by David Weber
It also helped Tsakakis to take his boss’s unpredictable and inconvenient work schedule with a certain philosophical acceptance. Yes, it made his life difficult. But it also made it even more difficult for a potential assassin to predict the citizen secretary’s movements with any degree of confidence. And if his principal’s habit of disordering all of the citizen lieutenant’s carefully worked out schedules without warning kept his entire team off balance, it also prevented them from settling into a comfortable, overconfident rut.
Tsakakis reminded himself firmly that staying out of a rut was a good thing, but it was unusually difficult at the moment. He had no idea what could have inspired the citizen secretary to get up four hours early, but it would have been helpful if he’d mentioned the possibility that he might do so before he turned in for the night. If he had, Tsakakis and the normal daytime security commander could have coordinated their schedules properly. As it was, the citizen lieutenant had been forced to screen Citizen Captain Russell—again—to alert her to the fact that Citizen Secretary Saint-Just would not, in fact, be at home where she expected to find him when she and her people reported for duty. The citizen captain was as accustomed as Tsakakis himself to such sudden and unpredictable alterations, but that didn’t make her any happier about being awakened at two in the morning so that she could start waking up all of the rest of her people, as well. It hadn’t made her any less grumpy, either, and even though she’d known it wasn’t Tsakakis’ fault, she’d torn a strip off his hide just to relieve her own irritability.
Tsakakis grinned at the memory of Russell’s inspired vituperation and pithy comments on his probable ancestry. The citizen captain had been a Marine sergeant before the overthrow of the Harris Government, and her tongue’s roughness was renowned throughout State Security. Tsakakis had enjoyed more opportunities to observe her style and vocabulary than most, and some of those opportunities had been less than pleasant, but he’d always recognized that he was in the presence of an artist, and he wished that he’d had his com unit on record to capture this morning’s effort for posterity. He wasn’t certain, but he didn’t believe that she’d repeated herself even once.
They reached the citizen secretary’s private office, and Tsakakis wiped the grin off of his face and assumed his on-duty expression as Saint-Just disappeared into his inner sanctum. The citizen lieutenant took a few seconds to inspect the positioning of the rest of his seven-man detail in the public corridor and the outer office assigned to Saint-Just’s personal secretary, then opened a discreetly ordinary door and stepped through it. He crossed the floor of the cramped room beyond, seated himself before the surveillance panel, and brought the system online.
As public figures went, Oscar Saint-Just was more willing than most to accommodate the desires of his bodyguards. A lifetime as a security professional in his own right had a tendency to help a man appreciate the difficulties of his security staff’s duties. And the fact that no more than a few trillion people would have liked to kill him gave a certain added point to his responsiveness. But there were one or two places where he drew the line, and one of those was his steadfast refusal to permit an armed bodyguard actually in his office. Tsakakis would have been happier if he’d been allowed to stand his post where he could keep the citizen secretary directly under his own eye, but he knew how fortunate he was not to have to put up with the sort of eccentric whims and all too frequent temper tantrums that came out of someone like Citizen Secretary Farley. And at least Saint-Just didn’t raise any fuss over electronic surveillance.
Tsakakis unsealed his uniform tunic and hung it over the back of another chair, drew a cup of coffee from the urn in the corner, and settled himself comfortably for another thankfully dull, boring watch.
* * *
Major Alina Gricou swore with silent venom. Damn the man! They’d known he had a penchant for unpredictable movements, but why in hell had he had to pick this night, of all nights, to suffer from workaholic insomnia?
She forced her temper back under control, but it was hard. Her strike team packed the cargo compartment of the unmarked civilian air van claustrophobically, and she found herself longing for a proper assault shuttle’s com systems with an almost physically painful intensity. She could feel her people’s tension like an extension of her own. Every one of them knew the official plan as well as she did, which meant that all of them also knew that the operation’s carefully choreographed timing had gone straight down the crapper.
