Shadow of Freedom

Chapter Seventeen

“Look out!”

The screamed warning came a lifetime too late as the first obsolescent but still deadly Solarian-built Scorpion light armored fighting vehicle rounded the corner of the pastel-colored ceramacrete tower. It moved down the center of the broad boulevard, and two more AFVs followed it. Still others were visible beyond the initial trio, all wearing the presidential seal and crossed thunderbolts of the Presidential Guard.

Any doubt as to the Scorpions’ purpose was dispelled quickly, clearly, and not with anything so potentially ambiguous as words.

The Scorpion’s main weapon—a 35-millimeter grav gun—didn’t fire, but its secondary, turret-mounted tribarrel spewed out thousands of rounds of solid five-millimeter darts per minute. They struck like some terrible, solid tornado of destruction, and the front of the crowd of demonstrators disintegrated in a hideous spray of crimson and shredded flesh. Pieces of bodies flew or flopped to the pavement, and shrieks of terror replaced the furious, chanted slogans of moments before.

The stink of blood and riven human bodies buried the warm summer scent of flowers from the capital’s green belts, and the huge demonstration began to shed a torrent of panicked fugitives.

None of those fleeing people were armed. They’d come to express their opposition to President Lombroso’s régime, not to engage in pitched warfare with the black-uniformed Presidential Guard, the most feared of the Mobius System’s many security services. The current demonstration had been a long time brewing, and over half of its members belonged to Lombroso’s own System Unity and Progress Party. That didn’t mean as much as it might have, since the SUPP was the only legal political party in the entire Mobius System and party membership was a requirement for anybody who ever hoped for anything better than purely menial employment, but it probably said something that so many of System Unity’s rank and file had been willing to come out in protest of their own founder’s policies. Yet while there’d been no lack of anger in their chants’ furious denunciations of Lombroso’s tyranny and corruption, very few of those running for their lives had ever imagined a response like this one!

Not all the demonstrators were fleeing, however. Nor had all of them come unarmed. Less idealistic (or naïve, perhaps) than their fellows, those others had anticipated the Guard’s appearance and come prepared. Or they’d thought they had, anyway; the appearance of AFVs in the heart of the planetary capital when there’d been zero violence from the demonstrators surprised even them.

Despite that, weapons began to fire back from here and there in the screaming crowd. Pulsers were few and far between, since (as Lombroso and his OFS-trained Presidential Guard had explained when confiscating all modern weapons over twenty T-years earlier) the security of Mobius’ citizens was the responsibility of their government. There’s no room for vigilantism on Mobius, Citizens, thank you very much! Now move along. Nothing to see here!

Less sophisticated firearms had tended to evade the government ban on personal weapons, however, and if they were less “advanced” than pulsers, they were no less deadly if they managed to hit their targets.

The Guard infantry following the Scorpions with their body armor, shields, and high-voltage stun batons found that out the hard way. Their riot gear had served them well in confrontations with outraged college students, fired more by intellectual outrage than organized hatred. It had served well enough breaking heads to discourage the occasional general strike, or moving “squatters” out of housing they happened to own but which had been condemned under eminent domain for transfer to Lombroso’s corporate patrons. And the swaggering, self-proclaimed “elite” troopers who wore it were backed by heavier infantry and armored vehicles, even sting ships. They’d been confident no one could possibly be stupid enough to offer them actual armed resistance with all that firepower on tap to support them.

Unfortunately, this time they were wrong, and the riot gear which had always stopped improvised truncheons or thrown rocks turned out to be far less effective against bullets.

The Guard’s ranks shuddered as the return fire slammed into it. For a second or two, the troopers simply froze, unable to believe such a thing could possibly happen to them, and over forty were killed or wounded in that handful of moments. For the first time in its history, the Guard heard its own members screaming in agony as their bodies were broken and rent, as their blood soaked the pavement. Then, as if it were a single organism, the “elite” infantry turned and fled in howling panic.

The Scorpion crews were just as astonished by the ferocity of the response. Like their infantry compatriots, they’d grown accustomed to being the ones who did the killing and maiming. The notion that someone could offer them organized violence in return had never crossed their minds, and they snarled in fury as their anticipated afternoon’s amusement of slaughtering enemies of the state turned into something else.

Yet there were still plenty of those “enemies of the state” out there, and the Scorpions still had their weapons…and their armor. They swept forward on their counter-grav, tribarrels raving. Dozens of demonstrators—most of whom hadn’t had a thing to do with the fire coming back at the Guard—were killed for every security trooper who’d gone down. Bodies (or parts of them, at least) piled in rows as hyper-velocity darts tore them apart, and scores of other people were trampled, many to death, in frantic efforts to escape the Scorpions’ wrath.

