The transatmospheric craft had come in high, but the pure air-breathers lacked both their ceiling and their speed. The best that they could manage was little more than mach three, but they compensated by coming in in terrain-riding mode. They shrieked in barely two hundred meters above the ground, weaving their ways between the ceramacrete mesas of the People’s Republic’s capital city’s administrative and residential towers, and fresh missiles streaked to meet them.
Not impeller wedge missiles this time, because hardwired software imperatives made it impossible for the defense grid to fire such weapons at any targets at less than five hundred meters’ altitude. A hit by one of those weapons on any tower would inflict catastrophic damage, and so, as if in some bizarre effort to level the playing field, the slower and lower sting ships could be engaged only with less capable old-fashioned reaction drive missiles.
But if the field had been leveled slightly, it remained uncompromisingly tilted in the defense grid’s favor. The system’s designers might have denied the grid the use of impeller wedge missiles, but it had scores of launch stations, and at least ten missiles targeted each of the incoming attackers.
It wasn’t a battle. It wasn’t even a massacre. Not one of the attackers survived to reach its own launch range of the Octagon, and fireballs and explosions rocked the heart of Nouveau Paris as bits and pieces of men and women and once sleek attack craft thundered down from the heavens.
“My God,” someone blurted. “Assault shuttles?”
McQueen didn’t even turn her head to see to it was. It didn’t matter, and even if it had, she could not have taken her eyes from the plot as a fresh wave of icons appeared. There were dozens of them, each a StateSec assault shuttle with up to two hundred fifty men and women aboard, and they streaked straight towards the Octagon as if their pilots actually believed that the sacrifice of the sting ships might have somehow distracted the tracking systems from their own approach. She watched them come, and an ancient phrase out of the history of Old Earth whispered in the back of her brain.
“C’est magnifque, mais ce n’est pas la guerre,” she said very softly.
“Dear God in Heaven.”
Oscar Saint-Just didn’t even turn his head, and his stonelike expression never wavered. He felt certain that the staffer didn’t realize that he’d whispered his half-prayer aloud. But even if the man had, and even if he’d been foolish enough to mean it as a criticism of Saint-Just as the man who had ordered the mission, the citizen secretary would have chosen, just this once, to ignore it.
His eyes never flickered as he watched the icons of the troop-laden second-wave assault shuttles streak into the teeth of the Octagon’s defensive fire. They came in at just over mach three, but they had come in higher than the sting ships had, and the impeller wedge missiles slashed into them with lethal efficiency. They had better ECM than the sting ships, but nowhere near enough of it to make any real difference, and the missiles ripped them apart effortlessly. Only two of them got close enough for the energy weapons on the Octagon’s roof to engage them directly.
The last assault shuttle went down, taking its embarked company of StateSec ground force troopers with it, and the silence in Saint-Just’s office could have been chipped with a knife. The SS commander watched the displays tally the horrendous casualty numbers with an unyielding basilisk gaze, then gave a tiny shrug.
I had to try. Badly as it turned out, my other options were even worse. And now, bad as they are, they’re all I have left.
He inhaled, and turned away from the displays to seat himself once more behind his desk.
“And now Citizen Secretary Saint-Just knows for certain who controls the grid,” Esther McQueen murmured softly, turning from the main plot to survey the direct view screens. Fires and secondary explosions filled them, and for all the serenity of her tone, her eyes were cold. “I do hope that whoever passed on the order for this attack survives to be captured,” she went on in a nearly conversational voice.
“I’d like to… discuss his choice of tactics with him myself, Ma’am,” Bukato agreed.
“I agree that they never had a chance of breaking through, Ma’am,” Captain Rubin said respectfully, “but as you yourself pointed out, I don’t see that they had any real choice but to try.”
“I realize that, Captain,” McQueen said after a moment. “But it was a forlorn hope from the beginning, and whoever actually ordered those shuttles in should have realized that the instant we mowed down the sting ships. And if she did, and if she’d had an ounce of moral courage, she would have told Saint-Just that sending those shuttles into the same defenses was nothing but an act of murder. It never had any real chance of succeeding as a serious attack, and if it was only a probe, he’d already drawn the response that should have told him everything he needed to know with just the sting ships. There was absolutely no point in taking the additional casualties.”
“Which doesn’t even consider how many civilians must’ve been killed or injured when the wreckage landed,” Bukato pointed out grimly.
“No, it doesn’t,” McQueen acknowledged. “But we can’t really get too sanctimonious about those casualties, Ivan. We’re the ones who fired the missiles that brought them down, after all. And I suppose that in the ultimate sense, we’re at least as responsible as Saint-Just for any civilians that got killed. If we hadn’t made our move, he would just have had us quietly rounded up and shot and none of this would have happened.”
“I know that, Ma’am. But at least we’re trying to minimize collateral casualties.”
“True, and it’s also true that Saint-Just and Pierre between them have killed more of the Republic’s citizens than the entire Manty Alliance put together, so replacing them as the new management has to be an improvement any way you slice it. But we do have a certain selfish interest at stake here, as well, don’t we?”
She smiled thinly, and to his own immense surprise, Ivan Bukato actually chuckled.
“What’s the latest status report from the port?”
Saint-Just’s conversational voice had the impact of a screamed obscenity in the silent, lingering aftermath of the destruction of Citizen Brigadier Tome’s entire brigade. All eyes snapped to him, and then a staffer shook herself and cleared her throat.
“I’m… afraid the news isn’t good, Sir,” she admitted. “We’ve got a little more information now, and it looks like McQueen managed to get Citizen General Conflans slipped into the spaceport garrison’s chain of command without our noticing. The latest estimate is that virtually the entire garrison went over to him in the first twenty minutes—that’s where they got the manpower to stop Citizen General Bouchard’s attack.” The staffer paused, then drew a deep breath. “And I’m afraid that’s not all, Sir,” she went on in a slow but determined tone. “Communications reports that Citizen General Maitland has just joined Citizen Colonel Yazov in announcing his open support for the mutineers.”
“I see.”
Saint-Just refused to allow his voice to show it, but the news about Maitland and Yazov hit him hard. Yazov had been the first StateSec officer to declare his support for McQueen. A mere citizen colonel might not seem all that significant in the great scheme of things, but no one knew better than Saint-Just how much success or failure at a moment like this hinged on perceptions and the reactions of frightened, confused human beings to those perceptions. And that had made Yazov’s defection a body blow. The citizen colonel had been handpicked for his apparent loyalty and devotion, as much as for his capability, when he was assigned to be in Nouveau Paris spaceport as the competent executive officer that the political appointee who officially commanded the capital city’s primary space-to-ground link required. As such, his defection raised frightening questions about what other “handpicked” officers McQueen might have reached.