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“No, that’s not negotiable yet,” the strike leader corrected her. “And I didn’t expect it to be, either. But we’re not going anywhere, and you’re not moving anyone else into this building, until he’s had an opportunity to…rethink that position.”

  “You think not?”

  “Not unless you want to start getting bits and pieces of Trifecta’s senior management team back as greasy spots on the street.”

  “You start throwing people out of windows, and I may just decide the only chance Ms. Guernicke has is for us to get in there before you throw her out one.”

  “I’ll take my chances on that. Besides, what makes you think that’s the only string to our bow?”

  “I know how many people got inside with you,” Yardley said. “That tower is lousy with security cameras, you know. I know about the people you’ve got covering your entry portal—and those tribarrels of theirs won’t do squat if I decide to send in the Scorpions, by the way—and I know how many people you’ve got covering the lift banks. I even know how many people got into Ms. Guernicke’s office with you…and that you lost somebody on the way in.”

  “And are you getting very much information from them now?” the strike leader inquired in an interested tone.

  He almost imagined he could hear her teeth grinding together in the silence from the other end.

  “Yeah, we know about the cameras,” he went on after a moment and shrugged. “There was no way to take them out before we got inside, but you’re not seeing a damned thing from them now. Which means you don’t know whether we’ve pulled SAMS out of our van—or ATWs, for that matter—or not. You don’t even know if we’ve still got Guernicke in her office or staked out across the lift bank doors. Oh, and by the way, did you know Ms. Guernicke has the master codes to access all of the building’s surveillance and environmental control systems from her desk? She was kind enough to give them to us when we insisted. So if you want to try infiltrating SWAT teams into the building, you go right ahead.”

  “Listen,” Yardley said, “I’m not going to send people up there after you—not yet. But I damned well am going to secure the lower floors of that tower.”

  “You try to do that and someone’s going to get hurt,” the strike leader said flatly. He was watching the feed from the tower’s ground level security cameras as he spoke. At least two companies of the Presidential Guard were advancing across Trifecta Boulevard from the parking garage. “Even if you manage to get troops inside the tower, it’s not going to buy you any edge you don’t already have. But if they keep coming, you’re going to regret the attempt.”

  “Are you threatening the hostages again?” Yardley laughed harshly. “You’re not going to kill Ms. Guernicke, or even any of the other management personnel with her, until you feel a hell of a lot more threatened than that! And if you do, you lose your bargaining chips, and we come straight in however hard and fast we have to.”

  “Last warning,” the strike leader told her, still watching the advancing troops. “Call them off now.”

  * * *

  Yardley’s eyes narrowed. His voice was flat, unwavering. In fact, there was something almost like…satisfaction in it, and alarm bells sounded in the back of her brain. But she couldn’t back off. She had to shake his nerve, destroy his confidence that he was in control of the situation, calling the tune while she had no option but to dance to it. She had to assert her ability to control the situation, and so she simply sat back, folded her arms, and watched her command vehicle’s visual displays.

  * * *

  “Have it your way, General,” the strike leader said, and pressed a button.

  * * *

  The van which had parked so quickly at street level when Air Traffic Control ordered the local airspace cleared had been abandoned with unseemly haste. The driver hadn’t even wasted any time trying to straighten it out; she’d simply left it there, dumped across three parking slots with its nose pointing out across the street at a sharp angle. It was sloppy of her, no doubt, but other vehicles had been abandoned with equal haste.

  There was, however, one difference between her van and any of those other vehicles, as the Presidential Guard discovered when it disappeared in a horrendous fireball.

  The weapon was technically an “improvised explosive device,” since it had been manufactured for the purpose out of readily available components by largely amateur hands. There was nothing haphazard or slipshod about it, though. A solid partition, both sides concave in shape, had been run lengthwise along the van’s generous cargo space. The outer surfaces of the partition had been coated in explosives—civilian explosive compounds stolen from construction crews, not military-grade, but amply powerful for the task in hand—and the explosives, in turn, had been coated with a thick layer of screws, old-fashioned nails, bits and pieces of scrap metal, broken glass, and chunks of ceramacrete. The van had been transformed into a huge directional mine which sent a lethal sheet of shrapnel sweeping out in both directions simultaneously.