Unfortunately for the Guard, however, President Lombroso’s security forces hadn’t managed to confiscate all of his citizens’ modern weapons after all, and the antitank launcher on the thirtieth floor of the O’Sullivan Tower was a very modern weapon, indeed. Its kinetic projectile weighed over five kilos, despite its slender dimensions. Accelerated to thirty KPS by the man-portable gravitic launcher, it was effectively an energy weapon. The super-dense projectile struck with the equivalent energy of well over half a ton of pre-space high explosive, concentrated into a penetrator barely one and a half centimeters in diameter, and the lead Scorpion erupted in a blue-white blaze of burning hydrogen as its fuel tanks ruptured.

A second launcher took out another light tank in equally spectacular fashion, and the Scorpion crews turned their attention from the diversion of butchering demonstrators to the desperate business of self-preservation. Their weapons tracked around, trailing swaths of destruction, hammering the faces of the towers from which the fire was coming. Display windows and businesses exploded. Flames gushed through shattered ceramacrete walls. Fire alarms wailed, smoke streamed up in dense, choking columns, and another Scorpion exploded.

The others redoubled their efforts, and main gun fire joined the tornado of tribarrel darts. The 35-millimeter projectiles were substantially heavier than, and at least as fast as, the antitank penetrators, and explosions pocked the towers, blasting deep into their internal structure.

* * *

“Intolerable! Unacceptable!” President Svein Lombroso shouted, pounding on his desk blotter. “Did you see that? Do you see that?”

He stopped pounding long enough to jab one hand at his office windows, which overlooked the columns of inky-black smoke rising from the heart of the of the city of Landing’s financial district. The firing had finally stopped an hour ago, but the lower stories of three major towers were roaring infernos, and God only knew how much damage those fires were going to do before they were extinguished. And not just to locally owned property, either. Two satellite offices of Lombroso’s major transstellar sponsor were part of the bonfire, as well.

“I’ve been telling you for months something like this was coming!” the President continued. “For months! I’ve been warning you about the rumors, the malcontents my security people have found! But did you believe me? Hell, no, you didn’t!”

“Mister President, please, calm yourself,” Angelika Xydis said in her most soothing tones. Her raised hands made stroking motions in midair. “I agree this is terrible, Sir. But the situation’s a long way from out of control!”

“A long way from out of control?!” Lombroso stared at her incredulously. “I lost over a hundred men. A hundred men! That’s more Guard troopers killed in one afternoon than in the last fifty T-years. D’you think those malcontent anarchists don’t realize that? Aren’t going to be emboldened by their success?”

Xydis bit her tongue.

Officially, she was a State Department employee, the Solarian League’s trade attaché on Mobius. Actually, as everyone realized perfectly well, the trade mission was where the local Office of Frontier Security’s representative (one Angelika Xydis, as it happened) hung her hat. As a mid-level OFS bureaucrat, Xydis had seen more strongmen like Lombroso than she cared to recall. More than one had gotten his ass in a crack through sheer, stupid incompetence, too. And it was amazing how many of them would have fixated—just like Lombroso—on the losses their security troops had taken as something likely to embolden their local opposition instead of reflecting on the fury the two or three thousand civilian casualties were going to engender!

Because, of course, they are civilians. They don’t matter, Xydis thought grimly. Why, oh why, have all these back-planet jackasses heard all about the stick but don’t even have a clue about the carrot? Who do they think supports the lifestyles to which they’ve become accustomed? Their security goons, or the workers they kill off in job lots at moments like this?

Not that Lombroso had a corner on the unthinking brutality market, she reflected, glancing at the two Mobians standing attentively behind the president.

General Olivia Yardley, CO of the Presidential Guard, was a fairly typical blunt object in Xydis’ opinion. A bit more imagination than many a uniformed enforcer, perhaps, but not a lot, and the Guard reflected its commander’s personality, which explained a great deal about its reactions this morning.

Whereas Yardley wore the Guard’s black uniform—and why did all of these back-planet thugs think black was the only possible color for their uniforms?—the man standing next to her was in civilian dress with a SUPP lapel pin in the red, gold, and black which indicated he’d been one of the Party’s original cadre. He was also a general, however: General Friedemann Mátyás, the commander of the Mobius Secret Police, an organization that didn’t officially exist…which had always struck Xydis as a silly thing to pretend. Everyone knew about the MSP. It would have been pretty stupid to rely on the terror of a secret police no one knew existed, after all! But Lombroso and Mátyás seemed not to understand that “secret police” was supposed to mean that nobody knew who was in it, not whether or not it existed in the first place.

