“So when are you going to hit the covens?”
“Good question. I wanted your opinion on that. If I hit them now, then whoever’s moving about will be warned and go to ground.
That’ll leave New York vulnerable.”
Western Europe took the stick from the Labrador, and paused. “Yes, but if you wait until every coven is taken over, you’ll
have a lot of the bastards to deal with. Someone will inevitably get through the police cordons, and you’ll be back in the
same leaky boat. How many covens can you monitor in real time?”
“All of them. That’s already being done. Those I have no direct access to are being watched by agents.”
“Then you’ve got it covered. Wait until a group of possessed shows up at a new coven, then take them all out together.”
“And if there’s more than one group moving round?”
“I’m paranoid, but am I paranoid enough. What sort of assault were you planning?”
“GISD tactical team, with shoot to kill orders. Wipe each coven out, I don’t want prisoners to interrogate. Fletcher is still
cooperating with Halo’s science teams.”
“Given the stakes, here, I’d suggest using a gamma pulse against them first. You’ll get peripheral casualties, but it’ll be
nothing like as bad as an SD strike. Send the tactical teams in to secure and mop up afterwards.”
“All right. I can live with that.”
“We might even get a vote of confidence from our illustrious colleagues.”
“Not even this century’s geneering can make pigs fly yet. I’ll get the assault organized for three hundred hours EST.”
“If you need any help, just whistle.” Western Europe smiled happily, and slung the stick high into the air.
______
Not even B7 could block news of events inside New York from spilling out across the global net. Speculation had been hot and
intense ever since the arcology’s vac-trains had been shut down after the Dome One “incident.” Several riots had been captured
by rover reporters; two of whom had been badly injured during the coverage, adding extra spice to the sensevise. Then eleven
hours later, the North American Commissioner had appeared before the press once more to announce the investigation had been
completed, and confirm the incident was not caused by the possessed. It was in fact a professional assassination carried out
in Grand Central Station involving a sophisticated weapons implant and a chameleon suit. Business rivals of the deceased Bud
Johnson were currently being sought for questioning.
The vac-trains had been re-opened. The rioters and looters had cleared the streets. The police reinforcements had been stood
down. Celebrity news presenters were given extended programmes to cover the paranoia raging across the planet. The arrival
of the
Mount’s Delta
appeared to have acted as the trigger for a multitude of small events that were blamed on the possessed, culminating in the
Grand Central Station disturbance. And Capone’s recent switch in tactics to flying infiltration attacks against Confederation
planets served to exacerbate people’s fears. The Confederation Navy and local SD networks seemed unable to prevent the Organization’s
strike flotillas. After the quarantine appeared to be preventing the spread, worlds were starting to fall again. Everyone,
ran the feeling, was vulnerable.
But the lifting of the vac-train restrictions eased the tension a little, right up until 2:50 EST when they were abruptly
shut again. Frustrated commuters datavised the information to the news agencies within ten seconds. New York’s rover reporters,
who had descended en masse into the arcology’s bars after a hard day’s sensationalising, were hauled back out onto the concrete
canyons by their editors. Agencies which datavised information requests to the ar-cology’s civic authority were met with blank
puzzlement. Nobody had told the graveyard shift about the vac-trains. The police precinct houses were equally baffled. Even
the urgent requests to in-house sources produced a blank, at least in the ten minutes that counted.
With all of the B7 supervisors on-line and observing, North America gave the order to launch the assault.
The Internal Security Directorate tactical teams had been arriving in New York ever since the vac-trains started running again.
By the time the assault was launched, there were over eight hundred personnel deployed around the various sect covens. They
were all armed with projectile weapons loaded with chemical or electric rounds. Complementing them were the gamma lasers.
Intended for anti-terrorist interception situations, they were powerful enough to penetrate at least five metres of carbon-concrete.
Such a range would allow the teams to strike at targets holed up deep inside skyscrapers and megatowers. One would usually
be sufficient to eliminate an entire room full of hostiles instantaneously.
