by David Weber
Please, God, she thought. I know you probably aren’t even on speaking terms with us at the moment, and we probably deserve it. But please, help me find a way to not kill every single person in that tower.
* * *
“We lost Aaronson and his tribarrel when they punched out the Proctor and Sangamon junction hardpoint,” Triêu Chuanli said wearily. He scrubbed one hand across his face and shook himself. “We got Serengeti and his crew out first, though.”
Thandi Palane nodded. She sat tipped back in the central control chair, her expression calm, but the awareness of approaching defeat swept through her. Frankly, she was surprised they’d held this long, once the Peaceforce took over from OPS and its stooges.
She knew who was in command on the other side now. Despite the savagery and close quarters nature of the combat, they’d taken a handful of prisoners—and captured quite a lot of highly useful weapons—over the last terrible weeks, and most of those prisoners had a tendency to spill their guts once they realized they’d truly fallen into seccy hands. Others had been more defiant, even though she knew Dusek’s people had been less than gentle with them. She supposed they probably ought to be observing all the niceties of the Deneb Accords, since the Peaceforce was, after all, a uniformed, regular arm of a legally recognized government. On the other hand, Dusek’s people and the volunteers who joined them had never ratified the Accords, and they could all be fairly confident that the MPP wasn’t going to be observing them where they were concerned, either.
Actually, the most interesting of the prisoners was the MISD section sergeant who’d been delivered—eventually—to Dusek. The handful of survivors from Bachue the Nose’s organization had endured several narrow escapes evading security forces in the labyrinth of underground passages between what had once been Hancock Tower and Neue Rostock, but they’d made it in the end. Thandi was glad they had, although she was far from sure what to make of Kayla Barrett.
The woman’s right leg had been beyond salvage by the time her captors dragged her into Neue Rostock, and Rudrani Nimbakar, who’d received quite good bootleg medical training despite her seccy origins by way of some of Dusek’s “gray economy” contacts, had amputated it just below the hip. If the woman lived—which seemed unlikely—regenerating the lost limb wouldn’t be particularly difficult. Aside from that and a moderate concussion, she’d been in pretty good shape, all things considered, when she finally arrived in Nimbakar’s infirmary, but there was something about her . . .
Thandi supposed any Misty who found herself in seccy hands, especially after what had already happened, was bound to be at least a little off. But Barrett seemed remarkably calm. She did what she was told to do, she was actually courteous—courteous, not fawning or subservient, and there definitely was a difference—to her captors, and she readily answered any question put to her. She hadn’t had an enormous amount of information to offer about the Peaceforcers, but she’d readily provided all she did have. And yet there was that sense of something broken inside her. Something even worse than the sorts of sights and sounds so many others were enduring. It was as if she was merely waiting for something only she knew was coming, but whatever it was, it had stamped out any interest she might ever have had in her own future.
Thandi gave herself a mental shake. She doubted she’d ever find out what was actually going on inside Section Sergeant Barrett’s head, and that was probably just as well. She doubted she really wanted to know. But the way her mind kept wandering back to Barrett was probably a sign of her own growing mental fatigue.
“We’re not going to make it, are we?” Jurgen Dusek sounded as weary as Chuanli looked, and she glanced across to where the gang boss sat at another console. “They’re going to take Neue Rostock away from us way before your friends could possibly get here, aren’t they?”
“Probably,” Victor Cachat said. He’d arrived in the control room with Chuanli, and even his improbably handsome disguise looked worn and battered. He was as dirty as Chuanli, a bulky bandage swelled the bloodstained shirt covering his upper right arm, and a hand-sized bruise discolored the left side of his face. He had to be just as exhausted as the seccy, but no one would have guessed it to look at him. In fact, he looked as calm and collected as he’d been at the start of the siege. It took someone who knew him really well—someone like Thandi Palane—to realize just how desperate even he must be beginning to feel. Of course, Victor’s desperation wasn’t quite like anyone else’s, she reflected.
