City of Mendel
Mesa System
Catherine Montaigne was appalled.
Her personal shuttle had been designed as the luxury tender of a luxury yacht owned by one the galaxy’s more…idiosyncratic billionaires. The term “no expense spared” was most often used to indicate only that something was very expensive. In the Harriet Tubman’s case, however, it was literally true, and her shuttle was an almost equally expensive vessel. Indeed, ton-for-ton, it was actually more expensive. It was much larger than most “shuttles”—a bit larger than a naval pinnace, actually—and boasted quite a lot of features lesser vessels did not. Unlike a standard shuttle’s rows of seats, its passengers sat in luxury armchairs scattered around a tastefully decorated “salon” with smart wall bulkheads. At the moment, those bulkheads were configured to display a panorama of snowy mountains and a magnificent waterfall. The viewscreen at the forward end of the compartment and the “portholes” spaced along that panorama displayed a much uglier view, however.
For all that she’d led a rather adventurous life, Montaigne had seldom seen destruction on this scale. Well, she had toured the ruins of Yawata Crossing after the Yawata Strike had virtually destroyed the entire city. That had been worse, but it had also been…different. The tsunami which destroyed that city might have been spawned by de-orbiting wreckage as the result of an attack, but the tsunami itself had been a force of nature.
What had happened to the city of Mendel had not. And Mendel was far larger than Yawata Crossing had ever been.
That size actually gave the destruction passing beneath her luxury shuttle even more impact, in a way, because so much of the city was untouched. It provided a stark visual contrast between what Mendel had been and what its devastated sections had become. Of course, she reminded herself, the true devastation was concentrated on the seccy side of town, so that part of it probably hadn’t mattered very much to the city authorities. Or to the previous city authorities, at least. But there’d been more than enough additional damage to go around.
The broken stub of a residential tower directly in front of the shuttle looked as if it had been hammered by a small asteroid. The once massive ceramacrete structure was a rim of rubble around a deep, ugly crater, and a vast swath of the city had been blanketed in a deep layer of the finely divided dust, like lung-tearing snow, vomited skyward from its destruction. Much larger and more dangerous debris had showered outward from the kinetic weapon strike which had wreaked that destruction, as well. More than enough “minor” craters marked where that wreckage had found the earth once again, and trees and recreational structures in the parks and green belts had been flattened like reaped grain by the blast front.
Gutted industrial areas were interspersed with the green belts. It had been the seccy side of town, after all, which made it the logical home for the industry first-class citizens objected to finding in their own backyards. Most of that damage, she knew, had been inflicted by direct combat, which probably explained why most of the ravaged structures were still recognizable. As structures, at least.
For a moment, her mind fluttered away from the chaos and the human agony and suffering that must have accompanied it. What would be the term for an expert on methods of destruction? Demolitionist? No, that would be the person who did the destroying.
She shook her head slightly, as if to shed those useless questions.
She knew the city bore other, lesser—but no less obscene—wounds left by the “small” nuclear detonations and fuel-air bombs attributed to Ballroom terrorist attacks. Those were beyond her view, even from the shuttle’s two thousand-meter altitude, but whatever else they might be, they hadn’t been Ballroom attacks. If anyone in the galaxy was in a position to know that, she was. That was another problem she’d need to address, but not yet. Not now.
At her command, the shuttle and its sting ship escorts were passing over the city slowly, but from their meager altitude, the terrain below them was still passing fairly quickly.
She waved a hand at the shattered tower which had drawn her eye.
“Is that…?”
“Yes, that’s Hancock.” Saburo X, sitting next to her, nodded. “Bachue the Nose ran that district, and we’re sure she’s the one who gave the order to drop most of an entire floor onto the Misties below. Killed somewhere around two thousand of the bastards.”
“Misties” was the nickname for the troops of the Mesan Internal Security directorate, whose official acronym was MISD. They were the most hated and feared of Mesa’s enforcement agencies.
Had been feared, rather. They weren’t any longer. But they were still hated.
“And that,” Saburo pointed toward another huge tower, “is Neue Rostock, Jurgen Dusek’s district. I’m told—” He paused as the shuttle passed over the ceramacrete structure and it disappeared from view through the viewports, then shrugged and continued. “I’m told—”
“Sandra,” Cathy said, “full vision, please.”
One might have expected such a palatial saloon to be carpeted. It was not, however, for reasons which became apparent as the deck, bulkheads, and overhead all vanished. Only the passengers’ comfortable seats remained visible…floating unsupported two thousand meters above the cityscape.
Two thousand meters of crystal clear, completely empty, thin air above the cityscape.
Saburo tensed a bit in his seat. Behind her, Jeremy X uttered a quickly stifled little hiss.
Cathy’s stepdaughter Berry had a more pronounced reaction.
“Mom!”
