The Price of Peace

by Mike Moscoe

  Immediately, Zylon realized her staff was underdressed. Everyone here sported coats, ties, even three-piece suits; her guards still had mud on their boots. “Where’s Big Al?” she asked one of the security people seated at the information desk.

  He glanced up, took in Zylon and her associates with a single sweep, and went back to the board he was watching intensely. “Tied up in meetings. Not seeing anyone today. Ned, is there anything we can do about that bogey?”

  Nobody ignored Zylon Plovdic. “Listen up, boy. I’m the one who got Big Al out of bed this morning. I’m the one who let all of you know we had a little problem here. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be waking up tomorrow morning to find this place under new management, you without a job and no idea how it happened. Now, if you don’t want to be handed a hoe and put to work for some of my boys, you’ll tell me where Big Al is.”

  That got the fellow’s attention. He cast a very worried look to the man on his right, apparently his supervisor. That one didn’t even look up from his board. “Mr. Alexander Popov is presently tied up in meetings in the seventeenth-floor conference room,” he said evenly. “Those in attendance have asked not to be disturbed. Rod, I’ve called in the unknown. No reaction team available. They don’t want to call out the junior militia.”

  “Thank you,” Zylon huffed. “Maybe Big Al will send me and my boys out to settle your little problem.” That got a rise out of them. She signaled her crew to a bank of elevators; Mordy rejoined them. For not yet three in the morning, the place was alive. She shared the elevator with suits who got off at the fifth floor, Acquisitions and Contracts; seventh floor, Legal; and ninth floor, Promotions and Sales. Aware of the stares her crew got, she deposited them at the tenth-floor cafeteria before going on to seventeen.

  As soon as she exited the elevator, the receptionist looked up from his desk. “May I help you?”

  “Big Al told me to see him as soon as I got in. I’m the one who raised the alarm.”

  “Ms. Plovdic, yes. He asks you to wait for him. As you understand, things are a bit unusual this morning. At the moment, the board is facing some very challenging opportunities.”

  The loud voices overflowing the two thick wooden doors and flooding the heavily carpeted foyer told Zylon everyone didn’t see the same opportunities in this morning’s challenges.

  She sat.

  • • •

  The assault craft flew low, heading up the river that flowed through Richman. A hundred miles out, they picked up a search radar. “Military issue,” the spacer at the countermeasures station announced.

  “I think they bought it cheap at an army surplus sale,” Steve contributed. Trouble wasn’t sure he’d trust that data.

  Fifty miles out, a computer demanded their access code and insisted they surrender control of their vehicle. The bos’n ducked lower and yanked the craft around to an easterly heading. They made a couple more nudges into radar coverage, got queried each time, but saw no sign of a lock-on or a missile.

  “Would be nice to know if they could land the troops in closer,” Steve suggested.

  “Be nicer still to get where we’re going,” Trouble reminded the bos’n at the controls. They stayed low and outside radar.

  South of town, a series of ridges ran east–west. They used those to close in, staying in their shadows to avoid the radar. Ducking over the ridges got them noticed, queried, but still not shot at. No human voice objected to their presence. Trouble called their experience in to the command post.

  “We’ve been following you,” the skipper told him. “I think I’ll skip a few fast movers over town at the start of the drop. If they don’t draw fire, I’ll move our landing zones up to the outskirts of town. No use wasting an hour driving in if we can land there.”

  The assault craft rose above the final ridge, hanging in air, ready to duck. When nothing came their way, it slipped over to land in a park’s meadow. The platoon took nearly five minutes to exit the craft, unusually long, but this load out included sixth squad and its full set of engineering gear. It also included a few choice words with Tom and Ruth; they refused to stay aboard. Giving up on commanding civilians, Trouble waved the craft off to return to the station for the demolition team and countermeasures he wanted before he would even think of assaulting the bunker.

  It was 0300 hours as fire teams moved from the woods into the outlying streets. Here, among condos and convenience stores, nothing moved. Still, Trouble wanted his crew off the streets as soon as possible. An engineer released several “tunnel gnats” at the first sewer drain they came to.

