Retreat Hell (16 page)

Instinctively, she pulled at the stick, yanking the shuttle to one side as she started to launch flares.  But it was too late; the shuttle rocked violently, then tilted to one side and started to fall.  Jennifer felt a moment of absolute terror, then tried to retake control.  The damage, she realised within seconds, was too extensive to allow her to guide the shuttle down to a crash-landing.  Quickly, she reached for the ejector switch, hoping desperately that there was time to launch her passengers into the air.  It would be a rough landing, but there was no alternative ...

And, once again, it was too late.  She saw, just for a second, the urban sprawl coming up at her ... and then the universe fell into darkness.

***

“Two direct hits,” his aide cheered.  “Two shuttles down!”

Pete nodded, glumly.  In the distance, he saw two plumes of smoke rising up from the other side of the spaceport.  It was easy to imagine that the falling shuttles had crashed on top of inhabited houses, crushing or incinerating innocent men, women and children.  The fires would spread rapidly too, he knew, unless the fire department responded in time.  It wasn't likely, not when the gangs opposed
all
evidence of government authority.  They’d prefer to let the whole district burn down then concede control for a few hours.

“Send the second signal,” he ordered.  He'd taken a week to set up the attack, with hundreds of pawns prepped for the moment they received the order to move.  It would shake the local government to the bone, although Pete doubted it would be enough to destroy it.  “And then order the mortar crews to engage.”

***

It had taken some careful arguing – and an agreement of future services – but
Rifleman Thomas Stewart had managed to convince Lieutenant Buckley that he should be allowed to join the 1
st
Avalon Mechanized Infantry Battalion as its lead elements landed on Thule.  He might be attached to local units, after all, and their landing would be his first chance to actually
see
the locals.  Buckley had been pissed, but he’d conceded the point.  Thomas
would
be allowed to go.

He swore as alerts flashed up in his combat helmet, warning of incoming missiles.  One shuttle was hit before the news even sank through his mind and started to plummet towards the ground, a second exploded in midair, showering wreckage over the area.  His shuttle dropped sharply, launching flares and other decoys as a missile closed in on them.  God was looking after them, he realised; the missile, thankfully, fell prey to one of the decoys and exploded harmlessly, some distance from the shuttle.

The craft rocked again as it dropped violently towards the ground, then slammed down and hit the ground roughly enough to be mistaken for a crash-landing.  Thomas thrust himself to his feet, clutching his MAG-47 in one hand, and started to bawl orders.  The unit’s CO had been in the second shuttle, while the senior surviving officer was completely untried.  Making a mental note to apologise later, Thomas chased the soldiers out of the shuttle and bellowed for them to secure the surrounding area.  Training, thankfully, reasserted itself as they recovered from the landing.

He snapped out a report as he surveyed the surrounding area, noting the plume of smoke from where the shuttle had crashed.  It would have to be secured as quickly as possible, he knew, but the spaceport was his first priority.  The local soldiers looked just as surprised as his own people, which didn't bode well.  Clearly, there hadn't been any warning at all ...

“Secure the gates,” he snapped.  The first moments of an attack were always chaotic ... and the enemy, if they
were
facing a former Marine, would know to take advantage of the confusion.  “Call your people; get me some air support!”

If they have any
, he thought. 
HVMs and helicopters don’t go together
.

The second shuttle landed, a little less violently than his own.  Hatches sprung open and soldiers ran out, heading away from the shuttle at speed.  Thomas blinked in surprise, then heard the telltale sound of incoming mortar fire.  The enemy, damn them, hadn't just prepared a HVM ambush, they’d prepared mortars as well.  It was a textbook ambush, he conceded, and it had already claimed the lives of seventy soldiers.

“Get under cover,” he snapped, as the shells started to crash down on the spaceport’s landing pads.  “Hurry!”

The Grand Senate was quite happy to allow the social scientists to propose remedies for conflict across the Empire.  After all, conflict was bad for business – and therefore tax collection.  However, their remedies were, in most cases, largely useless at best and downright harmful at worst.

-
Professor Leo Caesius. 
War in a time of ‘Peace:’ The Empire’s Forgotten Military History.

Mara Schuler had slaved – she wouldn’t say worked – as a cleaning lady for nearly two years, despite the pressures of her job.  No one really questioned why she stayed; employment was scarce, after all, and she
was
a voter.  She was just part of the background, the cleaning lady who swept the police barracks clean, washed the toilets and put up with their smutty jokes and innuendo without ever answering back.  They didn't even know she was twenty-seven, not when she looked old enough to be her own mother.  Two years of hard work and exposure to cleaning chemicals had turned her red hair stringy, her face pale and her hands flaky, her skin drying and falling off like dandruff.  Somehow, she’d endured two years of hell.

But the order had finally come!

It hadn't occurred to the police that she might have family who
had
suffered the indignities of being unemployed and thus disenfranchised.  After all, Schuler was hardly an uncommon name.  None of them had thought that she might be politically minded, not when she was just the cleaning lady.  And none of them had really understood the potentials in the chemicals she used to carry out her duties.  Mara did.  The one time she'd been allowed to take a short holiday, she’d spent it in the countryside, learning how to turn ordinary chemicals into bombs.

