More Than Honor

And here I am a sitting duck, he thought bitterly. Nothing for a captain to do; the ship couldn't maneuver.

He looked to another screen, this one showing his assigned targets for bombardment. That made him lick dry lips. Insane, he thought again. Kinetic energy bombardment, warheadless missiles fired straight down at—literally—astronomical velocities. When they met the surface, mass in motion would be converted into heat. They didn't need warheads. The thought of that type of strike on a populated area, on Nouveau Paris, for Christ's sake, made his testicles try to crawl up back inside his abdomen.

'We didn't start it,' he reminded himself. The gang of madmen who did start it had used nukes in a populated zone, and that showed you the sort of thing they'd do and order him to do if they got their hands on the levers of power.

He still tasted vomit at the thought of what he had to do, and what the Admiral was going to order herself. McQueen, when I'm fighting the Manties, I'd trust you to the limit. She was a hard CO, but she got the job done and she didn't flinch herself. Can I trust you here?

Rousseau's eight million tons leaped and shuddered as an energy lance went through her sidewalls and blasted into her armor.

'Damage control,' he said in a metronome-steady voice.

'Compartments twenty-six through eight open to vacuum. Graser one down.'

'Reconfigure—'

There was no need to look at the display screens anymore, though some still did. Rob S. Pierre sat with his hands on the table, looking ahead, ignoring the worried glances and whispers where Oscar Saint-Just and Cordelia Ransom had their heads together.

Everyone looked up as a couple of Security noncoms came through the door, their arms full of pulse rifles.

'Citizens,' one of them said. 'It's time.'

They began handing the weapons out.

'Hit them,' McQueen said.

They were coming in over the city of Nouveau Paris at twenty-five thousand meters, and even from here the pillars of smoke were obvious. One or two of the huge towers must have fallen to create the gaps she saw. There was an ominous-looking crater, and her skin crawled as she watched the readout. Oh, it wasn't really a very large weapon—subcrit squeeze job—and it was designed to be relatively clean, but 'relatively' was the operative word there. She remembered an old, old grisly joke: A tactical nuclear weapon is one that explodes a thousand kilometers downwind of you.

'That used to be Regional Intervention Battalions HQ, didn't it?' she said.

'Yes.' Fontein's voice was flat.

Fourteen thousand people, she thought. More than a good-sized fleet engagement usually killed.

'Status on the crowds,' she said.

'They've thinned out. Everyone must have gotten the idea that something serious is going on, and the fun- seekers have gone home,' one of her staffers said. 'We estimate that only two hundred thousand are still out.'

Still a fairly substantial number, even in a city with a population of thirty-two million.

'These must be the real Leveler militants. They're all in or near Committee HQ and adjacent parts of the Government district. No particular organization, but plenty of arms.'

'Citizen Brigadier Conflans.'

'Citizen Admiral, I can't proceed until the . . . mob . . . is cleared out of my way. Dropping ground troops into that would be like throwing a handful of buckshot into a barrel of snot.'

'And I can't do that until the airspace over the Avenue of the People is safe,' she said thoughtfully. Then on another channel: 'Citizen Captain Norton, execute.'

'Ma'am—' there was an edge of desperation in his voice. 'Ma'am, those are government units.'

McQueen throttled an impulse to shout. She couldn't force Norton to obey her; all bets were off, and everyone was proceeding on personal convictions and loyalties. Norton had been with her all through the fighting around Trevor's Star; he'd stayed calm when the Rousseau's bridge was blown open to space and they were slugging it out with Manty superdreadnoughts at energy-weapon range and a main fusion bottle started to go critical. . . .

'Bob,' she said quietly, 'we can't spare the time to convince them of our bona fides, and they'll fire on us. There's no time. Clear our way, but whatever you do, we're going in.'

The voice that answered might as well have been a robot's. 'Affirmative, Citizen Admiral. Initiating.'

Someone gasped as a solid bar of white light stretched down from heaven; air riven to ionized gas, and fragments of ablative shielding. The bar touched earth, and a pattern of shocked-white fury reached out from that point. The shock wave moved after it, and buildings rippled and blew away like straw around it.

'God have mercy on anyone within half a klick of any of those.'

'Civilians,' she said to nobody in particular, 'call this sort of thing a surgical strike. Sort of like surgery with a chain-saw.'

'Two,' someone murmured. Another bar of light; she looked away, blinking at the after-images behind her eyelids. 'Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.' A pause. 'Eight.'

'Citizen Admiral,' Norton's voice said. 'Liberty and Equality have opened fire with their energy armaments.' Another pause, and surprise in his tone: 'Fraternity is opening fire on them.'

'Get out of there, Bob. You've done all you can.' She switched channels. 'Prepare to execute, Citizen Brigadier Conflans.' To her own tiny flotilla of pinnaces: 'Let's convince the Leveler militants they're in the wrong line of work. Execute Grapeshot.'

Many of the crowd that filled the Avenue of the People for two kilometers were in a holiday mood; the police officers hanging from the street-lamps on either side, or twitching on the points of the decorative wrought- iron fences around gardens added to the festive air. There was still fighting going on towards the three-hundredth floor of the Committee's tower, but they didn't have to do anything in particular. A few of the more energetic were amusing themselves by dragging out civil servants from the lower floors of the towers on either side, and giving them impromptu People's Justice. Others passed bottles around, sang the war-chants of the Conspiracy of Equals, or simply stood or sat and waited. It wouldn't be long now.

Many of them looked up at the turbine wail. Police vehicles had tried overflights an hour ago, and a few of them had even gotten away, but the falling debris from the others had been dangerous. Leveler cell-leaders at the fringes of the street barked into their communicators.

Some of the mob might have had time to realize the nature of the pepper-flake tiny loads the pinnaces were dropping. None of them had time to run before the tens of thousands of fragmentation loads from the cluster munitions reached their preprogrammed height and exploded in a long surf-wall of white fire. Each of them threw thousands of pieces of jagged ceramic shrapnel into the air, cutting across the crowd at chest-height at thousands of meters per second. Where they struck blood and flesh and bone splashed, divided into a spray of damp matter as liquid as the blood alone.

The crowd was huge, more than eighty thousand on this avenue alone. The laws of probability and various obstacles assured there were more than enough left alive to scream as the pinnaces began their second run.

One man managed to stagger back to his feet and fumble at the load across his back. Blood was running down into his eyes, and there was a wetness when he tried to breathe, but his hands still functioned.

'They're running, Ma'am,' the pilot begged, forgetting himself and the presence of Citizen Commissioner Fontein. 'They're running.'