“They might have cut through it.” There was a long silence after she said that. And after a while she said, “Then again, they might not have. You don’t have any idea, do you?”
“No, but if I were laying an ambush, I’d put them in one of the empty lockers down that hall.”
Shane nodded. “So I’m taking a chance.” After a moment, she added, “Maybe you should lock yourself up in that case of yours.”
As she heard the sounds of cables withdrawing and Random’s case closing, she considered the fact that she probably knew the marines on the other side of the door. She could surrender and escape with her life. For some reason the thought shamed her.
I chose my team.
“I made my bed,” Shane whispered. “Now it’s time to die in it.”
Smoke was wisping from the bottom of the door. The edges were glowing red and occasionally the light from the cutting torch flashed along the edge. Parts of the door were warping inward.
It was 07:50.
“Think the others made it, Random?”
“Yes,” came the voice from the case’s speaker, behind her. “All the force is surrounding the ship.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
“No regrets?”
“Only one.”
“What?”
“I think I chose the wrong line of work.”
At 07:50:30, the door to the secondary computer core of the Barracuda-class troop-carrier Blood-Tide fell open and ex-Captain Kathy Shane fired her weapon.
* * * *
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Extreme Prejudice
“Nothing is so fierce as a coward who is backed into a corner.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.”
—Guy Fawkes
(1570-1606)
07:48:00 Godwin Local
The elevator rose.
Johann Levy stared at the rifle on the floor in front of him and thought of Paschal.
Twelve years ago he had been a young lawyer rising in the Paschal hierarchy. There might have been a chance of rising in the secular arm of the Paschal government, if it weren’t for the revolution. If he hadn’t panicked. If he had stayed.
It was the colonel’s fault. Klaus Dacham had been a captain then, and he’d ordered the TEC reinforcements to roll over all the demonstrations. Five hundred dead, ten times that injured, ten times that imprisoned. Even the Paschal Elders who had called for help were shocked.
Levy had been one of the liberal voices in the establishment, but when he had seen most of his friends from the university disappear at the hands of the TEC, he had run. Left Paschal, left the Confederacy, left everything he had known, to come to this nihilistic little dirtball called Bakunin.
Levy had never forgiven himself for that.
Worse, he had left himself. He hadn’t even dared to apply for his own exit visa. He had stolen a friend’s and had left the planet wearing that identity. The real Johann Levy was most likely in some unmarked student’s grave on Paschal.
Somehow, the twisted process of his own mind had made him, a gentile lawyer on Paschal, metamorphose into an expatriate Jewish revolutionary on Bakunin. He had spent the last dozen years capitalizing on Levy’s reputation as a revolutionary.
He was a revolutionary who had done nothing when the guns had begun to fire. A revolutionary who might have had a platform to condemn what was going on, who instead packed his bags and left before he attracted attention.
He had built a string of contacts, learned the arcane lore of security and armor, bombs and surveillance—all without ever putting himself in any physical danger.
He had long ago admitted to himself that he was a coward.
If he weren’t a coward, he wouldn’t be in the position he was in now.
What had he been thinking when he allowed the colonel to contact him and contract for his expertise in the Bakunin underground? Did he really think that he could use “Webster” against Dacham? Was that it? Or was he just too terrified to say no?
He had dealt with the devil, and his own hands were as bloody as Colonel Dacham’s.
Levy wanted the colonel to pay for Paschal, but his own fear kept him from ever going through with it. He had built up “Webster’s” credibility to the point where he knew he could’ve gotten a personal meeting. With Colonel Dacham’s brother as bait, he could have had the colonel where he could have finished him off—
Why hadn’t he done that?
The elevator continued to rise as Levy slowly knelt to pick up the weapon.
He hadn’t wanted to do the dirty work. That was it. He was afraid to. He had been drowning in deception and manipulation for so long that it seemed easier to arrange for the colonel’s own brother to do it. It would have been a perfect setup, if Jonah Dacham had cooperated.
Ironic, Levy thought, how many deaths I am responsible for when I’ve never fired a shot.
Levy stood straight and checked the laser. It had a full charge.
It’s over, he thought, all the duplicity, the lies, the running. After dealing with the colonel, after this last betrayal, there was nothing left for him. Bakunin was the last place anyone could run. Bakunin was the end, and if you kept running from here, all that was left was an abyss.
Levy knew he was never going to leave this building alive.
He thought of the students cut down on Paschal. He thought of nearly fourteen hundred people cut down from orbit only minutes ago. He thought of the people on the Blood-Tide whom he’d betrayed. He thought of Klaus Dacham.
A dozen years of fear and anger gripped him like a tourniquet.
Then the elevator doors opened and he no longer had time to be afraid.
The elevator had stopped at the top of the air-traffic control tower for the GA&A complex. It was a massive room housed inside a ten-meter-high transparent dome. Control panels were everywhere, showing holo tracks of local aircraft. The view commanded the entire complex and the wooded hillside all the way down to Godwin.
There were five people in there.
Levy surprised himself by shooting first.
The guard Levy shot was standing next to the elevator. The man had a personal field, but it was a civilian model and it failed under the strength of the laser rifle Levy wielded. The guard was still turning to see what was happening when the power sink on his field exploded and the beam sliced through his abdomen.
As the guard collapsed, Levy felt something burn his right shoulder and he dove for the cover provided by one of the consoles.
The elevator was inside a pillar that rose into the center of the control room. There’d been another guard on the other side of it, and he was rounding it, aiming a handheld laser pistol at Levy.
Levy screamed as he swept his laser across that half of the room. Consoles exploded, a chair erupted into flames and burning smoke, and the attacking guard’s field proved as useless as his comrade’s. The guard got one more shot at Levy before his field collapsed and his face turned into a hollow blackened groove.
Levy scrambled behind another console and realized that he couldn’t feel his left leg any more.
There was moaning somewhere, and Levy looked for the four techs he’d seen when the elevator doors had opened. He kept close to the floor, pulling himself around the base of a console. Once he cleared the rank of consoles in front of the elevator, he saw two of the techs.