TNE 02 To Dream of Chaos Read online

  "You know, guys, this Isn't really necessary; I've decided to talk...."

  "Oh have you now?"

  That voice came from behind her, from a man who had Just entered the room. Wearing rubber garments from head to toe, he actually squeaked when he walked around to face her, a gaunt embodiment of clinical detachment with eyes the color of night.

  "er...yes."

  "Somehow," the rubber man said, pulling on his insulated gloves, "you don't sound convincing."

  "Hey, look, you want to know where the depot is, right? I can tell youl"

  The rubber man nodded his head appreciatively, but ended those rods with a larger nod to die guards, who understood it was time to roll up An-Wing's sleeves and puli back the hair over her temples.

  "Hey. stop that," An-Wing said, as electrodes were applied to her head and arms. "I said I know where the depot ill"

  "I'm glad," the rubber man said. "So tell me."

  "I will But first you have to tell me what will happen to my friends if I do."

  By way of a response, An-Wing received a surge of electric current. She jumped In reflex, (eeling every muscle In her body spasm simultaneously, though the aftermath was worse: jangled nerves left her quivering and nauseously disoriented, unable at first either to think or articulate speech.

  "That was Just 120 amps at 200 volts, Ms. An-Wing—a mere trifle of the power I can generate. Consider It a warning that all arrangements will be made on our terms."

  Aware of spittle running down her chin, An-Wing nodoed understanding, "Now tell me: Where Is Zero's depot?"

  "Angel De La Cuarda," An-Wing gasped.

  Astonished, the rubber man raised his brows.

  "Angel De La Cuarda, Ms- An-Wing? That's halfway across the Coronado Sea."

  "I know...but that's where It is,"

  "Where exactly?'

  "I don't know where exactly."

  The rubber man moved toward his power switch.

  "It's the truth! I swear, I don't know tWiereitls, just what it looks liket" "Go on."

  "Ifs under a round Nil by the coast, but hell, I'm no navigator—I'd have 10 show you In person."

  The rubber man's reaction to this was utterly unexpected.

  He laughed.

  "Oh, Ms. An-Wing, you really aren't a very good liar. The depot Isn't in the sea; ifs on this continent"

  "What?"

  "We don't know where, of course, but we know that much. Apparently, Zero and one of his drivers were the only members of his crew who Knew exactly where the depot was, but they had the unfortunate luck to be killed In battle when their ship was captured. All Zero's crew could tell us was that it was somewhere in the mountains."

  "fiut,..t>ut...vWry did you execute them?"

  "Oh, It's the will of the emperor. Like you, they tried to lie and invent locations for the depot to avoid torture, but unfortunately His Imperial Majesty frowns on that sort of deception."

  Suddenly, An-Wing felt her heart sink heavily In her chest.

  "You're a bunch of idiots," she said. "If you'd left Zero's crew alive, there's no telling what other Information you could have gotten from them."

  "Yes, I suppose that may be true. However, the only Information our leader Is interested In Is the location of the depot."

  Whereupon the rubber man paused for a thoughtful moment.

  "Of course," he said, "that means you're probably going to be execu led soon. But in the meantime, let me acquaint you with the upper levels of voltage lean coax from my beautiful generator..."

  Chapter 15

  Although she was annoyed by the flight of the junior technarchs, Coeur knew the same danger existed now as when Car) and Katzel were taken—that interrogation of the Oriflammen would reveal the location of the Lomarica camp. Although she could not know that the junior technarchs had been captured, the safety of all Coeur's people made her first priority—after recovering the two Marine reconnaissance teams—to move the camp again, this time Into the heart of the southern wasteland where the Imponsero Phalanx kept Its headquarters.

  Though Coeur alerted the rebels to the Imminent arrival of her force beforehand by laser, the appearance of her vehicles In the eariy morning twilight—the G-carrier, grav tank and ship's boat—attracted more than a little awestruck attention from the rebel community as the craft landed in an empty lot beside General Lemos' warehouse. Awe was precisely what Coeur hoped to arouse, however, for the time to rally her allies had come.

  "I hope we haven't Inconvenienced you," Coeur said to Lemos, whom she found gawking at the grounded Intrepid, "since we came at such short notice."

