He was still trying to comprehend the enormity of what had just happened when the third van—the one parked in the garage which the strike leader had recognized just as clearly as Braddock was the perfect place to stash the Guard’s armored vehicles—exploded.
It was a much larger bomb this time, and the driver had carefully parked it directly beside the central support pillar of the garage’s entire structure.
A huge sheet of flame shot out both open sides of the garage. Fresh flame billowed as the fuel tanks of parked vehicles fireballed, joining the fury of the original explosion. Braddock flung himself down on his belly, covering his helmeted head with his arms in instinctive self-preservation. For an instant all he was aware of was the terrible, concussive force of the explosion. Then his stunned ears heard another sound—a grating, grinding rumble—and he had one more second to realize his instincts had played him false.
If he’d run out into the body-strewn nightmare of Trifecta Boulevard, he might have survived after all.
The entire parking garage came down, puffing out concentric rings of smoke and dust as its floors collapsed, one by one, into the roaring inferno which had engulfed “Tiger” Braddock’s entire regiment.
* * *
“Looks like you need another régiment, General,” the icy voice on Olivia Yardley’s com observed.
“Pity about that.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“I don’t need this kind of shit, General,” Svein Lombroso said unpleasantly. “I could go out and fuck everything up by the numbers myself without paying you and the rest of the Guard such obscene amounts of money! Hell, I could probably even have gotten Guernicke killed without you, if I’d really tried!”
“Would you rather I’d let the bastards walk away after taking out Braddock’s entire régiment?” General Olivier Yardley’s tone was rather pointed, Lombroso thought. Which probably had something to do with the fact that she knew she was irreplaceable…at least for now. “It was a no-win situation from the outset, Mister President. Once they got in and had Guernicke in their possession, we either gave them what they wanted, or we lost her. And you told me not to give them what they wanted.” She shrugged. “So I didn’t.”
“Goddamn it!” Lombroso snarled. “This makes what happened last month look like a frigging picnic! And when Trifecta’s home office hears about this…!”
“We didn’t move in until Frolov personally okayed it,” Yardley pointed out, and Lombroso’s jaw muscles clenched.
He started to tell her exactly what he thought of that threadbare excuse, then stopped. First, because it wouldn’t do any good. He could chew her ass out all he wanted, and it wouldn’t pour the blood back into Tyler Braddock’s slaughtered men or put Georgina Guernicke’s shattered head back together again. And, second, because she had a point. The standoff had lasted for over three T-days before Christianos Frolov, the assistant planetary operations manager for Mobius, had—as Yardley put it—“okayed” the assault. In fact, he’d effectively ordered the assault in a demonstration of manly determination that would probably go down well with his corporate superiors after he got done spinning his report properly.
And which just happened to put his ass in Guernicke’s chair, the president thought grimly. Well, she always was a pain in my ass, anyway. And we’ve got Frolov on chip telling us the standoff was costing Trifecta millions of credits every day and that it was time we got in there and took the Tower back. If somebody back on Old Terra wants to chew me out over that one, I’ll just dump it on their own golden boy.
Who knew, it might even do some good. And it might not, either.
“All right,” he grated in a marginally calmer voice. “I’ll give you that one. But I still want to know how the hell this happened in the first place. You and Braddock got fucking reamed. How?”
“Because no one saw it coming,” Yardley told him frankly. She glanced at Friedemann Mátyás. “We didn’t, and neither did the MSP.”
“Friedemann?” Lombroso gave the commander of his secret police a rather harder glance than Yardley had, and Mátyás frowned.
“Olivia’s right; we didn’t see it coming,” he confessed. “We’re still trying to get someone inside the MLF. So far we’ve almost pulled it off three times, and I’m running short of volunteers, given what happened each of those times.” He showed his teeth briefly. “The problem, Mister President, is that this is the best organized opposition group we’ve faced yet. They’re good.” He shrugged. “I don’t like admitting it, but they are. And so far they’ve always been smart enough to avoid high-profile challenges like this one. Our estimate at MSP—and I think from Olivia’s people, as well—is that they’re really still in the infrastructure building stages. They’re building membership, laying in caches of weapons, and setting up their communication chains.”
He raised his eyebrows at Yardley, who—despite their long-standing rivalry—nodded sharply.
“That’s been our impression in the Guard,” she agreed. “It’s one of the reasons we’ve both been arguing that we needed to nip these people in the bud, before they get themselves fully organized, Mister President.”
“Well, if they’re so damned smart and if they’re still so unprepared for major operations, what the hell was this all about?” Lombroso demanded. “I can’t think of a more ‘high-profile challenge’ than murdering Guernicke in her own office! And how the hell did they get inside in the first place?”
“We’ve identified what was left of the body of the guy we’re pretty sure was the mastermind,” Yardley told him. “His name was Kazuyoshi Brewster, and he was telling the truth. He lost his entire family in the May Riots.” She shrugged again. “We’ve only been able to identify six other members of his team. Five of them lost their entire families or at least their closest family members the same time he did. Obviously, Brewster was a damned good planner, but what really made the difference was that all of them had apparently decided they had nothing left to lose. They just wanted to do as much damage as they could before they went down, and I have to admit they did a damned good job.”
“‘A damned good job,’” Lombroso repeated, glaring at her.
“Well, they did,” she responded. “And the fact that they didn’t care whether they got out or not meant they were prepared to take chances nobody except a bunch of suicidal nut cases would’ve considered for a moment. That’s why we never saw it coming—this time, at least. We’ve beefed up security across the board on off-world corporate offices.”
Lombroso glared at her for a moment, remembering an ancient cliché about locked barn doors and missing horses. Or was it cows?
He brushed off the irrelevant thought and inhaled deeply.