Gricou didn’t know why the execution code had been sent now, with so little warning—there hadn’t been time for neat, orderly briefings—but she suspected that she wouldn’t have liked the reasons if she had known what they were. All of the ones which occurred to her had to do with things like security breaches, and the thought that their targets’ SS security teams might be waiting for them had not been a palatable one.
And now this.
She closed her eyes and forced herself to think things through. If she absolutely had to, she could use her battle armor’s internal com to contact General Conflans, but that had to be a last-ditch option. She wasn’t particularly concerned about the security of the encrypted transmissions, but StateSec maintained a round-the-clock listening watch, and any military-band transmissions from unmarked civilian vans hovering just outside the residential tower which the commander of State Security called home were likely to arouse all sorts of suspicions.
All right. If he wasn’t here, there was only one other place he could be. And maybe that was actually a good thing. Gricou had never truly been happy about going after Saint-Just at home. Killing civilians in job lots was what StateSec did, not what she did, but she’d known going in that collateral civilian casualties would be unavoidable if she and her strike team met any organized resistance in a residential tower. But if he’d gone into the office early, there wouldn’t be any civilians around. Or not any innocent ones, at any rate. Of course, the downside was that StateSec HQ was scarcely what someone might call a soft target. But at three in the morning, the on-site security people’s guard was bound to be down at least a little, and she had what was supposed to be the complete, current blueprint of the tower in her armor’s computers. Best of all, no one would expect for a moment that anyone could be insane enough to go after the ogre in his own lair.
Getting in shouldn’t be a problem, she concluded. Getting out again might be another matter, but if they succeeded in taking Saint-Just alive, they’d have an extremely persuasive spokesman to get them past the defenses. And if they didn’t succeed in taking him alive—or at least in killing him—then they and all the members of their families were extremely unlikely to survive the scorched earth purges which were certain to follow. Nausea churned at the thought, but she didn’t have time for that. The operation had been planned to send her team in after Saint-Just and Captain Wicklow’s in after Rob Pierre, simultaneously and before anyone else moved, in order to get them in before any general alarm could be raised, and Wicklow had no way to know that Saint-Just had picked this morning to be elsewhere. Which meant she had to make her decision quickly.
She turned to the pilot.
“Turn us around, Pete. It looks like we’re going calling on the Citizen Secretary at his office, after all.” She bared her teeth in a predatory grin. “I hope he won’t be too upset that we didn’t call ahead for an appointment.”
Mikis Tsakakis yawned and stretched, then grimaced and reached for his coffee cup once more. Few things were more boring than watching someone else sit at a desk and do paperwork. But boring was good. Any bodyguard would unhesitatingly agree with that sentiment, he reflected, then snorted in mild amusement at his own thoughts and took a sip of coffee.
He glanced at a side display that monitored traffic around the tower. What happened outside was neither his concern nor his responsibility, but at this motherless hour any distraction was welcome.
Not that there was very much to see. StateSec’s critical departments worked around the clock, of course, but t
he population of the tower was less than half as large for the night shift, and the air car parking garages were correspondingly sparsely occupied. He skimmed idly through the various levels, and grimaced again. There was no real difference in the light levels within the vast internal caverns, yet somehow they seemed dimmer and more deserted at such an early hour.
He watched a civilian air van ease in through one of the automated security portals and quirked an eyebrow. The van was unmarked, but then, a lot of SS vehicles were unmarked, and he wondered what covert operation this one was assigned to.
Alina Gricou very carefully did not sigh in relief as the security systems accepted the admittance code. General Conflans had assured her that they’d managed to get their hands on valid perimeter security codes, and she trusted the general with her life, or she wouldn’t have been here in the first place. But she was also a veteran who had learned the First Law of Combat decades ago: Shit Happens. She made it a point to assume that any intelligence briefing would be full of crap, because that way any surprises would be pleasant ones.
Unfortunately, she’d had very few surprises in that particular regard.
