Shadow of Freedom

Chapter Thirty-One

Sir Aivars Terekhov watched his tactical plot as his flagship and the other units of his small task group settled into orbit around Mobius Beta. HMS Cloud’s LACs spread out around the planet, and Colonel Alex Simak’s Marine assault shuttles moved out of the big CLAC’s boatbays behind them. The bulk of the task group’s small craft were otherwise occupied, however. They were busy collecting the lifepods of the Solarian personnel whose ships had blown themselves up an hour and a half before.

“All right, Atalante,” he said. “Given how well Helen’s prescription worked out with Commander Watson, I think we’ll just let President Lombroso and Brigadier Yucel and friends sweat for a little bit before we talk to them, too. See if you can get a response over Ms. Summers’ link, instead.”

“Yes, Sir.” Lieutenant Montella turned to her console, and Terekhov folded his arms across his chest as he gazed into the master visual display at the blue, green, and dun colored planet so far below.

Commander Pope stepped up beside him.

“Do you really think Breitbach’s going to be in a position to answer, Sir?” the chief of staff asked softly.

“I don’t know, Tom,” Terekhov replied. He twitched his shoulders. “Given what these people have been up to, I just don’t know. If his security held, maybe. But…”

His voice trailed off, and he shook his head. The news reports had been bad enough on the way in; now that they’d entered orbit and deployed air-breathing recon platforms, it was even worse. Several square blocks of Landing lay in charred, flattened ruins. Most of the destroyed structures—which happened, just coincidentally of course, to lie in the middle of the capital city’s low income housing, far away from the important corporate assets downtown—seemed to have been old-style construction, possibly left over from the city’s earliest days and built out of native materials. Few of those buildings had been more than five or six stories tall, but two much more modern towers had been caught in the holocaust and towered over the ashes at their feet like burned out Sphinxian crown oaks.

And then, of course, there were the half-dozen or so craters which could only have been created by kinetic strikes. Three of them, not that far from Landing, were surrounded by the tattered ruins of fire and blast shredded towns. None of them liked what that suggested, and not just because of the loss of life they undoubtedly represented. Kinetic weapons were a routine method of supplying fire support for planetary forces and had been for well over a thousand T-years. Over that time, they had been refined into precision weapons, capable of pinpoint strikes and almost infinitely variable effective yields. But no one had been interested in pinpoint accuracy when it came to those strikes. They’d been terror attacks—exactly the sort of attack the Eridani Edict was supposed to prevent, although he was certain Yucel and Lombroso would justify them as “military necessities”—and as he thought about them, Terekhov found himself wishing Watson hadn’t taken his offer to abandon ship. But those scars were at least a week old; they lacked the immediacy of what was happening in Landing even now.

As Terekhov and Pope watched, the image on one of the secondary visual displays CIC had tied into their air-breathing recon platforms changed, and Terekhov’s blue eyes were colder than arctic ice as he saw the line of bodies hanging from an obviously prefabricated, mass-produced gallows. There must have been twenty-five of them he thought as the platform zoomed in on them, and not all of those bodies had belonged to adults.

“I want this imagery absolutely nailed down, Stilt,” he said without looking away. He didn’t raise his voice, yet a couple of people on the flag bridge flinched when they heard it. “I don’t want any doubt, any ambiguity, about what we saw or where we saw it before we ever landed.”

“Yes, Sir,” Commander Lewis acknowledged.

Helen sat very still at her own console. She wanted to look away from those dangling bodies. They’d obviously been there for a while, judging by the extent of decay. Even as she watched, one of Mobius Beta’s avians landed on the central beam of the gallows. It was one of the local planetary ecosystem’s buzzard analogues, and she felt her gorge trying to rise as it stretched down its long, sinuous neck and began ripping at what had been the face of one of the smaller bodies.

So this is the ultra-civilized, oh-so-superior Solarian League’s view of “protecting” another planet, she thought grimly. And they have the gall to label the Ballroom terrorists?!

She felt her hands clenching into fists and made herself sit back, breathe deeply, remember what Master Tye had taught her about channeling anger. It didn’t seem to help as much as usual.

