She’d said she was fine, but she always said that. In fact, she’d said it right after she finished falling down the stairs at their second daughter’s third birthday party. She’d broken her arm in three places, as Jules recalled, but she’d said she was fine. Yes siree, nothing wrong with her! “Go back to the party, honey. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Right, he remembered with a fond snort. She was back, all right…just as soon as the EMTs finished setting the arm and scheduling her first quick-heal appointment!
At least this time didn’t rise to that level, but something was twanging his “something’s not right” button. Maybe it was fatigue, maybe she was having a personality clash with one of the other researchers, or maybe it was something else entirely—maybe even his imagination! But he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she was…out of sorts, somehow.
Well, if she is, at least she gets to go home this afternoon. He smiled, thinking about the catered candlelit dinner he’d arranged to welcome her home. And the rather more…personal welcome he had in mind for her after dinner. I may be pissed off that she’s been gone so long, but it’s not all bad. I know my Lisa. In her case, absence really does make the heart—and certain other body parts—grow fonder!
He chuckled, restored to a cheerful sense of anticipation, as he stepped into the lift car and punched his destination.
* * *
“All right! Way to go, Jamie!”
Allison Renfrew surged to her feet, waving her orange-and-black striped scarf as her fifteen-year-old son drove past the final defender and punched a sizzling kick straight into the goal with his off foot. More orange and black waved furiously all around her in the bleachers on the home field side of the Dobzhansky Soccer Complex as the students and parents from Matthew Stanley Meselson Academy celebrated the go-ahead goal. It was early in the second half—still plenty of time for the Transformers, MSM’s hated rivals from Oswald Avery Prep, to score—but MSM had an outstanding goalie. She’d given up only seven goals so far all season, and three of those had been on penalty kicks!
Allison settled back into her seat, and reached for her uni-link. She punched in her husband’s combination and grinned as his face appeared on the wrist unit’s small display.
“Jamie just put one in!” she crowed. “It was beautiful, Stevie! Just beautiful. I wish you could’ve been here to see it!”
Colonel Stephen Renfrew of the Mesan Planetary Peaceforce smiled at her from the display.
“Great, honey! Left foot or right?”
“Left!” Her grin grew even broader. “From the look of things, Avery Prep’s spies never had a clue he’d been working on that, either.”
“That’s our boy!” Colonel Renfrew chuckled. “I wish I could’ve seen it, too.”
“I know.”
Allison’s jubilance faded just a bit as she thought about why her husband hadn’t seen it. There were many things an officer’s spouse had to accept about his or her partner’s career, and in Allison’s opinion the worst of them were the frequent absences. At least Stephen was in the Peaceforce, not one of the other security agencies, so his absences tended to be…less irregular than some. They could usually plan around training exercises, for example. But not this time. Not with those Ballroom lunatics killing people right and left! There hadn’t been another major attack in several weeks, but there’d been dozens of small, seemingly random bomb explosions and assassinations—enough to kill and maim three or four hundred people every week.
That might not be that huge a number out of an entire star system’s population. In fact, it was a tiny number; one of the newsies trying to reassure people that the government had the situation in hand had pointed out that almost four hundred people died in perfectly ordinary accidents in a city Mendel’s size every single week. And Mendel, he’d pointed out, was scarcely the only city on the planet. The largest, perhaps, but it represented less than five percent of the total system population. For the system as a whole, accidents killed almost seven hundred thousand every week!
Allison was prepared to accept his numbers, but these people weren’t dying in “accidents”—they were being murdered. That was more than enough to make anyone nervous, and the Peaceforce had been at a much higher than usual readiness state in case it was needed to back up the Office of Public Safety and the Mesan Internal Security Directorate. Allison didn’t much care for the Misties, but this time she was willing to admit that even Internal Security’s normal tactics seemed justified. Green Pines had been bad enough, but as stunning and terrifying as it had been, it had also been a one-time event, something so totally outside the normal Mesan experience that it had seemed almost like an earthquake or a forest fire. A natural disaster, not something someone had done deliberately.