This time looked like an exception, however, and she watched the schematic in her visor HUD as her pilot worked his carefully casual way towards the proper parking stall.
The sound of explosions woke him.
He didn’t realize at once that they were explosions. He hadn’t slept well in years, but he’d managed to sleep far more deeply tonight than usual, and at first, he thought it was simply a distant thunderstorm. But as he roused from sound sleep to groggy wakefulness he realized that it couldn’t be thunder. The Chairman’s Suite lay at the very heart of the People’s Tower, and it was far too well soundproofed for mere thunder to disturb its occupant.
He roused further and sat up quickly in bed, and his pulse quickened as more explosions sounded. They were coming closer, and he rolled out of bed and fumbled his bare feet into a pair of shoes even as his hand darted under the pillow and came out with a heavy, military-issue pulser.
The door to his bedroom flew open, and he spun in a half-crouch, pulser rising. The man in the sudden opening flung his arms up, and Rob Pierre just barely managed not to squeeze the firing stud as he recognized one of his bodyguards.
“We’ve got to get you out of here, Sir!” the StateSec sergeant exclaimed.
“What’s going on?” Pierre demanded. “Where’s Citizen Lieutenant Adamson?”
“Sir, I don’t know.” The bodyguard’s voice was tight with tension, and the words slurred as they tripped over one another with the clumsiness of panic restrained only by the iron rigor of training. “They’re coming at us from the roof and from below, and they’ve got heavier weapons than we do. Please, Sir! There’s no time for questions—you’ve got to go now, or—”
Pierre was already hurrying towards the door. The fact that the citizen sergeant didn’t even know where Adamson, the commander of his personal security detail for over two T-years, was said terrifying things about what must be happening outside his bedroom. But the man who had made himself master of the People’s Republic of Haven was not the sort to stand paralyzed, like an Old Earth rabbit caught in a ground car’s headlights, in an emergency. The StateSec sergeant’s shoulders relaxed ever so slightly as the man he was responsible for protecting with his own life began to move, and he turned and stepped back out into the hallway first.
Pierre was almost surprised by the power of his own fear as the entire tower seemed to quiver to the fury of explosions and approaching combat. He’d thought that after so many death warrants, so much blood, he and Death were old friends. But they weren’t, and he was astounded to discover that despite all his weariness and all the times he had wished there were some way—anyway—to dismount from the tiger of the People’s Republic, he wanted desperately to live.
A haze of smoke and dust hung in the luxuriously carpeted passageway, and he could hear the wailing warble of fire alarms as temperature sensors responded to the inferno ripping its way towards his suite. The citizen sergeant had been joined by three other StateSec troopers. One had a light tribarrel, but the other three carried only pulse rifles, and, aside from the citizen sergeant, not one of them was from his regular detail. But the obviously scratch-built team seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and with the citizen sergeant directly behind them, they formed a flying wedge, moving down the corridor at a half-run. Pierre knew they were headed for the emergency dropshaft hidden in his private conference room, and he spared a moment to pray that whoever was behind this attack didn’t know about the shaft or where it emerged.
And then, suddenly, it didn’t matter whether they knew or not. Pierre felt the overpressure on his back as another explosion, louder than any of the others, roared behind him. The citizen sergeant spun around to face him, right hand bringing up his pulser while his left reached out, grabbed the Citizen Chairman by the collar of his pajamas and literally flung him further up the passage. Pierre’s feet left the floor, and he sailed forward like some ungainly bird, until one of the pulse rifle-armed StateSec men caught him and slammed him to the floor.