“Do you think that was Yucel or Yardley, Sir?” she heard Commander Pope ask, and Commodore Terekhov snorted harshly.

“Do you think it matters?” he asked in reply. “If it was Yardley, she did it with Yucel’s knowledge and support. And from our intelligence reports on Yucel, not to mention what we monitored on the way in, she’s the kind who’s going to be ‘hands-on’ whenever she gets the opportunity.”

“Agreed, Sir.” Pope nodded. “But if it was Yardley’s Presidential Guard thugs who actually carried out the hanging instead of the Gendarmerie, you know Yucel’s going to claim it was all the local authorities of an independent star nation. She sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with it!”

“And?” Terekhov turned his head to look at the commander. “No matter what really happened here she’ll claim that in front of any tribunal. Or she would, if the opportunity ever arose.” He smiled thinly. “And no tribunal or court of inquiry we could possibly impanel is ever going to prevent Abruzzi and his E&I shills from claiming it was Lombroso or Yardley. Unless, of course, they decide they can actually convince the Solly public we did it in the process of crushing the courageous local resistance to our callous imperialistic invasion. Then, having produced all of these perfectly serviceable atrocities, we decided we’d record them all and use them so our propaganda could fasten responsibility for them onto that splendid patriot and democratically elected president, Svein Lombroso, and Mobius’ stalwart ally and defender, Brigadier Yucel.”

Commander Pope, Helen noticed, looked like he really wished he thought Terekhov was joking with those last two sentences. For that matter, she wished she thought that.

The commodore saw his chief of staff’s expression and grimaced.

“The last thing anybody on the other side’s going to be interested in at this point is accurate reportage,” he pointed out. “They’ve never felt any compunction about distorting the truth to justify their peacetime policies; why in heaven’s name should they hesitate for a minute to manufacture atrocities out of whole cloth in wartime? And they won’t even have to manufacture these. We’ll have provided the visuals; all they’ll have to do is cut and edit and modify the audio.”

“Should we be providing it at all, then, Sir?” Pope asked, his eyes troubled.

“Of course we should. Sooner or later this war’s going to be over. When that happens, accurate records are going to be essential, and not just from a dry, historical perspective. Even more importantly, we need to show our people what this is really about right now, while it’s happening. That’s the real reason I want Stilt to make sure we have every bit of this absolutely certified and verified. I’d love to see some of the people in Old Chicago responsible for this”—he tossed his head in the direction of those pitiful, decaying bodies—“treated to the same penalty, but I don’t see that happening unless we actually physically occupy Old Terra, and somehow I don’t see that happening, either. We can always hope, though. And in the meantime,” his voice dropped, turning as icy as his eyes, “I want this evidence available when we deal with the people who actually did it.”

“Yes, Sir.” Pope nodded firmly. “I understand. But it’s—”

“Excuse me, Commander,” Atalante Montella interrupted respectfully. Pope and Terekhov turned towards her, and she looked at the commodore. “I don’t have Mr. Breitbach, Sir,” she said, “but I do have Ms. Blanchard.”

“Do we have visual, or just audio?” Terekhov asked.

“Both, Sir. The signal quality isn’t very good, though.”

“Put her on the main display,” Terekhov directed, and turned towards the display as a woman’s image appeared on it. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a strained, exhausted face smudged with dirt. An ugly bruise discolored her right cheek and temple, and a Solarian built pulse rifle was slung across her shoulder as she crouched over what was obviously a handheld com.

“Ms. Blanchard, I’m Commodore Aivars Alexsovitch Terekhov, Royal Manticoran Navy,” he said. “We’re here in response to Ms. Summers message.”

“Summers?” Blanchard’s voice was as exhausted as she looked, and she shook her head. “Was that the name?” She grimaced. “I didn’t know. Operational security.”

“I don’t think operational security’s going to be an issue very much longer,” Terekhov told her grimly.

“Maybe not. It’s the only reason some of us are still alive, though.” She scrubbed her hand across her face, smearing the dirt.

“I can believe that. Are you ready to trust me, though?”

“You had this com combination, and we saw the explosions from down here.” She shrugged. “We’ve been getting our asses kicked for the last week. I don’t see the bastards deciding they have to get tricky at this point.”