North America had ringed each coven with nine, while the Leicester skyscraper had fifteen ranged against it. The supervisor’s
deepest worry was that the possessed with their extended senses would discover the preparations. To try and deny them any
hint, engineering mechanoids had been used throughout the day to unpack and install the gamma lasers in surrounding buildings.
Give-away human supervision had been kept to an absolute minimum. As well as the gamma lasers, North America had the exits
and service tunnels rigged to electrify anyone who scuttled down them. That was the most dangerous aspect of the work, but
again mechanoids with New York’s civic service emblem on their sides trundled along modifying wires and cables without drawing
questions or interest.
The tactical teams had assembled several blocks away to avoid attention. North America started to move them forward simultaneously
with closing down the vac-trains. He also closed down all road traffic and metro transit carriages inside the arcology, and
sealed the domes from each other; an aspect the news agencies didn’t realize until a lot later. According to every asset and
functional bug infiltrated into the covens, neither the possessed nor the acolytes were aware of the preparations. They didn’t
even know the tactical teams were advancing.
The gamma ray lasers fired at 2:55 EST. The fifteen beams transfixing the Leicester skyscraper swept through the lower eight
stories which made up the sect’s headquarters. They used a scan pattern, switching between vertical and horizontal to cover
every cubic centimetre. When the beams were aimed right through the core of the skyscraper, the energy was absorbed by the
structure, while furnishings and composite walls ignited instantly under the intense radiation barrage. Thick, radiant orange
lines were scratched across the carbon-concrete support pillars and floors as the beams traversed the building. The air was
superheated, dissolving into its component atoms. Windows detonated outward from the appalling pressure, showering the street
below with daggers of glass.
Fire sprinklers burst into life, only for their water to vaporise first into steam then clouds of ions. Glaring blue and violet
streamers jetted out of the smashed windows, and fountained up the skyscraper’s elevator shafts. Ruptured air-conditioning
ducts provided secondary routes for the heatstorm to pervade the building. The entire lower floors were engulfed in a dazzling
fireball.
Human bodies caught within the flexing three-dimensional mesh of beams burst apart from the terrible energy input. Their water
content exploded into steam as the carbon combusted. When the beams reached the outer sections of the skyscraper, they were
powerful enough to pierce clean though the walls. Surrounding skyscrapers were strafed with the radiation, resulting in vast
tracts of damage. Then the sharp spires of ions exhaled by the Leicester played across their outer walls, igniting dozens
of ordinary fires.
The gamma ray lasers switched off. The night was filled with the roar of flames and the screams of those being burnt alive.
There was enough light thrown out from the fires to light the entire district. Unharmed residents of the nearby buildings
lucky enough to live on the lower floors rushed onto the street; while those higher up could only stare out helplessly as
the flames took hold. The images they relayed to the news agencies, which were distributed across the planet in real-time,
showed the GISD tactical teams marching down every approach road to the Leicester. Against the raging orange flames, their
heat-proof flexarmour suits appeared as matt-black silhouettes. Weapons with long snouts were cradled casually on their arms
as they walked into the conflagration with astounding nonchalance.
Three times, figures rushed out of the skyscraper’s main entrance doors, making their bid for freedom. They were like fire
monsters, flames shooting from every part of their bloated figures. The tactical team guns spat short pulses of turquoise
flame with quiet efficiency, and the fiery creatures crumpled to burn unhindered on the wide sidewalk.
It was those scenes of perfunctory extermination which finally convinced the world that the possessed had somehow penetrated
the titanic defences of the Halo. The political fallout was considerable. A motion of impeachment was put before the Govcentral
Grand Senate, condemning the President for not informing the senatorial defence committee in advance. The President, who could
hardly publicly admit to knowing nothing about the situation, fired the chiefs of GISD Bureaus 1 through 4, for gross insubordination
and overreaching their authority. The GISD’s New York chief was charged with reckless homicide, and put under immediate arrest.