Still, Mátyás was at least smarter than Lombroso, and his MSP was the System Unity and Progress Party’s primary counterintelligence service. Over the five decades of Lombroso’s régime, Yardley and Mátyás had done a fairly impressive job of crushing all effective opposition. They hadn’t managed to make him any less hated along the way, though. And while Mátyás seemed at least marginally aware of the potential downside of slaughtering his own planetary workforce in job lots, Yardley—like Lombroso—was clearly more focused on the casualties her guardsmen had taken.

Xydis considered the refreshing frankness of pointing out that she and Lombroso could always get more security troopers where the last batch had come from. Or, if not there, they could import them from off-world prisons or lunatic asylums! In fact, she considered—briefly, of course—reminding the system president who truly propped up his régime.

Appearances have to be maintained, she told herself instead. Besides, if I really want to jerk his leash, I need to take it up with Guernicke. Not that she’s any prize.

The “attaché” suppressed a headshake of pure disgust at the thought. Georgina Guernicke was the Trifecta Corporation’s chief executive in Mobius. As such, she, ought to have at least some vague notion about conserving her captive labor and customer base. But Trifecta was perfectly comfortable with the slash-and-burn style of exploitation Frontier Security’s sweetheart deals made practical out here in the Verge. She didn’t give a damn what Lombroso or his cronies did as long as they didn’t get any uppity ideas about who actually owned their star system.

“I realize the troublemakers are likely to be even more exercised than they already were, Mister President,” Xydis said out loud, once she was sure she had control of her tone and expression again. “And I assure you, I’ve forwarded all your security people’s warnings to Commissioner Verrochio’s office. I’m sure his people have reviewed them carefully.”

Or not, she thought. After all, you’ve been whining about the threats to your régime for the next best thing to four T-decades. Ever hear the story about the little boy and the wolf? Whatever the hell a “wolf” is.

“And how much good is that going to do?” Lombroso demanded. “Meyers is over twelve days from here even for a dispatch boat! And it’s not like they’ve paid any attention before this!”

“Mister President,” Xydis allowed a cold edge to creep into her voice, “you’re perfectly well aware of how the Manty provocations in Talbott and Monica have threatened not just this entire region but especially the Madras sector for the last T-year. Obviously, the Commissioner’s attention has been focused on that threat. I realize it may feel as if he’s been ignoring your situation or the severity of the threat. I assure you that has not been the case, however.”

“That’s easy enough to say,” Lombroso muttered. But he also sat back down, Xydis noted with satisfaction. She’d thought reminding him who really ran the Verge might recall him to semi-rationality.

“I understand your concerns, Sir,” she said in a milder tone. “And I assure you I’ll send an immediate report to Commissioner Verrochio, and request an OFS intervention battalion or two. I’m sure Brigadier Yucel will send her very best troops and advisers to assist the Guard. It’s hardly a situation the Gendarmerie hasn’t faced before, I’m afraid.”

“Good,” Lombroso said. “But I hope you’ve also passed on my reports of Manticoran provocateurs. There’s no telling what kind of assistance they’re prepared to offer their proxies here in Mobius! For that matter, that’s probably where those antitank weapons came from this afternoon!”

“I’ll be certain to remind Commissioner Verrochio—and Brigadier Yucel—of those reports, Mister President,” she assured him.

Even if I don’t think there’s a chance in hell the Manties are actually trying to provoke trouble here in the armpit of the galaxy, she thought bitingly. Not that I wouldn’t be doing my best to kick Frontier Security in the most sensitive spot I could reach if I were them. But this little tempest started brewing well before jackass Byng sailed off to New Tuscany, and whatever anyone else thinks, I don’t see them deliberately courting a confrontation with the League. Even if they were, why in Mobius, of all places?! I’m sure they could find a better, more effective spot to make trouble. I’ll admit we’rea little behind the news out here, but still…

“Good,” Lombroso repeated. “Good.”

* * *

“Well, Xydis has promised him intervention battalions,” Michael Breitbach said bitterly.

The chairman of the Mobius Liberation Front stood on the balcony of what had been the flagship tower of an early Lombroso Administration public housing project which—like all Lombroso projects—had foundered in a sea of graft, kickbacks, bribery, and bareknuckle extortion. Only one of the projected towers had ever been constructed, and even it hadn’t been finished. The ten uppermost of its seventy floors were inhabitable only by the Mobius equivalent of rats, bats, and cockroaches.