What had happened since, and the horrific, gloating “communiqués” from those Ballroom butchers describing their murders in loving detail and promising still more, was something else entirely. Everybody seemed to know someone who’d been killed, and it was little wonder that the cheers for today’s game seemed even louder, more frenetic, than usual. A lot of worried parents were finding the same relief—momentary, perhaps, but genuine—that Allison was.
And Stephen was stuck in a command post somewhere as the duty watch officer. There were times, she thought, when the world didn’t exactly run over it with fairness.
“Well,” she said with only slightly forced cheerfulness, “it’s not like this is the end of the season, sweetheart. Hopefully things will settle down enough for you to make at least some of the games. And whatever else happens, you know we’re going to be facing Avery in the playoffs. They always make it, just like we do, so—”
Her transmission cut off abruptly, and Colonel Renfrew frowned as the link went dead. He punched the callback function.
“Hi, this is Allison!” a cheerful voice said in his earbug. “I’m sorry I’m occupied right now, but leave a message. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks!”
His frown deepened, and he began to key a diagnostic into his uni-link. But then he was interrupted.
“Sir,” a voice said, and his eyebrows shot upright. That voice belonged to Captain Angela Klauser, his battalion intelligence officer, but he’d never heard it sound quite like that.
“What is it, Angie?” he asked quickly, forgetting the interrupted call as he turned towards the captain with a sudden surge of concern for her. “What’s wrong?”
“Sir,” Klauser said, and an icicle seemed to run down the back of Renfrew’s neck as the harrowed, riven sound of her voice—and the stunned sympathy in the captain’s glistening green eyes—registered. “Sir, there’s…there’s been another incident.”
* * *
“Ma’am, you’d better see this,” Colonel Byrum Bartel said, stepping unceremoniously into Lieutenant General Gillian Drescher’s office.
Drescher looked up from the contingency plans on her display. The last month or two had been an absolute nightmare. As a general rule, Drescher enjoyed her position as the senior field officer of the Mesan Planetary Peaceforce. The job was interesting and professionally challenging, although the MPP had never fought a war in its entire existence. And unlike certain other people—Internal Security and Public Safety came to mind—her people didn’t get involved in the kind of routine head breaking involved in keeping the planet’s slave and seccy populations in their places. Drescher didn’t approve of the Misties or the Safeties, for a lot of reasons. She didn’t care for thugs who wore uniforms, because she wore a uniform every day of her life herself, and she had strong opinions on how people who wore them were supposed to behave. She didn’t care for organizations whose default setting was brutality. For that matter, she didn’t much care for the institution of genetic slavery itself, if only because of all the headaches involved in keeping a servile population under control.
Headaches which, as recent experience demonstrated, could turn into something much worse upon occasion. It was obvious to her and to Bartel, he
r chief of staff, that something from outside had…destabilized the normal planetary equations. She didn’t really buy the theory being put about by François McGillicuddy, the system Director of Security, and Bentley Howell, his fair-haired boy at Internal Security, that it was the Manties. Oh, it clearly was the Ballroom, and God knew the Manticorans had close associations with the Anti-Slavery League. And while the Star Kingdom had never condoned the Ballroom’s excesses, everyone knew it had more tolerance for them than most other star nations would admit. But she couldn’t convince herself that people as smart as the Manties would have anything to do with a nuclear terrorist event when they were already looking down the barrel of a pulser at a war with the Solarian League. She was pretty sure Manty politicians were at least smart enough to pour piss out of a boot.