Such machinations went almost unnoticed by the public, who were fed a continual stream of updates of the on-the-ground aftermath
by the news agencies.
Once the tactical teams had confirmed that there were no possessed left alive in any of the sect covens, they withdrew. Only
then were the emergency services allowed in. It took ten hours for the fire department mechanoids to extinguish the last fires.
Paramedic crews followed them through the burnt out floors. The arcology hospitals were swamped by casualties. Preliminary
insurance damage estimates ran into hundred of millions of G-dollars. Dome One’s mayor, in conjunction with the other fourteen
mayors of the arcology, instigated an official day of mourning, and opened a bereavement fund.
Officially, one thousand two hundred and thirty-three people died in the assault against the New York possessed; nearly half
as a result of being hit by gamma radiation. The rest were either burned or asphyxiated. Over nine thousand needed hospital
treatment for minor burns, shock, and other injuries. Double that number lost their homes; with several hundred businesses
forced to try and relocate. The vactrains in and out of New York remained closed.
______
“Well?” North Pacific asked. It was five hours after the tactical teams had finished their sweep of the covens, and B7 had
reconvened to hear the genuine results.
“We got a hundred and eight possessed, that’s the best estimate I can provide. There wasn’t a hell of a lot left for the forensic
crew to analyse after the gamma lasers finished.”
“I’m more interested in the ones you didn’t eliminate.”
“Eight of the electrocution traps we rigged along possible escape routes were triggered. The teams pulled eleven corpses out
of various ducts and service tunnels.”
“Quit stalling!” South America said. “Did any of them get out?”
“Probably, yes. Forensics thinks maybe three or four people got past the electrocution traps. There’s no way of telling if
they were possessed or not, but it would take one inhumanly tough mother to survive what we threw at them.”
“Shit! We’re right back where we started. You’re going to have to initiate this kind of slaughter operation each time they
regroup. Only now they don’t have any convenient sects to flee back to.”
“Well this time, I’m going to insist on keeping New York’s vac-trains shut,” North Pacific said. “We can’t let them get out
of New York.”
“I quite agree,” Western Europe said.
“Only because you can’t risk another vote.”
“There’s no need to get personal. We remain on top of the situation.”
“Really? Where’s Dexter, then?”
“When the time comes, I will eliminate him.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
______
The K5 star had a catalogue number, but that was all. Only three planets were in orbit around it, two of them smaller than
Mars, and a gas giant fifty-thousand kilometres in diameter. Undistinguished in astronomical terms, it lay forty-one light-years
outside the loose boundary of space claimed by the Confederation. There had been a single scoutship visit in 2530, which quickly
established its worthlessness. As far as official records were concerned, that was the first and last time humans had visited
the barren system. Certainly the Navy never bothered with it; their patrols were stretched thinly enough as it was searching
for illegal activity within the Confederation and through the stars fringing the boundary. Although the surrounding wreath
of stars was an obvious location for illegal operations (and several highly dubious independent colony ventures), forty-one
light-years was just too far away to justify the expense of regular inspection flights.
Such a safeguard made it ideal for the black cartel. Their antimatter station orbited five million kilometres from the star’s
surface, a closeness which stretched human materials science to its limit. The radiation, heat, particle, and magnetic forces
it encountered were appalling. An approaching ship would see it as a simple black disk sailing across the incandescent solar
glare. Sixty kilometres in diameter, it cast a significant cone-shaped umbra behind it; a zone insulated from the star’s heat,
the one place where hell’s proverbial snowflake might just have survived. The surface facing the star was a radial concertina
array of solid state cells absorbing the incredible blast of heat and converting it directly into electricity. At the back
they glowed a gentle pink, utilizing their own shade to radiate the immense thermal load away into space. In total, the array
was capable of generating over one and a half terawatts of electricity.