Colonel Rogero walked alone back to his quarters after a coordination meeting with President Iceni’s representatives. Meetings with people in locations remote from each other were easy to hold, everyone gathering in a virtual meeting place, but just as easy to tap into and monitor despite every possible security precaution. For routine matters, that was accepted as a fact of life. The ISS, and possibly someone else, would be listening. For anything important, or anything that shouldn’t be overheard, it had become habit for people to choose actual meeting places at the last moment. Much more secure, but it could also lead to long walks as twilight darkened the sky and streets grew dim before the gloom deepened enough to trigger streetlights to life.
There were bars he could have gone to, restaurants he could have dined at, but Rogero preferred burying himself in his work. Every time he visited a bar or a café, he would find himself looking for her, knowing she couldn’t possibly be there but still studying the crowd. Someday, I’ll buy you a drink, Bradamont had said at their last meeting. Someday, I’ll buy you dinner, he had replied. Neither had believed it could ever happen, but still Rogero found himself searching crowds.
She had been in the Midway Star System. She had sent him a message. But it was still impossible.
Tonight, then, he walked straight from the meeting to his quarters. But even though his course was a straight one, he didn’t actually walk in a straight line or at a steady speed. Reflexes from the battlefield had become natural to him, so that as Rogero walked, he would, without thinking, speed up or slow down between steps, veer a bit to one side or the other, move slightly to keep objects between him and open lines of sight that could become lines of fire. It made it hard for anyone to target him on the battlefield and annoyed the hell out of anyone who walked with him at other times, but it took a conscious effort to not do it, so when he walked alone, he gave in to instinct.
As a result of one such sudden jerk forward, the shot fired at his head instead grazed the back of Rogero’s skull.
He fell forward, rolling behind the nearest streetlamp base, weapon in hand as he searched the night for the assassin. The streetlights came on, triggered not by the oncoming night but by sensors that had detected the shot, and sirens hooted nearby. The police would be here soon, he would give a report, and they would search for the killer.
Rogero knew they wouldn’t find anyone. This felt too much like the work of a professional. He raised his free hand to touch the bleeding scrape across the back of his head. Someone had tried to kill him, but who that was mattered less than who had ordered the hit. Or had he escaped death? Could the shot have been aimed to miss, a warning? If so, from who? And would that warning have been intended for him or General Drakon?
But whoever had fired had known he would be meeting with President Iceni’s representatives and had known where that would be so they could predict what route Rogero would have to take back to his quarters.
“Launch the bombardment,” Drakon ordered. He stood in the Free Taroan command center, eyes on the big map display, which had rotated and risen so that he could watch everything play out. Ideally, he would be out there, with the attack, but there was too much going on this time, too many widely dispersed things happening, and he needed to be somewhere he could watch it all with the fewest possible distractions near at hand.
The tracks of kinetic projectiles fired by the warships in orbit appeared on the display, curving downward like a precise sort of rainfall. All of the projectiles were timed to hit at the same moment, and instead of falling across the three targeted valleys, they were aimed in curtains that dropped toward the defenses on the rims of the mountains surrounding the valleys and along the narrow coastlines where the valleys met the sea.
Massed along the other sides of those valley rims were Drakon’s brigades, supported by some of the Free Taroan forces. Three brigades, three valleys, each valley held by an understrength battalion. Overwhelming force deployed against the most hard-core portions of the loyalist ranks. Victory wasn’t in doubt, but if they couldn’t time it just so, and the snakes blew everything to hell, then the victory would be a hollow one, as well as costing the lives of more of his soldiers.
Drakon’s eyes rested on one of the falling projectiles. Just a chunk of metal, aimed precisely, gaining energy with every meter it fell. There were a lot of meters between orbit and the surface, and the projectiles were already moving fast when they were launched. The seconds to impact vanished in a flurry of numbers spinning by too fast to read; then the rounds hit.
It was as if volcanoes had erupted in long lines along the ridges, rock and dust flying upward, the ground trembling, a sustained roar of noise rather than single crashes from impacts. The defenses along the ridges vanished, replaced by rubble.
He had been close to bombardments like that. Drakon could have closed his eyes and seen the rocks hitting, sometimes those fired by Syndicate warships to batter Alliance defenses before he sent his own soldiers in to attack and seize the ground, sometimes rocks launched by Alliance warships against him. Men and women as well as structures disappeared under those bombardments, not simply killed but their bodies blown into fragments, leaving battlefields empty and strangely devoid of the dead. That’s what hell really is. Not those places with fire and demons but just a place where death has been, and nothing remains because humans have wiped out all trace that humans or any other life had ever been there.
I know how Conor Gaiene feels. I’m tired of turning places into hell.
But I don’t know any other way to get this done that wouldn’t kill a lot more people.
The sentry gaping at the violence erupting along the ridges died without even knowing Roh Morgan was nearby. A moment later, the antiair vehicle the sentry had been guarding rocked as a limpet mine tore out its insides and killed its operator. Under the distraction of the bombardment hitting, commandos in stealth suits who had carefully infiltrated over the last few days struck at the same time, carrying out pinpoint attacks to destroy mobile defenses which had parked among the populace to discourage bombardments aimed at them.
A platoon of soldiers came pounding down the street, staring around for enemies. Morgan took careful aim and dropped their leader, who had made himself obvious by gesturing commands. Grinning, she gunned down two more soldiers, then shifted position as shots began hitting the area around her.
A panicked civilian racing across the street blocked her next shot. Annoyed, Morgan fired twice, both shots tearing through the civilian before slamming into the soldier behind him.
Green lights glowed on Morgan’s helmet display, showing the other commandos in the valley had completed their hits.
But all of it had been a distraction, designed to keep the snakes confused and overwhelmed as reports of activity and threats poured in from all sides. She had learned that about people at an early age—how easy it was to divert and disorient them by throwing too many ideas and images and emotions their way. Men were particularly prone to losing the ability to think when women tossed the right enticements in front of them, but almost any human could be knocked off-balance by enough of the right kinds of mental overloads.
Not her, though. Morgan could always see her goals with crystal clarity no matter the confusion around her. It had all snapped into focus after she had been pulled from that asteroid. She had been reborn then because she had a destiny. Drakon’s acceptance of her as an officer had been part of that destiny. He didn’t know that yet. But she had known it for a long time.