Less sophisticated firearms had tended to evade the government ban on personal weapons, however, and if they were less “advanced” than pulsers, they were no less deadly if they managed to hit their targets.
The Guard infantry following the Scorpions with their body armor, shields, and high-voltage stun batons found that out the hard way. Their riot gear had served them well in confrontations with outraged college students, fired more by intellectual outrage than organized hatred. It had served well enough breaking heads to discourage the occasional general strike, or moving “squatters” out of housing they happened to own but which had been condemned under eminent domain for transfer to Lombroso’s corporate patrons. And the swaggering, self-proclaimed “elite” troopers who wore it were backed by heavier infantry and armored vehicles, even sting ships. They’d been confident no one could possibly be stupid enough to offer them actual armed resistance with all that firepower on tap to support them.
Unfortunately, this time they were wrong, and the riot gear which had always stopped improvised truncheons or thrown rocks turned out to be far less effective against bullets.
The Guard’s ranks shuddered as the return fire slammed into it. For a second or two, the troopers simply froze, unable to believe such a thing could possibly happen to them, and over forty were killed or wounded in that handful of moments. For the first time in its history, the Guard heard its own members screaming in agony as their bodies were broken and rent, as their blood soaked the pavement. Then, as if it were a single organism, the “elite” infantry turned and fled in howling panic.
The Scorpion crews were just as astonished by the ferocity of the response. Like their infantry compatriots, they’d grown accustomed to being the ones who did the killing and maiming. The notion that someone could offer them organized violence in return had never crossed their minds, and they snarled in fury as their anticipated afternoon’s amusement of slaughtering enemies of the state turned into something else.
Yet there were still plenty of those “enemies of the state” out there, and the Scorpions still had their weapons…and their armor. They swept forward on their counter-grav, tribarrels raving. Dozens of demonstrators—most of whom hadn’t had a thing to do with the fire coming back at the Guard—were killed for every security trooper who’d gone down. Bodies (or parts of them, at least) piled in rows as hyper-velocity darts tore them apart, and scores of other people were trampled, many to death, in frantic efforts to escape the Scorpions’ wrath.
Unfortunately for the Guard, however, President Lombroso’s security forces hadn’t managed to confiscate all of his citizens’ modern weapons after all, and the antitank launcher on the thirtieth floor of the O’Sullivan Tower was a very modern weapon, indeed. Its kinetic projectile weighed over five kilos, despite its slender dimensions. Accelerated to thirty KPS by the man-portable gravitic launcher, it was effectively an energy weapon. The super-dense projectile struck with the equivalent energy of well over half a ton of pre-space high explosive, concentrated into a penetrator barely one and a half centimeters in diameter, and the lead Scorpion erupted in a blue-white blaze of burning hydrogen as its fuel tanks ruptured.
A second launcher took out another light tank in equally spectacular fashion, and the Scorpion crews turned their attention from the diversion of butchering demonstrators to the desperate business of self-preservation. Their weapons tracked around, trailing swaths of destruction, hammering the faces of the towers from which the fire was coming. Display windows and businesses exploded. Flames gushed through shattered ceramacrete walls. Fire alarms wailed, smoke streamed up in dense, choking columns, and another Scorpion exploded.
The others redoubled their efforts, and main gun fire joined the tornado of tribarrel darts. The 35-millimeter projectiles were substantially heavier than, and at least as fast as, the antitank penetrators, and explosions pocked the towers, blasting deep into their internal structure.
* * *
“Intolerable! Unacceptable!” President Svein Lombroso shouted, pounding on his desk blotter. “Did you see that? Do you see that?”
He stopped pounding long enough to jab one hand at his office windows, which overlooked the columns of inky-black smoke rising from the heart of the of the city of Landing’s financial district. The firing had finally stopped an hour ago, but the lower stories of three major towers were roaring infernos, and God only knew how much damage those fires were going to do before they were extinguished. And not just to locally owned property, either. Two satellite offices of Lombroso’s major transstellar sponsor were part of the bonfire, as well.
“I’ve been telling you for months something like this was coming!” the President continued. “For months! I’ve been warning you about the rumors, the malcontents my security people have found! But did you believe me? Hell, no, you didn’t!”
“Mister President, please, calm yourself,” Angelika Xydis said in her most soothing tones. Her raised hands made stroking motions in midair. “I agree this is terrible, Sir. But the situation’s a long way from out of control!”
“A long way from out of control?!” Lombroso stared at her incredulously. “I lost over a hundred men. A hundred men! That’s more Guard troopers killed in one afternoon than in the last fifty T-years. D’you think those malcontent anarchists don’t realize that? Aren’t going to be emboldened by their success?”
Xydis bit her tongue.
Officially, she was a State Department employee, the Solarian League’s trade attaché on Mobius. Actually, as everyone realized perfectly well, the trade mission was where the local Office of Frontier Security’s representative (one Angelika Xydis, as it happened) hung her hat. As a mid-level OFS bureaucrat, Xydis had seen more strongmen like Lombroso than she cared to recall. More than one had gotten his ass in a crack through sheer, stupid incompetence, too. And it was amazing how many of them would have fixated—just like Lombroso—on the losses their security troops had taken as something likely to embolden their local opposition instead of reflecting on the fury the two or three thousand civilian casualties were going to engender!
Because, of course, they are civilians. They don’t matter, Xydis thought grimly. Why, oh why, have all these back-planet jackasses heard all about the stick but don’t even have a clue about the carrot? Who do they think supports the lifestyles to which they’ve become accustomed? Their security goons, or the workers they kill off in job lots at moments like this?
Not that Lombroso had a corner on the unthinking brutality market, she reflected, glancing at the two Mobians standing attentively behind the president.
General Olivia Yardley, CO of the Presidential Guard, was a fairly typical blunt object in Xydis’ opinion. A bit more imagination than many a uniformed enforcer, perhaps, but not a lot, and the Guard reflected its commander’s personality, which explained a great deal about its reactions this morning.
Whereas Yardley wore the Guard’s black uniform—and why did all of these back-planet thugs think black was the only possible color for their uniforms?—the man standing next to her was in civilian dress with a SUPP lapel pin in the red, gold, and black which indicated he’d been one of the Party’s original cadre. He was also a general, however: General Friedemann Mátyás, the commander of the Mobius Secret Police, an organization that didn’t officially exist…which had always struck Xydis as a silly thing to pretend. Everyone knew about the MSP. It would have been pretty stupid to rely on the terror of a secret police no one knew existed, after all! But Lombroso and Mátyás seemed not to understand that “secret police” was supposed to mean that nobody knew who was in it, not whether or not it existed in the first place.