  "Oh, It was no trouble," Lemos said, pulling himself away from admiratlonofthet2nk'sgun."lamama;ed, though, that you can carry anything that big through space."

  Despite herself, Coeur got a chuckle out of that The age-old lament of starship architects everywhere was too much mission, too little hull, "Yeah, it's pretty amazing. But didn't you tell V-Max you'd come up with a floor plan of the defense ministry?"

  "I don't know If I'd call It a floor plan, Captain, Actually, Ifs more like the recollection of one of our men named Colletto, who deserted from Brak's army."

  "Anything will help, general."

  "You think the time's come to hit the capital?"

  "Well, not quite yet. Unfortunately, I don't know where the junior technarchs are, and I'd rather know if they're in the prison before we hit It."

  General lemos shook his head.

  *l can't believe those technarchs ran off like that," Lemos said. "I hope you'll forgive me for saying so, but It they were my people, I'd almost have a mind to let Brak execute them,"

  "Yes, welt much as I'd like that, If s not an option. 1'llg'rve Brak until tomorrow to give some sort of sign they're alive, then we move."

  • • *

  following Coeu^s Instructions, Deep Six tried at hourly intervals to reach Emperor Brak for word about the junior technarchs, but the emperor's UHf frequency remained rigidly silent until just after 1000 hours—planetary noon.

  "Peoples of space," Brak said, in a recorded statement, "be advised that your criminal agents, Cari Becker, Liu An-Wing and Bela Masaryk, will be executed in the common square of the Federal District tomorrow evening. Be further advised that your feeble protestations will have no bearing on this proceeding, as the course of justice has been set. Do not attempt to Interfere,"

  "That's It?" Coeur asked, from her G-carder. "just the recording?"

  "Affirmative," the Schalll answered. "Soledad has not answered any of our other messages."

  "Well, if you want to look on the bright S'de," Drop Kick said, "at least we know they're alive."

  "You mean most of them are alive," Tom countered. "He didn't mention Kauei-"

  "It might have been an oversight," Physic ventured, though without much conviction.

  "Yeah," Coeur- fumed. "Well, I've had as much of this Brak as I'm going to take. Gyro, you there?"

  "Affirmative."

  "Gyro, alert the drop troops to stand by for assault. The mission code name Is Jailbreak."

  "Understood, sir."

  "Red Sun out."

  Coeur then shut off the radio and turned to her comrades, crowded In close around her in the confines of the G-carricr.

  "Let's not stand around, people. We've got work to do."

  * t m The first clue that An-Wtng, Masaryk and Cari had that something was up came when the light In their cell flickered and went out. Though they hadn't been subjected to any "political correction" that day, their stash of morphine had been found and taken away, leaving all three spacers lying disconsolately on their backs—An-Wing and Cari on one bunk, Masaryk on the other— staring at the light when it went dark.

  "Looks like our bulb burned out," An-Wing observed.

  "Maybe not," Cari said. "It might be lime for lights-out"

  This was no: the case, however, for the light flickered back on a moment later, suggesting perhaps that power from the city grid had been shut off and
replaced by power from a building generator. Having almost abandoned the possibility of rescue, the spacers lay absolutely still after that, Straining their ears to catch any possible sound of consequence through the massive concrete walls of their cell.

  When that sound finally came, several minutes later, they need not have strained to hear it. A titanic rumbling—iess heard than lelt through the floor and walls of the basement prison— resounded suddenly like thunder overhead, setting l he overhead light to llkkc-ring again and causing all three spacers to jump to a sitting position.

  "What the hell was that?" An-Wing said-

  "A planetary strike missile," Cari relayed, "or a blockbuster bomb."

  "Are you serious?" Masaryk asked, the pain In his arm forgotten, "Well, something big anyway. It sure wasn't anybody's car backfiring."

  "Shouldn't we do something?" An-Wing asked, full of sudden nervous energy. "You know, prepare somehow?'

  "IdoiYt think there's much we can do," Cari replied, though sudden, lesser rumblings quickened her voice as well, "except sit here and hope,"

  "Hope?" Masaryk questioned, "Yes. Hope the guards don't start shooting prisoners if this place is overrun."