“So I’ll take that as a yes?” he asked dryly.

“Exactly.” She managed a quick, fleeting grimace of a smile. “Oh, and by the way, we’re happy as hell to see you.” She shook her head again. “I’ve got to say, when Michael told me you folks were backing us, it surprised the hell out of me.”

“You’re not the only one,” he said even more dryly. Then his eyes narrowed. “On the other hand, you just mentioned ‘Michael.’ Am I correct in assuming that was a reference to Michael Breitbach?”

“Yeah.” She made a face. “After all this time, knowing you know both of our names makes me a little nervous. Nothing personal.”

“Understandable. But may I ask why we got you at this combination and not him? My understanding from Ms. Summers was that this was Mr. Breitbach’s combination.”

“It is.” Her weary voice was suddenly leaden. “Unfortunately, he’s not here to answer.”

“What happened?”

“He was on his way to meet with one of our cell leaders and there was a sweep through the area. He didn’t come back.” She raked the fingers of her right hand through her short cut, filthy looking hair.

“Do you think Yucel and Lombroso know who they caught?”

“No way.” She shook her head hard. “It would’ve been all over what’s left of the news channels if they knew they’d gotten him. He was unarmed, and he wasn’t even carrying his com…which is why I happen to have it.” Her image moved dizzyingly on the display as she swept the hand holding Breitbach’s com around for emphasis. “I’m guessing they figure he’s just one more civilian they’ve swept up.”

“All right.” Terekhov nodded. “That makes sense.” He pursed his lips for a moment. “I haven’t contacted Lombroso or Yucel yet. What’s your situation? The real situation, I mean, not what they’re putting out on the information channels.”

“To be honest, it’s almost as bad as they’re saying it is,” she admitted, setting the com down on a table or desk of some sort and perching herself on an overturned trash can. “Lombroso and that bitch Hadley started the sweeps a couple of weeks before Yucel got here. Beatings, casual brutality, secret arrests, something more imaginative when they had time for it. That kind of thing. Then they started the public executions.” Her jaw tightened. “Not just for people who were actually caught doing something ‘criminal,’ either. They were making examples, and they didn’t even pretend they weren’t.”

She fell silent for a moment, nostrils flaring, and Terekhov waited patiently.

“We couldn’t hold our people when that kind of shit started. If Michael hadn’t moved—and hadn’t made sure everyone knew he was moving—he’d have lost control and Hadley would’ve picked us off one at a time as each cell tried something on its own. And he had a pretty good ‘nothing left to lose’ plan already in place. We damned near took Hadley, the PG’s HQ, and the President’s Palace in the first eighteen hours. Killed a bunch of the bastards, and shot up at least two thirds of their remaining armor.”

For a moment, her eyes were fierce, proud. Then her shoulders slumped.

“Damned near wasn’t good enough, though. We had three quarters of the capital, five other cities completely, and most of the countryside on this continent, but we couldn’t break into the final compound, and then Yucel got here. Landed her damned intervention battalions and launched orbital strikes on half a dozen smaller cities and towns that had come over to our side. That’s when Michael pulled us out of the other cities. He wouldn’t give them any kind of excuse to do the same thing to a major population center. But he figured they wouldn’t try the same crap on Landing. Too much real estate they don’t want to lose, and any strikes would be too damned close to them. He was right about that, too, so they’ve been coming after us house by house.” She bared her teeth. “We’ve been costing them, but you’ve seen the news channels.”

“Yes, I have.” Terekhov’s eyes were fiery blue ice. “We haven’t seen any imagery about the orbital strikes, though. Do you have a casualty estimate from them?”

His tone was calm, almost conversational, but his expression wasn’t.

“Best guess is somewhere around four hundred and fifty thousand,” Blanchard said.

“I see.” Terekhov looked at her for a moment or two, then inhaled sharply. “Our recon platforms show you holding a crescent around the southern and western edges of the capital. Is that accurate?”

She nodded.

“And Yucel and Lombroso hold the area around the Presidential Palace?”

