Shadow of Freedom

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Captain Peter Clavell frowned grumpily as he checked his chrono for the third time in the last fifteen minutes. His relief was late—again—and Clavell didn’t like the rumors he’d been hearing. All very well for General Yardley to announce a general offensive against the rabble-rousers and malcontents, but she wasn’t the one out here in command of a checkpoint whose relief was dragging in late…again. And she wasn’t the one wondering if maybe this time his relief was late for a reason nobody would like. Or if some terrorist son-of-a-bitch was going to come along and ruin his entire night when he should have been safely back in his quarters while some other poor bastard took over the checkpoint in question. God knew it had happened to enough other Guardsmen in the last two or three weeks!

He scowled at the thought and reminded himself that it would be a very bad idea to say anything like that out loud where it might get back to Internal Affairs. “Defeatism” was well on its way to becoming a capital offense, and at least one other field grade officer Clavell knew had been posted to one of the penal battalions for “sedition” when she’d questioned an intelligence appreciation of the general public’s support for the terrorists who’d taken down the White Whore. Against that sort of backdrop, suggesting General Yardley didn’t care diddley about how many Guardsmen she might have to sacrifice to make this particular omelette probably came under the heading of something other than career enhancement.

And given the sort of welcome a member of the Presidential Guard was likely to receive from the citizens of Mobius this day, it wasn’t as if Captain Clavell could expect much of a career in the civilian sector. Most jobs tended to go to people who were still breathing, after all. Not that he wouldn’t have been simply delighted to embrace some other form of employment if he had been able to find it.

Clavell sighed heavily, tipped back in the Scorpion’s command chair, and yawned and stretched—hard—before he crossed his ankles and clasped his hands behind his helmeted head.

It wasn’t that he had any qualms about breaking heads if the President told him to, he reflected. That was his job, after all, and Svein Lombroso understood that men and women of proven loyalty deserved to be rewarded. The perks that went with Clavell’s career choice were fairly awesome, when he came down to it, and it wasn’t as if the work had ever been especially difficult. Break the occasional head, send a few unionists or protesters to the hospital, pull the occasional stint guarding one of the concentration camps, make your own quota on arrested malcontents…all fairly straightforward and routine. If there weren’t enough protesters or genuine malcontents around when you needed them to look good on your annual efficiency reports, it wasn’t too hard to find someone to stand in for them, and it wasn’t as if the courts were going to waste time listening to protestations of innocence, anyway.

There’d been the occasional—very occasional—moment when Cadet Clavell or even Lieutenant Clavell had questioned the system and his own participation in it. But Captain Clavell, older and wiser than those younger personae, knew someone had to maintain order and public discipline, and if the someone in question was rewarded for his efforts with special privileges, better pay, and the respect which the authority he represented properly deserved, that was no more than he merited for all the sacrifices he’d made. And he’d never much worried himself about the Intelligence pukes’ claims that hundreds of plots against the Presidency simmered perpetually away. He’d never seen any sign of it, at any rate—not on any organized basis. The people who might have made real trouble knew better than to cross swords with the Guard or poke their heads up to be broken.

Until the May Riots, at least.

But the Riots—and the White Whore attack—had changed all that. Now, every time he looked around someone was painting anti-government graffiti, or vandalizing a government office or a System Unity office, or sabotaging public transportation. The police were everywhere, backed up by the Guard’s ominous presence more and more openly. Arrest totals were soaring (and executions were climbing), and System Information and News made sure the proles knew about it. Commentators and government spokesmen underscored the many ways in which a tiny handful of malcontents, rabble-rousers, radicals, and anarchists like the so-called “freedom fighters” of the thoroughly misnamed Mobius Liberation Front poisoned the society around them. Presidential news secretaries bemoaned the imposition of the ever sterner security measures which a handful of violent extremists had made necessary and the way in which those measures intruded into the lives and personal affairs of the huge majority of citizens who wanted only to obey the laws and get on with their own lives. Stern penalties, however reluctantly enforced, were the only argument vicious criminals like the “Liberation Front” seemed able to understand, however, and so the President had found himself with no option but to seek the death penalty for crimes against the state in hopes that imposing that punishment upon those whose guilt had been proven might deter others from their predatory actions against a law-abiding society.