But whatever lunatic faction of the Ballroom was behind this—and she was entirely willing to accept that the terrorists behind it truly believed Mesa had been complicit in the attempt to genocide the entire ex-slave population of Torch—the problem was no more than a light-year or two beyond the capabilities of someone like Howell or his “colleague” Selig, over at Public Safety. Well, maybe three light-years, in Howell’s case; Selig knew she was basically a blunt instrument, whereas Howell had genuine illusions of competence. Sooner or later, Drescher’s people were going to be called in to pull the Safeties or Misties’ asses out of the fire, and she had to admit the MPP’s planning for that contingency had been less thorough than she’d believed it was before she’d had to start thinking about actually implementing it. That was why she’d been working such long hours lately, and under normal circumstances, she would have welcomed an interruption of her thousandth—or was it the two thousandth?—perusal of the plan currently gracing her display.
From Bartel’s voice and expression, however…
“What is it?” she asked.
“Ma’am, we just had a mid-air detonation—looks like maybe seven or eight kilotons.”
“Damn,” Drescher said, much more mildly than she felt. “Where?”
“That’s the really bad part, Ma’am,” the colonel said grimly. “It was over Dobzhansky. Not centered on the city, thank God, but Eval’s preliminary estimate is at least ten thousand casualties.”
“Dobzhansky?” Drescher heard someone repeat with her voice, and wondered if her own face had just turned as ashen as the colonel’s when Bartel nodded.
Dobzhansky wasn’t that big a city, but it was—or had been—a pleasant place to live. There was no seccy district in Dobzhansky; its population consisted entirely of full citizens. And it also produced, per capita, more members of Mesa’s police, security forces, and military than any other town or city on the entire planet.
Drescher stared at her chief of staff for four or five seconds—an eternity for someone as quick thinking and decisive as she normally was—then shook herself.
“Get on the horn,” she said. “First, I need General Alpina. While I’m talking to him, you issue an Alpha One Alert to all units. Then get the entire staff in here and up to speed, because we’re about to have a hell of a mess on our hands. The one thing I’ll absolutely guarantee you is that Selig and Howell are going to fuck up by the numbers when McGillicuddy orders them to move in on the seccies. And you know that’s what exactly he’s going to do.”
Bartel nodded, his expression as bleak as her own.
“After that,” she continued, “I’ll need a conference link with all our regimental commanders. McGillicuddy will probably send in the Safeties first, but the Misties will be right behind them, and when Howell screws the pooch—and we both know that’s going to happen, too—everyone will be screaming for us to back them up. So while I’m talking to the regimental COs, I need you to be liaising with—”
* * *
Jules Charteris turned the last corner in the wide, pleasantly lit corridor and stepped through the open doors into the Kornberg Auditorium on Saracen Tower’s fortieth floor. He was running a little behind his original schedule—he’d planned on getting here a good twenty minutes earlier—but the keynote speaker was just beginning his address. He’d wanted to meet Lisa when she arrived, but she must have beaten him by a good five or ten minutes, and he keyed his uni-link to ping her link for its location in the vast audience. There had to be the better part of fifteen hundred people present and she hadn’t been able to text him her seating assignment, so it would probably take him a little while to reach her, wherever she was.
He frowned slightly. That was odd. According to his uni-link’s software, she wasn’t here yet. But surely—
The 1.5-kiloton tactical weapon in the auditorium utility closet was almost exactly twenty-five meters to Jules Charteris’ left when it detonated.
* * *
“Always nice when a plan comes together,” Janice Marinescu remarked as the air car soared above the Nirenberg Mountains en route to the extraction point.
The blast cloud above the Blue Lagoon Amusement Park on the outskirts of Mendel had been visible, towering upward from just beyond the visual horizon, when they took off from their control center in the resort town of Haldane. If the preliminary calculations on that one proved as accurate as the predictions on most of the other attacks, the twelve-kiloton warhead they’d used on Blue Lagoon had killed another thirteen thousand people. Between that one and the Dobzhansky attack, somewhere close to twenty percent of Mesa’s security and military personnel had just been directly impacted by the “Ballroom” terrorist campaign.