“They hold everything we don’t,” she said frankly. “Everything from the sports center to the tower complex just east of where I am now.” She managed a tired grin. “I’m assuming you’ve got my signal located?”

“We know where you are,” Terekhov agreed with a brief answering smile. “What about the eastern side of town, in closer to the Presidential Palace?”

“That’s mainly been cleared. I mean, they’ve run out all the civilians, except for a handful of residential towers dedicated to off-worlders and corporate employees.”

“And I gather from the newscasts that they’re holding their prisoners in the soccer stadium?”

“That’s right.” She nodded again. “President Lombroso Memorial Soccer Stadium. Son-of-a-bitch just loves naming things for himself.”

“What can you tell us about their security situation around the stadium?”

“Not much. They’ve pushed us too far back. I’m guessing you can see more from orbit then we can see from down here.”

“You’re probably right about that.” Terekhov nodded again. He stood thinking, arms still folded across his chest, then nodded slowly, more to himself than to Blanchard.

“Thank you, Ms. Blanchard,” he said. “I think it’s time I had a few words with President Lombroso and his associates. Perhaps I can convince them of the error of their ways.”

* * *

Brigadier Francisca Yucel took another quick, angry turn around the luxurious office she’d been assigned in the Lombroso Arms Tower. The Lombroso Arms was across President Lombroso Boulevard from the Presidential Palace, and its thick ceramacrete walls made it virtually impervious to anything the rebels had been equipped with when she first arrived. It also gave her a commanding height as an observation post and a ground-based communications station.

“Her” office was huge, lavishly decorated, with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked directly down on the roof and ornate façade of the Presidential Palace. She’d enjoyed its comfort since her arrival, and her communication section had set up along with the rest of her staff in the larger office suite next door. Her lofty perch had let her oversee the systematic destruction of the scum who’d been about to kick Lombroso’s worthless ass before she arrived, and she’d felt nothing but satisfaction as the effort progressed. She probably could have finished it sooner, but she’d wanted to be sure these worthless proles never forgot. That they never again even dared to think of raising their hands to Frontier Security or its allies.

Only now the fucking Manties had turned up and that worthless asshole Watson hadn’t even tried to stop them. He’d just rolled over and blown up his own ships so the Manties didn’t even have to waste any missiles on them! One of these days she’d settle his cowardly ass the way it deserved to be settled, but for now she had to deal with the goddamned Manties.

You didn’t believe it, did you? she asked herself viciously. Didn’t want to. Wang did, damn him. But not you. You knew better.

She snarled, burying the fear she didn’t want to admit under fresh anger. They hadn’t had anything to go on, really. A couple of hints from interrogation. Nothing concrete, and God knew the lying bastards would say anything—invent anything—if they thought it was going to keep somebody they cared for alive.

Admit it, she told herself. You did believe the Manties were involved, it just never occurred to you they might be this involved. You figured you had plenty of time to settle these fuckers’ hash before anyone back in Spindle even knew you were here. Jerk their goddammed rebels out from under their feet, and they wouldn’t have any ‘spontaneous uprising’ to support. But you didn’t have time, did you?

No, she hadn’t, and she gritted her teeth as she remembered how positive she’d been that the Manties would back down. That even they had to realize taking on the Solarian League was nothing more than glorified suicide. Obviously they were even stupider than she’d thought, and even now she took a grim, vengeful satisfaction from the thought of what this was going to cost them in the end. They’d pay one day—pay in spades!—for everything they’d done, for all their treachery and deceit.

But this wasn’t “one day.” This was today, and today the Manties were sitting up there in orbit, and they hadn’t even tried to talk to her or that idiot Lombroso yet. They were just sitting there, letting her sit down here and rot, but it wasn’t going to work. She had their fucking number. If they thought they were going to waltz in here and—

“Excuse me, Ma’am.”

“What?” she snarled, wheeling around to face the Mobian communications tech who’d dared to enter her office.

“There someone on the com asking for you, Ma’am,” the Presidential Guard tech said nervously, sweat beading his forehead. “He says he’s somebody named Terekhov. Commodore Terekhov.”

“Oh, he does, does he?”