Cathy glanced at her. The young woman’s thin face was paler than usual. Her eyes were wide, and her hands were locked with clawlike power on her seat’s armrests.
“For Pete’s sake,” Cathy said. “It’s just the smart walls! Well, and the smart deck, I guess. But still—”
“Mom!”
“Oh, pfui.” Cathy gave Neue Rostock Tower a quick glance. It was now—appeared to be, rather—passing directly below her. “Sandra, restore the sissy floor.”
The space below their feet and under their seats instantly seemed to be a deck again, although the deck was now a magic carpet suspended in mid-air. The view all around them remained unimpeded.
Saburo whistled softly. “Perhaps a bit of warning next time, Countess.”
“I gave up the title, remember?”
“As you said yourself, pfui. People who make perfectly serviceable shuttles disappear are obviously aristocracy. Sensible commoners like us—” he pointed toward himself with a thumb and Berry with a forefinger “—would do nothing of the sort.”
“Berry is hardly a commoner,” a voice spoke up from the luxurious landing shuttle’s flight deck. It belonged to Cathy’s assistant, Sandra Kaminisky. “She’s a monarch. And, Catherine, I really don’t think it’s proper to call your stepdaughter queen a ‘sissy.’”
“Who asked you?” Cathy demanded.
“You did. When we left Congo you told me to maintain proper protocols.”
Sandra more-or-less ran the Harriet Tubman, as well as serving as a combination social secretary and aide-de-camp. And, in truth, Cathy had told Sandra to keep her from straying too far into her normal habits. This was, after all, officially a royal visit. Queen Berry had brought much of Torch’s government with her, prominent among them, Prime Minister Web Du Havel and the Secretary of War, Jeremy X.
Now that the deck had been restored—more precisely, now that the optical illusion that the deck had vanished had been abnegated—Berry was able to relax a little. She turned her head and looked at her prime minister, whose expression was serene. Undeniably, it was serene.
“You knew she’d do that,” Berry said accusingly, and Du Havel shrugged.
“I had no idea what she’d do. But I’ve known her for decades. Any time Cathy is in close proximity to technology which she doesn’t understand but knows how to use, you’ve got to be on your guard.”
Cathy had ignored the interplay while Neue Rostock Tower reappeared to her left as the shuttle banked. Now that she had a better look at it, she could see just how badly damaged it was. Repair and construction remotes swarmed about it, but even now, the next best thing to three T-months after the fighting, they were still mostly at the “hauling away debris” stage. Actual repair, assuming that would ever happen, lay in some distant future. At least it was still standing, though, unlike Hancock. Its upper stories were basically a heap of rubble, but it was obvious that it had never been hit by the monster that had destroyed Bachue’s tower. Instead, it had been systematically hammered by far more—but far smaller—KEWs. Among other things. Scores of jagged breaches had been blasted through the incredibly tough outer shell of its lacerated ceramacrete flanks by other weapons, as well.
There were more of those holes than she could possibly have counted. A lot more. Neue Rostock hadn’t been destroyed…only blasted into ruin.
“Ruthless bastards,” she muttered.
“Being fair about it,” Saburo said, “they did try to limit the collateral damage as much as they could once they launched their assault on Neue Rostock. That’s why they refused to release even the tactical KEWs to General Drescher for so long. Which was just as well for Dusek and our friends. Drescher was a nasty enough handful even when her superiors insisted she had to send her assault force in on the ground, and when they finally relented enough to let her use the tactical KEWS…” He shook his head. “Just as happy she wasn’t in charge from the beginning. She might’ve hit Hancock with something a lot smaller than the big bastard they actually used…and then the collateral damage wouldn’t have stopped them from doing the same thing to Neue Rostock.”
Cathy had already known that much, from the report Thandi Palane had sent to Torch right after the fighting was ended by the arrival of Admiral Gold Peak’s fleet in the Mesa System.
The Mesan authorities had begun trying to crush the rebelling seccies by using the Office of Public Safety’s regular troops, the so-called “Safeties.” Those barely even qualified as policemen; they were essentially just official thugs. The Safeties had very rapidly gotten chewed to pieces once the crime bosses who ran the seccy districts realized they were in a fight for their lives. At which point the authorities sent in the MISD’s troops. They were, if anything, even more brutal than the Safeties, but they were also better trained and armed.
Unfortunately for those authorities, the Misties had gotten hammered even more badly than the Safeties, at which point they had sent in the army—the Mesan Planetary Peaceforce. The MPP had still heavier combat equipment than the MISD’s forces, and they’d been trained as a real military force. By Mesa’s admittedly loose standards, they even followed the established laws of war. Prior to the recent emergency, they’d never been deployed to break heads—and necks—among the slaves and seccies of Mesa, so the slaves and seccies hadn’t felt the same hatred for them that they felt for the OPS and MISD.
That wasn’t saying much, of course. The distinction between sheer hatred and bitter hostility could get awfully thin.
