatly. “Ludvigsen, you’ve got point.”

  “Right, Sarge.”

  There was a lot of anger in Ludvigsen’s acknowledgment, Barrett observed. Maybe the SOB thought she was trying to get him killed to eliminate him as a witness to what had happened to Lieutenant Ferguson . . . and to those massacred seccy children. Which, now that she thought about it, might not be that bad an idea.

  “Malden, stay on your toes,” she continued.

  “Gotcha, Sarge,” Corporal Denise Malden, the leader of Barrett’s second fire team, acknowledged. The rest of 2nd Platoon was flowing into the tower behind them, and Barrett waved into the dimness.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  * * *

  Kayla Barrett’s mouth was unpleasantly dry. It didn’t matter how much water she sucked from her helmet’s nipple, either. She supposed that what she ought to have been feeling was relief, but what she was actually feeling was something very different.

  Second Platoon had advanced to and beyond the first bank of grav shafts. Not surprisingly—this was a seccy tower, after all—the shafts were down. That was scarcely unusual, although she couldn’t help wondering if this time around it was genuinely lack of maintenance or if some overly clever seccy hadn’t simply switched them off. If they had been turned off, however, whoever’d done it had also managed to block the Emergency Services override codes to turn them back on, and that suggested some things she really didn’t want to contemplate about what else might have been done to the tower’s internal systems.

  The advance had gone well, though. The rest of 4th Regiment’s 2nd Battalion had made entrance behind Bravo Company successfully, as well. Like 2nd Platoon, Bravo’s other platoons had moved inward, providing point teams for the rest of the battalion. Those point teams swept the dimness before them with their sensor systems, weapons ready to engage anything they encountered, while the covering teams following on their heels systematically kicked in doors and sensor-swept the apartments behind them. So far, 2nd Platoon had encountered no resistance, although 1st Platoon and Bravo’s HQ section had walked into a nasty little firefight. First Platoon had lost three people, but Captain Shultz and the HQ section had come in on the flank of the seccy firing position through a cross corridor.

  The fighting had been brutal, if brief, and none of the eight seccies in the position had survived.

  That had been about it, though, and Barrett sensed a growing confidence in the men and women of her section. A dangerous confidence.

  “Stay sharp, damn it!” she snapped over the section net. “There’re thousands of the bastards in here somewhere! You think they’re going to let us waltz all the way through and out the other side just like that?”

  No one answered her, but Malden’s covering team moved a little more briskly, a little more alertly, as they kicked open more doors and scanned cross passages.

  Even a miserable rats nest like Hancock had to have some open spaces in it. The squat, eight hundred-meter high cube did have a single central access well, but it was only about twenty meters across. Aside from that, it was a squared off, monotonously repetitive grid. The sort of maze laboratory rats had been sent to negotiate for millennia . . . and which had dominated the design of government housing warehouses for almost as long. But according to her HUD schematic, they were coming up on one of the tower’s commercial sections. It wouldn’t be anything like the spacious malls in the citizens’ towers, but it offered a fairly broad central arcade, surrounded by shops, stores, and restaurants.

  The arcade was Bravo Company’s designated objective point. When the company’s troopers reached it, they would have secured a roughly pie-shaped section sixty meters wide at its base and eighty meters deep. Adding the arcade’s grav shafts to the banks the MISD had already secured and bypassed, they’d have at least a dozen potential points of access to the floors above, and Howell’s other two regiments each had a pair of battalions driving in on separate axes. Their joint objective was a sports complex—a large gymnasium with adjoining tennis courts and a large swimming pool. They had less distance to cover, but they were also moving a lot more slowly. When the
y took the sport complex, however, they would have secured almost half of the rest of the ground floor and all of the grav shafts and stairs which served it. Even with the shafts powered down—and there was no question in Barrett’s mind now that they had been powered down, deliberately—counter-grav equipped troopers would be able to ascend them, and the defenders were going to find it difficult to cover all of those points of vulnerability.

  “Sarge, I’ve got eyes on the objective,” Ludvigsen reported.

