Shadow of Freedom

Despite that, weapons began to fire back from here and there in the screaming crowd. Pulsers were few and far between, since (as Lombroso and his OFS-trained Presidential Guard had explained when confiscating all modern weapons over twenty T-years earlier) the security of Mobius’ citizens was the responsibility of their government. There’s no room for vigilantism on Mobius, Citizens, thank you very much! Now move along. Nothing to see here!

Less sophisticated firearms had tended to evade the government ban on personal weapons, however, and if they were less “advanced” than pulsers, they were no less deadly if they managed to hit their targets.

The Guard infantry following the Scorpions with their body armor, shields, and high-voltage stun batons found that out the hard way. Their riot gear had served them well in confrontations with outraged college students, fired more by intellectual outrage than organized hatred. It had served well enough breaking heads to discourage the occasional general strike, or moving “squatters” out of housing they happened to own but which had been condemned under eminent domain for transfer to Lombroso’s corporate patrons. And the swaggering, self-proclaimed “elite” troopers who wore it were backed by heavier infantry and armored vehicles, even sting ships. They’d been confident no one could possibly be stupid enough to offer them actual armed resistance with all that firepower on tap to support them.

Unfortunately, this time they were wrong, and the riot gear which had always stopped improvised truncheons or thrown rocks turned out to be far less effective against bullets.

The Guard’s ranks shuddered as the return fire slammed into it. For a second or two, the troopers simply froze, unable to believe such a thing could possibly happen to them, and over forty were killed or wounded in that handful of moments. For the first time in its history, the Guard heard its own members screaming in agony as their bodies were broken and rent, as their blood soaked the pavement. Then, as if it were a single organism, the “elite” infantry turned and fled in howling panic.

The Scorpion crews were just as astonished by the ferocity of the response. Like their infantry compatriots, they’d grown accustomed to being the ones who did the killing and maiming. The notion that someone could offer them organized violence in return had never crossed their minds, and they snarled in fury as their anticipated afternoon’s amusement of slaughtering enemies of the state turned into something else.

Yet there were still plenty of those “enemies of the state” out there, and the Scorpions still had their weapons…and their armor. They swept forward on their counter-grav, tribarrels raving. Dozens of demonstrators—most of whom hadn’t had a thing to do with the fire coming back at the Guard—were killed for every security trooper who’d gone down. Bodies (or parts of them, at least) piled in rows as hyper-velocity darts tore them apart, and scores of other people were trampled, many to death, in frantic efforts to escape the Scorpions’ wrath.

Unfortunately for the Guard, however, President Lombroso’s security forces hadn’t managed to confiscate all of his citizens’ modern weapons after all, and the antitank launcher on the thirtieth floor of the O’Sullivan Tower was a very modern weapon, indeed. Its kinetic projectile weighed over five kilos, despite its slender dimensions. Accelerated to thirty KPS by the man-portable gravitic launcher, it was effectively an energy weapon. The super-dense projectile struck with the equivalent energy of well over half a ton of pre-space high explosive, concentrated into a penetrator barely one and a half centimeters in diameter, and the lead Scorpion erupted in a blue-white blaze of burning hydrogen as its fuel tanks ruptured.

A second launcher took out another light tank in equally spectacular fashion, and the Scorpion crews turned their attention from the diversion of butchering demonstrators to the desperate business of self-preservation. Their weapons tracked around, trailing swaths of destruction, hammering the faces of the towers from which the fire was coming. Display windows and businesses exploded. Flames gushed through shattered ceramacrete walls. Fire alarms wailed, smoke streamed up in dense, choking columns, and another Scorpion exploded.

The others redoubled their efforts, and main gun fire joined the tornado of tribarrel darts. The 35-millimeter projectiles were substantially heavier than, and at least as fast as, the antitank penetrators, and explosions pocked the towers, blasting deep into their internal structure.

* * *

“Intolerable! Unacceptable!” President Svein Lombroso shouted, pounding on his desk blotter. “Did you see that? Do you see that?”