“Victor’s right,” she said. It didn’t occur to her to offer Dusek any comforting half-truths. Even if it might once have, it didn’t now; she and the gangster had been through too much by now. “I’ll be honest, this Drescher who’s calling the shots for the other side’s a lot better than I’d estimated she’d be. And the Peaceforce is better, too.” She shrugged. “Maybe I let myself be persuaded to underestimate them because of what miserable excuses for troops the Safeties and Misties are.” She snorted. “Hard to believe, but most of them were actually worse than I’d expected! Probably only fair that the Peacies turned out to be better.”
“Well, there aren’t as many Misties left as there used to be,” Chuanli put in grimly. “Not after the way Bachue cut them to pieces in Hancock.”
Thandi looked at him and nodded. She’d distrusted Bachue’s gleefully triumphant estimate of how many MISD troopers the initial Hancock ambush had killed, but only until she’d had an opportunity to talk to Barrett. Until the section sergeant had confirmed it, Thandi wouldn’t have believed anyone would be stupid enough to send three battalions of the MISD into that kind of opposition without any intelligence on what the other side had or how it was deployed.
Unfortunately, by the time Barrett arrived in Neue Rostock to do any confirming, Bachue and all of her people—including all of the “civilians” still trapped in Hancock—had been dead, which had deprived Thandi of any opportunity to apologize for her original skepticism.
“No, there aren’t,” she agreed out loud. “And I think our Peaceforce prisoners are probably right about who called in the tower buster on Hancock. They’re probably even right about why Drescher didn’t use any KEWs on us for so long.”
She smiled thinly, and despite their grim situation, Dusek and Chuanli actually laughed. It was part of the bizarre nature of the fighting that here in Neue Rostock’s central control room the air was still cool and dust free and they still had access to the Mesan information net. But the same could not be said for certain other places, both inside the tower and out. And it would have been just a bit pointless for even Culture and Information to try to hide the nature of what had happened to Hancock, since three quarters of Mendel had been blanketed in a snowlike covering of dust and ash. Thandi doubted very much that anybody actually believed a single word about the “nuclear suicide bombers” story Bryce Lackland and his minions were spouting to explain that ash fall, but it had suggested one reason for Drescher’s restraint where kinetic weapons were concerned. Probably not Drescher’s, really; it had the stink of a political decision to Thandi’s nostrils. Either way, she was grateful for it. Once the KEWs had started falling again, she’d known their time was growing short.
“I think it’s time we started thinking about withdrawing as many of your people as we can,” she said, looking back at Dusek.
The gangster frowned, and she grimaced.
“Look,” she said, “you and Triêu are right, Jurgen. They are going to take Neue Rostock away from us, probably in less than a week. The one thing that’s actually worked out better than I’d projected, though, is that we still hold the grav shafts and they still haven’t managed to seal off the tunnels. That means we can still get your people—or a lot of them, anyway—out, and it’s time we started thinking in those terms.”
Dusek continued frowning, and she glanced at Victor.
“Thandi’s right, Jurgen,” Victor said. “I know I’m the one who got you into this, so you might not think I’m the best person to be giving advice now,
but she’s right. You need to get as many of your people out as you can . . . and you need to go with them.”
Dusek looked up sharply, his frown deeper than ever, and Victor smiled wolfishly at him.
“Culture and Information’s mouthpieces wouldn’t be spending so much time trying to blame this all on you—specifically on you—if they weren’t scared as hell of you,” the Havenite said. “The last thing a genuinely repressive regime wants is a folk hero on the other side, and that’s exactly what you’ve become.”
“I’m not going.” Dusek’s voice was flat, and Thandi felt one eyebrow quirk. “Maybe it is time to start getting some of our people out, but I’m not going to be one of them.”
“This isn’t the best time to start turning all noble,” Victor said mildly.
“Fuck noble,” Dusek replied even more flatly. “I’m not going.”
