Manville, Capital District

Basalt

Prefecture IV, Republic of the Sphere

24 February 3133

We reached the hospital quickly and both of Niemeyer’s people were rushed into the trauma center. He should have been looked at first, but he wasn’t going to let them drug him until his men were out of danger or while there was a possibility that I might get away. I gave him my word I’d not leave, which he laughed at. He had me join him in a trauma room, where the doctors took care of both our shrapnel wounds.

In the trauma room I looked down at my bloody trouser legs. “See, no running away for me anyway.”

He just grunted as they began to peel him out of the armor. His chest plate had been punctured and the armor on the right shoulder had been ripped away. No gashes there, but a licking tongue of flame had clearly toasted him a bit. Interns pulled shrapnel from him and applied sutures, while medtechs slathered unguents on the burns.

Interns similarly worked on me and, like Niemeyer, I passed on anything more than local anesthesia. He didn’t want to pass out and I didn’t want to become a babbling idiot. While I had enough evidence to have Bernard arrested, and enough circumstantial evidence to have Emblyn picked up, it would have been for minor offenses. The prosecution would have dragged on while the war for Basalt continued. The winner would pardon himself and the loser would likely be executed for minor crimes.

Minor crimes all wrapped up as a treasonous conspiracy.

Aside from grunts and the occasional hiss, Niemeyer and I fell silent. The doctors talked, forceps clicked and shrapnel clanked into metal pans. I pushed all that and the little tugs and pinches away. I needed to gather my thoughts because Niemeyer would be on me hard and fast. I had to figure out what I was going to tell him.

I couldn’t tell him the truth. My claims of being a Ghost Knight would be looked upon askance and, with the HPG network down, couldn’t be verified by anyone on Basalt. While I could send reports in through local staffers, they would just treat them like agent reports. While mine might be accorded higher priority than others, there would be nothing in their handling to compromise my identity.

Regardless of that, I still didn’t have enough evidence to put the principals away. With Bernard willing to kill Niemeyer and his men, arrest became a moot point. There really wasn’t an authority on the planet that could stop him, unless it was someone who was going to terminate him. And, if that were to happen, there would be nothing to stop Emblyn from completing his takeover of the world, since all the attacks had left the people’s trust of the government in tatters.

Bernard had successfully hit on one point that seemed like a way out of the LIT trap. His appearance at Number 8 to smash the attack—much akin to Reis’ antics on Helen—elevated him to the image of a strong, central authority figure with the power to hit back at the enemy. If he were able to capitalize on this political asset, it would make him very strong.

The problem with LIT is that halting such a campaign is like nailing gelatin to a wall. Yes, Bernard did stop one attack, though not until it had done an incredible amount of damage. Not only did it take out Number 8, but it devastated a contingent of Public Safety Department officers. While their deaths would ratchet up the public’s concern, and would invest Bernard’s calls for vengeance with some power, Bernard could never command enough in the way of troops to put a stop to the FfW attacks. He couldn’t have troops everywhere all at once, and absent that, some sites were going to be vulnerable. Without completely subverting the system of civil liberties guaranteed by The Republic, Ff W could not be stopped.

I realized that thinking about that was getting ahead of things. In the hovercar with Niemeyer we’d hit on the core understanding of the raid that I needed to sort out. Gypsy had planned the raid and turned it over to Catford to execute. Someone had sold the raid to Niemeyer, though the chances of my learning who that was from him were zero. The same individual might have sold Niemeyer back to Catford, but I doubted that. Catford could have easily had troops in reserve waiting for trouble. If nothing else they could have been used to cut off pursuit or secure an alternate escape route and Catford was cunning enough to deploy forces to do just that.

I already knew that Bernard had people in Public Safety on his payroll, so they clearly sold the operation to him. I wasn’t sure if the guys working for Bernard would have expected him to try to assassinate Niemeyer. If they suspected Niemeyer was watching them, they might have. That was really another moot point since Bernard could have had dozens of reasons to want Niemeyer dead, right down to not realizing he was there and just wanting Public Safety bodies to blame on Ff W. The idea that killing Public Safety officers might move his agents up in the organization could not be discounted either.

Elle was a wild card in the mix. She’d clearly told me the operation would be going off twenty-four hours later than it did. Gypsy could have moved the timetable up, though Catford likely would have balked at that. Gypsy could have misled her for whatever reason, or she could have lied to me. It didn’t make much sense for her to do that, but that fit with the odd nature of the conflict here.

Bernard’s escalation of things did make sense—frightening sense. His action, while unilateral, would show FfW to be an enemy of the state in a very direct and threatening way. His military reaction to their effort—as opposed to Niemeyer’s law enforcement one—made them into a military threat. Calling up the Basalt Militia and arraying them against FfW could now be easily done. With inside knowledge of what FfW was doing, he could hurt them, giving his forces an advantage if Gypsy decided to stage a military coup.

As I thought it over, it seemed to me inevitable that things would come to some BattleMech slugging match worthy of a Solaris championship. Frankly, that solution would have suited me well, since it would have limited the size of the conflict, confined it to an arena, and would have chosen a winner without ripping apart the lives of a lot of folks.

The problem is that neither Bernard nor Emblyn would abide by the outcome of such a battle. There would be more outbreaks and as folks got desperate, serious damage would be done. So far the attacks had caused a lot of property damage and inconvenienced people, but death had not slopped over into the civilian population. I was not sanguine about that situation continuing. Bernard’s willingness to murder Public Safety officers indicated there would be no restraint on his part.

And once he had taken power, I could imagine a lot of civil rights abuses in the name of maintaining security.

This analysis was all well and good, but left me with nowhere to go and nothing to do, short of a wholesale murder spree—which, I will admit, was tempting. I mean, I knew I would never do it, which is why I could entertain the fantasy. Each clank of shrapnel in the dish was another bullet pumped into Bernard and Emblyn. I tossed Teyte, Catford and Siwek into that mix, just because I knew I’d have that many bullets in a clip, with a couple to spare for anyone who twitched one more time.

Niemeyer looked over at me as an intern swathed his body in gauze. “Don’t expect that your intervening there will spare you from prosecution.”

I frowned. “Look, let’s cut to the chase, shall we? You’re going to figure I was there as some sort of a spotter for the whole thing, right, which explains in your mind why I was present when things went down. You’ve seen my files and you know what I’m capable of piloting, so you know if I were going to be there in some capacity, I’d not have been there in a Cabochon. And if I was there working for FfW, why would I have rescued you? If I wanted to save you and your men, I wouldn’t have called in reserves, right? And if I was working for the guy in the ’Mech, I’d not have pulled you out, right?”