Shadow of Freedom-eARC (4 page)

She broke off, tears spangling her eyes, then shook herself savagely.

“Goddamn it, Megan! It’s all we’ve got
left!
You’re our chairwoman, if anyone can speak for us, you can! At least get out there and see to it that someone hears
our
side of what happened here. Don’t let the bastards just sweep us and Conerock and all the rest of this shit under the rug like it never even happened!”

MacLean stared at her for a moment, shaken to the marrow of her soul by the raw appeal in MacFadzean’s last sentence.

“I wouldn’t even know how to contact him,” she said finally. Something exploded in the near distance, the sound muffled but clear through the apartment building’s walls. “And that’s assuming I could get off-world in the first place.”

“Here.” MacFadzean tossed her a data chip. “The contact information’s on there.” She smiled crookedly. “It’s in my personal cipher, but you’ve got the key.”

MacLean caught the chip. She looked down at it for a moment, then clenched her fist around it.

“I’m not running out and leaving you and everyone else behind, Erin. I’m just not doing it.”

“Yes, you are,” MacFadzean told her as more explosions began to shake the command post. “You
owe
it to us.”

She locked eyes with the other woman, and it was MacLean’s gaze that fell.

“Jamie will get you out through one of the tunnels,” MacFadzean said then. “If the two of you can get out of Elgin, head for Haimer. I think our cell’s still secure there. Lie low for a few weeks, and Tobias MacGill—he’s the cell leader in Haimer—will fix you up with new papers. Then he and Jamie will get you onto one of the timber shuttles. From there…from there you’ll have to play it by ear, but you can do it, Megan. You
have
to.”

“I—”

MacLean tried to find one last argument, but she couldn’t, and there wasn’t much time. She looked at her friend, the friend she knew was about to die with all those other friends, and she could hardly see through the blur of her tears.

“All right,” she whispered. “I’ll try.”

“Good.” MacFadzean stepped around the table and enveloped her in a brief, crushing hug. “Good. Now go!”

MacLean hugged her back for an instant longer, then nodded, grabbed her pulse rifle, and headed for the door. MacFadzean watched her go, then picked up the handset again and pressed the button that connected her to every other handset simultaneously.

“Blàr Chùil Lodair,” she said simply. “Let’s by some time for the tunnel rats.”

* * *

“No fucking around this time!” Colonel Nathan Mundy snarled over the battalion communications net. “And no excuses, either! Get in there, kick their asses, and bring me their fucking heads!”

Acknowledgments came back, and he smiled savagely as he settled deeper into his seat while his ground effect command vehicle slid around the final corner and his direct vision screens showed him the apartment building the rebels had taken over. It didn’t look any different from half a dozen other buildings they’d occupied across the capital, but this one was special.
This
was the one that was going to break the rebels once and for all, because this was their central command post. He’d thought for a while that MacPhee wasn’t going to break, but the UPS had a way of convincing even the most recalcitrant. Maybe MacPhee
wouldn’t
have broken if they’d had only him to work on, but when they brought in his daughter…

I suppose he still might’ve lied
, the colonel thought harshly.
Of course, if he did, he’ll think what we already did to the bitch was nothing
.

“Get closer!” he barked at his driver.

“Sir, I—”

“Get me
closer
, goddamn it!”

“Yes, Sir.”

* * *

The tanks were Solarian surplus, at least two generations out of date, but some tank was always better than no tank, and their armor shed pulser fire with contemptuous ease. They moved forward steadily, pounding the apartment building and the two structures to either side with fire from their main guns—fifty-millimeter hyper-velocity weapons with the firepower of a pre-space hundred and fifty millimeter cannon. Gouts of dust and smoke erupted, spewing showers of splintered ceramacrete, and coaxially mounted tribarrels spat thousands of explosive darts at their targets. It was impossible for anything to survive under that pounding, and the tank crews knew it.

But the tank crews were wrong.

The first antitank missile struck like hell’s own viper. The superdense penetrator impacted on its target’s frontal armor at just over ten thousand meters per second, and that armor might as well have been made of paper. The tank erupted in a thunderous fireball, and an instant later there was a second fireball. And a third.