And beneath the surface, behind the newsies and uniformed law enforcement personnel, underscoring the drama of public trials, convictions, and sentences, were General Mátyás’ secret police. No one spoke about them—not openly, anyway. Everyone knew they were there, but no one knew who they were. They did their work in the shadows, without fanfare or glory, accountable only to their own superiors, General Mátyás himself, and the Presidential Special Courts whose task it was to deal with the most hardened enemies of the state. It was their invisibility that made them most intimidating, the knowledge that they were perpetually on guard, unseen and ready to pounce. And it was the silence which enveloped and erased the enemies of the state with whom they dealt which deterred the troublemakers who might otherwise have dared to defy the forces of public order.

Yet now the system which had worked so well for so long found itself confronted by a level of unrest, verging on outright insurrection in some areas, such as it had never before experienced. Despite the newscasts, despite the spokesmen, despite the public arrests and the rumors of secret arrests, despite the publicly announced executions and the unexplained disappearances of agitators and protesters, anonymous posters became daily more aggressive, more vituperative, on the public boards. The graffiti multiplied, the vandalism spread, and government employees had been assaulted. Over three dozen of them had been hospitalized, and one of them had actually died! And just trying to keep count of the ever mounting avalanche of threats against Trifecta employees was using up more and more police resources. Not to mention Guard resources, like Clavell’s own Scorpion platoon and the infantry platoon attached to it while they sat here guarding the approaches to Summerhill Tower. He understood the need to reassure Trifecta’s personnel of their own and their families’ safety, but parking this much firepower in the middle of a residential district in the middle of the night seemed a little excessive.

But perhaps it wasn’t, he thought. After all, things had gotten even uglier over the last week or so. They’d been fairly quiet here in Landing itself—since the Trifecta Tower attack, anyway—but just the day before yesterday a mob had gathered outside a regional police station in the city of Granger, pelting it with stones and improvised incendiary devices in a protest over the hanging of three convicted seditionist agitators. Eleven officers had been injured, two of them seriously, before the mob had finally been dispersed, and there were conflicting reports about the anarchists’ casualties, although SINS was flatly denying the ridiculous claims that over sixty of them had been killed.

Clavell didn’t know about that, although he rather hoped the newsies were wrong about how low the anarchist casualties had been. The more he heard about the way things were going out in the boonies, the more in favor he was of showing the yokels the error of their way before things got completely out of hand. Or even spread to Landing, for that matter!

Some of his fellow Guardsmen scoffed at his worries, and he was careful not to be too vocal about them. But he heard things, even when he wasn’t supposed to. Like that shootout in Brazelton, for instance. SINS hadn’t so much as mentioned it, and even the Guard’s daily intelligence reports had treated it as only one more minor incident in a sleepy little town of no more than a hundred and twenty thousand or so. Clavell wasn’t so certain, though. True, Brazelton wasn’t Landing, and the security assets concentrated here in the capital were a lot better than anything a provincial town boasted. And, true again, they were talking about small town cops who probably hadn’t had a clue what real security measures were all about. But even having said all of that that, he personally might have argued that the assassination of a city police chief—and the successful ambush of his entire six-man security detail—came under the heading of a fairly major incident, no matter where it happened. Of course, everybody from General Yardley on down was denying Chief Brinkman was dead, and confidence that the perpetrators would soon be run to earth was high, but Clavell figured he could believe as much of that as he wanted to.

Stupid, he thought, checking the time again and then scanning the Scorpion’s displays. What? They think scuttlebutt isn’t going to pass the word around anyway? And given the fact that at least half—probably a hell of a lot more than half, since the official report says ‘less than half’—of the bastards got away, the other side sure as hell knows how much damage it did. I mean, go ahead and put a lid on it for the proles. Fine. I’m all in favor of that. But don’t hand a line of obvious bullshit to the Guard, for God’s sake!