Thandi started to argue, then stopped herself and glanced at Victor and shook her head ever so slightly, instead. He regarded her quizzically for a moment, then gave a patented, minimal Victor shrug.
“Have it your own way,” he said, and Dusek grunted in obvious satisfaction.
Thandi was positive the gangster would never put it into words, but she knew exactly what was going through his head. Before she’d met him—and before he’d allied himself with her and Victor—she might not have believed it was possible. Now she knew better, and she felt a deep and abiding sense of warmth as she looked at him.
Victor had been right from the beginning; Dusek always had been more than “just” a gangster, whether he would ever have admitted it or not. But he’d still been mostly a gangster, and now he’d become something else. The crime lord was still in there, and not very far from the surface, yet it wasn’t the crime lord who’d announced that he wasn’t leaving Neue Rostock. No, the Jurgen Dusek who’d announced that had made the transition from gangster to patriot.
She glanced at Chuanli and saw the same hardness in his eyes. Both of them knew the equation on Mesa had been changed forever, whether or not the Grand Alliance ever responded to their desperate call for help. The seccies would never again simply lie down and die for the Office of Public Safety. They’d seen where that led . . . and they’d discovered that they could fight back. That they could hurt their oppressors, punish them in return . . . even defeat them. What had happened to the Security Directorate in Hancock, what was happening even now to the Peaceforce in Neue Rostock, proved that, and all of the Culture and Information propaganda in the universe couldn’t hide that truth.
More than that, Neue Rostock’s stand had already bought time for other seccy communities to begin organizing, begin stockpiling weapons and preparing their own defenses. The forces Mesa had been forced to commit to reducing Neue Rostock alone had prevented the Office of Public Safety from breaking up those defenses, and the longer Neue Rostock continued to stand, the higher the blood price the Safeties and Misties would pay if they attempted to break them up afterward. None of the other seccy communities by themselves could hope to stand off the massed might of OPS and the Peaceforce, but neither could` the security establishment possibly hope to suppress all of them. The only way they could do that would be to call in the KEWs from the very beginning . . . and the seccy communities were inside their own cities. To rain kinetic weapons on them would be to devastate their own communities, their own infrastructure . . . their own families.
My God, she thought. Victor was right again—probably more right than even he realized. We’ve started a genuine revolution, and if the seccies go up in flames, the slaves aren’t going to be far behind.
She remembered the comment Victor had made about providing Torch with the equivalent of its own Alamo if they all died here in Neue Rostock. Jurgen Dusek had probably never thought in terms of a glorious last stand in his entire life, but now he’d grasped the reality—the larger-than-life reality, but still reality—that draped itself around those sorts of stands. The reality of Thermopylae and Masada, of Fort Saint Elmo and Khartoum. Of the Alamo, Verdun, and Stalingrad. Of the Battle of Carson and the Second Battle of Yeltsin and a thousand other places where men and women had stood their ground. Stood to die. “They shall not pass!” All too often the defenders who’d shouted that warcry had failed. They’d fallen, and the enemy had marched forward across their bodies. But for every Thermopylae there was a Battle of Salamis, and for every Alamo there was a Battle of San Jacinto. For every Stalingrad there was a Battle of Kursk . . . and ultimately, there was a Battle of Berlin, as well.
That was what Jurgen Dusek and Triêu Chuanli had decided to give the seccies of Mesa—give their people, with an awareness that they were their people—their own Leonidas, their own Travis . . . their own Spartacus. And if they died in the giving, so be it.
“I think we should at least start evacuating the wounded,” she said.
Chapter 65
“—and then,” Gillian Drescher said using her pointer to drop an icon into the holographic terrain display, “Brigadier Hanratty’s people will attack here. Essentially, First Brigade and Third Brigade are diversions. If either of them has an opportunity to convert a diversionary attack into an actual attack with a chance of success, I expect the opportunity to be taken, but there’s no prize here for running unnecessary risks and getting your people chopped up.”