Citizen Chairman Rob Pierre felt the StateSec trooper’s weight come down on him. Knew the bodyguard was protecting him with his own body. Saw the citizen sergeant go down on one knee, raising his pulser in the two-handed grip of a man on a pistol range. Heard the tribarrel wine and hiss as a chainsaw of darts sizzled back up the passage. The citizen sergeant was firing now, full auto, filling the air with death, and none of it mattered at all. The figures striding through the smoke and newborn flame where the explosive charge had breached the corridor wall loomed up out of the inferno like ungainly trolls, swollen and misshapen in the soot-black of battle armor. The hurricane of pulser darts sparkled and flashed with spiteful beauty as they ricocheted from that armor, but not even the tribarrel was heavy enough to penetrate it. The ricochets were a lethal cloud, rebounding from the armored figures to lacerate what was left of the corridor walls, and Pierre knew that every one of his bodyguards must realize that they had no chance at all against Marine battle armor.
Yet all four of them stood their ground, pouring their futile fire back down the passageway, and then one of the armored attackers raised a grenade launcher. The launcher steadied, and the last thing Citizen Chairman Rob Pierre ever saw was the way the StateSec citizen sergeant flew backwards as the grenade impacted directly on his chest before it detonated.
The shrill sound of the alarm took Tsakakis completely by surprise.
For a moment, he didn’t even recognize which one it was, but then he saw the flashing light on his com panel, and his heart seemed to stop. Sheer disbelief held him paralyzed for perhaps two breaths, and then the heel of his hand slammed down on the outside line’s acceptance button.
“They’re coming right over us! We never saw them on the way in, and—”
Explosions and the sound of weapons fire formed a hideous backdrop for the desperate voice, and then a final, louder explosion chopped it off with dreadful finality, and Mikis Tsakakis went white. He hadn’t recognized the frantic voice, but he was certain he’d known the speaker. He knew every member of the Citizen Chairman’s personal security detail.
His brain seemed to be frozen by the sheer impossibility of what must have happened. Thought was momentarily beyond him, but training substituted for it. His left hand hit his own alarm key as if it belonged to someone else, and his right hand had already drawn his pulser before he was even fully out of his chair.
The strident howl of the alarms was almost enough to drown out the thunderous roar of chemical explosives as the passengers from the unmarked civilian van triggered their breaching charges.
Major Gricou led the way through the shattered security door. Properly, she knew, she should have let Sergeant Jackson take point, but that was a lesson she’d always had just a little bit of difficulty learning. Besides, in this situation out in front was where she needed to be, so Jackson could ju
st keep himself busy watching her back.
The sudden clangor of alarms had taken her by surprise, but only for a moment, and she congratulated herself on her timing. She knew what had to have alerted whoever had sounded them. It couldn’t have been the detection of her own team, because not even StateSec was stupid enough to warn a hostile assault force by setting off alarms all over the frigging building before their response teams were in position to strike. Which meant something else must have caused it, and she knew what that something else had to be. But although the news that someone had attacked Pierre was bound to throw SS HQ into a tizzy and send their security personnel to a higher state of alert, there wouldn’t be enough time for it to do them any good. In fact, the confusion which rumor and counter-rumor must inevitably engender would actually help her.
She couldn’t expect that confusion to last for long. Whatever she might think of StateSec’s morals, its personnel were too well trained for that. But for at least the next few minutes, all the training in the world wouldn’t be enough to offset the sheer stunning surprise of the discovery that a coup attempt was underway. And while the surprise lasted…
She stepped through the breach, turned to her left, and sent a screaming pattern of death howling down the corridor from her flechette gun. The SS file clerk who’d stood gawking at the night-black troll emerging from the cloud of dust and rubble didn’t even have time to scream.
Tsakakis’ team members reacted almost as quickly as he had. They were already opening the special wall lockers for the heavy weapons stored in them and assembling in the secretary’s outer office by the time he made it out of the surveillance room. But just like him, their reaction was one of trained reflex and guard dog instinct which scarcely consulted their forebrains at all. They had no idea at all what was happening.
“Someone just attacked Citizen Chairman Pierre!” he barked, and saw his own shock in their expressions. “I don’t know what’s happening at that end,” he went on tersely, “but it didn’t sound good. And if this is some kind of coup attempt, the Citizen Secretary has to be on the same list, so—”