  • i ,

  The rumbles that shook the prisoners were, in fact, the concussion from detonating planetary strike missiles, just as Cari had surmised—the first salvoes of Operation Jailbreak.

  Or at least the first ones fell. Moments before, the lasers of Vr tlArmii—justahead of Hornet ina low orbltalpath over Soledad— discharged with quiet efficiency, disabling every fire control sensor in the heart of the Federal District and disabling the main transformer relays outside Soledad's nuclear power station for good measure. Shocked and blinded, Soledad's armed forces were then subjected to the hammer blow of four streaking strike missiles from Hornet, each armed with a 500-kilogram warhead.

  Given the excellent quality of Homers master fire director, Snapshot had no difficulty ditecting two of these missiles directly onto their targets—the roof of the Soledad Defense Ministry, and the barracks of the Soledad 1st Brigade across the street—but she needed help to be sure of a hit on two far-mo re-intimidating targets—the Imperial heavy grav tanks parked together in a nearby starport berth.

  Over the objection of her subordinates, Coeur herself took the assignment of illuminating the tanks with a laser rifle, but she didn't perform the mission without help. Even as she sat In the front seat of a broomstick, hovering over the dark ruins of the starport, the Hiver Newton clung with four limbs to the rear seat behind her, using its prime limb to hold and monitor a portable EMS sensor.

  "Anybody onto us?" Coeur asked, In the seconds before the first missiles hit.

  "Negative," Newton replied. "We are not being actively tracked."

  "How about you?" Coeur went on, keeping her laser trained on the side of an unmanned tank's turret. "You all right back there?"

  "To be perfectly frank, no."

  "Rather be somewhere safe?"

  "Yes."

  Well, of teast he's honest, Coeur thought, recognizing the fear of conflict legendary among Hivers. Wherever there was warfare, that was the last place any Hiver wanted to be.

  "Well, just hold on a few more seconds, and then we'll be out of here."

  Sure enough, Snapshot's first two missiles appeared just moments later, first shattering the roof of the Defense Ministry in a rumbling blast, then blowing apart the mtddle of the 1st Brigade barracks as chunks of the defense ministry rool came raining down on Enea Avenue. Then—a second movement In the overture of destruction—the tank killing missiles appeared, spaced at five-second intervals to give Coeur time to paint the second vehicle after the first was hit.

  So great was the force of these Impacts—bone-rattling concussions that shook the hovering spacers though they were a kilometer away—that Coeur was almost certain the tanks were completely demolished, shrouded as they were in clouds of flame and Hying debris.

  "All right, Newton, we're out of here."

  Later inspection would reveal that the armored shells of the "100-tonne tanks had, inf act, survived substantially intact, though fire had torched their Interior compartments, and sheer concus-sive force had both wrecked the works of their fearsome 175 Mj fusion guns and slaughtered their crews relaxing nearby. One way or another, though, thetankswereoutof action, and the rest of the operation was free to proceed.

  Nominally, Coeur set jailbreak's objective as the liberation of all rebel and spacer prisoners from the Defense Ministry prison, but very early on it became apparent that It would develop a momentum and direction of its own. Disoriented by the bombing of their barracks and the loss of the city's electric lighting, those Soledad troopers who managed to take up arms soon found themselves falling back In retreat between two jaws of an unyielding pincers—two full companies of rebels to the west and the Coalition's grav tank and G-carrier to the south.

  Yet, in the midst Of all-out retreat, the Soledad forces might still have held, If only the Imperial Guard had taken better care of its equipment. Led by Emperor Brak himself, this 12-man force assembled on the ground floor of the Defense Ministry to lay an ambush for the oncoming rebel force. Charging the ground floor of the Ministry en masse, the rebels suddenly found themselves walking intoclose-range lirefrom massed relic fusion rifles. Whole squads went up in flames, and the rebel attack would almost certainly have broken—except that none of the fusion guns would function for more than a few minutes. Still game, the rebels formed up and advanced again with anti-armor rocket gunners in the lead. Shortly thereafter, the Guard took its first two casualties, and, though he still retained a formidable firepower in his unit's relic gauss rifles, Brak elected to withdraw.