He shook his head. The brass had better get a clue pretty damned quick, in his humble opinion. So far, things hadn’t been that bad here in Landing—since the Trifecta Tower attack, at least—but if the sort of crap happening in Granger and Brazelton ever did spread to the capital, it was going to get ugly. He didn’t doubt the Guard could deal with these MLF bastards if they’d only come out into the open and stop skulking around in the shadows like the cowards they were, but that didn’t mean they weren’t going to do a lot of damage first. And the sooner General Yardley and the rest of President Lombroso’s advisers figured that out and turned the Guard loose on the “resistance’s” sympathizers with open hunting licenses and no bag limit the better it was going to be for all concerned. The last thing they needed was to let the MLF build up some kind of effective support structure in Landing! In fact—

A shrill, high-pitched buzz interrupted Captain Clavell’s reflections. He jerked upright in his chair, reaching for his console, and his blood ran cold as the bright red icon flashed in his helmet visor’s HUD.

Laser! his brain screamed. We’re being lased, but—

The five-kilo kinetic penetrator struck the Scorpion’s thinner, vulnerable rear armor at thirty kilometers per second, within less than a centimeter of the target designation laser’s aiming point. Not that it really mattered where it had hit, of course; no light AFV had the protection to resist that kind of attack, and Captain Peter Clavell, late of the Presidential Guard, united with the alloy and fuel of his light tank—and the other two members of its crew—in a fireball that towered against the night.

Three more penetrators struck within half a second of the first one, killing the remaining Scorpions of Clavell’s platoon. More fireballs billowed, painting the faces of surrounding towers and buildings in bloody crimson light, and then the tribarrels opened up, scything down the Guard infantry troopers lounging in their unarmored personnel transports while they waited for their relief.

One of the infantry noncoms, protected in the heavily sandbagged CP, had time to scream for support, but she never got through to HQ. She was still trying to get a com response when one of the antitank launchers retargeted on the command post and turned it into an expanding cloud of dust, debris, and human remains.

It wouldn’t have mattered if she had gotten through, really. No one could possibly have gotten there in time to do any good. Besides, the elimination of Captain Clavell’s security detail was only one of dozens of simultaneous attacks spread across the city of Landing.

* * *

“Where the hell are they all coming from?!” Svein Lombroso demanded, his expression haggard as he stared at the map displays in the command center under Presidential Palace. Leprous scarlet splotches glared across them, marking the death and destruction which had exploded out of the night all across the capital city. “My God, there must be thousands of them!”

“I doubt it, Mister President,” Olivia Yardley replied. She wore two separate earbugs, and her own attention was focused on a much larger scale holographic display of the residential area around Summerhill Tower. “Not here in Landing, anyway.”

“Oh, really? Well just why in hell should I listen to what you doubt?” Lombroso snarled. “You were the one who thought it was such a wonderful idea to turn the screws on the MLF! Get them to come out into the open, you said. Force their hands. Suck them out where we could get at them!” He glared at her. “Well that’s working out just goddammed fine, isn’t it?!”

Yardley swallowed an almost overwhelming impulse to snarl right back at him. He’d seen the same analyses she had, and it was clear she’d been right about the dangerous escalation in the Mobius Liberation Front’s organization and equipment. In fact, she’d obviously underestimated both of them! And it was just like him to vent his frustration and his fear by blaming the situation on everyone—anyone!—other than himself.

Yet tempting though it was to point that out to him, actually yielding to the temptation would all too probably have been a fatal mistake. He was perfectly capable of ordering her shot, and she could think of at least three of her own subordinates who’d pull the trigger themselves if it let them step into her shoes. That would have been uncommonly stupid of them under the current circumstances, but that minor fact wouldn’t have prevented any of them from doing it.