Cathy sighed. Creating a functioning society with a generally accepted government out of the human cauldron Mesa’s former rulers had created wasn’t going to be easy, to put it mildly. She had no idea where to even start.
Fortunately for her and Mesa, she didn’t have to figure it out. That was in the hands of other people. People who, despite outward appearances, she suspected would do a much better job of it than she could have.
Two of those people were now sitting with her, looking down on the wreckage. Seated just behind her was Jeremy X. Today, he was the government of Torch’s Minister of War. But in his former life, he’d been the head of the Audubon Ballroom—which, depending on how you looked at it, was either the fighting organization of Mesa’s genetic slaves or the galaxy’s most savage terrorist organization.
Or perhaps both.
An even more dubious candidate for peacemaking was the man seated to her right. Saburo X had been in charge of organizing and coordinating the activities of the Ballroom on Mesa itself. The sharp point of the spear, you might say.
But perhaps that was the key to it, she thought. Jeremy X and Saburo X hadn’t simply hated Manpower Incorporated and Mesa’s government the way all the ex-slaves and seccies did. Unlike most of those folk—and more than any of them—they’d spilled blood themselves. A lot of it. They didn’t really need revenge, any longer, because they’d already gotten plenty.
So—maybe—they’d do the best job of making peace.
What was the old saying? Magnanimous in victory, if she remembered right. It might prove true that people who used “X” for a surname could manage that better than anyone else.
On the other hand, if she remembered the saying right, the other half of it was Gracious in defeat.
Could the people who’d once ruled a planet like Mesa manage that? She had her doubts.
“We’ll be landing soon,” Sandra said. “You might want to get properly dressed for the occasion. That especially applies to you, Catherine. Even if you did renounce your title, you still shouldn’t disembark in the company of a reigning monarch wearing a sports jumper. What they used to call ‘sweatpants,’ except that I can’t remember the last time I observed you sweating.”
Catherine frowned. “Who the hell needs an assistant to be that sarcastic?”
“You do,” Berry said. “I remember you spending quite a while interviewing candidates until you found one with the best—or worst, maybe—reputation.” She thought for a moment, then added: “Sandra’s really good at it too. I approve of her. Especially right now.”
✧ ✧ ✧
Saburo spent the rest of their flight to Mendel’s spaceport giving Catherine a detailed explanation of the various ruins.
“Most of the damage in the seccy districts was caused by the Hancock KEW and the debris it threw up. Well, there was plenty of battle damage, too, but you can’t really see that from this far up. A lot of the damage to the industrial sections around Neue Rostock is from that. Dusek’s people fought a delaying action against the Misties to cover the evacuation of as many people as possible into the tower.”
“How many nuclear strikes were there?” she asked, then, seeing the frown gathering on her companion’s brow, hastened to add: “Blasts, rather. I guess I’m not supposed to call them ‘strikes,’ since that suggests they were sent down from orbit.”
The frown faded, and after a moment, a little smile took its place.
“I can’t say I care that much, myself,” he said. “But, yes, the Manties—The Grand Alliance, I mean—will get touchy on the subject.
“There weren’t any nukes in Mendel itself in the final wave, after Gold Peak got here,” he continued. “But there were three in the ‘terrorist campaign’ her arrival interrupted. That one—” he pointed at a spot in the distance “—is the only one you can see from here. The other two were smaller. One of them took out an entertainment complex on the outskirts of the city, and the other one—go figure—was detonated above a lake in one of the richest citizen districts. Other than the fish, all it killed were some boaters and people having picnics. As a military target, it made no sense at all. Not even from the standpoint of running up the body count just for the hell of it.”
“And the big one?” As far away as they were, all Cathy could see was what looked like rubble.
“That used to be a district that had a concentration of research labs and high-priced think tanks. Sort of the crème de la crème of their brainiacs.” Saburo shrugged. “It wasn’t really that big a blast, by nuke values. Five kilotons, they figure. If the labs and such had all been in a single big, sensible ceramacrete structure, the bomb—missile, whatever it was—wouldn’t have done nearly as much damage. But, no! They had to use up prime real estate right in to middle of Mendel—well, the middle of the suburbs, anyway—to show how prestigious their work was. All low airy buildings—not a one of ’em more than nine or ten stories—with lots of walkways and gardens. So they fried.”
It was impossible to miss the coldness in Saburo’s voice. However much the man might have it under control, he hated the people who had enslaved him and his folk just as much as any of them. You’d not find any sympathy in his heart for the thousands of slavers—that’s how he’d think of them, even if they hadn’t directly participated in slavery—who’d died in the aftermath of the Grand Alliance’s seizure of the Mesa System.
Maybe the children. A tiny little bit.
Building a society out of that was…not going to be easy.
“We’re coming in for the landing,” Sandra announced. “Everyone please check your seatbelts. That means you, too, Catherine.”