Lost heir, p.30
Lost Heir, page 30
“You can leave it that way until we get to the operational zone,” Karen said, “By that, I mean after we get off the spaceport, anywhere a bad guy with a gun might be lurking.”
Maeve nodded before clanking awkwardly toward the door. As she did, she enviously watched Hugh’s almost effortless strides. Show-off, she thought sourly. How did he expect her to run the commo and battle screen with this on? Virtual keyboards, of course, but she could do without this steel straitjacket, a burden she didn’t want or need.
Clomping onto the tarmac, she couldn’t even feel the breeze whipping Sally’s hair around. She felt miserably hot and immobile. In the last rays of sunset, she saw two sleds ready to go. Pam signaled her to step up. Karen carried the heavier load of Hugh and his armor which were already hooked on behind her. After Sally joined her on Pam’s sled, they accelerated smoothly, arcing off after Karen’s lead.
Maeve noticed a flashing red light on her heads-up. Environmental, it read when she focused on it. Hitting it with her chin, the suit became almost instantly cooler. I wonder what else this thing can do?
Another light strobed red as a little voice whispered, “Entering danger zone, enable all defense systems.” Taking a deep breath, she flipped her visor closed. Then quickly she opened the operator’s manual on the heads-up display with her face muscles and began reading feverishly. She had just gotten to leg power augmentation when their landing startled her, so engrossed in learning about the suit she had quite forgotten both her anxiety and her surroundings. She hit the switch for power to the legs and stepped off effortlessly.
Someone could have told me! she pouted to herself as she joined Hugh. No wonder Hugh moved around so easily; he had already known about the augments.
Moving off to follow Hugh, she saw Pam and Karen shoot back up in the air, quickly becoming invisible in the darkening sky. Their stealth mode must be on, she decided. Hugh, his eyes on her, stood beside a small, dark man she remembered seeing earlier. His steady gaze as she tromped toward him made her feel like a lumbering elephant.
Hugh formally introduced them, “Dr. Vintner Jacques, Ensign Maeve uch Robert.” They greeted each other. As Maeve chatted with Dr. Jacques, she suddenly became aware of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in the area around them, each showing up as individual icons on her display. Forgetting Dr. Jacques for a minute, she focused on clearing up the clutter. It took her two tries before she could create group icons instead of having a mass of individuals fill the screen. At that moment, she saw the doctor waiting for an answer to his last polite question, whatever it had been.
“I’m sorry, the suit distracted me for a moment.”
“That happens a lot,” Hugh said, with an amused smile.
She wished she could punch him for that.
Dr. Jacques stepped in to fill the awkward void. “You are doing very well for just getting started.” She appreciated the compliment, regardless of the truth. “Shall we go?” he suggested.
Hugh remained still. Turning toward Maeve, chuckling, he said, “I agree about you’re doing well. It took me a while to get the hang of these tin cans, too.”
Maeve shrugged as Hugh asked Dr. Vintner, “Are your leaders here?”
Jacques nodded.
Hugh simply pointed to Maeve to start the next part of the plan. She projected both Hugh’s image and a map of the area onto the side of a building for everyone to see. Above them, several drones hovered, prepared to amplify his voice as she broadcast it. “I’m Hugh Cascade. You are under my command tonight. If you don’t want to follow me or my orders, leave. I expect to be obeyed and will enforce discipline on anyone who does not follow my orders, which may include shooting them. Do you understand?”
Maeve’s eyes were firmly fixed on her control screen, but to her Hugh sounded like he meant business. Bluntness had its virtues. When he acted like this, she would willingly follow him through anything. I hope these civilians get the message. Even as she thought that, the sound of agreement came back from the crowd. They’ve been taking orders from the Enlightened so long, it’s become a part of their nature.
Hugh sounded impatient as he spoke again, “When I ask for your agreement, I expect to hear Aye, sir, loud and clear. Do you understand?”
“Aye, sir!” came back louder this time.
“Do you understand I will kill you if you disobey my orders?”
“Aye, sir,” rolled back over them much louder, like an ocean wave. Maeve, remembering her first days in the navy, smiled. It amused her to hear their disjointed enthusiasm, suddenly knowing she had crossed to the other side of the training divide. More, it fascinated her to see how Hugh got them to do what he wanted.
“You understand that we want to get as few of you killed as possible and that includes not killing the secret police if they surrender before we attack?”
This “Aye, sir!” did not come back as loud as the last time but still loud enough that the echoes off the buildings rumbled on for seconds after the masses had responded.
“The plan is for you to make noise, when I say so, not a heroic death charge into their machine guns. Do you understand?”
“Aye, sir.” The crowd had gotten into the rhythm of it now, Maeve judged, because the volume grew ever louder with fewer straggling sounds afterward. Pretty smart. Getting them to act in unison here makes it more likely they will follow his orders out there.
Hugh continued, “This is how we are getting there.”
On cue, Maeve brought up a map showing four columns and the streets they were to walk down to their positions. To keep things simple, there were four groups, one for each side of the warehouses, with a different color for each.