  Most of the anger had faded from his voice as they moved steadily deeper, and Barrett was glad to hear it. It was still going to be there between them afterward, and she had no idea how that was going to work out, but for right now they all depended on one another to survive long enough for there to be an “afterward” to worry about.

  “Don’t get carried away,” she replied. “I don’t want anyone rushing out into the open just because we haven’t run into anybody yet.”

  “Don’t worry about me getting carried away!” Ludvigsen snorted, and continued cautiously forward.

  * * *

  “The bastards coming up Gladstone are almost in the zone, Bachue,” Fred Trujillo said tautly.

  “What about Merriwell and Patterson?” the tall, rawboned woman with the beaky nose asked harshly.

  “Not yet. They’re still about two cross corridors out,” Trujillo replied.

  “Shit.”

  Bachue the Nose rested her right palm on the butt of the pulser at her hip, fingers drumming on the holster’s plastic. Her gang was less tightly organized—less disciplined, much as she hated to admit that—than Jurgen Dusek’s, and she hadn’t spent as much time as he had worrying about planning for a possible situation like this. Why the hell should she have? The notion of seccies actually being able to defend a residential tower against a frontal assault was ludicrous.

  Yet, as the warning signs had accumulated, she’d realized Dusek was right about what was coming down this time. Personally, if she’d been able to get her hands on the Ballroom bastards behind the nuclear strikes, she’d gladly have handed them over to the Safeties. It wasn’t like the lunatics were actually going to change anything here on Mesa, and the security agencies’ reaction had been as predictable as sunrise. For that matter, she was none too fond of anyone prepared to kill that many people just to make a point herself.

  But she couldn’t get her hands on them, because she had no idea where to find them—not that she expected the Misties to believe that for a moment—which had left her with only one option. Even a cornered rat would fight savagely when it had no option, and Bachue the Nose was a hell of a lot more dangerous than any rat.

  “Any sign the Gladstone bunch is planning on pushing past Brookner?”

  “Not yet.” Trujillo shook his head. “Looks like you called it, boss. They’re planning to link up at Brookner.”

  Bachue grunted. The Brookner Plaza—although she’d always thought calling it a “plaza” was pretty damned high-flown and fancy for a down-at-the-heels, threadbare shopping arcade—at the intersection of the Gladstone, Merriwell, and Patterson trunk corridors had been an obvious weak spot in Hancock’s defenses. Of course, as Dusek’s advisor Palane had pointed out, obvious weak spots could be very useful things from a defender’s perspective. But to make it work, she wanted as many of the Misties in her sights as possible.

  “What about the ones coming in from the west, Levi?” she asked.

  “They’re still about ten minutes out from Crawford, maybe fifteen at the rate they’re moving,” Levi Andrade, Hancock Tower’s building supervisor, replied from his central console.

  Bachue nodded. There were twice as many Misties in the four-pronged advance moving in from the west, and they were more widely separated. It looked like they were heading for the Crawford Sports Complex, located right off the tower’s central air shaft opening, but their approach routes made it difficult to be certain. Even if they were, though, they’d never reach it by the time the first bunch reached Brookner. Still, she’d made preparations on that front, as well.

  “Get Pablo and his people over to the west side,” she said. She turned her head, looking at the crimson lines advancing across the building manager’s schematic. “Tell him they’ll be coming up Whitman, Severesky, Ibanez, and Chasnikov. They’re not going to be far enough in for the Crawford charges, so tell him to make for the secondary trunk positions.”

  “On it, boss,” Andrade told her, and she turned back to Trujillo, moving closer and resting her left hand on his right shoulder as she looked over his head at his display.

  “We wait a bit longer,” she told him. “I want Pablo in position, and I’d really rather have as many of these other bastards as deep as as we can get them before we pull the plug. Keep a close eye on the Gladstone bunch, though. Let me know if they get antsy.”

  “Gotcha.”

  * * *

  “Malden, secure the entrance,” Barrett directed. “Ludvigsen, I want you and your team about as far out there as that first kiosk. Don’t think about wandering any farther until Captain Shultz and the rest of the Company gets here!”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, Sarge,” Kimmo Ludvigsen said fervently.