  The driver hadn’t achieved a perfect angle, but she’d come close, and the strike leader had judged his moment carefully. He caught at least ninety percent of the advancing Presidential Guard infantry in the IED’s blast area, and destruction crashed over them like a thunderbolt. The blast front swept up weapons, helmets, equipment, and body parts on its fiery breath. It shredded its victims like toys…and painted the pavement and slide-walks in ghastly sprays of blood decorated with bits and pieces of mangled flesh.

  * * *

  “I told you to call them off,” the voice on Yardley’s com was cold and precise. “You should’ve listened. But since you didn’t—”

  He pressed a second button.

  * * *

  “Tiger” Braddock was astonished he was still alive. His position had been just deep enough inside the parking garage for its sturdy walls to intercept the shrapnel which had butchered his infantry. One moment, the next best thing to three hundred of his elite troops had been sweeping across Trifecta Boulevard towards their objective. The next moment, at least two hundred of them were dead and a lot more were dying. He stumbled to the garage entrance, head ringing from the force of the explosion, and peered out in horror at hell’s own landscape as men and women with no legs tried to drag themselves out of the charnel house of the boulevard on their elbows and forearms. He saw another rocking on his knees while he tried to stuff his own intestines back inside his ruptured body. Another stumbled helplessly about, hands clasped over the blind, red ruin of what had been a human face only moments before. Still others only lay there, unable to drag their mangled bodies anywhere, shrieking amid the motionless dead.

  He was still trying to comprehend the enormity of what had just happened when the third van—the one parked in the garage which the strike leader had recognized just as clearly as Braddock was the perfect place to stash the Guard’s armored vehicles—exploded.

  It was a much larger bomb this time, and the driver had carefully parked it directly beside the central support pillar of the garage’s entire structure.

  A huge sheet of flame shot out both open sides of the garage. Fresh flame billowed as the fuel tanks of parked vehicles fireballed, joining the fury of the original explosion. Braddock flung himself down on his belly, covering his helmeted head with his arms in instinctive self-preservation. For an instant all he was aware of was the terrible, concussive force of the explosion. Then his stunned ears heard another sound—a grating, grinding rumble—and he had one more second to realize his instincts had played him false.

  If he’d run out into the body-strewn nightmare of Trifecta Boulevard, he might have survived after all.

  The entire parking garage came down, puffing out concentric rings of smoke and dust as its floors collapsed, one by one, into the roaring inferno which had engulfed “Tiger” Braddock’s entire regiment.

  * * *

  “Looks like you need another régiment, General,” the icy voice on Olivia Yardley’s com observed.

  “Pity about th
at.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “I don’t need this kind of shit, General,” Svein Lombroso said unpleasantly. “I could go out and fuck everything up by the numbers myself without paying you and the rest of the Guard such obscene amounts of money! Hell, I could probably even have gotten Guernicke killed without you, if I’d really tried!”

  “Would you rather I’d let the bastards walk away after taking out Braddock’s entire régiment?” General Olivier Yardley’s tone was rather pointed, Lombroso thought. Which probably had something to do with the fact that she knew she was irreplaceable…at least for now. “It was a no-win situation from the outset, Mister President. Once they got in and had Guernicke in their possession, we either gave them what they wanted, or we lost her. And you told me not to give them what they wanted.” She shrugged. “So I didn’t.”

  “Goddamn it!” Lombroso snarled. “This makes what happened last month look like a frigging picnic! And when Trifecta’s home office hears about this…!”

  “We didn’t move in until Frolov personally okayed it,” Yardley pointed out, and Lombroso’s jaw muscles clenched.