Not that the public housing which had been completed was all that much better, when it came down to it.

Now Breitbach leaned on the balcony’s rickety railing (rather recklessly, in Kayleigh Blanchard’s opinion) and glared out across the darkened city. The fires still hadn’t been completely extinguished, and the pall of smoke was underlit by lingering flames. Rather more attention had been given to putting out the fires than to removing the bodies, of course. It wasn’t as if the dead were in any hurry, was it?

“That’s confirmed?” Blanchard asked, and Breitbach turned to face her, propping his elbows on the railing and leaning back against it.

“Yes,” he said, and she nodded slowly.

Although Blanchard was one of his most senior lieutenants and generally considered his heir apparent, not even she knew all (or even most) of his sources. Unlike most of the liberation movements which had come and perished in the half T-century since Lombroso won the presidency (in a “free, fair, and transparent election” overseen by no less an authority than that paragon of justice and fair play, the Office of Frontier Security), Breitbach had never cherished any illusions about the sheer scale of his task. Before he ever formed the first MLF cell, he’d spent literally years researching everything he could find about successful revolutionary movements. As a result, unlike any of the earlier movements the Presidential Guard had crushed, the MLF was a tightly compartmentalized organization which had been known to ruthlessly eliminate security threats. There were far better ways to die than to be identified by the MLF as a government informer, but there was no better way to guarantee one would die. Or that one’s body would end up deposited in some prominent location as a message to the Guard…and any other potential traitors.

“Do you think Verrochio will send them?” she asked after a moment.

“I think it’s a tossup,” Breitbach said frankly. “If—”

He broke off, then smiled a bit crookedly as Blanchard gently but firmly pulled him away from the deathtrap railing. He gave her a quizzical look, but he also followed the pressure of her tugging hand obediently.

“Better?” he asked.

“Yep.” She nodded. “I’d just as soon you don’t do Lombroso a favor by plummeting to your doom.” She regarded him sternly until he shrugged and leaned against the frame of the door giving access to the balcony from the vermin-ridden tower, instead of the railing. Then she nodded in satisfaction. “Now, you were saying about the intervention battalions?”

“I was saying that if it’s left up to Yucel, and if they’re available, they’ll be here on the fastest transport she’s got,” Breitbach said, his brief amusement fading. “Verrochio would be more likely to vacillate, judging from his record, but Yucel’s like our own dear General Yardley, although from what I’ve heard, Yucel’s probably at least a little smarter than Yardley. Then again, I suppose it would be hard to be stupider than she is!”

His face twisted in familiar disgust, and Blanchard snorted harshly. It had taken Lombroso a decade or two to find someone as willing to kill everyone and let God sort them out as he was, but Olivia Yardley had been the PG’s commander for over twenty-five T-years…mostly because her personal security, unfortunately, was too tight for the MLF to get an assassin into position to let God sort her out. On the other hand, that could be just as well. As Breitbach had just pointed out, she was scarcely a mental giant, and killing her off might simply have made room for somebody less compulsively brutal but ultimately more dangerous. Now, if they could only get someone inside Mátyás’ security…especially if they could convince him that Yardley had been behind it…

“Hongbo’s more of a wildcard,” Breitbach continued, pulling her back up out of her thoughts. “I think he’s smarter—or more likely to think things through, at least—than Verrochio, but that doesn’t mean a lot.”

Blanchard nodded again. That was another thing about Breitbach; he’d done his homework on his adversaries, and his estimates of their actions and reactions had proven accurate again and again.

“On balance,” he continued, “I think it’s more likely they will send the battalions than that they won’t, especially if Guernicke signs onto the request, too. After what happened in the Talbott Sector, they’ve got to be feeling nervous about the possibility of any of us getting uppity. I think Verrochio’s probably running scared, if only because of how he expects his bosses to react. And if he is frightened, he’s going to be even less inclined to irritate—or disappoint—someone like Trifecta, which is only going to make him more likely to embrace the iron fist approach.”

“Wonderful,” she muttered.

“Actually, it’s not the intervention battalions I’m most worried about,” Breitbach said, and Blanchard’s eyes widened in surprise. “I’m more concerned about the possibility of his sending along a couple of Navy destroyers to ride herd on their transport and possibly provide a little orbital fire support.”