“These are the four leaders who will take you there.” Maeve threw up the pictures of four men, Jacques, Hebert, the other man that stood with him from the beginning at the port, and two others with their colors. She attached one face to each of the four routes.
“Do you understand me?”
The crowd’s “Aye, sir!” threatened to blast bricks off the buildings around them.
She saw a blinking signal on her heads-up display. Ward had arrived in position, just inside the target warehouse under a closed manhole cover. “Ward’s ready to go,” she told Hugh on a closed circuit. She didn’t know what to call him out here. Hugh didn’t seem formal enough in this setting and she felt odd calling him sire. She put the thought aside for the moment.
Anyway, she had prompted him as per procedure. He had the same heads-up display, but he’d been speaking to Jacques and a group of people around him, so he might not have noticed.
Hugh half-turned toward her. “Thank you, Ensign.”
Maeve nodded to herself. Better to call him sire out here, then.
Returning his attention to the crowd, Hugh bellowed, “Good luck! Red group, follow Hebert down Dubois.” A large mass went off with Hebert toward the spaceport’s back fence.
Hebert followed a simple GPS/com that Klostermann had given him. Blue and green groups followed as soon as red cleared the area. Maeve also retasked several drones to gather intel, which kept her up on real-time events. Those columns straggling through the city were even worse than she had expected them to be. As soon as they left the rally area, they began to wriggle along like drunken worms toward their positions, with little groups getting lost at practically every intersection. During the simulations, neither Ward nor Hugh had been optimistic about everyone getting to where they needed to be because night moves were notoriously difficult, even for trained troops. With civilians, she doubted even a large percentage would make it. Just as she thought this, she saw a couple of hundred blues go wandering off into the night. She hoped they’d find their way back before the shooting started. Or ended, for that matter.
Hugh looked at Jacques with a smile. “Let’s go. We don’t want yellow group to be late for the party.”
Jacques’s “Aye, sir” indicated many things, but Maeve’s concern about controlling her armor and not making a fool of herself in front of the locals, or Hugh, took most of her concentration, with the drones needing the rest of her attention. That left nothing for sorting out subtle meanings or subtexts. Maeve walked along almost like an automaton, paying more attention to her screens than where they actually were. Eventually, she figured out how to know when to turn by watching the icon for Hugh a little ahead of her on the street. Stopping one street over from the complex, Hugh and Jacques went off in opposite directions to place their portion of Jacques’s civilians in the buildings facing the warehouse complex wall. Maeve watched the progress on her screen, waiting at the last intersection, until Hugh returned to show her where they would take up position.
The sewer tunnel measured four feet wide by five feet tall and smelled dreadful. Sergeant Major Sean Ward knew it smelled terrible, but he had been so many places, many of them worse than Alpine, that he simply ignored it. Directly behind him, Vinnie Klostermann and Kevin Dunn filled the tunnel because he didn’t want some local, who barely knew which end of a gun to point, at his back. Being shot by friends made you just as dead. The twenty locals with them came next, followed by Abdul Jebet and Tabi Fleisch bringing up the rear. Unfortunately, those two and the people nearest them had drawn the short straw and stood in what Ward smelled. Having stood more than knee-deep in that kind of muck before, and probably would again, he felt for them. Regardless, he needed to be directly under the manhole cover, which gave him the added bonus of being relatively dry.
Ward smiled wryly to himself. Wish Hugh could be standing back there in the muck with those boys . . . and girl. He definitely could benefit from the experience. Every emperor needed to know what his orders might mean, and not just the death parts. There likely wouldn’t be another opportunity like this for Hugh to get right down in the worst conditions in the name of duty on this trip, so he would just have to learn this lesson at another time and pla—
The thought ended as the stinking ooze triggered a memory. Could there be any worse conditions than those Hugh had already endured? Ward clenched his teeth. Deft. He smelled again the destruction after they had defeated that final charge, much worse than this place. All around him there had been nothing, only a moonscape of craters, bodies, and destroyed equipment, as dead as any orbiting rock in the heavens for hundreds of yards, no one left alive except him, Hugh, Doña Carlota, Carhart, and seven other Marines. He could see Carhart again, clear as day, smiling, offering him a deal if only Ward killed Doña Carlota and let Carhart take the boy. He often wished he’d killed Carhart back then. Fragging, the killing of bad or useless officers, held an old and honored place among the traditions of the Marines.
Of course, Carhart’s prediction, that unless someone strong took control of the empire things would well and truly come unglued, had been proven true in spades. But that didn’t matter. Ward had stayed loyal to his oath and, as a result, his soul remained intact, while keeping a fighting chance to fix things, an opportunity Carhart had thought impossible. Ward shuddered briefly. If he had given Hugh to Carhart, the lieutenant would have twisted this boy into something ugly. Hugh wouldn’t have been someone Ward would be proud to call his emperor. Or his son.
He settled back. Having arrived with half an hour to spare, it gave him time to kill, to think. Though he knew being early easily beat the alternative, it still grated on the nerves. Every so often, as time crawled past, Ward checked on the progress of the columns on his com, relayed by drone, shaking his head at the mass of confusion.