  He started to tell her exactly what he thought of that threadbare excuse, then stopped. First, because it wouldn’t do any good. He could chew her ass out all he wanted, and it wouldn’t pour the blood back into Tyler Braddock’s slaughtered men or put Georgina Guernicke’s shattered head back together again. And, second, because she had a point. The standoff had lasted for over three T-days before Christianos Frolov, the assistant planetary operations manager for Mobius, had—as Yardley put it—“okayed” the assault. In fact, he’d effectively ordered the assault in a demonstration of manly determination that would probably go down well with his corporate superiors after he got done spinning his report properly.

  And which just happened to put his ass in Guernicke’s chair, the president thought grimly. Well, she always was a pain in my ass, anyway. And we’ve got Frolov on chip telling us the standoff was costing Trifecta millions of credits every day and that it was time we got in there and took the Tower back. If somebody back on Old Terra wants to chew me out over that one, I’ll just dump it on their own golden boy.

  Who knew, it might even do some good. And it might not, either.

  “All right,” he grated in a marginally calmer voice. “I’ll give you that one. But I still want to know how the hell this happened in the first place. You and Braddock got fucking reamed. How?”

  “Because no one saw it coming,” Yardley told him frankly. She glanced at Friedemann Mátyás. “We didn’t, and neither did the MSP.”

  “Friedemann?” Lombroso gave the commander of his secret police a rather harder glance than Yardley had, and Mátyás frowned.

  “Olivia’s right; we didn’t see it coming,” he confessed. “We’re still trying to get someone inside the MLF. So far we’ve almost pulled it off three times, and I’m running short of volunteers, given what happened each of those times.” He showed his teeth briefly. “The problem, Mister President, is that this is the best organized opposition group we’ve faced yet. They’re good.” He shrugged. “I don’t like admitting it, but they are. And so far they’ve always been smart enough to avoid high-profile challenges like this one. Our estimate at MSP—and I think from Olivia’s people, as well—is that they’re really still in the infrastructure building stages. They’re building membership, laying in caches of weapons, and setting up their communication chains.”

  He raised his eyebrows at Yardley, who—despite their long-standing rivalry—nodded sharply.

  “That’s been our impression in the Guard,” she agreed. “It’s one of the reasons we’ve both been arguing that we needed to nip these people in the bud, before they get themselves fully organized, Mister President.”

  “Well, if they’re so damned smart and if they’re still so unprepared for major operations, what the hell was this all about?” Lombroso demanded. “I can’t think of a more ‘high-profile challenge’ than murdering Guernicke in her own office! And how the hell did they get inside in the first place?”

  “We’ve identified what was left of the body of the guy we’re pretty sure was the mastermind,” Yardley told him. “His name was Kazuyoshi Brewster, and he was telling the truth. He lost his entire family in the May Riots.” She shrugged again. “We’ve only been able to identify six other members of his team. Five of them lost their entire families or at least their closest family members the same time he did. Obviously, Brewster was a damned good planner, but what really made the difference was that all of them had apparently decided they had nothing left to lose. They just wanted to do as much damage as they could before they went down, and I have to admit they did a damned good job.”

  “‘A damned good job,’” Lombroso repeated, glaring at her.

  “Well, they did,” she responded. “And the fact that they didn’t care whether they got out or not meant they were prepared to take chances nobody except a bunch of suicidal nut cases would’ve considered for a moment. That’s why we never saw it coming—this time, at least. We’ve beefed up security across the board on off-world corporate offices.”

  Lombroso glared at her for a moment, remembering an ancient cliché about locked barn doors and missing horses. Or was it cows?

  He brushed off the irrelevant thought and inhaled deeply.

  “So tell me how this changes our situation,” he commanded. “You first, Olivia.”

  “Well, after examining Brewster’s equipment, it’s obvious someone’s managed to stockpile even more off-world weapons than we thought. Given all of the deep cover informants we’ve got out there, that says more than I want to hear about how good the MLF’s security is. I know Friedemann’s just pointed out that we haven’t managed to get anyone inside the MLF itself, but we damned well ought to have enough surveillance system and human intelligence sources out there to at least be able to spot modern weapons moving in quantities like this.” She shrugged. “We didn’t.”

