Malin closed down, emotion vanishing from his face. He nodded. “That is true, General. We have no choice. It must be done as soon as possible. I know that if we did have a choice, you would act on it.”
“I would.” Despite everything that Morgan had done, and everything that she might yet do if still alive, she deserved that much for the services she had rendered him in the past.
Supreme CEO Haris walked rapidly through the halls of the Internal Security Service alternate command center, moving toward the entrance of the secret bolt-hole that would let him escape to a concealed hangar where a shuttle awaited, a shuttle equipped with the latest stealth gear available to the Syndicate. Several heavily armed bodyguards walked three meters ahead of him and several more three meters behind him.
Haris wiped sweat from his brow, trying to keep from breaking into a run, trying to figure out what had happened and how it had happened. After a career spent focused on promotion, on sucking up to his superiors and frequent transfers to punch as many tickets as possible, he hadn’t actually managed to acquire all that many concrete job skills. Doing the job hadn’t been the point. Not for him. Doing the job got in the way of maneuvering for that next promotion.
It was a career pattern that had produced some unexpected problems when he was secretly told to proclaim himself Supreme CEO of this star system. The biggest problem, to CEO Haris’s way of thinking, was that being diverted off the main ISS track meant he no longer had any promotions to vie for. That robbed him of purpose. The other problem, which Haris found annoying, was his lack of experience with the kind of day-to-day work that needed to be done when he could no longer count on someone else’s doing it. His current crop of subordinates had shown a growing tendency to fall down on doing his job, despite Haris’s attempts to motivate them by such measures as random arrests and executions.
In fact, he had started wondering if his superiors had chosen him for this job specifically because of his lack of effective skills other than those focused on promotion. Had they expected him to be unable to spot the ultrasecret preparations for the trap intended for Midway’s forces at Ulindi?
He had missed them—he had known only what he was told—but how could that be his fault? Hadn’t he simply been what his superiors wanted? That had always worked in the past.
Nothing had worked this time, though. The rebel ground forces had not only survived, they had wiped out Haris’s own brigade and taken his ground forces base. The Syndicate division had slaughtered itself attacking the base and, according to the reports he was receiving, was now disintegrating as the workers and some of the executives mutinied. CEO Boucher’s flotilla had been smashed by a battleship that the rebels weren’t even supposed to have in working condition, and now that rebel battleship was in orbit and turning what was left of the visible Internal Security Service infrastructure on the planet into tangled junk.
Fine. His superiors had left him without guidance, and his subordinates had failed. He was leaving, and the subordinates and workers could have the mess created by their own failure to support him properly. Not for long, though. Once Haris reached the entrance to the bolt-hole, he would enter the detonation codes to begin the countdowns for the nuclear weapons buried under every city on this planet. He would be well clear of the surface before nuclear fires terminated every incompetent on the planet along with every enemy on the surface.
As for him, he would just consider this another transfer, an opportunity to identify new positions to vie for in other star systems. It would take some creative wording to make the events here seem like a success justifying another promotion, but that was the one job skill Haris knew very well.
The end of the corridor came into sight as Haris and his bodyguards turned a corner and passed a security checkpoint whose occupants didn’t realize they would soon have the honor of sacrificing themselves to cover his escape. Another few hundred meters and—
The ceiling ahead suddenly erupted as a rectangular patch going all the way across the hall and perhaps four meters wide was outlined by a strip of fire. Haris stared, not recognizing that the cut-through represented breaching tape laid on the floor of the level above this one, breaching tape powerful enough to cut instantly through the armor in the ceiling. If he had been able to think quickly enough, he would have wondered what had happened to the guards and security sensors covering that section of the complex above him.
The section of ceiling outlined by the explosion dropped onto the bodyguards who had been walking just in front of Haris. There must have been a pinhole camera watching this corridor from above, to ensure the explosion was triggered at just the right moment.
Haris hadn’t really noticed the woman standing on the segment of ceiling as it fell, riding down on the broken fragment as if it were the floor of an elevator. He hadn’t noticed her wild smile, or the weapon in her hand as it fired three times, and never realized that three shots had slammed into his head before the falling portion of the armored ceiling had time to crush the leading set of bodyguards.
As his lifeless body dropped limply, Haris was also unaware of the corridor’s exploding into a storm of gunfire as his surviving bodyguards at the rear poured an avalanche of fire at the assassin.
The bombardment that Midway aimed at the concealed snake alternate command center fell through the sky as frightened citizens huddled and watched the fiery tracks. But the rocks did not fall on any of them. Instead, the buildings and parking lots of a drab industrial park were turned into a mass of rubble occupying the bottom of a crater. Anyone examining the crater would have found among the rubble the remnants of many things that had no place in an industrial park and would have noted that its depth implied quite a few layers of floors underground, but the people of Ulindi had a lot of other things to worry about at the moment. They couldn’t spare time for yet another pile of wreckage, or for wondering who might have died in it.
Chapter Thirteen
“The fighting in the Syndicate lines is dying down,” Colonel Safir reported.
Malin nodded to Drakon. “Yes, sir. We’re seeing indications that at most spots, the fighting is ending.”
“Are we seeing any indications as to who won?” Drakon asked pointedly.
“No, sir. There’s still fighting going on opposite sector two, and we’re spotting movement of soldiers from sectors one and three converging on the areas where combat is still under way.”
“That sounds like someone is in command.” Drakon pointed to the comm specialist. “Try to punch a message through to the Syndicate soldiers. Use the standard frequencies and codes from before we revolted. They should be able to read those.”
“What do you intend doing, General?” Safir asked.
“I intend finding out what’s going on before I decide what else to do. There are times to be bold, but this isn’t one of them. We’re still just two brigades, and even though we’ve done a lot of damage to the Syndicate forces out there, we’ve taken plenty of damage ourselves, and we still don’t know how many soldiers they had to start with. They could still outnumber us, they could still have reserves that are heading this way right now, and for all we know, the loyalists out there finished off the soldiers who revolted.”
“Our position is still tenuous,” Colonel Kai agreed.
Drakon saw Malin smile at that. Kai would have felt their position was tenuous if they had ten times the numbers of the enemy and were dug into the best fortifications humanity had ever constructed.