Yucel felt her lips twist in anger. Terekhov. The same son-of-a-bitch who’d shot up the Monica System and started this whole frigging nightmare. She should’ve guessed.

The Mobian only stood there, looking at her, obviously uncertain whether he was supposed to answer or not and terrified to make the wrong choice. Her fingers flexed with the urge to rip his head off, but she made herself draw a deep breath, instead.

“All right. Put him on my desk display.”

“Yes, Ma’am!”

The tech disappeared like smoke, and Yucel turned towards the office’s enormous desk just as the display lit with the face of a blond, blue-eyed officer in the black and gold of the Royal Manticoran Navy.

“What?” she snapped.

“I assume I have the dubious privilege of addressing Brigadier Yucel?” The contempt in Terekhov’s tone flicked Yucel like a whip.

“I’m Yucel,” she confirmed in a harsh, hard-edged voice. “What the fuck d’you want?”

“I thought, much as the idea disgusts me, that I might offer you a chance to get off this planet alive.” Terekhov’s voice was like ice, his expression one of indifference. “Personally, I’d prefer to kill you where you stand. I’ve had the opportunity to observe your handiwork in some detail. However, since we’re all civilized people here, I decided to give you my terms, first.”

“Your terms?” she sneered. “Who the hell do you think you are? You come waltzing into this star system, you attack Navy starships, and now you have the sheer, unmitigated gall to tell me you’re going to offer me terms? Well fuck you! One of us is here at the invitation of the legally constituted government of this star system, Commodore Terekhov, and it sure as hell isn’t you!”

“A legally constituted government that’s massacred—or allowed you to massacre—a half million or so of its citizens with kinetic strikes? That legally constituted government?”

“What a sovereign star nation does to suppress criminal insurrection is none of your goddammed business,” she said harshly. “And what the Solarian Gendarmerie does at the request of that sovereign star nation is none of your business, either! So get your ships the hell out of this system.”

“Not going to happen.” Terekhov’s calm, cold precision was a sharp contrast to the seething fury of her own tone. “To put this in terms even you may be able to understand, Brigadier, you’re screwed. I don’t care if we have to kill every single gendarme down there, and I certainly don’t care if we have to kill you. But I’d just as soon avoid any additional damage to the Mobians’ planet if I can. So here are those terms. You lay down your weapons, you march all your personnel out of Landing to a point to be designated by me, and you wait there until my Marines take you into custody.”

“And then what happens in this fantasy of yours?” she demanded. “You shoot us all on the spot?”

“I’ll admit the thought has a certain appeal,” he said. “But, no. We take you into custody and we keep you there until a proper court can be convened to consider the actions of your personnel on this planet. All of you will receive a fair trial, and the guilty will receive the sentence commensurate with their crimes.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind.” Yucel’s voice was almost conversational. “You really think you’re going to get away with trying and shooting Solarian gendarmes?”

“I was thinking more in terms of hanging, actually, since that seems to be your own favored form of execution, but we’ll probably leave that up to the Mobians,” he told her, and she barked a scornful laugh.

“And just what the hell do you think is going to happen to your pissant little Star Empire when the League finds out about that?” she demanded.

“I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” he told her flatly. “Not that I’m particularly worried about it in the short term.”

“You may have kicked Crandall’s ass at Spindle, but it’s going to be different when the Navy knows what you’ve got and comes after you!” she spat.

“You obviously haven’t paid any attention to reality in some time,” Terekhov said. “And you’re just a bit behind the news, too. For example, on the basis of what you’ve just said, I don’t suppose you’ve heard about what happened to Vice Admiral Dubroskaya at Saltash, when five of our destroyers destroyed all four of her battlecruisers. Or about the fact that the Star Empire is now allied to the Republic of Haven. Or that between us, we now have somewhere around five hundred ships of the wall, any two of which could have controlled every missile we fired at Crandall in Spindle. Let’s do some math here, Brigadier. If two of our ships can kill seventy of yours, and we’ve got five hundred of them, that means we can kill every superdreadnought in Battle Fleet, including the Reserve, about three times each.”

He paused, smiling coldly at her, letting her see the total confidence in his eyes, then continued.