And then, six minutes ago, the remote they’d left behind had confirmed the largest single detonation of Final Flourish—the forty-five-kiloton blast which had eliminated any physical evidence of the control center…and utterly destroyed the entire city of Haldane and at least five thousand people. That would be the actual body count. Given the anonymity the resort had always guaranteed to visiting celebrities, Houdini had been able to erase another nine hundred of its evacuees’ names in the same explosion.
“Should I send the code?” Haas asked.
“Might as well key it in.” Marinescu shrugged, her attention on the flight controls. “No point making them all sit around and wait for a ride that’s not coming any longer than they have to.”
“Right,” Haas said, and began punching the authorization code into the air car’s secure data terminal.
Marinescu left him to it, although she was tempted to enter the final commit code herself. It was the sort of thing a responsible craftsperson did, after all. On the other hand, even her appetite for homicide had been momentarily slaked. And she supposed almost anyone ought to feel at least a little guilty about the fact that they were about to kill seventeen thousand—give or take a thousand here, or a thousand there—of the onion’s inner membership. She’d never been very good at hypocrisy, though, so she wasn’t going to pretend that what she felt was anything but a sense of satisfaction for a difficult job achieved on time and under budget.
That asshole Chernevsky would probably be peeing himself about now, if he had to push the button, she thought. God, I know Collin had to pick somebody to put into Bardasano’s place, but why the hell did it have to be him? The man doesn’t have the stomach for it. Probably a damned good thing we got him out of here over a week ago. Wouldn’t put it past him to actually try to abort the operation at the last minute!
She couldn’t understand—literally couldn’t—how someone could have reached Chernevsky’s seniority and been so…so…squeamish. There wasn’t time to get everyone out, so another answer needed to be found. It was that simple—a binary solution, for God sake—so where did he get off looking at her as if she were something stuck to the bottom of his shoe when she explained how she intended to do it? As if there were something wrong with her because, unlike him, she understood what needed to be done and had no qualms about doing it. Maybe if she’d been willing to pretend, to display a little of the unhappiness he so obviously felt, he wouldn’t have felt so holier than thou.
Probably wouldn’t ha
ve helped, though—not really, she thought. He’d still be beating his breast over it, the idiot! Necessity’s necessity, so suck it up and then put it behind you. Done is done, and you move on to the next job. Why the hell doesn’t he understand that?
Well, there might just be some changes after they got things sorted out again in Darius. Right off the top of her head, Marinescu couldn’t think of a single other Alignment operative who’d ever managed an assignment on this one’s scale so efficiently, and it wasn’t written in stone anywhere that Rufino Chernyshev would have Bardasano’s old job forever.
“Keyed in,” Haas said.
The announcement broke into her reflections, and she quirked a thoughtful eyebrow for a moment, then smiled.
Screw it. This is my op, and I think I’ll enjoy rubbing Chernyshev’s nose in it by telling him who actually pushed the button.
“My bird, I think,” she said, and reached past Haas to depress the last key.
A crimson light blinked obediently on the secure terminal as four more kiloton-range blasts eliminated 17,327 members in good standing of the Mesan Alignment. Another 42,612 innocent bystanders joined them in their moment of incineration, and Janice Marinescu felt a sense of almost sublime completion flow through her.
Then another light flashed on the terminal, and her earbug pinged with an incoming transmission.
“According to the terminal, you’ve just completed your part of Houdini, Janice,” Rufino Chernyshev’s voice said in her earbug. “I suppose congratulations are in order, so consider yourself congratulated. The truth is, I’ve been deeply impressed by the efficiency and…enthusiasm you brought to the assignment. In fact, I’ve been so impressed that I discussed another assignment for you with Collin just before I left.”
Marinescu’s eyebrows rose in surprise. Chernevsky had recommended her for promotion? She’d never seen that one coming!
“Collin fully approved my recommendation, especially in light of your perfectly correct insistence on operational security and tidying up loose ends,” the recorded message continued. “So ten seconds after the end of this message, the peewee one-kiloton charge hidden inside this data terminal will detonate. Consider it your severance package. Ten…nine…eight…seven…”