  The tiny flyers, less than three centimeters across and supported by a single spinning blade, hovered for a moment, then dove down the drain. Trouble watched the corporal’s board as the gnats spread out. Reporting back by laser comm beam to a base gnat that hovered in the first drain, they split up. Half went right, the others left. The right-hand team quickly hit the end of the pipe. The left team reported a six-foot-high sewer pipe two blocks over. The platoon headed in that direction.

  There was traffic on that road. The first car caught half a squad down a manhole, the other half waiting. Everybody scrambled. The manhole cover was back in place when a duded-up gal, late getting home, passed by. Trouble never sent more than a four-trooper fire team out at one time after that. There were more drive-bys, fancy dressed, finally heading home, or work clothed, heading for an early shift. In between them, Trouble slipped his marines down the manhole.

  By 0320 Trouble had his team out of sight. Now the tunnel gnats went to work in full force. As the marines slowly made their way toward the center of town, the gnats mapped the sewer. Trouble let them go in all directions until he was confident they had a good route toward the bunker, then had the gnat boss recall those headed in the wrong direction. Every five minutes, they raised an antenna up a drain to listen for traffic aimed at them.

  Everything was quiet, frighteningly quiet.

  • • •

  “Zylon, my dear, so glad to see you.” Big Al was his usual positive self. Two dozen Very Important Managers had left the meeting quickly, their faces showing various levels of confidence and anger. Behind Big Al, five more trailed from the room looking a lot less sure of themselves. “Thank you for the call. Seems High Riddle has had a change of management that went unnoticed by the security watch office down here. Disgusting oversight.” Al eyed a man in a gray-and-black uniform. Zylon smiled at him. The thought of adding him to her field hands was a pleasant image to contemplate.

  “However”—Al turned back to her—“at the moment, we have everything well in hand. We’ve sent out an emergency call and expect to have a full Senate investigation launched on this atrocious matter by tomorrow. We should have no trouble holding out until they arrive, should we, Carl?”

  The uniformed man nodded. He would have looked more assuring if his face were not so ashen. “All the weapon pits are active and under positive control. Every inch of our ‘golf course’ is under automatic weapon, mortar, and antiarmor rocket coverage. If they’d only bought the surface-to-air missiles I asked for…”

  “Yes, yes, Carl.” Big Al cut him off. “No one in uniform is ever content with his toys. You must make do with what management can afford. So long as you use what you have to the utmost, I am confident we will be left here unmolested until our lawyers can sort this out.”

  “Sir.” A young suit with the nose of a rat broke in. “Has security checked our asshole, as you named it?”

  “Yes.” Big Al fixed his gaze on the security boss.

  Carl’s face drained from gray to translucent white. “I will make sure of that as soon as I return to my command post.”

  “Darling Zylon, why don’t you go along with Carl? Your team would be a fine addition to his people.”

  “Covering our asshole?” Zylon echoed.

  “Water drainage system,” Big Al tossed off. “Normally quite full, but Riddle does indeed have a dry season. May not be quite as underwater as we assumed. Right
, Carl?”

  “I shall see to it.” He headed, stiff-legged, for the elevator.

  “So shall I,” Zylon answered, following the fellow. She wouldn’t mind wearing a cute uniform like that. Colors would look good on her. She’d want a floor-length skirt, slit up the side. Yes. She had plenty of security experience on her résumé. If Carl’s job became vacant, she’d fill it.

  • • •

  Trouble had an antenna up at 0400, but he needn’t have bothered. Fifty assault landing craft dropping out of orbit set off enough sonic booms to wake the dead and send people racing from their houses, putting on whatever they found handy.

  “Okay, crew, the show is on,” Trouble announced over the laser network maintained by tunnel gnats clinging to the roof of the sewer. “These civilians know this isn’t their average Monday morning, so keep your heads up and your asses low. Fourth squad, fall back and spread out to maintain contact with our initial entry point. Taylor, you and a private return to the LZ and get ready to lead in our support teams.”