  And the center was broken.

  "mar's it," Lemos told Drop Kick, over the radio. "We've got Brak on the run!"

  "Good job," the sergeant major replied, "but don't let your men get carried away. There's still plenty of armor in the area,"

  "Understood, We'll wait for you to flush 'em out."

  That Drop Kick didn't reply was a testament to his respect for relic armor. In the hands of trained troops, using good tactics, the remaining support sleds and APCs of the Soledad Army could still easily outfight a single Intrepid.

  But these weren't good troops, and they weren't using good tactics.

  Operating without coordination, the vehicles were picked off one by one In the southern approaches to Enea Avenue. Brave as the tank en of the 1st Guards Armored Company were—attempting to protect the troopers still holding out in the burning 1st Brigade barracks—14 of their 21 relic armored vehicles were set ablaze by Drop Kick and Mercy in less than 10 minutes, prompting the remainder of the force to flee across the River Loro toward the residence of Emperor Brak.

  Demoralized by this sight, the regular soldiers of Soledad rapidly lost the wifl to fight, and most of the those in the area surrendered on the spot. The only exceptions were the soldiers in the upper floors of the Defense Ministry—who were unaware that Brak had abandoned them—and the survivors in the 1st Brigade barracks, who failed to heed rebel advice to surrender—offered from long distance by bullhorn. They Instead burrowed deeper into the unmbbled portions of their building. In retrospect, the decision of the latter group would prove unwise.

  Thirty minutes after the assault began, the drop troops from Homer finally arrived in a public park to the west of the Defense Ministry, gliding in by parachute after rocketing through the upper atmosphere in breakaway heat-resistant shells. Outfitted in heavy battle dress, they naturally terrified the soldiers attempting to flee in that direction, but their prime effect on the battle occurred a short time later, when four of their decoy capsules— stuffed with hundreds of 2SO-kilogram high explosive bombs— plowed into the 1st Brigade barracks, bursting the eardrums of many a loyalist who wasn't killed outright, and blowing the windows out of buildings as much as a kilometer away.

  The barracks Itself was completely annihilated, blasted so thoroughly Into rubble that the
holdouts in the upper floors of the Defense Ministry quickly reconsidered the merits of resistance and surrendered with a profusion of waving white flags.

  Had this not been the case, the spacers would have pressed on with a direct assault on the prison, exploiting a little-used street-level entrance revealed by the rebel Cotletto. However, it was the prison guards who availed themselves of this exit to surrender to Hornets G-carrier, flown by a jubilant 2om and Vink. Whiz Bang, Bonzo and V-Max, together with seven rebels stuffed Into the G-carrier for the assault, emerged with bayonets fixed to their rifles to accept the surrender, and gathered keys that shortly emptied the prison of its hobbled and haggard denizens.

  "Captain," Physic reported a few minutes later, when she found An-Wing, Masaryk and Carl among the liberated masses, "we got our people back. Katzel's the only one who didn't make it. He was killed a couple days ago"

  "Damn," Coeur answered, from her broomstick patrolling the battlefield perimeter. "I was hoping we were wrong about him being dead."

  "Well, at (east the others are alive, Bela's got a nasty fracture of the radius, but their injuries look minor otherwise."

  "Well, thank Cod for that. Any other casualties down there?"

  "Gala be blessed, no—not among our people."

  "Unbelievable."

  "HI say," Physic agreed. "Skipper, It looks Hke somebody up there likes us."

  ■ *«

  One of Hammer Lathrop's more memorable quotations, though It came In earty 1202 and therefore out of Coeurfs earshot, was offered in response to a journalist's question about what sort of commanders he wanted in the field. His answer The stingiest bastards I can find."

  Far from a one-off comment, that statement summed up the commodore's entire philosophy toward hot operations—that his commanders should take the utmost care that their personnel and equipment not be wasted unnecessarily. Conscious of that philosophy, Coeur made quite sure that the forces of Soledad would not get up off the carpet once the shooting started.

  "All the same, I'd like to know why our people risked their lives for you," Coeur said to An-Wing, who tried to avoid her when she and Newton landed at the G-carrier. "So tell me, why did you go to Brak, Liu?"