“Christ!” someone yelped over the command net. “Where the fuck did they get
that?!
Break right! Alfie,
break ri—!
”

The voice cut off abruptly.

* * *

Innis MacLay bellowed in wordless triumph as the first UPS tanks exploded. Then a pair of APCs encountered one of the improvised explosive devices the Provos had buried in the sewers under Brownhill Road. It wasn’t powerful enough to destroy them outright, but the blast was more than enough to cripple them, and he watched their vehicle crews bail out, the Uppies scattering like blue-uniformed maggots.

The grips of the tribarrel were comfortable in his hands as he peered through the holographic sight, and he squeezed the trigger stud.

* * *

Nathalan Mundy stared at his readouts in disbelief. That bastard MacPhee! He hadn’t said a single word about weapons
that
heavy! And the rebels hadn’t shown anything like that kind of firepower here in Elgin! How was he supposed to have realized—?

* * *

Another tank exploded, but this time one of its companions got a firm lock on the third-floor window from which it had come. A turret swiveled, a tank gun flashed, and half the floor behind that window disintegrated in a deafening explosion.

* * *

MacLay couldn’t feel the shock of the explosion from his lofty perch. Or, at least, he couldn’t feel it clearly enough to separate it from all the other shocks and vibrations whiplashing through the building. He saw the tank fire, though, and it wouldn’t have if it hadn’t had a target.

He wondered who’d just died, but it didn’t matter. They could hurt the bastards, but they couldn’t
win
, and he’d already heard the reports from the other side of the building. The Uppies had to know exactly where they were; they were closing in from every direction, and MacFadzean was right. Only those closest to one of the escape tunnels had any chance at all of getting out alive.

Assuming someone else kept the Uppies occupied, that was.

He selected another target, slamming his heavy caliber darts through the thinner top armor of one of the APCs. The twenty-five-man personnel carrier staggered to a stop, then exploded, and his bloodshot eyes glittered with satisfaction. It was only a matter of time before someone spotted his firing position, but at the moment they were more preoccupied with the missile teams than mere tribarrels, and he swung his weapon’s muzzle towards fresh prey.

* * *

“Fall back!” Colonel Mundy snapped at his driver. “Get us further back—
now
, damn it!”

The driver snarled something that could have been an acknowledgment, and the command vehicle curtsied on its ground effect cushion as he spun it around. The sensor cluster kept the apartment building centered in Mundy’s display even as the vehicle turned away, and a cursor flashed on the screen, highlighting a balcony on the sixtieth floor. An icon appeared beside it as the command vehicle’s computers identified the energy signature, Mundy’s eyes widened as he recognized the data code.

Tribarrel!
a corner of his brain gobbled.
That’s a tri
—

* * *

The GEV erupted in a boiling cloud of red and black. It tore apart, incinerating its crew, and Innis MacLay howled in triumph. It was brief, that triumph, no more than seconds before one of the surviving UPS tanks put a round from its main armament right through the balcony’s French doors, but it was enough.

* * *

“This way, Megan!” Jamie Kirbishly said hoarsely. “We’re almost there.”

Megan MacLean nodded, wading through the ankle-deep water at her guide’s heels, trying not to think about what was happening behind her. There were perhaps twenty more people in the tunnel with her, stretched out in a long, grim-faced queue, most of them people who still had—or might still have—family somewhere on the other side of holocaust. People who knew their friends—friends who no longer had anyone waiting for them—had chosen to stay behind and cover their escape.

She put her hand into her pocket, feeling the hard edges of the chip folio, wondering who the man who had called himself “Partisan” really was. If he’d told MacFadzean the truth about his official status or if it had all been a lie. And if it hadn’t, what had he and the star nation who’d sent him really intended? Why had they offered to help the Liberation League? Whatever MacFadzean might have thought, it hadn’t been out of the bigness of their hearts. MacLean was certain of that, and God knew they had enough problems of their own at the moment. Had they simply been looking for a way to distract their enemies? That might well make sense, she supposed. But it was also possible it hadn’t
all
been cynical, pragmatic calculation on their part. They had a reputation for standing up for lost causes; maybe they even deserved it. And if they did, and if she really could get off-world and reach them somehow, maybe this nightmare slaughter wouldn’t have been entirely in vain after all. Maybe—

“
Down!
” Kirbishly screamed.