  * * *

  Captain Gavin Shultz smacked his left hand on his armored leg in satisfaction. His HUD showed 2nd Platoon already on the objective. He still didn’t like to think about how . . . messy accounting for Ferguson’s death might turn out to be, and he hadn’t been delighted to get a brand-new replacement for the dead lieutenant on such short notice. But damned if Kalanadhabhatla hadn’t turned his frigging problem platoon around!

  His other platoons were making good progress, as well, and aside from that little firefight where he’d managed to get his HQ people stuck in, there’d been no resistance at all to speak of. He always known seccies were cowards, and they were damned well proving it now.

  “All right, people,” he said, striding along just behind 1st Platoon’s point team, “let’s close it up and get a move on. We’ve got us some seccies to kill!”

  * * *

  “They’re all into the zone now.” Trujillo’s voice was tighter and a little higher-pitched than it had been, and Bachue looked over his shoulder at the display.

  The Misties were so self-confident that they hadn’t even tried to knock out her corridor surveillance cameras. Or perhaps they simply hadn’t realized they were there. They were completely separate from the official surveillance system even seccy towers were required by law to provide, and their pickups were far better maintained—and concealed—than the official ones.

  “How’s Pablo doing, Levi?” Bachue asked over her shoulder, never turning away from Trujillo’s display.

  “About there, boss. He says two minutes.”

  “Are the Misties into the secondary zone?”

  “Just about. My cameras aren’t as good as Fred’s on this side. Looks like we’ve got maybe . . . seventy-five, eighty percent into the zone. Probably got a few already past it, though.”

  Bachue frowned thoughtfully, then nodded.

  “Let those bastards moving up on Brookner get a little deeper into the zone, Fred,” she said, squeezing Trujillo’s shoulder. “Another fifteen or twenty meters.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  * * *

  Bentley Howell gazed down at the Cyclops’ map in satisfaction as his battalions penetrated deeper and deeper into Hancock Tower. The green lines indicating their progress crawled across the display steadily, and he smiled triumphantly. He’d told that idiot Drescher the seccies would break and run when they realized the situation was hopeless. He had them bottled up in their holes now, and they were probably pissing themselves just thinking about what was headed towards them. He’d have all of the first five floors of that damned tower secured by the time Drescher ever even got here! He wouldn’t be able to keep her from claiming credit for the occupation of the rest of Hancock, but the record would clearly show who’d executed the initial breaching operation an
d damned well handed her the tower! In fact, he was looking forward to—

  * * *

  “Now,” Bachue the Nose said softly.

  * * *

  Hancock Tower lacked the spaciously laid out cellular structure of a tower like Saracen or Rasmussen, but the loadbearing walls and floor plates of its relentlessly square grid work were just as tough, just as strong, as those other towers’ structures. Ceramacrete was ceramacrete. There was no point in anyone’s trying to provide substandard materials, because the basic materials were so cheap to begin with. And there was no point skimping on the fusing, because either it fused completely or—for all intents and purposes—not at all.

  That meant that despite its smaller size, the much more tightly divided Hancock was actually structurally stronger than Saracen or Rasmussen. And, of course, “smaller” was a purely relative term. Bachue the Nose’s organization had been unable to evacuate as many of Hancock’s residents as Dusek had managed to get out of Neue Rostock. They hadn’t planned for it, and—as Thandi Palane had suspected—they hadn’t explored the subsurface passages and networks as diligently as Dusek had. Bachue had managed to get five or six thousand of Hancock’s people evacuated through Neue Rostock, using the tunnels Dusek had mapped, before the Safeties and Misties cut the two towers off from one another, but she still had well over twenty thousand “civilians” to look out for.

  A surprising—or perhaps not so surprising, under the circumstances—number of those people had volunteered to assist the gang members in preparing Hancock for what was to come. Again, Bachue had started later, with less warning from Victor Cachat, but her people had pitched in enthusiastically once she did start. And, strong as ceramacrete was, it wasn’t battle steel. A little judicious work with rock drills and the odd kilo of blasting compound—civilian, construction-grade compound would do just fine—tucked into the drilled holes could accomplish wonders.