Focusing in on Hugh and Maeve through his com, he nodded. Although a little more comfortable with each other, beginning to work together more easily and effectively, they still tried to maintain a proper military decorum and distance. Ward judged that Hugh, as a leader, had risen to the occasion, his almost subconscious calmness and command presence creating unity throughout the mob wherever he went.
He checked his timer before reviewing the plan. Again. Fifteen minutes, much too much time to keep his thoughts from wandering to Hugh, Maeve, Gail, and back again. Of course, if this little attack on the warehouses hadn’t been essential for their survival, none of these things would be happening, regardless of Gail’s desire to play matchmaker. Duty always came first. He checked the time and ran over what needed to happen. Again. Eight minutes until kickoff.
But, as he finished his review, Ward’s earbud chirped. Time! From here the plan would change. Focus on the goal and don’t try to force the plan to work. As his experience had taught him repeatedly, no plan, ever, survived contact with the enemy intact.
Even in her suit with all the technical aides and sensors active, Maeve found the night creepy, making her nervous.
Moving through an alleyway, Hugh and Maeve approached the rear of a building that faced nearly the exact center of the wall surrounding the warehouse complex. They took a position in an empty second-story office, about twenty feet by thirty feet, with good views of the gate and strongpoints on the wall. She zoomed in, enhancing her vision of the wall. Just as seen from the aerial survey, it consisted of concrete topped with barbed wire and broken glass, designed to keep out the rabble of this workers’ paradise. The guns in the towers, spaced every fifty feet or so on the top of the wall, were more terrifying up close than they had been in the sim. Simulations couldn’t kill you, however. If they had to assault that wall in reality, lots of people were going to die, easy pickings for those guns.
“I’ll speak to the people across the street now,” Hugh spoke formally, interrupting her thoughts.
“Roger,” she replied, patching in the remote mic to the drones flying overhead.
“This is Hugh Cascade, heir to the Core Empire,” Hugh spoke quietly into his mic. Hearing his voice rolling back at them from across the street, as he stood next to her, disoriented her a bit. The drones worked together, like a network of wireless speakers, ensuring Hugh’s words could be heard from wide and far. Simultaneously, Maeve had hacked into the city’s communications grid and Hugh’s words were being broadcast from any audio, video, holo, or screen device already on.
Thankfully, Ambrose B came fully equipped to pull off lots of parlor tricks like this and Maeve had spent a considerable amount of free time going through the user’s manual to see what other fun things she could do. She really enjoyed some of the more esoteric items on the list.
An older man in a black uniform dripping in silver piping stepped out of the protection of the guardhouse just to the left of the main gate, a gate not one hundred feet from Hugh’s window. The street-side wall of the strongpoint had been heavily sandbagged and reinforced against rifle fire. Coming out into the relative openness of the front porch with no completely encircling cover showed him to be pretty brave, Maeve judged. The man reached the front half wall and shouted back. Maeve trained a parabolic mic on him when he did, so everyone in the command post heard what he said, “So what? We aren’t in your lousy empire. Get out of here and go home!” He turned his back and began to leave.
Maeve heard Sally tut-tut behind her. Maeve agreed. In her short acquaintance with him, she knew that being rude to Hugh failed spectacularly as a good life choice in this sort of situation. With his face shield closed, Maeve could barely see the hard smile on the lower part of Hugh’s face she knew meant things were getting real. When he looked like that, bad things were likely to happen, at least to whoever happened to be unfortunate enough to be the focal point of his attention.
Hugh’s hard voice rolled over the street and warehouses like thunder, “Really, Commissioner Inoye, ignoring me is not a good career move.”
The head of the man in silver and black snapped around at Hugh’s use of his name. Maeve knew it hadn’t been a tough trick, actually, to figure out the man’s name. She had listened as Hugh had spent a good share of his time while coming over here discussing possibilities with Jacques’s command group as to who might be in charge, and who might be sent out to talk to them. They had used every minute, actually, improving on the battle plan until they’d arrived, so Hugh had been ready to give the Association one last chance. As soon as Inoye stepped out, his features had been caught with sniper scopes, magnified, provided to people who knew the police personally, and independently confirmed by several of them. The information had then been given to Hugh. Inoye still looked shocked that an outsider knew his name.
Hugh continued, “I am here to negotiate a truce so you and the free city of Spreitenbach can mutually co-exist. If you don’t agree, we will take over your compound and kill all of you.”
“Tough words, off-worlder, but it has been tried, and those who did never even got over the wall. Most didn’t get across the street. We will not negotiate.” He disappeared into the safety of the fortified strongpoint. A moment later a spear of light from one of the air sleds blew up the strongpoint and everyone in it. The blaze from the explosion lit up the street for fifty feet in both directions, including the room Hugh and Maeve stood in, as well as the courtyard of the warehouses behind the wall. Groups of people could be seen huddled there, mostly armed, but they could also see masses of women and children. After a moment, the women and children could be seen fleeing for the doors of the warehouses.
Hugh broadcast again to the entire compound, “Last chance. I can negotiate or I can open you up like a tin can. You have five minutes. If the authorities do not agree to negotiate, anyone who doesn’t want to be part of the massacre must leave or take over a warehouse and put out a white flag. Your five minutes start now.”
