"Yes." Fontein's voice was flat.
Fourteen thousand people, she thought. More than a good-sized fleet engagement usually killed.
"Status on the crowds," she said.
"They've thinned out. Everyone must have gotten the idea that something serious is going on, and the fun-seekers have gone home," one of her staffers said. "We estimate that only two hundred thousand are still out."
Still a fairly substantial number, even in a city with a population of thirty-two million.
"These must be the real Leveler militants. They're all in or near Committee HQ and adjacent parts of the Government district. No particular organization, but plenty of arms."
"Citizen Brigadier Conflans."
"Citizen Admiral, I can't proceed until the . . . mob . . . is cleared out of my way. Dropping ground troops into that would be like throwing a handful of buckshot into a barrel of snot."
"And I can't do that until the airspace over the Avenue of the People is safe," she said thoughtfully. Then on another channeclass="underline" "Citizen Captain Norton, execute."
"Ma'am—" there was an edge of desperation in his voice. "Ma'am, those are government units."
McQueen throttled an impulse to shout. She couldn't force Norton to obey her; all bets were off, and everyone was proceeding on personal convictions and loyalties. Norton had been with her all through the fighting around Trevor's Star; he'd stayed calm when the Rousseau's bridge was blown open to space and they were slugging it out with Manty superdreadnoughts at energy-weapon range and a main fusion bottle started to go critical. . . .
"Bob," she said quietly, "we can't spare the time to convince them of our bona fides, and they'll fire on us. There's no time. Clear our way, but whatever you do, we're going in."
The voice that answered might as well have been a robot's. "Affirmative, Citizen Admiral. Initiating."
Someone gasped as a solid bar of white light stretched down from heaven; air riven to ionized gas, and fragments of ablative shielding. The bar touched earth, and a pattern of shocked-white fury reached out from that point. The shock wave moved after it, and buildings rippled and blew away like straw around it.
"God have mercy on anyone within half a klick of any of those."
"Civilians," she said to nobody in particular, "call this sort of thing a surgical strike. Sort of like surgery with a chain-saw."
"Two," someone murmured. Another bar of light; she looked away, blinking at the after-images behind her eyelids. "Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven." A pause. "Eight."
"Citizen Admiral," Norton's voice said. "Liberty and Equality have opened fire with their energy armaments." Another pause, and surprise in his tone: "Fraternity is opening fire on them."
"Get out of there, Bob. You've done all you can." She switched channels. "Prepare to execute, Citizen Brigadier Conflans." To her own tiny flotilla of pinnaces: "Let's convince the Leveler militants they're in the wrong line of work. Execute Grapeshot."
Many of the crowd that filled the Avenue of the People for two kilometers were in a holiday mood; the police officers hanging from the street-lamps on either side, or twitching on the points of the decorative wrought-iron fences around gardens added to the festive air. There was still fighting going on towards the three-hundredth floor of the Committee's tower, but they didn't have to do anything in particular. A few of the more energetic were amusing themselves by dragging out civil servants from the lower floors of the towers on either side, and giving them impromptu People's Justice. Others passed bottles around, sang the war-chants of the Conspiracy of Equals, or simply stood or sat and waited. It wouldn't be long now.
Many of them looked up at the turbine wail. Police vehicles had tried overflights an hour ago, and a few of them had even gotten away, but the falling debris from the others had been dangerous. Leveler cell-leaders at the fringes of the street barked into their communicators.
Some of the mob might have had time to realize the nature of the pepper-flake tiny loads the pinnaces were dropping. None of them had time to run before the tens of thousands of fragmentation loads from the cluster munitions reached their preprogrammed height and exploded in a long surf-wall of white fire. Each of them threw thousands of pieces of jagged ceramic shrapnel into the air, cutting across the crowd at chest-height at thousands of meters per second. Where they struck blood and flesh and bone splashed, divided into a spray of damp matter as liquid as the blood alone.
The crowd was huge, more than eighty thousand on this avenue alone. The laws of probability and various obstacles assured there were more than enough left alive to scream as the pinnaces began their second run.
One man managed to stagger back to his feet and fumble at the load across his back. Blood was running down into his eyes, and there was a wetness when he tried to breathe, but his hands still functioned.
"They're running, Ma'am," the pilot begged, forgetting himself and the presence of Citizen Commissioner Fontein. "They're running."
"And I want them to keep on running for a long, long time," McQueen said softly. "All their lives, in their heads. How do you think those bodies got to hanging from those lamp-posts, son? We'll make another pass, with the pulsers, slow and level. All pinnaces, one more pass. Citizen Brigadier Conflans, we've cleared your way for you. Now go in there and make it worth something."
The pinnace screamed up in a near-vertical turn, passing near the scarred, smoking side of the Committee tower, then looped over again and began another run down the Avenue of the People. This time she was working from the rear of the crowd forward, towards the building the mob had hoped to overrun. To either side of her nose heavy tri-barrel pulsers raved in long spears of white light, sending thousands of heavy explosive projectiles down into the street below. Bodies living and dead blew apart, and the ground-cars and pavement below them offered little more resistance as they erupted into volcanoes of shredded metal and stone. Lime in the concrete burned white under the howling lash of projectiles driven to thousands of meters a second by the impeller coils. Wrecks trailed the clean blue flame of burning hydrogen in the pinnace's wake.
"Target acquisition!" the pilot shouted as an alarm shrieked and blinked red from his control panel. He rammed his throttles home.
The pinnace leapt forward. Something slammed into its side, and one of the massive air-breathing turbines lurched free and pinwheeled away. Admiral Esther McQueen watched it slam into the side of a tower. Her last thought was an angry impatience. She wouldn't even get to see if her gamble had succeeded or failed.
"Citizen Chairman," the Marine said, saluting. "I am pleased to report that this building is under control. I must ask you all to remain here until we've—"
"Got it!" someone shouted. "Sir, the net's back up! We killed the fucking ghost!"
"Excuse me," Rob S. Pierre said to the Marine brigadier. He turned and took two steps to the terminal, sat, and began giving orders. It was twenty minutes before he sat back.
"Citizen Committeeman Saint-Just," he said. "Perhaps you could tell me exactly what happened, at this point?"
Saint-Just swallowed; he'd just allowed the most massive Security breach in the new regime's history. Of course, Pierre thought behind the mask of his face. He knows I know everyone makes mistakes. But he can't really be certain of that. A wry smile tugged at one corner of his mouth; it would be an odd start to his New Look policy to have his second-in-command shot, anyway.