  “Should never have laughed at the LT’s butt,” Taylor muttered, but he headed back the way they’d come, leaving pairs of troopers at each major intersection.

  “Lieutenant, gnat boss here. I think I’ve found our target.”

  “Show me.”

  On Trouble’s heads-up, a maze of lines appeared. Most were yellow. One ran off to the left of the rest before branching into four other lines. “There are bars at the mouth of that red one.”

  “Have the gnats mapped that branch?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pull them back, then. I want to be real careful exploring that one.” Beside Trouble, Steve nodded.

  “Be real careful,” he whispered. “Don’t make so much as an extra drop of water fall before we got that puppy wired our way.”

  • • •

  Izzy was having a much better day than she’d expected. Pirates had not shot up her troops. The landing was going down unopposed. Well, almost. Some irate fools felt that having their sleep disturbed gave them the authority to scream at armed men. The stupidity of civilians never ceased to amaze her. Faced with strong men, armed, her first goal would have been to be elsewhere, fast.

  With the first companies of each brigade moving in rapidly, she assigned LZs closer to the center of town and moved the second wave into them. Things were going so smoothly, there had to be a rub. She checked the “city hall/bunker.” None of her troops were near it. Why did she expect a rub there—big time?

  “Has Trouble gotten his support units?”

  “They’re on the ground and moving up,” Urimi answered.

  Good. Or rather, as good as it was going to get. If she isolated all her problems in the redoubt, and then couldn’t get at them, what then? Could she really blow them up?

  That bridge she would wait to burn until she was on it.

  • • •

  Zylon liked the Security command post. It was full of tight butts going purposefully about their business. She could really enjoy this place. A few people would have to go, like Carl and the pasty-faced woman who brought him the bad news.

  “We’ve lost the sensors in the tunnels,” said pasty-face. “They’re always full of water, and we couldn’t keep cameras working. Last time the camera circuit went down, we let it go.”

  “Has anybody actually taken a look at them today?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Have a repair team do it immediately.”

  “And a fire team,” Zylon added coldly. “We move out in five minutes. I’ll be back by then with my team. I’ll need twenty full sets of automatic weapons and night visual gear.”

  “I’ll see to that,” the woman said and cringed away.

  “This is going to be fun,” Zylon crowed. She turned on her heel and went to find her men.

  • • •

  Trouble left his platoon strung out behind him and waved Tru forward. For once, the three civilians did what he signaled them to do—stay put. That was the first time Steve, Tom, and Ruth had paid any attention to him. Nobody should have to go to war with civilians around who took his orders for suggestions.

  Trouble and Tru rounded a corner. Down the eight-foot-diameter pipe he could just make out a branch off to the left. Tru signaled the marine to halt, then produced a gizmo from her satchel. It skittered forward like a spider, trailing a web out behind it. A window on Trouble’s heads-up opened, showing a bug’s-eye view of the tunnel. He saw nothing unexpected, which did not relieve the tension growing in his gut. Today, what he didn’t know would be what killed him.

  Tru’s heads-up dimly showed several windows. The lieutenant waited for the expert to send him one she considered important. He had a long wait. Even after the multilegged scout reached the side entry, all Trouble got was a picture of mesh, bars, and a dribbling stream of one-centimeter-deep water. Ten years of high-tech mayhem gave him the patience to wait.

  “Damn,” Tru finally whispered, and retreated to the last side tunnel. “They got that place covered. Video, motion, laser, the works, and probably the best available. This is going to be a challenge.” The woman grinned.

  “Let me know when you’re done with your challenge. I’m not moving anyone in there until you’re downright bored.”

  “Good move, marine.” Tru aimed her comm unit down the tunnel. “Measures and counters, I need all you got. We got to sink our own tunnels, hack their cables, and set up our own feedback to them. Get a move on, folks.”

  “How long?” Trouble asked.