MacLean responded instantly, throwing herself down on her belly in the icy water even before she realized she’d moved. She landed with a splash, hearing shouts behind her, and raised her head just in time to see the heavily armored UPS troops plummeting down the ladder from the manhole above with their pulse rifles flaming in full automatic.

It was the last thing she ever saw.

* * *

Frinkelo Osborne stood on the landing platform of SEIU Tower, his face hard and set as he watched fresh smoke billow up to join the dense, choking cloud hovering above the Loomis System’s capital. Over twenty percent of Elgin’s buildings had taken at least some damage, he thought disgustedly. MacQuarie insisted it wasn’t that bad, and it was possible his own estimate was high because of the revulsion and fury boiling through his brain, but he didn’t think so. She was a liar trying to cover her own arse, and she was going to have plenty of covering to do now that the shooting was over. Just what he could see from his present vantage point was going to cost billions to repair, and the damage her in Elgin was nothing compared to what Captain Venelli’s KEWs—not to mention the UPS’ kill teams—had done to the
rest
of the planet. He remembered his conversation with Venelli in
Hoplite
’s briefing room and his right hand rose, touching the hard angularity of the holstered pulser under his left armpit.

Tempting,
so
tempting. He could walk into Zagorski’s penthouse office and no one would think twice about admitting him. And once he got there…

He took his hand away from the pistol again and grimaced bleakly. The thought might be tempting, but he wasn’t about to act on it, and he knew it. Just as he knew the real reason he wanted to paint Nyatui Zagorski’s office walls with his brains.

Osborne had served OFS well, for longer than he liked to remember, but this was the worst. Somehow he’d always managed to avoid the details like this one, but now he’d climbed down into the sewer with the worst of them, and he’d never be clean again.

And the worst of it
, he thought in the cold, cruel light of honesty,
is that now that I’ve done it once, it’ll be easier the next time. And if I stay with it long enough, there
will
be a next time. There always is
.

He stood for another few minutes, gazing at the blazing apartment building, wondering how much longer it would stand before its skeleton collapsed into the inferno, wondering if there was anyone still alive inside that furnace, praying for death.

Then he turned and walked silently away.

* * *

It was still and dark in the smoke-choked sewer under the city of Elgin. There was no light, no movement…no life. Not any longer, and a data chip folio settled slowly, slowly through the bloody water into the sludge below.

Chapter Three

“Just a second, Gwen,” Captain Loretta Shoupe said as she followed Lieutenant Gervais Winton Erwin Neville Archer out of Admiral Augustus Khumalo’s office space aboard HMS
Hercules
.

Gervais had just finished delivering a late-hour briefing to Khumalo and Shoupe, his chief of staff. There’d been a lot of those briefings over the last three weeks, and it didn’t look like getting better anytime soon. The entire Spindle System was still somewhere between astonishment and euphoria over the devastating defeat Admiral Gold Peak’s Tenth Fleet had inflicted on the Solarian League Navy, but the Navy remained too busy to celebrate as it scrambled frantically to deal with the enormous flood of POWs it had so suddenly and unexpectedly acquired. Despite which—or perhaps because of which, given the exhaustion quotient of her crew—the ancient superdreadnought flagship of the recently created Talbott Station was quiet around them.

“Yes, Ma’am?” Gervais replied, turning to face her.

“You know Ensign Zilwicki pretty well, don’t you, Gwen?” Shoupe’s tone made the question a statement, Gervais thought, and wondered where she was headed.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said again. Despite the monumental rank disparity between a mere ensign and a senior-grade lieutenant, he’d come to know young Zilwicki, Sir Aivars Terekhov’s flag lieutenant,
very
well, as a matter of fact.