“You think they’d use starship weapons on planetary targets?” Blanchard couldn’t hide her alarm, but Breitbach shook his head.

“I doubt they’d use them on any target in an urban area, if only because of how that would piss off the Lombroso toadies the city in question belongs to. And we’re not going to give them any nice, isolated targets out in the countryside where they could make big craters without pissing off Lombroso’s supporters. No, I’m more worried about their managing to effectively interdict any additional arms shipments.”

Blanchard cocked her head, frowning in thought for a moment or two, then nodded slowly. The Guard’s brutal reaction to the peaceful demonstrations had surprised the MLF. Despite the general effectiveness of its penetration of the régime’s middle echelons, no one in the movement had had a clue what was coming in time to even contemplate doing anything about it. In this instance, despite what had happened, that was probably a good thing, Blanchard thought. If they had known, they might have been drawn into the open, into a standup fight with the Guard, too early. Their stockpile of modern weapons, like the antitank launchers which had taken out a total of five Scorpions before they themselves were destroyed, was growing steadily, but it was nowhere near large enough yet.

And if they wound up with a couple of Frontier Fleet destroyers in orbit around Mobius Beta, the system’s capital planet, the chance of getting any additional arms shipments delivered would become virtually nil.

“So what do we do?” she asked.

“For the moment, we use what happened today.” Breitbach bared his teeth. “One of the things you can always count on a thug for is plenty of martyrs. God knows I never would’ve supported anything like the demonstrations if I’d expected Yardley would react this way, but now that she has—now that she’s managed to kill that many people—I think she’s going to hate what Thomas and his people do with that death toll. The hard part’s going to be convincing people that this time we aren’t inflating the body count, really.”

Blanchard nodded. Thomas Marrone headed the MLF’s agitprop section. There were undoubtedly many better and more stylistically refined writers in the universe, but Marrone had a gift for putting the people of Mobius’ hatred and fury into words at any time. Probably that was because that hatred and that fury were so deeply his, as well. There was no cynicism, no ideology, in his hard-hitting anonymous posts or the graffiti slogans and cartoons with which he’d decorated more than one wall even in downtown Landing. There was only outrage, wrath, and passion, and the people who saw and read his messages knew it.

“I just hope Thomas doesn’t take any chances along the way…again,” she said.

“I do, too.”

Breitbach’s expression tightened for just a moment, for Marrone’s one weakness as a revolutionary was the very passion which made him so effective in his role of spokesman and propagandist. He wanted—needed—to be hands-on, and the Guard had damned nearly caught him putting up one of his own graffiti less than three months ago. Breitbach had read him the riot act over that episode, ending by pointing out how disastrous it would have been for the Liberation Front if Lombroso’s thugs had gotten their hands on a member of their central committee. Marrone had argued that they probably would have figured he was only one more rank-and-file member of the movement, or even no more than a sympathizer, but his heart hadn’t really been in it.

“I hope he doesn’t, and I don’t think he will,” Breitbach said now. “I think I scared the crap out of him by pointing out what Mátyás could get out of him in the end if anyone did figure out who he really is. Of course, I also think I’ll have another little conversation with him about it before we turn him loose on this one, just to be on the safe side.

“In addition to anything we do here locally, though, I think it’s time we sent off our own dispatch boat. If Lombroso and Xydis are running to Verrochio, we need to do some running of our own.”

“Dispatch boat?” Blanchard didn’t even try to conceal her surprise at that one. “You’ve got access to a dispatch boat, Michael?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said with his customary evasiveness. Then he shrugged. “What the hell, if anything happens to me you need to know about this anyway. We have a…call him a friend on the crew of one of the local transstellars’ dispatch boats. I’m not going to tell you which, even now, although I will tell you Landrum knows how to get in touch with him.”

Blanchard nodded again. Joseph Landrum was one of Breitbach’s senior cell leaders. In fact, Landrum had been with the movement longer than Blanchard herself. He was one of the MLF’s smoother operators, too, and she wasn’t surprised Breitbach had chosen him to manage whatever interstellar communications link they’d been able to establish.

“Anyway, the dispatch boat in question will be leaving Mobius in the next couple of days,” Breitbach continued. “Doesn’t have anything to do with us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make use of it. Especially when, despite the current unpleasantness between the League and the Manties, it’s headed into the Talbott Sector. In fact, it’s heading to Spindle by way of Montana, which is certainly in the right direction, don’t you think?”

“Spindle?” Blanchard repeated, then smiled. “Oh, yes,” she agreed. “Spindle would be just fine with me, Michael!”