The architect who’d designed the police station had done a good job, she’d been told; he’d designed the building to ensure that it would survive even a large bomb blast outside its walls.  But he’d never anticipated a bomb going off
inside
the building, or that the materials he'd used to shield the policemen from outside threats would contain a blast inside their base, ensuring that it would do more damage.

No one noticed as she pushed her trolley of cleaning supplies into the basement.  It was part of her job, after all, to clean the holding cells, once the prisoners were moved on to detention facilities a long way from the Zone.  Sometimes, the prisoners were mistreated and she had to clean up blood and piss, sometimes they were treated fairly decently.  She'd watched, unseen and unnoticed in the background, as some prisoners were tortured.  It had helped to convince her, when the order finally came, that she had no choice.

She mixed the explosive together quickly and efficiently, then set the timer and placed it at the bottom of the liquid.  One spark would be enough to detonate the bomb; they hadn't even bothered to search her when she'd come back from holiday.  It wouldn't have revealed anything – she wasn't stupid enough to try to carry the timer into the station on her first day back on the job – but it still annoyed her.  They
really
didn't take her seriously.

Gritting her teeth, she turned and walked out of the cell.  It was all she could do to walk slowly and steadily towards the entrance, feeling sweat pricking at the back of her neck.  Some of the policemen were thugs, true, but others were experienced officers with years on the streets.  Surely they would sense that something was wrong ...

... But no one moved to stop her as she left the building and headed down the street, passing the homeless bums as she walked.  She wondered, absently, if any of them were actually observers, or if they were just what they seemed to be.  The police sometimes ignored them, sometimes treated them as criminals and sometimes tried to help.  Mara reached the corner, glanced at her watch, then looked back at the police station.  She was just in time to see the blast.

The entire building shook, violently.  Windows, made from reinforced glass, exploded outwards, shattered by the sheer force of the blast.  The walls, unsurprisingly, remained intact, almost undamaged.  Flames roared through what remained of the building, glowing an odd series of colours as chemicals – both hers and the chemicals used for forensic work – caught fire.  If there were any survivors, Mara didn't see them in the wake of the explosion.

She felt an odd pang of regret as she turned and made her way towards the Zone.  Some of the cops hadn't been too bad to her; they’d almost been friendly, even to the point of making cups of tea and coffee for the cleaning lady.  Others ... others had only been deterred from cornering her by the disapproval of their fellows.  But, in the end, both the decent cops and the bastards had been working to uphold a system that needed to be destroyed.  It might have started out with good intentions, but it had mutated into a monster.

And Sandi will cheer
, she thought.  Her cousin had been arrested – a case of mistaken identity, as it turned out.  She’d still been badly abused by the time she was released. 
The guilty have been punished
.

Turning her back, she walked on.  Behind her, the city started to fall into chaos.

***

Constable Gunter Schmitz liked to think that he was doing his duty by his city.  His father had been a policeman, his grandfather had been a policeman ... and his great-grandfather had been an immigrant from Earth, who’d once been in the Civil Guard.  Being a policeman meant more than just policing, he'd been told; it meant being a friend as well as a supervisor to the public.  If they trusted you, his father had said, when he’d graduated from the academy, they were likely to bring matters to you, rather than try to take them into their own hands.

But it was different now, Gunter admitted, in the privacy of his own mind.  The world had changed, hundreds of thousands of people had found themselves out of work ... and they had grown to hate authority.  Once, there had been nowhere a policeman couldn’t go; now, entire districts were judged too dangerous for the police unless they were in force.  The weapon on his belt was just another sign that times were different.  His grandfather had never carried a weapon on the streets, while his father had eventually joined the SWAT team. 
They’d
backed up coppers who’d needed armed support.

He sighed as he peered into an alleyway.  Technically, the homeless shouldn't have been there, not when it was against the law to block public access ways.  But they had nowhere else to go and he was damned if he was ordering them to move.  They weren't just bums, after all; some of them had once been decent families, reduced to poverty.  Even their children were trying to sleep in the alley.  God alone knew how long it would be before the children fell into even worse conditions.  Rumour had it that some desperate families were even selling their children to
pimps
.  It was disgusting, but they were desperate to survive.

It was worse elsewhere, he knew.  He’d been part of the police force that had dispersed the rioters outside the First Speaker’s Mansion, watching grimly as young men and women were cuffed and led away to detention camps.  Most of them couldn't be held for long, but by the time they were released they’d probably hate the police even more than they had before the riot started.  There were rumours, whispered among the cops who liked to think they were still upholding the rules, that some of the prisoners had been abused by the guards.  But anyone who asked too many questions tended to be put on shit duty ...

