Shadow of Freedom

John Pole’s head flew up as his tactical display changed abruptly. Half a dozen of his single reserve platoon’s icons went crimson in the same instant, and three more blinked from green to amber—or red—even as he watched. That couldn’t be right! The Manties couldn’t—!

“Central, they’re hitting us from—!”

The voice chopped off in mid-sentence, and Pole’s face went white as even more icons went down. Others were falling back desperately, abandoning their positions, and he heard heavy firing and explosions over the open circuit. But that wasn’t possible. There was no way the Manties could have—

“Sir, the Manties want to talk to you,” a pale-faced communications tech said. Pole stared at him, and the tech pointed at a display. Somehow the Manties had patched into the station’s “secure” communications net.

Pole stood for a moment, frozen while his brain tried to process the information coming at him. None of this could be happening, but—

“Sir?” the com tech said almost plaintively, and the major shook himself viciously back to life and turned to the indicated display.

“What?” he got out. His voice sounded strangled, even to himself, and the young woman on the display smiled coldly.

“I’m in contact with my people who have just taken control of your brig, Major,” she said flatly. “I understand at least twenty-five of your gendarmes have surrendered to them. At the moment, your people are being locked into the cells and my people are evacuating the way they came. I very much doubt you have anyone in a position to intervene…and if you do, I’d strongly recommend you don’t try it. So far, whether you believe it or not, I’ve been trying to avoid killing any more of your people than I have to. I’m perfectly prepared to abandon that approach if you insist, however.”

Her smile was icy, but her eyes were colder still, and something inside Major John Pole shriveled under their weight.

“So tell me, Major,” she invited, “which way would you like me to handle it?”

May 1922 Post Diaspora

“Oh, you ain’t seen bad yet, but don’t you go away, now. It’ll be along in a minute.”

—attributed to Simon Allenby

of the Cripple Mountain Allenbys, Swallow System.

Chapter Seventeen

“Look out!”

The screamed warning came a lifetime too late as the first obsolescent but still deadly Solarian-built Scorpion light armored fighting vehicle rounded the corner of the pastel-colored ceramacrete tower. It moved down the center of the broad boulevard, and two more AFVs followed it. Still others were visible beyond the initial trio, all wearing the presidential seal and crossed thunderbolts of the Presidential Guard.

Any doubt as to the Scorpions’ purpose was dispelled quickly, clearly, and not with anything so potentially ambiguous as words.

The Scorpion’s main weapon—a 35-millimeter grav gun—didn’t fire, but its secondary, turret-mounted tribarrel spewed out thousands of rounds of solid five-millimeter darts per minute. They struck like some terrible, solid tornado of destruction, and the front of the crowd of demonstrators disintegrated in a hideous spray of crimson and shredded flesh. Pieces of bodies flew or flopped to the pavement, and shrieks of terror replaced the furious, chanted slogans of moments before.

The stink of blood and riven human bodies buried the warm summer scent of flowers from the capital’s green belts, and the huge demonstration began to shed a torrent of panicked fugitives.

None of those fleeing people were armed. They’d come to express their opposition to President Lombroso’s régime, not to engage in pitched warfare with the black-uniformed Presidential Guard, the most feared of the Mobius System’s many security services. The current demonstration had been a long time brewing, and over half of its members belonged to Lombroso’s own System Unity and Progress Party. That didn’t mean as much as it might have, since the SUPP was the only legal political party in the entire Mobius System and party membership was a requirement for anybody who ever hoped for anything better than purely menial employment, but it probably said something that so many of System Unity’s rank and file had been willing to come out in protest of their own founder’s policies. Yet while there’d been no lack of anger in their chants’ furious denunciations of Lombroso’s tyranny and corruption, very few of those running for their lives had ever imagined a response like this one!

Not all the demonstrators were fleeing, however. Nor had all of them come unarmed. Less idealistic (or naïve, perhaps) than their fellows, those others had anticipated the Guard’s appearance and come prepared. Or they’d thought they had, anyway; the appearance of AFVs in the heart of the planetary capital when there’d been zero violence from the demonstrators surprised even them.