She looked up from the display to meet her regained commanders’ eyes levelly.
“We’re grinding them away, but they’ve proven repeatedly how badly they can hurt us if we get ahead of ourselves. So we’re doing this methodically, carefully, by The Book.” She forbore to mention that the old Book had proven itself woefully inadequate. All of them understood that she was talking about the new Book. Her book, rewritten and annotated on the fly. “Sixth Brigade is the key here. If they can reach this objective, we’ll be positioned to squeeze out this entire portion of the tower—” her pointer’s icon shifted, circling a crimson-coded portion of Neue Rostock’s interior “—and that will flank their position on the gamma group of grav shafts.”
She stood for a moment, gazing at them, then deactivated her pointer and shrugged.
“This operation isn’t going to give us Neue Rostock,” she told them. “But what it is going to do is to make it even harder for them to get in and out of the damned tunnels. And it’s going to put us in a better position to drive for the central residential sections. If we cut off the tunnels, we cut off the flow of reinforcements, and once we do that, we can finally start rolling them up one section at a time. Is that understood?”
Her subordinates nodded, their expressions grim, but confidence glittered in the backs of their eyes, and she nodded back. None of them expected it to be easy, and all of them expected to lose a lot more people, but like her, they realized the end was in sight for the seccies.
“All right. Let’s look at some of the details. Byrum?”
“Yes, Ma’am.” Colonel Bartel stepped forward and activated his own pointer. “Brigadier Edson, to make this work, your Second Regiment will have to advance to at least this point. Once you’ve reached it, we’ll be able to—”
* * *
“Shit!”
The shouted expletive was all the warning the seccy strong point had. The Peaceforce didn’t have a great deal of all-up battle armor, and battle armor wasn’t really that well suited to fighting in the close confines of a seccy residential tower. That was the main reason Gillian Drescher had been holding it in reserve. The other reason was that she’d been waiting for the proper moment to commit it.
That moment had come.
The Mesan Planetary Peaceforce’s assault companies weren’t as well trained as Solarian League Marines or the Royal Manticoran Marines. Very few military organizations matched the capabilities of those elite forces. But they were well trained enough and there was nothing at all wrong with their courage, and they bulled forward, heavy tribarrels blasting. None of them carried plasma rifles—there were limits to the amount of destruction they could inflict without
effectively blocking their own advance—but the hurricane of heavy tribarrel darts was almost as bad.
The strong point was a solid wall across the corridor, built out of slabs of ceramacrete and sandbags. The only opening in it was the firing slit which had been left for the tripod-mounted tribarrel—in this case, one of the several Peaceforce tribarrels which had been captured by the defenders. It wasn’t a very large opening, but there were thousands of darts screaming towards it. Ceramacrete dust erupted, the incredible, deafening thunder of the exploding darts filled the corridor, and a few of those darts actually slashed through the firing slit and exploded against the tribarrel’s battle steel splinter shield.
The seccy gunner stood her ground, holding down the firing stud, hosing the Peaceforcers with her own explosive darts, and even battle armor had its limits. She killed five of them and wounded two more before their companions’ fire punched through the splinter shield and blew her apart. Her assistants dragged her body frantically aside, trying to get the tribarrel back into action, but the battle-armored Peaceforcers had gotten close enough to launch a fusillade of grenades through the slit. Fresh thunder rolled, punctuated by screams—brief screams—and then the Peaceforce combat engineers swarmed forward, setting the charges to blow the barricade.
They were almost done when Nolan Olsen pressed a button in the command center and the shaped charges on either side of the passage blew. Blast and fragments swept the engineers, whose utility armor was far less resistant than battle armor, and their screams disappeared abruptly as a massive chunk of ceramacrete smashed down onto them. But the blast did little harm to the battle-armored troopers who’d been waiting impatiently behind the engineers, and the explosions effectively breached the barricade the engineers had been trying to remove in the first place.