  “Best guess two, maybe three hours. Could be four. In the meantime, sit tight, trooper. Catch a nap, relax.”

  Trouble passed the word to Gunny. Half his platoon probably would flake out. He headed back to the demolition team. He wanted them in and out fast, like a millionaire’s spoiled brat at boot camp. He got no objections from the swabbies, and drafted third and fourth squads to support them.

  He was leaving as Corporal Taylor faced a leadership challenge. “Man, Corporal, how do I get out of this squad? The LT ain’t ever gonna forget you.”

  Back in front, Tru was a happy camper. “I heard from some ex-miners how fast these little beggars cut through, but you got to see it to believe it.” She grinned at several one-centimeter holes in the pipe’s wall, fiber-optic lines flowing smoothly into them. Tru’s handheld screen showed new lines reaching out toward the target one. “Got to isolate their sensor pods, cut into their network, record their reports, then randomize them and rerun them for public consumption while we close down their whole sensor suite. Neat, no?”

  “Neat, yes. Just let me know when I can get that place rigged for booms.”

  “Two, three hours.”

  • • •

  Zylon bossed a crew of forty; she liked that. Each of her guys now had someone else working for them. She doubted the gray-suited security personnel saw it that way, but that didn’t matter. What Zylon saw was real; the rest were fantasizing.

  Down here, it was cold and damp. They’d found a break in the cabling, just as the fiber optics left the sensor ring. A quick patch, and she was watching a very boring hole in the ground. “No problem,” she reported to Security with a voice mail to Big Al. “I have everything under control. Nothing will happen down here we can’t handle.”

  Beside her, Mordy slung his automatic weapon and juggled three grenades. His grin showed that he agreed with Zylon; anybody came in here, they were dead before they got their head in the hole. “Tell me about your board,” she said, caressing the neck of the tech concentrating on the readouts. Might as well learn something, as well as have fun.

  • • •

  “Marine, you there?” The skipper’s voice startled Trouble.

  “Yes, Captain, we’re working on getting in.” He eyed Tru; she held up a finger. “One hour, maybe less.”

  “Well, the bunker has stopped us in our tracks. They got machine guns, mortars, rockets dug in everywhere you look. All controlled from somewhere else. We move with
in a hundred meters of their perimeter, and we take fire. Tried everything, smoke, decoys. They got a sensor suite that won’t quit. No heavy artillery until tomorrow to start plowing ground. Even then, I suspect they got backups for their backups.”

  “We wait them out,” Trouble surmised.

  “We got problems up here from the civilian population.”

  “They up in arms?”

  “Quite the contrary. Except for a few shouters, they’re very easy to get along with.”

  “So why isn’t declaring martial law and locking them down for a day or two gonna work?”

  “Because nobody’s got any food in their refrigerator. Would you believe that every meal around here is eaten out? Every block’s got a restaurant, or a fast-food place. Nobody cooks.” Trouble waited. You don’t rush the skipper.

  “And nobody’s got any cash in their pocket. Everything is credit card.”

  “And the bastards closed down the credit network,” Trouble and the skipper ended together.

  “Nobody up here can buy a sandwich or a plate of waffles or pay for a load of vegetables the farmer just brought to market. We got eighty thousand hungry people and no way to feed them.”

  Trouble had a mental image of an old Sunday-school story with Izzy trying to multiply loaves and fishes. He didn’t dare laugh. “So we got to close these people down.”

  “Close them down, dig them out. Something. How does it look from our side?”

  “Give us another hour. We’ll move the demolition charges in there fast, then weld all entrances from the bunker shut. You give them thirty minutes to call it quits, or else.”

  “Or else I blow them out. That will be an interesting order.” The skipper’s voice had a choke in it as she closed out.

  Could she give such an order? Could Trouble legally and morally execute it? Interesting. He’d damn sure rather blow a big hole in the ground than see a lot of good troopers pay for that bit of real estate. But if the bad guys just sat quiet, neither giving in nor taking action…Like Izzy said, take things one step at a time.