Admittedly, the results were positively anemic compared to those of the far heavier strikes Yucel had used to obliterate “rebellious towns” as object lessons, but that suited Aivars Terekhov just fine. The structure’s massive ceramacrete walls confined and channeled the blast, and the towers around the impact point acted as cofferdams, further confining the blast and restricting the damage. Yet the explosion still reached out to obliterate the Presidential Palace and everything else (including the residential towers in which the System Unity and Progress Party’s leadership and the majority of the transtellars’ off-world personnel had been quartered) in a three-block radius. Within the primary zone of destruction virtually nothing survived; outside it, except for shock damage, there was remarkably little devastation.
Even as the shockwave rolled outward from what had been the Lombroso Arms Tower, two dozen assault shuttles plummeted out of Landing’s sky. Eight of them swooped down on the soccer stadium, heavy with wing-mounted precision guided munitions that launched and screamed in on the tri-barrels Yucel’s gendarmes had mounted on the stadium’s uppermost row of bleachers to cover the prisoners below. Precisely calculated fireballs crushed them like some giant’s brimstone boots, and the shuttles reefed back around, going into hover, dropping their noses to bring their bow-mounted heavy cannon to bear.
The rest of the shuttles streaked by overhead, and three companies of battle-armored Manticoran Marines plummeted from them on counter-grav drop harnesses.
Here and there an isolated gendarme or two had survived the PGM strike with enough courage—or stupidity—to fire on the hovering shuttles or try to nail one of the plummeting Marines. They didn’t have much luck. The Marines came in far too hard and fast to be easily targeted by men and women terrified of what was happening, and the gendarmes had no antiair weapons. The Mobius Liberation Front hadn’t had any aircraft for them to worry about, so none had been issued to the stadium guards, and the shuttles were too well armored for their surviving light weapons to pose any threat.
Those far enough away from any prisoner discovered that their body armor was worth precisely nothing when a thirty-millimeter round from a shuttle pulse cannon hit them at several thousand meters per second. The others lasted a little longer—until the Marines grounded and they discovered that their pulse rifles were as useless against battle armor as they’d been against the shuttles.
A handful threw their weapons to the ground and got their hands clasped behind their heads quickly enough to survive.
* * *
Helen Zilwicki stood behind Commodore Terekhov, watching the recon platforms’ imagery in the main visual display. The kinetic strike’s towering, ugly, anvil-headed cloud of dust and smoke was still climbing when the first Marine landed. The prevailing wind had barely begun to bend it before the entire stadium had been secured.
The sheer, stunning speed of it left her feeling vaguely dazed. She’d been at Terekhov’s elbow as he, Commander Lewis, and Colonel Simak planned and organized Zeus. Yet she’d been convinced, somehow, that Yucel was at least smart enough to realize how hopeless her position was.
I guess Daddy was right when he told me to never underestimate the power of human stupidity, she thought. God, I hope the word gets around and finally starts penetrating even Solly skulls! If we have to keep on killing every damn one of them…
“Well,” Terekhov said after a moment, blue eyes still on the visual display, “I suppose we should see if whoever’s still alive in their chain of command is more willing to listen to reason.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
“I wish we knew what he wants to talk about,” Mackenzie Graham groused as she locked the door behind them. Then she and Indiana headed down the rickety stairs—their apartment building’s elevator was on the fritz again—from the sixth floor. “I’m not crazy about unexpected emergency meetings.”
“We’ll find out why he’s here soon enough,” Indiana pointed out, keeping a cautious eye peeled.
The landings were none too well lit, and muggings weren’t unheard of even inside apartment complexes. Especially not here, on the older side of town, where so many “historical” buildings from Seraphim’s early days remained in use. Most of those older buildings had been constructed using natural materials and without counter-grav capability. They were smaller, built closer to the ground than the later towers, and easier to break into, and they’d never boasted the security systems that were part of the city’s newer structures. They were also firetraps, but on the limited plus side, there were fewer public security cameras on this side of town, and the rundown tenements offered their inhabitants a much higher degree of anonymity. And given what had happened to Indiana and Mackenzie’s father, and the complete destruction of the family’s financial fortunes, not even the scags were likely to find it remarkable that they’d been reduced to such miserable quarters.
The light was out again on the second-floor landing, Indiana noticed when they reached the third floor, and he slid his right hand casually into his pants pocket as the made the turn and started on down. If anyone was going to try anything, it should happen just…about…now.
The two men lurking in the landing’s shadows had obviously done this before. They came out of the darkness in a concerted attack, rushing the brother and sister from both sides, and he saw the dull gleam of a knife.
His right hand came out of his pocket in a practiced move. His thumb pressed a button, the collapsible baton extended instantly to its full seventy centimeters even as his left arm swept Mackenzie behind him.
“Gimme your wal—” the one with the knife snarled, only to break off with a scream as Indiana brought the weighted baton down.
It was a whipcrack strike, a quick, powerful flick of the wrist rather than a full-armed blow, and he recovered from it instantly. He stepped towards the knife-wielder, not away from him, as the injured mugger clutched his own shattered wrist and hunched forward. The second man had targeted Mackenzie, but she wasn’t where he’d expected her to be thanks to her brother’s shove, and Indiana’s move took him just out of the mugger’s reach, as well. The second attacker shouted an obscenity and turned towards Indiana, one hand going back over his shoulder. Indiana saw the blackjack against the third-floor landing light, but he had plans of his own, and the other man collapsed with a hoarse, whistling scream as the rigid baton’s rounded tip slammed into his solar plexus like a rapier.
The second man went down, writhing in agony, trying desperately to breathe. It didn’t look like he was going to have much luck with that, given the serious internal injuries he’d probably just suffered, a corner of Indiana’s mind reflected. At the moment, he had other things to worry about, however, and he turned back to the first mugger. He stood like a swordsman, baton poised, and the broken-wristed attacker gawked at him in disbelief.
“My sister and I were just leaving.” Indiana was amazed at how level his own voice sounded…and the fact that he could actually hear it through the thunder of his pulse. “I think your friend needs a doctor, and as far as we’re concerned, you can find him one. But I wouldn’t advise choosing this building again in the future.”