Most importantly, however, the Cabochon shielded Niemeyer and his crew. The only reason to shoot again was to kill him, and the only person who would want him dead would be Bernard. That put Bernard or his agent in the Catapult and that started all manner of things running around in my brain.
Niemeyer popped up on the passenger side and, though his face was hidden behind smoked glass, I could almost see his eyes widen when he saw me.
“Get your men in here, we’re going NOW!”
“No.”
“It’s your ass that thing wants dead. Leave and your people are safe.” I kicked both fans on. “Get in unless you want them to die.”
Snarling, he boosted a wounded man into the backseat, piled another on top, then tore the passenger door off the Cabochon. He knelt on the seat as I hit the accelerator and spun the hovercar around. I drove toward the Catapult, then under the highway overpass. We emerged going fast, cutting back and forth across lanes. I figured it was an even-odds shot that we’d get a couple of flights of missiles once we were in range, so I hit the first small cross street, and then another.
“If he’s going to shoot us, he’ll wipe a lot of real estate.”
Niemeyer grunted. “Bernard?”
“My guess. In the morning media he’ll have saved Public Service operatives from an Ff W ambush. Someone sold the FfW to him, and you to him.”
“And we were sold to Ff W. Set up.” His right arm swung and snapped the jagged roof post off. “Next right, then along Fiftieth to the hospital.”
“With all speed.”
“Yeah, with all speed.” A low growl sounded from him. “Just the way my world is going to hell.”
35
He who wants to kill a snake must aim for its head.
Manville, Capital District
Basalt
Prefecture IV, Republic of the Sphere
24 February 3133
We reached the hospital quickly and both of Niemeyer’s people were rushed into the trauma center. He should have been looked at first, but he wasn’t going to let them drug him until his men were out of danger or while there was a possibility that I might get away. I gave him my word I’d not leave, which he laughed at. He had me join him in a trauma room, where the doctors took care of both our shrapnel wounds.
In the trauma room I looked down at my bloody trouser legs. “See, no running away for me anyway.”
He just grunted as they began to peel him out of the armor. His chest plate had been punctured and the armor on the right shoulder had been ripped away. No gashes there, but a licking tongue of flame had clearly toasted him a bit. Interns pulled shrapnel from him and applied sutures, while medtechs slathered unguents on the burns.
Interns similarly worked on me and, like Niemeyer, I passed on anything more than local anesthesia. He didn’t want to pass out and I didn’t want to become a babbling idiot. While I had enough evidence to have Bernard arrested, and enough circumstantial evidence to have Emblyn picked up, it would have been for minor offenses. The prosecution would have dragged on while the war for Basalt continued. The winner would pardon himself and the loser would likely be executed for minor crimes.
Minor crimes all wrapped up as a treasonous conspiracy.
Aside from grunts and the occasional hiss, Niemeyer and I fell silent. The doctors talked, forceps clicked and shrapnel clanked into metal pans. I pushed all that and the little tugs and pinches away. I needed to gather my thoughts because Niemeyer would be on me hard and fast. I had to figure out what I was going to tell him.
I couldn’t tell him the truth. My claims of being a Ghost Knight would be looked upon askance and, with the HPG network down, couldn’t be verified by anyone on Basalt. While I could send reports in through local staffers, they would just treat them like agent reports. While mine might be accorded higher priority than others, there would be nothing in their handling to compromise my identity.
Regardless of that, I still didn’t have enough evidence to put the principals away. With Bernard willing to kill Niemeyer and his men, arrest became a moot point. There really wasn’t an authority on the planet that could stop him, unless it was someone who was going to terminate him. And, if that were to happen, there would be nothing to stop Emblyn from completing his takeover of the world, since all the attacks had left the people’s trust of the government in tatters.
Bernard had successfully hit on one point that seemed like a way out of the LIT trap. His appearance at Number 8 to smash the attack—much akin to Reis’ antics on Helen—elevated him to the image of a strong, central authority figure with the power to hit back at the enemy. If he were able to capitalize on this political asset, it would make him very strong.
The problem with LIT is that halting such a campaign is like nailing gelatin to a wall. Yes, Bernard did stop one attack, though not until it had done an incredible amount of damage. Not only did it take out Number 8, but it devastated a contingent of Public Safety Department officers. While their deaths would ratchet up the public’s concern, and would invest Bernard’s calls for vengeance with some power, Bernard could never command enough in the way of troops to put a stop to the FfW attacks. He couldn’t have troops everywhere all at once, and absent that, some sites were going to be vulnerable. Without completely subverting the system of civil liberties guaranteed by The Republic, Ff W could not be stopped.
I realized that thinking about that was getting ahead of things. In the hovercar with Niemeyer we’d hit on the core understanding of the raid that I needed to sort out. Gypsy had planned the raid and turned it over to Catford to execute. Someone had sold the raid to Niemeyer, though the chances of my learning who that was from him were zero. The same individual might have sold Niemeyer back to Catford, but I doubted that. Catford could have easily had troops in reserve waiting for trouble. If nothing else they could have been used to cut off pursuit or secure an alternate escape route and Catford was cunning enough to deploy forces to do just that.
I already knew that Bernard had people in Public Safety on his payroll, so they clearly sold the operation to him. I wasn’t sure if the guys working for Bernard would have expected him to try to assassinate Niemeyer. If they suspected Niemeyer was watching them, they might have. That was really another moot point since Bernard could have had dozens of reasons to want Niemeyer dead, right down to not realizing he was there and just wanting Public Safety bodies to blame on Ff W. The idea that killing Public Safety officers might move his agents up in the organization could not be discounted either.
Elle was a wild card in the mix. She’d clearly told me the operation would be going off twenty-four hours later than it did. Gypsy could have moved the timetable up, though Catford likely would have balked at that. Gypsy could have misled her for whatever reason, or she could have lied to me. It didn’t make much sense for her to do that, but that fit with the odd nature of the conflict here.
Bernard’s escalation of things did make sense—frightening sense. His action, while unilateral, would show FfW to be an enemy of the state in a very direct and threatening way. His military reaction to their effort—as opposed to Niemeyer’s law enforcement one—made them into a military threat. Calling up the Basalt Militia and arraying them against FfW could now be easily done. With inside knowledge of what FfW was doing, he could hurt them, giving his forces an advantage if Gypsy decided to stage a military coup.
As I thought it over, it seemed to me inevitable that things would come to some BattleMech slugging match worthy of a Solaris championship. Frankly, that solution would have suited me well, since it would have limited the size of the conflict, confined it to an arena, and would have chosen a winner without ripping apart the lives of a lot of folks.