assistirfilmes Book 3: Chapter 31: Cleanup
Book 3: Chapter 31: Cleanup
Book 3: Chapter 31: Cleanup
Marcus
September 2215
Poseidon
The loss of their main fleet was a blow to the Council, but not a fatal one, as it turned out. Maybe I’d been underestimating the Council, or maybe they had someone who was a terrific strategist. Whatever the reason, the Council kept coming up with surprises.
The first surprise, although I’d suspected as much, was that they didn’t have just the dozen cargo ships. Our first inkling of that came the day after our takeover of strategic ‘ground’ assets.
“We’ve got several cities under attack!” Gina announced, sitting up abruptly.
Kal opened one eye—he was lying on a blanket, getting some sun—and said, “With what?”
“See for yourselves.” Gina held her tablet up. On it was shown a grainy, obviously blown-up image of a vessel. It appeared to my eye to be a variation on a version-3 Heaven vessel.
“Interesting. Looks like they’ve been reading BobNet,” I said. “I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me. I wouldn’t normally think of it as strategic information.”
“And yet the improvements the Bobs have been making in the Heaven design have been primarily for military purposes,” Kal responded.
“Plus,” Denu added, “if they’ve been perusing BobNet, wouldn’t they have found out about the cloaking?”
I raised an eyebrow at Denu, then exited the android and frame-jacked. A quick scan of recent BobNet blogs reassured me on that front.
Returning to normal time, and to the android, I responded, “There’s nothing but general descriptions, Denu. With all the crap happening, Bill’s just been transmitting plans directly to other Bobs. A bit of serendipity, there.” I didn’t add that I’d just sent off a description of this situation to Bill. Hopefully, he would scan the blogs for any other potentially damaging information and remove it. Great. We’d just re-invented military secrecy.
Gina, who had continued monitoring the situation, announced, “Aanthor, Kaol, and Ptarth are fending off missiles. It looks like whoever is still fighting has decided to go for a scorched earth policy. They’re not even trying to board, just trying to knock the cities out of the sky.” She looked over at me.
I nodded. Reluctant as I was to get directly involved, in this case, hundreds of lives were at stake. I ordered several squads of busters down from their hiding place on Pelias, the inner moon.
“It’ll take a few minutes for them to get there,” I said to Gina. “Can you tell the cities that help is coming?”
Gina nodded and typed furiously for a few moments. “Done.”
“This is unbelievable.” Denu shook his head. “They’re just trying to kill people.”
Gina led the charge herself. The busters couldn’t smash the buildings at speed—I didn’t want to kill anyone—but they could smack gun emplacements hard enough to force defenders back.
“Concentrate on all defenders on the west walls,” Gina’s voice ordered over the comm system. Our security people set up a blistering fire which kept the defenders down.
“Marcus, there’s a weak spot on the wall at the southwest side. Can you get an explosive into there?”
“Uh, no, no explosives, Gina. Still too dangerous to print. But...”
A weak spot was easy to target. A ship buster came in at about a hundred klicks and rammed the corner of the wall. Five hundred kilograms of steel completely did a number on it. Maybe a little too well. As usual, I seemed to be a little more enthusiastic with the ramming than was really required.
“Thanks, Captain Crash. All units, enter with caution.”
I sent in some roamers as well, although all I had left were the little guys. The video feed showed a stunned, dust-covered group with no fight left in them.
“I think they’re done, Gina. It’s all mop-up.”
* * *
Gina, normally a somewhat dour, brooding person, was grinning unabashedly. “We got Brennan. No question that he ordered the attacks. We’ll be debriefing the security people we captured, but I’ll bet none of the other Council members were involved in this.”
“Still, they’ll all have to be dealt with. There will be trials. There will likely be convictions. Then there will be the question of what to do with them.” Kal shrugged. “My money’s on menial labor.”
Gina blew out a noisy breath. “Yeah, let’s not count our chickens just yet. We don’t know if there are any more loci of resistance. We may get individuals who keep fighting back, but hopefully we can contain the damage from that. As long as there are no more Council members in the wind, though, I think that’s it for anything organized.”
“The biggest thing will be accounting for all the remaining Council members, then.” Kal looked at me.
“Sorry buddy, I don’t have any special tricks for finding individuals on an entire planet.” I gave him a crooked smile. “Or off-planet, which is also a possibility.”
“Oy.” Kal rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “This really came down to the wire. If we’d had to fight just one more battle, we probably would have run out of assets. Do you have the printers back?”
I nodded. “And I’ve already started replacement construction, but it’ll be a few days before anything pops out the other end. If we do find ourselves another fight—” I looked pointedly at Gina. “—we’d probably better go for containment rather than a punch-up.”
Kal nodded. “Meanwhile, we also have a whole society to put back together. I hope you guys are okay with overtime.”
We all grinned back at him.