“According to the latest dispatches before I headed out for Mobius, your Admiral Filareta was on his way to Manticore with somewhere around four hundred of the wall. By this time, I’m sure he’s arrived…and if he was foolish enough to actually fight when he got there, I doubt any of his ships lasted long enough to surrender. I’m certainly not worried about the outcome, anyway. Now, do you accept my terms or not?”

Yucel stared at him, her face momentarily slack with shock. Manticore and Haven allied? Allied against the Solarian League? He was lying. He had to be lying! But even as she thought that, something with thousands of icy little feet started crawling up and down her spine. If he wasn’t lying, if he was telling the truth, that would explain why he’d been willing to take out Watson’s ships. And if he really was ready to do what he’d just said he’d do to her personnel, to her…

The ice moving up and down her back seemed to settle in her belly. It was odd. She’d never realized her stomach could be simultaneously nauseated and frozen into a solid lump.

Panic surged suddenly, rising into her throat like vomit, and she swallowed hard. For a moment, she knew exactly what it had felt like for countless malcontents and troublemakers when her gendarmes’ pulser butts hammered on their doors. But then she forced herself to push the panic aside and glared at Terekhov’s image.

“All right,” she said. “Those are your terms. Well, here are mine. You stay the hell off this planet. You put one shuttle down here, one frigging Marine, and I start shooting prisoners. I’ve got over thirty thousand of them in the stadium. You’re welcome to take a look for yourself. And I’ve got two companies of gendarmes over there. I can kill every fucking person in that stadium in five minutes flat, and if you try any shit like landing on this planet, I swear to God I will!”

“Courageous and determined to ‘serve and protect’ to the last, I see,” Terekhov observed contemptuously, and Yucel flushed as he tossed the Solarian Gendarmerie’s official motto into her teeth.

“Just try me and see,” she snarled through gritted teeth.

“One more time, Brigadier, and my patience isn’t unlimited. If you choose not to accept the terms offered, the consequences will be on your own head.”

“What? You think I believe you’d come down here after me? Wreck the rest of this podunk city coming after my people and get everybody in the frigging stadium killed?” She sneered at him. “Not you. You’ve got to be the goddammed white knight in shining armor. Well, you come down here and screw around with us, and you’ll get plenty of blood on that armor. I guarantee it!”

“I see. Perhaps I should be having this conversation with President Lombroso. He might be perfectly willing to hand you and your gendarmes over to me if he thought it would save his own skin.”

“Lombroso couldn’t hand you candy from a baby! He’s hiding in the damn basement—him and Hadley both! He deputized me to ‘negotiate’ with you, and I’m all done, friend. Now. Are you going to accept my terms? Or do I need to pass the order to shoot the first hundred or so prisoners to make my point?”

“Why is it,” Terekhov asked conversationally, “that people like you always think you’re more ruthless than people like me?”

Something about his tone rang warning bells in the back of Yucel’s brain, but she refused to look away. She held her glare locked on him, refusing to back down, and he shrugged.

“Stilt?” he said without glancing away from Yucel.

“Yes, Sir?” a voice replied from outside his com pickup’s field of view.

“Pass the word to Colonel Simak. Then set Condition Zeus.”

“Condition Zeus, aye, aye, Sir.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Yucel snapped.

“I can’t say it’s been a pleasure speaking to you, Brigadier,” Terekhov replied. “Educational, yes, in a disgusting sort of way, but not a pleasure. In fact, I’m just as happy we won’t be speaking again.”

“Good,” she said. “Now get the fuck out of here before I change my mind and decide to shoot a couple of dozen of them to hurry you on your way!”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of that,” he assured her. “In fact,” he raised his wrist and glanced at his personal chrono, “you should be receiving my response to your terms”—those ice-blue eyes flicked back to her face—“just about now.”

She frowned, wondering what the hell he was talking about.

She was still wondering two and a half seconds later when the kinetic projectile struck Lombroso Arms Tower at approximately thirty kilometers per second.