“Mister President,” she said instead, interrupting the reports she should have been listening to and the orders she should have been giving, “this is exactly what the analysts and I warned might happen.” She met his fiery eyes levelly. “It’s happening on a lot wider scale than we ever anticipated, and I have to admit the MLF’s degree of organization outside Landing’s taken us by surprise, but it was the influx of modern weapons and the MLF’s increasing militancy that had all of us concerned in the first place! God only knows what would’ve happened if we’d sat back and let them choose the moment to kick off their offensive!”

“Well, I don’t see how it could be a whole hell of a lot worse,” Lombroso shot back. He jabbed an index finger at the maps. “Brazelton, Granger, Lewisville—how many more towns are we planning to give them?”

“I said their organization and strength outside Landing came as a surprise, Sir,” Yardley replied coldly. “Apparently, our intelligence assets let us down pretty badly in that respect. I’m sure General Mátyás shared all of his information with the rest of us, but you saw the analyses.” She saw the president’s eyes flicker at the mention of Mátyás’ name. “I’m not trying to pass the blame,” she continued with consummate insincerity, “because all of us screwed up in that regard. But the truth is that we can lose all of those towns, and half a dozen more, if we have to. As long as we hold the capital, we can always take them back again, especially after the gendarme battalions get here. And with all due respect, Sir, they have come out into the open. I think it’s obvious we’re going to get hurt more badly than any of us wanted or expected, but they’re going to get hurt even worse because now we know where to find them.”

Some of the steam seemed to go out of Lombroso’s glower. He remained anything but happy, yet Yardley’s firm tone and projection of confidence were having their effect.

At least until the next time Frolov gets on the com to rattle his cage, the general thought sourly.

She’d heard quite enough from the Trifecta manager herself, and she wished to hell that he’d just leave her alone. And that Lombroso would, too, for that matter. She had more important things to do than sit around holding frightened politicos’ hands! Still, it would have been foolish to expect anything else. The attack on the Summerhill security point had penetrated into one of the Trifecta uppercrust’s more palatial residential districts before Guard quick response teams could reinforce the Trifecta Security detachments. The security personnel had taken heavy casualties. Worse, over a dozen Trifecta bureaucrats had been hurt or killed before the attackers withdrew, and Frolov had made it abundantly clear that lapses like that were unacceptable.

And considering how much Trifecta’s invested in Lombroso, Frolov obviously thinks he’s entitled to a better return. I’ll bet he hasn’t been shy about making that point, either. Funny how much more enthusiastic about “taking the fight to the terrorists” he was when all it was likely to do was get Guernicke killed, isn’t it?

“All we have to do is hold them until the gendarmes get here,” she said out loud. “I’m going to hit them as hard as I can anywhere I can in the meantime, and I think there’s a damned good chance we’ll be able to handle this on our own,” she added with rather less than total truthfulness, “but in the final analysis, all we really have to do is hold them. If the first batch of gendarmes doesn’t do the trick, Governor Verrocchio and Brigadier Yucel will send in however many reinforcements they have to. Do you really think either of them wants Trifecta screaming for their blood to OFS headquarters, Mister President?” She smiled unpleasantly. “This is going to turn into the best chance we’ve ever had to burn out the infection once and for all, Sir, and all we have to do is hold them.”

* * *

“What’s the latest from Lewiston?”

Michael Breitbach looked exhausted and his shoulders sagged with fatigue. His voice was pretty much gone, too, but his eyes were still focused and intent as he asked the question, and Kayleigh Blanchard checked her notepad display.

“Segovia says his people are making good progress now,” she replied. “They’ve got over half the city and they’re moving in on Beaver Run Heights. He says that once they take out the satellite police station there, they should be able to start sending additional manpower to us here in Landing. He—”

She broke off as her com beeped at her. She listened intently for several seconds, then nodded with a grunt of satisfaction and looked back at Breitbach.