  Lombroso suppressed a desire to throttle her. Strong as the temptation was, he knew it wouldn’t do any good. Besides, what she’d just said was self-evidently true, and at least she’d had the nerve to say it.

  “Friedemann?” he said, looking at Mátyás.

  “Olivia’s right. We’ve always known they were better than anyone else who’s come along, but I’m beginning to think we’ve underestimated them for some time, anyway.”

  Lombroso jaw muscles clenched as he glared at the two of them. They were his senior security officers. It wasn’t a case of “we’ve underestimated” the MLF; it was a case of the two of them underestimating the terrorist bastards, and he considered pointing that out. Unfortunately, it would have accomplished exactly nothing.

  “All right,” he said once he was certain he had his voice under control. “So you’ve underestimated them.” He emphasized the personal pronoun only very slightly, but Yardley’s hazel eyes glinted with anger anyway. Mátyás had better control than that, probably because he wasn’t the one in the primary line of fire at the moment. “Obviously, it’s time you stopped doing that. So how bad does the situation look now?”

  Yardley’s eyes didn’t soften. For a moment, she seemed to hover on the brink of something rash, but apparently she realized no one was genuinely irreplaceable when it came down to it.

  “I’m not really certain,” she admitted levelly. “Things are clearly escalating since the riots last month. My best estimate is that the MLF leadership doesn’t want to escalate, though.”

  “What?” Lombroso interrupted. He stared at her in disbelief. “They just fucking wrecked Trifecta Tower and killed Guernicke! Nobody’s ever done that kind of damage to use before!”

  “Brewster and his team did,” Yardley acknowledged. “But there was no MLF statement about the attack until it was all over. And even then, their ‘Commandant Alpha,’ whoever the hell he is, didn’t claim direct credit for it.” She shook her head. “I think Brewster and the others put this together on th
eir own. They were obviously MLF, because nobody else’s that good, and as far as we know, nobody else has the kind of off-world weapons support they seem to have. But I don’t think Commandant Alpha or the rest of his cadre knew anything about it before we did. And I don’t think they’d have okayed Brewster’s plan if he’d asked them to authorize it, either.”

  Lombroso shook his head.

  “I’d think those bastards would be getting behind and pushing for all they’re worth!” he said. “What the hell makes you think they aren’t?”

  “Because they’re not ready,” Yardley said flatly. “That’s what Friedemann and I have been talking about. They’ve got some modern weapons on-planet, yes, but not anywhere near as many as they want. We’ve confiscated around a hundred pulsers—total—so far. Most of them aren’t new, but they’re all in first-class condition; it looks like they’ve been refurbished as needed by some very competent armorers. But we’ve been picking them up in ones and twos. Frankly, most of them got grabbed because someone just pretty much stumbled over them, and Brewster’s team is the first one we’ve seen armed entirely with military-grade pulse rifles. I think they’ve got more of them than we thought they had, but we’re still picking up substantially greater quantities of old-fashioned chemical-powered firearms. So they’ve made an off-world connection somewhere, but they still don’t have enough modern weapons to go around. And without more modern firepower, they’re going to be at a significant tactical disadvantage in any confrontation with us, much less any Solly intervention battalions. They know that.” She shrugged again. “That being the case, my analysts say the leadership cadre can’t be in favor of opening the dance this early.”

  “Then what the fuck is going on?” Lombroso demanded. “We’ve got transit bombings, ambushes of isolated security forces, and more acts of minor sabotage and cyber attacks than I even want to think about. All in addition to what happened to Guernicke, of course!”

  “I think Olivia’s right, Mister President,” Mátyás said unexpectedly, and Lombroso looked at him sharply. “I think what we’re seeing here is primarily a more or less spontaneous reaction to the May Riots, not a planned campaign by the MLF,” the secret policeman continued. “It certainly was in Brewster’s case, and I don’t see any reason to assume it’s not for the rest of these people, either. And it would explain why we’re seeing this now, when all indications are that the MLF is still in the building stage.”