* * *

The Mark 87 “Damocles” Kinetic Strike Package was a containerized weapon system designed to fit into any standard shipboard magazine and sized to dep0loy through a counter-missile launch tube. The KSP could be configured with several different types of payloads, but the most common variant—like the one which had been deployed from Quentin Saint-James number three CM tube shortly after she’d entered orbit—carried a rack of six of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps’ M412 kinetic penetrators. Each penetrator was a six hundred and fifty kilogram dart fitted with its own small, short-lived but powerful impeller drive, a capacitor ring for onboard power, and a guidance package. By controlling acceleration rates and times, the M412 could produce an effective yield of up to one megaton…but this particular application called for a slightly smaller sledgehammer than that.

The projectile impacted at barely one tenth of a percent of light speed. The tower was enormous, the projectile wasn’t all that huge, and its velocity might seem positively snail-like compared to the eighty percent of light speed a Mark 23 could attain, but it was sufficient. In fact, its produced an effective yield of just over sixty-seven kilotons as it struck dead center on the tower’s roof at an angle of exactly ninety degrees and punched straight down, pithing it with a spike of plasma that vaporized everything in its path.

Admittedly, the results were positively anemic compared to those of the far heavier strikes Yucel had used to obliterate “rebellious towns” as object lessons, but that suited Aivars Terekhov just fine. The structure’s massive ceramacrete walls confined and channeled the blast, and the towers around the impact point acted as cofferdams, further confining the blast and restricting the damage. Yet the explosion still reached out to obliterate the Presidential Palace and everything else (including the residential towers in which the System Unity and Progress Party’s leadership and the majority of the transtellars’ off-world personnel had been quartered) in a three-block radius. Within the primary zone of destruction virtually nothing survived; outside it, except for shock damage, there was remarkably little devastation.

Even as the shockwave rolled outward from what had been the Lombroso Arms Tower, two dozen assault shuttles plummeted out of Landing’s sky. Eight of them swooped down on the soccer stadium, heavy with wing-mounted precision guided munitions that launched and screamed in on the tri-barrels Yucel’s gendarmes had mounted on the stadium’s uppermost row of bleachers to cover the prisoners below. Precisely calculated fireballs crushed them like some giant’s brimstone boots, and the shuttles reefed back around, going into hover, dropping their noses to bring their bow-mounted heavy cannon to bear.

The rest of the shuttles streaked by overhead, and three companies of battle-armored Manticoran Marines plummeted from them on counter-grav drop harnesses.

Here and there an isolated gendarme or two had survived the PGM strike with enough courage—or stupidity—to fire on the hovering shuttles or try to nail one of the plummeting Marines. They didn’t have much luck. The Marines came in far too hard and fast to be easily targeted by men and women terrified of what was happening, and the gendarmes had no antiair weapons. The Mobius Liberation Front hadn’t had any aircraft for them to worry about, so none had been issued to the stadium guards, and the shuttles were too well armored for their surviving light weapons to pose any threat.

Those far enough away from any prisoner discovered that their body armor was worth precisely nothing when a thirty-millimeter round from a shuttle pulse cannon hit them at several thousand meters per second. The others lasted a little longer—until the Marines grounded and they discovered that their pulse rifles were as useless against battle armor as they’d been against the shuttles.

A handful threw their weapons to the ground and got their hands clasped behind their heads quickly enough to survive.

* * *

Helen Zilwicki stood behind Commodore Terekhov, watching the recon platforms’ imagery in the main visual display. The kinetic strike’s towering, ugly, anvil-headed cloud of dust and smoke was still climbing when the first Marine landed. The prevailing wind had barely begun to bend it before the entire stadium had been secured.

The sheer, stunning speed of it left her feeling vaguely dazed. She’d been at Terekhov’s elbow as he, Commander Lewis, and Colonel Simak planned and organized Zeus. Yet she’d been convinced, somehow, that Yucel was at least smart enough to realize how hopeless her position was.

I guess Daddy was right when he told me to never underestimate the power of human stupidity, she thought. God, I hope the word gets around and finally starts penetrating even Solly skulls! If we have to keep on killing every damn one of them…

“Well,” Terekhov said after a moment, blue eyes still on the visual display, “I suppose we should see if whoever’s still alive in their chain of command is more willing to listen to reason.”