He froze as he heard the first explosion, then swore as he heard several others in quick succession.  Everything had been quiet, too quiet.  Now ... he reached for his radio and clicked the switch, only to heard nothing but static.  Had something happened to the radio network or ... he caught sight of the plume of smoke and realised, to his horror, that it was alarmingly close to the police station.  Gritting his teeth, he started to run towards the scene of the crime. 

The building was in flames by the time he reached it – and totally deserted.  There should have been a pair of policemen guarding the outer door, but they were gone.  The waves of heat drove him back, convincing him – at a very basic level – that everyone inside the building was dead.  Policemen had died along with their prisoners.

There was a low growl behind him.  He turned, slowly, to see a mob of people slowly filing out of the nearby buildings, their gazes fixed on him – and his uniform.  Once, it would have allowed him to calm them.  Now, it was a symbol of their oppressors ... marking him as a target.  Gunter hesitated – it was beneath his dignity to run, wasn't it? – and then made up his mind as cold ice filtered down his spine.  He turned and started to run ... and then saw another mob forming in front of him.  Panic gripped him as he reached for his weapon, but it was already too late.  The mob closed in, pushing and shoving at his exposed face and hands.  He fell to the ground, trying to shield himself ...

... And then he someone kicked him in the face.  There was a moment of intense pain, a sudden chilling awareness of his skull cracking, and then nothing at all.

***

The entire building shook.  Alarms started a moment later, underscoring the shouts that seemed to be coming from all around the giant mansion.  First Speaker Daniel Krautman blinked in surprise as several armed men appeared from a side door, then relaxed slightly as he realised they were his security officers.  The insurgents couldn't have managed to get men on his personnel security detachment, could they?

“This way, sir,” the leader said, opening a hidden doorway hidden behind a portrait of the planet's spiritual founder.  She was an odd-looking woman, Daniel had often thought, but no one had removed her picture from his office.  Now, he understood why.  “We have to hurry.”

Inside, there was nothing more than a flight of metal stairs leading down into the basement.  Daniel hesitated, then followed the leader as he led the way downwards, weapon firmly in hand.  At the bottom, there was a sealed metal door, a security sensor blinking ominously beside it.  The leader caught Daniel’s hand, pressed it against the sensor, then let go as the door hissed open.  Daniel caught his breath in surprise.  He’d been First Speaker for years and he’d never known there was a secret complex under the mansion.

“First Speaker,” a familiar voice said.  Daniel turned to see General Erwin Adalbert, carrying a terminal in one hand.  He couldn't help noticing that his security advisor was wearing a holster at his belt, with the flap unbuttoned.  “Welcome to the Underground Bunker.”

Daniel looked around, shaking his head in disbelief.  There were a dozen computer consoles, manned by a team of operators, a large electronic map of the entire planet, a holographic display of near-orbit space and several displays that blinked for attention.  He knew that there were parts of the mansion that were devoted to the military, but he’d never seen
this
one before.  How had it been kept a secret?

“It was installed when the mansion was originally built,” Adalbert explained.  “The First Speaker at the time insisted that the secret should be held by the senior military officials – and even then, kept on a strict need-to-know basis.  Those who work here” – he nodded to the operators – “are conditioned to keep its secrets.  You would only have been brought here if there was a military or civil disaster you couldn't handle in the mansion overhead.”

Daniel glanced up at the bare ceiling, then followed Adalbert into a smaller briefing room.  It was barren, compared to the briefing rooms in the mansion itself, but somehow he found it surprisingly reassuring.  A pretty female officer poured him a mug of coffee, then helped him into a seat.  Adalbert stood on the other side of the table, looking down at his terminal.

After a moment, Daniel cleared his throat.  “What’s happening?”

“A series of major attacks,” Adalbert said.  “We’re still pulling together the reports, but there was a major explosion outside the mansion and an ongoing situation at the military spaceport, as well as hundreds of minor attacks all across the continent.  Right now, we’re looking at upwards of seventy police or military installations that have come under attack, followed by rioting and uprisings that have crippled our response.  Shootings in the city, several more bomb attacks in vulnerable places ... we've even had a report of soldiers firing on policemen.”

Daniel swore.  “Panic?  Or rebel spies?”

“We’re unsure as yet,” Adalbert said.  He turned to look at the map.  “Right now, our communications network is suffering the effects of a chaos virus, so we’re actually having to depend on makeshift communications systems just to pass messages.  My belief, however, is that the overall objective of the attack is to engage and destroy the Commonwealth forces as they land.  Everywhere else, the rebels have used hit-and-run tactics.  The spaceport seems to be the only place under constant attack.”

“I see,” Daniel said.  He stared down at his hands, bitterly.  The military aspects of the sudden series of attacks were beyond him, but he could see the political aspects all too clearly.  His political enemies would insist on harsher measures, while the Commonwealth might think twice about honouring their commitments if they couldn't even land their forces, which would be disastrous.  “Can we win?”

“We’re pulling our forces back together,” Adalbert assured him.  “I don't think we’re in danger of losing any more ground; we just need to gather our forces, then restore security to the city.  After that, we can go on the offensive.”