“That was Leamington. She says her people have hacked the Guard’s satellite feeds. She doesn’t know how long she’ll be able to stay in the system, but for right now we’ve got access to their recon birds right along with them.”

“Good, Kayleigh. Good!” Breitbach managed a weary smile, but there was worry—a lot of worry—in those focused eyes, and Blanchard looked a question at him.

“All of that sounds good,” he told her after a moment, “but I’m not sure it’s good enough.” He shook his head, looking down at the map displayed on the terminal in front of him. “We needed to get deeper quicker here in Landing. Even with Leamington getting into their recon, we just aren’t deep enough, and I’m not sure were going to get there, either.”

“But we’re winning in almost all of the outer cities,” she pointed out. “And practically the entire farm belt’s come in on our side.”

“I know.” He nodded. “And I know they’re going to be a hell of a lot more cautious before they try any more of those air assaults.” He showed his teeth in a vicious smiled. The Presidential Guard had lost twenty-three sting ships and nineteen counter-grav transports trying to reinforce Brazelton. Now that they’d discovered that the MLF had modern impeller wedge SAMs, they were unlikely to try that again—not without far better EW capabilities than any of their antiquated equipment boasted, anyway! He savored the memory of that moment, but then his smile faded and he shook his head once more.

“I know,” he repeated more softly, “but even Lombroso’s always recognized that Landing’s the real key. There are eight and a half million people in Landing and the suburbs, not to mention the main planetary spaceport, the Guard’s central barracks, Trifecta’s entire planetary headquarters complex—and staff—and most of the SUPP’s core membership and all of its leadership. If we’re going to claim that we control the planet, which makes us the legitimate—or at least the de facto—system government, we’ve got to hold Landing. And you can bet your ass that as long as Lombroso and Trifecta hold it, they’re going to claim to be the legitimate government. And, frankly, we need it for its hostage value.”

“Hostage value?” Blanchard looked at him in shock.

One thing he’d always insisted upon was that the MLF had to target legitimate objectives and do its level best to hold collateral civilian casualties to an absolute minimum. He’d even successfully opposed the demands of some of his rank and file that the Liberation Front go after anyone who did business with Trifecta. She knew part of that was a cold calculation that the MLF had to avoid providing any grist for SINS’ “independent newsies’” efforts to label it a terrorist organization. But she also knew that another part of it—probably the greater part of it—was his personal hatred for the Lombroso régime’s policy of ruling by terror and atrocity.

“I’m not planning on shooting people in the street, Kayleigh,” he said wearily. “But there’s a quantitative difference between Landing and any of the other cities, even Laurent.” Laurent, Mobius’ second-largest city, had a population of almost two and a half million. None of the planet’s other cities topped three hundred thousand. “Lombroso—or the frigging gendarmes, when they get here—could take out twenty or thirty cities the size of Brazelton and Lewiston combined without killing as many people as live in Landing all by itself. And don’t think for a moment that Frolov doesn’t recognize that, too. I want us holding Landing when the gendarmes get here because I doubt even OFS is going to be willing to take out eight and a half million revenue-producing Trifecta helots with an orbital strike. Not when they know how all the other transstellars are going to react to that kind of threat to their bottom lines. And the longer they hesitate to take us out from orbit, the longer we’ve got for the Manties to come riding over the hyper limit in the proverbial nick of time.”

Blanchard looked at him for several more moments, and then she nodded slowly.

“I guess there’s hostage value and then there’s hostage value,” she said.

“Exactly.” Breitbach turned his attention back to the map display and squared his sagging shoulders. “And maybe I’m wrong.” He sounded as if he were willing confidence and fresh determination back into his voice. “Maybe we can get deep enough quick enough, especially with Leamington getting us inside their recon. And if Segovia really can free up some additional manpower soon enough.” He smiled grimly. “And even if we can’t take the entire city, I damn well guarantee we’ll manage to kill enough more of the bastards to make sure any of them who are still alive remember us for a long, long time.”